Tweets are saying Québec Solidaire’s Amir Khadir has been arrested while demonstrating in Quebec City. Photo.
Updates from June, 2012 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Starting with the less lurid news in the Magnotta category: Labatt is dropping its demand to the Gazette to remove a photo of Luka Magnotta posing with a bottle of Blue. I’d like to have seen it dawning on the PR people that lunging to protect their brand when a guy had been killed and dismembered was in pretty goddamn poor taste.
A hand and a foot were discovered having been mailed to grade schools in Vancouver Tuesday although the connection between these schools and Magnotta is not clear.
DNA tests have confirmed that the remains mailed to Ottawa were from the same body as the torso found in Montreal, identified as Lin Jun.
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Anarchopanda has made a formal request to Superior Court to get the city’s anti-mask law invalidated. (He’s really a philosophy prof and Radio-Canada mentions his real name, but let’s not allow that to spoil the fun.)
Demonstrations continued Tuesday evening in Montreal and Quebec City.
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Ephraim
Pointless. By the time it gets through the courts, the national law will be in place.
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Hamza
‘Pointless.’
What are you, the Borg? It’s called dissent for a reason.
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Luka Magnotta has been accused of cannibalism after discussion of this has been floating around for days.
I have not watched the notorious video, nor am I going to.
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Bill Binns
Yes, clearly a sick man. He may want to look up the name of Dr. Turcotte’s lawyer.
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Kate
The two cases have almost nothing in common.
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Bill Binns
@Kate – Maybe, but how could Magnotta’s behavior not be descrinbed as crazy? Cannibalism? Are there any sane cannibals? If he’s crazy than nothing he did is his fault right? I’m sure the fact that he tried to escape will complicate matters but is there really much of a chance he will not use the insanity defence?
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Anto
@Bill: As I see it, the question is not only to judge whether the person is crazy, but also to evaluate the chances he will kill again.
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Bill Binns
@Anto – I hope so but I wonder what an acceptable number is. I mean, someone who has already commited murder once must be many times more likely to do it again than a random person out of the popluation. Personally, if someone needs to take a pill everyday to keep from turning into a murdering psychopath, I’m not comfortable letting him out.
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qatzelok
At least the mafia only cannibalizes the public purse. At least the mafia don’t cut off body parts…. oh wait. Yes they do. I just know there’s a positive comparison with institutional corruption in here somewhere… ie. why this is news.
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Kate
@qatzelok it’s news because if someone kills his own kids and is tried for it, it’s a public event and human nature means we will take interest in it, from all kinds of angles – how justice deals with it, how the medico-legal world deals with it, how the public handles it.
As I heard the story today it crossed my mind that Turcotte’s likely being kept inside at least as much to protect him from the public as to protect the public from him.
@bill binns I’ve thought about this a bit, but be warned, I have neither formal legal nor psychological training:
Earlier on this blog I compared Turcotte to Vince Li, the man who went berserk on a long-haul bus and killed and partly ate Tim McLean, who was a total stranger to him. Li was, by any metric I’d recognize, insane: witnesses agreed there hadn’t been any communication between Li and McLean before the attack. What happened there totally boiled up out of a deeply diseased psyche. I do not think most people would want to see Li punished for being a “bad man” but I think we can reasonably feel we want to see him treated for being a deeply sick one, and kept away from people as long as there’s any doubt he could snap again. For life if necessary.
Turcotte is a different situation and a different kind of crazy. I had mixed feelings about this case because from time to time we see similar cases in the news, in which a messy breakup leads someone to attack their own kids as a way of hurting their partner. The Li case had no logic. The Turcotte case had a horrible logic: whatever else happens, Guy Turcotte has succeeded in damaging his ex-wife Isabelle Gaston permanently.
But we have to use our imagination here even if it’s only to admit we can’t stretch our imaginations to encompass the psychosis that possessed Vince Li on the bus, or the deep hysteria that must have possessed Guy Turcotte. You go around in a circle here: maybe Guy Turcotte wasn’t Li-crazy, but just try to imagine the anger and disturbance that would cause a man to kill his own kids and you back into a different zone most people would call “crazy” too.
We could debate over and over how much of an action is consciously willed (i.e., not crazy?) vs. how much is done in a kind of sleepwalking, compelled state by the perpetrator, but we will never know for sure.
