Matt Yglesias

Fembots Everywhere

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.

Gay Life in Iran

Nazila Fathi takes a look. Apparently there’s some public tolerance of transsexuals, but not of homosexuality.

The Dross

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.

A Footnote

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.

A Bit Late, But

Rosa Brooks had a great take on the Bollinger/Ahmadenijad face off a few days ago.

Tactical Voting

It seems to me that there’s no real point in arguing about the significance of the rather large +/- 7 points margin of error on this Newsweek poll showing Barack Obama in the lead for the Iowa caucuses. For something like this, uncertainty about the likely voter screen are probably going to be a bigger problem than sampling error anyway.

But even more to the point, in a close, multi-candidate race the actual method used by the caucuses to allocate delegates starts to make a big different. This method is, especially on the Democratic side, very complicated and tactical voting can start to make a big difference. This is an issue I haven’t seem much coverage of, probably because preparations for it on the ground won’t start happening until much closer to election day, but one key factor in Iowa is going to be where Edwards and Obama supporters go in caucus sites where they aren’t strong enough to win delegates for their guy. Part of what made Howard Dean’s task in Iowa so difficult was that almost everyone who wasn’t firmly in his camp was firmly against him. In DC, at least, people tend to have Hillary as their first choice or else as a third or lower choice. If that pattern exists in Iowa as well (and I’m not sure that it does) that can be a big problem for her.

Cackling

A friend who knows him well was swearing to me the other day that Patrick Healy is a really great guy, so I’ll defer to the judgment of other on that, but does the world really need closer scrutiny of Hillary Clinton’s laugh?

Contractors and Counterinsurgency

Via Marc Lynch, “Can’t Win With Them, Can’t Go To War Without Them” by Peter Singer (the one who writes about private military contractors, not the controversial philosopher). The basic argument, to quote Lynch’s gloss, is that contractors are a kind of addiction “a cheap fix which allows for poorly conceived military interventions beyond the real means of the United States.” Their use is counterproductive in counterinsurgency situations, yet we’ve organized ourselves so that it’s impossible to conduct a counterinsurgency without them.

Does Universal Health Care Make Cancer Kill You?

Betsy McCaughey Ross and John Stossel say yes, but Tim Noah says they’re wrong and notes what the study showing strong performance for the US in the field of cancer survival actually concludes:

The significant differences observed in the study resulted not from a country’s relative adherence to market principles in its health-care system, but rather from its relative wealth. “Countries with higher national expenditures on health … generally had better all-cancer survival.” Survival rates tended to be highest in northern and Central Europe, middling in southern Europe, dreadful in the United Kingdom, and abysmal in Eastern Europe. Except for the anomalous poor survival rates in the U.K., these findings track with the relative wealth of the countries surveyed.

Meanwhile, though the UK is a wealthy country, UK per capital health care spending is ridiculously low. The salient thing about the NHS in all of these controversies is not so much its quality (very mixed) but its price (dirt cheap). The United States, meanwhile, spends a ton on health care and for our efforts get a system that performs well on this metric. But we could maintain our high level of overall health spending within the context of a different financing mechanism were we to choose to do so. Indeed, given that I don’t see anyone proposing cutbacks of health expenditures to Canadian or British levels, that’s almost certainly what we will do.

The Case for Jenna Bush

Courtesy of Dana Goldstein.

Retreat and Defeat

It was back in October 2006 when I first started hearing knowledgeable western analysts suggest that cutting a deal with the Taliban might be the only way to stabilize Afghanistan. Naturally, such talk was not in favor in political circles in the US, but now it looks as if Hamid Karzai himself is thinking along those lines.

Freedom’s Just Another Word for Let’s Bomb Iran

Last week, Daniel Drezner and I were wondering what ever happened to the PR rollout for bombing Iran. Don Van Natta reports for The New York Times on Freedom’s Watch, who’s Iraq-related ads have already made a stir: “the nonprofit group is set apart from most advocacy groups by the immense wealth of its core group of benefactors, its intention to far outspend its rivals and its ambition to pursue a wide-ranging agenda. Its next target: Iran policy.” Sounds fun.

This, incidentally, seems to be one of the main reasons why widespread predictions of Republican disaffection with the Iraq War haven’t come true. A bit contrary to what most people thought, a significant segment of the Republican donor class seems to be composed of big-time war enthusiasts. Many of the GOP members of congress who made some gestures toward distancing themselves from the war are now facing primary challenges, and with outfits like Freedom’s Watch springing up everyone knows money could be made available for more.

