Rachel Smith (she/her)

Academic working in Phonetics. Perception, voices, rhythm, nitpicking phonetics.

[May Bulman @maybulman]

INVESTIGATION: Most European citizens won't have heard of VFS Global. But across much of Africa, Asia + the Middle East, the visa giant has become notorious

@LHreports can reveal VFS has made huge profits by subjecting people to exploitative practices
https://t.co/rfGmhWqEbu

[Dr Ruby (she/her) jaboukies everything @PaperWhispers]

Can we bring back a Black owned bookshop selling literature by Black authors? I would love to see it happen, please if you have coins, give them here and if you can please share.

[Melissa Sigodo @melissasigodo]

Edna Mmbali Ombakho came to the UK from Kenya to study and reach her goals, only to end up being found dead in a body of water. No wall-to-wall mainstream media coverage. No televised press conference. Just one local news report followed by silence. https://t.co/kyZUqIcM5b

[Sangita Myska @SangitaMyska]

Big Tech = Big Brother on X ll

A photo of a YouGov Poll showing a negative opinion of 🇺🇸🇮🇱 war against Iran has been labelled “sensitive content” - meaning it’ll reach fewer people.

I attach the original image. Please share the heck out of it if you want to annoy Mr Musk.

[Middle East Eye @MiddleEastEye]

A British minister has refused to declare the school massacre in Iran, which killed 165 people, many of them children, a war crime, labelling it the "realities of war"
https://t.co/6o3i2LjcYk

[Ghassan Abu Sitta, Chair of Conflict Medicine AUB @GhassanAbuSitt1]

Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear.

Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

[Misan Harriman @misanharriman]

Re Bafta and the BBC.

These are excerpts from @JohnAmaechi substack. Please read it in full.

Link below:

https://t.co/45gwIhKZDD

[Race Reflections @RaceReflections]

A few words of the BAFTA

The recent apology from the BBC for failing to edit out the N word during its broadcast of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts ceremony raises issues that extend far beyond the incident.

The slur (reportedly) shouted while Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were presenting, was aired without being removed or immediately addressed.

I agree with much of what has already been said, that the failure to blank the word or issue an immediate, live apology to the Black actors or members of the Black audience reflects more than a technical oversight.

It suggests;

1) A failure of care.

In moments of racial harm, immediacy matters. The absence of swift acknowledgment communicates that the emotional and psychological impact on Black people was not treated as urgent or worthy of intervention; a common way anti-Blackness shows up; lack of care, compassion and attention to harm.

2) Institutional desensitisation or tolerance to/of anti-Black racism.

When an anti-Black slur can pass through multiple editorial systems without disruption, it raises questions about what harms are recognises as harm, which are reflexively prioritised and which are treated as tolerable if not acceptable.

3) The persistence of a hierarchy of harms.

Public institutions often mobilise rapidly around certain forms of offence. When anti-Black racism does not trigger that same reflex, it says something important about which communities’ dignity is more institutionally protected, prioritised and safeguarded. This is really damaging for all concerned, poisoning race and community relations and keeping certain groups in the lowest echelons of concern.

4)The usefulness of delay/safeguard mechanisms…

Major public broadcasters operate with compliance protocols precisely to prevent foreseeable harm and take corrective and preventative actions when it arises.
When those mechanisms fail repeatedly in relation to the same group, it signals more than a technical lapse; it signals a cultural one…

4) The neurology of racism…

And this takes us to something more deeply troubling at a psychological/neurological level.

Anti-Blackness can reside beneath conscious self and community perception, still laregely restrained by social norms and institutional filters.

When inhibitions are lowered, it can surface in unmitigated forms.

That surfacing is often framed as aberrational or surprising, yet it reveals latency, beyond the individual concerned, this is a more difficult conversation.

We see a related phenomenon in cases involving neurodegenerative conditions, where racial hostility that may not have been expressed; because suppressed by cognitive and inhibitory control appears in old age.

This does not suggest that someone “suddenly becomes racist” nor is it just incidental, it tells us that executive function and the capacity to filter/inhibit inappropriate language and social conditioning is weakened.

So rather than individualising this expression …

We perhaps need to think about how it underscores how deeply racial hierarchies are embedded within the culture, the body, the memory, even when consciously disavowed.

Also speaking to the denial of the racist implications of the BBC’s actions.

Ultimately, the significance of this incident lies not only in the words that was uttered, or the individual who uttered them, but in the institutional response that followed, as I often say the real test for institutional racism.

What is tragic for me is that here too, we are reminded that we cannot extract the social, from the psychic/psychological and neurological/biological functioning.

This is a more troubling reckoning I think for many.

[Michael Rosen 💙💙🎓🎓 NICE 爷爷 @MichaelRosenYes]

When the Board of Peace start putting up luxury hotels in Gaza for the types of folk who used Epstein's facilities, Israel will let in the world's press.

[Financial Times @FT]

How Palantir captured the Ministry of Defence https://t.co/q0JiyQbd97 | opinion

[Priyamvada Gopal © @PriyamvadaGopal]

Why has this firm not been shown the door yet?

[Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis]

Government deals with Palantir stink, and stank long before the Peter Mandelson scandal. The government must pivot away from companies like Palantir - a company that has widespread allegations against it about human rights abuses, which is closely connected to Trump, and is run by an oligarch who despises democracy.

[Good Law Project @GoodLawProject]

We heard Palantir's throwing a party to celebrate yet another multi-million pound contract in the UK...👀🎉 We thought we’d bring the decorations🎈

Keep Palantir out of the NHS ⬇️
https://t.co/IRLHFyQyIt

[The Green Party @TheGreenParty]

The Green MPs have written to the Cabinet Secretary urging an investigation into "Palantir's vice-like grip on our Government" and the role played by disgraced Peter Mandelson in brokering it.

All contracts with this Trump-supporting spy tech company must be suspended.

[Ghassan Abu Sitta, Chair of Conflict Medicine AUB @GhassanAbuSitt1]

Al Jazeera investigation reveals how US-supplied thermal and thermobaric munitions burning at 3,500C have left no trace of nearly 3,000 Palestinians
https://t.co/KuKrjNS470

[Amnesty UK @AmnestyUK]

Wes Streeting is right… Israel is committing war crimes against Palestinians.

What is damning is that @WesStreeting is part of a government that has continued business as usual with Israel despite its war crimes and genocide in Gaza.

Why has the UK government refused to demand…
- Israel’s full withdrawal from the occupied Gaza Strip
- the complete lifting of the unlawful blockade
- a halt to all trade or cooperation that sustains war crimes and genocide?

Failing to take these steps makes the UK a bystander to a genocide.

[Stuart Schrader @stschrader1]

A thread more useful than 8+ years of the stupid fascism debate

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

A £240m defence contract without tender.

Their fingerprints all over our health care data.

A meeting in the USA but without any minutes.

Everything around Palantir stinks.

https://t.co/25O4Idt3u7

[Priyamvada Gopal © @PriyamvadaGopal]

Palantir, owned by Peter Thiel, who had discussions with Epstein about how Brexit would 'create chaos' and enrich them.

MoD revolving door leads to jobs for MoD officials at PAlantir and rich contracts for the company using our taxes.

WAKE. UP.

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

I wrote to Streeting asking him to disclose contacts with Mandelson about Palantir.

Palantir has an NHS contract, and access to *our personal health data*. Here are old friends casually texting about off the books corporate lobbying with their corporate tech friends.