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.
*headscratch*
I don’t get it.
If that’s online slang for something I am unfamiliar with it. Sorry.
@wwth
Whoa. I stay off Twitter for a few hours to get some actual work done, and look what happens!
Wow.
@Surplus
When WordPress embeds images sometimes the trailing data gets turned into text rather than remaining part of the image url. It looks like that’s what happened here
Surplus,
I just mean the image speaks for itself.
Mish,
Right? I was at a little neighborhood party in the park thing for a bit and came back home to that.
It’s not like it’s anything we didn’t already know, but seeing it actually splashed across the news like that is a whole different feeling.
The upcoming Twitter tantrum from orange one should be interesting. I hope he doesn’t decide to start a war with Iran over it though.
@Passagère clandestine
Holy fuck. RAPE IS NOT SEX. This is fucking gross.
@K. from page or 2back:
Alex Jones is banned from “livestreaming” on Youtube for (up to) 90 days, and some of his most offensive videos were removed (I believe a total of 4, can’t confirm). It’s another strike, but Youtube still loves that ad money too much to ban.
Personally, I think we’re not being mean enough.
kupo: I believe Passagère clandestine was channeling the inner voice of the incel community, there, rather than agreeing with it.
@Kupo:
Except for one wee problem: there isn’t an image in WWTH’s mystery post, only text.
@WWTH:
What image?
If there was supposed to be an image there, well, hate to break it to you but it’s missing.
I see the image. I’ll see if I can post a link.
Thanks Freeemage. I forgot that internet doesn’t transmit nuances very well and I should have added /s somewhere…
Yeah, see… I’ve tried the “be nice to them” thing. And, as a woman, if you aren’t offering to have sex with them, they hate you too much to care about anything you say, and just want to hurt you.
And if you are offering sex, you’re a slut and they don’t want you because there must be something wrong with you, and they just want to hurt you.
Because the ultimate goal isn’t to gain others’ empathy, improve their sex lives, or try to find a romantic partner. Ultimately, they just want to hurt women.
If everyone else is describing an image being there and you don’t see it, I guess everyone else must be wrong, huh?
Some are seeing it, some are not (I’m not). Could be to do with ad and tracking blocks I have installed, perhaps.
@KG
I don’t doubt that Surplus and you (and probably others) can’t see it. What I take issue with is the tone and certainty that everyone else is wrong. It’s kind of an ongoing issue with this person that their experience trumps all others.
Hi@Mish
I just watched that video and really wish I hadn’t now! That poor woman – if it had been me, I would have freaked the hell out! And he’s claiming it’s because he’s incel?!
I was kind of expecting he would at least make it clear he was her Tinder date before talking to her! If I was sitting in a bar waiting for a date and a guy who as far as I was concerned was “some rando’ approached me, was FILMING ME, and and said “You look nice, do you have a boyfriend?” my response would have been “Yes” as well!
Also, you can hear how funny he thinks it is. Wherever he is, he can fall down a hole.
Well…. okay, but church is as much about socializing as salvation, from my experience. I’m not a believer, but if I end up moving to a small or mid-sized town I would most likely scout out a few churches just for that reason. I grew up in a small town, and church was probably 75% of my parents’ social life. Not so much us kids, as we also had school and after school activities.
Look, I don’t know you, but reading through this thread it seems like you’re looking for holes to punch in any suggestion. Maybe that’s completely off the mark, and if so, I apologize.
Either way, the church nearest me right now has a volunteer clearinghouse for members and also for non-members, and it also offers services (not just church services but volunteer type services) for non-members.
My childhood church did the same: they served the community, not just their own parishioners. Most of the volunteer work I did through them as an adolescent was for non-church members.
At any rate, good luck.
On the subject of churches–see if there’s a local Universalist Unitarian Church. Many UUC’s are quite comfortable with the idea of non-Christian, and even atheist members. Quakers are similarly open-minded (as an atheist, when my to-be mother-in-law said she wanted any grandchildren to be raised in a church, I knew it would be in one of those, for that very reason).
The phrase virtue signaling must die!
@Kupo, others:
If someone’s image is being blocked by ad blockers, then there is a larger problem. Linking directly to an advertisement for the purpose of media criticism runs afoul not only of the widespread use of ad blockers, but also of the way web advertising is typically done. The link is likely to point to different ads at different times, or even depending on the preference-tracking cookies on different people’s machines. Furthermore, an ad that someone feels worthy of commenting on here is probably problematic in some way and (on its way to becoming) controversial, perhaps wildly so. The odds of an ad that gets too controversial being yanked by the advertiser approach 100% eventually, and then the link will stop working.
Which means someone might paste in the link and talk about a political ad they saw there, while someone else sees a sales pitch for Coca-Cola or for Dodge Ram trucks and yet another sees nothing at all due to using an ad blocker, and after a week or two everyone might see nothing at all if the advertiser yanked it for generating too much bad press.
If one is going to discuss an ad and wishes to embed it, one should therefore take a screenshot, crop it down to just the ad, host it at tinypic, and link to that copy, which should remain stable and not be blocked by ad blockers.
