Okay, I really wasn't interested in doing this, but...

I kind of have to address it, because it's getting ridiculous.

For anyone who doesn't know, The Wooly Bumblbee (Kristina Hansen) is an internet atheist who found the MRM during the atheist/sceptic schism over Atheism+. She is on a rampage of epic proportions, determined to avenge her honor after being wronged by the MRM.

When she found the MRM, she started making videos (fairly accurately) bashing feminism. Or perhaps she started making those videos, and then the MRM found her.

Paul Elam at A Voice for Men liked her "in your face, I don't give a fuck" style. He published a few of her articles, embedded a few of her videos, then eventually offered her an editor position.

He did this despite several glaring red flags in videos she'd uploaded to her previous YT channel (TruthandOblivion, which got flagged down), where she used terms like, "you're the man, you have to be the adult" to a male DV victim, etc. Demonstrating she's not really sensitive to the issue of sexist male-shaming language. At one point, her husband got into a disagreement with Integralmath (Justicar) a non-MRA but MRM-friendly gay atheist YouTuber, and ended up calling him a "disgusting fudgepacker" or something of the sort. A lot of things that should have filled most of us with misgivings.

Apparently Paul wasn't aware of the red flags (he doesn't even have time to watch all MY videos, pfft :P), or ignored any tingling of his spider senses (or perhaps intentionally ignored the flags because he is constantly juggling multiple priorities). He promoted her (way too early for ANYONE, really, who was so new to the MRM) to senior news director for Canada. His rationale as far as I understood it was that the MRM needs doers as well as thinkers, and she was the former rather than the latter.

Almost immediately after that, she started making videos on her personal YouTube channel demanding that certain people (racists, homophobes, libertarians and misogynists) "get the fuck out of OUR movement", and calling out MGTOWs for being bitter, paranoid misogynists who want to blame all their problems on women (something even the most extreme MGTOWs don't really do--they blame men's problems on both men and women).

She managed to alienate so many people, Paul finally had enough and removed her from the masthead of AVFM.

At that point, she went on the warpath and released a video containing snippets of a skype call with Paul (which both parties recorded without telling the other, ha!), snippets that were isolated from any context. In response to the quote-mining, Paul uploaded the entire conversation to YT.

I had held my tongue through all of this, even having been in the position to see it coming the moment he offered her an editor's position. AVFM is Paul's website, and I'm not interested in telling him how he should run it. Several MGTOWs had asked me to make a response video to WBB over her accusations, and I declined. I know what kind of person she is, and I didn't want to step into the warzone.

But once Paul had severed ties between her and AVFM, I did make some comments--on Paul's video and on reddit--regarding how I'd seen this coming right from the start, and expressing my opinion of WBB, which I will crystallize here: 

WBB seems to thrive on attention (both negative and positive), has very sloppy impulse control, is emotionally unstable, and shows a pattern when criticized for anything she said of blaming the listener for not hearing her properly and then repeating exactly what it was she said that they took issue with ("Learn how to listen, moron. I never said X. What I ACTUALLY said was X. Idiot."). She takes up causes she thinks will get her admiration (such as the A Voice for Boys site, which she started and quickly abandoned--the URL now redirects to her personal website), and it's probably at least as much about external validation as anything else. I have watched her repeatedly engage in several of the tactics of abusive women--DARVO (deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender), especially--when people take issue with her attitudes or behavior. Witness the quote-mining she engages in, while simultaneously castigating her opponents for their "intellectual dishonesty" and "lies".

So anyway, I made some comments expressing these opinions about her and the debacle on that video of Paul's, and a few on reddit.

Paul then uploaded a 12 minute video that described the situation as he saw it, explained why he'd let her go from the site, reiterated his position that being apolitical means tolerating libertarians as well as more mainstream political philosophies, and confirming AVFM's support for MGTOW. I may have commented on that video, as well, though I really can't recall.

She uploaded a video of her and her husband playing that video, then pausing and attacking him, libertarians, MGTOWs, me, and anyone else they could think of, in one of the most infantile and incoherent examples of an ad hominem rant I think I've ever come across. You really have to listen to it to understand what I'm talking about.

I commented there, and my comments were heavily upvoted. 

When the bombardment of criticism from annoyed MRAs peaked, she disabled comments for a brief period. A day or two later, I went to see if they were still disabled, and there was a note in the lowbar that she'd uploaded the first of a new 7-video series about all that is wrong with the MRM. I thought it was odd, since I was subscribed to her and that video hadn't shown up in my subscription new upload list. So I went to her channel and discovered I was blocked (which automatically un-subs you).

