Incel terrorism

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To be fair, the comment sections on YouTube, Yahoo, etc have been that way for as long as most users can remember, meaning talking past each other is normal on there. This board was always intended for discussion and that's generally been what's normal here.

Yes, places intended for talking past each other are worse, but that's what 'normal' there and not what's 'normal' here.
(Even if talking past each other is common here, it's not normalized, discussion is still strongly encouraged.)

My point is that men and women totally failing to empathize with each other isn't really an "aspie" thing.

I didn't get to it yet. People came over yesterday, but it's on my list.

TBH I really wasn't worried about as I really didn't even think we were debating so much as trying to clarify the contents of our viewpoints.

If anything I was surprised that video got any responses, and I would have guessed the criticisms would have been that what she was saying was uselessly obvious or trying to profiteer by saying a lot of nothing in a low-cut shirt after a tragedy - which is why I phrased that it's sort of a 101 for people who aren't on the autistic spectrum, don't have any tangential experience, and couldn't imagine the implications of living much more than a few months without a date or whatever else - ie. the kinds of people who seem to really be pulling out the truncheons and not showing much or any empathetic discernment on the matter because they lack any point of reference to hearken back to.

It seems like empathy gets sidelined when people perceive a certain group as dangerous. I also think that if you're a women, the notion that there are guys out there that will become so enraged that they will want to kill you if you don't have sex with them is terrifying. Somehow I don't think entitlement to sex is really the root of the issue though.

If people feel like there's a hole in their life somewhere, it's easy to THINK they know what's missing and become OBSESSED with that thing. This can be especially true in this day and age where people are often addicted to the internet. Even if you're not addicted to online pornography, it's pretty hard to escape constant advertising with imagines designed to trigger mild sexual arousal.

There was another 'about incels' video, posted by Dr. Nerdlove if I remember correctly, telling incels that even if all of the incels got laid tonight or tomorrow it wouldn't solve the problem for the reason that they'd just see it as a one-off and it wouldn't fix the self-esteem issues and ways of thinking that surround that. I'd fully agree with him that 'not getting laid' is really symbolic shorthand for 'failed by societies standards' and living almost like a sort of informal untouchable caste. This sort of thinking even shows when a guy might not be all that excited about the idea of sex with a particular girl but in the back of his mind he thinks 'Well, I can tell my friends that my born-again virgin clock is reset'.

It can be tough for me to tell sometimes when I think about this, how much of the repulsion a lot of people have to thinking about these things (eg. the media, popular bloggers, and the like) has to do with genuine myopia and lack of ability to empathize vs. a deep down understanding that to fix the incel problem would really be to uproot hierarchy and no longer be able to have much of anyone under them anymore - to which so many people do measure their worth by who their above as much as whose above them that they'd say 'no way in hell' just on those grounds.

I tried, and I find her stack of hypotheticals too high and too wobbly. I can imagine a person like she describes, but not enough to make a movement.

My friends and I were bullied, and some came from neglectful or abusive backgrounds. There's no guarantee that the conditions she describes will make a person do things which inspire admiration, or that they will inspire contempt. In some cases, people have serious mental health issues, but the religion of personal grievances won't offer much help for them.

Whether an individual incel deserves compassion or derision depends on them and their behavior. The movement deserves only contempt in its current state.

If incels really wanted to smash the oppressive system of unattainable standards based on gender, they'd be feminists.

Out of curiosity, if you mean feminism in its current popular form, how so?

If by current popular form, you mean a diverse set of ideas frequently in conflict, then they can help by supporting other men who find our gender norms oppressive.

Incels complain about hierarchy, but what they want is not to get rid of hierarchy and have an equal society between men and women: what they really want is to be accepted among the oppressors. They are like abused children who empathize with their abuser instead of with other victims of abuse and so they idolize and admire bullies and oppressors. If there were no hierarchy they wouldn't have women beneath them, and as long as they can dehumanize and disparage and abuse women they can feel like someone else is lower than they are on the totem pole.

