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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   2601 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 20, 2025

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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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