Rampage shooting in Santa Barbara by misogynist 22-yo.

[Broomstick]

Yes, Mr. Plain gets it.

[ray245]

Yes, Mr. Plain gets it.

Ironically enough, his points seems to be another way of saying "not all men are like that". I won't be surprised the only message some males got from his argument is being a person who espouse Plain's views is another way to attract girls.

[Kitsune]

Sorry, it is suppose to be Phil Plait and he is a pretty well known person in the freethought movement.
Sorry about that. . . .

[Broomstick]

That's what you heard. What I heard is that men need to internalize that fact. When women bitch and complain they already know not all men are like that so men need to stop being so damn defensive about it. Plait is not "espousing" a view, he has that view. Can you understand that subtle difference?

What men do is as important as what women do. In fact, for far too long women have been expected to carry the entirety of this burden and that won't fix the problem. Men need to change how they interact with other men. Don't support misogynist bullshit. If a young, inexperienced man is having problems relating to half the human species, dating, or with relationships then YOU, as an older or more experienced man, are in a position to steer him in the right direction instead of leaving him to toxic on-line forums. This doesn't need to be a classroom lecture or some sort of formal deal, it means reinforcing the positive and not encouraging the negative. If the young permavirgins scream "all women are evil bitches!" don't chime in with "yeah, they are". The ARSE dating advice given here is actually pretty good. Let these guys know it goes beyond good grooming and a fast car.

You see, I don't know what to say to these guys even if they would listen to me. It's other men who are the ones who have a chance of getting through to these guys and actually helping them. You don't take advice from your toaster and the "incels" who have descended to regarding women as NPC's aren't going to listen to women. Other men have to reach these guys before they'll even start to hear the women in their lives.

[ray245]

That's what you heard. What I heard is that men need to internalize that fact. When women bitch and complain they already know not all men are like that so men need to stop being so damn defensive about it. Plait is not "espousing" a view, he has that view. Can you understand that subtle difference?

I'm saying that there are males out there that can express such a view without actually holding it, not that I think Plait is lying about it. There are still many people out there that knows how to be espouse gender equality when they are talking to girls while being sexist in an all male crowd.

Maybe it is just my social circle, but I've seen too many cases of other guys being more than happy to stop arguing for feminism movement when they are in a crowd without girls/

What men do is as important as what women do. In fact, for far too long women have been expected to carry the entirety of this burden and that won't fix the problem. Men need to change how they interact with other men. Don't support misogynist bullshit. If a young, inexperienced man is having problems relating to half the human species, dating, or with relationships then YOU, as an older or more experienced man, are in a position to steer him in the right direction instead of leaving him to toxic on-line forums. This doesn't need to be a classroom lecture or some sort of formal deal, it means reinforcing the positive and not encouraging the negative. If the young permavirgins scream "all women are evil bitches!" don't chime in with "yeah, they are". The ARSE dating advice given here is actually pretty good. Let these guys know it goes beyond good grooming and a fast car.

Given that there are experienced and older men that seems to justify this view, it's going to take a while before we can reach that stage.

You see, I don't know what to say to these guys even if they would listen to me. It's other men who are the ones who have a chance of getting through to these guys and actually helping them. You don't take advice from your toaster and the "incels" who have descended to regarding women as NPC's aren't going to listen to women. Other men have to reach these guys before they'll even start to hear the women in their lives.

Would they listen to people that they view as competition?

[Eleas]

Would they listen to people that they view as competition?

If a sufficient number of men around them act as if certain things are significant, they will learn not to dismiss them out of hand. Consider: these are people who want what they feel are things that other people like them deserve. If other men around them act as if women are not, in fact, a combination of servant, receptacle and scoreboard -- in short, not things -- then they will internalize this idea. The idea that women don't matter while men do did not spring ex nihilo from their foreheads in the first place.

[ray245]

Would they listen to people that they view as competition?

