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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) by Yog-Yogguth on Wednesday April 15 2015, @10:51AM
Okay I'm still stupid enough to throw myself at the windmills. Here I go. I bet it will be another attempt in vain and you'll probably end up hating me and my immense arrogance, so be it, I think this is important enough to be stupid and arrogant. It's not much in the way of hand-holding either but it can be an entryway to confronting oneself (for me too).
No I'm sorry on your behalf (and disappointed) but you're not excused in this case, your peers brought this upon yourselves (and everyone else) as they successfully made racism and sexism worthless words and badges of honor both by your own metrics (inverted) and others. You made everything worse rather than better, you increased the crimes and most of it is still hidden. Stuff like the topic of TFA is nothing compared to what's coming over the hill. That's your achievement, your monster child, and you can't disown it just because you were too ignorant to see it coming. That kind of excuse didn't work in the Nuremberg trials either. So please learn, it really doesn't have to be that way. You might for example think of yourself as anti-racist and anti-xenophobic when you support immigration but in practical terms you are functioning as a slave trader (both for sex and profit) while you're destroying the working class or even disturbing the ecology of societies that were heading towards ecological equilibrium (falling birthrates in industrialized populations) and doing relative population replacement on scales that already now trend towards genocide (look at immigration birthrates and don't feign stupidity). You are funding the people and things you claim to oppose and you've been doing it on a massive scale. It doesn't really matter if you understand or agree because the result will be what it will be either way unless you stop. It doesn't matter what ideology you confess to or what ideals you spout. Reality doesn't care about intent.
You/your peers still don't understand it but it happened the moment you started to shut people down because you only wanted to listen to and expand the influence of your private bubble of approved opinion. It is exactly the same no holds barred control freak nonsense the NSA etc. have brainfucked themselves with. There is a lot more coming your ways in this regard and hopefully it stops with your lot being a bit wiser about those flaws of yours. No I should say it even though I like you: not really flaws but purely fascist methodology straight out of Nazism and Soviet communism. You see it really doesn't help what your aims are, who or what you fight, because it's a direct result of choice of methods. No different to how torture is totally useless beyond the most trivial of trivial cases and highly detrimental even in those (was it Chicago that just now started the long process of trying to pay the bill for torture committed locally in the seventies? How ironic considering their current mayor: one of yours whether you like it or not or whether you realize it or not).
George Orwell/Eric Blair tried to make everybody understand it a long time ago (and others far earlier than him), this time it's not 1984 (although it's really part of the same issue and deeply connected) but Animal Farm and you took the role of the pigs and most of you seem to still be stuck on that.
You did not/do not understand that the evils you've read about are the evils you represent. Keep pushing and the slaves, your slaves, will take revenge upon you soon enough when stuck between a rock and a hard place (not that it will solve anything or break the cycle of idiocy), most of them know by first hand experience how wrong you and yours are and have been and they utterly despise your words much more than I do (and I despise your words as exemplified in the comment I'm replying to a lot), the rest want to kill you for other reasons (even though you're funding them) and the only exception in that case is if you submit to them as a few have done already. As long as these are the only alternatives we're all destined to lose.
You can insist and reply with the same old clichés but it changes nothing. You're both lucky and unlucky it has gone as far as it has: lucky to still be alive, unlucky to have kept on building up resentment to ever greater heights. It doesn't take much in the brains department to realize that it can't go on forever.
The solution? Try to understand what those you declare racists, sexists and whatnot have been and still are trying to tell you. Isn't this post plain English? Is there anything you find obfuscated or occluded? Is it too hard to understand the quantities? Have you ever made any effort at all to understand or play devils advocate against your own preconceptions? Have you even identified your assumptions? Yeah it is a lot of work when you're catching up thirty or forty years but it's all out there on the net in multiple variations and formats from a lot of different people just waiting for you to connect (or discard as is also required) the dots on your own.
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(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday April 15 2015, @11:23PM
Yog! Thank you for the rational reply! Totally unexpected, I assure you. And of course you are totally wrong, even though I agree with almost everything you say.
Okay I'm still stupid enough to throw myself at the windmills. Here I go. I bet it will be another attempt in vain and you'll probably end up hating me and my immense arrogance, so be it, I think this is important enough to be stupid and arrogant.
Hate's got nothing to do with it. I don't hate you, and I would hope the non-hate is mutual. And I would not call your response arrogant at all.
your peers brought this upon yourselves (and everyone else) as they successfully made racism and sexism worthless words and badges of honor both by your own metrics (inverted) and others.
