Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Dear SJW's: We Sad Puppies CAN'T Repent

The 2016 Hugo Awards season is beginning to kick into gear -- and as you might expect, those of us who backed the Sad Puppies in last year's contest have begun receiving a slew of ludicrous demands and baseless accusations. Renounce Vox or admit you're his lackeys! Apologize for breaking our unspoken "rules" and distorting the "natural" vote! And while you're at it, repent and debase yourselves for locking out Andy Weir!

I'm sorry, folks, but we won't do what you ask.

Let's dispatch the final complaint first: The fact that Weir did not make the ballot last year was due to an unintentional error on our part. We were told he was ineligible for Best Novel last year because The Martian was originally self-published before the eligibility window, and we assumed - mistakenly, as it turned out - that this ineligibility extended to the Campbell as well. Geez, we're sorry we're new to the process! Excuse my French, but are you this shitty to all the newbies who are just hopping onto your learning curve?

Here's the truth: We all love Weir. We thought his novel was amazing. (For representative samples of our enthusiasm, see my review here and a Sad Puppy-generated list of great hard SF here.)  And this is just a hunch on my part, but since we know now that Weir remains eligible for a Campbell, I suspect he will not be left off this year's Sad Puppy recommendation list. So please - please - put a sock in it.

Regarding the second complaint, we won't apologize for our "slate" either, for four very simple reasons:

Number one, we've already acknowledged that the pool from which last year's recommendations were pulled was not as representative as it could've been, and we're already trying to cast a wider net when it comes to creating this year's list. Kate's site is open to everyone and is 100% transparent.

Number two, we had no idea last year's list would be that successful. The numbers for Sad Puppies I and Sad Puppies II simply did not presage what would happen with Sad Puppies III. We didn't bank on the Vile Faceless Minions getting involved, and we underestimated the enthusiasm within our own ranks.

Number three, Brad Torgersen may have called our list a "slate," but it was not deliberately designed to function in that manner. From the get-go, we Sad Puppies were encouraged to read the suggested works (hence the book bombs) and vote our conscience, and based on the numbers, most of us did. That's why Chuck Gannon's Trial By Fire did not make the ballot despite being featured on our list (which made me sad, by the way, but I suppose not enough of our group was able to read Chuck's novel in time). Yes: Vox may have encouraged people to vote a slate, and he did in fact appropriate much of our list, but the Rabid Puppies campaign was not our circus and not our monkeys. Stop mixing us up.  

Lastly - and most importantly - there is no such thing as a "natural vote." This is probably one of the biggest misconceptions that under-girds our opposition's argument: the idea that, before we philistines got involved, the Hugos highlighted works that were genuinely the best in the field -- which were selected by a group of high-minded, pure, and totally impartial fans. Ha. Ha ha. And again: ha. Do you know how many works of science fiction are published in a typical year? Many thousands. There is no one on God's green earth who is capable of reading them all. In reality, modern fandom (like any other large group of human beings) has always had its aristoi -- in this case, a small group of influential bloggers, reviewers, publishers, and magazine editors that routinely has an outsized impact, intentional or not, on what gets the hype and what doesn't. The only thing that's changed here is that some "politically objectionable" people have proven themselves to be a part of that aristoi and have decided not to play pretend. My suggestion? Make peace with the fact that factions will forever be with us. Man is inherently a political animal. Instead of denying this state of affairs, try to manage its effects by increasing overall participation on both ends of the Hugo process.

Now about Vox Day: We get it. You think he's Evil Incarnate and should be run out of fandom on a rail. But do you want to know a secret? Most of us don't like him either! And honestly, we don't understand your confusion; quite a few of us are on record stating that we do not share Vox's goals for the Hugo or his Alt Right views. Renounce him? We can't renounce something that's not our fault to begin with; as I noted above, we didn't ask Vox to steal our idea and use it to his own advantage. To reiterate: Not our circus, not our monkeys. In our view, the only person who should be held responsible for Vox's activities is Vox himself.  

And that brings me to some additional - and more philosophical - reasons why the Sad Puppies can't blacklist the Great Fannish Satan. First of all, personal responsibility is one of our lodestones. We don't believe authors or editors should be held to account for the views or actions of their fans because we don't believe anyone should be held to account for something they didn't personally do. We absolutely refuse to accept Cultural Marxist notions of collective guilt. The fact that Vox likes a particular writer does not and should not tar that writer for all eternity. This is classic argumentum ad hominem, and we won't accept such a fallacious line of reasoning no matter how many times you try to bully us into doing so.

Secondly, we are, to a man, cultural libertarians, and as such, we believe that having a political opinion - even a wrong and offensive opinion - is not in itself a crime and should not have any bearing on how we judge the quality of a person's work. Folks might object to my "not our circus" claim by pointing out, correctly, that Larry Correia put Vox on his list for Sad Puppies II. But this was not an actual endorsement of Vox's personal views. Larry was, admittedly, testing World Con's supposed commitment to "tolerance," but he and his fans also sincerely liked Vox's writing regardless of what they thought of the man himself. Speaking for myself, I didn't nominate Vox's story, but I did read it in the voter packet and concluded that Vox's detractors were likely allowing their personal antipathy to color their judgment. Failing to separate the author from the story? As far as the Sad Puppies are concerned, that is something we should all try to avoid.  

30 comments:

  1. I find demands to denounce inherently... bad. Significantly more than "problematic" but not quite rising to the level of "evil" though it's a near thing.

    I would rather, deep in my soul and before God, defend and stand with VD, than to be forced to denounce someone and something I've nothing to do with. The whole psychological process is similar to 10 year olds harassing classmates with "cooties" or with the control mechanisms of cults which use the exact same process of shunning and enforced denouncement and for the same purpose.

    It's toxic no matter who is doing it or what justification they feel that they have since the bottom line is that it's not enough not to promote, one must abase and vow.

    Used to be those with a "liberal" mindset would insist that they'd defend to the death anyone's right to their offensive opinions. Now, they're practically gods their virtue is so great on account of they don't kill people, just try to destroy their careers and expel them from society. And... demand that everyone else make similar public denouncements.

    People who do so are not GOOD people, no matter what they think of themselves.

    So I won't do what they demand. Not only that, but I won't go so far as to even spout some "but I don't even like the guy". How dare someone even care if I do?

    I don't like bullies. I will not comply with bullies because they've promised that they'll stop hating me if I do.

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    1. To steal a line from Ghostbusters and Glenn Reynolds; The SJWs have simply chosen the form of their Destructor, and that form is Vox Day.
      Perhaps Scalzi can write another derivative novel using this idea, like Red Shirts and Fuzzies.

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  2. I am about this close to saying to Hell with the Hugos, WSFS, WorldCon, and "trufandom". . .

    Let them continue their rapid decline into utter oblivion. . .

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    1. I'll be attending. Saturday, I'll be hall-costuming as "Commodore Guptill". For the Hugo ceremony, it'll be the Galaxy Girls bowling shirt. If there are SP IV mission patches available by then, I'll have one prominently affixed to the shirt.

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  3. I'm with you on that Keith. These awards are becoming as worthless as the people controlling them. The thing that kills me about that is it proves people like Vox are right. I don't want to be on the same side as him, but the sjw's aren't giving me much choice.

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  4. Whatever happened to that Voltaire-ish quote once beloved by the left

    "I may not believe in what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"?

    SJWs have become the living embodiment of intolerance, forgetting their own roots. And we know what happens to those that forget their history.

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  5. Hi Stephanie!

    I'm here from File770. I'm firmly in the anti-slate position, but I respect and agree with almost all of what you're saying here - to wit, being pro-Puppy doesn't mean being pro-slate, and I also think the Puppies have been the targets of a lot of anger, sweeping generalizations, and analyses trying to attribute a bevy of faults and ill intentions.

    I think a lot of it comes down to this: What was new in the Puppy campaigns was that some of its participants (certainly most of the Rabids; the percentage of Sads is a matter of contention) were acting maliciously. That's very very clear for Beale ("All this has ever been is a giant Fuck You—one massive gesture of contempt," -- WIRED article ). For basically everybody else - well, people have a strong tendency to think highly of their own motives, and an even stronger one to assume that if somebody else does something I don't like, they must have done it on purpose. The minute that starts, the two sides start getting angry at each other, leading to more insult and injury. And things spiral downwards.

    That's kind of what happened here. The biggest problem with Sad Puppies was how much it blurred the line between "Let's nominate books we love" and "Boy do we hate the books those other guys nominate." (I'm sure this can be argued, and plenty of people will say the line had already been blurred. We can talk about this :P) When the "We love these books" is also viewed as a direct attack, there's a ton of pushback, defensiveness, and generally just assuming the worst about the other side. And so you get a vicious cycle of people getting angry at each other and accusing each other of Attacking the Thing, louder and louder. Every side tends to pay the most attention to the most injurious behavior from the other side, and dismiss bad behavior on its own side as insignificant or well-justified.

    (1/2)

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    1. I'm hoping the moderates, on both sides, will be able to carry the day. On the Sad Puppy side, the move to a crowd-sourced list with twice as many entries as ballot spots is huge progress, and I'm certainly taking it as recognizing some of the problems (and the surprising effectiveness) of SP3. And on the other side, you've got things GRRM acknowledging and commending that effort, and the support behind EPH, which is meant to limit the dominance of narrow clusters, but *not* by disqualifying them or discounting their voices - it's crucial to the system that that bloc be represented, just in proportion to the others instead of getting total control of the ballot. I know there's a lot of vitriol all around. But when you cut through the noise, I hope there's still a lot to work with. I certainly think it's worth making the effort. :)

      When it comes down to it, I think what everybody wants is to feel that everybody's getting their fair shake. The Puppies feel like the Hugos are fixed against them, so they're not getting a fair shake. The non-Puppies feel like the Puppies are deliberately, maliciously gaming the system, so they're not getting a fair shake.
      So going over the various issues, calmly and respectfully, is probably going to get us a lot further than yelling at each other. And I really like your post here, because, well, you're talking about specific accusations made towards your side, and why they're misplaced. Why they misread your intentions to the point of being irrelevant. That's constructive and I appreciate it :)

      I'd be happy to discuss more, if you like. (Not that I represent anybody in particular. I just like discussing things :) ). I have a bunch of individual points (in your post, and in general) I could probably phrase a decent op-ed about. If there's something in particular you'd like to hear "the other side" respond to, I think I can lay out the positions opposing the Puppies in a pretty reasonable manner - not necessarily in a way you'll find convincing, but in a way where I think you'll understand where they're coming from.

      All the best to ye. I hope we, all of us, have a better, more joyful Hugo season than the last.

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    2. Thank you for your kind response! The sentiments behind it are sentiments I share. I don't really have time at the moment to reply at length, but please know that I appreciate the good will in which your comment was offered and I would indeed like to have a constructive conversation about the Hugos and Fandom in general. Keep watching this space; I'll try to have something up by Friday. ;)

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    3. :)

      Glad to hear. No rush at all. I've followed comments, so whenever you get back to this, I should get a ping.

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    4. @Standback: Ping!

      http://therightgeek.blogspot.com/2016/02/opening-moderate-conversation-on-fandom.html

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  6. The current Hugo (and Nebula) voting by so-called "SJWs" is based on a diversity crusade to right a "wrong" promoted by SFF's feminists since 2009: that women, non-whites and gays were systematically excluded from SFF in the crucial genesis of our genre 1912-60, and which continues to this very day. That fable is a bald-faced lie based on the ratio of women vs. men authors and propaganda about white old school SFF writers using aliens as stand-ins for blacks and then making fun of them or manly white men going to other planets and colonizing them.

