Yesterday the following media outlets ran articles about the Sad Puppies campaign, in which they either directly said or insinuated that it was run and populated by racist straight white males with the goal of keeping scifi white and male. (not true)
The Telegraph
Entertainment Weekly
Salon
Huffington Post
Slash Dot
io9
The Guardian
It was almost like they were all reading off the same script.
Most of them said our slate was exclusively white, straight, and male (not true)
Most of them said that last year was a big win for diversity (I believe last years winners were all white and one Asian).
Most of them said our slate was exclusively right wing (not true, in fact the majority skew left, we have socialists, liberals, moderates, libertarians, conservatives, and question marks. To the best of my knowledge, I believe that last year’s “diverse” winners all espoused the same social justice politics).
But there is no bias in this perfectly functioning system. My side said that political narrative trumped reality in this business. Believe me yet?
We’ve seen this behavior before, but never at a level so blatantly false. Truth is utterly irrelevant. Actual positions don’t matter. Our actual words are replaced with fabricated new ones in “scare quotes” or bizarre out of context nonsense.
Everyone on my side is held to account for the most outlandish thing anyone tangentially related to us says, even if they’re not on our slate, but none of the untrue, vile, rude, horrible, things said about us by our opposition is ever condemned.
In the last 24 hours I’ve watched people we nominated have to go public about their sexual orientation and politics in the hopes of not becoming targets, and staving off social justice witch hunters.
We’ve been yelled at by the inquisition for failing to notify all of our nominees that we were going to endorse their work, and that makes us bad, not the inquisition.
Don’t worry, at this rate, if we keep this up the SJWs will make it so that everyone in fandom will have to wear helpful little color coded armbands that explain which group you belong to.
To the the SMOFs, moderates, new comers, and fence sitters I addressed yesterday, yes, we have disagreements with you. We’re happy to discuss them. We are not, however, happy to be libeled as the vilest forms of scum to walk the earth, and we are not happy to live in fear of career destruction.
You want my part of fandom to coexist peacefully? You want to work out our differences and keep the awards meaningful? So do we. Though we disagree on the details and the issues, we also love this stuff.
But coordinated slander campaigns, lies, character assassinations, threats, witch hunts? No… We won’t stand for that.
You want to know why we’re here now, loud, annoying you, upsetting your apple cart? Read those articles. Look at the bylines by culture warriors who all share the same set of politics. You say that you don’t like how we made the awards political. Newsflash, they have been for a long time, only you wouldn’t know it because my side didn’t bother to take the field. Now we’re here, taking ground they think they own, and those culture warriors don’t give a shit about you, the authors you love, the books you read, or the future of your culture. They think they own you like they own every other group, and they’ll lie, slander, threaten, coerce, defame, sabotage, and hate anyone who stands up to them.
No More.
EDIT: Brad Torgersen, who has the helm for SP3 chimed in too. He got libeled as a white supremacist on his birthday.
https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/fort-living-room/
Read that link. Look at the picture of Brad and his family. Explain to me how an Army Warrant Officer in a 20 year interracial marriage with biracial children is a white supremacist, because some trust fund babies with gender studies degrees declared it to be so.
EDIT: 8, I missed the A/V Club.
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470 Comments on "Addendum to Yesterday’s Letter"
I salute you, sir. If you decide to sue for libel and set up a legal fund, I will definitely help out. (Although, since you’ve gotten a decent amount of money from me already, I don’t think you’ll need one…)
I’d chip in for a character named after me…
GamerGate would help to chip in I’m sure if you planned that.
Right now the separate resistances in fandoms are like Lego bricks. They’re a real pain in the ass to these SJWs that try to stomp all over everything but we could snap the pieces together and become a 15 foot mecha bullshit destroyer. SF/F fans, gamers, comic book readers and more are finally standing up to defend the hobbies they love and will no longer capitulate like the neo-puritans are accustomed to.
I’m excited to see this victory for you guys and can’t wait for next year so I can join in.
You can pretty much bet that there would be people willing to chip in. We’ve already been though the “gamers are dead” articles. Boy oh boy doesn’t this spate of “sad puppies are dead” articles seem familiar.
I almost feel like JC Denton, realizing that there might actually be a real conspiracy here.
You don’t have to wait until next year! Buying a supporting membership for $40 now gets you Hugo voting rights for this year and nominating rights for next.
Plus, thanks to puppies both sad and rabid, it gets you a lot of free* reading material so you can make educated votes!
*free with purchase of Worldcon membership. contact your doctor for details.
I think that we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the SJW dominance of science fiction and fantasy. And it’s coming just in time … had it continued much longer, it might have destroyed the genres.
It’s about time. How about a new hashtag, along the lines of “So-called ‘Social Justice’ is dead!”
I would note that Charlie Jane Anders at IO9.com was a HUGO winner in 2012 for a story published on TOR.com. Furthermore, she is published at salon.com as well. Given her numerous media connections and connections with Tor one begins to wonder if there is coordination occuring. One also notes that Gawker media was involved with Gamer Gate too.
I am glad that you are investing time in this but I am angry that it is using writing time that I need from you in order to supply my fix.
Seriously, that hit piece on Brad and yourself was nauseating.
Let’s see if anyone from the MakingLight crowd or their apologists tries to walk it back.
https://twitter.com/CChupik/status/585460310816886784
Not happening. They’re doubling down.
O.o
Well, now I have a new example of extreme irony.
When Tempest complained about hate speech, I tweeted “Irony.”
I don’t think she got it.
Time for a hitler’s bunker parody.
“Paul Weimer @PrinceJvstin 2h2 hours ago
@caldodge @tinytempest @CChupik @sparkymonster Calvin, turning this into a personal attack is uncalled for.”
You’re wrong. You’re a couple of retards.
Anyone going to call out Tempest, or does she get a pass, Paul?
Pass? Paul Weimer guards her flanks.
And that is a lot of territory to guard…
Tempest gets fisked over on according to Hoyt here. http://accordingtohoyt.com/2015/04/07/not-your-shield-rhiain/
Looks like a bunch of folks are taking her to task. They even retweeted a few of my tweets to her.
Paraphrasing a parable I read the other day, for he who has ears to hear, etc.: One day, there was a little girl, who crept up to a sleeping bear and poked it with a stick. The bear continued sleeping. The villagers who lived with the little girl paraded her bravery and gave her awards and commendations.
Thus rewarded, she went and did it again. Again, she was rewarded with adulation from her village.
A third time she went to poke the bear. This time, the bear said, “I’m sick of this BS” and with one swipe of his massive paw, killed the little girl.
Then the villagers, dismayed at the reaction, said to each other. “Wow, that was uncalled for. Disproportionate reaction.”
The end.
Well, *killing* the little girl probably would be disproportionate. I might modify the end of your tale thusly:
A third time she went to poke the bear. The bear opened one eye and growled. Terrified, the little girl went running back to her village, and the villagers all gathered in a rage and vowed to drive off the bear: “How disproportionate a reaction, to terrify that poor helpless little girl!” Pelting the bear with pebbles and stones, they at last woke it; with a mighty roar it swept through their ranks, knocking several down and bruising them, and then lumbered off.
The villagers congratulated each other in triumph, then marched back to their homes… only to find that the bear had eaten much of their livestock and scattered the rest while they celebrated. Devastated and facing starvation, the villagers had no choice but to return to the city, where they spent the rest of their lives living as beggars.
Moral: Before you call someone’s reaction “disproportionate”, always ask, “In comparison to what?”
Nah, too complicated. I like to keep things simple.
Understandable, but beware of being too simple — if you want to present the villagers as real idiots it doesn’t do to make them look like they have a point. Even in metaphor I wouldn’t suggest killing as a proportionate response to anything but a real threat.
On the other hand, if I am being too much the editor to what was meant as a momentary gag then feel free to tell me to shove off.
Could be infinitely worse….
Imagine villagers being dumb enough to get somebody like Agent Franks both annoyed and focused…
They never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever walk it back.
Instead the run to twitter and screach “LiES! ALL LIES!” (we saw you TNH. You are a ridiculous person.) and then they double down on their own slander.
They never provide quotes.
They never back up their assertions.
This is all they have.
Goebbels never let a little think like the truth deter him. The SJWs are no less fanatical.
Salon. Wasn’t that one written by that utter idiot and disgrace to Jeopardy Arthur Chu?
Okay, snide comment aside, given Chu is part of the con crowd straddling games and sci-fi, I fully expect that there were some sort of Right People whisper campaign.
Apropos Chu:
“We’ve seen this behavior before, but never at a level so blatantly false. ”
Oh, we have, we have. Sincerely, Gamergate & NotYourShield.
True that, but I was talking about in genre fiction.
Watch what happens next. Yesterday was our Gamers Are Dead day, and it isn’t like these geniuses have a lot of tactics to choose from.
“They came at us in the same old way, and we defeated them in the same old way.”
We’ve seen this behavior before, but never at a level so blatantly false. ”
Oh, we have, we have. Sincerely, Gamergate, NotYourShield, Atheist community, Skeptic community, MRA’s.
Chu: “Arthur Chu @arthur_affect · 7h7 hours ago
@Moon_Clinic @AaronPound Baen Books Manly Man stories are actually a “marginalized” genre right now but they can’t admit that”
Oh. Really?
Yes, really! Who cares about pesky bestseller lists. TWITTER HAS SPOKEN!!
Larry, I’ve shared this elsewhere on social media, and I don’t want this to feel like spamming your pages or anything, but I want people to stand up as well.
http://tlknighton.com/?p=7023
You and Brad are “my people”. I stand by my people come hell or high water.
I’d like others to make similar stands. They have to stop thinking they can just do this crap, and no one else will care.
Him and Brad are probably not “my” people in any important sense. But they’re still PEOPLE, dammit. Anyone who actually cares about fairness, justice and truth as something independent from political tribalism has a great occasion to show it right now. You go, puppies.
Isabella Biedenharn’s is a casualty of the SJW machine. She took their narrative and posted it without any research… which has probably served her well in the past. Fortunately EW.com took some steps to correct the libel, and this morning it looks like her twitter handle disappeared from the article and they finally removed the racist and misogyny tags.
My question is, how long until the SJWs claim Ms. Biendenharn has been harassed into hiding by #gamergaters?
“Harassed into hiding by #GamerGates”? Dude, have you not figured out that whatever you’ve read about GamerGate in the media just as false as what you’ve ready about Sad Puppies?
Yeah dude. I’m a Sad Puppy 2 and 3 voter. The point I was making is the same as yours… reality doesn’t matter to them. Their next move is to make Biendenharn a victim… watch it happen.
Isabella Biedenharn’s is a casualty of the SJW machine. She took their narrative and posted it without any research…
I think that makes her a casuality of her own poor journalism skills. I’m not interested in making allowances for people who will smear someone without even doing the most utterly basic research first. She should lose her job.
It was more of a self inflicted gunshot wound.
To the head. And botched it. So it’s a slow, painful death.
Birdman came out ok
It makes her a willing soldier of the SJW army. Nothing less.
There was no part or piece of ignorance or mistake on her part. She wasn’t mislead or misinformed. She is a misleader and misinformer.
Journalists: “we heard someone call these guys racist/ misogynist/ etc, so we decided to write an article WHILE DOING NO RESEARCH AT ALL.”
This is not the behavior of people interested in promoting the truth. This is what hacks do.
I just read the guardian article and while it’s clear they got the same press release at least they include a quote from Larry.
Basically, a new headline should read, “Dopey Millennial* Mugged by Reality.”
* – I understand that there are many Millennials who are not divorced from reality, but they aren’t the ones beclowning themselves as our special snowflake here just did.
The problem is that the propaganda factories we laughingly call “universities” and “colleges” are not only failing to prepare students for real life, but are actively sabotaging their ability to properly function in it. Practical skills and critical thinking have been replaced with the academic version of conspiracy theories, warped perspectives, and unrealistic expectations. Graduates are incapable of balancing a budget, but can likely recite the entire hagiography of RadFems. This leads many of them to live in a daydream of ~making a difference~ which is undermined by their inability to see and deal with reality as it is. And the Academic Industrial Complex has crippled them.
There are many universities, some good at what you talk about, some bad. If a student doesn’t research the university before deciding to go to it, that is a poor decision. But there are a number of private and public universities with great programs that teach a number of practical skills.
So probably a side decision, but as a millennial I can tell you that college was portrayed to me as a necessity if you wanted to make anything more than minimum wage by society in general. There was never a discussion about trying to plan for an actual career, and there was never any discussion about the consequences of student loans.
I was lucky in that my parents were intelligent (and gave me good advice) and that I was offered a rather generous scholarship program. I escaped the trap of student loan debt. I’m in the minority though, and I have several friends who’ll be paying off their loans for the rest of their lives because they listened to rather awful advice from people they trusted when they were still kids.
* Side discussion… not decision. Darn you auto-correct.
I’m a millennial also, and I am also one of the lucky ones that won’t have horrific amounts of debt. I agree that more should be done to inform people about the problems of student debt.
But college does teach a lot, and a lot of jobs do require college degrees.
I give it maybe another 24hrs before they say she was harrassed into hiding Orrrr…throw her silly ass under the wheels of the bus. Remember the latter is a tried and true tactic of theirs too
EW will throw her under the bus. The SJWs will canonize the crazy cat lady.
If she’s a casualty, she’s a casualty of her own cupidity. You DO NOT do journalism that way. Even “blog journalism.” Sweet fkn chrst! It’s like “journalism for dummies” never even made it on her radar.
If she is excoriated for her own actions, so be it. There will NEVER be accountability unless these so-called victims aren’t called out for what they are – perpetrators.
[…] Update: Larry notices the spread: […]
The reason that they all look alike, is because they all came from the same source, I’m sure. Just as the news media formed a secret journo list to keep their left wing news stories in line, I’m sure that the ‘privileged class’ who have been the gatekeepers for the Hugos sent out a nice press release yesterday far and wide.
Odds are that many places engaged their brains and their lawyers however before attempting to publish such blatant libel.
We have all seen, both on this forum and elsewhere, how much the people who think they ‘own’ the Hugos, because they have worked on them for ‘so long now’ feel about us, the great unwashed masses, upsetting their apple cart.
Guess I’ll have to go buy a voting membership now after all, because I’m definitely not the right type of person, and how dare I question those that are, right?
Now excuse me as I get back to my own writing.
Got mine yesterday. I suspect it takes a while before one’s name shows up on the list.
Working on my own writing too.
Welcome to the ranks of wrongfans enjoying wrongfun and engaging in crimethink.
So they shit their pants over SP3 bloc voting, yet they have no problem with bloc journalism?
Anything they do is automatically good. Anything you do is automatically bad.
Double standards are twice as good as standards.
I’m stunned at how weak the other side really is. For all their bluster, they couldn’t keep SP3 off the ballot. The EW article: total failure.
Right now I’m singing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JRgHol94Xc
Yah know, I really wasn’t one to believe in conspiracies and shadowy grandmasters, or that professional writers would stoop to extremes like this.
I thought it was more just a loose group of cranky people who disagreed with other people on their particular taste in books, and maybe got a little hot under the collar in defense of their art.
I am deeply sorry to have been shown wrong.
Nobody in Gamergate thought that there was Journolist-style collusion going on in the gaming industry, either. Not until they found themselves on the receiving end of the SJW outrage machine and Milo “Based Milo” Yiannopoulos blew the lid off it did Gamergate collectively jawdrop and post on 8chan that they owed conservatives who have been complaining about this for years an apology.
Nothing quite like having the Cabal of Crazy descend upon you personally to make you realize they really do exist.
Not even a well run conspiracy.
Amateur retards. The bear they have been poking with a stick for years has confused them by ripping their heads off.
And of the two, I think it’s the incompetence, rather than the malice, which bothers me the most.
A more perfect evil would have some…majesty to it. Grandeur. Maybe a flaming eyeball or two.
You know. Old school.
We have the flaming eyeball. They have mere retardation.
Revel in our evil.
The problem with battling the inept is that there is no joy, no honor, no Art, in beating the ever loving shit like Tony Stark suiting up to take on the Lollipop Guild.
Frickin’ sharks with frickin’ lasers on their heads!
Jumping out of a plane with snakes in it!
A little late to this thread, but I have to say your comment takes the cake.
Majesty indeed.
You, sir or ma’am, leave me grinning widely and laughing with glee. Well done.
Are any of the people leading the charge for Sad Puppies going to Worldcon? I think i read a post by Larry last year that said your fans don’t go to Worldcon. I dont think they will start attending unless authors they like attend and sit on Panels. I think Brad Torgerson wrote that he is getting called up by the military at that time so he can’t go.
The people who run worldcon are volunteers. My understanding is they have to spend their own money to win the bid. Did they do anything to you? I really think people involved should try to attend. I am not saying ‘should’ since I know most writers dont make a lot of money.
John C Wright has 6 nominations. If he can afford it he should go, sit on panels and discuss his work. He doesn’t sell like you do and has a family, so I won’t go ‘should attend’. I don’t know how long of a trip it is for him.
Larry… Worldcon leads more heavily towards the SF side than the fantasy side. There also seems to be an under-representation of Urban Fantasy fandom. When is the last time an Urban Fantasy book of any kind won a Hugo for best novel? Brandon Sanderson had a good blog post on the Worldcon preference for SF.
If your don’t care enough about the con to attend then what is the point to this other than to get a rise out of people? I don’t know if you stated whether you are going to Worldcon or not. I am sure the people who run the con would be happy to have you sit on panels. Its more of an SF panel than a fantasy panel. SF has alot of military and weapons. Having a gun expert discuss how to write about guns would be interesting to alot of fans who don’t even like Urban Fantasy. I think you have a new series come out about that time, so not sure if you can make it.
I don’t go to WorldCon, but it isn’t out of hatred for the volunteers or the vast majority of the people who go there.
You’ve got to understand. Some people hate me, and this is their home turf. Have you ever had people sneer at you and flee the room because you entered at a con? Have you ever had all the other panelists just want to yell at you and lecture you? Have you ever been accused of making people feel “unsafe” by your mere presence? Have you had drunk people try to pick fights with you at room parties because of who you are? Have you had other authors come up to you at an author dinner, and spit “oh, this fucker.”
Yeah… Loads of fun. Since I’m a 6’5″ 300 pound man who grew up punching cows (and people), when the belligerent drunk gets in my face, I just smile and take it, because I could break them in half and they are too stupid to realize it… It makes for a wonderful con going experience.
I get this at other cons too because of who I am, but it is rare, and when it happens, it is usually from a CHORF who is a WorldCon regular. I went to 13 cons in 2014, from 500 to 150,000 people. I love cons. However, the only place I’d be likely to find more people who actively despise me and want me to die in a fire than WorldCon would be WisCon. Which is on my list of places to visit, right after Mordor and Hell.
So instead I usually go to GenCon, and this year I’m going to DragonCon.
That’s… that’s just plain astounding.
And they asked you to play nice? I just . . . wow.
WorldCon 2016 is in KC. For me that’s less than an hour drive, so I’ll be going. Plus, I figure a spare Larry-sized hulking brute like myself may add a touch of security for the Hoyts.
I have attending memberships to both Sasquan and MidAmeriCon. Also rooting for Helsinki in 2017 and Dublin in 2019, as I haven’t been to either city. They aren’t getting rid of me anytime soon.
May 29th – 31st
http://www.awesome-con.com/
If you can find your way to DC, Awesomecon is dedicated to everything that is awesome. If you can think of it, there will be something representative of that genre. If you were to get a table, I can personally guarantee that TWO people will be right there chatting with you and offering to buy dinner (or beers if thats what you like) while you’re in town.
