I'm pretty sure it was Glenn Reynolds who linked this video of a woman having a fit and threatening a Human Events photographer, but WTH, I can't find his link so maybe it was Memeorandum. I do try to be accurate in attributing links, but I also have to sleep.

Nothing pretty about it unless you get titillated by fantasies of imminent leftist ultraviolence directed your way.

Personally (and especially in terms of my bastardized theories of rights), I think there is just as much right to act like an asshole in front of a camera as there is to act like one behind a camera. Bend over and take it from the lens! Except in this case, the photographer wasn't acting like an asshole. He was simply covering an event, and the irate woman didn't like having the camera pointed at her, and probably hated photographers she thought were "conservative" and therefore evil.

Clearly, some people lose control around cameras. And clearly, they see it as the fault of the camera. (Or maybe the cameraman. I'd say "cameraperson" except spell check doesn't consider it a word, and I care deeply about the opinions of anonymous code writers.)

Much as I hate to say it, in light of the gay suicide case in New York and the well documented propensity of some people to experience more emotional distress than others (all emotional distress not being equal, of course), I expect some sort of "crackdown." On cameras.

OTOH, I wouldn't want to be photographed in the act of lovemaking in the "privacy" I still have in my own bedroom, and I don't think most people would.

But going bonkers at an event isn't lovemaking, it's hatemaking, right? And isn't it in public? Yes, but the more they blur the distinction between public and private, the more the distinction is extinguished. Public is private and private is public. Sex is politics. There is no privacy and we are all victims.

Which means that ultimately, some people -- and only some people -- will allowed to do their hatemaking in public. And if you point a camera at them, you'll be invading their privacy.

My worry here is that because the personal has become political, unless those who oppose selective privacy speak up, the right to privacy may depend on partisan political considerations.

Hope I'm just being paranoid.