By David Futrelle
Several hours after the news broke that a gunman had shot five people dead at the Capital Gazette newspaper offices in Annapolis, Maryland, but before we knew much of anything about the shooter himself, I took a look at the forums on Incels.me to see if anyone on the site was saying anything about this latest mass killing.
Incels, after all, have an almost reflexive tendency to praise or excuse anyone who kills a high enough number of the “normies” incels consider their sworn enemies, and many of them worship incel mass killer Elliot Rodger as a virtual saint.
But no one there seemed much interested in this particular killer. “[P]rolly some political kind of shit given that it’s a newspaper,” wrote someone called mutant in a not-very-busy thread on the topic, “really it’s only normals who care about left v right.”
Several hours later, we learned that the Annapolis shooter’s anger at the media — and at the Capital Gazette — had its roots in the newspaper’s coverage of his conviction for harassing a former high-school classmate on Facebook. Though she didn’t remember going to school with him, she told the paper, she tried to be nice because it seemed like he was having a rough time. But he quickly turned on her, allegedly bombarding her with threats and trying to get her fired from her job. Ultimately, the future shooter pleaded guilty to pleaded guilty to one count of harassment — and then started directing his ire at the Capital Gazette for having the gall to write about his case in a way he thought was unfair. (A court disagreed, dismissing his defamation suit against the paper.)
Well, this bit of news woke the murder fans on Incels.me right up, and soon they were hailing the Capital Gazette shooter as a new hero.
“Praise the saint,” wrote someone called JeffGoldblumInTheFly.
“When will he be canonised?” asked AfrikanCel.
“The newspaper was bullying him for being incel and Jarrod Ramos stood up to his bullies,” added incel4life. ” Jarrod Ramos is a hero.”
“Bless His Heart,” agreed doktordoom, “death to the media.”
A few of the commenters wondered if their new hero had managed to kill any “femoids” — that is, women — in his rampage.
“Did he score at least one femoid frag?” asked the aptly named evildoer.
In fact, he killed two women. “I don’t condone shootings,” noted someone called Jackson14, “but anyways looking at the victims one was a Stacy.”
This last assertion proved somewhat controversial, because the possible “Stacy” in question was a bit older than most incels consider ideal. “Maybe Stacy from 30 years ago,” grumbled Notgoingtomakeit.
“Come on man you don’t think she is hot?” Jackson14 asked.
Not everyone on the incels.me forums considers Ramos a saint, though. Someone called AR15 was unimpressed with his body count. “Weak score tbh,” he sniffed.
Others were unimpressed with his looks. “Homeboy look like a Lamb Of God tribute act 
,” wrote one. “He legit looks like an egg.” added another.
Somehow I suspect that all the “sex redistribution” in the world wouldn’t transform any of these guys into actual decent people. It would just put more women at risk.
One thing that’s very important too imho is the internet.
I am from a non-English speaking country (hence the wonky English), where so far the incel phenomenon is unknown.
Of course there ARE horrible men who can’t handle rejection. I’m getting long in the teeth so it’s quieter for me now but I vividly remember a diatribe directed at me in the street for the benefit of anyone within hearing distance: “Anyway I would never f**k you you b**ch you’ll see when I f**k you you’ll be begging for more you stupid d*ke you’re so ugly that I would not even let my dog f**k you you sl*t!!!!!” (I had dared not being interested.). I’m afraid that kind of men are universal.
However, they cannot (so far…) find an online communauty of likely-minded people where they will reinforce each other’s hate of women. They will not be able to contaminate akward young men looking for answers. And if they rant in real life no one will advise them to rape or kill women.
I really love the internet, I love reading news from all over the world, discovering the story of Belyaev’s foxes (google it!), hoarding recipes and 19th century books, frightening myself with close-up photos of spiders, getting infuriated when reading the Daily Mail comments, googling a few words of a half-remembered song and being rewarded with the full lyrics and even a youtube version and so on. Internet brings people together and that’s generally a good thing, but in the case of hate groups that’s for the worst.
To clarify, I don´t think reading Incel websites could ever have made me commit or celebrate mass murder. But before you reach that insane endpoint of the spectrum there are less extreme ideology that could still be considered clearly unhealthy.
I couldn’t get a boyfriend in high school either
I actually was conventionally attractive, but too poor to dress well, and socially awkward
Boys and men were persnickety then, they’re persnickety now, it bites them in the ass, and they can’t figure it out
J, I kind of appreciate seeing your progress in this thread. It wasn’t entirely what you were going for in your first comment, but this was a pretty good insight.
Suffering can happen to all of us. And I think teaching boys to recognise and express a wider range of emotions is incredibly important, but also… we should stop teaching girls to be polite.
The amount of abuse I’ve endured because I didn’t want to, basically, be rude or hurtful, makes a pretty upsetting list.
I guess down with the narrow, strict, shitty gender binary.
