Two years ago, a post of mine looked at why people were falling for the BLM narrative about Floyd and Chauvin – not just the usual suspects who’d already fallen for the ones about Zimmerman and Wilson, but people like this guy, eloquently aware that Floyd was simply…
“a violent misogynist, a brutal man who met a predictably brutal end”
…yet swallowing the idea of police guilt in his death. (Before or after reading this post – or instead, if this post seems too long – by all means (re)read my old one.)
Now that poor (literally) Chauvin’s appeal seems to be overcoming his lack of funds for a lawyer, and the Minnesota Supreme Court’s refusal of a public defender, it’s time to remind people why it is folly to look at a picture of prone Floyd dying while under police restraint and confabulate belief in BLM’s narrative about it. My old post told people to read the story forwards, not backwards. This one tells people to know the background before studying the foreground. The usual suspects will continue telling the usual lies, but after two-and-a-half years of experiencing what believing BLM brings, maybe more people are prepared to review things they fell for back then.
Two superficially-contradictory statements are key to grasping what happened:
1) You cannot understand what happened without knowing about Bell’s Mania, and about how it makes modern Democrat-run city councils train their police forces.
2) George Floyd did not have Bell’s Mania, let alone die of it, and he was not wrongly treated by Derek Chauvin, let alone murdered by him.
It’s because these two seem to disagree at first glance that even many people who had no agenda to lie, or to deceive themselves, swallowed too easily the idea that Chauvin was guilty. Since he has enough enemies without those as well, this post will see what it can do to explain why they do not disagree.
So let’s get started.
A) BELL’s MANIA (which, remember, George Floyd did not have).
‘Bell’ is a known name in medicine and beyond. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Joseph Bell inspired the character of Sherlock Homes: studying under Bell at Edinburgh, a young Arthur Conan Doyle was astounded at his mentor’s ability to diagnose much more about his patients than just what was wrong with them, turning tiny clues into information about their profession or their family as easily as into medical diagnoses. And in 1849, Dr. Luther Bell (primary psychiatrist at the McLane Asylum for the Insane in Massachusetts) was the first to summarise a range of cases observed since 1800 into a type: Bell’s Mania (not to be confused with Bell’s Palsy or Bell’s Syndrome, each defined by yet another Bell).
Why am I telling you where the condition’s oldest name -‘Bell’s Mania’ – came from before even getting round to telling you what it is? Well, a bit under fifteen years ago, a conference on the condition decided its modern name should be Extreme Delirium Syndrome – ExDS for short. BLM declared ExDS was a pure fiction invented by racist whites to allege of police-victimised blacks – and declared it was racist to question that. So it helps to know that Bell’s Mania was first recognised in pre-Civil War US psychiatric patients – patients whom anyone who knows anything about anything can guess were, uh, very disproportionately white.
So what is Bell’s Mania? For one thing, it’s a cause of the illusion that mad people have unnatural strength. As a Twin-Cities criminal defence lawyer who witnessed a case said:
Heck of an illusion. I remember in lockup one day, as we met our new clients for arraignment (first appearance before a judge after being arrested) I got a guy who was still quite high.
I spoke to him, and he seemed off – schizo, talking to the air. He wasn’t communicating, to anyone, so I marked him down as, basically, “get him through this appearance and set him up with the docs.” Not much more you can do. I had, like, fourteen clients assigned in this morning custody arraignment session.
I moved on to other clients in the lockup meeting room, and I hear a fight start in the room. It was this guy, ignoring blows from batons and throwing two guards across the room. Then he swung his elbow into a guard’s head so hard that he shattered everything between his wrist and his shoulder, along with the guard’s skull.
He was feeling no pain, and so it was an illusion – HIS illusion – that gave him, maybe not “superhuman strength”, but the ability to push through pain and do rather superhuman things.
This is a typical example of pre-Bell state (“he seemed off – schizo, talking to the air”), followed by an explosion into Bell’s Mania (” ignoring blows from batons … throwing two guards across the room … swung his elbow into a guard’s head so hard that he shattered everything between his wrist and his shoulder, along with the guard’s skull” – and then continuing to fight, albeit without the help of one no-longer-functioning arm). Only a bit later did the post-Bell state – ‘sudden cessation’ – kick in (this state is usually followed by death). The pre-Bell state can be mistaken for loads of other conditions – and vice versa. Bell’s Mania could be mistaken for a scene from ‘The Terminator’, but not much else.
So what is happening here?
– Think about what happens when you do ‘ham-stretching’ exercises? You are not actually making anything longer. Your bones don’t change length, so your muscles and tendons need to stay in the same relation. What you are doing is pushing out your ‘limiters’. Human beings have muscles so strong that, used to the full, they can break their own bones, so our reflexes tell us not to go to extremes. When you ‘ham-stretch’, you are training your body to get used to using more of your muscles’ power before it tells you “Hold on; stop here”.
