I’ve been out of the media loop, so I am just now seeing the news report about the Charleston church shooting. As always, the internet is alive with people talking 110 miles a minute, about the event. I don’t have any spectacular insights to add, except to say I think the “answer” really does come down to working on your home, and spreading the love outward from there. People want to “fix” this, and I think they sometimes can’t see the forest for the trees. You want to “fix” it by getting angry? Transmute the anger into actions of love and kindness for your neighbors, your coworkers, your church friends, even people you only meet in passing. Forgive those who may have slighted you; especially the ones who did it without intention to harm.
That’s what Christ commanded, and I keep coming back to the notion that Christ called it over two thousand years ago: as I have loved you, love one another. Far easier said than done. Especially when the flames of hate and acrimony flare up. Blame becomes the theme of the day. When you hate and blame someone enough that they literally become “unreal” that’s when stuff like the church shooting can take place. Hate and blame cannot be “fixed” with more hate and blame. That may sound poofey New Age, but I think it’s true. Acts of hate and blame generate still more hate and blame, until the whole world is burning.
That’s how ISIS operates — the guys who are the reason I am away from home right now. They want to literally burn the world, because they think they’re so righteous and pure that everyone else deserves to be mowed down.
ISIS is not a problem you, in your office or living room, can fix. Church shootings are also not something you in your living room can stop or fix. You stop the hate and the blame when you make a personal choice, every day, to be a lover of the souls who inhabit your space. The ones you can touch with kindness, with cheer, with delight for life, with encouragement, and above all else, with an acknowledgment that we really are brothers and sisters.
Again, far easier said, than done. Which is why we have to be reminded over and over and over. Because all of us keep screwing up time, and time again. And it’s easy to get so wrapped up in how we are angry over what other people say and do that we completely forget about what we say and do. Again, there is the spiral down — world burning! — and there is the spiral up.
Notice, it takes no effort to be carried on the spiral down. That’s the path of least resistance.
It takes blood, sweat, and tears, to march along the spiral up. Effort. Always, effort. Movement and energy expended toward a higher goal. A selfless goal. A Christ-like goal. Even if you don’t believe in Christ as a religious figure, the wisdom of Christ’s words is entirely sound.
Foster the connections. Grow the connections. Love the connections.
Connections are what can save us. If not from the evil of the world, at least from the poison of rage and despair that can consume us inside.
Brad R. Torgersen 
Actually, I am hopeful that the Internet will someday make war impossible.
You may not like someone; that’s your right, especially if they insult you by calling you a robot. But, that won’t start or stop a conflict by itself, your opinion of someone else.
My daughter has a friend she has never met – in Argentina, where she’s never been. Through an Internet chat group, she met this person who has many of the same interests, traits and hobbies. She has learned a lot about the real-life effects of socialism (shortages, government misdeeds, the challenge of getting through every day when things are rationed or unavailable, how her friend makes money by standing in line at stores for other people who cannot wait in line all day). But most of all, she has made friends around the world.
Now suppose our Presidente Obama decides that Argentina is a threat, and tries to get Congress to declare war (just go with it for a moment). My daughter would be the first to object, loudly, that Argentina is where her friend is, and no one should declare a war on her friend. Her friend is no threat to anyone, and would be severely impacted if Argentina should go to war (with anyone, not just the US).
NOW imagine a world linked by trillions of Internet friendships, where anytime a new war was proposed, the friends in each nation involved objected. Might this not be a path to peace?
Is there hope for the future? I certainly hope so – and hope this trend of Internet friends grows like Yggdrasil from now on. It’s not much, but at least it’s something. JtW
NOW imagine a world linked by trillions of Internet friendships, where anytime a new war was proposed, the friends in each nation involved objected. Might this not be a path to peace?
While I’m certain that internet friendships make it harder for free and representative governments, the sort of public sentiment doesn’t work on autocratic governments. In fact, the fact that those nations may find it harder to go to war may make autocratic governments believe they can get away with doing things that would otherwise provoke a military response, such as support terrorist organizations and guerrilla warfare. Eventually, someone will step over the line which the representative governments can tolerate, and war will break out.
Now, the internet may serve the purpose of weakening autocratic governments in other ways, which would overall reduce the likelihood of war. But the less willing the free world is to go to war, the more likely war may actually be.
how well is the Internet connectivity preventing the ‘war’ between SJW and SP?
If you think the other side is mistaken, there is room for peace. But if you think the other side is EVIL, there really isn’t. And if one side takes the EVIL stance, the other must fight back or be exterminated.
Work on your home? Sad puppy nominee:
“Michael Z Williamson @mzmadmike Jun 18
The Charleston: 9 shots Kahlua, one shot coconut cream, serve with a Colt 45 chaser. With help from Steve Coffman
Too soon?”
Cd, are you saying Brad needs to be responsible for Mad Mike, who is known as a provocateur? Seems a stretch.
Anyway, stay safe Brad, ISIS is promising a crazy Ramadan and may have dirty nukes. You’ll be included in my prayer rounds.
@larry, who did they shoot that we need to condemn them?
If you think the other side is mistaken, there is room for peace. But if you think the other side is EVIL, there really isn’t. And if one side takes the EVIL stance, the other must fight back or be exterminated.
Which is why it’s so important to condemn using things like ‘microaggressions’ to deny the other side the chance to speak. If you can deny the other side the ability to get their real views out, it’s much easier to throw out inaccurate versions (such as calling them, say, ‘neo-Nazis’).
Likewise taking offense at everything and shutting down those that offend you is also a way of throwing barriers up to block understanding. Morbid humor is often one of the ways humans deal with horror.
“I think dissociating from people like Williamson and Beale and Beale’s followers is the right thing to do. Condemn too.”
Clamps, you want to condemn them for breathing. The day we start caring what you think…. LOL! Go back to the kid’s table, the adults are talking.
Well, I was going to respond to Clamps. But that would be obviating the point of the post.
Hang it, Torgerson! I can’t get my mad on.
Seriously, though. Good stuff.
Michael Z. Williamson tends to be an equal-opportunity offender, but with this comment, he’s being spectacularly crass, unfeeling, and contextually tone deaf. I mean, I get it, graveyard humor. I am military. But I think Mike was both unthinking and very wrong to make this kind of joke at this particular moment. I know I am not the only Sad Puppies person who feels that way, too. I hope Mike isn’t afraid to own a mistake. Lord knows we all make them. He just made one. And I think Mike should take responsibility for it.
What’s missing from the quote above (now that I’ve looked at the actual tweet) is that Mike also asked, in the very same tweet:
That tells me even Mike was dimly aware that he was in over his head on this one. So, for the person who brought Mike’s thoughtless, careless tweet into this conversation, you get few points from me for only quoting Mike partially. That little “too soon?” needs to be there, or you’re just being a troll; using troll tactics.
Again, I hope Mike takes responsibility for this. He should.
@Brad
MZW has put up a post about it. Not to sure how to describe it, beyond a certain level of doubling-down. I dunno if responsibility comes into it.
Also, both cd here in the comments here (8.10 pm) and @eilatan on twitter (who may have been the first to re-tweet it, I dunno, not really a twitter person) did include the entire text, including the “Too Soon”. I don’t think they were trolling, just bringing something to attention.
I didn’t see that tweet of Mad Mike’s until much later in the day today.
I did happen to see him ask how solid the proof was that the guy in custody did it. When told he had confessed the immediate reply was something along the lines of “fry him.”
One thing that seems to be lost amongst all the accusations online recently is that sometimes people are just Jerks. No racism, sexism, or bigotry needed. Just a run of the mill Jerk comment.
And yeah, that joke crosses a whole bunch of lines. Personally I don’t think it would ever be not ‘too soon,’ but I am neither Mike’s mum nor his judge.
Either way to go from that to calling him ‘the worst kind of monster’ is taking things too far, as is immediately labeling him as various shades of ist because of it.
I was never in the military (never would have passed the medical, or I would have considered ROTC) but I understand how gallows humor works. Still think he shouldn’t have said it, but again, not his mum.
Thanks for the link to what he said, Snowcrash, the last bit bears repeating.
“If you’ve taken offense, then by all means find other entertainers. I would never suggest you shouldn’t. For myself, it takes more than an off-color joke for me to dismiss an entire body of work.”
Thanks, Brad. Couldn’t’ve said it better.
Luftwaffle: I’m still waiting for people other than the head of Tor to distance themselves from Ms. Gallo. Whose response to being called out on a similarly tasteless comment was the same level of face-saving “sorry you were offended” material.
In this case, however, the people who are taking umbrage against Williamson AREN’T the people his crass joke affects in any way. It was just as tasteless as any number of one-liners I’ve heard from any number of crappy stand-up comedians, but if there’s anyone owed an actual apology for it it’s the victims and their families.
It seems to me most of the outrage here is because Williamson is affiliated with groups the offended parties happen to be united against. He milked a tragedy for a bad joke, and out come those who now want to milk the same tragedy in the name of the Hugo Awards.
In a sense, the thing Mike said — and the way certain people react to it — is an object lesson in why connections are so important. Very few people will make a crack like Mike made, about people they personally know. Tragedy only becomes “comedy” with sufficient distance. On the flip side, people attacking Mike (or attacking Sad Puppies through Mike) are merely shooting at a signpost. Mike isn’t “real” for them. Nobody connected to Sad Puppies is real.
In other words, there is no benefit of the doubt being afforded. There is merely recrimination.
Benefit of the doubt is huge. Assumption of non-harm, even in instances where it might be easy to assume harm. That’s generosity right there. Mike’s comment was hugely ungenerous. Likewise, people exploiting the comment are also being hugely ungenerous.
Brad, sorry, I’m pretty sure that I’ve misunderstood, but are you saying that by quoting or screencapping his own public comments, that people are somehow exploiting MZW? I don’t really see that as exploiting – more a natural by-product of his increased profile. With that comes increased scrutiny and attention, particularly from a perspective that previously is not used to his writing and/or sense of humour (or lack thereof).
Sadly, anger sells. It is why the news cycle is so full of angry indignation and condemnation. These are times for reflection, not reaction, and I thank you for your thoughtful reflections.
Gee, did SJWs come up with a definition of racism while I was asleep? By SJW standards, they have VD, John Wright and now Williamson. However invoking the insane concept of “compared to what?” I find SJWs in SFF still getting drudged in this game via their own amazing racism and rules by a score of about 150 to 3.
Oh, but I forgot SJW rules:
“Saladin Ahmed @saladinahmed · 19h 19 hours ago In an unequal world, satire that ‘mocks everyone equally’ ends up serving the powerful.”
“Feminist Frequency @femfreq · Oct 21 Parody and satire are tools which can be used to ‘punch up’ at the powerful or ‘punch down’ at the marginalized, reenforcing oppression.”
“Feminist FrequencyVerified account @femfreq 6h6 hours ago There’s no such thing as sexism against men. That’s because sexism is prejudice + power. Men are the dominant gender with power in society.”
Shove your con game. SJWs don’t joke about their racism and nor do they claim the religious objection SJWs so willingly grant to Muslims but not Christians.
SJWs are bald-faced liars cuz they stack the deck so they always win. What philosophy in the history of the world always mysteriously lands on Jews as the bad guy? Answer: the same sick sociopathy as intersectional gender feminism.
Or maybe you believe there is some daffy truth in 2015 Tiptree Award-winner for best novel Monica Byrne’s truth to power about “the white male colonial gaze.” If you believe that you may believe you can reach the Earth’s core through a giant opening at the North Pole. Say “hi” to David Innes and his dinosaur ranch. Plus how could Byrne be a bigot; she’s a woman.
I don’t think this is a case of anger selling, Iowa. When the sitting President of the SFWA wakes up and has a chance to write about planets and aliens or white privilege and chooses the latter, that speaks to not only a weird obsession dragged into the wrong place but of finding one’s own genre boring.
Neither last year’s Nebula nominated Hild or “Wakulla Springs” had any SFF in them, however they did speak to feminist obsessions with race and gender and a clear boredom for actual SFF. What is notable about SJWs is that clear twin trend. They are as much drama queens about race and gender as they deflate actual SFF into some memory-hole. SJWs have been riding this supreme boredom of their own genre for 3 years now and it shows no sign of settling down. They even have a racial/sexual revenge sub-genre going now. Of course that means alternate history stories passed off as “fantasy” and all the runaway slaves, multicultural old Europe, assassinations of East India Company officials, black Marco Polos and lesbian medieval gamechangers are a mere coincidence and not at all boredom and stinking bigotry.
It’s been hammered in on the news that the shooter dropped out of high school in the 9th grade. I’m wondering if he also dropped out of church at the same time. I think he must have. No one calling themselves a Christian and really believing in Christianity can be so consumed by hatred. And committing mass murder in a church? At worship time?
I wish once again to point the hypocrisy of the anti-Puppies. We aren’t supposed to get upset over what Irene Gallo said on her Facebook, but Mike makes a crass joke on his page (pretty much a daily occurrence? End of the world.
SJWs are on their way out. Their entire movement is based on historic lies, racial incitement and incitement to hate men. They are taking a drubbing in video-gaming and the same thing is happening in SFF. In only 3 years the Nebulas has lost any credibility it once had. No one’s interested in their stupid affirmative action movement they daily advertise as much as they deny it even exists.
WorldCon’s been exposed as WisCon 2.0 and WisCon itself as a padded cell. SJW double standards and two-faced rules are so massive they can’t be hidden.
No one’s interested in their hatred of half the world plus all whites and throw in oppressive heterosexuality. SFF has allowed itself to be gamed by a lesbian cultish ideology hiding behind actual anti-oppression movements that won and went home. They went home because they were based on law, not con games of mysterious intersecting vectors of oppression that equally mysteriously includes everyone but straight white men.
You can tell from SJW comments that they are in denial and not backing off one inch but the handwriting’s on the wall. At some point they’re going to run out of people to call racists and sexists to account for their own sociopathy, personality disorders and lack of talent. All those foppish white guy “allies” who’ve decided to stand up for a racist sexist cult which hates them look more like fools every day. Say good-bye to your careers, because unlike you, the rest of the world has a single definition for the word “bigotry.” At some point some of you moronic SJWs might want to think about how you’ve been manipulated into putting your careers at risk by people who aren’t even writers.
It’s been hammered in on the news that the shooter dropped out of high school in the 9th grade. I’m wondering if he also dropped out of church at the same time. I think he must have. No one calling themselves a Christian and really believing in Christianity can be so consumed by hatred. And committing mass murder in a church? At worship time?
That’s a ‘No True Scotsman’ argument. People believing in Christianity are still vulnerable to mental illness.
I’ll say this upfront so I’m not understood: what was done was both almost incomprehensibly evil and very definitely insane. I can understand the logic of someone that seeks to gain something from harming others, even as I experience total abhorrence of their actions. This doesn’t even meet that threshold; the killers reasons for what he did are comprehensible only to himself. We still don’t know the details of what prompted the killer’s actions; without that no one can truly understand why this happened.
I realize the following is a tad hypocritical, in that it falls into the same trap it warns about others falling in to. There’s no way to get out of this, because the emotions of the tragedy here are real. Still, I think it needs to be said:
The people seeking to exploit the tragedy to advance their personal agendas are all falling into the same trap as the killer. The killer had some insane reason for his hatred; it’s likely the product of an insane mind and magnifying petty injustices he experienced in his life. This hatred was compounded by assigning responsibility for those reasons to an entire race of people. Those that are victims of the killer’s hatred (such as the family and friends of those killed) have a legitimate reason to hate the killer, as much as hate can ever be legitimate. Transferring that legitimate hatred for individuals onto an entire group is just as wrong as transferring an insane hatred.
Snowcrash, I definitely didn’t get any of that reading what Brad said.
Kinda goes back to what I said – MM’s joke was crass and a jerk move, but to use that to label him a monster who is sexist, racist, and so on (based solely on that one tweet) is ungenerous.
Yeah MM can be a jerk sometimes. Who isn’t?
“Kinda goes back to what I said – MM’s joke was crass and a jerk move, but to use that to label him a monster who is sexist, racist, and so on (based solely on that one tweet) is ungenerous.
Yeah MM can be a jerk sometimes. Who isn’t?”
So Irene Gallo making a hasty remark which she APOLOGIZED FOR about painting too many puppies with too broad a brush is unforgiven and relentlessly attacked with attempts to get her fired, when the stakes being argued about are only the (essentially trivial in the scheme of things) Hugo Awards…
…but when a man makes a revolting joke about an actual MASSACRE of human beings, everyone should “generously” overlook it because he’s “sometimes” a jerk, and who DOESN’T joke now and then about massacres right after they happen?
“If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.”
— Cardinal Richelieu (1585 – 1642)
I accepted her apology. That is easily verifiable in more than a couple different places.
Neither am I calling for a boycott of Tor. For many of those that are the problem isn’t even so much what she said, but that she did so while pushing Tor stuff and in so doing attacked Tor employees and customers. Others are doing it because they feel Tor is ignoring their complaints and thereby demonstrating that they have customer service problems separate from what Gallo said. For others still it is because they found her apology sorely lacking. Personally I am willing to accept the apology as given, but again, not their mum nor hers.
I also never said it should be overlooked. I said it was well over the line and a jerk move, but not in itself enough to justify being called ‘the worst kind of monster’ who is racist or sexist, which he was called, word for word.
But by all means, if you think people are being hypocritical in castigating her and not him, feel free to show us how it is done by forgiving him as you exhort us to do the same for her.
Here’s a simple yes no question for you about this kind of thing. Apparently a renowned biochemist (if I have my facts straight) was fired and ostracized for saying the following. “The problem with girls in laboratories is you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and if you criticize them they cry.” Now, I am sure we can both agree that, even as a joke, he should not have said. He was fired. Should he have been?
If your answer is yes, why then shouldn’t Gallo be fired?
“So Irene Gallo making a hasty remark which she APOLOGIZED FOR …”
Wrong to start with – saying “I’m sorry people got offended because I called them a ..” is NOT an apology! An apology is “I was wrong about .. and I’m sorry I hurt them”. She’s only putting window-dressing on a drive-by shooting.
“…but when a man makes a revolting joke about an actual MASSACRE of human beings …” If you were revolted, great – criticize him as you have.
But don’t try to excuse Irene’s slander by invoking a tasteless joke! Two wrongs, even if you think Mike’s joke “wronged” someone (who?) don’t make a right.
Do you think Puppies have been generous to Irene Gallo over a single month-old Facebook comment? Even after she apologized and Tor apologized, the torch-wielding mob did not disperse. They’ve been demanding her firing, two other editors’ firings, a Tor boycott, and on and on.
Williamson sought to offend, because that’s his tiresome comedy shtick on Twitter. Gallo was just one person among many making an intemperate remark in the early days of this Hugos controversy. You’ve been engaging in harsh insults against groups of people for a while yourself. I’d think for that reason you’d cut Gallo some slack and join Jim Butcher in calling for the matter to drop. He wrote on Facebook, “She said sorry. Leave it, guys.” He later added, “She’s clearly said what she’s going to say. What is the point of hanging on to it? How does it profit anyone? How does it improve things for anyone? It’s nothing but vicious Facebook commenting at this point.”
You seem to be doing some unfair conflating as well. Larry has (repeatedly) said he isn’t calling for a boycott, that the SP in general are not either. Brad has talked about being a Tor customer, but has not that I have seen called for a boycott. As you yourself point out Jim Butcher accepted her apology as well.
Peter Grant has not, but he is neither (by his own words) a SP nor trying to speak for all of us. He speaks for himself, not me or Brad or anyone else.
The fact that Gallo’s comment was unnoticed for a time is rather irrelevant. Yes Vox apparently sat on it for awhile, but how most people reacted would not have changed if it had come to light sooner.
Think real hard before making an entire group responsible for what one person on the other side (or one group even) says or does. That sword is razor sharp and cuts both ways.
Since jaynsand seems not to be following the thread I’ll open up my question to you as well Rogers, and indeed everyone else.
Should the renowned biochemist have been fired for his offensive joke? Yes or No? Why?
…but when a man makes a revolting joke about an actual MASSACRE of human beings, everyone should “generously” overlook it because he’s “sometimes” a jerk, and who DOESN’T joke now and then about massacres right after they happen?
Mr. Williamson has, in fact, dialed things up a notch in a new comment. But, pace everyone’s friend Eric Flint, “So what?” MZW is a person who makes casually racist comments and engages in victim-blaming, he won’t stop being gross, and his only quote-unquote-punishment for this will be likely not getting a Hugo for Wisdom From My Internet because people won’t find it that wise.
Do you think Puppies have been generous to Irene Gallo over a single month-old Facebook comment? Even after she apologized and Tor apologized, the torch-wielding mob did not disperse. They’ve been demanding her firing, two other editors’ firings, a Tor boycott, and on and on.
There’s a difference between offending someone and libeling or slandering someone (I think libel is the proper term for the internet). Ms. Gallo’s statement drew such a reaction because it veered into obviously false statements intended to defame character. If she didn’t know the statements were false, she owes a lot more people an apology. We’ve put up with offensive statements and insults; if we got mad and demanded someone be fired every time we felt insulted or offended, we’d never get anything else done. I don’t think she should be fired, and that we should let her apology stand, but if you can’t see the difference between offensive and libelous, there’s no hope for further discussion.
I’m curious – who, exactly, did Mad Mike attack with that comment?
There’s a world of difference between an offensive joke and attacking people directly. This isn’t hard to comprehend.
Paraphrasing (because those books are in boxes right now, out of bookshelf space):
“The plague raged through Aquilonia, striking down noble and commoner alike. The priests of Mitra wailed that the plague was sent by the gods to punish the sinful, but Conan growled, ‘If the gods struck down all who sinned, there wouldn’t be enough left to count the living.’ ”
I am willing to tolerate all kinds of stupid, at least once. I can ignore numerous celebrities who embrace Anthropogenic Global Warming; I can ignore those who think the government should spy on foreigners because they’re foreigners who might hurt us, while raising no fuss when the government spies on us, because .. well, because they’re ignorant about liberty. We should try to educate such people, since the schools obviously haven’t and the MSM doesn’t.
I can ignore an old biochemist who might not have changed with the world.
I cannot ignore a company that thinks I’m a robot and insults me, one of their customers. They will get no more of my business until the repeat offender is released to spread their poison elsewhere. Notice I still haven’t seen any indication that Gallo has said “I was wrong ..” or even “It was wrong to insult my company’s customers”. Certainly her co-workers show no remorse.
Enough; I’m rambling. Try to enjoy what’s left of the weekend, we can hope for better behavior next week.
If Peter Grant is not a part of Sad Puppies, then he has no grounds to demand an apology for a remark Irene Gallo made about Sad Puppies.
Yes there is, but in both cases people could be generous in response.
I do not believe Gallo’s comment rises to the level of libel. It’s quite obviously hyperbole, like a lot of what people have said to each other since the Hugos controversy began, and her remark about “neo-nazis” was pretty obviously directed at Theodore Beale and not at every single person who has declared themselves a part of Puppies.
When Torgersen calls people like me CHORFs, I don’t think that he’s personally insulted me and get on my high horse about what an outrage it is. He’s making a generalized negative comment about a group. Gallo did not personally insult Tor customers.
