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By David Futrelle
What if incels took a break from their endless circle-jerking about the putative evil of “femoids” and “cucks” and how the world treats them so badly it’s like another Holocaust, and decided to put some of their energy into making the world a better place for incels?
Well, some incels have decided to do just that, setting up a website for a largely imaginary incel political party, complete with statements of principle and even a half-baked platform. Not surprisingly, it urns out that their vision of an incel utopia would destroy the civil liberties of other people while keeping incels themselves as miserable as they already are.
The platform on the Incel Party site is a genuinely weird set of proposals, ranging from the almost sensible (their version of universal basic income) to the bizarre (forcing Hollywood to make “More Michael Cera movies, but where he is not just shy, but unemployed and living with his parents”). You see, as the platform explains,
The national socialists were able to convince a buncha Germans that Jews needed to be gassed (against human nature, as gassing is not a natural human drive). Similarly, (but non-violently) we could legally convince women that unemployed men are desirable through hollywood movies. IE men don’t need hollywood to adjust our sexual drives, but women do. And it wouldn’t be scamming women, but genuinely overriding their nature. Female sexuality is more influenced by social mores than male sexuality.
The incels are not big on respect for women.
In case you’re wondering, the Incel Party platform has a solution for that whole “involuntary celibacy” thing: “Pay femcels and incels to date each other.”
Given that most incels don’t even think that femcels exist — because every women on earth can apparently get all the sex she wants — I’m not quite sure how this plan would work on a practical level.
And apparently this plan would only work for white people, as the platform also demands “[s]tate mandated femdom girlfriends for all people of color. No they won’t be paid.” What if people of color don’t want femdom girlfriends? More to the point, what if the femdoms don’t want to be femdom girlfriends for incels? Women’s bodies can’t simply be distributed like government cheese.
The party also has a rather unique program for helping millennials aquire real estate: simply confiscate homes now belonging to boomers. But don’t worry! The boomers would still be allowed to live in their old homes alongside the new owners. “We are not trying to just kick Dad out.,” the Incel party helpfully explains.
The strangest demand?
Make all anime real life immediately with absolutely no exceptions.We will seize the portal to imagination land the government has and bring all the anime girl to our reality.
Depressingly, alongside all this ridiculousness, the Incel Party devotes most of its energy to a completely self-destructive platform plank: “Abolish psychiatry.”
Most incels could benefit immensely from good psychiatric care or, at the very least, therapy. But that’s incompatible with the basic tenets of their intensely pessimistic and self-defeating “black pill” philosophy, which holds that psychiatry is a simultaneously ineffective yet also dangerous attempt to control incels and others. As the Party asserts on a page devoted to the suject:
Psychiatry is an instrument of social-control for deviants who aren’t in regular jail. In other words, “Society’s Sewer“. If you deviate from society in any meaningful way and you do not live on your own, expect to meet a psychiatrist at some point in your life.
It’s basically RD Laing meets Scientology, though the incels insist that their irrational, pseudoscientific hostility to psychiatry is is somehow different than Scientology.’s irrational, pseudoscientific hostility to psychiatry.
The entire project reflects incels on their best behavior. There are no nasty attacks on “foids,” no creepy discussions of the sexuality of underage girls, no glorification of Elliot Rodger or other incel mass killers. But incels are incels, and the Incel Party website is as suffused with misogyny as any Incels.co forum rant. And the site is steeped in the nihilistic pessimism of the “black pill” philosophy. It’s telling that the platform offers only jokey non-solutions (“make anime real”), “solutions” that abrogate the rights of others, and the wholly self-destructive demand to abolish psychiatry, which in the end is one of the few things that could bring incels back from the edge.
It would all be a lot funnier if it weren’t also so sad.
H/T — once again goes to Twitter’s @EXPELincels, whose tweet brought my attention to the incel party website
Subs. I don’t watch anime, but that’s my preference for opera. I don’t want to restart the argument from last time, but I realize I might have just done that.
Speaking of subtitles, I wonder if any of the very clever people on here can assist with a query.
I can watch a foreign language film with subtitles no problem. I don’t even notice I’m reading them. The (English) words seem to be coming from the actors. It’s almost like having a universal translator running in my head or something.
But if I’m watching something in English with English subtitles it all goes to pieces. I can neither understand the audio or the writing. They’re both just white noise. It’s impossible to ignore or blank out the subtitles though.
I’m guessing it may be something to do with your brain trying to process apparently identical information but in two different ways. Whereas with different languages your brain can compartmentalise the different input streams so they don’t clash.
But does anyone actually know what the psychology or neurological reasons behind that is?
