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Comment by paperwasp42 | Hacker News Reader

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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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/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.

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.

It could still result in a mob piling on them, which is exactly the behaviour they're arguing against...

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.

People can downvote this, but I've literally read right-of-center people making this argument.

I'm genuinely ok with a mob piling on someone who is making stalking threats.

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.

Ah yes, they may want to chop off my head... but I would never tell them this is wrong.

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.

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.

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.

Everyone will dismiss it with the "Paradox of Tolerance".

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.

It's beyond my comprehension that anyone can believe that it was a reasonable response to some anodyne literary criticism. Hunger Games is rubbish. It's OK to say so. It's not OK to behave like a vicious lunatic because someone said the books and genre you like are rubbish. If you do lose your shit over it, then you are at best infantile and at worst mentally ill. The reaction might be predictable, but it's not defensible.

>If you do lose your shit over it, then you are at best infantile and at worst mentally ill.

The very sad, unfortunate thing is that a lot of these authors are indeed mentally ill. A lot of the ring-leaders of these mobs openly embrace their mental illness as a personality trait (ie: listing it in their Twitter bios).

It leads to this bizarre environment where their reactions are, medically speaking, insane (ie: the reaction of someone in bipolar mania, the reaction of someone suffering from paranoia or extreme anxiety.) But there are so many insane reactions, that it becomes normalized.

And then people who don't struggle with mental illness start to mimic the insane behavior, because hey, everyone else is doing it! And it's now the best way to get internet points, collect followers, and get some profitable attention to your own books.

>And seriously, who would outright mock the Hunger Games without expecting some sort of disproportionate backlash?

I believe you're having some selective memory issues. This was back in 2015, when "Hunger Games" was starting to lose steam. And many feminists on twitter were lampooning it for focusing on romance, and having a flimsy love triangle, when the life-or-death situation of the book wouldn't realistically allow for that.

Mocking the "Hunger Games" and any book with a love triangle was totally in vogue.

>He made some godawful marketing and communications decisions and faced predictable consequences.

It's funny, because I've seen dozens of YA authors sneer at "Fifty Shades of Grey." Call it toxic, poorly written, laugh at it, mock it, insist it was dangerous to even publish it.

Yet I've never seen the Fifty Shades of Grey fanbase, or any Romance genre authors, talk about threatening, stalking, and publicly heckling those authors who criticize the work.

You call it "predictable consequences." I call it "hateful, disturbing, potentially dangerous behavior that reeks of censorship."

What could possibly be wrong with mocking the Hunger Games?

I find those quotes absolutely normal, what's wrong with them?

You should maybe start off with his interview with Publisher’s Weekly. He said a couple of things about the YA genre that just aren’t true. The biggest one was that he seems to think it doesn’t take a lot of brains to write YA whereas his book is somehow special.

That interview was the first time that anyone had taken any notice of Bergstrom. So then, everyone read his excerpt.

(Incidentally, that’s a bad flow in writing. If your press insults an entire genre, your excerpt better be damned flawless. This goes 100x if you’re talking YA.)

The first paragraph delivers a really traditional out of touch old dude description of the Hunger Games. That’s treading on dangerous territory because you’re dealing with a universe that young people have become deeply invested in.

The second quote violates one of the genre’s rules about writing women.

So, you’ve got a writer who signed a big contract and a film deal. His introduction to his genre’s fans was an absolute disaster. So, the genre’s fans did what they always do and made a huge mess.

Some might call it disproportionate but then they don’t understand the genre either. YA is about disproportionate reactions. That’s essentially marketing.

All of that should make everyone seriously question whether this is a Paramount growth hack. Heaven knows Paramount wouldn’t be the first company to try to create controversy when they own rights to a book.

>YA is about disproportionate reactions. That’s essentially marketing.

I think you are entirely missing the point of these comments, which is: the "disproportionate reactions" of the YA community are hateful, bizarre, mob-like, and often dip into censorship.

You're also stating that the "genre's fans" are to blame. As the comments above clearly state, the criticism in this thread is toward the professional authors who take part in these mobs. Not the "young people."

I think it's worth clarifying two things:

1) This excerpt is written from the POV of a snarky, troubled 17-year-old girl. Very different from the author himself saying these things.

2) I can excuse 14-year-old fangirls losing their minds over the Hunger Games and lashing out at anyone who criticizes it.

I can not excuse 35-year-old adults encouraging their huge following to harass the author and cheering on the idea of burning his books.

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.

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".

That is sad but normal.

What’s scary is that this behavior is now acceptable. As long as it’s against group X

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...

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You're just redescribing the horseshoe theory. The X axis is political leaning, the Y axis is level of authoritarianism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

Horseshoe theory implies (if not explies, if that's a word) that going far left or far right automatically entails becoming authoritarian, and that they converge as you go farther "left" or "right". That's pretty demonstrably false, and even a two-dimensional political compass (let alone one with more axes) does a much better job of describing actual political stances than a horseshoe can. Authoritarianism v. libertarianism and socialism v. capitalism are separate and independent axes, and societies have existed across the whole gamut, corner-to-corner-to-corner-to-corner and everything in between.

I always viewed it as descriptive and not prescriptive, so I wouldn't say it implies movement across the authoritarian axis just by moving more right or left.

I feel like even as a descriptive theory it doesn't really map all that well to reality, though.

Pretty sure leftist authoritarianism exists and is violent. i.e.: Communist Russia, Maoist China, Cuba.

