Tag: SJW

The Third Law in action

It’s so terribly frustrating to SJWs when they can’t find any scary threats to point-and-shriek about that they have to go and manufacture their own imaginary ones. Either these people are lying for effect or they are literally, clinically and medically insane.

Ann Somerville on June 20, 2015 at 10:29 pm said:
I really fear for Irene Gallo and Moshe Feder. GGaters have no boundaries, and it’s beginning to look as if the Puppies of either kind don’t either.

Matt Y on June 20, 2015 at 10:59 pm said:
It’s not their jobs I’m worried about. It’s that small portion of the hyper-reactionary crowd that flock to some of these assholes get obsessed with trying to personally cause damage or harass people as if it’s some sort of game. Like GGs obsession with Quinn, Anita, and so on. I don’t know if that is what Anne is talking about but I’ve thought about that, which is really depressing that it’s even a potential concern.

Stevie on June 20, 2015 at 11:39 pm said:
Thank you, Anne and Matt. I was obviously being far too privileged to take on board the real physical dangers confronting them; I will try to do better.

Laura Resnick on June 21, 2015 at 1:02 am said:
I, too, have started wondering about Irene Gallo’s physical safety. Is she being cyberstalked or receiving threatening messages? Will the vitriolic rhetoric against her escalate to a level where she’s at risk from doxxing and physical stalking?

The apologies she and Tor issued should have resolved the matter. (And I assume Tor and Macmillan have remained silent since then because those apologies eliminated any legal exposure the corporation might have been concerned about.)

The bizarre, inexplicable ESCALATION we have seen over Gallo since then indicates that the Puppies and whoever else has joined this anti-Gallo hysteria are functioning so far outside the boundaries of rational behavior that their anger is self-feeding and could keep escalating, especially if the ringleaders keep feeding it. Which does lead me to wonder if unstable individuals in the group will harass and endanger Gallo, in the way that people like Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, Briana Wu, and others have experienced in the past year or two.

I, too, have thought, oh, maybe I’m overreacting to what I’m seeing, maybe this is just Puppy Fatigue and not a realistic worry… But the very first person I mentioned this to, a few days ago, is probably my most level-headed anti-dramatic friend–and that person’s reaction was that this is a realistic concern and she’d been thinking about it, too. I see from the comments here that others were also thinking about it but thinking, “Oh, that’s probably just me.”

No, I guess it’s a bunch of people by now seeing some indicators in the Puppy mess of a pattern that we’ve already seen in GamerGate, and it’s alarming.

I’ve wondered much less about Moshe Feder, John Scalzi, or PNH’s safety than Gallo’s, partly because the angriest Puppies and boycotters seem so focused specifically on Gallo (and she’s the one whose apology, instead of being accepted by these people and ending the matter, has been reacted to with irrational escalations of rage), but also because they’re men. Yes, men also get doxxed, threatened, stalked, and harassed, of course, and these men could be in potential danger… but “movements” like this tend more toward stalking women than men. So I think that after Gallo, the next likeliest target is Teresa Nielsen Hayden. Plus, the Puppies have been heavily focused on her at times, and a number of them have already “unpersoned” her with nasty nicknames like the “Toad of Tor.”

Anyhow, nothing may come of it. But it seems like it’s something that probably many people are wondering about by now. Perhaps also at Tor.

Octavia on June 21, 2015 at 1:43 am said:
I agree. The vitriol of the puppies, especially against Irene Gallo seems to be spiraling completely out of control. Just like the narrative (comments instead of one comment with subsequent apology, attack against everyone and their dog, etc.).

Since some of the puppies/puppy-supporters own guns and a few have no problem with throwing all kinds of threats around, it does get really worrisome. Especially as none of the supposed “puppy-leaders” is even pretending to try and reign them in. Or call for some moderation. Instead they pour gasoline in the fire.

I hope Irene Gallo has a strong support network and people who can help her with the vitriol. I’m pretty sure that she’s receiving all kinds of threats at least on her work-email, maybe also on facebook.

First, the only person who has been doing any cyberstalking is Irene Gallo. She started following me on Twitter after this whole thing erupted and only stopped after I sent an email to the Compliance Officer at Macmillan informing them of her actions. And before anyone is stupid enough to point out the Facebook screenshot I posted, let me remind you that while I have a Facebook account, I have not utilized it in well over a year.

Second, Laura Resnick’s feigned concern over nonexistent violence is ridiculous given her own fantasies about sexually attractive men.

