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That would be the same military with APCs and drones that can't beat a bunch of savages armed with assault rifles? Even after 17 years and trillions of dollars spent?

Have we already come full circle on this? Who remembers right after Trump was elected, when liberals suddenly discovered they needed guns for protection against fascism? http://monsterhunternation.com...

http://archive.is/hnfJQ

The United States Government has extensively studied the concept of second American Civil War (along the assumption that it will be left versus right. HMM. I WONDER WHY THEY MIGHT *POSSIBLY* DO THAT.)

Their conclusion is as follows: They don't have a snowball's chance in Hell of winning. The moment civil war is declared, the government loses. No scenario or outcome ends in their success. Period. It's just a matter of how long it takes.

http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/06/23/an-opinion-on-gun-control-repost/

I was being kind. I avoided the actual label of "boring message fiction" that causes puppies to be sad*

(* Insider Joke: the original Sad Puppies campaign included a tongue-in-cheek pitch about 'boring message fiction' being a major cause of puppy-related sadness. . )

RE slates: I agree that slates during nomination phase can have a high impact. I still disagree that the anti-Puppy slate was not a slate or was okay somehow or was justified.

And I have never said anything good about the Rabid Puppies. I'm not a fan of them. This year they gave us Space Raptor Butt Invasion, which I'm sure they think is very funny, but I am not amused.

RE block voting for "No Award": I am amazed that you are even entertaining the theory that it was an organic movement. Toni Weisskopf received a record number of votes, and her record was shattered by the even more amazing 2:1 "No Award". And you think that just happened? You think it is actually more likely that 2500 people are familiar with her work, and so convinced it's terrible that they felt "No Award" was better than her? It's at this point that I give up trying to convince you.

Larry Correia summarized it:

Editor Toni Weisskopf is a professionalâ(TM)s professional. She has run one of the main sci-fi publishing houses for a decade. She has edited hundreds of books. She has discovered, taught, and nurtured a huge stable of authors, many of whom are extremely popular bestsellers. You will often hear authors complain about their editors and their publishers, but youâ(TM)re pretty hard pressed to find anyone who has written for her who has anything but glowing praise for Toni.

Yet before Sad Puppies came along, Toni had never received a Hugo nomination. Zero. The above mentioned Patrick Nielsen Hayden has 8. Toniâ(TM)s problem was that she just didnâ(TM)t care and she didnâ(TM)t play the WorldCon politics. Her only concern was making the fans happy. She publishes any author who can do that, regardless of their politics. Sheâ(TM)s always felt that the real awards were in the royalty checks. Watching her get ignored was one of the things that spurred me into starting Sad Puppies. If anybody deserved the Hugo, it was her.

This year Toni got a whopping 1,216 first place votes for Best Editor. That isnâ(TM)t just a record. That is FOUR TIMES higher than the previous record. Shelia Gilbert came in next with an amazing 754. I believe that Toni is such a class act that beforehand she even said she thought Shelia Gilbert deserved to win. Fans love Toni.

Logically you would think that she would be award worthy, since the only Baen books to be nominated for a Hugo prior to Sad Puppies were edited by her (Bujold) and none of those were No Awarded. Last year she had the most first place votes, and came in second only after the weird Australian Rules voting kicked in (donâ(TM)t worry everybody, they just voted to make the system even more complicated), so she was apparently award worthy last year.

Toni Weisskopf has been part of organized Fandom (capital F) since she was a little kid, so all that bloviating about how Fandom is precious, and sacred, and your special home since the â70s which you need to keep as a safe space free of barbarians, blah, blah, blah, yeah, that applies to Toni just as much as it does to you CHORFs. You know how you guys paid back her lifetime of involvement in Fandom?

By giving 2,496 votes to No Award.

I've spent far too much time on this, so I am not going to dig through all the blog postings from last August and collect a bunch of blog postings about why the Puppies needed to be slapped down. It seems it wouldn't convince you anyway.

Here, let me link you to something that a leader of the Sad Puppies said last year, posted on his own blog: http://monsterhunternation.com...

