Just a reminder

Kicking Puppies is not nice. Glenn Hauman issued a second call for anti-Puppy Amazon reviews, this time on File 770:

Glenn Hauman on April 15, 2015
You can game Amazon ratings as well. Here’s a list of all of Mr. Beale’s nominees, complete with handy links to Amazon. It might be a good idea to take a look at the reviews and see which ones are helpful. If you’ve read the works, you should add your own review. Oh, and to answer the title question: what do you do to rabid puppies? You put them down.

Glenn Hauman on May 20, 2015 at 10:51 pm said:
Just a reminder to all Hugo voters: After you’ve read items in the Hugo packet, you don’t have to confine any reviews of them to your own blogs and social media. Feel free to add them to Amazon as well.

And once again, SJWs have obediently responded to his call. Mr. Hauman’s actions strike me as a very good way to encourage publishers to stop participating in future Hugo Packets. I mean, why should we do so if it’s only going to provide the SJWs in science fiction with another means of attack? Mr. Hauman has demonstrated how the Hugo Packet can be destroyed in a single year; what publisher is going to even be willing to include excerpts when inclusion in the Packet means several hundred one-star reviews on Amazon within weeks?

BIG BOYS DON’T CRY

Not recommended

This is not a very good story. To be honest, it is not my kind of SF and the only reason I read it was because of the Hugo nomination.
Published 3 hours ago by Hampus Eckerman

Lame Whiny Book.
(Disclaimer: I didn’t buy the book here; got it as part of the Hugo ballot packet.) David Weber can write cartoon villains and cowardly REMFs and it’s fun to read, even…
Published 10 hours ago by Bill Stewart

What a Waste of Time
This must have been a rough year for novellas if this is one of the front-runners for a major award. Did he pay his friends to nominate him?
Published 11 hours ago by Janelle Wilbanks

Dated and amateurish MilSF
Another 2015 Hugo nominee from the Puppies.
Magnolia, a.k.a. Maggie, is a Ratha, an armored war machine in the military forces of a starfaring and aggressive Earth… Read more
Published 21 hours ago by Elisabeth Carey

These reviews averaged 1.5 stars, whereas the 142 other reviews averaged 4.3 stars. Elisabeth Carey is also attacking John C. Wright, giving ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM its only two-star rating in 80 reviews which otherwise average 4.5 stars. No doubt this is merely a matter of differing tastes combined with some coincidental timing. Again.

Of course, BIG BOYS DON’T CRY and ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM are not the only Hugo nominees included in the Hugo Packet. ANCILLARY SWORD presently has 204 reviews and a 4.1 rating. THE GOBLIN EMPEROR has 232 reviews and a 4.4 rating. To quote Mr. Hauman: “Just a reminder to all Hugo voters: After you’ve read items in the Hugo
packet, you don’t have to confine any reviews of them to your own blogs
and social media. Feel free to add them to Amazon as well.”

Feel free, the man says. Feel free. On a tangential note, while Chuck D brought us the concept of the one-man riot, Lori Coulson has invented the one-woman blacklist. She’s going to continue to not read books by authors she had never read before:

Lori Coulson on May 21, 2015 at 8:38 pm said:
The one thing the Hugo packet has demonstrated to me? That there are a bunch of authors out there I never want to read again, and not only will I not read anything more by them, I definitely won’t be reading anything the “Evil League of Evil” writes, edits or publishes. After being wowed by “The Crucible” in High School and taking the lesson within to heart, I find I’m starting my own personal blacklist. And it makes me very unhappy that it’s necessary to do so.

And here we were told blacklists were bad. Anyhow, this sounds rather like MSNBC’s audience threatening to never watch Fox News again.


The SJWs review the shortlist

Not that the outcomes were ever in any doubt, but it’s always interesting to see what justifications the SJWs produce for their DISQUALIFY. Here are a few commenting at File 770:

Hampus Eckerman on May 19, 2015 at 9:04 am said:

Just finished the Related Works. Not satisfied again.

Wisdoms from my Internet was mostly a collection of tweets. Some were funny, some were well thought out, others were boring and a few were… well, lets say they catered to people with another political taste than me. Ranting about “SJWs” is not the way to get votes from me. Anyhow, who wants to read that amount of tweets? Nah, this is a no award.

Why Science is Never Settled was the standard article about the scientific methods, one of hundreds, just not as well done as many others. No award again.

Wright is as horrible as usual in his Transhuman and Subhuman:

“The female spirit is wise rather than cunning, deep in understanding rather than adroit in deductive logic, gentle and supportive rather than boastful and self-aggrandizing.”

“Contrariwise, when women in the kitchen or the nursery use the name of the Lord in vain, and the children they are nursing and teaching hear them, the vulgarity has the negative effect of deadening the emotions of the youngsters and making them vulgar and indifferent to vulgarity.”

“Also a woman who is crude inspires contempt, because she has contempt for God and man. The difference is that a woman who loses her native delicacy and modesty does not become an object of fear and respect, but an object of contempt and loathing, because the aura of sanctity women naturally inspire in men is tossed away.”
And so on. Bollocks I say.

Hot Equations might be very interesting for a weapons nerd or for someone who loves reading about exactly how weapons work. Sorry to say, I’m not that person.

Which leaves Letters from Gardner which was just damned weird. A mix of a guys memoire, writing tips and then stories. As I had never heard of him before, the memoire part was kind of boring. The writing tips weren’t anchored in anything. Stories in the mix of this just felt strange. So, nah.

