Tag: mailvox

The SFWA Board decides

Well, so long as the consideration of the evidence was careful….

After careful consideration of the evidence gathered by the Board-appointed investigator and your response, and in compliance with the existing Massachusetts By-Laws, the approved operations and procedures, and legal counsel, the SFWA Board has unanimously voted for your expulsion from the organization, effective immediately. This has been a difficult decision, but thorough examination of the evidence and the situation makes it clear that this action is necessary to best serve the interests of the organization and its members.

According to our records, you paid for your Lifetime Membership in October of 2002. As this period of time exceeds 10 years, you are not eligible for any pro-rata refund of your dues.

Sincerely,

Steven Gould
President
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

Fascinating. Notice that Steven Gould informs me “the SFWA Board has unanimously voted for your expulsion from the organization”, but he did not inform me that I was actually been expelled, nor did SFWA subsequently announce my expulsion, presumably because Gould knows “the existing Massachusetts By-Laws” state that as per Title XXII, Chapter 180, Section 18: No member of such corporation shall be expelled by vote of
less than a majority of all the members thereof, nor by vote of less
than three quarters of the members present and voting upon such
expulsion.

In any event, if you’d like to see the evidence that was so carefully considered by the SFWA Board yourself, you can download the two relevant documents:

And if you’re looking for my immediate response to what appears to be an elaborate charade on the part of the SFWA Board, all I can really say is this: rabbits gonna rabbit.

UPDATE: I was initially been under the impression that SFWA had expelled me from the organization. But after legal review, it was determined that the Board merely took the first step in the process since they have not yet held the full membership vote to confirm their decision that is required by the existing Massachusetts By-Laws.

    Mailvox: four erroneous arguments

    Ann Morgan appears to have no idea that she’s in completely over her head here. Her anti-Christian reasoning is specious and rests on a foundation of ignorance and error.

    Christianity generally fails when one or more of a few things happen:

    1.
    Those who claim something is ‘sinful’ cannot give any reason why it is,
    other than ‘Because God says so’. In the absence of actual proof of
    God, functionally, that statement is no different than ‘Because I say
    so’.

    2. A person is promised various rewards during their life
    for being ‘good’, only to have the promise broken, and the rewards
    either not given out at all, or given to those who were not good. Sooner
    or later, they will conclude that the promise of an afterlife is just
    one more promise that is going to be broken.

    3. The wealth earned
    by a person believing in Christian ethics ends up in the hands of those
    promoting the Christian ethics. At some point they are going to
    conclude that the entire business of Christianity is a con, to trick
    them out of their wealth.

    4. The promise of ‘forgiveness’ sounds
    nice, but the way it functions is that people who harm others and their
    society their whole lives, get to repent at the end of their lives and
    go to heaven. This will end up in some sort of ‘tragedy of the commons’.
    If you don’t want the commons overgrazed, you need to be vigilant about
    those who are overgrazing it; allowing them to overgraze it for years,
    ruin the commons for everyone else while getting fat cattle for
    themselves, then tell them everything will be fine because they ‘repent’
    is a recipe for disaster.

    Even her introduction is false.  Christianity does not, and cannot, fail on the basis of any of these points.

    1. There is no other reason than “God says so”.  In the absence of God, sin does not exist.  This is hardly philosophical or theological news.  However, makes the basic error of confusing an objective statement with a subjective one.  For example, it makes no difference whether the Magna Carta exists or not, the statement that “the Magna Carta says you must do X” is materially different than “I say you must do X”.  This should be completely obvious, since when the Christian says “God says Y is a sin” and cites a document that existed before he was born, that statement cannot possibly be considered equal to “because I say so” whether God exists or not.
    2. This is irrelevant.  The Bible says that all are fallen and no one is good, save God.  Her argument is based on a false premise and indicates her ignorance concerning Christian theology.  Luke 18:19: “And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? none is good, save one, that is, God.”
    3. This is observably false, as evidenced by the fact of billions of Christians who have not, in fact, concluded that the entire business of Christianity is a con.  It would be a poor con that settles for ten percent when the federal government takes, on average, twice that.
    4. This is logically fallacious because it rests on a false assumption.  The fact is that there are relatively few deathbed conversions and there are billions of Christians who do not wait to repent of their sins.  Ergo, no tragedy of the commons. Let reason be silent when experience gainsays its conclusions.

