Well, this is pretty freaking disturbing. Metronews.ca reports that
Toronto police are looking closely at video of a Toronto pick-up artist who filmed himself muttering about stabbing a girl who turned him down. …
“She deserves to f**kin’ like stabbed and cut up into tiny pieces for that s**t,” he says. “Like, I would f**king take her and her boyfriend and all her f**king friends down. F**king worthless pieces of s**t. She thinks she’s all that, just because she has the looks and s**t. I’ll show all these little bitches one day.”
In a second clip, [“xsouldeath”] appears to try to purchase a knife from a grocery store.
After news of this began to spread, someone who described himself as
E.J., the head coach of TdotPickup, a group that holds PUA bootcamps and coaching in the Yonge and Dundas area, called Metro Monday evening after speaking with xsouldeath. He said some of his comments had been misunderstood.
“This whole thing about getting them back, all he was talking about is basically getting them back by getting a really good-looking girl and rubbing it in their face,” he said.
Apparently, there is some mysterious language that resembles English in which “she deserves to f**kin’ like stabbed and cut up into tiny pieces for that s**t” actually means “rubbing it in their face.”
As for talking about stabbing a woman and cutting her up, E.J. said xsouldeath is not the type of person to do that.
So reassuring.
The video in which xsouldeath talks about looking for a knife at a grocery store was taken out of context, E.J. said. “Basically the whole reason he was asking for this knife was to find the cutlery section and they were not really understanding the English,” he said.
And then there was this plot twist:
Update: xsouldeath, the creator of the YouTube videos, appears to be EJ, the head coach of TdotPickup.
Creepy as hell.
While xsouldeath’s YouTube channel has been taken down, what appears to be his Google+ profile is still up (I’ve archived it here). In addition to posts about his own videos and a wide assortment of popular Youtube “prank” videos, xsouldeath posts videos from other PUAs as well as from antifeminist “philosopher” and self-described Men’s Rights Activist Stefan Molyneux and from obsessively antifeminist Youtuber Bane666au, whose frequently hour-long videos feature him as a talking skull in a pitcher of Koolaid.
What appears to be his Twitter account has been made private.
On the Toronto subreddit, meanwhile, someone writes:
I’ve known this person since High School. There are some stories I would rather not share about him on this page to save him dignity. But he needs Help. I am just really creeped out to approach him anymore.
I’ll post more later as the story develops.
@Penny:
Likewise, commenting under my real name, or at least the abbreviation of it that I commonly go by in real life.
The issue with calling people monsters is that it makes it a question of “how could they have done it”, rather than “how could we have done it.” It’s more comforting to imagine oneself as being incapable of horrible acts, but it also prevents real empathy and therefore real solutions to the problems.
A personal example.
I have family who were involved in events on both sides of the last days of white minority rule in South Africa. Us Afrikaans-speaking whites did some fucked up shit, no mistake, and without a doubt we deserved to lose. However, the black factions that won were hardly any better – they killed a lot of people, mostly innocents, black and white. The people who did those things were humans, just like me, just like you. Every man of my father’s generation was involved somehow, on one side or the other. Because of this, I know people quite well who were the footsoldiers of their side. I know that one relative was involved in terrorist bombings of supermarkets, and another was involved with the security police (who did deeply awful things.) And you know what? They’re both decent guys. They’re funny, intelligent, well-read people who are good company at a barbecue just like anyone else. They both had failed first marriages and both look after the kids from those first marriages along with their current partners. They’re human, not monsters.
If I was in their place, I may well have done the same thing. If you were in their place, you might have too. To deny this is to lose any hope of any real solution to the problem, which would be to fix the systemic issues which underlie such actions.
@Kirby
Nietzsche is so German he tried to write a joke and ended up with The Birth of Tragedy.
Nietzsche is so German, he turns people into nihilists by looking at his picture.
Nietzsche is so German, it’s not even funny.
…
I can make these jokes since my family is mostly German, right? Also some Russian, so don’t be Stalin when you say you’re offended.
Eh, eh?
…
Eh?
…
…
…
http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/uncomf.gif
Eh…
Nietzsche and … I wanna say Baldur’s Gate 2, but I’m a bit hazy.
Seriously, though – if you’re spending hours defending a right to diagnose randoms with mental illness, have you thought why it’s so important that you can call people “crazy” or whatevs?
