On Fri, 6 Dec 2024, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

>> Interestingly in the UK we cannot use handguns at all. For anything outside
>> single shot target shooting at a registered range.
>
>
> That's left-wing totalitarianism for you.

This is called "europe" in everyday language! ;)

> Alas, I think the UK is just about to go DOWN.

This sounds plausible. I predict 4 difficult years with Starmer and socialism.
After that, if the Tories have bright and flexible minds, there will be a
coalition between Tories and Farage, and UK will be where sweden is now with a
center government supported by the nationalist sweden democrats.

> Hope you have a place way out in the countryside.
>
>
>> Legal firearms range from 12 gauge and even 20 gauge shotguns down through
>> 410 'crow guns'  to game approved rifles. .22 is allowed for small game
>> like rabbits, but a .25 is mandatory for deer and many people use larger.
>>
>> Naturally Britain being a very small country with a lot of people, strict
>> codes of practice accompany game shooting.  It is illegal to shoot anything
>> but bird shot upwards...
>
> And you don't find this suspiciously Big Brotherish ?
>
> WHO is being protected with all that - YOU ?
>
> Try the USA. You can own almost anything - and even
> get a license for .50 machine-guns. Probably won't
> even need that once Trump's people are in.

If I could move to red, rural and bible thumping US I would do so right now.
Sadly family commitments keep me chained to europe. =(

> In the PAST I'd have said the UK was 'less hazardous'
> and therefore less need for strong weapons ... but
> the news the past several years .........

Very little gun violence in the UK. However, seems to be a lot of sword and
knife violence! =/

> At minimum dude :
>
>
> https://www.allbeststuff.com/chain-mail-armour/aluminum-brass-titanium-chain-mail-shirts/titanium-chain-mail-hauberks-the-strongest-chainmail-for-sca-full-contact-fighting
>
> https://www.ringmesh.com/
>
>
> https://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Gears-Titanium-Chainmail-Riveted/dp/B00ZYYPNZE
>

On Sat, 7 Dec 2024, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

> On 12/6/24 4:11 AM, D wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Fri, 6 Dec 2024, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>>
>>> On 12/5/24 7:17 AM, D wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, 5 Dec 2024, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On 05/12/2024 09:31, D wrote:
>>>>>> There is great good and great evil in man. That's what makes him so
>>>>>> fascinating and why fighting is such a necessary sport to give an
>>>>>> outlet for all that aggression.
>>>>>
>>>>> Only man creates the categories of good and evil.
>>>>> Science does not include them
>>>>
>>>> I think you know what I mean. In order to avoid nitpicking, let's say
>>>> creative and destructive energies.
>>>
>>>  To "Nature" ... I think it's all just superstrings hummin'
>>>
>>>  WE make of it all as we will.
>>>
>>>  Joe Alien ... he many have entirely different ideas ...
>>>
>>
>> I know. Natural and I have discussed this violently and agreed to disagree.
>> I'm a huge fan of the material world. As for the ultimate nature, laws and
>> composition, I am agnostic, and we'll see how far science will take us. I
>> lean towards instrumentalism/cognitive empiricism.
>
>
> IMHO, 'material' owns it - 'reality'-wise anyhow.
>
> However the Quality Of Life depends on what we DO with that.
> It generally stops of short agreeing to the Nietzschean extreme.
>
> Sci-tech will eventually take us All The Way insofar as
> power over our environment. But, again, how do we FEEL
> such power and insight be used ?
>
> If it was easy they'd have resolved all this 25,000
> years ago.
>
> The Buddha understood there was a Real World - but
> WE could never ever really see/perceive it because
> of what we were, how nature put us together, our
> native environment, our IQ range. We will always
> have a key-hole view, seeing things through
> "human-colored glasses".
>
> Plato's "Allegory of the cave" kinda touched on the
> same stuff - but, maybe for political reasons, left
> off the last paragraph or two.
>
> ANYWAY, at the cold cold root - it's just all
> superstrings hummin' ... calculating a 'reality'
> as WE can sorta perceive it. Wolfram seems to
> have grasped this.
>

I pretty much agree with you. Not much to add. Interesting that this is
your interpretation of Nietzsche. Mine is very similar. I would add, that
Nietzsches philosophy is his own attempt, and that every person needs to
make it "his own".

Tying that to politics, I think it was Ludwig von Mises who wrote in his
classic "Liberalism" (and this is liberalism in its original meaning, not
the bastardized US meaning of the term, so think libertarianism),
somethings along the lines of...

Liberalism [libertarianism] is nothing more than the scientific view and
method of how to structure society in such a way as to maximize material
wealth and quality of life. Beyond maximizing material wealth, it makes no
other claims or sets no other goals.

So what you, as an individual, do with that wealth, if you use that to
purchase time (work less) and what you fill that time with, is entirely up
to you.

I believe that this is why many people find libertarianism so scary. They
have no inherent sense of value or goals. They need the goals pushed on
them from the outside (equality, sustainability, be a cog wheel in the
machine of the nation, the prosperity and success of the race, etc.) in
order to feel meaning in their life.

When they have an ism that does not push any form of value, but only wants
to create time for people to flourish, since they are not self directed
from within, they cannot make any sense at all of it, and it scares them
at a deep level.

That is why I think that the human psychology is not really ready for
libertarianism, as long as the majority of humans are drawn to religions
and isms in order for an external person to supply them with goals and
values.