    The last piece which accompanies that propaganda is the lie women were forced to use aliases when in fact virtually 100% of women authors used their own names. The first and only case I know of a women SFF author purposefully passing herself off as a man to editors and fans alike is Alice Sheldon's weird feminist gender prank using the name James Tiptree, Jr. at the end of the '60s. Obviously, were there a need to do such a thing to enter the field, women, gays or blacks had that scheme available to them from WW I on due to the fact everything was done by mail. The fact no one actually did that is telling. It tells such a demography simply wasn't there in any meaningful numbers. Hardly a women-hating homophobic KKK. There was no mechanism in place to determine who was who or signs anyone wanted such a mechanism. Burroughs was completely unknown when he had his first (Mars) story published in 1912 and no Munsey editor met him until 3 years after that first submission. He could've been a one-eyed lesbian Muslim.

    Only a cult with irrational and even insane suspicions of men and whites would think a bouncer enforced quotas to make sure there weren't too many woman like Mary Roberts Rinehart or Agatha Christie. Somehow this bouncer operated on both sides of the Atlantic and among magazine and book publishers competing for ad dollars and readers. Neither feminists nor Wiki will tell you The Circular Staircase - the novel which started Rinehart's rise to fame as a mystery writer - was serialized in 1907-8 in the same All-Story Magazine which published Burroughs' Mars story and which was the flagship for SFF in America from then until Weird Tales became the first SFF genre magazine in 1923.

    Here's a taste of the insane bullshit from Tor's Church of Intersectional Lesbiantology from Liz Bourke also quoting N.K. Jemisin: 'Because the "fantasy" most EF (epic fantasy) delivers is of white male power & centrality, as much as dragons. That *is* conservatism, now.' We can agree that conservative, here, is fundamentally concerned with not changing the present default cultural narratives of who gets to hold and use power, how, and why. For our genre, for our culture(s) in the US, UK, and Europe, that's white (heterosexual) cisgendered men. Often persons who don't fit these criteria who hold and use power anyway are portrayed as wrong, anomalous, wicked. (There are plenty of cultural narratives floating about concerning the moral and occasionally physical degeneracy of non-straight-white-men. Plenty.)"

    White men all had each other's back in a secret century-long conspiracy.

    Here's more from the Lovecraft-loving and daffy speaker-to-whites Daniel Jose Older: "sci-fi and fantasy have always been a very white, very straight, very heteronormative, male political project. A very colonial project... . By not publishing black authors, by not publishing books about black people, that’s become the message by default. Whiteness being the default has been the message."

    The short version is the Hugos and the Nebulas today are an affirmative action scam called "diversity" powered by lies and Xanax.

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  7. The SP4 site appears to be failing for lack of participation. That makes some sense, in that many people think that if a work appears on your list, that will guarantee that it doesn't win anything.

    Sasquan taught everyone that you're a small minority inside Fandom. You cannot win this fight. Instead of trying to manipulate the Hugo awards, you should create your own award instead. Maybe call it "The Puppydog Award for Traditional Science Fiction and Fantasy." That would be a wholesome thing to do and people could feel good about working on it. What's the point of trying to mess up someone else's award?

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    1. Your response is "separate but equal"? If we're such an unimportant minority, why should you care if we create our own? Why not encourage us to waste our efforts while you deliberately shun anything we like simply because we like it?

      Oh, right, because we brought in thousands of new participants to an award process that was decided by a few hundred, and we can't let the elites get drowned out, now can we.

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    2. SP is "failing?" How do you reach that conclusion? As with anything, this too shall pass. Puppies do not exist for the sake up stirring up crap storms the way SJWs do. Puppies have productive lives outside of whatever crap storms arise that might concern them. For us to return to our normal lives is a signal that we are well-adjusted adults, not a sign that our "movement" is failing. So why don't you SJW types go-go WRITE the kinds of books you want to read. Of course, they may or may not be the kinds of books millions of others might want to pay to read, but that's life.
      So WHAT if sci-fi "started out" as a white man's game? It's a wide-open field NOW.

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    3. SP4 just isn't getting enough submissions to make up a top-10 list. In some categories, I'm not sure they've got more than two or three nominations with more than one vote. I suppose there's nothing that says they have to produce a list in all categories, but at the moment, even Best Novel looks like a stretch.

      As for the rest, there are no elites. There are only fans. Most fans don't like the stuff you like. That's just a matter of taste. It's hard for Steampunk to win too. If the Steampun fans cared enough, they'd create their own award too. They'd never try to hijack the mainstream awards. You shouldn't either.

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  8. Greg, I don't disagree with your suggestion. I think where the problem is coming from is the Hugos has turned into a racialized version of the Tiptree Awards. Why not just admit what everyone can see and we'll part ways; that the Hugos no longer award SFF stories on merit but instead is an affirmative action initiative heavily weighted towards addressing SFF through a lens of race and gender based on a stunning number of falsehoods strewn about by those who most benefit from that AA? Kameron Hurley claims to have a PhD in history and yet was given two Hugo Awards based on an irrational and false claim men have erased women from military history and therefore from their natural place in epic fantasy as warriors. That's a Red Chinese politburo rearranging of history right there. Just sign the confession and we'll all retire to our respective memory holes, except my hole is the one history books have been dumped in. At least the Tiptrees don't lie about their agenda. You'll notice the Hugo site no longer even states what was once taken for granted: that the Hugos are an award for the best SFF of the year. That's because they're not.

    As for messing up someone's else award, notice the Puppies have not done this to the Tiptrees, but to an award which has shifted under their feet. Just be honest about what it is you are doing. When the Locus suggested reading list has 30 people who would be at home in the KKK as compared to 15 to 100 years ago when that number would be zero, people are going to notice the sudden appearance of all the "white male tears" coffee mugs and allegorical blog posts by award-winning SF authors about "cis white dudes" who want to beat women, "PoC" and gays at random. When by an amazing coincidence the 30 people booted out of nominations by the Rabid Puppies are all rabid Third Wave Feminists people are going to notice. Denying what everyone can read and has quoted makes those denying this shift has taken place look like a pack of liars, and yes, people are going to get angry and prank the Hugos for that.

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    1. I don't see any evidence for what you guys are claiming, though, and I've read all the Hugo-winning novels. Also, the nominating process can't possibly be rigged or the puppies would never have been able to game it. There just can't be any agenda; there's only fans.

      Best Related Work, I'll admit, is a category I pay zero attention to (and have trouble caring about). Skimming over the work you mentioned, I'd agree that's a really weak piece; women warriors turn up all the time in SFF these days. (I read over 560 short fiction pieces in 2015, so I think I know.) It's definitely evidence that the Hugo nomination process occasionally rewards sub-par work. (Even a few of the novels are embarrassingly bad.) But I don't see any evidence for any sort of conspiracy or agenda. Rather, it shows that categories the fans have trouble nominating for are more likely to yield bad results. (Helping fans get the info to nominate is why I'm putting so much work into Rocket Stack Rank http://www.rocketstackrank.com/p/2016-hugo.html).

      So all I see is that the majority of fans don't like the same stuff you do, but you don't want to believe that, so you invent this conspiracy. But there is no conspiracy; people just have different tastes. There's nothing wrong with having different tastes, but you should create your own award to celebrate it. (Like the Steampunk folks ought to do.) That would be a worthwhile expenditure of effort, and would guarantee that the works you value actually DO get celebrated. Trying to force your own tastes on a large group that doesn't agree with you just guarantees hard feelings.

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    2. Greg, please don't insult me by claiming I've invented a conspiracy. I am claiming and have provided the massive evidence for a filthy comprehensive ideology lodged in the heart of fandom that is viciously anti-white, anti-male and anti-heterosexual, all the while claiming it is a movement based on anti-defamation. People who act on the concept of white cis male privilege has as little to do with reading tastes as does the line-up of Tiptree Award winners since 1991.

