A Thing to Remember

John Scalzi tried to call back one of his posts yesterday:

A Thing to Remember When Dealing With Sad Puppies
April 22, 2015 Uncategorized John Scalzi
[On second thought, this was not well-argued and I’m withdrawing it until I can more fairly and accurately make the point I want to make. Will update when I do. In the meantime, note to self: Don’t write screeds when operating under lack of sleep — JS]

Unfortunately for him, the Internet always remembers….

A Thing to Remember When Dealing With Sad Puppies
April 22, 2015 Uncategorized John Scalzi

I notice that some of those identifying with the Sad Puppies, and particularly Messrs. Torgersen and Correia, are out there puffing about, as if they are leading the charge against the horrible SJWs who control the Hugos, thinking of themselves out loud in a haigographically overblown manner as if they are already blocking out in their heads the inevitable Ken Burns 10-hour documentary of their heroic exploits. But in fact:

1. Nearly everything that was on the Sad Puppy slate that made it onto the Hugo ballot was also on the Rabid Puppy slate, promulgated by Vox Day.

2. Conversely, very little that was on the Sad Puppy slate that was not also on the Rabid Puppy slate made it onto the Hugo ballot.

3. Several things that were on the Rabid Puppy slate but not on the Sad Puppy slate made it onto the Hugo ballot.

Therefore, it’s Vox Day and not either Mr. Torgersen or Mr. Correia who was the true slatemaker here. Their roles are, at best, as supporting footmen in Mr. Day’s self-interested crusade (and at worst, as noted before, his useful idiots).

So when any of the Sad Puppies start barking about how they’re leading some sort of romantic charge against whomever, for whatever reason, or start blathering as if they are somehow responsible for anything with the Hugos this year, it’s entirely fair to point out that in fact, their slate largely failed, when the elements of their slate were not also supported by a self-interested bigot, an association with whom they are now desperately trying to flee.

They aren’t in control of any of this; they never were. They aren’t in a position to issue manifestos or self-congratulatory paeans to their moral rectitude because (among many other things) they didn’t get the job done; that was done by the aforementioned self-interested bigot. This isn’t their parade. The Sad Puppies can run in front of the parade with pom-poms and sparkly batons and made a lot of showy hand movements, but doesn’t mean that they’re leading it. The parade has already turned in a different direction, and they’re out there by themselves.

Which may be the saddest thing about the Sad Puppies: Apparently they don’t know that they are also-rans, the supporting act, and reduced to taking credit for someone else’s achievement, if “achievement” is the word to use here. The only way they can legitimately claim credit for (or have credibility discussing) any of this is to admit they’ve been working hand in glove with Mr. Day all along, which is something they are now loath to do. Otherwise, it’s all empty, pointless grandstanding, and ignorable as such.

Just a thing to remember when a Sad Puppy puffs himself up in a blog post or comment thread near you. You’re looking at a failure, trying very hard to convince himself — and you — otherwise.

I don’t know why Scalzi felt the need to backtrack, it’s no sillier than his usual blathering. I suppose his portrayal of me as an evil, self-interested mastermind manipulating the poor little innocent Baen authors tends to fly in the face of me being a ignorant jackass dipshit assbag shitbug or a chaos-loving madman who seeks only to destroy the One True Fandom. But regardless, if anyone wishes to flee an association with me, let him do so without criticism.

(It is interesting to observe the repeated accusations of self-interest in light of how he has been successfully engaging in this sort of “personal award pimpage” for nearly a decade now.)

In any event, I stand with the Dread Ilk. I stand with the Rabid Puppies. I stand with the Evil Legion of Evil. And I stand with #GamerGate. We don’t reject anyone out of hand for simply existing or disagreeing with us. We don’t demand that people think exactly the way we do, we don’t expect them to march in lockstep with us, nor do we police their thoughts, speech, beliefs, or works. And we don’t need anyone. If you don’t like where things are going or how they are being done, you’re free to leave at anytime.

