Another one.
Today the Department of Justice announced that
A federal grand jury has charged a self-identified “incel” with attempting to conduct a mass shooting of women and with illegally possessing a machine gun.
Tres Genco, 21, of Hillsboro, Ohio, allegedly plotted to commit a hate crime, namely, a plan to shoot students in sororities at a university in Ohio.
The indictment noted that Genco had been a regular commenter on an unnamed incel site. It didn’t take long for one of the regulars at Incels.is to identify him as one of their own. (They matched details in the indictment with his past posts.)
Genco — apparently known as Oedipus on Incels.is — seems to have been quite serious about his (alleged) planned massacre. He wrote up a manifesto in which, according to the DOJ, he
stat[ed] he would “slaughter” women “out of hatred, jealousy and revenge…” and referring to death as the “great equalizer.” As part of this investigation, law enforcement agents discovered a note of Genco’s that indicated he hoped to “aim big” for a kill count of 3,000 people and intended to attend military training. Searches of Genco’s electronics revealed that the day he wrote his manifesto, he searched online for sororities and a university in Ohio.
He wasn’t bluffing about the military training: indeed, he trained at Ft. Benning, Georgia, from August through December 2019.
When police searched his home they found an impressive arsenal:
[in] the trunk of Genco’s vehicle, police officers found, among other things, firearm with a bump stock attached, several loaded magazines, body armor and boxes of ammunition. Inside the residence, police officers found a Glock-style 9mm semiautomatic pistol, with no manufacturer’s marks or serial number, hidden in a heating vent in Genco’s bedroom.
The DOJ also notes that in 2019, “Genco purchased tactical gloves, a bulletproof vest, a hoodie bearing the word “revenge,” [and a] a skull facemask.”
He idolized incel “saint” Elliot Rodger, seemingly preparing himself for his day of “revenge” by staging a sort of test-run in which, he told his incel friends, he sprayed a number of college women with orange juice from a watergun. The DOJ says that:
In one [incels.is] post, Genco allegedly detailed spraying “some foids and couples” with orange juice in a water gun. “Foids” is an incel term short for “femoids,” referring to women. According to the charging document, Genco compared his “extremely empowering action” to similar conduct by known incel, Elliot Rodger. … Prior to his mass attack, Rodger shot a group of college students with orange juice from a water gun.
Incels often dare themselves and one another to harass women in real life as a way of getting past their inhibitions and readying themselves for greater violence. Most of the time this seems to be just talk, though it seems clear that in at least some cases some incels do in fact carry out the ‘low inhib” actions they boast of.
On Incels.is, Genco (posting as Oedipus) wrote that
I put some orange juice in a water gun, I was planning to spray some foids and couples like ER did, when I finally did do it, it was ER’s birthday and I didn’t even know that. Felt like I spiritually connected to the saint on that day. … I suggest it to all incels, extremely empowering action.
Today on Incels.is the regulars reacted to the news mostly by worrying about the chances that their forum would be shut down, as well they should; some also worried that their “edgy” posts on the forum would lead the police to their door.
“We all should be more careful what we search and post online,” a commenter called Mecoja wrote, “he will maybe get a lifetime behind the bars without actually committing something, he should have been much more careful.”
BummerDrummer agreed: the alleged would-be killer
was talking about this in fucking 2019. Wtf? Low Iq. …
seems to me like he had the equipment and didn’t do it and law enforcement still raped his asshole. That’s what u get.
BlkPillPres took it a step further:
Wish he was actually smart and carried out the attack successfully, but of course most incels are attention whores and they have to “foreshadow” everything they do and do everything “boldly” rather than plan in secret and execute with proficiency
Incels are happy to embrace “successful” mass killers; they don’t much like them if they fail.
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Thank {deity} they got him before he did anything, but it took the feds 2 YEARS?!
On the plus side, sounds like the DOJ is starting to take things a bit more seriously?
Seriously, can they now nuke incel sites off the planet for good? Anyone hosting them should be as guilty as they are if they commit crimes. They’re monsters.
