By David Futrelle
You may worry about your country descending into chaos, or turning into a fascist hellhole, or even a bit of both. But when incels imagine the future they have much more specific concerns. Oddly specific, you might say.
Over on Incels.me, one paranoid commenter conjures up what for him is evidently the most nightmarish future dystopia he can imagine: One in which women can use sonar technology to check out penis size at a distance.
In a thread titled, with typical incel melodrama, “[SuicideFuel] In 2030, it will be absolutely over for dicklets” — dudes with tiny dicks — a fellow called Cuckcel offers his dire warning.
Incel dudes, when women look at you the first thing that pops into their mind isn’t “small dick.” It’s “huge asshole,” because that’s what you are.
Women are excellent multitaskers. We can think “small dick” and “huge asshole” simultaneously.
@WWTH: That Foreskin Man-comic looks like it’s made by the same people (men) who’ve made the Voluntaryist ….
And Kropotkins beard, that’s some antisemitic drivel!
I guess they’re checking the boxes on despicable internet-cults one by one.
Same here. But on my side of the Atlantic, the notion of a man being dumped for being uncircumcised (at least outside Jewish/Muslim circles) is pretty much unimaginable. Put it like this: you’d have to be extraordinarily picky to have a problem with it, what with it being overwhelmingly the norm.
Personally, I’ve had just one comment, and that was from an American girlfriend – and it was purely out of curiosity as she’d never seen an uncircumcised penis before.
Gently pull back foreskin, then proceed as otherwise. If a woman can’t figure that out, I’m not letting her anywhere near my genitals.
Urgh blockchain
Blockchain is a method of recording a stream of information in a way that is eventually secure. It’s not secure the moment it’s submitted for storage, it’s secure after more data’s been packed on top of it – and the depth it has to be before it’s “secure” is nondeterministic.
All of the security it provides is relatively untested. The buttcoin-community brags about their perfect security, but there are enough instances of Blockchains being faked to poke great big holes in those theories. A lot of their claims are simply untested theories.
Here’s the basics as I understand them. A Blockchain requires high velocity and volume to provide reasonable security – you need to be able to embed your transaction (financial, educational, whatever) into the Blockchain quickly and with high volume, and you need to ensure that the transaction is distributed well enough that others gain confidence in it being true.
Can a bank do that? Sure. Blockchain is fine for a bank – it’s going to have a high-volume, high-velocity stream of transactions that it can use to create high confidence in the chain. Lots of large, centralized organizations can use that.
Can a distributed platform do that? Possibly, if it’s aggregating enough data to create that 2V stream. Some cryptocurrencies meet this requirement, many don’t. Those that don’t get forked – a malicious party creates a fake transaction (to give them a bunch of buttcoin or whatever) and then piles on a bunch more authentic transactions overtop. If they do this at a higher rate and volume than the legitimate chain, it succeeds in authenticating the fake transaction.
That’s just one way to fake it. Blockchains are only as secure as their data streams allow. The Blockchain hype is just that – techbro hype about how this one weird trick will fix everything.
Sorry, I get grumpy about that stuff! Not your fault.
Do these guys seriously think that the only reason we pick guys is because we’re size queens? Because some of us are as unattracted to huge ones as we are to the lesser-endowed. And because at the end of the day, an average-sized guy who’s actually pleasant to be with is going to win out over assholes both large AND small of wang.
Also, I do NOT think I’ll be purchasing those X-ray spex of the future, even if I live long enough to see any such thing actually hit the market. The very prospect is so ludicrous that I’m doubled over in laughter. Or stomach cramps. (I’m not sure which.)
@Alan Robertshaw
I’m late, but wanted to chime in that your first comment was so funny it made me guffaw.
Thanks to everyone who said sensible things here.
Like it is the person who owns the penis who is important,
or that size obsession/anxiety is more of issue for men than women,
And that given the fact that most people fall into the average category the entire topic is kind of a tempest in a teapot anyway,
And finally too big is overrated and can be painful.
