Trump, Clinton and a fair voting system
There's a claim that has been repeated a lot on social media by former Hilary Clinton supporters (the graphic on the right posted to Twitter by Victoria Brownworth being an example) that Trump won...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
Honi soit qui mal y pense
[Outcry over sexualised hijab schoolgirl](http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/hijab-girl-in-childrens-books-is-sexualising-fouryearolds/news-story/ba831356aa747865914da54ffe24367a) (from *The Australian*) *Honi soit qui mal y pense* is a Norman French phrase, meaning “shame on he who thinks ill of it”. It appears on the British royal...
Respect your elders, young ladies!
There was an article on the Independent last week calling for younger feminists to concern themselves with the plight of the so-called WASPI women, the women born in the 50s who are being caught...
Ain’t got the Knowhow
I was listening to the BBC's You and Yours programme and heard a feature on ransomware (malware that encrypts your files and then demands money for the key to decrypt it), and having data...
The Lexit delusion
It's no secret that the bulk of the support for the campaign to pull the UK out of the European Union last year came from the Right — UKIP and large sections of the...
The Handmaid’s Tale: speculation so white
The Hulu TV adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel set in a New England taken over by a fundamentalist Christian theocratic police state that styles itself the Republic of Gilead, concluded...
Dumping Hopkins didn’t hurt LBC’s ratings
LBC sees audience numbers rise after Katie Hopkins departure | The Independent According to Rajar, the organisation which researches the listener base of radio and TV stations, the national talk station LBC did not...
Reverting to type
Democracy is dying – and it’s startling how few people are worried | Paul Mason | Opinion | The Guardian This was in today's Guardian, and uses a few examples of democracies turning back...
We all knew Kevin Myers was a bigot
Today, social media has been abuzz about a column by Kevin Myers, about whom I last wrote on this blog in 2009 in response to a column full of stock false Islamophobic assertions by...
Charlie Gard and NHS versus private care
So, the tragic story of Charlie Gard, the terminally-ill baby boy whose parents have fought a legal battle to stop doctors at Great Ormond Street in London from turning off his life support, has...
Blaming the colonials for everything
Over the weekend I saw a touching story about an elderly Moroccan lady who completed the first grade of her country's school system after having been illiterate all her life and having spent three...
A 20-year-old is not a baby!
Yesterday a young man called Rashan Charles was killed in an encounter with the police in London, and the footage has been posted on social media with the hashtag "Justice for Rash". The footage...
Polygamy and being Muslim
Earlier a Facebook friend (an African-American Muslim woman) posted a status that Black Muslim men should just accept that most Black Muslim women hate polygamy and that "no amount of guilting and shaming is...
Are ISIS really Khawaarij?
Yesterday I saw a Facebook post which linked to a story about a paper by Craig Considine which claimed that "newly translated" stories from the time of the Prophet (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam)...
HS2: worst of all possible worlds
The juggernaut of HS2, the new high-speed rail link from London to Birmingham and, we are told, eventually beyond, ploughs on. Today the government awarded the contracts to various major construction companies to build...
Charlie Gard: What if they’re just wrong?
The case of Charlie Gard, the baby boy with a mitochondrial disease and allegedly irreparable brain damage whose life support doctors have been trying to turn off as they believe there is no hope...
Why Muslims aren’t pacifists
Martin Luther King junior famously wrote a Letter from a Birmingham Jail, a response to local White clergymen who had urged him to be less strident and roll back on the direct action. One...
What value “100% attendance”?
Last Sunday I saw a Facebook and blog post by a mother who said her son would not be accepting his award for 100% from his school, which would have meant a trip to...
Tories’ road fund is no revolution
This morning it was announced that the government was diverting just over a sixth of the £5.8bn assigned two years ago to the National Roads Fund (NRF) from trunk roads and motorways to regional...
Seven Days of Action: poor excuses for poor care
This week sees the third Seven Days of Action event to raise awareness of the people with learning disabilities who are trapped in psychiatric units, usually so-called Assessment and Treatment Units, sometimes for lack...