Mainstream, toxically masculine culture insists that emotions are for women and weaklings (except for anger; anger is manly). It also tells boys and men that they are owed sex and unconditional support from a woman, and that if they don't have that, there's something wrong with them. Culturally, we're setting them up to fail and to be mad about it.
Not just a woman, a woman who looks like a movie star.
The way media warps what "average" is in peoples minds is insane.
I just saw Endgame, and one of my buddies said Scarlet Johansson looked ready to be put out to pasture.
He's older than she is, and she's just 34 years old.
Inkstain, I strongly feel like your whole modus operandi here is to shit on anything that could possibly be construed, in any way, to give any sympathy to incels.
If that really is your goal, please accept this invitation to fuck right off.
I'm not entirely sure that this isn't the right way. To sympathize with these people is a major endeavor, and it may not only be fruitless but downright dangerous for the unprepared. If my thesis is correct, those of us without a strong support anchor of real friends may be at risk of absorbing malignant ideologies and should limit exposure to content regarding social isolationism regardless of context. Does sympathy with an extremist group make you more vulnerable to their views?
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Mainstream, toxically masculine culture insists that emotions are for women and weaklings (except for anger; anger is manly). It also tells boys and men that they are owed sex and unconditional support from a woman, and that if they don't have that, there's something wrong with them. Culturally, we're setting them up to fail and to be mad about it.
Not just a woman, a woman who looks like a movie star.
The way media warps what "average" is in peoples minds is insane.
I just saw Endgame, and one of my buddies said Scarlet Johansson looked ready to be put out to pasture.
He's older than she is, and she's just 34 years old.
@Inkstain82 if your only contribution to the thread is dismissive one liners of everyone else who’s making good faith, thoughtful arguments maybe don’t bother posting in this thread.
Inkstain, I strongly feel like your whole modus operandi here is to shit on anything that could possibly be construed, in any way, to give any sympathy to incels.
If that really is your goal, please accept this invitation to fuck right off.
I'm not entirely sure that this isn't the right way. To sympathize with these people is a major endeavor, and it may not only be fruitless but downright dangerous for the unprepared. If my thesis is correct, those of us without a strong support anchor of real friends may be at risk of absorbing malignant ideologies and should limit exposure to content regarding social isolationism regardless of context. Does sympathy with an extremist group make you more vulnerable to their views?
I think that there is a strong argument to be made for non professional helpers avoiding incells, and other extremists, like plague.
Not just because the ideas they have can spread in sympathetic minds, but because they are potentially dangerous.
And even if they are not dangerous, most people are not really equipped to help them, and can easily make things worse.
Also, while i can have sympathy for people who, for whatever reason, find themselves isolated from people, my sympathy stops when they start worshipping mass murderers and preaching about how women should be forced to have sex with them.
Incells are not just "lonely people in need of friendship", and depicting them as such is dangerous.
Incels all have an image of sex and personal intimate relationships, and intimacy in general, which is wildly at odds with reality. And there's a lot of reasons why that is.
1) social isolation prevents them seeing real relationships in their social group
2) reliance on often extremely problematic fictional romance narratives as a template for how relationships look.
3) Even when incels bemoan their lack of social understanding they absolutely don't want to try to change themselves and instead the community encourages wallowing in self-hate and despair.
4) raging misogyny prevents them from seeing a female perspective or understanding why women in reality are not like the depictions of women in a lot of the media they consume, that women are in fact people etc. This is a big deal!
Therefore we need to 1) prevent social isolation, 2) promote more healthy relationships in media, 3) promote self-improvement and challenge mindless nihilistic self-hate, and 4) push progressive feminism in a way which is positive, healthy and reaches people.
"I've not no friends, all I do is watch [niche media] all day, my life sucks and I deserve to die, women only care about asshole chads" is basically the in Incel line. We need to fight all of that in a multi-corps pincer assault that Napoleon would be proud of.
Therefore we need to 1) prevent social isolation, 2) promote more healthy relationships in media, 3) promote self-improvement and challenge mindless nihilistic self-hate, and 4) push progressive feminism in a way which is positive, healthy and reaches people.
All of these are things that need to be done, and are being done already.
Not just because it helps with incells, but because they generally make the world a better place.
But the incell problem is one that gets solved over a generation.
On short term, i think priority needs to be, in no particular order, to make people realice incells are not just lonely guys on the internet, deplatform incell movement as much as possible to stop/slow the spread, and make law enforcement take internet harrasment in general, and incells in specific, seriously.
Inkstain, I strongly feel like your whole modus operandi here is to shit on anything that could possibly be construed, in any way, to give any sympathy to incels.
If that really is your goal, please accept this invitation to fuck right off.
It is my belief that the sympathy they get in this thread is a result of misunderstanding them and overprojecting some of our demographics' experiences onto them. If you want to interpret that as what you said, sure.
I find this thread's repeated cycles of talking about everyone's personal social struggles to be akin to a thread on our country's abhorrent immigration policies constantly turning into personal stories about how hard it was when the local plant went to Mexico.
It is my experience interacting with the incel movement that actual social isolation is not at all a requirement for joining. Many of them have perfectly normal social lives. Accepting their premise to begin with that they have legitimate complaints about social isolation that they just take too far with the misogyny is misunderstanding them and underestimating their true threat. They're yet another outgrowth of modern patriarchal fascism, and one of fascism's most used plays is convincing regular people to buy into the first half of their pamphlet, even if said regular people say "But they're going too far."
Inkstain, I strongly feel like your whole modus operandi here is to shit on anything that could possibly be construed, in any way, to give any sympathy to incels.
If that really is your goal, please accept this invitation to fuck right off.
It is my belief that the sympathy they get in this thread is a result of misunderstanding them and overprojecting some of our demographics' experiences onto them. If you want to interpret that as what you said, sure.
I find this thread's repeated cycles of talking about everyone's personal social struggles to be akin to a thread on our country's abhorrent immigration policies constantly turning into personal stories about how hard it was when the local plant went to Mexico.
It is my experience interacting with the incel movement that actual social isolation is not at all a requirement for joining. Many of them have perfectly normal social lives. Accepting their premise to begin with that they have legitimate complaints about social isolation that they just take too far with the misogyny is misunderstanding them and underestimating their true threat. They're yet another outgrowth of modern patriarchal fascism, and one of fascism's most used plays is convincing regular people to buy into the first half of their pamphlet, even if said regular people say "But they're going too far."
The issue I take with your perspective is that I feel it is overly dismissive of people such as me.
As I shared a couple of months back, I see myself in these fools. I picture an alternate universe where I am one of them. My desire to share my experience and eventual reform is born of a desire to offer insight, in the hopes that it might inspire some to seek to understand and see that there may be hope for some of these lost souls. Since I have gotten a lot of positive feedback for sharing my story, I feel confident that I was successful, to a degree.
Your stated position makes me feel that, had you known me twenty years ago, you would have immediately dismissed me as an irredemable monster. Had you, or someone like you, come into my life during those troubled years, speaking to me the way to speak of incels in general in this thread, I can tell you one thing: that would have radicalized me further, and I likely would not have become the man I am today. And, I'm sorry, but I can't help but feel that your reaction to that outcome might just have been "well good!" and that bothers me.
Seeking to better understand troubled individuals doesn't excuse their behaviour, but treating them as unreedeemable assholes who cannot be reformed serves only to further isolate and make them more desperate, which makes them MORE likely to lash out and become a danger to society. Yes, it's possible that someone might be too far gone that the only option remaining is to incarcerate them until it can be determined that they are no longer a threat, but it becomes next to impossible to detect those who may be a threat if we drive them into hiding up until a point comes where they make their move.
It is my position that you treat societal ills and dangerous views with empathy, not scorn. Incarceration and other law enforcement tools are state powers that should be used to shield society from its dangerous elements, not to seek vengeance or retribution. Working towards ensuring troubled people have access to empathic resources (such as the love not anger site in the OP) can provide a path to troubled individuals to redeem themselves before it's too late. It's not perfect, of course, no solution can be, but it is a superior alternative than treating individuals with hatred and scorn, no matter how damaged they may be.
