Fun with Tasers

Silbur is angry about the sloppy use of tasers. Silbur talks about the bro who got tasered, Andrew Meyer (no relation), and how he wasn't a wacko, but just a dissenter. A one time dissenter myself, this has given me serious pause.

On her show one day shortly after the Meyer incident, Rhodes' guest was Jonathan Turley. One primary focus of Turley's comments was especially enlightening, and particularly alarming. Turley's concern was the increasingly common Catch-22 of our increasingly authoritarian government: police approach you about some matter; in many instances, you have committed no crime at all; if you question the police -- or do anything at all that the police will later construe as "resisting arrest" -- then the police get you for that. In this manner, the police have free rein to arrest anyone and everyone. All they have to do is come up to you, for any reason or for no reason. If you do anything, if you even continue to breathe, you may be accused of resisting arrest. Out come the tasers, among other instruments of torture. If you manage to keep breathing and live, off to jail you go.
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In this manner and in many similar ways, we see how cruelty, barbarity and torture have become normalized in America. We feel no need to mention that the sun rose again this morning; it is an unremarkable, known, predictable fact, one of no significance whatsoever. And so it is now with torture and inhuman cruelty. These practices are now so common as to be unworthy of comment. The sun rises and sets; America tortures and murders, many times a day, every day, throughout the darkening years. There is nothing to note here.

This shit is scary, as James Wolcott points out. Tasers torture and kill:

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Nov. 25) - A Canadian man died Saturday, four days after police used a Taser stun-gun on him because he reportedly was acting erratically in a store, police said. He was the third person to die in recent weeks in Canada after being shocked by the hand-held weapon.

I guess I don't want to live in that country either. I'd rather be caned.