First of all, let it be said that I’m sorry for causing harm and distress to all the femmes on Hexbear. The holiday season is very stressful (I’m dealing with a bunch of real-life bullshit myself), and I’m sorry for ruining what should be a place to escape from the bullshit. I hope this apology and explanation would restore at least some faith in this website’s ability to be a safe space for members of marginalized communities.

Second of all, let it be said that I consider incels to be nothing more than another type of reactionary like the racist and the transphobe that must be crushed. They are the enemy, and for the sake of undying love for marginalized communities and for the sake of undying hatred of all those who chose to humiliate, exploit, bring harm, or attempt to destroy those communities, we must bring ruin to the wretched enemy by any means necessary.

Third of all, let it be said that I flipped-flopped between posting some self-indulgent whiny bullshit, posting some juvenile “fuck the admins the admins can kiss my ass” temper tantrum, and not bothering with this apology and fucking off, but after seeing the other “self-crit” where OP just spend the whole tl;dr post defending his actions and yet another dumpster fire thread full of cringey incels by people who learned absolutely nothing from the previous dumpster fire thread full of cringey incels, I realized that I needed to pull my head from my ass and stop centering myself. I was falling into the trap of individualism, to view my temp banning purely from the perspective of me as a individual who got temp banned by an individual admin. But the temp banning was given within a particular social context and within a particular collective body. The real question is not whether the temp ban was justified from an individual perspective, but what does this collective body called Hexbear need and what actions should I pursue for the sake of fulfilling that collective need. The answer becomes crystal clear when I discarded individualism: I ought to draft a post in /c/selfcrit for the sake of supporting the admins’ drive to rid this collective body of incels-in-hiding and for the sake of hopefully being a better example of what a /c/selfcrit post ought to look like.

So why did I made those two posts? Essentially, I wrote those two posts in a very poorly executed and absolutely terribly timed attempt at understanding and feeling compassion for incels. I was in “bouncing off ideas with other people and throw shit at a wall to see what sticks” mode, which makes me a lot more careless in how I post, careless in the sense of not paying attention to tone, not paying attention to the audience, and just throwing out half-baked ideas that I sorta but not really believe but that I throw out there just to see how people would react. One fundamental problem is that I didn’t specify that I was mostly describing the wretched state of the incel from the perspective of the incel, which was made even worse by me using the “reaching out to a person stuck in a hole” metaphor and virtually skimming past the 100+ comments where the incels were showing their asses. Due to my poorly written and completely untimely comments, people in the thread thought I was like the other cringey incels there advocating for some shitty Incel Outreach Program^TM.

Those comments were a failed attempt in understanding their degradation towards reactionary politics from their perspective. From the perspective of the incel, their salvation lies in some fuckable mom who’s willing to provide hundreds of thousands of hours of free emotional labor as a therapist, but because women are naturally repulsed by those pathetic incels on top of not wanting to risk dying from a murder-suicide wrought by those incels, incels will never find the salvation that they so desperately want but absolutely do not deserve. Denied of their undeserved salvation, they will lash out even further and sink even further into reactionary politics, where they can be recruited by fascists and slotted into organized fascist formations. Therefore, femmes and nonmascs in general ought to organize their own formations. They should not focus on “converting” incels but instead focus on building collective power that renders incels powerless so that incels can do nothing but seethe in their little corner. Needless to say, the fact that I have to completely rewrite those comments meant those comments were trash and should have never been posted. It’s one thing to shit out some half-baked poorly thought out unhinged rant about the best Fallout game (it’s FO1 btw), but it’s completely irresponsible to have the same cavalier attitude about a current social crisis that’s happening in real life and on Hexbear.

As a final point, why did I feel that reactionaries like incels deserve compassion? I feel that we must have complete compassion for the enemy and incels are no exception. We must be able to truly feel what the enemy is feeling, to truly understand on an emotional level the enemy’s thoughts, the enemy’s dreams, the enemy’s desires, and the enemy’s fears. The vast majority of people will read this and say that I’m advocating for us to be like Jesus who turned the other cheek. No, I’m not advocating compassion for the enemy from the perspective of Jesus and Christianity, but from the perspective of the Art of War. We must understand how the enemy feels so that when we stick the knife, we’ll stick it where it really hurts. We must understand the enemy’s dreams so that when we crush them before their eyes, we’ll understand that their spirit has been broken and more vulnerable to even more attack. We must understand the enemy’s fear so that we can become even greater than their worst nightmare. This is the spirit in which I made those comments.

Unfortunately, virtually no one here would have picked up that, and without this understanding, it just becomes fascist apologia. If I say something like “That fascist has a broken leg. Look at how he’s almost completely immobile. Imagine the pain and sense of helplessness he feels right now. Is there anything we can do?” the vast majority of people wouldn’t pick up my implied response: “He’s almost completely immobile, so he can’t run and defend himself when we go and break his other leg, rendering him completely immobile. See how much pain and helplessness he feels right now? Good, now he’ll feel even more pain and helplessness when we break his other leg, and since he’ll be in a spiral of pain and helplessness after we break both his legs, we might as well break both of his arms as well. Don’t want your limbs broken? Don’t be a fucking fascist.” Given that the vast majority of people wouldn’t pick up this point whatsoever, it’s my responsibility to clearly state this in order to avoid misunderstanding and hopefully push people to internalize approaching the enemy in this way.

Regardless of my intentions and sincere beliefs, I became part of the fucking problem, and I hope that with this apology and explanation, I would make up some of the harm that I have caused.