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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
A driver plowed a car into a crowd at a street festival celebrating Filipino heritage in Vancouver on Saturday night, killing at least nine people and injuring others.
Some of those attending the festival helped arrest the suspect at the scene, who police identified as a 30-year-old man.
…
“It’s something you don’t expect to see in your lifetime,” Kris Pangilinan, a Toronto-based journalist, told Canadian public broadcaster CBC. “[The driver] just slammed the pedal down and rammed into hundreds of people. It was like seeing a bowling ball hit — all the bowling pins and all the pins flying up in the air.”
He continued, “It was like a war zone… There were bodies all over the ground.”
“car plows”
So we only call it a murder or a terrorist attack if guns are involved?
We are brainwashed and numb to car violence. Super sad that nothing is done to stop this from happening.
Cars need to go. Away forever.
Is it a terrorist attack if it’s a mental health issue?
Where are you “mental health issues” people coming from? I know you people are brainwashed by the car corporations but come on now half my inbox is full of you.
Are you in the regular habit of bringing up your political agenda at funerals and vigils?
Where’s the funeral?
Cars need to go, streets need to pedestrianize, and bollards need to go up to make sure cars stay the hell out.
To your point, imagine if this were a mass-shooting and the title were: “Nine people killed after gun shoots into crowd at Vancouver Filipino Festival”. “Nine people killed after knife stabs into crowd at Vancouver Filipino Festival.” It’s so fucking passive as to be sickening. It reminds me of the “Man dies in officer-involved shooting” trope we see in US media because extrajudicial murder by the police is so routine and heavily whitewashed.
The AP gives it the same treatment. The only equivalent I could think of is “Nine people killed after bomb explodes into crowd”, and you know why that might be written that way? Because it’s not immediately obvious who placed the bomb. This mass-murdering psychopath is in custody; we can say “Nine people killed after man drives into crowd at Vancouver Filipino festival.”
Edit: the death toll is now eleven, not nine.
“gun-involved incident”
While I agree that it skews the narrative, it’s likely that media at early stages of the story use passive language like that to leave open the possibility of various causes, such as mechanical malfunction or even an algorithmic failure.
Yes, but you’re mixing several points here, primarily environmental and direct harm. Car-centric city design is harmful, but a highway doesn’t up and kill people one day in the same way that a driver hitting someone with their car does.
The other thing you’re mixing into this one comment is the attribution of harm, the “car plows into crowd” thing. Yes, the car didn’t do it, a driver drove their car into the crowd. Having the reporting properly attribute the action is a separate issue from the actions themselves.
Cars are absolutely not the problem here. Yes cars have issues, but using this as an anti-car platform is disgusting and shameful.
This is a growing problem with mental illness, racism, and the right wing. Focus on the problem.
Oh yeah, the old “this isn’t a
guncar issue; this is a mental health issue”. “You’re disgusting for trying to make thismass-shootingmass-ramming aboutgunscars; this isn’t the time™.” It’s such a shame that the US is the only place in the world with a mental health crisis and that’s why first-world gun deaths almost exclusively happen in the US, not in Canada where firearms are heavily reg– checks title Oh wait. It seems like “This isn’t an X issue, it’s a mental health one” curiously always seems to come back to “I want you to solve this nebulous, prolific, and stochastic issue in lieu of addressing the most immediate, concrete problem by regulating X because I really like my privileged position of being able to use X however and wherever I want and fuck anybody who suffers for or questions that privilege.”Why can’t it be both? Car deaths have concrete, meaningful steps we could immediately take (pedestrianizing roads, adding bollards to pedestrian streets, reducing car dependency so fewer people own and drive cars, etc., and that’s just for incidents where people intentionally use cars to murder people), but it seems like you happen to prefer ignoring the reality that designing cities around cars is horribly dangerous and dysfunctional. “Cars have issues”? Yeah, try reading the title to see one of them.
