The Murder of George Floyd and the Response To It

[Túrin Turambar]

No.

[Frelga]

To recap - a group of people in no particular position of power had a voluntary event expressing an opinion with which you disagree. This must necessarily mean that the entire movement, in the broadest possible sense, share this opinion and indeed it defines and negates the entire movement.

A Vulcan might find that illogical.

[yovargas]

This must necessarily mean that the entire movement, in the broadest possible sense, share this opinion and indeed it defines and negates the entire movement.

I like the part where you completely ignore the actual words that he said so that you could instead put words in his mouth.

[Inanna]

Who is the audience for this workshop? It sounds, well, stupid.

It was run by UW-Madison, and advertised to faculty and students.

Oh gawd. That’s just awful.

[RoseMorninStar]

Was it one of these? UWM Diversity forum 2020

[Inanna]

From that forum, something really good:

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo is utterly decimating the defense argument about the bystanders in his testimony right now.

I'm still cautiously pessimistic about the ultimate outcome of the trial, but I've never heard testimony like the Chief is giving today and the Lieutenant gave on Friday in a trial of an officer accused of misconduct.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Probably the most important witness in the entire trial is testifying now. The Hennepin County Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Andrew Baker, who performed George Floyd's autopsy. Unlike the other expert witnesses who have testified clearly that Mr. Floyd's cause of death was Chauvin's actions, Dr. Baker is not hired by the prosecution. He independently determined that the cause of death was "cardiopulmonary arrest" that occurred during "law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression" but made no specific mention of asphyxiation as a cause of death.

[elengil]

https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dm3m/ ... raying-him

[Voronwë the Faithful]

And another black man killed by police outside Minneapolis under questionable circumstances, leading to more protests.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/12/us/brook ... index.html

On a brighter note, Maryland has passed a sweeping package of police reform laws, overriding the veto of moderate Republican governor Larry Hogan.

https://www.baltimoresun.com/politics/b ... story.html

[Dave_LF]

And another black man killed by police outside Minneapolis under questionable circumstances, leading to more protests.

"Protests"

Walmart employee Thomas (who declined to give his last name) picked up items looted and left outside of Walmart. “All of the big screen TV’s are gone,” he said.

https://www.startribune.com/brooklyn-ce ... 600044821/

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Your concern about the big screen TVs is noted. I'm sure Mr. Wright's family will be very comforted.

Sent from my VS988 using Tapatalk

[Dave_LF]

It would indeed be fairly crass to take advantage of something like this to do something as banal and materialistic as loot a TV, right?

[RoseMorninStar]

It's not helpful.

[Frelga]

We can't have police shooting people without a trial if we want to call ourselves a civilized society.

[elengil]

Looting a store is bad, yes.
Taking advantage of a tragedy to loot a store is bad, yes.
Murdering someone is worse than losing a TV. Murdering someone is worse than losing a lot of TVs. The two are not equivalent problems.
Protesting the murder of someone is perfectly legal and legitimate.
That some people take advantage of these protests to loot stores does not invalidate in any way the protests.
The group protesting is not responsible for the looting nor are they responsible for stopping the looting.

Maybe the police should focus more on preventing/solving crimes and less time perpetrating them.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

It would indeed be fairly crass to take advantage of something like this to do something as banal and materialistic as loot a TV, right?

What I find ... disappointing ... is that your immediate reaction is not concern for the life lost, outrage at what even putting the best spin on it was an unreasonable use of force, or support for the people who are validly protesting this action, but instead to immediately invalidate those valid protests by focusing exclusively on the inevitable looting and pretending that that is all that is happening.

As for the looting itself, here is a good, fairly balanced article on why it tends to occur during these kind of protests.

Why People Loot

x-posted with both Frelga and elengil.

[Dave_LF]

It's the same hysteria as with the zero-COVID crowd--insistence that the numerator stay stuck at zero no matter how big the denominator gets. Neopuritanism. There are thousands--tens of thousands!--of police encounters every day, yet if even one of them goes wrong over the course of months and years, social media amplifies it 1000x and people lose their minds and decide it's ok to just burn down civilization as a nice idea that didn't quite work out.

[elengil]

It's the same hysteria as with the zero-COVID crowd--insistence that the numerator stay stuck at zero no matter how big the denominator gets. Neopuritanism. There are thousands--tens of thousands!--of police encounters every day, yet if even one of them goes wrong over the course of months and years, social media amplifies it 1000x and people lose their minds and decide it's ok to just burn down civilization as a nice idea that didn't quite work out.

But that is not at all what happens.

For a certain segment of the population, those encounters with police routinely go wrong. They have routinely gone wrong for a hundred years. Not that there aren't thousands that go right, but that does not in any way excuse the way they seem to go wrong much more often and to a much worse degree when it does. But now we have video evidence of them going wrong - instead of just anecdotes that can't be proven and in which, of course, police always got the benefit of the doubt.

That video evidence is proving that what a certain segment of the population has been saying all along is, in fact, happening, and now they can prove it and they are angry with good reason, and the fact that the police - even in the face of being openly recorded, sometimes by their own body cameras - refuse to alter their behavior is like blatantly admitting that they can get away with this and they just don't care.

Civilization is not being able to abuse or murder a segment of the population with impunity. Protesting that happening is not "burning down civilization." It is protesting a gross and chronic abuse of power against a certain segment of the population. Asking to not be murdered by police is in no way burning down civilization.

That some people take advantage of any situation to perform criminal acts is also not "burning down civilization", any more than when people riot after they lose a sports game, or loot stores for non-essentials in the wake of natural disasters. But it seems that looting somehow becomes the worst possible crime only when "certain" people do it, and suddenly negates the very real, very legitimate anger and push back they have against being treated like less than people.

[River]

Bear in mind that this incident happened while there's a trial going on in Minnesota for another incident of excessive use of force by police (I think it's pretty safe to call it that, given that Chauvin's own chain of command said those words in court). People are on edge. How easy is it to get a firearm and a Taser confused anyway?

Also...why would someone get pulled over for air fresheners?