Canada

It's really hard for me to wrap my head around why it's so easy for certain extremely online guys to hate women so much and so easily.

I encounter a little bit less of it on the fediverse but it's not immune either. Yesterday on lemmy someone posted something making fun of women who get plastic surgery, and pointing out that they were being kinda misogynist* got a lot of replies about how men are the real oppressed class and you can never make jokes about women and other incel bullshit. No where is immune.

Shortly before he launched his terror attack, the killer disseminated a manifesto to media. The essay is borderline unreadable: A hodgepodge of discordant economic and social politics, strung together by an intense hatred of women.

Sigh. Sounds like a worrying number of lemmy users.

The solution to this loneliness epidemic and all the downstream dangers that flow from it, is painfully simple: We need to break this internet addiction and get disaffected young men into physical, shared spaces again. The difficult part, the thing we haven’t yet figured out, is how we do that.

Unfortunately third spaces do not coexist well with any modern society, especially capitalism, and are quick becoming extinct. Especially post covid, making friends for anyone is extremely difficult - In a point against the incel philosophy, I'm a cute goth girl with big tits and I struggle to meet any new friends. It's just shockingly isolating to participate in society these days.

Suggesting Jordan Peterson as someone who "earnestly tried to respond to the question".

@grte

Gift link.. because: https://www.thestar.com/gift-redeem?t=63cb88b8-903a-45eb-a9cc-bfd70310f87b

(I pay to support the last Canadian-owned major media concern, Torstar)

I find it interesting that in response to a murder spree here we're already looking at how the system failed. In the US they'd be looking for who to pin the blame on. And thoughts and prayers.

We still need to find fucking something. I hear tons of calls for gun control but no matter how many rammings or shootings or stabbings or other acts of violence do I hear an attempt at drawing young men (and men in general) away from this shit.

But the incels are the most intense manifestation of a societywide problem: How do we get lonely young men to log off and rejoin society? How do we convince these men that they are not, as the killer believed, “barred from actualizing your potential?” 

...

The solution to this loneliness epidemic and all the downstream dangers that flow from it, is painfully simple: We need to break this internet addiction and get disaffected young men into physical, shared spaces again. The difficult part, the thing we haven’t yet figured out, is how we do that.

Meh, honestly, while I agree there ought to be more offline options for guys, blaming the internet for isolation is a bit simplistic. It's not simply just "being online" that causes this sort of shit.

Earlier internet days, it was common for guys who were on the outskirts of social norms to find support and inclusivity in online activities. You'd pick a game, go online, and have the same general set of gamers you played with over a long period of time -- you'd get familiar, start guilds, have real-life meetups and so on. Even FPS games, it was super common that you'd hit up a specific designated server that was close to you for a lower ping, and the same people from the same general geographic region would meetup there regularly. You got to know one another, interact socially, and have that sort of ecosystem where you could voice ideas, even questionable ones, and you'd get checked by other sane/regular people. Incel type stuff was practically nowhere on the radar.

Social media is a different story though, and likewise how the internet in general has evolved since its early days. Social media basically turns people into faceless mobs -- some 'influencer' pushes out a racey photo and gets 1m followers thirsty, someone posts a lusty comment, and there's no checking, just piling on, because no one will remember each other later, no one will have to actually interact with one another. The influencers will even post more racey photos, because all that matters is engagement/clicks, not quality of discussion. You get games like WoW revamping their systems, with the aim to reduce wait times on group content, by making it so that you get randomly paired with a bunch of faceless people you'll likely never interact with again after that night - instead of a massively multiplayer online social experience, it's a game with a lot of faceless players you can treat like disposable NPCs. FPS games are similar, with little to no persistence amongst the actual player communities. Servers are often run by companies, that have rules/auto-censures that prohibit open conversation/dialogue -- say the wrong thing in a chat, and you're kicked.

Even more, we endorse/support communities that provide lgbtq+ safe spaces, or women's safe spaces, where people can generally be openly misandrist, without repercussions because it's a safe space, and the target of their vitriol are men -- but male safe spaces don't have the same protections, you still face banning if you question the broader progressive narratives.

Saying solutions are hard to find, is galling to me, when the system has been progressively designed to break apart the sorts of supports guys need. Third-spaces are needed, I agree -- physical ones are great, but virtual ones also previously helped, until we engineered them to push guys into isolation.

I read the shooter's manifesto and didn't see the prevailing hatred as being directed towards women, as suggested in the Star article, but more as directed towards capitalism and who the shooter thought of as elites. There's definitely a distorted view of women in there, and the advocacy for violence is extreme, but the prevailing themes are surprisingly common in what you see in popular discourse: anger about inequality and anger about perceived injustice resulting from inequality. Attacking Mindgeek would have resulted from that ideology not because of hatred for women, but out of hatred of porn and the impacts of porn on men and on young people's relationships and intimacy as, which is the kind of thing you could read about in a broad spectrum of mainstream publications.

It's a weird read. Overall, it made me really sad. The pain and sense of rejection then turned into motivation for violence and calls to kill whole classes of people is quite chilling. It's disturbing. Most disturbing is probably that he wrote about grievances not just as justification for his own individual act of violence but calling for a mass movement that would be violent and, as he put it, "liquidate" whole groups of people as it took power. The grievances he focused on are also not so uncommon to see people feeling/expressing online, which is no doubt part of the danger of the ideology. I wouldn't share it with anyone vulnerable.

I wish that guy had experienced a better childhood or some influences that could have stopped him going down that spiral, but I'm glad he ended up as a lone shooter rather than part of something much bigger that he advocated for. The deaths he caused are already tragic, but a movement sharing that ideology would be a movement of mass murder. It's pretty awful.

Firstly, the star and mirror are both crap papers.

The path to solving the incel issue lies in understanding it arose as a counter-culture.

Easy. Just revamp society to provide freedom to all. Then these guys can buy poontang instead of guns.

There are a multitude of social, legal, and economic policy changes that need to happen to make societies more resilient against this kind of culture war shit in the future. For extant populations the only way to de-radicalized them is with education, whether that's voluntary or otherwise.

I'm certainly going to get down voted to oblivion, but the Chinese model is worth looking at. No civilization in human history has provided a higher standard of living to a larger population of individuals.

I like the idea of a true secular humanist end state, but as populations explode, I think we need a system that can function and deliver value at scale first; then we can gradually expand technological and ideological infrastructure for more direct democratic decision making.

It strikes me that finding ways to expand ideological freedom and democratic participation in the Chinese model would be orders of magnitude easier than scaling something like the Nordic model to more than a billion people.