Inkstain, I strongly feel like your whole modus operandi here is to shit on anything that could possibly be construed, in any way, to give any sympathy to incels.
If that really is your goal, please accept this invitation to fuck right off.
It is my belief that the sympathy they get in this thread is a result of misunderstanding them and overprojecting some of our demographics' experiences onto them. If you want to interpret that as what you said, sure.
I find this thread's repeated cycles of talking about everyone's personal social struggles to be akin to a thread on our country's abhorrent immigration policies constantly turning into personal stories about how hard it was when the local plant went to Mexico.
It is my experience interacting with the incel movement that actual social isolation is not at all a requirement for joining. Many of them have perfectly normal social lives. Accepting their premise to begin with that they have legitimate complaints about social isolation that they just take too far with the misogyny is misunderstanding them and underestimating their true threat. They're yet another outgrowth of modern patriarchal fascism, and one of fascism's most used plays is convincing regular people to buy into the first half of their pamphlet, even if said regular people say "But they're going too far."
The issue I take with your perspective is that I feel it is overly dismissive of people such as me.
As I shared a couple of months back, I see myself in these fools. I picture an alternate universe where I am one of them. My desire to share my experience and eventual reform is born of a desire to offer insight, in the hopes that it might inspire some to seek to understand and see that there may be hope for some of these lost souls. Since I have gotten a lot of positive feedback for sharing my story, I feel confident that I was successful, to a degree.
Your stated position makes me feel that, had you known me twenty years ago, you would have immediately dismissed me as an irredemable monster. Had you, or someone like you, come into my life during those troubled years, speaking to me the way to speak of incels in general in this thread, I can tell you one thing: that would have radicalized me further, and I likely would not have become the man I am today. And, I'm sorry, but I can't help but feel that your reaction to that outcome might just have been "well good!" and that bothers me.
Seeking to better understand troubled individuals doesn't excuse their behaviour, but treating them as unreedeemable assholes who cannot be reformed serves only to further isolate and make them more desperate, which makes them MORE likely to lash out and become a danger to society. Yes, it's possible that someone might be too far gone that the only option remaining is to incarcerate them until it can be determined that they are no longer a threat, but it becomes next to impossible to detect those who may be a threat if we drive them into hiding up until a point comes where they make their move.
It is my position that you treat societal ills and dangerous views with empathy, not scorn. Incarceration and other law enforcement tools are state powers that should be used to shield society from its dangerous elements, not to seek vengeance or retribution. Working towards ensuring troubled people have access to empathic resources (such as the love not anger site in the OP) can provide a path to troubled individuals to redeem themselves before it's too late. It's not perfect, of course, no solution can be, but it is a superior alternative than treating individuals with hatred and scorn, no matter how damaged they may be.
What do you think is this forum's role in that endeavor? Is there any, or is this a platform that should be cleansed of dysfunctional and dangerous people and views?
Advocating for empathy will always sound right, but it's hard to practically execute since it's a skill best exercised in person rather than over the internet. If you look at all the gears of the complex interactions in this space, you'll realize the negative consequences of every approach mentioned here, and you'll have to make hard choices about who you want to keep and who you don't.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Inkstain, I strongly feel like your whole modus operandi here is to shit on anything that could possibly be construed, in any way, to give any sympathy to incels.
If that really is your goal, please accept this invitation to fuck right off.
It is my belief that the sympathy they get in this thread is a result of misunderstanding them and overprojecting some of our demographics' experiences onto them. If you want to interpret that as what you said, sure.
I find this thread's repeated cycles of talking about everyone's personal social struggles to be akin to a thread on our country's abhorrent immigration policies constantly turning into personal stories about how hard it was when the local plant went to Mexico.
It is my experience interacting with the incel movement that actual social isolation is not at all a requirement for joining. Many of them have perfectly normal social lives. Accepting their premise to begin with that they have legitimate complaints about social isolation that they just take too far with the misogyny is misunderstanding them and underestimating their true threat. They're yet another outgrowth of modern patriarchal fascism, and one of fascism's most used plays is convincing regular people to buy into the first half of their pamphlet, even if said regular people say "But they're going too far."
The issue I take with your perspective is that I feel it is overly dismissive of people such as me.
As I shared a couple of months back, I see myself in these fools. I picture an alternate universe where I am one of them. My desire to share my experience and eventual reform is born of a desire to offer insight, in the hopes that it might inspire some to seek to understand and see that there may be hope for some of these lost souls. Since I have gotten a lot of positive feedback for sharing my story, I feel confident that I was successful, to a degree.
Your stated position makes me feel that, had you known me twenty years ago, you would have immediately dismissed me as an irredemable monster. Had you, or someone like you, come into my life during those troubled years, speaking to me the way to speak of incels in general in this thread, I can tell you one thing: that would have radicalized me further, and I likely would not have become the man I am today. And, I'm sorry, but I can't help but feel that your reaction to that outcome might just have been "well good!" and that bothers me.
Seeking to better understand troubled individuals doesn't excuse their behaviour, but treating them as unreedeemable assholes who cannot be reformed serves only to further isolate and make them more desperate, which makes them MORE likely to lash out and become a danger to society. Yes, it's possible that someone might be too far gone that the only option remaining is to incarcerate them until it can be determined that they are no longer a threat, but it becomes next to impossible to detect those who may be a threat if we drive them into hiding up until a point comes where they make their move.
It is my position that you treat societal ills and dangerous views with empathy, not scorn. Incarceration and other law enforcement tools are state powers that should be used to shield society from its dangerous elements, not to seek vengeance or retribution. Working towards ensuring troubled people have access to empathic resources (such as the love not anger site in the OP) can provide a path to troubled individuals to redeem themselves before it's too late. It's not perfect, of course, no solution can be, but it is a superior alternative than treating individuals with hatred and scorn, no matter how damaged they may be.
What do you think is this forum's role in that endeavor? Is there any, or is this a platform that should be cleansed of dysfunctional and dangerous people and views?
Advocating for empathy will always sound right, but it's hard to practically execute since it's a skill best exercised in person rather than over the internet. If you look at all the gears of the complex interactions in this space, you'll realize the negative consequences of every approach mentioned here, and you'll have to make hard choices about who you want to keep and who you don't.
I'm not sure I quite understand the question here, do you believe that I was advocating that someone be banned? I was simply wishing to express my own feelings as to why Inkstain's postition troubled me. This was not an attempt at meta-modding in any way, and dissagreement is not censorship.
As to your point about empathy sounding right but being hard to execute: yeah, no disagreement there, of course it's easier to just tell someone to fuck off, and yeah, some people deserve it, but I felt that it was important to remind about the risks inherent with further alienating those who hold troubling views. I feel I can speak with some degree of authority on the matter because, as I stated, I can imagine how I might have reacted to such treatment had I been confronted with it during my darker days.
Incells are not just people who have troubling views.
These are people who cheer for rape and murder of women, who treat a mass murderer as their patron saint.
Incells are not just people who have troubling views.
These are people who cheer for rape and murder of women, who treat a mass murderer as their patron saint.
It's not a binary function. Incels don't just pop into existence, they become that way. It is incumbent on us as a society to find ways to keep them from becoming that way in the first place. Treating people who are at risk of becoming incels (let's call them "proto-incels") as irredemable is an abdication of responsibility and serves only to further the problem.
Tactics that I think work:
- patience and empathy
- seeking to explain why their viewpoint is troubling, rather than condemn them for having those viewpoints in the first place
- offering resources, instead of ostracizing (example: "hey man, you were saying some crazy shit earlier, are you good? Wanna grab a beer and talk or something?")
- calling out your friends when they express toxic behaviour (online or in real life) - a simple "yo dude, that's gross, cut it out" can usually suffice
Yeah, many of these solutions are harder than just ignoring shitty people or telling them to fuck off, but that's the point I'm trying to make. Societal change takes effort, it's hard, I know. That doesn't mean it isn't worth doing, and there are small changes we can all make in our own lives (like call out our friends, for example) that aren't too much to ask.
For example, I've got a friend who occasionally likes to throw out incel terms like "thot" and "chad" every now and again. I know he's not an incel, but I still feel it's important to nip that stuff in the bud. All I do is say stuff like "yo dude, get out of here with that incel stuff" and he'll roll his eyes and say "whatever". But if he does let another "thot" slip he'll catch himself, give me a furtive glance and course-correct. It's nothing big, but it adds up.
