JCCarlton explains why Eric Flint owes Brad Torgersen an apology:
The best thing the CHORFs could have done is lived by the principles they say that they said the Hugos represented. They cold have welcomed the puppies as new blood. At the very least they could have remained silent and accepted the fact that things are going to change. Instead they created a huge media smear campaign against, among other people, Brad. Frankly, accusing BRAD of being anything other than the nicest guy you will ever meet is just weird and I don’t think I’ve ever met Brad personally. But when you play by Alinsky rules, facts aren’t relevant, the narrative is.
Along with that they are trying to “fix” the Hugos to make sure that only the “proper Worldcon membership,” the TRUFAN is allowed to pick who SF awards the Hugos to. They are trying as hard as they can to make the Hugos the comfortable racket they like so much. I don’t think that they realize just how much the nastiness they’ve been spreading around is losing them friends
Of course it doesn’t help that the CHORFs have been diligently creating their own monster. I suspect that they thought that Vox would just fall apart and blow away like dust when they went all Alinsky on him at SFWA. The problem is that Alinsky tactics only work when the other side accept you definition of them. And Vox didn’t believe what the CHORFs were saying he was and frankly was able to turn their constant distortions and half truths against them. Making false assertions doesn’t work as well on the internet where almost nothing is permanently forgotten and everything can documented. It’s hard to make false assertions when the truth is a Google search away.
What the CHORFs don’t seem to be able to understand is that once you put up something in a blog, you might as well be broadcasting your actions to the other side. And while most of us don’t care what’s on the CHORFs’ blogs on or another of us will probably see it and pass it around. And Vox is not above pointing out the other side’s strategies and saying to his readership, tit for tat.
Up until the last few years I don’t think that many of us fans really cared about the Hugos very much. The one time I’ve been able to attend a Worldcon I don’t think I even voted. I’m absolutely sure that I didn’t participate in the nomination process the next year. One thing the response the CHORFs have made many of realize for the first time is just how rotten the Hugo Awards have gotten. I think that up until the CHORFs declared total war on the puppies none of us on the other side really understood how far those people were willing to go for little plastic rocketships.
I have to admit that I don’t give a damn what Eric Flint thinks. He need not apologize to me, regardless of what he may have said. I know that some of his fellow Baen writers think well of him, but I’ve never read anything he’s written and I don’t know anything about the man except for the fact that he’s published by Baen and he’s said to be an unreconstructed socialist.
So, I don’t know if JCC is correct or not. But he’s certainly correct to claim that I am not above recommending tit for tat. Indeed, I am considerably below that, being a devotee of the tactical philosophy that requires three or more tits for every tat.