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By now you’ve probably seen the pictures of Allen, Texas mass shooter Mauricio Garcia showing off his freshly inked Nazi tattoos. His social media account on OK.ru is filled with racist material and quotes from far-right white supremacist sites like VDare and the Daily Stormer.
But he also seems to have been at least a semi-regular reader of the Incels.is forums, cutting and pasting several rants from the site into his own social media posts. They’re filled with incel lingo, referring to women as “foids” and “fuckable meatbags.” It’s not clear if he had an account on the site; the Incels.is rants he reposts are by different people.
Here’s a portion of one of his posts:
These are indeed quotes. Here are a couple of the Incels.is threads he got quotes from: 1, 2. Here’s a VDare article he got another of the quotes from. And he also quoted from our old, er, friend Vox Day as well as from a thread on Roosh V’s forum. It’s practically old home week here; these are all sites I’ve written about before, most of them quite extensively. This, evidently, is the sort of shit Garcia was reading while he was putting together his plan to murder as many people as he could at the mall. Clearly in his mind white supremacy and misogyny were mixed up together into an extremely toxic sludge.
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@epitome of incomprehensibility:
Thank you. You, and others like you (nods toward Alan and Yutolia, among others), epitomize why this site is special. Though:
There seems to have been a misunderstanding there. I didn’t, and I don’t, blame this comment section, or anyone here. My adversary is certainly not a mammotheer. I just noted that, unfortunately, because I am here this site has apparently landed squarely in the dickhead’s crosshairs, and … something has apparently been done that is harming it now. Nobody here is responsible for the dickhead’s actions, not even those who have been swayed by whatever propaganda or similar method to drift away. Propaganda is used because it works, other people’s alleged free will be damned. Hard then to blame its targets for being influenced by something purpose-designed to influence the vast majority of people.
@Nequam:
Also a misunderstanding. I said I was throwing in the towel on finding community in any lasting way; not on my presence here. The damage, whatever it is, has been done; I doubt it would help matters here any if I left now, especially as my enemy would very likely not leave, but would continue to salt the earth here to ensure that nothing I might value would grow here again that I might someday come back to.
@Yutolia:
Indeed. I also remember sending an email to that address and not hearing anything back after maybe one iteration.
Meant to by whom?
I find it fascinating that people (as a collective) will call me crazy (or, in this particular place, bend over backward to not explicitly use the c-word, while still conveying the same meaning) for suggesting that there are shadowy forces shaping events in, at least, my life, and then go right on ahead and imply that they believe in some such force themselves, usually through some sort of implicit (or even explicit) reference to religion. Even more remarkable is that my shadowy force is the only one of these with at least some actual evidence, however circumstantial, supporting its hypothetical existence …
@Surplus: I must’ve missed it – sorry about that! I did look for awhile after first getting one from you so maybe it got lost. Anyway, try again!
@Surplus: As for the ‘meant to be’ thing, I’m not referring to any kind of force or anything like that. It’s more a way of saying “if it’s going to happen, it will”, without it being so circular. Not that any being or force or even the universe means for anything to happen to anyone. ‘Meant to be’ is also more soothing to my anxiety for whatever reason.
Surplus wrote:
I said no such thing. I said:
“I benefited from checking myself into a psychiatric hospital” and “you should be locked up” are not remotely the same thing. I should not even have to explain the difference.
But this kind of response is exactly why I have joined others in giving up on trying to help Surplus, or even engaging with him directly any more. It doesn’t matter what we say, only what he is willing to hear.
By that logic, lots of people in prison are “not locked up” because they turned themselves in to the police rather than being tackled and cuffed.
If you spend most of your time in a cell, whether of the barred or padded variety, in some place you’re not free to leave at will, then you’re locked up, however it is that you wound up there.
@Allandrel
When you check yourself into a psychiatric hospital were you a prisoner or did you have the option of checking yourself out at anytime even against the advisement of your doctor?
@Fabe
I was at the psychiatric hospital voluntarily, at my own recognition. I could have checked out Against Medical Advice any time I wanted, just like any other hospital, because I was a patient at a hospital, not an inmate at an asylum.
