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posted by LaminatorX on Monday April 13 2015, @11:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the Livejournal-still-works dept.

From the The Guardian.

Introducing the Sad Puppies...

"The shortlists for the long-running American genre awards, won in the past by names from Kurt Vonnegut to Ursula K Le Guin and voted for by fans, were announced this weekend to uproar in the science fiction community, after it emerged that the line-up corresponded closely with the slates of titles backed by certain conservative writers. The self-styled "Sad Puppies" campaigners had set out to combat what orchestrator and writer Brad Torgersen had criticised as the Hugos' tendency to reward "literary" and "ideological" works.

Today's Hugos, Torgersen has blogged, "have lost cachet, because at the same time SF/F has exploded popularly – with larger-than-life, exciting, entertaining franchises and products – the voting body of 'fandom' have tended to go in the opposite direction: niche, academic, overtly to the Left in ideology and flavor, and ultimately lacking what might best be called visceral, gut-level, swashbuckling fun".

Twenty years ago, he writes, "if you saw a lovely spaceship on a book cover, with a gorgeous planet in the background, you could be pretty sure you were going to get a rousing space adventure featuring starships and distant, amazing worlds". Nowadays, he claims, the same jacket is likely to be a story "merely about racial prejudice and exploitation, with interplanetary or interstellar trappings".

And here we have the Rabid Puppies definitely not mentioning GamerGate:

Another group of allied rightwing campaigners, dubbing themselves the Rabid Puppies and led by Vox Day, real name Theodore Beale, have also added their voices to the block-voting campaign against what Day called "the left-wing control freaks who have subjected science fiction to ideological control for two decades and are now attempting to do the same thing in the game industry".

And finally a bit of Martin:

"Call it block voting. Call it ballot stuffing. Call it gaming the system. There's truth to all of those characterisations. You can't call it cheating, though. It was all within the rules. But many things can be legal, and still bad ... and this is one of those, from where I sit. I think the Sad Puppies have broken the Hugo awards, and I am not sure they can ever be repaired," he wrote.

"If the Sad Puppies wanted to start their own award ... for Best Conservative SF, or Best Space Opera, or Best Military SF, or Best Old-Fashioned SF the Way It Used to Be ... whatever it is they are actually looking for ... hey, I don't think anyone would have any objections to that. I certainly wouldn't. More power to them," he added. "But that's not what they are doing here, it seems to me. Instead they seem to want to take the Hugos and turn them into their own awards."

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday April 14 2015, @08:53AM

    by cubancigar11 (330) on Tuesday April 14 2015, @08:53AM (#170278) Homepage Journal

    This is ridiculous. The problem with claiming 'All nazis are bad people' is not that all nazis are not bad people, it is that you can pretty much call anyone bad by calling them nazi without proving why they are bad. For example, this is exactly what you have done. People like you ruin left. It is like that moron who read one book on newtonian physics and now goes around calling all physicists a pseudo-scientists for believing in relativity.

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  • (Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Tuesday April 14 2015, @04:11PM

    by Vanderhoth (61) on Tuesday April 14 2015, @04:11PM (#170435)

    I'm in agreement there. In the early days of GamerGate the FIRST thing the media and opposition did was, "GAMERGATE IS MOSIGYONIST, GAMERGATE IS THE KKK, GAMERGATE IS WORSE THAN ISIS, GAMERGATE ARE LITERAL NAZIS" and people sucked it up.

    Go to just about ANY game site and say you feel ethics are a good thing for journalists, or professionals in general, to strive for and it's, "STFU YOU GAMERGATE GOON!!"

    It's all guilt by association. Make your opposition such a taboo that anyone fence sitting will be afraid to accidentally fall on to their side.

    --
    "Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday April 15 2015, @06:21AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Wednesday April 15 2015, @06:21AM (#170795) Journal

    OMG. Let's do the math. You are a Nazi. Now, you may not buy into that whole "superior Race" thing, but you are loyal to your nation that seems to have bought into it. And rounding up Communists, Socialists (other than the Nationalist kind, of course), Homosexuals, Jews, Gypsies, and actual Catholics, you did not agree with any of that, even though you participated in it. And the whole work/death camp thing of the "final solution", yes you acceded to it but it always seemed a bit extreme to you. Couldn't we just send these aberrant writers of science fiction to another country instead of killing them all? Of course, as a "good" Nazi, you would never dare say such a thing, and so by silent tacit consent, you are responsible for the entire Nazi program. That is what it means to say there are no good Nazis, if they were good, they would be in the camps as a political prisoner. not still wearing the uniform and bearing arms. So what of the Sad Puppies? Good Nazis, or Bad Nazis? Not so bad right wing fanatics and Mormons, or just Science fictions writers who want to be able to have a hard-on and conquer evil lesser races, like Slavs? Let's not go all Godwin at once, since I really think it is possible to get there by slow steps. "Service guarantees Citizenship! Want to know more?" Fascism, pure and simple, only redeeming quality is that it is fiction, after all.

    • (Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday April 15 2015, @09:10AM

      by cubancigar11 (330) on Wednesday April 15 2015, @09:10AM (#170863) Homepage Journal

      What do you mean by 'You are a nazi'?

      You are a woman. Now you may not have a vagina, or you might even like girls... ugh.. the brain is already hurting by imitating your strenuous reply. Just. Keep it simple stupid.

      • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday April 16 2015, @09:05AM

        by aristarchus (2645) on Thursday April 16 2015, @09:05AM (#171485) Journal

        Evidently I did not keep it simple enough for you. I would give you a "whoosh", but I am afraid that would go right over your head as well. Stay cool, bro, don't ever change!

        • (Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Saturday April 18 2015, @11:56AM

          by cubancigar11 (330) on Saturday April 18 2015, @11:56AM (#172365) Homepage Journal

          You can't make so many assumptions and keep it is generalized. I don't know what your personal experiences are but most things don't happen with so much planning or are how things run. At some time you need to stop looking at rest of the humanity under discovery channel - as if there are certain 'type' of people and this or that is their behavior.