#also i spent a total of 10 minutes researching game theory for this im not a poli sci or economics person please don't come at me hahahahha
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More nonsense.
~~~~~~
Ford fans out his cards, accordion-style, bringing them to rest just below the bridge of his nose, his eyes peeking out from over the top of the wide leaf he’s created. “Perhaps,” he mumbles from behind the improvised mask, “I’m trying to lull you into a false sense of security. After all, we are participating in one the most basic tenets found in game theory, a von Neumannian model in which there can only be one - ”
“Jesus Christ,” Stan groans, pulling a hand down his face, smudging his glasses in the process. He might as well spring the first part of his plan now, before his brother gets too wrapped up in Newport models or whatever the hell he’s going on about. Anything to get him to stop tracing that fucking triangle. “Ugh, too much nerd shit, blah, blah, blah. How about we can the math and make this a little more interesting?”
Step one, set up and hang the bait.
Ford tilts his head. “I’m listening.”
“Simple stuff," Stan shrugs. "You draw a card, you have to answer a question. You drop a card, no penalty.” Not the most elegant of Stan’s pitches in his long career, but he’s got one more kicker to sweeten the deal. “That sound game theory enough for you?”
Step two, spring the hook.
“This would add a rather compelling layer of Nash’s Equilibrium to our competition,” Ford says, rubbing his chin with his fingers. “Assuming we both have a vested interest in avoiding or manipulating the interrogation variable to our own means. The mathematical models alone would be fascinating.”
“So how’s about it, Ford? Drop or draw?” Stan drawls with an affected nonchalance, plastering on his best Mr. Mystery smile.
Step three, let them reel themselves in.
His brother stiffens, righting himself into a perfect seated posture as he folds his hand into a neat stack. With a deliberate, exact motion, he reaches out to the messy pile of cards splayed over the center of the table.
“I will call your bluff and draw, Stanley,” he says, not bothering to look at the card as he places it on his stack with the others. “Now,” Ford reaches for a mug of coffee that’s gone cold hours ago, “what question would you like to ask of me?”
Hook. Line. Sinker.
#hello there#writing#the eternal struggle#i could write these two for days#stanley pines#stanford pines#i really REALLY want to get a first full draft of this thing done today#we'll see how things go#also i spent a total of 10 minutes researching game theory for this im not a poli sci or economics person please don't come at me hahahahha
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Weight Loss Quotes
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• A great mix of tips, tricks, and anecdotes, All is Forgiven, Move On has excellent ideas for your weight loss journey and for improving your life along the way! – Judith S. Beck • After a lifetime of losing and gaining weight, I get it. No matter how you slice it, weight loss comes down to the simple formula of calories in, calories out. – Valerie Bertinelli • Almost everything inside was filled with sugar, cheese, and weight-loss tips. – Adam Rex • Another good reducing exercise consists in placing both hands against the table edge and pushing back. – Robert Quillen • As far as dieting and weight loss go, diet and exercise actually works. Lots of running and healthy eating. – Emile Hirsch • As you experience success in applying kaizen to clear goals like weight loss or career advancement, remember to hold onto its essence: an optimistic belief in our potential for continuous improvement. – Robert D. Maurer
jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Weight+Los', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_weight-los').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_weight-los img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Balanced, sensible nutrition: eat food, not too much, mostly plants, a healthy diet ala Michael Pollan, modern physical activity on a daily basis, modest weight loss – translated into a 58% reduction in the occurrence of diabetes. A clear indication of the power of lifestyle over health. The challenge now is the development of the community-based programs that will translate what we learned in the diabetes prevention program and put it to work in every town in America. – David Katz • Behind weight gain are the larger hurts and questions that have to be explored, probed, and understood before weight loss and maintenance is a possibility. It’s a bigger issue than just calories in, calories out. – Ali Vincent • Coconut oil contains the most concentrated natural source of medium-chain fatty acids (MCFA) available. Substituting coconut oil for other vegetable oils in your diet will help promote weight loss. – Bruce Fife • Despite what many nutritionists have preached for years, rapid weight-loss diets can be healthy if done correctly and can work wonders on reducing pounds and inches in just days. – Mike Moreno • Dieting is long-haul. Many rapid weight loss programs actually only squeeze the water out of you. Just like a wet sponge. But a good dieter maintains his or her grip on that sponge, not letting it soak up water again. – Owen Jones • Dieting is the only game where you win when you lose! – Karl Lagerfeld • Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections. – Saint Francis de Sales • Don’t even wait until you’ve lost a pound. The minute you can push the plate away with food still on it, give yourself a pat on the back. – Tony Robbins • Every study on chocolate is pointing to the same conclusion: there is something in chocolate that is really good for us. That something is the raw cacao bean, the nut that all chocolate is made from. The cacao bean has always been and will always be Nature’s #1 weight loss and high-energy food. Cacao beans are probably the best kept secret in the entire history of food. – David Wolfe • Everything we’ve been taught about health, weight loss and aging is wrong. – Jorge Cruise • Fitness and proper nutrition truly go hand-in-hand. Focus on eating clean and filling your plate with veggies, fruits, whole grains and lean proteins. And, everyone hates to do it, but calorie counting is crucial to weight loss as well as maintaining a healthy physique. – Jillian Michaels • For both optimal health and weight loss, you must consume a diet with a high nutrient-per-calorie ratiothere are no shortcuts. – Joel Fuhrman • Frequently, visualization is the key to lose weight. Imagine yourself with your desired body, and work for it. At some point in the future, this wish will come true. – David Viscott • Here’s the secret to weight loss: It’s all about crowding out, not cutting out. – Kathy Freston • High protein diets make you sick in the long and short term. Expect kidney disease, heart disease and more strokes and cancer. Plus the weight loss is temporary because you can’t stay sick for long. Look at the creators of these diets – many are fat themselves. – John A. McDougall • I could not bounce back from my divorce – emotionally – I just could not bounce back. With any bad situations I��d experienced before – a bad game or my two previous divorces – I got over them. This time I just could not get out of the hole. The anxiety attacks were frequent and extensive. I had weight loss, which I’d never had before. I couldn’t stop crying. And if I wasn’t crying, I was angry, bitter, hateful and mean-spirited. I couldn’t sleep – couldn’t concentrate. It just got crazy. – Terry Bradshaw • I didn’t get excited by weight loss, and since I was already happy being fat, I couldn’t see the point of it all. I’m 6 ft. and weigh about 18 st. or 19 st., but weighing myself is not something I do with much pleasure. – Maeve Binchy • I didn’t start out about weight loss. I was very tired and my energy was low. This is my second go-around in love, so I want to make sure I’ll be around to enjoy it. – Niecy Nash • I found that people like rules, and I love to tell people what to do. It’s not rocket science when it comes to weight loss. It’s about eating a little less and moving a little bit more. – Bob Harper • I freak out if I go a little too long without being in the gym. For a long time it was all about getting the weight off because I was 240 pounds at my heaviest, and now I’m around 175, so the majority of that weight loss was due to diet and exercise. – Nick Carter • I have a theory that the best ads come from personal experience. Some of the good ones I have done have really come out of the real experience of my life, and somehow this has come over as true and valid and persuasive. People love to read stories. They like to know you as a real person who has your struggle, pain, success and failure, etc. One well-known example is Jared Fogle’s weight loss story which made millions of dollars for Subway. Start to collect your stories from today and use them in your ad campaigns. – David Ogilvy • I have gained and lost the same 10 pounds so many times over and over again my cellulite must have deja vu! – Jane Wagner • I have more energy to run after our four children. Weight loss and great skin were a bonus! – Niecy Nash • I thought a lot about how so many memoirs about fatness focus on weight loss; they don’t focus on living with weight in a world that is rather inhospitable to it. So I knew that was the idea that was going to be most interesting and most challenging, and I like to be challenged as a writer. – Roxane Gay • I used to define success as being able to produce any result you wanted, whether it was a relationship, weight-loss, being a millionaire, impacting the culture, changing society, whatever it might be, it might be homelessness, whatever, but lately I’ve realized that success is “fulfilling your soul’s purpose.” – Jack Canfield • I went on a diet, swore off drinking and heavy eating, and in fourteen days I had lost exactly two weeks. – Joe E. Lewis • If you believe that weight loss requires self-deprivation, Im going to teach you otherwise. – Robert Atkins • If you find you require willpower, you aren’t ready to lose weight. – Augusten Burroughs • If you keep on eating unhealthy food than no matter how many weight loss tips you follow, you are likely to retain weight and become obese. If only you start eating healthy food, you will be pleasantly surprised how easy it is to lose weight. – Subodh Gupta • If you’re going to solve a weight-loss problem – or smoking problem for that matter – you must address both the psychological and physiological. – Tony Robbins • If you’re not doing what is best for your body, you are the one who lose. – Julius Erving • I’m a girl who enjoys a great meal with great friends, so I’m not really that concerned about weight loss. – Jill Scott • I’m not against working out. It’s just not effective for weight loss. I like strength training to tone and firm the body so you look tight. But working out just makes you hungrier. – Jorge Cruise • I’m prouder of my weight loss than my Oscar! I hope it has inspired people. – Jennifer Hudson • Imagine a weight-loss program at the end of which, instead of better health, good looks, and hot romantic prospects, you die. Somalia had become just this kind of spa. – P. J. O’Rourke • In India, we kind of concentrate only on weight loss. I want to teach people that it is very important to be strong and fit, rather than just thin. – Bipasha Basu • In two decades I’ve lost a total of 789 pounds. I should be hanging from a charm bracelet. – Erma Bombeck • Instead it seems that business – like weight loss – is a subject wherein hope and fear inspire limitless gullibility. – Paul Krugman • It seems that researchers at Colorado University say wine may help people lose weight. It’s not the wine directly that causes the weight loss, it’s all the walking around you do trying to find your car. – Jay Leno • It suddenly hit me—it was nearly impossible to take good care of something I hated. I’d spent so long hating my body that I didn’t know how to respect and nurture myself or my body. By focusing so much on my exterior, I also robbed myself of the opportunity to feel good about myself and my body, simply because I didn’t meet a cultural standard of beauty that is obsessed with thinness. That created stress that interfered with my weight loss and with my own happiness. – Jessica Ortner • It’s easier to stay in shape if you never let yourself get out of shape in the first place. – Bill Loguidice • I’ve been on a diet for two weeks and all I’ve lost is two weeks. – Totie Fields • Keeping off a large weight loss is a phenomenon about as common in American medicine as an impoverished dermatologist. – Calvin Trillin • Little changes over time are the secret to long term weight loss success! – Chris Powell • My recipes aren’t geared towards women; my books are marketed