The novelist Martin Amis wrote that modern terrorism, with its uninhibited bloodlust, is better characterised as “horrorism”. Its object is less the paralysing fear that, say, the IRA aimed to stoke, than hideous violence itself. His neologism certainly fits the killing of Lee Rigby, a British soldier, in London last week.

The murder has not terrorised the British, who have summoned their usual restraint. When David Cameron counselled against “knee-jerk responses”, the prime minister was heeded. Although “questions will be asked” about the need for new security measures, he said, the mightiest response to these attacks is to “go about our normal lives”. Britons are doing that.

But the oldest quandary in politics – between liberty and security – cannot be finessed away like this, as he is finding out. His Conservative home secretary, Theresa May, long ago drafted a bill to give the security services more power to monitor emails, telephone calls and internet use. It failed to withstand opposition from Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister who derides the “snooper’s charter”, but it is stirring again. It has advocates in the Labour opposition, including the former home secretary Alan Johnson, who says Ms May should make it a resignation issue. The Liberal Democrat Lord Carlile, who served as the independent reviewer of anti-terror laws under three prime ministers, is another supporter.

Reviving the legislation because of last week’s attack alone would be rash. It remains unclear if the powers under discussion would have averted it. And whether we give it the name terror or horror, the dark truth is that no law can ever equip the state to eradicate such violence.

But it is not necessary to approve of the bill to sense that some of the opposition to it is overdone. And it does not take a hawk to worry that, over the past decade, the civil liberties lobby has become dogmatic and sensationalist.

Liberals who show more fervour than rigour can be found in parliament, the judiciary and pressure groups such as Liberty, an outfit that proves you can get away with any claim, however silly, if you belong to the “third sector” of campaign organisations and charities. Civil libertarians grew in voice during Tony Blair’s premiership – sometimes thwarting anti-terror laws that commanded public support, such as 90-day detention without charge – and can now claim to represent the received opinion of the British elites. It therefore matters that many of their certainties are wrong.

One example is the idea that anti-terror laws betray exactly the freedoms we are trying to defend from terrorists. This assumes that what al-Qaeda hates about Britain are the habeas corpus and online privacy. What actually defines western democracy, and riles its enemies, are its basic rights – to vote, to live freely, to worship as one chooses or not at all. Protecting these by compromising other liberties does not make the UK a despotism or reward murderers.

The notion that all freedom is indivisible is a lovely thought but there are fundamental freedoms and slightly less fundamental freedoms. Pragmatic societies weaken the latter to secure the former when under threat, as they did during the second world war. If anything, the UK does it less than comparable nations such as France, a country that nobody confuses for Iran or North Korea.

Libertarians who concede this point then bring up the “slippery slope”. Some liberties may be secondary, they say, but losing them is the first insidious step to outright authoritarianism. Erosions of freedom are never reversed, and only ever expand with time. This is ahistorical. Britain has tightened security laws at many moments without becoming an unfree country. And policy does not move in one direction: wartime restrictions were lifted when peace arrived and the Diplock courts of Northern Ireland, which comprised a single judge and no jury, were abandoned when the Troubles eased.

There are other libertarian inanities, such as the habit of invoking the ancientness of certain freedoms as though menaces to public safety have not changed in character or scope since the Magna Carta was signed. But the worst argument of all is the pretence that restrictions on freedom do not even enhance security. This is merely a way of not having to do any hard thinking. Mr Blair’s plan to introduce identity cards was, on balance, a costly and bureaucratic scheme that deservedly came to nothing. But only a churl or ideologue could suggest that it would not have improved security at all. And yet many did.

Intellectually honest liberals should argue that counterterror laws can work, but at an unconscionable cost to personal freedom. They should also acknowledge that, if western security services have made it much harder in recent years for terrorists to launch large attacks, they did not achieve this by asking nicely. Their work has been helped by new powers, many of which were controversial at the time.

Mr Cameron was impressively restrained in his response to the killing of Mr Rigby. But the real knee-jerks in the immemorial struggle between liberty and security now come from the liberal side.

Good god this is retarded. It basically boils down to "Well if decreased freedom has stopped attacks you guys are the spaz cases LOL".

Quote from: Meta Cognition on May 22, 2015, 04:14:09 PM

Quote from: challengerX on May 22, 2015, 04:13:09 PM

Good god this is retarded. It basically boils down to "Well if decreased freedom has stopped attacks you guys are the spaz cases LOL".

I don't really know what point you're trying to make; I can't tell if you're misunderstanding the article, or I'm misunderstanding you.

My point is it's a really biased piece of writing.

Not only that, it's acting as if all these measures are stopping terrorism. I'm sure it's stopped several attacks, but some legislation just goes way too god damn far and there's nothing left or right wing about calling them out on it.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/21/fbi-admits-patriot-act-snooping-powers-didnt-crack/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS

Wait, when did Meta become a statist bootlicker?