If a sufficient number of men around them act as if certain things are significant, they will learn not to dismiss them out of hand. Consider: these are people who want what they feel are things that other people like them deserve. If other men around them act as if women are not, in fact, a combination of servant, receptacle and scoreboard -- in short, not things -- then they will internalize this idea. The idea that women don't matter while men do did not spring ex nihilo from their foreheads in the first place.

How often do we have a significant number of men that actually does this? It's not like the feminism movement has been widely embraced by men for what it is around the world. The fact remains that there are still a large amount of men that can enter a relationship despite holding sexist views, and young permavirigns will start asking how did those sexist males get a girlfriend or wife.

It's not like a person's ability to have a relationship is entirely dependent on how non-sexist the guy is. Until that changes, the chances of young single males listening to this will be quite low.

[Eleas]

How often do we have a significant number of men that actually does this? It's not like the feminism movement has been widely embraced by men for what it is around the world. The fact remains that there are still a large amount of men that can enter a relationship despite holding sexist views, and young permavirigns will start asking how did those sexist males get a girlfriend or wife.

It's not like a person's ability to have a relationship is entirely dependent on how non-sexist the guy is. Until that changes, the chances of young single males listening to this will be quite low.

I think you make a mistake in casting it as a binary thing, where either a man holds sexist views or not. There's a sliding scale, and feminism has made impressive strides in that area during the last couple of decades, even among people who profess to loathe feminism.

Fifty years ago, calling a black man "nigger" didn't mean you were necessarily a hateful, avowed racist. Today it does, because today, the standards have changed. Even among the racists themselves.

The "young permavergins" may ask, and they may reach terrible conclusions, but with less of a permissive and toxic culture they will not be inoculated with the same amount of contempt for women. I really think it's that simple, at least in this respect.

[Simon_Jester]

You have absolutely no basis to judge whether his therapy was targeting his issues or not. For all we know he was withholding information from his therapist in order to avoid treatments that might have worked.

That's my point though. If the issue is not being able to identify his issues correctly, then we should not make an argument that all forms of help we can give him is exhausted, which seems to be the argument made by Broomstick.

On the other hand, in that case all feasible help was being given to him. It's functionally impossible to diagnose and treat someone for a psychological problem if they deliberately withhold information from you.

[ray245]

You have absolutely no basis to judge whether his therapy was targeting his issues or not. For all we know he was withholding information from his therapist in order to avoid treatments that might have worked.

That's my point though. If the issue is not being able to identify his issues correctly, then we should not make an argument that all forms of help we can give him is exhausted, which seems to be the argument made by Broomstick.

On the other hand, in that case all feasible help was being given to him. It's functionally impossible to diagnose and treat someone for a psychological problem if they deliberately withhold information from you.

It's not like Elliot was deliberately hiding his views online though.

One online message board he frequented, PUAhate, is “a forum full of men who are starved of sex, just like me,” he wrote. Despondent and angry about female rejection, many of the members refer to themselves as “incels,” short for involuntary celibate, and openly fantasize about harming women, while also regularly lashing out at one another. But “ElliotRodger” seems to be the only one who posted under his own name.

He sent a link to the website to his parents, to help them understand how he was feeling. They didn’t respond — perhaps they were too shocked by the content to know quite what to say — though they appear to have gone to great lengths throughout his life to get him emotional support, working with an array of psychiatrists, therapists, life coaches, and “social-skills counselors,” or what he called “hired friends.”

http://www.businessinsider.sg/what-can- ... 4T8uvmSw4c

And it's not like his memoir indicates he is a person that did not feel that there is something wrong with killing people.

He wrote: “What if father is in the house to stop me? Would I have to kill him too? That would be too much. I felt sick to my stomach. It would be too risky to try to kill him. I might hesitate at the last second.
“When I thought about all of this, I truly did feel sick. I felt a shiver run through me. My whole world had become so twisted and wrong. I didn’t want it to come to this. I desperately wanted a way out.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... amily.html

[Melchior]

They want a steady girlfriend, one that puts up with their obnoxious and entitled character and even caters to it. How's sex therapy going to cure that? I would advise you to actually hold your breath and read what those people write on Loveshy forums yourself as odious as it is.