towards women because women are the biggest market for weight loss, weight management and weight maintenance and for cooking. – Bethenny Frankel • My success has been something I’ve worked a long time at and it’s been a gradual process. I compare it to the idea of someone losing a lot of weight over a period of a few years. You don’t really notice the weight loss overall but if you compare photos from then and now there’s a big difference. – Ray William Johnson • My temptation is emotional, and resisting will further my needed weight loss and strengthen my character. Furthermore, nothing tastes as good as thin feels. – Stephen Covey • No, as it turns out, I really like being congratulated on my weight loss. I like it so much, it’s tragic. – Carrie Fisher • Not only weight loss surgery is unnecessary but also it deprives human being a normal life. People after surgery would never be able to enjoy their food ever for the rest of their life whether it is Christmas or they are on their holidays or their child birthday or any other festival. List of problems and complications after the weight loss surgery operation are endless as one may get additional problems such as Hernia, Internal Bleeding, Swelling of the skin around the wounds, etc. I wonder how many weight loss surgeons advice about weight loss surgery to their own family members. – Subodh Gupta • Oh. No wonder I’d been sick. I hadn’t eaten anything since then. I’m a girl who likes her meals, so it hadn’t been a weight-loss tactic. I’d just been too busy bumping from crisis to crisis. Go on the Sookie Stackhouse Narrow Avoidance of Death Diet! Run for your life, and miss meals, too! Exercise plus starvation. – Charlaine Harris • Overweight and obesity is the second leading cause of death, killing 300,000 people a year, There is not a miracle pill that will lead to weight loss. – Richard Carmona • Pay more attention to losing inches than losing pounds. – Jane Fonda • Perhaps by sharing my personal weight-loss journey on television, I can help others confront the truth and lies behind obesity. – Ruby Gettinger • Permanent weight loss doesn’t come with an on and off switch. It is not something you do for a little while and think it is going to change your body. – Jennifer Hudson • Permanent weight loss means making small, manageable changes and sticking with them for life. – Michael Adam Hamilton • Place a picture of someone that looks like what you want to look like when you reach your weight loss and fitness goal somewhere nearby. However, be sure to keep it realistic to your own body type. This is a visual reminder of what the end result of your fitness and weight loss program will be, helping to keep you motivated. – Jackie Warner • Rather than strive to ‘lose weight,’ most people would be better off striving to lose only fat and to build or maintain muscle. – Mark Sisson • Reality check: you can never, ever, use weight loss to solve problems that are not related to your weight. At your goal weight or not, you still have to live with yourself and deal with your problems. You will still have the same husband, the same job, the same kids, and the same life. Losing weight is not a cure for life. – Phil McGraw • Some people’s weight loss is impeded by an impaired thyroid. So I think it’s worth testing that at your next physical exam. If it’s off, sometimes, that can be caused by excess metals, such as mercury or cadmium. A qualified M.D. can help you cleanse your body of those. – Tony Robbins • Successful weight loss takes programming, not willpower. – Phil McGraw • Sudden total weight loss. – George Carlin • Thank you for calling the Weight Loss Hotline. If you’d like to lose a half pound right now, press 1 eighteen thousand times. – Randy Glasbergen • The bottom line is that you will not lose fat effectively with exercise-driven weight-loss efforts unless your eating habits moderate insulin production. – Mark Sisson • The Glycemic Index is one the best tools for fat loss. It measures how quickly foods breakdown into sugar in your bloodstream. – Al Sears • The hardest thing was going through different stages of weight loss. At the beginning, it was easy to take off the weight with exercise and eating less but then you reach a point where 90 per cent of the weight loss is achieved purely through reducing your calorie intake. My goal was to lose four pounds per week. That worked well for the first few months but then things got tricky. – Matthew McConaughey • The most important thing I want to get across is that maintaining weight loss is just hard. It takes a dedication to exercise and eating right most of the time. I’m not saying I don’t enjoy the days that I’m not eating chocolate cake. But I do particularly like those days when I am eating chocolate cake. – Trisha Yearwood • The real pride, the real present, is your health and your longevity. My whole career, I have never done anything where competition was involved with weight loss. – Richard Simmons • The secret of losing weight is patience. – Jane Fonda • The surest way to identify those who won’t succeed at weight loss is that they tend to say things like “My goal is to lose ten pounds.” Weight targets often work in the short run. But if you need willpower to keep the weight off, you’re doomed in the long run. The only way to succeed in the long run is by using a system that bypasses your need for willpower. – Scott Adams • The usual justification for eating extra meals is that it keeps the metabolism “revved up” so that weight loss is easier. There is, however, very little hard evidence that supports this idea, and a fair amount that disputes it. – Andrew Weil • The weight loss has been a secondary change to the mental changes I have made. Weight loss does not fix problems; how you view yourself does. – Erin Willett • There is no lasting glory in rapid weight loss. – Mireille Guiliano • There’s a huge emotional component to weight loss. – Carnie Wilson • This country is so urbanized we think low-fat milk comes from cows on Nutri/System weight-loss plans. – P. J. O’Rourke • We compliment weight loss, monitor our appetites, and shrink ourselves to fit some kind of standard. I wish we could all be the size we actually are. One size doesn’t fit all because there are as many sizes as there are women. Let’s look closer at the size of our hearts, the width of our souls, and the length of our spirits. – Sark • We talk a lot on ‘Biggest Loser’ about how fitness is a natural antidepressant, how it burns off stress. What I like about running is that it gives me time alone. I’m always busy, with people at work, with my kids. I love getting out for a run by myself and just listening to my music. – Alison Sweeney • Weight loss after pregnancy is safe but requires attention and guidelines – Debbie Meyer • Weight loss does not make people happy. Or peaceful. Being thin does not address the emptiness that has no shape or weight or name. Even a wildly successful diet is a colossal failure because inside the new body is the same sinking heart. – Geneen Roth • Weight loss programs and health clubs have an ethical and legal obligation to adequately disclose details about program costs before customers sign a contract. They should also clearly explain how the program works and what is expected so that consumers can make an informed choice whether to join. – Bill Vaughan • We’ve got a recipe for disaster. It’s huge — this combination of body image issues and the drug’s weight loss appeal. – Robert Hughes • What some name well being, if bought by perpetual nervousness about weight loss plan, is not a lot better than tedious illness. – George D. Prentice • When followed correctly, the Dukan Diet is both a safe and effective method of weight loss. – Pierre Dukan • When food becomes the enemy, every time we lose the fight we not only gain weight, but lose our self-esteem as well. – Jane Fonda • When I hear health professionals suggesting that you shouldn’t worry about the balance of calories in versus calories out, but rather eat clean and follow your hunger instincts, well, I really just want to pinch their heads off. That’s like a millionaire suggesting that instead of worrying about that’s in your bank account, just listen to your shopping instincts and buy high-quality goods . . . weight loss is not magic. To a great extent, it’s accounting. – Chalene Johnson • When we lose twenty pounds… we may be losing the twenty best pounds we have! We may be losing the pounds that contain our genius, our humanity, our love and honesty. – Woody Allen • When weight loss becomes a goal in your life, eating right and exercising are just two pieces of the puzzle. Figuring out why you’ve put on the extra weight is the hardest part. – Ali Vincent • When you’re the spokeswoman for a weight-loss program, everything is witnessed. I weigh in once a week with a witness. I have to sign an affidavit saying I cannot have any surgeries. – Kirstie Alley • While weight loss is important, what’s more important is the quality of food you put in your body – food is information that quickly changes your metabolism and genes. – Mark Hyman, M.D. • You can think of the Health Impact Fund as a mechanism that would keep the benefits and burdens of pharmaceutical innovation for the affluent roughly as they are while massively reducing the burdens presently imposed upon the poor. This sounds like magic. But it really works because the current system is not Pareto efficient. It’s a system that generates hundreds of billions of dollars in litigation costs and deadweight losses that HIF-registered medicines would sidestep. By avoiding these losses, the HIF reform can bring improvements all around – including for pharmaceutical innovators. – Thomas Pogge • You don’t need to worry any more or punish yourself about food. It is totally counterproducti ve to stress yourself out about weight loss because that same stress causes you to put weight on. – Marc David • You have to want weight-loss success so badly that no mountain, river, or ocean could keep you from reaching your goals. If you have that drive, passion, and commitment, there is no way you won’t get there. – Jennifer Hudson • You know what the secret to weight loss is? Don’t eat much. – Simon Cowell
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Weight Loss Quotes
Official Website: Weight Loss Quotes
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• A great mix of tips, tricks, and anecdotes, All is Forgiven, Move On has excellent ideas for your weight loss journey and for improving your life along the way! – Judith S. Beck • After a lifetime of losing and gaining weight, I get it. No matter how you slice it, weight loss comes down to the simple formula of calories in, calories out. – Valerie Bertinelli • Almost everything inside was filled with sugar, cheese, and weight-loss tips. – Adam Rex • Another good reducing exercise consists in placing both hands against the table edge and pushing back. – Robert Quillen • As far as dieting and weight loss go, diet and exercise actually works. Lots of running and healthy eating. – Emile Hirsch • As you experience success in applying kaizen to clear goals like weight loss or career advancement, remember to hold onto its essence: an optimistic belief in our potential for continuous improvement. – Robert D. Maurer
jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Weight+Los', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_weight-los').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_weight-los img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Balanced, sensible nutrition: eat food, not too much, mostly plants, a healthy diet ala Michael Pollan, modern physical activity on a daily basis, modest weight loss – translated into a 58% reduction in the occurrence of diabetes. A clear indication of the power of lifestyle over health. The challenge now is the development of the community-based programs that will translate what we learned in the diabetes prevention program and put it to work in every town in America. – David Katz • Behind weight gain are the larger hurts and questions that have to be explored, probed, and understood before weight loss and maintenance is a possibility. It’s a bigger issue than just calories in, calories out. – Ali Vincent • Coconut oil contains the most concentrated natural source of medium-chain fatty acids (MCFA) available. Substituting coconut oil for other vegetable oils in your diet will help promote weight loss. – Bruce Fife • Despite what many nutritionists have preached for years, rapid weight-loss diets can be healthy if done correctly and can work wonders on reducing pounds and inches in just days. – Mike Moreno • Dieting is long-haul. Many rapid weight loss programs actually only squeeze the water out of you. Just like a wet sponge. But a good dieter maintains his or her grip on that sponge, not letting it soak up water again. – Owen Jones • Dieting is the only game where you win when you lose! – Karl Lagerfeld • Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections. – Saint Francis de Sales • Don’t even wait until you’ve lost a pound. The minute you can push the plate away with food still on it, give yourself a pat on the back. – Tony Robbins • Every study on chocolate is pointing to the same conclusion: there is something in chocolate that is really good for us. That something is the raw cacao bean, the nut that all chocolate is made from. The cacao bean has always been and will always be Nature’s #1 weight loss and high-energy food. Cacao beans are probably the best kept secret in the entire history of food. – David Wolfe • Everything we’ve been taught about health, weight loss and aging is wrong. – Jorge Cruise • Fitness and proper nutrition truly go hand-in-hand. Focus on eating clean and filling your plate with veggies, fruits, whole grains and lean proteins. And, everyone hates to do it, but calorie counting is crucial to weight loss as well as maintaining a healthy physique. – Jillian Michaels • For both optimal health and weight loss, you must consume a diet with a high nutrient-per-calorie ratiothere are no shortcuts. – Joel Fuhrman • Frequently, visualization is the key to lose weight. Imagine yourself with your desired body, and work for it. At some point in the future, this wish will come true. – David Viscott • Here’s the secret to weight loss: It’s all about crowding out, not cutting out. – Kathy Freston • High protein diets make you sick in the long and short term. Expect kidney disease, heart disease and more strokes and cancer. Plus the weight loss is temporary because you can’t stay sick for long. Look at the creators of these diets – many are fat themselves. – John A. McDougall • I could not bounce back from my divorce – emotionally – I just could not bounce back. With any bad situations I’d experienced before – a bad game or my two previous divorces – I got over them. This time I just could not get out of the hole. The anxiety attacks were frequent and extensive. I had weight loss, which I’d never had before. I couldn’t stop crying. And if I wasn’t crying, I was angry, bitter, hateful and mean-spirited. I couldn’t sleep – couldn’t concentrate. It just got crazy. – Terry Bradshaw • I didn’t get excited by weight loss, and since I was already happy being fat, I couldn’t see the point of it all. I’m 6 ft. and weigh about 18 st. or 19 st., but weighing myself is not something I do with much pleasure. – Maeve Binchy • I didn’t start out about weight loss. I was very tired and my energy was low. This is my second go-around in love, so I want to make sure I’ll be around to enjoy it. – Niecy Nash • I found that people like rules, and I love to tell people what to do. It’s not rocket science when it comes to weight loss. It’s about eating a little less and moving a little bit more. – Bob Harper • I freak out if I go a little too long without being in the gym. For a long time it was all about getting the weight off because I was 240 pounds at my heaviest, and now I’m around 175, so the majority of that weight loss was due to diet and exercise. – Nick Carter • I have a theory that the best ads come from personal experience. Some of the good ones I have done have really come out of the real experience of my life, and somehow this has come over as true and valid and persuasive. People love to read stories. They like to know you as a real person who has your struggle, pain, success and failure, etc. One well-known example is Jared Fogle’s weight loss story which made millions of dollars for Subway. Start to collect your stories from today and use them in your ad campaigns. – David Ogilvy • I have gained and lost the same 10 pounds so many times over and over again my cellulite must have deja vu! – Jane Wagner • I have more energy to run after our four children. Weight loss and great skin were a bonus! – Niecy Nash • I thought a lot about how so many memoirs about fatness focus on weight loss; they don’t focus on living with weight in a world that is rather inhospitable to it. So I knew that was the idea that was going to be most interesting and most challenging, and I like to be challenged as a writer. – Roxane Gay • I used to define success as being able to produce any result you wanted, whether it was a relationship, weight-loss, being a millionaire, impacting the culture, changing society, whatever it might be, it might be homelessness, whatever, but lately I’ve realized that success is “fulfilling your soul’s purpose.” – Jack Canfield • I went on a diet, swore off drinking and heavy eating, and in fourteen days I had lost exactly two weeks. – Joe E. Lewis • If you believe that weight loss requires self-deprivation, Im going to teach you otherwise. – Robert Atkins • If you find you require willpower, you aren’t ready to lose weight. – Augusten Burroughs • If you keep on eating unhealthy food than no matter how many weight loss tips you follow, you are likely to retain weight and become obese. If only you start eating healthy food, you will be pleasantly surprised how easy it is to lose weight. – Subodh Gupta • If you’re going to solve a weight-loss problem – or smoking problem for that matter – you must address both the psychological and physiological. – Tony Robbins • If you’re not doing what is best for your body, you are the one who lose. – Julius Erving • I’m a girl who enjoys a great meal with great friends, so I’m not really that concerned about weight loss. – Jill Scott • I’m not against working out. It’s just not effective for weight loss. I like strength training to tone and firm the body so you look tight. But working out just makes you hungrier. – Jorge Cruise • I’m prouder of my weight loss than my Oscar! I hope it has inspired people. – Jennifer Hudson • Imagine a weight-loss program at the end of which, instead of better health, good looks, and hot romantic prospects, you die. Somalia had become just this kind of spa. – P. J. O’Rourke • In India, we kind of concentrate only on weight loss. I want to teach people that it is very important to be strong and fit, rather than just thin. – Bipasha Basu • In two decades I’ve lost a total of 789 pounds. I should be hanging from a charm bracelet. – Erma Bombeck • Instead it seems that business – like weight loss – is a subject wherein hope and fear inspire limitless gullibility. – Paul Krugman • It seems that researchers at Colorado University say wine may help people lose weight. It’s not the wine directly that causes the weight loss, it’s all the walking around you do trying to find your car. – Jay Leno • It suddenly hit me—it was nearly impossible to take good care of something I hated. I’d spent so long hating my body that I didn’t know how to respect and nurture myself or my body. By focusing so much on my exterior, I also robbed myself of the opportunity to feel good about myself and my body, simply because I didn’t meet a cultural standard of beauty that is obsessed with thinness. That created stress that interfered with my weight loss and with my own happiness. – Jessica Ortner • It’s easier to stay in shape if you never let yourself get out of shape in the first place. – Bill Loguidice • I’ve been on a diet for two weeks and all I’ve lost is two weeks. – Totie Fields • Keeping off a large weight loss is a phenomenon about as common in American medicine as an impoverished dermatologist. – Calvin Trillin • Little changes over time are the secret to long term weight loss success! – Chris Powell • My recipes aren’t geared towards women; my books are marketed towards women because women are the biggest market for weight loss, weight management and weight maintenance and for cooking. – Bethenny Frankel • My success has been something I’ve worked a long time at and it’s been a gradual process. I compare it to the idea of someone losing a lot of weight over a period of a few years. You don’t really notice the weight loss overall but if you compare photos from then and now there’s a big difference. – Ray William Johnson • My temptation is emotional, and resisting will further my needed weight loss and strengthen my character. Furthermore, nothing tastes as good as thin feels. – Stephen Covey • No, as it turns out, I really like being congratulated on my weight loss. I like it so much, it’s tragic. – Carrie Fisher • Not only weight loss surgery is unnecessary but also it deprives human being a normal life. People after surgery would never be able to enjoy their food ever for the rest of their life whether it is Christmas or they are on their holidays or their child birthday or any other festival. List of problems and complications after the weight loss surgery operation are endless as one may get additional problems such as Hernia, Internal Bleeding, Swelling of the skin around the wounds, etc. I wonder how many weight loss surgeons advice about weight loss surgery to their own family members. – Subodh Gupta • Oh. No wonder I’d been sick. I hadn’t eaten anything since then. I’m a girl who likes her meals, so it hadn’t been a weight-loss tactic. I’d just been too busy bumping from crisis to crisis. Go on the Sookie Stackhouse Narrow Avoidance of Death Diet! Run for your life, and miss meals, too! Exercise plus starvation. – Charlaine Harris • Overweight and obesity is the second leading cause of death, killing 300,000 people a year, There is not a miracle pill that will lead to weight loss. – Richard Carmona • Pay more attention to losing inches than losing pounds. – Jane Fonda • Perhaps by sharing my personal weight-loss journey on television, I can help others confront the truth and lies behind obesity. – Ruby Gettinger • Permanent weight loss doesn’t come with an on and off switch. It is not something you do for a little while and think it is going to change your body. – Jennifer Hudson • Permanent weight loss means making small, manageable changes and sticking with them for life. – Michael Adam Hamilton • Place a picture of someone that looks like what you want to look like when you reach your weight loss and fitness goal somewhere nearby. However, be sure to keep it realistic to your own body type. This is a visual reminder of what the end result of your fitness and weight loss program will be, helping to keep you motivated. – Jackie Warner • Rather than strive to ‘lose weight,’ most people would be better off striving to lose only fat and to build or maintain muscle. – Mark Sisson • Reality check: you can never, ever, use weight loss to solve problems that are not related to your weight. At your goal weight or not, you still have to live with yourself and deal with your problems. You will still have the same husband, the same job, the same kids, and the same life. Losing weight is not a cure for life. – Phil McGraw • Some people’s weight loss is impeded by an impaired thyroid. So I think it’s worth testing that at your next physical exam. If it’s off, sometimes, that can be caused by excess metals, such as mercury or cadmium. A qualified M.D. can help you cleanse your body of those. – Tony Robbins • Successful weight loss takes programming, not willpower. – Phil McGraw • Sudden total weight loss. – George Carlin • Thank you for calling the Weight Loss Hotline. If you’d like to lose a half pound right now, press 1 eighteen thousand times. – Randy Glasbergen • The bottom line is that you will not lose fat effectively with exercise-driven weight-loss efforts unless your eating habits moderate insulin production. – Mark Sisson • The Glycemic Index is one the best tools for fat loss. It measures how quickly foods breakdown into sugar in your bloodstream. – Al Sears • The hardest thing was going through different stages of weight loss. At the beginning, it was easy to take off the weight with exercise and eating less but then you reach a point where 90 per cent of the weight loss is achieved purely through reducing your calorie intake. My goal was to lose four pounds per week. That worked well for the first few months but then things got tricky. – Matthew McConaughey • The most important thing I want to get across is that maintaining weight loss is just hard. It takes a dedication to exercise and eating right most of the time. I’m not saying I don’t enjoy the days that I’m not eating chocolate cake. But I do particularly like those days when I am eating chocolate cake. – Trisha Yearwood • The real pride, the real present, is your health and your longevity. My whole career, I have never done anything where competition was involved with weight loss. – Richard Simmons • The secret of losing weight is patience. – Jane Fonda • The surest way to identify those who won’t succeed at weight loss is that they tend to say things like “My goal is to lose ten pounds.” Weight targets often work in the short run. But if you need willpower to keep the weight off, you’re doomed in the long run. The only way to succeed in the long run is by using a system that bypasses