Tag: media

A special kind of cowardice

Vox Maximus observes that people are much more interested in talking ABOUT me than TO me:

I recently listened to the Nerdvana Podcast on the 2015 Hugo Awards (a two-part series with Part 2 being located here).
Minute after minute, I listened to these individuals converse about Vox
Day. They mused about his motives. They psycho-analyzed him. They
called his family members “stooges”. And they just talked, and talked,
and talked about Vox in quite a bit of detail (they also
cried–seriously–when they thought about what Vox was “doing” to the Hugo
Awards).

But do you know the one thing that they did not do? TALK TO VOX DAY HIMSELF.
That’s right, these individuals used up precious time speculating about
everything from Vox Day’s goals to his potential financial fixing of
the Hugo Awards themselves. And yet, they did not talk to him.
They did not send him an e-mail with questions. They did not try to
contact him on his blog. In fact, they did not even quote anything from
his blog or his writings (or a bad paraphrase or two was included).

I don’t think that this is so much a special kind of lying as it is a special kind of cowardice. The reason so few people are willing to take me on directly can be seen in my interview with David Pakman. Sure, I didn’t cover myself with glory there, but the fact is that even with all the advantages on his side, even when taking me completely by surprise by misleading me about the topics the interview would address and demanding that I explain why I had written words that I never wrote and defend a case I never made – see if you can find where I said anything about “signs” or declared that the Denver shootings were definitely a false flag operation in The Lone Gunmen – I still managed to get him on record confessing himself to be in the habit of having sex without obtaining consent first.

Can you blame them for not wanting to take such risks?

Sure, they claim that I am stupid, that I am an idiot, that I am crazy, that I am a badthinker, that my views are beyond the pale and unacceptable to all goodthinking people. But if they are correct, why are they so afraid of me? Why are they so afraid to simply meet me on equal terms and prove that my ideas are indefensible and wrong?

Because they can’t. And more importantly, they know they can’t.

This sort of thing doesn’t upset me. I just sent an email to David Pakman offering to do a second interview with him, one that would actually address #GamerGate, the game industry, and the Hugo Awards. I’m entirely willing to talk to the people on the Nerdvana Podcast too. If you’d like to see me do either, go ahead and contact Pakman or Nerdvana and let them know.

But (and I cannot stress this strongly enough), I don’t care. I don’t have a media career. I’m not concerned about looking like a politician on camera. I’m not concerned about talking points or winning people over, and I neither need nor want any more platforms than the one I’ve got.

And if people want to attack me for being a criminal badthinker, well, that’s something for which they will have to answer one day. Not to me, but to themselves. For all my terrible thoughts and deeds and words, the one thing I have never been guilty of is telling anyone “you are not permitted to think that and you are a bad person if you do.”

The world is what it is. You can be as upset about calling homosexuality a “birth defect” as you like, but being upset is not going to save the life of a single homosexual fetus if – note the word IF – it turns out that there is a detectable genetic component that reliably predicts homosexuality in the unborn child. The “born that way” concept doesn’t go very far in a society that permits the murder of the unborn.

If you could boil my perspective down to its essence, it would be this: “The world is what it is and there is no point in pretending otherwise.” I may be wrong about some things. I may be wrong about many things. But I do not pretend.

UPDATE: David Pakman emailed me back and expressed his opinion that there was no ambush and no hit piece. He also declined to have me back on next week to discuss GamerGate, the game industry, or the Hugo Awards.

Pakman Show interview

Not the greatest performance by me. I was taken more than a little by surprise, as I thought we were going to be discussing GamerGate and the Hugo Awards, not op/ed columns I wrote 10 or 12 years ago and didn’t even recall immediately.

But that’s how they play the game. I’m not the least bit upset or annoyed about it. I could have shut it down once it became clear that David Pakman had set up a bait-and-switch, but I was interested to see just how far he would take us off subject. I find it amusing that the headlines are focused on my supposedly “controversial statements” when saying that some races are smarter than others is no more debatable than saying that some races are taller than others.

