Your Day Today!

[Buckster]

7 minutes ago, Clive said:

May take ride to CMC later this afternoon, see if they have any cheapo summer gloves......not holding my breath on that though.  

Or free mirrors?

[Pedro]

8 minutes ago, Clive said:

May take ride to CMC later this afternoon, see if they have any cheapo summer gloves......not holding my breath on that though.  

You're really just bringing @Six30 his mirrors back, aren´t you? Feeling guilty?

[Clive]

15 minutes ago, Pedro said:

You're really just bringing @Six30 his mirrors back, aren´t you? Feeling guilty?

If I had them, I would have posted a photo of the mirrors, with the message

[Sir Fallsalot]

1 hour ago, Clive said:

May take ride to CMC later this afternoon, see if they have any cheapo summer gloves......not holding my breath on that though.  

I got some nice gloves for the trailbikes from Trago Mills a few years ago. the tag said £9 when i went to pay they were £7 i was that impressed i went back a couple of weeks later and bought three more pairs just in case they are not available next time i need a pair

[Six30]

1 hour ago, Clive said:

May take ride to CMC later this afternoon, see if they have any cheapo summer gloves......not holding my breath on that though.  

Good luck , they are shut the wankers .

[Clive]

13 minutes ago, Sir Fallsalot said:

I got some nice gloves for the trailbikes from Trago Mills a few years ago. the tag said £9 when i went to pay they were £7 i was that impressed i went back a couple of weeks later and bought three more pairs just in case they are not available next time i need a pair

We do not have a proper bike shop in Mansfield, well we have 1 very small bike shop, but they don't sell gear, the next nearest is in the next town, but I havd never managed to find a pair of gloves there that fit me.

CMC seem to have a wide selection, but some of their prices I do not ride far, or often enough to lay out big money......and no Trago Mills here. 

[Clive]

1 minute ago, Six30 said:

Good luck , they are shut the wankers .

Shut?  Strange that.  

[Six30]

3 hours ago, Buckster said:

Zero chance of the old battery recovering.

Get a tenner off a steptoe type of chap 

[Six30]

Just now, Clive said:

Shut?  Strange that.  

Can’t understand bike shops that aren’t open on a Sunday , it was proper busy there yesterday .

[Clive]

Closed till Tuesday, so it looks like a drive there on Tuesday, cos weatherman says rain.

[Clive]

2 minutes ago, Six30 said:

Can’t understand bike shops that aren’t open on a Sunday , it was proper busy there yesterday .

Use to go there quite regularly on a Sunday, when weather was good the place was heaving...

[Pedro]

2 hours ago, Otto von Jizzmark said:

Now that’s not entirely true, is it? 

No, but they were your words, not mine.

I'll leave War and Peace for an evening read, though.

[XTreme]

3 hours ago, Otto von Jizzmark said:

Now that’s not entirely true, is it? In the short time I’ve been here you’ve had a deeply fascinating overview of my bike history, some riveting pictures of my son making pens and fixing guitars, and even a highly risible anecdote concerning an encounter with an Irish tinker on a motorway service station. Admittedly I haven’t been here long enough to get into some of the more esoteric stuff I carry around in my head, but if you ever feel that what’s really missing from your life is a detailed knowledge of the mating habits of earwigs, I’m your man. 

As for the rest? Well, I’ll give you a whistle-stop tour before I go. There are few things more tedious than endless farewell tours though, so once an appropriate time has passed for people to read this and, if they feel so inclined also to comment on it, I’d like Pete to do the decent thing and throw the switch on my account and its content once and for all. “I, Otto von Jizzmark, known in professional circles as Professor Wankstain, being of sound mind and body, do hereby declare this to be my last will and testament…” etc, etc.

I’ll start with being a musician, not that there’s a great deal of any interest to say about that. After starting out on the piano at about age five I have ended up playing bass guitar (badly) and trumpet (worse), and spent years playing in numerous orchestras, big bands, jazz bands, pit bands for shows, rock covers bands – you name it. Nothing too remarkable there. The only vaguely unusual part I suppose was when I was 16, when I was briefly the bass player with a thrash punk band called The Nun Fuckers. They were something of an underground hit in my home town for a while, with one of their most popular numbers being the sensitive and tender romantic ballad ‘Anal Intruder’. The only lyric of that one which I can recall is “I’ll put roses on your piano if you’ll put tulips on my organ.” I was the youngest of them by a good four years, and only got the gig after the band I was in at the time shared the bill with them at a particularly dodgy nightclub where one of the headbangers in the audience invaded the stage and hospitalised their bass player. We only ever played the shittiest venues (another enduring mystery of our time) and every gig was utter carnage. Our final gig was at a condemned nightclub that had been closed by the council two years earlier, but which after ‘unofficially re-opening’ had rapidly become the local drug-dealing hotspot. The police raided that one and gassed the place. The band all legged it and hid in the bus depot until about 6 am when it was finally safe to go back and reclaim our gear. At one point we held the distinction of being one of only two bands to be permanently banned from playing an especially seedy local boozer, the other being The Macc Lads. I don’t know if you are familiar with their work, but if not, I’d leave it that way if I were you. 

