[Ammi]

...but ‘incel’ is a form of ‘radicalisation’, I presume..?..it’s not the same as being a single...it’s being convinced by a person or a group that all of the negatives in a life is because of females and feminism...?...that, that person would have happiness if it weren’t for females preventing that..?.../...is my very limited understanding...

[Ammi]

...is this type of thing what is known as the ‘dark web’, then..?...

[Toy Soldier]

Originally Posted by Ammi

...but ‘incel’ is a form of ‘radicalisation’, I presume..?..it’s not the same as being a single...it’s being convinced by a person or a group that all of the negatives in a life is because of females and feminism...?...that, that person would have happiness if it weren’t for females preventing that..?.../...is my very limited understanding...

It stands for "involuntarily celibate" ... basically the idea is that they're "owed" sex and are being "denied their right". But yes it's definitely made worse by them encouraging each other and developing full on ideologies that I think probably could be described as radicalisation, yeah.

Originally Posted by Ammi

...is this type of thing what is known as the ‘dark web’, then..?...

Oh Ammi, sadly no... this is very much mainstream web. Dark web is the stuff you can't even find on a search engine and honestly if we discuss it you'll lose all faith in humanity and I couldn't do that to you

[arista]

Originally Posted by Ammi

...is this type of thing what is known as the ‘dark web’, then..?...

Like Islamic Snuff Videos?

[Toy Soldier]

Originally Posted by arista

Like Islamic Snuff Videos?

Tip of the iceberg Arista.

[Ammi]

..I mean, I understand that there are things from the dark web that I or many people could not possibly imagine...but surely to openly use phrases like ‘turning live statuses into death statuses’...and with complete intention as to the literal meaning of that...would also be seen as ‘dark web’...that could never be described as mainstream, to discuss killing sections of society or groups of people or individuals...

[Ammi]

...people in relationships are termed ‘chads’ and ‘staceys’ for male and female...so these terms are used to dehumanise in exactly the same way as any radicalisation we’ve become familiar with...

[MTVN]

Weird I'd never heard of incels either until a few days ago, seems to be basically purely a North American phenomenon?

I've just been having a look at some of the reddit posts and it's an eye opener alright

[arista]

Originally Posted by Ammi

..I mean, I understand that there are things from the dark web that I or many people could not possibly imagine...but surely to openly use phrases like ‘turning live statuses into death statuses’...and with complete intention as to the literal meaning of that...would also be seen as ‘dark web’...that could never be described as mainstream, to discuss killing sections of society or groups of people or individuals...

Sure The Dark Web is Full of Criminals

[Toy Soldier]

Originally Posted by Ammi

..I mean, I understand that there are things from the dark web that I or many people could not possibly imagine...but surely to openly use phrases like ‘turning live statuses into death statuses’...and with complete intention as to the literal meaning of that...would also be seen as ‘dark web’...that could never be described as mainstream, to discuss killing sections of society or groups of people or individuals...

Dark Web is a specific thing though, not just the "dark side of the internet". You need specific software to access Dark Web sites, and specific search engines to search it. Many sites you need to actually know the full address and they can't be found at all without someone giving you the full link.

[Toy Soldier]

Originally Posted by MTVN

Weird I'd never heard of incels either until a few days ago, seems to be basically purely a North American phenomenon?

For now, mostly, it seems so. Terrifyingly they have many threads showing off their gun collections etc.

But as with most US cultural phenomena - it's starting to spill over towards Europe now and will probably gather pace. A lot of things over the last few years that were "a US thing" at first are very present in the UK now.

[Twosugars]

Another piece on this.
Ammi, theres lots of reading material on this on the Guardian site if you or anyone is interested


‘Raw hatred’: why the 'incel' movement targets and terrorises women
The man accused of carrying out the Toronto van attack has alleged links to ‘involuntary celibate’ online communities. The language they use may be absurd, but the threat they pose could be deadly

When a van was driven on to a Toronto pavement on Tuesday, killing 10 people and injuring 15, police chief Mark Saunders said that, while the incident appeared to be a deliberate act, there was no evidence of terrorism. The public safety minister
Ralph Goodale backed this up, deeming the event “not part of an organised terror plot”. Canada has rules about these things: to count as terrorism, the attacker must have a political, religious or social motivation, something beyond “wanting to terrorise”.