Magnotta is a different case yet again. We’ve seen that he’s deeply narcissistic and disturbed and has been for a long time. Is he a “bad man” – and does that question mean anything? Even if we say he’s “bad” and not “insane” what does that mean? Surely someone who can do what he’s alleged to have done is tantamount to crazy, whatever actually went on in his head at the time.
I think what I’m trying to say is that we can’t know what goes on in another’s head, but while there are crimes with reasons we can see – revenge, gain, killing from anger and so on – and which, as a society, it actually may help to punish – crimes like the killings of Jun Lin and Tim McLean are so much the culmination of an insane logic inside their perpetrators’ heads that they are, by any standard, the acts of insane people, and clearly not acts carried out by someone in their right mind. Past a point we can’t get hung up on guessing how they felt at the time or what internal justifications they were making for the actions. We can only go by what they did (or are alleged to have done).
Now, you could make a radical case that such people are so broken and potentially so dangerous, and keeping them alive so expensive, that as a society we can’t afford to keep them alive and they should be put down like mad dogs. I don’t think I’d want to live in that society, but I see that it’s a logical argument. Executing people as revenge or punishment is quite different, but in all these cases you’re deleting a human being, and I think it’s worth going to some considerable trouble not to do this.
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steph
Sane people don’t murder each other. It definitely takes a moment of insanity (momentary or a year of instability) to kill another human. So I don’t understand any insanity plea – none of them are acting sane. I don’t understand the law.
All these people need medication. I don’t believe in capital punishment, but I’m not against having them medicated for the rest of their lives – and using incarceration to enforce that. -
Marc
The man is getting exactly what he wants: a ton of publicity. His trial is going to be a three ring circus and he’ll savor every moment of it. He can’t not do otherwise.
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ant6n
@Steph
Soldiers kill people. Some police sometimes kill people. -
qatzelok
@ Steph
Drivers kill thousands of Canadians each year. Each death is important to the family, and if we actually HEARD about these deaths, we might change our behavior. What are we supposed to learn from the Magnotta trial? That feminine euroqueens are potential cannibals? Or is this story pulp trash to prevent the working class from discussing anything remotely serious?
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Robert H
An individual acting with premeditation, intention and malice to kill someone for some twisted motive is not the equivalent of a careless, distracted, possibly drug-addled, possibly physically-impaired motorist who adds to the carnage on the roads, though the result is just as tragic and absurd. Soldiers and police at least kill at least ostensibly under the mandate of a state, for the sake
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ant6n
I was mostly responding to this idea that “sane people don’t hurt each other”. Either they do, or there are a lot of insane people.
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Robert H
…for the sake of a cause or to defend the public. Extreme behavior, whether virtuous or loathsome, is by definition anomalous and attracts human curiosity. There is no shame in wanting to know more or eanting to make some sense of some unusual, disturbing event. I’d say this is serious and the attention the crime is getting is logical. Qatzelok, did you actally read what Kate wrote?
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qatzelok
Let’s ignore the real problems around us and gawk at “the bearded lady” for a while.
@ Robert H, defending this story as “news,” nonetheless concludes: “though the result is just as tragic and absurd (car accident, psycho drag queen attack). Soldiers and police at least kill at least ostensibly under the mandate of a state”
Yes, and drivers are also killing “for the state,” or at least, “for the economy.” And this makes it alright? This is why we should concentrate on circus freaks? To take our minds off the much larger damage that we cause by being normal?
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Kevin
I think many people are too quick to dismiss murder, even mass murder, as ‘insane’.
Immoral, evil, misguided — but not insane.
Was Anders Breivik insane? He killed dozens of people because he disliked the way his fellow countrymen accepted immigrants. He knew mass murder was immoral and deliberately picked his act to cause harm and spur revolution.In my opinion Li was legitimately psychotic, and like many Quebecers I think Turcotte’s sentence was inadequate, especially given Cathie Gauthier performed almost identical actions and was found guilty.
@qatzelok
Something that happens every day is not news.
(And in your case, I’m sorry if someone you love was badly hurt or killed in a car crash.)We don’t report on car crashes — much — because they are commonplace. They happen every day, and so cease to be news. While they are, individually, tragic, hearing about them every day creates a sense of fatigue in the public.
Unless there is something unusual about a crash, we tend not to cover them (and even then not always. There’s a case stemming from last summer involving a supposedly drunk driver and young women who were badly hurt that did not get much coverage).