On Sat, 7 Dec 2024, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

> On 12/6/24 12:12 PM, D wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Fri, 6 Dec 2024, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>
>>> On 06/12/2024 06:48, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>>>> On 12/5/24 4:36 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>>> On 05/12/2024 09:31, D wrote:
>>>>>> There is great good and great evil in man. That's what makes him so
>>>>>> fascinating and why fighting is such a necessary sport to give an
>>>>>> outlet for all that aggression.
>>>>>
>>>>> Only man creates the categories of good and evil.
>>>>> Science does not include them
>>>>
>>>>    The Real World exists. What any of that MEANS,
>>>>    entirely our own inventions.
>>>>
>>>>    And those inventions tend to CHANGE over time.
>>>>
>>>>    Yea, kinda Nietzsche-esque ...
>>>
>>> More Kant-ian.
>>>
>>> His metaphysics draws a clear distinction between the 'world-in-itself'
>>> and how we perceive it. His point being that the objects we reify it into
>>> are not actually there as discrete entities, they are simply how we
>>> describe it to ourselves and to others.
>>>
>>> Which immediately solves the 'Theseus' ship' paradox*, as such a ship
>>> doesn't exist, it is merely how we refer to a collection of rotting bits
>>> of wood.
>>>
>>> (The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's Paradox, is a paradox and a
>>> common thought experiment about whether an object is the same object after
>>> having all of its original components replaced over time, typically one
>>> after the other.
>>>
>>> In Greek mythology, Theseus, the mythical king of the city of Athens,
>>> rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the Minotaur
>>> and then escaped onto a ship going to Delos. Each year, the Athenians
>>> would commemorate this by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to
>>> honour Apollo. A question was raised by ancient philosophers: After
>>> several hundreds of years of maintenance, if each individual piece of the
>>> Ship of Theseus were replaced, one after the other, was it still the same
>>> ship? )
>>>
>>> Modern philosophers still get their knickers in a twist over this. If you
>>> are a died in the wool realist and materialist it is a problem because you
>>> believe there exists such a thing as 'Theseus' Ship' in reality.
>>
>> I would argue that the ones who most certainly do not have a problem with
>> this are materialists. It's a bunch of atoms, and we can then make up
>> labels. The problem guys are the platonists with their ideal heavens,
>> concepts etc. which are forever beyond proof. The ding an sich is an absurd
>> konzept an sich. If you postulate something which can never be known, it is
>> kind of useless. It goes the same way as god, or a postulated first mover
>> etc.
>>
>>> Kantians say that it's just a label: Distinct from the object that it
>>> refers to. Meta data. A pointer.
>
>
> Kant ?
>
> Try Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" tome.
>
> OK ... you'll go brain-dead after just a few
> chapters ..... and it's like 1000 pages ......
>
> BUT, he kinda DID prove that our "physics" can be
> an emergent property of ultra-zillions of 'strings'
> humming along with simple interaction rules -
> cellular automata math.
>
> Ultimately, all 'materialistic'.
>
> But what WE make of it all, how we LIVE in it all ...
>

If he proved it, how come there has been so little talk about him in
scientific circles?

On Sat, 7 Dec 2024, rbowman wrote:

> On Sat, 7 Dec 2024 00:55:10 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>
>> Plato's "Allegory of the cave" kinda touched on the same stuff - but,
>> maybe for political reasons, left off the last paragraph or two.
>
> Then he went off he deep end with Platonic realism and set Western thought
> to chasing its tail for 2000 years.
>

Agreed!

On 06/12/2024 17:12, D wrote:
> If you postulate something which can never be known, it is kind of
> useless. It goes the same way as god, or a postulated first mover etc.

And yet that is what people do all the time. In fact it is the necessary
foundation of thinking.

All metaphysics - and we all use it, whether we understand that we do or
not - is to assume the framework for our understanding, and use it not
because it is demonstrably true, but because it *works* for us.

We don't and can't *know* that time and space exist - at least in the
way we understand them, but they do *work* for us, the way we understand
them.

--
"Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They
always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them"

Margaret Thatcher

On 07/12/2024 07:41, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
> On 12/6/24 12:12 PM, D wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Fri, 6 Dec 2024, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>
>>> On 06/12/2024 06:48, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>>>> On 12/5/24 4:36 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>>> On 05/12/2024 09:31, D wrote:
>>>>>> There is great good and great evil in man. That's what makes him
>>>>>> so fascinating and why fighting is such a necessary sport to give
>>>>>> an outlet for all that aggression.
>>>>>
>>>>> Only man creates the categories of good and evil.
>>>>> Science does not include them
>>>>
>>>>    The Real World exists. What any of that MEANS,
>>>>    entirely our own inventions.
>>>>
>>>>    And those inventions tend to CHANGE over time.
>>>>
>>>>    Yea, kinda Nietzsche-esque ...
>>>
>>> More Kant-ian.
>>>
>>> His metaphysics draws a clear distinction between the
>>> 'world-in-itself' and how we perceive it. His point being that the
>>> objects we reify it into are not actually there as discrete entities,
>>> they are simply how we describe it to ourselves and to others.
>>>
>>> Which immediately solves the 'Theseus' ship' paradox*, as such a ship
>>> doesn't exist, it is merely how we refer to a collection of rotting
>>> bits of wood.
>>>
>>> (The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's Paradox, is a paradox
>>> and a common thought experiment about whether an object is the same
>>> object after having all of its original components replaced over
>>> time, typically one after the other.
>>>
>>> In Greek mythology, Theseus, the mythical king of the city of Athens,
>>> rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the
>>> Minotaur and then escaped onto a ship going to Delos. Each year, the
>>> Athenians would commemorate this by taking the ship on a pilgrimage
>>> to Delos to honour Apollo. A question was raised by ancient
>>> philosophers: After several hundreds of years of maintenance, if each
>>> individual piece of the Ship of Theseus were replaced, one after the
>>> other, was it still the same ship? )
>>>
>>> Modern philosophers still get their knickers in a twist over this. If
>>> you are a died in the wool realist and materialist it is a problem
>>> because you believe there exists such a thing as 'Theseus' Ship' in
>>> reality.
>>
>> I would argue that the ones who most certainly do not have a problem
>> with this are materialists. It's a bunch of atoms, and we can then
>> make up labels. The problem guys are the platonists with their ideal
>> heavens, concepts etc. which are forever beyond proof. The ding an
>> sich is an absurd konzept an sich. If you postulate something which
>> can never be known, it is kind of useless. It goes the same way as
>> god, or a postulated first mover etc.
>>
>>> Kantians say that it's just a label: Distinct from the object that it
>>> refers to. Meta data. A pointer.
>
>
>   Kant ?
>
>   Try Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" tome.
>
>   OK ... you'll go brain-dead after just a few
>   chapters ..... and it's like 1000 pages ......
>
>   BUT, he kinda DID prove that our "physics" can be
>   an emergent property of ultra-zillions of 'strings'
>   humming along with simple interaction rules -
>   cellular automata math.
>
>   Ultimately, all 'materialistic'.
>
>   But what WE make of it all, how we LIVE in it all ...

