Happy Labor Day Weekend, everyone!
Posts Tagged ‘science fiction’
LinkSwarm for September 2, 2016
Friday, September 2nd, 2016Tags:Alabama, Alan Grayson, Apple Computer, Austin, Brazil, California, Charles James II, Crime, Democrats, dogs, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, John Shirley, London, Media Watch, Milo Yiannopoulos, red light cameras, science fiction, Social Justice Warriors, South Carolina, weird news, welfare, Welfare State
Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, Welfare State | 1 Comment »
Recording of Dave Truesdale’s “Offensive” Worldcon Panel Now Available
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2016Following up on yesterday’s story of Dave Truesdale being expelled from Worldcon for expressing non-PC thoughts, Truesdale has now put up his own post about the short fiction panel that was cited as the reason for his expulsion…including full audio of the entire panel.
I haven’t listened to the entire recording, but if the first ten minutes are any indication, people calling Truesdale a “dick” and an “asshole” and accusing him of “hijacking the panel” are engaging in the rhetorical device known as “lying.” What you hear Truesdale doing in the first five minutes is not just making points about how easily offended Social Justice Warriors are damaging short fiction, but also bending over backwards to bow to shibboleths of tolerance and diversity in the field. Then he politely let others on the panel express their opinions on the subject.
And he still got expelled.
Worldcon has made it clear that no challenges to Social Justice Warrior rules will be tolerated, and that non-liberals are no longer welcome at their ever-smaller, ever grayer convention.
Tags:Dave Truesdale, science fiction, Social Justice Warriors, Worldcon
Posted in Social Justice Warriors | No Comments »
Dave Truesdale Kicked Out of Worldcon For Expressing Non-SJW Thoughts
Monday, August 22nd, 2016Tangent Online editor Dave Truesdale, who’s been in the science fiction world about as long as I have, was expelled from the World Science Fiction Convention for expressing anti-Social Justice Warrior thoughts on a panel.
To the best of my knowledge, being kicked out of Worldcon entirely (not just kicked off a panel or off programming) for daring to express an opinion is absolutely unprecedented. I can’t think of any Worldcon expulsions happening since the Futurians were barred from the very first Worldcon in 1939. Indeed, I can’t remember anyone getting kicked out of Worldcon at all in my lifetime. (Convicted child molester Walter Breen was exluded from the 1963 Worldcon.)
It seems the people running Worldcon fandom these days have decided that non-liberals are no longer welcome there at all.
Tags:science fiction, Social Justice Warriors, Worldcon
Posted in Social Justice Warriors | 4 Comments »
LinkSwarm for June 3, 2016
Friday, June 3rd, 2016Another week, another Texas flood. Try to stay dry and enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:
Tags:2016 Election, 2016 Presidential Race, Camille Paglia, Crime, Democrats, Donald Trump, Elections, Enya, Fast and Furious, Foreign Policy, Gregory Benford, Guns, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton Scandals, Leonard Francis, Media Watch, Military, Navy, Obama Scandals, ObamaCare, Rolling Stone, science fiction, Social Justice Warriors, Switzerland, Texas, Venezuela
Posted in Crime, Democrats, Economics, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Media Watch, Military, Obama Scandals, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 3 Comments »
LinkSwarm for January 22, 2016
Friday, January 22nd, 2016Been a trying week. Have a Friday LinkSwarm, on me…
Tags:2016 Election, 2016 Presidential Race, California, Charles Krauthammer, Crime, Donald Trump, Elections, Flint, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton Scandals, Jim Cooper, LinkSwarm, Mark Rich, Michigan, ObamaCare, science fiction, Soviet Union, Ted Cruz, Texas
Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Jihad, Media Watch, ObamaCare, Republicans, Texas | No Comments »
Robert Conquest, RIP
Wednesday, August 5th, 2015Robert Conquest, one of the leading historians of Soviet genocide, has died at age 98.
It’s hard to remember now, but for most of the Cold War, western liberals vehemently denied that genocide had occurred in the Soviet Union (or other communist nations) at all. Conquest’s The Great Terror helped crack that facade of willful ignorance, as did Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s monumental The Gulag Archipelago.
I once reviewed The Harvest of Sorrow, his work on the Holodomor, Stalin’s terror famine in the Ukraine, and it’s a devastating, amazingly well-researched book. “In the actions here recorded about 20 human lives were lost, not for every word, but for every letter, in this book.”