Why have the authorities been so fast to reject the idea of terrorism (taking as read that this may change; the tragedy is very fresh)? Shortly before the attack, a post appeared on the suspect’s Facebook profile, hailing the commencement of the “Incel Rebellion”, including the line “Private (Recruit) … Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161.” (“4chan is the main organising platform for the ‘alt-right’,” explains Mike Wendling, the author of Alt-Right: from 4Chan to the White House.)

There is a reluctance to ascribe to the “incel” movement anything so lofty as an “ideology” or credit it with any developed, connected thinking, partly because it is so bizarre in conception.

Standing for “involuntarily celibate”, the term was originally invented 20 years ago by a woman known only as Alana, who coined the term as a name for an online support forum for singles, basically a lonely hearts club. “It feels like being the scientist who figured out nuclear fission and then discovers it’s being used as a weapon for war,” she says, describing the feeling of watching it mutate into a Reddit muster point for violent misogyny.

It is part of the “manosphere”, but is distinguished from men’s rights activism by what Wendling – who is also the editor of BBC Trending, the broadcaster’s social media investigation unit – calls its “raw hatred. It is vile. It is just incredibly unhinged and separate from reality and completely raw.” It has some crossover with white supremacism, in the sense that its adherents hang out in the same online spaces and share some of the same terminology, but it is quite distinctive in its hate figures: Stacys (attractive women); Chads (attractive men); and Normies (people who aren’t incels, ie can find partners but aren’t necessarily attractive). Basically, incels cannot get laid and they violently loathe anyone who can.

Some of the fault, in their eyes, is with attractive men who have sex with too many women – “We need to do something about the polygamy problem,” said the Incelcast, an astonishing three-hour podcast about the Toronto attack – but, of course, the main problem is women themselves, who become foes as people, but also as a political entity. There is a lot of discussion about how best to punish them, with mass rape fantasies and threads on how to follow women without getting arrested, just for the thrill of having them notice you. Feminism is held responsible for a dude who can’t get laid, and birth control is said to have caused “women to date only Chads. It causes all sorts of negative social ramifications”.

There are no numbers on how many adherents this doctrine has, or how extreme they are, “but it’s not one tiny bit of Reddit” says Wendling. “It’s big. It’s substantial. It’s a movement that has tens of thousands of people who visit these boards, these sub-Reddits, that are safe places for them.”

Angela Nagle is the author of Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. She says: “There is a really interesting irony in the incel style of quasipolitics – they are both a response to and advocates of almost an Ayn Randian view of romance and human relationships. So they rail against the loneliness and the isolation and the individualism of modern life, but they seem to advocate it as well, in that they love the language of the strong triumphing over the weak. But they themselves are the weak.”

Their landscape is strewn with completely unsquarable contradiction: “They’ll say how terrible it is that the left has won the culture wars and we should return to traditional hierarchies, but then they’ll use terms like ‘banging sluts’, which doesn’t make any sense, right?” Nagle continues. “Because you have to pick one. They want sexual availability and yet, at the same time, they express this disgust at promiscuity "

Incels obsess over their own unattractiveness – dividing the world into alphas and betas, with betas just your average, frustrated idiot dude, and omegas, as the incels often call themselves, the lowest of the low, scorned by everyone – they then use that self-acceptance as an insulation. They feel this makes them untouchable in their quest for supremacy over sluts.

They borrow a lot of language from the equality/civil rights agenda – society “treats single men like trash, and it has to stop. The people in power, women, can change this, but they refuse to. They have blood on their hands,” read one post the morning after the Toronto attack. Basically, their virginity is a discrimination or apartheid issue, and only a state-distributed girlfriend programme, outlawing multiple partners, can rectify this grand injustice. Yet at the same time, they hate victims, snowflakes, liberals, those who campaign for any actual equality.
The Guardian

The less sense their outlook makes, the more sense it makes, on some elemental level. Coherence, consistency, reason – these are all tools by which we understand, accommodate, include and listen to one another. In a purely authoritarian worldview, those are the rules you most enjoy not playing by. That makes it very difficult to formulate a response to, on an intellectual level, let alone a practical one: you can’t argue with a schema whose principle is that it will not brook argument. But the regular alternative – ridicule – is not necessarily wise, or right.

Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista killer, uploaded a video to YouTube about his “retribution” against attractive women who wouldn’t sleep with him (and the attractive men they would sleep with) before killing six people in 2014. He was named by the Southern Poverty Law Center (which tracks activity on the far right) as the first terrorist of the “alt-right”: so even if incels don’t describe the full extent of far-right activity, so far they have been its most devastating subgroup.

