No, you're totally fine. No worries at all!

I've been known to get a little carried away at times as well - sometimes on purpose to incite certain religious hateful types - haha.

I don't claim to know Neil very well - I've met him a number of times, but he's a friend of some friends of mine. He really is an amazing writer and is firmly in the center of the zeitgeist.

I can't say much for all the other PUAs - I found myself as a fly on the wall as all that was going down. Let me put it this way. Neil's portrayal was very accurate to what I saw.

I will say that there was a deep divide within that community of people, so it was really hard to lump everyone into one particular thing.

On one hand, you had people who were interested in how attraction worked, and really wanted durable and healthy relationships. They discovered the answer was to simply "fix your shit". Don't be an asshole. Be a person of high character. Become competent and confident.

I agree completely.

On the other side of things, you had all the people who figured out how to sell a "magic bullet". Pickup techniques, strategies, manipulations, psychology tricks, NLP... Fuck doing the hard work of fixing your life, here's a secret trick, just pay me $x,xxx.xx.

What do you think people went for?

The good news is, most of the people I knew back then who believed in fixing your inner game, did indeed eventually find happiness and are in loving healthy relationships today.

No idea what ever happened to Mystery, though.