Anomander

my family can euthanize me even if I object?

No.

There’s no law that allows killing of the unwilling; even a living will addressing assisted suicide or euthanization due to incapability assumes that you would still consent at the later date, but lack either physical or intellectual ability to communicate that. If you can clearly communicate that you’ve changed your mind, they have to respect that, even if that changed mind has reduced capability due to dementia.

Your best hope would be to go with assisted suicide while you still have enough faculties to make the decision and execute on your portions of the act.

Whole lot of people here have cut off other people, but no one’s yet shared a story about what got them cut off. This one’s mine.

I was unceremoniously removed from The List by a group of folks I was close with for years, after clashing with a couple of new additions to the group for a few months. We collectively ran a bit of a sketchy party scene and had been hosting stuff out of the weird end of town for a year or two when it all blew up - we weren’t quite on the scale of underground warehouse raves, but we were like the training-wheels version. We’d get a lead on a place that was slated to be vacant for a month or a commercial building gone dark, arrange a couple bands and an escape plan, and pull a couple hundred bucks each in entry charge and dodgy beer.

They were great friends in addition to being sort-of in business together, and we had some absolutely great times.

Except one couple who’d been with us from the start and were OG team members met a new crowd of people. They wanted to bring their friends, we said sure, and … shit started going downhill. The couple weren’t bad. Their friends weren’t bad. Their friends’ friends were awful. I didn’t like the new crowd’s vibe, I didn’t like who they were bringing in, what they were up to, and I didn’t get along with the initial connections in the slightest. I thought they were assholes, they thought I was an asshole, and in hindsight we were both correct.

As much as each new member of our little scene was more money at the end of an event, I didn’t want them there. I spent a lot of time and everyone’s patience arguing why I felt these specific new people needed to be shown a door and firmly told to be on the other side of it, and I definitely went out of my way to cut them out of anything I had control over. My friends were frustrated, I was frustrated, and everyone was on edge - I was convinced these people were going absolutely ruin what we’d built, my friends were frustrated I wouldn’t drop the grudge and didn’t see the problem I was focused on.

In my defense, the new people were bringing in their crowd, and their crowd was bad news. It was like they were the scene where all the people other parties didn’t want wound up congregating. There was the sketchy “why are you here?” old dudes, there were the people who did too much of many drugs even for our standards, there was the massive collection of edgy at-risk middleschoolers, there were the aggro bros and the dealers with Connections … to me, inviting those people in the door was a massive heat score and absolutely ruining the vibe for the kind of people we wanted to attract. That said, in my friends’ defense - we had agreed we’d make decisions as a team, and I was outvoted but unwilling to let it go; and we didn’t have a problem with drugs or kids or even weird old dudes in general - half of us started in that community young and most absolutely dabbled in chemicals. We all were those kids a few years prior. My concerns read as hypocritical or gatekeep-y, rather than genuine, because I’d never been concerned about that shit prior.

The last straw? I paid a guy I knew from the other side of town to drive his dad’s charger slowly past our venue a couple times, for several different events, so that people thought we might be about to get raided. Because the people I didn’t care for were pretty dodgy, they fucked off at the faintest hint of trouble.

The other people in our crew found out, and I was excised from that group.

In hindsight, we were both right. I was petty and sabotaged the group to get my way - and those new people did absolutely ruin shit for that scene within a couple years. I’ve connected individually with a few members of that group over the many years since, but am very formally persona non grata at shit they do as a group - I don’t think any of the people I still talk to even admit to the rest that they see me sometimes.

I don’t want this to read like I was booted for taking some moral highground. I absolutely wasn’t. I took the low road and went behind my friends’ backs to undermine what we were doing, all because I wanted a specific group of people gone from our scene. As much as an adult’s perspective would make it easy to spin this as if I had moral objections to bringing hard drugs and hard druggies and middleschoolers into the same place for underground parties - I wasn’t concerned about those things, morally. Having middleschoolers get wasted at parties wasn’t a problem to me, or even having creepy dudes trying to pick them up, or people shooting hard shit in the living room … I just didn’t like how there was more of “them” than “us” and our events were slowly becoming that scene, instead of just having a little bit of it off in one corner.

I always loved the convergence of the various Rustled Jimmies memes popping off, just before Harambe happened.

The other one was manufacturing and engineering teams ‘back home’ would scrawl the Kilroy on parts, like while ships or tanks were being assembled, that would otherwise be inaccessible - which meant that when that thing was hit, or taken apart for maintenance closer to the front, Kilroy was like, inside the sealed-up wall or at the bottom of the engine compartment.

In both your example and this one - both growing the myth that no matter where you went, Kilroy had been there first.

According to my grandpa, it was a myth that they used to feed the new guys and green squads, like a Santa myth, and putting on “genuine belief” in the Kilroy myth was as much of a running joke as the myth itself was. He claimed servicemen were also constantly trying to get commanding officers to unwittingly participate, by doing stuff like submitting paperwork signed Kilroy or that referenced him already being somewhere when troops liberated it - in the hopes that report or news tidbit would be one that COs shared as announcements.

So I’m assuming the duplicate communities are communities of the same exact name in different instances/server. Is anyone else finding this somewhat confusing?