There is this huge disconnect between the threat they pose – which is, even if we accept Rodger as only a foot soldier, deadly – and the things they talk about, which are often absurd. In the sphere of the “pickup”, seduction is weaponised in the gender war: there is a huge amount of discussion about its finer points, but its core and only principle is that you get women to sleep with you (and behave) by making them feel insecure.

When this, amazingly, doesn’t work, incels disappear down the wormhole of the black pill: the game is rigged from the start. Appearance is everything. If you’re dealt a bad hand, you’ve lost before you’ve started. This escalates to violent fantasy, since if the game is rigged, then the only thing that will get attractive women to sleep with you is force. Attractive men are collateral damage in the violent fantasy, though it is interesting that message boards can get away with a lot of mass rape fantasy, only to be shut down when a man starts fantasising about castrating his male roommate.

From the way chatroom moder-ators respond to threats of violence against women, to the reluctance among authorities to name this as a terrorist threat, I am filled with this unsettling sense that because incels mainly want to kill, maim or assault women, they are simply not taken as seriously as if they wanted to kill pretty much anyone else. Doesn’t everyone want to kill women, sometimes, is the implication? Or at least give them a fright?

Their behaviour is often ridiculous – someone last week got a tattoo of Jordan Peterson’s face (he is the pop philosopher of meninism) across his entire arm. The incels’ folk hero is the 30-year-old virgin wizard – if you can make it to 30 without having sex, you will be endowed with magical powers. And the threads are so pathetic that it is hard to feel anything but ambient pity (on the site Wiz Chan – subtitle “disregard females, acquire magic” – one thread titled How do I live in my sedan? is like a short story).

Puzzling in the abstract, weirdly inevitable in the flesh, their stance combines that utterly flaky 90s joking-not-joking (“Hey, I was only joking when I said I wanted to rape you! Unless we’re actually in an alley and there’s no one else around”), raging self-pity, false appropriation and superhero costumes, all delivered with the deafening rage of the reptilian brain. It makes Four Lions look like Wittgenstein.

But this fails to reflect, or reflect on, what modern terrorism is: the perpetrators don’t have to meet and their balaclavas don’t have to match. All they have to do is establish their hate figures and be consistent.

“The answer is not simple,” Nagle says. “We end up talking about, say, gun laws and all these very surface things. But in America in particular, the root of this is very, very deep. It’s my view that the kind of cultural revolution that came to fruition in the 60s, where people were questioning older institutions, was very successful in the breaking down of those institutions. But I think it’s fair to say, if you look at contemporary American society, that there has been a failure to replace those institutions with anything new to hold society together. So they would say: ‘Women are just out for themselves, so the way to respond to that is to get some muscles and trick them.’ Love never enters into it. Trust in other people, it’s all gone. It’s a very, very bleak worldview. And they’re not getting that from nowhere.”

[Ammi]

Originally Posted by Twosugars

Another piece on this.
Ammi, theres lots of reading material on this on the Guardian site if you or anyone is interested


‘Raw hatred’: why the 'incel' movement targets and terrorises women
The man accused of carrying out the Toronto van attack has alleged links to ‘involuntary celibate’ online communities. The language they use may be absurd, but the threat they pose could be deadly

When a van was driven on to a Toronto pavement on Tuesday, killing 10 people and injuring 15, police chief Mark Saunders said that, while the incident appeared to be a deliberate act, there was no evidence of terrorism. The public safety minister
Ralph Goodale backed this up, deeming the event “not part of an organised terror plot”. Canada has rules about these things: to count as terrorism, the attacker must have a political, religious or social motivation, something beyond “wanting to terrorise”.

Why have the authorities been so fast to reject the idea of terrorism (taking as read that this may change; the tragedy is very fresh)? Shortly before the attack, a post appeared on the suspect’s Facebook profile, hailing the commencement of the “Incel Rebellion”, including the line “Private (Recruit) … Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161.” (“4chan is the main organising platform for the ‘alt-right’,” explains Mike Wendling, the author of Alt-Right: from 4Chan to the White House.)

There is a reluctance to ascribe to the “incel” movement anything so lofty as an “ideology” or credit it with any developed, connected thinking, partly because it is so bizarre in conception.

Standing for “involuntarily celibate”, the term was originally invented 20 years ago by a woman known only as Alana, who coined the term as a name for an online support forum for singles, basically a lonely hearts club. “It feels like being the scientist who figured out nuclear fission and then discovers it’s being used as a weapon for war,” she says, describing the feeling of watching it mutate into a Reddit muster point for violent misogyny.

