Boycott, Shmoycott

Although I think that Laura J. Mixon says what most needs to be said about the Puppy-proposed  boycott of Tor books (mentioned here by Laura Resnick via Facebook) in her letter to Tom Doherty, a few choice bits about the individual most responsible for initiating it need to be repeated here:

(Theodore) Beale has been pursuing a personal grudge against several people, including Tor author John Scalzi and the Nielsen Haydens, for years. The reason he has targeted them is that they have stood up for those who have been bullied and harassed by Beale and his supporters.

Beale was booted out of our professional trade organization, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), in 2013, after using official SFWA channels to promote a series of deeply offensive, blatantly racist remarks against SFF writer and SFWA member N. K. Jemisin. He has a long history of horrific reactionary public statements, not only against people of color, immigrants, and non-Christians (including citing Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, who gunned down 77 people, mostly teens, as a national hero for his acts, and suggesting that we look to Hitler to solve our immigration problems [he has since deleted the offending paragraph from his article, but the original pro-Nazi text appears here]). His views on women (“a few acid-burned faces is a small price to pay for lasting marriages,” “[A] purely empirical perspective on Malala Yousafzai, the poster girl for global female education, may indicate that the Taliban’s attempt to silence her was perfectly rational and scientifically justifiable”) and gays (“Correcting the gay defect;” “How ‘gay marriage’ harms you”) are equally repugnant.

All of the above has been documented over and over again, but that's not the point: the point is that there are apparently people out there who've decided to still make Beale the champion of their cause despite the fact that he has repeatedly proven that all he seems to be is a singularly repulsive scumbag whose supply of grudges never seems to end, either in terms of the number or the expiration date. Mixon, again:

But there is no getting around the fact that a misogynistic, homophobic white supremacist, who has spoken approvingly of shootings and acid attacks on women, and of Hitler and the Holocaust, who has called a respected SFF scholar and popular writer an ignorant, “not equally human” savage, stands at the heart of this conflict. Beale’s followers and fellow travelers may not themselves hold all the bigoted views he does, but information on who he is and how he feels about women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and others has been widely shared by now. If people are emailing you calling for Irene to be fired, they are unavoidably supporting Beale’s hate-filled agenda.

What makes this worse, IMHO, is that the nonsense he's orchestrating about demanding Gallo's firing doesn't just stop there. Laura Resnick:

One of their explicit demands is that Tor must publicly apologize for "the attitudes, lies and libel expressed by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Moshe Feder and Irene Gallo, all current or former employees of Tor, and by the Tor-published author John Scalzi, concerning supporters of the 'Puppies' slates for the Hugo awards."  A second demand is that Tor must publicly reprimand those individuals. With so many different Puppies involved, I can't tell at this time whether they're still demanding that Irene Gallo's employment be terminated.
If anyone thinks that I was being far too harsh in my language when I called the RSHD a singularly repulsive scumbag, please feel free to tell me how. Come to think of it, my forgetting to use the term "egomaniacal" earlier is a bit of an oversight. My bad.

To be perfectly honest, the people who support his little campaign aren't much of an improvement, at least in terms of the outrageous chutzpah they're showing in demanding an apology here and a reprimand there. Okay, they may not be as hate-filled and venomous as he is. Few people are who already aren't in a prison cell, psychiatric hospital or currently running a torture program in a third world dictatorship. But let's face it - they let him take the lead in all of this despite knowing exactly what he is. Why they did so is beyond me, but the history of SF is chock-full of people who are more than a bit tightly wound. The RSHD is just one of the latest examples. I'm also sure that by the time this all ends he'll also go down as one of the worst.

Granted, I think that Tor won't just roll over in the wake of this bullshit. Too much of their reputation as a publisher is at stake for that to happen, and if you were thinking of picking up a book published by them over the weekend it couldn't hurt. Just keep in mind the following: a fanatic has a right to his views, but that right ends at the range he can punch someone who wants to violate it. The RSHD has gone way past that range.

But nothing bad can happen when you continue to incite people to such levels of hatred, right?

Nine people might disagree with that point if they could.