– In Bell’s Mania, the mind stops listening to this information. When the guy described above smashed his arm, his body was screaming at him “Stop! This hurts!!” but his mind was simply not listening.
B) THE POLITICS OF BELL’s MANIA (which, remember, George Floyd did not have).
So much for Bell’s Mania itself. Now let’s take a simplified (caricatured?) look at how it affects typical policemen – and how this in turn affects a typical Republican-run city’s police training versus that of a typical Democrat-run city.
– To policemen who encounter it, Bell’s Mania is abrupt and terrifying. All the batons and other tools police rely on to arrest and control a rowdy suspect suddenly aren’t working. Those police who do not simply back away or flee can justly be called brave – and as justly be called terrified. Their typical instinctive response is to double-down on the (not-working) tools, savagely hitting out at the suspect. By the time ‘sudden cessation’ brings the mania to an end, a Bell’s Mania guy opposed by police too brave to run may have a good few more injuries than just the ones his own insane blows gave him.
– To a Republican mayor, police are good guys and criminals are bad guys – so bad they routinely make false accusations against the policemen who arrest them, just to play the system. Therefore their city’s police complaints system has an early stage that weeds out ‘obviously’ fake complaints, only taking forward the ones that seem like they could have merit. The mayor’s voters are fine with this, and the kind of people who think it brazenly covers up police brutality won’t vote for the mayor anyway. Because of this, the city’s rulers don’t have an especial political fear of their policemen colliding with a case of Bell’s Mania. Just as a policeman who shoots someone will say it was self-defence if it was self-defence, and a policeman who commits murder might try claiming it was self-defence, so policemen who savagely beat a suspect with Bell’s Mania will say they had to, and policemen caught savagely beating a suspect who didn’t have it might try claiming he did. But such cases do not terrify the mayor, because his voters are ready to believe that real cases of Bell’s Mania get rightly weeded out in the police complaints system’s early stage – and that the ones weeded out there are the real ones.
– For a Democratic mayor, things are different. Left-wing activists – people the mayor relies on and wants to keep in with – think the police so racist and corrupt that every case should be investigated. And they are deeply suspicious, to put it very mildly, of acquittals. No such mayor, nor any Democrat politician aspiring to be mayor, wants to be caught publicly weeding out anything at all from the police complaints list. So pretty well everything gets passed down the line, to be weeded, if at all, by people the mayor can keep at a political distance – judges, juries, people like that. Minneapolis is such a city – it has not seen a Republican in a position of power since the late 1970s.
In the days before ‘defund the police’, this political difference meant every instance of Bell’s Mania risked becoming a political problem for a Democratic mayor. The activists he needs are screaming about the savage violence inflicted by a brutal police force, but the police he needs to keep order (and so keep moderate voters) are screaming about the savage violence inflicted by a manic suspect. It didn’t take long to find the solution – catch possible Bell’s Mania before it starts – especially as that is the doctors’ emphatic recommendation. Medical theory says the patient’s own frenzy will kill him if nothing else does, so you save his life by restraining him.
the specific physical control methods employed should optimally minimize the time spent struggling, while safely achieving physical control. The use of multiple personnel with training in safe physical control measures is encouraged. … research is needed to establish field protocols and techniques that allow police, emergency medical services and hospital personnel to interact with these agitated, aggressive patients in a manner safe both for the patients and the providers. (The Western Journal of Emergency Medicine, 2010)
It did not need much research for everyone to see that, ideally, it would be safest for patients and medical providers to start restraining a suspect-cum-patient about to have a Bell’s episode before the mania started. However the research on techniques was also done, and well before 2020, the Minneapolis Police Policy on Use of Force document showed its results. This was what Chauvin and his team were taught.
– The frontal neck hold (“the chokehold” the MPPUF called it) was life-threatening and was to be avoided in all sorts of cases.
– The side-neck hold (“the unconscious neck hold” the MPPUF called it) could render the suspect unconscious, which could be dangerous, and was to be avoided in various cases
– The rear-neck hold (“the conscious neck hold” the MPPUF called it) didn’t have these disadvantages, so could be used in a wider range of circumstances, and was just the thing to help restrain a guy with Bell’s Mania (or someone you thought was about to have Bell’s mania). The manual’s picture of how three policemen should combine to restrain such a guy is posturally identical to Chauvin, Koenig and Lane restraining Floyd.
This approach pleased everyone. Doctors liked a solution that promised the best chance of saving the patient’s life with the least chance of losing the lives of those trying to save him. Policemen liked that last part a lot too. And left-wing mayors liked the idea of not getting caught between activists screaming about a case of extreme police brutality and policemen saying they deserved medals for protecting the surrounding public at great risk to themselves.
C) THE INNOCENCE OF DEREK CHAUVIN (and his colleagues)
If you’ve already read my older post, this section won’t tell you too much that’s new, but the long screed above may help you understand it better and/or explain it better to others.
