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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2375 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 20, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Was Floyd picked as a figurehead because he was a criminal, rather than in spite of this?

I've been wondering about this from time to time over the last couple of years. I'd like to know if there's a term for this political strategy, if indeed it exists.

Surely there were some truly "innocent", non criminal black men - or black women, as the media would spin the 'racism crisis', but I gather it is pretty rare for women of any color to be murdered by cops - who were killed by cops in dubious circumstances, and could have been picked out by the BLM movement as their martyr? I'm not American and am not very familiar with the issue, but I do vaguely remember a few cases of egregious police brutality against black men without criminal records and without meth addictions, maybe even during the same time period in the year 2020. Rather than someone with a long criminal record and two types of hard drugs in his system.

If indeed this was done on purpose; why? May it be in order to make the pill harder to swallow for political opponents? And with the movement becoming unstoppable as they hoped for, it resulting in a bigger political win? If people went along with protesting for a criminal, they'll definitively be very likely to do it for actual decent people too...?

Was Floyd picked as a figurehead because he was a criminal, rather than in spite of this?

I'd say more likely any person who would end up in this situation would be a criminal with the probability > 95%. I mean to set off the whole thing, the person obviously needs to be black, poor (a cop may arrest an affluent looking man, but much less likely to manhandle him), drug addict (otherwise he wouldn't die) and with poor impulse control (otherwise he'd just quietly go into the car). And it should happen in a large city, otherwise it'd be impossible to make a huge deal out of it. The chance that a person with such profile, statistically, doesn't have a record is not very large, to be honest.

You have a dangerous line of thought. You're almost downplaying the problem of police brutality and similar abuses of power.

Predators seek out vulnerability in the victim and the opportunity to get away with the crime. Finding particularly guilty people to punish does not really enter into the equation except coincidentally.

You have a dangerous line of thought.

Thank you, I guess? Usually the ideas that can be endangered by thinking aren't the worthy ones.

You're almost downplaying the problem of police brutality and similar abuses of power.

I didn't "downplay" anything, I didn't discuss this topic at all. I think you are projecting some kind of bias on me which is not related to what I have said.

Predators seek out vulnerability in the victim and the opportunity to get away with the crime

Not sure what you mean here.

Assuming that police brutality and other forms of abuse of power happens because of racism misses the more important point:

Abusers want to hit without getting hit back, and to get away with the violence (in whatever form) without being punished by the law.

So they seek out people who are weak/vulnerable in some way, and preferably isolated and stigmatized.

If you're implying the policemen specifically look for people like George Floyd to abuse them, this does not sound plausible. I mean, did you see the man? His standard description in the woke media is "gentle giant". I am not sure about the gentle part, but he's 6'6", played multiple sports, was employed as a security guard, and he doesn't exactly look like something you'd describe as "weak". And, of course, if you wanted to target somebody weak and unable to resist with violence, without the possibility of punishment, would be a public street, in presence of your peers and multiple witnesses possessing recording devices, your preferred venue for that?

What do you mean by "isolated" and "stigmatized"? Floyd certainly weren't "isolated", given how much resources have been spent on defending his cause and lionizing him, including burying him in a golden casket, all DNC leadership kneeling to apologize for whatever happened to him, and erecting a monument to him. And anybody alive in the last 20 years would know how such things work. So if you think the policemen were on the lookout for some helpless victim nobody would care about, it's literally the worst choice in the history of bad choices. And they would know it very well. Neither is he "stigmatized" - if anything, all his past as violent psychopath and drug addict is completely forgotten and any discussion of it is now considered "downplaying the problem of police brutality and similar abuses of power" and definitely means whoever discusses it is a racist.

Even most of the people in the Soviet gulags were genuine criminals.

If you mean "criminals according to the arbitrary application of USSR laws", which included criminal punishment for things like criticizing The Party, having more property then the Party things you should have, or procuring any food when The Party decided you must starve to death, let alone being late to the job or making any mistake (which is clearly terrorist sabotage) - then yes. Otherwise I don't think they were.

Can I ask why you routinely resort to such snark? What he very obviously meant to say was that the majority of GULAG prisoners were common criminals as opposed to political prisoners i.e. thiefs, murderers, bandits, rapists, average thugs and bums etc., which was indeed the case if you look at the data.

