I haven't seen the actual album yet, so all I've seen is that tiny thumbnail on the site to which Noreen gave us a link.

Reading through the thread, it sounds to me that Sondra Wills is probably a real person who does see this as an example of someone being insulting to people with disabilities, and is therefore hopping mad. (The alternative way of reading her posts is that this is just another case of someone cynically stirring the shit, perhaps the same someone as GUEST. Unfortunately there are people around who play those kind of mind games; the fact that, while there is a Mudcat member called Sondra Wallace, there isn't one called Sondra Willis feeds into that kind of paranoia.)

I wholly go along with the idea that genuine insults to people with disabilities need to be dealt with forcefully. But I think there's a serious misunderstanding here.

What I see looking at that picture is something totally different. It's Nic saying "I'm not dead yet folks - Up Yours, Dave Bulmer and Co who've been trying to bury me". And the term "Unearthed" is an echo of the TV music term "Unplugged".

The thing is, it's really true that people in different parts of the world and different cultures really do see things differently.

"Sondra", on the face of it anyway, sees an insult to people with disabilities, and reacts ferociously; in my view inappropriately so. Greg sees an attack on an individual who doesn't in any way deserve to be attacked, and also reacts ferociously.

The difference is that "Sondra" was reading insults to people with disabilities into a cartoon which very likely had no such intention. Greg is seeing a personal attack in something which is hard to read as anything other than a personal attack.