The first five of her 7 videos are up. After listening to 1 through 4, I can understand why she preemptively blocked me from commenting--every other criticism (perhaps more) seems focussed on me specifically. Which means she either thinks I'm the biggest fish to fry in the MRM, or she has some personal girl-grudge with me. The latter seems a little silly and obsessive, but my comments about her probably stung, and there's not much a woman like her will not do to tear another (more popular, yes, I said it) woman down. In fact, she is so much the embodiment of every toxic woman Dr. Tara talks about in her Shrink4Men blog and Erin Pizzey describes in her material, I don't know how she passed the MRM smell test beyond her first dozen videos.

The number of logical fallacies in this series (and in her and her husband's comments on them) are too many to name: ad hominem, tu quoque, personal incredulity, slippery slope, composition/division, appeal to consequences, appeal to authority... Which is kind of laughable when one considers how often she claims to care about LOGIC and FACTS and how much she claims to hate BULLSHIT so much she HAS to call it out, good fucking grief.

Even the points they make that they have actually researched are pathetic and moot. At one point, for instance, they post a screenshot of one comment of mine on reddit where I posited that the more caesarian sections we perform today, the more we'll need to in the next generation and the next, as children who would have died will survive to carry the trait of an inadequate pelvis. They claim that because having narrow hips isn't one of the leading causes of C sections (which is true), the logic is unsound. Whether they are unable to grasp that any heritable trait that used to get you killed as a baby but which modern medicine can now help you survive is going to become more common, I don't know. But it doesn't matter how common or rare that heritable trait is now, or what place it currently occupies on the list of things that modern medicine can treat--all you need to do is ask, "Is that trait heritable? Did it used to kill your children? Can modern medicine now make it so your children survive to pass on the heritable trait?" This is not that complicated, people. 

Their "understanding" of my politics (soft-core libertarian) seems to derive from my one-time use of the term "John Galt" to describe many of the long-term MRAs who, along with mostly libertarian and non-mainstream political thinkers, kept the MRM embers burning over the last 30 years, something confirmed by Rod van Mechelen of The Backlash.

Kristina and her husband seem to think I'm in cahoots with the Libertarian Party of New York, despite me being neither a New Yorker, nor an American, simply because I spoke at their convention about radical feminism and men's rights--they claim that I'm a member or affiliated with what she calls "big L" libertarians (without ever really defining what she means, other than that it's a "bullshit ideology"). 

If I spoke at the annual convention of the Alberta NDP (which I absolutely would, if they invited me) would she claim I'm in bed with them, too? I wonder what she thinks of the fact that for a year, I was a member of The National Organization for Women (I was involuntarily signed up when I registered to attend their national conference last year). When someone in one of the videos' comment threads mentioned that I was speaking about anti-feminism and the MRM to libertarians after being invited, and would likely speak about such things to any other audience as well (which is true), and wouldn't Kristina accept an invitation to speak about atheism to a Christian group? Well, she said she'd never speak to a group with different beliefs, because to do such a thing would be prostituting herself. And then later denied insinuating I'd be a prostitute for being willing to speak about men's issues to a group whose political philosophy I disagree with. 

This, after making a huge issue of the fact that I receive money from YouTube ads (which she also uses), and accepting donations from people who value my content (again, I don't see her turning away money, even when it's been forcibly extracted from other people).

The ratings bar on most of her recent videos is nearly entirely gray, she's hemorrhaging subscribers like mad, and has deleted more comments and blocked more people over this than a young earth creationist on a rampage against Richard Dawkins. One of her new supporters is a Manboobz-wannabe radical male feminist who likes to call himself "Hannibal the Victor" who she seems to like perfectly well despite her oft-stated loathing of feminism and ideological thinkers, and she has mirrored videos made by libertarians, who she claims to detest, simply because in those particular videos they are critical of MGTOW. 

But she doesn't seem able to control her impulse to get back at people she thinks wronged her, myself included, perhaps especially. Her husband is only reinforcing her in what seems little more than an escalating vendetta against "those motherfuckers who made my wife upset". The two of them together are like, "Ms. Dunning, meet Mr. Kruger", and despite being edumicated in university, not only can neither of them construct a coherent argument, as far as I know, her husband's "job" is to collect disability, and her "job" is to collect child support and pop out kids (4 already, and another on the way). I've never been more pleased with Canada's heavily subsidized post-secondary education system than when I learned my tax dollars went toward ten years of taxpayer-subsidized education so she could earn 4 degrees that apparently qualify her to sit on lawn chairs, complain, gestate babies and live on other people's dimes. 

