Current Affairs

Brief Linkage

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I’m busy catching up with all of the Google Reader entries I accumulated while I was traveling. Here are a few highlights.

UK libel laws are so infamous that people with something to hide come here from all over the world to make money from suppressing free speech. Now at last there is a campaign to get something done about this.

Scientists in Sweden claim to be able to “fingerprint” authors based on their pattern of use of words.

The flood that filled the Mediterranean must have been truly awesome to behold. Current estimates suggest the water flowed in at around 300 kph, filling the basin at 10 meters a day, and taking less than two years to complete the job. More detail here. Sadly no mention of Felice Landry’s role on the event.

A Note on Visas

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

Whenever I mention the difficulties I have getting into the USA some of my American friends make a great show of apologizing for the awfulness of their country. That’s very kind of them, but in all honesty I should point out that most wealthy countries are pretty bad. As evidence if this I present an article from today’s Guardian from which I learn that thousands of foreign students who have been awarded places at UK universities are unable to start their courses because they can’t get visas.

In this particular case the problem appears to be not xenophobia — the kids in question are entitled to visas even under the new, tougher regulations — but our government’s habit of creating massive new regulatory systems without having any idea how those systems will be administered or funded. However, that’s no consolation to the poor kids missing out on their college courses.

The Totem Pole of Oppression

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Left wing groups and bloggers often accuse each other of playing a “more oppressed than thou” card – something which is also called “climbing up the greasy totem pole of oppression.” The idea is that whichever group or person can claim to be most oppressed has the moral high ground. It is a really awful way to do politics, but at the same time it has some basis in reality.

Consider: today the Gubernator of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, signed into law several bills that the local LGBT community had been campaigning for. These include the establishment of Harvey Milk Day on May 22nd to celebrate LGBT rights movement, and agreeing to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other parts of the USA. This is all well and good.

However, as Monica Roberts reports, the Gubernator also vetoed a number of bills specifically designed to benefit trans people.

Politicians like Arnie don’t do things like this by accident. They make very careful assessments of the state of public opinion and act accordingly. Arnie clearly thinks that he can’t get away with being down on lesbians and gays (and indeed may sympathize with them), but he feels that he can’t be seen to be sympathetic to trans people (even if he is). He makes the LGBT lobby happy in some ways, and panders to the religious right in others. And because of the way the public views different parts of the LGBT community it is the T people who come off worst.

Pretty much the same is true in the UK. Today the Equality & Human Rights Commission issued a paper titled Beyond Tolerance which seeks to lay out guidelines for progressing LGB (but not T) rights in Britain. This particular quote caught my eye:

Seven in 10 lesbians (69 per cent) and gay men (70 per cent) felt they could be open about their sexual orientation in the workplace without fear of discrimination or prejudice. This contrasts sharply with only around two in 10 (23 per cent) bisexual men and three in 10 (30 per cent) bisexual women who felt the same.

In other words, public acceptance of bisexuality in the UK lags far behind public acceptance of homosexuality. Had trans people been included in the study in question I’m fairly sure that the number that felt they could be open about their status at work would have been well below 10%.

But with social acceptability comes a price. Trans people in the UK are, at least in theory, allowed to keep their status secret. If they are outed against their will by someone who needed to know (e.g. a pensions company) then in theory they can sue. The same is not true, as far as I’m aware, of LGB people. Indeed, the whole thrust of the Beyond Tolerance paper is that LGB people must be more open about themselves, and be prepared to stand up and be counted, specifically in government surveys, so that their place in society can be better understood and better catered for. The EHRC acknowledges that some people in certain professions, in certain parts of the country, and so on, cannot be as open as they might like, but it places the onus on those who are fortunate to stand up for their colleagues.

It is a messy business, this dealing with diversity, and I don’t envy people whose job it is to try to craft policies and make them work. Inevitably whatever you do cannot be right for everyone, so someone is bound to yell FAIL! at you. All that we can hope for is that we keep on moving forward.

A Brief Message to US Readers

~ Cheryl ~ 13 Comments

Remember those polls you used to see occasionally back in the Dubya days where people outside the USA were saying that America was a greater threat to world peace than Iran or North Korea and any other bunch of crazy saber rattlers? OK, now do you understand why Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize?

So no, he hasn’t achieved a lot internationally since he got elected. But he got elected.

Of course you are still welcome to believe that giving someone the Nobel Peace Prize for saving the world from Sarah Palin is jumping the shark, but now at least you can stop asking WHY???