your need for willpower. – Scott Adams • The usual justification for eating extra meals is that it keeps the metabolism “revved up” so that weight loss is easier. There is, however, very little hard evidence that supports this idea, and a fair amount that disputes it. – Andrew Weil • The weight loss has been a secondary change to the mental changes I have made. Weight loss does not fix problems; how you view yourself does. – Erin Willett • There is no lasting glory in rapid weight loss. – Mireille Guiliano • There’s a huge emotional component to weight loss. – Carnie Wilson • This country is so urbanized we think low-fat milk comes from cows on Nutri/System weight-loss plans. – P. J. O’Rourke • We compliment weight loss, monitor our appetites, and shrink ourselves to fit some kind of standard. I wish we could all be the size we actually are. One size doesn’t fit all because there are as many sizes as there are women. Let’s look closer at the size of our hearts, the width of our souls, and the length of our spirits. – Sark • We talk a lot on ‘Biggest Loser’ about how fitness is a natural antidepressant, how it burns off stress. What I like about running is that it gives me time alone. I’m always busy, with people at work, with my kids. I love getting out for a run by myself and just listening to my music. – Alison Sweeney • Weight loss after pregnancy is safe but requires attention and guidelines – Debbie Meyer • Weight loss does not make people happy. Or peaceful. Being thin does not address the emptiness that has no shape or weight or name. Even a wildly successful diet is a colossal failure because inside the new body is the same sinking heart. – Geneen Roth • Weight loss programs and health clubs have an ethical and legal obligation to adequately disclose details about program costs before customers sign a contract. They should also clearly explain how the program works and what is expected so that consumers can make an informed choice whether to join. – Bill Vaughan • We’ve got a recipe for disaster. It’s huge — this combination of body image issues and the drug’s weight loss appeal. – Robert Hughes • What some name well being, if bought by perpetual nervousness about weight loss plan, is not a lot better than tedious illness. – George D. Prentice • When followed correctly, the Dukan Diet is both a safe and effective method of weight loss. – Pierre Dukan • When food becomes the enemy, every time we lose the fight we not only gain weight, but lose our self-esteem as well. – Jane Fonda • When I hear health professionals suggesting that you shouldn’t worry about the balance of calories in versus calories out, but rather eat clean and follow your hunger instincts, well, I really just want to pinch their heads off. That’s like a millionaire suggesting that instead of worrying about that’s in your bank account, just listen to your shopping instincts and buy high-quality goods . . . weight loss is not magic. To a great extent, it’s accounting. – Chalene Johnson • When we lose twenty pounds… we may be losing the twenty best pounds we have! We may be losing the pounds that contain our genius, our humanity, our love and honesty. – Woody Allen • When weight loss becomes a goal in your life, eating right and exercising are just two pieces of the puzzle. Figuring out why you’ve put on the extra weight is the hardest part. – Ali Vincent • When you’re the spokeswoman for a weight-loss program, everything is witnessed. I weigh in once a week with a witness. I have to sign an affidavit saying I cannot have any surgeries. – Kirstie Alley • While weight loss is important, what’s more important is the quality of food you put in your body – food is information that quickly changes your metabolism and genes. – Mark Hyman, M.D. • You can think of the Health Impact Fund as a mechanism that would keep the benefits and burdens of pharmaceutical innovation for the affluent roughly as they are while massively reducing the burdens presently imposed upon the poor. This sounds like magic. But it really works because the current system is not Pareto efficient. It’s a system that generates hundreds of billions of dollars in litigation costs and deadweight losses that HIF-registered medicines would sidestep. By avoiding these losses, the HIF reform can bring improvements all around – including for pharmaceutical innovators. – Thomas Pogge • You don’t need to worry any more or punish yourself about food. It is totally counterproducti ve to stress yourself out about weight loss because that same stress causes you to put weight on. – Marc David • You have to want weight-loss success so badly that no mountain, river, or ocean could keep you from reaching your goals. If you have that drive, passion, and commitment, there is no way you won’t get there. – Jennifer Hudson • You know what the secret to weight loss is? Don’t eat much. – Simon Cowell
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Sympathy for the Incel
If you want to know why young men are broken, ask them.
There is a cultural crisis emboldening the misogyny and violence of the little-known incel movement (an abbreviation for the self-professed involuntary celibate community of men) and which has now been tied to three mass murders: Elliot Rodger, Chris Harper-Mercer and, this week, the alleged Toronto killer Alek Minassian, who is accused of killing 10 and injuring 15 people in one of the most horrific acts of mass violence in Canada in years.
One after another, media outlets are seeking to understand how this could happen while raising the question of how we got here. The Internet is enabling a community of men who want to kill women, read the headline in The Verge. Can the radicalization of incels be stopped? asked the Globe and Mail. But one headline stood out, from The National Post: What should we do about the incels? Maybe help them. Shouting about what horrible women-hating losers they are (which they may be) is not going to prevent one of them from murdering again.
This, in particular, is the question Im concerned with, and why I am attempting to find whatever empathy or compassion might be possible for the disconnected young men flocking to the movement and who might be at a crossroads. One young man stood out in the countless hours I spent listening to podcasts, videos and chat room conversations within the incel community which I have been following for months now: 19-year-old Jack Peterson, a socially awkward Chicagoan who after hours of interviews agreed to reveal his real identity for the first time to The Daily Beast.
To be clear, Peterson initially did not want to do any media regarding the group, particularly a profile on what the makings of an incel look like, but after considering my appeal that perhaps others might want to reach out if they could have a better understanding, he agreed.
Born Kalerthon Demetro in the suburbs of Chicago, Peterson (his mothers last name) is a high school dropout who lives with his single mother and whose father left when he was two years old. Peripherally involved in the online incel community for years, Petersons first reaction to the Toronto horror was to record a podcast specifically condemning violence and misogyny and underscoring that for the majority of participants, this is not their reality. For him and many like him, he says, the incel community is a means of supporting one another in a world when it sometimes feels like there is no one else.
To listen to the teenager speak, he does not seem psychopathic. He does not seem like he endorses psychopathy. On the contrary, he seems shy and awkward and lonely and angry. He laughs when other incels make dark jokes about killers, but he does not make them himself. He gets it. They are blowing off steam.
Being an incel is not about violence or misogyny, repeats Peterson, who is the only incel who has been on television doing interviews in recent days since the alleged Toronto killer pointed a finger at the incel movement in a cryptic post on Facebook confirmed earlier this week. Yes, for some guys it is, but not for me. Not for many of us.
The challenge in covering the incel movement is that in many cases the cherry-picked and sensationalist coverage reinforces these mens persecution complexes and drives them further into a pit of rage-fueled nihilism. Attempting to find any kind of compassion is in no way to excuse or normalize the deranged among them. On the other hand, it is to see what options we have left in reaching them at all.
In the groundbreaking book Change or Die, author Alan Deutschman writes, [The sense of self is threatened by any major change in the deep-rooted patterns of how we think, feel, and act, even a tremendously positive change such as leaving behind a life of crime and addiction. A change in progress demands new explanations for a past thats now cast in a darker light.
Essentially, reaching someone entrenched within a near-fanatical belief system is often impossible because the ego will put up a fight to the death in order to not deal with the psychic pain of feeling that everything that has been done up until this point has been done wrong. But it is possible.
In Deutschmans book, spanning extensive research on changing past negative behavior to future positive actions, one case study of a parole officer illuminates how he found the most success in reaching the seemingly unreachable. By realizing that the real reason why people dont change is demoralizationthe overwhelming sense of hopelessness and power he applied the theory that the most he could do is to inspire a new sense of hope and power. Indeed, this officer invited 14 of the most argumentative ex-convicts and spent 90-minute sessions listening to them rather than telling them what to do. The response was extraordinary. The parole officer recounted: In one and a half hours they calmed down. They said, These guys arent against us. Now they come back every week and say, At least Im being listened to. In the last year the difference has been huge. They want to make a change.
In speaking to Peterson on the phone, while a journalist is about as a far away from a parole officer as you can get, its amazing the difference that occurs when I listen to what he has to say about the reality of incel culture versus how he sees the media portraying its members.
In his view, as despicable and morally unfathomable as the psychopathic fringe is, the reality of the wider membership estimated in the tens of thousands of active members is far more complex.
The way Peterson tells itand as is supported by his digital footprint of videos, podcasts and commentsfor him and many others, to be an incel is to seek the camaraderie of a group of male peers who provide an outlet where, for once, they can honestly talk about the increasing fragmentation, disconnection, alienation and ostracization they feel in an always-online world in which, as far as they can see, they are not welcome or wanted.
Peterson compared the mischaracterization of incels to the xenophobic broad brush that takes a minority of radicalized Islamic suicide-bombers and uses it to condemn the vast majority of Muslims. Instead, he said, there is an acceptance that there is a vile minority who distorts the vision of the communitybut that it is not his vision for the group.
Like many in the incel community, Peterson essentially grew up without a strong father figure.
His mother kicked his father out because, in Petersons words, he used to beat the shit out of my mother and she got a restraining order. His father was the same age that he is now when he got his 39-year-old mother pregnant, and hes never met him, but they have spoken on the phone a few times.
I dont really have any feelings about him, Peterson says. He just kind of is.
From an early age, Peterson felt a level of social anxiety that was bearable but distinct. His kindergarten teacher asked him why he did not play with the others. He said, I dont know how.
Things started to change around the third or fourth grade. It was the first time the girls started making fun of him, he says, saying he was creepy and gross and weird.
I didnt understand it, he says. I was told either to act like a man or that girls could do no wrong. And yet I was constantly told that men were the cruel, bad ones. None of it made any sense to me. I was just extremely shy. I didnt talk to them, but the teasing was relentless and made me want to kill myself.
In the seventh grade, Peterson transferred to three different middle schools all in one year as the bullying followed him everywhere. By the time he reached high school, he says, one young woman started taking photos of him and sharing them with other girls who openly laughed in his face about how ugly he was and why they did not want him near them. He did not finish his freshman year at the Chicago Academy for the Arts, but dropped out after the first semester. His mother never knew the extent of the bullying he experienced.
