Tag: McRapey

SJWs always lie

“Being a “social justice warrior” means I get to read (and incidentally,
vote for on award ballots) what I want, rather than waiting to be told
by someone else what I should like and what I shouldn’t.”
 – John Scalzi, 1 May 2015

Actually, that’s almost exactly the opposite of what it means to be an SJW. That sounds considerably more like a #GamerGate position, which McRapey vehemently opposes.

Translation: Johnny Con knows he’s on the losing side and he’s trying to run his “make nice” routine. Yep.

“You’ll note I’m addressing Mr. Ringo’s argument here and not Mr.
Ringo himself. He and I get on tolerably well as humans. Do likewise,
please. Likewise, avoid gratuitous slamming of Baen,
please. This all is less about the publisher itself than it is about the
publisher being used as a stand-in for a particular worldview, which it
(or its individual employees or authors) may or may not endorse.”
  – John Scalzi, 1 May 2015

“I think both Toni Weisskopf and Jim Minz are eminently worthy of Hugo
Award editor nominations; I regret the presence of the slates makes the
argument of their consideration more complicated for so many people.”
   – John Scalzi, 1 May 2015

Contrast with this:

When Ms. Weisskopf addresses the Baen true faithful like this (as she
does both in the Baen’s Bar and on the site of Ms. Hoyt, a Baen author),
aside from anything else she’s doing, she’s engaging in the laudable
tactic of binding — or rebinding — her company’s host to her company’s
product: Baen fans are the real science fiction fans, and real science fiction fans want real science fiction, which comes from Baen. It’s a nice bit of commercial epistemic closure. So good job, Ms. Weisskopf.

Ms. Weisskopf’s unilateral attempt to establish fans of her publishing house as the One True Church, with Heinlein as its graven image, is flat out wrong. Not only are they not the One True Church, they don’t even get Robert Heinlein to themselves. They have to timeshare him with me and with many other fans who love his work, see him as an influence, and at the same time are happy to welcome anyone who wants to be part of the science fiction and fantasy community into the fold, no matter how they got there. Try to take Robert Heinlein from me, guys. See where that gets you. He’s not yours alone. You can’t gatekeep him from me.

Likewise, Ms. Weisskopf’s handwringing about what should be done about the interlopers and heretics incorrectly arrogates to her little group the ability to make any sort of decision on the matter. They can’t. Baen is not, in fact, the core of science fiction and fantasy; people who identify as Baen fans are not the only “real” science fiction and fantasy fans. 
– John Scalzi, 11 March, 2014

 Yeah, I tend to doubt she’s likely to buy it, Johnny Con. And “tolerably well as humans” should be translated as “John Ringo regards me with contempt, but I’m not done trying to suck up to him yet.”

And then there is, as usual, this: “Pretty sure that’s not the reason as far as regards Beale. I think his problem is straight-up envy.”

Mm-hmmm. Keep telling yourself that, Johnny. Perhaps one day you’ll even start to believe it.

Defensive much?

Johnny Con is feeling a little caught out. And defensive:

    1. It’s been recently suggested that I should be ashamed for getting the Hugo for Redshirts (by an author who hasn’t himself read the book).

    2. To be clear: I am not. I am deeply pleased it won, and I think it was entirely deserving of the award, and the other awards it won.

    3. It’s funny and an easy read, and if you think that’s easy to accomplish as a writer — and still pack an emotional punch — well, try it.

    4. The same author suggested (again without reading it), that it was a “social justice” sort of book, which lent itself to winning.

    5. It is, in fact probably the least racially/sexually diverse book I’ve written BECAUSE the characters were supposed to reflect a BAD show.

    6. Indeed, when the TV script for it was written, they CHANGED the sex of a couple of characters to make it more diverse! This is true.

    7. So it really is a bad example of a Social Justice-y sort of book. Much worse, in fact, than my OMW series in general.

    8. Also, if the “SJWs” vote en bloc, why would they award me, SWM, when Saladin Ahmed and Mira Grant were on the ballot?

    9. The only answer here would be because the SJWs secretly crave straight white male leadership, which would be kinda not SJW-y at all.

