Views from the Reading Room

ISDS: Invester State Dispute Settlement mechanism, a system of courts run by corporate lawyers in which companies can sue governments, outside of the normal judicial process, when they claim to have been discriminated against. Apologists for the mechanism say its purpose is to protect firms when government unfairly favour domestic firms over foreign ones, or expropriate their property. That's not how it's actually used.

TTIP: Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a big trade deal currently being negotiated between the US and the EU (see also TPP (US and Pacific countries), CETA (Canada and EU)). Includes ISDS mechanism.

Promoters say TTIP will be good for the economy and create jobs, but of course it will destroy jobs and only be good for some big firms that are doing well in the economy already, because that's how these trade deals work, from NAFTA onwards (and maybe before that, before my time). But if ISDS stays in it'll be even worse: a danger to all our public services and a benefit to no-one except evil multinationals.

A case in point: Canadian-Australian company OceanaGold wants to open a gold mine in El Salvador, which would pollute the country's remaining clean water (90% of their water is already contaminated). El Salvador rejected the mine, so the company is suing them at ICSID (International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes), a World Bank tribunal. This is the sort of thing ISDS will be used for if we don't stop it. More detail from The Guardian.

There's a petition to the World Bank to drop the case against El Salvador at Sum of Us, and you can join the fight against TTIP in the UK at noTTIP.

I doubt anyone reads me who doesn't already know about the Tories' plans, in the Health and Social Care Bill, to destroy the NHS. 38 Degrees have put up billboards to publicise the danger, and you can download posters and leaflets at their blog. It appears that the govt. will try to push the Bill through the Lords tomorrow (19th March), then back to the Commons for the last time. A lot of Lib.Dem. and cross-bench Peers, and Lib.Dem. MPs, seem to have been bought off with minor changes that don't affect the crucial elements of the Bill: privatisation, postcode lotteries and even more red tape getting in the way of staff doing their jobs. The TUC's Going to Work campaign has a tool for you to "adopt" a member of the House of Lords, to ask for their support for an amendment delaying the Bill, as well as the usual write-to-your-MP mechanisms.

October 16th is the UN's World Food Day. It's objectives include heightening public awareness of the problem of hunger and strengthening international and national solidarity in the struggle against hunger, malnutrition and poverty. This year's theme is "Food prices - from crisis to stability". Apparently world food prices rose 25% last year. This isn't just a result of the economic crisis, where even more than the 99% in "first world" countries, people in the poorest parts of the world are being made to bail out the bankers; the current world economic order is set up to treat everything, including the most basic necessities, as a market to make profit in, and this is the result. It's also part of the Happening Right Now impact of climate change, and made worse by the appropriation of land that could be used to grow food for biofuels and other cash crops.

I don't have anything original to say about it: have some more links.
Oxfam's GROW campaign;
Fix the Food Chain, Friends of the Earth's campaign on how the way we do farming in the UK damages the environment;
La Via Campesina has today down as World Food Sovereignty Day, with a lot of recent posts on price volatility and land grabbing.

Just over a week after having an eye test, I got my new (free from the NHS, single vision) glasses. I guess they're easier to make than varifocals. I got reading glasses and a distance-only pair, which look similar enough that I keep getting confused; also, the fit feels very odd. I guess I'll get used to them, though.

I don't think I'll use the distance-only pair much, because that part of the prescription hasn't changed a lot from my varifocals, which have the advantages of (i) going darker in sunlight, and (ii) still being able to read with them well enough to program the digital recorder. (With the reading glasses, I can read the Radio Times; with the others, I can see the menu on the TV screen.)

But next time I get a new prescription, I definitely want new varifocals if I can in any way afford it. I'm spending so much time taking one pair off and putting another pair on. At least I now have 2 pairs of reading glasses: one for the living room, one for the computer.

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In response to the latest "Top 100 SF list" apparently compiled by people who stopped reading it some time last century, eruthros and collaborators are creating a list of recommendations by people who still read and/or watch speculative fiction. All media, all related genres. Go here to nominate.

I know a lot of other things are going on now, which other people on my reading list are covering, and I don't usually "share" petitions I find online, but I'll make an exception for this one, which I found via the F Word's weekly round-up.

( cut for talk about rape )

You know how the oil industry's determination to get at every last barrel leads to disaster? No, not that one; I'm thinking of a situation that's been going for some time with less mainstream publicity, and where the "developers" have no intention of stopping, and with environmental racism written all over it - oh wait, that would be the Niger Delta.

The one I'm thinking of is in Canada, encroaching on indigenous land, and an "unconventional" source of such diffuseness that it wasn't worth exploiting until comparatively recently. We seem to be approaching Peak Oil, and unfortunately, the companies' reaction is not to diversify into less harmful technologies, but to exploit sources that are even more damaging.

