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...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
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...
Emily Rose Collingridge, 1981-2012
Please note: Emily’s mother has requested that her appeal from 2011 be reposted. I posted it here at the time and readers are invited to read the appeal. Today I heard the very sad...
Who is really Undateable?
Channel 4 has been advertising a forthcoming TV show titled “The Undateables”, in which they try to hook up various people with disabilities and disfigurements which might have been getting in the way of...
City status: Croydon loses out again
Yesterday, three towns — one in England, one in Wales and one in Scotland — were awarded City status by the queen (i.e. the government). This is a status which is purely symbolic and...
Monckton ignores the elephant in the room
Last night BBC1 aired a programme, Letting Go (available until 20th March in the UK), presented by Rosa Monckton, one-time friend of Princess Diana and whose daughter Domenica, god-daughter of Diana, has Down’s syndrome....
Educating social workers about ME
The other night, I was at a screening of the film Voices from the Shadows at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which had been convened by the school’s film club as...
Kony campaign insults viewers’ intelligence
Recently a campaign launched by a charity called Invisible Children, which works in northern Uganda, has led to a video being promoted over Twitter, Facebook and no doubt other social media, calling for the...
Review: Keith Allen meets Nick Griffin
Keith Allen Meets Nick Griffin – 4oD – Channel 4 Keith Allen has previously done a programme in which he interviewed what he called “the God Hates Fags sect in Topeka, Kansas”, and whose...
What If Malcolm X Were Alive Today? (with no mention of Islam)
What If Malcolm X Were Alive Today? – Jack & Jill Politics This article was published on 20th February, but I only noticed it when it was linked off the Womanist Musings weekly link...
How well does the Muslim community accommodate special needs?
After Shahadah – MuslimMatters.org The above article is about how the Muslim community accommodates converts, and these issues have long been discussed on various websites including the blogs that sprung up in the mid-2000s...
Workfare critics DO care about its impact on workers
The war on workfare is worse than workfare itself | Brendan O’Neill | spiked This article dresses up a familiar argument of the present government and its supporters in the right-wing press — that...
Review: Proud and Prejudiced
Proud and Prejudiced on Channel 4 (available to watch for another month at the time of writing) Proud and Prejudiced featured Saiful-Islam, one of the public speakers of the group commonly called Al-Muhajiroun, a...