Now here I disagree. What makes you think that anyone has changed the meanings of these terms? I think the only think that has changed it that the behaviors which used to pass (due to far more egregious wrongs) are now being called out. Maybe this is the point: when I say someone is racist, because, for example, they repeatedly use the term "thug" to refer to an African-American victim of police violence, I am not making things up and disagreeing with them about the facts, I see that there is actual racism behind their choice of words. Am I supposed to listen to them about how African-Americans are actually more criminal that white folk, and intellectually inferior, and how slavery was actually good for them? No, you see there is nothing to debate here. I already understand what the racist thinks, but they fail to understand their own position.
while you're destroying the working class or even disturbing the ecology of societies that were heading towards ecological equilibrium (falling birthrates in industrialized populations) and doing relative population replacement on scales that already now trend towards genocide (look at immigration birthrates and don't feign stupidity).
Um, who is doing this? Falling birth rates and immigrants? Genocide? Oh, you are talking about White People! Well, couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of folks! (Sorry, couldn't stop myself.) I do fail to see how it could be Social Justice Warriors that are bringing about injustice here. Usually they are pro-union and pro-ecology. So what are you really saying? Could you be a racist? Wait, this is not an insult or an attempt to stop us talking, it is a serious question. Why would the extinction of the white race be such a bad thing? (On the assumption that in reality there is no such thing as race, beyond a social construct, I mean.)
You/your peers still don't understand it but it happened the moment you started to shut people down because you only wanted to listen to and expand the influence of your private bubble of approved opinion.
See above. Two points: no one is shutting anyone down. People just do not like right wing science fiction, not because it is conservative, but because it is not very good fiction. Second: Free speech does not imply a right to be listened to. Political correctness is not censorship, it is manners. And again, it is not that progressives don't listen to conservatives, it is that they have heard it all before many times and it is wrong, there is nothing more to debate. And it is rude not to accept your loss and try to rig the game instead. Can you see this? The fact that someone does not accept your views, even to the point that they reject them as worthy of discussion, does not mean that they do not understand them. In fact, it is because they understand them that they are rejected. At some point we all have to ask, is it them, or is it me? I am willing to do that. Are you?
The solution? Try to understand what those you declare racists, sexists and whatnot have been and still are trying to tell you.
What are they trying to tell us, beyond the fact that they are racists and sexists? Should not racists and sexists have to try to understand why they are continually called these names? They are not happy, I get that. But I am not so sure about what, other than as Obama put it, "the ground has shifted under their feet."
Is there anything you find obfuscated or occluded?
Now that you mention it, yes. Took me a while to figure out who you were talking about with the genocide thing, and I am still a bit puzzled about who are the slaves (and who you think it is that is responsible and in danger of being slave-revolted--wait, is it a white thing again? Reverse race slavery?) See, it is very difficult for a normal person to decode all the racist jargon and be clear about what is being said. You could try to do better, for the sake of everyone.
Our greatest disagreement, however, is over the prognosis:
You can insist and reply with the same old clichés but it changes nothing. You're both lucky and unlucky it has gone as far as it has: lucky to still be alive, unlucky to have kept on building up resentment to ever greater heights. It doesn't take much in the brains department to realize that it can't go on forever.
Granted, this too shall pass, but as MLKjr said, "the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice." I think that all the fooforaw over things like GamerGate and the Sad Puppies is the last gasp of a past way of life. The average age of Fox News viewers and the Teabaggers is over seventy. Racists ain't gonna race forever. We have time.
So I am open to a clear explanation of what is going on here. Are you saying the Sad Puppies do have legitimate greivances? Do they need some Social Justice Warriors to help them out? Make the case!
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Thursday April 16 2015, @04:15PM
We do disagree about things.
If I've misattributed the opinions and actions of those I'm talking about to you then I apologize however it really sounds like you're like them. It is hard to communicate clearly, maybe impossible, and I have my share of total failures already on this site, I have to make allowances for the same to others and keep it in mind.
A lot of people love the culture they were brought up in despite both flaws they wish could be corrected and flaws they ignore or don't mind, it's common and natural to most or all cultures. For each individual it usually takes some time and some will find they don't. But for those it applies to because they love it they want the culture to continue to exist in a way they approve of or are at peace with.
I could ask the next thousand people I meet out here in non-US-land and unless I'm freakishly unlucky/lucky none of them would know what ‘Gamergate’ or ‘Soylent News’ or ‘Hugo awards & Sad Puppies’ is about. Those things are just different specific US examples of reactions in order to retain something.
If anyone tries to stop people from loving what they love and protecting what they love they should expect resistance. When social resistance doesn't work you can expect political resistance and if that doesn't work then physical resistance. This is also universal, it goes both ways/in all directions. If you are a local minority it is a losing game dependent on sympathy to win, many minorities has (rightfully) won such sympathy in the various local majorities in the western world and many are now (rightfully) losing it (the sympathy) because they've escalated it further despite winning or otherwise misusing their victory. In some cases it is third parties who claim to be in their support who are losing it on their behalf (e.g. minority sexualities). In some cases and irregardless of opinions people might have not everybody picks up on that. In other cases the distinction is in danger of becoming moot and irrelevant (e.g. islam).
