Incel terrorism

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What liberals are you talking about? I don't think I addressed them in my post.


It could be that we're at least starting to get somewhere here, so let me clarify one point - I see the evidence that collective action falls into the hands of busy-bodies, and such busy-bodies tend to either be the sorts of malcontents or 'jerkwads' you'd describe, or they have a way of making the top of any movement so toxic that decent people flee in the wake of them.



I think what I believe on this is best described by at least a few different people's famous quotes, stated slightly different that the best men and women are often meek, live private lives, and want to be left alone where as the worst are usually the most passionate about radically transforming their environment. That's not to say that change is necessarily bad or that it can't amount to progress, just that it's disastrous if its change in the hands of incompetent or pathological people.


And if 'incel rights' becomes a significant movement I'd likely stand against its brand of identity politics as much as I would any other.

To really give dignity to life or better treatment to the downtrodden I think it'll really take some collectively agreed upon moral philosophy that puts human dignity much higher and looks at 'dog eats dog' in a much dimmer light.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 25 May 2018, 9:39 am, edited 1 time in total.

I don't think they actually want to smash oppressive hierarchies.

They want to create a new one with themselves at the top.

If people stop insisting on this or that perspective on what a man should be/what a woman should be, we could learn what they do without the failing models currently in use. This helps individual men and women to think of themselves as people, in pursuit of whatever goals they set for themselves.

Our current system maintains its power by excluding people from consideration based on stereotypes. I can't guarantee that increasing the diversity of viewpoints in positions of power will fix all our current problems, but I can trace many of those problems back to monolithic viewpoints.

Look at the special attacks directed at men who cry in public, or any woman in a leadership position. These obstacles make a difference in any contest to distinguish oneself based ostensibly on capabilities.

Feminism will lead to better data about people, and I'll have more suggestions at that time.

I don't have the energy for this discussion today, I have other s**t going on. I just don't have the low opinion of the majority of other humans that you do and I don't want to argue with you about why 99% of humans are garbage. I also have a really hard time with your particular discussion style, sorry but I just have a hard time with understanding your comments. I can't follow you very easily, your posting is very vague and opaque and I don't know how to respond to it except to give up trying to communicate. I find your style of communication indirect and frustratingly hard to follow.

You don't need to respond to the following, it might help clarify where I'm coming from so it doesn't sound like I've got goalposts on wheels:

I think most people have all the natural tendencies toward being crap lined up for fruition and it manifests if they let themselves go and if the incentives of their environment further reward them for being so. There's something under the foundations of social being, thirst not just for survival but status, that can easily keep them from ever being happy unless they're doing well, and this is also important part, doing well compared to other people. It actually takes tremendous effort for people not to be that way or to be completely egalitarian in how they rate themselves and others (you could almost call that the achievement of sainthood). Nearly all of the pressure we have in life is competitive, and we spend a lot of time actually trying to hide that from ourselves and convince ourselves that we're above it even though we simultaneously feel compelled to play that game every day. It's not even that we're born with the desire to be mean (though some probably are), more like we're inexorably embedded in nature and this is how cruel nature is to conscious life. The way I'd put it is we're probably some of the most exquisitely/excruciating self-aware cannon fodder in the universe.

That said I don't know that everyone absolutely wants to dominate one another with hierarchies, I think most people all share in the same dream of at least being 'a bit above average', and if one wants even the humble place of 60th or 70th percentile for themselves that means 60-70% of people, reflexively, are down below them, and that's the part they never want to consciously think about.

You can't "smash" social hierarchies, that's an impossible goal.

^
To that, the moment two people enter the same room at least some form of hierarchy or set of different hierarchies is spontaneously generated, based on everything from individual differences in interest and competency as well as differences in physical and mental power. I'd almost want to call it an automatic/reflexive feature of two or more individuals meeting in some given space.

In fairness to the people who seem to be 'against' hierarchies though, I don't think they could - or would after thinking about it - be against transactional hierarchy or even competence hierarchy but rather the arbitrary ossification of hierarchy, ie. where it becomes entrenched and stagnant for no other purpose than people who've gained the power keeping their power. Really if someone's climbed to a special place in a hierarchy, finds themselves too pleased with their accomplishments, and starts offering less than what they had to offer in order to get there, it usually a great time for that person to be replaced by someone who can output more consistently and with higher quality.

As far as humans go, I agree.

This is part of why I have a way of constantly beating on the dark and ugly drum about humanity, ie. if we don't see the causes of these things for what they are our and subsequently address them on matching grounds our attempts to combat them are largely futile.

To the best I can tell there are a few conditions that could at least start laying the groundwork for removing cut-throat competition, men rated by both men and women on their power, or women rated by both men and women on their looks and similar social power.

The first would be innovation of the like where no one absolutely has to work. That might expedite biological competition but the 'needing to make board for a tolerable standard of living' would be alleviated considerably. Other than that we can talk all day about different political circumstances that help us bake a bigger pie rather than change how the current pie is distributed but I think the only solutions that will really bake the kind of pie that can assure human financial dignity as far as I can tell are technological, not political.

Secondly we'd have to be very free in how many avenues we have to explore and fulfill ourselves. Part of the current shortfall in that I think is social taboo, the other part is technological limitation. The more we can solve our own problems the fewer of our own problems we export to other people, or comparisons of wealth. Most of that as far as I can tell has to do with the constrictions that the current situation places on us, and going back to something NCM said earlier it's the coupling of these things that makes them seem like a combined issue and if men and women could live as well as they wanted to without having to worry about where they were on the socioeconomic ladder then said ladder would almost disappear from relevance.


