One of the iconic persons in this ‘movement’ was Elliot Rodger, a rich, spoilt brat who used his white privilege to acquire guns, go undetected and perform acts of violence. The introduction of  terms such as ‘Incels’ are mostly about justifying negative white male behaviors. It is common for them to try to hijack sympathy movements which leaves no room for others to consider the most marginalized people .

They turn to movements such as the #metoo slogan but it seems more like  ‘#mealone’ campaigns.

While the article has points worth discussing in a general context or quite another context, I am left wondering why all this time was spent attempting to psychoanalyse and excuse the actions of those whites (mentioned in the article and maybe those that may have plans to commit similar acts later on)

I don't think the same consideration would be extended to persons who are most affected by systemic injustices.

Must admit....that was a chore to read. I find the juxtapositioning of the crazed Toronto driver to some theory about sexual dissatisfaction quite weird...but then again, I have not followed the story closely. Anyhow, the idea that males are poorly conditioned is true. But to claim that white males are the greatest "victims" of such is plain ridiculous.

Valid responses.

The article explains the issue in some strange ways though. For example: "Here in America the problem is purely cultural in that entirely too many women of all ages believe most men are just plain bad and therefore of no use romantically or sexually. "

Also strange is his description of "poisonous femininity" which he says is perpetuated by the mothers in the family. The example he gives of this is that "Too many women simultaneously teach their daughters that nice girls don’t “give it up” to a boy"without respect... and this respect is sometimes seen in terms of "dates and gifts". This is a weak argument that puts the blame on mothers.

So while he have a few  parts of the explantation, other parts of the article are suspect, and so  i don't find he nails the analysis, which for me would involve going past sexual/relationship issues.

I have been following this debate on twitter in the past couple weeks. I agree the incel movement is about white male privilege and feelings of entitlement. As there are many other groups of people who don't have sex not by their own choosing but because of many  prejudices. However they don't go on murder sprees. Some persons have argued that when there is an unequal distribution of other resources (wealth, food etc.) groups and persons argue for redistribution and that is seen as okay. But given the demands of incels who are white heterosexual males this is demanding womens bodies to be used as they please.

As the debate expanded on twitter a point came up that it should not be a question of the redistribution of sex but questioning why certain people are not deemed attractive or persons do not wish to engage with them in a sexual or romantic way. That points to poor socialisation, structutral  notions of attractivenes and sexuality. At the heart of it is layers of discrimination.

"Girls of the same age are given no clue what their male peers are going through, or how they might sympathize with and help them emotionally as opposed to sexually" this invalidates his argument because he is continuing in the same vein that created the privilege by using the same gender roles and assuming that those said young women aren't grappling with their own "powerful onslaught of directionless lust" and attempting to place the responsibility for giving that male lust direction on their female counterparts.

The problem isn't toxic masculinity or femininity...as I see it...the problem is the commodification of sex which is one of the manifestations of capitalism. It isn't that these guys can't get sex or romantic relationships it is that they cannot get it with who they find valuable and by extension who their 'world' would find value in and reward them for being able to possess. Women are still considered possessions in the Western context (which has spread all over the earth due to enslavement and colonisation)and because of that one of the value positions of men within this society is who they partner with based on the value society has placed on that woman.

They are mad that they are to the top of the 'food chain' but have no access to choice meat those are the same frustrations being felt by poor and middle class whites in this current climate. Therefore they fixate on the object women, blacks, sexuality etc. they believe is their Right to dominate rather than the dream that was sold to them as their birthright according to Hollywood and the Bible. Sadly they are being forced to come to terms with the fact that it isn't their birthright to dominate and instead of dealing with themselves and why it is they believe what they do and admitting that they do unfairly benefit from oppression and it isn't as far removed as they would have us think.

Their frustrations and subsequent response is wanting to sustain the oppressions that gave them that benefit without admitting that they have no issue with subjugating others to fulfill that dream.

Unless i missed something...this Incel thing is another irresponsible action to justify white previledge. Males and females experience social insecurities with the opposite sex for reasons that goes back to a misguided foundation...social structures...society.

By Robert Anderson
May 07 2018 - counterpunch.org

The recent slaughter in Toronto has many people chattering away about “Incels”, or involuntary celibates. Several people have taken to Twitter to offer explanations via links to sites in the “manoverse” – that is, web pages dedicated to the notion that men are somehow the real victims of gender discrimination and, more specifically, misandry. Many of these sites hoist the Incel flag as a way to demonstrate their bona fides to a supposed terrorist army of young (or youngish) men whose self-alleged sexual frustration has reached murderous proportions.

The great irony of this is that “involuntary celibacy”, as a socio-cultural development, was first identified by the Georgia State University’s Department of Sociology in the late 90s, after which they published a paper about it here. It was a new social trend of large numbers of people in the United States who had become sexually and romantically redundant due to social dysfunction, or disability, chronic illness or obesity. These are people who are hardly ever or never able to engage in romantic relationships and sexual congress. One of the chief emphases of the study is that this is a problem afflicting both men and women, gay and straight, young and old, white, brown and black.

