From next week’s column in the Hill Times.

Twenty-nine years earlier: it is around four o’clock in the afternoon, on a bitterly-cold Wednesday. I am a lawyer at an Ottawa valley law firm, and volunteering for Jean Chretien, who is also working as a lawyer, at the firm next door.  We are preparing for Chretien’s announcement, in just over a month, that he is going to seek the Liberal Party leadership.  And then the news starts to trickle in.

A “man” with a rifle has started shooting up the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal.  He has wounded dozens of people – and he has slaughtered 14 young women.  Because they are women.

Stunned, we listened to Michael Enright interview a student at the school, Genvieve Cauden, on CBC Radio.  What happened, Enright asks her.

“We all go on the floor and we go under the desks. After, he shot people. He shot girls. I just closed my ears and closed my eyes. I didn’t want to know what’s going on. I received a shot in my head,” and then she paused. “But it’s not bad. It’s OK.”

“It just grazed your head,” Enright says.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Cauden says.  “After, the guy killed himself.”

The guy in Toronto, who was apparently following the precisely same Satanic, women-hating manifesto, didn’t kill himself.  As the entire world saw, he wanted a Toronto cop to do that for him.  The cop – amazingly, bravely – refused, and arrested the alleged mass-murderer without firing a shot.

After his arrest, the usual bullshit happened.  Politicians offering “thoughts and prayers,” instead of actual policies and measures to prevent something like Ecole Polytechnique and Yonge Street from happening again. Online losers, sitting in their mom’s basement and calling it Muslim terrorism – when it was decidedly neither.  Media lavishing attention on the alleged killer, instead of his many victims. 

The usual bullshit.

Comments (12)

1. Why do some people always bicker over whether it was terrorism or not? It was mass murder. Isn’t that enough?
2. How could he be driving for as long as he did on Yonge Street (half an hour) – as far as he did (more than a kilometre) – and no one shot him, or rammed his van, or both?
3. What do those early stories mean, when they say that he was known to police?
4. Why do politicians always offer thoughts and prayers? Why don’t they instead offer policies and ideas that would prevent something like this?
5. Who was that truly amazing cop who caught the killer without firing a shot? Where does bravery like that come from?
6. Who are the ones who took pictures of victims to post on Twitter? Can we find them and shame them?
7. Why do we always give these mass murderers what they want, and profile them? Can’t we, just once, lavish that much attention on the victims alone?
8. Has anyone started a fund to help the families?
9. Why do we need to hear from anyone other than the mayor and the top cop? Why do federal and provincial politicians insist on being seen at the press conferences?
10. Why did this happen, and how can we make sure it never happens again?

Comments (30)

I am active on Twitter. I admit it.

Some people apparently read me on Twitter, too, and I (mostly) enjoy interacting with them. Here’s what the last week has been like. Lots of interaction.

A “reach” of over five million. I don’t know what that means, exactly, but I know this: me and others are clearly drawn to Twitter.

But I’m repulsed by it, too. Perhaps you are, as well. Because, you know, Twitter is also often terrible.

Its creator, Jack Dorsey, has a more benign take on President Pisstape’s preferred platform, naturally. Speaking of Twitter’s beginnings, Dorsey says “we came across the word ‘twitter’, and it was just perfect. The definition was ‘a short burst of inconsequential information,’ and ‘chirps from birds’. And that’s exactly what the product was.”

Well, no.

In my experience – and in the experience of not a few others – Twitter is often anything but inconsequential. It is the place where neo-Nazis and white supremacists go to spew hate and frighten minorities. It is where misogynists come to threaten and demean women – with dark promises of rape and murder and blackmail. It is where the mob is, most days, digitized torches and pitchforks at the ready.

Facebook is for falsification. Twitter is for defamation.

Case in point: a proud Beaches-area neo-Nazi named James Sears publishes a “newspaper” against which we have been doing battle for years. We have had some successes, but we aren’t nearly done yet.

Sears also has a Twitter account, under the name “Dimitri the Lover.” He fancies himself one – although the law sees him differently, having charged him in the past for sexually assaulting women.

I block Sears’ Twitter account, but I also periodically scan it for material that may be useful in the five legal actions we’ve initiated against him and his Hitlerite winged monkeys (two criminal, two civil and one administrative). A few weeks ago, I found a Sears tweet that contained the foulest expressions of anti-Semitism and race hatred. I won’t reprise it here.

I reported it to Twitter, however. I pointed out – yet again – that they had become a willfully-blind accomplice to the dissemination of Naziism. I demanded they remove it. They speedily acknowledged receiving my complaint.

This weekend, I finally received a brief notice from Twitter that they’d dealt with my complaint, here:

Wow. Had they finally kicked Sears off Twitter? Really? I went over to Sears’ account and this is what I found.

A birthday tribute to Adolf Hitler. Complete with swastikas, a declaration that the Holocaust was a hoax, and “Hitler was right.”

Twitter, with its “chirpy” name and “inconsequential” bits of information, is neither chirpy nor inconsequential. It is the haters’ village square. It is the place where subhumans like James Sears have found their voice. With impunity.

Dorsey shouldn’t have called it Twitter.

He should have called it Sewer, because that’s what it so often is.

Comments (6)