That Baudrillard Quote Again...
Baudrillard on Watergate: "The denunciation of scandal is always an homage to the law. And Watergate in particular succeeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal... A large dose of political morality reinjected on a world scale... The essence of every relation of force is to dissimulate itself as such and to acquire all its force only because it dissimulates itself as such, understood as follows: capital, immoral and without scruples, can only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever revives this public morality (through indignation, denunciation, etc.) works spontaneously for the order of capital."
Something similar happened tonight with Derek Chauvin, a cop so rotten that even his comrades turned on him at trial. But why did the police allow this breakage of their Omertà? By eliminating their most visible monster they hope to reify this country as just place, to strengthen their own legitimacy. Nancy Pelosi, a true status-quo conservative, admitted as much with her awkward "George Floyd sacrificed his life for justice"-- a baffling statement until you realize for her that's exactly what tonight meant. The strategy will fail for two reasons, the first is that our right wing is too hilariously racist to play along, instead of cutting their losses with one individual killer cop and forevermore say "see the system works" they're throwing a fit. They just can't help themselves. The second is that BLM activists are too smart to settle for this scrap of justice, they want the whole damn table and god willing they're going to get it