Crtl+F "Satan", and bear in mind that Vox Day is
A) the leader of the Rabid Puppies, who don't bother with the pretense of their nominations being about quality
B) the kind of bigot who makes comments to the effect of "Europe would be better off if it were run by neo-Nazis", so the comparison to Satan (at least politically) is way less hyperbole than you might expect.

I too once (naively) believed that the Sad Puppies were honest about that goal.

Unfortunately (for everybody), their claim would be a lot more credible if one of the leaders of the Sad Puppies hadn't not only put a book by Vox Day on the Sad Puppies slate, but then gone on record saying I nominated Vox Day because Satan didn’t have any eligible works that period.

That is not a claim compatible with "The Sad Puppies have always been about recommending the SF works that you enjoyed the most." Yes, the Sad Puppies leader liked Vox Day's story, but he didn't nominate the story "because there wasn't a better story available from somebody at least approximately as disliked by social progressives", he nominated the story because it was it was eligible and as close to Satan as he could come.

I'd be a lot more sympathetic toward the Sad Puppies (as opposed to the Rabid Puppies) if their leadership didn't have a history that includes comments like the following:

Not to mention that one of my stated goals was to demonstrate that SJWs would have a massive freak out if somebody with the wrong politics got on. So on the [Sad Puppies] slate it went. I nominated [Rabid Puppies leader] Vox Day because Satan didn’t have any eligible works that period.

Kind of puts a massive dent in the argument that the Sad Puppies are all about quality. It's not even "given two works of otherwise equal quality, we nominate the more rightist one." That would be understandable, in a "we encourage diversity, and most nominees are leftist" sort of way (ignoring the question of whether that claim is correct; the belief is understandable and the action would logically follow from it). "We set out to make political statements that make people mad" is just trolling, though, or perhaps more accurately flamebaiting.

Note that I don't consider this sort of behavior acceptable by any side of an argument, in case anybody planned to respond by pointing out some of the leftists who explicitly set out to anger rightists (or just to anger those who are insufficiently well tucked into their niche of leftism). It's immature and counterproductive, regardless of who is doing it or what context it's being done in. It deeply damages the credibility of any claims the speaker makes of being motivated by an apolitical goal (such as story quality)..

Speaking personally, I read a lot of authors whose political views I disagree with. Except for the ones who get Really Preachy about it, I'm generally fine with this. Card is an obvious example (in fact, he's better than many about being un-preachy, at least in most of his work), although I'll admit to now preferring to get his books second-hand. I also read a lot of stuff that, whatever the authors' views are or were, would be considered socially unacceptable today (some of what Heinlein wrote early on was very socially progressive for the time: things like including a named black character who wasn't immediately killed off, even if the way people interacted with him or her would be viewed as racist and demeaning today).

I think the "left-wing" label mostly only exists in the minds of these activists - it's a catch-all for "any work that discusses topics or espouses positions that we are uncomfortable with".

The typical Sad Puppies member is not so much decrying "left-wing" as decrying SJW-ish works. Have you read "If You Were a Dinosaur My Love"? I refuse to believe that it was the best short fiction in its year, but it got nominated for the Hugo. Was it because it checked the right boxes... SJW themes, written by a woman?

http://www.apex-magazine.com/if-you-were-a-dinosaur-my-love/

http://difficultrun.nathanielgivens.com/2015/02/10/the-hugo-awards-dinosaurs-and-me/

I would absolutely classify most of John Scalzi's books as "swashbuckling fun", but they hate Scalzi.

I think it's not so much that they hate his books, and more that they hate Scalzi the man, and that pretty much because he hated them first.

My respect for Scalzi plummeted when I read him taunting Larry Correia on Twitter. I've met 5-year-old children with more good manners and dignity.

