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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.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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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...?

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.