Incel terrorism

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I really tried to post this last night but WP turns into an impassable mountain of bugs for me from around 12:00 AM to 8:00 AM every night. Anyway:

The third world seems to be quite a mixed bag. You have some villages and tribes that live very peacefully in some places, then you have others where genocide has been going on for years - some of it sparked by colonial history, others by subtle race differences and religion. I think if there's greater peace in certain places they have a particular cultural buffer where they keep things small and close-knit enough where the village can be something like an extended family and in some places that's worked out exceptionally well.

As far as where we find ourselves - it's incredibly difficult to pin down exact causes for why we can't stand each other or have the obsessed 'Smiths must beat the Joneses' sense of self-worth. I get the impression that class, aristocracy, and striation of that sort was something that was present in Europe and only lost foothold in the US in that we didn't allow titles of nobility. I think the only thing that seems obvious about where we're at now is that we've had an increased Balkanization through technology, where we can keep our heads in bubbles of people who think like us and it gets increasingly easy to truly make the 'other', or people who think unlike ourselves, alien to the point of being adversarial. I also get the impression that big city life, without tightly knit ethnic communities comprising it, makes cannon fodder of human beings, makes the people passing through businesses and agencies fungible, makes the sphere of dating partners fungible as well, and so the overdose of options commoditizes the person to community, to business, to local government, and the only place one can sort of get away from that is finding some niche group to join and stick with.

I think what we've done really badly in the west, and this maybe touches on some major agreements I used to have with Dennis Prager when I'd occasionally listen to him back in the mid 2000's, is that we threw away cultural symbol and ritual, and his suggestion was that the degree to which we did such without replacing it with new symbol of equal or greater value meant that people had nothing to spool identity around in any positive manner, and that this erosion of symbol and ceremony had a fair amount to do with our erosion of culture. I remember too back then bringing this up to people and during the height of vogue where it was only in-style to be an atheist rationalist people just said 'Meh - symbol and ritual is for primitive people - we're moderns, we're beyond that', and I think the sort of 'if it wasn't televised it's inferior' attitude that we've had even before the 2000's, for most of my lifetime that I'm aware of really and I'm sure decades preceding my lifetime, we've had an arrogance that the past had nothing to teach us aside from that it bumbled and failed at making science and that that only thing worth knowing is that there were a few rationalist Greek philosophers, a few pre-chemists in the Renaissance who called themselves alchemists, after them the horrible veils of mysticism and ignorance were thrown off and we had something that looked like a proper sheer and clean science forming where people stopped believing in silly superstitions and started our ascension toward fact-based living.

So in short it's complicated, and a lot of it seems to be failures of philosophy, failures of imagination, failures of cultural self-insight, and add to that a sort of headless drifting myth of progress that was probably decapitated in the early 20th century with WWI and WWII but seemed to put on the transfigured mantle of desperation and need to make the wished real.

I'll add at this point - the only faith I have that technology can really solve these problems is that most of the zero-sum aspect comes from competition over limited resources. There are all kinds of human resources that would obviously always be scarce but the less that's in the zero-sum domain the less power I would think that will have to distort our character or give us the impression that we're forced to fight others or financially triumph over in order to have the money to lets say not live in a crime-ridden area, or to be able to have a car instead of riding the train or bus, or a case familiar to those of us in the spectrum having the financial wherewithal not to be stuck under the thumb of an abuser. In a way it's that old natural lack of freedom, or tyranny of nature, that I think is still fueling most manifestations of people's contempt for each other.

You can smash the existing hierarchy, but perhaps not the drive to dominate or the tendency to need authority figures.

Other things also don't help, like women are always accused or thought of as being objectified or "treated as objects". It doesn't always have to do with treating women as objects, just because you say you think a good-looking gorgeous woman is "sexy" or attractive. Yet, I see many marriages or serious relationships involving the woman partner being seen as "sexy" or "very gorgeous" standard. Will you say their partners are only treating her as an object?

Does this comment relate to incel radicalisation?

It seems more like you have an ax to grind. I feel skeptical that anyone could still misunderstand such a basic idea this late in the day. Maybe you should read up on what constitutes objectification, and the difference between appropriate and inappropriate sexualization.

Yea. It's frustrating when you get the "WP is currently offline" page intermittently when you're trying to post something you just put a lot of thought/work into. It's been happening a lot lately.


