emma short

paging @phlaimeaux.bsky.social

Calls to halt UK Palantir contracts grow amid ‘lack of transparency’ over deals Opposition MPs urge Labour to pause public contracts with the US tech firm after attempts to examine deals blocked

Pressure building on govt to come clean about Mandelson's role in bringing US spy-tech firm Palantir into the heart of our NHS.

The fingerprints of Mandelson and his lobbying firm are all over these deals.

The rot goes to the heart of this Labour govt

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Take the time to do this folks. The proposed changes to ILR are shocking and cruel, which is made abundantly clear in the text of the public consultation linked below. Please lend your voice to try to mitigate the cruelty.

my dad didn’t go to university and he was extremely happy to pay taxes for his four children to do so; and, indeed, for the doctors who treated him at Addenbrookes to have gone to university as well.

There is money for "education" if and only if that money is being directly funneled to corporations. Anything involving actual learning, however, well there's no magic money tree

IGALA list: Deborah Cameron, one of the greatest feminist linguists ever, has passed away. Everybody interested in the relationship of #language and #gender, please go and read her witty and myth-busting blog: https://
debuk.wordpress.com/ .
#linguistics #GenderLinguistics

I’m sharing this video again because people don’t really get what these data centers and ai are doing to our planet and our communities. Especially Black communities because they were strategically placed there.

I need you to listen to these people.
STOP USING AI. STOP SUPPORTING AI.

Look no further than an English or other Arts and Humanities degree
#EnglishCreates excellent careers

A Black man named Keith Porter was shot and killed by an ICE officer on New Year’s Eve.

Marimar Martinez was shot five times by an ICE officer in Chicago who went on to brag about leaving seven holes in her body.

This is not new but it is expanding.

Renee Nicole Good, murdered by ICE, was a prize-winning poet. Here’s that poem. Renee Nicole Good, 37, mother to a six-year-old boy, was murdered earlier today by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, a few blocks from her home. According to the Minnesota Star Tribune: [An ICE agent] s…

“i want back my rocking chairs, / solipsist sunsets, / & coastal jungle sounds...”

A poem by Renee Nicole Good, who was murdered by ICE earlier today.

lithub.com/renee-nicole...

Renee Nicole Good.

May her memory be a blessing.

7-year-old is extremely delighted with his looshkin, @jamiesmart.bsky.social, lovingly handmade by his auntie eszter (in the background).

The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (permalink) Last night, I gave a speech for the University of Washington's "Neuroscience, AI and Society" lecture series, through the university's Computational Neuroscience Center. It was called "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI," and it's based on the manuscript for my next book, "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI," which will be out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux next June:

"AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more."

This piece on AI by Cory Doctorow is spectactular.

pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/p...

We're watching the wholesale burning of every scrap of dignity afforded to trans people in the UK, their rights, their medical services, their employment, their place within society, their bodily functions.

It is a disgrace, and a disgusting stain on the government and media of this country.

Great culture can save lives. Literally.

Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

LIVE: Global Sumud Flotilla Approaches Gaza YouTube video by Novara Media

‼️IMPORTANT‼️ LIVESTREAM from the Gaza flotilla as they near Gaza. This is now the most vulnerable time for these brave folks. We need as many eyes on them as possible. Please watch/stream when you can & spread this far & wide. www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCAN...

This is great work. But this article in particular should be raising eyebrows and a LOT of questions

www.thenerve.news/p/tony-blair...

LOCAL AI ZONES: what's at stake?2025-09-26T08:05:27.412Z <<The Government’s announcement that Blyth in Northumberland and Cobalt Park in North Tyneside will become designated AI Growth Zones has prompted debate about the trade-offs we need to consider. Durh...

Last week, a new North East AI Growth Zone was announced, with new data centres at Blyth & Cobalt. But what is at stake for resources & the environment? Prof Karen Lai (@karenpylai.bsky.social) of Durham University explains the issue in a guest blog. www.climateactionnewcastle.com/post/ai-grow...

It’s gone so quickly from ‘boat people’ to all immigrants. So quickly from ‘I don’t mind if they come here legally and pay taxes’ to ‘actually it’s anyone foreign’. We are living in the ‘first they came for’ poem. All to give the population a scapegoat so the super rich can hoard yet more wealth.

Consider the Snail — The Dial “In writing about snails, I wanted to write about slowness and strangeness, solitude and death, hibernation and estivation.”

I have a new translation up at @thedialmag.bsky.social, Lauren Bastide's Courir l'escargot, which we're calling Consider the Snail. I loved this book & was so happy to get to translate some excerpts from it, about slowness, failure, grief, alterity, cycles, & goo www.thedial.world/articles/lit...

Behind the doors of asylum hotels - what I found when I went inside A BBC reporter goes into four hotels and speaks to asylum seekers and staff about what daily life is like.

this is heartbreaking reading the shit we make these people put up with and the square root of fuck all we give them and at no point will the BBC reflect on how their own reporting helped create the unbelievably hostile environment they have to endure

jesus christ.

'"You can’t have hobbyist research that’s unfunded going on in institutions. We can’t afford it.”'

Such a badly formulated phrasing of the issues, so open to so many misinterpretations. If this is the level of thinking about research among sector leaders and policy-makers, be very afraid.

this is a great piece, in particular the point on students using AI to summarise critical material. as Fitzgerald so astutely observes,
“There’s a joy in comprehension, that moment of understanding something new. AI robs them of that.”

Academics are under unrelenting pressure to accept the narrative of the inevitability of #generativeAI & to embrace it in teaching & learning. We resist - because it is ecologically destructive, ethically corrupt, & because it undermines the thinking abilities that make us both human & intelligent.

what a wonderful tribute. please share this cfp for a special issue dedicated to our brilliant late colleague, simon j. james.

Retail giant closes all UK stores in tax protest over Gaza Cosmetics retail giant Lush has closed all of its UK stores in protest at Israel’s actions in Palestine ...

Brilliant leadership from Lush
Buy their stuff - it’s against genocide.

They have also support many excellent refugee projects I’ve been involved with over the years

And @scotnational.bsky.social for covering tenaciously.

These actions work as they build

www.thenational.scot/news/2543703...

Be ready to be shocked and offended at university, students told Guidance has been published by the Office for Students on new free speech rules coming into force this year.

Seriously, with the whole university system on the brink, this is what the OfS and the BBC focus on? A dereliction of duty.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Carole Cadwalladr - Broligarchs, AI, and a Techno-Authoritarian Surveillance State | The Daily Show YouTube video by The Daily Show

Jon Stewart is a legend & the way this show is trying to explain to a mainstream audience the gravity what is happening in the US is amazing. It was both thrilling & terrifying to be part of it. Thank you @TheDailyShow 👏

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG7C...

Please sign and share widely - Liverpool Hope is one of *the* centres for cultural Disability Studies research. This threat is a threat to the field itself and to its important commitment to challenging societal prejudices and advocating for social justice through cultural analysis.