Books for the Blind - you need to support this!

About 60 countries have exemptions to their copyright laws that allow copyright works to be converted into the special formats needed by visually impaired people, including Braille, large print and digital audio books  But these exemptions don't apply worldwide, and the special formats can't be transferred from one country to another.  The result is that visually impaired people have limited access to written material that most of us take for granted.  Even if a suitable format is created in one country, it can't be exported to another country.  Each country has to repeat the work again.  That is expensive, and that's why people with visual impairment don't have access to as many books as the rest of us.

Now a new international treaty has been agreed at a World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) conference which would solve these problems anywhere in the world.  But it won't come into force until a certain number of countries ratify it.  If the USA ratifies it, this would encourage other countries.  But there are people in the USA who don't want it to happen.  The main objector is likely to be Hollywood,  which has been lobbying President Obama.  Film makers fear that there the new treaty would be abused by film pirates.

I appeal to the best traditions of the USA.  Lobby your polititians now to ratify this vital new treaty.  If the treaty is adopted, if someone in Britain converts a book for the visually impaired in Britain, it would immediately be available to US citizens.  It would no longer have to be converted for each country separately.  And people in poor countries would have the  same access.

We aren't trying to steal your films to show to blind people!

The treaty is called the "Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons who are Blind, Visually Impaired, or otherwise Print Disabled"

In Praise of Unsolicited Advice

This week, the big news in Britain is that Philip Gordon, the US assistant secretary of state for European Affairs, advised the British government to remain in Europe or face the probability that Britain would be less important to the United States.  Quite a lot of Brits got angry.

These folk seem to forget that Britain often express opinions about US policies.  In fact it is a national sport.

There are good reasons for this.  Every national election in the USA has a global effect.  When a new president is inaugurated, he (or maybe one day she) has to learn a lot about the world.  While they are doing this, they can make terrible mistakes.  Moreover, because all their advisors change with each administration, their advisors also go through a dangerous learning process.

Those of us outside the USA get some nasty shocks.  Mitt Romney’s blunders during his world tour gave me a few nasty moments.  How could he have described Jerusalem as the capital of Israel?  If he had been elected, his ignorance could have started wars.  And we non-US citizens can't vote in a presidential election.

Turning to Britain, we have a lot of people who want to pull out of the European Union because they think that the EU has too much power to influence Britain.  These are people who don’t understand the realities.  They think that Britain can survive in isolation – it can’t.  They think that European regulation is burdensome – it isn’t.  They think that Europe is run by an over-large bureaucracy – it isn’t.  They think that pulling out of Europe would affect nobody but us – but it would affect every one of our trading partners.

So when one of our largest trading partners says that a Britain outside the EU would be a less attractive trading partner for the USA, these folk need to hear this message.

Thank you, USA, for telling the truth.  That is what friends do when they see someone about to do something really stupid.

Newtown

Normally I try to write about the differences between the USA and Europe in a balanced way.  But now that we have had a few days to think about the tragedy in Newtown, I can't find anthing balanced to say about the US love affair with guns.  So here goes: all guns blazing, to coin a phrase.  My apologies to all those US citizens who don't love guns.

I understand that the second amendment is unlikely to be changed anytime soon.  This means that the USA cannot conduct a rational debate about gun control, because everyone is debating what can be done without changing the second amendment.  I want to speak the unspeakable and give an outsider's view of this insane situation.

At the time of the revolution, the British colonies had just fought a war against the French and their Indian allies.  Because of clumsy British attempts to get the colonists to pay for the war, the colonies reached the point where British troops tried to take away the colonist's guns.  The colonists quite reasonably resented this.  They needed guns to hunt, to protect themselves against hostile indigenous people, and above all to protect themselves against the British oppressors.  So two things appeared obvious when they came to write the Bill of Rights:  A standing army was a bad idea (because they had just fought a war against the standing army of the British) and a well-regulated militia was essential to prevent the British (or anyone else) coming back.  So the right to keep and bear arms made sense then.

That was nearly 250 years ago.  The US standing army is the most powerful in the world.  The basic reason for the right to keep and bear arms has gone.

I have heard US polititians say that the right to keep and bear arms is the US citizen's ultimate safeguard against a repressive government.  Seen from the perspective of Britain, this claim appears both deranged and deeply cynical.

Another argument I have heard is that gun ownership means that you can defend yourself against crime.  But this argument works the other way round too:  Criminals are armed because guns are easy to get and because they expect to meet well-armed citizens when they commit a burglary or robbery.

In Britain, it is extemely difficult to get a gun.  Criminals do get them, but it is a complicated and expensive business.  So most of them don't.  If you shoot for sport, you keep your gun at the shooting club under lock and key.  If you want to hunt, you have a police background check, and you are only allowed certain types of guns.  Any sort of rapid-fire gun is illegal.  The same applies to handguns that can be hidden.  We have a very low rate of gun crime and gun accidents.  Our police are not normally armed.  Armed police are specially trained and operate under strict military-style discipline in emergencies only.

