No, it's not that it's illegal for you to post that.
However, when a company like google does this, and you add perpetual storage, accessible to everyone everywhere, in an indexible/searchable system, there comes a point where, once that scales up large enough, it's a "difference-in-kind" from you posting your vacation shots.
There's a certain point, I think, where when you do "something" (in this case, take and post a picture) 10,000,000,000 then the whole is more than the sum of the parts.
I always thought that the worst thing about the Iraq invasion is that the Americans managed to turn the only secular middle-class country in the region into something more like Iran.
Before gulf war I, Iraq had some things that were rare in the region, like, say, women working as doctors and lawyers and stuff. Free education and healthcare for everybody.
Now, what was a stable secular state (granted it was ruled by a guy who intentionally modeled himself after Stalin,) is being taken over by fundamentalists, and most of the middle class (anybody who could manage it) has fled to Syria. Syria's managed to accommodate over 1 million Iraqis.
Hmmmm... Since Bush came in, we've got Iraq, global war on terror, killed Kyoto, and that other treaty on bio-weapons. As a Canadian comedian said, "Mr Bush, all we're saying is, 'Slow down'! Rome wasn't burnt in a day!"
OK, you're right, I haven't kept up on politics in TO recently, but all I'm saying is, even if they manage to say, crush the unions, replace them all with non-union, cheaper workers at half the pay, there's no absolute guarantee that that will lead to lower taxes.
Politicians make all kinds of promises, right?
But to get back to my original point - why is it a good thing to take employees at $30/hour (again, still not sure if that's a sourced number of a "off the top of my head" number...) and replace them with employees at $10/hour?
If a large number of employers did this, wouldn't there _eventually_ come a point where your whole economy is in the toilet?
Henry Ford said something about how he wanted to pay his workers more, so that way they'd buy more of his cars.
Well, I don't necessarily concede that the city's being run "into oblivion". Deficits have happened before, and the world didn't come to an end.
All I mean is, if you take a large number of people who are making a decent living, and replace them with people who are living paycheck to paycheck, that has an impact on your economy.
People making a decent living spend more and have more disposable income. If you get rid of them in the name of lower taxes, and replace them with people with no purchasing power above and beyond the bare minimums of survival, that will have an impact on your economy, eventually. Also remember that there's no guarantee that getting rid of the unions = lower taxes. It might, but there's no guarantee that politicians will pass the savings on to the taxpayer.
And I think to suggest that it's either "smash the unions" or "the city's finances are in the toilet" is a false dichotomy. I don't live in TO (anymore), but I don't think anybody who lives there would suggest the only city government waste is due to high salaries of union employees.
Let's give a complex problem the respect it deserves.
"I want private garbage collection - this will save money."
Yeah, 'cause saving money is the number one priority, everything else takes a backseat to that.
$30 an hour (do you have a source for that, btw?) works out to be 55-60K/year. That puts someone at the lower-end of a middle-class income in Toronto. Decent living, but by no means extravagant.
Let's take employees with a middle-class income and replace them with people at a poverty-level income. What's the net effect on your economy if everybody does that? How is something like private garbage collection different from outsourcing your IT job to India?
Why are you committed to the idea that, because someone's job is low-skill, that therefore they have to live in poverty?
Another poster (can't remember who) made a very good argument that single-payer canadian style healthcare should be a libertarian issue.
Argument went like this: Libertarianism is all about standing on your own two feet. Work hard for what you get. Well, if your leg is broken, then you can't work to support yourself.
Really, I think the nerdy guys have a lot easier path ahead of them than the "less-desirable girls".
First of all, there's a lower premium on male attractive-ness, and confidence, amongst other things, can compensate for a lot.
Lots of guys who aren't considered attractive by many women can do a lot with a decent haircut, bit more care for personal hygiene, and some better clothes. How often (especially in nerd-circles) do you see some guy with black shoes & white socks, or pants that have been out of style for years or something.
Finally, the other big thing that makes a person (male or female) unattractive is being overweight, and men lose weight AND build muscle faster than women through the magic of testosterone.
So overall, men have less work to do to get to the "desirable" range than women do.
Personally though, I'm just as happy with the current situation. Most men are so undesirable (or, attractive men get less desirable as you get to know them better via personality traits) that it means average looking guys like me can do well by just not sucking as much as other guys do.
OK, if you're offended by hyperbole, then you probably shouldn't be reading slashdot. Bad for your blood pressure.
That aside, sure, ok, some people blow things out of proportion, and it's fashionable to see the current US administration as the great satan.
However, don't you think you're seeing things through rose-tinted glasses to say that "a small amount of freedom has been removed in order to insure their safety"?
The suspension of habeas corpus should be a pretty big concern. Or The Mayer Arar case. Do a search on youtube for "senator patrick leahy Arar Gonzales" and watch Senator Leahy tear a strip off Gonzales over sending a citizen of an allied nation (Canada) to syria to be tortured.
