The Honest Courtesan

This blog has a lot more infrastructure than most people probably realize.  Over the past few years, it has become obvious to me that the majority of readers don’t understand how I create the subtitles in my news columns, so I’ve decided to provide a brief demonstration.  I think it’s obvious that the tags collect items of similar subject matter, but some of y’all may not realize that they also help organize specific themes within a topic.  Take, for example, this recent example from the “The Mob Rules” tag:

There have been quite a few examples of this tag since it began two years ago, so why #1311 specifically?  There weren’t any other examples of politicians encouraging lawsuits against schools which don’t discriminate against trans students, but the item in #1311 was about politicians using the same mechanism to try to prevent young people from getting information their parents don’t want them to have (which naturally includes LGBT teens):

That one in turn references #1307, which as you can see is a much more direct connection: busybody Utah politicians trying to control the internet using the current porn panic as an excuse:

#1303 was the report on the Louisiana law referenced above:

And #1231 was the article which first mentioned this terrible law when its sociopathic sponsor first introduced it:
This one brings us back to the original article which spawned the tag.  If you explore that tag, you’ll notice a couple of other subthreads; there’s even the beginning of a spur from this one:

As you can see, that one references the original Utah article, which in turn leads back to the Louisiana one; any future articles on similar laws will refer back to this one, while future laws encouraging anti-trans lawsuits will link to the one at the top of this column.  Clicking on a subtitle link will take you directly to the article it names; as you can see, it’s possible to follow a rabbit hole all the way back to its origin, and multiple rabbit holes can lead to the same origin point; it’s all interconnected in one big warren.  So if you find an article interesting, infuriating, or whatever, you can follow the thread of references back through similar articles, often for years, while marveling at the obsessive lengths and depths to which my librarian’s brain will go to impose order on chaos.