Waco II

It looks like something might be more than a little awry in the investigation of the Waco shootings that took place last month:

Four weeks after the deadly May 17th shooting incident outside a Waco Twin Peaks restaurant, more details have come out concerning the incident, but significant questions still remain about the actions taken by law enforcement and the police’s account of what transpired.

Although the national mainstream media has largely moved on from the Waco story, if critics of the police are correct, the incident represents an unprecedented civil rights violation and media cover-up campaign by the Waco authorities.

Police in Waco still have yet to state how many bikers, if any, were killed by the police, or to explain why the police showed up in force at all prior to the meeting on May 17th.

In a statement on Friday, the police said that of 16 officers that were in the parking lot, only three fired a total of 12 shots.  However, the statement still didn’t clarify how many of the bikers were killed by police. Authorities say they have not recieved final autopsy results that would clarify ballistics….

The Morning News piece quotes friends of Kirschner who praise him as a
gentle family man, but also includes a quote from “Lori,” a friend of
Kirschner, who echoed some of the rumors swirling as more doubts are
raised about the police account of the Twin Peaks incident.

In fact, Lori said, the biker community is rife with
reports about witnesses who heard the discharge of lots of high-powered
weaponry after a few initial pop-pop sounds of handguns. The reports
sounded like they came from “muzzled or suppressed high-powered
weapons,” said Lori, though she wasn’t there. The theory is that the
heavy fire came from tactical police officers.

I don’t believe the police version for one very simple reason: police are usually a) trigger-happy, and b) terrible shots. In one incident in Minneapolis, police fired 41 shots at a man in the skyway – which means absolutely no cover at all – and somehow managed to score zero hits.

The key is probably to be found in the statement “of 16 officers that were in the parking lot”. Fine, setting aside one’s skepticism that three police opening fire would only pull the trigger an average of four times each, there were a lot more than 16 police officers on the scene who were not in the parking lot. How many shots did the rest of them fire?

We Are Real People

Tor Books author John Wright repeats the call:

I have received more messages, publicly and privately, from fans who
enjoy and buy my works but who, deeply offended at at least four,
perhaps more, of the ranking officers of my publisher, have told me they
can no longer buy my works.

This is unprecedented, or, I should
say, at least I have never heard of readers disavowing books based not
on the content or author, but the publisher. Some have likewise written to Tor books to express their displeasure at this high handed and unprofessional treatment.

However, the latest slander issued from the enemy is that these readers do not exist.

They
are trying to blank you out of their minds. You are unpersons. The
claim is that the emails and letters sent to Tor expressing the
displeasure of the customer are said to be faked, counterfeit, written
by robots.

As does Peter Grant:

I’m sure you’ve been reading my posts about the Tor debacle over the past days.  It’s time for action, and I’d be very grateful if each of you would please help by sending one e-mail separately to three different addresses tomorrow.

Vox Day came up with the idea.  Note that I’m not one of his ‘Rabid
Puppies’ or ‘minions’.  I’ll simply take allies where I can get them,
thank you very much!  I’m aware that some SJW’s regard him as being in
league with the Devil.  To that I can only make common cause with
Winston Churchill:  “If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”  So, Vox, this is my best Churchillian imitation!

As does Tor Books author L. Jagi Lamplighter:

Appalled to see posts suggesting that the emails to Tor—many of which, I am led to understand, are arriving with photos of the reader’s Tor book collections, in some cases, collections worth thousands of dollars—were not legitimate but were sent from automated bots.

Tor Folks:  You may disagree with the Sad/Rabid Puppies, or feel loyalty to your co-workers—but please! Don’t insult our readers by claiming they don’t exist!

Readers:  I realize that, in the age of electronics,this is an unprecedented request, but: if you have a strong opinion that you wish to be heard, it might help if you committed it to physical paper—perhaps along with a printout of your photo of your Tor book collection—and snail mailed it to Tor and Macmillan.

Meanwhile, George Martin demonstrates the truth of the aphorism: “SJWs always lie”:

I have spoken out against name-calling from the first, Brad. It is the
Puppies and their supporters who started it, and who keep dialing it up.
I will concede that you yourself have been mostly civil, but read the
comments in your own blog, or Correia’s, or even on FILE 770, and it is
all venom and epithets.

No, Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Patrick Nielsen Hayden started the name-calling back in March 2005. Martin then goes on to do more of what SJWs always do, which, of course, is lie:

The vast majority of customers have no idea about any of this. The
“unhappiness” here is a campaign orchestrated by the odious Mr. Beale,
and once again you Sad Puppies have lined up behind the Rabids. Early in
this debate, I heard a lot of stuff from your side about careers being
threatened and your opponents saying “you will never work in this town
again” and similar crap. Not one instance of that was ever
substantiated. But now we are seeing a deliberate internet campaign to
cost someone their career — and it is coming from VD, with the full
howling support of Puppies of all stripes. No one on “my side” ever threatened anyone’s livelihood or career. Your side is doing just that. In public.

Emphasis added. That’s an absolutely absurd lie. Look at the post below for starters. Or look at this list of victims of the ongoing SJW witch patrol. And even if we limit Martin’s claim to the small world of science fiction publishing, Charles Stross warned me that I’d somehow managed to unwittingly make “a career-limiting move” by writing an opinion column as a nationally syndicated opinion columnist ten years ago. Martin is not telling the truth. Look, we all know that if Irene Gallo had called Tor’s customers “half-savages” or “hymies” or “faggots” instead of “racist, sexist, homophobic neo-Nazis”, she’d have been disappeared that same day. Are some customers less equal than others in the eyes of Tor Books? Are they less valued?

Note that we’ve seen a Nobel laureate and a principal in Florida banished from the commons in just the two weeks since Ms Gallo’s public attack on Tor customers and Tor authors was first brought to Mr. Doherty’s attention. George Martin’s side has been waging war against people’s livelihoods and careers for years, if not decades. And his side knows it. Hence this little warning ten years ago:

“The people who live and work and pitch their tents in this field have long memories. You’ll have to share the same field with them for a long time — decades, maybe — if you want to be in it at all. And you’ve just offended 75% of them? This is Not Clever. You may not need them now, but you have no idea what your circumstances will look like in ten years’ time…. In a corporate environment it’s sometimes termed a career-limiting move. I think you just made a career-limiting move.”
– Charles Stross, March 5, 2005

In any event, the increased hysteria from the other side means that they know the pressure on Tor Books is growing, from above and from below. Their position is totally indefensible and they know it. So have you sent your three emails yet today? If not, why are you still reading this? If you oppose what you’ve been seeing, then it’s time to get out of the stands and get in the game. It’s time to tell Macmillan that you are a real person and your opinion counts.

  1. tom.dohertyATtor.com
  2. andrew.weberATmacmillan.com
  3. rhonda.brownATmacmillan.com 

So much for that theory that there is no other side. Not only has this nonexistent other side, as per Mr. Martin, never done nothing to nobody, but they’re emailing Tor Books and Macmillan too. Because they are also real people who do “not want the community to
reflect the views of Theodore Beale and his rabid puppies.” Of course, they’re missing the central point, which is that it is not the job of anyone at Tor Books to play thought-police and eliminate those views from the community.

      Downfall of a Nobel Laureate

      Sir Tim Hunt and his wife describe how the SJW witch patrol suckered and burned him:

      As jokes go, Sir Tim Hunt’s brief standup routine about women in science last week must rank as one of the worst acts of academic self-harm in history. As he reveals to the Observer, reaction to his remarks about the alleged lachrymose tendencies of female researchers has virtually finished off the 72-year-old Nobel laureate’s career as a senior scientific adviser.

      What he said was wrong, he acknowledges, but the price he and his wife have had to pay for his mistakes has been extreme and unfair. “I have been hung out to dry,” says Hunt.

      His wife, Professor Mary Collins, one of Britain’s most senior immunologists, is similarly indignant. She believes that University College London – where both scientists had posts – has acted in “an utterly unacceptable” way in pressuring both researchers and in failing to support their causes. Certainly the speed of the dispatch of Hunt – who won the 2001 Nobel
      prize in physiology for his work on cell division – from his various
      academic posts is startling….

      “I was told by a senior that Tim had to resign immediately or be sacked – though I was told it would be treated as a low-key affair. Tim duly emailed his resignation when he got home. The university promptly announced his resignation on its website and started tweeting that they had got rid of him. Essentially, they had hung both of us out to dry. They certainly did not treat it as a low-key affair. I got no warning about the announcement and no offer of help, even though I have worked there for nearly 20 years. It has done me lasting damage. What they did was unacceptable.”

