I’m not Vox Day

I have repeated this stuff dozens of times, but apparently I need to repeat it again.

The Sad Puppies 3 campaign is a separate and different entity than the Rabid Puppies campaign.

I started Sad Puppies a few years ago. My goal was to demonstrate that the awards were biased, represented the likes of only one small part of fandom, and that authors with the wrong politics who got on the ballot would be attacked.  All of that has been demonstrated rather conclusively.  

Brad Torgersen ran Sad Puppies 3, and I was one of the people who helped. The mission changed, and Brad’s main goal was to get deserving, worthy authors who would normally be ignored onto the ballot, regardless of their politics.

Vox Day ran a separate campaign called Rabid Puppies.

I believe that RP started with most of existing SP3 suggested slate, and then added more works that they liked. But I can’t speak for them.

Vox Day himself was not on the SP3 slate.   

I believe 3 short fiction works from his publishing house were on our suggested slate. They were on our suggested slate because we thought they were very good.

Vox Day was on a prior SP suggestion slate, because I liked his novelette that year, and the SP2 slate was pretty much just my personal suggestions.

The Sad Puppies campaign doesn’t endorse anybody’s politics. Our slate had people from everything, left, right, middle, and question mark. We only cared if the works were good.

I personally do not agree with Vox on a wide variety of topics.  

I do not speak for him.

I do not control him.

He does what he wants.

We have argued about this topic. You know the situation has gotten weird when I’m the voice of moderation.

I cannot disown what I do not own.

I neither condone nor defend any of his public statements. I did not make them.

Of course I do not like some of the things he has said.

Do you think the existence of Rabid Puppies has somehow made my life easier?

I’m not going to burn anyone in effigy. Stop asking.

I’m not going to condemn anyone by association. Stop asking.

When two assholes collide, I shouldn’t have to take a side, declare one a sainted victim, and the other the devil aggressor. Stop asking me to.

I’ve said all of the above before.

My personal politics are on record. I have been involved in politics. I’ve written about my personal beliefs a lot. I am very opinionated. Those are my personal beliefs. I stand by them. Since this has started reporters have combed through everything I’ve ever written, trying to find something sexist, racist, or homophobic to use against me, and they haven’t found anything. Why? Because they aren’t there. Because I’m not.

I recommended someone’s short story. You do not like his belief. I can defend my liking his short story, but I cannot, and should not have to account for the author’s personal beliefs. A giant group of other authors, who are also not affiliated with him, should not be assigned his beliefs and be attacked for them.

However, I can believe that all authors have the right to free speech. That includes people who say stuff I don’t like or agree with. I have a giant list of authors I disagree with. I have done so, loudly, and often. We should all be free to disagree without the danger of purges, defamation, and career sabotage. As far as I am aware, Vox Day hasn’t ever called for censorship or tried to ruin any author’s career. I cannot however, say that same thing for others.

Authors should not be attacked for the crime of being recommended by someone you don’t like. That is asinine. The only questions should be, is the work good? Is the work award worthy? Yes? Good. Then quit yelling at them. I was told by one of his supporters yesterday that Vox is also a fan of Umberto Eco and China Mieville. Better break out the torches and pitchforks!

I cannot explain his quotes or his public statements because I did not formulate them, do not hold them myself, and I did not write them. Unlike my critics, I do not claim to read minds.

I cannot purge him. First, I don’t believe in purges. Second, I believe in free speech, warts and all. And third, since he isn’t part of my campaign, I’ve got nothing to purge him from.   

Let me clarify something. When I say something to the effect about how it would be awful nice to see normal people on the other side condemn the outlandish, racist, stupid, hateful, threatening things that hundreds on their side have said, I don’t actually expect them to. They don’t own other people’s comments either. Normally when I bring that up, it is out of frustration, because I’m expected to ritually shun someone who is nominally on my side of the debate for saying mean things, while all those on the other side saying things just as bad or worse, are given a pass. That is hypocritical.

For the one loudmouth I’m being demanded to account for, just among the award winning and nominated folks on the other side you’ve got NAMBLA supporters, psychopathic trolls, and a whole mess of racists… But Brad and I are the ones who need to anoint ourselves with ash and perform the ritual of shame? No. Buzz off.  

Look at it like this. I’m Churchill. Brad is FDR. We wound up on the same side as Stalin.

SP3 has been accused of trying to sweep the nominations. First, we didn’t have 5 in most of the categories, and when we did, it was because we had a ton of good suggestions and honestly thought all of them were awesome. Second, we did not expect to do as good as we did. Our showing was a surprise. Some of the categories were not swept by SP, but rather a combination of SP and RP noms, and SP had no control over that. Note, that isn’t an apology. That is a clarification. They are fans too, they spent their $40 like everyone else, and they voted for what they wanted.

And believe me, if I was surprised by how many fans SP brought, I was really surprised by what RP pulled off.

John C. Wright is also not Vox Day. Sad Puppies did not get him a record number of nominations. I believe we had him for 3 items in novella, short, and related work, and all of them were excellent. Wright picked up more nominations beyond that, which again, my campaign had no control over. He is now tied for most in one year. However, Wright is an excellent author, who has been around about as long as Charles Stross, but he is normally ignored at awards time. So rather than bitch and moan about him getting several noms, why don’t you actually read the works to see how good they are and vote honestly?

My motivation was not to replace one biased clique with a new biased clique, but rather to get an award that everyone—up until two weeks ago—claimed represented all of fandom, to represent more of fandom. I suppose the one way that I do have to accept responsibility for Vox Day is that I’m the one who demonstrated to all the outsiders just how little and cliquish the system actually was.  

So in conclusion, we are not Vox Day. Quit trying to make us the same. Vox Day is Vox Day. If you have any problems with him, take it up with him.

Catching up, then back to work
Well, this sucks.

826 thoughts on “I’m not Vox Day”

  1. It’s absolutely pathetic that you felt like you had to say something like this, Larry. Absolutely pathetic.

    There’s no way any of us should have to announce that we’re not Vox Day. Especially considering all the digital ink spilled saying so previously. You shouldn’t have had to do it again.

    And what’s really pathetic? This whole post won’t accomplish a damn thing, because they’ll still equate you and Brad with Vox.

    1. Wuck? You want to clarify “pathetic?” It’s certainly sad that SJWs are pulling the Alinsky tactics and Larry has to remind them about basic logic.

      1. The left cannot tolerate logic. No matter how much you remind them it exists, they will continue to ignore it.

        1. The one I like best is when they make some wild assertion, then crow, “Prove I’m wrong!” I always say, “You don’t get how debate works, do you? You made the assertion, I challenged it, the onus is on YOU to prove what you said, not on me to refute it. Till you do, what you said must be assumed to be untrue.”

      2. Logic will not work. It is viewed as hatred and evil (note, there is no sarcasm).

        The fact do not matter to them, only the hate does. They hate Larry, and most of us, because we don’t hate as they do.

    2. While I am saddened that anyone would perceive a need to make this differentiation, but I find myself often saddened by the state of humanity at times.

      On the other hand, I find new reasons to love Larry’s writing in each of these blog posts. I really love this analogy: “Look at it like this. I’m Churchill. Brad is FDR. We wound up on the same side as Stalin.”

      Well said.

      1. That is a good one. (Now waiting to see how it gets misconstrued by the other side…)

        Larry says, “Vox Day is Vox Day. If you have any problems with him, take it up with him.”

        But they won’t. How many of VD’s detractors have actually argued their points with VD himself? Time and again I hear (paraphrased) “I don’t feel safe going to VD’s site.” So the answer is not very many, because it’s so much safer to fling poo at an effigy (where in this case, Larry is doing duty as the effigy).

        1. They tried that. Vox is a racist, but he’s not a stupid racist.

          Every time they go their to howl at him, he hands them their heads.

          1. This is the sort of thing he loves. A bit like how Hunter Thompson would have reacted to a major, 1 hour prime time Nixon speech denouncing the Rolling Stone*.

            *for you lefties out there.

          2. Every racist is a stupid racist. Believing in race, a concept that was made up for financial gain, when science has proven there is no basis for racial differentiation, is the mark of a simple mind.

        2. I’ve read Vox’s irrational atheist as well as a few other ridiculous posts by him. He is well-past the point where one could be reasonably engaged with. Or to put it differently, there are more useful things to do in life than to argue with (broken) wind.

          Arguing with Vox reminds of the many pointless discussions I had with 9/11 truthers. They also certainly “knew a lot” and could at every chance pull another obscure random fact or connection. Same is true here. Pick any claim by Vox, the evidence he uses to back it is only superficially related and any contradicting evidence is happily ignored.

          But yeah, Larry Correia is not responsible for Vox and it does not make him a racist if he happens to like a story by Vox. Although, I would be disappointed if he happens to like the crap music Vox used to make.

          1. Hmmm… “disqualify”, “attack” and bordering on “make sh*t up”

            Well, coming from someone who can’t use a common standard of racism for speech independent of the speaker, I don’t expect you to follow deeper logic in arguments either

          2. Hey, weren’t you in the previous thread demanding that people disavow Vox because he (like the Democrats do) figure that women pretty much only vote with their vaginas?

        3. People don’t feel safe GOING TO A WEBSITE?

          Will evil spirits haunt them, or will the Abominable Dr. Day leap directly out of the monitor to kill them?

          1. It is 2015, shouldn’t the Cyberpunk stuff be coming out? Cyberlimbs, cyberdecks, black ice…

          2. @Brian
            The Firestarter program would set the unfortunate user on fire, though it would be most effective if the user was using a neural interface.

          3. Will destroy shadowy conspiracies 4 Adam Jensen augments…

            Watch for Operation Screaming Fist, coming soon to blogs near you.

      2. I get metaphor but I suspect that many will go, “mmm so true, Vox is a Sallin” You go Larry, call it how you see it.
        Maybe you should use the language that the Hugo gate keepers willl understand better:

        You are Augusto Pinochet, Brad is King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud

      3. Was having a drink of tea at the moment I read that. I literally had to wipe my face after laughing back into my mug.

        Well played Correia! (Great metaphor!)

    3. It isn’t that simple. SP and RP have very similar logos, shared some of the same nominations, and had been mentioned here as the “even more eevul” slate with a couple of recommendations from the RP list. It was NOT OBVIOUS to an outsider that the lists were unrelated without disclaimers of this sort.

      Yes I understand that NOW. But it was very hard to know that when the Hugo nominations came out. I suspect this is what happened to EW too.

      1. Assuming EW means Entertainment Weekly then it probably would have helped if they had bothered to talk to someone… anyone… on this side of the issue before going to print.

        1. From personal experience in completely unrelated matters, I know many “journalists” are so intellectually lazy that they will basically republish a press release almost verbatim if it looks like it fits their preconceptions.

          1. Over 80% of the articles we see in newspapers or posted on websites have their origins in someone’s press release. The people who generate these press releases are never dispassionate observers: They inevitably have some skin in the game”.

            Adding to the problem, many journalists walk into a situation with their minds already made up. They learn of an issue that will arouse the passions of their readers, then build their article around the information they already have. They’re only interested in including contradictory information when it lets them present the illusion that they are dealing fairly with the issue. They dig just far enough to find material for a paragraph toward the end of their article, something along the lines of “Conservative writers asked about the issue denied any wrongdoing.”

      2. “They would have needed to do research on the story before accurately representing it, so therefore it’s understandable that they did not do the research on the story before accurately representing it.”

      3. You may excuse yourself if you like, but there is no excuse whatsoever for EW. They were lazy and biased. Period.

        Journalism 101: You talk to BOTH sides.

        That means, if there are two groups, you talk to two groups. If there are three groups, you talk to three groups. The number of people you talk to scales up with the number of groups in the story. This so “duh” that a high school reporter can master it. Middle school, even.

        What you do not do–and this is so bloody obvious–is take one person’s side and run with it. Reporters don’t get to libel people just because they’re too lazy to look for contact information, they don’t get to libel people just because they don’t want to look for both sides. The reporter believed one side from the get go; it’s why she didn’t bother to ask the other sides. See “Sabrina Erdely” for an example of this writ large.

        I’m not a reporter, but a newspaper pays my bills. I can’t think of any editor off hand where I work who would have run with this story. Just the other day we brought in our lawyer on a video I was editing, because at casual glance, a woman appears to be [falsely] accusing a man of pedophilia.

        We ultimately decided not to present the video, because we couldn’t take the chance that readers would not conclude that she was accusing him. There are an insane number of fools out there who truly believe that an accusation means “well something must have happened,” and we weren’t about to nurture their stupidity.

        Because we have real reporters on our staff, we already knew the man was nowhere near those kids, and we already knew the mother had made unsubstantiated claims like this in the past. And the guy was no saint; what with not paying child support and all. But you know, just because a guy isn’t a saint, that doesn’t mean it’s okay to let the “he’s a pedophile” rumor get started at our hands.

        Even if Larry was an evil “-ist,” that doesn’t mean it’s okay to tar him. And that he was tarred is not excusable. That is not his fault, that is entirely and solely the fault of EW’s reporters and editors. Period.

        1. Journalism today isn’t about accuracy. It’s about collecting as many eyeballs as possible to sell to advertisers. Cuz for journalists, YOU are the product.

          Outrage works much better than truth as a means of gluing eyeballs to the screen. Therefore journalism today looks for outrage first and foremost, and for truth only incidentally, or if truth will provoke further outrage.

      4. Are you claiming that Vox Day suggested only voting for straight white guys, as suggested in the EW story? If so, a citation would be nice.

    4. Throwing a voice of (what I perceive to be) sanity into all this mess here:

      Instead of creating Sad Puppies, why didn’t you just create a positive campaign to make more scifi readers aware of all the different flavors of scifi out there, encourage ALL of them to nominate their favorites, and let democratic process decide the nominations? Instead, we have what has devolved into silly name-calling, and a total clusterf*ck for the Hugo Awards.

      Yeah, in recent years I’ve personally found the nominated works, especially the Novel and Novellas, to be kind of boring. So? Those are the people who took the time and the money to nominate and vote. (Had I taken the time to nominate, I’d have picked a lot of Lois McMaster Bujold or Patricia Briggs books. That’s my preference.) It’s not a sekrit cabal of elitists, contrary to what some people are saying or implying.

      Now we have the Puppies camp, claiming that everyone who isn’t agreeing with you are SJW or liberal or what have you. Grow up, people. Try to be more inclusive. Expand your horizons. The “us against them” mentality is the problem here. Look at the other comments on this post and tell me I’m wrong.

      1. OK, then, “You’re wrong.” That’s what Brad did. It was called SP3. Others trashed it, and you come along and appear to think that what they did was what Brad wanted. Ah well, life is like that.

      2. You didn’t bother to read what Larry said about Sad Puppies and why he did what he did.

        Consider yourself gonged. Exit’s to the left.

      3. “Now we have the Puppies camp, claiming that everyone who isn’t agreeing with you are SJW or liberal or what have you.”

        Excuse me? I can’t imagine anyone having said that simply disagreeing with Sad Puppies makes someone an SJW. An SJW has a rather specific definition (mine is… “must have an enemy”… on account of status is gained by public battle against that enemy.)

        Liberal? There were liberals on Brad’s list and self-identified liberals comment here and are welcomed. A whole heck of a lot is made of the virtue of NOT having a political litmus test as a proxie for “good fiction”.

        Also, why not talk to “them” about the “us vs. them” thing. They might listen to you, or you might come to the attention of the foot soldiers who are making a name by their public battles and intimidation.

        1. To be fair on the liberal front — I keep combing through comments on this post using ‘leftist’ and ‘liberal’ as an insult and ‘how the left cannot tolerate logic’. Why is that necessary?

          It’s made me, someone trying to understand the movement, balk considering just as you said — Larry seemed clear in his inclusiveness. But so many on the replies on this post seem very much not interested in ‘welcoming’ those ideologies. Hence I think the comments about the ‘Puppies’ camp.

          But, back I go to see if I can sort the informative comments from those just bashing as I educate myself on this.

          1. Well, for what it’s worth, I don’t see this as a liberal problem per se. To me, SJWs are a coalition of extremely naive liberals with a certain almost hysterical crusader mindset driven by a cult of mentally unhinged female-worship and paranoid anti-white racism that self-identifies using the term “intersectional feminism.” I’d say roughly 2/3 of the whole are bigots and the rest do-gooders. It’s a really weird phenomenon, a perfect storm of creepiness. If I were to point to the two biggest culprits I’d say it’s gender studies classes and prescription medications. These people are not exactly shy about sharing the fact they often have ADD, OCD, PTSD and bi-polar depression.

      4. Oh look, yet another concern troll whining about how it Messrs. Correia’s and Torgerson’s fault that the Flaming Douchnozzles of Tolerance are acting like sociopaths.

      5. “Instead of creating Sad Puppies, why didn’t you just create a positive campaign to make more scifi readers aware of all the different flavors of scifi out there, encourage ALL of them to nominate their favorites, and let democratic process decide the nominations?”

        That’s actually what I understood SP to be. I wasn’t really aware of the Hugos previously (vaguely, but they weren’t really on my radar), and I didn’t know that it was something I could join in on. SP made me aware of that and encouraged me to participate. So that’s what I did. I think I nominated 2 of the books from the SP slate and a handful of the movies/shows. And only because I actually really enjoyed those things and thought they were great. Then I voted for a bunch of other stuff I thought was great (none of it, unfortunately, made the ballot). So … yeah, I think SP did what you suggested here. From what I can see, I think it’s really RB that messed everything up. Larry and Brad just tried to get more people involved. Seems like Vox was the one who, separately, actually tried to attack the Hugos. But I haven’t been keeping totally up on all sides of this thing, so I can’t say for sure.

  2. I’m personally astonished by how easy it was to massively change the nominations, which in turn shows just how small a pool was voting for the Hugos. And the angry desperation with which this is being met by those who are members of the previous in-group demonstrates that they lack much in the way of support out of their own tiny faction.

    1. As the saying used to go in the Society for Creative Anacronism, the politicking and infighting was so fierce because the stakes were so small.

      In this case, you’re seeing egos who are used to ‘controlling’ who gets the Hugos finding they don’t have the power they used to have. And authors who have been GOHs on the Con circuit for ages seeing their potential GOH slots threatened.

      This is unacceptable, so regretfully the Sad Puppies Must Die so They can continue being the apex of Fandom.

      1. SJWs are like all leftists: they are Satanists in the Miltonian sense.

        They would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven.

        The Hugos and WorldCon is the proof of this. They’d rather burn the award down to keep it to themselves than share it with the broader fandom.

          1. I know but…

            I am voter for the first time even though I started reading SFF when I started reading circa 1970.

            I thought I had to go to WorldCon to vote until last year but only did SP this year. I didn’t have what I considered a broad enough reading to honestly nominate and the book I very much wanted to nominate wasn’t eligible after all.

            So I didn’t nom but I’ve been looking forward to my packet and reading as hard and fast as I could to be able to vote.

            The physical award is a thing of beauty and as silly as it sounds to get to vote on the rocket the year SpaceX takes off and lands a rocket on its tail the way God and Heinlein intended and the award symbolizes means a lot to me.

            And now it feels like voting will just the award equivalent of flying on the Dresden raid. The SJW have declared they’ll burn down any non-SJW approved nominee with a No Award without thinking that if only 1 in 10 SP and RP supporters return the favor to SJW approved works the result will in fact likely be No Award across the board.

            Can Brad and Larry convince over 90% of the SP voters from returning the favor. Does VD even think convincing any of the RP voters to not return the favor is the correct idea? Larry and Brad have said so but I don’t know if VD has. Even if he does can he succeed in convincing enough?

            I said on the other thread this is what war is like and this is why rational people avoid it. They often avoid it longer than they should.

            I am wondering if SP needed to happen 10 or even 20 years ago. I suspect the way to get an award that represents fandom is help the SJWs burn the Hugos down and work to give prominence to the awards at DragonCon if they have some and start some if they don’t.

          2. SP did need to happen 10-20 years ago, actually. Too bad nobody was around who 1) put two and two together again to see that it was actually doable, and 2) cared to do so.

            I’m afraid that since SP didn’t happen 10-20 years ago, we’re at the point where RP is the only solution that has any hope of saving the Hugos at all, in the same sense that the Reconquista saved Hispania by (eventually) turning into Spain instead of al-Andalus.

            Not only that, #GamerGate and the Puppies are more important than people think; because they are the first green shoots of the tipping point, where liberalism is being shown to the greater, wider world, even beyond gamers and scifi fans, to be absurd, totalitarian, intellectually and morally bankrupt, and populated by childish, mentally ill, rabbity bullies and petty tyrants who are, nonetheless, paper tigers who are relatively easily defeated once one finally wakes up and realizes the need to do so.

          3. because they are the first green shoots of the tipping point, where liberalism is being shown to the greater, wider world, even beyond gamers and scifi fans, to be absurd, totalitarian, intellectually and morally bankrupt, and populated by childish, mentally ill, rabbity bullies and petty tyrants who are, nonetheless, paper tigers who are relatively easily defeated once one finally wakes up and realizes the need to do so.

            Does that make SP, #GamerGate, and the D&D fans who fought a similar purge last summer the early settlers who are taking the arrows?

          4. Herb–Perhaps I missed something, but the D&D drama last summer felt like a combination of other issues and the Revolution starting to eat its children. The two ‘gentlemen’ that the SJWs went after despise social conservatives as much as the SJWs do.

          5. OK; looked up the D&D drama. I’m not sure if that’s really the same thing at all. That’s SJWs eating their own, and nobody taking a really principled stand over the imbecility of a witch-hunt of fellow SJWs who may possibly have made some “trans-gender” gamer feel bad once. Or who might do so in the future, at least.

            Although any non-SJWs watching might have had their eyes opened, it still seems more likely that they’re still concerned that secretly they may be “transphobists” or the victims of some equally stupid made-up malady.

          6. I do consider the D&D drama the same thing as Zak, especially, has stood up for the idea that if you’re talking about D&D all that matters is you’re making useful D&D stuff.

            Zak openly has no political use for social conservatives yet he publishes under one of the most politically incorrect imprints, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, that is deeply stepped in heavy metal culture. LotFP is also routinely accused of violence against women due to its art choices and themes.

            Zak’s real sin that started it all was when rape accusations were repeated without investigation about a designer he called people out by name on it. When, a year later, someone went through all the publicly available evidence and determined he could not conclude the rapes had occurred Zak again called out the people he’d listed earlier by name (and we’re talking 30-40 people in a community that is pretty small). He said either they needed to retract their statements publicly and apologize or he would consider them liars who were not to be trusted on anything. He also said he would tell other the same when asked.

            In the interim he was thrown off RPG.net for defending Monte Cook against accusations of being a rape apologist because of a succubus like character he included in the Ninth World. Zak argued it was a good monster and that was what mattered.

            The only aspect of it was the revolution eating its own was Zak and to a lesser degree Pundit’s political positions.

            The thing that was like GamerGate and SP was Zak and Pundit had a history of standing up for anyone who made interesting RPG material that was fun to play. Another thing that was parallel was Zak especially has a history of calling BS on the very SJW tactics of accusations and demands to denounce based on them. The only thing I’ve seen Zak denounce anyone over is, as seen above, spreading false rape accusations.

          7. Sorry; I meant it’s not the same thing in that I don’t see anyone making a principled stand against it and attracting supporters who are openly claiming to have seen behind the curtain because of it, as has happened with GamerGate and the Puppies.

            The discussion isn’t around whether or not witch-hunters against “transphobists” is appropriate in the first place, it’s about whether or not those two actually ARE transphobists. The Narrative™ seems to remain entirely intact; it’s not even an attack on The Narrative™, rather it seems to be just political infighting between one group who dislikes a couple of individuals, all parties of which are thoroughly steeped in The Narrative™ even so.

          8. Joshua, had to think a bit about your comment and why I couldn’t agree.

            I think the issue is The Narrative. It is possible to be a leftist, that is believe a certain social organization is desirable, and not be wedded to the The Narrative.

            Zak S. is a leftist but he is not committed to The Narrative. The fact that he earned their ire over a year earlier and that the fight was payback shows it. He say, “Don’t repeat rape accusations without proof” when The Narrative is “all rape accusations are true”.

            When they were found not to be true he said, “Retract them openly and apologize or I consider you a liar not to be trusted ever”. The Narrative is “even false accusations raise awareness and must not be punished to discourage victims”.

            Zak stood up for truth over The Narrative and that made him in the eyes of the SJW transphobic, homophobic, misogynistic, etc (some white dude in Sweden tried to convince his female players they had Stockholm Syndrome and that’s why they supported him).

            Now, you are correct in that the territory was more “These people are liars in that Zak isn’t A,B,C because 1,2,3” instead of “they are liars promoting a false narrative.”

            Maybe that makes it parallel instead of the same but I still consider it a battle in the same war to judge artist/writers/etc on their works and call out liars using character assassination as a weapon.

            YMMV but from my point the D&D thing is a big part of why I’m in SP3 but wasn’t a voter in SP2 (was too late to nominate even if I had paid in SP2 but didn’t nom in SP3 either).

    2. > I’m personally astonished by how easy it was to
      > massively change the nominations

      I also think it was a sign of a lot of deep-felt frustration with the Hugo nominations these last few years.

  3. Well said. Just sorry you have to keep saying it…

    Keep writing those dynamite fun books and know that you’ve got a huge fan base that know what you’re saying, agree and agree with it.

    NEXT YEAR I’m getting a membership, when the packet comes I’ll have someone black out the names of the authors so I have no idea what I’m reading and vote the Best Stories.

    Best regards,

    The Captain

  4. “I have repeated this stuff dozens of times, but apparently I need to repeat it again.”

    You’ll have to do it till the cats come home.

    “Before some audiences not even the possession of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people whom one cannot instruct.” Aristotle

  5. But Larry, if you’re REALLY not VD, why haven’t we ever seen you in the same room together? (And of course, if we did that would mean that you have identical beliefs and support each other in all things…)

    Do I really have to say “sarcasm?”

    1. Biggest reason you’ve never seen us in the same room together is because we’ve never met in person.

      1. You guys also kind of live on 2 different continents separated by a fairly large ocean and I dont think Vox really leaves Europe these days.

      2. i thought you were vox day (secret identity), larry correia was your super hero i.d.
        (and when are you going to start wereing a cape. sarah hoyt weres a cape)

  6. Alas, because the opponents of SP3 use the Alinsky Playbook, this is what it’s comes down to. They’re running with the narrative of LARRY = BRAD = VOX. Which to anyone with a brain is wrong, but then, the people who are hating on us right now have proven they don’t have brains. Larry’s statement is for the middle. The people who haven’t dropped their nickels into one jar, or the other, just yet. I like Larry’s statement a lot. I think it says just about everything I could possibly say. Thank you, Larry!

    1. Larry’s Big Three analogy shows you both to be completely out of touch with reality and with no perspective.

      First read Vox Day in context
      http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/04/13/vox-day-says-his-totally-not-racist-comments-have-been-taken-out-of-context-in-context-theyre-even-worse/

      You wonder “Why Oh Why are people associating me with him”. Then a few paragraphs later you acknowledge you are willingly and happily allied with him. Gee…. wonder why people are associating you with him.

      The thing is that when you do that, you send a message that you think you are uniting with VD (an appropriate abbreviation considering the context) to face a greater evil (ala FDR/Churchill with Stalin). You seem to believe that the a clique of SciFi writers is a greater evil than the hate and bile which is Vox Day. You lack perspective.

      You are angry about mean hateful unfair things someone said about you on the internet. Wow, wonder how the people (basically all black people) feel about those things VD said about them?

      You lack the integrity to call a wrong a wrong, unless you are PERSONALLY wronged. So you lack credibility as well.

      Finally, for a guy who spends time moaning and whining about the “perpetually offended” left, you spend a lot of time being offended. Project much?

      1. Concern troll is concerned! Why you no join witch hunt?

        If you think Vox being a dick is more dangerous than a clique of scifi writers, then you’ve probably never seen those scifi writers go after someone’s career before, so I’m guessing you lack perspective.

        And that “clique of scifi writers” is specifically why I use the term SJW to differentiate them from normal, sane liberals.

        Move on Concern Troll. I’ve responded to all this before. You bore me.

        1. “Concern Troll” would suggest Im pretending to try to help you. Im not, you made your poor life choice, you should live with the ramifications.

          You fail to realize that while you acting like VD was the crazy, but lovable, racist uncle at family functions, in order to align your goals, he was using you as much as(more than) you used him.

          He has an ideology that he would like to promote, you in a quasi embrace of him have given him a bit of the legitimacy he didn’t deserve. This is what is driving people mad. He attached himself like a parasite to your movement, which has a legitimate point, and sucked it dry. Because you allowed it. Its now exactly what he wanted it to be about, its about him.

          And what do you mean “go after someones career”? Did they have them fired? Did Amazon refuse to ship their books? Did they break in their homes and steal their laptops? Or did they just say mean stuff on the internet? This reeks of hyperbole.

          1. It reeks of hyperbole says the man talking about parasites sucking people dry. 🙂

            As for gong after someone’s career, that’s been covered a bunch. So I can either take the time to type out something that I and a dozen other authors have talked about for years ( I recommend searching through Mad Genius Club or Sarah Hoyt’s Scarlet Letters post) OR instead of repeating myself to somebody who probably doesn’t care, I could spend my time writing stuff that pays me, or at least debating with somebody who has a clue.

            Hmm… Tough one.

      2. “The thing is that when you do that, you send a message that you think you are uniting with VD (an appropriate abbreviation considering the context) to face a greater evil (ala FDR/Churchill with Stalin). You seem to believe that the a clique of SciFi writers is a greater evil than the hate and bile which is Vox Day. You lack perspective. ”

        Christians and Jews are being genocided across the Muslim World. Western Civilization is in sharp decline.

        Vox merely has the nerve to say something and he is the monster?

        The actual genociders are enabled by the cover they receive from these Social Justice Warriors.

        1. It should be pointed out (since it is unfortunately not obvious) that the kinds of freedoms SciFi writers enjoy only exit in Western Civilization and nowhere else.

      3. I wonder why you are willing to so openly associate yourself with David Futrelle, an openly bigoted man-hater?

  7. I’m waiting for the next revision to the Narrative here.

    I’m betting on “Vox Day is a sock puppet controlled by Correia via the Orbital Mind Control Lasers”.

    Because you’re OBVIOUSLY a 1%er attached to the Military-Industrial Complex. . . . (evil grin)

    1. No, no, get your facts straight. It’s Larry who is under the control of Vox’s mind-control lasers on behalf of the GamerGate/Reptilian/Rotarian axis.

      1. The “GamerGate/Reptilian/Rotarian” axis, eh? What’s the PUFF one one of those (waiting for the MHI story where it turns out the British Royal Family really *is* composed of reptilian aliens like the ones in V)

        1. Doctor who writers already turned the royal family into werewolves….. Its really more a fun question of how they stay PUFF exempt.

          1. Actually, its a fun mental experiment to wonder how ANY politician stays PUFF exempt…

        2. “GamerGate/Reptilian/Rotarian military axis G.R.R.M for short.

          Wait it shows who was behind this the whole time.

    1. Because only Right Wingers have guilt by association. Left Wingers simply denounce and move on.

      And besides, N.K. Jemwhatsit has been “rehabilitated” back into the GoodThink fold. Poor strayed lamb, you meanies leave her/him/it alone!

      Meanies!!!

  8. They have their narrative and they’re going to stick to it, Larry. They’re still saying SP is all about you wanting a Hugo when you turned down your nomination this year (for an outstanding and worthy book, I might add) and have stated unequivocally that you will never accept another nomination in the future. Yet they persist with their narrative.

    It’s why their trolls are so witless. They’re more easily roused and sent in a direction but they don’t do well with conflicting information so they ignore all but the narrative of their masters. Thralls, the lot of them.

    Please don’t let the assholes get you down.

      1. I like how she starts out explaining that she’s worried about getting attacked for speaking her mind and having an opinion.

