All posts by Th1sWasATriumph

Star Trek – The Definitive Review

AW suggested I do a review, which struck me as difficult considering I don’t want to give away any of the plot, setpieces or script, so I’ll just censor the spoilers.

This film is balls to the wall winrar, culminating in a terrifying [censored] in which Scotty amputates [censored] [censored], plugging the leaking [censored] and so saving the ship. The scene in which Kirk [censored] for about fifteen minutes, before [censored] for a further five, is superlative. Special mention must be made of Kenneth Branagh, who [censored] every living thing in the movie.

Some surprises as well. Spock and Sulu smashing each other round the head and chest with office chairs; Chekhov’s wincing “toilet incident”; someone shouting “KHAN!!!” every few minutes; Nathan Fillion in a surprise cross-universe cameo as Mal Reynolds (although he [censored] after less than two minutes of screen time). And, of course, the blisteringly fast-paced trolley race which leaves a bewildered McCoy bleeding from his [censored], [censored] and partially severed [censored].

I heartily recommend this film to everyone. Where else are you going to see [censored], [censored], [censored] and – best of all – inter-species [censored]?

Catering Manager Outraged At Expectation To Handle Pork

Hasanali Khoja, an Islamic chef for the Metropolitan Police, is sueing for religious discrimination after being expected to handle pork in his new job.

He’d previously arrived at an informal arrangement whereby he wasn’t expected to handle pork products, but his new placement has no such leniency.

And why should it? It’s just his belief, unauthorised and unjustified. Quite why an expectation for a chef to handle pork is religious discrimination is, I freely admit, beyond me. Oh, I can see why – but I don’t get how such a case is even allowed to get as far as the news.

Fine, if you have a delusional belief that prohibits you from handling certain foods and your bosses allow you – in your job as a catering manager, remember – to not touch such food, then lucky you. Someone else has been the man that you couldn’t be. But when you get transferred and are suddenly outside this umbrella of leniency and you view an expectation to handle pork products (remember – your job is a catering manager) as religious discrimination? Hell, you’re not going to leave your job. Why should you? You’re a catering manager who has decided they can’t touch pork. Your will should be done.

Seriously. Let’s apply this to something else. I’m working in an office, and I don’t like to touch paper because I have a personal belief that this isn’t right. Not a physiological issue, not a phobia – some mythical being has commanded that I do not touch paper.

Let’s assume for a moment that I would even get a job after saying “By the way, I can’t touch paper” in the interview. If I have a lenient boss who allows me to work without the requirement to touch paper, I’m very lucky. But why should I take such luck and generosity for granted? When my boss is replaced and I’m expected to touch paper just as everyone else is, why should I take umbrage?

It would be too much to ask that I wear gloves. Then surely I could touch the paper and save myself from hell.

Mr Khoja said: “The Met has shown no sensitivity towards my religion. Their response has been ill-thought and discriminatory.”

ULTRA FACEPALM

Kicked Out For Saying “There Is No God”

Here’s a funny thing.

I say funny . . . it’s actually only funny in the sense that a really fat guy trying to get down some stairs is funny. Granted, it’s pretty funny, but there’s an undercurrent of pathos.

My girlfriend got kicked out of her maths class a couple of days ago for saying God didn’t exist. When people expressed righteous anger at this perspective, she challenged them to prove God did exist. Some people got angry and her tutor sent her out – not only because she was “offending” students but the tutor as well.

My only suggestion to her was not to state “God doesn’t exist”, as then we occupy that dangerous faith-based stance; but to state “There is a chance, but it’s merely a logical necessity dictated by the deductive nature of empirical observation.” Although it didn’t sound as if anyone in her class was aware of such subtleties. No, they were simply offended that someone had disrespected their faith.

As my GF said, she’s just as offended by assertions that man should not lie with man, or that a rapist could go to heaven if he repents. In fact there was a whole bunch of stuff she only thought of saying afterwards, as is often the case with impromptu debates. Her tutor actually used the “prove God doesn’t exist” argument, which is sort of like punching a kitten in the face. As we all know, the correct response is “Oh, so you are granting equal probability to Ra, Thor, Neptune, trolls and djinn then? You can’t completely disprove them, do you believe in them? Do you believe in Allah? I hear he’s very popular.”

There often isn’t a very good answer to that question. When some street preacher said I was accountable to God, I asked him why he wasn’t accountable to Allah. His answer? Sidestep.

Magnificent.

The annoying thing is that when Christians get removed from classrooms for telling children they will go to hell, it gets in the papers and the poor child is raised on the shoulders of giants. It’s religious intolerance, apparently, to stop someone inflicting mental bullying on someone else.
If my GF complained, I can’t see it getting too far. It is the believers of the world who hold some kind of nebulous high ground, and I don’t know why.

The thing that made me especially sick were the intimations of violence to my GF from other classmates, which frankly makes me want to fly down there and beat them like naughty puppies. Can no-one see that as soon as a position has to be protected from debate by violence and censorship, it’s lost the game?

Idealistic Musings On Space, The Universe, And What The Duck Has Planned For Us

Whatever the duck does have planned, I’m willing to bet it will be spectacularly unpleasant. Anyway.

It might be considered a disadvantage to talk about space considering I know virtually nothing about it. When I go on Wiki to discover new and crunchy space facts, I skip past all formulae or esoteric terminology; about the only numbers I can cope with are the ones describing size (15,000 miles? I must write that down). I am, in any practical sense regarding space, stupid. I gawp at the pretty photos and loll my tongue at the details of size, age and speed but when it comes to really understanding the underlying fabric I sort of zone out.

