My kingdom for a "like" button!
otseng wrote: ↑Sat May 30, 2020 4:58 pmWe need to stop these insane monetary policies where it is getting the rich richer and the poor poorer. George Floyd ultimately died for the crime of using a counterfeit twenty. Meanwhile, the Fed is counterfeiting/printing trillions with most all of it ending up with those close to the Fed and nobody bats an eye.
I would like to point out that I once committed the crime of attempting to use a counterfeit ten. Well, it technically wan't a crime, because like most criminal laws, the statute requires
intent and I didn't realize it was counterfeit. I didn't actually have to explain that, though, because nobody called the police. I can only speculate why, but I don't think it's a coincidence that I'm white and have a white-collar job. It's also perhaps not coincidental that the cashier, an African-American, might not want to involve the police in what could conceivably have turned into a mixed-race confrontation. All she said was, "I can't take that, Honey." It was actually an obvious counterfeit, having been done on an inkjet printer. I had probably gotten it in change somewhere earlier and not noticed. Had that cashier not noticed as well? Or didn't notice at first, but still passed it to me to avoid getting in trouble with an employer? Or brought the counterfeit bill him- or herself and noticed I wasn't paying attention? Who knows? Until the police were called, George Floyd was potentially in exactly the same position I was.
Anyone being reasonable can see that people might have made different decisions based on either racism or classism. Changing nothing else, would the cashier have called the police on me if I had also been black? Or if I had been obviously poor? Since at the time, she seemed as embarrassed for me as I was, I don't think so, but I can't know. If the police had been called on me and Derek Chauvin had responded, would he have casually murdered me while his colleagues silently watched? I can't know that either, but I have what I think is a pretty good guess.
Officer Chauvin is probably a murderer. It's possible that he in fact neither intended harm to George Floyd nor was culpably negligent, but I don't think that's likely. He and his colleagues are also probably racist. It's possible that the same events would have happened if George Floyd were white, but I don't think that's likely, either.
A cop murdering someone is bad and needs to be dealt with. Five cops racist enough to watch a murder that took eight minutes to complete without intervening is, to my mind, far more troubling overall.