Wednesday, August 20, 2008

They Weren't Sensitive This Time

Another day, and another plot by those sinister Men Of No Appearance. But wait... I see a possible clue further down:
Ch Supt Andy Rhodes, of Lancashire Police, said: "These arrests and subsequent searches of the nearby premises will be conducted with sensitivity and carried out as quickly as possible to ensure minimum impact on the three areas concerned.
Say, you don't think...

But don't accuse the police of pandering to ethnic minorities. Nope, it's only certain - riot prone - minorities that get Chief Super Sensitive stopping by. Other minorities get this.

Yes, I'm sure suicide is an extreme reaction, but that's the thing - the police's carpet bombing approach makes it inevitable that vulnerable people like this will be caught up in one of their muscle-flexing exercises in low-level thuggery. Bottom line: if the victim had topped himself shortly after being beaten senseless by freelance thugs, no one would blink at connecting these two events, so why the reluctance now?

Yes, the police have to investigate complaints - even ones made by loonies - except they clearly didn't actually do any investigating here. There was never the slightest evidence against the victim, excepting the testimony of a known nutcase, but that was enough for these thugs to destroy a man's life.

Incidentally, even if you're an uber-authoritarian this should still worry you. These people are paid to prevent and detect crime, yet it now turns out that they're really spending their time giving random Chinese guys a hard time. Forget the specifics, these guys were given public money to do a job, but instead they were busy dealing with bogus make-work. How exactly is this different from dodgy builders who knock on the door to tell 80 year olds they've got some slates missing?

Back in the day, this would have been the point where I'd have written 2000 words on how the obsession with harassment of the innocent was both the perfect mirror-image of the left's belief that actual criminals were just citizens exploring an alternative lifestyle, and the natural result of their goal of decoupling the law from morality, in favour of law as the arbitrary exercise of state power. But that was then, and this is now, so instead I'll leave it to Ayn:
It is a grave error to suppose that a dictatorship rules a nation by means of strict, rigid laws which are obeyed and enforced with rigorous, military precision. Such a rule would be evil, but almost bearable; men could endure the harshest edicts, provided these edicts were known, specific and stable; it is not the known that breaks men's spirits, but the unpredictable. A dictatorship has to be capricious; it has to rule by means of the unexpected, the incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational; it has to deal not in death, but in sudden death; a state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically unable to bear.

No comments: