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jorgelito:
i am confused about "his case"----what is it that is being evaluated?
at this point, what you have are ex post facto narratives each of which functions of justify the actions of the party producing the narrative.
not all these narratives are equally present in the thread.
further, i am not entirely sure of how interesting each narrative would be, precisely because they each would smooth out the problem by imposing a particular ex-post logic on it---the problem arose in the ambiguity of real-time, in what appears to be choices made at each point of what came to be a chain of such choices.
the one that bothers me is that taken by the cops--but in a justificatory narrative, the criteria that played into making the choice to treat the student as they did would be fundamentally altered.
it'd maybe be interesting to have more of the actual narratives from all sides here....and maybe links to other video materials...if folk want to treat this as a kind of ad hoc courtroom. but what i have seen from the video stuff that i have looked at is that the cameras were switched on well after the point where the situation took a decisive turn had already happened, and so i dont really know if they would help. and the narratives are inevitably going to be mutually exclusive. so i would expect undecidablity.
in the end, i am not sure but what most of the debate in this thread actually turns on different folk's aesthetic reaction to the taser footage itself--how they responded to what the cops were doing from what they could see--and how this response resonated with wider aesthetic and/or political attitudes (prior to committments) that were then routed through political positions. explaining this would probably be a routing of empathy--which party you chose to sympathise with in the footage, who you chose to humanize and what projections you were able to structure around that.
it is obvious how the lines have played out here. for myself, i could not imagine a situation that would justify the use of force like that, and so empathized with the voice of the student. you are closer to the situation and project through anxieties particular to the campus mediated by the experiences of your friends, who may or may not share those anxieties. other folk clearly empathized with the campus police, and developed positions based on that.
and i would expect that adding more information would result mostly in a repeat of the same process.
it is all very curious, this tangle that can arise when you start to slow down the process of making judgments about video footage and--by extension (with problems) situations partially represented in it.
btw: dilbert--thanks for the link: it is interesting.
totally inconclusive...but interesting.
what is with that messageboard, tho?
jesus...
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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