The hard part was actually getting in despite my psychiatrist’s assistance, because I had to wait in the ER until a bed was available, which wound up taking 26 hours. I could have left then, of course, but that would have required starting the process all over again, and I really wanted help.
I spent a week there while they worked on my meds and provided counseling. I was feeling on an even keel after five days, but agreed to finish out the weekend incase my medication change had any unexpected effects. When Monday came and I was still doing well, I was out within an hour.
That was my first stay. My second was a few years later, when my doctor recommended that I spend a weekend in the ” quiet floor” due to the state of my anxiety. I agreed, and was in after about a two hour wait. There were no med changes this time – it was basically just two days in a quiet, low-stress environment, and I checked out Monday morning.
@Allendrel:
Something similar happened to me. I checked myself in to the local emergency psych center because I was having non-stop panic attacks, and my psychiatrist and my psychologist and I all thought that it would be a good place for me to go for the next few days to maybe a couple of weeks. But actually getting the hospital to allow me to do it was like pulling teeth. They kept saying I didn’t need to be there and I should just go back home and go away basically. Finally after I persisted and would not go away for the entire day they checked me in. It wasn’t about not having a bed for me either, they just assumed since I was checking myself in voluntarily that I was doing it for attention.
Our system sucks so bad!
Sounds a lot like these places are sometimes being used as a poor substitute for vacation time, by people whose jobs don’t provide adequate vacation time and require a medical excuse to use your sick days. No wonder the hospital didn’t want people cluttering up the place who only needed a week to decompress without work obligations. (The non-stop panic attacks case perhaps representing a genuine need for medical intervention and not just a time-out from obligations.)
Meanwhile my own limited contacts with psychiatry have me convinced I want nothing further to do with them, and most especially not to be checked into any of their facilities as an inpatient, whether or not they would theoretically allow me to leave against medical advice. All I ever got from them was one wrong diagnosis after another, when as far as I can tell I have four actual, identifiable problems only two of which are medical … medical #1 is the sleep disorder, and medical #2 is a quite low threshold for stress before I am unable to function effectively and need to leave a situation. (And if it’s something where leaving has negative consequences, or there’s a deadline I can’t hit pause on, that compounds the problem.) Non-medical #1 is “being a square peg in a world of round holes” and non-medical #2 is my stalker/harasser/whatever, both of which are the fault of a society that overvalues conformity and breeds bullies who enforce that. I’m fine if I’m allowed space and not subjected to pressure. Or I would be if everything was open 24/7 and nothing demanded appointment times to be set far in advance.
What did I get? Well, I luckily avoided incarceration of any sort, including being sent to “a home” or “a school” that only unlocks from the outside as well as the more overtly coercive sorts of prisons. They did drug me a whole lot, though, and in almost every instance, the drug of the year refuted the diagnosis of the year by not working. They usually did have side effects, though, including one that caused me to need koala levels of sleep each day and one that caused episodes of a bizarre feeling of restlessness and dissatisfaction/discomfort without any specific identifiable body part being the source of the complaint. I later learned that at least one of these meds is linked to developing Parkinson’s disease later in life. I definitely do not recall being informed about that and given the option of saying “no” at the time! The one thing that did work got rid of some OCDish symptoms, or at least greatly weakened them, and moreover it did so permanently. Without having to continue taking the drug past a certain point. Which was apparently theoretically impossible. So even the one arguable “success” (it still didn’t make me the round peg they clearly wanted me to be) further supports my contention that these bozos have about as much of a clue as a bunch of pre-Clovis hunter-gatherers would if tasked with effecting repairs to Three Mile Island. Or, perhaps, retooling it to be a sneaker factory instead of a power plant, in a world where every large industrial facility is pressured to be a sneaker factory, regardless of its actual aptitudes. So, they push a few buttons, twirl a few knobs, and maybe happen to make one of the little red lights on the control panel go out. A stopped clock is right twice a day, after all.
So, you’ll forgive me if I don’t trust that, if I were to throw myself completely on the mercy of the psychiatric-industrial complex in the future, they would improve anything or let me keep my freedom. Particularly when they have a perverse incentive, under the system here, to hospitalize someone, keep them in a drugged stupor that precludes any possibility of exercising any theoretical option to check themselves out against medical advice, and use them thereafter as a milking machine attached to a government-money teat by charging miscellaneous drugs and procedures to OHIP. Someone like me with a history of not fitting in and who very few people would miss is pretty much perfect for such a scheme; a random homeless person would be even more ideal, except for likely lacking a health card. No health card, no cash cow.