They couldn't live being equals with women. Then their hatred would truly have no target and would return back on their own selves and they would all self-destruct.

It's a term that's seen, at least in action, a lot of definition-creep and hijacking. I know the technical definition centers around activism for women's rights with the aim for equality of the sexes, I may have pointed out however that it appears there are a couple different ways you could look at equality, the first which I'd be more in favor of with both genders with their respective strengths and weaknesses weighing even on a balance scale, and then there are views where both genders need to be industrial processed to a degree that they become the same thing, differences in anatomy notwithstanding. Past that there's a sort of continuum that fades out in all directions that either take their feminism more conservatively in some directions or lampoon it in the sphere of public opinion in the other direction.

To be fair to your assertion, that to smash oppression is to become a feminist, I think it would be helpful if you could clarify in what ways you believe feminism can successfully rearrange the structures of humanity, how that would either obliterate hierarchy or at least refine/revamp it for its best qualities, and what points in feminist desires for social change would make the world run smoother given the kind of buy-in from both men and women alike that you'd recommend.

I think it's worse than that - ie. you're most likely describing how nearly everyone looks at hierarchy.

It's also part of why I tend to think identity politics, no matter whose practicing it, will almost never stop at equality or will be so discomfited by what actual 'equality' feels like or the lack of any sort of wonderful land of milk and honey moment that they'll keep blazing right past it looking for what they really wanted but didn't get. Unfortunately that sort of dishonesty and mendacity seems to be, by all intents and purposes, stamped on our genes and it's what tends to bubble to the surface any time people are trade rational thought in for feelings because it's the primary wellspring of where feelings come from. In that sense I tend to be fully on board with the kinds of thinkers who'd argue that identity politics is almost the perfect opposite of western liberal values and antithetical to democracy, and as such it would be in no way better in the hands of incels.

The problem is if you go by that reason, tons of people "fail by societies standards". All throughout history there are highly accomplished men who never married or had an active sex life. Attaining sex as an indicator of status is really an incredibly low bar considering there are so many complete morons with absolutely nothing of distinction who nevertheless manage to mate and reproduce. A lot times judging men for "not being able to get any" is really a case of judging a fish for not being able to win a race on land, while it could swim circles around the competition if it were in water. These ideas are what is clearly toxic, not the male sex drive in and of itself.


With a lot of women, the revulsion looks like it's really about fear. At least that's what I get from reading the reactions of women. I think the idea that revulsion of low male status plays a dominant role is often a projection of one's own low self-esteem. It's also not really rational to assume women have some kind of moral agency over who they are and aren't sexually attracted to. Women can be sexually attracted to as*holes or "alpha males" on a superficial level, yet still reject them because they have absolutely no other reason to want to be around them.

The view that the world is completely nihilistic, cold, and menacing... that status determines everything of value... genuine love and connection do not exist... etc... is the problem. In the end though, I think it's the role of social isolation and societal alienation on the male psyche that feeds this ideology, not sexual frustration alone. Sexual frustration only gets wired together with it in a semi-accidental manner due to the way our psychology works... as a sort of Pavlovian response.

I can't join you in your cynical misanthropy. I think better of the majority of humans and what they are capable of than that.

Equating what liberals and incels want is disingenuous at best. Not everyone wants to enslave an entire gender to feel better about their own inadequacies, that is just these jerkwads want to do because they are maladjusted (which is why people have consistently rejected them throughout life, the anger and spite they carry around.) It might make someone who buys into that mentality, that women are only good for being subjugated, feel better about embracing such a sexist mentality if they tell themselves that everyone wants to subjugate everyone else though. That would be a convenient way to justify to oneself wanting to subjugate women to cover for one's own inadequacies, to handwave it all away as "everyone wants to subjugate somebody so me wanting to do that to women is normal and just part of being human." Yeah I can see how that twisted train of thought might appeal to some of these sexist idiots.

I think I could agree with a fair amount of what's said in these two lines.