The drummer and the guitarist are both long gone – one in an accident, the other of a heroin overdose – and I have no idea what happened to our lead singer. He’s probably a record company executive somewhere…

Anyway, I’m happy to say that that wasn’t the summit of my musical achievements, and I did go on to (blush) play in the Royal Albert Hall a few times and also on the telly. These days I’m a degenerate jazzer – far less rock’n’roll, but also far less energetic.

My professional life isn’t something I go into much detail about, and with good reason, but it’s not as exciting as you make it sound. Most science isn’t. It’s not thrilling or glamorous, it is - by and large - a long, hard, repetitive, tedious and pedantic slog. And it needs to be if it is to stand up to the mauling it gets from its peers, because most scientists love nothing more than to rip each other’s work to shreds. That’s not to say that bad science never slips through the net – it does – but good science is what exposes it and roots it out. Having a paper withdrawn after publication is the kiss of death to any scientific career, which is one of the reasons that a mauling at peer-review should be seen as a service rather than a trial. At least, that’s what we tell ourselves when we’re gleefully eviscerating some poor bastards work… 

I fully took your point Pedro about goading Buckster for my own entertainment perhaps getting a bit boring for other people, and perhaps this is the explanation for it. But then if you are going to take on something as audacious as discrediting everything science has learned since the Enlightenment you’ll certainly get my attention, and if you’re daft enough to do so with such a woefully deficient grasp of the subjects then you deserve what you get. And with apologies to those who found it boring, this sort of nonsense needs to be ridiculed wherever it rears its head, not least because it is deeply insulting to those of us who have dedicated our lives to the acquisition of genuine knowledge.

That leads me on to my final point (which is in no way a dig at you, Pedro, because most people do it) which was your admonition to be mindful of the feelings of people on here with existential doubts. I dismissed that one so instinctively that I later realised that it hadn’t even occurred to me at the time to explain why.

Whilst we should all fully respect anyone’s right to hold religious views, we are under no obligation to have any respect for the views themselves, especially when so many of them are such an outrage to logic, reason and morality. In a free society, no ideas should be immune to scrutiny and, if necessary, to ridicule and contempt, whether they be political, scientific or religious. To think that any one set of opinions deserves special privileges and protections is a very dangerous road to go down.

If people are having existential doubts, then what they need above all else is honest and accurate information from both sides on which to make their decisions, not a ring-fencing of one set of views that puts them beyond criticism or attack merely because they are religious views. Where were you when Buckster was telling people that evolutionary biology is junk science, or that evolution has been disproved, or that there are no transitional fossils, or that radiometric dating is bogus and the earth is really only a few thousand years old? Where were you when I was being denounced as a deluded pseudoscientist, or being told that I was an insignificant grain of sand who lacks the intellectual or moral sophistication to be able to fathom the plans of The Almighty? Now in one sense of course it doesn’t matter, because I am quite capable of looking after myself, but nobody ever steps into these arguments on behalf of the atheist or the natural scientist who might be deeply offended by religious dogma or by their tawdry bastardisation of science. People will often say “I am offended” as though those three words constitute any sort of argument. I am offended by religion on a daily basis, not least when I turn on the news only to be confronted with the latest sub-human atrocity the parties of God are inflicting on their fellow humans, but merely being offended does not constitute an argument, nor a moral position.

I have never allowed myself any delusions (at least, not since I was 15) and I am not inclined to indulge them in anyone else. Nor am I in the least bit concerned about riding roughshod through the intellectual ‘safe spaces’ of the existentially baffled. They are adults, and they need to approach the problem as such.

In a nutshell, the root of their dilemma is trying to square what we once believed with what we now know. One way to do that is to do what Buckster does, and retreat into an alternate reality where everything we have learned since the Enlightenment is wrong, and where the only people who really understand what’s going on are charlatan hacks on the payroll of dodgy creationist organisations - essentially, to perform an intellectual self-lobotomy. That’s fine if you are happy with facile answers to important questions, but not all of us are so incurious. Another option is to make use of the innumerable high-quality, reputable educational resources at our fingertips in the 21st Century and get to grips with real science - and with more intelligent theology - and take it from there. Which of those they choose is entirely down to the individual, but the one thing they have no right to expect is that the rest of us modify or temper our views to accommodate their dithering.

At this point we haven't even set foot outside the realm of the natural sciences; the moral discussions take things to another level altogether. What elicited your rebuke in the end was my suggestion that much of what is to be found in the bible is exactly the sort of inane and morally reprehensible drivel that you might expect from a bunch of semi-literate Middle Eastern goat herders. And so it is. Take the story of Onan, for example, who was commanded to have sex with his dead brothers grieving wife by his father. Finding the ethics of the whole enterprise a bit dubious, he pulled out at the last second and ejaculated on the floor. This angered God, who promptly killed him. What profound moral or philosophical lessons are we supposed to take from this? Pretty much the only thing we can say with any degree of certainty is that with an aim like that he had no future in the porn industry.

