Tag: McRapey

Response Part X

Section C purports to be evidence of what Matthew Johnson imagines to be my “bad faith”.  Which I find to be more than a little ironic, considering his near-complete failure to provide any of the considerable exculpatory evidence available in his “comprehensive” report.

C. Actions which demonstrate bad faith

This section of the report examines actions by Mr. Beale which, while not individually as serious as those described in parts A and B, may be taken as cumulative evidence that his interactions with SFWA have not been in good faith.

Two general issues will be addressed in this section:

1. Declarations of unwillingness to obey SFWA bylaws and procedures

1.1 Archiving Forum material for later publication
1.2 Refusal to abide by bylaws and Board sanctions

2. Threats of nuisance litigation

As well, the final part of this section will look at posts and comments made by Beale in which he makes statements regarding his intentions and his attitude towards SFWA.

In related news, the SFWA Board has voted on my 17 June complaint, which concerned Nora Jemisin’s apparent violation of discussion forum confidentiality in her speech in Australia,  Lee Martindale’s implied threat to commit criminal violence against me in the event of my election, and Laura Resnick’s threat to kill me, dismember me, and serve the remains to her dinner guests.

SFWA President Steven Gould moved that the Board “disallow the complaint filed by a member against multiple members to continue through the complaint process for insufficient grounds” and the measure passed 6-0.

Just to make it clear that I have not violated any confidentiality rules, please note that I received the results of the Board vote from parties other than the SFWA Ombudsman. I am still awaiting the result of my 11 July complaint concerning the actions of Mr. Gould and Mr. Johnson.

Something else I found interesting related to the charge in B.3 concerning the supposedly negative effect of my membership in the organization.  Given the necessity of an objective metric to ascertain the validity of Mr. Johnson’s charges, I asked him how many members the organization had on June 13th versus July 15th.  Mr. Johnson informed me: “The membership numbers in the online directory represent our best data. We do not track membership numbers by specific dates.”

Given that the online directory still contains several members who left the organization some time ago, this makes it clear that the Board will have little choice but to dismiss that aspect of the complaint for what are, in this particular case, legitimately “insufficient grounds”.

And in the meantime, former SFWA president McRapey appears to have taken the news that rehashed Jane Austen is still acceptable “science fiction” in the eyes of SFWA 3.0 a little too enthusiastically.  That, or he’s simply not dealing well with his copious free time now that he’s left Steven Gould to clean up, however ineptly, the Augean detritus that three years of McRapey’s “leadership” left behind.

Either way, he has let it be known that he would henceforth prefer to be known as Jane Scalzi in a courageous attempt to play life on a more challenging difficulty level.  I know everyone in the Dread Ilk will join me in wishing him well in his transition.

UPDATE: Mr. Johnson’s statement is absolutely fascinating in light of Article V, Section 5 (c) of the SFWA bylaws.

Response Part IX

§ 107 . Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use

Notwithstanding
the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted
work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by
any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as
criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies
for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of
copyright. 

My convention policy

Inspired by McRapey’s brave decision to tell the SF conventions of the world what is, and what is not, acceptable to the public, I too have decided to provide a list of hard requirements for my being a panelist,
participant or Guest of Honor at a SF convention in the interest of making the world a better, safer, and more respectful place for everyone:

1. That the convention has a harassment policy, and
that the harassment policy is clear on precisely how all Tor authors and editors will be harassing the other attendees, sexually, ocularly, olfactory and otherwise.  I mean, given the probability that McRapey is going to be running around in his little red pumps while “Hands” Frenkel is feeling up the lumpy protruberances of spike-haired shoggoths and the Toad of Tor is squatting in the corner croaking threats at all who pass it by, these are sights and sounds – and smells –  for which one desperately wants to be prepared.  Preferably with a hazmat suit and a flamethrower.

2. That the convention provide a list of the fawning terms by which I am to be addressed at all times by the attendees, by
at least one and preferably more than one of the following: posting the list on their Website, placing it in their written and electronic
programs, putting up flyers in the common areas, discussing the list
at opening ceremonies or at other well-attended common events.

3. In cases when I am invited as a Guest of Honor,
personal affirmation from the convention chair that I will be provided with two (2) attractive cisgendered women, age not to exceed 25, BMI not to exceed 18.5, and height no less than 5’6″, dressed in age-appropriate Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders attire to serve as my personal entourage. Pictures of the prospective candidates are to be provided by email no less than two weeks prior to the event for my approval. 

