By David Futrelle
On Monday, I wrote about the gleeful reaction some commenters on the Incels.me forum had to news that one of the victims in Sunday’s mass shooting in Toronto was a ten-year-old girl.
Yesterday, I found a lengthy comment in the We Hunted the Mammoth moderation queue from a gentleman who thought that the “virtue signaling” commenters here were being too harsh towards the incels celebrating this girl’s death.
I didn’t let the comment through, but I thought I would share it here as a kind of extreme example of an argument a lot of people have been making about incels.
The would-be commenter, calling himself Skynet0225, began by accusing the commenters here of self-righteous cruelty:
Interesting responses on this subject, mostly by those who identify themselves as leftist on the political/social spectrum. A handicap I shed many years ago. The liberals of old would have sought to understand what could possibly drive a human being to express such shockingly hateful ideations. But they all died long ago I suppose, supplanted by the self righteousness of the modern SJW.
As you read the rest of his comment, you may notice just a teensy bit of self-righteousness from Mr. Skynet0225 himself.
Most of those spouting this nonsense, at least 95% are being extremely provocative to garner attention. They damn well know what they’re saying is disgusting, maybe even to themselves as the words escape their fingertips and into the great interube void. Raging silently they listen for an echo, either approbation or repudiation will suffice. Any human contact, repugnant hatred or a questioning curiosity will do.
There are several problems with this rather ancient “just kidding” argument, For one thing, I’m not quite sure there is much of a moral or practical distinction between someone who responds with glee to the news of a ten-year-old being murdered and someone who pretends to feel glee because he knows it will disturb people; in either case he is a moral monster and is making the world a worse place for everyone.
Second of all, these guys have been making these same arguments for years in forums mostly read by others who agree with them, none of whom are particularly shocked (or impressed) to see one of their compatriots say something like this. And many of the commenters I quote in these sorts of articles have posted hundreds or even thousands of comments to Incels.me and other forums. My guess is that very few of them can be considered trolls in any meaningful sense. This is quite likely what they honestly believe.
None of you have experienced life in their skin, but you see fit to pass judgement, which is not really surprising because that’s what most of you empty heads do 24/7.
Not true. Incels see themselves as special snowflakes of suffering, dealing with problems no one else has faced. But it’s not true. Hundreds of millions of people — including many of those commenting here — have deal with depression and anxiety bad enough to be diagnosed as such, and every single person who has ever lived has felt loneliness. I’ve been dealing with chronic, sometimes quite severe, depression and anxiety for most of my life; during one particularly bad year in grad school I felt so fragile and empty that any slightly awkward conversation would send me rushing home fighting back tears. Many of the commenters here — and many other people in my life — have dealt with worse.
Yes, most incels are dealing with serious shit. That does not excuse their abhorrent views.
Virtue signalling on cue, forever seeking the next oppressed class or cause to champion, no matter how banal or venal.
Feeling sad or angry about the murder of a ten-year-old isn’t “virtue signaling” nor is it “banal or venal.” It’s a basic human reaction to a genuine tragedy.
Which is not to say that some of these guys are not truly dangerous. They surely are, as I’ve little doubt that 5% are the pool that school shooters are drafted from, and some times monsters of an even worse nature.
I suspect it is quite a bit higher than 5%. Anyone who willingly steeps themselves in incel culture has the potential to turn violent. Some regulars on the forum brag about groping and otherwise assaulting random women. Already at least two men heavily influenced by incel culture have gone on mass killing sprees.
The weakest of their number are the most vulnerable, and the most dangerous. Seems to me that maybe reaching out to these guys would be the prudent course, the most humane to someone who as of yet has done no harm, but is a deeply wounded creature trying to make sense out of the world around them and experiencing ever diminishing results. You never know the power of a kind word, a voice from the darkness to hang on, that it will get better, maybe even a reference to someone who could help.
