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Hugos Refuse To Award Anyone Rather Than Submit To Fans' Votes
An anonymous reader writes: You may remember way back in April there was a bit of a kerfuffle over the nominees for the Hugo Awards being "too conservative" based on a voting campaign organized by a group of science fiction fans who wanted to promote hard science fiction over more recent nominees. This was spun as conservatives "ruining" a "progressive" award. The question was left: would the final voters of the Hugo awards accept these nominees, or just take their ball home and refuse to give out anyway awards at all? The votes are in and we know the answer now: they'd rather just not give out any awards. (Wired has a slightly different slant on the process as well as the outcome of this year's awards.)
This sums it up pretty well: http://io9.com/how-the-hugo-aw...
"This actually sounds like a compelling argument at first â" but the saboteurs themselves have already disproved it. Their own success shows that their conspiracy theory is absolutely false. If there had been a left-wing conspiracy to stuff the ballot, it would have largely counteracted the efforts of Beale and his friends. The Beale strategem only succeeds if all the other nominations are scattered and disorganized. And that kind of disorganization is exactly what we saw in most nominations. It appears that everybody except Bealeâ(TM)s crew simply nominated whatever stories they happened to enjoy in 2014. Had there been a secret left-wing bloc nominating its own stories in lockstep, then Bealeâ(TM)s strategy would have failed."
And not just Breitbart - Milo-freakin'-Yiannopolous. That dipshit is as dishonest as the day is long, even Andrew Breitbart die-hards despise the guy.
This is the most ignorant story summary I can ever remember reading on Slashdot.
I don't believe that it is worth engaging with it, but readers should understand that there has always been a "No award" option. Furthermore, anyone can join up and vote in the Hugos. There is no "cabal" of "SJWs" who are taking over anything. Anybody can sign up to vote in the Hugos. If the majority voted "No award" in some categories, that reflects a democratic view of those people who bothered to register to vote.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
The Hugos are a fan vote, not a judge vote. The fans voted: they rejected an attempt by two groups, one a band of right wing extremists, the other a kinda "We feel in our gut that previous winners are left wing but can't come up with a coherent reason why", to hijack the awards by gaming the nomination process.
The two groups, Vox Day's "Rabid Puppies" (the right wing extremists), and the "Sad Puppies", attempted (mostly successfully) to force fans to choose between only works they believed were ideologically sound by focusing nomination votes on two slates. With fans only able to vote for the highest supported works, there was a strong chance each ballot would only have Puppy-supported works on it. This happened in a number of ballots.
The fans said no. The choices we're stuck with suck. We'd rather not vote for anyone.
The headline is an outright unmitigated lie. The fans voted. They rejected the slates they were offered. The Hugos accepted the fan's choices here.
(And how ironic that supporters use the SJW canard when both Puppy campaigns were blatant attempts to prevent anyone voting for anything that might be ideologically unsound to the grounds involved.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
> This was spun as conservatives "ruining" a "progressive" award.
Umm, according the blithest troll behind the group that's exactly what it is:
"For his part, Beale—who runs his own small publishing company, Castalia House, which got five of its writers and editors (including Beale himself) on this year’s Hugo ballot—has been outspoken about his goals. “I wanted to leave a big smoking hole where the Hugo Awards were,” he told me before the winners were announced. “All this has ever been is a giant Fuck You—one massive gesture of contempt.” Some nerds just want to watch the world burn."
[..]
“I have 390 sworn and numbered vile faceless minions—the hardcore shock troops—who are sworn to mindless and perfect obedience,” he said, acknowledging that his army wasn’t made up solely of sci-fi fans. On the contrary, “the people who are very anti-SJW said, ‘Okay, we want to get in on this.’”
-- source: http://www.wired.com/2015/08/won-science-fictions-hugo-awards-matters/
They are the typical scummy trolls, just like any other juvenile middle school troll. It's rather sad to see *adults* behaving that fashion. WTF is wrong with some people, really. And that's who you have writing your summary, great job there Slashdot. Breitbart, *really*?! Pretty low.
Okay, some basic factual errors. First off, the Hugos are a fan award, not a writer award - that's the Nebulas. They're both important, they aren't the same.
Second, the people who refused to grant awards were *the very people who paid $40 [or much more if they attended] to vote*. This wasn't some arbitrary decision, or a decision by some committee, there has always been an option of voting that it was better to not award an award in that category than to award it to the option on the ballot because they were so universally sub-par. This wasn't done by some committee, this was the voice of the voters.
Seriously - the summary was godawful and misleading, but the information is widely available.
Nope. This was a free vote of everyone who wanted to register to vote. You don't have to go to WorldCon to vote. Anybody who wants to register gets a vote. So there is no question of "SJWs" getting butthurt. There were a series of votes on the various works that were nominated. In the categories where serious nominations were made, Hugos were awarded. In the categories that only had non-serious nominations, no awards were made. If the puppies had wanted to win the votes, they should have recruited more people to vote for their nominations. They didn't (or couldn't), so their nominations did not win.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Yeah, the headline is false- in fact, it is backwards.
The fans voted for no award.
No award wasn't instead of the fans' votes: it was the fans' vote.
(not in all categories, though.)
