Just a general gripe.

Cheetahfan123 · 2023-08-04T05:46:54+00:00

Maybe when men are told they’re “failed” as men and there’s something wrong with them, it makes them feel like shit? Just a thought. Many of these men don’t have control over it and they don’t feel entitled. There’s a difference between feeling entitled and simply wanting something and being frustrated that other people seem to get it so easily while you can’t, and at the same time, you’re shamed for not being able to get it

Nihi1986 · 2023-08-03T23:57:54+00:00

Isn't narcissism a bit more common among women? Anyway, that kind of propaganda seems super useful and definitely will help with the issue...yeah, why not...

BKEnjoyerV2 · 2023-08-04T02:06:21+00:00

I’ve read the comments on that piece when I saw it. People don’t really see the issue that’s really at hand with incels, no one ever gives any advice or policy recommendations that focus on making socializing and romance better, it’s not just education and jobs

Nachtlicht_ · 2023-08-04T06:07:46+00:00

Yes, a person dying of thirst who is angry at those who have plenty of water, is definitely narcisstic. As longs as it's not a woman that is, then it is called "victim".

ArmchairDesease · 2023-08-04T08:15:10+00:00

As usual men's issues are portrayed as a villany. Something they should be ashamed of. Of course their suffering must be rooted in narcissism or egotism.

I'm sure this will do real good in encourging these men to come forward about their struggles instead of bottling up

AraedTheSecond · 2023-08-04T08:16:42+00:00

"The issue is X being demonized, let's demonize them" is the kind of thinking I whole heartedly love.

It fucking happens to everyone, and then they wonder why the group retaliates. Which is then used to demonize them more in the eyes of idiots.

shit-zen-giggles · 2023-08-03T23:01:50+00:00

In case you want to read the intro to this agitation propaganda:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230129132156/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/lost-boys-violent-narcissism-angry-young-men/672886/

One bud light for this 'gentlemen', please.

better yet, he just refurbished his piece from 20015:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230129133821/https://thefederalist.com/2015/07/09/the-revenge-of-the-lost-boys/

so you can read the gist of it for free

gratis_eekhoorn · 2023-08-04T07:02:24+00:00

hello, u/MissDaphneAlice we think it would be more appropriate post this in r/everydaymisandry

kinkyonebay · 2023-08-04T12:43:10+00:00

They identify a problem and manage to blame the victims while ignoring the underlying cause. The West has abandoned, abused, and maligned what it means to be a man. These young men are treated like dysfunctional girls the second they enter the world. No wonder they are checking out.

BreakThings99 · 2023-08-05T11:39:39+00:00

Next up: Black men are just violent, and police brutality is justified.

silversurfer199032 · 2023-08-04T11:18:53+00:00

Your link doesn’t work. Also, Atlantic Magazine paywalls their content.

2023-08-04T18:33:30+00:00

This author is straight fucking evil, I have no more words.

Acrobatic_Computer · 2023-08-09T15:01:23+00:00

I've mostly given up reddit, with just the occasional glance through a few old subs, but holy crap this article is scary that it was written by someone who ostensibly has input on counter-terrorism policy.

Indeed, to search for the killer’s manifesto is now part of the ritual of investigating a massacre, a tradition we might trace back to the Unabomber, the ur-Lost Boy Ted Kaczynski

Kaczynski is like the literal opposite of the description of a "lost boy". He was relatively successful and pretty happy to go do his own thing outside of society until he felt society directly disturbed him. He was like someone trying to be lost and got angry that he failed.

and Edward Snowden, who is the embodiment of a particular kind of nonviolent but nonetheless highly destructive misfit

Fucking Snowden (well payin is now a "lost boy"? Nichols is basically just describing people he doesn't like (most quite understandably) as "lost boys". The label here seems to basically just be code for "bad person" and lacking in identifiable traits.

And they are, above all, staggeringly narcissistic. Almost all of the recent mass killers, for example, thought they had a special mission in the world. We know this because they felt compelled to tell us so.

It is now narcissism to publish a treatise on why you're being violent? This only makes sense if we stretch the definitions of what is being described here extremely broadly to the point of basically giving us no useful information about the "lost boys" beyond "they were trying to accomplish something". Like, the alternative here is just wanting to wallow in wanton destruction? That isn't exactly a uniting force. After all, if you think about it, the US military in WW2 felt they had a "divine mission" to "liberate Europe from Nazi control", were the commanders all a bunch of narcissists? Or is the fact that Nichols (I presume) agrees with that mission all of a sudden mean we should interpret it fundamentally differently?

There seems to be a fundamental miss here on the nature of what makes identifying violent criminals difficult, or the nature of the selection bias of people who are successful in committing violent crime. The reality is that a lot of people are deeply narcissistic. A lot of people are insecure. A lot of people look a lot like a lot of mass shooters, but only a very small number of them engage in mass shootings.

