There was likely a time when “incel” just meant “involuntarily celibate,” without all of the baggage, but then two things happened together.

First, a significant number of “incels,” most notably on 4chan, fell into a specific set of essentially misogynistic coping behaviors - primarily blaming the supposed hypocrisy and shallowness of women for their own problems.

And second, a significant number of smugly self-righteous bigots saw an opportunity to hurl self-affirming hatred at an undifferentiated mass of people without suffering the backlash they’d get if it was directed at a group that essentially enjoys protected status, and leaped at the opportunity.

So now the popular conception is that all involuntarily celibate men are “incels,” with all that that implies - that they’re not just involuntarily celibate, but shallow, hateful, misogynistic losers and assholes.

It could potentially help if involuntarily celibate men who don’t share the misogyny of the “incels” had their own label, but honestly I don’t think it would make much of a difference in the long run, because there are now enough asshole bigots reveling in their hatred of “incels” that they’d refuse to let anyone get away. Just like all other more traditional bigots, they’d cling to their self-affirming conception that the mere fact that an individual is of a specific race gender sexual orientation relationship status means that they’re necessarily foul and loathsome, so their hatred of them is justified.

True, and I indeed should have said “reflex” instead.

I have no more right to interfere in someone else’s life than they have to interfere in mine.

Avoid people who don’t share that view.

Of course he is.

It’s really a very simple calculus - any deal is going to include a timeline for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, and if Netanyahu signs off on a deal that includes a withdrawal from Gaza, the hard right assholes are going to turn on him. And if the hard right assholes turn on him, he’s not going to be able to hold onto the office. And if he doesn’t hold onto the office, he’s likely going to jail, because he’s not just a psychopathic piece of shit, but a grotesquely corrupt psychopathic piece of shit.

And that’s really the whole deal right there - tens and potentially hundreds of thousands of people are dying and millions of people are displaced all so that one grotesquely corrupt psychopathic piece of shit can evade justice.

People are almost more susceptible to simpler charts with race and IQ than they are to the really complicated stuff

Ironically enough, that’s because they’re stupid.

It amuses the hell out of me every time the conservatives whine about their brazen disinformation getting censored, since whenenver and wherever they get an opportunity (including, especially ironically, Facebook), they reveal themselves to be the most cowardly censorious people on the planet.

Everywhere, without exception, where conservatives have control, anything that even hints at undermining their comforting delusions is instantly censored.

But if anybody dares to censor anything they might want to say, including overt and deliberate lies, they wail and cry like the spoiled children they are.

I guarantee that the explanation for this would become very obvious if one were to simply, as the cliche has it, “follow the money.”

So the unspoken bit about RFK Jr. is that he’s a tweaker, right?

I mean, the details are all in the context of politically entitled progeny, but the underlying vibe I get from the stories about him is very reminiscent of the tweakers I’ve known over the years.

Israel is a rogue state.

“Doubts grow?”

Why would they even need to “grow?” This is just June and July all over again, with the only difference being that Hamas isn’t buying any of it this time around.

The Biden administration isn’t trying to negotiate anything. It’s just trying to strike a pose to dodge the entirely deserved condemnation it’s getting for enabling a genocide while continuing to enable a genocide.

And a billionaire singer who’s already such a common target for AI deepfakes that she’s quite likely the one person on the planet most ready, willing and able to sue someone’s ass off over them.

Wow - that was quite possibly the dumbest thing he’s done yet.

He doesn’t need to do it this time - he has a veritable army of fascists, a brazenly corrupt and compromised supreme court and a squad of billionaire plutocrats to do it all on his behalf, and not coincidentally they have a detailed blueprint in Project 2025 that tells them exactly what to do, step by step, to transform the US into a christofascist/plutocratic autocracy.

All Trump has to do this time around is just carry on being Trump, while all those other people do all the dirty work.

To “win?” No - not really.

But I don’t think that matters much.

Honestly, I think that Trump and the overt fascists and plutocrats who are backing him fully intend to get him into office or destroy the country trying - that if he doesn’t win legitimately, he’ll “win” through fraud, or through the machinations of the brazenly corrupt and compromised supreme court, or through violent revolution.

His backers - the Heritage Foundation and the rest of the fascists and Musk and Thiel and the rest of the plutocrats and so on - don’t just want to try to get him into office - they want to destroy American liberty and democracy. It’s not even so much about him specifically - he’s just the right combination of charismatic and shallow that they see him as their opportunity to impose the autocracy they want. And I don’t think they’re going to let anything stand in their way. So whether or not he actually wins the election isn’t even really relevant, other than to the degree that that will determine what other strategies they might have to, and will, implement.

Right, nor did I expect a rating based an on individual article - sorry if that’s the way I made it sound.

It’s simply that the rating of high credibility accompanying an article that was so obviously little more than a barrage of loaded language cast the problem into such sharp relief that I went from being unimpressed by MBFC to actively not wanting to see it.

All I see here is someone whose ego relies on a steady diet of derision hurled in the general direction of strangers on the internet.

I haven’t seen any evidence that it does that, and quite the contrary, evidence that it does not - examples from publications ranging from Israel Times to New York Times to Slate in which it accompanied an article with clearly loaded language with an assessment of high credibility.

It’s possible that it’s improved of late - I don’t know, since I blocked it weeks ago, after a particularly egregious example of that accompanied a technically factually accurate but brazenly biased Israel Times article.

So are you saying that you wouldn’t be able to recognize my second example as a biased statement without the MBFC bot’s guidance?

Or did you just entirely miss the point?

The main problem that I see with MBFC, aside from the simple fact that it’s a third party rather than ones own judgment (which is not infallible, but should still certainly be exercised, in both senses of the term) is that it appears to only measure factuality, which is just a tiny part of bias.

In spite of all of the noise about “fake news,” very little news is actually fake. The vast majority of bias resides not in the nominal facts of a story, but in which stories are run and how they’re reported - how those nominal facts are presented.

As an example, admittedly exaggerated for effect, compare:

Tom walked his dog Rex.

with

Rex the mangy cur was only barely restrained by Tom’s limp hold on his thin leash.

Both relay the same basic facts, and it’s likely that by MBFC’s standards, both would be rated the same for that reason alone. But it’s plain to see that the two are not even vaguely similar.

Again, exaggerated for effect.

No it doesn’t. That assumption just fits the strawman living inside your head.