Just to have a bit of fun, I sent that link to ChatGPT to see what their take would be. After the requisite throat-clearing absolving itself while agreeing it’s an inappropriate use case, I got down to brass tacks:

Following election news is admittedly a pain in the ass, especially in an environment where empirical facts now often take a back seat to the letter after a candidate’s name, and shouting nonsense is often the core of a campaign. Take the Texas Senate race as an example: If you only watch Fox News, James Talarico is a radical godless communist whose main goal is to turn all kids trans before they even make it to high school, and the campaign ads in between will confirm the narrative, when the reality is Talarico is a Presbyterian seminary student who may know a bit more about Christianity than most voters who claim to be staunch Christians. Evangelicals hate when you point out the basis of the faith is loving each other.

And this, I shit you not, was the beginning of the response:

Following an election properly is a research problem with a continuously changing corpus. You have to keep updating the set of facts you’re working from, distinguish primary evidence from somebody’s characterization of it, and notice when something that seemed peripheral becomes important.

And the Talarico example is almost comically good for demonstrating why “relevance” isn’t a neutral filtering operation.

There is a real, documented religious story here. Talarico attends Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary and is training to become a Presbyterian minister; the Texas Tribune has reported extensively on how his theology informs his politics. His central theological argument really does involve the Christian obligation to love one’s neighbour and the idea that political action is, in part, about how we treat other people.

At the same time, he has said things such as “God is nonbinary” in a legislative speech, and Republican opponents have seized on that as evidence of his supposedly radical theology. The underlying statement exists; what it means theologically is a separate question.

Well, that’s an unexpected response, not least of which because I’ve been following the race pretty closely, and I’ve not seen this quote before, which I point out.

Talarico is a Presbyterian seminarian who has explicitly made Christianity central to his political identity; he completed a master’s degree in theological studies and has described his politics through Jesus’ commandments to love God and one’s neighbor.

And “God is nonbinary” is absolutely a real Talarico quotation. But it came from a 2021 Texas House speech about a bill concerning transgender athletes, where he was making a theological argument about biblical descriptions of God. He has subsequently explained that he was deliberately being provocative and meant that God cannot be confined to human categories.

So, I ask why the hell a quote from an unrelated situation from five years ago would come in response to a question about a candidate in 2026, and it admits there’s a fair amount of sources in current conservative circles presenting it as both current and relevant, so that’s what it went with.

Great when you already know enough to question; propaganda otherwise.

If he was a bad dog, this is actually Kristi being humane.

Love the channel as always. The irony is not lost on me that I’ll likely be using wifi to learn survival skills once I’m out on the land.

Translation: “People have finally caught on to the corporate Democratic playbook and don’t like it! That was working so well for us, pretending they’re avowed enemies when they’re as happy to take AIPAC funds as we are. Now we actually have a challenge to failed neoliberalism, Mamdani is doing that asshole thing of being responsive to constituents, and we aren’t prepared, so let’s grab a page out of the '50s as though the Red Scare has legs 70 years later.”

I mean, that jackass move is how I found Beehaw! But the reality is, many old. users didn’t use apps in the first place. So while that was a clusterfuck, it wasn’t surgically targeted at the very people who produce the content that makes Reddit valuable. Cutting off access to old. will be the final straw for me, and I’m going to guess I’m not alone. I don’t want some cartoonish, ad-laden approximation of Reddit.

Wow. Pay to get more ads. That’s certainly a take. I guess people really like their stickers?

They seem to think “the cost of college athletes is too damn high” somehow makes sense as “let’s restore [UNINTELLIGIBLE] to college sports” to undecided voters. How anyone remains undecided is beyond me, but gas prices seem to be solving that problem.

It’s of course unsurprising, but I agree that having hard data, especially this stark, is useful.

I don’t know why you’re on the warpath for me reiterating a three-year-old rule because of recent issues. I said post politics in Politics and your response was disproportionate. Now you’re smearing me as being unkind for doing basic server-janitor stuff that really hasn’t been an issue for years, accusing me of not knowing what news is, and telling me I’m the one being unreasonable.

I’m also not stalking you. I’m a user of the site. So of course I see posts in other communities. The reasonable response here would have been to post politics in politics. Instead, you chose to test my boundaries by posting entertainment news to U.S. News as some sort of flex.

As I said, it doesn’t appear you understand how Beehaw works. If you wholesale dislike it, I’m not sure why you continue to show up.

There’s a certain irony to wanting more control over what you see in Politics while complaining about U.S. News. It’s possible you’re simply not aligned with the goals of Beehaw as a project, which is fine. But you seem to want the site changed according to your desires, and things just don’t work that way.

It’s somewhat crazy to think what Texas might look like with term limits. I moved here in 2015, and so far as I can tell, I don’t live in a democracy. Abbott, Patrick and Paxton have all been frozen in amber in their roles the entire time. Never have I lived somewhere that the governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general are simply established infrastructure that never changes for over a decade.

I mean, at a certain point, you have to go with the angle of the current story. I know this is going to be a hell of a stretch, but that’s sort of like expecting any car review of a new Ford to include the founder’s anti-Semitism.

Why institute a robot tax when you could just fund the government with corporate and wealth taxes using existing structures? (Rhetorical question; we all know why.)

The U.S. did just fine without an income tax until the 1910s, and the circumstances under which that even happened are suspect, but that’s a tale for another day.

The sheer logistics of a “robot tax” ensure a lack of compliance. Are we charging by the hour while it’s in service (where are the service logs?)? Sheer numbers in the fleet? All options I can come up with are easily gamed; we end up exactly where we were, but lawmakers can say they “did something” instead of the more extreme action of doing something useful.

Yet again they trot out billions in losses for the MPA caused by piracy.

For reference, 100W panels were running 66 cents/W when I did my build in 2023. Larger panels have always been cheaper per watt, but it means prices have dropped by up to 80% in just three years.

gets up from rocking chair I never really got the purpose of dating apps, as I was still married when they came out, and when the ex and I separated, I had a Plan B inadvertently lined up via work. The latter and I did use apps on her phone, but it was just for the purposes of making fun of the banality of cookie-cutter pictures and bios while drinking on the porch.

The irony is I met both my ex-wives on OKCupid, but back in 2004.

A shit interview in a vacuum? Sure.

But consider the situation they were already placed in. I’m fine with mud-slinging as a counter to prior restraint.

The issue the GOP is facing isn’t new. They go apeshit when a pastor dares to teach the actual teachings of Jesus in a soft-spoken way.

Just add in an order of magnitude if Texas.

I’m running a fever and as such can’t reasonably give this a good read.

That said, this handwriting on the sign is totally weird. The style seems to attempt Suetterlin, but that’s out the window once the lowercase e’s don’t look like n’s or r’s. Then we have the internally consistent umlaut styles that don’t make sense (just as common to draw a contiguous arc over an ‘a’ as a ‘u’ circa 1995).

I had to learn Suetterlin for classwork in Gymnasium. My cursive was apparently unintelligible. I’m back to “normal” except for how I write my 1’s.

I absolutely cannot stand algorithmic feeds. Unless I can.

Here’s the thing: I left Facebook when I stopped seeing anything my friends posted. At the same time, YouTube wouldn’t be all that useful without suggestions. My subscriptions is my home page, so I’m getting videos in chronological order from users I’ve decided to follow, and then the algorithm occasionally serves up a suggestion that leads to a new subscription.

So just saying “social media must provide an opt-out method” is something of a sledgehammer. Moreover, companies will bury that method behind a bunch of dark patterns so no one ever ever gets to it, even if it technically exists.