Inkstain, I strongly feel like your whole modus operandi here is to shit on anything that could possibly be construed, in any way, to give any sympathy to incels.
If that really is your goal, please accept this invitation to fuck right off.
It is my belief that the sympathy they get in this thread is a result of misunderstanding them and overprojecting some of our demographics' experiences onto them. If you want to interpret that as what you said, sure.
I find this thread's repeated cycles of talking about everyone's personal social struggles to be akin to a thread on our country's abhorrent immigration policies constantly turning into personal stories about how hard it was when the local plant went to Mexico.
It is my experience interacting with the incel movement that actual social isolation is not at all a requirement for joining. Many of them have perfectly normal social lives. Accepting their premise to begin with that they have legitimate complaints about social isolation that they just take too far with the misogyny is misunderstanding them and underestimating their true threat. They're yet another outgrowth of modern patriarchal fascism, and one of fascism's most used plays is convincing regular people to buy into the first half of their pamphlet, even if said regular people say "But they're going too far."
The issue I take with your perspective is that I feel it is overly dismissive of people such as me.
As I shared a couple of months back, I see myself in these fools. I picture an alternate universe where I am one of them. My desire to share my experience and eventual reform is born of a desire to offer insight, in the hopes that it might inspire some to seek to understand and see that there may be hope for some of these lost souls. Since I have gotten a lot of positive feedback for sharing my story, I feel confident that I was successful, to a degree.
Your stated position makes me feel that, had you known me twenty years ago, you would have immediately dismissed me as an irredemable monster. Had you, or someone like you, come into my life during those troubled years, speaking to me the way to speak of incels in general in this thread, I can tell you one thing: that would have radicalized me further, and I likely would not have become the man I am today. And, I'm sorry, but I can't help but feel that your reaction to that outcome might just have been "well good!" and that bothers me.
Seeking to better understand troubled individuals doesn't excuse their behaviour, but treating them as unreedeemable assholes who cannot be reformed serves only to further isolate and make them more desperate, which makes them MORE likely to lash out and become a danger to society. Yes, it's possible that someone might be too far gone that the only option remaining is to incarcerate them until it can be determined that they are no longer a threat, but it becomes next to impossible to detect those who may be a threat if we drive them into hiding up until a point comes where they make their move.
It is my position that you treat societal ills and dangerous views with empathy, not scorn. Incarceration and other law enforcement tools are state powers that should be used to shield society from its dangerous elements, not to seek vengeance or retribution. Working towards ensuring troubled people have access to empathic resources (such as the love not anger site in the OP) can provide a path to troubled individuals to redeem themselves before it's too late. It's not perfect, of course, no solution can be, but it is a superior alternative than treating individuals with hatred and scorn, no matter how damaged they may be.
What do you think is this forum's role in that endeavor? Is there any, or is this a platform that should be cleansed of dysfunctional and dangerous people and views?
Advocating for empathy will always sound right, but it's hard to practically execute since it's a skill best exercised in person rather than over the internet. If you look at all the gears of the complex interactions in this space, you'll realize the negative consequences of every approach mentioned here, and you'll have to make hard choices about who you want to keep and who you don't.
I'm not sure I quite understand the question here, do you believe that I was advocating that someone be banned? I was simply wishing to express my own feelings as to why Inkstain's postition troubled me. This was not an attempt at meta-modding in any way, and dissagreement is not censorship.
As to your point about empathy sounding right but being hard to execute: yeah, no disagreement there, of course it's easier to just tell someone to fuck off, and yeah, some people deserve it, but I felt that it was important to remind about the risks inherent with further alienating those who hold troubling views. I feel I can speak with some degree of authority on the matter because, as I stated, I can imagine how I might have reacted to such treatment had I been confronted with it during my darker days.
I'm not advocating you do anything, just looking for ideas. Kicking out people is simple and low maintenance. Doing anything else can be trouble. Who goes and who stays? How do we deal with people who can stay? It's ok if you don't know the answer; I don't either.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Thanks for expounding on your position. My apologies for jumping down your throat. I was projecting anger from an unrelated situation into this thread. You didn't deserve that.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
It's not a binary function. Incels don't just pop into existence, they become that way. It is incumbent on us as a society to find ways to keep them from becoming that way in the first place. Treating people who are at risk of becoming incels (let's call them "proto-incels") as irredemable is an abdication of responsibility and serves only to further the problem.
Has someone said treating proto incells as irredeemable?
You could have been an incell in a different world, fine, so could i, or almost any other male in this forum, us treating incells with disgust is not treating whatever brand of asshat you may have been in the past with same disgust, or the brand of asshat i was in the past with disgust.
By the time someone has become an actual incell, my sympathy, and empathy, have been spent, and my focus will be in stopping them from harming others.
We totally should try to stop people from becomming incells, you know whats the most effective way to do so?
Denying them platforms to spread their shit. Making sure authorities take them seriously. Stopping them from becomming the next Elliot Rodger.
And then doing all the things Solar pointed out in a post earlier this page that i agreed to but these are going to take effect over a generation, or more, here and now, more immediately effective actions are needed.
Trying to be an amateur counselor for people is unlikely to be helpfull, is often quite harmfull, and can be actually dangerous for the amateur counselor.
Quarantining extremists and trying to rehabilitate them are not mutually exclusive endeavors. Minimizing the damage they do to other people (i.e., deplatforming them and taking harassment, etc. seriously) is definitely a first priority, though.
Any strategies for dealing with incels or any other radicalized group will not have a "one size fits all" answer. Of course, we want to deal with them with empathy and patience when it is someone we know, a friend or family member. But those solutions also do not work as a short term solution (these changes take time), they do not work in as a large scale solution (because it's tailored to each individual... you can't take a group of a dozen incels and "convert" them all at once!*), and they do not mitigate any of the harm caused by members who do destructive acts. For a specific individual, empathy and understanding could make huge changes, especially if the individual wants to change. We cannot expect those changes to propagate (and indeed, they usually don't), and it requires a cost of labor on the part of the people trying to convert them, which isn't fair (but what in life is?).
So, we need to have ways to deplatform hate and prevent the spread of their message which, I'm sure, would rankle free speech absolutists who can't abide by the slippery slope. However, this is akin to people shouting "fire" in a crowded theater... it's speech that impacts people and causes harm. Authorities need to take them seriously so that another tragedy doesn't occur.
These aren't mutually exclusive options. You can write off the Incel The People without writing off the Incel Your Brother. They both will "cost" things from us, either personally through emotional labor or as a society (through more rules, regulations, legislation, and most importantly, actual enforcement). And this doesn't even tackle what I feel is the root cause of it all, but something needs to be done in the short term while the long term solutions happen.
* Well, maybe YOU can, but then what are you doing faffing about on these forums? Are you trying to convert US? *paranoid*
Quarantining extremists and trying to rehabilitate them are not mutually exclusive endeavors. Minimizing the damage they do to other people (i.e., deplatforming them and taking harassment, etc. seriously) is definitely a first priority, though.
One achieves the other imo. The best way to combat people being indoctrinated is to shutdown the information sources that radicalize them. Which also happen to be the same sources that allow them to organize.
It's not a binary function. Incels don't just pop into existence, they become that way. It is incumbent on us as a society to find ways to keep them from becoming that way in the first place. Treating people who are at risk of becoming incels (let's call them "proto-incels") as irredemable is an abdication of responsibility and serves only to further the problem.
Has someone said treating proto incells as irredeemable?
You could have been an incell in a different world, fine, so could i, or almost any other male in this forum, us treating incells with disgust is not treating whatever brand of asshat you may have been in the past with same disgust, or the brand of asshat i was in the past with disgust.
By the time someone has become an actual incell, my sympathy, and empathy, have been spent, and my focus will be in stopping them from harming others.
Ok, and where is that line, exactly, between proto-incel and full-blown incel?
We totally should try to stop people from becomming incells, you know whats the most effective way to do so?
Denying them platforms to spread their shit. Making sure authorities take them seriously. Stopping them from becomming the next Elliot Rodger.