A shopkeeper summons police to an unusual suspect who is still parked nearby, acting silly, when the usual passer of forged $20-bills would have driven off. As they go through the routine of questioning him, Floyd’s strange behaviour starts to get to them. They ask “Are you on something right now?” (See bodycam transcripts for Officers Kueng and Lane.) “No, nothing” Floyd replies, but then Officer Koenig tells Floyd he is “acting real erratic” and asks him why he is foaming at the mouth. “I was hooping earlier”, George explains. (Hooping: street slang for absorbing drugs via the anus, believed by some to enhance their potency. The autopsy confirms George Floyd was telling the truth: the amount of fentanyl in his system was far above lethal dosage.)
Foaming-at-the-mouth George starts to complain he can’t breathe. He repeatedly begs to be allowed to get on the ground rather than into the car. He repeatedly says he can’t breathe even before he is on the ground. The police agree to this. They abandon the idea of arresting him for now, instead summoning an ambulance. After putting him on the ground Chauvin tells Lane (who is handling comms) to call again and ensure the ambulance is high priority.
All this time, the police have been noticing the possible-pre-Bell’s signs that their left-wing superiors have taught them to watch for. The prototypical Bell’s mania example is past-his-first-youth (median age middle-thirties) and has been doing drugs for many years, and just before the outbreak he will seem ‘off’, talking silly or crazy. Floyd is ticking the boxes – and one more: the 6’4″ club bouncer looks like a guy the police do not want to risk having to fight in a Bell’s episode. So when Chauvin agrees to Floyd’s request and puts him on the ground instead of in the police car, he uses Extreme-Delirium-Syndrome-style restraint – the rear (“conscious”) neck hold and etc. – just as Mayor Fry and subordinates taught (indeed urged) Minneapolis policemen to do. Discussing whether to move him to his side or keep him on his front, Lane asks if Chauvin is concerned about Extreme Delirium. “Yes”, replies Chauvin, and Floyd stays on his front.
As I keep saying, Floyd was not about to have ExDS. That deadly overdose of Fentanyl was filling the lungs of foaming-at-the-mouth-Floyd with liquid. He couldn’t clear them even lying on his front (and certainly couldn’t have if they’d put him on his back and given him CPR). As Floyd ODed, there was nothing anyone present could have done, even if they’d had a clue what exactly was happening to him, which neither police nor bystanders did.
D) IN CONCLUSION
I wish Chauvin more justice next January than he got the first time round from his venue-change-denied, jury-misselected court, threatened as it was with doxxing by the media and violence by the rioters. These points, and mine above, get mention in the appeal brief (links to it and other info are here).
Chauvin did what he was trained to do, and in full accordance with what his department told him to. They left him out to hang, in the aftermath.
Ya wonder why you can’t get cops in Minneapolis?
The irony here is that nobody at all has made the connection: All of these terrible, very bad, no good police departments? Like Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis? They work for city governments that have been Democrat for generations. Yet, every time they “do wrong”, that fact is side-slipped away, and the people who get the blame for all the lousy policing? The Republicans. Who’ve got zilch to actually do with any of it.
Makes ya wonder, it does. It’s all of a piece with the prestidigitation performed by the left when they decry the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany as “Right Wing Extremists”.
Well, I guess they were. Slightly to the right of the Communists and Spartacists. Actual conservative “right wing” types would have been of another entire order, under that sort of categorization.
Derek Chauvin was not a popular man (so he was an ideal scapegoat) – there were various complaints against him for being too quick with physical force – a bit like Mr George Floyd himself (indeed Mr Chauvin and Mr Floyd had worked security jobs together), but was Derek Chauvin a “racist murderer”? Of course, not – Mr Floyd died of fentanyl, he had enough in him to kill a horse let alone a man with a weak heart.
Mr Floyd was calling out “I can’t breathe” (see David Horowitz’s book by that title) long before Mr Chauvin even got there – but the two policeman who arrested him could not control him (because Mr Floyd was very large and out of his mind on drugs) – and so called for help, called for help from someone who was physical. In the end there were four policemen there – two white, one black and one East Asian (like the wife of Mr Chauvin).
The jury convicted Mr Chauvin because their homes would have been burnt down if they had not – many people were killed in the Marxist uprisings of 2020, but for some reason this was not “insurrection” because the media corporations supported the Marxist BLM violence (the irony of an alliance between Big Business, the Corporate State, and the Marxists is not lost on me – such are the weird times we live in).
Some people do not like obvious truths – such as that the 2020 American Presidential Election was rigged, or that Mr George Floyd died of the drugs he consumed.
The “Woke” Corporate State, the banks who create money from nothing, the lying media companies,the censors of Big Tech, the toxic injection pushers of Big Pharma (carefully protected from being sued – everyone can be sued in litigious America, with the exception of the “vaccine makers), is coming to an end.
