You can't have a community without a meeting place.
- Thread starter luka
- Start date
luka
Well-known member
its something ive been thinking about for a few years. i got prompted to start a thread cos a man on telly was just suggesting atheist churches. at first i thought what a load of shit then i saw how it fitted in with what ive been thinking. of course first we replace the word atheist with the word secular, becasue otherwise youre excluding a large part of the community before you even start. ideally you get rid of the word church too.
luka
Well-known member
im going to run the country one day. this is one of the things im going to implement. im going to ban dogs too. not guide dogs, but all other dogs. im going to join the green party and turn it into the vehicle for my ambitions. i will use their infrastructure to take me where i want to go.
What about mountain rescue dogs they send out to find lost accountants up on Ben Nevis? Or those earthquake rescue dogs that are shipped out to international horror zones with shoddy building codes? Are you positioning yourself as an anti-Hitler with all the dog hating? Sure to be a vote winner.
The vital infrastructure you need to pierce the heart of the Green Tora Bora can be found here http://goo.gl/OmpUf
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Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
In the Tesco Metro or Express or whatever it is on Bow Road near where I used to live, there's a soi-disant COMMUNITY NOTICE BOARD just inside the door. Apart from a small map of the local area, it's completely empty.
I agree with luka's central point here, though I'm not sure how it would be best implemented in practice. It's become a cliché to say that pubs are a bit like secular churches in the role they play but I think the idea has something to it. The rate at which pubs are closing in Britain is a terrible tragedy. I can't bear the idea of these villages, or collections of houses that used to be villages, that have no pub, no shops, not even a post office any more, perhaps a church which at best has an old lady come round to put some flowers in it once a week, and a population that works or goes to school miles away and spends its evenings watching TV or fucking about on the internet.
I agree with luka's central point here, though I'm not sure how it would be best implemented in practice. It's become a cliché to say that pubs are a bit like secular churches in the role they play but I think the idea has something to it. The rate at which pubs are closing in Britain is a terrible tragedy. I can't bear the idea of these villages, or collections of houses that used to be villages, that have no pub, no shops, not even a post office any more, perhaps a church which at best has an old lady come round to put some flowers in it once a week, and a population that works or goes to school miles away and spends its evenings watching TV or fucking about on the internet.
Come on, as if there aren't any meeting places and there aren't hundreds of thousands of people meeting right now. Unfortunately most of them are football matches, line dancing nights, local UKIP events and people going on group dog walks. People are meeting and forming communities all the time, just not people you like and not for reasons you'd agree with.
As for free adult education, there are services like https://www.khanacademy.org/ or coursera and night classes at the local college or whatever usually aren't expensive.
As for free adult education, there are services like https://www.khanacademy.org/ or coursera and night classes at the local college or whatever usually aren't expensive.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Sure, but in all those cases people are meeting to do a particular thing, rather than just meeting for the sake of meeting. You might go to a pub to take part in a quiz and some pubs host music nights or even theatre or stand-up, but mainly you just go to have a drink and shoot the shit, don't you? Barber's shops seem to serve the same purpose in some cultures, they're places to hang out with your mates as much as places to have your hair cut or get a shave. Coffee shops used to be a bit like that a couple of hundred years ago, some even became the focal points of radical religious or political sects. (From what luka tells me, the café where he worked in Australia was the nucleus of a fanatical climate-change denialism movement, although that might just be Australia.)
Football matches do look like a huge deal of fun (though obviously they cost a fortune if you follow a big team) - it's just a shame I have no interest in football.
Football matches do look like a huge deal of fun (though obviously they cost a fortune if you follow a big team) - it's just a shame I have no interest in football.
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Not just Australia, commercial banking, debt, began in coffee houses in London and the Netherlands. Slave traders met in Bristols coffee shops. <godwins>Beer halls in Munich</godwins>. On this evidence, we could conclude people are generally cunts and should be kept apart, like spheres of Plutonium, lest there's a criticality excursion.
I also have no interest in football and a visit to White Hart Lane one Saturday afternoon last December confirmed that I had not missed out on anything. 30,000 twats honking and sighing half-heartedly, on cue. I went for free and still felt out of pocket.
Patrick Swayze
I'm trying to shut up
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
OK, sure, I wasn't suggesting that everything that went on in coffee houses 300 years ago was necessarily a good thing. Quite possibly you had slavers and bankers meeting in one coffee house and abolitionists and Quakers meeting in another one across the road. My point is that they were important places, basically public forums.
Well, there are about a dozen active, posting members on Dissensus on any given day and Luka is the one most likely to whore for attention by telling us all about how he wants to learn biology in a week or that he'll run the country one day by hijacking the Green party. His online persona's delusions of grandeur and his repeated conviction that he's a born leader comically undermined by his born-yesterday, barely-literate style are very funny. He's a slapstick comedy turn and I'm laughing at him. He has to be prepared for a heckle. Sorry, everyone, if I'm putting him off his stroke. I'm trying to help him by gently teasing out his ideas.
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