Don’t Tase Me, Bro!
This is the first time that I have incorporated a YouTube video into a post on English Dreaming, English Rain. However, it is an important video in terms of reflecting our current culture and I am posting it here despite the fact it has already become an incredibly successful meme. (Thank you to the dozen or so people who took the time to send it me). People often ask me why I bother to write about conspiracies and parapolitics. The truthful answer at its most simple is this: while 95% of all conspiracies are bullshit, the 5% that are not matter.
I have also always said that the 5% should also be an antidote to your passivity. The 5% should make you prepared to do something about those forces that conspire against all of us even if they only conspire to shoot just one man.
The video shows what happens when Andrew Meyer, a University of Florida student, does something about what he believes to be a conspiracy. Something as simple and innocuous as asking questions of a politician in a public forum. If I can be forgiven the bad pun, most people find what happens to him shocking, though as a hardened, parapolitical sceptic I am far from surprised.
Once you have seen the video, you can debate whether Meyer is a bit of an arse, but it is clear the only threat he posed was as an annoyance. In my judgement, he was just trying to exercise his mythical First Amendment rights and ask exactly the questions I would want to put to John Kerry. Pranks can be more than just entertainment; they are often a legitimate form of symbolic sabotage to the Empire of Symbols. Given the potential lethality of Tasers, it seems that asking about the Skulls and Bones is now to be considered a crime punishable by possible lethal force.
At least the coverage generated will benefit nascent Meyer’s comedy career. It will also ensure he does not spend too long incarcerated in Alachua County (the type of hellhole jail I have nightmares about visiting if I return to America). Already on t-shirts and destined to be trivialised by being his catchphrase, ‘Don’t Tase me, Bro!’ ought to be a reminder that the last thing those in ever power want are individual citizens asking for straight answers over the conspiracies that can be proven and proven to matter.
‘Don’t Tase me, Bro!’ should also serve as a warning to those in the Con-sensual resistance movement. Unless it can ditch the unproven bullshit and demonstrate the relevance of their research to the wider populace, no-one will be rushing to help them. No one is going to raise a protest when the police Taser them for asking questions about HAARP, the DRA’s Dorchester secrets or the AI component of Magistrand. The end result of allowing those we need to question to make the C-word dirty is going to be that they deliver 50,000-volts of hurt to all us annoyances with even greater ease.
I have also always said that the 5% should also be an antidote to your passivity. The 5% should make you prepared to do something about those forces that conspire against all of us even if they only conspire to shoot just one man.
The video shows what happens when Andrew Meyer, a University of Florida student, does something about what he believes to be a conspiracy. Something as simple and innocuous as asking questions of a politician in a public forum. If I can be forgiven the bad pun, most people find what happens to him shocking, though as a hardened, parapolitical sceptic I am far from surprised.
Once you have seen the video, you can debate whether Meyer is a bit of an arse, but it is clear the only threat he posed was as an annoyance. In my judgement, he was just trying to exercise his mythical First Amendment rights and ask exactly the questions I would want to put to John Kerry. Pranks can be more than just entertainment; they are often a legitimate form of symbolic sabotage to the Empire of Symbols. Given the potential lethality of Tasers, it seems that asking about the Skulls and Bones is now to be considered a crime punishable by possible lethal force.
At least the coverage generated will benefit nascent Meyer’s comedy career. It will also ensure he does not spend too long incarcerated in Alachua County (the type of hellhole jail I have nightmares about visiting if I return to America). Already on t-shirts and destined to be trivialised by being his catchphrase, ‘Don’t Tase me, Bro!’ ought to be a reminder that the last thing those in ever power want are individual citizens asking for straight answers over the conspiracies that can be proven and proven to matter.
‘Don’t Tase me, Bro!’ should also serve as a warning to those in the Con-sensual resistance movement. Unless it can ditch the unproven bullshit and demonstrate the relevance of their research to the wider populace, no-one will be rushing to help them. No one is going to raise a protest when the police Taser them for asking questions about HAARP, the DRA’s Dorchester secrets or the AI component of Magistrand. The end result of allowing those we need to question to make the C-word dirty is going to be that they deliver 50,000-volts of hurt to all us annoyances with even greater ease.
Labels: Con-sensual Resistance Movement, Conspiracy Theories, Empire of Symbols, Parapolitics, Skull and Bones, Tasers
posted by David at
8:11 PM
4 Comments:
This was a disturbing incident but as you said hardly surprising. I've watched our liberties grow ever smaller in recent years even as they lean upon the Consitituion and Bill of Rights to remove these liberties.
A country that was supposedly built on tolerance is not so much anymore. Sometimes I think Canada would be a much better place to live but I'm ignorant of the way they live so I don't really know.
I see it more of a sign of our times I guess. More and more either I'm going crazy or their reasons make less and less sense to me.
My initial reaction to this is that the guy's an actor - but then to me that's how most Americans seem to act....
“Don’t Tase Me, Bro!”
Does this resonate with the same electric clarity as “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country”? While Nathan Hale’s comment has about it more gallows bravado, shows more butt-clenching spine, Myer’s plaint butts the edge of contemporary reality.
We Uni-Stations today live in a place of suspended fears. Fear, yes, of our “enemies” foreign, who may yet again visit upon us the unthinkable, and worse, fear of our enemies domestic. That fear of those in high places, those who seem totally divorced from the political realities of their own milieu is the one about which we should be concerned. With ratings in the drink, with those in their ‘party’ who are about to go before the electorate and are trying to swim farther and farther from it’s own power-source while holding to the fractious dividing points that once put them in Command, the increasingly isolated Commander in Chief seems more and more capable of edging the States closer to the brink of some wretchedness just to ratchet up the fear-level and keep us in a state of moral paralysis.
Was Myer an arse? Yes. Did he deserve to be dealt with as he did? No. Senator Kerry seemed to be willing to deal with him and Greg Palast’s comments. But somehow the campus police at that school seem to have gotten the message – however delivered – that it was all right for them to make a public display of taking down a dissenter. That message seems to become ever more resonant even as public opinion of the message-givers diminishes.
It may well be that “Don’t Tase Me, Bro!” will become an irony-abounding cry and a comment on early 21st Century patriotism in this land of the free and home of the brave.
I had forgotten about that, shocking simply shocking, pardon the pun :(
Wait and see what happens when they introduce tasers here, do you think it will induce heart attacks in 70 year old Labour supporters?
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