And yet somehow, through the often bilious alchemy of the Internet, this problematic social trend became appropriated by angry, sexually frustrated young white men, who have proceeded to weaponize and aim it at those they perceive as more sexually successful, referred to on their sites as “Chads” (socially successful men) and “Stacys” (socially successful women).

Alek Minasian frequented many sites associated with this utterly bizarre “movement”, and may have been inspired by Elliot Rodger, the sociopathic killer who gunned down six people in Isla Vista, California after uploading a ludicrous “manifesto” onto YouTube, in which he described the on-coming “Day of Vengeance.” Apparently Rodgers is referred to as “the Supreme Gentleman” in Incel circles, a kind of hero.

In my opinion, the real question is just what, exactly, is driving so many young men to identify themselves as Incel in the first place, what is making them hate with such ferocity. As usual in such cases, the answer is much more systemic than most people would care to admit. It is not so much their rejection by women that drives them, but what is behind those rejections, the how and why.

Here in the United States we have failed miserably to educate our adolescents about their budding sexuality. Moreover, we have over the decades allowed a culture of poisonous masculinity to develop that abates and feeds the sexual and social ignorance created by this failure. Boys grow into adolescence completely unprepared for the powerful onslaught of directionless lust that begins to fill them, while the surrounding culture gins up that lust with endless images of gorgeous women who appear available but in fact are, as figures of fantasy, not at all. Girls of the same age are given no clue what their male peers are going through, or how they might sympathize with and help them emotionally as opposed to sexually. Buttressing that ignorance is an equally poisonous form of femininity taught to females starting in early adolescence, usually by the women in their family, especially their mothers. The latter is one of the great unmentionables of modern America.

Too many women simultaneously teach their daughters that nice girls don’t “give it up” to a boy without respect while implying – or, in some cases, openly stating – that said respect is made up of dates and gifts and, therefore, their vaginas somehow have a price tag. If a boy or man doesn’t take a girl or woman out on a certain number of fancy dates while being polite to a fault, then he has not “earned it.” In this way are girls taught to understand, however unconsciously, the enforcement role they play in our socio-economic system. Meanwhile, too many fathers are teaching their sons that if they want to “make it” with a girl, they’ve got to “earn it” with – guess what? – dates and gifts. These venomous “lessons” have been taught for a very long time in this country and, despite valiant attempts by smart feminists to change them, continue to be taught to this day.

Because of all this, commentators in the media make mistakes when trying to grapple with the sometimes tragic aftermath of the Incel problem. Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote in Salon, “It’s not because they’re lonely. It’s not because they can’t get laid. It’s the misogyny, stupid.” Of course, this gets the problem precisely backwards. The loneliness and frustration of these young men leads them to lay the blame on women, rather than on the societal system that created the rejection in the first place. Their justifiable anger and frustration is mis-directed. And writers like Williams likewise fail, however understandably, to place the onus where it belongs. For example, Williams correctly argues how wrong-headed is Russ Douthat’s idea that sexbots will douse the Incel flame, but not for the reasons she thinks. No young man I have ever known, including myself at that age, has ever found it appealing to f*** a piece of plastic, however “real.” All of us understand that to do such a thing is a kind of creepy social failure, similar to having to go to a prostitute. And yet Williams implies that while, yeah, young guys can and will enjoy purging their lusts with an anatomically semi-correct robot, that won’t cool the ardor of their hate because, well, misogyny.

What is truly remarkable about this mess is how similar it is to what is going on in China. Young men in that country endure sexual frustration because of a demographic nightmare created by the Chinese government’s former one child policy combined with rural Chinese culture’s elevation of sons and denigration of daughters. At the moment there are about 33 million more young men than women. Here in America the problem is purely cultural in that entirely too many women of all ages believe most men are just plain bad and therefore of no use romantically or sexually. There was more than a whiff of this in Lori Gottlieb’s Marry Him: The Case for Choosing Mr. Good Enough. The women featured in that well-researched but disturbing book are filled with a breathtaking sense of entitlement that, ironically, none of them would tolerate in men. And rightly so; self-entitlement of any sort has no place in relations between couples, gay or straight. But there it is, angry opinions creating here in America what only the communist party could accomplish in China.

Combine all of the above with a nation as steeped in gun culture and violence as the United States (and, to a lesser extent, Canada), and you end up with young psychopaths like Rodgers and Minasian. But tranquilizing the culture and seizing all the guns won’t help. All of us, male and female, young and old, must take stock of our own attitudes about relationships and how the nature of same are warped by the demands of commerce, and do something about it. Perhaps it will take a kind of socio-cultural Marshall Plan, with an intense focus on early and adolescent education and, perhaps, adult re-education of some sort (preferably benign). I’m not sure. But something must be done, and quick. Otherwise we can expect more and more young men identifying as Incels, and ever more massacres.