Now, OK, throwing around terms like "Police state" might be over the top, but one of the characteristics of a police state is when a government keeps a file on citizens, as if they were investigating a criminal matter, (where someone went, what they did, who did they talk to, what are they reading) when they are not a suspect in a criminal case.
Ever hear that quote from cardinal richelieu "If you would but give me ten lines in his own hand from an honest man, I can find something in that to have him hanged"?
Finally, do you really feel safer because the government is keeping track of what you're reading? The basic flawed premise of this "data mine everybody to protect us from terrorists" (who, btw, have yet to cause a single casualty on US soil since 9/11) goes like this: We're looking for a needle in a haystack, that one suicide bomber that might slip in on a tourist or student visa.
So, if we make the "haystacks" bigger, then the needles will just magically appear!
Do you see the flawed logic in the current administration's strategy? Do you really not see any threats to the civil liberties of Americans?
Look, I'll freely concede that this person was a pain-in-the-ass drama queen, but that doesn't justify excessive force. There _is_ no justification for "excessive force", or else it'd be called "appropriate response".
The only reason I mention your 'sympathies' is that you have first-hand experience with how badly people in a position of authority can behave at times.
My feeling is that campus cops aren't exactly top of the line for law enforcement. This is the 2nd story about campus cops using a tazer on someone that posed no threat we've seen on/. in the last year or so.
If this is how these guys overreact when faced with a 21-year-old, whiny, kid, what do they do if they're faced with a drunken 6'6" 240lb football player or frat boy or a coked-up trust-fund kid having a fight with his girlfriend or a homeless guy with schizophrenia off his meds? Call for artillery support?
The ability to defuse a situation like this without having to lift a finger is absolutely essential for law enforcement. If you don't like to or can't do that, then you have no place working as a campus cop.
I don't have much sympathy for the kid, I mean, if you go overtime in a forum, you're trampling the 'free speech' rights of others, right? So on the 'free speech' front, I have no sympathy for the kid.
However, on the "inappropriate police response" front, I think this should be a matter of concern for all citizens, regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum.
"The thing you're leaving out is that he deliberately provoked this, and did everything possible to bring about a physical escalation so that he could enjoy the theater of it."
Well, as a someone who was just as much of a retard when I was 21, no, I'm not leaving that out at all. I _assume_ that a whiny-drama queen (as I'm confident this person is) will behave badly.
If you can't handle this, you shouldn't be working security at a university.
I'll be the first one to concede that this kid was acting up, deliberately provoking a scene, but that doesn't mean the cops have to fall for it. They were the ones that took the bait, and fell for his tricks.
For starters, if they'd just let Kerry respond, an experienced public speaker like a US senator probably could've taken the wind out of his sails quite easily.
Again, the point isn't 'was this kid in the right' or not, the point is, these rent-a-cops used a tazer, something that's only supposed to be used if there is a threat to someone's safety, to make it a bit easier to take him out.
4 cops, with the kid on the ground, should be able to cuff a kid like this, and take him out easily. They couldn't, or didn't, and instead hit him with the tazer.
I re-iterate: When the tazer was introduced, civil libertarians were concerned that it would be used like this, that is to say, punitively. Law enforcement officials promised that it'd be used only if someone's safety was at risk. No one's safety was at risk when they hit him with the tazer.
The actual day-to-day use of this weapon turns out to be very different from what those in authority promised. And that's something we should all be concerned about.
Sure, sometimes they had to get down and wrestle with a suspect, sometimes nightsticks and/or guns were used, but, as I said before, if you can't get a 21-year-old white kid to obey you with nothing more than your voice, you have no business in police work.
If it takes 3 or 4 of these guys with a tazer to remove a 21-year-old kid who's making an ass of himself, what would these guys do against a suspect who might be genuinely dangerous?
These guys should be used as a training video for "how not to behave" for other cops.
Yeah, and sometimes, when the cop had a 3-digit IQ, they actually managed to talk people down, and de-escalate situations.
A good cop should be able to handle a 21-year-old kid, even if he is upset, without having to lift a finger. If you can't intimidate a 21-year-old college kid into behaving, then you need to find a new line of work.
What, are these cops seriously gonna claim that this kid was a threat to their safety?
C'mon, what if they had to deal with an actually dangerous person, like a crackhead, or a drunken man who's taken up the hobby of beating his wife, or someone with some flavor of mental illness? I guess they'd have no option but to shoot on sight.
Sorry, if the tazer really was the last resort, these guys have no business working in law enforcement.
He perceived that he was about to be arrested for asking a question, one that Kerry wanted to respond to.
From that point on, to my viewing, it was the campus security guards that escalated the situation. I'd also like to point out that lots of us are assholes when we're 21 years old, and if you don't like having to deal with 21-year-old assholes, then you shouldn't be working as campus security.
It's the job of police to calm down somebody who's upset, to defuse situations, not always act like stormtroopers. If you can't handle verbal abuse from a 21-year-old kid, you need to find a new line of work.