Laura Resnick says:
August 17, 2012 at 1:12 pm
Whever I think “alpha male”… my daydream quickly becomes a Sweeney Todd nightmare in which I’m serving the remains to my dinner guests, disguised as some sort of heavy-seasoned stew beneath puff pastry, because I wound up killing said Alpha Male in sheer exasperation before sundown and need to get rid of the body….

Imagine her reaction if I said I daydreamed about killing and eating Tor employees. The fact is that no one in the Sad or Rabid Puppy camps wishes any physical harm to come to Irene Gallo, Moshe Feder, or Patrick Nielsen Hayden. No one has suggested or even hinted at the desirability of them being physically harmed in any way. We merely expect them to receive pink slips as a reasonable consequence of their unprofessional and abusive actions.

In any event, it should be obvious that it is not our side that contains the mentally unstable. Ergo the Third Law of the Social Justice Warrior: SJWs always project

UPDATE: Sweet Mendel, but these people are stupid.

Jim Henley on June 21, 2015 at 9:23 am said:
I stand foursquare against taking a baseball bat to anyone. But when it comes to defending the honor of one’s spouse, I have been dwelling on this:

Brad Torgersen’s wife, as everyone keeps telling us, is black. In VD’s attack on NK Jemison, he asserted that “genetics tells us not all of us are equally homo sapiens.” This says “Brad Torgersen’s wife is not fully human according to Science!” far more explicitly than, for instance, anything Moshe Feder said about the Tor boycott applies to either Wright or Lamplighter. But other than saying, generally, “I’m not Vox Day,” Brad Torgersen refuses to repudiate VD or criticize him in specific. The guy who, not just by Puppy logic but any commonsense reading, called his wife subhuman.

I have a hard time squaring that with any concept of “personal honor” that means anything.

He obviously hasn’t been dwelling anywhere nearly hard enough. Brad understands what Jim quite clearly does not, which is that pointing out the INCONTROVERTIBLE GENETIC FACT that all of us are not equally Homo sapiens sapiens is not tantamount to calling his wife subhuman. My statement is not controversial nor any more debatable than “2+2=4” or “a fish is not a tiger”. Nor does it say, “Brad Torgersen’s wife is not fully human according to Science!”

Anyone can be uninformed. But only an idiot attempts to inaccurately summarize things he does not understand rather than simply ask for clarification. Jim literally does not understand the plain English of what I wrote. And neither Brad Torgersen nor his wife are going to criticize me for that statement because they are not scientific ignoramuses.

You’d think the morons would learn to start looking before they leap. But they never do.

UPDATE 2: And even when they’re explicitly told they’re being morons, they STILL jump in:

Paul Weimer (@princejvstin) on June 21, 2015 at 2:59 pm said:
My “translation of Beale” seems to be on the fritz. He updated his post with a reply to Jim with an explanation that I don’t grok. As far as I can make it (and that’s not far) means that Nora is subhuman, but Brad’s wife is not, because I said so that’s why.

FungiFromYuggoth on June 21, 2015 at 3:27 pm said:
You’re missing Beale’s dodge – he’s not arguing that black people are sub human, just that the people-he-likes are more evolved than baseline human. He thinks he’s being clever, and it speaks ill of the intellect and character of anyone who is impressed by that dodge. Especially if they’ve read his entire tirade. This is the essence of Beale – to weasel and imply while building a half-assed trick, and then to point and laugh at the people who understand what he’s actually saying, trying to claim that he’s the truly smart one.

Keep in mind when reading this, that these are people who genuinely believe they are more intelligent and better educated than we are. Because science. Also, vaccines. I’m not claiming to be smarter than them, I’m publicly DEMONSTRATING it.

Delusion and deterrence

Mr. Smith has a rather unusual theory about the Charleston church shootings:

Adam F. Smith ‏@Adampdx Jun 18
Haters like @castaliahouse  Theodore “Vox Day” Beale are the cause of massacre at SC AME church #SadPuppies #hugoawards

I look forward to the SJWs at File 770 being as horrified and outraged by this ludicrous accusation as they pretended to be by Mike Z. Williamson’s “too soon” joke. It’s particularly bizarre since I am not Castalia House and @castaliahouse has never taken any position on any American racial or religious affairs.

