Friday Gothic: Angel's End

Time to head back to the stars with a third Blood Angels Strike Cruiser.

Alas, this might be the largest this fleet gets for a good long while, since Games Workshop have decided to a) stop selling Battlefleet Gothic miniatures b) tell no-one they were doing it.  The game still has pages on their website, they've just been taking down ships one by one - presumably as the back stock has been exhausted - as quietly as they can.  That this is a shitty way to deal with customers who will almost entirely be fairly long term is, of course, no surprise.

"Everyone Is Exactly Like Me, Right?"

If you get the chance, try reading this.  It's absolutely hilarious.  Well, it might be.  It might also be massively blood-boiling.  It depends.  But the whole thing is so utterly devoid of logic - people who shush you in cinemas is the real antisocial activity - that those are really your only two options. 

Bless him, Seitz has a go at taking this enormous pile of  self-entitled crap apart piece by piece, but really, such effort is pointless.  Dash is not a man with whom one can reason, because he quite simply cannot view the world in the way you need to if you're going to interact on the topic of your own behaviour.  He's like my friend who years ago came to my house for a video night (like I said, years ago) and talked his way through the film he didn't want to see, and shushed his way through the one he did.  He's the prick who turns up late to a party and immediately replaces the music a dozen people are listening to with whatever he's brought.  He's the inveterate gossip who becomes irate when he finds out others have discussed him behind his back.

He is, in short, the man who simply cannot grasp the fundamental concept that his own reality is no more valid than any other.  You'd think you could defeat this kind of nonsense by pointing out his interruptions are no more reasonable than those who interrupt him, but you'll get nowhere. What he does is fine because he does it.  You could point out that there are movies he'd hate to have interrupted, but he'll argue he's smart enough to wait for those to come out on DVD.  The fact that everyone taking that approach would mean anything more highbrow than The Smurfs would suddenly become financially non-viable is of no concern, because nothing has any consequences outside his own entertainment.

Still, maybe there's a way everyone can get their way.   How about we start having arsehole screenings.  They're half-price, and everyone gets to make as much noise and cast around as much light as they want. Meanwhile, everyone who messes with any actual films can be dragged into the streets and beaten to death with cinema hot dog buns.

And at long last, the world can be at harmony.

This Will Get Me A Thousand Hits Minimum

Because who am I kidding, y'all are here for the cute animals.  This here is my parents Old English Sheepdog, Molly.  The voice on the video is my father, demonstrating the power of positive reinforcement.  Which, considering last time they played together she ran into his leg so hard he was on crutches for weeks, is actually pretty good of him.

Further delightful images.

Greatest dog alive.

Stupid Has Degrees, Stupid!

I listened to Radio 4's Science, Right or Left this evening as I was driving back from a weekend of statistics and playing with children (not concurrently; that can lead to poor modelling choices and children pawing carelessly at colourful graphs).  It wasn't very good, annoyingly.  The topic was the reasons why various political positions find themselves at odd with science (by which is meant scientists), but no real effort went into trying to figure out why such conflicts arise, in favour of merely noting them.

In among the presenter shaking his head sadly that laypeople are too dismissive of scientists and scientists are too full of themselves, the BBC found time to construct one of the most awesome false equivalences I've seen them manage, utterly dropping the ball in the process.  Looking for someone to present the climate change sceptic side (itself a ridiculous term, but that's not Radio 4's fault), the programme trotted out someone to offer the old saw that there could be loads of research demonstrating global warming isn't our fault, if only the government would start funding it.

In fairness, that might just have been a pre-recorded soundbite, leaving the program makes no chance to directly point out to this guy the obvious flaw in thinking all science research is public funding.  And if you can't confront the commentator directly, there is perhaps some problem in inserting a comment immediately after to the tune of "Of course, this is transparent bullshit" [1].

Trying to fold it into a false equivalence in the hope of seeming balanced, though?  That's pretty weaksauce.  With the utter refusal of wide swathes of the international right to countenance the possibility of climate change, it was time to look at a more left-wing phenomenon: profound suspicion of GM food.

Now, I know almost noting about the ins and outs of GM.  I haven't anything even close to an informed opinion. Maybe it's entirely safe, and those who don't believe that are terribly misguided, I've no idea. But the central tenet of those that object to GM is this - private enterprise has strangled fair research on the topic.

See the trick?  The right thinks vast international coalitions with access to phenomenal monetary and political resources have too little power.  The left thinks they have too much power.  A pox on both their houses!

The program is even good enough to make this explicit by asking one of the GM haters why he believes scientists are wrong about GM but right about GW. A more sensible way to phrase the question would be "If commercial interests failed to throw enough money at the theory of climate change to kill it, why do you think they have managed  it here?"  Because, you know, fair question.

But any time you're trying to argue politicians being in hock to the rich and powerful is as deluded as the idea that politicians ignore those people completely, then it's not just those can't tell a scientist from a snake-oil salesman who need to be paying more attention.

