extremism – WTFville Chronicle

“It’s not guns, it’s video games that cause violence! …
so, here’s a video game designed for kids where they can practice shooting a gun.”

The NRA’s New Shooting App Is for Kids of the Same Age of Sandy Hook Victims (and Up)
Leslie Horn
Here is some free PR advice for the National Rifle Association: Now is not the time to release a target practice iOS app—especially one intended for kids.
According to the NRA, the app is intended for children as young as age four.
In Target Practice you can choose to test your skills in an indoor or outdoor range or opt to shoot skeet. You get to pick your weapon, and you can pony up $1 to unlock better (more powerful) guns. For example, in the outdoor range your default is an M16, but you can upgrade to an AK47 or an MK11 if you pay. It’s really just a point-and-shoot game, but the fact that it’s meant for kids is straight up stupid.
It would be a different story if the app were teaching kids about gun safety. As advertised, Target Practice does give safety tips, but they aren’t the kinds of things that are going to keep a child from accidentally setting off a gun in the home. They’re tidbits like, “keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot” or “know your target and what is beyond it.” And the official Safety Tips section just takes you out of the app to the NRA’s website.
Not that it should surprise you at this point, but the organization really missed an opportunity here. This would be an excellent time to teach kids about gun safety; too many children are killed each year by accidentally setting off firearms in their homes. Kids see guns in games and they think guns in real life are games. That’s just how innocent minds work. And that’s what makes this app—like most moves this out of touch lobbyist group has made in recent memory—both poorly timed and poorly executed. How about something productive for once? I guess that’s too much to ask of an organization whose only interest is to get guns into peoples’ hands.
reposted from gizmodo

for those of you that think that the problem of “right wing lunacy, indifference and intolerance stops at the 49th, let me assure you that the problem is one which affects canada at an alarming and ever hastening rate …
canada has a prime minister who doesn’t talk to the press, runs his cabinet as a secretive, right wing, scandal ridden, ethically corrupt cabal intent on only maintaining power and control for the 1%, no matter the cost to democracy or the citizenry …
and he is every bit as beholding to the corporate few as any leader, anywhere …
he is a fundamentalist, right wing, pseudo christian” at his core, and he is no longer “listening” to the wishes of his citizenry …
and he is using fear mongering and enforced austerity as his weapons of control …
sound familiar? …
it may even be much worse in canada than it is in the states because canadians generally have one or more of three reactions to what is going on around them …
1. “it couldn’t happen here, things are pretty good in my little world, and that kind of shit only happens in the united states”
2. “we have health care and welfare and unemployment insurance, therefore we are nothing like them” …
3. they, like an alarming number of americans are totally oblivious and ignorant of what their government is up to and as such just “accept the party line” from harper and his government …

as i have written before, these are the makings of a perfect storm for any democracy as the combination of these three things allows a government to totally subvert the basic democratic principles and take control of a people by seemingly unrelated and “non-threatening” incremental steps …
and all the while, step by step, a democracy which once thrived and “heeded it’s citizen’s wishes” is turned into a corporate controlled oligarchy …
and by the time the people finally wake up and smell the coffee, it’s too late for true democracy …
think i’m kidding or exaggerating? …
don’t believe me canucks? …
read here, or here, or here, or here, or here, or here …
or just google this shit yourselves and get informed …
before it’s too late …

Harper’s Canada “Making Up Terror Identities”

by Obert Madondo

In Stephen Harper’s Canada, we’re all potential terror threats. Until proven otherwise. So suggests a recent study by Queens University’s Jeffrey Monaghan and Kevin Walby, published in the journal Policing and Society. Welcome to Multi Issue Extremism (MIE), Canada’s new classification of so-called domestic terror threats.

We saw it coming.

In a January letter, Joe Oliver, the Minister of Natural Resources, labeled environmental movements “radical groups” funded by “foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest.” Oliver believes these groups are also pursuing “their radical ideological agenda”. And their goal is “to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth. No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydro-electric dams.”

In other words, Oliver perceived these defenders of our besieged environment as enemies of the state. This, from a minster we expect to do his job of defending the environment.