And thats it. No award I guess.

clif on May 20, 2015 at 9:39 am said:

so I’ve read all I’m going to read of the short stories … preliminary voting …

1. Totaled
2. A Single Samurai
3. No Award
4. Turncoat
5. On a Spiritual Plain
6. The Parliament of Beasts and Birds

Nate Harada on May 20, 2015 at 7:27 am said:

I will confess that I No Awarded four full categories and I’m pretty >_< about it. I *wanted* to like “A Single Samurai.” I did, really! But, well, yeah. No. But it was good of Baen to include the entire anthology in which it appeared.

Katya on May 20, 2015 at 4:54 am said:

@Happy Turtle I’ve read
most of 3 categories (Short Fiction, Novel, Graphic Story). In one of
those categories, only two of the works are strong enough that I would
have finished reading them if I came across them in a magazine. While
both are OK, neither has strong enough writing or storytelling or
characterization to be ‘award’ level writing. I’ve read short stories
published this year that are much, much stronger than both of those
works. I don’t feel it is right to give a prestigious award to works
that are middle-of-the-pack. To me, it devalues the award.

nickpheas on May 20, 2015 at 1:08 am said:

OK, reads Hugo Packet. One Bright Star To Guide Me By.

Is there an in story reason why Wright seems to use Sally and Sarah to describe one of his characters, or just did he forget what he called her?

rob_matic on May 20, 2015 at 1:58 am said:

He may be using Sally as a diminutive of Sarah, although I can imagine it reading oddly if both are being used.

Peace Is My Middle Name on May 20, 2015 at 2:07 am said:
Given Wright’s stated attitudes towards women, I find it utterly unsurprising that he cannot even remember the name of his own character.



SocialInjusticeWorrier on May 20, 2015 at 4:43 am said:

I don’t
think switching between Sally and Sarah is a problem, so long as the
author has a good reason for doing it. I could see O. Henry, for
example, using the shift in names very effectively to make a point about
how different someone is/appears in a formal setting (as Sarah) as
opposed to their normal life (as Sally). What I don’t see is John C
Wright having any such purpose in his narrative, which argues for
incompetence or carelessness.

 GSLamb on May 19, 2015 at 7:18 pm said:

Had a few days convalescence (and a few more ahead), so I thought it a fine time to catch up on my Hugo reading.

Thanks
to a very good local library, I have been reading most of the Best
Novel nominees on the traditional Ent-corpse editions. “Skin Game” was
everything I thought it would be – no more, no less. “Three Body
Problem” was either over my head or not something to read on medication
(I will revisit next month). Even though I had not read the first novel,
I enjoyed “Ancillary Sword”. It wasn’t until the end when I realized
that not every “She” was female (again, medication).

With renewed access to my laptop, I started greedily digesting the Hugo packet.

Oy.

The
worst thing about the packet is that I have to wait until they release
the list of what would have made the Hugo ballot sans-slate so that I
can read those works.

Having read that one story by John C.
Wright (do not bother me with quibbles – they are all the same story*)
five times was, admittedly, rough work. Luckily I had left the Graphic
Story for afterwards. I nearly ruptured something reading “Rat Queens”.

Now, this might all sound very convincing were it not for the sort of works they were awarding in recent years. Or if you weren’t able to see for yourself what “Rat Queens” is like. No, there can be no compromise, as those who were formerly neutral are coming to understand.

Will on May 19, 2015 at 4:43 pm said:

Until now, until tonight, I thought they were full of BS. Utter BS. But you make their case better than they do. Congratulations.

Will on May 19, 2015 at 4:49 pm said:

You couldn’t be helping Vox more if he was paying you.

And where would we be without SJWs to not only explain what is good and acceptable science fiction versus what is bad and unacceptable science fiction, but also our own principles.  After all, they obviously understand us so very well.

Bruce Baugh on May 20, 2015 at 8:26 am said:

Nate’s monologue reminds me of the thing that really chafes me about a lot of noisy, disruptive modern conservatives: how much time the rest of us end up explaining their own principles to them.



Aaron on May 20, 2015 at 5:30 am said:

The Puppies have already lost. Even if one of their authors wins a Hugo, the Puppies lose, because what none of the Puppies seem to understand is the award doesn’t confer the prestige you all so clearly crave. The prestige has to come first, or the award will be seen as tainted and undeserved. Every Puppy campaign has been an admission on the part of the organizers that the works they are touting are too weak to get nominated on their own merits. Every Puppy campaign is an admission that the Puppy touted authors are simply too lousy at their profession to earn recognition for their actual work. Every Puppy campaign is itself a loss for the Puppies.


Men don’t matter to SJWs

Nero observes the uneven and sexist reaction to acts of violence in A GAME OF THRONES:

    D&D are trash bags go back to the sewerage where you belong
    — ziggy (@foxfeuer) May 18, 2015

    D&D are so gross I hope they burn in hell.
    — stevebucky asun (@mybaabyblue) May 18, 2015

    I AM FUCKING FURIOUS I WANT D&D TO DIE THOSE PIECES OF SHIT
    — JUSTICE FOR SANSA (@sansaslady) May 18, 2015

“D&D” refers to the show’s creators, Daniel Benioff and Daniel Weiss.

If any other group were caught making tweets like this, they would probably be labelled a hate group. But that can’t happen to feminists, so publications like Vox instead blamed the show’s creators for “provoking the ire of the internet”. It’s hardly surprising, of course. These are the same people who had nothing to say about #killallmen.

This isn’t the first time that violence against female characters in Game of Thrones has attracted attention. The first was over the graphic murder of a prostitute by the sadistic King Joffrey. Then people were upset when Robb Stark’s pregnant wife was stabbed in the belly. Robb himself was impaled with a sword before his corpse was decapitated and paraded around with a wolf’s head stuck on his neck, but no one minded so much about that.