        And we were supposedly making that up.

        Other than that… this difference in submission rates has been known/suspected not-a-secret for a long time. As in… everyone KNOWS that women tend to take on the “editor” role and reject their own work and so never actually send it out. (I got chewed out once for this “pre-rejection” usurpation of someone else’s job.)

        The result is that the acceptance rates tend to be higher for women than men coming out of the slush.

        Because men just jump in there and Do It. At least as a statistical thing. They either think they’re awesome, or they don’t put the same emotional weight on a rejection of their “baby” and just send the dumb thing out to see what happens. Who knows. Maybe you men can explain.

        But women don’t (in general terms) behave like men.

        Super funny (and to the topic of this “I am not Vox Day” post)… someone or other posting evil horrible sexist awful misogynist VD quotes the other day included (and I’m gonna paraphrase and mangle it) a quote to the effect of… Women decide to be an artist and the first thing they do is take an art appreciation course… Men decide to be an artist and just grab a paintbrush and start painting… probably boobies.

        Rather than proof of misogyny I thought… Yeah… that is definitely one of the self-defeating things that women do. Men don’t make us do it. Maybe it’s just hormone prompted needs not to take social risks (rejection). But women DO this. For whatever reason they get tied up in the process and trying to be good enough before actually diving in and sending stuff out than men do.

        Guy at my husband’s work (as an example) decided to write a fantasy… set up an author web site and is half way through writing his fantasy. I got social anxiety just *hearing* about it.

        1. Those are pretty durn good insights, and very much my personal observations as well, across a number of species.

          The root is basic biology. Once the male has reproduced nature doesn’t care if he gets himself killed — so there’s no selection pressure against just up and doing whatever idiocy comes into his head. But the female needs to live long enough to raise the next generation, so selection pressure has been more toward females that think everything through before they act.

          Add the human social pressure to perform, and worst case, in guys you get the famous last words of “Hey Bubba, watch this!” and in gals you get terminal performance anxiety. But best case, you get exploration from the one and perfection from the other. (Ignoring for the moment that there’s also a lot of overlap.)

          Fact is both traits have survival value and value to civilization, but it does mean that ‘performance’ in some venues will be skewed one way or the other, and no amount of angsting about equality will change biology.

      2. And now imagine it’s 1912 and Burroughs’ first story is published. The country of 90 million is 90% white, 90% of black folks are still living in the old South and somehow these daffy gender feminists think black folks and women are being turned out of SFF, which only had two or three magazines semi-regularly publishing SFF stories. There were plenty of magazines for women. It’s not exactly anyone’s fault women mostly didn’t buy SFF magazines.

        Now fast forward to 1923 and 26. Weird Tales and Amazing Stories start – 2 full-time genre magazines now, and they barely survived, and the Astounding which followed in 1930 barely survived. Many parents thought the magazines so trashy they thought twice about their kids reading them.

        A semi-boom starts around 1940 and instantly stops because of WW II. The boom resumes after WW II. 10 to 15 years later women start entering more and more. They are entering because they are TRYING to enter, not because they were being turned away. In all that time there is virtually NO hardcover publications of SF novels other than the SF Book Club which offered one low-rent book per month starting in 1953 and for 15 years when it finally increased that. SF paperbacks only get going in the early ’50s. 1946 to ’71 is only 25 years. Hell, that’s only back to 1990 today. These creepy people act like it was a locked gold mine for a couple of centuries. In fact SFF had no nationally respected reputation other than being mostly for kids and fringe lunatics.

        Somehow these crazy intersectionalists act as if this was some national craze that included people out and should’ve had some United Nations-like demographic representation. The truth is SF was a ghetto even throughout the ’60s and didn’t even have a N.Y. Times best-seller until 1976. You can’t make up people who aren’t there and you can’t call people who were there women-hating racists merely for existing.

  9. I saw someone on another blog (it was boring, didn’t bookmark it for notes) insisting that okay, so Larry Correia is right, Vox isn’t on Sad Puppies. BUT, she insisted, LARRY CORREIA HAS NOT SAID THAT VOX WASN’T INVOLVED IN THE PLANNING PROCESS! Proof of guilt!

    Yep. Logic. It’s useful for more than making Vulcans seem weird.

    1. Larry also didn’t say that he’s not a humaniform robot remote-controlled by Vox. And even if he did say it, it wouldn’t mean anything — he might just be a humaniform robot controlled by Vox, after all! :O

      1. But learning that would require reading Brad’s blog and being exposed to his “hate speech”.

      2. No no I’m certain she means the secret meetings held in dark gun smoke filled rooms. 😉 You know the ones that only happened in her imagination.

          1. It’s okay, Doug, I wasn’t invited also, and I’m Larry and Brad’s friend!

          2. Well Sarah, anytime you’re down in east Tennessee, bring the family on over and we’ll pot at a few cans. 🙂

          3. Sarah, they only want you to THINK that, while they exploit your Vajayjay and Hispanic credentials. As “cover” for their obvious “racism” and “misogyny”. . .

            (and I halfway expect one of the Social Justice Trolls to say something like that any day now. . .)

          4. Now I’m picturing everyone shouting to be heard over ear pro:

            “HOW ‘BOUT KEVIN J. ANDERSON?”
            (bang! bangbang! bang!)
            “DEVIN K. SANDERSON? NEVER HEARD OF HIM!”

          5. Keith Glass–Two weeks ago, on a message board I frequent(ed), I saw someone say

            “I do know the Sad Puppies nominated some people solely as a screen so they couldn’t be accused of racism or sexism. That’s why Jen Brozak got nominated by them, much to her dismay.”

          6. M.L. Martin — I saw that same quote (I’ve forgotten where but I expect it’s migrated) … hello, who’s feeding the conspiracy theories now??

            And howcum after comment nesting gets to a certain point, the Reply link vanishes??

          7. @Beolach

            You owe me a new keyboard. And now I have to explain to my coworkers why I just fell out of my chair giggling like a fiend. Took me back to my lj days when I’d find myself with my head on my right shoulder reading posts
            one
            word
            at
            a
            time.

    2. I’m pretty sure Larry Correia has also never said that he isn’t planning a ritual sacrifice of 17 rabbits to Sasquatch for every Sad Puppy nominee that gets the Hugo. Therefore, we must infer that he is, and vote “No Award” to save the bunnies!

      1. But I have it on good authority that Bunnies aren’t just cute like everybody supposes. After all, they’ve got them hoppy legs and twitchy little noses. And what’s with all the carrots? What do they need such good eyesight for anyway?

      2. WAIT… you sacrifice the rabbits (goats, chickens, bunnies, fluffy kittens, etc.) BEFORE the vote to win the hugo. not afterwards. that is a celebration not a sacrifice.

      3. Sacrificing rabbits to Sasquatch? Oh geez, River Shoulders is going to be pissed. His people have enough stigmas already.

    3. Was that the blog that went:
      Vox is part of the Evil League of Evil, he even has a title.
      The Puppies said the Evil League of Evil planned SP3.
      They did not say that Vox was not part of the planning.
      Therefore Vox was obviously part if the planning.
      ?

      The logic there is flimsy at best.

          1. Check out the comment thread here. Warning: be sure you’re somewhere you can laugh hysterically without anyone calling the guys from the local asylum.

          2. Achillea, Drake, thanks for finding the links for me. I didn’t have time to respond to Emily last night, alas…

  10. Sorry to hear people don’t understand the concept of individual identity. Its stupid, excessively stupid and shouldn’t be falling in anyone’s lap.

    Maybe someday people will realize that someone can enjoy one part of something(Vox’s novel) without that meaning that the person has to condone everything else from A-Z involving that person.

    At least I can hope someday everyone can figure that out.

    1. But people are widgets, that can be sorted by skin color and sexual preference and equipment! Within those groups they all think the same.
      And of course you can’t enjoy someone’s work unless they rightthink and you agree with everything they say. Good Lord, Man, haven’t you been paying attention to the awards these last few years?
      /sarcasm off.

      1. Wait, wait, I thought you couldn’t sort by equipment because some people discover they have the wrong equipment and should be sorted as if they had they other equipment so you have to sort by equipment but not the actual equipment but the equipment they say they’re supposed to have.

        I’m so confused.

        1. You’re making my head hurt, and I’m a woman. So you’re sexissssss and your argument is invalid.

      2. Sarah, having heard your accent on that podcast the other day I’m adding it to your comments. And I must say, the results are absolutely hilarious.

        That you’re saying what I’m thinking just makes it all the more hilarious. HoytSpeak. In my head. Bwahaha!!!!

      3. It’s a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, except instead of pigeonholing other stuff, they pigeonhole people. (And I’m being serious, sad to say.) And you can’t be pigeonholed until they’ve drilled down to your specific traits (if you’re blessed) or flaws (if you’re cursed) by which to be sorted. If you lack, frex, big racism, they have to keep at it until they find your little racism, cuz otherwise they don’t know how to pigeonhole you.

        (With apologies to pigeons…)

  11. The truth doesn’t matter to The Opposition.

    It is good to know where they stand. They’ve made themselves clear.

    We are dinosaurs. We are not welcome. We are to be silenced. And if possible, destroyed.

    It is as I always suspected. It is good to know where I stand.

    And for that, Larry and Brad both, I thank you for your efforts.

    Respects,
    Steven Francis Murphy
    On the Outer Marches

    1. Please remember that the opposition isn’t the rest of us. I’ve been fighting these people quietly for years and losing.

      Thanks for all of you that have brought the fight out into the light.

      1. Thank you for reminding us that there are still some reasonable people over yonder. Now if they’d just stop being afraid to speak up…

    2. If I’m to be a dinosaur I want to be a pteranodon with laser eyes.

      Where do I go to have my reconstructive species reassignment surgery? I am pretty sure that Obamacare should pay for it. No one can expect me to stay trapped in the body of a cuddly grandma when I feel in my heart I was meant to soar above the clouds and lay burning waste to random villages.

        1. Dear Times,

          The highest part sticking up on a shark is called a:
          “Dorsal Fin”

          The head is the pointy part on the front with eyes and teeth.

    3. I think a sequel to a famous work is in order: “Since you are a Dinosaur, My Love”.

      Do you think it might get nominated for a Hugo?

  12. The sad thing is that you’ve been saying variations of this since I’ve been reading your blog, and people still won’t get it.

      1. Yep. As I have said previously, Vox is their last chance to make SP3 out to be haters. They can’t do it with the SP3 suggested works since there is way too much evidence that it is open minded and based on merit. They can now only lie about SP3 being linked to Vox.

  13. use the Alinsky Playbook

    I don’t think there is anything special about the Alinsky Playbook except, perhaps, that it is written down. It is basically instruction on how to be a manipulative asshole, and as such invents nothing new to history, politics, or the human condition.

    1. The part that’s most amusing is that the Alinsky Playbook can basically be summarized as “Step outside of Civilized Rules and rally the mob to the flag of Barbarian!”

      That’s Vox Day. Fire, meet fire.

  14. And so, you too, are forced to renounce Vox Day. Maybe I’m not the sharpest spoon in the drawer, but your post looks an awful lot like a soviet era denoucing.

    You are not, nor have you ever been, a supporter of Vox Day.

    I’m not surprised it’s come to this.

    It’s foing to get worse, too. I fully expect someone’s house to get burned down before this is over.

    1. please note, previous post is meant to be sympathetic, not accusatory. I’m not a writer, I’m a grease monkey.

    2. My understanding of denouncing would be to trash the person being denounced.

      Simply stating that one is not who one is being associated with is not quite URRS-level. I, too, would be sick of being told I’m evil becuase – Vox.

      I’m sure Larry can come up with plenty of evil on his own.

    3. Calm the hell down.

      I didn’t say anything there that I haven’t said in public before. I just put it all in one place because I was sick of being challenged to defend somebody else’s statements.

      1. Eight at last count entirely separate media outlets publish exactly the same libelous garbage about SP and yet they accuse Larry, and Brad, and Vox of collusion.
        Funny thing that.

        1. Projection. They privately collude continuously, and savagely eat their own for failing to conform to their hivemind.

          They cannot imagine us not doing the same.

  15. I am sad and frustrated this has gone on for so long. It doesn’t matter how many times you say that you’re not Vox. They NEED to align you with him to keep this a scandal since they were unable to say you were a racist/homophobe/cat hater by your nominations. There is an orgy of evidence that the people you picked were from a diverse group so they have to hold on to the last thing they have to try and prove their false point. As I have said previously, they can’t get their whiny base to actually vote, they can only get their people to whine on social media. So expect this to continue until after the Hugos are announced.
    Also, I think it’s entirely unfair that you will not accept a nomination. If your work is good enough to stand out, it should be recognized.

    1. “Also, I think it’s entirely unfair that you will not accept a nomination. If your work is good enough to stand out, it should be recognized.”

      I agree with Mark Whipple, who sounds like a fine fellow.

      Larry Correia should be up for whatever new award replaces the Hugos if or when the Social Justice Planeteers burn the award rather than let any unpersons win one.

      1. We can call the new award “The Correia”, or perhaps “The Torgersen”.

        in all seriousness, it could just be something like “The World’s Best SF/F”, though TWiBSFuF may not catch on all that well.

          1. Or…(I don’t hate ‘The Heinlein’) – dig even deeper back, to da Vinci, perhaps.

          2. Sounds better than the, “Gernsback.”

            Or for that matter, “Hugo the Rat.”

            Which is what Hugo Gernsback was known as by his stable of unpaid writers.

            It’s funny to me that the most prestigious writing award in SFF is named for man who was widely detested by so many of his writers.

          3. I like Steve’s suggestion of The Julie.

            (Since that’s my name.)

            But really … Jules Verne… good choice.

            Or go even farther back and call it the Illiad.

          4. Want to second Tiago Becerra Paolini’s suggestion of the “Wendell.” The trophy should be a manatee on a pedestal, while joyous puppies frolic beneath it.

      2. You should as well John. Count to a Trillion was amazing.

        Awake in the Nightlands was just fantastic. It was the first time in a very long time that something like that has had any effect on me.

        1. “Awake In The Night Lands” was the first thing I read by Mr. Wright; indeed, it was one of the first books I bought for my Kindle, based solely on Internet buzz.

          And yes, it blew me away. High-octane nightmare fuel, written in prose with an antique beauty reminiscent of Lovecraft at his best, but without Lovecraft’s nihilism.

          That was the book that made me a fan. I’ve been reading him ever since.

      3. It is time for a new award anyway.

        Basset hound holding a kukri in her jaws staring mournfully up at you. The ultimate Sad Puppy.

      4. We’re close to the point where winning a Hugo, unless it’s an ironic thumb in the eye of the SJWs, is a toxic albatross around your neck. I’m more in favor of a Reconquista of the Hugos than the replacement of them, if that’s even possible.

        But since the topic is up, I prefer that the new awards that were formerly called the Hugos be named after a true pioneer in the genre, like Jules Verne. Maybe the award can be called the Family Jules.

          1. Eh. Maybe. I’m still hopeful that the Hugos can be rehabilitated.

            But if they can’t, I’m not in the least distressed to see them nuked instead.

  16. It certainly doesn’t help that Vox keeps using the Sad Puppies hashtag on Twitter. It gives the impression that he’s part of it, when he isn’t. But as Larry said, Vox is not under his control.

      1. So who is Noah Ward (the author of all the blog entries, and one would assume the owner of the site)?

  17. Larry,

    They are doing this in order to make you separate from Vox. It is a classic example of divide and conquer. George Martin has already started this with his posts about Vox.

    They know this. They don’t care. They are going to keep at you in order to drive a wedge between the united front that is opposing them. Don’t let them get away with it, especially when victory is in your grasp.

    1. I actually do not agree. I think they want to link SP3 to Vox and RP because they think that is enough to destroy SP3. Funny enough, it is not. Vox isn’t going anywhere. Neither is SP. We are really worrying about things that have already been decided. SP3 has done what was intended and they are just unable to accept their defeat. They have done a good job in convincing Brad and Larry that they, the SJWs, are still in this fight. They are not. They lost.

    2. I didn’t write it for them, I wrote it for everybody else. When I’ve got people who I know are on my side saying they don’t like how I’m associated with Vox, then I need to clarify it.

      I didn’t say anything there that I haven’t said repeatedly before.

      1. Therein lies the problem. They’ve got you repeatedly repeating yourself wasting time and effort.

        This entire post and comments is a big SJW win. Recognizing the problem, defining it, then dragging it into the sunlight is the first step in solving it.

    3. They aren’t a united front. They haven’t ever been. That is the point of Larry’s post.

      If they think *isolating* Vox is going to make him any less obnoxious, they have clearly not been paying attention.

      1. They don’t get it. The SP crew are merely their opponents. Vox is gleefully piloting his kamikaze into the SF establishment. And the CHORFs are not only proving LarryC and BradT right, they’re also dancing to Vox’s tunes.

        1. Thanks for that…now I’ve got soda all over my screen…damn it… I can’t stop giggling every time I reread your comment and picture VD in a little Yokosuka D4Y Suisei (“Judy”) dive bomber (thanks Wikipedia) hurtling towards the convention center, cackling gleefully. Oh man…

    4. Yes, our side is not a monolithic bloc.

      Even if there hadn’t been an SP3, I suspect there would have been a Rabid Puppies. And it probably would have been even more successful.

  18. I don’t know about you, but I actually AM Vox Day.

    I am also Napoleon, Batman, Sam (I Am), Charlie, The Walrus, and Spartacus.

      1. I am Spartacus.

        And Larry Correia

        And Brad TOrgerson

        And Sarah Hoyt

        And yes, even Vox. Day

        I may or may not agree with them, but I will not denounce them. You will not pin their perceived sins on me, but I will provide them covering fire when requested.

          1. While I personally may not care for someone’s opinions, I am rabidly opposed to slander and censorship, and to be honest, the frustrated tears of bullies add great flavour to coffee. Lock Shields.

  19. Larry, I am planning on attending Sasquan because

    1. I have never been to a WorldCon

    2. I am a proud Sad Puppies, we’ re just as good as any other fans and think we should be represented there.

    Questions for you:

    1. Given the likely hostile atmosphere at Sasquan, is the anticipated cost (appx. $2000) worth it? I mean, I could go on an Alaskan cruise instead!

    2. How should a Sad Puppy conduct himself? Dignified silence, even if provoked? Engage the opposition quietly and politely? Engage the opposition politely but forcefully?

    3) Would wearing a Wendell t-shirt be too “in-your-face”?

    Thanks for any advice you can give me.

    1. 1. Your money, your call.
      2. Being polite, dignified, and professional is never wrong.
      3. Who could possibly hate Wendell?

      1. First off Worldcon is big enough that you’ll probably won’t run into any of the SWF’s unless you look for them on the schedule. Although if you go to the business meeting you will see them. Also quite a few of them will be in their safe room. Another wonderful SJW term. Go to the Baen party and the Baen Traveling Roadshow for fun.

      2. Hmmm…

        1. Watching the splendors of Alaska and stuffing myself with fresh-caught seafood vs. listening to SJW mindless hate speech. Tough call.

        2. I am always polite and dignified, but the SJWs consider any disagreement harassment, so would a bit of gentle sarcasm and ridicule be unprofessional? I need to have some fun, after all!

        3. Who could possibly hate sad puppies, yet they do! And I don’t want diet Dr. Pepper and Cheetos dumped all over my Wendell shirt!

        If I do go, I’m thinking of sponsoring a Sad Puppies “safe room,” where free speech and the appreciation of attractive women by cisnormative men is not only celebrated but encouraged!

        1. #2…Please remember to be condescending to them. They really hate that. And when they complain that you’re being condescending, explain to them that condescension means affability to your inferiors and temporary disregard for differences of position or rank, and that it’s the only way we can have conversations with them.

        2. If you go on a cruise to/along Alaska…. you will be surrounded by SJW’s. Wealthy ones who can afford such cruises, basking in their gloriously hypocritic magnificence, and whimpering about the glaciers, polar bears and fish.

          Think about it.

        3. Wear a sad puppies shirt. If any SJWs come up to berate just say “I find your words and behavior threatening, please leave me alone.” If they continue, “You are in violation of Sasquan’s anti-harrasment policy, please leave me alone”
          If they fail to leave after your first indication the encounter is unwanted, report them to Con Security.
          It’d work best if you had a compatriot to record their activities. Getting the worst of the SJWs kicked out of the con for violating their own requested policies would be wonderful black knighting.

    2. I have been to several Worldcons. I’m a reader, not a writer, and have completely missed a lot of the politics going on. (Including 2011, when I was one of the Hugo Escorts—yup, got to carry rockets around. I wouldn’t have attended the ceremony otherwise, because it wasn’t central to my enjoyment. Probably won’t attend this one unless I can participate, because again, it’s an awards ceremony, not my thing.)

      You can have an excellent time at a Worldcon without dealing with politics at all. Or you can engage according to your personal level of desire. Spokane is a lovely setting for the Worldcon, particularly in terms of hotel proximity and the fact of a beautiful park with a river and waterfalls being literally right outside the doors of the convention center. There’s an incredibly dense selection of restaurants and a new & used bookstore just a couple of blocks away.

      Attend. Have fun. Make friends. See art. Go to the con suite. Attend readings. Pick panels with people who know how to speak well. (Lament the loss of Terry Pratchett.)

      That’s my advice, anyway.

      1. They’ve got a nice gondola over the falls too. There’s not likely to be much water at that time of year, especially given the dearth of winter precip, but the rock are still pretty.

        And there’s a massive carousel in the park! And ducks to feed!

        1. Can’t forget the garbage-eating goat.

          (I went to college in Spokane and didn’t have a car. However, the campus was right next to the Centennial Trail, about a mile from Riverfront Park, so any time this broke, carless college student was bored, I went to the waterfalls.)

      2. Well, at least until they throw you out for making them “feel unsafe”, as happened here. Fortunately, in this country we have several laws and Amendments to the Constitution to allow us to each sue the Worldcon, it’s ConCom, the WSFS, etc. both personally and corporately until they either go bankrupt or decide this game isn’t worth the candle. Teach them what public accommodation and equal access really mean.

    3. I won’t be there, but I’m in favor of visual identifiers as a general rule.

      Wendell ought to be “in group” enough not to scare the natives.

      1. I am waiting to see how this all goes down, because Kansas City next year is quite driveable… But if it just turns into a complete wreck I won’t bother.

        1. Kansas City is driveable for me too. I also might be working and thus have funds next year. I *almost* went to World Con in San Jose but we sold our house and moved out of California in June and I didn’t realize I’d missed it until August. (Moving, it sucketh.)

          If I do go… if you go… it’s really SOOOOO possible to wander about completely alone and isolated next to an imaginary internet friend and never know it. I like the idea of the Wendell shirt because it’s be a great identifier without being off-putting to random passers by.

    4. Jon,

      Alaska Cruise. After an hour of eau du ConStench and standing in lines surrounded by constant arrogant idiocy, you will kick yourself for not cruising.


      1. You have probably never been waterboarded either. It sucks.

      2a. A Sad Puppy would conduct himself to the travel agency and inquire about heavily discounted cruise tickets to fill last minute vacancies.

      2b. Dignified silence and professionalism is always appreciated by the left. Nothing like a target that won’t scream back.

      2c. Polite, forceful engagement with them is like bringing brass knuckles to a gunfight. Brave, stupid and worthless. The ones you defend yourself from won’t care. The rest of the audience will be against you, and laugh at your pathetic attempts to shame the shameless.

      3. No, the SJW are pretty slow and it always takes a while for higher intelligence decisions like “which are friends and which are to be persecuted?” It’s always nice when the enemy wears a uniform.

      Why not save money and simply wear a ‘vote republican’ t-shirt at your nearest left-wing nuthouse (probably a local university). The effects will be precisely the same, and hippy stench isn’t so bad outdoors.

  20. You’re not Vox Day, but they’re too scared to go against him, so they go against you.

    Pretty normal practice for people whose convictions are based on the word of the group. They can swarm, but they can’t stand alone.

    I’m sorry you have to deal with all of this. I also want to thank you for opening my eyes to the reality of the publishing field I refused to see. I can pretty much say I will, at this point, never be able to publish professionally.
    As bummed as I am about the epiphany, it hurts less now than it would have if I had managed to get my foot in the door, somehow.

    1. You don’t need a publishers opinion to tell you your writing is good, just your fans.

      Self publish, keep more money, kick the middlemen out, and be happy. Its easier to do that today than it was five years ago, and there’s a ton of resources out there that are willing and able to help you.

      1. Everyone wants to belong. When your day job doesn’t align with what you really want, the idea of belonging jabs you hard in a little corner of your mind.

        ‘Belonging’ is now making my stomach turn.

        But thank you for the support. It is more appreciated than I have words to describe.

        1. I get a distinct Grouch Marx vine now too when I think about whats going on sometimes.

          I’m an aspiring writer, doing what I can to work on my craft and improve my storytelling before I put my work out there.

          I use to dream of belonging to SWFA, and maybe winning an award or two for my works.

          When Amazon and KDP started, it was a game changer. Heck, I owned a Softbook back in the day, I remember paying $17.99 for a .pdf of a book. I’m on my fifth Kindle right now, and I’m a voracious reader as well. I’ve read some klunkers, but have also found some good stories.

          If I want to get my work in front of a reader, I can write it, hire an editor myself, get a cover artist, my wife can handle and conversion for me, and I hit publish. Then its all about building a website, building your mailing list, finding your first 1,000 fans. Their feedback is what matters. Get their approval, and its all good.

          There’s a ton of very good resources out there. Writes Cafe on Kboards, JA Konraths blog, Hugh Howey. Rocking Self Publishing Podcast, Joanna Penn, the list goes on.

          Write well and it well get noticed, regardless of who published it. The Martian started out as a self published work, as did Hugh Howeys Wool, as did Marko Kloos. As did our host IIRC.

          SF/F is a big tent, and you’re always going to be welcome at this particular table.

    2. “I can pretty much say I will, at this point, never be able to publish professionally.”

      Pardon me for being blunt, but humbug. If I can be published, you can be.

      These people about whom we complain are on their way out. The reason why there is so much screaming and drama on the Internet is because this is their last cry of panic before the waters of oblivion close over their heads.

      1. I would pay good money just to read JCW comments.

        Should not be OT, I think. When the guy [and gal?] over at Worldcon decided to remove JCW work from the nominations based an ‘evolving’ and increased ‘understanding’ of what constitutes published material for Hugos, did they not violate some sort of Worldcon rule about rules? Should not the evolving standard for previously published works up for Hugos be voted on by the members?
        At a minimum, considering that Scalsi, to name maybe only one, was given a pass some years ago for the same ‘offense’ the least they could have done was to say, ‘OK, JCW can stay in; we need to give notice, though, that, starting in 2016, these are the NEW standards. Unless, of course, their idea was to flame the anger of Puppydom to ever greater intensity. Which they have to a great degree.

        1. Chris Gerrib over on Brad’s blog made two points that I actually agree with regarding this:

          It’s worth noting that the Hugo admins are (like the rest of Worldcon) unpaid volunteers, trying to run this event in their spare time.

          I think of them as similar to referees or umpires in sports, doing their best to correctly enforce the rules in an unbiased fashion, but still fallible humans who may make errors. And just because a fan disagrees, doesn’t necessarily mean their call was wrong. As volunteers, I don’t hold the Hugo admins to as high a standard as professional sports officials, but I do expect they’ve read & studied the WSFS constitution, and so are more likely to have a correct understanding & interpretation thereof than random fans. Speaking for myself, I’ve only skimmed parts of the WSFS constitution.

          There was a rules change in 2009 – see here and scroll down to Web Sites, Ebooks and Mediums of Distribution.

          Web Sites, E-books, and Medium of Distribution

          Works published electronically rather than on paper have always been accepted as nominees. A decision of the 2009 WSFS Business Meeting formally acknowledged this by ratifying a Constitutional Amendment that added the words “or the equivalent in other media” to various category definitions.

          Note, however, that this means that if a work is first published electronically and then is printed in paper form without substantial revisions in a subsequent year, the later paper publication is not a new work; the original electronic publication is what’s eligible, not the later paper publication.

          I think “rules change” is maybe a little too strong, since the quote from the linked page both says “have always been accepted as nominees”, and also the actual change to the official constitution was a lot smaller, and doesn’t include the clarifying “Note” about eligible years. But it was still an amendment to the WSFS constitution, that occurred after Scalzi’s Old Man’s War was nominated.

          So based on the combination of those two points, I’m willing to forgive the previous Hugo admins’ error of accepting OMW as a Hugo nominee, and accept the current Hugo admins’ judgement on “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus”’s eligibility.

      2. You are absolutely right. We’re witnessing the old order’s death throes. Like a dying kaiju, its final spasms can be frightening; even destructive.

        But if we only endure, SFF will return to the hands of its rightful sovereigns–the readers and the authors.

      3. Do you really, honestly, think that’s true? Looking at the societal shifts in the US, and the trend for Millennial values, I greatly doubt it. I feel that, if anything, things will become MORE pro-SJW in future years. There will always be a core group who refuses to shift on these issues and moderates who agree on some points with either one side or another but if statistics on things like support for gay marriage are any indication (and I know that statistics are not the be-all, end-all as they can be easily manipulated but they do seem consistent on this issue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_of_same-sex_marriage_in_the_United_States) then I don’t think that this assertion holds water.

        I’m a liberal but old enough to find the hyperbolic rhetoric surrounding most social issues to be cringeworthy (and apparent lack of fortitude in the Millennial generation to be just sad). I’m also saddened by the mess the RP slate added to the mix. I very much wish it had stayed with the SP slate alone (and would have preferred something less targeted and more egalitarian overall, but that ship has sailed and clearly the system was begging for this particular game so what can you do if someone takes the challenge) as I think Vox Day’s presence in the mix has poisoned things almost beyond redemption.

        I’ll vote for the best works and if I find the works in a category truly unworthy in my personal estimation I’ll vote “No Award” for the lot. But I’ll give everything a chance to win me over. Because I like books/stories and good ones deserve recognition. Even in a year where every single winner will likely think there’s an asterisk beside their name when the winners are listed…

    3. Taysha said:

      I can pretty much say I will, at this point, never be able to publish professionally.

      Don’t be too sure of that. There are a lot of “small” sf/f presses being set up recently. And while I am not an author, and thus have no personal knowledge, some of them seem to be quite successful.

      The one thing I am sure of is this: if you don’t play, you won’t win.

      1. Many of the small presses are simply there to rob authors of money and copyrights.

        Nowadays, the big publishers don’t do much of anything for anyone who isn’t a star. They generally don’t take anyone who isn’t self-publishing and marketing anyway, so why bother with either.

        If you’re good, and you really, really want to get published, Baen and Castalia are around for the non-PC. Amazon is available for the self-promoters.

        No need to sign your life away to big evil, in other words.

  21. I’m just finishing The Golden Transcendence, unbelievable I’d never heard of Wright before Sad Puppies.

    Now all we need is for Glenn Reynolds to start his own slate: #blendedpuppies!

    I denounce all denunciations, including this one.

    1. His Orphans of Chaos trilogy was my first. I was out at a week long training class and saw a Borders when I went out for dinner. Picked up the first book before heading back to the hotel. Went back and picked up the next two the following evening.

    2. To quote Erik Avari as the Grand Inquisitor of the Great Underground Empire: “‘Shun magic, and shun the appearance of magic. Shun everything, and then shun shunning.” 😀

  22. I remember seeing a TV movie about Skokie Illinois. Nazi’s wanted to march and have a political rally in a town where 1 in 6 Jewish residents was a Holocaust survivor. It was intended to be a deliberate affront to public sensibilities. It went to the Supreme Court as a 1st amendment, free speech issue.

    I was a child then and thought of course you don’t let Nazi’s march in you town. You shoot Nazi’s. That what we did in World War II and it still seems like a good idea.

    But when I grew up, I eventually recognized that you either have freedom of speech or you do not. You tolerate things you don’t like, or you do not. It is an absolute, binary, either or state.

    There are lots of people that are terrible human beings that have been awarded recognition in any number of fields. Marion Zimmer Bradley and Samuel Delany sympathize with child molesters. Harlan Ellison sexually harassed women. If you can put your emotional reaction to that aside, do they deserve their award or not? Not just science fiction. Hitler and Stalin were Time magazine’s Man of the Year. Yasser Arafat won the Nobel Peace prize. Can you put your emotions aside to say if they deserve their award or not? Maybe they don’t. Maybe you shouldn’t put aside your emotions and you should put aside your principles instead? Or looked at another way, which principles should you sacrifice.

    Regardless, to whoever is doing it, stop black listing and harassing people, read the books and vote for what you like.

    1. Retro Rocket, your info is a little behind the times. You’re thinking of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s pedophile husband, Walter Breen, and his doings.

      Last calendar year, Moira Greyland (the daughter) revealed that Bradley had also physically and sexually abused her personally, as well as her brothers.

      But yeah, back to your point… as newsmakers, yes, Hitler and Stalin were certainly influential on events in those years, and that is all Time is supposed to be talking about. But did Arafat actually make peace? No, it was another truce and regroup period.

    2. Slight correction:

      Marion Zimmer Bradley *WAS* a child molester. Samuel Delaney still only sympathized with them as far as we know, though.

    3. Part of the problem is that everyone has a breaking point. When we are thinking rationally, we can admit the logic that if you don’t protect ideas you hate, you can’t get your ideas protected from others who hate your ideas . . . but most people have at least one idea they hate SO much, or think is SO intrinsically dangerous, that reaction trumps logic and they just want that idea exterminated.

      The single greatest danger of Alinsky -style progressivism is that it validates this reaction as licit and acceptable.

    4. Bad examples.

      Yasser Arafat winning the Peace Prize for his leadership of the PA is like Hitler winning the Hugo for his festive book burnings. The award was explicitly celebrating actions that were antithetical to the award. Now, if Yasser Arafat had won the international yodeling trophy instead, and he really was a great yodeler, his years of supporting terrorism shouldn’t come into it (aside from the wet-work team dispatched to take him out if he flew to accept it, of course… although it would be inappropriate for the Yodeling Committee to arrange that. Hmm… book idea… The Yodeling Assassin).

      And “Man of the Year” isn’t really an award. By Time’s explanation, its inclusion of horrible people is a feature, not a bug in the system. Osama bin Ladin was in contention in 2001, and not because Time’s editors thought he was just dreamy. I think its decision to give it to Guilliani instead was an example of politics instead of giving it on the merits, as it were.

    5. I remember seeing a TV movie about Skokie Illinois. Nazi’s wanted to march and have a political rally in a town where 1 in 6 Jewish residents was a Holocaust survivor.

      I remember another movie. The Nazis had their rally and the Bluesmobile forced them to jump off the bridge into the pond.

      1. “Illinois Nazis. I hate Illinois Nazis.”

        Though I have to give the Blues Brothers credit for being just about the only movie that did the neo-Nazi villain right.

      2. SP is doing the same thing. I found it amusing that O’Neil at Black Gate finally realized he may have been played, punked and pranked. That guy openly supports the most rancid politically correct feminist bullshit and happily deletes any push back in the comments.

        1. Well – FWFW – he let my (first ever) comment out of moderation. It wasn’t hideously condemnatory, but I basically said that referring to what happened as “ballot stuffing” – or even as “block voting” under most definitions, is counterfactual, that I’d enjoyed the articles, but that I felt like pulling out the way they did is a refutation of the support of many of us who voted for them because we thought they were good. As if we were welcome to enjoy them as long as they didn’t have to acknowledge us.

          And that given the lies, the libel, etc. all being directed at the Sp side, no matter how cruddy some of the people MAY be associated with it, that that was the side I’d choose. At least the side working to cure puppy related sadness, and hangers on, have been honest.

  23. Besides, even if you did, you’d just take his place, and they’d start pushing Brad to distance himself from the horrible unperson Correia. And if he was that stupid, next year they’d be telling Kate to distance herself from him.

    The tactic has actually worked very well for them in the past, but most people have learned if you feed your allies to the alligator, you might be eaten last but you’ll still be eaten. Better to team up and kill the damn thing.

  24. I’ve been brought back into the realm of genre fiction mostly by picking up your MHI series, Larry. I’m a political outlier – Catholic Integralist Monarchist with an Authoritarian streak who superficially gets along with conservatives of most sorts until the real underlying philosophy comes out. I’m a libertarian’s worst nightmare, really.

    I was involved in SP mostly as band wagon guy. And I admit, with the fallout, I regret it. I got in because I thought I was a part of something great, a renewal of genre. I’d left it because I’d sensed far too much liberalism involved and thought these actions were a return to the right path. I knew of Vox’s involvement (I think it’s slightly disingenuous to say he wasn’t involved – in the lead up to it he was clearly involved in the planning). I actually agreed with Vox a lot at first – fellow man of the right I thought. Took me a while to look past some of the superficial “conservative-values, values of the right” agreement to take his radical rationalist enlightenment liberalism honestly and reject him (though I do still plan to read his stuff).

    Still, it’s become clear that SP (and RP, of course) is just too populous a movement to be about its great ideals. There’s too much ideology and faction-mongering among the ranks. I don’t think anyone is lying. It’s just too many ideas trying to be the “voice” of the movement. Is it Brad? Ideally, but practically he’s just a face. Is it you, Larry? No, but you’ve got too much history to not be a face. Vox? The man embraces chaos, so he very well may be in some dark paradox of de-ascendance into the primordial abyss (“Non Serviam” – better to reign – far too many allusions to something far too dark…).

    Still, the chaos of mass appeal doesn’t allow there to be a single voice. This whole thing has gotten bigger than it was supposed to. Each man is his own pope. All we’re seeing is what can herd the cats best. People are clinging to ideological totems on both sides (Brad, I love his spunk, but he’s kind of worshiping the idea that the Hugos are the end all, be all – save the hugos, save the world). You are one of the few I don’t think have done so – you’re wordy about it and so people think you have your totems, but I think deep down this isn’t a totem for you (or maybe its more private than you want to let it believe). Wright, my beloved fellow Catholic, is similar though he can get on the anti-Morlock totem a little too often, Christ gets his final and absolute allegiance in the end.

    So I regret getting involved. Probably for rather esoteric reasons, but what’s done is done.

    I don’t regret my love of genre, though, and I don’t regret loving your books. You have no idea how much I’ve been crawling up a wall to clear my slate for your Grimnoire books to fill it (people have said reading and listening to Detroit Christmas and Murder on the Orient Elite will just confuse if you haven’t read the trilogy – lies, they’ve put a burning, white-hot desire for them in my bowels).

    I think its time for all involved to just ignore the issue. Let Vox be Vox. You be Larry. Write awesome books. Love your fans. Ignore the hate. Maybe your slightly concerned about your career. I wouldn’t be. You’ve got too much love for what you do.

    It’s gotten to the point where the only Hugo stuff I want to see now is “Make sure to vote” and nothing else (though my habit of watching trainwrecks will make me a hypocrite in this). I may not even vote myself, not for ideology, but just because I don’t know what’s right or wrong about any of this stuff anymore.

    I think we all just need to let this go. That’s Vox’s power, both against his enemies and against his allies. He can hold a bone longer than anyone. Let him have it. He can go play with his dead things. It’s resurrection season. Let’s go live and write and read.

    Alright, off my high horse. I don’t know you Larry, but I consider you my friend. Great writers are like that.

    1. I think it’s slightly disingenuous to say he wasn’t involved – in the lead up to it he was clearly involved in the planning

      HOW DO YOU KNOW THIS? Where did you get this impression? What evidence is there of this?

      Answers: You don’t, Vox’s public statements of support, and none.

  25. For all the disagreements I have with him, Vox certainly makes all the right enemies, and he does it with style.

  26. I am honestly surprised how far off base this initiative has gotten. Suddenly it’s all about Left vs. Right. Let me tell you something: that is a battle you will never win. No one has a fundamental right to have the Hugos or Nebulas reflect their politics. When it comes to something like that, you are occupying no moral high ground whatsoever.

    #DitchYourRacists

  27. By making this about Vox Day and how he, and everyone he likes, should be banished or burned at the stake for xxx-ism, the powers-that-have-been-and-still-want-to-be and the mob they have created have declared their intent to punish the innocent for the sins of the guilty, and have effectively abandoned the position that this has anything to do with literary merit.

    On the other hand, those who criticize Annie Bellet and Marko Kloos for withdrawing their nominations because the whole controversy has become too political for the merit to be judged fairly only support the anti-Puppy League’s contention that this is all about politics.

  28. I don’t think she’d do it, but I’d love to see some of the emails Bellett received after being nominated.

    I really liked her story, and think she had a better than good chance of winning. It my number one, unless I read something else that I like better.

  29. Larry, last night I suggested that since your opponents are succeeding in making this about Vox, you leave the Hugos to him and start your own award. I have reconsidered. They’d just find someone else impure and use that person to devalue the Larry award. So if you didn’t already ignore my suggestion, ignore my suggestion. And good luck!

  30. I’m not Vox Day

    You know that. I know that. The SP and RP supporters know that. Vox Day knows that. God and the Devil know that.

    And the SJW’s know that.

    The difference is for you, me, SP, RP, Vox Day, God, and the Devil pretending they don’t has not value.

    The SJW’s do get value from pretending otherwise because their methods have made the Father of Lies blush over their excessive falsehoods.

    So you’ll have to keep answering.

    My motivation was not to replace one biased clique with a new biased clique, but rather to get an award that everyone—up until two weeks ago—claimed represented all of fandom, to represent more of fandom.

    That is your true crime. Had you been willing to allow them to maintain that lie of theirs I suspect they’d have give you a Hugo about 2018 to “prove” you wrong.

    Instead you exposure their circle-jerk-award pretending to represent the broad swath of fandom was just pretending. Even if you limit it to Con attending fans the size difference between WorldCon and DragonCon alone shows how little of fandom it represents much less fandom defined as the regular purchasers of SFF reading material.

    You are the little boy who not only said the Emperor has no clothes but proved it.

    They can never forgive you and will defame you however they can because of it.

  31. When you let a bunch of people who ardently support N. K. Jemisin, K. Tempest Bradford and a host of others buffalo you over VD, you have lost the game. You have as much as agreed to sign a treaty to abide by separate speeding limits for SP and SJWs.

    It’s amazing we had these people completely checkmated with no way out and we suddenly declared a draw. There was no reason to sign this treaty. Instead this was the opportunity to bang them over the true heart of the matter. Kloos doesn’t like Day. Really? According to what whirling helicopter blade of a moral ethos did he come to that conclusion?

    Perhaps a satirical post titled “I’m not N. K. Jemisin, Arthur Chu or K. Tempest Bradford” that went on about how you don’t support them and you don’t know why people keep bugging you about that would’ve been in order.

    Unbelievable, really.

    Not being under any pressure, I cannot truly criticize anyone over losing heart, but we self-evidently have lost heart and ceded the moral high ground we occupied with no hope of dislodging us.

    “Sir, you broke the speed limit.”

    “Really? I was going slower than a whole pack of cars around me.”

    “They’re not straight white men, sir.”

    “Ah, I see.”

    #DitchYourRacists

  32. Larry, you’re the best and most eloquent debaters I’ve seen, but please tell me you didn’t just break Godwin’s Law.

    1. didn’t just break Godwin’s law

      I had to read that part of LC’s post twice before I got it. I’m not sure one could claim a violation (*) without accepting LC’s premise, in which case his point is made.

      (*) Dude. It’s a law of proportionality. It’s broken when a thread goes on for days and *doesn’t* reference Nazis. I dunno why we keep calling it “breaking” the law instead of “fulfilling” it. Esp SFF fans.

      Anyway, I suspect Godwin’s law needs a revision, post-Downfall.

      Invoking the-mustache-which-must-not-be-named seems required now – it’s not really a good fight until someone’s done a parody.

    2. No. It is an apt comparison, Churchill and FDR weren’t best buds with Stalin, but they were the allies. Now, if I’d gone on to say that Teresa Nielsen Himmler of the SMOFfen SS was angry with us, that would have been Godwinning the thread.

      1. Churchill may not have been, but FDR seemed awfully chummy with “Uncle Joe.” And it sure didn’t seem to bother him (or Truman) when Soviet spies were identified in his organization. Heck, they got promoted to even higher positions with even more authority.

        1. You may not want to read Churchill’s history of WWII, with his first hand account of a jolly evening at a dacha with Stalin and Beria.

          The really scary thing was that Churchill saw no problem with Stalin’s wonderful plan to plant the same kind of wheat in every climatic area of the entire USSR.

          Churchill… was pretty socialist on some matters.

          1. Oh, I’m not surprised. Churchill has attune great pithy quips, but I’m not a part if the cult of Churchill. Actually, I just honestly don’t know as much about him.

          2. Churchill was also very much not a farmer. He was a fascinating and multitalented man, but he had a weakness for snake oil.

    3. Godwin’s law is a joke. Literally. It’s a joke that says, “wow, some people sure are quick to make Nazi comparisons, aren’t they?” It is NOT a “law” that you can break or not break, which renders an argument logically unsound.

      People immediately invoking Godwin’s Law every time someone draws comparisons to the Nazis is far more harmful to rational discourse than all the inappopriate Nazi comparisons you could ever possibly imagine. Those who fail to remember the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it, and if you cannot draw comparisons to one of the most important historical events in the history of the world, what CAN you draw comparisons to?

      In short:

      Do you know who would have invoked Godwin’s Law to try to shame his opposition into silence? Hitler.

      1. I thought it was funny when somebody invoked Godwin, on a post I wrote going through the Nazi party platform and political actions to demonstrate that they were actually socialists. Well… Yeah…

        1. Man, how dare you compare the National Socialist German Workers Party to the Nazis, of all people!?! Don’t you know they killed millions of people?!? Have a sense of proportion, here! You should only break out the Nazi comparisons when you’re talking about someone truly terrible, like Vox Day or George W. Bush, not when you’re simply talking about National Socialists.

        2. Heh – and the neutrals asserting that the German National Socialist Workers Party was not socialist…

      2. Godwin’s Law ignores the fact people are trying to draw parallels to an intellectual and philosophical space which creates hatred by mainstreaming hate speech.

        Instead they go straight to genocide and give over with the LOLs. There’s a shitload of harm that falls short of mass murder. It is not an either or proposition.

  33. Stay the course, Larry. Your opponents know you’re not Vox, but they’d rather have you fighting him than fighting them. He’s not on your team (which he said last week–“Larry and Brad are not my pack, but they are allies”), but he has supported your team. He’s linked to your book bombs and your fiskings and your vigorous defenses of Sad Puppies. In his very introduction of the Rabid Puppies slate, he acknowledged the disagreement over the “optimal” way to combat the decay in the field but pointed out a lot of convergence in your recommendations because you all “we value excellence in actual science fiction and fantasy.” That hasn’t changed.

    When it comes to Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies, you’ve got nothing to apologize for, and he’s got nothing to apologize for. You guys put Annie Bellet and Marko Kloos on the ballot because you thought they deserved it. Your enemies drove them off. All of you said what you were trying to do before the nominations came out, and you stuck to your guns. You’ve now had some casualties, but as you’ve pointed out, it’s just an open case of what’s been happening quietly all along.

    Regardless, stay strong, laugh at your enemies, and don’t worry about defending Vox Day. Instead, threaten your enemies with him. (“No award, eh? Do you want vengeance, or a solution? The line for vengeance starts at the Rabid Puppies display right over there.”) He’s not seeking to harm you. They are. So bugger ’em.

    1. I hear the claim that “enemies drove off Marko Kloos and Annie Bellet”, and the variations, over and over again. I understand it is a very nice talking point to have, but didn’t you read their actual words that described their actual reasons behind leaving? For Marko it was pretty clear (and he very strongly worded it too) that it was because of VD’s involvement so if you want to blame someone blame VD. He also explicitly said that he has no problem with SP and implied that he would not have done it if VD had not wedged himself in.
      For Annie, it was not as clear, but she mentioned the controversy and implied that she prefers her votes to come from people who have read her works, instead of just those who vote for lists they saw on websites.

      1. Neighbor, when Annie Bellet writes, “I don’t want to have to think over every tweet and retweet, every blog post, every word I say. I don’t want to cringe when I open my email”, do you honestly think it’s Sad Puppies or Rabid Puppies driving her to that? Do you think the people who nominated her story are the ones pushing her to decline the nomination?

        As for Kloos, if he does mean what he initially stated, then it’s no loss that he’s off the ballot. “I decline my nomination because I don’t like my voters” is a rather pissy way to treat people who like your writing. But even at that: he was moved to quit because people said, “don’t care about your politics, we like your stuff”? That doesn’t make any sense to me. What does make sense is the people in his circle giving him a hard time about appealing to WrongFans. Again, who would want him off the ballot: the people who put him there, or the people outraged at the process?

        1. Regarding Annie, you are just *assuming* that she gave up based on reactions from the opponents of SP. I think it is likely that some people emailed her asking to drop out, but is also possible that the hostile environment and the very political nature of the debate also discouraged her. At anyrate, she is not explicit enough that you can confidently “pin” her dropping out to the anti SP group. And that is the whole point, if you want to make such a claim as the anti-SP group “put” Annie out, then you are lacking evidence to back it up.

          Regarding, Marko, I don’t know where you got the “I don’t like my voters”. He is really, truly, and honestly very clear: http://www.munchkinwrangler.com/2015/04/15/a-statement-on-my-hugo-nomination/
          On FB, he even issued a stronger statement (which was posted here too).

          1. Shorter Lotharloo…

            “The fear isn’t real! The fear isn’t real!”

            And that after having come here to demand that people disavow Vox, or else be branded by association.

            Because guilt by association is so civilized.

            But… “The fear isn’t real!”

            Gotcha, bucko.

          2. @Syvona:
            I can understand why people here get so defensive whenever VD is brought up, however, I did never demand that people here should disown VD. I posted his silly and offensive statements to show that how natural is it for someone like Marko to not want to have anything to do with him and I also applauded him on that decision.
            That was it. But somehow mentioning even the name of VD brings back memories of trauma and feelings being accused of guilt by association.

        2. I doubt either would have dropped out if the whole of fandom had been decent to them. If there hadn’t been numerous articles bashing the entire thing. Linking to lists with their names on them. Of they hadn’t had people sending private emails and making public comments.

  34. Just to summarize the facts, a small select ever so special exclusionary clique managed to game the Hugo process, not by controlling the votes, but by controlling the nominations. They used the Hugo to award each other and those few writers who delivered the messages they in their infinite wisdom approved of.
    Had this been all that they did the rest of us would have probably simply shrugged and if we thought about the Hugos at all it would have been remember when they meant something. But just owning the Hugos wasn’t enough, they had to make the claim that the Hugos still represented the best of the best of F&SF, and the majority of the uninitiated believed them. So new and budding readers would pick up the list of nominees and winners and expect quality entertainment. What they got instead was poorly written message fiction with massive agenda and precious little entertainment.
    So, a few folks in the fan community saw the situation and determined to set things right. Thus the birth of Sad Puppies. And that elite clique acted exactly as expected, just like spoiled brats caught with their hands in the cookie jar. They deny, deflect, cast spurious blame on their accusers, act all butt hurt when presented with the simple truth, and threaten the lives and families and livelihoods of people who just want a bit of fairness.

  35. What a waste of time. It’s too bad you need to spend any portion of your life stating the obvious in terms that a group of 4 year old children could understand. Smdh…

    1. Consider: these are people whose first instinct is that everything must be centrally organized. The idea that people might go off and do their own thing doesn’t even occur to them.

  36. As a libertarian and casual Sci-Fi fan, it shocked me to read about this whole mess at lewrockwell.com.

    To learn that the SJWs (the MOST bigoted, hateful, dishonest, intolerant and yes, racist folks I’ve come across) have even gotten their talons into Sci-Fi so that they can censor un-PC authors appalls me…these people just won’t be satisfied until everyone is as miserable as they are in the gray, colorless, humorless world they’re seeking to create for us all.

    Good for you, Larry and SPs, for standing up to the SJW bullies who never engage in rational argumentation but seek to destroy opponents using the vilest of slander tactics.

    I’ve bookmarked this blog and will follow w/interest.

    1. Thank you, Shane.

      The SJWs’ infiltration of the Hugos is shocking–especially their threat to vote No Award en masse to make sure no one wins.

      You can still take action to stop them. The Hugos belong to Worldcon, and Worldcon is everyone who buys a membership.

      $40 supporting memberships are available here: https://sasquan.swoc.us/sasquan/reg.php

      Becoming a supporting member now grants you voting rights this year and nominating rights next year.

      The con admins are preparing a packet of the nominated works for all voters, which is free with registration. Voting doesn’t close until July, so there’s plenty of time to read every nominated work and cast an ethical, informed vote.

      Ride the manatee, Shane!

  37. I know have that scene from ‘Spartacus’ replaying through my mind . . .

    ” . . . not to replace one biased clique with a new biased clique . . .rather to get an award . . . to represent more of fandom . . . ”

    A noble goal.

  38. Why is Jemisin a racist? Every quote from her that I’ve seen which is supposedly “racist” is just her accusing other people of being racist. Usually wrongly, but that doesn’t make her racist. Being oversensitive is not the same as being a bigot.

    KTB is a whole different ballgame, she’s definitely prejudiced against white people and it would be nice if more progressive fans would acknowledge that.

    The weird thing to me is that you spend a lot of time writing about your disagreements with someone like GRRM, when I think you’re closer to him in a lot of your opinions than you are to Vox. I’m a liberal, but a lot of my time is spent arguing with lefty wingnuts who I think are crazier than a lot of the conservatives I know. I’m not saying there’s any law that says you have to argue with Vox, but why don’t you ever do that?

    1. Why don’t I argue with Vox? Because there are a thousand people who disagree with Vox who will say so in public. Meanwhile, there are like a handful of us who will disagree with someone like Tempest or End Binary Gender lady in public. Everybody and their dog lines up to yell when Vox says something controversial, but when people are told don’t read white men, or authors are told to not write male and female characters, crickets. Because it is okay to fight with Vox, but fighting with them automatically makes you a sexist/racist/misogynist, so most people avoid.

      So if I’m going to fight with somebody, I’m going to fight with the ones whose bullshit normally goes unchecked.

      1. That’s a fair point, Larry. Speaking as a liberal who disagrees with people like KTB and NKJ, it is very hard to work up the gumption to argue with them, especially under your own name, because of the way you’ll be labeled if you do.

        I also appreciated your clarification about how you don’t actually expect liberals to police the badly behaved people on our side. Really helps me see where you’re coming from.

        I don’t think SP is the right way to try and fix the issues you’re upset about, especially because I think the online mobbing from SJW fans is a far worse problem in SF than any political slant to the awards, and SP won’t do anything to change that. But I do think there’s a problem that you’ve put your finger on, and it’s real.

        1. “I don’t think SP is the right way to try and fix the issues you’re upset about, especially because I think the online mobbing from SJW fans is a far worse problem in SF than any political slant to the awards, and SP won’t do anything to change that.”

          Eh. I think that part of the mobbing (which, to be fair, is not just practiced by SJW – we had lynch mobs dating all the way back to when Third Man crawled out of the ooze and First Man and Second Man hung him from First Tree) would be strongly blunted by people saying “your problem with him is not my problem with him, go argue with him yourself.”

          And of course, anything to get back to the point where we judge people by their *work* (and character) is better than judging them by their politics or gender or skin color.

          So, no, I see this as part of the same thing. Ish.

        2. The only thing SP could do about that was expose the bullies. In that sense, it has accomplished a lot, because a lot more regular people got to see them in action.

          But no, the campaign wasn’t perfect, and we made a lot of mistakes. As I said in my letter to the SMOFs there isn’t exactly an owner’s manual for this stuff.

          1. Yes there is :-). Shoulda borrowed it from Toni.

            Problem is, the stuff in the manual is outdated.

          2. Yes, there is – Saul Alinsky wrote it, and it would be oh so very appropriate to apply his tactics against people who follow him.

        3. The reason SJW mobbing is bad is because a) they are the only ones doing it–read Federalist No. 9 and 10 for a discussion on factions–and b) they are explicitly doing it to control the culture, not to promote the genre. Sad Puppies is an answer to the first part. Those people wringing their hands over the possibility other groups will follow the SP example are kind of missing the point: if the award really is supposed to represent the best of science fiction, then all of fandom should be active and involved, which means let a thousand Puppy campaigns bloom.

      2. We live in a strange world where SJW’s rabidly pounce on the mildest (or made in jest) of un-PC comments (of course, esp. when its a non-Leftist making the comments, whereas ‘proper-thinking’ individuals usually get a pass), but where actual crimes like Obama drone-striking 1000’s of innocent folks including 100’s of children (aka: ‘collateral damage’) and Bill Clinton’s embargo having killed 1/2 MILLION Iraqi children during the 1990’s is completely ignored by these same folks.

        Hell, I got run off of Salon for posting these FACTS.

        To the SJW’s you’re simply not allowed to have different opinions on things like welfare, global-warming, and the role of govt. in our lives.

          1. There are probably more examples of white male leftists getting a pass than you’d think, you obviously just don’t hear about them because the SJWs choose not to amplify it the way they would a rightist’s remarks. However, the double-standard is appalling enough even IF it were only applied to non-whites.

          2. SJWs often *praise* straight white males who actively disparage LGBT/PoC/females for being LGBT/PoC/female who disagree with the SJWs.

    2. You need to get over to Jemisin’s site right now and read her Hugo post. It is disturbing, as is all of Jemisin’s writing.

      In the midst of all this stuff about Day, it is begging to be fisked, especially since Kowal is in the comments with a high-five and Jemisin states “racism is our status quo.” In other words white Americans are racists.

      Next, read her Wiscon Guest of Honor speech. That is remarkable to say the least, and completely distorts the facts of her career and that of Samuel Delany.

      1. Again, I don’t see how it could possibly be racist to say that there is a lot of racism. She might be wrong about how much racism there is, but how could that mean she’s racist?

        I’ve read the Wiscon speech, and again, I don’t agree with it but I don’t see any evidence of prejudice. She’s just a radical leftist, that doesn’t maker her racist.

        1. Her argument is that acknowledging that some people care more about a writer’s race, gender, or sexuality than the merit of their work means you think “underrepresented writers couldn’t possibly just be good enough to have earned awards on the merits of their writing, so the only reason they’ve gotten nominated is because they’re [check a box].”

          (It’s also worth noting that the “quoted” text she said this in response to was never said by Torgersen at all. She even admits to never having actually read what he said.)

          1. That’s not a rational argument (Jemisin’s), it’s just her trying to set up another strawman.

          1. She didn’t say white people WILL murder you without provocation, she said the law allows white people to do so. That is an unhelpful exaggeration of what’s wrong with stand your ground laws, but it doesn’t involve any prejudice against white people.

          2. That “stand your ground” law preferentially allows white people to murder black people without provocation is either a flat-out deliberate lie or an example of an amazing degree of ignorance of the law. The law is race-neutral, and in point of fact is more likely pro-rated by population to be invoked by blacks defending themselves than by whites (for the excellent reason that more blacks than whites are likely to find themselves in a situation where they need to “stand their ground” and defend themselves).

            What’s more, she was obviously referring to the case in which George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin, and in that case Zimmerman never invoked “stand your ground” at all. Showing that Jemisin was massively ignorant of the very instance on which her argument hung in the first place.

          3. Saying that white people can legally murder black people is a lie. And it is a racist lie. Lies about people based on their race is exactly racism. Not only that but it pours oil on racism building the fire higher. That is why it’s “unhelpful”.

            BTW… If I said that a black man might rape me… Could you manage to find any racism in that? At all? Anywhere?

            And gawwwd… You don’t see racism in whitewashing people of color she doesn’t like?

            How about if I made some statement about how you couldn’t tell someone was white and thank goodness I didn’t read more of it. Could you see racism in that?

            You don’t see racism in unpersoning people of color because she’s not even talking about a white person?

        2. I apologize in advance Zoldberg, but anyone who can read that delusional bit of white hatred and not see any evidence of prejudice isn’t even worth talking to.

          1. OK.

            The word ‘white’ scarcely even appears in that Wiscon speech. I’ll reproduce all the appearences here:

            “But it has been almost twenty years since his prophetic announcement, and in that time all of society — not just the microcosm of SFF — has racheted toward that critical, threatening mass in which people who are not white and not male achieve positions of note. And indeed we have seen science fiction and fantasy authors and editors and film directors and game developers become much, much more explicit and hostile in their bigotry. We’ve seen that bigotry directed not just toward black authors but authors of all races other than white; not just along the racial continuum but the axes of gender, sexual orientation, nationality, class, and so on. We’ve seen it aimed by publishers and book buyers and reviewers and con organizers toward readers, in the form of every whitewashed book cover, every “those people don’t matter” statement, and every all-white, mostly-male BookCon presenters’ slate.”

            All she’s saying here is that there’s a lot of racism. It’s not racist to say that.

            “But I suspect every person in this room who isn’t a straight white male has been on the receiving end of something like this — aggressions micro and macro. Concerted campaigns of “you don’t belong here”. ”

            Same thing.

            “That person looks too white, anyway, are you sure they aren’t lying about being an Indian?”

            She’s not even talking about white people here

            “Yeine, the protagonist of THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS, was almost a white man because I listened to some of what these people were saying. (Imagine if I’d listened to all of it.)”

            Again, she’s not even really talking about white people.

            And that’s all. There is nothing racist in the speech.

          2. Zoldberg, there is so much bullshit in that speech I can’t list it all. But I will say both her and Delany were showered with awards from the very onset of their careers. So no “careers have been strangled at birth.”

          1. Literally all I’m saying is that the speech isn’t racist. I’m not saying it’s a good speech, I’m saying it’s not racist.

            I didn’t say there wasn’t any bullshit in the speech. I said it wasn’t racist. Is it racist to be wrong about whether people’s careers have been strangled by racism?

            Is it racist to exaggerate how immoral your political opponents are?

          2. Zoidberg, if you can’t see the blatant racism in her speech there is no hope for you understanding English at all.

          3. There’s not even such a thing as white people. It’s just SJWs throwing American Jim Crow over the entire world and its history. It ignores a multiplicity of language and culture from Moscow to Lisbon and people living all over the world in every country.

      2. What’s so wrong about her post? It is a bit on the extreme side, e.g., she ignores that a lot of the “affirmative action” enjoyed by white males is subconscious and that minorities and women also in many cases discriminate against the minorities and women while overrating contributions from white males (because in many cases it is not deliberate!). So certainly white males cannot be blamed for all the existing inequalities.
        But as other posters say, you cannot blame her for being too sensitive. The biggest troubling part was that she lumped everyone on the SP in one group and accused them of enlisting help from “GamerGators”. But then again, plenty of people are doing the same thing here (Hello those who consistently curse liberals/lefts!)

        1. There is a difference between “too sensitive” and “false accusations and blatant calumny about innocent strangers minding their own business.”

          Fluttershy the pony is too sensitive.

          N.K. Jemisin doesn’t remind anyone of Fluttershy.

          1. Yeah, I don’t think that anyone is going to be making N. K. Jemisin plushies any time soon. And I think that if Discord was ever forced to hang out with her, he’d conclude rather rapidly that evil was more fun than good.

        2. Ah, one of the lighter moments in the debate. I do like GamerGators better than GamerGaters. Someone should make a Sad Puppies-like logo of GamerGators.

  39. Speaking of Stalin, perhaps the SPs and SJWs can come together and put Harry Turtledove’s Joe Steele on a unity ticket next year. Both sides have someone in-universe to root for.

  40. “I’m not going to burn anyone in effigy. Stop asking.”

    (Looking over at the effigy of myself on the workbench…): “Awww, son of a…”

  41. well I’m afraid that if you really want to use this analogy ..