Well I don't apply the term materialistic as strictly to that kind of view.

Although he is still stuck with 'objects and events in space time linked
by causality' .

He hasn't really changed his metaphysics at all, merely made it
increasingly remote with yet more dimensions to explain why it seems to
be the way it seems to be.

(Epicycles versus heliocentrism. You CAN do it all with epicycles, but
sticking the sun in the middle is a co-ordinate transform that really
makes it less shitty to calculate, as the Church accepted. What they
didn't like was Galileo claiming it was 'true'. Because it isn't. It
just works.)

And hasn't gone as far as seeing that all of the above are in fact
emergent properties of the consciousness that uses them as foundations
for its thinking to map what really is, into a digestible form.

Or rather that is in fact a far simpler way to arrive at a metaphysics
that *works*.

Bohm did all that with his theory on an 'implicate order' behind quantum
physics. Showing that if you postulated another realm, quantum effects
could be the emergent properties of that.

And then testing the Bell inequality showed that at least that couldn't
be the case for *local* variables.

Physicists and mathematicians have all been trying to 'save materialism'
from the onslaught of the Quantum world. Until recently are they
beginning to think 'let's say we scrap materialism and think of it as an
emergent property...what then could be the underlying reality and why do
we see it as other than it probably is'?

They are slowly getting there.

I can't find a very interesting talk held in an annex before a big
physical society conference on you tube any more . I suspect it simply
hasn't had enough you tube views because no one understood it. I almost
did. Enough to stay the course.

Suffice to say the three participants were starting to think outside the
materialistic box to find a solution to 'what quantum physics has to
mean' etc.

Also Sean Carroll is a very good presenter of ideas in this area. Worth
a listen to.

I think we are probably sue for a Kuhnian 'paradigm shift'

--
"Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They
always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them"

Margaret Thatcher

On 07/12/2024 10:52, D wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, 7 Dec 2024, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>
>> On 12/6/24 12:12 PM, D wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, 6 Dec 2024, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 06/12/2024 06:48, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>>>>> On 12/5/24 4:36 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>>>> On 05/12/2024 09:31, D wrote:
>>>>>>> There is great good and great evil in man. That's what makes him
>>>>>>> so fascinating and why fighting is such a necessary sport to give
>>>>>>> an outlet for all that aggression.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Only man creates the categories of good and evil.
>>>>>> Science does not include them
>>>>>
>>>>>    The Real World exists. What any of that MEANS,
>>>>>    entirely our own inventions.
>>>>>
>>>>>    And those inventions tend to CHANGE over time.
>>>>>
>>>>>    Yea, kinda Nietzsche-esque ...
>>>>
>>>> More Kant-ian.
>>>>
>>>> His metaphysics draws a clear distinction between the
>>>> 'world-in-itself' and how we perceive it. His point being that the
>>>> objects we reify it into are not actually there as discrete
>>>> entities, they are simply how we describe it to ourselves and to
>>>> others.
>>>>
>>>> Which immediately solves the 'Theseus' ship' paradox*, as such a
>>>> ship doesn't exist, it is merely how we refer to a collection of
>>>> rotting bits of wood.
>>>>
>>>> (The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's Paradox, is a paradox
>>>> and a common thought experiment about whether an object is the same
>>>> object after having all of its original components replaced over
>>>> time, typically one after the other.
>>>>
>>>> In Greek mythology, Theseus, the mythical king of the city of
>>>> Athens, rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying
>>>> the Minotaur and then escaped onto a ship going to Delos. Each year,
>>>> the Athenians would commemorate this by taking the ship on a
>>>> pilgrimage to Delos to honour Apollo. A question was raised by
>>>> ancient philosophers: After several hundreds of years of
>>>> maintenance, if each individual piece of the Ship of Theseus were
>>>> replaced, one after the other, was it still the same ship? )
>>>>
>>>> Modern philosophers still get their knickers in a twist over this.
>>>> If you are a died in the wool realist and materialist it is a
>>>> problem because you believe there exists such a thing as 'Theseus'
>>>> Ship' in reality.
>>>
>>> I would argue that the ones who most certainly do not have a problem
>>> with this are materialists. It's a bunch of atoms, and we can then
>>> make up labels. The problem guys are the platonists with their ideal
>>> heavens, concepts etc. which are forever beyond proof. The ding an
>>> sich is an absurd konzept an sich. If you postulate something which
>>> can never be known, it is kind of useless. It goes the same way as
>>> god, or a postulated first mover etc.
>>>
>>>> Kantians say that it's just a label: Distinct from the object that
>>>> it refers to. Meta data. A pointer.
>>
>>
>>  Kant ?
>>
>>  Try Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" tome.
>>
>>  OK ... you'll go brain-dead after just a few
>>  chapters ..... and it's like 1000 pages ......
>>
>>  BUT, he kinda DID prove that our "physics" can be
>>  an emergent property of ultra-zillions of 'strings'
>>  humming along with simple interaction rules -
>>  cellular automata math.
>>
>>  Ultimately, all 'materialistic'.
>>
>>  But what WE make of it all, how we LIVE in it all ...
>>
>
> If he proved it, how come there has been so little talk about him in
> scientific circles?

