The Pessimist

I’ve only recently become an addict of youtube. Occasionally somebody would send me a link to some funny animation or cute animal vid, I’d watch it and that would be it. If I looked around at all, the most popular videos all seemed to be of face-pierced youths crashing their skateboards, getting hoofed in the nuts, or singing or dancing badly. Or sometime all 4 at once.

But I put “atheist” into the search box and fairly quickly came across padcondell.

I watched it, then watched another and another. Pat has been publishing these videos for about a year, and he currently has 45 posted on youtube. I watched 7 or 8 at my first sitting, killing several hours watching them, and some rebuttals and reading the latest comments.

His shtick is to deliver a 4 to 6 minute monologue directly to camera. His voice is conversational, pleasant, humourous and imbued with a plummy London accent. His topics speak against Islamic extremism, reasonable accommodation, political correctness, and religion in general.

The most amazing thing is, after watching about 20 of his 45 vids, he has not uttered a single word that I disagree with. Stated another way, he says exactly what I have been thinking (and saying on this website), only he says it better, with more wit and humour.

If I weren’t an atheist, I’d make him my prophet or even my god. But I am, and I don’t believe in that kinda bullshit, so the best I can do is express my admiration for the man. By putting his face out there, he is taking a not inconsiderable risk that some religious wacko could whack him.

If he were running for political office, I would definitely vote for him. Canada could use a politician like him.

For more patcondell videos, see his youtube index.

That Winnipeg bus incident was a real shocker. What a nasty way to wake up. My sympathy goes out to the victim’s friends and family, and I hope that Mr. Vince Weiguang Li spends the rest of his life in prison.

There’s a lot of commentary already in the blogosphere about this incident. Comments like Canadians are wussies. Why didn’t anybody take this guy out? I’ll never visit Canada again. I’ll never take a bus again.

I’ve commented before on tragedies of this sort (Virginia Tech). I don’t think I can fault the people on the bus for basically running away. Unlike an airplane, a bus can quickly stop and you can bug out. On a plane, you’re basically stuck there and the situation will likely get worse, so the passengers would be expected – post 9/11 – to overwhelm the bad guy. But how do you go about disarming a mad man on a bus. The space is very crowded, it wouldn’t be easy to mount a multi-person defense. Unlike a classroom or office space where a madman could be surrounded and jumped, a bus would be a single file line up to a serial stabbing. The victim was a goner by the time the slumbering bus passengers were aroused. He couldn’t be helped. I do believe the right action was taken. Just get out. Like when a crocodile leaps out of the drinking hole to take a wildebeest, the rest of the herd is best to just run away.

The other comments are an exaggeration in the other direction. Nothing like this has ever happened in Canada before, or on a bus anywhere in North America. Your life is no more endangered today than it was yesterday. This event was totally without precedent, and there is no reason to believe it was anything other than an isolated incident.

But I’m sure, again, that Muslims across Canada breathed easier this morning … praise be to allah that the crazy man was not a muslim, but a crazy Chinese guy.