By David Futrelle
The Incels Without Hate subreddit is supposed to be the good one, free of festering resentment and calls for (or threats of) mass murder. The subreddit’s rules specifically ban expressions of hatred, as well as “blanket statements assigning blame to a particular group of people for your problems.”
So why are the denizens of the sub openly cheering on hatred?
In a post today with dozens of upvotes, an incel calling himself BeertjeBombazijn makes a case for hate:
“Why is ‘no hate’ stressed so much?” he asks.
Isn’t it a kind of ritual submission to the system which inflicted to so much pain and heaped so much aggression on us?
How is “the system” aggressing against incels? Perhaps some assholes bullied you in school; that sucks, but it’s happened to a lot of us — including me — and most of us make an effort to process it and move on. Any anger that the public feels towards incels today is the result of incels’ abhorrent and hateful beliefs — not to mention the actual massacres that have been carried out by incels and celebrated by their incel fans.
Resentment is just the appropriate emotional reaction to not getting your dues and if you let resentment simmer and stew it turns to hate and aggression. After all, they live while we rot and they are withholding what’s due to us.
Women aren’t “withholding what’s due” to you, dude. They just don’t want to have sex with you, and their right to basic bodily autonomy trumps your desire for sex.
The self-hate we feel is just an internalization of their hatred and aggression.
Dude, virtually no one knew that “incels” were a thing until Elliot Rodger launched his murder spree and you guys cheered him on. You brought whatever hatred the public feels for you on yourselves.
It’s like a garrison posted in our brain, to keep us down and depressed, so that they are relieved even of the task of bullying us. We bully ourselves for them.
Aside from a few obsessed individuals, no one is interested in bullying you or having you bully yourselves. We want you to step back from incel forums — virtually all of them cesspits of self-replicating hate and self-hatred — and try to get yourselves healthy. You’re the ones who react with bitter anger towards those who have tried to help you.
It’s about time we stopped letting our oppressors dictate what we should feel and how to express it and instead own our emotions.
Giving in to your worst impulses isn’t the same as owning your emotions. When you truly own your emotions you take responsibility for them and for whatever sorry consequences that follow from them. Trying to drum up even more hate within incel communities is a losing strategy, and will only serve to make incels feel more alienated from society than they already are.
We know you’re hurting. We don’t want you hurting. We want you to take steps to pull yourselves out of the incel morass — and are willing to help, if you only let us. So far very few of you have.
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@Alan Robertshaw, Jenora Feuer
I also am annoyed by the “feel good” stories about disabled people that belittle them and their achievements in favor of lamenting things they struggle with. Or the ones about neurodiverse people that do what Jenora mentioned and promote quack cures or fake charities, like Autism $peaks or MMS (aka bleach).
@ jenora
Oh yeah. I was having a discussion recently about supposed ‘death panels’ us poor socialised medicine victims have to put up with. I pointed out all the legal hoops hospitals have to jump through just to withdraw treatment for hopeless cases.
There was also “I can chose what treatment I want!”. I tried to explain the NHS only does science based stuff.
Although…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Centre_for_Integrative_Care,_Glasgow
@Alan Robertshaw
That’s a thing? I’m a bit surprised the NHS funds that center, one would think that in a time of a pandemic they’d be moving to more proven methods of care.
Can we try to treat my various dermatological issues by giving me a million dollars? I think that would help, so I choose that treatment.
@ Naglfar
The NHS stopped providing homeopathic treatments generally in 2018; and most of their homeopathic hospitals transitioned to conventional medicine.
The NHS had been very candid that they knew the treatments were rubbish; but they stopped the ‘worried well’ cluttering up doctors’ surgeries, and the placebo effect could assist standard treatment.
Finally though the danger of people seeing homeopathy and related as alternative medicine rather than complimentary medicine outweighed the benefits.
The Glasgow centre appears to have a niche function, but it will be interesting to see how long it can stick around in its current form.
I’ve heard this argument, too … and I don’t hesitate to point out that if your insurance company declines to pay for certain treatments, you aren’t getting much of a choice. If it weren’t a HIPAA violation, I could tell hundreds of stories of doctors fighting for the right to treat their patients in accordance with the current standards of treatment (whatever that may mean for a given diagnosis). As a diabetic, I can say that my own treatment options are not governed solely by my physician, but that he continues to do his best, and luckily we’ve hit on a combination that works to keep my diabetes under control.
Heck, most Americans at one point have struggled with keeping their doctor when their insurance changes (either due to a job change or an employer moving to a different plan). That certainly affects one’s choice in treatment.
In an emergency, you don’t have time to weigh the options. Back when Mr. Parasol was rushing me to the ER, we didn’t know that the nearest hospital was in my insurance network. It was sheer luck that it was, just as we were lucky enough to pick the hospital that was the local leader in stroke treatment.
It’s nice to be lucky, but I’d rather not depend on luck.
If the feel-good stories serve any purpose beyond the “oh, isn’t that sweet?” reaction, it’s to give us an opportunity to look at our current system and make whatever changes are necessary.
Re: medical choice
I was once selected as a bone marrow donor. There are two ways they can collect.
“We can give you drugs for a week to boost the stemcell count; then we filter your blood. The side effects can be nausea, fatigue, soreness, stiffness, and restricted movement…or we can drill a hole in your pelvis.”
“What’s the downside of that?”
“We drill a hole in your pelvis”
@Alan Robertshaw
Which did you end up doing?
@ Naglfar
I went for the drilling. It has a better chance of success for younger recipients. They also offered me all the free diamorphine I wanted (not a fan of general anaesthesia)
In the end though I was stood down. I must confess I still hope to this day that was because they found a better match.
@Alan:
Hasn’t been helped by the fact that Prince Charles was a big supporter of homeopathy, I presume.
Of course, you want a rant about people doing fundraising for bogus treatments and credulous media reports, Orac at Respectful Insolence has done those rants multiple times. Then again, he’s actually an oncological surgeon, so he generally knows what he’s talking about on cancer treatment.
Yeah, for bone marrow donation, drilling a hole into the bone is usually the best way of getting a sample. It’s not a pleasant experience, but it’s generally over with quickly.
(A friend in Montreal needed a bone marrow donation at one point, but I and most of the people I knew weren’t eligible donors anyway; Emru sadly had some pretty specific immunological requirements.)