Read 186282@ud0s4.net's exact words.

"prove that our "physics" *can* be"...

....Anything.

It's a bit like 'With enough terms in a polynomial I can draw an
elephant'. True, but moderately useless.

The first point that is relevant is the linkage between facts, and
theories. Science *presupposes* that invisible eternal and immutable
Laws of Nature (more digestible than Gods Demons or Elohim) guide events
to inevitable conclusions, given the exact starting points. And the
business of science is to 'discover' what those laws are.

Or at least that was roughly the Newtonian worldview.

It came under attack beginning with a clearer exposition of a logical
flaw in how we arrived at these theories.

Hume expressed it as the 'problem of induction' . That is the inability
to derive general rules from specific instances. The sun rose today. It
always has, but does that mean it always will?

And we can extend that uncertainty into general rules of inference by
stating categorically that in the case of certain events happening,
there are both an infinite number of *possible* 'causes' as well as an
infinite number of *impossible* ones.

And science is a collection of possible ones. Not as most people think,
of *facts*.

And what is deemed possible is subjective. To some people the idea of
injecting microchips into your brain to control your thinking is plausible.

So the fact that some one 'proved something' *could* be *possible*,
means absolutely nothing.

If the something is vague enough and untestable it's basically pseudo
scientific bullshit.

What a theory has to do is to explain something in a testable way that
differs from how it was explained before, and is more accurate in
describing the world.

Then scientists get interested. Einstein's theories accounted for
gravity as we then understood it but gave corrections to things we had
measured that didn't quite fit, as well. It worked better than Newtonian
but it was radically and shockingly different.

And a great loosening of the conviction that theories uncovered truths,
to an understanding that they were *plausible constructions that
worked*, only.

And a better understanding of Occam in that the simplest idea no longer
represented the truth, it was just that , in an infinity of
possibilities, inventing complicated ones where simple ones were just as
good, was mere posturing and intellectual flatulence.

And that is the problem with string theory. It could be right but it
brings nothing to the party. So why bother?

--
There’s a mighty big difference between good, sound reasons and reasons
that sound good.

Burton Hillis (William Vaughn, American columnist)

On 06/12/2024 17:18, D wrote:
>>
>> Its not that the real world is not at some level most usefully
>> regarded as a fact, it is that the more subtle question is whether
>> what we *perceive* is in fact the real world *at all*. Or simply a
>> construction in our own minds that maps what is *actually* there
>> (maybe a probabilistic entangled quantum soup) into a recognisable
>> world of objects and events linked in space time by natural law and
>> causality.
>
> I'd say it is an obvious fact and not a subtle question if we look at the
> limited spectrum of our senses, and our limited compute resources. I
> think in terms of reality, it can be seen as a spectrum of probabilities
> about
> things in the world. Many clever people cling to this, and think it
> means that no world exists, or that nothing can be proven.

Well the concept that no world exists is called Idealism. It's all in
the mind. Mine alone [solipsism], Gods [monism], or some other
arrangement. It explains everything but predicts nothing. Like Islam.
Inshallah. If it is Gods Will. Great, But not very *helpful*.

'Nothing can be proven' is in fact the case, and the whole problem and
the disjunct between the mind of the ordinary person and that of
philosophers.

Only deductive logic is provable, But all science and everyday life
rests on inductive logic and inference.

On 'probable cause'.

My late mother was convinced that people were coming in to her house and
hiding her car keys. So she started putting them in places no one,
including herself, would think to look.

But with short term memory loss, she couldn't find them again, thus
reinforcing the original belief.

The neighbours were a plausible if somewhat paranoid explanation. For
someone in her condition.

It's the same with conspiracy theories. They are plausible to people
without the background to reject them as extremely unlikely. How many
people believed in WMD in Iraq?

I reverse
> that, and say that any proposed alternatives to the real world should be
> proven, and if they are not, the real world is a perfectly reasonable
> default assumption.

The problem is that no alternatives can be *proven*, and indeed while
the 'real world' is a perfectly reasonable *assumption*, it starts to
crack a little under the strain of modern physics. And indeed some
psychology and other pressures. It cannot be 'proven' *either*.
It is as you correctly say a default *assumption*.

Left wing idealists would argue that the world is simply what you think
it is and can be changed by 'magical thinking'. To them this is more
than plausible, it is self evident *fact*.

My point in advocating the philosophy of Kant et al, is that it solves
problems that mere materialism does not.

Neither can be proved correct, but in the context of modern life
'transcendental idealism' may prove to be (sic!) more *useful*.

It accounts for the subjective element of experience. It allows time to
pass differently for different observers.

Pure materialism insist that time and space are immutable, they are
there as the framework of all material existence. Einstein says that
they are in fact relative to the observer.

Oh dear.

--
"Women actually are capable of being far more than the feminists will
let them."

On 06/12/2024 20:40, D wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, 6 Dec 2024, rbowman wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 6 Dec 2024 18:23:09 +0100, D wrote:
>>
>>> I once experimented with the concept of agnostic monism, by which I
>>> mean,
>>> a unified underlying construction or explanation of the world (of which
>>> we are a part), but, that we cannot (at the moment, and probably, never
>>> will)
>>> determine the nature of it.
>>
>> It's all water.
>>
>
> Nonsense! Ether!