There's no snark there. By USSR laws, a lot of minor acts were criminalized - like being late to work, or any unauthorized usage of kolkhoz property (which was just forcibly taken from the farmers) - e.g. the infamous Law of Three Spikelets so a lot of people that were convicted under supposedly "criminal" articles weren't actually bandits, rapists or bums - they were average citizens trying to survive in the hellscape of total terror. "The data" (which btw you neglected to support with any evidence) can't tell you that, you need a little knowledge about what actually was going on.

There is, in fact, a rather mundane legislative reason for the phenomenon you’re describing, included at the beginning of the Wikipedia article you linked to:

Before it the prosecution for theft of state or cooperative property was formal and didn't exceed 2–5 years of prison or community work, which wasn't a barrier for mass thefts of foodstuff and property, especially in kolkhozes.

The Russian version of the same article goes into more detail on this:

Researcher of the criminal world of Russia and the USSR, Soviet dissident Valery Chalidze noted that even in tsarist times, Russians were characterized by “disregard for the right of ownership of the treasury,” and this tradition “remained significant in Soviet times. This tradition became unusually widespread… also due to the fact that now almost everything around is the property of the treasury or state property”.

After collectivization, a large mass of public property was formed in the villages, which the peasants perceived as alienated and did not consider it necessary to look after it. Petty thefts in the collective farms became a mass phenomenon, while industrialization required food resources. However, the punishment for theft of public property was so insignificant that it did not stop anyone.

A similarly mundane and succinct reasoning was actually provided by Stalin himself in private correspondence, quoted in the same article:

"Capitalism could not have smashed feudalism, it would not have developed and grown stronger, if it had not declared the principle of private property the basis of capitalist society, if it had not made private property sacred property, the violation of the interests of which is most severely punished and for the protection of which it created its own state. Socialism will not be able to finish off and bury the capitalist elements and the individual-grabbing habits, skills, traditions (which serve as the basis for theft), shaking the foundations of the new society, if it does not declare public property (cooperative, collective farm, state) sacred and inviolable."

Who knows, maybe if the so-called Law of Spikelets had been enforced with as much longevity, relentlessness and rigor as the Bloody Code in Britain, the peoples of the USSR would have gradually come to respect the concept of public property. Then again, I’m not a sociologist by profession. It should be noted for the sake of context that, according to the same article, a rough total of 182,000 people were sentenced according to this law in a span of 7 years in a country of almost 170 million, which was a scarce contribution to the spectacle of mass imprisonment, total terror, hellscape and whatnot, to the extent that it existed in reality (as opposed to the realm of sensationalist literature and yellow journalism).

With respect to the criminalization of being late for work, that is explained by the even more mundane fact that Russian peasants usually had zero concept of measuring time in hours and minutes; I imagine they’d have gradually acquired this trait in the span of decades after being turned into factory workers even without such harsh penalties, as it probably happened in Britain (although I imagine the difference in harshness was only limited in that respect); however, industrialization in the USSR was to be completed in a much more swift manner. This phenomenon is actually described in a rather succinct fashion in the novel Darkness at Noon by the character named Gletkin.

I find it rather curious that you but ‘the data’ in quotes when in fact yes, it’s factual truth that to the extent that any examination of the Gulag’s history discusses this subject (which I imagine is a touchy one for many), it mentions that the majority of inmates were not political prisoners but common criminals. See here and here, for example.

The Soviet Union had no western style prisons, only the work camps. If you were a murderer, rapist, thief or gangster, you went to the same gulag complexes that the political prisoners went to. That’s where the scary tattooed Vor V’Zakone that later became the Russian mafia came from. That’s part of why being in a gulag was so hellish, the company wasn’t great.

The Soviet Union had no western style prisons, only the work camps.

Can I ask where did you get such ideas from? The GULAG was founded in addition to prisons in order to fulfill a purely economic function.

The Soviet Union had no western style prisons

Of course they had. Well, not "western-style" - much, much worse - but they existed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Prisons_in_the_Soviet_Union The problem was that building a physical prison - with walls, doors, grates, beds, plumbing, etc. - was too expensive and too slow for the number of inmates the NKVD machine needed to process. So most were directed to "camps" which were much cheaper to maintain (and way worse to be in, of course).

That’s where the scary tattooed Vor V’Zakone that later became the Russian mafia came from.

Err, no, Vory as a socio-cultural phenomenon existed way before the Glorious Socialist Revolution. But, since Soviet style mass imprisonment was not practiced in Russia before, at least not in the way USSR practiced it (look up how the revolutionaries sentenced to be deported to remote areas were handled by the Tsar - they were basically free to do whatever they liked there, including access to firearms for hunting, with the only requirement to periodically check in with the police. And yes, they were allowed to be accompanied by their wives, too) - the fertile ground for development of real comprehensive mafia-like structure only appeared with Gulag. Though given that many other mafias also started gaining power at the same time (e.g. Cosa Nostra, which existed way before, but started to become really powerful in the US by mid-century), I wonder if it's not part of some larger trend.

