We Hunted The Mammoth
It was a busy day on the Incels subreddit yesterday. While some subreddit regulars celebrated the third anniversary of “incel killer” Elliot Rodger’s murderous rampage — they call it “Saint Elliot’s Day” — others lashed out at the victims of a fresh tragedy: the terrorist bombing of the Ariana Grande concert that left nearly two dozen dead, many of them teenage girls.
While the rest of the Western world grapples with the horror of the Manchester bombing, Reddit’s incels are looking back three years to another terrorist massacre — and lauding the angry young incel who carried it out.
The University of Toronto is on edge in the wake of online comments urging a mass shooting of feminists.
Last week, an anonymous online commenter on BlogTO urged men to “rent a gun from a gang and start firing bullets into these feminists at your nearest Women’s Studies classroom.”
Here’s one of the threats, screencapped by a woman who posted it on Twitter and alerted police:
It’s yet another reminder that online hate has consequences. In a manifesto of sorts he posted before he shot and killed 9 black people in a Charleston church, Dylann Roof noted that he had learned his racism online. He even specified one of the hate sites that fuelled his hate: the Council of Conservative Citizens.
Now it appears he was also a regular commenter at The Daily Stormer, an especially vicious neo-Nazi “news” site.
Last year, I wrote about a repellant little “community” on Reddit: the PhilosophyofRape subreddit, devoted to promoting what it called the corrective rape of “filthy, unmitigated, sluts … [t]hat badly need to be punished. Badly.”
Reddit being what it is, the subreddit remains up to this day. And now the folks behind it have taken their repugnant “philosophy” to the web. Earlier this week, one of the subreddit’s numerous moderators, a veritable cauldron of bigotries who calls himself European88, announced the grand opening of a new Philosophy of Rape website. He urged his fellow “philosophers” to “[s]ubscribe and submit your rape tips … !”
Over on Boing Boing, Mark Frauenfelder has posted the excerpt below from A Love That Multiplies: An Up-Close View of How They Make It Work by Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar — yes, those Duggars — explaining how women “defraud” men when they dress in a way that men find exciting (in their pants).
While Men’s Rights Activists are quick to label virtually any woman that they disagree with a feminist, they react with outrage when anyone who is not a self-admitted MRA is described as one.
The folks at A Voice for Men are still fuming about what they consider a “trust-shattering” media scandal: the fact that a bunch of news outlets wrote about a supposed Men’s Rights boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road, when in fact the virulently antifeminist Youtube blabber calling for the boycott wasn’t technically a Men’s Rights activist at all.
Meanwhile, there’s a dude cluttering up my Twitter mentions with demands I take some sort of action against a tiny handful of commenters on this blog who have referred to the woman-hating mass killer Elliot Rodger as an MRA, even though, as far as we know, he wasn’t one.
To which I can only say: Sorry, guys. You’re Kleenex. And you’d better get used to it.
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Sluthate’s “shitty advice” forum, devoted to discussing such high-minded topics as “Do fat women have dirtier vaginas?” and “why is rape bad,” is a haven for embittered “incels” — self-described “involuntary celibates” — who’ve convinced themselves that they are too objectively unattractive and un-alpha to attract attention from the cruel and superficial “sluts” of the world — a category that seems to include all the women they find attractive.
Back when the forum was known as PUAhate, it was a regular hangout of one especially embittered incel, a young man known as Elliot Rodger, who last year killed six in Isla Vista California, and then himself, in what he called his “Day of Retribution” against women. Many of Sluthate’s regulars, unsurprisingly, have embraced “ER” as a kind of incel martyr.
Now they’ve found a new and improved hero: Andreas Lubitz, the troubled co-pilot who, French officials say, deliberately flew Germanwings Flight 9525 into a mountain in the French Alps.
French prosecutors are saying that the co-pilot of the Germanwings Airbus A320 that crashed in the Alps brought the plane down deliberately, after locking the pilot out of the cockpit. If so, this was one of the most horrific cases of murder/suicide the world has ever seen.
At the moment, we don’t know enough about the co-pilot, 28-year-old Andreas Lubitz. to know what motivated him to allegedly crash the plane. French authorities are saying that they don’t think it was an act of terrorism. But that may be because they have a rather simplistic definition of terrorism.
If you watch only one 15-minute interview with Davis Aurini about his breakup with his former Sarkeesian Effect collaborator Jordan Owen today, make it this one!
Ok, I realize that might not be quite persuasive enough to get all of you to click play, but, seriously, this is pretty primo internet drama here, especially when a very testy Aurini starts comparing Owen to Elliot Rodger and basically telling us that his former filmmaking partner has none of the skills necessary to make a film.
And yep, it appears that they really did have their big falling out over Roosh. Which is a teensy bit ironic, because criticizing Roosh is pretty much the only decent thing that Owen has done since he first started obsessing about Anita Sarkeesian.
Anyway, the whole interview is worth listening to. Honest. But if you’re in a hurry, or just can’t tolerate 15 minutes of Aurini, skip ahead to 8:38, where it starts to get juicy, or to 10:30, where it gets even juicier. Here’s a partial transcript, courtesy of CringingAtTheWorld on the GamerGhazi subreddit .
I give it 4 “Ethics in Games Journalism” out of 5.
H/T — r/GamerGhazi, and everyone else who pointed me to this video.
