Tag: SJW

Who is the racist, George?

So, who is more reasonably deemed “racist as fuck”, a white man active in science fiction fandom who created one of the most racially iconic scenes of the last decade and is openly trying to exclude a Native American from the science fiction world, or a part-Mexican Native American who dares to respond to people attacking him? I remember seeing that scene myself and thinking: “seriously, the white girl Christ?”

Last summer, in the finale of Game of Thrones’ third season, mother of dragons Daenerys Targaryen stood outside the walls of Yunkai waiting for the slaves she just freed, hoping to convince them to join her army as free men. Daenerys, the white-blonde queen traded moons ago to the Dothraki by her brother, moves into the crowd of outstretched brown arms as they chant “mhysa”, which, we learn, means “mother” in their native tongue, and is carried into the crowd as the camera pulls back to show her floating in the middle of this sea of arms like the bright planet in a constellation of darkness.

I turned to my husband and said: “No one at HBO remembers the visual impact of slavery, I guess?” It was at that moment I decided to stop watching it. I’m aware that Game of Thrones is a TV show, a work of fiction, but having invested in it for three seasons, I no longer trusted the creators to bridge the gap of thoughtful conversation between action and intent. How much misogyny and racism are we expected to put up with in the name of entertainment?

 
Save us, little white girl!

The man who came up with this imagery is calling me racist? And doing so because I generously described a deranged black woman as a “half-savage” after she described Robert Heinlein as “racist as fuck”, most of science fiction fandom as “racist as fuck” and me as “a self-described misogynist, racist, anti-Semite, and a few other flavors of asshole.” I tend to doubt Martin has any idea who and what he is defending when he attacks me.

I am not. And no doubt Dr. Martin van Creveld, the brilliant Israeli military historian I have the honor of editing and publishing, would be very surprised to learn about the anti-Semitism I supposedly proclaim so loudly. I know I was. Needless to say, I have never described myself as any of those things. Nor am I any of those things.

As it happens, my novelette that was nominated for the Hugo last year, “Opera Vita Aeterna” from The Last Witchking, is about a deep and abiding friendship between two individuals of different races, an elven sorcerer and a human monk. It is not a story of hate, but of three loves, the love of knowledge, the love of God, and the love of a friend. Another short story in that mini-collection, “The Hoblets of Wiccam Fensboro”, is a story about a reluctantly righteous goblin saving innocent hoblets from the hoblet-hating orcs who occupy his village.

I am absolutely nothing like Requires Hate. When Martin says “Make no mistake. Vox Day and Requires Hate are twins. Mirror images of one another.” he not only makes a mistake, he lies.

John O’Neill says I’m the most hated man in SF, but honestly, I don’t think we’ve even come close to maximizing the hate yet. All we need now is for George Martin to have a heart attack from the stress brought on by attacking #GamerGate, thereby enraging all the Westeros fans who haven’t given up hope that Martin has a Secret Master Plan to salvage the series and reverse the disaster of the last two books. Of course, the Torlings would inevitably put it all down to my cunning plan to market Castalia House in general and ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT in particular.

“Vox Day is ruthless! George RR Martin’s untimely death just proves he will STOP AT NOTHING!”

Anyhow, this tweet amused me: Be especially nice to @GRRMspeaking at the moment. He’s getting much flack right now. 

Do you think? Because I was deeply moved by his plight, I felt I would be remiss if I failed to respond:

@GRRMspeaking My response to you is here: http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/04/who-is-racist-george.html … I think it is clear who is, and is not, “racist as fuck”. #SadPuppies

@GRRMspeaking Now those you called “toads” will respond. Only they’re not toads. They are the Dread Ilk and they are wolves.

George Martin baits the hook

Anyone who read A Dance with Dragons is aware that George R.R. Martin has lost it. Hell, I wrote A Throne of Bones partly because, after finishing that tedious, pointless slog of a poorly edited doorstopper, my first thought was, “I’m no great writer, but dammit, even I can do better than that shit.”

It seems a few people agreed, as ATOB has a higher rating on Amazon than ADWD, 4.2 to 3.9.

Anyhow, it’s probably a mercy that instead of further mutilating his literary legacy, he’s decided to spend the last few days waxing ignorant with regards to #GamerGate, Sad Puppies, Rabid Puppies, and the Hugo Awards. I was particularly amused by his belated Appeal to Divide and Conquer.

I do believe that there are decent, honest, well-intentioned conservatives in our field, many of whom are deeply involved in the Sad Puppies movement. Brad Torgensen and Larry Correia among them; my disagreements with them so far have been on the issues, but I don’t believe that they are racists, sexists, misogynists, bigots, or haters. But I do have a question for you:

When are you going to do something about Vox Day?

Make no mistake. Vox Day and Requires Hate are twins. Mirror images of one another. The Toad of the West, the Toad of East, each of them spewing forth the venom of hatred and violence, poisoning any attempt at honest dialogue. Requires Hate had her acolytes and enablers, and so does Vox Day, and it is from those toads that they derive their power.

Liberals and moderates and “SJWs” can denounce Day all they want, and it only serves to generate more hate, more division, more death threats. His followers will just shrug that off. But if some respected figure from the right were to speak up, well, maybe someone would listen. But do we have a conservative in the house with the courage and integrity of Laura Mixon, someone honest enough and brave enough to denounce the excesses of their “own side?”

First of all, the only Toad in science fiction is The Toad of (formerly) Tor, Teresa Nielsen Hayden. Second, neither the Ilk nor the Dread Ilk are toads. They are intelligent individuals who are entirely capable of thinking for themselves, and unlike the foolish Mr. Martin, they’re not stupid and gullible enough to swallow every false narrative put forth by SJWs in the media. Nor do they deserve to be insulted by a fat old fool who can’t be bothered to learn any of the salient facts before deciding to pontificate on the subject.

And third, it is amusing that Mr. Martin seems to seriously believe this is the first time any of us have seen this sort of Two-Minute-Hate Bait before. “Why, Mr. Decent, Honest, Well-Intentioned Conservative, if only you will join us in our ritual denouncing of today’s Emanuel Goldstein, we will be nice to you and pretend to respect you… for as long as we need you.”

Just how dumb does he think everyone on the right side of the political spectrum is anyhow?

Every member of the Evil Legion of Evil has been offered this deal if only they will abjure their Supreme Dark Lord, most of them multiple times. Every single one of them has spurned it, whether they agree with me about anything or not, because they all know exactly how forked the tongue is that speaks such deceitful promises.

Hell, I was offered the same deal myself if only I would disavow Roosh of Return of Kings and Reaxxion. To which my answer was simple and straightforward: “No, absolutely not.” This isn’t even the first time an SJW has broached the idea publicly:

  •  “There’s only one way to deal with people like Day, who see themselves as above basic human decency, and that is to cut them out of the community like a tumour. Shun them, ignore them, no-platform the hell out of them. Our conventions, our fanzines, our anthologies, our community is not open to people whose racist arguments could have come straight from the mouths of slave-owners.” (April 19, 2014)
  •  “How do you bring the weight of community disapproval on someone who isn’t part of the community?” (March 30, 2015)

Give a man a platform and he will speak his mind. Deny him a platform and he will build his own… and you will never silence him again. Rabbits always think that the only possible response to being shunned is to a) submit or b) vanish. The problem, of course, is that some of us aren’t rabbits.

And that’s why the SJWs are desperately appealing to Entertainment Weekly and George RR Martin and The Guardian and anyone and anything else that will swallow their false narrative. They are terrified because they know we are in the process of building a platform and that will mean they no longer have any influence or control over us. Over any of us.

As for Mr. Martin, it’s observably two books past time for him to hang it up and hand over A Song of Ice and Fire to Brandon Sanderson or Joe Abercrombie. Although my personal vote would be for R. Scott Bakker, just because it would be hilarious to see a horde of shape-shifting, black-seed spewing rape demons unleashed on Westeros without warning. What’s the point of featuring pointless nihilism if you don’t embrace it to the full?

Perspective

One thing I thought particularly worthy of note is what a small proportion of #GamerGate tweets are in response to the Hugo Awards. And notice that they didn’t move up until several days after the initial #SadPuppies spike.

That’s what I find so amusing about the SJW panic about those they call “thugs” in their midst. Not even a tenth of #GamerGate is paying any attention at all to the Hugo Awards yet, and that’s already enough to send them shrieking and running. This is still a period of calm as far as GG is concerned.

But if the SJWs want to be sure to grab #GamerGate’s attention, I suppose a coordinated media blitz full of ludicrous lies about people are an effective way to do it. It certainly isn’t anything we haven’t seen before.

I do have to give one SJW some credit, however. In addition to urging sanity on the more violence-prone SJWs, Mary Robinette Kowal also has a sense of humor. In response to Patrick Nielsen Hayden learns about the 2015 Hugo Awards, she wrote:

I never thought I’d say this, but you’ve made me laugh at something you intended to be funny. So, thanks for the chuckle. This was hilariously over the top.

The American Spectator covered the developing story:

The controversy over the Hugo Awards contains elements of a good
dystopian science fiction story. Unfortunately, the media brat-fit over
the successful effort to rescue escapist fantasy literature from its
political pursuers comes not from the pages of Brave New World but from Slate, Salon, and Entertainment Weekly.

Like
sports, video games, and cake baking, science fiction strangely finds
itself in the crosshairs of ideological killjoys. Perhaps it was only a
matter of time and space before the genre obsessed with time and space
became a culture-war battlefield.

“To many of the people involved in this industry, politics and message trump entertainment or quality,” Larry Correia, a New York Times-bestselling bard of monster stories, tells The American Spectator.
“But most people buy entertainment because they want to be entertained.
Many longtime readers fell away because they were tired of being
preached at or having their values insulted.”

It’s pretty good. It even contains a quote from yours truly. “We believe that the Best Novel award should actually go to the best
novels,” Vox Day says of his modest aim. “The best works should be
awarded, not only works by the best-connected.”

Who but a lunatic could possibly object to that? And, as I’ve noted, we can make a powerful objective case that the works awarded this year will be better, by every objective standard, than in recent years.

Sun Tzu and the SJWs

In the podcast interview last night, I made a comment about how SJWs have been able to apply one element of Sun Tzu’s strategic recommendations to great success throughout the culture. And, when I thought a bit more about it, I realized there is also a second element that their deceitful nature allows them to successfully implement reliably without even being aware of it.

The first is this:

It has been said aforetime that he who
knows both sides has nothing to fear in a
hundred fights; he who is ignorant of the
enemy, and fixes his eyes only on his
own side, conquers, and the next time is
defeated; he who not only is ignorant of
the enemy, but also of his own resources,
is invariably defeated.

The second is this:

War is a thing of pretence: therefore,
when capable of action, we pretend disability;
when near to the enemy, we
pretend to be far; when far away, we
pretend to be near. Allure the enemy by giving him a small
advantage. Confuse and capture him. If
there be defects, give an appearance of
perfection, and awe the enemy. Pretend
to be strong, and so cause the enemy to
avoid you. Make him angry, and confuse
his plans. Pretend to be inferior, and
cause him to despise you. If he have superabundance of strength, tire him out;
if united, make divisions in his camp.
Attack weak points, and appear in unexpected
places.

Remember, SJWs ALWAYS LIE. Deceit is not second nature to them, it is their first and most reliable instinct. They will lie when they do not have to. They will lie when there is no reason to. They will lie when their lies are easily detected. They will lie when their lies are bound to be exposed. They will lie and and dissemble and exaggerate and spin with such shameless abandon that the average individual will find it almost impossible to believe they are doing so.

And because war is a thing of pretence, their deceitful nature makes them very successful in conflict as long as their enemy does not realize how deceitful they are, anticipate their inevitable pretenses, and take advantage of them.

Sun Tzu says: “victory is to the side that excels
in the foregoing matters.” That means that if you do not anticipate SJW deceit, if you are not proactively prepared to penetrate, expose, and defend against their lies, you will lose to them.