    “Look at it like this. I’m Churchill. Brad is FDR. We wound up on the same side as Stalin.”

    you’ll have to become Mussolini to VD’s Hitler … I mean come on both Churchill and FDR were liberals! If you want real right-wing conservatism, you can’t beat Hitler.

    1. I’m gonna guess you’ve never actually read Hitler’s campaign platform. Leaving out the rhineland bit, most of it looks like it could have been lifted straight from Canada’s NDP or the US’s Democrats.

      1. Hell, Hitler and Mussolini were big FDR fans and FDR very much liked Mussolini…the New Deal was very similar Mussolini’s economic fascism. A lot of the New Deal propaganda artwork is creepily similar to what you’d’ve found in nazi Germany and fascist Italy.

        Besides Lincoln (whom Hitler also admired), FDR was probably about as close to a dictator as America has ever had…he was very much America’s authoritarian/Progressive version of a Hitler/Mussolini.

        1. Well, Wilson would give him a run for the money. Read about the American Protective League, kind of Wilson’s SA during WWI. Mussolini based some of his principles on Wilson’s actions as I recall. And Harding’s campaign slogan, “A Return to Normalcy,” was understood to mean a rolling back of Wilson’s unconstitutional actions. Wilson publicly distained the Constitution.

          1. I probably don’t know as much history as you, but enough to know that the Progressive Wilson was about as bad as they come.

            Harding was probably the best (from a liberty perspective) President of the last 100 years. He reacted to the massive economic crash of 1920-21 by doing…nothing (except cutting federal spending). What an uncaring SOB! Oddly enough I don’t remember learning about the Great Depression of the 1920’s…

            Whereas the ‘caring’ FDR (and Hoover before him) actively fought the 1929 crash and we got a Great Depression which didn’t really end until after WWII.

          2. I just read this — It’s horrifying. All the more so, since the book I read about Wilson APPROVED of him.

          3. I usually call him President for life Roosevelt, as for the stock market crashes… anyone here remember the crash of 1987.

        2. Don’t forget Wilson. It’s a toss-up if Wilson or FDR is truly the American Fascist dictator. I guess you have to give the edge to FDR because he was just charismatic enough to make the people want it.

          1. The Right Strong Man for the Right Crisis, lol…him (for the good of the nation of course!) seeking re-election 3 times helps his case as 2nd worst American Fascist Dictator (Lincoln, whose monument in DC is actually adorned with fasces will always be #1 in my book).

        3. Quoting “The Ballad of Booth” from Sondheim’s Assassins:

          While Lincoln, who got mixed reviews,
          Because of you, John, now gets only raves.

          There’s a lot of truth in those lines. I for one like to think that Lincoln really did consider his measures to be extraordinary, and would have rolled them back after the extraordinary circumstances (Civil War) were done. Which I like to think would have led to a better future (from that time’s perspective; present for us) than we got. But maybe I’m wrong, and if Lincoln hadn’t been assassinated the trend we would’ve seen since then would have been just as bad. Thanks to Booth, we’ll never know, and I’m free to keep raving about Lincoln…

      2. “Socialism is the philosophy of failure,the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy.It’s inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery” – Sir Winston Churchill
        I love this quote so much that I have a nifty t-shirt (via Zazzle) with this quote and a cool picture of Sir Winston on it. I wear it. In PUBLIC too !!
        I live in a province of Canada (or “Canuckistan” as Larry calls it) which ( until 2007) was ruled by Socialists. It was dreary and not much fun. No fun at all.Frustrating.The economy sucked. Now a government more Right- of- Centre rules .The economy is booming,people are proud to live here and they have jobs and much lower taxes and disposable income and they have fun.Americans STILL can’t pronounce (or locate on a map) S-a-s-k-a-t-c-h-e-w-a-n but we’re the TOPS in North America.No lie.
        I’m on the side of the SAD PUPPIES. No doubt about that. I will eventually buy a Wendell t-shirt but no matter how cute he is , he will never replace Sir Winston. Never !
        Have a great day! 🙂

        1. For the love of God, why oh why can’t Canadians spell center correctly? (Or admit that the Canadian NHL teams aren’t that great?)

          1. The same reason Americans can’t seem to spell centre, colour, armour, or neighbour correctly…

            (now looking through this post for the inevitable typo)

          2. Stop gratuitously adding U between O and R you crazy word terrorists! (let’s not even get started about “tyre”.)

      1. To be fair, European left/right doesn’t map very well to North American left/right. They’re more on the nationalism axis, while we’re more on the statism/individualism axis.

        1. I’ve said that for years; the axes are different, even though the terms used to describe the ends are the same.

          1. I wonder if Sarah Hoyt would be game for doing a blog on the topic once the Hugos are over – she’s very familiar with both and could probably elaborate the differences quite well.

          2. Answering Matthew here. It’s not the Hugos. It’s post-op recovery and fixing a house up for sale. Ping me on this around July. I totally can.

          3. I shall do so, most Beautiful Yet Evil Space Princess.

            Best wishes for a fast recovery and sale, eh?

    2. You mean the Hitler who was head of the National SOCIALIST German WORKERS’ Party?

      Not a very right-wing sounding name to me…

      1. But Shane, you actually have to LEARN something about the subject to understand that! That would defeat clif’s purpose entirely!

        1. Lefties go insane when you use the actual name of Hitler’s Party instead of its abbreviation…they also go off the rails when you point out that Stalin and Mao were socialists too.

          You’d think people would be a tad more skeptical of an ideology w/a body count in the 100’s of MILLIONS.

          The Left also portrays Herbert Hoover as a “do-nothing” President who sat on his hands as the nation sunk into depression when the truth is that he was (up until then) the MOST economically interventionist President ever…candidate FDR himself actually said HH was too interventionist–but after being elected expanded HH’s interventionist policies.

          The disconnect between reality and perception is incredible.

          1. Hoover was a Keynesian, and attempted to fix the Depression with Keynesian principles. Coolidge ignored his advice for a reason.

            FDR doubled down on his stupid.

            Hoover publicly recanted Keynesianism when he looked at European countries in 1936 with a engineer’s eyes. He noticed that countries that had instituted austerity programs instead of “stimulus” had recovered from the depression, but countries run by Keynesians were still reeling.

            ( Check out Hoover’s book, Freedom Betrayed, for more info. Be aware that the first ten percent of the book is a lengthy post-death pre-buttal by some idiot dem-cong publisher ).

          2. In recent times I’ve found myself wondering why the people who gloss over that hundreds of millions bodycount do so. My rather uncomfortable thought, inferred from the guilt by association lynch mobbing that is going on, is that they SJWs would love very much to do the same to those they have unpersoned, but since they cannot do so openly, they threaten livelihood and reputation instead.

            Threatening one’s livelihood is, historically, one way of threatening one’s life. To be unable to provide for oneself in ages past meant starvation. This starvation is more metaphorical in this case, but the emotional impact remains much the same. So for many it is a requirement to make, at least on the surface, the correct genuflections towards the metaphorical bloody idols and display the correct signs in the digital window, in the hopes of keeping the screeching, slavering beastial packs of the SJWs at bay.

        1. History fail, apples and oranges.

          It’s long been a joke that Soviet satellites and socialist states other than the USSR, for propaganda purposes, use “democratic” sounding names – names like the “Republic” of Germany, etc.

          So first fail – failure to recognize the difference between superficial form and actual content.

          Secondly – even at a piss-poor public school level in the 80’s, and watching stuff like Schindler’s list/etc., it’s pretty obvious the national socialists were totalitarian (“papers please”), and while unlike the Soviets, they allowed business “owners”, production/goals/etc. were set by the government. An ever-increasing scope of private activities were managed and regulated by the government.

          So fascist/totalitarian – check

          Less known historically because it’s commonly glossed over, was the support for the NDSP from many communists including in the US until Stalin fell out. Labeling the Nazis as “right wing” – something that in Europe still has more nationalist connotations than scope of government – was brilliant (on Stalin’s part).

          Last but not least -0 go read the party platform. Subtract the nationalist stuff (for these purposes you can treat teh communists as internationalist socialists, their struggle is ALL workers), and what do you have, aside from teh modern progressive platform since the 1920’s on?

          Socialism.

          So please go acquire more knowledge so you know of what you speak. Having only a little of it is a dangerous thing, and makes you look like an ignorant fool.

    3. Which part of “National Socialist” brings this right-wing attribute to Hitler? lol Once you have drunk the SJW cool-aid, historical perspective is no longer applicable.

      1. The title of this very blog post, of course. Ellipsis (…) can be used (among other things) to indicate one or more words in the original text being quoted were omitted, as being unnecessary to convey the point.

  42. A couple of days ago I made the mistake of getting into a Facebook discussion about all of this. When I pointed out that Sad Puppies had nothing to with Vox and Vox had nothing to do with Sad Puppies, the genius response was (paraphrasing slightly):

    “Torgersen only put four editors on their slate so they could leave a slot open for Vox.”

    I pointed out that the Sad Puppy slate only had five nominees in three out of fifteen categories, so wondered how the hell someone could even make the stupid claim paraphrased above.

    The next response was about how Larry “bought the bus” and Brad “drove the bus” but how they saved a seat on the bus for Vox.

    At that point, I gave up. After all, it’s impossible to refute “logic” like that.

    1. You have to remember–you’re not trying to convince the brainwashed leftist you’re talking to, but to show any rational third parties following the discussion the fundamental falsity of his arguments. That’s why it’s important to refute this silliness rather than to let it fester unchallenged.

      1. Yes and no. You refute it, but they always want to get the last word in, so they’ll make some other even more inane comeback.

        Once you’ve already refuted it, and this is the trap I’ve had to train myself not to fall into, there’s no point in further argument. At that point the only way to get them to shut up and their viewpoints to become toxic to observers is to pour contempt onto them for their stupidity.

        But even that’s a tricky line to walk, because if you go too far, you put other people off, because, “ew, you’re so mean!”

        That’s the part Vox doesn’t do. He goes straight to being mean, and therefore he’s misconstrued frequently by people who now have no interest in even finding out what he actually said.

        Not that he cares, but in any case, if the goal is to convince the semi-interested neutral third parties, it’s an important balance to keep in mind.

        1. This is true. That’s why at that point I start referring to them as Son, or Child, or some other diminuitive. When they complain, tell them that if they want to be treated like adults they need to act like adults, and not like kindergartners.

    2. Heh. So obviously the correct response is to have Larry, Brad, and Vox get to the back of the bus, where their kind belongs. Can’t have Those People getting “uppitty,” now can we?

      1. For a group of people ostensibly opposed to bigotry, the SJWs sure sound like pretty much every bigot ever.

          1. Any online mention of Charles Krauthammer or Justice Clarence Thomas invariably results in an epithet lobbed by a leftist explicitly targeted at their respective disability or race. For all their big talk, no one is so white, male, and straight that they won’t be welcomed by SJWs if they perform the appropriate absolutions and no one is so diverse they can’t be excommunicated for wrongthink. Which suggests the SJWs don’t care about diversity in the slightest.

          2. Encountered that on an Enlightened Forum… I’ve forgotten what point I was making, but I quoted Booker T Washington and brought up Dr. Walter Williams (whom I greatly admire) … and the SJW response was, I quote, “They don’t count, because they’re house n****rs.”

  43. First got to know of you some years back through George Hill, when you were still a firearms dealer. It’s been interesting to keep up with you, although somewhat limited.

    You do such a great job of expressing your thoughts, I’m envious. Keep it up. The politics in everything is mind blowing. Having a rational mind like yours is refreshing. Thanks for all you do.

  44. Well, you can stick a fork in Glyer. He’s forbidden any more talk about N. K. Jemisin. Go after SP white supremacist homophobic racists all you want, but Jemisin is sacrosanct territory. Glyer deleted the following innocuous comment:

    Here’s a funny comment from Jemisin:

    “I’m also not sure what to call it when people react to the presence of non-white non-men on ballots by suggesting that those people could not possibly have made it for the quality of their work.”

    This is why it’s funny:

    “Sofia Samatar ‏@SofiaSamatar 1h My list (which is already growing, & will have to be updated!) of #horror by non-western writers/writers of color”

    “Retweeted by Foz Meadows Nnedi Okorafor, PhD ‏@Nnedi Feb 25 60 Black Women in Horror now on Smashwords (Free)”

    “Retweeted by M J Locke A.C. Wise @ac_wise · Jul 11 My latest Women to Read post is at @sfsignal with @CarolineYoachim @erinmorgenstern @AlyxDellamonica & @mamohanraj”

    “Dandy McFopperson @rosefox · 15h 15 hours ago @JonathanStrahan It was a really good year for queer and feminist SF/F.”

    “Rose Lemberg retweeted prezzey *Bogi Takács @bogiperson · Sep 29 just a reminder that i have a SF story with two #nonbinary #trans* protagonists :)because yes.”

    “Rose Lemberg retweeted Daniel Fredriksson @thelovelymrfred · Sep 29 I’ve decided to start a book group celebrating queer, feminist and postcolonial SF/F. It shall be called @fabulations. RTs appreciated”

    “Bee Sriduangkaew ‏@bees_ja 6h Just cobbled this together quickly – a very incomplete list of queer SFF published in 2013 I liked!”

    “Alex D MacFarlane ‏@foxvertebrae 7h I look forward to following it up with THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF SF STORIES BY WOMEN in 2014, which, trust me, is going to be fucking brilliant.”

    1. Don’t quote Jemisin, because Glyer says “these comments cross the line into abuse.”

      I agree. Quoting Jemisin is abusive, but not for the reason Glyer thinks.

      1. Ask him if it’s OK to paraphrase her then, or to just put words in her mouth as she does to those she rages against.

          1. Or change “white” to “jew”, and then tell her you found this in something Hitler wrote.

    2. This is the exact type of double standard that created SP. So just keep making up rules only one side has to obey, because we’ll just sit back and say “Yes, master.”

    3. James: I knew if I checked I would find you had reproduced the comment here. Larry has seen fit to accomodate your stable of hobby horses. Be happy with each other.

      As for me, I don’t consider your agenda to belittle NK Jemisin quotes to belong in to discussion about SP/RP happening on my blog. She’s not on either list. Did not promulgate either list. Which are both things you CAN say about VD. Who also regularly engages with commenters on F770 and has had no difficulty holding his own.

      1. So you have only approved thoughts that can be expressed, eh? Anything not on the list gets mercilessly deleted. Gotcha.

        1. I don’t think it’s ever occurred to SJWs that the sheer number of racist quotes they have made makes their own obsessive hatreds seem like my own obsession.

          It takes no amount of research at all to find these quotes. There is no searching through the stacks. All you have to do is go to any of their Twitter feeds on any given day and there they are, right in front of you. They’re like Arthur Chu. It’s every single day.

          So you copy and paste them into an HTML document, a thing that takes a few minutes. Anyone could make a massive archive of racist quotes from this crew in any single week. When I say “massive,” I mean far more than you can use. I would say the percentage of quotes I’ve saved is on the order of under 1%, or even statistical zero. There are that many. This is just a guess but I’d say in 2014 there might’ve been something like 10,000, and all well placed or supported by folks in key positions in the core SFF community.

          This is no “conspiracy.” This is a massive and open cult of racial and sexual defamation.

          1. And here I thought I was the only one who had noticed that current progressive rhetoric bears a rather uncanny resemblance to that of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei in the 1930s … only the target has changed.

            All you have to do is mentally substitute “jew” for “straight white male” and it becomes obvious – and more than a little scary.

          2. @James May; do you mind if I link to your archive of quotes? I’d like to make a blog post that is a small smattering of http://menkampf.com/ like observations. Maybe I’ll call it #HugoKampf or something.

            For what it’s worth, my blog has very few readers.

      2. You call an actual quote placed in correct context an agenda? Plus it’s a stable of hobby horses?

        Mr. Glyer, there is in fact an agenda and it is not mine. That quote and the one’s after it are completely innocuous from my end. They show open collusion to promote SFF according to race and sex and then when they’re successful to pretend it’s because of the content of the stories.

        I think you can do better for me than implying I’m fixing the match, Mr. Glyer, or not accurately reflecting a very real trend in this community to openly do race-gender promotion and then calling an accidentally all-white table of contents a white conspiracy.

      3. @ Mike Glyer: James May is predictable (and in need of other hobbies) but I think in this he is correct – either everyone’s character and/or actions may be discussed in the comments, or no-one’s can be. (For instance, you have not forbidden comments about Connie Willis.) NKJ has chosen to engage in the wider debate as well.

        That being said, sir, your blog, your rules.

          1. And guess is what you’ll have to keep on doing.

            (Alas, my amusement level with this conversation is negligible. Feel free to carry on by yourself, do.)

          2. Sorry, the insulting unawareness is surprising. There are zillions of people all over the world who do volunteer work that amounts to thousands of hours. That ranges from folks at home who volunteer to monitor NASA or volcano feeds to pro bono lawyers to folks doing work doing pencil drawings of ancient fatimid or mamluk decorative screens. None of that needs the approval of idiots.

            Telling them they all need to get new hobbies reveals a person who needs any hobby. I couldn’t even count the number of man hours I’ve spent around researching, getting to and climbing active volcanoes alone. Was there a point to that? They were there.

          3. Geez James… the slightest hint of criticism of your life’s work while saying she agrees with you and you get abusive?

            Touchy much?

            You *can*, you know, do something worthwhile and valuable without becoming so myopic and invested that you 1) become a jerk face, and 2) fly into a rage if someone points that out.

          4. Would you like an insulting assessment of your motivations and how you spend your time or would you prefer I MYOB? I’m sure each of you has your own backyards. Go stare at them.

        1. Hey, wait… maybe I’m late to the party, but is James May the same person as Fail Burton? Or are there two of them with the same collection of racist SJW quotes?

      4. I have no agenda such as you describe, Mr. Glyer. Provide evidence to back that accusation up or apologize. The word “seems” will not suffice. Prove it. There is no such agenda on my part.

  45. Brilliant.

    I don’t normally comment, but I had to put one on this.

    This situation is so biased-ly reported around the internet, it honestly makes anyone reporting on it suspect of regurgitating the typical nonsensical group-think.

    These people clearly don’t have to very far to climb up batshit-crazy mountain and reach the group-think Kool-Aid chalice.

    Honestly, I don’t believe anyone who reports Larry is responsible for Vox Day or any of his actions has read past any of Larry’s blog-post headlines.

    /sigh

  46. Yes, but Larry, if you would just make clear that you don’t like Vox Day, that he is the embodiment of Satan in flesh and promise never to do anything that anyone else might possible consider as being in line with him even a little bit, really, they will leave you alone.

    OK, maybe not.

    David

  47. Larry, if you are not careful, you will end up fighting this battle on the ground chosen by the SJWs, which will be to their advantage. I’m pretty sure you know that, but a reminder never hurts…

    1. Right. Vox Day is not Stalin. Its nuts that you are saying that. Stalin murdered millions and millions of people. Vox Day is a colorful guy who speaks his mind rather a lot.

      1. I don’t read that metaphor as meaning VD is similar to Stalin. I read it as meaning that any alliance between VD and Larry or Brad cannot be used as evidence that Larry or Brad agree with VD on everything (or anything).

        Some more bits of Larry’s blog, that I think are relevant:

        I’m not going to burn anyone in effigy. Stop asking.

        I’m not going to condemn anyone by association. Stop asking.</blockquote

        I recommended someone’s short story. You do not like his belief. I can defend my liking his short story, but I cannot, and should not have to account for the author’s personal beliefs. A giant group of other authors, who are also not affiliated with him, should not be assigned his beliefs and be attacked for them.

        However, I can believe that all authors have the right to free speech. That includes people who say stuff I don’t like or agree with. I have a giant list of authors I disagree with. I have done so, loudly, and often. We should all be free to disagree without the danger of purges, defamation, and career sabotage. As far as I am aware, Vox Day hasn’t ever called for censorship or tried to ruin any author’s career. I cannot however, say that same thing for others.

        And from Brad’s blog:

        Maybe Vox is terrible.

        But the Marxist politics of unpersoning is much moreso.

        It doesn’t matter if you think it’s justified.

        Unperson enough people for enough “crimes” and you will eventually find yourself excommunicated from humanity.

        I reject this. I reject the whole thing. As much as Vox is a serial dickhead, I reject his unpersoning. Being a dickhead is not a crime. It’s uncool. But it’s not a crime.

        I don’t read any of this as an attack on VD by either Brad or Larry. They don’t agree w/ VD on everything, but surely you didn’t expect that, did you? And they are quite clear that any disagreement they have doesn’t justify attacking him.

        All I read them saying is that they’re tired of people attacking them for things they didn’t say or do, or have any control over. Perfectly reasonable.

        1. My point is that the conversation on both Brad and Larry’s blogs has revolved around Vox for a couple of days. Vox is a distraction from the main goal. Such distractions happen with regularity when arguing with the left, usually starting with a “what about so and so”, and if you fall into the trap of responding, you will end up defending yourself against the implied association. That battle is unwinnable, and a distraction from the main goal.

          1. “That battle is unwinnable”

            Its probably unwinnable anyway, in the sense of reaching a harmonious conclusion.

            These SJWs have the hearts of totalitarians. They will stop at nothing but total submission. You can call Vox Stalin if you want. I doubt if it will satisfy those folks.

            Stalin murdered tens of millions in support of notions of equality. So calling Vox Stalin is kind of ironic since his main crime is the same as that of My Little Ponies: Pointing out that ‘equality’ is a bunch of B.S.

            http://thefederalist.com/2015/04/08/my-little-pony-to-children-marxism-is-not-magic/

            http://thefederalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/MLP1.jpg

            Larry’s old thing was machine gun sales. Larry’s new thing is trying to persuade insane totalitarians. I hope the new thing is a more effective form of resistance than the old thing, but I the jury is still out.

      2. Actually to them Vox is worse than Stalin because Uncle Joe spouted equality, statism and was basically on their side.

  48. You know what I like about you, Larry? Besides the good books, of course. It’s the fact that even though we are complete opposites when it comes to politics and religion, you don’t let your politics and religion make you a dick. Too often, people who are both religious and conservative are complete assholes against anybody who isn’t them. Anti-gay, anti-women, anti-everything. Thank you for being one of the good guys.

    1. So you’re trying to tar all of us with the same brush, eh? But I’m sure you’d complain about unfairness if we did the same thing to you, wouldn’t you?

      1. I said too often, not always. I didn’t even say a majority of the time. I was thinking more along the lines of people like Orson Scott Card, but thanks for putting words into my mouth!

    2. Is your “too often” anecdotal or done by a properly designed sample?

      Because I could say the same thing about leftists. I have tried to chalk it up to only hearing those who feel the need to tell me how evil I am and not to the average leftist. However, it seems more and more unless I want to hear a screed even from coworkers who think I should still organize group lunches every week after they told me my ideal society is Mogadishu based on my politics I need to STFU.

      Should I conclude that too often, people who are both secular and religious are complete assholes against anybody who isn’t them. Anti-white, anti-male, anti-Christian, etc and then congratulate you for being better than the typical leftist?

    3. I was anti-everything just the other day, but no matter in which direction I fled, there was still at least one member of the set ‘everything’ hanging before my face in mockery.

      I leaped from the Earth, because the soil was a thing, and held by breath because air was a thing, and closed my eyes, because light was a thing; and then drew a breath, because choking is a thing and Brian says we Godbotherers are against things, and opened my eyes, because blindness is a thing, and…

      Mr Goulet, be serious. We Christians are only against three things: sin, death, and damnation. And we have a cure in whose name we find hope.

      It is not Everything that we are against. Our enemy is the Nothing, that abyss of outer darkness where their is wailing and gnashing of teeth.

      Some false pleasures and bad habits, sins and vices and acts of self destruction, are meant to lead the unwary into the Nothing. That is what we are against.

    4. You do realize that coming in and saying that “Hey, everyone on your side and most likely people you like are assholes, but you’re not so good job” is NOT a compliment?

      Thought maybe I should point that out.

      1. Would you care to point out where, exactly, I said everybody? I said too many. And I could write a list a mile long if I cared to take the time to, filled with asshole actors, authors, and especially politicians. Hell, I could even through in regular every day people who decide that their religion trumps my freedom. So yes, as a matter of fact, thanking somebody for not blindly believing something and actually being a decent human being IS a compliment. I never said that anybody was perfect, liberal, conservative, religious, or atheistic. I said one fucking thing, thank you for being a decent human being, and suddenly I’m the target of a lynch mob. So you know what? Fuck every last one of you bastards.

        1. That’s damned intolerant of you, Brian. Just what we’ve come to expect of the “tolerant” left, of course, but damned intolerant nonetheless.

          1. Actually, it means EXACTLY what I think it means. It’s you lot that are trying to redefine it (as you constantly try to do with so many perfectly understood terms, so that you can pretend the good ones apply to you when they manifestly don’t).

          2. You lot? That sounds pretty intolerant to me. Pot. Kettle. You know the rest. I also seem to recall something about glass houses and throwing stones.

          3. “You lot” sounds intolerant? You stand convicted of not knowing the meaning of the term by your own post.

          4. in·tol·er·ant
            \-rənt\
            adjective
            : not willing to allow or accept something
            : not willing to allow some people to have equality, freedom, or other social rights

            You keep lumping all liberals together as somebody trying to somehow deny you roughs. I thank an author i admire for not being intolerant, and you decide that I’m intolerant. You abuse me and everybody like me of trying to redefine things. First, words are always being redefi, that is how language evolves. Second, what, exactly am i trying to redefine? Because it is people on here who are attacking me for expressing an opinion, not the other way around. Seems rather intolerant to me.

          5. tol·er·ant
            (tŏl′ər-ənt)
            adj.
            1. Inclined to tolerate the beliefs or behavior of others; forbearing: a tolerant attitude.

            in·tol·er·ant
            (ĭn-tŏl′ər-ənt)
            adj.
            Not tolerant, especially:
            a. Unwilling to tolerate differences in opinions, practices, or beliefs, especially religious beliefs.

            “Intolerant” as properly defined here describes what you’re doing quite exactly. As for not understanding the meaning of these words, you keep proving it over and over with your posts.

          6. What you’re not getting, Brian, is that people have the right to be bigoted, against “you lot,” “my lot” or any group against whom they wish to be bigoted. That is “freedom of thought” and “freedom of speech.”

            What they don’t have the right to do is commit acts of force or fraud against anyone, save in self-defense or the direct defense of others against the use of unprovoked force or fraud.

          7. Again, where exactly did i say people can’t have opinions or differing beliefs? I don’t give a shit what people believe. i said they can’t force those opinions on others. People that do are assholes. It’s that simple. If you want to call me intolerant towards assholes who want to make out that I’m not a real human being, feel free, but frankly, what’s next? Am I intolerant because i think sharia law is Barbaric? Or because i think that the higher ups in the Catholic church who helped get child molesting priests to places they can’t be charged are just as disguising as those raping bastards? I have friends that follow pretty much any religion you can think of, from all sorts of political parties. You know what the one thing they have in common is? They don’t want to force everybody to be exactly like them.

            As for the right to be bigoted. Technically true. But spewing hate and promoting violence is considered a hate crime. Forcing that bigotry into law is just as bad. The flaw in your reasoning, however, is that hatred never stops at words. If it did, people would just laugh at bigots and ignore them. At least, I would. Especially when you have a bigot that is charismatic. That’s basically what happened with Hitler. One charismatic man who preached hatred. And apparently my phone has the weirdest auto correct feature ever.

        2. … and suddenly I’m the target of a lynch mob.

          Hyperbole, much? Nobody here has made a single threat against your life or even health. Nor, as far as I can tell, does anyone wish to do so.

          1. hmmm…yes, perhaps not the best metaphor. The whole mob with torches and pitchforks feel is definitely here, though.

    5. Perhaps it is the attitude in which YOU confront them. I find that most Christians are accepting and kind. However if you confront them with the typical “your beliefs are wrong and stupid because science” they tend to react in kind. Also please note the distinction that Christians are not anti-gay people, they are anti-sin and they believe that homosexuality is a sin. That does not mean they hate the people, they disapprove of the sin. In fact, they believe everyone is a sinner so they tend to treat them equal to everyone else. I realize that people on your side tend to enjoy making nuanced excuses for people who you believe are minorities (see radical Muslims) but you seem to ignore the nuances of Christianity’s objections to homosexual behavior. As for being Anti-woman? According to surveys ~80% of people in the US identify as Christian. You would be hard pressed to find more than 10% of that population that is Sexist based on a religious belief.

      1. Bigotry wrapped in religion is still bigotry. If you want to debate religious ideas, I’ll be more than happy to do so, but this is not the forum for it. The fact that people are yelled at, spit on, beaten, and even murdered because of how they were born is disgusting. No, this is not all Christians, but the only reason people give for denying equal rights to gay people is that *insert holy book here* says that it’s unnatural and a sin. It doesn’t MATTER what anybody believes, until they try to force it on everybody else. When there are new stories every day about one conservative politician or another trying to force anti-gay, anti-abortion, pro-religious laws through, then yes, too many people allow their religion to influence them where it shouldn’t, and too many people are assholes because of it. Did you know that lgbt youth are four times as likely to try to commit suicide than non-lgbt? Why, exactly, do you think that is? I assure you, it’s not because every last Christian is accepting them with open arms. I’d love to see all Christians be as open and accepting as Larry, but when I have to be careful about where I even choose to do my shopping, it’s very hard to be loving and forgiving to religious people. Hell, I’ve been banned from certain blood banks, because somebody somewhere thought I might be gay, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it, because it’s perfectly legal. It scares the crap out of me that next I won’t be able to get my car fixed, or buy groceries, or even rent an apartment, because of religious freedom laws that are forced through my asshole conservatives.

          1. Because why, exactly? Did I say somewhere that religious people should lose rights? Or that they should be rounded up and shot or sterilized? Or maybe that they shouldn’t be allowed to shop at certain businesses because their views differ from mine? No, I’ve said that they shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate. By the way, those are all things that have been said by religious people about lgbt people. Maybe you should look in a mirror if you think that wanting equality is showing intolerance.

          2. “Did I say somewhere that religious people should lose rights?”

            Yes. Look up “Freedom of Association”, and also “Freedom of Religion”.

          3. Got news for you. I’m not them. Get over it. Because if you want to play guilt-by-association, I will.

        1. The usual dishonesty. If you have any evidence of physical harm (spit on, beaten, murdered), you should be down swearing out a warrant instead of here. Disagreeing with you or anyone is neither a crime nor evidence of bigotry no matter how many times you assert it. And denying the First Amendment right of freedom of association isn’t your call.

          1. Treating somebody like shit because of how they are born its the definition of bigotry. You can disagrwe with whoever you want, but refusing somebody service because they are gay is no different than if you did it because they are black, or disabled. Your rights end where your neighbor’s begin. That goes for all rights. Would you want to be thrown out of your home because you own legally obtained guns? No. But you could be for firing them out of your window, because that affects your neighbor’s rights. You have the right to own a business and go about your day, you do not have the right to refuse service because you don’t like the way somebody was born.

          2. Forcing someone to participate in a ceremony they believe is inimical to their religion is the act of a tyrant (because, let’s face it, that’s what’s happening here).
            As you said, your rights end where your neighbor’s begin–a notion, by the way, that is simplistic to begin with.

          3. 60guilders, nobody is trying to force religious institutions to perform marriages. The entire argument is that they shouldn’t be able to force people to not be married. Marriage far predates Christianity. Further, it is a government contract with certain monetary incentives. if it were strictly religious? A lot more people couldn’t get married. Pagans, atheists, etc. Current laws are based on religious interpretations of marriage being between one man and one woman. There is no other reason for it, and frankly, in this country religion isn’t supposed to influence law.

          4. To be fair, if he were “murdered,” I don’t think he’d be posting here or swearing out any complaints — unless our communications technology has made considerable advances since the last time I checked. 😀

          5. Also… no one, no one AT ALL, has refused service to someone because of how they were born. They refused to *make a product* for a *religious ceremony*.