Before we’d the chance to digest Oliver’s propaganda, another Conservative cabinet member, Vic Toews, the Minister of Public Safety, released a brand new “anti-terrorism strategy”. The “Building Resilience Against Terrorism: Canada’s first Counter-terrorism Strategy”, repeats the oft-repeated mantra that “violent Islamist extremism is the leading threat to Canada’s national security.”

But it does much more. “Domestic, issue-based extremism” enters the fray. The strategy identifies as potential terror threats movements concerned with “various causes such as animal rights, white supremacy, environmentalism and anti-capitalism.” Other unidentified “historical sources of Canadian domestic extremism” are also mentioned, but they “pose less of a threat.”

The Canada of Harper and Company is a wrathful country where dictatorship-style policies, attitudes and propaganda are part of the political process. It’s a country that perceives itself as being under unprecedented attack. As facing a clear-and-present terrorist threat. It is, in short, armed and dangerous.

On November 23, 2011, I tasted the wrath of this new Canada. That day, my country became a police state far too eager to criminalize dissent, and abuse power, resources and the law. I was part of eight unarmed Occupied Ottawa (formerly Occupy Ottawa) protesters peacefully resisting the movement’s eviction from Ottawa’s Confederation Park. Between 150 and 200 Ottawa Police officers were dispatched just after 2am to evict us and issue eight $65 trespass tickets.

Furthermore, the Ottawa police had no qualms about spending $16 000 on the four-hour operation. Meanwhile, 600 aboriginal women and girls are either murdered or mission and the feds remains unwilling to act.

The police applied disproportionate and unnecessary force. I was treated differently than my two white colleagues with whom I made the final stand. I was subjected to cruel and unusual treatment. I ended up in hospital with injuries to my back, legs and left arm. I now experience frequent headaches and memory loss or temporary blackouts. I was recently certified temporarily medically unemployable.

Harper recently appointed Vernon White, the man who was in charge of the Ottawa Police that morning, to the senate.

As a pro-democracy activist, I couldn’t let this circus waltz through town unchallenged. I recently ended an 85-day hunger strike protesting the appointment, and Harper’s new “crime law”, the “Safe Streets and Communities Act” (omnibus Crime Bill C10 ). In my protest narrative, I questioned the senator’s judgment in a situation that demanded sobriety and a quick glance at Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That day, I argued, a failure of judgment and Canadian leadership occurred that morning.

In their study, Monaghan and Walby try to help us understand what’s going on in the mind of those who currently control political power. They analyzed multiple classified reports from CSIS and other Canadian policing and intelligence agencies, gained through Access to Information requests. The agencies see an “ongoing threat to Canada from listed terrorist entities in Canada, and other ideologically motivated extremist entities active in Canada” (emphasis added).

The dilemma the agencies face is that it’s not clear to them who the enemy really is. But the agencies have a way around the quagmire, the study suggests. They simply resort to “creating classifications” and categories of terror threats. Next, comes the “the blurring of these categories” as a strategy “to rationalise domestic spying campaigns that target grassroots social movements.”

In essence, the absence of credible terror threats does not restrain the agencies in their overzealousness. They simply “construct” potential threats. For example, by blurring “the categories of terrorism, extremism and activism.” The result is that Canadian grassroots movements, especially the more vocal and politically-engaged ones, end up receiving more undue scrutiny. We have already seen how the Conservatives recently targeted the David Suzuki Foundation.

The study makes it clear that the Conservative government’s anti-terrorism propaganda and policies are based on half-backed information. Fantasy even. The Conservatives’ war is not just against the pronounced terror groups. Introducing the terror, Toews said: “Our government is committed to keeping our streets and communities safe.”

Sounds familiar? You bet. There’s a war on for every Canadian’s mind.

Together with the other draconian pieces of legislation the Conservatives are currently bulldozing through parliament, the propaganda seeks to create a vindictive, divisive, pro-punishment, poverty-ignoring and anti-minority right-wing Canada. A security state. They seek to create a society that is cowed, uncritical, fearful and divided. They seek to force us into a state of permanent fear; a place from where we’ll clamor for protection from the state.

And yet, fear and terror create an intellectual and moral void. It disarms society of its power to question.

reposted from Canadian Progressive World