So, basically my youth consisted of getting the following messages from various sources.
Parents: You’re broken, but we love you anyway.
Bullies: You’re broken, and that means we get to use you as a stress reliever!
Non-bully peers: You’re broken, why would we want to have anything to do with you?
Teachers and other non-parental authority figures: What the fuck is wrong with you? Go away!
Teachers at special ed, who can’t play the “Go away!” card: What the fuck is wrong with you? Go sit in the corner/here’s a book to read/etc.
Psychiatrists: Aha! Zees eez vat’s vong vith you! And zese vill fix you! Vhat? Eet deedn’t vork? Aha! Eet is actually zis vat’s vong vith you! And zese that vill fix you! Vhat? That deedn’t vork either? Aha! …
Note that nowhere in all of this is someone who doesn’t think something’s wrong with me, or even, much of the time, sees me as a person rather than something that needs either fixing or making go away.
The adult world hasn’t been a lot better. The bullies and the non-bully peers have the same message as their younger counterparts did decades earlier.
Corporate HR department: You’re broken, why would we want to have anything to do with you?
The rest mostly want what little money I have, and don’t like it much when I never turn into a paying customer (freemium services) or donor (lots else). The places where I am a paying customer are all like “Why can’t you be middle class like everyone else?”, even though the middle class has been imploding for at least a decade and a half now.
Store: fails to reliably stock essentials, and in a few cases even keep predictable hours, as if everyone can easily “just come back tomorrow” rather than needing to set aside a whole afternoon or evening for each shopping trip.
Store: charges extra if you get too few of some items, and issues bags with no handles, as if everyone has a car with generous trunk space waiting at the curb outside.
Store: sells a bucket of regular cat litter, plus a much lighter one containing a similar product volume at double the price, thus effectively surcharging anyone who hasn’t got a car and a house, and so has to carry things a ways and up flights of stairs to bring them home.
Store: Do you have miles/foo points/etc.? (No, and neither does anyone else anymore. We all have just plain old cash and debit. Maybe one or two even have a credit card. Could you please optimize for what is now the common case and ask if we have debit first, rather than all that weird middle class stuff?)
Store: keeps raising prices, as if we will all just sigh and divert money from the putting-in-a-pool fund or the kids’-fancy-private-school-tuition fund or the renovate-the-rec-room fund or the Disney-trip-next-spring fund rather than having to either divert it from the keeping-a-roof-over-our-head fund or else starve.
Hydro company: assumes everyone has a back yard and a BBQ and therefore won’t starve if the power goes out for a whole evening, right through dinner time.
City works department: Why would we put a sidewalk there? Sidewalks go in affluent neighborhoods for people to walk their dogs around the block on. It’s not like they’re essential transportation infrastructure or anything, the way roads are!
Cops: assume anyone walking across half the city wearing a backpack instead of riding in a car is a thief or some other sort of ne’er-do-well; also act like cars have the right of way over pedestrians, in direct contradiction to what the law books all say.
City works department: agrees with the cops about whom the roads are for, and sets light timings accordingly. Usain Bolt might be able to cross before it changes back to a red hand, on a good day.
…
All of this can be summarized quite easily:
This world is not for you, and we’re revoking your tourist visa. Would you please get out of our hair now and go fly your saucer back home? Pretty please with kicks and punches to the nose on top?
Bloody hell, you think there is someone the world is optimized for? Someone whose packages never go astray, who never suffer a power outage, or poor quality reception/telephone service? Who never had to go around with some absolutely tool in customer service? Who hasn’t been on the sharp end of capitalism?
Entropy isn’t an enemy, because entropy doesn’t have the ability for malice no matter how it feels to be on the receiving end.
Put simply, shit happens. Shit doesn’t require an enemy causing it to happen; shit just happens.