He was also a poet, and dabbled in science fiction as a writer and editor, but it was as a historian he made far and away his greatest impact. Communism was the great evil of the 20th century, and Conquest had a key role in exposing it. “Over all, Mr. Conquest estimated the death toll for the entire Stalin era at no less than 20 million.”
Here’s an obituary from The Telegraph. “Conquest personified the truth that there was no anti-communist so dedicated as an ex-communist.”
Tags:anti-communism, Christopher Hitchens, Communism, genocide, history, Robert Conquest, science fiction
Posted in Communism | 1 Comment »
Sad Puppies Redux (Or Why That Tor Boycott Won’t Work)
Friday, June 19th, 2015There’s enough news on the Sad Puppies front that a lengthy follow-up post is called for.
First, on May 11, Tor Books art director Irene Gallo stepped in it:
There are two extreme right-wing to neo-nazi groups, called the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies respectively, that are calling for the end of social justice in science fiction and fantasy. They are unrepentantly racist, misogynist, and homophobic. A noisy few but they’ve been able to gather some Gamergate folks around them and elect a slate of bad-to-reprehensible works on this year’s Hugo ballot.
This post was so false, ill-tempered and venomous that Tor head Tom Doherty had to issue an apology.
Eric Flint, a respectable far-lefty (and a guy who bought a story from me for Jim Baen’s Universe), had this to say:
And applying the term [neo-nazi] to the Sad Puppies is simply slander, pure and simple. I have no objection to calling either Brad Torgersen or Larry Correia “right wing,” because they are—and say as much themselves. If you want to add the term “extreme” because it makes you feel better, so be it. For whatever it’s worth, coming from someone who has seen extreme right-wingers a lot more up-close and personally than I suspect Irene Gallo ever has, I think applying the adjective to either Brad Torgersen or Larry Correia is not accurate. If we can descend into the real world, for a moment, what both men are is political conservatives with a libertarian slant who are also devout Mormons. (I mention their religion simply because, as with most religious people, it does influence their political views at least to some degree.)
But leaving aside the issue of “extreme,” suggesting that either of them is a “neo-nazi” or anything remotely close is just disgusting. And don’t anyone bother protesting that Gallo didn’t actually make that charge directly since she did, after all, distinguish between “extreme right wing” and “neo-nazi.”
Yes, I know she did—with the clear intent of smearing the two together. This is the sort of rhetorical device that Theodore Beale loves to use also, when he insists he doesn’t “advocate” shooting girls in the head for wanting to get an education, he just points out that, empirically and scientifically speaking, it’s “rational” for the Taliban to do so.
I’m not guessing at Gallo’s intent, either, as will become blindingly obvious when we move on to her second sentence. But before I do so it’s necessary to address the last part of her first sentence, which is either as dishonest as the first part or is just silly, I’m not sure which:
“…that are calling for the end of social justice in science fiction and fantasy.”
Huh? The last time I looked, nobody except possibly Theodore Beale (and even with him you’d really have to squint) is calling for the end of social justice in F&SF. In one way or another, at least half of the stories written in our field—including ones by Brad Torgersen and Larry Correia—are stories in which the fight for social justice figures prominently. To be sure, people can disagree over what social justice really is and isn’t and the best way to achieve it. But who in hell is actually calling for social justice to end?
Once again, Gallo is employing sleazy rhetoric. The charge which can accurately be laid at the feet of the Sad Puppies is that they are calling for an end (or at least amelioration) of what they believe to be the dominating influence of what they call “social justice warriors” over who gets nominated for and wins the Hugo Award. But translating that into the statement that they are “calling for the end of social justice in science fiction and fantasy” is ridiculous. You could just as easily charge me with “calling for the end of straight white males” because I do in fact believe that straight white males have an undue amount of power and influence in our society.
Snip.
In what sense can Brad Torgersen or Larry Correia or any person identified with the Sad Puppies be called racist, sexist and homophobic, much less “unrepentantly” so?
Words matter, damn it. If Irene Gallo has any citations that would substantiate her charges, let her make them public. And if she can’t—and I’ll make a prediction here: she can’t—then she needs to publicly retract the accusation and apologize to the people against whom she made it.
Period. There is nothing to discuss here. Put up or shut up.
Gallo did indeed eventually offer an apology on her Facebook page, but it seems to me that saying you “painted with too broad a brush” when calling a wide range of writers and science fiction fans “neo-Nazis” is far too weak contrition indeed.
On the other hand, Sad Puppy and Tor author John C. Wright has accepted her apology, stating “The insult was pro forma, ergo a pro forma apology is sufficient.”
Since then, a few people on Twitter have been calling for a boycott of Tor Books over the incident. About this I would just like to make a few points:
So put me down in the category of thinking a boycott is foolish, pointless and counterproductive.
One big point on the Sad Puppies campaign: Most recent domestic Worldcons have topped out in the 4,000-6,000 members range. I recently bought a Supporting Membership in Sasquan, and my membership number was in the 9,000s. This tends to indicate that the Hugos have indeed become a test of strength in the culture wars. Science fiction fans who want to make a point would probably find it far more productive to pony up their $40 for a Supporting Membership and vote for the works they like than threatening boycotts.
Tags:Bertelsmann, Eric Flint, Hugo Awards, Irene Gallo, John C. Wright, Larry Correia, Sad Puppies, science fiction, Social Justice Warriors, Tom Doherty, Tor Books
Posted in Social Justice Warriors, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Sad Puppies, If I Must
Thursday, April 9th, 2015Being at the intersection of several overlapping roles of interest on the Venn diagram (science fiction writer, once-upon-a-time Hugo nominee, Social Justice Warrior mob victim, and conservative blogger), I suppose I have a one-eyed-man-in-the-land-of-the-blind duty to talk about the Sad Puppies Hugo Campaign now that it’s a major story.
For those unfamiliar with them, the Hugo Awards are given out at the World Science Fiction Convention and voted on by the membership. Both Supporting and Attending members can vote for Hugos.
The Sad Puppies are a group of science fiction fans lead by Larry Correia, author of the popular Monster Hunter series of books, and writer Brad Torgersen, to promote a slate of writers for the Hugo Awards for two reasons: To counter the Social Justice Warrior influence that has increasingly roiled science fiction, and to break up perceived cabal of the Same Old People getting nominated for the same awards every year largely at the behest of a small crowd of science fiction elites. (This post will largely address only the first point.) This year the Sad Puppies were wildly successful at getting most of their slate nominated for Hugos.
For the last several years, a vocal minority of Social Justice Warriors has wreaked havoc on the fabric of the science fiction community. Taking their clues from the Alinskyite “direct action” tactics of far-left political activists, they’ve carried out a virulent campaign against anyone unwilling to toe the political correct line on victimhood identity politics. Their tactics have included doxxing, online mobbings, demands people be fired from their day jobs for non-PC transgressions, numerous calls for censorship, demands that only politically correct language be used when it comes to race, sex, ethnicity, or anything to do with Muslims, and follow-up demands for “official policies” and “committees” to enshrine their extremists demands as institutional law.
Let me provide a few examples. They went after:
This is not an exhaustive list. Most of the people they have gone after (Spinrad, Malzberg, Moon) are political liberals. Science Fiction fandom has gone from a big, happy, occasionally fractious family where a far lefty like Harlan Ellison and a far righty like Jerry Pournelle could maintain friendships despite sharp political differences to one where Social Justice Warriors have injected constant discord into the community.
To see an example of the havoc wrought by just one Social Justice Warrior, read this lengthy essay by writer Laura Mixon on Benjanun Sriduangkaew, AKA Requires Hate, AKA Winterfox. (When reading it, however, note that pretty much all the tactics described have been used by other Social Justice Warriors, and that many of the people chiming in to support Mixon only spoke up when Requires Hate went after people on the far left and/or those with victimhood identity politics credentials.)
More recently Social Justice Warriors have succeeded in bloc voting to get very minor writers with SJW/victimhood credentials onto the Hugo ballot. It’s at this point that Larry Correia and others started the Sad Puppies campaign, so I’ll let him provide the background:
For those of you just joining us, Sad Puppies 3 was a campaign to get talented, worthy, deserving authors who would normally never have a chance nominated for the supposedly prestigious Hugo awards.
I started this campaign a few years ago because I believed that the awards were politically biased, and dominated by a few insider cliques. Authors who didn’t belong to these groups or failed to appease them politically were shunned. When I said this in public, I was called a liar, and told that the Hugos represented all of fandom and that the awards were strictly about quality. I said that if authors with “unapproved” politics were to get nominations, the quality of the work would be irrelevant, and the insider cliques would do everything in their power to sabotage that person. Again, I was called a liar, so I set out to prove my point.
Snip.