People have been “reaching out” to incels for years. They’ve invariably been met with hostility and sometimes harassment. One of the basic tenets of incel ideology is that nothing — not therapy, not medication, not even the most basic self-help techniques — can help incels at all. When the topic comes up on incel forums, the response is generally something like this comment, found on the Braincels subreddit:
A few have gone further; I ran across one commenter on the now-banned Incels subreddit who thought that “conning [incels] into “therapy” should also be a stoneable offense.”
Still others have argued against medication because in their mind it is “too fucking effective,” threatening “to turn even the most suicidally depressed men into tax contributing good goys [sic].”
This is a bad thing, this particular incel argued, because
Depression like all other state of minds has a purpose. It is meant to hurt, weaken, and ultimately kill you. Trimming the fat from society so to speak. It is in the benefit of all to let the weak and disabled die off.
Only a small fraction of incels are open to help, and none of them hang out on Icels.me. As for the rest, I honestly have no idea how to reach these people. If you know some magic way that allows you to somehow get past this huge mountain of toxic bullshit, by all means go ahead and minister to them. I’m going to devote my attention to others who are more open to, and frankly, more deserving of, help.
Perhaps not as satisfying as a good old fashioned public denouncement, but maybe more productive. Even humane.
Mr. Skynet0225, I eagerly await your forthcoming report on all the incels you have saved from themselves.
Surplus,
I didn’t suggest it was an ad. I said I (like you) didn’t see any image, and speculated that my ad or tracking blockers might be preventing it appearing (it’s possible an ad blocker could block something that’s not an ad, software doesn’t always perform exactly as, er, advertised).
@WWTH:
“There’s no image” is calling it like I see it. I don’t see how that’s rude, sorry. And the “hate to break it to you” part is because your intentions had evidently been thwarted, in that apparently you’d intended there to be an image there.
@KG:
Speculating that your ad blocker might be preventing it appearing is suggesting it was an ad, since that’s what ad blockers prevent from appearing, and ad blockers should be unable to have false positives, since there’s no mistaking the domain name of an ad server like Doubleclick for that of a normal image host like Tinypic.
@ surplus
I can’t walk across cattle grids; doesn’t make me a cow 🙂
Surplus,
Hate to break it to you, but the phrase “hate to break it to you” is always meant to convey condescension or contempt and it is always said with a sarcastic tone.
I was going to let it go, but since you’ve doubled down on this to others, I’m jumping in.
You’re acting like I’m an idiot who doesn’t know how to post an image. But other people, including myself did see the image. Which you don’t seem to grasp. I don’t think you have any bad intentions here, but the problem is, you’ve spent the whole thread universalizing your own experience. In your mind, it’s not that you can’t see the image, it’s that the image isn’t there. It’s not that you, personally feel isolated, it’s that it’s impossible to make friends or date unless you have money. I think you’re just failing to see that your experiences and perceptions are yours and yours alone. They are not everyone’s. It’s a common thing that men – particularly white men – do. It’s closely related to mansplaining.
I suggest rereading the thread and examining your responses to people here and really take in what other people are saying to you.
You are being very rude. Whether you want to see it or not.
Apparently, I was unclear earlier, despite my best efforts.
My browser did not give any indication to me that there was an image there. Not even one that it had been unable to download for whatever reason.
I didn’t even know you’d tried to post an image until later comments mentioned an image that I hadn’t seen.
I don’t see how I can explain this more clearly. It’s not that I knew there was supposed to be an image there but it was missing. Until the missing image was mentioned by other people, I didn’t know there was supposed to be an image there at all. And other people, not only myself, didn’t see an image.