I’ve been thinking about male circumcision again, thanks to this thread, and it occurs to me that I don’t think I’ve ever met a circumcised penis. I mean, on some occasions, it was dark and things were moving pretty quickly (oh god accidental double entendre, sorry), but I’m fairly sure they’ve all been uncircumcised.
Perhaps because of this, I’m rather fond of the foreskin. It’s like a lil hoodie for the penis, or a wee gift wrap 🙂
Regarding Blockchain, particularly Bitcoin:
I seem to recall reading on Bruce Schneier’s blog that the Bitcoin system wasn’t actually as secure as the original people had thought; rather than being impossible to dominate unless you personally controlled half the Bitcoins ‘mined’, somebody came up with a method by which any consortium with control over a third of the field could effectively dictate the worth of the currency. And given that Bitcoin was deliberately set up to have a limited number of coins, all the easy ones have already been mined to the point where individuals really can’t accumulate much, and there have been botnets mining Bitcoin for years now… the currency is probably a lot more concentrated than most people think.
@Scildfreja:
In some ways, even worse than the techbros are the techbro hipsters who are already complaining that now that everybody’s talking about ‘blockchain’ it’s no longer the in thing. See also a fair bit of the reason why people started up other cryptocurrencies after Bitcoin took off.
@ jenora
I used to live in Hoxton. I bet I could re-introduce tally-sticks there, and people would bite my hand off to invest.
(In fairness, tally-sticks are pretty secure)
Women already have a device to tell whether or not a man is a jerk when they meet them…it’s called a brain.
@Alan:
Yeah, but tally-sticks aren’t tech-y enough for that crowd; a lot of them think technology can solve everything, even problems that don’t actually need solving. How about tally-sticks with E-ink markings so you can change what they read?
Granted, that does reduce the security some.
(Admittedly, one of the things I would like to see more of would be external storage devices with E-ink displays so you can effectively label them. Most of the ones that exist just do ‘how full is this drive’, though, not actual labels.)
It amazes me that incels worry about things that dont even matter. Like since they arent ever going to get laid, who cares about what women think of your penis size?
For the love of god, I mean, for fuck sake, why cant the incels get a grip of themselves and realise that sex and dating isnt the be all and end all of life?
As an undateable guy myself, a 25 year old virgin (I know…WHELPPPP, How do I cope?!!), heres what I did to improve my life;
1- Stopped watching porn
I know most people watch porn and that is normally OK, but for us undateable guys (the only thing I have in common with the incels), it is very very unhealthy. Its basically just fantasy, baseless fantasy of pleasure that is never going to happen, which turns into an obsession which is not good. I stopped masterbating 3 years ago, and it did me wonders!
2- Delete the dating apps
I found them to be unproductive and a waste of time, barely got any replies, I spent about 1 hour on them a day. After I deleted tinder/pof/OKCUIPD , I freed up more time to read about politics/play chess ect. Much more productive than getting rejected with no replies and feeling crap at the end of the hour you would normally spend on a dating app
3- Stop approaching women/flirting/asking them out
Just stop. Promise yourself you will never approach a woman as a potential date . Ever. I did that and it has kept me sane and happy. Dont get me wrong, women make up half the population and you still need to learn how to interact with them and fucking respect them (which incels dont). But you dont need to be attractive to women to live a happy fruitful life
And thats my advice for any angry bitter incels reading this (I am sure lots of them come on here and try and argue with you lot, painting themselves to be the victim). As an undateable virgin myself, I know firsthand there is so much more to life than dating and sex. Such as reading, walking, travelling, studying, playing sports ect.
Good luck to everyone
I watched it a couple of weeks ago. Laughing crying laughing crying.
@ jenora
I know this has been covered before, in fact I know a lot of regular commenters probably won’t bother because the horse is long dead, but 25 is not really all that old to be a virgin. Second, no one is really undateable. With so many people in this world, you think absolutely none of them are attracted to you? Maybe you’ll run into one, and maybe you won’t, but there’s a big difference between “I haven’t found one in a relatively short period of time” and “they don’t exist.” By all means, do what makes you happy and doesn’t hurt others, but I’m just tired of mostly young men claiming no one would ever want to date them.
