[Dusty]

(07-28-2013 12:21 PM)Aliblahba Wrote:  

The most efficient way to destroy the enemy is from within. If the community is filled with Trojan Horses, it will continue to degrade. Now is a good time to shake the tree and expose the bad apples. The only way to insure the integrity of an organization is to police the ranks from within. When it's done from the outside, the validity of that entity is lost.

A good model is what Bill Buckley did for the conservative movement. In the 50s and 60s, conservative were considered nuts, and a lot of them were. Buckley purged the movement of the frauds and kooks (like the John Birch Society) and helped create an intellectual framework for conservatives (think tanks staffed with brilliant academics doing empirical research, hired great writers to create opinion pieces challenging liberal dogma, etc). It took awhile, but Reagan won two terms in landslides.

Of course the manosphere will never have the resources to do what Buckley did. But we can raise the bar and challenge dogma in our ranks, and rely on empiricism.

Start by being leery of people who speak in extreme absolutes.

[arafat scarf]

(07-28-2013 06:01 AM)Roosh Wrote:  

To think you can separate the idea from the man is foolhardy.

Gotta disagree with this sentiment. One of the hallmarks of being a rational person is exactly that: separating the idea from the person.

A good idea is a good idea no matter who it comes from.

Case in point: Friedrich Nietzche. A non-functioning, unsocial, syphilis-infected loser on the surface. He had no influence among his peers, he couldn't get a girl, and he lived as a restless hermit in small towns around Switzerland during his mature years.

I sure as shit wouldn't want my life to look like Nietzche's, but all of us on this forum subscribe to some extent to his ideas of overcoming, will to power, and the ubermensch.

Likewise, there's Minter's words and there's Minter the person. Hopefully none of us want to be like Minter the person- bitter, joyless, humorless, gameless. A man who has fucked up his life to such an extent that his situation at 58 has reached a nearly tragic point of desperation.

But we can still agree that Minter was right about marriage. That for guys like us it's a bad gamble, a foolish assumption of risk, and that it will probably make us miserable. We can also agree that it's probably a good idea to do things that involve raising testosterone- like lifting weights, banging girls, and engaging in activities that encourage the 'winner effect'.

So we were captivated and trolled by a lightning rod on the internet who wasn't who he said he was. We expected the man to mirror message. Now we know better. I have to say it's been good entertainment.

[DetlefMourning]

(07-28-2013 12:22 PM)Dusty Wrote:  

The revelation that he is a broke basement dweller makes plausible the theory that he hasn't met her in real life, and explains why he would be "ga ga" for her.

You're 58 years old, you're broke, you don't have a job, you're living in a relative's basement, and a girl 24 years younger than you who is presumably not fat then throws herself at you. At this point your confidence has to be in the toilet and attention from a younger girl must feel really really good. You'll do stupid shit.

Exactly. He literally can't afford the courage of his convictions.

[Norset]

(07-28-2013 12:51 PM)arafat scarf Wrote:  

(07-28-2013 06:01 AM)Roosh Wrote:  

To think you can separate the idea from the man is foolhardy.

Case in point: Friedrich Nietzche. A non-functioning, unsocial, syphilis-infected loser on the surface. He had no influence among his peers, he couldn't get a girl, and he lived as a restless hermit in small towns around Switzerland during his mature years.

I sure as shit wouldn't want my life to look like Nietzche's, but all of us on this forum subscribe to some extent to his ideas of overcoming, will to power, and the ubermensch.

Loser? Please read the wikipedia article about him.

Fortune was with him early in life, but later took his health away from him. Yet, he was able to write his major works during this latter period.

One can make the argument that Nietzche's famous saying "What does not kill me makes me stronger" describes his life in a nutshell.

[Roosh]

Would you take girl advice from Nietzche? No, so his writing on women should be met with a grain of salt. But he PERSONALLY overcame disease difficulty, so when he says what doesn't kill him makes him stronger, he speaks from the heart.

When Schopenhauer speaks of women, you can give more attention, since had experience in that front.

The point is that if someone makes up some fantastical bullshit, even if it's technically correct, he should not be given a pass for lying or hypocrisy.

[Aliblahba]

(07-28-2013 01:56 PM)Roosh Wrote:  

The point is that if someone makes up some fantastical bullshit, even if it's technically correct, he should not be given a pass for lying or hypocrisy.

The media sure won't if the manosphere goes mainstream. Investigative journalist will dig until they find the biggest names. If any of those turn up to be frauds, that will kill the community. Shows like 20/20 are ruthless, and won't give pass. If they're expecting to find a playboy that owns private jets, cheatau's in Europe, and bangs hundreds of women a year, but finds this guy instead, game over.

