Month: March 2017

Re-Kindling a love of Librarians

For my birthday last year I got a Kindle. I’ve both wanted an E-Reader for years, but I’ve always been put off them due to the DRM and associated restrictions. But last summer, I spent a lot of time on the move, often passing through 4 countries in a day, and I just couldn’t carry enough books for the amount I read. So eventually I caved and ordered the basic Kindle model with money my family gave me for my Birthday.

The post arrived, I opened the package eager to play with my new toy. I sat on my bed with this shiny grey object, fresh with possibilities. I sat there with the kindle store open on the device and froze. What should I read? Standing in a book shop could be the very definition of option paralysis. Only here I don’t have the shelves of pretty covers, all neatly sorted into categories. Just a text box and a cursor.

I tried typing a few things into the search box. “Iain M Banks”, “Peter F Hamilton”, “Sci-Fi”. The first two gave me some results by those authors, some I’ve read, a few I haven’t, but mostly stuff that was more than I wanted to spend on my first books to explore what the Kindle can do. The 3rd of those searches gave me thousands of results. Thousands of indistinguishable, unrecognised, unfamiliar titles.

I needed to narrow this down a bit. So I thought I’d see if I could find some Sci-Fi with a lesbian character. I selected the text box, and accidentally deleting the “sci-fi” already in there, typed in “Lesbian”, and hit search.

I regretted it.

If you want an idea of the results that come up, you can click this link. You may not want to do it on your work computer tho. Pages upon pages of results for what is essentially soft core porn in written form. Most of it obviously targeted at men, and obviously written by men. The cover images don’t give much hope. No matter what I played with in the search box, I couldn’t get anywhere with the search function, beyond the porn. I just couldn’t find a Sci-fi novel with a lesbian character using the search box alone.

I turned to google and had a search around for various recommendations for lesbian sci-fi. Which allowed me to find something to read.

What I realised from this experience is that what the Kindle really needs is a good Librarian. I’m fortunate, I have friends who are librarians of various forms (academic, public etc…), and they’ve always been helpful in finding me something to read. But not everyone is this fortunate.

So the search function on Kindles isn’t great, that’s hardly news. The thing is there is a wider issue here. Public libraries have been facing cuts across the UK as austerity bites and councils see this as an easy way to save money. Many councils have tried to get volunteers to run their libraries, getting rid of full time qualified librarians. And this is a problem.

It’s a problem that comes from a general lack of understanding of what a library is. For many it’s a building with some books in. Simple as that. I’ve even seen councillors and the media saying “Wouldn’t it just be cheaper to give everyone a subscription to Kindle Unlimited”. This shows a total lack of comprehension of what a library does and how it works.

A library is a curated collection of resources (not just books), and the librarian is the guide to that collection. Don’t know what to read? Go to your local library and ask the librarian for a suggestion. Like a book by a certain author? Tell the librarian and they’ll be able to help you find something similar (they will often consult Who Writes Like?). Want to know about Ship building in medieval Britain? Ask a librarian, they’ll be able to give you a list of books and resources that can help you (A search a librarian recently did for me).

A library without a librarian however is like staring at the blinking cursor in the search box, a world of information so near, yet out of reach.

Buying a Kindle made me realise just how much we all need Librarians, and libraries. Society needs to remember this, before it’s too late, before they’ve all been replaced by warehouses of books with no guide.

I love my kindle, it just needs a good librarian.

Ook.

Post script: If, like me, you’re  looking for something to read which is perhaps break from the hetronormative, you may enjoy:

May I have my human rights?

The triggering of article 50 looms. Like a giant crack across the face of a dam awaiting that final gentle poke necessary to flood doom upon all those in it’s way. By this time tomorrow, article 50 will have been triggered and the Brexit bus will be set on it’s course towards the edge of the cliff.

It’s pretty clear that Theresa May wants a hard Brexit, free from the single market, free from the customs union. Lots has been focused on how the government wants to turn Britain into a tax haven 30km off the coast of Europe. A bargain basement sweatshop, free of those shackles of employee rights. Many have asked why? Asked where the mandate for this comes from. After all none of this was on the side of the bus.

After much thinking and discussing with others, I think I’ve come to a conclusion on her reasoning. Human rights.

A condition of pretty much any involvement with the European Union is signing the European Convention on Human Rights. If you read the daily mail, then you’ll know this as the legislation that protects terrorists and ne’er-do-wells. If you have an actual understanding of the law, you’ll know it as the law that protects us from the government.

Theresa May has spoken out against the ECHR especially when she was home secretary when a succession of court rulings stopped her from being a tyrant.