Its all in the mind.
Whose mind? I cancel that question! MY mind!

--
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
– Will Durant

On 07/12/2024 06:04, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
> On 12/6/24 2:54 PM, rbowman wrote:
>> On Fri, 6 Dec 2024 18:23:09 +0100, D wrote:
>>
>>> I once experimented with the concept of agnostic monism, by which I
>>> mean,
>>> a unified underlying construction or explanation of the world (of which
>>> we are a part), but, that we cannot (at the moment, and probably, never
>>> will)
>>> determine the nature of it.
>>
>> It's all water.
>
>   Containing turtles ....  :-)

An infinite collection as well. Turtles all the way down!

--
“Progress is precisely that which rules and regulations did not foresee,”

– Ludwig von Mises

On 06/12/2024 17:24, D wrote:
>> I drank a couple of points of pear juice. Delicious. And unbeknownst
>> to me Natures best laxative...
>
> Pear juice? Had no idea!

Neither did I.

> I do know though, that after enjoying fresh
> pressed apple juice, most, if not all, store bought juice tastes awful.

Yes. Fresh pressed juice contains nothing to stop it becoming cider.,

> I am also not a fan of the filtered apple juice you get on planes, which
> probably comes down to the previous statement.

Store bought juice is simply another product...

--
“Progress is precisely that which rules and regulations did not foresee,”

– Ludwig von Mises

On 07/12/2024 05:19, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
> But larger cal is better for 'hunting'. 6.5mm to .30
>   for northern Europe. The old 6.5 Swedish is a great
>   cartridge.

I think that is broadly the UK legal range.

To be blunt about it, to kill a large animal cleanly requires a single
massively traumatic event. Many hunters will not shoot until they can
get a head shot. Either they miss, or they kill. No wounded animals
dying of blood loss.

To do that level of damage requires a bit more than even a high velocity
..22 can manage. I believe those have a tendency to go straight through.

--
"I am inclined to tell the truth and dislike people who lie consistently.
This makes me unfit for the company of people of a Left persuasion, and
all women"

On 07/12/2024 10:20, D wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, 6 Dec 2024, rbowman wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 6 Dec 2024 10:09:11 +0100, D wrote:
>>
>>> Don't even go there. Natural and I had very lively discussions on that
>>> theme.  But yes, I'm in the camp of the people who accept the real world
>>> as a fact, and that without humans, there's no ethics, math, true or
>>> false.
>>
>> Buddhism has the concept of two truths, conventional and ultimate.
>> Conventionally I went out this morning to feed two cats. Ultimately 'cat'
>> is a construct I imposed and there aren't two of anything.
>>
>> https://thebuddhistcentre.com/system/files/groups/files/heart_sutra.pdf
>>
>> Nietzsche condensed into a couple of hundred Chinese ideograms...
>
> Buddha seems to have been far ahead of his time. I really like his
> position on god, that instead of speculating, they should "shut up and
> meditate". ;)
>
There are states of mind that can be achieved that clarify why people
started talking about gods and spirits and other realms in the first place.

> On the other hand, I do not know if this is what he actually thought, or
> if it is just hearsay.
>
Does it matter?

The sound of one hand clapping is a phrase that seems to make sense, in
that you understand all the words, but it points to an impossible or
meaningless event.

The intention is to guide the student away from a dependence on the
reality of words to a reality beyond them.

> I tried for a bit, to try and "distill" original buddhism, and although
> it was difficult to find anything specific, my feeling was that original
> buddhism was more about doing, rather than speculating, so heavily
> meditation focused, and not very speculation focused.
>
Buddhism is what one bloke said after he had successfully stopped his
mind from thinking but yet wasn't actually unconscious. And a set of
instructions on how to copy his techniques.

I met a guy once who spent a long time doing that, who had also taken
LSD He claimed that 'the end result is the same, but the LSD is much
easier, and a bit more dangerous'.

:-)

> Another thing I found out was also that original buddhism was heavily
> adapted to the individual (naturally) where buddha tried to tailor the
> techniques and teachings to the individual he was talking with, and that
> is why it started to diverge over the millennia.

Yes. If you regard the primary purpose as detaching the consciousness
from the intricate entanglement with ordinary affairs, which as far as I
am concerned is all that it is, then the method will differ for each
individual since their involvements all differ.

Stopping the incessant flow of internal conversation is the name of the
game, and it's (meditation) not the only way to do that. Trauma does
it. Isolation and asceticism does it. Self punishment (flagellation)
allegedly does it. Even lack of sleep does it. Some drugs do it.

--
Gun Control: The law that ensures that only criminals have guns.

On 07/12/2024 10:26, D wrote:
> do like opensuse, but their way of acting towards non-woke people, as
> reported on by Lunduke, really makes me want to stop supporting them.

Go woke, go broke.

The Marxist termites have been burrowing through the fabric of society
on the 'long march through the institutions' since 1967.

Now they control them the inevitable collapse towards anarchy or
idiocracy begins.

Inevitably people who combine into less stupid and idealistic cohesions
will take over.

Possibly without any evident democracy. Hey ho, Twas ever thus...

--
No Apple devices were knowingly used in the preparation of this post.

On 07/12/2024 02:30, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2024-12-06, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> I was recovering from a tumour operation at that point and was on
>> seriously concrete butt plugging pain relief.
>>
>> I drank a couple of points of pear juice. Delicious. And unbeknownst to
>> me Natures best laxative...
>
> Interesting. I've found that peanut butter acts as a mild laxative,
> at least for me. This is a Good Thing - I love peanut butter.
> I had a knee replacement yesterday, so I'll get to test it.
>
Oh gawd. I hope it works out. I hate to say it, but IME around 50% of
knee operations fail.