But the latest outrage has surpassed all the others, with odious, risible “geek feminist” blog The Mary Sue announcing that they would no longer promote the series.

    Here’s our new policy re: @GameOfThrones. http://t.co/OkqrSawZaI #GameOfThrones

    — The Mary Sue (@TheMarySue) May 19, 2015

If these aggrieved Tumblrinas took a minute to think, they might figure out why violence against female characters seems so shocking: it’s because on-screen violence against men is so common that it doesn’t surprise us, and that in turn makes on-screen violence against women stand out.

It’s no different in games. Remember all the protests against GTA because you COULD kill prostitutes in a game where you MUST kill copious men in a broad variety of ways just in order to play. Meanwhile, an SJW-approved version of A GAME OF THRONES is suggested:

Daenerys Targaryean withdraws from marrying Khal Drogo after realizing she’s a strong independent Khaleesi that don’t need no Dothraki. Daenrys still takes the dragon eggs that were a wedding gift. As she never burns though the eggs never hatch.

Sansa cuts her long red hair short and dyes it rainbow colours. Starts a social media raven campaign for the awareness of how tough the daughters of Lords have it. Spends the rest of her time telling peasant boys to check their privilege.

I’ve previously pointed out how the basic story of A GAME OF THRONES isn’t even possible if the author had been properly feminist, and how a single change to a single character in A Song of Ice and Fire
would have eviscerated the entire series and eliminated the
greater part of its plot.  Consider the consequences of changing Cersei
Lannister from an oppressed woman used as a dynastic piece by her father
to a strong and independent warrior woman of the sort that is presently
ubiquitous in third-generation fantasy, science fiction, and paranormal
fiction.

  1. Cersei doesn’t marry Robert Baratheon.  She’s strong and independent like her twin, not a royal brood mare!
  2. House Lannister’s ambitions are reduced from establishing a royal line to finding a wife for Tyrion.
  3. Cersei’s children are not bastards.  Robert’s heirs have black hair.
  4. Jon Arryn isn’t murdered to keep a nonexistent secret.  Ned Stark isn’t named to replace him.
  5. Robert doesn’t have a hunting accident arranged by the Lannisters, who don’t dominate the court and will not benefit from his fall.
  6. Robert’s heirs being legitimate, Stannis and Renly Baratheon remain loyal.
  7. The Starks never come south and never revolt against King’s
    Landing.  Theon Greyjoy goes home to the Ironborn and never returns to
    Winterfell.  Jon Snow still goes to the Wall, but Arya remains home and
    learns to become a lady, not an assassin, whether she wants to or not.

So, what was a war of five kings that spans five continents abruptly
becomes a minor debate over whether Robert Baratheon’s black-haired son
and heir marries Sansa Stark, a princess of Dorne, or Danerys
Targaryen.


Delenda est

I couldn’t help but smile yesterday when the gentleman at File 770 mentioned that he had asked several pro-Puppies what they wanted and they answered “SJW delenda est.” That was beautiful. It touched me to such an extent that a single tear trickled down my cheek beneath the iron mask. And speaking of tears, this cri de coeur by Zoe Quinn about her unemployed and now-unhireable boyfriend is a good summary of what we want to see repeated over and over by SJWs in science fiction in the future:

How has the industry responded to his loyalty? Dubbing him a hiring risk. Too hot to touch. Heaven forbid some teenagers spam them with meme-laden emails. SmegmaDan’s blog said Alex hated gamers, better not hire him it could be risky.

Elephants afraid of mice.

God could you imagine how much worse it’d be if he was a marginalized person? Look at what happened to The Mighty No 9’s Dina Abou Karam? Look at her google search.

When you combine this with all of the other barriers marginalized people face, combined with how they are targeted for mob hatred at an exceptionally higher rate, it has a chilling effect on speaking out. There are countless marginalized people I’ve spoken to in the industry who are too afraid to support their friends in even the most lukewarm ways because they don’t want their employers to retaliate. There are so many women and people of color that have expressed private support alongside an apology for their fear of making it public because they have to keep their search results clean for a potential studio’s HR department.

You know that’s done to people like us on purpose, right? That running away at the first sign of smoke without fire is a tactic used against targets of online mobs CONSTANTLY? That they abuse SEO as a tool of social warfare? That the only power this carries is the kind major companies give to them by not bothering to see if it’s smoke without fire?

What if someone like Alex wants to go independent (leaving aside the question of if indies even hire producers for a second)? I cast a long shadow. He gets fucked over not just once from the industry’s general fear, but twice because his story has been looked over or lumped in with mine because he wasn’t “loud enough” about his own trouble. Not only does he get targeted because of being with me, but people look past his suffering, sacrifice, his work, and efforts to rebuild. People thoughtlessly treat him as an appendage. It’s infuriating. Look at some of the articles written about Crash Override. Look how often he’s missing or thought of simply as “a boyfriend” and not the cofounder he is. Look at how people attribute his work to me.  The man works his face off, gets results, and still gets screwed out of some of the credit.

Does that sound familiar? It does to me. I’ve fucking been there myself. It sounds like what USUALLY happens when I work with any men on a project. If you’re a marginalized person at all, you KNOW this feeling of frustration, of being whitewashed, of seeing your work being downplayed.

It’s not just Alex either. I’ve watched people who have been targets keep their heads down to try to keep themselves safe, just to have people all collectively forget what has happened to them. They’re stuck in a no-win position because speaking out means more hurt gets hurled their way, and more of their privacy is lost, but the cost of staying silent is that it seems that the world forgets about what happened to you at all. You’re left to wonder why people weren’t standing up for you like that, and if they cared about your suffering at all.