I have noticed from following the links you’ve posted on Incels is is there is a shift towards Christian nationalism and tha shift includes something out of Dr Strangeloce, the whole “purity of essence” of Jack T Ripper. The Kubrick film was making fun of that insanity, but guys like Tucker Carlson have glommed onto it. The idea being that these Incels must deny women their essence and that every time they “release” it takes way from them like they’re batteries that get charged up only one time in their life. Trump himself believes that exercise causes himself to be depleted which is why he avoids it at all costs.
but the recent posts are coaching Incels to be a mad monk squadron who must retain their essence. This will cause sexual frustration and anger that the Christian nationalists will exploit by turning these pent up guys towards their target groups to exterminate.
Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Fuckerberg, Rupert Murdoch, Mohammed bin Salman, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orban, Sergei Brin, Steve Ballmer …
@Surplus:
WTF dude? This is ableist bullshit, just don’t. And yes I know you’re not exactly including me, still… fucking don’t…
@Surplus
“Vacation time?”
“A week to decompress without work obligations?”
“‘Perhaps’ Yutolia’s nonstop panic attacks represented a genuine need,” unlike, evidently me?
I checked myself in because my depression had turned to suicidal ideation over grief from my father’s death, you … (don’t violate comments policy, DON’T violate comments policy…) But obviously you never considered that it might be a “genuine need” because you’re the only person that has real problems, right?
I know you won’t belive this, but other people have problems, too. Things suck for all of us. Stuff goes wrong for all of us. I am dependent on daily medical intervention just to stay alive, and even a small cut in government support will literally kill me.
YOU ARE NOT SOME SUPER-SPECIAL VICTIM OF HOSTILE ENTITIES. YOU DO NOT HAVE IT UNIQUELY HARDER THAN EVERYONE ELSE. You would realize that if you ever engaged in the slightest bit of empathy by actually paying attention to what other people say to you here, instead of just using a bad-faith, superficial reading of their words as a springboard for another thousand-word wall of text about how slight daily inconveniences are proof that They are out to get you,
See a fucking doctor, before every last person you interact with starts going out of their way to have nothing to do with you. That won’t be because your imaginary nemesis got to them, it will be because they are sick and tired of dealing with your self-absorbed hostility.
@ allendrel
Oh man, you really have my sympathies there. My dad passed away last Christmas. I was sort of lucky though in a strange way. He’d been ill for some time. But because of the Covid I’d been unable to see him. I had constant panic for over a year just dreading the phone call.
When he was finally released from hospital (I was pretty realistic as to why that was) I just drove overnight back to Yorkshire. He’d been suffering, inter alia, from dementia. But he had a lucid moment and we were able to connect. The next day he died.
But my main feeling was one of relief. I actually got to see him at the end. So many people, because of the Covid, didn’t have that privilege. I felt blessed.
I really feel for you with all you have to put up with. I hate what my American friends have to deal with healthcare wise. Our NHS only survives because of the goodwill and dedication of its exploited staff; but at least we never have to worry about treatment because of cost.
You’re a really decent cove and I hope that things do get better for you. At the risk of just world fallacy, you deserve to have a good life.
@Allendrel:
That’s horrible, I’m so sorry you went through that. Losing someone close to you, especially someone like a parent, is one of the worst things that can happen. I’m glad you fought for yourself and were able to get the help you deserve!
@Alan:
I’m so sorry for your loss!
@ Alan and Allandrel
I’m sorry for your loss, my heart goes out to you.
@ Yutolia
I hope you are feeling a lot better now. Panic attacks are horrible.
@ Surplus
I don’t want to pile on, so this isn’t in annoyance, but I thought it’s important to address…
Because it’s scare-mongering. Our health systems are not great (obviously we Brit mammothers are lucky to be in the UK in this regard), but mental health professionals do not generally kidnap and drug people to make money for themselves and companies. Mental health care isn’t necessarily brilliant but the people working within it are generally dedicated professionals who try their best for people, and make personal sacrifices to do so.
The fault of poor mental health care is complicated but can be broadly put down to a current lack of understanding (we basically don’t know how the brain works), a systemic lack of will to research and address these issues, and the realities of functioning under capitalism. It costs money to give comprehensive mental health care, and beds are always limited, which is why it can be very difficult to access for those without extensive funds.
