links for 2009-09-28
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Sometime between now and whenever I last read it, A Gift From Earth has been visited with a very heavy dose of the sexism fairy. There will now be some spoilers. And it may even get shrill.... [T]hree women mentioned.... Polly, who is beautiful and resourceful and who spends most of the book waiting to be rescued. Polly gets to sneak around and take photographs, and also martyr herself. The second is Laney, whose job in the revolutionary organization is morale-raising whore.... Laney can program an autopilot, plan an invasion and shoot straight, but her job in the revolution is having sex with the men to keep their spirits up. Right. The third, Lydia, who cooks dinner when they all escape, is described quite without irony or even malice as a “virago” and a “shrew.”
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we took a middleaged aircraft engineer who flew to Afghanistan for charitable purposes a short while before 9/11, cobbled together some insane story out of interrogations from unreliable informants, and tortured him into confessing to it. If I follow the course of events correctly through all the redactions, we then continued to torture him because the story we told him to confess to didn't make any sense. And now we've asked a judge to keep him imprisoned on the basis of the confessions that the US interrogators found unbelievable.