It’s rather amusing to see the many attacks by their own side the SJWs resolutely ignore as they go about their daily posturing and strike their latest outrage poses. Tor employees attack Tor’s authors and customers alike, Castalia House has undergone six straight months of cracking attempts, Vox Popoli is now into its third straight day of a DDOS attack, hundreds of people emailing Tor Books have been accused of being bots by Tor employees even as as Tor supporters create fake tweets to feign public support for Tor, and yet science fiction’s SJWs still preen and posture as if they’re the good guys because a few hundred science fiction readers followed the rules and violated an unspoken gentlemen’s agreement to which we were not privy and to which we never agreed.

And yet, some of those on our side still want to pretend this decades-long cultural conflict is some sort of white-glove affair. There is a fundamental disagreement between the noble defeatists and those who are less willing to continue to submit to the SJWs attempt to claim cultural dominance at Sarah Hoyt’s post on The Marquess of Queensbury’s rules:

thewriterinblack  
Another observation I have made in the past is that our enemies often not only know that we don’t play by the same “rulebook” as they do, they count on it. Those among the Jihadis who have even a ghost of a clue know that if we were really as bad as they make out, well, it would be easier to pray toward Mecca–just face the blue glow.

Apropos of nothing, I am reminded of a scene in an old Fantastic Four comment. Sue Storm as the Invisible Girl (I think this was before she started calling herself the Invisible Woman) facing Dr. Doom. “Doom, do you have any idea how dangerous my force fields would be if I decided to play by your rules?”

That’s us all over.

Dorothy Grant
And this would be why they hate and fear Vox Day above all others: because he does play by their rules.

RES
If we played by their rules the earth would be scorched. But playing by the Devil’s rules would be to concede defeat — what we fight for is ordered liberty, constrained government, rational argument over insanity.

Batman does not become the Joker, Superman does not accept the values of Luthor, Spiderman does not become Doc Octopus.

RES is completely wrong for the obvious reason that SJWs are not the Devil, they are merely his unhappy, not-very-bright children. And the vital point that RES completely misses is that you do not defend ordered liberty, constrained government, and rational argument over insanity with unconstrained liberty, government inaction, and talk. You defend it with force, and you defend it successfully with force that exceeds that of your opponent at the point of conflict.

The Romans did not become the Britons by defeating them with superior force. The USA did not become Nazi Germany by invading Normandy (although it may as a result of the 1965 Immigration Act). The Soviets did not become the Afghans and the Coalition of the Willing has not become the global jihad. Batman would not become the Joker even if he snapped the Joker’s neck, but he would certainly save the lives of all of those who would have been killed by the Joker in the future.

What frustrates me about the noble defeatists is that they are like a football team who refuses to accept the newfangled rules that permit the forward pass. They insist on playing the game in the outmoded way they believe to be the correct way, run the ball every down against a defense with 11 men stacked in the box, and inevitably lose when the other team passes for ten touchdowns and wins 70-0.

The problem is a conceptual one at heart. Even those whose devotion to free expression is unquestioned, such as Ken and Clarke of PopeHat, fail to understand that their efforts are doomed to failure so long as they confuse the objective with the methods used to defend it. This is not a “by any means” argument, it is a straightforward argument for Chicago Rules deterrence.

The best defense for free expression is not to permit the other side to freely libel and slander and calumniate and defame and lie while responding with few feeble protests that what they’re saying just ain’t so. The reason poison gas has made very few appearances on the battlefield since WWI is not because the French, English, and Americans set the Germans a good example, but because they promptly responded by manufacturing and using even more gas than the Germans did. The only reason the USA has not dropped an atomic bomb since 1945 is because the Soviet Union obtained their own in 1949.

Has the assault on free speech waxed or waned since Belgium introduced hate speech laws in 1981? The high-minded non-deterrent approach has failed, continuously failed, for the last three decades. The SJWs find speech-policing to be a useful weapon for marginalizing, disqualifying, and destroying their enemies and they are not going to give it up until they find themselves suffering from it to a greater extent than the free speech advocates do.

If you seek to defend free expression, you can do no better than to follow the lead of Lieutenant General Sir Charles Ferguson, who said of poison gas, which he deplored as a “cowardly” and un-English form of warfare:

“We cannot win this war unless we kill or incapacitate more of our enemies than they do of us, and if this can only be done by our copying the enemy in his choice of weapons, we must not refuse to do so.”

This does not mean we must blindly imitate the other side, particularly not in their instinctual resort to stupid and petty lies, transparent psychological projection, and a foolish insistence on defending the indefensible. Nor should we seek to be as blindly ignorant of them as they are of us. What it means is that we should adopt their more effective tactics, and, as the Allies did with gas in WWI, make even more effective and extensive use of those tactics until they agree to abandon them.