   


Denouncing those individuals now will save from a lot of damage control later. If the media brings them up, simply agree and amplify.

[Kieran]

I'm also quite happy to separate the idea from the man. I couldn't care less what he does in his personal life, I'm grateful for the posts which were excellent, and up there with the best of the manosphere.

Regarding women in this sphere, I'm also glad that Roosh doesn't allow women here. The female posters and bloggers are a waste of internet megabytes, and yet a lot of men give them props and white knight for them.

[LeBeau]

I wasn't around for many of his postings in the past, but after reading all of this, I think it's safe to say that any marriage that starts out with an intervention from one side of the family isn't a good sign.

[Nineteen84]

A picture of the couple would answer most questions here

[Basil Ransom]

You guys just need to get in the mood.

[delicioustacos]

If this is not performance art, then Mark, Kate, and Suzanne are all hilariously nuts.

The two Mrs. Minters are resuming their comment banter here. But who knows what's real and what's not. We are through the looking glass.

Secretly I hope that Mark Minter, his wives, David Futrelle, Hugo Schwyzer and Great Books for Men are all the same person.

Edit: Roosh just posted a new ROK article addressing this, and the alleged Kate is jumping in in comments.

[Nineteen84]

lol that would be great

[delicioustacos]

[Ben Akiba]

She is clearly following this thread and as she is unable to post here she posts responses to the other site the moment we linked to it here.

But, wow.



Sminter1

"Mark Minter is a fraud. He lives in his sister’s spare bedroom and has done so for the last 3 years as he has been unemployed for 5 years. He has NEVER paid a dollar of child support. I AM the ex wife. To say that Mark was in a loveless marriage is asinine. I loved him when I married him, but as time moves on, you should grow up and carry your weight in a relationship. For all his rantings he never once mentioned that I always earned at least as much as he did if not more. Mark got fired from a job 3 days after his son was born for bitching out an admin in theoffice. I was a Natural gas/crude oil trader at the time. I had an entire 4 day maternity leave as i had to start working again right after that since we had no income due to Mark’s temper. I had enough when he thought parenting involved sitting stoned on the couch each weekend while I took care of the kids. Mark is the biggest victim I have ever known. You say his children didn’t appreciate him? What the hell did he do for them? They were 7 and 3 when we finally divorced. He never saw them because he moved out of state and then emptied out is 401k after getting fired for the 6th time , to go to South America to have relationships with women he met on the Internet. (As a result of that brilliant financial decision he owes the IRS about 35k in back taxes and penalties and fees)

You people act like Mark is the greatest thing ever. He is a fraud and a liar. 99% of what he has written on the web is fabricated. Don’t you people have real lives that involve human interaction or do you only have the social abilities to exist in cyber space? I really would have thought that one or 2 of you might have been smart enough to do some fact checking before you took Mark as your messiah.

His engagement is a sham. Don’t you find it odd that he is marrying someone he has only seen pictures of? Well, I take that back, he did marry a columbian woman he met on the Internet which she shortly after had annulled. Apparently, Mark felt it was ok to be sleeping with girls of 16 or so. This is a true statement. His behavior while he was in Columbia was apparently so outlandish that complete strangers felt the need to contact me on Facebook to make me aware of his activities.

Moral of the story: mark is a liar and a fraud and they way you people idolize him his a sad testament to the modern Internet. I am a 5’7 135 lb blonde who earned 200k last year. I raised my children on my own and was single for almost 10 years before marrying someone 8 yrs younger than me. I am clearly the slob, pig, bitch, moron, bloodsucker here.

Have a great Sunday."

fokm

"Everybody: these are anonymous commenters on the Internet. There is no way to say whether any of the above is true or complete lies. That includes Kate–no verification has been done at all here, so this could be made up. The above users are responsible for their own comments but if anything known to be libelous comes out the comments will be removed.

In response to Sminter1: I can only go by reading Mark’s posts. His posts seem to contain lots of knowledge and experience, but even if he’s intentionally leaving out relevant details, he is still coming at things from his point of view. Most people are not and cannot be 100% objective about themselves and their experiences. If Mark feels that his kids don’t care about him, then that’s how he feels. Maybe his kids don’t care about him because of what you say, or maybe he was a fantastic father. We can’t know, we can only go by what he says and what you say now."

Sminter1

"If you are 40 and your kids are 7 and 3, isn’t it your job to be the grow up ? Mark did not see the kids after we split up because it was “too depressing”. For the record, I sent my son to Austin to see his dad on my dollar several times. The last 2 summers he has chosen not to go as he is 15 and is forming is own opinion of his father. His daughter is 19 and is actually just now trying to make some sense of this. She has reached out to mark via written letter a few times. Also note, that for years, mark would remember his son’s birthday via card and token gift, but ignore his daughter. Nice, hu? And you wonder why he “can’t count on his kids to take care of him?!” They are 15 and 19! I pay the 27k tuition and fees all by myself., she is in college, he is a HS freshman undergoing chemo for autoimmune issues. It isnt their job to take care of him.

I find it amazing that you guys take Mark at his word because he “speaks from experience”. Yes, everyone’s reality is their own, but marks recollection of the facts are a bit skewed. Do a little fact checking about your messiah."

[Basil Ransom]

Well, just goes to show the value of meeting people in the real world. You can never really vouch for anyone until you do.

[Ben Akiba]

[arafat scarf]

(07-28-2013 01:56 PM)Roosh Wrote:  

Would you take girl advice from Nietzche? No, so his writing on women should be met with a grain of salt. But he PERSONALLY overcame disease difficulty, so when he says what doesn't kill him makes him stronger, he speaks from the heart.

When Schopenhauer speaks of women, you can give more attention, since had experience in that front.

The point is that if someone makes up some fantastical bullshit, even if it's technically correct, he should not be given a pass for lying or hypocrisy.

Agree to disagree. I still say the reasonable thing to do is to separate the thought from the thinker to the extent that it's possible. But I see your point and on some issues experience and identity matter. And nobody's giving MM a pass...

Well written on ROK.

[WesternCancer]

[cardguy]

Mark Minter has met Kate in person.

Kate mentioned in one of the comments that Mark gets on well with her kid. So - I take that to mean they have met in person.

I wish Mark and Kate the best.

Mark is a brilliant writer - and I am always in awe of people who can write that well.

I find it amusing that Mark is getting married. But I don't take it personally.

[Samseau]

(07-27-2013 09:30 PM)soup Wrote:  

(07-27-2013 07:49 PM)Roosh Wrote:  

So I guess you can say he literally was a basement dweller troll.

I think the reason we got duped is because so many of us on this side of the manosphere aren't close to his age. How can guys 35 and under do a reality check on the writings of a 60 year old? His anti-marriage rants fit our model of the world, so we quickly accepted them as a sort of truth and validation of our beliefs.

What I like about the forum is that many guys are meeting each other, so the seed is already planted to prevent this from happening again. At the minimum, I will be looking for a "I met him... he exists" level of verification. Otherwise, I will believe nothing.

We're arriving at the point where if you want to be a prominent member of this community, you must be prepared to shake hands with others.

This is a community of ideas.

It's like how Al Qeada isn't centralized. If he couldn't live up to his own words, that's his business.

Truth is truth, it doesn't matter who is saying it.

An example of this is game-deniers. They talk shit all they want, but the truth is that if you go out and try some of the stuff we talk about here, the results are real.

This is why I don't care if a woman like Girls Says What posts MRA videos. As long as what she says is true, it doesn't matter.

It's like medicine; throughout history, there have been atrocious experiments done, but does that mean the knowledge gained from them shouldn't be used to save peoples lives?

(07-28-2013 04:12 AM)Anaguma Wrote:  

(07-27-2013 09:16 PM)scorpion Wrote:  

I think we should take a step back here. It's not like Mark Minter was leading a manosphere cavalry charge. He was just a guy who spit some major venom on marriage and his words managed to strike a chord and resonate with people. I can't speak for everyone of course, but personally I never saw him as some kind of leader or role model. He was just a guy who made some good anti-marriage posts.

The fact that he couldn't live up to his own advice doesn't really bother me, or surprise me. It's like a former drug addict who preaches zealously against drugs for awhile, and then relapses. Anyone who could be so fiercely against something was clearly once very taken in by it. Love and hate are two sides of the same coin. In hindsight it was obvious that Mark Minter very much wanted to be married, he liked the idea of being married; he just felt betrayed and wronged by marriage, and he let that anger out in his posts.

However, that doesn't invalidate his writings, in my opinion. I believe they can still stand on their own as a warning to others. Any man who reads them and as a consequence starts to think more carefully about jumping into marriage will still benefit, regardless of Mark Minter's marital status.

Ultimately, the idea is more important than the man himself.

Exactly. His posts stand or fall on their merits regardless of who he is or what he does afterwards. Discrediting his writings because of his actions is an ad hominem attack. Y'all should know better; that is the work of shallower minds like manboob.