Also, these cops weren't exactly the FBI or the mounties. Most campus cops are guys who, for whatever reason, can't get hired as real cops. Sure, this guy was a jackass, but it's their job to _prevent_ situations like this.
"He got tasered for resisting arrest, which was understandable given the behavior I saw on the video."
I agree with essentially everything in your post, except the part above.
Every law enforcement agency said that the tazer would only be used when somebody was a danger to themselves/others, or when it was too dangerous for an officer to get close enough to touch, that sort of situation.
This guy was on the ground, there were 3 or 4 officers on him, and he was begging them not to tazer him.
He was not a threat, he was a pain-in-the-ass. You see the difference?
Tazering someone for resisting arrest is not acceptable, unless the person in the course of their "resisting" is a threat to themselves or others. Guy with a knife in his hand? Go for it with the tazer. But this guy was not a threat.
Also, fwiw, as somebody who has done judo for years and worked security briefly in the past, these guys were like keystone cops. They had fifty different ways they could've handled this, starting with just letting Kerry answer, like he wanted.
Y'know, as somebody who has a tale of being wrongfully arrested by the police, on a charge of "resisting arrest", I would've thought you'd be a bit more sympathetic to somebody who, to my viewing, was being arrested for asking a question somebody didn't like.
I'll concede that this guy was an unapologetic ass-hat, rude, whatever, but so what? When did we only start extending civil rights to "people we like"?
The point is, the tazer is supposed to be used only when there's a threat, when there's no other option. As somebody pointed out above, except in very extreme conditions, you're not supposed to use the tazer on a handcuffed suspect.
This is not "appropriate use of non-lethal force". This is torture, plain and simple. You had a guy who was quite rightly upset because his freedom of speech rights had just been trampled, and they hit him with the tazer not because he was a threat, but because it would make their life easier.
"Tear gas, nightsticks, and rubber bullets have caused death before. In fact, people have even died after just being handcuffed. I guess we should get rid of those, too?"
Oh, nice job on the straw man/false dichotomy.
Let's give a complex problem the respect it deserves, ok?
The question isn't "should we get rid of tazers", the question is, "is the tazer being overused, abused, or used in a variety of law-enforcement circumstances that go beyond it's intended scope?"
I can't get really excited about deaths involving tazers. Usually those turn out to be quite rare, and often there's other factors like health conditions of suspects, or drugs they were using.
How about this one for you - if low-wage/low education security guards can't be trusted to use the tazer in a responsible fashion, they shouldh't have it. And if we can't trust these guys with non-lethal weapons, how can we possibly trust them with firearms?
I don't know why this is such a hard point to get across - the tazer is supposed to be used by a law-enforcement officer against a suspect that they believe is a threat to themselves or others. Not against a suspect who is a pain-in-the-ass.
"You know, I actually agree with you that the taser was too much, but the guy went in there looking for trouble and got it."
OK, well, so what? I'll concede that the guy was a "know-it-all-college-hippie", an all-around pain-in-the-ass.
Do we only extend free speech rights and other civil liberties to "people we like"? The point is, that the tazer is supposed to be used when somebody is a threat to themselves or others. I didn't see anything like that. I saw a guy who was quite obnoxious, but jesus, if we're gonna tazer and handcuff somebody for not having manners, then we'd better start hiring a lot more cops.
Kerry wanted to answer the question, it was the security people who wanted to remove the guy. I don't see that at any point this guy (ass-hat though he may well be) was a threat to anybody. Certainly not with 3 or 4 security guards on him, which was the point where they tasered him.
I don't know how to make the point any clearer - the tazer is for use when the cops see a threat to themselves or others, not for use when threatening someone with a great deal of physical pain could make their lives easier.
These guys would make a great police training video for "how not to handle this sort of situation".
"It is blindingly obvious that this guy got exactly what he was looking for."
See, to my viewing (maybe I should watch a couple of other videos of this event), it looked like this guy had probably been rambling on/going over alloted time for questions, and then he wanted to ask Kerry why he conceded, and wanted to talk about the Skull and Bones society.
At this point, the rent-a-cops start to try and get him out. Keep in mind that Kerry wanted to answer the question, but the rent-a-dicks would have none of that, they just decided to start moving him out.
It looked like the presence of several rent-a-cops suddenly behind him when he asked a controversial (ok, let's be honest, "inflammatory") question startled him, and then the security guards made a gong show of everything from that point on.
One way or the other, there wouldn't have been any sort of scene if they'd just let Kerry respond, probably he would've shot down whatever BS argument this guy wanted to come up with, and that would've been that. Instead, this bunch of incompetent thugs created an incident where there didn't have to be one.
When the tazer was first introduced, it was sold as an "alternative to shooting someone". OK, fine, sounds good. If a law-enforcement officer fears for his or someone else's safety, sounds great if you can subdue a violent suspect without risking killing them.