Thank you for your support of my courage and goodthought. I will now bathe in the smug comfort of my self-regard.

On a tangential note, I would be remiss if I failed to show my support for the reinvention of SFWA as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Sexual Harassment Police.  In their feeding frenzy, the pinkshirts are demonstrating, more convincingly than I could ever have managed myself, that SFWA is no longer fit for purpose and is now essentially divorced from the business of writing and publishing science fiction.

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.

Equality in the SFWA

A German university points the way:

The University of Leipzig has voted to adopt the feminine version of the word for “professor” as its default. In German Professorin refers to a female professor while Professor is the male equivalent. Under the new measures, written documents will use the term Professorinnen when referring to professors in general. A footnote is to explain that male professors are also included in the description.

This solves so many problems!  I’m sure the likes of McRapey and McRacy will be delighted to henceforth be known as science fiction authoresses.  They’ll probably throw on pretty dresses to celebrate this bold step forward in gender equity. 

You know McRapey is just dying to break out his little red pumps again.

Rabbit logic in action

“Branding terrorists as LOSERS, not villains, not monsters, not fanatics, not foreigners, not religious fanatics —> a win.”
– Ana Marie Cox

This is a revealing and educational statement. It demonstrates both the priorities and the intrinsic solipsism of the average rabbit.  To a rabbit, the thought of being labeled an all-caps LOSER is the ultimate evil and everything from religious faith to national identity will be readily cast aside in order to avoid that dreadful fate.  Being a loser, after all, is only one step away from being cast forth into the outer darkness outside the warren. Living in fear as it does, the rabbit genuinely cannot imagine that the not-rabbit does not feel the same way.

The rabbit believes that if the not-rabbit only understood, truly understood, that all the rabbits are calling the not-rabbit is a LOSER, (or RSHD), he will be so overcome with remorse and shame at his ostracism that he will stop slaughtering people, (or making John Scalzi feel bad about himself), in order to avoid the pain of that terrible, awful, unbearable state.

The fact that this tactic has never, ever worked on a not-rabbit, (for example, the ritual denunciation of people willing to give their lives in suicide attacks as “cowards” doesn’t appear to have any effect in reducing the frequency of such attacks), because, as always, material results are much less important than the rabbit’s ability to feel it is a contributing and valued member of the warren who is Doing Something.

Defined by one’s enemies

I could not be more pleased to know that I am not on the side of chinless men without chests – and I use the term “men” in a very loose sense – such as John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton.

Fuck the NRA.
—
Wil Wheaton (@wilw) April 17, 2013

Savor the sweetness of their tears.  Savor their angry bitterness about your ability to defend yourself against their proxies with lethal force. And remember that because they will never stop being afraid, the rabbits will never stop trying to defang the wolves.

McRapey and McRacist react to criticism

James May criticizes two left-wing starlets of science fiction and fantasy:

Pretending the 21st century is actually the 19th just doesn’t cut it,
no matter how much you argue everyone born before you had the same
interest in politicizing and racializing the most innocuous things, or
even white people today, who show not the least interest by way of law,
institution or mainstream culture in the very things they are accused
of. If you wish to group together people as whites, a thing I detest,
then it is whites who have created the very laws that protect minorities
in America today. In the absence of law, institutions and mainstreams
cultural expressions of racial disdain, one must then of course come up
with theories which assert the unseen, the underground and the
unwitting, showing the “truth” of a thing by its shadow, showing a
dearth of cultural morality while at the same time denying such a thing
is possible by non-white cultures. And let’s be very clear here: there
is no scholarship which can support whites even think of themselves as a
culture racially in the 21st century while the exact opposite in regard
to Jemisin and advocates like her provides mountains of black
symposiums, black organizations and black culture artifacts. There’s
even a black scuba divers association if you can believe in that bit of
idiocy. And don’t hold your breath waiting for either Scalzi or Jemisin
to wring their hands over black basketball players in the NBA
overrepresented by 5 times their demography in America. “Meritocracy”
is a slippery word in the hands of racial bigots. Am I to assume that
lack of diversity in the NBA is a tacit plot by black players to keep
out the white ones, or an example of black privilege?

