Nasim Najafi Aghdam. CBS News.
Yesterday I posted about the YouTube shooting and posted it right before the identity of the attacker was released as well as her motive. The attacker, Nasim Najafi Aghdam, was a strange women, to say the least, but it is very clear that her supposed motive reported on the day of the attack was incorrect. She was not involved in a relationship with anyone at YouTube and was in fact a content creator for the company.
More on that in a bit. The fake news that she was involved with someone working at YouTube and that this was a domestic dispute should not have been put in the last post. Local news and other outlets were reporting that as fact but it was not so and I repeated their error. Funnily enough, my main source for the story, the New York Times, was smart enough to avoid the error. Credit where credit is due, they did the right thing while I rushed things a bit. It was speculation on my part anyways but I am going to edit the last post to remove that paragraph.
With that out of the way this case is even weirder than I first thought. The attacker was one hell of a character. Her personal website, which is currently up as of this writing, (archive here) shows that she seems to be an Iranian, vegan, animal rights protester and fitness enthusiast. She also has a lot of pictures up and had quite a few YouTube channels.
She also seems to have quite a grudge against YouTube. She claimed to have been demonetized and had lost quite a bit of money due to that fact. She thought she was being censored for her politics, (ie animal rights) and seemed to be absolutely furious that her videos weren't giving her money anymore.
I won't go into it much more than that. Unfortunately, I am hosted by YouTube's parent company, Google and it wouldn't do for me to bite the hand that feeds me. They are pretty specific that you don't talk about how ads and stuff work here and even if I could talk about it, I am obviously going to have a biased account.
That being said, there are other issues that this case brings up. The most obvious is Nasim Aghdam's hypocrisy. She said she was in favor of animal rights but she had no problem shooting three innocent people that probably had very little to do with her YouTube channels. They were just three random employees who's lives didn't matter to her at all. For someone that seemed fairly disgusted with killing animals, she didn't seem to have any problem with trying to kill people and did kill herself. I'm no expert on vegans or animal activists but I am guessing most of them would agree that Aghdam's actions were beyond the pale.
I also think it is likely that Aghdam was mentally ill. She looks the same in all of the pictures and videos I have seen look the same. Dead eyes with no change in expression. I am not a doctor but that isn't normal and I would not be surprised if there wasn't something medically or psychologically wrong with her.
Some noise is being made about the fact that the cops had contact with Aghdam before the attack. Apparently she was listed as a missing person and was confronted by the police. The cops let her go and the next day she attacked YouTube. I think that is a tragedy but it seems less likely to be a screw up on the level as the Parkland shooting were everyone failed so spectacularly. My guess is that they had nothing to hold her on so they had to let her go. Still, huge chance to prevent this that failed.
I also wonder how long this story is going to last. I am guessing that after today the media will move on, and they appear to be doing so already. Even though this is a very strange story with plenty of different angles to cover, I am thinking that it will disappear.
Why? Because the attacker was a woman, of Middle Eastern descent, with leftist politics and attacked a gun free zone in a very tightly controlled state when it comes to gun rights. That runs against quite a few narratives at once. She doesn't paint white males as dangerous, she's not right wing and she can't really be used to push for gun control. That means one thing will happen. She will be memory holed.
And honestly, if that was the case for all of these mass shooters (or attempted in this case), things probably would be better in this country. We all know that these kinds of things spread memetically and the media has done a very good job of hyping up killers like Nikolas Cruz. It would be much better if these stories would be handled locally and then buried quickly, but that hasn't happened with Cruz and it's making him into a folk hero for people that want to do this kind of thing and all because it is politically convenient to do so. This attack here isn't so it will disappear...
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