It is part of the “manosphere”, but is distinguished from men’s rights activism by what Wendling – who is also the editor of BBC Trending, the broadcaster’s social media investigation unit – calls its “raw hatred. It is vile. It is just incredibly unhinged and separate from reality and completely raw.” It has some crossover with white supremacism, in the sense that its adherents hang out in the same online spaces and share some of the same terminology, but it is quite distinctive in its hate figures: Stacys (attractive women); Chads (attractive men); and Normies (people who aren’t incels, ie can find partners but aren’t necessarily attractive). Basically, incels cannot get laid and they violently loathe anyone who can.

Some of the fault, in their eyes, is with attractive men who have sex with too many women – “We need to do something about the polygamy problem,” said the Incelcast, an astonishing three-hour podcast about the Toronto attack – but, of course, the main problem is women themselves, who become foes as people, but also as a political entity. There is a lot of discussion about how best to punish them, with mass rape fantasies and threads on how to follow women without getting arrested, just for the thrill of having them notice you. Feminism is held responsible for a dude who can’t get laid, and birth control is said to have caused “women to date only Chads. It causes all sorts of negative social ramifications”.

There are no numbers on how many adherents this doctrine has, or how extreme they are, “but it’s not one tiny bit of Reddit” says Wendling. “It’s big. It’s substantial. It’s a movement that has tens of thousands of people who visit these boards, these sub-Reddits, that are safe places for them.”

Angela Nagle is the author of Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. She says: “There is a really interesting irony in the incel style of quasipolitics – they are both a response to and advocates of almost an Ayn Randian view of romance and human relationships. So they rail against the loneliness and the isolation and the individualism of modern life, but they seem to advocate it as well, in that they love the language of the strong triumphing over the weak. But they themselves are the weak.”

Their landscape is strewn with completely unsquarable contradiction: “They’ll say how terrible it is that the left has won the culture wars and we should return to traditional hierarchies, but then they’ll use terms like ‘banging sluts’, which doesn’t make any sense, right?” Nagle continues. “Because you have to pick one. They want sexual availability and yet, at the same time, they express this disgust at promiscuity "

Incels obsess over their own unattractiveness – dividing the world into alphas and betas, with betas just your average, frustrated idiot dude, and omegas, as the incels often call themselves, the lowest of the low, scorned by everyone – they then use that self-acceptance as an insulation. They feel this makes them untouchable in their quest for supremacy over sluts.

They borrow a lot of language from the equality/civil rights agenda – society “treats single men like trash, and it has to stop. The people in power, women, can change this, but they refuse to. They have blood on their hands,” read one post the morning after the Toronto attack. Basically, their virginity is a discrimination or apartheid issue, and only a state-distributed girlfriend programme, outlawing multiple partners, can rectify this grand injustice. Yet at the same time, they hate victims, snowflakes, liberals, those who campaign for any actual equality.
The Guardian

The less sense their outlook makes, the more sense it makes, on some elemental level. Coherence, consistency, reason – these are all tools by which we understand, accommodate, include and listen to one another. In a purely authoritarian worldview, those are the rules you most enjoy not playing by. That makes it very difficult to formulate a response to, on an intellectual level, let alone a practical one: you can’t argue with a schema whose principle is that it will not brook argument. But the regular alternative – ridicule – is not necessarily wise, or right.

Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista killer, uploaded a video to YouTube about his “retribution” against attractive women who wouldn’t sleep with him (and the attractive men they would sleep with) before killing six people in 2014. He was named by the Southern Poverty Law Center (which tracks activity on the far right) as the first terrorist of the “alt-right”: so even if incels don’t describe the full extent of far-right activity, so far they have been its most devastating subgroup.

There is this huge disconnect between the threat they pose – which is, even if we accept Rodger as only a foot soldier, deadly – and the things they talk about, which are often absurd. In the sphere of the “pickup”, seduction is weaponised in the gender war: there is a huge amount of discussion about its finer points, but its core and only principle is that you get women to sleep with you (and behave) by making them feel insecure.

When this, amazingly, doesn’t work, incels disappear down the wormhole of the black pill: the game is rigged from the start. Appearance is everything. If you’re dealt a bad hand, you’ve lost before you’ve started. This escalates to violent fantasy, since if the game is rigged, then the only thing that will get attractive women to sleep with you is force. Attractive men are collateral damage in the violent fantasy, though it is interesting that message boards can get away with a lot of mass rape fantasy, only to be shut down when a man starts fantasising about castrating his male roommate.