His writings indicate that it is possible to end up turning into someone with that line of thought and subsequent fate if you get married without red pill knowledge. And that even if you have the red pill knowledge, it may not be enough to save you from falling anyway. His writings provide very interesting glimpses to possible fates for younger people in the manosphere, which allow them to make better decisions to avoid such fates or know what to expect.

(07-28-2013 11:13 AM)Vicious Wrote:  

(07-28-2013 06:01 AM)Roosh Wrote:  

To think you can separate the idea from the man is foolhardy.

But the idea was never his in the first place, he just worded other men's thoughts in a very accessible way.

I think we're doing ourselves a disservice if we have to accept everything he says or nothing of it.

Heck I'm a guy that's fairly positive about marriage (though not by American law) and I found a lot of gems in his thoughts.

There are many who are saying, "Hey, that's ad hominem - who cares about the man, it's just the ideas that matter!"

I believe this statement is true except for moral arguments. For moral arguments, which are arguments that make the case for the best way to live one's life, or the right or wrong course of actions, hypocrisy can be used to discredit ideas. And here's why.

As Norset said, it comes down to epistemological reasons:

Quote:

The ONLY truths we have are mathematical truths.

Remember that scientifically we can only disprove, not prove.

Then way down the "purity hirearchy", far away from 1+1=2, comes advice on how to live your life in relation to other people. Here the messenger and the message can not be separated. The advice in the manosphere falls into this category.

Maybe xkcd can illustrate:

http://xkcd.com/435/

100% spot on good job. Mathematical proofs can be proved without any doubt. In fact there is a large debate in the philosophical community for the last 250 years if mathematics are true by definition (i.e. math is a function of logic, making math a tautology), or true because of formal rules (i.e. math is a function of language, making math nothing more than a game with rules), or true because of the why our brains are wired (i.e. math is a reflection of the mind).

Regardless in all cases no one disputes the validity of math. It does not matter if you are a rapist, 1+1=2.

Then, when it comes to questions that involve empirical research, or as we like to call, "science," we are always left in doubt if our results are complete or not because there is always more empirical data to discover.

Finally, when it comes to questions involving "How should I live my life best?" or "What should be permissible in a civilized society?" then we no longer have any standards to go by other than our intuition. Ethics cannot be proven logically or mathematically, nor can they be disproved scientifically. For questions of morality all we can do is look at the example of the man.

Thus it is men like Jesus or Socrates who are held as exemplars of morality, and live on in our social consciousness for thousands of years, because these men were not hypocrites. They practiced what they preached and lived their code even as it brought about their death. The truth of their statements could be seen through the power of their lives, and men understand that great moral prophets are not sophists who are only there to bullshit for their own gain.

Mark Minter is a sophist. Not only did he contradict what he wrote, but he used what little online fame he could get to cash out on any pussy he could find. He was a highly entertaining writer (His "Marriage is for Pussies" rant is still one of my favorite pieces of manosphere writing) but his heart was not in it; he was just telling us what we wanted to hear so we would elevate him to some position of fame.

And now, because everyone knows Mark was a hypocrite in it for himself and not for others, we know that everything he wrote is suspect and probably contains falsehoods designed to deliberately mislead and manipulate his readers for own own gain.

Thus ad-hominem is not a fallacy when applied to moral arguments; indeed ad-hominem is perhaps the only thing that invalidates any moral teachings due to their unfalsifiable and unprovable epistemological nature.

This is why people look at Catholicism with skepticism when you've got priests preaching abstinence and yet they are molesting little boys.

This is why people looked at Al Gore's global warming alarmism as bullshit when his mansion consumed more energy than 20 normal houses combined.

This is why men look at women with suspicion when they claim they want nice guys, yet they spend their youth's chasing bad boy alphas.

You cannot separate a moral teaching from the person who makes the teaching, because the person is the only standard by which we can judge a teaching by.

[Matt Forney]

One point I forgot to make in my previous post is that this really represents more evidence that the manosphere is going mainstream. I mean, the guy's marrying a groupie. A blog commenter---not even an author or writer---is so popular that he has a groupie. And given Minter's station in life---nearing sixty years old, jobless, has no money, lives with his sister---he's punching way above his weight class by having a non-obese 34-year old single mom as a groupie.

