Just as an illustration of how incredibly screwed up we are, this week on the social media:
I saw somebody declare that it was good they had stripped Campbell’s name from the best new writer award because we had learned that his views were “problematic” (he was guilty of being alive when he was alive, and not a woke time traveler from 2019) but then to back up how/why Campbell was a horrible bad thinker who should be shunned once we learned of his sins, she linked to an article by novelist Sam Delaney… who supports NAMBLA.
My personal opinion on the Campbell controversy (and I was actually nominated for one of those when I was a newb!) is that these people are hysterical idiots, and the “Astounding Award” sounds like it should be a paper star you pin on the best behaved Kindergartner. But in a completely unrelated note DragonCon should get Bruce Campbell to host the Dragon Awards, and that year they should add a Best New Author category, which people could then refer to as the Campbell Award for short, but which would in no way have anything to do with anybody else’s estate or trademarks. Groovy.
Then I saw morons declaring that Dave Chappell is a white supremacist now, and we shouldn’t watch him because he’s a hatey hate person of hate (so I’ll probably watch it this weekend because I love Dave).
In a FB hobby group that I’m in, where I never ever go political because I’m not an obnoxious twit (I’m just there for the mini painting) people were talking about how in this imaginary few hundred years in the future sci-fi war game setting, they didn’t like how Islam was being portrayed (and ironically, this is a world where every faction does bad stuff, they’re fairly decent). One guy said he was happy with it and that if he wanted a realistic portrayal of Islam he’d make all his female minis were burkas and hit the gay ones with rocks. He was immediately attacked as a racist, bigot, islamophobe, so on and so forth. The ironic part? The guy who said it was a Muslim immigrant from Iran, joking about the problems in the culture he came from, who then got screamed at and told he needed to “get educated” by a bunch of white American liberals.
Also, the Hong Kong protestors are white supremacists now. So Dave is in good company.
I saw everybody freak out one day about how Trump was stripping birthright citizenship from military babies, and 24 hours later like maybe 1/10th of those people who freaked out posting about how the articles they shared the day before had gotten it wrong.
I learned that my new house is bigger than Barack Obama’s (but I’m still not a *real* writer, sigh), only mine is up high in the mountains, and his is a terrible investment because it will be underwater within 12 years… I actually don’t know which did more damage to the catastrophic global warming narrative this week, Michael Mann’s inability to show his homework, or Obama’s house. Probably Obama’s house.
Because I’m Mormon and a gun nut, I had a lot of people ask me about the news articles that were going around saying the church had banned guns from church buildings. It’s a stupid policy, but not new. They just updated the general handbook (that’s like the binder for how to run a ward). They’ve already banned guns from church buildings since back when I was teaching CCW ten years ago. A multitude of us ignore it and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. The handbook also says I’m not supposed to use foul language, and you can see how well that has stuck.
I had lefties randomly screech at me for a wide variety of topics. That’s so common I can’t remember most of them. You kind of tune them out after a while. I get a lot of rando strangers showing up to scream at me every Hugo season. It’s the annual running of the Chorfs.
But in the spirit of bipartisan fairness, exactly one week ago I got screeched at by people on the right because I said if you are an American and any politician says they “Hereby Command” you to do anything, whether you agree with them or not, your response had better be a reflexive Fuck Off or you are a sorry excuse for an American and need to quit being such a pussy.
