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Owen Blacker

@owen.blacker.me.uk
3.2K followers 3.3K following 15K posts

Queer political geek; proud social justice warrior, proud trans ally. Queering Wikipedia as chair of @wmlgbt.org; trustee @fasttrackcymru.bsky.social. ex-ORG & mySociety. Dysgwr. My opinions, not my employer’s. he/him t.me/owenblacker owen.blacker.me.uk

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Reposted by Owen Blacker
Spookably UnAwake @lamentablyawake.bsky.social · 3h
Zionists' relentless use of false accusations of antisemitism has sadly made many anti-Zionists suspicious of all attempts to combat antisemitism. This is bad but claiming it is only caused by a failure on anti-Zionists part is *at best* a terribly analysis.
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M a r c u s 🏳️‍🌈🇧🇧 @marcusjdl.bsky.social · 3h
Useless without reparations mate
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FactPost @factpostnews.bsky.social · 4h
Trump refuses to turn his camera on at the G7 summit
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Rob 🏳️‍🌈 @rotster.net · 3h
OMG! Dolly Parton sings Jolene in Welsh in recording released after her death www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
bbc.co.uk
Dolly Parton sings Jolene in Welsh in recording released after her death
Parton's niece Jada Star and Welsh singer Bronwen Lewis say the country artist was proud to sing in Welsh.
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Polis Loizou 🐺🎃 @polisloizou.bsky.social · 4h
"Are you wearing the-" "One-off 'The Way It Breaks' t-shirt featuring the cover painting done by my mum? Yeah, I am."
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ChicagoVintageTileFloors @chicagovtfloor.bsky.social · 4h
I hope this reminds somebody of a place they remember fondly.
Apartment entrance hall with vintage tile and aged marble steps.A potted plant in an apartment building entrance hallway with a vintage tile floor, marble walls and a glass panes door. Closeup of a vintage tile floor with a geometric border.
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Lee Hurley @hleehurley.com · 5h
I would just like to confirm that Ireland has not erupted into full blown civil war.
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Codfather #FBPE 🇫🇷🇪🇺 @codfather.bsky.social · 5h
😂 Casper the friendly Ambulance - I guess it's the season - lol
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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 6h
I've heard people make claims that AI would lead to a new Renaissance, but I didn't imagine it'd happen like this:
Screenshot of a Tweet from Pope Leo XIV. It reads: 