Of all the characters in the bible, perhaps unsurprisingly I feel a particular sympathy with Isaac, the naïve and trusting son of Abraham. God commanded Abraham to kill Isaac to prove that he feared Him, and Abraham dutifully took the unwitting lad off to be slaughtered, only to be stopped at the last moment by a messenger of God who congratulated him on ‘passing the test’. What benevolence is this, that would conceive of such a monstrous test? Any man alive today who needs his wife to fear him would rightly be denounced as a coward and a thug, but if God can terrify a parent into murdering their own child we are supposed to be in awe of Him? What is this? Personally, I have no time for it, nor for those who fall over themselves defending it or apologising for it.

And perhaps this should be the test for any readers who are experiencing existential doubts: if God appeared in the heavens and commanded you to kill your child – or any child, for that matter - would you do it? If the answer is yes, you need to be institutionalised without delay; if the answer is no, you have already taken the first step towards self-enlightenment. Keep going.

And now, with nothing further to say before my self-imposed sentence of death is passed, I shall bid you all a fond farewell. You are a pretty cool bunch, and I like you all a lot. And yes, that includes you, Bucky.  But the bike was trailered away yesterday morning, and I’m making a clean break; no sense hanging on to things that will only remind me what I’m missing out on.

So @XTreme, as bad as I feel about abandoning you to the braindead gammons (again), once a suitable interval has passed for people to read this undoubted masterpiece, please go ahead and zap the lot. It’ll be like I never existed – a wise one who came, who spread his word and then vanished into the ether, leaving no physical trace, never to be heard from again… Wooo…. 

Will do Mark......I'll be sorry to see you go!

And once again you've left me lumbered with @Six30.......he's like a turd I can't flush!

[boboneleg]

4 hours ago, Otto von Jizzmark said:

Now that’s not entirely true, is it? In the short time I’ve been here you’ve had a deeply fascinating overview of my bike history, some riveting pictures of my son making pens and fixing guitars, and even a highly risible anecdote concerning an encounter with an Irish tinker on a motorway service station. Admittedly I haven’t been here long enough to get into some of the more esoteric stuff I carry around in my head, but if you ever feel that what’s really missing from your life is a detailed knowledge of the mating habits of earwigs, I’m your man. 

As for the rest? Well, I’ll give you a whistle-stop tour before I go. There are few things more tedious than endless farewell tours though, so once an appropriate time has passed for people to read this and, if they feel so inclined also to comment on it, I’d like Pete to do the decent thing and throw the switch on my account and its content once and for all. “I, Otto von Jizzmark, known in professional circles as Professor Wankstain, being of sound mind and body, do hereby declare this to be my last will and testament…” etc, etc.

I’ll start with being a musician, not that there’s a great deal of any interest to say about that. After starting out on the piano at about age five I have ended up playing bass guitar (badly) and trumpet (worse), and spent years playing in numerous orchestras, big bands, jazz bands, pit bands for shows, rock covers bands – you name it. Nothing too remarkable there. The only vaguely unusual part I suppose was when I was 16, when I was briefly the bass player with a thrash punk band called The Nun Fuckers. They were something of an underground hit in my home town for a while, with one of their most popular numbers being the sensitive and tender romantic ballad ‘Anal Intruder’. The only lyric of that one which I can recall is “I’ll put roses on your piano if you’ll put tulips on my organ.” I was the youngest of them by a good four years, and only got the gig after the band I was in at the time shared the bill with them at a particularly dodgy nightclub where one of the headbangers in the audience invaded the stage and hospitalised their bass player. We only ever played the shittiest venues (another enduring mystery of our time) and every gig was utter carnage. Our final gig was at a condemned nightclub that had been closed by the council two years earlier, but which after ‘unofficially re-opening’ had rapidly become the local drug-dealing hotspot. The police raided that one and gassed the place. The band all legged it and hid in the bus depot until about 6 am when it was finally safe to go back and reclaim our gear. At one point we held the distinction of being one of only two bands to be permanently banned from playing an especially seedy local boozer, the other being The Macc Lads. I don’t know if you are familiar with their work, but if not, I’d leave it that way if I were you. 

The drummer and the guitarist are both long gone – one in an accident, the other of a heroin overdose – and I have no idea what happened to our lead singer. He’s probably a record company executive somewhere…

Anyway, I’m happy to say that that wasn’t the summit of my musical achievements, and I did go on to (blush) play in the Royal Albert Hall a few times and also on the telly. These days I’m a degenerate jazzer – far less rock’n’roll, but also far less energetic.

My professional life isn’t something I go into much detail about, and with good reason, but it’s not as exciting as you make it sound. Most science isn’t. It’s not thrilling or glamorous, it is - by and large - a long, hard, repetitive, tedious and pedantic slog. And it needs to be if it is to stand up to the mauling it gets from its peers, because most scientists love nothing more than to rip each other’s work to shreds. That’s not to say that bad science never slips through the net – it does – but good science is what exposes it and roots it out. Having a paper withdrawn after publication is the kiss of death to any scientific career, which is one of the reasons that a mauling at peer-review should be seen as a service rather than a trial. At least, that’s what we tell ourselves when we’re gleefully eviscerating some poor bastards work… 

I fully took your point Pedro about goading Buckster for my own entertainment perhaps getting a bit boring for other people, and perhaps this is the explanation for it. But then if you are going to take on something as audacious as discrediting everything science has learned since the Enlightenment you’ll certainly get my attention, and if you’re daft enough to do so with such a woefully deficient grasp of the subjects then you deserve what you get. And with apologies to those who found it boring, this sort of nonsense needs to be ridiculed wherever it rears its head, not least because it is deeply insulting to those of us who have dedicated our lives to the acquisition of genuine knowledge.