Big Brother Is Us

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

In the department of magnificent irony I find this post from Alex Massie that begins:

Then again, if things are bad in Ireland, they’re also pretty ghastly here too.

Unfortunately he’s right, and this has nothing to do with fandom. It is all about this article in The Times which begins by noting:

A network of citizen crimewatchers will be given the chance of winning up to £1,000 by monitoring CCTV security cameras over the internet.

I should add that the people behind this idea are aware of the possibility for misuse. The article quotes one of them as saying that:

a ban on players who sent three incorrect alerts, would prevent the game being abused.

But even so I am pretty sure this will end up with lots of money being wasted, lots of people having to be banned, and very few crimes being solved. It is, after all, notoriously difficult to secure convictions on the basis of CCTV evidence.

LGBT Rights: the Good and the Bad

~ Cheryl ~ 10 Comments

Gordon Brown issued a formal apology to Alan Turning last night in response to the petition I mentioned last month. This is very good news, as indeed is the fact that over 31,000 people (last I looked) have signed the petition.

On the downside, over at The Outer Alliance there is news of a speculative fiction market that refuses to accept any LGBT material, or even an ad for such material elsewhere.

Personally I am happy for anyone to set limits on what they are prepared to publish. If I were running a fiction magazine there are things I would be reluctant to accept. Stories that get their “entertainment” value from violence against women, for example, or stories in which the main villain is a gross stereotype of a gay man and there are no other gay characters in evidence. I’ve spoken out against such things before, and been criticized for doing so, but I did so openly and I think that anyone not prepared to accept LGBT material should be open about it and be prepared to defend that stance.

More specifically I object strongly to the idea that to even mention same sex attraction, or the existence of trans people, is somehow explicit sexual content that is obscene and pornographic — something that should not be mentioned in polite company.

And finally, if you don’t mean to equate being gay with being a pedophile, don’t do it. If you do the whole “whoops, I did it again” thing, no one is going to take your apology seriously.

But basically all anyone has to do is read. Go take a look at what Gordon Brown has to say about gay people, and then take a look at what Jake Freivald has to say about them, and ask yourself which one of them sounds like the better human being.

By the way, the ad that caused all the fuss is now visible in my sidebar. I’ll have an article in that issue of Crossed Genres (I was asked to provide it when I was in Boston last month). It will be about Heinlein.

The Turing Campaign

~ Cheryl ~ 7 Comments

A campaign has been launched in the UK to obtain a posthumous apology for computer pioneer, Alan Turing, for his conviction for homosexuality that ended his career and probably led to his suicide at the age of 41. Turing was one of the most brilliant pioneer computer scientists and a key part of the code-breaking team at Bletchley Park that helped crack secret enemy communications during WWII. He received an OBE for his war work, but was later prosecuted for “gross indecency” simply for having sex with a man.

There is an article about the campaign in the Manchester Evening News. If you are a British citizen you can sign the petition over at the 10 Downing Street web site.

It has been pointed out to me elsewhere that many other people (notably Oscar Wilde) also suffered significantly as a result of the UK’s sexuality laws, and they deserve apologies too. Turing, however, is an excellent poster child for such a campaign and an apology to him will effectively be an acknowledgment by the UK government that it has acted very badly in the past.

International Blog Against Racism Week

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Apparently this week is International Blog Against Racism Week. Given that we have Worldcon coming up in just a few days, I’m not going to produce anything spectacular, but I would like to point you at a couple of interesting posts.

Firstly Mary Robinette Kowal nails it with respect to the question of “how does race affect white people?”

And secondly a guest blogger over at Justine’s asks us to read outside of our comfort zone – something I have always been in favor of.

Talking of which, my reading this morning with regard to the Not the Booker Prize initiative turned up something very interested. It is a book called White is for Witching, and while it is marketed as literary fiction it is undeniably horror. The author, Helen Oyeyemi, appears to be one of the rising stars of the LitFic community in the UK. She’s originally from Nigeria but grew up in London. Here’s a review from the New Statesman. The book is available in the US (see Amazon link from cover).

Joined Up Government (Lack Thereof)

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Some time ago I signed one of these online petition things asking the UK government whether the proposed ID card scheme would provide protection for transgender people who could be put at risk if their full personal history were made available to anyone doing ID checks. The Government’s response is now available on the 10 Downing Street web site, and it includes this:

As such, when an individual is using an identity card to prove their identity to an employer and a confirmation of their details is requested from the Register, their gender history would not be revealed.