I was just ashamed, he says. How do you talk about that?
The profoundly formative pain of youthful bullying has been around forever. When a classmate taunts you and proclaims your worthlessness to all your peers, if you are a kid, the humiliation of such an experience doesnt feel like its happening in a classroomit can feel like a worldwide-televised death sentence.
Very few kids on the receiving end of the cruelty know how to deal with itbecause of a lack of life experience that is just as undeveloped as their pubescent brains.
But for a kid growing up today, the tool of the Internet levels the game. No longer do you wonder, Will anyone ever love me? Now you can Google it, and find secret places and communities and bodies of knowledge that your parents dont even know exist. This can be exciting, emboldening, a total game-changer.
I remember the first time I found a site that even mentioned the word incel, I was like, Woah, these guys are outcasts, too, he says. I kind of felt like, maybe Im not alone.
At the age of 11, Peterson visited 4chan for the first time, and he saw his rage and loneliness expressed as well as the impotence of such advice as just get over it. He didnt know how to. He didnt have anyone to ask. He just didnt want any more ridicule.
It was kind of crazy to see and read a lot of the stuff I did, Peterson says. But it was also the only place where other guys talked about some of the things I was experiencing. Feeling so alone and rejected by the people around you. I was extremely shy then, and still kind of am, but it makes you feel really fucked up to be told youre a creepy loser by a pretty popular girl when youre just sitting there, saying nothing, doing nothing, wishing you were invisible but instead being the quiet freak with the cystic acne all over his face.
He also received an indoctrination into the culture of these young men who accepted him and what they found acceptableand what he would need to as well if he were to finally fit in somewhere.
To understand the increasingly irony-rich language of the users, its essential to read Angela Nagles book Kill All Normies, which exquisitely captures the critical shift in online perspective and the death of what remained of a mass culture sensibility that happened at exactly the same time Peterson began actively engaging with it.
In her brilliant book documenting the culture wars of the extreme left and the extreme right in recent years, focusing on subcultures including 4chan and incels, Nagle describes the attitude rebellion on the site against the sentimentality and absurd priorities of Western liberal performative politics and the online mass hysteria that often characterized it.
Peterson is one of the best representations of exactly how these culture wars are shaping our young mens identities.
When everything is ironic, nothing is. So they mock it. All of it.
Theres this big hypocrisy in the fact that so many people who say they are all about human rights and empowerment think its actually funny when boys get mocked, he says. I never said a single misogynistic thing growing up. And I was punished. Just because I was weird. I couldnt help it. I honestly wanted to die.
On the contrary, the incel communities he found online seemed different.
When I dropped out of high school, the one place I felt okay about stuff for a little while was when I was online, Peterson tells me. By the time I discovered the incel culture on Reddit, it felt like, Okay, Im not insane. I was reading all these other guys stories about how girls told them they were repulsive. I never identified with the misogyny, but I did identify with the rage at the hypocrisy of just how untouchable women were in society. No matter what, no matter what awful thing a woman did, it was always supposed to be like, Oh yeah, thats female empowerment. But when you have no friends and are getting bullied and humiliated by women constantly and are told to both man up and renounce your masculinity its like the one bright light you see is this community.
By the time he was 16, Peterson finally met in person a young womanfour years older than himwith whom he had been chatting online since he was 12 years old. She did not know what he looked like for some time, and when he finally shared his picture, she told him that she didnt find him attractive. He lost his virginity to her, after which he says she ridiculed his penis size and laughed at him. Later, she sent him copies of messages that she had sent on to other men she was cheating on him with where she explicitly described the sex acts she wanted done to her. (Ive seen corroborating evidence of all of this.)
I was literally cucked, Peterson says. That word doesnt have any meaning anymore, but thats what I was. I still wanted to see her though. She was the only girl who had ever expressed interest in me, even though she tore me down and told me how ugly I was. It was still better than nothing.
According to Peterson, the relationship finally disintegrated when she began choking him and tried to go after him in her car. He ran to a nearby store to get help, and has the actual footage of the security cam showing him flailing against the glass window. The police came, and to cover for the girl, he said that he was suicidal. He spent three days in a mental institution because of it.
This was a turning point for Peterson.
He finally aligned himself fully as an incel. He was, in the words of Internet argot, black-pilled.
Anyone who has dabbled in understanding Internet lingo is likely familiar with the term red-pilled (inspired by the film The Matrix, where Neo is offered a blue pill where everything stays status quo or a red pill where the ugly truth is supposedly exposed). Adopted by mens rights activists around 2004, to get red-pilled is to subscribe to the particular ideology that feminism is a cancer and men are the real victims. But what does it mean to get black-pilled, as many refer to this communitys belief system? It sounds as bleak as it is.
Essentially, the philosophy is that everything is broken and the answer lies in refusing to engage in a meaningful or constructive way with society. (The phrase black pill first appeared in 2012 on a blog called Omega Virgin Revolt.) A critical part of being black-pilled is recognizing, with zero sentimentality or euphemism or explaining away, that women do not like genetically inferior men. They now have infinite options in the form of men who are higher status (be it, economic, physical, or intellectual) because of the breakdown in societal monogamy and now high-status men can game apps and use hypergamy (or dating up) to their advantage. (Meaning, a less attractive woman will nowadays reject a less attractive male if she is suddenly able to have meaningless sex with a high status man, who can juggle multiple women. This leaves men who are not as good-looking in the dust.)
Incels theorize that once you are black-pilled, you are finally given the gift of brutally honest Darwinian truth that, essentially, the game is rigged, so why bother? With such entrenchment in the truth of the doctrine comes freedom. No longer do you have to run around in circles. You can accept the world for what it is and settle back into your status on the lower rungs.
If you are red-pilled, you might take this theory of female behavior to use it in manipulative pick-up strategies to try to game women into thinking you are higher status or to find the weakest prey.
If you are an incel and have never had a single successful romantic attempt or only disastrous ones, this type of theorizing provides that wonderful feeling of certainty that comes with confirmation bias and the emancipation from regret of knowing that nothing could have been done anyway. Which is why many incels describe being black-pilled as an awakening from humiliation. Like finally realizing that you have been the subject of a joke that everyone else has been in on the whole time.
For a young man like Peterson, spouting such beliefs, he seems not so much a product of toxic masculinity as a failure of masculinity itself.
No one is teaching these men how to be men. This doesnt mean men in the sense of mens rights activists, but a healthy, balanced (not extremist) definition which includes someone who treats women well but also treats himself well by not being afraid to think for himself with opinions that deviate from the loudest, most hateful elements in the community.
But isnt the worst parts of the incel community hate speech? And shouldnt such hate speech be eradicated?
In Nadine Strossens timely new book Hate, she makes the case for countering bad speech with more speech, and illustrates how in countries where hate speech speech laws have been enacted, support for racist and xenophobic politicians has risen. In Europe, hate speech laws have in fact been used as a means of stifling dissent amongst the disenfranchised.
Equal justice for all depends on full freedom of speech for all, she writes.
Not only that, but as Keith Whittington argues in his new book Speak Freely, offensive speech is crucial to safeguard because of its utility in generating, testing, and communicating ideas.
One of the most brilliant defenses of the subject is Jonathan Rauchs 2013 essay, The Case for Hate Speech in The Atlantic, where he thanks the loudest and most noxious voices he faced along the way in his fight for gay marriage. [W]e won in the realm of ideas, he writes. And our antagonists–people who spouted speech we believed was deeply offensive, from Anita Bryant to Jerry Falwell to, yes, Orson Scott Card–helped us win.
For the incel community, of course, many of the ideas espoused are in defense of their identity as the losers of society, which frees them of the need to take personal responsibility.
I think thats a valid criticism, Peterson says. I get sick of the guys who seem like they just want to keep others down no matter what. Its almost like you are scorned when you experience a little bit of success.
The podcast Peterson recorded after the Toronto attack represents the incel community as not seeming as extreme as a cursory visit to the incel-tracking site We Hunted the Mammoth or the incel-mocking community Incel Tears might lead you to believe. On these sites, in the communitys most chilling screengrabs, posts include suggestions that in order to truly terrorize the women who have rejected incels over the years, perhaps mass acid attacks and rapes could be coordinated in order to inflict the same damage upon women that these young men feel has happened to them.
In contrast, Petersons podcast discussion contains an unusual degree of literacy about sociological phenomena, including the Japanese trend of hikikomori, or isolationism and utter retreat occurring with young men, which many incels predict will spread around the world in due time.
But at its core, it is still a conversation littered with misogyny and resentment.
At one point, someone says that women use men like emotional tampons. Another brings up the possibility of mandated girlfriends (or state-sanctioned rape, as shown on the new season of The Handmaids Tale). A joke is made that the best-case scenario is when incels go ER (or Elliot Rodger). There is discussion about the evolutionary benefits of sexual violence, which harkens Rodgers infamously deranged advocacy of a program where men could kill all women because if women were able to choose their own mates, their inferior brains would devolve humanity completely. Someone laughs about the idea of blackmailing women into having sex with them by threatening to post nude photos online. Peterson himself brings up the idea of access to assisted suicide for incels to prevent future attacks, and he suggests that talking to those who wonder about incel culture might help with improving our image, especially if you attach a face to the incel phenomenon, I think that that makes it more sympathetic.
Peterson clarifies to me: He was not suggesting it be him.
I meant someone else, but then it turned out, I guess I was the only person dumb enough to show my face in videos I made online, he says. So here we are.
When I ask him about the references in the podcast to Rodger, he responds, That guy was fucking nuts. I dont really joke about going ER, but I dont tell the guys who make those jokes not to do it because I know theyre being sarcastic. All this shocking stuff is often just the guys trolling. I would argue that I dont think anybody is going to be stupid enough to believe that sanctioned rape is being talked about as an actual suggestion. Sometimes the most ridiculous shit makes me laugh, even though I dont condone it. So if I do laugh at some of this stuff its probably me laughing at something because its fucking stupid.
The psychopaths are the problem, not the incels, he says.
If someone is going to carry out an attack like this theyre gonna have to be severely mentally ill to be capable of that, he says. Making jokes or being active in the incel community doesnt cause it. Being mentally ill does.
But what about when jokes arent just jokes?
I mention how last year when the Nazi website The Daily Stormers guidebook was leaked online, it contained the message: The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. So what about when such humor is actually a means of subversive propaganda?