That leads me on to my final point (which is in no way a dig at you, Pedro, because most people do it) which was your admonition to be mindful of the feelings of people on here with existential doubts. I dismissed that one so instinctively that I later realised that it hadn’t even occurred to me at the time to explain why.

Whilst we should all fully respect anyone’s right to hold religious views, we are under no obligation to have any respect for the views themselves, especially when so many of them are such an outrage to logic, reason and morality. In a free society, no ideas should be immune to scrutiny and, if necessary, to ridicule and contempt, whether they be political, scientific or religious. To think that any one set of opinions deserves special privileges and protections is a very dangerous road to go down.

If people are having existential doubts, then what they need above all else is honest and accurate information from both sides on which to make their decisions, not a ring-fencing of one set of views that puts them beyond criticism or attack merely because they are religious views. Where were you when Buckster was telling people that evolutionary biology is junk science, or that evolution has been disproved, or that there are no transitional fossils, or that radiometric dating is bogus and the earth is really only a few thousand years old? Where were you when I was being denounced as a deluded pseudoscientist, or being told that I was an insignificant grain of sand who lacks the intellectual or moral sophistication to be able to fathom the plans of The Almighty? Now in one sense of course it doesn’t matter, because I am quite capable of looking after myself, but nobody ever steps into these arguments on behalf of the atheist or the natural scientist who might be deeply offended by religious dogma or by their tawdry bastardisation of science. People will often say “I am offended” as though those three words constitute any sort of argument. I am offended by religion on a daily basis, not least when I turn on the news only to be confronted with the latest sub-human atrocity the parties of God are inflicting on their fellow humans, but merely being offended does not constitute an argument, nor a moral position.

I have never allowed myself any delusions (at least, not since I was 15) and I am not inclined to indulge them in anyone else. Nor am I in the least bit concerned about riding roughshod through the intellectual ‘safe spaces’ of the existentially baffled. They are adults, and they need to approach the problem as such.

In a nutshell, the root of their dilemma is trying to square what we once believed with what we now know. One way to do that is to do what Buckster does, and retreat into an alternate reality where everything we have learned since the Enlightenment is wrong, and where the only people who really understand what’s going on are charlatan hacks on the payroll of dodgy creationist organisations - essentially, to perform an intellectual self-lobotomy. That’s fine if you are happy with facile answers to important questions, but not all of us are so incurious. Another option is to make use of the innumerable high-quality, reputable educational resources at our fingertips in the 21st Century and get to grips with real science - and with more intelligent theology - and take it from there. Which of those they choose is entirely down to the individual, but the one thing they have no right to expect is that the rest of us modify or temper our views to accommodate their dithering.

At this point we haven't even set foot outside the realm of the natural sciences; the moral discussions take things to another level altogether. What elicited your rebuke in the end was my suggestion that much of what is to be found in the bible is exactly the sort of inane and morally reprehensible drivel that you might expect from a bunch of semi-literate Middle Eastern goat herders. And so it is. Take the story of Onan, for example, who was commanded to have sex with his dead brothers grieving wife by his father. Finding the ethics of the whole enterprise a bit dubious, he pulled out at the last second and ejaculated on the floor. This angered God, who promptly killed him. What profound moral or philosophical lessons are we supposed to take from this? Pretty much the only thing we can say with any degree of certainty is that with an aim like that he had no future in the porn industry.

Of all the characters in the bible, perhaps unsurprisingly I feel a particular sympathy with Isaac, the naïve and trusting son of Abraham. God commanded Abraham to kill Isaac to prove that he feared Him, and Abraham dutifully took the unwitting lad off to be slaughtered, only to be stopped at the last moment by a messenger of God who congratulated him on ‘passing the test’. What benevolence is this, that would conceive of such a monstrous test? Any man alive today who needs his wife to fear him would rightly be denounced as a coward and a thug, but if God can terrify a parent into murdering their own child we are supposed to be in awe of Him? What is this? Personally, I have no time for it, nor for those who fall over themselves defending it or apologising for it.

And perhaps this should be the test for any readers who are experiencing existential doubts: if God appeared in the heavens and commanded you to kill your child – or any child, for that matter - would you do it? If the answer is yes, you need to be institutionalised without delay; if the answer is no, you have already taken the first step towards self-enlightenment. Keep going.

And now, with nothing further to say before my self-imposed sentence of death is passed, I shall bid you all a fond farewell. You are a pretty cool bunch, and I like you all a lot. And yes, that includes you, Bucky.  But the bike was trailered away yesterday morning, and I’m making a clean break; no sense hanging on to things that will only remind me what I’m missing out on.

