Friday, February 12, 2016

Opening a Moderate Conversation on Fandom with "Standback"

Based on the hit counts and the comments, my last post on the Sad Puppies definitely generated some heat. Unfortunately, Real Life has made it impossible for me to respond to everyone -- but I do want to address one individual in particular whose very polite, very well-written reply definitely deserves an equally polite response. And so -- 

Dear "Standback,"

Again, thank you for your willingness to talk about these controversies without shouting or vitriol. Constructive discussion is indeed sorely needed; if we can at least get to a place of mutual understanding, that will only redound to fandom's benefit. 

Disclaimer: Like you, I don't represent anyone in particular; other Pups may dispute some of the points in my analysis. Still, I've been active in the various Puppy groups for a while, so I'd like to think my impressions are fairly accurate.

Let's talk first about what I like to call the "pre-history" of the Sad Puppies. For the past fifteen years (at least), the character of fandom has shifted in a way that many Puppies find very troubling -- and by the way, for the vast majority of our number, this has nothing to do with race, gender, or sexuality. A significant number of us are women who accept the precepts of first wave feminism at the very least. A number of us are "people of color." And a number of us are gay or, at minimum, amenable to leaving gay people alone to live their lives as they see fit. No -- what has disturbed the Puppies is the increasingly strident tone that many fans have adopted in support of their favored cultural and political causes. In our perception, the vague "codes of conduct," the "shit lists," the pilings on, the endless internet flame-wars, and the non-falsifiable accusations of racism/sexism/homophobia/etc. have all created an environment that is extraordinarily hostile to points of view that don't hew to a particular left-wing party line. The result? We've felt unwelcome and stomped on for what, to our mind, should be recognized as sincere and well-meant differences of opinion.

Over the same time frame, the Puppies have also become concerned about the artistic direction of our field. The "Human Wave" movement, the "Superversive" movement, and the more generalized complaints about "message fic" and "grey goo" that started gaining steam before last year's Sad Puppies campaign are all flailing attempts by the Puppies to describe the flatness we've perceived in many recent award winners -- particularly in the shorter fiction categories, where the stylistic sophistication and emotional catharsis beloved by creative writing professors and MFA programs the world over appear to be crowding out more accessible stories with identifiable plots and recognizably science-fictional ideas. Have the aforementioned accessible stories been shut out of the mix entirely? No, thankfully -- but prominent fannish critics have definitely been agitating against any "traditional" authors who happen to be short-listed. When Larry Correia was nominated for the Campbell back in 2011, for example, one such critic hyperbolically proclaimed that a win for Larry would "end writing forever."

Finally, before the Puppies became a controversial sensation, many of the same people were getting nominated for the Hugo year after year after year. Now, this state of affairs may have been justifiable if fandom were really tiny, but it's not. As I remarked in my previous post, thousands of science fiction works are published and bought every year, and the most recent circulation figures I could find for, say, Asimov's or Analog exceed the number of people who voted in the Hugos in 2012 by over 1000%. To us Puppies, the proposition that a couple thousand super-motivated Pre-Puppy World Con voters were in any way representative of the fandom in the aggregate was and is ridiculous on its face.

So we got involved.

I've already acknowledged the flaws in our process. We should've checked the eligibility rules more carefully before making our suggestions, we should've widened our crowd-sourcing pool, we should've included more options on our list, and we shouldn't have called it a "slate," as that wasn't really what we intended it to be.  Additionally, while we've recommended authors who were conservative, liberal, apolitical, and every flavor in between, we've often failed to separate our political disputes from our artistic arguments when responding to our detractors. But overall, we Sads really did just want to vote for what we liked; we wanted to give several very successful authors and editors a fighting chance to be recognized, and we wanted to highlight some newer writers (like Kary English) who may otherwise have been overlooked. Was there also a little "we hate those guys!" folded into the mix? I'd be lying if I denied it; as I explained above, a lot of us have been "hit" in the fandom over the years, and the anger has been simmering for quite a while. But this "resentment vote" was driven less by a desire to destroy the Hugo and more by a desire to assert our right to dissent without being abused. 

I can understand our opponents' being upset that their choices were effectively locked out of the ballot by the combined activities of the Sad and Rabid Puppies campaigns. Indeed, I highly respect certain prominent Antis - like Eric Flint and George R.R. Martin - who've written calmly worded blog posts on the subject. What I can't understand is the manner in which other Antis have often expressed their disappointment. Steve Davidson is, even now, busily trying to define us out of the fandom even though many of us have loved science fiction for decades. Others, meanwhile, have repeatedly called us vile and defamatory names in some very high profile venues and have yet to retract their statements. And the less said about the comments on File 770, the better.

Do we have unsavory characters on our side? Yes. However, I do think there's a critical difference between the Puppy trolls and the Anti trolls: the Antis, as a group, have more power in the fandom. You may scoff at this, but I invite you to consider several key facts. Number one, it wasn't the Puppy position that was spread far and wide in mainstream entertainment publications once the 2015 ballot was announced. Number two, among the Antis behaving badly were editors and art directors from at least one major publishing house, while among the Puppies behaving badly was -- well, no one of any import. Number three, we lost. The Antis trounced us when it came to the final vote and felt perfectly free to gloat about it in public afterwards; indeed, I saw at least one officer of SFWA congratulating the Antis for their "victory" on Twitter. And lastly, there's a objective double standard in the way the opposing trolls are treated. While the Sad Puppies are urged to denounce Vox Day and other malefactors, Requires Hate continues to be published in Clarkesworld with nary an acknowledgement of the contradiction. 

Above, I mentioned our resentment. Sadly, the events of last year did much to sharpen those feelings of ill-will. That's why you're hearing talk of "conspiracies" -- and why you may have heard a Sad or two saying, "To hell with those twat-waffles. They can fuck themselves with rusty chainsaws for all I care." Personally, I think this is deeply unfortunate; though our respective groups may have irreconcilably different tastes in science fiction, there's no reason we can't find some common ground when it comes to the need for more civility in our disputes -- not to mention greater participation and viewpoint diversity in both the nominating and voting rounds of the Hugo Awards. MOAR recs, MOAR voters, and MOAR discussion? Sounds good to me! So let's try to make it happen.

Sincerely,

Stephanie S.

149 comments:

  1. Oh heck, I don't even think that our tastes in science fiction or fantasy are that different. Certainly the characters with whom we populate our stories are not different at all. And to explain *that* statement I have to explain that May isn't wrong. And to explain *that* I have to say that the "establishment" doesn't notice what doesn't actually affect them. That noise they hear buzzing about as this or that activist complains that a famous and well-loved author is guilty of writing "colonialism" doesn't really hurt the famous and well-loved author and isn't going to make a moment of difference to the fellow with the TV show in the works or who is firmly established in the...establishment. Everyone still gets their super violent adventure, door stop fantasy, space opera drama, and the people who write it take it to the bank.

    Because our *tastes* are really not very different at all.

    What is different is how we experience the "punching up" and the scolds and the lectures and the social positioning of those "not very important so who cares what they say" SJWs that May is always quoting.

    To a certain extent someone like Requires Hate can't hurt us the way that she could destroy those who'd bought in to the narrative, but acceptance of the outright abuse which is so typical and explicitly approved of and hardly limited to that one person, sends a strong message of suppression and oppression to anyone who might have a little bit of a different take on issues. You'll get dog piled and defamed. You'll find out that *your* non-binary characters weren't done right, somehow. There was a Hugo award winning examination of how that destroyed authors, the abuse and the attacks, but somehow the judgement itself was never questioned, only the targets of the abuse.

    So we all know where we stand.

    The question is only... are you in a position to ignore it or not? Do you have contracts and contacts and can ignore it all? Or are you in good with those who have set themselves up as the judges? Or have you given yourself into the power of those judges and opened yourself to abuse? Or are you willing to revolt and refuse the power of the judges and reclaim your place in fandom and in the genre, even if it means doing it the hard way and without support.

    Because I read "Puppy" stories and the characters in them meet all the oh-so-important check-lists, but they do so with a big FU to the judges who insist on giving themselves the power to approve or disapprove.

    It doesn't matter if Requires Hate is welcomed back with open arms because the *tactics* were never denounced or even disapproved of. Others moved, immediately, to fill the empty space in the system, the ones self appointed to issue moral judgments...

    So sure... a lot of people are pissed off and are going to stay pissed off. They've darned good reasons to be angry. Good reason to be disgusted with the enablers who let it all happen and approve of the "punching". Approve of rewriting the whole History of the genre, actually. They can't expect that no one would notice and no one would blame them for it either.

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  2. Hey Stephanie! Again, thanks for the conversation :)

    So, just to start out with, let me try to recap your post, just so we know we're one the same page here.

    As I understand you, you're saying this:

    1. As much as the gestalt of "fandom" can be said to be uniform, you feel fandom has become dominated by a particular ideological strain (characterized by, say, liberalism and support of diversity as a cause), which is actively hostile to those outside that strain.

    2. Mirroring that (and not necessarily related), you're seeing a rise and a newfound popularity in fiction you don't find valuable. I can't do justice to the distinction in a recap, but "accessible; strong plot; SF ideas" vs. "strong style; MFA-like" is at least a hand-waving attempt at it.

    3. The Puppies feel these differences are, to a large extent, the result of very narrow participation in the Hugo nominating and voting process. Bringing the Puppies in to the process should result in their tastes and opinions being represented better than they were; if their tastes are echoed by larger portions of fandom, then this will result in the Hugos becoming more representative of fandom at large then they had been.

    4. The actual Puppy nominating effort was primarily driven by two motives: sincere admiration for the particular works (and authors) nominated (and a desire to see those admired works and authors recognized), and a form of dissent against the problems detailed in the previous points. (I think you're also saying that the "sincere admiration" was primary and the "dissent" was secondary.)

    5. There were several problems with the Puppies' list - in how it was compiled; in how it had effects beyond what the Puppies intended; in how it was represented in discussions and arguments. You acknowledge these, but these are errors to be corrected, not underlying flaws of the Sad Puppy movement.

    6. Your primary complaint at the moment is the bald animosity and vitriol towards the Puppies from the non-Puppies; the sense that they're a "foe" to be both beaten and ridiculed. This was, in a sense, the same problem you started out with, but the Puppy attempt to join in, participate, and be heard, in fact resulted in an immense exacerbation of the problem - from occasional latent hostility, to out-and-out enmity (including from prominent and influential figures within the field).

    --this "recap" may have come out as long as your original post by now :P
    But: Are those the salient points? Am I understanding your position correctly?

    (I'll note in advance that, as can be expected, I'm in agreement with some of this, in disagreement with some, and in some cases I'm in agreement on the facts but I interpret the significance differently. This'll be fun :) )

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    1. One point I'm not quite sure I understood:

      Do we have unsavory characters on our side? Yes. However, I do think there's a critical difference between the Puppy trolls and the Anti trolls: the Antis, as a group, have more power in the fandom.

      I'm quite in agreement that the non-Puppies have more "power," for whatever vague definitions of "power" we can offer. What's not clear to me is what point you're trying to make by this.

      Are you maybe saying that the more vitriolic anti-Puppies represent the non-Puppies to a greater extent than the vitriolic Puppies represent the Puppies? Or maybe that they have more influence, more people listen to them?

      And if they are more powerful or more influential - OK, but what of it? Is that a qualitative difference? What effect does it have?

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    2. The effect this power gap has should be evident at first glance. When the anti-puppies decide they don't like you, they have the ability to silence your voice within the fandom indefinitely without any sort of fair hearing. And what's worse, the media trusts and reports the perspectives of established fandom to the exclusion of the puppy crowd, so the world, at large, only hears their side of the story.

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    3. I'm trying to get a handle on this:

      Are you suggesting that "the fandom" is a monolithic block that has a direct line into the press?

      If so, an alternative explanation for your perception(s) would be that: the majority of people, including many press outlets, simply do not agree/share the position that is espoused by the "puppy crowd".
      Which is a much simpler (and dare I say, believable) explanation.

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    4. It's not a believable explanation at all. The Hugos, the SFWA, and TorCom, which is the website associate of the largest publisher of SF have far more credibility than individual bloggers on the wrong side of feminism. Media outlets have demonstrably simply taken the word of people who rep those groups. But when you read about the Puppies thing or Gamergate they are unrecognizable narratives that are little more than propaganda. Why would that be a surprise since the history of SFF they present is itself one giant lie?

      And let's look at actual real facts: people like Damien Walter, Saladin Ahmed, K. Tempest Bradford and Mikki Kendall have all gotten writing gigs at The Guardian, Salon, NPR, etc for doing nothing more than sitting on Twitter all day and writing about the inadvisability of being a straight white male. Collectively, what have those 4 together produced in SFF as artists or scholars? The easy answer is virtually nothing.

      How can media outlets share an opinion they haven't researched and know nothing about except from the mouths of propagandists?

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  3. What she is saying is that while the puppy extremists can be ignored, as they have no power to harm anyone really, the anti's have the power to use their hate to destroy their so called enemies. The slander they spread entered the mainstream media and got repeated and magnified.

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  4. By the way, if just asking for a place at the table is enough to get make the problem worse, that says more about the antis than the puppies don't you think?

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    1. Heya Chris,

      I expect I'll be focusing my attention on conversation directly with Stephanie - mostly to keep the conversation manageable on my end, and due to my own limitations of how much time I can spend chatting on the internet :) I'm going to try to keep *one* really good conversation going on (even a branching one); juggling multiple conversations at once is probably beyond me at the moment.

      Which is not to say I won't be reading other people's comments, or addressing them! But I'll probably be addressing them mostly from within the conversation with Stephanie, as we reach those topics, rather than responding to each one individually.

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    2. Perhaps our hostess should just give you her email address then, so you don't have to deal with the rest of us.

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    3. @Chris: I would actually like to keep the conversation wholly public so everyone has access to our actual point of view. :)

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  5. OK, so as a way of kind of establishing some baseline agreement: You've explained how the pushback against the Sad Puppies has been hostile and vitriolic out of all proportion. Am I safe in guessing that you find very similar pushback against the Rabid Puppies much more understandable and well-placed?

    Beale is a self-described "cruelty artist." In a WIRED interview, he gave the rather unambiguous quote: "I wanted to leave a big, smoking hole where the Hugo Awards were. All this has ever been is a giant ‘fuck you’—one massive gesture of contempt." After the 2015 ceremony, he posted this lovingly-crafted image macro.

    In other words, Beale and his Rabid Puppies are explicitly malicious; their purpose is to disrupt the award, and to outrage those who care about it. Does it make sense to you that the reaction to that would include hostility, ridicule, vitriol -- well, all the things that you see as misplaced towards the Sad Puppies?

    (I'm not trying to conflate the Sad Puppies with the Rabids here. The Rabid Puppies are a whole Thing of their own, and even using them as a reference point is something I'll try to keep to this particular sub-thread. What I'm trying to do is establish what kind of behavior makes the pushback we're talking about seem justified.)

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    1. To be honest, I've never read any of the rabids, though I get the feeling I'm probably a better man for it. From what I gather, their goal was to (as you put it) blow up the Hugos. Interestingly enough, the organizers of the Hugos awards seemed quite happy to oblige.

      That said, I don't think asking people to engage in a 2 minute hate as requirement of discussion is very productive. The rabids were used as an excuse to ignore what more moderate people were saying. The people using them knew full well they weren't the same as the sads, so spare us the moral posturing.

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    2. "You made it possible for me to deliberately misrepresent and lie about you, so it's your fault. Had you merely complied with my demands that you engage in a 2 minute hate all of this could have been avoided."

      The answer is... no. I know where the moral high ground is, and that ain't it.

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    3. The hostility, ridicule and vitriol started long before Vox entered the scene. And it was the puppy kickers who dragged him and gamergate in to drum up hate. followed shortly thereafter by a mass international media hatefest. To say nothing about how puppy nominees were bullied and threatened so that they would withdraw their nominations. Followed up by that Hugo ceremony where the kickers made buttholes of themselves, literally and acted like perfect jackasses. To say nothing of the sock puppet votes that showed up and no awarded everything in sight. And the puppy kicker are asking us to hate Vox? What have the puppy kicker ever done but kick a bunch of fans, who for the first time wanted to get involved?