This was not what we saw here. We saw someone who, quite rightly in a democracy, objected to being removed or arrested because of the question he asked a politician. When he didn't go quietly, they had him down on the ground, where he was clearly no threat to anyone, and they threatened him with, then used a tazer on him, for not going quietly on a questionable or odious arrest.
This is exactly what the ACLU et. al. were worried about with tazer-type weapons. That they'd be used not exclusively when a suspect is a danger to self or others, but when the police don't like what a suspect is doing, to make things more convenient for law enforcement by using what amounts to torture.
Most modern democracies have their roots in parliamentary democracy, which was originally intended as a way for kings to gather the movers and shakers in one place to figure stuff out. It was designed to serve the interests of kings, not citizens.
Athenian democracy was a society that had slavery as a given, they never intended to have every single human being voting, certainly not the slave classes.
Now, the original founders of the US did a bang-up job trying to make a break with English kings, but then we get the electoral college system in it's present incarnation, where it does an excellent job of _consolidating power_.
As a Canadian, I've always been a big admirer of the US constitution (oh, that we could have something so iron-clad as you guys do!) but it seems like in modern times, there's been a push to take power out of the hands of citizens and consolidate it in the hands of a few.
Saying that Microsoft was "necessary" for google to succeed is a statement that's 10% true.
Microsoft OR SOMETHING LIKE THEM was necessary for the internet to take off, but if Microsoft had never existed, as people have pointed out, someone else would've filled the niche.
But for Microsoft to suggest that the ONLY WAY this could've happened was through them is at best a misinformed position and at worst a mendacious thing to say.
"Stallman's view that you can "lose your freedom" is similar to the argument that "piracy is stealing".
My guess is you're thinking of things from the software developer's point of view.
RMS has always been more concerned with the freedom of the end user than the freedom of the developer.
As I said before, go read "the right to read" and then John Walker's "digital imprimatur", see if you still "don't get it".
The scenario in "the right to read" is not a theoretical problem, it is what a large number of people in power see as PARADISE.
Stallman is working against that sort of scenario, and every single other concern in this debate is a secondary issue. And rightly so.
If Stallman's main opponents (those who support software patents, DRM, trusted computing) had their way, a future version of Linus Torvalds would need to ASK PERMISSION from a future version of Microsoft before writing a competing operating system.
In case you think I'm exaggerating, that sort of scenario already exists with DVDs. If you want to build a product that plays DVDs, you have to ask permission from a group made up of current manufacturers.
Well, I gotta disagree. If someone has sound reasons for doing [thing x], then why does it need to be a secret?
One of the real problems of our modern world is that, in the public sphere, everything is a secret unless stated otherwise.
I think we should flip that around and say that, in the public sphere (governments and publicly traded companies, for starters...) NOTHING is a secret unless you can come up with a good reason why it should be secret.
I'm sick to death of public figures taking the "trust me, just take my word for it" attitude.
I don't understand why people (who aren't astroturfing, anyway...) are so critical of Stallman.
Go read Stallman's "the right to read". Then read John Walker's "digital imprimatur". See if Stallman seems like such an out-there zealot any more.
The scenarios in those two works are not some way-off-in-the-future, sci-fi hypothetical/theoretical concerns, they are very real concerns, and anybody who doesn't see that either isn't paying attention to things like the **AA, the DCMA, and software patents, or is hoping to make a great deal of money off of constructing the dystopian scenario in "the right to read".
For RMS, stopping a scenario like he describes in "The Right to Read" is the number one priority. Everything, quite rightly, is a secondary priority to that. It's too bad that people like Torvalds don't see it that way.
What is at stake here, amongst other things, is whether or not, 50 years from now, if a future version of someone like Linus would BE ALLOWED TO (legally or technically) write his own operating system without having to ask permission from a future version of Microsoft.
I don't see how any concern in this debate can possibly have a higher priority than that.
"True, but doing heroin doesn't give insight as to how to live your life, how to treat those around you and how to deal with life's unforeseen problems."
Yeah, like what day to offer a burnt offering to the lord, or that you should have no contact with a woman while she is menstruating because she's "unclean", or when it's ok to own slaves and from which country they should come from.
The basic message of Christ was "wouldn't it be cool if we were all nice to each other?", and you don't need to believe in a supernatural, all-knowing, all-powerful being to realize that we're all better off if we all try and be good to each other, share, keep the strong from oppressing the weak, etc. Many of these ideas pre-date Christ by thousands of years.
"Who are you to challenge the intelligence of people like Einstein, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King Jr.,"
Ah, earlier above somebody else had "false dichotomy", and now you got "appeal to authority". Talking to believers about the existence of god is like playing logical fallacy bingo.
Alexis de Tocqueville had it right, writing in the 1830's.
He had amazing high regard for how the American republic had been set up (compared to how France had their revolution, no wonder) and he said something about how the USA will remain a functioning democracy/republic until congress figures out that they can bribe the citizens with their own money...
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No, it's not that it's illegal for you to post that.
