whYNOT

This one's from RT, definitely has to be "Putin's propaganda" ... (as opposed to overwhelming western, war mongering propaganda)
https://www.rt.com/news/555356-hatred-russia-mcdonalds-us/
 

Not at all, Putin's propaganda. A prescient speech delivered in 2015.
 

"Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Marxism was an instrumental theory in African-based liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea Bissau. Amilcar Cabral, the revolutionary leader of Guinea Bissau, linked class struggle to anti-imperialism, demonstrating the necessity of “incorporating the proletarian project into the project of national liberation” (Magubane 1983, p. 25). Also, antiapartheid ideologists in South Africa adopted aspects of Marxist dictum even as they emphasized national and racial identities (see Marx 1992).
Marxism continues to inform the spectrum of black progressive politics, even as Afro-Diasporic intellectuals argue for the autonomy of black liberation struggles and their “organic political perspectives” (James 1992, p. 183). Contemporary black intellectuals urge that a tripartite analysis, stemming from “the nexus of three crucial sites of struggles, community, class and gender, be at the center of Black liberatory projects” (Marable 1997, p. 8). If they adhere to this perspective, social justice movements constituted by black people can remain “avant-garde” formations of contiguous race and class struggles".
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And look at them - Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, etc. and missing, Zimbabwe - now.
It's those very "national liberation" and "Black liberatory projects" which hold and have held African citizens and their countries back - No more excuses and no one left blame, the colonists/colonials/"imperialists" have been gone for thirty to fifty years. South Africa has been 'free' for 25. Albeit that the Apartheid regime was proven by economists to have been de facto Socialist, apartheid is still irrevocably (and conveniently) equated with capitalism. Many of the original ANC cadres were trained in and had ties with Moscow back then, and I sometimes read the new wave of intellectuals spout the identical, worn-out doctrines, e.g. the LTV, above. Again, it is the neo-Marxism of the governing elites that did most of the damage, along with grand scale corruption in government.
For all its official, systemic racism, at the change over in '95, SA had the No.1 economy in Africa, little poverty and very high (Black) employment. From that height, just five months ago Moody's down-rated SA's status to "Junk", and a pre-lockdown unemployment number around 30% - clearly doubled at minimum, since.

Whose life is it anyway? Properly, individual rights have to be justified as man's life, the right to. Life, being self-directed/generated action, which we know to be volitional "action" of an individual's mind in accord with his physical acts.
Therefore, the right to freedom of action, and protected individual rights.
Coming at this from the bodily-ownership angle, I didn't mean to by-pass the above. Although the greater society may not be aware of Rand's unique explanation of rights, her "freedom of action" is applicable (I think would be agreeable) to anyone. 
The freedom of action for a whole society of individuals can never be homogeneously "one size fits all". I.e. man's rights are indeed one size for all, but each man's choices of action can't be and shouldn't.
in action, as in thought and values then, what suits one, isn't the universal standard for all, nor vice-versa. That sounds most "categorical imperative". (I'm convinced Kant's CI was the implicit moral base of the mass lockdowns-vaccinations).
For proper life to keep continuity during a pandemic, as always, an individual has to decide on his/her own health and risk/benefit status . The enormous human range of age/etc/etc. requires a personal evaluation that can't possibly be made by others. Particularly, not forced on him by others. There are many thinking and rational people who know they haven't a need for vaccines for reasons well-known. There is also nil certainty of not having side effects and adverse reactions.
There will be some and many whose fear of vaccination is seemingly irrational in avoidance of their own benefit. Again, it is not a choice anyone else can make on their behalf. Morally, one might say, they are wrong: in rights they have that freedom of (in)action. They should be upheld by those who value liberties.
(What doesn't need repeating here is vaccines protect one quite well - BUT - are unable to prevent further infections. You'd think that fact has been understood at large, incredibly it's still denied. Simply: Everyone remains a pathogen 'vector' - vaxed and not. The earlier demand for all to get inoculated selflessly for the sake of all others has provably become superfluous and intrusive. The vaccinated have presumably gained their protection, so they and govts should leave other people, who pose no extra danger to them, alone. Visibly, their moral sanctimony is all that keeps them demanding compliance of others. Control, not health and wellbeing). 
Rights cannot be suspended for an emergency nor equally in normal times. An emergency is exactly when they must be affirmed, more than ever. The effect of this immoral exercise of suspended rights for some - we will see and are seeing how difficult recovering our rights for all will be afterwards.
Whose life - and body - is it, anyway?
 

Welcome to Objectivism Online, MJ, and thanks for the link to the paper in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. Aristotle took perception, in the primary sense and in the expanded sense of our higher cognitive powers, as discrimination and grasp of what is. Let us suppose that perception requires consciousness and no neuronal processing supporting less than required for perception supports consciousness. I do not think that the authors have selected a definition for consciousness that rises to the level of perception. That is to say, what they take for consciousness, thence the brain processes sufficing for consciousness, is too broad.
The fetus comes to discriminate his or her mother’s voice from other sounds in utero. But that is no cognizance of what the thing discriminated is, and so, no consciousness rightly conceived. And the fact that certain memorial competence is required for consciousness under any reasonable conception of consciousness and the authors of the scientific paper report the requisite sort of memory for their too-broad concept of consciousness is no weight in favor of selecting their concept as right or best.
I most certainly reject the idea that life of animals that can come to possess consciousness are not alive until they come to have consciousness. One’s living existence is not confined to one’s conscious existence, however extra important is the latter.
And I take the real line at which a fetus first becomes capable of dependent existence on caretakers who are not the mother to be at viability-outside-the-womb time, not at full-term delivery.
I composed a developmental time-line of human cognition beginning in uterus to about age three about twenty-five years ago, but I can’t locate it just now. I do have the following portion I have sometimes put online, and this may be of interest to you, MJ. On day of delivery, the offspring begins to obtain oxygen by breathing, and it has as well the competencies at the beginning of the following report, which we would expect to have continuity with powers had the day before and in anticipation, so to speak, of the new environment.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
By day of birth, one had the additional reflexes of pupil dilation, knee-jerk, and startle. On that day, one had visual preference for 3-dimensional objects (one perceived something of the 3D of objects), visual discriminations of different static line orientations, visual correction for 3D size constancy under variation of distance and correction for shape constancy under variation of object orientation. One was unable to detect boundaries and unable to fill in invisible parts of objects. One’s visual acuity was poor (probably due to immaturity of both the retina and the visual cortex), and one’s contrast sensitivity was poor.
One’s significant body motions were in alternation with visual attending. One was capable of rough, saccadic tracking, which was not only not smooth, but not anticipatory. One fixed on interesting objects, and perhaps one had some slight control in this; perhaps it was not entirely passive capture. One may have had an early visual preference for faces in tracking. One could imitate two facial movements and one head turn; one could perform these imitations when forced to delay until the model movement was absent.
One’s auditory resolution of pitches and volumes was already pretty good. One had a preference for Mother’s voice over the voice of a stranger, and one could distinguish human language from other auditory input. One was engaged in early head-turning, in the horizontal plane, towards sound sources. As of the time I compiled—about 25 years ago—the developmental time line from which the items here are taken, it was unknown whether the sound source is experienced as outside the head; head-turning had been evoked also by earphones.
Let’s wrap up the first day. One cried when other infants cried. One had auditory recognition memory; retention was for days under conditioning, for 24 hours under habituation. One was sensitive to pain, to touch (coetaneous and active), and to changes in bodily position.
By the end of the second day, one could discriminate Mother’s face from a stranger’s face. One had a preference for infant-directed speech (motherese) over adult-directed speech.
By five days, one engaged in early reaching towards an object in the visual field, reaching that included a preparation for grasping. This reaching and visual detection may be an undifferentiated attention system.
By twelve days, one could imitate three facial (oral) movements and one set of sequential finger movements. By fourteen days, one had a preference for Father’s voice over that of other males. By three weeks, one expected the reappearance of visual objects that were gradually occluded by a moving screen, provided the occlusion time was short.

The embryonic "clump of cells" (AR) is "a potential"- absolutely. At its final stage of development, with viability - and consciousness - I'd argue the fetus has grown to "an actual". And has attained its right to life - I believe.
The timing of birth, as we know, is quite arbitrary nowadays: "Natural" birth or induced labor.  I think Rand might well have qualified her "until it is born", today, in light of greater biological and medical knowledge.  I'm open to debate, though.

https://newideal.aynrand.org/abortion-should-be-legal-until-birth/
With Rand's formulation of "life", MrJ, one should certainly not assume that a fetus/infant has to be independent of its  mother's body before it qualifies as 'life'. The "action" taken by the fetus, is its consciousness, senses functioning before birth by some weeks. Its total dependency on its mother or another person (or an incubator) for nutrition, etc. continues long after, obviously. Mr Bayer above makes a very weak argument, imo - for individuation - not viability -being the "bright line" for its rights. Which I maintain is pretty primitive: i.e. only once separated at birth, having become a visible and touchable, 'independent' entity, has it arrived at "individuation"? With all the mother feels and senses from her quite mobile fetus and she and her doctors can view on ultrasound, and measure heatbeat, etc.? I don't think so.
Rand would only go so far as "the first trimester" and left the rest open to debate. I think it probable that full-term abortion would not get her nod, apart from emergency extraction to save the mother.

There's such a thing as these new 'Democrats' pushing the US as far Left as they can go as fast as they can, and Trump and his normal antics are the problem?
Sorry, I found myself nodding along in agreement with this article, then the present reality hit.
Trump's election obviously was the temporary block on the Left's ambitions, which they've taken up with an extra vengeance since. They have now blatantly outed themselves and shown their true colors.
Otherwise, maybe some other GOP candidate of the decent, gentlemanly, good-loser sort - who could not have stood a chance against Hillary - and in her two terms she'd have eased the country on the same route, anyhow.
It was always my stance and my cause for support then, that a 'self-interested' and independent America was what Trump and his supporters were essentially after. Only, no one, or few intellectuals articulated it as such, on moral grounds. Then, predictably, the opposition including Objectivists cried "nationalism!"
Never mind about their 'brothers' keepers', even the religious conservatives know when their nation was and is being sacrificed at home and abroad. Charity begins at home, they will say.
It is not my first concern that Trump himself is re-elected, only that the Biden bunch isn't. (The media have made certain "Trump-fatigue" would set in).

Next, in a totalitarian state, spreading ideas will be actionable. (Oh, wait ...) Is there a face mask to protect against a thought pandemic?
The irrational is the insane or the impossible, I believe Rand said, Michael.
Try to prove in court that it was my germs you caught off a door handle. Then, that it was my negligence or malice at fault.
If anyone wants, who and what stops them from going round masked their whole day and every day of their lives? Just leave me out.

A virus is an element of nature and an inherent risk of life on Earth, not a weapon that an infected person goes around assaulting people with. If you don’t have symptoms, haven’t tested positive, or knowingly been exposed to an infected person, it’s rational to assume you’re not infected and go about your business. You can’t live if you have to assume you are infected with a deadly virus. 
Each individual’s health and safety is his own responsibility. The onus to stay home and/or get vaccinated is on those who are at risk.
Every medical treatment has benefits and risks. If you fear the risks of vaccination more than you fear the virus, you have an absolute right not to get vaccinated. No one has a duty to sacrifice himself by accepting potential bodily harm for the sake of protecting others.
The ardent anti-vaxxer’s assessment of the risks might be incorrect, but it’s his judgment, and he has a right to act on it, even if others disagree.

This exposes the faulty basic premise of all these arguments and public controversy: one is NOT initiating force by transmitting an infection; one does NOT have the right to not be infected. The consequences of trying to uphold and enforce that 'right' would be insane. About a thousand 'rights violations' a day might have occurred during the spread pf this pandemic.
A business owner however could rightfully disclaim as many have always, that injuries (etc.) on his premises are non-liable. "Enter at your own risk".

Exactly right. 
What’s the logic here? Even for a deadly virus that would kill man at his best i.e fit and healthy?
It seems to me your claim rests on divorcing the virus from the individual even though the latter carries the former.
For covid, there is perhaps a case to be made. I’m not sure it can be considered a violation if the damage is primarily due to the ‘victim’s’ own poor health. 
Right, this seems like the obvious solution to me, and I’ve been left baffled by the libertarian and Objectivist controversy over how to respond to Covid. At the very least, it does the bulk of the heavy lifting.
Do you know of any prominent Objectivists who have argued along these lines?
Then what’s your definition of “initiation of force”? 
Punching someone in the face complies with the literal definition of those words.
If the initiation of force (literal interpretation) is illegal only when it is involuntary receipt of the initiation of force, as Doug suggests Ayn Rand meant, then the individual can dispense of his right to life (and its derivatives) in any way he pleases meaning he can consent to the receipt of physical force (guaranteed or potential). 
As necrovore argues, man can “surrender” some of his rights in exchange for other values.
In other words this is ultimately down to the discretion of the individual. If not, why? Since he owns his life, he has the right to incrementally trade it off (or incrementally risk trading it off) for other values. 
In the case of covid, when one enters a premise “at their own risk”, they weigh that risk against the values to be gained from entering. By entering they trade away some of their right to life (they’d be losing their right to be free of the initiation of physical force from covid, assuming one considers the transmission of covid an initiation of force). 
A more extreme example: a group of men dying from cancer agree to a televised fight to the death for big sums of cash which they can pass onto their family. 
One might object on the basis that the the “surrender” of rights for values, or the “weighing” of force and values must be rational (like receiving a vaccine) and so voluntarily fighting to the death for money is fundamentally anti-life and irrational. 
But we know from Objectivist literature that one has the right to live the life of a heroin addict which is also fundamentally anti-life and irrational. One has the right to sabotage oneself. 

