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.
My older brother is a card carrying incel, and he’s forty-five. We have been arguing about how women/girls are evil and out to get him for spite since we were toddlers. Masculine entitlement is not a millennial thing by any means.
Today there was this in The Beaverton (Canada’s answer to The Onion):
Motives of man who clearly stated his motives unclear
Loved it, you absolutely nailed it, great job! I only wish I was as skilled at explaining a situation as you are. I especially love the line “addicted to self-pity”. If that isn’t the shortest way to perfectly sum up the entire incel cesspool, I don’t know what is.
I was born in 77 so I’m not a millenial myself, but it’s not difficult to find out that millenials have a harder time getting apartments, jobs and so on than the generation before them. I think a lot of this “millenials are so entitled” stuff comes from not wanting to acknowledge that millenials might have legitimate grievances because they have a harder time making it than people born, well, in the 70:ies. (And I think my generation, in turn, have it harder in many ways than the baby boomers had.)
@Fishy Goat:
They tore the roof off with that headline. I’m speechless. That’s amazing.
@EJ No kidding! I want to ‘like’ the FB post but it’s very much a *LOLSOB* thing.
@Dave Congratulations!!!
Every generation in power considers the ones who came after them entitled. It is a thing. Let’s not dump on millennials for some reason, maybe?
I mean here’s an article with quotes from the last ten years about millennials, and then quotes from much earlier.
Re: Aging Chad-
Please don’t reply through emails, come back to the site. Replying like that messes up the flow of the comments on the site for some reason. It’s too bad we can’t turn it off, but oh well!
Re the content of wanting to have other children beat up the ones who don’t conform socially – Maybe no. I don’t think having children now be less afraid of physical beatings is a bad thing, and I don’t think that having kids be physically afraid for their safety in the past was a good thing.
I don’t think that incels would have not become incels if only someone had knocked some sense into them.
Never noticed millenials being more entitled than any other generation. Some are shits, some do awesome shit – same as every other generation we’ve ever had.
Want to read some real shit? Read this thread. The author comments to replies, too.
https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/989535565895864320?s=19
Oh gods, that thread.
Anyone else getting a governmentgotgirlfriends dolt vibe there?
Good work David,
It must feel validating and sad at the same time. Validating in that everything you have been saying about these men being dangerous to society has been incredibly accurate, but unbelievably sad for the obvious reasons.
Toronto police have id’d the victims.
8 women and 2 men lost their lives.
Shadowplay, first person I thought of.
Wonder what happened to him. Sort of expected to see him crop up in a police blotter somewhere.
“You too apparently believe that millenials feel an unreasonable sense of entitlement” Says who? You?
I don’t much about anything regarding millennials. No opinion either way.
@Shadowplay
Reminds me of a guy I dated once. His parents were Vietnamese immigrants; he told me about how his mom was forced into survival sex work while his dad was in a North Vietnamese “reeducation” camp.
Socialism without feminism: as garbage as anything else without feminism.
@Aging Chad
Could we please not re: defending bullying? Toxic masculinity policing itself more is not how we’re going to teach boys to do better.
” Given the age of the school shooters and incels, it seems to correlate with a lot of “zero tolerance for bullying” policies.”
Isn’t one argument though that bullies *push* these types to breaking point and then after years of internalizing finally they burst open like a pressure cooker and do something like mass murder?
“Socialism without feminism: as garbage as anything else without feminism.”
Some people seem to think we’ve reached parity now and an exclusive focus on women is no longer needed. That we can just be focused on “everyone” from here on out.
Some people seem to think that people who post things like this are merely parroting disingenuous talking points to derail productive discussion.
@Aging Chad:
You may have a point there. There’s bullying, and then there’s honest feedback from one’s peer group. I think most people will agree – social skills are learned, like any other skill. They can be improved upon.
This may be a stretch, but I wonder if some of the problem could be due to the very controlled childhood and early adolescence so many young people today have been subjected to. For example, I understand daily school recess is a thing of the past, at least in the US. Then, there’s all the kids I see waiting for the school bus in their parent’s cars. Plus, it doesn’t seem like kids play together outdoors nearly to the extent they did, say, 30 years ago. I realize video games and IPads have probably taken over here.
