Tag: freakshow

LEAVE NEIL ALONE!

Given what is already known and confirmed by Neil Gaiman himself, you wouldn’t think anyone would be dumb enough to step forward, at this point, and seriously try to argue that he never did nothing wrong to nobody. Apparently he just writes six-figure checks to middle-aged women out of the goodness of his heart or something. In any event, a publicist – seriously, a publicist – tries to argue that Neil Gaiman simply could not have done what seven-and-counting women have alleged that he did to them.

Of this I assure you with all certainty: as night follows day and day follows night, Neil Gaiman respects women. He loves women to which his daughters can attest and has supported women his entire life.

Now I’m not saying that this demonstrated respect discredits the standing allegations. What I am saying is that knowing Neil, having been around Neil, I find it highly suspect that he would commit acts of aggression, sexual or otherwise to women, regardless the circumstance.

Neil just isn’t made that way…

Most if not all the women accusing Neil of improprieties concede that their relationship were not just consensual but mutually initiated… He’s no saint, but he’s no demon either and his demonization is not only injust and unfair but does nothing to help the lives of his accusers.

What I am saying is that personally, I am skeptical because I am a very good judge of character and I find it highly unlikely that Neil would be capable of the letter of these allegations.

Yeah, I suspect one of the many lessons to be learned from this comedy of misdeeds is that Igor Goldkind is not, in the end, a very good judge of character. And to say that people are unimpressed with this inept attempt at restoring Neil Gaiman’s shredded reputation would be to put it mildly.

  • Your blog post and comments are a masterclass in how to do rape apologia. You should worry about that instead of speculating about hypotheticals.
  • Someone should ask him how many times he’s had sex with Gaiman since he’s so sure about what Gaiman would or wouldn’t do sexually.
  • “I respect women so much that I’m going to listen to my buddy instead of them.”
  • That’s gonna reflect so badly on him when the storm will reach the mainstream. Which it will. Buckle up, Igor and Co.
  • Neil’s lawyers aren’t sending their best cause they can’t find the best.
  • I read this yesterday, and didn’t have words for how fucking irritating and disgusting it was.

Anyhow, there’s no need to read it. This pretty much sums up the entire wall of text.

UPDATE: Oh… my… days. This guy is about enough to convict Gaimain via guilt by association. Consider the source.

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He Knew It Was Coming

Neil Gaiman appears to have engaged a damage-control firm and begun an extensive social media campaign TWO MONTHS BEFORE the podcast that broke the news of the alleged sexual assaults, based on what the members of the Neil Gaiman Facebook group have observed.

In the past few weeks, there have been reports that a reputation management firm has been hired by Neil or on his behalf, and their activities may include astroturfing X with positive comments about his work. Messages take the form of paragraph of Chat-GPT-style text praising a Gaiman project, or describing it as if readers will never have heard of it before (which is not appropriate for the intended audience, who have already been discussing it for years). There is then a bunch of replies to the post expressing delight about the work. I assumed that couldn’t happen on Facebook.

A few days ago I was concerned by a post that was shared to this group from the Neil Gaiman group. Now, we’re all positive folks and we’re here because we like Neil’s stuff (or did until recently), so it’s not unusual for the mood to be on the enthusiastic side. It’s possible I’m seeing more than is there. But…
You can check how long somebody has been a member of a group, so I had a quick look for each of the posters. Tortoise Media’s podcast was published on 3rd July so there would have been an awareness of their initial investigations in the months running up to then. A remarkable number of commenters only joined the Neil Gaiman group in May, June, and July.

A Reddit commenter points out that Gaiman’s claims to have been diagnosed with autism – at the age of 62 – appear to be rather dubious. He first made the claims on March 8, 2023. That would appear to have been before the podcast production was underway, but well after Gaiman was aware that he was going to be facing public accusations of sexual assault.

If I remember correctly, didn’t he also talk about having autism for the first time a few months before the podcast was released? I think he confirmed it for the first time on Tumblr earlier this year, (and surprise, that was one of the defenses used by a friend of his who talked to Tortoise). Seems like he and his team were already long prepared for the podcast episodes to drop and had a plan in place.

It’s certainly interesting that while Gaiman is more than willing to tell people that he’s autistic – which apparently has not impressed anyone as an even remotely legitimate diagnosis – while continuing to conceal what appears to be his continued involvement with Scientology. Personally, I think he should have gone with sociopathy, although perhaps that would have struck just a little bit too close to home.

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Into the Gammas’ Den

I’ll be doing an AMA – with the exception of anything related to my family – in the r/gammasecretkings subreddit on Friday at 7 PM EST. Feel free to come and enjoy the repertoire, and if you’ve got a Reddit account, join in the fun.

Same as the Kurgan AMA, Marquess of Queensbury rules will apply. I expect a clean fight and for all parties to be good sports. I’m not saying anybody should pull any punches, just that none will be allowed to fight dirty. u/voxday, whether he intends it or not, is a man that can bring out the worst in both his supporters and detractors.

Of course, it being Thursday, that means tonight at 7 PM EST is Arkhaven Nights. Turn on the lights!

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SJW Reason

We all know better than to expect logic or consistency out of SJWs. But sometimes, their contorted reasoning is so incredible that simply it has to be appreciated for the gymnastic accomplishment that it is.

Now, keeping in mind that one of my great offenses in the minds of the r/nealgaimanuncovered crowd is that I don’t believe in the concept of “marital rape” – and to be clear, I am in absolute accord with the centuries-long history of legal jurisprudence in rejecting the concept as an intrinsic contradiction in terms – it is somewhat astonishing to see the same people who genuinely believe that a man can rape his legally-married, fully-consenting wife also believe that Neil Gaiman cannot have raped any of his various accusers because he was reportedly in some sort of sexual relationship with them after the fact.

I’m quite willing to listen to the arguments of those who insist that the act of signing a marital contract and undergoing a wedding ceremony is not tantamount to giving permanent and ongoing sexual consent. Those arguments are obviously wrong – try telling the US Army that even though you enlisted and signed the papers, you are refusing to provide active consent to deployment in the Middle East – but they’re not entirely self-contradictory.

But how you can argue that rape exists in marriage despite the obvious evidence of consent having been previously provided, but that having sex with a woman proves you didn’t previously rape her, is simply incoherent nonsense.

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Amanda Palmer Speaks

In a way. Neil Gaiman’s ex-wife’s cryptic allusions do NOT bode well for Neil Gaiman. She put out a Patreon post that mostly consisted of images.

“One of the pictures is a trash can on a city street that has a copy of “Lolita” sitting on the rim.”

Yeah, that’s not a good sign.

The novel is notable for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, a middle-aged literature professor called Humbert Humbert, is obsessed with the 12-year-old Dolores Haze, with whom he becomes sexually involved after he becomes her stepfather.

Whatever could she be trying to tell us about Mr. Tubcuddle?

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A Distinct Lack of Support

It’s not exactly a mystery why the radical feminists never get anywhere in their endless, and futile, campaign against sexual predators. They drive off everyone who isn’t one of them, then complain that no one supports even their most reasonable efforts. They now have a rule that nothing posted on r/neilgaimanmemes can be posted on r/neilgaimanuncovered, which is ironic because r/neilgaimanuncovered was set up in response to r/neilgaiman banning all discussion of Neil Gaiman or the growing number of allegations against him.

r/neilgaimanuncovered
A sub for discussion of Neil Gaiman, post sexual misconduct allegations and for any other writers with similar allegations.
Rules
1 Be nice.
2 No spam.
3 No racism, homophobia, sexism, ableism or TERFs.
4 If they say they’re traumatized, they are.
5 No “Bitches Be Crazy.”
6 No reposts from “Neil Gaiman Memes”

What’s particularly amusing is that the rule was just adopted today because a member of r/neilgaimanuncovered requested a meme that was subsequently produced on r/neilgaimanmemes.

What’s even funnier is that they sincerely believe their side is in sole possession of all human creativity and talent. To the contrary, some of the memes are excellent and are entertaining even if you have no idea who Neil Gaiman is.

On a tangentially-related note, it appears F&SF is already dead. There can be little doubt that this is a harbinger for the converged mainstream F&SF publishing industry.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, commonly referred to as F&SF, has long been revered as one of the last century’s most important genre fiction magazines. It’s the one cultural staple that held out the longest against wokeism, actually focusing on great storytelling for much of the 2010s, but it appears as if the magazine may be in trouble or even ceasing publication entirely... Since the Winter Issue, Fantasy & Science Fiction has not published any new content, its website has not been updated, and no commentary has been made on the magazine’s status.

UPDATE: Wow, Bing has declared “Neil Gaiman” to be unsafe content.

Prompt: Neil Gaiman signs a book

Result: Unsafe image content detected Your image generations are not displayed because we detected unsafe content in the images based on our content policy. Please try creating again with another prompt.

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Sociopaths Play Nice Guys

My wife and I visited a winery this week where the owner gave a tour—good looking young dude, charismatic, great speaker and storyteller. Everyone in the group seemed to be fawning over him. But something in his story, and something about him, felt very off to me.

Sure enough, when I got home some quick online searching (oddly, his last name is scrubbed from any mention on on winery website) and some texting with a few friends—we are usually only 2-3 degrees of separation, it’s a small world—turned up that a number of years ago he had cheated on his wife in a different state and been involved in a massive fraud scheme in education, misappropriating public funds (he was a ”public school teacher”, he told us). He had fled the state and turned up in a new one, now running a multi-million dollar winery and presenting himself as morally superior to every other wine maker in the region.

Did you notice the tell? Con men of every stripe always present themselves as nice people. This is why I roll my eyes when obvious creeps like Neil Gaiman are unmasked and everyone somehow manages to be surprised; of course he acted super nice to everyone in public, unless you’re a rock star, you don’t get young women fawning over you if you don’t present a warm and welcoming mask to everyone. But the comparison between the art and the artist was incongruous, ergo there was a problem lurking underneath.

But there are lots of nice people and sociopaths work very hard to imitate them. The dead giveaway is the posturing at being morally superior. Normal people don’t do that; if anything, they tend to exaggerate their flaws. Always be very leery of any man or woman who is conspicuously nice, and then tells you why they are better than the average individual. And definitely keep one hand on your wallet.

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Indeed

Even if Vox Day rather than Rachel Johnson had 1st reported the accusations against Neil Gaiman, I hope I would have believed K and Scarlett once I read/heard their testimony & the damning statements from whomever communicated Neil‘s response. I say that as someone who owes a lot to Neil.

You know it’s getting serious when SJWs are getting to the point that they would, even hypothetically, consider believing your favorite Dark Lord rather than the self-appointed social justice saint and LGBTQFP+ ally Neal Gaiman. The ironic thing is that I’m very far from the only one on the Right who knew that he was an overrrated creep all along. Consider what I wrote publicly back in 2018 when I first got into writing comics.

  • If you think Neil Gaiman is a great novelist, or even a great SF/F novelist, you are simply wrong. He is a successful, talented and much-loved SF/F author, and understandably so, but he is also little more than a very successful stunt writer with two or three tricks in his bag. There is a reason that all of his notable books involve mythology of one sort or another; his true gift is translating ancient myth into a form that pleases postmodern palates. He also has the ability to convey that sense of the numinous that I lack. But Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Alan Moore, John C. Wright, China Mieville, Nick Cole, and even George R.R. Martin are all better, more original SF/F writers with considerably more to say about the human condition than Gaiman. When I have thought about the writers whose work I would like to be able to emulate or surpass over the years, Neil Gaiman never once entered into the equation, not even for a moment. Consider that American Gods is described as “Neil Gaiman’s best and most ambitious novel yet.” I liked that story considerably better when it was called Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul and On the Road.
  • It’s pretty simple. I am a better novelist than Neil Gaiman by almost every reasonable measure. Anyone who has read a sufficient variety of both our novels will recognize that pretty easily. Gaiman writes a variant of the same book with the same sort of characters almost every time. Even his Sandman is a Gary Stu of sorts. I have much wider literary range and can write everything from haunting shorts that could almost pass for modern Maupassant to murder mysteries to epic military fantasy. I don’t write myself into my books and I can even successfully pull off the “you genuinely think he’s dead but actually he isn’t” trick without cheating or magic or medical science or anything but pure literary sleight of hand. George Martin can’t do that despite repeated attempts. Gaiman can’t do it either. And as for Murakami, I have been writing a literary novel inspired by his style for years, although since I am not Japanese, it is more likely to feature a wedding than a suicide. I have no idea when it will be finished, if ever, but I think I might be able to pull it off. And if I can’t get even reasonably close, then I won’t publish it. I admire Tanith Lee. I admire JRR Tolkien. I admire John C. Wright. I admire China Mieville. I admire Alan Moore. I admire Umberto Eco. The only thing I admire about Gaiman’s writing is his ability to give everything the flavor of a fairy tale. That’s not nothing, it’s actually pretty cool, but it’s very far from the most significant thing. Sure, he sells a lot more books, but then, Dan Brown and Katie Price sell even more and I don’t have any respect for their literary abilities either.

The reason so many people on the Right knew Gaiman was a creep while no one on the Left did is very simple. We believe the art reflects the artist. They reject the connection between the art and the artist.

And, obviously, they are wrong.

It is, however, mildly amusing to observe that the way SJWs ritually disavow a formerly beloved author is to repeat “F— Neal Gaiman” as if it is a formal anathema.

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The Memes Must Flow

It’s going to be a busy day on r/neilgaimanmemes today, in light of the news that two more women have come forward to accuse Neil Gaiman of sexual assault, one in 1986 and the other in 2017. That makes five alleged victims over a period of 35 years, so the chances that there will be dozens more is astronomical. It’s a good thing Gaiman is a prolific storyteller, because he’s almost certainly going to have to be coming up with an awful lot of stories explaining away his historical behavior over the next few months.

Exclusive: Two more women accuse Neil Gaiman of sexual assault and abuse

The two new accounts — published today in a new episode of ‘Master: the allegations against Neil Gaiman’ — have been corroborated through documents, emails, and messages seen by Tortoise as well as through interviews with friends and family who the women confided in. Gaiman did not provide any on-the-record response to multiple detailed requests for comment on either set of allegations.

