RadixJournal - St. George Floyd, The Redeemer

00:00:00.000 As I see it, it's a grotesque miscarriage of justice, but I wouldn't expect there to be a great deal of justice in a period of modern rule.

00:00:11.360 Feelings don't care about your facts, and religion, God knows, doesn't care about facts. 0.80

00:00:19.700 And he arose to a kind of religious significance that will overwhelm any form of doubt.

00:00:30.000 And so I'm not particularly surprised by it.

00:00:40.340 I mean, it seems to be quite obvious that, first of all, second-degree murder is he intentionally, and with malice aforethought, but not in a premeditated or planned way, killed the person.

00:00:52.640 So this implies that he didn't go out with the intention of killing George Floyd, but once he was on top of him, he thought, yeah, I'm going to kill him.

00:01:00.740 Right.

00:01:01.500 There's no evidence that can be brought forth for that, other than that it is true that he was saying, I can't breathe, man, I can't breathe.

00:01:10.340 But that is exactly the kind of thing that you would say if you were trying to escape apprehension in order to cause the person to loosen their grip so that you could try to escape.

00:01:22.220 So that's not really an argument.

00:01:24.920 And the people witnessed George Floyd saying these kinds of things, but again, that's not really an argument.

00:01:32.880 Secondly, voluntary manslaughter.

00:01:35.140 My understanding is that American law on murder, or at least the law of this particular state, seems to be more complicated than English law.

00:01:42.760 You have all these different degrees of manslaughter and degrees of murder.

00:01:46.020 Voluntary manslaughter, as I understand it, is things like a crime of passion.

00:01:49.620 So you don't have a prior intention to kill, but you go in in such circumstances where you just you just lose it.

00:01:56.200 Any reasonable person would become mentally disturbed.

00:01:59.400 And on the spur of a moment, spur of the moment, they would kill because of that.

00:02:04.040 Right. Is there any evidence that he is guilty of voluntary manslaughter, that he completely lost his temper with this person and decided to kill him?

00:02:12.200 As far as I can see, he was completely calm and he was doing his job and he was engaging in a apprehension hold, which they are taught to do.

00:02:23.660 And then with.

00:02:25.040 Yes, in Minnesota, they are in other states.

00:02:28.060 They have actually decades ago moved away from a kind of neck or lower back hold.

00:02:34.100 But that was actually part of policing procedure in Minneapolis.

00:02:38.660 So he's following policing procedures.

00:02:40.240 That's good.

00:02:40.980 So we can't possibly say he's guilty of voluntary manslaughter.

00:02:44.200 So that that's out.

00:02:45.540 Then we have involuntary manslaughter.

00:02:47.840 That is a killing that stems from a lack of intention to cause death, but involves a negligent act.

00:02:53.160 Right.

00:02:53.600 If he has been taught that that is how you should apprehend somebody, that is how you should keep hold of a criminal, then that is not a negligent act.

00:03:04.360 Right.

00:03:04.500 If that person is saying, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, it is quite reasonable in the circumstances for him to say, well, look, that's just an attempt to escape, you know, whatever.

00:03:14.920 So that cannot be understood to be a negligent act either.

00:03:18.740 So he hasn't engaged in a negligent act and the person has nevertheless died.

00:03:23.880 So he's also not guilty of involuntary manslaughter based on the definition that you have under American law or under the law of that particular state.

00:03:34.220 As I understand it, under English law, he may well be guilty of manslaughter.

00:03:38.740 But then, on the other hand, he is acting.

00:03:41.720 He has not put himself in that situation.

00:03:44.560 And that makes a fundamental difference.

00:03:46.660 He is acting on behalf of the government as an enforcer of the law.

00:03:52.380 He has not put himself in that situation.

00:03:55.360 He has been put in that situation.

00:03:57.580 And in that situation, it is understood that he has to follow the instructions.

00:04:01.740 And if things go wrong, then the training.

00:04:04.760 And if he follows the instructions and follows the training, then he should not be guilty of a crime.

00:04:11.860 The best that could be said is that he is guilty of incompetence in his office, that he should have somehow intuited that this person was losing consciousness or whatever.

00:04:25.960 And he should have released.

00:04:26.860 If you bring in a rule where they're not just guilty of incompetence, but they can be sacked for that, understandably, but they're guilty of a crime, then you bring in a situation where no reasonable person would want to become a police officer.

00:04:42.580 Because if you become a police officer, then you will put yourself in those kinds of dangerous situations where you have to make split second decisions that are life and death or can result in serious violence if it goes wrong.

00:04:59.260 And sometimes they go tits up.

00:05:02.000 And that's what happened in that case.

00:05:05.320 And so that's why, in general, in America, you don't have that system, which we do have in England, by the way, where you can sue police officers in civil court.

00:05:15.960 Now, it's the worst of both worlds in America if they bring that in.

00:05:20.160 Because at the moment, in America, police officers are paid badly, but they have certain, compared to Britain, they're paid very badly.

00:05:29.520 Well, that might be true.

00:05:30.540 I mean, being, look, I don't buy this right-wing thing that, like, no white person will become a police officer ever again after this or anything.

00:05:37.560 Oh, no, no, absolutely.

00:05:38.440 I'll look in a minute.

00:05:39.220 I mean, they have benefits.

00:05:41.460 Most of them do not, are not in this situation.

00:05:44.640 Yeah.