    10. I’m happy with the politics I have and I try to be a good human, which is apparently what makes me an SJW. But Redshirts is, in fact…

    11. … a genuinely TERRIBLE example of a book to show influence of the SJW cabal, both in content, and in its year. It’s a bad argument.

    12. The book won for a number of reasons, including people just liked it. But because of an SJW cabal? Really, no. That’s dumb.

    13. I’m done.

My rebuttal:
 

“Man, I owe you a blowjob,” Duvall said.

“What?” Dahl said.

“What?” Hester said.

“Sorry,” Duvall said. “In ground forces, when someone does you a
favor you tell them you owe them a sex act. If it’s a little thing, it’s
a handjob. Medium, blowjob. Big favor, you owe them a fuck. Force of
habit. It’s just an expression.”


“Got it,” Dahl said.


“No actual blowjob forthcoming,” Duvall said. “To be clear”

“It’s the thought that counts,” Dahl said, and turned to Hester. “What about you? You want to owe me a blowjob, too?”

“I’m thinking about it ,” Hester said.  

Best Novel-worthy prose or Participation Hugo? You decide. This is nearly as amusing:

I do find the fixation on me weird, and I really do think it comes down to the fact that I would be the perfect flag-bearer for the sort of person who identifies as a Puppy, if for the inconvenient fact of my personal politics. And also because Beale really has a thing for me, which is straight-up pure envy, as far as I can tell.

Yes, because contempt is so easily confused for straight-up pure envy. What It was a little more than two years ago that I was informed I was desperately jealous of Mr. Scalzi because his blog readership was “ten times the size of mine.” Now that my blog readership is three times the size of his, I’m envious of what, his failed career as a game writer? I’m the lead designer on six different games. His career as a writer? If I find an hour to write every other day, I’m fortunate.

John Scalzi has been attacking me and calling me names for just over ten years now. He’s been attacking my readers and calling them names for nearly as long. It’s absolutely stupid for the pathetic fraud to pretend he doesn’t know why we continue to go after him. He’s squirmed, he’s dissembled, and he’s spun, but he’s never simply admitted that he lied. He’s never apologized. He’s never simply admitted that he was wrong.

It’s kind of a pity the traffic didn’t quite hit 2 million this month, but fell 90k short. Because this would have been the perfect time to juxstapose that graphic with Scalzi’s 2010 interview with Lightspeed, in which he exaggerated his traffic by a mere 1.7 million.

there’s more to John Scalzi and his writing than meets the eye. For one
thing, his blog gets an extraordinary amount of traffic for a writer’s
website–Scalzi himself quotes it at over 45,000 unique visitors daily and
more than two million page views monthly. And it’s well-deserved
traffic, too, in light of the man’s reputation for posting unique
content.

I find it amusing that so many SJWs still try to pretend that 300k pageviews per month was “extraordinary traffic” while simultaneously insisting that more than 6x that much is nothing. The lesson, as always: SJWS always lie. Case in point:

Re: “Feud” with VD:

I kind of get exasperated with it being regarded as a feud. What it
is, is Beale obsessing about me and maneuvering that obsession into my
path so I have to deal with it. Which I would submit is less a feud, and
more dealing with something akin to a persistent stalker.

Right, which is why he put together his mock charity drive and put pressure on the SFWA Board so they would pretend to expel me just to keep him and PNH in SFWA. The Scalzi cries “stalker” as he attacks you.

Yeah, so, about that….

What’s the lesson? No, not the one about women, the one about SJWs:

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi 
I’m not the Anti-Beale. I’m merely the person who Beale so very desperately wishes he had the career of.

Deirdre Saoirse Moen ‏@deirdresm
Which is why his Alexa rank is < 1000 milliScalzis.

Notorious E.G.G. ‏@silvermink
Though, I have to say, his Alexa rank is much closer to that number than my faith in humanity can handle sometimes.

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
Trust me, if his Alexa score ever gets above mine, he’ll trumpet it to the heavens.

Deirdre Saoirse Moen ‏@deirdresm
It wasn’t until I looked at the puppy Alexa rankings that I understood why RP was more successful than SP. Sigh.