Unfortunately, since that petition was submitted, the Government has published a new “Equality” Bill. The provisions of that bill include granting firms the right to declare any job as unsuitable for transgender people, and making it a criminal offense for a transgender person to fail to disclose his or her status when applying for such a job.

Um, #joinedupgovernmentfail?

Saving Children From Writers

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

Today’s Independent brings the news that a group of leading UK writers of children’s books will no longer be doing school visits because they object to having to be vetted to prove that they are not paedophiles. Philip Pullman is one of the more prominent authors involved.

This is part of a wider government initiative to insulate the nation’s children from all possible forms of harm, no matter now unlikely. One of the possible side-effects I have seen discussed is that UK conventions will no longer be able to admit children unless all convention staff have been vetted.

Of course, this is all for the good of the children. They have to be protected from bad people. And you can be sure that this legislation is going to get used to bar all sorts of people from working with kids, starting with LGBT folk.

India: Glad to be Gay?

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

The huge news in the LGBT news today is that a court in Delhi has ruled India’s law on homosexuality unconstitutional. Currently anyone convicted of homosexuality in India can be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison. While convictions are not common, the law does mean that gay people are unlikely to be open about their behavior, and this can cause huge problems with medical issues such as AIDS.

This is not a new development. As The Times of India reported a few days ago, the Indian government had been considering repealing the law, which many see as an unfortunate hangover from colonial times. However, as this Thai newspaper reports, religious leaders from India’s Hindu, Muslim and Christian communities are united in their opposition to any change.

The news from India is important in a wider context because of the vast number of people that live there. As part of the Stonewall commemoration over the weekend Jeff VanderMeer and John Coulthart linked to a chart showing the state of gay rights legislation around the world. I thought at the time that it would be interesting to see the country representations weighted by population (hello, Russell, you there?). Changing the situation in India would make an enormous difference to such a map.

We Stand Up

~ Cheryl

In this age of Twitter and attention deficiency there is a new fashion for writing short fiction, but Bruce Holland Rogers has been writing very short stories for years. Normally you can only get them on subscription (a remarkably good value of $10/year for 3 stories a month), but this month Bruce has opted to make one story (quite an old one) public. He did so because of the recent events in Iran, but in many ways it is also a very appropriate story to point you at on this, the 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riot. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you, “We Stand Up”, by Bruce Holland Rogers.

Tragically Young?

~ Cheryl ~ 15 Comments

One of the things that has struck me while reading posts about Michael Jackson this morning is the number of pieces that have described him as dying “tragically young”. He was 50, an age by which many people have become grandparents. It is also a commonly assumed starting point for old age – for example SAGA, a UK-based company that markets specifically to “older” people, takes 50 as its base age.

With Jacko I suppose his Peter Pan image might have caused people to believe that he is younger than he really is, but generally the posts I have seen have mentioned his actual age alongside the “tragically young” comment. So I’m confused. Tell me, O blogosphere, have we really reached a time when dying at 50 is perceived to be a tragically early departure, or are all these posts just being written by people who are over 50?

Full Disclosure (or else?)

~ Cheryl

CNet News reports that the US Federal Trade Commission is to crack down on bloggers who write glowing reports of products that have received for free in lieu of payment for their services in writing those reviews. The intention here is to go after people who receive things like free computers or cars or finanacial services and pretend that they’ve bought them, but because of the way laws get written it could easily end up being loose enough to take in book reviewers. The CNet article even speculates that the regulations might extend to affiliate schemes, so even if you bought the book you could be pinged for not disclosing you got a cent or two if someone else bought it through your site.

I expect there to be much wailing and gnashing of teeth over this in the blogosphere in the next few days. Personally I don’t expect the affiliate scheme thing to happen because Amazon will be on the ball and lobby against it. I also don’t expect the FTC to waste its time going after small fry like book reviewers. However, the anarchist in me worries about governments accumulating excuses to go after people they don’t like, however petty those reasons might be.

How Bad Laws Get Written

~ Cheryl

As some of you will know, there is an “Equality” bill currently progressing through the UK parliament. There are many bad things about the bill, some of which I have written about before, but not all of this is deliberate. Writing laws is hard, especially when you have smart lawyers ready and waiting to pick holes in everything you do.