From the way chatroom moder-ators respond to threats of violence against women, to the reluctance among authorities to name this as a terrorist threat, I am filled with this unsettling sense that because incels mainly want to kill, maim or assault women, they are simply not taken as seriously as if they wanted to kill pretty much anyone else. Doesn’t everyone want to kill women, sometimes, is the implication? Or at least give them a fright?

Their behaviour is often ridiculous – someone last week got a tattoo of Jordan Peterson’s face (he is the pop philosopher of meninism) across his entire arm. The incels’ folk hero is the 30-year-old virgin wizard – if you can make it to 30 without having sex, you will be endowed with magical powers. And the threads are so pathetic that it is hard to feel anything but ambient pity (on the site Wiz Chan – subtitle “disregard females, acquire magic” – one thread titled How do I live in my sedan? is like a short story).

Puzzling in the abstract, weirdly inevitable in the flesh, their stance combines that utterly flaky 90s joking-not-joking (“Hey, I was only joking when I said I wanted to rape you! Unless we’re actually in an alley and there’s no one else around”), raging self-pity, false appropriation and superhero costumes, all delivered with the deafening rage of the reptilian brain. It makes Four Lions look like Wittgenstein.

But this fails to reflect, or reflect on, what modern terrorism is: the perpetrators don’t have to meet and their balaclavas don’t have to match. All they have to do is establish their hate figures and be consistent.

“The answer is not simple,” Nagle says. “We end up talking about, say, gun laws and all these very surface things. But in America in particular, the root of this is very, very deep. It’s my view that the kind of cultural revolution that came to fruition in the 60s, where people were questioning older institutions, was very successful in the breaking down of those institutions. But I think it’s fair to say, if you look at contemporary American society, that there has been a failure to replace those institutions with anything new to hold society together. So they would say: ‘Women are just out for themselves, so the way to respond to that is to get some muscles and trick them.’ Love never enters into it. Trust in other people, it’s all gone. It’s a very, very bleak worldview. And they’re not getting that from nowhere.”

...I just have to go out for a while but I’ll read that later...thank you, TwoSugars.....

[Tom4784]

Originally Posted by MTVN

Weird I'd never heard of incels either until a few days ago, seems to be basically purely a North American phenomenon?

I've just been having a look at some of the reddit posts and it's an eye opener alright

I've known a few people IRL who certainly display some incel.... Qualities... In terms of mass violence however, I'd say it's mostly contained to North America.

It wouldn't surprise me to see some vehicle attacks or knife attacks happen over here in future though. Inceldom extremism is something that will become more prevalent as time goes on, I think.

[Ammi]

Originally Posted by Twosugars

Another piece on this.
Ammi, theres lots of reading material on this on the Guardian site if you or anyone is interested


‘Raw hatred’: why the 'incel' movement targets and terrorises women
The man accused of carrying out the Toronto van attack has alleged links to ‘involuntary celibate’ online communities. The language they use may be absurd, but the threat they pose could be deadly

When a van was driven on to a Toronto pavement on Tuesday, killing 10 people and injuring 15, police chief Mark Saunders said that, while the incident appeared to be a deliberate act, there was no evidence of terrorism. The public safety minister
Ralph Goodale backed this up, deeming the event “not part of an organised terror plot”. Canada has rules about these things: to count as terrorism, the attacker must have a political, religious or social motivation, something beyond “wanting to terrorise”.

Why have the authorities been so fast to reject the idea of terrorism (taking as read that this may change; the tragedy is very fresh)? Shortly before the attack, a post appeared on the suspect’s Facebook profile, hailing the commencement of the “Incel Rebellion”, including the line “Private (Recruit) … Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161.” (“4chan is the main organising platform for the ‘alt-right’,” explains Mike Wendling, the author of Alt-Right: from 4Chan to the White House.)

There is a reluctance to ascribe to the “incel” movement anything so lofty as an “ideology” or credit it with any developed, connected thinking, partly because it is so bizarre in conception.

Standing for “involuntarily celibate”, the term was originally invented 20 years ago by a woman known only as Alana, who coined the term as a name for an online support forum for singles, basically a lonely hearts club. “It feels like being the scientist who figured out nuclear fission and then discovers it’s being used as a weapon for war,” she says, describing the feeling of watching it mutate into a Reddit muster point for violent misogyny.

