Incels: America’s Newest Domestic Terrorism Threat

https://www.lawfareblog.com/incels-americas-newest-domestic-terrorism-threat

by smacktoward • 7 years ago

42 88 7 years ago

lawfareblog.com

mdni007• 7 years ago

Prostitution needs to be legal

wyldfire3• 7 years ago

Sure, but that would not solve this problem. It's an unhealthy community.

brighton36• 7 years ago

I think it would uncelibate them, at least.

dx872• 7 years ago

It's not that simple. Legalizing prostitution leads to increased human trafficking because the demand exceeds the supply.

https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ei/rls/38790.htm

jasonjayr• 7 years ago

Legalize and regulate. Don't let it be a free for all.

arthurcolle2• 7 years ago

Once the majority of boomers start to shuffle off their mortal coils, I suspect many social issues that are perceived as "divisive" at present will immediately become accepted, and things like this will just come to pass.

Drug legalization, sex work, perhaps gambling & sports betting, etc. However, I could see holdouts if some subsegment of the post-boomer generations continue to hold attitudes that "vice industries" are immoral, which is fair. I imagine that the later generations will just adopt an "I don't care, let people do what they want" attitude.

ses19842• 7 years ago

I'm guessing you're pretty young, late twenties at the latest.

s1artibartfast• 7 years ago

I tend to agree.It will be interesting to see how post-boomers reconcile the pervasiveness you mention with their safety minded pro-scocial worldview.

memling3• 7 years ago

I imagine that the later generations will just adopt an "I don't care, let people do what they want" attitude.

I guess that's possible, and in fact seems like it's accelerating. But then again, what constitutes a vice is also changing.

Take a different example. Surely climate change presents a significant social challenge, both immediate and downstream. Inasmuch as climate change is exacerbated by the vice of over-consumption, there's a great deal of social approbation in some circles against it and a number of proposals to regulate it.

One wonders, of course, if a successful campaign against over consumption won't result in a future sometime where people forget the dangers of over-consumption and argue for a more libertarian approach.

The idea that some vices aren't really immoral is not a new one; it's just that we have short memories and forget their very real dangers.

The_rationalist2• 7 years ago

Honestly, technologies like https://www.fleshlight.com/ have mostly obsoleted prostitution. Being far cheaper and more pleasurable.

But this is not an alternative for affection. I do believe there is a big market for renting Affection. There is also a market for renting optimal friendships.

wpietri5• 7 years ago

I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted. The incels claim their problem is not getting any. But we live in a golden age for porn and sex toys. They can get off if they want.

What they instead want is either companionship and affection (which they clearly don't have or they wouldn't be hanging around in incel forums) or having a woman as quasi-property to serve them and enhance their social standing (the status of most women in quite a lot of history).

There are reasons they can't get those things, of course. But rather than face them, they've built up a toxic shared ideology to explain why it is never their fault. They're not the only group that has done this, [1] but they're definitely one of the most dangerous.

[1] For a fascinating look at what abusive parents tell themselves when their children have finally had enough, I recommend this article series on "Estranged Parent" forums: http://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/index.html

e12e• 7 years ago

Buying a friend isn't the same as making a friend.

memling3• 7 years ago

and playmates are not playthings

wpietri5• 7 years ago

True, but that's a wrong answer here. Their problem isn't lack of orgasm; it's maladaptation and misogyny. There's no reason sex workers should have to deal with these guys either.

snagglegaggle2• 7 years ago

At the end the article foists everything upon mental health treatment. I see no evidence that that will be enough. What if your life just sucks?[1] A therapist can't snap their fingers and get you more money.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shit_Life_Syndrome

wyldfire3• 7 years ago

Life sucks ergo violence? No, therapy can help you cope.

snagglegaggle2• 7 years ago

My wants are inconvenient so roll over and die quietly? Doesn't sound attractive.

coliveira• 7 years ago

The problem is exactly that psychological therapy was replaced by social networks. Instead of helping each other, they're incentivizing their criminal urges.

wpietri5• 7 years ago

If your life circumstances sucks, good mental health still means you won't blame it on women and/or do something horrifically violent to people unrelated to the causes of your problems. Instead, you'll turn toward fixing the problems.

I will also note that the perception of having enough money is not very closely related to the amount of money you have. I have known people who are happy living on quite modest salaries, and people who feel like they're barely getting by on $500k/year. That's something therapists (and financial advisors) can definitely help with.

corporateslave52• 7 years ago

Online dating has made it so basically all of the women are sleeping with the top 10% of men. This is the new normal.