I can see that, Peterson acknowledges. I mean, Ive had guys tell me some really fucked-up shit, and Ive told them, you know, get some help because I dont want you to hurt anyone. But I do think that making dark jokes for people who arent mentally ill helps keep a lot of us from going crazy.
And how exactly does he feel about the disparagement of women in saying that they use men as emotional tampons? Men do the same fucking thing, Peterson says. Thats not a one-sided thing. Men can use women emotionally, too.
And what of the suicide idea?
What it really comes down to is that Id rather these mass shooters and attackers just kill themselves than kill 10 or more innocent people. So maybe if it was easier to commit suicide wed see less of these attacks. Im not condoning suicide but I prefer that to innocent people dying.
On the incels.me forum, a stated list of rules for participation include guidelines that are stricter than most elite private clubs in America.
No women allowed. No exception.
Yes, this means that a forum dedicated to decrying success with women has as one of its primary rules a focus on enforced isolation. Other rules also brutally shut out any chance to provide advice or mentorship to other young men.
A few months ago, when Peterson was using the forum, he suddenly found that he was banned from having certain privileges in the chatrooms. Even the incels, it seemed, were rejecting him.
In response, he filmed and put on his YouTube one of the most astonishing, hyper-granular deconstructions of modern Internet life Ive ever seen.
It is bizarro land for anyone not deep in the world of Internet language.
To create the video, he spent three days nonstop (two days spent up for 24 hours straight in between passing out) to create a meticulous 30-minute PowerPoint video that he filmed objecting to the ban and making his case that he in fact was a genuine incel using a barrage of evidence and minutiae and dictionary definitions and failures of logic to try to break down the bullying he felt he experienced on the forum.
And, if you want to get brutal about the absurdity of the exercise (and the insanity such subcultures can create amongst its members), to prove exactly why he was just as reprehensible to society as the rest of the incels.
It was pretty ridiculous, he says in retrospect. Its like American Vandal, Netflixs mockumentary on super-deep-dive crime docs, except with the heartbreaking element of seeing how brainwashed a young man is into trying to obtain peer approval.
At one point in the video, he even includes a diagnosis that he is paranoid schizophrenic as evidence that he ought to qualify as an incel because of this mental illness. The reality is that after he was given that diagnosis, another psychologist said he was not. Instead, the doctor told him (and is evidenced in the video), he was making himself sick with his own thoughts.
All of this humiliation is laid out for his fellow community of incels to seeand all of it to get back into good standing in the incel community. Thats how bad isolated young men want status and the reassurance of having a community to call their own. Even when the group identity is in how perversely low and entrenched their status really is.
Is it any wonder that these boys need a father figure?
Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson (no relation to Jack) has been known to be moved to tears in interviews when discussing the crisis of alienation he sees amongst young men today and the need to provide them with tools that will reach them.
As he told Tim Lott of The Spectator late last year about his 90 percent male audience, Im telling them something they desperately need to hearthat there are important things that need to be fixed up. Im saying, You guys really need to get your act together and you need to bear some responsibility and grow the hell up. The lack of an identifiable and compelling path forward and the denialism these kids are being fed on a daily basis is undoubtedly destroying them and that is especially true of the young men.
Lott then observes the author of The 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos displaying a level of vulnerability on the subject that is striking.
At this point, to my astonishment, Peterson begins to weep. He talks through his tears for the next several minutes. Every time I talk about this, it breaks me up, he says. The message Ive been delivering is, Find the heaviest weight you can and pick it up. And that will make you strong. Youre not who you could be. And who you could be is worthwhile.
As psychologist William Pollack articulates in the documentary The Mask You Live In about the boy code that warps masculinity from an early age: The way that boys are brought up makes them hide all of their natural, vulnerable, empathic feelings behind a mask of masculinity When theyre most in pain, they cant reach out and ask for help because theyre not allowed to or they wont be a real boy.
In fact, boys express depression in a completely opposite way than girls. They act out. But most people see it as a conduct disorder or just a bad kid.
After the Parkland high school shooting in March, one of the foremost activists in trying to address the crisis of reaching out to troubled young men before they become killers met with President Donald Trump to say his piece. Every single one of these school shootings has been from young men who are disconnected, said Darrell Scott, the father of the first student murdered at Columbine High School almost 20 years ago. In response, he founded Rachels Challenge to intervene with action rather than yet another toothless spectacle of condemnation of the empirically condemnable violence itself.
In a tweet rant posted during this same time by Martin Daubney, the editor of the English lad magazine Loaded, he articulated a similarly jarring portrait of collective angst from young men who feel callously tossed aside and branded as innately wrong, which only serves to compound the sense of victimization even further.
Im mindful of a seminal TEDTalk by Warren Farrell, author of The Boy Crisis, Daubney wrote. He looks at school shootings, and says: Boys who hurt, hurt us…They say todays boys feel part of some grand problem. You could frame it as #ToxicMasculinity: the notion that all males are to blame for the actions of a minority of damaged individuals. This is identity politics at its most destructive. Because we live in a world where every male indiscretion is used to attack all males. Im saying this: many boys are switching off. Were losing them.
How does an incel feel about all of this concernextended within the realm of ideas and intellectualism?
Itd be nice, Jack Peterson says, if he just had someone else to talk to about it.
I like Jordan Peterson a lot, he admits in a tone that sounds more upbeat than the rest of our conversation. I was going to go see him with another incel but that guy ended up not being able to go. But I bought a VIP ticket so I get to meet him next week.
In the wake of the Toronto attack, Peterson is unique in that unlike many in the incel community who have scrubbed their social or taken down their WordPress blogs that chronicled their life, he decided to see what happened when he went on TV to talk about his life in this widely reviled community now most associated with mass murder.
The decision to do so was gutsy. Especially considering the against-the-agenda talking points he is now presenting in condemning misogyny and violence.
The reaction he has received from other incels has been negative. And the public certainly doesnt like anyone who might be an incel.
Its an unwinnable place to be for someone who might still have a chance of climbing out of the twisted, self-fulfilling prophecy gutter that such dangerous places can become for young men who dont think they have anywhere else to go.
But Peterson doesnt regret doing the media and putting his face out there.
Instead, he speaks with an inverse of the perverted sadism of the Toronto attacker. It is a nihilism of potential that is in stark contrast to the nihilism of murderous revenge.
As he describes the decision, you can almost hear an epiphany clicking: When you dont care when you have nothing else to lose, it can be used for good or evil.
I dont know why I said yes to identifying myself as an incel, he says, mulling it over. I just felt like, you know What do I have to lose?
Of course, within the incel community itself, the answer is clear.
He could very well lose his status as an incel.
They called him all the predictable names. He was a cuck. He was a status-seeker. He was an opportunist. He was a number of slurs that are not fit to print. But for an incel, the worst insult he received of all was that he was a fake.
And, this being incel-world, the name he was called was targeted and precise.
You see, for incels, each man within the community self-identifies with how they qualify for their incel status. For instance, mentalcels achieve their status as a result of mental illness. A braincel is that way because of intelligence. A truecel has never had sex, a relationship, any kind of success at all.
Thus Peterson was called a fakecel. No, Peterson says, thats wrong. He definitely still is an incel. He is a part of the group. Where then does he now belong?
Peterson is quiet as he considers the answer.
I think something where I can help people, he says. I like talking about the positive stuff more, even if its frowned upon.
He considers a while longer.
I dont know, he considers, maybe Im a hopecel.
Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/sympathy-for-the-incel
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Sympathy for the Incel
If you want to know why young men are broken, ask them.
There is a cultural crisis emboldening the misogyny and violence of the little-known incel movement (an abbreviation for the self-professed involuntary celibate community of men) and which has now been tied to three mass murders: Elliot Rodger, Chris Harper-Mercer and, this week, the alleged Toronto killer Alek Minassian, who is accused of killing 10 and injuring 15 people in one of the most horrific acts of mass violence in Canada in years.
One after another, media outlets are seeking to understand how this could happen while raising the question of how we got here. The Internet is enabling a community of men who want to kill women, read the headline in The Verge. Can the radicalization of incels be stopped? asked the Globe and Mail. But one headline stood out, from The National Post: What should we do about the incels? Maybe help them. Shouting about what horrible women-hating losers they are (which they may be) is not going to prevent one of them from murdering again.
This, in particular, is the question Im concerned with, and why I am attempting to find whatever empathy or compassion might be possible for the disconnected young men flocking to the movement and who might be at a crossroads. One young man stood out in the countless hours I spent listening to podcasts, videos and chat room conversations within the incel community which I have been following for months now: 19-year-old Jack Peterson, a socially awkward Chicagoan who after hours of interviews agreed to reveal his real identity for the first time to The Daily Beast.
To be clear, Peterson initially did not want to do any media regarding the group, particularly a profile on what the makings of an incel look like, but after considering my appeal that perhaps others might want to reach out if they could have a better understanding, he agreed.
Born Kalerthon Demetro in the suburbs of Chicago, Peterson (his mothers last name) is a high school dropout who lives with his single mother and whose father left when he was two years old. Peripherally involved in the online incel community for years, Petersons first reaction to the Toronto horror was to record a podcast specifically condemning violence and misogyny and underscoring that for the majority of participants, this is not their reality. For him and many like him, he says, the incel community is a means of supporting one another in a world when it sometimes feels like there is no one else.
To listen to the teenager speak, he does not seem psychopathic. He does not seem like he endorses psychopathy. On the contrary, he seems shy and awkward and lonely and angry. He laughs when other incels make dark jokes about killers, but he does not make them himself. He gets it. They are blowing off steam.
Being an incel is not about violence or misogyny, repeats Peterson, who is the only incel who has been on television doing interviews in recent days since the alleged Toronto killer pointed a finger at the incel movement in a cryptic post on Facebook confirmed earlier this week. Yes, for some guys it is, but not for me. Not for many of us.
The challenge in covering the incel movement is that in many cases the cherry-picked and sensationalist coverage reinforces these mens persecution complexes and drives them further into a pit of rage-fueled nihilism. Attempting to find any kind of compassion is in no way to excuse or normalize the deranged among them. On the other hand, it is to see what options we have left in reaching them at all.
In the groundbreaking book Change or Die, author Alan Deutschman writes, [The sense of self is threatened by any major change in the deep-rooted patterns of how we think, feel, and act, even a tremendously positive change such as leaving behind a life of crime and addiction. A change in progress demands new explanations for a past thats now cast in a darker light.
