Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

You are here: Home / Popular Culture / KULCHA! / Septuagenarian Sexbot Chatter (Open Thread)

Septuagenarian Sexbot Chatter (Open Thread)

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I was driving a short while ago and caught a snippet of Diane Rehm’s interview with Margaret Atwood, who has a new book out. Here’s a paraphrase of an odd exchange:

Rehm: What are your thoughts about technology in general and robot sex specifically?

Atwood: At my age, Diane, I think robot sex is not going to be my problem!

I was only in the car for a few minutes, so I have no idea what the context for that conversation was. But Atwood’s response made me laugh.

Open thread!

Reader Interactions

98Comments

  2. 2.

    Punchy

    What’s SCOTUS’s take on the Roe-bot vs. Wade abortion question? Only a matter of time before said robot forgets to reboot after coitus and ends up with fraternal twin CPUs maturing….

  3. 3.

    Elizabelle

    Can’t stay, but headline on front page of NY Times:

    Public Editor: ‘The Column is Accurate,’ Dowd Says

    That “Says” conveys it all to me.

    On the Public Editor’s page, they removed the “Says.” RE MoDo story about VP Biden.

    I heard from many readers Monday asking me to look into claims that a column last summer was wrong or even fabricated. Their concerns followed remarks made by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on “60 Minutes,” in which he countered the idea that his son Beau had, in a dramatic moment as he lay on his deathbed, pushed him to run for president.

    It’s a twofer, because skimming Ombudsman Sullivan’s response, the blame may actually lie with another NY Times reporter, Amy Chozick, who IMHO is a total shit sandwich. The Times’ Hillary reporters are supremely awful, but she’s the worst. Used to be an entertainment reporter at Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ.

    Got to go out for a few hours, but I’d love to see this one blow up badly for the Times and particularly for the odious Chozick. Hope she’s got a family to spend more time with.

    PS: kinda on topic, don’t you think? We’re discussing the story’s subject is a sexy 70-something …

  4. 4.

    Germy Shoemangler

    imagine being told by your robot that it’s been faking its orgasms. Embarraskin, as Popeye would say…

  7. 7.

    Bobby Thomson

    This will be an unpopular view, but I strongly suspect Biden told them something pretty close to what ran in the column. His reputation for truth telling has always kind of mystified me.

  12. 12.

    GregB

    Not tonight dear…..bbbzzzz….click….not tonight dear…bbbzzzz…click….not tonight dear…….

  13. 13.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    @Bobby Thomson:

    I think Biden understandably wavered about running after his son died, and he told different people different things depending on where he was in the process. I honestly don’t think that talking through a decision and lying are the same thing.

  14. 14.

    Betty Cracker

    @redshirt: I’ve been hearing about it since the Usenet days. This may not be entirely fair, but there seems to be a strong correlation between overall personal creepiness and interest in robot sex.

  15. 15.

    rikyrah

    Diversity is for white people: The big lie behind a well-intended word

    Our country is convulsing over the issues of diversity and race. Police departments from Baltimore to Minneapolis are talking about diversity hiring as the antidote to anti-black police brutality. Last month’s flash point was Hollywood darling Matt Damon whitesplaining diversity, igniting a Twitterstorm of outrage. Earlier this year was the failed Race Together stunt by the CEO of Starbucks, which tried to enlist customers in over-the-counter exchanges about America’s most vexing dilemma.

    As an academic, I have spent more than a decade investigating this enigmatic term: What do we mean by “diversity” and what do we accomplish when we make it our goal? Using first-hand ethnographic observation and historical documents, my research has taken me from the U.S. Supreme Court during debates about affirmative action to a gentrifying Chicago neighborhood to the halls of a Fortune 500 global corporation.

    Here’s what I’ve learned: diversity is how we talk about race when we can’t talk about race. It has become a stand-in when open discussion of race is too controversial or — let’s be frank — when white people find the topic of race uncomfortable. Diversity seems polite, positive, hopeful. Who is willing to say they don’t value diversity? One national survey found that more than 90 percent of respondents said they valued diversity in their communities and friendships.

    The term diversity has become so watered down that it can be anything from code for black people to a profit imperative. Consider the cringe-worthy experience I had sitting in on a corporate diversity training, where initiates learned that diversity could mean our preferences for working at daytime or at night, or our favorite animal. As a Deloitte study showed, many Millennials take it to simply mean one’s unique culture and perspective. (Apparently they are listening to their diversity trainers).

    http://www.salon.com/2015/10/26/diversity_is_for_white_people_the_big_lie_behind_a_well_intended_word/

  17. 17.