Larry Correia collected the juvenile taunts in this blog posting: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/6846396-hugo-aftermath-post

The other part of it is that they hate Scalzi because they believe he is connected with the behind-the-scenes clique or cliques that used to decide who got the Hugo. I've never met anyone who genuinely believed that Redshirts was the best novel of its year, deserving of Hugo status; I've heard it is a light and fun read ("swashbuckling" maybe?) but it can't have been the best novel published that year. Somewhat more egregiously, Scalzi published a book of stuff from his blog and that won a Hugo also, and then as part of the Sad Puppies firestorm the cliquish types claimed that some of the Sad Puppies nominations were not sufficiently scholarly and were an insult to the Hugo. I don't know about you, but I hate double standards, and here a double standard was applied to the benefit of Scalzi.

http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/03/31/sad-puppies-update-the-melt-down-continues/

I suspect they don't like Lois McMaster Bujold very much either, since she frequently explores gender issues - but most of her books are also pure space opera.

Oh no, not at all. The Sad Puppies are not a homogeneous bunch, but on the whole they love Lois McMaster Bujold. If you know only one thing about a book, that it was published by Baen, you know that the Sad Puppies probably like that book. Not a slam dunk, but that's the way to bet.

Lois McMaster Bujold writes entertaining books. The Sad Puppies like entertaining books. Her books aren't loaded down with SJW freight; it's interesting to see how a strong and independent woman from Beta Colony reacts to the strangely backward society of Barrayar.

Remember how the Sad Puppies nominated Toni Weisskopf? She's the senior editor at Baen. She edited Lois McMaster Bujold's books. The Sad Puppies nominated her for a Hugo for editing.

The "Rabid Puppies" and "Sad Puppies" have about as much to do with each other as "JavaScript" and "Java". That is, nothing but a confusing similarity of name.

Charges that Sad Puppies needs to control Vox Day are simply unfair. How are they supposed to do that exactly? Vox Day is an independent adult and there is no reason why the Sad Puppies would have the ability to control him. See above point.

Last year, the Sad Puppies pleaded with Vox Day not to burn the Hugo Awards to the ground. Then the science fiction fandom got really organized and burned the Hugo Awards to the ground. Vox Day got everything he wanted and they did the work for him.

The Sad Puppies have always been about recommending the SF works that you enjoyed the most. Sad Puppies 4 continues this tradition.

Rabid Puppies, on the other hand, seems to be a trolling campaign by Vox Day. (Vox Day seems to have a knack for saying things that are so beyond the pale that they literally enrage people. I suspect he's trolling because his statements are so perfectly calculated to enrage. And now "Space Raptor Butt Invasion"?)

One final point, submitted for your consideration: The novel Three Body Problem won a Hugo. It was Vox Day's favorite novel of the year, and had he read it a little sooner, he would have nominated it for a Hugo. It would then have lost the Hugo to "No Award" as the organized fandom was voting an "anti-Puppy" slate.

The organized fandom and their organized "No Award" campaign claimed that they had to award an unprecedented number of "No Awards" to protect the Hugo, but how would denying the Hugo to Three Body Problem have protected anything? What was protected when Toni Weisskopf was denied her Hugo? And here we are, with the Rabid Puppies causing worse trouble than ever, and some fraction of fandom repelled by the No Award and wooden asterisk plaque antics, and walking away from the whole thing.

Your comment is objectively false. Armed civilians stop would-be mass shooters all the time.

"The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by law enforcement: 14. The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by civilians: 2.5. The reason is simple. The armed civilians are there when it started."

Victims are harmless, armed or not; you take them by surprise and you take them down. If they have weapons, you take them away before they can use them--this is hilariously easy when you attack someone and they turn out to have a firearm. A knife is actually more of a difficult proposition.

Citations, please. You have stated as fact that nobody ever successfully uses a firearm to prevent a violent attack, and that a knife is more likely to work for this purpose.

There is solid research estimating that firearms are used in the USA about two million times each year to prevent a violent crime. Most of these "defensive gun uses" do not involve anyone being killed or even anyone firing the gun; the defender deterred the assailant just by having a gun.

http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html

If you think a knife is a better defensive weapon, please read through this discussion.

https://www.reddit.com/r/knives/comments/3alo5f/why_is_a_knife_for_self_defence_a_bad_idea/

A society of armed loners who only care about themselves is a society of targets.