    Mailvox: the null hypothesis

    CKK has a few questions about God:

    I
    read your blog and find that you make interesting points. I have a few
    questions for you which revolve around the Null Hypothesis as it relates
    to the evidence and knowledge of God.

    First, do you
    ground your faith in God based upon an evidentiary standpoint? I know
    the trend (and often impasse) in discourse between atheists/agnostics
    and Christians revolves around which side has the burden of proof and I
    am wondering how God has satisfied any logical hiccups you may have come
    across in your life.

    Second, in regards to other
    people who lack faith, how can God ask people to perform a logical leap
    to believe in Him which they don’t do in every other part of their
    lives? For example, a basic precept of just criminal courts is the idea
    of being innocent until proven guilty; the burden of proof is always on
    the accuser (in the form of the State) as they are the ones making the
    claim of guilt. This is the same with every other arena of life and even
    forms the basis of the scientific method. Yet this isn’t done for God.
    We are given antidotes based on argument but not necessarily based on
    evidence.

    Third, and this relates to the first, is who
    does the burden of proof regarding the evidence of God falls upon? Those
    who claim His existence or those who deny Him?

    I
    would say my faith is more grounded in a logical standpoint than in one
    based purely on evidence, although I am entirely content with the
    evidence for God as it exists to date.  The inability of secular and
    pagan philosophers to produce coherent moral systems, combined with the
    logical absurdity of most non-Christian moral systems, leaves me
    entirely satisfied with the Christian moral structure, even if I find
    occasionally find the application of that structure to social policy to
    be difficult, if not impossible.  Since a Creator God is a necessary
    anchor for that moral structure, I conclude that not only must He exist,
    but that it is necessary for Man to postulate His existence even if
    there were no evidence for that existence to be found.

    I
    find it remarkable, and rather stupid, that individuals who don’t
    hesitate to accept mathematical postulates in order to permit a
    considerable quantity of mathematical equations to function effectively
    are so terrified of accepting the existence of God as a moral
    postulate.  It strikes me as even less intelligent than rejecting basic
    math postulates and thereby refusing to utilize any of the math that
    follows from them.

    How can God ask people to perform a
    leap of faith rather than logic?  Very easily, since obedience is
    clearly more important to God than understanding.  I neither ask nor
    care if my dog, my children, or my teammates understand my orders, I
    simply want them to follow them.  If I yell “square” to a teammate with
    the ball, it is of no concern to me whether he grasps all the relative
    positions of the various players on the field, I just want him to react
    by immediately passing the ball 90 degrees to one side.  If I can test
    my teammate’s confidence in me by telling him to pass the ball based on
    faith, God can certainly test our confidence in Him by telling us to
    believe without proof.

    It’s not as if both Jesus Christ
    and Aristotle haven’t independently explained the reason anyhow.  Many
    people saw Jesus perform miracles and didn’t believe. And as Aristotle
    observed centuries before Jesus was performing those miracles, some
    people cannot be instructed by knowledge.  I tend to doubt this
    observation of basic human behavior would have escaped God.

    The
    burden of proof always falls upon the individual asserting something to
    another individual.  If I ask you if you believe God exists and you
    tell me that you do not, you have no burden of proof.  You were simply
    asked about a simple fact and you have no need to justify that fact to
    me or anyone else.  If, on the other hand, you tell me that God does not
    exist, then you have made an assertion and the burden of proving the
    truth of that assertion lies with you.

    A view on black crime and white decline

    In which I ask Huggums for his opinion about the observation that blacks have higher crime rates in a wide sampling of societies:

    What is your currently preferred theory for higher black crime rates? You
    know mine is a combination of genetic and cultural factors leading to
    lower average time preferences, I’m just interested in knowing what
    yours happens to be.

    Pretty much the same, but I don’t think the
    genetic influence is quite as strong as many believe it to be. I think
    that depending on the cultural environment and the existence of positive
    social pressure, just about any human trait can find a positive mode of
    expression.

