The University Democrats at UT-Austin, a longstanding student group, has been told that no guests, candidates, or speakers can speak at their meetings unless the administration approves them. Submitted speakers' lists have been ignored or summarily denied. Please HMU if you know a good 1A attorney

Like so many things utilized by the right to limit freedom, the original intent of HUAC was largely to protect against anti-democratic, white supremacist activity. Yet, because of the makeup of the committee, soon it almost exclusively focused on communist and then leftist activities. #HUACsky

Let's make it happen, people! 😆 OR even better, let's turn HUAC back into HISTORY & not the present, amirite?

A fun fact about McCarthyism is that just two and a half years after he was condemned and censured, Sen. Joseph McCarthy drank himself to death at 48. Fevers break. Petty tyrants fall. Censorship and persecution drive good people to stand together and fight back.

If they're going to try and retcon Charlie Kirk, then we should try to retcon him too.

Wild laughter from the audience because in that group this is what passes for humor.

the funny thing about the constant misappropriation of MLK is that the guy left a massive body of writing specifically aimed at explaining his views of those of the movement he represented to the broad public. it is extremely easy to know what the guy thought on a variety of subjects and yet

Parking at CVS for my covid shot, I flashed back on the first time I did this. The strong feelings at being able to receive some semblence of safety, & the joy of it. And I tore my favorite shorts getting out of the car, but it was worth it! Anyway now I just teared up telling the shot giver this.

a timely reminder that anyone in the US over 16 can join the league of women voters to help educate and empower voters and protect and expand voting rights www.lwv.org

For more, see @gvaughnjoy.bsky.social’s forthcoming book! www.degruyterbrill.com/document/isb...

Apropos of nothing in particular, here's Walt Disney's testimony to HUAC in 1947, where he named employees he believed were communists, condemned labor unions, and accused "commie" groups, including the League of Women Voters, of smearing him. 🗃️ archive.org/details/walt...

One county he won decisively is Loving County, Texas, population 64.

If this continues we're going to get an executive order requiring us to watch.

Sadly, I just canceled my subscription.

Covid is gonna shape American politics for years and years because it was the first time most Americans were asked to make sacrifices and they lost their minds because of it.

Someone said to me today, "Oh, you teach college? You must really be having a problem with AI."

“The value of a degree from a Texas college or university is not made by administrators and certainly not by politicians in Austin. It stems from the hard work of faculty and academic staff, and the determination and discipline of our students." Brian Evans @texasaaup.bsky.social President

"What started with lawmakers weaponizing their platforms against civil servants has morphed into a statewide directive to hunt down and fire educators for opinions shared on their personal social media accounts." - @zephcapo.bsky.social www.texasaft.org/government/t...

1) Western civilization spends a hundred years pretending that uncertainty doesn’t exist. 2) Tech bros create a machine that can’t acknowledge uncertainty. 3) Western civilization embraces the lying machine because it will save us all.

And, frankly, it also lacks the capacity to identify true/false information. It just spits out likely combinations of words—it’s a hell of a lot more than being “unsure.” There’s no way to program that kind of emotion-driven reticence (aka the feeling that you don’t know) into AI.

We've entered the briefcases full of cash phase of governmernt corruption. www.msnbc.com/msnbc/news/t...

"Unlike human intelligence, it lacks the humility to acknowledge uncertainty,” said Neil Shah. “When unsure, it doesn’t defer to deeper research or human oversight; instead, it often presents estimates as facts.” www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

I just canceled my subscription to Hulu/Disney+. The First Amendment is more important than instant access to Marvel movies.

Most of us loved America before. They want to make us love Trump.

Again Bouie from the top rope

Harris County statehood now!

Reminder that LLMs produce false information because of how they’re designed, and “improved” iterations will produce false information because it’s a basic aspect of how they work. LLMs don‘t try to provide accurate information; they produce information that looks good enough to fool you at a glance

One might argue this is at least as important as Jimmy Kimmel's indefinite suspension--and it's not new, just getting worse.

this exists it is called thinking

Kind of thought we already knew this about LLMs, but evidence is always good. Personally, I just don’t have a use case for a tech that isn’t reliable. Then there’s the long list of ethical issues & concerns, and LLMs (still) get a resounding “nope!” from me.

In a sane society, this would be a deal killer. www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

“'Like students facing hard exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty,' the researchers wrote in the paper. 'Such ‘hallucinations’ persist even in state-of-the-art systems and undermine trust.'”

I created a bunch of quiz questions this semester to try to evade AI. "See Slide 3 on the presentation I gave you. Who is quoted on that slide?" Paste that question into ChatGPT, which can't access my course materials, and it generates a response that's usually wrong but always extremely confident.

You know, if you can't be bothered to read a book or manuscript yourself, or if you don't have the time, that's fine. It is permissible to say no to the invitation.

Peer reviewing manuscripts and now seeing that there is a box to check that the reviewer has not fed the manuscript into AI. This is a good step, but a sign that some reviewers are behaving very poorly.

Again, just to be clear here, Siebert's replacement will take office with a clear, virtually explicit, mandate to prosecute people who have committed no crime

RIP U.S. innovation. Between gutting the H-1B program, purging US scientists from civil service, slashing research grants, and disappearing international students off the streets, our government has made a conscious decision to kill America's roll as a global leader in science and innovation.

One nice thing about the rich trying to buy an election is that sometimes they lose their money and the election.

If you're not following Vikki, you should be. She's running against Dan Patrick.

This moment we’re in has more parallels to the 1940s than we’d like to admit. thebarbedwire.com/2025/09/19/s...

Obviously they know AI "accurately predicts" your future diseases because they waited 20 years to confirm the results. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

What are the ethical implications of an ‘AI’ that claims to predict people’s disease profiles? who will have access to these predictions and what will they do with them? And why are these questions not included here? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Here comes the next one. A UNT student claims a professor asked her to leave the classroom after she defended Kirk while other students laughed at the video of his shooting. Paxton says he's concerned about the lack of disciplinary action against the professor and the laughing students.

I, um, agree with, uh, Ted Cruz on this. Where we still disagree, however, is that I think he should do something about it.

There's a lot of political and protest dynamics that create this moment, but still seems important to acknowledge how unusual it is in modern U.S. history to see federal agents just straight-up throw elected officials (such as Sen. Alex Padilla earlier this year) and candidates to the ground.

Right-wing indoctrination.

When everyone was clamoring for more civics education over the last couple years, some of us warned that that meant a very different thing to people on the far-right. This is the white nationalist version, a Trojan horse for religion in the schools and for censorship of a full history.

Pretty clear illustration of "you may as well stand up for what you believe in, they're coming for you anyway."

DISNEY: Wins 5 Emmys for ANDOR, a show about resisting fascism ALSO DISNEY: Bends the knee to the federal government and suspends Jimmy Jimmy Kimmel for resisting fascism

Interesting to consider that he would have suffered the exact same fate if he had refused to fire anyone.