Opportunity Knocks
Just over 2 years ago George Floyd died (25th May 2020). It shouldn’t have happened, but it did. I remember watching the video of the incident and not being able to get to the end. It was too harrowing, and the tears I shed too inadequate to contain the depth of anger and sadness I felt.
I could not understand how this had happened.
But we should always be mindful of context - and the whole Covington ‘smirk’ incident (Jan 2019) is a salutary lesson in that regard
But even having said that I still I couldn’t, at the time, imagine what possible context could explain the horror in what I saw in the George Floyd arrest.
But that context existed. Huge dollops of context. By the time we were able to see and assess that context it was far too late, and emotions had been whipped into a frenzy. I didn’t appreciate at the time just how much my own emotions had been manipulated.
Please don’t get me wrong here; Floyd’s death in that manner was not justifiable at all. But neither was it the egregious act of hate-filled racist murder that it was painted to be. Once the cops had arrested him they had a duty of care, and they failed in that duty. Of course there should have been consequences for that failure.
Chauvin was charged with, and found guilty of, second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. It goes without saying that I’m not a legal expert - a legal ignoramus would be more accurate - and I’m even more of an ignoramus when it comes to the US legal system. But how can you be found simultaneously guilty of all these 3 different categories of murder? Isn’t the whole point of these categories to be able to characterize and distinguish the type of murder that occurred? If that isn’t the point of having these different categories, then what is the point?
Personally, I don’t see anything other than manslaughter as being justifiable (in a moral sense) here - especially not after having examined the whole context a bit more. I’ve looked at the definition of 2nd degree unintentional murder as it applies in Minnesota - and it doesn’t make any sense to me to apply it to the George Floyd situation - but then I don’t have the necessary deviancy deviousness of mind to be a trial lawyer.
Politically, however, the charging makes a whole lot more sense. The nation’s dander was well and truly up and ‘justice’ had to be seen to be done.
Here was an ‘opportunity’ to quell the storm. Realistically, nothing other than the maximum charges they could get away with, and a guilty verdict, would have satiated the mobs.
It had to be this way - especially as it had been painted as another example of ‘racism’, for which the only “evidence” I’ve seen for that being that it was a white cop vs black dude.
Whilst the anger and sadness at Floyd’s death was, to some extent, justified, what happened next was mostly about the dictum of never let an opportunity go to waste. The political group BLM (Buy Luscious Mansions) catapulted to prominence and in a very short space of time supporting BLM became the ONLY ‘acceptable’ way to demonstrate your moral rectitude and aversion to racism. If you even mildly questioned this organisation you were cast as a pariah - some white supremacist evil nutcase with a fondness for wearing pillowcases.
It was not enough to be against racism, appalled and disgusted by it - no, you had to be those things in one particular way and one particular way only.
If you didn’t do the whole performative charade of making black power salutes, kneeling, putting black squares on your profile, and the rest, you were viewed as some evil and morally-deficient entity (I have no doubt the folks demanding compliance viewed you as sub-human to some extent - and how do we “tolerate these people” eh, Justin?)
Of course, the politicians had several premmies as they gushed and fawned and spaffed platitudinous globs of moral ejaculate everywhere in the wake of Floyd’s death. It was a horrifying and hideously insincere display of political opportunism run amok. None of these politicians gave the slightest shit about George Floyd, in my estimation, but they cared very much about how they could exploit his death.
I can’t watch Biden’s eulogy for Floyd, for example, without feeling cheapened and dirty at the grotesque opportunism and exploitation on display. This mawkish, ridiculously over-sentimental and sickening spectacle creeped me out. But that was just my own personal reaction and maybe you thought Joe was being sincere.
I can’t remember exactly when it was in relation to Floyd’s death - a little while after I seem to recall, but I remember reading about a young kid, aged around 2 I think, gunned down in their pushchair at a barbeque that suffered a drive-by shooting. That’s the time to be overly-sentimental, and understandably so. But there were no national outpourings of grief, no murals, no politician’s purple prose for this poor soul - and I don’t know why not. It’s not a competition, of course, and we can feel sad and angry for Floyd and for this life cut short. But it does rather seem that the only reason the politicians speak about one death, and not another, is because they can make more political capital out of it.
Bad things happen. But always be mindful of people, and politicians in particular, using those tragedies for their own ends. Some opportunities are just too good to pass up for these kinds of people.
Whether covid was a manufactured opportunity, or an accidentally generated opportunity, or an entirely natural opportunity is an interesting question - and the implications are different in each case. However, there is little doubt that covid was seized upon as an opportunity to change things. How else are we to interpret the various calls for “building back better” and better “biosecurity” (whatever that is) so early on in the ‘pandemic’. How else are we to interpret the near universal, and deliberate, inflation of the severity? How else are we to interpret the deliberate ramping up of fear to the point of hysteria?
Covid might be ‘over’ for most people - but its legacy is not. We’re facing a different future now - one in which governments feel they have the right, and now have the power, to severely restrict your freedoms whenever the appropriate ‘health emergency’ demands it - to require you to be injected with some government-approved substance, and to prove that you have been in order to live anything like a ‘normal’ life - and they’ve got most people to acquiesce, to believe this is a good thing.
I know this isn’t about some cock-up, some misguided attempt to keep people ‘safe’. Or perhaps I should say that if approval is granted for the vaccination of kids as young as 6 months old is given, then I’ll have all the evidence I need to know this is nothing to do with health (as if I needed any more). There is no conceivable benefit to the kids here - and it’s injection with a vaccine designed to combat the original WuFlu. The ‘evidence’, the ‘trial’ data, upon which this decision will be based is mind-bogglingly shite. If it gets recommended you’ll know this has all been about opportunity and nothing to do with health.
The opinions that follow are the conclusions of me, based in the facts provided, and not on legal or moral SCIENCE™. I do not care for labels, I care about facts.
The death of G. Floyd was unfortunate, but not murder. His primary cause of death was his self ingestion of fentanyl, as he tried to avoid another arrest for drug possession and distribution, on top of charges for distributing counterfeit currency.
The restraining hold used by the officer is standard practice in most agencies and is successfully used tens of thousands of times, when not exacerbated by overdose.
The charges, trials and convictions against the officers is not justice, it is revenge.
The real criminals here are the politicians who prey on mentally and physically weak populations to gain power and control.
The real criminals are the "community organizers" who manipulate and exploit communities who have been habituated to hate, envy and to be made dependent on others to provide their daily needs, without responsibility or immediate consequences.
The enablers of both are those who rely on socialized waves of misinformation to garner status, social "credit" with their faux outrage and posting of images of "support", "inclusivity" with the veneer of morality.
The real criminals are the collectivists who what their momentary slice of power here on earth, made important only by the destruction of a free western society. For them, their ends always justify their means, regardless of who dies.
The death of Mr Floyd was just another symptom of the decay of society, being used by manipulators of emotion, seeking power over the weak.
Recently, during a football match on the George Floyd sports ground in Berlin, an angry dad attacked a 14-year old player, who had committed a foul against his son, with a knife.
Bad stuff has always happened, everywhere, all the time. Our globalized age, where we not only have to deal with our local bad stuff, but have to weave all the bad stuff in the world into the tapestry of our lives, is driving us mad.