For space/astronomy news, I recommend Doctor Becky https://youtube.com/@drbecky and Fraser Cain. https://youtube.com/@frasercain

Becky handles mostly astronomy news, Fraser handles mostly space flight news. Both are pretty decent at staying more objective.

Honestly, no I wouldn’t automatically call that person stupid. I’d think they had trouble regulating their emotions, but would not judge their overall intelligence based on just that. There are many things that can lead to inability to handle anger in a healthy way, that have nothing to do with intelligence.

Sometimes your tolerance for hearing something becomes saturated. When this occurs, it no longer matters what context you might be hearing it in again, you will dislike hearing it regardless of the context.

Not to excuse the audience or anything, they should know better. They could have just walked out if they were unhappy. It’s a little disingenuous to call their reaction stupidity though, I’m pretty sure they do recognize fiction from reality. They probably just weren’t willing to hear that speech, delivered in a fictional or any other context.

Personally I’ve encountered this with film before. The movie Django Unchained had enough casual, laid back racism in its plot and dialogue, that I just got fed up and quit watching. I wasn’t enjoying myself, so what’s the point? It’s almost worse when it’s casual too, I’d rather watch something like Schindler’s List where it gets more gravity.

Depends if I can get my phone unlocked and call an ambulance or not. Unassisted I’m probably bleeding out, but if I can get to a hospital then I can probably make it. I do wonder how much skin I’ll even have left at this point, considering the sheer number of cuts, scrapes and burns I’ve had, but blood loss should be the only potentially fatal problem needing to be dealt with immediately.

Big if, though, my hands would be a busted up mess. Operating a touchscreen would be a pretty big ask, and I probably don’t have a lot of time fully conscious. I’d also have several broken bones preventing me from going anywhere to find help.

When the Generative Agents system was evaluated for how “believably human” the agents acted, researchers found the AI versions scored higher than actual human actors.

That’s a neat finding. I feel like there’s a lot to unpack there around how our expectations are formed.

Even when I see Elrond in LotR, that’s actually just Agent Smith in a funny costume.

You very well might be able to, actually, though I’m not going to guarantee it. Regardless though, if the line is commonly parroted by a certain group, then the claims are not particularly wild, are they?

And yes, there are lots of very useful tips that can identify most propaganda based off of common traits. This is not foolproof though. Still very good to know, though.

Nothing about the term tankie does or should deny their right to live. Advocating for the deaths of people who disagree with you is profoundly against everything liberalism (the freedom-based guiding principle of what we’d call “the west”) stands for.

To the contrary, as a pretty standard liberal American I fully support their rights to advocate for whatever they wish. Since there is no realistic way to accurately and objectively determine what is or is not propaganda, I support their right to create that as well.

Regarding the utility of recognizing where propaganda comes from, it can occasionally be useful to know, as it tends to follow certain patterns based on the goals of whoever created it.

Actually the goal of terms like that is efficiency. We could say “supporter of aggressively implemented authoritarian communism” if we wanted, but tankie is shorter.

Helps if you have the background to understand the specifics of what different “isms” support and thus what they disagree on that leads them into genuinely fighting each other. A fascist, a lib and a tankie really do have very core disagreements that cannot be realistically compromised on. At the most basic, a fascist wants a unified society with a strict hierarchy, the tankie wants a unified society with no hierarchy, the lib doesn’t want any kind of unified society. If any one of these people gets their way, the other two do not, which leads to conflict.

Left/right are more economic arguments with some wiggle room due to being more or less a spectrum, but also tend to feature significant real world disagreements.

Anyways, I do agree that it’s important to have conversations about these underlying details, but when you’re talking amongst other people who know the background already, some shorthand terms are going to start appearing. Since these are overarching governance philosophies that any person can adopt or discard at will, they’re also a little different from more inherent divisions, like ethnicity for instance. Being a tankie, lib or fascist is a choice, where being Arabic or gay or something is not.

Somebody needs to put this guy in charge of all the branding elements.

Same. Every time I see someone complaining about the all feed I wonder if they came from 4chan’s b board or something.

How many places on the internet expect you to regularly use some sort of all feed? 9gag maybe? Did people regularly use reddit’s all feed, despite it being crammed full of garbage and vote farming? I think I used it for like 5 seconds when I first started there before I gave up in disgust and started picking communities intentionally.

Do you set up your newsreader with all of everything? You want all the sports, all the pop culture, all the tech, etc etc?

I just don’t get it. All is always going to be garbage on every service just because the world is a big place, and that’s fine.

Now, rant aside, I did actually find his idea of an all feed where local instance voting is all that gets counted kinda neat. I don’t have any problems with that being an available option if someone wanted to work on it.