Agreed, I don't see how that statement contradicts anything I've said.
And then doing all the things Solar pointed out in a post earlier this page that i agreed to but these are going to take effect over a generation, or more, here and now, more immediately effective actions are needed.
Therefore we need to 1) prevent social isolation, 2) promote more healthy relationships in media, 3) promote self-improvement and challenge mindless nihilistic self-hate, and 4) push progressive feminism in a way which is positive, healthy and reaches people.
"I've not no friends, all I do is watch [niche media] all day, my life sucks and I deserve to die, women only care about asshole chads" is basically the in Incel line. We need to fight all of that in a multi-corps pincer assault that Napoleon would be proud of.
Trying to be an amateur counselor for people is unlikely to be helpfull, is often quite harmfull, and can be actually dangerous for the amateur counselor.
Here I take issue
1 - This is a mischaracterization of what I proposed. Being an attentive friend is not equivalent to being an amateur counselor.
2 - Even so, could you please qualify this statement? What harm, exactly, do you belive can come from trying to reach out and empathize with a hypothetical proto-incel?
Trying to be an amateur counselor for people is unlikely to be helpfull, is often quite harmfull, and can be actually dangerous for the amateur counselor.
Here I take issue
1 - This is a mischaracterization of what I proposed. Being an attentive friend is not equivalent to being an amateur counselor.
2 - Even so, could you please qualify this statement? What harm, exactly, do you belive can come from trying to reach out and empathize with a hypothetical proto-incel?
1 - Incells are not kind of people who have lot of friends, so just being attentive friend does shit to counter incells. Unless you expect people to go out and specifically befriending proto incells. At which point we are back to unpaid emotional labor the thread already talked about.
It is unreasonable to ask for people to go and interact with horrible (potentially dangerous) people just in case that might stop them from becomming actual monsters.
2 - Well, starting from utterly failing to help and cementing their horrible views (and actually absorbing some of them), i guess the end point is somewhere around mass murder.
Claiming that social isolation as a result of shitty economic setups aren't factors in why some become incels, is just as wrong and dismissive as claiming that economic anxiety had zero influence on people voting for a certain shit stain. People don't become awful in a vacuum, a variety a factors feed into the makings of a person. Also we're dealing with a group of individuals, not some fuck awful gestalt consciousness. Yes, you can certainly find people that weren't isolated and just became shitty incels, but that isn't everyone that gets swallowed up by the shitty movement. The current shit economic model pretty much ensures you do get a ton of bitter individuals, that feel trapped in their current situation. Throw in the fact that the setup is rather effective at isolating people and those people are more susceptible to joining the wrong crowd.
Trying to be an amateur counselor for people is unlikely to be helpfull, is often quite harmfull, and can be actually dangerous for the amateur counselor.
Here I take issue
1 - This is a mischaracterization of what I proposed. Being an attentive friend is not equivalent to being an amateur counselor.
2 - Even so, could you please qualify this statement? What harm, exactly, do you belive can come from trying to reach out and empathize with a hypothetical proto-incel?
1 - Incells are not kind of people who have lot of friends, so just being attentive friend does shit to counter incells. Unless you expect people to go out and specifically befriending proto incells. At which point we are back to unpaid emotional labor the thread already talked about.
It is unreasonable to ask for people to go and interact with horrible (potentially dangerous) people just in case that might stop them from becomming actual monsters.
2 - Well, starting from utterly failing to help and cementing their horrible views (and actually absorbing some of them), i guess the end point is somewhere around mass murder.
Pretend for a moment that Romantic Undead isn't out to save the world, but help his one friend. Your contention is still that he shouldn't, at any point of their "Becoming an Incel" magical journey? For the sake of argument, let's go ahead and stipulate that further along their journey to becoming a shitheel that it's demonstrably more dangerous and less fruitful to engage with them.
Any strategies for dealing with incels or any other radicalized group will not have a "one size fits all" answer. Of course, we want to deal with them with empathy and patience when it is someone we know, a friend or family member. But those solutions also do not work as a short term solution (these changes take time), they do not work in as a large scale solution (because it's tailored to each individual... you can't take a group of a dozen incels and "convert" them all at once!*), and they do not mitigate any of the harm caused by members who do destructive acts. For a specific individual, empathy and understanding could make huge changes, especially if the individual wants to change. We cannot expect those changes to propagate (and indeed, they usually don't), and it requires a cost of labor on the part of the people trying to convert them, which isn't fair (but what in life is?).
So, we need to have ways to deplatform hate and prevent the spread of their message which, I'm sure, would rankle free speech absolutists who can't abide by the slippery slope. However, this is akin to people shouting "fire" in a crowded theater... it's speech that impacts people and causes harm. Authorities need to take them seriously so that another tragedy doesn't occur.
These aren't mutually exclusive options. You can write off the Incel The People without writing off the Incel Your Brother. They both will "cost" things from us, either personally through emotional labor or as a society (through more rules, regulations, legislation, and most importantly, actual enforcement). And this doesn't even tackle what I feel is the root cause of it all, but something needs to be done in the short term while the long term solutions happen.
* Well, maybe YOU can, but then what are you doing faffing about on these forums? Are you trying to convert US? *paranoid*
Broad policies are something we can present here and discuss as news but aren't as relevant as the person-to-person strategies we will actually use as forum members. I believe we should be more objective focused with actionable goals.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
The idea that there is some concrete line where you became an incel and thus are now irredeemable reads like nonsense to me. If we can view criminals as capable of rehabilitation, how can we not view incels as the same?
Trying to be an amateur counselor for people is unlikely to be helpfull, is often quite harmfull, and can be actually dangerous for the amateur counselor.
Here I take issue
1 - This is a mischaracterization of what I proposed. Being an attentive friend is not equivalent to being an amateur counselor.
2 - Even so, could you please qualify this statement? What harm, exactly, do you belive can come from trying to reach out and empathize with a hypothetical proto-incel?
1 - Incells are not kind of people who have lot of friends, so just being attentive friend does shit to counter incells. Unless you expect people to go out and specifically befriending proto incells. At which point we are back to unpaid emotional labor the thread already talked about.
It is unreasonable to ask for people to go and interact with horrible (potentially dangerous) people just in case that might stop them from becomming actual monsters.
This is why I put myself up as an example, to counter this narrative. I came out the other side because I had attentive friends. Some people noticed I was having trouble and took the time to take me out and work on my issues, which is why I made it out.
And before you say "yeah but you weren't really an incel", I'll respond by saying "I know, because I had attentive friends!"
And the reason I bring this up on this forum is because I think it's reasonable to believe that there are people here, on this very forum, who may be, or may know, someone who is at risk, and I want to tell them that you, yes you, have the means to help them, to protect them, and set them on a better path. I don't know who the next Elliot Roger is going to be, but I can at least try to make sure it isn't someone I know, and I ask that everyone here try and do the same. You can do this by, for example, by calling out shitty language in your gaming groups or checking in with your friends who express questionable views, and offer an ear. This isn't being a pseudo-therapist, it's being a friend.
And note, I'm saying friends. That means people you actually know and care about. I am absolutely positive there are people who read this forum who know or may even be people at risk. That's who I'm talking to here. Nowhere did I recommend that it's incumbent on us to go out to random forums and proselytize.
2 - Well, starting from utterly failing to help and cementing their horrible views (and actually absorbing some of them), i guess the end point is somewhere around mass murder.
I find this statement completely hyperbolic to the point that I can't help but think it's made in bad faith. Can you provide some kind of source supporting the claim that you seem to be making that trying to help someone can incite them to violence? Heck, I'll even take an anecdote.
My experience contradicts the claim you made. Are you saying I'm some kind of outlier? If so, please show your work because I don't believe you.
Trying to be an amateur counselor for people is unlikely to be helpfull, is often quite harmfull, and can be actually dangerous for the amateur counselor.
Here I take issue
1 - This is a mischaracterization of what I proposed. Being an attentive friend is not equivalent to being an amateur counselor.
2 - Even so, could you please qualify this statement? What harm, exactly, do you belive can come from trying to reach out and empathize with a hypothetical proto-incel?