That’s part of why being in a gulag was so hellish, the company wasn’t great.

It didn't matter too much, it was hell regardless of who was around - it was designed and implemented that way. Of course, none of the above establishes that the majority of Gulag inmates are career criminals, as claimed, that point remains unproven.

The video of George Floyd just looked really unusually bad, and it came at the right time(the lockdowns when black culture had adapted to social-media scrolling driven video-based victimmongering rather than text based a la facebook or radio), in the right place(a white progressive ruled city). I think that's the reason. Most people killed by the cops are scumbags, even if they don't deserve to die, and so mathematically an unusually bad-looking video at the right place and time will probably have a scumbag in it.

This was addressed in one of the holy texts:

More important, unarmed black people are killed by police or other security officers about twice a week according to official statistics, and probably much more often than that. You’re saying none of these shootings, hundreds each year, made as good a flagship case as Michael Brown? In all this gigantic pile of bodies, you couldn’t find one of them who hadn’t just robbed a convenience store? Not a single one who didn’t have ten eyewitnesses and the forensic evidence all saying he started it? [emphasis mine—and note that this was written in 2014!]

I propose that the Michael Brown case went viral – rather than the Eric Garner case or any of the hundreds of others – because of the PETA Principle. It was controversial. A bunch of people said it was an outrage. A bunch of other people said Brown totally started it, and the officer involved was a victim of a liberal media that was hungry to paint his desperate self-defense as racist, and so the people calling it an outrage were themselves an outrage. Everyone got a great opportunity to signal allegiance to their own political tribe and discuss how the opposing political tribe were vile racists / evil race-hustlers. There was a steady stream of potentially triggering articles to share on Facebook to provoke your friends and enemies to counter-share articles that would trigger you.

TL;DR: controversial topics go more viral than benign ones.

Edit: also, to address the specific case of George Floyd, at the time, the video footage that went viral was very chilling to watch. (Or so I’ve been told by friends, conservative ones, who had watched the video; as a rule, I try to avoid viewing such things.) When one sees a man being choked to death slowly over the course of eight minutes while protesting “I can’t breathe!” then it’s hard not to viscerally feel that an injustice has been committed. (And if I remember correctly, the video went viral long before the man’s extensive prior criminal history or fentanyl usage became common knowledge.)

Back in the old subreddit, I recall some contemporaneous discussion about whether or not George Floyd would go viral, and some speculating (possibly myself included, I don't remember) that it wouldn't specifically because it failed the toxoplasma criterion: in the first few weeks, it seemed that more or less everyone agreed he'd been the victim of excessive force at the hands of Chauvin et al. Perhaps the subsequent revelations about the drugs in his system allowed it to circle back around to being controversial, as for a time it seemed there was some legitimate ambiguity about whether he'd died because of Chauvin compressing his chest or because of an overdose (my understanding is the autopsy confirmed the former).

Out of curiosity, of the people here that watched the video, who found the video chilling to watch?

I didn't. I do find plenty of things online disturbing, but this wasn't one of them.

I found the video disturbing. Sometimes I have to recall how I felt watching that first video to give any credence to the other side at all, especially as it relates to the conviction of Derek Chauvin, whom I usually think should have been acquitted, but sometimes, the thought of that video pops up again and I think twice.

Obviously, it didn't justify any of the rioting, though. That was an insane year.

It wasn’t chilling, but it was definitely enraging to watch the initial videos without any context other than police brutality. A bunch of cops slowly killing a man who seemed helpless while dozens of people around begging them to stop. After the body cam was released (showing he is high as a kite, very violent, already losing his breath due to the drugs etc) I swore to myself to never again come to emotional conclusions from video content without A LOT of autistic context

Thank you for the link. I suppose Occam's Razor here is that the controversy adds to the virality and that's that.

I never watched the video either, but I had the same reaction to the text. I don't doubt that the cops in question were horrible predators.

I don't doubt that the cops in question were horrible predators.

The kneeler Derek Chauvin maybe, but Alexander Kuong and Tou Thao seemed more incompetent/overwhelmed than evil. Thomas Lane, the other white cop, was unlucky as it was his fourth day on the job and he challenged Chauvin only with questions but not with actions.

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