      One of the funniest things I've uncovered with recent research is that Ann Leckie's marvelous novel promoted as marvelously dealing with the linguistic pronoun cure for heterosexuality has it's origins in an 1969 SF novel published in France and from there into the lexicon of radical French Queer Theory feminists like Judith Butler where it made its way into WisCon and from there into mainstream SFF. In other words, the entire fundamental basis for the sexual side of Third Wave Feminism is as made up by a single SF author and as mad as L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology. It's as nuts as claiming a pre-historic Amazon culture sank with Atlantis.

      That makes Hurley's Hugo-winning piece about women warriors seem a precise historical document in comparison. Even funnier is I doubt Leckie has the faintest idea of what I'm talking about, or any of you for that matter, though you give Hugo noms to people who want to eff the "gender binary... sideways with a chainsaw" and dote on people who call for its end in SFF at Tor the same day they use slurs like "cis peeeooooople." Just imagine if I called for the end of the non-binary in SFF and Tweeted "Homo peeeoooople" in exasperation and added "eff the non-gender binary sideways with a chainsaw." What's that called? Hugo time? No. Oh yeah... homophobia. But that's how madness and hate speech is mainstreamed, isn't it? And that's done at the website associate of the largest publisher of SFF.

      Instead of asking people to disassociate themselves from VD - a single guy you've multiplied into a army - you'd be better off disassociating yourself from an actual army of award-nominated authors, bloggers and editors who have Twitter feeds with "white tears" mugs and full of so many racist quotes I can't even process them all. Not only do you not disassociate yourself from them you positively fawn over them.

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    3. You're describing a very extreme ideology that a few people probably do hold (but no one I'm familiar with), but which has little or no influence on modern SFF or the Hugo Awards. I've read ~560 stories this year. A handful of them played with gender issues (nothing like what you describe, though) but those are not the stories people are raving about.

      Just for a start, here is a list of every Novella published in 6 magazines and 9 anthologies which received a recommendation from any of the 9 big SF reviewers. Not a single one deals with gender issues.

      http://www.rocketstackrank.com/p/2016-hugo.html#_Novellas

      None of them even has an important gay character, unless I'm forgetting one. If you go through all the novelettes and short stories, you'll find the occasional gay character and a story or two that explores gender in a curious way, but it's rare. (Ham-handed attempts at it don't get recommendations, of course, but they generally don't get published either.)

      You are all upset over a problem that simply doesn't exist. Read the stories that do get published. And calm down.

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  9. Greg, I appreciate the effort, but there's really no use trying to reason with Mr May (his real name). He's off in the Twilight Zone.

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    1. So you're saying he's not typical of Sad Puppies in general? I do think I've heard the same conspiracy-theory argument from other people, though.

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    2. Yes, but only James May takes it so far he falls off the edge of the world.

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    3. What conspiracy? Go to any of these folks Twitter feeds; Natalie Luhrs, S.L. Huang, N.K. Jemisin, Foz Meadows. Look who they round-robin with and what they rant about all day, every day for months and even years on end. They talk about straight white men the way medieval Christians talked about the devil. Those feeds are routinely paranoid and sociopathic.

      I provide you with facts, history and context. You give nothing in return. It is you folks who feel simple marketing is a conspiracy to "marginalize" women, "PoC" and gays. Does Golf Digest "marginalize" fisherman? Rant all you want; you can't create excitement by shoe-horning in stories based on affirmative action. Even you folks don't believe your own stunts. Read Rachel Swirsky's Hugo recommendation list. Half the stories were so boring she openly admits she couldn't finish them and recommends them anyway. Look at the authors names and the reason becomes self-evident. It's correctthink and affirmative action almost straight up and down the line.

      Thanks for wrecking my hobby. Turn out the lights when you're done funding the next "PoC Destroy SFF" built on lies about SFF's history and simple-mindedness about how marketing works.

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    4. Actually that book will get an honored place on my bookshelf, right next to "Queers Destroy Science Fiction" and "Women Destroy Science Fiction."