Broham, you’ve already done a hell of a lot more than some of your peers have so props. You don’t need to apologize for anything, the fact that you’ve actually understood this is a good first step. I would suggest that your next step is to look inside yourself (as Kupo and others have said) and maybe take a look at why you didn’t realize this until I talked about my experiences.
No one, not even women, are born with a full database of knowledge. It takes a willingness to listen to others to get that knowledge of other people’s struggles. And it seems like you’re willing to listen.
Please do feel free to lurk a bit if you’d like. And do take what other people have said to heart. We won’t pull any punches, but what they have to say is very important.
Please read the comments policy.
Always wondered about this idea that women have a “higher pain threshold”. How would you even test that?
JFC, The only other group of people I know this eager to take credit for mass shootings is ISIS.
Myself and the usual crew here know much about harassment. From men.
Just a few minutes ago another of our friends came by, she was very upset, she’s being harassed by a cult.
And we wondered if anyone had any ideas that could help. I have no idea what to do.
Just now she came over to bum cigs and said that she had gone to the cops and they hauled her off to a hospital thinking there was something mentally wrong with her. They literally carted her off to a psych ward.
Now this might sound fantastical, but I’ve heard of other instances of the same type of treatment by the cops here. Such as our pal T here who said the cops “hauled her off for nothing”, for sticking her head out her back door, to see what was up, saw lights and cop cars.
And she had on pajamas and was holding a paperback book in her hands. She stepped out of her back door to see what the lights were about and two cops grabbed her, handcuffed her, dragged her to their cop car, and then took her to their local office where they threw her in a room and left her there. She sat for awhile then got up (door was open) (she was still in handcuffs) and started yelling about what was up and I’ll get a lawyer and all of a sudden they were super nice, took cuffs off, and drove her back home.
That turned out to be, the female cop who drove her home, she said there was a party where some guy stabbed people, at least 3 miles from here, but they thought he may have “been hiding in this area”.
A female in pajamas with a paperback book in hand is not some teen male stabber come from a party.
Other people have backed this friend up on this tale.
And if that happened,
What this girl M said happened, we can absolutely see that happening.
It may sound quite bizarre, but other people have had similar experiences here.
So this girl has had enough of these cult harassers, goes to the cops, they think she’s “crazy” and haul her off to a hospital.
This IS an actual cult, also. This woman is not delusional. I don’t want to name it here, because they are sue happy, there are Nth tales online about these people. Is absolutely a cult.
Does anyone here have any ideas about what this girl could do?
No BS about the cops here either because this other friend here had a sim experience. Simply from stepping out her back door …
The other creepy thing about this –
We asked how did you get out? First off she kept telling them she “wasn’t crazy” and people were harassing her. And not on drugs or anything like that. How she got out was they called her husband to vouch for her, that she “wasn’t crazy”.
(He is harassed by the cult also.)
It’s all very disturbing. And we believe her absolutely and want to try to help any way we can. We showed her this site and I said, maybe someone here has some ideas on what to do?
This thing is a cult.
And the cops here (Chicago) don’t do shit.
It boils down to another form of “domestic abuse” that cops, anyone, couldn’t care less about.
Any ideas appreciated, for help for our friend.
We do absolutely believe her, we have witnessed it all. This particular cult tried to recruit us, too.
This miscavige of justice shall not go unavenged!
On a more serious note, they’ve bought the cops in Chicago and not just Clearwater, FL?
Did I read that right? That… person… thought a 37 year old woman would be hotter if she were 30 years younger?
What a disturbing community they have.
Some other various related things,
We all here are interested in real estate, and do have business and tech ed. related to Land.
Chicago? It’s all swamp here, I’m not entirely sure where you’d mark the line at swamp areas though.
Self and all various people I speak of might not be exactly super brainiacs, but we all do have enough of education.
The best take on the male entitlement angle I’ve seen so far: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/06/30/the-annapolis-shooting-was-an-attack-on-a-newspaper-and-on-women/
@Z&T
I don’t know about the cult part specifically but for the harassment side of it, David has a great list of resources on the sidebar (bottom of page on mobile) under the heading, “If You’re Being Harassed”.
I hope your friend is able to get away from them safely. <3
Is the cult we’re talking about this one?
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ChurchOfHappyology
Because if it is, it does make things more complicated. If it’s something else entirely, may I recommend calling the FBI?
@Weirwoodtreehugger:
I think the character of Jane suffered a bit in season 4 when Moffat tried to make her more into a real person. I liked her better when she was, and this is in Moffat’s own words, based on what he thought that hot girls were like when he was young and super insecure. I guess in incel terminology she’s simply a Stacy for the first three seasons, and it’s hilarious because she’s so far removed from anything resembling a real human being.
