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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: 4, Insightful) by naubol on Monday April 13 2015, @04:27PM
ANGRY MINORITY FIELD GUIDE
How do you succeed as a pissed off minority? First, you're never going to get anywhere if you stop being angry for a moment and start to think about why you're actually angry. Doing this will inhibit your ability to vehemently exhort your position. So, the first tip is remain angry at all costs and make sure all the members of your community are also angry.
Appeal to their vanity! Make sure they understand that what they want is not proportionately represented with the existing system. Help establish martyrs, used words like, "we're being attacked!". Cloak yourself in the righteousness necessary to suggest that you're just trying to get some equal representation in a world totally against you.
Before you launch your conspiracy to grab disproportionate control over the system, establish a story line that suggests the current system has unjustly ignored you. It is important to cherry pick evidence, but even dealing with evidence is a problem. The mere existence of policies or artifacts that are not to your taste should be branded as proof positive that you are being marginalized beyond all justification. While speaking about their products, it is important that you use characterizations that imply the worthlessness of the majority's output as well as their general lack of fitness for general society. You have to appeal to bystanders who might be considered reasonable.
Since you're going to be flinging a *lot* of poo in this process, it is important that you find sensitive firebrands in the majority who you can pick on and reference constantly in the upcoming struggle. If you pick the white knights that exist on the other side, they may be so boring that reasonable observers will figure out that you're slinging almost all of the poo! Remember, your actions will be considered much more justifiable if you can get some on their side to lower themselves to your level. Since you will soon have a platform for voicing your views loudly, you can and should make these opposing poo-flingers much more famous than they should be!
Remember, you have more to win than they do if the argument turns ugly, because you will now get to frame the debate! This will cause everyone to start talking about the middle as thought it is halfway between you and them, a big win for you! In the process of making the other side's poo-flingers more famous, you will also marginilize the more reasonable voices on the other side, who are better able to counter your arguments without making it seem like they're being unfair.
You absolutely must develop words that shame and humiliate people. Without these, your characterization attacks will sound rather week. Since the other side is a complicated nuanced community with a large tent and a million views, if you present too many views yourself, you won't be able to create an us vs them mentality and your community might fragment underneath you. Therefore, at all costs, push a simple image of them and a simple image of you. This also helps you sound reasonable, because it is easy to drop a low-grade whine referencing just the two simple concepts and why yours is so obviously better.
Segregate your messaging based on the medium. Your most insane comments need to be kept with the true believers or you might end up being perceived by all people as too fringe to accommodate. Remember, most people want to compromise! You actually want a compromise, because you will win far more than you deserve, based on your numbers.
Your public comments should be angry, low-grade, generic, and easy for other low-grade angry internet users to project their own frustrations. Then, they become your natural allies on other forums as they really just want to feel like they're part of something. They aren't usually living lives filled with affection and security, so they'll do anything that makes them feel a little powerful.
Be careful, however. One of the hidden dangers is that someone more extreme will hijack your movement out from under you! Unfortunately, I don't have much advice here because this tends to be inevitable. However, if this does happen, at least you can comfort yourself that your successful efforts at balkanizing a community make you an important person.
HAPPY MINORITY FIELD GUIDE
Make reasonable requests, seek concession, start dialogues, build loyalty (slowly), suggest how the larger community can absorb your interest requests without significantly compromising theirs, build bridges, ... This process takes decades and much more effort. It also is rarely satisfying. You do have to be disruptive, people do only appreciate strength, but judiciously so, and that is a hard needle to thread!