There are definitely times during Ron Paul’s Meet The Press interview where you wonder how it is that Paul got to me the protest candidate while Russert is the voices of sober-minded sensibleness:

MR. RUSSERT: So if Iran invaded Israel, what do we do?

REP. PAUL: Well, they’re not going to. That is like saying “Iran is about to invade Mars.” I mean, they have nothing. They don’t have an army or navy or air force. And Israelis have 300 nuclear weapons. Nobody would touch them. But, no, if, if it were in our national security interests and Congress says, “You know, this is very, very important, we have to declare war.” But presidents don’t have the authority to go to war.

Of course, Iran also lacks a land border with Israel so unless their uranium enrichment program winds up leading to the development of a teleportation device (or, more precisely, the Heisenberg compensator you’d need to make it work) we probably don’t need to worry. On the other hand, though, you get this:

MR. RUSSERT: Let me ask you about race, because I, I read a speech you gave in 2004, the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. And you said this: “Contrary to the claims of” “supporters of the Civil Rights Act of” ’64, “the act did not improve race relations or enhance freedom. Instead, the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of” ’64 “increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty.” That act gave equal rights to African-Americans to vote, to live, to go to lunch counters, and you seem to be criticizing it.[...]

MR. RUSSERT: You would vote against the Civil Rights Act if, if it was today?

REP. PAUL: If it were written the same way, where the federal government’s taken over property–has nothing to do with race relations. It just happens, Tim, that I get more support from black people today than any other Republican candidate, according to some statistics. And I have a great appeal to people who care about personal liberties and to those individuals who would like to get us out of wars. So it has nothing to do with racism, it has to do with the Constitution and private property rights.

Now Paul is right to say that this is just an area where libertarian ideology and white supremacist ideology just so happens to overlap, but there you have it — overlap
with white supremacist ideology. And then there’s this:

MR. RUSSERT: I was intrigued by your comments about Abe Lincoln. “According to Paul, Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery.”

REP. PAUL: Absolutely. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. No, he shouldn’t have gone, gone to war. He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic. I mean, it was the–that iron, iron fist..

MR. RUSSERT: We’d still have slavery.

REP. PAUL: Oh, come on, Tim. Slavery was phased out in every other country of the world. And the way I’m advising that it should have been done is do like the British empire did. You, you buy the slaves and release them. How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans and where it lingered for 100 years? I mean, the hatred and all that existed. So every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. I mean, that doesn’t sound too radical to me. That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.

Obviously, yes, there were better ways to end slavery. That’s why Abraham Lincoln didn’t run on a platform that said “let’s have a bloody civil war!” Rather, his idea was to prevent the expansion of slavery into new territories and try to nudge the country in the direction of compensated emancipation. The South, though, decided that rather than abide by the results of the election, they would secede from the country and establish a new herrenvolk democracy committed to slavery uber alles. They, not Lincoln, put resolution of the slavery issue through the political process out of reach.

Photo by Flickr user Jayel Aheram used under a Creative Commons license

Someone calling himself “Scylla” decided to try waterboarding himself on an experimental basis to see if he thought it should qualify as torture:

I’ll put it this way. If I had the choice of being waterboarded by a third party or having my fingers smashed one at a time by a sledgehammer, I’d take the fingers, no question.

It’s horrible, terrible, inhuman torture. I can hardly imagine worse. I’d prefer permanent damage and disability to experiencing it again. I’d give up anything, say anything, do anything.

Seth Roberts read the account and made some musings about human evolution:

This shows something non-obvious: We are hard-wired to avoid drowning and like all good safety systems, the system kicks in well before damage occurs.

For such a system to evolve, humans must have spent a lot of time in water deep enough to drown in. We don’t now, of course. The sheer fact of Scylla’s post — the fact that waterboarding is torture isn’t obvious — shows this.

All this — Scylla’s initial ignorance, what he experienced and concluded — is consistent with the aquatic ape theory of human evolution and inconsistent with alternatives to that theory (e.g., the savannah theory), which assume no long aquatic phase. Belief that the aquatic ape theory was probably true was one reason I started omega-3 self-experimentation, which led to the discovery of very clear experimental effects.

Well, someone else read that post and used Google Reader’s new “share” function to flag it and then I read the post and though I already knew waterboarding was torture, I’d never heard of the Aquatic Ape hypothesis before so I’ve been looking into that (it seems that most scientists reject it for what sound to me like good reasons) … all in all an excellent way to waste some time while semi-watching the Giants play the Bills.

I adhere to a lot of outré notions about the desirability of introducing massive socialism into our health care system and not satisfying ourselves with a lot of tinkering around the edges with subsidies and regulations and just having the government provide health care to people as a public service, just as we have roads and police departments and all the rest (and just as you can hire a security guard or build a driveway, people could also do whatever). There is, after all, tons of evidence in favor of such a system — from the awesome cost-efficiency of the UK’s National Health Service, to the massive amounts of ineffective spending, to, of course, the excellent quality of the VA system.

I remember reading Philip Longman’s Washington Monthly article that he later expanded into a book on the VA system and expecting the end to be something like “so, as you can see, even though it’s not politically practical at the moment what we really need to do is adopt massive socialism.” Instead, though he waxed all pragmatic. Which I guess is fine. But still, the ponit should be made that we really ought to adopt massive socialism.

Fortunately, someone or other got the widely respected Congressional Budget Office to do some research into the VA system, leading to this (PDF) interim report. CBO Director Peter Orszag summarizes:

In general, VA’s experience underscores the potential for improving performance in a large and relatively integrated system through a sustained and comprehensive effort that involves indicators of quality, financial incentives that are aligned with those objectives, and the use of health information technology. It is important to note, though, that the combination of these factors — a large, relatively integrated system; well-designed incentives; performance measurement; and health information technology — likely creates much more substantial opportunities for improvement than any of the pieces taken by themselves. The applicability of VA’s experience to other parts of the health system, which often have a much different structure than the VA system, is therefore unclear and will be explored in CBO’s final report (which will be published next year).

In short: massive socialism works, but the applicability of its success to other models is “unclear.” Thus, the case for massive socialism. But, yes, nobody wants to hear it.