Notorious E.G.G. ‏@silvermink
People actually listen to Mr. Beale, mindboggling as I find that.

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
Yeah, but they’re assholes.

Notorious E.G.G. ‏@silvermink
A bit of a saving grace, it’s true.

Jonathan Bergeron
now that’s a burn

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
It’s not the Alexa award. It’s that the RPs appealed more to people happy to shit all over other people.

Deirdre Saoirse Moen ‏@deirdresm
 I figured as much (and said so in response to a comment).

Marty ‏@hugbug94
VDBEALE doesn’t have the writing chops to be in your league.

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
Thanks, although I would not that for commercial success, writing chops are not always required.

Current Alexa Ranks

Scalzi Global: 84,147
Scalzi USA: 18,628

VP Global: 84,187
VP USA: 17,599

Now, Alexa is a ridiculous measure, as it is based on links rather than the more straightforward metric of traffic. At present, VP alone has about 3x Scalzi’s Google pageview traffic, and VP+AG has about 4x the traffic. If history is any guide, we should see the first 2 million-pageview month in August; this month is on course for 1.9 million+ combined.

But, as is our wont, let us count the lies:

  1. I very desperately wish I had John Scalzi’s career. I’m a lead game designer, a lead editor, and a minor author. He’s a very successful midlist author who is making some headway in television and failed as a game writer. My blogs surpass his by a factor of four and are nearly double his all-time peak. My Twitter Impression/follower ratio is considerably higher (355 to 125), and despite having only one-fifth the Impressions and one-seventeenth the followers, I expect my Impressions will pass up his within 18 months.
  2. I will trumpet to the heavens if my Alexa score ever passes his. It did, months ago. I didn’t. That’s VP alone, by the way, VP+AG is far beyond his, as AG alone is around 105k Global.
  3. People who read here are assholes. Actually, according to the demographics, you’re much wealthier and better-educated than the norm. And considering how lightly I moderate, I think it’s self-evident that most people here are more civil than average as well. You’re certainly less vulgar than Scalzi’s commenters, for the most part. I like you, anyhow. Obviously, he doesn’t.
  4. RPs appealed more to people happy to shit all over other people. Considering how the SJWs have treated the 2015 nominees, this is certainly false when compared to them. But compared to Sad Puppies, that’s probably true. It’s an unfair and misleading exaggeration, but not a lie.
  5. VDBEALE doesn’t have the writing chops to be in Scalzi’s league. Actually, I’d put us both right in the same league. We’re both mediocre, albeit for very different reasons. My Style has no melody, no flare. It is plodding and pedestrian whereas Scalzi’s Style is light and breezy. Scalzi can’t do characters and they all speak in one snarky voice: his own. My characters are diverse and distinct, albeit limited to the upper half of the male spectrum. I think Story comes out fairly equal, although he directly rips off the greats whereas I merely borrow here and there, Concept is also fairly even, his clever stunts versus my worldbuilding.

A Thing to Remember

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

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

Unfortunately for him, the Internet always remembers….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

Fingerprints on the prize

SciFi Pundit shows that once again, if John Scalzi says it, you can be pretty confident that it isn’t true:

WHATEVER:   John Scalzi announced on his blog today that he had predicted white chocolate M&M’s in his book The Android’s Dream. Unfortunately for Mr. Scalzi, white chocolate M&M’s, called Pirate Pearls, were already on the market in 2006 when his novel about killing aliens by farting (yes, really) was published. Apparently, ripping off Robert A. Heinlein (or Philip K. Dick, or Joe Haldeman, or Gene Roddenberry) isn’t sufficient to give someone powers of prognostication.

That’s actually a good heuristic for any SJW. Did they say it? Are they an SJW? Then it probably isn’t true.  Consider the following statements from the now-defunct Staffer’s Book Review:

“Opera Vita Aeterna” by Vox Day, the originator of the Sad Puppy Slate, received far fewer votes than No Award, which took fifth place. “Opera Vita Aeterna” did not place at all. In fact, 698 ballots refused to even recognize “Opera Vita Aeterna” existed.