And since people with the power and reach need to speak up when those without are being hurt. Since I have been given the privlege to have this platform, I can’t just watch this, I have to speak up: THIS INDUSTRY IS CREATING A RISK OF SPEAKING OUT BY CALLING THOSE WHO SPEAK OUT A RISK.

We are bleeding assets to this industry, to this medium, at an alarming pace because of this risk aversion and shortsightedness. I would be dead or totally lost if not for Alex and the other folks who have been targeted by GamerGate and quietly faded away because it got to be too much. To see so many of them treated as footnotes is heartbreaking. To see my partner who has endured all of the hell I have and more treated as a fashion accessory and not the fully fledged and fucking impressive human being he is insults both of us and the things we have built *together*. For a risk adverse industry to treat him and other activists like lepers because a teenager might go “ur game sux” shows some pretty fucked up priorities.

The #GamerGate response has been worthy of the Vile Faceless Minions themselves: “Schadenfreudelicious!” One thing we’ll be discussing at Brainstorm tonight is how to bring successful #GamerGate tactics into science fiction, as Zoe Quinn points to one obvious possibility. It’s readily apparent that Tor Books doesn’t care in the slightest that PNH calls himself a racist or that John Scalzi launches vulgar attacks on everyone to the right of Hilary Clinton who crosses his path. But then, Tor Books is not their ultimate employer….

The employer stood behind us. They saw the horde for what it was. But
it didn’t stop there. Studios he never worked at got brigaded. Then his
employer’s employer got brigaded, and upped the pressure. One of the
things that makes mob harassment so insidious is how it attacks from
every possible angle, and some you didn’t even think of. All it takes in
any system is one point of failure, one person to make the wrong
decision, one person to not understand what’s going on, one person to be
a coward.

The SJWs have been playing this game of DISQUALIFY for a long time. They love to hurl the threat “you’ll never work in this industry again” at their enemies; Charles Stross, to his eternal credit, even warned me about it ten years ago. So it’s tremendously rewarding to see an SJW literally crying over the tactic being successfully brought to bear against them.

The secret of #GamerGate’s amazing success is emails, sent out on a daily basis in a series of coordinated campaigns against specified targets. Few corporations can resist a steady barrage of emails; as Quinn herself points out, it only takes one person somewhere in the system to crack and the target will be cut loose. And given the poor sales and financial performance of the science fiction publishing houses in recent years, it is unlikely that their corporate masters are likely to continue to tolerate actions and behavior which have quite observably turned a statistically significant percentage of the science fiction-buying public against them.

Zoe Quinn claims “20 accounts owned by 3 guys” have been sufficient to DISQUALIFY her boyfriend from industry employment. There are 364 Vile Faceless Minions. There are another 200+ Dread Ilk, plus an unknown quantity of Ilk, Rabid Puppies, and #GamerGate sympathizers. Even if we assume that Ms Quinn is lying (she is an SJW after all), I expect we can accomplish more than most of us might think if we were to follow #GamerGate’s lead in this regard. And in case you’re feeling sorry for the unemployable SJW lowlife, do keep this in mind.

|



SJWs only get sick of culture wars when they start losing. Until then it’s “Full Speed Ahead!” and “Remember the Misogyny!” 
– Daddy Warpig


King Log or King Stork?

The only question is who will be king? Chris Hensley usefully summarizes the core issue underlying the conflict in science fiction at File 770:

It is helpful to understand the context in which the Puppies were started. There has been a debate going on for a number of years at this point, predating the Puppies and one which they are involved in like or not, about what, and who, we actually should accept and tolerate within the community. There has been a growing sentiment that maybe not everybody should be welcomed with open arms, maybe some people should be excluded.

I could spin it to sound more palatable, but it is a grave and terrible thing and as someone who supports sometimes excluding people for their actions it would be dishonest for me to do so. Fandom has had a tradition of not excluding anybody for any reason, including some pretty horrendous behavior up to and including sexual harassment and assault. This has finally come back to bite the community in the posterior, as well it should. A lot of this push back has been from the left-leaning end of fandom, and good for them, which has flavored both the community’s response and the reaction to that response. A lot of this is working how the details of what is, and is not, acceptable in what spaces.

One of the most heated debates, and the one the Puppies tapped into, is when speech should be excluded and when people can be excluded for their speech. The community traditionally leaned towards “never”, but the consensus has moved on that.

The moment that the SJWs in the science fiction community decided they could exclude individuals from it (and whether the SFWA expulsion was technically real or not is irrelevant in this regard), that meant the open community concept was dead. The principle was established. Now we can exclude Eskimos, people with big noses, people with little noses, people who look funny, or people who smell bad; in short, we can openly exclude anyone we have the power and the desire to exclude.

There is no longer free speech in science fiction. There is no longer freedom of expression or thought. It is now a simple ideological power game and we are ready to play that game with extreme prejudice. There is no need for discourse. There is no need for dialogue, for compromise, or negotiations. There is nothing to discuss.

They laid out the new rules. They laid out the new consensus. We not only accept them, we’re going to use make far more ruthless use of them than they ever imagined. Once we were content to let the twisted little moral freaks do and think and say what they wanted, but now they have claimed the right to tell US what to do and think and say we’re not going to tolerate them anymore. We are the sons of the Crusades and the daughters of the Inquisitions. This is a game we know how to win.

