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I have literally seen NYT bestselling authors talk about how they're super excited to publicly heckle an author at his next book signing. And join in on convers

I have literally seen NYT bestselling authors talk about how they're super excited to publicly heckle an author at his next book signing. And join in on conversations promoting burning his book. His crime? Writing a female character who goes on the run, has limited food, and trains in martial arts--which leads to her losing weight. This was, apparently, fat-shaming and deeply sexist. The authors involved in these threats and book-burning talk had literally no punishment. None. Just a bunch of new followers who gushed about what "strong women" they were. (As a woman, I can't think of anything weaker than threatening to burn a book and harass someone, all for internet points.) The thing is, Publishing Twitter is super safe if you're on the far left. You can talk about harassing people, burning books, and purposely destroying careers. Zero consequences at all. But if you're so much as a hair right of center left? Forget it. Your career is gone.

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common_crow 6y ago
I assume you're speaking of the Scott Bergstrom debacle? Yeah, I remember that one. Link to Scott's interview that infuriated those authors is here: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/article/68782-ya-debut-gets-six-figure-deal-sold-to-16-territories-and-jerry-bruckheimer.html https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/child... Don't want to dox anyone and post which authors had such horrible behavior, but I will say I personally witnessed those tweets discussing book burning, stalking, and public harassment.
- scoot 6y ago
  Linking to someone's public posts isn't "doxing". Publicly sharing their personal details (private email address, home address, phone number, etc.) or other private information as a form if direct or indirect harassment is.
  - Vinnl 6y ago
    It could still result in a mob piling on them, which is exactly the behaviour they're arguing against...
    - kruxigt 6y ago
      I think large parts of the right has now come to the conclusion that it can not hold itself to so much higher moral standards than the opposite team, or it will continue losing and moving down leagues until there is no right team left.
      - jtbayly 6y ago
        People can downvote this, but I've literally read right-of-center people making this argument.
    - LocalH 6y ago
      I'm genuinely ok with a mob piling on someone who is making stalking threats.
    - common_crow 6y ago
      Correct. I know at least one of the authors who was behaving horribly has severe depression. I don't care how horrible their behavior was, I'm not going to potentially sick an unknown internet mob on a person with suicidal tendencies.
      - ndiscussion 6y ago
        Ah yes, they may want to chop off my head... but I would never tell them this is wrong.
        common_crow 6y ago
        I am 100% fine with telling them this is wrong. I'm quite vocal about this being wrong. But I am not okay with unleashing random internet people on a mentally ill person, which could easily spiral into a mob that involves death threats, doxing of personal info, etc. Hell, I'm not okay doing that to a mentally healthy person.
- hluska 6y ago
  I’m not sure that I’d call the reaction to Bergstrom a debacle. Here are a couple of quotes from the excerpt that made everyone angry: “It’s a novel with a teenage heroine set in a dystopian future. Which novel in particular doesn’t matter because they’re all the same. Poor teenage heroine, having to go to war when all you really want is to write in your diary about how you’re in love with two different guys and can’t decide between them. These novels are cheesy, I know, and I suck them down as easily as milk.” “They love this—the school uniform, the flash of seventeen-year-old legs.” The first quote is a pretty direct attack at the Hunger Games. HG has a rabid following so that was risky. The second is just godawful writing. He still would have been okay but he went a little too far mocking the amount of talent needed to write YA. Scooter Braun recently learned a lesson about screwing with media that rabid young adults identify with. It’s a bad idea, but if you’re going to do it, bring better prose. Or at least accept that the genre’s bestsellers are way better at the internet than you are.
  - Chazprime 6y ago
    Those quotes really don’t warrant the disproportional responses to his book nor the vitriol directed at him personally & professionally. I think it’s time we start calling out the social media mobbing for what it really is: hateful.
    - ttt0 6y ago
      Everyone will dismiss it with the "Paradox of Tolerance".
    - hluska 6y ago
      Did you actually read his interview though? If you’re going to mock your entire genre, you should at least be accurate. Otherwise, critics will rightly point out that you’re writing a genre you don’t know. When you add in that second quote, it’s even more obvious that he doesn’t know his genre. The dude wrote some books at a team with YA was all the rage and got a film deal out of it. He made some godawful marketing and communications decisions and faced predictable consequences. I don’t feel bad for writers who can’t communicate. Nor do I feel bad for writers who aren’t capable of thinking through how their work fits within a genre they’re trying to capitalize on. Businesses that make bad marketing decisions cancel themselves and in this case, the writer made a myriad of awful business decisions. That’s capitalism. And seriously, who would outright mock the Hunger Games without expecting some sort of disproportionate backlash? YA works in disproportionates - it’s the entire beast, right down to the growth strategy. If you’re not wise enough to understand your genre, you lose. The thought that you could dismiss that entire genre with garbage critiques and not face bizarre retribution is so insane that I can’t take it seriously. And if you’re going to do that after you’ve signed a film deal?? I’m sorry but you deserve to be cancelled.
- trident5000 6y ago
  People basically found out a new way to be an asshole. They would have been an asshole in another way if this current lane was closed and socially challenged. It just happens to be that virtue signaling and sticking some BS cause in front of your behavior lets you get away with it at this point in time.
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Number157 6y ago
Some people just want to hurt others. These are just excuses to do it in a way that they can enjoy being malicious while claiming to be "good".
- treeman79 6y ago
  That is sad but normal. What’s scary is that this behavior is now acceptable. As long as it’s against group X
johnchristopher 6y ago
Ah, reminds me of the difference of treatment between Sam and Frodo in Lord of the Rings: >> Looking in a mirror he was startled to see a much thinner reflection of himself than he remembered: it looked remarkably like the young nephew of Bilbo who used to go tramping with his uncle in the Shire; but the eyes looked at him thoughtfully. > Pauline Baynes's illustration of the Fellowship, done while Tolkien was alive, shows all four hobbits as being of very much the same proportions. Oddly enough, the movie shows Sam as more or less the same build when he leaves Hobbiton and when he reaches Mordor, even though he had some weeks of semi-starvation. https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/92576/is-there-any-evidence-that-tolkien-thought-of-samwise-gamgee-as-being-particular https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/92576/is-there-any...
- p_l 6y ago
  FWIW, in Lord of the Rings, it was implied that the change in Frodo was due to carrying the One Ring, and that it was due to it that he couldn't rejoin normal life while the other Hobbits could (and in Shire, ultimately became much more famous)
  - johnchristopher 6y ago
    No, not when that scene happens. It clearly was a comment he made on how he got healthier by walking around. It's early in the book.
    - p_l 6y ago
      Ah. Well, he was the lazy stay-at-home guy of the four hobbits before the adventure :) Samwise did hard physical work regularly, and Meriadock and Pippin while also somewhat pampered (remember, of the four hobbit, only Sam wasn't nobility!) were somewhat known for their adventures.
secondcoming 6y ago
> Twitter is super safe if you're on the far left For now. There is a deliberate tactic on the left to become more and more extreme. A sentiment expressed today that's totally fine may not be fine tomorrow. It will be used against you. The left will turn on itself once it has made Conservatism illegal.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  The right just tried to burn down the House in the US, murder the government, and install a dictator because it didn't accept that it lost a fair election. Many on the right still can't, even now. If you want your philosophy to remain legal, acting like this is a very bad thing and not something that can really be excused - for any reason - might be a good start.
  - smaryjerry 6y ago
    I think another post hit the mark here but generalizing people into extreme groups is a real problem. I know many people on the “right” and “left” that basically only agree with half of what their chosen party says, or maybe they only agree with one issue that is very important to them. On the left it is usually abortion and the right it is usually economy. My point is that saying things like “many” is not all or even a majority. Taking the capitol building riots, even the people present there were incredibly diverse in their mindset. There was a group of a couple hundred that had bad intents and there were several thousand that were actively stopping others from causing damage or fighting the police. There are many videos of people pulling rioters away from breaking windows and shouting at them to stop. The big problem is that the peaceful group didn’t mix with the rioting group soon enough. Trump was having a rally not even close to the capitol building meanwhile this other group started storming the capital. I find it similar when people get angry at like a “Google” employee for saying some obviously idiotic things. Sure an employee represents the company in some capacity but for companies that have tens of thousands of employees, there is almost certainty that some will behave badly. Now take mentality that to the over 70 million Trump voters. Each has their own individual reason for voting for him and lumping them together is no different than saying all men or all women are the same, the ratio is about the equal to genders. This gets exacerbated by media companies who will take one example and call that out as if it is the rule. I can’t tell you how many articles and new shows that say “some say” and use one tweet saying that as evidence as if it is a majority held opinion or representative of a whole. In the BLM protests it was reasonable was assume a lot of the rioters were not protesters or not there for the protest but that same standard was dropped for those at the capital.
ljm 6y ago
If you go with the horseshoe theory then the far left is barely distinguishable from the far right. The only thing that changes really is the framing of the issue and the motivation. If you're looking at people being criticised because they're not writing characters of their own skin colour or sexuality, or 'staying in their lane' with their culture, or because their own experiences don't conform to some expectation (like the author criticised for describing slavery but not how it was in the US), then you're still looking at segregation and oppression, but approaching it in a way that is falsely empowering. It is still massively authoritarian and oppressive and extreme, no matter how virtuous people think the left wing is, and it's certainly not liberal. There's just nothing good about being at the extreme end of anything. But that aside, and with the crowds on twitter, I just wonder what it will take for people like that to be happy, and not perpetually angry. So much aggression couched in seemingly kind language.
- pepperspray 6y ago
  I completely agree. Honestly, I'm pretty sure those people have no friends in real life, the way they jump down peoples' throats for every minor thing, so they gravitate online to find echo chambers. Their cohorts online are only "allies", not real friends. They will turn on each other as soon as one of them challenges their ideology.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  I don't think the horseshoe theory works. The critical factor is authoritarianism. Which is a grown-up word for bullying and narcissism. Authoritarians are invariably toxic damaged people who are full of rage and are looking for a target to make themselves feel better. Sometimes they end up on the left. Sometimes they end up on the right. Sometimes they end up in management or venture capital. Same issues, same dynamic, different context. The difference is authoritarians on the right are more likely to use physical violence. "Cultural" authoritarians are more likely to use social exclusion - brigading on social media, getting people fired, and so on. The key point is that the presenting issue is irrelevant. The social dynamic and mode of relationship - angry tribalism used to justify violence without any sense of context - is the real tell.
baron_harkonnen 6y ago
> is super safe if you're on the far left Liberals are not considered the "far left" and people on the far left dislike them as much as people on the right do. This isn't a "no true Scotsman" issue either, there are clear distinctions between various left-wing ideologies and mainstream liberalism (radical or not). Finger pointing and blaming individuals, the type of behavior your describing, is classic dominant capitalist ideology, something that all flavors of the left are deeply skeptical of. Both "radical" liberalism and rising right-wing extremism are different varieties of nihilism, stemming from the same root cause of a degradation in our overall material conditions and the breakdown of late capitalist society. Both are essentially empty systems of rhetoric with no underlying values that ultimately lead to a totalitarian way of thinking. To reiterate, the thinking your describing is absolutely not "far left".
- Udik 6y ago
  Political trials, formal and informal, against "class enemies" are typical of extremist left wing movements. See for example Maoist "struggle sessions", which seem nothing else than an in-person version of a twitter mob: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session Note that the targets of cancel culture are in the most proper sense "class enemies" since their sins are not directed against specific individuals but entire classes of people: blacks, women, transsexuals, etc.- and can be as vague as dismissive attitudes or generic antagonism.
- bitwize 6y ago
  > Liberals are not considered the "far left" and people on the far left dislike them as much as people on the right do. Indeed. Graffiti in the wake of a recent riot read: "Liberals get the bullet too "

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common_crow 6y ago

I assume you're speaking of the Scott Bergstrom debacle? Yeah, I remember that one. Link to Scott's interview that infuriated those authors is here: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/article/68782-ya-debut-gets-six-figure-deal-sold-to-16-territories-and-jerry-bruckheimer.html https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/child... Don't want to dox anyone and post which authors had such horrible behavior, but I will say I personally witnessed those tweets discussing book burning, stalking, and public harassment.

scoot 6y ago
Linking to someone's public posts isn't "doxing". Publicly sharing their personal details (private email address, home address, phone number, etc.) or other private information as a form if direct or indirect harassment is.
- Vinnl 6y ago
  It could still result in a mob piling on them, which is exactly the behaviour they're arguing against...
  - kruxigt 6y ago
    I think large parts of the right has now come to the conclusion that it can not hold itself to so much higher moral standards than the opposite team, or it will continue losing and moving down leagues until there is no right team left.
    - jtbayly 6y ago
      People can downvote this, but I've literally read right-of-center people making this argument.
  - LocalH 6y ago
    I'm genuinely ok with a mob piling on someone who is making stalking threats.
  - common_crow 6y ago
    Correct. I know at least one of the authors who was behaving horribly has severe depression. I don't care how horrible their behavior was, I'm not going to potentially sick an unknown internet mob on a person with suicidal tendencies.
    - ndiscussion 6y ago
      Ah yes, they may want to chop off my head... but I would never tell them this is wrong.
      - common_crow 6y ago
        I am 100% fine with telling them this is wrong. I'm quite vocal about this being wrong. But I am not okay with unleashing random internet people on a mentally ill person, which could easily spiral into a mob that involves death threats, doxing of personal info, etc. Hell, I'm not okay doing that to a mentally healthy person.
hluska 6y ago
I’m not sure that I’d call the reaction to Bergstrom a debacle. Here are a couple of quotes from the excerpt that made everyone angry: “It’s a novel with a teenage heroine set in a dystopian future. Which novel in particular doesn’t matter because they’re all the same. Poor teenage heroine, having to go to war when all you really want is to write in your diary about how you’re in love with two different guys and can’t decide between them. These novels are cheesy, I know, and I suck them down as easily as milk.” “They love this—the school uniform, the flash of seventeen-year-old legs.” The first quote is a pretty direct attack at the Hunger Games. HG has a rabid following so that was risky. The second is just godawful writing. He still would have been okay but he went a little too far mocking the amount of talent needed to write YA. Scooter Braun recently learned a lesson about screwing with media that rabid young adults identify with. It’s a bad idea, but if you’re going to do it, bring better prose. Or at least accept that the genre’s bestsellers are way better at the internet than you are.
- Chazprime 6y ago
  Those quotes really don’t warrant the disproportional responses to his book nor the vitriol directed at him personally & professionally. I think it’s time we start calling out the social media mobbing for what it really is: hateful.
  - ttt0 6y ago
    Everyone will dismiss it with the "Paradox of Tolerance".
  - hluska 6y ago
    Did you actually read his interview though? If you’re going to mock your entire genre, you should at least be accurate. Otherwise, critics will rightly point out that you’re writing a genre you don’t know. When you add in that second quote, it’s even more obvious that he doesn’t know his genre. The dude wrote some books at a team with YA was all the rage and got a film deal out of it. He made some godawful marketing and communications decisions and faced predictable consequences. I don’t feel bad for writers who can’t communicate. Nor do I feel bad for writers who aren’t capable of thinking through how their work fits within a genre they’re trying to capitalize on. Businesses that make bad marketing decisions cancel themselves and in this case, the writer made a myriad of awful business decisions. That’s capitalism. And seriously, who would outright mock the Hunger Games without expecting some sort of disproportionate backlash? YA works in disproportionates - it’s the entire beast, right down to the growth strategy. If you’re not wise enough to understand your genre, you lose. The thought that you could dismiss that entire genre with garbage critiques and not face bizarre retribution is so insane that I can’t take it seriously. And if you’re going to do that after you’ve signed a film deal?? I’m sorry but you deserve to be cancelled.
trident5000 6y ago
People basically found out a new way to be an asshole. They would have been an asshole in another way if this current lane was closed and socially challenged. It just happens to be that virtue signaling and sticking some BS cause in front of your behavior lets you get away with it at this point in time.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Number157 6y ago

Some people just want to hurt others. These are just excuses to do it in a way that they can enjoy being malicious while claiming to be "good".

treeman79 6y ago
That is sad but normal. What’s scary is that this behavior is now acceptable. As long as it’s against group X

johnchristopher 6y ago

Ah, reminds me of the difference of treatment between Sam and Frodo in Lord of the Rings: >> Looking in a mirror he was startled to see a much thinner reflection of himself than he remembered: it looked remarkably like the young nephew of Bilbo who used to go tramping with his uncle in the Shire; but the eyes looked at him thoughtfully. > Pauline Baynes's illustration of the Fellowship, done while Tolkien was alive, shows all four hobbits as being of very much the same proportions. Oddly enough, the movie shows Sam as more or less the same build when he leaves Hobbiton and when he reaches Mordor, even though he had some weeks of semi-starvation. https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/92576/is-there-any-evidence-that-tolkien-thought-of-samwise-gamgee-as-being-particular https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/92576/is-there-any...

p_l 6y ago
FWIW, in Lord of the Rings, it was implied that the change in Frodo was due to carrying the One Ring, and that it was due to it that he couldn't rejoin normal life while the other Hobbits could (and in Shire, ultimately became much more famous)
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  No, not when that scene happens. It clearly was a comment he made on how he got healthier by walking around. It's early in the book.
  - p_l 6y ago
    Ah. Well, he was the lazy stay-at-home guy of the four hobbits before the adventure :) Samwise did hard physical work regularly, and Meriadock and Pippin while also somewhat pampered (remember, of the four hobbit, only Sam wasn't nobility!) were somewhat known for their adventures.

secondcoming 6y ago

> Twitter is super safe if you're on the far left For now. There is a deliberate tactic on the left to become more and more extreme. A sentiment expressed today that's totally fine may not be fine tomorrow. It will be used against you. The left will turn on itself once it has made Conservatism illegal.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
The right just tried to burn down the House in the US, murder the government, and install a dictator because it didn't accept that it lost a fair election. Many on the right still can't, even now. If you want your philosophy to remain legal, acting like this is a very bad thing and not something that can really be excused - for any reason - might be a good start.
- smaryjerry 6y ago
  I think another post hit the mark here but generalizing people into extreme groups is a real problem. I know many people on the “right” and “left” that basically only agree with half of what their chosen party says, or maybe they only agree with one issue that is very important to them. On the left it is usually abortion and the right it is usually economy. My point is that saying things like “many” is not all or even a majority. Taking the capitol building riots, even the people present there were incredibly diverse in their mindset. There was a group of a couple hundred that had bad intents and there were several thousand that were actively stopping others from causing damage or fighting the police. There are many videos of people pulling rioters away from breaking windows and shouting at them to stop. The big problem is that the peaceful group didn’t mix with the rioting group soon enough. Trump was having a rally not even close to the capitol building meanwhile this other group started storming the capital. I find it similar when people get angry at like a “Google” employee for saying some obviously idiotic things. Sure an employee represents the company in some capacity but for companies that have tens of thousands of employees, there is almost certainty that some will behave badly. Now take mentality that to the over 70 million Trump voters. Each has their own individual reason for voting for him and lumping them together is no different than saying all men or all women are the same, the ratio is about the equal to genders. This gets exacerbated by media companies who will take one example and call that out as if it is the rule. I can’t tell you how many articles and new shows that say “some say” and use one tweet saying that as evidence as if it is a majority held opinion or representative of a whole. In the BLM protests it was reasonable was assume a lot of the rioters were not protesters or not there for the protest but that same standard was dropped for those at the capital.

ljm 6y ago

If you go with the horseshoe theory then the far left is barely distinguishable from the far right. The only thing that changes really is the framing of the issue and the motivation. If you're looking at people being criticised because they're not writing characters of their own skin colour or sexuality, or 'staying in their lane' with their culture, or because their own experiences don't conform to some expectation (like the author criticised for describing slavery but not how it was in the US), then you're still looking at segregation and oppression, but approaching it in a way that is falsely empowering. It is still massively authoritarian and oppressive and extreme, no matter how virtuous people think the left wing is, and it's certainly not liberal. There's just nothing good about being at the extreme end of anything. But that aside, and with the crowds on twitter, I just wonder what it will take for people like that to be happy, and not perpetually angry. So much aggression couched in seemingly kind language.

pepperspray 6y ago
I completely agree. Honestly, I'm pretty sure those people have no friends in real life, the way they jump down peoples' throats for every minor thing, so they gravitate online to find echo chambers. Their cohorts online are only "allies", not real friends. They will turn on each other as soon as one of them challenges their ideology.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
I don't think the horseshoe theory works. The critical factor is authoritarianism. Which is a grown-up word for bullying and narcissism. Authoritarians are invariably toxic damaged people who are full of rage and are looking for a target to make themselves feel better. Sometimes they end up on the left. Sometimes they end up on the right. Sometimes they end up in management or venture capital. Same issues, same dynamic, different context. The difference is authoritarians on the right are more likely to use physical violence. "Cultural" authoritarians are more likely to use social exclusion - brigading on social media, getting people fired, and so on. The key point is that the presenting issue is irrelevant. The social dynamic and mode of relationship - angry tribalism used to justify violence without any sense of context - is the real tell.

baron_harkonnen 6y ago

> is super safe if you're on the far left Liberals are not considered the "far left" and people on the far left dislike them as much as people on the right do. This isn't a "no true Scotsman" issue either, there are clear distinctions between various left-wing ideologies and mainstream liberalism (radical or not). Finger pointing and blaming individuals, the type of behavior your describing, is classic dominant capitalist ideology, something that all flavors of the left are deeply skeptical of. Both "radical" liberalism and rising right-wing extremism are different varieties of nihilism, stemming from the same root cause of a degradation in our overall material conditions and the breakdown of late capitalist society. Both are essentially empty systems of rhetoric with no underlying values that ultimately lead to a totalitarian way of thinking. To reiterate, the thinking your describing is absolutely not "far left".

Udik 6y ago
Political trials, formal and informal, against "class enemies" are typical of extremist left wing movements. See for example Maoist "struggle sessions", which seem nothing else than an in-person version of a twitter mob: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session Note that the targets of cancel culture are in the most proper sense "class enemies" since their sins are not directed against specific individuals but entire classes of people: blacks, women, transsexuals, etc.- and can be as vague as dismissive attitudes or generic antagonism.
bitwize 6y ago
> Liberals are not considered the "far left" and people on the far left dislike them as much as people on the right do. Indeed. Graffiti in the wake of a recent riot read: "Liberals get the bullet too "