Basically, I did what the other side had been doing for years, only in public and with the wrong kind of fans, and everything unfolded just like I predicted it would. Especially vehement was the contingent of fandom that I took to calling Social Justice Warriors. This may offend the No Labels crowd, but oh well, it is what it is. The name has stuck in our culture.
Snip.
[Sad Puppies 3] is actually extremely politically diverse. That’s because this time our slate of suggestions was put together by a bigger group of authors and fans, and since Brad was running the show and trying to be all about getting recognition for quality, deserving authors, their personal beliefs were of no concern. Don’t take my word for it. Go through our list of nominees for yourself. You’ll find that we have liberals, conservatives, moderates, and question marks who’ve kept their politics to themselves.
Indeed, the people fighting the Social Justice Warriors in science fiction are far more politically diverse than their exclusively far-left enemies. Will Shetterly, author of the invaluable Social Justice Warriors: Do Not Engage blog, is a dyed-in-the-wool socialist.
Here’s the thing. This massive upheaval wouldn’t have ever happened if the moderates had done something years ago, but they didn’t. I can’t really say I blame them though. If they took a stand against the perpetually outraged crowd, they risked their career and their reputation. We’re talking about the same angry, entitled twitter mobs that ran off a famous comedian because he might tell a fat joke in the future. Those mobs are quick to outrage, slow to reason, and will turn on their allies, because attacking is what they are programmed to do. And the moderates—those who will admit it—are terrified of ending up on the wrong end of a witch hunt.
Now it is okay to rail against my people for doing what the other side has done in the past, because we’re not going to sabotage anyone’s career or slander you. We actually believe in the concept of free speech and free expression.
We’re getting condemned for bringing politics into the awards, but we all know politics have been in the awards for a long time. We just did it openly.
I never expected us to sweep the awards. Frankly, I was shocked by the results. I didn’t realize just how many regular fans had been turned off for so long.
Now the moderates are telling us we did it wrong, or telling us what we should have done better, but the thing is at least we did something.
Correia is right. If the “good liberals” in the science fiction community want to know who brought about the current situation, they should look in the mirror. They were the ones who stood on the sidelines and remained silent while the likes of Spinrad, Moon and Malzberg were being smeared as “racists,” “sexists,” “homophobes,” etc. for not toeing the Social Justice Warrior line. As Martin Luther King, Jr. noted, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
The Social Justice Warrior reaction to the success of the Sad Puppies slate was swift, vicious, and unreasonable, with a number of MSM outlets (most of whom have probably never printed a single word about the Hugo Awards before) writing stories condemning Sad Puppies, all parroting the same SJW line. Perhaps the worst example came from Isabella Biedenharn in Entertainment Weekly, which started out “The Hugo Awards have fallen victim to a campaign in which misogynist groups lobbied to nominate only white males for the science fiction book awards.” Not only was demonstrably false (as proven by the very links Biedenharn included in her story), it was so potentially libelous that Entertainment Weekly issued a correction, and Biedenharn deleted her entire Twitter account.
And as a bonus, she essentially accused Brad Torgersen, a man with a black wife and a mixed-race child, of being a white supremacist.
Says Torgersen: “Political correctness has gone to a place of destructive take-no-prisoners soul tyranny that could very well and permanently wreck this field; unless good men and women of conscience decide to stand up.”
And this is why the Sad Puppies campaign is important. The Social Justice Warriors have been rampaging through the genre for years now, wrecking civil discourse, marginalizing institutions and destroying the professional lives of those who disagreed with them. But no one stood up to them in an organized, coordinated way until the Sad Puppies.
Says one long-time liberal science fiction professional who was not associated with Sad Puppies: “This whole toxic mess has sickened me immeasurably, almost making me feel as if I had wasted my life by ever loving science fiction…All I can say is that the SPs have conducted themselves with humor, dignity and style, while the SJWs have sunk to new lows of hatred and pettiness and blind ignorance. They truly are a despicable cult.” And a lot of science fiction professionals who aren’t part of the Sad Puppies (many of whom emailed me privately over WisCon) feel the same way, but were just too intimidated to fight back.
Now people of good will in science fiction, from all across the political spectrum, are finally standing up and saying “Enough!”
That’s what the Sad Puppies Hugo campaign is about.