Edit.

This is also largely the view of incels. Forums where they talk about why they can’t get girls. So everyone down voting my post can go stick their heads in the sand.

Adding one more thing. Anyone that hangs out with an extremely tall and attractive guy will be shocked how easy it is for them. It’s almost like living in a different reality. Dating and sex are extremely opaque. You need to run in different circles to understand what’s going on

ivraatiems2• 7 years ago

You're gonna need to provide some data on that, because that sounds like absolute nonsense (potentially mixed with some misogynistic assumptions about how women choose partners) to me.

corporateslave52• 7 years ago

It’s not misogynistic if it’s true. The dating scene is absolutely brutal for a lot men, atleast until they can date women in their late twenties.

The source is basically all I did for the last five years was work and chase women in major cities. I’ve seen it all

ericmcer• 7 years ago

The research does show women generally having a similar number of partners, whereas some men will have 100s and others 0. Dating apps might exacerbate this? Source is uhhh basic google search?

lidHanteyk• 7 years ago

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/8/eaap9815

It's not misogynistic if we fix one part of the meme: It's not that just women try to date up, but that everybody tries to date up, at least on average.

To clarify: For one person to on average try to date up merely means that their attempts will have an average which is above their actual attractiveness, but that doesn't say anything about who they actually date.

dx872• 7 years ago

OkCupid did a study a few years back that showed that unless a male is very attractive, they probably won't have much luck with online dating. Male attractivness tended to be highly skewed towards below average, while females attractivness mostly followed a bell curve where most girls were ranked as being around average, with very few being considered unattractive or very attractive.

allovernow7• 7 years ago

OkCupid used to run a sort of stats blog. Unfortunately I think they took them down so all I have left are screenshots. There are a couple of interesting things going on online that are illustrative of a darker side to dating.

1. The top 80% of women tend to message the top 10% (or less) of men, while men message according to an approximately normal distribution

2. Aggregate male ratings of female attractiveness are approximately normally distributed, while female ratings are heavily skewed such that most men are rated below average.

The overall indications are that the vast majority of women go for the highest ranked men. Now, from an evolutionary perspective, this makes some sense, a woman can have one child every month, while a single man can impregnate an entire village. Unfortunately, when you erase cultural norms that correct this innate tendency by encouraging long term committed relationships, the result increasingly resembles hypergamy, where a small population of men are sleeping with the majority of women.

And so the lowest ranked males, who ultimately cannot simply "learn to groom" or "be themselves" or "be confident" end up isolated and perpetually frustrated. Then when a tiny minority act upon their wholly justified misery, the entire bottom end of the distribution get slandered as "incel" and "terrorism".

This article is moral panic bullshit, as inane and disconnected from reality as blaming Eminem for teenage violence.

You want to talk about mental health? Imagine living a life where you are innately driven to desire companionship and affection, but are consistently unable to receive it because of physical and psychological limitations to your status as a desirable mate. Couple this with a broken culture which indirectly encourages hypergamy and notmalizes infantalism well into your 20s and now you have a serious chronic loneliness crisis - but the perception is that it's just those nerds everyone bullied in high school so there's no need to pay it any attention.

aklemm• 7 years ago

I'm way out of that loop, do you have any citations or more perspectives to underscore this claim?

bb611• 7 years ago

Why are you so focused on online dating? 80%+ of couples don't meet on the internet: https://flowingdata.com/2019/03/15/shifts-in-how-couples-mee...

If online dating expectations are really the issue, why aren't incels pursuing the many other options people use to find a partner? And if they can't/won't, what does that say about their viability as a partner?

orf• 7 years ago

You can view some of the more... repostable incel content here: https://old.reddit.com/r/IncelTears/top/?sort=top&t=month

Seems like this is the natural progression of the "kneckbeard" stereotype, when mixed with more extreme online content and teenage sexual angst. Not sure how you can combat this kind of ideology.

HeWhoLurksLate• 7 years ago

From the mods on a post:

Comments are locked because I got 10 reports of seperate people calling each other “fags” come on guys. We aren’t 12 anymore be an adult and stop using homophobic insults. Everyone who used a homophobic slur was banned for 30 days.

Stop that.

Wow. Apparently the moderation team is pretty important in deciding the path a sub goes down.

allovernow7• 7 years ago

Or there's a sizable minority attached to this subject with legitimate concerns but an opinion which runs very counter to what is socially acceptable on Reddit. If you start paying attention, you can already tell which articles on Reddit are likely to be locked for this reason. Reddit is practically designed to amplify dogma into an echo chamber - that goes for how power among mods and admins is distributed and how the voting algorithm determines comment ordering and visibility.

