By David Futrelle
Check out my piece at the Globe and Mail today about shutting incel forums the hell down. Here’s a snippet:
[I]f appeals to shared humanity are out, is there anything else we can do? We may not be able to win back those who have plunged too deeply into the incel rabbit hole, but we can take steps to limit their ability to recruit new members. Incels aren’t born; they’re made. Sure, most new incel recruits start out embittered and lonely. But they are radicalized by their incel peers on a relatively small number of message boards devoted to the incel ideology.
So we should take a page from the anti-fascist activists who’ve done so much to kick back against the so-called “alt-right” over the last year – not only by confronting the fascists in the streets but also working diligently behind the scenes to take away their platforms online.
You can find the piece here.
Re: historical marriage
This is pretty funny
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x335ow3
“Why is there a dead horse at my wedding?”
Welcome, Katherine the Adequate!
@ Katherine the Adequate
What a great nym, and seconding the hello.
(Speaking of cool names, has anyone heard from Cleverforagirl recently? Hope she’s ok)
Welcome, Katherine! Thirding the admiration of your name.
Your point about the fear of computers is an interesting one: arguably it’s what we’re seeing now with Zuckerberg versus Congress, and a clash between two groups of men who are determined that their vision of masculinity will become the new patriarchy.
As a millenial myself (one of the older ones, anyway) thank you for the attitude you’re taking. My best wishes to your spawn; they seem to have an awesome mom and I hope they’re grateful.
EJ, Thank you. Awesome they are! WWTH and Alan, Thank you as well for your hearty welcome! I plan to lurk here and comment once in awhile when moved to do so.
And EJ, I agree with you about the menz deciding for society how it shall use technology. The Zuckerberg vs. Orrin Hatch and other assorted aging guardians of power of the patriarchal sort discussion was interesting indeed.
This might feel like I’m attacking you personally here, Shadowplay, so please know I’m talking about the way this discussion has been going here on WHTM, on Twitter, etc. and not about any one comment.
The discussion keeps veering towards discussions of the value of women, towards hypothetically what would happen if women were commodified, and topics of that nature. The problem is, discussing the commodification of women as a hypothetical thought experiment is gross. It’s gross when Robin Hansen does it and it’s gross when we do it. We expect that we can remove emotion and discuss it as a logical argument. Except there is emotion involved: men’s emotions. The decision of how valuable women are is 100% about the emotions of the men evaluating them. It’s not about what women bring to the relationship in terms of carpentry work or income or whether they have the potential to be in the C-suite or whether they can teach the children to play baseball. It’s about men’s emotional desire for someone to look a certain way and care for tgeir emotional needs. But women’s emotions? Never considered even a little bit.
And what’s more, we’re taking the discussion about what to do about a violent subculture that worships rape and murder of women and we’re framing it as, “what can we do to make the violent rapist murderers’ lives better?” instead of “what can we do to make women’s lives better?” It’s NEVER about the latter unless a woman brings it up 500 times and then a man somewhere in the world repeats it (at which point, it was his idea).
I’m just sick and tired of my humanity being “debated.”
Ok haven’t really followed this thread lately but re INFINITY WARS: Saw it yesterday and both me and Husband really liked it. But yeah, only for people who already know all the characters and have seen the previous films.
I’m really impressed with the mo-cap work Josh Brolin put in and the CGI used to bring Thanos to life. Brolin’s acting is really crucial for you to buy Thanos and his motivations.
It’s such a contrast to Justice League which we saw recently on streaming. The villain in JL is bland even as bland villains go, and the CGI looks absolute shit, like something out of the 1990:s. Both me and Husband really liked Man of Steel and we think the extended cut of Superman v Batman is a good movie, so I guess we should be the target demographic, but boy has the DCEU gone off the rails; JL was shit.
@kupo
No worries and well said.
“I were wondering a bit about that myself. I’ve kicked around a fair number of places where arranged marriage is the norm and girls, while commodities to be married off (to be fair, so are the boys), are VALUABLE commodities. They’re not given to just anyone as asks. The groom and his family has to pay – both up front and long term.
Given as incels aren’t exactly keen on the idea of paying for women in any way, shape or form – how the hell would going to an arranged marriage style society make any difference at all?”
In India the bride’s family pays the groom’s family a dowry to take their daughter off their hands, believe it or not. Although dowry is illegal and has been for decades, it is a common custom. It’s also a status thing among rich people, the more you give and get signifies the overall wealth and social position both families have. For the poor and middle classes, a dowry can break them. This is one reason (maybe even the biggest one) why female infanticide is so widespread and some North Indian states have severely skewed male-female population ratios.
It’s also related to “accidental kitchen deaths” of new brides and the ongoing harrassement of wives and their families after the dowry is given and the two have been married. Some families want more and more down the line.
And yeah, some incels think they can go to India and be “arranged”, not realizing the arrangements are based on family connections, caste, religion, socio-economic status, region and language.
India is an enormous country made up of several different religions and cultures, and each of these has its own sub-groups and varying beliefs – believe it or not.
Sikhs, Muslims, and Christians in India do not have a caste system, for example. God I wish people would make the effort to say “the Hindu caste system” instead of “the Indian caste system.”
Dowry systems, female infanticide, “accidental” bride deaths, and general misogyny, are serious issues, but they won’t be addressed if westerners persist in viewing India as one giant, homogeneous blob of backward brown people.
/rant over
@Katherine the Adequate – your nym and your post are equally wonderful 🙂
@ Shadowplay,
Thanks for those expanded thoughts. Always interested in learning more about everything.
@ Katherine the Adequate,
We wave hi! 🙂
We’re all engineers here too, and your cousin might be onto something.
What I figure it might be, you may work for a bigger and older biz, they have systems in place, (to deal with such things), and also have to (manufacturing in my case) compete worldwide and cannot afford any loss through lawsuits.
Math is not that hard! No one should be intimidated by any type of math. On the other hand you might wind up in some crappy, stressful job.
edited out a vid I was going to point to, which did not work.
So…
I think I just found out why GMU still has a rape apologist like Robin Hansen in their faculty
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/385560-major-university-allowed-conservative-donors-say-in-hiring-and
@Z&T – You’re welcome. Tried to give you a bit of information without it being too upsetting. Didn’t quite manage that, for which I do apologise. 🙁
@Mish – I left that one for you. Know you like slapping down THAT nonsense! 🙂
I have a better idea: Force open their hidey-holes and expose their echo chambers to the world.
What censorship might simply drive underground, mockery and derision can kill outright. As an added bonus, the ridiculousness of their ideas will ensure that members of the general public that might otherwise be radicalized by them will simply dismiss the incels as self-absorbed fools unwilling to admit that the only constant in all their rejections is themselves.