However, when a company like google does this, and you add perpetual storage, accessible to everyone everywhere, in an indexible/searchable system, there comes a point where, once that scales up large enough, it's a "difference-in-kind" from you posting your vacation shots.
There's a certain point, I think, where when you do "something" (in this case, take and post a picture) 10,000,000,000 then the whole is more than the sum of the parts.
I always thought that the worst thing about the Iraq invasion is that the Americans managed to turn the only secular middle-class country in the region into something more like Iran.
Before gulf war I, Iraq had some things that were rare in the region, like, say, women working as doctors and lawyers and stuff. Free education and healthcare for everybody.
Now, what was a stable secular state (granted it was ruled by a guy who intentionally modeled himself after Stalin,) is being taken over by fundamentalists, and most of the middle class (anybody who could manage it) has fled to Syria. Syria's managed to accommodate over 1 million Iraqis.
Hmmmm... Since Bush came in, we've got Iraq, global war on terror, killed Kyoto, and that other treaty on bio-weapons. As a Canadian comedian said, "Mr Bush, all we're saying is, 'Slow down'! Rome wasn't burnt in a day!"
OK, you're right, I haven't kept up on politics in TO recently, but all I'm saying is, even if they manage to say, crush the unions, replace them all with non-union, cheaper workers at half the pay, there's no absolute guarantee that that will lead to lower taxes.
Politicians make all kinds of promises, right?
But to get back to my original point - why is it a good thing to take employees at $30/hour (again, still not sure if that's a sourced number of a "off the top of my head" number...) and replace them with employees at $10/hour?
If a large number of employers did this, wouldn't there _eventually_ come a point where your whole economy is in the toilet?
Henry Ford said something about how he wanted to pay his workers more, so that way they'd buy more of his cars.
Well, I don't necessarily concede that the city's being run "into oblivion". Deficits have happened before, and the world didn't come to an end.
All I mean is, if you take a large number of people who are making a decent living, and replace them with people who are living paycheck to paycheck, that has an impact on your economy.
People making a decent living spend more and have more disposable income. If you get rid of them in the name of lower taxes, and replace them with people with no purchasing power above and beyond the bare minimums of survival, that will have an impact on your economy, eventually. Also remember that there's no guarantee that getting rid of the unions = lower taxes. It might, but there's no guarantee that politicians will pass the savings on to the taxpayer.
And I think to suggest that it's either "smash the unions" or "the city's finances are in the toilet" is a false dichotomy. I don't live in TO (anymore), but I don't think anybody who lives there would suggest the only city government waste is due to high salaries of union employees.
Let's give a complex problem the respect it deserves.
"I want private garbage collection - this will save money."
Yeah, 'cause saving money is the number one priority, everything else takes a backseat to that.
$30 an hour (do you have a source for that, btw?) works out to be 55-60K/year. That puts someone at the lower-end of a middle-class income in Toronto. Decent living, but by no means extravagant.
Let's take employees with a middle-class income and replace them with people at a poverty-level income. What's the net effect on your economy if everybody does that? How is something like private garbage collection different from outsourcing your IT job to India?
Why are you committed to the idea that, because someone's job is low-skill, that therefore they have to live in poverty?
Another poster (can't remember who) made a very good argument that single-payer canadian style healthcare should be a libertarian issue.
Argument went like this: Libertarianism is all about standing on your own two feet. Work hard for what you get. Well, if your leg is broken, then you can't work to support yourself.
I thought it rang true, anyway...
Really, I think the nerdy guys have a lot easier path ahead of them than the "less-desirable girls". First of all, there's a lower premium on male attractive-ness, and confidence, amongst other things, can compensate for a lot. Lots of guys who aren't considered attractive by many women can do a lot with a decent haircut, bit more care for personal hygiene, and some better clothes. How often (especially in nerd-circles) do you see some guy with black shoes & white socks, or pants that have been out of style for years or something. Finally, the other big thing that makes a person (male or female) unattractive is being overweight, and men lose weight AND build muscle faster than women through the magic of testosterone. So overall, men have less work to do to get to the "desirable" range than women do. Personally though, I'm just as happy with the current situation. Most men are so undesirable (or, attractive men get less desirable as you get to know them better via personality traits) that it means average looking guys like me can do well by just not sucking as much as other guys do.
OK, if you're offended by hyperbole, then you probably shouldn't be reading slashdot. Bad for your blood pressure.
That aside, sure, ok, some people blow things out of proportion, and it's fashionable to see the current US administration as the great satan.
However, don't you think you're seeing things through rose-tinted glasses to say that "a small amount of freedom has been removed in order to insure their safety"?
The suspension of habeas corpus should be a pretty big concern. Or The Mayer Arar case. Do a search on youtube for "senator patrick leahy Arar Gonzales" and watch Senator Leahy tear a strip off Gonzales over sending a citizen of an allied nation (Canada) to syria to be tortured.
