It is a peculiar fact about the Christian fundamentalists that they deny their clergy special elevated status (as you might see in the Catholic Church or even among orthodox rabbis), but everyone is offered the same status in the eyes of the community in their ability to interpret scripture, with everyone with the same right to go back to the text and argue their point. — Hanover

This is Protestantism in general, not just fundamentalism. It’s why there are thousands of Protestant denominations.

Factually incorrect. Nazi ideology was religiously motivated, as fascism tends to do — Darkneos

This is spectacularly ignorant. Up your game.

:party:

I’ve done that, but I can still see it when logged in. This is either because the way permissions work makes it impossible to have a thread that only guests can see, or else it’s showing me everything because I’m an admin. If you or @Banno can no longer see the Joining thread, it has worked.

That’s even better than Baden’s idea. I should be able to achieve that by putting it in a new category with custom view permissions.

That’s a pretty good idea. If we’re going to do anything about this, that’s probably what we should do.

I have long agonized over that issue, and you are to be commended for your suggestion, but I don't think those threads should be amalgamated. I often want to link to them separately, I want prospective members to quickly see how to join, members to get to the guidelines directly (and it's good conventional practice to have the guidelines in the form of a pinned thread), and to display the Subscribe thread prominently.

The Chomsky thread is only there temporarily, so it'll be down to four in a short while. If I were to move one of the other four it would probably be the "Joining" thread; maybe it could go under "Help". But I think that might reduce its visibility too much.

During the period of the swift's seasonal residency in Western Eurasia (that's May to September), I prefer the weather to be mostly warm and sunny after a misty morning, with either calm air or a light breeze, and with occasional rainshowers in the late afternoon or early evening from small-to-medium cumulus clouds, and a mid-day thunderstorm when the moon is in its waxing gibbous phase.

I’m not done here.

I’m a member of some online book groups and there are endless stupid arguments pro- and anti-Kindle. I don’t intend to repeat that here. However, I do want to insist that ebooks are real books, lest there be some suggestion that reading an ebook is importantly different, qualitatively, from reading a codex-style book (paper pages bound together between boards or paper). This would be true of “audiobooks,” because you don’t read them—but not of ebooks.

Kindle is better for me for several reasons:

• I move around so portability is important
• The text of codex-style books is usually too small for me to read comfortably; on a kindle I can adjust the text size and font style
• You can look up words quickly and easily
• Most e-readers now have a backlight, so you don’t have to rely on external light-sources and you can read in the dark
• You can start reading a book seconds after you decide to read it
• I can copy and paste into TPF or wherever

The first two points are the most important. If they weren’t important to me, e.g., my eyesight was as good as it was 30 years ago and I was settled in a house with a dedicated library, or I didn’t live in a foreign country, then I would likely read codex books a lot more.

I realize all of this is obvious and goes without saying. But Jamal’s Law is: online, that which goes without saying doesn’t go without saying.

Now I’m done here.

I only read papyrus scrolls.

:roll:

I only read real books — Noble Dust

I still love books — T Clark

Ebooks are real and ebooks are books.

I don't think so. It's dense, long, and pretty bleak — T Clark

On the contrary, I found it exuberant and fun, and dense only in its profusion of monstrous detail.

In Perdido it only happens at moments but not generally, as I recall.

I enjoyed The City and the City so much that I feel I owe it to myself to give him at least one more shot after failing with Last Days Of New Paris. Is Perdido the one? I get the sense The City and the City was atypical, so I’m unsure of how to proceed. — Noble Dust

Of the books of his I’ve read, the Bas-Lag books have stuck in the memory the most, and Perdido is the first of those. I think I’ll probably re-read it. So yeah, I’d say Perdido.

As I mentioned above, I found it disappointing in the last half or third, and I remember the writing as occasionally and undeservedly pretentious, but I might be wrong about all that—and anyway, it hasn’t detracted from the good things I remember about it, and I still want to re-read it.

Yes.

However, I’m wary of answers that go something like this: lonely young men are being turned into misogynists by reactionary patriarchal ideology, to which they’re being exposed because of the internet. I mean, I think that’s true, but (a) it might deflect the sociological questions, and (b) it might fail to appreciate the ideology as itself something new.

