A useful tactic that works well in lots of situations is when you want someone to do something that they don’t really want to do, you offer them two choices: what you want them to do and something even worse, thus giving them the illusion of choice.
This is the tactic that is being employed by Them in the area of violent crime.
We are told we have only two choices, a classic either-or trap. Either we allow criminals to run rampant in the streets or we submit to mass surveillance and draconian restrictions. You object to Flock cameras recording your every move? Don’t you want to be safe?
What has made this issue so pressing is that the “justice” system has been turned on it’s head. While it was always intended to put the burden of proof on the accused, what we are seeing now is that even when a criminal is convicted against all the odds, they are still favored by the system. Ridiculously lenient sentencing, early release, letting violent felons wander around with ankle monitors that they just ignore, repeat felons walking in and out of prison via the proverbial revolving door.
Normal people see this and can’t understand what is going on but they know something is wrong. More and more of our society is taking on the look of an armed camp….
Vertigo Politix shared this on Twitter…
I just saw this on Faceberg….
People are stealing A/C components so clearly the only viable solution is to buy an expensive cage to put around your A/C. Well of course that makes perfect sense.
We are presented with a quintessential false dichotomy, forced to choose between “safety” and freedom. The flashpoint of the day is of course the Flock camera system.
The story we are fed is that we have to have these cameras that are surveilling all of us as we move around urban and suburban areas because they are just so darn helpful to the police for catching criminals, and this is important, after the criminals have already committed their latest crime. Let me restate this because it is important:
Flock cameras don’t really deter crime, they are only really effective after a crime has been committed.
They might deter crime if the risk of potentially getting caught and going to jail was a deterrent at this stage. It is not. Hood rats are in fact stupid but even they are smart enough to frequently steal a car before committing a crime. Even if they are caught and somehow are convicted, jail sentences for many crimes are so ridiculous that they aren’t a deterrent. Besides the criminal class tends to have very little in the way of impulse control or the ability to consider future consequences for their present actions.
I didn’t realize this but I should have but there is a lot more to the Flock system than “just” cameras. This is an interesting and disturbing video from Isaac Botkin at T.REX ARMS.
Flock is just one piece of the mass surveillance puzzle, and the drone thing is really concerning. Flock cameras are stationary meaning you can sort of avoid them and definitely you should not cut them down but drones? Drones are mobile and cheap, and while we don’t have Flock where I live (and they would last less than one night if they were installed), drones can buzz over without any trouble (unless someone with a shotgun sees them).
Despite all of the red flags, Flock is still widely used despite rising pushback in local communities and the reason is simple. People see endless news stories about violent crimes and mass retail theft among other urban shenanigans and want to be “safe”. Given a choice between criminals running wild and some cameras watching you as you drive (and perhaps stalking you if your ex is a cop), most normies will choose surveillance and typically give the normie caveat:
If you aren’t doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about.
My belief is that this is why we are seeing laws that are being rewritten to create the revolving door on prisons, laws that seem intentionally designed to put criminals back on the street again and again. It presents the normie with that false dichotomy between safety and freedom, and for most people “freedom” is just an amorphous concept while “safety” is quite real. To reiterate a point I have made before (A Glimpse Into Our Future):
One of my rules to live by is that if things get bad enough, people will accept just about anything to make it better (or at least not as bad)
Of course there is also the money issue. John Wilder looked at the financial incentives for the mass surveillance state: The Economics of the Surveillance State. The saying goes, always follow the money and no surprise the mass surveillance state is big business.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The truth is that there is an alternative between mass surveillance and letting criminals run rampant:
Lock up the criminals
This is how we used to do things. Prison was ugly and unpleasant. They didn’t offer GED classes and weights to allow violent criminals to get stronger before they got out. They weren’t air conditioned. Prisoners broke rocks or dug ditches and it sucked enough that most people didn’t want to go and if they went once they didn’t want to go back. For serious crimes they only went to jail long enough for someone to tie a noose and then hang them.
Take a gander at pages like CWB Chicago and you will read story after story after story of violent crimes committed by people with very lengthy criminal records, many currently out on parole for a previous crime and often committed while wearing an ankle monitor.
It is an error to approach the issue of Flock cameras as a simple either-or, either you submit to a variety of mass surveillance watching you 24-7 or you allow criminals to run wild. There is an alternative that has worked relatively well for a very long time, an alternative that has been intentionally taken off the table by people with the goal of using out of control crime as a pretext to surveil the entire population and to do so for reasons that have nothing to do with safety.
