By David Futrelle
On the Incels.me forums, a bunch of the regulars recently had a little debate over slavery. Not whether or not the enslavement of women (or blacks, or whoever) is morally wrong; they didn’t care. No, the main question on the table was why men haven’t already enslaved women, given what a great idea it is.
Someone called lesbianwalrus — but who presumably was neither — started off the “debate” with this lovely post:
I’m not sure if that bit at the end was a reference to abolishing women’s basic human rights, or an outright call for genocide — it’s so hard to tell with these guys! — but the other incels who replied stuck with the issue of slavery. All but one thought that enslaving women would be great for guys like them, though there were a few different explanations as to why men haven’t just gone ahead and done it yet.
According to longtime Incels.me member Newbite the problem is that “soyboys are too powerful.” Mentalcel lamented that “western civilization chose cuckery and political correctness.” Imbored21 declared that “men are pathetic betas” and that “[w]omen have us by the balls.”
But not everyone blamed men — or even soyboys — as a whole. ElliotRodgerHere, reminding us once again that bigotries flock together, pointed his finger of blame at a familiar target: The Jews, — or, as he put it, that “small parasitic tribe” that runs the world and “decides these things for us.”
Damn those evil Jews for preventing us from enslaving women! Is there no end to their depravity?
A few commenters conjectured that re-enslaving black men would help incels like them by cockblocking the “Tyrones” — the black equivalents to the evil white Chads who allegedly steal all the women who would otherwise be forced to date incels.
But the creepiest post of the bunch came from someone ominously named The End, who suggested that incels might not have to wait for all women to be enslaved to have a sex slave of their own.
Well doesn’t that just make your skin crawl? And The End isn’t just some drive-by troll. He’s made nearly 2000 posts to Incels.me since joining in April. Evidently he’s found a welcoming home on Incels..me, which is nearly as sickening a thought as his comments about capturing himself a “plaything.”
I hope law enforcement keeps an eye on “The End”. Shudder.
@buttercup
This made me think of modern slavery that is still going on. It seems to happen in nations that can’t afford industrial machines on a wide scale. In a lot of places, criminal gangs and militias will offer ‘jobs’ in mines and factories but make people pay a ‘tax’ to leave. This ‘tax’ is often times is impossible to pay since your wages are so little that all you can afford is to buy food (sold by the slavers obviously).
I guess that is just one more reason to head off the looming oil energy crisis.
I recall hearing of a classical philosopher who said that slavery qould be abolished only when machines could do all the labour of humans. He meant this in the way we say ‘when hell feeezes over’.
@Surplus to Requirements
@bekabot was quoting a comment that appears to have vanished or been deleted. I saw it while it was around.
John Norman is the writer of the Gor books, which are widely known (and mocked) in certain nerd circles for their turgid prose (think pulp fantasy novels) and, more pertinently, for fetishizing female servility to the point of outright slavery. Also for giving birth to the “Gorean” subculture.
@Surplus I was the one who brought up John Norman, and bekabot is quoting my comment. Norman is the pen name of philosopher John Frederick Lange Jr. He’s the creator of the Gor series of fantasy novels. They’re primarily known because of Norman/Lange’s belief that women are naturally submissive, and would prefer to be slaves if given the opportunity. On Gor, the planet most of the action takes place on, they get that chance, which the books one way or another describe in considerable detail. It’s the kind of world someone like lesbianwalrus would probably love.
Since Norman/Lange is 87 he probably doesn’t know about incels and their fellow travellers. But I can’t help but suspect he might be sympathetic to them if he did.
Semi-OT, but: Any techies here figure out how to view the full article at: https://ips-dc.org/donald-trump-is-flirting-with-fascism/ ?
All I get is a headline and one more brief line of text, plus the usual navigational cruft: header, footer, about-the-author, etc. … there’s no “below the fold” content. And none of my usual tactics work. Disabling CSS. Google cache. View source and look for article content hidden inside variables. Usually at least one of these circumvents registerwalls and even some paywalls. Not this time. Enabling scripts does result in a popup begging me for money I don’t have, but phrased as a request for donations, with no implication that it’s a condition of being able to view the article body.
It looks like either I would need to do something really, really unsafe to get at the content (e.g., install Java or Flash in this browser — but I don’t even see a missing-plugin placeholder anywhere, and any website designer who expects viewers to have either is either an idiot, malicious, or has been living in a cave since about 2005 or so and in particular has never heard of the iPhone or HTML5) or else it’s just plain broken.
I did discover one more tracking/analytics url to blacklist in noscript, though, gaug dot es.
@Ariblester, tim gueguen:
Thanks.
@ Surplus to Requirements:
John Norman is the author of the Gor saga, a science fiction-cum-fantasy novel series somewhat in the Edgar Rice Burroughs vein; Gor, posits Norman, is a world where men are iron-thewed steely-jawed Men because women are ruthlessly kept to their proper place; a relentless theme has some uppity female (sometimes an upper-class Gorean–free Gorean women do exist, although the narrative seldom keeps them that way–but often an unattainable Stacy or feminist Becky transported from Earth) being abducted, raped, and enslaved–and coming ecstatically to embrace submission to a dominant male as her ordained role in The Natural Order of Things.