[1] This is the only explanation for why the programme rebroadcast Owen Patterson's claim from his Any Questions appearance that there has been no climate change in the last seventeen years without adding "In the same way that there's less light pollution this century because we haven't had another Tunguska fucking Event".

Dawkins Go Home

Can we please retire Richard Dawkins, already?

Look, I get that he has his uses.  There are plenty of people in the world who are under more social pressure - or even threat, explicit or otherwise - than myself, and certainly many people with a more valid beef with religion than my own - I regret my parents having taken me to church for fifteen years, but the worst it ever led to was severe boredom.  For these people, having a strident voice calling out various religious figures for their inconstancy and refusal to aid society's ills (or even to add to them) makes sense to me.

But just as I get tired of the constant broadsides against religion itself - which, unlike specific religious figures, cannot possibly be dismissed as a clear negative; whether it's actually a net negative is a question way above my pay grade - one can't simply point to the fact that Dawkins has a role to play and leave it at that. The next two questions are these: does it have to be him performing the role, and how well is he performing it anyway?

Because the decline in Dawkin's critical thinking (as presented  to the world) has been utterly amazing and distinctly unpleasant to watch.  I will defend to my dying breath The Blind Watchmaker, which contains the best arguments for the theory of evolution I've come across, not just in form, but in  presentation.  How does the man who wrote that come to tweet crap like this:

All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.

As Nesrine Malik says,where does one start? How about the fact that though the Nobels have been running for 112 years, fully half the Muslim Nobel Prizes were awarded in the last 13 years?  Have Muslims suddenly become far more intelligent, industrious and  peaceful than they were in the 20th Century?  Or is there, just maybe, something else going on?

I mean, what could possibly lead a western institution filled with westerners chosen by other westerners to focus more on contributions from the west than elsewhere?  What could possibly explain why western places of learning might have natural and obvious advantages over their counterparts elsewhere?  Why, when Jewish recipients receive ten times as many prizes as they should based on global population alone, has Dawkins not hailed them as some kind of super race?

The answer, I'm afraid, is neither particularly difficult or particularly pleasant.  Dawkins has tipped his hand on this before, remember, back in 2011, when he lambasted a woman who'd complained about an incident at a conference she had been speaking at.  She wanted to make a point about it not being cool to follow women into elevators and proposition them.  Because, hey, that's a shitty thing to do, and if you do it, you're making it clear that you don't care how something might look  to a woman you're interested in, your  manly man-view  of the situation should carry all.

In response, Dawkins decided he wanted to make his own point: Watson's experience pales massively into comparison to some of  the shit  Muslim women have to go through.  What does this have to do with the original incident?  Nothing.  Dawkins apparently didn't believe it even needed to be addressed at all.  But it sure as hell gave him the chance to have a pop at those crazy Muslims!

The same process seems to be in evidence here, except it's far, far worse (in logical terms, I mean; his response to Watson strikes me as much more unpleasant).  Look at what he's doing here.  He's using a college created following a religious power grab that cost the lives of thousands, which was a recruiting ground for the "Cambridge Apostles", which has benefited handsomely over the years from associations with the Church of England, which saw its Master awarded the Templeton Prize - for "affirming life's spiritual dimension" - just two years ago, which is named after the fucking Trinity, as a club to beat Muslims with.

And he wants us to believe this is a point about how religion is bad?

Nope.  Ain't gonna wash.  I'm not trying to have a pop at Trinity itself, here.  That place is amazing.  But it didn't get to be amazing because no-one working there had to stop to pray five times a day.  Pretending otherwise is the absolute worst kind of half-considered prejudice.  Which coming from a man who insists religions exist only due to a lack of critical thinking skills, is pretty reprehensible.

People Who Take Pictures of Food

It's been very quiet round here, I know.  That's mainly due to the four days I took to play through Diablo 3 with various vidheads, but it'll be going on for a little while longer whilst I visit my mother (who just turned sixty-one) and occasional commenter Chris.

In the meantime, here is a picture of a battenberg cake I made for my mother.  I did a test run last week that actually turned out a bit tastier than this one,butthis is the one  I'll be giving to Parental Unit Beta because a) it's newer, b) it's more symmetrical, and c) Fliss hasn't dropped it on the floor.

(Note that this picture is already out of date, since we smothered it in melted Galaxy chocolate moments later.  I decided not to go with a picture of the finished product, though, because it could basically be anything under there.  No-one is going to believe I baked a cake without overwhelming evidence.)

Cornetto's End

Caught The World's End last night with Fliss, and was pleasantly surprised.  Not just because it's a definite improvement over the rather overrated Hot Fuzz (a fantastically funny 90 minute comedy stretched into a two-hour mess), but because it turns out there's rather a lot to be said about it.

Of course, pretty much all of that requires spoilers, so head across the jump at your own peril.