Ben ‘Oh’ Pah
@benspatz.bsky.social
Conflict-avoidant revolutionary. Critical planetary theorist. Creative practice researcher at University of Birmingham.
Despite personally knowing someone killed on Oct 7th I went to a Palestine solidarity rally the next day. Not bc I wasn’t grieving but bc I knew from past Israeli wars how the IDF wld respond: to add to the 100 yr death toll countless, uncounted, uncountable Palestinian lives 1/2
The Israeli army has bulldozed over 1.6 million olive trees in Gaza since the beginning of the genocide in 2023, threatening the livelihood and heritage of olive farming communities, and the survival of a centuries-old Palestinian cultural tradition. mondoweiss.net/2026/10/afte...
After three years of genocide, Gaza’s olive harvest is going extinct
The Israeli army has bulldozed over 1.6 million olive trees in Gaza since the beginning of the genocide in 2023, threatening the livelihood and heritage of olive farming communities, and the survival…
mondoweiss.net
AI safety expert Timnit Gebru says tech leaders are promoting greatly exaggerated claims about "superintelligence" and "existential risk" as a way to distract from the real threat — their own unregulated companies.
The Real Existential Risk Is AI CEOs Avoiding Oversight: “Alternative Nobel” Winner Timnit Gebru
We speak to the prominent AI researcher and leading critic of the AI industry, Timnit Gebru, who was recently awarded a 2026 Right Livelihood Award for her work investigating the harms and hype behind...
democracynow.org
Keir Starmer wanted to be remembered as Prime Minister for building homes. Instead he will be remembered for his complicity in destroying them. #GazaGenocide
@davetuller1.bsky.social, a great champion of patients, interviewed me about the massive, ongoing scandal of the neglect, abuse and mistreatment of people with ME/CFS www.youtube.com/watch?v=Maae...
Interview with George Monbiot about Guardian column on ME/CFS
YouTube video by David M Tuller
youtube.com
Eye popping. Court just unsealed Summary Judgment motions in New York Times v OpenAI / Microsoft. Easy to see why the AI companies had so many redactions (pink). Their own people wrote the lede for NYT, the "largest theft of labor in human history"... "more and more substitutive..." /1
Between the PRs of (largely likely stolen) math breakthroughs, claims of "rogue AI" (actually cybercrimes by companies, but whatevs), and doomerist "whistleblowers", it feels like we've been subjected to a gish gallop of hype recently. >>
This was always their goal. And until people admit it no conversation will fix it www.springfieldnewssun.com/tncms/asset/...
Springfield Haitian student takes his own life after being fitted with ICE ankle monitor, advocates say
A 20-year-old Wright State student took his own life on Interstate 70 out of anguish over a required ICE ankle monitor, according to local community advocates.
springfieldnewssun.com
JOURNAL OF EMBODIED RESEARCH is very pleased to announce issue 9.1 (2026), our largest yet, with six peer-reviewed video articles and two curated video essays. jer.openlibhums.org
Journal of Embodied Research
jer.openlibhums.org
We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books. www.404media.co/we-tracked-a...
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.
404media.co
how should we talk about it?? using Fat Politics WHICH IS ABSOLUTELY NOWHERE IN THIS FUCKING ARTICLE
People’s bodies are changing in the age of Ozempic. How are we meant to talk about it?
Discussing people’s bodies can be fraught. We asked eating disorder experts how to do so – or not – responsibly
theguardian.com
How many anti-Jason Arday pieces if the fucking Atlantic going to publish. IT IS NOT 2022 ANYMORE ANTI WOKE IS BORING THERE’S ACTUAL GOVERNMENT CENSORSHIP PETE HEGSETH IS RESEGREGATING THE MILITARY SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT BLACK PEOPLE SUCCEEDING FUCK YOU
I know this isn't terrorism. You know this isn't terrorism. The authorities know this isn't terrorism. But, once again, they have labelled protesters "terrorists", as part of the long-running programme to ensure that no one dares protest about anything any more. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...