How despicable we (I'm taking the liberty of assuming that I have a reaction similar to yours to this subject, having read the rest of the thread) feel those people to be is somewhat interesting.

Bitter misogynists are undoubtedly the most unbearable human category I have any interaction with, and, while I can't say I know religiously-motivated terrorists, I have been able to be civil with outright fascists (I had to in order to mediate matters in student government).

I can't stand them to the point of feeling physical revulsion. The loveshy/incel types aren't even the bottom of the barrel - the bottom of the barrel is the "red pill" subreddit; I discovered that place while on a trip with girlfriend, she was already sleeping, I was browsing aimlessly on a tablet while waiting to be tired enough to be able to rest - I proceeded to inflict months of their "content" on myself, as if feeling some kind of duty of bearing testimony, for hours, unable to stop - afterwards I wasn't even able to talk to her about the whole thing, I had to wait for my therapist (this despite the fact that she probably already knew about that "movement", she's well-versed in idiots from the internet).

How negatively I feel about these people doesn't seem entirely warranted - fascists, religious fundamentalists, corrupt politicians, etc. are probably worse in their effects on society and vastly more effective in advancing their agendas. I can't shake the feeling that this is either due to social conditioning (they're basically the only group that the, well, gauche caviar can feel superior to without guilt, since bronze age savages in the middle east were in fact oppressed by our countries, the average idiot right supporter has admittedly been failed by the school system, etc.) or a somewhat perverse evolutionary perspective (these people are arguably the least-fit males...); I find disturbing that we might be overlooking some kind of actual plight that these people are indeed experiencing (I'm referring to their imperfect grasp of human interaction, not the fact that women don't like them) because we find them too easy to hate, they also pose a relevant danger to others that might perhaps be better addressed by the healthcare, rather than legal, system (yes, this encounters significant practical challenges, from identifying some kind of diagnostic heuristic to the ethics of potentially medicating them).

[xerex]

I really you guys are missing the forest for the trees here. From my experience most of these guys simply do not know what they are doing wrong. And because of their isolation there is no one to tell them basic things.

Basic things like it is not okay to follow a girl while you take several hours to try and figure out what to say to her.

If she doesnt respond positively to you it is not okay to follow her because you think you can change her mind.

If you do make eye contact with a girl - remember to smile. it makes you look less creepy.

They're basically 10 year old brains with the urges of an 18 year old.

[PainRack]

Nice red herring.

You were the one who brought the War on Terror out of nowhere in here. That fishy smell is emanating from you.

Bullshit. You mean you utterly unable to recognise that you pulling the EXACT same attitude as some Americans back then?

Again. Being able to understand someone does NOT equate to sympathy and AGREEING with them.

The only mother fucker bringing out the fish is YOU.

Your and Ray's (well, it's Ray's idea but you didn't contradict him) plan is to supply these people with women to counter their "loneliness" issues. Since that would be essentially rewarding them, what else but sympathy is it?[

Odd. I explicitly said that there are no real world solutions. Zaune and Ray are talking about engagement and sex therapy, not me.

However, all these STILL doesn't change the initial point.
That Elliot actions are being propelled by the powerful warping nature of isolation, that his isolation is one of the factors for his warped philosophy.

Pratchett described it best. We need the Brownian motion of society to learn our morals.

Still feel motivated to help these people and "understand" them?

The same way I have to understand and nurse wife beaters, adulterers, molesters and etc.

But hey, I guess we aren't all ITG around here. Here's the horn, go blow and masterbate somewhere else.

[madd0ct0r]

Question - since elliot has left an impressive online trail behind him, scattered across multiple forums, threads and videos, can we really say he was isolated?

It's seems to be like the suicide forums, where individuals only find a place where they fit in in a group of people that's already so cut off they just spiral downwards.

[Eleas]

PainRack and madd0ct0r both raise an interesting point: "isolation" isn't really a cut and dry phenomenon when it comes to the Internet. It's rather reminiscent of deep depression. One can experience profound isolation in the middle of a crowd.