But defeat is not inevitable, it’s not even likely, given the first element. Due to their deceitful and self-deceptive natures, SJWs neither know themselves nor their enemy. I’ll have a post later today demonstrating this: their descriptions of me and my motivations are risibly far off the mark. Because they are emotional and for the most part limited to the rhetorical level, no amount of information is capable of changing their minds, so SJW failure tends to reinforce itself rather than be corrected. (That’s why they always double-down right up until they give up.)

This ignorant self-delusion is significantly to our advantage. The problem conservatives have is that while they know themselves, they fix their eyes only on their own side and remain ignorant of the enemy. Thus the conservative “conquers, and the next time is defeated”. The conservative knows himself and mistakenly assumes that his enemy is just like him.

Because they know neither themselves nor us, the SJWs will be “invariably defeated” so long as we identify them and see them for what they are: liars and self-deceivers. We have the ability to win every conflict with them, and yet we will inevitably lose everywhere we refuse to see them for what they are or refuse to take the field.

And, by the by, this is why reading books like A HISTORY OF STRATEGY is so often useful. One simply never knows how the intellectual seeds planted by the author will sprout in one’s mind.

UPDATE: Case in point:

神乃木荘龍 ‏@SoryuKaminogi
.@voxday You’re abysmally stupid and yet somehow disturbingly malign. Like a crocodile or a cancerous hangnail. 

Notice how their rhetoric is incoherent. They have to cling to the idea that their enemy is stupid – to do otherwise would risk harming their fragile self-esteem – but somehow this “abysmally stupid” opponent is a dangerous risk. This can only be explained by attributing the danger to evil that goes well beyond the pedestrian variety, and reaches the level of disturbing malignity.

So, they choose to believe in a very stupid, very malignant enemy rather than an intelligent opposition. Needless to say, this violates the first principle mentioned above, which is to know your enemy. They simply don’t know themselves well enough to permit them to do that.

Their greatest threat

The Hugo announcements appear to have driven a few SJWs well around the bend:

This is a man who goes beyond bigot, whose longterm planning looks more and more like creating a Christian version of ISIS. I don’t care about Godwin’s Law, he has written his own Mein Kampf. Forget the “War Against Terrorism”; Vox Day’s Culture War is the greatest threat to us all.
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:38 PM on April 5 [5 favorites]

My old Uncle Charlie – he once invited me to call him that – appears to be deeply, deeply disappointed with his black sheep of an adopted nephew:

The screaming question I feel the need to ask, is: why Finland? Could there be a connection between the white supremacist Perussuomalaiset (Finns Party), the overtly racist Sweden Democrats, the Dark Enlightenment/neoreactionary movement, and Vox Day’s peculiarly toxic sect of Christian Dominionist theology?

Over a period of years, he’s built an international coalition, finding
common cause with the European neo-nazi fringe. Now they’ve attempted to
turn the Hugo Awards into a battlefield
in their (American) culture wars. But this clearly isn’t the end game
they have in mind: it’s only a beginning. (The Hugos, by their very
nature, are an award anyone can vote in for a small fee: it is
interesting to speculate on how deep Vox Day’s pockets are.) But the real burning question is, “what will he attack next?”

And now we know how the imagination that once produced Accelerando now exercises itself. Great stuff! My question is if it is “the screaming question” or “the real burning question” that takes priority? Remember, this is one of the very people who informs us that John C. Wright isn’t a Hugo-quality writer, like them. Cuz they be writing real gooder! But at least we now have a proper name for the auxiliary forces of the Evil Legion of Evil, which is the International Coalition of the Willingly Evil.

But I do owe the man for honestly warning me about how speaking my mind freely would pose a serious risk to my career in SF/F. Is Scalzi around? Does that merit a hand job or will a mere “thanks, mate” suffice?

McRapey’s friend Sparklepunter was content to settle for a death wish:

Chris Warcraft@chriswarcraft
The only thing that Vox Day deserves to win is a trip to a society that believes what he espouses so a random person can shoot him.

