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?


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.


A letter to Popular Science

Dear Editor,

I am writing to demand a retraction and apology for the libelous article posted Apr 17th, 2015 at 3:00pm by Mike VanHelder. Mr. VanHelder wrote:

“Big winner Vox Day is an outspoken white supremacist and campaigner
against women’s education and suffrage, who is on the record as
supporting the Taliban’s attempt to assassinate Nobel Peace Prize winner
Malala Yousifazi, finding it “scientifically justifiable.””

  1. I am not a white supremacist. This is flat-out false. Also, I am a Native American with Mexican heritage.
  2. I am not a campaigner against women’s education. I am not an activist. I have never campaigned against it.
  3. I am not a campaigner against suffrage. I am not an activist. I have never campaigned against it.
  4. I am not against women’s suffrage. I support direct democracy for all, including women.
  5. I am not on the record supporting the Taliban’s attempt to assassinate Nobel Peace Prize winner
    Malala Yousifazi. This is an absolutely outrageous accusation and utterly false.

All of these statements are false, provably and demonstrably false,
and appear to be malicious. Therefore, I am requesting an immediate
retraction of this error-ridden article as
well as a published apology to me. Some of these additional errors include:

  1. Gamergate is not anti-feminist.
  2. Neither Sad Puppies nor Rabid Puppies courted any assistance from GamerGate.
  3. The extent of the collaboration between the THREE groups, (not
    two, as in the article) is not difficult to quantify. There are
    precisely two GamerGaters who are also Rabid Puppies, myself and Daddy
    Warpig.
  4. It is false to claim “No nominated author has ever before
    withdrawn their work after making it onto the Hugo ballot.” It is
    actually not uncommon for an author to withdraw one of his works after
    getting more than one nominated in a category. To give a few examples, Harlan
    Ellison withdrew his Hugo nomination in 1968. Jack Gaughan withdrew his
    nomination in 1968. Fritz Leiber withdrew his nomination in 1971, as did
    Robert Silverberg in 1972.
  5. Therefore, the action of withdrawing a nomination is not “unprecedented”.

I will appreciate your prompt attention to this matter.

NB: If you would like to add your voice to this call for a retraction and apology, this is the editor’s email: letters@popsci.com


Anti-GamerGate attacks the Honey Badgers

The SJWs came for the Honey Badger Brigade yesterday:

Early this morning, Fan Expo Canada banned Honey Badger Brigade (HBB) from the Calgary Comics and Entertainment Expo (CalEx). Security staff approached the HBB booth, ordered us to leave, and refused to state the reason why unless Alison Tieman agreed to speak to them away from the other members of the group, without recording. They informed Alison that they had received complaints on social media, including 25 allegations of harassment. No evidence was presented, no request was made for information from HBB, and no specific incident was cited until further questions were asked of security.

Upon further questioning, security mentioned the Women in Comics panel discussion from the previous day, where Alison was given permission to speak. Alison spoke briefly in relation to a topic brought up by the panelists. Accusers, however, claimed that Alison derailed the conversation. Alison and myself were in attendance, and you can listen to Alison’s statement in the panel here on YouTube. You can hear Alison, myself and indeed the entire panel in the full discussion record.

As you will hear, there was no harrassment. Expo staff and mob rule, in their crusade for ending harassment against women, harassed the Honey Badgers despite having no evidence of any policy violation.

This is what we are up against. This is why I will never back down, why I will never ever apologize for thinking, speaking, and writing freely. This is why I am the Leader of #GamerGate and why you should be too.

The real crime of the Honey Badger Brigade, for which they were successfully attacked, was not “reportedly disrupting panels”, but rather “associating with GamerGate”.

Think about it. A group of women were just harassed and driven out of a convention for being guilty by association. And the SJWs claim that we are the intolerant ones, we are the uncivil ones, we are the ones harassing women, we are the ones trying to drive others from the public discourse. Meanwhile, the moderates claim that the problem is our tone, that we’re simply not being nice enough, that if only we didn’t express our “problematic” views but kept them quietly to ourselves, everything would be all right.

Horseshit. Absolute and unadulterated horseshit.

Notice that they wanted to isolate Alison, and speak to her away from the others and without recording. Sound familiar? Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that I am an arrogant, cruel, and ruthless badthinker who eminently deserves every “shitbag” “asshat” “jackass” “dipshit” insult and every denigrating and disqualifying “mentally unbalanced” “racist” “misogynist” “sexist” “anti-Semitic” “homophobic” “Nazi” “white supremacist” description that has been hurled my way by SJWs from New York City to New Zealand for the last 10 years. Even if all of those accusations were perfectly true, how would that explain the coordinated assault on the Honey Badger Brigade?

Did that take place in response to me? If I was just a little nicer, if my rhetoric dripped with pure honey rather than pure contempt, if I lovingly laved Teresa Nielsen-Hayden’s warty folds with my tongue and dutifully nominated John Scalzi and Charles Stross and Patrick Nielsen-Hayden for awards so those three giants of modern science fiction could add to their collective total of 39 Hugo nominations (only 8 more than Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke combined), would that have somehow prevented the Honey Badgers from being attacked by SJWs and expelled from Calgary Expo?

Several tweets from this morning suggested one of the exhibitors was
proudly demonstrating banners and shirts for GamerGate. It was quickly
revealed this was The Honey Badger Brigade…. Calgary Expo has been actively responding to comments and criticisms
about its decision on Twitter, expressing it had no desire to allow a
GamerGate-themed booth onto the show floor.

This is a cultural war, everyone. And if you’re not fighting it, you’re losing it.


The reason the SJWs went after the Honey Badger Brigade instead of #GamerGate is the same reason they went after Sad Puppies instead of Rabid Puppies. The more publicly acceptable the face of their opposition, the more they are determined to silence and separate it from their most implacable opponents.

It didn’t work with Larry and Brad. It won’t work with the Honey Badgers either. #GamerGate will not abandon them. What do you say, Rabid Puppies? What do you say, Dread Ilk?

Support the Honey Badgers and join the #GamerGate email campaign against the sponsors of Calgary Expo. Send one email, just one polite little email, to start. I have. That’s all it takes… because we are legion.


Perspective

One thing I thought particularly worthy of note is what a small proportion of #GamerGate tweets are in response to the Hugo Awards. And notice that they didn’t move up until several days after the initial #SadPuppies spike.

That’s what I find so amusing about the SJW panic about those they call “thugs” in their midst. Not even a tenth of #GamerGate is paying any attention at all to the Hugo Awards yet, and that’s already enough to send them shrieking and running. This is still a period of calm as far as GG is concerned.

But if the SJWs want to be sure to grab #GamerGate’s attention, I suppose a coordinated media blitz full of ludicrous lies about people are an effective way to do it. It certainly isn’t anything we haven’t seen before.

I do have to give one SJW some credit, however. In addition to urging sanity on the more violence-prone SJWs, Mary Robinette Kowal also has a sense of humor. In response to Patrick Nielsen Hayden learns about the 2015 Hugo Awards, she wrote:

I never thought I’d say this, but you’ve made me laugh at something you intended to be funny. So, thanks for the chuckle. This was hilariously over the top.

The American Spectator covered the developing story:

The controversy over the Hugo Awards contains elements of a good
dystopian science fiction story. Unfortunately, the media brat-fit over
the successful effort to rescue escapist fantasy literature from its
political pursuers comes not from the pages of Brave New World but from Slate, Salon, and Entertainment Weekly.

Like
sports, video games, and cake baking, science fiction strangely finds
itself in the crosshairs of ideological killjoys. Perhaps it was only a
matter of time and space before the genre obsessed with time and space
became a culture-war battlefield.

“To many of the people involved in this industry, politics and message trump entertainment or quality,” Larry Correia, a New York Times-bestselling bard of monster stories, tells The American Spectator.
“But most people buy entertainment because they want to be entertained.
Many longtime readers fell away because they were tired of being
preached at or having their values insulted.”

It’s pretty good. It even contains a quote from yours truly. “We believe that the Best Novel award should actually go to the best
novels,” Vox Day says of his modest aim. “The best works should be
awarded, not only works by the best-connected.”

Who but a lunatic could possibly object to that? And, as I’ve noted, we can make a powerful objective case that the works awarded this year will be better, by every objective standard, than in recent years.



The Haydens take on #GamerGate

At this point, one has to wonder if the Toad of (formerly) Tor is a serious glutton for punishment, as well as, obviously, being the conventional sort.

Two observations here:

(1) Clearly, the Sad Puppy campaign is all about healthy fannish enthusiasm for particular people and books, not at all about vengeance, score-settling, or a desire to “hurt” “social justice warriors” and “hunt down” the “disease”. They’re all just nice folks who make jokes about puppies.

(2) Reaching out to #GamerGate, inviting them to join Worldcon: special.

To repeat something I said in the lengthy Making Light comment-section discussion of all this, here’s my own take what’s not a big deal, and what really is a big deal.

(1) To the best of my knowledge, the campaign to get a slate of specific people and works onto the Hugo ballot hasn’t done anything that violates the rules.

(2) As anyone over the age of ten knows, it’s generally possible to do things that are dubious, or scummy, or even downright evil, without violating any laws or rules.

(3) Merely running a campaign to get a slate of specific people and works onto the Hugo ballot doesn’t really rise to the level of “evil”, but it’s definitely “dubious” at the very least. Which is to say, it violates a lot of people’s sense of how one ought to behave, and if you do it you’ll incur widespread disapproval. Prepare to deal.

(4) However, running a campaign to get a slate of specific people and works onto the Hugo ballot and reaching out to #Gamergate for support in this…in effect, inviting a bunch of people who traffic in violent threats, intimidation, and “SWATting” to join our community…well, that rises all the way to “downright evil”.

For complicity with this, the Sad Puppy campaign deserves our comprehensive rejection.

Voting No Award for everything… wow, that’s such an astonishing and totally unexpected tactic! Who could ever have possibly anticipated THAT? Certainly not these dreadful people who are, I am reliably informed, “downright evil”. Now, I wonder what would be more evil, some perfectly reasonable works from the likes of John C. Wright and Jim Butcher winning an award or two, or leaving the Hugo Awards an awardless smoking ruin?

Meanwhile, Tor Books Senior Editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden launches his own attack on #GamerGate:

Does the desire to expand fandom mean we have to welcome every imaginable kind of person? I think a moment’s reflection reveals that no, we do not. The SF convention that finds itself sharing a hotel with the International Association of Cheerful Child-rapers can probably be excused for not inviting them to come visit the con suite. Likewise, many people, me included, think that #Gamergate is an association of terrible human beings that we don’t want to see joining us.

(shakes head) Do these people know how to do anything but double-down?


Dev vs dev

Another one for the “SJWs always lie” book. For some reason, an Ubisoft creative director, self-identified SJW, and anti-GG game designer decided to comment on the fact that Mark Kern, another game designer, had retweeted one of my tweets, the one about American McGee:

Palle Hoffstein @Palle_Hoffstein
So Mark Kern is getting chummy with Vox Day? I suppose it was only a matter of time.

University Watch ‏@UniversityWatc1
@Palle_Hoffstein So if you are going to say spiteful things about @voxday & @Grummz #Sayittotheirface Palle #GamerGate
 
Palle Hoffstein ‏@Palle_Hoffstein
I have spoken to them many times. Settle down.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
When have you ever spoken to me? I am afraid I don’t recall.

Palle Hoffstein ‏@Palle_Hoffstein
Twitter. A while a ago. Not that memorable for me either.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
So once on Twitter is “many times”? Look, if you’ve got criticism, that’s fine. The line is over there.

Palle Hoffstein ‏@Palle_Hoffstein
I wasn’t the one who tagged you. I was talking about Kern. If I feel the need I will address you directly, I assure you.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
No, you were talking about me. And you have not talked to me many times. So you’ve lied and now tried to dissemble. Why?

Palle Hoffstein ‏@Palle_Hoffstein
Look Vox. I didn’t tag you. I didn’t want to talk to you. I can’t imagine anyone ever wants to talk to you. Buzz off.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
No, you wanted to talk ABOUT me. I would think as a game designer, you would get how this “social media” thing operates.

My favorite part is the way he shamelessly contradicts himself in a futile attempt to claim the status high ground. First he claims we’ve spoken “many times”, then after it’s clear that I don’t recall ever speaking to him, he tries to claim the one time we did communicate was “not that memorable” for him either.

The funny thing is, I did initially stop and wrack my brain to figure out if I knew him, because I do know several people at Ubisoft in Europe at the higher levels. But what can you do? Gammas gonna gamma. Even very smart ones with very impressive jobs can’t surmount their socio-sexual instincts when pressed.


A name designer speaks out

Game designer American McGee dismisses SJWs and Literally Who 2:

I’m prepared for the SJW flamethrower…

Seriously, isn’t Anita saying this character is acceptable because she’s such a blank slate? I can’t help but think the “woman” in this game might as well be wearing a burka for all the identity she has. If this is “positive” and we (as game writer/designers) are meant to emulate this model… then I imagine the characters in our future games getting some really odd looks as they walk down the streets of virtual Los Angeles, sneak through the corridors of Space Station 009, or try to blend into any world that isn’t a magical fantasy world of pixel make-believe.

To me, real characters, positive characters, have flaws. They’re broken. They have an identity constructed of past events – good and bad. Like real people, they might make poor “life choices” which result in them being shallow minded, skin revealing, homicidal maniacs, who wear women’s lingerie under their space armor. Or, like the rest of us, they might be who they are, and wear what they wear, because society (the real world) hasn’t left them many other options. If we’re going to tell real stories, it’s best we do that with characters who closely resemble real people.

We are now advancing on two fronts, the game industry and the science fiction publishing industry. And we’re able to do so because more and more people are entering the ranks. If you know someone who plays games or reads SF/F, talk to them about #GamerGate and Sad Puppies. Let them know about it. Chances are, if they’re not an SJW, they’ll turn out to be as enthusiastic about it as you are.

A lot of science fiction readers abandoned all hope sometime between the late 90s and the middle 00s and lost interest in the genre. They didn’t know exactly why, all they knew is that they weren’t interested in reading the books about kickass werewolf lovers with crossbows or in being lectured about how evil the bigoted Biblethumpers who didn’t accept the quadsexual aliens with open arms and orifices were. So they stopped reading and started playing games instead.

But now games are under attack and there is nowhere else to run, so we have no choice but to fight back. And, lo and behold, it turns out that they are paper tigers, and their victory is no more inevitable or lasting than Hitler’s defeat of Russia.

I was acquainted with American from the time he was a level designer at id and it’s significant that he is speaking out because he is an old school, name-on-the-box game designer. I’ve said repeatedly that the designers and developers are with us, but only now are they beginning to realize that their livelihoods and their freedom to create is under attack. And more of them will be speaking out against the SJWs soon.

Speaking of SJWs and their inability to write characters, consider my original review of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, specifically, this part:

Characters: This is probably the weakest link of the book. While Scalzi makes some effort to provide motivations for his characters, only the protagonist and, ironically, a character who knows next to nothing of herself, come across in full-color. The crude bigot who gets his, the delightful gay man, the crusty drill sergeant, the overenthusiastic fool and the sexually uninhibited beautiful women are all oft-seen staples of SF fiction and they’re simply plugged in as required here.

Of course, I got this part dreadfully wrong: “OLD MAN’S WAR is both stylistically and thematically informed by
Heinlein, especially STARSHIP TROOPERS, but manages to be so without
being a thinly disguised ripoff.”

It’s a bit embarrassing, but how was I to know Scalzi had written what he openly admits was a straight-up color-by-numbers attempt to imitate Heinlein, then follow it up with even less-disguised ripoffs of Dick, Piper, and Star Trek? Anyhow, what I gave the benefit of the doubt and rounded up from a 6.5 to a 7 rating would, in retrospect, lose one star for Style and two stars for Creativity, and therefore wind up rated 5/10.

Of course, Scalzi is far from the only SJW in science fiction who has trouble with characters as a direct result of his ideological perspective:

I certainly don’t deny that I am making a value judgment about modern fantasy, what Bakker simply can’t seem to grasp is that I am expressing a literary judgment and not a moral one. The fact that one of the causes of the genre’s literary decline can quite logically be attributed to observable moral color-blindness on the part of many modern fantasy authors does not make the observation a moral judgment, anymore than attributing the decline to historical ignorance would make it a historical judgment.

This isn’t double-talk or moral cowardice. I am about as genuinely disinterested as it is possible to be and still be cognizant of the matter. I have read everything from Nietzsche and Stalin to Keynes and Onfray without it ruffling my feathers so I’m not inclined to be perturbed by mere fictitious monsters. If I was concerned that Joe or anyone else was “leading innocent souls to potential damnation” through nihilistic genre literature, my track record of publishing highly controversial opinions strongly suggests that I would not hesitate to say so. The fact is that I simply don’t believe the writers of modern fantasy matter all that much, in part due to the literary decline of the genre. As I stated before, they are a symptom of the greater societal decline, they are not a cause.

Meanwhile, an SJW named Bruce Baugh perfectly summarizes the core attitude of every SJW: “It occurs to me that the problems some of us feel about Hugo
nominating tie into something I’ve remarked on in other contexts: the
sense that we have to act like pundits, arbiters, or decision-making
authorities (judges, chief executives, etc.) when commenting on things.”

Everyone else’s opinion is merely an opinion. But their expressed opinion is that of a “decision-making authority”.


The Toad tries to walk one back

The Toad of Tor, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, belatedly realized she’d shown the true face of SJW gatekeeper privilege to the world because she’s desperately trying to walk back her words. But it’s much too late; we’ve already impaled her upon them. She even alarmed her fellow SJWs.

“I will admit to having been in kind of an unsettled state since
Teresa’s “this is the Worldcon award, and others can go do their own
thing” post. But then I may well not be the only one in that state, too.”

Compare and contrast this statement:

“The Hugos don’t belong to the set of all people who read the genre; they belong to the worldcon, and the people who attend and/or support it. The set of all people who read SF can start their own award.”
– Teresa Nielsen Hayden, March 29, 2015, 03:43 PM 

 With this one:

“I should have been clearer. Those of us who love SF and love fandom know in our hearts that the Hugo is ours. One of the most upsetting things about the Sad Puppy campaigns is that they’re saying the Hugo shouldn’t belong to all of us, it should just belong to them.”
– Teresa Nielsen Hayden, March 30, 2015, 10:15 PM

Like all SJWs, the Toad of Tor is a shameless liar. First, the Sad Puppies have NEVER said the Hugos should just belong to us. We haven’t said it, we haven’t implied it, and in fact, none of us have ever even thought it. It’s not even remotely credible to claim that a group of “outsiders”, of “thugs” and “reavers” and “nobodies” who aren’t “part of the community” have ever believed that something that has been under Tor’s control for 30 years just belongs to us. Teresa Nielsen Hayden is not only lying, she is insulting the intelligence of every single person who reads her words.

What we have said, what we continue to say, and what we will continue to prove, is that the Hugo Awards do NOT belong to the small group of SJWs led by Tor Books, who for the last 15 years have been handing awards to mediocre diversity lit written by SJWs and their pet minorities. In their eyes, it’s a good thing to be celebrated when minorities such as Saladin and Jeminsin are nominated for awards. It’s a bad thing to be decried when minorities such as Correia and Day are nominated for them.

The only people who have claimed ownership of the Hugos is Teresa Nielsen Hayden and the SJWs. They are already clamoring for rules changes before the nominations have even been announced. The Toad is one of those affiliated with Tor who have, somewhat successfully, turned the Hugos (and the Nebulas, for that matter), into the Best SJW-Endorsed Writers of the Year award. The Toad obviously knows how badly she screwed up because she’s resorting to a ridiculous technicality in order to rewrite the narrative and deny that she said what she quite clearly said:

“When I say the Hugos belong to the worldcon, I’m talking about the literal legal status of the award. But I also know that one of the biggest reasons the rocket is magic is because it spiritually belongs to all of us who love SF.”
– Teresa Nielsen Hayden, March 30, 2015, 10:15 PM

Sure you were. It “spiritually belongs” to everyone, so they can fuck off “and start their own award”. That makes sense. Sad Puppies 3 leader Brad Torgersen responds in his own inimitable fashion:

We. Matter. In fact, we have always mattered. Everyone who ever
came to love and cherish SF/F in ways not vetted and approved by you, by
TruFans, or by SMOFs.

And we’re not going away. Not this year. Not next year. Not the year after that.

We’re not here to destroy the field, nor the Hugos.

We’re here to keep you from greedily clutching the award to your chest, while the field sinks beneath the waves.

That is precisely what Sad Puppies is about. As for Rabid Puppies, we don’t want to destroy the field or the Hugos either. We want to destroy the SJWs. We want to crush them into dust. And we will.

If you’re not already marching with the Evil Legion of Evil under one Puppy banner or another, I encourage you to join us. We can always use the reinforcements, and as other Sad and Rabid Puppies can testify, it is invigorating to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the croaking lamentations of their women.

As Brad said, we’re not going away next year. And with Kate the Impaler holding the black standard, we’re not going to be inclined to show any mercy to the liars and the con artists. Nor, I suspect, will GamerGate.

I want the Justice Department to declare them a criminal organization and hit them with felony charges. It would not be an excessive response to their actions.
– Teresa Nielsen Hayden, March 30, 2015, 11:25 PM

UPDATE: And here Larry and I were repeatedly accused of gaming the Hugos last year. I told them I didn’t, that I had nothing to do with it, but they didn’t believe me. If Jason Sanford is correct, perhaps they will now admit the accusation was false.