Posts by Rich Lock
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The UK pro-foxhunting marches - although foxhunting was banned, it continues with no effective enforcement action.
I read an argument somewhere recently suggesting that the heavy-handed policing of the countryside march may have had the entirely unintended effect of showing 'ordinary decent law-abiding folk' that it's not just smelly long-haired hippies who get their heads busted when they voice a dissenting opinion.
Whether this is true, and what the long-term consequences (if any) are likely to be, remains to be seen.
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Hmmm, lots of interesting stuff on wikipedia, now you've prompted me to go and have a look.
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So heaven consists of watching drunken relatives dancing to Come on Eileen?
Noooooooooooooooooooooooo!
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?
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Not entirely. We are social creatures, To do absolutely what we want could land us in jail.
But whether we want to act in a social or an antisocial manner is, arguably, a matter of free will.
I, of my own free (?) will, make certain choices on a day-to-day basis. Some of which will benefit me more than they benefit society locally or globally. And some of which are more altruisic. I attempt to pick a path through my more selfish desires, and what I think I should be doing as an individual social creature interconnected with a whole bunch of similar creatures, for the benefit of the 'tribe' as a whole.
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Why do people talk about death as passing on or over if they don't think there is a destination?
Some people. I'd dearly love to believe that some of my family have 'passed on' to the Elysium fields and are keeping a seat warm and a pint cold for me. I'd also like to believe that there's a place reserved in the brimstone jacuzzi for, say, Robert Mugabe.
But I can't. We're born, we live, we die. Those are the only facts we can be certain of. So what we do in the middle bit is down to us and us alone.
Why is it that people a long way away geographically sometimes know the time that a person died?
Quantum entanglement....? :)
There's a lot of unexplainable phenomena out there, certainly.
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People are always finding ways of incorporating good ideas and criticisms into their personal positioning strategies. It makes me want to not. I am such a rebel like that.
It's not the good ideas I mind obviously, it's the scarcely concealed implication, 'this is how neat I am', which leads to the feeling that you're less having a genuine conversation than participating in someone's extended image management effort. I dunno, maybe I have this wrong.
I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at here: could I ask you to expand on this.
Are you suggesting we shouldn't actually be discussing our personal positions because it makes us look like egotistical fools?
There's going to be an element of that in any discussion we have, surely?
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And the closer we look, the less we know we know. The nature of nature is spooky at its most fundamental level. It offers and promises phenomena that do look a lot like magic in the context of the understandings we use to be human.
The remarkable thing is that we live in an era where our ability to make measurements has become so good that we can more confidently theorise about once-unknowable things. It's a fun time to be a cosmologist.
But that still doesn't mean that it's not rational, salutary and fulfilling to experience awe and wonder at the scale and complexity of the universe. It is awesome.
I realise that the reasons people fall in behind Brian Tamaki are not exactly the same as those I am awed by the universe, but it still puzzles me that people would choose the former over the latter.
Because thinking about things like quantum entanglement mangles even the cleverest brains? And no matter how awesome that shit is, it doesn't help to put bread on the table, or offer direct and easy solutions to social problems?
Apparently, reality is just a state of mind after all.
I suspect that in order to fully start understanding the fundamental nature of the universe, someone might have to have a point of view so disconnected from 'normality', that they wouldn't be able to tell us about it coherently anyway (from inside their rubber room...).
There's a good reason that that is a staple cliche of both Science Fiction and religion ('no-one can truly understand the nature of The Gods: to look upon them is to go mad.').
Personally, although I find all of this stuff fascinating, I do try to kep it somewhat at arms length - rather than thinking too hard about the construction of the ride, I just try to lie back and enjoy it, as it were.
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My bookshelf is bigger than your bookshelf...? :)
Hey, I like it that people here know way more than me about specialist subjects.
I think Our Lord Mod was more concerned with the tone of the discussion rather than the content, although it is not for me to interpret His Will.
I'm just glad that He is a loving and gentle Mod, rather than cruel and vengeful.
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I was on the verge of a gentle admonishment about it
My bookshelf is bigger than your bookshelf...? :)