Should I be friends with this person in the seduction community?

Chances are there’s no person out there that matches ALL of your values in lockstep. The question then is how important is value X to you & how much of it is a factor in your relationship w/ that other person.

His views on women are different than yours & it came up in one conversation, You may not like it but it’s not necessarily a deal breaker. His views on women are different than yours & that’s many/most of our conversations, well that’s a bigger deal. His views on women are different than yours & he wants you to go to pick-up bars with him? Maybe that shouldn’t happen.

Still, I’m unsure as I don’t want to feel like I’m turning a blind eye to something like this.

So he’s not in the “seduction community” then?

Look - be friends with him if you want to or don’t be friends with him if you don’t want to. If you become friends with him because he seems genuine and non-misogynistic and later discover that he’s actually a philandering abusive asshole, you are legally allowed to stop being friends with him. If you are concerned that there are signs he is actually a philandering abusive asshole now and you don’t want the potential drama in your life, then walk away now, but we can’t tell you what your own risk tolerance for these things is.

As for the purported argument in the OP, there is certainly value in learning how to better interact with the opposite sex in a way that keeps one from coming across as a creepy jerk. But treating women as objects to be won, or basing one’s self-worth on the number of women slept with, will not bring anyone happiness in the long run and will cause a lot of unhappiness in the meantime (albeit punctuated by the occasional orgasm). And the lemon-to-nonlemon ratio in the “seduction community” is not a good one. Perhaps your potential friend is one of the rare nonlemons, but only you can judge that for yourself.

Let’s see. This friend wants women to “like” him, so he sets out to learn the tricks of seduction. But only so he can use his powers for good.

Could he possibly be talking about things like:

Get you out of a mental rut, give you new thoughts, new visions, new ambitions.
Enable you to make friends quickly and easily.
Increase your popularity.
Help you to win people to your way of thinking.
Increase your influence, your prestige, your ability to get things done.
Increase your earning power.
Help you to handle complaints, avoid arguments, keep your human contacts smooth and pleasant.
Make you a better speaker, a more entertaining conversationalist.
Help you to arouse enthusiasm among your associates.

Because those are the things Dale Carnegie talked about when he wrote How to Win Friends and Influence People back in 1936. Your friend (and you) can find copies of it everywhere, with translations in dozens of languages. You can even tell women you’re reading it without them thinking you’re a skeevy pick up artist who’s only interested in women so far as he can manipulate them into having sex. Perhaps you should find out why your friend chose the other path to self-improvement.

So there’s no problem but you’re going to create one?

Good plan.

Let’s see, a person who is a habitual liar. Who treats people like objects.

“You have a cat? Well, I like cats, too. <smirk>”

You wouldn’t be a friend. You’re going to be someone who is lied to and gets used.

I’m a guy. Second, on reddit, he still does post on r/seduction, which is why I was wary.

a) If you don’t approve of the practice, why are you following the subreddit? Recreational outrage?
b) Why are you stalking him?

A person is known by the company they keep.

Should I be friends with a skinhead even though I don’t subscribe to their beliefs? Sure you can, just don’t be surprised when rumors start going around that you’re a white supremacist.

The same holds for any malodorous group IMHO.

I was checking his reddit to view his comments to see if he posted anything sketchy.

Why?

See answer B.

I have one friend who suddenly became quite interested in the whole PUA thing some years ago (probably more than a decade now). Mostly noticeable when he started giving Neil Strauss books to his (single) friends on birthdays and explaining the concepts of “negging” and “peacocking”; probably because our reactions were mostly “are you for real?”. When going clubbing we really didn’t notice much, besides him wearing silly shirts and him wanting to go to hip places. In the end, as far as I know, the first girl he was successful with (as in: a date with good chemistry) is now his wife and the mother of his child.

He is a stand up guy and we (me and other friends) never took his interest in that PUA stuff too seriously. I don’t think he was too successful with women before all this, so it probably was an attempt to make something happen with the opposite sex. But that is just making assumptions. In any case: having had some interest in the whole PUA thing does not disqualify someone as a decent human being for the rest of their lives.

How can the OP post a “Let’s you and him fight by proxy” post if he doesn’t give one side ammunition?

This poor guy issick

What is appealing about a potential friendship with this guy?

They said it’s fair that the general view of pick up artist is scumm, so I don’t think they are part of the misogynistic aspect of it?

How would a relationship with this person improve your life?

Sorry, I just can’t get past the name, The Seduction Community. It’s the first time I heard it. The Seduction Community, AKA jerking off in to a tube sock while quietly weeping.

Perhaps the OP’s potential friend has been practising his manipulation techniques on the OP. Has he been negging you and peacocking at you?