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Comment by 2-tpg | Hacker News Reader

The blog post about leaving politics at the door was in response to the death of Floyd and some employees upset about their perceived "silence" of upper management, where more woke companies did speak up. So it's relevant and provides context to that policy of focusing on company mission, instead of making statements about racial inequality, police brutality, and unfair societies.

You are entitled to political thoughts. If you can handle it, you are even allowed to share them with colleagues. But don't get upset if others have different political thoughts. And certainly not get upset enough to accuse them of racism.

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It's very odd how people who openly express deeply-racist sentiments (as your previous comment repeating lies about George Floyd does) get so offended when accused of being racist.

What lies?

> Floyd was a career criminal unworthy of sainthood or role modeling.

Floyd was arrested for a home invasion, where a 1-year-old baby was present, and he threatened a woman to tell her where the money and drugs was hidden, by pressing a gun to her stomach. After that he was arrested and processed 8 times for crimes related to drugs and theft. The day of his arrest he tried to pay with a counterfeit bill. After his death, Floyd was witlessly treated as some martyr, killed at the hands of racist violent police, and portrayed as a role model for all black people and the struggles they go through, just trying to turn his life around.

> dying from a self-inflicted fentanyl overdose

Handwritten notes of a law enforcement interview with Dr. Andrew Baker, the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, say Floyd had 11 ng/mL of fentanyl in his system.

"If he were found dead at home alone and no other apparent causes, this could be acceptable to call an OD. Deaths have been certified with levels of 3," Baker told investigators.

> and resisting arrest

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/aug/4/george-floyd...

Offended that you brand me with racism for telling you an unpleasant truthful interpretation? No, I think me and my wife can live with that. But a little scared, yes. You can accuse me and others of deeply-racist sentiment, and that accusation seems enough to financially and socially damage me. At least give me a "fair" trial: Show me where I lied. Or these racist accusations hold as much water as those in the Coinbase article, and are exposed for the bloody clubs they really are.

> At least give me a "fair" trial: Show me where I lied

Just one example: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/sep/25/blog-posti...

> As evidence, it cites comments from Andrew Baker, the chief medical examiner in Hennepin County, who performed an autopsy on Floyd. But Baker didn’t say that Floyd died of a drug overdose.

> The medical examiner’s office ruled that the manner of Floyd’s death was homicide.

> The cause of death, according to the medical examiner, was "cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression."

You realize that his murder was caught on video right? Tens of millions of people saw it. And for the crime of trying to pass a counterfeit bill at a convenience store. If you've ever exceeded the speeding limit while driving, you have performed an act which posed more of a threat to society and danger to others than the act of passing a counterfeit bill.

"The Hennepin County medical examiner said that Floyd bloodwork showed a “fatal level of fentanyl,” according to court documents, but he didn’t say this killed him."

Seems a bit pedantic and disingenuous to say that the examiner didn't attribute the death to an overdose, without providing the above context.

I'm not here to defend the knee-on-the-neck arrest of a handcuffed suspect, but the evidence as it stands holds it as a possibility that he died from the drug use, which still wouldn't justify the completely reckless/inhumane way in which he was restrained.

Actually I think what the other poster did is disingenuous, which was to repeat a (false) claim that Floyd died from an OD, and not mention the fact that the medical examiner conclusively ruled he died from a heart attack caused by suffocation, and ruled the manner of death a homicide.

He was dying from an OD, brutishly helped along by a poorly applied restraint move, held too long, because filming onlookers challenged the authority of the cop, and the cop was afraid to have to fight Big Floyd, before the ambulance arrived.

Anything to avoid admitting that a cop killed a black man in cold blood by kneeling on his neck for eight minutes, even after he said "I can't breathe" repeatedly.

> because filming onlookers challenged the authority of the cop, and the cop was afraid to have to fight Big Floyd.

Are you suggesting that cops are such snowflakes that they can't do their jobs if a civilian criticizes them? I'm struggling to think of any other customer-facing job where that would be acceptable. This is like suggesting that it's fine if a waiter throws your meal in the trash and refuses to comp you because you complained that it was taking too long. They would be fired on the spot, for the crime of slightly inconveniencing you!

Also, there were FOUR cops there. Are you trying to suggest that an experienced cop, with three other cops present, was afraid of one guy who was supposedly so incapacitated that he was actively dying before even being subdued?