Where I live in northern Europe and as far as I can tell in most of the western world the definitions/use/misuse of “white people” (as well as a lot of other politicized words and phrases) has changed a lot (“white people” and also “white man” which meant exactly the same —man was/is still also short for mankind i.e. all humans and the old word for male no longer used— wasn't even racial originally: it was a class or perhaps a class within another class, something which should make sense if you look at the color of “white” people and realize what is required for people to actually be nearly white in color: no sun and no outdoors work and lots of shade). Some of the changes are for the better (those against actual discrimination) and some of it is bizarre (why stop people from eating delicious “niggerbuns” or black chocolate “gods” and “goddesses”, will a ban on black dildos be next?) and some of it is extremely destructive to everybody like when families are firebombed or when “non-white” politicians are berated for being “uncle Tom's”/“coconuts” or when people are murdered like Pim Fortuyn who was an openly gay Dutch popular/superstar politician (he was murdered by a self-declared “defender” of minorities).
The people that are often called social justice warriors and white knights (the irony) on this site sound entirely identical to the people who call themselves “autonomous left”, anti-fascist/AFA, “blitzers”, anti-racists and so on in my part of the world.
Those actively contribute to the things I mentioned and some of them will openly argue in favor of genocide against “whites” in precisely the same way as the Egyptian muslim brotherhood did: genocide by outbreeding and replacement, at least until physical/violent victory becomes certain.
Like others have pointed out it's very reminiscent of past intolerance championed by the extreme left, only a slight update really.
While the vocal ones are extremely visible they have allegiances that run deep in the political left, for the most part it is unspoken but public examples would be when Swedish Mona Sahlin (a fairly powerful politican on their left) declares that Swedes never had a culture of their own at all and should be grateful that immigrants have one (including all the “tasty” car-bq's and attacks on firefighters and medical personnel) or when the political left hardly makes any attempt to distance themselves from political violence against others (Sweden again, worse than the US).
They're the kind of people who saw no problems with pogroms in the seventies and who apparently still don't see what's wrong with it nor understand why most people were happy and relieved when the people in the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries broke free.
They were slaves to an ideology however the slaves I was talking about are people uprooted from their own societies who are radically different in many big and small ways and transplanted into an entirely different world where they are at immense disadvantage and even more so if they have no pressure to adjust themselves. It can be hard to understand why people thought that would work but at the “elite” level which unfortunately made the decisions and keep making them any differences are marginalized and made exotic: it's easy to get along when you're powerful and rich and free to come and go as you fancy, it's hard to get along if you're raped ten times each day or sprayed with insecticides while working the fields and even harder to forget. Let me find that link [rt.com] for you (RT isn't perfect but at least they try, there's more there). The people who enslave them are usually their own, the people one step up from that (parents & ethnic community) usually immigrated (legally or illegally doesn't make much difference), the people one step up from that call themselves anti-racists, and above that you find the “elite” politicians.
They speak against rape but only when it's rape committed by “white” people. They speak against racism but again only when it's from what they interpret as “white” people or “white” enough or “coconuts” (their word for “white on the inside”). They speak against discrimination against sexual preferences but only if it isn't heterosexuality. They speak against censorship but only if it is against themselves. They speak of protection against job loss but only for the approved. They speak of egalitarian rights but only for their own groups. They speak of job protection but only for their own and actively try to make “enemy whites” unemployed due to “enemy white” political beliefs.
So once again if you actually aren't among those people you do have my apology.
Am I a racist? Yes according to the people who use that word against others. Now I'm not racist enough to start chanting “we're racist and that's the way we like it” while pushing some unfortunate person off the train platform (as someone did not too long ago) but I am racist. So am I racist or am I racist?
Am I a sexist? Absolutely according to the people who use that word against others. Now I'm not sexist enough to keep some unfortunate person hidden and secluded and enslaved as a material object for my own gratification (as someone did not too long ago) but I am sexist. So am I sexist or am I sexist?
The trouble is that people who are called names start to adopt those names and take pride in them. I for one do, and each time someone else is called racist or sexist the natural tendency becomes to identify with them, after all it's the same people who keep calling them and me and just about everyone racist and sexist. Maybe some of those people push people, maybe some of those people run private jails, no way to tell, no way to care, at least not if the people who call them racist or sexist say anything. The word nigger might be a good previous/historical example of the same mechanism in the US. I see it happening to people around me and elsewhere, it's becoming normal, it's becoming accepted, even potential victims are starting to join in such extremes. No I am not talking about racism; I'm talking about racism. You might call them uncle Tom and I might call them Amal Aden but that's not what I was talking about: I was talking about racism.
