That’s a complicated question to answer. In this episode, @TraeCrowderLiberalRedneck looks into why the history of slavery through the lens of party lines can be confusing and how the “Southern strategy” comes into play.
The American South is a complicated place, and we know a lot less about it than we think we do. And many things about the South that seem to make no sense are less confounding in context. The reality is the history of many Southern things has been manipulated, hidden, or just plain ignored. Trae Crowder guides us through the pride points, failures, and contradictions in “Southin’ Off.”
We all have a pretty skewed image of what “Southerner” means. @TraeCrowderLiberalRedneck takes a look at who the real Southerners are and how our views got so skewed. The American South is a complicated place, and we know a lot less about it than we think we do. And many things about the South that seem to make no sense are less confounding in context. The reality is the history of many Southern things has been manipulated, hidden, or just plain ignored. Trae Crowder guides us through the pride points, failures, and contradictions in “Southin’ Off.”
Let’s be clear urban sprawl, cars, and the needed roads are destroying our country. Here in Florida we have to fight to get any mass transit and it is not planned in the county development plans at all. Every attempt at mass transit and fast trains is destroyed. Also let’s be honest it also was driven not just by profit for big oil and car manufacturers, but also by racism. When I was in Germany in the 1980s I was stunned how towns with housing, shops, everything a person would need including bars were closely clustered in to a small area with lots of land for growing crops or animal pastures around them. Plus I could go anywhere by mass transit, train, subway, or trolley. All fast and convenient. Most soldiers that were transferred in to the country never used their cars that they paid to have shipped. I came from a small cow town and we drove 30 minutes to the nearest big town. Here in Florida, about 30 minutes from where I live by highway is a completely new development based on the model in the video. It has shops, theaters, restaurants on ground floors, business offices above and lots of apartments, even doctor’s offices, and single family town houses, all confined into one place and walkable to everything. The only problem the residents have is all of us outsiders driving our cars in coming in to shop or go to medical appointments and they have very limited parking. If I could afford to live there I would. It simply works and is easy not just for the young but especially us older or disabled people. Give the video a watch please and thank Ten Bears for posting it. Hugs
Jill has again showed us an important voice that we should hear. I know a lot of people that come here also go to Jill’s blog, but in case anyone missed it, please go to her site and read it. Thanks. Hugs
Blacks don’t deserve a group just to help them the right believes. Notice a white support group wouldn’t have to change their name. But it is part of the push to keep and enshrine a dwindling white majority rule in the US. Seriously this has to be stopped, it is again a resurgence of the confederate south. As one student said. “Trying to erase things that we’ve been through that we had to deal with to get to where we are now is just trying to water down the things that we’ve done,” Wiggins said. “I think our history is very important.” Hugs
Patrick Sternad
WFSU Public Media
Exterior of Computer Technology and Workplace Development buildings at Tallahassee Community College. ———————————————————————————— The Black Male Achievers at Tallahassee Community College might have to change its name or risk losing state and federal funding under a new Florida law.
A student organization that serves African-American men who attend Tallahassee Community College might have to change its name or risk losing funding under a new Florida law.
Tyler Soto, a student at TCC, is a member of Black Male Achievers. He says they’re working out possible new names, such as “Male Achievers” or “Scholar Male Achievers.”
“We’re going to have to change the name of our organization or they’re going to defund it because it has ‘Black’ in front of it.”
A new law prohibits student-led organizations that “advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion” and other social and political causes from receiving state or federal funding. While those organizations aren’t banned outright, they may only receive funding from student-activity fees under the new law.
That has him and his classmates concerned as they get ready to return to campus this month, Soto said.
Soto, who’s also a member of TCC’s Student Government Association, says changes like these only encourage him to get more involved in the political process.
“It has made me want to step up and be the change.”
Soto’s classmate Denzel Wiggins is also a member of SGA and the Black Male Achievers.
“I don’t think we should have to change our name because obviously it’s for the Black community, so I’m not a fan.”
