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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: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday April 14 2015, @08:36AM
Racism and sexism are not mild disagreements, they are crimes.
Libel is a crime. Racism and sexism may or may not be, depending on the jurisdiction and if/where the behavior manifests. Merely, being accused of such things in the writing of science fiction is obviously not a crime in most of the developed world. If such behavior actually did occur during a business's hiring practices or the exclusion of people from public activities, it might be a crime or the basis of a civil lawsuit (which is not a crime, but is a punishable offense).
If I call you a racist because you are one, there is no libel at all, even if you yourself, personally, in your own little cocoon of racism, could not detect it.
Unless, it's not true. Truth is an absolute defense, only if it is true. One of the things that notable here is a callous disregard for truth. For example, the Sad Puppies were accused of presenting a group of candidates that weren't diverse in the usual multicultural sense. This accusation was trivial to rebut, indicating that the accusers didn't spend even a little time fact-checking.
This is not a matter of disagreement, it is not a "difference of opinion", it is some people having criminal intent, in violation of the International Declaration of Human Rights.
Bullshit for two obvious reasons. First, the International Declaration of Human Rights is an intent to curb government not private behavior and actions. It was never intended to apply to individual people. Second, it's not an actual law, but rather an agreement. Few individuals have explicitly agreed to the agreement and nobody, government or otherwise has agreed to allow that statement to apply to their actions with legal force.
I'll note here that it also is terrible law, due to the various rights to have stuff, but not have the right to have someone provide that stuff. For example, I have supposed rights to a nation, social security, paid lots of money ("just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection"), "special care and assistance" if I'm a mother, free education, and "entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized" (world tyranny, here's yet another flimsy pretext for your creation).
Expect someone, sooner or later, to come after you, just like they did for the Nazis who escaped to South America.
Fuck you. When are you going to care about justice and actual problems rather than engage in toothless witch hunting?