1 - Incells are not kind of people who have lot of friends, so just being attentive friend does shit to counter incells. Unless you expect people to go out and specifically befriending proto incells. At which point we are back to unpaid emotional labor the thread already talked about.
It is unreasonable to ask for people to go and interact with horrible (potentially dangerous) people just in case that might stop them from becomming actual monsters.
2 - Well, starting from utterly failing to help and cementing their horrible views (and actually absorbing some of them), i guess the end point is somewhere around mass murder.
Pretend for a moment that Romantic Undead isn't out to save the world, but help his one friend. Your contention is still that he shouldn't, at any point of their "Becoming an Incel" magical journey? For the sake of argument, let's go ahead and stipulate that further along their journey to becoming a shitheel that it's demonstrably more dangerous and less fruitful to engage with them.
It is quite possible that, yes, he shouldn't, depending on how far his one friend has gone.
Maybe his friend is not dangerous, maybe his friend can be helped just be being their friend, maybe romantic Undead can help them.
If so, great.
This in no way translates to a broader expectation of other people to engage potentially dangerous people.
Or that we should expect people to spend their time and effort to go out and befriend proto incells to stop them from becomming incells.
The idea that there is some concrete line where you became an incel and thus are now irredeemable reads like nonsense to me. If we can view criminals as capable of rehabilitation, how can we not view incels as the same?
Has someone advocated for a concrete line? If so, i missed it.
If we treated incells with same seriousness, and spent similar resources to rehabilitate them, as we do actual dangerous criminals, i would be overjoyed.
The idea that there is some concrete line where you became an incel and thus are now irredeemable reads like nonsense to me. If we can view criminals as capable of rehabilitation, how can we not view incels as the same?
The first step in rehabilitation is acknowledgement of the problem, and ultimately that's a door they have to walk through on their own. The problem with the incel movement as a whole is that they actively avoid acknowledgement - the whole belief system is structured around the concept that it's the world that's wrong, not them.
CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
Not all incels become mass murderers. Most of the time the world view creates suicides. Not every incel is the worst incel that could ever be, and some people who even call themselves "incel" eventually find their way out. It's a mistake to just paint it all black and say there's nothing we can do about that group.
Peace to fashion police, I wear my heart
On my sleeve, let the runway start
It is my belief that the sympathy they get in this thread is a result of misunderstanding them and overprojecting some of our demographics' experiences onto them. If you want to interpret that as what you said, sure.
I find this thread's repeated cycles of talking about everyone's personal social struggles to be akin to a thread on our country's abhorrent immigration policies constantly turning into personal stories about how hard it was when the local plant went to Mexico.
It is my experience interacting with the incel movement that actual social isolation is not at all a requirement for joining. Many of them have perfectly normal social lives. Accepting their premise to begin with that they have legitimate complaints about social isolation that they just take too far with the misogyny is misunderstanding them and underestimating their true threat. They're yet another outgrowth of modern patriarchal fascism, and one of fascism's most used plays is convincing regular people to buy into the first half of their pamphlet, even if said regular people say "But they're going too far."
My position is that incels are an extreme expression of toxic masculinity, or what the APA refers to as "masculinity ideology" (PDF link) and my horse in this race is not to excuse incel behavior, but to dismantle toxic masculinity using inceldom as an illustration of how toxic masculinity damages people.
I'm definitely not saying 'incels wouldn't be violent if we were just nicer to them,' which is an attitude I routinely mock (example) but rather that incels would be less of a problem, or potentially not exist at all, if we didn't have toxic masculinity undermining our mental health. (That said, I do think that being nicer to young men who are leaning towards inceldom - or other MRA subcultures - can prevent them from getting radicalized. This is preventative, not curative.)
I appreciate the sympathetic posts in this thread because they demonstrate how toxic masculinity affects people who aren't extremists.
Social isolation in this context is interesting to me because it is both a cause, and a symptom, of toxic masculinity. Men are discouraged from forming emotional bonds with other men. We can have friendships, but those friendships are encouraged to conform to a model that limits vulnerability and emotional intimacy. (There are two books I wholeheartedly recommend that explore this: Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent and Will to Change by bell hooks.) Meanwhile, as the APA pointed out in their PDF above, "It has been suggested that many men do not seek psychological help because services are not in alignment with masculine cultural norms that equate asking for assistance for psychological and emotional concerns with shame and weakness," which means that when we have difficulties with social anxiety / social phobia, we're less likely to seek help and less likely to comply with treatment.
Men are afraid of showing vulnerability, because vulnerability is coded feminine... which means that misogyny and social isolation are not cleanly separable.
As an aside, I tend to be pretty skeptical towards analogies between sexism and racism. Toxic masculinity is one of the enormous ways that they differ. White privilege does not substantively injure the people who internalize it. (Sometimes white privilege can lead white people to support leaders or laws that disadvantage them in the long run, even sometimes going to war over it, but that's much more indirect.)
White people, when they see something they like about another ethnicity, co-opt it. Male privilege, on the other hand, eschews anything coded feminine. Toxic masculinity harms those with male privilege, and there's no analogous corrupting force undermining the health of people with white privilege.
As for the argument that "one of fascism's most used plays is convincing regular people to buy into the first half of their pamphlet," I agree that is the case. But we can draw a dividing line where the pamphlet stops being true. In the recent Gilets Jaunes thread, I argued that "the left-wing posters in this thread are underestimating the right-wing element in the Yellow Vest movement because we are used to North American conservatism, which combines economic austerity with racism & nationalism. When we look at demands like higher minimum wage and increased retirement benefits, we see then as left-wing. However, the French nationalist-right is pro-welfare and pro-redistribution, so letting ourselves be mollified by superficial similarities to Occupy is an error." In that case, opposing the fascist ideology of Marine Le Pen does not mean that we should just ignore double-digit employment in rural France. We can evaluate the complaint separately, on its empirical merits, without adopting the fascists' prescription. Pretending that the complaints and the fascist ideology are inseparable only works in their favor.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Incells are not just people who have troubling views.
These are people who cheer for rape and murder of women, who treat a mass murderer as their patron saint.
OK so we have already experimentally observed how this turns out.
In 1987, the IRA bombed a Remembrance Day service in Enniskillen. 11 people were killed, most of them elderly. It was an absolutely despicable act of violence which no sane person could possibly defend on any grounds whatsoever. After that, there was no moral foundation whatsoever for supporting the IRA bombing campaign.
This came, it might be noted, 37 months after the Brighton bombing, where the entire top tier of the current government was targetted. The reaction to that bombing was to 'unperson' the IRA. There were some pretty strict deplatforming rules, even down to stuff like any statements made by the IRA were read out by "neutral" newsreaders - no recordings or videos by them could be played. Oh yeah, also, oh, a whole bunch of people were killed under.... questionable circumstances.
And hey ho, what do you know, all those people in Enniskillen were still killed. 11 years later, 29 people were killed and over 200 injured in a somewhat similar incident in Omagh
Are you prepared to take this to the wire? Are you prepared to see the civil authorities escalate this to the level that the British government did in the 70s and 80s? Because god damb, there was some dirty shit done in that campaign. And are you prepared for it to not fucking work?
So, years on from 1998, the Good Friday Agreement it turns out that no matter how rigorously the symptoms are combatted, if the underlying causes are not addressed, if dialogue is not established, if the unpersons are not given a pathway to being repersoned, then the violence escalates, the deaths increase, the bombs get bigger, the more lives get wrecked.
You have to sit down with monsters, because monsters get more monstrous not less if you are monstrous back. The Queen shook hands with Martin Macguinness in 2012, who was at least peripherally involved in multiple IRA killings. Did she want to? Did she like it? Was it needed.
Not all incels become mass murderers. Most of the time the world view creates suicides. Not every incel is the worst incel that could ever be, and some people who even call themselves "incel" eventually find their way out. It's a mistake to just paint it all black and say there's nothing we can do about that group.
It's also a mistake to avoid acknowledging the harm they can do, though. Even leaving out the extreme violence that the movement has inspired, incel thought creates toxic environments hostile to many individuals, women in particular. And it's not just something you see with what you might describe as "typical" incels - here's a college professor stating incel-adjacent views. If you were his student and read that, would you feel that you would get a fair shake from him?