I don't know if it's really that easy to divide the world into "west" vs. "third world" anymore as western culture is slowly spreading everywhere, especially urban areas. I did notice from living in Turkey that the philosophy is a little different. While inequality is extreme and a lot of people are closed minded, there's less of a social darwinist attitude. Poverty is kind of accepted as a fact of nature. There isn't this thought line of "we're the land of opportunity, thus if you're poor it's your own damn fault" thing. In the West we empower the individual, but when things aren't working out we also blame the individual rather harshly. There's a greater sense of duty towards community in non-western culture as well. There's a sense that there's a duty/obligation to be socially gracious towards neighbors (sharing food, inviting over, etc...). Of course the bad thing about Turkey is there is there's less respect for freedom. On both the left and right, the government has taken up the role of directing the culture through laws and it's caused all kinds of division.


The problem of urban alienation exists pretty much everywhere. The problem is in the west we elevate making money as a moral virtue and not making money as a moral failing. It seems to stem from "just world fallacy" thinking. We value fairness to such an extent that certain people don't want to accept that things aren't fair. The left want to fight to make everything more fair, while the right make-believe things are already fair which leads to a nasty culture of victim blaming.


Maybe the loss of religion is a problem for the world, but I don't really see a way to fight it. I see the biggest loss as the loss of any sense of community outside of family. I don't buy into the crap that people need religious motivations to be moral, but there's a sense of community that seems missing in modern secular life.


I don't know that it was really decapitated that early. The fight to end official institutionalized racism beginning with the civil rights movement of the 1960s was a big step forward. I also see women's liberation as a net positive. It does seem that the hippy movement had an element of naive hedonism to it that has done some damage and caused a lot of the reactionary backlash we've been dealing with ever since.


I don't really think technology will come to the rescue. It's funny if you think about all the labor saved by computer technology, yet work has not been reduced at all. The basics we all need to survive are provided by a rather small section of the economy as a whole. The majority of economic activity is created consumption. It's hard to comprehend the amount of time and effort that goes purely into advertisement. Where resource shortages exist, it seems to be a problem of where active energy is directed. I think a lot of people today have a vague sense that their work is largely superfluous, and this is a driving force of despair.

I'd definitely agree - fairness only looks like its there for people who haven't had massive interruptions to their lives or capacities. I have concerns that the natural world has a tendency to push us toward this kind of 'myth of fairness' mendacity for it's own reasons - ie. that honesty seems to matter to the sorts of conscious and subconscious processes that are cultivated to demand integrity, anywhere else in consciousness things are much more fluid and pragmatic.


I think we're in quite deep trouble if we box symbolic thought and needs in as religious. There's really a lot one could call philosophy in motion, if one wants to get edgy sure - you can also have mysticism without any sort of fundamentalism, but I think back to things like the Eleusynian Mysteries, Orphic Mysteries, the ideas of what groups like the Masons, Marinists, etc. were trying to re-vivify, and I think there are aspects of that which would be very useful but I think we'd do our best going that way if we are able to think of symbol without necessarily thinking of it as religion.



We had a lot of good social progress, I think what I was considering the myth of pure reason, combined with science, solving all benightedness or bringing in a comparable utopia. What remains of that is something that people may buy into but they're rarely bold enough to use that language unless they're rather young out-and-out antitheists.


I'm sure the sense of superfluity isn't helpful, but I'd say that while a person might be able to sort-of get by, live hand to mouth or under an assistance program, without a job they have little or no real freedom. This is also true of people who might work their fingers to the bone and work quite long and difficult hours but not get paid enough to get their heads above water, their job might be quite taxing but it's one most people can do hence high quantity of labor supply, hence the low pay. The later group have almost as few options as the former group, and quite unfortunately both groups seem to be growing quite a bit.

The only sense I can derive from this is that we don't yet have enough automation or AI for both the basic amenities and educational, self-actualizing amenities to be available in much supply to those without work. The bottleneck between those two places - ie. dwindling number of available jobs vs the time where things truly get cheap enough or low enough on actual labor that things like housing, heating/cooling, electricity, food, clean water, internet, appiances, etc would cost virtually nothing looks like it could have at terrifying chasm - looks terrifying to me because I see very good odds of us losing democracy in favor of dictatorship/authoritarianism in that trough based on just how bad things could get.

Some people do claims that the new jobs will just keep coming, people will just need to retrain for them, and that faster technology will mean more bottlenecks that human hands needs to shovel out or analyze. My problem with that view is it assumes an infinite growth model and ignores saturation. My guess is that the fourth industrial revolution will be massively upsetting. The additional problem as well, which I think you were getting at somewhat, is that people won't be able to bind personal significance or meaning to work anymore and we'll be in a very difficult place trying to figure out how we fill that void. It's a future that holds a lot of promise in the way of goods but also a lot of terrifying puzzles in the way of sociology.

