Not us personally. But collectively as a nation, we have let to many incidents pass by without enough outrage.We had a kid younger than a teenager tasered. Now we got the UCLA and the strike incident.
I was surprised by the lack of outrage towards the UCLA incident on this blog. We got a million diaries on trivial stuff, at times, but we just had one diary on this , and the one diary had 3 or 4 responses at best. The UCLA Bruin had a scathing editorial on the incident, but the outrage was not as severe as it should have been even at UCLA. The paper online edition had one opinion writer saying the guy deserved it and no one to counter that guy. It's like they had to bend backwards to give it balance. The guy couldn't even counter a single point made in the editorial. Very few cared about it even on MYDD. Did any Democratic Party leaders even bother to condemn it? I don't care whether the student was a jerk or not, it should be a basic accepted principle that we do not taser unarmed students, even if he is committing an act of civil disobedience(whether you feel it is trivial or not) , especially 4 or 5 times in a row, not even giving the guy a chance to recover. We had maybe 3 comments about it in two days?
The news really didn't talk about it that much. I think Olbermann gave it some space. This is a wakeup call.
Now we got this. If this group didn't have the word "union" in it, I wonder if many would be bother talking about it.
I had a diary on the UCLA torture at Wes Clark's CCN site today and got nearly 200 responses.
This guy has been publishing an excellent, in-depth series this week exposing this kind of police state behavior and the public support for it throughout our nation's history. Today's segment draws comparisons to A Clockwork Orange and how the most monstrously hostile and belligerent members of our youth are prime candidates for police hires.
I highly recommend reading the whole series started earlier this week, the man's writing style is the most cynically adroit prose I've seen in a while. http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/ (don't know him, never met him, just find his writing incredibly powerful and well researched).
Thanks man, I will look at it.
But it is disappointing at the low reaction level at UCLA and other campuses. I know it's the week before Thanksgiving, but why is there no bigger reaction? While some people did good to question the cops on the spot, I did find the student crowd on the spot to be a bunch of sheep. There were some cries of stop, but not enough. A lot of people just stared. If you cannot muster any passion to stop injustice as a teen, how pathetic are you going to be once you start a family?
Even if you believe in tasering certain individuals(I personally would condone it for IMMINENT self defense and NOTHING ELSE ), how can one say the UCLA guy deserved it? THe guy was UNARMED!!!! Geeez man. I wonder if some of these people so blase about this incident would feel if cops started tasering people for every little incident. The cops were CLEARLY in no danger. They outnumbered the guy four to one. Even after they tasered him, the student said he was going to leave. And they tasered him again.
Here is what I am going to propose in a diary I will write over the weekend:
I agree tasering has enabled bully cops to act out their sadistic authoritarian bent without consequence, but don't support a movement for all out tasering every damn thing that happens, even if it's meant to teach us a lesson about granting police too many powers over our behavior.
Someone on dkos proposed that for every discharge of a taser on a civilian, a randomly selected cop in the same department must also submit to tasering within a certain period after the incident, in effect causing the officer to realize "I'm doing this for your own good but it hurts me as much as it hurts you." Seemed like a good idea to me but didn't go over so well with the gang there.
I've often wondered how long it would be before street thugs armed themselves with tasers and started using them pre-emptively on cops (or anybody else for that matter), since they're legal for civilians. They're not easy to obtain first of all, but the idea of equalizing the playing field does have its appeal.
Your item #2 was already shockingly demonstrated in Aaron Russo's Freedom to Fascism film, which I also highly recommend. The full-length film is free on google video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid= -4312730277175242198&hl=en
Didn't read the responses at Kos, but in a sociology course I took on deviant organizational behavior, we learned that shocking/hurting someone as part of their training RAISED the likelihood that they would then go on to harm/shock persons in their care.
You are desensitizing them in many ways. The standard way the taser training is done doesn't help either. A police recruit is tased, but in front of all the other recruits, so that an "it was nothing" macho front had to be kept up.
It also brings an air of superiority to the taserer over the taseree. "I withstood this and could handle the pain. You cannot, therefore you are weak and worthless. Unlike me."
The most effective thing I've found to say to people is that a judge wouldn't be allowed to sentence a child molester to being tased as punishment. Why are police allowed to tase anyone they want without oversight or accountability?
Note: this issue is very personal for me. My husband has a seizure disorder and has been beaten by the police and almost shot for basically staggering around and drooling.