I tried to make that point by making it hard to communicate, by using those words as they have been redefined.
Am I a minority? Yes I am. There are less than six million “white” people that are part of the same culture as I am on this planet (and none off it!). Why should I be forced to sacrifice anything for much larger cultures that are transplanted into where I was born? Would you save the Native Americans if you could? What about the Aztecs or Mayans?
I would, because I'm racist :)
P.S. already such a long comment that I won't go into detail about how the workers in Europe have been marginalized and worker culture more or less obliterated outside islands of protection, for the most part it was the unions and the labor parties that did it by not only supporting but driving for increased immigration. The UK Labor party has pretty much admitted this publicly, German politicians has declared multiculturalism failed, the Norwegian Labor party has indirectly admitted they did it (Thorbjørn Berntsen has and he should know since he was in the middle of it) although they're so afraid they'll deny it as much as possible (understandable since one of their own —also denied— killed 77 of theirs in retaliation).
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday April 17 2015, @06:44AM
Ah, you could have admitted this earlier!
Where I live in northern Europe
So you have no culture because you are a Dane. I understand this. I have family who are (at least part) Swedish. Of course, at least they are not Norwegian, damn Quislings, not even having their own culture to the point of adopting German Culture?
This is where we part. American racism is based, to a large extent, on people fleeing from racism. America is a nation of immigrants, except for the indigenous people. And even they were fleeing from racism rather shortly, or being shipped off to Mighty Buzzardland by the racist Andrew Jackson. And of course, having fled racism, all those people ended up looking for some one else to return the favor to . But it is, and was, a temporary disfunction. It could not stay that way, because of the liberal basis of the American Revolution. All men (and women) are created equal, and endowed (by their creator, but this is not necessary) with equal rights. Now this is very unEuropean. In fact, it is Anti-European. Europeans are claiming a unique cultural identity? Ha! To the Romans you all were just Barbarians. I wonder why?
The violence you keep referring to is of course silly. It is silly in America as well. If a culture is worthwhile, it will attract others and survive, Culture has nothing to do with race, lineage, blood, or soil. Right, Nazis? The attempt to prevail by violence will succeed about as well as the Sad Puppies attempt to stuff the Hugo Awards. I do hope that Europe can overcome its racist tendencies. I am not optimistic. But you need to realize that everyone comes from somewhere else, and there are no true autochthonous peoples anywhere. I know, I have been around for almost 2400 years, and this same racist stuff comes around on a regular basis. You should think a little on who you really are, and why you are so threatened. And seek peace.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Friday April 17 2015, @03:34PM
You skip more than a few beats there, I can hear your cognitive dissonance loud and clear just as I've heard it from people like you so many times before.
Windmill? Checked! But it was worth it :)
No; I've only ever been threatened and attacked physically by actual Nazis (individual Nazis and groups of Nazis, and these were real self-confessed Nazis and not the make-believe ones like yours). And since you most likely don't realize it and maybe never will: they love people like you making it easy for them just in the same way as they make it easy for you. On their own they're impotent but with your kind they're not and this as well is mutual between you and Nazis just as it has been all the way back since the 1930ies. World history has already shown the two of you can be beaten even when you get up to speed. You feed off each other and grow but now you have two more allies represented by the “control” freaks and “religious” idiots. And that quartet combination is unfortunately going to be much tougher to get rid of if it is at all possible. That's our dismal future as things stand.
Immigrants and temporary immigrants (and particularly Roma) love me because they recognize what I am/represent near-instantaneously. Treating someone as an equal is not something one can claim as a badge of honor or community award, it is only something one can only do /without effort/ and they see right through bullshit like yours because it's them that have to pay the price for it right away. What I mourn is the total waste of both what is already happening each day and what is to come down the path that's still dominating the future despite a lot of effort to shift the course. As you are you're a testament to the fact that the US is facing exactly the same problem: you proudly represent the reasons for it.
It's not that most people don't get it —they do— it's that their (sensible and cautious) readjustment and actions in total are too slow to succeed. Unless more people like you wake up to the bigger picture and reassess yourself and what is happening around you.
But when you do —as Pim Fortuyn did, as Amal Aden did, as Irshad Manji did at least briefly or halfway before fleeing into US anonymity (can't blame her, she tried), as Christopher Hitchens did, and as many more are poised to be able to do— then you're more awesome than anyone else :)
Bonus points to you for pulling both the race card and the exceptionalism card simultaneously, if you had an NSA lanyard around your neck you would be a complete representation of everything the world hates about the US :D
Well at least you're more fun than most who espouse similar views to yours. I'll continue to enjoy your comments and occasionally mod you up.
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