And I am not stating unequivocally that homosexuality is a birth defect for the obvious reason that we don’t know with any degree of certainty that it is an immutable condition determined at birth. But if it is, then what else would you realistically call a condition that significantly reduces the odds that a creature will be able to propagate its genes?

Anyhow, the interview turned out to be an obvious hit piece, as Roosh demonstrates with this screencap of the original video title.

And just to be clear, I was told this would be an interview about #GamerGate and the gaming industry.

On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 4:30 PM
From: VD
Subject: show appearance

Message Body:
You tweeted at me and asked me if I would appear on the show. That’s fine, you can contact me via this email.

Regards,
Vox

Terrific, would love to set something up. We do our interviews via skype
video. If that works in principle it would be great to set something up
for sooner than later. Would you be available this Friday at 11am
eastern time? I’d love to discuss your views on gamergate and just more
broadly how you general views inform your views on gamergate and the
gaming industry. It will be a casual discussion, likely 25 or so
minutes, just between you and I.


best,


David Pakman
Host / The David Pakman Show / www.davidpakman.com

And then there is this:


6h6 hours ago

Today’s interview with is up. He admits to sex without consent, says gay is a birth defect, more
From the interview (17:30)

Vox Day: Have you always obtained absolute formal written consent every time you’ve had sex?
David Pakman: No.

Literary journalism

I think this must represent a new low where the coverage of books is involved. Lana Jordan busts Jane Carnall of the Guardian, who openly admits that she hasn’t read the very books that she “reviewed” and gave one-star ratings on Amazon.

Tom Knighton goes into more detail on this: “When we talk about why we despise CHORFs so much, it’s because of
crap like this.  Carnall isn’t trying to just keep Sad Puppies nominees
from getting awards — which has its own brand of pathetic — instead,
she’s actively working to destroy people’s livelihoods.  Keeping a Hugo
out of their hands isn’t enough for her.  No, she wants to destroy their
careers.  Why?  *GASP* Because they disagree with her!!! We now see the face of evil, and believe it or not, it’s not Vox Day.  Shocking, I know.”

This is what we are dealing with. No compromise, no retreat, no apologies, no mercy. They started this cultural war. We will finish it.

Puppies on NPR

KW listened in and heard NPR doing their usual bang-up job on Sad Puppies. For me, the most intriguing aspect of the media coverage has been the near-complete lack of interest in actually talking to anyone involved in the actual news-making activity. I mean, I am about as cynical a media skeptic as it is possible to be, and yet somehow, these journalistic incompetents haven’t even managed to rise to my very, very low level of expectations.

Weekend NPR show “On the Media” spent 15 minutes on the Hugo awards controversy, starting at about the half-way mark (30 minutes)

Arthur Wu was the expert interviewed.  He did some amateur psychoanalysis of the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies groups.

This was tied to GamerGate, and shortly after mentioning death threats and harrassment, Vox Day was re-mentioned as active in both controversies.  One might conclude, if one was a sloppy thinker, that Vox Day has made death threats.  They non-judgmentally mentioned your blog is among the most often blocked by workplace filters for hate.

Larry Correia was interviewed, or a clip reused, and John C Wright was brought up and invalidated as a right wing has-been whose prose now includes Randian divergences into poltical polemics.

They must have read PopSci, because they almost quoted their line:

“…Vox Day is … on the record as supporting the Taliban’s attempt to assassinate Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousifazi, finding it “scientifically justifiable.””

“Disco Demolition Night” was also brought up.  Apparantly, Disco hate, Sad Puppies, and GamerGate are about fear of castration.

NPR “All Things Considered” teased that they were going to cover Sad/Rapid Puppies as well, but the website does not help out yet.

