[PHOTO] "Rob Ford for Ex-Mayor"

Torontoist shared this scene, a poster of anti-Rob Ford graffiti pasted onto the corner of Spadina and Baldwin last Wednesday. (Original photo, this one.) It's certainly strident.

[ISL] "'Seasteaders' gather in San Francisco to develop ocean cities"

Seasteading is a concept developed by libertarians who detest the monopolization of the Earth's habitable land space by states, so preventing the formation of libertarian stateless societies. Going to the ocean, the theory holds, and building artificial islands free of any terrestrial sovereignty is the solution necessary for libertarianism's realization. Matt O'Brien's Mercury News article provides his readers with a look at a recent conference held by the movement in San Francisco.

Colonizing the oceans to free human progress from the choking grasp of regulation has drawn a wealthy group of futurists, engineers, maritime lawyers and libertarians to San Francisco this weekend.

"We've run out of frontier. All land is claimed. And our revolutions have become superficial," said Patri Friedman, who cofounded The Seasteading Institute four years ago with billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

They envision a floating city movement whose most immediate step is to launch a "visa-free" ship by 2014 to house and employ high-tech workers in international waters 12 miles off the Peninsula.

Next might be a medical tourism ship in a refurbished, $8 million casino ship recently donated to the institute, said Friedman, a Berkeley resident and grandson of the late libertarian economist Milton Friedman.

But those are just pioneer projects for "seasteaders" who want to populate the high seas with autonomous city-states that compete for the world's residents by creating the best governments.

"We could let a thousand experiments like Hong Kong bloom," Friedman said. "Politics can be like shopping for a country."

[LINK] "Murder, With a Side of Porn"

Toronto journalist Bert Archer's Toronto Standard article critiquing the inadvertant glamorization of--thankfully caught--accused murderer Luka Magnotta says pretty much what needs to be said

Luka Rocco Magnotta, the man suspected of murdering a Chinese man in Montreal and mailing out parts of his body, is pretty. As a result, newspapers and TV shows are pelting us with the contents of his ample album of glamour shots. He was a model, he worked in porn, and even auditioned for a reality show. There’s plenty of material, much of it posted by Magnotta himself.

[. . .]

The pictures of Magnotta are the pictures of a suspected murderer. It’s been less than a week since the Conservative Party office received that foot, which we now know belonged to Concordia student Lin Jun, but already, you can sense the frenzy. The body parts thing was big enough; the fact that they were mailed to political offices made it bigger. But when you add Magnotta’s looks, the fact that he reportedly made some porn, seems to have had sex with men and women, and the fact that he may have had something romantically to do with Karla Homolka, the story goes through the roof.

We’ve seen it before. Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka did bad things. But in the universe of bad things, these were not big stars. But just as Bonnie and Clyde were petty hoodlums who made it big because they were a photogenic couple, Paul and Karla’s notoriety rests at least as much on their hairdos, cheek bones and complexions as it does on their crimes. People couldn’t get enough of those pictures, could not, I think, get enough of the fact that these were attractive people, not criminal looking, pictures of the sort of people you might have looked twice at on the street, the sort you might have flirted with, and had sex with if given the opportunity. Some of this was retroactive terror – It could have been me instead of those poor French and Mahaffy girls – but some of it, and in light of Magnotta, I’d say a lot of it, was pure pornographic fascination. Because these weren’t just murders, they were sexual murders. So to imagine the murder, you have to imagine the sex, the bodies.

[. . .]

Things have changed. And it makes what the shows and papers are doing even more transparently hateful. Because this video is out there. I’ve watched it, and maybe so have you.

It’s not clear if it’s Magnotta – whoever it is wears a hoodie and has his back to the camera – but everything else is on full view. The naked victim’s alive at the beginning of the video, as the hooded character sits on his chest, possibly stroking his face. Though he’s tied to the bed, it all looks consensual (unless the victim was drugged; we can weakly hope he was). Then there’s a jump in the video, and we see a half dozen little red marks on Lin’s torso. He’s not moving anymore. When the hood comes back into frame, we see where those marks came from. He’s holding an ice pick, which he then uses to puncture the body about a dozen more times. Then he takes the camera in one hand, a knife in the other and starts cutting. Small, tentative slices at first on the thighs and arms, just enough to make the body start to look like meat. Then we get a close-up on the victim’s face just above his slashed throat.

That’s when I stopped watching.

It turns out, I didn’t need to see the killer’s face. The association I made between the two visual stimuli was strong enough to make me see what I only intuited before. Sexualizing this murder by posting shots of the suspect raising his shirt to show off his tidy little body is disgusting. And not in a helpful way, like some images of war, disease and famine can be. Those are simply visually disgusting. The decision editors and producers and web publishers are making hourly to throw up these shots is morally disgusting. Moral’s not a word I use a lot. It’s muddy, and gets more caked with crud nearly every time it’s hauled out. But I think it works here. Using the parts of us that make us horny to up circulation, Nielsen and web-hit numbers on a story like this, one that almost certainly involves a man who used that same strategy to get his victim into his room, naked and tied up, is unjustifiable.

[CAT] "Animal rights activists started chasing Magnotta years before mutilation murder"

As Luka Magnotta's extensive Encyclopedia Dramatica article points out, the first sign that Magnotta was not merely an Internet attention whore but was potentially seriously deranged came when he uploaded multiple videos to the Internet showing him kill different cats in different ways. It stands to reason, here, that the tendency of serial killers to start their careers killing animals was present in Magnotta's case.

One of the most disheartening things about Magnotta's case was the apparent disinterest and/or inability of multiple police forces in Canada to do anything about his sadistic videos. One of the most heartening things was the mobilization of hundreds of people around the world behind an effort to identify and try to do something about the man making these abhorrent videos. Stephen Maher's Postmedia News article outlines these two elements quite well.