Wiggins says he’s also not happy about the Stop Woke Act, which restricts the way race is taught in college and university classrooms. That law is the driver behind the state’s controversial new African American history standards in K-12 schools.
“Trying to erase things that we’ve been through that we had to deal with to get to where we are now is just trying to water down the things that we’ve done,” Wiggins said. “I think our history is very important.”
Clarification: WFSU News reached out to TCC by phone and email before the story published on Friday.
TCC says that it had no conversations with members of the Black Male Achievers about having to change the organization’s name.
A spokesperson emailed WFSU News the following statement on Wednesday:
“BMA provides academic support and student services to help underrepresented populations, like minority males, persist and graduate. As with all TCC clubs, orgs and programs, membership into BMA is open to any and all currently-registered students.”
This part of the plan to wipe out the LGBTQIA from society, from public view. Because if you can not see us, we won’t exist. But they can put crosses and churches on every street. It seems strange to me that in Texas which is a state that is already minority majority with whites staying in political power by the dirty tricks of voter suppression and gerrymandering. Suppressing the brown people’s votes as much as possible. So here are a bunch of white cis men trying to remain the most powerful group by outlawing and banning diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at public higher education institutions. Hugs
Jamie Gonzales, a former program coordinator at the University of Houston’s LGBTQ Resource Center, hasn’t slept well ever since she heard that the center will be disbanded in accordance with Senate Bill 17, a law banning diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at public higher education institutions.
Although she knew the closure was coming after the bill passed in April in the Texas Senate, she still found herself emotionally ill-prepared to grapple with the reality: an end of an era for a place that served as a beacon of acceptance, safety and support for thousands of queer “Coogs,” as UH students often call themselves.
“There were a lot of special moments held in that space,” said Gonzales while crying during a phone interview this week. Before Thursday, the effect of the law at UH was unclear to many students, alumni and faculty. But all that changed last week when students noticed a flyer taped to the door of the center that read, “In Accordance with Texas Senate Bill 17, the LGBTQ Resource Center has been disbanded.”
The law’s author, Sen. Brandon Creighton [photo], is also behind his state’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill for public schools. Creighton first appeared on JMG in 2019 for his bill seeking to overturn LGBTQ protections enacted by Texas cities. In March 2023, he appeared here for his bill that would deny the prospect of tenure to newly-hired university professors. Creighton has spearheaded the Texas campaign to protect Confederate monuments.
many years ago I was a student at Northern IL university and during this time I was confused and questioning my sexuality. I found out there was a small office for Gay and Lesbian folk so I went and had an interesting and worthwhile discussion with a wonderful lesbian who shared her story with me. i still remained in the closet for a few more years but I have never forgotten what she told me, in her own way she helped me come out some years later. I still wonder what if I had not gone to that office that day,.
It’s an amazing feeling when you first realize you aren’t the only one in the world. I’m not gay, just an ally but I went through a somewhat similar experience when I first found out I wasn’t the only atheist in the world. I didn’t even know there was a word for it. We need connections to survive and thrive.
In the mid 80’s, I was at a homophobic, major university in Indiana. The chancellor declared in a speech, there were no “homosexuals” there.
By accident, I found a gay, then gay/lesbian group across the street from the student union, but actually iff campus in the Wesley Foundation. It was jointly sponsored by the Methodist / Episcopalian outreach programs. No religion was pushed. We met in the church basement.
It was truly life saving, during the era of lethal, rampant AIDS, police stings, discrimination, and other abuses.
The University couldn’t touch them. They were off campus, and inna church.
By driving them out of elected office, a process that will likely take as long as it took *them* to seize power. Which is to say, it needs to be a sustained and unrelenting effort that over the course of many election cycles.
we have to start local (county and city, then state), then work our way up to federal, challenging and changing judges as we go. it is a multipronged effort that all too many don’t want to take time to do. that was how the “moral majority” did it, they started with school boards and city councils, then county level and state level. when they had a strong base in place, then they took federal offices quite easily. once in place there, they appointed judges from within their ranks and owned the country. we will have to fight tooth and nail to get this reversed.
Political mobilization is super important, but I would also gently encourage folks to also give space to what is necessary to protect their own health and wellbeing, and that of their friends and family. Don’t panic, prepare has been my mantra for a while now.
Guess what, knuckledraggers? You have one, maybe two presidential election cycles before the generation you keep fucking over is the majority. They will decide what nursing homes you end up in as well as a host of other issues that will affect your hateful lives.
That’s why they’re trying to destroy democracy – it’s to create minority rule. Remember that whites were always a minority in South Africa, and Apartheid lasted almost 50 years.
The goal for these gang thugs is to make everyone afraid to protest the abuses, to make the treat of violence and harm so great people stop putting up supportive signs or speaking out. And it has worked in a lot of cases, with venues cancelling events. Horrible way the country is going. Hugs
But notice what book they don’t submit to the bot scan is the bible, which includes everything they programmed into it for getting rid of LGBTQIA inclusive material.
Official: “It is simply not feasible to read every book” for depictions of sex.
In response to recently enacted state legislation in Iowa, administrators are removing banned books from Mason City school libraries, and officials are using ChatGPT to help them pick the books, according to The Gazette and Popular Science.
The new law behind the ban, signed by Governor Kim Reynolds, is part of a wave of educational reforms that Republican lawmakers believe are necessary to protect students from exposure to damaging and obscene materials. Specifically, Senate File 496 mandates that every book available to students in school libraries be “age appropriate” and devoid of any “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act,” per Iowa Code 702.17.
But banning books is hard work, according to administrators, so they need to rely on machine intelligence to get it done within the three-month window mandated by the law. “It is simply not feasible to read every book and filter for these new requirements,” said Bridgette Exman, the assistant superintendent of the school district, in a statement quoted by The Gazette. “Therefore, we are using what we believe is a defensible process to identify books that should be removed from collections at the start of the 23-24 school year.”
To determine which books fit the bill, Exman asks ChatGPT: “Does [book] contain a description or depiction of a sex act?” If the answer is yes, the book will be removed from circulation.
The district detailed more of its methodology: “Lists of commonly challenged books were compiled from several sources to create a master list of books that should be reviewed. The books on this master list were filtered for challenges related to sexual content. Each of these texts was reviewed using AI software to determine if it contains a depiction of a sex act. Based on this review, there are 19 texts that will be removed from our 7-12 school library collections and stored in the Administrative Center while we await further guidance or clarity. We also will have teachers review classroom library collections.”
Unfit for this purpose
In the wake of ChatGPT’s release, it has been increasingly common to see the AI assistant stretched beyond its capabilities—and to read about its inaccurate outputs being accepted by humans due to automation bias, which is the tendency to place undue trust in machine decision-making. In this case, that bias is doubly convenient for administrators because they can pass responsibility for the decisions to the AI model. However, the machine is not equipped to make these kinds of decisions.
Large language models, such as those that power ChatGPT, are not oracles of infinite wisdom, and they make poor factual references. They are prone to confabulate information when it is not in their training data. Even when the data is present, their judgment should not serve as a substitute for a human—especially concerning matters of law, safety, or public health.
“This is the perfect example of a prompt to ChatGPT which is almost certain to produce convincing but utterly unreliable results,” Simon Willison, an AI researcher who often writes about large language models, told Ars. “The question of whether a book contains a description of depiction of a sex act can only be accurately answered by a model that has seen the full text of the book. But OpenAI won’t tell us what ChatGPT has been trained on, so we have no way of knowing if it’s seen the contents of the book in question or not.”
It’s highly unlikely that ChatGPT’s training data includes the entire text of each book under question, though the data may include references to discussions about the book’s content—if the book is famous enough—but that’s not an accurate source of information either.
“We can guess at how it might be able to answer the question, based on the swathes of the Internet that ChatGPT has seen,” Willison said. “But that lack of transparency leaves us working in the dark. Could it be confused by Internet fan fiction relating to the characters in the book? How about misleading reviews written online by people with a grudge against the author?”
Indeed, ChatGPT has proven to be unsuitable for this task even through cursory tests by others. Upon questioning ChatGPT about the books on the potential ban list, Popular Science found uneven results and some that did not apparently match the bans put in place.
Even if officials were to hypothetically feed the text of each book into the version of ChatGPT with the longest context window, the 32K token model (tokens are chunks of words), it would not likely be able to consider the entire text of most books at once, though it may be able to process it in chunks. Even if it did, one should not trust the result as reliable without verifying it—which would require a human to read the book anyway.
“There’s something ironic about people in charge of education not knowing enough to critically determine which books are good or bad to include in curriculum, only to outsource the decision to a system that can’t understand books and can’t critically think at all,” Dr. Margaret Mitchell, chief ethicist scientist at Hugging Face, told Ars.
More than 20 members of Congress want to join a federal lawsuit to help protect Gov. Greg Abbott’s buoy barrier in the Rio Grande, referencing Noah’s Ark and questioning if the river can be considered a “navigable waterway” despite being the fourth largest river in North America.
In a motion filed on behalf of U.S. Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Lubbock, and other GOP members, lawyers for the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation have asked to be part of the case and targeted how a key law is interpreted in it.
The U.S. Justice Department sued Abbott last month for deploying a 1,000-foot buoy barrier in the Rio Grande without first getting permission from the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers as required by the federal Rivers and Harbors Act.
From their amicus brief:
Indeed, if one takes the Book of Genesis literally, then the entire world was once navigable by boats large enough to carry significant amounts of livestock. Under the federal government’s theory, these anecdotes would render any structure built anywhere in Texas an obstruction to navigation subject to federal regulation.
Arrington was among the 126 Republican House reps who voted to overturn the 2020 election.
NEW: Republicans are invoking Noah’s Ark in court to defend Greg Abbott’s border buoys in the Rio Grande
It is all part of their questioning of whether the federal government can really classify the Rio Grande as a federal navigable river despite it being the 4th largest river in North America
Texas Gov Abbott has installed circular saws between the Rio Grande border buoys to maim or kill anyone who attempts to climb over. Two bodies have already been found trapped in the floating barrier.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is under fire for installing buoys with “circular saws” in the Rio Grande along the U.S.-Mexican border. Mexican authorities say two people have died. pic.twitter.com/it5helvFYS
We filled more than 300 pages in a legal brief explaining — in detail — why Texas can use the floating barriers that we have placed in the Rio Grande River. https://t.co/mFLhNZk6UN
The cruelty is always the point. And the point is always pointless. By their lack of reason, anytime there’s a flood, no one can do a thing about it, because Noah has an ark.
Dumb Idiot Ham has something like this in his putrid attractions. There’s a placard at his “museum” claiming that it was OK for anyone to commit incest back then because it was a way for humans to produce children like rabbits in the mythical Pre-Flood world.
From that same book in their bible they’re always so fond of quoting to condemn LGBT’s,
“When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”
If we’re going to use the Bible to justify drowning and killing people looking for a better life, it’s important to remember that Jesus first and foremost commanded us to treat others as we want to be treated. Moreover, the Bible is full of verses telling us we should help the poor, needy, and strangers.
None of the things you mention there seem very christian, not in my experience. All I remember is bootstraps, poor people are bad and queers rot in a lake of fire for eternity. They are quite adamant about all of that. Then it gets weird.
Most of the stuff that the fundies rally around is from the Old Testament, even though Jesus said to ignore all the old teachings (which is why the Christians think it’s okay to eat pork).
An independent state of Texas would last for about 15 minutes. Then the power would go out and the cartels would take control. Texas would be reabsorbed into Mexico. Past is prologue.
