Rebalancing

I probably disagree greatly with Kamm on civil liberties, but this seems, well, balanced:

I have little problem with supposedly draconian restrictions on civil liberties that reflect a rebalancing of the system of law against a real terrorist danger. In the case of Israel’s war on Islamist militancy, I believe targeting terrorist leaders for assassination is, in the absence of an effective supranational system of law enforcement, defensible if it deters future terrorist acts.

But these policies need to be allied with a recognition of the extreme fallibility of human judgment, and an ostentatious willingness to acknowledge culpability and make possible restitution for it. [Damning facts snipped.] It is not a witch-hunt, but a response to a man lacking a sense of public duty, to demand that restitution to the de Menezes family start with Sir Ian’s dismissal.

Rebalancing is not a true newspeak word. It is appropriate to debate the ‘balance’ between individual rights and safety. That people use the word when they are consistently trying to shift the balance in one direction is probably dishonest b/c they may not actually believe in balance, but taken at face value, I don’t think they’re really misusing the term. Its not quite the ministry of love.

Tonight I heard the word “overhaul” used in the news report on the story. “Overhaul” suggests a creaky old machine that needs to be cleaned and oiled to bring it back to proper working condition. It is not a word that is appropriate for a neutral news report to use, as it is strongly biased in favour of the vandalism of constitutional safeguards.
I’ve half a mind to “overhaul” a journalist’s car with a key, but oh! that would be me being an angry blogofascist, which is so much worse than the real fascists who are keying civilization in front of our very eyes.

Well Beryl, Israel has been murdering ‘terrorists’ for some years now. Do you, when turning on the news, reflect to yourself ‘gosh, I’m so glad that Israel is at peace now and free from all that terrorism because their ‘targetted assassination’ policy was such a success’?

The Grauniad’s legal columnist, Marcel Bellins, wrote about the word a few weeks ago

Here’s an excerpt:

What does rebalancing mean? It suggests a scale, one side of which is weightier than the other. It’s a totally misleading image. The victim does not belong on that scale. The English system of criminal justice has never been, is not, and must never be, seen as a contest between two people – an aggressor and a victim. The two parties are the state – acting on behalf of us all, in the interests of lawfulness and stability of society – and the individual who threatens that well-being. The victim is, in our trial system, a mere witness, if usually an essential one.

Tony Blair, in his speech in Bristol on Friday, saw the balance in another way. Here is the accused, with too many rights; and here is the victim, with too few. So take some away from A to put onto B’s scale. That is absurd. The two are not in conflict. Their rights are not of the same kind and cannot be transferred from one to the other. Besides, how does it help victims if rights taken away from defendants result in innocent people being convicted? Where is the rebalancing there? If there is a case for removing the traditional safeguards within our criminal justice system, let the government argue it openly, and not hide behind the facade of bringing succour to victims.

Are you seriously defending the assassination policy? Man, have you gone completely insane? When I was a kid, this kind of stuff belonged to dystopian novels, no one would take it seriously.

It seems like the policy of “every time Hamas claims credit for a suicide attack in Israel, the IDF kills the highest-ranking Hamas member it can find” correlated with a decline in the number of suicide attacks taking place within Israel. Of course, so did the withdrawal from Gaza, completion of security walls, negotiations, and any number of other things, so you can’t conclusively argue correlation. But it’s not completely ludicrous.

It’s also a completely different matter from random daily shootouts with gunmen or “lower management”, which I agree are ineffective and only serve to piss people off at best.

…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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.)

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