Unhinged snowflakes and the targeting of YouTube

Another day, another mass shooting. This one left three employees wounded at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California. This one is likely to have higher impact than most of them, because it comes in the midst of high public anger at Silicon Valley's tech giants, with one of the root causes the arbitrary censorship of user content. And sure enough, the pathetic woman who enacted the latest mass shooting seems to have had a grudge against YouTube, for what she claimed was the company's "filtering" of her videos, some of them bizarre but sort of cute, although with her YouTube channel down, we have no idea whether it was all of them. She claimed in one of her rants that there wasn't anything objectionable in them and the company employed a double standard in allowing the truly suggestive videos of pop singers to go up while hers were banned.

It's attention-drawing for what it is not – a typical Muslim rampage in the name of some Islamist cause. The woman, Nasim Aghdam, despite the appearance of her name, wasn't a Muslim, didn't wear a veil, and said she was Azeri Persian and of the Bahá'í faith, which isn't associated with terrorism. Her last name is actually the name of a province in Armenia, next door to Azerbaijan, so the picture that emerges is that she seemed more of a Kim Kardashian-type, with her excessive makeup, her focus on showing off her body, and her compulsive need to be on camera, which is why she was so obsessed with YouTube and paranoid about its intentions. She also was a rabid leftist, a vegan, and an animal rights campaigner, and many of her videos decry and revolve around the consumption of meat. It would be possible to dismiss that sentiment as typical of PETA fanatics, and this may have been why no one paid attention to her or thought anything was amiss (except her family, who apparently tried to warn authorities). But most PETA people don't do spray-shootings. Something about her was unhinged. She used her YouTube videos to promote herself above all, and also to promote her crazy left-wing causes. The loss of that privilege to do that seems to be why she targeted YouTube. She felt she was entitled to be on YouTube and be a YouTube star. It's not known why YouTube did suppress some of her selfie videos as violations of its terms of service, but the whole thing seems to have driven this snowflake over the edge. There might be comparisons to the Parkland shooting from this incident, but it seems to me that she actually has more in common with the lesbian Hart couple who drove themselves and their six adopted children over a cliff last week. Those people also were into promoting political causes for the camera, and they used their kids to do it, just as Aghdam used YouTube. The couple seemed to have snapped when the jig was up and the child protective services were closing in on them for abusing the children, and they knew that the children were likely to be taken away. Aghdam snapped when her YouTube jig was up. It's also strange that both were female and both resulting massacres occurred within such a short time of each other, as well as the spate of mass killings from Las Vegas to Parkland. The facts aren't all out about Aghdam or the Hart couple who drove their kids off a cliff, but the initial reading is that this is snowflake culture taking a very, very bad turn. Colliding with the tech giants in the midst of their public unpopularity, Aghram's deed is likely to resonate through Silicon Valley for a long time. The culture today promotes snowflakery, and among some fragile souls, the snowflakery makes some go over the edge. Whether the solution is to regulate social media and give citizens "rights" to it or to reform education to end snowflake culture, this shooting is likely to draw attention to how far political grandstanding snowflake culture should be allowed to fester, given how it tips some unbalanced souls over the edge.