    The genetic issue can only really be “solved” with
    time. Of course, if white liberals are any indication, even if some
    environmental catastrophe or social upheaval pushed the next generations
    of black people towards civilization, once that civilization reaches
    its apex, it will begin working feverishly to destroy itself. Either
    that or just start massacring its own citizens because of whatever
    thin-as-wet-tissue-paper reason it happens to come up with.

    Huggums raises an important point here, which is the flip side of my controversial observation that the African population, taken in the whole, can only be half-civilized because fully civilizing a people appears to require about 1,000 years of exposure to civilization.  This, I have argued, is the primary reason blacks have repeatedly shown themselves unable to maintain advanced societies everywhere from Detroit to Zimbabwe, and why the more savage portion of the population has demonstrated that it cannot even constructively participate in an advanced society.

    However, whites and other distinct human populations should not be too impressed with the accomplishments of their ancestors simply because they happened to get an earlier start on the process, because if the process of civilization is hard, maintaining it is observably even more difficult.  Indeed, one could even argue that it is impossible and eventual failure is only a matter of time.

    It would be very hard to argue with Huggums’s observation that there are a considerable quantity of whites who have been working feverishly, and in some cases purposefully, to destroy white Christian European civilization.  Indeed, one could observe that their actions are a logical extension of the white European destruction of traditional Chinese civilization, traditional Japanese civilization, traditional Russian half-civilization, and even traditional Aztec/Inca quarter-civilization.

    If I am correct and extended average time preferences is a critical factor in developing and maintaining civilization, then it would appear the white population has taken several significant steps towards savagery, in both intellectual and behavioral terms. The Keynesian concept of economic growth through inflation and debt-spending is literal intellectual savagery, as intrinsically magical and nonsensical as the illiterate Australian aborigines ideas about causation. And it is not hard to determine where “if it feels good, do it” falls on the time preferences spectrum.

    And this highlights the intrinsic danger of inviting the barbarians inside the gates and encouraging them to integrate with the civilized citizenry. It is easier to bring down than to build up. It is much easier to infect the civilized youth with the idea of living for today and letting tomorrow take care of itself than it is to convince the savage youth to restrain their impulses and save for tomorrow what could be be consumed today. 

    Daniel Patrick Moynihan once described the pathologies of black America as a warning of the coming pathologies of white America.  He was more prophetic than he knew; the dire effects of the behavioral problems to which he attempted to draw America’s attention turned out to be even worse than he had feared.  Black hip-hop culture may have been the most noticeable symptom of the cancer of anti-civilizational savagery, but it was the wigger adoption of it that signified the metastasis.

    We are now well past the point of peak American civilization. The only question now is how far into savagery we are going to fall before the process can be reversed.  If it can be reversed.

    Random book notes

    Huggums asks about other novels with military action:

    I really enjoyed all the short stories leading to A Throne of Bones and
    I’m halfway through the novel now. The battles are what really pull me
    in. Are there any other novels with that level of tactical detail that
    you’d recommend?

    That’s a good question.  There really aren’t many in the fantasy genre that spring immediately to mind, and even the historical Roman fiction out there tends to concentrate on the personalities rather than the tactics.  The Malazan Books of the Fallen contain some, although it’s more akin to the Bataan Death March than anything out of Jomini or Vegetius and reading the 10-volume Malazan series feels a bit like a literary death march at times.

    I haven’t read Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Chronicles, but based on his Sharpe books, which I have read, I suspect they will have a fair amount of military tactics.  In the latter, he provides some of the most detailed description of Napoleonic tactics I’ve seen in fiction. Unfortunately, I imagine the former will probably also have a character who always gets – and loses – the girl ala James Bond, even on battlefields where one would not imagine there could possibly be a girl for miles around.

    Harry Turtledove’s Misplaced Legion, which I belatedly discovered was more or less ripped straight out of Procopius, is probably his best work and also contains an interesting take on tactics as a conventional Roman legion is forced to adapt to fighting foes akin to the historical enemies of the Byzantine empire.

    In general, there are a lot more novels that utilize naval tactics, and ersatz naval tactics in space, than infantry tactics.  But if anyone has any additional recommendations for Huggums, please feel free to throw them out there.  As a few sharp-eyed Selenoth fans have noted, the tactical elements within the Selenoth series will remain strong; the question is who will be utilizing the Tactics of Asclepiodotus.

    In other news, I was surprised and delighted to discover how unexpectedly good A Presumption of Death turned out to be.  Dorothy Sayers is my third favorite mystery writer, after Ellis Peters and Agatha Christie, (so much for the theories of my literary misogyny), and so my expectations from a book that was cobbled together from the Wimsey Papers were pretty low.  But Jill Paton Walsh did an astonishing job of capturing the essence of Sayers’s characters; she wisely chose to make Harriet Vane the center of the novel.  While the wit does not sparkle and the erudition is more plodding, both are there and the plot is considerably superior to any of the proper Wimsey novels.

    Walsh doesn’t give in to the temptation to modernize either the characters or the setting; the Christianity of the English people of the World War II setting is deep and reminds the reader of the civilized world we have lost.  The nobility, the dignity, and the humanity of even the most common people is striking in comparison with the parade of vulgar fools, cowards and moral degenerates who fancy themselves a progressive advancement from their predecessors.  It’s easily the best novel I’ve read for the first time this year.

    The author adds in a note:

    From November 1939 to January 1940 Dorothy L. Sayers made a series of contributions to the Spectator magazine, consisting of mock letters to and from various members of the Wimsey family, about war-time conditions like blackout, evacuation, rationing, and the need for the public to take personal responsibility: ‘They must not continually ask for leadership – they must lead themselves.’

    These contributions, usually now referred to as ‘The Wimsey Papers’ in effect lay out the characters in the crime novels like pieces on a chess board during the opening moves of a game. They tell us where everyone was. Lord Peter was somewhere abroad, on a secret mission under the direction of the Foreign Office; Bunter was with him; Harriet had taken her own children and those of her sister-in-law to the country, the loathed Helen, Duchess of Denver had joined the Ministry of Instruction and Morale, etc. etc.

    The Wimsey Papers are almost, but not quite, the latest information that Dorothy L Sayers provided about her characters. There is also a short story called ‘Talboys’, contained in the volume ‘Striding Folly’ which shows Peter and Harriet and their children living in their country farmhouse peacefully together, and which must refer to 1942.

    The Wimsey Papers are not fiction, and were not intended to be read in a continuous chunk. Some of them are about details of war-time history that would now require extensive footnotes in explication. But they do afford an authoritative foothold for an account of the Wimsey family in 1940. I have opened this novel with a selection from them, and incorporated insights and information from them in the narrative where I could.

    I should be very pleased indeed if anyone playing in the Selenoth sandbox, now or in the future, manages to do so as effectively as Ms Walsh.  It has definitely interested me in her own novels.  If this is fan fiction, as a few puritans have described it, it must come very near to the Form of that despised form.

    Tom Simon’s Lord Talon’s Revenge is quite good, although it is the sort of novel that is most likely to be appreciated by a writer or a student of the traditional fantasy genre.  One imagines Matthew David Surridge would have a field day with it.  I’ve also been re-reading Stephen Brust’s Vlad Taltos novels and while they remain fairly entertaining, it’s a little disconcerting to discover how socio-sexually juvenile and logically nonsensical they are.  I hope to put a few more substantive reviews together in the next week or two, but in the event that I do not, I thought I would at least mention them here.

    Mailvox: what martial art

    The Baseball Savant has been bulking up:

    I remember asking you this
    awhile back but I’ve went through some physical changes. I’m going to
    start to really try and master a martial art. I remember talking about
    brazilian jiu-jitsu because I thought at 5’10 it might be better to
    ground fight given my lack of height but I think I remember you saying
    something about akido because of my strength at potentially being a
    striker. I think when I e-mailed you I was around 200lbs but now I’m 245lbs and have been doing some lifting. My best lifts are:

    BENCH: I can do 225lbs for 49reps and my last max was 430 although it might be higher.
    SQUAT: 550lbs
    MILITARY: I do bells for this and my gym only goes up to 135lbs but I can get reps (6-8) with these

    DEADLIFT: 600lbs for one

    What is your recommendation on this? Is it still strike-oriented?

    Okay, that’s ridiculous.  That’s 3x more reps than I can do at 225, or rather, than I could do before I dinged my shoulder.  Anyhow, with that sort of power at his disposal, BS probably doesn’t need to do much in the way of strike-oriented training.  Strike-training allows one to deliver more power through speed and technique, but when one already has power in truckloads, it’s not necessary.

    However, all the power in the world doesn’t do much good when one doesn’t have the reflexes, moves, and combinations that come from training.  So, I would look at something in the grappling range that still uses strikes, in other words, aikido rather than judo.  But some strike-oriented sparring is still a good idea. Ender does judo and I’ve noticed that while he and his fellow judoka have an enhanced ability to defend themselves, it hasn’t given them the heightened sense of alertness or the hair-trigger fighting reflexes one is accustomed to seeing in a well-trained strike-oriented fighter.

    Aikido may do so; I don’t know.  But either way, I would encourage BS to look for an aikido school that utilizes multi-discipline sparring.  At the end of the day, there is simply no substitute for getting hit.

    Mailvox: on moderation

    Halojones-Fan erroneously believes moderation equates to copyright and responsibility:

    Someone as smart as you figure yourself to be should understand that, if
    you’re talking in a legal-proceedings sense, there is no such thing as
    “light” moderation. It’s like saying you’re “a little bit” pregnant.
    If you delete comments for content, beyond simple “this is spam”, then
    you’re implying that you review and approve of whatever stays on the
    blog. You provide the discussion forum; you allow people to wander in
    and use it; you are as responsible for the content as the editor of a
    newspaper is responsible for what’s in his rag.

    That moderating is hard is not an excuse to not moderate.

    “But it’s other people saying these things, not me!” Then let them get their own blogs.

    First, his argument is intrinsically self-contradictory.  How is spam excerpted from this magical review and approve process?  Furthermore, the fact that a comment is not deleted does not mean it has been reviewed and approved; it does not even mean that it has been read.

    The newspaper comparison is a false equivalence. The very important difference between me and the editor of a newspaper is that the editor of the newspaper is soliciting and paying for the content he publishes.  The newspaper also often owns the copyright for the material he publishes, whereas I do not solicit comments, pay for them, or claim ownership of their copyright.

    To say that I am responsible for the comments made by the commenters on this blog is more closely akin to claiming that the owner of a restaurant is responsible for the comments made by the people who come to eat there.  The fact that the comments are written here rather than spoken is irrelevant; it is totally absurd to attempt to hold any blogger responsible for the free speech of his commenters and I am unaware of any case in which a blogger has been legally held responsible for the comments of his commenters regardless of whether moderation is allowed or not.

    Furthermore, even in the legal sense, there is a distinction between light moderation and heavy moderation, just as there is a definite legal difference between a woman who is pregnant for two weeks and one who is pregnant for eight months.  Halojones-fan point is observably absurd, as the law quite clearly distinguishes between a woman who is “lightly pregnant” and a woman who is “heavily pregnant” in numerous ways.

    Mailvox: on Scalzi the author

    Patrick is curious about my opinion of John Scalzi as an SF/F author:

    Vox, his politics aside, what is your assessment of the Chief Rabbit as a novelist? China Mieville, for example, is a Marxist lunatic, but I read one of his novels and found it creative–if a little dull.  Do
    you think that Scalzi’s would be more or less successful as a novelist
    if he stopped blogging, or if he merely stopped the political posts?

    My assessment is that Scalzi is a one-book writer of modest literary talent who has prolonged his writing career through a combination of a) unusually good self-marketing skills, and, b) stunt writing.

    In the recent history of publishing, there are a lot of one-book writers, by which I mean writers who have one genuinely good book in them and nothing more regardless of how many books they write.  Dave Eggers is a very good example of this while Jay McInerney is another.  I think David Foster Wallace would have proven to be one too; I even suspect the painfully self-aware Wallace knew this and the knowledge may have played some role in his suicide.

    In most cases, the reason is simple: the writer is writing about his life.  Very few of us have lives so interesting that they are capable of supporting multiple books about them, so once the writer has finished his book about himself, he literally has nothing else about which to write.  Now, that’s not the case with Scalzi; Old Man’s War is obviously not about his life. But although it’s a pretty good science fiction novel, (you may recall I reviewed it favorably), in hindsight it can be seen to contain the seeds of Scalzi’s subsequent decline as a writer.  First, there was the transparently silly bit about the atheist who rebukes the bigoted Christian by – you’ll never guess – quoting John 8:7.  How totally new and creative and different than anything that had ever been done before! That little scene was a hint concerning his intellectual laziness as well as the ideological inclinations that have increasingly taken over his public persona. Second, and more importantly, there were the heavily derivative aspects that briefly caused everyone to wonder if a new Heinlein had appeared upon the scene.