I supported the Sad Puppies goals, even though I believed that their failure to grasp the true nature of science fiction’s SJWs meant their well-intentioned attempts to reach out to the science fiction left and find common ground were likely to meet with eventual failure. But I have been wrong before, and so I saw no harm in the attempt. I did not use them. I did not need them.

I won’t abandon the Sad Puppies. I will support Sad Puppies 4 and Kate the Impaler. I won’t disavow them when I disagree with them in the future, just as I did not when I disagreed with them in the past. I will not criticize Brad Torgersen or Larry Correia even if they repent of their sins against the One True Fandom and are baptized in the urine of Teresa Nielsen Hayden before duly reciting the Litany of Hate against Vox Day. I do not, however, consider it likely that either of them will ever cower in the face of the SJWs rage, let alone submit and kneel before them.

Brad and Larry are not “desperately trying to flee” anything. They are not cowards. They have done nothing more than point out the entirely obvious. They are not me. I am not them. They are no more responsible for my words and beliefs and actions than I am responsible for theirs. They are good and decent men. I am not. But Sad or Rabid, none of us are fools who are so stupid as to fall for the transparent blandishments of a petty SJW like Johnny Con. There is no guilt by association.

Divide et impera is neither a new concept nor an unfamiliar one to any of us. And as for the constant barrage of emotional manipulations and posteriorpains and feelbads and feelsads to which we have been subjected, I am certain that our vile faceless minions speak for all of us in this regard.

The Red-heeled Guards

There always comes a time when a state military jumps the shark. The U.S. military appears to be rapidly reaching that point:

“The purpose of the event is to create a basis of understanding about
sexual violence, stigmas and rape culture in the military as well as in
our community and to reinforce standards of behavior, active bystander
mentality and to be peer advisers to one’s unit and community,” Johnson
said. “By walking in heels, the hope is to instill standards of behavior
that will resonate.”

Johnson said they chose this event because the powerful message of
the heels would be best at capturing the community’s attention.

“The heels represent the rise of sexual assault within our
community,” she said. “Though the heels may feel one-sided, only
acknowledging that females suffer the horrors of rape and sexual
assault, that is not the case. The event is a synopses of the problem
that both men and women suffer in our community and society through the
stigmas, rape culture and lack of respect and education.”

Of course, they could always try the absolutely foolproof plan of ending rape and sexual assault within the military by banning women and homosexuals. On the other hand, considering that the American people increasingly appear to be one of the more likely opponents of this New Fabulous Army, seeing the US Army putting on red heels probably isn’t the worst thing in the world.

At this point, I would fully expect the U.S. military to not only lose a war with Russia or China, but lose it badly. It may have better toys as a legacy of its historical greatness, but even Rome’s legions eventually became toothless parodies of their former selves.

I’m not sure they were ever quite this ridiculous, though. The fact that even a single ROTC candidate member was willing to go along with the program demonstrates how hapless the future officer corps is going to be.

Kicking Puppies makes Vivian sad

I wonder how many SJWs have the wits to grasp what that picture indicates? In any event, there are two more SJW responses worth noting this week, including another heartfelt soliloquy from David Gerrold as well as an absolutely revelatory response by John Scalzi.

David Gerrold first writes an open letter to Brad Torgersen:

You have hurt the Sasquan committee. These are people who have spent years planning, campaigning, bidding, working, preparing, and anticipating the best convention they can imagine. You don’t know what goes on behind the scenes of a convention, how many moving parts there are, how many people have to rise to the occasion. There’s programming, guest relations, membership registration, con suite, green room, sound and video, tech of all kinds, finances, insurance, security, special needs, cat-herding, and more. Everyone who takes on one of those jobs does so out of a love of the field — and everyone who was looking forward to a party is now hurting because there’s a turd in the punch bowl — and you are perceived as the guy who dropped it there. You and Larry Correia.

