[UPDATED with name of shooter]
By David Futrelle
Last night, a young man opened fire on people enjoying a night out in Toronto’s Greektown neighborhood. Numerous people were hit; two of his victims died — an 18-year-old woman and a 10-ear-old girl.
The shooter, identified as 29-year-old Toronto resident Faisal Hussain, was found dead shortly after a gunfight with police; it’s not clear if he was killed by the police or if he took his own life.
As of yet, we don’t know the shooter’s motive, but given his choice of targets — people out socializing on a summer night in a neighborhood known for its many restaurants — it’s hard not to wonder if he was inspired by the incel van attack that killed ten pedestrians and injured many more on a busy street in Toronto in April.
On the Incels.me message board — where many have made heroes of incel mass killers like Elliot Rodger and the Toronto van killer — some of the regulars are openly celebrating the shooting, with some taking special pleasure in the death of the ten-year-old girl.
Someone called /pol/cel, with more than 1499 comments to his name on the site, kicked off the celebration by declaring how glad he was that the shooting took place in Toronto:
“IT” is a reference to the IncelTears subreddit. devoted to mocking incels.
After one commenter took offense at /pol/cel’s glee over the murders, prolific Incels.me commenter Getlooksordie took the discussion into an even darker direction:
And things got worse from there, with much of the rest of the discussion centered around the alleged crimes-against-inceldom committed by the murdered “8 year old girl” (who was actually ten).
Somehow the discussion managed to get even more grotesque.
While a few commenters pushed back against the celebration of the murders, or simply dismissed their comments as the work of “edge lords,” the regulars who weren’t giddily joking about the murdered ten-year-old were much more worked up about one commenter who referred to the shooting as taking place in “America.”
These are men who insist they are “involuntarily celibate” — yet who are choosing of their own volition to be such utterly reprehensible human beings that no decent person of any gender would want to have anything to do with them.
Brain bleach
(All from the itty bitty kitty committee)
These people, among others, are gradually making my concept of religion more punitive. I really would like for there to be a literal hell for them to go to.
I don’t think they are trying to make sense anymore. A child should die because they might have sex someday? A woman should die because of what penis goes/doesn’t go in her vagina? (I realize not all sex is P in V, but usually that’s usually what these guys are talking about ) Every woman is either an evil feminist or a “roastie” and therefore should be killed? These guys just want excuses to kill women, it is only a matter of time before they commit more hate crimes.
And when they do the powers that be will just dismiss then as “mentally unstable” and a “lone wolf” when we all know they’re perfectly sane and part of large community that supports and encourages their behavior.
@Z&T
“Don’t they know how many dad’s take off?”
Isn’t that what they call going their own way?
@Z&T, I am raising a glass to your mum. I am so sorry for your loss. She did some good in the world, clearly raised you right.
@Z &T
Reading on another blog, a tangential comment made me start reading and researching about the attitudes toward single motherhood. I was no more than 20 search results in on the first search terms before I ran into incel videos on this very topic. I was braced for ugly knowing just what the general attitudes about single mothers is but I persevered. Initial impression? Attitudes haven’t changed as much as we think. Single mothers may be one of the few groups left it is ok to hate. Which is very odd, because in my anecdata and observation and experience their kids really love them. Your post ended up being my brain bleach Z&T. Thank you.
Because with the topic of the post? I just can’t even.
I hope that these dudes meet the same fates that they wish upon others. (If they’re really “just joking” about it, then I’m not wishing any harm upon them now am I?) That’s the most civil thing that I can say about this topic.
@Rabid Rabbit:
Probably he’ll sigh and croak something about how this is what happens when women don’t clean men’s rooms and make sammitches for them, or something equally irrelevant.
Honestly, I could wait forever to hear another droning dipshit monologue out of him.
If it were any other context, the phrase “The mother was probably just giving her oral instructions on how to please all the school kid chads” would make me laugh. “Oral instructions” just means instructions that are spoken. It doesn’t convey what it’s supposed to mean and the intended meaning is absurd.
But thinking that grief over an actual child’s death is something to be laughed at? FFS.
I vote that we build a large rocket, tell the incels it’s going to Mars and that they’ve been chosen as the first wave of colonists.
Then we just shoot it into deep space.
Also, this is one of those days where I wish the world were flat so I could push people over the edge…
Turns out the Toronto shooter has been identified as a Pakistani-Canadian whose family immigrated when he was a child, and whose attack authorities and family members are linking to his lifelong severe mental illness.
So stand by to watch the alt-right misogynists do a 180 from gleeful cackling over mass murder, especially of women and girls, to self-righteous outrage over the “violent tendencies” of “Muslim animals”, especially against women and girls. (They’ll still be holding feminism ultimately responsible, though, because of course they will.)
If these incel forums aren’t on a terrorism watchlist they should be. It’s radicalizing and normalizing terrorism against women.
Every single one of these scum celebrating a child’s death has just exposed themselves as wannabe child murderers.
Just when I thought they couldn’t get any worse.
I can’t even either. I suppose we’ll find out what ” lifelong severe mental illness” is soon enough. Sadly, the very few murders genuinely attributable to mental illness tend to be hidiously memorable, which makes things harder for all the gazillion harmless people with mental illnesses.