Delahunt v. Bush

Congressman Bill Delahunt (D-MA) returns from a visit to the UN and cosigns a letter with several House colleagues:

In order to achieve a comprehensive international climate regime that includes all major emitting countries after 2012, there is an urgent need to make significant progress in negotiations at the Conference of Parties to the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) being held this December in Indonesia. You have invited representatives from the world’s leading emitting countries to Washington, DC on September 27th and 28th under the auspices of advancing these negotiations.

We are concerned that in announcing the Major Emitters Meeting, and then again in the recent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s Sydney Declaration, you have focused on reaching long-term “aspirational” goals. Given the latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which provide clear evidence of global warming impacts on all continents and most of the oceans, we need actual reductions in global warming pollution, not aspirational goals.

Indeed. Full text below the fold:

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What Ails the Music Industry?

Tyler Cowen recycles some insights from his highly recommended Good and Plenty:

In the past most people didn’t much like or listen to most of the music they bought, or in any case most of the value came from their very favorites. A relatively small percentage of our music purchases accounted for most of our listening pleasure. So if people can sample music in advance, and know in advance what they will like, music sales will plummet. This will be a sign of market efficiency, not market failure.

Right. Obviously, from the point of view of a record company executive, a “healthy music business” is one which maximizes his profits. From a more reasonable point of view, the relevant metric is consumption of music. On the one hand, you have declining sales. On the other hand, you have the basic truth that people now have easier access to a wider array of music than ever before, along with better devices on which to listen to it, and much more convenient ways to store it.

Orphaned Trusts

The New York Times takes a look at a problem I’d never considered. The moral of the story, however, is clear: any wealthy readers considering dying without heirs should leave their money to me rather than establishing one of these trusts and ending up posthumously screwed over.

Baby Bonds

Hillary Clinton comes out in favor of a “baby bond” scheme. I like these kind of plans and think the general subject of asset-building is unduly neglected. Achieving a more equitable distribution of capital ownership is going to be key to combatting inequality under 21st century conditions.

ZIP It

Given that each ZIP code in the United States of America specifies a unique state, why do you need to specify a state whenever you’re filling out address fields to make a credit card purchase on the internet? Given the vagaries of brick-and-mortar mail delivery, especially in the pre-digital age, providing superfluous information on your envelop no doubt makes things easier for the postal service and provides some chance of rescue in the event of erroneous addressing. But whatever program processes your form after you hit “okay” ought to be able to infer the rest of the information from — 04616 is Brooklin, ME; 10003 is New York, NY; 20009 is Washington, DC — from the ZIP code alone rather than giving you an error message and demanding that you fill in the blanks.

The Case for PMCs?

I should say that I agree with the spirit of Reihan Salam’s argument that the egregious problems we’ve had with private military contractors in Iraq should serve, as such, to discredit the PMC problem. That the PMCs working in Iraq operate in a legal black hole is, in my mind, a huge problem but also an eminently solvable one.

That said, I’m not actually seeing the specific compelling argument in favor of such widespread use of PMCs. The arguments Reihan adduces sound to me like good arguments in favor of a professional military staffed by volunteers which, of course, is what we have.

I do, however, sometimes feel like there may be a decent case for something like the UN hiring PMCs do conduct certain kinds of humanitarian options. It’s pretty obvious why a standing UN military force might be a useful thing to have (could deploy quickly into a crisis as soon as the Security Council authorized it, etc.) and also pretty clear why you’re not likely to see one created. One could, however, much more easily imagine the Security Council creating a standing budget that could be used to fly a crack team of PMCs in somewhere to guard a refugee camp or impose a no-fly zone. Other times, this seems like a terrible idea: does Africa really need more mercenaries?

In The Navy

This is just one hilarious slide in an endlessly hilarious Navy PowerPoint presentation about how to convince the kids these days to join the military. Read Noah Schachtman and Entropic Memes for more. According to their own data, the real issue here actually has nothing to do with MySpace or emoticons and everything to do with the fact that the war in Iraq has — correctly — made military service look less appealing to people than it once did.

It’s one thing to ask people to sacrifice and risk their lives for a worthy cause, but it becomes another thing entirely when the main mission facing the military is fruitless war that appears to be continuing mostly to salve the egos of politicians.

Amtrack

Doesn’t it seem like Amtrak ought to buy Amtrack.com — I was really confused there for a minute. And now that I think about it, given that trains travel on tracks, shouldn’t Amtrak be called “Amtrack.” The name we’ve got seems more appropriate for Denmark or something.