"In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgen to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity."
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Owen Blacker @owen.blacker.me.uk · 5h
Ok, that is wild. Like, sure Israel is a settler-colonialist project, but the *punctuation* being imported from German / Yiddish as opposed to Arabic is not something that I would suggest makes a substantive difference to how people relate to anything. That is some wild Sapir–Whorf shit 🥲
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Owen Blacker @owen.blacker.me.uk · 6h
Oh, I did understand that from your thread just, as you said, that makes somehow **even less** sense! 🙃
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Jess (a ghost) 💀 @notmoro.bsky.social · 7h
This is my current favourite gigglesome post bsky.app/profile/benr...
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Micah @rincewind.run · 7h
that twitter still has a lot of normal people on it is the main problem! it would be a lot better if it was exclusively fascists and the blast radius of their propaganda was smaller! truth social isn't warping brains that weren't already warped
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Owen Blacker @owen.blacker.me.uk · 6h
🤯 What a wild assertion — both to make and to get through howevermany rounds of editing to be printed in the actual book. Like you said, firstly niqqudot are not puncuation but also has the author never heard of abjads at all? Do they not realise Arabic is one too? And that these are all spoken?!
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Alex @purplechrain.bsky.social · 6h
If anything, the most interesting thing re: vowels in modern Israeli Hebrew is that general non-use of vowel markers has led to an increasing disconnect b/t how Israelis pronounce words (often collapsing formerly distinct vowel sounds) vs. both the etymology of those words & their official spellings
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Alex @purplechrain.bsky.social · 7h
The idea that a lack of diacritical vowel symbols hindered people from speaking Hebrew at least is comprehensible to me in the sense that I can parse that as a chain of reasoning that someone might assert - but it’s one that is nonsense both practically and historically.
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Alex @purplechrain.bsky.social · 7h
Per the review, the author of this book about punctuation claimed “adding punctuation turned Hebrew into a spoken language”, but I have no idea what that could mean - not in the sense that it’s inaccurate, in the sense that I don’t know how lack of punctuation would hinder people from speaking it
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Alex @purplechrain.bsky.social · 7h
Sure! but also pre-Israel Hebrew was not a dead language or exclusively liturgical prior to ‘modern Hebrew’ that many very online posters love to claim. Obviously it formed a part of the Zionist project, but the idea that Jews had no prior connections to one another or linguistic overlap is…
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Ben Natan @thebennatan.bsky.social · 7h
I think there’s an interesting study of Zionism and the making of modern Hebrew that… isn’t this
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Alex @purplechrain.bsky.social · 7h
and if by punctuation the author literally means regular punctuation like commas and exclamation marks and so forth, I genuinely have no idea how that would have turned Hebrew as a spoken language or made it easier for people to speak it out loud.
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Alex @purplechrain.bsky.social · 7h
so if by ‘punctuation’ the author means niqqudot, the idea that there’s a link between their adoption/use and Zionism and/or Israel and/or oppression of Palestinians seems directly at odds their general lack of popular use in modern Israeli Hebrew
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Alex @purplechrain.bsky.social · 7h
in fact, most Israeli Hebrew publications - for example, Israeli newspapers - don’t include niqqudot/diacritical vowels and people just understand what the words are contextually including words with the same root letters where pronunciation with different vowels impacts things like verb tense etc.
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Alex @purplechrain.bsky.social · 7h
but also, while I get why someone might think that the absence of diacritical vowel notations could be a hindrance to people’s ability to speak Hebrew out loud, practically speaking that wasn’t the case historically, nor is it the case re: modern Hebrew.
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Alex @purplechrain.bsky.social · 7h
also, I’m not convinced that the author of that book understands/is drawing any distinction between punctuation and niqqudot (the diacritical symbols used to represent Hebrew vowels, which have existed in their current form since ~750 CE/AD
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Alex @purplechrain.bsky.social · 7h
anyway, this is a weird thing to assert and it’s weirder that it’s apparently asserted so definitively as an aside in a book about punctuation.
newyorker.com
The Curious Power of Punctuation
Commas, dashes, semicolons, and spaces have shaped how we read for centuries. What happens when machines start crafting the sentences?
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Alex @purplechrain.bsky.social · 7h
Also, Jews were still able to speak Hebrew out loud prior to the introduction of n’kudot. Vowel sounds existed in Hebrew prior to the creation of a formal standardized notation system for them. Jews weren’t just silently reading the Torah & prayers & poetry with no idea how to pronounce any of it.
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Alex @purplechrain.bsky.social · 7h
“Punctuations marks in Hebrew are relics of a brutal colonial system” that “turned Hebrew into a spoken language” thereby creating “an artificial sense of unity among Jewish people from all over the globe” and thus led to Zionism/Israel/genocide. Well, it’s certainly a creative chain of reasoning.
“This ambition inevitably leads to overreach. If punctuation played a role in everything, what about, say, the war in Gaza? Hazrat finds a link. “Punctuation marks in Hebrew,” she explains, “are relics of a brutal colonial system that is far from over.” Adding punctuation turned Hebrew into a spoken language, “paving the way for an artificial sense of unity among Jewish people from all over the globe, encouraging them to move to the land that already had people—a people made to suffer and bear the brunt of European anti-Semitism in the most horrendous ways for generations.” It seems (the reason is not altogether clear) that, had Yiddish been the official language of Israel, atrocities might have been avoided.

