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.)
It's like Slashdot doesn't even try any more.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
The headline there is stupid. The result IS the fan's votes. In six categories "No Award" won the vote.
From the wired story linked above:
But in recent years, as sci-fi has expanded to include storytellers who are women, gays and lesbians, and people of color, the Hugos have changed, too. At the presentation each August, the Gods with the rockets in their hands have been joined by Goddesses and those of other ethnicities and genders and sexual orientations, many of whom want to tell stories about more than just spaceships.
While on the other hand, most SF fans like stories about spaceships as part of their science fiction, hence the rocket shape of the award.
But no, mustn't have anyone who isn't on-board with the latest politically correct dinosaur win!
I'm sure the fans can't wait until next year, when a concentrated campaign will emerge to vote one particular non-SJW in each category as the winner, turning their own tactics (block voting on one option and refusing to even consider the quality of others and vote for the "best") on their head.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
This whole movement came out of the same place as GamerGate. A reactionary minority group, upset that their media fandom was getting too diverse, tried to spark a backlash. It didn't work for GamerGate, and it didn't work for the Puppies either.
The fans rejected the Puppies' attempt to stuff the ballot with their own (largely subpar) works, and now the Puppies are claiming victory with a refrain that sounds an awful lot like "Those grapes were probably sour anyway."
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I have to wonder why Slashdot ran that submission from an anonymous coward (sorry, reader). The Wired article Timothy mentioned in passing looks like it has a stronger grasp on reality but that submission is what people will actually read. Do we need to start moderating the editors or as the GG/Puppies contingent gotten so strong here that it's a lost cause?
Please explain how a fallacy could be true.
It's literally defined as being a false belief or a failure in reasoning.
It's the "fallacy fallacy."
If you conclude that because a line of reasoning contains a fallacy, the statement reasoned about is false, you just fell into the fallacy fallacy..
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
People paid 40 dollars a pop to vote for no award, I think that not giving an award is the right thing to do in that case.
Yes, the social justice clique burned the awards to the ground to stop any Puppy-nominated candidate from winning. But all Vox Day (the Rabid Puppy leader) wanted was to take the award away from that clique, and he was openly willing to burn it down. They did it for him. Bravo.
The Sad Puppies this year were run by Brad R. Torgersen. He's the most moderate of the puppy group. He explicitly wanted the Sad Puppy slate to be apolitical, the best works around. So on the slate were works by people in the Social Justice clique, and works by those who were neither puppy nor SJ. All the clique had to do to save the award for themselves is vote for those works. But instead they hounded some of their own people into withdrawing their nomination, and refused to vote for those neutrals (e.g. Jim Butcher) who remained. Once again, bravo, SJW/CHORFs; in stomping on as decent a person as Torgersen you gave victory to Vox Day.
You could call them mysogenists, racists, etc. But if you want to sum them all up with broad strokes the most relevant moniker would likely be WMLs for White Male Libertarians.
Science fiction authors always had political differences, which fans were in many cases aware of. In the days of the Big Three, we had, let's see...a New Deal Democrat, a military/libertarian Republican, a gay Eurosocialist. The worlds they built reflected their sociopolitical values, and guess what - nobody worried about it! It just caused them to offer different styles of future, which fans debated as alternative scenarios, which is the whole idea. The field as a whole had no net political coloration.
What Beale and his minions (there might be henchmen in next year's budget, but they'll never be able to afford cronies) are mainly concerned about seems to be identity politics, especially when combined with the current softening of the science being presented in an effort to broaden readership. I think they have a point on the retreat from science into what Beale calls "angsty fantasy," but do fans really care deeply about the gender ratios in their stories? Beale is attacking from a fundie Christian perspective that has zero following in the genre.
If SF needs a political mission, I would like to see it address a real present danger, which is the general culture's mounting disrespect for science itself. Tis showed up first as a generalized fear of every application of science, but it has mushroomed into deep-seated evil like this:
http://dgrnewsservice.org/2015...
If these people gain political traction, everything we value here is in deep trouble. If the genre wants to charge into a political battle, this is the one it needs to join.
But if you compare the results of this year's vote, to votes of previous years, you can easily see that this year is the only year where there was an organized attempt to get certain people elected. Categories that they did not care about were ignored, there was no disagreement at all among the conspirators, while their was no unified pattern of votes in previous years. In previous years there was real competition - rather than an agreement for all of one category of voters to focus on a single, predetermined winner.
So the analysis of their attempt to game the system proves that they were in fact WRONG, and previous awards were fair voting, rather than a conspiracy as they paranoidly claimed.