I think what remains true though is if people have to give it their all to get the things they want and they have to do so with a zero-sum game in mind it has a lot of the distorting and atomizing qualities you're talking about. Other than technology I don't know what else can get us around that and, who knows, the answer could either be nothing or nothing we can foresee at this moment in time.

I thought these guys did an interesting deconstruction of Elliot Roger and the problems with his character and how he saw the world. My only caveat, while I like the particular author's channels on certain topics and ideas he tends alt-right and there's a lot, like monarchism, that I'd rather strongly disagree with him on (IMHO all systems are crap sandwiches in different manners - and monarchy/dictatorship are a far worse crap sandwich than even decadent liberal democracy the way we have it now) but similarly there's a lot of cultural analysis he gives that I do have to agree with him on when he talks about things like the collapse of philosophy, integrity, symbol, etc..

I'd add to their analysis, over and above commenting on Elliot's entitlement and just not getting the picture on what men have to do to approach women, it needs to be said also that the shape of our culture will deselect certain kinds of guys and it quite likely won't acknowledge their ultimate worth because the means to show it are extremely limited. What I mean by that is in part a lot of 'men of depth and letter' in history may have been technical geniuses, great poets, great leaders and generals, but they did terrible with politicing and terrible with women. Some of them apparently did that to themselves because they didn't want their sex drives to interfere with their work (I think Tesla was at least in part like that), but there's this horizontal social element that some people will never be able to do well and a lot of times they have more vertical or depth-oriented personalities. People with more strictly vertically-constructed personalities will often make great literary, artistic, or technical contributions, but they're the classic introverts and what they are just doesn't always translate well into the horizontal picture. For the most part I would figure that these types are invisible to other people in a crowded room, invisible to the opposite sex unless they actually do reach out themselves (tougher to do if only 1 in 1,000 could relate to them already), and even then the only benefit the women have over the guys is that the guys have to approach and the dating and relationship woes of women who are more depth-oriented are also myriad. That's not to say that all guys who have more vertically-aligned personalities lack horizontal capacity, just that while I don't know that the two necessarily prohibit one another they clearly don't necessarily include one another either.

My feelings about the above comment regarding and to those guys, and girls who might find themselves in an impossible situation - life is cold, do your best with it, if you spend your life single read great philosophy, make great art, think on big problems and if you can find worthwhile answers offer the modestly and see if they're worth the offering. Also consider this - procreation is something that animals of all intelligence levels do (having children can be fulfilling but as other people have mentioned - it's not a stellar achievement in and of itself), for as much as some might pass it off as the central feature and thus central value of life it's also worth noting that philosophic zombies could do it as well, perhaps even better, than we do - that leaves consciousness sort of there on its own terms and the closest thing to a self-consistent picture I can draw for this is that consciousness is here to experience, and if you're experiencing and learning then you're fulfilling its purpose.

Other than that - I'd also add, Elliot blurs the line of what an 'incel' properly is, in that he goes on about the types of women he wants to be with and clearly if his singlehood really bothered him this much he could have appealed to his own impossible standards. If this is what jrjones9933 mentioned about this being a toxic culture of grown juveniles who similarly aren't actually incels in any proper sense but are just single guys furious that models won't sleep with them - good luck to them, they're not going to find much sympathy from other men and even less from the women they're objectifying. I like how Trudiltom and some of his guests actually hit the nail on the head in saying that, in a way, these guys are something like a caricature of what a lot of men go through but the difference is denial of personal responsibility and agency.

Also, even though Elliot Rogers is a pretty open-and-shut case and not that difficult to read it's still clear to me that this topic, ie. incels, is quite interesting because society will always create its 'dregs' and it's a very valid question - if culture creates them should culture equally be concerned with how they find meaning and purpose in life? Ignoring our hierarchical habits and flipping our lids when one goes on a rampage of some kind seems really counterproductive. We used to have monastaries and places like that for permanently single introverts, and sometimes I think some alternate form of dignity needs to be offered rather than a life deep in the capitalistic mono-culture's toilet bowl.

I'm watching another thread with concern relevant to this topic.

Keep us up to speed if it needs our attention.

I didn't mean to come across so cryptic. The thread about people not wanting friends of an other sex doesn't cross any bounds of decency on its own, but I feel concerned by the last few posts. OP got a referral to other sites where he can find like-minded people, and reading that made my skin crawl, a little.

I don't want to tread on anyone's safe space, but I worry what OP will learn, safe from our onerous anti-bigotry TOS. He seems impressionable, if you catch my drift.