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    4. I understand this question touched a sore point for some.

      It's important for me to clarify: I'm not asking for a two-minute hate, or condemnation of Beale and the Rabid Puppies. As I said, I'm just trying to establish that in *some* cases, you understand why the non-Puppies are angry, even if it's not about something you're angry about yourself.

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  6. As to the push back, whether it was understandable with regard to the rabids or not is besides the point. As they (like all extremists) were imune to such pushback, it was the sads who had to deal with it. In fact, the pushback resulted in exactly what the rabids wanted.

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  7. @Standback:

    1. We wouldn't describe the ideological strain in question as "liberal" -- at least, not in the traditional sense of the term. It is, in fact, a highly ILliberal set of ideas that is hostile to free expression and seeks to close the marketplace of ideas under the guise of "protection" and "safety." Is fandom uniform in its acceptance of this ideology? I don't think so. However, the fact that many concoms are adopting codes of conduct that ban "discriminatory comments" (what does this mean?) and "commentary that reinforces narratives of oppression" (ditto) indicates, to us, that people who embrace said mode of thought ARE indeed in a position to punish the heterodox for speech that is innocent. And as for diversity: I don't think any Sad opposes that particular goal in principle. We DO, however, oppose certain superficial and non-organic METHODS to achieve that goal. Of particular concern to us is the freedom of the author or artist to create according to his/her inspiration, which, to our mind, is threatened by certain demands of the so-called "diversity push."

    2. Your understanding here is correct. As a general rule, we Sads, to use Eric S. Raymond's formulation, want sci-fi to "get back in the gutter where it belongs." :)

    3 - 6. On these, your recap is also basically accurate. And yes: The sincere admiration was absolutely primary.

    On the power question: My commentary on the first bullet point approaches what I mean. Non-Puppy malefactors have greater influence on our conventions and professional organizations. They also have more influence on our traditional publishing companies. The impact of that last fact is certainly blunted by the rise of Amazon and independent publishing (which is why we Sads are quite vigorous in our defense of Bezos), but elsewhere? The non-Puppies are definitely in charge. As Chris has noted, the non-Puppies DID have a commanding media advantage, which led to unrelenting and disruptive harassment of our more prominent members.

    On whether or not the vitriol was justified when directed against the Rabids: Firm and reasonable anger is certainly justified so long as it doesn't cross over into outright demands for censorship. Vox IS a shit-stirrer and should be dealt with accordingly. But as Chris correctly observed, a lot of the anger that should've been directed solely at Vox has blown back on the rest of us; very few people, as far as we can tell, are bothering to discriminate. And I agree with Chris: I think this IS out of convenience. If we can ALL be tainted with the hated VOX DAAAAAY, no one has to listen to anything we say.

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  8. The casualness of the slander really is about "we don't have to listen"... something like "Oh... they're just some neo-nazi misogynist racist haters" (mix and match, it really makes little difference) is short hand for "no one has to listen to anything we say."

    It's just a little bit hard to take, you know, when the same people, the *exact* same people, insisting on "inclusiveness" don't see any problem whatsoever on kicking people out for having another point of view.

    "...people who embrace said mode of thought ARE indeed in a position to punish the heterodox for speech that is innocent."

    And have proven that they'll take the innocent and explain why it's really hate speech because of some invisible fault, or maybe just whoever said it.

    "And as for diversity: I don't think any Sad opposes that particular goal in principle. We DO, however, oppose certain superficial and non-organic METHODS to achieve that goal."

    Particularly when the methods are actively toxic. Quite frankly, if someone supports diversity instead of just virtue signaling, you'd think they'd develop methods that weren't actively toxic and didn't involve identifying and isolating enemies or justifying "punching".

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  9. Actually, I'd go so far as to say that if you support diversity and want to see more of it and want all people to feel like science fiction is a welcoming place you'd START by actively opposing the rewriting of science fiction History as a place of orthodox patriarchial whiteness, either in the people involved since the late 1800's, or in the fiction that was written and published for all that time.

    Lying about our History is creating, for whatever purpose, an atmosphere where "diverse" authors must to question if they'll get a fair shake or not. How does this help? Who does this serve?

    How can a *good* person not oppose it?

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  10. Puppy: Science fiction has lost a sense of adventure and wonder. We need to go back to the Good Old Days when men were burly and it wasn't a sin to colonize a planet or write a story where humans are heroic.

    Anti-pup: Those Puppies just want to turn this back to the all-white all-male heteronormative science fiction of the Bad Old Days.

    Puppy: What?

    Anti-pup: Well, the jokes on you! Science fiction has always been inclusive!

    Puppy: ...

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  11. (Note: I aten't dead! Busy few days, and my next post is, unsurprisingly, Non-Short. I'm working on it. Expect it when you see it :P)

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  12. I think the main problem in this entire affair is one of information. The story of the blind men and the elephant is an illustration of the idea that what one knows is what there is to know. Frankly, the amount of research required to accurately portray what has happened in core fandom since 2009 leaves most of the differing factions blind. This is exacerbated by propagandists who do know what is going on, willing to ensure that blindness by way of false narratives continues; that has been their stock in trade since the beginning. The lies these people have perpetuated about the history of SFF literature 1912-60 are as enormous in number as they are ignorant.

    An example of an information gap is this idea of affirmative action within fandom. Well, if you advocate that in literally hundreds of quotes but no one understands the sheer volume of those quotes then one can simply deny they occurred in the first place. What comments section can list 300 quotes? List 10 and one can claim they are anecdotal or out of context.

    You can't climb a wall you can't see, but you can keep banging into it.

    Don't ever underestimate the sheer amount of intellectual dishonesty SocJus folks indulge in. They will tell you you're mad to have an ignorant-through-privilege straight white male fulfill the post of a "Diversity and Inclusion Officer" in the same week they'll tell you you're a racist for imagining someone got that job because of their race and sexual orientation, or more precisely that "...suggesting that he was hired for optics instead of his actual for real qualifications you’re perpetuating the idea that the ONLY reason marginalized people get hired for any thing is quotas, diversity-cookies, back-pattings, instead of their actual ability to do the work required of them."

    Notice the intellectually dishonest straw man "ONLY"; who ever said that? Answer: no one. We're talking about successful collusion, not absolute control.

    Their Orwellian arguments are constructed so you're wrong coming and going; an easy if dishonest thing to do, since the unerring target is the straight white male. That is not an opinion; I could list that contrariness above by way of actual quotes til my eyes bleed, but not in a comments section.

    The Requires Hate fake narrative falls just as easily. Not one SocJus was against RH until it was claimed she targeted "PoC." Before that, targeting straight white males was just fine, as is shown by 3 Tor Com bloggers who left sympathetic comments at her now deleted site, another a 7-times Hugo/Nebula nominee, another two personages who now claim to be against her. In other words it was perfectly fine as long as RH wrote "...we consider buffaloes especially stupid as animals go. The perfect analogy for white men." Even the hint she wrote that about "PoC" and SocJus suddenly discovered their neo-Nazi version of "equal protection" and Laura Mixon gets a Hugo, a woman who herself writes loving things about the "unconscious bias on the part of men/whites."

    I will tell you this: the idea there are two sides to this story is as ridiculous as saying there are two sides to "that feud" between neo-Nazis-KKK and Jews-black folks.

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  13. This is not a complex story: around 2009 a wave of intersectional lesbian theory straight from women's and gender studies classes began an assault on SFF. Some of it was fueled by true believer ideologues, some of it by do-gooders who drank the Kool-Aid and saw themselves as Marlon Brando marching with Martin Luther King. This Third Wave Feminism sold itself as an extension of the Civil Rights movement and women's suffrage when in fact it is more an analogy to anti-Semitism, powered by an irrational suspicion and even phobia of men, whites and heterosexuality.

    By claiming SFF's historical demographic spike of men, whites and heterosexuals was socially engineered by hostility, collusion, exclusion, and erasure built on the homophobia, racism and misogyny of straight white men, these ideologues have relentlessly engaged in shaming witchhunts and false accusations to push for "diversity" and what is in effect affirmative action, though they won't call it that.

    These fake inquisitions have ranged from silly paranoia about a "white dude parade" to morons offended by "white saviors" to claims of white men across 100 years conspiring to maintain their central position in fantasy, to idiotic metaphors of "cis white dudes" randomly punching women, "PoC" and gays, to outright lies in Guest of Honor speeches about careers being "strangled" and suppressed, an idea promoted by and about people who were published and award-nominated from the very beginning of their careers.

    Another Guest of Honor speech claims "I wish I was exaggerating" the racism and marginalization they admit they've never seen while elsewhere claiming a too-white photo of former WorldCon chairs is proof of this white male conspiracy.

    They routinely claim SFF is built of manly men doing manly things, but any fool knows even the 100 year old Burroughs was called a writer of planetary romance. No man has ever tried to impress a woman at a night club or beach by flashing an SF novel at them. Our genre has more the flavor of big front yards, vintage seasons and supercilious con men wandering dying earths than it does a body-building ad in the back of an old comic book.

    The truth is what built SFF is what built every other form of entertainment in magazines: ad dollars, sales figures and reading tastes.

    I have no intention or desire of meeting this cult half-way, no more than does the NAACP in regard to the KKK. Politeness has nothing to do with it. Unpacking lies has everything to do with it, and getting back to genre for the sake of genre, instead of innocuous SFF stories seen through the eyes of morbidly political paranoids and sociopaths.

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  14. The Sad Puppies' top problem is their association with Vox Day. He was a part of SP2 and it defies belief to claim he wasn't part of SP3, given the nature of the list, the secret way it was produced, and the way some of Brad Torgesen's comments that make it sound like he and Vox Day worked on it in concert. (E.g. https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/vox-plays-chicken-with-worldcon/)

    Most people would be at pains to dissociate themselves from a self-proclaimed White Nationalist, but the Puppies go to great lengths not to do so. It inclines reasonable people to think that the Sad/Rabid divide is a sham. The truth seems to be that you still have strong ties to Vox Day and you are not willing to break those ties.

    Breaking those ties will take a lot more than the occasional mild post saying "we're not Vox Day." A lot more.

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  15. No one seems to have identified the activity around the changes in ideology here as bullying. I'd like to suggest this now. The role of bullies in a social situation is to enforce conformity and defend the “correct” social order. They are generally people of lower status who expect this activity will raise their social standing in the group. For this reason, bullies tend to become the tool of dictatorial regimes and to produce knee-jerk, group-think responses in a community to people trying to propose a reasonable discussion about change.

    It’s fairly easy to fit cases of author bullying into this model of how bullying works. When you accept that the role of bullies is enforcement, then it’s easy to understand that authors who get out of line somehow will be attacked. This suggests that there is currently a dominant ideology in the speculative fiction field, and given the recent attacks on the Sad Puppy authors, they’re apparently seen as trespassing against this ideology.
    Many people want to make a positive contribution by supporting progressive goals, and see themselves as activists without realizing they have slipped into bullying behavior. Activism becomes terrorism when the person causes real harm to others. Terrorists tend to shop around for an ideology that permits them to engage in this kind of violence and then allow the ideology to shape their actions. Requires Hate’s behavior seems unprovoked and suggests that she has been operating as a terrorist. Should others in the SFF community also look at their behavior and consider moderation?

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  16. Listen to yourself Greg. The top problem is an association with VD? Fine. What principle are you using there? What neutral definition of group defamation, racism, sexism, sex hatred or genderphobia? What bar are you using that one can apply to all rather than slipping away on some punching up/power/privilege gibberish?

    Listen, I will never allow hate speech to define itself. I am not that stupid.

    Slippery definitions is what allows you to write what you did with a straight face while ignoring the obsessive group defamation of men, whites and heterosexuals by Jemisin, de Bodard, Ahmed, Elliott, Book Smugglers, Uncanny, Lightspeed, Older, A. Dawn Johnson, Bradford, Finlay, Larbalestier, Kendall, Goh, Patel, Luhrs, Buhlert, Hines, Scalzi, el-Mohtar, Mixon, Gould, and so many frickin' more I can't hold them in my brain at the same time.

    Go get yourself a chalkboard and write "equal protection" on it until you get it.

    I am not the Devil of some absurdly delusion gender studies program. I am a human being just like you. You want respect, you give it. You want double standards? I can give that to you too. Really, I just want to be left alone. But make me the butt of demonization theories and there's going to be problem.

    Choose. You folks are not having this both ways. I have never agreed to have my rights eroded because of some moronic ideology cooked up by insane and even murderous lesbians in the '70s which demonizes me for waking up in the morning.

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    1. "Listen, I will never allow hate speech to define itself. I am not that stupid."

      Yet the Hate Crime/Hate Incident definition promoted by the UK's Association of Chief Police Officers, hardly a left wing group, specifically identifies the need to allow the victims of hate incidents to determine what is and isn't hate at work.

      And thanks for that list of the writers working to defend people like me. As an aside, I spent thirty years not recognising the privilege I enjoyed as a straight, white, middle class male. Then I became disabled, and suddenly I was a fraud, a scrounger, someone to be attacked in the street and harassed out of my job. Becoming disabled showed me that the privilege I had had was stunning in its extent, and that I had been wrong when I denied it, not the people calling attention to it. And that's why I thank God I became disabled, and a better man for it.

      And wow, could you be any more offensive than in that last paragraph? I count at least homophobia, ableism and misogyny, and isn't that something we should all be taking a stand against?

      Delete
  17. Wow, so many people arguing 'we're not the bullies, we've always been inclusive, it's those horrible Social Justice Warriors who aren't'.

    Let me tell you how it feels from my perspective. I'm a disabled fan, a disabled SF/F author (one of this year's Pitchwars mentees for my diverse urban fantasy Graveyard Shift), and a reasonably prominent disability rights activist. Since I became visibly disabled I've lost count of the number of verbal attacks I've faced, mostly complete strangers labelling me a 'scrounger' and 'a fraud' - I've not yet had the experience of several disabled friends and had an utter stranger walk up to me in the street and tell me I should commit suicide, I've been physically assaulted for walking while disabled, I've been accused of benefit fraud and forced out of my cutting edge career with a prominent multinational. Cons aren't like that, you say, yet last year I had to publically put a prominent con on the spot because a month before the con they had zero accessibility information and their hotel info was suggesting that as a wheelchair user I pay a 50% surcharge to stay in a non-con hotel. Putting them on the spot got them to finally publish that vital access info, to explain that the hotel info was badly worded, and to admit that you couldn't actually get between the secondary con hotels and the main one in a wheelchair (they offered to pay for taxis - but all this only came out once they were put on the spot). I had to be a Social Justice Warrior just to work out if I could get in the front door (and the answer was I couldn't). So when the Puppies spit on the work of Social Justice Warriors, you're spitting on people like me, trying to ensure we can get in the door.

    And yes, I will police your language towards me, and your stories, because I don't give hate speech a pass. And SF/F is rife with it. Think of any SF/F story about disability, Ship Who Sang is a classic example. If they aren't trying to cure us, they're trying to hide us away in the attic (or the instrument panel), or patronise us (and Ship indulges in outright eugenics towards the disabled kids who don't get to be walled away in a shell, yet people proclaim it's a _positive_ example of disability in SF/F). Imagine the reaction to an SF/F story that said 'We've come up with a cure for being black' (or gay, or muslim, or conservative), yet every damn SF/F story about disability is 'We can cure you'. No one has the common courtesy to do the damned research and realise huge swathes of disabled people absolutely do not want to be cured. And fighting to make people understand this, to not claim I should be erased from the face of the planet, is what Social Justice Warrioring is.

    And all the while the Puppies rant about how SJWs like me are destroying SF/F, your movement is cosying up to a woman-hating neo-Nazi, with not a word of criticism for the hate he openly indulges in. Meanwhile last year's Sad Puppy campaign draped itself in the flag of diversity - yet Puppies I talked to didn't even understand that diversity is more than just race, way to exploit me as a political token, people. If you want my respect, show me something to respect.

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  18. David, please read Magazines in the 20th Century (1956). Surprisingly, it is about Magazines in the 20th Century, not nonsense about privilege. In it you will find how magazines operated, and it had nothing to do with women's studies classes or post-structuralism.

    I am sorry you are disabled. People who have insulted you are not me. This is called "equal protection," a thing the U.K. does not have. Neither do they have a Constitution nor free speech and I don't care what they do or say. I am an American.

    There is no homphobia, ableism or misogyny in anything I said. Radical lesbian feminists are no more representative of lesbians or women than whites are of the KKK. We've now all seen this sad trick people like you do where if we push back against any ideology which claims to represent non-whites, women or gays - no matter how insane - that somehow makes us bigots. It's not working - stop selling it.

    The insane lesbian radical Valerie Solanas had her insane SCUM Manifesto published in Sisterhood is Powerful (1970), an insane anthology published by the goofy lesbian supremacist Robin Morgan. The New York Public Library put that silly book on its list of the 100 most influential books of the 20th century, to the regret of us all. Valerie Solanas tried to murder Andy Warhol - shooting him and an associate - and got 3 years in a prison mental hospital for her trouble. She died as insane as she lived, living on the streets of San Francisco mutilating her own flesh. If you want to defend that, go ahead. I don't remember hearing anything about "ableism" or "whiteyphobia" or "misandry" when some mental case shot 9 black people to death in S. Carolina. All I heard is white people got to get their act together. The simple reason for that is social justice crusaders are hypocrites and liars. No one you deem politically unclean is spitting on disabled people; that is another lie.

    In fact you do give hate speech a pass. That is because you have no definition of it and you have no definition of it because you have no principles.

    And in fact Ann Leckie's historically awarded novel Ancillary Justice was acclaimed precisely because it addressed this daffy cult's "cure" for heterosexuality: genderblindness via the subversion of speech/pronouns. The fact you don't know that means nothing to me.

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    1. why would I care about something printed in 1956 when I am challenging behaaviour in 2016?

      You say you haven't insulted me, yet you insulted me just by saying you're 'sorry' I am disabled. It says you think disability is a negative. Imagine telling someone that you're sorry they're black or gay. I'll give you a pass on that one, because that's a lesson we're having to teach the whole of society, but it's the only pass you're getting here today.

      You're incorrect in stating that the UK has neither a constitution nor free speech. The UK follows the constitutional law model, by having a living body of constitutional law able to respond to the needs of society. I find it a far superior model to the US one, you are free to differ, but not to deny it exists. As for free speech, we have that, and like other rights we realise that it stops the moment it as used as a bludgeon to attack the rights of others (a position also held by the US, c.f. crowded theatres). And we're discussing fandom, not narrow national issues.

      You claim there is no ableism in what you said, then go on to repeatedly use 'insane' and 'mental case' in a pejorative manner.

      You claim I give hate speech a pass and that in allowing it's victims the freedom to say 'this attacks me for who I am' I have no principles. Sounds like hatred for my principles (and those of the UK Association of Chief Police Officers) to me.

      Thanks, I couldn't ask for a stronger advocate for my points.

      To all the other Puppies who claim you're hard done by. You prove it by speaking up against people like this.

      Delete
    2. WRT to Ancillary Justice, it actually says nothing about the values we attach to homo- or heterosexuality, or trans and cis-gender, it simply explores a world in which the distinctions are so meaningless they no longer have any value, or a word to describe them.

      And isn't rigourous exploration of new concepts, with a damned good story attached, precisely what we have traditionally cherished as fans?

      Delete
    3. I am only going to comment once here, and have no intention of being drawn into a lengthy flame war over science fiction tastes.
      I am legally blind and have been so my entire life (genetic condition). I have been looking over the comments in this thread, as I know some of the key players well (I'm the OP's brother and keep in touch with several others here). And I must say...I'm gravely concerned.
      David G - you really feel that you are being insulted when someone says "I'm sorry that you're disabled"? I find this tendency of the differently-abled (to use a needlessly complex politically-correct term, in the hopes that I don't offend you) to pummel the world for daring not to be constructed around their specific issues offensive.
      As I said, I am legally blind. I cannot drive, I was never good at sports, I struggled and fought every...single...day...with a public education system that didn't do very well catering to my specific needs. There were bright spots. I had a geometry teacher, who was frustrated with the whole class talking too much and making it impossible for me to follow the lectures, have everyone don blindfolds for an entire lecture and then write a quick one-page summary on what that was like, trying to learn an inherently visual subject without vision. There was no talking problem the rest of the year. :) I had a technology teacher tell me that, although I couldn't master circuit boards because I couldn't see the pieces well enough, and I took forever to make a technical drawing, that I "see things no one else can" because I was ahead of the curve at understanding the force balances in bridge design based on the feel of various possible models. I had a drama teacher who made sure to cast me in every production for which I tried out even though dancing was difficult for someone who couldn't see well enough to pick up the steps because I had more desire to be involved than any of her stars (and no...I was not that good an actor).
      So there've been bright spots. But I've also faced unfair barriers - my vision may even have cost me a Ph.D. I had a terrible dynamic meteorology professor (he was a good guy, but lousy at teaching) who used to write illegibly on the board and never face the students for entire lectures...they had trouble, but I found it IMPOSSIBLE to follow even with his notes printed out and handed to me. So I did really poorly in the class and my adviser, based on my poor performance, told me not to take the qualifying exam (though my fellow student colleagues disagreed) and I foolishly listened to him.
      Here's the thing...I've been through a lot because of my blindness, and never once have I become bitter about it - never once have I expected the world to remake itself especially for me - never once have I been offended when someone regretted my plight by saying something like "Oh no...I'm sorry!" when I explained it. That is a fundamentally CARING thing to say...and it is extremely difficult for people to know how to act when encountering evidence of their own advantages, fair or not, over another person.

      Delete
    4. It's really funny, actually - most people don't even want to bring up my obvious visual problems...when they do it is almost always with extreme caution. "Do you wear glasses?" is a common starter. After I explain my issue (albinism), they are always AMAZED that I can talk about it so openly and seem not to be bothered by their questions. That attitude...the fear of offending me...is offensive...not their reasonable curiosity or even their pity for me that I have to work harder than they do.
      I'm legally blind...I ask absolutely NOTHING of the world but honesty and maybe, occasionally, a bit of mercy shown if I don't move quickly in line at an airport because I'm trying to read the signs or can't see that there is an open teller station at the bank. Just a little bit of toleration and no more. I will not throw a pity party because things are harder for me. I will not lob grenades at people who are behaving in a completely natural way when encountering someone like me. And I will not hold all of society hostage and demand that absolutely everything be 100% perfected so that I'm on a level playing field. I don't believe level playing fields exist. Humans are not equal...we have equal rights and equal value, but we are all different with different abilities and different limitations. You sound like you are on some sort of personal quest to demand that every accommodation be made by all who cross your path and to hold people to IMPOSSIBLE standards of perfect behavior in your eyes. You will never be happy living that way. You will never...ever feel like anything other than a victim. It will never be enough for you...no level of effort to help you will be seen as anything but "it's about time" or "insufficient". I feel sorry for you...and it has nothing to do with your handicap.
      Sir, you have it exactly wrong - you are the victim of only one person...yourself. It does not matter what insults people throw at you. PROVE THEM WRONG. Do so and you will be happy...do so and you will truly overcome whatever hurdles you've faced. They cannot hurt you...only you can hurt yourself.

      Delete
    5. SABR Matt, apologies for the delay in responding - disability stuff happened. Picking up items from your posts:
      Most of the disabled activists I know detest 'differently abled' and the like, these cutesy terms are mainly externally imposed by non-disabled 'ally' groups who won't listen when we object to what they are doing, and are ultimately rooted in a belief disability is something to be ashamed of, which is diametrically opposed to where the actually disabled activists stand. As I pointed out in the fan access group just yesterday, many of these so-called allies won't even allow us to label ourselves the way we want and insist that they know better. That's the kind of ally we could do without.

      I say I'm insulted by people being sorry I'm disabled, and I am, they're locked into the personal tragedy model of disability, in which my life is lessened by disability. In fact my life has been massively enriched, and to bring society to viewing me, and other disabled people, as their equals, we need to start challenging their views. That's how we got the statutory rights we have today, it's how we make those statutory rights into a lived reality.

      You talk about your disability. I can happily talk the hind-leg off a donkey on the details of my disabilities, but that information is not people's by right, which is the attitude we encounter from many. When 'what's wrong with you?' is the first thing they demand of us, that's not a healthy attitude to disability, nor a respectful one, and it opens up an opportunity to educate them. Anyone asking me "what's wrong with you?" is liable to find me inquiring after their grandma's sex life, to illustrate by analogy the depth of private information they're asking for. Rudeness doesn't begin to cover it, and education is the appropriate response.

      I ask one thing of the world, and make no apology for that - I demand it treat me as an equal, with equal rights to go everywhere and do everything. That's the core of the Social Model of Disability, the heart of disability policy, and it's the breadth of that demand that people have difficulty grasping. That equality is reflected in everything from the physical presence of ramps to the social acceptance that I cand other people with similar disabilities can't reliably commit to many activities and may have to cancel at no notice, because that's the way fatigue-based disabilities operate, and it's not something that should be seen as a negative. That's a subtle point to get across, but a valid one. I, and the rest of the disability rights movement, believe we won't get these things established as the common understanding of disability unless we fight for them and challenge entrenched views of disability. I won't apologise for that, and I absolutely will not accept anyone dismissing fighting for equality as 'a pity party'. Would you label black rights or gay rights so contemptuously?

      Delete

    6. Perfect accomodation is impossible, you and I are actually an example of that: textured paving, a vital safety accommodation for people with visual impairments, is actually dangerous to many people with mobility impairments, whether at the minor level of a trip hazard, or as potentially life-threatening to someone with skin-breakdown issues. I don't demand perferction, I'm far from perfect, but I demand the right to be heard with respect when I say 'this is a problem'.

      You say "you are the victim of only one person...yourself. It does not matter what insults people throw at you. PROVE THEM WRONG. "

      Two answers. First the personal. I have. I glide, I sail. I spent 20 years at the bleeding edge of aerospace, team-led the first ever safety-critical head-up display for C-17 (vs mission-critical for everything that preceded it), provided the evidence for my ex-employer to show we were CMM Level 4 as a software organisation (that's NASA level for complexity and safety criticality), rewrote the complete quality processes for a $Bns multinational. And all the while I was doing this for one set of managers, another set were claiming I was idle, incompetent, lazy - except when no one was listening, when they would admit the issue was disability, and not being able to treat me as a faceless cog in the machine. They called our CTO 'the Rottweiler', for her ferocity and her manner. I didn't just argue her to a standstill when I forced her to defend those managers, I won. So they came after me a different way, by axing the group I was in, not me as an individual. The man who tried to assault me for walking while disabled? He was the one who found out how good a weapon a crutch is. I'm no one's victim.

      And the collective answer. You've framed your criticism of me as 'a victim' as individual. But what I'm articulating is the standard position of 1) followers of the Social Model of Disability (so a significant proportion of disabled people everywhere, and especially disabled activists). 2) the neurodiverse community, so the autistic self-advocates, the dyslexics, dyspraxics and other people with Specific Learning Difficulties, and many people with MH issues who choose to consider themselves part of neurodiversity, 3) the Deaf community, who consider their disability a culture, and 4) many tens and hundreds of thousands of other disabled people and disability groups who don't see themselves as lessened by disability, and refuse to be treated as if they are.

      And in the end you have proved my point, by trying to diminish me as 'a victim' for no crime other than being an activist and speaking out.

      Delete
  19. I don't think you'll get much of an argument here about Vox and his cohorts being total douches. Wht we object to is the demand to engage in 2 minute hates to satisfy some SJW requirement for penance before they will even consider treating us like human beings. We know it's all a mugs game. Scalzi was having much fun on his blog about the confusion of rabid and sad puppies. He knew they were different, but it suited his purposes (to ignore the critics) tp pretend he didn't. Again, spare us your moral indignation.

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    1. You guys are a group historically associated with white supremacists. That's a fact. Think about that for a minute.

      Despite your claims, you've made no serious effort to disassociate yourselves. That's just astonishing.

      Quite the opposite. You talk like them; you have the same enemies list, you use the same acronyms, you have the same list of imaginary grievances. It's clear from your posts (on both sides) that your leadership talk together a lot.

      Why would anyone be so stupid as to think you're two different groups? Bar the occasional "we're not them!" post, it's impossible to tell you apart.

      Delete
    2. Well, Greg, your movement is historically associated with black, female and gay supremacists. They outnumber the single white supremacist you envision by an order of magnitude. That is an easily documented fact.

      At what date can we announce your happy disassociation from them and their daily and obsessive hate speech against men, ethnic Europeans and heterosexuals?

      Delete
    3. See what I mean? No amount of "Vox Day and his clan (pun intended) are evil Maternal Frackers!!!) are enough. That's why Scalzi was having such a good time. He knew playing the game meant he didn't have to answer any questions.

      Look, if you want to discuss the issues, great. If you just want to call us names, the game is over.

      Delete
    4. I see precisely no difference between the Sad and Rabid Puppies. What I do see is that the Sads freely associated themselves with Theodore Beale and all he stands for when they thought it was convenient for their cause.

      A man, or a movement, is known by the company they keep.

      Delete
    5. David, you are incorrect when you say, “the Sads freely associated themselves with Theodore Beale and all he stands for”. The Sads associated himself with a story he wrote—to my mind a decent story, perhaps not phenomenal but superior to others on the ballot and far better than the Hugo and Nebula winners that year. We associated ourselves with the idea that a story ought to be judged on its merits, even when written by a person with unpleasant beliefs.

      We did not associate ourselves with Beale as a person nor with his positions. Any argument to the contrary must come with special pleading why authors associated with even more vile, but left-wing, causes are not to be equally shunned.

      Delete
    6. "You guys are a group historically associated with white supremacists. That's a fact. Think about that for a minute."
      It's stuff like this that's hate speech. Placing labels on people that are not true has been the modus operendi of the puppy kicker right along from the beginning. If you have any actual proof that the sad puppies are in any way white supremicists, considering most of who the membership of the sad puppies is, it would be truly amazing.

      Delete
    7. Greg HullenderFebruary 25, 2016 at 4:22 PM
      "You guys are a group historically associated with white supremacists. That's a fact. Think about that for a minute."

      Citations required, please.

      Delete
    8. DavidGFebruary 26, 2016 at 5:52 AM
      "I see precisely no difference between the Sad and Rabid Puppies."

      Then you are blind AND stupid.

      "What I do see is that the Sads freely associated themselves with Theodore Beale and all he stands for when they thought it was convenient for their cause."

      Citations required.

      "A man, or a movement, is known by the company they keep."

      Then you would be a liar, a bigot and a hypocrite, by your very own yard-stick.

      Delete
  20. If one wants to open a moderate conversation you can see the single defining problem here right off the bat. We need to agree on one single defining definition on what "hate speech" is.

    I'll tell you the same thing I said 2 years ago when I made the same appeal: that act, which should be simple for any sane culture or civilization to do, is the one thing these social justice crusaders will never do. Keeping that term vague and one-sided is the entire essence of their con game.

    The other obvious problem to observe is how deep the social justice crusader bench is when it comes to that term. On the other side, they keep saying "Vox Day" as if he is not only an entire army of bigots but one that stretches back 100 years to the Munsey Magazines.

    I'll say this again: the 5 supremacist "feminist" authors on the same ideological page who won Nebulas the night of the "no white men" Tweet (6 if you include the Tweeter) outnumber the entire number of any mythical opposite ideology in the last 100 years of SFF. That is not an opinion, but a fact, and a rather stunning one.

