I'm guessing he got alternative facts that had it being a muslim shooter. Or maybe it's like how some people tried to blame racial tensions in this country on Obama being black. You know, if we bring refugees here some white guy might gun em down. Can't have that happening. Might as well not let em in.

Or maybe this Spicer guy's a bit of a dolt. So many possibilities!

Trump was well within his rights to fire her for insubordination. Let's not be hyperbolic.
http://www.npr.org/2017/01/30/512534805 ... tion-order

Yeah, but it's not really a defensible act from any moral standpoint. Morrigan said it right earlier, the whole ban thing and the way he did it are super unconstitutional and basically laying the groundwork for further demonizing, discrimination, etc. Utter reprehensible trash from an administration that's promised nothing else but that. We're in vile times.

The point is, as was said previously, that this shooting shows that a ban on a subset of people this large is an overly simple, dumb, unhelpful solution to a problem, especially when they're regularly victimized in other instances.

Sick6Six was making a joke with the "fake news" comment; Trump and his staff (and therefore followers) use the hashtag #fakenews on any news story they find even the least bit inconvenient. I've really tried to dial back the Godwins in recent months, but FUCK... is there a comparison more apt?

What with everything that's happened in the last 11 days, I can't help but start wondering if there's any Antifa groups around me/how difficult it'd be to start one up. If hate groups and neo nazis are gonna be the new norm in North America, it's only a matter of time before people start fighting back - literally.

There's an old joke that a press secretary is essentially a diplomat whom a president asks to lie to the press instead of other countries. Spicer has taken that advice a bit more literally than the last half dozen or so people who held the same title.



Also, Morrigan's helpful guide to mass shooting reporting is excellent, but it needs an addendum: "10. It's almost never an actual assault rifle or machine gun." The first reports I saw said "two or three gunmen wielding AK-47's in Canada" and I actually laughed out loud at the headline. In the US there's been 1 shooter with an AK-47 in the last 20 years, you'd think reporters would be a bit more skeptical about 3 of them at once in Canada. Remember when Sandy Hook was supposedly two shooters with M-16's, a gun which costs more than my car did?

Just because he has the legal right doesn't mean he should have done so. The last (and only?) president who did something similar was Richard Nixon with regards to... Watergate. Yeah.

Just read the statement on this and tell me if the language used here is normal for White House stuff (and not, say, fascist dictators):



So much dishonest garbage in every single line.

The thing that really aggravates me about the EO is that they say they are halting immigration from these seven countries for 90 days so that they can work on fixing the vetting process, but they don't need to stop immigration to do that. There have been proposals for stronger vetting floating around for years, all he has to do is issue an EO stating "effective by (__ date) the following new procedures must be in place" blah blah. We already know what the major change is going to be and have known for years (it was a really, really stupid rule Obama wrote which forbade agents from looking at immigrants' public social media posts, which by definition have no privacy rights), if it was really just about getting the vetting policy correct than he wouldn't put a halt on immigration.

But of course it's not actually about getting the vetting process correct, it's about appeasing some of his more bigoted voters via a campaign promise. And also riling his critics up, and also distracting people from the horrifying changes he made to the NSC the same day.

When was it ever a good thing? Honest question even with the later explanation of you referring to patriotism.

Nations are fundamentally arbitrary and based on a history full of blood and unjustifiable authority. I'm neither a nationalist nor a patriot since I don't see value in the structure of a nation nor pride or anything like that based on just being born in a place/of a group which at the time in history happens to be the nation of [insert country]. Had one war or other decision by arbitrarily appointed leaders throughout history gone differently, then the group of people who are supposed to be proud for being of nation A would have been supposed to be proud for being of nation B. And of course with the arbitrary nation borders, the decision of who is considerd an invader also becomes arbitrary.

This sort of clip is bound to have several flaws, but it still illustrates a fundamental problem of nations and, frankly speaking, how ridicuous it is to be proud over being part of a group what was and is decided by war and other authoritarian bullshit:


Or a more detailed one for Europe:


When watching stuff like that, I find it both laughable and tragic that millions are proud of being part of a group that was decided by brutal violence and agreements between leaders.

Fox News got bitch slapped by Justin Trudeau and took down a tweet saying that the shooter was Moroccan, not white, as a result of said bitch slapping.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/01/31 ... 32494.html

I like Trudeau. Why can't Americans do something smart like you Canadians did and vote a guy like him into office?

