The Guardian’s Village Idiot Admits to Libel

Yesterday I posted a link to my latest fisking of the Guardian to Facebook. Surprisingly enough, Damien Walter showed up in the comments.

Now I suspected Damien wasn’t particularly bright, you can tell by his clumsy column writing, but I was only joking about him being the Guardian’s village idiot.  Little did I realize he was Show up on Facebook and Brag about Committing Libel dumb. 

https://www.facebook.com/larry.correia/posts/868347473176183?comment_id=868385793172351&notif_t=like

Because that thread has three hundred comments on it, I trimmed out everything before Damien showed up. The only other things I cut were the memes people posted because they don’t paste over and I’m too busy to go copy and insert the individual files. The parts where Damien incriminated himself are in bold. But really, check out the whole thing to watch Damien’s bizarre attempt at deflection through deconstructionist straw grasping.

Larry Correia Just keep calling him on his lies.

 

Damien Walter Libertycon sounds great. When is it?

 

Larry Correia Hey, Damien, how about you cite where Toni said that or you retract it and issue a public apology?

 

Zachary Hill Force it. Make him prove it or apologize.

 

Damien Walter How about you give a definition of science fiction, as you’re certain it’s a genre.

 

Larry Correia Okay, noun, plural genres [zhahn-ruh z; French zhahn-ruh] (Show IPA)
1.
a class or category of artistic endeavor having a particular form, content, technique, or the like:
the genre of epic poetry; the genre of symphonic music.
2.
Fine Arts.
paintings in which scenes of everyday life form the subject matter.
a realistic style of painting using such subject matter.
3.
genus; kind; sort; style.
adjective
4.
Fine Arts. of or pertaining to genre.
5.
of or pertaining to a distinctive literary type.

According to the world’s largest book retailers and publishing houses, science fiction is a genre.

So, back to you, who started it, cite where Toni said that.

 

Joseph Capdepon II So I guess Mystery isn’t a genre of fiction? Romance? Horror?

You call yourself a journalist and you can’t even get the most basic and simplest of things correct in your article?

 

Damien Walter I said give a definition of science fiction, not of genre.

 

Ross K Wolfe *grabs popcorn*

 

Zachary Hill Well, you don’t seem to know the definition of genre, so he had to start there.

 

Mark Davis Jr. This is gunna be good.

 

Larry Correia  First thing on Google: Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginative content such as futuristic settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, time travel, faster than light travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life. It often explores the potential consequences of scientific and other innovations, and has been called a “literature of ideas”.[1] Authors commonly use science fiction as a framework to explore politics, identity, desire, morality, social structure, and other literary themes. 

Now, back to the part where you fabricated a total lie about Toni Weisskopf, cite where she said that. This isn’t some little obfuscation issue over terminology, cite where she said that or you are a liar.

 

Thomas Mandell Richard; Halfwit Damien probably would take one look at the guest list for LibertyCon and beg off or come up with a really assinine excuse for not goin’.

 

Larry Correia From Britain: 

British Dictionary definitions for science fiction Expand
science fiction
noun 
1.
a literary genre that makes imaginative use of scientific knowledge or conjecture
(as modifier) a science fiction writer

 

Damien Walter What’s the scientific knowledge in Star Wars?

 

Larry Correia Shit, it is harder to find a definition of science fiction that doesn’t use the word genre in it.

But that is a side show. Let’s get back to the part where you lied about Toni. Provide a cite where she said that. There is nothing open to interpretation. She either said that or she didn’t.

 

Damien Walter Where is the scientific knowledge in Star Wars? You mean you write science fiction, but can’t define it without google? Lame.

 

Larry Correia Look at you playing semantic games. I don’t do the frenemies thing Damien. Cite her or you are a fucking liar. I even posted the link to her diatribe. Cite it or you are admitting to everyone that you are liar.

You did the same thing to me when you put words in quotes attributed to me which I never said.

 

Loopy Libertarian 

Wow, you cannot answer a direct question if your life depended on it, can you, Damien?

Larry has directly asked you, “Now, back to the part where you fabricated a total lie about Toni Weisskopf, cite where she said that.”

He did that both in his post and here.

Yet, you dodge and weave with semantics over definitions of genres.

I think that right there is an “answer” in and of itself.

 

Greg Ellis Star Wars is more closely related to fantasy than to true science fiction. Star Wars has virtually no science foundation upon which to base the appellation “science fiction” since it contains virtually _no_ actual “science” in its plot, storyline, or backgrounding. It’s almost pure fantasy – and fantasy is its own genre.

 

Damien Walter Come on Larry. You’re a scifi writer. Where is the scientific knowledge in Star Wars?

 

Joseph Capdepon II Before we get into ideas like faster than light travel, robots, shield technology, weapons that fire coherent light, the mecha, the fighters, etc, I want to see where Toni claims to say what you claim she said Damien, or like Larry said, you are just a fucking liar.

 

Damien Walter Because it’s an easy question. Any fan has discussed this a thousand times.

 

Mark Davis Jr. I get it, he’s talking about Star Wars not having science in it because Star Wars is fiction, just like his claims about Toni Weisskopf!

 

Joseph Capdepon II You write about space opera and you don’t even know what the hell space opera is do you Damien?

Star Wars is space opera. I would classify Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn series as Space Opera as well. No real hard science in it either.

 

Larry Correia I didn’t write a response to your opinion on Star Wars. I wrote a response to the fact you’re a liar. I’ve given you multiple dictionary definitions. Now you owe me an answer. Provide the cite.

As for Star Wars sci-fi elements (because you conveneintly leave out the part of the definition which says CONJECTURE) robots, AI, FTL, laser weapons, space ships, alien life. 

Now, that’s 3 I’ve answered. Give me the one I asked for. Provide the cite where Toni said that or demonstrate that you lied.

 

Damien Walter Hurrah Greg Ellis yes Star Wars is indeed a lot like fantasy! These genres aren’t so clear. So, what do you call the genre that contains both SF and Fantasy?

 

Larry Correia Cite where Toni said that.

 

Patrick Freivald So Damien, your idea of journalism is to lie about what people said, and then to literally ignore it when called on your error? Typically, when presented with facts counter to something previously stated, a journalist will issue a retraction, often with an apology.

 

Joseph Capdepon II Now, if you want hard sci-fi, I would recommend Stephen Baxter to you.

Hard sci-fi, space opera, military sci-fi, etc are SUB-GENRES of the GENRE of SCIENCE FICTION.

 

Damien Walter You haven’t answered my question at all Larry. You want to assert that science fiction is a genre. And yet you can’t even separate it from Fantasy.

 

Greg Ellis There’s a word for that, Damien, and a genre. But you know that already. It’s called scifi-fantasy. It’s also referred to as cross-genre fiction. However, Larry’s right. Answer his question about Toni, if you would please.

 

Joseph Capdepon II I think Damien has comprehension problems as Larry answered the question, but Damien doesn’t want to accept it.

 

Ross K Wolfe The non sequiturs continue. It’s almost as if he knows he’s a liar and a libeler.

 

Jason Hobbs Yesss, Finally, you two are duking it out on here!

 

Thomas Mandell Damien Walter: QUIT DODGING THE BLOODY QUESTION!!! Provide cites or accept the title of BLOODY FECKING LIAR!!

 

Larry Correia They are both genre fiction, but this is pretty obvious pathetic obfuscation. Provide a cite where Toni said that.

You are a liar and a coward. 

Genre fiction categories primarily exist so that book sellers know where to shelve things. According to the largest retailers in the world it goes fiction-scifi/fantasy- then they break down into sub genres. Whoop. None of that has anything to do with the part where you fabricated a lie about a real person, and now you will not provide a cite.

Quit trying to change the subject. You are a liar. Provide the cite or shut the fuck up.

 

Zachary Hill So, you refuse to offer proof and therefore admit that your a liar?

 

Steve Poling So, Larry Correia cites examples of serial lying, impugns the fellow’s character and says, “Correia is really mad.” The guy gets knocked around like a pinata and his defense is the passion with which his whipping was administered.

 

Greg Ellis Baxter and Benford are _gods_ of hard sf.

 

Larry Correia Of course I’m mad. I don’t like liars.

 

Patrick Freivald To be fair, lazy shithead wannabe journalists not fit to run a college paper will sometimes report things from secondary sources without checking the primary source, and so without actively lying they end up saying things that are outright false. When this is made apparent, they issue retractions, often with apologies.

 

Rob Fabian Damien won’t accept anything Larry says, just like he’ll never actually answer Larry’s question. He actually thinks he’s “winning.”

 

Chris Cook Come on Daimen, just admit your mouth / keyboard wrote a check you can’t cash… You figured nobody would notice, right? Dork.

 

Joseph Capdepon II But hey, Damien will make fun of Baen’s covers, even though Baen has sold millions upon millions of books, he will lie about what Toni and Larry said but it is all okay.

The Brits are paying him to “write” a novel. I’m sure it will check off all the boxes on the SJW checklist.

 

Steve Weinberg This sort of reminds me of when in FIREFLY Mal is having the duel, and the rancher remarks “my god, he thinks he’s doing well!” Except, of course Mal is awesome and Damien is… well…

 

Sam Cook Am I really a rarer beast than a unicorn for being a left-leaning fan of Larry Correia?

 

Damien Walter I read Toni’s essay when it was published, and dozens of responses to it, and re-read in writing that piece. My opinion of it was exactly as stated in my column.

 

Rob Fabian Translation: I CAN”T cite anything, but I have the feels…

 

Zachary Hill Star Wars: The potential for advanced robotics, aka Droids. Ion engines which is a real concept. Using advance machines to collect water for a better life in arid climates, Anti-gravity and its uses. I can keep going but this is already far more of an answer than the liar deserves.

 

Joseph Capdepon II Translation: Toni’s essay says th
e exact opposite of what I want it to say, so I will say it says what I want it to say so that it fits the narrative I want.

 

Tommy Craddock Jr You never said a word about it being your opinion Damien, you said this happened:

“issue a diatribe against any and all sci-fi that did not pander to this conservative agenda.”

Where did that happen?

 

Tom Walls I read Toni’s essay. Damien lied. No weasel way around it.

 

Joseph Capdepon II What about Eric Flint, Damien? Is he a part of the conservative agenda?

 

Chris Cook You would think he’s a progressive or something like that…

 

Zachary Hill He can’t answer with proof because he made it up.

 

Larry Correia Guys, screen cap this.

 

Patrick Freivald We’re not asking for your opinion of the piece. We’re asking for evidence that Ms. Weisskopf said what you say she said.

 

John Van Stry Damien, opinions are not facts. You need to apologize to Toni for what you wrote, and need to put in a retraction. If you want people to take you seriously, you must admit when you’re wrong. Otherwise you’re just another hack and a liar.

 

Damien Walter No, toni’s essay as a whole is a diatribe – IE one sided and biased. Every single sentence singles out those she politically disagrees with as the enemy, and her message is that for “peace” to come back to the genre they need get bak in line with the genres conservative values.

 

Zachary Hill As a hack historian, I know that you have to always cite your sources. Source for Damien’s accusation: Damien’s butt, Facebook, 2014.

 

Tom Walls Oh. Sorry. Weasels aren’t a “genre”. Or something

 

Dan Paddock Damien: please define right wing and present the right wing elements of Eric Flint’s personal politics.

 

Michael McInnis Larry cowards and liars never admit they are wrong, they simply change the subject, and try to marginalize their detractors.

 

Zachary Hill Damien, you’re saying what you think she said, but you have yet to cite any quotes.

 

Colin Collins “You haven’t answered my question at all Larry. You want to assert that science fiction is a genre. And yet you can’t even separate it from Fantasy.”

It’s alright, I can’t separate your “journalism” from fantasy either.

 

Rob Fabian “Every single sentence”? Really? So, if, just by chance, I COULD cite a single sentence that does not, then you’d admit to lying and retract? Didn’t think so.

 

Damien Walter Now let’s get back to genre Larry. You’re asserting that science fiction is a genre, but you can’t define it.

