Last night, a young man opened fire on people enjoying a night out in Toronto’s Greektown neighborhood. Numerous people were hit; two of his victims died — an 18-year-old woman and a 10-ear-old girl.
There’s a scene in the sci-fi drama Humans in which an angry sexbot hits her breaking point. Disgusted by the demands of a john who wants her to act the part of a scared little girl, she strangles him to death and marches towards the door of the robot brothel.
So I’ve been rereading Warren Farrell lately and, as always, it’s been a bit of a surreal experience. The man singlehandedly responsible for many if not most of the bad ideas held by Men’s Rights Activists today is not what you’d call an especially lucid writer. His organization is free-associational, his writing style evasive and cluttered with incoherent metaphors, and it seems like every time I go to check the source of one of his confidently asserted facts it turns out there’s nothing real supporting it.
So the guys who get mad about imaginary tiddies are mad about imaginary tiddies again — or, rather, the lack of them. This time they’re mad about the lack of huge gazongas in Netflix’s reboot of She Ra, the 1980’s He-Man spinoff that none of these dudes ever watched in the first place either because they weren’t born yet or because it was a show for, ick, girls.
Incels aren’t really very good at the whole “humor” thing. Last week, I wrote about the “Imaginary Girlfriend” meme in which an earnest stick-figure woman declares that if she hadn’t been aborted she could have grown up to be every incel’s dream girl. “Sorry I couldn’t be there for you,” she says. “But my mom had other plans … would have liked to have a lot of kids with you.”
Never doubt the ability of Reddit’s The_Donald — the site’s biggest hangout for meme-loving, conspiracy pushing Trump stans — to turn the worst debacles into wins (in their minds at least) for our illegitimate president.
Regrets, he’s had a few. Last night, the founder of the KotakuInAction subreddit, the hate-filled hangout that has been the main meeting place for Reddit’s angriest gamers since the days of GamerGate, decided to do something he’d been thinking of doing for a long time: he denounced his misbegotten creation as a “cancerous growth” on the internet and closed it down.
Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer isn’t just some dude who spews out seemingly dozens of posts a day for his rancid neo-Nazi website; he also fancies himself a bit of a self-help guru, regularly offering his male readers (and they’re almost all male) advice on how to live their best lives.
You may worry about your country descending into chaos, or turning into a fascist hellhole, or even a bit of both. But when incels imagine the future they have much more specific concerns. Oddly specific, you might say.