Remember, they didn’t exclude rapists. They didn’t exclude child molesters. They didn’t exclude Communists. They didn’t exclude monsters. They only excluded those with whom they ideologically disagreed. CMM observed:

I was reading the discussion from a 1960s fanzine which contained the discussion of whether Worldcon should ban the man who later became her husband (and still later died in prison after being convicted of child molestation).

In their attempts to keep up their ideal that everyone is welcome in fandom, the fans doing the discussing go to amazing lengths to deny that the guy is a problem and as they do so they reveal behavior they and people known to them have personally witnessed that made my hair stand on end, including groping the children of mutual friends in front of the friends and other guests at their house.

Remember, the science fiction community was absolutely fine with open child molesting. They still defend and honor child molesters and the sexually aberrant, even as they mock and exclude their ideological opponents. That is the sickness of the community over which the Evil Legion of Evil will methodically march. And speaking of the long march, now that the Hugo Packets are out, I should have my Totally Personal List Of Merest Voting Inclinations That Absolutely No One, Not Even The Vilest of Minions, Has To Follow To The Letter ready in about two weeks. I trust that description should suffice to keep everyone who has been whining about slates and bloc votes satisfied.

Mike Glyer adds:

It’s possible for people to exclude themselves from community with others they disapprove, but there seems to be no literal way of excluding anyone from fandom, which is why it has that misunderstood reputation for unlimited tolerance. I remember the time I passed Walter Breen in the aisle of a con huckster room, at first being astonished, then wondering “Should I tell someone?” Then, “Tell them what? They already know, he’s wearing membership badge.”

He’s absolutely right. It’s possible for a large group of people to exclude themselves from community with others they disapprove. All that we’re initially sorting out right now is who is on the Blue SF side and who is on the Pink SF side. Which, of course, is why many of those on the latter side are suddenly rushing to deny that there are two sides; they know theirs is much smaller. And they know we aim to misbehave.

UPDATE: This sums up our position nicely.

I did ask some pro-puppies that very question about how much they want. The answers I’ve gotten in emails have been very much along the lines of “Delenda Est”.

The Legion marches.


SJWs eat their own

There is a wonderful scene in Garrison Keillor’s Wobegon Boy when the protagonist, a true red SJW who runs a public radio station at a private university, returns from a conference where he received an award for excellence in public broadcasting to learn that the women who report to him have turned on him and are accusing him of sexism in order to oust him from his position as the station manager. Led by his secretary, a card-carrying member of Wounded Daughters of Distant Fathers, they plant a story in the local media prior to taking their manufactured complaints about him to the university administration.

The reporter was Sandra Welles, who had called me the day after my dinner with Jean. The story was a real torpedo… It said that I had “a problem” with assertive women, being from the Midwest, and that I tried to “psychologically seduce” women in meetings and charm my way around them. I had paternalized the decision structure and made women afraid to speak up….

My heart sank. These slanders had come from people who knew me. They worked at WSJO and had come to my house and drunk my wine and eaten my Chinese spareribs…. Why would people be so angry and bitter toward me? I had built this station from the ground up and had managed it reasonably well, and what was their beef?

Their beef, of course, was that said protagonist, John Tollefson, was a white man from the Midwest who played white male classical music at the station he built and managed. Ergo, he had to go in order to make way for the station’s transformation into a vehicle for social justice and women’s issues. After his ouster has been successfully orchestrated and is all but complete, Tollefson reflects on what will happen to the station, but like a good SJW, he completely fails to learn anything from his experience.

I sat in bed, drinking water and gazing out at the snowy backyard and thinking about the radio station and Dean Baird. In a few months, WJSO would change over, from classical music to talk: the Gay-Lesbian Parenting Hour at one P.M. and the Men Dealing with Impotence Hour at one-fifteen, the Hearing Impaired Hour at one-thirty, Wounded Nephews of Distant Uncles at one forty-five, People in Grief for Former Lovers at two, the Herpes Hour at two-fifteen, People in Search of Closure at two-thirty – each with its own smug host and tiny clientele, its own style of vacuity – and should I fight this? No, I did not think so.

This seemed apt in light of the recent SJW declaration of disavowal of George R.R. Martin, who has gone from repeatedly attacking the wintery, chaotic evil of the Rabid Puppies and Vox Day to refusing to talk about the feminist attacks on him and his television show.

I am getting a flood of emails and off-topic comments on this blog about
tonight’s episode of GAME OF THRONES. It’s not unanticipated. The
comments… regardless of tone… have been deleted. I have been
saying since season one that this is not the place to debate or discuss
the TV series. Please respect that….

There has seldom been any TV series as faithful to its source material, by and large (if you doubt that, talk to the Harry Dresden fans, or readers of the Sookie Stackhouse novels, or the fans of the original WALKING DEAD comic books)… but the longer the show goes on, the bigger the butterflies become. And now we have reached the point where the beat of butterfly wings is stirring up storms, like the one presently engulfing my email.

Prose and television have different strengths, different weaknesses, different requirements.

David and Dan and Bryan and HBO are trying to make the best television series that they can.

And over here I am trying to write the best novels that I can.

And yes, more and more, they differ. Two roads diverging in the dark of the woods, I suppose… but all of us are still intending that at the end we will arrive at the same place.

In the meantime, we hope that the readers and viewers both enjoy the journey. Or journeys, as the case may be. Sometimes butterflies grow into dragons.

((I am closing comments on this post. Take your discussions to the other sites I have mentioned….)

They’re just doing the best they can, people! Translation: “Please stop hitting me! Also, please go away and leave me alone.” What a complete fucking coward! Whatever happened to all that “debate and honest dialogue” for which you were calling, George? I also enjoy his resort to the patented Sam Harris Defense, in which the ex post facto claim of having anticipated a response is considered tantamount to rebutting it.