Of course, if the right to keep and bear arms were abolished tomorrow, it would take a long time to get rid of all the secret stocks of weapons.  But that is not a reason not to start.

So get real, USA.  Think the unthinkable.  The second amendment will be repealed eventually.  Will it take 10 years? 100? 1000?  How many more people have to die?

Politically Correct Language

In 1969, when Armstrong said “one giant leap for mankind” everyone understood that he wasn’t referring only to men.  Times have changed.  Now we would say “humankind”.  That is a change we can all make without doing violence to the English language.  We can all avoid expressing gender bias by dropping words such as “manageress”.  However, there are lots of other cases where neutral language is more difficult and many cases where it is unnecessary.  For example, we don’t express racial bias if we refer to a “blackboard” or ask for a “black coffee”, so we don’t need to change these terms.

Years ago, I met a nun in a bed and breakfast in Ireland.  She was attending a Catholic conference on conception and reproduction.  She asked me if I was “pro-life”  “Of course” I said.  How could I not be in favour of life?  Then I found that I had accidentally signed up to the Catholic view that abortion was wrong under all circumstances.  I was a deep disappointment to the nun, and in the rude manner of her kind she condemned me and my murderous attitudes.

Travelling to the USA in the 1990s, I discovered that if I wasn’t “pro-life” then I had to be “pro-choice”.  There was no centre ground.  Only the two extreme of the argument were allowed, and I was expected to join the fight on one side or the other.  I upset many people by saying that I could see both sides.  I think that abortion law must aim to achieve the least bad outcome, taking into account individual circumstances, and that is what British law does. 

Let’s look at what is happening here.  Those who oppose abortion claim the high ground by describing themselves as “pro-life”.  They then act as though those who are unsure about abortion are “anti-life”.  Then they invent the concept of “personhood”. This invented concept diverts debate into an argument about when “personhood” starts. This is not a good starting point for law-making.

On the pro-abortion side, the activists have invented “a woman’s right to choose”.  This sneaks in a lot of concepts which are nothing to do with abortion.  It ignores the fact that many of those who oppose abortion are women.  This subject should not be part of the battle of the sexes, but “a woman’s right to choose” drags it into that arena.  It suggests that as a man, I don’t have any right to an opinion.

On other uses of language, we are strangely blind to obvious racial bias.  For example, if you have no African ancestors at all, you are described as “white”.  But President Obama, who is ethnically an equal mixture of African and European, is normally referred to as “black” or “African-American”.  Why?  I suggest that it is because “half caste” is historically very insulting, leaving us without a word to describe mixed race.  I believe that this linguistic mess is exactly what you would expect after a history of slave-owning.  If the origin of this prejudice is in slavery, Obama is in an interesting position; none of his ancestors were slaves.

Language is a living entity, and it needs to change as society changes.  However, I believe that language change should follow societal change.  Politically correct language tries to change society by changing language. 

Politically correct language is mostly a one-way flow from America to Britain.  Why is this?  Is it because of the more polarised politics of the USA?  Or the use of TV sound-bites to influence US voters?  Are there any Americans out there who want to answer that?

Finally, something else to think about: English is unusual in having no gender for inanimate objects. In most other European languages, inanimate objects do have a gender, which is always indicated.  So the banning of gender-specific words is impossible and pointless.  Nobody thinks that a table is demeaned by being feminine.  Then there is the problem of professions.  French male and female teachers are described by different words.  You could choose just one word for teachers, but it would still have to be male or female – it couldn’t be neutral.  Yet the feminist movement is alive and well in France!

Universal Healthcare: US and European Ideas

As a Brit who often visits the USA, I have struggled to understand the US view of government, and especially taxation.  It seems unique in the developed world.

Today I listened to a program on the BBC called "The Public Philosopher" in which a well-known philosopher interacted with an audience at Harvard about universal healthcare.  He asked audience members to speak about their beliefs and tried to reveal the principles behind their beliefs.

My country (like most in Europe) has a universal healthcare system.  Britain is a rather extreme example, because its system is financed by tax and run by a government agency.  In other European countries, the health systems are often insurance-based.  But however payment is organised, to have universal basic healthcare, most countries insist that everyone is covered.  This means that people who are unable to work are paid for by taxation, and workers are covered by compulsory insurance arranged by their employers.

All these systems need compulsion, and Europeans accept that.  Compulsion means that healthy people can't say "I won't pay insurance (or tax) because I'm not sick" and insurance companies can't say "we won't accept a sick person because we will lose money".