Actually, 698 ballots had no preference between “Opera Vita Aeterna” and No Award, which means virtually the opposite of what  Mr. Landon is suggesting. All that meant was that having voted for their preferred finalist(s), the voters didn’t bother ranking the rest of them. One could also say, with equal justification, that 234 ballots refused to even recognize that the winner, “Lady Astronaut of Mars”, existed.

But more importantly, Vox Day was not the originator of the Sad Puppy Slate. Vox Day was not involved in any way with the Sad Puppy Slate; he was not even registered to vote for it. Vox Day was also not the originator of the Sad Puppy 2 Slate last year. Vox Day was not involved in any way with the Sad Puppy 2 Slate, except in that one of his works appeared on it. That’s like saying Jim Butcher is the originator of the Rabid Puppy Slate. It is true, however, that Vox Day is involved with the Sad Puppy 3 Slate and is the originator of the Rabid Puppy Slate.

Mr. Landon, who now writes for Tor.com, might be forgiven for his ignorantly erroneous ways were it not for that it appears to be his obvious ideological bias that is leading him to assert things that simply are not true. Consider the fine line he tries to invent here:

Where Vox Day and Larry Correia intentionally sabotaged the process, authors like Seanan McGuire are finding themselves disproportionately represented due to a consistently adoring fan base. Without the Sad Puppy Slate, McGuire would have been nominated in Best Novel, Best Novella, and Best Novellete. She appears three times on the Best Novella longlist, three times on the Best Novelette long list, once on the Best Short Story longlist, once on the Best Related Work longlist, and once on the Best Fancast longlist. Many of these nominations totals are around 30 ballots. I do not believe McGuire has in any way intentionally manipulated the ballot, but the mere fact that she has fans willing to nominate everything she publishes in a given year, and the fact she’s rather prolific, has created a glaring issue. There simply aren’t enough ballots cast in the nominating process to weed out the obsessive fan. Whether it’s Vox Day and his crazy or Seanan McGuire and her charisma, the Hugo nomination process is flawed.

So, we’re supposed to believe that Seanan McGuire putting herself on the Hugo  longlist nine times in one year is totally unintentional and indicative of nothing more than her charisma, but Larry Correia putting himself on the longlist once in a single category somehow means that Vox Day intentionally sabotaged the process? Now THAT is seriously crazy. It hurts the mind to even try to trace back how much doublethink is required to produce that conclusion.

But it does raise one question. Where did Seanan McGuire learn this little trick of charismatically inspiring such consistent adoration? Well, you’re not going to believe this, but it brings us right back to McRapey! Consider these nominations from the 2009 Hugo longlist:

54 Best Novel, 09 Best Novella, 24 Short Story, 23 Fan Writer, 31 Related Work, 45 Drama Long

We’re supposed to believe that this is all just the consequence of “a consistently adoring fan base”, right? Unfortunately, there is one little problem with that explanation. Those six appearances on the longlist occurred back when Scalzi had 308,745 pageviews per month. How very strange, then, that his appearances on the longlist abruptly dropped to the following in 2012 despite his site traffic more than tripling in the interval, even hitting its all-time monthly peak at 1,027,644 that year. From the 2012 Hugo longlist.

79 Novella

And keep in mind that we are supposed to believe that all of these Scalzi ballots from 2009 and 2012, none of which amounts to even half of the 183 nominating ballots cast for Larry Correia last year, are somehow more valid or more genuinely indicative of the former’s popularity than the latter’s. And yet, even the 69 ballots cast for me (which, by the way, shows far less SP2 voting in lockstep than the Scalzi-Stross alliance in 2008), were at least 15 more than were cast for Scalzi in any of the six categories in 2009.

The only conclusion we can reach from all this is that the SJWs don’t believe your votes are valid, simply because you are casting them for the evil people. Don’t ever forget that. But you need not fear, because you have a great defense attorney speaking out on your behalf, namely, Mr. John Scalzi, Esq.

I see that Seanan McGuire is getting a fair ration of crap from various quarters because she’s on the ballot a remarkable and record-setting five times, including in the Best Novel category, and twice in Novelette. What I’m seeing heavily implies that McGuire’s on the list because she has an apparently mystical ability to drive hordes of fans to nominate her for everything no matter what. Hey, I have an alternate theory, which goes a little something like this: Seanan McGuire is a very talented writer! Who writes things that people like! Including the people who nominate for the Hugos! Seems the simpler explanation, all things considered.

