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.
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 individual’s 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 Lowery 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.