OK, ‘fess up — some of you know that I thoroughly detest libertarianism, that reactionary political movement that seeks to elevate greed and selfishness as a ruling principle, and I suspect one of you got me a subscription to Reason magazine a few months ago, just to taunt me. If your goal was to persuade me to come over to the side of unbridled anti-social self-centeredness, you failed. The issue comes, I glance through it, find a few little bits and pieces I can agree with, but because they’re all imbedded in this thick tarry fecal sludge of libertarianism, I end up throwing the whole thing away in disgust.

The issue I got today was no exception. The cover story: Ron Paul. Bleh.

I disliked Ron Paul before I learned he was a quack, before I heard him deny evolution, before I learned he was an enabler for neo-nazis. I rejected him when I first read about his proposed policies, the ones he isn’t embarrassed to make public, and saw that he was promoting the same garbage my relatives in the John Birch Society were peddling when I was a young man: isolationism, anti-government, anti-immigrant, generalized hatred of the other and a blind refusal to recognize that culture matters.

The mostly laudatory article in Reason confirms my opinion.

…it’s all classic Ron Paul: Get rid of the income tax and replace it with nothing; find the money to support those dependent on Social Security and Medicare by shutting down the worldwide empire, while giving the young a path out of those programs; don’t pass a draft; have a foreign policy of friendship and trade, not wars and subsidies. He attacks the drug war … one of his biggest applause lines, to my astonishment, involves getting rid of the Federal Reserve.

I actually approve of some of that, like ending the drive to empire and the drug war. The John Birchers of my youth pushed the same agenda, but then you dig a little deeper, and you find the rotting core of their reasoning.

He wants tougher border enforcement, including a border wall; he wants to eliminate birthright citizenship; and he wants to end the public subsidies that might attract illegal immigrants.

Ron Paul isn’t just a small-government obsessive: he’s a no-government radical. And at the same time he wants every positive function of government to vanish, he wants what amounts to a police state in place to keep the rest of the world out, all out of fear of those strangers with different customs and ideas.

So, please, whoever you are: don’t renew my subscription to that awful magazine, and please, please don’t make me live in a Ron Paul America.

One little post about waterboarding seems to have stirred up the mob, but at least the majority seem to agree that it is torture. How could it not be? It’s a process for causing pain and suffering, nothing more. At least the commenters here, even the ones I disagree with most strongly, are more honest than our politicians, many of whom seem to be in a state of denial.

But then the argument becomes whether torture is a useful procedure. I’m going to surprise some people and agree that torture is an extremely powerful tool. It’s just useless for gathering information. There’s just no way you can trust information gotten while ripping somebody’s fingernails off with a pair of pliers — they’ll scream anything to get you to stop.

Here is all that torture is good for: inspiring fear in a population. If you want it widely known that your ruling regime is utterly ruthless and doesn’t care about individuals, all you have to do is scoop up random people suspected of anti-government activities, hold them for a few weeks, and return them as shattered wrecks with mangled limbs, while treating the monsters who would do such a thing as respected members of the ruling clique, who are immune from legal prosecution. The message gets out fast that one does not cross the government.

So, yeah, if you’re a tyrant in Uzbekistan who is holding control through force of arms, fear is a useful part of the apparatus of control, and torture is a great idea, as are barbaric executions, heads on pikes, and bullets to the back of the head.

When the US government announces it’s support for torture, they aren’t talking about intelligence gathering: they are simply saying “Fear us.” They are taking the first step on the road to tyranny.

The real problem is that fear isn’t a good tool to use in a democratic society. We are supposed to be shareholders in our government; when a process of oppression is endorsed by our legislators and president, we should recognize that they are trying to set themselves apart from the ordinary citizenry, and it’s time to rebel…before the goon squads come to your neighborhood. Anyone who supports torture is a traitor to the democratic form of government, and should be voted out of office, if not impeached.

And I know some are going to crawl out of the woodwork to claim it’s OK in this case because the US is mainly trying to torture non-citizens, outsiders and foreigners — but then what it represents is an announcement to the rest of the world that the American superpower is not planning to be a benevolent member of the community of nations.

Someone was willing to try waterboarding on himself — he was in complete control, but he still found it a terrifying experience.

Now we just need to get all our representatives who claim it is not torture to try it themselves.

Well, they’ve got one Republican and one Democratic congressman to agree to co-chair a presidential debate on science, which is good news. The framework for the debate is coming together…now all they need is some debaters.

This is no way to run a country.

Yeah, they’re already pouring in: everyone has a list of the best or worst of 2007. Most I couldn’t care less about, but the Beast’s 50 most loathsome people in America is at least primo grade-A disgust.

The winners in this year’s list weren’t just predictable, they were inevitable.

This would be an ordinary photo if it were a young girl and her father or grandfather.

But no… they’re a ‘couple’.

He’s forty, she’s eleven. And they are a couple – the Afghan man Mohammed F.* and the child Ghulam H.*. “We needed the money”, Ghulam’s parents said. Faiz claims he is going to send her to school. But the women of Damarda village in Afghanistan’s Ghor province know better: “Our men don’t want educated women.” They predict that Ghulam will be married within a few weeks after her engagement in 2006, so as to bear children for Faiz.

I guess pedophiles in Afghanistan have no shame. It’s tragic that that girl has just been condemned to a lifetime in the kitchen and the bedroom, something between being a slave and a pet.

I did not bite the head off that chicken.

Popular Mechanics has sorted through the various presidential candidates web sites for information on their stance on various science-relevant issues (and on gun control…how that ended up in their matrix is a mystery, and I presume there is just some gun fanatic on their staff). They have produced a
table listing various science issues for each candidate with check marks indicating whether they have declared anything on the subject. You can’t get their positions from the table — a check just means there is more information available — and you have to click through each to figure out what they’re saying.

Right away you’ll notice that pretty much everyone is ignoring space technology (sorry, Phil). The Republicans have little interest in science education, and when you click through, they’re usually just mouthing platitudes, like “encourage students to pursue science careers”. The Democrats are much, much better — they make more points and offer some specifics. Clinton wants to restore the OTA and improve the science advisor’s access, as does Edwards; Edwards also want to increase NIH and NSF funding and remove research restrictions, and invest more in teacher training and pay. Obama wants to double research funding. Richardson wants to hire and train 100,000 new math and science teachers.

Anyway, it’s a useful guide to what the politicians say they want to do, and gives a peek into their priorities. It looks like if you’re pro-science, you ought to be a Democrat; if you’re pro-gun, you need to vote Republican, or for John Edwards.