Several people bent over backward to help Elliot Rodgers, and a lot of resources were expended. None of it made an impact because he wasn't receptive to their approach. Whether it was because he thought he was "above" their efforts or the treatments simply didn't work can be discussed. Nevertheless, he seems to have held certain strongly held beliefs that are unlikely to have spontaneously manifested: that he was owed women as a default state, that men should do and women be done, that a man's worth would be measured by his success at accumulating sex, and that women were denying him these things out of spite. He built his sense of self-worth around those ideas, mirroring the online personas and rhetoric on the forums he frequented. The ideas he had were so ingrained by our culture that a concerted effort of therapy failed.

So yeah, it's not random, it's an expression of extant misogyny and bigotry in our society. In a culture that didn't constantly reinforce these ideas, Elliot Rodgers would likely not have internalized them. He might have fucked up in some other way instead, but that's immaterial: Elliot Rodgers is just one indicator of a pervasive phenomenon that regularly claims lives and oppresses people.

And that's a bad thing worth fighting.

[PainRack]

Question - since elliot has left an impressive online trail behind him, scattered across multiple forums, threads and videos, can we really say he was isolated?

It's seems to be like the suicide forums, where individuals only find a place where they fit in in a group of people that's already so cut off they just spiral downwards.

Read up on Facebook and other social media studies. Having a large online presence does not necessarily means one isn't loneliness or alienated.

[madd0ct0r]

PThe ideas he had were so ingrained by our culture that a concerted effort of therapy failed.

So yeah, it's not random, it's an expression of extant misogyny and bigotry in our society. In a culture that didn't constantly reinforce these ideas, Elliot Rodgers would likely not have internalized them. He might have fucked up in some other way instead, but that's immaterial: Elliot Rodgers is just one indicator of a pervasive phenomenon that regularly claims lives and oppresses people.

And that's a bad thing worth fighting.

I might argue it's not 'our' culture, but more in terms of the culture of the fora he participated in. 'Our culture' whether it refers to SDN or just everyday umbrella western civiliastion would have been extremely clear with him that concentration camps for women 'so they can have their mates selected by rational men' is unacceptable.

He was isolated in everyday culture, but his beliefs were reinforced by those toxic online places. Without their social effect (limited as it is compared to real life) would he have cracked earlier, the same or not at all? Did they make him more resistant to efforts to change his beliefs? (ie the therapy)

[Eleas]

I might argue it's not 'our' culture, but more in terms of the culture of the fora he participated in. 'Our culture' whether it refers to SDN or just everyday umbrella western civiliastion would have been extremely clear with him that concentration camps for women 'so they can have their mates selected by rational men' is unacceptable.

And you'd be right, I think. I was being simplistic. A more nuanced image is needed: there are many currents within our culture. The idea of concentration camps is distasteful by many of them, but the idea of "harems" or perhaps "groupies"? Less objectionable to many people.

And all through everyday culture, there is the unstated but clear perception that women owe men, and that women belong to men. That women should defer in conversation (which we can actually measure by seeing who interrupts whom, consistently, over length of time), and that their ideas are appropriated by men and only then receive praise. Beautiful women as a reward for men's deed is a staple in fiction, particularly fiction that celebrate masculine power.

Similarly, the idea of rationality as an exclusively masculine trait is alive and well and has been since the 19th century. We've wrapped it in euphemism and codified it, but it is very much there.

Elliot Rodgers didn't invent these things. He just listened to them and expressed them in an unambiguous fashion, likely because he found they appealed to his ego. He then chose to surround himself with people who embraced the ideas and therefore internalized them further.

Without their social effect (limited as it is compared to real life) would he have cracked earlier, the same or not at all? Did they make him more resistant to efforts to change his beliefs? (ie the therapy)

It's hard to say. All these things feed off each other. I suspect that he was always self-absorbed, which means it's easy to be resentful, which means that any ideology in which he could frame his disaffection in terms of "I'm a paragon, but other people are stealing from me what's rightfully mine" would have a memetic precedence. In other words, the gist of it ("other people should exist for me because I'm the best, but they don't so they're evil") appealed to him so much that alternatives couldn't compete.