    Not so much. What we didn’t realize at the time is that the Heinlein elements were only there because Scalzi is insufficiently creative. He’s essentially a fan-fic writer whose derivative works are publishable, not unlike EL James.  This isn’t necessarily a bad strategy if you want to sell books, just ask Terry Brooks or every post-Laurell K. Hamilton author of urban fantasy.  But it’s the exact opposite of being a good storyteller, much less a great science fiction writer like Heinlein.  I am not the anti-Scalzi, China Mieville is, their political kinship notwithstanding.

    Scalzi sent me The Android’s Dream when it came out and I also read The Ghost Brigades.  And that was when I stopped reading his books, not because I had anything against him, but because the former was abysmally unfunny and the latter was uninteresting. I didn’t review them here because I didn’t have anything positive to say about either book and I didn’t wish to poison relations that had improved after our initial encounter.  It didn’t surprise me when he went on to publish books like Fuzzy Nation and Redshirts, since by that time I’d already pegged him for a derivative stunt writer.

    Now, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with stunt writing.  It requires an amount of cleverness and can definitely sell books, as AJ Jacobs has shown.  The problem is that you can’t repeat the stunt, but have to continue coming up with new ones in order to stay relevant.  Scalzi’s latest stunt, the serial ebook, was a good one, but has already worn thin.

    I suspect Scalzi knows his limitations better than anyone, which is why he has been attempting to move on to television, movies, and games.  If he is successful in making any of those moves, it wouldn’t surprise me if he stopped writing novels because he obviously doesn’t write for the love of it or because he has so many stories to tell.  He’s a true professional in that he writes to earn money, and he does an exceptionally good job in that regard at a time when it is difficult to do so. I don’t think even his biggest fans grasp how gifted a self-marketing BS artist he is; had he gone into Internet technology rather than writing, he would be a very wealthy man on his fourth failing VC-backed venture by now.

    I actually have great respect for Scalzi’s ability to make bestselling soup out of what is very thin literary gruel.  If Tor knew anything about business beyond scooping up genre awards and paying for one-week bestseller list placements, they would hire him as an editor and turn him into a James Patterson-style book factory churning out three or four books per year. It’s an absurd waste of talent for Scalzi to spend time writing his derivative mediocrities when he could be marketing them.  There are 500 SFWA members who could write them as well and at least 150 who would produce better books.

    In answer to the final question, I think Scalzi would be far less successful as a bookseller if he stopped blogging, and I think it would be a huge mistake for him to stop the political posts because they are an important part of his appeal to his most loyal fans, the great majority of whom are SF/F readers.  Nor do the political posts appear to hurt at all him with the right. Conservatives and libertarians have always bought left-wing fiction because they are accustomed being offered little choice in the matter.

    Mailvox: Mike Resnick clarifies

    One of the chief targets of the SFWA pinkshirts corrects two misconceptions and explains a few things concerning Bulletingate:

    A couple of corrections. I -asked- Laura not to get involved in this. I
    know how much vituperation can get spewn by the hatemongers.

    Also, I had nothing to do with the Campbell Award. I never created it, administered it, or won it.

    For
    those who haven’t read the offending articles (in which case, you have a
    lot in common with the screamers): in issue #200, at the request of our
    (female) editor, we wrote a very complimentary article about editors of
    that gender…but we had the temerity to call them “ladies” rather than
    “females”, and to state that Bea Mahaffey, who edited Other Worlds 63
    years ago and died a couple of decades ago (and was a close personal
    friend of mine) was beautiful. Those were sins #1 and #2. After the hate
    mail began appearing, we committed Sin #3 in issue #202: we defended
    our right to call Bea Mahaffey beautiful, and our (female) editor’s
    right to run a generic, non-naked, non-bare-breasted warrior woman on
    the cover. They’re still screaming for our deaths by slow torture. 🙂

    It
    got so bad that our editor, Jean Rabe, resigned, not just as editor but
    as a member of SFWA. And for the record, I hired her as my assistant on
    the Stellar Guild line of books 5 minutes later.

