Firstly a set of warnings: this post is going to be looking at organised groups of online harassers and discuss some very toxic websites. The victims of these groups include people I know online and some of whom read this blog — so apologies in advance to them for bringing up painful experiences.
Secondly, by their very nature, the sources of much of the information I’ve been looking at are unreliable. Sites dedicated to malicious trolling have members whose own claims about their identities and background cannot be relied upon. A key tactic of the harassment campaigns under discussion includes PEOPLE IMPERSONATING OTHER PEOPLE so I’m going to be very equivocal in some cases. A particular example would be where a character from one internet world (say a writer of the “Scrappy-Doo” right-wing culture warrior world) appears to be also a member of a specific trolling/harassment site. In some cases, sure, yes that person using the same name and avatar as author X on some obscure site is actually the person who uses the same name and avatar on mainstream social media. However, the due diligence to confirm that is very difficult, so please apply a degree of scepticism.
Thirdly, there are cases where a pseudonymous user of a site describes themselves in particular ways that have a strong resemblance to a real person. Here I must ask that people be particularly mindful that drawing apparently obvious connections is dangerous and, more importantly, mirrors the kind of identity pseudo-sleuthing that these sites engage in. Person X (a toxic troll) may well be Person Y (nice mainstream person) but given that Person X is a toxic troll you really should not believe ANYTHING they say about themselves. So even if it looks blindingly obvious that X is Y there’s still a non-negligible chance that X is trying to look like Y for their own malicious reasons.
Anyway, I’m going to be doing some weird little dances about names and identities. I’m absolutely not trying to doxx trolls and I’d ask people not to speculate in the comments, even when in basic cases (e.g. Jon Del Arroz comes up in various places using handles like “Jon Del Arroz” and saying Jon Del Arroz things but even then I’ll still say something like “a user claiming to be Jon Del Arroz” if it’s a non-mainstream site).
Well that’s four paragraphs and I haven’t even reached the opening yet. This is will be a long post.
Layer 1: The Tomlinson Harassment
I had only been vaguely aware of the long-running harassment campaign against author Patrick Tomlinson prior to 2019. Towards the end of that year, I became partly embroiled in one aspect of that campaign when trolls began spamming negative reviews of an upcoming book of his on Goodreads. The brigading tactics on Goodreads expanded beyond harassing Tomlinson directly with the trolls impersonating other authors, including Cat Rambo and Mary Robinette Kowal.
The Goodreads harassment was just one part of a years-long campaign against Tomlinson. That campaign had extended itself to target other people, in particular people who had been seen to defend Tomlinson in some way. After fan-writer Paul Weimer had objected to the trolls using a photograph he had taken of Tomlinson, he became a specific target of the group and has faced ongoing harassment as a consequence. More recently, notable Nigerian science fiction writer and editor Oghenechovwe Ekpeki has become an additional target of the group.
I’m not going to recap the whole history of the troll group. If you follow the links or look up Tomlinson’s own accounts there are detailed histories. Currently, the group coordinates via a site called OnAforums (named after the “Opie & Anthony” radio show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opie_and_Anthony ). The users of the site are pseudonymous, the owner of the site is pseudonymous, and they maintain a degree of deniability between their more online harassment and the more physically dangerous events that have impacted their targets. Patrick Tomlinson’s attempts to use legal measures against them have not succeeded. Tomlinson recently wrote an extensive Twitter thread on the topic here https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/1648819170618880000. I’ll come back to that.
I like to make fine distinctions, often ones that make little functional difference to events. In this post we are going to be looking at different grades of shit, not because it isn’t all shit but because there are multiple agendas and people are throwing shit for different (but closely related and often hard to distinguish) reasons.
The posts on OnAforums have the usual features of far-right toxicity: racist slurs, homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny. The genre is Chan-style nastiness. However, the purpose is far more focused. The site exists to further the harassment of Patrick Tomlinson for the purpose of harassing Patrick Tomlinson. They have other targets (as discussed above) but the point of harassing the other targets is to further the campaign of harassing Tomlinson. In particular, by targetting others they aim to make Tomlinson essentially a cursed object online. To be seen as associated with Tomlinson (even tangentially) runs the risk of being targeted. It’s monomaniacal.
That monomania doesn’t divorce the harassment campaign from broader and more ideological culture war harassment campaigns but there is a fine distinction to be made in terms of making sense of strategy and objectives. That Tomlinson has made social media posts attacking Trump or supportive of progressive causes is cited by the trolls as a reason why they regard him as a legitimate target. However, clearly, in terms of ongoing culture wars, Tomlinson is a tiny target and the scale, time and effort this group expends on attacking him are vastly out of proportion if the objective was to silence progressive voices. The trolls offer a kind of moralistic circular reasoning to justify their actions in that Tomlinson has responded to them in various ways which they cite as a reason to escalate their attacks. Such excuses are clearly self-serving but beyond them, there really is not much additional substance to their motives. They do this because it is the thing that they do — which is part of the horror of it.
Anything is ammunition for the group and this is where we do see the connections with the broader culture wars as well as the specific ones that have raged within popular culture. As we saw with the Goodreads trolling, the group pulled in connections to the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. The Puppy Debarkle left behind on the net a trove of right-wing anti-SFWA propaganda, including Vox Day’s attempts to slander SFWA officers as being sympathetic to child abuse. The post-Puppy harassment campaigns by Jon Del Arroz also created a lot of material including the specific harassment of former SFWA president Cat Rambo. Notably, in the Goodreads trolling, the group attacked Cat Rambo and also impersonated her father. I should add, that I don’t believe that at that point JDA was involved with the OnA trolls, just that they picked up on the targets that past harassment had identified.
I want to pull away from this thread for awhile though. This post is about connections and layers of harassment rather than one group. So time for a different distinction.
Layer 2: Kiwi Farms
If the OnA forums have a singular mission then Kiwi Farms is more eclectic in directing harassment. Despite attempts earlier in the year to close the site, it still exists and is still a major site for ongoing harassment campaigns. The site is a particular nexus for anti-trans hatred but it acts more broadly as a kind of internet repository for collating personal details and doxxing. For example, Vox Day’s location in Switzerland was doxxed on Kiwi Farms long before it Swiss news media revealed that he lived in the country (I was aware of the Kiwi Farms doxxing but didn’t cover it or link to it because of the source).
While you can find misguided leftists on Kiwi Farms, it should be seen as essentially a far-right project. The tactics deployed by the site disproportionately the less powerful and marginalised people, so even when used against a wealthy ultra-nationalist like Vox Day, it further the broader spread of hate by the site.
Kiwi Farms has had an ongoing thread dedicated to Patrick Tomlinson for several years. This illustrates the way the site magnifiers trolling, internet grudges and harassment campaigns. The site needs a supply of individuals to target, gossip about and collate personal information on, so when Tomlinson was targeted by one small group of trolls, that helped single him out as a person of interest to the Kiwi Farms community. This process isn’t unique to Tomlinson, Kiwi Farms identifies people already being targeted and then amplifies that harassment to a wider audience who enjoy seeing somebody being harassed on the internet.
While Kiwi Farms is something of a pariah website and there is pressure to close it due to the demonstrable harm it has inflicted, the site has a tangible influence on the rest of the internet. Curiosity, gossip and people attempting to settle scores will make use of the site’s reputation as a clearing house for doxxing. People on the right and left exploit that to score points against enemies. However, there is also a flow of talking points from the site to right-wing websites and not just on the kind of topics that Kiwi Farms is known for.
For example, consider this post on John C. Wright’s website from June 2022:
“A friend sent me this remark, and I pass it along without comment:
https://www.scifiwright.com/2022/06/remark-on-geo-rr-martin/
‘The issue Martin ran into with ASOIAF [A Song of Ice and Fire] is, ironically, one of this own hand… he spent five books subverting expectations, killing key characters, torturing and scattering the survivors to the ends of creation… and only now realized that there’s no way in hell he can actually bring them all back in one place and piece together a story that makes sense in just two books. The problem with endless deconstruction is that, eventually, you have nothing left to build with.’”
It’s just bog standard GRRM-not-finished-yet moaning but it is actually quoting a longer comment from a Kiwi Farms thread dedicated to mocking events in YA book world. That same post goes on to discuss how much better Larry Correia’s books are and later says:
“Martin and Rothfuss have done more damage to the fantasy genre’s reputation and sales numbers with two books they will never write than I think many will ever realize. Decades of goodwill and fan trust not even hurt by scores of bad riffs on Lord of the Rings, dozens upon dozens of “Clone-ans”, or a series clearly being used to explore the authors politics or fetishes, all gone from two fat assholes refusing to actually finish two damned books. That’s actually a thing now within the fantasy genre – now a ton of people refuse to try a new fantasy series until its completed. Sales in the fantasy genre have suffered, even by good/popular authors, as a result of these two idiots.”
https://archive.is/Dr6fj Archive of Kiwi Farms post #1923 yabookthread
This is a sentiment very similar to one recently expressed on Larry Correia’s blog.
Which takes me up to the next layer.
Layer 3: The Post-Puppy Sphere
Well given the nature of my blog I was going to mention the Puppies sooner or later. In the aftermath of the Debarkle there have been numerous outlets, blogs and spaces that have attempted to continue the right-wing culture war perspective on science fiction and fantasy. Some of those spaces have gone by the wayside, others are (such as Mad Genius Club) have toned down their culture war rhetoric, some have found a specific niche such as the Castalia House blog which carries promoting pulp sci-fi long after the publisher has moved on to other things.
One of the more recent examples of the Post-Puppy Sphere is the Substack-based review blog Upstream Reviews. The site is associated with ex-Puppy and culture warrior Declan Finn. I’ve covered it on a couple of occasions, once in relation to the Dragon Awards and more recently when the site was duped into publishing an interview with somebody pretending to be the YA author who had faked their own death. So, fair to say, Upstream Reviews is not a site with the best editorial standards or one that has a healthy scepticism for what their writers read on the internet.
The site recently published an article largely uncritically promoting the OnA forums version of events around Patrick Tomlinson.
“Tomlinson has a sociopathic ability to deny bald-faced reality as easily as he belabouredly breathes.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20230417040035/https://upstreamreviews.substack.com/p/waiting-for-the-knock
It’s a pretty shitty piece and even if you were sceptical of Patrick Tomlinson’s claims the broader evidence of an extensive harassment campaign attacking multiple people from the same source is undeniable. The thrust of the article is an attempt to establish that Tomlinson is a bad person who lies. I don’t personally know Tomlinson but even if the multiple claims made about him in the piece are true it neither explains nor justifies morally (or even pragmatically) why there is a years-long harassment campaign from a dedicated forum as well as Kiwi Farms is a good thing. Indeed the most repeated point made by Upstream Reviews, the Kiwi Farms thread and the OnA forums appear to be that Tomlinson looks overweight to them…which…well it speaks for itself in terms of people looking for a post-hoc rationalisation for bizarre and obnoxious behaviour.
Upstream Reviews is not a particularly popular or credible website but while both OnA forums and Kiwi Farms sit on the legal margins of the internet, sites like Upstream Reviews are on mainstream services. It is just one example of how the more toxic websites have their abuse pushed into less marginal spaces.
This churning of the effluent from the lower layers to a multitude of smaller spaces but on more legitimate services (Facebook accounts, Twitter, Substacks etc) is partly an organic process, partly trolls directly acting out on social media but also a process pushed by people with direct agendas beyond trolling.
Churning the layers
In each of these layers (OnA, Kiwi Farms, the Post-Puppy sphere) you’ll find the same anti-SFWA propaganda. It is familiar stuff, most of which was created from 2013 to 2017 during the Debarkle conflict. The Rabid Puppy/Castalia House attempts to use the history of abuse committed by Walter Breen and Marion Zimmer Bradley, to falsely characterise the SFWA as harbouring paedophiles, and are reproduced uncritically. When Vox Day was directing his campaign against the SFWA he made editorial decisions to, for example, avoid discussing Robert Heinlein’s connection to the Breens and to avoid stressing Ed Kramer’s role in Dragon Con because those issues would be inconvenient to his agenda. These same editorial decisions are now repeated years later on sites like Kiwi Farms but with less thought.
The layers share, overall, a common ideology of racism, misogyny, transphobia and homophobia but they differ in direction. OnA forums are focused on a campaign against an individual, Kiwi Farms is dedicated to harassment for harassment’s sake but the Post-Puppy sphere retains the objective of combating what they once called SJWs and now call “the Woke”, while they also further author self-promotion via culture war controversy.
There’s not a lot of functional difference: OnA are direct attacks at the SFWA because they see the organisation as supporting Tomlinson, Kiwi Farms attacks the SFWA as part of its quest for more “lolcows”, while the Post-Puppy Sphere has a long lasting grudge against the organisation which, while it arose from the expulsion of Vox Day, they’ve largely forgotten the origin of. It is now classed as “woke” and hence a target.
However, this doesn’t mean that there are no individuals attempting to direct the harassment.
During 2020 accounts under the name of Jon Del Arroz and using avatars associated with his brands were active on both Kiwi Farms and on OnA forums. There is no way of confirming whether those accounts were JDA’s or were somebody impersonating him. The account on OnA eventually alienated the users of the forum and by 2022 there were numerous anti-JDA threads on the site directing racial slurs at the author.
Notably in May 2022 screen grabs of chat on an SFWA Slack channel were leaked on Kiwi Farms. The screen grabs showed members of SFWA coordinating to report trolls harassing or impersonating Patrick Tomlinson on Twitter. The leak was made both in an attempt to embarrass SFWA and to lend support to OnA’s harassment campaign. Taking credit for the leak was the account named TheCosmicWarrior: Jon Del Arroz with an avatar of Jon Del Arroz’s Flying Sparks comic. When another user asked whether the leaker had been an SFWA member, the account claiming to be Jon Del Arroz answered:
“SFWA leaker here — no they had zero security on their chat to start. Unfortunately, it did log me in under my email so they knew who I was immediately. I got the shots I could.”
https://archive.is/gNBIw Archive of Kiwi Farms post May 21, 2022 #4645
Assuming this was Jon Del Arroz, there’s nothing surprising here based on his previous history. However, it helps illustrate that there are people moving between these layers who hope to coordinate the agendas of these different groups.
The purported Jon Del Arroz account was replying to a different Kiwi Farms user. Interestingly, this user was one I have already quoted: the person who was later quoted by John C. Wright complaining about George R.R. Martin’s slow output.
This user under the pseudonym of Boston Brand (presumably named after the DC comics character) had been particularly happy at the SFWA leak. They anticipated that this signalled that the OnA forums might put more of their effort into attacking the SFWA:
“Oh my god they’re really going after SFWA? This is even more exciting than Pat losing the second lawsuit… especially given the relatively little they’ve done already has the organization in panic mode.”
https://archive.is/UYFlo Archive of Kiwi Farms post #4631
Boston Brand had been calling on Kiwi Farms members to target the SFWA for sometime and earlier in the same comment had this to say:
“Shame that leaker got caught so quickly.
ibid
Like I have said repeatedly, there’s a known network within SFWA that coordinates messaging blasts and harassment targets… exposing its full extent and methodology would cut off SFWA at the knees.Entirely theoretically, you need a SFWA membership to have access to these chats, right?
I have one. If I can access it without outting myself…”
Readers are probably curious about this “known network” within the SFWA. An elite cadre of SFWA operatives? SFWA: Special Circumstances? Section 31? He’s posted on multiple occasions a list of names which vary a little with who they include. Here is one version of the list from 2022 on a Kiwi Farms thread dedicated to being very angry about the existence of Chuck Wendig:
“People have no idea not only how incestuous that circle is, but how outside appearances be damned, how very fragile that circle is. As I tell the folks picking on Fatpat, you really want to cut guys like Wendig or Tomlinsin to the quick? Go after SFWA’s big guns – John Scalzi, Mary Three Names, NK Jemisin, Cat Rambo, to name a few – and their support network – Mike Glyer, Jason Sanford, Cora Buhlert, Paul Weimer, Camestros Felapton. Foz Meadows, to name a few biggish names – and the entire house of cards will collapse. They coast on trad publishing moving at a snails pace, the SFWA name coasting on past legacy and reputation, and being able to rally a mob of online lefties at the snap of their fingers, or a tweet. Take out one or more at the legs, or reveal how much of that image is false – and the entire house of cards will collapse on top of them.”
https://archive.is/iUlE9 Archive of Kiwi Farms #2392
Wait, hold on a mo, who was that again? That’s quite a set of co-conspirators! Suffice to say that particular set of names looks less like the Praetorian Guard of the SFWA and an awful lot more like a list of people that really, really upset the Sad Puppies over the Hugo Awards. I can speak for the rest of them but what connections I have with the SFWA are very tangential and I’ve only really been involved with one SFWA-related controversy. In the same post, Boston Brand also links to Larry Correia’s podcast. Actually, the account spends a lot of time promoting Correia’s books.
Boston Brand claims to be a publishing industry insider. Of course, as I noted at the very start of this post, you cannot take the claims of these accounts as trustworthy. Having said that, Brand appears to have access to Bookscan data and has posted sales figures for targetted authors on Kiwi Farms. They haven’t stated which publisher they work for but have stated which one they do NOT work for: Baen Books. However, they regularly promote Baen Books to Kiwi Farm members and related industry news about potential signings to Baen Books and generally put more effort than you might expect in boosting the publisher. Perhaps they hope to get a job there someday.
Upstream Reviews has also published Bookscan sales figures for notable SFWA figures in an attempt to show that the organisation is failing.
“Of course, SFWA’s mission has turned from celebrating quality storytelling to secular preaching. A series of recently leaked screenshots of NPD Bookscan sales figures show that reader demand for some of sci-fi’s most well-known (and politically vociferous) names are faring absolutely abysmally.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20220301122419/https://upstreamreviews.com/?p=3114 This archived page is from Upstream Review’s former website before it moved to substack
In the comments is a familiar name:
“Boston Brand
ibid
Happy to see those numbers finally start to spread.
Really guts the argument from the SFWA hangers on that they represent anybody except their own pathetic little circlejerk, doesn’t it?
Keep up the good fight lads.”
I don’t know or care who is actually behind the “Boston Brand” name but whoever they are they very much appear to:
- Be actively promoting Baen Books to Kiwi Farms members
- Actively cheering on the harassment campaign against Patrick Tomlinson
- Keen for Kiwi Farms to target people associated with the pushback against the 2015 Sad Puppies campaign
Which takes me back to the layers. There’s no big conspiracy here, even though there are a lot of people involved. Each layer seeks to promote its own shitty agenda and in doing so recruits lost souls to the goal of harassment. Some of the harassment may be coordinated but a lot of it will operate more like stochastic terrorism. They aim to single out victims and promote the idea to the broader internet that specific people are suitable people to harass. The collective motives are different from the individual motives. “Boston Brand” may or may not be a Baen op or they might just be somebody who admires ultra-toxic trolls and Larry Correia — that’s hardly a suprising combination.
It is, in the end, a septic tank of excrement. That the tank has its own regions and zones and mirco-enviroments doesn’t alter its overall nature.
Camestros Felapton 
71 responses to “An analysis of effluent: the mainstreaming of harassment”
. Here is one version of the list from 2022 on a Kiwi Farms thread dedicated to being very angry about the existence of Chuck Wendig:
“People have no idea not only how incestuous that circle is, but how outside appearances be damned, how very fragile that circle is. As I tell the folks picking on Fatpat, you really want to cut guys like Wendig or Tomlinsin to the quick? Go after SFWA’s big guns – John Scalzi, Mary Three Names, NK Jemisin, Cat Rambo, to name a few – and their support network – Mike Glyer, Jason Sanford, Cora Buhlert, Paul Weimer, Camestros Felapton. Foz Meadows, to name a few biggish names
Hunh. I had not realized I had “graduated” from just the Opie and Anthony to Kiwi Farms as a target. Well that explains some things.
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Did they increase the harrasment in your direction? (Sorry the ending of your comment does imply that)
From the list it screams at last Puppyrelated poster. Unfortunatly Twitter (if existing any longer) is now a place more where hatred can be posted without consequences.
I found it interesting that there seems to be a connection beetwen Wright and Larry and the doxers. (at last they seem to be aware of the postings on Kiwi Farm
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There have been some new actors and new vectors for that ongoing harassment. I thought it was just overenthusiastic Onaforums folks…but I think that’s not right, now.
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I believe other Tomlinson related thread at KF will have picked Paul out also simply because OnA where already targetting him.
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Yes, KF has been boosting the harassment of any target of OnA – and in this case suggesting others
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Well, I guess that explains the randos who decided to scream at me for daring to consider Top Gun Maverick a superfluous movie.
Anyway, the whole list is ridiculous. I’m not an SFWA member, largely because I didn’t get around to applying for membership yet. Paul, Mike and Cam are not SFWA members either, as far as I know. What unites all of those names is that they have been Hugo finalists or winners in the recent past. Except for Cat Rambo.
What is more, I know neither N.K. Jemisin nor Chuck Wendig at all. I’ve met Patrick Tomlinson and Foz Meadows online, though I don’t know them particularly well. I have reported and blocked some of Tomlinson impersonators. I have also met John Scalzi and Mary Robinette Kowal in person, though again I don’t know them well. The rest I know. So apparently I’m part of a conspiracy in an organisation I don’t belong to, with people I barely know.
Yeah, I guess that makes sense in Boston Brand’s sorry excuse for a brain.
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I suspect that Boston Brand is laboring under the usual Puppyish confusion where they have mistaken WSFS for SFWA.
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This has been noted several zillion times before and the Puppies must have chosen to ignore it, because of their fee-fees. Like that time someone showed up at a SFWA meeting to “burn down the Hugos” and the long-suffering Cat tried to explain it again. Because they know they can’t burn down the Nebulas? Because they’re stupid? I blame Teddy for fanning all the confusion for his own egoboo and grifting.
They also have a specific wrong-footed claim about who the Big Names are. I mean, while we all know and love Mike, Cora, and Cam, none of them have Big Professional Name clout. (Hint: they’re in the fan categories) Cam doesn’t even go to cons! And they only got their hate on for Mike when he started reporting about Puppies in their very own words, because apparently accurately quoting them is malicious?
And all of their “Big Names” are much better writers than any of the Puppies and Puppyish types. Even with Cam’s tyops.
I mean, I know MRK and Scalzi way better than Cora does, but I’m not a woman who does work eligible for Hugos.
On a really snide note, aren’t JCW (a man with 3 initials!) and LC both actual fat assholes? I mean, yes, we’d like for GRRM and PR to write faster, but they are, as has been famously pointed out, not your bitch. And they do a lot of good charity work. GRRM’s spending the “stupid money” (his words) he got from HBO to support a lot of other artists, and PR has raised millions to help people around the world. Also, protip: GRRM started winning Hugos before most of the Puppies were born, and he wasn’t fat then. They’s probably just jealous of the magnificent beards.
(By the way, assholes, MRK has only 2 names: one’s Mary Robinette, the other’s Kowal. Which is even her husband’s family name, not hers! Pretty damn traditional of her, particularly as it’s harder for people to pronounce by looking at it.)
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Mary Robinette Kowal and I will be on a panel together at MetropolCon in Berlin next month, so we can discuss important cabal stuff. The con takes place in a former crematarium, so we even have a convenient place to dispose of our enemies without leaving a trace.
Anyway, I really don’t get those comments about Mary Robinette Kowal’s name, since let’s just say plenty of puppies and puppy adjacent types are really not in the position to make jokes about anybody’s names.
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TBF, if I needed a body disposed of, I’d guess you and she could do a good job of it if you’d had an ethics-ectomy. I’ve watched every episode of CSI so I could help.
I make fun of Brad for not being able to write his own name. Everything I’ve ever seen him sign is as “Brad T. :)” I wish I was making that up.
At least she’s not named after a foodstuff. Fingers crossed, I’ll see her in a couple weeks at an event. Last time I went to this event, I saw Scalzi and that hippie eco guy Kim Stanley Robinson (more 3 names! although it took me a second to remember the “Kim”, because I’ve never heard him called anything but “Stan” at cons), so I guess I’m cabal-adjacent. Can I get the newsletter?
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Erratum: it’s “Brad T.😀”
I blame Word Press.
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I will answer here to get that I feel slightly atacked for using only the Initial for the last name. 🙂
Re three names, I am also suprised that this is unusual. More than two names are not unussual here, I don’t have them because my mother who even has four names (the second and third were from her grandmothers) didn’t like them. Most people I know don’t use those extranames, which I got the impression that this is a difference between the states and here.
I short this one was always strange and streams who puppy or puppyrelated? (I know it is a dig towards people using double names after there mariage, but that doesn’t make it less stupid)
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It seems to me as if second names are a lot more common in the US – and they’re not exactly uncommon here either, though people mostly stick with one.
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I make fun of Brad for attempting to come off as a friendly goofy old turtle when his twitter shows that he’s every bit as racist as Vox Day.
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Like I said, the con takes place in a former crematorium (no idea if the equipment is still there) adjacent to a cemetery, so ideal for body disposal.
Fascinating that no one can figure out to spell Brad’s name, including Brad himself. And it’s not that difficult.
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It is particularly weird when the “three names” thing comes from Sarah Hoyt
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Though I haven’t noticed an uptick of harrassment except for those two randos. But then I’m not a good harassment target, because I don’t live in the US and am self-employed, i.e. there’s no employers to contact.
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Tyop Ptarol weighing in here on the last sentence, “a sceptic tank of excrement.” Do you mean “septic”? “Sceptic tank” is a pretty clever phrase, but I don’t know if it’s warranted here.
Please tell me if people are annoyed by these corrections. Sometimes spelling and grammar mistakes are almost painful for me, but I can stop correcting them if I need to. (Mostly.) (And yeah, you can end a sentence with a preposition. Sez me.)
This is a fascinating look at an internet phenomenon I’ve never heard of. I’ve only been targeted by jerks a few times, and my heart goes out to the people being harassed.
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Always appreciated.
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I find their attempted beef against SFWA as a whole particularly fascinating. Especially since they try to act like it’s an active hotbed of protecting pedophiles, and their proof is pointing at two reviled people who have been dead for over twenty years.
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Yes and while I think it is shallow of me, it is also such a sad secondhand, recycled and derivative beef. The warmed up left overs of the Rabid Puppies that they don’t even really understand.
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It’s projection. Whenever any specific group starts going on a loud pedophilia scree, my default assumption is that they’re just loudly trying to denounce their inner feelings.
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Yup e.g. currently the US party supporting child marriage laws in multiple states is having a tantrum about “grooming”
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The most troubling thing about the far right in the US and elsewhere screaming “pedophilia” and “grooming” at each and every political opponents is that these accusations become just background noise and actual cases of pedophilia will have a harder time getting attention.
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They’re largely silent about the Catholic scandals, similar scandals in Protestant churches, Alex Acosta giving Epstein a sweetheart plea bargain — and Epstein only interests them because he knew the Clintons.
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It also gives them a reason to hate their enemies (always tempting) and to see themselves as virtuous — obviously that “remove the beam from your own eye” doesn’t apply when the mote in your neighbor’s eye is a pedophile mote!
Christian feminist Samantha Field said the underlying assumption when religious conservatives talk about consent is that Fallen Humanity will consent to anything at any time, which is why you need absolute black and white rules (only marriage! Only het sex!) to keep you in check.
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Re OnAForums: What’s the relation between the forum, the radio show, and the group doing the SF-related harassment? Like, are the trolls there because some of them are old fans of the radio show, or is it just happen conveniently pseudonymous forum the use? Are there other forum users talking about other things? (Harassing other people?)
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So there was a sub reddit dedicated to the show that became one of those toxic reddit groups whose identity was based on hating and being obsessed with the subreddit’s topic. It was that sub reddit that Tomlinson pissed off and when Reddit closed the sub reddit, people from there recreated it in a series of dodgy webforums.
The forum does pick up tangentianlly on other topics in the way a community of people will but the primary purpose is harassing Tomlinson or people associated (in the forum’s mind) with Tomlinson. So they’ll have thread about how much they hate Paul or how much they hate Oghenechovwe Ekpeki or how much they hate the SFWA etc. As well as being quite evil, there is something extraordinarily sad about it – the time effort they put into their obsession is extraordinary. It has all the characteristics of a fandom (obsessive shared interest establishing a common community) but expressed via hate and vindictivness.
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If you were not already aware, the Opie and Anthony show has been off the air since 2014, when Anthony was fired by SiriusXM for posting racist shit online. There is nothing left for the members of the subreddit to be “fans” of with respect to the show (which was awful anyway; it was put on their air in the DC area for a while, I wrote to the radio station saying I would prefer to listen to a test pattern signal for four hours than listen to any amount of Opie and Anthony).
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Just a nitpick, somethink beeing of the air doesn’t prevent people from beeing fans of it, sometimes it makes it even easier, it is just the memorie not the reality.
Also a lot of older stuff that is off the air has still fans, of course mostly there is a posibility to watch/read it today, where a radioshow is probably not archived. Nerly 10 years is of course a lot of time.
Of course I knew nothing about the radioshow besides reading in the wikipediaarticle (but this is true for all the american radioshows even the very good ones), so I can’t comment on the quality, but beeing awful doesn’t prevent you from having fans, exibit a (most of) the puppies.
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I remember when they got fired from WAAF for their prank.
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Sure, there are people who are fans of long-concluded properties. I would ay that with O&A, their show was almost the definition of ephemeral media. I doubt most “fans” would be able to conjure up anything from the show today other than the very broad strokes – more or less that they had recurring bits that involved things like egging their supporters on to having sex in public places.
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Why can’t we get in the game?
I, personally, would welcome a bunch of 70’s sitcom fans to engage in lefty harassment of online RW shits. How about the Mary Tyler Moore Show? Or the Bob Newhart Show (first iteration, of course). Watch the show, and then every time someone says “Hi, Bob” then you send a nonsensical arguably threatening email to some Pup or ex-Pup. My choice would be John C. Wright, but your tastes may differ.
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Yuck. These tactics are life destroying, I do NOT approve of “turnabout is fair play” when applied to SWATting.
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It seems to me much of the harassment is aimed at silencing people, particularly anyone who publicly expresses support of Tomlinson. There’s been a lot directed at the SFWA board, and general shittiness flung out like like fetid poo via anyone whose website has a public contact form. It’s definitely a weird little series of clusterfucks on those forums, generally worth avoiding IMO, unless you’re wading through it for journalistic purposes, and I applaud Cam for getting through a lengthy read in that name. Their willingness to involve anyone remotely connected to their targets, including elderly and under-age collateral damage, in the poo-slinging shows how much people will lean into evil when they’re egging each other. Really sad, particularly when you see people trying to use them to harass others, whcih seems a whole other level of spiritual bankruptcy. 😦
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I agree with Cat—it’s mostly about silencing people.
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I think there’s also a type of sadist for whom the point of bullying anyone even vaguely connected to the main target isn’t exactly to “silence” those people in the sense of suppressing their defense of the target, but to make the main target feel as isolated as possible – like, afraid that no one will dare to associate with them, or that they’ll bring down this evil on their friends/family and feel responsible.
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Well congrats, I guess, Camestros, on being promoted to a big name forming a support network for SFWA and Tomlinson, even though you’re in Australia, aren’t a member of the SFWA and Tomlinson is still not a leftist nor someone whom you particularly know.
The irony of course is that younger authors have been heavily critical and often uninterested in joining SFWA because they found it behind and out of touch on key modern business issues, not only discrimination issues that affect the careers of women and authors of color but concerning e-books, self-publishing, modern promotion, health insurance, etc. It has often been seen as an organization of older fuddy-duddies who lean conservative, not diverse lefties, and younger authors have looked for other groups and networks instead.
The people appointed to lead the SFWA over the last ten years have worked at addressing these complaints, often indeed to much whining from older (white) members, especially about dealing with the actual industry discrimination they like to pretend isn’t there. But while SFWA has made progress, particularly on e-books and self-pubbing authors, and spearheaded legal negotiations such as helping authors in Nightshade Books’ bankruptcy and more recently going after Disney for royalties for authors, it’s never been an organization particularly good at dealing with what the alt right considers “lefty/lib” issues on equity in publishing. (I mean everyone is still trying to get SFF conventions to have standardized, decent codes of conduct after decades of effort.) And Scalzi, whom these corners of the Net frequently focus on even though they often don’t know who he is, was a mixed bag as SFWA president, dropping the ball at a crucial time, as he’s freely admitted and apologized for.
But when the Puppies tried to push a myth of the Hugos hijacked by an imaginary liberal cabal gaming the awards for literary diversity, they brought on Beale to mainly attack N.K. Jemisin, and Beale directed non-fan agitators he brought in from Gamergate to screech about the SFWA in mass confusion, hoping to cause problems for as many of his self-proclaimed nemeses as possible. Jemisin has had a rocky relationship with SFWA for her entire career and been very critical of the organization. I don’t even know if she’s still a member of the SFWA. But given that Beale was booted from the SFWA for abusing their official feed to push a racist attack at Jemisin, the mythic lore becomes simply that SFWA and cabals are determined to protect and promote Jemisin and that her popularity in the field and in book publishing must stem from such a protective network of minions. Because that’s how they themselves do harassment campaigns.
It sounds like Tomlinson isn’t even a member of SFWA? But people at SFWA are concerned about a modern issue that affects their members — Internet stalkers, harassers and swatters. And it seems like someone Puppy adjacent is trying to regurgitate Puppy myths to direct Internet trolls at added targets in SFF, just as Beale directed Gamergaters towards SFF authors and the SFWA during the Puppy campaigns.
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I think Tomlinson is in the SFWA but I don’t know that for certain
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I’m not familiar with the time Scalzi dropped the ball as SFWA president, though I trust he was doing his best- what happened?
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The Part with the SFWA’s professional magazine.
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https://mythcreants.com/blog/sfwa-pisses-off-teh-womenz/ I think
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Yes, it was part of Scalzi’s job as prez of SFWA to do a review of the SF Bulletin, the organization’s trade magazine. And when it came to an issue that was supposed to be centered on recognizing and celebrating women in SFF publishing, he didn’t pay enough attention, approved it and some pretty sexist material was used in the magazine (despite a woman editor.) And this caused a lot of members to be critical of exactly a central issue — that the SFWA wasn’t a club of pals, as many older members tend to view it, but a business and legal organization for writers that needed to be inclusive of all its members and consider issues marginalized authors faced in the business as part of its writ, as well as modern issues like e-books — needed to be more active.
And Scalzi did not handle the aftermath as well as he might have either. All of which he has freely admitted, apologized for and had to hand over the tangle to the new president (he was already scheduled to be out-going) who then had to deal with a lot of flack from what we could call proto-puppy whining. It was that whining — a petition which many older established SFF writers were tricked into/careless about signing by Robert Silverberg — that helped inspire LC and other Puppies to try what they did. They thought they had the backing of the older writers to their cause. And initially they did have a bit of support until their claims started being dismantled and they went for wilder and more accusatory conspiracy theories. And those theories have since migrated to other areas of the web where the belief that geek/SFF culture — even if they aren’t real fans themselves — should belong only to white man libertarian/conservatives is fervently stoked.
Tomlinson’s situation sounds a good bit more complicated, as far as I understand it which isn’t a great deal. I know he’s been swatted several times and I’m not surprised that some of it drifted to Kiwi Farms. It seems like several very disturbed individuals have a fixation on him and stir up the layers of murk as Camestros points out. But the later part of it does seem to be Puppy adjacent folk trying to resuscitate the Puppies campaign through other harassment campaigns. I’m sure Tor will figure in there somewhere eventually. It’s really awful for Tomlinson. I’ve gotten and read one of his novels and enjoyed it. And for the other people dragged in. And it is very much a legal and business issue that is part of SFWA’s responsibility to try to help members and other SFF authors with in the business. So complaining that the SFWA is nefarious for working to counter harassment of SFF authors makes no sense. But then these folk never do. They just want to hurt their targets and feel powerful doing it.
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Writing an alternate timeline novel in which John Scalzi vetoes that cover art & persuades reznick to tone things down a bit and in 2016 Jeb Bush wins the presidency
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Honestly, if Scalzi had just read (which I’m convinced he did not) and nixed the article by that guy who advised that women authors should be like Barbie and never be “mean” and critical of the men authors (which is a total misunderstanding of Barbie for one thing), I suspect that the uproar would have been a lot less. The Red Sonja cover and Reznick & Malzberg’s waxing on about how good their lady editor looked in a bikini rather than her editing skills — let’s call it bikini nostalgia — would have still produced criticism but in the more exasperated with attitudes of the past being re-upped vein. But it was the combination of that with the blatant sexism of that article about the modern field, instead of actually looking at women’s achievements, that brought up the key issue: how exactly is a professional organization of use to professional writers if it still refuses to treat women as equal professionals in its own trade magazine that goes out to the business.
And it did not help matters when Scalzi tried to balance it with everyone by letting Reznick & Malzberg respond to their critics in another column after much online debating. Which basically amounted to them saying that they were used to writing whatever they wanted and if people didn’t dig that, they could write a polite and easily dismissed Letter to the Editor like the old days of fanzines. It was the definition of out of touch, not just in attitudes and issues towards women but about how the modern field and technology had developed since the 1970’s.
And that was the main concern about the SFWA — that they were out-dated and ineffective on major business issues. And those are still issues that come up in some areas about them. Scalzi had a lot of irons in the fire at the time — film option deals, multiple books going out that then led to his big deal with Tor, etc., and while he did some good things as president, he admitted he didn’t keep an eye enough on the Bulletin. And the editor for whatever reason made the choices she did. Which is why they wisely changed how the Bulletin was then handled. Which caused Silverberg to invent a conspiracy theory about it and launch a petition he didn’t even write that said it was a mistake that women were given the right to vote. Which I will never get over.
I’m pretty convinced that the main Puppies, many of whom were older authors, saw this as evidence of a schism in SFF that they could exploit over the Hugos, along with the hoopla of Gamergate. Having had a black president in the U.S. particularly, which panicked white people that the rules and privileges they knew were gone, led to the renewed movement that white, right wing America had to take the country back. I’m not sure that this would have gotten Jeb elected — his wife being Latina after all — if Trump hadn’t been there, promising fruitlessly to crush Mexico under his heel. But anything goes in alternate history.
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Interesting, that you remember the main Puppies as older writers, while I remembered them as pretty new (Larry, Brad and quite a few of the nominees) who wanted all the awards now.
And no wonder Trusdale and Beale were on the same side, that part you quoted could have been written by him.
For my the question is, if that incident and the stupid pedition did help Larry to get more usful idiots äh alies and the biggest chance would have been not nominating Beale. Would the puppies even got noticed without him?
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The main Puppies themselves were GenX but they saw the old-guard reaction to SFWA stuff as indicating that there was broader support against progressives/liberals. Brad in particular was seeing people he admired like Resnick and Pournelle reacting against changes in the SFWA.
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Which the Bulletinisue definitly helped.
So without it, we wouldn’t have Torgerson as a leader for the Sads/usful idiot for Day perhaps.
Resnick is interesting in this case, because Brad did miscalculate badly. Despite this isue, Resnick was still in good standing with most of the other writers (Okay, with that Hugonominations it is hard to not be impressed with his success) and he didn’t help them. (That he would be Anti-Beale shouldn’t have been a supprise)
Pournelle was unfortunatly an other story.
But I would assume, that Beale was a problem generall in getting the old guard and also general uninterest to be involved in a fight to destroy the Hugos.
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In general, writers are unwilling to tear down or burn down awards they themselves used to win, because that would lessen their achievements.
Resnick might have been grumpy that he was no longer getting Hugo nominations (and the last few years seemed to be people nominating him out of habit, since I remember a lot of groaning about “the inevitable Mike Resnick story”), but Resnick was also generally liked and supported a lot of writers. Also, with the Resnick/Malzberg columns, it always seemed to be as if Malzberg was the problem rather than Resnick.
The name of the woman editor who looked good in a bikini was Bea Mahaffey, editor of Other Worlds, Universe Science Fiction and Science Stories in the 1950s. She was a very good editor, but also young and attractive and apparently the subject of many infatuations and also what we would call harassment today. In short, definitely someone who deserves to be remembered for more than her bikini body.
Oddly enough, the name of the guy with the Barbie article completely escapes me. He had one or two urban fantasy novels published at the height of the urban fantasy boom. However, considering that urban fantasy is a very female skewing genre, I’m not surprised that he vanished.
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C J Henderson https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._J._Henderson_(writer) – he passed away a year or so after the Barbie article (I knew him slightly from dealer rooms)
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I’m sorry to hear that C.J. Henderson died, since his urban fantasy novels actually sounded pretty good.
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Correia, Torgersen and Beale are about my age. Hoyt is a few years older. JCW is the oldest of the bunch, as far as I know. They’re not silver age leftovers, they’re mostly people who started publishing in the 2000s. However, I guess their careers didn’t go as they hoped, because tastes changed, leaving the sort of SFF they were writing and championing (and note that they are all very different types of writers, insofar I have read them) a minority taste.
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Physically, not that old and fuddy-duddy. Mentally, though…
JCW writes/speaks like he’s 80 or 90. Larry and Brad at least have things going on in their stories, pew-pew and suchlike.
Well, Brad *used* to — being Teddy’s bitch seems to have shut down his career completely. Not that I’m looking for either of their stuff. For all I know, Brad’s self-publishing up a storm, and I know Larry’s still selling to the red-meat reactionary cultural warriors of Baen.
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Last thing Torg published was this:
The Zenophobia Saga
1 Heretic (2021) with Brad R. Torgersen
2 Messenger (2021) with Brad R. Torgersen
3 Extremist (2022) with Brad R. Torgersen
5 Conflagration (2022) with Brad R. Torgersen
He is a true disciple of Teddy.
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Oh, so he’s only getting work doing what Craig Martelle tells him to, by ripping off Animorphs and adding pew-pew.
And neither of them can spell Xenophobia, I don’t care what their note says. Probably pandering to their audience.
Braddles used to be in Analog and Asimov’s regularly before the Puppies, which is how he got legitimately nominated for the as-was Campbell. Now he’s quite literally a sharecropper, churning out Generic Extruded Mil-SF Product (with totes kewl beast-men!!!) for the KU pittance.
(Picture me holding my thumb and forefinger on my head, making an L)
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I found their note on the spelling of “Zenophobia”. They would actually have sounded less dumb if they’d just said “Neither of us knew how to spell it.”
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They’re scared of Japanese Buddhists?
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I thought it was Greek mathematicians (or mathematical paradoxes) rather than Japanese Buddhists.
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They are so scared of him that they take a step away from Zeno, then half a step away from him, then a quarter of a step away from him…
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They are so scared of him that they take a step away from Zeno, then half a step away from him, then a quarter of a step away from him…
How did you ever arrive at that conclusion?
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LOL
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Oh, but Craig Martelle sells a lot of books and makes a lot of money and is the future of publishing, as he will tell you in countless (over 600) videos on his YouTube channel and the 20BooksTo50K conferences. Asimov’s and Analog are legacy publishing that will die out any minute now. Oddly enough, Baen is not legacy publishing and Baen authors are very welcome at 20BooksTo50K conferences.
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It’s so sad, they don’t understand that we’re happy for them to be selling books. The goal is always to reach out to more and more readers and bring them in through whatever initially sparks interest and then some of them browse to other works. Fiction authors help each other sell, even when they are complete opposites. Asimov’s and Analog help attract readers who browse out to SFF novels and vice versa. The vast sea of excited self-pub authors were indeed sometimes greeted like a puppy jumping up one’s leg at first, but that was just the initial deluge Amazon set off. Self-pub is incredibly useful to publishers and again vice versa for bringing readers to the yard. Baen and Tor aren’t at odds — Tor helped fund Baen.
But when you’re politically an autocrat, you always think it’s zero sum, dominate and kill. I can understand it for them because Amazon runs their KU like Thunderdome on payment, but it’s so depressing and detached from reality beyond that area. It’s like listening to Immortan Joe ramble about breeding his wives. If your marketing strategy is glee that parts of the SFF market will die, and you’re just going to MLM publicity, it may be successful but it’s such a joyless effort.
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I love that all of you don’t see Gen Xers as “older authors” but yeah, we’re old, y’all. And we often bring the attitudes from the 1980’s and 1990’s with us and did in 2013, 2015. Wright, Lou, Freer, Hoyt, etc. Their movement weren’t up and coming twenty-somethings. Of course neither were the authors they were targeting and accusing, for the most part, which made their claims of sudden modern changes all the more bogus. And sadly yes, authors and folks like Pournelle, Silverberg and Truesdale made Puppies think they had wide support among older, famed authors of SFF and they tried to make it a generational argument over the Hugos, which it wasn’t.
And yes, Brad endlessly miscalculated, about the reactions of younger authors he dragged into things like Annie Bellet and Marko Kloos, about Chuck Tingle, about authors like Resnick and Cherryh, about what sharing the spotlight and taking orders from Beale was going to get him, about arguing whether Star Trek was liberally political with David freaking Gerrold, and so forth. He and the other Puppies were gently warned by people like Gerrold and George Martin that they were barking up the wrong tree, but they decided to go follow Beale instead, a guy who thinks archaic medievalism is the height of culture.
Tomlinson seems to be dealing with a bit of a different though related creature — younger white alt righters who see themselves as warriors in a video game version of the world, wrapped up in traditional bigotries of white supremacy, misogyny, anti-Semitism, eugenics, etc. They are the type of folk whom Beale was hoping to employ from Gamergate, which worked very briefly in a limited manner. Why they’ve particularly focused on Tomlinson, I don’t know. But that Gamergate connection and the right wing networks that used all the “gates” certainly still have some links to the old Puppies, so I’m not surprised that’s a thread trying to be worked into the conspiracy narrative by someone.
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Brad is generally… not a smart man. BT definitely doesn’t know when to shut up, which he proved when he finally (after several flounces) left Scalzi’s blog comments. He got really tired of people there of all races, genders, and politics handing his ass to him, particularly on facts. For which we brought the receipts. Exhibits A through ♾️
Since we know Teddy’s obsessed with Scalzi ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ he obviously spotted a Useful Idiot there with similar bigotries.
Marko Kloos is a hero for stepping aside, though you can expect Germans to recognize Nazi rhetoric. Annie Bellet is too. That was a perfectly serviceable story of hers they slated onto the ballot, but she had the smarts to distance herself. And Kloos leaving let the eventual winner “The Three-Body Problem” in.
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I think SFWA supported Tomlinson is his lawsuit to get a court to order the names and addresses of his tormentors released, so I guess he is a member.
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At least part of the problem, as you note here, is that there are groups like KiwiFarms which pretty much exist as harassment outsourcing depots. You get a whole bunch of people who just love to mess with other folks, and who egg each other on in doing so, and all they need is to be given a ‘target of the day’ and maybe an appropriate excuse to use.
It’s the modern equivalent of bored kids throwing rocks through windows every time they pass by a building, but the damage is harder to quantify, the active people are harder to catch, and many of these folks aren’t kids anymore, they just continue acting like them, tantrums and all.
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Sure. They don’t care, they just want to get their Two Minutes’ Hate on.
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Excellent article, but in Layer 3 I think you have a sentence that needs some revision (either remove “there is” or remove the last 4 words):
“I don’t personally know Tomlinson but even if the multiple claims made about him in the piece are true it neither explains nor justifies morally (or even pragmatically) why there is a years-long harassment campaign from a dedicated forum as well as Kiwi Farms is a good thing.”
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Thanks
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[…] However, recently (May 12 & 13) Singal’s podcast overlapped with a topic of direct interest to me. In two parts, primarily written by Herzog, the podcast covered the topic of the ongoing harassment of Patrick Tomlinson. […]
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