Let’s say it again: change the Hugos by nominating, voting and participating, or (much more slowly and far less reliably) actively making your case to the people who are nominating, voting and participating. As a pro tip, explicitly or implicitly disparaging their intelligence, taste or standing to make choices when you try to do that is unlikely to persuade them to decide anything other than that you’re probably an asshole.
– John Scalzi, April 5, 2013

“Change the Hugos by nominating!” That is a proper battle cry. One can hardly fault Mr. Correia for taking to heart the advice of such a distinguished and oft-nominated science fiction luminary. Let’s say it again indeed.

More Hugo predictions

One Aled Morgan responds to the Chaos Horizon Hugo predictions, which were as follows:

  1. Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer
  2. Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie
  3. Monster Hunter Nemesis, Larry Correia
  4. The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison
  5. Skin Game, Jim Butcher  

First, the two I’d be astonished not to see on the ballot:

Lock In
Ancilliary Sword

Then very likely:

The Three Body Problem
Annihilation

Then at about the same level of probability fighting for the fifth slot:

Monster Hunter Nemesis
My Real Children
The Goblin Emperor
Symbiont

Possible but unlikely:

The Peripheral
The Darkling Sea

What you’re overlooking about Scalzi is that he has a massively popular blog, he has orders of magnitude more readers than the “Sad Puppies”, and while he never opersteps the line he encourages his fans to nominate him… and they do. The same goes for Grant, who has made the ballot so often already but doedn’t win — she has the same kind of nominating fans.

For the Hugos, what’s important is not wide readership but readership within Worldcon going fandom. Lots of the measures you’re assessing would be great if this were a wide-constituency vote, but it isn’t. It’ll be around two thousand people. SFWA’s even smaller, and everyone in SFWA knows each other. Butcher’s really really popular in the wider constituency, but his books don’t feel like the kind of thing people nominate for Hugos to the people who nominate, so I’d say it has zero chance except with Sad Puppies. And I expect a backlash against Sad Puppies this year.

I have to admit, The Three-Body Problem looks pretty good. I find the concept interesting, seeing as I used a variant of it to explain some of the problems with Keynesian economic theory in RGD. As a fan of Japanese literature both ancient and modern, I’m curious to see what Chinese SF is like. I tried Vandermeer’s Balzac’s War and ended up putting it down before long, but perhaps his Southern Reach Trilogy is better. In any event, Holmwood, who both reads the occasional Scalzi book and is a Sad Puppy supporter, offers a mild correction:

John Scalzi is a good author. I enjoyed both Old Man’s War and Agent to the Stars. His books are pushed heavily by his publisher (deservedly so) and Lock-In was a better work than Redshirts which won previously. That said, I believe his blog’s readership is a good deal smaller than (say) that of Vox Day, and certainly smaller than Day, Correia, Wright, Torgersen, Hoyt, etc combined.

Back to the general topic of Puppies, sad and otherwise.

I would be both surprised and disappointed if Puppies locked up overwhelmingly to vote a slate en masse without regard to quality. So far that’s not been the case, though I’m well aware there are those who’d love to poke a stick in the putative SF establishment fans’ collective eyes and do just that.

But this, while very well and good, VIOLATES THE NARRATIVE. Tudor leaps in to explain that Whatever is not merely big. It is ENORMOUS:

Scalzi’s blog is not big, is enormous. There are many good SF writers, but there are only a handful NY Times Bestsellers. Scalzi became one because of his blog. I only like some of his books but even I read his blog regularly. And if an author will write on his blog about her/his new book, than it’s certain that its sales will receive a great boost.

And so it fell to me to actually provide the relevant facts of the matter:

John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever, is not reasonably described as “enormous” and his blog readership is considerably smaller than mine, let alone the combined readership of the various Sad and Rabid Puppy authors. The most traffic Mr. Scalzi ever had is just over 1 million Google pageviews per month back in May 2012. Since then, his blog traffic has declined to around 450,000 pageviews per month. By comparison, my blogs alone now enjoy traffic of 1.5 million pageviews per month, about three times that of Mr. Scalzi’s Whatever.