The Bianca Leduc case has received a lot of coverage, and the act itself has had a lot of investigation: One young man’s incredibly stupid mistake in getting behind the wheel of a vehicle he could not control, racing through residential streets and killing a young girl. Then the ridiculous legal attempts to deny responsibility for his actions?
It reeks of the problems our modern society faces in terms of blaming someone else, or wanting someone else to pick up the tab. Where is the self-respect?So how to deal with this every day problem.
The solution is to look at the root causes of crashes. Individual acts of irresponsibility? Poor design on roadways? Deliberate actions? But that’s not something that can be covered on a daily basis — that’s a magazine article.
Here are three I’ve contributed to in the past year or so.
http://montreal.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20111114/mtl_special_blacklist_111117/20111117/?hub=MontrealHome
http://montreal.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20111031/mtl_special_texting_111031/20111031/?hub=MontrealHome
http://montreal.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20110214/mtl_special_drive_110214/20110214/?hub=MontrealHome -
Bill Binns
@qatzelok – What does this car free utopia you fantasize about look like? Are we all growing turnips in our back yard and seldom travelling more than a few miles from the spot where we were born? Are we riding horses? Are trains ok? Planes? Ambulances? I’m genuinely curious. I have met people who are against cars for enviromental reasons but you seem to go beyond that. Even if we had electric cars and some form of clean electricity gereration, we would still have car accidents and we would still have a lot of sapce given over to roads and parking.
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ant6n
@Bill
I think it should be possible to envision a society without the need for individual car ownership. So no turnips required, we don’t need to ride horses, trains are ok, planes possibly, ambulances as well. And electric cars do not solve many of the efficiency issues related to individual car ownership; and assuming clean electricity as a techno fix is not very realistic in the near to medium future. -
qatzelok
@ Kevin: “We don’t report on car crashes — much — because they are commonplace.”
That’s exactly my point. Killing people with blunt instruments is what normal people do in our consumer-mad society. Why does this incident make the news? To make our industrial “normal” seem less toxic? It’s very toxic. I’m not fooled by these foolish tabloid red herrings.
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Rufus Wainwright is going to open the jazz festival with a free concert on
July 3June 28.-
Singlestar
The jazz festival opens about 5 days earlier….
From the article you cited: “C’est Rufus Wainwright qui ouvrira la 33e édition du Festival de jazz de Montréal le 28 juin à Montréal. Le second grand spectacle gratuit aura lieu le 3 juillet avec Escort, une troupe venue de Brooklyn.”
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Kate
HOW CONFUSING.
Thanks!
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Ian
Ah, Rus, So un-jazzy, So whiny. If only the student protests could drive him away.
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Kate
I tend to agree with you. Not someone I’d stand in a crowd for three hours to see.
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steph
Maybe he’s the plan to drive the students away?
He’s not that bad though.
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Just found this page of fascinating visual data about Montreal on a uwaterloo blog. It would be nice to be able to zoom in closer to some of the maps (adults by generation of immigration, visible minorities, the distribution of families, dwellings by type and year of construction, work and income – lots of demographics).
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Robert J
I was looking at the data in one of the comparative charts: http://env-blogs.uwaterloo.ca/atlas/files/2012/05/GENERATION-final.pdf. Interesting to see how Montreal still has significantly more population within 10km of the central business district than Toronto. It’s not until you get over 10km away from the central business district that Toronto’s population is clearly larger.
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Adam Hooper
I published an interactive at OpenFile with 2011 Census data (as opposed to these charts, which are from 2006) and more fine-grained data (regions roughly 10x smaller) last week. http://www.openfile.ca/interact/census — it only includes “people per dwelling” (and some interesting age/sex stuff) because the rest of the 2011 census data hasn’t been released. The rest will come later this year.
You can’t zoom in on these uWaterloo maps because the dots would become misleading. They don’t individually represent people on the map: the only thing we know is, the number of dots in each region (in this case, census tract) is correct. Zoomed out, the maps are accurate enough; but if you zoomed in, either the legend would have to change (to something nonsensical, like one dot per 0.01 person) or the dots would be badly placed. (The alternative way of presenting this data is to use a legend with many colours, which sucks in different ways but lets you zoom in.)
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Kate
Thanks, Adam Hooper!