 

Larry Correia So Damien just said – ” I read Toni’s essay when it was published, and dozens of responses to it, and re-read in writing that piece. My opinion of it was exactly as stated in my column.” 

So you just admitted that she didn’t say that. You fabricated it. You put words in her mouth. There was nothing about pandering to right wingers.

So in your newspaper column you knowingly put fake words into the mouth of another person, thereby harming their business. 

Splendid. 

 

Robert Gants Damien, we know Toni, we know what she wrote, and we know that you are an ignorant little person with an inflated view of your own importance in the universe!

 

Zachary Hill He defined it. Several times. Because you refuse to accept those definitions for reasons, doesn’t mean he hasn’t defined it. Not let’s get back to you being a dirt bag liar.

 

Tom Walls Damien,,,, Argumentum ad anus extractus,, or Argumentum ad feces fabricatum ?

 

Mike Phillips Damien, answer the question. I actually read her speech. It sounded more like a praising of diverse ideological. You know, because the battles that wage between

 

Damien Walter Still no definition of genre. If you want to hold science fiction as a genre Larry, you need to have a definition. How about literature, is that a genre?

 

Colin Collins Damien, define “thriller” as a genre. Is something still a “thriller” if it has a mystery?

 

Damien Walter The novel? Poetry? Theatre? Are those genres?

 

Sean Hraba As for your “militarism after 9/11” remark Damien Walter, FUCK YOU, as a native New Yorker I find that remark offensive.

 

Zachary Hill He’s defined it twice already. Now give a quote and cite your evidence.

 

Rob Fabian Wow, Damien here is a perfect example of what Ronald Reagan was talking about so many years ago:

 

Ross K Wolfe Hey, Damien, define: “Liar” and “Libeler”, and explain how you are neither.

 

Tom Walls Somebody define “asshat”….

 

Larry Correia At no point did you specify in your column that it was your opinion. You fabricated something and put it out as if it was fact. You did not clarify in any way that was your opinion of Toni’s words, you portrayed it, to your audience, as if that was something which she had actually said, knowing full well that it was a lie. 

I can’t believe you were dumb enough to admit that in public. Screen capped. 

Now when Toni gets back from DragonCon we’ll have to see if she wants to sue you for libel or not. Be glad that it is her and not me, because she is far kinder.

 

Thomas Mandell Damien Walter quit with the semantics, admit you are a liar & libelist hack.

 

Keith Glass Oh, PLEASE, Damien, DO come to Libe
rtycon. It will be an utter hoot. For us. . . .

 

Joseph Capdepon II Ah, because Damien doesn’t have a leg to stand on, he is going to quibble over what is a genre and what is not.

 

Tom Walls Game, Set . Match,..

 

Damien Walter There’s a long history of debate about defining science fiction. One of the long established arguments in that debate is that genre definitions don’t fit SF. So it’s hardly a new opinion.

 

Nicole Baston Larry , you may have to define libel for Damien he doesn’t seem to understand words.

 

Zachary Hill There’s a long history of people making up lies about other people to make themselves look good. Its hardly knew to people with low self esteem.

 

Truman Jensen I’m pretty sure libel laws are easier to win in the uk. This should be fun.

 

Colin Collins So, Larry says that the entire thrust of your article is based on lies and you get hung up over whether genre means genre or literary form?

 

Robert Sestito Wow dude is completely bat shit crazy. This is insane if Larry had a interview with Obama and completely added a information to that interview he would be liable. It’s kinda cut and dry.

 

Sam Cook I’m surprised that Damien Walter actually had the courage to come over to Larry Correia‘s page.

 

Damien Walter All newspaper columns are opinion Larry. That’s the distinction between a columnist and a reporter. I’m entirely happy with the piece, and of course you’re welcome to proceed however you wish.

 

Larry Correia Hey, Damien, while I’ve got you here, any chance you can explain how your quotes you misattributed to me were based upon your feelings as opposed to things I actually said? 

 

Keith Glass Love the bit where he tweeted that Larry would sacrifice his first-born child to the gods to destroy Damien.

I think the reality is the sacrifice of an ingrown nose-hair down the porcelain altar would be sufficient. . . .

 

Nora MacFie Still reading but: “And for the record, I don’t know or care what Damien’s orientation is, though I’m willing to bet when the act is over there is a lot of weeping involved. ” Burn. The burn is hotter than the sun. Back to reading.

 

Sam Cook We know that you’re happy with it. It’s not true, though.

 

Dan Paddock That’s because your a libelous loon with no moral compass.

 

Larry Correia Since you are hung up on definitions, 
libel
[lahy-buh l] Spell Syllables
Examples Word Origin
noun
1.
Law.
defamation by written or printed words, pictures, or in any form other than by spoken words or gestures.
the act or crime of publishing it.
a formal written declaration or statement, as one containing the allegations of a plaintiff or the grounds of a charge.
2.
anything that is defamatory or that maliciously or damagingly misrepresents.
verb (used with object), libeled, libeling or (especially British) libelled, libelling.
3.
to publish a libel against.
4.
to misrepresent damagingly.
5.
to institute suit against by a libel, as in an admiralty court.

 But we’ll have to see how that opinion of yours about how everything in a newspaper is just opinion shakes out.

 

Steve Weinberg I can’t wait to see how his “column” (which is all “opinion” because facts are columns”) spins this thrashing he’s receiving. I wonder if it’ll be recognizable?

 

Steve Lewis Damien’s genre question is the attempt of a no-nothing to sound intelligent.

Nothing more. 

Could you make the point that Star Wars is, in many ways, a fantasy story that incorporates a science fiction image system, but that doesn’t negate the science fiction label. The Lensman series that Damien cites is classic science fiction and incorporates many of the same elements that Star Wars does. 

Also, Damien, yes, the novel is a genre. 

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/421071/novel

novel (literature)

www.britannica.com

An invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that…See More

 

Damien Walter Yes, exactly, the novel is a genre, that’s why I asked. Is literature a genre?

 

James Schardt Damien, I hope you aren’t shooting for a government grant for your dancing ability. Your ability to tap dance around a question you are afraid of asking is seriously lacking.

 

Dillis Freeman Larry, I know some excellent Queen’s Counsel and solicitors if you would like a referral. They would have fun with this.

 

Ivan Wolfe As I tell my writing students, Damien, opinion does not mean you can lie or ignore facts. Trying to hide under the “opinion” label to cover irresponsible claims and sloppy writing would get someone a failing grade in my class.

 

Colin Collins Damien, even if you do believe Toni’s article to mean what you say, it only proves that you have a complete lack of reading comprehension or are a hack.

 

Thomas Mandell Sam Cook; The only reason Herr Walter showed up was to get ideas and fodder for his next piece of regurgitate.

 

Joseph Capdepon II James Schardt, well, he did get a grant from the British government to “write” a novel…

 

Ray Carter Larry Correia hire a nice (at least to you, to Damien, not so much) attorney in the Land Where Great Br
itain Used to Be – this begins to sound like a Popehat worthy legal adventure, complete with cheddar popcorn…

 

Larry Correia Dillis, that would be wonderful. I leave it entirely up to Toni’s mercy. 

 

Joseph Capdepon II Damien never explained either how Eric Flint is a part of that conservative whatever he claims that Baen and Toni favor.

 

Rob Fabian Not courage, just self-promotion. By picking a fight with the eeeevil orchestrator of the Sad Puppies campaign, he makes himself the darling of the SJW brigade. Next year, he walks off with a preemptive Hugo for the novel he still hasn’t actually written…

 

Mark Wasko · Tom, it all makes sense now. Someone at his company told Damien he was an asshat, but he thought they said asset so he’s been doubling down on the derp ever since.

 

Sam Cook Do you really think he’ll finish it by then?

 

Rob Fabian Of course not. He’ll win it for “standing up to Larry Correia” while everyone babbles about the genius of the work he’s never actually finished.

 

Damien Walter Ok Larry, we’ve established you’re suing me now let’s get back to your assertion that science fiction is a genre. Define the genre, what is SF and what isn’t?

 

Joshua DeBoe “the novel is a genre” – do go on, please.

 

Rob Fabian It’s not like THAT has never happened before with a prestigious award…

 

Alan Kuhn Damn…….that boy certainly has sand….in his Vag that is…

 

Damien Walter Secondary question, is literature a genre?

 

Patrick Freivald I love how Damien seems to believe that being a “columnist” instead of a “reporter” means that he can make shit up without consequence and it’s all okay.

Apparently that “ethics in journalism” course didn’t take.

 

Sam Cook The novel is a genre of literature the way that painting is a genre of visual art.

 

Dan Paddock And the distortion continues…

 

Dan O Mac I’ve heard stuff like this before. It’s usually from a child that finds him/herself in a loop of lying and misdirection while trying to figure out an escape from their parents right before they learn how “the truth can set you free.”

 

Rob Fabian You know, I’m not entirely sure Damien passes the Turing test…

 

James Schardt Larry, unfortunately Toni 1) is far to nice to do something like that 2) probably doesn’t care enough about Damien to do anything if she weren’t.

 

Damien Walter Also, original question, Libertycon. Sounds great, when is it?

 

Chris Wilcoxson · 3 mutual friends

Damien, that you tweeted this proves you know absolutely nothing about Sci-fi.https://twitter.com/damiengwalter/status/506419035844526080

Damien Walter on Twitter: Emotionally complex sci-fi. Does such a thing exist?

twitter.com

@damiengwalter @InformationHead Le Guin often focuses on a nuanced depiction of women’s lived experience which not all readers may notice.

 

Dillis Freeman Larry, have Toni contact me at her convenience. Would she like the head of the News of the World investigation team?  He’s expensive but loser pays in the English system. 

 

Joseph Capdepon II Damien is in a loop! Someone reset him!

 

Larry Correia Dillis, kick it over. I’m going to try and talk her into it on principle.

 

Colin Collins Just because one group of critical theorists have redefined the popular term “genre” to mean essentially literary form does not mean that in popular usage we have to agree. That definition may be useful for those esoteric articles that will remain unread by almost all writers and readers of popular fiction, but it is useless for anyone who lives in the real world.

 

Graham Bradley For Damien: Google is hard, so I did this on your behalf. The definition of “genre”:

a category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter.

SF has similarities in form, style, and subject matter. It’s fiction that deals with science as an overt element of the construct. You’ll find subgenres under the umbrellas of hard SF and soft SF (where lots of the fun stuff comes in), but your straw-man assertion that SF is somehow not a genre does not hold water.

Furthermore your assertion that all newspaper columns are opinion and therefore your libel of Toni does not count as actual libel would undermine the worth of anything you write for a newspaper anyway.

(Not that you hadn’t already done that yourself.)

 

James Schardt Damien, it’s June 26-28 in Chattanooga, Tennessee

 

Joseph Capdepon II Really, genre labels matter for places that sell books, something Damien will never have to worry about.

 

Nicole Baston Wait- is he crowd sourcing Larry and his fans for their grasp of Google because he can’t be bothered to look up his own definitions?

 

Keith Glass Larry Correia: how about a MHN Kickstarter to fund the legal action ?

 

Nora MacFie Excellent fisk, as usual, Larry

 

Dan O Mac ^BOOM

 

Colin Collins Be aware Graham Bradley, that Damien has made it obvious that he doesn’t know much about science fiction forms, styles, and subject matter.

 

Richard D. Cartwright I think this is the time when the judge would be telling Damien to answer the question or risk contempt of court.

 

Graham Bradley Colin Collins, I’m starting to wonder whether he knows much about the meaning of words in general.

 

Keith Glass Richard D. Cartwright: he’s already gotten OUR contempt. . .

 

Dillis Freeman Larry, it’ll be a bit but I’ll get you contacts. I’ve actually thought of the perfect team. There have been 317 female QCs since the system was formalized. I know two and have been waiting to see them have some fun.

 

Mark Olivares ·Is it a genre? Is it not? For Damien, reality flows in and out of fashion like the solar winds. 

