Hi, these are some links from our almost 5 hour stream today. You can check twitch.tv/vice if you wanna catch the next one. Let's get into it:
Ben Makuch talked about the Chinese (alleged) Spy Balloon, and why an F-22 shot it down. Also some speculation on why everyone's so worked up about it.
Ben Solomon got on to talk about the brutal war in Ukraine. Be warned that there's some blood in this one:
But we ended up talking a lot about both this 8-year-old Ukrainian girl who drew a picture of him, and also this weird moment in the doc where a guy smiles at the camera, holds up a mug, and says:
'Nothing in the morning wakes you up better in the morning than freshly brewed of coffee and firing rockets at bastards.'
it's an obvious riff on the famous Apocalypse Now 'I love the smell of napalm in the morning!' line.
But it's weird to think about the fact that this guy probably watched a film about war, which was based on the War in Vietnam, which was at that point the most-well covered by news cameras in history,
...and is now experiencing actual war, and quoting the film back to a news camera.
At some point there will probably be a film about this war, and perhaps there will be an iconic line in that film, and then some kid will quote that line back in a future war.
Or, more likely, he'll be quoting a war-themed video game:
Ben also mentioned this time when he was with a bunch of Ukrainian dudes who spoke zero English, but out of nowhere they started quoting (in English) - a line from Call of Duty. And they all had this strange moment where they bonded over having played CoD as kids, and then it was back to war.
Weird.
Next up, this one, about how flying is absolute hell for people with wheelchairs.
If you've seen those TikToks of people having their wheelchairs destroyed by airlines, you know where this is going. But interestingly, this piece proposes some solutions.
I don't even want to say too much about it - it kinda speaks for itself, and makes you wonder why, when the solutions are right there, it hasn't been fixed already. We talked with Dan and Mindie about this one.
Oh, at the top, we also talked about that AI 'Seinfeld' takeoff that got banned from Twitch for making a potentially transphobic joke.
It's weird, because there's a world in which this joke could be funny: It actually reads a little like a description for a situation in a TV show: a comedian says something homophobic/racist/whatever, expecting that it will get him some right-wing fans (like it has for some comedians), but instead people see through his gimmick and walk out.
Which is to say, this accidental 'joke', if we can call it that, could work a sort of meta-commentary about comedians who 'punch down'.
But that's the thing about comedy: so much of it depends on context, and shared understanding, and our positions and intentions. But AI, at least as we understand it, has no position; it's a nebulous, collective, 'cloud'. So we don't trust it, or its intentions.
(Does AI have intentions?)
And combine that with the fact that there are people who genuinely believe some of the things that the AI was joking about, and are attempting to legislate accordingly, and it's not hard to understand why this could feel pretty hurtful.
As I've said before about AI: it's only going to get weirder from here.
Oh, and, somebody stole the Shrek statue.
Lastly, the inaugural VICE Book Club:
Samir recommends 花冷え-お先に失礼します, and I recommend the new lil yachty record. Specifically, the first cut, the black seminole.
That's about it for this one. If you want to catch the next one, we're on 11a to 1pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, over on Twitch.
bye!