In 2014, Mr. Scalzi’s blog had 5.6 million annual pageviews whereas mine had 15.7 million. Where Mr. Scalzi is very popular, however, is on Twitter, where his 70k+ followers are more than all of the aforementioned authors combined. Whether Twitter followers or blog readerships are more predictive of Hugo success, I leave to Chaos Horizon to predict.

The reason many people have a false impression of Mr. Scalzi’s blog is that Mr. Scalzi has historically been prone to a considerable amount of exaggeration. For example, in an August 2010 interview with Lightspeed magazine, he claimed Whatever had 2 million monthly pageviews. The actual number of pageviews that month was 305 thousand, or about 15 percent of the amount claimed.

I do find it intriguing that more than a year after the greater part of Mr. Scalzi’s claimed blog traffic was exposed as nonexistent, there are still those pinkshirts who fail to recognize that the numbers in the science fiction market simply do not add up in the way they apparently believe they do. I wonder what would suffice to convince them otherwise?

As for Holmewood’s concern about quality, I would simply urge the prospective Worldcon voter to compare the Rabid Puppy slate to last year’s Hugo winners. I contend that the Rabid Puppies are, across the board, considerably superior in terms of both science fiction essence and and science fiction quality to the 2014 winners.

He’s on a manic swing again

I always enjoy McRapey’s manic phases. That’s when he produces his most amusing quotes and you get a clear glimpse at how messed up and insecure he is. He’s apparently been feeling his oats lately, so he decided another shot at #GamerGate was in order, which promptly led to him feeling insecure after a number of #GamerGaters wondered who the hell he was:

4 NYT Best sellers. 3 Hugos. 3 TV series currently in development. Books in 20 languages. CLEARLY, public opinions have hampered my career.

(I should note that two of those Hugos were awarded to me, essentially, FOR having opinions in public. So.)

GamerGater: YOU ARE TERRIBLE FOR TELLING ME NOT TO READ YOUR BOOKS AND I WILL NEVER READ THEM NOW Me: Ate a lot of lead paint as a kid, huh?

Lots of GGers smugly asking who I am because they’ve never heard of me. Of course not, you’d have to be literate for that, lads.

It’s amusing how Johnny can’t open his mouth without trying to spin the narrative. I mean, full credit for admitting that two of the Hugos were political in nature, but we all know that all THREE of them actually were. There is not a single person on the planet who genuinely believes Redshirts was the best science fiction novel of 2013 in any sense of the term. Including McRapey himself.

And the idea that anyone who is literate has heard of John Scalzi is hilarious. I live in Europe. I know many highly literate people. Absolutely NONE of them have ever heard of him. We have over 100 players at the adult level. Ender has a game this weekend, so between that and practice next week, I should see everyone. I’ll report back on how many of these literate and multilingual Europeans have ever heard of “the science fiction writer John Scalzi”.

It’s also funny that Scalzi thinks he’s big time because he can sell up to 150k books per shot with Tor pushing him as hard as it can. He’s trying to break into the game industry, where games that have 17 million active players are still practically unknown to the game journalists as well as everyone who doesn’t play in that particular genre.

One more amusing note. Back in 2012, someone named CDaniell claimed I was jealous of Scalzi. His words are even funnier today, now that we know what we know about SF’s biggest con artist.

I did have a chance to read up a bit on Mr. Scalzi. So: The SFWA presidency, the Hugo nominations, the ascendancy to the the New York Times best seller list, the 50,000 visitors-a-day blog and a novel being adapted to film with Wolfgang Petersen attached to direct? Goodness. Talk about an Alpha who can seriously put the bread on the table. 

The film was canceled, the 50,000 visitors a day was proven to be a lie, the fan writer nominations are now an award and a Best Novel award that is a historic embarrassment, and the NYT bestsellers show every sign of being nothing more than his publisher gaming the list.

A lesson in Gamma

This revelatory explanation by a Gamma male was so unexpected, and yet so illuminating, that I felt it worth bringing to the attention of the VP readership as well:

Gammas think they are Alphas.