Robert Anderson is a resident of Fremont, California and a screenwriter, technologist, composer of novels and short stories, insatiable reader and lover of words, and, last but not least, an enemy of tyranny and exploitation in all of its forms.

Source: https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/07/the-shooters-in-the-rye/

Silencing and erasure of Indians in the Caribbean
by Ravi Dev Guyana Times May 6, 2018

 Over the last two weeks, we have discussed the refusal of leaders in the Caribbean in general, and those in Guyana in particular, to acknowledge the legitimacy of the descendants of the Indians who were brought in as indentured servants after the abolition of slavery, to be a Caribbean people entitled to the patrimony of their respective countries as citizens of those countries.
We illustrated this position in their refusal to acknowledge as rational and valid the concerns of the Indians of Guyana about being swamped in a federation of the West Indies, which those same leaders had worked to define as part of a “Pan-African” nation. One of them — Arthur Lewis, who worked assiduously to create and then save the Federation after Jamaica and Trinidad pulled out — could, without irony, condemn “democracy” in plural societies as a “zero-sum game”, and ask in reference to elections in Guyana, where Africans were a minority: “Are we, on counting heads, to conclude that…The Indians of British Guiana may liquidate the Negroes?” The Guyanese Indians, however, with even less dire concerns, were dubbed “racialists”, not only by the Caribbean leaders of African descent, but Cheddi Jagan, their leader. After splitting hairs on the federation, due to local politics, he was also dubbed “racialist”!!

Indian Arrival Day, which falls on May 5th in Guyana; May 12 in Jamaica; May 30th in T&T, and June 5th in Suriname, allows us to examine genesis of this denial of legitimacy to West Indians of Indian descent, especially in Guyana. Black scholars and leaders have taken great pains to insist the Indian immigrants after 1945 entered into an already formed “Anglo-African Creole society” with a “white bias” in terms of its value system. But they refuse to give enough credence to the salience of those values and their evaluative reach vis-à-vis Indians up to the independence era, even as they fought to recuperate African culture.

The British hegemonic discourse on one hand informed the Indians they were “industrious” and hardworking people as opposed to the freed Africans, who were “lazy and shiftless”. But at the same time, the British efforts to proseletyse and “civilise” the Indians gave the Africans the message that they, having imbibed that “civilising” influence for hundreds of years, were socially higher than the Indians. They were uncivilised “coolies” who were performing menial tasks for wages the slaves had refused.

The history of Guyana is replete with the latter evaluation. In 1963, addressing his party Congress in the midst of a critical general strike against the PPP government, Burnham offered his analysis on what he called the “race question”. Indians, he said, were belatedly adopting the values of Guyanese society, but because of their late entry, “…retained much more than fragmentary traces of their native culture…It must also be recognised that in spite of the new values now becoming part of the Indian repertoire, there is a lag between the forward group and the rest.”
It is this view that the Indian’s “necessary assimilation” into Creole society demands his jettisoning his “backward” culture that has led to a continued and studied effort to silence and erase that culture, even though Caribbean governments pay lip service to “multiculturalism”.

At Guyana’s Independence, the national symbols of flag (Garveyite and Ethiopian colours) National Hero (Cuffy) were ostentatiously of African origin, while the National Motto declared the cultural goal explicitly: One People, One Nation, One Destiny. By 1970, “Ujaama Socialism” was adopted from Tanzania — after Burnham’s tour of Africa — as our philosophy of development when the country became a republic.

Republic Day became commemorated by Mashramani, which was simply an imitation of the Trinidadian carnival under a completely made up “Amerindian” name. Pan-African activists in Trinidad had taken much time and effort to prove the African origin of carnival — even as the PNM adopted it as T&T’s “national” festival. In 1970, there was also the Caribbean Writers and Artists Convention – with less than a handful of Caribbean Indians invited. Many of the attendees had been at the Oct 1968 “Montreal Congress of Black Writers of 1968”, which had led to Jamaica Rodney’s Black Power riots. A flavour of the times can be gleaned from the play staged at the Theatre Guild: My Name is Slave. A “Caribbean Festival of the Arts” (Carifesta) was proposed and launched in 1972.

Representation of Indian culture in the WI has always been at best a token gesture. And the silencing and erasure of a people continues unabated.

http://guyanacaribbeanpolitics.news/?p=9486

Faces Of Africa- Kwame Nkrumah
Kwame Nkrumah was born on September 21, 1909, in Nkroful, Gold Coast (now Ghana), and shepherded the country in its struggle for independence from Great Britain. He went on to be named life president of both the nation and his party, until the army and police in Ghana seized power in 1966 and he found asylum in Guinea.