But it's not entirely fair to blame the conspirators. They simply abused a system that was not designed to handle intentional abuse.
Frankly, the main problem is that people simply don't care enough about the Hugo's to cheat - until now. So now we have to upgrade the voting system to account for a-holes trying to game the system.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I haven't heard anyone ask this: were the nominated works any good? If you don't like the nominees, is it because of their politics or because the works sucked?
I just want to read a good yarn. I have never researched the political views of any author, and I'm not about to start now.
The Sad Puppies won. Yes, they didn't win a single award -- in fact, some really good works lost to No Award, seemingly just to spite them.
But that was the point.
Their stated goal was to prove that there was a group of people out there voting for political reasons and fixing the Hugos. To fight this, they did the unforgivable sin of nominating some good works (such as one of the Dresden Files novels) for a Hugo.
The CHORF / SJWs fell for it en mass, just as George R R Martin begged them not to (archive version) back in April. They proved the Sad Puppies point -- that the Hugos are fixed by a group of gatekeepers.
The Hugos have been fixed for years, to the point that Steven King outright refused to participate due to how bad it became. The CHORFs proved the Sad Puppies' point more than anything else could. The Hugos have been forever tarnished by this -- not by the Sad Puppies voting in the "wrong way" for the "wrong type of fans", but by the CHORFs decreeing that you have to have the right politics, the right thoughts, the right opinions, to be a "real fan" or a "real hugo winner."
If the shoe were on the other foot, the rally cry would be for the liberals to go establish their own award and awards process. Why can't the conservatives do the same? Yeah, we know that slashdot has catered to the right for some time (note the breitbart link in the summary as yet another of thousands of front-page examples here) but really the hypocrisy here is rather extreme.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
This is also, apparently, a huge increase over the last number of people who voted in the Hugos (65% more than last time?) suggesting a significant groundwell.
...or a significant mustering of the troops. If you look at the breakdown of the numbers there an interesting picture emerges. I've also linked to Scalzi telling his minions to vote No Award after their preferences elsewhere on this page, it wouldn't be difficult to organise a couple of thousand people at all.
If Sarkeesian can get almost seven thousand people to donate almost $160,000 to help her create a series of videos I'm not even sure she finished, then yes it's definetely within the realms of possibility.
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.
That's a terrible argument. It's a have cake and eat it argument. If the Beale strategy works, it shows there is no conspiracy. If the Beale strategy doesn't work, then it shows that there is no conspiracy. The only thing that doesn't support the argument is having no one protest against the conspiracy - which shows that there is no conspiracy.
"The facts of this case are the same as in gaming and in every other industry that social justice warriors touch. They do not care about art forms. They do not care about science fiction. They do not even particularly care about talent. They care about enriching and ennobling themselves and their friends, and pushing a twisted, discredited, divisive brand of authoritarian politics."
"Puppies supporters say that slew of "eno award" 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.
First, all of the "no award" wins won by a majority on the first ballot. Even if all of the puppy voters had agreed on a single candidate-- they still wouldn't comprise a majority. That argument is false.
Second, that argument is by somebody who doesn't understand how the ballot functions. It works for the nominations, but not for the actual votes, which use a "single transferable ballot" (aka, "australian ballot"). When your first choice is eliminated, your vote goes to your second choice. So, if the puppy vote was distributed between four authors-- so what? As each candidate is eliminated, that vote doesn't go away.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I don't understand the mindset that can't accept the fact that science fiction encompasses more people, more ideas and a wider audience than first presumed. It's antithetical to the precepts of the genre.
As an old white guy who grew up on Heinlein and Silverberg and Asimov and Niven and Pohl, it's been proved for decades that non-Anglo and female and gay authors offer something valuable and aren't just a side show. I don't know why anyone who calls themselves a science fiction fan would not want to celebrate that.
Play Command HQ online
You're not getting it. The argument by people in favor of the puppy stuffing is that the nominations were already being stuffed by SJWs. But if SJWs were stuffing the nominations, then someone else trying to stuff the nominations would fail. They wouldn't be able to get basically all the nominations they were looking for, because someone else's stuffing would make sure that some other nominations succeeded. Since they did succeed, we know that there was no SJW-led stuffing worth mentioning, and that the entire puppy argument is a lot of dogshit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's almost as if that's not the issue at all, and female/LGBT/non-white authors are in fact regularly celebrated and embraced... when they're not being terrorized by SJW trolls. It's almost as if all that talk of "equality" and "diversity" from SJWs is provably just a smokescreen for toxic bigotry and a violent hatred of dissent.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."