I've been harping on this point for a while now: attempting to overtly recruit women to the manosphere or any fringe movement is a waste of time because most women are followers at heart; they are attracted to movements not out of ideological conviction but a base desire to be on the winning team. Now that the manosphere is breaking out into the mainstream, the girls' hindbrain groupie switches are being flipped. "Mate with the winners... MATE WITH THE WINNERS!" It's like how French women threw themselves into the arms of German soldiers when Hitler invaded... and then threw themselves into the arms of American soldiers when they rolled the Germans five years later, without the slightest bit of guilt.

It's happening. I already told you the story of how a woman I knew absconded a thousand miles to suck a manospherian's dick. Shit, a girl came out from her flyover state last week just to hang out at my hovel and make me breakfast. Delicious Tacos has written about girls who flew out to his house just to get fucked. Pretty soon, you'll need at least one groupie bang under your belt in order to be in the manosphere's elite.

Also, I'm willing to cut the people who got taken in by Minter's schtick some slack for not researching the guy (contra his ex-wife's ravings) because I assumed that "Mark Minter" was a pseudonym.

[aphelion]

So my complaint is thus.

I don't think that it's necessarily crazy for Minter to get married at this stage in his life. As someone mentioned here - given his advanced age and the stage of life he's in, marriage is probably his best option. He doesn't have his money situation straight, so he can't exactly fly to Eastern Europe to go bang hot 22 year old Ukrainian models. A 34 year old single mother is probably seriously as good as it gets at this point, even one with possibly a screw loose or two. So I don't even consider him a sellout for flipping the script after going off for so long about how marriage is no good for American men. Usually it isn't. In this case I think he's probably still coming out ahead, all things considered.

But.

First off, we can brook no tolerance for misrepresentation. Based on some of the comments from his ex-wife (and granted they're from an ex-wife, but she seems to have a reasonable amount of credibility), we can see how he may have contributed quite a bit to his own downfall. In fact, she may have been the rational one in the relationship. If Minter comes off and blows off about how his marriage was horrible and it victimized him, but then Ms. Minter gives credible testimony against that, it ruins his message.

Second, his whole 'top that, motherfuckers' attitude toward the manosphere for landing an engagement to a single mom is an affront. We weren't cutting him down. He didn't have anything to prove to us, we agreed with his message. It was the blue pill brigade that he had to qualify himself to, the ones who disagreed with his diatribes against marriage and how it ruins men.

I don't mind his apparent flip-flopping on marriage, because I don't think it's necessarily internally inconsistent based on factors at play here. But apparent misrepresentation, and the self-congratulatory attitude in the aftermath, is poison to his pen.

[NY Digital]

This thread has brought something to mind:

G Manifesto.

What's his credibility, in light of recent events?

[Samseau]

(07-28-2013 05:42 PM)NY Digital Wrote:  

This thread has brought something to mind:

G Manifesto.

What's his credibility, in light of recent events?

Things get tricky here. Plenty of forum members have met each other (myself included) yet have not told the rest of the forum about it.

Must we invalidate our privacy? What should the threshold for validating members be? "I met him, he's not full of it?"

[Samseau]

(07-28-2013 05:23 PM)Matt Forney Wrote:  

One point I forgot to make in my previous post is that this really represents more evidence that the manosphere is going mainstream. I mean, the guy's marrying a groupie. A blog commenter---not even an author or writer---is so popular that he has a groupie. And given Minter's station in life---nearing sixty years old, jobless, has no money, lives with his sister---he's punching way above his weight class by having a non-obese 34-year old single mom as a groupie.

I've been harping on this point for a while now: attempting to overtly recruit women to the manosphere or any fringe movement is a waste of time because most women are followers at heart; they are attracted to movements not out of ideological conviction but a base desire to be on the winning team. Now that the manosphere is breaking out into the mainstream, the girls' hindbrain groupie switches are being flipped. "Mate with the winners... MATE WITH THE WINNERS!" It's like how French women threw themselves into the arms of German soldiers when Hitler invaded... and then threw themselves into the arms of American soldiers when they rolled the Germans five years later, without the slightest bit of guilt.

It's happening. I already told you the story of how a woman I knew absconded a thousand miles to suck a manospherian's dick. Shit, a girl came out from her flyover state last week just to hang out at my hovel and make me breakfast. Delicious Tacos has written about girls who flew out to his house just to get fucked. Pretty soon, you'll need at least one groupie bang under your belt in order to be in the manosphere's elite.

Also, I'm willing to cut the people who got taken in by Minter's schtick some slack for not researching the guy (contra his ex-wife's ravings) because I assumed that "Mark Minter" was a pseudonym.

You guys can keep your manosphere groupies. I don't want any of them. I already am more than capable of pulling ass on my own, not to mention I don't trust a single girl on the internet. My privacy > a slutty notch.