And you have hurt all the fans who will be attending, all the fans who wil be following events online. Instead of the convention being about a celebration of our common interests in SF, it is now about you and Larry Correia and a few others associated with you. You have pulled the convention off purpose and you have hurt the fans who wanted to have a good old-fashioned happy Worldcon. There have been many of those.

You have hurt your colleagues in the field. There are people who have declined to be award presenters. Others have asked to have their works removed from the ballot. You have hurt the integrity of the awards.

And then promptly deletes Brad’s response to his open letter:

And once again, Brad Togersen misses the point. I’ve deleted his msgs. I’m done with you, Brad. At long last, have you no decency? Have you no shame?

Do they still wonder why we laugh at their disingenuous calls for “honest dialogue” and “debate”? I thought Brad’s response was considerably longer than it needed to be. “We don’t care” would have sufficed. Although I suppose it is amusing to see that Gerrold still doesn’t realize that what he thought was a punch bowl has been a toilet for a decade.

Speaking of deletions, Johnny Con first made fun of sexually abused children in the process of attacking Larry Correia, then belatedly deleted his post.

[On second thought, this was not well-argued and I’m withdrawing it until I can more fairly and accurately make the point I want to make. Will update when I do. In the meantime, note to self: Don’t write screeds when operating under lack of sleep — JS]

But not before I happened to notice this interesting big of psychological projection: “Day is a perfectly lucid person. He’s a fine con man, in other words, and Correia and Torgersen fell for his con.“

The choice of words is revealing. It was nearly a year ago when I wrote about SF’s biggest con artist: “Sure you’re smiling, Johnny. That’s why you stopped reporting your
annual numbers in 2013. That’s why you shut down your Quantcast reports.
That’s why you don’t post a traffic meter anywhere on your site. That’s
why you threatened to quit SFWA…. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I find your constant
snake oil salesmanship genuinely amusing. You’re the Bernie Madoff of
science fiction and you’ve got the Participation Hugo to prove it.”

To say nothing of two more Hugo nominations than Arthur C. Clarke, and seven more than Iain Banks and Terry Pratchett combined. As it happens, thanks to the Dread Ilk and the Puppies, I am rapidly approaching the 2 million monthly pageviews that Johnny Con falsely told Lightspeed Magazine he had back in 2010, when he actually had 305,000. The difference is that if I say I have two million monthly pageviews, you can be 100 percent certain that I do. I do not lie on the Internet. It is very, very stupid to lie on the Internet. Johnny also let Larry Correia have it for Larry’s refusal to let little
Johnny be friends with him despite Johnny’s repeated overtures.

Also, can we please now stop pretending that this whole Puppy nonsense began for any other reason than that once upon a time, Larry Correia thought he was going to win an award and was super pissed he didn’t, and decided that the reason he didn’t had to be a terrible, awful conspiracy against people just like him (a conservative! Writing “fun” fiction!), as opposed to, oh, the voters deciding they just plain liked something and someone else better? Can we stop pretending that a fellow who practically begs people to nominate his work three years running, hiding the begging behind an oh-so-thin veil of “let’s stick it to the SJWs!” doesn’t desperately crave the external validation that he thinks the award will bring? Can we stop pretending that this is anything other than a grown up child stomping his feet, screaming look at me, look at me, loooook at meeeeee? Because, come on, folks. We’re well past the point of genteel here. Let’s call it for what it is.

(And yes, I know, Correia declined his nomination for the Hugo this year. Let’s talk about that for a minute, shall we. It takes a very special sort of fellow to allow himself to be on a slate to get nominated, marshal people to nominate him for the award as part of a slate, and then decline — and write a big ol’ puffed-up piece about why he was declining, social justice warriors, blows against the empire, blah blah blah, yadda yadda. Yes, nice he declined the nomination and let someone else on the ballot. But it’s a little like wanting credit for rescuing a baby squirrel when you knocked the baby squirrel out of the tree to begin with.)