It might still be vulnerable to a copyright takedown by the advertiser, if they decide to be especially thorough in yanking it in the event that it generates bad press for them, but the use for commentary and criticism is a fair use and such aggressively censorious behavior can backfire badly on the advertiser (Streisand effect; counter-suits that the use didn’t infringe and therefore the takedown violated free speech) so it’s fairly likely to remain available even then. Most online businesses have learned by now that responding to online criticism with legal threats or action (including the misuse of copyright to attack critics) tends not to end well for them.
@various:
While churches that accept volunteers from outside their faiths do exist, such volunteers will be a) subsidizing (with their labor) a faith they disagree with and b) socializing with a group that will try fairly often to save their souls by converting them. That’s likely to get tedious fast. Networking via people met there will likely lead to more devout parishioners, in large part. And, of course, any potential romantic relationship that arises from said networking is then likely to run aground on the rocky shoals of irreconcilable religious differences. (The classic being, “which religion will we raise the children in!” … assuming the relationship survives differences of sexual mores, or one having a religious proscription against contraception, or one feeling a religious obligation to have children while the other would prefer not to or to delay that, or the really nasty one, where one partner gets pregnant, one partner (possibly the pregnant one) doesn’t want children (yet), and the other(‘s religion) is staunchly against abortion. Given everything that can go wrong, it’s a wonder that interfaith relationships sometimes do thrive, but I’m guessing the majority of those are between two loose adherents to their respective religions, rather than either being seriously devout.)
Of course, I don’t know what Dr. Thang’s religious beliefs are or what his circumstances were vis-a-vis such things at the time of the dry spell he wrote about, so how applicable the above is to the instant case is unknown to me. It just strikes me that turning to a heterodox-to-you religious community for social opportunities is likely to be tedious at best and a potential minefield at worst, with any romance developing out of this being near-guaranteed to be a minefield in particular given how strongly most faiths try to govern the sex, relationships, and childrearing their practitioners engage in.
And that’s leaving aside the cishet privilege angle, which is that non-cishet people (especially if hoping to network their way to a romantic partner eventually) are pretty much out of luck from the get-go since next to no religions’ more devout practitioners will accept LGBTQIA+ folks in their midst, or at least, openly LGBTQIA+ relationships. For them, stepping through a social minefield becomes the best case scenario, with the worst likely involving their own violent death. There’s a reason those LGBTQIA+ born in small towns in southern states who gain the financial capability to leave almost invariably do. In those places the only social game in town is the local church, and it’s a sure bet it’s packed to the gills with bigots some of whom are capable of violence. Elsewhere there are secular social opportunities, but at least some of the church communities will be no better than their southern-small-town counterparts.
Unitarian would probably be safest, for LGBTQIA+, and least objectionable/minefieldy for others of differing (or no) faith, so of course it’s also the rarest outside larger cities …
@Surplus
What are you talking about? No one is linking to ads. It was an image. Just a straight jpg file. And my point was you were being condescending and rude for no reason. Whatever. I’m done. You’re always right. Everyone else is always wrong.
@Kupo:
OK, it wasn’t you that suggested that, it was KG. If it’s not an ad, then it’s not missing because of my ad blocker. A straight jpg file embedded from a normal host should not be impacted by that. Something else is going on here. But at the same time I don’t see why I am being singled out here, because KG said they don’t see any image either. Whatever’s going on is therefore not something wrong with my machine, let alone with me, and so I don’t see justification to objecting to my calling them as I see (or don’t see?) them, let alone objecting solely to me doing so while giving KG a pass.
Meanwhile, @WWTH: you might want to reupload and repost using a different image host. Perhaps the one you used is doing something hinky or that breaks the spirit, if not the letter, of the rules — say, serving a 1×1 transparent gif to IPs from outside of the US, or other such stupidity (listen up, all web masters: the internet’s lack of borders is a feature, not a bug!) — such a thing would also explain why I’m not seeing a broken-image icon, just text, if I am getting an image but it’s white or transparent and not very large instead of whatever image you intended.
@Surplus
You’re not paying attention. This isn’t about whether you can or cannot see an image. You’re not being singled out. You’re being called out for your rude attitude that you have towards anyone and everyone all the damn time, even over something as minimal as a damn image not showing up for you. You can’t even handle that situation without breaking Wheaton’s law.
I didn’t even know there was an image. I don’t see even a broken-image icon. Just text! And if I’m breaking “Wheaton’s law” that likely has something to do with the fact that I’ve never even heard of it until just now. It’s hard to just happen to have followed some rule by pure blind chance. If it’s a rule you wish me to follow, link to or explain it and I’ll see whether that’s feasible. I can’t make any guarantees now, though, seeing as how I don’t even know the content of it yet.
As for a “rude attitude towards anyone and everyone all the damn time”, I’m unaware of this as well. Possibly it’s an instance of the “everything seems ruder online” thing, because body language doesn’t show through alongside the text. It certainly isn’t intentional.
It was the “I hate to break it to you, but there’s no image” thing. You could have just said you weren’t seeing it and asked what the image was.