When you have neither the law or the facts, pound on the Taser.
(Reposted--hopefully the HTML is right this time.)

Lefty blogger PZ Meyers posts about the UCLA student who was tasered repeatedly by campus police when he failed to show his student ID during a random check. After watching the video--which is really hard to watch, what with the student shrieking in pain--nearly all of the commenters concluded that while the student had been a jerk, tasering him after he'd been handcuffed and threatening to taser bystanders who asked for the officers' badge numbers was way over the line.

Poster GWW, however, disagrees:

Sounds like guy was acting like a HHUUUUUUUGE asshole before he got tazed. Maybe even like a violent fucking dick.

So the cops were supposed to do something gentle like ... tackle him? Guess what: that's assault, too.

Man, nobody dislikes police less than I do. On the other hand, I'm not so fucking stupid to believe that screaming "Don't you fucking touch me" to cops in a public library isn't going to have some serious consequences, including getting tazed or severly bruised when the cop kicks my ass.



Several posters disagree. Someone brings up the fact that the student is Iranian, and raises the question of whether there was some profiling going on. </a>GWW, again doesn't buy it:

Are you seriously suggesting that this dude was profiled and asked for his ID? AT UCLA??? That's a laugh.

Before you throw the racist card, please bear in mind that Tehrangeles is NOTHING like Minnesota. You can't throw a sour cherry without hitting a Persian down there. There's probably more Persian cops in LA than the entire state of Minnesota. The idea that this guy was picked out for looking Middle Eastern or some shit like that is totally fucking absurd.

And before anyone throws the fucking racist card at me, I have loads of Iranian relatives, whom I love.

As the thread grows, GWW becomes increasingly belligerent, and responds to criticism by insulting other schools in the UC system, telling other posters to "suck it", and finally to "read the fucking thread, asswipe". PZ comes in and disemvowels him.; when that doesn't work he slaps a temporary ban on him.

An hour later, the temp ban expires, but poor GWW is still without vowels. Several posters have noted the irony: the most obnoxious poster in the thread is the one who thinks that being obnoxious is grounds for being zapped with a taser.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the spectrum, poster Max Udargo thinks that it's just not like when he was in school:

All I know is the boys at UCLA are a bunch of pussies. You stand there listening to that guy scream in pain like that and your response is "I demand your badge number!" Jesus, what a bunch of pussies. In my college days with my buddies, those cops would have been lucky to get out of the building in one piece.

Later, he blames it on the bio majors:

...maybe we poli-sci/econ majors are just less sissy than you bio majors. We don't blog about this shit. We throw hands. And the pigs usually respect us for taking a stand. Fuck you, pussy.


All I know is that I definitely won't try sneaking my bottled water and Luna bar into the library on my next library shift.