Keep in mind that Wobegon Boy was published in 1997. SJW women turning on the white men in their midst is nothing new, and yet every Tollefson and Martin and Scalzi and Sanford and Hines believes it can’t possibly happen to them because their little SJW hearts are pure.


Sexism and ideological bias in science fiction

Since we’re often informed by the SJWs how vital it is that more women are given awards on the basis of inclusivity, let’s begin with putting the facts out there. We already know, per Mike Glyer, that Hugos have been awarded to 19 conservative winners since 1996. I went through the list of Hugo Awards by Year and counted the number of women awarded, then counted the total number of awards given out. When more than one individual was awarded, I added the relevant percentage of that particular award (so one women in a group of four counted as 0.25, for example), and rounded up to a single decimal at the end.

2014: 9 of 17
2013: 4.8 of 17
2012: 8.8 of 17
2011: 6 of 16
2010: 2.8 of 16
2009: 4.5 of 15
2008: 1.3 of 14
2007: 3 of 14
2006: 3 of 13
2005: 4.8 of 14
2004: 4.7 of 13
2003: 4 of 13
2002: 1.5 of 13
2001: 2 of 13
2000: 1 of 12
1999: 1 of 12
1998: 0.5 of 12
1997: 1.5 of 12
1996: 1.5 of 13

TOTAL: 65.7 women have won 24.7 percent and 19 conservatives have won 7.1 percent of the 266 Hugo Awards given out since 1996. This is despite the fact that conservatives outnumber liberals by a factor of 1.6 in the USA, which means that conservatives are underrepresented by a factor of 11.3, versus women being underrepresented by a factor of 2.

Now, if the SJWs are to be believed, sexism is a serious problem but there is absolutely no evidence of left wing ideological bias. They keep repeating this despite the fact that the anti-right wing bias in science fiction is observably 5.6 times worse than the purported sexism about which they so often complain.

Which merely points us once more towards the truth of the lesson: SJWs always lie. And if the numbers aren’t enough to convince the more rhetorically minded, there is also a considerable quantity of anecdotal evidence of bias such as this comment from Martin Wisse:

To be honest, Worldcon fandom has been caught with its pants down by the Puppies, too slow to react to the first two attempts to game the Hugos. We all thought, and I was no exception, that after the Puppy nominees were trashed in the actual voting last year, the spoiled brats behind it would get the hint and fuck off.

Well, not so much. But at least we all know how seriously to take their pose of inclusivity.


The common factor

XDPaul points out that the parties responsible for what the Worldcon community is lamenting are not either the Sad or Rabid Puppies:

This is supposed to be a literary award, not playground taunts and bullying

If that was generally understood Sad Puppies would’ve never happened in the first place!

Exactly.

Scalzi should never have – unprovoked – called that guy he didn’t know a “a jackass, and a fairly ignorant jackass at that” in order to curry favor with established authors. All of this could have been prevented, had Scalzi not turned fandom into his private personal playground specially designed for these taunts and bullying of which you complain.

Taunts, bullying…and awards-gathering, of course. I know, let’s call it “Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded,” that epic scholarly work so highly regarded in the annals of SF.

If you want to condemn the one who set this all off, I think the former President of the SFWA, initial taunter, rape humorist, “easiest difficulty setting there is,” master of the recommendation list, and award-winning Professional Fan Writer John Scalzi is not a bad place to look.

Everyone here knows why I went to the trouble of getting John Scalzi’s traffic statistics and unmasking him as the liar and fraud that he is. Perhaps fewer understand why Larry Correia is no fonder of the little charlatan, but Steve Moss explains:

 From what I can determine,the Corriea-Scalzi feud started as follows:
1. Ms. USA makes comments about women’s self-defense.
2. Corriea supports her comments.
3. Jim Hines’ criticizes Ms. USA and Corriea, in not too pleasant terms.
4. Corriea pins Hines’ ears back.
5. Scalzi goes after Corriea, and is his usually condescending and insulting self.
6. Scalzi gets his butt kicked in the Twitter exchange.
7. Many hot tempered words follow for the next 2-3 years year, with no sign of abating.

And then, of course, I would be remiss if I failed to recall this hilarious exchange:

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi Apr 8
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.
45 retweets 66 favorites

Larry Correia @monsterhunter45
I turned down my Hugo nomination and you still didn’t make the ballot.
360 retweets 501 favorites

The post-Loncon period in which McRapey repeated the very sort of falsehoods that the International Lord of Hate predicted the SJWs would attempt to put forth also merits mention. Meanwhile, Hugo nominee Kary English notes that the self-proclaimed inclusivity crowd has been more than a little bit hostile to outsiders, even to the point of harassing us with violent language.

“I’ve pretty much lost count of all the times I’ve seen someone say the Puppies should be shot, euthanized, put down, drowned, etc. It’s not cool. It’s not acceptable”

Perhaps someone should enquire of Sasquan if people who have harassed Hugo nominees in such violent fashion will be banned from the con, as I expect such statements are likely in clear violation of their Harassment Code. And finally, we have more evidence of the oft-observed truism; SJWs always lie:

Owlmirror on May 16, 2015 at 9:43 pm said:

    Scalzi should never have – unprovoked – called that guy he didn’t know a “a jackass, and a fairly ignorant jackass at that”

You mean VD’s anti-Semitism and misogyny don’t count as provocation?

    All of this could have been prevented, had Scalzi not turned fandom into his private personal playground specially designed for these taunts and bullying of which you complain.

