The Grand Convergence

At a certain level, formerly functioning societies seem to be growing unnecessarily complicated. Yet, in a more basic sense, it's all coming together:

Yesterday, as I was heading home after our live Clubland Q&A, it was all breaking news about the YouTube shooter. As usual in the first moments after such an attack, it's all tediously speculative - except for the apparent eyewitness report that the gunman was, in fact, a gunwoman. That, on the other hand, sent the breaking-news chappies boring down yet another dreary alley - that it was supposedly a YouTube employee upset with an ex-boyfriend. I gave up and listened to music all the way back.

In fact, the shooter was subsequently revealed to be Nasim Aghdam. What kind of name is that for a psychologically disturbed white-loner NRA gun-nut? Well, Miss Aghdam turns out to be a Persian vegan who came to the US in 1996. She made the first vegan Farsi music video. Is that as big a breakthrough as it sounds? Well, if you haven't already seen it, you'll never know: her entire social-media presence has been vaporized, in part because a mass shooter who's female, vegan, immigrant and Iranian is not helpful to the narrative - which is why CNN, MSNBC and the rest have done to this news story what YouTube did to her vegan video.

And yet the San Bruno shooting is oddly emblematic. As Miss Aghdam discovered, Persian vegan vids weren't quite the cash cow (if vegan readers will forgive the expression) that she hoped they would be.

Great editorial by Steyn. That man can write! This line really cracked me up:

“As you’ll notice in YouTube comments, I’m often derided as a pansy fag loser by the likes of ShitlordWarrior473 for sitting around talking about immigration policy as opposed to getting out in the street and taking direct action.”

He can write and THINK! Who else would have conceived of the YouTube shooting as a "Grand Convergence"? What a closing paragraph! He neatly wraps it all up in conclusion as we were all taught in English class:

What happened yesterday is a remarkable convergence of the spirits of the age: mass shootings, immigration, the Big Tech thought-police, the long reach of the Iranian Revolution, the refugee racket, animal rights, vegan music videos... It was the latest mismatched meeting between east and west in the age of the Great Migrations: Nasim Aghdam died two days before her 39th birthday, still living (according to news reports) with either her parents or her grandmother. She came to America at the age of seventeen, and spent two decades in what appears to be a sad and confused search to find something to give her life meaning. But in a cruder sense the horror in San Bruno was also a sudden meeting of two worlds hitherto assumed to be hermetically sealed from each other: the cool, dispassionate, dehumanized, algorithmic hum of High Tech - and the raw, primal, murderous rage breaking through from those on the receiving end.

So true!

I worked with a genius like that once. Top-notch, world-reknowned metallurgist, incredible jazz saxophonist always in demand, AND he could write absolutely hilarious doggerel that would just flow off his pen without any serious thought and no editing. I could struggle for days and never write what he could produce in mere moments.

Truly genius! I really admire people like that.

Mark Steyn is terrific & usually right on target. I do have a quibble over his comments on the Dennis Prager suit. It is about censorship, not de-monetization. Prager’s videos are targeted at those most in need of the information - millenials - since they’re not getting it through school anymore. YouTube is deliberately preventing those most in need of a different point of view of exactly that. I have no doubt that the judge is just another leftist. On the other hand, maybe Prager does need better lawyers.

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