Incel terrorism

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Thank you for your input.

To extract this down even further:

As far as incels, incels killing people, incels planning to harm or kill people - I'm completely against all of it.

All I've really been trying to say in this thread is I think I can see how the edges of this take shape. That's not condoning it, it's closer to saying that I think I've observed 2 H2 + O2 => H2O. It's not a moral endorsement, it's more like a proclamation that I'm seeing physics in motion and have an observation about those physics that may be relevant to the topic at hand.

If I had to guess people might get bent out of shape at my suggestion because I'm implying that there may be forces or vectors much larger than the individual that are lighting the fuses and such thoughts are so odious to people that I often hear people like Dan Dennett or Matt Dillahunty saying they're compatibalists, ie. that they don't believe in the idea of libertarian free will, ie. a person being able to make uncaused decisions but.... there's still free will if you mean something else by it.

Part of the reason why I wouldn't lighten his sentence is that probably every man or woman in jail can thank similar math for how they ended up there or how they even ended up being who they are. One of the ingredients of crime seems to be IQ in the 80's range. That's not a moral decision, it's an accident of birth. While I can't have sympathy for heinous acts to some degree I have the empathy of knowing that if my IQ wasn't what it is, for what I've been put through in various ways (and have come to understand just what odd and complex stacks of suffering people can find that have nothing to do with race, gender, religion, etc. - no one has any idea whose going through what at a glance) I could say that I have no clue how I would have survived it if my IQ was in the 80's. In a way I could have been spared such a fate of, say, turning into a heroin addict or meth head to solve my problems (or slowly kill myself), robbing people for a fix, these are the sorts of solutions people reach for when life has put them in impossible places internally where - from what their own brain is telling them - they can't live another day being themselves without doing something about who they are, where they're at, and there are no solutions.

A highly intelligent person might be able to read all kinds of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky, Jung, Joseph Campbell, and come up with enough home-made narratives to act as stepping stones over a series of years to narrowly pass the bullet of suicide, or crime, or whatever else. I really don't know what a person can do if they don't have the mental faculties to do that. This isn't something I'm saying about incels, rather it's something I'm saying about human coping mechanisms getting blown way out of their depths in general. This is also part of why I find how we currently do things in terms of the criminal justice system or even the precursory paths that sort of pipeline kids from school to prison. There's a destructive competition factor in our culture that seems to malignantly benefit from this and as automation starts taking everyone's jobs, for better or worse, most people will be living in glass houses in that sense.

Technically I'd also say that I don't have any particular attachment to the incel issue. It might not appear that way but the best way I can say it - I didn't grow up in the slums, get my life constantly threatened by gang members, or get forced to join a gang out of safety. If topics like that come up my lack of participation in such topics might seem to suggest that I don't care about such people, it's more like I can't speak intelligently on an experience I haven't had. What I do have, for part of my experience at least, does lead me to say that I do have a good grasp on what might make a toxic incel of the variety that might actually go out and do the kinds of things we're talking about. It's not a pet sympathy or any of that, it's just something that I think I can speak to with a useful degree of understanding.

In response to iq as a constituent part of the criminal psyche, I have to disagree rather strongly. Whilst I agree that many criminals face lives involving lawbreaking due to ineptitude, many have to be intelligent to hide their true nature, that behind their own psychological damage.

Petty criminals, ie. thieves, arsonists, abusers, etc. are not usually on the intelligent end because they have no means to survive otherwise, or control their emotions. They can't actively rationalise like most other people on the average end, usually around the 110 mark, and as a result have to turn to deviance.

With that in mind, most sociopaths are marked by high intelligence. This is actually one of the key factors behind the definition, perhaps observed through trend. As a result, I would personally come to the conclusion that most Incel (at least those that are likely to commit mass murders) have to be intelligent enough to hide, plot, and orchestrate such events.

I'd actually agree that if someone has antisocial tendencies, or is more than willing to eat the other dog running next to them, the intelligent person will be really good at distorting reality within the lines of the law - especially if they're quite socially successful (I have to think of socially successful and socially skilled as two importantly different things). These are the sorts of people who are willing to run a corporation into the ground to line their pockets, lie on TV to use people's sympathies, the wold unfortunately does have enough of these people running around and a fair amount of them work their way into the upper levels of politics.

I would be curious to see what happens if they are able to figure out something like a standardized profile of incel killers. My guess is that there will be a pretty steady profile, as there are for a lot of crimes. It could well be that IQ will be bimodal, or if it's not IQ it's some other impediment that accumulates enough stigma to achieve the same effect. What makes the whole thing more complex - I think anyone even going through such things, if some part of them knows they're better than this, they won't do it. When someone performs a mass act of violence it means that all of the safety catches in their brain were overpowered or switched off, and it's tough to say whether those safeguards just never properly developed in the person (which is indeed possible) or whether those safeguards were utterly overwhelmed over time.

There must be some smart people behindhand bars. What about Berni Madoff? Was Al Capone smart? Hideki Tojo was pretty smart and he got the death penalty.