With multiple people seeing an image, and multiple other people not seeing one, it seems odd to castigate one person for privileging one of these two views of reality whilst simultaneously privileging the other, let alone to suggest that it is tantamount to “mansplaining” for one of those people to have been initially unaware that anyone else was even seeing a different version of reality. Was it “mansplaining” (or any other kind of ‘splaining) on either yours or Kupo’s part that both of you initially thought it was obvious to everyone that there was an image there? If not, how is it different that I initially thought it was obvious that there wasn’t? The situation to me appears to be symmetrical. Rotate it 180 degrees, and KG and I switch roles with you and Kupo.
In any event, it is clear that the whole argument is a tempest in a tea-pot that’s starting to get blown way out of proportion for some reason. The website, which has been a bit wobbly for two months now, had one more glitch that will probably never be adequately explained. Time to draw a line under it and move on instead of having an acrimonious battle over who is or isn’t seeing what.
Okay, but I said there was an image. Saying something like “huh, it’s not showing up for me at all” would not be rude. “I hate to break it to you but it’s missing” is rude. I mean, like I said, I was going to let it go, but it’s pissing me off that you’re not listening to people who are saying your tone was rude and just fixating on whether or not people were seeing the image.
@Surplus
Every single post you have made on this thread (bar two short ones) has essentially been (or at least contained) “no, you’re wrong, allow me to explain exactly how wrong you are to you like you are a particularly stupid child”.
This is not a great tone to adopt if you wish to maintain friendly rapport with the other members of the thread. I would suggest listening to others and considering that, even though their comments may not reflect your exact experience, that they may actually be intelligent people who are speaking about things that they have put thought into. You can still disagree, sure, but maybe tone down the condescension a bit.
At that precise point, I thought you had attempted to upload an image, the upload had failed in some way without it being obvious to you that it had, and the image wasn’t showing up period, but you hadn’t noticed that yet. I was trying to inform you that the upload hadn’t worked. Is there a more polite way to alert someone to a failed upload? Or just a way you personally would prefer to be alerted to such a thing, should it happen in the future?
I am trying my best here …
@Catalpa:
That’s a two-way street. If I was overgeneralizing my experience in towns and smaller cities, then so were others overgeneralizing their experiences in larger cities, assuming that I would have ready access to {insert facility here} when I don’t — on top of which, that whole subtopic arose regarding the experiences of a third party, Dr. Thang, which means it’s hard to even be sure who else’s experience would be the closer match, the bigger-city side or mine. I don’t recall Dr. Thang specifying what size of town or city they resided in.
I’m sorry — what condescension? I don’t know which parts of what I said you find objectionable, so you’ll have to be more specific if I’m to know what you mean here. Unless you just mean the whole “saying my experience was different” bit, in which case we’re back to a symmetrical situation with inexplicably asymmetrical blame assignment, since everyone was saying their experiences were different.
It’s not about overgeneralizing your experience. People generally speak from their experience, because that’s what they know best. People offer advice about solutions that have either worked for them or that they assume could possibly work for them given a certain assumption about available resources.
That isn’t a problem unless people assume that their solutions will 100% work all the time for all situations. This generally is not how advice is offered, it’s more of a “hey, this thing might possibly be helpful!” not “You, specifically, should definitely do this thing.”
Responding to good-faith advice with “oh yeah well you didn’t think about X, Y, and Z! Because of X, Y, and Z your advice is completely worthless and also classist and you should feel bad! Educate yourself, you ignorant pleb! Everything is hopeless and there’s no point in even trying!” is… shitty. You’re lashing out at people who are trying to be helpful and you’re engendering bad feelings all around.
And the fact that you’re unable to identify your use of condescension gives me little hope in being able to get through to you. But sure, I’ll give it a try. Here, let’s go on a condescension adventure, I’ll try to grab a few highlights just from this thread alone (this pattern of behavior hasn’t been restricted just to this thread, though you’ve been particularly indulgent in it here):
You could note that other people aside from WWTH (e.g. Kupo) could apparently see the image, as they referenced that image as being present, and go “I’m not seeing any image on my end” rather than “the image isn’t there.”