The big surprise for me is the strong belief of the Harvard audience that compulsion (they called it "coercion") is un-American.  For Republicans, this was expressed simply as "the government should not take away what I've earned".  For Democrats, the question is whether poor people are coerced by their poverty and sick people are coerced by their sickness, so that they are denied participation in American society.  The debate was not about the obvious benefits of basic universal healthcare, only about freedom from coercion.

Now to Europeans, this focus on coercion is surprising.  We don't like being taxed, (who does) but we all assume that our governments must be coercive about a lot of things in order to run the country.

For Europeans, the freedom to elect our governments is enough.  When the government coerces us to pay tax and obey the law, that is OK because we elected them to do that and we can un-elect them at the next election.

For Americans (at least in the audience in Harvard) freedom also means freedom from government coercion.  I think that this must relate to the fact that the US constitution is confrontational.  So an election is not about choosing between manifestos, as it would be in most European countries;  it is about choosing adversaries who will slug it out in the Washington boxing ring.

I note that the American Revolution was not won to secure freedom from taxation as some US citizens claim.  It was won to ensure that there was no taxation without representation.

My question to US citizens is this:  is this an accurate picture of the US system and an accurate analysis of the differerence in thinking between the USA and Europe?

Europe - a good thing or a bad thing?

As a Brit, I don't hear politicians saying that Europe is good for us.  There are plenty of politicians who think it is, but they seem afraid to say so.

The British view of Europe is narrowly focussed on the European laws and regulations that affect us.  We often complain bitterly that "they" in Brussels are controlling our lives.

I work on medical devices.  Before Europe published the Medical Device Directive, my company had to obey separate safety regulations for each of the (then) 12 countries in Europe.  Afterwards, we only had one regulation for 12 countries.  Since then, the EU has grown to 27 countries.  The European regulations are simpler than many of the national regulations, and they allow manufacturers complete freedom as long as they obey the one set of European safety regulations.  How could this be bad?

As one of the authors of international standards,  I am one of the "they" that Brits complain about.  Even worse, I am writing standards that will probably be recognised all round the world, not just in Europe!

Other Europeans have a quite different view of Europe.  For the French and Germans, Europe is about ensuring that the terrible wars of the past never happen again.  For most Brits it is about a free-trade area.  Brits don't want a United States of Europe.  Germans generally do.

Yesterday, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to the European Union for keeping the peace on the European continent from 1945 to the present.

The joke is that Norway has never joined the European Union!

Turning to the USA, you might expect that a federation of states would do better.  But the USA has never taken that final step of ensuring that the federal government is supreme.  The consitution, written in the days when it took 6 weeks to travel from Maine to Georgia, allows states the power to pass different and contradictory laws.  And the civil war ensured that state's rights would never again be seriously challenged by the federal government.

So it seems to me that on both sides of the Atlantic, we don't have agreement on whether we want political union and, if so, how we might achieve it.

Our national stereotypes

I'm British and I travel a lot, especially in the USA.  Now, Americans are very nice people, welcoming, friendly and hospitable, but I soon noticed a habit of measuring the rest of the world against the American Norm.  At first I was amused, sometimes angry and then finally thoughtful.  Do British people do the same?  Are we just the same as Americans?  Do we measure the rest of the world against the British Norm?  Of course we do!

This blog is really about all nationalities and the mistaken beliefs they have about themselves, but I will focus on British and American errors, because those are the ones I see.

It is easy for me to see when an American has a mistaken understanding of America's position in the world, but not so easy for me to see the mistakes that I make myself.  So if you are American, and you have always wanted to tell the British what's wrong with them, here's your chance!  All I ask is that you avoid ranting and recognise that this is a two-way process.

Let's kick off with a simple set of errors about language.  The British usually pronounce foreign words as if they were written in English. No mystery there - it's what you do if you haven't learnt to speak the foreign language.  Americans have a strange habit of pronouncing all French words with a strong emphasis on the last syllable.  So the French Filet (a boneless cut of meat) becomes "Fillit" in Britain and "Flay" in America.  The French name Bernard is pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable in Britain (Burnud) and the emphasis on the second syllable in America (Brnard.  And yet in France both words are pronounced with an equal emphasis on both syllables. Why don't Americans mispronounce French the same way the British do?  Their idea of how to mispronounce it must have started somewhere.  Any ideas?

Of course, this leads on to a common Bitish illusion - that Americans don't speak real English and that they need to be put straight by any British person who has the opportunity.  The truth is, of course, that British and American forms of English have both changed in the last 400 years, and 300 million Americans have a perfect right to speak the English that has evolved on their continent.  But I know lots of Brits who are unshakable in their belief in the special position of British English.  And yet some Americans have apologised to me for speaking an inferior form of English.  So it's not just a British idea.