Who needs a unifying theme anyway?

I have long argued that giving pepper spray and tasers to police officers is a terrible idea.

I believe that by giving the State the ability to inflict astounding pain on people, but for that pain to leave no physical mark, we made it easier for human beings to inflict that punishment on the State’s behalf. Just as shooting someone from 200m away is easier to do than to stab them with a bayonet, spraying someone with mace is likely much less confronting to the police officer than it would be to hit an unarmed civilian with a billy-club.

I suspect that this decoupling of the infliction of pain and the causing of physical wounds is what allows otherwise decent people to think it’s reasonable or rational to pepper-spray an 84 year-old woman.

Could you even imagine this woman being hit with a truncheon? 

No.

But you can totally believe that she was sprayed with pepper-spray, right?

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I also firmly suspect that tasers and pepper spray (which decouple pain from intimate physical violence or danger of wounding) contributed to the creation of a society that would consider waterboarding to be something other than torture.