            And as much as I’ve always been pro-SSM… some of the fantasy “make stuff up” parts really annoy…

            Like the claim that there is no reason for the State to involve itself in defining marriage between a man and a woman. Really, there is NO reason the State cares who you live with. None. Not a single one. And there is NO reason for the State to have to give you its blessing as if that makes your partnership more real.

            But the State did have a reason to care about who had financial responsibility for wives… when wives were more or less kept from professional employment or ownership of property. A MAN had to be identified legally… for a WOMAN who was entitled to support. Also, who was responsible for children? THus bigamy… huge deal, bigamy because it left some woman and children without support.

            Women’s legal status is equal now, but there are still children to care who has responsibility for them. And as of NOW having children still takes a male and a female human. Marriage may not be an issue with that for long because we certainly can prove paternity without it.

            And that leaves… a big WHO CARES for pretty much everyone on the planet who wants to live together. No matter how they were born and no matter who they love. The government doesn’t Make You Real. Sorry about that.

          6. Sorry, I mean Yankovic’s “Midnight Star” (it won’t let me post the link for some reason), which is on the same album. And on YouTube. It’s pretty funny, it’s about supermarket tabloids.

          7. Synova, the man and a woman to make a child argument is utter nonsense. First, if that were the only reason for marriage, infertile couples and senior couples couldn’t get married. Neither could anybody who had undergone a hysterectomy, or undergone the little snip snip. Furthermore, there are plenty of options to have children even for same sex couples. Artificial insemination, surrogate mothers, adoption, etc.

          8. Sorry, mac, but forcing someone to cater your wedding is forcing them to participate in the ceremony.
            And the belief that religion isn’t supposed to influence law…excuse me while I go and laugh vigorously.
            Of course religion influences law! How could it not, given that it offers a moral lens through which to view the world? A moral lens that people will use when they decide who to vote for, and what laws they will pass, and the like.

          9. “Would you want to be thrown out of your home because you own legally obtained guns? ”

            I’d like to see it tried. The resultant massacre of Leftists would solve an infinite number of problems.

          10. Brian… read.

            I explained ONLY why the State has an interest in marriage. Because you know what? The state doesn’t have an interest in marriage between two seniors, or between infertile people NOW THAT WOMEN ARE NOT DEPENDENT. But at one time there was that interest. If half the population is legally kept from full economic participation, by the government, then the government has a stake in making sure that those legally second-class people are not being left to die.

            Same with children then… the State has an interest in who is financially responsible.

            The fact that some people don’t have children is irrelevant. Even people intending to do so don’t know if they will conceive. And it makes NO SENSE for the government to have a dozen different rules for every eventuality.

            But why don’t you explain to me why the government should care if two people, who both have equal legal access to economic activity and property, who don’t and won’t have any legally dependent second-class citizens (as children are, for various sensible reasons), want to live together?

            Because LOOOOOOVEEEEE? Because OMG you look smashing in that dress? Because… why?

            I’ve had this conversation before, trying to point out that there is NO VALUE to the community that is tied up in if two people have sex with each other or not, and gotten this emotionally ridiculous insistence that somehow that *relationship* is rendered unimportant to the people it is important to if I don’t pretend because of the FEEELS that it’s desperately important to total strangers.

            It. Is. Not.

            The State does not care. Your neighbors do not care. No one cares. You’re a freaking ADULT person able to deal with your own relationships and partnerships and domestic arrangements.

            The ONLY group of people who are not, now that women have equal rights, is children.

            “But childless people get married” is the exact sort of non-thinking emotionally stupid argument that is so annoying.

            I think you should be able to get married to any adult you want to marry. But that doesn’t mean that sloppy thinking doesn’t annoy me, or that emotionally based illogic suddenly becomes persuasive.

          11. That probably sounded crabbier than I meant it to.

            Just look, Brain. You might think that such and such an argument is dumb… your opinion doesn’t make it so… nor does your opinion turn everyone who doesn’t hold that line of proper thought into someone who hates gays or wants to hurt them or has the first bad thought about them.

            Something bad has happened and people just seem to want it this way…

            Our society is ever more divided because *a difference in policy* is backward engineered into *a difference in values*.

            Oppose some stupid SJW stuff because it’s stupid and HURTS people…. and you’re called a sexist or racist or homophobe.

            It’s a bit like insisting that the solution to the common cold is turning around five times with one hand on your head before bed, and then when people respond by calling that stupid, using it as proof that they just want people to be sick.

            People disagree. They disagree for ideas that you do not find persuasive.

            And?

          12. Synova, I honestly don’t care about love. I think it’s a silly concept, it’s all just chemicals in the brain. My argument is that there are legal incentives to get married. Tax options, insurance options, social security issues, etc. All provided to people who are married, not to people who aren’t. Therefor, if two people are not allowed to be married simply because of gender and religious arguments, it is discrimination. If somebody doesn’t want to cater a same sex marriage, they’ll have to deal with the public fall out of that. If somebody forces through a law that you can’t have government or job benefits because of your sexual orientation, THAT is where the big problem lies.

          13. Right. I was recently involved in a discussion of certain educational opportunities being denied because of federal child labor laws.

            Labor laws prevent consenting adults from making agreements they find advantageous with one another.

            If it were a matter of principles, one would advocates to be just as heated over minimum wage as over SSM. Frankly, that is what you see if you look at the relative few for which it is principle.

            Once you have conceded that government may intervene in one type of contract, you have conceded their regulation of another.

          14. Bob, a lot of people are just as passionate about minimum wage as about marriage. Personally, I’m not a fan of capitalism at all, but it’s what we have. Since it is what we have, then we should at least make sure that people making a living wage, which was what minimum wage laws were supposed to ensure when they were first written. Minimum wage, and wages in general, have not kept up with inflation, or with profits. Where people seem to have the disconnect is that they insist that raising minimum wage will somehow screw over people who make more than current minimum wage, instead of forcing raises across the board. I can spend ten pages talking about the history of minimum wage, how it’s been forced down, and how there has been an organized campaign to make minimum wage jobs so easy that a trained dog could do them in order to save money and keep minimum wage low, but frankly, I doubt you want to spend the time reading it. Another cognitive disconnect is people thinking that increased wages mean increased prices, which they don’t make enough to afford…but that also leads into the increased wages across the board solution.

          15. Brian, you’ve just demonstrated a truly profound ignorance of economics. To bring up only the most obvious consequence of a raise in the minimum wage, the people who get screwed over the most by such a raise are the workers who are just worth the previous minimum wage to an employer (they get fired and find it hard to find new jobs); and the poorest consumers (because prices of low-end goods then rise). Raising wages across the board merely results in inflation, which ultimately helps only debtors (and only current debtors, as future loans become harder to get).

        2. Bigotry wrapped in the guise of anti-bigotry is still bigotry.

          And, frankly, religious freedom is a great deal more fundamental than your “right” to not have your feelings hurt by someone else’s beliefs.

    6. You *do* realize that’s not concentrated primarily amongst “religious and conservative” people, right?

      That too often, people who are both anti-religious and progressive are complete assholes to anybody who isn’t them. People like the SJW myrmidons who successfully bullied two deserving authors into giving up their nominations.

      I would say in the current environment you are microscopically inspecting the speck in the Sad Puppies eyes and are oblivious to the plank in your own.

  49. Just a thought, and I’ll try and remember to mention it elsewhere, but maybe SP4 should have a slate of 8-10 nominees in each category. And on each posting of the slate, the order should be mixed up. It might dominate, yes, but the vote counts might be interesting for Larry to analyze, to see how lockstep we really are–or are not, as most of us here would claim.

    1. How about nominating the diversity hire stories which have the biggest buzz? They always have that cute darling AA story they’re pushing.

      Mass nominating Veronica Schanoes would blind side them.

      Or we could gang up on getting Scalzi and Requires Hate nominations.

    2. I actually agree with this, but I guess there will be time to talk about this. There’s a lot of time to SP4, and a lot can happen in the meantime.

      1. I mean that I agree with Gnardo Polo. What James May says is funny, but I don’t think it would be a good idea.

  50. Larry, I’m not sure if anyone has said this in the comments, but it seems really pertinent. Rabid Puppies didn’t show up until February 2 and the deadline to register for nominations ended on January 31. So only people who had already registered, presumably for Sad Puppies, could have gone on to vote for Rabid Puppies, if they so desired. In reality, the SJWs should only be angry at you and Brad, since any of Vox’s followers who might have wanted to register to nominate when they heard of RP on February 2 for the first time, would have been too late to do so — they would have to have already signed up on January 31.

    I’m not saying anyone should be mad at you or Brad or Vox, but the only way Vox might have gotten people to nominate was by advertising that you and Brad were doing Sad Puppies. No one registered to nominate in order to get RP works on the ballot, that’s impossible, unless time travel is truly real.

    1. So Vox could not have impacted the Hugo noms via RP, which would make it….

      Holy crap, that’s possibly the most epic troll of all time!

      1. Yea, but his slate MAY have influenced current supporting members.

        It’s all about Nazi mind control machines operating from flying saucers based in the giant hollow earth hole at the north pole.

        1. He likely gave it up for nothing anyway. His stared reason was that he didn’t want to get the nom/award due to ideological slate voting. I don’t think you’re ever going to find an open election that doesn’t have such slates. Essentially, this is the same as the clique voting seen in previous Hugos, opened to the wider audience of the internet. By his reasoning, virtually all elections are illegitimate. That might be his belief, but I doubt it.

          Of course, it might just be that his moral satisfaction at rejecting VD outweighs the combined satisfaction of being recognized by the who read his book, and the cost/pain of rejecting the accolades (votes) of those same people. I suspect this, albeit simple and visceral, reasoning, is what’s actually happened.

          1. Yea, Marko just wanted to distance himself from that crowd, and wasn’t interested in a Hugo that might have an asterisk after it.

            I’m kind of curious about how Vox will weaponize his slate next year, now that being on it has become a contagious thoughtcrime.

          2. I’m rather curious how Marko imagines the Puppies will be kept out of future Hugos, and if the Hugos become openly restrictive, how much (or to be more precise, how little) prestige it will have in the future.

    2. And the first mention of gamergate influencing the noms came after they were closed…they must have that time traveling machine….

        1. Seriously!

          Although threaded comments can be a pain to follow chronologically. Maybe that’s why people do it?

  51. I hope that some good comes out of all this turmoil. If we’re lucky, the controversy will inspire hundreds of fans to shoulder some responsibility for ensuring the Hugos represent the finest in Science Fiction. I dream that we will see dozens of people and groups letting people know about stories, novels, and essays that haven’t received the attention they deserved.

  52. I worked at a Barnes & Noble for 8+ years, up until 2013. The first thing I learned, and not once in those eight years did I see an exception to this, is that people who think of themselves specifically as “book” people are, hands down, the least intellectually curious people on the planet when it comes to politics and religion and their various intersections.

    Doesn’t matter if the customer is on the right, the left, or at any perceivable hybrid point in-between: self-styled intelligent “book” people read books for confirmation bias instead of challenge, period. A liberal will not even touch a book by, say, Thomas Sowell (once he learns Sowell’s bio), nor will a conservative touch a book by a noted liberal author. Willingly encounter an opposing viewpoint?? Perish the thought! Put money in the coffers of a writer who has a different worldview than my own even if his work is politically and religiously innocuous?? Never!!

    The fact that you have had to write this post is only proof positive that far too many modern bookstore-style “I’m intelligent because I only read people I agree with already” people have taken over sci-fi fandom.

    Sad days.

    1. I worked at B&N for a while and I cannot imagine how on earth you would know all this about people’s politics. Do people talk about politics when they bop in to pick up a romance? A history book? A kids book? A gift?

      Maybe a small subset of the ‘book’ people who want to talk to somebody at barnes and noble about politics and read political books are not curious…

    2. Cameron, that’s what libraries are for ….

      So I don’t have to put money in some lieberal’s pocket.

  53. There are a lot of people here asserting that Vox Day is a racist. He is not, unless the recognition that humanity is broadly differentiated into groups with similar characteristics makes one a “racist”. Here is a remark Mr. Day was kind enough to put into a discussion on Brad Torgersen’s blog today:

    “I don’t have any reason to believe any one human population sub-group is intrinsically superior to any other population sub-group. That being said, both science and logic quite clearly indicate that no two population sub-groups are identical, and therefore every population sub-group is either superior or inferior to another sub-group on the basis of any chosen metric.

    It makes no more difference that you like or dislike this fact than if you disapprove of the speed of light or the rate of Earth gravity.

    I assert that an unborn female black child with a missing chromosome and an inclination to homosexuality is equal in human value and human dignity and unalienable, God-given rights to a straight white male in the prime of his life and a +4 SD IQ. How many of my dishonest critics will do the same?

    That doesn’t mean that I think it is wise to ask that particular child, when she is grown, to design the next plane on which I intend to fly. Or even to work in the air traffic control tower.

    I deal in reality as determined by history, science, and logic. And I care no more about what an equalitarian fantasist thinks about me or anything else than I do about the mentally deranged babbling in the psych ward. The world is as it is, not as we might wish it to be. If you can’t understand that, then I am among the least of your problems.”

    QUERY: Do the above statements about what he believes mean Vox Day is a racist? If so, then a whole bunch of people are “racist”. A WHOLE bunch. They are characterized by their ability and willingness to observe, reason, and arrive at logical conclusions based upon observable reality, while also believing that every human being has inherent, inalienable, natural rights conferred by God or by nature, or both.

    1. Thank you. I recently started reading Vox Popoli, including going back into older columns. I wondered why Vox Day was being so rabidly (Yes, pun intended) attacked by so many writers (Some of them ones I enjoy).
      I haven’t yet seen anything in his work that would make him “hate-filled” “vicious” “racist”… et cetera. I was starting to think there was something wrong with my comprehension.
      You have reassured me.

      1. Vox is part of the Dark Enlightenment, or at least shares a lot of their views.

        Some of his opinions are too extreme for me, but he is smart, and not some cousin-humping sheet-wearing retard. Which just intensifies the SJW hate.

        1. The only reason it’s called “The Dark Enlightenment” is because “The Dark Enlightenment” sounds way cooler than Neo-Fascism, which is what it undoubtedly is, however much intellectual-sounding arguments are used (as was the case with Fascism the first time around) to dress it up.

          1. Fascism. You keep using that word.

            I don’t think it means what you think it means.

  54. Sadly, I feel that this reverse Spartacus moment (“I am NOT Vox Day!”) is precisely what these trolls want.

    At the same time people do need to recognize that grown-ass adults aren’t responsible for what other people say. I am sorry this is draining your time, Larry. This distraction is completely unnecessary and would be easily avoided if some people would just grow up.

    Still waiting on the SFWA to distance themselves from MZB or any other pedophiles in their ranks.

    1. I don’t think so. I think this has, like everything Larry has been doing, to do with the bystanders, the yet unconvinced, the newcomers who don’t get what this is about. It’s no different from his explanation post when SP2 was raging back in the day, right after Damien Walters’ slanderous hit piece.

      1. Too right. The ones who are insulting us will keep insulting us, but that only makes them look worse. We need to speak to anyone who will talk to us fairly and try to explain our position. The bullies are better ignored.

        1. Have you ever dealt with a bully? An honest to goodness one?

          If you have, is ignoring the tactic you took to deal with it? How did that work out for you?

    2. The SFWA needs to distance itself from the SFWA. From the past 2 presidents to the most boring bloggers, there is no single larger source of anti-white, anti-male and anti-heterosexual sentiment and dogma. Change the word “white” to “black” and it wouldn’t take much convincing to have the Southern Poverty Law Center monitor them as a hate group.

      The sheer intensity and number of quotes that emerges from that place is stunning.

  55. I wish there was a way to make the Larry’s point in a shorter form – y’know, like he had been repeatedly – but I suspect in the long form it won’t work either.

    The people who are most rabidly against Sad Puppies, or Rabid Puppies or whatever comes next isn’t that Vox Day is superbadevil but because they’re too provincial in outlook to consider that people have differences of opinions they’ve arrived at in a logical matter.

    To their minds everyone thinks like them. So anyone who isn’t an advocate for things they advocate for cannot do so in good faith – they either have to be prejudiced somehow (sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted as Dennis Prager so succinctly puts it) or just evil. There’s got to be something wrong with people who don’t realize that the SJW’s totem hate group (whatever the shifting target is that day anyway) isn’t the devil incarnate.

    If you really are a moderate and you’re feeling brave ask one of the SJW’s if there’s any good reason someone could hold a different viewpoint on a topic than they do (affirmative action would be a particularly courageous pick in my opinion) and ask them what a good reason would be – I’d be surprised, pleasantly surprised, if they said yes and could give you one.

    Thanks for fighting the good fight Larry – I’ve been reading SFF less than some readers here, only since the late 80’s, early 90’s but I’ve always seen the Hugos and Nebulas as a joke – a good reason to avoid a book so I appreciate whwat you’ve done in the past, and what Brad is trying to do now.

    To all the people out there screaming at Larry et al for someone else’s words, or attacking people for daring to play in your sandbox I’ll say this: the day after the EW and company went out and smeared SP authors as bigots I put down my money for a WorldCon membership so I could vote for a good story for the Hugo – which is the last thing you’d ever want anyone to do. And I’m more than willing to bet I’m not the only reader who did so.

    1. “…Vox’s just the beast under your bed
      In your closet, in your head

      Exit light, enter night
      Grain of sand

      Exit light, enter night
      Take my hand
      We’re off to never-never land.”

      [/James Hetfield off]

      😛

    1. He has non-PC opinions (on lots of topics), and won’t shut up about them. Read his blog if you want to see his evil badthink. Personally, I don’t think he’s evil, but he most definitely is confrontational.

      He used to be a member of SFWA, but he was expelled after he used a SFWA twitter account (that was open for use by members of SFWA) to link to his blog – specifically, a blog post that contained evil badthink (the one I used in the link above). That blog post was a response to N. K. Jemisin’s Guest of Honor speech at Continuum. It was deemed to be either “not about writing, or about fiction or publishing” or else “include threats or personal attacks or obvious trolling”, and so was an abuse of the SFWA twitter account & grounds for expulsion.

      1. Jemisin’s speech not only abused all of Australia but even found room for Japan and Italy. I laugh every time I hear an SJW say VD is a supremacist. SJWs clearly have no idea what the word even means.

        1. Nail in the coffin. I really don’t see what value SFWA offers to their members. Their legal fund is useless per Sarah Hoyt’s linked blog post & a few other things I’ve seen. Their medical fund might be helpful, but is not sufficient, based on how many crowd-funding campaigns to help authors w/ medical bills I’ve seen & participated in. The best reason I can see for joining is to be able to nominate for & vote on the Nebula Awards.

          1. I guess that’s a reason. But the Nebulas seem to be as nebulous (heh) as the Hugos right now.

            I can’t remember the last time I actually decided to buy or read a story based on either of those awards. It had to be when I was but a lad in the hot sands of Arizona. Right now my inner 12 year old is crying at this whole kerfluffle, but the adult me is just fed up with it all. Not just in Scifi but everywhere…

      2. To be pedantic… the body of the membership of the SFWA never voted him out, as per the by-laws, so he is NOT actually a former member of the SFWA. Only the board made a vote, and that accomplished…. I’m not sure what, exactly.

        1. My reading of the by-laws says only the board vote is required…

          Section 10. Expulsion of Member. The officers of the Corporation may, by unanimous vote, expel any member for good and sufficient cause. In the event of such expulsion, the said member’s dues, if paid, shall be refunded on a pro rata basis. If a member so expelled is a life member, the refund shall be the life membership fee paid by the member minus $50 per year elapsed since the life membership was purchased. A member so expelled shall be reinstated upon petition of two-thirds of the active membership. The Corporation shall have no responsibility to circulate the petition.

          1. IIRC, that rule is not permitted under MA law. SFWA had to go back and revise the rule to make it legal.

    2. (This are just my observations and my own understanding of his blogposts.)

      Part of the reason is because he has incredibly un-PC opinions and doesn’t hold back for the sake of the easily offended. A number of the topics he discusses requires dispassionate discussion and debate, or at the least the ability to step back and look at something analytically.

      He also will respond to how people treat him in like or escalating kind. He doesn’t shy back from telling you to defend your statement or bring up facts, and I’ve witnessed a few rather big back and forth arguments, but as long as the argument is done in good faith, it seems to me that that’s fine. Disagreement is fine as well.

      One of the most common accusations against him is that he’s racist because of his calling N.K. Jemesin a ‘half savage’ – but ignore that this was him describing her behaviour. Instead it’s spun as him calling her a savage because of her skin color.

      Another is the out of context supposed support for shooting girls for wanting an education. Except he was discussing the Taliban, and that from the Taliban’s point of view, that is a threat to their way of life (or the way of life they want to impose, or a risk of Westernization, etc) so from the Taliban POV, killing her is a completely rational decision.

      Yet another common one has to do with the concept of mutual obligations and consent regarding marriage. As I understood it, the expectation of sex is inherently tied up in marriage (and logically, realistically this is true – there’s a difference between annulment and divorce) and that the obligation is actually binding upon the two spouses. You consent to have sex with your spouse when you marry them, publicly – or else fidelity wouldn’t be a matter of question, nor the legal differentiation defined entirely by the consummation of the marriage. The detractors spin it as ‘wife sex slavery’ or something insane, or Vox being a ‘rape apologist’.

      Finally, and this is something that trips lots of people up – he deliberately writes things in a way that will trip up the easily offended. I’ll admit that it wasn’t an easy thing to get past but when I was able to there were interesting things to read. I don’t agree with everything he says, but some of the things he’s willing to say I think need to be said, especially that part about science.

      1. Congratulations on producing perhaps the most lucid exposition of the perplexing matter of Mr. Day I’ve ever read – masterly summary indeed!

        (And, if it is not too forward and it is not too late and if I am not confusing you with someone else, my most profound condolences upon your recent loss. I have no words ….)

        1. Heh, thanks. I actually am not very lucid these days. I use writing coherent replies as a method of pushing away the painful fog of grief. But as I noted; that is my understanding of Vox’s writing. I started reading his blog to see what the controversy is about, on and off.

          And no, it is not too forward and never too late, and no you indeed have not confused me with anyone else. I’m the Shadowdancer Larry posted about who lost her 11 week old son to what is likely SIDS on the 8th of April. Thank you. *hug*

          1. Yah. Heard about that. Condolences. All the best to you and yours. You still have us on your side, the people you love, and others who love you.

      2. Here is what I don’t get, and I’ll reply to everyone in this thread after I asked that question: Aren’t writers supposed to look at life differently than others? Most writers I grew up reading did. Asimov, Clark. Phillip K. Dick. CS Lewis. Tolkien. McCaffrey. Niven/Pournelle, Heinlein. Everyone of them looked at life from a different POV. Heck, has anyone ever watched that speech Dick gave at that one convention in the 70s? Man, it was both unPC and a little askew of normal thinking. Doens’t mean his work wasn’t great. (I can hear the arguments now “So you mean we need to give Hitler a pass because he wrote Mein Kampf?” Sigh.)

        That is okay, it helps those that can’t think like that view life in a different way. I can’t say I agree with everything Day says, but I can’t say that of anyone really. It seems to me (From reading the Q/A article above, the blog posts and the summary of his views) the main thing Day is guilty of is not giving a crap what anyone else thinks of his own opinions. And maybe baiting people into arguing with him. If that was a crime, man the whole USA would be in jail.

        We live in such a screwed up society that people are more worried about someone they don’t know offending someone else they don’t know then looking at the merit of something someone writes. Yet, then these same people will pull out a vicious attack piece and say it has artistic merit. The public just needs to ignore the message… It doesn’t matter that the person pulling the piece out supports said message.

        I swear. I saw this crap coming in Scifi in the mid to late 90s and slowly stopped reading much of the mainstream stuff. Now it’s soaked into almost every type of media imaginable. A guy has an opinion you don’t agree with? Fine, let’s form a lynch mob and go after him. Or her.

        I say screw the Hugos. Let these people have their own little clique. I hate to say this, but most of what I read supporting the current state of the hugos sounds like people that are supporting a dying system. I see words like prestige and such thrown around. I also see people talking about how authors like Larry and Brad don’t see the ‘changing marketplace.’ I think that is wrong. I think these authors see the changing marketplace very well and it is many of the estalbished authors that are trying to hang on to the dying corpse of a corrupt system.

        Like I said I don’t support much of what Day says but I understand it is his right to say it. Not caring for what people say has never stopped me from reading what they wrote. I like George RR Martin and I think much of what he says is rubbish. And I’ve thought that for years.

        Let’s get back to reading stuff and judging it on the merit of the story and stop worrying about what opinions the authors themselves hold. I’m intelligent, I can tell if stories are message fiction or not. If i don’t like it? I won’t buy it.

        Anyway. I’m an unknown author myself so I’m sure this will come bite me in the ass someday. “Five years ago He said THIS on that scumbag’s website! AND HE SAID HE AGREED WITH VOX DAY!”

        Well whatever. I think it’s time to stop worrying about getting inside these so called prestigious award circles and just do our own thing. It’s a new world with self publishing and such. Screw ’em. I’d rather have fans and money than awards anyway.

        (Says the author that has a few fans, no money and no awards. Hah.)

        Thanks for your answers. I’m saddened to see this happen to an industry that helped raise me as a kid. But I guess all institutions start rotting from the inside at some point.

        1. : Aren’t writers supposed to look at life differently than others?

          Short, quick answer: Supposed to, yes.

          I can hear the arguments now “So you mean we need to give Hitler a pass because he wrote Mein Kampf?”

          See, the nice thing about Mein Kampf is, it let people know what Hitler actually thought, and then formulate their own opinion about it- and most people thought it monstrous. I advocate that it not ever be censored. I am a big proponent of ‘Let them speak, so that we may know their thoughts/mind.” All too often, the person speaking exposes themselves.

          That’s why I smile when James May quotes them directly. He exposes the hypocrisy the SJWs and victim-mongers adore.

          The problem too with the idea that ‘just because a person is a horrible person, that means everything he thinks, says or does is horrible,’ is that it makes caricatures of people, and does not acknowledge that people can be complex and have perfectly good goals and plans but their execution is HORRIBLE, or having done lots of atrocities, and done some good. (and I forsee Clampsy likely taking this out of context somewhere again, and posting it on FSTDT or somewhere similar) An example of this is Ferdinand Marcos, the man who became the dictator of the Philippines and the boogeyman of Philippine politics. Few know that he actually was trying to get Philippine culture recognized and feted on a global scale, and tried to do so with some success while he was in power. Since then though it has fallen by the wayside. He wanted the Philippines to become on par with say, Hong Kong. He had grand ambitions and well, the way that he went about that was to declare martial law. In the time since alas, most of the projects that would have been beneficial to the Filipino people have fallen by the wayside.

          To not recognize the good and the bad and simply favor only one facet of history is to view history with an extreme bias that leads to mistakes that are repeated in the future. This is ultimately why facts, reason, and logic are the bane of the SJWs, or those with a hidden agenda aimed at control of people. It tears away the veil hiding that agenda, and exposes the mental slight of hand.

          …I’ll have to try continue this some other time as there are funeral arrangements to do.

      3. I know i had a long reply to this, but I wanted to reply to you specifically. Thanks for the comments and i’m reading up on what you linked to atm. I don’t agree with everything Vox says, but reading has never been about agreement with opinions for me. If it was that, I’d never read anything. I feel sorry for those that think they have to agree with someone to read their work. It’s kind of a pathetic type of thinking and leads to stunted growth.

  56. Sasquan Final Hugo Ballot Adds Novel Three-Body Problem, Short Story “Single Samurai”
    http://file770.com/?p=21930

    Let’s hope this is the last change to the ballot. I’m sorry about Kloos’ novel not being there, but since it is withdrawn, I’m glad Three-Body Problem replaced it. This is one of the books I really want to read.

    1. You know…Vox Day praised “The Three Body Problem” and IIRC said he would have included it on the Rabid Puppies slate had he known about it at the time.

      Seriously.

      Oh well: The Flaming Rage Nozzles of Tolerance can still vote for Leckie. Or Noah Ward.

  57. “Paul Weimer Republic retweeted Beth Bernobich @beth_bernobich · 4h 4 hours ago Hello, Not!Sherlock. You are all about black women in the near future. Some (white, male, straight) men are afraid of that. Screw them.”

    Or maybe burn them in a fire.

    The amazing perversion about SJWs is they are ultra obsessed with racism, bigotry and supremacy and yet seem to be the only bloc of people in SFF who have no actual definitions for those terms.

    Or quotes, a thing they seem to have a phobia of.

    1. See, here I agree with you. This is prejudice, plain and simple, and Patel should be ashamed.

      If Jemisin has ever said anything similar, about how she discriminates against authors on the basis of their race, let me know and I will revise my opinion of her.

      1. Jemisin wrote that whites in history had created “…an ingenious system allowing it to dominate most of the planet. (Diabolical… but ingenious.)”

        People like Jemisin say the same thing about diabolical Jews, only with her it’s whites.

      2. Isn’t it just obviously true that majority-white societies have historically held most of the power? And that the reason for the power disparity is the political system that was put into place in the past by those majority-white societies (like when they enslaved or took over non-white societies)?

        Do you think any of that is false?

        The reason it’s prejudiced to say “Jews control the world” is because it’s not actually true that Jews control the world, so the only reason you’d believe that is prejudice against Jewish people.

        But it is just a fact that, in the modern age, white people have historically controlled most of the world.

        1. But it is just a fact that, in the modern age, white people have historically controlled most of the world.

          ???!!!

          This statement is only true for the period from around 1750-1950, whereas “the modern age” is generally held to have begun around 1500. Unless, perhaps, you’re counting the Arabs, Persians, Turks and North Indians as “white?” (Which is actually true in terms of majority-descent, but still ignores the Chinese, Japanese, Southeast Asians and others).

          Good Lord, what’s happened to the popular knowledge of history?

          1. 1950 is a conveniently even historical date, and represents roughly when serious decolonization of the Third World, coupled with moves toward greater racial equality within the West, got underway. I could have as reasonably said “1945” or “1964” or “1975.” Today, the world is not particularly white-dominated, even if we use “white” in its most inclusive possible meaning (to embrace Arabs, Persians, Turks and North Indians).

            In any case, how does discriminating against present-day white science fiction authors somehow address whatever crimes were committed in the age of European colonialism? All the perpetrators and victims are now in their graves: what’s happening is that innocent people are being discriminated against supposedly in order to redress crimes committed by people who looked kinda sorta like them against people who looked kinda sorta like those who are now being favored. This is no sane concept of “justice.”

          2. Is there a quote from Jemisin where she’s suggested discriminating against white authors?

            I’ve said before that if she says that anywhere, I will recant my view that she’s not prejudiced against white people.

          3. “Is there a quote from Jemisin where she’s suggested discriminating against white authors?”

            Don’t buy books by black authors. Discrimination, yes or no? We could probably even add in there… because books like black authors suck because of black author bad think… and not be exaggerating.

            (Or was this Tempest… maybe it was Tempest.)

            Don’t buy books by white male authors… exact same statement given with the same reasons… “diverse” authors write better books without white male bad think. Discrimination? Yes or no?

          4. Okay … then perhaps we need to see those on the Tor side of things disassociate themselves from and denounce Tempest‘s anti-white racism. Goose, gander — and the Puppies have the numbers in this fight.

          1. Can you name a non-majority-white society since the 18th century that’s held a comparable share of world power to that held by the US and Europe?

          2. Just why should I even bother to try? What’s the point of this? There’s no obvious reason to do so.

          3. Zoldberg, you seem to have a very low threshold of understanding when someone deep-sixes an entire race at the behest of a hateful agenda.

            I have often pointed out you can tell as much about an intersectionalist by what they never say as by what they do.

            In a world where slavery was endemic, those diabolical whites are the only ones who have ever unilaterally ended slavery. You will never hear that type of leavening of context from Jemisin and her cadre of fools. I could add a lot more context like that.

