More steps down the road to fascism: Legitimizing "Preventive Detention"

So things are really looking up in America: the mass media is now circulating an incompetent whitewash of the last great experiment herding suspect racial groups in to concentration camps; the great unwashed are running scared to an incumbent who has been endorsed by the terrorist group he is supposed to protect us from; and now the house magazine of the "liberal" Yale Law School, Legal Affairs, runs an article by a political "scientist" defending "preventive detention," one of Hitler's early, favorite tools, and a popular choice of authoritarian regimes everywhere. No doubt this is really just part of that famous effort to strike "an appropriate balance between civil liberties and security," as Professor Bainbridge reminded us. Someone said the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is also paved with some bad ones pretending to be good.

Finally, it is perhaps worth noting that the "liberal" Yale Law School magazine has chosen to publish an article defending police state tactics of a kind that one has reason to believe Justice Scalia would find beyond the pale.

So things are really looking up in America.

UPDATE: More on the Legal Affairs article from Chris Bertram (Bristol, Philosophy) here.