The Sun Eater series is an interesting one that kind of goes both ways. The big alien baddies are basically demons, and humanity gets a lot of love, but all the politicking and whatnot shows humanity to be both good and bad

Hopefully without spoiling it, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time has an interesting take on game theory at the end

There's an instinct in many of us to destroy and pervert, and it can lead to very dark places.

This is silly.

They aren't trying to pervert the children. This isn't some cabal.

It's just money.

It's just people trying to get children's eyeballs to collect minuscule ad revenue.

It's the same as the people who abuse their kids for a Youtube channel, or the russian companies that put out 10 """DIY""" shorts a day which are just fake.

Youtube rewards constant churning content creation, so that's what is done

Yes, spiderman and Elsa on YouTube is a prime example. It's just slop for kids, they're not even in the same universe. But kids like spiderman, and they also like Elsa, so... here we are.

They do it because it actually works.

Many of the fairy tales have it too. Maybe its something deeper common to humanity

This is interesting; I always assumed that the Grimm's tales and all kinds of folklore throughout cultures and history were responding to anxieties about, say, super-high rates of infant death.

It would be, in a way, hilarious if it was all just lazy writing the entire time.

Its the messy application of FDR's claim that the USA should be the arsenal of democracy and should protect people everywhere. Which sounds all well and good, until you get different ideas about what is the best and that 'I' know better than you. Basically all the mess of the Cold War and propaganda and advertising

USA is the arsenal of democracy as long as you vote their candidate (or all candidates are their candidate, like in Italy)

The FBI is also used by various organizations to investigate various crimes, whether real or not. For instance, the Bureau of Industry and Security thought my company was flaunting export regulations and had the FBI raid my company to investigate. It turned out to largely be due to a paperwork problem, but the BIS didn't have the power to investigate so they contracted the FBI to provide the manpower to do the raid. So who we saw was the FBI, but it was really the BIS originating the raid.

You want _Flouting_ .

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/is-it-wrong-to-confu...

Until kids show up lol

Almost every map is oriented wrong. They should be oriented towards the East (orient comes from the Latin word for east)

While there's some things that's can be done in the political and legislation spheres, there's a lot more need for just basic human relationships. Talking to those people and making friendships with those who different than you, and might be a little scary or uncomfortable. I suspect a lot of out social and political problems could be solved were we to get off of these shiny screens and spend time being in our bodies, building relationships with real people who don't fit all of our lofty ideals

These problems existed before phones

Two problems: 1. We don't have community anymore and thus don't have people helping us when we're emotionally and mentally sick. 2. AI chatbots are the crappy plastic replacement of community.

There's going to be a lot more stuff like this, including AI churches/cults, in the next few years.