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Justin Ling: I’ve studied the ‘incel’ culture that fuelled the Montreal shooting and solutions are hard to find
I read the shooter's manifesto and didn't see the prevailing hatred as being directed towards women, as suggested in the Star article, but more as directed towards capitalism and who the shooter thought of as elites. There's definitely a distorted view of women in there, and the advocacy for violence is extreme, but the prevailing themes are surprisingly common in what you see in popular discourse: anger about inequality and anger about perceived injustice resulting from inequality. Attacking Mindgeek would have resulted from that ideology not because of hatred for women, but out of hatred of porn and the impacts of porn on men and on young people's relationships and intimacy as, which is the kind of thing you could read about in a broad spectrum of mainstream publications.
It's a weird read. Overall, it made me really sad. The pain and sense of rejection then turned into motivation for violence and calls to kill whole classes of people is quite chilling. It's disturbing. Most disturbing is probably that he wrote about grievances not just as justification for his own individual act of violence but calling for a mass movement that would be violent and, as he put it, "liquidate" whole groups of people as it took power. The grievances he focused on are also not so uncommon to see people feeling/expressing online, which is no doubt part of the danger of the ideology. I wouldn't share it with anyone vulnerable.
I wish that guy had experienced a better childhood or some influences that could have stopped him going down that spiral, but I'm glad he ended up as a lone shooter rather than part of something much bigger that he advocated for. The deaths he caused are already tragic, but a movement sharing that ideology would be a movement of mass murder. It's pretty awful.