 

Patrick Freivald The judge would be telling Damien to answer the question, and his lawyer would be telling him to shut the hell up! Fun to watch, though.

 

Damien Walter oh well. Larry’s opinions on genre have dried up. Good evening people, until next time.

 

Thomas Mandell Welll he’s been at it for four years

 

Graham Bradley Let me see if I understand this…Damien learned everything he knows about solar wind from, I dunno, probably fiction…science-fiction…which isn’t a genre because…reasons, I guess…damn I’d better write this down. Can the UK government give me a grant?

 

Richard D. Cartwright Nicole, I am ok with educating Damien. Of course I weep for how far the British educational system has apparently fallen.

 

Mark Olivares · 33 mutual friends

Damien’s going back to his fifteen followers and going to complain that we were mean to him, isn’t he?

 

Joseph Capdepon II And we see the Damien as he flees with his tail between his legs. Later, he will write a column where he misrepresents and lies about what happened.

 

Mark Olivares ·The solar winds blow, like Damien’s writing.

 

Mark Olivares ·I have Always been a proud member of the Libertarian-Conservative-Mean Poopyhead conspiracy to undermine Sci-Fi.

 

Steve Lewis Damien, you seem to have a problem understanding classification systems. Labeling science fiction a genre is a bit nebulous, but the same can be said of fantasy. Most fantasy contains magic or paranormal elements, but not all. Oftentimes, the only element needed to define something as fantasy is a secondary world. 

Also, in any classification system, the higher you travel up the hierarchy the less defined things become. The broader the category, the less defined. The things you’re fixating on are first year English major minutia. You sound like a freshman on winter break trying to impress his family with all he’s learned.

 

Robb Kelley This is great.

 

Larry Correia My opinion on genre is who gives a fuck? I don’t care what genre any given book of mine is until it shows up in some on Amazon. Damien is picking at a mote in his eye as I brained him over the skull with a beam. 

But getting back to the fun part, this is the US legal definition of libel:

“Libel occurs when a false and defamatory statement is published which tends to harm a person’s reputation or expose him or her to public hatred, contempt or ridicule. It is important to remember that defamation can be in many forms, including articles, headlines, advertising, letters to the editor, sports columns, drawings, opinions, outlines, and photographs.” 

Hell, attempting to damage reputations seems to be Damien’s job description. 

So yes,opinion still counts if it is false and defamatory. Damien admits it is false, and it is obviously defamatory. This is even cooler since he’s already demonstrated a pattern of lying and fabricating quotes for authors from this publishing house.

 

Joseph Capdepon II Genre labels only matter to those who have books for sale. Something that Damien will probably never have to worry about.

 

Nora MacFie Classic deflection on DW’s part throughout this thread. It’s a tactic of the left. He’s all hung up on the genre thing and spins even when he’s proven wrong there. Doesn’t want to talk about the actual topic which is that he lied about what TW said in her post. I’ve screen capped it to use as an example of the tactic. As I say, it’s classic.

 

 

Steve Binder Wow. Just wow! Can’t believe there are really people in the world like DW.

 

Michael Rizzo · 4 mutual friends

I commented a couple of times on the guardian piece and included the original of Toni’s “diatribe” something Damian should have done as a responsible literary figure who knows the definition of genre. It was interesting to have casual observers have a WTF moment in regards to his reading comprehension after reading it. So long and thanks for all the fisk!

 

Retiqlum RetiQlum Um let’s see:

The novel, like poetry, is a form of the art known as literature.

Genre is “a category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter.”

Also, a columnist doesn’t write opinion pieces. A column, as opposed to an editorial, is supposed to be factual. Even then an editorial is supposed to use facts to base the opinion on. Creating an opinion based on supposition would be called a work of fiction.

 

Sean McCune Holy Crap! That was…’gnome getting punted by Franks’ type of awesome.

 

Graham Bradley Can we get some NSFW tags on this hardcore pwnography?

 

Brian Gal
loway
 Damian’s claim that SF isn’t a genre is the first time I’ve ever heard that assertion, and I’ve been reading SF for 30+ years. Is there really a school of thought that believes that? Or is he just making that up, too?

 

Eric James Stone Wikipedia says science fiction is a genre:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fiction

Science fiction – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginative content such as f…See More

 

Thomas Mandell Brian Galloway; probably made up, or just argued among SJW’s

 

Eric James Stone Encyclopedia Britannica says science fiction is a genre: ” The term science fiction was popularized, if not invented, in the 1920s by one of the genre’s principal advocates, the American publisher Hugo Gernsback.”http://www.britannica.com/…/topic/528857/science-fiction

science fiction (literature and performance)

www.britannica.com

A form of fiction that deals principally with the impact of actual or imagined s…See More

 

Steven Smith Damien, language evolves. A few years ago, a meme was a transmissible unit of cultural information. Now it also means a picture with a clever caption. Your definition of genre is what I mean when I say medium.

 

Todd Wilkinson <set marker>……… and a full set of screen caps of the message thread up to this point. Message me if you want them Larry.

 

Sanford Begley I am going to run counter to those who hope Damien comes to Libertycon. While I would possibly enjoy watchjing him be made fun of I fear for the freedom of some attendees. Someone would wind up drowning him in a crapper and go to jail for it. He certainly isn’t worth it

 

Cameron McCurry I see that Damien is a star pupil of “Argument via attrition.” The problem is that around here, we don’t get tired.

 

Larry Correia  So Damien says science fiction isn’t a genre. The Encyclopedia Britannica, the entire publishing industry, and all of the world’s book retailers say that it is. Okay, glad we got that cleared up. 

But while Damien was straining at a gnat, he swallowed a camel. Even if Toni is too nice to sue, he just demonstrated to the world he is a liar, and had zero qualms about smearing someone’s character based upon his feelings rather than any objective facts. 

Now some people in the media can do that sort of thing and still have jobs, only those people are talented in a way that makes up for it. Damien has no talents. 

You know, I thought Damien was dumb. I mean really, he’s a terrible, clumsy, columnist, his points aren’t strongly made or persuasive, when they’re even rational enough to be considered a point that is, but I figured he was just run of the mill dumb. Not stupid enough to admit to criminal behavior on Facebook dumb. I was only joking about him being the Guardian’s Village Idiot. Little did I realize that I’d underestimated him.

James L Young ·Given that Baen does business in Great Britain, is there any reason Toni can’t sue under the UK’s much easier libel laws? I mean, has anyone thought about contacting a solicitor regarding this article? Not to throw a bucket of chum into an already ac…See More

 

Larry Correia Just sent to me by an English professor: “1. Darko Suvin. 1972. Science fiction is “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.”” 

And Damien is still a liar. 

 

Brett Bowen So let me see if I follow.

Damien wants a definition of Sci-Fi.
Larry provides one from google as well as a definition of genre.

Then Damien wants to know what’s the scientific knowledge in Star-Wars.
Some various readers discuss futuristic scientific innivations…

Damien then contends that Larry has presented no definitions of either “genre” or “sci-fi,” and begins all over again.

Larry, et. al. attempt to move on, Damien runs away.

Cool. I think I’m all caught up now.

So, Larry Correia, allow me to express my disbelief that people like Damien actually exist. Most of the libprogs I talk to are dense, and I had just chalked this up to hyperbole. Lo and behold, Damien pops up to shows us whay it’s like to occupy the shallow end of the intellect pool.

Lin Wicklund You know, Damien has 15 whole followers!

 

Mark Olivares · Surprising, isn’t it, Lin? Usually, train wrecks gather more morbid curiosity…

 

Larry Correia From a Marxist literary scholar: . SF is distinguished by the narrative dominance of a fictional novelty (novum, innovation) validated both by being continuous with a body of already existing cognitions and by being a “mental experiment” based on cognitive logic. From Metamorphoses In Science Fiction.

Heh. Even Marxists think that scifi is a genre. 

Rod Linkous Damien, for a “college educated man” you’re a moron. Literature is the entire field of written works. It is then broken down into different genre. A novel is nothing more than a work of a certain (arbitrary) length. Frankenstein is literature, it’s also borderline horror/science fiction (GENRE). A Tale of Two Cities is literature; it is also IN THE GENRE of historical fiction. Get the idea you mouth breathing, panty wearing, pathetic excuse for a human
being? As some great person once said, ignorance can be cured, stupidity is forever.

 

Steve Barish

 Again, I’m sorry I missed this. Seems like a great occasion for somebody (Damien) to get sued, but even if not I would think his editor and publishing team would like to know about his utter lack of journalistic ethics. Making Stuff Up is only slightly less egregious than Copying Others’ Work…(I felt the need to use expanded phrasing since Damien’s illustrious career evidently didn’t expose him to concepts more sophisticated than a six-year old’s homework). 

I wonder how The Guardian would react if it got a flood of email and letters from people who just watched Damien admit to making up statements? This is a second offense that we know of already…seems like his bosses would want to know.

 

Larry Correia

 Brett Bowen basically correct, but don’t forget the part where Damien admitted to being a liar. 

What you just saw was a bunch of deconstructionist nonsense and intellectual straw grasping over a quibble to avoid the actual topic of Damien Walter being a liar.

##

 

 

It goes on for a bunch more posts, mostly with people hoping that Toni sues the Guardian, but you get the idea. Toni probably won’t sue because she is nicer than I am, and Damien is a bug to her. Me personally, I must like stepping on bugs.

 

Damien left after that last post. I was told afterwards that he’d taken to Twitter, where he was telling his followers about how he’d won a debate with me. Yikes… I’ll just leave this here for people to make their own call about that.

 

The lesson to be taken from this exchange is this:

  1. As I asserted yesterday, Damien Walter is a liar.
  2. When the liar was dumb enough to place himself in a position to be called on his lies, he resorted to obfuscation and deconstructionist nonsense to divert the issue away from his lies.
  3. When a liar does that, don’t let them change the channel. Don’t play their semantic games. Hit them in the head with a brick. Backed into a corner, Damien fucked up and committed the ultimate pseudo-intellectual sin of telling the truth.

 

When his professional abilities and fundamental integrity were called into question, Damien tried to turn weasel by repeating inane diversionary questions instead. A decent human being would defend their honor. A worm tongue would try to play games. Spending much time on his stupid diversions during the exchange would have played into his hands. I prefer the brick to the face method.

 

But now that ship done sailed, let’s go through why Damien is extra stupid.

 

Science fiction is a genre. As can be seen by the above definitions pretty much everybody agrees that it is. Dictionaries, professors, publishers, book sellers, and authors consider science fiction a genre. While searching I found it harder to find a definition of science fiction anywhere that didn’t use the word genre. I started out by posting the definition of genre, because it answered his question.

 

I’ve got some English professors who are fans. Since they work in academia in left wing dominated universities I can’t imagine why they don’t want to come out of the closet as Larry Correia fans! They were PMing me definitions the whole time (yes, shockingly enough I actually don’t have a copy of Darko Suvin’s seminal treatise on literature on hand).They were laughing at Damien during this too because they were used to his form of pathetic word games, as that tactic was common in academia.  Here are some quotes from the PMs to shed some light on Damien’s sad little brain.

 

What D is trying trying to do is too pull you into the swamp that the deconstructionists love. They try to get their opponents to concede to their claim that all language is inherently indefinite. Once they get that, they can disrupt any definition or absolute meaning. The effective riposte is the one based on common sense, not theory. In short, if there was no limit to the indefinitude human communication would not be possible. So the inability to come up with exacting definitions is only a limiting theory, not a destruction of definitions, sub definitions and nuances. That language is flexible does not mean that it lacks sufficient precision for us to be able to distinguish between closely related types of similar things. It’s a despicable academic parlor trick.

 

And

 

The sad additional truth: that too many critics become slavish devotees of some perspectives to the point where they retain less common sense than a dim-witted cow. Damien and a lot of acadwmics fit that bill.