Portland.

Bob Altemeyer would disagree. He formulated the idea of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) as a psychological condition. His research discovered that there is no corresponding left-wing authoritarianism -- that even the authoritarianism exhibited by followers of Stalin or Mao was right-wing.

Kinda hard to be authoritarian if one of your central beliefs is in the fraternity and equality of all. It's more useful to describe Stalinist USSR or Maoist China as right-wing regimes cloaked in leftist rhetoric.

Thomas Costello has found countering data: https://psyarxiv.com/3nprq, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00926...

This sums it up pretty well: "Left-wing authoritarians, in Costello's research, typically strongly agree with the following statements: the rich should be stripped of their belongs and status; deep-down just about all conservatives are racist, sexist and homophobic; classrooms can be safe spaces that protect students from the discussion of harmful ideas." (https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/05/there-suc...)

All of which lines up with the rhetoric from the Bolsheviks and the Maoists and a lot of the modern day critical race theorists.

Have to agree. If Mao and Stalin can be disqualified as being left-wing due to the contradiction between their actions and the leftist values of equality and universal solidarity, then, by the same token, Hitler and Mussolini must be disqualified as being right-wing because of the contradiction between their actions and the values of limited government and rule of law.

Critical race theory has more in common with National Socialism than with the leftist values of equality and solidarity, because when you get past the verbal subterfuge which ostensibly denies that race exists, you find a deeply racist ideology of racial collectives locked in a struggle for supremacy, with one particular collective singled out as evil beyond redemption and in need of destruction. We have seen that before, and it is undeniable where it must lead. Critical Race Theory is Nazism barely disguised by a light sprinkling of leftist pixie-dust.

The common factor between the extremes of left and right is collectivism. Totalitarian demagogues, left or right, favor collectivism as a tool of control because it detaches people from their moral obligations to other individual human beings and transfers their loyalties wholly to an abstraction controlled by that demagogue.

I agree that it isn't really about 'left' or 'right', as both leanings are held by plenty of rational non-extreme people. Extremism itself seems to be growing in our culture, and as long as we're focused on putting a political label on it I think it will continue to grow. It is very tempting to believe that everyone you disagree with is part of the most extreme representation of that disagreement, because that makes it easy to dismiss them, and ultimately I think that just pushes people more to the extreme ends.

I don't know how we get out of this. I can't think of a good way to encourage empathy over outrage, as the former is often too painful and the latter often too enjoyable. In the information age it is far too easy to find the hedonistic outrage-dens, and there's a lot of money to be had running such places.

Speaking of likening echo chambers to opium dens, the Rat Park[0] experiments suggest that environment does play a significant role in drug-seeking behavior, and it does seem that a lot of this extremism can be traced back to things like the increasing wealth-gap, the hollowing out of rural America, systemic racism, rampant political corruption, and other societal ills. Therefore, maybe it isn't necessary to address the symptom of extremism directly --by, say, trying to teach people empathy-- but instead focus on treating the underlying illnesses. Of course, since our politicians are elected by the people they represent, and it would seem far easier to manipulate people's outrage for votes than to focus on actually fixing things, that might not be possible either.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

It's interesting you're being downvoted - because from the way I'm reading this you're not advocating that this theory is true but merely pointing out that it exists, describing it's attributes, and showing a couple of examples that seem to overlap with the theory. Which only seems to shore up your last statement.

> 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".

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

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.

> 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 "

> 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.

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.

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.

You're not going to convince many that symbolically property damage across the nation is of the same offense as storming the capitol and beating one of your own to death. The group that stormed the capital was also not ideologically diverse. They were running on a common emotion of hate. Sure, you had hundreds of useful idiots giving the bad actors cover but that's the whole point of being a useful idiot for the left/right/center. It provides an excuse for like minded to dismiss the extreme position but they still sat down with Fascists to eat a meal.

Property damage? I mean literally police stations and city halls were attacked across the US and many people did die in the protests, and cops were even killed at random in the name of BLM. Don’t try to stand on the grave of one individual officer in the case who volunteered to protect the building and reports still read his “injuries were unknown” and report it as if it was a murder. Officers die every day around the country from a traffic stop and somehow it is an “insurrection” when one dies in a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people. And to you that fault is all of those hundreds of thousands of people? Did anyone at your high school ever murder someone, does that make you a murderer because you all were not ideologically diverse and had the same education. It is prejudice to assign others blame by virtue of association. There was no hate by many people they simply wanted election integrity to be verified and allow investigation to occur.

You've lumped about 3 months worth of time into a single response as some kind of single metaphor to a single incident incited by a rally held by several political figures. You want to sit with Fascists and that's okay with me but don't tell me you don't stink mate. Every single person who went to that shit show knew what it was going to be about and anyone so blinded to not see it devolving into violence falls into the useful idiot camp.

Sure that was 3 months of very similar riots. Take any single one of them and it was as violent as the capitol protest. I guess you know exactly what everyone was thinking that went there? Even though the “leader” of the whole thing, Trump, said “be peaceful, don’t give them what they want, be peaceful.” Please tell me how fascism even relates to this conversation? Isn’t asking for election integrity the exact opposite of fascism?

We're not even existing in the same general reality of truth at this point so it doesn't make sense to continue talking past each other. Have a good evening and maybe buy some GME stock.

Really though I see fascism as something people actually fear is coming true. What are people afraid of?

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