Mr. Feder fans the flames

Now Tor Books editor Moshe Feder calls Tor’s unhappy customers “idiots”:

As you may have heard, certain scoundrels have declared a boycott of Tor, starting today, to protest the efforts of some Tor employees to defend the Hugo Awards from attack. In response, some of our friends have declared today “Buy A Tor Book Day.”

I wouldn’t have the temerity to ask you to buy a book just because some idiots have declared war on us. But if there _is_ a Tor Book you’ve been meaning to get anyway, buying it today would be a a gesture I’d appreciate.

[As always here on Facebook, I’m speaking for myself and not the company.]

It’s got to be nice for Tor Books to know they’ve got so many imaginary friends defending them. As we have been repeatedly and reliably informed:

Since the Puppy boycott of Tor Books is on I just bought three ebooks from Tor and preordered two more.

And if Mr. Feder is only speaking for himself, who is this “us” to whom he refers? Whose friends are they? But it is nice of him to dial down the rhetoric from “racist neo-nazis” to mere “idiots” and “scoundrels”.

Meanwhile, Peter Grant points out that Feder is lying. Personally, I find Feder’s explanation of the boycott to be fascinating, as apparently Irene Gallo was merely defending the Hugo Awards from attack when she described Tor-published books as “bad-to-reprehensible”, attacked Tor’s customers as “racist” and “misogynistic” and “neo-nazi”. That’s an interesting priority. I was not hitherto aware that “defending the Hugo Awards” was a professional responsibility for employees at Tor Books.

It’s worth pointing out that we are not at war with Tor Books. We are merely asking Macmillan to save Tor Books from the observably self-destructive and unprofessional leadership of three of its senior employees, who have abused Tor’s authors and attacked Tor’s customers.

The Internet never forgets.

The war on free expression

The principled defenses have failed. The attempts to ignore it have failed. The attempts to placate have, predictably, failed. The only way to shut down the “army of self-appointed militants who see themselves as the guardians of correct thinking” is hit back twice as hard and hold the SJWs completely accountable to their own rules.

When Professor Tim Hunt, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, recently addressed a major conference in Seoul about women in science, he said he had three problems with ‘girls in laboratories’, namely that: ‘You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry.’

As a media storm erupted, Hunt insisted that his remarks were made in ‘a totally jocular, ironic way’.

But none of that matters to today’s self-righteous crusaders against offensive opinions, for whom language is never a laughing matter. Professor Hunt was immediately surrounded online by an outraged Twitter mob demanding his head on a pike.

These boycott-and-ban zealots are not content with exercising their right to criticise somebody who makes an offensive joke. Quivering with self-righteous indignation, they want to silence those who fail to conform to their group-think.

In this case, their bullying worked. The scientific authorities immediately caved in. Not only was Hunt forced to resign from his post at University College London, but he was also dismissed from the science committee of the European Research Council.

So biochemistry loses a brilliant pioneer, while we lose more ground to the forces of oppressive censorship.

For the saga of Tim Hunt’s downfall is just the latest example of how a culture of verbal prohibition is taking over society, led by an army of self-appointed militants who see themselves as the guardians of correct thinking.

If you don’t want to see more Nobel Laureates like Tim Hunt and James Watson hounded from science, more innovators like Brandon Eich hounded from tech, then you should endorse the Tor Books boycott and force the SJWs to realize that they will be held twice as accountable for their every joke, every tweet, every Facebook comment, and every personal statement as they hold everyone else.

The First Law in action

The SJWs trying to save Irene Gallo and Patrick Nielsen Hayden from the Macmillan axe must be getting desperate. In addition to launching a “Buy Tor books” campaign in response to the boycott they mocked, they’re doing what SJWs always do.

Which is what? All together now…. In this case, the SJWs in science fiction are pretending to buy books that they’re not actually buying. ED noticed a recurring pattern on Twitter today:

Kerian Larsen ‏@KerianLarsen  1h1 hour ago
Since the Puppy boycott of Tor Books is on I just bought three ebooks from Tor and preordered two more.

Phyllis Chandler ‏@phyllis_chandle  1h1 hour ago
Since the Puppy boycott of Tor Books is on I just bought three ebooks from Tor and preordered two more.

