This ludicrously dishonest croaking from the Toad amused me. It demonstrates how completely, how utterly, how absolutely, the SJWs in science fiction have no conception whatsoever of the zeitgeist. Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who may or may not have already been fired from Tor, croaked:
A sense of injured privilege is what PUAs, Gamergaters, and Sad Puppies have in common. Their fury at SJWs comes from a sequence of assumptions that’s very common in individuals and groups that are smarting from a sense of wounded self-importance:
1. I have less power than I feel I should have.
2. I feel those people over there have power I don’t have.
3. They must have stolen mine!And poof, there’s their evil enemy, made to order.
Gamergaters think gaming belongs to them, and should answer solely to their preferences. PUAs hate women who selfishly consult their own feelings and preferences, then turn them down. Torgersen wants awards to go to the people and works he thinks should win, rather than the ones the voters would naturally vote for.
In the long run, this is doomed. What the Sad Puppies are doing will not make disinclined readers love their work or respect them as authors — readers really are stubborn that way — but they might conceivably do a lot of damage along the way.
She might as easily have written “ribbit, ribbit, ribbit” for all that it has any relationship to reality except for her statement about Brad. Let’s identify and count the errors just from the quoted section:
- Pick-Up Artists do not have a sense of injured privilege. They have a sense of mastery. Because they are sexually successful men who have sex with large quantities of women much more attractive than the Toad of Tor ever was. They don’t hate women who turn them down; the abundance mentality teaches precisely the opposite. She has literally NO IDEA what she’s talking about here. Or she’s simply lying.
- GamerGaters do not have a sense of injured privilege. They don’t think gaming belongs to them. They have a sense of being betrayed by the gaming media, which they no longer can trust to honestly review games, and a correct sense of being attacked by people for developing the games they want to develop and playing the games they want to play. The entire core message of GamerGate is simple: fuck off and leave us alone to play what we want to play, not what you think we should be permitted to play. Again, the Toad is saying things that are demonstrably false.
- Yes, Torgersen wants awards to go to the people and works he thinks should win. So does the Toad of Tor. Notice the deceit here about what the voters would “naturally vote for”. What is this “natural vote” and how does the Toad somehow know what it is? Isn’t that what the actual vote is meant to determine?
- What is doomed in the long run? Long after the Toad of Tor is dead and forgotten, pick-up artists will be picking up women, game developers will be developing games, and gamers will be playing them. As for Sad Puppies, here is a prediction: Sad Puppies will outlast Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s career at Tor Books.
- It’s true that Sad Puppies will not make disinclined readers love anyone’s work or respect anyone as authors. Now, I can’t speak for any other supporter of Sad Puppies, but as for me, the Toad is ludicrously mistaken if she genuinely believes I give even the smallest fraction of a damn. And Sad Puppies don’t have less power than they think they should have or that anyone stole their nonexistent power. This sounds a lot like psychological projection coming from someone who was until recently associated with Tor Books, the winner of the Locus Award for best SF publisher 20 years in a row and a sizable chunk of all the major science fiction awards given out over the last two decades.
- Our contempt for SJWs is because they are obnoxious individuals like the Toad of Tor who believe they have the right to tell other people what to write, what to read, what to develop, what to play, and for what it is natural to vote on the basis of their pinkshirted ideology. We stand for freedom. They stand for them being in control. And we do not accept it.
SJWs are the people of the lie. They are Aristotle’s people who are intellectually limited to the rhetorical level. We all know that no amount of new information will change the Toad’s mind. We all know that the Toad will not address any of this honestly. She will not recant her observably false claims. She’ll simply tell more lies about what other people really think and produce more incoherent rhetoric. And that is why she merits nothing but the utmost contempt. As disgusting as the Toad of Tor may be on the outside, she’s even worse on the inside.
All you need to know who is right and who is wrong in this is to note who is able to directly quote the other side, and who almost invariably has to resort to writing complete fiction about the other side’s thoughts and motivations. I don’t give a damn why the Toad thinks what she thinks. I don’t give a damn what her motivations might be. All I need to know, all anyone needs to know, is what her words are in order to reach an accurate conclusion and dismiss her accordingly.
If you do feel like a safari through the SJW fever swamp, I would encourage you not to leave any comments there. You cannot engage in rational discourse with the intrinsically irrational and Making Light is not a place where you are going to find anyone even remotely capable of dialectic. Treat it like the zoo it is, just drive through and marvel at the grotesquerie.