ManyBallsacks

@jeroenk: @jeroenk: Agree with you mostly, but dude - are you seriously holding up pharmaceutical research as the paragon of scientific objectivity and reliability? The pre-market trials which drugs undergo before being approved are laughably unrepresentative of what the drug will be used for - they're designed to ensure that the drug is marketable, rather than effective. The alternative medicine industry is totally messed, yes, but so is the pharmaceutical one. Medicine has historically been an eminence-based discipline more than evidence-based and, whilst this is slowly changing, it continues to lean that way. You may want to actually look into material published by independent parties that deal with this stuff.

@mitochris: I absolutely agree - the best way to change things is to talk in the language of legislators and provide ample evidence as to why mountain biking should not be an illegal activity. That would be the public manifesting itself in its claim to its own land which, as the article notes, is not happening when people sneak about avoiding detection. My point was simply that a) laws can be unjust; b) in cases of public ownership land, what is illegal is up for discussion and c) this is distinct from illegal trails on private land, which are completely different kettle of fish.

@KeithReeder: I think the premise of the argument is that public lands are designated for public use and should, ideally, work on a democratic basis. This democratic basis is flaunted when a significant percentage of users - members of the public ownership - are forbidden from deciding how the land should be used. In the U.K. it's somewhat different as many illegal trails are actually on private land, which raises a whole other host of issues to which moral and philosophical discourses concerning the 'public' are less related. Laws can certainly be unjust: justice itself is a relative concept but is largely dependent on the idea of public morality. If the public morality changes and the law does not, it can thus be seen as unjust. The buggery laws here in the U.K. are a prime example - surely you'd concede that they were unjust prior to their being repealed (woefully late, I would add)?

@bluumax: I see what you did there

@hazbazmtbmonkey: I think he may have been joking

One does not have daydreams at night.

@SintraFreeride: Are you for reals?

@ecologist: Yeah, imperial measurements is another thing that you guys maintained long after it left these drizzly shores.. I only ever learnt how to convert an ounce to metric (oh wayward youth), the rest is nonsensical gibberish.