In this specific case, the above insult is directed at that girlyman Rich Lowry at National Review. (Back in the Buckley Days, I actually had a subscription to the Dead Tree National Review for many years. Now? I’d drink old motor oil first.)
Basically, Lowry is fawning all over the foul Flock company and their little snooping cameras, signing their praises to the heavens because:
There’s a reason, though, that police departments so rapidly adopted the cameras — they are an extremely useful investigative tool.
I bet they are. How much so?
The cameras routinely aid in the identification and apprehension of the perpetrators of serious crimes and the location of missing persons.
According to the Jacksonville, Fla., sheriff’s office, the cameras since 2024 have “helped solve 15 murders, 17 kidnappings, 6 forcible sex offenses, nearly 100 shootings, and 172 missing-persons cases.”
That’s over two and a half years, which, compared to the crime stats of said area, is not so great a proportion — and let’s not kid ourselves, we’ll never know how many of those would have been solved anyway, without the “assistance” of Flock..
Here’s the thing. Unlike Lowry, I’m not interested in the entire country surrendering their privacy just to help the fucking police solve a few crimes, any more than I support universal gun confiscation to help the police (I know, it wouldn’t, but it’s the principle I’m arguing here).
You can make an argument for any kind of totalitarian abrogation of rights for the same reason — the old “security vs. freedom” argument we’ve heard so often before.
And finally, we all know that this wholesale collection of individuals’ private information is going to be abused.
“Really, Kim?”
Newsflash: it’s already being abused. From Lowry’s selfsame article:
According to The Washington Post, “Authorities have charged or accused at least 50 law-enforcement officers of using license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes, including to stalk their exes.”
I know that’s not a large number: but it’s a lot greater than zero (which is what it should be).
Lowry’s idiocy continues:
But license plate readers aren’t the only offender. There are all sorts of other surveillance cameras, many of them privately owned and operated, that the police access during investigations.
We let our mobile phones and various apps track us all day long.
And something like 60 million households have Ring or other security cameras that record what’s happening on their property, and often in the immediate surroundings.
Good grief: this idiot can’t even tell the difference between private security activity and State steamrolling. Just because we (voluntarily) do it for ourselves, does not justify the Gummint doing it to us all, without our consent. And the final insult:
The only reliable way to ensure that you aren’t being recorded is to stay inside — and draw the curtains.
Fuck you, you supercilious, condescending little turd. Do you even know what you’re saying?
It’s bad enough when the Commies want to fuck us all over; but to have a nominally “conservative” commentator spew nonsense like this?
Somebody reserve Lowry a seat on the next Air Pinochet flight.
Fuck Lowry with a flaming barbwire wrapped pineapple sideways.
“Back in the Buckley Days, I actually had a subscription to the Dead Tree National Review for many years.”
Mir auch. The whole NR thing makes me sad as, back in the 70’s, they seemed the voice of pure conservative reason and I learned an enormous amount from them. I still look back fondly on many of the columnists and not a few of the articles. The years since his death have not been kind to Mr. Buckley, including everything from his vicious gatekeeping of HIS conservatism to his (alleged) crypto-homosexuality. Of course, the heirs to the magazine have not done any service to either their roots or the cause in general. Out of pure nostalgia, I’ve had the enormous Tannenhaus WFB biography sitting on my bedside for a very long time. I can’t be arsed to open it.
Screw Flock and anyone who supports them.
That said, I wish we had the same degree of outrage about phones. They’re basically personalized tracking devices that show where we go, so we communicate with and what we say. And very few know or care.
I have a modest proposal – federal funding for flock cameras outside of every polling location, active before the poll workers arrive to when they leave, doing facial recognition on everyone who enters and leaves. Too expensive? Do it in just the districts that vote communist/democrat. You aren’t hiding anything, there’s no problem, right? Then arrest every damn poll worker where illegals and otherwise unqualified voter voted.
The police dont have that much trouble finding the bad guys, the problem is the legal system doesnt know what to do with someone who has been convicted a dozen times.
I stopped reading NR after the back page columnist Florence King left.
What I was going to say. The judges are releasing violent offenders left and right and they think we give a shit about just solving crimes? The guy that killed Iryna on that train was arrested and released how many times? And that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of violent sociopaths being sent back to the streets.
Kill all the flock bullshit and allow open carry everywhere – no restrictions. The police dept should be reduced to a handful of unarmed report takers who show up, say something like “darn, that’s a lot of bullet holes”, and then arrange to have the bodies hauled off. We could lay-off 90% of the judicial system soon after.
Gee, the Patriot Act was passed as a knee jerk reaction to the arab terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. Surely that hasn’t been abused :::eye roll::::
What could possibly happen when a private company has the data. They can give or sell it to law enforcement or marketing firms as they wish. No Thank you.
A local article noted how some of these nosy cameras were destroyed. The post was on a town’s police department’s social media page. All the comments supported the modern day Robin Hoods or Boston Tea party participants.
If some group of right-minded citizens were to begin going all “civil disobedience” on surveillance cameras in general, and Flock cameras in particular, I can’t say I’d be heart-broken. Hell, I’d even go so far as to allow the patriots to hide their tools of destruction on my property between attacks.
The Flock camera craze reminds of a scene in Demolition Man.
Police Captain: How did you ever catch criminals?
John Spartan: We did real police work. This fascist crap makes my skin crawl.
Probably not the exact quote but I am too lazy to look it up right now.
NR has gotten too high on its own farts for decades since Bill died. It may have already been that way before, even though I was a subscriber and loved it. But NR always seemed to have that pompous George Will vibe of, “We always lose, but at least we’re morally superior.” Its one of the reasons I believe the old denizens of Con Inc. despised Trump so much (Trump ain’t all that conservative), because he showed a combativeness that made them look like complete wussies.
It looks like the soy-boy crowd has gotten more entrenched. Reminded of Emerald Robinson’s quote of “The NR could be sold as an estrogen supplement”. Spot on Em, Spot on.
Several communities in Kansas (Yay The Wheat State) have ditched Flock cameras lately because concerned private citizens raised 19 kinds of hell over the overreach.
Anybody remember the OUTGRAGE and official handwringing over people vandalizing traffic cams in the U.K.?
Buehller? Buehller?
There used to be a website where people submitted photos of the traffic cameras they burned out. A tire filled with gasoline (Petrol I guess since this was Brit-landia), a match, and a dead Gatso.