ISIS Are So Hip it Hurts, Argues Guardian

One of the Guardian’s house intellectuals – Pankraj Mishra – has written a lengthy apologia for ISIS. Apparently it has very little to do with Islam. It’s more kind of an achingly hip exercise in chin-strokingly cool post-post-modernism. Or something.

To save you the trouble of reading it, let me just quote my favourite sentence:

Isis mocks the entrepreneurial age’s imperative to project an appealing personality by posting snuff videos on social media.

Let’s just savour that one for a moment, shall we?

The reason that ISIS posts beheading videos on Twitter is, by Mishra’s erudite account, because they’re hip young gunslinging groovesters who’ve realised that being nice is oh-so-square, Daddy-O, so they’ve settled on the modish, nay, bleeding edge idea of, like, doing the exact opposite.