            Did you know that Islamic slavery not only equaled the Atlantic Slave Trade in sheer numbers (albeit over a far longer time frame) but that without it institutionalized along the Niger River area, there never would’ve been an Atlantic Slave Trade?

            Why has that been memory-holed? With Mughals, Manchus, Incans, Aztecs, Ottomans and Arabs staring at us in the face, why is colonialism ever only redcoats and western frontiersmen? The Ottoman Empire directly or by proxy controlled much of the Middle East and N. Africa through to WW I. There was a slave trade in Constantinople even into the early 1900s.

            You do not parse history through demographics. When there is a racial supremacy involved, talk about it but you can’t say English having a disdain for French or Irish becomes some completely different mechanism when it’s aimed at Africans, or that that doesn’t and hasn’t worked both ways. In the early 17th century the English parliament held a special session to deal with repatriating the thousands of Englishman held as slaves in N. Africa. There were slave raids in Cornwall and County Cork around that same time.

            The lesson is this: people are people, a thing too obvious for racial supremacists to grasp or have any interest in.

          4. Than the U.S.A. and all of Europe combined? No, of course not, because this combination covers more than two continents (given that Russia is European and rules North Asia.

            Than America, or a single European Great Power? I can name several: most notably China, Japan and India.

            And what does any of this have to do with the immorality of racially discriminating against white science fiction authors?

          5. Actually, there is one example in the non-Christian world of a government ending slavery.

            Goryeo (medieval Korea). The current Korean history drama “Shine or Go Crazy” is about the youth of a guy who grew up to become king/emperor of Goryo. In real life, Gwangjong did actually end slavery and emancipate all slaves in the year 958. Color me shocked, as I’d never heard this.

            (Of course, Goryeo girls and boys still had to do what their parents said, and being indentured to a brothel or a household as a servant isn’t a lot better than being a slave, but it did make a difference.)

            Slavery did eventually come back, unfortunately, and there were tons of slave rebellions in the late 1100’s. Slavery didn’t go away again until modern times.

        2. So whites ARE diabolical? And in a mind of sick paranoia and race hatred, how do YOU know Jews don’t control the world? Couldn’t I point out shit about who it was who established a bank when LIbya fell and that Syria never allowed itself external debt or borrowed money from the IMF and yadda yadda?

          See how group defamation works? It doesn’t matter who has had their turn at empire, it doesn’t include me in diabolism. If someone has a problem with the British Raj, go talk to the people who actually did it.

          1. This can all be summarized by; most people are driven by self-interest, throughout history most people have been willing to pursue their self-interest through brutality and atrocity. Name just about any major ethnic group and you can find atrocities they’ve committed and atrocities that others committed against them. It makes no more sense to blame Europeans for the sins of their ancestors than it does to blame any other ethnic/geographic grouping of people for what their forebears did.

          2. And micro-aggression is bullshit. If someone can produce evidence of ACTUAL discrimination against ethnic minorities, not just, “look at the percentages, it MUST be racism, I don’t need to show malicious intent!” then, yes, that is morally wrong, but I don’t think that was ever in question.

          3. Justin, I agree with you that there’s no point blaming white people. People of other races would act the same way if they were the ones who held more power.

            There is some evidence of actual discrimination that isn’t just “look at the percentages.” For example, there have been several studies where resumes with stereotypically black names were sent to employers, and these received significantly fewer call-backs than the exact same resume but with a white-sounding name.

            http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html

          4. The thing you cite about names and resumes? Freakanomics went into great detail on all the many flaws with it. As a guy who used stats most of his life, I recommend it.

          5. Zoidberg, the names they used in that study are poor black names and middle class white names. Apples and Oranges. You want to know what employers actually think of ethnic names you need to compare Jamal and Bubba to each other and Emily and Michelle to each other.
            Because middle class blacks, in the USA, use the same name pool as middle class whites. Like, say, Michelle Obama’s parents did.

          6. There are studies, I should add, that show a preference for middle-class male names over female ones. So in the gender case, it’s not about class.

            This study shows that callbacks for a research science job are more common for “John” than “Jennifer,” with the same resume:

            http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full

            There was a similar study of resumes for a police chief candidate which was pretty interesting, don’t have the link though.

          7. Yup. Tiffuhneeee and Billy Beau Bob ain’t gunna be gettin’ no callback from that big law firm neither.

        3. Dear freaking DOG Zoidberg… did you just explain that “white societies” have always been more successful than non-white societies? Did you just insist that *white people are better at civilization?”

          Honest to freaking DOG Zoidberg… watch yourself!

          And then you conveniently disappeared China. *poof*

          1. Synova, some people are just chumps. Did you really think hate speech was successfully mainstreamed for a logical reason? It is a failure of intellect and reason, like buying swampland.

          2. Zoidberg… I don’t think that “white” people are better at civilization (China’s civilization is ancient, for example, and massive, and ancient, and huge, and ancient.)

            I think that Protestantism… a philosophy of the laity, every man equal and every man answering to God and every man having access to God without intermediaries… a very very individualist centered philosophy… we labor for and own our own salvation and so it would seem natural that we also own our labor… is the reason that the “West” is successful.

            Not *chance*… not *luck*… not *having been at it longer* because the West in practice are upstart children in the world context.

            Sub-cultures that retain a “priesthood” mindset don’t do as well. Not saying at all what is more true or better in a religious sense, but in a practical sense any abdication of one’s success… either spiritual or temporal… to a higher authority tends to be less successful. Failures aren’t your fault and successes are unearned. (Now don’t *that* sound familiar.)

            It’s not chance or luck that a social system that respects the right of individuals to their labor and protects property sees the most economic and quality of life gains. How much effort are you going to put into something that will only be taken from you? How much risk will you take when it all belongs to someone else?

            The Chinese had gunpowder before Europe crawled from caves… so why didn’t they have guns? They had metallurgy… so why didn’t they have guns? Do you suppose somehow that *guns* was an accident? Luck?

          3. ” Do you suppose somehow that *guns* was an accident? Luck?”

            I’ve always seen them as second only to beer as proof God loves us and wants us to be happy. 😎

          4. Guns, germs and steel – I am reading that book, FYI – notes that the luck is in having the grain and animal types in the continent of Eurasia that lead to the rise of civilizations. It does NOT assign, as you imply, superiority to ‘whites’, but attempts to answer why certain cultures developed in advancement over certain others, and why some cultures remained technologically simple. The book is FAR more complex than you are trying to make out.

            And if I may, I believe that you’d have a far better time debating Vox on this than here.

          5. Guns, Germs and Steel explains quite well in what one might term neo-physiocratic terms why the dominant civilizations originated or directly descended from those on the main Eurasian axis, including Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, India, China and Southeast Asia. It does not explain why Europe (and European-descended cultures such as those of the Anglosphere and Hispanic Diaspora) beat out the Amerindians (North and South), Sub-Saharan Africans, and Australian Aboriginies — and generally did so with humiliating ease and decisive completeness — and also defeated (with less ease and completeness) the Moorish, Arab, Persian, Indian and Chinese civilizations, all of which were at various historical points more advanced than Europe.

            My theory is “superior cultural innovations” — or, put differently, that Europe made some importantly advantageous philosophical and political choices in the period ~ 1000-1500, while the Muslim, Indian and Chinese groups all made fatal errors. Vox obviously thinks it’s some sort of racial mico-variation. I’m not sure where the truth lies.

          6. I read ‘Germs, Guns and Steel’ on the recommendation of a friend, and was utterly unimpressed.

            Read carefully what the author says in at the very beginning. He identifies his methodology. He says, in effect, that by hypothesis he will not look at any racial nor cultural difference between the peoples and civilizations examined, because his hypothesis is that the differences in success rates of the races cannot be a non material, spiritual, mental, or cultural cause.

            Well, if you eliminate all non material causes for civilization flourishing over another, one is left with nothing but material causes. Since the material resources of the Earth are more or less the same all over the globe, one ends up by saying, it must be due to the climate and the lack of navigable waters.

            A sociologist who tracked how often and how many people and institutions prayed to God and how fervidly with the social and material success of Jewish, Arab and Christian nations would have an absurd and unscientific hypothesis, but at least it would be an hypothesis.

            He could compare some sort of measure of success rates against the estimated number of manhours spent praying or somesuch nonsense.

            Mr Diamond did not even have that: He has a circular argument.

            Starting from the assumption that all differences between cultures have a material cause, he comes to the conclusion that, surprise, surprise, all differences between cultures have a material cause

          7. I do, however, find his arguments particularly with regard to continental sizes and orientations fairly convincing. Eurasia is the largest east-west body of land on the planet, and thanks to the Mediterranean forms an easily-accessible bloc with North Africa. And what do we find there by 1500? The most advanced civilizations on the planet — not just the Europeans, but also the Arabs, the Persians, the Indians and the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese — many sharing exactly the same domesticated plants and animals, and also sharing much technology.

            In Sub-Saharan Africa, which is isolated by the Sahara and by a lack of good ports and navigable rivers, one finds a bunch of lesser cultures and civilizations — which nonetheless all have large domesticated food animals, lots of domesticated plants, and ironworking technology. In the Americas, which run north-to-south instead of east-to-west, there are few domesticated animals, little or no contact with non-Amerindian cultures, and a Bronze Age or lower technology. And in little Australia, the natives are still living at a Paleolithic level of technology.

            That’s pretty signficant proof of the hypothesis as to the nature of the favorable vs. unfavorable geographic factors. Though to really prove it, we’d need to study the civilizations of numerous Earthlike planets — something beyond our current technology.

            And Jared Diamond does fail to explain why Europe eventually outcompeted the other Eurasian cultures.

          8. JCW – the problem with the assertion that “Since the material resources of the Earth are more or less the same all over the globe, one ends up by saying, it must be due to the climate and the lack of navigable waters.” is that the material resources are *not* the same all over the globe (else we would never have had trade, much less the thriving exchange of the Silk Road, etc).

            God favors both the lucky and those who work their butts off. This does not mean that portions of the earth are not more blessed than others.

            I am reminded of a story of a clan whose wealth lay in pigs and pastures – never to be counted among the most prestigious, but never to fail of harvest, either.

          9. And of the various Eurasian civilisations around 1500, the Europeans were then clearly in the lead, with the gap increasing as time went on. If Diamond’s thesis were true this lead would be difficult to explain. Might there be non-material (and non-racial, since the split does not occur along “racial” lines, either) factors?

        4. “White people”

          Ah, I see. Some European powers, whose populations were mostly white, once had great influence over much of the world once so to you and Jemisin et al that excuses judging white people as a whole based upon that history.

          So not only do you judge people based upon their perceived race, you judge them based on things that happened before they were even born.

          How interesting.

          1. I’m not judging anybody on the basis of this stuff, I’m just saying that what Jemisin said is factually correct, so it’s not racist.

          2. But Zoidberg, it isn’t factually correct. If you believe it is, provide evidence to support your assertion.

  58. Damn.

    LC- For what it’s worth, sorry you’re having to do this yet again.

    Keep up the good fight.

    Chris

  59. Its just you are so much bigger than them. You can destroy the terrible monster haunting their dreams, surely.

  60. Say what you will about Day, but he’s the only one who has the right of this. When you’re up against people who will not give you a fair shake no matter what, then you’ve no choice but to fuck them and prank them as hard as you can. That can best be accomplished using their own stupidity and bigotry against them rather than expecting them to change their ways.

    There’s some subtle shit going on here where SJWs are not only being forced to eat their own so to speak but once again putting their intolerance for anything that resembles fair play on display. At the same time you destroy the credibility of the very thing they cherish the most.

    I’ve spent a couple of days at Glyer’s and frankly those are some of the most brutally stupid people you will ever meet. You have about as much chance of being given a fair shot from the likes of them as you do a cat. They don’t understand the simplest concepts about goose/gander nor are they capable of making the simplest comparisons. In other words they’re typical okie SJWs. There’s just nothing you can do with people like that except fuck ’em.

    Learn this lesson: you will never get satisfaction from a bigot. They don’t like you just for waking up. What you actually do doesn’t enter into it. You have as much chance of getting a fair shake as black folks from the KKK or Jews from neo-Nazis. So, if you’re more or less sharing the same space, you do what Jesse Jackson said he used to do – you spit in their water and then hand it to them.

    I haven’t changed my mind about these people. We’re done asking and safe-spaces actually work two ways. Just get used to being on the outside and even enjoying it. Those on the inside are rather trapped there, and by their own doing. All we’re doing is kicking a dead horse. Instead of re-thinking anything we should kick ’em even harder next year. Fuck these people and their shit-ass mental KKK.

    1. That is exactly the most important lesson I’ve learned from watching Day at work. We are in an existential fight to save our very civilization, and if the battle for science fiction awards seems small and petty, well it’s gotta start somewhere, and the lessons learned can be applied more broadly.

      These rabbits are our ENEMIES. There is no such thing as reasonable discourse with them. There is no compromise. Know SJWs? No peace. No SJWs? Know peace.

      It is past time that we stopped assuming that just because WE were willing and trying to be reasonable that we would get the same thing in return. We have been LOSING for decades even though we have literally every advantage. We have just let it happen.

      No more. I’m done. I’ve had enough.

      Vox Day may or may not be a likable guy. But that is the lesson of Vox Day right there, and in demonstrating that, he’s done more good than a lot of other folks in arguably more important (or at least more visible) positions in our society.

  61. I’m sad that the controversy has taken away from one of the best military science fiction anthologies of all time. “Riding a red horse” contains some of the best military science fiction ever written, and will be hailed as such in the future. vox day and tom kratman created a work for the ages, politics completely aside.

  62. So, one thing I’ve seen repeatedly is a demand that SP denounce Vox Day, distance themselves from him, etc.

    After much consideration, my response has evolved to the following: “It’s an interesting idea. But, since you went their first, you get to go first. You get to denounce your hatemongers, your libelists, your people who have no room for the truth while they try to whip up a pitchfork and torch mob, your people who try to denounce Torgeson/etc. for some fantabulous “early knowledge”, all while discussing the ballot results days early…in short, your equivalents of Vox. And we’re going to start at the top, with your people who have most abused the SP contingent, and most abused the process for the last couple decades. In short, when your leading lights (GRRM, Scalzi, Gerrold) are willing to publicly pillory TNH and PNH, we’ll see about an appropriate and complementary response viz Vox.

    But until then, pound sand. “

  63. Tell me Larry…. as a Rabid Puppy….

    Exactly why shouldn’t we burn this whole hugo thing to ground now… relieve ourselves on the ashes…. Flip everyone involved the bird… and remind them that next year will be far worse if they don’t shut their stupid mouths?

    Because we can Larry.

    You’re an auditor. You know exactly what the numbers say.

    So why shouldn’t we?

    We wanted to nuke the whole thing this year and you talked us out of it.

    Regretting that decision yet?

      1. You’re tired Larry. This isn’t news or anything. You’ve been beat on for 3 or 4 years now… and this is the worst its been.

        Being this tired… it may by hard to see that the beating is this intense because you’re up 77 to 3 with 5 minutes to go in the 4th quarter.

        If they no award The Three Body Problem and Skin Game… we win.

        If they don’t… We win.

        take a break. We won’t burn it down. The last thing I need is a mournful Wendell hoooonning at me in sad sadness.

    1. We are doing this because we care about fandom. Laughing at SJWs may be a bonus, but if you are only in this for that reason you may as well save your money. You can laugh at SJWs without voting at the Hugos.

      1. No. That’s why you are doing this. But you’re Sad Puppy.

        I am not Sad Puppy.

        I am among the most Rabid of Rabid Puppies… and we are doing this for very very different reasons… and we have very very different goals.

        We like Larry and Brad. We like Larry and Brad a lot… so we’re playing nice.

        And that is the only reason.

    2. Because we can Larry…
      We wanted to nuke the whole thing this year and you talked us out of it.

      The ridiculous amount of self-confidence on Vox Day and his clown of supporters looks very funny if you manage to look at the situation from far enough distance.

      Sure, bro, your tribe can totally, like, destroy Hugo with … er, internet comments and paying $$$ to worldcon! NUKE THEM FROM ORBIT WITH INTERNET COMMENTS!!! It’s the only way to make sure!

      1. You seem to be completely unaware that the Hugos are nearly destroyed at this point already. It will only take the merest push to send them into oblivion.

      2. Judging from the amount of effort you and the other SJW put into nervous laughter and poh-poohing, we’re definitely impacting something.

      3. @Doug Loss:
        Oblivion? My gods you rapid poppies are funny. Yes, oblivion until they implement some of the many ideas on changing their voting system. But please, continue to send them more $$$. That is a burden they cannot continue to take forever!

        @SDN:
        First, I’m not a SJW and I don’t like them. SJW have a lot in common with folks such as those at “a voice for men” and those at Vox Day’s garage: they have 0 sense of humor, they take everything very seriously, they think they are soldiers at a war, and they are stuck in their own little echo chambers.
        Second, “nervous laughter”? I am still chucking at their genius idea of “DEATH by internet comments”!
        (reminds of me this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew8KPNeEds8 )

        1. I don’t think I’m in a war. It’s just that I can read when people say they won’t review books by white men, ask people to not read white men, or say white men should come with trigger warnings, and all of that all day, every day, and from people institutionally well-placed in SFF.

          1. What better example of how our intersectional gender feminist KKK uses the word “diversity” as cover? They must think we’re as dumb as they are.

        2. I don’t believe you. Period Dot. Just another lying leftist,

          Oh, and they can change the voting system. What they can’t do is claim to be either inclusive or an award that means anything afterward.

  64. Report from the other side:

    I hang with people who are on the moderate other side of this debacle. Two examples of what I have noticed when discussing the literate side of it:

    1: The other side has zero military experience. You get comments like :
    “Why is he telling us the guy is a master sergeant twice, and so clumsily?”
    What they want here is to establish the title of master sergeant and then go on to call him John or something, and because of repetition, the work is written off as bad writing. This is not stupidity or ideology, it’s just a fundamental lack of contact with anything military.

    2: They largely don’t have any STEM education, so they have no idea if the science is plausible, so nothing is dismissed, even on grounds of internally inconsistent physics. I have talked to people who think “The day the world turned upside down” is plausible.

    This means that from their perspective, a lot of what puppies think is great writing is actually horrible writing and a lot of horrible science is accepted without damaging the suspension of disbelief.

    Thus, a lot of the resentment felt by the other side is not because of politics, but because of fundamentally different assumptions.

    There is a thing called “double illusion of transparency” which means that when two people talking to each other both _think_ they know what the other is talking about, but because of different background, neither one does. If we discount the extreme nutjobs on either side, I suspect this is a lot of what is going on.

    Of course, the Hugos were dying and any shaking up is long over due, so thanks again for that.

    1. Basically what you’re saying is that the other side is ignorant. Got no problem with that per se, ignorance is a correctible condition. Problem is that the other side appears to be ignorant and proud of that ignorance to the point of true denial of reality. Our side states facts quote numbers, their side makes chit up.
      When I read something in a story that I do not understand I generally assume that the author did due diligence and got it right. If it’s important to me or piques my curiosity I will research the topic and educate myself. But if it is a subject I know well or research and find that they just made stuff up, pulled from a nether orifice, then everything that author writes becomes suspect.
      So I find ignorant and unwilling to learn to be a very weak justification for the poo flinging butt monkey demonstrations the other side has adopted in response to the Sad Puppy initiative.

      1. Found a quote that I think fits the situation:

        “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

        Martin Luther King, Jr.

    1. I can’t imagine being an SJW would be much fun.

      Self-flagellation doesn’t get more pleasant when you trade in the whip for self-hating thoughts.

  65. I’m a big fan of the Monster Hunter books, which is what brought me to this site around the time of SP1. From my perspective, the entire Sad Puppies saga has been well worth it, because 1) I didn’t have to endure any of the resulting abuse, and 2) it led me to Vox Day (A Throne of Bones), who led me to John C. Wright (Awake in the Night Lands), who led me to William Hope Hodgson (everything he ever wrote).

    I so think some of the anger expressed here at Vox for jumping on the SP bandwagon is a little misplaced. He was put on the SP2 slate because Larry liked his novelette. But I think Larry has acknowledged that an added bonus was the fact that including Vox would make SJW heads explode. And explode they did. Once the expected blowback began, against both SP and Vox directly, Larry and Brad have been at pains to keep Vox at arms length. Fair enough. But considering the abuse directed at Vox because of this whole episode, I think he could be forgiven for feeling a little used. (Not that I pretend to speak for Vox.) So I think his taking the SP idea and running with it is understandable.

  66. I would strongly encourage you to not go down this road any further.

    * Nothing you do or say will distance yourself from Vox, because they do not WANT to allow you that distance. They wish to put you on the defensive.

    * This fragmentation is exactly their goal, right out of Alynsky. The want you to moderate your stance and your demands. They want to split your followers, cloud your support.

    But most importantly, i think you are wrong to abandon Vox. You were better when you were neutral, you were a stronger voice when you did not seem so desirous of the favor of your critics.

    You don’t need to like or agree with Vox, but you do need to stop letting yourself be driven into this rabbit hole.

    1. So looking this over, it comes off slightly more strident than intended 🙂

      Particularly I would like to take a different tack with the the following:

      “But most importantly, i think you are wrong to abandon Vox.”

      Of course you are not abandoning him in a literal sense… you two were not “together” in any way that would support the concept. However I do think the tone of this note has a little more “just leave me out of it” than previously – and that is a modification.

      The initial tone you took on these things was more in the tone of “while we may disagree, he has certainly been a better ally to me than you (meaningful critics) have”. This post seems to distance yourself from even that.

      It is hard to pinpoint specific sentences on this – but you understand that the tone of a post can not always be reduced to simply single sentences.

      Also, I would like to clarify this…

      “you were a stronger voice when you did not seem so desirous of the favor of your critics”.

      This is not to say that you ARE desirous of their favor, again I am speaking not of your actual intent but of how it seems in terms of tone.

      Finally, allow me to say thanks for SP and what you have done here. These issues have been under the radar for far to long, and it has allowed huge segments of our entertainment to fall sway to the SJW types.

      1. I said nothing I haven’t said repeatedly before. I just put it all in one place because I was sick and tired of repeating myself.

        1. Fair enough for sure. There was something about the tone that seemed different, more conciliatory. But I am a fairly new reader of your blog eve n though I am a logn fan of your books so I may simply be unable to judge this yet.

          That is one of the reasons I wanted to follow up on my own post and offer more info 🙂

          It can be incredibly tiring when dealing with people who seemingly have a willful desire to ignore what you say, no matter how clearly you say it. This is one of their primary tactics… simply pick a accusation and repeat it despite all evidence.

          Stay strong 😉

    2. Soulhuntre’s point on Alynsky tactics is correct. Vox was easiest to isolate. But don’t think the SJW CHORF crowd won’t continue to gather outside your keep with flaming torches and pitchforks. The more they can divide the opposition to their objectives, the better for them. Facts are obstacles and inconvenient to The Cause.

      After first picking up a book with a funny little rocket on the spine from the library in 1970, I have been watching the Hugo go from a good indicator of possible new places to begin reading to a list of things I’d rather not have wasted my money on. Works either way. 😉

      But reading the SJW crowd, although I have dumped multiple thousands of dollars since 1970 into the open pockets of eager authors(well, their publishers pockets anyway), I find that since I have never attended a Worldcon I am not a TruFan.

      Interesting.

  67. “My goal was to demonstrate that the awards were biased, represented the likes of only one small part of fandom, and that authors with the wrong politics who got on the ballot would be attacked. All of that has been demonstrated rather conclusively”

    Really? And how is that? The authors on the ballot, many of which you recommended, are from left/right/middle/? as you say, so they can’t be being attacked because of their politics …
    … the hijacking of the nomination process is what is being attacked.

    I see no evidence of the assertion of yours I have quoted above. Oh, I’m sure there are a few individual assholes on every side of every debate, and some people (perhaps even people claiming to speak for all fandom, but obviously not) have said horrible things … but that is not proof that the awards have ever been biased before this.
    Yes, they were representative of a small part of fandom, those who could be bothered to nominate and vote, those who were active in fandom and gave a damn.
    *Now* this year’s slate is representative of one small part of fandom (how many voters? A few hundred? A thousand? Out of 50,000+ fans worldwide (people who attend conventions, participate in online discussions, write fanfic etc.)

    1. Uh huh… You see no evidence of my assertion because you either haven’t bothered to look, or you don’t want to see. I don’t have enough hours in the day to type it out for every new poster that shows up demanding I explain 2 years of evidence. Search window. Top right of your screen. Search for last year’s Hugo Aftermath post. There was no hijacking that year to be mad about. Just a nom in each category, and it still caused enough of a political backlash that the USA Today noticed it.

      My left/right/middle slate was uniformly attacked as being right/straight/white/male by a bunch of media outlets working of the same script, but sure… They were just protecting the sainted democratic process.

      Your last paragraph makes you sound ignorant. My one local ComicCon has 150,000 attendees. Fandom numbers in the millions. Hugo nominees are normally determined by tens of people. The biggest category? A couple hundred. I let more fans know they could participate.

  68. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaaha!!!

    Weasel does Weasel moves to try to brush off Weasel Shit.

    Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

    You is funny*

    *Not really.

    1. Ah, it’s Paul Ebbs, who is perhaps one of the stupidest motherfuckers I’ve ever seen.

      Paul has the honor of being one of only ten or so people I’ve ever blocked on Facebook, and I’ve argued with a ton of people on FB. After he spent a couple of days arguing with some of my homosexual friends about my invisible homophobia–because he could just tell–I had to block him for my own safety. I got so bored reading his bullshit that I literally developed a case of narcolepsy. I fell asleep and hit my head on my desk.

      I’m warning you guys, he is so dumb that his posts should come with a warning sticker.

    2. So, is your argument that Larry Correia controls Vox Day, or that Vox Day controls Larry Correia? Do you even have a coherent argument, or do you just obtain personal gratification by typing “ha” again and again and again?

  69. I had a disturbing thought after reading this post. Why Larry Correia cannot be Vox? Both men are rather largish, but I bet the latter can fit inside the former. After some preparation involving taxidermy and padding in appropriate places Vox Day can walk among people as Larry Correia and do evil things. Granted, the result of this process may look and sound strange, but nobody expects normal behavior from fantasy writer.

  70. It’s funny how the left wingers always want people on the right to condemn the Vox Days of the world, yet people like GRRM won’t even acknowledge the existence of SJWs, let alone really call them out when they’ve become what is in essence the establishment.

    It’s good you reiterated your point about how this is all about free speech and not destroying a person’s career over their political stance.

  71. On one hand, Mr. Correia, I think you’ve got a basic point which is fair and rests on true assertions: either the Hugo is the award of one intentionally-small con, and it speaks just for that tribe or clique or whatever, in which case, it’s time for the WSFS to shut up about the Hugo’s status; or the Hugo belongs to All of Fandom, in which case, you and Torgersen might as well do some active recruiting, which might well mostly reach people whose politics and tastes match yours.

    On another hand, my goodness, you’ve got a lot of supporters who say that all liberals are idiots, that no idiots can use logic, that we’re all pussies, and so forth. You say that you’re not Vox Day, and that you’re not responsible for him. Okay, that makes sense. (You also carefully avoid denouncing Vox Day; I presume you also would refuse to denounce Commander George Lincoln Rockwell, just to show that you can’t be pressured into denouncing people.)

    So how about you give what you ask for, and stop holding Martin, Scalzi, Entertainment Weekly, Arthur Chu, the Neilsen Haydens, and Requires Hate collectively responsible for everything that any of them have said? You don’t owe that as an explanation to Noah Ward, but could you perhaps point it out to your frenzied followers, the ones who *categorically* dismiss all liberals as incapable of logic?

    Torgersen says, earlier in these comments: “the people who are hating on us right now have proven they don’t have brains.”

    GRR Martin doesn’t have a brain? Scalzi doesn’t have a brain? Your position is so clearly the One True Way, that the only possible cause for disagreement, is brainlessness? That’s rather arrogant.

    Anyone who’s served in the Army has at least trained to use GPS, not so? GPS works because of relativity. Ya know who did the breakthrough work on understanding relativity? A liberal, named Albert Einstein.

    Are you so committed to THERE IS NO TRUTH BUT SAD PUPPY TRUTH, that you’re committed to a position in which Einstein belongs to a category of people who have no brains and no logic? Or are you sad when your frenzied supporters take that position? Or are you gonna fudge about whether Einstein was really a liberal?

    You were decent and civil in your open letters to GRR Martin. Can you keep it classy, when you’re “among friends” on your own site?

    1. Okay, that was some better than average concern trolling. Bravo. Well done. Golf clap. Points for mixing it up a little bit.

      I don’t hate liberals. I think their political philosophy is flawed, but I don’t hate them. That’s one reason I like to use the term SJW, and despite many of you, including GRRM, insisting they don’t exist, pretty much everybody knows exactly what group I’m talking about. I do hate SJWs, because I hate people who form twitter mobs to intimidate, cow people, and try and ruin careers by framing people.

      So, if Albert Einstein never got on twitter and started screaming about cis-het patriarchy, then I probably wouldn’t have a problem getting along with him either.

      As far as keep it classy, I don’t delete or massage comments, whether I agree with them or not. I block insane trolls, but if somebody disagrees, that don’t make them a troll. Some of these people aren’t even my regulars. Note that many of the “frenzied supporters” are actually here disagreeing with me over this blog post should kind of clue you in. Your argument is kind of stupid, since I’ve got people on here combing through everything I say with a microscope to find something else bad to use against me.

      Brad said something mean? Well, I can’t imagine why his thin veneer of civility is a bit worn out.

      So, to keep it classy, try harder next time, concern troll.

      1. I would like to say that I have never claimed they don’t exist. They do and are pretty terrible people.

        I am arguing for a different term because I really don’t think most non-conservatives who encounter your movement and the term do understand it. I only do cause Gamergate. If SP was using it a year ago I encountered it, I would have been totally confused and actually offended. I got to watch one of my relatives have that reaction, and had to explain things to several friends to prevent that reaction.

        Instead I am mostly a little sad, because it makes it harder for me to convince some of my friends to support you guys. While I may quibble with some of your tactics, by going outside of the outdated operations manual for fandom, you are actually getting *^#^ done.

        1. You know what? The fact that you are willing to explain it to your friends and family is very helpful! You are opening the eyes of people who have not previously agreed to see the truth, to the truth.

          1. Its not even a hard explanation. I just go, you know that group of people we all hate? Yea them.

            We just wish you didn’t use a term that trashes something that at least some of us care about.

            For the record, I teach a STEM subject at a title one school. That is how I fight for social justice.

          2. Then you also should explain to them just WHY the term “SJW” came about. It’s because that thing you care about has been perverted in the eyes of the rest of the public by the group of people you all hate. And if you want to gain any respect tor what you care about from the rest of us, you need to clean your house. You can’t just stand by and wait for us to do it–we won’t be as “nuanced” or selective as you might be.

          3. You got a problem there, ATF.

            I suggest taking the term away from the people who are abusing it.

            We have very little influence on the leftist community, and cannot do this job for you.

          4. @Kristopher

            Experience indicates otherwise. I have tried repeatedly convince fellow travelers on thr left that not all who claim to be your friend should be embraced. Since a common feature in leftists is to assume best intentions, this is a remarkedly hard sell. Add in several problematic markers, (southern christian) and troubling beliefs (gun control is a dumb idea, a strong military is important) and I am very easy to marganilize. Since the majority of liverals never really see firsthand the CHORFs tactics in action, I have been extrodinarily innefective.

            I have many opinions about Sad Puppies as a movement, but at least it is easier to show off their tactics and basic shallowness.

            Aside, totally did not realize this abbreviated ATF. Anyone need booze or cigs? Pretty sure the guns are covered.

          5. The very fact that you feel marginalized by our using the term SJW on these people because they use the term SJW themselves is, again, not our problem.

            We still cannot fix this for you.

            ( yea, thoughts about a certain gov agency also flew through my head when I typed that )

        2. Brad suggested Flaming Rage Nozzles of Tolerance.

          The problem… and yes, it’s a problem,… with disallowing Social Justice Warrior for “those people we all hate because reasons” is that you’ve got to say *something* and it’s got to be descriptive.

          And yes… they *think* they’re Warriors for Social Justice. That’s their focus and explanation for everything they do. “Yay! I’m the good guy! I’m fighting for Social Justice and Equality and Inclusion and Tolerance! Did you see we got that guy FIRED!!!! Whooo hooo! BTW, I uploaded a video of me being a “good guy” to a helpless minimum wage worker… go “like” my video!”

          (I’m not going to go into nitpicks about what is already politically wrong with the term “social justice”… most people just figure it means anti-racism, so I’ll leave it there for simplicity’s sake… but almost everyone is against racism. Everyone. If someone says they’re against it, it’s because they know that the term has Marxist roots.)

          So it’s all… “You’re saying something “bad” about this thing that I think is “good”. That makes me feel bad. Don’t do that.”

          But how can you separate it one thing from the other?

          Well, you stick “Warrior” on the end of it.

          Sort of the way “femi-nazi” was supposed to be a term for “those people we all hate because reasons” because they were far off the deep end into Man Hating crazy land… but wow… you couldn’t get away with that either because all the “good” feminists were all… how dare you call me a femi-nazi? And you could say… well, does the shoe fit or not? If not, take a chill pill.

          So we *could* all adopt Brads glorious new descriptive term… Flaming Rage Nozzles of Tolerance.

          But then it would be… “Hey, I believe in tolerance. Why are you saying bad things about people who believe in tolerance? You’re making me feel bad.”

          1. I just wanted to post here to say, that the community here has been pretty great. Great thoughts and reasoned responses. Rare for the internet.

        3. The term SJW has been around for quite some time now, it used to mostly describe the Tumblr snowflakes or Big Red of Toronto and their ilk. The original entry for the term on Urban Dictionary is from July of 2011, but until recently there wasn’t much reason to use it outside of certain corners of the internet.

    2. Riley, I am talking about people like David Gerrold and Teresa Nielsen-Hayden, who have been out having histrionic ad hominem fits of rage. I’ve worked hard to conduct SAD PUPPIES 3 with decorum, and both Gerrold and Nielsen-Hayden had turned it into a straight up character assassination with slash-and-burn tactics; to include feeding the media lies about me. I am also talking about Arthur Chu, who has personally attacked me. Most people parsing these comments figured that out instantly, because they are not seeking excuses to make Larry and I into the Bad Guys.

      Of course, people seeking to make us into the Bad Guys will not care how much of a gentleman I’ve been. They will simply find some excuse — even invent an excuse — to tar and feather me. Because this isn’t about logic or reason anymore.

      This is about the tribalism instinct. SP3 has threatened both the tribe of Worldcon (and the liberals who inhabit same) and their totem: the Hugo award. Invaders have come to take the totem away! Defend the totem! Use all means necessary! The totem must be ours, and ours alone!

      We’re talking about a bunch of white (and in many cases, senior citizen) liberals who pride themselves on being “diverse” because they all hold the same beliefs, views, and politics.

      And if you can’t see the titanic irony in that . . . well, good luck to you in life. You will need it.

    3. “So how about you give what you ask for, and stop holding Martin, Scalzi, Entertainment Weekly, Arthur Chu, the Neilsen Haydens, and Requires Hate collectively responsible for everything that any of them have said?”

      One possible answer: because all these guys are saying the same things and using the same tactics. They are a de facto collective, a hive mind, if you will.

      1. I strongly disagree. As much as I dislike some of those people, equating them with RH is wrong.

        TNH and Chu are distinctly different kinds and classes of problems.

        I don’t believe Martin even belongs on that list (assuming you meant GRRM)

        Lets not lose Clarity out of dislike. With the exception of GRRM and RH, I have seen problematic statements from each one documented and attributed here. SP is holding them responsible for their statements, not each others.

        RH’s misdeeds are well documented elsewhere. Repeating the exercise would be wasteful.

    4. “GPS works because of relativity.”

      No, it doesn’t. Geometry is hard, I know, but at least try to know what you’re talking about well enough to troll.

      1. GPS works because of simple math … but GPS can be used to prove Relativity.

        That microsecond error in the original LSC-Hadron results was due to the clocks on the GPS satellites being 24,000 miles out of the gravity well.

        Fascinating stuff …

    5. Hey riley, why don’t you point out where either Larry or Brad said Martin was Hating on them.

      Stop trying to lump Martin in with the rest of the mess. He’s been straight with larry and had a civil debate.
      EW called them racist, homophobic, etc.

      If you’ve been following this, your trying to bring Martin down to the level of Requires Hate, Chu, etc is insulting to Martin.

      1. I had a civil (LONG) discussion with Martin. Chu is a no talent assclown hurling his own feces and asinine allegations while attacking people’s families. They are two very different things. It isn’t Brad who insists on conflating the two.

    1. I know exactly who this is. He’s active duty so obviously didn’t want to tie himself too directly to something the SJW would hone in on as an excuse for attacks. I’ll try to pass on that his modest effort was appreciated.

    2. Tom Kratman just read this and thinks it was “funnier, however, than you may guess.” It seems he did pretty much exactly this when he was 15, at “the oldest school in this hemisphere, a school so ancient that Harvard was (I’m serious) founded in good part to give its first graduating class a place to continue their studies.”

  72. I was sitting on the sidelines. I supported SP3 but wasn’t a participant. After seeing all of the attempts of the other side to look reasonable while not really budging an inch I decided I needed to get involved. Just bought a supporting membership and am eagerly awaiting my voter packet so I can start reading.

    1. I think you might be late, but you do get to vote next year.

      Hey, $40 for a ton of free reading material still ain’t bad.

  73. There is a big reason things always seem to move left. The moderates of the right are goaded into going after those to their right, thinking this will win them the approval of the left. It won’t help and it will only make the moderates on the right the next ‘right wing extremists’, for believing horrifying things that everyone believed a few years ago, such as that children do best with a mom and a dad.

    The moderates of the left almost never do this to those on the hard left; instead, treating those on the hard left as shock troops and important allies.

  74. You are judged by the company you keep Larry. Your enemies will be trying to make big mileage on that. It isn’t fair, that’s just the way it is.

    As an outsider watching this tempest in a tea pot – it looks to me like Vox is alienating some respectable people and powerful allies that might otherwise be sympathetic to your cause. I personally don’t think he and his fanboys will do anything good for the industry and sales but who knows.

    Yaknow, when I first started reading your two blogs I had no respect for you and quite a bit for Vox. That has since turned right around by 180 degrees. It might be time to admit that allying yourself with Vox may have been a bit of a mistake. That boy isn’t much better than the SJW’s he hates so much. It is my conviction that those cultural warriors are bred by men like Vox.

    Good luck getting things sorted out though. Things are getting weird, somebody wake me up when it’s over.

  75. Do not give an inch, Larry. Don’t lose faith. Don’t relent. Don’t apologize. Don’t give in to their pressure. Don’t fall for their tactics of isolation and division.

    This fight is a microcosm of the battle that must be waged for the very soul of Western Civilization. You, Brad, and Vox have shown the blueprint for how such a war is fought and won. And make no mistake, it is a war, even though few recognize it as such.

    Remember this: They shriek because they are losing.

  76. Imagine last year’s Hugo winner for best novel wrote a blog post about an allegorical restaurant where blacks and homosexuals randomly raped white women and children and where women were morally inferior.

    Imagine best novella went to a guy who forbid speculation on the Boston Marathon bombers and then an hour later bet it was non-whites.

    Imagine best novella went to a woman who was once startled by a non-white speaking english without an accent, an Asian playing a violin and who allowed herself to be publicly bullied by a couple of racial ideologues for using the term “cracka ass cracka” in a fictional story and revised it, although it was already finished and published online.

    Imagine best short story was about NAMBLA and GLAAD raining all over nuclear families.

    Imagine best related work was won by a man who wrote a blog post asserting women were moral cowards in an historic time frame.

    Imagine best semiprozine was won by a magazine which review-censored black women and published a men’s-only and heterosexuals-only anthology of SFF together with essays centered around group defamation.

    Imagine the Campbell was won by a person who declared S. Africa a black supremacy.

    Imagine best professional artist was won by a woman who specialized in SFF art with white characters.

    What is that?

    #DitchYourRacists.

  77. “Look at it like this. I’m Churchill. Brad is FDR. We wound up on the same side as Stalin.”

    Vox isn’t Stalin, he’s Marshal Tito: he’s an effective insurgent fighter who you’re glad isn’t on the other guy’s side, and while you wouldn’t want to live in a country he’s running, he isn’t a monster.

  78. “Look at it like this. I’m Churchill. Brad is FDR. We wound up on the same side as Stalin.”
    Lunatic SJWs screeching that you called them Hitler in 3… 2… 1…

  79. “Stop it, white people. Stop it.”

    Read this PoS by a PoC and see what voices are supporting it.

    http://awitin.likhain.net/2015/04/out-of-fracture/

    I am so tired of reading this racial defamation and incitement and see it so widely supported by morons who call it “social justice.”

    On the single Twitter thread I found the link on there was:

    Kate Elliot – “I am speechless. You are brilliant and shining.”

    Ken Liu – “powerful and complicated. I offer my support… I can go on and on about this for hours actually.”

    Elizabeth Bear – “Your voice is valuable because it is your voice, and even where we differ I am glad to have your voice in the world.”

    Rose Fox – “Thank you for writing this.”

    Jaymee Goh – “you are precious and your voice matters.”

    Michael Damian Thomas – “Thank you for existing. Your voice matters to me.”

    And people wonder why I don’t want to see their stupid expressions on a Hugo podium. These are just some of the people whose Twitter feeds have been choked for months going on years with defamatory comments about whites and men. I have my own quote and it goes something like “fuck you” and #DitchYourRacists.

    “’Would RH have been subjected to this treatment were she a white man?’ That is a difficult question” the writer says.

    HELLO VOX DAY and every fucking white man out there YOU MORON!!!! Are you reading your own post?

    Fuck these people – straight up and down the line. I will never support them or their stupid wrong-way racist shit as long as I live.

    “I wish that when an abuser turned out to be a person of color it did not turn into opportunities for white people to gleefully excuse their racism.”

    Charming. Fuck off.

    I love the way at the end she lists stories by every new race-gender fuck who has it in for the white patriarchy coming up the pike. It’s ALL about the rocket ships and dragons. These are truly broken and compulsive nitwits.

    1. And here’s the really sad thing about all that praise. The implication on the part of the speaker is “Wow! You’re non-white, and you’re intelligent and civilized and creative? Wow, that’s really special! I expected you to eat bugs and speak in vague grunts, instead of being able to talk coherently. You’re a Credit To Your Race!”

      In other words, it’s false praise, based on the assumption that most members of the specific non-white group are little better than animals. And the fog of false praise utterly drowns out any real praise that someone might want to give them, for any genuine accomplishments.

  80. Joshua said:
    liberalism is being shown to the greater, wider world, even beyond gamers and scifi fans, to be absurd, totalitarian, intellectually and morally bankrupt, and populated by childish, mentally ill, rabbity bullies and petty tyrants who are, nonetheless, paper tigers who are relatively easily defeated once one finally wakes up and realizes the need to do so.
    ==
    C’mon, Joshua, don’t hold back – tell us what you REALLY think…

  81. “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” – Desmond Tutu

  82. Impressive examples of racist statements from SJWs, James May. SP4 could be titled the fight against racism in SF. Do you have them all collected anywhere?

    1. You don’t have to have them collected them anywhere. They’re the obsessive gift that keeps on giving. They can’t and never do shut up about this stuff.

      No surprise I found that on K. Tempest Bradford’s Twitter (And the woman who wrote it lives in Manilla, which I guess is a white supremacy).

      Contrary to what you may think, this requires no research. If you’re connected to one you’re connected to all of them. They are like a genuine Klan meeting that never ends.

      “Ken Liu retweeted Marko Kloos @markokloos · 18h 18 hours ago @kyliu99 The inclusion of TBP on the shortlist validates my choice in ways you can’t even imagine. I hope it wins that rocket.”

      I hope Marko gets a dictionary. And Ann Bellet

      “Ken Liu @kyliu99 · 17h 17 hours ago @anniebellet Heh. Thanks :-)”

      “‘authentic’ seems often to mean ‘what white people would approve'” – Ken Liu

      My those dirty whites. They are dirty, aren’t they?

      Liu doesn’t like VD, but it’s hard to figure what Byzantine moral ethos Liu uses to feel that way, or Kloos, or Bellet. I honestly feel like this is the Bizarro world with the square tires and lava air conditioners.

      1. Nevertheless, most people outside the fight don’t believe this stuff unless you spoonfeed it to them (see Martin’s post, for instance). Collecting them in one place is a huge help.

        1. Martin doesn’t know about this stuff because he’s too busy. And he’s far likelier to know about it than the average outsider. Other people are going to have to pick up the slack on this. Like I said, it’s not hard to find. If it was it wouldn’t have been an issue with me in the first place.

          Go to the Twitter feeds of last year’s Nebula and Hugo nominees. They never shut up. They talk to others who also never shut up. Follow the ripples outwards. It’s like a flood of quotes. The real way to fight these people is to quote them and in effect signal-boost exactly what they want signal-boosted. They think their rancid remarks actually make sense and aren’t at all racist or supremacist. Though they claim to be passionately against group defamation they in fact have no awareness of what that is, or of how their quotes sound to normal people. Following these people and quoting them is going to have to become a habit, or you’ll lose the initiative. SJWs and their goofball feminists are their own worst enemies. They spend as much time destroying their careers as promoting them.

          Even skeptics are surprised when you show SJW quotes. In fact I still can’t quite get over the fact adult human beings talk about other human being like gender feminists do. I have never in my life seen such rhetoric outside a white supremacist web site… at least til a few years ago.

          What someone needs to do if they want to help is keep a running weekly feature of SJW quotes. The thing that’s most interesting to me is the evidence that outsiders new to this are not at all happy with what they’re finding out about SJWs. In contrast, SJWs are finding themselves with few new supporters and basically falling back and huddling together with the same old racists. It doesn’t help that SJWs don’t use quotes very much and make up lies. They have to, there’s almost nothing to quote.

          1. If someone does, we’ll need either links or screenshots. Nobody will believe the stuff otherwise.

  83. Too late, I’m afraid. You and Vox have been thick as thieves for years now. Indeed, were thieves, trying to steal the Hugos for yourselves and Vox Day’s publishing company (it didn’t escape anyone how you nominated Vox last year, and how he nominated Brad — and how you left spaces open on your ballot this year, so you wouldn’t interfere with Vox’s nominations of Wright).

    You attacked the enemy as allies. Now when the enemy attacks you both, you complain.

  84. “After this however, is the start of the campaigning which started around 2005 or 2006 in the Best Pro Artist category with several interested parties even attempting to change the conditions for nominating because they were fed up with myself or Whelan always being A) nominated and B) potentially winning. I was even asked to withdraw my name-publicly(at the 2007 Hugo Awards in Japan) and privately I was getting my arm twisted and a form of ostracism started taking place. It was not a fun place to be for me, and no longer a good feeling. I felt that as Whelan fell off by attrition so would I eventually and in 2013, after 24 years, I did. I am happy it went that way, I wish and always wish all the winners and nominees for this award well, and personally congratulate them all via email or if they are present. I’ve been thrilled to see it go to newer winners Shaun Tan and John Picacio for example both good pals as well as amazing artists. And that is how it should be.”

    Nope, nothing going on behind the scenes, at all. Move along, move along.

    From Bob Eggleton, artist extraordinaire on Eric Flints blog.

    1. I heard that if you have female suffrage in the Western world for 90+ years, Neo-Fascists are still butthurt about it.

      1. Ah. Libertarians. The “fascism” of leaving people alone.

        Of course to get that you’d have to understand what fascism is…..

        1. Cut Ollie some slack. He saw a new word, and it sounds all ooga-booga scary (and much more sophisticated than ‘big meanie poopy-head,’ which is probably what he was using before). Now he’s gotta run around slinging it at people he doesn’t like in hopes of convincing himself he’s smart. Learn what it actually means? That would require possessing an intellect and actually applying it to something, both of which are anathema to SJWs.

  85. No! Nook! Nit’s Nora Nuhlert. Nhe’s not na nazi.

    “Cora Buhlert retweeted Tananarive Due @TananariveDue · 45m 45 minutes ago Good info on Samuel R. Delany! Oh, and other stuff. // Science Fiction’s White Boys’ Club Strikes Back http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121554/2015-hugo-awards-and-history-science-fiction-culture-wars … #Afrofuturism

    For those of you unfamiliar with the term “Afrofuturism,” in SFF it refers to any fiction or artwork where black folks are up front and center. You can assume “Eurofuturism” would be considered racist. You can also assume SJWs say we have been doing a version of it for over 100 years, which is a lie.

    Tananarive Due is the co-host of the Hugos this year. She had a story in the anthology Long Hidden co-edited by Rose Fox and Daniel Jose Older, two people who have been ruthless in their anti-white remarks on Twitter. It’s an anti-colonialist anthology. I’ll give you three guesses who the bad guys are.

    I would no more accept a Hugo from Tananarive Due than I would David Duke.

    Damien Walter surprisingly says of the article “This is an excellent overview of the longterm problems of racism and sexism with sci-fi.” Damien Walter couldn’t find a quote to back that up if it was tattooed on his stupid fucking head.

    For a pack of proven yowling racists, it’s amusing they have repeatedly put Brad at the head of a white boy’s club which exists (according to N. K. Jemisin) in the tradition of Jim Crow literary tests and strong arm “violent bigots” like Daddy Warpig, and on zero evidence and with zero quotes. I’m not sure how much more swinish these people could act with their bald-faced lies.

        1. honestly, most tend to do better than that, when they have the promotion muscle this kind of politicized thing has backing it. these anthologies don’t sell that well because they are fearfully boring.

        2. Science Fiction Writers Sampler 2014, with a story by Brad Torgersen, is sitting at #15,118. Much higher.

          1. “Riding The Red Horse”, anthology edited by Vox Day and Tom Kratman: Kindle rank #35,209.

            😎

            The tears, they are delicious.

  86. From someone who is way more a cat person than a puppy person, I gotta say….
    Man fuck EW and the shitty reporting the last few weeks from major media outlets. They started this frustrating chain reaction where uniformed people conflate puppies of the rabid and sad variety, don’t look into this at all, start the trolling, cause response trolling, lead to trolls coming out everywhere from all sides and prevent reasonable people with reasonable grievances that should have started reasonable dialogues from getting to do anything other troll fighting. People taking the extreme, uninformed, views on both sides are the fuckin worst.

    Even if I don’t agree with you Larry I’m sorry you have to deal with this bullshit. Thanks for fighting the trolls.

  87. Question not about SP and RP but I couldn’t find Larry’s e-mail:

    I really liked the Grimnoir Chronicles. Are there any sequels planned?

    1. First there’s the free short story (on the sample chapters tab up top), then the two Audible sequels. (All already out there.) the next trilogy IS set a few years after Warbound. Larry also has a few ideas for at least one set before Hard Magic (possibly another trilogy- who knows?) but I believe those have completely different protagonists.
      (All of this is dependent, of course, on Larry actually getting to write books instead of replying the same thing over and over to folks on his blog… Which is the point of this post…)

  88. Mr Correia,
    After some cogitating, I take issue with your statement comparing yourself, Torgerson, and Day to the Big Three.
    At present, you are George Marshall, Torgerson is Eisenhower, and Vox Day is Henry Morgenthau.

        1. I guess you are talking about Junior and not Senior? Because comparing the Hayden clique to the Armenian genocide seemed a bit much.

          1. Junior.
            Vox Day’s planning for the 2016 Hugos strikes as being a little bit too close to “And then we reduce Germany to an agrarian economy.”
            Supposedly, when word got out, German regulars started fighting much harder.

          2. The Hugo’s probably are not significant enough for that to be a really valid comparison.

            Most of the industry’s problems are self inflicted damage revealed by Amazon/technology making competition viable.

            As for the WWII relationship between the United States and Germany, you’ve got to remember that it was the second time Germany was involved in a war against the US. Americans of the time would’ve considered that a failure of policy, and naturally would look for harsher preventative measures, to avoid the need for a third war.

            We were at ‘Japanese will be spoken only in Hell’ level at only one war, and the Democrats had used two wars to coerce people to disavow their German heritage.

            Morgenthau seems fairly credible as a moderate wishing to avoid the need for more extreme measures, perhaps out of sentiment for his German heritage.

            Yes, we don’t see that much looking back, but that may be because we color in the need to keep the Germans alive for sepoys against the Soviets. That was a later realization on the American end, and FDR made it impossible to realize, as an institutional culture, that the Soviets were the root cause of WWII, much less that they were the next enemy in line.

            Okay, yeah, the last couple of decades of German internal messaging may look like they are building up to another war against the US, but the Soviets really were that dangerous.

            So the parallels are really weak. Despite what our enemies in this conflict claim, no one on are side is going to kill any of them. Vox is not the moderate alternative to sentiment that will cool off once the opposing forces actually lose. Furthermore, there is no greater enemy that we need to keep the SJW around and in action to fight against.

          3. Fair enough, but at that point, the Big Three analogy doesn’t really work either.

          4. Well, sure, Vox certainly hasn’t done /more/ harm to the production of fiction for sale.

            The Downfall sub is good enough to make me want to strain to match Hayden to Hitler, and strain further to match some of our guys to the others. Even if what Hayden is alleged to have done doesn’t really compare to what Hitler did, except maybe the latter’s art.

            If Vox is anything, he is Churchill*, and we don’t have any real cognates to the other two. Kratman is Patton, metaphorically speaking, I’ll concede Marshall for Larry, and I don’t know enough about high level Allied officials to have a match for Brad. Right now I don’t see Brad as quite aggressive enough for Eisenhower.

            Kate Paulk may yet prove to be Truman.

            *Set Europe Ablaze.

  89. Larry and Brad, it has been something of a tactical error in leaving out a crucial reason for SP which I know you believe in in addition to the stuff you already talk about, and that is the non-stop racial/sexual harassment from this oddball gender movement that calls itself “feminist.”

    If you break down SJW rhetoric the last 5 years to its barest essentials it reads whites/men, whites/men, whites/men in an endlessly repeating pattern. When you push back against that, SJW rhetoric returns it as racists/conservatives, racists/conservatives, racists/conservatives.

    The latest New Republic article reflects this fact by going straight for your jugular. You are a “white boy’s club” accused of “stacking of this year’s Hugo ballot largely with white men once again.”

    Let’s examine the article’s main argument about SFF history: MEN WHO ARE WHITE WROTE SFF. When you put it like that, it exposes how batshit crazy racist and sexist these people are. It also adds women writers HAD to “cloak their identity. It uses C. L. Moore (she says she did it because of her boss), Leigh Brackett (her actual name) and James Tiptree, Jr. (a prank). In other words it’s bullshit piled on bullshit. It also ignores Ursula Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey and Joanna Russ in the time frame the article itself establishes.

    Laura Mixon’s latest post hands it to you on a silver platter with the same goofy accusation: MEN WHO ARE WHITE WROTE SFF. Mixon flat out says you want to return to a day of “stories about white guys overcoming obstacles.” She writes “#NotAllStraightCisWhiteGuys—there are lots of guys out there who get it.” You’re just not one of them cuz sexist racist homophobe. You’ve missed a golden opportunity. “Get it” and “radical feminist gender studies” obviously means the same thing.

    With no Golden Age evidence of the same ideological racial/sexual harassment we have undergone for the last 5 years, SFF having been white and male is in and of itself said to constitute something like a male oriented KKK. The shoe should be completely on the other foot. If SJWs can’t come up with hostile race-gender rhetoric from the 1912-1970 white boy’s club to match that of last year’s 5 Nebula winners alone, then there’s a whole lot of bullshitting going on.

    In short, one of the most crucial elements of your platform – the truth that SJW rhetoric using the word “Jew” instead of “white” or “men,” reads like a Nazi beer garden or Klan rally – is completely gone. You already knew media outlets were going to lie but you could at least mention they left out this insane cult. The problem is they didn’t – you did.

    In my opinion if you take out this “whites/men” stuff there is no SP and Brad and John never leave the SFWA. Maybe that part is so obvious you simply forgot it.

    WisCon just released an initiative that states that convention’s overall goals: “gender and its intersections with race, nationality, class, disability, sexuality, age, and other categories of identification and structures of power.” It is clear who the bad guy in those identities are and also that that quote reflects the ideology of 100% of last year’s Nebula and most important Hugo winners. What more do you want?

    Based on the overall rhetoric of each side as an entire group, it’s pretty clear that by SJW’s own definitions, for every Vox Day, SJWs have 50 of their own VDs. Why let SJWs skate away? Instead this entire narrative is SP claiming they are anti-liberal dominance with no reference to what that includes: the endless racial incitements and sexual harassment. Frankly, showing how crazy SJWs are should be a no-brainer.

  90. Being married to an Asian and knowing Asian culture I find the over presentation of Asians amongst those SJW:s making the worst comments hilarious. I guess the whole “model minority” thing doesn’t give that street cred of being super oppressed so much yearned these days.

  91. The problem I have with your statement, Larry, as well as Brad’s is that you’re playing right into GRRM’s attempt to divide the movement to reform the Hugos. You have given the inch, he will now attempt to extract from you the mile. (As he apparently has already done by proposing that he get a word in future Sad Puppies slates.)

  92. Larry, I’m a 1st time poster who loves your books and have been following your blog for about 3 years. I just wanted to tell you that George Martin has another post and challenge for you or whomever about sad puppies 3. I just wanted to caution you that he’s pulling one of the oldest and most reliable sjw tricks in the playbook.
    Separate you from your allies, add just enough sweetener to make himself seem reasonable, infiltrate and topple. I don’t know if Martin is sincere in his efforts, but one only needs to look at the dubious track record of those he claims as friends in that very post to be careful. (Trust but verify) You know what your doing and are far smarter than me but i would hate to see all the good you’ve done for our genre be for naught.

  93. Actually, one of the most unfortunate things I’ve seen lately is how the SJWs cower in fear of all those who disagree with them. They feel “unsafe”, need “room”, feel “violated” and on and on. I’m not here to make people feel bad, but if you choose to indulge feelings, I can’t help you recognize their unfounded irrationality.
    It brings up an ancient memory of mine …

    The dungeon master intoned,
    “You enter a dim, low room. A bowl of fire-blackened bones sits before a horrible statue, all wings, fangs and tentacles; above the statue is written in bloody runes, “He who must not be named”. Below it on the pedestal are the letters, “B*A*S*Q*U*E” ….
    Seymour the clueless: “Bask? Bask?”
    DM: “You see a flash of light and a clap of thunder fills the room! The statue starts to move ….

    Soon all we will have to do is go to Worldcon and say, “Vox Day! Sad Puppies! Rabid Puppies!” and the SJWs will scream and run ….
    Blucher! [Neigh!]

    1. You mistake for fear their attempts to use normal people’s compassion for others as a way to control those people. Once you realize what they’re doing and start refusing to play their game, they get screamingly vitriolic.

  94. Bah, there is no need to worry about SJW tactics. “Racist, bigot, sexist, homophobic, I don’t feel safe around you…”. They use all those indiscriminately on anyone who disagrees with their methods, and without any basis in reality. It’s all meaningless, part of their manual book of bullying. It’s better just to laugh at them.

    In fact, I think that I will not call them social justice warriors, because they are not. I’ll call them social justice bullies (SJB), because that is what they are. I have nothing against people who fight for justice. I have everything about people who bully and harass online to suppress the freedoms of those who disagree with them.

  95. I don’t know much about Vox Day, so this isn’t an informed objection, it’s just….Stalin? Really?

    1. Well, if one goes with the best Downfall subtitle ever…

      [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXxNODbC6IE&w=560&h=315%5D

      It isn’t a perfect fit. Soviet foreign policy and their Ukrainian mass murders played a huge role in making a favorable situation for a mad man of Hitler’s qualities.

      It simply is not plausible that Vox Day, in the mid nineties, gave industry moderates so great a fear for their livelihoods that they hired a charismatic madman for dictator.

    2. As I said elsewhere on this thread, he’s Marshal Tito: he’s an effective insurgent fighter who you’re glad isn’t on the other guy’s side, and while you wouldn’t want to live in a country he’s running, he isn’t truly a monster.

  96. I find it highly ironic that the crowd that routinely wears Che t-shirts and Mao t-shirts are insisting that Larry and the Sad Puppies disavow Vox Day.

  97. Wow. People like you make me want to puke. You middle of the road moderates are merely going to be run over by cars going in both directions. Those diversities will never let you be part of their world because of the color of your skin, but you’re racist.
    You remind me of Bush saying Islam is the Religion of Peace or Romney letting that Mad Cow debate for the idiot who reads his script right off the teleprompter.
    There is no negotiating with terrorism. That’s what “socila justice” really is. The reason they side with the Ayatollah is because the only thing they disagree with him on are principles. Since they have none themselves they will gladly team up with Religious Fanatics to further atheist or satanic beliefs.

  98. You personally dragged Vox Day to the party. Heck, you tried to drag GG here too. You’re now responsible for that choice. Don’t give me this “no association” nonsense.

    Here’s your tweets from Sept and Jan, which everyone’s talking about today. “No association?” Finally caught in your own lies:
    https://twitter.com/sinboy/status/589798898325188608

    I’m glad that your reputation is now ruined. None too soon.

    1. There are different meanings of association.

      You display your integrity – or lack of – by choosing the one that makes us look absolutely the worst, as if under that definition anyone here has control of everyone else.

      But then, we don’t live in a fantasy world where we get to control who everyone else talks to and what they do and think.

    2. You don’t seem to realize that your attacks only serve to prove all the assertions that the SPs have made, do you? Silly leftist, unable to understand simple logic.

    3. Wow.
      Just…wow.
      How dare Larry Correia bring in someone who’s been covering culture brushfire wars when he’s in the middle of one.
      Also, the fact that you can’t distinguish between Breitbart London and Gamergate is hilarious.

    4. For those of you who don’t know Sinboy, that’s Rose Fox’s friend. The two together never tire of making the most rancid comments about white men. Sinboy is often in Scalzi’s comments going after anyone who’s a straight white male who hasn’t bent the knee to their insane ideology. It’s hard to detect what any of this has to do with SF but it’s easy to see that if someone thinks it does, they’re an obsessive compulsive freak who probably drags their weird obsession with them wherever they go. These people seem to have no sense of boundaries whatsoever. Everything is about them.

    5. Yep, I’m Pandora.

      In a campaign to expose SJWs, I spoke to a reporter who exposes SJWs. And it was all so terribly secret and reputation threatening that I did it on Twitter.

      It is funny that you put “no association” in quotes, as if I said that, because that would be a lie, but you can Ctrl F this blog post and see that I never said that. We were in the same fight, shooting in the same direction, doesn’t mean I invite him over for BBQ.

      And that whole reputation ruining thing? Yeah, the fact you guys keep trying that with everyone who crosses you is kind of why I started all this to begin with.

    6. “your reputation is now ruined”

      Years of attacks from the other side haven’t managed to hurt Larry yet. Quite the opposite.

  99. On Jan 26, you tweeted that you sent Milo an email about how he could get involved with the Hugos. Milo — a popular voice for GG. Shortly thereafter, Milo tweets about how you AND VOX will have big news for us in the near future.

    I trust you won’t have an issue sharing that email with the rest of us? Nothing in there would prove that you are a racist, sexist, GG bigot… would it?

    Can’t wait to read that email in its entirety, Larry.

    1. Bob – haven’t you heard? Larry can’t be racist. Only white people can be racist, which doesn’t include hispanics.

      I find you calling a hispanic names to be highly racist.