Unless a doctor is engaging in fraud (which can happen, but is extremely rare) who benefits from taking a homeless person and using them as “a milking machine attached to a government-money teat by charging miscellaneous drugs and procedures to OHIP.”? Mental illness can be so terrifyingly acute that a drug-induced stupor is the kindest/safety option while a long-term treatment plan is put in place, but we’ve moved on significantly from the era of using it as a default.
I wasn’t meaning to claim that anyone here was using this as a way to get needed time off work. I was suggesting that, the way things are in the US, it’s likely that some people do do so, and that is why the hospital is so skeptical of anyone’s need to be there if they aren’t overtly … symptomatic.
Suicidal ideation obviously warrants treatment, as do panic attacks.
Let’s just say though that I’m leery of inpatient treatment. The system as a whole is strongly motivated to regard people who don’t fit in and aren’t easily useful to the billionaires as problems, and to find some way to quietly sweep them under the rug. That usually means just leaving them to neglect, so most of them show up in the unhoused population and in precarious housing in poor neighborhoods, but it does also often mean finding some excuse to incarcerate them, especially if they’re seen as troublemakers. New York (a blue state!) is talking about having homeless people rounded up and incarcerated, using a psychiatric excuse rather than a criminal-law one. I worry that that sort of “solution” to homelessness will spread. They were willing to tolerate a few homeless guys hanging around, serving as warnings to everyone else to keep their noses to the grindstone and don’t even think about using the U-word within earshot of a management snitch, but now it’s reached the point of wealthy and middle class people considering them to be an eyesore that needs moving out of sight of the places they frequent. So, encampments get dispersed, or cops look the other way while Nazis set them on fire, and politicians search for a more lasting way to remove them from the streets, while still making sure that those unable to make rent are punished hard for that, and that the real estate owning class still feel secure in their property values. That obviously precludes housing them … at least anywhere where anyone would ever want to be housed. And that in turn makes clear that the psychiatric incarceration New York plans will be hellish, not just a week or something under observation or being medicated and then released.
And it’s not hard to guess where this will go, another decade or two down the line: a “final solution to the homeless question”. Unless there’s a revolution, or a major reformist gets in power with the clout to actually walk the walk, FDR-style, the people New York rounds up in the next few months will be kept in some miserable prison for ten or fifteen years and then escorted to a gas chamber or something.
Based on my own experiences, I wouldn’t trust psychiatrists not to make things worse while trying to “fix” me, and based on what’s happening elsewhere, I also wouldn’t trust them not to find some excuse to keep me from leaving.
And you can see why I’m terrified of anything that threatens my ability to keep myself in (normal, locks-from-the-inside) housing. Although the climate here is such that I doubt the more fascistic elements of Canadian society will ever feel the need for gas chambers. Just being denied shelter is a probable death sentence during the winters where I am. They won’t feel the need to go beyond “harass them, steal and/or burn their tents, keep them out of abandoned or otherwise vacant structures, and let nature take its course while disclaiming all responsibility, after all if they didn’t want this the lazy buggers should have gotten jobs”.
Others here have evidently had different experiences. Clearly neither mine nor theirs have been universal. It does look like maybe they are halfway competent at treating acute conditions, like panic attacks or a severe depressive episode, while being totally at sea with the chronic cases. I suspect that’s because the chronic cases are, in many instances, not actually disorders at all but variously shaped pegs that just won’t fit in our society’s mass-produced monoculture of round holes. The rest (persistent depression, schizophrenia, things like that) are very likely to be, in many instances, perfectly rational responses to circumstances. This world chronically abuses most people. Chronic abuse will readily induce depression in some individuals, dissociation in others. Is it irrational to be paranoid if most of the people you encounter day to day have an ulterior motive, usually money-related? Our society throws us all into endless cut-throat competition with each other and then pathologizes mistrust. The one saving grace here is that a society so thoroughly divided against itself will crumble promptly once challenged by any rival with strong internal solidarity, and between that and the environmental disaster it’s making for itself the current situation can hardly last very much longer. The bad news is that that cohesive rival will probably be some damn far right ethno-nationalists bent on world domination, whose solidarity is limited to loyal members of their own race, rather than socialists.
