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.
Thank you for writing this, David. And a great place to write it too, the Globe and Mail has huge circulation. It’s sad that your rise in success is due to these hateful people, but I’m glad you’re in a position to help beat them.
Very nice, David.
Well done, David 😀
Congrats! You’re a great writer and it’s always great to see talent get recognized in bigger circles. (I’ll admit since having become somewhat of a shut-in I haven’t had nearly as many friends as I used to, so in a way I kind of feels like a “friend-by-proxy” kind of congrats for me.)
But as Scildfreja says above, it’s a rotten shame that your broadening success is due to your area of expertise, or rather that some manospherians’ actions are bringing your area of expertise into the spotlight right now. I wish we could go back to the days of Roosh not wanting to wash his ass or Paul Elam’s latest embarrassing fail-which-he-calls-a-victory. But for now these articles are much, much more important.
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I’ve got all I can do confronting the fascists in my family! It leaves me exhausted. (And a nephew who is spouting garbage straight from the MRA playbook).
China has a huge imbalance of men to women, but thanks to The Great Firewall stymying any antisocial movement from organizing (or gaining moral support) online, they seem to avoid things like this “incel rebellion” nonsense, as well as the manipulated social discord that led to Trump. Maybe that’s the answer.
@iknklast You do what you can, when you can. As do we all. *virtual hugs*
Congratulations, David! Very good article, though I’m sad it’s necessary.
David, you are doing Goddess’s work. Thank you.
I get a lot of schadenfreude from reading about the Incels and MGTOWs. There is more to getting laid than good looks. They both fail to recognize that their repellent personalities are the cause of their problems.
I agree that we should take away their voices. This is becoming malignant.
More about Trump please.
” I wish we could go back to the days of Roosh not wanting to wash his ass or Paul Elam’s latest embarrassing fail-which-he-calls-a-victory. ”
They were the seeds. The tree is bearing fruit now. As much as they want to criticize Feminism, Feminists just don’t go on killing sprees. However if these killers were women, you’d be seeing the Manosphere filled with blogs linking the crime sprees to XX chromosome. So when are they going to start discussing “the problem with men/testosterone/XY”?
What this really goes to show is that freedom of speech was never an ideal, but always, at best, a compromise. It’s a shame that most people don’t realize that something they held dear was only a lesser evil until it ceases to be lesser.
Damn, awesome get Dave! The Canadian newspaper of record is massive! Actually, I think it’s worth pointing out that despite how much a lot of these alt-righters want to style themselves as “pundits” or more laughably “journalists.” Dave actually gets his pieces printed in national newspapers. As in people from St. John’s to Vancouver Island are going to be reading this column, not just the same collection of dillholes that troll Bretibart.
Now we just gotta get Dave to replace bafflingly-employed serial plagiarist Margaret Wente on a permanent basis and we’re set….
Is the online incel community largely populated by millennials? If so it could be related to the entitlement that people say millennials suffer from. Of course, it must be noted that female millennials are not going on killing sprees as a result of not getting what they want.
Good piece, David. I cannot see any material difference between the online radicalisation of Islamic terrorists and the online radicalisation of incels. (Obviously I’m not comparing the religion of Islam and the manosphere, just the parts of both that promote terroristic violence)
Oh wait, I can think of a difference. One is allowed to flourish, one has huge state resources devoted to destroying it.
I agree. They should not have a platform. Incels are all about encouraging each other to not solve their problems. Once their sucked in, it’s way too hard to get out. And I think the hate speech and the encouragement of violent retribution make this not a free speech issue.
Congrats, David!
I liked the piece. To experienced blog readers this is very much 101 stuff, of course; but as WWTH pointed out some time ago, 101 stuff is some of the most powerful because it can start people thinking who have not thought about it before.
@idli sambar revolution:
Could you not, please? Splash damage is not an act of kindness.
An observation – perhaps society has erred in deeming all peer-based social correction among adolescent males as “bullying” which must be stopped while encouraging everyone to understand, embrace and be gentle to the socially inept.
There was a value to it in my generation, where somebody who acted weird and said goofy things got steered into more socially acceptable conduct (plus, the fact that this sort of correction is the primate way and hardwired definitely played a role in making those corrections tend to stick). Given the age of the school shooters and incels, it seems to correlate with a lot of “zero tolerance for bullying” policies.
@idli sambar revolution: I don’t know the numbers, but there are incels in their 40s and 50s; some of us encountered them on Usenet 20+ years ago.
Off topic, but the body language at Trump and Merkel’s presser is interesting. He keeps looking over at her smugly and making big domineering arm gestures and she’s clearly uncomfortable around him and leaning away as much as she can. He’s so obviously not okay being in the presence of women that aren’t in some way subordinate to him.
Ignore and please delete this comment – it was a reply to something now deleted
Congratulations David. Globe and Mail and NPR?
Like others have said, it’s a shame about the reason you are getting your voice out to a broader public – but I’m damned glad you are.
Hi! I’m a frequent reader, but an infrequent poster. Here’s a Twitter thread about capybaras, for those of you in need of joy or calmness.
https://mobile.twitter.com/PAYOLETTER/status/989861085367930880
@idli sambar revolution:
You too apparently believe that millenials feel an unreasonable sense of entitlement, but you’re still trying to avoid coming straight out with it by using “people say…” like maybe you’re not one of those people. There’s a good reason that weasel words are frowned upon in wikipedia articles.
Be honest now.
I don’t know, I’m wary of that, given that the “weirdness” that gets “corrected” by these methods is just as likely to be “that boy likes ‘girly’ stuff” as it is “that boy creeps on the girls.” Probably more so.