I talked in a prior thread about the "redemption narrative", and how it can refocus people from harms and the victims to the perpetrators. Yes, I get that many incels are hurting. That doesn't mean they get to hurt others.
Trying to be an amateur counselor for people is unlikely to be helpfull, is often quite harmfull, and can be actually dangerous for the amateur counselor.
Here I take issue
1 - This is a mischaracterization of what I proposed. Being an attentive friend is not equivalent to being an amateur counselor.
2 - Even so, could you please qualify this statement? What harm, exactly, do you belive can come from trying to reach out and empathize with a hypothetical proto-incel?
1 - Incells are not kind of people who have lot of friends, so just being attentive friend does shit to counter incells. Unless you expect people to go out and specifically befriending proto incells. At which point we are back to unpaid emotional labor the thread already talked about.
It is unreasonable to ask for people to go and interact with horrible (potentially dangerous) people just in case that might stop them from becomming actual monsters.
2 - Well, starting from utterly failing to help and cementing their horrible views (and actually absorbing some of them), i guess the end point is somewhere around mass murder.
Pretend for a moment that Romantic Undead isn't out to save the world, but help his one friend. Your contention is still that he shouldn't, at any point of their "Becoming an Incel" magical journey? For the sake of argument, let's go ahead and stipulate that further along their journey to becoming a shitheel that it's demonstrably more dangerous and less fruitful to engage with them.
It is quite possible that, yes, he shouldn't, depending on how far his one friend has gone.
Maybe his friend is not dangerous, maybe his friend can be helped just be being their friend, maybe romantic Undead can help them.
If so, great.
This in no way translates to a broader expectation of other people to engage potentially dangerous people.
Or that we should expect people to spend their time and effort to go out and befriend proto incells to stop them from becomming incells.
The idea that there is some concrete line where you became an incel and thus are now irredeemable reads like nonsense to me. If we can view criminals as capable of rehabilitation, how can we not view incels as the same?
Has someone advocated for a concrete line? If so, i missed it.
If we treated incells with same seriousness, and spent similar resources to rehabilitate them, as we do actual dangerous criminals, i would be overjoyed.
I probably missed it, but I didn't see anyone actually communicate any such expectation. Romantic Undead started on a much smaller scale than you're wanting to frame this argument.
Again, let's stipulate that there's an inherent danger in walking up to incels or...uh....proto-incels and attempting to reform them. Danger communicated and received. Let's also stipulate that none of us are trained mental health professionals and as such are woefully underprepared for the job, and could potentially make things worse as we blunder into this. Yes, absolutely. And finally, let's stipulate that most incels are socially isolated to the point that they have no friends to beg them down from the ledge.
Given all that:
If my friend is walking down this dark path, step 1 for me is to confront him about it. Agreed? And that trying to understand them and why they're feeling this way is instructive as to how and where they need help? Again, assume I know the dangers involved and don't care.
I think deplatforming is the first, easiest and probably most effective attack on the Incel movement. The incel movement is like a specific ideology grafted on to and feeding off of larger problems in society but those problems don't have to get as extreme as incels do. And the reason incels exist and are as extreme as they are because they feed off each other and pass around the toxic ideology. If you can cut that off, if you can keep people from linking up and reinforcing each other that way you could do a lot to combat the whole thing.
The idea that there is some concrete line where you became an incel and thus are now irredeemable reads like nonsense to me. If we can view criminals as capable of rehabilitation, how can we not view incels as the same?
The first step in rehabilitation is acknowledgement of the problem, and ultimately that's a door they have to walk through on their own. The problem with the incel movement as a whole is that they actively avoid acknowledgement - the whole belief system is structured around the concept that it's the world that's wrong, not them.
I don't think that's even remotely unique to incels or their general ethos. They are hardly the first group or individuals to externalize their problems and blame the world/others/society for their woes. It is an incredibly normal thing to do--not normal as in good, but normal as in common, ordinary, not unique.
I also disagree with the idea that it's a door they have to walk through on their own. It's a nice statement, but it doesn't feel true. Very bootstraps. What is our overall societal success rate for individually recognizing, identifying and dealing with our mental issues? I'd venture quite low. There's a reason we urge people to seek professional help, and the reason we have to urge them is because of gigantic stigmas around the idea of mental care.
I agree that they do need to take some actions on their own. Everyone is eventually responsible to choose change or not, but often getting to that point is incredibly difficult. And if we don't believe they can change, why should they?
I think deplatforming is the first, easiest and probably most effective attack on the Incel movement. The incel movement is like a specific ideology grafted on to and feeding off of larger problems in society but those problems don't have to get as extreme as incels do. And the reason incels exist and are as extreme as they are because they feed off each other and pass around the toxic ideology. If you can cut that off, if you can keep people from linking up and reinforcing each other that way you could do a lot to combat the whole thing.
I dunno about the first and easy part. I know I'm not in control of any meaningful platforms
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
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I just saw Endgame, and one of my buddies said Scarlet Johansson looked ready to be put out to pasture.
He's older than she is, and she's just 34 years old.
Fuck's sake.
I'm not entirely sure that this isn't the right way. To sympathize with these people is a major endeavor, and it may not only be fruitless but downright dangerous for the unprepared. If my thesis is correct, those of us without a strong support anchor of real friends may be at risk of absorbing malignant ideologies and should limit exposure to content regarding social isolationism regardless of context. Does sympathy with an extremist group make you more vulnerable to their views?
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Bloody hell.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
I think that there is a strong argument to be made for non professional helpers avoiding incells, and other extremists, like plague.
Not just because the ideas they have can spread in sympathetic minds, but because they are potentially dangerous.
And even if they are not dangerous, most people are not really equipped to help them, and can easily make things worse.
Also, while i can have sympathy for people who, for whatever reason, find themselves isolated from people, my sympathy stops when they start worshipping mass murderers and preaching about how women should be forced to have sex with them.
Incells are not just "lonely people in need of friendship", and depicting them as such is dangerous.
1) social isolation prevents them seeing real relationships in their social group
2) reliance on often extremely problematic fictional romance narratives as a template for how relationships look.
3) Even when incels bemoan their lack of social understanding they absolutely don't want to try to change themselves and instead the community encourages wallowing in self-hate and despair.
4) raging misogyny prevents them from seeing a female perspective or understanding why women in reality are not like the depictions of women in a lot of the media they consume, that women are in fact people etc. This is a big deal!
Therefore we need to 1) prevent social isolation, 2) promote more healthy relationships in media, 3) promote self-improvement and challenge mindless nihilistic self-hate, and 4) push progressive feminism in a way which is positive, healthy and reaches people.
"I've not no friends, all I do is watch [niche media] all day, my life sucks and I deserve to die, women only care about asshole chads" is basically the in Incel line. We need to fight all of that in a multi-corps pincer assault that Napoleon would be proud of.
Not just because it helps with incells, but because they generally make the world a better place.
But the incell problem is one that gets solved over a generation.
On short term, i think priority needs to be, in no particular order, to make people realice incells are not just lonely guys on the internet, deplatform incell movement as much as possible to stop/slow the spread, and make law enforcement take internet harrasment in general, and incells in specific, seriously.
Not enough, not fast enough, and not always effectively.
But they are things people are trying to do.
It is my belief that the sympathy they get in this thread is a result of misunderstanding them and overprojecting some of our demographics' experiences onto them. If you want to interpret that as what you said, sure.
I find this thread's repeated cycles of talking about everyone's personal social struggles to be akin to a thread on our country's abhorrent immigration policies constantly turning into personal stories about how hard it was when the local plant went to Mexico.
It is my experience interacting with the incel movement that actual social isolation is not at all a requirement for joining. Many of them have perfectly normal social lives. Accepting their premise to begin with that they have legitimate complaints about social isolation that they just take too far with the misogyny is misunderstanding them and underestimating their true threat. They're yet another outgrowth of modern patriarchal fascism, and one of fascism's most used plays is convincing regular people to buy into the first half of their pamphlet, even if said regular people say "But they're going too far."
The issue I take with your perspective is that I feel it is overly dismissive of people such as me.
