if, like me, you have been endlessly amused by the ill-informed rantings and sexual politics of libertariangirl, a puported 24 year-old female working in washington d.c. with a slavishly devoted conservative male following, the following revelation will hopefully cause you to laugh hysterically for at least ten minutes. maybe twenty.

libertariangirl is, in my opinion, pretty much an idiot, and the cynic in me generally believed that she received so much male attention in the blogosphere mostly due to the fact that she has a large, prominently featured photo of herself in her very pink sidebar. in the photo, she is blond, porcelain-skinned, and disturbingly glassy-doll-eyed. not what would float my boat, but whatever. to each his own. often libertariangirl would describe dates she'd been on in our fair city; in one particular post, she mentioned that she'd slept with the guy, which led to the simultaneous explosion of the heads of all her male commentors, many of whom proceeded to insult her and tell her she must not have had a good relationship with her father, etc.

well, the next fact probably disturbed her admirers even more: liberatariangirl's photo is not her own. libertariangirl is actually a male. and libertariangirl's original photo had been lifted from a catalogue for ukranian mail-order brides. here's the poor, unknowing ukranian bride-for-sale's profile.

uglylibertariandude defends himself with a few accurate remarks about sexual identity in the blogosphere:

Well I may be an unemployed man without a wife or girlfriend still living with my parents despite being over the age of 30, but at least I’m not so stupid as to think that a gorgeous young girl would be the author of a popular libertarian blog...

One thing I learned from this blog is how easy attractive woman have it. When I had a blog as my real self, no one linked to me, no one left any comments, it was as if the blog existed in a vacuum. But things were different for Libertarian Girl. Every day I’d check Technorati and discover new unsolicited links. It was like I had warped into an alternate universe where all the rules had changed. At the rate things were happening, this would have been an A-list blog in a few more months.

It’s funny how there have been some posts in the blogosphere saying that the political blogosphere was a boys club that discriminated against women, as evidenced by how few politics bloggers were women. Boy were they completely off the mark. It’s ten times easier for a woman’s blog to become popular.

i somewhat disagree. it's ten times easier for a woman who prominently features her hot photo on the front page to become popular in the blogosphere. witness: hot abercrombie chick, majikthise, michelle malkin, the exposed libertarian girl and several other blogs written by females that i normally find pretty unremarkable, but receive an inordinate amount of attention. i won't critique a woman's choice to feature her sultry photo in her sidebar or banner or whatever, but for some reason, it always strikes me as odd. perhaps i have turned sexist overnight. in which case, i am off to remedy that by beating up tommy and making him hold my purse in public for hours at a time.

Yglesias' observation that the Democrats ought to figure out what they think about globalization got me wondering what I think about it. Allow me to preface this by pointing out that it's a cry for help: honestly, I don't know jack about this stuff and am hoping someone can explain it to me. So here's my thinking.

In the past my intuition has been that globalization will mostly be a race to the bottom -- can global economic growth really occur quickly enough to offset the diffusion of wealth from the first world? Given the gaping divide between American prosperity and the rest of the world's relative poverty, it at least seems like the answer is probably "no". I understand that assuming a zero-sum situation is a classic mistake in economics, but assuming growth will fix everything also seems myopic.

I have no doubt that globalization will increase the planet's net wealth -- to the extent that this is true it seems like we have a moral imperative not to oppose it. But I'm not convinced that everyone will come out a winner; nor am I convinced that protectionism is as futile as some people suggest. I know there are important human rights and environmental considerations to be sorted out, but my thinking generally arrives at the conclusion that Americans have an ethical obligation not to fight globalization, and that we're going to end up mostly getting screwed by it.

Yesterday's adventures with AllOfMP3 has got me thinking that this problem might be worse than I'd imagined. In globalization fans' rosiest storytime fables the US stays healthy and wealthy by virtue of being wise: we export parts of that wonderful Information Economy we've got going and in return the developing world sends us cargo ships full of injection-molded plastic lawn furniture.

The internet seems to be teaching us a couple of important lessons about how this arrangement is going to work, or fail to. First, if you want to sell information it needs to be priced affordably or it'll simply be stolen. Related but separate is the idea that the market in which it's sold needs to prosecute piracy. China's the classic example of these prerequisites not being met -- foreign music and movies are too expensive and enforcement is lax, so piracy occurs on a truly mammoth scale.

But how can you price information elastically across the world when network technology eliminates all trade barriers? Obviously this problem is worst at the consumer level of IP-purchasing, but it seems like the principle will broadly scale: IP owners will be pushed toward using a single price point, and will consequently either be unable to optimally sell their product overseas or will take a huge cut in their domestic revenues. Artificial measures like DVD region codes are feeble stopgaps -- it's easy to find a $40 player that ignores them completely. And so far, intellectual property treaties don't seem to have done much good -- what incentive does the Chinese government have to protect Hollywood?

Maybe I'm too dumb to see the alternative, but I can't figure out a way to sell intellectual property more effectively than manufactured goods. Combined with a rapidly declining monopoly on high-tech innovation -- most chip fabrication happens in Asia, you know -- I'm not feeling too good about America's economic prospects. Maybe we'll invent flying cars or fusion energy generators or an amazing new kitchen utensil that grips, flips, scoops AND strains. But assuming for a moment that such a miracle doesn't occur, what's going to save us?

Well, probably I just don't understand econ and everything will be fine. But so far I haven't been able to understand why that is.

A web-only album won a Grammy last night. No label, no distributor, just fans financing the production of a recording by an artist they liked. That's cool and all, but how did the recording industry let this happen? The Grammies aren't exactly a rigorously objective measure of musical value. So why validate a business model that's going to make you obsolete? Could I be wrong about the record companies being fundamentally evil?

Of course not. This one must have just fallen through the cracks -- music industry execs are very busy fulfilling their vital role in society, you know. I'm sure they'll be on top of this next year with an ad campaign explaining how downloading music from the internet can give you herpes.

Did anybody else watch the Grammies? I always enjoy complaining bitterly about things I freely choose to watch on TV, and the Grammies make for some prime whining. I particularly enjoyed the tribute to southern rock and the academy president's annual confirmation of his organization's irrelevance. Sweet-lookin' beard, though.