00:05:44.840 I absolutely do think white people will become police officers, and that's the problem. 0.96

00:05:48.140 So I think that this is a matter of total injustice, and we shouldn't be surprised it's a matter of injustice. 0.89

00:05:55.540 Firstly, the judge should have sequestered the jury for the entire time, so they couldn't have been aware of any of the coverage of this trial, let alone of this insane congresswoman basically calling for violence. 1.00

00:06:09.060 Secondly, the jury would have been, even if he hadn't done that, would have been so intensely aware of this,

00:06:14.960 and would have been so intensely aware of the potential consequences of delivering the wrong verdict,

00:06:19.160 and would have been so sort of indoctrinated, potentially, that I don't see how this could be anything other than how it could be possible to get a fair trial.

00:06:27.180 And the guy's attorney raised that issue, and weirdly, the judge said that this might be a matter for you to appeal on, that it's a mistrial,

00:06:37.640 but I'm going to rule it out here, which is most peculiar, because if it's a matter on which he can appeal,

00:06:42.400 then it's a matter that's a fundamental problem with the trial, which should come before him there and then.

00:06:47.560 So really, you've got almost sort of jury-nobbling, sort of de facto jury-nobbling.

00:06:51.400 There's no way he could get a fair trial.

00:06:52.840 These people were under intense psychological pressure.

00:06:55.520 Right. There's also, at the very least, a reasonable doubt on the cause of death.

00:07:04.120 There was actually a man who was quite authoritative, maybe even charismatic,

00:07:14.060 who was discussing the cause of death as effectively strangulation, lack of oxygen, to the brain.

00:07:22.620 The fact is, there really are very serious issues about what happened in the sense that George Floyd

00:07:29.540 had, I believe, twice the amount of fentanyl in his bloodstream that could cause death by itself.

00:07:41.940 There's also an issue of his drug dealer refused to testify.

00:07:46.900 He pleaded the Fifth Amendment, which is your ability not to incriminate yourself effectively.

00:07:54.240 And there were...

00:07:56.040 He did not do that because he was basically providing drugs for George Floyd that could easily have killed him.

00:08:04.800 And these drugs were found in his car.

00:08:07.500 There were a mixture of meth and fentanyl.

00:08:09.980 I mean, God knows what that will cause someone to be like.

00:08:17.020 The video itself showed someone who was just clearly...

00:08:21.640 Of George Floyd, the body cam video of just someone who was clearly out of his mind.

00:08:27.980 So I don't know what to say.

00:08:29.780 I don't...

00:08:31.400 There is much more than reasonable doubt that Derek Chauvin killed him by effectively suffocating him with his knee on his neck.

00:08:41.120 So is the law in America, then, that it's not good enough...

00:08:46.960 Because you could argue that there's no way he would have died.

00:08:49.260 Yes, he's on drugs.

00:08:50.280 But it was that that pushed him over the edge.

00:08:53.360 Right.

00:08:53.780 The whole...

00:08:54.920 So is the law in America that the assumption is that the person is a normal...

00:09:00.000 That the person who dies is...

00:09:01.540 You have the right to assume that they're just a normal average individual and they're not on drugs.

00:09:08.920 I don't know the answer to that.

00:09:11.360 I mean, obviously, you can't take these things so far, you know, in the sense of if there's a 90-year-old man in a swimming pool and you start dunking him underwater like you would a teenager and he dies and you say, well, I was just having fun.

00:09:28.540 I didn't intend to kill him.

00:09:30.120 Obviously, that is going to be some level of manslaughter or murder, too, or something.

00:09:34.680 So you can't...

00:09:36.880 I mean, even if you're aware that someone's on drugs, that obviously doesn't give him a death sentence.

00:09:42.780 You have to reasonably affect your actions to accommodate that, I would assume.

00:09:50.560 But I don't have a direct answer.

00:09:52.100 I'm not a legal expert.

00:09:53.720 But I just think there are so many reasons to believe that Chauvin's direct action did not cause anything.

00:10:03.860 And he actually did things like he and his team called an ambulance and so on for him that it's just it cast much more than reasonable doubt.

00:10:14.640 But I would say that in this kind of thing, the facts don't matter, really.

00:10:19.940 And I don't believe that this case now spells the fact that all cases across the country are going to be mob justice and that, you know, if you're white, you're guilty. 0.53

00:10:36.740 And if you're black, you're innocent. 0.99

00:10:38.080 I don't think that is going to at all be the case. 0.89

00:10:41.380 I do think that that kind of mob justice has an effect in these particular instances when a case rises from just another, you know, police shooting of a black man.

00:10:56.380 And it rises to this religious like import for Americans, which the George Floyd case did.

00:11:02.560 You wrote an excellent piece on the BLM protest that followed immediately after George Floyd and its relation to the coronavirus pandemic.

00:11:15.600 The fact that people were cooped up, that they had anxiety due to this, you know, worldwide pandemic and death and so on.

00:11:22.980 And it also is related to a replacement religion in the sense that these times of stress, anxiety and insurgency will bring about a greater deal of religiousness.

00:11:36.360 And what we have to understand about George Floyd is, again, you know, feelings don't care about your facts and the religion God knows doesn't care about facts.

00:11:50.680 And he arose to a kind of religious significance that will overwhelm any form of doubt.

00:12:00.860 And they were asking on the news, they were asking this woman who used to be his girlfriend or something, you know, what would this white woman, what would George Floyd want?

00:12:12.020 Oh, George Floyd want peace and justice and all this.

00:12:14.520 No, George Floyd held a gun to a pregnant woman's stomach demanding money for drugs.