The “men pretending to be feminists to get laid” reminds me of post here a few years back where some dude was suggesting just that. The gist was that since feminists are supposedly more sexually liberated, all you had to do is listen to them babble and agree in order to get into their pants. The hilarious part was that the guy gave a few “buzzwords” to listen for in order to spot an easy feminist target, and the example was “demisexual”.
@Uglyguy,
Hi! Welcome. Hello. I think you’re about to get a whole lot of pushback on your comments here, because you’re far from the first guy who’s washed up on our emerald shores with these saltwater words sputtering from their lips. Let me help pick you up, get you a towel, and let’s see if that barnacled rind of yours can be pried off.
See, there is a core problem with your arguments. They basically boil down to “I’m too ugly to date, and so are you incels, so here are tips for coping with it.” As is often the case, part of this is good and fine, and part of it is horrible and worrisome. “Tips for coping with datelessness” are fine as a general concept. I don’t even have a problem with opposing the instinct to pursue sex, I’m fine with that.
It’s your reason for pursuing those things that’s an issue. It’s the “I’m too ugly to date” that’s an issue. We’ve repeated this ad nauseam here before, but such is the labour we’ve chosen. Here it is again – claiming “I’m too ugly to date” is not a valid reason for avoiding dating.
There are lots of people who are conventionally ugly who are in long term relationships, who have regular sex, who have families and children. Because traditional beauty standards are largely bullshit that only act superficially, and are overridden for more fundamental personality evaluations as relationships deepen. As explanation, did you know that people rate as more attractive those they know and like compared to those they know and dislike?
Our sense of what “attractive” is shifts and moves according to our other emotions towards the person in question. If you walk up to someone out of the blue and interact with an intent to “get a date”, then of course you’ll get a negative reaction. Everyone gets that, not just not-conventionally-attractive people.
The most central thing here is that you’re offloading responsibility onto women. Your argument is “Women are too shallow to see past my appearance, so don’t bother trying.” And that’s bullshit.
(Notice how there’s no murder-society of incel women. Women have just as many troubles with romance and love, and experience tremendous pressure to conform to beauty standards that are impossible, and they somehow have avoided the seething pit of hate that some misogynistic men have slid into.)
As an aside – I’m glad that you’ve found your own path to peace. There’s nothing wrong with deciding that dating isn’t worth the effort for you, because it’s a lot of effort and it’s fine to decide that you’d rather put your energy into other things. Just don’t put it on women that you took that path. Women aren’t responsible for your lack of romance.
Okay I don’t quite agree with all you said, but the “stop pursuing” is sound advice.
Guys will often talk about how the second they have a girlfriend suddenly it seems like women are into them.
It’s because you’re not chasing any of them now. You’re actually relaxing and interacting with them like they’re just people, and you’re actually noticing the women who are attracted to you, instead of the ones YOU’RE attracted to.
Uglyguy,
Could you at least try and pretend you aren’t a sock for Feministguy? It’s really, really obvious.
I didn’t want to ring the o look it fguy again buzzer, even though it was ringing in my head. Not sure why I hesitate to. I knew you would though!
Ya know. I was thinking to myself that whtm has had a serious decline in the amount of trolls in the past 6 months. I was ALMOST missing some good chew toys.
But the old toys have a gross funk not worth chewing on; they seem to turn into an old, disgusting crusty sock.
I don’t need an app – it’s patently obvious from wrist size and canthal tilt. /s
@Alan:
*laughs* I remember that xkcd, yes.
I actually studied cryptography and network security back in University, and I used to follow Bruce Schneier’s blog fairly regularly.
I also agree with Schneier when he says that we have got to the point where we have cryptographic security systems that are, at their core, more than strong enough for the foreseeable future, where foreseeable includes ‘any computer that we can even theoretically design within the bounds of the laws of physics and information theory limits’.
The problem nowadays is almost always with the implementations and the connections around the security system. The strongest deadbolt isn’t useful if the doorframe is half-rotten. And I think this is one of the things that the biggest blockchain boosters refuse to understand.
This sort of thing is why Schneier branched out from actual cryptography into more general security system design, and why he’s gone into things like voting systems.