It cannot continue – as I recently pointed out to Johnathan Pearce, the American people just will not tolerate the rule of the corporations anymore – not after the “fortifying” of the 2020 Presidential Election and-all-the-rest-of-it.
The question is not, will the corporations (with the brain damaged front man they put in the Oval Office because they could control him) lose power – of course they will lose power, the question is will they give up power peacefully?
That is all they need to do – just give up power and peacefully walk away.
Give up the House and Senate at the November 2022 elections – and allow President Trump to return on January 20th, 2025.
Not because Mr Trump is wonderful, he is NOT, but because Donald John Trump is the legitimate President of the United States – elected by the people (not a handful of corporate entities creating vast numbers of fake votes – Mr Zuckerberg alone spent almost half a billion, billion, Dollars on the “voting process”, NOT convincing people to vote the way he wanted them to, no, creating and counting “votes”).
And if Mr Chauvin is still in prison on January 20th, 2025 – then, President Trump should pardon him.
By the way – it is not “insurrection” to oppose a corrupt regime created by election fraud – otherwise the people who took up arms against such a regime in Athens Tennessee in the 1940s would be guilty of “insurrection”. And the people who came to Washington D.C. on January 6th, 2021, almost all left their firearms at home – if one is trying an “insurrection” one does not leave one’s firearms at home. If the million or so people who came to Washington D.C. (of whom only a tiny minority went on to the Capitol building) had come armed – things would have been very different, they (almost all) came UNARMED.
In reality the insurrectionists are the corrupt, and vicious, people who make up such organisations as the FBI and the “Justice” Department – people who, for example, wish to treat as “terrorists” parents who oppose the sexual mutilation of their children.
As for “that way is madness” – it is not me who wishes to sexually mutilate children, and it is not me who pretends that Mr George Floyd was “murdered” – it is the regime that does these things.
It is the regime, not its opponents, that is insane.
The Governor of California is a classic example of the regime – not only does he support the sexual mutilation of children (even from outside his State – brought into the State without the knowledge of their parents), Governor Newsom also supports the killing of babies (even AFTER they are born – indeed up to a MONTH after they are born) and he supports the systematic censorship of medical doctors on Covid and on all other matters where they differ from the line of the Corporate State.
There can be no peace with a regime like that – yes (I fully accept) people can and should leave California – – but are they supposed to leave the United States entirely? Especially when the Federal Government is no way legitimate – based, as it is, on a blatantly rigged election.
With the House and Senate taken from them, the Federal regime will (hopefully) move to a more moderate position and stop pushing extreme “Critical Theory” (Frankfurt School of Marxism) policies – and then in January 2025 the regime (all of the regime – including the FBI and the “Justice” Department types) can choose to retire – with generous pensions and benefits.
There need be no bloodshed – the regime just needs to walk away. Partly after the elections of November 2022, fully after the elections of November 2024.
If we are to condemn (and I do condemn) the regimes of, for example, Belarus and Russia as illegitimate – because of their corrupt legal system and their rigged elections, then we must also condemn the Federal regime in the United States – for the same reasons.
Sorry, but “it is O.K. when we do it” is not acceptable.
As for the State Governments of the United States and their legal systems – well we shall have to see how things develop.
But I will say this – a corrupt monetary and financial system, in the end, leads to corrupt everything else.
And the United Kingdom is not free from that sad principle.
Either honest money (money that is something that people choose to value – before-and-apart-from its use as money) and sound finance (lending from Real Savings, the actual sacrifice of consumption, not Credit Bubbles) will return – or everything else, including the criminal courts, will eventually be corrupted.
From what I read and watched at the time, Derek Chauvin was the victim of a reprehensible miscarriage of justice. It’s not necessary to like Mr Chauvin to come to that conclusion.
He should never have been found guilty or sent to prison. The man’s life has been destroyed for doing his job, to satisfy the bloodlust of a bunch of commie grifters and Democrat party miscreants.
john in cheshire – yes indeed Sir.
But one must not be too hard on the jury – after all their lives, and the lives of their families were at stake (the mob would have burned them alive – and the corporate media would have, privatly, laughed as the jury members and their families burnt to death).
And the jury also knew that the Biden/Harris regime, the “Justice” Department (see Mr Mark Steyn on what utter scum they are – with the near perfect conviction rate, because of a corrupted system) would have arrested Mr Chauvin as soon as he tried to leave the State courtroom – he would have been arrested on “Civil Rights charges” (try avoiding conviction on such “charges” – the Arch Angel Michael would be found guilty of something in the institutionally corrupt Federal “Justice” system).
Picture the thoughts of the members of the jury….
“If I find Derk Chauvin innocent, I and my family will be killed, and it will not help him to find him innocent – the Feds will just arrest him anyway, so I might as well find him guilty as that way I and my family get to LIVE!”.