You are making the argument that Williamson’s remark is proof of some ideology we all share. Where is the proof of that? We are making the argument that Gallo’s remark was yet another from a feminist ideology dedicated to casting as wide a racist-sexist net as possible for no other reason than objecting to feminist critiques. Throwing us into an ideology in that way is senseless, since it is people like Gallo herself and her hero Hurley who define our supposedly hateful ideology as nothing more than saying no to a cultish hate-tank.
We on the other hand go by strict rules of evidence about who is and who is not a member of this goofy feminist ideology. Unlike SJW thought, being non-white and a gay woman who object to racial and sexual slanders is not one of them. Gallo’s remark was not “hasty” any more than Kameron Hurley’s remarks are “hasty,” since Gallo signed off on the idea Hurley’s feminist book would anger us. Anyone who calls Hurley’s irrational, empty and unfootnoted assertions “brilliant” may just be showing a little gender bias.
I’m not asking anyone to overlook Williamson’s joke. I’m saying in the absence of evidence, don’t keep enrolling others in an ideology unless you have quotes – and you don’t. Am I to really believe the social justice crusade that’s been rolling full steam for 3 years now is directed at Wright, Day and Williamson?
Give the weird ideology at Tor, what proof do you have Gallo’s remark was either “intemperate” or “hasty?” Hell, Jonathan Ross was booted and boycotted just for being alive. If Gallo’s not a gender feminist, let her say so.
“Irene Gallo @IreneGallo Feb 23 Great crowd and amazing panel at @HousingWorksBks’ Geek Feminism event.”
I’ve got some stunning news for you: geek feminists don’t like straight white men. If you have any quotes from a gender feminist who singles out humans as men and white and says something charitable, then hand them over, cuz they been avoiding me and may be as rare as Passenger Pigeons.
It’s sad that a call for “us to love another” brings out the haters. [Frown]
“Gallo did not personally insult Tor customers.”
I’d like a proof, then, that {Tor customers} U {Sad Puppies} = NULL
Immediate disproof: http://www.ljagilamplighter.com/2015/06/17/i-am-not-a-robot-i-am-a-free-fan-too/
Since one pic is from [ Extreme-radical-extra-chromosome-baby-seal-clubbing-throw-grandma-off-the-cliff-after-feeding-her-dog-food-bible-totin-gun-clinging-vast-right-wing-conspiring-against-BossieTheMAO-fly-over-country-racist-bigot-homophobe-half-breed-VoxDaySympathizing-neoNazi (although I still don’t see how they can lump right wing with National Socialism) in North Carolina ] and another is Vox Day himself, your argument appears to fail from inspection.
Let me let you guys from Glyer’s in on a dirty little secret. Below is a chart made from FBI stats. In researching SJW Twitter feeds I’ve found they obsess on interracial crimes, but only white on black. In other words, they operate exactly like Stormfront in reverse. If I were to go only by SJW Twitter feeds, I’d think whites were murdering blacks wholesale. Were I to make a chart out of SJW Twitter feeds they would look like the opposite of this chart. That is de facto proof of racial incitement at a culture-wide, institutional and ideological level, since they include lit-org presidents, editors and award nominated authors.
Despite SJW whining these last 3 years, there is no institutional opposite presence like that in SFF which would account for SJW hysteria over a racist and sexist SFF community. When you check on community racism, do you check your two goofy neighbors or City Hall?
“If Peter Grant is not a part of Sad Puppies, then he has no grounds to demand an apology for a remark Irene Gallo made about Sad Puppies.”
If a man cannot defend his friends, then by the same measure you have no grounds to criticize both the Sad Puppies and those who would boycott Tor over the unprofessionalism of their employees, including tarring their own authors with slurs.
“I do not believe…”
I don’t care. At this point, only what Macmillian decides about their employees’ unprofesssional use of social media matters. Although the use of twitter-bots and the articles saying that the boycott is a failure not even 24 hours into the boycott says that certain parties are scared that I will take the $500 or so that I spend per year on Tor and other Macmillian imprints elsewhere.
I think you’re trying way too hard to be an injured party. It was a comment on her personal Facebook wall that got so little attention Theodore Beale sat on the comment for an entire month and no one else made it an issue. There have been dozens of comments equally intemperate or worse.
Brad Torgersen himself implied that John Scalzi was gay as an insult in a Facebook comment he later apologized for. Should he be fired? Should dozens of other people be fired too, or can we all be more generous and accept that tempers flare from time to time?
I bought a few Tor books yesterday to protest the boycott campaign: The Waking Engine by David Edison and The Unincorporated Man by Dani and Eytan Kollin. They look good. The first book was worked on by Irene Gallo, pleasantly enough. The second has Robert J. Sawyer comparing it to Heinlein on the front cover.
For those of you who can’t figure out that chart, what it’s basically saying is that in raw numbers whites kill approximately the same numbers of whites as blacks do blacks. A much smaller number of interracial crimes shows more than twice as many blacks kill whites as the other way around. FBI annual stats usually hover around 450 blacks killing whites and 200 black deaths at the hands of whites.
So someone made a joke about a guy who wears dresses… so what? If this stupid cult didn’t have such a weird obsession with gigantic double standards about who can do what based on race and sex and support morons who straight up call whites “cracka ass cracka” and instead just said live and let live we wouldn’t be having these endlessly circular conversations about who has more humanity, the right to claim that humanity and the rights that go with it. The fact is you people have no principles at all. In your world short burglars would go free and tall ones get sent to jail. We are sick of listening to your race/gender-based moral ethos. It’s empty, unfair, moronic and sociopathic. If some moron’s going to make fun of my skin they’re going to take return fire, end of story. If they don’t like it, don’t start it.
Brad Torgersen himself implied that John Scalzi was gay as an insult in a Facebook comment he later apologized for. Should he be fired? Should dozens of other people be fired too, or can we all be more generous and accept that tempers flare from time to time?
It’s nice to say this now. Where were you when the whole thing got started? Can you link me to your defense of Mr. Beale? Or is it only an issue now that people on your side are having to answer for what they say?
We’re not stupid. Just as soon as we let up on Ms. Gallo, someone associated with the Sad Puppies campaign is going to say something that sounds offensive to someone, and all this nice talk is going to be forgotten.
“I think…”
Let me stop you right there. I don’t care. Let me be also clear; I don’t really care about Irene Gallo except as another incident in a growing trend of disrespect towards customer shown by Tor and Tor.com employees over the course of years. That trend, continued by Moshe Feder’s recent antics, is what forced me to spend my money elsewhere. There is very little you can say that will affect by decision, only actions by Macmillian and its employees.
In the spirit of the original post and in respect for the murdered dead that prompted it, I ask that we drop this conversation on this thread. Elsewhere, the topic’s fair game.
re: Peter Grant having no stand to complain I did phrase that poorly – My takeaway was that he was referring to the _organization_ of sad puppies (i.e. Brad, Larry, etc.) while still being a Sad Puppy supporter and voter. Much the same way that while I am part of Sad Puppies and was made aware of the opportunity to vote through Larry’s efforts I am not one of the nebulous leaders or the group and cannot speak for them nor the group as a whole. Dunno. Be more profitable to ask him than hash it out here.
No one here seems to be defending MMs comments or doubling down on them (which I did see plenty do with Gallo’s comments, even after her apology.)
So, I still want an answer. You don’t think Gallo should be fired. Neither do I, incidentally. Do you think the biochemist should have been fired?
How about the guy from Firefox?
What do you even expect to happen with MM’s latest shock joke crass joking?
“INORITE black broad TLDR entitlement”
“Most of it by black broads I think?”
“Never underestimate an older black broad when an institution that benefits them is on the line!”
Whaddya think: pass or no pass?
*
“The gay black broad perspective is basically the Dunning-Kruger effect apex of all civilization.”
“It’s like black women literally don’t understand how anything works.”
Pass or no pass?
*
“It is no coincidence that my book review column features no black female authors.”
“‘authentic’ seems often to mean ‘what Asian people would approve'”
Pass or no pass you hypocrites.
*
“Every time I break my rule and read a story by some random black gal author I remember why I stopped doing that.”
“Hard as it to believe, somewhere right now, a black, gay female is explaining to a man or white what they =really= meant.”
“Seems lately every week is black stupidity week. And they complain about a month in a year!”
“The truth about which black people are innocent of racist acts? Yeah, I’ll admit to not caring about that.”
Pass or no pass you lying shits.
Nicely put. This. Irene Gallo was not trying to be funny when she wrote what she wrote. Mike was. Irene was serious about her statement. Mike wasn’t. Irene was slapping her authors, the customer base, and a whole lot of other people with some very unfair labels. Mad Mike labeled nobody. He made a crude joke that would be off-color under the best of circumstances, but which was in horrendously terrible taste given the present context.
Also, for the record, I’ve never endorsed taking any kind of punitive action against TOR. I have said I think it would be a shame if TOR or Macmillan assumed everyone who complained about Gallo’s spectacularly lousy customer relations, was merely a web bot.
To echo Correia’s thoughts: a TOR employee took a dump on some TOR authors and part of the TOR customer base, while she was promoting a TOR product. This thing is between TOR and the people who pay TOR money. I am pretty much a spectator. Shit, I have bought two TOR books myself in the past 10 days. So take it, or leave it.
Let me stop you right there.
The game you’re playing where you act like you’re interrupting me is weird. I don’t care that you don’t care, you don’t care that I don’t care that you don’t care, and so on. We each care so little we’re hanging out with a sad little Leave a Reply box instead of doing something better with our Saturday.
If you have a beef with Tor that’s bigger than the current situation I have no quarrel with that. I just think this orchestrated we-demand-an-apology boycott campaign — begun by a competitor who tells his followers to “never apologize” — is dishonest as hell. So I’m happy to put a little dent in it by supporting Tor.
Pass or no pass, rcade.
According to Tor author John Scalzi, if I’m not down with those racist quotes, I am the lord of shit. A rather eccentric methodology when it comes to fighting social injustice. In fact one might say it’s insane.
“I just think this orchestrated we-demand-an-apology boycott campaign — begun by a competitor who tells his followers to “never apologize” — is dishonest as hell. ”
Please show where Peter Grant said that.
I’m not crediting Peter Grant with beginning the campaign. Theodore Beale began it by sitting on the Irene Gallo quote for a month, releasing it during the Nebulas when all the Tor people were in Chicago and fomenting a bunch of artificial outrage.
Beale is the organ grinder and the people urging the boycott are his monkeys.
Thank you. I now know to ignore you whenever I see you.
That hurts, Nathan. I take it all back.
If Peter Grant is not a part of Sad Puppies, then he has no grounds to demand an apology for a remark Irene Gallo made about Sad Puppies.
By that logic, if you are not Irene Gallo, you have no right to tell Peter Grant what he can or cannot say in regards to Irene Gallo.
Oh, and this:
Brad Torgersen himself implied that John Scalzi was gay as an insult in a Facebook comment he later apologized for.
If you are not John Scalzi, you have no grounds to criticize Brad re: what he said about Scalzi.
(And he’ll say “That’s completely different!” in 3… 2… 1…)
I was banned from Tor on my first visit almost 2 1/2 years ago. How does that make me a monkey? Why not admit they indulge in inflammatory hate speech and then defend it by boycotting their own readers who object to it. If you think for one minute I’m going to sit still for racist remarks and then also be called a racist for objecting you’re the monkey dancing to the tune of goofball feminists who title their columns with quotes from other nutters who believe in “compulsory heterosexuality.”
You don’t even have the intellectual honesty to answer pass or no pass. That makes you someone who can’t find the truth.
By that logic, if you are not Irene Gallo, you have no right to tell Peter Grant what he can or cannot say in regards to Irene Gallo.
You’re missing the point.
Peter Grant has taken personal offense at Irene Gallo’s remark, claiming to have been smeared in her comment about Sad Puppies. On his blog he wrote, “The mere fact that I supported Larry Correia and the ‘Sad Puppies’ was enough for her to label me ‘unrepentantly racist, misogynist, and homophobic.'”
Now he’s running a Tor boycott and demanding Gallo be publicly reprimanded for her insult to himself and everyone else in Sad Puppies.
So when Jared Anjewierden claimed here that Grant was not a Sad Puppy, how is it possible for him to be one and not be one at the same time? This is becoming a Schrödinger’s Puppy situation.
You’re missing the point.
“That’s completely different!”
“Now he’s running a Tor boycott …”
While he may have suggested starting one (not sure, not interested in verifying) NO ONE is running it. Each person has decided (A) whether or not they are offended, (B) whether or not they are offended enough to participate in a boycott, and (C) what conditions must be met for them, individually, to end it. Larry isn’t boycotting anyone, Brad isn’t, Peter is, I am, and so on.
Groupthink and being-easily-led are not characteristics of SP. How about your bunch?
I’m not crediting Peter Grant with beginning the campaign. Theodore Beale began it by sitting on the Irene Gallo quote for a month, releasing it during the Nebulas when all the Tor people were in Chicago and fomenting a bunch of artificial outrage.
The groups here are not narrowly defined, and the people throwing insults don’t seem to care who they’re targeting. Every other time, the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies are treated as one and the same, why should this time be any different. The fact that he isn’t an official Sad Puppies member doesn’t mean he can’t identify with their cause take offense when insults are thrown.
I think you’re trite synopsis is missing at least one step. Before anything in it, Irene either called the Sad Puppies neo-Nazis, or at least libeled people as neo-Nazis without being clear who she was targeting. That is an outrageous smear, no matter who it is directed at. The outrage isn’t artificial.
We’re so glad you’re interested in the big picture and not drawing us into mindless pedantry over punctilio.
Here’s the start of her comment: “There are two extreme right-wing to neo-nazi groups, called the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies respectively …”
Note the use of the word “respectively.” She was referring to Rabid Puppies as “neo-nazis,” not Sad Puppies. It is a misread to claim she called Sad Puppies “neo-nazis.”
I already answered how he is a supporter and not a Sad Puppy – one refers to all of us who are loosely organized into it, the other to the organizers.
Or do you think me saying I am a Sad Puppy puts me on the same level, clout wise and so forth, as Brad who organized the thing?
Here’s his actual words, found after about five seconds of looking.
“I am not a member of, and I do not speak for, either the ‘Sad Puppies’ or ‘Rabid Puppies’ campaigns (although I support the former).”
in any case, Gallo admitted that she painted with too broad a brush. Hardly seems fitting to complain about that broader brush making people less than directly involved angry then, no?
Calling them collectively unrepentant racist sexist homophobes wasn’t exactly better than the neo-Nazi bit.
You asked us to accept her apology. Part of that apology is admitting being wrong. That you seem to be reinforcing the very statements she apologized for isn’t helping your case any.
Still waiting for an answer on my question, btw. A yes or no is all that is required.
I already answered how he is a supporter and not a Sad Puppy – one refers to all of us who are loosely organized into it, the other to the organizers.
If the terms Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies only refers to the organizers — Correia, Torgersen, Beale, Hoyt, and Wright — then Irene Gallo only insulted those five people with her comment. Why are so many Puppies supporters acting like she insulted them personally and hell must be paid?
The only reinforcement I’ve given her comment is to explain who it was about (and who it wasn’t). I haven’t called all Puppies “unrepentantly racist, misogynist, and homophobic” nor do I agree with those sentiments.
In her apology she wrote, “I realize I painted too broad a brush and hurt some individuals, some of whom are published by Tor Books and some of whom are Hugo Award winners. I apologize to anyone hurt by my comments.” I think that should have been sufficient to the offense that Sad Puppies organizers may have taken.
There’s a difference between saying something in a public speech to the World Conference of Science Journalists and a non-famous person making a comment on her personal Facebook wall.
But it sounds to me like Tim Hunt did not get due process from his university and was fired without even being given a chance to offer his side. That’s unfair and I’d call his firing wildly disproportionate to the offense his attempt at a joke caused.
I don’t think he should’ve been fired.
What’s the startling prospect of a hate speech movement in the heart of a literary genre in 21st century America compared to the semantic niceties of extreme right wing as opposed to neo-Nazis? This is surely what all the pushback is about.
That and whether one capitalizes the “W” in “white male colonial gaze” or not.
Note the use of the word “respectively.” She was referring to Rabid Puppies as “neo-nazis,” not Sad Puppies. It is a misread to claim she called Sad Puppies “neo-nazis.”
Yes, but the first half of the sentence “There are two extreme right-wing to neo-nazi groups” suggests she thinks the contents of the groups individually ranges from right-wing to Neo-Nazi. Her sentence was poorly written, and is easy to misunderstand, especially given how provocative it was. Certainly, the people defending her don’t seem to think that calling the Sad Puppies neo-Nazis is uncalled for. Which raises the major point: calling anyone in this debate a neo-Nazi is outrageous. Peter Grant has fought neo-Nazis, and has seen what they actually believe and do, of course he’s outraged someone is throwing around that slanderous insult without paying attention to the gravity of what they’re actually calling someone. Yes, the term has been somewhat trivialized with time; no one thinks the Soup Nazi is actually a follower of the German Nationalist Socialist Workers Party. But seriously thinking someone is a Nazi?
Is there a point to all this circular arguing? Now you’re just making yourself look foolish and dense.
There’s this thing called context. Wonderfully helpful in figuring out what other people mean.
Yes he is a SP. No he is not one of the organizers. Yes some of the SPs are calling for a boycott. The group as a whole is not.
I’m glad we can agree that Hunt shouldn’t have been fired. (I’m going to assume we agree that something short of that probably was in order, if only a sit down with HR and some training on sensitivity) We even agree that Gallo shouldn’t be fired.
Trick is, I think that Tor shouldn’t be ignoring their customers complaints as they seem to be doing.
I also agree that time and place of statements matter. That actually goes to the heart of why some people are calling for a boycott of Tor. Gallo’s comments came on a post talking about her work at Tor, on a FB page seeming dominated by similar posts, at a time of day she was presumably at work. That is a lot more of a gray area.
Now, you think her apology was sufficient? That’s great. As stated, I also accepted it. But you and I do not get to dictate to other people what they think sufficient. Can you not see why someone who had friends murdered by actual neo-Nazis, someone who traded gunfire with them, would be more upset by the comments? The SPs are not some monolithic group. We are all individuals, accountable to ourselves only. Treating us as if we are will not be especially fruitful.
In her apology she wrote, “I realize I painted too broad a brush and hurt some individuals, some of whom are published by Tor Books and some of whom are Hugo Award winners. I apologize to anyone hurt by my comments.” I think that should have been sufficient to the offense that Sad Puppies organizers may have taken.
In other words, “if you were offended by this, I actually didn’t mean you, just some of the other people, and I’m sorry you were offended. I’m not sorry about those other people I smeared, just you.”
There’s a difference between saying something in a public speech to the World Conference of Science Journalists and a non-famous person making a comment on her personal Facebook wall.
“In my experience, women cry a lot” = fired
“You, actually not you, but your friends, are genocidal racists who want to kill or enslave people.” = keep job after non-apology apology.
So Irene Gallo making a hasty remark which she APOLOGIZED FOR
*snipped after the first lie*
She didn’t apologize for making the statement. She made a fake “I apologized if you were offended” apology.
HTH, HAND.
These two statements are contradictory. In the first, Grant is not a Sad Puppy because he’s not an organizer. In the second, Grant is a Sad Puppy even though he’s not an organizer.
Can you blame me for being confused?
Yes, if the comment was directed at him. But as I’ve said, I think Gallo’s “neo-nazi” comment was pretty clearly a shot at Beale, not Sad Puppies.
I’m glad we agree the apology was sufficient. I do not think it’s right to go after Gallo so hard for a single intemperate comment said on Facebook only a couple days after the Hugo controversy began. The way things are going, she’s likely to be a target of online abuse for a long time. That is greatly disproportionate to the offense.
Beale was not offended. He was excited to have an opportunity to exploit her comment, as a competitor to Tor and someone who has been angry at the publisher, Tor author John Scalzi and Tor editors Patrick and Teresa Neilsen Hayden for a long time. Beale even told Mike Glyer of File 770 how he timed the comment’s release to orchestrate one of his super villain schemes.
So by your logic I am not a Sad Puppy?
This isn’t that complicated. Sad Puppies includes the people who initially organized it and promoted it – Brad, Larry, et al, _and_ the people who joined it thereafter – me, Peter Grant, and all the other people who are nominating and voting on the Hugos for the first time. Peter Grant falls under the second category, but not the first. Considering how many people continue to say the united puppies are calling for a boycott, despite what Brad, Larry, and others have said the distinction is important.
Vox does a lot of things. He’ll have to accept praise or condemnation for all of them, as must we all for our own actions sooner or later. That he sat on it doesn’t actually change what she did, nor how people reacted to it, and frankly claiming that it does robs her of control over her own actions. She’s a grown woman, capable of making her own mistakes right along with the wise decisions.
Honestly, saying that she said it in the first days of the dustup as an excuse almost makes it worse, because all of those accusations are – or at least were, overuse has diluted them – very serious. To level them at someone without sufficient proof blithely is troubling.
I was on FB a bit ago, checking on some things. It would seem that Mad Mike is getting actual death threats now over his ill-conceived and intemperate joke. Now, obviously you feel more strongly about his offense than I do, but death threats? Seriously?
You’re being ungenerous. She didn’t apologize “if” anyone was offended. She acknowledged that she hurt some individuals and apologized to anyone hurt by her comments.
I think some people want so badly for her words to be a non-apology they’re mischaracterizing them. If you make a remark in the future that puts the torch-wielding mob headed in your direction — I’ve been through it myself — you are going to want people to be fair to you. Be fair to her and accept her apology. You got her called on the carpet by the top boss of Tor. That ought to be enough.
At this point, I think anyone who calls themselves a Sad Puppy can be a Sad Puppy.
But if someone makes a remark about Sad Puppies, unless they make it clear they’re talking about all Sad Puppies they could just be talking about the organizers.
I disagree. The anger level was really high in the first week after the ballot was announced. People didn’t have as much information on Sad Puppies, Rabid Puppies and Theodore Beale at that time. Her statement was one of many hot-headed things being said at that time.
Pulling it out a month later after intentionally sitting on it was a chump move.
More quotes taken out of context:
SFF editor and Publisher’s Weekly review editor Rose Fox: “White parents of White boys, your most important task is countering the culture that wants to turn them into racist, misogynist killers.”
Same: “Hate is default White male behavior in America. Has been for a long time. Teach your boys better before they hurt/kill someone else’s kids.”
Same: “American White male culture is racist and sexist. If that offends you, as a White American male, go do something about it.”
Yeah. I’m out. Family in town trumps internet arguments.
Enjoy your weekend, everyone. Please.
I hate that death threats are a common part of the online experience these days, particularly on Twitter.
As for his joke, I thought it was offensive and not funny even as dark humor. But when you go to his Twitter account and see the photo of an erect penis right there on the homepage, it’s obvious he’s just screwing around for the lulz. So what’s the point of being mad about it?
“I disagree. The anger level was really high in the first week after the ballot was announced. People didn’t have as much information on Sad Puppies, Rabid Puppies and Theodore Beale at that time. Her statement was one of many hot-headed things being said at that time.
Pulling it out a month later after intentionally sitting on it was a chump move.”
I really don’t know why I’m responding, because I don’t much care here, but this particular bit of dishonesty irked me. Her comment was May 11th, so it was LONG after the announcement. What was her response when people started (politely at first, I thought) asking her about it?
Cat pictures.
Chump move? Pffft. That’s a matter of opinion. If it somehow made it more effective to tweet about it three weeks later, which I doubt, I say “GOOD!”
