Tag: SJW

So very unconcerned

The First Law of the Social Justice Warrior: SJWs always lie.

The Second Law of the Social Justice Warrior: SJWs always double down.

As you’d expect, both of these things are seriously in effect in the Gallo affair. The latest SJW incoherence is this:

  1. Mocking the prospective boycott of Tor Books as being numerically trivial and ineffective.
  2. Declaring that they are buying books published by Tor Books today in order to preemptively counteract the effects of that trivial and ineffective boycott.

Based on their actions, the SJWs are just a little more concerned about it than they affect. Quelle surprise. The fact is that I don’t know how effective a boycott of Tor Books will be. I don’t know if it will inspire Macmillan to actually pay attention to the unprofessional behavior of the senior employees at their subsidiary. The point is that I am simply not going to support an organization that employs an individual who so openly hates me, my readers, and various authors that I support, and who publicly lies about us.

The organization is certainly free to ignore me and continue to not sell books to me. The organization is absolutely free to employ anyone they like, including ludicrously unprofessional people who can’t even bother to disguise their hatred for all of their customers to the right of Bernie Sanders. I can’t dictate anyone’s actions but my own.

Even so, it appears there are either an awful lot of people who are interested in my actions today or just a few SJWs who are concerned enough to launch a DDOS attack to try to disrupt the anticipated announcement this afternoon. This is a screen shot of the current Sitemeter traffic at VP as of 10:15 AM this morning. I suppose it could be a Sitemeter bug, but I find the timing rather suspicious, especially considering that AG’s sitemeter is operating normally and the Google traffic is indicating normal traffic of between 45-50k pageviews today. My guess is that it’s an attack being deflected by Google somewhere between Sitemeter picking it up and it interfering with Blogger’s operations. But regardless, UP TO ONE MILLION DAILY PAGEVIEWS isn’t bad.

The broad-spectrum SJW attack

If you think the SJWs will ever leave you alone anywhere, in any industry, you are wrong. Even if you volunteer and provide your time and skills somewhere for free, they will attack you and try to remove you.

CoralineAda commented Jun 18, 2015
Elia Schito is publicly calling trans people out for “not accepting reality” on Twitter. His Twitter profile mentions that he is a core contributor to opal. Is this what the other maintainers want to be reflected in the project? Will any transgender developers feel comfortable contributing?

meh commented Jun 18, 2015
If you want him removed, start working on Opal and contributing as much as him to everything he did for Opal so we have a replacement that’s more in orientation with your morals and views. Protip: you won’t because you can’t.

strand commented Jun 18, 2015
As a queer person this sort of argument from a maintainer makes me feel unwelcome. The ignorance which @elia shows by claiming that transfolk are “not accepting reality” is actively harmful. I will not contribute to this project or any other project which @elia maintains.

aredridel commented Jun 18, 2015
Damn. I found out about this project thanks to this issue, and it’s super relevant to my interests. But not going to come near it with a thousand foot pole if these are the people I’d have to interact with.

bhaibel commented Jun 18, 2015
@meh You’ve said that you’re committed to creating a welcoming environment for new contributors. Saying that is easy. Doing that is hard. You’re failing at it: right now, as a queer woman, I do not believe Opal would treat any contributions I might make fairly. I do not believe that I would be welcomed onto the project.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. Notice that none of them actually use Opal or have contributed to it, they just want to execute a drive-by disqualification. This is why SJWs have to be methodically ignored when they run their usual game and removed as soon as they are identified in your organization. They don’t give a quantum of a damn about the project, the job, or the company, all of it is mere grist for their ideological mill.

Macmillan has learned that its SJWs are more concerned about denigrating those who won’t kowtow to their insane ideology than promoting authors or selling books. It would do well to jettison them in their own self-interest, regardless of what we do, because SJWs cannot be rehabilitated and are always focused on furthering their agenda at the expense of their employers.

I was able to attend Representation Beyond Characters and Creating Comics. The former’s panelists were primarily people of color; the latter was all-female, including several women of color. Both talked about sneaking small but relatable details into worldbuilding, the difference between work-for-hire and creator-owned comics, and how publishers have responded to calls for greater diversity. Though the panels took place at different points during the con, they presented a refreshingly diverse lineup talking about real issues in modern storytelling.

However, Bennett cautions, while people are talking about how inclusive and wonderful it’s going to be in the future, they can’t take it as a given. “While I appreciate the optimism, that’s a trap I don’t want to fall into,” she said. “You have to remember that it takes active participation from every single person to make sure we keep this momentum going.”

Read that part again: “active participation from every single person” is required. Translation: they regard totalitarian thought-policing as not only desirable, but necessary.

Mailvox: the sorry state of SF

I thought this email from RC was interesting, as it demonstrates how Gresham’s Law applies to science fiction, with Pink SF tending to drive out Blue. Hey, even if Tor Books can’t be bothered to read your emails, at least I do:

I am writing to you today regarding the lack of professionalism of certain staff at Tor books.  I know others have contacted you regarding the contempt in which some staffers hold certain authors and a large part of your customer base.  What I wish to address is the editors’ contempt for the genre itself, and their incompetence at one of the essential tasks of producing SCIENCE fiction: getting the science right.  I am certain these are related.  The upshot is that Tor is printing a lot of stuff which ticks all the fashionable social and political check-boxes, but stinks on ice as SF.

An egregious example which I encountered recently is in the first of the Ender’s Game prequels, Earth Unaware.  There are a host of glaring faults in the orbital mechanics among other things, but they are too involved to detail in a short letter.  I will instead quote a concise example from page 261:

“The ship scoops up hydrogen atoms, which at near-lightspeed would be gamma radiation, then the rockets shoot this gamma plasma out the back for thrust.”

There is no such thing as a “gamma plasma”.  Gamma rays are photons, not atoms or parts of atoms.  Plasmas are a mixture of ionized matter and free electrons.  A high-energy proton is not a gamma ray; many cosmic rays are high-energy protons, but that does not make this phrase remotely acceptable in a science fiction book.  A well-read middle school science geek could have caught this error; I should know, I was one.

Shortly after this comes another one (p. 269):

“If it’s sucking up hydrogen atoms at near-lightspeed and taking in all this radiation….”

This is part of a plotline that plays for weeks, between a mining ship plying the Kuiper belt and Earth.  The Kuiper belt extends from about 30 astronomical units to 55 AU from the Sun (earth orbits at 1 AU).  Light travels 1 AU in roughly 500 seconds, so an object travelling at “near-lightspeed” would cover 55 AU in not much more than 27,500 seconds; on the order of 8 hours.  Even if the initial speed of the object is reduced to 25% of c and it decelerates linearly, the transit time is less than 3 days.  The whole plotline is nonsense because the author (Johnston, I’m sure; Card does better work) couldn’t be bothered to read a basic science book.  This is lousy even for fan-fiction.  Why did this ever make it to print?  More to the point, why do the editors have such contempt for the genre and its fans as to allow it, to the point of commissioning a lightweight like Johnston to play in Card’s universe in the first place?

I could not but help but notice that Earth Unaware got all the “we are the world”, social justice, anti-corporate messages lined up front and center.  The priorities are literally that obvious.  That’s why I’ve not bothered to read the other two prequels.  I don’t waste my time on dreck. I spotted this trend quite some time ago, but it was only after the highly-publicized outbursts of certain senior Tor staff that I realized that it wasn’t due to the times, but was a matter of policy.

Well, we all make mistakes from time to time, authors and editors alike (cough, tunnel), but it is pretty egregious to combine SJW message fiction with a major plot foul-up of the sort one RC describes. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t testify to the accuracy of his critique, but it does sound like a rather impressive howler.

As for the total number of emails sent, based on the CC’s Peter and I received, around 2,300 emails were sent by 765 different people that we know of. And there were others being sent as well, although we can’t possibly know how many. Regardless, I expect that enough were sent to make it clear to Macmillan that the excuses given by the senior Tor employees for the emails that they previously received was a false one.

Those senior employees have publicly attacked Tor-published authors, Tor published-works, and Tor customers. They have needlessly antagonized tens of thousands of book-buyers in pursuit of their ideological agenda. They’ve now been caught lying to their superiors about the extent of the consequences of their unprofessional behavior and violations of the Macmillan code of conduct. And that is why, at this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if Macmillan cleans house even more thoroughly than people have been demanding. I certainly would if I were in their shoes.

Then again, for all we know the Macmillan executives are fanatic SJWs whose instinct will be to dig in and defend the actions of Irene Gallo, Moshe Feder, and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. If that’s the case, Peter Grant has made it clear that the boycott, which for no particular reason at all may be christened TORDROP, will begin at noon on Friday, June 19th. And since no one has received any sort of response at all from Macmillan or Tom Doherty as yet, this is a good time to take a picture of your books published by Tor Books and tally up the total of the books and ebooks you have purchased from them. The truth is that we’re not asking for much, only that the senior employees at Tor Books be held to the same professional standard expected of a retail sales clerk or a fry cook at McDonalds.

SJWs respond

Chris S on June 15, 2015 at 6:42 am said:

I’ve emailed the poor sods over at Tor. Spoiler: it’s probably not what VD wanted me to say. I did ask them to reconsider their relationship with JCW when the current contract ends.

 [18 minutes later, he added this.]
I did say Irene Gallo’s comments were intemperate, and the use of “neo-nazi” wasn’t justified. It was also in a comment to a Facebook post. But JCW’s continuous spewing of homophobia and misogyny is utterly beyond the pale. It’s not just an offhand comment, it is continuous, on his blog, in his writing, and in his interactions with, well, just about anyone. He also hasn’t apologized for anything he said.

The two are not remotely comparable, in my mind.

In other words, he believes that Tor Books should police its various authors’ opinions, but should not hold its employees responsible for direct attacks on the quality of its own books and on the character of its customers. Fascinating.

And George Rape Rape Martin is concerned, deeply concerned, about the wounds that are being inflicted in this, the most savage civil war in the history of science fiction. RapeSquared was so upset this morning that it put him off writing his daily rape scene, which was a pity as he had a real corker in mind involving Sansa Stark, Wun Wun the giant, four dire wolves, a Wildling wight, and Hodor being warged by Bran Stark.

By now, everyone has bruises. And I fear we will all have more by the time this is done. Did you really think fandom was going to lie back and thank you for gaming the Hugo awards and pissing on fifty years of tradition?

A writer of my acquaintance, older and wiser than myself, has told me that this is worst fight he has ever seen, the nastiest and most divisive war in the long history of our field. Worse than the Exclusion Act. Worse than the Cosmic Circle crap. Worse than the Breendoggle, than the Old Wave/ New Wave struggle, than the competing Vietnam War ads. The wounds will take a long time healing… if indeed they ever heal.

Bruises? Healing? I expect a set of twelve silvered SJW skulls for my dinner table by the time this is over. My dear George, I have had Patrick Nielsen Hayden and the Toad of Tor taking shots at me for 10 years now. I put up with moronic SJWs telling lies about me for years before I finally bothered to do something about it. You think this is war? We’ve barely finished warming up. It’s only been three months since the Hugo shortlist was announced. It will be another 9 years and 9 months of us taking shots at you before we can even begin to consider calling it even.

That reminds me, I still haven’t seen a single person apologize for falsely accusing me of gaming the awards last year. I’m not holding my breath on that one.

Finally, Tintinaus demonstrates why the SJWs keep miscalculating in such an amusingly inept manner. I can’t decide if they are simply innumerate or if their devotion to The Narrative renders basic mathematics inoperative in the event of a contradiction.

From memory Beale said the reason why he was so late in reading TBP was publishers had stopped sending him review copies. He then went on to point out since his blog gets more traffic than Scalzi’s they were cutting their own throats. Of course he used his site figures for April where most of the traffic was people going to check out his slate post after the nominations announcement.

Most of the traffic? Now it’s true, there was a nice traffic increase in April, from 1,583,104 in March to 1,907,664. It slipped back a bit to 1,737,320 in May, and should be right around there again in June. Meanwhile, Scalzi’s best-ever traffic month was 1,027,644 in May 2012, thanks to numerous sites linking his “Easiest Difficulty Setting” post. I’ve averaged more monthly traffic than Scalzi ever had for 26 straight months now. It’s not even close.

I find it amusing that the SJWs keep looking at #Gamergate, or bot-nets, or anything besides what Occam’s Razor dictates. But their problem is that it’s not just me that they’re facing, it’s the Dread Ilk, the Ilk, the Sad Puppies, the Rabid Puppies, and the Evil Legion of Evil. And, most terrible of all, the Vile Faceless Minions.

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

      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”.

      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.