    Amir Khalid

    @Mike J:
    I don’t know why, but the Royal Malaysian Police has never been the most forward-thinking organisation in my country. Especially when it comes to sex.

  27. 27.

    Mike J

    @Paul in KY: Agreed. As such, as long as people aren’t doing it in public, I don’t really care how they do it.

    Another human is always going to be more interesting than a machine.

  28. 28.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    @C.V. Danes:

    You started with a pretty big “if” there. Personally, I think that most of the guys who buy Real Dolls need some intensive psychiatric treatment to help them deal with their deep-seated issues. At least guys who hire hookers are still getting some kind of human interaction.

  29. 29.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Bobby Thomson: This will be an unpopular view, but I strongly suspect Biden told them something pretty close to what ran in the column.

    I’ll sit with you at lunch. If the source wasn’t Biden, it was someone close to him, and he himself didn’t try to knock it down for almost two months. And I like Biden and have a lot of sympathy for him, and don’t for a moment think that his grief over his son and how it affected his political thinking was anything but sincere. From the reading I’ve done about his circle, I’d bet ten bucks is was Harpootlian, who seems to be the kind of guy who would talk to Dowd.

    Like I’ve said, it may speak well of Biden that he can inspire such loyalty, and my support of HRC is 85% pragmatic, but what became flat-out trolling of the all-but-certain Dem nominee was not admirable. It’s the kind of crap that made me hate Carville and Ed Rendell.

  30. 30.

    benw

    @Betty Cracker: there’s a strong negative correlation between being a creepster and chicks wanting to do it with you (why of why am I assuming the creepster is a dude?), leading to a strong positive correlation between creepiness and interest in robot sex and posting in internet comment sections. I have no idea why I know this is true.

  31. 31.

    p.a.

    @Mike J:

    A conference about having sex with robots scheduled to be held in Malaysia was canceled due to fears that people may have sex with robots.

    Malaysia???!!! Isn’t that where a dog-petting event got death threats? What kind of security would a mechano-sex conference need?

  34. 34.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    @Mike J:

    Another human is always going to be more interesting than a machine.

    For most people, yes, but there does seem to be a segment of the population that is unable to deal with the messiness and unpredictability of other human beings. With the Real Doll thing, there’s definitely an element of misogyny, but when I read stories about those guys, I always get the impression that they have a hard time dealing with *any* human being face-to-face, not just women.

  37. 37.

    Paul in KY

    @Amir Khalid: They are conflating ‘artificial intelligence’ with robots. Unless the robot is self-aware, etc. it is just a device & would have no emotions, etc. (IMO).

  38. 38.

    kindness

    It may not be Mz. Atwood’s problem now but how old is her SO? Might be a problem if the SO goes there.

  39. 39.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Betty Cracker: It was a trope of sci-fi for years before then. 1950s short stories, men are replacing their wives with sexbots or women replacing the husbands, think the plot of Stepford Wives.

  40. 40.

    Amir Khalid

    @Paul in KY:
    Maybe. But the IGP (that is, national police chief) seems to think that because the subject matter of the conference is SEKS, that’s reason enough to forbid it. I think the real concern here is academic freedom in this country, which should not be subject to a veto by some fucking prude in a cop uniform.

    (Edited to add emphasis.)

  44. 44.

    Betty Cracker

    @DTTM: Thanks; I’ll take a look. My main concern was about the deal being spun as a victory. I realized from the start that we (Democrats) weren’t going to score a major triumph thanks to the make-up of Congress.

    @kindness: He’s dead, so not a problem. At least not in this dimension.

  48. 48.

    dogwood

    Always appreciated Margaret Atwood, but I want to thank whoever it was who recommend listening to the president’s conversation with Marilynne Robinson. Robinson is my girl and the conversation is great.

  49. 49.

    trollhattan

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:
    My contra-contra is MoDo not getting verification on her fvcking “scoop” before hitting send. Someone needs to hold these folks accountable; sadly, it’s not going to be the NYT opinion page editor.

