Mr Chattertons Self Reliance Article...

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Oh come on, I'm just stirring the pot in the spirit of John's post. :D

Well, I guess I see threads like this as an opportunity to close the gap rather than opening it, or creating new gaps, but I appreciate your following up with a ":D"
 
Well, I guess I see threads like this as an opportunity to close the gap rather than opening it, or creating new gaps, but I appreciate your following up with a ":D"

I took it in the spirit of good fun. I hope I was not mistaken.
 
Both sides secretly cherish "the gap". As long as both sides are still talking to each other I'm happy enough...

Hence the 39 page thread, and counting...

Its a "discussion" board afterall - not a cumbaya board :)
 
I don't remember George ever talking about having a plan to fight with a buddy underwater and winning the fight.

... George did all his fighting on the Internet ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)
 
I don't remember George ever talking about having a plan to fight with a buddy underwater and winning the fight.

Obviously the buddy of George would be instantly offered air if they needed it. For the Chatterton example of a tech diving stranger coming in fast, and OOA,

George would have donated his gas to any OOA diver that came screaming up to him. He and the team would manage the gas needs this would present.

This is more of a moral issue than a diving issue....It has a great deal to do with who you choose to dive with....and to a degree, who you choose to be friends with, or associate with. This has NOTHING to do with Buddy Diving or Solo diving as something you embrace.

In this world we live in, there are people that would drive up in their car to an accident that just happened, and do no more than rubberneck, no matter if the accident victims were in dire need....And, there are people that would immediately pull over and render whatever aid they could...My take from this, is to avoid the rubberneckers, they are not friend or buddy material.
 
So John Chatterton is a rubberneck, got it.
Well, a Rubbernecker would just try to avoid the OOA diver.....John Chatterton actually said he would fight off the OOA Diver.... I think that separates things a little further :)

You know, when I wrote this post, I almost felt bad about making an implication like this...But John said this so many times that this is a black and white issue. But again, I don't think this is part of Dive Training. I think being on one side of this discussion or the other, is more about who your parents are, and what they raised you to believe in.
 
I think being on one side of this discussion or the other, is more about who your parents are, and what they raised you to believe in.

After your earlier (I'll be charitable) intemperate comments hypothesizing about Chatterton's likely lack of military service/likely lack of courage as a combat medic, followed by attempts to make the general issue about whether one is a fundamentally moral or immoral person... I didn't think you could, much less would, get further down into the muck. While I understand you believe all this bloviating to be a sort of 'useful idiocy' that may help protect newer divers, rather than deeply held intrinsic beliefs, it’s tedious and unbecoming nonetheless. Now, however, the general issue is also about whether one's parents were fundamentally moral or immoral people and whether they raised you properly or not.

You're right: you don't want to be in the same water as me.
 
The point I was trying to make with my list of quotations is that in a series of quotes, people are still offering opinions as to what the original article actually means. The argument seems to be as much about determining what the article says as it is over the inferred principles.

As for me...

1. I believe all tech divers should go in to a dive with a thorough plan. They should expect to be able to handle just about anything themselves, and they should only have to rely upon a teammate in the case of something highly unusual, and running out of gas during a planned dive because of poor or absent calculations is not such a case.

2. If during such a dive a teammate were to signal a need to me, such as to share my air, I would do so without hesitation. Mine is not to reason why. Mine is but to do or (watch him) die. After we have eliminated the emergency, I can find out why that emergency arose.

3. If I have a diver whose habits are so poor that he or she regularly needs such help for reasons that should have been foreseen, then I will stop diving with that person. I have never met such a person. One reason for that is that I have always planned tech dives with my teammates together, so if there was anything absent in the teammate's plan, it should be evident. Even in a recent situation in which I met the diver for the first time on the boat as we headed out, we talked through our dive plan to my satisfaction before we even started to gear up.​

Maybe I am confused, but people in this thread seem to be arguing that John meant exactly what I just wrote. If so, here is the part of the article that confuses me:

"Let me be clear, if you have nothing to breathe, or nothing you feel like breathing at the time, and you jump me for my regulator, I will fight you for it, and I will win. Period."

Now, Howard later sad that John didn't mean that, that John actually wrote the opposite of what he really means just to make people think. Well, maybe so, but when I taught writing, if a student started a statement with "Let me be clear..." and ended it with "Period.", I would suggest to him that it would be a good idea to have a clear and concise statement of belief in between the beginning and end. I would counsel a writer that this is not the time to say anything other than what is truly meant.

Finally, as I said about 5 times in this thread, I don't think GUE, UTD, and DIR have anything to do with this. I am confident John did not give them a thought when he wrote it, and that is mostly because those acronyms are not the only places in the world where the principles involved with team diving can be found. John is a TDI instructor, and I have a pretty firm memory of learning the concepts of gas planning and emergency team processes when I got my TDI instructor training.
 

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