» discrimination

“You might fancy running say, the Jewish Relocation Office, or the German railroads system - agencies which, come to think of it, may have some crossover… “

Anyone think a European journalist would ever dare to write the above paragraph in an article? How about one writing for the BBC?

I didn’t think so.

Except it seems perfectly acceptable for a BBC journalist to do just that, when the topic refers to Native Americans.

Witness the article about the incoming US Administration’s quest for replacements for a myriad of government jobs and appointments, which includes this paragraph.

Oh dear, it seems someone has stolen “Chief Zee“’s tomahawk.

My heart goes out to the dear gent … OK, no, that would be a lie - it doesn’t.

The guy still seems totally incapable of understanding just how downright offensive and racist his antics are considered by many.

I guess it can only be a total ignorance of the issues he ends up being a caricature of that he thinks it must be a “prank”. It doesn’t seem to even remotely cross his mind, given his remarks, that anyone might just have taken his tomahawk because of how racist his portrayal of NDNs is.

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen runs a blog on Time Magazine’s website, “Work In Progress“, which sometimes can be almost close to approaching nearing the level of cynicism I occasionally use here.

Recently, she ran a blog entry, “Equal pay isn’t a partisan issue. Is it?“, explaining that the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act had been filibustered in Congress by the Republicans.

The Act was intended to be

I love all these environmentally-friendly groups. They are wonderful examples of the heights of prejudiced stupidity political correctness can lead people to.

The latest bright idea these perfectly mobile people have come up with? Banning plastic grocery bags.

Now, this might not seem such a bad idea on the face of it. They take oil to make, and they’re possibly the most common source of unsightly trash littering the world, not to mention they’re not that biodegradable and are a choking hazard to children.

They also happen to be one of the best inventions for people in wheelchairs.

Junk mail tends to get skipped over around here pretty quickly, but I guess advertisers have finally figured this out, and will do anything to get people’s attention.

They certainly did with the copy of “Auto Selector” that arrived here the other day. Right on the front page, ignoring the large black GMC SUV covering most of it, is a picture of some black guy dressed up in some caricature of American Indian regalia, complete with obligatory mini-skirted-and-high-heeled girl beside him.

Underneath the picture however reads the text “Spotlight on Chief Zee” with a page.

Oh dear.

By now, everyone has likely seen the video of, or at least heard about, the quadriplegic in Florida who was detained by the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s department and dumped out of his wheelchair.

What’s less widely publicized in the media is the call in January of 2008 by Rod Liddle in The Times newspaper for people to do precisely what occurred.

It’s astonishing to me, there’s such an uproar about this one case, caught on video, but relatively speaking there is absolutely no practical reaction to Liddle’s column. I can’t understand the reason behind the silence in the UK from all “decent” people, when those same people are so vocal condemning what happened in Florida.

Luntz, Maslansky, is a “Strategic Research” company that does market research, focus groups and the like for corporations and politicians.  We’re signed up for their alerts asking for participants in these research projects, and they come in reasonably regularly.

Imagine our excitement at one received last week, for research being done (presumably) for Fox News:

You will be commenting on the presidential candidates for a cable news network. You will be shown on live television and then will make an appearance on the Hannity and Colmes show. This is your chance to get your opinion on one of the highest rated shows and networks on television and to be seen by millions of people.

No, the title isn’t “disability discrimination”, but “disabled discrimination”.The BBC has a series of (badly written) message boards, one of which is frequented by people with disabilities. A recent thread was started there, entitled “Does disablism work both ways“.

The question was about this new pseudo-word, “disablism”, that has become common on those message boards, and asked if the word also applied to discrimination by people with disabilities towards people who have no disabilities.

As expected, the responses varied from the term being solely applicable to discrimination against people with disabilities, and the more-than-expected comments from one poster that implied discrimination against people without disabilities were “sauce for the gander”.