To be clear, the Puppy nonsense now isn’t just about Correia really really really wanting validation in the form of a rocketship; Day’s stealing the Puppy movement right out from under Correia and Torgerson has changed things up quite a bit, and it’s certainly true at this point that this little campaign is about a bunch of people trying to shit in the punchbowl so no one else can have any punch. But at the beginning, it was Correia hurt and angry that someone else got an award he thought was his, and deciding that it was stolen from him, rather than being something that was never his to begin with. And I’m sorry for him that it didn’t go his way. But actual grown human beings deal with disappointment in ways other than Correia has.

Correia can bluster about this all he likes; he’s a lovely online bully, and certainly he wishes to project that he’s a Tough Guy Saying Tough Things, Toughly™. But, eh. If he was actually who he wishes he could project himself as, the Sad Puppy thing would have never happened. And, ironically, he would be better positioned to win the awards he craved, because he wouldn’t be seen as a petulant whiner about such things. As it is, all we can do for him now is let him show us on the cartoon face pain chart how much Worldcon hurt him, and offer him soothing hugs until all his pain goes away.

See, if only Larry had only treated Johnny Con more nicely, then he would have won the award that he so badly craves. Why won’t he be friends, why?

Breed to win

The Palestinians understand this. The Israelis understand this. The future belongs to those who show up for it.:

Conservatives, it is not enough to merely produce children or, as so many do, adopt those already here. We must nurture them and teach them properly because liberal society is determined to corrupt them and convert them into eager drones for the Borg Collective that is progressivism. Fight back. If you are religious, teach your children about God. If not, teach them to respect and understand those who are. Teach them about our country and our history – there’s no better way to demonstrate to them, as opposed to indoctrinate them, why America deserves their patriotism….

And teach your kids skills that will help them survive. Teach them to fight, and to shoot. Teach them to be steadfast in the defense of their rights, and to stand up for those being oppressed. My kids have a standing offer – if their school suspends them for justifiably punching a bully they get taken out for ice cream. And demand that your school teaches your kids properly – as Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds often says, sending your kids to public schools is almost parental malpractice.

It’s not “almost parental malpractice” it is parental malpractice. Have at least three children, four is better. Homeschool them. Teach them to anticipate being attacked for who and what they are. Teach them to have pride in who and what they are. Teach them to serve God first and fear God only. Teach them to love the truth and hate the lie.

And don’t live in fear yourself. Don’t fear divorce and the stacked deck. Giving up what you fear potentially losing means you have already lost. Your odds are not the general odds.

War doesn’t care whether you are fighting it or not. You are caught up in the cultural war whether you want to be or not. The only question is if you are an armed soldier or a helpless civilian.

When rabbits rabbit

I’m not sure which is more amusing, this guy’s complete failure to even begin to grasp what neo-fascism is, the fact that the SJWs are pretending to take his ranting babble seriously, his claim that “If You Gave a Dinosaur a Cookie, My Love” is better than anything on the 2015 shortlist, or the severeness of the butthurt radiating from his crimson posterior:

Fuck you, Theodore Beale.

Fuck you for trying to break a thing I loved. Fuck you for doing it to serve your stupid, lame fascist ideology. More to the point, fuck you for your stupid, lame fascist ideology. Your beliefs are horrible. You’re horrible. You’re a nasty, cruel little bully, and I do not like you.

Fuck you for making me feel that way. Fuck you for the way you’ve brought this thing that I love, this celebration of great science fiction, to a point where it is full of the sort of mean and hateful desires that seem to animate you. Fuck you for dragging us all down to your sorry level. Fuck you for being so odious that we have to go there.