Sometimes fatally

--
"Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They
always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them"

Margaret Thatcher

On 07/12/2024 10:27, D wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, 7 Dec 2024, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>
>> On 2024-12-06, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>> I was recovering from a tumour operation at that point and was on
>>> seriously concrete butt plugging pain relief.
>>>
>>> I drank a couple of points of pear juice. Delicious. And unbeknownst to
>>> me Natures best laxative...
>>
>> Interesting.  I've found that peanut butter acts as a mild laxative,
>> at least for me.  This is a Good Thing - I love peanut butter.
>> I had a knee replacement yesterday, so I'll get to test it.
>>
>
> Knee replacememt? I have heard of hip joint replacement, but had no idea
> they do it with knees as well! In truth, science is mighty!

A friend had it. She was an overweight NHS nurse, After 4 further
operations to try and clear infection, she said when she contracted
pneumonia 'don't revive me. I've had enough of pain'.

I went to her funeral.

Other people end up with amputations.

Hip replacements are very successful though.

Its something to do with the ability or inability to deliver antibiotics
to the wound site

--
Truth welcomes investigation because truth knows investigation will lead
to converts. It is deception that uses all the other techniques.

On 07/12/2024 02:30, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2024-12-06, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> (The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's Paradox, is a paradox and
>> a common thought experiment about whether an object is the same object
>> after having all of its original components replaced over time,
>> typically one after the other.
>
> Last night somebody broke into my apartment and replaced
> everything with exact duplicates. When I pointed it out
> to my roommate, he said, "Do I know you?"
> -- Steven Wright
>
Love it!

> This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for
> almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it
> needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new
> handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing
> of the ornamentation... but is this not the nine-hundred-
> year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed
> gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know.
> Pretty good.
> -- Terry Pratchett: The Fifth Elephant
>
> And of course, our bodies go through much the same process.
>
And yet we have the feeling of continuity of at least our consciousness.

--
Truth welcomes investigation because truth knows investigation will lead
to converts. It is deception that uses all the other techniques.

On 07/12/2024 04:43, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
> On 12/6/24 8:09 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>> On 06/12/2024 06:31, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>>> On 12/5/24 2:34 AM, rbowman wrote:
>>>> On Thu, 5 Dec 2024 01:28:57 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>     Had a .44 Mag lever carbine - it was ideal for boar in dense brush
>>>>>     ... strong enough and easy to whip around real quick. The boar
>>>>> hunts
>>>>>     YOU as much as you hunt IT. I think someone offers a .50 S&W
>>>>>     carbine/handgun combo now, but only use the handgun if you want
>>>>> fused
>>>>>     wrists in yer old age
>>>>
>>>> A friend bought a .454 Casull which was the big dog at the time. He was
>>>> pissed when S&W upped the ante. I draw the line at .357 and even
>>>> then for
>>>> target practice I load closer to .38 Special specs.
>>>
>>>    .38 +P is about all ya need for general/defense work.
>>>    Just generally go for the lighter bullets, not the
>>>    traditional 158s. Fer sure those old "police loads"
>>>    did NOT impress.
>>>
>>>    NOT sure I'd like .357 for wild boar. It'd take TOO
>>>    perfect a hit. The .44 gives you a little slack.
>>>
>>>    I've fired a .454 ... and decided I didn't want to
>>>    fire one anymore. The .50 ... nah ! MAYbe for extra
>>>    large people. There's some point in there where you
>>>    go for a carbine/rifle.
>>>
>>>    Hmmmmmm ... if you necked-down the .50 to 10mm - a
>>>    sort of modernized 44/40. Might make a really good
>>>    revolver/carbine combo.
>>
>> Interestingly in the UK we cannot use handguns at all. For anything
>> outside single shot target shooting at a registered range.
>
>
>   That's left-wing totalitarianism for you.
>
>   Alas, I think the UK is just about to go DOWN.
>
>   Hope you have a place way out in the countryside.
>
>
>> Legal firearms range from 12 gauge and even 20 gauge shotguns down
>> through 410 'crow guns'  to game approved rifles. .22 is allowed for
>> small game like rabbits, but a .25 is mandatory for deer and many
>> people use larger.
>>
>> Naturally Britain being a very small country with a lot of people,
>> strict codes of practice accompany game shooting.  It is illegal to
>> shoot anything but bird shot upwards...
>
>   And you don't find this suspiciously Big Brotherish ?
>
>   WHO is being protected with all that - YOU ?
>
Yes. I got spattered with bird shot by a person shooting 300 yards away

>   Try the USA. You can own almost anything - and even
>   get a license for .50 machine-guns. Probably won't
>   even need that once Trump's people are in.
>
It's a lot bigger with plenty of empty spaces.

Nevertheless I read or hard a story about a short woman firing a
revolver (I think) upwards at a watermelon target in a drunken
suburban barbecue. The bullet travelled a mile and killed someone in
their own back yard.

>   In the PAST I'd have said the UK was 'less hazardous'
>   and therefore less need for strong weapons ... but
>   the news the past several years .........
>

It's all knives these days. Lots of knives. Our ex middle eastern chums
love big knives,
A few shootings. But that's socialism for you. They are more concerned
about 'thought crimes' these days than people with guns.

>   At minimum dude :
>
>
> https://www.allbeststuff.com/chain-mail-armour/aluminum-brass-titanium-chain-mail-shirts/titanium-chain-mail-hauberks-the-strongest-chainmail-for-sca-full-contact-fighting
>
>   https://www.ringmesh.com/
>
>
> https://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Gears-Titanium-Chainmail-Riveted/dp/B00ZYYPNZE

Titanium chain mail should be good against stabbings

--
“Some people like to travel by train because it combines the slowness of
a car with the cramped public exposure of 
an airplane.”