As I shared a couple of months back, I see myself in these fools. I picture an alternate universe where I am one of them. My desire to share my experience and eventual reform is born of a desire to offer insight, in the hopes that it might inspire some to seek to understand and see that there may be hope for some of these lost souls. Since I have gotten a lot of positive feedback for sharing my story, I feel confident that I was successful, to a degree.
Your stated position makes me feel that, had you known me twenty years ago, you would have immediately dismissed me as an irredemable monster. Had you, or someone like you, come into my life during those troubled years, speaking to me the way to speak of incels in general in this thread, I can tell you one thing: that would have radicalized me further, and I likely would not have become the man I am today. And, I'm sorry, but I can't help but feel that your reaction to that outcome might just have been "well good!" and that bothers me.
Seeking to better understand troubled individuals doesn't excuse their behaviour, but treating them as unreedeemable assholes who cannot be reformed serves only to further isolate and make them more desperate, which makes them MORE likely to lash out and become a danger to society. Yes, it's possible that someone might be too far gone that the only option remaining is to incarcerate them until it can be determined that they are no longer a threat, but it becomes next to impossible to detect those who may be a threat if we drive them into hiding up until a point comes where they make their move.
It is my position that you treat societal ills and dangerous views with empathy, not scorn. Incarceration and other law enforcement tools are state powers that should be used to shield society from its dangerous elements, not to seek vengeance or retribution. Working towards ensuring troubled people have access to empathic resources (such as the love not anger site in the OP) can provide a path to troubled individuals to redeem themselves before it's too late. It's not perfect, of course, no solution can be, but it is a superior alternative than treating individuals with hatred and scorn, no matter how damaged they may be.
What do you think is this forum's role in that endeavor? Is there any, or is this a platform that should be cleansed of dysfunctional and dangerous people and views?
Advocating for empathy will always sound right, but it's hard to practically execute since it's a skill best exercised in person rather than over the internet. If you look at all the gears of the complex interactions in this space, you'll realize the negative consequences of every approach mentioned here, and you'll have to make hard choices about who you want to keep and who you don't.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I'm not sure I quite understand the question here, do you believe that I was advocating that someone be banned? I was simply wishing to express my own feelings as to why Inkstain's postition troubled me. This was not an attempt at meta-modding in any way, and dissagreement is not censorship.
As to your point about empathy sounding right but being hard to execute: yeah, no disagreement there, of course it's easier to just tell someone to fuck off, and yeah, some people deserve it, but I felt that it was important to remind about the risks inherent with further alienating those who hold troubling views. I feel I can speak with some degree of authority on the matter because, as I stated, I can imagine how I might have reacted to such treatment had I been confronted with it during my darker days.
These are people who cheer for rape and murder of women, who treat a mass murderer as their patron saint.
It's not a binary function. Incels don't just pop into existence, they become that way. It is incumbent on us as a society to find ways to keep them from becoming that way in the first place. Treating people who are at risk of becoming incels (let's call them "proto-incels") as irredemable is an abdication of responsibility and serves only to further the problem.
Tactics that I think work:
- patience and empathy
- seeking to explain why their viewpoint is troubling, rather than condemn them for having those viewpoints in the first place
- offering resources, instead of ostracizing (example: "hey man, you were saying some crazy shit earlier, are you good? Wanna grab a beer and talk or something?")
- calling out your friends when they express toxic behaviour (online or in real life) - a simple "yo dude, that's gross, cut it out" can usually suffice
Yeah, many of these solutions are harder than just ignoring shitty people or telling them to fuck off, but that's the point I'm trying to make. Societal change takes effort, it's hard, I know. That doesn't mean it isn't worth doing, and there are small changes we can all make in our own lives (like call out our friends, for example) that aren't too much to ask.
For example, I've got a friend who occasionally likes to throw out incel terms like "thot" and "chad" every now and again. I know he's not an incel, but I still feel it's important to nip that stuff in the bud. All I do is say stuff like "yo dude, get out of here with that incel stuff" and he'll roll his eyes and say "whatever". But if he does let another "thot" slip he'll catch himself, give me a furtive glance and course-correct. It's nothing big, but it adds up.
I'm not advocating you do anything, just looking for ideas. Kicking out people is simple and low maintenance. Doing anything else can be trouble. Who goes and who stays? How do we deal with people who can stay? It's ok if you don't know the answer; I don't either.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Thanks for expounding on your position. My apologies for jumping down your throat. I was projecting anger from an unrelated situation into this thread. You didn't deserve that.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
You could have been an incell in a different world, fine, so could i, or almost any other male in this forum, us treating incells with disgust is not treating whatever brand of asshat you may have been in the past with same disgust, or the brand of asshat i was in the past with disgust.
By the time someone has become an actual incell, my sympathy, and empathy, have been spent, and my focus will be in stopping them from harming others.
We totally should try to stop people from becomming incells, you know whats the most effective way to do so?
Denying them platforms to spread their shit. Making sure authorities take them seriously. Stopping them from becomming the next Elliot Rodger.
And then doing all the things Solar pointed out in a post earlier this page that i agreed to but these are going to take effect over a generation, or more, here and now, more immediately effective actions are needed.
Trying to be an amateur counselor for people is unlikely to be helpfull, is often quite harmfull, and can be actually dangerous for the amateur counselor.
So, we need to have ways to deplatform hate and prevent the spread of their message which, I'm sure, would rankle free speech absolutists who can't abide by the slippery slope. However, this is akin to people shouting "fire" in a crowded theater... it's speech that impacts people and causes harm. Authorities need to take them seriously so that another tragedy doesn't occur.
These aren't mutually exclusive options. You can write off the Incel The People without writing off the Incel Your Brother. They both will "cost" things from us, either personally through emotional labor or as a society (through more rules, regulations, legislation, and most importantly, actual enforcement). And this doesn't even tackle what I feel is the root cause of it all, but something needs to be done in the short term while the long term solutions happen.
* Well, maybe YOU can, but then what are you doing faffing about on these forums? Are you trying to convert US? *paranoid*
One achieves the other imo. The best way to combat people being indoctrinated is to shutdown the information sources that radicalize them. Which also happen to be the same sources that allow them to organize.
Ok, and where is that line, exactly, between proto-incel and full-blown incel?
Agreed, I don't see how that statement contradicts anything I've said.
Also agreed, to quote @Solar for context:
Here I take issue
1 - This is a mischaracterization of what I proposed. Being an attentive friend is not equivalent to being an amateur counselor.
2 - Even so, could you please qualify this statement? What harm, exactly, do you belive can come from trying to reach out and empathize with a hypothetical proto-incel?
It's up to everyone to decide at what point someone has become more than they are willling to deal with.
1 - Incells are not kind of people who have lot of friends, so just being attentive friend does shit to counter incells. Unless you expect people to go out and specifically befriending proto incells. At which point we are back to unpaid emotional labor the thread already talked about.
It is unreasonable to ask for people to go and interact with horrible (potentially dangerous) people just in case that might stop them from becomming actual monsters.
2 - Well, starting from utterly failing to help and cementing their horrible views (and actually absorbing some of them), i guess the end point is somewhere around mass murder.
Pretend for a moment that Romantic Undead isn't out to save the world, but help his one friend. Your contention is still that he shouldn't, at any point of their "Becoming an Incel" magical journey? For the sake of argument, let's go ahead and stipulate that further along their journey to becoming a shitheel that it's demonstrably more dangerous and less fruitful to engage with them.
Broad policies are something we can present here and discuss as news but aren't as relevant as the person-to-person strategies we will actually use as forum members. I believe we should be more objective focused with actionable goals.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
This is why I put myself up as an example, to counter this narrative. I came out the other side because I had attentive friends. Some people noticed I was having trouble and took the time to take me out and work on my issues, which is why I made it out.
And before you say "yeah but you weren't really an incel", I'll respond by saying "I know, because I had attentive friends!"
And the reason I bring this up on this forum is because I think it's reasonable to believe that there are people here, on this very forum, who may be, or may know, someone who is at risk, and I want to tell them that you, yes you, have the means to help them, to protect them, and set them on a better path. I don't know who the next Elliot Roger is going to be, but I can at least try to make sure it isn't someone I know, and I ask that everyone here try and do the same. You can do this by, for example, by calling out shitty language in your gaming groups or checking in with your friends who express questionable views, and offer an ear. This isn't being a pseudo-therapist, it's being a friend.