And perhaps “could you try reposting the image using [directions here] or describe the image for those who can’t see it?” Instead of “hey, you should do x, y, and z, and you should never do [thing that I assume you did and which is very wrong for reasons I am going to go into excruciating detail about]”, if you want to add more to the discussion beyond a heads up that the image is invisible to you.
@Catalpa
You have way more patience than I.
I mean…
Did you not actually read my post?
@Catalpa:
Except I never wrote that. Paraphrasing what I did write could be fair, but I don’t think that qualifies as paraphrasing; more like caricaturing, in which one exaggerates something to the point of making it extreme. And the result of doing that is invariably going to be worthy of harsh criticism, independently of whether the original was.
For example: please point to one single place where I said anyone should feel bad. One single place. It doesn’t even need to have had an exclamation point after the “bad”.
OK, I admit that’s a bit snarky and sarcastic … but it was aimed at a specific Meetup group, not at any commenter here. Most of the others with some snark were aimed at generic advice that has struck me as unhelpful and/or classist in the past, not at any specific instance or its utterer (save Dr. Nerdlove, who is not to my knowledge a commenter here), including the initial remark about self-improvement advice in general tending to cost money to implement.
It’s condescending to assume that not everyone knows some fairly technical things that, well, not everyone knows? Well that puts me in a bind. If I explain the technical thing, I’m condescending. If I don’t, then my argument doesn’t make sense to the subset of people reading it who lack the technical information in question.
Please tell me, then, how I should have conveyed “if one wishes to embed an advertisement to reference it for criticism or commentary, embedding the link won’t generally work well because the ad at the link will change over time and for different viewers, so it is better to take a screenshot and embed that instead”? Or are you saying I shouldn’t have conveyed that at all — in which case you’re saying I shouldn’t have offered the best working theory at the time for why an image didn’t embed correctly so that everyone could view it, and how to fix it to make it work for everyone? (If that theory had panned out the problem would have been fixed. Does that mean attempting to fix problems isn’t allowed, because someone who already knew a technical fact that not everyone knows might get ruffled feathers at having that technical fact summarized for an audience they happen to be in? I really am not getting how to navigate this particular social minefield, other than “ignore the problem and hope someone else figures it out and fixes it”, which means not trying to be helpful, even when I think I might be able to be of service…)
Same as above. Not everyone knows the under the hood of how ad blockers work, and that since nearly all ads are served from the domains owned by advertising middlemen while all non-ad content is served from a non-overlapping set of domains, ad blockers work by blocking the domains advertising middlemen serve nothing-but-ads from and letting everything else through, save some small number of rules here and there that exclude first-party ads by blocking directories at some sites that they serve their own ads from while letting the rest of the site through. The same thing applies there in a microcosm: those ads are served from distinct file directories, often site/images/ads/file.jpg or something else with a “/ads/” in it. The non-ad stuff on such a site obviously gets stored elsewhere.
But not everyone knows this, and KG in particular appeared to believe that ad blockers had significant rates of false positives, and therefore appeared not to know this. Is there some other way you would have explained to KG why false positives were extremely unlikely? Or again would you have just let KG continue in a false belief that resulted in them blaming their ad blocker for something that is almost certainly not its fault? It’s more important not to risk hurting KG’s feelings than to alert them that something they believe and perhaps base decision on is probably wrong? What would you do in the equivalent situation?
I did not know that Kupo could see the image yet, at that time. What I knew about Kupo’s state of mind at that time was that Kupo knew that WWTH had attempted to upload an image and that something had gone wrong, since Kupo described that little text fragment I’d quoted as a known result of a known WordPress bug when embedding images. The obvious supposition at that point, on the data available then, was still that the site was only presenting one face to the world, with no image in that spot, but WWTH knew she’d intended there to be an image there and Kupo had spotted the symptoms of a known WordPress bug from which fact she had inferred the same thing. Only later did anyone state that they did, in fact, see an image there.