00:12:18.820 That's the kind of person George Floyd is. 1.00

00:12:21.720 George Floyd is a horrible, nasty person, a criminal, a violent criminal. 0.96

00:12:27.180 And so the idea that you could with some people, you can try and make them into a saint, perhaps. 0.98

00:12:31.360 But it's more than more difficult with someone like George Floyd.

00:12:33.740 I mean, it reminds me.

00:12:34.900 Incorrect, Ed.

00:12:35.520 They have already done it.

00:12:37.680 I mean, I don't know what to say.

00:12:39.900 I that that is it.

00:12:41.100 People have said that about MLK.

00:12:42.800 MLK, he screwed around with too many women and he had some funding issues, so he can't be a hero for Americans.

00:12:52.260 Incorrect. 0.94

00:12:53.640 Like, feelings do not care about your facts.

00:12:57.140 George Floyd is already a savior.

00:13:00.400 And I found it interesting.

00:13:02.800 I'll it's I find it interesting. 0.93

00:13:06.080 All these white women want to sacrifice George Floyd for their sins. 1.00

00:13:10.860 It's kind of funny, actually, is including his own girlfriend. 0.57

00:13:14.800 But someone on the news said that he someone said that he was a martyr.

00:13:23.300 He was a martyr.

00:13:24.420 But that to me implies that he voluntarily gave up his own life for a religious cause.

00:13:28.740 And therefore, surely, Chauvin is not guilty because he voluntarily died.

00:13:32.320 But again, that's like being autistic. 0.94

00:13:35.560 Yeah.

00:13:35.720 If he was if he was if he was if he was a martyr, it's like a religious significance.

00:13:40.060 He died for the good of race relations in America. 0.90

00:13:42.860 I think it might have been the way that people will understand it.

00:13:46.140 Yeah.

00:13:46.680 Here's Nancy Pelosi.

00:13:48.000 Thank you, George Floyd, for sacrificing your life for justice, for being there to call out to your mom.

00:13:57.420 How how heartbreaking was that?

00:13:59.480 Call out for your mom.

00:14:01.320 I can't breathe.

00:14:02.280 But because of you and because of thousands, millions of people around the world who came out for justice, your name will always be synonymous.

00:14:14.020 And again, yeah, yeah, that's where we are.

00:14:21.020 It is.

00:14:21.440 It is.

00:14:21.840 It is.

00:14:23.280 It is simply Christianity with a new person there. 0.98

00:14:27.640 I mean, George Floyd is kind of the son of man.

00:14:29.740 The fact that he's flawed, I don't think will actually be.

00:14:33.260 And he is obviously flawed much.

00:14:36.180 You know, you and I are flawed.

00:14:37.840 This guy is flawed off the charts.

00:14:39.580 But it's just irrelevant.

00:14:41.800 And they're going to forget about this stuff.

00:14:45.940 There are there.

00:14:46.920 We are living in a time of just total decadence in which people.

00:14:53.620 Everyone's depressed.

00:14:54.720 They want my drugs and my Netflix and my alcohol.

00:15:00.620 And the fact that he's a drug user and in fact that he's a hard drug user and that those might have been the actual cause of his death.

00:15:08.420 It just doesn't matter because people will kind of imagine their version of drug use as what he was up to.

00:15:15.560 It's like, oh, yeah, I smoke pot, you know, every week.

00:15:17.760 But, you know, whatever, man, it's cool.

00:15:20.140 It's not to be taken literally.

00:15:21.640 Right.

00:15:22.160 And they're going to forget about the really bad stuff like the point.

00:15:25.460 I have heard that pointing a gun at a predicate woman. 1.00

00:15:27.400 I mean, that seems kind of you can't come back from that one, but he will.

00:15:32.860 And I this is at least my kind of cynical view of it is that it is really like it's it was a religious thing.

00:15:42.600 It was probably impossible for the jury not to have gone this way, particularly given the circumstances of not being sequestered and so on.

00:15:54.240 And we now have this myth, but the myth can kind of support the system itself.

00:16:03.560 So Nancy Pelosi can say, like, the son of man, George Floyd, sacrificed himself for our sins.

00:16:11.820 And now we are closer to justice.

00:16:14.700 None of them want to say this is actual justice, like this is accountability.

00:16:17.820 We're approaching, you know, approaching that big platonic good up in the sky called justice.

00:16:25.800 But by turning him into a religion, it kind of like helps support the status quo in this way.

00:16:33.380 I mean, Joe Joe Biden disbanded a some committee on defunding or radically changing the police. 0.89

00:16:42.000 The idea that the police are going to be defunded in major cities strikes me as totally ridiculous.

00:16:48.780 It's just simply not happening. I think it will change.

00:16:51.500 There's probably more social work involved.

00:16:53.640 But these right wingers who think that, like, whites are going to quit on mass.

00:16:58.120 They're going to defund the police and we're going to have just endless chaos in American cities.

00:17:02.320 That is not going to happen. That's reactionary nonsense.

00:17:05.300 Not yet. I think you're right. The defunding the police, that, as I argued at the time or implied at the time in my article for Radix, that was the popular reformation.

00:17:14.600 That was that was a motion getting too far.

00:17:17.200 That was we need to think about a time of radical change, a time of breakdown.

00:17:21.680 And when you have breakdown, you have all kinds of chaos that happens.

00:17:24.460 And then it's reined in into a new dispensation.

00:17:28.000 Think of it in terms of Thomas Kuhn and scientific theories.

00:17:30.560 You have the scientific theory falling apart. You have all kinds of scientific theories being suggested.

00:17:35.640 You have the new scientific theory taking power. And then that's it.

00:17:38.120 That's the new power in the land.