    Do NYT, WaPo and WSJ have a circuit rider system where their talent just travels within their tiny orbit from paper to paper? They seem to share so many similarities. How I wish we had meaningful print media from somewhere other than the NY-DC corridor (don’t look to us on the left coast, we killed off journalism here along with the wolf and grizzly).

  50. 50.

    DTTM

    Hi Betty………sorry, my Hill link didn’t work, but if you go to the site, the article is front page. For PBO, getting the crazies in the GOP not to send us all over the cliff for two years is significant……

  52. 52.

    RSA

    @Amir Khalid:

    I should note that the conference was to be an entirely serious one. The academics behind it had organised a first conference on the subject in London the year before.

    Yes. I’ve met a couple of the organizers of the first conference; well-respected researchers in artificial intelligence.

  54. 54.

    Cervantes

    @Amir Khalid:

    When it comes to academic freedom in Malaysia, prudery is the least of your problems:

    In Malaysian public universities today, both staff and students are formally forbidden, except with permission from their respective vice-chancellors, to express opinions publicly, write about, or organise or participate in forums about politics, religion (particularly Islam) and education. They are not allowed to criticise their own institutions.

    The ministry has given directives that no staff should talk to the media on sensitive issues without permission. This ban does not just include the areas mentioned above, but also environmental issues like haze.

    The Malaysian Bar Association claims that this directive breaches Section 10 of the Malaysian Constitution guaranteeing free speech.

    In addition to the formal directives, informal bans exist on research and discussion about ethnic conflict and local corruption, especially if research findings might raise questions about government policy.

    Sanctions for violating these rules and norms range from rebukes from administrators, to the loss of jobs through the non-renewal of work contracts, to prosecution in the court system through sedition laws, etc.

    The use of teaching contracts is particularly powerful in curbing free speech of academics, where academics fear they will not get extensions if they don’t carry favour with administrators.

    Malaysian academics even need permission from the vice-chancellor to attend any conference and travel outside their own state within Malaysia.

    All university staff and students are required to swear allegiance to the Barisan Nasional government, rather than the constitution of Malaysia or the Agong.

    They must promise to follow directions of their immediate superiors and the government of the day without question or criticism.

  55. 55.

    ThresherK (GPad)

    @Elizabelle: Cripes, the NYT Public Editor must be sick of bringing MoDo over to the neighbors’ after the umpteenth broken window. The little brat won’t even mouth an insincere apology over which the adult can pretend she’s learned anything.

  56. 56.

    dogwood

    @Betty Cracker:
    Robinson was born and raised in my neck of the woods. I was always a voracious reader as a kid, but in my mid twenties I picked up Robinson’s first novel, “Housekeeping” and was initially taken aback. I had never read a novel set in my own landscape. People , places, towns that were home to me. It was a weird feeling.

  58. 58.

    Mandalay

    @Elizabelle: Dowd is in the clear, and Amy Chozick is guilty as sin.

    But even worse than Chozick’s blatant lie is Sullivan trying to airbrush over it. That cover up is so egregious that it won’t go away. And the shit is only hitting the fan because Biden repudiated the NYT’s lie.

  59. 59.

    Gimlet

    Murderer!

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/video-of-cop-shooting-zachary-hammond-released_562f8de6e4b06317990f5ff6

    The past three months have been extremely difficult for the residents of Seneca, its city employees and the 45 members of its police force. While the effects of outside agitators to tear apart our community lingers, we are thankful the investigation has come to an end and shows Lt. Tiller was acting in self-defense. The night of July 26 was a tragic event for this community and I personally will always grieve for the Hammond family.

  60. 60.

    Amir Khalid

    @Cervantes:
    Indeed, the larger problem is a real-life Harrison Bergeron environment within Malaysia’s intellectual and political culture as a whole. Having said that, I am sometimes sceptical of what I read in The Malaysian Insider. Especially when, as in the piece at your link, what is essentially a letter to the editor is presented as though it were editorial content, with no hint as to the writer’s credentials. It would be nice to have some way of judging the piece’s credibility.

  63. 63.

    Gimlet

    @goblue72:

    Instead of interrupting campaign speeches and blocking bridges, if I were a BLM member I would collect for a memorial wall or slab with all the victims’ names, who shot them, and a brief description of the incident.

    This should infuriate the police and I doubt there’s a recourse to it.

  64. 64.

    yellowdog

    @MattF: Well, the protagonist is a sexbot but she is unemployed because humans have gone extinct. There is robot sex, but not with humans. It’s weird but I enjoyed it. I enjoy every word that Stross writes, especially the Laundry novels.

