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Fembots Everywhere

By ThinkProgress on Sep 30, 2007 at 11:49 pm

220px-Bionicwoman.jpg

Via Ann Friedman, Alicia Rebensdorf considers the fembot phenomenon from a feminist perspective, with special attention to the Bionic Woman remake, the Heinecken fembot bots, and a new campaign for Svedka Vodka that I haven’t actually seen. It’s an interesting essay, but I think that in some ways it suffers from a failure to put fembots within the larger cultural category of representations of robots more generally.

From the R.U.R., the robot has almost universally been a locus of fear and anxiety rather than fantasy . . . the male robot’s strength and endurance is a threat, not wish-fulfillment. Typically, the crux of the matter is that the robots betray their masters and take over the world (The Matrix, The Terminator, etc.) and robot stories that don’t follow this scheme are so intensely against the grain that you get things like the movie version of I, Robot where, unable to fit Asimov’s actual stories into our archetypes, they turn it into yet another robot rebellion tale.

I’m not sure if the right thing to say is that the fembot is a fantasy that serves as a counterpoint to the (presumptively male) robot, or else if consideration of the broader picture undermines the fembot-as-fantasy conceit, but I do think you need to consider the broader context. This is especially true insofar as these archetypes can coexist, as in the appearance of Priss, “a basic pleasure mode,” in the midst of Blade Runner‘s tale of replicant rebellion.

Politics

Pentagon Issues Blackwater New $92 Million Contract

By Amanda Terkel on Sep 30, 2007 at 6:35 pm

Earlier this month, Blackwater USA was involved in the fatal shooting of 11 Iraqi civilians. While the Iraqi government swiftly condemned the contractor, the Bush administration has continued to back Blackwater’s story that it was “defensive fire.”

Last Thursday, Gen. Peter Pace told reporters, “Blackwater has been a contractor in the past with the department and could certainly be in the future.” The next day, that future was already here. The Pentagon had issued a new list of contracts, including one worth $92 million to Presidential Airways, the “aviation unit of parent company Blackwater.” From the release:

Presidential Airways, Inc., an aviation Worldwide Services company (d/b/a Blackwater Aviation), Moyock, N.C., is being awarded an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) type contract for $92,000,000.00. The contractor is to provide all fixed-wing aircraft, personnel, equipment, tools, material, maintenance and supervision necessary to perform passenger, cargo and combi Short Take-Off and Landing air transportation services between locations in the Area of Responsibility of Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. This contract was competitively procured and two timely offers were received. The performance period is from 1 Oct. 2007 to 30 September 2011.

Government officials have repeatedly ignored Blackwater’s transgressions. Senior Iraqi officials “repeatedly complained to U.S. officials” about Blackwater’s “alleged involvement in the deaths of numerous Iraqis, but the Americans took little action to regulate the private security firm.”

Next week. Rep. David Price (D-NC) plans to introduce legislation “to extend the reach of U.S. civil courts to include security contractors in Iraq.”

Digg It!

Politics

U.S. coordinates with Gulf nations on possible air strikes.

By Faiz Shakir on Sep 30, 2007 at 5:15 pm

“The American air force is working with military leaders from the Gulf to train and prepare Arab air forces for a possible war with Iran, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.”

UPDATE: “John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, told Tory delegates today that efforts by the UK and the EU to negotiate with Iran had failed and that he saw no alternative to a pre-emptive strike on suspected nuclear facilities in the country.”

Culture

The Dross

By ThinkProgress on Sep 30, 2007 at 4:33 pm

McMegan explains that “The lone benefit of losing all my CD’s in the move to Chicago, and then my MP3s in two separate hard drive crashes, is that I have no dross–no embarassing choices left over from my adolescence, no random songs downloaded while writing the annual GSB follies.” That drossless collection comprises 2,406 tracks. I, having been well-backed-up for several years now, have managed to compile 8,609 songs not all of which are among my absolute favorites.

