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
Volunteering costs nothing and is rewarding in itself; in big cities there are urban explorers groups for all ages and physical capacities that are either free or only charge a nominal fee; and so on.
And Violet is right: basic grooming costs next to nothing in terms of time and money. I have the fashion sense of a near-sighted perriwinkle and I don’t care much about what other people wear, but even I will balk at dirty/smelly clothes. However if the person is clean, that’s good enough for me.
Mr. Skynet is just vice-signaling to the other shitlords.
And here we have the right-wing power fantasy in a nutshell. Prescribe a set of behaviors that you get to aggressively police, but don’t have to abide by yourself.
How about no.
I highly doubt this guy ever had this “handicap”. Empathy and common decency aren’t childish fads to be put aside once you turn 18 and have a rough encounter or two with the world. If it’s that easy to ditch compassion, you never had it to begin with.
This is as transparently fake as the #WalkAway campaign. If right wingers want to pretend to be something they’re not more convincingly, they’re going to have to develop some of that walk-a-mile empathy that they think the left wing is so lacking in. Yeesh, the right wing is terrible at believably imitating others. Terrible at satire, terrible at writing characters, terrible at acting. It comes from deep contempt for others and not believing that other people are truly human.
Anyway, it isn’t empathy they want. It’s deference. So: remind me again why we should all kowtow to people who gleefully celebrate the murder of children and regularly issue terroristic demands?
I haven’t had a sexual relationship since I was 30 and am now 53. I have had sex once in that time as I don’t like casual encounters and was not meeting anyone to partner with.
In my 30s and half of my 40s I very much wanted to be in a sexual relationship. Never met anyone in that time with whom it was mutual (apart from that one time, which was a disaster!).
This dropped off sharply after 45. Having cancer pretty much sealed it – I have lost a breast and have a lot of large scars. I already have trust issues as it is.
I can honestly say I am OK about it. I would have loved to have had more sex when I was younger, but now am not prepared to do ANYTHING that might mean I could!
@Passagère clandestine:
And outside of big cities (even in cities that just aren’t big ones), you’re apparently SOL.
This arose in the context of Dr. Nerdlove’s grooming advice, which went far beyond “shower before you go out and put on clean clothes” (aka the obvious — don’t all civilized people do this?) and appeared to possibly have been ghostwritten by the cosmetics for men manufacturing industry association, if there is such an association, for all that it amounted to “pleeeease spend thousands of dollars a year on all these different little bottles of stuff some of which have price densities higher than gold bullion, pleeease?” Methinks some marketing departments are desperate to raise the amount one half of the population is expected to spend on this shit to equal the amount the other half already was expected to spend. I suppose that might count as a victory for gender equality, if they succeed … a Pyrrhic one.
(attempt #2: something is interfering with submitting comments)
There are volunteer opportunities in small towns too. My little town has a food pantry, a women’s shelter, a humane society, a Friends of the Library, more churches than you can shake a stick at, and probably some other stuff that I can’t think of right now.
Speaking of public libraries, pretty much all of them host free events. Check your local library’s schedule, and if you don’t see something you would like, ask a staff member about hosting a new program.
Distastefully self-righteous…
but what the hell, I’ll bite. Reduced to digital level, us-them level, the difference between the “leftists” and the right is summed up admirably in Skynet0225’s quote:
Is there supposed to be something wrong with supporting oppressed people? Is there a “threshold” below which someone’s oppression is “not worth fighting against”??
One side of this us-them struggle wants to end the oppression of people who are vulnerable… the other side wants half the population killed or exiled.
In the immortal words of Florence Reese, “Which Side Are You On“??
@Buttercup
Thank you for articulating this so succinctly.
Also this:
No, Skynet0225, I (as well as many others) am not willing to break out the kid-gloves and sugar-coating for people who willingly sexualize a 10-year-old girl in order to justify her violent murder.
Lead gloves with spikes and Ajax-coating would more appropriate, but still won’t help because incels choose to stew in their toxic ideas instead of getting out and getting help. So guess what, incels? You only have yourselves to blame for your misery.
@ surplus
I live in a big city, so that’s my experience :-). But as MrsObedMarsh said, there are many opportunities for various activities in small towns too, and specifically public libraries: with the advent of ebooks they now do their best to propose various cultural events in order to remain attractive.
I realise that now, sorry. Well, being a snappy dresser helps to a certain extent, but it’s not a prerequisite for many persons. And personally I will not be attracted to a dandy because I have other interests (he probably won’t find me very attractive as well TBH).
Regarding basic grooming like showering and clean clothes:
This is in no way obvious to some people.
I overheard this in the lecture hall before a lecture. Both students are male.
S1: Man, you stink! Do you ever shower?!
S2: I showered this morning!
S1: Well, that’s fucking useless if you don’t wash your clothes as well, you donkey!
And last year, when I was in the psychiatric day clinic, there was a patient who’s BO was on ‘Foul Ole Ron’ levels.
