Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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
You should probably read the Wired reporting on the story rather than perpetuating ignorance. They interviewed Annie Bellet. She was not pressured by anyone. She personally rejected Sad Puppies' using her as a politically pawn. She personally thinks their approach is antithetical to inherent inclusiveness of nerd culture. But yeah, keep regurgitating the WML-fabricated narrative. I'm sure it goes over well on blogs like Breitbart.
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 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
Christian apologist is just someone who explains Christianity and why it's right and good. The term has a long history and is not usually considered derogatory. C. S. Lewis was a Christian apologist.
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.
Play Command HQ online