And fuck you for making me want you to hate me. Fuck you for all of your beliefs that amount to nothing short of hatred for the things I love. For the people I love. For the art and beautiful things that are why I get out of bed in the morning. Fuck you for living your life for the sole purpose of destroying things that I love, and for making me wish that I could destroy something of yours in retaliation. Fuck you for making me write this, in the sincere and passionate hope that it will make you feel even a moment’s unpleasantness.

And fuck you for the very real possibility that a work nominated purely because you used your noxious little voice to rally your loathsome, asshole supporters to support it might win a Hugo Award. Fuck you because it’s actually possible that you will break the Hugos successfully and demonstrate that you’re oh so much stronger than a bunch of fans who were previously just happily attending a convention and voting for stuff they loved in awards. In short, fuck you.

Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln? I am afraid that the only thing this extended rabbiting managed to elicit from me was a wry smile. As for my “loathsome asshole supporters”, every article like this creates more of them because the true face of the SJW cannot be forgotten once it is revealed. And the lesson, as always, is this: SJWs always lie.

I particularly enjoyed the punchline: “I will not attempt to construct some absolute explanation of Theodore
Beale’s beliefs. Instead, I will construct a caricature of them.”

You don’t say….

Mailvox: the racism lens

It’s always fascinating how some people have an amazing ability to detect racism no matter how clearly the absence of racism by literally every definition is explained to them. From a discussion on Eric Flint’s blog:

I may as well go all-in here: In comments above Vox Day has repeatedly been called a “racist,” perhaps dozens of times. Have any of you ASKED him what his position is on racial differences? Have any of you READ what he has to say about racial differences? No? Then those of you who call him “racist” are simply a mob. In an attempt to educate, here is what Mr. Day wrote recently in a comment on Brad Torgersen’s blog; it was in response to the following statement by someone else (not Brad): “Vox Day believes that white people and Asians (and clearly Hispanics, since Beale is one, at least in part) are superior to black people, and he believes this inferiority of blacks is innate, genetic.”

Here is what Mr. Day wrote in response:

“Correction: I don’t have any reason to believe any one human population sub-group is intrinsically superior to any other population sub-group. That being said, both science and logic quite clearly indicate that no two population sub-groups are identical, and therefore every population sub-group is either superior or inferior to another sub-group on the basis of any chosen metric.
“It makes no more difference that you like or dislike this fact than if you disapprove of the speed of light or the rate of Earth gravity.
“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. How many of my dishonest critics will do the same?
“That doesn’t mean that I think it is wise to ask that particular child, when she is grown, to design the next plane on which I intend to fly. Or even to work in the air traffic control tower.
“I deal in reality as determined by history, science, and logic. And I care no more about what an equalitarian fantasist thinks about me or anything else than I do about the mentally deranged babbling in the psych ward. The world is as it is, not as we might wish it to be. If you can’t understand that, then I am among the least of your problems.”

So query: Do the above statements validate the multiple assertions above that Mr. Day is a “racist”? (Disclaimer: I’ve never met the man, nor talked to him; I have exchanged perhaps a couple of emails when I challenged a statement he made. But I do despise mindless online mobs screaming “racist!”)
Reply

    Gav says:
    April 21, 2015 at 10:39 AM

    A moment’s thought shows that his premise is completely ridiculous. Choose people A, B, C such that A & C are from one group and B from another, but A is taller than B is taller than C. So now I’ve got a metric (height) where group 1 is both superior and inferior to group 2 on the height metric. (For a real-life example, choose Robert Wadlow and his father for A & C, and Michael Jordan for B).

    You have to be not only racist but also stupid to believe that “every population sub-group is either superior or inferior to another sub-group on the basis of any chosen metric.”
 
        Mike says:
        April 21, 2015 at 12:21 PM

        This is a result of false equivocation between individuals and categories. Yes, the mean of the heights of all adult men if taller than the mean of the heights of all adult women, but that doesn’t mean all men are taller than all women.