So @XTreme, as bad as I feel about abandoning you to the braindead gammons (again), once a suitable interval has passed for people to read this undoubted masterpiece, please go ahead and zap the lot. It’ll be like I never existed – a wise one who came, who spread his word and then vanished into the ether, leaving no physical trace, never to be heard from again… Wooo…. 

Sorry but I couldn't get through all that, reading War & Peace would have been easier.  Anyway what do I know, I'm just a braindead gammon.  But I do ride a bike , even on one leg ...........

 

[Buckster]

5 hours ago, Otto von Jizzmark said:

Now that’s not entirely true, is it? In the short time I’ve been here you’ve had a deeply fascinating overview of my bike history, some riveting pictures of my son making pens and fixing guitars, and even a highly risible anecdote concerning an encounter with an Irish tinker on a motorway service station. Admittedly I haven’t been here long enough to get into some of the more esoteric stuff I carry around in my head, but if you ever feel that what’s really missing from your life is a detailed knowledge of the mating habits of earwigs, I’m your man. 

As for the rest? Well, I’ll give you a whistle-stop tour before I go. There are few things more tedious than endless farewell tours though, so once an appropriate time has passed for people to read this and, if they feel so inclined also to comment on it, I’d like Pete to do the decent thing and throw the switch on my account and its content once and for all. “I, Otto von Jizzmark, known in professional circles as Professor Wankstain, being of sound mind and body, do hereby declare this to be my last will and testament…” etc, etc.

I’ll start with being a musician, not that there’s a great deal of any interest to say about that. After starting out on the piano at about age five I have ended up playing bass guitar (badly) and trumpet (worse), and spent years playing in numerous orchestras, big bands, jazz bands, pit bands for shows, rock covers bands – you name it. Nothing too remarkable there. The only vaguely unusual part I suppose was when I was 16, when I was briefly the bass player with a thrash punk band called The Nun Fuckers. They were something of an underground hit in my home town for a while, with one of their most popular numbers being the sensitive and tender romantic ballad ‘Anal Intruder’. The only lyric of that one which I can recall is “I’ll put roses on your piano if you’ll put tulips on my organ.” I was the youngest of them by a good four years, and only got the gig after the band I was in at the time shared the bill with them at a particularly dodgy nightclub where one of the headbangers in the audience invaded the stage and hospitalised their bass player. We only ever played the shittiest venues (another enduring mystery of our time) and every gig was utter carnage. Our final gig was at a condemned nightclub that had been closed by the council two years earlier, but which after ‘unofficially re-opening’ had rapidly become the local drug-dealing hotspot. The police raided that one and gassed the place. The band all legged it and hid in the bus depot until about 6 am when it was finally safe to go back and reclaim our gear. At one point we held the distinction of being one of only two bands to be permanently banned from playing an especially seedy local boozer, the other being The Macc Lads. I don’t know if you are familiar with their work, but if not, I’d leave it that way if I were you. 

The drummer and the guitarist are both long gone – one in an accident, the other of a heroin overdose – and I have no idea what happened to our lead singer. He’s probably a record company executive somewhere…

Anyway, I’m happy to say that that wasn’t the summit of my musical achievements, and I did go on to (blush) play in the Royal Albert Hall a few times and also on the telly. These days I’m a degenerate jazzer – far less rock’n’roll, but also far less energetic.

My professional life isn’t something I go into much detail about, and with good reason, but it’s not as exciting as you make it sound. Most science isn’t. It’s not thrilling or glamorous, it is - by and large - a long, hard, repetitive, tedious and pedantic slog. And it needs to be if it is to stand up to the mauling it gets from its peers, because most scientists love nothing more than to rip each other’s work to shreds. That’s not to say that bad science never slips through the net – it does – but good science is what exposes it and roots it out. Having a paper withdrawn after publication is the kiss of death to any scientific career, which is one of the reasons that a mauling at peer-review should be seen as a service rather than a trial. At least, that’s what we tell ourselves when we’re gleefully eviscerating some poor bastards work… 

I fully took your point Pedro about goading Buckster for my own entertainment perhaps getting a bit boring for other people, and perhaps this is the explanation for it. But then if you are going to take on something as audacious as discrediting everything science has learned since the Enlightenment you’ll certainly get my attention, and if you’re daft enough to do so with such a woefully deficient grasp of the subjects then you deserve what you get. And with apologies to those who found it boring, this sort of nonsense needs to be ridiculed wherever it rears its head, not least because it is deeply insulting to those of us who have dedicated our lives to the acquisition of genuine knowledge.

That leads me on to my final point (which is in no way a dig at you, Pedro, because most people do it) which was your admonition to be mindful of the feelings of people on here with existential doubts. I dismissed that one so instinctively that I later realised that it hadn’t even occurred to me at the time to explain why.

Whilst we should all fully respect anyone’s right to hold religious views, we are under no obligation to have any respect for the views themselves, especially when so many of them are such an outrage to logic, reason and morality. In a free society, no ideas should be immune to scrutiny and, if necessary, to ridicule and contempt, whether they be political, scientific or religious. To think that any one set of opinions deserves special privileges and protections is a very dangerous road to go down.