I don’t really object to their futile attempt to pile on. What this tells us is that the SJWs are uncommonly concerned about losing control of the narrative. And in their point-and-shriek frenzy – and that is all this is – they are bound to overreach themselves and their exaggerations will reach ludicrous proportions as they essentially play a high-tech version of the telephone game.

I won’t be surprised if I’m accused of being a self-admitted member of the Taliban by the time this feeding frenzy reaches its peak. The other thing this tells us is that they are afraid of me. It was remarkable how Damien Walters, who normally likes to work VOX DAY and LARRY CORREIA into everything, didn’t even mention either of us in his initial Hugo column. The media only likes to expose unsophisticated and unsympathetic enemies to the masses, but I am entirely comfortable with the media and not inclined to fall into their patently obvious traps.

That means they are left talking about me, without going to the source, and relying upon dishonest people to give them the straight story. And while they’ll convince the SJW choir, as well as mostly indifferent people who can’t bother to pay attention, at least 9 out of 10 people who discover me as a result are going to immediately notice that I am not even close to what they say I am.

So, I expect this to be not only a net positive, but a significant net positive. I grew up watching Ronald Reagan, after all, and the man not only survived, but thrived on absorbing everything the media could possibly throw at him.

One thing that will be useful, though, is to dig into the identity of each hit piece author. We’ve already tied several of them to Tor Books; the original Guardian hit piece author is published by Tor Books and was in contact with John Scalzi. And we know about both Heer and the PopSci guy as well.

Once we have the complete dossier, we’ll be able to draw a clear picture of how their media operation works and then go about exposing it. Remember, wu wei is all about the art of bending with the wind. Right now it is time to let the wind blow. But that’s all it is, is wind.

A letter to Popular Science

Dear Editor,

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

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

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

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

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

I will appreciate your prompt attention to this matter.

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

Downloadable Content

UPDATE: The Downloadable Content podcast is here if you would like to listen to it and were unable to do so live:

LIVE WEDNESDAY 9PM EST: Tune in at 9PM EST for our special guest, Vox Day! We’re going to be discussing #SadPuppies, #RabidPuppies, Entertainment Weekly, gaming, SJWs/CHORFs and more!  Vox Day, Larry Correia, and Brad R. Torgersen had tremendous success with their Rabid Puppies and Sad Puppies nomination slates and swept the Hugo awards with their recommendations.  We’re looking forward to hearing Day’s unique perspective on the sci-fi/fantasy community’s battle for creative and intellectual freedom!

I spoke with both vox.com and the American Spectator today, so it’s good to see that some media outlets are more responsible than Entertainment Weekly and Slate, which responded to the astonishing Sad Puppies revolution by running to John Scalzi, of all people. In fairness to Mr. Scalzi, what he said was, for once, entirely true.

As Will Shetterly points out on his blog, people have been manipulating the Hugo nomination processes for decades. (Shetterly recalls watching Orson Scott Card glad-handing his way through various gatherings, penning glowing reviews of fellow sci-fi travelers for his column, and otherwise using his superior resources to mount an effective awards campaign.) And it’s true that, in the past, authors and fans often ignited individual crusades around books they wrote or liked. Writer John Scalzi in particular was famous for opening the threads on his blog to sci-fi and fantasy scribes who wanted to remind the community that their work was Hugo-eligible. But, Scalzi told me on the phone, explicitly anointing and championing a full group of titles, while not illegal, violates convention. It is unprecedented.

Anyhow, tune into 405 Media if you’re interested. Today was hilarious, though, due to this epic clash of SJW vs Sad Puppy. It was like watch a kitten fight a riding lawnmower.

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
I wish Larry Corriea had the balls to admit the reason he started the Sad Puppies campaign was that he just wanted a Hugo so fucking bad.