Now, OK, throwing around terms like "Police state" might be over the top, but one of the characteristics of a police state is when a government keeps a file on citizens, as if they were investigating a criminal matter, (where someone went, what they did, who did they talk to, what are they reading) when they are not a suspect in a criminal case.
Ever hear that quote from cardinal richelieu "If you would but give me ten lines in his own hand from an honest man, I can find something in that to have him hanged"?
Finally, do you really feel safer because the government is keeping track of what you're reading? The basic flawed premise of this "data mine everybody to protect us from terrorists" (who, btw, have yet to cause a single casualty on US soil since 9/11) goes like this: We're looking for a needle in a haystack, that one suicide bomber that might slip in on a tourist or student visa.
So, if we make the "haystacks" bigger, then the needles will just magically appear!
Do you see the flawed logic in the current administration's strategy? Do you really not see any threats to the civil liberties of Americans?
Look, I'll freely concede that this person was a pain-in-the-ass drama queen, but that doesn't justify excessive force. There _is_ no justification for "excessive force", or else it'd be called "appropriate response".
/. in the last year or so.
The only reason I mention your 'sympathies' is that you have first-hand experience with how badly people in a position of authority can behave at times.
My feeling is that campus cops aren't exactly top of the line for law enforcement. This is the 2nd story about campus cops using a tazer on someone that posed no threat we've seen on
If this is how these guys overreact when faced with a 21-year-old, whiny, kid, what do they do if they're faced with a drunken 6'6" 240lb football player or frat boy or a coked-up trust-fund kid having a fight with his girlfriend or a homeless guy with schizophrenia off his meds? Call for artillery support?
The ability to defuse a situation like this without having to lift a finger is absolutely essential for law enforcement. If you don't like to or can't do that, then you have no place working as a campus cop.
I don't have much sympathy for the kid, I mean, if you go overtime in a forum, you're trampling the 'free speech' rights of others, right? So on the 'free speech' front, I have no sympathy for the kid.
However, on the "inappropriate police response" front, I think this should be a matter of concern for all citizens, regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum.
"The thing you're leaving out is that he deliberately provoked this, and did everything possible to bring about a physical escalation so that he could enjoy the theater of it."
Well, as a someone who was just as much of a retard when I was 21, no, I'm not leaving that out at all. I _assume_ that a whiny-drama queen (as I'm confident this person is) will behave badly.
If you can't handle this, you shouldn't be working security at a university.
I'll be the first one to concede that this kid was acting up, deliberately provoking a scene, but that doesn't mean the cops have to fall for it. They were the ones that took the bait, and fell for his tricks.
For starters, if they'd just let Kerry respond, an experienced public speaker like a US senator probably could've taken the wind out of his sails quite easily.
Again, the point isn't 'was this kid in the right' or not, the point is, these rent-a-cops used a tazer, something that's only supposed to be used if there is a threat to someone's safety, to make it a bit easier to take him out.
4 cops, with the kid on the ground, should be able to cuff a kid like this, and take him out easily. They couldn't, or didn't, and instead hit him with the tazer.
I re-iterate: When the tazer was introduced, civil libertarians were concerned that it would be used like this, that is to say, punitively. Law enforcement officials promised that it'd be used only if someone's safety was at risk. No one's safety was at risk when they hit him with the tazer.
The actual day-to-day use of this weapon turns out to be very different from what those in authority promised. And that's something we should all be concerned about.
Imagine a time before the tazer.
Sure, sometimes they had to get down and wrestle with a suspect, sometimes nightsticks and/or guns were used, but, as I said before, if you can't get a 21-year-old white kid to obey you with nothing more than your voice, you have no business in police work.
If it takes 3 or 4 of these guys with a tazer to remove a 21-year-old kid who's making an ass of himself, what would these guys do against a suspect who might be genuinely dangerous?
These guys should be used as a training video for "how not to behave" for other cops.
Yeah, and sometimes, when the cop had a 3-digit IQ, they actually managed to talk people down, and de-escalate situations.
A good cop should be able to handle a 21-year-old kid, even if he is upset, without having to lift a finger. If you can't intimidate a 21-year-old college kid into behaving, then you need to find a new line of work.
What, are these cops seriously gonna claim that this kid was a threat to their safety?
C'mon, what if they had to deal with an actually dangerous person, like a crackhead, or a drunken man who's taken up the hobby of beating his wife, or someone with some flavor of mental illness? I guess they'd have no option but to shoot on sight.
Sorry, if the tazer really was the last resort, these guys have no business working in law enforcement.
See, I see it a different way.
He perceived that he was about to be arrested for asking a question, one that Kerry wanted to respond to.
From that point on, to my viewing, it was the campus security guards that escalated the situation. I'd also like to point out that lots of us are assholes when we're 21 years old, and if you don't like having to deal with 21-year-old assholes, then you shouldn't be working as campus security.
It's the job of police to calm down somebody who's upset, to defuse situations, not always act like stormtroopers. If you can't handle verbal abuse from a 21-year-old kid, you need to find a new line of work.