[A]nimal lovers around the world had been on [Magnotta's] trail for two years.

They notified humane societies and police departments in Toronto and Montreal, posted rewards, spent countless hours poring over videos and photos for clues, established a thick dossier on Magnotta, and identified fake Internet personas that seemed to be leaving false trails to confuse the people pursuing him.

They were motivated by four horrible videos in which a young man gleefully kills kittens. In the first one, in 2010, a young man alleged to be Magnotta suffocates two kittens in a plastic bag. A few weeks later, he posted a related video.

By January of 2011, after frantic online searching, animal lovers tentatively had identified Magnotta as the suspect. They meticulously compared photos that Magnotta posted of himself, identifying jewelry and furnishings that appeared in both, until they were certain they had found the right guy.

They then focused on finding him, something which was made more difficult by the many apparently fake photos Magnotta seems to have posted — using a host of false online identities — showing him in cities around the world.

Volunteers analyzed the digital fingerprints of the photographs and identified the camera used to make the videos, linking it to photos of Magnotta. They tracked down products in the background of his pictures, tried to figure out when and where they were sold.

They tried to place him in particular places at particular times, using film posters and landmarks in the backgrounds, analyzed accidental reflections of his camera, and established that he was in the Toronto area.

In December 2011, he posted two more videos, in which kittens were killed in horrible ways.

On the Facebook group where they shared photos, member after member fretted that he would move on to human victims.

"He might end up killing human beings one day though," wrote one member in December 2011. "He might just not stop with animals. He needs to be caught ASAP."

[. . .]

In a statement released Thursday, the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals reported that after being informed of the allegations in February, 2011, they reached out to Toronto Police, the FBI, the RCMP, the Quebec Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Montreal police.

Montreal police are dealing with a Mafia war, various corruption investigations and, more recently, a mass student protest, and may not have had time to track down a kitten killer.

[. . .]

Commander Ian Lafrenière, of the Montreal Police Service, told me Thursday that he doesn’t know yet what kind of information the force received about Magnotta and the kittens, but animal protection law is not as strong in Quebec as it is in other jurisdictions.

"The question is, when this is over, can we backtrack and check this out? You know what, we've been there for more than 130 years and we're still improving. So if something could have been done better we're more than happy to do so."

His police force and others should ask themselves these questions. Well-meaning people around the world were ringing alarm bells about Magnotta, and the police seem not to have heard.

[LINK] "Amid the horror Magnotta case reveals, the moral order stands"

Law professor Dawn Moore's Ottawa Citizen article, published three days ago, provides a useful corrective to concerns of society's moral torpor as evidenced by the whole Luka Magnotta affair and the snuff film. Terrible things happen whenever, and our time is rather less violent than many (see Steven Pinker, for example). The fact that it caused such ruckus is a sign of our society's fundamental normality, that it can be so easily be outraged by something terrible happening.

Murder itself is a rare thing. Ottawa has about 12 a year. Almost all of these will receive media attention for a day or two and then quickly fade from memory. We tend not to be terribly interested in these murders because they lack salacious or sensational storylines. A drug deal goes wrong. A woman is killed by her abusive partner. Sadly, we see these instances of interpersonal violence as run of the mill and, despite the fact that they make up the “norm” of murder in most jurisdictions, we rarely see them as having any particular significance or impact on our own lives.

The case of the suspect in these crimes, Luka Rocco Magnotta, is different. It stands apart from the “norm” of murders and, as such, it takes on its own special weight and significance.

Newspapers, TV and online news sources have been awash with the gory details since the story broke. When we are inundated with descriptions and images of nightmarish actions it inflates our sense of danger. It makes sense then that we should greet the news of the Magnotta case with alarm. We draw an instant connection to our own lives, giving us the idea that threat (albeit vaguely defined) is both imminent and ubiquitous. Presented with over the top violence, we can’t help but be left with the sense that there is something very, very wrong with our society. The logic follows that in a society so horribly derailed, how can anyone be safe?

The apparent snuff video serves to heighten the sense of alarm. It’s not enough that a person was apparently assaulted, murdered and cannibalized. Countless others watched the images of the murder online. And, if the online comments responding to the video are any indication, many of these viewers got a little thrill in the watching. Some call for more gore while others speculate on the realness of the depiction of cannibalism. Granted, it would seem that most of the commentators believed they were viewing a staged scene and not an actual murder. Still, the apparent blood lust is distasteful. It’s no wonder this calls into question the state of society.

Crime, according to the philosopher Émile Durkheim, gives us an opportunity to reaffirm our collective commitment to the moral order. I’m sure Durkheim would be onside with those who decry the ubiquity of violence on the Internet and indeed in society. These same sentiments suggest the Magnotta case gives us an opportunity to collectively denounce the unregulated nature of technology for not only creating the opportunity for an individual to broadcast a murder unfettered, but also to give incentive to individuals to commit heinous acts as a means of securing notoriety. It is the same logic that condemns video games and horror movies.

[. . .]

Neither Magnotta’s alleged acts nor the widely viewed video give credence to concerns that such events mark the downfall of society or reveal anything about our own personal safety. We have never lived in a safer society than we do today. Communities are less, not more violent. And the fact that untold numbers clicked on the link to download what appears now to be a bonafide snuff video speaks only to an enduring human fascination with the macabre, and not to any rend in the social fabric.

[DM] "A note on international student migration"

I've a post up at Demography Matters taking a brief look at the phenomenon of the international student, with special focus on Canada as a destination. Seeking educational opportunities not available in their homelands, welcomed by countries looking for extra income, international students are frequently desirable migrants.