        It ends up being a big problem in the scientific study of people. Some people have political/personal reasons to try to see one group as better than another, while other people have similar reasons to try to see no groups as being any different from each other. Both camps accuse the other side of being unscientific and ignoring the data.

        Really there is no conflict between the idea that one group may, on average, have a measurable difference than another group, and also the idea that the variance of individuals withing the groups may be much larger than the difference between the groups. But due to confirmation bias, people tend to ignore whatever part of that equation it is convenient for them to ignore.
        Reply
            Eric Flint says:
            April 21, 2015 at 12:33 PM

            The problem goes deeper than that, because there’s an intrinsic bias in the categories someone chooses in the first place. For instance, if you choose to compare “the race of whites” to “the race of blacks” you are assuming not only that such races exist but that they are the proper basis for comparison. But why should that be true? Due to the way the human race evolved, there is more genetic variation among Africans than there is between any given group of Africans and any non-African segment of humanity. The reason people think all Africans belong to the same “race” is because they share certain literally superficial features: skin color, hair and some facial features. But why should those criteria be used as the basis to define a “race” in the first place? Why not, for instance, choose the average distribution of blood types? In which case you wind up with a “racial map” of humanity that is completely different from a “racial map” drawn according to skin color, hair and facial features.

            My point is that there is an inherent bias in the way the question is posed in the first place, which makes any answer to the question automatically questionable. What defines a “racist” in the first place, intellectually speaking, is the firm conviction that “races” as defined sociologically have an actual biological reality which is more basic than any other possible differentiation. For which there is not a shred of actual evidence. It is a faith-based conviction. That’s a polite say of saying it’s just bigotry.
            Reply
                Mike says:
                April 21, 2015 at 1:59 PM

                Yes, I agree. There very definitely are biological races, if you define that as subsets of the overall human gene pool where certain collections of genes are much more prevalent than they are in the general population. But there is so much nonsense and xenophobia and misunderstanding involved that it’s a real nightmare to try to approach these questions without stepping on any land mines.

                I recommend a really interesting book called “The Sports Gene” that gives some great examples of how this can be done properly (IMO), and also some examples of where it has been done very much improperly.
                Reply
                    335522 says:
                    April 21, 2015 at 2:13 PM

                    With all due respect to all of you, I believe you’re missing the point. Please read the third paragraph by Vox Day that begins “I assert that an unborn female black child….” And then answer the question that I posed at the end, please (it being notable that not one of the responses addresses it).

The following quote from that exchange is an astonishing assertion that clearly demonstrates both the intellectual inferiority as well as the logical incapacity of the SJWs:

“You have to be not only racist but also stupid to believe that “every population sub-group is either superior or inferior to another sub-group on the basis of any chosen metric.”

Quite to the contrary, you have to be utterly stupid and wholly irrational to deny that assertion, or else possess hitherto-unknown evidence demonstrating that every human population sub-group is absolutely and entirely equal across the board. Every single group has an average, a mean, and a median, regardless of the metric chosen. None of those three statistics are likely to be precisely equal to the average, the mean, and the media of any other group.

At no point have I EVER claimed, suggested, implied, hinted, or intimated that EVERY SINGLE MEMBER of one human population group is superior to EVERY SINGLE MEMBER of another one. And anyone who claims that I ever have is either lying or simply too dim to bother even attempting to talk down to.

The idea that “races” don’t exist is simply antiscientific dogma. They might as well deny that “species” and “groups” exist while they’re at it.

Meta-SWATTing

Patterico has the details:

This is one of the creepiest articles I have ever read. It reminds me of my experience being SWATted — having armed police rush into my home in what looked like retaliation for my speech. Yet in the case described in the article, the SWATting is actually being carried out . . . by the government.
In Wisconsin, citizens had cops bust into their homes with battering rams. Property was taken from their homes, in full view of the neighbors — and in some cases officers mocked them. Then the citizens were told that they could tell nobody about what had happened. If they did, they could go to jail.
All for exercising their First Amendment rights. Essentially, for being conservatives.

This should be kept in mind by anyone who still thinks going along to get along is still an option. The Statists are as insistent in their demand for submission as those who named their religion after the concept.

There is a theme

A Rabid Puppy responds to David Gerrold

This is an open response to Mr Gerrold’s heart felt facebook post. This post represents the Rabid Puppies official position on the matter. Word for Word. Mr Gerrold’s words will be in italics. The Rabid Puppies response will be in bold. It is my sincerest hope that this dialog will provide some insight to those who seem so confused by the Rabbid Puppies actions.

I’m going to get very personal and candid here.

We don’t care.

In 1995, I won a Hugo award for “The Martian Child.” The story was about how much I loved my son. Because so much of the story came from him, the award was his to share, so he came up on stage with me to hold it proudly. That award meant a lot to me. It still does. It was a validation of that thing we say — writing is easy, sit down at the keyboard and open a vein. That’s where that story came from. And that’s one of the reasons why I hold the Hugos in such high regard — it was a joyous validation of what for me was not only an ambitious experiment, but also a personal breakthrough in my own storytelling. It went someplace I didn’t know I could go. It went someplace I didn’t know a science fiction story could go.

We don’t care.

To me, the Hugo has always meant excellence, but since then I think it also had to represent the most ambitious efforts to stretch the genre in whatever direction an author wants to soar. This is a unique genre. It’s the only genre that asks, “What does it mean to be a human being?” It’s the only genre that reaches for the stars and asks, “What’s next? What are the possibilities in front of us?” It’s the only literary form that functions as the Research and Development Division of the human species. So the Hugo is special.

We don’t care.

Yes, I would say that pretty well sums it all up.

This is an interesting exercise in rhetoric. Mr. Gerrold clearly wants us to be very impressed by his feelbads, and thereby convinced of the pure and utter evil of those who would cause such feelbads.

With all due respect, Mr. Gerrold, you’re not exactly convincing anyone. We’ve read STARTREKSHIRTS. We’ve read “If a Dinosaur Had a Cookie, My Love”. We’ve read “I am Chinese and I am Gay”. We’ve read LOOK MA, I CAN DO WHAT DAVID SILVERBERG DID NEARLY 30 YEARS AGO. The only soaring that is taking place here is the Muse of Science Fiction leaping out the window in protest.

More interesting is Mr. Gerrold’s threats of unpersoning and banishment from that fine community of SF fandom, which of course proves exactly what we’ve been saying from the start.

But the one thing that is growing more and more likely … the architects of this squabble will have indelibly damaged themselves in the eyes of the SF community. There are invitations and acknowledgments that will never be offered — not because it’s a blacklist, but because nobody wants to hang out with assholes.

And if that’s “unpersoning,” then it’s self-inflicted.

Whine all you want, Brad. It won’t work. I learned it by the time I was five. I never got anything I wanted by whining — so I stopped wasting energy and learned how to work for results the old-fashioned way.

This can’t be repeated enough: we don’t care.

We know the SJWs in science fiction are influential and have been actively acting as ideological gatekeepers for the last two decades. We know that there are invitations and acknowledgements that will never be offered – and we know it is a blacklist because people who are most certainly not assholes are treated as badly, if not worse, than those who are.

We know we will never belong to David Gerrold’s little club. We know we never have.

We don’t care.

We’re not wasting energy. We’re not whining. We are working for results in ways that Mr. Gerrold and his little tribe do not, and perhaps cannot, imagine. And I tend to expect they are going to like those results even less than they are enjoying the 2015 Hugo Awards.

Black Gate withdraws

Or rather, they have asked to not be considered for the Hugo award for which they will be on the ballot. While I disagree with John’s decision, I respect his right to make it.  I find it ironic, however, that people are responding to a large group of people dictating the ballot by unilaterally dictating to people for whom they will not vote.

 I also find it telling that a threat to support No Award next year is supposedly worse than a vow to do it this year. I am curious. Would they consider it better if I accepted what passes for their reasoning and announced that Rabid Puppies will join the No Award movement this year? Because that is certainly an option. (Settle down, you bloodthirsty bastards, I said no more than the obvious. It is an option.)

 The goal is to improve the Awards, not destroy them. But if the SJWs would rather destroy them than relinquish their control, well, that will tell the world exactly what sort of totalitarians they are. That’s two birds for the price of one. We’ve already got them on the record stating that our views are invalid and should be suppressed by force; seeing them demolish the awards without our assistance will communicate that more effectively than we can do ourselves.

Puppies on NPR

KW listened in and heard NPR doing their usual bang-up job on Sad Puppies. For me, the most intriguing aspect of the media coverage has been the near-complete lack of interest in actually talking to anyone involved in the actual news-making activity. I mean, I am about as cynical a media skeptic as it is possible to be, and yet somehow, these journalistic incompetents haven’t even managed to rise to my very, very low level of expectations.

Weekend NPR show “On the Media” spent 15 minutes on the Hugo awards controversy, starting at about the half-way mark (30 minutes)

Arthur Wu was the expert interviewed.  He did some amateur psychoanalysis of the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies groups.

This was tied to GamerGate, and shortly after mentioning death threats and harrassment, Vox Day was re-mentioned as active in both controversies.  One might conclude, if one was a sloppy thinker, that Vox Day has made death threats.  They non-judgmentally mentioned your blog is among the most often blocked by workplace filters for hate.

Larry Correia was interviewed, or a clip reused, and John C Wright was brought up and invalidated as a right wing has-been whose prose now includes Randian divergences into poltical polemics.

They must have read PopSci, because they almost quoted their line:

“…Vox Day is … on the record as supporting the Taliban’s attempt to assassinate Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousifazi, finding it “scientifically justifiable.””

“Disco Demolition Night” was also brought up.  Apparantly, Disco hate, Sad Puppies, and GamerGate are about fear of castration.

NPR “All Things Considered” teased that they were going to cover Sad/Rapid Puppies as well, but the website does not help out yet.

I don’t really object to their futile attempt to pile on. What this tells us is that the SJWs are uncommonly concerned about losing control of the narrative. And in their point-and-shriek frenzy – and that is all this is – they are bound to overreach themselves and their exaggerations will reach ludicrous proportions as they essentially play a high-tech version of the telephone game.

I won’t be surprised if I’m accused of being a self-admitted member of the Taliban by the time this feeding frenzy reaches its peak. The other thing this tells us is that they are afraid of me. It was remarkable how Damien Walters, who normally likes to work VOX DAY and LARRY CORREIA into everything, didn’t even mention either of us in his initial Hugo column. The media only likes to expose unsophisticated and unsympathetic enemies to the masses, but I am entirely comfortable with the media and not inclined to fall into their patently obvious traps.

That means they are left talking about me, without going to the source, and relying upon dishonest people to give them the straight story. And while they’ll convince the SJW choir, as well as mostly indifferent people who can’t bother to pay attention, at least 9 out of 10 people who discover me as a result are going to immediately notice that I am not even close to what they say I am.

So, I expect this to be not only a net positive, but a significant net positive. I grew up watching Ronald Reagan, after all, and the man not only survived, but thrived on absorbing everything the media could possibly throw at him.

One thing that will be useful, though, is to dig into the identity of each hit piece author. We’ve already tied several of them to Tor Books; the original Guardian hit piece author is published by Tor Books and was in contact with John Scalzi. And we know about both Heer and the PopSci guy as well.

Once we have the complete dossier, we’ll be able to draw a clear picture of how their media operation works and then go about exposing it. Remember, wu wei is all about the art of bending with the wind. Right now it is time to let the wind blow. But that’s all it is, is wind.