[mr friendly guy]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_KHQZqdai8

Guys we are totally wrong. He is not a misogynist. According to Faux News he is just gay. He shot the women because he didn't like women taking men away from him. And those men he killed, well that was because he was angry at them because he wasn't getting any action from them. Sometimes the comedy just writes itself.

[Eleas]

Wow, you're so right. To think that I couldn't see it.

[mr friendly guy]

You and me both buddy. Faux news has totally opened my eyes.

[PainRack]

And you'd be right, I think. I was being simplistic. A more nuanced image is needed: there are many currents within our culture. The idea of concentration camps is distasteful by many of them, but the idea of "harems" or perhaps "groupies"? Less objectionable to many people.

And all through everyday culture, there is the unstated but clear perception that women owe men, and that women belong to men. That women should defer in conversation (which we can actually measure by seeing who interrupts whom, consistently, over length of time), and that their ideas are appropriated by men and only then receive praise. Beautiful women as a reward for men's deed is a staple in fiction, particularly fiction that celebrate masculine power.

A sidetrack from Elliot, but I can't help wondering if men need to create a counter idea of masculinity against Men Rights or their British equivalent.

An... Updated version for the modern world. Let's face it, modern Western society doesn't have appropriate growing up rituals for men.

The signs of growing up are being able to drink and party, being able to drive, being able to vote. Of the above, only driving is a visible status of maturity for men. I would argue college should be a sign of maturity, but modern culture has tainted it as a useful symbol for teenagers.

In the past, men became men by accepting a whole bunch of values and behaviours. Chivalry, honour,duty,husband...

Yes, those virtues were tainted by misogynistic behaviours.

But, shouldn't it be possible to revamp said virtues and remove said taint? A good husband doesn't mean one who works and bring back the dough. It does mean one who values his spouse input, a good husband works at his marriage to merge it into a stronger family unit. And if he's managing the family finances, does this mean he's automatically the patriarch?

I can't help feeling that the right way to overcome MRA culture is to replace and build up a better concept of masculinity to replace the one that feminism has overthrown.
After all, all it would take to be acceptable is for men to say women are equal, and we can then update and replace the whole ideas of manliness...

Surely that would be a better placeholder than Broship or the current contenders on the market, wouldn't it?

[Purple]

The issue with that is that in the modern world we tend to shy away from such structures as a whole. And for arguably good reason too. What you propose is no less than establishing a set of standards and forcing men to conform to those. And that is kind of off putting to anyone who believes in the concept of freedom.

[Melchior]

Surely that would be a better placeholder than Broship or the current contenders on the market, wouldn't it?

Do we really need to emphasize the role of gender in culture beyond what's strictly necessary (suitable support for maternity, etc.)? Why should an identifiable, identitary concept of masculinity be necessary (or femininity, for that matter)? People should be encouraged to build their view of themselves on something more worthwhile than the just-about-salvageable remnants of largely arbitrary and functionally surpassed gender roles. I like the fact that if I suddenly woke up as a woman nothing very important would change in my life (my girlfriend might be somewhat happy about that, actually) and I feel that if more people were able to say that society would improve (I don't mean to diminish in any way those that feel strongly about their gender identity - I'm thinking trans people, etc. - referring more to external pressure to conform).

[Eleas]

I suspect that PainRack is right in that there needs to be a number of ready-made stereotypes that are, for lack of a better word, acceptable. I don't believe in rigidly gendering them or forcing adherence to them, but a consequence of our in-group behavior is a need to conform and there should be some provision for conformity, because some people ground themselves in identifying with a stereotype. Arguably we all do, when we grow up.

I guess what I mean to say is, I think the observation that people will gravitate to stereotypes is a valid one. If we can't prevent that, the next best thing is to mitigate it or channel it in some way.