The site also happened to have paginated the thread between the image-attempt and the discussion that ensued, so there was nothing odd about nobody having scrolled up and seen whether the image was actually there or missing, and instead just assuming it was there.
The simpler explanation was that the image was just plain missing, the pagination had caused this not to be noticed yet by anyone who knew there was supposed to be one there, and Kupo knowing there was supposed to be one there was by inference from other symptoms of a known WordPress image-embedding bug. Why would it ever have occurred to me, until after someone said explicitly that they saw the image there, that the site was doing something much stranger by actually showing wildly different versions of the same comment to different people? There must be a million failed uploads for every instance of a site showing different viewers of the same comment massively different versions of it. Even since the bugfest that started here a couple of months ago, the inconsistencies that show up have been comments showing up after differing delays for different people, but when a comment has shown up it normally still is identical for every viewer. Until that one.
So, it is condescending of me to not assume that the site has done something unprecedented when there’s a much more commonplace explanation for the data on the ground? When I hear hoofbeats, I should assume zebras before horses and assuming horses until I see the stripes is considered to be very rude?
This is just plain mystifying. I don’t suppose I will ever get the hang of communicating anything without any possibility of inadvertently giving offense. Apparently any indication that one a) isn’t seeing the same thing as someone else, and b) isn’t aware that they aren’t seeing the same thing, constitutes rudeness (at a level warranting the adverb “very”, no less), even when there is every reason to expect everyone to be seeing the same thing in that instance.
The worst part of that being, there’s no way to know when that is happening until after the fact. In this case, by the time I knew it wasn’t a simple failed upload attempt it was too late and the “hate to break it to you” had already been misinterpreted as something other than a sincere “sorry that your upload failed and that you’ll consequently have the frustration and tedium of doing the same work twice that you should only have had to do once”. It seems that your set of politeness rules is impossible to guarantee not violating without use of a time machine … but I’m open to any suggestions as to how I might be wrong about that.
… Yeah, I figured that the response to any quotes provided upon your request for them would be met with more “no no no no you’re completely wrong allow me to explain your mistake in depth”. But I decided I would give it a try anyway, I guess since I’m a glutton for punishment.
Fine, whatever, keep on doing your “I’m the most intelligent and informed and cynical person here and I must make sure everyone knows it! My advice about fixing the site must be taken as gospel truth and anyone else’s advice must be shot down with extreme prejudice!” dick-waving routine (no, I’m not saying that you’re a dude with this phrase). I hope it brings you joy. Just don’t expect it to win you friends.
http://gifimage.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Oh-Really-GIF-Image-for-Whatsapp-and-Facebook-10.gif
@Catalpa:
I asked you explicitly how you would rephrase several things, or otherwise what you would do instead in the same situations … I got two such suggestions that both made incorrect assumptions about my state of knowledge (one, that I knew people were seeing wholly different versions of a comment sooner than when I knew that, and the other that I knew that the problem wasn’t an ad blocker sooner than when I knew that). I tried to explain as much, but all I got back was a cartoon caricature of what I’d actually said, and criticism of that caricature.
So I made a more detailed comment with more detailed questions about several more things, and I hoped maybe I’d receive constructive responses to those questions, but no, it’s just more hyperbole and caricature that doesn’t address one single word that I actually wrote.
I give up.
I don’t know what you want me to do.