Or: They Won't Admit It, but Some Leftists Hate Private Vaccination Requirements
Image by Mark Adriane, via Unsplash, license.Not long after I made a similar point, but in what I hope was a somewhat more constructive and positive way despite my exasperation, Hayes Brown of MSNBC chimes in to the effect that it's good business to require employees to be vaccinated.

(Brown does, alas, call these requirements "mandates," further entrenching the apparently near-universal confusion between business and government in our society.)

This leftist columnist should be cheering the move, but he can't help sneering the whole way through, and spitting on the "laissez-faire" -- as if, and if only! -- wagon delivering the good news that we're about to get this pandemic right where we want it:Those people. Aren't "othering" in general and phrases like those people supposed to be anathema to the left? More to the point, a small remnant of capitalism is showing us the way out of the pandemic: While it might be appropriate to call out many conservatives for being hypocrites about this, the charge of hypocrisy carries with it a subtext of moral agreement when one is not careful.

In that respect, Brown is careful: Leftists can be chaste to the point of unintelligibility when it comes to language, except when they disagree with someone, and then it's no holds barred. So, Brown is calling out hypocrisy, but we still know where his moral compass points, as we shall see.

However, he is like a meticulous navigator steering straight towards a dangerous rock because he is looking at a bad map, but ignoring what he could see through the window next to him.

Strike that: He just saw it. This move is a glaring refutation of the idea that "we" require the government to order us around, for our own good. That, left to our own devices, we'd all just get sick and die -- or worse.

Brown oddly and incorrectly accuses the right of advocating laissez-faire, but doing so hypocritically. (The right should advocate capitalism, but generally doesn't, and usually isn't convincing when it does.)

I'll pass over a tortured analysis of who's hypocritical about what, because here's what I find most interesting about Brown's piece:Here are apt expressions, although Brown is too pissed off to realize it, of the empty evil of altruism, society's dominant moral code, and collectivism, its political expression. It would appear, despite his claim to not see a "downside," that the government's not coercing everyone to get a vaccine is a downside to Brown, who professes to want vaccinations to happen.

But this defeat pales in comparison to the glimpse of the effectiveness of capitalism and self-interest Brown got and is trying his damnedest to bury: Those greedy corporations making it happen by the marriage of their self interest (called cynical and insinuated as corrupt by the phrase bottom line) and those of their individual workers -- who want to trade with them and freely do so (smeared by a cheap and cowardly analogy to prostitution) -- is proof that self-interest and the system he obviously hates are, in fact, moral and practical.

There is no joy in Mudville: What people like Brown have been claiming to want -- while supporting numerous tyrannical abuses of government -- is starting to happen thanks to the tiniest slivers of the system, capitalism, that have somehow survived in the weeds of our mixed economy, and despite the boots of the pandemic-emboldened thugs people like him support.

Brown is right to point out that the conservatives he calls out should be happy, but they're not the only ones. If they should recognize and celebrate business finding a way to get America closer to herd immunity (as a happy byproduct of trying to earn a living!), Brown should ask himself: If I am so concerned about the welfare of others, why am I unhappy to learn that capitalism and self-interest can deliver exactly those things?

The lack of joy and the dripping bitterness are telling enough. Will anyone notice, or will Brown and his ilk succeed in causing Americans to forget this miracle, and continue, themselves, hiding behind the scoundrel's refuge of a professed concern for others?

