Welcome back to the theater of the absurd, where the tickets are free and the price is your dwindling faith in the human project. Today’s performance features the predictable, state-mandated tragedy of Robina Aminian, a 23-year-old who dared to exist in Iran on January 8, 2026, and was promptly erased for her efforts. If you’re looking for a tear-jerker about ‘bravery’ and ‘hope,’ you’ve wandered into the wrong column. I deal in the cold, hard currency of reality, and reality says that Robina is dead, her killers are currently enjoying tea, and you—yes, you, clutching your smartphone—will forget her name by the time your next food delivery arrives.

Robina Aminian was 23. In the West, 23 is an age dedicated to making poor financial decisions and oversharing on social media. In the hands of the Iranian theocracy, 23 is apparently a threat to the very fabric of the universe. The girl was killed during a demonstration, a term that has become shorthand for 'government-sponsored target practice.' The details provided by her aunt to the talking heads at France 24 describe an ‘ordeal,’ which is a remarkably polite way of saying the state decided to murder a citizen and then spent the subsequent weeks psychologically liquidating her family. It’s a standard operating procedure for a regime that fears a woman’s hair more than it fears the judgment of history—mostly because they know history is written by the survivors, and they’ve become very good at ensuring the opposition doesn't survive.

Let’s look at the Iranian leadership, shall we? A collection of geriatric clerics who claim a monopoly on divine will while utilizing the most pedestrian tools of earthly repression: bullets, batons, and bureaucracy. There is something profoundly pathetic about a government so insecure that it must extinguish the life of a young woman to prove its strength. It’s not strength; it’s a terminal case of fragility masquerading as piety. They aren’t protecting a religion; they are protecting a payroll. Every bullet fired into a crowd in Tehran is a desperate attempt to stop the clock, to keep the 12th century alive in a world that has moved on to quantum computing and artificial intelligence. They are fighting a war against time, and Robina Aminian was simply caught in the gears of their failing machinery.

But don’t let the Western 'democracies' off the hook just yet. The response from the global community is, as always, a symphony of performative impotence. On the Left, we have the activists who will post black squares or trendy hashtags, carefully curating their outrage to ensure it doesn’t accidentally offend their ‘anti-imperialist’ credentials. They’ll talk about 'nuance' and 'cultural context' as if there’s a culturally specific way to enjoy being shot in the street. On the Right, we have the professional warmongers who will use Robina’s corpse as a convenient prop to advocate for more sanctions or ‘regime change’—not because they give a single damn about Iranian women, but because it plays well with their donor base of defense contractors. To them, she’s not a human being; she’s a data point in a geopolitical chess game they’ve been losing for forty years.

And then there’s the media. France 24 and its ilk are currently dining out on the ‘ordeal’ of the family. They package the grief, add some somber music, and present it to you as ‘news.’ It’s not news; it’s tragedy porn. They know that a story about a dead girl in Iran will get X amount of clicks, which translates to Y amount of ad revenue. They aren't seeking justice; they’re seeking engagement metrics. The aunt’s testimony, raw and agonizing as it is, is processed through the editorial meat grinder until it’s palatable enough for the average consumer to digest between segments on the weather and the latest stock market fluctuations. We are all complicit in this commodification of misery.

The truth is that Robina Aminian’s death serves no purpose because we refuse to let it. We live in a cycle of disposable outrage. We scream into the digital void for forty-eight hours, satisfy our internal requirement for ‘caring,’ and then retreat into our bubbles of self-interest. Meanwhile, the men with the guns in Tehran remain the men with the guns. They know the cycle better than we do. They know that if they wait long enough, the world will get bored and look away. They are counting on your apathy. They are banking on the fact that your attention span is shorter than a politician’s promise.

So, spare me your prayers and your petitions. They are the intellectual equivalent of trying to put out a forest fire with a water pistol. The 'ordeal' of the Aminian family continues, not just because of the cruelty of the mullahs, but because the world has decided that some lives are simply the cost of doing business. Robina Aminian is gone, another victim of humanity’s bottomless capacity for organized stupidity and disorganized empathy. I’d say we should do better, but we both know we won't. Now, go back to your scrolling. There’s probably a video of a dancing dog waiting for you, and it’s much easier to handle than the reality of a 23-year-old girl rotting in a grave because she wanted to breathe.