politics

I feel this is mostly a criticism of "right-wing anti-inceldom", I hope no one farther left of an average Reddit user has to read this. I think not reproducing toxic masculinity should be obvious?

Left-wing anti-inceldom should still be practiced ofc

I'm not keeping a weirdo with bad energy in my circle when I've spent nearly half my life trying to purge myself of patriarchal brainworms; especially not when said weirdo repeatedly rebuffs my attempts to get him to see right. Like, you can only burn your hands on a hot stove so many times before you decide "y'know what, nah, I'm over it; have a good life-- or as close to one as you can ig". You are who you chill with; and I'm not tryna wake up with fleas.

The only people I keep around me are those tryna grow and self-improve. If an incel actually wants to get on that motion, cool, more power to him; but I'm not wasting breath or effort on somebody who's gone out of their way to either rebuff or outright denigrate my viewpoints.

This is what i feel about you sex havers

This thread makes it clear that half of the otherwise socially hyper-aware leftists are completely clueless about what incels are and how they are made, and how easy it can be to bring them out of it with some guidance and hand holding. I'm guessing most of you are anglos with bully culture ingrained in you since school. A very small fraction of incels are psychopathic forever-misogynists.

Not a bad article. It's important to make the distinction that, while some people are misogynists and don't have sex, those traits aren't exclusively found together. Some people who are technically incels are otherwise normal, and a lot of misogynists are in relationships. Belittling a man for not having sex reinforces patriarchal ideals that not having sex as a man makes you a failure.

All that said, there are a lot of very loud misogynist incels online, and they deserve what they've brought on themselves. It's just good to target your insults in such a way that their misogyny is the focus.

The rise of "inceldom" as a social phenomena was inevitable with the destruction of non-transactional social spaces and general alienation brought about by capitalism.

It's tempting to think that these people are struggling exactly because they're horrible misogynists, but historically tons of misogynistic people have still had sex and relationships. Bluntly, even the Golden State Killer was married at one point, and had children.

Life is materially and socially worse for a lot of people. I've made this same post basically every time this comes up, but where are the places where people can just hang out publicly, without being harassed by the cops or expected to spend money they might not afford to spend, just to socialize? If you cannot meaningfully socialize, you have little hope of getting a relationship or even just sex.

For many USians at least (can't speak for other countries) dating starts to suck waaaay more ass once you're out of school. The post-school options people are generally aware of are: Dating apps (which suck ass and seem to be a potent vector for extreme mental illness), bars and clubs (which cost money and suck if you don't drink or you have anxiety about being compromised around strangers), and that's basically it.

Lack of social spaces necessarily produces lack of sex and relationships. It will get worse before it gets better.

I'm guilty of saying "I have a bf" as a knee jerk reaction to random guys invading my space like inviting themselves to sit with me or something ngl.

But just as much I don't bring my bf up around guys who give off a particularly energy. I'm scared they'll lash out if they find out I'm "not theirs for the taking" and instead i just get away as quickly as I can.

Every friend i have who dates men has a story like this. (god I realise that sounds like him lmao)

Don't know how I feel about having to engage and teach feminism to the later group when I'm scared to even be honest around them.

::: spoiler dumb rant

I wonder how many people have spent some time on incel forums. I have, though I never self-identified as an incel (I only looked at these forums out of curiosity while I happened to be dating someone) and an interesting thing about them is that they spend way more time than you would think not talking about women. Yeah, they mostly talk about women, but there were a lot of threads that were like "When I go to the grocery store, everyone gives me strange looks. They think I'm disgusting and they're probably right."

I think people ignore how these incel communities are an indoctrination process that prey on the severely mentally ill, racial minorities, and actual children. It's not just an evil that bursts from someone's heart when they spontaneously choose to be a reactionary after getting turned down twice. It's a somewhat-elaborate ideology that people, often minorities of some kind, are taught to believe, using their histories of trauma (as in spending a 7+ years being bullied, not not getting laid) as "evidence" that the world is just like this, maybe even on an evolutionary basis, and they are encouraged to hold on to this false consciousness by their peers standing in so-called solidarity with them. These same peers make a contest of who can devise the most soul-crushing posts to encourage catastrophizing and suicidality in each other ("rope fuel"), but I guess that's what false consciousness gets you.

I don't really know what my purpose in saying this is, I just tend to feel bad for the people abused by this cult, and yes, that's with having read some of their repulsive fantasies (though obviously I struggle to feel bad for the specific people who post those). Obviously they need re-education. Obviously. But I think your prospects of re-educating someone are going to be pretty poor if you don't understand their motivations and their context. You can't just fucking Ludovico Technique Mao into their brains and overwrite what is there. Reaction and false consciousness are a knot to be untied, and you can't get past the problem by trying to cut through it instead of unraveling it.

In revolutionary circumstances, fascists should be shot on the basis of practical expedience. Once the dust is settled, if you have the resources to imprison someone and you still choose to execute them, you're a sicko. If you can re-educate them and you choose to have them rot in prison, you're a sicko. Treating people, including the followers of a reactionary movement, as just an uncomplicated evil that exists only for you to inflict pain or death on it is itself reactionary. As communists, yes, quite a number of people will need to die as a matter of winning the revolution, but when we have someone who can be a good member of society -- and that means basically everyone, even the people we both dislike -- and we choose to treat them with cruelty out of our own ignorance or a malice we might not even acknowledge exists, we've already begun to take the wrong path.

On average, who do you think was the bigger reactionary? One of these not-fucking fuckers, or Emperor Puyi? The one who collaborated with the KMT and Imperial Japan and opened the gates to a marauding occupation China that I'd need to CW to say anything about? Who has done more to "deserve" punishment? This may be controversial, but I think it's Puyi. So what did Mao do with him? Shoot him? Torture him? No, most of you reading this know that he was re-educated and Mao saw it as a meaningful victory for the CPC that they were able to turn this depraved figure into a good citizen of the new China. Mao was right, and the CPC and WPK were right to take the Americans they captured in the Korean War and do their best to re-educate them, despite knowing the US military was a heinous organization full of wildly violent racists. [Don't tell me there was a draft, there is no equivalency between some prison time and slaughtering countless civilians.]

I will repeat Marx's motto until I die: "Nothing human is alien to me." It should be the aspiration of any communist, even if we all acknowledge that many of those people need to die* nonetheless, that's just the nature of a revolutionary war. Not a single death should be because they "deserve it," but only because the rest of us need it to happen to end the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, to protect our vulnerable comrades, etc. etc.

But most of all I just wanted to procrastinate from finals. And before you ask, no, I did not watch the video.