 

So in the thread we established through over half a dozen widely accepted places that science fiction is in fact a genre. Then the bit about Star Wars and how it fits the definitions of using extrapolative tropes… I’ve got no idea where that comes from, but let’s see… Besides aliens, alien planets, space ships, space stations, energy weapons, artificial moons, faster than light travel, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, cyborg limbs, robots, energy shields, stasis, walking battle mechs, holograms, escape pods, cloning, flying cars, jet packs, and Ewoks, not much.

 

And best of all, somebody found a tweet from 2013 where Damien himself talked about how science fiction is a genre. So he’s not only stupid, he’s forgetful. It turns out he truly is like the freshman who came home from college, trying to wow the grownups with all his exciting new knowledge, as if the fact he gleaned some bold new literary theory somehow excuses the fact that he’s a liar.

 

The important thing is that we have established, without question, that Damien Walter is a liar. He lied about Toni in his last column, and he has lied about me twice. He isn’t just a liar, he is an admitted liar, and an unapologetic one at that. He is someone who has proven he is willing to defame in order to further an agenda. Whenever Damien’s name pops up in any conversation, he needs to be branded with the word. He needs to wear it like a scarlet letter. Well, he’s already got an L on his forehead but I’m pretty sure that’s for Loser, but we need to make sure that other one sticks.

 

Damien Walter is a liar.

 

 

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Fisking the Guardian's Village Idiot Again

212 thoughts on “The Guardian’s Village Idiot Admits to Libel”

  1. UK libel laws are brutal (less so after last year’s reforms). The “burden of proof” in English defamation law falls upon the defendant. The accuser only has to prove the statements were made and are defamatory.

    1. Yeah – I kept reading, hoping someone would ask him (DW) to check that back through the Grauniad’s legal department.

  2. This is reminiscent of one of the old Loony Tunes cartoons wherein Wile E. Coyote is trying to bait the Roadrunner into one of his traps; Mr. Walter was obviously trying to get Larry to step on the red X he’d painted in the ground, but fell off the cliff while trying to maneuver him into place…

  3. As I said on that thread, Damien is entitled to his own opinions. He’s not entitled to his own facts, nor is he entitled to present his opinions as facts. At best, he presented opinions as facts, which is a gross misrepresentation of the facts.

    The reality is, Damien is unable to actually debate with anyone. Try and be polite, and he’ll block you if you don’t agree with him. Someone like Larry, someone he doesn’t think he can afford to completely ignore, and he’ll deflect left and right.

    I’m still trying to figure out how anyone can take that piece by Toni and turn it into a diatribe about how non-right wing fans should shut up. Especially since she explicitly states that for a conversation to happen, both sides must be willing to listen.

    Maybe it’s just me, but it sounded like a warning to both sides there. Damien probably missed that.

    Along with everything else.

    1. Damien read John Scalzi’s interpretation of Toni’s article, and quoted from there. So the basic lack of understanding starts with Scalzi.

      1. And I still can’t comprehend it. At all.

        Of course, I was also the only one defending Toni at a writing forum shortly after that came out.

        One I no longer spend much time at.

          1. Tempting.

            But that would require me to actually go back. Hell, I learned more about writing from a handful of writers I enjoy reading (such as yourself) than I ever did there.

            Hell, I’m apparently such a good writer, Clamps thinks I’m worse than you, Sarah Hoyt, and Tom Kratman. 😀

      2. “Clamps”is a 47 yr. old kid who lives on Blueberry Lane in the haunted New England town of Arkham. He constantly trolls sites for reasons no one knows and often complains about people from the future following him and fish-people doing his laundry while he sleeps. He claims he can breathe underwater and once lived behind a star, but that is doubtful at best.

      3. Clamp (Andrew Marston), a much worse writer of Eye of Aragon (and that was written by a 15 year old) who enjoys trolling Internet under myriad of handles. He also enjoys stalking Asian female writers on Internet (some have taken out restraining order against him).

        1. I think he’s got a google alert set up for whenever my name shows up anywhere, because if I’m mentioned on some blog he will show up in the comments to talk about how I’m not a real writer. That’s not creepy or weird at all!

      4. Yes, the willful misinterpretation of Toni’s post started with Scalzi, and now the lie’s been repeated so many times it’s become “the truth”. Which is why it’s important not to let them get away with it.

      5. I should have read the above posts first before bloviating as I did below — yes, this is a much simpler explanation: Walter believes Scalzi’s interpretation of Toni’s words over Toni’s. Which is unsurprising, coming from a school of literary criticism that says the last person you should trust about the meaning of any text is the author of that text.

      6. Larry, that assumes he hasn’t already been banned from said blog. If not, he simply finds someone who is part of the discussion on the blog he’s banned from and tries to relocate it to one he hasn’t been.

        FWIW, we need to launch a crowdsourcing campaign for Brad. He’s too good a writer to have to put up with such a bad troll. We need to help him upgrade his trolls.

        And really, Clamps is part of the crowd that thinks it far more important to craft a beautiful sentence than it is to craft a compelling story. Unfortunately for him, he fails at both.

        Plus, he has a love affair with commas. I think someone counted something like 26 in one sentence. I don’t recall with perfect clarity the full number, but it was insane for a single sentence that wasn’t even listing things.

        Oh, and Hi Clamps. After all, he’s reading this right now, I’m sure.

      7. @dyingearth – Several women were able to take out restraining orders against him? That works on Internet venues now? I wonder if it’s possible under Aussie law. I may have to seriously investigate this.

        @ TL I think it was 26 or 27 commas – you’re close though. I’d have to look up the video again sometime.

      8. Writing a post on my old blog celebrating Larry and John C. Wright’s first exchange here was what first acquainted me with Clamps. Larry must be right about the Google alert, because someone called “Yama” showed up and said that I may as well invite Vox Day to join in. Being then naïve to the controversy surrounding Vox, I did, and he graciously obliged.

        My first indication of what was going on came when Yama started hurling insults at Vox, whose response left me cleansing my site of Yama’s scattered viscera for days (I needed a toothbrush to get between the floor tiles, and the blood never fully came out).

        Not until much later did I learn that Yama was Clamps, and that his initial comment was a sarcastic attempt to dissuade me from associating with Larry, Mr. Wright, and Vox. I can confidently report that the attempt backfired. I was already hooked on COUNT TO ESCHATON, and since Clamps’ visit, I’ve bought works by both Vox and Larry and enjoyed both enough to continue giving them my custom in the future.

        1. “SOME boarding families are BETTER than others, Potter.”
          How DARE you not fall for Malfoy’s mind trick!

      9. @Combat Missionary –

        So Autocorrect, by correcting “wizarding” to “boarding”, proves that it has read the Harry Potter books, and has correctly grasped that they’re based on the old British boarding-school genre. Wow, that’s impressive! 🙂

  4. You know, he argues like a drunk. Maybe he was deep in his cups when he came to your facebook page?
    His desire to keep changing the subject when proven to be lying, and his inability to admit he lied and apologize for it seem like pretty classical behavior for a drunk.

    1. He’s following the 3 rules of arguing a case: If the law is on your side, pound on the law. If the fact is on your side, pound on the fact. If neither the fact nor the law are on your side, pound on the table. Damien is pounding on the table, all the while trying to sound sophisticated.

  5. Genre: A set of tropes that define a common spectrum of stories. Some stories may use tropes from more than one genre, and be defined as cross-genre. An example would be a murder mystery within a science fiction setting* or a police procedural in a fantasy setting**.

    Medium: The method by which a story is told. Comics are a medium. Books and movies are separate mediums. Any given genre may be told via any given medium. For example, a summation of Damian Walter’s failures as a writer, columnist, and a human being can be delivered through epic verse, raunchy limericks, or a half-brick in a sock.

    *Didn’t Asimov write a crapton of those?
    **Like some books by Terry Pratchett. Who masterfully commands the English language*** in a way that Damian Walter can never even aspire to.
    ***And footnotes.

    1. The fact that he was trying to zing me on that was kind of weird, since I’m the dude with the 1930s alternative-history/epic fantasy/noir-pulp/action/sci-fi series. Every con I go to that has a panel about “cross-genre” they put me on it.

      1. Fact is, Damien and people like him wants to rewrite reality. They want to redefine everything to represent their view of what reality should be because what is real now is just too cruel to live in. They want a world where you use victimhood as a shield and self-righteous indignation as a sword. And they are loud and shrill and incessant about it.

        You answered the genre question in your original post. There is no debate here. No argument. Genres are already well defined. He tried to bully you into a corner by hampering on it and it backfired because you didn’t take the bait. And when you didn’t take the bait you took the wind from his sails. That is why he went onto Twitter and threw rocks from a distance.

  6. Social Justice Warriors are all about changing definitions of actual words in order to suit their own pseudo-reality.

    Apparently Damien’s personal bonnet-bee is authors who actually publish without government help. They cannot possibly be actual authors, so he needs to re-define their work as non-work ( gendre-less ), because they are big meanie non-social-justice-warriors.

    The best way to deal with them is to refute their attempt to re-define an actual word into some kind of thoughtcrime, and then beat them senseless for accusing you of said crime after they re-defined it to include you, because you are a big meanie that they don’t like.

  7. In Walter’s cult of intersectionalism that falsely passes itself off Left-Wing, one’s “political” opponents are failures based on their race and their sex by default.

    That is why Walter and his cult argue so strenuously that everything is politics.

    That way, me being born white, heterosexual and male when not acknowledging the reality of that advantage also makes me “Right-Wing” by default while simultaneously absolving the PC of charges of bigotry.

    That’s how intersectionalists sell racist and sexist bigotry and their own narcissistic supremacy as “politics.” And they got plenty of doofy allies they’ve suckered into feeling guilt and carrying their water.

    Yeah, it’s just politics. That’s how Walter can enroll me in a racial cult by writing about the “overwhelmingly white, male perspective that dominated the genre,” all but saying white male authors and readers are racial and sexual supremacists on some level, and guilty of some immoral social malfeasance independent of what they actually did or think. All that is determined solely by skin and sex.

    Someone please tell me how stipulating Jewish, black, white and Arab perspectives locked into their ethnicity is not racism? Why not just say white male SFF authors eat fried chicken and watermelons?

    Group demonization theories are very subtle and cleverly thought out. Keep in mind intersectionalism has been writing and developing these theories for 25 years as demonstrably intersectional and another 25 as the close relation of early radical feminism. These demonization theories, like white male privilege, are no accident. It is no accident they always find the straight white male wanting when characterized as a group – 100% of the time.

    This cult very coyly opens up a world of racial profiling, but only for one side. That’s why mentioning a “lady” editor is cause for Foz Meadows declaring “Objectified women are a male fantasy” while cursing out Malzbert and Resnick as “old white guys” and “bitter old sexist, racist morons” in an Orwellian double-standard only a moron could write. The truth is it’s a gay, women’s and non-white intersectionalist fantasy that “objectified” white men are sexists and racists. Resnick and Malzberg never defamed gays, women and non-whites; Meadows, Walter and their cult does that.

    Intersectionalism is easily seen as much for what it discusses as for what it NEVER discusses, and that is in applying its so-called “principles” of diversity and blah, blah, blah to the non-West, non-whites, gays and women. They too are often characterized as a group in other ways – 100% positive – never negative. Judge your Las Vegas odds on that bit of farcical bullshit and tell me what you come up with.

    What need does Walter have for quotes? He has skin and sex – the equivalent in intersectionalspeak – and always damning. Case closed.

    1. Why not just say white male SFF authors eat fried chicken and watermelons?

      But… I do like fried chicken and watermelon. 🙁

      (seriously, I NEVER heard of that as anything race related until well into my twenties – I thought maybe it was just a poor/south thing since my family ate a lot of both when I growing up)

      1. Don’t like Watermelon. LOVE Fried Chicken. I prefer to cook it myself but dang doing more than 2-3 pieces takes a while with my fryer. If I were gonna fry on a more regular basis…I’d definitely need a bigger fryer. Of course my fryer is cast iron and also multitasks as a steamer and slow cooker.

      2. I love fried chicken but I never actually let anyone see me eating it lest I perpetuate a stereotype to go along with my rapeness and racism, which are already as burdensome as living the life of a vampire.