@ yutolia and lollypop
Thanks for that; means a lot. It’s not so bad now. I’m at the happy memories stage. My mum keeps dad on the mantelpiece. So when I go visit he can still guilt trip me about turning up the thermostat.
@Alan
I put my share of Dad’s ashes in our front yard so he could (like a good Southern gardener) keep an eye on the oak tree and the shrubbery bed.
I still feel fairly guilty for not planting tomatoes in our back yard, but the soil’s not all that great, so I’ve stuck to planting rosemary. I did have some very good luck with bluebonnets this year.
Well, you’re wrong there, too. I don’t expect you to understand the US system, but you get health insurance here through your employer. You can also get fired pretty easily for missing work even with a sick note (this might also vary in some states; IANAL). So the minute you take that unplanned time off you’re likely to get fired and then boom, there goes your health insurance, too, so this theoretical vacation is now magnitudes more expensive. Of course, it was already probably not going to get covered until you’ve already paid your 10k deductible towards health care (for most people’s crappy health plans, anyway), and that’s after your monthly insurance premiums you pay for the privilege to maybe get something covered (but it’ll be denied, at least the first time) after spending a whole 10k on medical bills. If I wanted to spend 10k on a vacation, and lose my job to boot, it sure wouldn’t be to an inpatient mental health facility.
Anyway, I suggest you maybe stop speculating about other people’s motives for these things because you’re really not in a position to make that kind of judgment and you’re hitting way too many people with friendly fire right now.
“I wasn’t meaning to claim that anyone here was using this as a way to get needed time off work. I was suggesting that, the way things are in the US, it’s likely that some people do do so…”
So you’re not making a dumbass clueless insinuation about anyone here, you’re just making it about some other (unspecified) person(s)…sorry, that doesn’t really improve anything. It’s still a dumbass clueless insinuation.
I don’t want to sound unsympathetic, but you’re really not helping yourself with this sort of talk.
Obviously some people here are determined to find some reason to hate me, no matter how I respond. So:
To those people, go fuck yourselves.
To everyone else, if you have something constructive to contribute on any of the topics raised here, best start a new thread as I doubt I’ll be bothering further with this one.
@ Alan and Allandrel,
My condolences. My biggest fear is that when my dad dies I will lose my mind completely. I’m a bit more stable these days than I was in the past, but still…
@Surplus,
no one is ‘determined to hate you’, you’re being an insufferable prick. You are not uniquely struggling nor are you unique in having bad experiences with mental health services; you’re opining about things you have no knowledge of, and yes, you did in fact suggest Allandrel was using inpatient care as a holiday.
You do that all the time. You respond to people with the worst possible interpretation of what they’ve said, distorting their point, and then claim innocence and try to backtrack with some unrelated excuse when you’re called out. You spew paranoid visions of the future that have a limited basis in reality and then claim it’s definitely going to happen and you’ll definitely be a victim.
I get it, I’m neurodivergent, mentally ill and catastrophise like a lot of people, and I have had some bad experiences in education, work, and medical care. I have friends who have had worse experiences, especially in in-patient settings; some of them are traumatised both by medical care they’ve received and by life in general, and respond defensively to anything they feel is a threat, it’s their first thought and a defense against possible trauma, but we also know to get help, to talk to the right people, when it gets bad, not go in a random blog and vomit it all over the commentariat, who have tried to help repeatedly and been ignored. Get some help.
@ Alan Robert shaw & Allandrel
My condolences for your losses
As for… the rest of it, I was debating on whether or not to chime in, but I suppose since we have gotten to the point of
Fair enough, but I’d point out you aren’t making it hard to find a reason and your responses are basically the same passive-aggressive novels every time.
It reads like any argument about how the Chads/neurotypicals/rich/poor/welfare people/Boomers/Millennials/etc have it all while the Incels/neurodivergents/rich/poor/middle class/Boomers/Millennials/etc have to deal with all the problems they cause. The nebulous terms “they” and “those people” who abuse the system to get rich, live off society, and apparently go on vacation in mental facilities is a dehumanizing tactic employed by the kind of people this blog revolves around.
For something more specific:
Apples to oranges. None of them are on here dealing with you ignoring or belittling their misfortunes so you can support your little theory the world is against you and they are living the dream.
Anyway, I slammed this out on break and am running late, so enjoy