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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 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.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))