It’s so obvious this attack was trivial to a point where it’s not even settled that it was intentional. You think this man could’ve killed
nineeleven people and injured twenty more with his fists? Seriously?? [Editor’s note: they seriously compare it to being armed with fists in a now-removed comment.] Even a knife attack is considerably more difficult, and it has at least some minimum barrier that you need to be in some kind of physical condition to perpetrate one, that there’s a minimal chance of escaping the scene, that there’s more chance of stopping it early, and that a car attack can be done much more impulsively. Plus there’s the matter that regulating cars is massively easier than regulating knives. A goddamn infirm 90-year-old has the capacity to perpetrate this attack. And what would’ve prevented it completely? A few slabs of concrete or steel that any decent pedestrian street would have. Make psychological and psychiatric care free under Canada’s Medicare? Absolutely, do it. Do it right now; why haven’t we already? Do I think that’d be as effective at preventing this attack as literally just some slabs on the street? No.You know there is a forest behind these trees right?
And I never said guns weren’t a problem, that’s you talking for me because you have no respect for anyone else’s opinion if it might challenge yours.
If you took the time to do the root cause analysis, you would have a different opinion of the problem. So, you can choose to keep your belief, or educate yourself. I’m guessing you go with the one that delivers the most dopamine.
I hope you’re smart enough to understand what an “analogy” is? If not, here you go. “Analogy is a comparison or correspondence between two things (or two groups of things) because of a third element that they are considered to share.” Hope that helps, champ. 🥰
posting definitions at someone who appears more educated than yourself is straight middleschool behavior from you.
They clearly weren’t educated enough to understand the basic rhetorical device of analogy – that I was comparing excuses for mass-shootings to excuses for car rammings as functionally the same – so I feel pretty secure in posting definitions.
Middle-school behavior for middle-school concepts, I guess?
Edit: sorry, I forgot that they also think this person could’ve killed
nineeleven people and injured twenty with their bare fists, so maybe middle-school behavior was too sophisticated.the “security you feel” is textbook Dunning-Kruger Syndrome
Root cause analysis. Do it or stay dumb. Adios.
So you do or do not understand that when I was talking about guns, I was drawing a direct comparison between your misdirection away from the lack of regulation to mental health and right-wingers’ misdirection away from the lack of regulation to mental health? Not actually assuming what your stance on gun regulation is? That is our common understanding now, right? You can amend your comment to acknowledge that you misunderstood this basic rhetorical device? Or acknowledge it in some form? You’re not going to “never play defense” me here, right?
You hate cars more than you hate people dying. That’s probably why you don’t like to dive too deep into mental health.
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Cars are made for transport, guns are made for killing. They are not the same.
I have no clue how your comment here got 5 downvotes.
This place is just like reddit/twitter—iIllogical and vitriolic.
The way too many people drive I’m not so sure cars weren’t made for killing
Haha, yeah, but you get the point.
Yeah you’re not wrong
Right here, right now, they can be compared to guns assuming this was an attack. Were it not for car-centric infrastructure, a car couldn’t even have reached this crowded festival. There would’ve been trivial safety measures like bollards in place, but because we as a society collectively value vroom vroom over human lives, they weren’t in place. With
nineeleven killed and twenty injured, it was comparable in devastation to a mass-shooting. Just like when the US values pew pew over human lives, there are mass-shootings.But you’re right: they aren’t the same.
By the way, “guns are made for killing” can just as easily be warped into “guns are made for self-protection”, and suddenly you can compare if their utility outweighs their ease of access and rampant deregulation – just like you can with cars.
Now give me the positive statistics. Cars save lives as well. Think of all the emergency vehicles that help people every day. I’m pretty sure guns are way less helpful.
