Comments on: Rebalancing

By: cm

cm — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 00:51:30 +0000

Where I work, “rebalancing” or “balancing” are euphemisms for offshoring or domestic staff cuts, depending on the context. “Restructuring” is so out.

By: SamChevre

SamChevre — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 17:20:28 +0000

Civil liberties are not the sort of things that have a natural tendency to get out of whack and need to be tweaked and rebalanced periodically.

Daniel, I disagree. It seems to me that civil liberties are the sort of thing that both tends to get out of whack (e.g., the “War on Drugs”, RICO, “financial security” (which means financial transactions that are private are illegal)) and tends to be realized to have been out of whack (abolition, Civil Rights movement, decriminalization of sodomy.)

By: Beryl

Beryl — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 15:39:46 +0000

To accept this as a fact we’d have to know what exactly is going on there, don’t we?

I’m surprised you haven’t already enlightened us. (Seeing as this is considerably off topic, I’ll desist from further commenting.)

By: Bernard Yomtov

Bernard Yomtov — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 15:22:01 +0000

Civil liberties are not the sort of things that have a natural tendency to get out of whack and need to be tweaked and rebalanced periodically.

I would have thought the opposite.

By: abb1

abb1 — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 15:15:14 +0000

Beryl, I am aware of these events, but you used them to assert that soft approach doesn’t prevent terrorism. To accept this as a fact we’d have to know what exactly is going on there, don’t we?

By: Beryl

Beryl — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 14:42:36 +0000

Beryl, I don’t know much about Indonesia and the causes of muslim terrorism there… Perhaps you could educate me on this, unless you just being rhetorical here.

I find it hard to believe that someone as adept with Google and Wikipedia (hint: Oct. 12, 2002 and Oct. 1, 2005) as you are, isn’t being rhetorical himself.

By: abb1

abb1 — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 07:15:35 +0000

Beryl, I don’t know much about Indonesia and the causes of muslim terrorism there – whether they are being killed or accomodated or something else. Perhaps you could educate me on this, unless you just being rhetorical here.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 06:30:17 +0000

Bernard: this is exactly why it’s Unspeak. Civil liberties are not the sort of things that have a natural tendency to get out of whack and need to be tweaked and rebalanced periodically.

By: Bernard Yomtov

Bernard Yomtov — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 02:08:51 +0000

I don’t know about British ministers, but “rebalancing” is a fairly common financial term, used in discussions of investment portfolios. The general idea is that an investor has a desired allocation of assets among, say, stocks, bonds, and cash. Over time, as investments perform in various ways, the portfolio is no longer allocated in the desired proportions and the investor may “rebalance” it.

You may not like the word, but it’s been around a while. More interesting, maybe, for the current discussion, is that it describes not a needed change but a return to a previous arrangement deemed more desirable than the current one.

By: matt d

matt d — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 01:26:31 +0000

I think it qualifies as unspeak because ‘RE-balancing’ is redundant.
What you want to do is balance two things. If they’re already balanced, then you don’t need to re-balanace them. If, on the other hand, they’re NOT balanced, then you’re balancing them, not re-balancing them.

By: Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 01:03:03 +0000

Legal scholars in America tend to talk about civil rights as if they were all a bunch of unfortunate anachronisms that have to be worked around for the time being. When is the last time you heard somebody suggest that the protection of individual rights should be enhanced to “balance’ the state’s greatly increased technical means to invade privacy?

Possible example: let us establish the absolute right of people to make legal political comments on the internet without fear of losing their jobs as a consequence. Let us extend the expectation of privacy to cover cell phones.

By: Brett Bellmore

Brett Bellmore — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 23:25:48 +0000

“In U.S. Constitutional jurisprudence, the interpretation and application of Constitutional rights has always involved “balancing” the rights of the individual against the interests of the state.”

Which is really weird, of course, when you consider that the Bill of Rights tends to talk about our rights in rather absolutist terms. “Congress shall make no law…”, “shall not be infringed”, “in all criminal prosecutions”.

Why, you’d almost think the courts had decided that it was ok to violate the Constitution if you had what they think is a good reason for doing so…

By: Brendan

Brendan — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 22:40:11 +0000

Yes Beryl the UK’s targetted assassinations of Sinn Feinn/IRA leaders was a huge success in destroying Irish terrorism. Not to mention their invasion of Ireland and the United States, which did so much to destroy the terrorist infrastructure of that organisation. Far more succesful than Israel’s ‘dialogue above all else’ and ‘bringing the terrorists into politics’ strategy. I stand corrected.

By: Beryl

Beryl — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 22:36:25 +0000

Abb1,

It would seem that even if, as Brendan claims, killing terrorists leads to terrorism (highly debatable and certainly not logically necessary), it in no way follows that not killing them prevents terrorism. To use your style of argument: just ask the people in, say, Bali.

By: abb1

abb1 — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 22:04:17 +0000

…how, exactly, “murdering alleged terrorists… leads to… terrorist acts”

Beryl, turn on your TV and watch a scene of a funeral procession of an assassinated Palestinian. Watch it for 30 seconds. If you still don’t understand, well…