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...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
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...
ME sufferer died because she couldn’t eat
University graduate Lois Owen, 34, died after her weight plummeted to just 3st 2lbs | This is Derbyshire (also reproduced on the ME Association site) Lois Owen achieved a first-class honours degree from the...
PCC fails to condemn misleading Mail article
Building for the Future Blog: The Daily Mail and the “Strict Muslim” – Part 2 The above article reproduces the response of the Press Complaints Commission, a deliberately toothless “self-regulation” body for the British...
People who resist subsidised cheap labour aren’t snobs
Faiza Shaheen – I’m a jobs snob. Iain Duncan Smith should be one too. | the new economics foundation There was also an article in yesterday’s Guardian from someone with a genetics degree from...
Review: Stacey Dooley on Luton’s fanatics
BBC Three – My Hometown Fanatics: Stacey Dooley Investigates Stacey Dooley is presented as someone who was plucked from working as a shop assistant at a perfume counter at Luton airport to presenting an...
How do we “face up” to the left’s eugenic past?
Eugenics: the skeleton that rattles loudest in the left's closet | Jonathan Freedland | Comment is free | The Guardian The article is about the enthusiasm of pre-war centre-left intellectuals for eugenics, the movement...
Chris Brown and other misogynistic musical mediocrities
Last Sunday night, the R&B singer Chris Brown performed at the Grammy award ceremonies, having apparently been given an exemption from the terms of his five-year probation to appear. Brown is probably better known...
George Carey only defends Old England
Recently there were two court cases which further established the secularism of the British state, despite its nominal Christian character: one involved an atheist councillor in Bideford, Devon, who resigned from a council after...
RIP trolling isn’t the worst kind
On Tuesday night, the BBC broadcast two programmes about online bullying, one of them specifically dedicated to the phenomenon of “RIP trolling”, meaning the phenomenon of mindless idiots posting insulting messages, videos and doctored...
Welfare Reform Bill and the Royal Assent petition
Recently someone put up a petition online calling on the Queen to refuse Royal Assent to the impending Welfare Reform Bill (i.e. to veto it), to which Sue Marsh, co-author of the Spartacus Report,...