The following parody should give you a reasonably non-triggery idea of the rhetoric: http://www.rdrop.com/~wyvern/data/houseplants.html
@Dalillama: That’s Aristotle in his “Politics”. There were legends at the time about Daidalos building robots, and Aristotle said if we had those we wouldn’t need slaves. The thing is, Aristotle is really inconsistent when it comes to slavery. He also says that it’s natural for “barbarians” to be slaves and argues for that, and also that “barbarians” are actually better off having a Greek telling them what to do. Well, if that really were the case, wouldn’t it be best to keep slaves even if robots were invented? So yeah he’s inconsistent. He also sometimes compare slaves to mere tools, sometimes admit that they’re people too.
Maybe the lesson to draw from all this is the following: The fact that even someone as politically super conservative as Aristotle, living in a society where slavery had “always” existed, is being inconsistent and contradictory about it, is one more piece of evidence that it really is very much wrong.
@Full Metal Ox: Ugh. Yeah of course media would treat it that way. Because men are always, always up for sex, right?
Slavery is still going on in industrial nations, including the US, Canada & Britain. The most common form is actually domestic slavery, also known as domestic servitude. http://www.endslaverynow.org/learn/slavery-today/domestic-servitude
I once read an interview on Cracked of all places with a woman who’d been kept as a slave in a factory in the US. Eventually she managed to escape and the factory owner got caught, but it’s probably not an isolated incident.
@Nym
Thanks a million. r/exredpill is an amazing site and gives me hope for humanity.
Folks, Hannity has solved the Annapolis shooting. Maxine Walters is to blame, apparently.
@Dvärghundspossen: Cracked has been remarkably great over the last few years, gives me hope for internet-culture.
@Skyla
In the U.S. that’s not the case; prison labour is the most common form of slavery here at present.
@Dvarghundspossen
Most definitely is not.
@ moggie
Ugh. I’m just going to post this Twitter thing, without comment.
https://mobile.twitter.com/AoDespair/status/1012441981920915464?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1012441981920915464&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fus-news%2F2018%2Fjun%2F29%2Fannapolis-mayor-gavin-buckley-hostility-media
Dvärghundspossen:
I don’t suppose he actually posited a moral duty for Greeks to nanny over barbarians, even if technology made it unprofitable? OK, he probably technically did, but didn’t consider the hypothetical at the moment.
With my limited knowledge of antiquity, I was the other day considering the common perception that slavery was considered “uncontroversial” back then.
Then it occurred to me that our written sources come from people who generally were slave owners, and certainly not slaves themselves, who constituted a rather large part of the public. Considering there were some large scale slave revolts, it seems like a non-starter that slavery was generally quite controversial among slaves.
And buried way down in there is some xylocephalic chucklehead claiming that the media in the US are “hard left”.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people, especially though not solely Americans, haven’t a frigging clue what “hard left” actually looks like. If the media in the US actually were hard left they would be advocating massive wealth transfers away from the Fortune 100 types — not just taxation, but expropriation of their fancy mansions and other assets, nationalization of the more important industries they own, and land redistribution. That’s at a bare minimum. In particular, the real hard left makes Bernie Sanders look like Ronald Reagan.
But that doesn’t stop these idiots bandying the phrase around as if they knew what it meant …
@ lumipuna
Under Roman law, the definition of slave stated that it was an ‘unnatural’ state. The general attitude, amongst lawyers anyway, was that there wasn’t an inherent slave ‘class’ or group, but it was misfortune arising from external circumstances.
(That’s from a famous legal writer of the time called Gaius)
Surplus – well, you gotta keep that moderate, sensible Overton window looking out on the bleakest dystopia possible. So people forget that there’s any other view.
Slavery has a dual function: labor, and subjugation. The first rationale may have waned somewhat with the Industrial Revolution, but it’s hard to think of what could replace the second one. Sexbots aren’t going to cut it.
Perhaps a ray of hope here?
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/06/29/what-ocasio-cortezs-win-says-about-the-rise-of-the-left/
Oh my, yeah if someone can’t leave then I guess it is enslavement. Why have I never heard of that before?
Though I’ve not read his work myself, I’ve been given to understand by those who have that Norman’s Gor series actually started out pretty decently in the beginning– probably still standard regressive raygun gothic concepts, but nothing overt enough to turn off the average (white male) reader, and with a few interesting plot ideas. Then he got really, really into the kink side of things, and Dared Us to Enter His Magical Realm. Most readers did not, but those that did were fanatically loyal to someone who played further and further to their fetishes.
(Google “Dare You Enter My Magical Realm” for an explanation of that meme if you’re confused.)
@ WWTH
Can’t think of one. Actually I thought “Maybe Adam Lanza”, if only because he was so young, then on Wikipedia: