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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...?

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.

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.