    2. your rapeness and racism? ROFLOLOLOL

      Hell Fail…You want to make heads explode? Tell them racism doesn’t exist. That the word is a misnomer. That what they call racism…is actually Tribalism. Which has been with man since our ancestors came down out the trees.

      As for the “rapeness” ‘hell lady, I ain’t touched you, have no intention of touching and would touch you with ron jeremy’s johnson!’

      The very soul of sensitivity and subtlety I am.

  8. That was …Wow. Just wow.

    Personally, having been a freshman English student at one point in my life, I think calling Damien a freshman college student is a little too insulting to the intelligent college-goers out there. His argument more reminds me of the stuff I would hear in high-school. His near-final response, less than that, which almost boiled down to a “I know you are but what am I” level of response, which jumps right down to pre-middle school levels.

    Then he takes to twitter to claim victory?

    The maturity level of the earth really has had it rough lately.

  9. Reminds me of this time I tried to avoid getting into a political debate on a query-letter-writing blog. People were getting their knickers in a twist because the author referred to abortion as “killing her baby”. They thought that might offend someone who’d had an abortion. (Never mind the fact that that’s pretty much the definition.) So I said the author shouldn’t worry too much about political correctness and rather do what she thinks is right for her story/query. A couple people tried to drag me into a political debate that they insisted wasn’t political at all by saying that “political correctness” is a term that doesn’t even exist anymore because back in the 70s everyone realized it just meant “not being an ass”. Okay, I’m paraphrasing, but that was the jist. In other words, liberals like to say they win debates by just refusing to admit the debate exists.

    BTW, I personally consider Star Wars to be space fantasy. My personal definition of sci-fi is a story that tries to explain the extraordinary things in a scientific (even pseudo-scientific) way. Something that has technobabble, basically. Fantasy would be something that doesn’t try to scientifically explain the impossible, extraordinary things that happen with science. The prequels actually did move more into sci-fi, with the midichlorians and all, but I really think the original trilogy was space fantasy. (The Force is really just magic, after all.) (Although regardless of this, Damien’s attempt to say that Star Wars isn’t sci-fi, therefore sci-fi is not a genre is just crazy troll logic.)

    1. The power of the Force is insignificant compared to the power of Dirty Kick.

      Or maybe I play too many smugglers on SWTOR.

      1. Haha. I have a smuggler, but only a lowbie, so I’m not very familiar with them. For some reason, I always end up making light-sided (or occasionally neutral) Imperials. (I have one pacifist Sith healer who’s a lot of fun.)

        1. Dirty Kick is lvl 4, IIRC. Of course, I’ve unlocked legacy dirty kick so now all of my alts can use that during a heroic moment.

  10. What D is trying trying to do is too pull you into the swamp that the deconstructionists love. They try to get their opponents to concede to their claim that all language is inherently indefinite. Once they get that, they can disrupt any definition or absolute meaning. The effective riposte is the one based on common sense, not theory. In short, if there was no limit to the indefinitude human communication would not be possible. So the inability to come up with exacting definitions is only a limiting theory, not a destruction of definitions, sub definitions and nuances. That language is flexible does not mean that it lacks sufficient precision for us to be able to distinguish between closely related types of similar things. It’s a despicable academic parlor trick.

    What’s even funnier is how you can use that against them. Let’s play Daimen’s game: Did you guys know he supports wide gun rights and objects mightily to women’s rights? Yeah, just the other day I read something where he explained that civilian men need access to military hardware because those are the only things powerful enough to get through women’s egos.

    See? And we already know how to defend if he takes offense.

    As seen on twitter, his opinion of Toni’s piece:
    https://twitter.com/damiengwalter/status/506537519714824192

    And you can follow this thread for major lulz.
    https://twitter.com/damiengwalter/status/506537519714824192

    1. “What should *we* do with *these* people.”

      Totally different, of course, from when *they* discuss what they’d like to do with us, I’m sure. 😉

      And believe me, since I started eavesdropping on their Twitter feeds, I’ve gotten an eyeful of what they really think and it ain’t pretty.

  11. Thinking about Mr. Walter’s responses, I can’t help but wonder if what’s happening here is a fundamental rupture in perception. The key statement seems to be the second bolded post: “Toni’s essay as a whole is a diatribe – i.e., one-sided and biased. Every single sentence singles out those she politically disagrees with as the enemy, and her message is that for ‘peace’ to come back to the genre they need [to] get back in line with the genre’s conservative values.”

    Now I’ve read the same essay Walter did and I can’t see this as a correct assessment either (to understate things greatly). But let’s assume, arguendo, that Mr. Walter is not in his own mind consciously lying, i.e. publicly stating something he privately knows or believes to be factually incorrect; that he genuinely believes Toni’s post was a one-sided attack calling for submission and silence on the part of non-conservatives, not reconciliation or re-engagement. The question that occurs to me is: Under what kind of perceptual filter does one have to be labouring in order to reach this drastic a misinterpretation of Toni’s words?

    Well, to riff on an old saying: “If you only ever see things from a nail’s point of view, you tend to assume anything moving quickly in your direction is a hammer.” Put simply, the only way I can see to “honestly” read Toni’s words as an attack is to start from the assumption that anything from a particular source, or type of source, is an attack by definition and to interpret every possible ambiguity in that light. Mr. Walter, in other words, is ironically demonstrating exactly the problem Toni herself complained about: a gap of mutual distrust so wide that engagement is not possible because honesty is discarded as a possibility even before starting. So it’s unsurprising that he would ignore condemnations as a liar from people he already believes to be too biased to grasp what looks like obvious truth to him; the fact that we can’t see the attack in Toni’s words only proves it’s there, because like the invisible cat, what would anyone expect us to see?

    This is hardly a tragedy from anybody’s perspective except perhaps mine, but I’m a wuss who hates conflict of any type. But perhaps, Ms. Weisskopf’s admirable calls for re-engagement aside, one has to recognize, like the Apostles, when it is time to shake the dust of certain towns from one’s boots.

    1. It’s not a gap of distrust but of a sort of language. Intersectionalists are identity freaks and literalists. Their moral ethos is not based on events but class, race and gender. Appearance is everything. On the other side are people who use principle. They look at events and individual behaviors, not group behaviors.

      It is in fact a rupture of perception, the same one Orwell warned us about by seeing with eyes closed and ears opened, not the other way ’round.

      Ironically that means the “racists” aren’t and the “anti-racists” are. That’s what makes the PC true Orwellians in an IngSoc sense. Plus they’re idiots.

    2. It is a lot simpler than that.

      DW is a traffic whore. When he needs to boost his numbers, he riles up easily (for values of the word ‘easily’) aroused people who have a large web following. Having provoked his target and their secondary audience, he then gets:

      1. To bask in the warm glow of the boosted traffic to his nook at the Guardian blogosphere.

      2. To enjoy successfully trolling the hell out of (in this case) a handful of authors that he already dislikes (as well as their fans).

      3. Reinforcement of his worldview.

      Pro tip clue – in order to ensure arousal sufficient for his purposes, he visits the lion’s den and pokes all the inhabitants with deliberately annoying BS – then retreats and proclaims victory.

      He isn’t trying to convince anyone here, or on LC’s FB of anything. He wants you as mad as possible, for as long as possible… and it is working, for now.

      If you want to punish an aspiring hack journo, you choke their supply of info and ignore him. If you have to respond, never reply to him – always reply to his boss.

      The policy of never (or rarely) censoring visitors plays into the DW tactic.

      All that said, sure he is a jackass… but he doesn’t care what I (you think) as long as he can rile everyone up.

      So chill, and ignore him.

  12. Can’t wait for the next column by Damien where he talks about how you threatened him and how brave he is to speak truth to white, racist power. By then I’ll have restocked my popcorn supply.

    1. I too can’t wait to read his gripping account of how he bravely bearded the Demon Larry in his own lair. I might wake the neighbors with my laughter.

  13. Damien reminds me of those people who keep poking a tiger through the bars of the cage, and then can’t understand why they’re suddenly missing an arm.

    1. Like the old recitation about The Lion and Albert.

      http://www.madmusic.com/song_details.aspx?SongID=11932

      Now Albert had heard about lions
      How they was ferocious and wild;
      To see Wallace lying so peaceful…
      Well, it didn’t seem right to the child.

      So, straightway, the brave little feller,
      Not showing a morsel of fear,
      Took his stick with the horse’s head handle
      And shoved it in Wallace’s ear.

      You could see that the lion didn’t like it,
      For giving a kind of a roll,
      He pulled Albert inside the cage with him
      And swallered the little lad whole!

  14. If we’re having a competition to come up with a scarlet title with which to brand Damien, I propose liebling, for the following reasons:

    1) If my Google-fu is correct, it’s a diminutive term one would use to affectionately address a child (actual German speakers, correct me if I’m wrong). While I’m not aware of any affection being directed toward Damien, his intelligence quotient clearly merits the usage.

    2) If its spelling is carried directly across to English, it sounds like the use of flashy adornment to cover up or misdirect attention from falsehoods (lie-bling). I would say that Damien’s pathetic attempt at a discussion of Star Wars meeting the criteria for Sci-Fi definitely counts as lie-bling.

    Also, for those of you wondering how Damien managed to reach 15 followers on Facebook, remember, if he was in YOUR family, YOU’D be following his movements too.

    Beyond that, I’m sorry I missed the fireworks!

  15. https://twitter.com/damiengwalter/status/506644582688256000

    Martin Petto adds the idiotic claim that “When Banks started writing, the political split in science fiction could be crudely described as leftwing British SF versus rightwing American SF. The new divide is something much closer to the traditional US culture war of Liberal versus Conservative but played out internationally. Correia writes for Baen Books, essentially the Tea Party of SF publishing; Torgersen’s stories both appeared in the decrepit magazine Analog, the GOP; Day – AKA Theodore Beale – is right out there in Freeper territory with his naked racism. Liberalism, on the other hand, is represented by online magazines such as Apex, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com, the latter of which received five nominations across the fiction categories.”

    I like how Petto uses the words “naked racism” as if he actually understood them, since his nice side are institutional racists by direct quotes and actions. The idea Apex and Strange Horizons represent anything but core intersectional identity doctrine is moronic.

    Baen = Tea Party = equal Right-Wing racism.

    Petto writes “I’m proud to be part of a culture that demands higher standards than the rest of society, that genuinely cares about being safe and inclusive…” like writing “Straight white males were side-lined and the focus remained on those receiving rather than giving the awards” and “only one white man won in an individual category.”

    Hey LA Review of Books and Petto: go fuck yourselves.

  16. I tend to see Star Wars as fantasy. It has the trappings of technology, but it is fantasy at heart. You could pretty much replace “this was your father’s light saber” with “this was your father’s sword”. The force was a mystical power, at least up to the moment that they wrote in the midichlorians (ugh).

    No matter, there is a reason why we generally include science fiction and fantasy together at most conventions. We don’t have separate Hugos for SF and Fantasy. The two are birds of a feather, and there is a lot of crossover.

    Have you ever shopped at a bookstore that tried to separate SF and Fantasy by the labels on the spine? It’s a mess. For a lot of authors, you have to search both stacks to be sure.

    1. I’d also add that I think Niven’s “The Magic Goes Away” probably has a better claim as SF than Star Wars does.

    2. “Have you ever shopped at a bookstore that tried to separate SF and Fantasy by the labels on the spine? It’s a mess. For a lot of authors, you have to search both stacks to be sure.”

      @ Khazlek – heck, you can find Ringo’s Ghost series in the SciFi section of B&N – not in the genre section where it belongs, which is fiction, adventure or even in the sex section next to the Kama Sutra.

  17. Hmmm . . . couple of random observations.

    1. As has already been said, Damien is entitled to his own opinions and I personally will up hold his right to express them (within the generally agreed rules of civilised discourse.) He is not, however, entitled to his own facts.

    2. Is it worth wasting time on him?

    3. Errr . . . I just have.

    Ooops.

