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.”
And I got a suprisingly good science education in my parochial (LCMS) jr. high; We knew even back then that the counter-earth theory was bunk.
@Jenora Feuer Having accidentally gassed myself w. a toilet brush that had ammonia on it (from the week before) while using it to clean a bleach-filled toilet bowl, I can attest that sense of smell will not work fast enough to stop oneself from (nearly) passing out.
And, really, if you could smell it, wouldn’t you just assume it was from passed toilet cleanings? Now if it smelled like sulphur or something out of the ordinary in a bathroom I could see how that would be a warning.
That reminds me — have there ever been any breaks in the case of the chlorine gas in the stairwell at the 2014 Midwest Furfest? Anytime I try looking it up, I just get old news stories, and mostly with a “hur hur hur kink nerds” tone.
I don’t know if John Brown was doing his “level best”. Granted, I think some of his guerrilla work might be censored and/or lost to time, but his biggest plan was a massive strategic blunder. They wanted to raid an armory to get weapons to pass out to slaves and jump-start the revolution. But just in case someone snitched on them, they didn’t tell anyone who wasn’t going into the armory. So no one knew to come get their weapons. Just a few trustworthy info-spreaders who could activate at the same time might have made a difference, but no, that part of the plan didn’t occur to him until he was in a shoot-out with the feds.
@Fishy Goat:
As I said, it was a plot point in the story; I doubt very much Spider Robinson was testing it out.
(The story involved a somewhat post-apocalyptic scenario where several years earlier a virus had been unleashed that gave everybody a super-enhanced sense of smell, which resulted in a lot of major cities being close to abandoned by anybody that could. It was an odd story. The point of the trap was a suspicion that one of the people involved in research that might have unleashed the plague might have done so deliberately, knowing that without a sense of smell he’d be unaffected.)
@Mooncustafer:
Not that I know of. (I was at the con, though was in one of the overflow hotels at the time, and only found out about it when my roommate who had been at a dance in the main hotel came back.) Granted, I haven’t been looking all that actively for reports myself.
Actually, I think that was the last con I attended in the U.S.
@Ariblester There’s debate over whether Muhammad and Malvo were serial killers or spree killers, as their actions overlap the two categories. Not that it matters to the victims.
Marvel Comics has had several versions of Counter Earth, starting with the original that was created by the High Evolutionary.
Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s first venture into live action was the movie Doppelganger, aka Journey to the Far Side of the Sun. It featured a duplicate Earth on the opposite side of the Sun.
There’s a bunch more ways to rule out counter-Earth:
* Lack of its gravitational influence on Mars, etc. being detected.
* Our space probes, when in transit, have never seen it. One took a picture of Earth from out beyond Saturn. No sign of a counter-Earth across the sun from it.
* We’ve had a Mars rover take a photo of Earth from the surface of Mars. When in a different phase of the planets’ orbits, any counter-Earth would have been visible to the same rover. None has ever been observed.
Basically the only way there’s a planet-sized object there is if it stationkeeps, is pitch-dark, and is hollow, with very low mass compared to a real planet. So, someone’s giant stealth balloon. And even then we should see drive plumes when it station-keeps. You can’t hide that sort of thing unless it’s aimed directly away from the observer and occurs behind an opaque barrier. This would have to be aimed sideways, along the thing’s orbit. We’d see a narrow line of plasma seemingly sticking out from the side of the sun. And of course some of our space probes would see it from other angles too.
Verdict: there’s nothing there.
Now there are stable places to look for stuff sharing Earth’s orbit: the L4 and L5 points, where in theory an asteroid or two might have collected. So far, though, nothing of any significant size has been observed at either location. Jupiter has some asteroids at corresponding locations in its orbit, but it’s a lot more massive and next door neighbors to the main belt.
Are all the people pointing to women who committed mass shootings unaware that women can be misogynists and/or Nazis?
@kupo
I am of those “all the people” you’re referring to.
I am aware that women can be fascists and/or misogynists.
I am also mindful that, absent a written manifesto, or traceable pattern of subscribing to an ideology, trying to impute misogyny and/or fascist intent to a mass shooting becomes difficult.
The examples I suggested of women mass shooters (Nasim Najafi Aghdam, Tashfeen Malik) were made on the basis that the evidence that they were fascists and/or misogynists is insufficient to make a definitive conclusion.
Their apparent goals in carrying out the attacks (revenge over YouTube blocking their videos, Islamic terrorism) do not neatly fit within the Fascist/Misogynist/Both boxes.
I am emphatically not saying that any woman who commits a mass shooting cannot be a fascist and/or a misogynist.
Islamic terrorism absolutely is fascist. It’s just a non-white form of fascism. Observe that Islamic fundamentalism is extreme right-wing conservatism, including social conservatism, and that it has a totalitarian outlook. Muslim theocracies are textbook examples of fascist states. Witness Saudi Arabia: periodic purges of gays or non-Muslims, strict and intrusive government rules on just about everything including aspects of the nominally private sphere, some cherry-picked bits of socialism such as state-backed industries and infrastructure here and there (“making the trains run on time”) to curry favor with the desirable part of the population (usually cishet men of a preferred color and religion), and extreme intolerance of dissent or differing viewpoints. It may have started out as feudalism but with the coming of the industrial age feudalism always seems to either fade into figurehead-ness (UK, Canada, other Commonwealth countries), disappear entirely (US, France), or morph into fascism.
