Eye In The Sky

Oddly, i just read 'Eye In The Sky' and was going to review it.  I may still do so.  The Alan Parsons song of the same name is rather imponderable because it seems to go in a completely different direction.  However, it also uses the Eye Of Horus, something i also use in my paid work:

Click to tweet: http://clicktotweet.com/_Qbrg . People nick bikes less if they think they're being watched. This is presumably one reason why we have CCTV surveillance everywhere in the UK - the fear of being found out is a deterrent. In olden days, this was of course impractical, but what we had instead was the idea that God was watching us and would punish us if we were found out. Crime is not straightforwardly prevented by CCTV but is pushed out to areas where there's less surveillance. Moreover, surveillance is a substantially private and therefore relatively unaccountable practice. For some reason, in this country, the home of George Orwell, the creator of Big Brother and the dystopia of '1984', we have a very large number of cameras watching our every move along with other forms of monitoring, such as 'phone calls, emails and so forth. People acquiesce to this and see it as positive.

There was of course a time when people did believe God was watching our every move in the same way. When they did, there seemed to be less crime although i presume what really happened was that fewer things were regarded as criminal and violence was more institutional, as with wars, capital punishment and famine. So in a way, it didn't really work. Christians are often seen as policing themselves only out of fear of punishment, and the metaethical theory of theological voluntarism states that God automatically makes things right by commanding them. My view is that God simply reports on what's right from a position of infinite wisdom. Therefore, i dislike the surveillance view of God, even though i think in some ways it would mean a better society.

What puzzles me about this, though, is that many apparently liberal atheists seem to pay little attention to the social value of this belief. They're presumably opposed to the government and other organisations spying on us, but at the same time oppose the apparent myth that God is watching us which, if widely promulgated, would mean people wouldn't actually commit so much crime. However, i do agree with them because the motivation not to sin should come from inside and i don't believe in that kind of God.

I was going to talk about Bell's theorem and omniscience but i ran out of time.

This is of course the usual Wednesday blether, as reflected in the viewing figures.  However, it does kind of mean i don't censor or pussyfoot as much as usual.  Coherence is a problem with my videos although not so much with the rest of what i do.  It is very difficult to do this well.  I occasionally succeed but it's very hit and miss, mainly due to pressure of time.


I wonder what would happen if i went through all my videos and stuck links to these blog entries on them.  Probably not very much because nobody reads descriptions and it seems to be impossible to link to external sites via annotations, which is puzzling because there is something called "external annotation" on YT.  I'm not sure it would add anything of value, since this blog is itself a load of blah.

More interaction with Lindsay Atkins on Twitter, which is nice.  Hard to stay cool about it though, like the Wheezy Waiter stuff.  Am i "little people"?  Is anyone?  Is anyone not?  How old is she anyway?  Craig is thirty-two, i think.  Lindsay is, er, i dunno.  And i still don't know in spite of Googling.  I tend to think of her as a contemporary, and i know a few primary school teachers, so she's sort of in my milieu although the home ed thing could be a source of friction - she approved my video response on it though, so maybe not.  There seem to be two categories of teacher with respect to attitudes to home ed, possibly divided by age.  One is heartily in favour due to disillusionment with the way schools have gone and memories of the movement towards child-centred education, along with possibly experience of schools.  The other seems to be very much against it, and seems also to consist of younger teachers.

Anyway (waffle waffle):  apparently it takes me six seconds to drink 250 ml of water at a comfortable rate, i.e. not bolting it down.  Useful data for tomorrow's mpreg video.  Incidentally, i'm going back on the phytoestrogens in earnest.  I knocked them on the head before because they seemed to be causing weight gain, which i've never lost, which would be best avoided, but as i've said before, this needs dedication.

Quick bit of mental arithmetic:  ten minutes.  Yikes!