-- CAVLink to Original

In The Prince, Machiavelli speaks of how a ruler who needs to do something unpopular can simply get one of his subordinates to do it for him, and then, if worst comes to worst, he can not only deny responsibility, but make a public spectacle of punishing the subordinate.
A government can not only use that to wield "unpopular" powers, but also powers that it is not supposed to have in the first place. In the United States, censorship is one of these powers -- and the subordinate in this case is the "privately owned" corporations, who "volunteer" to be subordinates because they have to, because the government wields various carrots and sticks. The government has figured out a way to get the practical effects of censorship while not doing it itself, thus having plausible deniability. This depends on allowing a few big corporations to have their hands in almost all speech -- and then the government "delegates" the power of censorship to them.
I think it's actually is proper to call this "censorship," because, when it comes down to it, it is the ruling regime doing it -- indirectly.
The corporations aren't really doing it of their own free will. If somebody puts a gun to your head and makes demands, then whether you agree with the demands or not doesn't really make any difference -- although the gunman might tell you that things will go better for you if it seems that you do agree. But it's a little different when the gunman is the government: people who really do agree might not mind the gun at their heads, because they figure, "the bullets in that gun are for other people, people who disagree... but I agree, I co-operate, so I don't have to worry about it."
When the corporations become unpopular, the government can make a big spectacle of "trust-busting," and the showmanship on this has actually already begun -- but you'll find in the end that, even if the government theatrically breaks these companies up, it won't make any practical difference. A few new rules will be announced, nobody will go to jail, and if you end up with two or three Facebooks or whatever, they will all toe the same line.
In a free market, companies would compete for people's business, and a company that started banning people for their political views would simply drive those people into the arms of the competition. A company in a free market wouldn't ban people for political reasons, because it's suicidal.** So why are companies doing it? Because they're confident that there is no competition for those people to go to. Why are they so confident? Because the government is guaranteeing it. We don't have a free market.
Trump has failed to grasp the nature of this problem and thus is proposing incorrect solutions.
However, once again we see some people claiming that there isn't really a problem at all, and that if people are being kicked out of the public sphere for their political views, it's just "the free market at work." That isn't true either.
(Some Republicans are doing one other thing wrong -- when they see the power being wielded, they don't want to eliminate that power, they want to take it over for their own use. That's not right, either: some powers cannot be used for good, at least, if good is defined as "promoting human survival.")
Over the decades, there have been a lot of people complaining, rightly, about smaller "public-private partnerships" than these, and how such partnerships somehow manage to wield government powers while simultaneously not being subject to any constitutional restrictions because "they aren't part of the government, they're privately owned."
Well, now we're coming to the culmination of the trend: companies and government are, for all practical purposes, just aspects of the same thing.
To save the free market we need to separate these things: the only ultimate solution to this censorship problem is a separation of state and economics, which would include the elimination of all of these powerful regulatory agencies, so that the regime has no way of compelling compliance with its censorship desires.
** This sentence isn't correct as worded. A magazine publisher, for example, is not "suicidal" if he only accepts certain kinds of articles for his magazine. A phone company, on the other hand, would be "suicidal" if it tapped in on people's calls and cancelled their service over their views.

So by "survival instinct" you do not mean an instinct directly to survive, nor any awareness of the issue of survival on the part of the animal.  Rather, you mean an instinct to perform certain particular actions, actions which in fact improve the animal's prospects of survival.

I have heard a conservative acknowledging that the fringe groups on both sides eventually converge at the bottom (when seeing the right and the Left departing in "a circle" instead of a flat line extending out to their extreme ends) and are one as bad as the other. That received my agreement, she was one who can be worked with.

What do I know of "QAnon" and right wing conspiracies? Little, thankfully. Only some words and rhetoric.
What I do know from long familiarity is that that "Fascist right" has been the go-to cause celebre of the MSM and others, in order to by sleight of hand, through misdirection, cover the tracks of the resurgent Socialist Left. 
And so far, thankfully, the right aren't actively responding, to the disappointment of many, I believe. Anyone can predict the, er, "active" response if the political shoe were on the other foot, mind you.

DA.
"Darker" - because of Trump - or despite him? Not to sing his praises too much, but weren't the shadows already gathering before his time, fully revealing themselves increasingly and disturbingly in only these last few months after his departure?
That's what I was catching strong hints of from the US, pre-2016.
And -possibly- perhaps his shock tactics were in a partial measure of calculated opposition to such forces, which even an unintellectual Trump could recognize were dangerous to the nation.
(Stephen King would say that, being about as Lefty as they come).
Oh and I have been to some shithole and basket case countries in Africa. It was about time they were (crudely) called out, maybe to take stock of themselves rather than this faking pretense by the delicate diplomatic community that all is fine and dandy on the continent. As long as they keep throwing guilt money at the problems there won't be change.

