Incel terrorism

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Again, leaving Elliott Rogers aside and in no defense of narcissists or psychopaths I'll clarify - there are good looking guys, who have great hearts, who will be single for the rest of their lives. Some of them may qualify as incels, and their crime may be weakness, or simply being different, possibly little career potential, without the need of an ugly personality to achieve that result. I think that's what I wanted to clarify - that does happen. I'm pressing that point because it would be rather tragic if part of the take-away from this conversation is 'Oh, if a guy is incel and attractive he must be an awful person' - sometimes yes, not always, and believe it or not (though I'd think most people do believe it), people with awful personalities can usually do quite well with the opposite sex.

If a guy is what you would call objectively physically attractive and labels himself an incel and relates with these guys who go on murderous rampages, I don't think it's possible that he's actually a decent person. Decent people don't post the sort of things these guys do online about women. When you label someone as incel in a thread about murderous terrorism like what the Toronto van attack guy did, they are going to get lumped in with the bad guys.

The guys that label themselves "incel" are all awful, no matter what they look like.

I don't understand why some of you guys have trouble seeing that. If you don't believe me, go to /r/braincels or incels.me and read in their own words about why they identify as "incel" and then come back here and tell me you really think some of them are not awful.

Statistically wise, over 70% of violence against women are perpetrated by partners/spouses....so by "men in relationship" who had been in relationship with them.

That's a lot of backward causation. The incel community didn't form years ago around the future nationally/internationally reported murders acted out by a few men.

The other thing - I was talking about whether or not someone was involuntarily celibate and what goes into that. I'm sure not all people who are involuntarily celibate go on forums about it or become card-carrying incel members.

Domestic abuse seems to have a lot of attributes that a lot of people wouldn't necessarily think of. I remember someone posted an interview with Erin Pizzey several years ago and she mentioned her observation over the years that violent people tend to find each other, some percentage of the time a non-violent person would find themselves with a violent person but they'd feel less compulsion to stay or at least feel enough alienness in the situation to push past the fear and bug out. It seems to be somewhat in a person's upbringing, somewhat in heredity, and the traits that drive it tend to manifest as power which, in a culture as obsessed with power and confidence, the makings of it are seen as attractive.

I'm sure there are incel guys who are like this, there's no guarantee anything including looks or aggression make someone attractive, just like I'm sure there are plenty who got beaten roundly by their parents and have it in them to push the cycle forward, but I really think this thread is on about two or three guys out of hundreds of thousands if not millions and if really bitter and nasty things are being said on internet boards that's also thousands or tens of thousands rather than a full show of hands for guys who are involuntarily celibate. Out of all the people in the world with Aspergers and Autism for example, I doubt WP is anything like a 50% head count, probably not anywhere even close to 10%.

The say 1% of world population is autistic, that makes them 76,000,000 - let's say half of them are high functioning - that's 38M.

Does WP have a 38M members ?

https://www.similarweb.com/website/wron ... t#overview

I highly doubt so.

I didn't mean to direct criticism at involuntarily celibate people who take a measured, rational view of their situation. I don't think that's whom people mean when they say Incel.

I do mean to criticize people who adopt it as an ideology, whether self-radicalized or in a group.

Similarly I don't think you're responsible for any turns the conversation takes, and i'm trying to clarify some of those.

I think one of the things I'm trying to address, and its part of what made Sargon's 2 hr livestream on it so funny, is that there's been a reaction to this story and I think it's one that shows confusion on the feminist side.

It seems like the narrative goes something like this: women are still oppressed by men, how could anyone with eyes to see and any honesty not see that crystal clear, the wage gap and many other issues still exist, the patriarchy is still alive and strong, thus any group of online guys irritated with women or complaining about their sexual status must be some vivid fragment of those men with super-regressive outlooks on sex who want women barefoot, pregnant, and chained to stoves (and I'm moderately sure that'll get a 'But what else could they BE!?' in response within a few posts).