You just said something very interesting, and I think this cuts against the popular grain in a particular manner. To say that you're for the diversity of viewpoints rather than diversity of faces puts you more in league with people like Jonathan Haidt (arguably another unofficial Intellectual Dark Web member) than it does with most people on the popular progressive left. That's not to say that all feminism is progressive left, just that its so often been bundled that way that people tend to see them as overlapping the point of synonymous - Jordan Peterson particularly beats the feminism and neo-Marxism drum quite often.


The question I'd have to this how do you envision politics rectifying culture over these two examples and/or others like them? Some of this is political, some of this is western historical narrative and machisimo cultivated in the public by history's victors, just that it's simultaneously difficult to tell how much of that is an accretion of natural forces that are there no matter what you do with the culture, might quite likely shake themselves free again no matter what yoke we put the culture under. Where I might differ with you may well be more agreement with someone like Bret Weinstein in that we need to see these things crystal clear, call them at their lowest root causes, and then yoke them on game-theoretical grounds, that any attempt to fix them by denying them will be the sort of tire patch that blows within another generation, sets us back at square one, and I think the effort is better invested in creating civic philosophies that game nature itself and do so far more adroitly than capitalism even claims to.


Google and Facebook would be juggernauts of feminism then, and the whole internet and how much data it's gaining on us is making the NSA look like its way the heck behind. I think any social scientist worth their salt should want to slice and dice this data to better understand what people are, put metrics under how we behave, and I think most importantly whip back into shape our relationship between statistical realities and personal ancecdote - ie. they're starting to take on almost a science vs. religion sort of flavor these days and if big data's essentially given away all our personal secrets and privacy to any sales forecasting, lead generating, and telemarking company under the sun the least they could do is put that data to at least some use that we find directly beneficial. My thought on statistics vs anecdote - both are true, completely different relevant ranges however, and that's been stalling out a lot of what could otherwise be productive dialog.

Incels want to be part of the hierarchy or at least obtain the wonderful life they think people who have sex are enjoying.

To a degree I emphasize. Certain unfair societal standards do prevent certain people from obtaining what the vast majority have. The frustration is not all about society however, sex is a biological need that if not met causes all sorts of problems for most. Relationships/love same idea. My problem is with killing or throwing acid in people faces whose sole crime is to look like a person that is having sex or being a woman. If you publicly blame all sexually active people and all women for your frustrations even if you do act upon against people you are enabling incel terrorism and a whole lot of other bad things. One of those bad things is making people fear innocent nice people whose sex life is nil to none.

Incel in its current post-Toronto attack meaning not in its original “involuntary celibate” meaning is not about feminism, it is not about hierarchies, it is not about societal expectations it is about incels.

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 25 May 2018, 1:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

This is exactly what happens with unrestrained capitalism in the absence of constant technological revolutions that shake things up by raising the living standards of even the poorest and bringing fresh blood to the top.

We've probably drifted off topic in the last few pages between examinations of what sort of conditions are at the root of the human condition, the efficacy of feminism in reshaping the world in desirable ways, and which groups, from any to all, either knowingly or unknowingly have it written into their work to throw other groups under the bus.

I'm sure part of the reaction to incels after this will be exactly what you said, ie. a similar reaction to seeing a guy in a trench coat or seeing a middle-eastern guy with a beard and head scarf. Terrorist acts in and of themselves are never helpful and to whatever degree they ever unfortunately are it's catching up backlogged conversation on public issues that people didn't consider relevant enough to be on the front burner until someone did something awful.

I also think this goes back to what I was saying to jrjones about growing the resource and technological pie, ie. the various kinds of exquisite human misery that people can be pushed to the brink under are unfortunately so many and so complex that about the only thing you can do that will help with some degree of assurance is set forth a tide that raises all boats.

Globalism IMHO has had massive trade-offs, and the elephant graph at least points to this somewhat. I love the side of it that may lift all or nearly all of the world out of abject poverty by 2025 or 2030, I'm less excited about how the first-world west has thrown the working class under the bus to prop up the lifestyles of the upper and upper-middle classes.

One of my favorite economists to listen to at the moment is Mark Blyth and he's said quite a bit lately about the link between that part of globalism, the late 70's and early 80's neoliberal/neoconservative economic revolution (re-balancing the economy in favor of investors/creditors), stagnation in real earnings per individual, and the growing wealth gap in first world countries leading to the sort of populism that gave us Trump and is helping to give Europe a wide array of prominent right and left-wing populist parties and even presidents/PM's. That last part, ie. the growing gap, does concern me in that we could see the west continually become less democratic and I've heard some pretty compelling arguments that to have a healthy democracy you need a robust middle class.

Do you assume 100% of the people involved were simply born bad? Or are you willing to accept that external influences played a role? It's possible the few who've decided to go on murderous rampages were in fact born with some kind of severe psychological defect, but you have to realize that for every murder-spree there are hundreds of suicides that are simply not reported. Also, there are tons of people who may relate to the label of "involuntarily celibate", at least in the literal sense, even though they don't subscribe to any of the toxic "black pill"/"red pill" nonsense that has infiltrated certain infamous internet forums.

I don't think it's fair at all to equate feminism as a whole to this toxic "black pill" misogyny. However, I do think there is an element on the left that emphasizes an adversarial perspective at the expense of empathy, and this only gives fuel to people with nihilistic and/or far-right ideologies that are strictly adversarial. I don't believe there is a zero-sum game, but when you encounter completely empathy-devoid adversarial politics, you get the sense that both sides believe deep down that there is a zero sum game and there is simply no path to a society that is more healthy for all.

I don't know that it's about limited resources so much as how we created a culture where people can't stand each other. There's plenty of far more materially impoverished places on earth where people none-the-less seem happier than in the west. The biggest difference seems to be that they don't worship the alter of the inflated ego so much. People in the west just seem to be so self-righteous and full of themselves these days. The only people with any humility are those who have been thoroughly beaten down in life.