    I'm surprised anyone has ever fallen for this transparent con game which erases the entire history of magazines in America, leaving only SFF pulps to represent an anti-female tyranny by the simple expedient of pretending Good Housekeeping, The New Yorker, Vogue, Red Book, Cosmopolitan and many others never existed, also erasing hundreds of female authors and editors in the process who were common names from 1912 to 1955.

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    1. You keep talking about needing to define hate speech, then making ableist statements based on sanity.

      "A hate incident is:
      ‘Any non-crime incident which is
      perceived by the victim or any other
      person, as being motivated by hostility
      or prejudice based on a person’s age, disability, gender identity, race, religion / belief or sexual orientation’ .’

      A hate crime is:
      ‘Any hate incident, which constitutes a
      criminal offence, perceived by the victim
      or any other person, as being motivated
      by prejudice or hate based on a person’s
      age, disability, gender identity, race, religion / belief or sexual orientation.’"

      Some radical social crusader? No, the UK's Association of Chief Police Officers, more often found campaigning for more surveillance, extra legal protections for the police, and other right wing agenda.

      Delete
    2. “… perceived by the victim …”

      A saner definition would be “… intended by the actor (or speaker) …”, with some discussion of intent can be ascertained. (In Common Law, the “reasonable observer” standard is customary.)

      As a lover of justice and fair play, I find definitions like this, intentionally designed to not to be defendable against, personally offensive; they seem to be aimed at bullying those who believe as I do out of spaces where such rules are in effect.

      Delete
    3. I perceive every word DavidG utters as motivated by hatred based on age, disability, gender identity, race, religion / belief or sexual orientation. DavidG, please immediately desist from these hate incidents.

      Delete
  21. Apparently you have a reading comprehension problem. I said quite clearly that VD and his kind are douches. Now I am suggesting we move on to the real issues at hand.
    To continue to harp on VD is to avoid those issues. That's the game Scalzi and company want play. We know that no matter how forcefully we denounce VD, it will never be enough, because your side doesn't want to talk about the real issues. As I said, it's a mugs game.

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    1. You said it, and I thank you for that, though I'd prefer you to have called him what he is, a woman hating, neo-Nazi, making your condemnation of those points clear. But the Sad Puppies as a whole haven't, and your leaders haven't. What they did do was cosy up with Beale and all he stands for. And I saw other Puppies deliberately trying to involve the Gamersgaters, knowing full well the kind of harassment and illegal behaviour that movement has indulged itself in.

      That's something one man can't apologise for (though again yours is welcome), it needs a mea culpa from the entire movement, an outright condemnation of everything Beale stands for from the leaders who associated themselves, and you, with him in the first place, and some visible atonement for backing a neo-Nazi (I'd suggest a crowd-sourced fundraiser to be split between leading women's rights and anti-hate groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center). If Scalzi can use donations to make a political point, surely it shouldn't be beyond the Puppies?

      Delete
    2. What they did do was cosy up with Beale and all he stands for.

      Either you're a moron or a liar. Proof or shut up.

      Delete
    3. DavidGFebruary 26, 2016 at 6:25 AM
      "That's something one man can't apologise for (though again yours is welcome), it needs a mea culpa from the entire movement, an outright condemnation of everything Beale stands for from the leaders who associated themselves, and you, with him in the first place, and some visible atonement for backing a neo-Nazi (I'd suggest a crowd-sourced fundraiser to be split between leading women's rights and anti-hate groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center)."

      Again, citations required. Otherwise, you get NOTHING.

      Regardless, screw you, nobody need apologize for anything they didn't do. Your claiming otherwise, without presentation of evidence, is a pretty foul, base attempt at slander.

      Delete
  22. Here's hoping that the "moderate" conversation between Stephanie and Standback can continue. I'm interested in reading how it plays out. That's not going to happen if folks on both sides can't stay moderate. Saying that people are white supremacists, or talking about secret cabals of feminist activists is, IMHO, not exactly moderate, and doesn't lead to conversation.

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    1. Making up a bald-faced lie about anyone claiming there is a secret cabal of feminists is the problem. There is nothing secret about Anita Sarkeesian nor her part in a panel in Australia called "What is feminism" nor her there claiming how much she adored bell hooks nor her saying at that symposium she has no interest in equality within a patriarchy. Go watch Milo's latest debate at Michigan U; self-described "political lesbian" Julie Bindel makes the same claim about a "patriarchy" crippling the life of women. That is all on youtube and is only as secret as you not watching it.

      Your comment is how fake narratives get into mainstream magazines.

      Delete
    2. Surely a fundamental part of the conversation is that Beale _is_ a white-supremacist and that the Puppies associated themselves with him knowing that?

      It certainly is for me when I look at the Puppies and try to judge whether to call them moderate or not.

      Delete
    3. You don't understand what the word "fundamental" means. The fundamental aspect is that Beale doesn't exist in a vacuum. Who and what are you comparing him to? What standard is in play? There is no such thing as "white supremacy" as a principle. That is just one identity. The principle is one of racial and sexual supremacy bound into an ideological context. If N.K. Jemisin is not a supremacist, then neither is Beale. Scalzi pushes feminist supremacist ideology that sees straight white men as morally inferior. Jim Hines pushes the same thing. The Twitter feeds of Justine Larbalestier and two-time Nebula nominee Kate Elliott are laced with an obsessive disdain for men and whites. There is no such thing as hate speech or harassment that only men and whites are guilty of. Of course that's what daffy Third Wave Feminists argue; they're supremacists.

      You cannot gerrymander language like a congressional district to come up with the result you want. You have no principles - only identity; period. That means you have no idea how something as simple as law works; unless you believe only whites should be guilty of burglary. Could be blacks, or Jews. Be careful what you wish for. Once you kill equal protection and open that Pandora's Box it will have no moral compass to guide it and it's as likely to come for you as "them."

      Delete
    4. DavidGFebruary 26, 2016 at 6:28 AM
      "Beale _is_ a white-supremacist and that the Puppies associated themselves with him knowing that?"

      Citations. Now.

      Delete
  23. In other words, you refuse to go beyond hating Vox and actually talk about the issues the puppies are talking about. Thank you for proving my point that Vox is being used by your side as a way to ignore everything else. So much for honest discussion.

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    1. I think the two can't be separated.

      Shouldn't everyone hate what Theodore Beale stands for? And shouldn't your movement's association with him and failure to denounce what he stands for be part of this discussion?

      But as I say I think it's also important to address this core hatred towards equality rights activists (like me) and the work that we do, which the Puppies dismiss as 'SJWs'.

      Isn't it vital that people like me can actually get in the front door of cons? That we're not actually charged extra for attending because vital access information isn't released until after early bird rates have closed (as we've seen with World Fantasy Con 2016 just in the past couple of weeks, no matter the bad publicity WFC 2015 already had over access)? Isn't it vital that if we're on a panel, we can actually get on the podium with the rest of the panel, not be expected to sit at their feet like a child begging for attention? Isn't it vital that if we are involved in the Masquerade or Awards, that we can get on the stage? Isn't it vital we can take part in the con as equals and not be denigrated or subject to hate speech just for who we are? And isn't it vital that the literature of SF/F not call for the extermination of my minority, as it so often does?

      I see these as vital areas for campaigning for my rights as a disabled person, and parallel areas for other minorities as equally vital. I can't ethically campaign for my rights if I'm willing to leave any other minority behind. Yet the position of the Puppies seems to be that this makes me an existential threat to SF/F. Shouldn't we be talking about this?

      You say we're refusing to discuss your issues, but from where I sit, your issues consist of objecting to my right to fight for my equality, in an environment where the need for that is both readily apparent and widely publicised.

      Delete
    2. @DavidG: I don't have time to respond to you at length because I'm spending time with my parents at a con, but I just want to note, as the originator of this post, that I have a serious chronic illness that has substantially impaired my mobility, and yet I take SERIOUS issue with your approach. The issue of accessibility IS real; believe me, I know. However, the way you mix that genuine issue with identity politics is something I FIERCELY oppose. Indeed, I find it extraordinarily counter-productive. And I'll leave it at that until I have access to my home computer and I am not shaking in rage.

      In short: YOU DON'T SPEAK FOR ME.

      Delete
    3. The idea that calling a clinically diagnosed insane convicted attempted murderer "insane" is an ableism and therefore hate speech isn't an idea worthy of an adult, neither are any of your other ideas, which are either uninformed or just plain bizarre. Your portrayal of Gamergate is an outright lie. You need to read the history of magazines to understand their rich complexity, how they actually worked and therefore what lies are told about the SFF magazines which created SFF as we know it.

      Delete
    4. David, I assume that you are over the age of ten, have traveled before, and know how to use a computer and a phone. In that case, if you have concerns about a hotel, it's real easy. You look them up on the internet, a task that takes oh, about ten seconds, find the phone number, and call the hotel. I'm sure that, if like every hotel I have ever been to, they've had to deal with accessibility issues, they would be glad to tell you what you need to know. Expecting the Con staff, which is a bunch of volunteers trying to deal with a difficult and complicated thing to deal with the needs of a few is asking a bit much. Especially if you want cons in the future. As for Vox. Why should I hate him. As far as Iknow he's done me names or done me any wrong. do I disagree with a lot of what he says, yes. And I've told him that and why. Frankly though, Vox didn't indulge in petty threats, call a good part of their customers "Nazis" and racists and slander friends of mine all over the international media. It tokk the puppy kickers and their hate speech to do that. Followed up by those stupid wooden buttholes
      As for disability, that's a state of mind.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-BephrXDwY
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqaD3EgUlcA
      Stop whining and maybe you'll do better.

      Delete
  24. As I predicted earlier, no amount of burning Vox at the stake would be enough. That's why I don't want to play this game. Scalzi was laughing at all this because he knew the sjw types would eat that crap up. He knows that Vox isn't the puppies, but is more than happy to pretend otherwise. Congrates, you've been had.

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  25. Hi, Stephanie S

    I'm interested in your statement in the original post around "non-falsifiable accusations of racism/sexism/homophobia/etc." When most of the SF/F that addresses disability wants to cure me of being me, I'm sure you can see how the way I'm addressed might be important to me. I've been insulted in the street too many times for being disabled in public, but it's the calls to eradicate people like me that really hurt, and the only place I see them being treated as a positive representation of disabled people is in SF/F, in response to stories with a cure narrative.

    It really doesn't take much research to find that whole hordes of disabled people are actively opposed to the idea that we want to be cured (and it's worse cousin that it should be imposed on us, a view that actually made in into the Conservative Manifesto in the recent UK election). Deaf, Neurodiverse*, followers of the Social Model of Disability, many born-disabled, we all find the cure narrative hostile to us, for many of us it isn't tantamount to hate speech, it is hate speech. And if it's hate speech, then clearly it's ableism.

    *Autism seems to be a particular draw for cure narratives, particularly problematical given both the vociferous opposition to calls for a cure from autistic self-advocates and the attempts to deny autistic people a voice of their own by people claiming to speak for them (full disclosure: I'm certainly Neurodiverse and have been told by a psychologist I'm likely somewhere in the vicinity of the Autism Spectrum).
    But that's not a widely held view among non-disabled people (see not bothering to do the research). So that brings us back to "non-falsifiable accusations of racism/sexism/homophobia/etc." If I say that a story that calls for curing people of being autistic (which David Weber did in one of the more recent Honor Harrington books, even claiming it as evidence of the good guys superior medical ethics) is not just problematic, but is engaged in ableism and hate speech (even if inadvertent) then isn't that an example of the 'non-falsifiable' claims you say are a problem?

    I've quoted it elsewhere here already, but UK law enforcement works on a hate speech/hate incident/hate crime definition that foregrounds the perception of the victim:
    "A hate incident is:‘Any non-crime incident which is
    perceived by the victim or any other person, as being motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a person’s age, disability, gender identity, race, religion / belief or sexual orientation’"

    When I'm attacked for being me, I'm the only person who can tell you how much damage it did to me. Anyone who tries to tell me whether it did or did not damage me is treating me as a child, who doesn't know their own experience (and being treated as a child is a particularly problematical form of disability hate categorised under the name infantilisation).

    In talking about 'non-falsifiable' incidents of hate speech, are you actually saying we as individual victims don't get to say if we are victims or not? And are you saying that is part of the Puppy platform?

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    1. "a story that calls for curing people of being autistic (which David Weber did in one of the more recent Honor Harrington books, even claiming it as evidence of the good guys superior medical ethics)"

      Which book is that? I want to reread it and take your viewpoint into account.

      Delete
  26. What she is saying is that you don't get to speak for her. She is rejecting the idea of group identity in this situation. Your feelings are not her feelings. You are not her.

    ReplyDelete
  27. Disability is not an identity. Nor is it a lifestyle. Disability is a predicament. Ask any disabled veteran if (s)he'd prefer going back to life prior to the bullet/bomb/accident, and you'll get a resounding, "YES!" I've written about people with disabilities. The main character of my award-winning novelette "Outbound" is a paraplegic who finds his skills advantageous in a zero-gee environment. Of course, when technology gives him the use of his legs (something he's never had before in his whole life) he takes it all in stride. Pun thoroughly intended. Again, disability is not an identity, and it is not a lifestyle. It's a predicament. That doesn't shame or diminish the disabled. It recognizes the truth of their existence. A compassionate society can still be compassionate, without losing sight of the gravity of the actual situation. This is why whole medical industries remain mobilized to find solutions to various disabilities, both physical and mental.

    Now, for Beale, I consider the slavishly cult-like calls for renunciation to be far, far more problematic than Beale himself. Besides, we all know the goal posts would get instantly moved if every single Sad Puppy supporter denounced and reviled Beale in proper Maoist fashion. People would say, "Oh, too little, too late, Puppies still suck." Or something along those lines. And the Puppy-kickers would simply invent some other excuse to hate us.

    There has been no "win" for any of us, since April of 2015. It was obvious. Pretending to be reasonable (in blog comments) while dangling some kind of false flag, "Oh, but if you'd only denounce Beale, whom all righteously good-thinking people denounce, we'd have less of a hard time with you." Bull. I don't believe it for a second. The culture of insta-grievance doesn't argue honestly. The culture of insta-grievance is determined to be pissed no matter what. Sad Puppies has been deemed a "designated target" in this regard, and since we all know it, we don't give a fuck what the Puppy-kickers say or pretend to want out of us. We do our own thing. And we're not chasing the approval of people who feign to have a dialogue, simply as a means to bait and twist.

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    1. I've come to realize that in many ways, disability is a state of mind.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-BephrXDwY

      Delete
    2. Wow, the arch-Puppy himself. I'm honoured. Actually, no I'm not, because your point erases the preferences of huge numbers of disabled people.

      I identify as a disabled person, as a disability rights activist, as a repeated victim of disability hate speech, disability hate incidents, and yes, disability hate crimes. Who are you to tell me disability is not an identity?

      "Disability is a predicament." Nope, I'm Neurodiverse, I'm quite sure being me is not a predicament. And the Neurodiversity movement as a whole is adamant you don't get to call it a predicament. It's who we are.

      I'm also a wheelchair user, pretty sure that's not a predicament either. I had a huge grin on my face this afternoon because the new chair's so much better. Better than the old one, better than walking. Now not every disabled person is going to agree with that. But ask them which they prefer, no chair, or a chair? Wheelchairs are incredibly liberating, but the normie population, who can't be arsed to do the research to see what we actually think, persist in thinking a wheelchair is a tragedy. The disability that leads to you being a wheelchair user may, or may not, be something you consider a negative, the chair itself is a positive on top of that.

      "disability is not an identity, and it is not a lifestyle. It's a predicament. That doesn't shame or diminish the disabled. It recognizes the truth of their existence."

      Contemptuous much? You get to judge what our existence is worth, we don't? Ask the Neurodiverse community, ask the Deaf Community, ask any follower of the Social Model of Disability, ask many born-disabled people, all of whom consider their disability a fundamental part of their identity and in no way a negative, nor 'a predicament'. And before you do that, go away and review what I said upthread about infantilisation as a particularly pernicious form of disability hate that denies disabled people the right to be treated as adults with our own opinions, and our own identity.