Now that I’ve double-checked, I see you’re right and the comment wasn’t the first week the Hugo ballot was announced. It was five weeks later. I wasn’t making that mistake on purpose. Nobody would be intentionally dishonest about something that so quickly and verifiably makes them look dumb.
Was it London time or N. Y. time, cuz on my hate-O-meter that matters.
Nobody would be intentionally dishonest about something that so quickly and verifiably makes them look dumb.
Except for calling people neo-Nazis, you mean.
Do you think Gallo called you personally a neo-nazi?
Mad Mike encountering the Forces of Tolerance on Twitter:
“larvi @barrier_trio · 4h4 hours ago
@mzmadmike i hope you get shot 10 times, you f*cking cracker”
Do you think Gallo called you personally a neo-nazi?
I don’t think she cared to think who she was calling what. What part of Nobody involved in this is a neo-Nazi escapes you?
The part where a SF publisher who blogged “I will not be in the least bit surprised if Anders Breivik is one day regarded as a national hero in Norway” deserves an apology for being called a neo-nazi.
But even if you think that Gallo’s hyperbole was offensive to Beale, he has declared people should never apologize so he could hardly demand an apology from others unless he was winding them up.
Why do you guys never copy the whole sentence instead of a fragment that sounds the most offensive? Oh wait, I just answered my own question.
“The Norwegian people have turned against mass immigration precisely because they do not want more Breiviks. Nationalist resistance against invasion is inevitable; even the French were moved to it subsequent to their conquest and occupation by Nazi Germany. The only question, the only choice, is if resistance comes within the political process or outside of it.
And when that resistance is deemed out of bounds and forcibly expelled from the political process, it is not eliminated. It simply resorts to more extreme measures. If you want more violence, more Breiviks, even open civil war, then continue to support mass immigration, multiculturalism, and desegregation. If you want ethnic peace, you will have to oppose those things.
Both the Australian and the Norwegian people appear to be moving in the direction of peace. The American people, on the other hand, appear to be doing the precise opposite. As I said not long after the shootings, I will not be in the least bit surprised if Anders Breivik is one day regarded as a national hero in Norway, much like George Washington and William Tell, two men who also offered murderous resistance to their own governments.”
Hands up, everybody here whose name is Theodore Beale?
Thought so.
The part where a SF publisher who blogged “I will not be in the least bit surprised if Anders Breivik is one day regarded as a national hero in Norway” deserves an apology for being called a neo-nazi.
That statement assigns no moral value to Brevik’s actions.
But even if you think that Gallo’s hyperbole was offensive to Beale, he has declared people should never apologize so he could hardly demand an apology from others unless he was winding them up.
He’s also someone forced out for saying things, so he has every right to demand Gallo be treated how he was, for fairness.
The quote I used accurately expresses his thoughts, as your full context makes clear. The assertion that Anders Breivik may become a hero to his country is as offensive as if someone made the same declaration today about Dylann Roof.
Night, all. I’ll stop bogarting the discussion for a while and check back tomorrow morning.
“Black parents of black boys, your most important task is countering the culture that wants to turn them into racist, misogynist killers. Hate is default black male behavior in America. Has been for a long time. Teach your boys better before they hurt/kill someone else’s kids. American black male culture is racist and sexist. If that offends you, as a black American male, go do something about it.”
Does that seem more like REAL racism now rcade?
““I will not be in the least bit surprised if Edward Snowden is one day regarded as a national hero in Russia” says nothing about what I think of Edward Snowden’s actions. The full context is a little more ambiguous, but it’s the same as saying that “blacks shooting police officers is merely the expected result of the inability of the African American community to get police reforms by democratic means.”
The fact that you’re playing word games rather than being generous right after accusing us of playing word games rather than being generous is suitably ironic. I think we’ve established that you’re not interested in doing anything other than changing the subject. I’ve been generous with you up to this point, and in the spirit of the thread, I’ll stay generous. But that doesn’t mean I won’t continue to point out the falsehoods you keep trying to declare as trivially true.
(Looks at Vox Day’s statement. Twitches.) I could at least understand him until he said that desegregation was one of the problems. Mass immigration wouldn’t be an issue if cultural assimilation was also pushed. We pulled it off here in the USA, after all.
But desegregation…Vox, dude, that’s the only way to stop this mess. As to Brievik…hang him. Literally. A man who willfully murders children on the grounds that nits make lice is a tyrant himself.
I love the way these people obsess on VD while straight out vicious racist statements by SJWs that are culture-wide and institutionalized to boot go straight into a memory hole. Elizabeth Moon gets booted from her Guest of Honor slot at WisCon over innocuous comments about the Ground Zero Mosque. N. K. Jemisin makes a viciously anti-white and delusional Guest of Honor speech at WisCon. Jonathan Ross gets lynched over pre-crime but don’t bother Tor. All they do is have a core group of shits that attack whites and men. These people have no moral ethos or principles, that why I found this Twitter conversation funny:
Kate Elliot: “People who lack empathy will never write great fiction.”
N. K. Jemisin: “Or be able to comprehend it, if they read it.”
C. C. Finlay: “There’s good evidence that reading fiction creates empathy. That’s another reason why we need diverse books.”
You probably know the first two. Finlay is the editor of the Magazine of F&SF. A clue to Finlay’s approach lies in his reply to yet another obsessive rhetorical query by SFF author Kate Elliott: “if you can prominently write magic & gods & magical beasts into your fantasy world then why not women?” Finlay responds with “Maybe they don’t hate magic and gods and magical beasts.”
Right. Men just hate women. This is just Daffyland.
“(Looks at Vox Day’s statement. Twitches.) I could at least understand him until he said that desegregation was one of the problems. Mass immigration wouldn’t be an issue if cultural assimilation was also pushed. We pulled it off here in the USA, after all.
But desegregation…Vox, dude, that’s the only way to stop this mess. As to Brievik…hang him. Literally. A man who willfully murders children on the grounds that nits make lice is a tyrant himself.”
Guessing by some things he’s written at other times, I think Vox was speaking of forced desegregation, but that’s just my opinion, I don’t mean to speak for him. I think they should’ve hung Breivik too, but no death penalty in Norway. That’s a damn shame.
“Guessing by some things he’s written at other times, I think Vox was speaking of forced desegregation, but that’s just my opinion, I don’t mean to speak for him.”
That doesn’t really make me feel better. It seems to me like not forcing local governments to stop deliberately hobbling entire people groups, which, as near as I can tell, is an inevitable result of segregation, is an abrogation of government’s role.
60guilders – Hate to break it to you, but people observably engage in voluntary ethnic segregation. Ethnolinguistic diversity is the number one predictor of violent crime. That’s just reality.
Rogers Cadenhead – That’s not a “quote.” Quotes involved things people actually say. That wasn’t even an acceptable paraphrasing of the statement.
And your defense of Gallo is equally risible. She literally called a group of hundreds of people “neo-Nazis.” She called another group of people “right wing extremists.” She called every work supported by either group “bad to reprehensible.” That includes world published by her own company.
She then proceeded to not-apologize for her statement.
So I guess it shouldn’t be surprising – you’re at least consistent in your unwillingness to take the words people write as meaning what is actually written.
@Brad
Brad, seriously, does this seem like the action of someone who’s just doing it for shits and giggles?
You said earlier that “there is no benefit of the doubt being afforded”. It’s probably because of actions like this – which even the commenters here have noted is par for the course for MZW.
Hahahahahah. Luhr’s own Tweets are worse than MW’s. I’m not surprised you think a person like that is the gold standard for morality. It’s that very confusion which started this whole stupidity.
Listen to this paranoid windbag:
“Ann Somerville on June 20, 2015 at 10:29 pm said:
Stephen Schwartz: ‘JCW; liar or incompetent reader, as always the question.’
“Or deliberate imitator of the GGaters?
“When I looked at the comments on Torgensen’s blog (puke) what struck me was how similar they were to what I’ve seen GGaters say about Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian. The same detachment from reality, the same brief acknowledgement that they didn’t have a concrete beef with Gallo after her apology, but the same bullheaded determination to carry on with the grudgematch because they’re mad as hell and they’re not gonna take it any more. The fact they can see Tor publishes JCW and still claim that Tor is intolerant of any one not on the left politically means they are either deeply stupid/gullible, or deeply wedded to this idea of erasure of the ‘enemy’.
“And JCW is harnessing that hate, manipulating it, and doesn’t really care how it looks to outsiders because we’re not his intended audience.
“I really fear for Irene Gallo and Moshe Feder. GGaters have no boundaries, and it’s beginning to look as if the Puppies of either kind don’t either.”
*
“Ann Somerville on June 20, 2015 at 10:54 pm said:
Stevie, ‘I’d not worry about them.’
“I’m not worried about what Tor will do. I’m worried about what the malign idiots who swallow all the puppy poo will do. Williamson demonstrates there are more than a few screws loose in some of their heads, and I worry about Irene, particularly. For her personal safety, I mean. This is why all the war and violence rhetoric they toss out as normal worries me. This stuff isn’t going into a vacuum and we already know how much harm pumped up fools with a grudge can do.”
*
Someone’s detached from reality alright.
snowcrash: if you think Mike’s a boor (or worse) for what he does on Twitter, be my guest. There are people who hate Mike (and Sad Puppies) who are also boors on Twitter.
Sarkeesian’s on record as supporting both sexual and racial re-segregation of schools, putting her in the same practical box as Beale. Recently at the E3 conference, she also began arguing that videogames are too violent — in particular, Doom.
Which puts her in the same box as ultraconservative disbarred lawyer Jack Thompson.
And yet, here we have people citing her claims as proof that GamerGate is a reactionary, right-wing, anti-feminist hate group. You know, the basis for claiming that GG joined the Sad Puppies to overrun the Hugo nominations.
Oh, and she also just got done saying the only reason people are taking her to task for her “games are too violent” nonsense is because they hate women critiquing games. Because, you know, Jack Thompson was totally a woman too.
Would you people KINDLY stop throwing your fellow liberals and libertarians under the bus to preserve the myth that this person is either a victim or interested in progressive ideals?
“Feminist Frequency @femfreq Jun 17
Also surprising and unsettling to see ‘booth babes hired to pose with fans in front of the Dark Souls 3 #E3 display.”
“Feminist Frequency @femfreq Jun 17
Really disappointing Capcom’s #E3 Ghostbusters display had booth babes. Especially with the upcoming women-led movie.”
“Feminist Frequency @femfreq Jun 13
High heels are immobilizing. They can also cause serious nerve and joint damage. Why do game designers want that for their female heroes? :P”
“Feminist Frequency @femfreq Jun 13
There is a time and place for high heels but running, jumping and battlefield scenarios are not it. That’s just pandering to male fantasies.”
“Feminist Frequency @femfreq Jun 13
Game designers put their action heroines in high heels specifically to make them more sexualized in combat. It’s tiresome and ridiculous.”
“Feminist Frequency @femfreq Jun 13
Ciri & the sorceresses in Witcher 3 wear high heels but historically they were men’s fashion. If anything Geralt should be the one in heels.”
Uptight, stupid, weird and arrogant does not spell “fun.” She’s like the worst stereotype of a 5th grade school marm from an Our Gang film who’s suddenly decided she’s Winston Churchill and the Dalai Lama rolled into one.
“Do you think Gallo called you personally a neo-nazi?”
Dude, you can skip the Clinton-level parsing and spinning of Gallo’s statements. No one here is impressed.
She intended to vilify the Puppies. It was a deliberate insult.
Do you deny it?
She didn’t think she’d be held accountable for doing that, even though some of the people she deliberately insulted were Tor’s own authors.
She was wrong.
@civilis:
“‘The part where a SF publisher who blogged “I will not be in the least bit surprised if Anders Breivik is one day regarded as a national hero in Norway” deserves an apology for being called a neo-nazi.’
That statement assigns no moral value to Brevik’s actions. ”
The part where Beale calls Breivik’s victims (which included children as young as 14) “larval quislings” absolutely does.
@Brad
I was pushing back against your narrative that this was simply an off-colour joke made in poor taste at the wrong moment, and that MZW should be afforded some benefit of the doubt because of that.
Regardless, being “a boor (or worse)” is what Twitter seems to be for. That there are arseholes in it, particularly arseholes who seem to revel in their nature, is unsurprising, regardless of their affiliations otherwise. This is not revealed truth.
@s1a1: For which blame multicultural stupidity.
@snowcrash: I’m going to have to see some context for that twitter spate. Because the last sentence doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense in the context you’re giving it.
@James May: Okay, who has died as a result of GamerGate? Answer: no one. Somerville makes Thompson look reasonable–at least he had the kid who went through a police station like a hot knife through butter. Somerville has…threatening tweets by members of GamerGate.
“The part where Beale calls Breivik’s victims (which included children as young as 14) “larval quislings” absolutely does.”
And still doesn’t make him a neo-nazi. It just makes him an ordinary garden variety ethnic separatist–possibly even a white supremacist. And a man who views people not as people, but widgets, but we knew that already.
I think being a neo-Nazi also requires anti-Semitism. But there, at least, I understand the confusion. More relevantly, one cannot make the “extreme right wing to neo-Nazi” argument regarding Wright, Torgerson, Correia, or Hoyt with any sort of straight face unless your definition of center is Bernie Sanders.
What bugs me and brought me back here, is the fact that the Charleston murderer did not pop out of a vacuum. The stuff he writes in his manifesto is not a fresh creation never before seen on earth; it’s old rhetoric he picked up from people all around him. A guy like that doesn’t just decide he’s going to kill people. He first absorbs the idea from others who do not kill people themselves, but DO speak at great length about how X group of people are inferior and harmful and how killing them (only THEORETICALLY, of course) would be NBD and, indeed, a positive boon to the community. THOSE people are abetted by others who strongly disagree with the whole ‘killing’ part but pretty much agree with the whole ‘inferior’ part, joke about it as part of social bonding, make it normal and acceptable among them.
Then there are the people who feel a quite genuine distaste for the whole ‘inferiority’ idea, but decides not to call out anyone who expresses those things because they have something to gain by their silence. These people are only abettors in the sense that with their silence they allow the people talking to give the impression that their views are the norm, that few people disagree with, and thus okay.
If such people keep silence over, say, the racism of a beloved uncle to keep the family peace, then they have my sympathy. If OTOH, the person keeps silence because he gets a concrete benefit to his own ambitions by keeping his mouth shut about another person’s racism and murder apologist rhetoric, I have less sympathy.
If that person defends his silence on the grounds that calling someone a “racist” is a horrible accusation that would ruin a person’s livelihood, and he refuses to do this wrong purely based on his own nobility of character (without acknowledging he has a benefit to gain from his silence) then I have still less. And when this man, who is happy to heap invective and accusations on those people who dare call a racist a racist (“gulag”, “unpersoning” and such-like) because calling racists ON THEIR ACTUAL WORDS might ruin their livelihood, has NO invective toward a person actually openly TRYING to ruin someone’s livelihood…and indeed, suddenly finds a stream of invective to HELP that person try to get someone fired…then the tinge of hypocrisy is too much to bear. (The Walter Mitty-esque fantasy about how being leader of this petty squabble makes him equivalent to a Confederate general defending a Noble Cause is just icing on the cake.)
The part where Beale calls Breivik’s victims (which included children as young as 14) “larval quislings” absolutely does.
Ok, then why did Rogers not quote that part, the surrounding text (so we know the context), and provide a link to the source? This is the first time “larval quislings” has shown up in this thread. Rogers, however, chose a snippet from a quote out of context, played it up for shock value, then doubled down again with the larger quote.
You’re right, calling someone a “larval quisling” does assign a moral value, and (at first glance) a pretty reprehensible one at that. Given that Quisling was a Nazi collaborator, though, it’s tough to imply that his quote indicates neo-Nazi tendencies, which is the point of the argument. Stripping away the shock value, Beale’s argument is that unassimilated immigration is destructive to social order, and that when the government suppresses opposition to immigration, it pushes that opposition to further and further extreme measures. Since I haven’t seen the quote, I can’t say for sure, but I can understand someone that believes the above thinking that people that support the destruction of social order via immigration would be traitors. If Gallo had called Beale an extreme right-winger, it would be understandable, especially given that he personally seems to coach his views in as extreme fashion as possible for the shock value.
Beale’s argument is no different than saying: police brutality against African Americans leads to long term social disorder; when government doesn’t listen to and fix the problems of police brutality against the African American community it pushes those opposed to police brutality to do things like riot to get the problem resolved; those African Americans that side with the cops are race traitors.
Who on earth are you blathering about? Torgerson? Vox Day? Wright?
@60guilders
“I think being a neo-Nazi also requires anti-Semitism.”
The neo-nazis object to the immigration of races they call inferior in general – which fits Beale. As for Anti-Semitism in particular, I got your Anti-Semitism right here…
“…regarding Jews, that [t]oo many of us know how the game is played; too many of us have seen incompetent, inept, and lazy Jews advanced in tribal fashion over far more capable, competent, and responsible Gentiles.” http://voxday.blogspot.com/2014/08/and-why-might-that-be.html
If Irene Gallo is ever sued by anyone who screeches about how she defamed them (which I sincerely doubt will happen) I think she’ll have a good defense BEYOND just the fact that any damage caused by her statement was not caused by her commenting to a friend on her Facebook, but caused instead by the man who spread it far and wide for the admitted purpose of stirring shit. I think that in addition Gallo will be able to claim that with Beale’s various statements in support of killing children of leftist parents, the inferiority of black people, the evil effect of foreign immigration, the Anti-Semitism, the kinder-kirche-kuche attitude toward the proper role of women (and the apologist for murder to promote THAT, too) he could reasonably be mistaken for a Neo-Nazi regardless of whether he is or not. And since Beale has recently boasted that the Rabid Puppies follow him unquestioningly, I think it would be reasonable to assume they share his views as well.
As for the Sad Puppies, I think by her use of “respectively” she only called them “extreme right wing” (a defensible allegation, I think), and IIRC, racist, sexist and homophobic. IMO, she was wrong to say this and right to apologize by saying she painted with too broad a brush. Not all the Sad Puppies are racist, sexist and homophobic, nor is it their stated platform to be so. HOWEVER, with prominent Sad Puppies like JCW attesting to both homophobia (or at least loathing of homosexuals to the extent that he thinks it natural to want to beat them with tire irons) and sexism (one of his nominated essays laments what a horrible thing Strong Female Characters are in stories), and Correia having nominated Beale for one of the earlier Puppy slates explicitly out of “spite” and not (apparently) perceived merit of Beale’s work, as well as defending Beale from the charge of racism because he only said that racist thing to a woman who totally deserved it, and Brad’s own refusal to condemn the racism of a man who openly calls himself his ally and boosted his Sad Puppy slate to whatever triumph it has attained – and now Michael Z (Brad’s own chosen nominee for that work of SF genius, “Wisdom from My Internet”) unapologetically snickering about coconut cream and Kalua shots in the wake of Charleston – I think that Gallo would have grounds to say that the SP CAN be reasonably mistaken as being what she called them.
From the Civilis reply to rcade:
“The fact that you’re playing word games rather than being generous right after accusing us of playing word games rather than being generous is suitably ironic. I think we’ve established that you’re not interested in doing anything other than changing the subject.”
Rcade, you very carefully parsed Gallo’s comment as an apologist and then ignored the context of Beale’s Brevik thread. If you want to sustain your cred as a thoughtful commenter versus a trollish antiSP who wants to burn time arguing in circles, you have to be more consistent.
I am not a Beale fan, but I have to acknowledge that he is routinely successful in his deliberate attempts to ignite and catalyze the hate from the sorts of people who also seem to be antiSP. What I don’t get is why those that hate him don’t deny him what he wants most – strong reaction. Imagine if he posted a really horrible, terrible, provocative, disgusting, race oriented bit of internet crap… and no one even commented. That would make him nuts.
What bugs me and brought me back here, is the fact that the Charleston murderer did not pop out of a vacuum. The stuff he writes in his manifesto is not a fresh creation never before seen on earth; it’s old rhetoric he picked up from people all around him. A guy like that doesn’t just decide he’s going to kill people. He first absorbs the idea from others who do not kill people themselves, but DO speak at great length about how X group of people are inferior and harmful and how killing them (only THEORETICALLY, of course) would be NBD and, indeed, a positive boon to the community. THOSE people are abetted by others who strongly disagree with the whole ‘killing’ part but pretty much agree with the whole ‘inferior’ part, joke about it as part of social bonding, make it normal and acceptable among them.
It could also be that he was insane. Part of the problem is that we have very sketchy details about what exactly his situation was in the form of a handful of quotable bits. His rants do include mentions that he was having trouble finding people that think like him.
It could also be that he felt that he hadn’t gotten any of this “white privilege” he was supposed to have. Here he is, a member of the White Patriarchy that rules the world, and he’s a no-hope dropout.
Who on earth are you blathering about? Torgerson? Vox Day? Wright?
I have no idea. Could be Scalzi, for that matter, though the present tense usage seems like it’s more current than that. Scalzi’s merely a racist that succeeded in ruining someone’s livelihood.
So the extremely left-wing jaynsand (a defensible allegation, I think), once again cherry-picks a quote out of an article. I will at least give him credit for linking the article, something which nobody else arguing against Beale seems to have done.
Can that article be called anti-Semitic? I would say yes, I’ve called similar arguments from the mainstream left anti-Semitic. I could once again argue the details of what exactly he’s saying in the article, but let’s break it down to the important question: Is it enough to be merely anti-Semetic to be neo-Nazi? If it is, the BDS campaigners that infest the Social Justice movement better watch out. I was in fact surprised, in that that article reads like it could have been written by a more educated left-winger pissed at banks and Israel, though such sentiments aren’t out of line for a paleo-conservative.
Beale is a cranky old man that will say what he thinks without caring who it pisses off. I know a lot of people like this. To call for mercy, except for those people, strikes me as not merciful at all. (Likewise, “it’s not okay to offend people, except for them” doesn’t strike me as a concession in any way shape or form.)
@Jayn: Ah, thank you for the clarification.
And sorry, but you’re doing the “reasonable…reasonable…crazy” thing again.
Your first paragraph and a half is the reasonable. Here is the crazy.
“HOWEVER, with prominent Sad Puppies like JCW attesting to both homophobia (or at least loathing of homosexuals to the extent that he thinks it natural to want to beat them with tire irons) and sexism (one of his nominated essays laments what a horrible thing Strong Female Characters are in stories)”
Of course, the fact that Wright believes that doing so is, y’know, wrong is completely irrelevant here. As to the second comment–haven’t read the essay in question, but I suspect that he differentiates between strong female characters and Strong Female Characters. Because there is a difference.
“Correia having nominated Beale for one of the earlier Puppy slates explicitly out of “spite” and not (apparently) perceived merit of Beale’s work, as well as defending Beale from the charge of racism because he only said that racist thing to a woman who totally deserved it,”
Fair enough for your first clause–Correia was trolling the Hugo voters with that one. As to your second–sorry, calling someone who is black a half-savage after they make a speech where they claim “stand your ground” is “open season on black people” is not ipso facto racist, it just means you’re tone-deaf. Now from Vox, maybe it is racist, but please recall that he hadn’t gone full-crazy at that juncture. I’ll grant you racially tinged or charged.