      But thanks for playing.

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  10. Was that your idea of challenging what I wrote?

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  11. Greg, it is not a question of how many stories you read or exist but of which ones get play at awards time, and that pattern is stark. Those are the stories these people are raving about; a Nebula-happy story about a half-Selkie lesbian and her lover escaping from white heterosexual men, a lesbian feminist author with a photo of a "white tears" mug on her Twitter feed and blog post about "rape culture" who gets a Nebula nom for a story where the entire male side of a family die for immorality against mermaids, written in a Clarion workshop no less. A gender feminist creates an imaginary dinosaur which takes out straight white males for the same reason; Nebula win, Hugo nom. The linguistic cure for "compulsory heterosexuality" shoots Leckie to stardom. By another amazing coincidence the lesbian Tor reviewer who claimed it one of the best space operas ever uses a quote from famous lesbian Adrienne Rich as the title of her column. And what essay is Rich most famous for? "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence." Wake up Greg. Did you really think SFWA president John Scalzi was a scientist who could see white male privilege was as "obvious" as "gravity," or did he get that idea from the founder of Strange Horizons who had a two-part white privilege post on Scalzi's blog 3 years prior?

    Anyone who's seen Natalie Luhr's recent bizarre take on the Locus reading list understands she's only one of a lot of people like her in SFF who intend to right the imbalance in the Force which has existed in SFF for 100 years, willfully wrecking the hopes and dreams of women, gays and "PoC." Imagine someone like Luhrs editing magazines and voting awards on the basis of their irrational suspicions of men, whites and straights and then tell me what kind of stories you come up with. I can answer that: terrible stories; bigoted affirmative action stories chosen with a slide rule and pie-chart.

    I have Uncanny, Lightspeed and Strange Horizons and their weird crusades against straight white males to point to for terrible fiction. I also have Hugo and Nebula results. I have the new editor of the Magazine of F&SF who once speculated on Twitter the reason men didn't include women in epic fantasy may be because men hate women. What kind of stories do you think he's going to publish to right that wrong?

    It's those terrible stories which got Lois Tilton out of her reviewing gig at Locus. Every time Tilton gave short shrift to feminist short stories there were round-robins on Twitter going after her for not "understanding" the new literature, for not holding the political line. They whined Tilton off her gig the same way Jonathan Ross was whined out of his Hugo gig.

    SFF's feminists claim they want to celebrate women in SFF but in fact they hate it when I point out Mary Gnaedinger was the sole editor of Famous Fantastic Mysteries for its entire 1939-53 run and Dorothy McIlwraith the editor of Weird Tales for the final 15 years of its 31 years of existence, 2 of the most loved SFF pulps ever. Then there is Cele Goldsmith, editor of Fantastic and Amazing 1958/9-65 and SF author Judith Merril, who was also an SF anthology editor 1954-68, missing only 1955. Feminists hate that info because it goes against the grain of the lies they sell and they're in the position of having to explain how those women escaped the net of the powerful Patriarchy. It undermines the con game they use to place themselves into segregated anthologies and make remarks about no white men winning an award on Nebula night. It undermines the fact it is racism which motivates a Lightspeed reviewer with a history of anti-white remarks to not review white men, not righting an imbalance as he claims. By an amazing coincidence it is that reviewer and his terrible short stories which are the beneficiaries of such fandom-wide initiatives. That's why he was on a SFWA Nebula Weekend panel before he was even published or an SFWA member.

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  12. Well said.

    "Number two, we had no idea last year's list would be that successful. The numbers for Sad Puppies I and Sad Puppies II simply did not presage what would happen with Sad Puppies III."

    I think that part of this had to do with Brad not only putting the list out in public, but also telling people how to join. As odd as it may sound, some of us were ignorant of the process. Larry and Brad pulled the curtain back and let us see the Wizard and his machine. Now people like me and my sister know and can participate. I've been eagerly watching my e-mail for my pin so I can post the first of my nominations.

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