The Killing of George Floyd: Open Thread

I live in Sweden. Everyone here who I’ve heard from about this — even people who describe themselves as “far right” — is saying basically the same thing: “how are these cops not in jail?”

My response is usually something like “don’t even get me started on that.”

There’s chatter on Twitter that the Auto Zone window smasher has been identified… as a St. Paul cop.

I undertand this strategy is colloquially known as “broken police windowing”.

Is it going to far to wonder if the police were involved in burning down their own precinct? I’m betting they get a fancy new building with a more military design out of the process.

This has left me depressed and horrified. I’m no stranger to watching people die horribly, but only in fiction. This simply confirms that I still find it abominable in real life. There were four cops. They had pepper spray, maybe tasers. It should have been relatively easy for them to restrain him – it was, actually, since that cop was able to maneuver himself to be in a position to kneel on his neck, which isn’t exactly a position of great stability when the one you attempt to do it to is actively trying to fight you off.

No matter what George Floyd had done or who he was, this was a cold, calculated power trip by someone who wanted to flaunt his power over a helpless man, who decided this man’s life was worth less to him than reveling in his capacity to end it and how powerless anyone else was to stop him from doing so. And that cop knew George Floyd was just the person to do this to, because he was black and therefore the institutionalized racism inherent in so many police forces in the United States could shield him from consequences. And he was right, up to a point – after all, his three colleagues present were far more preoccupied with preventing anyone helping a man suffocating to death than helping that man themselves.

The closest thing to a silver lining is that this obviously sadistic sociopath turns out to have miscalculated. Of course, assorted right-wing racist scumbags try to defend him, but even for many of them this is a bridge too far. There’s no way to spin it as violently resisting arrest – George Floyd was powerless in their “custody” for over five minutes. It didn’t happen at night with only one or two witnesses and a blurry video taken from over fifty feet away – it happened in broad daylight with dozens of witnesses and clear video footage from less than ten feet away. The only way to reconcile the cognitive dissonance is to prevent oneself from looking at the evidence or to bury it under a metaphorical mountain of bullshit – when even uber-conservative cartoonist Ben Garrison thinks this is beyond the pale (then again his libertarian leanings are likely at play here; let’s see how long it lasts), there’s no excuse; either you’re appalled, or you’re a blinkered fanatic, a delusional fool, a callous monster, or a mix thereof.

And if what Big Titty Demon and Alan posted is anywhere in the vicinity of the truth as I suspect it is, then yes, we have a serial killer cop on our hands, who uses his colleagues’ well-known racism as a shield for his own proclivities by preying on visible minorities. Reading the evolution of his MO, I can’t help but be reminded of the UnSubs from Criminal Minds.

And this soon after the Ahmaud Arbery case finally gained some traction. It’s as if they actually want a race war; let’s hope all of us (including, by unfortunate necessity, those scumbags) never get to find out exactly WHY Sun Tzu wrote that the best way to win a war is to never fight it in the first place.

CNN just uploaded a YouTube video of one of their reporters being arrest for literally no reason. He is super compliant with the cops that approach him but they arrest him anyway and won’t say why. They later arrested the other CNN crew too.

https://youtu.be/ftLzQefpBvM

…but apparently those arresting officers were “just following orders”. One wonders who gave the order to arrest journalists without reason.

@Naglfar, or they’re aware of the parallel, and are happy for the comparison to be made. It’s not like they’ll suffer any consequences.

I think for a lot of people, they expected it to happen eventually, but not that soon. The eternal fallacy of “it will be a problem in the future”.

As a side nbote, once again, France have had its police trying to jail journalists because they questioned violence (apparently they failed big time at it). Unlike gun violence, that problem is not uniquely american at all.

@Naglfar: So much for “small government” and limiting the state’s power that Repubs are always droning about since the Reagan era… What’s that you say? They were always massive hypocrites on that subject!? Well I’ll be…

@Naglfar
He’d support it 110%. Who’s MV?

@Dalillama: MansVoice, the recently-banned troll who seems to think Trumpelstiltskin has been a “reasonably competent” conservative president, and who touts being rationalist (e.g. he’s a fan of LessWrong and Yudkowsky).

Techdirt has an article on that executive order. They say: it’s distraction, red meat for Trump’s base, and legally nonsense.

@Moggie : distraction and red flag for now. If he get reelected he will end up actually doing it, just like he finally got his travel ban.

Of course, like the travel ban and the wall, there will be a lot of grotesque contorsions, delay, and additional caveat.