      "A compassionate society can still be compassionate, without losing sight of the gravity of the actual situation"

      I don't want your compassion. I want you to look me in the eye and tell me you accept me as your equal just the way I am, and that you accept my right to identify myself any way I damned well please.

      And do the damned research! Huge swathes of disabled people consider disability to be a core and inseparable part of their identity and want no part of any cure. It's not even as if it hasn't been all over fandom in the past month with the SF Signal/Amy Sterling Casil/"We Are All Disabled" fiasco!

      Delete
  28. We've certainly seen the goalpost thing here. I stated at the outset that I wasn't a Vox fan, in an effort to move beyond that point. That wasn't enough though, as Vox is all the other side wanted to talk about. I knew it was a mugs game, and I've seen nothing here that proves me wrong.

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  29. The truly ironic thing about the Vox hate thing is that the kickers did exactly what the so and so wanted them to do, what he baited them to do. He knew they wouldn't be able to resist burning down the Hugos if it meant keeping outsiders out. That they could do it under the guise of social justice was just icing on the cake. Yes there was much celebrating that night, with Vox having the most fun.

    ReplyDelete
  30. Hate speech does not "foreground" the perception of the victim. By that standard, anything can be anything, and that is precisely the way intersectional gender theorists want it. There's no rules, no equal protection, no due process.

    Hate speech is typically any rhetoric which obsessively singles out and demonizes entire groups according their biological origins. In essence that means the very SFF authors who you claim advocate for you occupy the same intellectual and philosophical space as neo-Nazis. Tweeting about wheel chair ramps hardly absolves them of that nor proves the average American doesn't advocate such ramps.

    Before the deluge of "mansplaining," and "white tears" came, there was not one single thing in the entire history of SFF to justify that other than ideological hatred fueled by Reichstag fires about the "underrepresented" and "marginalized" in SFF; an event which never happened.

    No where have you proved such advocacy for the disabled in America exists along any ideological lines whatsoever, certainly not that of Third Wave Feminists. The simple reason for that is they don't. In America, in the '60s and '70s, entire cities created little curved ramps on every single corner on every single block for wheel chair access, and at enormous expense. That was not an ideological act nor broken down along sexual or racial lines. It's just how we decided to do things. No party or ideology gets credit for that, nor does any biological group get shut out of the credit.

    Considering your obvious hostility towards people who've never done you harm and argue nothing more than Constitutional protections, you're a perfect example of the types of people attracted to intersectionalism; the more vectors of victimhood the better you are and the worse we are. You become the voice of wisdom by default, I the voice of ignorant "privilege." Intersectionalism is nothing more than a sociopathic cult and hate movement. It is also the default orthodoxy of the "social justice" arm of SFF.

    John Scalzi himself tried to sell us the magnificently ignorant nonsense of famed black lesbian intersectionalist Audre Lorde about the privilege of the "white, thin, male, young, heterosexual." I'm tired of that con game. Please stop selling it and confusing your disabilities with a morality superior to mine while wielding your misfortunes like a baseball bat to beat us with.

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    1. Am I attracted to victimhood? Or are you attracted to victimisation?

      You bring up Scalzi. Scalzi actually did the research. He talked to disabled people, found out what we though about cure narratives, and wrote Lock In, in which the desire, or not, for a cure becomes a major plot point, and writing what I and many disabled people have found to be the single best representation of actually being disabled in SF/F.

      If Scalzi can do it, is it really beyond the authors who align themselves with the Puppies?

      And by the way, before likening disabled people and their supporters to the Nazis, go away and have the sheer common decency to read up on Aktion T4. Disabled people were the first victims of the Holocaust, and they started with our children.

      Delete
    2. Heinlein wrote "Waldo" in 1942 and in any event, how many stories like that do you think a genre like SFF can handle? How many TV shows like Ironsides or movies like Silver Bullet does it take before you declare us fit to be as human as you? You need to take up your complaints with the people actually doing these things you're complaining about instead of smearing us all as being complicit in some kind of act of immorality.

      Thanks for the Nazi story, but in fact being disabled is not a free pass to indulge in supremacy and you're not going to get away with using it as a shield or weapon, not with me. Ironically, in my culture, I recognize transgender, gays, straights, whites, non-whites and in fact everyone to be human. That means no groups get a pass based on their identity. No such groups have ever cornered the market on morality, so stop selling that. Go read our Constitution; there is nothing about "privilege" in it.

      Delete
    3. @DavidG said" If Scalzi can do it, is it really beyond the authors who align themselves with the Puppies? "

      The answer to that is "yes", it is beyond them. Puppy writers are not very good. Probably the best they have is Larry Correia and he is just OK. That's why they do niche marketing which is what the Puppy branding is all about.

      Delete
  31. The white privilege thing really ticks me off. Look, if you are a successful best selling sf author who gets to hang out with T.V.'s Wil Wheaton, then yes you have the right to declare your privilege. What you don't have is the right to extend that sense of privilege to other people who happen to share your skin tone and gender. Most of us (of any color and gender) are not living life at the lowest difficulty setting.

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    1. I went from being a Straight, Cis, White, Middle-Class Male able to go anywhere in safety, to being a Disabled, Straight, Cis, White, Middle-Class male, and being abused and assaulted in some of the poshest parts of my gentrified, tourist-trap home-town. Outside the cathedral, on the high-street, almost at my door. The overwhelming view of non-disabled people, helped by national newspaper headlines such as '75% are faking' and a stream of propaganda from a hostile government, is that disabled people are overwhelmingly fakes and frauds, and they feel entitled to abuse us for it.

      Privilege is real. Disability is one of the few areas where you can transition from privileged to non-privileged, and the contrast is stunning.

      That's why I say I was so pleased to become disabled, it was my conversion on the road to Damascus, and opened my eyes to the real situation. I'm a far better man for it.

      Delete
    2. If you were really able to go anywhere in safety, more power to you. The 99% of the rest of humanity (of every color, gender, orientation, or ability) doesn't have that luxury. That's the problem with the whole privilege idea. You are trying to assign a quality to people you've never met and have no idea how they live.

      Delete
  32. Oh gawd. Try talking to people who *haven't* had their experiences and feeling dismissed whole sale as a matter of course what it's like to be unpersoned on a regular basis. As for England "help to cover up a child sex racket affecting hundreds or get accused of Hate Speech" which actually happened to the person who broke silence is NOT a model anyone should tolerate.

    ReplyDelete
  33. Although a couple people is hardly a consensus, the social justice side are in fact representative of the same tired argument; the only rules they wish are those which benefit them and their "oppressed" identities.

    The anti-feminist side argues due process, free speech and equal protection which benefits or punishes based on human rights and law, not a whirling weather vane.

    Social justice crusaders are not only addicted to this scenario, their movement literally ceases to exist if they give it up. "White privilege" and "rape culture" are nothing more than demonization theory which subtly smears and involves every man and white person in the world in acts of immorality, racism, sexual bigotry or even crimes. Such theories are not one whit different than anti-Semitic blood libels.

    Then ask yourself what any of this has to do with SFF and the obsessive and lunatic nature of it becomes apparent.

    Without rules there is no meeting ground. Without agreeing on the meaning of quotes there is nothing. Lying about facts becomes a merry-go-round. Third Wave Feminism is a delusional, anti-science, ahistoric hate movement of proven serial liars. It needs to be thrown out of SFF, not met halfway. In any event, there is no halfway, is there?

    The great irony here is social justice crusaders define Vox Day as indulging in hate speech and show us he must be thrown out. In essence, social justice crusaders are themselves calling for their own expulsion from SFF.

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  34. David... you are entitled *not to like* books where disability is cured. I can understand that when no cures are possible that reading about someone being cured might be like rubbing salt in a wound that you've worked hard and long not to be resentful over. But to pretend that cures and imagining future cures are hate speech is obsurd. Trying to decide for others who are disabled that they shouldn't seek a cure isn't absurd, it's disgusting, and I hope you would never do so. You've no right, either, to decide what disabled people are allowed to enjoy reading, and if blind milSF fans want to listen to David Weber on audio book, we can be glad they've got the option.

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    1. Julie, you are making huge and ungrounded assumptions based on your preconceptions of disability, and specifically my experience of disability, and they are utterly wrong. Which basically is my point - do the research, and don't substitute your stereotypes for my reality. You seem to be trying to invoke the 'bitter crip' archetype (variant on the 'uppity n-word'), unfortunately for that I've never been resentful WRT my disability, stuff happens, move on. (Extremely resentful of the discrimination I've faced, that one I'll not just own, but bear as a flag of honour). The pain I could do without, but I've actually rejected effective painkillers and said I would prefer to go without any (as I did for 15 years) rather than face the level of neuro-fog they caused, with the expectation of that being precisely what would happen. And we aren't talking some piddling level of pain here, but a daily 8 or 9 out of 10 on the pain scale (I had an opportunity to recalibrate my pain scoring last year, turned out I'd been significantly under-scoring).

      I absolutely adore the 'have you stopped beating your wife yet?' implication that I would stop people reading what they want, and especially that I would stop adapted forms of texts being available. Very clever. Utterly morally reprehensible, but very clever.

      Significant groups of disabled people, specifically including autistic self-advocates, argue that cure narratives erase our identity. When the dominant position of a disability community is 'We don't need to be cured of being us' and some SF/F author comes along and writes a book featuring a 'cure' for being themselves, then that is directly and morally equivalent to writing a book which celebrates a 'cure' for being black or being gay. I hope you would recognise how horrific that must feel to black or gay people, but why are you (and SF/F as a whole) so resistant to listening when the same message comes from a disabled person?

      Do the research.

      And just to be utterly clear, I don't want people not to read David Weber, _I_ read David Weber. What I want is Weber, and every other SF/F author, to do the research when it comes to disability and get it right. Finding out that autistic self-advocates loathe cure narratives isn't difficult, ask one, or just follow #Autism and #ActuallyAutistic for a couple of hours on Twitter. The utter loathing for Autism Speaks and its advocacy of cures should come through very quickly.

      I want Weber, and all the other SF/F authors, to do better, because when they say 'autism needs to be cured' fans who don't know the real position of the autism community take that for gospel, and it makes the work of disabled people educating non-disabled people that we don't think what you've been told we think that much harder.

      Is that so very wrong?

      Delete
    2. Thank you for that lesson on intersectionality. Once again you confirm how it is used: to gather in as much misfortune as you can and beat anyone over the head lacking such misfortune to assert how more nuanced, moral, just and genuine your view of the world is than mine. The mere act of being thin, white or generally healthy becomes a class crime of "unearned privilege," as they say. Why am I not surprised you are so attracted to this ideology?

      Intersectionality is a clever con, because people in wheel chairs in fact do know more about that sort of life than those who are not and also encounter more obstacles in life. But everyone has known for ages about the ebbs and flows of such things. We know it's easier to meet people in a night club when you're 20 than 60 or thin rather than fat, or have legs; so what? Why choose to belabor the obvious? What is the motive? The motive seems to be to join a victimization club where you turn the world upside-down with you at the moral top and treat everyone who is not disabled as if they are some sort of evil capitalists who have legs or are thin on purpose just to taunt the disabled with their riches. When are intersectionalists going to use handsome vs. ugly? The world is not a fair place. The best we can do is have compassion and charity for the less fortunate, but I will not be shamed or beaten into that, especially when so many of these "oppressions" are manufactured.

      What you have chosen to do is politicize all that and make a fake Jim Crow and a fake oppressor class universe out of it where anyone not suffering from misfortune or disadvantages due to weight, sanity, or age become that oppressor class by default.

      It is that very cleverness which is how hate speech is mainstreamed into the public arena to demonize people for nothing more than waking up in the morning.

      Delete
    3. DavidGFebruary 28, 2016 at 7:18 AM
      "Julie, you are making huge and ungrounded assumptions based on your preconceptions..."

      Irony, you haz it.

      Delete
  35. "You guys are a group historically associated with white supremacists. That's a fact."

    "You guys" is a sexist term that completely dismisses the other gendered members of the Puppies. Perhaps it would be advisable for you to check out the leaders of Sad Puppies IV. They self-identify as women. I believe two of the three are immigrants to the United States, but don't quote me on that, as those things don't matter to me as much as intelligence, kindness, and common decency.

    "a group historically" Sad Puppies is in its fourth year, hence the IV in this year's name. That's a very tiny history! Did it spring forth in full bloom its first year? No, it started as a joke, more or less. Otherwise, I do believe someone would have chosen a more illustrious name for the group. It may have begun as a lark, but it was NEVER an exclusionary group, and it wasn't predicated in hate. If you would open your eyes to learn more about the Sad Puppies, you'd find a loosely-banded group of people from all walks of life: red, yellow, black, and white; pagan, Christian, atheist; able, disabled; white collar, blue collar, and couture collar; and heterosexual, homosexual, and ammosexual. What bands us all together? The love of science fiction and the freedom it has historically (ah, now that word applies) represented. If you weren't dead set on vilifying the Sad Puppies, you'd find all sorts of them that you'd enjoy. They're smart, funny, and compassionate, but you'll never give yourself the opportunity to learn that by standing on the sidelines screaming at them about bad behavior from someone who isn't part of their group. Go scream at that person. Please.

    "white supremacists" Them's "fightin' words" to Puppies. We are and have spouses, children, relatives, and friends of different races. Brad Torgersen, last year's leader of the Pups, has been in a marriage of 20+ years with his wife of another race. Your side never knew until he was battered as a bigot in the media repeatedly; when he revealed a photo of his wife and child, did your side apologize as decent humans who make a mistake do? No, you doubled down on your asinine and offensive behavior and called his family "shields." That's repugnant. As a matter of fact, I'd not be surprised if a photo of the Pups compared to the non-Pups would be significantly more diversified. But you stick with that myopic and incorrect view of them being all white males.

    You feel free to keep hating on a group of people you don't know. Virtue signal to your friends that your thinking is pure and righteous. Get that little thrill of adrenaline when you mansplain to Stephanie how wrong she is for associating with the Puppies by throwing nonsense at her and claiming it's a fact when you presented absolutely nothing to back up your words.

    Or you could come without all of your hostility and incorrect perceptions and talk to us. We love to talk books, space, and scientific advancements. And children, kittens, puppies (!), art, theater, food, etc.

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  36. Old school SF is looking better all the time. In 1975 in a short essay titled "American SF and the Other" Ursula K. Le Guin wrote "The women's movement has made most of us conscious of the fact that SF has either totally ignored women, or presented them as squeaking dolls..." As far as I can tell so does Bernal Diaz' History of the Conquest of Mexico and any History of the Crusades I've ever read. If someone wants to write stories that are otherwise I've no problem with that, but using feminist cant to demonize men and an entire genre of adventure stories because they're based on adventure stories makes little sense to me and shows this rot which pretends to equality in order to mask bitter bigotry we're seeing today began to set in over 40 years ago.

    There's quite a difference between a demographic slant based on marketing and actual reality and hateful geek feminists. I don't recall Le Guin having to fend off 6 1/2 decades of terms like "womensplaining" and "female tears" to the accompaniment of cursing like a 1920s China Sailor in a whore house with cries of "harassment" when any woman pushed back. I do recall Leigh Brackett saying she was welcomed with open arms and Ray Bradbury saying he considered her a mentor.

    I could as easily argue 100 years of magazine romance fiction distorted reality in favor of women and then have myself barge in with a men's movement and start pie-charting women's magazines with an affirmative action movement that eventually kills the magazine's circulation. I could do that if I was faintly paranoid and for some reason could pretend magazines slanted towards men's reading tastes didn't exist.

    I'm trying to imagine a Robert Heinlein so eagerly naive that he writes an award-winning SF novel which embraces some Scientology-like cult's linguistic cure for homosexuality without being aware of it and has to embarrassingly have it pointed out to him after the ceremony. I'm trying to imagine an A. E. Van Vogt with a cartoon of him wielding an anti-first amendment "banhammer" or Isaac Asimov dedicating his non-fiction writing to taunting Rod Serling as a "shitlord" because Serling advocates equal protection. I'm trying to imagine Ray Bradbury writing pro-Jim Crow stories. I may as well since our current feminist crew of mental cases likes to say men like him did that anyway via "the cultural and racial other" as Le Guin puts it.

    Let me adopt intersectional feminist jargon about racial and sexual ownership and cultural appropriation: "GET OUT!"

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  37. In essence, before the arrival of Le Guin's own innate feminine clarity, she falsely declares 6 decades of SF as "male elitism," racism, sexism, imperialism and colonialism, not to mention a de facto "subjection of women." Please someone tell me how this women is in truth not the ideological supremacist monster she seeks. Le Guin's sneering disdain for men almost leaps off the page and more resembles a type of group defamation similar to anti-Semitism than it does insight or compassion.

    Most importantly, everyone ask themselves this question: would you welcome such people a second time now that the sick mask of "social justice" these delusional "feminists" hide behind have come off? Let's be honest about the type of minds we are dealing with here; the difference between someone like John Scalzi and someone like Christopher Hitchens is the difference between a child and an adult. All members of this cult in SF share similar traits: they are routinely ignorant of the history of their own genre and history in general, they have no truly neutral love for or understanding of law, they despise debate, they create myths and lies not only about their opponents as individuals but great swaths of people who never number fewer than tens of millions, and the two are always based on race and sex or loyalty to same - not events, not ideas. They routinely take one person or one anecdote and multiply and smear it over history or an entire race and sex and portray that as an institution, trend or ideology. They routinely portray their own ideology as a race or sex. They portray their own trends and institutions as anecdotes, signifying nothing, claiming their own open collusion as hysteria about secret cabals. They portray a demographic spike of men in old SF as segregation while ignoring the demographic spike of romance fiction. They portray their own segregated anthologies and awards as "diversity."

    One thing is brutally obvious: whether through naivete or purpose, these people work very hard to falsely portray an anti-white female and lesbian supremacist ideology as equal rights for women and anti-Jim Crow.

    Whether it's Le Guin in '75 or the daffy feminists today, they share the weird trait of not understanding they consistently complain about a past America long dead. While they proclaim it is we who are irrelevant to today, it is they who "are not relevant to the world we live in today." Anyone claiming women are second-class citizens go to sleep at night and wake up yesterday, fighting old wars won long ago. That same year of 1975 Phyllis Schlafly gave a speech in which she said this:

    "I really think you have to have psychological problems or have a chip on your shoulder because at one time in this country women didn’t have the right to vote; it’s been more than fifty years since this problem was solved. I think the Equal Rights Amendment was very well summed up by [(Starvington?)] at the Virginia legislative hearing, a woman who identified herself as ninety-three years old, an original suffragette who had been campaigning for women’s rights for more than half a century. She said the proponents of the Equal Rights Amendment are fifty years behind the times; they are fighting a battle that has been long since won. And I think she said it very well, because all these things that they’ve criticized have long since been passed in our society. Yet they keep talking about it and crying about it and addressing themselves to problems that no longer exist. They simply are not relevant to the world that we live in today."

    ReplyDelete
  38. @DavidG
    If you want to identify as disabled or neurodiverse or whatever, none of us really cares. You will be judged by your actions (or words in this case), not on any self-identity you wish claim. So stop playing the victim here, as no one is attacking you because of what you are.

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    1. Chris, there you go, telling me what I can and cannot find offensive. Sorry, you don't get to make that call (though that you and Brad think you do confirms my fears about how the Puppies view disability). I find Brad Torgerson saying I cannot identify as disabled horrifying offensive. So does every disabled person I've discussed it with (and that's a bunch). It is in fact a variant of the most horrifyingly prevalent form of disability hate active in society today, the trope that non-disabled people get to decide how we identify ourselves and whether our disability is 'genuine'. Disabled people are attacked every week by people who decide that we are not 'genuine', that we are 'fakes', 'frauds', 'scroungers'. Been there, done that, and it's intimidating enough when you can stand up for yourself (don't attack the guy walking with two four foot clubs), but I've had it happen to friends with absolutely no chance of defending themselves.

      This is our reality, a reality where we are regularly attacked just for who we are. And Torgerson just tried to take even that from us.

      My record in fighting for the rights of disabled people will stand judgement by any. Will yours?

      Delete
  39. Disability has been considered an identity by millions for many years. We have civil rights minority group legislation. We have disability studies researching the identities and sub-cultures (of Deaf people, autistic people and so on) and how people feel about their identities as such. We have detailed histories of eugenics and normalcy showing where our present social thinking has come from. We have the social model of disability showing that, far from being a 'state of mind' (*gag*), it is social oppression that disables people. This is pure ignorance speaking, above, as far as I can tell.

    Naomi Jacobs, PhD candidate and activist, disability studies

    ReplyDelete
  40. @DavidG
    Your disabled status grants you no moral superiority, gives you no moral authority, and does not enable you to tell the rest of us what to do. We see you for what you are, a self appointed moral authoritarian, and treat you and those like you with the respect you deserve. As you and your kind continue to step on the toes of those more kind and considerate than you will _ever_ be, your very actions ensure that your insane brand of identity politics will eventually be forcefully ejected from polite company as the rude condescending ass holes you truly are.
    SJWs always lie
    SJWs always project
    SJWs always double down.
    You have done all three in this thread. Be gone with you, nobody is buying what you are selling.

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    Replies
    1. Dear unknown. The only 'moral authority' I'm claiming here is actually being disabled and knowing the position of the disability community in a variety of areas, as opposed to people who quite clearly haven't done the research and who prefer to resort to false stereotypes when presented with an opportunity to learn.

      Please explain what's 'kind and considerate' about telling me that I cannot identify the way I wish and that my existence is a lesser form of being (and if you don't think Torgerson told me that, imagine telling a black or gay person their existence is 'a predicament').

      It's fascinating that you claim the moral authority of being 'kind and considerate', then immediately resort to ableist slurs such as 'insane' and then to ad hominems.

      Thanks for making my points for me.

      Delete
    2. Doubling down yet again. Predictable.
      Wake me when you have an original thought.

      Delete
  41. Heh, it seems I'm not the only Unknown. In my case, it is short for UnknownSailor; why Google truncates it, I dunno.

    ReplyDelete
  42. For a group of crusaders who eagerly evangelize their myths on their blogs and Twitter every single day, notice how much they are just as eager to never show up in a neutral forum and debate. Instead they confine their remarks to their own blogs and Twitter where they can and do block any dissent.

    I don't know about you, but if I were so passionate and so convinced of the rightness of my cause and the facts which back up that cause, I'd be eager to shoot down anyone who contests it. Instead, social justice crusaders are no-shows, and the bigger the name the more they never show outside the confines of their own carefully arranged echo-chambers.

    Let's be honest: whether by naivete or motivated by racial and sexual hatred, the social justice crusaders are frauds, and that's all they are. We have routinely unpeeled and shot down every one of their hateful myths and there is nothing left standing. There was nothing there in the first place and when Nebula-nominees have "white tears" coffee mugs and phrases about the "mediocrity of whites," in their Twitter feeed, they reveal the true motivation behind their self-contradictory demonization theories about "rape culture," "white saviors," and "white male privilege."

    This is a KKK in all but name and that is exactly how they should be treated. The difference between the phrase "mediocrity of whites" and "mediocrity of blacks" is non-existent. Yet to pretend one is noble and the other evil, and to reward the one with expulsion from the SFWA and the other with a Nebula nomination itself verges on evil. For an SFWA member - a Nebula nominee and Hugo winner - to complain about the one while retweeting a fellow Nebula nominee on the exact same day who used the phrase about "whites" on that exact same day is beyond moronic; it is indefensible, and that is why these people never show, preferring to block, delete and ban and stay in their safe spaces. Any pushback to their inflammatory racial and sexual remarks about millions of people is considered "harassment" and even bigoted supremacist ideology itself, yet more words with dual meanings within this sick cult.

    ReplyDelete
  43. @David
    It's pretty clear to me now that you aren't really interested in an actual discussion of issues beyond your own victimhood. You (like so many SJW's) just want use your status as a self-proclaimed victim to shut the rest of us up. I told you before that you'd be judged by your actions, and you have.

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  44. The whole idea of this thread was to see if some common ground could be found between the puppies and their critics. So far we have gotten nothing but declarations of victimhood and moral preening. I think we are fast approaching the point of uselessness here, and I am very disappointed in that. I really wanted to have a conversation about the literary genre that I love, without having to worship at the alter of political correctness. People like David don't want to have that conversation.

    ReplyDelete
  45. Intersectionality: the short version

    I used to have to walk a mile to school
    I used to do that in bitter cold
    I used to do both and build a fence along the way

    Institutionalize that as a system of merit and you institutionalize whining and probably a lot of lying in the mad scramble to the bottom. Give a man an inch and he'll take a mile.

    "...offering a premium on incapacity: I shall now endeavour to fail" - Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre

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  46. DavidG

    Thank you very much for your efforts here. I appreciate everything you've said, and I want to commend you for hanging in there. I've never heard of you before, but be rest assured I will follow you now.

    Mr. Burton (AKA Mr May): Honestly, are you even listening to yourself? This is hardly an "echo chamber," is it? And yet DavidG did a credible job of pushing back against your usual bullshit, and he did so in an arena that is hardly hospitable to him.

    Whether you like it or not, third wave feminism, intersectionality, women's studies, and the reality of white male privilege is not going away. Twitter's finally pushing back against harassment is just the latest example. You can bleat about it all you want, but when I see you continually preaching to the choir at, say, Mad Genius Club...you want to talk about an "echo chamber"? You've got one, right there.

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    1. Are you listening to yourself? No, this isn't an echo chamber, so where are the people so eager to tell us about "white mediocrity" and "mansplaining"? You once called out the owner of this blog for not challenging me but instead of - for example - pointing out how I'm wrong about how SFF started in magazines, you instead consider "bullshit," pointing out your own bigotry is not going away and once again using the word "harassment" in a way that makes no fair sense to be some kind of debate.

      In other words there is nothing behind your passion to light up straight white men but double standards, a nonsensical hatred of men, and mulishness. In fact Twitter is not pushing back against harassment. What they are doing is silencing people who are pushing back against people like you who concoct inflammatory racist theories about "white male privilege" and then Tweet about it tens of thousands of times over a period of years.

      You're wrong about Third Wave Feminism, intersectionality and women's studies. People just like me marginalized the KKK and neo-Nazis into the swamps where they belong and we have every intention of doing the same thing to you with the help of a Constitution to back it up which recognizes no blood libels about white male privilege. Instead it recognizes equal protection and due process, a thing you cannot for the life of you understand. No one should be surprised we are now seeing straight up anti-Semitism emerge from the Black Lives Matter, intersectionality and gender's studies culture you defend since your culture is in principle not one whit different from blood libels of group defamation we've seen in the past. Now go read your latest issue of Uncanny File 101 is shilling for, the closest thing SFF's ever had to a house organ of the KKK. Rod Serling, Ray Bradbury and Gene Roddenberry would've spit on a thing like that, horrified their principled parables had done so little good.

      Delete
  47. So hostility is now defined as not buying into victimology and actually wanting to talk about issues that don't involve how horrible you think the puppies are. As I've suspected, P.C. is just a way for fascists to shut other people up.

    ReplyDelete
  48. Tim Hunt: Nobel Prize winner driven to exile in Japan by a mentally challenged intersectionalist serial liar for a joke

    Jonathan Ross: Driven out of the Hugos for a fat joke a mentally ill feminist saw in her crystal ball

    Malzberg/Resnick: Driven out of a magazine by a feminist witchhunt

    White men: Driven out of reviews by one of Lightspeed Magazine's editors

    David Brin: Boldly opposing the "oligarchy" while self-censoring himself on his own website out of fear of his feminist colleagues in the SFWA

    Average white man: fired for telling a tech joke within the hearing of an intersectionalist

    Vox Day: Expelled from the SFWA for acting like the SFWA

    Straight white men: Exiled from a series of segregated SFF Lightspeed anthologies in the cause of diversity

    Straight white men: the target of open ideological collusion to reduce their footprint in SFF

    Chuck Wendig: Is shamed by a witchhunt into publicly recusing himself from future public discussions about race on his own blog because he is a "white dude" and "creature of enormous privilege"

    H. P. Lovecraft: Exiled because of his racism in a witchhunt led by a man who talks about "white mediocrity"

    R. S. McCain: Banned from Twitter for opposing feminism days after Anita Sarkeesian is appointed as a harassment consultant. A few days after that Sarkeesian poses for a selfie with a feminist who Tweets things like "I'm so fucking sick of white men."

    Neil Gaiman: After K. Tempest Bradford's article "I Challenge You to Stop Reading Cis, White, Male Authors for One Year" Gaiman Tweets it "is great, & don't mind being the posterbook." Days later Gaiman posts a selfie of himself with Nalo Hopkinson, Sofia Samatar & Nnedi Okorafor and on the same day retweets a feminist from a TED Talk "Separate genders are a constructed fiction." No comment from his friend Jonathan Ross

    I could list these until my eyes bleed.

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    1. Fail Burton said...

      "Neil Gaiman: After K. Tempest Bradford's article "I Challenge You to Stop Reading Cis, White, Male Authors for One Year" Gaiman Tweets it "is great, & don't mind being the posterbook." Days later Gaiman posts a selfie of himself with Nalo Hopkinson, Sofia Samatar & Nnedi Okorafor and on the same day retweets a feminist from a TED Talk "Separate genders are a constructed fiction." No comment from his friend Jonathan Ross..."

      To which I reply - Hey you SFF fans that enjoy audio books, audible has a sale and Gaiman's "Trigger Warnings" is only $5.95. Gaiman reads his own stuff and while this is often not a great idea, it is for Gaiman. Check it out. But move quickly. Today is the last day of the sale.

      For you culture warriors... carry on.

      Delete
    2. Gaiman's not even a frickin' American. What does he know about equal protection, or you, since you refer to it as "culture warriors."

      Delete
  49. I would be stunned if anyone at File 101 could give me a definition of "group defamation" which benefits all persons on Earth, or in other words, the concept of equal protection.

    They dare not do that. If they do, the entire basis of their ideology falls like a house of cards, even though equal protection is the key tenet of human rights. Steven Davidson can morally and intellectually posture all he wants. He is an adult in the 21st century who does not understand equal protection and dares not speak its name. If he does, the feminist long knives will come out about the power/privilege/punching up which is the basis of feminist claims they are never anti-white, gender-phobes or man-haters, no matter how obvious the hateful rhetoric.

    ReplyDelete
  50. STILL NOT DEAD.

    Sorry for the long wait; I've had an overwhelming few weeks, I wanted to give this the attention it deserves, and I can't write on the weekends :P

    But my reply, I haz it!

    https://medium.com/@ZivW/a-moderate-conversation-re-sad-puppies-c8a8f96ea22f

    (My reply proved much too long to work as a comment here, or even split up into multiple comments. I don't have a blog of my own, so I used Medium as a handy platform for a one-off. I'll follow the conversation and comments there, here, wherever they go, as much as RL permits.)

    Thanks again, and cheers!

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    1. Thank you! I think this post was very fair, and I take your suggestions seriously. The bit about being more vocal about what we like is especially constructive, and I plan on acting on that as soon as I get through an upcoming oral surgery.

      PS: BTW, contra Fail, I think you're right about the outrage cycle too. ;)

      Delete
    2. Really? Exactly what was Monteleone doing to anyone. What was Waterstones Books doing to anyone when they were witchhunted on Twitter over a table display of books? What did Malzberg/Resnick do to anyone by using the word "lady" and how did a painting of Red Sonja amount to an anti-Civil Rights initiative, the combination requiring almost 80 blog posts to fight against? What did Jonathan Ross do to anyone to be hounded out of the Hugo gig? How did 7 decades of magazine SFF become an act of immorality simply by choosing the best stories submitted? What did white males do to be shut out of reviews at Lightspeed or their PoC anthology? Where is any trend recommending people read fewer woman, gays and PoC? Where are the counterparts to the Twitter feeds of N.K. Jemisin, Jaymee Goh, Requires Hate, fangirljeanne, Veronica Schnoes, Andrea Hairston, Jim Hines and 100 others I could mention which are in constant attack mode targeting straight white men?