@Alan Robertshaw
Is it by any chance a fish in your ear?
I’ve never had an issue with subtitles, but my mother says she has an issue like you described.
Out of curiosity, does the same thing happen if you listen while watching someone interpret in sign language?
@ naglfar
No; I just hear the words and understand them. If they do that thing where the person doing the sign language is sort of ‘picture in picture’ then I am aware of that; but it doesn’t detract from the spoken words. And if there’s just someone present with the speaker then I don’t really notice them.
So I guess that fits on with the compartmentalism thing. Maybe like how you can filter words even out of quite loud background noise; but if two or more people are having separate but similar volume conversations near you then you can’t focus on either of them?
In small language areas, most TV/film is foreign language (typically English) production, and usually subtitled, because subbing is cheaper than dubbing. Only children’s shows are dubbed.
I have some fond childhood memories from watching the 90’s Disney animated features in Finnish dub. When I was grown up and graduated to Ghibli films, they were initially mainly available with English subtitles. At the time I was already accustomed to subtitles, and also reading English. The DVDs also often had an English dub option, but that seemed entirely unthinkable to me.
Totoro and Porco Rosso were already shown on Finnish TV, with Finnish subs, when I was a tween in the 90s. They gave me a strong impression of “something completely different”, where the Japanese language audio was a major part of the experience. Nowadays, several Ghibli films are available in Finnish dub, for the obvious benefit of child audience, but it still seems entirely irrelevant to me. I’m not much of a japanophile, but I absolutely adore how Japanese language sounds (and also how it looks written). If I really want to enjoy the visual experience without distraction, I can watch a DVD first with subtitles, and then without 🙂
Growing up watching subtitled foreign shows, I also learned to zone out the audio. Later, after studying English for years in school, I found I can pick up at least some of the original dialogue, but only when I concentrate hard. It’s hard to say how much of this is a language comprehension issue, though. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything with Finnish to Finnish subtitles. I do still have some difficulty following English dialogue without subtitles. With anime, I try to pay some attention to the audio just for the aesthetic value.
The problem I’ve had with Finnish-to-Finnish subtitles is that I immediately notice if the subtitles have omitted something to save space, and it makes me trip up and I might miss a portion of the audio because of that. It’s really not been an issue, though, since I think I’ve mostly encountered this with plain language news and such.
If there’s English audio with English subtitles, that’s not a problem for me. I can mostly ignore the subtitles but also use them to double-check that I’ve understood the audio correctly. I guess this comes somehow down to watching English-language stuff with Finnish subtitles and just ignoring the subtitles.
There could be a difference between managing this for your first language and a foreign language. My English comprehension is nowhere near my Finnish comprehension, so if there’s a difference between English audio and English subtitles, I’m less likely to notice it.
@Masse_mysteria
I notice this when it happens on English subtitles on things in English and it annoys me momentarily but usually doesn’t cause any serious problems. I understand why it’s done, but it often means the subtitles are worded a bit clunkier.
@Naglfar
I found it doubly weird in the case of plain language news, since I’d thought the idea with the subtitles was that you’d be able to read as you listen. There’s been talk of how few Finnish-language TV programmes have Finnish subtitles available, even though it would be of help to the hard of hearing, so maybe the subtitles were there for different reasons than I thought.
When I was a kid, my brother would watch The Daily Show with live scrolling subtitles. It helped him to process all those words coming really fast. For me, the slight delay between the two made it way harder to fully focus on either stream. It was a real ASD vs ADHD battle of the neurodivergencies.
@Viscaria
I’m autistic and although I can understand things fine without subtitles, I usually have them on where possible. This gained a lot of ire from the rest of my family, who didn’t like the subtitles.
The other day I was on a conference call where someone was subtitling what people said after they said it, and the delay was about a minute. This was somewhat distracting, as by the time the subtitles appeared the conversation had moved on to something else.
Given the choice between realtime captions and a transcript afterward, this seems like the absolute worst third option. I’m getting a headache just thinking about it. Sorry you had to deal with that!
It sounds like that was maybe just a one-time thing, but if your company/client/whoever you were on the call with is looking for live captioning for their meetings that is not massively out of sync, I would suggest searching for realtime captioning and/or CART, and they might find something that suits their needs.
@Viscaria
There were a few such meetings but they’re over now and future meetings probably won’t employ it, so it’s not a big deal. If such a situation ever arises again I’ll mention real-time.
There absolutely is a common English word equivalent for experiencing schadenfreude. That word is gloating.
The difference is noun vs. verb/gerund, but the usage is much the same.