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ant6n
@Adam
Cool stuff! I didn’t realize census canada actually released data down to this level of detail for free. -
Stefan
Given that all Canadians pay for gathering and processing all these data with their taxes, shouldn’t it be available for free? (at least for personal/academic use, with a possibility for commercial licensing to recover a bit of the cost)
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ant6n
@Stefan
Data that the federal government in the US creates is freely available. In Canada, you gotta pay. You can’t even get the postal code database for free, because the crown corporation who owns it uses it as a source of revenue.
Universities tend to buy access licenses for data, so it is available to academia.
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Guy Turcotte is to be kept at the Pinel Institute for the moment, but his case will be heard again before the end of the year. Meantime he will allowed outings, at first supervised, later unsupervised. He killed his two kids in February 2009, but made a pitch a jury found plausible that he was in the grip of mental illness.
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Bill Binns
Wow. Murdered both of his children and he’s back on the street in two years. I wonder what the mother of those children thinks about that. Let’s hope Pharmaprix doesn’t run out of whatever it is that is supposedly going to keep him from killing again.
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Tux
That man will have to live with the memory of what he did for the rest of his life. That sounds like a living hell, and punishment enough, to me. If a jury found that he won’t be a danger to society, I see little point in keeping him in jail, soaking up public funds. Nothing will bring those children back.
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walkerp
Not that she deserved to have her children die, but the mother was not the most responsible person either. Her role gets forgotten in the horror of Turcotte’s actions, but she was carrying on with her trainer and didn’t seem too interested in dealing with her children.
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steph
I found this more disturbing “Guy Turcotte wants to have more children” from last November. http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/11/04/doctor-guy-turcotte-convicted-of-killing-his-son-and-daughter-wants-to-have-more-children/
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Kate
Yes, I opined back then that I wished the judge could impose a vasectomy, but it didn’t go down too well with some folks here on the blog.
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Gilbert Rozon met with the student group reps Monday – even offering a special Juste pour rire show for their benefit. Rima Elkouri notices how the very positioning of the students as a danger creates a tension that doesn’t actually exist.
Garnotte and Chapleau came up with similar visuals as commentary.
Some students are said to be planning a naked protest to disrupt the Grand Prix festivities? Are they entirely clear on what Grand Prix culture is like? This might be a treat for those partygoers, rather than a trouble.
Kind of lamely, the mayor also plans a meeting with the student reps. François Cardinal sees the issue clearly as Rozon having stolen a march on Tremblay. Urbania has some other thoughts on Rozon and on the situation generally.
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Berlin police say Luka Magnotta won’t fight extradition back to Canada to be tried in the killing of Lin Jun.
Meanwhile, Labatt is threatening to sue the Gazette over running this picture (which I’ve found on the Ottawa Citizen site but has been used by many other news media this week, as noted on OpenFile).
A blogger writes about sharing a flight to Paris with Magnotta and noticing him, then realizing later who he was.
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Bill Binns
Apparantly, Labatt has never heard of the Streisand Effect.
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C_Erb
I was wondering how Labatt would react when I saw that picture.
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Michel Therrien is set to be named head coach of the Canadiens Tuesday. He held that position in 2000-2003 and his stint wasn’t exactly memorable.
Hamza 02:56 on 2012/06/06 Permalink
Wow
qatzelok 07:25 on 2012/06/06 Permalink
A corrupt government typically arrests all its opponents eventually. I wonder what the Charest mafia will do next? What private-public partnership will they sign with leg-breakers?
Adam 08:03 on 2012/06/06 Permalink
Qatzelok, to use an expression that Kate employed with me recently, put a sock it in. You are not in Syria. You are not in North Korea. You are not in Belarus. Hell, you’re not even in Sicily. So stop carrying on as if you’re the Last Honest Man standing up against a government that disappears its opponents. Yes, there are problems in Quebec with corruption and organized crime but you seem to want to convince yourself that Don Corleone is the puppet master behind the sun rising in the morning. Go read a book or take a walk or get a massage and chill out.
Hamza 08:06 on 2012/06/06 Permalink
I’m enjoying how the Charestists’ mode of attack now has retreated to ‘you are not in north korea’ and ‘shut up’
Kate 08:06 on 2012/06/06 Permalink
@Adam, I appreciate your view, but please don’t order people around on my blog.
Bill Binns 09:02 on 2012/06/06 Permalink
I watched “The Trotsky” last night and found myself thinking about qatzelok all the way through.