Likewise, arguments about “toxic masculinity,” as tempting as they are in these cases, miss the mark. The problem of toxic masculinity is real, but the swaggering jerks and violent abusers who sometimes become a threat to their partners (and themselves) are distinct from the insecure man-boys who decide to prove their worth—or just to prove that they exist—by committing extraordinary acts of mass murder. And, in general, toxic men are easy to spot. The Lost Boys are, by their nature, usually invisible until they strike.

Explicitly drawing parallels of "toxic masculinity" and "toxic men", which is allegedly against standard use, also emphasis on external harm rather than internal ofc.

Performative mass killings and large-scale terrorism are mostly post-1970s phenomena, and we can likely trace at least some of the Lost Boy problem to the rapid emergence in the past 40 years or so of a hypersexualized and yet lonelier, more atomized society. Likewise, the social institutions that once shaped and restrained the worst impulses of young men—religion, the military, schools, and even marriage itself—have gone through drastic and irrevocable changes in the same period.

Just earlier Nichols states:

For all their supposed distaste for Western immorality, many of the young males who gravitate toward jihadism are avid consumers of forbidden Western delights, such as music, alcohol, drugs, and pornography. (Even in middle age, Osama bin Laden had quite a porn collection.) For these men, terrorism may be, among other things, some sort of self-purification, a way to deny their illicit desires by destroying the places and people that supposedly coax them toward perdition.

And then is talking up American religion which is often puritanical and against porn, and masturbation? Is the problem of violence among Muslim radicals because their religion just isn't good enough at suppressing these urges? This also doesn't click considering that in the west over the last 40 years we've become more open about these things and accepting of them. Surely that should mean that this type of situation should be much rarer than in the past (indeed this is basically the plot of Hunchback of Notre Dame because of its association with religion in general).

Participation in the military was not ubiquitous even in the time of the draft for Vietnam, with only a few million American men being drafted (out of a pool of tens of millions). Surely this effect should be pretty small even if we grant that it exists. The definition of "lost boys" seems to preclude getting to the point of marriage so it is also unclear how the change in the institution of marriage itself would have mattered much, unless Nichols meant "dating and relationships" instead. School certainly has changed, but has it really gone from "reigning in young men" to "producing violent individuals"? This seems to be a big ask for us to just accept but nothing is really provided.

We can lament some of those changes—I certainly do, particularly the collapse of a kind of mature sense of stoicism and self-control among men.

Hey, at least he expresses that traditionally masculine roles are pro-social.

But we cannot reverse them, not least because that would, in effect, require turning back time and unraveling years of social progress. The advances of women’s rights are especially terrifying to a certain cohort of the Lost Boys, but such progress was necessary and irrevocable, and society cannot be held hostage to the insecurities of a small group of males in arrested adolescence, no matter how dangerous they may be.

This is disjoint and literally doesn't make sense to be structured as part of the same paragraph unless Nichols is saying that a "mature sense of stoicism and self-control among men" is necessarily opposed to "women's rights".

Let us of course remember that the men Nichols is describing were probably altogether significantly more violent than men today.

What we can do, however, is start talking more about the specific problem of dangerous male immaturity without falling into endless loops about gun control, public health, or “toxic masculinity.”

I can agree on not falling into endless loops.

We can, in schools and colleges, pay closer attention to the boys and young men who seem to be sliding toward darkness, perhaps with more attempts to pull them toward a community or into mentorship with older men. At the least, we should be able to find a way to engage in gentle interventions early rather than face more drastic consequences later. As Enzensberger presciently warned nearly two decades ago: “It is difficult to talk about the loser, and it is stupid not to.”

This doesn't follow from his earlier claims and descriptions but isn't in and of itself particularly objectionable, mostly because of how incredibly vague this is. I do like that this in particular doesn't try to demonize nor blame men, but it could have been the entirety of the article since nothing before it actually is really needed to support it. That said, since Nichols is missing the conception of selection bias, he seems to not realize that the issue is that if someone is easily identifiable as "sliding towards darkness" (how vague) then you're going to intervene, which means, in theory, they won't do anything. It is, as a result, precisely the people most difficult to identify that slip through the cracks.

If we want to fight this particular form of mass violence, the easiest way is to just regulate the media in terms for bang for buck. Mass shooting is highly memetic and no shortage of shooters are explicitly out for notoriety. The second biggest step up is to work on suicidality as a whole, which, unlike a lot of things Nichols tries to point to, very clearly is trending up within the timespan being discussed.

Somehow, despite all the words, this entire thing basically boils down to:

> Mass shooters are bad men. Bad men have bad traits. We should talk to people before they commit violence.

Which is on one hand kinda unobjectionable, and on the other extremely shallow.

ONETEEHENNY · 2024-02-23T03:28:31+00:00

While searching for a free text of this article I may have finally found a place akin to home 😌

Title	Just a general gripe.
Author	MissDaphneAlice
Upvotes	112
Comments	30
Date	August 3, 2023 10:30 PM UTC (2 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/15hi7gj/just_a_general_gripe/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/just-a-general-gripe.1227376 https://theredarchive.com/post/1227376

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