You mean, VD would have not taunted and bullied anyone if not for Scalzi? What about the fact that he taunted and bullied women SF writers in the first place?

Yes, nonexistent anti-Semitism and misogyny don’t count as provocation, for the obvious reason that they do not exist. Nor does a single column addressing an attack on a disease-stricken Michael Kinsley by Susan Estrich and explaining the toxic effect of feminism on female intellects qualify as taunting and bullying women SF writers.

It’s fascinating to see how the SJWs resolutely refuse to see the obvious and recongize the single common factor in everything from award campaigning and pro Fan Writers to the culture war and the increased incivility in SF. This is particularly obvious once you take into account that I was an SFWA member participating in various events and activities without incident for seven years prior to McRapey first surfacing in the SF community.

However, the most interesting bit in the comments might have been easily missed, as Mike Glyer raised one of the few relevant points to be found amidst the lunatic sea of SJW rhetoric:

“How many conservatives have won the Hugo in the past 2 decades again?”

I just did a count and found 19 Hugos have been won by conservatives since 1996.

The determination of who is and who is not a conservative may be arbitrary, but as Mike has shown himself to be impartial throughout, there is no reason to quibble over it. This means that out of the approximately 304 266 Hugo Awards* that have been given out since 1996, only 7.1 percent have gone to conservatives. It will probably surprise no one here to learn that this factual observation of extreme left-wing bias in science fiction fandom was immediately met with the suggestion that conservatives simply aren’t very good at writing science fiction and fantasy.

“It could be just that Conservatives are not (at the present) very good at creating art…. Certainly (some) Conservative art in the PAST was good. Maybe there is
something about the current Conservative movement which curtails their
ability to create art? IDK.”

That could be. Or, you know, perhaps there is something to the assertion that nearly every single right-of-center author, male and female alike, has made about aggressive left-wing ideological gatekeeping in science fiction and fantasy. After all, the mere possibility that a few more right-of-center authors might win a Hugo has not only prompted a hate campaign in the international media, but open calls for changing the rules.

*This is a correction. I originally multiplied the number of years by the number of awards given out in 2014, but fewer awards were given in previous years.


Mailvox: whitewashing history at Wikipedia

Wikipedia’s gatekeepers are up to their usual shenanigans, in this case, attempting to casually brush the topic of Cultural Marxism under the carpet to keep it from innocent eyes:

In case you haven’t noticed the “Cultural Marxism” entry to wikipedia has been deleted and replaced by “conspiracy theory” at the body of the “Frankfurt School” page.

I noticed this a few days ago.  After reading a work on Critical Race Theory which wasn’t inspired by an article I read on the Baltimore riots.  It reminded me a lot of the line of thinking that Pat Buchanan describes as Cultural Marxism in “Death of the West.”  Naturally, I looked up Cultural Marxism on wikipedia and I find that the page had been deleted and replaced.  Orwell would be proud.  To be quite honest, this really has shocked me.  Call me sheltered, but the audacity and dishonesty of it is appalling.

Being an optimist (or a masochist) I looked at the talk page to see if I couldn’t reason with someone.  Turns out that the page replacement took place in November and that a single editor it engages in some serious gate-keeping.

Over the past five months several dozen people have expressed concerns with the page and he dismissed and passive-aggressively threatened them all without answering any arguments.

I decided to engage with him, but the results are about what you’d expect.

Here’s a summary:

Me:I don’t think Cultural Marxism counts as a conspiracy by any reasonable definition and this article leans way left.  Can you please define your terms for Cultural Marxism and give me your criteria for conspiracy theory.

Him :Ok go ahead and try to prove your conspiracy theory Mr. Tin-foil hat man.  Oh and Welcome (grumble)…can you please go away…be a shame if someone were to report you for vandalism…..and did you know Satanic, baby eating, white supremacist Anders Breivik used the phrase “Cultural Marxism” in his manifesto…you don’t want to be like him do you…be a shame if you got reported….

You can imagine two days of this I’m sure.  But if you have time, I’d love to know what you think of the debate.  I’ve rarely dealt with someone so completely unwilling to actually argue all the while claiming that the battle was over before I got there and that he’s the victor. 

I’ve finally got him to consider an academic source from Paul Gottfried, but it looks like this will take time.

So, what I’d really like is you to give a shout on your blog detailing what’s happened.  It’s bigger than two guys fighting on the internet considering how many people use wikipedia, if only to get oriented in finding out more about a topic.  I know I do, or before this did.  Just a link would get more people involved.

I’ve decided to ask you because a) Castalia has published work by William Lind, one of the (if not the) coiners of the phrase “Cultural Marxism” to describe the ideology, obsessions, tactics, and behaviors of the Left and their current diffusion in society at large and b) because no one should know better than you that so-called little issues like Gamergate and the Hugos are key battlegrounds in the culture wars and will lead to bigger things. 

Honestly I think keeping wikipedia honest (as far as it’s possible) is even bigger.  This isn’t just a case of “oh no!  Somebody’s wrong on the internet!”

What do I think? I think this is simply SJWs SJWing. And what do SJWs do? The lesson, as always, is this: SJWs always lie. The ironic thing is that Wikipedia has a fairly extensive entry on one of the more important cultural Marxists, Herbert Marcuse, and even quotes him in some detail concerning the cultural Marxism he advocated, and which the SJWs practice.

  • “Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”[17]
  • “Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people (i.e. in the majority of the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.”[17]

It should come as no surprise that cultural Marxists, which is what the SJWs manifestly are, don’t want people to understand their core doctrine or its roots in the misapplication of a failed economic theory.