William 09:16 on 2012/06/06 Permalink
I think its worth pointing out that he was arrested with hundreds of other people. One law for everybody is one of the foundations of our democracy. What I think is worth thinking about is why considers it more useful to run around the streets of Quebec City breaking traffic laws than to use his privilege to speak up in the National Assembly and the media. I guess he doesn’t have anything really that interesting to say.
ant6n 09:16 on 2012/06/06 Permalink
Maybe it’s a sign that Quebec Politicians are not above the law *wink*
Ephraim 09:24 on 2012/06/06 Permalink
He’s subject to the law, just like everyone else. Of course, considering that he is notoriously discriminatory himself, maybe they will find him a nice cell mate and he will learn what discrimination is.
Hamza 09:30 on 2012/06/06 Permalink
‘ Long live the emperor and king jean the charest . He is our protector of the realm. He can do wrong, let all those who speak ill or oppose him be crush’d beneath our boot. God is on our side. Justice is what our king decides and nothing else. We are loyal to Jean, to the end of our days. ‘
paul 10:17 on 2012/06/06 Permalink
Hopefully Marois is next :-)
Like Martin Luther King, Ghandi and Mandela before him, I hope Khadir is able to overcome this oppressionist state and provide $325 for each poor student. Much like Rosa Parks, years from now this moment will be recognized as the turning point in our fight; boosting students to their rightful place at the top of the totem pole to rule over the land and provide all citizens with free iPads.
PS – Adam…don’t feed the trolls
C_Erb 10:18 on 2012/06/06 Permalink
http://tinyurl.com/d5m8cwz
marco 10:37 on 2012/06/06 Permalink
He gets a $494 fine for blocking traffic while combating the oppressive murdering PLQ regime. What’s next Amir? Not returning library books? Letting your dog poop on the sidewalk?
steph 11:46 on 2012/06/06 Permalink
Is the blocking traffic fine the result of declaring a peaceful march illegal? – declared illegal arbitrarily because of Law 78?
I’m hyperboling but imagine how much money the province could recoup if they decided to fine the construction companies for causing traffic – $$$$ for every orange cone, every lane closure & detour – the cars must flow! And since street festivals also cause road closures fine all festival goes this summer too, we’ll be rich! Declare anything illegal arbitrarily, no one is safe!
Kevin 11:48 on 2012/06/06 Permalink
Nah, he’ll go back to protesting against a store in his own riding. Because all the tax money he lives off of comes from the magic tree.
Hamza 12:12 on 2012/06/06 Permalink
Public school system is a COMMUNIST TROJAN HORSE!!! Those kindergartners have been freeloading off our TAX MONEY for wayyy too long. Let them pay their own way through school dammit! You know, in Pakistan, kids WORK and PAY THEIR OWN WAY through life!! I am an island! Kids should pay their own way JUST LIKE THE REST OF US.
Ephraim 12:14 on 2012/06/06 Permalink
@marco – “Oppressive murdering PLQ regime”? Gee, aren’t we good at exaggeration. You want to see what oppressive and murdering regimes are… buy a plain ticket to Syria.
marco 12:19 on 2012/06/06 Permalink
@Ephraim
Sorry, I’ve been looking at too many #GGI tweets.
qatzelok 12:48 on 2012/06/06 Permalink
Hey Adam, while I realize I “don’t live in Syria,” I also realize that global capitalism is global, and that global capitalists have no more use for my race than they do for others. I am not vain or ethnocentric enough to think that my tribe is “special” in the eyes of MONEY.
Stefan 13:46 on 2012/06/06 Permalink
Let me just put this in context:
1) blocking the road in company of others, for repeat offenders: $3500-$10,500 (about triple if convicted of organizing it, up to $27,000) – Source: cbc.ca
2) killing somebody on the road with a motor vehicle by not paying attention: usually not even gets you arrested – Source: look in any quebec daily newspapers
il faut que ca roule …
steph 14:44 on 2012/06/06 Permalink
@ Stefan, those fines are for Highways. Does Rene-Levesque qualify? I’m sure the Ville-marie tunnel does. The speed limits on Jacques-Cartier bridge are 50km – is that a highway?
but still ridiculous. & if highway codes can take priority, havn’t they had the power to declare any march illegal at any point, kettle and fine everyone?
Ephraim 16:58 on 2012/06/06 Permalink
Can we have the police issue jaywalking tickets when students who walk on the street, just to make this all seem that much more absurd?