Also, these cops weren't exactly the FBI or the mounties. Most campus cops are guys who, for whatever reason, can't get hired as real cops. Sure, this guy was a jackass, but it's their job to _prevent_ situations like this.
"He got tasered for resisting arrest, which was understandable given the behavior I saw on the video." I agree with essentially everything in your post, except the part above. Every law enforcement agency said that the tazer would only be used when somebody was a danger to themselves/others, or when it was too dangerous for an officer to get close enough to touch, that sort of situation. This guy was on the ground, there were 3 or 4 officers on him, and he was begging them not to tazer him. He was not a threat, he was a pain-in-the-ass. You see the difference? Tazering someone for resisting arrest is not acceptable, unless the person in the course of their "resisting" is a threat to themselves or others. Guy with a knife in his hand? Go for it with the tazer. But this guy was not a threat. Also, fwiw, as somebody who has done judo for years and worked security briefly in the past, these guys were like keystone cops. They had fifty different ways they could've handled this, starting with just letting Kerry answer, like he wanted.
Y'know, as somebody who has a tale of being wrongfully arrested by the police, on a charge of "resisting arrest", I would've thought you'd be a bit more sympathetic to somebody who, to my viewing, was being arrested for asking a question somebody didn't like.
I'll concede that this guy was an unapologetic ass-hat, rude, whatever, but so what? When did we only start extending civil rights to "people we like"?
The point is, the tazer is supposed to be used only when there's a threat, when there's no other option. As somebody pointed out above, except in very extreme conditions, you're not supposed to use the tazer on a handcuffed suspect.
This is not "appropriate use of non-lethal force". This is torture, plain and simple. You had a guy who was quite rightly upset because his freedom of speech rights had just been trampled, and they hit him with the tazer not because he was a threat, but because it would make their life easier.
"Tear gas, nightsticks, and rubber bullets have caused death before. In fact, people have even died after just being handcuffed. I guess we should get rid of those, too?"
Oh, nice job on the straw man/false dichotomy.
Let's give a complex problem the respect it deserves, ok?
The question isn't "should we get rid of tazers", the question is, "is the tazer being overused, abused, or used in a variety of law-enforcement circumstances that go beyond it's intended scope?"
I can't get really excited about deaths involving tazers. Usually those turn out to be quite rare, and often there's other factors like health conditions of suspects, or drugs they were using.
How about this one for you - if low-wage/low education security guards can't be trusted to use the tazer in a responsible fashion, they shouldh't have it. And if we can't trust these guys with non-lethal weapons, how can we possibly trust them with firearms?
I don't know why this is such a hard point to get across - the tazer is supposed to be used by a law-enforcement officer against a suspect that they believe is a threat to themselves or others. Not against a suspect who is a pain-in-the-ass.
"You know, I actually agree with you that the taser was too much, but the guy went in there looking for trouble and got it."
OK, well, so what? I'll concede that the guy was a "know-it-all-college-hippie", an all-around pain-in-the-ass.
Do we only extend free speech rights and other civil liberties to "people we like"? The point is, that the tazer is supposed to be used when somebody is a threat to themselves or others. I didn't see anything like that. I saw a guy who was quite obnoxious, but jesus, if we're gonna tazer and handcuff somebody for not having manners, then we'd better start hiring a lot more cops.
Kerry wanted to answer the question, it was the security people who wanted to remove the guy. I don't see that at any point this guy (ass-hat though he may well be) was a threat to anybody. Certainly not with 3 or 4 security guards on him, which was the point where they tasered him.
I don't know how to make the point any clearer - the tazer is for use when the cops see a threat to themselves or others, not for use when threatening someone with a great deal of physical pain could make their lives easier.
These guys would make a great police training video for "how not to handle this sort of situation".
"It is blindingly obvious that this guy got exactly what he was looking for."
See, to my viewing (maybe I should watch a couple of other videos of this event), it looked like this guy had probably been rambling on/going over alloted time for questions, and then he wanted to ask Kerry why he conceded, and wanted to talk about the Skull and Bones society.
At this point, the rent-a-cops start to try and get him out. Keep in mind that Kerry wanted to answer the question, but the rent-a-dicks would have none of that, they just decided to start moving him out.
It looked like the presence of several rent-a-cops suddenly behind him when he asked a controversial (ok, let's be honest, "inflammatory") question startled him, and then the security guards made a gong show of everything from that point on.
One way or the other, there wouldn't have been any sort of scene if they'd just let Kerry respond, probably he would've shot down whatever BS argument this guy wanted to come up with, and that would've been that. Instead, this bunch of incompetent thugs created an incident where there didn't have to be one.
When the tazer was first introduced, it was sold as an "alternative to shooting someone". OK, fine, sounds good. If a law-enforcement officer fears for his or someone else's safety, sounds great if you can subdue a violent suspect without risking killing them.
