Quick(ish) take/coming soon: The Derek Chauvin verdict and Tony Timpa

 Derek Chauvin was convicted.  As he should have been.  Yet I cannot find a single media outlet that is getting the story right.  Why not?  Because nobody is talking about Tony Timpa.  This weekend, it's time.  George Floyd and Tony Timpa.  The BLM storyline is as follows:  George Floyd was murdered because he was black.  This is a thing that happens to black people.  Had he been white, it either never would have happened, or justice would have been swift and certain.  It took video and mass protests, nationwide, to secure a conviction, and even then it was not certain.

Yet if you know the case of Tony Timpa, this story is difficult to maintain.  Except for the fact that George Floyd was murdered.  That, you can get from the isolated facts of the case, and the video itself.  The rest, the social context... remember my broken-record advice.  What stories are you not seeing?

Tony Timpa's death has been buried as ignominiously as his body itself by the indifference of BLM and society at large.  The phrase, "white bodies," has more of a Boogaloo ring to it, so it can't be used as the same kind of shibboleth, and the Blue Lives Matter crowd can't admit that the cops ever just fucking murder anyone, so the Black & Blue Lives Matter crowd agree on one thing:

Nobody must ever talk about Tony Timpa.

And that's why nobody is.  Right-wing media outlets want to play this down, talk about threats of violence from protests, and yes, Maxine Waters was playing with fire, and the threat of actual, literal fire.  Left-wing media outlets are trying to figure out how much to celebrate given that George Floyd is still fucking dead, and qualified immunity is still a thing, and that's what lets cops get away with actual, literal murder.

So this leads me to where I'm going this weekend.  Math!  Dimensionality!

No, wait!  Come back!  I promise, there'll be, like, snark 'n stuff too because this thing wouldn't be fun otherwise, but here's the basic point.  I have hinted at it before, but I'm going to elaborate on it directly.  Racial bias in policing and excessive force in policing are distinct dimensions, yet our public dialog has collapsed them onto one dimension.  Tony Timpa, and cases like his are excised from public discourse because they cannot be fit within the dimension of discourse.

Don't worry.  The math'll be simple.  More conceptual than computational.  But we shall discuss Tony Timpa, and the forbidden topic of his death.

Feel free to celebrate the conviction of Derek Chauvin.  Just be careful how you interpret it.

If you have never watched the death of Tony Timpa, you should.  Here is the raw body-cam footage, complete with cops laughing and joking as he died, face down in the dirt, unable to breath.  It misses the lead-up, which is basically the same lead-up as George Floyd.  Timpa called the cops to help him.  This is the result.

In tenure veritas.  Academic freedom.  This is a raw video.  This happened.  I didn't forge it.  This is real.  I cannot be disallowed from discussing the politics of it, just because the dominant faction in academia doesn't know about it, and doesn't want to know about it.