And note, I'm saying friends. That means people you actually know and care about. I am absolutely positive there are people who read this forum who know or may even be people at risk. That's who I'm talking to here. Nowhere did I recommend that it's incumbent on us to go out to random forums and proselytize.
I find this statement completely hyperbolic to the point that I can't help but think it's made in bad faith. Can you provide some kind of source supporting the claim that you seem to be making that trying to help someone can incite them to violence? Heck, I'll even take an anecdote.
My experience contradicts the claim you made. Are you saying I'm some kind of outlier? If so, please show your work because I don't believe you.
Maybe his friend is not dangerous, maybe his friend can be helped just be being their friend, maybe romantic Undead can help them.
If so, great.
This in no way translates to a broader expectation of other people to engage potentially dangerous people.
Or that we should expect people to spend their time and effort to go out and befriend proto incells to stop them from becomming incells.
Has someone advocated for a concrete line? If so, i missed it.
If we treated incells with same seriousness, and spent similar resources to rehabilitate them, as we do actual dangerous criminals, i would be overjoyed.
The first step in rehabilitation is acknowledgement of the problem, and ultimately that's a door they have to walk through on their own. The problem with the incel movement as a whole is that they actively avoid acknowledgement - the whole belief system is structured around the concept that it's the world that's wrong, not them.
On my sleeve, let the runway start
My position is that incels are an extreme expression of toxic masculinity, or what the APA refers to as "masculinity ideology" (PDF link) and my horse in this race is not to excuse incel behavior, but to dismantle toxic masculinity using inceldom as an illustration of how toxic masculinity damages people.
I'm definitely not saying 'incels wouldn't be violent if we were just nicer to them,' which is an attitude I routinely mock (example) but rather that incels would be less of a problem, or potentially not exist at all, if we didn't have toxic masculinity undermining our mental health. (That said, I do think that being nicer to young men who are leaning towards inceldom - or other MRA subcultures - can prevent them from getting radicalized. This is preventative, not curative.)
I appreciate the sympathetic posts in this thread because they demonstrate how toxic masculinity affects people who aren't extremists.
Social isolation in this context is interesting to me because it is both a cause, and a symptom, of toxic masculinity. Men are discouraged from forming emotional bonds with other men. We can have friendships, but those friendships are encouraged to conform to a model that limits vulnerability and emotional intimacy. (There are two books I wholeheartedly recommend that explore this: Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent and Will to Change by bell hooks.) Meanwhile, as the APA pointed out in their PDF above, "It has been suggested that many men do not seek psychological help because services are not in alignment with masculine cultural norms that equate asking for assistance for psychological and emotional concerns with shame and weakness," which means that when we have difficulties with social anxiety / social phobia, we're less likely to seek help and less likely to comply with treatment.
Men are afraid of showing vulnerability, because vulnerability is coded feminine... which means that misogyny and social isolation are not cleanly separable.
As an aside, I tend to be pretty skeptical towards analogies between sexism and racism. Toxic masculinity is one of the enormous ways that they differ. White privilege does not substantively injure the people who internalize it. (Sometimes white privilege can lead white people to support leaders or laws that disadvantage them in the long run, even sometimes going to war over it, but that's much more indirect.)
White people, when they see something they like about another ethnicity, co-opt it. Male privilege, on the other hand, eschews anything coded feminine. Toxic masculinity harms those with male privilege, and there's no analogous corrupting force undermining the health of people with white privilege.
As for the argument that "one of fascism's most used plays is convincing regular people to buy into the first half of their pamphlet," I agree that is the case. But we can draw a dividing line where the pamphlet stops being true. In the recent Gilets Jaunes thread, I argued that "the left-wing posters in this thread are underestimating the right-wing element in the Yellow Vest movement because we are used to North American conservatism, which combines economic austerity with racism & nationalism. When we look at demands like higher minimum wage and increased retirement benefits, we see then as left-wing. However, the French nationalist-right is pro-welfare and pro-redistribution, so letting ourselves be mollified by superficial similarities to Occupy is an error." In that case, opposing the fascist ideology of Marine Le Pen does not mean that we should just ignore double-digit employment in rural France. We can evaluate the complaint separately, on its empirical merits, without adopting the fascists' prescription. Pretending that the complaints and the fascist ideology are inseparable only works in their favor.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
OK so we have already experimentally observed how this turns out.
In 1987, the IRA bombed a Remembrance Day service in Enniskillen. 11 people were killed, most of them elderly. It was an absolutely despicable act of violence which no sane person could possibly defend on any grounds whatsoever. After that, there was no moral foundation whatsoever for supporting the IRA bombing campaign.
This came, it might be noted, 37 months after the Brighton bombing, where the entire top tier of the current government was targetted. The reaction to that bombing was to 'unperson' the IRA. There were some pretty strict deplatforming rules, even down to stuff like any statements made by the IRA were read out by "neutral" newsreaders - no recordings or videos by them could be played. Oh yeah, also, oh, a whole bunch of people were killed under.... questionable circumstances.
And hey ho, what do you know, all those people in Enniskillen were still killed. 11 years later, 29 people were killed and over 200 injured in a somewhat similar incident in Omagh
Are you prepared to take this to the wire? Are you prepared to see the civil authorities escalate this to the level that the British government did in the 70s and 80s? Because god damb, there was some dirty shit done in that campaign. And are you prepared for it to not fucking work?
So, years on from 1998, the Good Friday Agreement it turns out that no matter how rigorously the symptoms are combatted, if the underlying causes are not addressed, if dialogue is not established, if the unpersons are not given a pathway to being repersoned, then the violence escalates, the deaths increase, the bombs get bigger, the more lives get wrecked.
You have to sit down with monsters, because monsters get more monstrous not less if you are monstrous back. The Queen shook hands with Martin Macguinness in 2012, who was at least peripherally involved in multiple IRA killings. Did she want to? Did she like it? Was it needed.
It's also a mistake to avoid acknowledging the harm they can do, though. Even leaving out the extreme violence that the movement has inspired, incel thought creates toxic environments hostile to many individuals, women in particular. And it's not just something you see with what you might describe as "typical" incels - here's a college professor stating incel-adjacent views. If you were his student and read that, would you feel that you would get a fair shake from him?
I talked in a prior thread about the "redemption narrative", and how it can refocus people from harms and the victims to the perpetrators. Yes, I get that many incels are hurting. That doesn't mean they get to hurt others.
I probably missed it, but I didn't see anyone actually communicate any such expectation. Romantic Undead started on a much smaller scale than you're wanting to frame this argument.
Again, let's stipulate that there's an inherent danger in walking up to incels or...uh....proto-incels and attempting to reform them. Danger communicated and received. Let's also stipulate that none of us are trained mental health professionals and as such are woefully underprepared for the job, and could potentially make things worse as we blunder into this. Yes, absolutely. And finally, let's stipulate that most incels are socially isolated to the point that they have no friends to beg them down from the ledge.
Given all that:
If my friend is walking down this dark path, step 1 for me is to confront him about it. Agreed? And that trying to understand them and why they're feeling this way is instructive as to how and where they need help? Again, assume I know the dangers involved and don't care.
I don't think that's even remotely unique to incels or their general ethos. They are hardly the first group or individuals to externalize their problems and blame the world/others/society for their woes. It is an incredibly normal thing to do--not normal as in good, but normal as in common, ordinary, not unique.
I also disagree with the idea that it's a door they have to walk through on their own. It's a nice statement, but it doesn't feel true. Very bootstraps. What is our overall societal success rate for individually recognizing, identifying and dealing with our mental issues? I'd venture quite low. There's a reason we urge people to seek professional help, and the reason we have to urge them is because of gigantic stigmas around the idea of mental care.
I agree that they do need to take some actions on their own. Everyone is eventually responsible to choose change or not, but often getting to that point is incredibly difficult. And if we don't believe they can change, why should they?
I dunno about the first and easy part. I know I'm not in control of any meaningful platforms
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.