I have no children of my own, so maybe take the above with a grain of salt. I think this goes beyond the cliche ‘helicopter parenting’. Stunted development could be the end result, at least for some people.
David, great article, BTW. I’ve read WHTM for years.
@ idli
It is an argument one hears. I’m not sure it’s a valid one though.
Although bullying is often spoken about in terms of low self esteem, there have been studies that suggest bullies in fact have disproportionately high self esteem; and the sense of entitlement that accompanies that.
School shooters have often been ostracised and avoided prior to the incident. That however appears to be legitimate survival behaviour on the part of their peers. They give off red flags that people pick up on.
I know this isn’t something you were trying to do; but I’m very wary (to put it mildly) of any suggestion that school shooters are somehow victims themselves, and that ‘walking up’ can prevent such occurrences; or that there’s any onus on their classmates to do so.
Sealion tingling going on here.
Yay! Thanks for doing a great job getting the word out there on highly visible platforms, Dave!
PeeVee, from that twitter link u posted;
Robin Hanson
“Those w/ less access to sex plausibly suffer simiarly to those with low income, & might similarly hope to organize to lobby for redistribution along this axis. Strikingly, I see little overlap between those concerned about income & sex inequality. ”
He failed to demonstrate how the two types of suffering are similar.
Without money people starve and die, not so with sex. Also, if you don’t have a partner you can always masturbate and get the same (if not better) result, whereas with a lack of income you cannot self generate money.
evilzenmuppet
“I don’t disagree but I remain baffled why people think sexbots won’t be more benefit to women. A sexbot can never rape you, impregnate you, give you an STI and will never expect you to make it a sandwich. Functional sexbots will make men obsolete, not women.”
Yeah, hard to get why the manosphere thinks immersive 3Dtactile technology and sexbots are going to make “wimmenz mad”. Women are the ones buying sex toys today, and they will be the ones buying buying 3Dtactile and sexbots tomorrow, even if they have real life partners because many (most?) men are not great in bed anyway.
From his Twitter I clicked on Robin Hanson’s “Overcoming Bias” article and low and behold in the comments;
leftist incel • a day ago
When someone drives a republican senator off the road and almost kills him, I do not not condemn the driver. When someone punches a Nazi, I do not condemn the puncher. When the noble leftist revolutionary kills the rent-seekers in the honorable eating of the rich, I do not condemn the leftist. When Elliot Rodger lashes out against a society that keeps him down, I don’t condemn him. I don’t applaud violence, but I certainly don’t condemn the people who point their spears upward.
Normies benefit from an invisible privilege in millions of ways. And they deny it over and over, all while literally advocating the deaths of virgins. We’re at an equilibrium point where normies refuse to do anything about the shootings, and the incels must shoot.
There are these grand noble truths that centrists love to spout. “Hire the best person for the job” or “Violence is never the answer” or “People shouldn’t be offended all the time”. Following these truths to their natural conclusion demonstrates they cede to one side – always the side in power. Hiring the best person for the job will see that offices are 90% white since whites have better access to education. Never resorting to violence sees the weak always oppressed. Not being allowed to be offended sees that minorities are run out of town (or otherwise not free to pursue their interests or happiness).
There is no middle ground: you are either defending the rich or eating them.
There is no middle ground: you are defending white supremacy or defeating it.
There is no middle ground: you are either laughing at the defeated virgins or you are shooting up the schools.
@Benterati You know when a man hates women he goes on a killing spree. When woman hates for men she writes a feminist manifesto. Guess I know who I’d rather deal with.
@Aging Chad:
As a person who was severely bullied and had it excused by my parents and the schools for the reasons you mentioned, I can say it did incredible damage to me and my future relationships. A lot of the time those kids that are bullied for being weird are weird for a reason beyond their control (i.e. they have disabilities or they are abused at home, both of which were happening to me), and being bullied by peers only makes it worse, not better.
Plus, a lot of these guys were bullied as kids. They use that as an excuse for their terrible behavior (which it’s definitely not).