I also interpreted it like this. But I believe there's an additional element; those three deficiencies get internalised and seen as universal/essential to the proto-incel. Universal in the sense that reality will always treat them that way; they can give up or adapt. Essential in the sense that reality will treat them that way due to their own personal deficiencies relative to perceived norms. — fdrake

Yes, that makes sense, although I doubt this is always present before joining up. Intuitively I’d expect some of them to join while still thinking they’re just going through a bad patch, only universalizing and essentializing it during their indoctrination.

Predictable oldies that I’ve posted before,,,

Great use of Fripp and beautiful spicy harmonies. I couldn’t get tired of the Roches.



Best guitar solo I’ve ever heard (at 3:00):



The best song ever:



Also the best song ever:



This is the one I’m most into this evening:



Actually maybe this is the best song ever:

I think that in the first two Titus books, the plot is crucial, an indispensable skeleton. With Perdido, it seems like the story either doesn’t matter or it matters too much. What I mean by that is that the monster hunt plot takes over, but on the other hand it’s like the author gives up and surrenders to the needs of a thriller-style plot.

I didn’t like the way it degenerated into a monster hunt. The world building was great, the plot, not so much. It felt a bit like an action movie: fascinating premise, then boring.

On the other hand, what I liked about it made me read his other books, so it’s still up there in my favourite books.

@Benj96 @fdrake

This open access paper, published last month, is quite interesting:

The Rage of Lonely Men: Loneliness and Misogyny in the Online Movement of “Involuntary Celibates” (Incels)

Four things about it:

1. Incels or proto-incels feel loneliness in three ways: in terms of intimacy, friends, and social status.

2. Their loneliness is transformed into misogyny by means of ressentiment.

3. Joining the incel community exacerbates this loneliness, fostering or producing ressentiment, even while providing some degree of social acceptance. This is because it does not provide the kind of social acceptance that they need, i.e., it does not provide intimacy, real friends, or respectability/status in wider society.

4. Joining the incel community means joining a movement with a doctrine. Thus new members undergo indoctrination.

EDIT: Sorry everyone, I forgot to say: incels are really bad! Grrr! :wink:

Do you see a way to thread the needle here without steering into right wing nut job territory? We were also pretty close when trying to humanise "pre-incels". — fdrake

Close to right-wing nut job territory? I don’t think so.

What’s better than submitting to the cancelling mob with self-censorship is thinking things through and speaking your mind. If you’re not a right-wing nut job but what you say makes people think you are, then those people are the problem.*

But I’m the wrong person to ask. I don’t much like joining things.

* It’s a bit more complicated than that.

It's political correctness gone mad!

Is it another example of what Adorno referred to as pseudo-activism, where what matters is the badges you wear, the signals you transmit, and the minimal action you take—no matter how useless—according to templates that define your political fashion?

Not an expert, but I think the pick up artist people sprouted off into the incels. An incel being a pick up artist failure who can't even manipulate women to get laid. — fdrake

But this goes against the idea that we seem to have taken for granted, that misogyny is a result of a lack of success with women. What you’re saying here is that they begin in misogyny.

I'm super sensitised to this because one of my mates lost a lot of their acquaintances because they complained about a bad run of dates, in public, in a frustrated manner. Entitled, resentment, etc. Rumour spread like wildfire. — fdrake

They were cancelled?

There's absolutely no reason to have sympathy with "incels" in their online incarnation — Baden

But there is reason to have sympathy for young men at risk of becoming part of that subculture. Just like Islamic radicalism.

And as victimhood and being different is so fashionable today, the idea of being an incel isn't so bad, at least in the horrible self-help groups of internet echo chambers. — ssu

So the interesting thought here, which I think someone else has expressed in this discussion already, is that what is lacking is shame. In a closely-knit real-world community, one avoids shame at all costs, unless one is out of control. There is a clear distinction between appropriate and inappropriate behaviour. And now, with social fragmentation, this is lacking. Since the community that these young men feel is most important in their lives is made up of remote individuals who are free to ratchet up the extreme opinions without any personal consequences, they never meet the healthy opposition that they would have met in the old-style community of people, most of whom they would not have chosen to associate with.

That’s the traditional (communitarian) conservative critique of modernity and postmodernity, and it has a lot going for it.

Not sure I do either.

