5 Feet of Fury

“Who owns you Michael Coren”??

Regardless of your views about surveilance cameras, that’s an awfully paranoid, and unfair, headline for a comment about it.

Have you ever noticed that the more “informed” conspiracy theorists try to sound, the more naive they actually seem?

A radio show premised on two men disagreeing with each other requires… two men who disagree. A radio show is entertainment; Michael Coren is a radio host not the Prime Minister. He is hardly in the position to declare martial law.

I have mixed feelings about surveilance cameras. Let’s face it, as the example of crime ridden London demonstrates, they don’t work.

However, how great an expectation of privacy should one have after one leaves one’s home? We don’t call it “going out in private”, after all. Would a cop on the beat disturb libertarians as much as a camera?

I don’t see an exact parallel between a cop searching your private property without a warrant and one observing your behaviour in public.

I sometimes think it is the camera itself that gives libertarians the creeps, because libertarians consume far too much dystopian science fiction for their own good; the genre keeps its fans in a virtually cryogenic state of adolescence, with all the cranky “know it all-ness” that accompanies that stage of life.

Because they live with their parents and are mostly catered too, (and because they don’t have children of their own) adolescents also have an unrealistic idea of/concern about the level of violence in the real world.

Plus they don’t like to be “spied on” — not out of principle but because they are up to something. Like, well, many childless “smoking pot without a helmet” libertarians…