Incels: America’s Newest Domestic Terrorism Threat

The issue is that society has a fairly strict range within which social, psychological, and physical features are considered attractive, and some subpopulation will always fall outside of these norms - but how society values these outliers changes over time and given the consumer, status driven culture in the U.S. there may be more of them now and they're being rejected worse than ever...but this increase in the trend is just speculation in my part.

Regardless, for some people, no amount of therapy is going to make them forget that they have suffered the collective judgement of society and weigh in at the bottom of the attractiveness scale, with little realistic hope of improving their rating without wholly changing appearance, personality, and or interests.

Against a person. Against a community. And against the state.

Mass shootings check all three boxes hard.

I guess that's possible, and in fact seems like it's accelerating. But then again, what constitutes a vice is also changing.

Take a different example. Surely climate change presents a significant social challenge, both immediate and downstream. Inasmuch as climate change is exacerbated by the vice of over-consumption, there's a great deal of social approbation in some circles against it and a number of proposals to regulate it.

One wonders, of course, if a successful campaign against over consumption won't result in a future sometime where people forget the dangers of over-consumption and argue for a more libertarian approach.

The idea that some vices aren't really immoral is not a new one; it's just that we have short memories and forget their very real dangers.

What they instead want is either companionship and affection (which they clearly don't have or they wouldn't be hanging around in incel forums) or having a woman as quasi-property to serve them and enhance their social standing (the status of most women in quite a lot of history).

There are reasons they can't get those things, of course. But rather than face them, they've built up a toxic shared ideology to explain why it is never their fault. They're not the only group that has done this, [1] but they're definitely one of the most dangerous.

[1] For a fascinating look at what abusive parents tell themselves when their children have finally had enough, I recommend this article series on "Estranged Parent" forums: http://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/index.html

Incels are the new nerds. They're safe targets for ridicule, even though their lot ultimately sucks for reasons not entirely within their control. Telling someone who has trouble dating to learn to date is like telling a socially awkward, uncoordinated teenager to just "learn to play sports".

The source is basically all I did for the last five years was work and chase women in major cities. I’ve seen it all

It's not misogynistic if we fix one part of the meme: It's not that just women try to date up, but that everybody tries to date up, at least on average.

To clarify: For one person to on average try to date up merely means that their attempts will have an average which is above their actual attractiveness, but that doesn't say anything about who they actually date.

1. The top 80% of women tend to message the top 10% (or less) of men, while men message according to an approximately normal distribution

2. Aggregate male ratings of female attractiveness are approximately normally distributed, while female ratings are heavily skewed such that most men are rated below average.

The overall indications are that the vast majority of women go for the highest ranked men. Now, from an evolutionary perspective, this makes some sense, a woman can have one child every month, while a single man can impregnate an entire village. Unfortunately, when you erase cultural norms that correct this innate tendency by encouraging long term committed relationships, the result increasingly resembles hypergamy, where a small population of men are sleeping with the majority of women.

And so the lowest ranked males, who ultimately cannot simply "learn to groom" or "be themselves" or "be confident" end up isolated and perpetually frustrated. Then when a tiny minority act upon their wholly justified misery, the entire bottom end of the distribution get slandered as "incel" and "terrorism".

This article is moral panic bullshit, as inane and disconnected from reality as blaming Eminem for teenage violence.

You want to talk about mental health? Imagine living a life where you are innately driven to desire companionship and affection, but are consistently unable to receive it because of physical and psychological limitations to your status as a desirable mate. Couple this with a broken culture which indirectly encourages hypergamy and notmalizes infantalism well into your 20s and now you have a serious chronic loneliness crisis - but the perception is that it's just those nerds everyone bullied in high school so there's no need to pay it any attention.