Thursday, September 20, 2007

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.

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