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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."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday April 13 2015, @01:43PM
Vote stuffing? Try again. Or do you mean that they're letting the "wrong kind of people" vote? Yeah, that's what I thought.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Monday April 13 2015, @04:27PM
Vote stuffing? Try again. Or do you mean that they're letting the "wrong kind of people" vote? Yeah, that's what I thought.
So there is nothing wrong with "mod bombing" on this site, then? Is mod bombing simply letting the "wrong kind of people vote?"
For someone who thinks gaming the system is OK you sure do spend a lot of effort trying to prevent it.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 13 2015, @04:58PM
Buzz is like Scalia - a man of principles and integrity (just ask him!) so long as everything lines up with his principles.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday April 13 2015, @09:49PM
So there is nothing wrong with "mod bombing" on this site, then? Is mod bombing simply letting the "wrong kind of people vote?"
Nothing wrong with mod-bombing on this site. It has happened to me and I quite thoroughly enjoyed it. The point is that everyone gets to vote, so there really is nothing unfair about it, unless you are a sad puppy Soylentil.
I don't think it means what you think it means.
And I am sure it does not mean what the Mighty Buzz thinks it means. But then, he is saying Social Justice Warrior (please spell it out for true American Glory!) as if that was a bad thing! Honestly, I do not know what to say, other than "Vote for Noah Ward in all categories!!" in the Hugo balloting.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 13 2015, @10:40PM
> But then, he is saying Social Justice Warrior (please spell it out for true American Glory!) as if that was a bad thing!
Better an SJW than a DSI - defender of social injustice.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 14 2015, @10:40AM
So there is nothing wrong with "mod bombing" on this site, then?
Honestly, I'm mystified by the obsession over mod bombing. I have yet to see anyone link to a serious case of it.
(Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Tuesday April 14 2015, @04:18PM
I've been out if it for awhile, what is mod bombing?
"Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Tuesday April 14 2015, @11:39PM
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday April 14 2015, @02:31AM
As a comment on one of the SP blogs put it:
Hugos: We need more people participating! Get all your friends to buy a membership and vote!
SPs: Okay.
Hugos: NO! NO!! WE DIDN'T MEAN IT THAT WAY!!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.