I started reading science fiction in grade school, first Andre Norton, then Isaac Asimov, then Heinlein, and then anything I could get my hands on. Like you my family was not exactly of an intellectual bent, nor was anyone else in my environment. Reading was considered unmanly and a waste of time. Unlike you I was not physically large, I was, as a child, skinny. So, SF and the wonders it introduced me to was an escape from bullies and intimidation. I have never attended an SF convention so I was surprised when I read a novel by John Ringo in which he has one con goer threaten another with physical violence because they disagree with him on some political matter. Now I read about your experience and I see that it appears that attempts to bully people at SF conventions do occur, and the truly frustrating thing is that the bullies are self-righteous fanatics who hold themselves in the highest possible self-regard.
It’s true. I went to my first and LAST con here in my home town several years ago. I got treated with active derision and disrespect when one of the concom members came into the dealer room where I Was looking at shirts and discussing fantasy and sci fi with the dealer. When I mentioned John Ringo the scorn and stupidity started flowing from his mouth. I never went back to that con, nor have I been to any other since. The only I would go to if I had the money would be in Tennessee. Because most of my favorite authors and friends among the fen go to it.
Every hear John Ringo’s story about the SJW moderator at DragonCon?
He introduced John as what’s wrong with the world, blah blah blah hate monger, and a descendant of slave owners (which if you know anything about Ringo’s family tree, you’ll realize how stupid and offensive that is). This so enraged John that he walked out of the room.
Difference between DragonCon and a lot of other places? DragonCon apologized to Ringo and tossed the jackass moderator into the street, because DragonCon is all about being awesome.
And that was John being exceedingly polite. It’s fun watching John at work when he decides To Do Something About It.
Look up Ravencon AAR
http://www.orthogonaltonormal.com/midden/RavenCon%202006.pdf
Darius, that was hilarious.
I’d have paid $.99 for it.
Seriously. Ringo should have sold that fucker on Amazon.
See. Now this makes me mad.
I know. You’re over it. And you don’t need me to be mad on your behalf.
But I DO wish I’d been there.
Never back down. Wait for the retard to hit you. I did it to some neo-nazi retard at an SLC convention, and he discovered he had brought a knife to a gunfight.
“Bring it, bitch.”
I’m going to Sasquan because I’ve never been to a WorldCon and this is gonna be the Hugo Awards show to be at!
I will be resplendent in my Guns and Gals Hawaiian shirt, the same one that comet scientist had to apologize to the SJWs for wearing.
http://www.alohaland.com/misc-novelties/new-gunner-girls-sold-out
I won’t apologize.
That’s the right kind of shirt to wear at a sci-fi con, in my opinion.
Heh. That will piss people off.
As a girl, you know what I want to wear? A cute little baby doll tee shirt, I’m thinkin’ purple. With a Green Monster Smiley right across the chest. I think I could even rig up a headband with green monster horns on it.
OOOH, and if we ever get the SP logo made into a patch, I’d want that on the shoulder. It’d be the MHI/ SadPuppies version of a Vivian James cosplay.
SJW assholes might feel free to be jackasses to Larry because he’s a big ole mean man. I’d like to see them try something with a 5’3″ female, minding her own business and supporting her favorite authors.
Not that I have the money to go to Sasquan- it will have to wait for another con. Also for Larry to make T-shirts like that available for sale.
I think there might be MHN shirts but I can’t remember where Larry’s swagshop is.
IIRC there was a baby onesie that said ‘there are no monsters under my bed’ that I wanted to get… but I guess there isn’t much point doing that now.
Shadowdancer – I got the news. I am so sorry for you.
@Book
Here ya go.
http://www.cafepress.com/monster_hunters/7964504
And I got the tactical bodysuit because my hubby thought it was cool and said ‘get one anyway.’
Be careful. All too many cons have adopted “harassment policies” which basically amount to “if an SJW complains, you’re gone.”
Complain about them preemptively.
“John Scalzi othered me with his male gaze.”
Demand a full investigation, with the entire committee. Threaten a lawsuit if they don’t live up to their own stated rules.
I know I certainly get creeped out whenever I see a picture of Scalzi’s mug.
It’s gotta be much worse in person, and this is all about how you feel, right?
So, I am planning on doing WorldCon this year and will happily form whatever moral support you need. I started reading your stuff via Vox. Full disclosure, I wasn’t super impressed with the original MH books but really enjoyed the Spellbound material.
I also have a multi-racial family (whole different continents and everything) so I would be just as much a target as Brad and am frequently called the same things no matter what the truth to the claims. I’m thrilled that you are fighting and would greatly enjoy you bearding the lion in its lair so to speak. I’d love if most if the Legion of Evil showed.
And for the record I can yell loud, I can lead some chants. This from a slightly light 210lb Chesterton who is in better shape than the original.
Man, if you were a dinosaur you’d really be able to teach those jerks who discriminated against you just because of who you are a thing or two…
…oh, wait. >_>
Embrace the hate and go to WorldCon Breitbart-style. Somebody follows you around everywhere discreetly videoing every interaction. Shoot 10 or 15 hours of video, then come home and edit it down to 100 thirty second spots of you responding calmly and politely to that sort of intolerant uncivil hate speech.
Caption it all with dates and times and places and, most importantly, names. Then release one or two of them online when some half-wit CHORF calls you out for something that Straw Larry did in his imagination. Every couple of weeks. For the rest of the year.
Save the best ones for last, and the half dozen absolute juiciest for next year’s Sad Puppies campaign.
It’s too bad you won’t be at LibertyCon. That’s going to be my first con in over a Decade.
Ever been to Miscon (Missoula, Montana) ?? I haven’t yet (it’s a long haul from here, tho still my closest), but it’s MT’s only con for the past age and a half. I have no idea what it’s like, tho Missoula =is= Montana’s primary bastion of liberal thought (somewhere around center compared to everywhere else’s left).
And I just read this
http://www.andromedaspaceways.com/
and I’m like… you’re thrilled to be nominated, but appalled that you were nominated by wrongfans?? If the wrong kind of people like you, aren’t you doing something wrong??
As I put it in e-mail, they could have turned it down like Larry did, but they want any bennies from winning while signalling the SJW crocs to eat them last. Bah!
I am with George RR Martin on this
http://grrm.livejournal.com/417812.html
If you don’t want to be a part of a worldcon why are you doing this? The entire name Sad Puppies is clearly meant to make people mad at you. The people who run Worldcon are volunteers. They don’t get paid. They have to spend their own money to bid on a con. They didn’t do anything to you. Its well known that Worldcon doesn’t represent all of fandom. It represents people who are a part of worldcon. That skews liberal, it also skews to Science Fiction over Fantasy (Brandon Sanderson blogged about this after last years Hugos) and least popular of all seems to be your genre of Urban Fantasy. Irregardless of political background Urban Fantasy doesn’t do well. Terry Practchet never won a Hugo. Robert Jordan didn’t get nominated until we (fanboy here) pushed to get him on the ballot .We just did that for 1 nomination. We didn’t take the whole slate.
If the point is to expand worldcon fandom, then go to the con. Eventually your fans will follow. If your worried about people treating like crap contacf the admins in advance. I posted once on John Scalzi blog that I think writers in general have personality disorders call all you guys do is cry like babies on the internet. I mean that across the board. He got offended and said he and Larry have met before and got along just fine. In the last few months John Scalzi has blogged and said positive things about John Ringo and when a fan attacked John C Wright John linked to a very positive review of John’s work and said he is clearly a good author. I don’t know if that will help or hurt their sales with some of their fan base.
There are 2 elections for the Hugo. If people start having parties across the board then only certain slates will get elected. I believe their were 35 books mentioned in broads post about what should be on the slate. The most votes any one book got was 5. That small of a number goes on a slate?
If you want to reform the nomination process you have to actually attend to vote on it. You would have to encourage your fans to attend. I think a far fan friendlier way to handle nominations is to let everyone who gets 5% of votes be on the ballot. I really liked spending $40 and getting all 14 Wheel of Time books last year. I appreciate that Baen dropped your whole trilogy in the voter packet. I got 17 books plus other stuff for $40. So as a fan, the more stuff that is nominated means I get more value for my money. You have to go to actually vote on this.
I like lots of different authors. I liked the monster hunter books of yours that I read. I REALLY liked Brad Torgersons Chaplain story from last year. I have not read the book yet. His writing style is very similiar to Daniel Abrahams(one of my favorite authors). I also like John Scalzis books. I have a Charles Stross book I have been meaning try.
I dont think you are a racist. I think those claims are bullshit. I do think you are being a dick. I think Brad is being a dick. I think Brad is doing this in part to drum up publicity. Yeah I know he isn’t on the ballot, but traffic to his site leads to word of mouth which leads to sales. I think that is the driving force behind the big internet temper tantrums. Going to piss and moan about someone to drive eyeballs to my site to get publicity to spur sales.
I told John on his blog I was convinced that his twitter slap fest with you last summer was orchestrated by both of you to drum up publicity since you both had books out about the same time. I figured you two were really in the same World of Warcraft clan and planned this on IM.
They paid good money to be part of Worldcon. The suggestion they don’t want to be is silliness distilled.
And, never forget, that is *EXACTLY* what the gatekeepers who were telling Larry he was paranoid *said* to do.
Get people interested and if enough like the stuff, they’ll vote for it.
Frankly, they were *fine* with it, right up o the point where it actually had some success.
Now, they want to change the rules.
Last year, Worldcon was in London. I think that was too expensive for a lot of people. This year it’s in Washington, which is a 2000 mile or so drive from where I live.
Next year it’s in Kansas City. Maybe then you will get your attendees.
OK, genius, riddle me this: Why have supporting memberships AT ALL if only those physically on site get to participate? Or are you just trying to make everyone buy attending memberships and price MORE fans out?
Itself pure elitism. And it flies in the face of what the SMOFs (not used perjorstively) and CHORFs have said for DECADES – that the Hugos belong to the FANS.
Not merely the fans who can afford a plane ticket, time off from work, and a hotel room.
For most of what you wrote, read my next blog post that went up today, about attending WorldCon.
As for Scalzi saying nice things? Yeah… No. He attacks, lies, and defames but does it in his snide way, so that when he is called on it, he says he is only being snarky. When he compliments people like me, it is only ever with an agenda, so he can say look how reasonable I am. Note, that I don’t do that.
My animosity for him is not faked. And yes, he did crash my booth at NYCCC. I didn’t really talk to him much, I was signing books and talking to fans. He spoke with one of my editors for a time, then left. I said maybe five sentences to him there, then shook his hand, because that was the polite thing to do. Of course, he trotted that out later to show that we’re like super best buds. Then a couple days ago he tried to call me a coward (which is a pretty asinine thing to call me if you think about it)
As for thinking Brad did this for publicity… Holy shit, dude. I can’t even put into rational words how incredibly wrong you are. Brad has been labeled as white supremacist on like 40 blogs now, going out to how many hundred thousand people, and he’s spent his entire week being hammered, insulted, mocked, ridiculed. He’s being attacked by Salon for having a black wife proves he’s racist.
I mean, can you even start to wrap your brain around what he’s going through right now? I mean, do you have any empathy at all? I …. I just… Shit. Seriously. Fuck this. Go google search his name. Imagine that was your name. Soak up that hate, and then tell me he’s doing this for publicity.
I getting really irritated no one is being more forthcoming about the parade.
You expect this crowd to show up, get in line, and walk timely? With no beer, or girls (or boys) in skimpy costumes, or promise of same at the end? Motivate us!
Best armored car division, best motorized scooter decoration, best imitation of an SJW (Rostlers Rules apply), Least likely to be invited to Holiday Dinner award – something!
You funny.
Fantasy has actually done about as well in the best novel category as Sci-Fi for the past ~14 years. Before that, it was all sci-fi, pretty much.
Fantasy won in 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2009, 2010, and 2012. Two of those were Gaiman.
Gaiman doesn’t count. They re-wrote the rules for the World Fantasy Award so the prose writers wouldn’t have to go nose-to-nose with him.
Don’t get me wrong, he’s done some lower-quality things, but still.
Years where Gaiman wins don’t count for anything except ‘Gaiman won.’
(yes, I’m the Calvin excoriated in that tweet).
I’m not going this year. But since I live near Houston, and next year’s Worldcon is in Kansas City, I’m thinking about how much fun it would be to attend it while wearing an SP4 T-shirt (or even something by Mad Mike, if I can find one that’s not too off-color for ME).
I’m done. I tried being nice to them. I tried being polite when engaging them. I’m done.
If they want war, by the gods, they will have war.
I just want to thank you, Larry. For standing up and being willing to put yourself in the line of fire, and for consistently making your position clear.
The outright lies and liberal outpouring of hate is sickening to see, and you have handled it with far more grace and dignity than most. Thank you.
Listen, when the core institutions of a literary genre have fallen so far that we have to debate and explain the concept of rules or how law and equal protection works, that is a core genre that has fallen farther than I honestly ever thought a group of Americans could.
For that to not only happen to a group of ARTISTS but one’s involved in a genre that specializes in perceptual shifts is a disgrace. These are the redneckiest of the rednecks, the worst sort of conformists who don’t possess a brain in their skulls. Reading Making Light, or Scalzi’s commenters or those of James Nicholls is like reading Bernal Diaz in the original early 16th century spanish but if he was retarded. Joinville’s account of the later Crusades seems like that of an enlightened man in comparison, and I think Europeans were still a few centuries away from imbibing mercury to cure STDs. In fact off the top of my head I can’t remember ever reading first-hand accounts from antiquity written by people as routinely stupid as our SJWs.
After months of combing through research I still manage to find comments that are more stunning than the last. It is an endless recycling of comments like “Space: not just for white men anymore” over and over and over again times a thousand.
This is the fearful world George Orwell imagined; yet another bit of irony we now need load-bearing gothic buttresses for. People who write anti-KKK essays are “internet racists.” People who defame one billion people every single day because of their perceived skin color are “anti-racists.”
I honestly don’t know if there is any civilization which ever existed while still having a system of writing that has ever been as immune to facts, reason and logic as our SJWs. I can understand the bigots among them – they’re simply liars. But what about the idiots who really think they’re running some sort of underground railroad in FRICKIN’ SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY!
Lord help these people. I can only imagine the stark hell they live in inside their heads that drives them to behave so.
I’m insulted on behalf of all the rednecks I know.
(Applause). Once again, you have nailed it sir.
The problem is, they don’t call it hell.
They call it home.
And they think it’s so wonderful the rest of us should live there too. Whether we want to or not.
They say ‘white, straight and male’ as if that was a bad thing.
I kid, I kid, of COURSE it’s a bad thing to them.
I’ll be at Worldcon, it’s in Spokane so it’s too close to miss. But I was at Norwescon just last week, too. (Watched the Hugo noms get announced live) Though there was a whole SJW track there, there was also a strong militarySF track, which was a pleasant surprise.
More racial defamation in scare quotes from an SJW:
“tnielsenhayden retweeted Madeline Ashby @MadelineAshby That moment when you explain the Sad Puppies & Hugo noms to your mother: ‘Because some straight white men think they own the future.'”
Ashby once apologized to an audience for being on an all-white convention panel, so that’s the level of brainpower in play.
“Madeline Ashby says: This weekend I was on an all-white panel on multiculturalism in SF, and we all agreed it was bullshit and apologized to our audience —- many of whom were people of colour…”
So why didn’t some of these people of color volunteer to sit a panel? it’s not like the bar to entry is all that high (cripes, *I* have been asked to be on a panel) and concoms are always begging for more panelists. If you don’t like who’s doing the job, volunteer yourself to do it better, and that includes being on panels.
In your books, there is very little whining, and a lot of “shoot first, shoot last, and shoot at any point in between.” So when do we see the lawsuits?
Hopefully before poor little victim Biedenharn indeed goes into hiding to avoid that vicious patriarchal attack called a subpoena.
The discovery alone would be worthwhile. I suspect enough info would turn up to lead to a RICO case.
To the following
rcade
Someone Else
Chris Gerrib
R. Maddox
Lamont Cranston
Lisa Hertel
and anyone else that oppose or disapproves of the Sad Puppies.
Please read the articles listed.
After that try and ignoring your personal feelings toward the sad puppies crowd and answer the following questions.
Specificly:
Are the articles factually correct or not?
Did the articles present multiple sides of the issues as befitting journalstic standards or not?
Is the the type of discussion or conversion you want to see in the media or not?
Please explain why you think what you think. Also what are you going to do about it.
(you are under no obligation answer or to do anything about these articles, but neither are you under a obligation to do anything here either.)
Lamont Cranston, last I saw, was too busy concern trolling about “OMG VOX DAY VOX DAY!!1eleventy!1!!!” to be capable of forming a coherent sentence.
Not that you can expect a quality response after he’s finally sobered up, since he went down the Guilt By Association fallacy rabbithole without stopping to think that sane people are going to take one look at the circlejerk he’s either attempting to suck up to or is himself a part of and go, “lolnope”. Vox ranting on his blog is not even remotely the same as actively sabotaging the reputations and careers of innocent people.
I’m not going back to yesterday’s comment section to find it, but a troll listed a bunch of alleged VoxDay quotes and demanded that Larry comment/explain/commit seppuku.
Listing outrageous quotes or acts from someone associated with a conservative is a long-standing troll technique for avoiding debating a conservative about what *he* does or thinks.
But it occurred to me that it is also a fantastic way of getting dubious or downright nonfactual “quotes” out on the Internet associated with someone’s name. When they ask a person other than the person “quoted” it’s not surprising when an out and out lie goes unfisked. Not to mention the usual games of taking things out of context, editing out parts that would show he wasn’t serious, etc.
Just a thought, for the next time you see unlinked “quotes” pop up from a troll.
Thanks, Larry for taking the fight to the SJWs. I purchased one of your books that I somehow overlooked…
I just noticed rcade over at Black Gate smugly declaring victory over Larry. The thread as a whole is almost hilariously behind the times as the editor keeps insisting that the Sad Puppies could win over neutral observers if only they just tried being nice.
Squuuuuueeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!
Being nice has resulted in decades of shaming. Screw nice.
I have no way of knowing but I suspect O’Neil and Black Gate were pranked. What better way to mess with someone than to get them on an SP set of nominations? O’Neil’s been active in supporting all this diversity/defamation shit and if you disagree he deletes you and starts making smug comments about his porch. HIs porch is in Canada. He should go back there.
In regard to this, please see the following post from rcade, posted on BlackGate:
********************************************
“OH, I get it, we don’t vary in a way YOU APPROVE OF, so we’re wrong to vote for the authors we like.”
You don’t get it, apparently.
What you are doing that I dislike is bloc voting. When the rest of us are nominating things we like as individuals in good faith, it makes it easy for you to take all the nominations by voting for exactly the same nominees in lockstep. Your group is a minority of the nominators but you chose all the nominees in many of the categories and chose a large majority of the ballot.
I don’t like Correia’s solution of multiple competing slates any more than I like the stunt his pals pulled this year. I’m going to keep voting as an individual, and I’ll keep voting No Award above any slate-imposed nominee to reject that tactic.
Correia admitted to me on his blog that he has zero evidence that any novel/novella/novelette category of the Hugos has been unfairly manipulated in the past 10 years. The “SJW victimization” story he and Brad Torgersen are peddling is just a myth to motivate people to part with $40 and vote for his bloc.
Comment by rcade – April 7, 2015 8:37 pm
***********************************************
Is this true?
Not quite true. The closest I found to what was said is this.
rcade, on April 7, 2015 at 12:42 am said:
Correia: You have no proof the Hugos were successfully gamed in past years. I will buy a copy of every novel you’ve written if you can prove that even a single novel/novella/novelette category was stuffed with a secret bloc’s nominees in the past 10 years.
correia45, on April 7, 2015 at 1:17 am said:
Luckily for you, they’re not that stupid, but I won’t miss the sales.
