August 7, 2007 • 11:51 pm
I’ve posted before on my experience with invisible disability, and linked to amandaw on the “But you don’t look sick!” phenomenon. And for further background, everyone should read the “Open Letter to Those Without CFS/Fibro” at Not Done Living.
Now Annaham at Hamblog has come out with the Invisible Illness Bingo card, v. 1.0. “But you don’t look sick!” features, as does “Lucky! You get to stay in bed all day!” and “But I went through hard times too, and I managed just fine. Let’s talk about what a great person I am.”
Anyone who has experienced chronic illness is likely to recognise a few of these. (Perhaps you’d like to punch a wall or two.) If you haven’t had the pleasure of a debilitating but invisible illness, you might still recognise a few of these as having flitted through your head (or even emerged from your mouth) in the past when confronted with the frustrating reality of chronic illness in others. Perhaps when they’re all down on a card like this, we can all recognise these comments for what they are, and for what they do to people on the sharp end.
Filed under: disability, health, peeves
Here’s a Sunday Night Quiz for you!
What is it?
(yes, some of you may already know. Don’t give it away, eh?)
Filed under: fun, photography
August 4, 2007 • 11:01 am
Why on earth would a telco have an online registration system for prepaid SIM cards which doesn’t accept street numbers with letters (eg 29B) or hyphenated surnames?
And why on earth would a telco with such a bizarre system then advertise on their phone help service “did you know it’s even easier to register your phone online”?
IS. NOT.
Filed under: sheer incompetence
Crossposted on Larvatus Prodeo, where each of the previous Haneef threads has generated hundreds of comments.
Much was made yesterday of claims that Indian police believe that there are links between Haneef and extreme jihadists. To kick this thread off, from The Hindu (Online edition of India’s National Newspaper):
Meanwhile, reports in a section of the Australian media that a dossier prepared by the Bangalore police on Mohammed Haneef on his alleged links with the Al-Qaeda have come as a surprise to the police here.
Bangalore Police Commissioner Neelam Achuta Rao told The Hindu on Wednesday that they had not prepared any such dossier.
So where has the alleged Haneef dossier actually come from?
Secondly, Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Politics, authoritarianism, law, sheer incompetence
And the police state lurches ever closer, with the SMH today reporting on proposed legislation for “New secret search powers”.
The proposed powers would give police the right to execute search, seizure and surveillance under so-called “delayed notification warrants”, without judicial oversight, and including the assumption of false identities by police to gain access. The subject can be denied notice of the s/s/s for up to six months, with extensions available on Ministerial approval, again with no judicial involvement:
The lack of judicial oversight was justified by the Minister for Justice and Customs, David Johnston, on the grounds that a court or judicial officer might leak news of the warrant.
“I don’t want to impugn anyone, but the security of these operations has to be pristine,” Senator Johnston told the Herald.
The article continues:
The position of the Labor Opposition is unknown. The party did not return calls yesterday.
Filed under: Politics, authoritarianism, law, moral panics, obstreperation
A veritable smorgasbord for you!
1. “Intimate Politics: A Roundtable”: a downloadable podcast of a panel of feminist scholars and their reactions (not book reviews, but further musings) to the book Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel, by Bettina Aptheker.
2. “Who hates to hear they look great?”: amandaw on the “But you don’t look sick!” phenomenon and invisible disabilities.
3. “What are we doing here?”: magniloquence muses at length on the femisphere, its characters, and the dynamics of blogwars. Meta upon meta, lots to unpack here.
4. “Students use sex to promote healthy foods”: Two students in Canberra come up with the absolutely ground-breaking new idea of presenting scantily clad women’s bodies in order to promote a food group. Somehow, this is “Innovative!” national news.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Meta, Politics, Read 'ems, bigotry, birth, indigenous, interblog, language, racism
I’m feeling way too sick to write anything much (stupid lungs), so I bring you – more kid art.
Chroma Kidz washable paint on Reflex A4.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Life, family, fun
In response to Dr Mohammed Haneef’s interview last night on 60 minutes:
Isn’t it better to be safe than sorry?
He was only inconvenienced for 4 weeks.
Everyone makes mistakes, and it’s all been corrected now.
Sure he was incarcerated, but he was fed and safe and he must have known that if he was innocent he’d eventually be set free.
He shouldn’t have been traumatised by that, he should be happy to be contributing to the safety of society by being thoroughly investigated.
The attempts by partisans to game talkback shows are becoming more and more obvious.
The last two lpoints strike me as particularly disingenuous. They’re trying to imply that only a person with some guilty secrets would be traumatised by being investigated. As if anybody who’s been paying attention to justice narratives (both fact and fiction) at any time in their life ever doesn’t know that innocent people get persecuted all the time for cynical political gain. Why on earth should Haneef’s pofessed innocence have made him unafraid of the investigation’s intensity?
Filed under: authoritarianism, elections, law, sheer incompetence