TL;DR did a pretty good job on this.

The point as I'd abstract (matching my own observations, less what he said directly) - love, compassion, empathy, etc. is for the victors in the game of social Darwinism. The losers are good for target practice and, not being of the strong, should indeed be stomped out the moment they complain of the effects of their genetic inferiority.

I think the real trouble here is that there's no cultural place of dignity, like becoming monks or anything like that, which we have for the unmarried or unmarriagable in which they can be held in high esteem or have a place from which to provide value or be held as valuable by the community unless luck really has it that they have highly profitable talents to keep themselves alive with. All of the things that the victors would assume just happens to anyone whose worth anything doesn't happen for a much larger part of the population (both men and women to significant degrees) than they'd ever dream of and again - the winners have contempt for the losers, can't relate to them, and that other people will be living in a void with little or no hope until the day they die isn't just something that doesn't trigger any empathy - it seems to almost make them hate those people more for being.

In so many ways this reminds me of how the upper and upper-middle classes used to and sometimes still do look on the poor, and it might have been Orwell who said something about the gentry on the train watching the poor in their shacks saying 'Wow, I could never imagine suffering through that, thank God their only mere beasts and can't feel it the way we would'. It's the same sort of apathy/antipathy game playing itself out, just that this time it's not playing itself out in a way that flows well with current political narratives, and it's yet another reason why incels need to be kicked as hard as humanly possible - they're a point of moral embarrassment to those kicking them.

There are women in this "genetic underclass" too, and you know what they don't do? They don't organize online calling for the sexual enslavement of men to solve their "social isolation". I wonder why that is, and why I as a woman (who could be considered a member of this genetic underclass, being poor and disabled as well as socially isolated) should be asked to have empathy for a movement that promotes violence and hatred against me?

I think we can clarify - I was talking about general human cruelty and what they tend to do with the discard heap.

IMHO no one has any right to make demands on the autonomy of another, and I think anyone with the ability to imagine what that would be like wouldn't wish that on anyone. Throughout the thread a lot of us have been reaching the consensus that these guys are textbook cases of people being thrown overboard and that the issue isn't one of sex, sex is just what culture (the dumber portions particularly) thrust out as the boundary of a guy being successful or unsuccessful, and for as stupid as that is when you're surrounded by such stupid people and they can pull the strings in your life quite effectively - their stupid ideas start to matter. I think this is where we can admit that perhaps our culture's always been base but really once we let the narratives of what life's purposes is go back to nature it started doing just that even more.

I'd really like for our culture get a better foothold on human dignity and achieve a couple things - 1) tune down the war of all against all as much as possible and in ways where the world can still be filled with accountable adults 2) find more ways to enfranchise people and give them avenues for finding meaning and purpose in their lives. TL;DR's video speaks a lot of alienation, and I think alienation compounded with nihilism is a particularly bad combination.

Part of why I tend to speak more out on their critics than the behavior of incels is that the hypocrisy's has been genuinely deafening. I try to think of how such things work, and I have to agree with the people who have suggested that when a group's not fully ingenuous, and then they run into another group whose existence threatens to lift their mask, the resulting behavior tends to be quite inhumane from the former group.

This doesn't really clarify anything, it just seems like you are trying not to answer my questions by throwing some words at me. You say nothing about why I should be expected to empathize with men who want to take all my rights away after you post a video clearly asking us to empathize with incels and their toxic ideology because of their "social isolation". As usual you say very little of substance with a lot of words.

You seem to be taking the stance that empathizing with them means accepting their behavior - it's not. It's knowing how they operate and accurately tagging why they are the way they are. Sympathy is approval, two very different things.

You're perfectly within your right to think their behavior's disgusting. If you actually understand that they're coming from an ugly place where society generally takes a leak, all day long, their bitterness and unhappiness is a bit less surprising than the number of people acting like they've found a new moral den of horrors to launch a witch hunt after when they're some of the same people who have no problem with these people being exactly where they're at and eating crap all day.

All of that could be beyond you, I don't know, if it is let me know and we can peacefully step back from talking to one another again.

People not far from where I live were actually murdered by someone like this (the Toronto van attack.) My empathy is tapped out for these guys. Maybe you should try having some for people targeted by these hateful groups and their violence instead of for the ones promoting and committing the violence? Can you understand that it's a lot of ask for empathy of the people that are targeted by such hatred and violence for the ones targeting them? Is my perspective entirely invisible to you, all you see is "witch hunt"?

All of that could be beyond you, though.