Earlier this week, Canadian authorities upped the charges against a minor suspect accused of slaying Ashley Arzaga in February. The Toronto machete attack is now charged not simply as murder and attempted murder, but also terrorist activity.
Per
The Guardian↱:
Federal authorities started investigating the case after Toronto police discovered evidence of “terrorist activity” tying the suspect to the so-called “incel” movement.
Incels … are self-described “involuntary celibates”, who subscribe to an ideology that the world is unjustly stacked against unattractive heterosexual men.
In recent years, a spike in killings in Canada and the United States associated with the moment have led to greater scrutiny from law enforcement and security experts.
The use of terrorism charges against the minor—probably the first for an act of violence not tied to Islamic extremism—indicates the federal government views the movement as a growing threat in Canada.
As the significance ripples and echoes among the interests, activist
Emily Gorcenski↱ sketches the latest basic overview:
The thing you need to understand about incels is that it's not outrage because of a lack of sex, love, attention, or affection.
The incel “movement” is fundamentally characterizable rage against an inability to dominate, control, and hold power over women.
It's easy to deride incels as losers who can't get laid, but in doing so we take the core of their deception at face value.
Incels don't want to get laid. They want supremacy over women.
They believe they have a birthright to power.
Killing is the ultimate expression of power. So incels will always tend towards a path that involves murder and terror.
Incels believe they are entitled to women's bodies, their lives, and the positions they hold. Moreover, they frame other men as undeservedly occupying those positions of power they feel are due to them. They see other men as competition.
So incel violence is a manifestation of a power struggle: to hold power *over* women by seizing power *from* other men.
Nowhere in their narrative is the possibility that a woman could be empowered.
Incels are a particularly vile form of violent extremists particularly because of these dynamics. They will expend the target of their hate (women) in a power struggle against the target of their derision (other men). It's a bit unlike many other forms of structural hate.
It is a difficult difference to parse; while identifying incels are, indeed, losers, Gorcenski is correct, we ought not limit that condemnation to, "losers who can't get laid". They are also among the laziest of supremacists. Recalling Sartre, as is easy to do, these days, given the plethora of opportunities:
The [incel] has chosen hate because hate is a faith. At the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions about the reality of his hatred appear to him. He has placed himself on other ground from the beginning .... Never believe the supremacists are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves .... They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to indimidate and disconcert.
The short form is to say that,
we try to ignore them, as much as we can, because, after all, the incel movement emerged from and sustains itself by a pretense of telling other people to lighten up and not get so triggered about it all.
To wit, as Futrelle explains:
Over on Incels.co. the most active online forum for incels, the regulars are reacting much as they do any time an incel “goes ER” and murders someone, or a whole bunch of someones: Some are cheering it on, while others are complaining that their movement, which they deny is a movement, is being linked to a crime that it does indeed seem to be linked to — and wondering why they're not being treated as the real victims in all this.
“Life fuel tbh,” wrote one commenter in a thread on the subject. “Good news,” added another. “[Toronto van attacker Alek] Minassian got out I see,” still another commenter joked.
Life fuel. There is a certain feel about the line that reminds me of youth, of saying something stupid because some pretense of authority would be shocked or some such, but therein lies the hook:
We tried to ignore them, as much as possible, and then they started killing people.
Futrelle notes a "self-described 'Anarcho nihilist'" who inquired after the dead victim's appearance, because he was "assuming she may be a stacy since she works in a spa". Moreover, Futrelle reports, "Others agreed that because the victim was a sex worker 'nothing of value was lost'". This is not so unusual a sentiment, although perhaps in its explicit assertion the easy devaluation of women as sex workers unsettles others who do, in fact, abide the diminution.
And this is where we come to a notion of Poe's Law:
A commenter called ChinaCurry wondered why no one was focusing on the real victims — them.
We are the only group of massively socially disadvantaged people (in first world countries) yet we are fucking victimised and treated as the criminals, rather than the victims!
That's kind of what happens when you murder people, or cheer on others like you who murder.
Toward that last, we might recall
the topic post↑, and the horror show Futrelle compiled
two years ago↱ after an incel hit in Toronto; and there was the bit,
last year↗, about incels complaining that, after years of threats and cheering one another on, law enforcement took incel terror chatter seriously.
But this ChinaCurry, to whom Futrelle retorts, is just another recitation of the same old blithering whine:
We are the one group of disadvantaged, disenfranchised, unfortunate people, who are not deemed worthy of any help. Instead social engineering is designed to turn people MORE against us! Why is no one asking about the perpetrators life? What he had to endure, and compare that to the lives of the massage girls? They would have had the most amazing lives, being desired and validated and paid by cucks all day to jerk them off, and then gone to fuck chad on the side ....
.... Whereas the kid, if he was an incel, which they haven't even proven, spent his life being lied to by bluepill society and parents, and this is the shit u get.
Society literally abandons us from the age of 5 to fend for ourselves, and then is weirded out when we do fend for ourselves??¿
It really is a cheap rhetorical sleight, but the fact that so many would abide its fallacy under other circumstances lends a perpetual,
why not? to the propositon of whether to attempt this argument. And should one, as a diverse marketplace nearly guarantees, suggest it somehow unkind and unfair to accuse others of devaluing women's lives according to masculine fantasies of massage life and sex work, the better thing would be to reject the devaluation itself. As long as incels are riding a groove like that, we are well advised to pay attention to which tropes and when.
Life fuel. On Tuesday, Canadian authorities upped the charges against a minor to terrorism for evidence of incel participation in motivation of a February machete attack. On Wednesday evening, an
identifying incel shot up a California shopping district↱.
So, yeah, we tried ignoring them, as much as we could.
And the incels, themselves? Their take on the Westgate shooting, as
Futrelle↱ reports, ranges between canonizing a new saint and denouncing him as a failure and retard because nobody died. It's pretty sick, but hardly new.
____________________
Notes:
@EmilyGorcenski. "The thing you need to understand about incels is that it's not outrage because of a lack of sex, love, attention, or affection. The incel “movement” is fundamentally characterizable rage against an inability to dominate, control, and hold power over women." Twitter. 20 May 2020. Twitter.com. 21 May 2020. https://bit.ly/2Ttw562
Cecco, Leyland. "Canada police say machete killing was 'incel' terror attack". The Guardian. 19 May 2020. TheGuardian.com. 21 May 2020. https://bit.ly/3g8Zr3m
Futrelle, David. "A deadly stabbing attack at a Toronto massage parlor was an act of incel terrorism, police say; incels call it 'life fuel'". We Hunted The Mammoth. 19 May 2020. WeHuntedTheMammoth.com. 21 May 2020. https://bit.ly/2LOgt8M
—————. "Incel wounds three in Arizona mass shooting; incels call 'false flag' and claim they're being persecuted like Jews in Nazi Germany". We Hunted The Mammoth. 22 May 2020. WeHuntedTheMammoth.com. 23 May 2020. https://bit.ly/2XmPN4t
—————. "Incels hail Toronto van driver who killed 10 as a new Elliot Rodger, talk of future acid attacks and mass rapes". We Hunted The Mammoth. 24 April 2018. WeHuntedTheMammoth.com. 21 May 2020. http://bit.ly/2HpBFyc
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Anti-Semite and Jew. 1944. New York: Schocken Books, 1995.
Villarreal, Daniel. "Westgate Shooting Suspect Was an 'Incel' Who Wanted to Kill Couples, Prosecutor Alleges". Newsweek. 21 May 2020. Newsweek.com. 23 May 2020. https://bit.ly/3bXcUrB