Larry has said in the past he has not seen any evidence that the Administrators of the Hugos that count ballots have unfairly manipulated the vote.
But there is evidence of the dreadful block voting that so concerns rcade has been going on behind the scenes for years.
Um. I was a neutral observer (who really couldn’t care less what wins a Hugo). Then I read both sides, as much as I could find. Guess which side was nicer.
Damn it. Black Gate is a great site, but this last week, I might as well be reading Tor.com . . .
Thank you to the following :
rcade
Someone Else
Chris Gerrib
R. Maddox
Lamont Cranston
Lisa Hertel
and anyone else that oppose or disapproves of the Sad Puppies.
Your answers to my questions have spoken lounder then words and are just what I expected of people with such high moral standards and sterling character.
Sorry, I just now returned to the blog and saw this. But I don’t see what it has to do with my concerns over bloc voting. Are some people who disagree with the Sad & Rabid Puppies getting hysterial and behaving reprehensibly? Yes. Do I find such behavior shameful? Yes. But my disagreement with the various puppies has nothing to do with any impression of your politics or goals; I even agree
with the stated goal of aiming for a greater variety in the shortlist. What I disagree with (and strongly) is the bloc voting tactic. To lay out my reasoning once more:
1) I want more variety in the Hugo shortlist.
2) Bloc voting produces LESS variety in the shortlist and rewards those voting out of some agenda beyond the quality of the work (because such voters are more likely to vote in lockstep)
3) I believe the best way to prevent further sweeps by lockstep-blocs is rule changes that allow expansion of the electorate (i.e. lessening/dropping
the fee to vote) and/or different voting systems that produce ballots more representative of the full spectrum of the electorate (such as STV and some of the other system alternatives currently being discussed)
4) Rule changes are difficult and large organizations have a lot of inertia. I believe “No Award” is the best chance for me to send a strong signal that change is necessary.
In summary, I’m not voting “No Award” out of spite or malice. I respect that the Sad Puppies have acted in accordance with your principles; but voting No Award to stymie bloc voting and as an expression of desire for change is in accordance with my principles.
If I understand you right, you’re voting No Award because that’s your path to stopping slate voting, is that correct?
Or is your intent just to signal for change?
Yes, I am voting No Award both to indicate my displeasure with bloc voting and to signal a change in nomination process is needed. And yes, I really feel that strongly about lockstep bloc voting being a terrible thing for the Hugos, though I realize others don’t share my opinion. I’m not trying to dictate anyone else’s vote. I’m just explaining my reasoning for mine.
1) How are you defining “lockstep” voting?
2) What would it take to prove to you that there was no lockstep voting, by your definition?
1) A bunch of people all voting for the exact same slate of works, as Vox Day encouraged his Rabid Puppies to do (and apparently succeeded – or do you think that his own tiny publishing company really produced nearly all the year’s best short works? Even without seeing exact nomination totals, if a ballot is almost identical to a single given slate, then you can be fairly certain that slate’s proponents voted in lockstep. This is why the RP slate did far better than the SP slate; SP voters used slate as guideline, RP voters went in lockstep.)
2) The data on nominations and vote totals provided by the Hugo administrators after the awards are over should show enough detail to confirm or disprove the hypothesis.
#2 the data has been released and analyzed by people who *aren’t* part of, affiliated with, or have ever said (AFAIK) anything supportive of Sad Puppies.
The conclusion was it wasn’t lockstep voting – it was more voters. The Sad Puppy list showed no more “lockstep” voting than the other nominee candidates.
So, by your own declared standard, what you claim to be fighting *didn’t occurs* as alleged.
But you’re going to lockstep No Award anyway, aren’t you?
Sorry, but shouting, “But, LOCKSTEP, LOCKSTEP, LOCKSTEP!” doesn’t prove your point.
Mathematical analysis of the vote totals for the nominations establish that, even with a slate of recommendations, Sad Puppy voters didn’t vote in lockstep.
Most of us are in favor 1 & 3.
2 can be dealt with by increasing the number of popular independent slates to 20+, which would seem a good goal for next year.
For 4, don’t you think you should try to change the rules before No Awarding everything?
There are better ways to try to change the system than No Awarding deserving works. It would seem more ethical to try to change the rules before using No Award on deserving works.
I don’t feel merely increasing the number of slates is a practical solution given the current nomination rules and approximate electorate size. A bunch of slates like SP’s slate this year (where people did not necessarily vote in lockstep) can still easily be outweighed by a relatively small set of people voting in lockstep, as the Rabid Puppies did this year. It is the lockstep bloc tactic I particularly do not want to see take over the awards, no matter which clique happens to use it.
The only defense available in the current system is to No-Award any and every bloc. I know that doesn’t come without cost. I do feel bad for the deserving authors and professionals who may lose out on awards; just as I feel bad for those who lost a chance at nomination because of the Rabid Puppies’ lockstep voting. That’s why this whole thing is so frustrating and sad for me; I feel I’ve been left with no good options for response, only a choice between unhappy ones. But I feel the real hypocrisy on my part would be to say, “I detest bloc voting…but hey, this book I like, so I’ll give it a pass.” No. Even if next year some bloc appears that’s magically “All the Authors R. Maddox Loves Best”, I will still No Award it. And hope that the Worldcon folks attending the business meetings this year and next get the message that a change in nomination process is desperately needed. All voting systems can be gamed; but some are more difficult to game than others. My personal hope for the Hugos is that a different, more robust system can be put in place that can mitigate the issue until the electorate really does increase enough that blocs are not a worry.
So your going to contest “bloc” voting by bloc voting No Award.
Whatever, I am going to read all the nominated works, and vote accordingly. I hope the majority does as well and No Award bullshit is put to rest.
If after the numbers are released and changes are proposed to the Nomination process then so be it.
My objection to you using this tactic is
1) all of the voting changes can be gamed, so you will not remove locksteping even by changing the nomination process,
2) The changes won’t take place for at least two years
3) No awarding will not prevent any slate from appearing next year (and there is already a SP4 in the process)
4) A much stronger signal could be sent, re: nomination process, by No Awarding EVERYTHING, rather than just the slates that you know about.
So on these grounds I hope to persuade you that your proposed solution won’t work, and urge you to consider another.
(Speaking just for myself, I do appreciate your distinction between SP & RP. Thank you.)
What if… these books that have been nominated this year REALLY ARE the ones that the majority of the voters find to be the best, regardless of any political opinions about the authors or the books themselves? What if there are 2,000 new voters next year, who just discovered that they can nominate, and they all like, oh, Christopher Nuttall and Jack Campbell, to pull two names out of my butt more or less at random? What if the enormous majority of SF/F fans, who have never voted for a Hugo because many of them either 1) never heard of the Hugo awards, or 2) didn’t know all you had to do was pony up $40 to be a part of it all, suddenly weigh in over the next couple of years, attracted by the controversy, and suddenly you discover that the majority of them have radically different taste than you, and your favorite books never get nominated?
What if we all wake up one day and discover that speculative fiction has gone mainstream, and there are tens of millions of fans; they just don’t buy or approve of the crap that’s been passed off as SF/F by most of the mainstream publishing houses for the last 15 years or so? Oh, wait: that’s happening right now.
Let’s keep our eyes on the ball.
If most people willing to pony up (is that speciesist?) $40 prefer a different book, I’ll live with that, the way I lived with the majority of voters electing (and re-electing) an incompetent politician.
And if there are “tens of millions” of “mainstream” SF fans buying books, I rather doubt anyone who rates his/her success by “books sold” rather than by “awards granted” will complain. (it’s a trivial exercise to search THIS blog for examples of that attitude).
But I rather doubt huge numbers of mundanes (not intended as a pejorative) will spend $40 for the privilege of voting for their favorite works.
@Maddox
We have yet to see if 20+ slates will be practical, I agree. I trust if 20 more slates pop up and 7000+ (or some other number) voters join, that you will withdraw your objection.
According to the way you say you will vote, though, slates get to control what you vote for. If No Awarding is very effective in the Hugos this year, someone could say “I don’t like these works, and they’re likely to be nominated. I’m going to put them on a slate so that Hugo voters will No Award them”.
Basically, if you No Award slates, slates get to control how you vote. You’ve given up your autonomy as a voter almost as much as a hardcore slate voter would.
Thank you for replying.
I saw your comments in the previous thread and appreciate your concern about block voting. But that is problem inherent to any type of voting and I don’t foresee any final solution that will resolve that.
My questions were asked not in regard to block voting but to learn what the critics of sad puppies think regarding the slander and character assassination illustrated by the linked articles.
Their response would illustrate their character.
I believe you have illustrated your character.
The other people named may have not seen my questions but I suspect they are merely drive by character assassins that would approve of the linked articles.
I understand your thoughts about using “No Award” as a protest, but that appears self-defeating to me and if it becomes the wide spread then the Hugo’s will be destroyed by a form of mutually assured destruction. I would ask that you vote for what seems best to you.
Calvin,
The main reason I became a hugo voter was for the packet of ebooks at a really good price. The 2nd reason was, I wanted my voice counted as nothing in recent memory was a book I thought was the best of SciFi and Fantasy.
I won’t be using No Award. I like the proposed change of 4 Nominations and 6 Entries.
Seeing the kind of shitstorm you’ve been going through and how much your blog posts resonate with me I’m surprised I haven’t heard about you. Combine that with the fact that I’m a huge reader… well I have a lot of books from an author I respect to catch up on!
It’s Sabrina Erdelys all the way down.
I was wondering if anyone else was having that same thought.
In both cases, we have a reporter who prints a highly inflammatory (and as it turns out, untrue) story based on an accusation from one side without even attempting to contact the accused for their response. In the case of Rolling Stone, and I would guess but don’t know EW, someone lied to the reporter but ultimately the story was accepted because it confirmed the pre-existing narrative. Ultimately, the only reason to fall for the lie was that the reporter wanted to be fooled.
I have to think these guys are going to regret it, though. The Evil League of Evil is not nearly as nice as the University of Virginia.
Did they learn nothing from GamerGate?
If not for the gamers are dead articles it would have blown over in a few months. Instead it marches on, and the game sites that published the articles are hurting for ad money.
And bad enough (for them) that they pushed their narrative with EASILY demonstrable falsehoods but they did it while poking GGers in the eye that it was all their fault.
I predict several thousand more voters before this is through.
This is going to get ugly.
Thing of it is, I can’t be bothered to care so much anymore. They’ve libeled people I respect, people who have helped me in more ways than they even know.
“Behold, look forth and see the field where I grow my fucks that I might give them unto others.
Lo, it is barren, and I have salted the earth that none more shall come forth henceforth and forever.”
Lets keep this in context of the greater whole.
We’re fighting back against a mindset. A mindset responsible for the mutation of our laws that purposely erode to destruction our cherished Constitutional protections. The mindset that plays witchhunt among our privately owned business such as bakeries and pizza parlors sending inquisitors and ambushers to use abusive laws created by corrupt politicians and idiot judges who are owned and operated by the SJW cause. The mindset that causes young adults to be kicked out of college or university for not toeing the line in Constitutionally forbidden PC speak and group-thought. The mindset that has succeeded in criminalizing thought.
This is a fight against a non-metaphorical domestic enemy that many of us are oath bound to stand against in manner and means no different from that of a foreign enemy.
Thank you for saying it so well.
For anyone who doesn’t know what the Gamers Are Dead Articles are: http://wiki.gamergate.me/index.php?title=Gamers_Are_Dead
From what I, and most GamerGaters, have seen over the last few days the people you are opposing are following their normal plan of operations to the letter with this.
You criticized them and have shown the world for whom they are. They will try to drive you out of the industry and will try to ruin your lives.
[…] just posted a very justifiably angry post about how the media are portraying the Sad Puppies. I’ve been following them off and on for a while, and it’s no secret I disagree with them […]
Having read the “Not Your Shield” post on Hoyt’s blog, I think a fantastic idea would be blog posts highlighting the female/non-caucasian/LGBT people who were on the Sad Puppies slate and got nominated. Perhaps even let them say a little about themselves, perhaps including their political leanings.
Then follow it up with:
1. quotes about how Sad Puppies is just a bunch of white straight men who hate diversity
2. attacks specifically made towards each of these female/non-caucasian/LGBT people because they were on the Sad Puppies slate (bonus points if the attacks claim the person is a different gender, race, and/or sexuality than the person actually is).
I really suggest you look into GamerGate’s “Gamers are Dead” event.
http://wiki.gamergate.me/index.php?title=Gamers_Are_Dead
The parallels are eerie — a group of journalists (who we would later discover were colluding on a mailing list titled GameJournoPros) posted about 15 opinion pieces at or around the same across otherwise unconnected news outlets, all claiming that “Gamers are Dead” — that gamers were just sexist bigoted jerks mad about diversity.
Well, you now have your own “Scifi Fans are Racist Bigots” event.
It’s been kinda fun watching the reaction to Sad Puppies 3 and GamerGate. These people seem to be playing by the exact same playbook each time, and when just shouting “Sexist, Racist, Homophobe! BECAUSE I SAID SO LA LA LA” doesn’t work, they don’t seem to have any other ideas.
On the plus side, the Gamers are Dead scandal really solidified GamerGate as a movement and made a lot of people sitting on the fence recognize there was a real problem, so with any luck this will make people realize that the Hugo awards have been fixed for years by SJWs, who are just mad now that someone dares argue against the CHORFs.
The literate don’t need to be your audience. Readers are over.
Dear Mr Correia,
You have turned me into an activist! Yesterday, when I saw the EW article on FB, I made a comment that the author of the article was a bald-faced liar and that I wanted to see a retraction with apologies.
The person who commented before me said something about Mr Torgersen’s lawyers; that they would having fun because of the libel in the article.
I wish I has saved a screen shot because the article and comments were deleted (at least from the EW FB mobile feed). I do not even see a story revision there now.
Here you go:
https://archive.today/0NH1i
All stupid posted to the internets is forever.
In my humble opinion, this is all a very good thing. They can’t come to grips with the fact that the authors who were nominated, and their fans, are a very diverse group of people; that will be their eventual downfall.
Don’t get me wrong, the libel and unfounded (and ridiculous) claims are awful; but the fact is anyone can learn the truth simply by doing a little research. If some people don’t want to bother, or ignore inconvenient truths to continue in an attempt to push their own particular agenda, screw ‘em. We don’t need those people anyway.
Hey, the slashdot article just links to the i09 stuff and doesn’t make any assumptions in the topic title. the comments seem to mostly reflect the idea that the SJWs have had something like this coming for a long time.
That’s good to know. I’ve heard that the comments all over the internet in a wide variety of places indicate the stupid racist narrative isn’t sticking, and the SJWs have beclowned themselves.
All of the comment attacking the poster on Slashdot (mine included) got modded up rather heavily.
The modding up was a pretty good indicator, as well as the large number of posts attacking the original post and supporting those of us who called it out for the lie it was.
(Yes, I used to slashdot a lot back in the 90’s. Nice to see my account is still there)
Yeah, I had mod points yesterday (I’m a 5-digit oldster myself, with around 17,000 comments), and found that most of what I wanted to mod up (mostly stuff countering outright lies) had already been modded up to +5. Slashdot has its spasms of groupthink, but generally it dislikes being told =which= group it should lockthink with.
[I never mod down, because 1) there are enough people eager to do so already, and 2) “disagree” isn’t a valid modpoint.]
I agree. When I saw Larry mention Slashdot I thought, “Oh no, not them”, took a look and… it’s not much more than a rather neutral reference, and the very short post itself is almost pro-SP.
Mr. Correia,
For the small measure of worth it owns, amidst this shitstorm, thanks for shouldering this burden.
It’s good work you do.
I can’t help but to see the parallels between this and the “gamers are dead” saga of gamergate. It’s pretty much the same thing, with glorified bloggers circularly referencing themselves about how awful these people are for disagreeing with them. A few observations from having been involved in atheism (with atheism+), gamergate, and having seen the same thing play out multiple times before:
Debate is a spectator sport. Don’t go in expecting to change your opponent’s minds. Your goal is to change the minds of neutral observers. Defend yourself, but don’t respond to attacks with attacks. Let it be self-evident who the aggressors are.
SJW ideology (if you can even call it that) is inherently self-destructive. They will always find some reason to attack someone, whether they’re neutral, or sometimes even on their own side. Never interrupt them when they do this. Just sit back, take some screenshots, archive it, and make some popcorn.
Archival tools are your friend. SJWs rely on attempting to rewrite history and denying everything. They’ll delete everything they can the moment it can be used against them, and claim all screenshots of their activity were faked. Archiving (with sites like archive.today) denies them the ability to memory hole everything. It’s completely outside the grasp of mspaint or whatever other image editor they’ll accuse you of using. Aside from gaining access to the server itself, there’s no way to fake an archive.
Aside from all that, it’s just a matter of time. A lot of gamergate is watching Sad Puppies because it’s a case of SOCJUS losing its stranglehold on a medium. They have the same stranglehold on game journalism, but not the medium itself. They also only have themselves to thank for potentially growing the SF/F fanbase. I’ll probably pick up a few more books myself, even if I don’t have enough personal investment just yet to actually participate in the Hugos.
There are interested parties who make a habit of archiving EVERYTHING.
https://archive.today/g5VaT#selection-1479.0-1479.45
Look at it this way; if everybody who voted for the Sad Puppies slate (that would include moi…) pays their $40 and votes next year, and the NEXT year, we could run the whole show and the SMOFs could take their marbles and skulk away.
You and Brad have done an invaluable service in showing how easily perverted the Hugo process is, and how easy it can be to un-pervert it. This is going to make science fiction FUN again!
As a 50-year fan, I thank you greatly!
If the Hugo awards become solely run by the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies, then that is also a perversion of the Hugos.
The Hugos are an award for all SFF fandom, and Sad Puppies, while quite possibly representing more of fandom, are not all of fandom. The purpose of Sad puppies (as I believe both Larry and Brad have said), is not to replace one set of tastemakers with another. There is plenty of good SFF that is unlikely to make it on the SP slate. The Sad Puppies slate has not included YA novels, to the best of my knowledge, for an example.
Even if Sad Puppies does include YA and other deserving sub-genres on its slate, it still won’t be able to push for all the deserving novels. We need more slates, featuring more novels SFF fandom cares about.
I can’t speak for anyone but what I suspect will happen is the slates from SP will grow increasingly complex. I think the overall point is they will be asking literary questions and not questions about race and gender predicated on the innate spiritual and moral failings of straight white men. Let’s be honest – anything’s better than empty stories racially and sexually pie-charted into play in tandem with a daffy progressive KKK.
This should always have been asking literary questions, and not if someone was the right race/gender etc. That’s what I hope SP has brought about.
Yes. And we don’t want to be Hugo Pope. I’d love to see so many people involved that any one little clique is totally irrelevant.
And that’s awesome. I do think you and Brad have decent motives, otherwise I wouldn’t bother posting. Lowering the cost of supporting memberships will help, as you pointed out in the other thread.
Currently, there need to be ~6000 nominations to make Sad Puppies irrelevant (as a 5% minimum is needed to make it on the ballot). Let’s see whether we can get that many fans from all SFF fandoms to nominate next year. I think we’d all be happy with just more regular voters coming in. Not everyone has to be a Sad Puppy to have good taste in fiction.
It wouldn’t take that many votes, just more organized alternative nominations. It’s quite likely this will create hugo-oriented political parties, with all sorts of different groups putting up different voting slates. Which is just fine with me; the problem doesn’t lie in having organized grouos, it lies in having one group that is more organized than the rest, so that they control the end result.
But there is no way that will happen here. Either SP will totally dominate, and grow more complex and less organized and then fracture or possibly dissolve completely, or more groups will emerge their own books.