But I’m through attempting to explain my point of view when it doesn’t seem to make any difference to you. Apparently, what I saw or knew and when I saw it or knew it is irrelevant; I’m automatically wrong no matter what. I should have known things at times when I could not possibly have known them yet, and acted accordingly. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for existing. I’m sorry for having an ASD that causes me to sometimes need social things explaining to me that people assume are obvious and incontrovertible. I’m sorry that people find it tedious to have to explain these things to me instead of my having been born knowing them like almost everybody else apparently was. I’m sorry that those explanations often don’t end up working because they rely on more assumed social knowledge that I don’t have. I’m sorry that I can’t tell you what you’re wrongly assuming I know, because I don’t know what it is, and I’m sorry that I don’t know that information either. I’m sorry for not apparently being able to measure up to some set of expectations the details of which have not even been made clear to me. I’m sorry for attempting to help explain a possible solution to a technical problem, because apparently explaining anything technical is rude if anyone in the audience happens to already know the technical information in question, even if it seemed fair and sensible of me to assume that not everyone in it did. I’m sorry that I ever participated in this stupid thread — if I’d known it would somehow turn into a major blow-up I wouldn’t have bothered. I’m sorry that I try, because apparently me trying is a waste of effort, the outcome is a foregone conclusion anyway and that’s that people will get angry at me and lash out at me in unpredictable-to-me circumstances. I’m sorry that I somehow wound up on this social minefield of a planet without a decent map, and I’m sorry that I asked to look at your copy. I’m sorry.
And I’m bowing out of this thread now because I see no evidence that my continuing to participate in it will result in any useful new information being conveyed in either direction. It’s showing clear signs of zero marginal returns at this point.
I… Can’t… Even.
For future reference, if you wish for people to continue to spend hours dissecting everything you wrote and pointing out exactly the bits that are raising hackles, then I suggest you do not respond to their initial posts doing just that with “no, that advice is wrong, no, that advice is also wrong, your interpretation is wrong and your delivery of the advice is wrong”. It doesn’t tend to make people inclined to waste their time when all you seem to be interested in doing is poking holes in everyone else’s contributions. It gives off the impression that you’re not interested in learning, just that you want to beat people into submission with your superior analysis and make them admit they were wrong for ever criticizing you, because x, y, and z.
Of course, this advice will also be ignored because I made a “caricature” of what you said in this post and because trying to clearly illustrate the way in which you are coming across to others in a concise way is apparently some kind of fallacy.
For what it’s worth, Surplus, I stayed away from contributing advice here because you bit my head off in a previous thread for offering sympathy over election results, and I felt really stupid and awkward for having tried. You might have felt justified (I can be a real dork and have a talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time), but I don’t think you were aware how much that hurt me.
It’s a little like blocking in improv, which is a no-no. No one is saying you always have to accept other people’s version of reality, but you do have a habit of reflexively shutting down well-meaning suggestions by catastrophizing. Any advice will look foolish when held to the standard of the worst outcome. It starts to feel like that story where the guy falls out of the airplane, but fortunately he has a parachute, but unfortunately it fails to open, but fortunately there’s a haystack, but unfortunately there’s a pitchfork sticking out of it, etc. etc. You always seem to have an “unfortunately” rebuttal handy when others offer advice/sympathy, in a gotcha way that makes them feel ashamed for not taking that exact scenario into account. It makes it hard to know how to help you. You know that annoying thing incels do when they angrily tell normies to shove their useless advice because it’s their jaw angle holding them back? Please don’t fall into that trap.
I know your situation is difficult, but sometimes it feels like you’re taking out your anger at the world on us. We’re all on the same side here. Lots of us struggle to navigate the social world without a map, even (or especially) as adults. I appreciate all the stories and ideas that get shared here. There are many regular commenters and lurkers at WHTM who might find useful tidbits in the crowdsourced advice given in this thread. Meetup may not work for you, but it just might be a lifesaver for someone else. An image may not appear on your screen, but maybe don’t automatically assume it’s because the other person did something wrong.
Surplus, that’s your choice, but given that people have noticed this as a long term pattern of behavior, the chances are high that this issue will come up again later. Pretending a conflict never happened and failing to learn from it never actually ends the conflict. Just puts it off till later.
Again, you should reread this entire thread carefully. Lots of people have given some good advice about communicating more effectively. With the easiest, simplest advice boiling down to actually listening to people. That’s self improvement is 100% free. Anyone can do it.