    Corrections duly noted. Although one can only imagine the shrieks of outrage when Mr. Resnick’s shockingly sexist paternalism becomes known to the pinkshirts.  I think it goes without saying that neither Jim Hines nor John Scalzi would ever be so appallingly sexist as to attempt to silence a woman’s voice in this oppressive and demeaning manner.  They’re much more inclined to hide behind, or wear, a woman’s skirt than to protect her.

    Mr. Resnick, on the other hand, is sufficiently old school to wish to shield his daughter from the hatemongering pinkshirts, for which one can only commend him.  And his Stellar Guild line promises to be a significant step up for Ms Rabe from the Bulletin. The idea of publishing collaborations between established writers and their proteges is a good one and something I can fully support, having been the beneficiary of a similar collaboration with the Original Cyberpunk in the early days of my SF/F career.

    It is amusing to note that despite SFWA being an organization originally founded to professionalize the relations between SF writers and SF publishers, this latter-day parody finds itself engaged in furious attacks on new model editors and publishers like Mr. Resnick and myself.  One suspects that one factor contributing to the pinkshirts’ unmitigated rage is their shattered dreams, as Judith Tarr describes in the following manner:

    Now, of course, there are so many more options. Chances are the
    author will still go broke–all those stories of ebook gold mines are
    exceptions, not the rule, especially for authors without large
    followings or very up-to-date, popular, trendy subject matter. But the
    books will see the light of day as ebooks, print-on-demand books,
    audiobooks, even games or graphic novels. That doesn’t help the authors of ten or twenty or more years ago who
    saw their hopes crushed, their dreams shattered, and their books
    rejected by the one standard that validated them in publishers’ terms:
    money and sales.

    It is not a coincidence that the vast majority of SFWA members who Mr. Resnick describes as “screamers” are complete nonentities in the field, most of whom have published little more than the bare minimum to qualify for membership. They’ve taken over the organization just as it has become entirely irrelevant to the wider SF/F market.

    At what point does complicity begin?

    AV has a question about how responsible he is for his organization’s official position contra Christianity and traditional morality.

    I have a dilemma. I work at a huge [REDACTED] company that is based in [REDACTED]. The company is publicly pro-GLBT.

    This week the HR dept published an internal article describing a company-sponsored pro-gay club. There was a fairly civil discussion taking place in the comments section. (Which illustrates the obliviousness of the publisher that comments would be enabled at all). Later in the day I noticed that the Christian comments were removed and others were not).

    Not huge deal, the company can do whatever they want. As a libertarian, I think its fine if they only hire GLBTs and the market can determine if that’s viable.

    But it got me thinking, am I participating in evil or facilitating ungodly activities? Would Paul work there?

    Clearly, if my manager asked me to sign a scroll in blood denouncing Christ, I would terminate my relationship with them. Things usually aren’t that obvious. I am sure Hitler’s secretary didn’t think anything was wrong at first either.

    At what point does the negative effects from associating with worldly organization outweigh the necessity to make a living? Or as good of a living; a longer commute isn’t exactly like being thrown to the lions.

    I don’t think an employee is responsible for his employer’s actions.  He is only responsible for his own. And so long as one is not lying or dissembling about one’s faith and about one’s principles, as Abraham did when asked about the nature of his relationship to his wife, then I think one can continue to work in that situation.  After all, one is expected to be in the world, merely not of it.

    On the other hand, the writing is clearly already on the wall.  The fact that one can, in good conscience, continue to work there now does not mean that one is wise to do so.  It is bad enough that the corporation has embraced evil and is now openly pro-GLBT, but the fact that the Christian comments were selectively deleted indicates that it will soon be entering the next stage of actively suppressing all internal dissent.

    The corporation hasn’t begun the witch hunts yet, but it will almost surely begin doing so in the relatively near future.  And that is when the ritual submissions will be required, which is when AV will no longer be able to remain there in good conscience.  Given that the clock is already ticking, I would recommend that AV begin actively looking for another job while he still has his current one.