No, they don’t. I’d like to see all sorts of people coming in to vote.
Look, my favorite convention to go to is SLC ComicCon. 150,000 excited fans last year. The entire voting population of WorldCon would fit into one of their big panel rooms. WorldCon would fit into one tiny corner of GenCon or DragonCon. Fandom is huge and it is diverse and it is excited.
But every WorldCon they have panels about how to bring new fans in (their solutions are usually idiotic things like diversity panels, which bore the shit out of the actually diverse by yelling at people who aren’t SJWs), and then they lament how fandom is graying and dying off (no it isn’t, go to those other cons I mentioned and see how the fans are young, excited, multicultural, and from many demographics). They always claim to want newcomers and fresh blood, until some newcomers show up with the wrong politics, and then they are wrongfan, and must be mocked, insulted, and driven away.
Geek culture is no longer the basement dwelling nerds afraid of sunlight. It is huge, everywhere, big business. And they like to read… Right now, most of them don’t even know the Hugos exist. How many comments have you seen related to SP saying that the first they became aware of the whole supporting membership to vote thing existed? Good.
My side wants everybody involved.
Part of the problem here (and on this I kinda agree with the opposition) is that individual categories can be and were gamed into being all one slate, even when everyone totally follows the rules.
A solution proposed elsewhere was to limit nominations to just one or two per category per ballot. Now, seems to me that to be anything like relevant, that needs a whole lot more than 2000 total voters (apparently most of last year’s members can’t be arsed to vote this year — that’s what, 20%?)
So how about the “one vote” supporting membership, where for $10, you get one vote in one category. Cheap and available, but gets expensive fast if you’re into vote-stuffing, and would mitigate the loss of votes from only allowing 1 or 2 per category for regular $40 memberships.
Just throwing out ideas; feel free to throw them back.
TNH has enlisted security expert Bruce Schneier in an attempt to find a better voting scheme; in my long observation (we were in an APA together long before he became famous) Bruce is scrupulously fair; I think we can rely on his advice.
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016199.html
The big problem is that eliminating one way of gaming the vote may make it more vulnerable to another method and possibly worse results. And one should never assume that one’s own faction will always be in power.
“You should not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered.”
— Lyndon Johnson, 36th President of the U.S.
““You should not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered.”
And if LBJ had actually practiced any of that, the country would have been far better off.
Recap of what’s being discussed on Making Light in terms of alternate voting practices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote
This system would reduce the impact from a single slate, as it says that your vote can only count for X works in a category. There doesn’t seem to be a reason Puppies should be against it. Data from Chaos Horizon suggests many Puppies might have only voted half the slate anyway.
We’ve heard the suggestion of increasing spots on the shortlist and lowering the number of nominating slots, which seems to be a less effective variant of Single Transferable voting. Nothing really wrong with it from a Puppy perspective, though fewer nominating slots could be sad (depends on how they do it).
Cumulative voting, where each voter gets a number of points to ‘weight’ their nominations with. It would seem to favor people who are only fans of one thing. It would also make the nominating process more difficult for voters, which doesn’t seem like a good idea.
Longlist, then shortlist. This form adds a round (or more), to the process, making it more difficult for nominators. But it does mean more works get recognized, if only on the longlist.
http://drplokta.livejournal.com/166650.html
Proposal would increase the number of non-slate works in categories where slates are already doing well. Nothing wrong with that, for Puppies. Puppies still get stuff on the ballot, and the nomination process doesn’t get more difficult.
Make the personal information of nominators available after the shortlist announcement – This is the most spectacularly bad idea on here, considering how much harassment happened this year.
Only allowing people who’ve been members for 3 years to nominate – another spectacularly bad idea. It removes the incentive to join and try to get works you like on the shortlist. Very elitist.
Guaranteed percentage – every work that gets a certain percentage of nominating votes ends up on the short list. If anything, I think this would increase the powers of slates, they can get anything they want on the ballot if they know they have X% of the vote. Also, the shortlist would get so large that no one could read all the works.
Sentence justification for nominations, and then making justifications public – This might be hilarious, but it does nothing with regard to the power of slates.
Making number of nominations for works visible during the voting process – This would seem to favor a well organized slate over a Hugo voter who doesn’t obsessively check rankings. Puppies could probably sweep every category if this rule change gets made. Whoever runs Sad Puppies just gives up to the minute data on who to nominate for.
Random ballot – I’m not sure anyone could take the Hugos seriously if it switched to that.
Moderators get to ban groups they think are blocs – basically allows one person to prevent anything from getting on the ballot that they don’t like. Could you hear the Puppies bay?
Class averaging – I’m fairly decent at math, and I have trouble understanding this. It encourages people to blindly follow a slate, because they have trouble figuring out the math themselves. Since SP was started by an accountant, they’d probably be fine.
There are probably more, but it’s a long thread.
The more convoluted they make it, the more it proves my original point.
Meanwhile, every single proposal that makes it easier for more people from all over fandom to get involved? I’m in favor of. Lower the supporting membership cost. Great. 4 noms for 6 slots. Fine with me.
No matter what method they choose, at the end of the day, people they don’t like that wrongfan showed up to have wrongfun in the club house. The more overt they are about that being the problem, the more wrongfan will be motivated to show up in the future.
Dude, you should totally be Hugo Pope. We can cram you into a little Hugomobile, and you can wear a funny Hugo Pope Hat.
Oh! Oh! We need an anti-Hugo Pope to really fuck with people!
Vox Day ………. ANTI-HUGO POPE
The only “power” there is in being a SMOF is the SECRET part. In this case, the “secret” was how few people it takes to invert the whole system and put it back, however momentarily, on an even keel.
The “secret” was that the arcane Hugo rules aren’t actually all that arcane, and a bunch of fans with an extra $40 per year to spare can restore the Hugo to being awarded for GOOD SCIENCE FICTION STORIES.
Let me put it bluntly. I don’t care about the race, sex, sexual preference, or any other personal detail about the author. I want to read interesting stories that involve some science. If it doesn’t include some science, or at least PLAUSIBLE science, then it isn’t “science fiction”. And if the story isn’t a GOOD STORY, then it isn’t good SF.
Further, I don’t much care about the race or gender of the hero/heroine of the story. Or whether they have two sexes or ten, unless it related to the STORY.
If SP has any lasting effect, it will need to be to RETAIN the however many additional people signed up for Sasquan to sign up for the NEXT convention, and the one after that, and after THAT. And to pledge to only vote for GOOD STORIES.
But it’s not too late to vote for Sad Puppies this year!
Nominations are closed, true, but a $40 supporting membership to Sasquan still lets you help decide the winners – and next year’s nominees.
Larry, not only that, but apparently Brad owes an apology… for being TOO SUCCESSFUL.
https://www.facebook.com/vanaaron.hughes/posts/647771745322832
Van Aaron Hughes I have no idea what you mean, Robert. LJLW suggested Brad didn’t realize how successful the Puppies would be at dominating the entire ballot. If that wasn’t his intention, then he should be offering a mea culpa and vowing not to do it again. Otherwise, LJLW’s assertion that Brad didn’t realize how well his scheme would work doesn’t mean anything to me.
2 hrs · Like
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Robert Ries I don’t understand. Why should anyone owe an apology for being more successful that anticipated?
Sad Puppies was/is a movement of two parts.
a. Publicize good writing and offer it up for consideration for awards.
b. A Voter Registration Drive for the Hugo’s.
Being successful at either needs no apologies.
The Wicked Witch of the West has taken over the Emerald City and is running it from behind the curtain, with her army of screeching, shit-flinging monkeys at her beck and call to go after those who would unseat her.
Now that Larry and others keep pulling back the curtain and exposing the truth of the illusion that is the Hugos, expect the screeching and shit-flinging to get worse.
What do we have to do to get the bucket of water in play?
I mean this seriously, what steps does it take to get these folks to shut up and go away?
Because its great that Larry can stand firm and endure the vitriol but there’s no real end in sight. You can’t expect these people to *change their mind* on this issue. Other people, ones who don’t have the fortitude to put up with a constant attacks will be cowed, and that’s just what these pseudo-fascists (only different from REAL fascists is their lack of actual power) want.
Perhaps we can grow our numbers sufficiently to just drown them out and render them irrelevant.
I don’t even want these folks to shut up and go away. I just want them to start acting like normal, grownup fans who respect other people as people. I would like them to regain sanity and perspective.
We should pray for them. Once somebody gets as frenzied as some of these folks, it must be really difficult to take a deep breath, step back, and mend one’s ways.
You know, this campaign against SP3 seemed familiar to me and I remembered when Rush Limbaugh first went on the national airwaves. The same sort of crap was said about him as is being said about Mr Correia dn Mr Torgersen. Then I remember hearing about Saul Alinsky. Here are his “rules”:
Saul Alinsky’s 12 Rules for Radicals.
* RULE 1: “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.”
* RULE 2: “Never go outside the expertise of your people.”
* RULE 3: “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy
* RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
* RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”
* RULE 6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy
* RULE 7: “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”
* RULE 8: “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.”
* RULE 9: “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”
* RULE 10: “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.”
* RULE 11: “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.”
* RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
(for an brief explanation of these rules see http://www.bestofbeck.com/wp/activism/saul-alinskys-12-rules-for-radicals
Sound familiar?
Sure does. And a very nice summary, too. Thank you for sharing that.
Hello All,
I’m a GamerGater. I didn’t know anything about this whole “Sad Puppy” affair until about a week ago when one of our guys started mentioning it. Now I used to read SciFi when I was a kid, so the mentions piqued my interest.
Now that the Hugo awards have been announced, the Haydens have suddenly invited us Gators to vote in it. I thought that was pretty gracious, but I’m still mistrustful of SJW’s. Is this invitation sincere?
That WAS so nice of them, wasn’t it? And the invitation is absolutely sincere- at least as far as we are concerned. I can’t speak for the Haydens… heh.
All we want is honest voting. If you read the books and prefer something not on the SP slate, then by all means, vote for it. We really do want GOOD books to win. Not just our personal favorites. (of course, personally I think our slate has the most talented work up there- but I’m a wee bit biased.)
Doesn’t matter. You can send in your money and then your ballot. (And nominate next year.)
They will shriek if they don’t get what they want but sincerity doesn’t matter.
Don’t need anybody to invite you. Supporting memberships are $40 this year, you get a big pack of finalist entries (so you can judge the nominations against each other) *and* you get to nominate for next year.
https://sasquan.swoc.us/sasquan/reg.php
We get enough people involved, maybeso we talk about a category for games. Or filks. Or whatever people-who-are-sff-fans do when they geek out. (Not sure how we could do cosplay, but surely we can figure something out…)
No, it’s sincere only to the extent that they want GG’ers involved because GG is one of their dog-whistles to rally the mob. And because the press releases they foisted out into the media claim GG is part of SP, and they need some actual evidence of that, when it’s precious thin on the ground.
Not armbands, Larry. Little colored triangles.
[…] HIVEMIND: Media outlets make the same smear at the same time about Hugo nominations. […]
Check out this one. This is in my school’s newspaper today:
http://www.dailybarometer.com/forum/intolerant-hugo-awards-finalists-show-edginess-nazism/article_38b933cc-dcc3-11e4-ba78-cf0e9c3b34f3.html
This brilliant author is also renowned for his ability to logically equate ISIS and Protestant, middle class America. *snerk* Seriously. He did that once. It was hilarious, in a face-palm, “I-don’t-want-to-live-on-this-planet-anymore” sort of way.
Wow. And I thought being called a white supremacist in EW was interesting. I made the Daily Barometer.
The only relation my family has with Nazis if fleeing from them or bombing them.
That article in a periodical that ships lead ( has readers that number in the tens ) must really hurt.
And of course Nazis are all about free-market libertarian conservatism. Noticing the words sozialistische and Arbeiter in Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei is crimethink, dontcha know?
I know, incredible, right? Massive audience. I just thought it was hilarious because I ran across the Sad Puppies story on a different blog the other day, and lo and behold, the local social justice idiot in Corvallis rants about it the next day. I make an effort to read the guy’s column every time he writes a new one, just to see how far down he can go before he hits rock bottom. He’s still digging.
My high school newspaper (which I was a part of) had greater journalistic integrity than that.
Maybe I just haven’t been reading the right articles, but did it take this long for someone to Godwin the whole thing??! They’re getting slow.
And the funny thing there is… who is mainstreaming hate speech?
Noticed that, did ya…
It’s GamerGate all over again. Hardly surprising at this point.
The only surprise is their shock at getting their heads torn off … again.
And now they are claiming that it just is GamerGate even though Sad Puppies is older than that.
C’mon, the only real villain in progressive arts and entertainment is still the Nazi Party and its offshoots and it’s been what, sixty plus years? Pretty sure they can keep #GamerGate going at least that long… or until their Obamacare kills them.
So yeah. I just heard about all of this over the last few days, and I just want to throw in some words of support. I’m quite a leftist myself (Think a belief of sorts that technology is going to drastically reduce the amount of labor needed in our society and barring warp drives we’re going to need to learn to economically deal with it) and I’ve seen these things go down over the last few years. It really is about the cliquishness and tribalism. Anybody who is not in the tribe, it’s OK to dehumanize them in any way possible because they’re sub-human.
I don’t read many books, to be honest. However, I think it’s rather amusing that some of my favorite authors were in the out-group, so to speak. (Butcher and Weber) And speaking as a leftist, I’m OK with conservative and libertarian fantasy/sci-fi worlds, as they’re often describing worlds and situations where those policies may be best. Or maybe not and I won’t like the book and think it’s dumb. But that doesn’t mean these books should be “no platformed” and entirely ignored/ostracized.
Believe it or not that worries some of us too. When the only thing people on an ever growing segment of the left side of the IQ bell curve have to trade for food and shelter is their votes in elections and bodies in riots, freedom will not last long.
It’s not just the left side of the IQ bell curve, often it can be the right side as well, especially as we move to a more and more regimented world, and the “McDonaldization” of the workforce continues.
So when do all the “SciFi readers do not have to be your audience!” articles drop? That’s the MO, after all.
If we were the evil bigoted monsters they say . . .
If we said and did all those evil things . . .
. . . Then why the unholy heck does the other side keep making things up? They should be able to point at all the awful things we’ve REALLY done and not have to lie and misrepresent constantly.
Dis.
Instead, all they got is Vox Day being horrible back to someone else being horrible to him. (God bless their hearts, digging into that mess is just for people with a scatology fetish.)
It should be *easy* to point to PROOF!
The very fact that they are still breathing means that either they are lying and know it or are terminally suicidal.
They don’t criticize Muslims precisely because they know that a significant percentage of them are evil and bigoted monsters whose reaction to someone insulting their beliefs is head removal, medieval style torture, and big explosions.
Let me know when some crazed Christianist pulls a Charlie Hebdo at EW.
Ironically, these morons, by refusing to leave those who haven’t responded with violence alone, are setting up an incentive system for Hell. /headdesk
Hey Larry,
Here’s a critical but reasonable commentary on the whole thing. Uses criticism of the Republican party, but as a concept of all groups of fandom.
http://www.pornokitsch.com/2015/04/justin-landon-on-the-hugo-awards-an-entity-at-war-with-itself-.html
While he is critical of the Sad Puppies, he doesn’t leave the CHORFS any escape, pointing out exactly how they have gamed the Hugos before now.
Justin Landon doesn’t know jack shit. He writes about a “moral compass” as if he understands what an “absurd bigot curiosity” is while he supportively interviewed the absurdly curious N. K. Jemisin and Kate Elliott. In that Tor podcast Jemisin claimed the reason people are always recommending and reading epic fantasy like Brandon Sanderson, Joe Abercrombie, Rothfuss, Ericson, etc. is because it’s “comfort food fiction” because those readers are people raised on “media” which “embraces white male power fantasies… in which, y’know the white guys do everything” and “of course you’re going to want that in your fantasy fiction too.” “The names that get mentioned are themselves white guys, they are white guys writing white guy power fantasy and, and, that is what a lot of readers are really just kinda… that’s really just all they want.” Jemisin said that Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice has been “stripped of the male power fantasy… which is what that story managed to do successfully.”
Why didn’t Landon step in and say those are absurdly curious conclusions based on ZERO evidence outside their thick skulls?
This is the guy who wrote in frustrated anger about an anthology that happened to have all white writers – “…zero people of color. Just saying, there’s not going to be anything new here.” Tweeted Landon: “All white. Really?”
He has written that SF is “a genre predicated on white cis men doing hero stuff.” He has written that “Ancillary Justice has become something of a clarion call for women and other underrepresented populations fed up with the kyriarchy.”
Landon himself is an “absurd… curiosity.”
A “full-court press to see more right-wing oriented white guys on the ballot.”
Really?
Considering those quotes, Landon then goes on about conservatives vs. liberals? Is he even capable of understanding his own words? Exactly what is liberal about the racial defamation of a Table of Contents? What if I said “Ugh… Asian. There won’t be anything new there.” Would that be conservativism or political then? Gee, somehow I feel the world “racist” might come up.
The only hint he has a light bulb flickering in his head is when he writes “many ballots are submitted with no white guys for exactly the same purpose.” Oh, really. Ya think? The problem there is, there is no rhetoric to back up a claim Sad Puppies is doing that in reverse. On the other hand the calls in quotes by SJWs for PoC are a flood.
So Landon’s conclusion is that a flood of thousands of anti-white, anti-male and anti-heterosexual quotes on one side (including his own) vs. virtually none on the other constitutes a he-said, she-said and we’re all bad boys and girls.
That’s like saying black people existing and the KKK are both at fault. I have read a lot of Landon and he is routinely clueless.
Deirdre is a funny gal:
“Deirdre Saoirse Moen retweeted tejas @tejasjulia · Apr 5
I don’t know everyone on the Sad Puppies slate, but damn, I think I need sunglasses to deal with the blinding white glare. #AlsoAJockStrap”
That happens to SFF’s new KKK when a lot of Europeans are in a room – they wear racist goggles.
I’m betting Tor’s editorship and recommended writers would blind her. Hope she doesn’t look. Somehow, I doubt that will be an issue, though…
I just wish I could’ve seen the looks on the faces of EW’s corporate lawyers yesterday when they saw the hitpiece article in question. Can you say “sinking feeling”? I knew you could!
While it does have a more measured tone, and it acknowledges the multiple sides in the issue, after the EW smear I really can’t abide the continuation of the BS that SP is about white/male/conservative voices drowning out everything else.
Justin Landon uses a more reasoned voice to perpetuate the same myths. His voice may be smooth, but his hands are still soiled from smearing the same shyte.
They have created a movement around tearing down an institution because it does not share their moral compass.
…the more recent full-court press to see more right-wing oriented white guys on the ballot…
On one side the Rabid/Sad Puppies rail against the loss of conservative commercial fiction on the Hugo Ballot…
I even generally agree with his larger theme, but it’s grossly undermined by the misrepresentations.
Damn thread fail. Tuck this under Peter O at 8:42 on the 7th of April.
Sheesh. I’ll endeavor to pay attention.
Yeah, how many people on the list are white + male + right-wing? Vox, Wright, Kratman and a couple of others?
Yes, I know Box has native blood. Based on my records that puts him approximately on par with me and Bradford. Not the point I’m making.
Hmmm… Let me think. Kratman is a Republican. I believe Wright is a Republican, but I’m not sure. His controversial “politics” are primarily devout Catholic. In that category. Uh… I’m not sure on Arlan. I think all of the other short fiction tend democrat on left. Bellet is a socialist.
In related, I actually couldn’t tell you. In Campbell, I actually couldn’t tell you. (though if Tempest wants to lecture people about white privilege, Jason Cordova’s childhood reads like a Stephen King novel).