That is the nation that the United States now is – and do not sneer too much, as the United Kingdom may well be heading down the same dark road.
Paul Marks (October 23, 2022 at 7:04 pm), just a logical point – the existence of complaints against Chauvin is not dispositive in itself. For precisely the reasons I explained when talking about a Democratic-run politics and policing, complaints don’t get weeded early and good policemen accumulate them as well as bad.
By the way – the Attorney General of Minnesota is a bizarre person (a former head of the Democrat National Committee) who has tried to mix Islam and Marxism (they are not compatible – but he tries anyway) – so it is not just the Federal regime that is insane.
Almost needless to say, he tried to frame Mr Chavin – but only releasing that part of the film of the incident that presented Mr Chavin in a terrible light and trying to prevent the rest of the film being seen.
What was that about “that way madness lies” – I am afraid madness (criminal insanity) is already here – and both the Attorney General of Minnesota and the Attorney General of the United States are examples of it.
I’ve always felt that public order is far to important than to be entrusted into the hands of hirelings.
What should happen is that when you lodge a complaint against the police, they make you one. Bigger the complaint, longer the term.
It’s also something I’d feel comfortable with conscripting for. Everyone ought to have to do the duty. You wanna rough up a cop? Fine; guess who gets the job?
At the same time, having to be “the guy” doing the duty teaches you certain lessons about the whole thing. I did not appreciate the crap that Military Police had to put up with, until I was tasked with going out to do their job, as part of the “Courtesy Patrol”. After a few salutary learning experiences, I came to understand why the Military Police were the way they were. I also started carrying a four-cell MagLite, in order to “illuminate” certain interactions. I’d have preferred a large-caliber handgun, but the Army frowns on summary execution being carried out on the drunk and disorderly…
I really think a great deal could be “fixed” with policing, if everyone were liable for it. Take some of these louts that are causing problems when intoxicated, put them to work keeping order. And, hold them to draconian standards of conduct, the way they like to have their police encounters adjudicated. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and turnabout being fair play, I think the results would be… Interesting.
I guarantee you this damn much: Put some of those sanctimonious freaks that are constantly complaining about the state of policing out onto the line of duty? I lay you long odds most of them are convicted of police brutality like you wouldn’t believe, in very short order. It’s all too easy to armchair quarterback, until you’re the one staring down the barrel of a gun yourself.
Very interesting to read about Bell’s Mania.
I am not yet through, but before i forget, i want to register 2 points of disagreement.
I disagree: it reminds me first of all of Viking berserkers.
In addition to that, i am reminded of people who learn self-hypnosis to the point that they can ignore the burn from a cigarette on the back of their hands.
And then there was that Stoic philosopher who, being tortured, warned his master that he was going to break his leg; and when the leg broke, he told his master: see? i told you!
And then there was Gaius Mucius Scaevola.
Huh?? your bones do not get longer, but the distance between the insertion points of your muscles DOES get significantly longer.
If that were not the case, how do you explain that people who do stretching become more flexible?
Too bad we can’t do photos here. I could show you some cool pics of the Floyd Shrine, which is now a two-block-square no-go area for the Minneapolis police. Not a place you want to walk without being on your guard.
All of Minneapolis has gone downhill significantly since that day – and because of that day. You can’t go out at night.
And the people still vote for the most progressive candidate they can find. So, I just stay amused when they describe their new perilous lives. Cause-and-effect never occurs to them.
We are watching the fall of western civ. I’m old, so it amuses me, but I have children and grandchildren and am very frightened for them.
After Floyd’s death the media reported that the official autopsy declared his death a homicide, but the autopsy does not appear to do so: https://web.archive.org/web/20200604001830/https://www.hennepin.us/-/media/hennepinus/residents/public-safety/documents/Autopsy_2020-3700_Floyd.pdf/ However a press release from the Hennepin County medical examiner *did* describe it as a homicide: https://web.archive.org/web/20200605222445/https://content.govdelivery.com/attachments/MNHENNE/2020/06/01/file_attachments/1464238/2020-3700%20Floyd,%20George%20Perry%20Update%206.1.2020.pdf And of course, at the trial, much later, the medical examiner, Andrew Baker, affirmed it was a homicide (albeit using some torturous logic)
It seems a bit off to me the media declaring it a homicide on the basis of the autopsy when the autopsy does not appear to say so, but perhaps there is some other official document other than the press release I have not seen.
I have a slight suspicion that the medical examiner was bounced into declaring a homicide via the medium of a press release, and did not have the fortitude to push back against it once established in the media as ‘fact’
Thank you for the historical perspective. It completes the picture I had, at the time, of the circumstances surrounding the death of GF. Canadian researchers studied the use of this technique and there was only one fatality out of hundreds of like events, and even that fatality was ambiguous.