This was not what we saw here. We saw someone who, quite rightly in a democracy, objected to being removed or arrested because of the question he asked a politician. When he didn't go quietly, they had him down on the ground, where he was clearly no threat to anyone, and they threatened him with, then used a tazer on him, for not going quietly on a questionable or odious arrest.
This is exactly what the ACLU et. al. were worried about with tazer-type weapons. That they'd be used not exclusively when a suspect is a danger to self or others, but when the police don't like what a suspect is doing, to make things more convenient for law enforcement by using what amounts to torture.
Most modern democracies have their roots in parliamentary democracy, which was originally intended as a way for kings to gather the movers and shakers in one place to figure stuff out. It was designed to serve the interests of kings, not citizens.
Athenian democracy was a society that had slavery as a given, they never intended to have every single human being voting, certainly not the slave classes.
Now, the original founders of the US did a bang-up job trying to make a break with English kings, but then we get the electoral college system in it's present incarnation, where it does an excellent job of _consolidating power_.
As a Canadian, I've always been a big admirer of the US constitution (oh, that we could have something so iron-clad as you guys do!) but it seems like in modern times, there's been a push to take power out of the hands of citizens and consolidate it in the hands of a few.
Saying that Microsoft was "necessary" for google to succeed is a statement that's 10% true.
Microsoft OR SOMETHING LIKE THEM was necessary for the internet to take off, but if Microsoft had never existed, as people have pointed out, someone else would've filled the niche.
But for Microsoft to suggest that the ONLY WAY this could've happened was through them is at best a misinformed position and at worst a mendacious thing to say.
"Stallman's view that you can "lose your freedom" is similar to the argument that "piracy is stealing".
My guess is you're thinking of things from the software developer's point of view.
RMS has always been more concerned with the freedom of the end user than the freedom of the developer.
As I said before, go read "the right to read" and then John Walker's "digital imprimatur", see if you still "don't get it".
The scenario in "the right to read" is not a theoretical problem, it is what a large number of people in power see as PARADISE.
Stallman is working against that sort of scenario, and every single other concern in this debate is a secondary issue. And rightly so.
If Stallman's main opponents (those who support software patents, DRM, trusted computing) had their way, a future version of Linus Torvalds would need to ASK PERMISSION from a future version of Microsoft before writing a competing operating system.
In case you think I'm exaggerating, that sort of scenario already exists with DVDs. If you want to build a product that plays DVDs, you have to ask permission from a group made up of current manufacturers.
Well, I gotta disagree. If someone has sound reasons for doing [thing x], then why does it need to be a secret?
One of the real problems of our modern world is that, in the public sphere, everything is a secret unless stated otherwise.
I think we should flip that around and say that, in the public sphere (governments and publicly traded companies, for starters...) NOTHING is a secret unless you can come up with a good reason why it should be secret.
I'm sick to death of public figures taking the "trust me, just take my word for it" attitude.
I don't understand why people (who aren't astroturfing, anyway...) are so critical of Stallman.
Go read Stallman's "the right to read". Then read John Walker's "digital imprimatur". See if Stallman seems like such an out-there zealot any more.
The scenarios in those two works are not some way-off-in-the-future, sci-fi hypothetical/theoretical concerns, they are very real concerns, and anybody who doesn't see that either isn't paying attention to things like the **AA, the DCMA, and software patents, or is hoping to make a great deal of money off of constructing the dystopian scenario in "the right to read".
For RMS, stopping a scenario like he describes in "The Right to Read" is the number one priority. Everything, quite rightly, is a secondary priority to that. It's too bad that people like Torvalds don't see it that way.
What is at stake here, amongst other things, is whether or not, 50 years from now, if a future version of someone like Linus would BE ALLOWED TO (legally or technically) write his own operating system without having to ask permission from a future version of Microsoft.
I don't see how any concern in this debate can possibly have a higher priority than that.
"True, but doing heroin doesn't give insight as to how to live your life, how to treat those around you and how to deal with life's unforeseen problems."
Yeah, like what day to offer a burnt offering to the lord, or that you should have no contact with a woman while she is menstruating because she's "unclean", or when it's ok to own slaves and from which country they should come from.
The basic message of Christ was "wouldn't it be cool if we were all nice to each other?", and you don't need to believe in a supernatural, all-knowing, all-powerful being to realize that we're all better off if we all try and be good to each other, share, keep the strong from oppressing the weak, etc. Many of these ideas pre-date Christ by thousands of years.
"Who are you to challenge the intelligence of people like Einstein, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King Jr.,"
Ah, earlier above somebody else had "false dichotomy", and now you got "appeal to authority". Talking to believers about the existence of god is like playing logical fallacy bingo.
Alexis de Tocqueville had it right, writing in the 1830's.
He had amazing high regard for how the American republic had been set up (compared to how France had their revolution, no wonder) and he said something about how the USA will remain a functioning democracy/republic until congress figures out that they can bribe the citizens with their own money...