Posts by BenWilson
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Good old Bob Solomon, did he still explain existentialism with constant reference to his sex life?
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Hard News: Floating the idea, in reply to Russell Brown,
But I was quietly glad to stop going -- it seems less fun when you're not there with young children, and it's certainly not as relaxing as jumping on my bike and riding down to the beach for a dip
For sure, on your own as an adult, living only what? 2km from the beach? that's gotta win most days. It's a much stiffer ride for me, particular with Marcus on the back of the bike. But still well worth it. The pool's just a different experience - he has certainly got in the water much more readily in the pool, and has taken an interest in the other people there. He's been squat walking in the pool, with its sure bottom and lack of waves. At the beach he'd be lucky to get in up to his waist.
For me alone, on those rare occasions I get leave :-), beaches are where I swim, unless it's low tide.
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I only hope nobody gets upset at this sort of discussion - like Ben not wanting to think about these things
I guess I should point out I majored in Philosophy, so I've spent, IMHO, far too much time thinking about these things. No answers, of course.
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Popular spot - and some of Ben's uninterrupted mangroves in the distance
Aren't they simply beautiful? You could travel the length and breadth of NZ and not see or smell finer.
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I'm personally not that bitter on terraforming beaches with extra sand, when they will be used by thousands upon thousands of human beings. Auckland has vast quantities of human-unusable coast where the natural wildlife can do it's thing. I'm surrounded by on all sides by the stuff, noisome mangrove swamps, where humans furtively arrive mostly to dump rubbish, and native flora and fauna gets on with doing its own terraforming, without any moral scruples. I don't really have any objection at all to very small percentages of the stuff being used by my own species for recreation.
Pt Chev may have been a lovely oyster covered muckpile fit especially for certain shellfish when I was a child, but I didn't really need to go there for that - I had miles of the stuff stretching from the bridge all the way to Te Atatu. On both sides of Pt Chev, the natural state continues, I know this because I had to wade through the horrible stuff rescuing my conked out boat a few weeks ago. There's more than enough slime covered oystery rocks there for anyone who wants to reminisce about the wonders of nature. Curiously I was alone in this endeavor, except for a guy fishing, yet when I got to Pt Chev beach the half-kilometer walk of shame in front of about a thousand people was at least alleviated by giving my cut feet a bit of a rest, before I plowed onward to the next beach with a boat ramp into, you guessed it, slime covered mud flats, which continue on all the way to the Northwestern Motorway. On the other side of the motorway is a particularly lovely example of a mangrove swamp, which almost never has any humans in it at all, because power boats are not allowed and it's an unsavoury place to swim with a very strong tidal flow. There is about 10 km of coastline in there that never sees any humans at all. Keep following the coast along the motorway, for several kilometers of totally deserted coastline, inaccessible except by kayak, and you come to Te Atatu Peninsular, which is mostly, yes, mud flats and mangroves. Or you can go up the Whau Creek, which is 100% mud flats and mangroves. There's really no shortage. I spend a lot of time in these places, they're all on my favourite bike routes and humans are a notably absent species everywhere. It's a weird thing about the modern instantiation of our species that this is considered a wonderful thing.
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And the mix of elderly patrons and young families from my local area (along with the odd person like me who has the privilege of managing their own diary) - all splashing about in the water - felt about as close to the idea of a community as you're likely to get around these parts.
That has been a really nice thing about Pt Erin and Pt Chev beach. People watching, casual conversations, seeing whole families (we're talking BIG families) having picnics, watching all the kids diving into the deep pool (good to see the fine art of bombing is still alive and well), running into friends. When I was a kid we'd go swimming en masse and lots of the other local kids were there.
And that seems like a good and proper thing for councils to be interested in.
I think so.
Tony, I think that except for very wealthy schools, having an exclusive pool is not cost effective. But the Mt Albert model is good, that a public pool integrates with a school. Then professional swim teachers are available, the pool is a good standard, it's much more fun, it's safer to get to, and it doesn't run at such a loss.
I'm very glad to hear the primary I'm sending my son to this year is doing exactly this, building a pool in conjunction with the council. My guess is that the place will be packed, because the school is right on the major bus interchange for all the kids at Avondale High. Also, the train station.
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How about children free and same for an adult accompanying a child? And yes, free lessons as it's in the public interest.
This is what they have at Pt Erin, I've been going for a couple of weeks. My wife got in free, because she was a "non-swimming guardian", meaning she was basically looking after my 1-year old. Both the under 5s got in free, and I had to pay for myself. So the whole family cost under $5. Awesomeness.
The predominant color of people there was brown, btw, despite Pt Erin being in St Mary's Bay. There were also many young white families.
if you don't like the idea of your non-sandy beach actually being a freaking mudflat or estuary, then... i don't know what. book in for a reality check somewhere...
Well, Pt Chev was not used by very many people before it got sanded. Now it gets used a lot. I think that's a good thing, personally. I use it a lot, because a mudflat or an estuary is not a good place to go swimming. They're unpleasant and dangerous. There's literally hundreds of those within 10 km of my house, and only one good sandy beach - Pt Chev. Every day I've been this summer there have been hundreds of people there. My son has become considerably more confident in the water there, and asks to go frequently.
As for learning to swim, I think lessons are certainly righteous, but that has to be consolidated with lots of time in the water. Free pools (for children at least, and possibly for adults accompanied by children) are a fantastic idea. I learned to swim at Boystown (now Youthtown), consolidated it with a lot of time at Pt Erin and The Teps, and also the Herne Bay coastline, and Waiheke. But it was definitely the pools where I actually learned to swim, you can't do it at a beach. You can, however learn to swim in the sea after you've learned to swim in a pool.
Water safety isn't only about being able to swim, of course. It's a basic education issue.
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Can you jack a thread that has simply stopped talking about the original subject? You can't jack an empty car, that's just called theft. So this is probably threadstealing, rather than threadjacking.
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My bet is based on the same reasoning as Gio's, that any guesses made by the living about what happens to our consciousness after death would be a stab in the dark. Total disappearance is also an arbitrary choice, I just happen to like the idea because it tallies with the idea that our consciousness is related to brain activity, something that seems to be pretty clear, certainly my experiences of consciousness and unconsciousness (or rather, becoming-unconscious and waking-up), have had a clear connection to things happening in my brain. Typically, the less going on in there, the less conscious. And we know the brain stops working at death, indeed the definition of death in medical terms is usually specific to brain-death. There have been revivals, even from brain-death, but it's difficult to trust any reports from survivors - quite probably any experiences reported would be from either the time going in or coming out of the dead state.
But all these arguments presuppose monism. Various dualisms could be true. There's just no physical evidence, by definition, of them. They're immune to disproof, and hence unscientific. But I think it's a mistake to conflate "scientific" with "true". They're not the same thing. Even if science had discovered everything it ever could, was somehow complete, it would only describe a subset of truth - the objective truths. Subjective truth is not necessarily a meaningless concept. I'm not even sure that objective+subjective covers all truth.
Arse, I promised myself years ago I wouldn't think about this any more. Let alone as a threadjack.
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Yes, the experience of death could only describe the lead up to it. If the actual death itself is a state of no-awareness, then there's no real meaning to "what it feels like to be dead". If.
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