( Video and transcript below cut )

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Further reading ...
More about tar sands:
No Tar Sands
Support for BP tar sands resolution at Ethical Consumer blog: 15% of shareholders either supported the resolution or abstained (strong for a resolution of this type) on a resolution asking BP to report on the financial, social and environmental risks associated with tar sands extraction.
Tar Sands threaten caribou extinction at Ethical Consumer blog

BP, the Deepwater Horizon spill and environmental racism:
Crude Violations by s.e. smith at FWD/Forward

More about RBS' funding of the oil industry, and action against them by Climate Camp:
How RBS funds ‘dirty oil’ at The Herald Scotland, via Liberal Conspiracy

(I meant to post this yesterday but had problems with my computer. I'm sure there was something relevant happening then that I meant to link to, but if I don't post this now it might never get done.)

Blog Against Disablism Day was several days ago, but as usual, it's taken me a while to catch up. I don't feel qualified to write anything original, so here are some links to posts I particularly appreciated (all the posts submitted for the blogswarm are indexed at Diary of a Goldfish).

Blogging Against Disablism Day: on being a disabled blogger by Amy Clare, guest blogging at The F-Word (one of my regular haunts).
Do You Need Assistance? by s.e. smith at FWD/Forward: great advice for currently abled (or less-physically-impaired) people on how to offer help and how not to.
Fictional Heroes with Disabilities by Beppie at Hoyden About Town: antidotes to whichever show is making you headdesk today.
Addressing Ableist Language by Cara at Feministe, where she's trying to make the comment threads less unsafe for readers with disabilities.
Voluntary Accommodations by angelikitten: if only paying workplaces had such a responsive attitude.
Of privilege and auditory processing by codeman38 at Normal Is Overrated: wow, some of those are really familiar to me although I don't have the same conditions. How do people tell which phone is ringing?
I live in a marginal constituency by Katie at Everyone Else Has a Blog - it's election time, but her local parliamentary candidates don't reply to her emails. Don't they want disabled people's votes?

Note: disablism and ableism are the same thing, it's two countries divided by a common language again. Like whether to say "disabled people" or PWD, I see both online and sometimes forget which is which.

Starting at the fun end of the spectrum:

I don't remember where I first saw this: Avatar - The Metacontextual Edition, hilarious takedown

Via Hoyden About Town: All the King's Men, about the first female ruler of Otuam, Ghana

From the Science in My Fiction blog: a short story contest for SF responding to a recent scientific discovery (open for entries from April 1 through June 30)

Good news reported at the F Word: Council of Europe adopts recommendation on measures to combat discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity; Helen G writes that this is the first intergovernmental agreement of this nature.

Gosh, is that the time? I think I'll leave the No Fun at All part for another day.

The F Word has an article on trans issues by Laurie Penny, Moving towards solidarity. Feminists - even prominent ones with big platforms to shout from - do not get to be the gatekeepers of what is and is not female, what is and is not feminine, any more than patriarchal apologists do.

Roz Kaveney has details of a masterclass next year provided by the SFF, at Science Fiction Foundation: SF Criticism Masterclass for 2010.

There's a new blog reviewing new-reader-friendly comics at New readers...start here! This blog will avoid comics with sexist, racist, homophobic or ableist overtones or intent.

I was watching last week's episode of Life (available on the BBC iPlayer if they think your location is acceptable), there was this crowd of jellyfish, and the narration mentioned a predator. Here comes this huge jellyfish (though I couldn't tell how huge from that shot, maybe the others were tiny), and I'm just thinking "Wow, that looks just like a fried egg" when David Attenborough introduced it. The fried egg jellyfish - the second picture shows the bright yellow effect from the camera lights, and more of an impression of the size. Sometimes critter names are unexpectedly obvious!

It's just like the Everready bunny, isn't it? Now we come back to cultural appropriation, from a different direction.

I've got a rotten cold and don't feel up to a detailed argument, so have an outline:

1: Oh, for crying out loud.

2: Original slash is, to a first approximation, written by and for women. Many - the majority, I believe - of the authors are het cis women. The stories are romance, erotica, or both.

Slash has the potential to be subversive, but my mostly-secondhand impression is that it usually isn't.

3: Gay fiction, as it was called in my day (LGBT is what the Lambda Literary Foundation are calling it; other acronyms are available), can be any genre. Its defining characteristic is featuring characters of minority sexuality and/or minority gender, from the viewpoint of someone who knows what they're talking about, unlike the stereotypes we're usually confronted with in the mainstream media.

LGBT fiction might just be written as a romance, detective story, western, SF story etc. with a protagonist the author can relate to, but promoting it as LGBT fiction is inherently political.

4: 2 and 3 are not the same thing.

If slash writers want to win awards, they should roll their own.



In the first post I read about this, Willow disproved a well-meaning but unfounded argument.

likespring calls out some of the nasty things being said (includes quotations of racism and general cluelessness; I'm using it as a guide to what not to read in the linkspam)

linkspam masterpost