I've said that 60+ millions of Americans are indeed really fucking dumb, but I got a lot of butthurt responses to that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Nationalist pride is a strange, scary thing. Too much of it from the wrong groups is how we get stuff like President Shit for Brains in the first place.

Such comment would've garnered a more hostile reaction a decade or so ago. Bush had a lot of support during his first term and I remember lots of Americans being called out on their "un-Americanism" whenever they'd criticise Bush or his foreign policy. This was in the post-9/11 years where many Americans were obsessed with patriotism and would immediately distrust anyone who wasn't a staunch patriot like them. That seems to have died off, though.

Way to generalise and completely fail to recognise the faults of the New Democrats in recent times, gj. Didn't you read that Cracked article I posted at you BTW?

here it is:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-t ... lks-about/

Also read this:
https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-pe ... king-class

Regardless of the failures of the Democratic party to meaningfully preach outside their own choir, it still takes a willfully blind idiot to vote for the likes of Trump.

That statement about firing Yates looks like it was written by a very upset 3rd grader. It was already really hard for refugees to get in this country and a whopping 0 of them have ever become terrorists. At least now the USA is listed on Europe's list of threats in between China, Russia and terrorists/ISIS who are all pretty pleased with Trump.

I am offended by your lowball number of 60 million. A lot of us are a lot dumber than you think, give us more credit!

Exactly. Couldn't have said it better or more concisely.

Anyway, this thread is about Québec...

Or a desperate one. Anyway, I'll stop now.

The first stories I saw about the shooting was naming 2 made up Muslims as the shooters, I can't even find a link to those fake stories anymore. Apparently a lot of big news sites even reported the fake news, and then deleted it later.

If you read the NPR article, they cite several Justice Department veterans and legal experts and they say that the former AG was not carrying out her duties as she should have been. The similarity to Nixon ends with the firing. The reasons are quite different.

Nothing Trump does or says is normal. But that doesn't make him a bona-fide fascist.

It must be because of all the Trump related news, but this shooting is receiving very little attention in America.

https://www.syracuseculturalworkers.com ... of-fascism

You can literally check every item on that list.

I became aware of this tragedy within 30 minutes of the first online report, and monitored online news both local and foreign about this frantically until early the next morning. I never encountered a report about 2 Muslim perpetrators. The most common theory until about 1 AM local time was: 3 suspects, one of Moroccan origin (turned out to be just an innocent witness and victim to this, as explained elsewhere on this thread: he wasn't made up), one definitely of Québec origin, and an unknown possible third (which turned out to be pure speculation). This is typical post-event news reporting confusion, though very clumsy for the press to be so specific about ethnic origins of suspects, when everyone knows the police always detain a larger number of suspects than necessary just to clear out all possibilities. I remember some of the more right-inclined press organizations here tweeting emphatically : 'One Moroccan possibly among perpetrators'.. It seemed to be in attempt to appease their reader base. Just awful, however, not as awful as what you report to have read. That's not just confusion, that's downright fabrication.

The article says that SOME (not several) DOJ veterans and law professors found fault with how she handled the conflict with the order, and that one professor wrote on a BLOG that what she has done SEEMS like an act of insubordination. That professor is also a DOJ veteran.

Who needs fake news when you got an illiterate population. Spin is as instrumental as fake news in propaganda and disinformation, has always been.

^Here's a link to some of the fake info that I saw at first. https://www.buzzfeed.com/ishmaeldaro/quebec-shooting-hoaxes-and-bullshit?utm_term=.bfwKO66LX#.rvZEdxxn3

http://imgur.com/a/Pn7T9

Sorry for not quoting the article verbatim.

Now take dis L goofy.


You could check 75% of that list for any right wing politician. Guess they're almost fascists?

If you wanna take this criteria as the be all determiner of fascism, here's a WaPo article about that: https://www.washingtonpost.com/postever ... 7f03763014

Even then, that's a ranking of "semi-fascist", which I would still disagree with. Trump is a populist, not a fascist.

Out of respect to the victims to the tragedy, I'll lock this thread since we're not talking about the event anymore.

Yes? Duh.


They are not mutually exclusive.


I don't see how discussing larger contexts is disrespectful, but ok.