It is part of the “manosphere”, but is distinguished from men’s rights activism by what Wendling – who is also the editor of BBC Trending, the broadcaster’s social media investigation unit – calls its “raw hatred. It is vile. It is just incredibly unhinged and separate from reality and completely raw.” It has some crossover with white supremacism, in the sense that its adherents hang out in the same online spaces and share some of the same terminology, but it is quite distinctive in its hate figures: Stacys (attractive women); Chads (attractive men); and Normies (people who aren’t incels, ie can find partners but aren’t necessarily attractive). Basically, incels cannot get laid and they violently loathe anyone who can.

Some of the fault, in their eyes, is with attractive men who have sex with too many women – “We need to do something about the polygamy problem,” said the Incelcast, an astonishing three-hour podcast about the Toronto attack – but, of course, the main problem is women themselves, who become foes as people, but also as a political entity. There is a lot of discussion about how best to punish them, with mass rape fantasies and threads on how to follow women without getting arrested, just for the thrill of having them notice you. Feminism is held responsible for a dude who can’t get laid, and birth control is said to have caused “women to date only Chads. It causes all sorts of negative social ramifications”.

There are no numbers on how many adherents this doctrine has, or how extreme they are, “but it’s not one tiny bit of Reddit” says Wendling. “It’s big. It’s substantial. It’s a movement that has tens of thousands of people who visit these boards, these sub-Reddits, that are safe places for them.”

Angela Nagle is the author of Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. She says: “There is a really interesting irony in the incel style of quasipolitics – they are both a response to and advocates of almost an Ayn Randian view of romance and human relationships. So they rail against the loneliness and the isolation and the individualism of modern life, but they seem to advocate it as well, in that they love the language of the strong triumphing over the weak. But they themselves are the weak.”

Their landscape is strewn with completely unsquarable contradiction: “They’ll say how terrible it is that the left has won the culture wars and we should return to traditional hierarchies, but then they’ll use terms like ‘banging sluts’, which doesn’t make any sense, right?” Nagle continues. “Because you have to pick one. They want sexual availability and yet, at the same time, they express this disgust at promiscuity "

Incels obsess over their own unattractiveness – dividing the world into alphas and betas, with betas just your average, frustrated idiot dude, and omegas, as the incels often call themselves, the lowest of the low, scorned by everyone – they then use that self-acceptance as an insulation. They feel this makes them untouchable in their quest for supremacy over sluts.

They borrow a lot of language from the equality/civil rights agenda – society “treats single men like trash, and it has to stop. The people in power, women, can change this, but they refuse to. They have blood on their hands,” read one post the morning after the Toronto attack. Basically, their virginity is a discrimination or apartheid issue, and only a state-distributed girlfriend programme, outlawing multiple partners, can rectify this grand injustice. Yet at the same time, they hate victims, snowflakes, liberals, those who campaign for any actual equality.
The Guardian

The less sense their outlook makes, the more sense it makes, on some elemental level. Coherence, consistency, reason – these are all tools by which we understand, accommodate, include and listen to one another. In a purely authoritarian worldview, those are the rules you most enjoy not playing by. That makes it very difficult to formulate a response to, on an intellectual level, let alone a practical one: you can’t argue with a schema whose principle is that it will not brook argument. But the regular alternative – ridicule – is not necessarily wise, or right.

Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista killer, uploaded a video to YouTube about his “retribution” against attractive women who wouldn’t sleep with him (and the attractive men they would sleep with) before killing six people in 2014. He was named by the Southern Poverty Law Center (which tracks activity on the far right) as the first terrorist of the “alt-right”: so even if incels don’t describe the full extent of far-right activity, so far they have been its most devastating subgroup.

There is this huge disconnect between the threat they pose – which is, even if we accept Rodger as only a foot soldier, deadly – and the things they talk about, which are often absurd. In the sphere of the “pickup”, seduction is weaponised in the gender war: there is a huge amount of discussion about its finer points, but its core and only principle is that you get women to sleep with you (and behave) by making them feel insecure.

When this, amazingly, doesn’t work, incels disappear down the wormhole of the black pill: the game is rigged from the start. Appearance is everything. If you’re dealt a bad hand, you’ve lost before you’ve started. This escalates to violent fantasy, since if the game is rigged, then the only thing that will get attractive women to sleep with you is force. Attractive men are collateral damage in the violent fantasy, though it is interesting that message boards can get away with a lot of mass rape fantasy, only to be shut down when a man starts fantasising about castrating his male roommate.