  67. 67.

    Amir Khalid

    @Gimlet:
    I fear that some cop, while off-duty and at some lonely hour, might visit such a memorial with a sledgehammer.

  68. 68.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    For anyone else currently obsessed with “Hamilton,” Genius.com has annotations for many of the lyrics that help you figure out the multiple musical, historical, and lyrical references in the show:

    http://genius.com/albums/Lin-manuel-miranda/Hamilton-original-broadway-cast-recording

    One of the reasons so many people (myself included) are going nuts over this show is that Lin-Manuel Miranda is using history to draw parallels to today, and making it entertaining to boot. If you don’t end up humming “The Room Where It Happens” or “Helpless” or “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story” after listening to the soundtrack, you have no music in your soul.

  70. 70.

    Gimlet

    @Amir Khalid:

    Certainly a surveillance camera or two would be part of the package. Not sure if local memorials or a national one would be more effective. Might want to add the DAs name too.

  71. 71.

    Paul in KY

    @Gimlet: I don’t see where the cop would have ‘feared for his life’ unless the young man had whipped the car around & tried to run him over (which he didn’t, as he was dead by then).

    However, NO ONE ought to try & drive off if a cop is pointing a gun right at you (as you can see he was). Gives them all the reason they seem to need. feel very sorry for family of young man, 5 seconds of stupidity ends up getting you killed.

  72. 72.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @trollhattan: I don’t doubt that Dowd was eager to publish a Clinton hit piece— being able to say that Biden thought the Clintons were unworthy of the presidency! That was moment that probably put winning the Pulitzer in the shade for her.

    Her piece on her adventures in a Colorado pot store was a pack of lies from start to finish (which only surprises me because she was so Mrs Grundy-ish about it), but because for some reason the subject of marijuana still seems to make otherwise sensible adults giggle and make jokes that a latter-day Bob Hope would’ve rejected as hack and corny, nobody noticed.

  74. 74.

    Cervantes

    @Amir Khalid:

    Sorry, I thought you’d recognize the name. He’s an Australian ex-pat who’s been in South-east Asia for decades. At this point he has some sort of pseudo-emeritus position up north at Universiti Malaysia Perlis. In other words he’s an academic in Malaysia.

    Testing his own assertions about academic freedom, he’s also been quite voluble about the disgusting state of politics in Malaysia. I thought you’d have seen, for example, the recent and lengthy article he co-wrote that appeared in (I think) the Malay Mail. Let me know if you missed it.

    Anyhow, you’re a journalist. If you find his articles provocative, I’m sure you know how to gather information to gauge their credibility — without my telling you how to!

  75. 75.

    Paul in KY

    @Gimlet: The Charleston thing was a little different, but if they are right there, pointing the gun at you, saying ‘POLICE’, the jig is up. You are caught. Accept that fact & surrender.

    EDIT: Agree no sane reason to shoot, you can catch him 3 blocks away.

  76. 76.

    Patricia Kayden

    @rikyrah: Two segments from that article jumped out at me.

    “A rigorous study by sociologists at University of California-Berkeley, Harvard University and University of Minnesota shows that corporate diversity trainings are especially counterproductive, despite being the most popular program in the multibillion-dollar diversity management industry. These trainings do not move white women or most people of color into management, and they actually decrease black women’s odds of becoming managers by 7%, perhaps because they can breed resentment.”

    and

    “’Whites see racism as a zero-sum game that they are now losing.’ That’s right, white folks think they have it worse off than black people.”

    Wowzers!

  78. 78.

    Hal

    If only the people of Wisonsin had been given one or two chances to dump Scott Walker.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/opinion/the-revenge-of-scott-walker.html?smid=fb-nytopinion&smtyp=cur

    Only weeks after giving up on his lackluster presidential campaign in the face of national indifference, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin is back to making mischief in his home state. Last Friday, Mr. Walker signed a bill to protect public officials like himself from an effective and well-established tool for rooting out political corruption.

    The tool, known as the John Doe law, lets prosecutors conduct secret investigations into possible crimes by executing search warrants and compelling people to testify. It is essentially a grand jury proceeding, with a judge rather than jurors deciding whether there is enough evidence for an indictment.

