{"id":1144,"date":"2007-09-26T15:46:46","date_gmt":"2007-09-26T15:46:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=1144"},"modified":"2007-09-26T15:46:46","modified_gmt":"2007-09-26T15:46:46","slug":"its_tasertime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2007\/09\/26\/its_tasertime\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s Tasertime!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I tend to be pretty anti-authoritarian by nature, and I’m deeply troubled whenever I hear about those who have power abusing those who do not. Even so, I just can’t seem to work up too much outrage over that incident that’s had the InterWebs buzzing for the last week or so, the one in which a University of Florida student got tasered<\/a> after disrupting an appearance by Senator John Kerry.<\/p>\n

The video evidence<\/a> plainly shows that police had no good reason to zap him, considering he appears to be handcuffed, on the ground, and surrounded by about a half-dozen uniformed officers. But it also looks to me like this kid was going out of his way to make a scene and was egging on the blackbellies by acting like Dennis the Constitutional Peasant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail<\/i> (“Help! Help! I’m being repressed! Come see the violence inherent in the system!”). I’ve also heard that Andrew Meyer, the student in question, is a known provocateur who butted his way to the front of the line so he could harangue Kerry, and that he had arranged for someone to film him in hopes (presumably) of getting his 15 seconds of YouTube fame (Warhol overestimated the country’s attention span, in my opinion).<\/p>\n

I think Jon Stewart probably nailed the situation when he called it<\/a>, “An unfortunate combination of police over-reaction and what appears to be student douche-baggery.”<\/p>\n

Still, whatever Meyer’s true motivations and regardless of where you may stand on the question of whether his civil rights were violated, he did<\/i> get his moment on YouTube:<\/p>\n

<\/object><\/p>\n

These days, that seems to be about all that matters, doesn’t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I tend to be pretty anti-authoritarian by nature, and I’m deeply troubled whenever I hear about those who have power abusing those who do not. Even so, I just can’t seem to work up too much outrage over that incident that’s had the InterWebs buzzing for the last week or so, the one in which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1144\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}