00:17:40.160 And there's a period of chaos in between where all kinds of ideas are out there and where all kinds of things can be questioned.

00:17:45.780 And then you have a new orthodoxy. And that's the orthodoxy. And that's what happened.

00:17:49.300 So this is now the new orthodoxy.

00:17:51.740 George Floyd, as you say, is the son of man.

00:17:53.620 There is a degree they're trying. And it's fascinating that people in power who have invested financially and socially in this system are trying to suggest that there's some sort of substitutional atonement in the death of George Floyd,

00:18:08.140 whereby, as you say, we are closer to the platonic ideal of justice, of racial justice, which we worship and of equality.

00:18:15.360 And therefore, it doesn't matter that Nancy Pelosi is a hereditary politician rolling in money. 1.00

00:18:23.280 That doesn't do it. We can look over that because her lack of equality, her greed, and the fact that she manifests everything that is unfair about the racial system in America, 1.00

00:18:35.840 if you want to say, a very, very rich white woman of unbelievable privilege, an aristocrat, that she's atoned for now.

00:18:46.060 Her sins are atoned for by her mask wearing, obviously, but also by the sacrifice that George Floyd gallantly made, laying down his life so that upper middle class, virtue signaling white people could feel better about themselves.

00:19:00.580 Exactly. In other words, the strong will use the strong will use the weak or let's say the strong will use a religion of the weak to their own benefit and to maintain the status quo.

00:19:13.380 Indeed.

00:19:13.760 And I think that's, in some ways, where we are now with the whole Biden administration, in which he, in a grandfatherly way, will kind of talk the talk of racial justice.

00:19:29.360 But he won't do it in a kind of edgy, hard way, like we need to tear down the white family or something. 0.82

00:19:35.580 He'll do it in a kind of grandfatherly way of, you know, we need to get better as an American and this is unfair and blah, blah, blah.

00:19:41.220 But they, again, have their cake and eat it, too.

00:19:45.740 They ultimately worship this religion, but they're ultimately going to maintain the status quo.

00:19:52.100 And this religion is a kind of functional ideology for the current order.

00:19:58.140 And it works for them.

00:20:00.160 The religion, well, it does.

00:20:01.120 The religion is a me.

00:20:02.300 The religion can only be understood as a genetic battle between two types of white people.

00:20:08.420 Between individualistic type white people and, well, not just two, but let's say two individualistic type white people and group oriented type white people.

00:20:18.500 Between rich white people and poor white people.

00:20:22.480 And the religion assists the individualistic type white people who make a coalition with the non-whites to abstain and attain power. 0.92

00:20:30.500 And it helps the white people that are already basically wealthy and rich to maintain power because they're intelligent enough to realize the brilliance of this system. 0.58

00:20:40.680 And they realized it very early on that in the wake of World War II, racism, that's the thing we can use.

00:20:46.900 That's the guilt thing.

00:20:47.940 Christianity is falling apart. 0.58

00:20:49.460 We need to hold people together.

00:20:51.300 We need to hold.

00:20:52.440 I need to continue to feel superior and radiate my superiority over everybody else to stay in power.

00:20:58.180 I can do it with this racism thing. 1.00

00:21:00.460 And other people are too stupid to understand that. 1.00

00:21:02.900 So they'll hold on to the thing that I was indoctrinated when I was a child with nationalism or whatever. 1.00

00:21:07.700 No, this is the new thing.

00:21:09.100 And so it's like this American Civil War, in a sense, not to be hyperbolic.

00:21:13.980 But I think you've got two castes of whites that are battling it out. 0.73

00:21:21.540 The thing is, it's the castes of whites that don't hold on to this that are the ones that are breeding. 1.00

00:21:27.920 And that's going to have consequences eventually.

00:21:30.260 But at the moment, it's a wonderful, wonderful religion.

00:21:34.400 It has everything.

00:21:35.220 It doesn't have God.

00:21:36.260 It even has forgiveness.

00:21:37.260 Because you were saying a few months ago, the problem is it's like Christianity, but there isn't the forgiveness.

00:21:43.420 There is forgiveness now.

00:21:44.440 They've come up.

00:21:44.940 They realized that problem.

00:21:46.820 They realized the problem of the no forgiveness and the nihilism.

00:21:49.500 You can be forgiven through the sacrifice of George Floyd.

00:21:54.800 Maybe we needed Floyd, ultimately.

00:21:57.220 Because MLK, I remember MLK when I was a lot younger, was a much bigger figure.

00:22:02.880 I hear a lot less about MLK now, interestingly.

00:22:06.920 And they kind of needed someone else.

00:22:09.200 They needed a new sacrifice.

00:22:11.380 Because, again, sacrifice is what lets you live.

00:22:15.560 I mean, you're giving this over so that you can live.

00:22:19.640 And we needed something.

00:22:21.880 And George Floyd has filled that need.

00:22:25.160 But that's the problem.

00:22:26.100 MLK advocated unhelpful things like meritocracy.

00:22:30.300 And that was what everybody accepted.

00:22:32.020 And so you need to move beyond that to a new way of virtue signaling, which is equality.

00:22:38.840 So we need a new person for that.

00:22:41.240 And that is George.

00:22:42.800 And he, I mean, I can only assume that the sort of reified equality God sent George to be in that place on that day.

00:22:57.820 And, you know, Golgotha.

00:23:00.980 They shouldn't call it George Floyd's word.

00:23:02.460 They should call it Golgotha. 1.00

00:23:04.520 And make the noble sacrifice, which he did.

00:23:09.100 I mean, it's brilliant.

00:23:11.920 They're such clever people.

