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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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In this NYT article, race isn't mentioned, so I assumed it was either a black-on-black or black-on-white killing, but apparently it was white-on-black! It's unusual for the NYT to not mention race in such a situation. Could it be that they're finally downplaying all races in their

crime reporting, and not just the ones that it's offensive to speak negatively about? That sounds too good to be true, but I want to believe.

Seems like at least two guys, maybe three restraining the one dude. https://twitter.com/_barringtonii/status/1653941898023665665

Everyones only focusing on that shot with just the marine and the guy, probably taken later than the above pic

Not everyone, Black Lives Matter thinks all three should be prosecuted. Because the mentally ill homeless are ordinary people's social and moral superiors and raising a hand against them, regardless of provocation, is verboten -- and black homeless especially so, of course.

I've spent a lot of time in my life doing BJJ and it's very hard to strangle somebody to death without realizing something has gone wrong long before that. It's not even a George Floyd situation where the restraint wasn't a conventional choke and/or it was very potentially a stress heart attack. The Marine was capable of restraining the homeless guy in far less risky positions.

My reaction as well from the same background. If i read the coverage right he held that chokehold for two minutes, which is crazy. It only takes a few seconds to knock someone out like that. Anyone trained enough to know the hand position would know that from experience.

Watching the video, although he does use the BJJ position it doesn't really look like he has a blood-choke; his arm just seems to be wrapped around the guy's chin?

Hard to tell of course, but I guess if the dead guy is found to have drugs in his system the defense will want to raise the possibility that the hold was just a restraint and the guy would have OD'd anyways.

On the other hand, the article I read seemed to say that he was just acting unruly but hadn't assaulted anybody at the point when the Marine started restraining him -- which puts the Marine in violation of the 'MYOB' doctrine, which is a bad place to be in a situation like this.

If he had been choking him properly (tightly) the guy would have stopped struggling and the other guys holding him down would have been unnecessary.

Most likely the guy choking him out had only a vague idea what he was doing, or clothing/bags/etc prevented a clean choke. The result was that the guy didn't really go out, but was just oxygen deprived for a long time still struggling, which caused an episode when combined with fentanyl or stress or whatever else.