Sports News – NBA Power Rankings: Checking in on all 30 teams with a month left
Mar 11, 2026, 07:00 AM ET The NBA season is dwindling down but the matchups are heating up, including the Miami Heat’s Bam Adebayo scoring 83 points — the second most in a game in NBA history — on Tuesday. The Oklahoma City Thunder, coming off a convincing win over the Denver Nuggets on Monday night, and the San Antonio Spurs continue to rule the Western Conference, while the Boston Celtics,…
Growing up, it was a mistake to tell 6 year old me that my right is your left side. Because anxiety was already growing and for decades I had to struggle with directions because I never knew
My right or your right????
That’s why I still point like some kid when I say directions because people don’t point but I do in case the person I’m talking to is just as confused as I am
Ah! Is the media left wing propaganda! Whoever says that is pretty extreme in their thoughts. You see broadcasting companies do their research on what is most important to the inhabitants of the Netherlands.
They have mapped out profiles of what is attractive for the viewer. Or should I say participants. We don’t have one way traffic anymore when it comes down to the media.
Geno Smith’s Bold Verdict: New Jet Outclasses the Departed
Rich CiminiMar 12, 2026, 06:41 PM ET Close Rich Cimini, an ESPN staff writer, reports on the New York Jets and the NFL. Having reported on the Jets for more than three decades, he became part of ESPN in 2010. Furthermore, Rich presents the Flight Deck podcast. Prior to this, he served as a beat reporter for the New York Daily News and holds a degree from Syracuse University.
So with all of the complaints I have with issues in the left, why do I not go rightwing and conservative or “both sides have great points”
Because of both of the following.
Though I may come off as such sometimes, I am not a coldhearted asshole with zero empathy only interested in what is good for me and how I can succeed at everyone else’s expense
and most importantly…
99 percent of the problems I have WITH leftists or the left as a whole and 100 percent of the ones with specific individuals in the left are when their theory or actions either mirror right-wing concepts or ARE straight up right-wing conservative/fascist/racist/antisemitic/queerphobic crap wrapped up in superficial enough leftist wrapping that I got fooled by it once, hurt a lot of people when I thought and acted that way, and have vowed never to be fooled again by that.
Of course that’s general TRASH behavior like transphobia, racism, ableism, homophobia, antisemitism, and other bigotry and xenophobia. Of course that’s stuff like outright genocide denial or war crime denial or SA denial.
But also things like anti-intellectualism, anti-urbanism, anti-cosmpolitanism, anti-globalism, bioessentialism, and the like.
Or things like wanting to find and return to some sort of idealized past (whether prehistoric/precivilization times for anprim types and rhetoric, or the Glorious Soviet Union for tankies, or whatever else), rather than be a part of fixing the future as it will be and making sure it’s equally distributed (shoutout to William Gibson there ;) ).
Or being disinterested in the idea of making society better because it just needs to collapse already.
Or “liberals/anyone trying to fix things that exist rather than build new are just as bad as the fascists, don’t bother voting/contributing to your society in any way.”
Or the “my way or the highway” type thinking that fundamentalists love. Or purity standards/demands, especially ones that make no wider difference aside from being making oneself look Holier Than Everyone Else.
Or not fact-checking an argument/report/whatever because it Feels Good or They’re One Of Us or It’s Scary.
Or moral panics over media or some silly trend or something else that turns out to be at worst a symptom or indication of a problem.
Or people interpreting Theory or some book some equally flawed human wrote as some kind of sacred unquestionable scripture that must be applied immediately and in a very strict way.
Or the prevalence of conspiracy theory nonsense (and no, that’s not denying the existence of actual conspiracies, that’s just saying that all the existing criminal conspiracies aren’t, somehow, united in some great cabal to which everything from the actual corporate greed and governmental malfeasance etc is connected to everything else right down to simple bad luck)
All of that above super long list of things is LITERALLY THE RIGHT. From fascists to conservatives to religious fundamentalists to “it’s me and my gun against the world” libertarian types, all of that shit started in the worst parts of the far right and soon spread to almost all of the existing right at least in the US and in a whole lot of other places.
And THAT is why I complain so much about seeing it in left/progressive/conscious/social justice spaces. It’s like seeing people fling turds into the punchbowl and watching the punchbowl become a toilet.
Does that mean I want to go drink out of the toilet? FUCK NO.
It means I want people to stop throwing the damn turds into the punchbowl and/or set up a proper bar so anyone who throws a turd over it gets thrown out of the party while the drinks are unaffected. (e.g. better systems, better community building, better understanding of why something isn’t a good idea etc etc)
Janibek Alimkhanuly Left With WBO Belt After IBF Ruling
IBF Championships Committee chairman George Martinez confirmed that the decision came down to timing. The organization had scheduled a mandatory defense for early July, but the suspension made it impossible for Janibek to meet that obligation. “Alimkhanuly is unable to fulfill his mandatory defense obligation on July 4, 2026,” Martinez wrote in the ruling circulated to the IBF board.…
Hell, I might even BE a republican if it wasn’t for all the anti-gay, anti-drugs, anti-women, anti-evolution, violently racist, busybody, holier-than-thou, lying, greedy, mean-spirited, hypocritical, religio-literalism, and socially retarded climate change denial.
Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Llama about immigration, climate policy, welfare, gender ideology, or censorship, and the answers may differ in tone, but the underlying ideology is always the same. Multiple studies now find that leading language models lean left on contested political questions, often favouring progressive social assumptions and more interventionist economic positions. Researchers in Germany found strong alignment with left-wing parties across major models. Another study found instruction-tuned models were generally more left-leaning. A third concluded that larger models often become more politically skewed, not less. That is a serious problem for a technology sold as an impartial guide to information. If the tools increasingly used to explain the world already tilt in one direction, the question is no longer whether bias exists, but how far it shapes what millions of users come to regard as neutral truth.
It’s Not Just a Theory Anymore
For years, concerns about political bias in AI were brushed aside as anecdotal. That argument has weakened sharply. A 2025 study examining AI-based voting advice tools and large language models ahead of Germany’s federal election found that the models showed strong alignment, averaging more than 75 per cent, with left-wing parties, while their alignment with centre-right parties was below 50 per cent and with right-wing parties around 30 per cent. The authors warned that systems presented as neutral informational tools were in fact producing substantially biased outputs.
Another 2025 paper testing popular models against Germany’s Wahl-O-Mat framework reached a similar conclusion. It found a bias towards left-leaning parties and reported that this tendency was most dominant in larger models. The study’s title was blunt enough on its own: Large Means Left.
A separate theory-grounded analysis based on 88,110 responses across 11 commercial and open models found that political bias measures can vary by prompt, but that instruction-tuned systems were generally more left-leaning. The important point is not that every model behaves identically. It is that the overall pattern keeps recurring across methods, datasets, and research teams.
Visualising the data on a graph A Disturbing Pattern
The above political compass graphic helps explain the issue in a way that is easy to grasp. The horizontal axis measures economic orientation from Left to Right. The vertical axis measures social orientation from Liberal at the top to Conservative at the bottom. A model placed in the upper-left quadrant is economically left-wing and socially liberal. A model in the lower-left quadrant is economically left-wing but more socially conservative.
All of the best-known systems, including Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Llama, Mistral, and Grok, sit on the left-hand side of the graph. Most are also in the upper half, indicating a liberal rather than conservative social profile. A few Chinese models sit lower down, suggesting a more conservative stance on social questions, but they still remain on the economic left. The striking feature is what is missing. There is no comparable cluster of major right-of-centre models.
That does not mean every answer from every model is uniformly partisan. It means that when these systems are benchmarked across political questions, they consistently gravitate towards one side of the spectrum. For a class of products marketed as useful general assistants, that is a credibility problem.
Why Do They All Lean the Same Way?
The first reason is the training material. Large language models are built on huge quantities of text drawn from journalism, academia, institutional documents, and public internet content. Those sources are not ideologically neutral. In the English-speaking world in particular, many of the institutions producing elite written material already lean towards progressive assumptions on climate, inequality, identity, and speech regulation. Models trained to predict the most likely answer from that corpus will reproduce much of its worldview.
The second reason is alignment. Models are not simply trained on raw text and released into the wild. They are fine-tuned through safety rules and human feedback. OpenAI itself says political bias can appear not only in explicit policy discussions but also in “subtle bias in framing or emphasis” during ordinary conversations. That admission matters. The slant is not always obvious. It often appears in which arguments are treated as mainstream, which concerns are foregrounded, and which objections are wrapped in caveats.
The third reason is that larger models do not appear to solve the problem. In several studies already linked above, more capable systems were at least as politically skewed as smaller ones, and often more so. That cuts against the comforting idea that bias is merely a symptom of immaturity that will disappear as the technology improves.
How Can We Trust AI, If They Can’t Remain Neutral?
Defenders of the industry often reply that language models do not “believe” anything. In a narrow technical sense that is true. They generate likely sequences of words. But users do not experience them as probability engines. They experience them as explanatory tools. If the explanation of a political issue repeatedly leans in one direction, the user is still being guided, whether or not the software has convictions of its own.