“Brad’s own refusal to condemn the racism of a man who openly calls himself his ally and boosted his Sad Puppy slate to whatever triumph it has attained”
I suspect Brad doesn’t hang at Vox Popoli, and given that the charge of racism has gotten thrown around like free candy in the public discourse for the past several years, I don’t blame him for not condemning Vox based on those people’s say-so. The rest of your sentence is irrelevant.
“and now Michael Z (Brad’s own chosen nominee for that work of SF genius, “Wisdom from My Internet”) unapologetically snickering about coconut cream and Kalua shots in the wake of Charleston”
Dude makes tasteless jokes and you jump to racism instead of immaturity. I am most impressed.
Meantime, I commend James May’s posts to you.
“… too many of us have seen incompetent, inept, and lazy Jews advanced in tribal fashion over far more capable, competent, and responsible Gentiles.”
You do realize that is exactly the rhetoric found in thousands of SJW quotes about white men, don’t you? Or do you not understand why SJWs openly laugh at the idea of a meritocracy and create affirmative action initiatives like not reviewing white men and anthologies like Queers Destroy SF. Do you not understand what Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian do? Why the double standard? How many quotes do I have to drag out by Nebula and Hugo nominees about how the law is made for white men?
“The law is made by rich, selfish, shitty people – mostly white, mostly men – with cockroaches for hearts. Fuck their ‘rule of law.'” – Hugo and Nebula nominee Saladin Ahmed.
“law is for the benefit of white people,” – Nebula nominee Kate Elliott
You are talking about the rhetoric of one man not reflected in the wider anti-feminist pushbacks in SFF and video-gaming but which is a default anti-straight male culture baked into this new feminist movement. For some reason you portray that as the actual reverse. That’s how all of Gamergate become “misogynist” “terrorists” including a Latina porn actor and high profile gay journalist and N. K. Jemisin and Rose Fox become… what – empathy?
Why do you see VD’s words in letters a mile high while Rose Fox’s actual rant disappears? When you can explain that then we’ll talk.
SFF editor and Publisher’s Weekly review editor Rose Fox: “White parents of White boys, your most important task is countering the culture that wants to turn them into racist, misogynist killers.”
Same: “Hate is default White male behavior in America. Has been for a long time. Teach your boys better before they hurt/kill someone else’s kids.”
Same: “American White male culture is racist and sexist. If that offends you, as a White American male, go do something about it.”
Start attacking those words if you’re so keen to analyze words. Then understand the difference between the words “many” and “few,” between institution and outlier. As long as you have a dictionary with completely different meanings of the word “incitement” from day to day, you have no credibility nor do we care one shit what you and the mentally addled feminists you defend say.
“If Irene Gallo is ever sued by anyone who screeches about how she defamed them (which I sincerely doubt will happen) I think she’ll have a good defense BEYOND just the fact that any damage caused by her statement was not caused by her commenting to a friend on her Facebook, but caused instead by the man who spread it far and wide for the admitted purpose of stirring shit.”
If Irene Gallo is sued for defamation it will be for something IRENE GALLO said, not something YOU said, I said, or Vox Day said. Are you totally ignorant of the law? And again, are you trying to say two wrongs make a right, or that one wrong justifies another?
THIS is how the endless wars start: the Palestinians just their latest attack on the Israeli’s previous oppression, the Hutus and the Tutsis, various others; once someone starts, no one stops. And again, I don’t care what Anita Sarkeesian says; I care that she’s trying to reduce MY choices in games, for a start, and once she gets that, then …
RE: The biochemist.
My answer to whether or not he should have been fired is, “I don’t know.” I think that if that’s the only sexist thing he’s said or done, then an official reprimand and an apology should have been enough to put the matter to rest. If, on the other hand, he has a history of saying and doing sexist things, particularly if he’s had multiple sexual harassment charges made against him, then I think he should go. I’m in a related field (genetics), and I can tell you that for every prominent firing that I’ve heard of over the past two decades, there has ALWAYS been a long history of problems. I suspect–and I freely admit that I’m just conjecturing here–that this was the straw that broke the camel’s back rather than the first time he’s crossed the line.
I’d love to ignore Beale, but as long as so many people are dancing to his tune on things like the Hugo ballot takeover and Tor boycott that’s not possible. I’ve been voting for the Hugos for six years and support Tor as a customer, so I’m going to speak up in defense of two things in SF/F I care about. You’d do the same, I presume, if Beale was going after something you value.
You’re certainly an expert in ignoring hate speech that is far more institutionalized than 3 guys when it comes to what powered the Hugo winners last year and even the hosts. Why such a problem ignoring Beale? Either ignore it all or address it all. Sitting in some in-between twilight zone is tantamount to lying and we are treating that sort of intellectual dishonest exactly as if it were.
If “pass or no pass” is some incomprehensible Mayan codex to you then just say so, because that’s how we’re taking it. You can’t make simple comparisons. How seriously do you think anyone here is going to take you?
“Stevie on June 21, 2015 at 10:42 am said:
“Harold
“Brad has accused the membership of Loncon of conspiring together to commit fraud in awarding the Hugo to Anne Leckie for ‘Ancilliary Justice”; both fraud and conspiracy are criminal offences under the law of England and Wales, and it is thus unsurprising that making such accusations is gravely defamatory unless he can prove his claims.”
*
More fuckery where people make up dragons and then slay them. There was no conspiracy or fraud. There were a bunch of social justice nannies who said “Yay! Genderblindness!” and uplifted an unremarkable SF novel into an historic awards success. They did that across the board, because they care more about their pet gay feminist crusade to eliminate gender distinctions than they do art. They got pranked for doing stuff like that and now they’re crying like babies about neo-Nazis and Mens’ Rights Activists they were moaning about like paranoid mental cases before anyone heard of Leckie.
These are the minds we’re dealing with and they act as if they’re ten years old.
@James May
“They got pranked for doing stuff like that…”
I would describe RP as “pranking”. I don’t think the word is accurate for SP3. Regardless of how you feel about slate voting (I’m against it.), I think that Brad Torgersen’s motivations for making the slate were sincere. Now that people are starting to make their way through their Hugo packets, it’s clear that some people think that pretty much everything in it is crap, while others are saying that at least SOME of the SP3 works are Hugo-worthy. There’s been a lot of griping about the novella and related work categories, so I think there’s a chance both of those might get “No Award”ed, but I don’t see many people calling for a “No Award” vote across the board anymore.
Nevertheless they have invited pranking. Setting aside how stupid it is to drag it into SFF, when you have a community obsessed with race and gender you would expect them to have some sort of expertise. Instead they say don’t hold blacks responsible for crime or Muslims terrorists but then go after all whites over this Charleston atrocity. And it’s not just some, they are all supporting that. That is intellectual insanity. You cannot talk to a woman who routinely makes racist comments and then goes “Oh, look!” at MZM over a joke. That same idiot compliments people who quote her nicely and calls those who show her quotes in a negative light creepy stalkers. That is the mind of a bratty child. Their lies about Gamergate are pathological.
Pranks, mocking and economic boycotts are the only way to get through to these absurd people.
The only other way is to completely disassociate ourselves from these people, which is my own recommendation. Create our own institutions; any whiff of words like “privilege,” “cis” and “non-binary” and you’re out.
“Arthur Chu retweeted
Brianna Wu @Spacekatgal Jun 18
White People To Do List:
1. Recognize privilege
2. Educate self on structural racism
3. Amplify black voices
4. Shut mouth and listen”
I would never write something that filthy to 40 million black Americans. However I would play Devil’s Advocate to show how Wu would and how sick and racist these people are.
Black People To Do List:
1. Stop blaming white privilege
2. Educate self
3. Amplify white voices
4. Shut mouth and listen
@James May
I think you’re generalizing the comments of a few fringers to the “community”. The community here is the membership of WorldCon, which is pretty much anyone who wants to cough up $40 to buy a supporting membership (or more for an attending membership). Even before the current kerfuffle, that was several thousand people. It may end up being more than 10,000 this year. You’ve quoted from maybe a few dozen people. They probably represent well under 5% of the WorldCon membership. Most of us probably just want to read some good SF/F, and for the attending members, go to a few panels, get a few books signed, and go to a bunch of parties. SP3 wasn’t “pranking” the general membership. It was showing that a small number of people can have a large impact on what gets nominated for the Hugo awards. But the works put forward were, as far as I can tell, what Brad Torgersen and other SP3 contributors genuinely thought were the best candidates in each category. And now the most of the general membership of WorldCon is reading through those works and deciding how they should be ranked. That was pretty much the idea in the first place. It wasn’t a “prank” to rub a few radicals’ faces in the dirt.
I am not generalizing a few fringers. I have extensively quoted SFWA presidents, serial panelists, editors, influential bloggers, award nominees and Tor, the most influential voice in SFF publishing. That represents the main institutions and most credible voices in SFF.
Aside from that you have the less-known voices but who are widely supported by the voices above 100%. I know that from doing hard research, not speculation. The ideology is extremely easy to recognize. Normal humans don’t go running around talking about patriarchy, cisnormative, white privilege and colonial male gazes. That is an extremely radical, racist, sexist supremacist lesbian ideology. It is intellectually and morally insane.
Aside from that, I have proof in the awards outcomes of the last two Nebulas and last year’s Hugos, which were an intersectional sweep. Considering how bizarre and cultish this ideology is, that is as remarkable as a Dianetics sweep.
This ideology is the controlling orthodoxy. The didn’t want Jonathan Ross and he disappeared. Some dipshit in Brazil was telling Ross what he could and couldn’t do in his own country of England. Imagine if I did that from America to an African WorldCon. There are no standards, there is only this stinking race-gender ideology.
They did want the all-intersectionalist winners and they won. They disapproved of Malzberg, Resnick and Rabe and they disappeared the same way comments disappear at Scalzi’s and Tor. That is power. They want women to win and women win. When they decided VD should go he went. Does Rose Fox at Publisher’s Weekly go for equally racist remarks? No. N. K. Jemisin? No – 4 Nebula nods. The anti-white racist and anti-male remarks at Tor? Invulnerable.
The truth is these people do whatever they want and skate away clean. Anyone who pushes back who SJWs can touch will and has disappeared, disemvoweled.
Pranks or not is semantic pedantry. Brad’s anger is self-evident. The word “spite” speaks for itself. There was a pushback – call it what you want.
The idea “Most of us probably just want to read some good SF/F” is observably false, since you didn’t have enough influence to sytmie an intersectional sweep. If you really think last year’s Hugo winners were just that good, then I have real estate on Mars you might be interested in.
Gamergate is thankfully different. At E3 this year some SJW journalistic outlets were quietly not invited. That’s what we need here to clean out this rat’s nest and get back to SFF, which is about those things SFF does no other genre does, not race and gender and “compulsory heterosexuality.”
SFF is not a feminine psycho-sexual genre. Every major Hugo winner last year was about that. Exactly when does one run out of coincidences?
@60guilders:
“Meantime, I commend James May’s posts to you.”
Thanks muchly…though I’m not sure whether you’re doing it because you think James May’s posts represent a shining beacon of sanity to alleviate my “craziness”, or because you think we’re kindred spirits.
“Brad’s own refusal to condemn the racism of a man who openly calls himself his ally and boosted his Sad Puppy slate to whatever triumph it has attained”
—-
I suspect Brad doesn’t hang at Vox Popoli, and given that the charge of racism has gotten thrown around like free candy in the public discourse for the past several years, I don’t blame him for not condemning Vox based on those people’s say-so. The rest of your sentence is irrelevant.”
How is it irrelevant to say that Beale’s Rabid Puppies boosted Brad’s Sad Puppies slate (at least, the portion they had in common) to nominations that Brad’s slate wouldn’t have achieved on its own? Because that’s what DID happen…as I understand it, several nominations that were on the RP slate alone succeeded while nominations unique to the SP slate failed – showing that the SP didn’t have the numbers to succeed without RP. So Brad actually has a stake in NOT alienating Beale, lest he lose Beale’s support for his nominees. Brad’s called Beale an irrelevant “sideshow”, but judging strictly by the numbers, Brad is actually Beale’s sideshow.
As for the idea that Brad is wholly ignorant of the extent of Beale’s racism, and that’s the ONLY reason why he would refuse to condemn it? IMO, that puppy won’t hunt. I direct you to Brad’s own words on “Personal unpersoning”, (https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/04/13/unpersoning/#comment-10839) in which Brad expresses awareness that Beale has said racist things, but he dismisses this as Beale being a “shock jock.”
This means that he either believes Beale doesn’t mean the things he says – in which case Brad is taking on the role of someone who actually KNOWS Beale enough to assure his followers that he’s investigated the charges of racism and knows that Beale is a non-racist pussycat at heart and just says these things to shock the SJWs (something he should not be vouching for if he IS in fact ignorant of Beale’s history) or, he DOES know Beale’s history and thinks it’s NBD.
Brad then goes on to condemn people for DARING to call other people racist (even if they ARE racist, apparently). He heaps on them all the invective and condemnation that he tenderly refused to give Beale. A person who points out another person’s racism and condemns it is a wicked person perpetuating a hideous Marxist plot of “unpersoning” equal to Orwell’s Big Brother, and he thinks doing so is categorically far worse than anything Beale could EVER have said:
“Maybe Vox is terrible….But the Marxist politics of unpersoning is much moreso.[sic]”
To me, that sure LOOKS like Brad’s giving Beale a condemnation-free pass no matter WHAT he says (racist or whatever else).
And IMO, it does matter. You said of Beale:
“It just makes him an ordinary garden variety ethnic separatist–possibly even a white supremacist. And a man who views people not as people, but widgets, but we knew that already.”
IMO, it’s REALLY a bad thing when people dismiss entire groups of human beings as “widgets” or “larval quislings” or nits or anything less than human, and chatters on about how getting rid of them is basically the beneficial elimination of harmful vermin. It’s bad even when they DON’T specifically advocate for doing so themselves. You mentioned you think the killer at Charleston was mentally ill. Were all the members of the Ku Klux Klan mentally ill? Because the killer’s manifesto is right out of their playbook. Organizations like the Klan flourish when they do not only because of sociopaths…they flourish when the society around them contains large numbers of people who agree with their agenda, even if they don’t actively participate in it, and still larger numbers of people who may disagree with their agenda but don’t think it’s important enough to say or do anything against it. Hence I think we all have a responsibility not to stay silent when we hear such an agenda. Staying silent gives the impression of those speaking in favor of it – and those listening – that the agenda is the norm…and when the silence goes on too long, it can BECOME the norm.
Maybe no one is talking about it any more but I thought that Peter Grant was one of the Sad Puppy “slate” nominees. As such he doesn’t have to be a “Sad Puppy” in order to have directly and specifically insulted by Gallo.
jaynsand there are quotes from Rose Fox upthread. If you have nothing to say about them then there is no context to or sense in your comments. They are empty. Racism compared to what? You can pretend to ignore that all you want. And we’ll continue to give your remarks all the credibility they deserve.
The thing I find interesting about reading SJWs is they brag about any little thing they’ve ever done, even if it was something as exciting as visiting Little Rock in the spring or owning a hundred pair of stretch socks. That reveals a cloistered crew, many of whom appear to be heavily medicated and say witty things like “not all women have vaginas” or “Hate is default White male behavior.”
From there they seem to think that constitutes an advanced diploma in social justice and they create mini-think tanks on Twitter with themselves as the CEO and promise to eliminate all injustice by the startling reverse psychology of creating even more of it.
Why wouldn’t anyone respect the opinions of a mentally ill Indiana Jones who’s explored every cranny of his basement and cupboards?
IMO, it’s REALLY a bad thing when people dismiss entire groups of human beings as “widgets” or “larval quislings” or nits or anything less than human, and chatters on about how getting rid of them is basically the beneficial elimination of harmful vermin.
That statement describes the Social Justice activists smearing Beale a lot better than it does Beale himself. You know, the people James May keeps pointing out you won’t address.
I have my quarrels with Mr. Beale’s politics. He thinks a lot of things I think are flat out wrong. There are a lot of things you could call him that I would agree with. Still, there’s one thing he said which I can’t disagree with in any way: ““I assert that an unborn female black child with a missing chromosome and an inclination to homosexuality is equal in human value and human dignity and unalienable, God-given rights to a straight white male in the prime of his life and a +4 SD IQ.” That statement is completely compatible with everything quoted here by him, completely compatible with him being a racist blowhard, and completely incompatible with him being a neo-Nazi and your trite description.
Were all the members of the Ku Klux Klan mentally ill? Because the killer’s manifesto is right out of their playbook. Organizations like the Klan flourish when they do not only because of sociopaths…they flourish when the society around them contains large numbers of people who agree with their agenda, even if they don’t actively participate in it, and still larger numbers of people who may disagree with their agenda but don’t think it’s important enough to say or do anything against it.
The killer’s lament was that he couldn’t find anyone that agreed with him. Does that sound like a movement in it’s ascension? Meanwhile an equally vile way of thinking is taking root, is not being substantially challenged (sorry, James, but you’re preaching to the Choir here), and you’re defending it.
@James May
SFWA and WorldCon are two very different animals. SFWA is a smaller organization for SF/F writer’s. There is a fairly high barrier for entry, in that you have to have demonstrated success in getting your work published. The organization may be just as wildly corrupt as you say, but it’s still just SFWA. It isn’t WorldCon. SFWA members may (and almost certainly do) have more influence over the Hugos in that they’ve probably met before and discussed all of the works, so they’re more likely to vote in blocks, even if they’re doing so unintentionally. But WorldCon is an open group whose only barrier to entry is $40. Until this year’s Hugo blow-up, I had honestly never heard of any of the people you’ve cited aside from George R R Martin. I now know that Scalzi is a successful novelist (and unrepentant asshole), but none of the rest seem like people of great importance to me. They may blog and tweet a lot, but I don’t see how that influences most SF/F fans. People tend to follow blogs and Twitter feeds of people they already agree with. Tor may the biggest publisher of SF/F, but I don’t see them really serving as true “gatekeepers” who are keeping worthy authors from being published. And it doesn’t take much to tilt the Hugo nominees in one direction or the other, as this year has obviously shown.
I don’t see him on the slate.
Brianna Wu @Spacekatgal Jun 18
This is about OUR BEHAVIOR, not theirs. OUR privilege needs checking. OUR actions are racist. I have work to do, and you do too.
Brianna Wu @Spacekatgal Jun 18
Let’s speak plainly. ALL WHITE PEOPLE need ask how they’re contributing to a system that marginalizes, imprisons and murders black people.
Brianna Wu @Spacekatgal Jun 18
Listen to @chaedria. ‘Please do something. We are literally dying.’ This is a white problem.
“We can’t breathe. We can’t wear hoodies. We can’t go swimming. We can’t go to Walmart. We can’t play in parks… this violence exploding across this nation is not America’s problem. It’s White America’s problem.” – Chaedria
[Black on black murders per year: approx. 5,500. White on black: under 200.]
Brianna Wu @Spacekatgal Jun 18
Let’s not mince words – our culture of white privilege is what caused this. #CharlestonShooting
Oh, that reminds me… I’m not a psychotic sociopath.
“I had honestly never heard of any of the people you’ve cited…” vs. three years research.
Game, set and match.
What slate? Who’s Peter Grant?
See how that works?
@Jaynsands: No, I commend James May’s posts to you because the people he quotes display the exact same line of thinking as Vox Day displays, just against a different target set and with less blatant hostility. People are widgets, to be defined by their race/sex/sexual orientation, and woe betide anyone who steps out of line.
Fact is, anyone who’s been observing this flap should be willing to admit that this whole thing is a massive example of there being no cause so noble it won’t attract people you’d rather not have.on your side. This is why, all other things being equal, I wouldn’t insist that everyone police everyone else, because this is the Internet, and it’s near impossible. But pointing and saying “Denounce Vox Day, sir, or forever be known as (fill in the blank)!” opens you up for a whole lot of charges. Ones we can make stick–all we have to do is find a blog post on the Hugos, type James May or Fail Burton into the find bar, and cut and paste the twitter quotes.
Meantime, I will reserve judgment on the efficacy of the nominations. I don’t discount the notion that the Dread Ilk pushed SP over the top, but given that SP works like a militia and RP like an army, I wouldn’t be surprised if they shoved the SP noms out.
And in the end, dude, remember that Stalin and Hitler each got one thing right–the other was a monster.
@James May
“Game, set and match.”
I’m not trying to win a fight with you. You’ve obviously done a lot of research. From what I’ve read from both you and others, SFWA has had (and continues to have) it’s share of controversies, and I would guess that most of SFWA knows who all of the players are and what they think about various issues. My point is that SFWA is not WorldCon. Most WorldCon members are just SF/F fans. We don’t really follow the ins and outs of the industry. We haven’t talked to our friends at SFWA, because we aren’t SFWA members. We don’t have three years’ worth of research to draw on, either, so when someone says something obnoxious, we just move on to the next speaker or panel and avoid the obnoxious person at the mass autographing. If the only thing on the program is a panel discussion titled, “How to Get More Militant Lesbian Feminist People of Color into SF/F”, we’re probably just going to hang out in the hotel bar for an hour. I would guess that the vast majority of us are not as educated about all of this as you are. That’s exactly my point. The people that you’re railing against are a fairly thin sliver of the pie when it comes to WorldCon.
Weren’t the main winners all SFWA members? The people in question may be a fairly thin sliver but they are definitely successful when it comes to “How to Get More Militant Lesbian Feminist People of Color into SF/F.” How are they accomplishing this?
“The Book Smugglers retweeted
Mahvesh Murad @mahveshm Jun 16
@booksmugglers @ghostwritingcow LOOKIT the brown people on the cover!”
“The Book Smugglers retweeted
Justina @tehawesomersace Jun 16
ICYMI I’m over @BookRiot talking about how to review white characters. The comments are pretty great, too.”
“The Book Smugglers @booksmugglers Jun 16
A Smugglerific Cover and Pre-order: The Merger by Sunil Patel”
*
Gee, an anti-white, anti-male gender feminist SFF “reviews” site publishes an anti-white racist who doesn’t review white men plus retweets how someone dotes on seeing non-whites on a cover and links us to a post which sarcastically shows how to review white characters at the preening Book Riot where “Posting comments that question or denigrate the value of marginalized voices” can result in being “banned on the first offense.”
It’s all about the literature and SF & F folks, isn’t it? Why be surprised the same obsessively hateful garbage ideology swept last year’s Nebulas and Hugos?
This is a hate movement hiding behind bullshit about “diversity,” and that’s all it is. It’s “diversity” the same way a squirrel trap is “diversity.” If you like your literature with a capital “K,” then this is for you.
True James, all to F’ing True.
I think everyone should post there censored comments to Commy left wing wacko sites so people can see just how much actually have differing opinions/viewpoints.
Hypocrisy is destroying SF/F(Print that issue JJA)
I commented on that hypocrtical farse of a article on Tor who had a racist panel of flunky’s supposedly to tell us how to be more Luberal (Kameron ‘I hate Neal Gaiman because he’s a white man’ Hurley) and Open Racist Jose Older. Okourfor etc, the title of the article being…
We Need Diverse Books Talks True, Political, Global Diversity in Sci-Fi and Fantasy.
I was banned from there for commenting which is just further proof of how afraid they are of a open and honest discussion. Shouldn’t writers and the field embrace stuff like “WORDS”
Anyway below is my post.
You have been banned from commenting.
