Man decapitates passenger aboard Greyhound bus in Manitoba

Something like this happen twice in a week!

 

I know Mr. Li is getting villainized in the media, but what if the kid was looking at Mr. Li funny?

 

That doesn't give him a right to maul him to death...therefore, he had a right to beat his ass up.

 

It's a horse tranquilizer, no? Taking any drug intended for a 1,000-lb animal with hooves is a bad idea. I'm just saying.

 

no, you are thinking of ketamine. very, very different than pcp. the only guy i've seen on pcp is now deceased.

 

Could not agree with you more. I don't care if this guy has a history of mental problems or whatever. This guy no matter what does not deserve to live. If I was a cop and given the chance I would have shot this mother ****er.

 

Let me start this by saying that this is not an anti-American post. We have our share of wacky groups too, but right now there are a couple of your wacky groups that are making a lot of Canadians very upset and very angry.

PETA has tried to exploit this tragedy by trying to buy advertising from a local Portage La Prairie newspaper for this ad. The paper refused to publish the ad. The suggestion that Tim McLean's struggles and cries were ignored is outrageous, and note also that Portage La Prairie on the Canadian prairie in the middle of farming and ranching country. PETA is trying to provoke these people in their time of tragedy any way they can.

http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=705090

And the second is this group:
"Canadian border guards are under orders to prevent members of a fundamentalist American church from crossing into Canada to protest at the funeral Saturday of a Winnipeg man brutally killed on a Greyhound bus last week.

Westboro Baptist Church, a controversial Kansas-based sect, intends to picket the funeral of 22-year-old Tim McLean to tell Canadians his slaying on July 30 was God's response to Canadian policies enabling abortion, homosexuality and adultery.

"God is punishing Canada for passing laws against WBC — by exposing Canadians as cannibals and highway decapitaters," the church says in a news release on its website, which refers to McLean as "The Headless Canadian."…”
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/manitoba/story/2008/08/08/westboro-protest.html

You'd have to work at it to come up with something more provocative than this. I think the challenge for us/me is to not let ourselves be provoked by this, and to not respond hastily and to take the time we need in order to get into a place where we can respond appropriately. These groups feed on the controversy and conflict, and I think it's important not to respond too quickly and give them what they want.

(I very much object to the CBC calling this group fundamentalist, btw, since what they are doing is quite clearly not consistent with the fundamentals of Christianity. Anyone can call themselves fundamentalists and the CBC should be more discriminating in how it uses that term. If someone called himself the Messiah and became involved in some newsworthy event they wouldn’t refer to him as the Messiah, and I think they should be using the same kind of discretion with the word fundamentalist.)

 

On behalf of the USA, I apologize. Pretty ****ty of PETA and WBC (though I wouldn't call PETA strictly American). I swear, neither group has any conscience.

 

Speaking of radical animal groups, I hope you all have heard of events in Santa Cruz, California. Perhaps they warrant their own thread...

Santa Cruz researchers firebombed

excerpt:
A University of California-Santa Cruz biologist whose home was firebombed this weekend feared for his family's future on Sunday while a spokesman for a radical animal rights group said the attacks were the consequences for performing research on animals.

The volatile rhetoric left UC-Santa Cruz on edge Sunday, a day after a pair of firebombings on two university biomedical researchers had authorities looking for clues and tightening security around scientists named in a pamphlet left at a coffeehouse last week.

FBI officials were expected to join the search today, in what authorities have called an act of "domestic terrorism."

Just before 6 a.m. Saturday, molecular biologist David Feldheim's home was firebombed, forcing him, his wife and their two young children to flee down a fire escape.

About the same time, a car belonging to a different, unidentified researcher was destroyed by another firebomb.

Santa Cruz police described the explosives as a "Molotov cocktail on steroids," and said the attack on the Feldheims' house was being investigated as an attempted homicide because the family was at home.

...

I hope they find these people, bringing them to face terrorism and attempted murder charges. One of the researchers they attacked studies single-celled organsims. As in, you kill more life when you wash your hands and brush your teeth than this guy's lab does per day!

 

I'm with them. They should blow off the the facade of the Listerine factory, too.

