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Notes -
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...?
This was addressed in one of the holy texts:
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).
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