If we have a hard Brexit, Britain can repeal the Human Rights Act. Proponents of this say they will replace it with a British bill of rights. Thing is, we already have one. The 1689 bill of rights. One of three documents that form the basis of the British constitution (the other two being Magna Carta, and the Crown and Parliament Recognition Act 1689). Theresa May wants to replace our human rights legislation with something that can be revoked by a simple majority in Parliament. A majority of MPs that were elected with just 37% of the vote. This is the first step towards the slippery edge of the pit. The first step towards totalitarianism. And that is terrifying.

A Proportional Response

It’s election time again in much of Europe, and if you read much of the tabloid press in the UK, you would get the impression that the continent is about to vote in fascist regimes in France, Germany and The Netherlands. With Geert Wilders’ PVV (Partij voor de Vrijheid/Party for Freedom) party recently taking a lead in the polls in the Netherlands, I’ve got a lot of questions from Brits asking if the Anti-Eu, Anti-Muslim, PVV will be taking the Netherlands far off to the right. Everytime I’ve been asked this I’ve had to sit down and explain to the person asking that in the civilised world, it doesn’t work like that.

Ultimately, it boils down to voting systems. The UK is unique in Europe (and to be fair, much of the western world), in having a First past the post voting system. A winner takes all system that only works in a 2 party system, and fails epically the moment you add a 3rd party. The Dutch by contrast use a party list system. As a result there are easily 7 parties with a fair chance of being part of a government coalition (I’ll discuss coalitions in a future post) after these elections.

As voting systems go, Party list is pretty good, it gives a nice balance of easy to understand, whilst providing good proportionality (exact proportionality is limited by the inability to subdivide an MP). What this means is that when polling shows PVV as having 28 seats in the Dutch Tweede Kamer, that’s 28/150. Forty-eight seats short of 76 needed for a majority. Given that mainstream Dutch political parties have no inclination to commit electoral suicide by entering coalition with the PVV, their lead in the polls isn’t anything to worry about. Come back when they are predicted more than 60 seats, then we can worry.

What this goes to illustrate tho is the ignorance of many in the Anglophone world about just how unfair their elections are. In the UK Cameron’s Tories got elected with a majority of MPs in the House of Commons, with just 37% of the vote. Let that sink in for a moment. Thirty-Seven percent of the vote means a whopping 63% didn’t vote for them. First past the post is an awful voting system, what ever way you try to spin it, it is not fit for purpose the moment you have more than two political parties, and a two party system is only one party better than a one party system.

Of course in the US, they take everything to the extreme, and not only does the US have first past the post, but they have first past the post squared. CGP Grey has a really good video that explains how you can get elected to the US presidency with just over 20% of the vote. Twenty Percent. Let that sink in. Any voting system that can allow the will of 80% of the people to be ignored is so far from fit for purpose it beggars belief.

In the UK we had a referendum on electoral reform, a referendum that should have been a massive warning that the legislation for UK based referenda is also not fit for purpose, a harbinger of the disaster that the EU referendum became. Alas many saw the AV vote as a vote against any voting reform, when in reality AV is a pretty ropy system too. AV can be a good system, in its multi member form, Single Transferable Vote, where you have large constituencies returning several MPs, the more MPs, the better proportionality (see previous statement about rounding to the nearest whole MP). The ideal here is therefore a constituency that covers the whole country. That’s what the Party list system as implemented by the Dutch delivers. Critics say that you lose the local MP. This is a double edge sword. Some UK MPs do fantastic work as constituent MPs, others are next to useless and leave people with no effective representation. There are ways you can deliver locality to MP’s with the party list systems, you can regionalize the lists, tho the party total count is nation wide ensuring that no vote is wasted.

In terms of equality, party list can also be used to help balance gender in parliament. A party might have a list which goes Female, Male, Female, Male, meaning that to ±1 you will have an equal gender balance (much as in society as a whole). Critics will say that with Proportional Representation then UKIP would have more MP’s. Yep, so would the greens, and the Libdems, and maybe even Labour. That’s the point, representation is proportional.

No voting system is perfect, each one has its faults and each has its benefits, but as with the result of any election the aim isn’t necessarily to get the best, but to get the least worst. Between Brexit and Trump, the time has come in both the UK and the USA for electoral reform to be put front and centre of the national political debate.

Edit: Since I started writing this article a few days ago, polling suggests that the PVV has slumped in the poles from its previous leading position of 28 seats, to 23 with the lead being taken by VVD (Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie/Peoples Party for Freedom and Democracy) on 26 seats.