The World is Talking. Global Politics

Verily, I say unto thee, this shit has to stop.

Arthur Silber, chronicling the escalating pattern of authoritarian abuse, details how the Taser is being used as a tool to enforce compliance and convulse resistance, even if that resistance poses no threat, as in the case of the poor, befuddled passenger Robert Dziekanski, who met his death at the Vancouver airport:

Other accounts provide further details that amplify the horror: for example, Dziekanski had never flown before. So he undertook what was a unique, and perhaps frightening, experience -- and then he was confined to a secure area in the airport for ten hours because of a bureaucracy unable to deal with the simplest of tasks, and unable to provide an interpreter or offer assistance of any kind. One account noted that Dziekanski and his mother were within several hundred feet of each other for some period of time, separated only by a wall. Finally the authorities told his mother that he had not arrived, so she went home. Not too long after that, her son was dead.

If you can bear to watch it, here is a video of Dziekanski's final moments of life. Please note that, when the Mounties arrived and while they were there, Dziekanski was no threat to anyone (not that he had been that serious a threat before). He had nothing in his hands, and he had no means of seriously harming anyone. He was in a secure area of the airport. Like Andrew Meyer, he was significantly outnumbered. If the authorities believed he had to be "subdued," they had any number of other means of achieving that end -- means that would not have been fatal. But for the state, such calculations are irrelevant. Dziekanski was too much trouble; easier to eliminate him. The fact that he had become "too much trouble" as the direct result of the state's own criminal incompetence is forgotten.

The United Nations has declared that the Taser is more than an instrument of compliance, it's an implement of torture, which will no doubt draw derision from all those hearties in the right blogosphere who consider the anguish of victims as slapstick fun--I can picture Glenn Beck getting quite the giggle out of the latest paroxysm captured on YouTube. I'm surprised Giuliani isn't packing a Taser in a belt holster and waving it around on stage, promising to Tase a suspected terrorist should he ever get a special visitor's guest pass to Guantanamo. As Silber writes, the widespread sentiment that those at the receiving end of a Taser probably "deserved it" and a whole lot more is another sign of our moral callousness and depraved indifference.