In the same thread, PPEcel (with more than 20,000 posts to his name) says this:
His own words came back to bite him in the ass. I’m thrilled.
Thank goodness he was stupid enough to publicly post his plans to kill people. Hopefully the law will take heed about incels being a hate group.
Does anyone know the significance of, specifically, orange juice in a water gun? It seems like an odd choice. Though I suppose none of these guys could be called logical.
@Janipurr:
My guess would be that it’s a way of spraying ‘acid’ in someone’s face without doing so much damage that authorities will take it seriously.
A simple explanation would be that orange stains would make it easy to see a hit vs. A miss.
OT, but I am furious right now, and more than a little scared. That broken computer needs replacing, and my father had placed an order for one after shopping with me for it. I had taken all of this in good faith, and spent much of the last week waiting for a knock on my door.
Today I decided things were taking too long and I called the store. Turns out the order was cancelled several days ago, without my notification. Apparently Dad’s credit card was declined.
The furious part here is that I just found out that the lot of them — Dad, his wife, store personnel — have been stringing me along for a week. The store surely notified Dad so why didn’t he notify me? Or else quietly fix it? Furthermore, how the fuck did his credit card get declined? He’s sitting on the border between middle class and upper middle class. He had a job-for-life with full salary and benefits that he scored back when there were such jobs available. Even after retiring he’s periodically replaced his car, gone on vacations annually, and lived in a nice suburban house. There’s no way he’s actually got cash flow problems all of a sudden, which means he gave them a bad card on purpose. The whole thing must be one huge, cruel prank on his part … which is out of character for him. Why??? Why do this to me? Hold my whole life hostage and dangle it in front of me for a week while actually having sabotaged things?
Which brings me to the scary part. What if they can’t be convinced to relent and order me one for real? It’ll mean even more delay, and me dipping deeply into my emergency fund. That fund can be measured in units of “months I’ll have left to live if Ford slashes Ontario disability” and paying out of pocket for the replacement machine will subtract one month from it.
Even as it is I’ve been subjected to an unnecessary, not to mention unconscionable, delay in getting my life back and I damn well want to know why!
Wonkette posted an excellent article on Genco today: https://www.wonkette.com/incel-s-dream-of-slaughtering-women-dashed-after-cops-find-his-manifesto-and-machine-gun
@Surplus, sorry you’ve had to endure this cruelty om top of having to deal with Ford’s vicious policies. I hope things get better for you.
@Janipurr, @Jenora Feuer
Regarding the significance of orange juice:
Elliot Rodger, who Genco revered as a “saint”, once mentioned spraying a group of college students with orange juice.
In his manifesto, My Twisted World, Rodger wrote:
What strikes me about that Wonkette article is the image of Genco at the top. Incels spend so much time obsessing over their features but that isn’t why they are suffering socially
Would this be a firearm with those milled off, or are there places that can can manufacture high-quality guns and avoid oversight?
… May you live in interesting times….
@banned
Mostly people buy the components separately and assemble the full gun at home, since individual components aren’t required to have serial numbers. In the developed world one can’t easily do this, as there’s a lot more rules about certain essential parts.
OT, but it’s been hours now and I am unable to contact him at all. Won’t answer his phone, texts aren’t returned, etc.
It looks like this is the beginning of the end. My last remaining meatspace support is gone. I don’t know why — two weeks ago everything was still normal so far as I know — but all of the data point to that single, unwelcome conclusion.
I am now living on borrowed time. If I ever have an emergency too big to handle unassisted, it’s all over. The last vestige of a safety net is gone. There is nowhere I could crash temporarily if forced out of my home; no one I could borrow money from; no one who could bail me out, literally or figuratively, in case of trouble.
I guess I’m radon now. An isolated atom. No bonds, unable to form new ones, and unwanted pretty much everywhere. Radioactive.
And with a short half-life. It’s now looking exceedingly unlikely I’ll still be around in a decade, and I have serious doubts about even the next year or two.
No one will miss me when I’m gone.