      What cycle are you referring to? This is so one-sided it is an open and shut case. Mere anger as a response doesn't count. If it did, we would be talking about the outrage cycle between Jews and neo-Nazis. Is that a cycle? Are there two sides to that story? No more than there is here. This is a question of research, documentation and fair-minded definitions. That approach spares no one and the guilty and the innocent stand out. Court battles don't all end in a tie and nor should that be the case here. That is why both sides are forced into debate in a court, a thing social justice crusaders resolutely refuse to do. They lecture, want comments sections killed, and routinely ban and delete opposition comments. There is a simple reason for that: their myths fall to pieces under scrutiny.

      Delete
    3. This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
    4. @Fail

      I have no idea what any of this has to do with the Worldcon Fans and how they conduct their convention and awards. The proper response is... "Meh".

      Delete
    5. Well, thanks for pretending nothing preceded Puppies and it just came out of nowhere, even though the sexual harassment and racial defamation of millions at a time continues to this very moment spread across SFF's institutions. It certainly is a convenient and self-serving point of view, if completely without merit.

      Separating out WorldCon from this makes no sense. It is the same people doing the same things elsewhere. The point is WorldCon used to sell itself as a neutral artistic space in terms of its award. It is clear that is no longer the case and its priorities are virtually identical to WisCon and its Tiptree Awards. The reason people do in fact go "Meh" at WisCon is WisCon has never lied about their priorities. No matter what you think of WisCon they have never pretended their award is not slanted towards gay intersectional feminist SFF and issues. The whole point of Larry's initial prank was to show this WisCon priority to now be exactly the case at WorldCon, but without WisCon's honesty.

      WisCon doesn't practice discrimination for the simple fact they never have claimed they wouldn't, nor have they claimed they are not effectively an alternate affirmative action space for themselves, which is their legal AND moral right.

      It is also the Hugo's legal right, but it is not their moral right to lie about their new obvious discrimination and affirmative action emphasis, though the evidence is as plain as day. WisCon never had a come-one, come-all literary award; the Hugos did and its rank and file, artists and business side of fandom now routinely lie about the new shift while in effect creating an award that is little different in its overall philosophy than are Lightspeed's rancid [enter injured group] Destroy Horror, SF, Fantasy series. And like Lightspeed, the dominant culture of WorldCon just as routinely lies about the history of SFF as well as perpetrating myths about whites, men and heterosexuals no different in principle than anti-Semitism. The sheer hatred and doublethinking whirls of logic of social justice Twitter feeds is astonishing.

      The mechanism by which this has occurred in SFF is self-evident: social justice do-gooders get to pretend they are Marlon Brando marching with M.L. King. The mediocre affirmative action darlings get to lay a claim to mainstream acceptance of their queer feminism and racial revenge stories which in fact exists nowhere in reality. Their literature is boring sleeping pills walking around on crutches like a special program for "gifted" youngsters. As late as the early '80s Hugo authors earned millions in advance for single novels they sold millions of copies of. It is the general public which has said "Meh" to this whole crooked culture and passed those millions on to Harry Potter, Hunger Games and Twilight in the same way they once gave that to Haggard, Wells, and Burroughs, the people who originated the excitement for SFF with the general public. Plus they didn't talk about their readers nor depict them within those stories the same way an imaginary Nazi SFF might depict Jews. This issue is the same as with Twitter today: an expectation of neutrality instead of a bait-and-switch.

      Delete
    6. Oh, I'm so pleased! Whaddya know, actual constructive discussion on the internet :)

      Is there more we want to talk about? I've been focused on getting this one big lump out, but once I catch my breath we could hypothetically have further lumps :P

      In the vein of hanging out and talking about awesome stories, I've got a very informal, totally casual short story discussion group going on there. If you're on Facebook, and interested, I'd love to have you in (and likewise for anybody else reading here). I pick stories that catch my eye, and everybody interested can offer their take on the piece. It's fun, and also a nice way to find some last-minute favorites before nomination :)

      And, if you've got a couple of recommendations from 2015 (ideally for short fiction; don't know if I'll manage more novels before April), I'd absolutely love to hear them :)

      All the best with your surgery!

      Delete
    7. @Fail, it didn't come out of nowhere. It came out of Larry Correia being a bad loser but a good marketer. Then other even weaker writers jumped on the band wagon. They stir you guys up to sell you books. Larry's always done that.

      The reality is that none of this has anything to do with the Fans of Worldcom. Fans get to read what they want and award what they want. They don't care what you think. Nor should they. Except...

      You freeped their award.

      With EPH you guys will fade away and soon it will be like you were never here at all.

      "...authors earned millions in advance for single novels they sold millions of copies of. It is the general public which has said "Meh" to this whole crooked culture and passed those millions on to Harry Potter, Hunger Games and Twilight in the same way they once gave that to Haggard, Wells, and Burroughs, the people who originated the excitement for SFF with the general public. "

      This is a good example of why people go "meh". But first an aside - JK Rowling won a Hugo for Harry Potter which she didn't bother to pick up. So your point was?

      I don't know why you think this has anything to do with Worldcon Fans. Twilight wasn't successful because Fans voted this way or that way for Awards at their own convention of a few thousand people. It's just stupid.

      And BTW - good writers are still getting large advances for books. You think SJW writer Stephen King didn't get an advance for "11.22.63"? But even if he didn't you think that has something to do with people voting for the Hugos? This is just goofy stuff.

      Delete
    8. I liked the essay and found much to agree with. The perception thing is interesting and I can see that once you have a perception of someone or group, it's tough to even want to change it, despite the evidence.
      And the outrage cycle is tough to stop.

      As to the puppy intentions, you could have just asked us
      . Vox made his intentions quite clear (burn the mother down), as did Larry, Sarah, and Brad (can we just vote on the merits of the story please). It wasn't difficult, they weren't meeting in secret, they talked about it on their blogs everyday. If their tone seemed angry, it's because they were being lied about.


      Delete
    9. @Chris: Glad you liked :)

      I think the "just ask us" solution isn't as simple as you're describing it. I mean, try flipping it around - do you feel like you can just ask the non-Puppies what their intent is, and be able to take our answer at face-value?

      Keep the flip-image here. The non-Puppies are also tired of being lied about. (Whether or not you see it as them being lied about, they certainly do.) Does that make you cool with their angry tone?

      Delete
    10. I understand what you are saying, but the attempt wasn't even made. You have to remember that much of the perception was created by deliberate lies (that were helped along by Vox) spread by kickers and their media freinds. No one on the other side even tried to have a real dialogue with rank and file puppies. Instead we got the scorn.

      Look, I don't want to refight the last war. The SF literary world is too small for us to write off dedicated fans on either side of this divide. That's why I'm still following this thread.

      Delete
    11. @Chris:

      I understand what you are saying, but the attempt wasn't even made. You have to remember that much of the perception was created by deliberate lies (that were helped along by Vox) spread by kickers and their media freinds. No one on the other side even tried to have a real dialogue with rank and file puppies. Instead we got the scorn.

      Would it shock you to learn that "the other side" doesn't see it that way? :)

      Delete
    12. I'd definitely rather not re-fight the last war! But, you're not going to avoid re-fighting that war if you think "deliberate lies spread by puppy kickers" is a rock-solid, mutually agreed description of what happened.

      There have certainly been attempts at dialogue; the most prominent one I recall was George R. R. Martin's, and OH SO MANY in comment sections everywhere. But "attempts" don't mean successes; they tend to get fairly heated fairly quickly.

      If you want to let bygones be bygones, and just look at how you move forward from here - well, that's an awesome approach to have. But that means not digging backwards into whose "fault" the initial animosity was, and doing whatever you can to keep heads cool now, in the present.

      If you do want to go back and talk about "who started," we could do that. But, well, that'd be re-fighting. (And I suspect the answer would mostly be "a bunch of gradually escalating steps from all sides involved," which I don't think will get you very far.)

      Delete
    13. There have been deliberate lies, Standback. One need only read Kameron Hurley's piece at The Atlantic at the time to see it. D. Walter's work at The Guardian were libels. There are many more examples. And let's not pretend GRRM attempted a dialogue. Were I to have debated either him or Eric Flint in a live setting in real time I would've torn them to shreds due to their sheer lack of knowledge of what was happening. Flint thought the Army of the Potomac were "SJWs" for god's sake.

      Let's not pretend this is a he-said, she-said. It is easy to see who started what and when. What S. Moreno-Garcia did to Tom Monteleone this week is a pitch perfect example of what started in 2009 and led to the Puppies. Monteleone was doing precisely nothing to anyone and got lit up as a sexist misogynist (if not a racist) and placed under boycott by a devotee of intersectional feminism who has used rhetoric which is blatantly anti-white and anti-male for years. In other words reality itself was flipped upside-down using "feminist" power/privilege, punching up theory. That pattern started in 2009 and has been a daily occurrence every day for 7 years. How can GRRM or Flint give an opinion of 10,000 quotes and Twitter and blog round-robins of Two Minutes Hate they've never read?

      Stephanie has already pointed out this is not about differences over race, gender and sexuality. This about creating a myth there are such differences, invoking old battles long since won over Jim Crow and the right to vote. The myth is created by altering the meaning of bigotry until the wrong side cannot escape it with nonsense about "gendered slurs" and "micro aggressions" being "institutional racism." Merely to be white, male and straight conjures up a whole list of accusations of a non-existent culture which is actually in favor of rape, racism and sexism due to privilege, lack of awareness and general bad intent. On top of all that is the bizarre fact we are adults in the 21st century arguing over the definition of hate speech. Again, by a slick sleight-of-hand set of rules, one side never indulges in it and the other never can stop speaking it, no matter how blatantly the opposite is true. There is no debate within such an environment.

      The reason this "feminist" hate movement is happening is precisely because of that word: "feminist." When the KKK and Nazis started there were no obvious associations between hate and symbols like Swastikas and hoods. That means that, just like then, we are being fooled again. Worse, a word we once trusted to mean a fight for legal equality - "feminism" - has been exploited and distorted to act as a Trojan Horse for a hate movement. Throw is the false association with Jim Crow by using terms like "white privilege" and it gets only worse whether out of naivete or intent. As an SF community, we should be better than allowing ourselves to be fooled by masks, especially since George Orwell wrote one of the centerpieces of our literature to precisely warn against a benign "Big Brother."

      I don't care what the other side "sees." I care about is a dialogue with an agreed upon meaning of words where they can make a case for it using quotes and facts, a thing they cannot and have not done. If they could, they wouldn't resort to scare quotes like Hurley used at The Atlantic nor could she have won two Hugos for an essay which is nothing more than a misandrist fantasy constructed of pure bullshit and paintings of women in armor. It is that bullshit which leads Sunil Patel at Lightspeed to boast his "book review column features no white men" and M. R. Kowal to Tweet "only one award went to a white male" and K. Tempest Bradford to Tweet "I do remember the No White People hour, hehe" at Wiscon.

      Show me that trend from 50 to 100 SF personages about women, "PoC" and gays. You can't do it; they don't exist.

      Delete
    14. @standback
      No it wouldn't surprise me, but that doesn't mean they'd be right. All either side had to do is listen to what the other side was saying to each other, and they'd know what that side was really thinking. That's how I came to my conclusions anyway, by reading what Scalzi and company were saying to their fans. Had the other side actually read the comments in the puppy blogs, they would have seen we weren't talking about returning to the days where men were men and women were scantily clad.

      All that being said, no I don't want to refight the same war. The problem is that both sides have to stand down for that to work. If we continue to encounter the same pathologies (on both sides), the war will continue.

      Delete
    15. Chris, please describe to me what Jonathan Ross or Tom Monteleone would need to do to "stand down." Or 100 years of white male SF authors.

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    16. I think, at least for this little sub-thread, I'm going to deliberately shelve discussion of who's "right," since it seems like we're both more interested in "what next."

      If we continue to encounter the same pathologies (on both sides), the war will continue.

      So, cool, let me ask you a constructive question: do you think could you narrow down one or two specific changes you'd like to see from the non-Puppies? Something you see as a "pathology," a request you see as reasonable from us?

      Hypothetical request, obviously; I don't represent the non-Puppies, I don't think anybody really represents the non-Puppies, and more likely than not I'll argue against whatever request you have :P But it sounds like you might be able to point to something more feasible than "you should like different books than the ones you like" or "you shouldn't get angry when you feel like something you care about is getting invaded." What could the non-Puppies do, in theory, that would make things better?

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    17. I don't speak for puppies either, I just speak for myself. I can only tell you what I, as someone who has followed this issue, thinks about it. I am also under no illusion that you represent anyone beyond yourself.

      That being said, I think the most concrete thing the non-puppies can do is what you are doing. That is, just talk to us, not at us. Stop treating us as if we are some evil ignorant savages who must be kept out of the cathedral.

      The SF literary fan community (folks who love the genre enough to spend their money buying books and convention memberships) is really kind of small. That is especially true when compared to other genre's. You could hold the next Worldcon in a small corner of the next Dragoncon and no one would even notice you. So any group of fans treating another group of fans like crap is not doing the future of the genre any good.

      They say the golden age of science fiction is 14. Well I have a 14 year old grandson who is as bright and imaginative as any of us were at that age. He watches SF movies, plays SF themed video games, and can tell you the family tree of any Marvel or DC super hero. What he doesn't do is read SF. Not because he doesn't like reading, in fact he loves it. It's just that there are too many other ways for him to feed his imagination addiction.

      That's what's happening to our favorite genre, and the Hugo wars aren't helping. No one would willingly introduce their kids to a fan community that is willing to launch a holy war over even the littlest of differences. So let's stop having the holy wars.

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    18. On a more practical note, you'd be amazed at how quickly people step out of their defensive mode when you treat them as if you actually care about what they think. Lose the stupid monkey dominance game and folks will revert to their natural mode of cooperation. We are social animals after all, who yearn to be part of and enjoy the group.

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    19. I think the most concrete thing the non-puppies can do is what you are doing. That is, just talk to us, not at us.

      Ok, I'd be hard pressed to argue with that one :)

      I will say this, though: I hope you understand that I'm making an unusual amount of effort here. This is a lot of what I talked about in my intro: speaking respectfully, reasonably, seems like it should be easy, but the medium's working against us. Disagreements trend towards flamewars, it's a very powerful dynamic. For things not to go flamewar fast, you need a lot of patience (I ignored so many comments on this page while I was writing, I can't even) and a fair amount of tact and understanding.

      (Heck, things might still go flamewar fast. The night's young!)

      So: yes, absolutely yes, to more engagement. But please understand that that's no trivial request.

      ----

      I think I'm also on the same page with you as to the size and state of the genre. Reading is kind of a niche hobby. Reading short stories is a super niche hobby.

      ---

      And no holy wars. Definitely won't argue with that :)

      Here's my suggestion to you, then, before I turn in for the night. This is my way of thinking about things, and I offer it to you. If we're in agreement that we're in an outrage cycle, then pretty much anything anybody writes about the Hugos and the Puppies, contributes to that cycle in some way. Eggs it on, slows it down; ignores it entirely. Reinforces stereotypes; increases outrage; discourages engagement. I could go on. :)

      Keep an eye on those contributions, is my suggestion. Anything you see, ask yourself: how does this affect the cycle?

      This is orthogonal to "right" and "wrong." I have strong opinions on that too, but this isn't about that. Keep an eye on who's keeping the argument going (hint: everybody, myself included), and how (in all kinds of ways).

      All the best to you. And wishing us all a nicer Hugos this year :)

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    20. I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. You want more engagement, but disagreement is a flamewar and an outrage cycle which discourages engagement? Engagement discourages engagement? Is that Orwell? Exactly what are we supposed to engage in? Engagement means debate - debate means facts, quotes, context. If your goal is to settle something, that is how it is settled. If you want us to give each other flowers, then save mine for Tom Monteleone and Jonathan Ross and 100 others I could name, as well as every white male SF author since 1912, attacked for no other reason than their race and sex by "anti-racists" and "anti-sexists."

