I love how Republican brinksmanship leads to this absurd self-fulfilling prophecy that government doesn’t and can’t work. It turns out bad faith reaps bad outcomes.
This has been their platform literally forever; rather than have to learn anything or improve themselves, just deny that knowledge or betterment exists.
I'm only going to answer the first part of your question, not the AI/generated part.
No one really chooses what or who they're attracted to; it kind of just happens to you. For example, you might be watching a TV show and someone gets lightly, comically spanked... and suddenly a light bulb goes off above your head and you think, "whoa, that might actually be kinda fun." People are wired in ways we don't understand to want things we don't even know we want.
To that extent, pedophiles are themselves victims of their own desires; there's no "logic" behind it. It's simply an urge they experience.
Of course that doesn't make succumbing to this urge excusable, and any children who are impacted are of course victims and the pedophiles, predators. But no one is training pedophiles in pedophile camp. It's just humans being human, unfortunately.
Such a great series! I just finished a reread of it; totally worth it.
The only misstep in the series, in my opinion, is the novel-length Network Effect. I think the perfect format for Murderbot is novellas. Wells’ longer form felt like a couple Murderbot stories mashed together and didn’t work as well for me.
It’s never explicitly stated what Murderbot’s gender presentation is. I do visualize it as feminine presenting personally, but I just finished a reread and it is never stated anywhere. A character calls it “third mom” at one point but it’s unclear if this is because it looks feminine or because it was smothering her as her extant mothers do.
Something I take heart in is the fact that Hitler, before World War 2, was considered controversial as well. A lot of people thought it was improper to mock or criticize a world leader, and that he had good reasons for doing what he wanted to do, and that America shouldn't be involved in foreign conflicts, and so on.
Of course, the judgment of history is (properly) that he is a racist, xenophobic, warmongering madman and we stopped him too late if anything.
I feel pretty confident Trump is gonna wind up remembered the same way.
Where to begin! The famines? The oppression? The lack of liberties? The persecution of queer people, or, indeed, any thought viewed as slightly aberrant? The megalomaniacal madman who keeps his people in chains while he lives the life of the ultra-rich? The gasping, desperate poverty of his subjects? Their inability to leave the country? The militarism? The backwardness?
One of the first books I can remember reading was a Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle. The concept of tesseracts totally blew my young mind.