And still, "physical" volition persists (as the argument for animal volition). Which was entirely covered, when one understands her, by self-generated, self-directed action - goal directed action - self-initiated motion - by Rand. 
The actions to life which every life-form has and must have, by definition.
So what "volition" is left to mankind, one which distinguishes his nature apart? 
Using volition for every act by any creature (like a Covid virus attaching itself to a host) devalues the concept of "volition" and makes it mundane. Then:
'Equality' of all living things, all under equal 'volition'. Which in practice inverts to equal determinism.
THIS is the form of the concrete-bound, anti-metaphysical assault on man's volitional consciousness, and one effect of growing skepticism, determinism and anti-individualism.

Well, not "to shrug". Although I like this telling paraphrase regarding the (con)temporary state of America (as I and many others view it).
(I had said pre-US elections that coming off a higher base than anywhere in a greying, long-compromised Western world, it would be the ~relative~ drop of liberty/freedom - by her own standard - that would hurt America. There would not be a complete collapse, like in AS. You would never fall to Venezuelan and Zimbabwean levels, as some misleading, alarmist, examples given, but the moral damage would be greater).
Not to shrug then. But to see this phase through with moral grit and intellectual conviction, with zero or the minimum of sacrifice and self-sacrifice. Never a conflict, that could cause more irreparable harm than would be worth it.
 Atlas Shrugged ends with: "We are going back to the world". Of course, returning to reality after a break and now work to be begun again. You and we all, haven't the opt-out choice the strikers had, one must remain here in the world.

For the sake of the children,
If you saw Lady Liberty, the giant who holds the free world on her shoulders, if you saw that she stood, blood running down her chest, her knees buckling, her arms trembling but still trying to hold her torch aloft with the last of her strength, and the greater her effort the heavier the looters and their children bore down upon her shoulders demanding freedom from want - What would you tell her?
(Ayn Rand's Francisco d'Anconia, paraphrased)

HD, Thanks for coming back. As for the wager, forget about it.

Stephen, much on board with this, that one can hold both the enjoyment of illusions together with their objective explanations. (The song: "Both Sides Now"?)
Here are usual (psychological, Ponzo illusion) explanations given for the perception of a larger sun and moon at the horizon. I favor the magnifying, refractive atmosphere theory (not given).
https://magazine.scienceconnected.org/2021/03/sunsets-are-illusions-2/

A counter-intuitive oddity, a brain-teaser rather than a paradox, imo. Quite something that Plato was then onto "tangential velocity" (the 'rotating' speed of various radii) clear above.
  "tangential velocity is directly proportional to the radius. It increases because tangential velocity is inversely proportional to the radius". Wiki
In the Paradox as presented, the suggestive, visual red herring is an *inner* wheel 'track' or line, exactly equalling the length of the outer - except - the wheels are different diameter/circumferences!
Of course, the larger one's circumference singly dictates the distance covered and all inner points of a moving object correspond.
Paradox explained, I reckon, by the inner wheel turning at a slower (vt) on its 'track' than the larger in order to also complete one identical revolution as the outer rim, and to traverse the identical track distance in the identical time.
Demonstrating the non-contradictory nature of a wheel's properties, how it's supposed to act and does act.

One can't lose sight of the climate of intimidation outside the trial. The jurors are only human and as much as they likely wanted the verdict be truthful to the evidence could not have not known that their personal lives, families and associates were under very possible threat, and violent acts, egged on or covertly encouraged by pols and the rest would spread through the country at large. At very least they would suffer social and work ostracization from that point on. One has to feel sorry for them being placed in an invidious position, damned if they do .... The facts presented them didn't change what was already a fait accompli. They would have to find him guilty on all charges. Chauvin is guilty of manslaughter with aggravating circumstances. Murderous intent wasn't there, or wasn't obvious - nor was proven. A 10 to 15 sentence fits the crime, probably. This was trial by camera: everyone saw the clip, and the rest was details. Every armchair 'expert' has been swayed by his facial expression and "body language", which was all it needed. That he is a brutal person and a bad policeman has been turned into - and confirms - white men are racist, all police are rotten and racism is entrenched in the system. The verdict is an implicit admission of guilt of these contemptible allegations. There's how street justice gradually gains control over rule of law. Also how policemen will become afraid to act promptly and forcibly in defense of citizens or themselves.