Shooting at Quebec City Mosque

[Shroom Man 777]

At this rate, if he's some alt-right racist fuckface (and he is!) who's not inspired by Trump, then big fucking whoop. That's like saying a particular white supremacist wasn't inspired by Hitler or Mein Kampf but was following the precepts of his Grand Wizard and whatever Confederate bullshit they chug over there. Oh no, they were wrong about calling the guy a Nazi, he's actually KKK or something else entirely. OMG LOL stupid shrill lefties with their blogs and Tweets and tumblrs buncha assholes no different from the alt-right Bannon-Brietbart brainwashed Thiel-funded disinformed shits whose people are now in control of the world's most powerful country.

[Flagg]

If it turns out to be a right wing nut not directly inspired by Trump, the leftists who said "right wing nut inspired by Trump" come out looking a little stupid.

If it turns out to not even be a Muslim guy, let alone a refugee, the rightists who said "Muslim refugee" should come out looking very, very stupid.

Being wrong about details of a person's motives is much different from being actively delusional about their identity.

Which is why for the most part I stopped even speculating about who and why when dealing with events like this until at least the next day when generally a lot more information is available. And really it's because being right even with little/bad information doesn't make you smarter or earn you browny points, and being wrong makes you look like a stupid (and often racist) asshole.

That doesn't mean that you can't have and share an opinion regarding sort of surrogate issues surrounding an incident.

[jwl]

I think more of a lesson here is to not jump to conclusions until things are clear. Cosmicalstorm said it was an Islamic attack and subsequently looked like an idiot. But other people (not here) were automatically jumping to the conclusion that it was an alt-right guy inspired by trump. It's looking he is indeed is an alt-right guy, although the jury is out whether he was inspired by trump. However, this easily could not have been the case, and in that case they would have been the ones that look like idiots.

If it turns out to be a right wing nut not directly inspired by Trump, the leftists who said "right wing nut inspired by Trump" come out looking a little stupid.

If it turns out to not even be a Muslim guy, let alone a refugee, the rightists who said "Muslim refugee" should come out looking very, very stupid.

Being wrong about details of a person's motives is much different from being actively delusional about their identity.

Yes, but is entirely possible that this could have been done by a Muslim at the time people started saying it was an alt-right guy. That was my main point.

It was also possible that it could have been neither, e.g. someone with a personal vendetta against that mosque because his wife cheated on him with the imam or something. We now know this not to be the case, but that was not true at the time a load of people were making claims about him.

On the term "alt-right" I deliberately used that term because it is broader than "fascist" or "neo-nazi" or whatever, and while the political alignment of the guy is still unclear it would be hypocritical of me to jump to conclusions about him in a post saying not to jump to conclusions in situations like this. To be honest I'm not a big fan of the term either because it seems to have more of a connection to online bubbles like /pol/ and #gamergate than to the real world, but I couldn't think of another broad term to describe the possibility space of who it could be. In retrospect "an Islamophobic attack" would probably have been a more apt word choice.

[cosmicalstorm]

I didn't apologize for being wrong yet, so I will do that in public here: I apologize for jumping to conclusions earlier.

Mosques get shot and blown up often in the middle east. Almost always by another extremist Islamist fraction so I used that, and my pre-existing disdain for Islam and the frenzied reporting right afterwards to jump to conclusions.

Lesson learned for me: Wait 24 hours after next attack before any conclusions so I wont embarrass myself.

[Simon_Jester]

That's a good start.