From the way chatroom moder-ators respond to threats of violence against women, to the reluctance among authorities to name this as a terrorist threat, I am filled with this unsettling sense that because incels mainly want to kill, maim or assault women, they are simply not taken as seriously as if they wanted to kill pretty much anyone else. Doesn’t everyone want to kill women, sometimes, is the implication? Or at least give them a fright?

Their behaviour is often ridiculous – someone last week got a tattoo of Jordan Peterson’s face (he is the pop philosopher of meninism) across his entire arm. The incels’ folk hero is the 30-year-old virgin wizard – if you can make it to 30 without having sex, you will be endowed with magical powers. And the threads are so pathetic that it is hard to feel anything but ambient pity (on the site Wiz Chan – subtitle “disregard females, acquire magic” – one thread titled How do I live in my sedan? is like a short story).

Puzzling in the abstract, weirdly inevitable in the flesh, their stance combines that utterly flaky 90s joking-not-joking (“Hey, I was only joking when I said I wanted to rape you! Unless we’re actually in an alley and there’s no one else around”), raging self-pity, false appropriation and superhero costumes, all delivered with the deafening rage of the reptilian brain. It makes Four Lions look like Wittgenstein.

But this fails to reflect, or reflect on, what modern terrorism is: the perpetrators don’t have to meet and their balaclavas don’t have to match. All they have to do is establish their hate figures and be consistent.

“The answer is not simple,” Nagle says. “We end up talking about, say, gun laws and all these very surface things. But in America in particular, the root of this is very, very deep. It’s my view that the kind of cultural revolution that came to fruition in the 60s, where people were questioning older institutions, was very successful in the breaking down of those institutions. But I think it’s fair to say, if you look at contemporary American society, that there has been a failure to replace those institutions with anything new to hold society together. So they would say: ‘Women are just out for themselves, so the way to respond to that is to get some muscles and trick them.’ Love never enters into it. Trust in other people, it’s all gone. It’s a very, very bleak worldview. And they’re not getting that from nowhere.”

From the way chatroom moder-ators respond to threats of violence against women, to the reluctance among authorities to name this as a terrorist threat, I am filled with this unsettling sense that because incels mainly want to kill, maim or assault women, they are simply not taken as seriously as if they wanted to kill pretty much anyone else. Doesn’t everyone want to kill women, sometimes, is the implication? Or at least give them a fright?

Their behaviour is often ridiculous – someone last week got a tattoo of Jordan Peterson’s face (he is the pop philosopher of meninism) across his entire arm. The incels’ folk hero is the 30-year-old virgin wizard – if you can make it to 30 without having sex, you will be endowed with magical powers. And the threads are so pathetic that it is hard to feel anything but ambient pity (on the site Wiz Chan – subtitle “disregard females, acquire magic” – one thread titled How do I live in my sedan? is like a short story).

Puzzling in the abstract, weirdly inevitable in the flesh, their stance combines that utterly flaky 90s joking-not-joking (“Hey, I was only joking when I said I wanted to rape you! Unless we’re actually in an alley and there’s no one else around”), raging self-pity, false appropriation and superhero costumes, all delivered with the deafening rage of the reptilian brain. It makes Four Lions look like Wittgenstein.

But this fails to reflect, or reflect on, what modern terrorism is: the perpetrators don’t have to meet and their balaclavas don’t have to match. All they have to do is establish their hate figures and be consistent.

“The answer is not simple,” Nagle says. “We end up talking about, say, gun laws and all these very surface things. But in America in particular, the root of this is very, very deep. It’s my view that the kind of cultural revolution that came to fruition in the 60s, where people were questioning older institutions, was very successful in the breaking down of those institutions. But I think it’s fair to say, if you look at contemporary American society, that there has been a failure to replace those institutions with anything new to hold society together. So they would say: ‘Women are just out for themselves, so the way to respond to that is to get some muscles and trick them.’ Love never enters into it. Trust in other people, it’s all gone. It’s a very, very bleak worldview. And they’re not getting that from nowhere.


...thank you for the article, TwoSugars...it was an interesting read and left me wanting to see if I could look at any of these Reddit threads...just to get a glimpse of the content because this is something that I was completely unaware of...I’m stunned...I mean, the part of the thread I read was awful, very disturbing word content...and a vid with a young guy fantasising about killing a female, it portrayed as him being attracted to...obviously it’s all so, so grim and woman hating...but what has stunned me the most is that it’s something that so many people are aware of and yet it’s something that is completely allowed...and largely ignored, even...it’s such a huge collective of extreme hate and yet the law keepers are not placing huge focus on it...that stuns me more than anything else...

