All is not happy in the world of Roosh Valizadeh. The formerly amoral hedonist, who built his online fiefdom on a bunch of books urging men to “bang” women in an assortment of countries, is turning into a moralistic, hectoring scold only a few steps removed from the Taliban.
And some of his old fans are wondering what the hell has happened to him.
Earlier this week, Roosh posted an especially dour and authoritarian post titled “How To Stop The Fall Of Women,” telling his readers that
It is completely your responsibility to create the environment of a good home, a good city, and a good country to prevent the fall of your women. It’s your responsibility to create the right environment where all women remain good instead of succumbing to an evil where within a short amount of time she becomes a useless, tattooed, overweight, and masculine slut. It should be clear to you by now that women absolutely can not save themselves, and have no inherent resistance to the pollution that tempts them in this world. It’s solely up to us men to shield their natural virtue so that they become the wives and mothers that allow you to fulfill your biological destiny while furthering the health of your society.
He continues on in this vein for several hundred more words.
It’s a big change from his older PUA writings, but one thing is consistent: Roosh doesn’t think women have the right to control their own lives.
Still, some of his old fans are having none of it. A reader pointed me to this interesting exchange in the comments to Roosh’s post:
A lot of Roosh’s old fans — like “Former Banger” there — are sympathetic to his new direction. But clearly not all of them. Alexa (an admittedly imperfect cataloguer of web traffic) also suggests that Roosh’s sites are losing steam, and losing readers. He’s still a long way from irrelevant, but he gets closer every day.
No wonder Roosh is so grumpy.
@ Kat
Yeah US federal law still uses the old concept of corpus delecti (the body of evidence).
There’s myth that that means you must produce a body in murder case, but what it actually means is there must be some evidence that a crime has been committed. That doesn’t mean evidence against any individual.
So if I walk into a police station and say I murdered a stranger 20 years ago, it would probably be enough to show that 20 years ago someone matching my description of the victim went missing.
Obviously if my description of my crime matched an unsolved case that would be even more satisfactory.
Basically it’s a way of preventing false confessions/time wasters.
Not all jurisdictions need that though. In England they’ll accept a confession even to a crime no one knows anything about so long as the confession isn’t inherently implausible.
Normally though there’s no doubt a crime was committed, it’s just who did it that’s in issue and if someone says “It was me” and the jury believe them that’s all the evidence that’s required.
@Argenti
What about “Aris Boch is an idiot so everything they say is stupid”?
Idk? My problem, if it can be called that, is that stupid and idiot mean the same thing in my head, so that reads, to me, like a tautology, not a fallacy. I could well be wrong here though!
Nope, that’s still just an insult.
Ad hominem: This person is a Jew, so obviously anything they say is untrustworthy.
An ad hominem doesn’t have to be an insult. The person in question actually is a Jew! The fallacy is the assertion that the person’s status as a Jew has something to do with their credibility. The ad hominem fallacy often draws on stereotypes, typically racist or sexist, and depends on the listener understanding that we’re supposed to believe Jews can’t be trusted; therefore, if this person is legit a Jew, we can’t believe what they say.
@PoM
But they’re legitimately an obtuse asshole; it’s not an insult if it’s fact. 😛
(I’m feeling rather mean today, apparently.)
LOL I’m not going to argue with that. 😀
But note that when these super-logickal STEM men say in as many words that women are overemotional, they are engaging in the ad hominem fallacy. It always makes my heart glad when someone tries to prove how logical they are by engaging in fallacies of logic.
Technically, this is an ad hominem fallacy, because of the “stopped clock” rule. No matter how willfully stupid someone is, they’ll probably say something true occasionally, if only by accident.
This. Roosh not only instructs men TO rape, he also instructs them HOW to rape. That alone is all the proof you need that his books are rape manuals. Whether he has practiced what he preaches is irrelevant. He has made a living, albeit a squalid one, off the preaching, not the practice.
Also, Aris, if you’re still skulking around reading this, I cordially invite you to go click yourself. (Hey, I’m just responding to your puerile idea of humor in kind!)
Also, the fact that an ad hominem argument is fallacious only means that it’s not valid, i.e., the conclusion doesn’t follow on from the premises*. That doesn’t mean that it’s ‘wrong’ (because of the fallacy fallacy), or that it can’t be persuasive, or that it isn’t worth making. ‘X is on retainer with British American Tobacco, therefore their research paper disputing the link between cigarette smoking and emphysema is wrong’ is an ad hominem argument, but there’s a reason we make scientists disclose sources of funding.
Re: foxes carrying leaves in their mouths – in the UK at least, foxes actually eat very large quantities of vegetation and fruit (apples, berries, rosehips) in the autumn, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they at least sometimes eat leaves.
*There are plenty of arguments of which the inverse is true, as well – for example, question-begging or circular arguments.
Sadly I do not encounter foxes around my part of Southern California, and the leaves here come in two varieties; alive, and dead. What color they are, well usually some shade of burnt by the sun brown. The drought has been punishing and I’m pretty sure my rose trees are done for despite my careful tending, regular feeding, and allotting them the most water on the days watering is allowed. I hate climate change, but hey at least I’m fairly certain that I’ll be dead when the sea level rises to my front door/the planet flips the poles/volcanoes all erupt simultaneously and plunge the world into the next ice age thanks to those conservative death panels for senior citizens whose healthcare costs too much. And I’d been planning a complete overhaul at a plastic surgeon so I could be the hottest old lady in the neighborhood and belle of the senior center!
@msexceptiontotherule, there are several species of foxes in California, including the introduced red fox, the tree-climbing grey fox, and desert-dwelling kit foxes. Reds and greys are especially versatile, doing well in forests, cities, coastal biomes and grasslands. There are probably some foxes around: you just don’t see them. 🙂 If you wanted that to change you could always leave out some food, although that might attract raccoons, stray cats, rats, and angry neighbors instead.
I think they’re just playing with the leaves. Leaves of deciduous trees are unlikely to have much nutritional benefit for an obligate carnivore, but they’re clever animals with a well-developed sense of fun.
“turning Taliban-lite”? You mean: true colors. Wasn’t that always the point of all this He-Man posturing? It’s the usual ‘Tea Party’ “women’s submission”/”legitimate rape” tripe (think Duggars, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Fox Snooze, Christian Right/Libertarians, von Mises Institute, Ron Paul, etc., etc…)… only with “Muslims.”
We don’t refer to “red pill” types as teahadists for nothing, you know:) Maybe some of them will eventually figure out they’ve been played by fundies and white supremacists with a common interest in subordinating women to the whims of douchebags:) Not holding my breath, though.