By David Futrelle
Hey, remember a little over a month ago when Reddit banned the Braincels subreddit — the the site’s main hangout for incels — as well as an assortment of other hateful subs?
Well, the incels are back, posting their repugnant nonsense in a bunch of new subreddits as well as in several that never were banned in the first place. The most active of the new batch seems to be the 22-day-old CommunityCels. But there are eight other incel-related subreddits that remain unbanned, including new ones like ArabCels (21 days old) and ProudMaleFeminists (22 days old), as well as several older ones (including ShortCels, TruestCel and IncelsWithoutHate) that somehow avoided the ban a month ago.
Have the commenters in these subs toned it down a little to avoid a future ban? Not exactly. Here are some recent posts from CommunityCels.
Same old same old.
I thought this one from TruestCel was nice, too.
Hey Reddit admins, do you have anything to say about this?
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@Teabug
Well, if you ever decide you do want cacti in a sandwich, it is possible to eat cacti (although the author of the blog I linked did not think highly of the experience).
Huh. I had some cacti in a salad once, and my main impression was that it was . . . chewy. Maybe it was a different variety.
I very carefully and gingerly picked some prickly pear and tried to prepare it once, following the YouTube instructions on how to de-prickle it. After several hours of using tape to remove the microscopic needles from my hands, I used tongs to carefully and gingerly wrap the remains in several layers of newspaper before depositing the remains in the trash. Anyone eating cactus has to really, really hungry!
And just to randomly combine comment subjects, here’s an article about two men in Mexico who make leather from prickly pear cactus:
https://vegnews.com/2019/11/two-guys-in-mexico-just-created-vegan-leather-from-cactus
This is just my opinion of course, but I have yet to encounter a method of preparation that makes cactus remotely palatable. Roasted is the most common I’ve found, and as far as I can tell, the best way to serve cactus is seasoned to the point where you’re primarily tasting the seasoning rather than any inherent flavour of the cactus. That leaves the texture, which as others have suggested, would be charitably described as “chewy”.
That said, please take my opinion with a generous grain of salt, as I rank cactus right up there with sweet potatoes as one of the more unpleasant culinary experiences I’ve had the misfortune to try multiple times.
Yes, I know. I hate sweet potatoes in every form. Let the cries of shock and dismay begin.
@Wandering Jewterus
I am so saddened by your tastes. :(((((((((
I’ve eaten cactus candy (a sort of pectin based jelly flavored with prickly pear syrup) and enjoyed it, but I haven’t eaten actual cactus. Based on what I’m hearing, I’m not missing much.
I only like sweet potatoes in fry or gnocchi form. Otherwise, hard pass. I’m actually not fond of Thanksgiving food at all. Turkey and stuffing, meh. Sweet potatoes and yams, gross. Pumpkin pie? Also gross.
@WWTH
I feel the same way about thanksgiving food. I don’t eat turkey or stuffing because I’m a vegetarian, I like potatoes but hate mashed potatoes (the texture), and I don’t eat the yams. The only thanksgiving food I like at all is the chocolate pecan pie.
I just call them feminists. Some feminists happen to be male. ::shrug::
The fruits of prickly pear cactus are delicious, although terribly full of inedible seeds, once you get past the spines (by fire or rolling them in sand). Probably why people usually make jam, jelly or candies from them. I used to pick a few low growing fruits from a plant I passed on my way to work (not on private property). I’ve never eaten the leaves or nopales, though I’ve seen them at the grocery store.
I’ve had store-bought pickled nopalitos before. Aside from the “pickled” part, it was basically flavorless.
Can’t they just ban the users as well as the subreddits? They’re already proving to be repeat offenders, and it’ll stop them from making more.
I’m envious that you think “feminazi” has fallen out of favor. I still get accused of it on a regular basis when I make the mistake of interacting with men on Facebook who don’t like hearing about toxic masculinity.
@Idiot1:
Feminazis aren’t real. They do not exist, therefore they have no power to harm anyone.
Incels, on the other hand, are all TOO real. Some of them have gone on killing sprees. We’re all wondering (and dreading) when the next one will be.
Please learn to distinguish between your imagination and the facts before commenting further, anywhere.