[Twosugars]

Reddit banned them now btw, Ammi.
Read this piece https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-elliot-rodger and enlarge and read a sample incel post shown within the article. But be warned, it's shocking

[GoldHeart]

Originally Posted by Toy Soldier

Most of them are defeated and sad, at first, but those emotions can quickly turn into frustration and anger given a little time. Especially if they get involved with groups who are actively telling them to "stop being sad, get angry".

Anyway, their main problem (all of them) is treating the opposite sex like another species. They're confused about why no one wants them when they're "doing everything right" like a checkbox exercise... and fail to realise that if they just treated everyone like a fellow human being without a constant ulterior motive, and engaged and conversed with people normally and without agenda, then plenty of people would be naturally drawn to them.

That's the problem with these disturbing forums& groups they join, it's like when young teens let themselves get brain washed by isis .

There's another guy on YouTube who I watched and he's horrible ,he constantly bashes his wife & brags about cheating on her . He was more upset he got found out than actually hurting her feelings . He said he'd rather use a sex doll if a woman can't please him ,and the weirdo actually filmed the hideous sex doll .

He also treats his wife more like a maid , and every event or date he does he calls it "boring" , when he's the most boring person himself.

He behaves like a woman hater yet his wife stays with him it's baffling .

[Niamh.]

Originally Posted by Twosugars

Reddit banned them now btw, Ammi.
Read this piece https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-elliot-rodger and enlarge and read a sample incel post shown within the article. But be warned, it's shocking

Bloody hell, what is wrong with people. I love how they claim to be the "nice guys" too when they don't even seem to view us as actual people. . .maybe that's why they aren't getting any

[Ammi]

Originally Posted by Twosugars

Reddit banned them now btw, Ammi.
Read this piece https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-elliot-rodger and enlarge and read a sample incel post shown within the article. But be warned, it's shocking

...so the hate threads that I’m reading atm are banned threads, TwoSugars...but left as readable...?...

[Toy Soldier]

From a quick browse around the "sort of related" Reddit forums, it seems like incel / Red Pill stuff has just spilled out into other forums now that the main places where it started have been removed. You'll find a lot of it on mainstream social media these days too (Facebook and Twitter). Unfortunately I think the snowball has started rolling with these groups so it's not something that can be easily "banned" at this point.

[Tom4784]

Originally Posted by Niamh.

Bloody hell, what is wrong with people. I love how they claim to be the "nice guys" too when they don't even seem to view us as actual people. . .maybe that's why they aren't getting any

There's a reddit called Niceguys in which women post screenshots of interactions they've had with incels claiming to be nice guys and it's just grim, compelling, but grim.

[Twosugars]

Originally Posted by Ammi

...so the hate threads that I’m reading atm are banned threads, TwoSugars...but left as readable...?...

Like TS says, the main board(s) got banned but it spread elsewhere

Idk what threads and where you're reading Ammi.
Maybe post a link?

[Twosugars]

A BBC documentary Inside the Secret World of Incels

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07fvhmw


And a sample thread from an incel forum, Incels.net
https://incels.net/threads/are-foids-scared-of-us.4726/

Foids, femoids- their terms for women

Spent over an hour reading their threads. It's bad, god it is really bad
The matter-of-fact evil of this delusional, hateful and primitive worldview expressed in depth and detail is quite a shock

[Marsh.]

Originally Posted by Toy Soldier

I would think it happens a lot more than we know about, with just individual assaults or even murders that wouldn't necessarily be linked to "incel stuff" unless the perpetrator mentioned it. Assaults especially, most probably aren't even reported at all.

It's very easy to go down the rabbit hole with these forums - Incels, Red Pill, MGTOW. Hours of reading with this face - .

MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) is a good one for just laughs though rather than it being scary... because the premise basically seems to be, a load of blokes swearing off women "until they start being nicer"... and they do stuff like hill walking and woodworking and drinking whiskey instead... with the idea being that their absense from the dating scene will be a major blow to womankind

The Truth?

[Ammi]

..yeah the content is really so bad, TS...and obviously there is some focus on it with the documentary....and the notoriety it’s getting with the mass murders...but I don’t understand why it isn’t a huge focus for the police, which it doesn’t appear to be...also I read in one thread or one article, I can’t recall...(..sorry...)...that there was a negative Reddit thread against males and it was closed down immediately...but that’s not so with these threads that display extreme hatred toward females...