You can’t have this argument two ways – either skin brings nothing to
the table or it does. If pedagogic racialists believe diversity in and
of itself brings something to the table then it is taking up the
opposite argument of what it claims, because those people are still an
“other,” just a better one, with innate qualities other races apparently
don’t have. But that argument can be turned around in a flash and in
the end, it’s just as stupid to ask a man to stand on a pedestal because
of his skin as it is to ask him to stand in a ditch. In this light, the
obsession the SFWA has with shallow diversity on the one hand while
arguing race and gender mean nothing on the other seems sad and rather
dark. Content of character, remember that? Gives a stupid and whole new
meaning to the term “uplift wars.”

The idea that Scalzi has what it takes to get inside the head of 100
million men based on their skin is an absurd idea and a racist one at
that. It’s no surprise to me that it basically amounts, in principle, to
the exact opposite of what he says he champions, because, at its heart,
political racialism is Orwellian doublethink. Scalzi should be sure to write a follow up where he tells us what 3
million Jewish and 20 million black men think. He mustn’t forget to
explain how he effortlessly rises above the fray while indulging in the
most despicable racial stereotypes, a neat trick. So generic whites are a
safe political target. Try the same thought process on Jews. I’m dying
to read that one. What about gays? How are they all doing? Does he
approve?

And this is how the two starlets react to it, on Twitter, naturally.

McRacist: ‏@scalzi What the — ? HAHAHAHA I’m not a Tor author, you putz.
 
McRapey: @nkjemisin It’s a special piece of writing, isn’t it?

McRacist:
@scalzi Why do champions of anti-racism (anti-anti-racism?) sound so
alike as they endlessly blather on? So much energy, so little *sense.*

McRapey:
@nkjemisin Poor logical skill and underdeveloped rhetorical control are
strongly correlated, i.e., I can’t argue but I CAN go on and on.

Quite
the pair of intellectuals, aren’t they.  And such a devastatingly
convincing response. McRacist is not a Tor author, ergo she must not be a racist black woman and McRapey isn’t a racist, incoherent gamma male who hates his socio-sexual superiors.  HAHAHAHA
EVIL WHITE MALE POWER AND CENTRALITY!  Also, DRAGONS!

Of
course, McRapey is correct.  He can’t argue. That’s why he always talks
about his critics instead of directly addressing their criticisms of him.
That’s also why he flees from debate, both in third-party venues and on his own blog, which is a pity since he is one of the
finest examples of the correlation of poor logical skill and
underdeveloped rhetorical control you’ll find anywhere on the Internet.

Me show all dem me no gamma! Me show dem me no rabbit! Now me haz gammarabbit.com. Agree and amplify DAT, bitchez! No hurtz now… why still hurtz, WHY?

As
for McRacist, someone needs to explain to her that the fact that
something doesn’t make sense to her doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t
make sense at all.

* * *

It may simply mean that she’s not intelligent enough to understand it.

Mailvox: in defense of “squee”

Perlhaqr attempts what I can only see as a futile defense:

I have to admit I’m somewhat confused by your diagnosis of scalzification via use of the word “squee”.  I use that term all the time, and I’m one of Correia’s Alphas. I don’t see the ideological binding of the term, I’m afraid.

The binding is not ideological, but socio-sexual.  Now, I don’t happen to know what “one of Correia’s Alphas” might be, but I find it very hard to conceive that Perlhaqr is either a sexual ALPHA as per Roissy or an Alpha Male according to the socio-sexual hierarchy. He might as convincingly attempt to defend his predilection for hair-braiding or high heels.  Alphas do not menstruate, they do not use their iPhones to self-shoot in bathrooms, (they seldom have iPhones in the first place), and they most assuredly do not “squee” over anything.

One can be excited.  One can be pumped, jacked, or psyched. One can rejoice, one can enthuse, and one can celebrate.  But one can no more be an alpha male and “squee” than one can queef, lactate, or get pregnant.  Only gamma males like McRapey, who revel in their perverse delusions, consider it not only fitting, but downright cool, to express themselves in terms that are popularized and primarily utilized by junior high school girls.

Should he wish to lower the probability of attractive adult women recoiling in disappointment, disgust and outright horror, Perlhaqr may also wish to consider excising “OMG”, “ZOMG”, “soooooooo”, and “One Direction” from his vocabulary.