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Sure, and if we simply joined hands together and sang kumbaya we might unlock world peace. This is a meta level observation on the discrepancy in interpretive rigour. One domain demands extreme nuance, while the other is a closed case. If the shooter is trans, you must pussyfoot around their gender dysphoria, use polite language, trace their psychology with maximum granularity, and absolutely never generalise. This tells me that the "other side" does possess the critical thinking skills and understanding of basic human psychology necessary to recognise the complex pathways from social alienation to real world violence. So when they don't extend these complexities to the "manosphere" or incel adjacent spaces, and instead treat their alleged behaviours as deterministic, self-evident and ideologically settled, as well as silence alternative explanations that may deviate from their "right-think" priors, that is a conscious choice.
Charity is a two-way road.
You are just repeating that they are being dishonest. That you should be dishonest in turn is a non sequitur. Again, why not point out their dishonesty and double standards and be better than them? At least on this website, if in the real world you feel a need to act dishonestly for pragmatic political reasons.
"Look your reasoning is flawed and collapses rather quickly under the standards you reserve for your own sacred cows" is not me advocating for tit-for-tat dishonesty, I'm simply echoing their own framework. Again, this is a meta-level observation about the discourse, not the shooting itself (which, to be clear, I agree extends beyond the shooter's gender dysphoria). So I'm not sure what dishonesty it is that you think I'm defending. Unless you believe that my meta-level observation itself is quite dishonest, in which case, please enunciate how and why.
Do you believe incel/manosphere attackers should receive the benefit of the doubt, i.e., their attacks should not be attributed to them being incels/part of the manosphere?
At minimum, you need to demonstrate a consistent and reproducible pattern showing engagement with online spaces as the causal driver of violent attacks, holding all other factors constant.
Tangentially, video game violence may have played a role in cases like Daniel Petric, but millions of people spend long hours gaming globally without exhibiting real world violence, so you have a much harder time arguing that any single factor in isolation drives such outcomes. And yes, I extend that logic to trans shooters as well.
As for the manosphere, Andrew Tate literally got streisand effected to fame. He had less than 4M followers on Twitter/X when he started making headlines around 2022. He's sitting at 11M now.
If we were to believe the narrative, that surge in visibility and consumption should be coupled by a corresponding uptick in violence against women, and that this uptick can be reasonably traced to his content. Instead, violent crime is trending down in both the US and UK.
I agree with the gist of your post. I just want to comment on:
A person with 3M+ followers on Twitter is not a nobody. The Streisand effect may well have contributed somewhat, but that kind of growth in four years isn't unusual.
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If it can be clearly established that the perpetrator of a mass shooting or similar spent a great deal of time in incel/manosphere spaces which pushed him to do something heinous, then that mass shooting should be attributed to the perpetrator being an incel or manosphere adherent. I have zero problem characterising e.g the Isla Vista incident as an example of incel-motivated violence.
But I think there's a clear double standard in which attacks get attributed to which ideologies/communities in the progressive media: that a terror attack is Islamist must be proved beyond reasonable doubt, while preponderance of evidence (if even that) is all that is required to "prove" that a given mass shooting is incel/manosphere/far-right. If a mass shooter is known to have watched one Andrew Tate video, that will go in the lede, while the years of mental illness will be glossed over if it's mentioned at all. Meanwhile, it's a cliché for progressive journalists to announce that "no motive could be established" for a mass stabbing incident even when the perpetrator was heard bellowing "Allahu Akbar" during the attack. I believe this double standard also extends to mass shootings committed by trans people: progressive journalists seem alarmingly reluctant to acknowledge that the pattern even exists, still less to ask hard questions about the kinds of content the perpetrators may have consumed prior to their attacks and whether there's any causal relationship.
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