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Rob Ford's Toronto

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ahm said:
who's the protagonist? who will the audience identify with, primarily? the reporter, the dealer, the mayor, or the detective? or would this be presented from the perspective of the community members?
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I always saw Gary Giroux as a protagonist. Read this Star profile http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2010/12/31/is_torontos_homicide_squad_losing_its_lustre.html.

For Giroux, it all goes back to “the call.”
“The call is the centre of all that is holy in the office. You have to be prepared to take the call,” Giroux says, sitting in the police office at Superior Court, waiting for yet another jury to return with a verdict in a murder trial.
Those who decide “I can't work nights, or I can't stay late” are not cut out for the job, he says.
Now in the home stretch of his policing career — he can retire with a full pension in three years — Giroux acknowledges the wearying aspects of the job.
“I don't want to be called in the middle of the night any more. I don't want to be called away from my family on special occasions. I think I've had enough of that; so have they.”
The son of a chartered accountant, he says his only ambition was to be a cop. And when the day comes to collect his inscribed plaque, Giroux says he would do it all over again. He looks forward to retirement, knowing he took killers off the streets.
“I'm sitting in a rocking chair someplace and they're sitting in prison.”
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Like, that is a CHARACTER, the last old guy who's keeping the faith in the profession. He's almost on the way out and this case lands in his lap. Brazen II.

EDIT: I should add I think you don't need a single protagonist. Maybe a main guy, like McNulty, but I maybe the broker, Mo, we could start with his story. The guy living on two sides of the law, threatened, regretting his decision to find a buyer.
 
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Kev, mine was missed too - May 12
(as an aside - my registration was also lost in the outage - had to re-register with the same user name).
 
Jimmi T said:
On the topic of the Somali community, I went to Scarlett Heights around when the first wave of Somalis arrived in the neighbourhood. About half of our school was Somali. They were really conservative religious people back then and none of them were involved in drugs or gangs. I remember when the school had some dance contest the Somali guys would even cover their eyes because they considered it indecent. But it's been 20 years and things have sure changed!
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I don't doubt that things have changed over a 20-year period the way they might for any community, I'm wary of seeing what's apparently happening with Ford and the Dixon Rd community as indicative of Somalis as a whole. I certainly don't have enough information to judge them as a whole and it really seems like whatever organization (for lack of a less neutral term) Ford is caught up in, it spans more than one community in this city.
 
the lemur said:
I don't doubt that things have changed over a 20-year period the way they might for any community, I'm wary of seeing what's apparently happening with Ford and the Dixon Rd community as indicative of Somalis as a whole.
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Majorly agree. There are drug dealers in just about every highrise & condo building in Toronto, and they are no less prevalent in Yorkville than they are on Dixon. Doesn't matter where you look: most people are not drug dealers. Rather, they're just trying to go to work, come home, put dinner on the table, raise their families and maybe have enough left over to have some peaceful fun now and again, but such people are seldom in the news.
 
SecretSquirrel said:
Majorly agree. There are drug dealers in just about every highrise & condo building in Toronto, and they are no less prevalent in Yorkville than they are on Dixon. Doesn't matter where you look: most people are not drug dealers. Rather, they're just trying to go to work, come home, put dinner on the table, raise their families and maybe have enough left over to have some peaceful fun now and again, but such people are seldom in the news.
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Except the ones in the higher end condos are more likely to keep it under wraps than in regular apartments...
 
Jimmi T said:
I'm not judging the community as a whole. I'm saying as they've become more Westernized more kids are giving up traditional values for our gang culture.
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But are you basing that observation on what you see of Somali kids now in general, or the presence of gangs in some areas?
 
SecretSquirrel said:
Indeed, why throw it up on the internet at all? It's a supremely valuable bit of information; you can guard a USB stick or a phone with a gun, but once something is online, you've lost all control of it. I realise that the people who had the video are gun-runners & drug dealers and not the protagonists of the movie Hackers, but this is basic stuff and in this day & age, it's simply not plausible that they wouldn't have access to someone who could advise them on this stuff if they needed the advice badly enough.

They don't have to be internet wizards; they just have to know someone who is moderately clued-up to tell them not to put this thing online. Chances are they never did.
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I work in "computers" and it has been my experience that people are far less technologically aware than they should be, even young folks who, we are continuously told, are "tech savvy"." Not only do I believe that they would use a free host like Bugs3 to host the "crack" video, I think they would feel like they were anonymous in doing so. The Goonies may be known in some circles, but they are hardly the Hells Angels. The word "Goonies" is popular enough as a cultural reference that they may have felt safe using it for any number of digital accounts.

Also, there is some evidence to show that the account was created before the video was shown to Gawker. This is a screen capture from the Wayback Archive showing the account in question was active on June 2013. The Wayback Archive takes its time in getting a first snapshot, so this account was likely opened at least a month - or more before. For unpopular sites, the archive takes less snapshots, so this account could have existed weeks, months or 2 years earlier. The Bugs3 website was first registered on 2011-03-14. This tells us nothing about who really owns the account, but it does show that the account was not created just to bolster a boast of involvement.

Still, there are some valid questions regarding the validity of the story because any credible hacker would know that you cannot destroy a video simply by deleting it from a single server and would probably have said so right away. It would have off-line backups, possibly on multiple servers. Free or not, the hosting company likely has redundant backup technology to restore accounts should the worst happen. Although the wording was to "find" the video not "destroy" it, the intent would have been clear.
 
Jimmi T said:
I don't have any desire to get into a social sciences debate. Just making an observation from my experiences growing up around the Dixon community and comparing those with what my little cousins tell me growing up in the community today and also with what I see in the media.
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FWIW dude, I don't think any reasonable person here thinks you are saying "most Somali kids are gang members these days" or anything remotely like that. It was clearly a personal observation of a limited subset of a community. Getting into social sciences debates with people who are really into social sciences debates sucks.
 
SFO said:
FWIW dude, I don't think any reasonable person here thinks you are saying "most Somali kids are gang members these days" or anything remotely like that. It was clearly a personal observation of a limited subset of a community. Getting into social sciences debates with people who are really into social sciences debates sucks.
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I'm not looking to get into a social sciences debate (not really sure what that would be anyway). My point is just that JimmiT's observations, valid as they are, don't explain everything about Somali gangs as they relate to RoFo. What we see in the media about any group should also not be taken at face value.
 
My March 28 pick was also deleted by the monster


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darmstrongd

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mark me down for March 28th
 
Jimmi T said:
So apparently Price might not be in the clear, even though he seemed to cooperate with police.
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I've always thought that Price was brought in as "muscle" when this whole thing blew up, wouldn't surprise me if he was involved with some of the physical stuff. He has history with Doug and remember you can't teach loyalty.
 
the lemur said:
I'm not looking to get into a social sciences debate (not really sure what that would be anyway). My point is just that JimmiT's observations, valid as they are, don't explain everything about Somali gangs as they relate to RoFo. What we see in the media about any group should also not be taken at face value.
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But why even make the point that Jimmi T's explicitly limited observations are not exhaustive on the Dixon Somali community? Who would think that they were? He certainly wasn't trying to position himself as an authority. It just seemed like you were calling him out on claims he wasn't attempting to make. And who thinks "the media" are unimpeachable info either?
 
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