It’s tempting to defend my naivety by saying “Well, I see the world through the innocent eyes of a child, I don’t need any more’ but it’s not as if knowledge dulls your ability to feel wonder. We all need more, I’m just not fitted with a brain that can take it.

I’m pretty much a late arrival into the whole “space is fantastic’ thing, it was never something I considered much until recently. I made appreciative noises when confronted with facts like “OMG THREE EARTHS COULD FIT INTO JUPITER’S RED SPOT’ but never really made the connection between interesting facts and the true reality behind them.

Seasoned astrophys types like AndromedasWake, who is officially recognised as Knowing About Space, probably hide condescending smiles behind their hands when I go on like this. After all, they’ve known for years. But I’m like a child in a sweetshop and a stolen wallet, except the sweets are facts and the wallet is the interblagz. I could probably take this metaphor further.

I won’t.

The gist of this is . . . look up. Try to reconcile your limited perception of distance with the fact that we are tiny, just one planet going round a small star in a galaxy that is one of billions, hundreds of billions.

It’s tough. So start small. Let’s take the moon.

You can see the moon most nights, and it’s pretty. But even when it’s really very pretty indeed, it’s seldom remarked upon as anything more exciting than, say, scenery. People don’t look at the moon and think “Holy wowz, that’s a small planet. A small planet that’s so close I can make out incredible detail with my naked eye. With a telescope, I may as well be there.’ Why would you think that? It’s a more or less constant background to the night sky. But after the sun, it’s the clearest intrusion of the universe into our world. The nearest clearly visible extraterrestrial body, massively plunging through space even as you look at it. Just try to make a connection with it as a real object, as an entity in itself both separated and linked to us, far from reach but tantalisingly clear.

Now, let’s try something a little bigger. Find some dark glasses and look at the sun. (I am, of course, obliged by some feeble moral tendril to tell you that looking at the sun without adequate protection can result in damage to your eyes. Don’t do it.) If you widen your eyes and get used to the glare, you can see the disc pretty easily. Much like the moon, the sun is seldom really thought of. It’s just there. Except the sun is a bit more special than the moon. All those stars you can see at night? That’s what the sun is, except it’s close enough to be seen as a large, visible disc. It’s a star, and it’s right there. Go outside and look at it. Now! It’s unimaginably large, unimaginably far away, and we can see it. There are billions upon billions of these things in the universe. Even from 93 million miles, we can barely look at it without protection. Are you looking yet?

And then there’s the other planets, some of which can be seen with the naked eye. Real objects, as real as this planet but strange and different and untouched.

It’s hard to get out of the comfort zone and think about where we really are, how we are utterly insignificant even within our own solar system – let alone the monstrous size of the universe. Scale ceases to have any meaning at all. As soon as you even try to grasp where we actually are, that every point of light in the sky is a bewilderingly large star that exists, as real as our own or the ground you stand on, and the intervening space is almost completely empty tracts of vacuum (and, of course, the stars we can see with our eyes are but a fragmented slice of the entirety) . . . your mind sort of sheers away. It’s like having a thought just out of reach of your mind, but so much more. Just think of the gaps, of the reality of such cosmic beauty that we’ll never touch, that we can only look at from a distance more or less impossible to grasp. And think of the near-certainty that there is other life of some kind, somewhere – probably some many wheres – within the hundreds of billions of galaxies we’ve so far detected.

I know the barest crumb of all the knowledge available, and couldn’t begin to understand most of it. To everyone who’s already realised how ridiculously magnificent the universe is, ignore my burblings. To everyone who doesn’t really think about it, go outside and look up. Try just to grasp the night sky as an entire panorama of reality completely outside ourselves. All I know is . . . it’s amazing. I can’t tell you how to feel it, I can just say that it freaks me out in a manner both depressing and uplifting.

Watch this video. It may or may not help.

Introducing My Face

Some of you may know me. I imagine that significantly larger numbers do not, so:

 

I’m Th1sWasATriumph. I’m an atheist, scientific pantheist and secular humanist, and my videos and musings tend to be on religion – specifically, how ridiculous it is, and how its exalted position in society can and should be challenged. I view religion, along with various related and unrelated pseudosciences and supernatural\paranormal beliefs, as at best misleading and at worst openly destructive and divisive.

I’m a moderator on this very forum, which is all very shiny – sort of like a tarnished sheriff’s badge I can flash at people whose seats I want to occupy. I have no real problem using my powers for evil. As for Youtube, well, TAKE THIS www.youtube.com/Th1sWasATriumph

My other passion is space, although I got into it pretty recently so my knowledge on the subject is bleak. I’m fascinated by the nebulous reality of very very big things a very very long way off, though I sometimes think that if I ever truly comprehended the scale of the universe my mind would simply implode, Lovecraft-style.

I’m also a musician\composer, primarily guitar-based. My music tends to be about the 80s and is completely unrelated to science, atheism or religion. It does, however, rock your face.

Common initial responses to me in conversation:

OMG you haf quote portal/I’m making a note here: huge success/Can I call you by your acronym?

Believe me, you can say nothing to me that hasn’t been said by wiser people in bigger fonts. Stop it.

I can name-drop the mighty AndromedasWake with legitimacy, as I appeared in his music video and he lent his voice to a couple of mine. Such company to keep. We’ll be blitzing TAM later on this year in League shirts and supercilious smiles.

Finally, give some kind of virtual handshake to CosmicSpork, whose digital mastery is the sticky web holding this whole shebang together. I find that looking directly at my monitor is impossible; the awesome can only be ingested in small portions. Any more than that and the world would crack in half like a clump of soil, spilling us all screaming into the core of space.

Stay tuned for musings of greater or lesser worth.