We need more brain bleach. I hope it works with gifs too
Unfortunately terrorism against women has been normalized for thousands of years
Reading the evil thoughts of these men make Auschwitz, Year Zero, Kosovo and Rwanda more comprehensible. This is what men are capable of and I say that as a man. Fuck that’s depressing.
So, they believe girls cannot be bullied at school?
TRIGGER WARNING seual violence
As a 12-year-old girl, I was bullied at school. They called me a slut, punched my (hardly existing) boobs, touched my butt and made my life a living hell. I was a shy, mousy girl and I just wanted to be left alone. I got PTSD because o them.
END of TRIGGER WARNING
This is horrifying.
And I’m sure that if they were called out publicly many of these guys would say it’s just edgy humour, but that’s such bullshit. Putting lol or hahahahahahaha at the end of hateful comments about the murder of a ten year old girl doesn’t make those comments any less abhorrent than if they end their comments with ‘I’m serious’. They are still comments ceebrating the murder of a child, whether that comment is said with a smirk or a scowl.
Also I I was bullied at school, only because I was not interested to interact with boys ant to become a desperate housewife like my mother. After school, I understood being lesbian. It was horrible and only now here in Italy people tells about bullying, expecially homophobic bullying.
@ Alexis Filth;
Nope…
Why not?
(emphasis mine)
E.T.A., (/s), in case that didn’t come across….
At the risk of appearing cynical, most definitions of terrorism have the element that the violence is to bring about political or societal change.
These guys/white supremacists etc are fighting to prevent change and keep things as they are.
ETA: Hmm, that’s a lot of italics.
*sigh* As if this recent spate of violence hasn’t been hideous enough, now we have the usual suspects rubbing their hands gleefully at my fellow Torontonians’ sorrow. You know, it’d be nice if my city made international headlines for reasons not related to mass murder or crack mayors every so often.
I never thought I’d say this, but TIFF can’t get here soon enough.
@Rabid Rabbit
I don’t think Tory’s an idiot; he strikes me as more a walking, talking balance fallacy and overall mealy-mouthed squish. Although him blowing the 2007 provincial election with his stupid faith-based schools funding nonsense was admittedly pretty dumb.
I’ll give him credit for aiming the discussion of prevention in the proper direction (handguns), but acquiescing to the demands of “moar copz!” is classic Tory-esque squishiness. Him and Saunders were made for each other. But digressions aside, I think this incident makes for a compelling case for re-instituting some of the firearm regulations that were dismantled during the Harper regime and toughening restrictions on handguns, if not banning them outright. Unlike in the US, “self-defense” against people is not an accepted rationale for firearm ownership in this country (which incidentally makes the acquittal in the Colton Boushie case all the more baffling). Handguns make for lousy hunting weapons, nor do they make good wilderness protection, so beyond target shooting, I see no purpose to owning one that isn’t nefarious. I say get ’em out of town; they’ve done too much damage and it’ll remove a key source of potential weapons for criminals to steal.
At the same time, we need to address the illegal firearms making their way here from the US. That’s going to be the real challenge, as the sheer volume of weaponry floating around south of the border makes it that much harder to track them.
Naturally, the long-term solution involves broader societal change in regards in our day-to-day interactions with people both online and in meatspace, but reducing the number of firearms will at least start to address the problem.
I’ll add my own distinctly Torontonian brain bleach with this adorable picture of the fugitive High Park capybaras and their pups:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/capybara-babies-1.4037436
https://www.toronto.com/community-story/7386425-high-park-zoo-capybara-babies-named-after-rush-s-alex-geddy-and-neil/
@happy cat. Apparently so? I’m sorry that happened to you. I was bullied in school, too. In my case they never crossed the line into molesting my body sexually, but I was tripped and spat on by boys, and regularly mocked for my social awkwardness and for my appearance (thick glasses, “unfashionable” clothes, and I was a “late bloomer” to boot).
These guys celebrating the murders… they’re the worst humanity has to offer. I really don’t understand how some people get to be so hateful. I can understand carrying pain around because you were bullied, but I can’t understand twisting it around and becoming a hateful asshole yourself.
Yeah, the echo-chamber effect is stronger the further the community is from the mainstream in the first place. If you’ve got a group of 30000 people on a forum all posting the same stuff, it SEEMS like the group’s position is really popular. But that doesn’t take into a account that, even if you limit the forum to just North America, you’re looking at less than 1 percent of 1 percent of the total population. Pre-internet, these guys would’ve all been just the local crackpot–the only guy in town who thinks like they do; even in a large city, you’d have no more than 100 of them in the area–and would’ve at least been forced to account for the fact that no one they knew seems to agree with them.
Now they can reinforce one another, constantly pushing the bar higher and higher.
Think of it more as attempting to force a course-change, rather than change-as-such and it becomes a bit more clear that they still fit the definition. They can see that society is slowly, painfully dragging away from what they believe the ideal past was (it never was like that, of course, but that’s a separate delusion). So they want to force society to stop getting better. (And in some cases, they do want change, going back to ‘the good old days’.)