I remain puzzled by two things. Why didn’t they, at least, try Narcan? I also find it difficult to agree with the reasoning by so many, that all four policeman brazenly persisted in committing a murder in front of witnesses who were filming them.
Crosbie (October 24, 2022 at 2:11 am), the official autopsy at the time found Floyd’s lungs were twice normal weight through being full of liquid, this in turn being an unsurprising effect of the amount of fentanyl in his system. Nothing remotely resembling rational cause to alter that diagnosis ever emerged.
In the UK, a police patrol will not normally be carrying Naloxone. Standard police procedure is for the police to call an ambulance. A UK ambulance will routinely carry Naloxone (whether as a Narcan opioid overdose emergency kit or otherwise) for use if they arrive at what looks like an OD-with-breathing-difficulties case. (That Floyd looked very like a common kind of OD was remarked by some at the time.)
So I conjecture the Naloxone was in the ambulance that Chauvin summoned before Floyd was on the ground, and then told Lane to urge to hurry after Floyd was on the ground. Floyd was dead by the time they arrived. They nevertheless administered CPR (“No-one is dead till they’re declared dead” is the sensible first-responder practice). Maybe they also administered Naloxone?
Bobby b can probably advise better than I whether the great unlikelihood of ordinary UK police having Naxalone to hand in such a situation (certainly until very recently, and I believe that still holds true today) applies to 2020 Minnesota police summoned to a report of a guy passing fake $20 bills.
If memory serves, police in Minneapolis did carry Narcan at that time. Can’t speak to whether these officers had it. Where I live in NH, pharmacists can dispense Narcan to any adult. It is carried by family members and friends of addicts.
My take is that GF’s death was the result of multiple factors and it takes stunning hubris to pretend that they could be disentangled and one factor given more weight than the others. I don’t see how I could have found him guilty.
Bobby b, how do they react if you hint their own responsibility for their problems? How does their response place on the line from genuine bafflement to the sour “shut up” of people who have a strong sneaking suspicion of it but whose egos are determined not to hear it said aloud?
(BTW, in the thread of my post of two years ago, I acknowledged that post’s debt to bobby b. As regular blog readers have doubtless realised, the same applies to this one. I express it in this muted manner lest the answer to my question be that these suffering-from-wokeness-in-two-ways Minneapolitans react violently whenever bobby b points it out to them. 🙂 Of course, I’m guessing “chance’d be a fine thing” as regards getting any of them ever to engage with either post’s thesis, let alone read it. Insofar as this post says more than the one of two years ago, I note that thoughts prompted by other commenters in that time period have also contributed to my analysis.)
The people of Minnesota have an opportunity to vote out their (utterly demented) Attorney General (the former head of the Democrat National Committee) in a couple of weeks.
If they do not do so – then Minnesota has committed suicide.
Will an honest election even be allowed?
bobby b can tell us that most of the people in Minnesota are not like the lunatic population of Minneapolis – but will real votes be allowed to win, or will there be lots of fake votes?
Exasperated – “I don’t see how I could have found him guilty”.
Very simple – if you do not find Mr Chauvin guilty you and your family will be burned alive, in your home, by a mob (whilst the police force is told to “stand down” not come to your aid).
And Mr Chauvin will be arrested by the (totally corrupt) FBI anyway – as soon as he tries to leave the State court room (and he will then be put in prison on “Civil Rights” charges – no chance of being found innocent as the Federal “Justice” system is institutionally corrupt).
Now do you see why the jury found Mr Chauvin guilty – and, unless you are truly heroic person, you would have found him guilty as well.
Yes, Me Marks, I will rephrase. I don’t see how I could have believed Derek Chauvin was guilty of murder.
The only think Chauvin was guilty of was being a white cop when a black man died in police custody. Someone had to swing for it or the city would burn.
Eventually the appellate courts will get around to letting him go free, but the wheels of justice move slowly and so he’ll sit in a cell for several years first.
Both adding to and dissenting from Paul Marks (October 24, 2022 at 1:43 pm),
1) The mob will be assisted to find you by MSM outlets whose intent to DOXX a non-convicting jury was advertised with considerable insolence.
2) Had I been there and able by my vote and/or words to be one of enough unconvicting jurors to prevent a guilty verdict, I would have thought of myself as brave but not literally and inevitably suicidal. The authorities’ preparations for ‘possible post-trial events’ might have kept me alive long enough to flee the state, had I made appropriate preparations beforehand, and where there is life there is hope.
And that fear was exactly what the prosecution was counting on. A panel of anonymous judges down the road who set him free and then pick up the phone when someone says “Judge Smith lives as 123 Elm Street, go get him for St. George!” will get a far different response to a juror who calls after an acquittal.
Remember, these (well-off) Minneapolis progressives are True Believers. They don’t act to convict a Chauvin out of fear that their black neighbors will riot. They act because they believe that cops are bad to black people, that they’ve finally caught a bad cop in the act, and that they serve justice. They believe their own fictions even when they’ve helped to write them. They want their fictions to be true, they want to consider themselves better than other people, and so those fictions become true for them.
