Here’s my segment from The Majority Report yesterday

@Argenti

Do you mean the Cathedral of Learning? (Right across from the Temple of Books?) I actually took a summer class at Pitt before I graduated high school, and it was in that magnificent building. Remember the Nationality Rooms? (Or were all the rooms Nationality Rooms?) And I’m now remembering that I took a grade school field trip to that building.

My summer class was a political science class taught by a guy named Steve Rosen, a hip-looking guy with curly hair, a mustache, and the kind of tight pants that seemed as though they should be worn by a rock star, not a professor. I was doing some research recently on espionage, and was stunned to come across his name. He became a top official at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee(!) and was later indicted for espionage(!!). Those charges were later dropped. I remain flabbergasted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_J._Rosen

Things more interesting that Obsidian — an axolotl flicking her gills at me, the stunning lack of visible fish in the 55g (having a party in the far corner perhaps?), a tortoise that is now slightly cranky about having been bathed, how much my hand smarts from his claws, whether I want to try trimming them or just file them, that it’s two hours until Who, that my coffee needs more creamer, and at least a half dozen things related to tomorrow being aerials day.

Point here? None of us are obligated to answer your questions dude.

@Tessa many of us here have been bored to tears by him before 🙂

@Argenti – how do you bathe a tortoise? I must know!

Mumia Obsidian Ali Silences “The Laughing Witch”

#ObsidianRadio

@Argenti:
“Point here? None of us are obligated to answer your questions dude.”

Of course not, but then we all know this, right? Let’s try and be grownups here, hmm? “Snark” and “Mocking” behavior is for children. Let’s have a real conversation on the issues, not the personalities, not the name calling, not any of the arid, abstract stuff that so many White folks on both sides of the Manosphere divide seem to devolve into, and discuss the actual issues that undergird the very existence of the Manosphere to begin with? I am using my own living personal testimony as a jumping off point here – a Black, inner city, working class, union card-carrying trades unionist.

What do you say?

I Googled Sree’s and it was after my time. Too bad, because I love Indian food. I haven’t spent much time in the ‘burgh in years. It’s very different now than it was when I lived there. As you know, those steel mills up and moved away to Japan, leaving lots of people out of work. Unemployment rose to 22 percent. But unlike Detroit or Buffalo, the city has made a comeback, and it now focuses on computers. And the skies are much, much cleaner.

I would love to eat a $5 Indian meal!

The link works fine – and thank you for the lovely photo!

There are a couple more of him, and some of the other menagerie residents, on my Instagram if you’re curious.

Tracy:

@Tessa many of us here have been bored to tears by him before 🙂

I started from the bottom and saw that post first. It wasn’t till after I responded that I noticed that rather than posting one loooong post (with no paragraph breaks) saying the same things we usually see, he has the “novel” approach of breaking it up into several consecutive posts that amount to the same thing. I shoulda paid more attention.

I meant to write that David isn’t a “life coach”, rather than “life couch” because the latter doesn’t make a lot sense.

Oh, well.

@kat

There were so many, many questions in those blocks of text.

I get a kick out of how Obisidian frames this onslaught as a direct response to what David said in the interview and yet almost all of his questions have little or nothing to do with the specific words that actually came out of David’s mouth. He arguably only responds to what David said once, when he took issue with David saying Men’s Rights “Activists” do almost no real life activism, other than the one conference and whatever the hell CAFE does.

The rest is just TL;DR bad faith marathon of wordy failed gotcha questions.

If I may, let me set the stage.

Starting around 14:00 in the interview David makes a clear distinction between commercial PUA instructors who run pick-up seminars, like Mystery, and the few PUA guys he writes about, like Roosh and Heartiste. David explains that it’s “almost misleading to talk about [Roosh] as a pickup artist because he’s more generally reactionary and misogynist, most of the stuff he posts these days are ideological attacks on feminism and attacks on women and he’s been increasingly moving into the whole white supremacist realm as well.”

So to recap, David doesn’t write about commercial PUA gurus and their self-help seminar scams. Instead he writes about former PUA gurus who moved away from dating advice and have now ideologically merged with the alternative far right. By covering guys like Roosh and Heartiste for years, David’s able to see how they have slowly interjected their shitty red pill lingo and pseudo-theories into the more general shitty far right wing talking points. Matt and David discuss this further, specifically the loathsome “cuckservative” nonsense, elsewhere in the interview.

But Obsidian ignores all of that in his parade of questions and instead creates an imaginary David who is on some sort of passionate crusade against “game” and all PUAs.

Regarding pickup artists: again, the question has to be: is it a crime for a man to want to learn how to attract the women he wants, for purposes of wanting sex? If your answer is “no”, then what really, is your problem with game? If your argument is that game is inherently flawed, my question then becomes: what’s the alternative, and why hasn’t it been available until now? I think the pickup artists have forced a number of very powerful questions onto the table for the rest of us to examine.

Let’s start out with a favorite topic of his – pickup artists. I am not interested in discussing particular personalities. Rather, I have a question for all of you: is it fundamentally wrong for a man to want to learn how to have sex with the women he actually finds sexually attractive?

David, as far as I can tell, has never said that it’s “fundamentally wrong” or “a crime” for men to seek out or even pay for shitty dating advice. “If your argument is that game is inherently flawed”? David doesn’t make that argument in the interview or in any blog post I’ve read, so you aren’t “questioning his statements”, you’re making shit up.

David has criticized Roosh, Heartiste and other PUA public figures for their reactionary and misogynistic rants. He’s also criticized Julien Blanc for encouraging men to add physical assault to their pick-up tool box. Ask him about his actual words, rather then pretending he’s some sort of anti-PUA prohibitionist trying to rob lonely men of potential opportunities to have consensual sex with sexy ladies because feminism is mean like that.

This is got more in-depth then it probably needed to, but the pomposity that went along with these terrible questions grated on me.

But he then ruins what little relative credibility he has left when he refuses to engage, directly, those he talks smack about from the safety of stans like Matt Binder.

Unfortunately for the manosphere, David isn’t the one with a credibility problem.

If your answer to this question is “yes”, what do you propose is the alternative – and why hasn’t such an alternative been available until now?

Are you a double hand amputee?