      1. “Bob – haven’t you heard? Larry can’t be racist. Only white people can be racist, which doesn’t include hispanics.

        I find you calling a hispanic names to be highly racist.”

        Remember that the Left subscribes to the doctrine of racial/sexual excommunication for any female and/or non-Caucasian who espouses views that stray towards the right. In their theology, Larry is incapable of being anything other than white.

    2. Why does Larry have to prove that he is not a racist or sexist bigot? Why would anyone imagine that GamerGate — which includes women and persons of all races — was “racist” or “sexist?”

      Blacks and women are, plain and simple …

      … not your shield.

      1. Did you see the latest thing? A con in Canada threw out a group that had already paid dues because they were GG supporters and ‘causing dissention.” That is how far this type of thinking has gone. People assume GG (and Sad Puppies) are a certain way because so many have painted them this way. You can look this stuff up if you want – Look up Calgary Expo and Honey Badgers. It’s sad, man.

    3. So, your smoking gun is that he corresponded with a journalist whose beat covers the subject matter of the controversy.

      Make sure you have a firm grip on those straws.

    4. I read that tweet – He was sharing the story with a journalist. It doesn’t matter if you agree with that journalist or not. There was nothing inflammatoryabout it. “Hey, people said to get in touch with you.” “Okay, here is my email.” “Alrighty then! Email sent!” An exchange thousands of people have had over twitter… Twitter isn’t a good place to explain much of anything, so obviously a reporter, which Milo is (Again, regardless if you agree with him on his viewpoints) is. I’d expect any reporter, regardless if I agree with their POV or not, to do the same.

      Your language shows your obvious bias and you are just here to stir up trouble, thinks I.

      I have issues with a culture that thinks just talking to a journalist about an issue is wrong.

    5. Before video gamers began to be attacked by the likes of Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu and Zoe Quinn, was there anyone pushing back against anyone? No. Bigots started this – bizarre feminist bigots and their weird theories about and obsession with white men any time they’re gathered in one place.

    6. Wait… So while I was trying to expose SJW corruption I spoke with a reporter known for exposing SJW corruption? And said reporter interviewed more people who were involved in the same fight… and that equals racism/sexism? I’m glad you didn’t tack homophobia on there, since the Breitbart reporter in question is openly gay.

      By the way, this was all so super secret that I asked my fans for help with it here: https://monsterhunternation.com/2015/02/04/i-need-your-help-gathering-links-to-sjw-attacks-in-sci-fi-for-a-news-reporter/

      You know, nothing makes me not want to do something more than having an asshole demand I do it. 🙂

  100. By the way, Milo has challenged Anita Sarkeesian to a debate and offered to donate 5 grand to a charity. She’ll never accept it. I’ve seen Milo in action – he’ll tear her to shreds.

  101. Hey everyone, Hugo here.

    So, this is embarrassing to admit, but I…misplaced, yeah miplaced my Diversity. I’m getting old, and the old memory isn’t what it used to be, and I bet that asshole Ellison hid it from me. I tried looking for it, but without my bifocals (Thanks Harlan) it’s become just to much of a task. So I am asking all the fans to help me find it.
    I think I lost, no misplaced it, in one of these photos. First person to find it gets a drink on me at the bar.
    Everyone else, we’ll put your drink on Ellisons tab. He wont notice until its too late.

    Anyways, heres where I think I lost it:
    http://www.locusmag.com/2000/News/News09a.html
    http://www.locusmag.com/2001/News/News09a.html
    http://www.locusmag.com/2002/News/News09Log1.html
    http://www.locusmag.com/2004/News/09_HugoAwardsWinners.html
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award#/media/File:Hugo_2005_2.JPG
    image.frompo.com/5a17495524444a2f2d6eec93528da188
    locusmag.com/2008/Hugo_Campbell_Winners.html
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/30268343@N00/3807508773/
    http://www.locusmag.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/HugosWinnersAcceptorsPresenters2FM2011.jpg
    http://www.midamericon.org/photoarchive/chicon7/12chicon42.htm
    warpcordova.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/2013_hugos_fullgroup.jpg

    If you find it, please let me know. The ruckus I’m enduring is just, well, lets just find it, okay?

    Thanks,

    Hugo

  102. I found this whole issue interesting and saddening. It shows, essentially, how liberals have infiltrated a historically fairly conservative group — Nerds and SF types — and subverted their preferred fiction to produce and reward mostly dreck masquerading as SF. And, when challenged, go into full-on character assassination mode to attack and devalue the opposition. Truth? Who needs that when you can make up all kinds of scurrilous lies and calumnies and spread them around using a whisper campaign? Sooooo much easier…

    You can argue all you want with that assertion — that SF is inherently conservative — but engineering types generally ARE conservative, and the central base of SF is, at its heart, always engineers and variants thereof (i.e., programmers, for example)

    I also found THIS article interesting. This is clearly not the first time others have set to challenge the hegemony in the artistic world of a small clique of self-appointed gatekeepers about what is “right and proper” in a field of art.

    It’s a nice little 1988 American Heritage “history of art” piece about George Luks, one of the members of The Eight (akin to the Sad Puppy people) , The Ashcan School, who challenged the imprimatur of the “National Academy of Design”:

    Today Luks is chiefly remembered as one of The Eight, unconventional painters who effectively broke the stranglehold on American taste in art exerted for decades by custodians of the genteel tradition in the ranks of the National Academy of Design.

    Sound familiar?

    I find reading old issues of AH both interesting and amusing. Not only are you reading an informative article about history, but you’re also getting a window into the worldview of 20,30,40 or more years ago, as you observe inherent assumptions built-into the article. Nowhere is this more telling than 80s articles about the history of the USSR and the Cold War … they had no idea at all that the USSR had only a short while to live. 90s articles about the post-breakup and the “what now” are equally interesting.

    1. SJWs are far worse than that, and why I find them the hilarious train wreck I can’t look away from.

      When I think of SF I think of other planets or a journey to the center of the Earth or aliens or rocketships. What do SJWs define as the SF genre? Homosexuality, race and gay feminism, and even the disabled and trans culture. That’s too crazy even for a Monty Python comedy sketch. That’s about as appropriate as hiring a three-ring circus for a funeral. But since SJWs have no sense of boundaries or dragging bizarre weirdness into inappropriate spaces, nothing they do is wrong, no matter how bizarre.

      You’d think usually a depraved lunatic culture of refined aesthetes would stop there. But no – not our SJWs. For a cherry on their cake they decided to engage in non-stop and daily public racial incitement and man-hatred going on 5 years now to emphasize the fact their ultra-paranoid initiative is dedicated to justice and world peace. They are convinced they are under assault by a white patriarchy whose most fun hobby for the last 5,000 years is to oppress everyone in sight.

      The idea of completely clueless do-gooders like Scalzi, Hines and Kowal led around by the nose by a loosely allied cult of mentally ill racists and heterophobic man-haters is just too humorous for words to describe. Every time I read a comment at Glyer’s by a civilizationally insane throwback to pre-history or even evolutionary cul-de-sac like Paul Weimer or Martin Wisse the clock strikes 13.

      Our dictionary needs a new definition for ignorant childlike playground arrogance, one that has flying buttresses like a Gothic cathedral. SJWs are the Lord of the Flies in action, made all the more terrible by the fact they’ve not had to be thrown onto a desert island to completely break down and revert to savagery. SJWs routinely show they don’t even understand the principles behind law or the meaning of words.

      Even worse, these intellectual castaways not only don’t want to be rescued but shoo away any adult that shows up by swarming them like the mindless dolls in Barbarella and chewing on their thighs. Barbarella is a brand of SF superior to SJW SF because it is at least aware of itself, unlike what has become the signature piece of SJW literature, “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” probably the single most inadvisable bit of fiction ever written in SFF, if not the entire world of literature.

      1. Hey! The Romans put on circus acts for their funerals. When Gaius Julius Caesar III, the famous one, was in his mid to late teens his father died. He got a bunch of slaves to have death matches, and this was some sort of tradition. We get the word circus from Latin, and the Roman circus may have developed from their funerals.

        Also, that one fanfic about the pink ranger being tortured also has a pretty bad reputation. I’d suggest that is at least in contention.

  103. I plotted some Hugo attendance numbers from wikipedia and did a trend fit.

    http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2nm96t&s=8#.VTTKts46WSI

    Notes:
    the trend is a 3rd degree polynomial, which gave the best fit.
    Two green dots at the end are 2014 and ’15 and not included in the fit.
    2015 figure is extrapolated from signup frequency @ the sasquan site and has very large error bars.

    Conclusions:
    1: The Hugo awards are in trouble
    2: Puppies seem to fix some of the troubles, but it may be too soon to tell.

  104. It may not be what you want to hear, but the distinction between you and Vox Day is irrelevant at this juncture. The SP slate, whether you’re willing to admit it or not, is fueled by contempt for what was already winning awards at the Hugos. You demonstrated and enabled a brand of voting that literally only appeals to people with a axe to grind, no matter how benign or vicious that axe is. Your actions and arguments showed people the way, and are now throwing up your hands and saying “Don’t look at ME, thats not ME”.

    Seriously, if you’ve cannot extrapolate the sociological implications of your actions, what kind of Science Fiction writer do you think you are?

      1. I don’t doubt you’d think so. It’s hard to face the reality that the things people do don’t happen in a vacuum.

        1. You should take your own advice. You clearly haven’t the slightest idea of what’s really happening around you.

        2. Wait – context matters, and there’s a whole world that has existed for millions, nay, billions of years, and genetics, and chaos theory, and anti fragile systems and dimorphism and generations succeeding generations and millennia of recorded human history and philosophy that precedes the here and now?

          Imagine that. We never knew that before you told us.

          Or is this like that “nuance” thing from the 200x’s – often used as s passive-egressive and deniable way of calling us idiots and simpleminded, but never actually used in practice by those proclaiming it?

        3. Are you willing to formally condemn your association with racists and sexists like Jemisin and Bradford? Until you do, you should be aware that these things do not happen in a vacuum, and that your reputation is damaged by the dogs with which you lie down.

    1. Paul,

      Larry’s stuff is more fantasy than sci-fi, and he’s the kind that makes enough money entertaining people with words to live quite comfortably.

      “… only appeals to people with a axe to grind, no matter how benign or vicious that axe is.”

      So, how is grinding a benign axe a bad thing? Larry’s argument that a large segment of fandom hadn’t been participating in the Hugo process seems to have been borne out. Now more people are participating, and they happened to choose, btw, an ethnically and politically diverse slate of authors. How is this a bad thing except for people who are allowing their personal distaste for Larry or Vox to overshadow every thing?

      1. Honestly I was being generous, and I would exactly call Larry’s axe all that benign. I mean, he dresses it up all sweetly and pretty like it’s only about promoting positive engagement; he may even truly believe that in his heart. But if he could just step back and examine it freshly, it’s really apparent from the dialogue that there is a truly ugly and contemptuous core to the Sad Puppies project. If there wasn’t, then it wouldn’t have attracted and been emulated by the Rabid Puppies.

        1. That ugly and contemptuous core is so racist, sexist and homophobic they’ll nominate ethnic minorities, women and homosexuals for awards because they’re so racist, sexist and homophobic- is that it?

        2. Your argument that an individual or organization is responsible for its emulators is highly suspect. I’m willing to bet, since you have enough cognition to write the English you can even find the flaw in that reasoning without my help if you think about it.

          1. It’s not about being responsible for emulators. It’s about recognizing the confluence of ideas and attitudes that one projects that can enable and support the intolerant and cruel campaigns we’re seeing happen right now.

            But I see a lot of you guys coming back at me with hostility about Tor Cliques, and -isms, etc. all of which I never brought up and am wholly uninteresting in. But, it at least demonstrates what I’m saying is right: there’s a deep-seated hostility in this Sad Puppies project and the community surrounding it that trying to make a distinction between it a Vox Day’s project rather worthless at this point. It’s all dripping with the same poison, and the more you try to defend yourselves in this way, the more you just enabling and normalizing the actions of those who both all can agree are really terrible people.

          2. Just because you’re uninterested in something doesn’t mean it isn’t the crux of the entire controversy. You’re willfully ignoring the whole point of the matter.

          3. It’s not about being responsible for emulators. It’s about recognizing the confluence of ideas and attitudes that one projects that can enable and support the intolerant and cruel campaigns we’re seeing happen right now.

            “Intolerant and cruel campaigns” in this field began with the Haydens, Scalzi, Jemisin, Bradford, Elliott and others who publicly displayed blatant racism against whites and sexism against men, and thought nothing of it, excusing it to themselves and others with the obviously self-serving and false “Critical Race Theory” under which only whites could be racist and only men sexist. All that even the Rabid Puppies are is giving them a heaping of their own crap served back to them — and, heh-heh-heh, with far greater numbers on their side, which is why the SJW’s are bleating so piteously.

            Can you point me to some of the posts you made condemning the SJW’s for the hate they directed at whites and males? Or at nonwhites and nonmales who dared to disagree with them? Heck, or at the explicit racial segregation of the “safe spaces” at Wiscon?

            And I think it’s utterly hilarious that you think that the Puppies are creating some sort of problem for themselves which will lead to their ostracism from fandom. They have the numbers, you silly little fool. It is the SJW’s who are finding themselves on the outside, who will find it very difficult to win any awards not voted upon by a formally-restricted Inner Circle of those who think in lockstep with them. Fandom as a whole is rejecting your kind.

            And you don’t like it one little bit. Nor, obviously, did you anticipate any such outcome. Which is pretty damned funny given the demographics.

          4. “It’s not about being responsible for emulators. It’s about recognizing the confluence of ideas and attitudes that one projects that can enable and support the intolerant and cruel campaigns we’re seeing happen right now.”

            You mean like the way that advocating internet harassment and vilification as a way to prove your “inclusive” multi-cultural and non-binary-gender bonifieds ENABLED the harassment of “good” people, women and PoC by Requires Hate?

            Sort of like that?

            And sort of like the way that NO ONE has taken responsibility for it, nor been moved to condemn intolerant and cruel campaigns that target those that they feel deserve it because of their birth race and gender?

            Sort of like that?

        3. You ever see any of us promote literature like this:

          “Bee Sriduangkaew ‏@bees_ja 6h Just cobbled this together quickly – a very incomplete list of queer SFF published in 2013 I liked! ”

          “Alex D MacFarlane ‏@foxvertebrae 7h I look forward to following it up with THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF SF STORIES BY WOMEN in 2014, which, trust me, is going to be fucking brilliant.”

          Try and find just one. I’ll wait.

          Meanwhile, you can bet I have 300 just like that.

    2. Why is showing fans the way to reclaim the Hugos from the tiny Tor-based cllique that previously dominated them and awarded them to laughably-bad stories something of which Larry should be ashamed? Furthermore, how does the fact that he did this make him responsible for every action of everyone else who votes for a Hugo forever more?

      You seem to be assuming that the Hugos “rightfully” belonged to the Tor clique, and so anyone else’s participation constitutes some sort of theft of their property. But what moral claim did the Tor clique have to the Hugos in the first place?

      1. Kafkatrap – where even the act of defending yourself (with facts) from a charge of “X”-ism is ALSO proof of whatever you’re being accused of.

  105. It’s really hilarious the way people like you show up calling us nasty vicious names and accuse *us* of being the ugly contemptuous ones. It shows such a massive lack of self-awareness that the mind boggles.

    1. Karin, Paul isn’t unaware; he’s a dishonest liar and a hypocrite. Don’t trust him and don’t deal with him. If he insists on dealing with you, proceed accordingly.

  106. …And if you could just step back and re-evaluate the situation without the prism of “everyone is trying to oppress women and minorities in someway” belief then you might see that the goal of the campaign was inclusivity. Worldcon and the Hugos became insulated from Fandom at large. Larry has encouraged people who haven’t traditionally been participants to get involved and vote on “the most prestigious award in SFF”.

  107. Notice how these media outlets never quote the editors and award-nominated authors who’ve caused all this?

    Were I to go on NPR and do nothing more than quote Rose Fox, Aliette de Bodard, Kate Elliot, and 50 others, the SJW cause would be savaged beyond hope of recovery.

    That’s the funny thing this group does, like at Entertainment Weekly. They attribute to us the quotes of SJWs, but leave out our quotes, cuz they have none for Larry and Brad. There’s a reason they keep score in sports, and in this case it’s because if EW did, SJWs would lose the racial and sexual incitement and defamation battle by about 100 to 4.

  108. What really annoys me about these calls for us to “disavow” somebody on “our side” (whether or not Larry considers Vox on his side), is that these people start SCREAMING BLOODY MURDER if we call on them to speak out against their assholes.

    I understand what Larry is saying but the hypocrisy (from them) is that they hate to be asked to condemn their assholes.

  109. Mr. Correia:

    I believe you. Because I believe you, I realized that Vox Day has exploited you for his personal gain. He didn’t really come up with his own list of recommendations, he took the Sad Puppies’ and edited it to be chock-full of Castalia House publications, to his profit. You can see the analysis at my link.

    Although I disagree with you on a number of points, I believe you-all put SP3 together in good faith, without an eye to personal gain — as was proved when you declined the nomination for Best Novel. Vox Day took your work and your honesty, and turned it into a tool for his own profit. This has been very successful for him, and it would be illogical to assume he won’t do it again next year: he’ll wait for SP4 to be announced, then edit it into an RP2 slate packed with as many Castalia House nominees as he can fit. I know of no way you guys can stop him.

    I have suggested to Sasquan’s Hugo Committee that they rule Castalia House, specifically, as having engaged in ballot-stuffing. I believe that the SF community as a whole can raise money to re-print the ballots, so as not to burden Sasquan further.

    I hope that you can see your way to supporting such an idea, even though it comes from someone opposed to the idea of slate voting. This isn’t about slates, it’s about someone *profiting* from slates, manipulating them for his own gain. The fact that we’ve all been extremely upset (and upsetting) for the past 10 days had made it very difficult to see what’s going on, even when it’s in front of our faces.

    With respect,
    Doctor Science

    1. Is there evidence that Vox has done anything other than recommend a set of stories to people likely to take his advice, such as paying for supporting memberships?

      If not, I’m not sure where the ballot-stuffing charge comes from.

      1. I’m not certain enough of the details of Hugo eligibility regulations (especially as they may have developed after the 1987 Scientology campaign) to be sure telling a whole bunch of people to vote this line and ONLY this *doesn’t* count as ballot-stuffing.

        If it doesn’t, the situation for the Sad Puppies next year is more fraught — because, sure as eggs is eggs, all the work you-all might put in crafting a slate is going to be hijacked again, to enrich one person in particular.

        Is that what you want the Sad Puppies to be *for*?

        1. No, that’s called “campaigning.” And nobody is being forced to vote for anyone, nor are any ballots being forged.

          Why is this okay when the Tor Clique does it, but somehow reprehensible when Vox Day does it?

    2. Ah, so you basically want the Hugo Committee to wind up paying lots of money to Castalia House? Why? I thought you didn’t like Castalia House?

      (Do you need an explanation of why the Hugo Commitee, or more likely Worldcon as a corporate entity, will wind up paying lots of money to Castalia House? Hint — consider how one gets to vote on a Hugo, and the legal concept of “consideration.”)

      1. Do you know enough about the rules and history of the Hugos to be certain that this would be the case?

        In particular, publisher-led vote drives have taken place before; I don’t know how that may have influence how the organization’s rules have developed.

        In the case of the 1987 Hugos, fans voted L. Ron Hubbard’s book below “No Award”, to indicate their rejection of his publisher’s (and his religion’s) tactics.

        1. Ah, then you don’t understand. Let me quote you:

          I have suggested to Sasquan’s Hugo Committee that they rule Castalia House, specifically, as having engaged in ballot-stuffing. I believe that the SF community as a whole can raise money to re-print the ballots, so as not to burden Sasquan further.

          If the Hugo Committee did this, then they would be selectively annulling ballots for Agreement With Castalia House. This might itself be actionable by authors who were on the Castalia House slate. More importantly, it would be very directly and obviously actionable by those individuals who had cast the ballots being annulled.

          At a minimum, the Committee would have to pay them back the $40 each of them had paid to cast the ballots. If they didn’t, then they would have committed intentional criminal and civil fraud, by accepting consideration for a good or service they did not intend to deliver.

          What’s more, if the Committee did not anull all ballots by all participants, it would be selectively rejecting the votes that it disliked, meaning that its voting procedure would be corrupt, creating clear grounds for action by authors on the Castalia House slate to sue the Committee for damage to their livelihoods. In this case, a lot of money (far more than $40 per ballot) might be at stake.

          If the rules say that for $40 one can have a ballot, then anyone and everyone who pays the $40 gets a ballot, and votes as he pleases, whether or not this is the same as others please. If the Committee tosses out the ballots of which it disapproves based on the votes on those ballots, that is fraudulent conduct on the part of the Committee.

          It has nothing to do with persons voting “No Award.” That too is a choice, and if the Tor Clique can find enough sympathizers to essentially cancel the award in major categories, this too may happen, and is legal and honest within the stated rules.

          I expect your thanks for enlightening your ignorance in this matter. You might want to study both contract law and political science, since you clearly have a very dubious understanding both of the concepts of “fraud” and of “ballot stuffing.” Neither means “voting for people you don’t like.”

  110. Dear Mr Correia,

    You msy be sober in the morning; but you are no Sir Winston.

    S (A British purchser of your books)

    1. Yeah, I’m pretty sure I didn’t mean that literally. (And there was no way I was going to claim FDR!)

      Though Sir Winston also carried a 1911, so he was a man of excellent tastes.

  111. So in conclusion, we are not Vox Day.

    Of course not. He’s Al Qaeda, and you’re simply the oh-so-innocent Taliban.

    1. Want to take a bet which side of this debate has more people on it who have shot Taliban and Al Qaeda? 🙂

    2. (*nods*)

      How dare either Larry or Vox encourage people to vote for different candidates than those already decided upon by far superior souls such as the wise Haydens and John Scalzi? Don’t Larry and Vox know that the awards really belongto the Approved authors, and that voting for other writers is an act of theft? You are to be commended for grasping that encouraging voting for anyone else is a despicable crime!

  112. I’m stopping by to make a point. I’ve seen a lot of commentary on this blog (and elsewhere) blaming what you see as the influx of sf based on gender/race politics on RaceFail. There appears to be a general misunderstanding of RaceFail, and I think you might find the actual origin enlightening.

    Elizabeth Bear posted something about “writing the other” on her blog. A reader posted saying that Ms. Bear was perhaps not as good at this as she thought, as the reader started one of her books, found it upsetting from a racial standpoint, and didn’t finish it.

    The response to this was a massive dogpile from Bear’s author friends, who went on to imply (or state outright) that the reader was simply too stupid to understand what a quality writer Bear was. Other people, upset that authors thought it was acceptable to dogpile a reader (and call her stupid!) came in to argue. TNH decreed that readers using pseudonyms were all trolls (and attacking these poor, poor authors who were in no way behaving badly) and started disemvowelling people who disagreed. I’ve forgotten at this point what PNH said (he deleted it), but it was similarly nasty toward readers. Sarah Monette wrote a post where she put a bunch of snide comments in parentheses about how Elizabeth Bear was a better writer than the reader was a reader (by saying she wanted to say this but wouldn’t, we were supposed to ignore that she actually had?). Scalzi likewise leapt in to insult readers (to date, I think he’s one of two who has halfway apologized, the other being Emma Bull). After initially saying maybe the reviewer had a point, Elizabeth Bear later posted something saying that she always knew she was right and was just pretending to care about the reader’s opinions. How sweet.

    The general feeling was that if these authors thought we were too stupid to read their books, why should we waste our time and money? Why not ditch them and go read books by actual people of color? Some people went to the 50books_poc community to get ideas.

    Enter Winterfox; if you liked books she disliked, she’d try to eviscerate you. What a sweetheart.

    In short: during RaceFail, we were upset because a bunch of arrogant assholes told us we were too stupid to understand their glorious books. Everyone tried to keep the hell out of Winterfox’s way, because she was dangerous. If you think we’re off buying these people’s books, patting them on the back, and nominating them for awards, think again.

    (If you don’t believe my description of RaceFail, look up Ann Somerville’s.)

    1. Scalzi didn’t half-way apologize, he groveled.

      Him “calling readers stupid” was something more like a mild “there might be a point to…” the alternate opinions. Because no alternate opinions were allowed.

      Winterfox was allowed to gain a following and run free with guilt ridden permission by everyone to be as nasty to “bad people” as possible since it had now become verboten to criticize someone who was “punching up.”

      Friends began to unfriend you if you didn’t make public confessions of guilt and privilege, even though those confessions didn’t involve any particular action, only public confession of the new doctrine.

    2. If you can’t see how the public shaming and forced attention to active affirmation of “no matter what a PoC or otherwise identifying person says, they are always always right… also they get to Punch UP” is involved in a whole bunch of ridiculously privileged white upper middle class women making a freaking FETISH out of forcing this on the whole genre, well, you’re wrong.

      1. I’m not a big believer in “punching up”, or in people being above criticism. But, okay, sure; the idea that anyone who identifies as a person of color ought to be able to say whatever they want to anyone else without ostracism is, in fact, a problem. Did it contribute to the rise of Winterfox? Perhaps. She was following the time-honored path of MsScribe. In both cases, it worked pretty damned well.

        Consider the power differential between one reader commenting on a post and a bunch of published authors slapping her down and telling her she’s too stupid to have an opinion.

        Take the concept of racism out of the equation here for a moment. If a reader comments that a book irritated him because, hmm, all capitalists are always evil in the book, is it okay to have a bunch of authors dogpile that reader and talk about how he’s just too stupid to read the book unless he can disengage from his irritation and recognize how beautifully it complicates the concept of capitalism in an artistic manner? Then, of course, to have this spread across multiple author blogs with more of the same…

        You know what would have prevented the explosion? Saying, “You know, I hadn’t thought of it that way. Thanks for the comment.” You don’t have to agree with reader feedback, but, if you invited it, be polite.

        When published authors slam their reviewers, they get publicly shamed. When they double down on the slam and start defending themselves with “If you can’t take it, don’t dish it out!” and especially when they stalk their reviewers, readers keep the hell away from them. People think this is different because it involved race– okay. But people have spent years mocking Anne Rice for telling people they were “interrogating the text from the wrong perspective” and “straining her Dickensian principles to the max.”

        These people were patting themselves on the back about their enlightened approach to gender, race, and politics well before RaceFail happened. They were writing books with heavy-handed moralizing. They were also dominating the Hugo nominations. Go look.

        During RaceFail, fans got smeared with the exact same tactics by the exact same people you’re conflicting with now (is TNH decreeing people who use pseudonyms are all a bunch of sockpuppets and trolls, telling them she’s going to make them suffer, and disemvowelling people who disagree with her, yes or no?)

        Whatever you think of the initial comment in RaceFail, the author pile-on was uncalled for. The people who acted like complete and utter assholes before and during RaceFail continue to pat themselves on the back and act like assholes, and you think it’s all about RaceFail and that we’re behind them every step of the way? Oh, please.

        1. One thing that I like about Larry Correia is that he defends his fans from accusations that they’re somehow either having fun wrong or somehow second rate fans and don’t count.

          You’re right that the best response of an author is some little “thanks for the comment” or “I hadn’t thought of that.”

          But here’s something else, too. I’ve had conversations with PoC where they asked, essentially, “why does it bother you to be called racist?” Because I’ll explain something that is true, here. A whole lot of this “stuff” in our culture right now… if it’s women against the patriarchy or PoC against whites is based upon and depends upon the “oppressed” side of that understanding exactly what it’s like to be the “patriarchy” or exactly what it’s like to be “white” and those people having Not A Clue what it’s like to be… the person they’re supposed to listen to.

          How likely is that?

          Someone posted elsewhere (and I can’t find it back for nothing) a screed about “Congratulations, Larry, now you know what it’s like…”

          Working class, in particular, have ALWAYS known what it’s like. It’s part of the reason they (we?) are so ready to call b*llsh*t on the supposed “white male privilege” thing.

          1. What I usually see on my end is *not* people being called racists. I see someone saying, “Hi, I’m black, and the way you did this thing bothered me.” The response to this then goes, “How dare you call me a racist! I’m not a racist! I have black friends who know I’m not a racist!” etc. etc. etc. massive pile-on of idiocy. etc. etc.

            Flat-out calling someone who isn’t a hood-carrying member of the KKK a racist is never going to go over well. NKJ was unwise to make the comments she made about Heinlein and the SF genre. Very poor choice of target, going after someone who sincerely tried to be inclusive. He may not have succeeded in her view, but he tried. (If she’d said Campbell was, I doubt there’d have been an issue.) And everything in the genre? Really?

            It’s of no great use to deal in stereotypes or big amorphous blobs like “the patriarchy.” That never gets anyone anywhere and just makes people angry: they never got a membership card or were invited to the oppression planning meeting. Much better to deal with individuals.

            To go back to the topic at hand, though, I’d appreciate it if people (including Correia and Torgerson) would stop implying that this is some conspiracy of the left against conservatives. It irritates me when I see claims that “the left” does this, that, and the other. When certain people are behaving badly, stick to that. If nominees are boring and you think they should be more fun, I don’t mind that, either. Most everyone I know ignores the Hugo award winners because they aren’t relevant to their interests, so, sure, suggest something more fun.

            I don’t like being bashed for people completely out of my control, some of whom I have actively disliked for years. I’m sure you can relate.

          2. If you are defining “conspiracy” as something deliberately planned, maybe not. The far better term would be innate. As in they can’t help being hateful any more than a rattlesnake can help being venomous. And in both cases, the remedy doesn’t involve hate, just appropriate weapons.

    3. I already knew all that. No one’s saying this was invented then, but that it was a flashpoint where folks discovered how they could muscle people around by shaming them. It was a perfect storm of certain intersectional authors entering just then and the real eruption of social media.

      1. The malicious will find a way to abuse any situation. No one expects people they “know” to be sociopaths, and most people take what their friends say at face value. If you assume most people are well-intentioned, it is very, very easy for those who are not exploit you.

        The context of the “STFU and listen” rule was as I’ve said above: Someone would say they found a *thing* troubling. People would respond by taking it as a personal attack and saying they weren’t racist, all their friends would join in, and an enormous clusterfuck would erupt. In this context, the rule makes perfect sense. When removed from that context, it doesn’t.

        In RaceFail, nobody wanted the authors to fall on their swords and make long posts of deep shame. They did that themselves, and it was largely seen as a massive attention grab. Which it was. Very few of these self-flagellations contained the key words people were looking for, which were: “I’m sorry.” Not, “I’m sorry for my deep unconscious racism”, to be clear, but, “I’m sorry for my bad behavior here.” Instead, we got conspicuous martyrdom where people managed to blather on about how well-intentioned they were, all their past hard work on social issues, and how important their work was. Then they all patted each other on the back and sang kumbaya.

        I’m not concerned with the *presence* of intersectional authors in the genre. I’m concerned with the quality of writing and with toxic behavior.

  113. I was told by one of his supporters yesterday that Vox is also a fan of Umberto Eco and China Mieville.

    God damn it, now I can’t re-read Foucault’s Pendulum, in protest!

    [/Sarcasm]

  114. Bless you Larry, you can pound nails into a fence post but not sense into an “intellectual.” But of course, the simple, observable facts must be repeatedly shoved into their noses… well, so you can prove to the court later that you tried, and due diligence is on your side.

  115. If you look around you and realize that everyone you know is an asshole, there’s probably a reason. Birds of a feather, and all that.

    1. “If you look around you and realize that everyone you know is an asshole, there’s probably a reason. Birds of a feather, and all that.”

      *sniff sniff* Something suddenly smells like urine-soaked adult diapers and impotent rage…. necroposting on a blogpost with Vox’s name on it… oh look, it’s Clamps!

    2. The people around me aren’t the ones who just voted No Award above more than 2 dozen nominees. Maybe you should take another look around you.

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