Incels are the new nerds. They're safe targets for ridicule, even though their lot ultimately sucks for reasons not entirely within their control. Telling someone who has trouble dating to learn to date is like telling a socially awkward, uncoordinated teenager to just "learn to play sports".

3fe9a03ccd14ca5• 7 years ago

There are a lot of troubled boys in this world growing up to be troubled men.

We’re passing through a season of men vilification. Changing this ideology as a society is probably a good first step to creating the support programs we need to help turn things around.

joaomacp• 7 years ago

This article treats the 'incel' phenomenon as a security threat, just like ISIS and Al Qaeda, instead of looking at it as a social problem and trying to solve it.

Doing this is the same as declaring 'war on drugs' instead of treating it as a medical condition, and trying to fix addiction problems by medical campaigns.

I think the USA do this because they have a weak state, that can't really steer people's social and mental health. I think the ideal approach would be to look at how we can improve society, in order for 'incels' to stop existing.

Technology plays a big part as culprit. Speaking from my experience, watching YouTube / Instagram / etc. fools my brain into thinking I have a social life, and makes real social interactions feel harder, as they're messier. It makes me socially anxious, because I almost never need to practice real-life interactions.

I think the above happens to many young men today, and we should look at it as a society and find / promote solutions.

kerkeslager3• 7 years ago

"Love the sinner, hate the sin" needs an update to the modern age.

It's easy to get disgusted and frustrated with "incels", as they are constantly saying reprehensible things. But ostracizing them from society doesn't fix them, it just results in worse problems like this. I think we need to focus on rehabilitating incels so they can rejoin society as healthy members, rather than ostracizing them.

At a more fundamental level, I think that our culture focuses too much on blame. Identifying the person who caused the problem doesn't solve the problem. We should focus on fixing the problem, not on blame. Yes, incels' suffering is mostly self-inflicted, but they are still suffering, and if we don't address that suffering, the suffering spreads.

Perhaps the answer is to start treating "incel-ism" as a disease. I don't know if the disease model really applies here, but I think it's at least worth investigating.

There's a balance to be had here: we need to be compassionate, but not naive. Some incels can't be in society because they are a danger to society, and our current ability to treat their suffering has limitations.

aiphex2• 7 years ago

I believe most good psychologists have the ability to treat incels. It comes down to the incel wanting it and having access to it. Unfortunately our society doesn't offer adequate mental health care to those in need but who are lacking in resources. Whether it's incels, drug addicts, or you name it, the answer is that we need to do a better job of taking care of each other. Unfortunately we have the greedy ultra rich on top who keep siphoning off the fruits of our labour and leaving everyone else to fight over the scraps. We could do better.

pizza2343• 7 years ago

Perhaps the answer is to start treating "incel-ism" as a disease.

There is already! Although the specific incel issue is not classified in psychology (AFAIK), a person with such severe symptoms can be classified as suffering from relationship and/or social anxiety disorders.

I think that the incel problem has a very specific issue in the fact that it's culturally ostracized; people who suffer from it are labeled as shy and lazy.

I'm not sure from which angle the social problem (I refer to the ostracization) should be attacked.

Research on this subject started in the 80s, but there has never been a (significant) following. The rational wiki has a good introduction: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Love-shy.com#Love-shyness_as_a....

If the condition was officially recognized, I think it would be a very good start, as probably people suffering from it would have a clear reference; right now, since there isn't any, it's very easy to fall into toxic subcultures.

allovernow7• 7 years ago

I think that the incel problem has a very specific issue in the fact that it's culturally ostracized; people who suffer from it are labeled as shy and lazy.

The issue is that society has a fairly strict range within which social, psychological, and physical features are considered attractive, and some subpopulation will always fall outside of these norms - but how society values these outliers changes over time and given the consumer, status driven culture in the U.S. there may be more of them now and they're being rejected worse than ever...but this increase in the trend is just speculation in my part.