  18. Toni idenfies two groups “the politically correct, self-appointed guardians of … everything” and determines that they are not us, and asks “So the question arises—why bother to engage these people at all? They are not of us. They do not share our values, they do not share our culture.”

    later she says “And yet, I can’t help but think that at some point, you have to fight or you will have lost the war”

    If you look at this through SJW glasses, those who aren’t in favor of the politically correct guardians of everything are political conservatives, and that fighting or we lose the war can be interpreted as a ” diatribe against any and all sci-fi that did not pander to this conservative agenda.”

    The glasses may distort like a funhouse mirror, but I’m inclined accept that bit as opinion, a silly one, but nevertheless an opinion.

    Furthermore, I’m a little averse to being happy at the prospect that it may be easier to sue Walter under the libel laws of Britain. Given what I’ve heard about British libel law, that doesn’t strike me as a point of pride.

    If, on the other hand, Walter made up defamatory statements from Larry, and actually put them in quotes, that strikes me as a better reason to seek legal action.

    1. If there is legally actionable offense – then retain counsel, get an opinion and bring action in the Guardian’s venue.

      Make certain that your counsel has done this before and has a winning record.

    2. https://monsterhunternation.com/2014/04/15/larry-f-correia-international-lord-of-hate/

      But Correia boils it down to a much simpler argument.However accurate a queer future might be, SF authors must continue to pander to the bigotry of conservative readers if they want to be “commercial”. – Of course, that wasn’t my argument. He imagined it the same way he imagined Toni’s conservative hate mongery. Then I had to put up with hate mail, insults, and trash talk from hundreds of morons.

      In this one he doesn’t name me, but maybe it is some other author that created a campaign exactly like Sad Puppies who wants to keep women and minorities out of scifi. The fact that I nominated women and minorities doesn’t seem to enter into his thick skull at any point.
      https://monsterhunternation.com/2014/06/02/fisking-the-guardians-village-idiot-part-1/

      And here is where he crowd sourced a witch hunt, after accusing me of racism, sexism, and homophobia and getting called on the fact that there was no evidence that I was any of these things. https://monsterhunternation.com/2014/06/03/fisking-the-guardians-village-idiot-part-2/

      Can anyone help identify times Larry Correia has “responded poorly” to diversity in genre?

      Yeah, you can pretty much see why I want to scrape this piece of dog shit off of my boot.

      1. No doubt. Maddening is a weak descriptor for DW. I hope that a UK solicitor finds that his writing is actionable. If he runs his blog thru a Guardian editor they may have carefully skirted that, however.

  19. I truly thank you for posting these fisks Larry. They are like strips of internet bacon to my snarky little brain. Nothing quite like seeing some idiot get knocked around like a soccer ball to wake someone up in the morning!

    Even by some of the idiot standards I see, this one is monumental. I am genuinely shocked that anyone can be this idiotic. Or perhaps worse, delusional. I know a few gents who work in psychology and deal with people with mental problems, and I literally had flashbacks to incidents upon reading this. This is almost a textbook example of someone refusing to admit facts and lying to themselves. It’s almost depressing.

    Merciful crap, this guy is getting paid by the Brit Feds to write something? What I find terrifying is that this guy made the cut. Who did they pass up?

    Funniest is how he somehow thinks he won. He “won” in the same way that the bad guy in Disney’s Oliver and Company won against that train.

    Also, he’s a liar. Liars suck.

  20. Since Damien is apparently unable to websearch anything: LibertyCon is held in Chattanooga, TN the last weekend in June. https://www.facebook.com/LibertyCon ; http://www.libertycon.org/

    Observing Damien’s ‘performance’, I am reminded of my speech teacher in high school William “Wild Bill” Hemmen, who told us: ‘When someone gives you a subject you don’t want to talk about, start out by pretending to talk about it, the, segue into some subject of your choice.’ Apparently Damien had the same advice at one time, but was too stupid to realize that it only works when you don’t have people constantly reminding you of the subject you were supposed to be talking about.

    Given British libel laws, which are quite strict, Toni may have a case. If it were me, though, the fact that Damien has more or less specified that his opinions are orthogonal to reality would be enough.

  21. From the response by one of Larry’s fans in academia: “In short, if there was no limit to the indefinitude human communication would not be possible.”

    Well, that’s arguing politics with liberals like Damien a nutshell: They might as well be speaking a different language…to go along with the alternate realities they all seem to inhabit, where two plus two equal five, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, and the worst thing in the world is the alleged conservative they have locked up in Room 101 or its social equivalent.

    Or whichever alleged conservative happens to be occupying it at the moment, anyway; for Damien that would be Larry (today; just as it was Toni Weisskopf’s turn in the box yesterday).

  22. Why is he even asking whether or not SF is a genre? Just to be stupid and irrelevant, and to avoid the subject of his mendacity?

    1. Because his entire stupid column started with the idiotic statement “Science fiction is not a genre” and then got dumber from there. When rightfully called on his idiocy, he decided to double down rather than admit he was wrong. Then he flounced off and declared victory.

  23. The funniest part was when he misinterpreted your use of Google as “can’t define it without Google”, rather than “realize that I’ll try to weasel my way out of anything other than an authoritative third-party source”.

  24. I cannot for the life of me understand

    1. Why anyone would think SF is not a genre (as far as books go, imo, if there is a section in the bookstore it is a genre. QED)

    2. Why anyone would get obsessed with debating this fact.

    3. How Damien seems to have missed the gobs of ‘science fiction’ stuff in Star Wars like sentient robots and flying land rovers

    4. How people can be so ridiculous as to be presented multiple, in use definitions of a term and refuse to admit their possible merit, to the point of acting as if they were never presented at all. Incredibly stupid or bad faith arguing or both? You be the judge.

    What a strange person this Damien is.

  25. 3. How Damien seems to have missed the gobs of ‘science fiction’ stuff in Star Wars like sentient robots and flying land rovers

    Fans can and do argue about this. Damien was right about this, even if it wasn’t relevant to the discussion.

    Some people argue that the distinction between SF and fantasy is a matter of set dressing. If it has space ships, ray guns, and sentient robots, it’s science fiction, and if it has wizards, dragons, and magic swords, it’s fantasy.

    I tend to be from the camp that set dressing isn’t very important. None of the technology in Star Wars has the first thing to do with actual science; it’s all made up. It’s treated like magic, and in fact, the force pretty much is magic, and force sensitives are magic users. It’s features a young man undertaking the hero’s journey. Someone up-thread described it as space fantasy and I think that’s a fairly apt description.

    Science fiction tends toward exploring ideas, usually in a universe that is a closer relative to the real world. Some people like to tout that any SF that isn’t possible is necessarily fantasy, though I find that pretty restrictive. There are lots of SF stories that use faster-than-light drives as devices to keep things moving along.

    The distinction between the two can be quite blurry and it can be a huge waste of time to try to categorize everything into SF or fantasy.

    Niven’s “The Magic Goes Away” takes a scientific approach to how magic works.

    In the Campbell era, psionic powers were seen as a legitimate area of science and SF stories were published which used them. There is mention in Heinlein’s biography that he believed that he and Virgina were mildly psychic, though he also regarded such beliefs as a poor substitute for evidence.

    Julian May wrote several books in which prehistoric Earth was visited by psychic aliens whose presence was responsible for the legends of the sidhe.

    Anne McCaffrey’s Dragon Riders series springs some surprises that tends to change how one sees the story.

    1. Navel gazing posers get hung up on putting books in the correct boxes. Writers concentrate on writing books. 🙂 You get one guess which category Damien falls in.

        1. We can get into a technical debate about Star Wars AFTER we resolve the technical debate: posers produce crap and CLAIM that it goes over the heads of 99.7% of the bourgeoisie. That means Damien’s a wannabe poser, doesn’t it?

      1. Arguing over which box to put books in is a fun fannish activity, but arguing over whether boxes that have been there for ages even exist is an attempt to shut down fandom altogether. It’s the kind of conversation-stopper that in real life just makes people look around awkwardly and then slowly turn away and go back to their own conversations.

    2. Another example of what I’d call fantasy disguised as sci-fi is Stephenie Meyer’s The Host. She calls it “sci-fi for people who don’t like sci-fi”, but I think that’s kind of an insulting and inaccurate description. Yes, it has aliens and it’s set in the future, but any details about alien civilizations are very vague and feely rather than scientific. Heck, when the main character goes to steal medical supplies, they consist of jars labeled things like ‘Smooth’ and ‘Clean’. That’s about as un-science-y as it gets.

    3. I think Star Wars is a mix if sf/fantasy (which is probably why I like it), but it seems a bit much to discount the many, many sci fi-ish elements entirely. Which is what Damien did.

  26. There’s a Genre that has the trappings of both things in it. I’d always heard it called Science Fantasy (Ever since my SF Writing Class I took at the University of Oklahoma- and before, actually…). Pigeonholing things is a habit humans have- but it’s not always valid.

    As it stands, the man can’t track his own damn arguments worth squat. Not terribly good for a “journalist” but it seems to be what passes muster these days for someone in that particular profession- much to the dismay of most.

  27. As much as I would dearly love to see Damien have to defend himself in a court of law, it would probably build sympathy for him. The SJWs would claim that it was all just retaliation on Baen’s part for the failure of Sad Puppies. Which of course is nonsense, but as we’ve seen, they don’t mind spreading nonsense.

  28. My definition of Sci-fi: Science fiction

    1. Storytelling genre where the science used is fictional. Ex. Faster than light travel.

    2. Storytelling genre where the fiction is about science.

    Yes, number 1 includes fantasy and number 2 includes stories where the science involved is viable. I totally agree with people using definition number two excluding Star Wars, which isn’t about science at all (except the times it tries and ends up looking deeply dumb.) Genres aren’t boxes they are labels.

    My definition of fool:

    1. One who when faced with serious, possibly career ending accusations quibbles over abstractions. Ex. A cashier accused of stealing from the till repeatedly asks what the definition of color is and keeps asking after being beat over the head repeatedly with a dictionary.

    1. “2. Storytelling genre where the fiction is about science.”

      I think this definition, taken literally, is just…regular fiction? When you start talking about aliens and tech that doesn’t exist, that’s where you get into Scifi for me. I thought the whole point of science fiction was to explore science that hasn’t happened yet. Maybe possible, maybe not.

      1. A story about a dog isn’t a story about science. A story about bullying isn’t about science. A story about a hypothetical space shuttle mission or an avian flu outbreak is about the science involved.

        It’s about the subject of the story.

  29. While I certainly appreciate the humor, and laud the effort in a way, why you waste such prodigious writing talent propping up this pismire’s self worth by bringing him into adult conversations is beyond me. Don’t feed the trolls!

  30. I’ve been considering this…

    If by “conservative diatribe” and identifying “those she politically disagrees with as the enemy” Damian means “disapproves of narrowminded exclusionary fascists and thinks everyone should be more tolerant of various points of view” then he wasn’t lying because any call for everyone getting along and celebrating the diversity of the genre (oopsie, I said “genre”) is going to have the “feels” of an attack on the narrowminded exclusionary fascists.

    And since the SJW cause is all about exclusion and purity and kicking people out of the cool kid’s club so that they don’t spread their cooties around, and is all about identifying enemies… anyone suggesting that identifying enemies is wrong is going to feel attacked.

    Like the guy upstream said… when “racist” is taken to mean “refusing to first and foremost see the color of my skin and make assumptions about my heritage” we have to reconsider the meaning of a lot of words.

    If your values are all based on identifying enemies to crusade against in your SJW glory, and someone attacks the idea of even *having* enemies, it actually is a personal insult… like giving a wedgie to the overly earnest fellow instead of taking him seriously.

  31. Reading his consistent and lame attempts to derail and avoid the question made my head hurt.

    “You lied!”

    “STAR WARS!”

  32. I had a few minutes of free time yesterday and took a couple of screencaps – I didn’t see the one where the wormtongue says that columns are all opinion (another outright lie as some of them are meant to be analytical columns) but the ones where he admits to libel I have.

