The Wardman Wire

Humanism / Secularism

I admit that I am rather surprised to find myself agreeing with an entire column (on Civil Liberties on Comment is Free) by Anthony Grayling:

It is by now a familiar fact that there are more CCTV cameras keeping watch in Britain than in any other country in the world, even in the worst police states. In one way this is an unexceptionable fact, because it could be argued that cameras take the place of policemen on the beat, and far more effectively, thus ensuring public safety and providing a useful adjunct both to the prevention of crime and its punishment.

But it is also a fact that there are a number of ways that CCTV footage can be misused, or lead to serious error. None are hard to imagine. In the capital of the free world, the US, individuals were for decades tracked and monitored, and their communications eavesdropped upon, not because they were known terrorists or criminals, but because of their political views and trade union affiliations: this happened from the late 1940s through the McCarthy, civil rights and Vietnam eras, until it eventually sparked a constitutional debate in the 1970s. The difference between the US and the former Soviet Union in this respect, vanishingly small while the police snooped on political “undesirables”, was that public outcry and political activism in the former brought a (temporary - until the advent of George W Bush) halt to sneaking and prying by the state on its citizens.

Tim Worstall has demolished another Polly Toynbee speculation, by applying a few well-targeted facts. Dangerous things, facts - speculation can evaporate like the morning mist:

Polly
It was a piece of breathtaking cheek and bare-faced larceny when David Cameron pledged to “Make British poverty history” this week, stealing Gordon Brown’s slogan and Labour’s policy stronghold. Cameron snatched [...]

Metres invented in Oxford

Hot off the radio: the Metric System was invented by an English Bishop, John Wilkins.

This story was first covered by the Daily Mirror Science Blog this morning:

In a bit of a blow to those who want to cling on to good old British Imperial measures like pounds and ounces - it turns out it was an Englishman who invented the “foreign” metric system.

Or so claims Pat Naughtin, a metrication specialist from Australia, who carried out his research at Wadham College in Oxford, at Trinity College in Cambridge, and at the Royal Society in London.

He says John Wilkins, founder of the Royal Society, first published his ideas for a metric measure in 1668 - 120 years before the French adopted the metric system.

Following on from my post about having discovered the membership of the National Secular Society, I have found the corresponding figures for the British Humanist Association.

I could find no figures on the website, so it was necessary to root around in the Annual Reports submitted to the Charity Commission by the BHA.

A dilemma of today:

Another dilemma for atheists:

How do you recreate the advantages of a society built on Christendom, when no one is willing to pay the price?  

A couple of weeks ago I published an article in search of Membership Figures for the National Secular Society. I emailed the NSS asking for the information, and received no reply (*). Well … we have progress.

After a certain amount of rooting around, I have found some published (sort of) membership figures. The NSS seems to be making its adherent figures available in press interviews.