00:23:13.340 That's the thing these letters do.

00:23:14.640 Yeah.

00:23:14.660 So to go back real quick, I mean, I think you're, you're like referencing Jonathan Haidt or Haidt, however you pronounce his name.

00:23:23.860 And so like individualism and binding values.

00:23:27.960 So when I, the way I look at it is that we, we have these every few months, some kind of event like this that might very well, you know, otherwise be a kind of quotidian event that no one talks about or cares about.

00:23:43.520 I mean, the fact is there, there are police shootings and killings every day, but this one really struck a chord.

00:23:51.900 It struck a chord because of the video, mainly just the image.

00:23:55.840 It struck a chord because it came at a very particular time right at the pandemic.

00:24:00.060 I mean, everything kind of the world kind of conspired to make this into a religious event and not just a quotidian or pedestrian terrestrial event.

00:24:09.520 But so, and I think we, we kind of can understand polarization when we see people, it's like this becomes a left, right issue and it becomes a red, blue issue in the United States.

00:24:25.400 And, and just because the United States is so big and media apparatus is so huge, this becomes a left, right issue across the world.

00:24:33.120 I mean, one of the most remarkable things, there were BLM rallies in Finland after the death of George Ford.

00:24:40.040 Poland, in Berlin, I don't, maybe Russia, I don't know.

00:24:44.940 And I don't know how far afield it went, but definitely in the Western world, people just freaked out about this. 0.99

00:24:50.980 And they thought that they had something at stake in Black Lives Matter, which is this just kind of stupid American thing. 0.98

00:24:59.420 Like, why are you even talking about this? 0.99

00:25:01.900 But it really impacted them because it impacted them on a religious level.

00:25:07.460 But what I guess what I was saying is that, you know, with conservatives, you, you see a lot of rationality and kind of deconstructing of this event where you can find some good content from conservatives where they're, they're talking about,

00:25:21.600 Oh, well, you know, how exactly did he die?

00:25:24.540 You know, who was this drug dealer?

00:25:26.900 You know, blah, blah, blah.

00:25:28.560 But I kind of agree with the left criticism in the sense that, you know, all of those things might very well be true.

00:25:37.580 But at the end of the day, it's that you support the police, because, you know, whatever kind of individualism you have, and I think there's actually a lot of individualism and harm avoidance among conservatives, this freak out of her mask being an example of that.

00:25:54.400 But you ultimately want order, and you ultimately support the police, and you ultimately identify with the state.

00:26:03.620 And conservatives can't, they're having a harder and harder time identifying with, say, the bureaucracy, that's not the deep state, or the, their local newspaper, oh, no, liberal media, or even certainly the president, you know, oh, crazy, the radical left, blah, blah, blah.

00:26:20.960 But they do identify with certain things, they still identify with the military, they can still identify with the police, they basically still identify with the badass, violent wing of the state, the police and the military, maybe a few other things in there.

00:26:35.900 But they want, this is the backup, this is the background of this left-right divide, is identifying your state with order, culture, and the state, identifying yourself with order, culture, and the state.

00:26:53.180 And then on the left-right divide, and then on the left-hand side, this kind of insane obsession with harm avoidance, where, you know, even this just kind of thuggish, you know, generally awful person, George Floyd, the fact that he was, he might have been abused in some way by the police,

00:27:16.680 it just expresses this, it just expresses this sin, this, you know, this almost like endless sin, that goes back to slavery and Jim Crow, and it's still infecting all of the, all institutions, are still kind of, you know, still attacking blacks, using this residual history.

00:27:35.520 And this is the divide of polarization.

00:27:38.060 Yes, it's that they, that they find this, well, it, I suppose what the, the thing that I see as the underlying mechanism is basically neuroticism and mental instability.

00:27:51.340 So if you have low self-esteem, then you identify with those that are outcasts, and you, and you feel a strong sense of guilt and negativity, and you feel unhappy with life,

00:28:05.540 and you, and you feel everything's unfair, and all this.

00:28:08.540 So it's, it's those kinds of people, what William James called the religion of the sick soul. 0.81

00:28:14.220 And those are now very much the people on, on the left, and there's many, many studies that I have found on this,

00:28:21.540 whereas those on the right have a high self-esteem, and are content, and are happy, and are mentally stable.

00:28:28.200 And it is having those individualistic values, that is being harm avoidance and equality, those are associated with being neurotic,

00:28:37.840 because being neurotic is this adaptation to this unstable world where you've just got to survive.

00:28:42.760 You can be killed at any minute.

00:28:44.400 So it's all about you and your ability to survive. 0.99

00:28:48.120 You know, you're like, you're like a, and we are like this, you're like an animal in an overcrowded cage.

00:28:53.140 All order in a pack animal in an overcrowded cage goes away, and they just start killing each other.

00:28:59.080 They're complete individualists, and that's, that's what we're dealing with here.

00:29:03.120 So I think I would see that as the divide.

00:29:05.480 I would see it to a certain extent as the divide between the mentally ill and the less mentally ill.

00:29:10.640 And that very strongly crosses over with what Jonathan Haidt...

00:29:17.140 Yeah, I think, I think that's certainly one level of it.

00:29:22.700 I can remember Michelle Obama, I think it was a 60 Minutes interview, where she was talking about Barack Obama, 0.97

00:29:29.460 and she was like, as a black man, he can just get killed for walking around. 0.82

00:29:34.680 And it was just so, you know, again, that was a kind of an earlier state of this hyperpolarization, 0.92

00:29:41.080 but it was definitely in effect.