Seven charged with damaging Trump’s Scottish golf course accused of ‘terrorist connection’
Course at Donald Trump’s Turnberry resort was painted with words ‘Gaza is not 4 sale’ and clubhouse was sprayed with graffiti
theguardian.com
Dear cis people, Please, for the love of G-d, stop using the terms "biological male" and "biological female." They're scientifically meaningless. Sex is a bimodal cluster categorization. The brain is biological, no? There is no one factor that's universally determinative of sex and gender.
It's extremely revealing that one of Harper's main takeaways from the tenure track as a Black professor was to become singularly suspicious of his Black colleagues' qualifications (and his own) rather than, say, at all interested in the existence of racism and white/male mediocrity within academia.
Anyway, I’ve been asking two questions in most rooms of late. How do we make them poor? How do we publicly litigate the data politics behind it all?
"They just want to turn it off." A fascinating story of the librarians who have started teaching classes showing people how to remove AI "features" from their phones and apps. www.bangordailynews.com/2026/07/02/m...
These Maine librarians are helping patrons resist AI and Big Tech
Despite breathless reporting on how AI is going to change the world, Hannah Cyrus, a Bangor librarian, said that, in her experience, most library patrons aren’t finding it helpful.
bangordailynews.com
Just here to post this again like I do every year, not only because Douglass was one of the founding philosophers of American liberty but because I am so moved by the kids Frederick Douglass’ descendants deliver “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July”
‘What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July?’: Descendants Read Frederick Douglass' Speech | NPR
YouTube video by NPR
youtu.be
He published it as a LinkedIn article. And any staff member and manager in #UKHE should read it and keep bringing it up in any meeting about cutting into departments.
The Cost Allocation Death Spiral and the University
The Cost Allocation Death Spiral and the University Accountants, as people whose business it chiefly is to bring hard news to powerful people, generally avoid emotional terms. They prefer softer, nuan...
linkedin.com
QM_UCU@qmucu.bsky.social · 3y agoOn the other site, Jonathan Mills shared this article about the Cost Allocation Death Spiral. It will hit too closely to anyone paying attention to accounting in UK Higher Education. May we all find ways to convince our governing bodies that our executives are inflicting harm. x.com/Muinchille/s...
And yes I am absolutely saying no government should kidnap, traffic and cage any children, including their own children, ever, for any reason, even if a cop or judge says that the thing they did like running away from abusive adults is a crime And yet Here almost every country on earth is
Erin Fogg says Free Link@criminalerin.bsky.social · last yr.North America as a whole cages 35 kids for every 100k kids The US? 49 kids per 100k overall Latino kids? 57 Indigenous kids? 181 Black kids? 228
By far the biggest problem with delegating judgement to machines is the people who own the machines can tune them towards outcomes they prefer but those who don't own anything can't. It's not the technology. It's a transfer of decision making power from rational accountable systems to capital.
My article on reimagining jewishness through critical black studies has been published in Lateral: csalateral.org/issue/15-1/c...
Ben Spatz, "cryptojewish speculations for a black planetary" - Lateral
A movement is growing to reimagine jewishness in a decolonial frame. As zionism loses its grip over white and white-passing jews in the global north, and with increasing momentum after Israel’s genoci...
csalateral.org
The cost of using the internet as model training data should be providing indefinite UBI for everyone on the planet.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌@chanda.blacksky.app · 5mo agoI understand why the lawyers settled for it but $1.5 billion from Anthropic was not enough It should have been in the several billions and now every company knows that the cost of perpetual plagiarism (among problems) is a fixed amount of $1.5 billion
To pretend that rapacious technocratic enclosure is somehow a more future-oriented national project than properly funding education, environment, and health is the culmination of a grotesque diminution of what we can collectively imagine and build.
The Artemis II flyby was not just a super cool jaunt around the moon! It was a test flight that’s part of a larger, extremely nationalist, plan to militarize and colonize the moon for AMERICAN interests It is NOT “For All Mankind“ And everyone who makes fun of someone who asks the question:
