Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

I was confident that someone would point it out and thought why not me.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

“But what about the lurkers?”

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

Republicans don’t trust women.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Ah, the different things are different argument.

An unpunished coup is a training exercise.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Cole, when it comes to calico cats, restraint is overrated.

Somebody needs to explain to DeSantis that nobody needs to do anything to make him look bad.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

“Joe Biden deserved better than he got from some folks in his own party.”

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

You are here: Home / Civil Rights / LGBTQ Rights / LGBTQ Rights Are Human Rights / Thursday Morning Open Thread: Pride Month

Thursday Morning Open Thread: Pride Month

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: Pride Month

(Drew Sheneman via GoComics.com)

On the last day of May, President Joe Biden issued a proclamation Wednesday from the White House declaring June as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Pride Month. It comes amid a wave of conservative attacks on the LGBTQ+ community.

“During Pride Month, we honor a movement that has grown stronger, more vibrant, and more inclusive with every passing year,” the proclamation read. “Pride is a celebration of generations of LGBTQI+ people who have fought bravely to live openly and authentically. And it is a reminder that we still have generational work to do to ensure that everyone enjoys the full promise of equity, dignity, protection, and freedom.”

Biden referenced the laws Republican-led legislatures have introduced in states nationwide, calling it an “inflection point.”

“In 2023 alone, State and local legislatures have already introduced over 600 hateful laws targeting the LGBTQI+ community. Books about LGBTQI+ people are being banned from libraries. Transgender youth in over a dozen States have had their medically necessary health care banned. Homophobic and transphobic vitriol spewed online has spilled over into real life, as armed hate groups intimidate people at Pride marches and drag performances and threaten doctors’ offices and children’s hospitals that offer care to the LGBTQI+ community.”…

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre explained to The Advocate why the LGBTQ+ community is front of mind for Biden.

“During Pride Month, we celebrate the strength, resilience, and bravery of the LGBTQI+ community and reaffirm our commitment to fighting for equality and freedom for all people,” Jean-Pierre said. “This year alone, more than 600 anti-LGBTQI+ bills have been filed in statehouses across the country and a significant portion of these bills target transgender youth.”

She continued, “As President Biden says, these young people are some of the bravest people he knows, but no one should have to be brave just to be themselves. The Biden-Harris Administration is going to continue to speak out and stand up against these attacks and we are going to remain focused on advancing equality for LGBTQI+ people across the country.”



Also proud:

HISTORY!:


(Gen. Friedrich von Steuben, represent!)


(Same for Casimir Pulaski!)

Reader Interactions

122Comments

  1. 1.

    satby

    Thank you AL, for highlighting that it is pride month. All of us, allies and LGTBQ+, need to be loud and proud this month and push back against the hate.

  3. 3.

    japa21

    @satby: ​
      Specially us allies. We can’t let our friends, family members, co-workers, etc. who are LGBTQI+ think they are standing alone.
    @rikyrah: ​
     Good morning.

  4. 4.

    rikyrah

    @japa21:

      Specially us allies. We can’t let our friends, family members, co-workers, etc. who are LGBTQI+ think they are standing alone.

     

    So true. they are not alone.

  9. 9.

    Roger Moore

    MacArthur’s attitude was fairly widespread during WWII.  In his WWII memoir, my grandfather mentions a couple of gay soldiers in his unit.  The common attitude seems to have been to look the other way at what they did with their time off as long as they did their job while they were on duty.  Admittedly, he was extremely liberal, especially for someone who was a career officer, so he might have been projecting his attitudes onto others, but there was no indication they got written up or anyone tried to discharge them.  The military was doing its utmost to get every soldier it could, so they weren’t going to throw people out for what were ultimately irrelevant reasons.

  10. 10.

    UncleEbeneezer

    Happy Pride Month to all in the LGBTQIA community.  You make the world a better and more beautiful place for us all.  We see you.  We love you :)

  11. 11.

    Geminid

    Reporting from Istanbul, three journalist wrote a timely article published May 31 by the New York Times, titled “After Erdogan’s Attacks, Fear Spreads Among LGBTQ People in Turkey.” Turkish LGBTQ people are rattled by the way President Erdogan made attacks on LGBTQ Turks a campaign theme in his presidential campaign.

    No political parties were advocating on issues like same sex marriage or adoption, and when a civil rights group asked the 2000+ National Assembly candidates to commit to protecting LGBT rights, only 58 signed on (11 of them were elected to the 600-member Assembly).

    Erdogan used the issue of LGBTQ influence anyway, to attack his opponent and motivate his own voters. He is already looking towards important municipal elections next March, and will likely continue pushing this issue.

    Turkiye does not have a Pride Month, but activists will celebrate a Pride Week starting June 19. Don’t expect Pride parades, though. They typically are banned:

       Officials often cite vague concepts like “general morals” and “public order” to act against activities they don’t like, such as Pride week.

  12. 12.

    Betty Cracker

    This kinda sucks:

    Pentagon cancels drag show at Air Force base as Pride Month begins

    CNN — The Pentagon forced an Air Force base in Nevada to cancel a drag show at the start of Pride Month that had already been approved, according to three officials familiar with the situation.

    The drag show at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada was scheduled for June 1 and recognizes the importance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender service members and civilian personnel. According to a military official, it would have been the third annual drag show held at Nellis, known as “The Home of the Fighter Pilot” and the Air Force’s center for advanced fighter training.

    Despite the previous two events being held at the base, this one was not allowed to move forward after the Pentagon intervened on Wednesday, according to two defense officials, forcing the base to cancel the event or move it to a different location.

    Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has spoken in support Pride Month in the military, saying in 2021 that “LGBTQ+ citizens have fought to defend our rights and freedoms from the founding of our nation to the Civil War” and beyond. But he has drawn a line at allowing drag events or shows to be hosted at military bases, one of the officials said, making clear that DoD funds cannot be appropriated for such events…

    In March, Austin told a House Armed Services Committee hearing that “drag shows are not something the Defense Department supports or funds.” Pressed by Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Republican from Florida who has attacked the Defense Department over what he claims is a focus on “wokeism,” Austin reiterated at the time that “this is not something we support or fund.”

    During the same exchange, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Mark Milley said he wanted to look into the occurrences of drag shows on military bases to “find out what actually is going on there.”

    “I’d like to take a look at those, because I don’t agree with those,” he said. “I think those things shouldn’t be happening.”

    Smirking pervert Matt Gaetz has successfully appointed himself morality police.

  13. 13.

    gene108

    I’ll never understand how someone gets angry at rainbows or the depiction of rainbows in art, on t-shirts, etc.

    Who doesn’t like seeing a rainbow? 🌈

    🤷‍♂️🤷‍♀️🤷

  14. 14.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    A thought – these AI scriveners will only be as good as the information sources available to them. As algorithms (looking at white supremacist nepo manbaby Melon Husk) push ever increasing white supremacist and antisemitic, anti LGBTQ content over left-center-left expression, news and analysis, AI programs will follow, platform, privilege and elevate misinformation.

  16. 16.

    Another Scott

    Yay!  Happy Pride Month.

    One for the programmer geeks…

    Psychotic Network Ferret
    @[email protected]

    About ten years ago, the IT building for a local highschool burned to the ground.

    My company donated a spare Juniper EX3200 switch to help get them back online. They had erected a small structure without any insulation, and left the switch inside unpowered for a day while the fiber splicers got them hooked back up.

    They started the switch, and it immediately shutdown. They looked a gift horse in the mouth and bitched to us that our donation was garbage.

    I was dispatched to assist. I connected to the serial console and powered the device up. It immediately indicated that the CPU temperature was 252 C, and shut itself down.

    It was January, the outside temperature was -3 C. The Juniper device was storing temperature as an 8-bit unsigned integer value. It got so cold, it thought it was on fire.

    Can’t say I ever expected to use a heat gun to get a switch to start before that day. Got it warm enough to power on, and then it kept itself plenty warm to continue operating.

    Data types matter, yo.

    (via https://mastodon.social/@delong )

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  18. 18.

    JPL

    Atlanta has a big Pride Parade but it’s in October.   I have all the noise quiets down by then.

  20. 20.

    raven

    Studs Terkel’s Pulitzer-winning “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II fought its own war: Terkel’s firsthand witnesses testified to the ugly side of a noble struggle–internment camps, homophobia and racism in the trenches, war profiteering, rejection of the disfigured wounded, and American propagandizing. Like any war, this one undermined the very principles it was fought for. But because it was made to justify later conflicts (more than 250 U.S. interventions since 1945), Terkel sought to demythologize its supposed purity of heart. In 1987 Michael Hildebrand and Anita Greenberg adapted the book into a groundbreaking musical energized by period songs that carried new meaning (especially a Japanese lullaby that reminds a Hiroshima victim of her incinerated mother). It will be presented next weekend at the Chicago Historical Society in a kinetic new Prologue Theatre staging by Kevin Theis, a revival worthy of its predecessors. Charles Glenn delivers harrowing testimony about black soldiers who were murdered for daring to use the white PX, then offers a haunting rendition of Fats Waller’s “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?” Eric Leonard is especially moving as “Ted Allenby,” a pseudonym for the late actor and activist George S. Buse, who was kicked out of the navy for being gay. Imagining a truer patriotism, the musical’s bittersweet songs and testimony convey a you-are-there immediacy.

  21. 21.

    Another Scott

    @Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: Meanwhile, …

    Forbes:

    The largest eating disorder non-profit in the country is replacing staff and volunteers with an AI-based online solution, and the chatbot has already been shut down. A half-dozen human staff and a volunteer army of over 200 have been let go, replaced by an AI chatbot named Tessa. However, Tessa is currently out of work as well: the National Eating Disorder Association says that the AI chatbot that was going to replace the humans “may have given” harmful information, according to multiple reports. […]

    This is my shocked, shocked face.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  24. 24.

    JWR

    I saw one, (and there was only one), of these outspoken bigots standing outside the school on TV news last night. Odds are she’s a Repug chaos agent, or an actual parent who’s had her head way too far up OAN and Fox to know any better.

    Pride Flag Torched At LA K-5 School; Trans Teacher Removed For Safety

    NORTH HOLLYWOOD, CA — Tensions continued to mount Wednesday at Saticoy Elementary School in North Hollywood, where opposition by some parents to a planned Pride Month assembly on Friday has escalated, and the burning of a small Pride Flag that was displayed outside a classroom has led to security concerns.

    […]

    The Times reported that the flag had been outside the classroom of a teacher who is a transgender man, and who has since been removed from the school due to safety concerns. Photos of the teacher, however, have been posted on conservative Instagram pages used by some parents opposing the planned Friday Pride assembly, the paper reported.

  25. 25.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    USDC ND Texas has come up with a neat local rule on AI:

    Just FYI for what the future of federal court practice might look like – Here’s a standing order on AI-assisted filings from the Northern District of Texas:

    “All attorneys appearing before the Court must file on the docket a certificate attesting either that no portion of the filing was drafted by generative artificial intelligence (such as ChatGPT, Harvey.AI, or Google Bard) or that any language drafted by generative artificial intelligence was checked for accuracy, using print reporters or traditional legal databases, by a human being. These platforms are incredibly powerful and have many uses in the law: form divorces, discovery requests, suggested errors in documents, anticipated questions at oral argument. But legal briefing is not one of them. Here’s why. These platforms in their current states are prone to hallucinations and bias. On hallucinations, they make stuff up—even quotes and citations. Another issue is reliability or bias. While attorneys swear an oath to set aside their personal prejudices, biases, and beliefs to faithfully uphold the law and represent their clients, generative artificial intelligence is the product of programming devised by humans who did not have to swear such an oath. As such, these systems hold no allegiance to any client, the rule of law, or the laws and Constitution of the United States (or, as addressed above, the truth). Unbound by any sense of duty, honor, or justice, such programs act according to computer code rather than conviction, based on programming rather than principle. Any party believing a platform has the requisite accuracy and reliability for legal briefing may move for leave and explain why. Accordingly, the Court will strike any filing from an attorney who fails to file a certificate on the docket attesting that the attorney has read the Court’s judge-specific requirements and understands that he or she will be held responsible under Rule 11 for the contents of any filing that he or she signs and submits to the Court, regardless of whether generative artificial intelligence drafted any portion of that filing.”

    https://www.txnd.uscourts.gov/judge/judge-brantley-starr

  26. 26.

    Eolirin

    @Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: AI models are currently heavily curated. It’s creating more work for their developers to keep hate speech out of their responses and the methods are imperfect but they’re actively working on doing that. There being more of it on the internet is unlikely to result in there being more of it coming out of the AIs.

  27. 27.

    mrmoshpotato

    “After Calling Joe Biden Senile, Republicans Complain He Outsmarted Them.”

    He seniley outsmarted them!  That crafty senile bastard!

    Fuck the GOP into the Sun.

  28. 28.

    Soprano2

    @Another Scott: Did you see that the reason these idiots tried to use a chatbot is because their workforce voted to join a union? As soon as I heard they were going to do this I knew it would be a disaster. There are some things robots just cannot do as well as humans.

  29. 29.

    Roger Moore

    @raven:

    Dugout Doug was an asshole.

    So was Patton, who was the commanding general who made the biggest positive impression on my grandpa*.  One can be an asshole while still holding some good opinions or otherwise doing good work.  For example, Fuck LBJ, but that doesn’t invalidate Medicare or the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

    *Grandpa was in the 915th Field Artillery, 90th Division which spent most of its time in combat in Patton’s 3rd Army.

  30. 30.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Another Scott:

    I can see ithe incel-forum sourced responses now (elevated by algorithm): “No, you will never find a nice boyfriend if you don’t lose some weight. Try being less fat.”

  31. 31.

    Eolirin

    @Another Scott: My god, how fucking stupid does anyone have to be to think they can replace humans in a health services context with current chatbot tech? The main providers of this technology are practically screaming at people that this stuff isn’t meant to be used in scenarios that have consequence. It’s not like they’re burying those disclaimers.

  32. 32.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Eolirin:

    The hate speech has gotten far too prevalent for weeding – it’s like kudzu these days.

  34. 34.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Soprano2:

    I will say that there is a machine in the JAL lounge in the Narita airport that poured me the most perfectly poured Sapporo that I have ever had.

  35. 35.

    Alison Rose

    Happy Pride month to all my fellow queers. Remember, rainbow capitalism won’t save us and Pride was always meant to be a protest, not just a party. And to the cis/hets: If you got money, give it to queer rights groups, and if you don’t, boost them as much as you can. Also the A in the acronym is not for you, ok thx!!!

  36. 36.

    Soprano2

    I started watching the new “Quantum Leap” because I loved the old show so much, and I wanted to see what they did to update it.  They have an interesting non-binary character on the show played by a non-binary actor, Mason Alexander Park. The last show I watched was about them helping a transgender girl in Los Angeles; I’m pretty sure all the transgender teens on the show were played by actual transgender teens. My husband’s comment about the Ian character was “He dresses like a woman”. LOL Well, they do! So, to me that’s progress of a kind – a non-binary character on a show who is brilliant and seen as totally unremarkable otherwise.

  37. 37.

    Eolirin

    @Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: It should be noted, MS, OpenAI, and Google all tell people not to use it for this kind of thing too. They’re all upfront about the hallucination issues. They all tell you you can’t assume the answer you’re getting is accurate and that you shouldn’t rely on it for anything of consequence, I’m fairly sure explicitly calling out legal scenarios.

    That people are doing this anyway is a sign that people don’t know what the fuck they’re doing and I’ll be glad to see rules like this stepping in to create consequences for misuse of the technology, not just in the courts but across all industry.

  38. 38.

    John S.

    @Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:

    There should be commercials about all this hate speech targeted at LGBTQ+ folks similar to the one running about hate speech against Jews (also on the rise).

    In it, a father is talking to his son in the cat about all the hate speech he is spewing online and tells him he didn’t raise him that way. And as the camera pans, you see they are in front of a temple where services just ended and the father concludes with “If you want to say something, say it to their face.”

    Pretty powerful stuff.

    ETA: Here is that commercial.

  40. 40.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Eolirin:

    My god, how fucking stupid does anyone have to be to think they can replace humans in a health services context with current chatbot tech? 

    We’re finding out how stupid almost daily.

  42. 42.

    Alison Rose

    Also, this is pretty cool:

    Amidst an ongoing nationwide attack on drag, San Francisco has crowned the first drag laureate in the United States.

    Mayor London Breed initially announced the Drag Laureate program last June and crowned D’Arcy Drollinger as the inaugural titleholder on Thursday. Speaking to a crowd at the San Francisco LGBT Center, Breed said that the occasion was so special “because even today we won’t give all the negative stuff that’s going on the energy that it wants.”

    Still, she acknowledged that “our drag community continues to be under attack even in our own city and county of San Francisco.” “That’s what makes today so special,” the mayor said, “because despite all of that there’s still love, there’s still hope, there’s still joy, there’s still sparkly nails in the air.”

    …

    As Drag Laureate, Drollinger will serve as the spokesperson for the LGBTQ+ community of the city, participate in and produce community drag events, and help share and preserve San Francisco’s drag history. For her 18-month term, the San Francisco Public Library will provide her with a $55,000 stipend.

    That sound you heard was DeSantis’s head exploding.

  43. 43.

    Soprano2

    @mrmoshpotato: Well, they replaced humans answering the phone with robotic pick menus that are sometimes impossible to get out of, so I’m not surprised they tried to replace humans on a help line with robots.

  46. 46.

    scav

    All the MBAs pushing automation and chatbots everywhere (drive down costs! Those unreliable greedy laborers, don’t they realize they’re replaceable cogs?) imagine their howls when they saunter into a five star dining establishment and are greeted by a wall of vending machines.

  48. 48.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Soprano2: Phone tree hell! :)

    Do you enjoy yelling at an AI “assistant” as much as I do?

    “Tech-ni-cal support!” “I’m sorry.  I didn’t get that.”

  49. 49.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Soprano2:

    It does listen (just like apes reading Shakespeare) – it just doesn’t answer…..  😁

  51. 51.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Eolirin:

    It’s the hot buzzword.  Even regular people have been inundated with ‘AI can do our jobs!’  Hardly anyone understands how it works or its limits.  They see it do something impressive and assume it can do what they actually want.  It can’t.  It never will.  But yeah, there will be people trying to replace humans with bots until the failures mount high enough that it sinks in.

  52. 52.

    Sallycat

    I am volunteering to register voters for the Democratic party at three Pride events this month.  That way I get to do two important things-show support and hopefully get more Democrats voting.  In Florida.

  53. 53.

    Roger Moore

    @Eolirin:

    AI models are currently heavily curated.

    Curation is not a cure-all, since it will only ever be as good as the curators.  Unless you’re confident the AI companies have managed to get curators who aren’t biased themselves- and I am not at all confident of this- it’s not going to buy you a lot.  You can probably use it to avoid the most grossly biased material, but there’s a ton of subtle bias that’s going to slip by.

    The real danger will be when one of the companies is dumb enough to believe the singularity is here, in that their current generation “AI” is good enough to curate the material that will be used to train the next generation.  I have a variety of reasons to think the singularity is not going to arrive, but the AI companies are run by a bunch of true believers.  The moment they turn the curation over to their own AIs, they’re going to get sucked into crazy land.  Whatever biases exist in generation N AI will be reinforced in generation N+1, and the suckers in charge won’t accept what’s happening.  Note that those biases aren’t necessarily the same as human bias, though they’ll probably feed on it initially.

  56. 56.

    NotMax

    FYI, entire first season (10 episodes) of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds now on YouTube. Official channel, however with no sign-up obligation for Paramount Plus. Dunno how long it will be available there.

    Never seen it previously myself. Having gone through several episodes, might as well have called the ship not Enterprise but the USS Kumbaya.

  58. 58.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Roger Moore:

    Unpopular opinion – in “Revenge of the Nerds”, the nerds were actually the bad guys…

  59. 59.

    Roger Moore

    @Eolirin:

    They’re not really up-front about the problems with AI.  It’s classic engineering vs marketing.  The engineers try to give people a realistic understanding of the product’s strengths and weaknesses, while the marketing people push it as though it’s perfect.  It’s legitimately confusing, and it’s totally understandable that someone would fall for the marketing rather than paying careful attention to the caveats.

  60. 60.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @mrmoshpotato:

    To be fair, our newer, better Roomba photographs temporary obstacles and sends me the photos. I get a lot of cat butt shots.

  62. 62.

    Betty Cracker

    @NotMax: My husband was in the Air Force band back in the 1980s and played at events like swanky NATO cocktail parties and shows at bases and communities all over the U.S. and Europe. But between formal gigs, he and the other musicians were often assigned to provide music for talent shows and stuff like that on bases, and he says a lot of it was raunchy and sometimes included drag. Forty years ago, nobody freaked out.

  65. 65.

    Betty Cracker

    @Sallycat: Good for you! I’ve done registration at Pride events before, and it’s always one of the best crowds. Gotta be mindful of the new rules designed to trip people up and suppress the vote, but I’m sure you know that.

  67. 67.

    Eolirin

    @Frankensteinbeck: I’m not in the never will camp. There’s nothing special about humans. It’s not there yet, but there’s no reason it can’t be eventually.

    People just need to listen to the people making the stuff about what it can’t do yet and actually be responsible about use. There are giant warning labels on this stuff.

  68. 68.

    Rusty

    Going to my first Pride Parade this month with at least two of my spawn.  I’m so damn old that I remember in college we had a week called GLAD, gay lesbian awareness days, that morphed to BGLAD a year or two later, bisexual gay lesbian awareness days, and so on.  I was from a small conservative town, but quickly had my mind opened with college and I wore a pin every year after my freshman year in support of my LGBTQ+ friends and roommates.   The world is both better almost 40 years on, a d worse with SCOTUS and the Republicans trying to drag us backwards into an ugly past.  Let’s keep fighting for the good and right.

  70. 70.

    Amir Khalid

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    Companies that use chatbots to do work that should be done by humans — news outlets publishing chatbot-written stories, lawyers relying on them to do research and write filings, chatbot-based tech support, doctors diagnosing patients with chatbots, who knows what else — are defrauding the public and should be subject to severe legal/professional sanctions.

  71. 71.

    Eolirin

    @Roger Moore: We were talking about this in the context of Twitter becoming a massive cesspool; that’s the kind of overt bias that does get caught by the curation.

  73. 73.

    Eolirin

    @Roger Moore: OpenAI is constantly talking about hallucination and BingChat has those disclaimers literally in the window when you open it.

    Journalists are falling down in their reporting, but it’s not being marketed, by the big players at least, as being a source of trustworthy knowledge fit to be used in places where people’s lives can be impacted.

  76. 76.

    JWR

    @Alison Rose: You really wanna see Ronny D’s head explode, especially while he’s out playacting as a viable presidential candidate? Check out what’s going on right under his smeller:

    LGBTQ+ people flock to Florida for Gay Days festival
    By MIKE SCHNEIDER 15 minutes ago

    ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Tens of thousands of LGBTQ+ people are flocking to central Florida this weekend to go on theme park rides, mingle with costumed performers, dance at all-night parties and lounge poolside at hotels during Gay Days, a decades-long tradition.

    Even though Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida lawmakers have championed a slew of anti-LGBTQ+ laws — spurring the most prominent gay rights group in the U.S. and other civil rights organizations to issue warnings the Sunshine State may no longer be safe — Gay Days organizers are still encouraging visitors from around the world to come to one of Florida’s largest gay and lesbian celebrations.

  77. 77.

    Ken

    @Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: any language drafted by generative artificial intelligence was checked for accuracy, using print reporters or traditional legal databases

    Charming assumption there that print reporters are not themselves using generative AI. The databases may be better, though (as with any such resource) once a “delusion” gets into them it’s subject to amplification by people who believe it because it’s in the database…

  81. 81.

    Layer8Problem

    @NotMax:  We heard it was closest to the Original Series, so gave it a shot for four episodes.  Just didn’t do it for us.  Kumbaya is right.

  84. 84.

    TEL

    I don’t understand the fascination with chatbots. To me, the AI being used is another tool, like a really fancy thesaurus.

  85. 85.

    schrodingers_cat

    All the Chat AIs only crawl a few languages so the results it gets reflects that. I put the both Chat GPT and Google’s Bard through its paces as a research assistant of sorts for my Indian history project. Chat GPT did okay when the subject was broad. When I had it focus on one state the results were sub-par. As for Bard it was just regurgitating Sangh propaganda in both cases. Google’s algorithm probably favor latest links. So Bard had little utility for this specific project.

  87. 87.

    Soprano2

    @mrmoshpotato: Ugh, I hate that! I’ve been extremely resistant at work to switching us over to any kind of system like that. These days I’m pleasantly surprised when I call somewhere and a person answers the phone. I want us to continue actually answering the phone rather than someone having to yell at a pick menu “Representative”! over and over again just to talk to a human being.

  88. 88.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    On another note, I see that the Putin Federation has put about 500 more Americans on a sanctions list, which seems to include an incomprehensible assortment of state officials that have no actual connection with foreign policy (Letitia James, Brad Raffensberger, some New Mexico pol comes to mind.  Bizarrely, they’ve included Louisville’s Congressman Morgan McGarvey on the list, too, and his beat is mostly domestic LGBTQ and domestic racial healing.

    I want to live my life in such a way that the Russian Federation announces a sanction against me.

  90. 90.

    Citizen Alan

    @JWR: I think about all this drag panic, and I can’t help but recall starting out as a HS band director in 1995 and the band parents proposing a Womanless Wedding whereby they would sell tickets to watch men from the Band Parents Association dressed up as bridesmaids in a wedding, with me as the bride (beard and all). And none of those good Christian folk saw anything wrong with it and were disappointed when the idea fell through for logistical reasons (much to my own relief).

  91. 91.

    Betty

    @gene108: These folks would be unhappy where I live during the rainy season because we have rainbows nearly every day, sometimes in the morning and the afternoon. I have too many pictures.

  92. 92.

    Sister Golden Bear

    For Pride Month this year, can cis-het people focus less on “love is love” and more on “queer people are in danger and trans people are facing genocide.”

  94. 94.

    Eolirin

    @schrodingers_cat: Bard is just not very good. Google’s moving to another model that is supposed to be better, but OpenAI’s stuff is quite a bit further along.

    I do expect they’ll catch up eventually.

  95. 95.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Alison Rose: I’m extremely proud of SF’s Drag Laureate program. The only sad part is that Heklina — who co-owned Oasis with D’Arcy — and was even more of a seminal figure in SF’s drag scene, died far too young about a month ago. She undoubtedly would’ve also been named as well.

  96. 96.

    Dave from the Rustbelt

    By wingnut standards, wouldn’t Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben and Casimir Pulaski also be considered undocumented immigrants?

  97. 97.

    Another Scott

    @Soprano2: No, I had not seen that.  I’m not at all surprised, given that too many companies buy into the notion that employees are nothing but a cost (rather than an essential resource to be nurtured).

    Thanks for the context.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  98. 98.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Roger Moore:

    Unless you’re confident the AI companies have managed to get curators who aren’t biased themselves- and I am not at all confident of this- it’s not going to buy you a lot.

    Given the past track record — e.g. several instances of image AIs identifying Black people as gorillas because the techbros didn’t bother to include them in the training set of images — I’m not holding my breath.

  99. 99.

    Marmot

    @schrodingers_cat: Interesting. That’s similar to my own experience. I gave Chat GPT the same writing project I’d just finished—a detailed look at how certain federal government agencies conduct inspections.

    No matter how I coached it, though, the dang thing gave me the “from the dawn of time” structure I usually see from novice writers. (Like “From the dawn of time, man has sought to depict his environment through the use of artistic expression,” for an article about the artist who made a nice poster.)

    EDIT: What it did was get all “Governments around the world seek to ensure quality and reliability, and thus use inspectors.”

    Maybe it just veers back toward the shit structure you see in most online writing. Maybe it’s not good for much else.

  100. 100.

    anastasio beaverhausen

    Growing up gay in mainly midwestern military communities, pre internet, it was pretty lonely.  Over time I moved on, and moved away.  I found another community of like minded individuals who really just wanted to be accepted for who they are.  Or at least left alone.  But now, after months of anti LGBTQ headlines I was getting a little depressed, realizing some people don’t think rights are “rights,” but privileges to be granted or taken away.  But just this morning, almost on cue for Pride Month I experienced this uplifting gem.  I walked our two kids to the bus stop and one of the moms there said, ” (daughter’s name) Your hair looks beautiful this morning!”  My daughter, “Thanks!  One of my dads washed it last night.”  Mom, “Nice!  I wish somebody would wash my hair!”  So matter of fact and also so apparently genuine from this bus stop mom here in suburban norther Virginia.

  101. 101.

    Ken

    @Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: our newer, better Roomba photographs temporary obstacles and sends me the photos. I get a lot of cat butt shots.

    Let us pause a moment and think of the amount of technical innovation that went into making it possible for autonomous vacuum cleaners to send cat butt photos for display on phones.  Truly, can the Singularity be far off?

  102. 102.

    Miss Bianca

    @Soprano2: OMG. So I’m not the only one who has to close my office door so that people walking through the theater don’t hear me screaming ‘CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE!!11!’ over and over again like a lunatic baying at the moon.

  104. 104.

    Jackie

    @Jay: I have a picture of my very hairy Dad in a chorus line with three other similarly dressed Army Air Corpsmen. They were having a blast based on their ear to ear grins. WWII.

  105. 105.

    jonas

    Homosexuality in the military or government really didn’t register as a big deal for a long time until the so-called “Redl Affair” that rocked the Austro-Hungarian empire a few years before the outbreak of WWI. Alfred Redl was the highly-respected chief of counterintelligence for the Austrian army in the early 1900s and developed a number of innovative surveillance tools for uncovering foreign spy operations. It turns out that at the same time, he was also working as a spy himself, passing sensitive military secrets to the Russians in return for cash and jewels. He was eventually caught and subsequently committed suicide. Redl was a closeted gay man and this quickly became the official explanation for his actions — he had been blackmailed by the Russians. The Redl scandal triggered a panic in a number of countries, including Britain and the US, about the presence of homosexuals in sensitive government and military positions, ultimately leading to regulations that forbade gay people from serving or receiving security clearances.

    As it turns out, more recent historical research done in Russian archives since the fall of the Soviet Union has found no clear evidence that Redl’s Russian handlers were aware of his sexuality at the time and it appears that he had done it simply for the money, which he used to finance a lavish lifestyle that probably would have raised flags much earlier had he himself not been the head of counterintelligence. In the meantime, the damage to LGTBQ people wanting to serve their country was done.

  106. 106.