Zionist complicities aside, Hazrat is a punctuation enthusiast, though there are a few marks that she is not very fond of”
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 01/10/2026
I recommend people read this to get a sense of the president's grave cognitive impairment. Trump is either unwilling or unable (or maybe both) to answer the questions he's actually asked, so he just rants and raves while the interviewers do their best to provide structure to his random brain firings
time.com
Read TIME’s ‘What Trump Has Built’ Interview Transcript
The U.S. President discussed the war in Iran, press freedom, AI, and more ahead of the midterm elections.
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Memento (artemis) Morty 🌙 @mementomorty.bsky.social · 13/08/2025
A murder of crows? You mean caws of death??
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David Kaib @davidkaib.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
It isn’t hypocrisy to engage in mass murder while demanding the death penalty for others—it is asserting a hierarchy of whose freedom entails killing and whose lives matter.
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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 7h
They have erased the history of the tech industry and tech innovation so that their workers don’t ask what happened to prior generations of innovators and innovations. It’s a very intentional strategy.
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aidsmap @aidsmap.bsky.social · 7h
HIV linked to greater increase in cardiovascular disease risk for women than men
aidsmap.com
HIV linked to greater increase in cardiovascular disease risk for women than men
Women living with HIV have almost twice the risk (a 93% increased risk) of cardiovascular disease compared to women without HIV, while men with HIV have a 44% increased risk compared to those without HIV, a study recently in the journal AIDS has found.
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Owen Blacker @owen.blacker.me.uk · 7h
Protesters halt game as calls grow on Ireland to boycott second Israel game Republic of Ireland’s game [against Austria] halted by tennis balls thrown and invader with Palestine flags amid Israel boycott demand. www.aljazeera.com/sports/2026/...
aljazeera.com
Protesters halt game as calls grow on Ireland to boycott second Israel game
Republic of Ireland's game halted by tennis balls thrown and invader with Palestine flags amid Israel boycott demand.
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Owen Blacker @owen.blacker.me.uk · 7h
Wolf encounter: A photographer on what humans have lost How a brush with the wild can expose what modern life no longer asks of us www.aljazeera.com/features/lon...
aljazeera.com
Wolf encounter: A photographer on what humans have lost
How a brush with the wild can expose what modern life no longer asks of us.
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Matthew Gertz @mattgertz.bsky.social · 9h
They're holding up a major escalation in Iran and a crackdown on abortion until after the midterms to limit political damage. To the extent that the last two years have been a right-wing smash-and-grab operation, the next two will be worse.
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Punished 'Woke' Bane @baneforyou.bsky.social · 8h
right now the pro-EU crowd are looking at a pack of XL Bullies who've just been fed and are lying down and think everything is safe now
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Punished 'Woke' Bane @baneforyou.bsky.social · 8h
any serious suggestion for rejoining the EU that involves a public vote of any kind would need to follow a Leveson 2 that has the power to issue prison sentences.
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John Wiswell @wiswell.bsky.social · 10h
UK readers! The Dragon Has Some Complaints is just 99p on Bookshop this weekend! The story of a curmudgeonly dragon who pretends to be tame so he can eat for free at the local dragon riding academy. Maybe he'll get a little revenge! But he's in for some surprises...
uk.bookshop.org
The Dragon Has Some Complaints: A Cozy Novel Of Friendship, Found Family and Dragons By The Award-Winning Author
In this heartfelt and humorous fantasy, a dragon whose three heads bear rather . . . different personalities finds family in the most unexpected of places.From the Nebula-winning author of Someone You...
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United Tech & Allied Workers @utaw.tech · 8h
7000 members and counting 🎈The UK's original and largest trade union for tech workers has hit a new membership milestone, with 7,000 active members joining our branch to fight for better conditions for workers in tech, and for more responsible deployment of the tech we build.
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Gretchen Felker-Martin PRE ORDER CHIMERA 2.16.27 🍉 @scumbelievable.bsky.social · 20h
she is maybe the only living star who could give a character the feeling a young Harrison Ford gave Han Solo. I would start there. bsky.app/profile/migh...
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Owen Blacker @owen.blacker.me.uk · 8h
static.klipy.com
Shut Up and Take My Money Meme
Alt: Shut Up and Take My Money Meme
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Jason Sanford @jasonsanford.bsky.social · 9h
Someone asked why Emily Bell attacks her authors like this. All I can say from what happened to me is she decides that anyone who disagrees with her is her enemy. And once you disagree with her on one thing, she lies and manufactures an entire web of things you didn't do. 8/
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Owen Blacker @owen.blacker.me.uk · 8h
Here is 1 (one) attention 🎟️
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Owen Blacker @owen.blacker.me.uk · 8h
#LetterboxdFriday #LastFourWatched #Last4Watched
Fast and Furious 5 (2011), rated 4½, liked, reviewed
Mortal Kombat 2 (2026), rated 4, liked
Lee Cronin's The Mummy (2026), rated 3
Twisters (2024), rated 4½, liked
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🗽LOLGOP🗽 @lolgop.bsky.social · 8h
No one has ever been this high on their own supply
thelettersfromleo.com
NYT: Anthropic Nearly Walked Out on Pope Leo XIV’s AI Encyclical — Then Lobbied His Advisers
Chris Olah saw an advance copy of Magnifica Humanitas days before the Vatican launch and proposed withdrawing over its stance on machine consciousness. The pope held his ground.
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Owen Blacker @owen.blacker.me.uk · 8h
Say hi to campus for me. (Or at least to the city centre)
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Owen Blacker @owen.blacker.me.uk · 8h
What a gorgeous … sofa!
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