‘Normalisation’ is real and has consequences
'Normalisation' is the idea that if the media gives too much exposure to extreme views or those without any basis in fact or science, they become the political mainstream and will come to be...
Author: Matthew Smith
Truckers blocking London? Get real.
This morning I saw a longish interview on the BBC Breakfast show with some guy called Richard Tice, who was identified only as a spokesman for "Leave Means Leave". I didn't hear most of...
What really lies behind Trump, Brexit and “national populism”?
During the post Iraq War days (when Iraq was effectively if not in name under occupation), the pro-war blogger Norman Geras ran an article on what it called the Single Transferable Article About Iraq...
Stacey Dooley and the environmental impact of fashion
I haven't watched any Stacey Dooley for about five years, since I watched her programme on drug smuggling through Ukraine in 2013 and gave it this scathing review. In tonight's BBC Three documentary (shown...
Is Britain really the most tolerant country in Europe?
Last Thursday, on the BBC's Question Time programme (a weekly late-night political panel show in which a panel of politicians and an academic, writer or other lay 'expert'), there was a contribution from an...
High-tech barbarism
Last Tuesday evening there was a 45-minute programme on Radio 4 (part of its File on 4 slot) exposing the abusive treatment of an autistic teenage girl at the St Andrew's hospital in Northampton,...
Transforming care? More like history repeating itself
Last night BBC's File on 4 programme was dedicated to how well the government's declared intention to get people with learning disabilities out of short-term mental health care and into the community where they...
A bridge to Ireland?
Last night BBC's File on 4 programme was dedicated to how well the government's declared intention to get people with learning disabilities out of short-term mental health care and into the community where they...
Want justice? Tell us your whole life story first
Yesterday it was reported that the police in some parts of the UK, notably London and Merseyside, demand that women reporting rape submit both medical records and an extraordinary array of electronic data to...
Show some respect
Yesterday I came across a tweet on Twitter which made some unpleasant generalisations about Muslim women and Islamic knowledge. It claimed that when men study the Shari'ah, it leads to "More ibadah > more...
Karanbir Cheema case: intention matters
Last week an inquest opened on the case of a 13-year-old boy with a severe allergy to dairy products who died in a London school playground after allegedly having cheese put down his shirt....
Who gets believed?
Recently a lot of people have been retweeting a tweet by one Amanda Brown Lierman, "political & Organizing Director for @theDemocrats" (not sure if she means the whole party or a local branch of...
Teenage boys do know rape is wrong
In the debate over whether the conservative American judge Bret Kavanaugh is fit to serve as a Supreme Court judge, an accusation has emerged that when in high school, he held down and groped...
What is a garment of liberty, really?
A couple of years ago there was a sketch on a Canadian comedy show (starts at 01:26), the Baroness Von Sketch Show, in which a woman walks into a clothing store and tries on...
On mental health care and staying connected
A few years ago I wrote a post on here (The Importance of Staying Connected) about how the Internet had changed from being a niche service which few people outside academia had access to,...
Why Muslims should protest public insults to the Prophet
Geert Wilders (or Geert Hitlers as I call him), a far-right Dutch opposition politician, has cancelled an event he had been planning (or claimed to have been planning) this coming November, a contest for...
Why “Jewish fears”, even if genuine, are misplaced
Last week I saw two blog articles published by self-described left-wing Zionists, one of whom I know through disability activist circles, about why they are concerned about the "rising tide" of anti-Semitism in the...
Muslimander TV: Are Asian lads lost, or is Mehreen Baig?
Lost Boys? What's Going Wrong for Asian Men (BBC iPlayer, available in UK only until about 12th September) Last Sunday there was an hour-long programme on BBC2 purported to be about the problems facing...
Why did I just lose 25 followers?
The other day I logged onto an unfollower tracker and discovered that I'd lost 19 followers, which is rather unusual (I often lose a few over the average week, often suspended accounts — which...
Who wears the burqa?
In an earlier entry I discussed the unhelpful 'defence' of niqaab that only a few thousand women wear the garment. However, a side argument is that only a few hundred wear the burqa, the...