It sounds insane, but it’s true. A man who knows his place and sticks to that place is usually left to his own devices. Pay tribute to those above, demand tribute from those below, and if a man should disagree with either his own or your relative position in the hierarchy, then conflict will ensue to determine who is correct. It’s a simple enough formula and it occurs frequently, if not daily, during the course of a man’s life. Men tend to be very diligent about ensuring the proper order of things, but once that order is established, there is an element of stability. The victor may be magnanimous to the defeated. In turn, the loser is expected to acclimate himself to his new position.

Gammas introduce instability to this hierarchy. They refuse to accept their station, nor do they propose to increase it through deeds and experience. Like women, they come to expect a certain station in life and feel wronged when it is not provided for them. A common Gamma thought would be “why should he be the leader and get all the glory for himself?”

The part that I thought was particularly insightful was this statement: “Doubtless, thinks the Gamma, the leadership position was earned through
subterfuge and oppression since that is how he would obtain it.”

A leadership position earned through subterfuge and oppression? Strange, for some reason that sounds strangely… familiar?

The SJW reader challenge

Larry Correia fisks Teapot Bradford’s call to not read straight white male authors while Superversive SF takes her SJW reader challenge:

In the spirit of taking this challenge seriously, I will be making an effort to avoid such writers and see what it does for my outlook. So I guess I should make a list of authors that are “acceptable” to read because they aren’t “cis white het males” to make it easier for anybody that wants to join me.

So lets see what is in?

    Sarah A. Hoyt – POC Womyn
    Larry Correia – POC
    L. Jagi Lamplighter – Womyn
    Kate Paulk – Womyn
    Amanda Green – Womyn
    Vox Day – POC

and out

    John Scalzi – Cis Het White Male
    Jim Hines – Cis Het White Male

It really is time that Native American literature finally found its place in fantasy and science fiction after all. It is, frankly, shocking how white women like Catherynne M. Valente are shamelessly appropriating our culture and our legends. I can only applaud Ms. Bradford for encouraging her readers and followers to read my work and I hope they will enjoy it.

Meanwhile, another SJW at File 770 warns about the consequences of the cultural war in SF in light of the attempt to ban Adam Baldwin from a convention in Australia:

This isn’t going to end any better than the rest of these discussions.

Let me ask a question based on two possible thought experiments. Those who want to can ban Adam Baldwin if they want. The right get to ban a person of their choice from an event of their choice. Are we all happier and better people?

Alternatively we allow this sort if banning but to stop people using it capriciously we say you have to pay some amount of money which is not easy to raise in order to do it. The ‘other side’ get to donate it to a non political charity of their choice. In this case I’d guess it would be between a quarter and a half million dollars. Is this issue really that important to people if it comes down to real effort, not just arguing online?

Think up your own method if you like but remember that your opponents get to use the same rulebook.

We can’t go on doing this. It has just about destroyed the gaming community and it could do the same to the SF community. The politics don’t matter. The same situation will crop up sooner or later with different politics. The problem is that neither side respects the process. Whoever amasses the most angry tweets wins but nobody believes that is either just or fair. Nobody has their thinking chaged, simply reinforced. The losers just retreat to reorganise and swear to be more vicious next time.

And now, the punchline, from the same SJW, Martin Easterbrook:

At Loncon last year we had many fans from the Ukraine and Russia, two countries who are effectively at war and who go out of the way to humiliate each others POWs. There were no problems with any of them. They stuck to the fan tradition that, as far as we can, we “leave our guns at the door”. This has become unfashionable lately but for some of us it remains something that is part of the core of being a fan.

Some decisions are difficult, for instance I’ve personally suggested to a convention that they exclude Vox Day because I believe he has personally insulted another author to the point where she would be justified in punching him on the nose if she met him. I would not want to attend a convention that had Orson Scott Card as a goh but neither would I want to go to a convention that excluded him completely.

As I pointed out, by Mr. Easterbrook’s standard, John Scalzi is due enough punches in the nose that he’s effectively given me permission to beat the little creep to death. I wonder, how many insults does Larry Correia have to take before he is justified in playing Mountain to Scalzi’s Viper?