I mean, it’s just one simple rule: Don’t make posts here that assume or assign mental illness. If you’re cut so deep by that simple request, it’s probably in your own best interests to examine why your reaction is so massive.
Kirbywarp:
I know the Nietzsche quote well. Used it on a number of occasions.
Ironically, it actually underscores my point. These people make a choice. They have free will and agency and they make a choice to act in a manner that is so far outside the bounds of an ethical society to be seen (rightly) as horrors. They divest themselves of everything that is good about human nature to take these actions. And yes, WWTH, they do it because they’ve imbibed the toxicity and hatred that still exists in our culture. Staring too long into the Abyss as it were.
What a monster is, what a monster isn’t and what it means in terms of humanity is something I’ve been personally wrestling with for a long time. But these people make a choice. It’s not that no sane human could… I’ve heard THAT excuse in other context more often than I care to count. It’s a choice, free will, based on their experience, to step outside the bounds of morality. And yes, by their experience I mean whatever they’ve come in contact with to warp their perspective that way. Be it MRA/PUA/fill in the blank racial hate group etc.
-Penny L. Horwitz
@Penny
Pssst, Penny, pssst.
That monster is inside us all, and that those who try to do good deeds may go overboard with it and become indistinguishable from what they’re fighting.
Dehumanizing people by calling them monsters, dehumanizing woman by making them sexual objects to serve someone in a sexual purpose only, po-tay-to, po-tah-to. Neither is justified.
Dehumanizing people by saying they aren’t sane…
All the reasons given in this thread are sufficient to make it clear that we shouldn’t use ableist language here.
But, if anyone wanted any other argument against describing people who do Bad Things in terms of speculative mental illnesses, or lack of abstract human qualities… there have been a whole bunch of psychological studies into what makes people do Bad Things.
Most famously, Milgram’s obedience study, and Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment.
Just about any person will murder, hurt or abuse another person if they’re set up to think that there’s some vague moral justification for doing so, and that there won’t be any severe consequences for them doing it.
So insisting that this guy is somehow “mentally ill” or “monstrous” by virtue of his actions isn’t even acceptable from that angle, either.
Penny, stop doubling down on it, and please follow the rules.
AltoFronto, history of depression.
@Penny:
No, they don’t, and that’s the whole damn point. They are wholly human, start to finish, because humanity does not only encompass good things. If you truly believe that humanity is only good, and one must divest oneself of humanity to become bad, then you fall into the trap Nietzsche is talking about.
Nobody believes themselves to be inhuman. Therefore, if they believe only monsters commit evil, they will never be able to accept that they have performed evil.
And, just to underscore what this whole conversation started with, pulling the concept of mental illness back into focus; if you believe that only monsters do evil, and if you insist that people who do evil must have some sort of mental illness (or insist on bringing up the topic), then you are reinforcing in your head that the mentally ill are monsters.
Have you guys seen this?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/blameonenotall-the-meninist-rape-campaign-that-spectacularly-backfired-10278297.html
I don’t doubt it (I’ve seen black people whose eyes were really as blue as robins’ eggs!), but that’s not the case here. This is the screenshot:
That looks like him in the “contact lenses” parts of the screenshot, does it not? That’s why I wonder about what he says of his ancestry, and why he switches emphasis depending on what platform he’s on. It’s quite possible to be Portuguese and Indian both.
(The eye color is still unbelievable as all hell. No doubt he uses it to try to give the hypno-eye to the ladies. He’s not very effective at it, by the sounds of things.)
So I was looking at the Toronto Reddit thread, and this comment sent me screeching to a halt:
Yeah, dude, ya think? Owen Cook, Real Social Dynamics? The rape-coaching PUA site that also features Julien Blanc (who ain’t gone away yet)? EWWWWWWWWW.
These guys thoroughly deserve their bad reputation, and we shouldn’t let them fly under the radar for an instant. This one’s trying to sell a TO redditor on RSD, fergawdsakes.
David do you mind doing something on this guy sexymgtow:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq3nstS_hHR8Xa4JgZ96pLQ/videos
he isn’t a mra but a mgtow.He is a woman hater and a racist and I think it would be wise to post about him so maybe people know about this guy as I see him as a real danger and maybe you would to.
BTW, for those who’d forgotten (or just never knew), the 411 on Owen Cook of RSD:
Raping a stripper…yuh-huh, that’s some “Natural Game” you got goin’ there, pal.
