Frontpage Mag
by Daniel Greenfield
June 12, 2013

Investigative work is built on selective mistrust. The difference between a state in which there are police and a police state is the scope of that mistrust. A state in which there are police will pursue criminals by using investigative techniques to profile suspects while a police state criminalizes everyone by treating the entire population of the country like suspects.

(excerpted)
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield...b-police-state/

@/Greenfield@FP123@Sanguine@algernonpj@W-Girl

Thanks for the post and the ping Palinista!

This:

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America and Europe are stuck with dumb police states in the War on Terror because anything else would undermine the illusion on which multiculturalism depends. It is why FBI training materials had to be purged of references to Islamic terrorism and why after the Woolwich attack, the London police prioritized arresting Brits who said offensive things on Twitter. Any idea that undermines multiculturalism is more dangerous than the actual terror that takes lives.

Bad policies require calculated ignorance. They require that governments and law enforcement deliberately not know certain dangerous things, like the profile of a likely terrorist. For decades, Americans have accepted that bargain, trading personal freedoms for collective security under a sensitive police state that might take away freedoms, but would never offend anyone.

The dumb police state can illogically mistrust everyone, but it can’t logically mistrust anyone, unless he’s a white male who is representative of the majority population. And so it’s stuck in a state of universal paranoia. It mistrusts everyone, rather than mistrust anyone. It randomly harasses people for no reason to avoid harassing those people who deserve it with good reason.

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A dumb police state is occasionally effective, but it’s as much by random chance as anything else. Smash a sledgehammer around the room often enough and you may occasionally hit a fly. Round up all the suspects to the gruesome murder of Colonel Windham III in the drawing room of his mansion and gun them all down and you may end up taking down the killer too.

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Thanks for posting and pinging.

Edit:

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Supporters of the dumb police state insist that there are only two choices; terror or the dumb police state. But there is a third choice. The third choice is the selective mistrust of likely terrorists, rather than the total mistrust of all Americans.

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