In novel, I believe KJA is a democrat, not sure where he falls between moderate and liberal. Butcher is a great big question mark, but he’s certainly no right winger. Marko Kloos is a straight up libertarian, and I truly think he doesn’t give a crap what anyone does, as long as you don’t do it on his lawn.
I keep getting called conservative, probably the single most accurate way to describe me would be liberty minded republican, because capital L Libertarians drive me nuts, and I’m eagerly waiting for the old GOP guard to retire and go away. If I had to choose between who I hated more, John McCain, or Harry Reid, Reid would win, but I had to think about it for a minute. But I don’t matter because I dropped out anyway.
Yeah… then again, we’re dealing with people who think that *owning* a gun makes you a right-winger. So their concept of ideological skew has been tested, tried, and found wanting.
And me? Heh, I don’t even know where to place myself, and neither do political quizzes. It’s some combination of centrist and right, but that’s about the limit of my capacity to judge.
Then again, IMO the entire internet skews about 1SD to the left, sooooo
I have no idea what Butcher’s politics are, and I like it that way. His writing is smart and addicting. Absolutely SHOCKING that he doesn’t have a closet full of Hugos already.
BTW- I wish we could belatedly give him one for Changes- Holy Cheese-doodles, that story was excellent!
Finished that on Sunday night. Late Sunday night. Way past my bedtime I need to get up in the morning, dammit Sunday night.
Could not agree more.
As a devout Catholic convert, Wright’s politics are exactly the same as those of Oscar Wilde, after he became a devout Catholic convert toward the end of his life.
But teaching Oscar Wilde’s mature conclusions about sexual sins would be politically distressing, so nobody says, “Oh, yeah, Orson Scott Card has the same politics as Oscar Wilde,” either.
I wasn’t aware of that… kinda fascinating, given Wilde’s earlier peccadilloes. Then again, he was far too much of a realist to not see the light eventually.
*Suburbanbanshee:
I’ve noticed that. The SJW types like to pretend that writers (and people in general) are set in stone their entire lives.
If it’s ever brought up (for instance) that C.S. Lewis used to be a very strong atheist or that he re-evaluated many of his views (especially on women) towards the latter years of his life, it’s like they think one is making it all up.
“What?!? No! He’s an EVUL Xtian who HATED SEX AND GIRLS!!!!$%^^&”
….kind of makes me wonder if “Till We Have Faces” was just never published in that glittering alternate SJW-verse they apparently call home.
Much as I am a tries-and-fails-to-be-as-devout-as-he-can Catholic myself, I don’t know if it’s quite fair to describe Wilde as a “devout Catholic convert” and that his politics therefore matched the Church’s; the biographical article on Wikipedia says that Wilde was baptized on his deathbed while already ill with cerebral meningitis and thus perhaps not entirely in command of his faculties. Can you point to something more substantial and coherent from Wilde’s work that supports this?
Re: Wilde, to be totally accurate it turned out he was baptized into the Catholic Church as a child, so he was technically just reconciled to the Catholic Church.
And yes, he was given conditional Baptism, Extreme Unction, viaticum, and the Apostolic Pardon when he was very ill. But he had discussed getting a priest beforehand with his friend/lover, and he was apparently repeating the prayers all along. It was extremely characteristic of him to delay matters until very late; but people on their deathbed are more serious about these things, not less.
(I suspect he didn’t want to deal with temptation after receiving absolution, and waiting until near death is one way to do it. Even if it’s like playing Chicken with death.)
What the Hell, it worked for Constantine, didn’t it?
(Bit of theological history here – at the time Constantine came along, baptism was pretty much the only practical way to “wipe the slate”, so many Christian adherents waited until the last minute for Baptism, so they could die with the best shot at a State of Grace.
)
You missed stuff.co.nz. They’re on the bandwagon too.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/67638135/scifi-hugo-awards-hijacked-by-antidiversity-campaign
If we’re running an anti-diversity campaign, that has to mean that their side is running a Diversity campaign, doesn’t it?
Meaning that diversity is coming before the most important thing of all.
“IS IT A DAMN GOOD STORY?”
and
“Have I read it?”
Nothing else matters.
It’s just as well that I was a lousy SF writer, because I wouldn’t have put up with this… _stuff_
I’ve never really done “fandom,” so I’m outside of all that. But if I’d been a decent writer, I would have been Sad Puppies Slate material. Readers used to tell me, “You shouldn’t have sent a manuscript to [insert publisher]; they hate anything libertarian.” And occasionally, I got some frothing negative feedback about how evil I am for writing “anti-government” stories (a couple of lefties went loopy over the revolution/balkanization of the US and the destruction of the White House in Net Assets — although some walked it back a little when they realized on which Republican resident of said government mansion the NA prez was modelled; it’s apparently OK to kill Republicans, but not Dems).
I was even advised to never mention in a submission letter that I was a Prometheus nominee, since that was allegedly the kiss of death from any publisher other than Baen (who will publish lebertarian-leaning material, but clearly prefers con and neocon).
But my writing wasn’t good enough to get me in the door, so it’s moot.
And just as well.
If you were a Prometheus nominee, you probably are good enough. Try Indie. A lot of us are finding a whole lot of good books that didn’t fit publishers political tastes there.
Besides, if you’ve already got the book(s) written, what’ve you got to loose if readers throw a few bucks at you for them?
Thanks for the kind words, Holly. But the sad-for-me fact is that I spent around 17 years working on SF; I wasn’t that good and I simply wasn’t getting any better. The nomination was a fluke. It also didn’t help that I’m even worse at marketing.
The whole story gets long and complicated (including pirated editions and Amazon pulling my own CreateSpace books on someone else’s DMCA claim — I think; they wouldn’t say). When I finally accepted reality, I put my stuff online as free downloads and asked for tip jar donations. When I was seeing more than 1,000 downloads a month and getting maybe 20 bucks a year, I pulled even that. Hosting and bandwidth was costing more than that. I was a wannnabe who wasn’t gonnabe.
These days, I design the occasional cover for someone else’s books, and make more on one jacket than I ever made total in 17 years of writing. _That_ says something about my writing skills. [grin]
Kindle (and other ebook platforms) is a whole new world. You could try again. (You’d probably want to run a search for phrases from your books, though.)
High numbers of download and low numbers of pay? Probably means you had a lot of young fans without access to parental credit cards, not that you weren’t any good.
Well… I spent some 17 years seriously working on SF, and you never never heard of me before; right? That doesn’t sound much like a great writer. [grin]
In fact, Net Assets originally released as an ebook. Later, it and the others were published in dead-tree and Kindle editions. Bootlegged editions even showed up on Smashwords and the iTunes store. There’s still a DeviantArt listing for bootleg posters of the original ebook cover art.
It’s hard to tell what my real demographic was. Younger folks will often download anything free, but never get around to actually reading. The people who communicated tended to be 30+ yo. NA mainly appealed to hardcore libertarians (especially “anarchocapitalist” types) because of the main themes; that’s what generated the Prometheus nomination, not any great literary skill.
The funny thing is: I never planned to write that novel. I was working on my “real” books, and started writing a couple dozen short stories in that universe, mainly as background to explain how the situation was possible. NA was the first short story in the universe chronology. Some… yep, hardcore libertarian-types — saw it and said, “Great story, but that really needs to be a whole novel.” They talked me into it.
There’s a lot of darned good writers I’ve never heard of.
Carl,
I just wanted to chime in and say _I_ enjoyed both your book and your short stories. I’ll admit they weren’t as well written perhaps as our host’s, but that is a high bar to jump. They were good enough to keep me up reading them. So thank you for writing them and placing them into the world.
Larry, do you think it’s possible that this is just battlespace prep for Hillary’s 2016 run?
“shaunduke @shaunduke 6h6 hours ago I’m legit bored of this ‘I married a PoC so I ain’t racist’ argument. It doesn’t prove you aren’t racist, just that you’re less likely to be”
“shaunduke @shaunduke 6h6 hours ago Remember, sexists married and had kids with women. The marriage didn’t stop them from hating women. It doesn’t stop racism, either.”
Gee, you must be all tired out li’l feller. Can I get you a soda water or anything, Skiffy? Or are you Fanty? I know hypothetical pedantry is tough work, and little man, you’ve had a busy day.
Does shaunduke have any evidence at all that she/he/it is not racist?
Given his standard I think he just brought suspicion on himself that he’s a racist. Hard to tell what retards are actually saying at any given moment though.
This sounds all too familiar. They did the exact same thing when it came to #Gamergate, even when faced by videos such as these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYqBdCmDR0M
7 articles, with very similar wording, style and attack pattern, all within 24 hours of each other. Hmmm? This seems somehow familiar? Like really really familiar? For those not up on the big brouhaha over in Video Games, go read up on #Gamergate. (Just not the mainstream press articles), you might see some really really troubling similarities to what you are encountering here in SFF. I mean scarily similar. Like the SJW’s only have one battle plan and they keep recycling it hoping the different sub groupings they attack never compare notes.
We see the same crap from the animal rights organizations, and those have actively destroyed lives (at least two deaths I know of — suicide, heart attack — plus millions of dollars in property losses). Get their attention and you become a target, vilified across a broad swath of press and media.
Last year Kameron Hurley finished a blog post with “I’ll leave you with this parting thought. Here’s the Campbell list this year:
* Wesley Chu
* Max Gladstone
* Ramez Naam
* Sofia Somatar
* Benjanun Sriduangkaew
Welcome to the fucking future.”
I said, welcome to nothing, because that’s what racism and hate is. So where’s your future now? You folks created Sad Puppies by promoting a racist supremacist ideology in which SFF authors couldn’t for the life of them go a single day without lighting up men, ethnic Europeans and heterosexuals as if they were depraved as an entire group. We have unpromoted them for you. You’re welcome.
Welcome to equal protection and a word called “inalienable.” Translated, that means I ain’t gonna argue about it. It just is.
Wasn’t Benjanun Sriduangkew the alias of Requires only that you hate?
Yes. That’s her all right.
So that’s the future?
Somehow I doubt it.
Mr Correia, I had an idea.
For your consideration.
https://marsascendant.wordpress.com/2015/04/08/chorfs-to-the-left-of-me-puppies-to-the-right-here-i-am-in-the-middle-with-a-modest-proposal-that-does-not-involve-cannabalism/
You can skip down to the end, the top is just my warped little recap of the huo situation.
Awesome attempt to get a discount on some good books, but the most of the authors on the SP slate don’t have any control over pricing deals. That is left in the hands of the publishers, who are for the most part remaining neutral to the SP campaign.
I’ve been following this whole ordeal since the beginning of SP2, albeit as a silent partner. Mostly with amusement at the antics of the perpetually outraged. But the more I follow this, the more I am flabbergasted by the depths of doublethink, and ignorant malice that the other side is willing to descend into.
I’ve been reading SFF since I could read on my own, and I’ve read anything that was well written and held my interest. Period. I never had any more criteria than that. But the intellectual dishonesty of the these people is starting to leave a sour taste in my mouth and completely turning me off to their work.
Mr. Correia, keep fighting the good fight. I appreciate what you’re doing and commend you for sticking with it, especially when you have to deal with this crap. I would have washed my hands of it long ago.
“Mr. Correia, keep fighting the good fight. I appreciate what you’re doing and commend you for sticking with it, especially when you have to deal with this crap. I would have washed my hands of it long ago.”
I wonder what Agent Franks would do?
Blow them all up?
Punt a gnome gangbanger about 3 blocks – and then look the nearest Socialist Justice Weasel right in the eye and say, “The next time one of you makes me mad…..this will end in a mushroom cloud.”
Oh and its gotta be #NotyourPussy, with a beautiful calico riding wendell as the symbol.
Would it be an unkind cry of “That’s Bull****!” if I pointed out that Entertainment Weekly and others while not understanding the point, slate or results of SP3, somehow managed to have the SP3 logo in their articles?
“We regret the error.”
Oh and to all the people who have EVER claimed that Larry “just wants it handed to him with no work”, I have to quote a previous International Lord of Hate fisking:
BREAD TRUCK, motherfucker!
Scalzi decided to weigh back in. Kind of weird tone for him.
Scalzi usually comes across as the literary equivalent of a pro rasslin’ manager: the little weasel who distracts the ref while the heel tosses powder in the good guy’s eyes, or tosses a chain to the heel, or sucker-punches the good guy from behind with a chair.
He seems to think he’s the heel in his latest piece.
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/04/07/human-shields-cabals-and-poster-boys/
“Nice career you had there, Sad Puppies nominees. Be a shame if (heh, heh) something were to happen to it. We might let it slide this year – so long as you don’t get uppity and accept another nomination.”
He’s still Jimmy Hart, not Hulk Hogan.
bwahahahaha. Shades of Baghdad Bob.
Heh. The concern trolls want peace now.
They know they are losing.
Scalzi: Bring it, bitch.
The thing I love about SJW morons like Scalzi is they’ll typically use a phrase like “nefarious conspiracies” as if in a sarcastic that-could-never-happen manner while his playmates publicly state they won’t review books by white men or intend to cut down on reading books by white heterosexuals or triumphantly proclaim no white men won an award as if that just happened by coincidence. Public and open racist collusion isn’t substantially different from a nefarious conspiracy when you also add SJWs openly state they will pie-chart the shit out of awards and Table’s of Contents just to get an Asian lesbian in the door. Scalzi doesn’t get sarcasm or satire. He has to make fun of something he and his DON’T do, not stuff they actually participate in.
Flick him on the ear and show the emptiness of his words.
I’m not going to bother to respond to that. Anybody with an ounce of integrity can see that for what it is. He’s trying to play good cop to the 8 scripted racist articles, while still managing to get in most of their slander, only without as many exclamation marks.
Then he calls Brad a liar without actually calling him a liar, in his mealy mouthed, sophomoric way. But then he uses that to dangle a carrot of acceptance to our nominees, who were either gullible dupes who many now beg forgiveness, or horrible bad people who deserve the beating.
Then, since he is a malignant narcissist, he explains about how the whole thing is about him.
Honestly, the only reason Scalzi often enters into these discussions at all is that to my side of fandom, he’s kind of like the poster boy for the asshole contingent.
He’s over on Twitter now saying that he wishes I had the balls to admit this was all because I wanted a Hugo.
My response? I refused my nomination and you still didn’t make the ballot.
Just for the record, I’m not a conservative and would probably vote differently than Larry Correla on several issues. But I took a look at the recent “Sad Puppies” slate, and I liked the idea of the Frankenstein monster (a.k.a. Agent Franks) as a badass pissed off monster-killing machine, and while I was tempted to get “Monster Hunters: Nemesis” first, instead I purchased the omnibus collection of the first three MHI books. BECAUSE of, not in SPITE of “Sad Puppies.”
Oh, you’re going to love Nemesis.
Agent Franks is awesome. My favorite of the three protagonists of the series so far.
Fight the good fight. There are a lot of people rooting for you and a lot of people who can see through the absolute LOCK STEP agreement on narrative – through multiple publications and authors – and can conclude for ourselves that this can’t possibly be right, uncoordinated and independently verified.
It’s almost like the left is bending over backwards in trying to make Fox News look like reputable journalism! For shame.
And hey, if they actually pull the “non vote” thing, they’ve legitimized a weapon that can be used right back on them should they wrest back nominees in the future. Do it. Everything they do to you, throw it right back at them with interest when opportunity arises. Don’t go for the moral high ground, go Sean Connery in The Untouchables, “one of ours in the hospital, two of theirs in the grave”.
As a liberal who absolutely believes in equality for women and minorities of every race, orientation or creed, thank you for standing up to the bullshit of the radical feminist, social justice windbag, politically correct goose steppers. As a lefty, it astounds me that those on my side are trying to be as fascist or more than anything that came up during the Bush (or McCarthy!) years.
Truly, we see that no political faction is better than the other… if it has people, EVERY SIDE can be turned into a steaming bowl of shit and the left simply can’t suppress their absolute enthusiasm for making that happen as fast as possible.
Not the first, and possibly not the last I’ll post this, but this old Kornbluth story – available online – that I first read in Baen/Pournelle’s “Imperial Stars” anthologies is very appropriate…..
http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0671698265/0671698265___7.htm
“I have been asked to make two announcements. One, a bulletin from General Sleg’s force. He reports that the so-called Outland Insurrection is being brought under control and that there is no cause for alarm. Two, the gentlemen who are members of the S.O.T.C. will please report to the armory at 1375 hours—whatever that may mean—for blaster inspection. The class is dismissed.”
Petulantly, he swept from the lectern and through the door.
Oh look, the Nielsen Haydens are talking conspiracy. Someone should tell Kevin. >.>
http://www.teleread.com/award/sad-puppies-sad-gits/#comment-1400965
Same crap different century. First was the puritans and the witch trials. Now it’s speechcraft.
“I saw Goody Pyrne derogating a trans-albino-cripple-ghey-underprivileged-etc fellow behind the barn”
Burn the cis-scum heretics.
[…] JOURNALISM: “It was almost like they were all reading off the same script.” […]
I’m reminded of Donald A. Wollheim’s characterization of Analog readers in The Universe Makers as people willing to obey The Establishment (and if you don’t believe me, I shall rise from my rocking chair and hit you with my slide rule). The politicization of SF fandom has been going on for a long long time.
Really? Name me one conspicuous political stance SJWs repeat over and over again.
They aren’t talking conspiracy; they’re DOXXING people…
Doxx me, bitches. And pack a lunch. I’ll be hungry once the smoke clears.
https://archive.today/lslKM
So, yeah, they googled an alias and posted a name. Got a nice Archive.Today link to capture it. Nice to know that these bullies use the techniques of harassers.
That’s the way they roll. I recognize the name, too, we have some mutual friends on FB (Larry, Mad Mike, Brad, Col Kratman). Such hypocrites these SJWs are.
How do you Dox people who are already public?
I mean writers freely give out their name and where about they live. It’s on their books after all.
As for my phone number, well it’s in the friggin whitepages!
Now if they want to make harassing phone calls, well that I think is still against the law.
Doxxing me wouldn’t be much of a challenge. My email address is my amateur radio call sign, which is public record.
Hey, Puppies!
Sorry it’s taken me so long to see this. I’m at the Writers of the Future week, and they’re keeping us VERY busy. I’m not sure how many of you have read my blog, but I want to make sure I’m really clear about something: I did NOT renounce or disavow Sad Puppies.
I didn’t write that post because I was afraid of retribution from the anti-Puppy contingent; I wrote it because I was saddened and appalled by what I’d seen from the anti-Puppy contingent.
The Pups have been nothing but kind and welcoming to me. Nobody here questioned me about my politics, and nobody here rejected me over them. Personally, I think that’s exactly as it should be. Story first, right?
So if you saw the title of my most recent post and thought I was throwing you under the bus, I invite you to look again.
I also have a confession to make. Until the last three weeks or so, I pretty much thought anti-conservative discrimination was a load of hooey. Boy, was I wrong. Having seen it first hand, I am gobsmacked. I will never think that again.
I have been honored and grateful for your support. I would like to offer my thanks to each and every one of you: thank you!
Cheers!
Kary
Glad to have you. Generally speaking we’re 14th Amendment live and let live types. No one has to show us their papers or bona fides. Not attacking me for waking up in my own skin is sufficient. For example, that would not be Sunil Patel at Lightspeed Magazine:
“Sunil Patel@ghostwritingcow It is no coincidence that my book review column features no white male authors. They can have EVERYWHERE ELSE. http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/book-reviews-february-2015/ …”
Don’t worry! We understood that you were disavowing anybody who treats people crappily, not Sad Puppies.
If you’ve gotten any feedback suggesting otherwise, it’s either sleep-deprived reading comprehension problems, or trolls.
Yeah, we can only wish we were making up the discrimination… but we have a lot of fun together, and you can develop a sick sense of humor about this stuff!
Kary, thank you. And honestly, I have absolutely no idea about your politics, beliefs, or anything else. All I know is that you are damned talented and deserve some attention. That’s what we are all about.
Sincerely, thank you.
Thank you
As one who posted on your other thread – I agreed with your overall sentiment, and should have said so before I commented on “Diversity” vs working to model the behaviors we wanted.
I thank you for your stand for the freedom of speech, mind, and soul, and maybe some other time we can talk about Diversity, strength, and Weakness (I invite you to read the book “Antifragile” by Nassim Taleb)
Thank you for standing firm. This means more than a thousand attacks from the anti-Puppy crowd, because it renders them meaningless.
Huge congrats on your nomination. It makes me sad that the whole process has been churned up so unpleasantly simply because there’s been a long overdue shifting to include fan opinions of every stripe. Fingers crossed your pleasure in this isn’t spoiled.
Many years ago, I gave up writing SFF in frustration over publishing. And that was long before it got bad. Looks like it’s just gone down that fandom Glory Road.
I love how Archur Chu took to twitter to declare, “I DON’T CARE IF HE’S MARRIED TO A BROWN WOMAN, I SAY HE’S STILL A RACIST, AND I ALWAYS WIN, BECAUSE I AM ARTHUR CHU!” Folks, you can’t win with that mindset. If I cannot win, none of the rest of you can win either. You were born bad, and you will die bad. Because . . . ARTHUR CHU!
“Arthur Chu @arthur_affect 2h2 hours ago @truesubmariner @jdmac4 They are. Racism is by definition not directed against whites. Racism is the global hierarchy capped by whiteness”
There is something truly broken in that guy. And then as icing on the cake he brings up N. K. Jemisin’s delusional and paranoid WisCon speech. I feel sorry for Chu. I really do. And Shaun Duke and Bradford too. How do you get that dumb in 21st century America with the archives of all the world and its history at your fingertips like never before?
Well, the simple answer is that without principle and a moral ethos, humans are animals no matter how many hi-tech toys.
It’s a kind of group mental illness, really. I keep linking and re-linking to this article, but Everything is Problematic discusses the disease from the point of view of a former sufferer. If Chu’s experience is anything like that of the woman who wrote this article, Chu’s world is a hell of enemies surrounding him every minute of every day. Even friends and family are not safe. It’s a never-ending decay into hatred and paranoia.
I’ve read that before. What I find interesting is how – even after leaving – she makes no real distinction between what she left and what she moved on to. In other words, she moved on to legitimate politics from a cult of sexual and racial defamation and supremacy. There is nothing inherently political about thinking a sexual or ethnic group is inferior. However she still sees the before and after each as “politics.” However what she if fact did was move from a world of identity as a moral ethos to a world of principle as a moral ethos. Our SJWs live in a world of identity used to mark right and wrong – race and sex itself. That’s why I call them a boutique KKK – that’s what they are.
Even after leaving I don’t think she quite grasps how supremacists always turn their race/sex foe into an ideology so as to better disguise their biological hatred of it. I see this all the time with SJWs. They consistently define straight white men as some sort of ideology or political grouping and then let ‘em have it with both barrels. Neo-Nazis do the same to Jews and black folks. They don’t REALLY hate them, just their political “advocacy.”
She mentions Judith Butler and French Queer Theory right off the bat. That’s no surprise. The fundamental basis of French Queer Theory is that heterosexuality and masculinity themselves are social constructs – an ideology – and therefore fair game. That way no one can accuse them of just hating men and having a phobia about heterosexuality.
Here’s a perfect example by radical feminist Denise Thompson: “Pornography is the ideology of male supremacist masculine desire writ large and shameless. It is the clearest, most unequivocal expression of male supremacist ideology in existence.”
Just liking looking at women naked becomes an “ideology.” Here’s another from the same woman, and typical of the books I’ve read about radical feminism:
“Far from being ‘natural’, phallic sexuality is a moral and political activity.” – Denise Thompson, Radical Feminism Today (2001)
Normal sex is “political.” This is how bigots roll – ALWAYS.
Simpler explanation is Anonymous Conservatives r- and K-selected behavior patterns. Chu is simply a rabbit. It’s amazing the predictive power of that theory. It’s being writ large across the internet in the wake of this “controversy.”
http://www.anonymousconservative.com/
I’ve said that before — to quote myself, “leftwing liberal wacko isn’t a political stance; it’s a learning disability”. I was being generous.
I don’t think it’s coincidence that SJWism tends to be contiguous with what I call functional schizophrenia (all the basic symptoms, but not so strongly expressed that the person cannot function in everyday life). I have a theory that this isn’t precisely something one comes down with, but rather something one fails to outgrow (probably due to a defect in the endocrine system, possibly in the role of sex hormones in physical maturation). Viewed objectively, ALL children are schizophrenic, but we only really notice that when they get to an age where it’s no longer acceptable to have imaginary friends (and imaginary enemies) and paranoid beliefs about the world. Normal people outgrow that (starting around puberty); abnormal people don’t, and when they start applying a child’s viewpoint to how the world works, we get the SJW mentality.
There used to be selection pressure against dysfunctional people, but the relative ease of modern life has negated that.
Incidentally there is a similar syndrome in dogs, and it is definitely inherited (and somewhat associated with the incidence of infertility, which is to say, an endocrine disorder). [I am a pro dog trainer with 45 years experience.]
I honestly don’t have any insights into what drives these people. They seem to have one thing in common: they are deeply sociopathic and paranoid. They all lay claim to secret knowledge only they can see, especially if they’re gay, non-white or a woman.
Very convenient. That’s the essence of their stupid privilege theory. Remember, the gender feminist ideology they are slaves to was cooked up by women who were truly psychotic – I mean as in escaping from asylums psychotic, as in the case of Kate Millet, who once held her sister as a captive audience out of fear for 3 non-stop days of ranting.
It is kind of funny, some Twitter folks found where I fought with Chu on there back in June. He called us all racists then, ignored all the evidence, and proudly proclaimed how he was going to get a bunch of his friends to put their $40 in to block us out next year. Now he’s got a bunch of Twitter folks posting screen caps of that and asking him how that worked out for him.
Chu’s cluelessness used to be amusing, but he’s crossed the line. Hope Salon takes you up on your offer to rebut him.
[…] You may not want to fight the culture war but the other side’s culture warriors still want to fight you. I’ll give Larry the last word: […]
“Damien Walter @damiengwalter · Apr 6 ‘welcoming women, PoC, and LGBTQ into an industry does not mean there’s a secret conspiracy against white dudes’ http://buff.ly/1y9c9qN”
Who ever said anything about “secret”? I haven’t had to delve into any crypts to find mountains of sexual and racial defamation by these cretins. In SJW-speak, words like “welcoming” and “diversity” always mean the failings of straight white men – ALWAYS.
[…] Addendum to Yesterday’s Letter – April 7 […]
You might want to add Comics Alliance to your list, Larry. They took a shot too.
http://comicsalliance.com/hugo-awards-ballot-stuffing-sad-puppies/
[…] Correia notes that on April 6, eight different news sites, from Entertainment Weekly to The Guardian, all […]
The media are the enemy.
1. Never believe anything they say without independent verification.
2. Know they are ALWAYS espousing a cause.
3. Know they are, with a few exceptions, skewed far to the left of the average American.
4. Know that they will lie to your face and deny it.
Don’t know if you’re aware but Sad Puppies also made Slashdot the other day: http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/04/06/1143240/hugo-awards-turn-even-more-political. Slashdot is less-than-civil at the best of times, but the comments section made for interesting reading no matter which side you’re on.
Doh! Looks like you are aware. Reading failure on my part. Back to the corner I go…
I don’t know how to link to Facebook comments, but this one pushes TNH off the top of the hill in terms of CHORF Elitism.
Moshe Feder: Well, I’m sorry to say it, but with that sort of silly attitude, you only _prove_ that you aren’t fans like us. When we came on the scene we took the time to learn the ropes and the jargon. We didn’t whine because we couldn’t always get our way. We put in the volunteer time and earned the right to have a say in how things ran. We didn’t expect to be on charge the day we showed up as neos, and we certainly didn’t dare to tell people how to vote. Tell me, when you go to Las Vegas, will you walk up to a poker table and announce that everyone there will now play with the special cards you brought, using your personal set of rules? If you do, you’ll find life doesn’t work that way in Vegas and they’ll probably eject you from the casino. Life doesn’t work that way in fandom either. You don’t get to take over our award on demand. But we can’t kick you out, so all we can do is try to talk some sense into you and vote
Actually, you are exactly allowed to walk into Worldcon, purchase a membership at the door, and vote for the Hugos five seconds later.
But I see that “the graying of fandom” is no longer considered to be a problem, and they’ve stopped trying to even pretend that kids and newbies are fans or even welcome to attend.
So who is this Moshe Feder guy, anyway? Did somebody elect him king?
Just an angry old white male, whose opinion is therefore irrelevant.
They keep telling us that, remember?
He’s an editor at Tor.
But the crowning irony is that Feder discovered Brandon Sanderson and Dan Wells. Since an editor’s main job is to champion his authors, you’d think he’d support SP after Sanderson and Wells got snubbed last year.
If my editor threw in with the folks who booed me at a major award presentation; then publicly advocated spoiling next year’s awards out of snobbish envy, he’d cease to be my editor.
Why *are* all the editors at Tor old white people?
Have they ever explained that?
I guess he’s the sort who after being booed, tries real hard to not get booed again.
Moshe is an editor at Tor. From what I understand he’s a good editor, and he’s a long time fan. I’m not going to say anything negative about him, though I think he is incredibly wrong on this subject.
“Back in my day, we had to walk uphill to the con. Both ways. With no shoes. In the middle of winter. AND WE LIKED IT!”
Did HuffPo delete their article? I was able to find the others, but not that one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXxNODbC6IE
Well done! The beginning is a little slow, but it gets funnier as it goes!
Comrade, Comrade Beale will accept noting but the finest of quality.
Man, if I ever see Downfall, it’s going to be really hard to keep a straight face during this scene.
Previously, the most memorable one for me was ranting about which Mecha were planned to show up, I think in SRW Z3.
Hmm, Super Robot Wars Z3.2 Tengoku Hen will qualify for next year’s Hugo’s.
I think this is the best bunker clip I have ever seen. Which means I may nominate it for Short Form Dramatic Presentation, if I scrape up the cash, because I watch very little.
I actually prefer Louder with Crowder’s recent RFRA one myself, but it’s pretty close. They’re both excellent.
I tracked that down, and do not think it measures up well in comparison.
It’s got some of the best dialogue I’ve ever seen in a Nazi/liberal parody. “What moron would ever call me right wing? I’m the most famous Nazi ever! It’s the National Socialist German Workers Party. It has SOCIALIST IN THE EFFING NAME! For crying out loud, we’re big government socialists! Let’s ACT like it!”
That was actually one of the things that caused me to see it as an inferior work.
Leaving aside the question of the gayness of the later Nazis, what is the character of the ranter? An Adolph Hitler, living both in the forties and our time, who dearly wants to have a gay ‘marriage’ just seems incredible. It felt more like an incoherent collection than they’d established that character.
Where fake Patrick is, I presume, a combination of distilled twitter noise and hostile speculation about the real Patrick’s motives and thinking. (I assume that Doctorow and Stross were fairly active on twitter on behalf of that side.) He feels coherent, and his emotional arc makes sense to me.
I am familiar with, and have argued in the past, the case for the NSDAP being considered left wing. It may simply be that I have seen so much discussion of state intervention that the video’s juxtaposition had no novelty for me.
Rather funny, in some ways. Then again, I’m not convinced one can make something with that clip that isn’t funny.
But there isn’t really any evidence Tor bought Scalzi a place on the Times list. According to his figures for Redshirts, he sold twenty-six thousand hardcovers in 26 weeks (I don’t think he’d lie, the numbers don’t make him look extremely impressive). Sales tend to bunch up in the first few weeks, and it doesn’t actually take a ton of sales to hit a national bestseller list (if Nielsen Bookscan finds you sold four thousand copies in a week, you will almost certainly hit national bestseller lists).
Also the New York Times list focuses more on what is selling near New York, and Scalzi got more publicity up there.
Lock In was released on a Tuesday, one of the better days to be released to hit the Time’s list. I really doubt Tor had to buy him a spot.
Good job on the video, though.
It is on Vox’s account, so he likely at least vetted the claims.
He tends to at least have a citation for any claim he makes.
Here is one link I found confirming my vague memory that he has discussed it.
My understanding is that the NYT BSL tracks purchases in certain book stores, and which ones are an open secret, making gaming trivial.
Forgot it:
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2014/09/of-fraudulent-lists-and-fake-bestsellers.html
The list is officially editorial content. The New York Times people can actually put whatever they want on that list, and not get sued for it. Someone tried.
I believe there actually is a company that allows you to buy a spot on the Times list by manipulating orders. But I don’t think Tor has any reason to that. It costs money to buy a spot on the list, and Scalzi has hit the list in the past, so he can already be advertised as a New York Times bestselling author. Tor doesn’t really have a motive, and the figures from Scalzi’s blog show he’s in about the right range in hard cover sales to some national bestseller lists regardless.
Look, the Publisher’s Weekly list, which is based on actual Nielsen Bookscan data, often requires only 2400 copies sold in a week to hit the top 20 for Hardcover fiction. Scalzi is no Neil Gaiman, but he probably has ~2500 people who pay attention to him enough to buy his stuff in hardcover when it first comes out.
As for Vox’s claim that the Amazon rankings don’t match up, that doesn’t have anything to do with it. Amazon doesn’t report to the Times. If Scalzi doesn’t sell well through Amazon, that means most of those 26000 copies sold have to come from other sources. Like independent bookstores that report to the Times. Scalzi is probably more popular with that demographic anyway. And even Vox notes Scalzi’s Amazon rankings weren’t ridiculously off.
Some of it is also demographics. Books that lean left will do better through Northeastern bookstores.
In short, Scalzi sells well enough, and bulk order campaigns cost enough, that Tor probably didn’t buy him a place on the list for Lock In. If we don’t have evidence that they did, we shouldn’t be asserting it.
I’ve gone into great detail about how the NYT list works here before, and it is one messed up system. I’ve had books that sold less make it than books that sold fewer, and I’ve had books with Nielsen ratings that absolutely crushed the lower half of the NYT list’s books Nielsen ratings that week not make it. It all depends on what was sold, when, where, and what you were up against.
I’ve got plenty of real confirmed reason to dislike Scalzi without making up new ones.
I don’t agree with Vox’s take on that. The NYT list is absurdly fickle to get onto. I think the majority of scifi and fantasy novels that make it are only on there for a week, and that is almost always the release week, unless you are one of the bigger more successful names, or you have some form of media tie in.
Publishers have gamed the lists before, but as much as I dislike Scalzi on a fundamental personal level, I don’t think it is fair to accuse him of that.
As far as the video is concerned, since Vox apparently believes it, it is a reasonable inference as for the script.
There can be many sides to any discussion, and only one actual truth. The video obviously is not claiming that Tor’s historical success in the Hugo is purely due to merit.
I think there are artistic critiques that have a stronger basis.
I find that the Patrick character addressing his wife as ‘Toad’ slightly hurts verisimilitude.
I’m also not sure if the Patrick character is intended to be speaking of Toni Weisskopf or Vox Day in the vomit or shoot himself section. If Toni has won before, it likely wouldn’t be her. If I understand it as Vox, knowing that Vox may have had at least editorial oversight over the video, it hurts my emotional experience.
Also: Someone who has dedicated fans that will buy anything right away spikes their sales in the first week, then drops off quickly.
Same as movie ticket sales.
Why don’t you think he’d lie? He’s demonstrated that he does so repeatedly, fluently, and with little to no reason to do so.
Heck, just the other day, he was out there on Twitter saying that Larry just did Sad Puppies because of Hugo envy, only to get slapped down by the fact that Larry declined the nomination.
You don’t think he’d make himself look more impressive if he were lying?
His claim of 79000 in six months for Redshirts is about the same as his number of Twitter followers now. Obviously, those don’t correlate very much, but around 80,000 people pay some attention to Scalzi on the internet. He’s claiming that slightly less people pay attention to his actual work (enough to pay for it), which doesn’t make him look impressive.
Pretty much every author with a similar Twitter following sells more than 80000 copies in six months.
Look, if Scalzi was lying, don’t you think he’d at least make his sales sound impressive? 80000 for a novel in six months is upper midlist sales, which is what Scalzi is. Us trying to claim he’s lying without any evidence makes us look like the liars.
Scalzi doesn’t think that far ahead. It’s not a manipulative super-genius. He’s just a shameless self-promotor and BSer. He lies if it seems convenient in the moment, and seems completely at a loss when his lies are proved false after the fact; i.e., the example I already posted, his Whatever blog site traffic, etc.
You’re making the classic mistake of thinking that this leftist progoldytes think like rational people; the way you would. They don’t. They think like vicious little herd animals attempting to manipulate events so that someone else other than them is the sacrificial lamb offered up to the inevitable predator that occasionally comes along.
There’s a reason that Anonymous Conservative calls their r-selected behavior patterns that of a rabbit.
Eeh. It’s already close to impossible to find data on sales numbers for books. I’m prepared to trust authors and publishers on the sales of their books, unless their is conflicting evidence or that the figure isn’t within an order of magnitude of what I’d expect, given their profile.
Also, we still don’t have a motive for him to lie about his sales, or for Tor to buy him onto the bestseller list.
If we claim he’s lying just because he’s Scalzi, that isn’t very convincing.
Innocent until proven guilty. Until we have evidence he was lying about his sales figures, or evidence he was bought on to the New York Times, we shouldn’t be accusing him of that.
That doesn’t mean we have to believe him (we don’t), but we shouldn’t claim things we don’t have evidence for. How many people have claimed Larry lied without them doing research to verify he actually did? Do we want to act in the same way they do?
That being said, the times we do have evidence, we can and should call him out. I have no problem with that. If you get Nielsen Bookscan data, feel free to offer contrary evidence.
Well, Scalzi has been known to lie about his web site’s popularity, so lying about books sold doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch.
“My God, Novella might actually go to Kratman.”
Over at Spacebattles, Kratman’s anti-fan club is having a meltdown over his nomination. I only wish we could harness their outrage as an energy source.
Be of good cheer. The SJWs are nowhere near as numerous as they would like us to believe. True, they have significant influence in the culture, but they’ve achieved that by strategically taking over positions in media, publishing, academia, etc.. They’ve only been able to maintain it because they have remained essentially unchallenged.
This is the reason for the hysterical reaction to the defiance by Sad Puppies. The SJWs absolutely understand they are defending a house of cards.
[…] Let me start out with something Larry wrote yesterday: […]
Here’s an interesting find: http://nielsenhayden.com/GodandI.html
I wonder if PNH’s vindictiveness this year in particular is partially driven by the faith of Correia and Torgerson?
Okay, didn’t know that. Learn something new everyday. But surely the head of the SMOFfen SS is completely unbiased.
Sorry; meant TNH, not PNH.
There’s been talk on the other side of No-Awarding *everything* in all categories regardless if they are SP or RP.
Wow.
I can’t imagine this would please everyone on their side. Would Ann Leckie’s fans, for instance, be happy that she was robbed of a Hugo just to put one faction of Hugo voters in their place? Are they really going to punish authors and artists they do like just to show us who’s boss?
That’s technically known as “rage-quitting”, I believe.
No, it’s RAGEQUIT.
But really? Is someone who loved Interstellar and thought it was the best SF movie of the last year really say: “No, I must put it below No Award because those Bad Puppies helped put it on the ballot” ? Are they that petty?
I’m afraid the answer may be “yes”.
So what if they are? They don’t realize it yet, but they’ve walked straight into a Xanatos Gambit. There’s no way that they can win. If they short-sightedly actually manage to give all of the categories to “Noah Ward” then they may think that they’ve won for a short while, but in reality, they’ve fired their soi-disant “best weapon” at the wrong target, and openly shown all of the world their pettiness. They’ll never be able to recover from such a debacle. Because they project their own “if I can’t own it, nobody can!” pathological psychology on “our” side, they don’t understand that this is a suicidal strategy that will render them impotent forever.
On the other hand, I think the more likely situation is that they’ll find that they can’t muster the numbers or the will to give all of the categories to “Noah Ward” after all, in which case their impotence and pettiness is also proclaimed publicly to anyone who’s paying attention.
Like I said; they’ve already lost no matter what they do; they just don’t know it yet. To paraphrase one of my favorite sayings; the game’s already over, the score is already on the board, the only thing left to do is for the players to decide which jersey they’re wearing.
King Solomon figured this out a few thousand years ago. Progs are dumb.
“Noah Ward.” I love redneck humor. Did Gerrold ever write for B.J. and the Bear, cuz there’s a lot of Oscar Wilde in that.
Gerrold can rightly be considered the Merv Griffin of our day.
I saw a tweet that said exactly that.
They nominated the Game of Thrones episode that got on the ballot.
Now they say they have to No Award it just because it was on the slate.
I cannot wrap my head around that at all.
They nominated the Game of Thrones episode that got on the ballot.
Now they say they have to No Award it just because it was on the slate.
Bonkers! There is overlap with people who were voting and people who were voting off a slate. Why on earth would you not vote for something good just because somebody else voted for it?
These people are nuts.
Yeah, anti-slate voting is just allowing slates to control how you vote. It becomes trivial, if Hugo voters have such a mindset, to guarantee certain works won’t win the Hugo. Imagine someone putting the last Imperial Radch book on a slate to guarantee it won’t win. Letting a slate control your vote (even if that vote is no award) is a terrible idea.
Imagine someone putting the last Imperial Radch book on a slate to guarantee it won’t win.
It would actually be kind of hilarious if the SP4 did all SJW works and said ‘ha. show us how you are anti slate now!’. and then people proceeded to nom stuff they actually liked.
Who says we can’t have multiple slates? Have one for “Books by Authors who Have Won Hugos” or something. Put the Imperial Radch on there. It would just be putting it on equal footing with other slate novels. If people are really anti-slate, they’ll be obligated to no award it.
Maybe then they’ll see that they’re just letting slates control how they vote.
(Just for the record, I rather liked Ancillary Sword. There was some funny stuff in there, though some of it may not have been intentional)
I’ve tried to read everything on both sides of this uproar (special thanks to Mike Glyer for compiling both pro and con), and on drilling down through some opposition links I encountered this fascinating article on the Association for Psychological Science site:
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/were-only-human/74794.html
“So why are only three out of a thousand raising their hands when asked? Apparently, it’s because conservative social psychologists perceive the field as hostile to their values. And it’s not just perception. The more conservative respondents were, the more they had personally experienced an intellectually unfriendly climate. Importantly, self-defined liberals do not see this—or believe it. The hostility is invisible to those who don’t run into it themselves.”
See that last sentence?? Exactly the same argument used by SJWs railing against ‘privilege’… goose, gander, hello??
“The Hugo emcees will be myself and Tananarive Due. Whoever wins whatever award, the trophy will be presented by a gay man or a black woman.” – David Gerrold
Who cares? The people who say WE care. These people are smelling their own body odor.
As a non-bigoted atheist conservative-libertarian, I have absolutely no problem with receiving an award from a black woman or a homosexual.
Just smile, be polite, and present the award.
Exactly. The sad thing is Gerrold truly thinks that might be offensive to the winner. It isn’t.
Says more about Gerrold than it does about the people he thinks might win awards.
Last time I heard anything from Gerrold, he was making a rather weird attempt to get a spot on DC’s latest “Superman” digital-first comic book series after the SJW online went absolutely INSANE that Orson Scott Card was commissioned to do one (and only one) story.
The way he tried to sell himself?
“I’m gay and stuff. Everyone knows Card hates gays. But I’m gay and stuff. I wrote ‘The Trouble with Tribbles’. Obviously, I’m perfect for Superman. (Did I mention I’m totally gay? I’m totally gay.)”
…it wasn’t very relevant or compelling.
Lol. I actually didn’t know he was. Really don’t care.
Trouble of Tribbles was a great fluff episode absolutely free of any message or social impact.
Tribbles are like Martian flatcats, right?
(Yes, I know; he and Heinlein independently had similar ideas around the same time.)
actually no. Heinlein came first, however HE got the idea from someone else as well (I forget the name of the story, but it was about Guinea pigs – google should have it).
John: Heinlein got it from the short story “Pigs is Pigs” by Ellis Parker Butler, which is totally hilarious and available to read for free at Project Gutenberg. Go ahead- it’s worth your time.
I don’t care what he does with who – he still hasn’t finished his ‘War Against The Chorr’ series – and when I complained about it on IO9 his reply was…
“I have other priorities. The well-being of my son takes priorities over everything.
Yes, I’m a bitch. I’m not YOUR bitch.
I will not publish the fifth book until I’m satisfied.
(signed) David Gerrold”
http://io9.com/5951944/if-you-really-want-to-read-the-end-of-david-gerrolds-chtorr-series-vote-for-obama
Classy dude. Don’t fault him for caring for his son – but…
…which says more about Gerrold than it does about others.
“Ewwwww! Cooties!!!eleventy!!!”
These people haven’t cleared nursery school, have they.
If xe has time to run around giving out awards, why doesn’t xe have time to finish the Chtorr Cycle? It’s been 22 years since the last book!
After this many years, I can’t really care. WAtC was awesome with moments of preachy BS, and it got worse as it went on. Look at it like this: there’s people of voting age today who weren’t born when the last book came out…
Dang it! I remembered it as a pretty cool series.
Why? Why do you have to tamper with my memories, like this?
And get them kids off my lawn!
From what I remember of the last draft for book 5 that got leaked to the internet, we’re probably better off not seeing it.
Wasn’t that about giant furry purring penises?
…he thinks that either the people who are accepting the award, or the people in the audience going “damnit I was robbed” are going to *notice* who hands them the award?
Granted, I’ve seen MCs who could make or break an evening, but those who tried to make the ceremony about them (or about anything but the award) were those who generally fell into the ‘break’ category.
I wonder if the opposition realizes that they’re responsible for just as many people supporting SP3 as Brad and Larry are.
No. And they never will.
“K Tempest Bradford @tinytempest 7h7 hours ago @sparkymonster you are an awesome human that I love. And also black”
“K Tempest Bradford @tinytempest · 7h 7 hours ago An excellent explanation of Safe Spaces, for those who seem to think they’re evil: http://mariareadsalot.tumblr.com/post/115825258249/when-we-as-black-people-create-spaces-and …”
White supremacists dream of having people like Bradford explain segregation and race pride. It makes their lives far easier when they just have to point a finger.
“Self love…”
In so many ways.
I don’t think safe spaces are evil, I think they’re stupid. But I will read the article anyone because I’m sure it will be entertaining!
That’s how I got here… someone’s complaint about it, and I wanted to see firsthand, not dragged and edited.
Will or has Wendell appeared on a MHI patch?
I really want one of those.
The thing that gets me about this thing, and the No Award proponents –
– and don’t get me wrong, if people really think that NA is the way to go, that’s their call; I understand that NA has been used by fans for decades (?) to express their displeasure with a whole category of works as a category, not a particular group of nominees –
– but the “we have to sacrifice the whole Hugos this year in order to save it for future years” – aka “if we push back hard enough this year, they’ll have learned their lesson and won’t dare do this again.”
To which I can only say, *dude*. I know that Kate the Impaler is already running it for next year, and I have talked to three people in the last two days, in the context of people being harrassed into dropping off the slate, who have decided to write & publish work for consideration next year.
“Fik it,” quoth one, “I got no rep to ruin. I’ll write a damn good story, see if I get on the short ballot, see if I get No Awarded. Heck, I could do this FOR YEARS.”
It’s beginning to strike me that one “side” really doesn’t have anything to lose.
Like I said; they’ve gotten themselves stuck in a Xanatos Gambit and don’t even know it. There’s literally no way that they can win at this point, even if they do successfully pull off the No Award strategy.
Gotta love the Xanatos.
Funny thing is, SP2 was a Batman Gambit rather than Xanatos – they could have won that one, simply by being unbiased and welcoming.
Admittedly a ton of stuff getting “No Award” is about the least satisfying win, but that’s why this is the long game.
Eventually we’ll get enough people voting and caring that no small clique can dominate, not ours and not theirs.
Points for Joshua for Xanatos Gambit, double points for correctly using both that and Batman Gambit.
Exactly!
Everyone complains when ‘dem oder folk’ show up in your neighborhood – the diner starts carrying different things, the old kook that everyone tolerated freaks out the wrong person and gets arrested for it, only to be replaced by a different old kook, and the picturesque old ruin at the end of the block finally gets torn down, and something shiny and depressingly modern goes up in its place, with lots more cars parked in the road.
But the whole theme of “keep them out!”…that’s supposed to be wrong, right?
Right?
I will be interested in the final numbers because I’m pretty sure if people get interested enough they can override those no awards, if not this year than next year.
I think most people will legit vote for who they like (Jim Butcher!) and what they like in the categories where they apply.
And if not? Heck, next year this thing is in kansas city. That’s driveable for me and probably a ton of people. It’s in the back of my mind, at any rate.
My big fear is that they use this WorldCon to change the Hugo rules to benefit themselves. Given how badly I suspect they’re be outnumbered, it would have to be a massive rule change with the obvious purpose of destroying the Hugo as an award of SF fans.
At which point SP morphs into a fan-based award and we win anyway.
This year WorldCon is in Spokane. Any rule changes would be suggested and voted on there. Then the rules would have to be voted on again next year.
Next year the con is in fly-over country.
“It’s beginning to strike me that one “side” really doesn’t have anything to lose.”
Been that way for years. Back in 2010, there was a Tea Party event where a famous sign was displayed: “No matter what I write on this sign, you’ll say it’s racist.”
More and more people are coming to the realization that if they’re going to have the rep, they might as well at least get the pleasure of telling the truth and causing the SJWs as much pain as possible.
Hell, now even I want to write something. Even have an idea forming up nicely. I just need to keep from getting sucked into research creep. And to figure out how to do that Amazon/kindle thing.
From makingspite:
#791 ::: beth meacham ::: (view all by) ::: April 08, 2015, 01:37 PM:
Trying to pin any kind of ideological identity on Tor is a fool’s game. We simply do not select books to publish with any criteria other than “will this make money? Do you love it?”
Respectfully, Ms. Meacham, I do not believe this to be the case. Both Moshe Feder & Patrick Nielson Hayden have both made posts indicating their politics lie on the left side of the political spectrum. If a book did not fit with their worldview, why would they support it in the editor meetings and processes?
Rather, it seems much more likely they would support books and authors who *do* resonate with their worldviews.
Which would explain why so many ‘right-wing’ authors find ‘doesn’t meet our needs at this time’ responses, when submitting to your house.
Your statement *should* be the primary criteria. But, based on what’s coming out under your imprint, I fear other criteria are at play.
Please feel free to correct me, should this not be the case.
Poke them about Baen — which *does* operate under those criteria — and I bet you hear them rant about Baen being political.
Daily Dot had a slanted article as well.
http://www.dailydot.com/geek/hugo-award-nominees-sad-puppies/
I also notice these media outlets attempt to tie SP to Gamergate. This is because they have already thoroughly demonized GG, and it’s a good shortcut to introduce their readers to the “fact” that SP is another right-wing reactionary group dedicated to reclaiming white privilege from minorities and women.
Not being a particularly conservative group, you may not appreciate the comparison, but this is what the leftist media did to the Tea Party.
If you smear a group as racist, bigoted, misogynistic, evil and predominantly white you don’t have to debate them on the facts, which is convenient since they are not on their side, they just pound the table. Debating you on the issues would be akin to debating Nazies, They have already established you are wrong, and therefore unworthy of civil debate.
This is how the leftist media works to destroy any backlash against their SJFascist tactics.
What happened with Gamergate is the same thing happening in SFF. Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu and a host of others started in defaming whites, men and heterosexuals and called it a “critique” of video gaming from a gender feminist viewpoint.
Anyone who pushed back got the same treatment we do: they defaulted to white supremacist transphobic misogynists. I’m not even sure why SJWs say that stuff since they know as well as we do the difference between a few bad eggs and an institutionalized ideology of bigotry. For an institutionalized ideology dedicated to group defamation SJWs only have to look to gender feminism and their own blogs and Twitter streams, all of which use the exact same language peculiar to gender feminism and which Americans otherwise don’t use.
As for George Martin crying the Hugos are broken, he is apparently unaware of the passing away of core science fiction and fantasy last year amid a welter of crying and counting coup on – SURPRISE – white men. Far from having broken the Hugos, we have at least made sure it will not reflect the new sub-genre of feminist racial revenge fiction for one year. Consider it a momentary revival of a dead corpse. Take away Sad Puppies and it once again reverts to vibrant Third Word radicalized lesbians crying about the horrors of straight white colonialist men. In what world of stupidity does an adult in 21st century America talk about “de-colonizing” one’s mind other than from racial bigots and their foppish worshipers?
If Martin wants NAMBLA, a “marginalized” KKK and feminist howler monkeys along with his starships and dragons that is of course his right.
George Martin has weighed in and he is utterly clueless about what is going on.
Martin was so upset about Bush winning in ’00 he couldn’t write for five years. One does not go to Martin for rational opinion.
Joe Abercrombie shot his mouth off, too – I’d expected a bit better from his quarters, but probably b/c I don’t know him.
His time would be better employed writing the winds of winter.
“GRRM is not my bitch.”
But truely, I can not imagine what opinion he could voice that would not be met with a chorus of “SHUT UP AND GO FINISH YOUR BOOKS BEFORE YOU DIE!”
(Now watch someone imagine that I am voicing a threat to him, rather than an earnest desire for him to finish his work before he shuffles off this mortal coil.)
GRRM is not my bitch.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah…
But seriously. It’s been how many years? I’m not trying to tell him what to do with his time, but come on.
We’re so evil that we made GRR Martin finish his next book?
Come on. *Nothin’s* THAT evil.
He’s taken 25 years to write 5 books of 1.8 million words.
Peter Hamilton published his 1.2 million word Night’s Dawn in three years and moved on. Plus he didn’t let it get away from him with dawdling towards no purpose like A Dance With Dragons.
Shit or get off the pot. It’s good – it’s not quarter century good.
ASoIaF is an extremely good series, the sort of thing that will be read for pleasure a century or more later. It’s notable for the author’s grasp of the premises that (1) not all enmities can be neatly divided into good vs.evil, and also (2) nevertheless, some enemies truly are evil.
However, George R R Martin has problems being even remotely objective about anything more recent than the War of the Roses. He came into his writing career trying to avoid service in Vietnam (literally, he wrote a story to convince his draft board that he was anti-American) and thus cast his own personal honor with the Left of that time and the political vagaries of its future.
Its future has now led him to a place where they hate his masterwork in away which he could not have predicted, because of the shifts in the politics of the feminists which now make him “evil” for having rape in his stories (even though not having it would be to absurdly whitewash medieval warfare and undercut one of the main themes of his story, “war is hell”) and furthermore makes him automatically suspect for his race, sex and sexual orientation.
And, because he started his career with an act of semi-betrayal of his own country, one which only became okay because the Left won in the 1970’s, he can’t detach himself. I think he lives in fear that the Left will turn on him, which is sad, because he’s a giant of writing and world-building talents. Dwarfs such as Jemsin and Bradford should be in fear that he will turn on them, rather than the other way round.
Such is the way in which the crimes of one’s past may shackle one decades later, even if one apparently escaped scot-free. And the sad thing? I think the reason this shackles George R. R. Martin is that he is a good man — he understands honor, which is why he can be restrained by the awareness that if he breaks free, he will have to accept that he did something dishonorable.
The worst of it? A draft is itself against Natural Law, it was one of the ways in which America let what it to be imagined military necessity. This is a delayed price we are paying for the way our own government abused the rights of Americans from 1939 through 1975, albeit in a very,/i> indirect fashion.
I finally got around to reading GRRM’s posts on the subject, and I actually found them refreshingly honest in comparison to most anti-puppy posts/articles, and appreciated his candor.
The crux of his argument is that the Hugo is Worldcon’s award and not fandom’s as a whole, and unlike the Nielsen-Haydens, he’s not trying to back away from that statement or dissemble. And you know what? That’s a valid opinion. Admittedly, it’s an opinion that I happen to disagree vehemently with, and the one that the Sad Puppies are fighting primarilly to change. He gets it completely wrong about the source of the Hugo’s prestige, and why the Puppies aren’t just ignoring it for a different award: It gained its prestige NOT because Worldcon is so great, but because for years it, unlike any other award out there, has puported to represent ALL of SF/F fandom, and had the supporting membership system to prove it. But whether he’s correct or not, it’s still a valid position, one that can be effectively argued either for or against, and at least he has the guts to come straight out and say it.
As long as the debate remains “does the Hugo belong to Worldcon or does it belong to all of fandom” and not “which political tribe is more evil,” then we might even be able to actually get something accomplished.
As long as the debate remains “does the Hugo belong to Worldcon or does it belong to all of fandom”
Here is my question. The ‘real fans’ keep talking about how they’ve been going for decades.
Do they really want to exclude everyone who is under 50? Dont’ they know that will kill the hugos far more effectively than anything SP could devise?
Not to mention how the “we support the marginal and disadvantaged” line goes straight out the window when we start limiting the ‘voice’ of the Hugos to ‘just those who can attend Worldcon’.
That people are actually claiming that Worldcon represents the same sections of fandom that they always have, and that we should limit this even more, is surprising.
Welcome to our side of the fence. This is the exact same ideology that painted those in #GamerGate as misogynist, and the same tactic.
Expect that they are all on the same Facebook or Google mailing list. We had GameJournoPros to thank, which was a clone of JournoPros.
They are reading off the same script. They are a hive mind, unable to break with the party line or they will be exiled.
It’s a frightening, almost Orwellian world that is forming, but we won’t be silenced. I hope you will not be either.
I finally got around to paying my $40. This time, the SJW plague-rats crossed the line. Come to think of it, they crossed so many, many lines over the past couple of years, they’ve long ago passed the moral event horizon. I can no longer stand neutral as between the fire brigade and the fire and still look at myself in the mirror.
I did, too. NO idea how it works, of course….
I did too. The EW/etc. hit pieces were the last straw.
What I’m getting sick of is the inevitable “Actually, for the past few years the Hugos have shown a conservative bias” posts.
1) This was never about works being “conservative”….or “liberal” for that matter. This was about story and content being considered more important than flavor and wrapping paper.
2) The same people who say stuff like “actually, there’s a _______ bias,” are also 99% of the time the people who have not the slightest iota of awareness of anything in the world beyond “OUR SIDE” and “THEIR (evil!) SIDE”
Check out Chaos Horizon: https://chaoshorizon.wordpress.com/
The site brings to light a number of biases in the Hugo award for best novel that have nothing to do with politics.
A work (conservative or liberal) will not probably not make it on the slate if it is published in the wrong half of the year or is the wrong subgenre of SFF.
I personally think some of those biases are scarier that the conservative/liberal biases.
Then again the political biases tend to make more libel happen, which is pretty darn scary.
I made you guys a Sad Puppy meme.
Because the important thing is free books!