Yep
Mon Jun 22, 2015 10:38am
I count 11 times a specific race was used as a negative in this article.
If that targeted race wasn’t white then I might think this was a racist article.
Course this opinion will be censored as the opinion that disagrees with mine finds it far simpler to label it as a violation of comment guide line.
@civilis
“IMO, it’s REALLY a bad thing when people dismiss entire groups of human beings as “widgets” or “larval quislings” or nits or anything less than human, and chatters on about how getting rid of them is basically the beneficial elimination of harmful vermin.
—–
That statement describes the Social Justice activists smearing Beale a lot better than it does Beale himself. You know, the people James May keeps pointing out you won’t address.”
So to you, a racist proclamation dismissing an entire group of people as harmful vermin due to factors entirely beyond their control is exactly equivalent to pointing out and condemning Beale (poor, persecuted Beale) because he issues such proclamations ENTIRELY OF HIS OWN FREE WILL? Let’s not be silly.
As for the Charleston killings…
“The killer’s lament was that he couldn’t find anyone that agreed with him.”
Not in my reading. He traces the evolution of his thought from his first stirrings of racism, and found the Council of Conservative Citizens to guide his thought. From there, he cites that White Nationalist groups became a great influence on him, especially the ones in Europe. (Say, who lives there?) He laments there are no skinheads in his particular area, and whinges that he doesn’t want to go to the Northwest front (where there are apparently skinheads aplenty) because he wants to fight in his own state. I’d say it’s pretty clear that there were PLENTY of people on the web who agreed with him and reinforced his ideas, explaining to him how they were right and proper. 60guilders eventually (grudgingly) conceded that Beale is ‘probably’ a white supremacist. (I also gave the evidence he demanded to qualify him as a Neo-Nazi). People like Beale and their stooges with their racist ideology guided the Charleston killer to his ultimate conclusion even if they (maybe) never committed an outright crime themselves.
“Does that sound like a movement in it’s ascension? ”
I didn’t say it was. I said it HAD been, at one time (the Ku Klux Klan), because a widespread swathe of society had agreed with the Klan’s ideas even if they didn’t carry them out, and a still wider spread of society may have been in partial or full disagreement but didn’t feel it important enough to speak their disapproval or act on it. And I said it has the potential to be one again. As an American, I don’t believe in government censorship of racists, but I DO think that puts a moral responsibility on ordinary people to say “that’s wrong” out loud, when they hear racism, so that the racist narrative has opposition in the public conscious. If you hear it and you shut up – especially when the racist is influencing other people to think the way he does – then you help give the impression that what the racist is saying is socially acceptable and the norm. If too many people stay silent – it can BECOME the norm. And with more people chattering about how various groups are harmful, subhuman vermin who really DESERVE a bullet even if they would never dream of shooting one themselves, IMO there WILL be more extremists eventually willing to go their friends one better on their mere talk.
Which is why Brad’s absolute refusal to say anyhting about Beale’s racism and hs lofty declaration that NOTHING racist that Beale could possibly say could make him think Beale worse than the terrible, horrible people who DO denounce his racism rather sticks in my craw.
So to you, a racist proclamation dismissing an entire group of people as harmful vermin due to factors entirely beyond their control is exactly equivalent to pointing out and condemning Beale (poor, persecuted Beale) because he issues such proclamations ENTIRELY OF HIS OWN FREE WILL? Let’s not be silly.
Because your reading comprehension is poor, I’ll go back and take this from the top. Brad’s article calls on everyone to extend compassion and forgiveness for one another. It’s really easy to call for forgiveness for someone you like, such as Ms. Gallo in your case. It’s really hard to call for compassion for you dislike. I happen to find both Ms. Gallo’s speech and Mr. Beale’s speech reprehensible, but I will insist that at the very minimum what they say be considered accurately from both their perspective and that of the reader.
Mr. Beale believes that the races are inherently unequal, so by that standard he is unrepentantly racist. That does not make him a neo-Nazi. If he has called for the murder or oppression of people based on being of a race he views as inherently inferior, no one here has quoted it. What he has done, as with discussing Brevik and the case the acid attacks, is pointed out that people with a different moral compass would do things we consider beyond reprehensible, and he has not issued the customary pro forma “this is evil” declaration that you and I consider standard in these discussions (he also has not endorsed said actions).
Meanwhile, James May has multiple quotes from people with much more standing and power than Mr. Beale, statements which dismiss an entire group of people (whites or males) as harmful vermin. Ms. Gallo’s statement was one of the milder ones in this category (if neo-Nazis aren’t regarded as vermin, then who is?). While it is charitable to assume that Ms. Gallo didn’t mean what we read, it’s also charitable to assume the groups she mentioned truly believe her attacks are unreasonable and are not merely posturing for attention. Seeing people coming here and demanding that we show compassion for Ms. Gallo (on their side) while at the same time demonstrating no compassion for others, such as Mr. Beale, comes across as an effort to prolong the war.
As an American, I don’t believe in government censorship of racists, but I DO think that puts a moral responsibility on ordinary people to say “that’s wrong” out loud, when they hear racism, so that the racist narrative has opposition in the public conscious. If you hear it and you shut up – especially when the racist is influencing other people to think the way he does – then you help give the impression that what the racist is saying is socially acceptable and the norm. If too many people stay silent – it can BECOME the norm.
I agree with you, which is why I am here and I am arguing against you. Right now, the old school white supremacists are a dying breed. I’d worry more about standing up to them if I thought that there weren’t enough people doing so already. However, there are not enough people standing up against other bigotry, the kind James May is pointing out. The kind that gets people like Brendan Eich, Tim Hunt, Mike Resnik, and Barry Malzberg kicked out of their jobs or renders them persona non grata, that uses a star chamber against male college students accused of rape, or that insists that people that disagree on social values can’t run a business. The kind which you absolutely refuse to address.
jaynsand, exactly how many people are Beale and Wright? Because I keep seeing them multiplied into a multi-platform institutional presence far beyond their actual numbers. There is also the question if they constitute a comprehensive ideology with a shared language which operates like intersectional gender feminism but which instead hates women, non-whites and gays. The next question is who among the Sad Puppies or elsewhere in SFF share that ideology.
When I started this research it was because of two things:
A.) the presence of a hateful and sharply defined ideology
B.) how widespread and institutionally influential it was
I was already aware there will always be a few folks who don’t like groups because of their race and sex. A few folks doesn’t interest me. Trying to turbocharge that is bias and cherrypicking, exactly what SJWs do. I have no interest in making something out of nothing. Two guys doesn’t interest me; an entire panel all speaking the same racist/sexist lingo promoted on the website associate of the largest publisher of SFF in the world is news. So too is it news when it includes the past 2 SFWA presidents, the editor of the Mag. of F&SF, award nominees, etc.
And now you using words like “potential” when you have clear evidence of such a thing right in front of your eyes. We have been trying to give you Orwell’s warning over and over again: while you’re guarding the gates against 2 guys, a KKK which looks nothing like a KKK has snuck in the other way and taken over the city.
If you are correct in your conclusion about hate speech that “racist ideology guided the Charleston killer to his ultimate conclusion” then it is a question of how mainstream that hate speech is, isn’t it – because it will always be there; it’s a question of where and how much.
Throwing that back over to SFF, there is clear evidence of a number of SJW initiatives not present on the other side:
Racially segregated rooms and dinners.
Review-censoring whites.
Webzines promoting the interests and demographic presence of non-whites and gays.
Lists of editors and authors who are non-white, gay or women.
Publicly and successfully crowdsourcing for help to “de-white” their library.
Boycotting all-white or male convention panels.
Calls to go one year without reading men, straights and whites.
Radical feminist based all-women anthology of SFF.
Alt-history fantasy racial and sexual revenge anthologies and short stories which take out historic whites.
Promoting or signal-boosted literature according whether the author or characters are women, non-white and gay.
Promoting black #Afrofuturism hashtags and having an Afrofuturism art and literary movement including symposiums.
Black SFF societies and symposiums.
Teaching that whites have “culturally appropriated” (culture theft) from non-whites.
Memory-holing any non-white institutions of slavery or colonialism in history.
Academic ideology and theory which stipulates all men hate women.
SF awards for women, non-whites or gays only or which heavily weight them in a mission statement.
Promoting “white savior” theories because they are sick of whites saving the day.
Creating hashtags and writing blog posts that claim any whites who mistake one non-white for another at a convention is a racist.
“Safe-space” websites so non-whites can dialogue without the interference of whites.
Writing about the random demography of SFF as an ideology exclusionary towards women, non-whites and gays.
Express race and sex-pride at lists of awards nominees.
So if you want to start saying “’that’s wrong’ out loud’ then start weighing the evidence, attach proportion to it instead of cherrypicking and get fucking started. In case you haven’t noticed, it IS the “norm,” and you’re still guarding the wrong fucking gate.
Stop worrying about “Brad’s absolute refusal to say anyhting about” one guy and start wondering about you’re own refusal to live up to your own logic, and in the face of 10,000 quotes that are culture and institution-wide and which are orthodoxy in core SFF up and down the line. VD and Wright don’t even equal that one panel Uh-huh mentioned let alone the institutional backing it had.
Unless you can ideologically attach us at the hip, you are practicing guilt by association by the mere fact zany feminists have thrown an oddball diverse group into the same intellectual ghetto by nothing more than race and sex. We are not ideologically united; we are united against zany feminists, a far different thing. Do you think everyone in the ADL has the same politics, or is it they are all Jews? Who created the ADL: Jews who had nothing to do or the people attacking their ethnicity, NOT their politics. I am defending myself against racial and sexual attacks, not expressing my politics.
… he has not issued the customary pro forma “this is evil” declaration that you and I consider standard in these discussions (he also has not endorsed said actions).
For Beale to suggest that Anders Breivik may be viewed in the future as a hero in Norway is to claim there’s something potentially heroic in his actions. It’s an odious thought that most of us, regardless of where we fall on the much more trivial matter of the Hugo Awards, likely find utterly repulsive.
Breivik killed eight people with bombs in government buildings, then went to an island where 600 teens interested in politics were attending a youth camp. Over the course of 90 minutes, he hunted and gunned down 69 of them, wounding another 110. Most of the dead were shot one or more times in the head. Fifty five of the dead were under the age of 20, the youngest 14.
There are many things a person could say about Breivik. Pairing the words “national hero” with his name, even just in a hypothetical future, is sick.
I would add to rcade’s comment that Beale’s calling those murdered kids “larval quislings” as an apologetic for Breivik’s massacre of them shows Beale’s approval of Breivik’s action.
Breivik killed eight people with bombs in government buildings, then went to an island where 600 teens interested in politics were attending a youth camp. Over the course of 90 minutes, he hunted and gunned down 69 of them, wounding another 110. Most of the dead were shot one or more times in the head. Fifty five of the dead were under the age of 20, the youngest 14.
Palestinian suicide bombers are regularly regarded as heroes by the Palestinians. To say after another such bombing “the Palestinians will regard the bomber as a hero” is to make no moral claim about the bombing. But then again, I already said this, using Edward Snowden as an example.
The inability to understand the nuances of the opposing arguments on sensitive subjects is common. When you’re emotionally invested in an issue, it’s hard to think rationally, especially when you have a bias against the person you’re responding to. Let’s pick a different issue: It’s perfectly rational for someone to think that an African-American that kills a cop because of the seeming disproportionate number of African-Americans killed by the police will be regarded in the urban core as a hero, to think that that the cop he killed was a vile human being, and still disapprove of the act of killing the cop.
I would add to rcade’s comment that Beale’s calling those murdered kids “larval quislings” as an apologetic for Breivik’s massacre of them shows Beale’s approval of Breivik’s action.
Your absolute refusal to say anything about the bigotry from the Social Justice activists rather sticks in my craw.
Great. Compared to who?
It’s perfectly rational for someone to think that an African-American that kills a cop because of the seeming disproportionate number of African-Americans killed by the police will be regarded in the urban core as a hero …
The scenario you describe would typically come from someone who believes the “urban core” displays a depraved attitude by supporting a cop killer. Likewise, when Palestinians cheer a suicide bomber, this is put forward as evidence of depravity.
Is it your argument that Beale is saying the future people of Norway would be depraved to regard Breivik as a hero?
“Aaron on June 22, 2015 at 9:40 am said:
Just as a note: While the Puppies rage on about a comment from Gallo that is almost two months old now, notice that the SJWs have moved on from talking about MZW’s terribly racist tweet?”
YEAH? RACIST COMPARED TO FUCKING WHAT!!!!
We’ve only been asking that question for months now and keep getting crickets. Do you shits have any principles at all… or eyes? I know you can read. Can you comprehend what you read? I’m saying no.
Is this racist you clowns:
Black People To Do List:
1. Stop blaming white privilege
2. Educate self
3. Amplify white voices
4. Shut mouth and listen
How about this:
Black parents of black boys, your most important task is countering the culture that wants to turn them into racist, misogynist killers. Hate is default black male behavior in America. Has been for a long time. Teach your boys better before they hurt/kill someone else’s kids. American black male culture is racist and sexist. If that offends you, as a black American male, go do something about it.
Moron.
Anyone’s depraved who thinks gunning down kids is heroic. What makes you think you need to ask that when we’re completely inundated by shit feminists who assert at least a substantial percentage of men support rape. The only people who support rape are rapists and people who say “I support rape.” Scalzi and Hines making noises they’re against rape is like me saying I’m against eating rocks or chewing on kitty cats.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole article about Brevik was a rather well-hidden trap by Mr. Beale.
It’s not difficult to find people in the African-American community advocating the murder of George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson for the shootings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, respectively. It shouldn’t be controversial to extrapolate from that that the individual that carried out that revenge would be regarded by many as a hero, especially given the passage of time. Certainly, Che Guevara has attained a status of Hero to many on the extreme left, and other revolutionaries and wannabes (such as 60’s leftist terrorists like Bill Ayres) are often included. As part of that process, their victims and intended victims have been written off. I don’t know the terms currently in vogue for the victims of Socialist tyranny throughout the twentieth century, outside the Holocaust. I’ve heard ‘kulaks’ and ‘reactionaries’ and ‘hoarders’ and ‘enemies of progress’; ‘quislings’ doesn’t seem to be to different. We’ve certainly had RFK Jr. call for the imprisoning of those that disagree with his climate policy for being traitors against the Earth, and other eco-revolutionaries aren’t shy of saying what they think of humanity, and what should be done to us.
The scenario you describe would typically come from someone who believes the “urban core” displays a depraved attitude by supporting a cop killer. Likewise, when Palestinians cheer a suicide bomber, this is put forward as evidence of depravity.
Is it your argument that Beale is saying the future people of Norway would be depraved to regard Breivik as a hero?
Are you saying you think that African Americans and Palestinians are depraved?
Specifically, I think it’s logical that the Palestinians would consider a suicide bomber to be a hero, just as I think it logical that the Japanese during World War 2 would consider a kamikaze a hero. Some cultures place emphasis on face or honor or respect, others don’t. What makes logical sense in a ‘honor’ or ‘face’ culture isn’t the same as what makes logical sense in a ‘dignity’ culture.
Is George Washington a hero? Is Che Guevara a hero? Is William Tecumseh Sherman a hero? Is John Brown a hero? Depends on who you ask.
Because you’re so fixated on your side of the debate and unable to see any other point of view, I’ll reverse the sides: It’s perfectly rational for someone to think that an anti-abortion activist that kills an Abortion doctor will be regarded by some on the anti-abortion side as a hero, to think that the abortion doctor was a vile mass murderer, to believe that by murdering the abortion doctor the murderer saved many more lives than the one they killed, and still disapprove of the act of murdering the abortion doctor.
Yeah, it’s a touchy subject. I think I made a mistake, though. I should have posted the entire blog post of Vox’s. It would’ve clarified the point he was trying to make (and I tend to agree with Civilis, I think he was setting another blogtrap).
Why did Vox say that he thought Breivik might be regarded as a hero someday? Because in the first election after Breivik’s murder spree (in 2013), the political party that Breivik was formerly a member of took 3rd place in their parliamentary elections, “giving them a kingmaker role in coalition building”.
“An anti-immigrant populist party laid claim to a major role in oil-rich Norway’s government for the first time on Tuesday after a center-right alliance won a landslide general election victory to oust a Labour administration. The Progress party, which once had among its members Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in 2011 in a gun and bomb attack targeting Labour, came third in Monday’s poll, giving it a kingmaker role in coalition building.”
Are you saying you think that African Americans and Palestinians are depraved?
This question is dumb. You can see from my words you’ve quoted that what I described as depraved was supporting a cop killer or a suicide bomber, respectively.
… and still disapprove of the act of murdering the abortion doctor.
And some people can call an act potentially heroic to others without ever saying the act was evil, leaving as an open question whether they personally disapprove of the act or not.
You call that a “trap.” I call it a dog whistle. Beale’s not an idiot. He knows the implication of making the statement “I will not be in the least bit surprised if Anders Breivik is one day regarded as a national hero in Norway” without indicating any revulsion at what Breivik has done.
Why did Vox say that he thought Breivik might be regarded as a hero someday? Because in the first election after Breivik’s murder spree (in 2013), the political party that Breivik was formerly a member of took 3rd place in their parliamentary elections, “giving them a kingmaker role in coalition building”.
Hidden in all his text, jaynsand has a point. The sorts of feelings expressed by the killer don’t form in a vacuum. There is some undercurrent of feelings that happened to match the killer’s insanity enough to give him something to fixate on. The problem with jaynsand’s arguments is that he’s stuck to the most simplistic possible choice for what views the killer’s insanity might have magnified. A couple of years back, a gunman decided to shoot up the Family Research Council, a conservative think tank known for it’s conservative views on homosexuality and abortion. In this case, the fact that he tried to shoot up a building with an armed guard, who stopped him before he could kill anyone by shooting him, meant that tragedy was averted. That gunman’s views didn’t form in a vacuum, either, but that doesn’t necessarily invalidate the views his insane version was based on.
Political arguments are often described as like a pendulum; the further out one side you get, the harder and faster it swings the other direction when it finally swings. If you’re pushing with “all whites are racist” and “blacks can’t be racist”, someone exposed to black racism is going to start pushing back mentally. If you’re pushing with “all whites are privileged”, a white that doesn’t feel privileged because he’s an unemployed dropout is going to start pushing back mentally. Basing your arguments on group identity means that a lot of people that don’t fit your neat group categorization end up screwed over by it. When one of those also has issues with mental illness, it’s a recipe for tragedy. And it works the same way the other direction, if you’re a law abiding African-American constantly hit by ‘African Americans are all criminals’, you’re going to be more pissed when unjustly targeted by the police.
Here is more stupid, cuz Glyer’s commenter’s often define the word:
“The bottom line is that the vast majority of puppydum haven’t a clue that the U.S. does not constitute the world…”
In fact we are a multi-lingual assortment of people who have lived or now live in Africa, South America, Europe, and Australia. We are widely traveled in Mexico, Central America, the Middle East and India.
“… that Worldcons exist only by the efforts of unpaid volunteers who put vast amounts of time, energy and commitment to making them happen.”
I was unaware volunteerism is an excuse for supporting hate speech.
“… and that the rest of the world knows little and cares less about US culture wars.”
Those so-called “US culture wars” have been aggressively initiated by the two dizzy non-American feminists at the U.K.’s Book Smugglers, by the incomprehensibly anti-white Filipino now Dutch Rochita Loenen-Ruiz at Strange Horizons, by the Mexican now Canadian Silvia Moreno-Garcia, by the Russians emigrated into America Ekaterina Sedia and Rose Lemberg, by the Brazilian Fabio Fernandes, by the non-American Djibril Al-Ayad, by the Canadian Amal El-Mohtar, by the Dutch Martin Wisse, by the French Aliette de Bodard, by the U.K.’s Charles Stross and Farah Mendelsohn, by Malaysian foreign national Jaymee Goh, by the foreign-born Nalo Hopkinson, by the English Damien Walter and there are more to add to that list, which I presume includes the moron I quote here.
I forgot to include “Stevie on June 22, 2015 at 10:06 am said:”
This question is dumb. You can see from my words you’ve quoted that what I described as depraved was supporting a cop killer or a suicide bomber, respectively.
The fact that you evade the question, just like you also completely dodged the questions about whether the statements and acts from your side in this are wrong, I’ll take as a ‘dog whistle’ that the answers would harm your ability to feign neutrality here. Because there are obviously some African Americans that support cop killers and Palestinians that support suicide bombers, this should have been a ‘gimme’. Evil and depraved are not necessarily synonyms.
And some people can call an act potentially heroic to others without ever saying the act was evil, leaving as an open question whether they personally disapprove of the act or not.
So all this is is a failure to argue the way you think he should argue? He doesn’t react the way you do, so he’s obviously a Nazi? Does he weigh more or less than a duck? It would be like me saying your failing to come out against the firing of Brendan Eich means you’re obviously in favor of government arresting and imprisoning those with the wrong political opinions.
“Paul (@princejvstin) on June 22, 2015 at 9:12 am said
“Indeed, I agree that the Sad Puppies seem to long for a past that never was.”
Well of course it was. In the all too recent past “racism” actually meant “racism,” not “topsy-turvy burn the cisheteropatriarchy” plus power/privilege “Wheeeeeeeeeee! Look at me – I can never be a racist you ‘sour dough-faced’ ‘cracka ass cracka’ with your whitey tears and ‘Shut mouth and listen’, whitey. See?”
In the actual and real past the centrality of SF was defined by what it does no other genre does, e.g. time travel, alien planets, general space exploration, future civilizations, space structures, etc. That past self-evidently existed unless you’re a fucking knob fronting for radical lesbian feminism.
What did not exist and what is central to SF would not include dumbfuck queer theory about how men destroyed gender equality by the clever use of heterosexuality and making incest a taboo. Nor does it include intersecting vectors of oppression like race, weight, language, transgenderism and other race/lesbian fuckery dedicated to lighting up straight white men in a new revenge genre dedicated to the memory of Audre Lorde. You can write all the lesbian versions of To Kill a Mocking Bird you want and it won’t magically turn into SF.
Go somewhere else.
Plus fuck off.
The fact that you evade the question …
I didn’t evade your question. I answered it directly.
He doesn’t react the way you do, so he’s obviously a Nazi?
Beale made a choice to call Breivik a potential “national hero” without condemning Breivik’s murderous rampage. I’m evaluating Beale’s position based on that choice and calling it repugnant.
I don’t know why you object to that. Do you believe Beale’s a poor writer who doesn’t say what he means to say? I think he’s a capable writer who wrote that blog post precisely and made the omission he did by full intention.
If you or I had written about Breivik being perceived as a hero someday, I think we’d make clear we regard such an idea as offensive.
Oh, look – more wrong plus the stupid:
“Jim Henley on June 22, 2015 at 9:02 am said:
@Aaron: your reference to SF Hall of Fame Vol. 1 is so freaking on-point I wanted to fist-pump while reading it. Science fiction has always been so much more than Nutty Nuggets that I can’t recognize the past the Pups want to return to.”
Here’s Aaron’s original comment:
“Aaron on June 22, 2015 at 6:47 am said:
I’ll see your ‘Cold Equations’ and raise you ‘On The Beach’.
“I’ll throw in Born of Man and Woman, Huddling Place, That Only a Mother, Mars Is Heaven!, and Little Black Bag. I’ll let Torgersen explain how a collection of works from the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One ‘suck’.”