One strong clue to the presence of fascism is an anachronistically strong state hostility towards LGBTQ+ people, and equally-anachronistic legal restrictions on the rights and autonomy of women, as well as anachronistic racial and/or religious laws.
Long story short: if a social conservative is bombing places, chances are it’s fascism. If the motive includes hostility to social liberalism remove the “chances are”.
Keep in mind about the whole “counter-Earth” part of old sci-fi was that it, like many things, relied on being seen as “plausible” to people without a scientific education. You can disprove it all you want, even using the tools of contemporaneous science, but it doesn’t matter if the “average person on the street” thinks that “Yeah, that sounds like it could be real.” The whole “We only use 10% of our brains” thing has been repeatedly debunked, yet we’re still making movies about it. The Hollow Earth was long debunked when Edgar Rice Borroughs wrote his adventure books set in it, and even his Martian adventure novels weren’t looking plausible to anyone with potent enough telescopes (i.e., not the average hobbyist). Don’t worry, though– fortunately, no one is seriously focusing on a “counter-Earth” as a real thing, so it doesn’t actually need to be debated. And if it does become the center of real debate, such as something that the Trump Space Force needs to defend against, then you’ll have millions of people that will believe in it both in spite of and because of scientists readily refuting it.
The “any mass murderer is a misogynist” point seems like it’s a gimme. Given that everyone has grown up in a sexist culture, chances are very good that any given person has demonstrated misogynistic tendencies at one point in their lives. I bet that for any killer, you can find something they did that would count towards them being a misogynist.
That’s not to say that particularly aggressive and virulent misogyny (and especially a history of domestic violence) isn’t a MASSIVE red flag for further future and past violence. It definitely is. It’s just that misogyny is depressingly common and the relatively “harmless” sexism essentially functions as a smokescreen for the terroristic misogyny. Because when assholes talk about, say, how all women should be enslaved, it’s dismissed as “oh, they don’t really mean it, it’s just stupid locker room talk, that sort of thing is normal”, instead of “holy fuck, what is wrong with these assholes, they are clearly dangerous, we should stop them”.
@Surplus to Requirements
That’s actually a very good point that you brought up. I myself did not feel myself to be qualified enough to touch on the links between fundamentalist Islam and fascism, so I originally left it as an open question.
(To say nothing of the ideological baggage attached to the term “Islamofascism”, which I mostly remember as a neocon snarl world from back in the 2000s)
@Catalpa
While it may be true that almost everyone has some degree of misogyny as a result of its prevalence in the wider society, I think to make that argument somewhat undercuts WWTH’s original statement, which was
If the statement “Are there any exceptions to all mass shooters being either fascists or misogynists” is “Well, everyone, mass shooter or not, is a misogynist to some degree”, then the statement ceases to have explanatory effect, doesn’t it?
That should have read:
Even moderate Islam is openly undemocratic, it is not seen as necessary as the Imam’s and other religious leaders are expected to know everything needed and do everything the way it should be done.
Picked up from a meme.
Joe Biden: ‘And I deliberately left that phony Space Force folder under the desk.’
Barack Obama: ‘Come on Joe, nobody’s going to be that stupid.’
@ellesar
With respect, that’s not the case. I highly recommend the following moderate Muslims, who are very much pro-democracy and would insist that this fits perfectly well with their faith:
Mariam Veiszadeh (@MariamVeiszadeh)
Yassmin Abdel-Magied (@yassmin_a)
Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@MuslimIQ)
If you don’t use Twitter, all three can be found in other places, too. Mariam has done several TED talks, and Yassmin has been widely published. Two of Qasim’s recent books, The wrong kind of Muslim, and Extremist, are brilliant reads.
All of these people are strongly pro-feminist, pro-gay rights, anti-racist, and so on. They’re also extremely entertaining 🙂
If you want an exception to the rule, there’s always Randy Stair, an actual extreme misandrist with equally extreme gender dysphoria. He believes that after he died he’d become a “hot ghost girl” (his own words). He, unfortunately, killed three people at his workplace. I don’t know if any MRA’s talked about him but I doubt it.
I wasn’t actually trying to get people to spend two days proving to me that there are some mass shooters not motivated by white and/or male supremacy. Just using hyperbole to make that point that a good number of them are, especially in recent years and that right wing terrorism is on the rise and violence against women is the best predictor of mass violence that there is.
Didn’t think that would be controversial or confusing here.
http://www.gifimagesdownload.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/free-shrug-gif-485.gif
This article covers the misogyny as pre-indicator point quite well. Nothing new to peeps here, but in case anyone wants to read.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jun/30/capital-gazette-suspect-stalking-mass-shooter-warning-signs
I was just enjoying the morbid curiosity of the novel mass killer.
Jarrod was not only a misogynist, but also an alt-righter:
(hope I posted the link correctly, if not the article was published today in Salon)
@WWTH
Holy crap, has it been two days? I need to re-evaluate my Internet habits. (j/k it’s actually more of a debilitating addiction)
I just took your question at face value because it sounded like a statement made in good faith, and because it spurred me to think about exactly what motivates a mass shooter.
As for it being hyperbole, well, irony died in 2016 and the world’s passed through a funhouse mirror since then, so the statement’s hyperbolic intent sailed over my head. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s cool. I’m not mad or anything. I was just sort of confused.
I meant Jarrod Ramos, my post has been partially eaten?