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Apparently Labor is going to treat Incel ideology similarly to political Islam in the UK (BBC, Guardian).
As a freedom of speech apologist, I don't think that this is a good development, but just the response to the latest moral panic and about as justified as the response to 'D&D satanism'.
What should be illegal is incitement to crimes. I am sure that this is already illegal in the UK. "Blow up Parliament for Allah", "Rape some bitches to protest against wokism", "Kill a cop to bring forth the dictatorship of the proletariat" are not protected speech, if anyone posts them on their facebook they would quickly be removed and the poster charged.
Of course, even here, technically enforcing this on more obscure pages is basically impossible without cracking down on the free internet as much as the CCP does (and possibly not even then). Punish what you can find and don't lose too much sleep over some .onion board which you can't police, or infiltrate them if it looks like they are planning concrete crimes in the physical world.
To make broader pieces of ideology illegal, such as "people should live according to Sharia law" or "Capitalism is just a development stage to be overcome" or "Women should have less/more power" would curtail freedom of speech too much for my taste.
I also don't think it will succeed on the object level much. Given that the punishments for simply reading the wrong ideology is hopefully going to be light (CSAM being the only content where merely intentionally viewing it should be a crime), that prohibition will do little to dissuade people from consuming Incel ideology. The main reason why an edgy teenager would not read something widely considered bad is not because the government forbids it, which is to admit 'this is so dangerous that we can't allow people to read it', but that it is generally considered lame in his circles. If Mrs. Cooper bans Incel ideology, that will make Incel ideology less lame, not more lame, because established politicians are invariably lame. (My vocabulary is probably half a century out of date, my point stands.)
I don't think teenagers are inherently rebellious against authority. In fact, what passes for "rebellion" is quite easily controlled by authority figures.
Think about the Hitler Youth. Or think about the Cultural Revolution, in which rebellious youth were mobilized to eliminate enemies of Mao's regime. Or think about all those protests in which high school students walk out of school over left wing causes (applauded by their teachers) but never right-wing causes (certain to earn them actual punishment).
Youth rebellion exists in the space that is allowed for it to exist and no more.
As the UK slouches towards totalitarianism, it is the youth who are most likely to cheer this development.
Teenagers are inherently “rebellious” in the sense that they pursue sex and fun even if an old man tells them not to. I suppose this is rebellious, but really it’s that the old man lacks any authority of significance: control over sex and fun. Terror organizations like ISIL were able to recruit young men precisely because they offered them sex and fun, even though this entailed a swap from one authority (being some Muslim kid in UK with an overworked Dad and a principal you never see) to a far stricter authority (literally a violent extremist religious cult which micromanaged daily routine). The sex came in the way of slaves, and the fun was multifaceted: brotherhood (highly instinctually appealing), war (instinctually fun), explosives (you already know)… but these are the more obvious funs. There’s also the aesthetic and fantastical pleasure associated with the apocalypse. There’s also the ingrained potency of religious language which, in a peculiar sense, places you in the center of the universe by totalizing the importance of your feelings, actions, and identity. All of those are quite seriously fun.
Incel ideology is inherently unsexy and non-fun. I don’t see anything coming from it, pun unintended. The dangerous incels are more likely to become Muslims and the smart incels are more likely to learn how to manipulate women (thus solving the problem) or visiting Southeast Asia. The Hitler Youth sprung out of a hippie-ish hiking and trekking brotherhood by the way, so its origin were very fun. And it took that fun and placed more fun on it, a quasi-religious identity package that is fun to dwell on.
Indeed the social reality is that access to sex and fun is directly and indirectly controlled by old men wherever patriarchal norms are still in effect, such as Mesopotamia.
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