Generally speaking, yes - but also, this is something that will likely fade over time as specific ones stand out. Currently, the plurality is a result of no developed community for that niche existing; as communities settle and grow, less of that sharding will take place unless there’s a crisis in the ‘main’ one.

I have a hard time believing that all of even just most of the men that initially joined her group had “concerning views” if that’s meant to refer to the misogyny we see in those most associated with the term today, but I do know that plenty of the posters I saw on the subreddit years ago when I visited were not of that ilk.

That’s fine, but remember you’re doubting the one person unique qualified to talk about the developmental history of the movement that they launched from the site that they ran.

I don’t think that it necessarily was “all” or “most” but simply that the male presence within the movement was sufficiently represented by individuals with those views that it’s one of the first thing she mentions in the context of discussing the growth of the movement itself.

Part of her point seems to be pointing out that they invited those views in, very early in the movement, out of a desire to be inclusive - only to be driven out by those views later on down the road.

I bring that up in this context because I don’t think that the movement or the term can be divorced fully from the male misogyny that it’s associated with today. Those people are not latecomers to the label, they’ve been there effectively from the start - from the point where it went from the comments section of Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project blog, to becoming “a community” centered around a shared label.

but I think if the term was originally coined to represent people who were genuinely suffering from external circumstances that put them in the position they’re in, it should remain for them and not those who sabotage themselves via their own toxic behavior.

I’ve used bold to highlight it in the quote above - that is a big “if” that the person who coined the term says is not true. If it were true, we’d be having a different conversation. But it’s not true.

The simple fact is that it’s a self-identifier. It’s a label that people put on themselves based on their perception of their own life circumstances. The original vision for the term says that neither you nor I get to tell anyone else they’re “not a true incel” or to go over their life and tell them the barriers are self-inflicted if they don’t see it that way. I guarantee you that the people you want to exclude from the term do very genuinely believe that they are “suffering from external circumstances that put them in the position they’re in.” No matter how much your or I might see them and think they’re clearly suffering from self-inflicted wounds, they are entirely sincere in their belief that their dating life is out of their control and has been a victim of cruel society.

One group deserves empathy and compassion; the other deserves scorn and derision. I don’t think it’s productive or fair to the former group to use the same term for both.

To me? They’re the same group. Some members of the group are hateful and shitty. Some members of the group aren’t. I’d say that the overwhelming majority of members, from both sides of that divider, are experiencing obstacles to dating or sex that are self-inflicted, even if they also have other barriers that are not. The vast majority of both groups would tell you that their personal circumstances are wholly out of their own control.

The “logic” that group uses around attractiveness and dating marketability and how this or that facet of looks or wealth or social status or whatever is ultimately spurious. If Ricky Berwick get rich, famous, and married - the absolute hard impassible barriers that incels talk about affecting themselves simply do not exist.

Internet history pedantry, but by the time the subreddit rolled around, the term and the movement had already been coopted.

Incel started as a term for men who felt depressed about being unable to find a female partner, and the subreddit they created was originally a supportive space for them.

The term was coined somewhere between 1994 and 1997 by “Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project” as a term for people of all genders who were unable to find partnership despite trying. Alana is a woman, and is effectively universally credited with coining the term and founding the movement. The movement wasn’t ‘for men’, the term wasn’t about men specifically, and it didn’t start on Reddit. It started off as more of a personal blog, where Alana documented her own experiences and struggles - the site gained followers from other people with similar experiences, eventually growing into a combined forum / support group / community.

Then it got taken over by angry misogynists and the term became associated with them, while the original group just kind of got forgotten about. That original group deserves attention and empathy as well as the term they coined; the latter group isn’t even “involuntarily celibate,” as they play a very big role in their own celibacy.

Those folks have kind of always been there, and have always been a heavily represented demographic - Alana has said in interviews that the men who joined in the early days did have some concerning views and some concerning themes were on frequent repeitition in the discussions the community had. I don’t think retconning the movement to exclude those people from the “true definition” is doing either camp any favours. The “involuntary” part of the label isn’t trying to engage with whether or not the barrier may stem from factors within their control, but solely confined to the fact that they want something and are not getting it. They are simply “celibate, but not voluntarily celibate”.

One quip that Alana made in several interviews while defining her modelling of the community she founded was that she didn’t care why someone was an incel, ie “it’s OK if you’re celibate because you’re into horses, but that’s illegal” that that person should still be welcomed and included in the community.

I just think more people should give some thought to who that term originally belonged to.

I think that in light of this, it’s even more important to be accurate and honest who those people are: Not male-exclusive, not limited to this or that cause of celibacy, not specifically gatekeeping out the misogynists or the beastialists any more than any other group. Just any people who want to get laid but are not getting laid.

I’ve got two nominations, in very divergent tastes -

Zeigeist - a fun pop electronica art project that was intended as a one-and-done experimental piece. Obviously, shut down as intended - after producing one of my all-time favourite albums.

World/Inferno Friendship Society - sure they were around for a while and pumped out a lot of albums, but it’s also felt like they were just on the cusp of breaking through and getting the acclaim they deserved, at any given moment, with each new release. … Jack Terricloth died in 2021, and while revival & tribute projects are ongoing, the band will have died with him.