Additional thoughts from:
Tags:Barry Malzberg, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Brad Torgersen, Elizabeth Moon, feminism, Harlan Ellison, Hugo Awards, Isabella Biedenharn, Jerry Pournelle, Larry Correia, Laura Mixon, media bias, Media Watch, Milo Yiannopoulos, Norman Spinrad, Requires Hate, Sad Puppies, Sarah Hoyt, science fiction, Social Justice Warriors, victimhood, Will Shetterly, WisCon
Posted in Democrats, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors | 12 Comments »
WisCon’s Feminist Failfandom Brigade Gets My Locus April Fool’s Piece Taken Down
Monday, April 1st, 2013In an effort to prove that they’re not dour, humorless, thin-skinned avatars of political correctness with authoritarian tendencies, Wiscon’s Feminist failfandom brigade had my contribution to Locus Online’s April Fools Day festivities taken down. (Note that, under the transparent pseudonym of L. Ron Creepweans, I’ve participated in every Locus online April Fools Day since 2002.)
Locus forced Locus Online editor Mark Kelly to pull the piece only a few hours after it went up.
Thanks to the magic of Internet caches, you can still read it in its entirety:
And the text:
WisCon Makes Burqas Mandatory for All Attendees
Today the SF3 ruling committee for the Madison, Wisconsin-based feminist SF convention WisCon announced that starting this year, all attendees would be required to wear burqas.
“We were trying to think of what we could do to make Wiscon more inclusive,” said con chair Belle Gunness. “Suddenly, we realized that devout Muslims could easily be offended by the amount of sinful and wanton flesh on display at Wiscon. Therefore, starting with this year’s Wiscon, we’ve made burqas mandatory for all attendees. Allah Akbar!”
Both male and female members will be required to don the traditional black, face-covering, head-to-toe Islamic garb for all convention events. Gunness indicated that the convention would have substantial quantities of Burqas for rental to congoers, from Small to 5XL sizes. As an added benefit, she said that the new regulations would help eliminate “rampant lookism.”
Gunness said that guests would be required to wear the garb as well, “in the spirit of egalitarianism.”
Wiscon also announced that next year’s guest lineup would consist of J. K. Rowling, Stephen King, George R. R. Martin, Joss Whedon and Suzanne Collins. “At least as far as you know.”
For those tuning in for the first time, this was a direct jab (in humorous form) at WisCon’s previous decision to yank their Guest-of-Honor invitation to Elizabeth Moon for daring to voice (in the mildest possible form) politically incorrect thoughts about certain aspects of modern Islam.
How radical Islam became so sacred to radical feminists is a topic for another time, and I have hamburgers to cook. But it’s sad to think how a tiny, unimportant, radical fringe of disgruntled feminists (so aptly dubbed “Failfandom” by Steven Francis Murphy) have not only come to believe that their right not to be offended trumps the free speech of others, but that other people in the SF community have come to cave into their petulant demands. (Whatever happened to “The solution to free speech is more free speech?” It seems that fewer and fewer people on the left side of the political aisle believe that any more.)
But if there objective was to get this piece to disappear down the memory hole, I think they shall find that they are sadly mistaken…
Tags:April Fools, Elizabeth Moon, feminism, Locus, Media Watch, science fiction, Social Justice Warriors, WisCon
Posted in Jihad, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors | 146 Comments »
J. G. Ballard and the London Riots
Saturday, August 13th, 2011You may know that I have another, non-political blog, mostly on topics like science fiction, book collecting, movies, etc. But every now and then a piece comes along that could fit on either blog, such as this Andrew Fox piece on J. G. Ballard’s works and the London riots.
Having been interned as a child in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in World War II (the source of Empire of the Sun), Ballard has always been interested in what happens when you strip the veneer of civilization away. Much of Fox’s piece concerns Ballard’s later novels, which I have not read, “all of which feature middle class professionals either diving into or being pulled into revolutionary, nihilistic violence due to ennui, boredom, or a cancerlike consumerism which has replaced religion and patriotism at the center of their psyche.” (Though I have a number of Ballard first editions, I’m still catching up on the reading them, having just finished The Crystal World earlier this year.) Ballard’s penultimate novel, Millennium People, evidently features “middle class professionals in suburban London instigating terrorism and revolution in an effort to shock a sense of meaning back into their lives.” Which does tie rather neatly into the London riots of the last week…
Also, I must have missed this Theodore Dalrymple piece on Ballard.
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Tags:Books, Crime, J. G. Ballard, London, riot, science fiction, Theodore Dalrymple, UK
Posted in Crime, Welfare State | No Comments »