Lord Jim wrote:I'm going to go way out on a limb here Gen'l....
And guess that given the poster, the "reason" that will be proffered will involve some dastardly, nefarious skulduggery on the part of the Bush Administration....
That is far too myopic. Long before Shrub ever started masquerading as the President, very powerful interests wanted Americans to be subject to search and seizure anywhere, at any time, and for no articulated reason. Terrorist attacks were their golden opportunity, and they have expoited and continue to exploit it to the fullest.
It is true, of course, that those authoritarian proclivities found a more comfortable home on the right than on the left: Right-wingism and authoritarianism have an inherently hand-and-glove relationship. But the left is by no means innocent. And the driving interests are neither left nor right. Their concern is not ideology; it is power.
Search-and-seizure rights have been steadily eroded for a long time. One can see it, for example, in the Supreme Court's self-consuming standard of an expectation of privacy. The Court says that for an expectation of privacy to be recognized by the law, it must be one which society considers objectively reasonable. That contains the seeds of the destruction of privacy altogether.
Today, the government does some invasive thing which the Court finds to be at the very edge of permissibility, but permissible. As time goes by, people become accustomed to that thing. So after a while, when the government does some other invasive thing that would have been impermissible a few years ago, what "society considers objectively reasonable" has shifted. The previously impermissible thing is now at the very edge of permissibility, but permissible. And that causes the "objectively reasonable" line to shift again. And more things become permissible. And that shifts the line yet again. And even more things become permissible. Eventually, no expectation of privacy is "objectively reasonable," and the government can search anyone it wants, wherever it wants, whenever it wants, and without giving any reason.
Which is the underlying purpose.
Suppose that when those of us who are now in our forties were children, some local government had decided that it could search every bag carried onto a public-transit vehicle. People would not have put up with that for a minute. But now we have been conditioned to accept such things. And the conditioning goes on. When full-body scanners were introduced, people were permitted to shield their genitals from observation. Now, people are expected to submit to genital groping in order to board a plane. Give it a while, and body-cavity searches will be considered as routine as the e-ticket.
That ongoing shrinking of the zone of personal privacy has been engineered primarily via the right. But here's an aggrandizement of government power at the expense of liberty from the left: the absolutely asinine rule that one has no right to resist an unlawful arrest. The core of the "reasoning" underlying that rule is that if one's arrest is unlawful, one can vindicate one's right not to be arrested through legal processes.
But that is exactly false: The minutes or hours or days of my life that are taken from me cannot be restored through any legal process. The loss is irretrievable, and nothing can compensate for it. The real genesis of the rule is power: Those who have it want to ensure that the rest of us are compliant drones.
And on and on and on.
In the end, it is not about left and right. The right is the vanguard of the erosion of liberty -- and again, not at all alone, just at the forefront -- because a core value of right-wingism is the elevation of social order above individual liberty. But that does not mean that those who have the power are themselves disposed toward right-wingism; it means merely that those in power find in the right a better vehicle than in the left to advance their own interests.
Not that those who have the power have found much difficulty using the left to advance their ends. The principal difference is that those who have the power exploit the right primarily by appealing to its basest impulses, whereas the exploit the left primarily by taking advantange of its blindness to its own excesses.
There is an impenetrable morass of federal regulations concerning interstate commerce (and things which "substantially affect" interstate commerce, a label which includes things that have not even the slightest effect on interstate commerce). For Mom and Pop's neighborhood grocery, complying with those regulations is often onerous. To Wal-Mart, they are a profit-inhibitor, but they are far from onerous. So Wal-Mart exploits the onerous burden on Mom and Pop to claim that the burden should be lessened not only on Mom and Pop but also on Wal-Mart. And people quite naturally sympathize with Mom and Pop, so there is a reaction against regulation, a reaction from which Wal-Mart benefits.
In truth, of course, Wal-Mart does not give a rat's ass about what is good for Mom and Pop. Quite the contrary, Wal-Mart wants Mom and Pop to go out of business. Wal-Mart's ultmate goal is to be the only retailer of everything. And it exploits sympathy for Mom and Pop precisely in order to eliminate Mom and Pop from the market which Wal-Mart wants to control.
The fundamental difference between, on one hand, the relationship of those who have power to the left and, on the other hand, the relationship of those who have power to the right is this: Those who have power manipulate the left into supporting what it does not want, whereas those who have power egg on the right in its support of what it does want. In both cases, what those who have power want is the same: utter servility.
Reason is valuable only when it performs against the wordless physical background of the universe.