Maisy ‏@Maisy_Chandler  2h2 hours ago
Since the Puppy boycott of Tor Books is on I just bought three ebooks from Tor and preordered two more.

Kalia ‏@kalia_weaver  2h2 hours ago
Since the Puppy boycott of Tor Books is on I just bought three ebooks from Tor and preordered two more.

Desiree ‏@Desiree_Waller  2h2 hours ago
Since the Puppy boycott of Tor Books is on I just bought three ebooks from Tor and preordered two more.

Dee Foreman ‏@Dee_Foreman  2h2 hours ago
Since the Puppy boycott of Tor Books is on I just bought three ebooks from Tor and preordered two more.

Cherie ‏@Cherie_Blanchar  2h2 hours ago
Since the Puppy boycott of Tor Books is on I just bought three ebooks from Tor and preordered two more

Fernanda ‏@fernanda_wise  2h2 hours ago
Since the Puppy boycott of Tor Books is on I just bought three ebooks from Tor and preordered two more

Greta ‏@greta_welch  2h2 hours ago
Since the Puppy boycott of Tor Books is on I just bought three ebooks from Tor and preordered two more

Jayla Bauer ‏@JaylaBauer  3h3 hours ago
Since the Puppy boycott of Tor Books is on I just bought three ebooks from Tor and preordered two more.

Bria ‏@brialangley  3h3 hours ago
Since the Puppy boycott of Tor Books is on I just bought three ebooks from Tor and preordered two more

Kurt Busiek ‏@KurtBusiek  3h3 hours ago
Since the Puppy boycott of Tor Books is on, I just bought three e-books from Tor and pre-ordered two more.

On the plus side, I think we now have an answer to how John Scalzi has so many Twitter followers when no one is reading his blog anymore.

Tor boycott announced

Peter Grant explains why he is no longer going to buy any Tor products:

Regrettably, due to the apparent lack of action by (and the deafening silence from) Tor and Macmillan, the time has come to do as I promised.  I therefore ask all those who believe, as I do, that the recent statement by Irene Gallo, and the pattern of behavior and statements from others at Tor whom I’ve previously named, are completely unacceptable, to join me in refusing to buy any of Tor’s products from now on.

I support and endorse what Larry Correia said about this yesterday.

    … this is between Tor and its readers who feel insulted, not the Sad Puppies campaign or the people who ran it … To the Sad Puppies supporters, do what you think is right. All I’m asking is that whatever you do, try to be as civil as possible in your disagreements. Stick with the facts.

I am not a member of, and I do not speak for, either the ‘Sad Puppies’ or ‘Rabid Puppies’ campaigns (although I support the former).  I don’t represent cute puppies, playful puppies, cuddly puppies or hush puppies – only myself.  If you share, in whole or in part, my values and outlook on life, I invite you to join me in this boycott.  Don’t do so just because I, or anyone else, is asking you to do so.  Act on the basis of your own informed conscience and reasoned judgment.

As you can see, I have been a Tor Books customer since 1986, when I bought a mass market paperback copy of The Edge of Tomorrow by Isaac Asimov. And because I have considerably more experience of Tor Books and the consistently abusive and unprofessional behavior of its senior employees than Mr. Grant, I will go a little further than he has. Until Irene Gallo and Patrick Nielsen Hayden are no longer employed by Tor Books or Tor.com, I will not:

  1. Purchase any books published by Tor Books
  2. Read any books published by Tor Books

Given (2), this means that if Ms. Gallo and Mr. Nielsen Hayden are still employed by Tor Books in 2016, I will not nominate any books published by Tor Books for any awards.

I encourage those who deem Ms. Gallo’s behavior to be unprofessional and unacceptable to follow Mr. Grant’s lead and join the Tor Books boycott. I am the leader of the Rabid Puppies, I do speak for them, and I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that they will follow my lead in this regard with all the vim and vigor for which they are rightly known.

I am not concerned about whether the boycott is “successful” or not. The simple fact is that if Macmillan is at all interested in the long-term success of Tor Books, it will jettison both Ms Gallo and Mr. Nielsen Hayden on the basis of their disloyalty, their unprofessional behavior, and their repeated violations of the Macmillan Code of Conduct, regardless of what any outside parties may happen to believe. I simply won’t have anything to do with Tor Books as long as those two individuals are employed there.

There will be those who claim that the boycott will make no difference at all. They may well be correct. Regardless, in response I can do no better than to quote the wise words of the VFM. “We don’t care.”

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.