A friend of mine is a middle school teacher and most of her students come from deprived backgrounds. She gives hygiene lessons. Like ‘Deodorant does not replace showering. Spray only once!’.
There’s lots of reasons, but basic grooming skills are not obvious to everyone.
Hey, it worked for Cassie Jaye.
I do actually think there are people who grow up as conservative, have a brief fling with progressivism in college, and then go back to conservatism later on. I do doubt these people are all that serious about their progressive views and actually are doing the virtue signalling they think we all do.
On the dating advice thing being classist, I suppose most mainstream advice is. To me, if you want to meet people, no matter what your class is, one of the best things to do is befriend on or two social butterfly types who will invite you to various social gatherings. Before the internet, people met people to date through mutual friends. That includes poor people. People who can’t afford to go out tend to hang out with a group of people at someone’s home.
I don’t think dating advice or self help for low income people is relevant specifically to incels or anyone else in the manosphere though. As much as they all feign sympathy for poor and downtrodden men, they pretty clearly aren’t in that group themselves. This is why coal miner is the only occupation for working class men they can ever think of. This is why think women don’t work and are all pampered bonbon eating housewives. This is why even the face of working class MRAs, Dean Esmay, didn’t know what stop and frisk was and this is why the manosphere has such a techbro libertarian bent. Don’t get me wrong, poor men can be plenty misogynistic too. But they don’t tend to feel personally attacked and oppressed by SJWs on Twitter and Tumblr and they don’t constantly spout Ayn Randian “philosophy.” Those are things privileged men do. Also, keep in mind that neither of the two known incel mass murderers were poor. Money was not why those two didn’t date.
This.
Oh, and another way to meet people is to get politically active. Go to the party meetings of whatever political party in your area matches up best with your views and sign up for any volunteering opportunities they have. Being politically active can cost no more than transportation costs. This can be a good way to make that social butterfly friend that I mentioned. Nothing causes an instabond like doing something political with like minded people.
Off topic, but can anyone confirm that YouTube finally kicked off Alex Jones/InfoWars? I’m seeing that news on my twitter feed…
These are the people who think “do-gooder” is an insult.
It never even occurs to them that doing good is actually a good thing.
God, that “facial bone structure” bit gets me every time. What a foolish, easily disprovable article of faith among incels that justifies them just stewing in their hate and doing nothing about it forever.
Okay, this post merits an essay response, because I absolutely loath this idea wrapped up in that phrase godawful phrase “virtue signalling”. MrsObedMarsh linked the Hbomberguy video which is perfect in teasing apart that phrase. But to take it a step further, it actually links back up with a broader trend I’ve seen surrounding the discourse of emancipatory movements and the definitional drift. What I’ve noticed in a lot of these guys (and you can tell from his handle of “Skynet” and the concept of the “Red Pill”) that they have a fatalistic nihilism about the world around us as some kind of Nietzchian hellscape that only they have really come to understand and the rest of us either deny or pretend to fight simply to make those that “understand” it feel bad about themselves. They cannot fathom that there’s actually a group of people out there that altruistically fights for the emancipation of others, hence the “virtue signalling” canard. They’ve convinced themselves that the only reason that people have to bring up the struggles of any minority group is to heap personal shame upon them personally (because they’re the only ones that matter). Their caricature of the SJW is somebody that doesn’t actually care about other people, but only adopt the labels of “feminist” or “ally” because it’s trendy and to get pats on the back while retweeting Buzzfeed articles. While those people exist and are obnoxious, Buzzfeed is not the end-all/be-all of minority activism, and yet the “virtue signalling” concept only works if every single call for action was as shallow as a Buzzfeed listicle. And in order to preserve their own self-image, they have to believe that’s the case.
But these guys, they know real suffering. They know how evil and cruel humanity really is. They’ve seen the face of human suffering, and it is… a conventionally attractive woman holding hands with a conventionally attractive guy in their presence. Stop the presses, we have the real sob story here, folks!
To sum up, a lot of the internet jackassery I’ve seen is in service of crafting narratives around the worst instincts of people that both justify them and dismiss opposition. Their misanthropy is a function of their “understanding” how Darwinian the world is. Their violence is their assertion of “manhood.” And anyone saying anything contrary to that is just a virtue signalling SJW that doesn’t actually care about the people they claim to care about because Buzzfeed.
Trump supporters have this down to an art form.
Sort of orthagonal to the discussion, but IIRC I first saw “virtue-signaling*” used as a term in left-wing forums, to describe hypocrisy, being a fake ally for cookies, etc. The right wing seem to have picked it up, but throw it around a lot more, seemingly convinced that *anyone* talking-the-talk can’t really be walking-the-walk (and if they are, well it just proves how far they’re willing to take the deception.)