00:29:42.480 And I think for most Americans, they just, that was just so foreign. 0.99

00:29:47.880 It struck them as kind of malicious and, and so on.

00:29:52.360 Like, of course, that's not what my life is like.

00:29:55.520 I don't worry about being shot as I walk to the grocery store. 0.95

00:29:59.140 And the notion that Barack Obama should worry about being shot by, for being a black man while walking down the street is just absurd. 0.89

00:30:07.960 But I think it does... 0.97

00:30:09.260 The notion that he's black man is, though.

00:30:11.260 Well, that's true as well.

00:30:13.980 But, but I think it gets to, I mean, you can view all of this as cynical, and they're just using race,

00:30:21.980 but I think you can also view it as they actually kind of feel this way.

00:30:26.420 Oh, no, I do.

00:30:26.980 I agree.

00:30:27.360 I think, I think some of them, some of them are, you've got the Vicar of Bray types.

00:30:32.760 Do you have that phrase in America?

00:30:34.620 No, I've never heard that.

00:30:35.600 The, the, the person that's like a willow that will just bend with the political, political tides in order to, to get, stay in power.

00:30:42.300 Yeah.

00:30:42.380 We call the Vicar of Bray.

00:30:43.420 Anyway, and the, you'll get the Vicar of Bray types that will, like, you know, Piers Morgan is an example of this.

00:30:49.340 Whatever is the thing where he feels that he can, he can get a niche and be a bit edgy.

00:30:54.560 And at the moment it's being anti-woke.

00:30:56.400 But if you go back to the, to the, to Thatcher's in Britain, it was being very left-wing.

00:31:01.200 Yeah, exactly.

00:31:02.200 Whatever it is, but that's a bit edgy.

00:31:04.400 That's, but there's not too edgy, not too edgy that he doesn't get money.

00:31:07.180 Right.

00:31:07.440 But it's a bit edgy.

00:31:08.540 That's what Piers Morgan will go for. 0.99

00:31:10.320 He's an extremely cynical and dishonest. 0.74

00:31:13.140 He's so brave. 0.91

00:31:14.280 He's stunningly brave.

00:31:16.540 And so, so you, you, you, you have got people like that and you, you, you've got to remember, well, that among these, these leftists, you do get people that are narcissistic and that are Machiavellian.

00:31:26.280 But on the other hand, it could be argued that being Machiavellian is an expression of being left-wing because if you feel, or being neurotic, because if you feel that the world's out to get you and are, then you want to have power because you want to control things.

00:31:38.600 You want to control things because everyone's out to get you.

00:31:40.320 So you, it could be that Machiavellianism is inherent to being an individualist and thus inherent to being a left-wing at the moment, or in general.

00:31:50.340 Indeed, Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, argued precisely this in his, in his manifesto.

00:31:58.840 So.

00:31:59.680 You brought this up a few times.

00:32:01.260 You must be reading.

00:32:02.520 Well, no, people have said to me, you should read it. 0.98

00:32:05.140 And I just thought, yeah, the schizophrenic ramblings of a madman. 0.86

00:32:08.680 No, no, no. 0.99

00:32:09.560 No, no.

00:32:11.820 Some of it was that, but most of it was a very well thought out, well-argued thesis.

00:32:16.680 Yeah.

00:32:17.400 Anyway, that's why I brought it up.

00:32:18.920 It articulated for me the nature of left-wingness, I think, in a way that I'd never seen as well articulated.

00:32:25.940 So that's why I brought it up.

00:32:28.200 So, yeah.

00:32:28.800 And the other thing I wanted to mention, though, when we were talking about the police and white people becoming police officers,

00:32:35.100 is I do think that this won't stop them from doing so, because I think that we get to a point where, what are the jobs you can do if you're about average IQ or a bit less?

00:32:47.680 Like, what can you actually do as everything gets outsourced, as there's no farming anymore, there's no factory work anymore, there's no internet, there's no shops anymore.

00:32:58.460 What can you actually do?

00:33:01.660 And one of the things, in a society of declining intelligence and polarisation, you're going to get more and more violence, so you're going to need more and more security guards, and you're going to need more and more policemen.

00:33:13.360 And so that's what you can do.

00:33:14.720 And so there'll be, it doesn't matter, there'll be way more people that will want to do this than there will be demand for it.

00:33:21.660 And there'll be a growing demand for it, but then increasingly, there'll be nothing else you can do if you can't do science or whatever, there'll be nothing else you can do as a man.

00:33:31.360 And so that's what you'll do.

00:33:32.960 And so they become like 19th century coal miners, really, where they're at the pit face of crime, and they're just expendable.

00:33:41.980 And so it doesn't matter if, well, this person, it's very unjust that he goes down for this crime, but so what?

00:33:49.420 Because, frankly, it's expedient that he does.

00:33:52.020 And there'll be somebody else that will replace him.

00:33:53.840 It's not going to have any effect on recruitment.

00:33:55.740 And it won't.

00:33:56.560 It won't. 0.96

00:33:57.020 This idea that other policemen from now on are going to say, oh, there's a six-foot black man on drugs. 0.90

00:34:04.840 I'm on my lunch break. 0.57

00:34:06.300 No, somebody will have to do it.

00:34:08.900 And so I'm afraid, I'm quite cynical about that.

00:34:12.920 I don't think it's going to have any effect.

00:34:15.720 I think it'll carry on like this.

00:34:17.660 And this guy is a convenient sacrifice.

00:34:20.080 From what I've heard about him, of course, they've dug up lots of things about his personal life and stuff like that.