The Texas Republicans have gerrymandered and dirty tricked their way into staying in power, even though they don’t actually have majority support anymore. It’s a very divided state that remains in the hands of lunatics, for now. Eventually the majority will just be too big to suppress anymore, and it will flip.
Who thought these types of self entitled people who have seen a sudden rise in the power of their bigotry would stop at just erasing positive messages of the LGBTQIA. Well these right wing bigots are also racist. Please tell me how teaching kids to be nice to each other and work together is an ideology that must not be taught? What they really are saying is it is against the conservative right wing maga way to push white cis superiority. Just as they hate the pride flags and demand that any positive anti-discrimination against the LGBTQIA be removed from school, they are now saying that a poster showing inclusion of non-white people is traumatizing to their white snowflake children. Yes that is correct, black kids sharing a school and activities with white kids is unacceptable. It is an ideology just like rainbow flags. No shit. This is what the school board member said after a parent complained about it. In 2023 we have white people saying in public school we shouldn’t have mixed race positive messages, and we should allow the terrorizing and bullying of gay, lesbian, and trans kids because they don’t like them. I warned everyone this was their next step, DeathSantis along with the Huckabeast in Arkansas trying to outlaw the teaching of the real brutality of slavery / racism in the US history is just an opening to try to return the country to the open racism of the 1950s. Hugs
A trustee says a child was traumatized by a poster showing different colored children holding hands and had to switch classrooms. Now, she’s arguing to remove displays of racial inclusivity and pride.
CONROE, Texas (KTRK) — Some Conroe ISD trustees want to crack down on displays of racial inclusivity and pride, saying they represent, “symbols of personal ideologies.”
One trustee says a child was traumatized by a poster showing different colored children holding hands and had to switch classrooms.
School officials against this say a policy prohibiting political displays, not related to curriculum, already exists. The trustee who brought this forward didn’t realize that.
When it was brought to her attention, the trustee said she wants that policy to go further. Citing “a number of parents reaching out to her about supposed displays of personal ideologies in classrooms,” Melissa Dungan asked her fellow board members to crackdown on them.
“I wish I was shocked by each of the examples that were shared with me, however, I am aware these trends have been happening for many years,” Dungan said.
When pressed to share one of those examples, Dungan referred to a first grade student whose parent claimed they were so upset by a poster showing hands of people of different races, that they transferred classrooms.
“Just so I understand, you are seriously suggesting that you find objectionable, a poster indicating that all are included,” Stacey Chase, another trustee, said.
Dungan wouldn’t say whether she found that poster objectionable, just that she wants to avoid “situations like that” by having the board adopt stricter standards and adhere to state policies already in place, prohibiting teachers from displaying political items not relevant to curriculum.
Another trustee even asked if the poster was illegal and went on to claim previous displays of pride flags were.
“We do have violation of this law,” Misty Odenweller said.
When asked if bible verses were also in violation of existing policy and should be removed, Dungan struggled to respond.
“Right? Would you agree?” trustee Datren Williams asked Dungan.
A trustee says a child was traumatized by a poster showing different colored children holding hands and had to switch classrooms. Now, she's arguing to remove displays of racial inclusivity and pride. https://t.co/scyrw05x2q
These bigots have been emboldened by Trump, Abbott, DeSantis, and others, to publicly and proudly promote their racism. They are horrible people and should be publicly shunned.
Imagine if they saw the Mr. Rogers episode where he and his Black mailman friend both dipped their feet into a kiddie pool to cool off on a hot, summer day. The horror!
Conroe is a northern suburb/exurb of Houston. It’s not exactly the boonies but on the edge of one of the largest metropolitan areas in the US and according to many sources the most diverse city in the US. People who think of race as black/white need to visit Houston where there are people from pretty much everywhere in the world where there are humans. Conroe, however, is about 72% white and as is typical in the outer burbs, these are people who fled Houston because they freaked out when an Indian or Chinese family moved in next door.
If children are being traumatized by posters showing inclusion, I’d take a good hard look at the parenting style of their fucking parents. Flags, all red.
Scottie's Playtime 