Nietzsche could have been an incel, but he wasn’t that boring. It’s partly thanks to him that we can identify this certain kind of resentment (ressentiment) in incels. That’s what he criticized. He is to be admired for making himself into something better (but sometimes worse) than what he was—through his writing. In his real life he remained, probably, involuntarily celibate for the most part. But in his writing he is never mean, resentful, or jealous. He still sounds pretty misogynist sometimes, but from a different direction.

I know a young man who, though definitely not an incel, is now a follower of Andrew Tate and, from the way he talks, has absorbed a lot of his ideas from the “manosphere”. I used to think of him as a friend but his sociopathic and misogynist tendencies made me back away, partly just because they made him so horrible to be with.

He and his online pals are part of a self-reinforcing community in which charismatic sociopaths bewitch the less disturbed men with their strong opinions and their charm.

So I wonder how much crossover there is between incels and the sexually successful misogynist “pick-up artists”. Maybe you can graduate from the former to the latter.

I don’t know if you should be worried, but it’s a nasty thing in our society along with many other nasty things, so it’s probably good to be aware of it.

Maybe such thoughts turn to misogyny when the intrusive thoughts become egosyntonic. When anger becomes justice. — fdrake

A scary thought. But then … how and when does that happen?

When the person in front in the queue is old and slow, I have ageist-lite thoughts that I never admit to, so it’s quite a good analogy.

Well, why not then start with the obvious: the internet. The ability there to find your own echo chamber. How public discourse has change because of social media.

One should look first at the general reasons and look what is similar to other hate groups which don't have anything to do with sexuality. — ssu

I agree, that’s a start. It’s also a form of identity politics, which is another interesting dimension.

:up:

Go for it!

Similarly, if someone is a misogynist and uses violence, it isn't important what the reasons are. It is the action, using violence etc, which is the main issue and ought to be condemned. — ssu

No, it’s not about moralizing, it’s about understanding what is going on. This is explicit in the OP. It is important what the reasons are, because it’s a new movement with its own particular characteristics and causes. This discussion, if it’s good for anything, is about working out what those are.

In any case, while I would say philosophy played a significant role in me personally losing my religion, I'm skeptical towards the idea that philosophy plays more of a role in undermining religious belief than it does in sustaining religious beliefs. — wonderer1

Maybe this is because most philosophy is bad philosophy.

Can't a guy just be frustrated at being alone? — fdrake

I can relate to a lot of what you say. What disturbed me were the intrusive alien thoughts that I disagreed with, the misogyny in embryo. Maybe you’re saying that that’s just how male frustration manifests itself (in this society etc.), and that this in itself is not indicative of incel tendencies, though it’s probably a necessary condition.

EDIT: I just realized that quoting you out of context like that makes it look a bit like you’re defending incels. Sorry about that :grin:

Not if you actually look at the OP, actually — ssu

The OP need not comprehensively describe or define incels, since it’s a pretty well-known subculture notorious for its abusive and sometimes violent misogyny. It’s probably wise to look into it rather than throwing around accusations of wokeness. Even just a quick look at Wikipedia would work:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incel

It doesn’t follow from the fact that “incel” is a word formed from “involuntary celibate” that when we use “incel” we are merely referring to people who are involuntarily celibate tout court.

To be completely honest, I went through it again around 2016-2017. I went a bit mad with resentment and, the flipside, an unhealthy infatuation (which never led me to do anything abusive or creepy, I should add. Well, maybe mildly creepy.). Come to think of it, over the course of my life I seem to have oscillated between periods of quiet incel resentment that I was saved from at the last minute by the women in my life.

It doesn’t hurt that you have a rich set of radically progressive beliefs to keep you away from the dark side. When I was going through it I had already been calling myself a communist for a couple of years, so I wonder if this helped prevent my descent into misogyny. I don’t think that was the main thing though.

At the time I felt a kind of disgusted resentment at the thought—which I couldn’t stop thinking—that there were women at that very moment having sex with other men. And at the same time I knew this was stupid. But as a socially anxious person I didn’t know what to do about it, and it was only by accident that things improved.

Anyway, it’s probably better to target one’s ressentiment at the abstract woman than actual women. I don’t know if the former leads to the latter in a smooth progression or if something just breaks at some point based on individual psychology or circumstances.