      The story appeared in newspapers round the world under headlines that said that Hunt had been sacked by UCL for sexism. Worse was to follow. The European Research Council (ERC) – Hunt served on its science committee – decided to force him to stand down in view of his resignation from UCL….

      Hunt is under no illusions about the consequences. “I am finished,” he
      says. “I had hoped to do a lot more to help promote science in this
      country and in Europe, but I cannot see how that can happen. I have
      become toxic. I have been hung to dry by academic institutes who have
      not even bothered to ask me for my side of affairs.”

      Hunt’s crime? He said this: “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry.”

      I wonder what would have happened if he said the women who worked in his lab were racist neo-Nazis who produced bad-to-reprehensible work?

      Of course, Hunt made two grievous errors. His first error: he apologized when he hadn’t actually done anything wrong. Unlike Irene Gallo, there was nothing wrong with what he said. It was a joke. And it was a joke based on the reality of his long experience. Sure, it was probably a foolish one to make in today’s hyperpoliticized environment, but Dr. Hunt presumably thought that his Nobel Prize and his standing in the field of science would be sufficient to protect him. He was wrong. His second error: he resigned. The university couldn’t possibly have fired him for what he said, but the SJWs lied to his wife and convinced her to convince him to make it easy for them.

      Now contrast this incident with the Gallo affair. Irene Gallo neither apologized for her indefensible statements nor recanted them. She has not resigned. And, unlike the unfortunate Dr. Hunt, she has given her employer more than sufficient reason to fire her for cause.

      Locking and loading

      Given the false defense presently being offered by Tor’s senior executives, which is that they are not being contacted by large numbers of unhappy science fiction readers but are instead being spammed by a bot-net at my disposal, their response to a prospective boycott is entirely predictable. If Macmillan does not act on the basis of the considerable evidence it will have acquired by now and we find it necessary to proceed to the boycott that Peter Grant and others have contemplated, Tor’s senior executives will undoubtedly claim that those threatening a boycott are not customers of Tor Books.

      There is, of course, an easy way to anticipate and disprove their expected lies.

      As you can see in the photo to the left, I currently have 38 hardcovers and 15 paperbacks published by Tor Books that retail for a cumulative $1,019.64. Some of them were sent to me by Tor, many of them were bought by me. This does not count any of the Tor ebooks that I have purchased, or any of the many Tor paperbacks I got rid of in a move some years ago, which I recall included at least six Wheel of Time books and a number of Orson Scott Card novels, among others. I figure that I would be wise to not lay claim to have had any books that I cannot prove I presently possess, but I estimate that I have probably spent an additional $500 more on Tor books than I can demonstrate today. As it happens, I have been a Tor Books customer since 1986, when I was still in high school and I bought a copy of Isaac Asimov’s The Edge of Tomorrow from B. Dalton’s. I still have it; you can see it third from the bottom on the right.

      I can’t pretend to be a Tor Books fanboy. In rooting through my collection, I learned that I appear to harbor a very strong predilection for Del Rey, as I have more than 1,000 Del Rey books. But I have probably bought more than 100 books from Tor Books over the years, which should suffice to demonstrate that something happened at some point in time to turn me against the organization. If you look closely at the titles, you will be able to discern that the newest copyright date on any of the books is 2005. I wonder what might have happened in 2005 to turn a loyal customer of 19 years standing against Tor Books and its editors?

      If you happen to own any Tor books, I recommend that you gather them together and take a similar picture. Then add up their total retail value. Go through your Amazon account and list how many Tor ebooks you have purchased, calculate the total retail value, and then add the print and Kindle totals together. And do it now, so that you’ll have everything prepared to preemptively counteract the likely lies of Tor’s SJWs if events proceed in the way that some are anticipating.

      UPDATE: Tor Books author Mary Robinette Kowal tempts fate on Twitter:

      Mary Robinette Kowal
      ‏ @RizziWorld @ClaireRousseau @jimchines @torbooks Fair enough. I do want to be fair here and say that I have inside info. She won’t be fired.
      5:20 PM – 10 Jun 2015

      Mary Robinette Kowal
      ‏ @RizziWorld How about this. If they fire Irene, I will return the advances on my next two books and pull them.
      7:23 AM – 14 Jun 2015

      It would be more efficient

      It’s a sad day when the parodies are more sensible than the actual policies:

      Recognizing the need for a new strategy to fight ISIS, the Pentagon announced today that it would no longer supply the Iraqi Army with American vehicles, artillery and rifles, and instead would supply materiel directly to ISIS.

      CENTCOM spokesman Air Force Col. Patrick Ryder says the idea “would be a game changer.”

      The plan has its roots in Army Capt. Noel Abelove’s PowerPoint briefing, which was hailed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sources said. Abelove, a supply officer on the Joint Logistics Staff (J-4), realized that cutting out the Iraqi Army middlemen had numerous advantages.

      “They taught me at West Point that ‘amateurs talk strategy but professionals talk logistics,’” Abelove told reporters. “The most important advantage is, we only supply about 40 percent of each ISIS requisition.”

      Abelove continued: “Before, when we gave the [Iraqi] Army 100 percent, then we had to fly strike missions to destroy a lot of it a week or two later. This way we immediately degrade ISIS by over 60 percent, without having to use our increasingly scarce missiles and JDAMs, and more importantly, without having to put any airmen into harm’s way.”

      Other sources indicate that supplying ISIS also reduces the risk of sensitive equipment being passed to Iran by Shiite commanders in the Iraqi Army, or being sold on Craigslist.

      “A lot of these guys were piling a lot of cash into banks in Qatar and the Caymans,” according to an analyst who requested anonymity. “Well, screw that. ISIS will literally burn anyone selling our gear.”

      Counterinsurgency is difficult enough in the best of circumstances. But it’s even harder when you’re stupid. And that’s the best case scenario. Worst case, “my Muslim faith” wasn’t the inadvertent slip of the tongue everyone, including the interviewer who had to catch and correct him, assumed it to have been.

      The outrage is not manufactured

      Peter Grant hears from a second Tor employee:

      It appears that there’s immense anger and bitterness among some senior personnel at Tor.  They reportedly believe the current backlash against that company is basically ‘manufactured outrage’, deliberately stirred up by Vox Day (whose name is allegedly an expletive there now).  Some have even asserted that the thousands of e-mails complaining about Irene Gallo’s statement aren’t genuine, but the product of a bot-net, a manufactured wave of pseudo-indignation that has no foundation in reality.  Apparently Macmillan and others involved aren’t so sure about that, but it’s a defense the SJW’s are using with might and main.  It’s also apparently why almost none of us have had any acknowledgment of our complaints, not even a notification that our e-mails have been received.  (Some correspondents who requested confirmation when their e-mails were opened have received it;  others have not.)

      A major cause of the bitterness among the senior SJW’s at Tor is that Macmillan is allegedly taking a much greater role in formulating Tor’s policies and enforcing adherence to them.  The company is said to have a new social media policy that’s been described as ‘Draconian’, and individuals have allegedly been warned that any further violations will be a terminally bad idea, career-wise….

      They’re worried about their own futures.  They say that any serious
      boycott of Tor will have very damaging effects, very quickly, because
      the company’s margins are not good.

      What the people at Tor don’t understand is that this is not merely a backlash of momentary outrage at a few recent actions by Tor’s senior SJWs. This is an expression of righteous fury for the way in which thousands of us have been routinely deprecated, insulted, denigrated, and marginalized by a very small group of individuals who believe they have the right and the duty to thought-police the world of science fiction and banish badthinkers from it.

      They have been the gatekeepers and they have abused their positions in the most shameless and unprofessional of ways. I may have been the chief target of their leader, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, but only because I happened to be a) the most visible, being a nationally syndicated libertarian op/ed columnist, b) the most irritating, being a published science fiction novelist and professional SFWA colleague, and c) the most stubborn. They despised conservatives and Republicans who don’t publish science fiction novels every bit as much as they despised me.

      But none of those people ever had a means of striking back at the people at Tor Books who were raining contempt on them at every given opportunity before. All I have done is provide tens of thousands of people with an opportunity to hit back at the very small number of individuals they know to hate and despise them. The outrage is not manufactured, it is merely directed. I can’t make people angry at Tor Books because they already are.

      So, now it is time to demonstrate that we are not bots. Now it is time to let Macmillan know that we truly exist and we do NOT approve of the senior SJWs at Tor Books who have been publicly attacking us for more than a decade.

      It is time to prove to Macmillan that the senior SJWs at Tor are lying to them by sending ONE email apiece to the following people on MONDAY morning. (Emphasis added as a result of already seeing emails in my inbox.) Send the emails separately, do not CC them or send out one email to the three email addresses at the same time. The point is to make it clear that you are NOT a bot, you are a human being, and therefore the people at Tor Books are lying to their superiors at Macmillan.

      1. tom.dohertyATtor.com
      2. andrew.weberATmacmillan.com
      3. rhonda.brownATmacmillan.com

      The three emails should be short, straightforward, polite, and respectful. It should have I AM A REAL PERSON in the subject, CC voxdayATgmail.com, and address the following points:

      • I am a real person and not a bot.
      • I do not approve of the behavior of the senior people at Tor Books, specifically Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Moshe Feder, and Irene Gallo.
      • I am requesting you to require Irene Gallo to resign from her positions at Tor Books and Tor.com as a consequence of her egregiously unprofessional public attack on science fiction readers and writers.
      • I request a response to confirm that my email has been received and read.

      Something to that effect, anyway. There is no need to mention any possibility of a boycott, tell them how many books you buy in a year, or anything else. The people at Macmillan are smart, they are professional, and they know what is at stake. What they do not know is something we are going to have to demonstrate to them: SJWs always lie.

      There is no bot-net. No one is spamming them. The wave of indignation is not manufactured and the indignation is not pseudo. Patrick Nielsen Hayden and the others are lying to them. What I would encourage the executives at Macmillan to ask themselves are these two questions:

      1. WHY has Vox Day deliberately taken advantage of this mass hostility towards the senior people at Tor Books? 
      2. WHO has put Macmillan in this situation?

      Am I a complete lunatic who, after 19 years of being an unassuming customer of Tor Books, suddenly developed an irrational hatred for Tom Doherty, a man who is by all accounts a very nice and decent guy? Or is absolutely everything I have said completely true and readily verifiable, and I have been the subject of unprovoked, unprofessional, ideologically-driven public attacks by Tor’s senior employees for more than ten years?

      Why not talk to the people at Pocket Books, at Simon & Schuster, at Random House, at Regnery, at BenBella Books, at Thomas Nelson, and at WND Books who know me? Ask them if they have ever had any problem whatsoever with me. Ask them if I have ever been less than entirely professional in my relations with them. And then ask yourselves why I am so uniquely and implacably hostile to a single publishing house with which I have never had any professional contact, to which I have never so much as submitted a single short story.

      And then I would also encourage the executives at Macmillan to ask themselves why thousands of people are so ready and willing to be stirred up into action against Tor Books and not against DAW, Del Rey, Orbit, Gollancz, Pocket Books, Random House, Golden Gryphon, or any other publishing house in the genre. What is it about Tor Books that causes so many people to regard it as an enemy?

      I’ll give them a hint. The answer starts with “P”.

      Unequally gifted

      It’s a real mystery. What a shame that the teachers in Sarasota and Manatee Counties are so racist:

      Only one in 50 black students and one in 15 Hispanic students are identified as gifted, compared with about one in seven white students. Overall, Sarasota County has the fourth-lowest rate of black students identified as gifted in the state, behind the less populated Martin, St. Johns and Wakulla counties.

      The picture is similar in Manatee County, where about one in 12 white students are singled out as gifted, compared with one of every 42 black students and one in 32 Hispanic students.

      Perhaps they should consider taking action to affirm that black students and Hispanic students are every bit as gifted as white students. Surely assigning more black and Hispanic students to the gifted courses will prove that those students are every bit as capable of excelling in those courses as the white students who test into them.

      I mean, there can’t possibly be any other explanation than teacher racism for this otherwise inexplicable racial gap.

      Wait, I have a better idea! Why not quiz the gifted white students to determine how many of them are transracial. After all, we know that 10 percent of all people are transracial, so correcting for transrace should go a long way towards addressing this dreadful inequality.

      Phil Sandifer explains the PhD lottery

      And why it is best avoided. Let it not be said that the man has never written anything sensible:

      At the end of my last class of the semester, one of my best students – one who, out of some tragically misguided instinct, actually took a class with me a second time because he enjoyed it – came up to tell me that he’d had a good semester but didn’t think he was going to re-enroll next semester. I asked why, and he explained that he had a job lined up in the family business and just couldn’t justify the loans.

      Years of defending academia and the value of a college education reared up inside of me, ready to make an impassioned speech. I wanted to tell him not to. And… I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Because he was right. I could not in good conscience tell one of my best students that it was worth the loans. And in hindsight, that was the moment I decided I was well and truly done with academia.

      I had been going to take one last stab at the job market this fall. With the Flood book done and maybe one or two more articles in process, and maybe even a book deal on an edited version of my dissertation. Just to answer the question, one last time, of whether I could make it in academia.

      Which is, as it happens, terribly silly. Academia is not a meritocracy. It’s a lottery, in which the grand prize – a tenure track position – is dangled over the heads of everybody so that we agree to work for the appalling wages that adjunct faculty get…. Meanwhile, the odds on tenure track appointments are astonishingly grim. It’s not unusual for a job to get five hundred applicants. There were, last year, maybe two dozen jobs in my field.

      This lack of employability also tends to explain why educated SJWs have so much time to comment so prolifically at File 770 and elsewhere.

      I find it very interesting that both Dr. Sandifer and I have reached precisely the same conclusion about higher education, despite our vastly different perspectives. Then again, we probably have very different ideas about the solution, as his likely involves increasing the demand whereas mine would involve eliminating the larger portion of the supply.

      In any case, the best way to be done with academia is to avoid starting with it unless it is necessary for your job.

      Bokhari on the Tor debacle

      Allum Bohkari draws some interesting conclusions from Tom Doherty’s statement last week:

      Doherty also affirmed one of the Sad Puppies core principles: that sci-fi and fantasy publishers should neither promote nor exclude any particular political worldview.

          We seek out and publish a diverse and wide ranging group of books. We are in the business of finding great stories and promoting literature and are not about promoting a political agenda

      That may sound uncontroversial, but prior to the Sad Puppies, it was a principle that was under genuine threat, with astonishing reports of political intolerance to non-progressive authors at sci-fi conventions. Doherty’s blunt affirmation that Tor is in the business of publishing good authors, not politically homogeneous authors, is therefore important.

      For the left-wing authoritarians of sci-fi, who previously seemed able to exclude whoever they want from the community, Doherty’s words came as a serious setback. Tor Books was once perceived to be in the grip of hard-line progressives and identity warriors, but now some angry social justice warriors are even threatening to boycott the company.

      Naturally, Gawker was also upset.

      But such opinions represent an ever-dwindling minority. Everywhere we look, the authoritarian left is on the retreat. As I predicted in January, a chorus of liberal voices has risen to condemn their behaviour. On social media, in tech and on the campus, ostensibly liberal and left-leaning commentators are busy condemning the extremists of their own tribe.

      Meanwhile, campaigns like GamerGate and the Sad Puppies are routing them in the culture wars. As in so many other cultural arenas, the SJWs of sci-fi are long past their heyday. And much of that decline can be attributed to the Sad Puppies themselves.

      We are admittedly making some minor, if encouraging, dents in the ongoing SJW onslaught. But while we should be encouraged, we should not be complacent or think that what we have accomplished will not be undone in a heartbeat if we stop paying attention and slip back into pushover mode.

      And while it’s great to see the Publisher at the largest SF/F publishing house disavowing the SJW thought-policing in which some of Tor’s editors have engaged for the last decade or more, that doesn’t mean that he is absolved of the need to get his house in order. I have heard, from different sources this time, that Tor Books is very much concerned about the prospect of a boycott, particularly one that is supported by SF/F authors.

      Which is interesting, because so far they have been unwilling to do the one thing that will end the matter. Indeed, Tor Books appears to have decided to stand by the broad spectrum insults of its Creative Director and its Associate Publisher. So, let’s see what Macmillan will do. And if they won’t do anything either, well, at least we will know that we gave them every chance to avoid what they apparently wish to avoid.

      The key to Tor’s intransigence is their belief that the “thousands of emails” they have received are from “bots”. This is the same narrative #GamerGate has encountered to attempt to minimize its numbers. Therefore, we will need to find a way to demonstrate to Macmillan that those “thousands of emails” represent “thousands of bookbuyers”.

      UPDATE: Aaron and JJ at File 770 are convinced that we don’t matter.

      I don’t think the Puppies realize that they could boycott Tor and Macmillan forever and neither of the companies would ever notice.

      Yeah, I was laughing so hard at the comments on the Tor Gallo post that I was almost in tears. The idea that the Puppies (who for the most part, are not huge Tor book-buyers, anyway) think that they are a large enough group to be of any importance to a large publisher — well, it makes me feel a bit sorry for them when they find out that their perceived reality of grandeur is, in fact, merely a delusion of grandeur.

      Perhaps not. Although I note that no one at Tor Books appears to be laughing; they even seem to believe they have suffered huge damage to their reputation. Regardless, there is only one way to find out.

      UPDATE 2: Then again, perhaps the companies have already noticed. There may be more going on than meets the public eye. Peter Grant has heard from someone at Tor:

      Let’s just say that if the information provided so far is correct, there appears to be a fair amount of sturm und drang in Tor’s upper echelons right now, and things are being shaken up to a considerable degree.

      Tor Books and the terror bots

      I have no idea how legit this is, but it was posted on Reddit today by someone claiming to be a Tor employee:

      Tor
      employee here: We stand by her too. Legal reacted to terrorist tactics
      of the Puppies (who created bots and have sent thousands of threatening
      emails to various people in the company) and, without stopping to speak
      to anyone else in Tor who damn well better understood the Puppies and
      the broader situation, made that statement from Tom go up. What people
      read was a draft that hadn’t been vetted by anyone and Tom was horrified
      when it went public. The internal handling of this situation has been
      deplorable and the community should know that Tor employees are very,
      VERY angry at how a respected coworker was publicly dressed down in this
      manor.

      Our reputation is heavily damaged and both sides
      of the aisle have lost faith in us as a company. As for fallout within
      the company? Other than a lot of upset employees, loss of faith in the
      corporate culture, and a shiny new Social Media Policy; very little. No
      one is going to get fired.

      Fascinating. So, let’s examine the claims to determine how credible this is:

      1. The Puppies are using “terroristic tactics”. That’s false.
      2. The Puppies have created bots and sent “thousands of threatening emails”. That sounds like a variant of the old “#GamerGate is just 200 people” narrative that everyone in GG knows to be false. We’re expecting 100 for GGinParis alone. In any event, it means that if you have sent an email to Tor Books or Macmillan, you had better send another one with proof that you are not a bot. And “thousands” of emails? I know people are pissed off, but I find that hard to believe. Dozens, definitely. Hundreds, maybe. But thousands? No. And I very much doubt the emails were threatening anyone either.
      3. Tom Doherty didn’t write the statement from Tom Doherty. That’s a fascinating claim. Doubtful. If he was angry about it, why did he leave it up?
      4. Tor’s reputation is heavily damaged. All right, that’s true enough.
      5. No one is going to get fired. If that’s true, then I will publicly endorse the boycott of Tor that many have been urging. However, given the nature of the previous statements, we should probably get confirmation before taking any such action.

      If Tor Books is foolish enough to follow the lead of its editors and double-down, I expect they will soon learn that is a tremendous mistake. If they thought their reputation was “heavily damaged” by Irene Gallo’s comments about Tor’s authors and customers, how much more will it be damaged by officially endorsing them through a refusal to hold her responsible for them? I suppose there is only one way to find out.

      That being said, don’t forget, one very important thing: SJW’s always lie. This may not even be from a Tor employee. It could be nothing but fantasy. So take this supposed leak with a grain of salt and don’t overreact to it.

      UPDATE: The purported Tor employee expands upon her statement:

      [Tom Doherty] is an 80 year old man who “doesn’t get social media” and responded to a carefully crafted attack by Vox Day who manipulated a situation that resulted in some of Tom’s oldest friends and most established authors calling him, personally enraged, by what “they saw on them there internets being said by one of his lady workers.” Tom responded exactly how Vox Day wanted him to because he made the bad decision to not pause for a moment and ask other members of his team for their advice. THAT was his error, rather than inherently being racist, homophobic, or greedy (he is none of those things, I know him personally). 

      Except she previously said that Tom Doherty didn’t respond at all, that it was Legal that reacted. This description is incoherent and somewhat self-contradictory. If Doherty wrote the draft letter and he “doesn’t get social media”, how did it end up posted on Tor.com without being vetted by anyone? If Legal reacted, how were they not involved in the vetting? Does Doherty actually endorse Gallo’s opinions of Tor’s authors and customers despite having disavowed those opinions in the draft that he a) personally wrote or b) never saw?

      This Tor employee makes Tor Books sound even less professional and more haplessly dysfunctional than I’d imagined. If I were the Macmillan CEO, I’d clean house. It sounds like Tor Books needs it even more than Tor UK did.