Dating coach, oatmeal lover, and raging misogynist: Casey Zander is all three. Actually, it’s not clear he’s a dating coach exactly, as his alleged wisdom on the woman question is so bleak and hateful that he may be driving young men away from the dating scene instead of providing them a reliable guide to it. Come for Casey’s “Oatmeal Story,” stay for his toxic advice.
Bonus Quest: See if you can find the spot in my narration when one of my cats decided to hock up a hairball.
“Whenever I see a whiteboard I reach for my revolver.”
Well that was a bit surreal. But I am impressed in how you got me shaking my head – mainly in bewilderment – at someone I had literally never heard of. And will forget again the moment I have finished typing this.
Actually already have.
Great vid though. You seem to be settling into nicely to your own style.
Your audio is really good. One thing you might consider though is moving your mic to one side of your collar. With Lav mics our chins can create an audio shadow. So you lose a bit of top end. If you go to one side you may find your frequency response is just a little bit brighter. But as mentioned, the audio is great anyway, so just something you might want to play around with and see if it makes any difference.
Geez, who even has the time and energy for drama, toxic or otherwise? No wonder men like him don’t think much of dating!
I totally missed the cat doing the hairball thing LOL!
My doctor says I should eat more fiber, and oatmeal is a good source of it. He’s wrong about everything else, though. Mrs. Dayib would probably laugh in his silly face.
True story: my late mom was a huge Cream of Wheat fan.
Now I have an urge to see if I have enough oatmeal on hand for the bread I’m planning on baking tomorrow.
Oh hey! Glad to see you’re back at this, and playing around with new formats. Toss me an e-mail or something if you need to privately scream about anything from the last year or so, or need a second voice for a video or something.
But seriously, I’m not surprised that this post didn’t get much comment. Aside from his apparent peanut butter honey oatmeal obsession, which I suspect that David exaggerated for comedy purposes (or attempted comedy purposes, as it wasn’t funny. if so, Sorry David) this dude’s a dime a dozen. He’s basically just someone who waffles between being a wannabe MGTOW and a wannabe PUA and gets tripped up by the parts of each which contradict. He doesn’t have anything to say that the long-time readers of this blog haven’t seen a jillion times already.
But at least these sorts of things remind me to be thankful that the men in my life are good and kind, don’t act like whiny manbabies, and cause no major drama. Granted it’s in part because I have the privilege to associate with people freely and to cut out anyone who shows too many red flags, something which some people may not be in the position to do so.
I guess someone has to post this…
Joyful warrior Tim Walz and the last days of patriarchy
Tim Walz drives MAGA men nuts — he’s living proof that their tormented masculinity is yesterday’s news
https://www.salon.com/2024/09/01/joyful-warrior-tim-walz-and-the-last-days-of-patriarchy/
I know I’m a little late to the party, but I’ll throw in my thoughts, as the little green message icon below suggests I do.
First off, David, I’m going to start by being a pretentious jackass and talking about your video. To start, the bluish background and marker had me thinking you had photoshopped in a graffitied porta potty as a backdrop. Seemed appropriate given your subject matter.
Secondly, this video feels more natural than the first, with less monotone staring into the camera going on. That’s good, obviously.
However, I kinda gotta agree with some comments on the video. The AI women popping in to toss some insults just feels weird and just there to… be there I guess?
Lastly, did I miss something, or was the whole women are stinky thing not directly addressed, only implied?
As for Mr. Oatmeal, I managed to get a girlfriend recently by doing basically the opposite of everything he says to do. Must be a glitch in the Matrix 🙄
I enjoyed the video. One small criticism but is related to the site. I am unsure if something has changed but I noticed that this site loads a lot slower on Mobile Devices.
Certain dating coaches need to be avoided and this guy’s advice is mostly bullshit. I prefer Dr Nerdlove, who provides more practical advice and at least he talks about women as people and explains their perspective, rather than as objects like what Casey does.
Bad dating coaches encourage you to think of women as prizes to be won. Good dating coaches encourage you to think of other people as, well, people.
@ Jono
I rather liked Nerdlove for a while, but right now he is doing nothing but advice columns. I want more of the how-to articles and discussions on positive masculinity, how things are changing in society, etc, so I only rarely look at his site anymore
Parasol, I might be a cynic. But, are there any good date coaches?
@ Hanna
I’m sure there are relationship therapists out there who incidentally serve as good dating coaches. Plus a lot of people reach out to friends for advice. There’s gotta be some non-bonkeyheads out there who can provide good coaching on the topic.
Right? Please?
It’s been a while since I bothered checking out anything by Nerdlove. The last time I did I found the site chock-full of the increasingly dated “default” that “everyone is middle class”. The advice there pretty much assumed you had a car, at least a few hundred discretionary dollars a month (if not a week), and a thriving metropolis worth of venues within a decently short drive (if there’s one closer to you than an hour-plus each way you’re paying way, way more for housing than a working class wage will support these days).
The advice for using dating websites was especially egregious, asking for an expensive wardrobe, expensive pro-level photography gear, and “gaming the system” with the site’s profile features in ways that sounded like interacting with the site would be a full-time job. With the strong implication that if you didn’t, someone else would, and they would be the ones to successfully woo the few genuine women (as opposed to bots) who were on the site. Sounds like a red queen’s race to me: if you can’t devote yourself full-time to it then don’t even bother.
All this when any such site is financially incentivized to keep you hoping but ensure that’s all you ever do. Obviously, they let the occasional sucker “win” so they have a few people they can feature in their ads as having met their wife/husband on the site, but that’s probably got the same kind of odds as winning the lottery, and for the same reason. The occasional person getting the jackpot keeps everyone else buying tickets. They’re incentivized to keep most people from winning most of the time, and they’re sufficiently unregulated that they can cheat like a carny and get away with it. The obvious method being to jigger “the algorithm” to keep matching men with fembots instead of real women until they decide to allow a few more matches to genuinely be made; then they disable or downrank their bots temporarily until enough users have quit to start worrying them, after which back to rigging the game for a while, until they’ve made their next quarterly earnings target or whatever.
Meanwhile, the typical working class joe is probably living in a low-rise apartment block or a trailer park on the fringes of a large town or small city an hour or two away from the nearest substantial city, probably commuting that far to a job in that city that doesn’t pay nearly enough to actually live in that city, with tens of dollars left over each month after paying for all necessities (rent, utilities, food, car expenses or bus pass). Work plus commute adding up to 50+ hours a week, assume another 56 for sleep and 14 for getting ready, mealtimes, and such and that leaves a maximum of 48 hours to spend each week on the aforementioned red queen’s race. Good luck with that. And good luck actually meeting anyone interesting in meatspace in that little apartment building or trailer park, where you have maybe 30 people maximum you can see without spending money and perhaps a few thousand without spending hours and hours of time traveling each way or very much money.
@Surplus to Requirements:
Your rant reminds me of how, in the early days of the internet, in the online nudist communities, there was a common attitude going around that “nudity erases class differences”. The reasoning was that clothing can act as a very visible social and/or economic class signifier, and without that you can’t really tell, so everyone is socially equal under nudism. The minority poor nudists didn’t take well to that, saying that clothing is hardly the only signifier, you could also tell by subtle physical differences, the way one acts and speaks, and what one commonly speaks about. And further, many of them felt like outsiders within the community due to how rarely they could attend clothing-optional beaches, resorts, and events. And when some of them did make inroads to their local communities anyway, they often felt like they had a lot of expectations placed on them that their living circumstances and/or budget couldn’t handle.
It was rather like “I don’t see race” – well-intentioned, but *really* not helping. The stereotypical “nudist lifestyle” (stereotypical among those within the community, not society as a whole) is/was very much a middle class thing. Middle class sensibilities and concerns took priority for anything involving nudism. I haven’t been much connected to nudist culture in the past decade, but I would be unsurprised to find that hasn’t changed much. Well, the attitude did mostly go away, eventually, but the class disparity hasn’t changed much that I’m aware of, nor am I aware of any serious attempts to tackle it.
Incidentally a bit later on there was also a common attitude of “love the skin that you’re in” / “love your body the way it is” which was meant to celebrate physical diversity and counter messages that everyone needs to be conventionally attractive, but the way it was usually framed at the time drove most of the closeted trans people out of the community. Admittedly this was more understandable because it was still well before trans rights were on most people’s radars (we’re talking early-to-mid 2000s), but it does show how groups which try to be inclusive can be tripped up by lack of understanding (or even awareness) of those who are often excluded.
…In regards to Dr. Nerdlove in particular (who I know nothing about) he does have the right to cater to a particular audience, even if he happens to be rather myopic about the realities of people outside of that narrow audience, and delusional about how big that audience really is. And if someone finds they’re not that audience then they can move on. Though at the same time, it can be frustrating that lifestyle resources and advice for the poor are so hard to find. If someone is successful enough to be doing that sort of thing, then they probably never really experienced poverty themselves and thus aren’t in a position to provide real advice or resources. I’ve said occasionally in the past (not here that I can remember, but elsewhere) that poor people [mostly] don’t choose lifestyles, they have one thrust upon them.
I don’t think the dating situation, in general, is bleak for poor people though. Maybe for some of the ones who are terminally online, especially if the reason for that is that their circumstances prevent them from getting out much. It’s just that the limited time, resources, and opportunities does significantly narrow one’s dating pool. But that’s pretty much always been true, what’s changed is more expansive lifestyle and dating options for the middle class.
First off, Surplus, I apologize for the following.
Secondly, to everyone else, I personally think Nerdlove is a good influence in the dating coach arena, and am tempted to write a big long defense on how myself and most of his readers are not this middle class default with piles of money laying around to be used on our whims Surplus speaks of, but I am going to cut to the chase and point out that in Surplus’s world, money is everything and anybody who doesn’t make high six figures is basically fucked and shouldn’t even bother with anything
https://www.abergavennychronicle.com/news/abergavenny-man-claims-there-is-a-necromancer-living-in-the-forest-of-dean-685319
Capybaras: Symbol of green resistance
Climate change and a lack of predators has moved capybaras into suburbs and gardens. Are they pests or heroes?
https://www.salon.com/2024/09/07/revolt-of-the-capybaras-have-these-large-rodents-taken-over-or-reclaimed-whats-theirs/
In Argentina they’re called Carpinchos. Which means “Grass Dudes”. That is so appropriate.
Hmm. Let’s see if this works
https://ibb.co/vV6KCsx
https://ibb.co/gJgVNpd
Yey, sort of did. That’s Capybarrister. I made his outfit myself. He’s better dressed than I am. Although that’s not a high bar.