00:34:25.100 And I guess they could do that with anybody, and they could slant it so that it looks bad.

00:34:29.980 So some people have tried to take it from me.

00:34:35.360 Not for someone safely like me, but perhaps for you and Derek Schulman.

00:34:39.160 The fact that he's married to a former Miss Minnesota makes one, who's also East Asian, makes one think he's a bit of a fast life history strategist, if you know what I mean.

00:34:52.060 So, but anyway, it's unfair because you could do that with anybody.

00:34:56.080 But they've certainly made it come across like he's callous, you know, like he hasn't apologized.

00:35:00.740 And he perhaps he should have seen fit to do that and to beg for forgiveness.

00:35:05.340 And then it might it might have helped.

00:35:07.580 That would have been a good strategy.

00:35:09.100 Yes.

00:35:09.980 Although I think.

00:35:11.840 Yeah, I think they kind of needed they they they needed this.

00:35:15.900 I mean, it's if if he were let off and again, Chauvin is doesn't is not doomed at the moment.

00:35:24.840 I mean, he is in prison at the moment.

00:35:28.100 But again, the judge seemed to indicate that an appeal is at least possible.

00:35:33.900 So who knows what's going to happen?

00:35:37.460 And we'll also see what what goes on with sentencing.

00:35:40.400 I do think there would have been riots afterward, you know, if if he had been let off or maybe just kind of nicked on manslaughter.

00:35:51.220 I remember this is when I was in Chicago about a year and a half ago.

00:35:55.840 And I was I would work out at this gym not too far from my house.

00:36:00.660 And I went in one day and everyone was standing around the TV as if it were 9-11 or something like that.

00:36:07.460 And I was like, you know, what's going on?

00:36:08.860 And and they're like, oh, you don't know, of course, you know, it's this it was this trial of a Chicago police officer.

00:36:14.220 And he, too, was found guilty of of of a case that was much like the Chauvin case.

00:36:21.140 It was it was violent and extremely unfortunate, but also kind of morally and legally ambiguous.

00:36:28.060 But he was found guilty.

00:36:29.760 And they were always all these white people and whitish people, maybe some Asians or an Indian or an Arab or something. 0.93

00:36:36.100 But it was it was upper, you know, not not exactly upper class, but yeah, middle and upper middle class people at this gym.

00:36:44.260 And they're all sighing relief.

00:36:46.540 Oh, I'm glad he was convicted.

00:36:48.660 And they might say that they're glad he was convicted because he's a cop murderer and so on.

00:36:55.020 But the real reason is that they can go to their favorite sushi restaurant tonight and so on that you kind of have to this religion has incentives based into it. 0.97

00:37:08.700 Like if we're just a crazy new version of Christianity where we're worshiping, you know, black drug users and killers and so on, that that wouldn't work. 1.00

00:37:18.180 But if there are incentives to you leading your middle class suburban or urban life and it going along more smoothly because you sacrifice the occasional Derek Chauvin or you express white guilt or wash the feet of a, you know, BLM activist, etc. 0.90

00:37:38.140 It's worth it because one thing we haven't looked at, I think is germane to this is that it's not new this if you look at romanticism and the romantic nationalist movement, what you're worshiping is peasant culture.

00:37:52.300 Yeah, it's a defanged peasant culture. 1.00

00:37:58.000 If you know anything about the actual lives of these peasants in 19th century Europe, these aren't nice people necessarily.

00:38:06.660 I mean, if you're high in general factor of personality, you tend to go to the top.

00:38:11.060 And if you're low in general factor of personality, you're low in intelligence, you're a peasant. 0.67

00:38:15.600 And that was the case even then.

00:38:17.140 The heritability of socioeconomic status is 0.7 and it's been 0.7 for hundreds of years based on studies that have been done.

00:38:24.300 So these are horrible people probably, at least by the sounds of the time.

00:38:28.760 And of course, those are the people that are worshipped.

00:38:32.060 And you have it again with the other romantic, with the Rousseau and the tribes.

00:38:37.680 Again, it's this defanged tribalism.

00:38:40.280 In reality, you're dealing with the Yanomamo, these extremely violent, aggressive, unpleasant people. 1.00

00:38:45.480 And it's just an extension of that. 0.94

00:38:47.140 This is defanged African-Americanism. 1.00

00:38:51.660 Right.

00:38:51.860 But it's interesting.

00:38:53.400 That's an interesting comparison between romantic nationalism in the 19th century of a kind of high-mot,

00:39:00.860 worshipping the good peasant who's connected to the land and God and the earth and who is kind of sinless as well and guileless. 0.69

00:39:13.720 I think it's interesting that Americans and increasingly the Western world have picked urban African-Americans for this role.

00:39:24.240 I mean, it's that and they don't pick, you know, say, rural white Americans in West Virginia.

00:39:32.740 They don't pick that.

00:39:34.080 That cannot be romanticized.

00:39:37.760 Well, they did do that.

00:39:39.180 No, they did do that.

00:39:39.620 They did do previously, yeah.

00:39:41.160 But for the last, I don't know, most of my adult life, those people are villainized.

00:39:47.780 Those people are the problem.

00:39:48.980 Those people are the ones who are, like, either benefiting from Derek Chauvin's of the world or the ones supporting him.

00:39:55.500 Or so it's those people have villainized and they've chosen the target of their romanticization is urban African-American culture, which, you know, quite a feat that they've accomplished this. 0.84

00:40:08.260 But they apparently have.

00:40:10.420 They have.

00:40:10.900 And they did do that.

00:40:12.300 But they move on.