If people are having existential doubts, then what they need above all else is honest and accurate information from both sides on which to make their decisions, not a ring-fencing of one set of views that puts them beyond criticism or attack merely because they are religious views. Where were you when Buckster was telling people that evolutionary biology is junk science, or that evolution has been disproved, or that there are no transitional fossils, or that radiometric dating is bogus and the earth is really only a few thousand years old? Where were you when I was being denounced as a deluded pseudoscientist, or being told that I was an insignificant grain of sand who lacks the intellectual or moral sophistication to be able to fathom the plans of The Almighty? Now in one sense of course it doesn’t matter, because I am quite capable of looking after myself, but nobody ever steps into these arguments on behalf of the atheist or the natural scientist who might be deeply offended by religious dogma or by their tawdry bastardisation of science. People will often say “I am offended” as though those three words constitute any sort of argument. I am offended by religion on a daily basis, not least when I turn on the news only to be confronted with the latest sub-human atrocity the parties of God are inflicting on their fellow humans, but merely being offended does not constitute an argument, nor a moral position.

I have never allowed myself any delusions (at least, not since I was 15) and I am not inclined to indulge them in anyone else. Nor am I in the least bit concerned about riding roughshod through the intellectual ‘safe spaces’ of the existentially baffled. They are adults, and they need to approach the problem as such.

In a nutshell, the root of their dilemma is trying to square what we once believed with what we now know. One way to do that is to do what Buckster does, and retreat into an alternate reality where everything we have learned since the Enlightenment is wrong, and where the only people who really understand what’s going on are charlatan hacks on the payroll of dodgy creationist organisations - essentially, to perform an intellectual self-lobotomy. That’s fine if you are happy with facile answers to important questions, but not all of us are so incurious. Another option is to make use of the innumerable high-quality, reputable educational resources at our fingertips in the 21st Century and get to grips with real science - and with more intelligent theology - and take it from there. Which of those they choose is entirely down to the individual, but the one thing they have no right to expect is that the rest of us modify or temper our views to accommodate their dithering.

At this point we haven't even set foot outside the realm of the natural sciences; the moral discussions take things to another level altogether. What elicited your rebuke in the end was my suggestion that much of what is to be found in the bible is exactly the sort of inane and morally reprehensible drivel that you might expect from a bunch of semi-literate Middle Eastern goat herders. And so it is. Take the story of Onan, for example, who was commanded to have sex with his dead brothers grieving wife by his father. Finding the ethics of the whole enterprise a bit dubious, he pulled out at the last second and ejaculated on the floor. This angered God, who promptly killed him. What profound moral or philosophical lessons are we supposed to take from this? Pretty much the only thing we can say with any degree of certainty is that with an aim like that he had no future in the porn industry.

Of all the characters in the bible, perhaps unsurprisingly I feel a particular sympathy with Isaac, the naïve and trusting son of Abraham. God commanded Abraham to kill Isaac to prove that he feared Him, and Abraham dutifully took the unwitting lad off to be slaughtered, only to be stopped at the last moment by a messenger of God who congratulated him on ‘passing the test’. What benevolence is this, that would conceive of such a monstrous test? Any man alive today who needs his wife to fear him would rightly be denounced as a coward and a thug, but if God can terrify a parent into murdering their own child we are supposed to be in awe of Him? What is this? Personally, I have no time for it, nor for those who fall over themselves defending it or apologising for it.

And perhaps this should be the test for any readers who are experiencing existential doubts: if God appeared in the heavens and commanded you to kill your child – or any child, for that matter - would you do it? If the answer is yes, you need to be institutionalised without delay; if the answer is no, you have already taken the first step towards self-enlightenment. Keep going.

And now, with nothing further to say before my self-imposed sentence of death is passed, I shall bid you all a fond farewell. You are a pretty cool bunch, and I like you all a lot. And yes, that includes you, Bucky.  But the bike was trailered away yesterday morning, and I’m making a clean break; no sense hanging on to things that will only remind me what I’m missing out on.

So @XTreme, as bad as I feel about abandoning you to the braindead gammons (again), once a suitable interval has passed for people to read this undoubted masterpiece, please go ahead and zap the lot. It’ll be like I never existed – a wise one who came, who spread his word and then vanished into the ether, leaving no physical trace, never to be heard from again… Wooo…. 

What I got from this is you are unable to give anything but a nonsensical account of how life comes from non life so you are flouncing before everyone realises what a bellend you are. Like the band hiding in the bus depot, it seems you are still there at least existentially.

As for the rest of your ravings, I can see you want them to go unanswered so you can imagine some sort of win for your narcissistic supply so I will let you have that rather than damage your clearly fragile and fractured ego any further.

It is clear that something or someone hurt you during your formative years. Hopefully you haven't paid that forward to your progeny even though you have failed to deal with it yourself.

Watch the door on the way out, it swings back violently. 

[Buckster]

20 minutes ago, boboneleg said:

Sorry but I couldn't get through all that, reading War & Peace would have been easier.  Anyway what do I know, I'm just a braindead gammon.  But I do ride a bike , even on one leg ...........

