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This is the big one I want too

Yeah same. When he started topping my feed despite me blocking him I ejected from his platform and washed my hands of the whole thing.

US "news" is billionaire propaganda designed to push whatever world view best supports their financial interests and/or any bizarre philosophy they've decided is most correct

Please stop, I can only be so erect

And the lack of parents at home during the day to parent, and the fact that those parents are exhausted at night when they both finish working.

We've really created a perfect storm of horrible conditions to raise healthy and well adjusted children

They're using the same playbook the FBI used to split leftists and prevent successful rallying around community leaders in the 60s, 70s and 80s. It's time tested and it works.

When I logged in about six weeks after the ownership change my feed included Elon Musk, Andrew Tate and 2-3 other right wing influencers. I follow none of these people, I have zero interest in what they have to say and I find them reprehensible. I deleted my account and haven't used the platform since.

The BBC, NPR and the NY Times. NPR in their effort to seem unbiased allows Republicans to frame the discussion of all things political and NPR participates rather than calling out obvious falsehoods or reframing any issue around facts. I bucket them firmly in the neoliberal controlled opposition camp. The NYT has become yet another corporate mouthpiece and the BBC does whatever they do. I never paid much attention to CNN but I engage with them even less now that they've switched to FOX's manufactured outrage "entertainment" model rather than engaging in journalism.

So, uh, all of those? I can't handle popular Republican "news" sources, they tend to twist facts in the name of this week's political expediency or simply lie.

Edit: I'd like to say "literally any corporate news source" here too, all of them present a view of the world that reinforces their owners' worldview and/or lobbies in their interest. All media should be carefully evaluated for a slant that benefits the owner of the publication regardless of their apparent political stance.

Try searching for authors who describe their work as "Speculative fiction" - that's the way most of them don't admit to writing low-brow schlock like sci-fi.

Also near future sci-fi tends to be a bit lighter on the "magical machine" plot tropes. Climate fiction might be worth looking into too, most of the near future books exploring possible global warming consequences aren't all hopped up on magical technological advances.

Edit: also check out various books described as literary speculative fiction. Authors who want the intellectual cred of being a literary writer tend to land in the speculative fiction genre more often than not.

Kinda reminds me of classic authors like Heinlein.

Heinlein or Niven are pretty accurate comparisons IMO

I read the entire trilogy a couple of years ago and I'll say a couple of things about it: the big ideas are great and the plot is interesting but the characters and the actual mechanics of the writing are solidly mediocre at times. I'm not sure if that's down to the translation between languages (Ken Liu's two translations are much better than the middle book IMO) or just the style of the novels but it's definitely a pain point for the series.

Parts of the later books read like bad western SF from the 60s or 70s and some of the later themes are ridiculously reactionary. Like women being incapable of aggressive choices necessary for survival or the decadent feminized men who are incapable of things in general. There's some large scale human social critique involved later about societal wishful thinking that's 100% on point but I won't spoil that for you.

It's definitely worth reading, pieces of the trilogy are great, but it also goes in decidedly reactionary directions at times as well. It's sort of like reading Ringworld - lots of neat concepts with some chauvinistic social commentary.