Well, one thing I have learned from this whole shooter-shitshow: It doesn’t pay to be nice to an incel. Because this one was fixated on the one person who had been nice to him…a woman he hadn’t seen since high school, but was still obsessing over, ten years after her random act of kindness. And he stalked her and made her life miserable, and when he got arrested, the paper printed a story on him that he didn’t like, which set him down a whole ‘nother spiral of obsession and awfulness.
Something tells me that even if she’d had sex with him, it would not have turned out well.
Being an incel is by design not about improving the lives of people who identify as such. Pretty much the opposite. It’s about stewing in their own misery and weaponizing that misery to harm others. That’s the whole point.
I hate to say anyone could make MGTOWS look good, but incels manage to do so. MGTOWS mostly seem like butthurt dumbasses who can’t get around to actually going their own way what with all the complaining about women that they do. Incels are downright evil. They actually like it when people get hurt.
Samira
I think people assume the higher pain threshold cause childbirth
@mildly
When I hear Trump go on abut his superior DNA, that’s exactly what I hear.
It’s true about the link between skin color and the perception of pain, as well as the empathy thereof. I saw the same study– they could color-shift a hand into anything else while showing it being mutilated, even unnatural colors like purple, and people would show more stress at what they were seeing than if the same hand was color-shifted to dark brown. I remember the Cracked article that sited it as well, because they noted “people have more empathy for friggin’ NIGHT ELVES than they do black people.”
@ ChimericMind,
These people:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/08/landmark-42-hours-500-65-breakdowns/
I tried to state this obliquely in my other post as well, wasn’t too clear. But while I was thinking about this it occurred to me: Why didn’t the cops just look it up?
@ Kupo,
Good idea about the sidebar. I’m going to tell her to get the “Gift of Fear” book.
These are potentially problematic people. And not someone’s paranoid imagination either, not with so much about them online. They operate worldwide too.
The saddest part about this: They targeted this girl when she was really sick, going through many serious operations.
But of course that’s how many of these groups operate. Standard operating procedure. I have been reading up on these things (cults) and it’s fascinating (and of course disturbing) stuff.
Exactly. We shouldn’t negotiate with these people because they’re fucking terrorists. If you capitulate to their demands once, they’ll keep escalating and keep escalating until they destroy everything around them.
There’s no end to their greed. They don’t just “want someone to love them”, they want people who will cow before their every demand under threat of violence. They want complete and utter control, and they won’t stop threatening violence until they get it.
I feel like there’s something similar to ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ going on here; like, when you get invested in a narrative and accept that all these improbable and/or impossible things are happening for the duration of the book, movie, or whatever. Only incels (and right-wingers generally) don’t turn it off when they’re done, and indeed don’t even acknowledge that it’s a narrative at all. That’s why their forums are so full of people reinforcing each other and egging each other on: without constant support for the narrative, they’ll have to acknowledge that it never actually mapped to reality.
Just getting caught up on threads from the long weekend and noticed the discussion here. Wanted to chime in on a couple of things:
1) Social development is indeed critical. My mother is a child psychologist and identifying behavioral issues or learning disabilities was her wheelhouse. Unfortunately, those programs are always stretched for money and it doesn’t help when the government wants to take an axe to them.
That said, it’s absolutely possible for somebody to be more solitary and not become a raging dillhole. I’m not all that comfortable in social gatherings and tend to keep to myself most of the time, but I’m still a staunch humanist that has used that lens in forming my own political and sociological opinions.
2) This paragraph from wwth really stood out for me:
I can only speak from my own experience with the pressures of youth, but a combination of entitlement and socialization would account for the attitude towards women that a lot of guys have. The idea that women are some kind of object to be obtained by physical trial is an age-old trope that goes all the way back the Perseus and Andromeda and has maintained its status in pop culture throughout. Mario. Zelda. Back To The Future. Ready Player One. Scott Pilgrim. For those whom life does not conform to this script (the vast majority), there’s a sense of grievance built up and would explain why there’s a self-loathing in a lot of guys who have been conditioned to think of a sexual encounter as the dividing line between childhood and adulthood.
Conversely (and I just watched one of Lindsay Ellis’ older videos apologizing to Stephanie Meyer and the Twilight franchise)… we don’t have a lot of pop culture out there that speaks to the adolescent experiences of girls and young women. As Ellis correctly identifies… society is very hostile to things girls like–something I was reminded of on this very site if I recall correctly. What they find popular is considered juvenile or somehow “not serious enough” to be taken seriously. That’s slowly changing as we have more things focusing on the experiences of girls coming of age (like Frozen or Lady Bird), but this is a relatively new thing. So no wonder that a girl having exactly the same issues of unrequited love that a boy have sounds so alien; their experiences haven’t been taken seriously.
What I don’t understand is the bloodlust that is suddenly frothing in these corners of the internet. Where that is coming from, I have no idea. Are community ties so frayed, has there been so much distance generated that we don’t look upon each other as thinking, feeling people any longer? That’s what keeps me awake at night.