 

When someone is looking for an excuse to quit, they invariably find one.

[Six30]

5 hours ago, Otto von Jizzmark said:

Now that’s not entirely true, is it? In the short time I’ve been here you’ve had a deeply fascinating overview of my bike history, some riveting pictures of my son making pens and fixing guitars, and even a highly risible anecdote concerning an encounter with an Irish tinker on a motorway service station. Admittedly I haven’t been here long enough to get into some of the more esoteric stuff I carry around in my head, but if you ever feel that what’s really missing from your life is a detailed knowledge of the mating habits of earwigs, I’m your man. 

As for the rest? Well, I’ll give you a whistle-stop tour before I go. There are few things more tedious than endless farewell tours though, so once an appropriate time has passed for people to read this and, if they feel so inclined also to comment on it, I’d like Pete to do the decent thing and throw the switch on my account and its content once and for all. “I, Otto von Jizzmark, known in professional circles as Professor Wankstain, being of sound mind and body, do hereby declare this to be my last will and testament…” etc, etc.

I’ll start with being a musician, not that there’s a great deal of any interest to say about that. After starting out on the piano at about age five I have ended up playing bass guitar (badly) and trumpet (worse), and spent years playing in numerous orchestras, big bands, jazz bands, pit bands for shows, rock covers bands – you name it. Nothing too remarkable there. The only vaguely unusual part I suppose was when I was 16, when I was briefly the bass player with a thrash punk band called The Nun Fuckers. They were something of an underground hit in my home town for a while, with one of their most popular numbers being the sensitive and tender romantic ballad ‘Anal Intruder’. The only lyric of that one which I can recall is “I’ll put roses on your piano if you’ll put tulips on my organ.” I was the youngest of them by a good four years, and only got the gig after the band I was in at the time shared the bill with them at a particularly dodgy nightclub where one of the headbangers in the audience invaded the stage and hospitalised their bass player. We only ever played the shittiest venues (another enduring mystery of our time) and every gig was utter carnage. Our final gig was at a condemned nightclub that had been closed by the council two years earlier, but which after ‘unofficially re-opening’ had rapidly become the local drug-dealing hotspot. The police raided that one and gassed the place. The band all legged it and hid in the bus depot until about 6 am when it was finally safe to go back and reclaim our gear. At one point we held the distinction of being one of only two bands to be permanently banned from playing an especially seedy local boozer, the other being The Macc Lads. I don’t know if you are familiar with their work, but if not, I’d leave it that way if I were you. 

The drummer and the guitarist are both long gone – one in an accident, the other of a heroin overdose – and I have no idea what happened to our lead singer. He’s probably a record company executive somewhere…

Anyway, I’m happy to say that that wasn’t the summit of my musical achievements, and I did go on to (blush) play in the Royal Albert Hall a few times and also on the telly. These days I’m a degenerate jazzer – far less rock’n’roll, but also far less energetic.

My professional life isn’t something I go into much detail about, and with good reason, but it’s not as exciting as you make it sound. Most science isn’t. It’s not thrilling or glamorous, it is - by and large - a long, hard, repetitive, tedious and pedantic slog. And it needs to be if it is to stand up to the mauling it gets from its peers, because most scientists love nothing more than to rip each other’s work to shreds. That’s not to say that bad science never slips through the net – it does – but good science is what exposes it and roots it out. Having a paper withdrawn after publication is the kiss of death to any scientific career, which is one of the reasons that a mauling at peer-review should be seen as a service rather than a trial. At least, that’s what we tell ourselves when we’re gleefully eviscerating some poor bastards work… 

I fully took your point Pedro about goading Buckster for my own entertainment perhaps getting a bit boring for other people, and perhaps this is the explanation for it. But then if you are going to take on something as audacious as discrediting everything science has learned since the Enlightenment you’ll certainly get my attention, and if you’re daft enough to do so with such a woefully deficient grasp of the subjects then you deserve what you get. And with apologies to those who found it boring, this sort of nonsense needs to be ridiculed wherever it rears its head, not least because it is deeply insulting to those of us who have dedicated our lives to the acquisition of genuine knowledge.

That leads me on to my final point (which is in no way a dig at you, Pedro, because most people do it) which was your admonition to be mindful of the feelings of people on here with existential doubts. I dismissed that one so instinctively that I later realised that it hadn’t even occurred to me at the time to explain why.

Whilst we should all fully respect anyone’s right to hold religious views, we are under no obligation to have any respect for the views themselves, especially when so many of them are such an outrage to logic, reason and morality. In a free society, no ideas should be immune to scrutiny and, if necessary, to ridicule and contempt, whether they be political, scientific or religious. To think that any one set of opinions deserves special privileges and protections is a very dangerous road to go down.

