Alt-right math

Canadian-born, New Hampshire resident writer Mark Steyn used to describe himself on his website as "the one-man global content provider".  For years, much of the content was entertainment related; Steyn watches a lot of movies, and knows way more about the Great American Songbook than is healthy for a man just entering middle age.

In recent years, however, Steyn's writing has taken a much more serious tone, and a very right-wing one. He is a ferocious climate change denier.  Currently he is embroiled in a lawsuit with Michael Mann, a professor at Penn State. Mann, unaccountably I'm sure, took offence when Steyn saw fit to drag a sex scandal involving the Penn State football team into one of his diatribes about Mann's work.

The main string to his bow, however, is rabid anti-Islamism.  Steyn believes that Europe's fate as an outpost of the caliphate is all but sealed.  It all gets very wearing, particularly given Steyn's tendency to play fast and loose with the facts.

This week, however, the appalling massacre in Las Vegas has driven Steyn over the edge. In this mind-boggling article , Steyn brings up three small terror attacks by Muslims in recent days, in Alberta, Marseille and Stockholm.  The total number of fatalities in these three events runs to less than ten, but in Steyn's mind, they are of far more significance than the 59 killed and 500-plus wounded by a white madman in Las Vegas. This sentence about the perp in Vegas is astonishingly callous: "An old dog taught himself a new trick, on a spectacular scale".  Trick?? Yeah, nothing to see here folks, just an ex-accountant going postal: happens every day -- which, sadly, it almost does.

If you get randomly targeted for extermination, you're not going to care if your killer is a white serial gambler or a "dimwit Mohammedan" (Steyn's phrase).  But what Steyn is saying is that if you're unfortunate enough to be in the line of fire of Stephen Paddock, you're just collateral damage in America's daily life: sorry about the Second Amendment, but that's just the way we do things around here.  If you get stabbed non-fatally in Edmonton, you're a part of history, a victim of a life-and-death interfaith struggle. It's a bizarre and immoral way of looking at the world.