Larry Correia ‏@monsterhunter45
I turned down my Hugo nomination and you still didn’t make the ballot. @scalzi

Brad Torgersen confronts the beast

It’s a little ironic that Brad Torgersen is being accused of racism, which you’ll understand if you click on the link:

What disturbs me more is that the field of SF/F is stooping this low.
That some of my colleagues — and no, contrary to my impression of the
field 20 years ago, not everyone likes or gets along with each other —
have decided to make the nerd argument over the Hugos into a decidedly
personal grudge match. Where the objective is to not just win the
argument, but to destroy the arguer. Professionally. In the
marketplace. On the big stage of public opinion. This is the kind of
stuff you ordinarily find in cut-throat national political elections,
but then it’s been clear for years that cut-throat politics have drifted
down into nerd circles of all kinds: comic book circles, movie and
television circles, video game circles, etc. There’s simply no escaping
it. And there are people for whom winning is more important than
ethics, more important than integrity, and more important than the
truth.

And the truth is, I’m not the dastardly guy Biedenharn’s piece makes me out to be. And neither is Larry Correia.

Am I concerned with the infestation of political correctness which
has invaded SF/F over the last 15 years? You bet. Today’s ride on the
media dunking machine was just another iteration in the near-endless
attempts by the politically correct to enforce their views, with slander
and falsehoods when it comes down to it. Our field is diseased. It
has been struck by the same mental virus that has been permeating other
sectors of our culture. As one astute and recovered victim put it, the
new zealots are a cult who dwell in depression and anger, seeking the slightest excuses to lash out and make other people suffer:

There is something dark and vaguely cultish about this
particular brand of politics. I’ve thought a lot about what exactly that
is. I’ve pinned down four core features that make it so disturbing:
dogmatism, groupthink, a crusader mentality, and anti-intellectualism.

Today, the crusader mentality decided to defame and slander Brad R.
Torgersen the evil demonic racist and hateful sick bigoted misognynist. As my friend Larry often quips, if I was half the bastard some of these crusaders say I am, I’d probably hate me too….

But really, when SF/F sinks to this depth, you know we’ve jumped a
certain kind of unfortunate shark. Political correctness has gone to a
place of destructive take-no-prisoners soul tyranny that could very well
and permanently wreck this field; unless good men and women of
conscience decide to stand up. I made the decision a long time ago that
I wasn’t going to be one of those professionals who diplomatically
skulks around the field, obsequiously trying to avoid controversy and
not upset the bigger fish. Again, I’ve seen too much of the elephant.
My career isn’t so important to me that I am willing to become an
ideological chameleon, or cipher. Perhaps this has angered some people
to the point they believe it’s time to “end” Torgersen once and for all?
If so, I think that’s a very sad statement — about the vindictiveness
that has overtaken the genre, among men and women who should probably be
working hard to be friends.

Folks, until or unless political correctness is given the boot, this kind of stuff isn’t going to stop.

It won’t be just me getting the torch. It will be you too. You
other authors, and you other fans. Political correctness has a
bottomless stomach, and is red in tooth and claw. Even if you try to
appease the beast, it will eat you eventually anyway.

Needless to say, I’m a little less surprised. I was openly warned about my sinful nature in the eyes of science fiction’s thought police more than 10 years ago, and attacked by a few of those self-appointed thought police for my thought crimes. They know perfectly well that I don’t care what they call me, so they’re going in search of what they think is easier prey, of people more inclined to give in.

Aren’t they in for a surprise!

Entertainment Weekly libels Sad Puppies

I suspect Isbella Biedenharn is going to be hearing from her superiors shortly:

Hugo Award nominations fall victim to misogynistic, racist voting campaign
by Isabella Biedenharn

The Hugo Awards have fallen victim to a campaign in which misogynist groups lobbied to nominate only white males for the science fiction book awards. These groups, Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies (both of which are affiliated with last year’s GamerGate scandal), urged sci-fi fans to become members of the Hugo Awards’ voting body, World Science Fiction Convention, in order to cast votes against female writers and writers of color. Membership only costs $40, and allows members to vote for the 2016 nominations as well as the 2015 nominations, which were just released.

