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TIPS as racial profiling by proxy
In the course of a somewhat rambling discussion of the ways of bureaucrats Gary Aldrich tosses off an interesting observation: “TIPS is what the federal government does when it knows what to do, but cannot do it out of fear of being accused of racial profiling.” I think there’s something to that. The Feds can’t single out Palestinians or Wahhabis for surveillance, because that would be profiling, but they can respond to tips from informers, and if the informers happen to watch young swarthy males more than others, who’s to know? It’s an application of the general rule that unrealistic principles in one part of a system lead to unprincipled realism elsewhere. The
Roman Law adopted on the Continent in the course of the Middle Ages imposed the unrealistic requirement of two witnesses or confession before a man
could be convicted. The result was judicial torture to extort confessions. Plea bargaining—extortion of confession by the threat of
draconian punishment—is a similar accommodation to reality in a similarly unrealistic modern system. We live in an age in which law is idealized, but the more idealized the law, it seems, the more lawless the reality.
Comments
“The general rule that unrealistic principles in one part of a system lead to unprincipled realism elsewhere” reveals a key aspect of liberal psychology. For example, liberals to varying degrees deny, as a matter of principle, that there is such a thing as enemies and evil (except of course for the evil of intolerance). They deny, as a matter of principle, that the use of force against supposed enemies is justified. Liberals keep looking for negotiation instead of violence, to find ways to “understand” the other side and so forth. But when such appeasement not only fails to resolve the conflict but actually makes the evil more aggressive, then the liberal is forced, as an urgent vital necessity, to use force in self-defense. But since the liberal has already denied the moral basis for force, his use of force becomes an amoral assertion of will. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on July 27, 2002 11:33 AM |