And another of Scalzi’s little friends, @SFReviews, managed to get his account suspended.

Account suspended
The profile you are trying to view has been suspended.

These people really have their identity tied up as the One True Science Fiction Fans. The mere threat of not collecting their annual rocket tribute has them reacting like Gollum to someone trying to steal his Precious. For who would contemplate something so purely evil, but Evil Nazi Finnsssssss?

If this keeps up, it will provide Anonymous Conservative with enough material for tome on Rabbitology fatter than A Throne of Bones. And you know, for all that they enjoy citing the fact that my father has been imprisoned for years and babbling about how dangerous I am, it’s interesting that they never manage to put the two together. I mean, in the movies, anyhow, people are usually very concerned about those who have direct contacts in the Federal prison system.

UPDATE: James Nicoll digs a deeper hole and swears off Baen Books:

Since Baen’s publisher Toni Weisskopf is part of the Puppies slate for the second year running, I will no longer accept new commissions where the only edition is from Baen and while I will finish current projects involving Baen Books, I won’t link to the Baen edition. I certainly will not be buying anything from Baen in the future. I urge everyone (particularly people with review sites) to do the same.

Not exactly a problem for Castalia House. None of them were ever going to review our books anyhow. What was that a very smart and astonishingly handsome man once said about denying a man a platform?

Their opinion doesn’t count

Keep this literary interpretation in mind when you see SJWs in science fiction striking poses and attempting to dismiss the literary quality of the Sad Puppies-recommended works. Considering their complete lack of reading comprehension, they shouldn’t even be allowed Hugo ballots. Or any utensils beyond plastic sporks.

#313 ::: rea :::April 03, 2015, 10:07 AM:
Nancy Lebovitz @300: ‘I think that if people hadn’t been aware of VDs history, the reaction to his nominated short story would have been more like “why is this mediocre thing on the ballot?” rather than “kill it with fire”.’

I read the story last year. I thought it was deeply, deeply racist, with “elves” being a stand-in for blacks and other minorities. Elves don’t have souls. Most of them commit atrocities. One elf manages to set aside his atrocity-committing tendencies, adopt the traits of human civilization, and even make friends with humans (“some of my best friends are elves”), but it doesn’t help him–he’s still soulless–and moreover all of the humans who have befriended him get massacred by the evil elvish majority. Moral–association with members of other races is at best futile, and likely to be dangerous.

Now, if you’ve read “Opera Vita Aeterna”, or any of my fiction set in Selenoth, for that matter, you will recognize that this particularly reading of the Hugo-nominated novelette isn’t merely wrong or stupid, it is downright insane.

Dev vs dev

Another one for the “SJWs always lie” book. For some reason, an Ubisoft creative director, self-identified SJW, and anti-GG game designer decided to comment on the fact that Mark Kern, another game designer, had retweeted one of my tweets, the one about American McGee:

Palle Hoffstein @Palle_Hoffstein
So Mark Kern is getting chummy with Vox Day? I suppose it was only a matter of time.

University Watch ‏@UniversityWatc1
@Palle_Hoffstein So if you are going to say spiteful things about @voxday & @Grummz #Sayittotheirface Palle #GamerGate
 
Palle Hoffstein ‏@Palle_Hoffstein
I have spoken to them many times. Settle down.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
When have you ever spoken to me? I am afraid I don’t recall.

Palle Hoffstein ‏@Palle_Hoffstein
Twitter. A while a ago. Not that memorable for me either.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
So once on Twitter is “many times”? Look, if you’ve got criticism, that’s fine. The line is over there.

Palle Hoffstein ‏@Palle_Hoffstein
I wasn’t the one who tagged you. I was talking about Kern. If I feel the need I will address you directly, I assure you.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
No, you were talking about me. And you have not talked to me many times. So you’ve lied and now tried to dissemble. Why?

Palle Hoffstein ‏@Palle_Hoffstein
Look Vox. I didn’t tag you. I didn’t want to talk to you. I can’t imagine anyone ever wants to talk to you. Buzz off.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
No, you wanted to talk ABOUT me. I would think as a game designer, you would get how this “social media” thing operates.