Even though the black community is (finally) beginning to question their patrons’ beliefs and effectiveness, the white progressives of Minneapolis will persevere.
And so I don’t even try with them anymore. Their reaction is usually “you’re one of Them!”, and I become a leper. I’ve truly given up on the area, and likely wouldn’t even return if my extended (progressive) family weren’t here.
We have become two separate countries, but without a workable border.
Bobby:
Having lived & worked both in Alberta and at the Ivy League, i flatter myself that i have some understanding of both countries. (And i don’t mean Canada and the US, i mean what you mean.)
It is the absence of a workable border that prevents me from returning to North America.
That, and the attractiveness of Baltic ladies.
Vis-a-vis the current conditions obtaining in America’s major cities, I would like to point out that things do not have to continue on as they are going, and that the inevitable counter-reaction to all of this is waiting in the wings, warming up for their turn at the wheel.
It ain’t going to be pretty. I guarantee you that.
I suspect it will begin with a certain, ah… Shall we say, disregard? Yes; a certain disregard for the supposed civil rights of the “street people”, as people begin to realize who is paying for all that public space in the parks and on the sidewalks, that they’re afraid to walk on or use. The first thing to go will be those parks, which are going to get privatized and paved over, because why the hell pay for the taxes to maintain them, if they’re only going to be used as needle bins and drug sites…?
Once people cease caring about the ne’erdowell street classes, the next steps are going to be very easy; pogroms and programs to take them the hell off the street. Warehousing them will be seen as a humane thing; the inhumane will simply have them conveniently disposed of. It strikes me that Narcan being made illegal would be a good first step, followed by subsidizing free Fentanyl in lethal doses.
There is such a thing as “compassion exhaustion”. I’ve seen it, first-hand, and it ain’t pretty. Friend of mine had a daughter that fell into addiction. Well, more like “leapt” into it; she was a druggie and doper of her own volition, from early on. I would speculate it was genetic, because her aunts and uncles on the father’s side were much the same.
Early on, her mother was distraught, and did anything, everything that she could. After about ten years of being the victim of incessant petty theft and abuse, she reached a point where it was actually a bit of a relief when her daughter finally overdosed on the street. At this point, where she was once a fairly liberal and charitable person? Yikes. She’s all for bundling the dopers and druggies infesting her neighborhood off to an island somewhere, where they’re offered all the freed drugs they want, in overdose quantities. She’s actually the one suggesting that Narcan be banned; she blames it for the last five years of suffering for her and her daughter. Without it, the daughter would have overdosed a long time before she did.
I don’t know when the point is going to be reached, or how far it will go, but reached it will be, and there will be a counter-reaction to all of this. It will be monumentally ugly, when it comes. No telling what form it will take, either–It might well be a religious revival or a new religion coming in, similar to the way Islam came into the damaged societies of the Middle East after Justinian’s Plague swept through, or it may be something else entirely, like a secular Communist revolution akin to what swept away China’s social detritus and addiction problems back after WWII.
The fuzzy thinking and social stupidity won’t go on forever. May not even last out this next generation…
The flip side of that coin is while the normal people might be just fine with cops turning on firehoses and giving out hickory shampoos to bums, the courts aren’t going to be quite so willing to go along with the program. After a few multimillion dollar payouts, we’ll be right where we are now: open air drug markets, bums defecating on sidewalks, and parks taken over by homeless camps and the police doing nothing about it.
Steven, just who do you think is going to be sitting on those juries, and voting for those judges…?
Dude, I’m here to tell you: The worm is already turning. I live in a fairly rural area of Washington state, where a whole lot of refugees from the Seattle mess are moving. Those people aren’t leaving Seattle because they want to, and they’re not the people that made that particular mess. If anything, they’re a hell of a lot more socially conservative than they were, and they’re a lot less tolerant of the usual suspect’s BS. They didn’t chose to leave the Seattle area; they were driven out by the luvvies and their rampant stupidity. I got to watch one of them interact with one of the local idjit types, and it was… Enlightening. The woman lit into the leftoid like she was a rabid Rottweiler with a grudge, and I think she was. She didn’t like being driven out of her childhood home by the stupids, and she’s pretty much of the opinion that it stops here and it stops now.
I think that there’s a great sifting going on, as we speak. The normies are abandoning the dysfunctional left to their fate, and are a hell of a lot more suspicious and untrusting of the leftoid freaks that come spouting “good ideas”.
Had a chat with the guy canvassing for a local judgeship. Asked him about this very issue, and he said that the most vociferous anti-leftoid BS types were the people he’d talked to who’d had to leave the greater Seattle metro area. He’d gotten an earful every time he talked to any, and they were all emphatic that they were tired of the BS, and wanted law and order. Period.
