Phyllis Bennis on Afghanistan, Marie Hicks on Women in Tech

This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump may just have been Trump-talking when he said, by way of rationale for escalating the US war on Afghanistan, that it shows “no place is beyond the reach of American might and American arms.” But it’s no joke that for elite media, there really is no alternative definition for American “might” other than American arms. In all the chatter about Afghanistan, the idea that there are other ways for a country to show strength besides killing people, or threatening to, is the worldview that dare not speak its name. We’ll talk about Afghanistan and the press with analyst and activist Phyllis Bennis. She is director of the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and co-author of Ending the US War in Afghanistan: A Primer

Also on the show: “There’s always a jury and it’s always still out”—that’s how one woman, a lecturer in computer science, described the discrimination against women working in technology, surrounded by people like the Google engineer fired recently for a memo ascribing women and people of color’s underrepresentation as due in part to “biological differences.” With their “some say/others differ” approach to the issue of structural bias, corporate media keep afloat this idea that we “just don’t know” whether or not “some people” aren’t just better suited for tech jobs than others. Except we do know; we really do. We’ll hear about that from Marie Hicks, assistant professor of history of technology at the University of Wisconsin/Madison, and author of the book Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing.


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