Chockstone Forum

      Sponsored By
      ROCK
   HARDWARE

Chockstone Photography

Australian Landscape Prints

Chockstone Forum - General Discussion

General Climbing Discussion

Topic Date User

The Irish Solution to The Ben Lomond Problem 9-Oct-2017 At 4:49:40 AM Wendy

Message

On 6-Oct-2017 IdratherbeclimbingM9 wrote:

>>
>I've been following this thread with interest.
>I support Gerry inasmuch as I like the idea he is putting forward and
>the reasons for it, implied or otherwise!
>
>I suspect that you are having a bet both ways Wendy including a little
>fear mongering as slippery slopes are real(!), and uwhp510 has called you
>out on it.
>
I didn't see any argument proving that slippery slopes were inevitable? We live on slippery slopes all the time. People use them as arguments about all sorts of dodgy things. Immigration. Racism. Homophobia. Varying "dangerous" activities. The point is that we stop slippery slopes all the times. When someone dies climbing, we don't say "we must all stop climbing before we all end up dying climbing". Some men commit violence against women. A disturbingly large number in fact. But are we going to remove all men for the safety of women? People drown. Should we drain the ocean to prevent people drowning? We set boundaries and reinforce boundaries. They don't have to involve extremes. Extremes are the rhelm of "Muslim set off a bomb. Make all Muslims leave Australia for our safety". They are fear mongering. Reasonable adults can separate between the circumstancest of a particular event and different circumstances.

>As for your Balls Pyramid example, all that I read in VL was; (to quote
>Vanessa);
>
On our climb the relics of previous climbers were apparent,
>with rusting
>bolts, friable manila rope reclaimed by vegetation, and the odd disintegrating
>piton and even a wooden peg. Thankfully technology has improved. We removed
>what we could and climbed clean.

>... This statement epitomises the ideal we should be aiming at, not only
>for Ben Lomond but also for Australian climbing in general.

That's exactly what I was referring to and it was my example that "traditionally" climbers were not all clean and perfect as Gerry tried to claim they were. There is no shortage of relics of "traditional" climbing around Australia, such as tat, weird old bolts, pitons are various sorts, wooden chocks, metal tubes, chips. I agree that it's all rubbish and removing it is great, I'm using it to point out that Gerry is making a claim to a fiction.
>