Essentially, reaching someone entrenched within a near-fanatical belief system is often impossible because the ego will put up a fight to the death in order to not deal with the psychic pain of feeling that everything that has been done up until this point has been done wrong. But it is possible.
In Deutschmans book, spanning extensive research on changing past negative behavior to future positive actions, one case study of a parole officer illuminates how he found the most success in reaching the seemingly unreachable. By realizing that the real reason why people dont change is demoralizationthe overwhelming sense of hopelessness and power he applied the theory that the most he could do is to inspire a new sense of hope and power. Indeed, this officer invited 14 of the most argumentative ex-convicts and spent 90-minute sessions listening to them rather than telling them what to do. The response was extraordinary. The parole officer recounted: In one and a half hours they calmed down. They said, These guys arent against us. Now they come back every week and say, At least Im being listened to. In the last year the difference has been huge. They want to make a change.
In speaking to Peterson on the phone, while a journalist is about as a far away from a parole officer as you can get, its amazing the difference that occurs when I listen to what he has to say about the reality of incel culture versus how he sees the media portraying its members.
In his view, as despicable and morally unfathomable as the psychopathic fringe is, the reality of the wider membership estimated in the tens of thousands of active members is far more complex.
The way Peterson tells itand as is supported by his digital footprint of videos, podcasts and commentsfor him and many others, to be an incel is to seek the camaraderie of a group of male peers who provide an outlet where, for once, they can honestly talk about the increasing fragmentation, disconnection, alienation and ostracization they feel in an always-online world in which, as far as they can see, they are not welcome or wanted.
Peterson compared the mischaracterization of incels to the xenophobic broad brush that takes a minority of radicalized Islamic suicide-bombers and uses it to condemn the vast majority of Muslims. Instead, he said, there is an acceptance that there is a vile minority who distorts the vision of the communitybut that it is not his vision for the group.
Like many in the incel community, Peterson essentially grew up without a strong father figure.
His mother kicked his father out because, in Petersons words, he used to beat the shit out of my mother and she got a restraining order. His father was the same age that he is now when he got his 39-year-old mother pregnant, and hes never met him, but they have spoken on the phone a few times.
I dont really have any feelings about him, Peterson says. He just kind of is.
From an early age, Peterson felt a level of social anxiety that was bearable but distinct. His kindergarten teacher asked him why he did not play with the others. He said, I dont know how.
Things started to change around the third or fourth grade. It was the first time the girls started making fun of him, he says, saying he was creepy and gross and weird.
I didnt understand it, he says. I was told either to act like a man or that girls could do no wrong. And yet I was constantly told that men were the cruel, bad ones. None of it made any sense to me. I was just extremely shy. I didnt talk to them, but the teasing was relentless and made me want to kill myself.
In the seventh grade, Peterson transferred to three different middle schools all in one year as the bullying followed him everywhere. By the time he reached high school, he says, one young woman started taking photos of him and sharing them with other girls who openly laughed in his face about how ugly he was and why they did not want him near them. He did not finish his freshman year at the Chicago Academy for the Arts, but dropped out after the first semester. His mother never knew the extent of the bullying he experienced.
I was just ashamed, he says. How do you talk about that?
The profoundly formative pain of youthful bullying has been around forever. When a classmate taunts you and proclaims your worthlessness to all your peers, if you are a kid, the humiliation of such an experience doesnt feel like its happening in a classroomit can feel like a worldwide-televised death sentence.
Very few kids on the receiving end of the cruelty know how to deal with itbecause of a lack of life experience that is just as undeveloped as their pubescent brains.
But for a kid growing up today, the tool of the Internet levels the game. No longer do you wonder, Will anyone ever love me? Now you can Google it, and find secret places and communities and bodies of knowledge that your parents dont even know exist. This can be exciting, emboldening, a total game-changer.
I remember the first time I found a site that even mentioned the word incel, I was like, Woah, these guys are outcasts, too, he says. I kind of felt like, maybe Im not alone.
At the age of 11, Peterson visited 4chan for the first time, and he saw his rage and loneliness expressed as well as the impotence of such advice as just get over it. He didnt know how to. He didnt have anyone to ask. He just didnt want any more ridicule.
It was kind of crazy to see and read a lot of the stuff I did, Peterson says. But it was also the only place where other guys talked about some of the things I was experiencing. Feeling so alone and rejected by the people around you. I was extremely shy then, and still kind of am, but it makes you feel really fucked up to be told youre a creepy loser by a pretty popular girl when youre just sitting there, saying nothing, doing nothing, wishing you were invisible but instead being the quiet freak with the cystic acne all over his face.
He also received an indoctrination into the culture of these young men who accepted him and what they found acceptableand what he would need to as well if he were to finally fit in somewhere.
To understand the increasingly irony-rich language of the users, its essential to read Angela Nagles book Kill All Normies, which exquisitely captures the critical shift in online perspective and the death of what remained of a mass culture sensibility that happened at exactly the same time Peterson began actively engaging with it.
In her brilliant book documenting the culture wars of the extreme left and the extreme right in recent years, focusing on subcultures including 4chan and incels, Nagle describes the attitude rebellion on the site against the sentimentality and absurd priorities of Western liberal performative politics and the online mass hysteria that often characterized it.
Peterson is one of the best representations of exactly how these culture wars are shaping our young mens identities.
When everything is ironic, nothing is. So they mock it. All of it.
Theres this big hypocrisy in the fact that so many people who say they are all about human rights and empowerment think its actually funny when boys get mocked, he says. I never said a single misogynistic thing growing up. And I was punished. Just because I was weird. I couldnt help it. I honestly wanted to die.
On the contrary, the incel communities he found online seemed different.
When I dropped out of high school, the one place I felt okay about stuff for a little while was when I was online, Peterson tells me. By the time I discovered the incel culture on Reddit, it felt like, Okay, Im not insane. I was reading all these other guys stories about how girls told them they were repulsive. I never identified with the misogyny, but I did identify with the rage at the hypocrisy of just how untouchable women were in society. No matter what, no matter what awful thing a woman did, it was always supposed to be like, Oh yeah, thats female empowerment. But when you have no friends and are getting bullied and humiliated by women constantly and are told to both man up and renounce your masculinity its like the one bright light you see is this community.
By the time he was 16, Peterson finally met in person a young womanfour years older than himwith whom he had been chatting online since he was 12 years old. She did not know what he looked like for some time, and when he finally shared his picture, she told him that she didnt find him attractive. He lost his virginity to her, after which he says she ridiculed his penis size and laughed at him. Later, she sent him copies of messages that she had sent on to other men she was cheating on him with where she explicitly described the sex acts she wanted done to her. (Ive seen corroborating evidence of all of this.)
I was literally cucked, Peterson says. That word doesnt have any meaning anymore, but thats what I was. I still wanted to see her though. She was the only girl who had ever expressed interest in me, even though she tore me down and told me how ugly I was. It was still better than nothing.
According to Peterson, the relationship finally disintegrated when she began choking him and tried to go after him in her car. He ran to a nearby store to get help, and has the actual footage of the security cam showing him flailing against the glass window. The police came, and to cover for the girl, he said that he was suicidal. He spent three days in a mental institution because of it.
This was a turning point for Peterson.
He finally aligned himself fully as an incel. He was, in the words of Internet argot, black-pilled.
Anyone who has dabbled in understanding Internet lingo is likely familiar with the term red-pilled (inspired by the film The Matrix, where Neo is offered a blue pill where everything stays status quo or a red pill where the ugly truth is supposedly exposed). Adopted by mens rights activists around 2004, to get red-pilled is to subscribe to the particular ideology that feminism is a cancer and men are the real victims. But what does it mean to get black-pilled, as many refer to this communitys belief system? It sounds as bleak as it is.
Essentially, the philosophy is that everything is broken and the answer lies in refusing to engage in a meaningful or constructive way with society. (The phrase black pill first appeared in 2012 on a blog called Omega Virgin Revolt.) A critical part of being black-pilled is recognizing, with zero sentimentality or euphemism or explaining away, that women do not like genetically inferior men. They now have infinite options in the form of men who are higher status (be it, economic, physical, or intellectual) because of the breakdown in societal monogamy and now high-status men can game apps and use hypergamy (or dating up) to their advantage. (Meaning, a less attractive woman will nowadays reject a less attractive male if she is suddenly able to have meaningless sex with a high status man, who can juggle multiple women. This leaves men who are not as good-looking in the dust.)
Incels theorize that once you are black-pilled, you are finally given the gift of brutally honest Darwinian truth that, essentially, the game is rigged, so why bother? With such entrenchment in the truth of the doctrine comes freedom. No longer do you have to run around in circles. You can accept the world for what it is and settle back into your status on the lower rungs.
If you are red-pilled, you might take this theory of female behavior to use it in manipulative pick-up strategies to try to game women into thinking you are higher status or to find the weakest prey.
If you are an incel and have never had a single successful romantic attempt or only disastrous ones, this type of theorizing provides that wonderful feeling of certainty that comes with confirmation bias and the emancipation from regret of knowing that nothing could have been done anyway. Which is why many incels describe being black-pilled as an awakening from humiliation. Like finally realizing that you have been the subject of a joke that everyone else has been in on the whole time.
For a young man like Peterson, spouting such beliefs, he seems not so much a product of toxic masculinity as a failure of masculinity itself.
No one is teaching these men how to be men. This doesnt mean men in the sense of mens rights activists, but a healthy, balanced (not extremist) definition which includes someone who treats women well but also treats himself well by not being afraid to think for himself with opinions that deviate from the loudest, most hateful elements in the community.
But isnt the worst parts of the incel community hate speech? And shouldnt such hate speech be eradicated?
In Nadine Strossens timely new book Hate, she makes the case for countering bad speech with more speech, and illustrates how in countries where hate speech speech laws have been enacted, support for racist and xenophobic politicians has risen. In Europe, hate speech laws have in fact been used as a means of stifling dissent amongst the disenfranchised.
Equal justice for all depends on full freedom of speech for all, she writes.
Not only that, but as Keith Whittington argues in his new book Speak Freely, offensive speech is crucial to safeguard because of its utility in generating, testing, and communicating ideas.
One of the most brilliant defenses of the subject is Jonathan Rauchs 2013 essay, The Case for Hate Speech in The Atlantic, where he thanks the loudest and most noxious voices he faced along the way in his fight for gay marriage. [W]e won in the realm of ideas, he writes. And our antagonists–people who spouted speech we believed was deeply offensive, from Anita Bryant to Jerry Falwell to, yes, Orson Scott Card–helped us win.