You seem to be arguing that the average person is a sociopath who is willing to just watch others be hurt.

I suggest to you that a larger problem is that the majority of people have no idea how to handle a violent situation. The news media, and many of our celebrities, push a meme that ordinary people should never be armed for self-defense, and by extension shouldn't even train for self-defense. The same people who would like to ban all firearms in civilian hands would tell you that people shouldn't fight back against assailants; they should let the police handle the situation. (As the old saying goes, though, "When seconds count, the police are just minutes away!" There is no guarantee that the police will arrive in time to save lives.)

If a person is totally untrained, and suddenly face to face with horrible violence, it is unlikely that the person will swiftly and decisively come up with a plan to counter-attack and take out the assailant. I don't blame the victims the way you seem to, but I do wish more people would train in self-defense.

I agree with Larry Correia: our society would achieve a net reduction in violence if more people got trained in the use of weapons for defense, and more people carried concealed firearms.

http://monsterhunternation.com/2012/12/20/an-opinion-on-gun-control/

P.S. I once, in an online discussion, commented that if people shouldn't defend themselves but rather should rely purely on the police to protect them, maybe people shouldn't have fire extinguishers in their homes and should rely purely on the fire department to protect them. A person I was debating agreed with this proposition. I didn't agree with her but I give her props for intellectual consistency.

Sad Puppies has gamed the system to its destruction. If the response turns out to be counter-slates, then they'll have (perhaps unintentionally) permanently destroyed what they sought to control.

1. Is it your contention that the status quo ante was fine, and the Hugo awards were given out purely by merit? (Before you answer that, consider that John Scalzi won a Hugo for his book that was funny blog postings, and another Hugo for a book that is affectionate fan fiction loosely satirizing Star Trek. Were those works truly the best books published those years?)

2. Do you know anything about statistics? I don't know much, but these numbers do look kind of suspicous to me. (I know, I know, this blog post was written by THE WORST HUMAN EVER but the numbers, the facts, are what matter here.)

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/04/their-cunning-plan.html

3. The Sad Puppies guys say that they are striking back against a system where SF works were judged more by who wrote them and which politically correct buttons the works pushed, rather than on actual merit. The SP guys say that their slate includes works by conservatives, and liberals, and white males, and minorities and women... in short they are claiming to focus not on the color of skin, but on the content of the works. Do you claim that this is not true? (Before you answer, you might want to check the list of authors on the SP slate and see how many women and minorities there are, plus check the political world-views of the authors on the slate.)

http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/04/06/a-letter-to-the-smofs-moderates-and-fence-sitters-from-the-author-who-started-sad-puppies/

4. Even if you think the status quo ante was perfect and the SPs are evil despoilers, would you at least agree that if the claims of the SPs were all true, that their games would have been a legitimate response? If a cabal really was secretly promoting a slate and using private emails to coordinate a vote and make sure that "the right people" would win each year, what should have been done? I think promoting a slate out in public, with public discussion, is as good a plan as any and better than most.

5. The people who are loudest about opposing SP have announced that they will vote "No Award" in almost every category; that they encourage everyone to do the same; and further that they won't read any stories on the SP slate, that inclusion in that slate makes the story unacceptable, sight unseen. These people also say that the SP slate will "destroy" the Hugo. IMHO, an organized campaign to vote "No Award" on the basis of politics looks more like "destrying" the Hugo than proposing a slate of stories does. Do you approve of the organized "No Award" campaign?

Then you missed this. I found it in about one minute.

Wow, just wow. That was the worst summation of the situation that didn't devolve into outright fantasies. Vox Day was only even tangentially involved to help prove the point of Sad Puppies II.
http://monsterhunternation.com...

http://monsterhunternation.com...

http://www.usatoday.com/story/...

Wow, just wow. That was the worst summation of the situation that didn't devolve into outright fantasies. Vox Day was only even tangentially involved to help prove the point of Sad Puppies II.
http://monsterhunternation.com...

http://monsterhunternation.com...

http://www.usatoday.com/story/...