I don’t think the “great march through the institutions” is going to end the way that Gramsci foresaw. The raw fact is that those institutions and areas are going to be abandoned en masse, because they don’t work, and they’re unlivable.
Point to be made with this? Note the media: The left captured it generations ago, and have worked diligently to discredit it through abuse and overuse of it. At this point, who the hell believes a word that comes out of a mass media source, besides the credulous and trusting elderly? Even a lot of them have lost all faith in anything the “authorities” say. Capturing those institutions and then using them to further their own goals? A losing game, because the minute it became apparent that that was what was going on, that was the moment those captures became meaningless and essentially useless, over the long haul.
I’ve no idea what’s going to replace it all, but I’ll guarantee it won’t go on. It can’t.
Kirk: Who do you think is now going to be an even bigger majority on Seattle juries? The cons are leaving. The tent-city cases get brought where they happen, inside cities now full of (mostly) progressive jurors. No backlash there.
What you describe will be the philosophy outside of the mega-urbs, but, ironically, there won’t be any need for that kind of vigilance out there, ‘cuz there wont be any tent cities or people running wild.
We’ll just have a more polarized and separate (and hostile) two-nations entity. The progressive cities will still blame us for everything, but they’ll just look that much more ridiculous.
Good point, bobby b. Can’t argue it with you at all, but I will point out that the urban areas have their sway due to several factors that are going to shift with the population that’s fleeing them, right now.
Seattle’s fundamental economic basis is washing away beneath the idjit class: Businesses leave, productive population leaves, there goes the tax base. Retail in Seattle is dying, along with a lot of business. If they lose economic power, then what do they do? The exurbs will be where all the money is, and they’re not going to sign up for paying for all that largesse.
Give you an example of what’s been going on, with this hollowing-out. Used to be a business called Bavarian Meats, down near the North End. Few years ago, they shut down operations at their plant, which was within Seattle city limits. They were profitable, making good money. Why’d they shut the plant down and outsource? Simple: City of Seattle. They were getting whipsawed between the health department coming down and fining them because vagrants and other homeless were using their loading docks and sidewalks as open-air toilets. When they called the police, either nothing was done, or they actually got ticketed for “harassing” the homeless. The bills for all this added up; plus, their employees weren’t safe. Cars were broken into, employees were assaulted.
So, they shut down. Bang, there goes a healthy chunk of taxes. Replaced by… What? Homeless vagrants?
There used to be a lot of regional suppliers in central Seattle. They’re all moving out, for a lot of the same reasons. Oh, and people are refusing to drive into Seattle to do business there, because of the street crime. It’s not a good look when you have to warn clients that they can’t park nearby because their cars and trucks will be broken into.
The “big picture” types running things never see this. People like me do, and we can see the impending economic collapse coming. Used to be, all the family matriarchs around here would go in for these big-city Seattle shopping expeditions for back-to-school shopping and the holidays. Nobody, but nobody, actually does that anymore. Why? Because they don’t feel safe on the streets over there, and they don’t even feel safe renting a hotel room at one of the “nice hotels”. Plus, why go to the bother of shopping in Seattle, when you can do it on Amazon…?
The business case for the metro areas is dying on the vine, as we speak. The political power those places used to wield will go right along with the rest of the collapse, just the way it did in Detroit. Look for the exurbs to find ways to marginalize and supplant the old political structure, probably through outright disenfranchisement of the urban voters.
This is all the result of dysfunction. If the policies of the people running these places actually, y’know… Worked? They’d have accomplished something by capturing them. But, because of their own actions, the conquests are going to be rendered meaningless in a generation or two, because the political power represented by the cities is going to be gone. It’s rather ironic, because the whole thing looks a lot like the way the old-school aristos went down before the mercantile classes in the 19th Century. Having those power centers will do the luvvies no good whatsoever, because their essential and inescapable incompetence is going to result in everyone “routing around” them and their dysfunction.
It’s going to be a mess while the system does that, but it is already doing it while we watch. Nobody wants to live in the big cities, these days. I mean, why live in those cesspools? What’s the value-proposition, there? Live in Seattle, step in feces on the daily? Pay taxes for parks you can never use, because they’re effectively open-air drug markets? Have your car broken into whenever someone feels like it?
People don’t want to live like that. And, they won’t. The idjit class that captured the high ground of big-city politics is about to find out that what they captured and effectively destroyed in doing so…? Has zero value to them, or anyone, now that they’ve done their damage to it all.
Portland, Oregon? That place ain’t coming back any time soon. It will be generations, I suspect. Much like Detroit. Of course, on the other hand, it may well get washed out to sea in the next major Pacific Northwest disaster. We can but hope…
BTW, my maternal family is actually from Portland. I suspect they’re all spinning in their graves at what the place has turned into, these days. I have fond childhood memories of that city, all of which are erased thanks to the idiotarians.