It seems to me, though, that being in easy possession of a certain amount of random material is one of the great pleasures of the internet age. I wouldn’t say that I ever really spend much time listening to The Advantage’s rendition of the “Dr. Wiley Theme” from MegaMan 2, but it’s sometimes amusing to play it for others during those moments when the conversation turns to memories of youth. And I prefer to think of Anti-Flag’s “Captain Anarchy” as more a monument to a past era than an embarrassing choice left over from my adolescence. And who wouldn’t want to own Avril Lavigne’s live cover of Green Day’s “Basket Case”? And the alphabet contains so many more letters. My only regret is that I don’t have way more dross.

Politics

A Footnote

By ThinkProgress on Sep 30, 2007 at 2:02 pm

Hendrick Hertzberg has an interesting footnote to the welcome demise of the effort to get California to split its electoral votes. This went down in part because of Arnold Schwarzennegger’s decision to oppose it. And what may have motivated him?

Anybody remember the first Republican debate, on MSNBC back in May? I’ll bet Arnold does. He was in the front row at the Reagan Library when Chris Matthews asked the ten candidates if they would support changing the Constitution ever so slightly to make naturalized citizens eligible for the presidency. The vote onstage was eight to one against. (The one was Giuliani; McCain said he’d “seriously consider it,” which I count as an abstention.) Eight to one, in other words, in favor of crushing the ultimate and perfectly legitimate dream of the distinguished Governor of California.

If I were Schwarzenegger, I wouldn’t lift a finger to help these bozos.

It’s good to see what’s probably our dumbest constitutional provision finding a way to do some good for the world.

Security

Hersh: Bush’s Case For Hitting Iran Has ‘Shifted,’ Now Focused On ‘Surgical Strikes’ To ‘Sell’ It

By Faiz Shakir on Sep 30, 2007 at 1:14 pm

Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker’s Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative journalist, writes in a new article entitled “Shifting Targets” that there has been “a significant increase in the tempo of attack planning” for war with Iran inside the Bush administration.

Most significantly, Hersh — who has been warning for months that the administration is seriously plotting for war with Iran — reports the administration has switched its rationale for war. The focus has shifted from a broad bombing attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities to “surgical” strikes again Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere.

On CNN’s Late Edition this morning, Hersh said the administration has adopted what it views as a rationale that can win over the public and international allies, while accomplishing its key objective of initiating a military conflict:

You can sell [this approach]. It’s more logical. You can say to people, the American people, we’re only hitting those people that we think are trying to hit our boys and the coalition forces. And so that seems to be more sensible. Because the White House thinks they can actually pitch this, this would actually work. In other words, you can do a bombing and not have the world scream at us and also get the British on board.

Watch it:

In his article, Hersh writes, “This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran,” emphasizing the shift in rationale. The “shifting emphasis” is “gathering support among generals and admirals in the Pentagon.”

Hersh also reveals:

During a secure videoconference that took place early this summer, the President told Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, that he was thinking of hitting Iranian targets across the border and that the British “were on board.” At that point, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice interjected that there was a need to proceed carefully, because of the ongoing diplomatic track. Bush ended by instructing Crocker to tell Iran to stop interfering in Iraq or it would face American retribution.

The White House has even prepared a “Clinton did it too” defense for attacking Iran, according to Hersh. “If Democrats objected, the Administration could say, “Bill Clinton did the same thing; he conducted limited strikes in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and in Baghdad to protect American lives.”

Politics

Bush’s EPA pursuing fewer polluters.

By Amanda Terkel on Sep 30, 2007 at 1:09 pm

Under the Bush administration, the EPA’s “pursuit of criminal cases against polluters” was “down nearly 70 percent between fiscal years 2002 and 2006, compared with a four-year period in the late 1990s.” The number of investigators in the Criminal Investigation Division is also down, with many “sometimes are diverted to other duties, such as service on EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson’s eight-person security detail.”

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