I’d still like to know why this happened, though. Two weeks ago things seemed to be improving gradually. My stamina was returning to normal. I had things mostly under control. It didn’t seem totally implausible that I might somehow improve at socializing. Now it’s all gone to hell, just like that, and I don’t see anywhere that I might have made a mistake that could explain it. This seems to have been done to me, without provocation.
I demand to know why. Maybe it can’t be fixed and I’m doomed to die miserable, alone, and soon, but I deserve to know why. What I should have done differently. And who my killer is.
@Surplus
You live in a genocidal coloni
al state built of bigotry. No amount of evil fuckery should be surprising in light of a centuries-long campaign of destruction amd mass murder.
Why couldn’t they be nicer this racist misogynistic asshole who constantly looked down on others made no effort to engage with others who he deemed beneath him and expected women to throw themselves at him for existing?
Oh Thank Lilith another one caught… Sighing
My situation just keeps getting more and more bizarre. My father called and said he’ll be bringing me the machine tomorrow, in person. He seemed quite angry that I doubted him and thought there was some nasty prank going on.
I suppose he could be lying, but again, that sort of lie (and that sort of prank, for that matter) would be quite out of character for him. I must consider an if anything more disturbing possibility: that the Staples phone rep was lying.
The phone rep said three particular things that, combined, implied the nasty prank scenario: one, that the order had been “cancelled”, implying that even if steps were immediately taken to redo the order and get it right that time, the clock would be restarted from zero and I’d be waiting another whole week before I could so much as begin getting my life back up and running; two, that said cancellation had happened days ago, meaning that that many days had passed pointlessly and I could have had my life back that many days sooner had I been informed immediately; and three, that the reason was rejection of my father’s credit card.
Two assumptions are also needed here, both of them with sound arguments behind them. One: the rep would not lie about this type of thing, and especially not about why an order failed to ship, and two, one of us would have been notified immediately when the credit card was declined.
Now, businesses will lie as much as they expect to get away with when doing so will make them more money than telling the truth will. However, it is not in their interest to lie about why an order didn’t ship. A customer who is informed accurately can likely fix the problem and redo, and then they may make the high margin big-ticket sale after all. Lying to the customer reduces the likelihood of such an outcome, hurting the bottom line. Nor does it benefit them to avoid notifying the customer immediately of a problem. Letting the customer spend days waiting for a delivery that isn’t coming and only informing them when they get impatient and call is not going to help them close a sale. Nor will it help their Yelp score any.
So, if the rep did lie to me, it was against, rather than in furtherance of, the store’s financial interests. This was a seemingly randomly-drawn phone rep, probably in an overseas call center, who doesn’t know me or anyone else involved from Adam. Normally it would be safe to assume that when it was against their boss’s client’s business interest for them to lie, they’d tell the truth.
If the rep didn’t lie, though, the prank scenario follows directly from what the rep claimed. If the CC# was no good, it was no accident: father is quite meticulous about his finances and always knows where his money is, and how much. It would be hugely out of character for him to have carried, and attempted to use, a maxed or expired or otherwise nonfunctional card without realizing it. And if the store was not going to let a customer wait days for an order that wasn’t shipping, and per the rep they’d known that this one wasn’t shipping for days, then they must have notified one of us days ago. Since they hadn’t notified me, it must have been him, meaning he let me sit for days waiting uselessly.
On the other hand, perhaps the anonymous phone rep of a giant megacorp, who doesn’t know me from Adam and thus presumably lacks any personal reason to dick around with me, and whose financial incentives in this instance strongly favored telling the truth, nonetheless brazenly lied right to my face.
To the people here who keep criticizing me as “paranoid”, it’s things like this that give me trust issues.
It’s not even the only time I’ve been lied to today. Google Maps claims the local grocery store is now open until ten on weeknights. It isn’t. Why did Google Maps’s listed hours for that store location “update” with a nonexistent hours change? If it was simply out of date, not reflecting yet a change the store made, that would plausibly be an honest mistake, but it’s the store that hasn’t changed and the listing that has. That’s not an honest mistake. It is a bald-faced lie.
