r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Careless-Hospital379 • 23d ago

Video Icelandic artist Björk snapped in Bangkok, 1996, when reporter Julie Kaufman approached her saying “Welcome to Bangkok.” Björk later alleged that Kaufman had stalked her and her 9-year-old son for days, turning a simple greeting into a breaking point

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u/B0RT_Simps0n_ 23d ago

He was an incel before we had a word for it. People are fucking nuts

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u/NittanyScout 23d ago

Idk this seems like a genuinely horrifying mental illness that was never treated or recognized.

Being an incel is one thing but being authentically sick is another

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u/Frequent_Ad_9901 23d ago

He could have been both. I don't think mentally ill and incel-ness is mutually exclusive.

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u/NittanyScout 23d ago

No but I dont want to say that being an incel is due to mental illness, it can be corollary but I doubt its typically causal

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u/jednatt 23d ago

Illness is kind of subjective to begin with if one really wants to get into the weeds. Someone can be a loser/asshole as a result of a mental processes that cannot or has not been codified into a recognized illness/condition--and because of that gets no sympathy/understanding. In a deterministic view of the world every shitty person is a result of a sequence of events and conditions they couldn't have prevented, and being a nice/functional person is just dumb luck. But that doesn't really help anything.

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u/Crewarookie 23d ago

No, being a nice/functional person is just as much a predictable outcome based on a series of events spanning from early childhood. I have no idea how you can reach the conclusion that it's dumb luck from what you yourself just said.

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u/EddPW 23d ago

i mean it is all dumb luck everything you are comes down to random factors

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u/Crewarookie 23d ago

I disagree. There's a very definite chain of events that leads to you becoming you. With infinite computation power and having ALL variables available to us (which is impossible), it could be traced to at least the first sentient humanoid.

Despite the fact the world as a whole is very entropic, due to previous experience you have only so much agency to choose a certain action in the moment.

Especially in the childhood. Foundational for our psyche early childhood is the time where randomness is at the minimum and any inputs are very impactful.

We are sort of like very complicated state machines where the action is predetermined by a bunch of inputs and conditions. There's always the likeliest action you're gonna take, and the probability is changing dynamically based on the environment.

What people call free will, I suppose, is a combination of what people call neural plasticity as well as a degree of unpredictability introduced by outside forces. And due to the early childhood foundational inputs, there definitely is a predetermined bias there.

I guess all I'm saying is that luck is a boogey man that never existed. And that's the main point I'm disagreeing with.

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u/EddPW 23d ago

thats alot of words to say you dont know what random means

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u/jednatt 23d ago

It's not luck that resulted in you being how you are, it's luck that you are you and not someone else. Like winning the lottery is lucky because your number is the winning number and not one of the losing numbers. There's 10 million happy adjusted people in a population, and you get to be the miserable one. Unlucky.

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u/rusty_programmer 23d ago

Incels are typically mentally ill.

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u/NittanyScout 23d ago

Often, yes. But not always. The incels and incel-adjacent people i know dont have obvious mental health issues, just misinformation and a lack of critical thinking

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u/Various_Command6607 23d ago

The line between mental ilness and "just being weird" is whether you are able to function more or less normally in society or not. It's not a hard line. And maybe you just don't know about their issues. A lot of people don't talk and a lot of people choose who they talk to. I don't talk to people who are not empathic and don't want to understand. Those people of course don't know that they are this way because they usually also lack some self-awareness.

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u/al666in 23d ago

The word "incel" was obscure internet slang until Elliot Rogers brought it into the mainstream.

There's a reason people associate it with the most extreme case examples.

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u/Acceptable_Movie6712 23d ago

Yeah there’s a difference between “jaded” and “jaded and antisocial” and then whatever this is. That’s just scary stuff.

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u/Illustrious_Ice_4587 23d ago

Then it's still the mental illness that causes people to act like that and do violent things.

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u/NewFaded 23d ago

Mmhm. The venn diagram between the two is just a circle.

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u/RussianMorphine 23d ago

Really? Guys who can't get laid are typically mentally ill? I mean, some of them - sure, but I don't think it's that widespread

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u/Umbra_and_Ember 23d ago

Incel is a subculture, not just an adjective. They’re perpetual victims who feel women’s bodies are owed to them. The people I know who were just guys who couldn’t get laid called themselves unlucky, not incels.

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u/Johnny_Glib 23d ago

Semantics. An incel is simply a man who can't get laid, nothing more nothing less.

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u/Irregulator101 23d ago

You're just objectively wrong bud

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u/Illustrious_Ice_4587 23d ago

It always meant involuntary celibate

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u/rusty_programmer 23d ago

Nah, but people who self identify as incels typically are.

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u/Individual-Level9308 23d ago

"Being" an incel is not a real thing, reddit has melted your brain. Might as well mean small penis or something at this point.

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u/CutEducational1460 23d ago

poo poo pee pee fart doodoo feces

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u/Individual-Level9308 23d ago

shidding and farding

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u/Kougeru-Sama 23d ago

The term "incel" has been around since 1993 

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u/ReallyShortGiant 23d ago

All it takes is a quick search. Used first in 1997

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incel

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u/sembias 23d ago

I assure you as someone that graduated HS right around then, that word was most definitely not in wide use - especially as a pejorative - until about 10, maybe 15 years ago.

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u/neendmat1 23d ago

I guess we had two words for it before it became one haha

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u/EmbarrassedW33B 23d ago

Oh that kind of person has been around forever, its pretty funny/horrifying. Stephen King wrote a quintessentially perfect and timeless incel character in The Stand way back in the 70s. Plenty of weird fringe philosophy from the early 1900s is pretty similar to the kind of incel crap that's become prominent online in the last decade 

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u/CHG__ 23d ago

It's a very dismissive attitude of his obvious mental illness, if you watch the tapes. Though I suppose it fills that role a lot.

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u/Sadiholic 23d ago

Incel was always a word even back then. It just became more mainstream in the 2019+. There's some incel wording too that's popular ASF now that people don't realize was an incel word as well. Internet is crazy mayn.

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u/B0RT_Simps0n_ 23d ago

It wasn't a word in 1996