    Jay

    @Sister Golden Bear:

    one of the things in the “news” a few years back, was when ISIL, NAZI’s, Pedo’s etc were flooding social media with horrific posts, the Social Media Corps were trying to “curate” what was on their platforms,…….

    The Corps, subcontracted the task out to other Corps, who paid humans minimum wage,  to work horrific hours, to find and weed out the horror,…….

    And three different things happened to those workers, A), became numb, B), became radicalized or C), had PTSD.

    I don’t see an AI learning C),……

  107. 107.

    Eolirin

    @Sister Golden Bear: There’s a lot of recognition of that exact kind of problem by the people who work on this stuff, and they’ve been working on improving things.

    It’s not like they deliberately or mistakenly failed to include black people in their datasets; it’s that their datasets were gathered by scraping the web, and the web itself skews in a biased direction. There are researchers working on those problems though, both at Google and Microsoft. Lots of Microsoft Research published papers on trying to deal with systemic bias in datasets.

  109. 109.

    Mike E

    @Layer8Problem: funny that you stopped there, since episode 5 is probably the most fun (aside from the fairy tale one centering around the ship’s doctor) and episode 10 explores Pike’s “destiny” in an alternate take on a classic original series storyline that IMO is well worth watching.

  110. 110.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Eolirin: I am not an early adopter by nature, but, I don’t see any real use for these programs.  If I have to check all of its research to see if it made up citations that just look real, why not just do the research myself?  This tech just doesn’t seem ready to be released into the wild yet.  But I guess it’s cool that I can see what the “rest of the Mona Lisa” looks like.

  111. 111.

    leeleeFL

    @mrmoshpotato: i feel like there should be a market that only sells rusty pitchforks, so we could order them and send them to Republicans and their helpful media enablers.  They really need them so they can fuck themselves very thoroughly!  Aargh!

  113. 113.

    Roger Moore

    @Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: ​
     

    Unpopular opinion – in “Revenge of the Nerds”, the nerds were actually the bad guys

    This is a common opinion of people who watch those movies today. The jocks are obviously bad, but the nerds are no better. A huge amount of what they do was classified as silly college hijinks back then but is seen as unacceptable today.
    I’m at least a little sympathetic; I wonder how I ever did some of the stuff I did while I was in college a few years after those movies came out. While it’s easy to take the easy way out and say it was a different time with different social mores, there were people back then who were pointing out how bad our behavior was. We just refused to listen.

  114. 114.

    Roger Moore

    @schrodingers_cat:

    The problem is who you’re getting to do your curation.  If you’re getting Americans to do it, they probably can’t tell good information sources from propaganda.  If you get Indians to do it, there’s a good chance there will be enough Sangh supporters among the curators that the propaganda will be deliberately allowed through.  Curated content is only as good as the curators, so a point of view that’s achieved substantial popularity is likely to be allowed through regardless of its factual accuracy.

  115. 115.

    Roger Moore

    @Soprano2:

    Even if you need to talk to a human, a good phone tree can help collect your information and connect you to the human who actually knows how to help you.  The ones I encounter professionally are like that.  They ask a few pertinent pieces of information- what kind of equipment I’m having a problem with, whether I want phone support or on-site service, and the like- and then connect me to a human who can take advantage of the information I’ve provided to get started faster.

  116. 116.

    Bupalos

    “Pride is a celebration of generations of LGBTQI+ people who have fought bravely to live openly and authentically. And it is a reminder that we still have generational work to do to ensure that everyone enjoys the full promise of equity, dignity, protection, and freedom.”

    I think this rhetoric is stronger when we leave off the (rightfully) ever-expanding signifiers. We really don’t need the list, LGBTQI+, it’s not just clunky, it’s actually limiting, as the “plus” testifies. The whole point politically is to connect YOUR freedom and MY freedom and HIS freedom and HER freedom and THEIR freedom as the same thing.

  119. 119.

    Alison Rose

    @Bupalos: Well, as someone who has multiple identities which fall under that +, I appreciate when people want to be clear that they wish to be inclusive and don’t mean to leave anyone out. I really could not give a fuck if it sounds “clunky” to someone. Oh, the horror!!! I’m sure you’ll survive.

  120. 120.

    MisterDancer

    @Alison Rose: I appreciate when people want to be clear that they wish to be inclusive and don’t mean to leave anyone out.

    As someone who’s identity doesn’t fall under any of the aforementioned, I very much concur.

  122. 122.

    Dan B

    @Jay:  I love the pictures of military drag shows during WWII and especially Bob Hope and Milton Berle in drag.

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