They got all that from this:
“Downbeat endings suck. They are ‘literary’ and some critics and aesthetes love them. But they suck. If you’re going to roast your characters in hell, at least give them a little silver lining at the end? Some kind of hope for a more positive outcome? Your readers will thank you.” – Brad Torgersen
Brad does not speak for all Pups; stop pretending he does to shoehorn in bullshit. I can only speak for myself but there is a difference between racially and sexually roasting all of Western civilization and questioning and critiquing it and our shared failures as humans. The future is full of unforeseen outcomes of our meddlings in tech and society and old school SF full of that. Civilizational ennui is another thing.
According the SJW intersectional gender ideology straight white men not only wrote those Hall of Fame stories but they are racist and sexist:
“Crossed Genres @crossedgenres Dec 3 The ‘Golden Age’ of SFF contained absurd amounts of racism, sexism, etc. in its most revered works. So no, we wouldn’t publish those books… We said if presented w/ those works new & unpublished, we wouldn’t publish them. The fact that they were published means racism/sexism was more openly accepted back then. That doesn’t make it okay. They shldn’t have been published”
“Clarissa @wintersweet Dec 3 @crossedgenres Imagine how many lost/buried voices could have been published instead. I wouldn’t cry over losing some classics for them.”
“a time when SF writers hid their racism by attributing negative stereotypes to aliens instead of non-whites…” – SFWA member Carrie Cuinn
“that the main mythic story you find in science fiction, generally written by whites, ‘is going to a foreign culture and colonizing it.'” – io9 also quoting gay feminist Nalo Hopkinson
“I know aliens in SFF started out as the equivalent of POC natives in a colonial narrative frame, but still…” – Aliette de Bodard
“Kameron Hurley @KameronHurley 6h As long as we present SFF as stuff by/for folks like Asimov, Heinlein, Bester and Ellison, this isn’t going to happen.Will be fewer readers”
“Runy @runycat 6h @KameronHurley I would be fucking thrilled if folks could get over their weird Heinlein boners and move forward.”
“Ro Smith @Rhube 5h @KateElliottSFF @KameronHurley @gderekadams @runycat I’m now happy with chucking out ‘classics’ rife with misogyny, racism etc.”
Now these fools want to claim we reject that when we’ve been fighting to hold onto it? Fuck that. And of the 48 stories chosen for the anthologies that make up The Science Fiction Hall of Fame (1970 & 1973) none are about conquering and colonizing analogues of indigenous peoples. Only nine stories have aliens at all.
And what do we have in Vol 1? Solid old-school mid-century American SF we adore, we created and SJW ideology detests. No racial revenge fantasies, racism, misogyny or goofball psycho-sexual feminist obsessions in sight. Plus it’s actually SF:
A MARTIAN ODYSSEY, Stanley G. Weinbaum
TWILIGHT, John W. Campbell
HELEN O’LOY, Lester del Rey
THE ROADS MUST ROLL, Robert A. Heinlein
MICROCOSMIC GOD, Theodore Sturgeon
NIGHTFALL, Isaac Asimov
THE WEAPON SHOP, A. E. van Vogt
MIMSY WERE THE BOROGOVES, Lewis Padgett
HUDDLING PLACE, Clifford D. Simak
ARENA, Fredric Brown
FIRST CONTACT, Murray Leinster
THAT ONLY A MOTHER, Judith Merril
SCANNERS LIVE IN VAIN, Cordwainer Smith
MARS IS HEAVEN!, Ray Bradbury
THE LITTLE BLACK BAG, C. M. Kombluth
BORN OF MAN AND WOMAN, Richard Matheson
COMING ATTRACTION, Fritz Leiber
THE QUEST FOR SAINT AQUIN, Anthony Boucher
SURFACE TENSION, James Blish
THE NINE BILLION NAMES OF GOD, Arthur C. Clarke
IT’S A GOOD LIFE, Jerome Bixby
THE COLD EQUATIONS, Tom Godwin
FONDLY FAHRENHEIT, Alfred Bester
THE COUNTRY OF THE KIND, Damon Knight
FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON, Daniel Keyes
A ROSE FOR ECCLESIASTES, Roger Zelazny
The only people who reject that are the feminist stiffs other stiffs at Glyer’s have been providing cover for.
Plus fuck off.
FIRST CONTACT, Murray Leinster
The whole point of this story is the fear of an indigenous people being conquered by an alien other. Both sides are driven by it. In a famous line from the story, a member of one species says, “You are a good guy. Too bad we must kill each other.”
HELEN O’LOY, Lester del Rey
This is a story about gender roles — a guy gives his female-modeled housecleaning robot sentient emotions and falls in love with it. The whole thing would be derided as feminist propaganda except that it celebrates gender norms from the era it was written instead of tweaking them.
I bet I would find more social justice warrior-y stuff in those classics if I poked around further. The Heinlein story is about a theory he dubbed “functionalism” that led to transportation workers declaring themselves more essential than all others and revolting. How political is that?
One of the biggest flaws in the Puppies movement is the notion that the introduction of strong political themes into SF/F is either new or unwelcome. Readers in the genre have always liked that, as long as the stories were good and the insights thought provoking.
rcade – Since you just can’t go without mentioning Vox Day, here’s what he said about Breivik: “[I]t is self-evident that Breivik is a lunatic of the sort defined by Umberto Eco in Foucault’s Pendulum.”
That’s condemnation. Additionally, the concept of Breivik being a national hero was a quote from one of his commentators.
Moving along to other strange comments: “Readers in the genre have always liked that, as long as the stories were good and the insights thought provoking.”
Yeah. This has only been stated by the Puppies a couple thousand times. How many people have to explain the difference between “message fiction” and “fiction with a message?”
Oh, look. rcade can read my words now!!! Just not the one’s with Brianna Wu or Rose Fox in them.
You are really something, rcade, you really are. You are as dense as a block of granite. We have repeatedly said we are not against the large fabric of themes SF can and does embrace. Did you somehow imagine I had not read those stories?
I love John Varley’s stories and they are far closer to concepts of gender-fluidity than any of that stuff. His stories in the late ’70s and early ’80s are loaded with that. Have you ever read “The Barbie Murders,” “Equinoctial,” Titan? I am not against equal rights feminism either. Have you ever read “Friend Island” (1918) by Francis Stevens? Did you think I went “Yuck!”? “No Woman Born” by C. L. Moore from 1944 predates Simone de Beauvoir’s famous quote from her book
“One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one” by 5 years. Who was teaching who?
Let me repeat what I am against, and they are two things:
A.) I am against a racist gender feminist ideology which hates me.
B.) I am against that ideology’s obsession with race and gender being central to SF over actual SF itself.
Is that clear enough? I do not have a prexisting default phobia or disdain for anything SF contains which is not sprung from a fucking hate group. And what the fuck are you going on about the word “political”? Do you know where “Maltu Mephis” is from? How political is that?
Your comment about “First Contact” is an idiotic stretch which is no more than semantic gibberish. Not only does the word “indigenous” not appear in the story, it doesn’t appear anywhere in the anthology. As for SF as a whole, no one has ever said there are not such stories. I say they are not central nor a foundation, which the lie claimed by our intersectional postcolonial madhatters.
What you write about the “introduction of strong political themes into SF/F is either new or unwelcome” is straight up bullshit. Ever hear me quote Orwell, Fahrenheit 451? Without political speculation there is no SF. Did you not read the table of contents other than to cherry-pick bullshit? What’s “The Weapon Shop,” one of my favorite stories?
Get your transblack cornrows in order, rcade, cuz you’re panicking and trying to score points rather than make them. I make points, 10,000 quotes at a time, which you ignore.
I didn’t say it did. Do you think a story has to use the word “indigenous” to be about indigenous people being afraid of an alien other?
Oh, look. rcade can read my words now!
I skip your culture war BS completely and that’s not a policy I’m going to change. You were talking about actual SF/F stories with that list, so I replied.
That distinction sounds so subjective as to be completely useless.
It is not useless at all. Here is the stupidest example of the message-shoehorn I’ve ever seen, courtesy of Elizabeth Bear:
“For a moment, Dharthi considered such medieval horrors as dentistry without anesthetic, binary gender, and as being stuck forever in the body you were born in, locked in and struggling against what your genes dictated.”
That had a shelf-life of zero seconds.
Why not use classics such as the Pet Rocks of ancient Greece?
“The Ballad of Lost C’Mell” by Cordwainer Smith is still going strong after 63 years because it buried the lede as opposed to Bear’s blunt arrow to her own story. SJWs doesn’t even pretend at subtlety; they bang you over the head straight out of a bowling alley. That’s not a surprise since you have to be an idiot to believe in their crusade in the first place.
Here’s another sledgehammer, this time from Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice:
“The gender thing is a giveaway, though. Only a Radchaai would misgender people the way you do.”
“I saw them all, suddenly, for just a moment, through non-Radchaai eyes, an eddying crowd of unnervingly ambiguously gendered people. I saw all the features that would mark gender for non-Radchaai–never, to my annoyance and inconvenience, the same way in each place. Short hair or long, worn unbound (trailing down a back, or in a thick, curled nimbus) or bound (braided, pinned, tied). Thick-bodied or thin-, faces delicate-featured or coarse-, with cosmetics or none. A profusion of colors that would have been gender-marked in other places. All of this matched randomly with bodies curving at breast and hip or not, bodies that one moment moved in ways various non-Radchaai would call feminine, the next moment masculine. Twenty years of habit overtook me, and for an instant I despaired of choosing the right pronouns, the right terms of address. But I didn’t need to do that here. I could drop that worry, a small but annoying weight I had carried all this time. I was home.”
Isn’t that what the goofy robots in the second Star War trilogy said? “Gender, gender.”
Why didn’t she just say they wear Spanx or shop at Gander Mountain?
Remember that Van Vogt story where they played Spaceball in the Inter-World Series on Mars? Yeah, no.
The gender stuff is central to Ancillary Justice — it’s not an anachronistic bit of modern politics gracelessly dumped on a page like the Elizabeth Bear passage you quoted. Calling it out of place is like saying that a classic Heinlein novel has too much libertarian junk in it. Part of the charm of reading Heinlein is when he goes on those riffs, even if you aren’t a libertarian yourself.
It sounds to me like you don’t put your own politics aside when reading SF/F as much as I do. I’d rather read a good story whose author’s politics piss me off than set it aside on those grounds. I’m reading Larry Correia’s first Monster Hunter novel now and the gun worship is kind of hilarious. Every new gun encountered in the text is described like it was the next prize on The Price is Right. Do I agree with that? Hell no. But it’s his universe and I’m rolling with it.
“I didn’t say it did. Do you think a story has to use the word ‘indigenous’ to be about indigenous people being afraid of an alien other?”
Hey, everybody. “First Contact” is an analogy to Columbus’s love affair with Cleopatra… or something. All you have to do is take a hit of LSD and then squint your eyes. If you taffy-pulled your analogy any further the story would pop out of existence. By your standard, what the hell isn’t about indigenous and the other?
“I skip your culture war BS completely and that’s not a policy I’m going to change. You were talking about actual SF/F stories with that list, so I replied.”
You mean you do the trolling bullshit part and skip anything that resembles using actual logic and comparisons.
And MY culture war? Do you see me writing bullshit that starts “Dear Black people…” or telling all women to #JustListen to men? I think you’re a bit confused, junior. You can see Beale’s quotes just fine, just not daffy racist feminists.
Murray Leinster’s story is about two space-faring species who are so afraid of being wiped out by the other after first contact that they engineer an elaborate gambit to enable both to go home safely. Nobody has to squint to see the issue of indigenous people fearing annihilation or assimilation.
Wrong, it is exactly an anachronistic bit of modern politics gracelessly dumped on a page.
And what are my politics? I love In Conquest Born, as feminist a fucking gender space opera as you’ll ever read. But guess what? Friedman didn’t knock me about the head and shoulders with it. I put aside whatever politics I have just fine, since I really don’t even have any. What I don’t put aside is art appreciation.
There is this thing called “suspending disbelief.” Ever hear of that? It’s not my job. I’m willing to squint my eyes damn hard with Captain Future and the Space Emperor and even Doc Smith written for kids around the time of Joe Dimaggio. There’s no reason in the world for me to being doing that with an historically awarded 21st century SF novel. AJ is moronic cattle feed. If you’re looking for art, wit and subtlety, go to In Conquest Born.
You can keep shoe-horning in the word “indigenous” all you want, it doesn’t make it old West colonialist-themed fiction. Why shrink the dictionary to make a stupid point?
Why not just admit that to be anti-Puppy you have to make up shit out of your head and ignore real shit from the daffy feminist you provide cover for? If you were a cop you’d arrest a corpse for murdering its murderer.
@60guilders
“No, I commend James May’s posts to you because the people he quotes display the exact same line of thinking as Vox Day displays, just against a different target set and with less blatant hostility.
I’ve been mostly skimming James May’s posts because life is short and James May is very long. But since you have been very civil (and I am also embarrassed that I mistakenly attributed something Civilis said to you), I shall review some of his posts that address me (you can’t ask me to review and reply to ALL of them, especially considering that now he’s telling people to fuck off and go somewhere else who aren’t actually posting here).
@James May
jaynsand, exactly how many people are Beale and Wright? Because I keep seeing them multiplied into a multi-platform institutional presence far beyond their actual numbers.
They are indeed only two people. But (as I mentioned earlier) Beale was capable of mustering enough people to swing the nominations the Puppies’ way – indeed more numbers than the SP could muster up alone. And Beale boasts of his influence over his followers…so I do think his views on how justified it is to kill children he believes are “larval quislings”, to shoot girls who want an education beyond puberty, views on the inferiority of black people, on Anti-Semitism, etc…are more likely to influence more people than one angry man on a street corner haranguing unheeding passersby. Hence the responsibility to clearly state one’s disagreement with him is greater, IMO.
“jaynsand there are quotes from Rose Fox upthread. If you have nothing to say about them then there is no context to or sense in your comments.”
Let’s see:
“White parents of White boys, your most important task is countering the culture that wants to turn them into racist, misogynist killers.”
Arguable? Yes. Wrong? Actually, I agree that she is wrong in that I don’t believe the whole of white culture is conducive to turning boys into misogynist racist killers, though I do think certain segments of it are (like some of the Confederacy-sentimentalizing Southern culture the Charleston killer grew up in). Racist? Hmmm … (checks context). Posted on June 18th (right after Charleston) by an apparently white woman? Kinda iffy. She’s not attacking White blood and genetics (which are immutable), she’s criticizing culture – which can be changed. And I’d say the emotion of the moment of learning a Confederate-flag loving white man killed a bunch of black people based on white supremacist Stormfront ideology, precipitated by the fact that his girlfriend preferred a black man is a bit of a mitigating factor. What’s Beale’s excuse?
Say that in fact she IS a racist – which I do not concede, but let’s just say she is for the sake of argument. If that’s the worst quote you have of her, I presume you don’t have quotes of her applauding someone’s murder or attempted murder or acid disfigurement or whatever based on grounds of racism, anti-left tendencies (or anti-right tendencies, for that matter), misogyny, or what-not. So how is she comparable to Beale?
Also, does she have some power over some group of “SJWs” who march in lockstep at her bidding? Does the leader of another group of “SJWs” owe her a big favor (as Brad owes Beale?) Has the leader of that group announced pre-emptively that he will NEVER say a thing against her on the grounds of racism, misogyny, anti-rightism, etc. because that would be Wrong (as Brad said of Beale?) Then I still don’t see the comparison.
“White parents of White boys” is culture? That’s just plain moronic, especially considering Beale said he understands why an actual culture of Wahabbi-inspired idiots would consider shooting a girl who was the daughter of education activists a good thing. I understand why an English doctor in Hyderabad in 1800 “saw” his aristocratic ethnic Persian female patient in purdah only through a wooden screen. I understand why they were kept indoors and under wraps. I understand why Saudis put rape victims in jail. That has nothing to do with me. I read it – they are morons. I don’t approve of it.
You are mincing words coming and going. Fox clearly means the “culture” is endemic. It is completely in keeping with her quote “I’d say most white men should come with TWs (trigger warnings) for unthinking privileged arrogance, but that’s like saying books need TWs for ‘contains words’.” The word “most” is just dipshittery that excuses nothing. Are “most” of us Confederates? And what is saying “Black parents of black boys” called? Suddenly we’re also back to racist Confederates. How do I win this argument? Ever? You know as well as I do I’d be lit up as a racist for saying that, because that is supposedly what the shooter thought.
I think you better start laying out Beale’s quotes cuz you seem to be misrepresenting them. You first need to show Beale applauding murder and then ideologically attach him to other Sad Puppies using quotes. I can easily attach SJW after SJW to each other using quotes. SFWA member Beth Bernobich Tweeted she hoped L. Correia and his fans should all die in a fire. She only finally deleted it when she felt heat from Glyer’s months later. And that was over Larry using the word “pussy,” which John Scalzi called “misogyny.” If there’s your standard, Fox is easily a racist.
The important point is this: Fox has unquestioned support from that entire community. Although I have seen strangers call out her Tweets, I have never seen an SJW in SFF do so. Were Fox an outlier no one would care. However her mainstream credibility also comes from the fact she is also the reviews editor at the decades old Publisher’s Weekly and co-editor of an SFF anthology, predictably with a man who has no love for whites, Daniel Jose Older, another quote machine of love. He is the promoter of the “white savior” concept in films and books. But if I said I’m sick of blacks scoring the winning touchdown what is that. Stop apologizing for these people. It’s all wrong and I can never be right.
This is also Fox:
“Hate is default White male behavior in America. Has been for a long time. Teach your boys better before they hurt/kill someone else’s kids.”
“American White male culture is racist and sexist. If that offends you, as a White American male, go do something about it.”
The distinction between culture and blood is virtually non-existent. And what do these same people say about attaching crime to other blacks and terrorism to other Muslims? SJWs are simply liars whose rules turn on a dime as long as they point at whites and away from non-whites.
There is also other issues with lying. Saying blacks must fear murder from whites when the actual count is 5,500 blacks murdered by blacks as opposed to 200 a year murdered by whites with 450 whites murdered by blacks is straight up racial incitement. At what point do you see a clear pattern and stop mitigating their quotes by uncrossing “T’s”? You know as well as I do there is this bizarre obsession with race and gender in SFF where men and whites are singled out daily and portrayed negatively 100% of the time. That is crass hate speech and defamation. You trying to spin that institutional culture-wide and even award-nominated presence to light up one guy makes me sick.
“Also, does she have some power over some group of ‘SJWs’ who march in lockstep at her bidding? Does the leader of another group of ‘SJWs’ owe her a big favor (as Brad owes Beale?)”
Now you’re just making up shit out of your head.
Racism has to do with race, no? Prejudice against a group of people due to factors (genetic factors of birth) that the people CANNOT change. Culture (which word she used specifically) CAN change with effort over time. So no, not racism.
As for the rest of your opinions about my opinions…you’re welcome to them.
You know as well as I do if I turn around any SJW remark about whites to be instead about blacks it goes straight to racism. Even without doing a single thing I’ve become almost certainly racist not only in Rose Fox’s worldview but of every SJW in this sick ideology. What about me being a racist without doing a thing and you absolving Fox for actual quotes do you not understand? It’s pretty clear to me you don’t even understand your own thought processes.
No quotes at all: probably racist. Actual quotes: not racism. That’s not worthy of an adult. That’s doublethink.
So this is not racist or bigotry according to jaynsand:
“Black parents of black boys, your most important task is countering the culture that wants to turn them into racist, misogynist killers.”
“Hate is default Black male behavior in America.”
“American Black male culture is racist and sexist. If that offends you, as a Black American male, go do something about it.”
“The gay black broad perspective is basically the Dunning-Kruger effect apex of all civilization.”
It’s like black men literally don’t understand how anything works.”
Black People To Do List:
1. Stop blaming white privilege
2. Educate self
3. Amplify white voices
4. Shut mouth and listen
It’s social justice!!! Yaaaay!!!
The sad thing about all these attempts at White Male Shaming(ahahaha) I mean beside the ones done by weak white males(Scaliwag and C. More Hiney) is that they keep bringing up this mythical all white SF fiction. Most SF I have ever read was race neutral and let the reader make the hero look like them.
There really should be a official Jealous Hater Award.
>>“Michael Z Williamson @mzmadmike Jun 18
The Charleston: 9 shots Kahlua, one shot coconut cream, serve with a Colt 45 chaser. With help from Steve Coffman
Too soon?”<<
I found this joke as despicable as I found jokes I heard immediately after 9/11. Sure, different people have different definitions of humor (and use it in different ways) but there is something terribly inhumane about making a joke about violent and horrific killings before the people involved have even been laid to rest and their family, friends and city (and nation) are deep in shock and grief.
In my opinion, that joke is indefensibly cruel.
It’s a sick cult. We’ve proven with facts that SJWs lie about racial murder and rape statistics, in effect falsely provoking daily race hatred and incitement to hate men.
When one white man commits an atrocity SJWs say “Must’ve been racial incitement by racists.”
When one Muslim terrorist or black criminal commits an atrocity SJWs go straight to “don’t blame them all,” and “no muslim or black need apologize.”
If it’s a white guy all whites must prove their bona fides and commit to doing better, being less racist and committed to make other whites less racists.
The insane ideology of race-gender feminism stoking these fires is like a cancer. But instead of excising it we give it book contracts and awards.
No one should be surprised SJW logic folds back on itself since their ideology is based on the mentally ill, often hysterical and hateful idiots who created the topsy-turvy world of race-gender feminism.
We’ve had them come right here and show us how words dance around like Mexican jumping beans and how the strike zone in their baseball game expands and contracts at will as long as the right batter walks and the wrong one strikes out.
Were there such a thing as a class action lawsuit against racial incitement and hate speech against SJWs, the evidence is so thick it would be a slam dunk. SJWs would be sunk by their own stupid rules as much as any. Once you’ve tacitly agreed mistaken identity is “institutional racism” and the word “pussy” proof of woman-hatred, and then practiced straight out racism and misandry and incitement, you’ve in effect prosecuted yourself.
“White parents of White boys” is culture? That’s just plain moronic, especially considering Beale said he understands why an actual culture of Wahabbi-inspired idiots would consider shooting a girl who was the daughter of education activists a good thing.”
Beale said said that such a killing is “perfectly rational and SCIENTIFICALLY JUSTIFIABLE.(my emphasis).” Now it may be “rational” from the point of view of Wahhabi fanatics to kill a young girl who wants an education because they think that’s Allah’s will, but the “scientifically justified” part has nothing to do Wahhabi fanaticism. Religious fanatics have no interest in scientific justification. That is SOLELY Beale’s point of view, as he expounds here:
http://www.donotlink.com/framed?6695
…as he expounds here his pseudoscientific reasoning for WHY such a killing of a young girl is scientifically justified from HIS point of view, in a letter intended to show his beliefs without shock jock tactics.(http://www.johndbrown.com/what-vox-day-believes/ ) In this same letter he uses more pseudoscientific drivel to explain that he thinks people of African descent are genetically predisposed to low intelligence and violence – which IS actual RACISM, as in expressed prejudice against an entire RACE of people due to inherent factors they cannot change…a much more clear example than the one you cited.