Dennis Miller

On 07/12/2024 10:43, D wrote:
> This sounds plausible. I predict 4 difficult years with Starmer and
> socialism.
> After that, if the Tories have bright and flexible minds, there will be a
> coalition between Tories and Farage, and UK will be where sweden is now
> with a center government supported by the nationalist sweden democrats.

I pretty much agree with that.
The tories had forgot to be conservative, and so they got kicked out.
The socialists are predictably beyond incompetence, and in 4 years time
they will go.

I am not sure what the outcome will be but the country needs, wants, and
will ultimately vote for, an end to wokeness and political ideology and
a return to some sort of competent management...

Kemi Badenoch is making all the right noises for the Tories, but can she
repair the damage?

--
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere,
diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”
― Groucho Marx

On 07/12/2024 08:17, rbowman wrote:
> On Sat, 7 Dec 2024 00:55:10 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>
>> Plato's "Allegory of the cave" kinda touched on the same stuff - but,
>> maybe for political reasons, left off the last paragraph or two.
>
> Then he went off he deep end with Platonic realism and set Western thought
> to chasing its tail for 2000 years.

Yup.

But it worked OK at the time.

--
The New Left are the people they warned you about.

On 07/12/2024 10:50, D wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, 7 Dec 2024, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>
>> On 12/6/24 4:11 AM, D wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, 6 Dec 2024, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 12/5/24 7:17 AM, D wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Thu, 5 Dec 2024, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On 05/12/2024 09:31, D wrote:
>>>>>>> There is great good and great evil in man. That's what makes him
>>>>>>> so fascinating and why fighting is such a necessary sport to give
>>>>>>> an outlet for all that aggression.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Only man creates the categories of good and evil.
>>>>>> Science does not include them
>>>>>
>>>>> I think you know what I mean. In order to avoid nitpicking, let's
>>>>> say creative and destructive energies.
>>>>
>>>>  To "Nature" ... I think it's all just superstrings hummin'
>>>>
>>>>  WE make of it all as we will.
>>>>
>>>>  Joe Alien ... he many have entirely different ideas ...
>>>>
>>>
>>> I know. Natural and I have discussed this violently and agreed to
>>> disagree. I'm a huge fan of the material world. As for the ultimate
>>> nature, laws and composition, I am agnostic, and we'll see how far
>>> science will take us. I lean towards instrumentalism/cognitive
>>> empiricism.
>>
>>
>>  IMHO, 'material' owns it - 'reality'-wise anyhow.
>>
>>  However the Quality Of Life depends on what we DO with that.
>>  It generally stops of short agreeing to the Nietzschean extreme.
>>
>>  Sci-tech will eventually take us All The Way insofar as
>>  power over our environment. But, again, how do we FEEL
>>  such power and insight be used ?
>>
>>  If it was easy they'd have resolved all this 25,000
>>  years ago.
>>
>>  The Buddha understood there was a Real World - but
>>  WE could never ever really see/perceive it because
>>  of what we were, how nature put us together, our
>>  native environment, our IQ range. We will always
>>  have a key-hole view, seeing things through
>>  "human-colored glasses".
>>
>>  Plato's "Allegory of the cave" kinda touched on the
>>  same stuff - but, maybe for political reasons, left
>>  off the last paragraph or two.
>>
>>  ANYWAY, at the cold cold root - it's just all
>>  superstrings hummin' ... calculating a 'reality'
>>  as WE can sorta perceive it. Wolfram seems to
>>  have grasped this.
>>
>
> I pretty much agree with you. Not much to add. Interesting that this is
> your interpretation of Nietzsche. Mine is very similar. I would add,
> that Nietzsches philosophy is his own attempt, and that every person
> needs to make it "his own".
>
> Tying that to politics, I think it was Ludwig von Mises who wrote in his
> classic "Liberalism" (and this is liberalism in its original meaning,
> not the bastardized US meaning of the term, so think libertarianism),
> somethings along the lines of...
>
> Liberalism [libertarianism] is nothing more than the scientific view and
> method of how to structure society in such a way as to maximize material
> wealth and quality of life. Beyond maximizing material wealth, it makes
> no other claims or sets no other goals.
>
> So what you, as an individual, do with that wealth, if you use that to
> purchase time (work less) and what you fill that time with, is entirely
> up to you.
>
> I believe that this is why many people find libertarianism so scary.
> They have no inherent sense of value or goals. They need the goals
> pushed on them from the outside (equality, sustainability, be a cog
> wheel in the machine of the nation, the prosperity and success of the
> race, etc.) in order to feel meaning in their life.
>
> When they have an ism that does not push any form of value, but only
> wants to create time for people to flourish, since they are not self
> directed from within, they cannot make any sense at all of it, and it
> scares them at a deep level.
>
> That is why I think that the human psychology is not really ready for
> libertarianism, as long as the majority of humans are drawn to religions
> and isms in order for an external person to supply them with goals and
> values.

I think this hits the nail on the head. Socialism now occupies the space
left by the demise of Christianity.

A sharp Jewish girlfriend of mine once observed that 'the people need to
be told what is right and what is wrong, and how they should behave
otherwise they simply don't know what to do'

But they are increasingly realising that socialism too, has feet of clay.
And I do not entirely agree that people cannot accept a reality without
ideology.

Libertarianism/pragmatism/conservatism can simply say that it
deliberately restricts its activities to ensuring law, order, prosperity
and social stability and is 'ultra vires' when it comes to determining
moral behaviour.

And leave that to religion or the BBC

--
“It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of
intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on
intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since...it is
futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into,
we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every
criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a
power-directed system of thought.”
Sir Roger Scruton

The Natural Philosopher wrote this post while blinking in Morse code:

> On 07/12/2024 10:26, D wrote:
>> do like opensuse, but their way of acting towards non-woke people, as
>> reported on by Lunduke, really makes me want to stop supporting them.
>
> Go woke, go broke.