A third instance: a video game tried to gaslight me. It has a common mobile monetization scheme: extra goodies can be claimed, some things doubled, etc. by watching a 30 second ad. Try to exit these ads prematurely and it warns you the reward won’t apply and lets you go ahead or resume the ad.
Today, and on sporadic occasions for a week or two, this particular game didn’t reward me afterward, acting as if I’d aborted early. The displayed countdown had completed and it had exited the ad without a confirmation prompt. So, the game lied and more specifically tried to make me doubt my own senses and judgment. Sounds like a classic, even a textbook case of gaslighting, except for it coming from a machine and lacking an apparent motive. Certainly treating a player this way is unlikely to benefit the game company’s bottom line.
And lying about things is very much against Google’s financial interests too. Their business model is predicated on connecting people to accurate sources of information and then selling ads alongside that information, while gathering information about their users. Violate the trust needed for that first part, and they face the nightmare scenario of Bing eating into their market share for the latter two.
Yet when the user concerned is me, specifically, suddenly the profit motives of all three businesses fly right out the window. It’s like some knee-jerk antipathy. “Wait, it’s him! Screw the money, he is not to be treated decently.”
I think at least one of you previously called me paranoid for suggesting there was some kind of distinct, near-universal, knee-jerk reaction to me as uniquely deserving of bullying and other maltreatment, yet the evidence just keeps pouring in that this phenomenon is all too real.
Oh, and I think we can finally lay to rest any debate about Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis. If had rained on and off this afternoon, but cleared up in the evening with a persistent gap in this area on radar. When I left the pavement was bone dry; not a drop had fallen in hours. When I was halfway there, a short rain shower came out of nowhere and made me shelter for a few minutes while it passed. When I got to the store, it had just closed, with the last customer just walking out the door right then.
The thing must have been tiny and very localised, to be so short and smaller than the radar could resolve. It may well have missed both home and the store, while hitting the road halfway between. And it ended the exact instant it wasn’t needed anymore. To the second.
If that isn’t a “fuck you” from the simulation overlords, then I’m a Regulan bloodworm.
@surplus
FWIW I have had internet orders cancelled without anybody telling me. In my case, usually, it’s the couriers who say they can’t find me, but they have my phone number and email and make no attempt to contact me. I just don’t use those firms again, but the delay is very annoying when I wanted stuff for Christmas or a birthday.
Credit cards can be declined for reasons other than lack of funds; they’re out of date or a mistake with the 3 digit confirmation number or something like that.
I suggest you wait and see what your father says before you explode at him. After all, he’s (apparently) buying you a computer.
@surplus
I agree with Sheila. I’ve had cards declined for seemingly no reason before, especially credit cards. The likely series of events is that the card was declined for whatever reason, the store informed your father of this fact (as it was in his name and billing address), so he decided to physically go to buy you a computer and drop it round – maybe thinking the few days delay wasn’t a big deal. Which is thoughtless but not sinister.
Whatever happens/happened though, it’s nice he’s getting you the computer, and what you’re describing, although annoying, sounds to me like the normal inconveniences of everyday life.
I understand however that you don’t see things this way, and I don’t know you or have any special insight, so I won’t try to argue with you at all. I just hope the rest of your day goes a bit better!
I wonder how his mother is taking this, particularly in reference to his incel username ?
Agree re credit cards. Sometimes it’s as simple as a number getting transposed or something equally banal.
As for the rain … Surplus, you’re not the only person who gets rained on. You probably weren’t even the only person in your part of Canada who got rained on that day. You’re just the only person you know of who got rained on.
surplus
my card gets declined sometimes too. especially for expensive purchases. it is sometimes part of the bank protecting the account if your card is stolen. also, many MANY times my orders are cancelled without telling me and I have to follow up. sometimes items never arrive. the system is just not perfect. people are not trying to hurt you specifically. bad things like you describe happen to basically everyone becuase really the system sucks and lots of people dont care about their job and do minimum effort or less than that. it’s not that they aim to target a single person and if the store did this about your computer seems to me they also dont care and there will be many other customers who have similar experiences. I rarely order online unless I must, because the system is always unreliable and I dont want to loose money.