And as far as her criticism that AVFM has done NOTHING to help men, I'll just leave these names here: Joel Kirk, Vladik Filler, Gordon Smith. And I'd remind her where the $5000 of seed money she received for the Earl Silverman Center (a man who'd be spinning in his grave over her recent bahavior and her usurping of his name, holy shit) came from. Her criticism that I'm doing nothing to help men? Ask Tom Matty--$5600 in 24 hours from the very generous folks who subscribe to my channel (thank you all so much).

Aaaaaaaaaaanyway, they just uploaded their 5th video in the series, so I figured I'd go see if there was anything they could talk about that wasn't me. HA! It's not even a minute long--nothing but a marked up screencap of a comment exchange I had on reddit, where someone asks what my education and credentials are, and WBB's added notation, "Funny how she never answers this."

Well, this conversation happened a month ago, so I didn't recall the specifics, but knowing the kind of person I am (someone who would have answered honestly) and knowing the kind of person WBB is (someone who likes to quote-mine to make her opponents look like douchebags), I scrolled ALL the way back in my comment history on reddit to a month ago, then scoured through them looking for the comment.

And wouldn't you know it? I didn't bother answering the commenter's question, because when I returned to the conversation, I noticed that they already knew the answer. And knew it, evidently, before they even asked the question: 

Imagine, someone as "intellectually honest" and who cares so much about FACTS and calling out BULLSHIT as the Wooly Bumblebee not showing you that! Honestly, this is getting retarded. 

Incidentally, one of the most interesting little coincidences in this entire thing is that after listening to a lengthy diatribe on how I have no post-secondary education and therefore am not S.M.R.T (as Homer Simpson likes to say), I happened to be listening to a CBC radio interview with someone representing Guild Software. This transgendered woman who is Stanford educated in neuroscience said that Google, after intensive internal research into the markers of excellent employees, concluded that the quality of the school an employee attended, or even whether they were credentialed at all, was no indication of how talented and effective they would be. In fact, what this woman described as "degree-seeking" was negatively correlated with the positive value of an employee because it indicates a need for external validation rather than an inner passion and drive, and an employer was better served looking primarily at "what code have you written?" when choosing new hires. 

I'm not raising this issue because of what reflection this may have on me, as someone who is not credentialed. The reason I raise it is that despite 10 years of state-subsidized education and four degrees, Kristina Hansen's accomplishments include 1) following her hind-brain into the weeds to her own self-destruction, 2) being a rabid joiner with little follow-through, as evidenced by A Voice for Boys, 3) whining about people who she claims "do nothing" a month after they handed her $5000, 4) alienating three quarters of the people she claimed she was serving, 5) squeezing out babies, 6) collecting child support and social welfare despite having milked the system for god knows how many degrees between her and her husband, and 7) throwing public temper tantrums because no one appreciates her. 

Money well spent, by all measures. Let's pay people to get educated so we can pay them to sit on their asses and generate more burdens on society. Again, I'm so glad to know I helped pay for those four degrees she's using to sit in a lawn chair and gestate a fifth fetus with. A fifth child who makes me weep for the future of humanity, because regardless of whether you're a biological determinist/reductionist or whether you think it's all environment, you have to admit those are five fucked up kids about to be unleashed on the world.

And now, in another coincidence arriving as if by divine intervention, a notable and award-winning documentary film production company has decided to make a film about the MRM and AVFM. Oh, if only, Kristina. If only you'd just kept your mouth shut long enough and kept a lid on your personality disorder batshit fucknuttery [EDIT: Kristina has taken issue with me using the term personality disorder, as this is a psychiatric diagnosis that has not been applied to her. In the interests of accuracy, I have amended this wording in such as way as to avoid implications of a clinical diagnosis, but which still conveys my intended meaning. Thank you], you could have been one of the people interviewed for that. A shame, since everything you've demonstrated so far about what you're all about has been about promoting yourself to acquire external validation, and lashing out at people who don't give you what you're after. 

Poor Wooly. You could have been famous, if only you'd just waited it out. 

Kristina, I just want to say, I avoided raising my concerns with Paul primarily because it might have been construed as me being catty--me being one of those women only concerned with monopolizing male attention and being top dogette. Given how quickly he promoted you, I figured he was smitten and would be even more prone to draw that conclusion if a shopworn old bird like me raised concerns. And I wasn't interested in turning anything into a cat-fight over market share over this movement's mostly male cheerleaders. 

