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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 (My vocabulary is probably half a century out of date, my point stands.)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.
You are missing one key detail, and it is that those previous examples of totalitarianism offered young men a path to virtue and status by obeying the regime. The current example does no such thing. All it offers is misery today, misery tomorrow, misery forever.
In such a position rebellion is a natural occurence.
How many of those young men actually believe this? Like pretty clearly feminist dating advice is bullshit- but pretty clearly to adults, which these are not.
This is surely not an isolated example of progressive ideas supposedly benefitting young men by following them.
Talk to young men and you'll see. They know they're getting a raw deal and nobody cares. I was even surprised at how much more unhinged zoomers are than myself. I still have some internalized ideas of civility even if I know intellectually it doesn't mean anything. They don't.
Now that's not to say that they're all right wing, but there is a very consistent rejection of progressive dogma. Which isn't surprising given it has absolutely no place for men in it.
I’m intrigued! Can you provide some anecdotes?
Are you actually surprised? Where were Zoomers even supposed to learn civility?
I will clarify that I didn't mean that exactly. They are not more right wing in my experience. They're just a lot more cynical that I've ever seen even Xers pretend to be.
In particular they don't give the slightest thought to the holy cows that are foundational to the boomer mythology of the Post War Consensus. The millenial reflexively shudders at criticisms of Israel that he knows are dangerous. The zoomer doesn't even know why he should.
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I wouldn’t say I’m surprised, exactly, just morbidly curious to hear examples of unhinged Zoomer incivility.
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