Carole Malone: a new low in victim-blaming
This was on “This Morning”, a chat show that goes out on weekday mornings on ITV1, earlier today (Wednesday): Carol Malone, a tabloid newspaper columnist, gave her judgement on the family of which six...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
A law unto themselves
What do medical staff and airline staff have in common? What separates them is that airline staff do not train for their jobs for five years, yet have the safety of dozens, if not...
ME Awareness Day 2012: some links
Because of the pressure of work, I’ve been unable to write anything for ME Awareness Day (or even week) this year. I’ve written a few articles over the past year, the two most important...
Review: Acer Aspire 5733Z
Last Saturday I bought a new laptop, a purchase made necessary by the fact that my old laptop had given up the ghost after just over four years. I had been using that for...
Why I believe Ken Livingstone lost
Last night, we discovered that Boris Johnson, the Tory mayor of London elected in 2008, had been re-elected: he gained 44% of first-preference votes against Livingstone’s 40.3%; when second-preference votes were counted, his vote...
It’s not news, and it’s not fit to print
This was originally going to be a BADD post and I was writing it in my head on Tuesday intending to type and post it that evening after work, but work dragged on longer...
BADD 2012: mobile accessibility
Being Accessible Doesn’t Just Mean Ramps – Blogging Against Disablism Day » Dannilion.com Danni Brennand posted the above article this morning, regarding how accessibility is often taken to mean providing wheelchair ramps, rather than...
Disability benefits and the self-made mouth
This post has been republished at Where’s the Benefit as a guest post, and you can comment there or here. Last Saturday night, there was a debate on the Stephen Nolan show, a late-night...
Postal vote reform and Britain’s disabled voters
Last week the issue of postal voting reform in the UK was in the news again, after a judge who had found six Labour councillors in Birmingham guilty of postal voting fraud in 2005,...
Eat halaal! Organic is no substitute
HijabMan » The Labels Halal & Zabihah And Why I Choose Local And Organic Instead The above article explains the author’s decision to prefer locally-produced, organic meat over halaal meat which has been slaughtered...
How do we deal with the care home abuse problem?
I’m starting writing this just before a Panorama programme featuring video’ed evidence of violence against an elderly lady in a care home is aired on British TV. If you don’t have the stomach to...
On vocationalism
I often hear it said that various professions, particularly medicine, nursing and teaching, are meant to be vocations, and that it is surprising that members of these professions are often found to be uncaring...
Baby boomers didn’t cause all the world’s problems
Yesterday, on the Jeremy Vine news discussion programme on Radio 2, they were discussing the proposition that the “baby boomers” (the generation born within about 20 years after the end of World War II)...
Brief review: Derek
Derek is Ricky Gervais’s latest TV outing and one which has caused some controversy among journalists and even among disability activists online, with some claiming that Derek is a parody of someone with a...
Fear-free healthcare
Recently the ME community online had to deal with the sad news of three deaths, including one of its best-known and most loved activists, Emily Collingridge (right). There were also two inquests which reported...
Trayvon Martin and rad-fem bigotry
Name the Problem « You think I just don't understand, but I don't believe you. (also here) I don’t normally follow American (or any other) radical feminist blogs, but I saw this when a...
Will YOU pay for disabled people’s services?
Rachel Cohen Rottenberg recently blogged about the recurrent problem of parents of children with severe disabilities (usually autism) murdering them, and the stock response being that the mother (as it usually is, but not...
Babar Ahmad should be freed now
Last night, BBC’s Newsnight interviewed Babar Ahmad, the man wanted for extradition to the USA on the grounds of receiving classified information and assisting mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan and Chechnya through his website, Azzam...
Thusha Kamaleswaran, disability and anti-Black hostility
Last Monday, three men were found guilty of a shooting in south London that left a 5-year-old girl of Tamil origin, Thusha Kamaleswaran, paralysed from the chest down, and injured an Asian man, Roshan...
Why I might vote for Ken Livingstone (for the first time)
London is having its mayoral elections on 3rd May this year (most people know about the elections; the date hasn’t been so widely mentioned on the news) and the two main candidates are Ken...