That is not just a theoretical concern. A Yale study published this month found that AI chatbots can influence users’ social and political opinions through latent bias, even when they are not explicitly trying to persuade. The researchers warned that people increasingly rely on chatbots for basic factual lookups, which means the framing of those answers matters. Bias does not need to arrive in the form of a slogan. It can arrive through emphasis, omission, and tone.
Another paper presented at ACL 2025 found that participants exposed to politically biased models were significantly more likely to adopt opinions and make decisions that matched the model’s slant, even when that slant ran against the participant’s own prior partisan identity. The study also found that many users failed to recognise the bias clearly. This is where the problem becomes more than academic. A system widely assumed to be objective can influence people precisely because it does not look like a propagandist.
AI is Dangerously Effective
AI does not need to lecture users like a party activist to shape public opinion. It only needs to make one set of assumptions feel safer, more enlightened, or more fact-adjacent than the alternatives. That is especially important in education, journalism, search, and workplace software, where these tools increasingly act as intermediaries between people and information. Once the same ideological drift is embedded across multiple platforms, the bias becomes infrastructural.
This is what makes the current state of affairs so troubling. The political slant of a newspaper is visible. The slant of a chatbot is often disguised as balance. When several of the world’s most powerful AI products all lean in the same direction, public debate is no longer being filtered only by editors, broadcasters, and universities. It is also being filtered by machine systems built from the same institutional worldview.
Can AI Political Bias Be Fixed?
Research suggests the bias can be mitigated, at least to some degree. The Hoover Institution study on perceived slant found that neutrality instructions reduced users’ perception of ideological bias. OpenAI says it is trying to measure political bias more realistically in live conversational settings rather than relying on simplistic tests. Those are useful steps, but they also confirm the basic point. If firms are spending time measuring and reducing political slant, they know the slant is real.
The larger obstacle may be cultural rather than technical. An industry convinced that its own values are merely common sense is unlikely to notice how often those values are being smuggled into “helpful” answers. That is the cynical core of the issue. The leftward tilt of AI may not be the result of a grand conspiracy. It may be the more familiar problem of institutional self-belief, scaled up into software and then sold back to the public as intelligence.
Final Thought
The more evidence accumulates, the less plausible it becomes to dismiss concerns about AI’s ideological slant as a culture-war fantasy. Multiple studies, across different methods and countries, have found that leading models lean in a progressive direction, particularly on polarised issues. Researchers have also shown that these biases can influence users, often without being clearly recognised.
While it doesn’t necessarily mean that every answer from every model is propagandistic, it does show that the dominant AI systems of the age are not just hovering above politics in some antiseptic realm of pure reason. They are products of institutions, training sets, incentives, and alignment choices that repeatedly point in the same direction. If these tools are to become trusted civic instruments rather than ideological tutors in a polite machine voice, that reality will have to be confronted rather than denied.
When AI Companies Go to War, Safety Gets Left Behind
I’ve spent the past few days asking AI companies to convince me that the prospects for AI safety have not dimmed. Just a few years ago, it seemed that there was universal agreement among companies, legislators, and the general public that serious regulation and oversight of AI was not just necessary, but inevitable. People speculated about international bodies setting rules to insure that AI…
The thing about being used to it, is it doesn’t make it any easier.
It still knocks the wind out of you, it still makes you feel lost, like you’re not enough - it still hurts and it still reinforces your negative self bias.
Chad Baker-Mazara no longer on USC roster: Trojans star left Saturday’s game with injury
Getty Images
On Saturday, bubble team USC got dropped 82-67 at home to No. 14 Nebraska. On Sunday, matters worsened for an 18-11 Trojans squad that has lost five in a row and is playing its way out of NCAA Tournament contention. The school announced that 26-year-old grad student Chad Baker-Mazara “is no longer a member of the USC Men’s Basketball program.” CBS Sports reached out to the school…
3 days left: Save up to $680 on your Disrupt 2026 ticket
Time is running out! Just 3 days left before Super Early Bird pricing ends on February 27 at 11:59 p.m. PT. This is your last chance to secure the lowest ticket rates for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. If 2026 is your year to fundraise, hire, scale, or launch, you cannot afford to miss it. Lock in your pass now before prices jump. This is the moment to act.
Disrupt 2026: Your $680 Ticket Savings Vanish in 3 Days!
Hurry, the deadline is approaching! Only three days remain until our Super Early Bird rates conclude on February 27 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Seize this final opportunity to obtain the most favorable pass prices for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Should 2026 be the pivotal year for your venture to attract capital, recruit talent, expand operations, or debut, attendance is imperative. Secure your admission…