I'm not denying that it can indeed look that way from a pedestrian glance and especially from the media reporting, but this is also part of why I think such uber-simplified narratives are dangerous both to those who hold them and to those who have to deal with those who hold them. These sorts of narratives generally tend to shoe-horn if not crowbar what's really a very categorically sloppy world into very neat and tidy containers, the pain's mostly felt around the edges where those narratives don't properly apply (incels are a great example), and I think maybe that's why aspie or autie guys would have a tendency to want to, if not protect them somewhat, at least clarify what we're seeing - because we've had a lot of overlap in experience and some of the similarities are uncanny. Also, even though I'm not a fan of intersectionalism, this also seems to be intersectionalism done really badly - in that isn't the very notion of interesctionalism the idea that all kinds of people from all genders and races can have distinct and overlapping angles where they find themselves oppressed and this is the male 'dregs of society' type of oppression? No, I wouldn't say that we'd defend misogyny but at least speaking for myself I feel uncomfortable when guys in a life situation a stone-throw away from my own are getting broad-brushed as misogynists, there are probably other issues I should take just as much moral and ethical care with but this one comes easy and I feel like I have a good eye on that by proximity.

This is where to have any hope at if not fixing a problem at least reducing it, no one gets there by moral-grandstanding, no matter how sincerely confused or well-intentioned that impression is. For individual guys in this group who say blatantly misogynist things - sure, 'misogynist' then fits like a glove. For the rest, its entirely too self-gratified and pedestrian, and the danger IMHO with that is no one gains any insight, and then this whole mess repeats several years down the road because the same crap pot is still brewing. Unless there's something expressly built into a group's philosophy that recommends mass murder such acts seem to serve as a barometer for how much that group is getting squeezed and it tends to pour out through the sheer world of statistical probability. Sure we could stop it and we'd need a surveillance state of the most absolute result to achieve such an effect.

I can't stand Sargon's smug attitude, so I can only respond to your interpretation.

Sargon likes the myth of the kooky feminist. I would bet a dollar that he has reported on stories from (the satirical) Medusa Magazine as serious editorials. That tendency to treat "extremists," whether serious or not, as mainstream makes for a handy straw man. On the other hand, most members of the incel school get let off the hook, despite actively associating with and failing to rebuke their fellows.

I disagree with lots of people who call themselves feminists, and call them out when I think they have debased the term. Likewise with intellectuals, or weirdos, or any of my self-identifiers. If a group keeps making me look bad by association, I push back. That seems like the basics of social responsibility.

Since they are the kind that get activated online by hatred (you know, how terrorism often spreads among young males) on the forums dedicated to self-identified "incels", that is who we are talking about in this thread. The ones who self identify and post hateful s**t about women. That is who this thread is about, that is the type that becomes violent and dangerous. The thread is called "Incel terrorism" and it's about the guys who visit those forums and post there about women being evil and how we all deserve rape and murder. So that's what we're talking about, not the ones who don't post hateful material about women and who don't want to murder and are "decent". The thread is asking what can we do about the hateful ones who post on those forums and are trying to foment more violence against women.

In that case I would have to hope that this attention invites serious clinical research into these guys to see what's behind it and that we can actually get some worthwhile answers as to what the meaningful correlations and subsequent best interventions are. Past that I'm iffy as to whether the public writ-large has the self awareness or self-inquiry in its toolkit to get it right on anecdote.

Yet it is happening in our time, and so we are tasked to deal with it. Talking about it publicly is how that starts.

Based on other recent editorials, there's a big market for think pieces trying to sympathize with various deplorable people, if anyone wants to earn a few bucks.

^ I think one thing that's actually been helpful for me was watching events like Dave Rubin's in California from a few weeks ago where the SJW's actually spoke up. When they're just making noise from a distance they look like rabid lunatics and when they actually do get the microphone I get to see that they're demonstrations of certain personality types and it's something of a memo on how they process and assimilate information, and to an extent there probably are some legitimate grievances buried in there but they aren't being articulated and average out on value and need about as much added filtering and interpretation as the InfoWars crowd.

That and yes, after going on a long rant about confusing incels with Incels I'll clarify - I mean the eyesore SJW's.

What such thinkers are worth perhaps is that they're good at demonstrating that nothing happens in a vacuum and when it seems to be it's really quite worth getting down to the root cause. I think that effort is what's being attempted there much more often than people simply licking their finger, sticking it out in the wind to taste the weather, and cashing their contrarian checks because they sense it's a good time to do so.

I'm not sure why, in threads where we're clearly discussing violent, hate-filled incels, someone needs to jump in with #notallincels.

We know not all incels are violent. In this thread, we're talking about the ones that are.

I think part of the problem is that there's no distinction in language. It could be that we're usually all asked to walk on eggshells in our nuancing when discussing most groups and I'm used to that being the 'subgroup of a subgroup' queue which is missing here.