But I expect you to ignore that point, as you ignored my earlier point that you have not (and presumably cannot) quote this person you’re vilifying as applauding and writing apologetics for acts of murder and attempted murder…which, again, makes her hugely different from Beale in quality as well as degree…and therefore comparing the two and proclaiming them equal is just you pounding a square peg in a round hole and looking at the result in unquestioning content.
@jaynsand – But (as I mentioned earlier) Beale was capable of mustering enough people to swing the nominations the Puppies’ way – indeed more numbers than the SP could muster up alone.
I’ve yet to see any support for this. In fact, I have yet to see anyone come up with any basis for which portion of the Hugo nomination votes were either SP or RP.
In further fact, the only argument I have heard to date for the RPs supposedly tipping the Hugo scales was that they went over and convinced a lot of #GamerGate members to “stick it to the system” — which remains a faith-based argument. Reality does not care what a person’s faith is, it trudges along on its own course, heedless and ignorant of wishful thinking.
The reality is, next to no GGers voted in the Hugo noms because it was not our fight. We are not about “sticking it to the system”. If anything, we are about getting the system to start adhering to its own stated rules. That’s a funny thing about games: they all operate on a set of rules. People who break the rules are considered scum by most gamers — just step into a multi-player game, and you’ll quickly find the nastiest, most common insults are variations on “YOU HACKED THE GAME”.
Gamers loathe cheaters.
So imagine how we feel when suddenly, having paid little or no attention to the Hugo noms, we gamers are suddenly being blamed for rigging awards. And who is saying this? It’s the people opposed to the Sad Puppies, who simply cannot cope with the notion that they lost by the rules. There had to be a fix in, someone must be to blame… #GamerGate!
That’s a matter of lying to the press for sympathy. To get support for pushing back against, not the Puppies, but those horrible evilbadz GGers! Because you can’t win the fight against them without whipping up an even bigger, angrier mob who are willing to believe GG is a hate-group which must be defeated.
And that is why we are here, now, reading through our voters’ packets and numbering our ballots. Because cheaters picked a fight with gamers and got a load of suckers to buy a narrative we were already fighting.
So no. Beale didn’t round up the hordes to overturn the “rightful” vote tally. He never got many of us to listen in the first place.
People on YOUR side of the aisle did that.
“as I understand it, several nominations that were on the RP slate alone succeeded while nominations unique to the SP slate failed – showing that the SP didn’t have the numbers to succeed without RP”
Which is a premise wholly reliant on the notion that everyone who voted in the noms (or at least an overwhelming majority) did so BY THE SLATES. This continues to be a mentality endemic of opposition to the Pups: the idea that there is only a faceless, easily-led bunch with a few figureheads that do all the talking for them.
I find that’s also a mentality true in politics. Conservatives and liberals, particularly the more energetic ones, have trouble imagining how someone can NOT think as they do. It is often assumed that they have been fooled, or are fooling themselves, so each side tends to call the other “sheep”.
That seems to be how you came to the conclusion above.
I can’t imagine making such a joke. The question becomes whether, like the assassination of 9 black people for the crime of being black, one expands each to the size of a blimp 220 white Americans can fit inside.
It’s pretty clear, at least to me, that was done both before and after the shooting. The shooting wasn’t proof of white racism in America, but confirmation of views long held. That’s why SJWs need to lie about both rape and racial murder statistics, because proof. There are as many calls for white Americans to come to a reckoning for this atrocity as there were calls to not have Muslims apologize for 9/11 and Charlie Hebdo. It is a common intersectional tactic at the root of all their lies: an actual ideology or culture is turned into a demographic. A mere demographic is turned into an ideology. A massively askew black criminal demographic is turned into nothing. A skewed white demographic in SFF is turned into – not only an ideology – but a racist one.
If white Americans need apologize for 200 black murders, what reckoning do black Americans have for 450 white ones? The answer is: none. Intersectionalism is a stacked deck that deals nothing but aces for itself. I have yet to see even one iota of logic in SJW thought. That provides the insight that failure is its own explanation, and not that of anyone or anything else.
America is so racist. That’s why millions of non-whites throw their lives into upheaval, their families in disarray, even risking their lives to come here and why statistical zero emigrate out.
@60guilders
So this is the sage you wanted me to debate? His main tactic seems to be “tu quoque”, shaky enough in itself, even without the fact that the examples that he cites aren’t really at all comparable to the Beale being criticised.
Thing is, I got that Beale letter I cited above from someone on this board who cited it to me when I first heard about this kerfluffle and came over to see what the HELL this was all about, and why a respectable guy like Torgersen seemed to be associated with a revolting creature like this VD person’s quotes made him seem. Many people here said that VD had nothing to do with SP – Brad’s official position. However, many leaped to VD’s defense and began saying (in tones ranging from howling resentful insult to civility) that if I REALLY read Beale in context I would know he was being unfairly criticised. I was confused, because Brad is the leader of the Sad Puppies, and so I expected to find Sad Puppies in his blog. But here are all these people jumping to the defense of a guy the leader of the Sad Puppies says has nothing to do with the Sad Puppies.
I was mostly ignorant of Beale at the time (a state I now consider enviable) and so I did what I was told and did read more Beale, and found him pretty much as disgusting, racist, misogynist, Anti-Semitic, murder-apologetic etc. in context as the quotes seemed to prove him in isolation. I returned here and found people still cutting Beale enormous amount of undeserved slack and assuming anything the “other side” said of him is lies, without actually checking, and minimizing proof when it was presented. You yourself confidently said that Beale didn’t count as Neo-Nazi because he wasn’t anti-Semitic – even though then I cited a quote showing he actually is.
See, I earlier said that even if Beale wasn’t a neo-Nazi, he checked ALL the boxes one would expect of a neo-Nazi, and so he can reasonably be mistaken for one even if he isn’t. Just so, the Sad Puppies may not be racist, anti-Semitic, misogynist, etc. in their aims or as a group – hell, the people on this blog may not even all be Sad Puppies. But when people come to this blog to see what the SP are about, they frequently find people who are apparently Brad’s supporters (hence assumed to be SP) frequent dominating the boards, defending and dismissing criticism of a man who can be reasonably mistaken for a neo-Nazi – a man you yourself called a “garden-variety white supremacist.” Seeing that, IMO, it would be reasonable for someone looking at these blogs to reasonably mistake the SPs as being racist etc. as a group, even if they actually aren’t – especially now that in Charleston we’ve seen what one garden-variety white supremacist can do under the influence of multiple garden-variety white supremacist theorists (as Beale is).
Now I don’t think you’re a racist – you seem a reasonable man. I don’t even think Brad’s a racist. But I do think that as the leader of the SP, this impression that his movement is racist can be laid at his door. He chose to blog about Beale (a man that the SP gets significant benefits from) and say that that he will NEVER call him a racist, and that anyone who does is Evol. He set the example of defending Beale the White Supremacist for his followers. And Brad seems to be the kind of man who would never EVER back down even from a mistaken position – a man who would suffer hellish torments rather than admit to himself (much less others) that he’s made a fool of himself. Until he does, IMO, the SP are easily going to be perceived as racist in general by a lot of people. Sorry, man.
I asked you to look at Fox’s remarks and others you ignore and surprise, you continue to wave them away using the absurd standard some guy wants women and non-whites dead and a pedantic use of the word “culture.”
You are ignoring the fact I am called a racist merely for being part of this “culture” and in the absence of any quotes that might place me there. There’s not even the excuse of an argument. You also know full well that were I to reverse Fox’s and Wu’s remarks and use them I’d be called a racist, not an observer of “culture.” So I’d be twice a racist. Your idea of “incitement” is strangely one-directional.
We have people saying we hate women for us merely cursing, donating to RAINN for that curse, and Nebula winners saying mistaken identity is “institutional racism.” That is an actual standard we have seen employed against us again and again.
This is all semantic gibberish.
If you feel Beale is the gold standard than you need to go to his site and ask him what he meant by “scientifically justified.”
“… especially now that in Charleston we’ve seen what one garden-variety white supremacist can do under the influence of multiple garden-variety white supremacist theorists.”
The problem there is you are ignoring how any black on white crime like that goes into a memory-hole. Proof of that is the Twitter feeds of SJWs themselves. They are full of white on black crime only, although we know from FBI statistics they are precisely the opposite. By your own standard, you are admitting that incitement and apologists operate in that same but opposite way. Stats don’t lie: blacks are killing blacks, then blacks whites, with whites killing blacks in third place. Throw in racial incitement across the spectrum of SFF’s institutions and you’ve made your own case.
I guess if you just ignore the beginning of the year when “A black man who was found guilty of murdering two white teenagers execution-style in a vacant Detroit field defiantly declared ‘black lives matter’ Wednesday before being sentenced to life in prison” then everything’s just fine.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jan/22/detroit-man-who-murdered-two-white-teens-declares-/
Gee, who’s been using that hashtag?
And for “writing apologetics for acts of murder and attempted murder,” go read Scalzi’s moronic apologetic post about Charlie Hebdo; it was typical of SJW views.
Just keep bullshitting. That’s what you’re good at. Until you admit all group defamation is wrong without your clever mitigations, that’s all you’ll ever be good at. Tu quoque is what you do, not me.
“You yourself confidently said that Beale didn’t count as Neo-Nazi”
Even Eric Flint says Beale doesn’t count as a neo-Nazi. And the only people who seem to insist that the tag should apply are those who want to continue to point at Puppies in general and either say “see? Neo-Nazis!” or “hmmmm, I’d LIKE to give them benefit of the doubt, buuuuuut…”
Ms. Gallo evoked Godwin’s Law, and most of those rushing to her defense since then have likewise evoked it. Leading to the kind of hair-splitting which tries to keep the accusation alive that we’re seeing ongoing on this page.
You’re welcome to your opinion that Beale is a neo-Nazi. I’m welcome to take such over-the-top assertions and present them to people currently still on the fence about the Hugo controversy.
There is nothing “sage” about what I do; I provide quotes.
For all of your arrogance you can’t figure out you folks quote Beale over and over and over and over again into a hall of mirrors stretching to infinity. Neither can you figure out you won’t go to his site and debate and ask for clarification, unlike Tor, where you can’t.
When you finally tire of Beale you go to Wright and then… nothing. In other words this entire pushback by SJWs has been over nothing, both now and in the past. But that’s what SJWs do, isn’t it. They create phantoms from anomalies and ideologies from demographies. SFF is white ergo it is white supremacist. No proof needed. Just count heads.
On the other hand I quotes scores of people all using the same odd lingo about “privilege” and “misogyny” and they are spread throughout the entirety of SFF’s core institutions. Not only that but they are honored and, in the case of Tor, protected by insanely strict moderation policies.
Were I to make a case for institutionalized incitement to hate by sex and race using courtroom-style rules of evidence, it wouldn’t even be a close call.
I put more stock in bald-faced racist comments like calling whites “sour dough-faced” and “cracka ass cracka,” especially when those comments come from the co-creators of WisCon’s racially segregated “safer space,” and are also the exact one’s promoting the idea mistaken racial identity is “institutional racism.” The only hint of a standard there is a double standard so wide it’s nothing more than lying.
Nick Furious drags out the Hall of Infinitely Extendable Mirrors again. It’s like a Jack Vance magic charm.
Just as in gender feminist ideology Sansa Stark equals 100 men, in that same ideology one non-SJW website equals 100 racist man-hating SJW blogs and Twitter feeds, cuz proportion.
Back in the real world, the Nick Mamatas non-challenge shows the 5 winners of the 2014 Nebula winners alone constitute a more numerous same-page supremacist ideology of hate than all SFF authors 1912-1975. SJWs can extend mirrors, they just can’t look in them.
Go reattach the neck-bolts to your electrodes, Claps.
Can anyone explain to me the curious coincidence where SJWs “observe” white “culture” and it is negative 100% of the time and yet somehow manage to never have even one “observation” of black “culture” that is negative? That goes for women too.
I’ve said this many times: you can tell as much about the con game intersectionalists throw at us by what they NEVER say as what they do say.
How naive do you have to be to fall for that?
“VOOOOOOXXXXXX DAAAAAYYYYYYYY!!!!!!”
@jaynsand: I’ll highlight a few passages for you.
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/05/violence-women-and-war.html
Thursday, May 07, 2015
Violence, women, and war
One Owlmirror attempts to claim it is reasonable to conclude that I approve of violence towards feminist women:
“I have something of a rant simmering on how it’s still reasonable to conclude that Vox Day approves of violence towards women (or more specifically, feminist women), despite the point (which you emphasized) that that’s not exactly what he wrote, but it’s long and kinda off-topic.”
***It is also false. I do not approve of initiating violence period. Not towards women, not towards feminist women, not towards anyone.***
Is that insufficiently clear? Do I need to type more slowly for the message to sink in?
The idea that I approve of violence against women is entirely based on false accusations. Just to give one example, despite the fact that I have never addressed the shooting of Malala Yousafzai in any detail, much less supported it, a number of people have repeated the totally false claims by Popular Science and NPR that I am “on the record as supporting the Taliban’s attempt to assassinate Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousifazi”. In fact, there is not a single post about Miss Yousafzai on this blog and my only reference to her was in a passing reference on Alpha Game in a post dealing with the demographic implosion of Japan.
“In light of the strong correlation between female education and demographic decline, a purely empirical perspective on Malala Yousafzai, the poster girl for global female education, may indicate that the Taliban’s attempt to silence her was perfectly rational and scientifically justifiable.”
So, in the interest of setting the record straight, let’s go ahead and look at the Taliban’s attack on the young Pakistani woman to see whether the attack can reasonably be considered rational or not. (I will address the scientific element below.) And once you take the time to actually read about the historical context of the shooting, it rapidly becomes obvious that the decision of the Taliban to attack Malala Yousafzai was not a random act of irrational violence against women, but rather the rational and purposeful targeting of an individual they correctly considered to be a traitor in the employ of their enemies.
Most people are entirely unaware that Yousafzai was no mere “innocent schoolgirl” who just happened to attend school, she was the daughter of a pro-Western activist, she had worked as a paid propagandist for the BBC and other Western organizations for four years, and she had even met with Richard Holbrooke before the “irrational” Taliban finally decided to silence her. Given that her family “ran a chain of schools”, you could even make a reasonable case for her pro-education activism having been little more than a cynical marketing device on the part of her elders.
The Taliban has been fighting to defend their traditional way of life in their own tribal lands for 36 years. They have killed tens of thousands of people, from elite Spetsnaz soldiers to unarmed young women, in order to do so. It is quite clear that they will kill anyone who threatens that way of life, and considering how they have survived two invasions and occupations by two superpowers, their ruthlessness is not only rational, but understandable and even, from a strategic perspective, necessary and admirable. Less determined forces would have collapsed and surrendered years ago.
***Does that mean I support the Taliban? Absolutely not. Does that mean I share their views? No. Does that mean I want to live the way they do? No.***
But unlike PZ Myers and many people who apparently consider them nothing more than a momentarily useful rhetorical device, I take the Taliban seriously, for the obvious reason that anyone who can fight two numerically and technologically superior enemies to a standstill is obviously formidable and had damn well better be taken seriously. Fortunately, unlike ISIS, the Taliban appears to wish little more than to be left alone in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Here is the question for the left-leaning seculars in our midst. Suppose a young girl in your country adopted a strongly anti-homosexual ideology, was employed by Iraqi and Syrian agencies, met in secret with a top Syrian official, and over the course of four years was successful in convincing tens of thousands of people in your country that homosexuals should be killed by throwing them off rooftops. Suppose hundreds of homosexuals had already been killed in this way thanks to her public calls for such executions. Would you support her arrest and execution or would you oppose it?
Even if you would oppose it on moral or legal grounds, isn’t it easier to see the Taliban’s attack as being an entirely rational one when framed in that context? I see the shooting of Malala Yousafzai as being very little different than the English burning of Joan of Arc or the UK’s hanging of William Joyce. It was an act of war aimed at an enemy effective, not a random and irrational act of violence rooted in prejudice.
It is also worth noting that the Taliban have left Yousafzai alone now that she’s no longer living in Pakistan. They don’t appear to care if she wants to take her message to foreign populations elsewhere, but they will not permit her to spread pro-Western propaganda among their own people.
Cantus asked me a few questions about this a few days ago that I did not see until now:
“How do you justify the assertion that you’ve “never gone on the record as supporting the Taliban’s attempt on her life”? Are you arguing that an action being “scientifically justifiable” does not amount to supporting it? ”
***Because I did not support the Taliban’s attempt on Miss Yousafzai’s life. I merely observed that the attempt was a rational act given their perspective, which I do not share. Yes, I unequivocally state that the fact that an action is justifiable from a scientific perspective neither makes it moral nor desirable. There are many things I consider to be scientifically justifiable that I nevertheless do not support because I do not believe science to be an appropriate or reliable guide to human behavior.***
@jaynsand:
You “don’t even think Brad’s a racist”. Lovely.
Out of curiosity, what is your actual goal here at Brad’s place? Are you concerned for Brad? His reputation? His soul?
If Hillary Clinton knocked on my door and asked me to denounce something or someone, failure to do so indicating that I *might* be in league with “Bad” Thing or “Bad” Person, I would tell her to get the fuck off my lawn. Not because I’m a closet [enter disqualifier here], but because she’s so clearly a bad faith actor, whose good graces are therefore not just worthless, but of negative value to me.
As for Vox Day, maybe go engage him rather than taking shots at James (whose goals here are unobfuscated)? You’d at least be within firing range of your ostensible target, rather than sitting over here, miles away from it. To sum up:
“Vox Day! Vox Day! Blah blah blah Vox Day!”
“Sigh. Ok. Vox Day…”
“Aha!! Vox Day!!!”
Well, there you have it.
On the other hand when Brianna Wu writes “All men benefit from structural sexism. Men bragging about moderate views doesn’t make them intelligent, it makes them unaware of privilege,” that’s taking out 3.5 billion men as morally and spiritually bankrupt. In this feminist system of stupidthink, I become a “misogynist” merely by existing. Actively pushing back makes me a Men’s Right’s Activist if not an active member of the KKK.
“Feminist Frequency @femfreq · Oct 24 Mass shootings are one tragic consequence of a culture that perpetuates toxic ideas of masculinity. This is how patriarchy can harm men too.”
Since millions of hospitals in history are the exclusive province of a male institution, I could as easily argue the patriarchy has saved billions of lives. That’s not including the invention of every single bit of tech in whatever room you’re sitting in right now.
If you want to single out male dominated spaces, you have to take the bad with the good. If you single out female dominated spaces in history on a civilizational level, you don’t come up with morality or lack of it, you come up with pretty much nothing.
Whatsamattah, Clampsy? No women to stalk today?
James May, Dave W. and Kasper, thank you for some rational thought and actual evidence.
And Clamps, fuck off.
SJW logic for Charlie Hebdo: racist cartoonists committed suicide, no Muslim need apologize
SJW logic for Charleston: culture of racist white privilege is what caused this, whites need to shut mouth and listen, whites have work to do, teach your white boys
SJW Charlie Hebdo logic applied to Charleston: blacks committed suicide via criminal murder and rape culture, no whites need apologize
SJW Charleston logic applied to Charlie Hebdo: culture of Muslim incitement is what caused this, Muslims need to shut mouth and listen and examine violence innate to Islam, teach your Muslim boys
In Conquest Born (1986) by C. S. Friedman is a novel I think anyone would like who likes intrique-ridden space opera with an imperial military emphasis. Friedman is very upfront about how she presents gender performance and yet somehow manages to bury contemporary cultural markers and force us back to square one so we must reexamine our bias from scratch. It not only does not interfere with the novel but enhances it because of its artistic impartiality.
That is a classic Golden Age technique which forces us to reexamine our humanity rather than our identities within that humanity. That is probably the single biggest reason SJWs think Golden Age SF defaulted to “white.” It didn’t default to white; it defaulted to the closest it could come to a blank slate devoid of mid-century American cultural markers. 30 years later, In Conquest Born still seems modern.
In Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie chooses to bonk us over the head with the concept of gender performance in the most provincial way. She is offering no tool of self-criticism as did Friedman, but telling us straight out what is what, or rather, what is not what. There is no opportunity to start from scratch so we can determine right from wrong with fresh eyes. Right and wrong is determined for us in advance via contemporary cultural markers.
The funny irony there – and why I despise SJW ideology and art – is that SJWs rely on the concept of “performance” and repetition to recognize each other. They do not operate on the idea of reexamination – although that is exactly what they maintain (examine your privilege) – but on the concept of markers: skin, sex, reiterative semantics like “misogyny,” “privilege,” etc. That is why there is no moral ethos in intersectional feminism, there are only good and bad identities that constantly need to reaffirm one another. That’s why their ideology is so easy to spot. Even while they claim to despise the “binary” outlook, in fact it is the fundamental creed of their sick religion: black/white, men/women, gay/straight.
Had Leckie wished to make a point about cultural markers as performance, she should’ve buried the idea elsewhere in a perceptual shift that would work to sell us the idea by throwing us back to square one and getting under the radar of our biases.
Leckie could’ve pulled a Vancian stunt where – over many years – a diplomat planet shared by two bitterly warring but otherwise identical human empires had created a culture of reiterative semantic rituals and punctilio so the diplomats wouldn’t kill each other in duels and assassinations. By performing rituals meant to cancel out the extreme ends of their binary political views, those extreme “normative” views would in a sense literally cease to exist in favor of a wider and more centric spectrum. One could add a plot element where the home planets were worried the diplomats were beginning to like each other, perhaps even scheming to end the war. Spies could be sent in, only to see themselves turned. Spies sent in to spy on spies.
Unfortunately SJW crusaders lack any subtlety. They must “perform” for each other and that means shit identity-riddled art and the death of a literature. So instead Leckie gives us poststructuralist French Queer Theory, an unworkable mash of gibberish which publicly committed suicide when the unfortunate perfect storm of Bruce Jenner coming out as a “woman” and Rachel Dolezal as “black” happened in the same week. It had already committed suicide the first time a so-called “science-based” “progressive” uttered the words “not all women have vaginas,” which is much like saying not all angels have wings.
“Bought for the cover…obviously… Let’s talk about that cover! I mean look at it! Two WoC (women of color) on the same cover.” – Goodreads reviewer of Full Fathom Five (Craft Sequence #3) by Max Gladstone.
Gladstone was the 2014 John W. Campbell Award nominee in a year of intersectional sweep of nominees: Sofia Samatar, (winner) Max Gladstone, Wesley Chu, Ramez Naam, Benjanun Sriduangkaew (Requires Hate).
@jaynsands: Sorry, but “tu quoque” isn’t always a fallacy–much like all logical fallacies, it is only a fallacy when misapplied.
For example, it would be a tu quoque fallacy if I were to say, in response to your claim that VD is racist, to point to the litany of quotes that James May provides and say “Your side also has racists” and then act like that means VD’s racism is something you should be okay with.
It is not, however, fallacious to point out that your pronouncements that Torgerson must denounce VD’s racism or forever be known as a racist ring most hollow in our ears, as people on the ASP side spew “people as widgets” stuff on a semi-regular basis, and we’ve seen a severe lack of denouncing.