And however much power you seem to think I have over AVFM (given your statements to that effect), and how much practical power I might actually have (given my reach), I choose not to involve myself in the inner workings of AVFM, and always have. Paul has actually made more decisions based on your counsel than on mine, because I would never think to tell someone how to run their own goddamn website. Even when they hire sociopathic, toxic, abusive people like you.

You've gone off the reservation, Kristina. You're operating on emotion. In fact, I don't know that there's any other way that you can operate. And whatever your actual motivations, I can tell you what it looks like to outsiders and disinterested parties: it looks like you're the misfit attacking the popular girl for getting more attention than you. It looks like you're grinding a man (AVFM) into the dirt because you were scorned by him. You're living up to every single goddamn negative stereotype of women out there, which is all the more ironic considering your constant NAFALTing to MGTOWs. 

You are the female nature that drives feminism, even if you're not a feminist, even if you hate the ideology or what it's done to something you care about (atheism). Because when it comes to what it's done for you? You're all there. Anything that will benefit you, even if it comes at the expense (or destruction) of others, you're in. Not just in, but all-in. Even as your subscribers abandon you, even as people who used to be sympathetic to your position abandon you. You'll scream you're right until your dying breath. 

You blocked me from your channel before uploading those videos either because you wanted the attention a video response from me would get you, or you wanted free rein to attack me without any rebuttal. You wanted me to seriously engage or be silent. And I didn't bother engaging, until video #5 was uploaded, obsessing entirely about me, with nothing resembling a concrete argument, nothing defensible and nothing remotely honest. 

I resent having to address this, the way I resent having to tolerate another person's screaming infant at the next table in a restaurant. I really did not want to get into this with you, but you've left me no choice. You've got one giant hard-on for me. Given my looks, how could blame you? :P

Bu there is no way you can win. And it's not even a you vs me thing. There is no possible way you can salvage yourself from the situation you've orchestrated by continuing to engage. Your credibility in both of the communities you called your own is virtually gone. I'm just the person burdened with the task of telling you.

My advice to you is to step back and let things rest for a while. You haven't demolished your credibility completely yet. There are still positive things you could do with that $5000 you got from AVFM's readers, which I'm sure they'll be eager to keep closer tabs on now. There is still a chance that you could redeem yourself for the memory of Earl Silverman. But if you keep this up--attacking people and then escalating when they criticize you--you're only going to dig your own grave. 

Your involvement with the MRM, and this petty, childish display, is even costing you your credibility among atheists. Fuck sake, let it rest.

If you have any coherent arguments against ideologies, then make them. Make them logical and back them up with evidence. It's not enough to say, "it's a bullshit ideology". It's not enough to shout, "Ayn Rand was a racist, and so are you because you follow her!" to people who don't even follow Ayn Rand. It's not enough to say, "I'll address that in another video," and then upload a video with quote-mines taken out of context. 

Good grief, get a grip on yourself. As I said in one of my comments before you blocked me, I'm embarrassed for you. Stop acting like a toddler and show some self-control.

And for any of my subscribers or followers, if there are any concerns raised in WBB's videos that you'd like me to address, please PM me and I'll deal with them. But at this point, I'm done. I'm not going to address WBB or her apparently brain-damaged husband's criticisms concerning, "Waitresses can know things!" any further.

Edited to add:

Annnnnd here she is insinuating that I have made some claim to being an academic. While I do describe myself as a gender theorist (considering that I analyse, and theorize about, gender, and considering the title is no more exclusive or protected by some accrediting or licensing body than, say, "feminist" or even "therapist"), I would challenge anyone to find any statement of mine where I have ever described myself as an academic.

Kristina Hansen, professional "bullshit caller", calling out all the lies that exist in her very own imagination. Good grief.

Happy father's day

I have to leave for work in half an hour, to serve ribs and steak to all the fortunate fathers out there whose loved ones are treating them on their one day a year. This is an especially hopeful father's day for me, considering how well the fundraising efforts for Tom Matty's appeal on the grounds of institutional bias went (thanks so much again to everyone who donated).

My own father, who is trekking around NY right now with his cell phone turned off to avoid roaming charges, is one of the most amazing people in my life, I love him dearly, and wish I could wish him the best of the day in person. Here's hoping the text I sent to my luddite mother to relay to him didn't make her hair turn whiter than it already is (she's completely oblivious to how texting works, and the chime probably threw her for a loop).

Love you, dad. Happy father's day. And for all the other dad's out there, I wish you all the best.