*Same goes for SJW, which originally seems to have described a combination of keyboard warrior/Monday-morning quarterback , and someone who embraces a cause mainly just as an excuse to fight
Off topic, but those of us who thought Stormy Daniels’ arrest in Columbus was a political hit were 100% correct.
http://thefayetteadvocate.com/2018/07/25/whistleblower-provides-emails-that-show-stormy-daniels-arrest-was-pre-planned/
Incredibly disturbing but not surprising that police are willing to act as Trump’s personal enforcers. I hope they sue the pants of the police department and there is political fallout for them wasting Columbus taxpayer money like this.
Just as a kinda-sorta OT aside, I had a conversation with my obnoxious gamer coworker “Dan” that I think is quite illuminating for that mindset. For one, he name-dropped Philip DeFranco, who I don’t watch, but I understand is one of those pedantic “what about racism against wypipo?!” dipshits. If that’s the case, I think that’s the source of a lot of these ideas he’s been babbling about.
Case in point: he’s mentioned on multiple occasions that “black people can be just as racist as white people” and brought up examples of randos on Twitter saying “White people aren’t allowed to talk about race” and not being as excoriated as white people that say something terrible about a minority group. I say “sure, that’s racist, but there’s a whole history of oppression that white Europeans inflicted on Africans and the aboriginal people that they’re uniquely qualified to talk about.”
His response was telling. He said “Just substitute the word ‘white’ for ‘black’. If a white person said that, their life would be over!”
Much like the character Stephen Colbert played that “didn’t see race,” the idea of these “colour-blind” people who just toss context out the window and think “Racism is bad. Therefore somebody making a racial generalization in service of minority voices is bad and all I gotta do is just switch up the races to reveal a double standard and checkmate racist!” It’s a very lazy and very obnoxious flatting of history that only white people do, white people who often claim to be “centrists.” It’s often accompanied by “these progressives calling everyone Nazis are just as bad as these Trump supporters calling everyone SJWs!” It’s a great way to smugly portray yourself as above these petty political slap-fights and cultivate an audience that wants to portray themselves as enlightened on the internet.
Ironically, Dan thinks SJWs exist and Anita Sarkeesian is the prototype.
I bring this up because I’m settling on this as the foundational seed that the rest of the awfulness springs from. Neither Dan nor Philip DeFranco may become Richard Spencer, but they don’t need to be to stymie the efforts of cultural change. Dan’s already revealed himself to have internalized GamerGate talking points and he has no problem justifying inaction due to perceived racism on the part of activists. A whole culture of Dans is how the status quo is maintained. And that’s a scary thought.
I’ve also noticed that a lot of these alt-light and alt-right talkers… they don’t talk a lot about their personal lives. I don’t mean like exposing themselves online, but if you look at a Philip DeFranco or a Carl Benjamin… the closest they come to something personal about themselves is an unboxing video or trying some product and talking about it in a vlog. They don’t actually relate a personal story about an activity they do or a family member has done. Seemingly all they do all day is read stories other people write and react to them. And sometimes play video games, but even that is spoken about only in hyper-competitive or clinical ways. There’s never a personal connection to them. Dan does this too when he tries to convince me to play League of Legends. He says “You’d be really good at it if you like realtime strategy games!” My response is “I don’t, really. I played StarCraft and Command and Conquer because I liked the stories.” Which is true; the achievement system and these ladder systems that keep stringing players along are obnoxious and I don’t care about how I stack up against other people. The fact that they play video games tells me nothing about what stories connect with them, it just tells me that they like breaking down systems and outdoing other people.
Just an observation, but one that fits the trend.
I’m repeatedly amazed and disgusted with how incels among others can’t seem to differentiate between virility and virulence. Like, basic comprehension skills, dude! And that’s leaving aside all of the problematic notions embedded in toxic masculinity. I mean, virility as a concept has its own set of issues, but conflating it with virulence is just awful. I still keep being surprised every time.
And the other downside is how much bloviation positively correlates with virulence. These people need editors stat because who wants to read hundreds of words of drivel?
I keep trying to read all the way through David’s posts because he puts so much work into them, but I only get about halfway through the screenshots before I start skimming because it’s just too much to wade through, even broken down with witty commentary. I am constantly impressed with David’s fortitude. He’s clearly outfitted with some well-used hipwaders for his forays into the sludge ponds.
@ wwth
regarding “political fallout” for the Columbus P. D., don’t hold your breath…. I just don’t think there’s going to be any political consequences for any of the ever-escalating series of outrages caused by trumpism. Simply because the believers just don’t care what the trumpists do. Even if it affects them personally, they just don’t care. As long as trumpism allows them to feel like their entitlement is being respected again, they will cheer any fascism.
(Laurie Penny’s assessment of trumpists)
They’ll continue to cheer the bumbler-in chief as he creates crisis after crisis, and they’ll wonder, as climate change causes the temperature to rise, the rain to stop and the crops to die… or as the mega-wealthy come after their Social Security and Medicare… or as the nuclear bombs descend on them….
“What the fuck went wrong?” No, they’ll wonder “How were the liberals able to do THIS?”
calmdown wrote:
I wonder if this is something they picked up only recently?
I mean self-victimization on schoolyard bullying, other than girls directly rejecting sexual advances.