Okay, let’s see here. If we put aside the climate change killing untold trillions of animals on top of the mass-extinction event, the untold number of humans that have died and will die from climate change, the number of people displaced by climate change, the over a million people killed annually, the few million injured annually (many permanently and debilitatingly), the billions of dollars in annual property damage, the regions destabilized and the hundreds of thousands killed and displaced over oil wars, the lung issues from air pollution and the brain damage from when it was leaded, the neighborhoods destroyed to make way for roads, the poverty in the inner city caused in large part by unsustainable suburban sprawl, the people bankrupted by the need to own a car, the opportunity cost from the money wasted on overpriced car infrastructure, the amount of hours wasted driving because of said sprawl, the contribution to the obesity epidemic by making people more sedentary, the disenfranchisement of the elderly, young, and disabled who can’t drive or would have a much easier time on public transit, that many of those emergency vehicles are responding to car crashes, that lower traffic and less sprawl via public transit and micromobility lowers response times for emergency vehicles (thus saving more lives), and if we totally disregard that emergency vehicles are more than capable of existing in a city built around public transit and micromobility (and much more that I’m forgetting)…
A rounding error in comparison. That your answer was “emergency vehicles” shows that you don’t understand the scope and scale of how badly car-centric infrastructure damages everything it touches. It isn’t on the same order of magnitude; it isn’t even within a few orders of magnitude. If anything, emergency vehicles have been hampered by the rampant proliferation and deregulation of cars, because it makes it harder for them to get to their destination quickly and safely.
Hell, half of the time I can’t move as quickly as I would like to through the city with my bicycle it is due to cars being in the way of moving quickly and efficiently. And that is a lot smaller than an ambulance.
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It’s the other way around in this situation. This isn’t a car accident. The fact is this person attacked a group of people. The weapon is whatever they could get their hands on. It’s Canada so obviously a gun isn’t the go-to weapon of choice like it is in the States.
I like how they’ve so far completely failed to defend or even address what they said about “fists” because they know it’s a heap of bullshit. They apparently want us to think that the everyman on the street is Kiryu Kazuma who can roll up to a crowded festival and kill
nineeleven people with their bare fists then injurelike tentwenty more before being restrained and brought into custody.So you’ve made my argument for me by showing that the tool used in an assault is not relevant, and by focusing on the tool you solve nothing.
… What? I’m taking the piss out of your argument that the tool isn’t relevant. You tried to bring “fists” into this as a comparison. Unless you’re willing to say that I could go out right now into a crowd of people and kill eleven and wound twenty with my bare hands like I’m the Internet badass from the Navy SEALs copypasta, then you’re absolutely full of it and are just running with the recently popularized bad-faith argumentation strategy of “never play defense”.
Do you or do you not believe that it is possible for me to go out into a crowd of people of some description unarmed, then kill eleven people and wound twenty with – your words, not mine – “my fists”. Are you actually that deluded, or were you mistaken in comparing a car attack to a fist attack?
The tool is very relevant when it enables greater amounts of violence.
Killing nine people with your fists is extremely hard and you’d probably die trying. A car, gun, or bomb makes it much easier.
There are a lot of areas that were designed based on cars. Where I live would be difficult for most of the residents without cars or something similar. The population density is too low to make most public transportation practical.
Good news, in those places a driver going off the road isn’t going to hit a crowd of people.
I completely agree. If you look at the comment I was responding to, though, you’ll see they appear to be advocating a complete prohibition, “Cars need to go. Away forever.” I’m just saying there are places where that’s not practical.
Most of those places would work just fine with a combination of trains for long distance and bicycles/walking for local travel too.
Boats, trains, subways, light rail, trams, buses, cable cars, micro electric vehicles, bikes, velomobiles, scooters, skateboards, rollerblades, feet, and sensible urban planning where the nearest grocery store isn’t an hour’s walk from my house don’t exist. If it’s not a car, I don’t wanna hear about it.
Sure, the elderly or disabled just love walking. And when you need to do a couple of miles to get groceries for the month a bicycle is great to carry those 9 bags!
The elderly and disabled are exactly the people who are forgotten in a car centric society that assumes everyone can drive.
The elderly and disabled are also (more the former, but sometimes the latter) maybe not people who should be operating heavy machinery. Hey, what if we had some sort of group vehicle that someone else could operate, and everyone else just hitches a ride?
That’s because they specifically designed those areas to be car specific to serve the needs of the Nazi Ford corporation. “Population density” is a poor argument.
Just look up pictures of America 100 years ago. Trains. Streetcars. Trams. Buses.
Not fucking highways and urban sprawl.
By all means, live in your little suburb with your car. We just want the cities to be safe from the violence they bring.