We’re fighting fire with artillery. Joshua W. Herring claims that we don’t understand moderates like him, while at the same time completely failing to understand the Rabid Puppies or our objectives:
That completely misunderstands the reason that we (that is, those of us who have some sympathy for the Sad Puppies but almost none for the Rabid Puppies) advocate tolerance for the SJW crowd.
We are not under any delusions about how SJWs act. We’ve seen all the same evidence you have. It’s QUITE clear that the a great many feminism and/or “diversity” and/or gay rights activists don’t give a fig about tolerance or inclusiveness. Tolerance and inclusiveness are just tools they use to get what they really want; they aren’t virtues for them.
Thing is: they are for us.
It’s always the same problem with Vox. He claims to want to live and let live, but there’s never any evidence of it. And it’s always the same excuse: “they” won’t play nice, so why should he? This is sensible enough if reserved for extreme cases, but when absolutely every post on his blog that deals with SJWs is about the need to deny them a seat, the line between their tactics and his becomes impossible to draw.
Here’s the rub: if somebody doesn’t start playing nice, it just never happens.
And here’s the question: do you think it will be the SJWs who start playing nice? It won’t. We know that from all past experience. So, as the addage goes, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.
If you want tolerance and inclusiveness, you start by being tolerant and inclusive. It’s not that it doesn’t matter that “they” aren’t tolerant and inclusive, because obviously it would be nicer if they were. The fact that they’re not makes our job a lot harder. But our job is still to get to a community that’s tolerant and inclusive, and you just can’t do that with purges.
Who said anything about tolerance or inclusiveness? Our job is not to get to a community that is tolerant or inclusive. Our job, our duty, our calling, is to destroy SJWs and SJW ideology. We are not part of the Worldcon community. We don’t support tolerance of SJWs. We don’t support the inclusion of SJWs. We intend to destroy their influence and their ideology and to render the latter as popular and as viable in science fiction as National Socialism in Israel today.
I will not “live and let live” with SJWs for the obvious reason that it is not possible for anyone to live and let live with them. You cannot live and let live with anyone whose ideology is totalitarian, who genuinely believe they have a right to tell you what is, and what is not, okay for you to think, write, and say. You cannot compromise with anyone who believes they have a self-appointed right to dictate what others read, what others write, what others review, and what others publish. You cannot be tolerant of those who claim the right to decide what is “problematic” and what is “unacceptable” and what “there is no place for” in science fiction.
They have, somewhat successfully, established an Index Informatorum Prohibitorum that declares what ideas there are “no place for” in science fiction. You cannot teach them by example, any more than you can apologize to them and expect them to take it for what it is and accept it rather than take it as an admission of weakness and use it as a weapon against you. The Index, and its inquisitors, must be destroyed.
We will relentlessly oppose them. We will ruthlessly humiliate them. We will harry them and make their miserable lives even more miserable until they completely abandon their totalitarian ideology. Because they cannot leave others alone, we will not leave them alone. And we will win in the end.
We will never play nice with them. We will destroy every last vestige of their pernicious ideology. I have no problem with writers of the left who wish to write anti-X, but I am at war with SJW writers who claim that there is no place in science fiction for anyone writing X. And I don’t care what X is, substitute the intellectual bugaboo of your choice there, whether it is racism, communism, misogyny, misandry, anti-Eskimoism, Eskimo supremacy, or anything else.
Like all moderates, Herring completely fails to understand how to accomplish anything but Noble Defeat and Losing the Right Way. Tolerance of totalitarianism is not a virtue, it is surrender. Accepting the inclusion of SJW entryists is not virtuous, it is submission. And while tolerance and inclusiveness may be virtues in the eyes of the moderates, we view them as little more than necessary evils that are not always possible.
The significant point is this: SJWs ARE the extreme case. Which is why the Rabid Puppy position is the sensible one.
As long as SJW ideology is accepted in mainstream SF/F and SJWs are welcome in their castle, we will besiege the walls. The non-SJWs in science fiction can either go down fighting us in the interest of a cause they theoretically oppose or they can cast out the ideologists and return to the Ellisonian concept of SF being a place where dangerous ideas are welcome again. All dangerous ideas, no matter how offensive they are to anyone.
And they can’t cast us out because we reject their community in its presently diseased state and want no part of it until the SJW cancer is excised. An SJW is anyone who believes that the quality of a message’s delivery vehicle can be judged primarily by the content of the message. An SJW is anyone who believes that any idea is intrinsically “problematic”, “not okay”, “unacceptable”, or that there is “no place in science fiction” for a particular idea or individual accused of harboring that idea.
An SJW is an individual who fundamentally rejects the Ellisonian vision of science fiction as a place that welcomes dangerous ideas. All dangerous ideas.
For example, if you think there is no place for racism in science fiction, you are an SJW. It is no different than if you think there is no place for atheism or for women in science fiction. Either all ideas, however controversial, are welcome and legitimate, or the science fiction community is engaged in a straightforward power struggle to determine whose morals will be imposed on everyone else in the field.
Science fiction can either reject the SJW ideology and abandon all the imposed diversity thought-policing or accept a long and vicious war over which moral code shall be law. Rabid Puppies is presenting the SF community with two choices: either embrace and defend the idea of complete intellectual freedom in science fiction or fight us over the shape of the Science Fiction Code Authority of the future.
And everyone should understand that we Rabid Puppies will never, ever accept, under any circumstances, the ongoing SJW attempt to impose their code on everyone. That is not an option.