For the incel community, of course, many of the ideas espoused are in defense of their identity as the losers of society, which frees them of the need to take personal responsibility.
I think thats a valid criticism, Peterson says. I get sick of the guys who seem like they just want to keep others down no matter what. Its almost like you are scorned when you experience a little bit of success.
The podcast Peterson recorded after the Toronto attack represents the incel community as not seeming as extreme as a cursory visit to the incel-tracking site We Hunted the Mammoth or the incel-mocking community Incel Tears might lead you to believe. On these sites, in the communitys most chilling screengrabs, posts include suggestions that in order to truly terrorize the women who have rejected incels over the years, perhaps mass acid attacks and rapes could be coordinated in order to inflict the same damage upon women that these young men feel has happened to them.
In contrast, Petersons podcast discussion contains an unusual degree of literacy about sociological phenomena, including the Japanese trend of hikikomori, or isolationism and utter retreat occurring with young men, which many incels predict will spread around the world in due time.
But at its core, it is still a conversation littered with misogyny and resentment.
At one point, someone says that women use men like emotional tampons. Another brings up the possibility of mandated girlfriends (or state-sanctioned rape, as shown on the new season of The Handmaids Tale). A joke is made that the best-case scenario is when incels go ER (or Elliot Rodger). There is discussion about the evolutionary benefits of sexual violence, which harkens Rodgers infamously deranged advocacy of a program where men could kill all women because if women were able to choose their own mates, their inferior brains would devolve humanity completely. Someone laughs about the idea of blackmailing women into having sex with them by threatening to post nude photos online. Peterson himself brings up the idea of access to assisted suicide for incels to prevent future attacks, and he suggests that talking to those who wonder about incel culture might help with improving our image, especially if you attach a face to the incel phenomenon, I think that that makes it more sympathetic.
Peterson clarifies to me: He was not suggesting it be him.
I meant someone else, but then it turned out, I guess I was the only person dumb enough to show my face in videos I made online, he says. So here we are.
When I ask him about the references in the podcast to Rodger, he responds, That guy was fucking nuts. I dont really joke about going ER, but I dont tell the guys who make those jokes not to do it because I know theyre being sarcastic. All this shocking stuff is often just the guys trolling. I would argue that I dont think anybody is going to be stupid enough to believe that sanctioned rape is being talked about as an actual suggestion. Sometimes the most ridiculous shit makes me laugh, even though I dont condone it. So if I do laugh at some of this stuff its probably me laughing at something because its fucking stupid.
The psychopaths are the problem, not the incels, he says.
If someone is going to carry out an attack like this theyre gonna have to be severely mentally ill to be capable of that, he says. Making jokes or being active in the incel community doesnt cause it. Being mentally ill does.
But what about when jokes arent just jokes?
I mention how last year when the Nazi website The Daily Stormers guidebook was leaked online, it contained the message: The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. So what about when such humor is actually a means of subversive propaganda?
I can see that, Peterson acknowledges. I mean, Ive had guys tell me some really fucked-up shit, and Ive told them, you know, get some help because I dont want you to hurt anyone. But I do think that making dark jokes for people who arent mentally ill helps keep a lot of us from going crazy.
And how exactly does he feel about the disparagement of women in saying that they use men as emotional tampons? Men do the same fucking thing, Peterson says. Thats not a one-sided thing. Men can use women emotionally, too.
And what of the suicide idea?
What it really comes down to is that Id rather these mass shooters and attackers just kill themselves than kill 10 or more innocent people. So maybe if it was easier to commit suicide wed see less of these attacks. Im not condoning suicide but I prefer that to innocent people dying.
On the incels.me forum, a stated list of rules for participation include guidelines that are stricter than most elite private clubs in America.
No women allowed. No exception.
Yes, this means that a forum dedicated to decrying success with women has as one of its primary rules a focus on enforced isolation. Other rules also brutally shut out any chance to provide advice or mentorship to other young men.
A few months ago, when Peterson was using the forum, he suddenly found that he was banned from having certain privileges in the chatrooms. Even the incels, it seemed, were rejecting him.
In response, he filmed and put on his YouTube one of the most astonishing, hyper-granular deconstructions of modern Internet life Ive ever seen.
It is bizarro land for anyone not deep in the world of Internet language.
To create the video, he spent three days nonstop (two days spent up for 24 hours straight in between passing out) to create a meticulous 30-minute PowerPoint video that he filmed objecting to the ban and making his case that he in fact was a genuine incel using a barrage of evidence and minutiae and dictionary definitions and failures of logic to try to break down the bullying he felt he experienced on the forum.
And, if you want to get brutal about the absurdity of the exercise (and the insanity such subcultures can create amongst its members), to prove exactly why he was just as reprehensible to society as the rest of the incels.
It was pretty ridiculous, he says in retrospect. Its like American Vandal, Netflixs mockumentary on super-deep-dive crime docs, except with the heartbreaking element of seeing how brainwashed a young man is into trying to obtain peer approval.
At one point in the video, he even includes a diagnosis that he is paranoid schizophrenic as evidence that he ought to qualify as an incel because of this mental illness. The reality is that after he was given that diagnosis, another psychologist said he was not. Instead, the doctor told him (and is evidenced in the video), he was making himself sick with his own thoughts.
All of this humiliation is laid out for his fellow community of incels to seeand all of it to get back into good standing in the incel community. Thats how bad isolated young men want status and the reassurance of having a community to call their own. Even when the group identity is in how perversely low and entrenched their status really is.
Is it any wonder that these boys need a father figure?
Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson (no relation to Jack) has been known to be moved to tears in interviews when discussing the crisis of alienation he sees amongst young men today and the need to provide them with tools that will reach them.
As he told Tim Lott of The Spectator late last year about his 90 percent male audience, Im telling them something they desperately need to hearthat there are important things that need to be fixed up. Im saying, You guys really need to get your act together and you need to bear some responsibility and grow the hell up. The lack of an identifiable and compelling path forward and the denialism these kids are being fed on a daily basis is undoubtedly destroying them and that is especially true of the young men.
Lott then observes the author of The 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos displaying a level of vulnerability on the subject that is striking.
At this point, to my astonishment, Peterson begins to weep. He talks through his tears for the next several minutes. Every time I talk about this, it breaks me up, he says. The message Ive been delivering is, Find the heaviest weight you can and pick it up. And that will make you strong. Youre not who you could be. And who you could be is worthwhile.
As psychologist William Pollack articulates in the documentary The Mask You Live In about the boy code that warps masculinity from an early age: The way that boys are brought up makes them hide all of their natural, vulnerable, empathic feelings behind a mask of masculinity When theyre most in pain, they cant reach out and ask for help because theyre not allowed to or they wont be a real boy.
In fact, boys express depression in a completely opposite way than girls. They act out. But most people see it as a conduct disorder or just a bad kid.
After the Parkland high school shooting in March, one of the foremost activists in trying to address the crisis of reaching out to troubled young men before they become killers met with President Donald Trump to say his piece. Every single one of these school shootings has been from young men who are disconnected, said Darrell Scott, the father of the first student murdered at Columbine High School almost 20 years ago. In response, he founded Rachels Challenge to intervene with action rather than yet another toothless spectacle of condemnation of the empirically condemnable violence itself.
In a tweet rant posted during this same time by Martin Daubney, the editor of the English lad magazine Loaded, he articulated a similarly jarring portrait of collective angst from young men who feel callously tossed aside and branded as innately wrong, which only serves to compound the sense of victimization even further.
Im mindful of a seminal TEDTalk by Warren Farrell, author of The Boy Crisis, Daubney wrote. He looks at school shootings, and says: Boys who hurt, hurt us…They say todays boys feel part of some grand problem. You could frame it as #ToxicMasculinity: the notion that all males are to blame for the actions of a minority of damaged individuals. This is identity politics at its most destructive. Because we live in a world where every male indiscretion is used to attack all males. Im saying this: many boys are switching off. Were losing them.
How does an incel feel about all of this concernextended within the realm of ideas and intellectualism?
Itd be nice, Jack Peterson says, if he just had someone else to talk to about it.
I like Jordan Peterson a lot, he admits in a tone that sounds more upbeat than the rest of our conversation. I was going to go see him with another incel but that guy ended up not being able to go. But I bought a VIP ticket so I get to meet him next week.
In the wake of the Toronto attack, Peterson is unique in that unlike many in the incel community who have scrubbed their social or taken down their WordPress blogs that chronicled their life, he decided to see what happened when he went on TV to talk about his life in this widely reviled community now most associated with mass murder.
The decision to do so was gutsy. Especially considering the against-the-agenda talking points he is now presenting in condemning misogyny and violence.
The reaction he has received from other incels has been negative. And the public certainly doesnt like anyone who might be an incel.
Its an unwinnable place to be for someone who might still have a chance of climbing out of the twisted, self-fulfilling prophecy gutter that such dangerous places can become for young men who dont think they have anywhere else to go.
But Peterson doesnt regret doing the media and putting his face out there.
Instead, he speaks with an inverse of the perverted sadism of the Toronto attacker. It is a nihilism of potential that is in stark contrast to the nihilism of murderous revenge.
As he describes the decision, you can almost hear an epiphany clicking: When you dont care when you have nothing else to lose, it can be used for good or evil.
I dont know why I said yes to identifying myself as an incel, he says, mulling it over. I just felt like, you know What do I have to lose?
Of course, within the incel community itself, the answer is clear.
He could very well lose his status as an incel.
They called him all the predictable names. He was a cuck. He was a status-seeker. He was an opportunist. He was a number of slurs that are not fit to print. But for an incel, the worst insult he received of all was that he was a fake.
And, this being incel-world, the name he was called was targeted and precise.
You see, for incels, each man within the community self-identifies with how they qualify for their incel status. For instance, mentalcels achieve their status as a result of mental illness. A braincel is that way because of intelligence. A truecel has never had sex, a relationship, any kind of success at all.
Thus Peterson was called a fakecel. No, Peterson says, thats wrong. He definitely still is an incel. He is a part of the group. Where then does he now belong?
Peterson is quiet as he considers the answer.
I think something where I can help people, he says. I like talking about the positive stuff more, even if its frowned upon.
He considers a while longer.
I dont know, he considers, maybe Im a hopecel.
Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/sympathy-for-the-incel
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