‘Incels’ are a rising threat in the US, Secret Service report finds

This rings true to me. With 4 marriages in my CV and another proposal recently, I obviously have little difficulty forming intimate relationships with women but I can see that being effectively blocked from doing so would provoke anger -- and anger is dangerous

And feminism is clearly part of the problem. It has generated high expectations in women and men unable to meet such expections will be stranded. I feel very sorry for them. I know what they are missing. But they should not take their anger out on random women. If they do so at all, targeting feminists would be deplorable but understandable

A new US Secret Service report details a rising threat from men who identify as “involuntary celibates” or “incels”, due to their inability to form intimate relationships with women.

The report released on Tuesday and prepared by the National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) highlights behavioral threat assessment themes identified in years of research examining targeted violence.

Themes include concerning and threatening communications, concerning online content, chronic and acute stressors, elicited concern in others, interpersonal difficulties, history of being bullied, financial instability, failed life aspirations and lack of consequences.

As a case study, the Secret Service examined a 2018 shooting at a yoga class in Tallahassee, Florida, in which a man killed two women and wounded six.

“The attacker was motivated to carry out violence by his inability to develop or maintain relationships with women, along with his perception of women’s societal power over men,” the report said.

The gunman, 40-year-old Scott Paul Beierle, exhibited numerous warning signs including a history of inappropriate and criminal behavior toward women and girls.

Steve Driscoll, a lead research specialist at NTAC, said: “During his teen years, the attacker was accused of stalking his classmates and he wrote stories that centered around violent themes.

“One of those stories was 81 pages long and involved the protagonist murdering several girls before committing suicide. The female characters in the story that were killed represented the attacker’s actual classmates from his high school, but he slightly changed the names in his writing.”

Beierle was arrested three times for groping women and was called “Ted Bundy” by his roommates, in reference to a notorious serial killer who targeted women.

On the day of the shooting, Beierle left a note in his hotel room that said: “If I can’t find one decent female to live with, I will find many indecent females to die with. If they are intent on denying me life, I will have no choice, but to deny them life … Their arrogance, indifference and treachery will finally be exposed and punished.”

According to the report, although Beierle did not adopt any specific ideological labels such as “anti-feminist” or “incel”, his behavior and beliefs aligned with many who do.

Another incident examined in the report is the 2014 killings in Santa Barbara, California, in which 22-year-old Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured 14. Before the attacks, Rodger lamented his inability to find a girlfriend and documented his contempt for women and interracial couples.

The report also cites the 2020 murder of the son of a US district court judge, Esther Salas, who was killed by 72-year-old Roy Den Hollander, a self-described “anti-feminist lawyer” who believed “manhood is in serious jeopardy in America”.

According to the report, NTAC research has shown no specific profile of an individual who plans or executes an act of targeted violence. Attackers vary in age, race, sex, education level, employment history and other characteristics. However, a unifying factor among most attackers is a set of concerning behaviors displayed before acts of violence.

Although the Secret Service is best known for its protection of US presidents, it has also extensively examined and implemented behavioral threat assessment programs designed to “identify and intervene with those who pose a risk of engaging in targeted violence”.

The agency noted that misogynistic violence is not restricted to high-profile incidents of mass violence.

Rather, “misogyny frequently appears in more prevalent acts of violence, including stalking and domestic abuse”. As a result, the report said, responses to threats need to be collaborative between law enforcement, courts, mental health providers and domestic violence and hate crime advocacy groups.

“The risk of future tragedies can be reduced if the appropriate systems are in place to identify the warning signs,” the report said.

Dr Lina Alathari, director of NTAC, said: “Traditionally law enforcement and other public safety officials focus on crimes … and so, if there’s no ‘direct threat’ or a criminal statute violated, they often feel that they can’t do anything.

“But what we know from the research and what we know from communities doing this successfully is that if you have a trained professional in threat assessment, in identifying warning signs and knowing what the proper resources are available … that’s when you have success stories.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/16/involuntary-celibates-incels-threat-us-secret-service

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America’s Ruling Class Wants to Reduce Us to Incompetence

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul blamed the recent shooting death of Jason Rivera, a New York City police officer, on “a shot from an illegal gun.”

In this strange passive voice, the Democratic governor didn’t mention the officer by name, but concluded that the true threat facing New York City was “the scourge of illegal guns on our streets.”

By refusing to state that an actual person acted viciously and illegally in killing a police officer, Hochul asked us to believe in a lie.

Obviously, that lie’s utility rests in its redefinition of violent crime as a problem stemming from lack of government regulation—in this case, insufficient gun control measures. She wants New Yorkers to ignore the violent crime rate spike in their city, aided and abetted by progressive crime policies.

This framework has undermined the nearly three-decadelong achievement in securing peaceful streets in New York City, a period that began under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican. Of course, Giuliani chose a law-and-order strategy in which authorities arrested and incarcerated those who chose lawlessness and violence.

Hochul’s logic, though, has deep roots, in our ruling class’ rationalist-scientistic-administrativist approach to the common problems we face as people. These experts disabuse us of the belief that we are free human beings, capable of answering the ethical questions of how we will live together.

Between this question and the confidence we have in ourselves to answer it, the ruling class intervenes, instilling doubt in our basic intuitions of free will and responsibility, and our capacity to live our own lives. They proceed to manage our cares and fears. They diagnose and prescribe cures for our neuroses and instill in us a resigned belief that we really aren’t free to govern our lives without their constant attention.

British cultural critic and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple illuminated this approach well in two books of essays titled “Life at the Bottom” and “Our Culture, What’s Left of It” In a classic essay, “The Knife Went In,” Dalrymple describes how the ideas of an academic elite seeped into government institutions and created the conditions for the emergence of an underclass in Britain.

The chief trait of this underclass is a belief in their inability to govern their own lives, Dalrymple notes. They have imbibed what the therapeutic class tells them and become “marionettes of happenstance.” Curiously, this makes them more likely to commit crime and become permanent wards of the state.

This surrender of human freedom, Dalrymple writes, comes about in part because of the therapeutic class—“the legions of helpers and carers, social workers and therapists, whose incomes and careers depend crucially on the supposed incapacity of large numbers of people to fend for themselves.”

And the “psychotherapeutic concepts” of this class of workers have been thoroughly disseminated throughout the populace. This philosophical decomposition of freedom and virtue meets with the self-interest of therapeutic experts, who find their clients in the ghettos of democracy. They mean to make the underclass permanent clients.

Dalrymple, a former British government psychiatrist, frequently found himself treating prisoners. The words they used to describe their crimes evoked passivity and victimhood. They frequently blamed the victims for the crimes they had committed.

But the prisoners always attributed total responsibility to police for any wrongs the coppers had done them. Police officials, unlike criminals, had perfect control of their actions.

Three of Dalrymple’s patients used the phrase “the knife went in.” They saw themselves almost as third parties to their crimes, to which they had been led by poorly understood internal drives or past circumstances.

The will of the attacker was as nothing, Dalrymple wrote, compared to the power of “the inanimate knives themselves, which determined the unfortunate outcome.”

Hochul, New York’s governor, would understand such a self-serving justification.

One prisoner was behind bars for stealing from churches, a crime he nearly had perfected. Churches, he told Dalrymple, have much silver and poor security. And he blamed his crimes on the churches; their lack of security drew him to confiscate their goods.

Another criminal demanded that Dalrymple help him understand why he frequently broke into homes and stole electronic goods. It was his past, he thought.

No, Dalrymple informed him, he did it because he decided to put vice over virtue. But there’s much of that going around lately.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a Democrat, similarly employed this blaming of victims regarding rampant mob theft at retail stores. Why, she inquisitively wondered, do these stores not employ security forces? They almost invite the mobs, otherwise known as thieves, incentivized in their lawlessness by the mayor’s progressive crime policies. Perhaps a youth jobs program, subsidized by taxpayers, would do the trick?

And this situation grows worse with the official explanation of “systemic racism” as the reason why inequality exists between certain minorities and an inherently racist white majority. Asian Americans’ academic and economic achievements go unexplained here.

Crime itself, in this view, is a liberation of the goods from the oppressors to the oppressed, as not a few Black Lives Matters figures have enunciated.

Politicians on the left also have attempted to induce a helpless mentality in the populace at large with COVID-19 restrictions. Rather than accept risk and liberty, large sectors of the government at all levels tried to lead us into impotence, dependent on “science” and the imprimatur of public health types regarding vaccines, vaccine cards, booster shots, and masks before we could leave our homes, go to work, or attend a sporting event.

The good news is that liberals’ COVID-19 regimes, their attempt to reduce us to subjects rather than citizens, seem to be failing. Something in the middle class in America resisted the narrative that they should become victim serfs, holding their breath for the government to relieve them from the stress of living.

Much work remains, though, if we are not to be reduced to incompetence. A key theme in the vast network of progressive policies is to remove us from voluntary life in civil society and ensconce us in their state-directed network of living.

Energy will be a government-created good, delivered to us at bureaucrats’ price. Education will become even more centralized with a curriculum devoted to regime goals of identity politics and sexual liberation.

