Wednesday, April 04, 2018

turn away now if you can't take gallows humor

The San Bruno offices of the increasingly oppressive YouTube were just shot up by 39-year-old Nasim Aghdam (here's her ranty website), who looks like a cross between David Hogg and Pat Benatar. Paint a black line between her brows, and she's Frida Kahlo. Stories coming out of the incident vary, but one of the main narratives—subject to revision, of course—is that Aghdam has having a spat with a boyfriend.* She ended up shooting and non-fatally wounding three people before she (successfully) turned her gun on herself.

When I first saw news of the shooter, all I knew was that she was a woman who had wounded three and then killed herself. Trust a woman to fuck up a mass murder, I thought. Guys, at least, do it right. When it came out that Aghdam was not only a woman, but of Persian extraction, as well as being a "vegan bodybuilder and animal-rights activist," I was disappointed to learn she wasn't another in a long line of NRA nuts who have shot up schools, offices, and public places... oh, wait. Anyway, it's going to be interesting to watch the media try to spin this as somehow the NRA's fault.


ADDENDUM: YouTube has been, for the past few years, a haven for alt-media voices, but that has been changing. As the alt-media have grown more popular, YouTube has betrayed its anti-alt-media stance by demonetizing videos by popular alt YouTubers. Demonetization affects only those who are using YouTube's own ad-linked software to earn money; some YouTubers, however, have avoided YouTube monetization from the beginning, preferring instead to receive subscriber donations from sites like Patreon and MakerSupport. These folks have been relatively safe from YouTube's demonetization tactics, but not from YouTube's outright blocking/hiding of videos that supposedly violate its terms of service. As YouTube slowly turns into Twitter, which has been brazenly stifling non-leftie voices for several years, more and more alt figures will leave the platform and eventually create an alt-friendly video site of their own, just as Gab arose after Twitter became intolerable. One blogger noted that blogs, at least, are generally free of such repressive nonsense because they're hosted on independently run websites (although technically, those of us on Blogger must bow to Blogger's terms of service). Some people speculate that we could witness a mass return to blogging as a way to stay free of centralized control. Personally, I doubt that blogging will ever regain the popularity it enjoyed five or so years ago, but I think it might see a slight uptick in usage.

UPDATE: on a less flippant note: Aghdam spoke Farsi, Turkish, and English. She was smart, talented (albeit weirdly so, given her videos), and driven. Had she not been on crazy pills, she might have become somebody, but now, she's taken the short route to fame, and she'll be buried under the neverending conveyor belt of shooters, past and future.

UPDATE 2: some news here. Her parents had reported her missing just before the incident.



*Another narrative is that she was a frustrated YouTuber whose videos were being repeatedly banned/blocked. The truth is out there....



1 comment:

King Baeksu said...

A quick scan of SJW Twitter, including control-gun crusaders David Hogg and local boy made good Ask a Korean, reveals thundering silence on the Nasim Aghdam shooting.

A non-white Muslim female normally sits near the top of the intersectional hierarchy embraced by progressives these days, so I guess she gets a pass by our moral betters.

The technical term for this approach is "tactical nihilism," by the way. Can't wait until they're in charge of us all once again.