-- this is an artifact of the fact that it only takes a plurality to get on the ballot, but it takes a majority to win (with single transferable vote). So a small groups can get works on the ballot, if the rest of the nominators are split, but if the majority doesn't like those works, a small group can't make those works win.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I trust him more than [xx]
Your fallacy is false dichotomy. Just because [xx] is a bad or unreliable commentator, doesn't mean that Breitbart is a good or reliable commentator
In fact, Breitbard is not a reliable source.
rather than actually pointing out anything untrue or misleading about what he wrote. If you see something he wrote that is untrue or misleading, spit it out. Otherwise, piss off.
Many people did so. His headline is backwards from the truth. The fans vote was for "no award."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Wrong! The condition for nominating are EXACTLY the same as the condition for winning the Hugo. Anyone who registers can nominate any work they like (it has to have been published in the relevant year of course).
So the Sad Puppies didn't prove anything, except that they could get works nominated but could not get those works to win Hugos. The reason for this is the different voting system used in both cases. None of this has changed in any significant way.
To put it another way, the changing nature of the types of work that win Hugos reflects the changing nature of the types of people who read sci-fi (or to be more specific, the changing nature of the types of people who register to vote in the Hugos).
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
No upgrade is needed. The voting system to get things nominated is different to the one to make the awards. So it's possible for a small group to create a voting "bloc" to get works nominated, but they are then not able to force those works to win awards.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
The Rabid and Sad puppies are mostly allies; the Sad Puppies are less viciously reactionary than the Rabid Puppies, but still more "anti-SJW" than not.
This doesn't corroborate with what I'm reading. It seems the Sad Puppies were formed as an opposition to the CHORFs (Cliquish, Holier-than-thou, Obnoxious, Reactionary, Fanatics) which apparently embody the SJW mindset of disregarding works from authors with differing political views. Everywhere I'm seeing the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies described as being very much the same, though the founders of both these blocs seem to disagree that they are the same https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/04/16/we-are-not-rabid/. And what Yiannopoulis is saying in the article seems to be that the SJWs bloc voted no award as opposition to the Sad and Rabid Puppies. FTA: "Puppies supporters say that slew of âoeno awardâ wins this year can at least partially be attributed to the fact that SJW votes were concentrated on that choice, while Puppies votes were distributed between as many as four deserving authors. The âoeno awardâ results in the novella and short story categories are a particular slap in the face to ordinary fans, who remember the genreâ(TM)s roots in short-form pulp magazine writing."
The works nominated by marching-in-lockstep slate votes were almost entirely shit. There's just so much better right-wing fiction out there, and yet we had John C. Wright nominated over and over.
And no matter how many times the obviously not-just-defeated-but-crushed Puppies repeat it, there's no getting around the fact that the Hugos have always been, as they were this year, an open vote, in which anyone can participate. The Puppy argument was that they *had* to rig the vote, because they were the Nixonian silent majority and that the mustache-twirling leftists, in between eating babies, were busy ensuring the Puppies' take on what sci-fi should be wasn't making it on the ballot through secret cabal-like actions (not that there was any proof offered of course: in time-honoured McCarthyist fashion, the accusation was enough). But even rigging the game, they still lost. Now, with the voting numbers public, and with them completely destroyed in the vote totals -- a clear declaration that they are in the minority -- the argument has shifted to "no really, we never wanted the awards anyways, also, a cabal is *still* preventing us from getting the awards we don't want! Victory through defeat!"
It's so transparently desperate and dishonest that I'm amazed anyone falls for it. But as Barnum used to say...
As I posted above, only 5950 people voted. For contrast 8363 people voted on the last slashdot poll, so we aren't talking about a whole lot of fans, making it an easy balance to swing either way with relatively small numbers of voters. Meanwhile here's Scalzi telling his fellow travellers how to vote, and more details on the exact votes here.
I don't think you get what I'm saying - it's a lot easier to rig a small vote than a large one, purely because you don't need to get as many people on board. Look here's a noted and very vocal SJW Charles Stross crowing about the "victory", although himself and Scalzi fail to realise they're just making the point for the Sad Puppies. When he speaks of "fans" here he's talking about his own clique who did exactly as instructed, as demonstrated above.
The no awards didn't receive a majority, but rather a narrow plurality.
So if you're going to complain about slanted news it behooves you not to engage in the practice.
Nope.
In every single one of the categories in which NO AWARD won, it won on the first ballot with a majority.
The closest was in editor, long form, where the results were:
No Award 2496
Toni Weisskopf 1216
Sheila Gilbert 754
Anne Sowards 217
Vox Day 166
Jim Minz 58
Total votes 4907
But 50.9% is a majority. (The other categories were not nearly as close.)
I'm rather sorry for Toni, who I rather like, and who might well have won in the absence of the puppy-only ballot. If she had won, I would have said "well deserved."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The Hugos did not "choose not to award anyone rather than submit to fan's votes". They submitted to the votes of the fans, as always. The fans voted for "No Award".
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MRA means Men's Rights Activist. There is a wide range of MRA folks. Some fight for equality in child custody cases or domestic violence cases (there are a lot of men who get beat up by women). Some are just misguided weirdos who think women should hold the door open for men or something, and there's a bunch of horrible misogynists.
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If you had been following this you would have noticed that the assertion was made by "the puppies" themselves on the initial website instead of being some shameful secret. It's grubby student political shit that has escaped the playpen and for some reason they are proud of it.
And yeah, I hate politically correct bullshit too. I hate it whichever side it comes from. "Oh no, the Hugo voters picked something that offends me--they must be controlled by an evil liberal cabal! We must destroy them!" That's politically correct bullshit, and I despise it.
Actually, that's a slightly different form, called "conservative correctness".