@Alan
I can’t phrase it as well nor find the original source (which was in Norwegian), but there was an article wherein someone reported that a study was done which found people were more comfortable with the idea of eating fish than land mammals because they could not make noise. The author then exhorted people to “be the screaming fish” and make a difference. Anyway, it was all much more gracefully written than I can relate, and my main point here was to thank you for being the screaming fish on behalf of the cows.
@ Big Titty Demon
Thank you; although I don’t do much. Especially compared to some of my friends who take direct action in liberating animals.
But yeah, there’s the slogan about being ‘a voice for the voiceless‘; but many animals do have voices. I’ve lived on a couple of dairy farms. One of the most heartbreaking sounds in the world is the crying of the cows when their calfs are removed after birth. It goes on for days. And the farms have to put up barricades because the mothers break out and go looking for their (now dead) babies. 🙁
https://www.kinderworld.org/videos/dairy-industry/baby-cows-slaughter-dairy-industry/
(I’m sure I don’t need to explain to anyone here that cows only produce milk when they’ve given birth. So they have to be kept in a constant cycle of pregnancy and calving. But of course the calfs can’t drink the milk because that’s needed to sell for humans to use; so they have to be killed straight away.)
The dairy cows themselves though don’t exactly have an easy time of it.
https://www.kinderworld.org/videos/dairy-industry/udder-flaming-cows/
As for fish, there’s even a supposed ethical stance called ‘seaganism’; where it’s ok to eat them so long as they’re from sustainable sources; but of course…
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/fish-feel-pain-180967764/
And that’s been today’s dose of animal rights haranguing.
@Jen
I’m sorry that that is still happening to you. What I meant was that I personally had been hearing it less because conservatives are trying to cater to actual Nazis and God forbid they associate feminists (good people) with them.
@Bina
That would be good advice for the manosphere and the right wing as a whole. They seem to have a very hard time distinguishing those two things.
@Big Titty Demon
I feel like that should be the title of my next solo album. It’s just a good phrase.
There are some fish that do make loud sounds, like the gulf corvina, but this apparently causes problems for them.
Regarding fish and pain, I’ve never eaten fish even before I was a vegetarian because I didn’t want to get mercury poisoning (but I do eat seaweed, supposedly it has less mercury), but I’m not surprised fish feel pain. I mean, they have brains and nervous systems, so it makes sense.
I’m also burnt out on Thanksgiving meals although I do like stuffing any time of year and enjoy the occasional green bean casserole. I’ll eat potatoes, but hate cooking them; I’m more of a rice and pasta gal. I hate all things pumpkin and pumpkin spice. I’d rather eat cactus.
Pumpkin spice itself might not be so bad, but I’ve been fooled too many times by products that also have pumpkin, so down with it all!
I will also eat sweet potatoes and yams but only with butter and salt or fries with ranch dressing, preferably from the Black Bear Diner. I spent most of my life thinking I hated sweet potatoes, but it was actually any sort of sweetened sweet potatoes that are objectionable. They’re already sweet, it’s right in the name!
re: feminazis – If they’re the incel equivalent and if they exist, please point out all of the “supreme gentlewomen” of the group, the Andrea Breviks and so on. I’ll wait.
I cannot eat sweet potato, I am severely allergic to it.
As far as “feminazi” goes, I haven’t heard it much lately either. Even when I did, though, the users didn’t claim that the people they were using it on were likely to drive a vehicle into pedestrians.
Part of the reason for this may be that a certain segment of the right seems to have recently decided that the Nazis weren’t so bad actually.
@Aaron – you’re probably right.
@Alan
My parents sometimes bought milk from a small local dairy. By small, I mean they had two cows. We used to pet them while they grazed in the pasture, just a few yards away from the farmhouse. When a cow gave birth, we couldn’t buy milk because the calf had to drink the milk. The milk was unhomogenized, so the cream would rise to the top.
I know that any kind of dairy farm is bad for the cows, but factory farms are the worst, worst, worst.
Brand new subreddits, same old incels, same old instructions to readers to rope, i.e., kill themselves. Same guys who simultaneously threaten to murder us and fret that we don’t want to date them. Same guys trying to frighten us about getting old.
Cry me a river, boys.
I too would rather have sex with a wolf than an incel. This is not because I particularly want to have sex with a wolf.
(Of the non-anthropomorphic variety, anyway)
@ColeYote
Your comment reminded me of this sketch by Kiki Smith:
I learned about it in an art history class I took a few years ago.