>>Anything to avoid admitting that a cop killed a black man

Way to stoke a flame war.. At the risk of exacerbating it: anything to bring up Floyd being black, while identical deaths involving people of other racial backgrounds, like in the case of Floyd, Tony Timpa, are never attributed to racism.

Also, way to implicitly accuse him of being a racist for not agreeing with you on the motives and culpability of the police.

Maybe it is the prevalence of this knee-jerk assumption you're exhibiting now, where you attribute any wrong committed to a black individual to some endemic anti-black societal bias, and not Coinbase's workplace environment, that is the reason why so many employees interviewed by Coinbase accused the company of anti-black racism, without a single definitive piece of evidence.

>>Are you suggesting that cops are such snowflakes that they can't do their jobs if a civilian criticizes them? I'm struggling to think of any other customer-facing job where that would be acceptable.

Strawman.

Would you agree or disagree with the statement that "systemic racism against Black Americans exists and is a major problem in American society"?

Would you agree or disagree with the statement that "accusing cops of intentional cold-blooded racist-motivated murder on the basis of his and his victim's skin color, without presumption of innocence, sourced from emotion, and with mob justice, is a major problem in American society"?

See how you can disagree or agree with my question, while your goal-post moving question can only be agreed to if you are a reasonable person? Just because racist-motivated murderers exist and are problematic, does not mean Floyd was murdered with racist motives.

You demand I defend the cop's actions, just for my interpretation of the case does not align with your interpretation. You call me a racist and a liar. You can't even direct quote me, so you put words in my mouth, and then call me disingenuous (I never said "died from an OD"). You are debating from very bad faith, and debating poorly at that. And I don't think you even realize that, nor the damage it does to the debate, working together to a solution, division, and growth of the "silent majority", who is starting to get fed up with this childish I-never-fell-off-a-skateboard Twitter-follower activism.

> You are debating from very bad faith, and debating poorly at that

You're clearly not trying to "debate" out of a neutral position. You are tossing out a mix of unrelated facts and lies in an attempt to prove that George Floyd's murder was not racially motivated, or that he was actually dying from a fentanyl OD so the cop's behavior would have been fine for a healthy person, or not even to prove anything but to paint him as a career criminal who deserved what he got to bias people against him.

Short of a written declaration from Derek Chauvin, stating that "I killed George Floyd because he was black and I was having a bad day", there is nothing that will make you admit this murder was racially motivated, and I think it's pretty obvious to most readers of this thread why that is.

>>You're clearly not trying to "debate" out of a neutral position.

I recommend you practice some introspection, because this statement is so out-of-touch with your own obvious bias and ideological perspective, that it makes discussion with you almost pointless.

>>in an attempt to prove that George Floyd's murder was not racially motivated

There is absolutely no proof Floyd's murder was racially motivated.

> Anything to avoid admitting that a cop killed a black man in cold blood by kneeling on his neck for eight minutes, even after he said "I can't breathe" repeatedly.

This shows how you view me. You judged me as a racism denialist, for having an opposing interpretation. It is like I won't accept the Truth of your rendition of that scene, but maybe evil enough to be aware of it.

It would be absolutely horrible if a cop killed a civilian by maliciously kneeling on his neck arteries! That the cop did it, mainly because the civilian was Black and he was white! You sound like you want that horrible reality to be the truth! You already spray-painted his face on a banner with political talking points! Maybe you even got your company Twitter to pay their respects to Floyd.

> even after he said "I can't breathe" repeatedly

He was saying that when he got out of the car. He was under enormous stress from the arrest and prospect of possible jail, with a drug that already increases heart rate. The single cop had to restrain, because ambulance (not arrest car) was called, after it was clear from the "I can't breathe" that he needed medical attention for OD. The other cops did crowd control, because the frantic yelling of Floyd attracted attention. "Hey, man, let him go, he is just saying he can't breathe". Like Philando Castile, that single video footage then went viral, and the cop acquitted on ALL charges, after companies such as Google send out PR condemning police brutality and systemic racism, because capitalism is a tool which employees can play as well (ideally, aligned with -- not damaging -- the company mission!), and now we are here, with you suggesting I think cops are snowflakes.

Give me a court case, a light symbolic punishment to avoid a second protest/riot, while allowing for the possibility that racism exists, and did not play even a minor role in the case of the death of Floyd. That cop looked like a nonchalant fool enough to mess this up. Not foolish enough to kill a black man out of racist motives, while your Asian and Hispanic colleagues are keeping Social Media away from reality.

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