Oh, and he also calls himself “Tyler Durden”. How original!
Hey, y’all, hope everyone had a good Memorial day weekend.
Bullshit bullshit bullshit.
This attitude is precisely why mass shootings end up happening. People don’t take misogyny as serious as they do any other kind of bigotry. They’re just like “oh, he’s a jerk” and shrug it off like nothing will ever happen.
And then, if something does happen (he murders his wife/girlfriend/daughter/mother or commits a mass murder) everyone passes it off as “Oh, he’s just crazy” or “he’s just got issues.” Or to add insult to injury, they blame the victim and/or his parents as another way to detach bigotry from his actions.
No, he didn’t kill people because he’s just a little boy inside that needs love and protection from the big bad world. He’s a bigoted criminal that views women and girls as subhumans. FFS.
@NicolaLuna
My favorite part of that story is the fact that the “signs” the women are holding are obviously blank white slates, and someone has come in after the fact to badly photoshop-in some words.
Why is that? If these women support these messages, why weren’t the messages on the slates when the women held them?
It makes me think that they tricked these women into holding blank white slates by telling them it was going to be for something else.
@everyone except Penny
Thank you.
@Penny
If you don’t/can’t understand why it’s bad to make these kinds of equations, you can at least be decent enough to stop because other people have told you it harms them. “I can’t really understand how this is hurting you” is not an excuse to keep punching someone in the face. Once someone has told you that being punched in the face hurts, a decent person stops doing it even if they don’t really comprehend why it hurts. The fact that it does hurt should be enough for you.
@Lea
Have you ever had the pleasure of talking to a doctor like both of you are intelligent adults, and then after a good bit of conversation the doctor discovers that you have A Diagnosis, and suddenly your credibility is completely gone?
Don’t read the comments. Those comments are Lewis law in action. I can’t understand how a woman says she was raped, teach men not to rape and stop blaming women for men’s actions = all men are rapists.
And yes it’s so much important to not generalize men (hurting their precious feelz) than it is to care about and protect women and girls /s
This. exactly.
Honest to god I am tired of hearing about MRA pain. Every time they comment on the Internet it’s all about them, their pain, their frustration, their entitlements. There is also the undertone that the only solution to men’s pain is to continue dominating all women into submission. Bullshit – go get a therapist. Many men can and do show that they are capable of living life without needing a nearby punching bag to take their issues out on.
Maybe that’s the whole point of PUA/MRA politics? To land a woman who is actually more like a mother – someone who will be perpetually approving, servile, and put his needs (no matter how sick and violent) ahead of her humanity (oh, and willing to throw other women under the bus). There’s a term for this kind of situation: it’s called domestic violence.
The irony is, many feminists do care about men’s issues and attempt to address them, but they can’t without these dipshits going pathologically selfish on them (or minimizing their bigotry, or once again making it all about them). Remember Emma Watson? Remember when she came out and said that the Patriarchy harms both men and women? All these assholes heard was ‘feminist’ and threatened to post nude pictures of her (or at least, pictures photoshopped to look like her nude). The stupidity is galling: She was addressing the fact that men are also harmed and they threatened her for identifying as a feminist.
FFFFFFFFFFFFFF
*flounces glitter*
@Penny:
You are a worthy human being whose presence on this website is valued. At the moment, people (including me!) are falling over themselves to disagree with some things you said, but this does not invalidate you as a person or mean that we don’t like you.
Re: pandapool
What does calling them crazy or inhuman achieve?
It lets the person doing the calling keep pretending this isn’t something that almost any random human could do given the right circumstances.
@Binjabreel
I know, I just wanted to hear them try to justify it.
Well, I think we can all agree that someone who is threatening to cut someone else up is certainly disturbed in some way – that kind of statement isn’t the product of a healthy and happy mind (at least not in our society).
Colloquially, “crazy” can just mean having really bad ideas or damaging ways of thinking – in which case I think it is entirely productive to call that kind of behavior “crazy” – it means ” you are thinking in a way that is damaging to others and yourself”.
“There’s a reason women aren’t murdering out of entitled rage in anywhere approaching the same numbers as men. It’s called patriarchy.”
Why don’t old men murder in anything approaching the numbers younger men murder? As someone who has been a young man, and is now an older one, I would assume it has more to do with hormones than a feeling of entitlement.
Fuck off, dipwad.
Productive if your goal is to stigmatise mental illness…
Seconding POM