Our speech and other activities in civil society will be under the thumb of a tech and administrative state consortium whose directives we will learn to obey or watch our access to this social media network be removed. A vast welfare, state that subsidizes those who don’t work will ensure that economic freedom diminishes and the soft despotism of dependency grows deep roots in our mores.

It doesn’t require a great work of imagination to see such a future take hold and define America.

The other route is to recover the ground of citizenship, which begins with our freedom and our virtue and their rootedness in an eternal order of right, or what John Adams referred to as the “revolution principles.”

Adams thought these principles were self-evident: “the principles of Aristotle and Plato, of Livy and Cicero, and Sidney, Harrington, and Locke; the principles of nature and eternal reason; the principles on which the whole government over us now stands.”

Some, apparently, need a refresher course. It’s our job to see that they get it.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/03/10/americas-ruling-class-wants-to-reduce-us-to-incompetence

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A Chick-fil-A in California may be declared 'a public nuisance,' city council plans vote

A Chick-fil-A restaurant in California could soon be designated a "public nuisance," after members of the community have complained to the city council.

The Chick-fil-A restaurant, located in Santa Barbara, has been tremendously popular since it opened in 2013, but its success could be having a negative impact on the community. As desiring customers flock to the Chick-fil-A drive-thru, those who do not fit in the parking lot are forced onto the adjacent roadway, blocking traffic, residents have alleged, CBS News reported.

After the restaurant’s temporary fixes did not alleviate the traffic clog, the disgruntled residents took their complaints to the city council, who are considering a public designation to label the Chick-fil-A location a "public nuisance," a city council agenda document reads.

"Previous attempts to informally remedy the situation have been unsuccessful. It is unlawful to stop in the travel lane, and there are traffic control signs posted that advise motorists not to stop in the travel lane, but Chick-fil-A customers routinely ignore those signs," the document reads.

The alleged blockage of vehicles has impacted the surrounding area, including unsuspecting motorists and nearby businesses, the city claimed.

"Each time a queue forms on State Street, the eastbound number two traffic lane is blocked leaving only one lane available. The queuing increases the risk of collisions, particularly rear-end collisions and side-swipe collisions," the city document reads.

It added: "Queued vehicles persistently block the sidewalk and bike lanes, creating a danger to pedestrians and cyclists. The queuing of vehicles routinely blocks access to adjacent businesses, which affects customer and delivery access to these businesses."

"Chick-fil-A has a good problem here. They are so successful, they have outgrown their site. It's possible they were oversized for that site, to begin with," Santa Barbara City Council member Kristen Sneddon said during a hearing earlier this month, according to the report.

The city council then unanimously voted to advance a motion that would label the restaurant a "public nuisance," but Chick-fil-A requested a delay, so the restaurant could take action once more to rectify the situation, CBS News reported.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/a-chick-fil-a-california-public-nuisance-city-council

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Bill Maher rips cancel culture 'lumping' Russians with Putin: If they weren't White, we'd call that 'racism'

Glad someone stated the obvious

"Real Time" host Bill Maher took aim at what he claimed was the canceling of Russian citizens who have nothing to do with Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

"Do you think we're, um, lumping the Russians too much with their government?" Maher asked the show's panelists during Friday night's "Overtime" segment. "I feel like in this country what we're doing now, everything Russian is bad and every Russian is bad.

"First of all, it's not fair," Maher said. "If they weren't White, I feel like we'd call that racism, you know. To lump everybody together -- not every, I mean, a lot of the Russian people don't know what's going on."

GOP pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson agreed, citing how Russian pianist Alexander Malofeev had his concerts in Canada canceled.

"Also strategically, it's unwise," author Max Brooks jumped in. "Because what we were very smart about doing in World War II is, we knew the war was going to come to an end. And we knew that if we punished all Germans the way we did after World War I, we would back them into a corner. So we crafted the narrative that ‘You Germans are led astray by Hitler,’ because we knew, even if in some cases it wasn't true, you know, we said to the average Nazi, you still got to run the post office.'

"So we have to think, we cannot back the Russians as an entire group into a corner. If we can separate Putin from the Russians in general, then we don't only have a victory, we have a post-war plan," added Brooks, 49, the son of comedic filmmaker Mel Brooks and the late actress Anne Bancroft.

Recent weeks have brought reports of seeming retaliation against Russians because of Putin's actions. Russian restaurants and churches being vandalized in North America, the Metropolitan Opera dropped famed Russian soprano Anna Netrebko after 20 years, a Russian Formula 1 driver was fired by his racing team, a U.K. tour of the Russian State Ballet of Siberia was canceled and Russian athletes were barred from competing at this year's Paralympic Games in Beijing.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/bill-maher-cancel-culture-russians-putin-racism

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http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

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