My favorite part is the way he shamelessly contradicts himself in a futile attempt to claim the status high ground. First he claims we’ve spoken “many times”, then after it’s clear that I don’t recall ever speaking to him, he tries to claim the one time we did communicate was “not that memorable” for him either.

The funny thing is, I did initially stop and wrack my brain to figure out if I knew him, because I do know several people at Ubisoft in Europe at the higher levels. But what can you do? Gammas gonna gamma. Even very smart ones with very impressive jobs can’t surmount their socio-sexual instincts when pressed.

How do they know?

Ptbarnium points out that the SJWs in science fiction are demonstrating one of the reasons Sad Puppies 3 is so badly needed:

Every single second of the controversy so far has taken place before the ballot has been announced. It might sound plain but it seems that they have all missed it. Everytime TNH wrings her aquatic hands pathetically, every time Jason Sanford stamps his feet childishly, every time Cora Buhlhert blares her senseless foghorn, the undecided ask one question: “How do you know?”

They have done more damage to their own cause than SP3 ever could simply because of their inability to restrain their wounded egos & frustrated self entitlement for four days. No matter how this all shakes out, no matter who wins, the cat is out of the bag now. To the CHORFs, wrapped in their delusions, they have done nothing wrong.

To anyone neutral, anyone without a dog in the fight, they have proven beyond all of our expectations that the motive force driving Sad Puppies is true. Anyone who asks the question “How do they know?” will see the immediate and obvious conclusion that eludes these morons, insulated by their self-righteous anger.

They know because many of the people who ‘should’ have been given the nod haven’t. Is there any other convincing reason why people un-nominated for any award seem to know the entire final slate? You could excuse knowing one or two finalists in a given category but the entire list? The only ways to have their level or knowledge at this stage are (a) Worldcon leaking or (b) interval communication based on information from the people on their own slates that were ‘supposed’ to get through. I know which one my money is on.

This is exactly right. The usual suspects, who revolve in orbit around Tor Books in general and Tor senior editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden in particular, are accustomed to quietly arranging things to their liking behind the scene. They talk to one another on a regular basis and arrange things like this outcome in 2008.

43 Best Fan Writer John Scalzi
41 Best Novel The Last Colony John Scalzi
40 Best Novel Halting State Charles Stross

That’s quite the coincidence, considering that Larry, Brad, and I were accused of bloc voting in 2014 with the following outcome.

184 Best Novel Warbound Larry Correia
111 Best Novella The Chaplain’s Legacy Brad Torgersen
092 Best Novelette The Exchange Officers Brad Torgersen
069 Best Novelette Opera Vita Aeterna Vox Day

What looks more like a bloc vote to you? Oh, and speaking of 2014, let’s not forget this:

120 Best Novel Neptune’s Brood Charles Stross
127 Best Novella Equoid Charles Stross
118 Best Novelette Lady Astronaut of Mars Mary Kowal

Again, what looks more like a bloc vote to you? Are we seriously supposed to believe that a 115-vote variance is an invalid bloc vote, but 9-vote and 3-vote variances that are limited to SJW authors published by Tor are just a pair of freakish coincidences involving the same group of closely connected authors six years apart?

Regarding Best Novel: I’ve heard that three of the five finalists are SP-endorsed. (Which, see above, doesn’t in itself guarantee that any of them are unworthy of a Hugo.) I don’t know what any of those three books are. I do know the identity of the other two, and I don’t think anyone in this conversation will regard them as unworthy candidates. (Disclaimer: Neither of them are books Teresa or I worked on in any way.) – Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Senior Editor, Tor Books

Since we’re speaking of PNH, how about 2009, 2010, and 2012?

76 Best Novel Saturn’s Children Charles Stross
74 Best Editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden
54 Best Novel Zoe’s Tale John Scalzi (Even some in on the game couldn’t bring themselves to vote for that steaming little pile, but it still got enough votes to make the shortlist and keep the next two authors off: Iain M. Banks and Terry Pratchett.)