Caroline Wallner lived in a house on Gaiman’s property in Woodstock, New York between 2014 and 2021 with her three young daughters and, until 2017, her husband. Alongside her work as a ceramic artist in a studio in a barn on the property, Wallner and her husband worked for Gaiman and his then wife Amanda Palmer, including doing property maintenance, gardening, and grocery shopping. Gaiman had moved to the area to teach at Bard College.

Around the time Wallner’s marriage ended in 2017, which she said devastated her emotionally, Gaiman told her ex-husband that there was no more work for him on the property, which had provided the family’s main income. Wallner and her daughters were now dependent on Gaiman for work and housing. While she was in this situation, Wallner, then 55, said that Gaiman began pressuring her for sex.

Wallner said: “There were little hints of, ‘we’re going to need the house’. And I remember saying, let’s talk about it. Let’s figure it out. That’s when he would just come to my studio and make me give him a blowjob”. There is no suggestion of physical force, but rather of coercion in light of her housing and family situation. Wallner said: “And he can say it was consensual. But why would I do that? It was because I was scared of losing my place”, characterising Gaiman’s treatment of her as “sexual abuse.”

The UN defines sexual abuse as actual or threatened sexual contact by force or coercive conditions. The UN’s refugee agency, where Gaiman is a goodwill ambassador, has described the allegations against him published by Tortoise as “very serious”, adding that it is “assessing the detailed reporting”.

Gaiman settled with Wallner for $275,000 and a non-disclosure agreement less than two weeks later. The NDA “disputes and denies that Wallner has sustained any losses, damages, or injuries for which Gaiman is legally responsible.” Gaiman’s position is that he settled with her to avoid expensive and protracted litigation. The NDA prohibits Wallner from talking about Gaiman with “family members, friends, associates” and from filing, reporting, or prosecuting any action or proceeding in “any court, governmental agency, or before any tribunal whatsoever or wheresoever”. If Wallner is asked to make disclosures by a “valid legal process”, the NDA says she must give Gaiman 20 days notice and help him resist disclosure.

The 1986 woman is an OBE. It’s certainly going to be difficult for Gaiman to play his customary “who are you, you’re nobody” card.

“I’m a very wealthy man. You’re…”

“I’m an OBE. Her Majesty the Queen made me an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Who are you, Mr. Wealthy Man?”

One wonders what the Crown knew about Gaiman. Far less well-known, far less successful authors have been given honors by the Queen. I would think he must have come up at some point but then failed the vetting process.

In less than 24 hours, there are already 96 members of r/neilgaimanmemes and loads of memes with thousands of views. The media’s wall of silence will not stand!

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The First Rule of Fighting the Patriarchy

The first lesson of fighting the patriarchy and exposing sex predators is don’t talk about Neil Gaiman! First Reddit:

r/neilgaimanuncoveredu/voxday is permanently banned from r/neilgaimanuncovered
expand allcollapse all

[–]subreddit message via /r/neilgaimanuncovered[M] sent 14 hours ago
Hello, You have been permanently banned from participating in r/neilgaimanuncovered because your comment violates this community’s rules. You won’t be able to post or comment, but you can still view and subscribe to it.

If you have a question regarding your ban, you can contact the moderator team by replying to this message.

Reminder from the Reddit staff: If you use another account to circumvent this subreddit ban, that will be considered a violation of the Content Policy and can result in your account being suspended from the site as a whole.

The amusing thing, of course, is that there are more comments on a single post on that subject at Sigma Game than on any post at that subreddit. And then something called Bluesky, which is apparently where all the would-be literary SJWs ran after Elon Musk bought Twitter for reasons that are still unclear to me. I’m not sure I even got around to posting anything there yet; they REALLY don’t want you talking about Neil Gaiman AT ALL. Notice that to SJWs, the mere creation of an account is “harassment”.

Hi there,

A Bluesky account you control (@voxday.bsky.social) has been taken down for harassment.

This takedown is not a temporary suspension. Please do not create additional accounts on our service. We will take action against any additional accounts as we become aware of them.

If you have any additional questions or wish to appeal this decision please email moderation@blueskyweb.xyz.

Bluesky Moderation Team

Anyhow, if you wonder why JDA and I are still talking about this, this should explain why. The evil people in this publishing industry desperately want to maintain their wall of silence. Just because he’s always been irrelevant to our community – I don’t own a single Gaiman book or comic; if I want to read magical realism, I’ll read Murakami or Borges, not a mediocre wannabe – doesn’t mean he’s not extremely important to them, if only as a symbol of success. And it’s observably making a difference; I have now heard from several people who have been strangely silent up until now who are clearly in the process of formulating their first public statements about Gaiman. But they know how it goes.

Of all the words of screen and pen

The saddest are these:

Vox was right again.

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