[…] a comment Larry made on his blog about his experiences. (Just part of the […]
http://www.themarysue.com/hugo-awards-george-rr-martin/
So Sad Puppies is actually “about misogyny, racism, and fear of the LGBTQ+ spectrum.”
Keep saying shit like that, morons. We’ll keep sending pizzas.
You do realize that sending so many carbs to those skinny jean wearing humps is considered assault to them right?
Of course you do!
So you probably already know this, but Seanan McGuire (I’m a fan, btw) no stranger to Hugo controversy, put a plea in her blog in Jan 2013 with a link to registration, also presented a slate and was nominated an unprecedented 5 times that year. Of course, it was all “woman makes good claptrap” but astonishing hypocrisy as no one pointed out what she did. http://seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com/491099.html
Digging into her Hugo post:
4 options for Novel
4 options for Short Story
3 options for Artist (Pro?
Totally not a slate! Because Racism! Homophobia! ClassWarfare!
I like her writing, mostly. But the political stuff (see J. Ross, Worldcon 2013) led me to follow other writers, and redistribute my entertainment $.
Seanan Mcguire is fun at parties:
“Seanan McGuire @seananmcguire 19h Really, let’s play a fun game. Let’s never ever ever use the word ‘g*psy’ in fiction again, unless…nah, screw ‘unless.’ Let’s just not.”
“Seanan McGuire @seananmcguire 19h @scalzi I had a fucking sociology professor stand in front of me and say ‘Using racial slurs gyps others of their cultural heritage.'”
“Seanan McGuire @seananmcguire 19h @scalzi I called him on it, he said I was being overly sensitive, I went to the Dean. FUN TIMES.”
Yeah, fun times there. Don’t use the fucking word “gypsy” in a fictional novel and sure, go rat out someone over nothing but don’t worry about lighting up 100 to 200 million people as assholes in your non-fiction comments cuz they’re white cis-racists something or the fuck other.
It absolutely boggles my mind how someone can be enough of a moron to get excited enough to get someone in trouble with their boss because of saying “gyps” but then employ racial insults and stereotyping like “white privilege” as if it’s some form of advanced egalitarianism. I mean, I’m not even in the same universe of time and space as someone that much of an unprincipled mental and moral cripple.
No word on what Seanan McGuire AKA Mira Grant thought of having her book reviewed at “Gypsy Reviews,” those bastards, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she feels gypped. McGuire apparently had no problem using “gypsy” on her own website in 2007, which at age 29 presumably post-dates having sociology professors to rat out.
Fun times from a fun girl at parties. In my old neighborhood we would’ve leapt into thorny fucking rose bushes to avoid that kinda fun when it came honkin’ up the street in the form of a walking commissar or politburo that acts out of “love.”
I remember that because I did a lot of research on that. In Dead Six, Lorenzo actually comes from a Roma background. The reason I went with that was because there were Gypsies in my home area growing up, who self identified themselves as gypsies, and I found them to be an interesting culture. If you asked them what their family was, they’d say Gypsies the same way I would say Portuguese.
After I saw this controversy, I looked it up, including statements from people who were leaders in the Roma community. Around the world some gypsies like to identify as gypsies, and others prefer Roma. In the US, it seems to go both ways, with many people prefering Gypsy over Roma. I even found letters and statements addressing it from their biggest single political organization (and I can’t remember their name) but it was basically, meh, we don’t care. In many countries, especially those with Latin language roots, nobody uses the term Roma, like if you are talking to a Portuguese person it is Cigano (probably spelling that wrong) and if you said Romani they thought you were talking about Romanians.
But if you want to be PC, then they are Romani, regardless of what they call themselves, or what they tell you to call them.
Which if you think about it, really isn’t fair to them, but the PC police have spoken.
Which is actually pretty damned unfair
Interesting. Thanks for the info.
Of course it’s more that the SJWs have co-opted and poisoned the old self-identity terms than that the people who used ‘em don’t like ‘em. Examples abound.
I liked the way she was actually proud of ratting this guy out. “Fun times.” That gives you insight into the nature of the PC. It’s like a hobby.
“Look, everyone. America’s a white supremacy. I’m gonna tell my mom.”
I know McGuire a bit through filk, and I’ve stayed at her house, so I should say something.
Seanan McGuire is touchy about Roma/Gypsy issues because that’s half her descent, and (I gather) because she’s not very fond of certain individual persons and events on that side of her family. She doesn’t have much family on the other side either, so I’m sure this is not fun. So there is family loyalty involved here.
It would be cogent to note that it’s well known that some Roma branches ask you to choose to live their way (and stay in contact) or the gajo way (and stay away). Being an educated literate writer with a house would definitely be considered the gajo way by such branches. Others are hostile to anyone who is not full-blooded Roma, or at least hostile to treating them as family. The Roma laws are as restrictive as those of Orthodox Jews, so it’s difficult to count as observant without going whole hog.
So basically, what she’s doing may or may not be jerkish, but it’s personal history rather than SJW stuff making her touchy. I think we all know people in similar situations with family or religious history issues.
It’s been years and years since I’ve seen her at one, because I’ve largely gafiated and she doesn’t get to my neck of the woods all that often; but she used to be the life and soul of parties.
Whenever she’s feeling comfortable in her own skin, she’s a lot of fun. Whenever she’s nervous, she gets cranky. (Like a lot of fans and performers.)
Based on how she writes these days, I would say that she’s a bundle of nerves most of the time. I expect that being a prolific author makes one feel a heavy load of responsibility. (And hanging out online with SJWs, feeding each other’s anxieties and dislikes, probably isn’t restful or healthy.)
Anyway… yes, she has a large acquaintance all over fandom thanks to her travels, a large blog following, a large amount of published work, and a large number of Hugo nominations for her own projects and for things she’s done as collaborations. Except for the travels, it’s a very similar profile to Mr. Wright’s, and similar numbers of nominations have resulted in both cases (but of course Wright gets more guff from the usual suspects).
That actually makes it worse. I tend to sympathize with people that have painful personal family history as I’ve got some of my own…however:
You can at least make a case for the idea that society as a whole shouldn’t do something anymore because it is injurious to some subset of the group. Whether “being offended” should count as “injury” is the principle that we’re fighting a cultural war over right now.
You really can’t make any case at all for her ordering everyone on earth to stop using a word because it tweaks her own personal family baggage. That’s full-blown adolescent narcissism. “Everyone stop doing that!! Because ME ME ME FeelBad ME ME!”
And in this case, I think it’s fair to assume that “Fun times” means “a sad or infuriating event, described sarcastically as fun.” A very popular expression during the 1990’s in certain circles.
Well, that’s why I said the response might or might not be jerkish. I agree that it’s not fair to come down like a load of bricks for this — particularly on someone who has no idea about an unpublicized issue and a near-invisible worn-down etymology.
OTOH, at least a personal chip on the shoulder has reason behind it, whereas a rage caused by one’s theoretical checklist of prejudice and privilege is completely worthless. (Although I have no doubt that an SJW would feel it was purer to have no self-interest involved.)
‘All politics is personal’?
She sounds disturbingly like me, in terms of how decent I am to other humans depends far too much on my mood. Which is *understandable* but not *excusable* – I should be called on it when I am being an ass.
I think it’s *very* reasonable for a person to say, “I prefer to be called ‘Roma'” and that a person who does not comply is being an ass. I think it’s far less of concern when a person grew up using one sort of description and uses that.
Surely we are not going to attempt to rub out all variation in the English language at this late time?
And the prof. she ratted out knows her family tree?
How does McGuire know that expression doesn’t come from “gyppo,” an English slang term for Egyptians?
Or is she 18th dynasty too?
Ratting people out. Fun times.
And what’s a “black dude parade” in this theoretical thing called her brain? Suddenly a magic dictionary flies in and dumps its contents on her head. “Racist.”
And how is “white dude parade” any different from “gypped?”
I have albinos on the caveman side of my family tree.
Since this seems to be the place where “press dealing with Sad Puppies” links are being collected, National Review Online had a post on it in The Corner:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/416647/social-justice-warriors-arent-so-tough-when-even-sad-puppies-can-beat-them-david
There’s also an article in The Federalist:
http://thefederalist.com/2015/04/08/the-hugo-awards-culture-wars/
“But if you want to be PC, then they are Romani, regardless of what they call themselves, or what they tell you to call them.
Which if you think about it, really isn’t fair to them, but the PC police have spoken.
Which is actually pretty damned unfair”
From what I’ve gleaned from watching what SJWs and the PC both say and do, I can only conclude that fairness has little to do with it. If they truly cared about the people they claim they are trying to help and protect, then things like #notyourshield wouldn’t be necessary. Neither would they, when confronted by minorities/etc. who don’t agree with either their goals or their methods, tell them that their opinion, beliefs, and life experiences are wrong because they don’t fit in with the narrative. And they surely wouldn’t be opposed to encouraging women to learn how to protect themselves since that, in and of itself, is a form of feminine empowerment which is something they profess to support.
Thank you Larry.
This lifelong SFF fan (Analog subscriber for oh about 30 years, I think) who is also an Asian American really appreciate what you and your friends have done with SP.
I’m doing my small part by purchasing a supporting WorldCon 2015 membership. I also went to Amazon.com and bought one of your books as well as one of Brad Torgersen’s books. I do have to say that the insane reactions that you and your friends have been subjected to after the success of SP3 was what made me aware of the Hugo mess and that I should do something about it.
Take care!
Didn’t see this posted, sorry if I missed it:
http://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/please-stop-with-the-death-threats-and-the-hate-mail/
Nice to see a little bit of sanity…
That was very classy of her.
[…] could help The Puppies, Whether they Sad, Brad, or Rabid. I posted links to the idea in various comments. And the few responses were not very enthusiastic. Pete, a commentator over at MHN thought it was […]
‘nother guy bucking to be added the the lawsuit:
http://electricliterature.com/how-bigots-invaded-the-hugo-awards/
He’s a Tor.com guy. As the ILoH has said, Tor has a lot of good people working there, and they publish a bunch of authors.
And I would not expect anyone to shift out of their “house” without a great deal of thought, emotion, and time.
But…he’s a Tor.com guy.
[…] can’t take back what we already have“, this is the reaction. And the twitstorm goes straight into the mainstream news sites without even the slightest amount of fact […]
[…] It’s almost like they were all reading off the same script. […]
The Atlantic got in on the fun:
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/04/the-culture-wars-come-to-sci-fi/390012/
(Note they choose a Hugo winner from last year to do it.)
“The prizes have been targeted by voting blocks opposed to the growing inclusion of women and writers of color.”
Are we surprised to read that straight up lie attached to an article with Hurley’s byline? And where’s the quotes to back that up? In their usual place – Hurley’s thick skull.
“… writers who claim the Hugos are turning into affirmative-action awards catering to left-wing ideologies.”
That’s not a claim but a thing backed up by enough evidence and actual quotes to fill a book. SJW webzines regularly publish actual pie-charts of diversity, like strategic war maps outlining territory yet to be conquered, yet that territory is conspicuously only ever straight white man territory. And Hurley has the nerve to write this piece of shit article? Gender-race feminists oddly never pie-chart blues music, rap, romance lit, Samba, Asian films, Bollywood, boxing, selected sports, Egyptian gov’t positions, Turkish pop music, or global anti-homosexuality laws.
Hurley’s own claims are nearly mindless and certainly factless:
“So it’s no coincidence that many of the people block voting these awards are the same ones sending death threats to women and people of color, sending SWAT teams to the addresses of critics, and hijacking accounts and identities to try and silence those creating more inclusive stories.”
If this daffy woman ever wrote something with actual quote marks or that wasn’t bullshit I’d be stunned. We are not pushing back against skin and sex but against a supremacist ideology of radical gender feminist morons of which Hurley herself is a member. A mind that dense will never write perceptive SFF. SFF requires sharp perceptions, not a mind straight out of “The Marching Morons.” Writers who are the object of such satire are no writers, but dullards pushing empty-headed propaganda which is a reflection of their own bigotry and lack of principles. This very article is one I’d expect to see in that Kornbluth story. The question then is: how does a person like Hurley write a story like Kornbluth’s? The answer is: she does not. These SJWs may feel they are the inheritors of SFF’s traditions like “The Marching Morons” but in truth they are the daffy inhabitants.
Hurley’s own award-winning mess from a year ago is streamlined with fake fins but plods like a mule that goes statistical zero miles per hour. What is more moronic and revealing than a story about women who have always fought illustrated with paintings? The fact Hurley claims to have a masters in history makes it all the more delicious.
SJW custom and practice: read the minds of millions of people according to their race and sex, and only ever one race and sex. Slap quote marks around it. Leave women and PoC out of this practice. Done. Literary result? “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love.”
“Feminist jazz hands” all around [Trigger Warning] (Formerly known as the now defunct PTSD-inducing “applause”).
many of the people block voting these awards are the same ones sending death threats to women and people of color, sending SWAT teams to the addresses of critics, and hijacking accounts and identities to try and silence those creating more inclusive stories
1. How could you possibly prove this? (Answer: You can’t). Better to just assert it I guess.
2. Many is such a fantastic weasily word that betrays you have no clu.e
Many SJWs fuck kangaroos, eat slime from tidepools and taxidermy their dead pet cats and use the asshole as an electric pencil sharpener. This is an especially marked tendencies known to be true of the Hugo nominees among them.
Maybe it’s just the insomnia, but I WANT to UNDERSTAND this, and I see 2 possible explanations for the hypocritical logic fail of the “it’s wrong to hate people you disgusting vile hateful hating scum” crowd.
They actually get that their semantic vandalism exists and they are deliberately using illogic as a tactic to short circuit rational debate, maybe in an attempt to sneak their beliefs into the ‘collective subconscious’ by ‘pranking’ the mundanes.
or
They really can’t see the irrationality of hating a group of people who they categorize by labels derived from skin color, gender or what have you, (white, male, heterosexual etc) because ‘those’ people are worthy of hate…since they’ve committed the sin of hating people because of their skin color, gender and so on.
Which leads to my questions, first is there anyway to test these statements for accuracy and if so what are they.
And 2nd, if either are true, how do you defend the rationality and honest truth seeking generally known as ‘science’, from this class of attack?
Because I like to read mystery, action-adventure, fantasy, historical….it’s easier to say I like to read a wide variety.
But I ‘love’ science-fiction. And I don’t see how SF can exist if logic, rationality and ‘operational’ definitions are debased and devalued to the point where words are useless without a secret decoder ring.
“Maybe it’s just the insomnia, but I WANT to UNDERSTAND this, and I see 2 possible explanations for the hypocritical logic fail of the “it’s wrong to hate people you disgusting vile hateful hating scum” crowd.”
There’s a third option; that linking to inflammatory articles serves as EXCELLENT clickbait, and clicks are money to a web publication. The author doesn’t have to like the article, or approve of the content, to know that THOUSANDS more people will click on a link with incendiary anchor text.
One might even justify this as “broadening the scope of the discussion”.
}}} Explain to me how an Army Warrant Officer in a 20 year interracial marriage with biracial children is a white supremacist, because some trust fund babies with gender studies degrees declared it to be so.
Actually, that’s all it takes.
The problem here is that we keep letting assholes play the race card, even though it’s long since word itself out.
It’s time to just stop playing to the pricks, and respond (since you can’t ignore them, that’s suicide), BY ATTACKING THE PLAYING OF THE RACE CARD DIRECTLY.
Shine a light on it. Ignore the rest of anything it’s trying to promote. VILIFY the race card. Because it’s essentially a racist, hypocritical thing 98% of the time, and 1.9% of the remainder it’s blown out of proportion.
I’m another long time SFF reader who just got my supporting membership.
My story is getting to be very familiar in the comments. Grew up reading the ‘grand old men’, Asimov, Anderson, Niven, Pournelle, Zelazny, etc, read the ‘New Wave’, and then read a bunch of stuff I didn’t see as related at first. Moon, Meiville, the 2 Ians (who I can’t keep straight, but the socialist welshman) and others like Mixon, Cadigan, and Tepper. I couldn’t quite see why I no longer LIKED what I was reading, and inertia carried me along for a while. THEN I STOPPED. I went from buying 10 signed first edition hardcovers a month or more, to nothing. I started gaming. That was FUN. Dragons, swordfights, huge worlds to explore!
Then at some point, a gun blog or a political blog linked to Larry. Hey this guy can write! And his books are really fun! And some authors he links to are fun too! HOLY CRAP HOW DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT JOHN RINGO? Suddenly I’m spending money on books again. LC, JR, SHoyt, TC, BT, random Baen authors in the anthologies. Free library here I come! I’ve been reading steadily for the last couple of years, and so has my wife.
I had no conscious idea why I stopped, but it was clear when I started again. Those books were not fun. They were tedious message fic. I’m older now, and will admit I’m not interested in pushing boundaries just to push them. I have NO need to explore 5 genders. The constant cry of “look at me, I’m different, accept me!” no longer appeals.
Every minute of my life is spoken for and every choice I make on how to spend it means it doesn’t get spent on something else. When you can see the end, even if it is far off in the distance, the rest of the journey becomes more important. There is no time to waste reading books I don’t like.
So, it seems like a LOT of people like me kind of didn’t pay attention for a while. The SJWs took over the Hugos and voted for stuff they think they should vote for. Hurray for them. BUT NOW, hundreds of us are awakened to how the Hugo voting works.
AND OUR MEMBERSHIPS ARE JUST AS VALID AS THEIRS. I think it’s an important thing to grasp and internalize. WE are now voting members. We have the opportunity to take it back. It’s a popularity contest, so lets vote what is popular among US. We don’t have to just pop in and vote on this one issue and then leave. We have JOINED, and now it is US.
If the SJW clique closes ranks against the ‘barbarous invaders’ and takes their ball and goes home, it only proves the point.
This shouldn’t be seen as a one issue campaign or a one off. It is a chance to expand and re-take the field.
Go read!
zuk
“Just for the record, I rather liked Ancillary Sword. There was some funny stuff in there, though some of it may not have been intentional”
So maybe it’s last year’s “Plan Nine From Outer Space”? I’ll have to check it out when I can find a dirt-cheap used edition.
James Nicoll won’t link to Baen, but he’ll link here:
http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/5302896.html
I’m not sure what kind of point he’s trying to make. What’s even funnier is the guy in his comments who thinks Larry will delete the post now.
The post in question is: http://monsterhunternation.com/2011/08/23/worldcon-report/?hc_location=ufie
I don’t think Paranoid Guy has anything to worry about.
I’m not the one “massaging”, deleting, “kittening”, or “disemvowling” comments. I don’t edit anyone’s words. I let everything stand as it is. In the years I’ve run this blog, I’ve blocked 20 IPs, and I think 10 of those are Clamps. The only comments I don’t approve are spam, threats, and actual crazy stuff, and I don’t mean like crazy like you disagree with me, like crazy as in Justify My Moon Ferrets. The only people I’ve blocked have been the really vile malicious repetitive trolls, and I usually only block them after they get boring. I leave all regular posts up, even if I disagree with them. A quick scroll through my comments will prove that.
None of which can be said for some of my more infamous opponents.
So I’m sensing a bit of projection.
“Cora Buhlert @CoraBuhlert · 13h13 hours ago Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, Germany
Just wondering, does Larry Correia realise that if he had won the Campbell, they would have made him wear a tiara?”
I can see why the Germans lost both wars.
And if someone posted this elsewhere, I apologize:
http://gawker.com/how-gamergate-radicals-seized-sci-fis-most-prestigious-1696731611
For the last BLEEPING time: GamerGate wasn’t involved until the nominations were already counted. Good God. Can’t they spend a few minutes to get their facts straight? Are they going to link everything they don’t like to GG forever? Looks like.
Sheesh!
[…] Addendum to Yesterday's Letter | Monster Hunter Nation […]
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