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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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Chauvin judged that Floyd was in a state of excited delerium and placed Floyd in the officially taught prone restraint position (ctrl-f “Minneapolis police training slide”) for cases of excited delerium. Restraining subjects in ExDS was department protocol. Actually there’s a recording of Chauvin and another officer articulating this, and that the reason they had him in this position was because of ExDS. And Floyd’s behavior was classic ExDS. You should probably care if Chauvin was performing departmental policy conscientiously because otherwise you’re punishing the innocent, which is 100x worse than failing to punish the guilty. Why would you want a police officer to be deciding on the fly a new restraint technique? He’s not an expert in restraint, and he’s not a medical expert, and he is being placed in an extremely high stress situation. Would you be okay with sending doctors to the Rape Dungeon if they prescribe something that is only proven to be deadly post-hoc?

excited delerium

I thought this was a fake thing cops made up. I'm sure their internal documentation refers to it and recommends methods of dealing with it. Pretending as though it was a medical diagnosis they are sensibly dealing with. That way when they get caught behaving in an unjustifiable manner they can use procedure as a shield from criticism. A procedure they made up and may not be legal if actually applied. As seen by this cop following procedure and then being convicted of murder.

excited delerium

Oh let me tell you, it's real, i've experienced it. It sucks a lot.

The reason ExDS fell out of fashion is that it’s overwhelmingly a phenomenon of young black men on drugs. For progressives, this means it can’t possibly be real. But it’s possible that there is a rare gene that makes some populations violently resist confinement which, when in combination with certain drugs, results in a heart attack. Why would that be impossible? We can imagine that such an instinct would confer an evolutionary advantage in violent regions of the world and in regions which did not face cold winters where confinement and close proximity would have weeded such an instinct out. And indeed certain Arcticism theorists note that East Asians have 12x less claustrophobia than Arabs, a population with African admixture. So the mere fact that Blacks experience it more frequently is not actually valid grounds for the illegitimacy of the psychiatric state, though this is the primary reason why doctors have become uncomfortable with the syndrome / state / diagnosis.

a jury

Unfortunately, multiracial jury trials are a meme.

That's a discussion for the police force policy manual though? Chauvin went to prison since the politics of the day demanded that he be railroaded. You can't do anything resembling state sanctioned violence if one can just arbitrarily toss out the official rules for use of force

Their policy manual and official department rules do not supercede the law. A cop can follow their procedure to the letter and also be convicted for his actions. Their procedures are something they made up and very much not the law.


We can have sanctioned violence with law enforcement follow the law rather than the "official rules" their department made. State legislation defining murder is not inferior to department policy.

excited delerium

I think it's a term coined to describe a regularly observable phenomenon, rather than something with a specific, well-understood underlying medical theory. "Sometimes people go pants-shitting crazy when getting arrested, usually involving a novel cocktail of unknown drugs. How the fuck am I supposed to describe this in the reports?"