The really bad stuff is, I think, a result of MPs having been convinced of the need for exceptions in “special cases”. They try to be fair to everyone, but with something like an civil rights the minute you create a special case you drive a coach and horses through the protections you are supposed to be creating, because everyone who wants to carry on discriminatory practices will immediately begin to present what they do in a manner in which, their lawyers can argue, they qualify for the exemption. In the case of this particular bill the loopholes are so loosely written that merely claiming to be prejudiced against trans people gives you the right to discriminate against them.

A really spectacular mistake can be found in the bill’s definition of trans people. It presents two examples, one of a person who has undergone hormone treatment and surgery, and one who merely chooses to live in the opposite gender, does so full time, and is generally accepted by society in that gender. Those are indeed two very common types of trans people (though it doesn’t cover everyone). However, in the first example the person described has transitioned from male to female, whereas in the second example the person has transitioned from female to male. The effect of this, once it gets into the courts, will be that female-to-male trans people are protected in all circumstances, but male-to-female trans people will be protected only if they have had surgery, because lawyers will argue that the examples clearly show that MtFs are held to a more stringent requirement than FtMs.

It is a messy business, making laws, but if you don’t get it right then you can create exactly the opposite effect to what you intended to do.

Gordon Brown Doomed

~ Cheryl

A world-wide recession can be dismissed as bad luck. Electoral disasters? Everyone has them sooner or later, especially when times are bad. But presiding over one of the most embarrassing disasters in the history of English cricket? Unforgivable. Time to go, Gordon.

Kids Will Vote Tory, Then

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Today’s UK news brings the story that a major plank of Gordon Brown’s manifesto for the next election will be that all young people will be required to undertake at least 50 hours of voluntary work by the age of 19. Alex Massie has already pointed out the bizarreness of the concept of compulsory voluntary work so that I don’t have to. It falls to me, therefore, to ask exactly what this means.

I’m pretty sure that by the time I was 19 I had put in well over 50 hours of voluntary work helping out at the local cricket club, and at the stamp club where my Dad was a leading member. My mum commented that at 19 she was spending a lot of her time looking after her young brother and sister, and helping out at her father’s business. Somehow I doubt that any of these things will count towards Mr. Brown’s targets.

What I think this is actually about is social services. The government is facing a huge shortfall in areas like the health service, care for the elderly and disabled, and so on. One way to plug that gap, and play to the general hysterical fear of “young people” that the media is so fond of encouraging, is to draft kids into unpaid service in these areas. Which of course leaves one very important question: who is going to train and manage these press-ganged kids?

In sensitive and difficult areas such as this, I have a sneaking suspicion that we may often be better off without help than with unwilling help.

Saving American Books

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Remember that daft “lead in books” legislation that I blogged about a while back? Well it is still on the books, and libraries are starting to think about which books they will have to destroy in order to comply with the regulations. Thankfully the American Library Association is not giving up without a fight, and they now have an ally in Congress. Representative Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.) has introduced legislation to exempt books from the legislation. Of course he needs votes in order to get is passed. And so, America, it is writing to your Congresscritter time.

Further details on the ALA web site.

Hat tip to Neil Gaiman who has been keeping on top of this one so that I didn’t have to.

Best Reason Yet to Leave Facebook?

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Because the British government wants to keep an eye on everything you do there and store it in a database. For you own safety and security, of course. Just in case you might happen to be a terrorist.

There’s lots being said about this today. Here are The Independent, The Guardian, the BBC and Nick Harkaway.

Probably the thing that worries me most about this is that the authorities generally don’t have a clue about how social networks are used. Many of us routinely accept “friend” requests from anyone who comes along, because we are public figures and it would be considered rude not to do so. But what happens if someone who friends you later turns out to actually be a terrorist, or a sex offender, or an illegal immigrant? Are you suddenly going to find yourself under investigation as an associate of this person? Unfortunately I suspect you are.

The other thing that worries me is that this renders any privacy systems that Facebook and the like might have in place useless, because all of the information will be available via the government databases which will almost certainly not be properly secured.

By the way, before anyone starts, I know the title was unfair to Facebook. The government wants to go after all social networks. They also want to keep track of every email you send, and every web site you visit. They are an equal opportunity snoop.

And finally, while we are on the subject, Joe Gordon reminds us that our ever-vigilant MPs have once again been passing laws that are so vague that any crank who happens to have a position of authority to use them to save children from the evils of comic books. Petition here. UK citizens go sign please.

George Orwell wants to be your friend. Do you know Mr. Orwell? Or his friend, Winston Smith?