    I screencapped as requested as soon as I saw your post “Guys, screencap this.” If they are needed let me know please. 🙂

  33. The behaviors demonstrated by leftists/intersectionalists can be explained by a false anthropology based on a faulty/absent metaphysic.

    The first thing to remember is that this anti-philosophy really is “progressive” in the sense of “relentless”. Its adherents will form alliances with amenable movements and institutions–but only as long as is necessary to tear down more traditional institutions (then the former allies come under attack as “establishment oppressors”). The endgame is for “progressivism” to be all-in-all.

    NB: this denial of truth explains why leftists shun reasoned debate in favor of nominalist word games. They are intellectual nihilists who argue not to prove a point, but to drag others down to their level and elevate themselves.

    The unholy grail at the end of this bloody quest is asserted to be total, unrestricted freedom. But the project dooms itself from the start by espousing a false definition of freedom, viz. “the absolute right to do whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want”. This view of freedom is ultimately incompatible with any coherent concept of human nature or objective truth. So humanity and truth become mortal enemies that must be destroyed to reach the goal.

    Now, rejecting human nature and objective truth removes the possibility of any external morality. As a result, progressives resort to Manichean, Puritanical codes of ritual purity, truly believing that what comes in from outside corrupts a man. If human nature is malleable, then not only can PC indoctrination perfect people; badthink can actually make a person bad.

    Because progressivism is totalitarian, anyone who disagress–or gives anything less than vocal, enthusiastic assent–is perforce an oppressor bent on denying others’ freedom. This is where intersectionalist/feminist/racialist theories come in. Those who have suffered under the old, traditional regimes are martyrs whose liberation is touted as a holy crusade.

    As many have said before, what we’re dealing with is not a political movement. It is a purposefully and vehemently heterodox cult. It claims to favor democratic reforms, just as it once championed constitutional monarchy over absolute monarchy, aristocracy against constitutional monarchy, republican government over aristocracy, etc. Its true goal is the abolition of truth and the abolition of man.

  34. This whole thing reminds me of something my Dad would say whenever I asked him why I’d ever need to know something my teachers were trying to inflict on me:

    “With the possible exception of Journalistic Ethics, there is no such thing as useless knowledge.”

    1. These days, a lot of what they teach in schools isn’t even knowledge, and it’s not merely useless but actively harmful.

  35. The funny thing about this whole worthless cult of diversity is that it’s based on the idea of inclusion. What this worthless cult has increasingly done is either taken over neutral spaces like conventions and organizations or presented their blogs as neutral spaces all are welcome to, and then excluded people for disagreement, but also for no other reason than their race and sex, the very thing Social Justice Warriors say motivates them in the first place. The obvious conclusion is they are liars or idiots.

    The result has been a campaign to advocate and include anyone who admits to a blind worship of the superior morality, vision and wisdom of the big three of PC: gay, PoC and women (intersectionalism), while simultaneously defaming heterosexual ethnic European men and the West. That is a cult of supremacy and bigotry.

    The PC have publicly conspired to not read books by white men, not give them literary awards and generally harass the shit out of them. Say anything and they push back with “anti-racist” comments about “white tears” and “how does it feel for a change?”

    The real pushback came when blogs started routinely censoring people for questioning all of the above. “Leave a comment here” really meant go eff yourself. On top of that, the pushback itself was promoted as confirmation of white privilege, misogyny and racism. People have been pre-banned for comments at a national media outlet where their comments at the outlet were NOT deleted and for things as innocent as bringing up the ACLU. The PC posture that is not censorship or blackballing but that is exactly what it is.

    The PC started this fight and have asked for it. The truth of which side is right can easily be demonstrated by who does and doesn’t show quotes and the complete context of those quotes. The PC are people who will go on days-long Twitter rants about Gaza but when kids and women are being killed by ISIS in much great numbers and brutal ways, they post pictures of old comic book panels on their Twitter feed like Muslim apologist Saladin Ahmed.

    John Campbell Award winners born in America like Sofia Samatar will Tweet “Horn-of-Africa Colonizer Showdown” “which of our colonizers will you choose?” when Italy plays England in the World Cup in a way they’d never do with Turkey vs. S. Arabia for the simple reason that statement is not a principled one about right and wrong and an actual event but about race and which race is better.

    WorldCon nominates the most vile, vulgar, supremacist and racist blogger in SFF history – Winterfox/Requires Only That You Hate – for awards 2 years in a row. An SFWA member publicly wishes us all death by fire to crickets from the PC while they throw up their hands in horror in 70 blog posts about the word “lady.”

    We’re not having this any more. I’m calling this cult exactly what it is: a supremacist racist and sexist movement different from neo-Nazism only in the details. The PC have distorted and abused words like “racism” and “sexism” until their use amounts to nothing more than outright lying and hate-speech.

    The PC either despise whites, the West, men and heterosexuals or naively support that spite. The problem for the PC is we have neutral definitions of words that act the same way law does and if you want to make racially and sexually defamatory quotes we’ll be only to happy to bring them to the attention of your readers and let them decide the meaning of words.

    The exact same racist and sexist cult is permeating gaming. A recent post about the gaming community could’ve been written about SFF. Milo Yiannopoulos at Brietbart writes “an army of sociopathic feminist programmers and campaigners, abetted by achingly politically correct American tech bloggers, are terrorising the entire community – lying, bullying and manipulating their way around the internet for profit and attention.”

    Like SFF, he points to the “remarkable proportion of whom suffer from depression or anxiety disorders,” the kind where they imagine themselves living in a country that punches them and where they leaves files for the FBI in case they are ever dragged “to death behind the back of a truck”

    Like SFF, Yiannopoulos points out “every blog out there seems more concerned with policing misogyny and ‘transphobia’ than reviewing the latest game releases” and the tendency to “speak ever more insultingly about their bread and butter customers – that is, their predominantly male readers…”

    You can have hashtags like #killallmen, make death threats like Requires Only That You Hate and wish people dead by fire like SFWA member Beth Bernobich but don’t use a vulgar slang term cuz rape. You can write “The people who run the tech industry are abusive, sexist, racist, cowardly white men. And they need to be removed from power,” like radfem tech guru Shanley Kane but don’t have a Table of Contents or con panel without a PoC/woman cuz racism/misogyny and boycott.

    1. “…[T]his worthless cult has increasingly…excluded people…for no other reason than their race and sex, the very thing Social Justice Warriors say motivates them in the first place. The obvious conclusion is they are liars or idiots.”

      Obvious; even logical, but not entirely accurate.

      You reached that conclusion because you acknowledge traditional Western standards of ethical and moral behavior, which derive inalienable rights from universal human nature. As the paradox you cited proves, the PC cannot accept such standards. On the contrary, the PC must reject them as an obstacle to their fever dream of total, unrestricted license.

      In their own nihilistic way, the PC are being consistent when they claim to want social justice for all; then vilify white, heterosexual males. Denying human nature has cost them the ability to affirm human equality. Indeed, their track record shows a history of conferring non-personhood to justify removing members of inconvenient groups.

      I’m willing to grant that most PC advocates aren’t lying about their beliefs. I also agree that convoluted rantings such as theirs require a certain type of idiocy–though it’s not strictly intellectual; but moral.

      1. I reached that conclusion because of research and their own statements about their goals and benchmarks, not mine.

      2. “I reached that conclusion because of research and their own statements about their goals and benchmarks, not mine.”

        Yes. I have seen ample proof of your exhaustive research, and I thank you for your tireless work unmasking the intersectionalists’ double standard.

        Do you not agree that outrage at and rejection of this double standard proceeds from at least tacit acceptance of the principle that all people have inalienable rights by virtue of their participation in a common human nature?

      3. “Do you not agree that outrage at and rejection of this double standard proceeds from at least tacit acceptance of the principle that all people have inalienable rights by virtue of their participation in a common human nature?”

        To me it goes without saying that human failing and success resides on a human and individual level, not that of race and sex. Such failings and successes often also express themselves in hardened institutions such as law. At one point in America women couldn’t vote and black folks were Jim Crowed in some areas. That’s gone now, but not in the minds of the PC.

        For me where the problem comes in is when you have a culture of people who never shut up promoting that above idea of egalitarianism and then routinely ignoring it.

        For PC intersectionalists, failings demonstrably reside in men, heterosexuals and whites and success in women, PoC and gays. There is absolutely no doubt of that – the quotes run into the thousands. They never shut up about that either. In fact, they never shut up about both at the same time – because they’re nuts.

        It’s like a cult of worship. Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ and now Ann Leckie have been bicycle pumped waaaaay beyond their talents. Similarly, the entirety of Golden Age SF has been thrown into the trash. In neither case is that based on an event, on artistry. It is based on race and sex, in a mass act of defamation and supremacy. The PC hate Heinlein, love Butler. The talent level isn’t even on the same planet. Daniel Jose Older revealingly says Butler was a better writer and a better human being than Lovecraft. That tells you right there what’s up. Art, sex and race are inseparable. Of course that’s coming from the idiot who’s sick of white people saving blacks (white saviors) in media (and thought Lovecraft’s “Cyclopean” architecture referred to the Cyclops and didn’t get that). But don’t say you’re sick of seeing black players scoring the winning bucket – that’s racist.

        What intersectionalists never say is just as important as what they do say. “White straight cis dude” is used as an obvious insult and sign of moral and spiritual failing. But you’ll never, and I mean never hear them doing that to a “black gay women”; in fact it is routinely the exact opposite, and both 100% of the time.

        The unfailing recipe every time an intersectionalist opens their mouth is one of combing identity supremacy with identity defamation. The PC don’t just talk about “diversity,” but who it is messing that up. The PC don’t just write stories with women, PoC and gays, but also take down white straight men, as was classically done with Vylar Kaftan’s Nebula-winning “The Weight of the Sunrise” and also the nominated “Wakulla Springs.”

        The whole cult is one of people who are sick in their hearts and minds.

    2. How far have we fallen as a nation when we “debate” what a bigot is? That’s a rather stunning fall from grace in only a few decades for a country like America.

      Insane – and I mean literally insane feminist racists are even dictating policy in universities now. One PC moron just said on Twitter they’d need trigger warnings to read Golden Age SF they haven’t read yet. You have to be almost literally retarded to be in good standing with either the Nebula or Hugo Awards.

      SF is supposed to be the literature – at least in its higher expressions – that makes fun of a thing like the idea of anti-racists who somehow come to adore racists. That’s what speculative fiction is, not writing a children’s prose book about a bi-sexual mercenary while you rage-blog about white men who want to drag you behind a truck.

      I remember clever short stories like “The Marching Morons,” not actual morons.

      I don’t remember memoirs from Heinlein like “Sending you the re-edit pronto – have to go – the wife is wrapping me in tinfoil for the night cuz beetles have been after me since I stepped on one in 1937.”

      “Duh – what am jonra? What am science fix? What am molecules in Star Wars? Ha ha. You can’t say. You am stoopid. Me not use sex nouns anymore cuz me advanzed. Man not need womans, only man. Me reproduce by pure thought and starlight. Future am only man and man. Oh – mebbe woman and woman, but never woman man, like medieval dark edges. Future is bynery.”

          1. Well, you got it. ;-D

            Seriously, I’d be surprised if it was only one in more that a handful of cases. And there are probably other character defects in most instances.

    3. John W. Campbell once wrote a reply to a letter he’d published in Analog, which read (quote approximate) “A bigot is someone who is certain he’s correct, and can’t be bothered to argue with you. A fanatic is someone who’s certain he’s correct, and insists that you must agree with him.”

      We’re seeing a lot of fanaticism lately.

  36. I think we should take Damien at his word. He says that anything that appears in a Column (as opposed to a News article ) is opinion. Fine, he can state that the Sky is Blue and we can always answer, “Well, that’s your opinion.” “You put it in your column, so we know it’s nothing but an opinion.”

    And darnit, I still haven’t found a really good opening for saying that he suffers from Cerebral Scalzi.