 

When PETA tells me I should be a vegan as it will help save animals from the slaughter house, I call BS. It would take a rather large subset of the population to become vegans to make enough dent in the supply/demand of meat to have any impact. Any animal raised for the intent of becoming food is still going to go to the slaughter house. There would have to be enough people becoming vegans to where demand went noticably down and this caused a trickle-down effect. Slaughter houses are not pretty places. I agree with that. If PETA is so concerned about how animals feel going into the slaughterhouse, then I'm all for blindfolding them, plugging their noses with the sweet smell of peaches, putting ear muffs on them so they can't hear, and giving them a carrot or something(final meal) while they wait in line (at least, for cattle). Maybe we can use all the confiscated cocaine to numb them up while they wait in line? Other than that...I'm not sure what we can do to accomodate PETA on this issue.

 

Good point. We should attack every anti-bacterial company and product. Also we should remove our living bone marrow, so that our own bodies quit attacking and killing micro-organisms.

 

I think so. It doesn't have a heck of a lot to do with the Manitoba murder.

 

Sorry 'bout that. It just seemed to me that the topic had about bled to -- D'OH!

 

Thanks. That’s a nice gesture, but one of the things that struck me when I read these two stories was how the world has changed in the last 10 years. I think that 10 years ago my response to this might have been to mutter something unpleasant under my breath about Americans or American culture, but today through the internet we’re all getting to know and understand each other better, even through humble sports sites like this one. From that comes an understanding that it’s not a case of standing up to “Americans and American culture”. It’s a case of how to appropriately respond to a certain worldview that a certain group of people hold, regardless of nationality, and that there are very large numbers of Americans who I’m sure stand shoulder to shoulder with me on this. The question of how to appropriately respond to this is still unclear to me. I think I’m still a little too angry to find the right balance just yet, but it did strike me that the social landscape that this has occurred in has changed a lot in the last 10 years. The borders between Us and Them are changing and are becoming less and less defined by national boundaries. Strictly speaking, these are American citizens who are aggressively trying to exploit a Canadian tragedy, and even cross the boarder into Canada to do it, but that’s not really the important point here. It’s more of a secondary detail. So while I appreciate the gesture of apologising for what citizens of your country are doing here, I understand clearly that not only do you have nothing to apologise for personally, but that you’re much more likely to have similar concerns to mine than even many Canadian citizens do, and that’s not something I would have understood nearly as clearly 10 years ago.

 

That last post was actually a response to JuanValdez's post. I quoted my own post by mistake somehow.

Here's an update on what happened:

Citizens claim victory as anti-gay zealots fail to show
By ROSS ROMANIUK, SUN MEDIA

Even without a conflict, they claimed victory.

That was the prevailing attitude yesterday among hundreds of Winnipeg residents who lined a Westwood street in hopes of keeping a zealous U.S. religious group from rallying outside the funeral of Tim McLean.

As the life of McLean -- who was stabbed to death and beheaded aboard a Greyhound bus July 30 west of Portage la Prairie -- was celebrated at Westwood Community Church, an estimated 400 to 600 supporters of his family lined adjacent streets for hours to keep watch for any appearance by members of the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church.

"None of us are just going to stand around and let this happen," Steven Hughes said outside the church on Westwood Drive.

The fundamentalist Westboro church, deemed a hate group by some U.S. organizations because of its raucous rallies to promote its stance against homosexuality, had announced a plan to picket at the funeral. The church had earlier claimed that McLean's grisly slaying was God's punishment of Canada for its liberal laws and policies.

But even as dozens of police officers surrounded the large church and the crowd prepared to form a human chain to block Westboro members, it appeared none of the U.S. protesters had showed up.

Kimberly Lemay handed leaflets throughout the crowd, which began forming 21/2 hours before the 4 p.m. service, to urge those on hand to remain calm should Westboro members arrive.

She suggested the U.S. group wouldn't have had a chance to protest outside the funeral.

"We've got the whole place covered," said Lemay. "Winnipeg and Canada won. Canada is too tough for them."

While at least a couple of officers kept watch with binoculars from the church roof, others stood on adjacent streets.

Shirley Phelps-Roper, Westboro spokeswoman and daughter of pastor Fred Phelps, could not be reached for comment on the whereabouts of her group, which was reported to have entered Manitoba and been in Winnipeg yesterday.

Where the Kansas-based protesters could have been was a subject of intense speculation along Westwood Drive. Some suspected the group had members watching the church. A rumour also emerged that a handful of Westboro members had picketed briefly with signs in Osborne Village.
http://winnipegsun.com/News/Winnipeg/2008/08/10/6403451-sun.html