      Ignoring people is not debate nor engagement; it's just ignoring people and a flat refusal to engage, which we have already had via censorship, deletions and banning which - surprise! - created the Puppies. You want a cycle - THAT'S a cycle. You have completely contradicted your stated aims.

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    21. @standback
      It really shouldn't be that hard to just talk to someone. All you have to do is treat them as an equal and an individual and not as a member of some hated group. It's called respect, and it's the foundation of common human decency.
      If the person you are talking to says something you disagree with. You can (as Fail suggest s)talk about those differences without it becoming a flame war. You just have to be honest and be willing to listen to other opinions. Again, it's just basic human decency.
      On the other hand, if you walk into a situation with a "ok, let me TRY to teach religion to these ignorant savages" attitude, then yes talking to people who disagree with you is a chore. Nothing will make a discussion go sour faster than one person coming to the conclusion that the other person is trying to where the cloak of moral superiority. That makes the defense screens go to 100% in an instant.

      In the end, the puppies aren't asking for forgiveness or asking for any favors. They are insisting on being treated as equals in the fan world because that is what they are. So if you really find talking to us a chore, you have missed the point of your own thread.

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    22. I agree with Chris. This is actually very simple. Any "dialogue" of this nature is going to actually be a debate. Debate is a common affair enshrined in our culture. It is not a "flamewar" nor a "cycle." When Christopher Hitchens debates Tariq Ramadan, of course they disagree. Nevertheless each side presents its points. What is necessary is to frame this debate in terms of a question; What Caused the Sad Puppies? seems a legitimate debate. Each side presents its facts, quotes, timelines, context, etc. You can frame this using your own example of a question as a starting point, but frame a question you must, or else how can it be answered?

      The important point is to have rules of engagement which are mutually understood. There can be no floating definitions of "harassment" that benefits one side or the other based on nebulous fantasies like "privilege," "structural inequality," or "post-colonialism." The same goes for terms like "bigotry," "supremacy," "diversity," "racism," "sexism," etc. These terms must be expressed in terms of a larger principle, not self-serving, one-sided terms where larger contexts are stripped away. It doesn't seem much to ask to have a dictionary as a rule of engagement as well as goose/gander, the Golden Rule, equal protection, due process, etc. If there are no rules there can be no game, no legitimate debate. We need to use a moral ethos based on right and wrong, not race and sex.

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    23. @Chris:
      Definitely not a chore. But an effort, yes. One I choose to make, and consider very worthwhile, mind you :)

      It really shouldn't be that hard to just talk to someone. All you have to do is treat them as an equal and an individual and not as a member of some hated group.

      That's the problem, though. It seems like it should be easy. But it isn't really easy at all. Because everyone, each of us, is much more aware of things that bother him, and much less sensitive to things that might bother other people. That means two different people can be talking with each other, each sincerely intending no harm - but each one of them will feel that he's treating the other guy fine, but the other guy's treating him poorly.

      It starts with little things; you start doubting good intentions more and more, and the two sides start spiraling further and further away from each other.

      That's what "This Video Will Make You Angry" is about. That's what my essay was about. That's how the outrage cycle gets perpetuated - because each side is sure that they're being fair and reasonable. Because speaking respectfully seems so obvious, so easy, that if somebody's not doing it -- they must be deliberately unkind.

      Neither side stops to think "Hey, I think I'm being reasonable and respectful, but the other guy thinks I'm not. What's up with that?".
      You know that you're being reasonable and respectful, so if the other guy doesn't see that, he must be unreasonable.
      You know that the other guy seems unreasonable and disrespectful to you, and since you know being reasonable and respectful is easy, the other guy is obviously not making any sincere attempt.

      Everybody thinks that way, and the internet cycle goes on forever and ever.

      What I'm saying is different. There's a gap here. It's very easy for one side to see something as reasonable, and the other side to see it as unreasonable. Navigating those gaps takes effort.

      It's not just the simple "don't be intentionally insulting;" it's the bit where you ask questions, understand where the other guy's coming from, let some unreasonable, disrespectful, crazy comments roll by unnoticed -- because they don't necessarily come from bad intent, just a gap we haven't settled between us yet.

      Does that make sense to you? Is it clearer how me saying "talking takes work" is in line with my original essay?

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    24. (Sorry, BTW, for the long lag between your post and my response. Had a really crazy few days. So it goes; and thanks for your patience :) )

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    25. @Standback
      Again you just have to be open about it. If person A says something that person B thinks is wrong, it's up to person B to say so and explain why they think so. We can't read each other's minds, so the only way to tell what each of us is thinking to say what we are thinking.
      Since I am not having any difficulty in talking to people I disagree with, I find it hard to understand why others would. You just have to accept the fact not everyone shares your opinions, and that those who don't aren't necessarily evil, stupid, or ignorant. If you find yourself talking to someone who disagrees with you, you can ask them why, listen to their answer, and judge by the quality of the response on what to do next.
      If the response you get isn't to your liking, you can tell the person that and explain why. That person then has the chance to respond to your response. It's called dialogue and it's what people who are being honest and open with each other do.

      It only becomes difficult if you go into it with an agenda that doesn't involve the free and open discussion of ideas. If you want to lecture or ridicule the conversation isn't going to go very far. If you want an honest conversation, it can be done.

      One more thing. While I understand the dynamics of the outrage cycle, I don't think it should be used as a way of not talking about the genuine differences of opinion and real grievances both sides have. Those things are there and they won't go away just because we choose to ignore them. Unless there is some honest talk about them, they won't be resolved either.

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    26. @Chris: OK, cool.

      Are we pretty much agreed that neither side, as a whole, is very good at initiating (and maintaining) that kind of dialogue?

      (Because that's fundamental to me. If you see one side as being capable of conversation and the other not, that's a major gap, and I can start going into specifics.)

      While I understand the dynamics of the outrage cycle, I don't think it should be used as a way of not talking about the genuine differences of opinion and real grievances both sides have.

      I hear you, and I'm happy to talk about specific issues as well.

      As I've said, I'm less interested in delving into "who's fault is this" and "who's wrong about that." I'm much more interested in looking forward, saying "OK, what's important to each side now," "What's the next thing we need to do to make things better?". Because if all we want, in the end, is for us all to be able to nominate and vote as each of us sees fit - well, it'd be a lot easier to just go ahead and do that, then argue over whose nominations are true, just and awesome.

      I asked you about steps for improvement, and you said the number one thing the non-Puppies could do was treat the Sad Puppies as equals, discuss more reasonably, approach the entire issue less tribally.

      What other issues do you see as being substantial, as something that needs to be addressed?

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    27. @Standback,
      Yes there are people on both sides who will not be reasonable. In some cases (Vox) it's a deliberate strategy. In others (the folks who gave us the asterisk awards) it's a matter of seeing their opponents as not deserving a reasonable response.
      As to what is needed beyond treating puppies as equals, there also has to be an acknowledgement that the worldcon members do not represent the totality of fandomn. Being able to go to cons doesn't mean you are better than others, it means you are just better off.

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    28. Wait, hold up a moment there --

      Let's not bring Vox into this any more than we have to? He's not part of the Sad Puppy side.

      When I say "both sides," I'm talking about the Sad Puppies, and the non-Puppies. Not the Rabid Puppies.
      And I'm not asking about motive for both sides being poor at keeping up a dialogue; I'm only talking about final result. Are we still in agreement?

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    29. @Standback
      I don't think you can completely separate motives from results. If one side really does see the other as evil and stupid, that side doesn't have much reason to reconcile with the other. By the same token, if one side believes that burning it down is the way to go (a growing group, though not Vox followers, since the Hugo awards), then they don't have a reason to play nice either.

      The real differences between the groups have to be aired out, otherwise any detente will only last until the next outrage. Trying to bury those differences in happy talk won't work. Both sides are too smart for that.

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    30. @Chris: Half the reason people are hostile to each other is because they're assuming the other side is hostile to them. And that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

      Really, what do you do when both sides "really do see the other as evil and stupid," and "don't have much reason to reconcile with the other"? Should we not be trying to talk?

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    31. @Standback
      We are talking, so obviously I think we should be. What I'm suggesting is that eventually we will have to discuss our differences and the reasons behind them. honest conversation demands that.
      Obviously though, we have to build confidence that both sides are dealing in good faith first. That's what you and I are doing. Also obviously, not everyone is on board with that idea. That's what we are fighting against.

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  51. Standback is wrong in his new piece about us being "locked into an internet outrage cycle." It only appears that way because the social justice movement in SFF absolutely refuses to stop indulging in moving definitions of what "racism," "harassment" and "sexism" is. But that's not including what all that is doing here in the first place. What does any of that have to do with our genre? It is a bizarre obsession.

    Let me give you a perfect example of what created the Puppies: this week Sylvia Moreno-Garcia started taking submissions for the new Lightspeed anthology she is editing, PoC Destroy Horror. Anyone familiar with her understands she has a long history of anti-white comments. Those comments are on a daily basis and it is hard to imagine her stopping for even one week. She also regularly exchanges friendly Tweets with Requires Hate and Jaymee Goh, two more viciously obsessive anti-white voices in SFF.

    This week Garcia called for the boycott of the 20 yr. old Borderlands series anthology's editor Tom Monteleone, referring to him as a "fucker" and an "asshole." Mr. Monteleone's crime: he insisted on Facebook he chooses stories based on merit, not sex. Requires Hate chimed in about Mr. Monteleone on Garcia's thread "I'm gonna guess also 100% white." The general accusation is that Monteleone doesn't reach out to PoC and women enough and doesn't have enough women in his anthologies. For that Garcia Tweets "PSA: Hey, don't buy anything asshole Tom Monteleone is involved with."

    Keep in mind, that's coming from a woman currently editing an anthology forbidden to whites.

    You can read filth like this by these cretins on a daily basis and there is widespread support for Garcia throughout the social justice community. Standback's waffling about an "argument" with "multiple sides" is ridiculous. There is no imaginary other side of scores of SFF writers and editors dogging non-whites, women and gays and engaging in or supporting willful segregation unless you buy into the idea a male-heavy Table of Contents is segregation worthy of boycott and actual segregation is "social justice." Standback doesn't need to be writing essays, he needs a dictionary and standards we can all live by. No one in their right mind is going to meet such incredible sexist and racist double standards half way.

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  52. There is a lot of "stuff" swirling around but this isn't difficult. Right-wing authors stir up their fanbase to sell them books. It is niche marketing. The Fans think they are involved in some big cause.

    Larry found out he could use "Freeping" to break the nomination process and other authors became puppy leaders and joined in the effort.

    The puppy argument is not well defined and shifts with the wind but mostly it is ... "Worldcon Fans are wrong Fans having wrong Fun and reading Wrong Books." Now they have added "wrong voting".

    Worlcon belongs to the Fans. Not to the puppies. If the puppies just want to be represented they should be thrilled. EPH will ensure they are represented - in proportion to their numbers. Which means the pups will go away because they didn't really want to be Worldcon Fans in the first place. It was for the cause.

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    1. First you talk about puppies not seeing others as true fans, then you declare puppies as not true fans. You really are making it easy for asswipes like Vox to win.

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    2. Win what?

      Worldcon Fans are just that - Worldcon Fans. Why should they care about you or Vox or sad puppies?

      These are just people with similar interest who hand out a few awards.

      But at any rate, EPH gets ratified the next meeting.

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    3. Vox wants the Hugo's to be worthless. By telling a group of people who were willing to part with their money to be a part of your group that they should just kiss off, you are helping him make the point that the Hugo's only
      represent the tastes of an inbred group "tru-fans".

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    4. Zenu, How long have you been a fan and how many cons have you attended? How do you know who is or is not a fan. Since when has the Worldcon Fan been a closed society? I've known about Worldcon since the 1970's and this is the first time that I've ever heard that the Worldcon Fan was some sort of elite group with secret decoder rings or something. What a small group of people of people apparently forgot was that Worldcon and the Hugos were not their personal little thing to play with anyway that they liked. The only reason what happened did was that the Hugos had become so moribund because far too many of us didn't want to go a little out of our way and spend the price of a couple of books to participate. That was a mistake that we are regretting. Unfortunately the little clique that had been running things for the last 20 years or so had their huge pissy fit and have more than likely killed Worldcon and rendered the Hugos irrelevant. It's actually pathetic, in a way. And Vox didn't have to do a damned thing. The puppy kickers did it all to themselves and awarded themselves hood ornament and handed out wooden assholes to show how virtuous they were on live stream TV. Now THAT's pathetic.

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  53. Ah - Why I was composing, Fail Burton posted his comment. My thanks to him for making my point.

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  54. Your logic is inconsistent. If pushing back against this racialized feminism is such a great idea to sell books then why did David Brin admit he self-censors on his own site out of fear of his colleagues? Even being a normal comic got Jonathan Ross hounded out of the Hugos and Orson Scott Card lost a gig writing a Superman comic. Tom Monteleone is now under some informal boycott for not pie-charting his anthology. Justin Landon at Tor once publicly excoriated a Kickstarter anthology because its T. of Contents was 4 women out of 20 writers and "All white? Really?" That's the same Landon who once wrote an essay "Why I'm voting for Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice." In that essay he wrote SF is "a genre predicated on white cis men doing hero stuff... Published in the middle of a cultural revolution within the science fiction and fantasy community, Ancillary Justice has become something of a clarion call for women and other underrepresented populations fed up with the kyriarchy." That's the same Landon who once left sympathetic comments at the now scrubbed site of Requires Hate, a woman who compared the intelligence of "white men" to "buffaloes." If I get lit up just for existing, what if I compared the intelligence of black women to buffaloes, or called one a "half-savage? That is not equal protection but the rules of a KKK. Is anyone in this cult going after Landon or Tor to disassociate themselves from all of that rubbish?

    You don't have to even do anything; just being white and male is plenty. In fact publicly pushing back against these people is a proven risk and just existing as a white man in and of itself is a proven cause for boycotts, witchhunts and discrimination.

    This weird cult only dates back to 2009 so Rowling is neither here nor there and transforming King into a Third Wave Feminist he is not to make some point is disingenuous. People are being racially and sexually skewered in blood libels about a "white dude parade," not because they are liberal or conservative. Brin hates the GOP and Garcia and Landon said not one word about such a thing, nor have any of these other "old white dude" and "white cis dude" witchhunts and blood libels.

    The cult of Octavia and Judith Butler freeped their own award, as is their right as an informal congregation. But they have lied about that congregation even existing and keep up the pretense the Hugo is still based on merit while in fact it clearly rewards race and sex together with racial and sexual incitement. I am calling that cult serial liars and man-hating racists based on actual quotes, not challenging their right to vote an award.

    I never said Twilight was related to the Hugos. I said fans prefer fun rather than overwritten artistry and being hated for being racially and sexually blamed for an "underrepresented" T. of Contents. Meyer doesn't hate her fans, while N. K. Jemisin has written SF fandom is "racist as fuck." Now this cult is pushing Jemisin's The Fifth Season as their flagship intersectionalist novel this year the same way they pushed Leckie in 2013-4. Normal humans are going to be no more excited by overwritten mediocrity which thinks you're a "racist" than they were with the mediocrity of Leckie and her theory "white cis dudes" like to punch women, PoC and gays. Meyer wins by default and lack of blood libels, a woman who'd never even written a story before Twilight.

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    1. And still none of this has anything to do with Worldcon Fans. No matter what odd conspiracy you see in the world Fans get to read what they want, like what they want and vote what they want.

      Sooner or later with puppies it comes down to "wrong fans" reading "wrong books" having "wrong fun" and now "wrong votes".

      You guys should go organize your own convention. You could hold it at a Holiday Inn conference room.

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    2. The KKK used to make similar anti-equal protection separate but equal arguments in regard to housing. Thankfully we used to have Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling. Now we have Garcia and Jemisin. Any advice on where I could find a good water fountain? How about a "room of my own"?

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