    Mr. Walker has been a target of two John Doe investigations in recent years. The first, which looked into misconduct by his aides or associates while he served as Milwaukee county executive, led to six convictions. The second involved allegations of illegally coordinated fund-raising between Mr. Walker’s campaign for governor and conservative political groups. In July, a deeply split Wisconsin Supreme Court — several of whose justices were backed by the same groups in their election campaigns — shut down the investigation, adopting an unprecedented reading of the state’s campaign-finance laws to find no problem with the activities in question. Mr. Walker was not charged in either case.

  79. 79.

    Brachiator

    @redshirt:

    There’s been chatter on the internets about robot sex and the ethics thereof. It’s silly but it will become real soon enough.

    Not really anything new, but I can understand some of the most recent discussion on this.

    One of the funniest and most insightful episodes of Futurama revolves around the warning, “Don’t have sex with robots.”

    And robots with a “adult enhancement” mode is part of the fascinating tv series, “Humans” and the movie “Ex Machina.”

  80. 80.

    Betty Cracker

    @SiubhanDuinne: I’ll be darned — I could swear I heard a relatively recent interview with Atwood (again, Rehm was the interviewer; I think it was around the release of “Stone Mattress”) in which the two were comparing notes on recent bereavement, having both lost their spouses. Glad to hear it’s not so!

  81. 81.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    @Patricia Kayden:

    Back when I worked at UCLA Medical Center, there was an actual rule that was strictly enforced that hiring managers had to show that they had interviewed a diverse slate of candidates. It literally was a checklist of X number from specific groups.

    It’s not a coincidence that the three managers of the department I worked for were an Asian-American woman (the department head), a Latino man, and a Latino woman. Companies and organizations that want diversity really do have to police it on that level.

    The other option is blind resumes (resumes with the name removed) and some companies are moving to that. I just heard recently that Pixar Animation Studios has chosen to do that, and I’m sure a lot of other entertainment companies will be watching them closely to see how it turns out.

  82. 82.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Betty Cracker:

    Well, Graeme Gibson (her partner) is a pretty well-known Canadian writer himself, so it would have been news. Now I wonder whom she was talking about.

  83. 83.

    Benw

    @Patricia Kayden: it’s both funny and sad that our hypothetical BLM Memorial Wall is already under hypothetical video surveillance to protect it from hypothetical police violence.

  84. 84.

    Poopyman

    80+ comments and nobody asks what happens if your robot smokes after sex? You people are slipping.

  85. 85.

    Betty Cracker

    @SiubhanDuinne: Maybe they were talking about a character in “Stone Mattress.” One of the stories was about a woman who had just lost her long-time husband. I usually listen to NPR in snippets in the car and might have missed a crucial transition.

  86. 86.

    catclub

    @Bobby Thomson:

    His reputation for truth telling has always kind of mystified me

    In a sane world political reporters would take this point into account when reporting on him.

  87. 87.

    Amir Khalid

    @Cervantes:
    I have read one or two of his articles, now that you mention it. I don’t find them especially provocative. They state what people here are already well aware of, and indeed some of us have already been fighting it for a long time; so perhaps it is not as much news to a Malaysian as it is to others.

  91. 91.

    Jasmine Bleach

    @Goblue72:

    Who would want to watch robots have sex? That’s like watching my toaster screw my microwave.

    That’s totally hot!

  92. 92.

    David

    A major character in The Heart Goes Last, Atwood’s latest novel, is employed by a manufacturer of sex robots. She is doing a media tour to publicize the book.

  94. 94.

    Brachiator

    @trollhattan:

    How I wish we had meaningful print media from somewhere other than the NY-DC corridor (don’t look to us on the left coast, we killed off journalism here along with the wolf and grizzly).

    What are you talking about? We’ve got the Herald-Exam …, wait no. Well, there’s the San Diego U …, no, not that.
    Well, what about the Orange County Reg…. no, no, OK. Well, there is always the venerable LA Ti …. damn, no, just no.

    Yeah, it’s just sad.

  95. 95.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Betty Cracker:

    Maybe Atwood was reading a first-person passage from the book.

    My NPR station doesn’t carry Diane Rehm, so I rarely hear her, but I do know her own husband of 55 years* died about a year ago.

    *Length of marriage, not his age.

  96. 96.

    Cervantes

    @Brachiator:

    If you’re looking, there are good things out there. Two examples: McClatchy is solid; and the Toledo Blade is an excellent small paper.

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