Islands in a sea of rhetoric

I stopped commenting at File 770 as it proved to be another exercise in demonstrating the truth of Aristotle’s dictum about those who cannot be instructed. Give them dialectic and they shamelessly attempt to pick it apart, some honestly, most dishonestly, while constantly declaring that any errors or falsehoods on their part are irrelevant. Give them rhetoric to meet them at their level and they either cry about it or concoct pseudo-dialectic to explain why it’s not valid.

Example 1
VD: SJWs always lie.
SJW: I told the truth once back in 2007. See, you’re totally wrong. Your whole argument is disproved. You are a bad person. DISQUALIFIED!

Example 2
VD: I stopped commenting at File 770.
SJW: You said you stopped commenting and then LEFT ONE MORE COMMENT THERE! See, you’re totally wrong. Your whole argument is disproved. Aristotle! You are a bad person. DISQUALIFIED!

Quod erat demonstrandum.

But the SJW theatre of the absurd aside, the continuing Hugo coverage at File 770 makes for interesting reading, particularly as the few remaining commenters possessing intellectual integrity one-by-one throw up their hands and stop trying to force the relevant facts through the SJW’s cast-iron skulls. A pair of neutrals recounted typical experiences, as one of them juxstaposed his treatment at various Puppy sites versus SF-SJW Central:

Brief Side note re: Making Light. I posted there, maybe 4 times in a discussion a month or so ago. Never a name called, never a nasty word, did not attack anyone, and was in the middle of a dialogue with another poster that came across as reasonable. My posts were disemvowelled and the board owner called me a liar. I’ve posted several times here, and at Larry’s, Brad’s, and Sarah Hoyt’s boards. At least one time I got shouted at a little, but no one edited me away to nonsense. That makes me more sympathetic with the folks not grooming their comment sections /shrug

AG on May 14, 2015 at 3:20 pm said: Regarding disemvowelling at Making Light, I took part in the initial discussion about voting rules, which as a mathematician I found very interesting. There was a contributor there (I don’t remember his name) who was an expert on voting systems and made the most valuable contributions. I certainly learned a lot from his posts. Then he made a post where he mentioned his web site (which was on topic, because it was about voting systems and potentially of interest to the people who were taking part in that discussion) and he was disemvowelled, which is something that I had never seen before and found absolutely bizarre.

Ostensibly the reason was for spamming, although as I said the poster was the one who had made the most valuable contributions to the discussion and the link was not off-topic. Talking about it, he got several more posts disemvowelled. I respect owners’ right to moderate content in their sites, but I found the practice of disemvoweling abusive and humiliating, more indicative of a petty bully in charge showing her power than of a serious moderator, and it convinced me that I did not want to have anything to do with that site.

The Making Light crew is what it is, and what it has been for the past decade. Another former neutral expressed some degree of surprise at the insistence that the Puppy tactics have been in any way worse than past tactics utilized in the SF field:

Steve Moss on May 14, 2015 at 3:20 pm said:

David W. @ 3:08 pm- So log-rolling is acceptable, with all that implies, but slates are not?

Accepting for argument’s sake the definitions of some, a slate is a list of public recommendation with a common political interest. That’s bad.

Log-rolling, quietly horse-trading votes based on self-interest (I want to win and need to be “strategic”), that’s okay.

Leaving aside the debated to death argument on slates (which I disagree is bad), it occurs to me the greatest sin the SP/RP have committed is exposing the Hugo process to the light of day. Now that more fans know: 1) that it didn’t/doesn’t take much to get a nomination; and, 2) about the behind the scenes chicanery, the Hugo loses some of its luster.

I think the position of some in fandom is laughable. What SP/RP did is the exact same thing; they just did it better and publicly. And that’s unforgivable.

It’s not surprising that the SJWs are already working very hard to change the rules because we’ve shown up and operated in an above-board manner. Instead of playing coy and disingenuous and plausibly deniable, we simply said “hey, vote for these works.” Note that it wasn’t all that long ago that SJWs in SFWA changed the Nebula rules to HIDE the evidence of all the log-rolling that was taking place there. They are always determined to hide what is actually taking place under the rocks where they dwell, which is why our straightforward tactics are so abhorrent to them.

UPDATE: While this will no doubt set the rhetoricals spinning again, it was too painful to watch people opining ineptly about whether Scalzi’s LOCK IN was a relative failure (truth) or a massive success that only proves that John Scalzi is a massive success in everything he does (SJW narrative). So, against my better judgment, I pointed out the completely obvious that had somehow managed to elude the rocket scientists commenting at File 770:

Forget Old Man’s War and all the
hardcover vs softcover vs audio and so forth. The reason both Scalzi and
PNH were so disappointed by Lock In’s sales is obvious:

“Lock In’s sales are for the first 8 months”: 10,000

Redshirts first seven months: 26,604

As every writer here knows, success is a) relative and b) takes
trajectory into account. Doing one-third the numbers with considerably
more marketing expense than your previous book is not, in most quarters,
considered a desirable trajectory.

Scalzi is an inflated midlist writer. He has likely peaked at a point
much higher than most SF writers ever reach. It’s an incredible
accomplishment, especially if one takes into account how little talent
or originality he possesses. There is no shame in that.

Where there is shame is claiming that you have 2 million pageviews
when you truly have only 305,000. Where there is shame is aggressively
campaigning for nine Hugo nominations, and then campaigning for more
because two more than Arthur C. Clarke is not enough.

That is an apples-to-apples comparison. Hardcover to hardcover. And if that simple recitation of relevant facts isn’t sufficient to convince you, then obviously no information is sufficient to instruct you or change your mind.