The Tiger at Home

This is an old story by now. Has whiskers on it. But I did want to make a comment or two about it.

I happened to think of it again after I was looking around the Full Comment blog over at the National Post.

Is tasering people inherently funny? I think it is. I’m sorry, maybe I’m a terrible person, but every time I see that video, and listen to the guy screaming, “Don’t tase me, bro!”, I have a chuckle.

Is my reaction disturbing? Probably. Charles Adler is right, it really shouldn’t be a laughing matter.

On the other hand, Colby Cosh is also right: it was damned funny, and almost every Q&A session degenerates into this sort of thing, where a blowhard just highjacks the conversation and uses it as an excuse to rant, rather than actually pose a question. (I say there should be a 100 word limit on whatever you ask.)

***

May I say, too, that this issue has a more serious side — one far more important than whether taserings are inherently funny or whether I should find it disturbing that I find this one funny.

That side is this: authorities have to be very careful with how they react to things, lest they provoke a counter-reaction.

Meyer is a loon. There is a reason why he was being kicked out. But after he was tasered, he got a lot more sympathy.

There are historical analogues in much more serious matters. Take, for instance, the 1916 Easter Rising. A solution to the Irish Question had been reached in 1914 — a Home Rule bill had passed Parliament, and preparations were being made to restore the Irish parliamentary assembly. Said preparations were suspended for the duration of the war — with the approval of nationalist leaders — because most of the young men of Ireland signed up to go fight the Krauts.

Still, in 1916, a bunch of idiots decided to set up their own revolt, because, darn it all, Home Rule for the whole of Ireland after the war (with six counties temporarily excluded) just wasn’t enough. So they took up arms against their own government in a time of war.

Public opinion about the matter was rational enough — people saw this as an idiotic thing to do, and crowds screamed and threw things at the arrestees, once the plot was broken up.

Then the government, in a moment of idiocy so grave that its like hasn’t been seen since, decided to execute the conspirators.

A pair of civil wars later, the outcome was more or less the same — Home Rule for Ireland, with six counties now permanently excluded from the Irish Free State. (Before, they had been temporarily excluded, and Ireland would still have sent a number of deputies to the imperial parliament in London — a superior solution all around.)

Because of almost criminal idiocy on the part of London, an already resolved issue became one that cost Great Britain and Ireland much blood and treasure. The 1916 people were idiots who deserved to be punished. But executing them led to terrible consequences.

***

In other words, over-reaction by authorities provides aid and comfort to the idiots of the world.

Don’t do it. Don’t beat up that demonstrator. Don’t taser that person who is disturbing the peace in a conference hall.

The consequences can be devastating.

Update: Funny thing, I had just clicked through to the whole Full Comment blog and I found this.

Wow:

Mr. Keating joined the First Kerry Brigade of the Irish Republican Army in 1920 and took part in two major 1921 ambushes, which left at least five police officers, four British soldiers and five I.R.A. members dead.  …

He served several short terms in prison for insurrectionary activity, including an aborted assassination attempt of a former general of Free State forces, and took part in an I.R.A. bombing campaign against London from 1939 to 1940. Mr. Keating spent his adult life committed to the most hard-line Irish republicanism. He said Ireland should never be at peace until the border dividing the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland — both of which he considered illegitimate — was eliminated, and the island united under one government.  …

When the Provisional I.R.A. called a 1997 cease-fire and supported the Sinn Fein push for a negotiated deal, he switched support to a breakaway faction, Republican Sinn Fein, which opposed compromise and backed the I.R.A. dissidents’ continued bombings.  …

Mr. Keating denounced the past 15 years’ peacemaking efforts as “a joke.” He appeared in a 2007 newspaper ad appealing to Sinn Fein not to begin cooperating with the police, the step that preceded this year’s rise of a new Catholic-Protestant administration in the British territory. Mr. Keating had no immediate survivors.