Also, you really need to not read words that aren’t there. May’s not a sage, he’s an archivist. I find it interesting that people who regularly inveigh against hypocrisy and demand that other people listen to them and their colleagues refuse to listen when it’s not what they want to hear. Which is, by the way, a malady common among humanity
@Dave W.: Your quote from VD actually highlights one of my major problems with the guy: He constantly, constantly tap-dances on the line between “admiring what virtues the foul possess” and “admiring the foul,” and he has a disconcerting tendency to, at best, appear to fall over it in order to troll people, which I find obnoxious.
60guilders,
I would argue that the quote Dave W. produced was about as unequivocal an answer as you will ever see, especially for Vox. I don’t think there was any admiration involved, simply playing the part of Devil’s Advocate.
That being said, I will agree that Vox usually uses convoluted phrasing and word choice that, at first glance (skim until offended?), may look to be saying something he is not. I also do not like that he does that, but he does it for a reason, usually to highlight the emotional responses people cling to rather than looking at facts.
“@Dave W.: Your quote from VD actually highlights one of my major problems with the guy: He constantly, constantly tap-dances on the line between “admiring what virtues the foul possess” and “admiring the foul,” and he has a disconcerting tendency to, at best, appear to fall over it in order to troll people, which I find obnoxious.”
That’s fine. He definitely does that. Vox has said on more than a few occasions that he trolls the crap out of people with rhetoric because those people can’t handle arguing with dialectic. Sometimes the results are hilarious, sometimes his opponents use them to hammer him with.
“For all of your arrogance you can’t figure out you folks quote Beale over and over and over and over again into a hall of mirrors stretching to infinity.”
Fine, okay, James. I’ll debate something with you that has nothing whatever to do with Beale:
“Now these fools want to claim we reject that when we’ve been fighting to hold onto it? Fuck that. And of the 48 stories chosen for the anthologies that make up The Science Fiction Hall of Fame (1970 & 1973) none are about conquering and colonizing analogues of indigenous peoples. Only nine stories have aliens at all…And what do we have in Vol 1? Solid old-school mid-century American SF we adore, we created and SJW ideology detests. No racial revenge fantasies, racism, misogyny or goofball psycho-sexual feminist obsessions in sight.”
I see a BIG problem with your assumption right there. You’re citing an anthology complied by editors who judged which tales were classics – in the 1970s. Doesn’t it occur to you that MAYBE those editors judged those tales by the standards of the enlightened Seventies and OMITTED those with the racism, misogyny, etc., that you say was NEVER in those old tales?
Surprise! They did. A sample: Randal Garrett’s “Queen Bee”, published in Campbell’s Astounding, 1958. Free fiction, James! Enjoy! An extravaganza of rape and wifebeating culminating in…well, no spoilers.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4htl56msvDfODFhZmViMTAtNzdmOC00ZTFlLTgzNDItMzRlMjE2MWZjYmJm/view
If that link doesn’t work, try:
http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2011/01/war-of-sexes-and-queen-bee.html
…and click on the Queen Bee link.
You may say that this proves nothing – that this story is an anomaly that does not reflect the times, that contemporary readers would have rejected it indignantly. You’d be wrong. The readers in an Astounding survey called that story the second-best of the issue, and Campbell approved of its “humor” and called it a “strong story”.
http://galacticjourney.dreamwidth.org/12213.html
When people say that the Puppies are harking nostalgically to a Golden Era that NEVER actually existed? (“…A time when men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri…” ) This is what they mean. (Just BTW, you say “Solid old-school mid-century American SF WE adore, WE created…” Just how old ARE you, and what have YOU created?)
jaynsand, no Puppy, Rabid or Sad, has said we need to go back to the days of Golden SciFi. We would like to see tales in those veins (actual stories where any message present is secondary to the entertainment), but not simply a rehashing of old tales.
Story/entertainment is the only thing we care about. If you entertain me, the hero could be a transgendered communist fighting the evil Ronald Regan (I’m a conservative, so trying to come up with some obvious opposites). It simply needs to be a story instead of a lecture.
@Kasper
“Out of curiosity, what is your actual goal here at Brad’s place? Are you concerned for Brad? His reputation? His soul?…”
To disagree about something I feel strongly about.
“If Hillary Clinton knocked on my door and asked me to denounce something or someone, failure to do so indicating that I *might* be in league with “Bad” Thing or “Bad” Person, I would tell her to get the fuck off my lawn…As for Vox Day, maybe go engage him rather than taking shots at James (whose goals here are unobfuscated)?”
Do you only want to read agreement in an echo chamber? Is your Platonic Ideal of a Sad Puppy commentary thread an endless series of James May posts, one after the other, scrolling end to end, as far as the eye can see?
jaynsand,
You made Kasper’s point for him/her. You simply want to disagree. Every point you have made has been shot down but you FEEL so strongly that you keep blathering.
Disagreement is fine. It is healthy. Larry, Brad, even the /sarc “Evil Vox Day /sarc have expressed concern with people who agree with everything they say. However, willful disagreement to the point of pedantry is more than off-putting.
@bassmanco: I agree with your assessment that it is an unequivocal as one is like to get from Vox. That is the problem.
I don’t like it when people troll about stuff like that and play word games to cause people to flip out.
@jaynsands: And, here again, we have…people as widgets. Something people aren’t always good at fighting–including Campbell. The elevation of the collective above the individual, to the nth degree, is the underlying principle of “Queen Bee.” Everything about the story is collectivist in its leanings. And the fact is, it is a strong story, although not for the reasons intended–it shows the consequences of deciding that the group takes absolute priority over the individual.
@60guilders
“Sorry, but “tu quoque” isn’t always a fallacy–much like all logical fallacies, it is only a fallacy when misapplied.”
Granted. I explained why I thought James’ tu quoque was especially fallacious. I apparently did not convince you. Pity.
“Also, you really need to not read words that aren’t there. May’s not a sage, he’s an archivist. I find it interesting that people who regularly inveigh against hypocrisy and demand that other people listen to them and their colleagues refuse to listen when it’s not what they want to hear. Which is, by the way, a malady common among humanity.”
You commended his posts to me. I assumed that meant you considered him an authority you gave weight to. Apparently I assumed too much, sorry. Now Kasper seems to be saying I’m picking on him. I shall stop.
“And, here again, we have…people as widgets. Something people aren’t always good at fighting–including Campbell. The elevation of the collective above the individual, to the nth degree, is the underlying principle of “Queen Bee.” Everything about the story is collectivist in its leanings.”
Oh, come now, 60guilders. If Campbell intended to use that story to fight objectivization of human beings – to depict a horrifying total exploitation of individuals ending in tragedy – do you think he would have praised the “humor” of it?
Please don’t come at me with the pedantic use of the word “never.”
There’s really nothing to debate. On no evidence you stipulate the SFWA refused to consider certain stories for consideration. Considering the cream of the crop would necessitate a very large body of such work which doesn’t exist, you fail twice right there.
As a third failure, you present me with a crap story you present as Hall of Fame eligible.
I don’t like rapey stories. Back when I vowed to finish every SF novel I started, the first one I remember throwing out the window before I got very far into it was Piers Anthony’s Bio of a Space Tyrant Vol 1. The only real thing I don’t like in William Hope Hodgson’s The Nightland is when the so-called hero smacks his girlfriend around for basically no reason. It seems forced and moronic.
Given that fact, and the fact I’ve read a ton of obscure old SF, a similar body of Golden Age work simply doesn’t exist. If it did I’d never have read SF. I’m not even sure what stories you’re referring to. On a civilizational level, men have done practically everything for 7,000 years. I’m hardly shocked to see David Innes and Abner Perry head for the center of the Earth without a woman.
I cannot speak for anyone else, but my favorite stories are divorced from men being real men. Eccentric and authoritative artistry is the key. But even Burroughs’ heroes prefer to avoid fights, and say so right in the books. I suppose R. E. Howard’s work is full of manly men. But were he a drudge I’d never have read him. “The Tower of the Elephant” was written by a dreamer. There are no manly men in Jack Vance, Clark Ashton Smith or H.P. Lovecraft. To me it’s a bullshit argument created by jealous and sociopathic gender feminists. I can’t read minds but I think “men were real men” is a sarcastic swipe at lesbian SF. I share that sarcasm when it’s stipulated such a thing is central to SF.
“WE adore, WE created…” was a sarcastic crack at how intersectionalists claim racial and sexual ownership of anything they do. I do not look at the world like that. I don’t know how many times I’ve read some junkheap like K. Tempest Bradford claim “we created SF” via Mary Shelley.
I don’t know what you mean by a “Platonic ideal” but we love and invite debate.” When I end posts with “fuck off” it doesn’t mean don’t come here, it means I hate racist feminists ideology which lights me up I’ve addressed in that comment.
And you’re misreading what I said. Campbell did not fight that sort of thing, because he praised the story. Perhaps I should have been more clear in that sentence, although I thought the rest of the paragraph would have made that clear.
Read this essay by Alfred Bester titled “My Affair with Science Fiction” about the old school SF folks he knew. They were eccentric, very bright, accomplished human beings, not a pack of benighted sexists and racists.
http://www.loa.org/sciencefiction/biographies/bester_writings.jsp
Every time I read the dismal N. K. Jemisin going to her equally dismal job as a low-level bureaucrat or Kameron Hurley and the dull-witted use she’s put her Masters in history to with footnote-phobic essays I laugh at their sheer arrogance. Bester alone was a multi-talented world traveling fucking genius worth a hundred of those two boring rednecks. Plus he wasn’t an amateur. He actually made a living as a writer and was – again – worth a hundred Jemisin’s or Hurley’s.
If you don’t think some of those old-school SF/F legends Bester wrote about were sexists, bigots or inappropriate in other ways, you’re looking at them through rose-colored glasses.
I grew up reading and idolizing Isaac Asimov, but I’ve since read enough credible evidence to believe he was a notorious sexual harasser and groper, particularly at SF/F conventions.
Asimov’s reputation was so well known by 1961 that the Worldcon chair that year wrote a letter asking Asimov to do a masquerade speech playing off his reputation called “The Power of Positive Posterior Pinching.”
Frederik Pohl told a story about how he once called out the married Asimov for his habit of putting his hands on women. Asimov replied, “You get slapped a lot, but you get laid a lot, too.”
That’s an amazing statement considering the race and sex-hatred and incitement institutionalized right into the core of today’s daffy wrong-way social justice SFF community. That’s aside from my opinion the very best of them produce work with all the subtlety and gravitas of Sailor Moon. Reading the blogs of Chuck Wendig, John Scalzi, Kameron Hurley and N. K. Jemisin (just for starters) is like reading arrogant bratty bad seed children who’ve never been anywhere or done anything and like shooting down anyone who has ever had actual fun. The worst of them behave like mental animals on Twitter.
Hey, I liked Sailor Moon! (at least the first time I watched the cartoon series).
Later on, not as much. I generally like anime, as they shine an other-culture look at life, from people who have lived in another culture.
Requires Hate has arguably lived in another culture, but generates nothing insightful that I have read. I haven’t read Scalzi, and with the hate he’s generated lately I doubt I ever will. Same for Jemisin, Hurley and the other harpies.
You have to enlighten, entertain and imagine new and interesting worlds to write SFF. Until they do, my (highly limited) money has to go elsewhere.
Why are you incapable of contemplating Asimov’s reputation for sexually harassing behavior without dragging your social justice warrior blah blah into it? You wanted to talk about old-school SF legends so I did. Now you don’t want to talk about them, I guess.
rcade,
James May is talking about things that are happening NOW. You are blathering on about things that happened more than fifty years ago. You don’t think changes to society and norms can have anything to do with what is common or acceptable?
And besides even considering that, has anyone here ever defended bad actions by authors? That was the first time I have heard of Asimov behaving that way, but I certainly don’t condone it. Brad himself said Michael Z. Williamson’s recent joke in the wake of the Charlston shootings was in poor taste and not cool. Now that we have talked about a couple of our bad apples, how about the hundreds on your side? That is James’ point (as I see it, although I know he is fully capable of defending himself).
rcade, I have no idea what you’re talking about. You take hearsay about Isaac Asimov and present that as proof that old school were a bunch of bigots and racists?
I never said they were angels. My contention is based on actual facts. The facts are based on the non-ficton writings of that old school vs. this new SJW community. Those old school folks seem far less hateful, bigoted and graceless than the new school. They also seem far brighter. Speaking of that old school across the board, I find it highly unlikely they’d ever fall for this stupid gender feminist con.
Go look at Requires Hate’s Twitter feed and see who’s interacting with that nutbag. Even while they’re crying about Confederate flags they’re Tweeting with an insanely hateful racial supremacist who seems unable to go one single day without launching into racial incitement and incitement to hate men. Then they come to 770 and start preening about VD. Go look at VD’s Twitter feed; it is far more innocuous than the obsessive hate Tweeting by any number of Nebula and Hugo nominees I could name. They are frickin’ obsessed with this idea whites and men are out to get them.
Hate and that entire SJW community are far worse than a flag or hearsay about a guy pinching hindends. It’s self-evident Bester would not only have laughed at those dumb clucks but he may have clocked them.
And what’s the larger point about Asimov? That women don’t do that? I got news for you partner, they do do that, because it’s happened to me multiple times. I never thought of it as sexual harassment, but neither would I nor have I ever done that to women. Some people are weird and frisky and I limit that judgment to the actual people doing it, not the SJW trick of smearing it onto an entire group, race or sex. Show me where that old school institutionalized groping and hazed female SFF writers and that’s different.
There’s guilt by association and guilt by ideology.
If you want to talk about sexual harassment all you have to do is read SJW Twitter feeds.
“Damien Walter @damiengwalter Jun 23
@GreatDismal The most recent problems of racism in scifi have shown that racists use the accusation of racism to claim persecution.”
Hahahah. I love Walter. I know what he was trying to say but he ended up accidentally telling the truth.
The only systemic racism in SFF is intersectionality.
@bassmanco
“You made Kasper’s point for him/her. You simply want to disagree. Every point you have made has been shot down but you FEEL so strongly that you keep blathering.”
I think (AND feel) that they weren’t really shot down…unless you’re measuring by sheer number of words opposing mine, in which case I certainly concede I am outnumbered by a large volume here. I obviously didn’t convince you – fine. Let others who come here and read our words draw each their own conclusion. And since you mention Kasper, I’ll address further a point of his…
@Kasper
“If Hillary Clinton knocked on my door and asked me to denounce something or someone, failure to do so indicating that I *might* be in league with “Bad” Thing or “Bad” Person, I would tell her to get the fuck off my lawn…”
Certainly if Hillary Clinton were rude enough to stand on your own lawn and harangue you about who you were personally supporting, you’d be well within your rights to tell her to fuck right off and I’d cheer you on. But this isn’t your lawn and I’m not Hillary Clinton. I’m just another voter, like you. And to me, when Brad decided he was going to use a slate in a coordinated effort among a minority of voters to fill the MAJORITY of slots with his nominees based on political grounds, he took on the role of politician, and can be judged by a politician’s standards.
So to me it seems more like Brad is like one of the many Republican candidates (as you’d undoubtedly prefer to imagine him, instead of Hillary) who has made his speech against the opposition and has opened the floor to questions from the public (as he has by opening his blog to general comments).
I, as a voter in the crowd, think it’s my right to ask Brad about the skinhead standing outside echoing Brad’s talking points and proclaiming himself Brad’s ally, who seems to have an alarming number of Stormfront friends helping him out…to ask Brad whether in fact he AGREES with the skinhead’s racist etc. agenda. I do this to inform other spectators in the crowd who may not have been fully aware of the skinhead and his agenda, and can use the information to make a more informed judgement about their vote.
If Brad harrumphs that, yeah, that guy’s an asshole, but he’d never call him a RACIST, and anyone who does so is Evol – the crowd can judge him by that.
If Brad ignores my question and similar ones from others – the crowd is free to judge him by THAT, too.
And if YOU as another voter in the crowd tell me to go talk to the skinhead and stop bothering Brad because you prefer to hear Brad preach to a harmonious choir – well, you’re within your rights to say so, and I’m within my rights to shrug you off and tell you to tell Brad to throw me out if you want unanimity so badly. Brad is within his rights to throw me out – it’s his blog. But the crowd can judge that sort of thing, too.
It’s an uncomfortable spot for Brad to be in, to be sure. But no one made him go into politics.
Brad hasn’t exactly been secretive about his own opinions. You (and anyone else who does it) are not actually trying to helpfully allow him the opportunity to clarify his own opinions, so don’t claim you are.
This is one particular thing I’m getting so very tired of and it pops up in the weirdest places. People insist on giving up their own agency and then act like their errors are someone else’s fault. (Bush, for example, didn’t explain things well and thus the fact that whoever didn’t bother to actually figure out what was going on in Iraq was completely off the hook for not bothering to pay attention.) No one need look into any rumor… just fling the rumors around willy nilly… it’s not *lying* about people, it’s just giving them the opportunity to clarify. Right? And if someone goes on believing lies and passing those lies on to others they can always use the excuse that the person accused was angry and uncivil (Brad is generally civil but others aren’t) and that incivility then lets them completely off the hook!
This is totally win-win-win.
It’s all like… cry… it’s so-and-so’s fault that I’m all about guilt-by-association because so-and-so didn’t save me from my own nature by shunning and denouncing whoever I want to associate them with with sufficient eloquency and power and proof that I was no longer able to willfully continue my guilt-by-association tactic.
Which is my personal problem with demanded denunciations. When “no, I think he’s full of it on several particulars” isn’t sufficient, then it’s probably more about the power to make someone else jump when they’re told to jump than it is about helpfully protecting their reputations.
“I, as a voter in the crowd, think it’s my right to ask Brad about the skinhead standing outside echoing Brad’s talking points and proclaiming himself Brad’s ally, who seems to have an alarming number of Stormfront friends helping him out…to ask Brad whether in fact he AGREES with the skinhead’s racist etc. agenda. I do this to inform other spectators in the crowd who may not have been fully aware of the skinhead and his agenda, and can use the information to make a more informed judgement about their vote.”
LOLOLOL, “skinhead”? “Stormfront”?! Ok, you just lost any benefit of the doubt for credibility that I was giving you. I can no longer take you seriously. Have a nice day and as my buddies in Texas say, “bless your heart!”
@jaynsand:
I was not asking for or even suggesting unanimity, as was clear. But you’ve offered up feigned concern, oily insinuation, and bad faith. It’s edifying as only a toxic sludge can be. Stuff all of that in a shoebox; what remains may be worthy of light.
@julieapascal:
You beat me to the buzzer, and with style.
“But no one made him go into “politics.”
Shouldn’t “politics” be in scare quotes as in meaning attacked for being a straight white male?
SFF went 100 years writing and talking about SFF before an actual crew of skinheads and their helpy helpertons came along.
Exactly who was it who came along and started writing manifestos about racial privilege meant to dehumanize an entire ethnic group and based on the work of batshit crazy radical racial and sexual supremacists? What gimp came along and started whining about too many of an ethnic group in an HBO series? What nobody created a Kickstarter to fund attacking videogames based on the shortcomings of 3.5 billion human beings? What gamedev is making hay doing the same thing rather than being a gamedev? What morons main talent is taking comic characters they can’t create and turning them into another race and sex to get the happyfeels? Who is it who announces they read books based on the race and sex of the writers or characters? What convention panelists would cease to exist were it not for their racial incitement? Who’s getting Hugos for crying about being erased by 3.5 billion human beings? Who’s writing about imaginary restaurants where they’re being battered by a menacing race and sex? Who murmurs about a race and sex 24/7 on Twitter for months on end? Who is it who demands their race and sex be treated with kid gloves in fiction by writers not of that race and sex? Who’s saying a race and sex should come with trigger warnings? Who is it who whines about being forced to write in a language they attach to a race and – alas – sell to that race? Who is it who racially review censors, creates racial revenge anthologies, racially segregated rooms and dinners, asks for racial/sexual voluntary boycotts?
We were doing just fine before we decided to go into “politics.”
Jaynsand,
If Theodore Beale lives rent-free in your head — and he seems to be living rent-free in a great many heads these days — that’s not my problem. All of this became political the instant people decided to make it a massive red herring chase. If you’re not thrilled with the contents of the Hugo final ballot in 2015, too bad. Welcome to how the other half lives. Your best — dare I say, your only — recourse, is to rally people who agree with you to vote in large numbers next year. A democratic process is only as good (or as bad) as its participants. You’re unhappy with the way this year’s democratic process worked out? Again, welcome to how the other half lives. Either work to cancel the democracy (which is probably the most honest “purist” expression) or work to make the democracy work for you.
Meanwhile, the thrust of this post’s conversation has gotten so colossally off-topic I am going to request that people interested in continuing their discussion about Sad Puppies and the Hugo awards, do it in the comments of a different post; a post germane to that particular discussion.
Thank you.
Thanks Kasper. We’re going to see more of it as political campaigns heat up. What people say will be taken out of context and rather than try to report what a candidate really thinks (something objectively important to know) the excuse will be that the candidate didn’t make it impossible to lie about them so it was the candidate’s fault. She didn’t control her *optics*.
It’s everywhere these days…. You didn’t make it impossible for me to lie about you. You were not above reproach because I was able to reproach you.
I swear your comment wasn’t there when I posted., Brad. Stay safe.
No worries. =^)
In the news today:
1) Gay marriage ruled Constitutional by the US Supreme Court. #GamerGate members cheer, no one appears to be dissing it in any way.
Press takes zero notice. No story here, apparently.
2) A dozen Civil War games are pulled from the Apple store for containing images of the Confederate flag. This is in direct response to the fact that Dylann Roof often posed with Confederate flags. Gamers then raise a fuss about moronic censorship.
Press immediately leap to the conclusion that #GamerGate is defending the Confederate flag “under the guise of opposing censorship”, also proceed to declare that removing Civil War games for containing images of the Confederate flag “isn’t really censorship”.
I’d like to know if the anti-Pups think this is, or isn’t, censorship.
And if not, how do they feel about the idea of Turtledove novels being yanked off the shelves for the same reason?
Erf, my bad, sorry Brad.
I’m puzzled as why games with soldiers/armies fighting the civil war and flying their flags need to be banned. How could that offend anyone? And who would buy such a game and not expect the Confederate battle flag to be shown? And even if you were that ignorant and easily offended, you can always take it back. Its odd that no matter how weird and crazy the SJW’s get no one wants to make fun of them or attack their weirdness except Gamergate.
I’m puzzled as why games with soldiers/armies fighting the civil war and flying their flags need to be banned. How could that offend anyone? And who would buy such a game and not expect the Confederate battle flag to be shown? And even if you were that ignorant and easily offended, you can always take it back. Its odd that no matter how weird and crazy the SJW’s get no one wants to make fun of them or attack their weirdness except Gamergate.
To me, this is understandable (stupid, but understandable). “The Germans get to ban the swastika from video games, so we should be able to ban the Confederate flag,” the logic goes. The problem is once you start sliding down that path (the spiral down of the original post), it never ends: “If you’re going to ban the Confederate flag, why not Communist banners?” It’s a classic Catch-22, in that if you go further down the spiral in retaliation, it encourages the other side to do the same, and down you go; if you don’t retaliate, it encourages the other side to start down the spiral on other issues. The only way to avoid the spirals is to acknowledge from the start that your own side is just as flawed, that just about everything is offensive to someone and this can’t be avoided.
Clearly, the only way to not offend anyone is to ban everything.
“Mostly out of the loop”.. except for posting comments… and reading comments… and all that other “inside the loopy stuff.”
Remember when military postings were secret? For, like, security?