Sad Puppies broadcast their selection on Feb. 1, writing: “If you agree with our slate below—and we suspect you might—this is YOUR chance to make sure YOUR voice is heard.” Brad Torgerson, who runs Sad Puppies along with Larry Correia, complains that the Hugo Awards have lately skewed toward “literary” works, as opposed to “entertainment.”

Torgerson also writes that he disagrees with Hugos being awarded for affirmative action-like purposes, as many women and writers of color went home with awards in 2014: ”Likewise, we’ve seen the Hugo voting skew ideological, as Worldcon and fandom alike have tended to use the Hugos as an affirmative action award: giving Hugos because a writer or artist is (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) or because a given work features (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) characters.”

The other lobbying group, Rabid Puppies, is run by Theodore Beale (who goes by the name Vox Day). As The Telegraph reports, “Members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have called for Beale’s exclusion from the group after he has written against women’s suffrage and posted racist views towards black writer NK Jemisin.”

Fortunately, some sane voters allowed well-deserving writers to pull through. Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Sword and Listen was nominated for Dramatic Presentation, and Annie Bellet’s Goodnight Stars was nominated, despite having a non-white, female protagonist.

Plenty of members of the science fiction community have voiced their disgust with both sects of “Puppies.” Writer Philip Sandifer wrote on his blog Sunday, “The Hugo Awards have just been successfully hijacked by neofascists.” Sandifer’s post, which is worth reading in full, addresses what this disaster means for the sci-fi world:

    To be frank, it means that traditional sci-fi/fantasy fandom does not have any legitimacy right now. Period. A community that can be this effectively controlled by someone who thinks black people are subhuman and who has called for acid attacks on feminists is not one whose awards have any sort of cultural validity. That sort of thing doesn’t happen to functional communities. And the fact that it has just happened to the oldest and most venerable award in the sci-fi/fantasy community makes it unambiguously clear that traditional sci-fi/fantasy fandom is not fit for purpose.

As writer Joe Abercrombie put it:

    The Hugo Awards have never looked less like the future of anything.

    — Joe Abercrombie (@LordGrimdark) April 4, 2015

It should be amusing to see the back-pedaling from this malicious hit piece. It’s like they have one tactic: call the media and lie. How fortunate that #GamerGate has demonstrated the complete impotence of the tactic.

UPDATE: They’re scrubbing the article and title, but Daddy Warpig provides the archived original.

CORRECTION: After misinterpreting reports in other news
publications, EW published an unfair and inaccurate depiction of the Sad
Puppies voting slate, which does, in fact, include many women and
writers of color. As Sad Puppies’ Brad Torgerson explained to EW, the
slate includes both women and non-caucasian writers, including Rajnar
Vajra, Larry Correia, Annie Bellet, Kary English, Toni Weisskopf, Ann
Sowards, Megan Gray, Sheila Gilbert, Jennifer Brozek, Cedar Sanderson,
and Amanda Green.
This story has been updated to more accurately reflect this. EW regrets the error.

They left out the only Native American. WHY DO THEY HATE INDIANS?

That’s not funny!

Satire isn’t satire if it’s the wrong satire:

31-year-old comic Trevor Noah was hired to replace Jon Stewart yesterday, and the backlash has already arrived with a vengeance. Noah has a large following in his native South Africa, and has toured extensively abroad, but he isn’t so well-known in the U.S. — to date, he has three Daily Show “correspondent” appearances under his belt — and it’s looking like some of his comedic sensibilities might not find such a warm audience Stateside.
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Noah is mixed-race, with a half-Jewish Xhosa mother and Swiss father, and much of his material centers on the issue of race. However, people have noticed that a slew of of Noah’s tweets — mostly posted in 2012 and prior — include unfunny, questionably offensive jokes about Jews and women.

Clearly Mr. Noah will require a remedial consciousness-raising session or two conducted by professional SJWs instructing him which topics and subjects are acceptable and which are not.