“Big society” is just an empty slogan
BBC News – Big Society is my mission, says David Cameron David Cameron gave a speech today in which he claimed that, while reducing the budget deficit was his duty, his so-called Big Society...
Author: Matthew Smith
Not exactly medical journalism
Earlier this week the Panorama documentary featuring Kay Gilderdale, titled “I Helped My Daughter Die”, won the Medical Journalists’ Association’s “best broadcast TV” award at their Winter Awards 2011 (the MJA don’t actually announce...
So Misbah could come back, after all
From a life of luxury in Pakistan to a modest house in Blackburn: Molly, a teenager torn between two cultures | Mail Online “Molly”, real name Misbah Rana, is the girl who ran away...
Busybodies and common sense
BBC News – Should a teenager be left to babysit a toddler? Lately I’ve seen a few stories about parents receiving cautions or fines for “child neglect” which consisted of leaving a young child...
Review: “Beauty and the Beast”, first episode
Beauty and the Beast (subtitled “The Ugly Face of Prejudice”) is a series on Channel 4 about our attitudes towards those with facial disfigurements, and seems to be based on getting people with beauty...
Suzanne Moore, Newsnight and the EDL
If the Left is to rise again, it must lift the official silence on race and culture | Suzanne Moore | Comment is free | The Guardian This weekend the so-called English Defence League held...
ME, mental health and victim blaming
Yesterday afternoon there was a debate on ME at Westminster Hall, an annex to the House of Commons, whose main participants were Ian Swales (Lib Dem, Redcar) and the Tory health minister Paul Burstow....
Android now single biggest smart phone platform
Android Topples Symbian in Q4 2010 These figures show that Android (which includes two variants, OMS and Tapas) narrowly sold more units than any other individual platform for the first time last quarter, pulling...
Why the rush to open the “ME files”?
Last week, the Countess of Mar, a long-standing advocate for the ME cause in the UK’s House of Lords, asked a question regarding why public records on ME dating back to the 1980s and...
Is the Holocaust really unique among genocides?
This morning, I heard a discussion on the Vanessa Feltz show (which I don’t listen to much now, except when I’m in the shower — that’s what comes of being out of work!) about...
Celyn Vincent and the problem of invisibility
This morning the papers reported that Riven Vincent, the mother of a daughter named Celyn (pronounced Kellin, Welsh for holly — and some newspapers thought the public was too stupid to process that, so...
Witless reporting of Bentall’s suicide
I gained a whole load of new Twitter followers today as a result of live-tweeting a tragic incident that happened in the local shopping centre, the Bentall’s Centre in Kingston. A young woman threw...
What’s wrong with sleepovers, exactly?
I saw an article by Amy Chua, the Chinese-American academic, in which she proclaims herself a “tiger mother” and tells the world that Chinese mothers (or maybe she means mothers from a particular group...
Review of “Mental” from BBC Four
One of my contacts on Dreamwidth requested that someone in the UK review this history of British mental health care since the 1950s, which originally went out in May 2010 and was repeated last...
Cloud coup-coup land?
OK, my title isn’t exactly original — it was a nickname for the Comoros islands in the Indian Ocean, which for some time had coups on a fairly regular basis (often engineered by the...
Facebook friends and “real friends”
Friendship, Facebook-style | Aditya Chakrabortty | Comment is free | The Guardian This appeared in today’s G2 (the A4 supplement to the Guardian) and it yet again raises the issue of the difference between...
Just don’t call it evil
Today Sarah (of Cat in a Dog’s World) pointed me to this Slate article about the present tendency to quickly assume someone is mentally ill if they commit an outrageous crime, such as the...
Jack Straw wields the wooden spoon again
So, the vicious old creep Jack Straw has yet again stirred up trouble for Muslims in the UK, this time with comments on the recent “Asian grooming scandal” involving groups of men of Pakistani...
Wot no spam?
It was reported last week that there had been a substantial drop in the level of spam on the net since last August and a precipitous drop since Christmas, which a Symantec analyst put...
Racial stereotypes exaggerated in ‘grooming’ reports
Child sex trafficking study sparks exaggerated racial stereotyping | Law | The Guardian Anyone read the extensive coverage of the issue of Asian men grooming white girls in northern towns that has dominated the...