If people are having existential doubts, then what they need above all else is honest and accurate information from both sides on which to make their decisions, not a ring-fencing of one set of views that puts them beyond criticism or attack merely because they are religious views. Where were you when Buckster was telling people that evolutionary biology is junk science, or that evolution has been disproved, or that there are no transitional fossils, or that radiometric dating is bogus and the earth is really only a few thousand years old? Where were you when I was being denounced as a deluded pseudoscientist, or being told that I was an insignificant grain of sand who lacks the intellectual or moral sophistication to be able to fathom the plans of The Almighty? Now in one sense of course it doesn’t matter, because I am quite capable of looking after myself, but nobody ever steps into these arguments on behalf of the atheist or the natural scientist who might be deeply offended by religious dogma or by their tawdry bastardisation of science. People will often say “I am offended” as though those three words constitute any sort of argument. I am offended by religion on a daily basis, not least when I turn on the news only to be confronted with the latest sub-human atrocity the parties of God are inflicting on their fellow humans, but merely being offended does not constitute an argument, nor a moral position.

I have never allowed myself any delusions (at least, not since I was 15) and I am not inclined to indulge them in anyone else. Nor am I in the least bit concerned about riding roughshod through the intellectual ‘safe spaces’ of the existentially baffled. They are adults, and they need to approach the problem as such.

In a nutshell, the root of their dilemma is trying to square what we once believed with what we now know. One way to do that is to do what Buckster does, and retreat into an alternate reality where everything we have learned since the Enlightenment is wrong, and where the only people who really understand what’s going on are charlatan hacks on the payroll of dodgy creationist organisations - essentially, to perform an intellectual self-lobotomy. That’s fine if you are happy with facile answers to important questions, but not all of us are so incurious. Another option is to make use of the innumerable high-quality, reputable educational resources at our fingertips in the 21st Century and get to grips with real science - and with more intelligent theology - and take it from there. Which of those they choose is entirely down to the individual, but the one thing they have no right to expect is that the rest of us modify or temper our views to accommodate their dithering.

At this point we haven't even set foot outside the realm of the natural sciences; the moral discussions take things to another level altogether. What elicited your rebuke in the end was my suggestion that much of what is to be found in the bible is exactly the sort of inane and morally reprehensible drivel that you might expect from a bunch of semi-literate Middle Eastern goat herders. And so it is. Take the story of Onan, for example, who was commanded to have sex with his dead brothers grieving wife by his father. Finding the ethics of the whole enterprise a bit dubious, he pulled out at the last second and ejaculated on the floor. This angered God, who promptly killed him. What profound moral or philosophical lessons are we supposed to take from this? Pretty much the only thing we can say with any degree of certainty is that with an aim like that he had no future in the porn industry.

Of all the characters in the bible, perhaps unsurprisingly I feel a particular sympathy with Isaac, the naïve and trusting son of Abraham. God commanded Abraham to kill Isaac to prove that he feared Him, and Abraham dutifully took the unwitting lad off to be slaughtered, only to be stopped at the last moment by a messenger of God who congratulated him on ‘passing the test’. What benevolence is this, that would conceive of such a monstrous test? Any man alive today who needs his wife to fear him would rightly be denounced as a coward and a thug, but if God can terrify a parent into murdering their own child we are supposed to be in awe of Him? What is this? Personally, I have no time for it, nor for those who fall over themselves defending it or apologising for it.

And perhaps this should be the test for any readers who are experiencing existential doubts: if God appeared in the heavens and commanded you to kill your child – or any child, for that matter - would you do it? If the answer is yes, you need to be institutionalised without delay; if the answer is no, you have already taken the first step towards self-enlightenment. Keep going.

And now, with nothing further to say before my self-imposed sentence of death is passed, I shall bid you all a fond farewell. You are a pretty cool bunch, and I like you all a lot. And yes, that includes you, Bucky.  But the bike was trailered away yesterday morning, and I’m making a clean break; no sense hanging on to things that will only remind me what I’m missing out on.

So @XTreme, as bad as I feel about abandoning you to the braindead gammons (again), once a suitable interval has passed for people to read this undoubted masterpiece, please go ahead and zap the lot. It’ll be like I never existed – a wise one who came, who spread his word and then vanished into the ether, leaving no physical trace, never to be heard from again… Wooo…. 

Fuck Bucksters Bible shit … you stay put .

[Buckster]

Just now, Six30 said:

Fuck Bucksters Bible shit … you stay put .

Piss off, I went for a ride today and have video footage.

[Six30]

2 minutes ago, Buckster said:

Piss off, I went for a ride today and have video footage.

Yeh right … but you misplaced your computer to download it ?

[XTreme]

14 minutes ago, Six30 said:

Fuck Bucksters Bible shit … you stay put .

What the annoying cunt said!

[XTreme]

14 minutes ago, Buckster said:

Piss off, I went for a ride today and have video footage.

Ride Report then!

[XTreme]

38 minutes ago, boboneleg said:

Anyway what do I know, I'm just a braindead gammon.

You're not a Gammon Bob!

[Buckster]

5 minutes ago, Six30 said:

Yeh right … but you misplaced your computer to download it ?

Funny you mention that, my dad came to visit which is a bit odd because he died 18 years ago and something something and that’s why so ner.

[Buckster]

19 minutes ago, XTreme said:

Ride Report then!

Maybe, will see if I can pull some stills off the video. 

[Buckster]

1 hour ago, XTreme said:

You're not a Gammon Bob!

Yes he is.