79 Best Novella The God Engines John Scalzi (indicates outside support)
56 Best Novella Palimpsest Charles Stross
52 Best Short Story Overtime Charles Stross
54 Best Editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden

49 Best Novel The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
48 Best Novel Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi
44 Best Editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden
 
Three more amazing coincidences! How do they know? How do they know? Furthermore, Kevin Standlee, a Secret Master of Fandom and Worldcon insider, acknowledged at File 770 that these quiet little campaigns are known to have taken place in the past.

There clearly have been campaigns to get individual works on the ballot, some of them going beyond the technically legal.
– Kevin Standlee on April 2, 2015 at 9:41 am

He also added that nothing Sad Puppies has done is illegal or against the rules:

I agree with Vox that what’s been done (at least from the rumors
rumbling around) isn’t illegal. It’s not against the rules. It’s simply
exploiting a heretofore never-considered loophole in the rules that has
never come into play because fans are traditionally not very well
organized.
-Kevin Standlee on April 2, 2015 at 9:44 am

The SJWs are upset because we play openly by the rules better than they cheat behind closed doors. And the mere fact that they are so upset BEFORE THE NOMINATIONS ARE ANNOUNCED is sufficient to prove that they coordinated their whisper campaigns in the past and they are still coordinating them now. And the fact that so few people in latter-day science fiction can’t see the obvious shows how crabbed and limited their imaginations are:

SF fans have been historically so independent-minded and disorganized that the idea of actually filling a slate to try and deliberately stifle anything other than a particular group of five works in each category hadn’t really occurred to anyone I know of, and I’ve been following this since 1984. Sure, there have been deliberate campaigns (of varying degrees of ethical) to get individual works onto the ballot, but to try and monopolize all 85 spaces? Nah. Indeed, the idea would probably been laughable until fairly recently. You can’t generally get five fans to agree on where to go to dinner, let alone get 500 of them to agree on exactly the same slate of Hugo Award nominees.

This juxstaposition, however, is my favorite proof that the other side is utterly incapable of thinking past the end of their noses.

  1. “There’s only one way to deal with people like Day, who see
    themselves as above basic human decency, and that is to cut them out of
    the community like a tumour. Shun them, ignore them, no-platform the
    hell out of them. Our conventions, our fanzines, our anthologies, our
    community is not open to people whose racist arguments could have come
    straight from the mouths of slave-owners.” (April 19, 2014)
  2. “How do you bring the weight of community disapproval on someone who isn’t part of the community?” (March 30, 2015)

Well, who could possibly have seen THAT coming? Give a man a platform and he will speak his mind. Deny him a platform and he will build his own… and you will never silence him again. Rabbits always think that the only possible response to being shunned is to a) submit or b) vanish. The problem, of course, is that some of us aren’t rabbits.

Now a number of them are credibly threatening to No Award everything even before the announcements have been announced. And I’m wondering, do they really think we didn’t anticipate that too? Considering that they repeatedly assert that Brad Torgersen is lying about the purpose of Sad Puppies, hasn’t it ever occurred to them that perhaps the purpose he is concealing is different than the one they assume it must be?

It is a proper conundrum.

A name designer speaks out

Game designer American McGee dismisses SJWs and Literally Who 2:

I’m prepared for the SJW flamethrower…

Seriously, isn’t Anita saying this character is acceptable because she’s such a blank slate? I can’t help but think the “woman” in this game might as well be wearing a burka for all the identity she has. If this is “positive” and we (as game writer/designers) are meant to emulate this model… then I imagine the characters in our future games getting some really odd looks as they walk down the streets of virtual Los Angeles, sneak through the corridors of Space Station 009, or try to blend into any world that isn’t a magical fantasy world of pixel make-believe.

To me, real characters, positive characters, have flaws. They’re broken. They have an identity constructed of past events – good and bad. Like real people, they might make poor “life choices” which result in them being shallow minded, skin revealing, homicidal maniacs, who wear women’s lingerie under their space armor. Or, like the rest of us, they might be who they are, and wear what they wear, because society (the real world) hasn’t left them many other options. If we’re going to tell real stories, it’s best we do that with characters who closely resemble real people.

We are now advancing on two fronts, the game industry and the science fiction publishing industry. And we’re able to do so because more and more people are entering the ranks. If you know someone who plays games or reads SF/F, talk to them about #GamerGate and Sad Puppies. Let them know about it. Chances are, if they’re not an SJW, they’ll turn out to be as enthusiastic about it as you are.

A lot of science fiction readers abandoned all hope sometime between the late 90s and the middle 00s and lost interest in the genre. They didn’t know exactly why, all they knew is that they weren’t interested in reading the books about kickass werewolf lovers with crossbows or in being lectured about how evil the bigoted Biblethumpers who didn’t accept the quadsexual aliens with open arms and orifices were. So they stopped reading and started playing games instead.

But now games are under attack and there is nowhere else to run, so we have no choice but to fight back. And, lo and behold, it turns out that they are paper tigers, and their victory is no more inevitable or lasting than Hitler’s defeat of Russia.

I was acquainted with American from the time he was a level designer at id and it’s significant that he is speaking out because he is an old school, name-on-the-box game designer. I’ve said repeatedly that the designers and developers are with us, but only now are they beginning to realize that their livelihoods and their freedom to create is under attack. And more of them will be speaking out against the SJWs soon.

Speaking of SJWs and their inability to write characters, consider my original review of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, specifically, this part:

Characters: This is probably the weakest link of the book. While Scalzi makes some effort to provide motivations for his characters, only the protagonist and, ironically, a character who knows next to nothing of herself, come across in full-color. The crude bigot who gets his, the delightful gay man, the crusty drill sergeant, the overenthusiastic fool and the sexually uninhibited beautiful women are all oft-seen staples of SF fiction and they’re simply plugged in as required here.

Of course, I got this part dreadfully wrong: “OLD MAN’S WAR is both stylistically and thematically informed by
Heinlein, especially STARSHIP TROOPERS, but manages to be so without
being a thinly disguised ripoff.”

It’s a bit embarrassing, but how was I to know Scalzi had written what he openly admits was a straight-up color-by-numbers attempt to imitate Heinlein, then follow it up with even less-disguised ripoffs of Dick, Piper, and Star Trek? Anyhow, what I gave the benefit of the doubt and rounded up from a 6.5 to a 7 rating would, in retrospect, lose one star for Style and two stars for Creativity, and therefore wind up rated 5/10.

Of course, Scalzi is far from the only SJW in science fiction who has trouble with characters as a direct result of his ideological perspective:

I certainly don’t deny that I am making a value judgment about modern fantasy, what Bakker simply can’t seem to grasp is that I am expressing a literary judgment and not a moral one. The fact that one of the causes of the genre’s literary decline can quite logically be attributed to observable moral color-blindness on the part of many modern fantasy authors does not make the observation a moral judgment, anymore than attributing the decline to historical ignorance would make it a historical judgment.

This isn’t double-talk or moral cowardice. I am about as genuinely disinterested as it is possible to be and still be cognizant of the matter. I have read everything from Nietzsche and Stalin to Keynes and Onfray without it ruffling my feathers so I’m not inclined to be perturbed by mere fictitious monsters. If I was concerned that Joe or anyone else was “leading innocent souls to potential damnation” through nihilistic genre literature, my track record of publishing highly controversial opinions strongly suggests that I would not hesitate to say so. The fact is that I simply don’t believe the writers of modern fantasy matter all that much, in part due to the literary decline of the genre. As I stated before, they are a symptom of the greater societal decline, they are not a cause.

Meanwhile, an SJW named Bruce Baugh perfectly summarizes the core attitude of every SJW: “It occurs to me that the problems some of us feel about Hugo
nominating tie into something I’ve remarked on in other contexts: the
sense that we have to act like pundits, arbiters, or decision-making
authorities (judges, chief executives, etc.) when commenting on things.”

Everyone else’s opinion is merely an opinion. But their expressed opinion is that of a “decision-making authority”.