00:40:13.440 So once everybody accepts something, you virtue signal some more.

00:40:16.700 Right.

00:40:16.860 And the other thing I'd note in a different way, and the other thing I'd note is some people have said to me, oh, romanticism, well, no, that's different.

00:40:22.840 We shouldn't compare that to Marxism or to these other multiculturalism or to these other Christian ideas because it's beneficial to the race, you know.

00:40:30.120 But I would think about this.

00:40:31.980 Who is it that founded these things?

00:40:34.860 What was the name of the person that published Kalavalla, the Finnish romantic folklore?

00:40:41.540 Was that a Finnish surname?

00:40:43.400 No.

00:40:44.020 What was the name of the person that published Kalavipoeg, the Estonian folklore?

00:40:48.080 Was that an Estonian surname?

00:40:49.200 No.

00:40:49.380 It was a German and a Swede.

00:40:50.840 So it was people from the different ethnic group, from the upper class ethnic group, playing for status by fetishizing the poor and saying that I'm on the side of the poor. 0.92

00:41:05.500 And that's how it started.

00:41:07.420 And you get this again and again with these kinds of romantic nationalisms.

00:41:12.780 So I think that that is, yeah, perhaps.

00:41:14.920 And also you have this history, don't you, in America.

00:41:16.480 Steve Saylor has written about this, the idea of the magic Negro.

00:41:20.840 So, yeah, the black person is somehow freer and more genuine and has such magic powers like Morgan Freeman.

00:41:30.100 Right.

00:41:31.360 Yeah.

00:41:32.180 I mean, it's a little, it's, I think it's a, I think it's kind of a residue of a paternalistic aspect towards African Americans. 0.77

00:41:42.720 I mean, when I would talk to my grandparents, both of whom lived in the South, they would very often say something to the effect that race relations were better because we would kind of take care.

00:41:57.480 It's this paternalism and you could say they knew their place.

00:42:01.460 Like you had a maid in your house who actually was taken care of in many ways.

00:42:07.380 She, she was treated decently, no question, and lived a very good life and got some money out of it.

00:42:15.180 And, but she also very much knew her place and was subordinated.

00:42:19.300 Um, and I think in some ways there was a kind of idea that they are kind of magical, that there may be inarticulate, but wise, that they'll, they'll give you a little saying here and there.

00:42:29.980 It's a kind of Oprah, um, God that lives in your kitchen.

00:42:36.060 Yeah.

00:42:36.640 Yeah.

00:42:37.140 It gives you a little wisdom drop.

00:42:39.300 It's my, my, my grandpa, Willie from Frasier.

00:42:41.940 Um, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's exactly, exactly.

00:42:45.260 There, there are many versions of this, but, uh, or your caddy on the golf course who, you know, uh, you, you just lost your job.

00:42:52.780 And, but he says, you know, um, sometimes when you're lost, you shouldn't be found or just some true, you know, truism that exactly, exactly.

00:43:04.480 But you kind of need that.

00:43:05.540 I think it's, I, I, and, and yeah, we, we've, we've always had this.

00:43:11.360 And I think in some ways you could say that the magic Negro, George Floyd is, is almost a kind of new version of this, a continuization, a continuation of this kind of paternalism and fetishism. 1.00

00:43:24.400 Yeah, it is.

00:43:25.260 That's what I just said.

00:43:26.440 Um, so, so yeah, I, I think that it's, it's a deep thing in American culture that doesn't quite, uh, work so well elsewhere that you have the magic Negro and that's what he is. 1.00

00:43:35.920 He's the magic Negro, but he's very, he's more than magic though. 1.00

00:43:38.600 Cause other ones like Morgan Freeman or Oprah or whatever, they've got like a bit of magic, whereas he's got like super deep.

00:43:45.620 Right.

00:43:46.020 And no other race. 0.98

00:43:49.060 Hispanics can't be magical in this way. 0.99

00:43:52.640 Um, Asians can't be magical in this way. 1.00

00:43:55.120 Native Americans might a little bit in the sense that there's long been a kind of romanticized talk about Native American culture, but it seems to be.

00:44:03.800 Mr. Miyagi, Mr. Miyagi, Mr. Miyagi, Mr. Miyagi.

00:44:05.820 Okay.

00:44:06.440 I'll, I'll grant you Mr. Miyagi, but, um, it's, it's, it's a particular African thing. 1.00

00:44:13.140 I, and I don't, there, there's probably some reasons for that, but I don't think other ethnicities can be, Jews can be magical a little bit. 0.99

00:44:20.960 The local spells the mugwai in Gremlins.

00:44:22.980 And I think, I think, I think you do have, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you do have a magic element with the, and even Indiana Jones's voice.

00:44:32.560 Oh, short round.

00:44:33.820 Yeah.

00:44:34.380 So I think, I think maybe there is that element with Asians to some extent, but it's, it's more, as you say, it's more than eclipsed by black. 0.86

00:44:40.480 Yeah. 0.97

00:44:41.060 It's eclipsed by black.

00:44:42.260 But anyway, good conversation.

00:44:44.580 We'll leave it there.

00:44:45.080 Bye.

00:44:45.120 Bye.

00:44:45.240 Bye.

00:44:47.120 Bye.

00:44:47.240 Bye.

00:44:49.240 Bye.

00:44:52.980 See, so it wasn't that bad, was it?

00:44:55.820 You didn't need to get a little straight.

00:44:56.320 No, it wasn't.

00:45:19.240 Bye.

00:45:21.240 Bye.

RadixJournal - April 25, 2021

St. George Floyd, The Redeemer

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