    1. I was going to mention something about a short bus with regard to Damien, but I know developmentally disabled people, and there’s not a bit of malice in them, and misattributing racism/sexism/hatemongery to people on the level of his kind is a choice. Larry Miller in “For Richer or Poorer” illustrated it perfectly: “It takes years of government training to learn to think like this.” I guess that applies to academia and the propagandist industry as well.

      1. Oh, the developmentally disabled are capable of the whole range of human emotions, including anger. But the kind of hate Damien’s crowd traffics in requires advanced training in self-deception, and yes, is well beyond the abilities of anyone who is based solidly in reality. You have to work really hard and be very smart to hate as strongly and irrationally as the SJW’s.

    2. Being a Lefty means never having to admit the existence of truth.

      Therefore, telling him everything in his column is “an opinion” won’t bother him. He already thinks everything is “nothing but an opinion”. And he will respond, “your opinion that everything I say is just an opinion is wrong, because racism, misogyny and homophobia, so there, nyah nyah nyah I am not listening to you!”

  37. I was glad to see that someone supplied Damien the definition of “libel”. My guess is that he’ll become uncomfortably familiar with that definition in the near future. Also “damages”.

  38. The first thing that popped into my head was “What is your Major Malfunction Damian?” in R.Lee Ermey’s voice from Full Metal Jacket.

  39. The Scarlett Pimpernel, however, was a lickspittle of the state.— Damien Walter (@damiengwalter) September 3, 2014

    Did that work?
    Anyway, he needs to go down. Nobody says that about the Scarlet Pimpernel (foundation of at least one genre, not that that means much to him) and gets away with it…

    1. Damien’s just pissy towards the Scarlet Pimpernel because when the rabble started using the guillotine on the aristocracy, the Pimpernel decided to take a stand against wanton butchery of persons of economic means. Damien probably dreams sweet dreams nightly of pulling the blade release and being bathed in the blood of privilege while the unwashed cheer the death of another aristocrat. You know, rather than accomplishing anything on his own.

      1. IIRC, it is standard Marxist dogma that Sherlock Holmes is a lackey for the state and bourgeois values, because he (scare music) solves crimes. A true progressive would be on the side of the criminals.

    2. The Pimpernel rocks, case closed. (And I say that as someone who had a world of fun rping as Chauvelin).

      Goes to cue up “Falcon in the Dive” in the MP3 player.

    3. The Scarlett Pimpernel, however, was a lickspittle of the state.— Damien Walter (@damiengwalter) September 3, 2014

      Great Ghu! Even for Damien, that’s impressively stupid.

      1. The Lone Ranger was a white settler colonialist running dog paper tiger lackey of capitalism, imperialism and genocide.

      2. Fail Burton, on September 6, 2014 at 9:26 am said:

        “The Lone Ranger was a white settler colonialist running dog paper tiger lackey of capitalism, imperialism and genocide.”

                Wow!  May I use that (with attribution, of course)?

      1. Hell, what do you think Damien’s DOING in Thailand. He’s there showing the little brown asian girls a little of the old British Colonialization. Unless he’s there for the Ladyboys, then we’ll know how much he supports non-binary gender.

        Maybe he’s there for a little work himself. I’m sure he can get a discount on the surgery since he’s probably got very little left to remove, having sacrificed the rest of his manhood on the altar of feminism.

        Sadly, no matter how much he abuses himself, He’s still a White male, and nothing he can do will make Ms. Jemison sleep with him.

        (Why yes, I DO have some brain bleach handy. Want some?)

          1. I figured out the book he’s been working on for the past 4+ years. “The Lonely Brit’s Guide to Asian Sex Tourism.” He’s still in the research phase, he needs to get that first date.

          2. I just want to accuse him of “Colonialism”, since he probably makes enough off one of his stupid Grauniad columns to feed a Thai family for a week, well.

  40. Three things:

    1. Libel is not a crime in the US. It is a civil claim of action, a tort. I do not know if this is materially different in the Youkayyyy, although I would hazard it is not a crime there either save perhaps to the Royal Family.

    2. The dictionary definition of libel is useless in the context for which you’re discussing Walter’s actions. The controlling definition would be the legal definition of libel wherever the aggrieved party was able to and elected to sue.

    3. Warmachine is structurally and artistically inferior to Warhammer 40k in every measurable metric save expense.

    1. Actually, there is “criminal libel” in the US although its largely obsolete, and arguably unconstitutional, nonetheless it still exists.

      1. I won’t bet on how many people point to it and screech “It’s in Wikipedia! It must be true!!!!” *facepalm*

    1. Walter isn’t the first person to suggest that Baen’s catalog is oriented toward conservatives, when it may be more accurate to say that they just don’t orient away from them. It’s akin to the gag where the sergeant asks for a volunteer to take one step forward and the whole line takes one step backward.

      1. Standard leftism: If you are not an active fighter for the Revolution, then you are a counter-revolutionary…and must be destroyed.

  41. How is the question of whether sf is a genre relevant to question of whether Damien Walter lied about what Toni Weisskopf said? Did I miss something, or did he troll you into wasting lots of time on an irrelevancy?

    1. It isn’t relevant.  But actually addressing the question would leave show that he just makes shit up.  So he used that pathetic dodge.

      But don’t worry about him trolling Larry.  The International Lord of Hate enjoys bashing such as Damien.

      1. “But don’t worry about him trolling Larry”

        I was more worried that I had missed some aspect of the debate, in which case it was time to foreswear the intertubes and request an Aricept prescription from my doctor. 🙂

  42. Is it me or is Damien benefitting from pissing people off? Are his articles getting more hits because of what he has said here?

    1. I think that is the point of it all. He belittles, attacks, lies about someone more known about and then all of their followers come and give him page hits…

  43. I get that the whole Star Wars thing was just a distractor meant to draw attention away from the main point and score some kind of meaningless point against you, and that paying any attention to it is just wasting my time, but it’s just so ridiculous I can’t help myself. I’m having trouble grasping what the point he’s trying to make with it even
    IS.

    Nothing he said established that Science Fiction wasn’t a genre. It established that Star Wars’ claim to being part of the genre is questionable, and it didn’t even do a good job of that! More importantly, by even having a discussion about whether or not Star Wars is Science Fiction, you’re implicitly saying that Science Fiction IS a genre! How else could Star Wars be part of it OR not be part of it?

    I know we should be focused on what he said about Toni, and that by focusing on his Star Wars argument I’m playing into his hands, but this argument is just so incredibly stupid that I can’t help but be fascinated by it!

    1. When the law is on your side, argue the law.
      When the facts are on your side, argue the facts.
      When neither the facts NOR the law are on your side, just…
      Give ’em the old razzle dazzle…
      Razzle dazzle ’em…

      Sorry, I meant, “Pop smoke, achieve fire superiority, and break contact.” Although in Damien’s case, he didn’t even have a magazine in his weapon, so he just went with “Pop smoke and GTFO.” Damien doesn’t have the brains for the razzle dazzle. 😀

  44. Damien Walter, probably refering to his self-beclownment:

    “Damien Walter @damiengwalter · 16h Debating with Libertarians is like being the monolith from 2001 with all the chimps screaming at you. We need to upgrade their intelligence.”

    1. …says the man who wrote “Science fiction needs to reflect that the future is queer.”

      May as well write the future has mountains with legs and Ireland decides to use giant propellors to float to Canada. Walter fits in well in Thailand: they both benefit from thin smears of Western innovations and education that gives them a sheen far above their innate talents. 500 years ago Walter would’ve been a peasant sneaking naps behind the barn and fending off advances from fat milk maids. He might have lucked out and been a member of the Inquisition, since that sort of thing seems to be his main talent. It’s a talent he shares with many PC SFF authors, who are more creative at group defamation than writing.

  45. Larry, if Damien ever is an invited guest at Libertycon, I will borrow money from loan sharks to get there. I’ve never seen a man skinned alive in public before, and in his case it would be both entertaining and well-deserved.

  46. This has nothing to do with Damien’s column, but Damien and Arthur Chu are discussing GamerGate, and we got this tweet:

    “@damiengwalter Hey man so right now @leighalexander is you and a man who calls himself Internet Aristocrat is Larry Correia”

    Can we add Internet Aristocrat to Larry’s titles? 😉

  47. I love this, retweeted by SFF radfem Veronica Schanoes.

    https://twitter.com/BinaShah/status/500180632316968960

    Hahaha. “Bravest girls in the world,” but girls. Build a frickin’ bridge and walk across.

    They fly across valleys in Bolivia like that too, cuz cultural relativism and postcolonialism stung their DNA like wasps. During the Civil War, privileged white Western males threw up about 38 kazillion bridges, cuz aliens helped us back then with privilege imprinted on our DNA.

      1. I think a different point here is that EVERYONE in that area uses the cable crossing, so pointing out the girls using it to go to school as something special is disingenuous on the part of Bina Shah.

  48. Someone, please have the graciousness to post Damien Walter being verbally flayed in public.

    I will provide drinks and popcorn…

  49. I thought about this debate over the weekend and in my opinion it is indicative of the postmodern society we now live in. Deconstruction only leads to one place: nihilism.

    I feel sorry for people like Damien Walter because they don’t believe in anything, anymore, and they are angry about it. Like a wounded animal they sit in a corner biting anything that comes toward them, whether it is good or bad. The wound that continues to bite and gnaw at their already frayed psyche; that in fact, there might be an absolute truth.

    Pluralism as a philosophical concept in my opinion just does not seem work, and yet we live in a world that tries to make it so. Beware of the Damien’s of this world. They are not here to make things better, just to relieve the pain in their hearts.

  50. Having read far more of the “Damien” comments than I can really justify, I’m left with one major thought: “Is this guy for real, or is it just a ‘bot?”

    Seriously, people used to run similar chatbots 20 years ago on GEnie and AOL. I bet the software has evolved quite a bit since then. And “Damien” doesn’t even try to maintain a dialogue; his replies look more like Eliza, or Monty Python’s “Argument Clinic” skit.

  51. Damien’s current bleats:

    “Right-wing folks have weird definitions of success. They’re determined I’m a “failed writer” even though +”

    “+ I’ve earned my living as a writer my mid-20s, write for some the world’s biggest media brands, and in the last year alone +”

    “+ have had critical pieces published by Oxford AND Cambridge University presses.”

    Whoa! Oxford AND Cambridge? We’re dealing with a badass here!

    1. Only a fool pinkshirt like Damien would define “getting a government grant to write a book and then not writing anything” as “earning a living”.

      Oooo, srs badass! I’m tempted to ask him the titles and where one could go to get them.

      1. But he apparently none the less got paid to write that stuff.

        Perhaps The Guardian et al. are really periodical fiction anthologies, and I’m stupid enough that I’ve never realized this.

    2. He has had his “critical pieces” published. It’s all Frankfort School critical theory bullshit, where you tear down anything good without presenting a better alternative, and promote the most degraded and destructive crap in its place. Check, he’s a tool of the socialist movement.

      Mark Twain had something to say about guys like him:

      “I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value–certainly no large value.”

      “The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.”

  52. More bleats:

    “@damiengwalter · 3h I’ve deliberately gone after trolls this year in my column, and with utterly predictable regularity they have taken the bait.”

    and

    “@damiengwalter ·3h That’s exactly my feeling. “Don’t feed the trolls” means letting trolls set the agenda, and that’s unacceptable.”

    You know, a few weeks ago, Damien was mocking Larry for saying the Hugos went the way he expected. Now Damien is claiming he’s got a grand strategy behind his recent idiocy.

    BTW, Janus Scalzi comments favorably on that second tweet.

  53. As of today, Damien has locked his Twitter feed. You can only read it if you’re a “confirmed follower”.

    I wonder what happened?

      1. Well, REAL intellectuals don’t waste time debating ineducable bourgeoisie, dontcha know? It’s beneath their dignity. 😉

  54. Looks like this twat has had his crap blog at the Guardian canned in one of the latest purges of that failing newspaper, nothing since August but posting 2-3 times a month before that

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