Regardless, for some people, no amount of therapy is going to make them forget that they have suffered the collective judgement of society and weigh in at the bottom of the attractiveness scale, with little realistic hope of improving their rating without wholly changing appearance, personality, and or interests.

gshdg3• 7 years ago

ostracizing them from society doesn't fix them

But it can be necessary to prevent others from concluding that their viewpoints are acceptable and creating snowball adoption thereof.

kerkeslager3• 7 years ago

I agree with your goals, but I do not believe the strategy you are espousing will achieve those goals.

eplanit• 7 years ago

Maybe sex robots can help with this issue?

wpietri5• 7 years ago

Probably not. If they were just lonely guys looking to get off, there are already plenty of options, commercial and free. Ones that they either reject or already use.

minimuffins3• 7 years ago

These kids are the spawn of a terminally deranged postmodern technocapitalist society. You can see it's contradictory historical cultural dementia in incel ideology. They have no idea where they are in history. I want a wife and a family like a postwar company man! I want a life of automated techno luxury full of endless porn and gaming! I want to own a woman like in fuedal times!

Somehow I doubt adding more soulless machinery to the mix is the correct solution to capitalist alienation.

But whatever, try it. Why not.

shrubble• 7 years ago

From the article: 'the death toll now stands at more than 50 people ' (over a few years)

https://crimeresearch.org/2015/01/do-more-children-die-of-ba...

Annual rate of 69 children each year that die from... bathtubs.

Seems a bit overblown...

However...

Anytime you have large numbers of unmarried men, you have social problems. This holds across multiple societies and multiple cultures across millennia.

93po• 7 years ago

It is. The whole "incel" movement is just manufactured outrage used to generate clicks

comicjk• 7 years ago

People with young children do worry about them drowning in the bath and take steps to prevent it. A better example of underfocused deaths, to contrast with the overfocus on unusual murders, would be car accidents.

minimuffins3• 7 years ago

Bathtubs aren't a novel cultural formation. Bathtubs also don't kill people on purpose because of beliefs they've recently adopted.

Personally I think it is reasonable that we talk more about incel killings than bathtub killings.

The problem is not that incels pose an objective risk to my safety or yours but that their presence signals some kind of pretty serious systemic dysfunction. How does an ideology like that take hold on any kind of scale, is a question worth trying to answer.

Gibbon1• 7 years ago

My bullshit theory is crimes have three potential 'against's'

Against a person. Against a community. And against the state.

Mass shootings check all three boxes hard.

awb• 7 years ago

Jordan Peterson has a quote roughly to the effect of: if you make people play a game they can't win they might flip the whole board over. Basically, people who feel powerless get angry.

I think the blanket mindset is: I want X. I don't have X because of those people.

Replace X and those people as needed and it covers the philosophy behind a lot of violence and division.

allovernow7• 7 years ago

Although it was originally conceived as a site where lonely individuals of both sexes could meet, exchange experiences, and provide support, both the concept and its online manifestation were taken over by men complaining about their own involuntary celibacy and debating the causes behind their frustrations

Because dating is asymmetric and loneliness is much more pervasive among men. It's incredibly frustrating that academics and media outright refuse to acknowledge this fact! This article is an ideologically driven, sensationalist dumpster fire.

wolfgke• 7 years ago

Because dating is asymmetric and loneliness is much more pervasive among men. It's incredibly frustrating that academics and media outright refuse to acknowledge this fact! This article is an ideologically driven, sensationalist dumpster fire.

Here an article who analyzes this phenomenon by the Gini coefficient (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gini_coefficient&...):

https://quillette.com/2019/03/12/attraction-inequality-and-t...

"On a list of 149 countries’ Gini indices provided by the CIA World Factbook, this would place the female dating economy as 75th most unequal (average—think Western Europe) and the male dating economy as the 8th most unequal (kleptocracy, apartheid, perpetual civil war—think South Africa)."

mnm1• 7 years ago

Right wing groups and Islamic terrorists have killed millions. Comparing incels to them is frankly idiotic and ridiculous. That's like saying my one server search engine can compete with Google's search infrastructure. The words "terrorism" and "terrorist" are already almost meaningless. Let's not make them completely meaningless. Not every crime is terrorism. These are not organized groups perpetrating violence for a stated purpose, but fucked up individuals randomly killing people. If this is terrorism, every shooting is terrorism and the word becomes meaningless. Worse, it normalized actual terrorism, like that perpetrated by right wing extremists, and makes that indistinguishable from other crimes.

The_rationalist2• 7 years ago

The root cause is a hard cold truth that should have far more visibility than #metoo, in an ideal world.

www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-how-and-why-sex-differences/201104/why-dont-women-ask-men-out-first-dates/

scarface74• 7 years ago

Just as a reference, the entire “Intel” movement started as a positive support group before it morphed into its current state.

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/76h59o

Incels: America’s Newest Domestic Terrorism Threat

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