Woke derangement syndrome. Is one deranged for:

1 Completely altering the original, native meaning of the word?
2 Wanting to change now-loaded words used in technical contexts,
such as "master" and "slave"?
3 Whining about item 2?

> The Marxist termites have been burrowing through the fabric of society
> on the 'long march through the institutions' since 1967.

LOL at the "Marxist termites". Wotta drama queen!

> Now they control them the inevitable collapse towards anarchy or
> idiocracy begins.

Are you saying the "go woke go broke" people are anarchists or idiocrats?

> Inevitably people who combine into less stupid and idealistic cohesions
> will take over.
>
> Possibly without any evident democracy. Hey ho, Twas ever thus...

Well, the pendulum does often swing... as in the Edgar Allen Poe story.

--
.... one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that,
lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of
their C programs.
-- Robert Firth

The Natural Philosopher wrote this post while blinking in Morse code:

> On 07/12/2024 02:30, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>> On 2024-12-06, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>> I was recovering from a tumour operation at that point and was on
>>> seriously concrete butt plugging pain relief.
>>>
>>> I drank a couple of points of pear juice. Delicious. And unbeknownst to
>>> me Natures best laxative...
>>
>> Interesting. I've found that peanut butter acts as a mild laxative,
>> at least for me. This is a Good Thing - I love peanut butter.
>> I had a knee replacement yesterday, so I'll get to test it.
>>
> Oh gawd. I hope it works out. I hate to say it, but IME around 50% of
> knee operations fail.
>
> Sometimes fatally

How so? Infection?

I've had two hip replacements and have 3 plates holding up my neck.

I had one cervical plate put in years ago, and play soccer, often as
goalkeeper. The hits to the head apparently lead to removal of the first plate
and the installation of 3.

--
NOTICE:
Anyone seen smoking will be assumed to be on fire and will
be summarily put out.

D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, 6 Dec 2024, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>
>> On 12/6/24 9:30 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>> On 2024-12-06, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Fri, 6 Dec 2024, rbowman wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On Fri, 6 Dec 2024 01:13:40 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Fedora still seems ok - as far as Fedora is OK. The
>>>>>> Manjaro/Endeavour/Arch end is still OK. Never a fan of Slack, but,
>>>>>> who knows ...... gotta keep evading suckitude.
>>>>>
>>>>> Slack was my first distro. Download in pieces and copy to about 40
>>>>> floppies.
>>>
>>> When I decided to try Linux I went to the local bookstore and
>>> browsed the Linux books, comparing all the ones that came with an
>>> install CD. I liked Patrick Volkerding's book best, so I wound up
>>> starting out with Slackware 3.5. I continued with it for several
>>> years (and upgrades), but the lack of a package manager required
>>> lots of application builds from source, which grew tiresome.
>>
>>
>> Slack IS very "raw". There's some good, but a lot of bad, in that.
>> You kinda have to be an OS fanatic ...
>>
>> But I'm not 16 anymore.
>
> Thank you for the review. Then it is not for me. I don't mind
> _some_ tinkering to improve things, but like you, I'm not 16 anymore
> and I have a business to run, so this I will remove from the list of
> my opensuse replacements.

Don't take the word of our nymshift troll 100%. Yes, Slackware is more
hands on than a full on "hold your hand, you are an idiot" distro such
as Ubuntu. But it is a far cry better than it was back in the "50
floppies to install days". A default install of slack 15, picking
"everything" gives you in most cases on normal hardware a working
useful system -- and if you leave KDE "on" in the list of "everything"
even gets you a "hold your hand, you are an idiot" desktop environment
too.

Where Slackware is more 'raw' than a Unbuntu is that if you want to
modify, say, your default name search path or default name server, you
simply edit /etc/resolv.conf instead of launching whatever GUI
'configurator' it is that Ubuntu provides to poke at tabs and entries
to make the change.

And for that one, the install script asks you for the details as part
of the install, so if you give the correct data at that time (same data
you'd poke into the Ubuntu GUI configurator) then you don't even need
to edit /etc/resolv.conf.

There's an old quote that came about from the net long ago:

Learn Ubuntu and you learn Ubuntu, learn Slackware and you learn Linux.

On Sat, 7 Dec 2024, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> On 06/12/2024 17:12, D wrote:
>> If you postulate something which can never be known, it is kind of useless.
>> It goes the same way as god, or a postulated first mover etc.
>
> And yet that is what people do all the time. In fact it is the necessary
> foundation of thinking.

I disagree.

> All metaphysics - and we all use it, whether we understand that we do or not
> - is to assume the framework for our understanding, and use it not because
> it is demonstrably true, but because it *works* for us.

I agree. But the key here is that it works, as in, it creates a tangible
effect. Das ding an sich, is useless, doesn't have any effect. I can
postulate a phlarg, no effect, in any way, useless.

I can postulate time, I can measure it, it helps me, it is not something,
that is forever beyond knowledge since it is something that interacts with
the world. I have no beef with that. But phlargs, and dings an sich, that
in no way affect that world, is just garbage.

In terms of god, go ahead, if the effect is that it makes you feel better.
Again, a pragmatic effect in the real world.

So therefore, metaphysics doesn't really exist, except as thought forms to
make us feel better (if we need that), in which case it's just a bunch of
nice stories.

> We don't and can't *know* that time and space exist - at least in the way we
> understand them, but they do *work* for us, the way we understand them.

I know that space exists, and I know that time exists. But I think we're
hitting our old battle ground, but, that this time I think it is about
definitions and usage of terms, and not actually about content. Based on
the previous post I think we are not as far apart as it might seem.