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.
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."
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
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
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?
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 has been an interesting development in Science Fiction. In many ways this has been an argument about the genre of science fiction: is the genre of science fiction about impossible but theorhetically plausible science such as the future or starships or aliens or time travel, or is the genre about a platform by which issues can be explored?
What I find interesting is the Sad Puppies were arguing that science fiction should be about the science fiction and not the platform argument, and yet not a single one has ever won a Hugo Award. Alternatively many past Hugo Award Winners such as Robert Heinlein absolutely used the genre of science fiction to ask questions about issues by using them in the somewhat fantastical but plausible context. Stranger in a Strange Land may have been in the future and involve aliens and be set in the future, but it's purpose was to take a plain, unbiased look at many of the social constructs in our society today and question them. Philip K Dick's work almost has to be set in a science fiction setting to his explore his typical themes of reality and perception.
So in many ways the Sad Puppies were arguing for a perception of what the Hugo Awards were about, a perception that in many ways was false. These guys may be science fiction writers, but I don't think they actually get science fiction.
> 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.
If we could vote on a title I'd think mine would stand more of a chance, unfortunately unlike the Hugo's we can't so we're stick with the disingenuous shit Timothy put up.
WHAT are you talking about? The voters ARE the supporters! There are no judges. The voters are ordinary sci-fi fans. In fact, if you had wanted to vote, you should have just registered to do so. Anybody can and you don't have to go to WorldCon. Of course, if you'd rather just complain and blather on about SJWs, you clearly are not interested enough in sci-fi to take part.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
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.
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.
No ... Science fiction is also all about radically shifting social mores (sexual deviancy to some) technology replacing the need for biological imperatives (corruption of sacred family structure to some) and very frequently a ton of blasphemy etc etc etc.
Lets take good old Crypto-Fascist Heinlein. Do you think these conservative wankers would vote for say ... Job?
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
This is probably where I fall in the scope of these things.
Indeed, I haven't read all the works in question, so I can't tell you that the strawmen built on either side ("SJW's", "right-wing nutjobs") are in any way reflective of what really is going on.
But I can say with certainty that most people (I said "most", okay? Fucking re-read before you jump down my throat about what follows in this post) who are planting a flag on one side of the other haven't either.
As near as I can figure, the majority of the talking-head opinion pieces on either side aren't making any clear citations about the either side's preferences (i.e., citations to the works in question with clear descriptions and references to the works), about what constitutes "progressive" in science fiction and what work would fall under whoever's banner.
And that as far as this particular controversy goes (as reading the works in question would take time I don't have), it's a lot of sound and fury. Awards are popularity contests. That's the way it's always been. Why anyone bothers to get upset about who wins, or why anyone bothers to trot out being an award winner as if personal preference can be swayed that way is beyond me.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
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
So you form your opinion on a guess ... I guess if you have an opinion and don't want to upset it by facts that's the best road to take. On the other hand I know you're wrong.
"Total the YES and NO votes. If YES wins, the PW is confirmed. If NO wins, then No Award wins."
You don't know enough about this to comment. Anybody can sign up to vote. The outcome of the vote reflects the will of the majority of those who registered. You don't have to attend Worldcon to vote. So the awards reflect those people who were interested enough to sign up.
Last year's winners were chosen by the same process. The majority of those people who signed up voted and Ancillary Justice won one of the awards. How can you say that it should not have won?
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Summary aside, if there really is an objection to the range of science fiction stories that the Hugos are currently addressing these days, then I can see two reasonable solutions, either or both of which may already exist:
1) hugos specific to the category being awarded: e.g. "hard science fiction"
2) another award entirely -- which means publicity, fan gathering, etc. Lots of work.
It seems like a tempest in a teakettle to me.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
What has that to do with the Hugos?
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
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.
Its funny. How do you think you take part. I've always taken part by reading. Lately when I look at a list of top scifi its all low rent soap opera in some vague dimensionless settings. In other words weather our new interlopers who confuse dragons and fairy's for scifi realize it. They have made the hugos irrelevant. Its amazing you think the main part of 'taking part' is worrying about some decrepit award. I've felt ignored for years by the awards. The crap that got voted in has mostly been crap. In truth to me it looks like the SJW has poisoned it to spite another diversity.
Goodbye Slashdot.
For the last couple of years, I've been mostly ignoring Slashdot, occasionally reading a headline, wishing back for the good old days when the incompetence was charming. This is not charming. This is hateful.
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.
There is no such entity as "Hugos" that can refuse or accept anything. The ballot was duly submitted to the fans, who in fact voted. They just didn't vote the way you thought they should vote. Well, tough; it's their vote and they can do whatever the hell they want with it, and if they don't think any of the nominees are worthy, that's why "no award" is on the ballot.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"The majority of those people who signed up voted and Ancillary Justice won one of the awards. "
Majority from a self selected group is far from being an indication of excellence. But if you think so, then If you expand and read around you will see that the popular estimate is far more mixed for ancillary justice. Do not take me wrong, it is a good novel, but it is a novel conservative in its execution, and as such it does not reflect excellence and innovation. If you had told me it was a novel from a white old guy back in the 70ies I would have nodded : that is how conservative it feel in its execution (note : literary execution and plot, I am not using conservative in a political sense). Maybe it was the best they could find that year though I did not look that up. But then again they could simply have voted "no award". Read around i am not the only one to think so, the critics about its execution, I am not the only one thinking that, and web site where you can see collated critic and fan vote certainly show a wide split. A good novel, but not one of excellence.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Unlike the presidency where the closest there is to "none of the above" is to write in a fake name, the Hugos has a "No Award" option, which the masses voted for instead of those nominated by either the Sad Puppies or the Rabid Puppies (which makes it hilariously sad to see the Rabid Puppies leaders so out of touch with reality that insist that their loss is proof that the "SJWs" have taken over... they lost too).
That is to say, there is no "Hugo" "refusing" to award anyone anything. All of them lost the election to "None of the Above" fair and square.
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.
Offer a complete argument if you have an actual criticism.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
apparently I mistook what happened... the people that voted, voted for no award to be issued. So I'm fine with that.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The WSFS brought this upon themselves by intentionally being vague and nebulous about what they're giving awards for.
The popular belief is that Hugo awards are for science fiction and possibly fantasy, but the truth is you can nominate any form of fiction.
Quote the FAQ:
The charter explicitly makes fantasy as well as SF eligible for our awards. Works of fantasy have often won Hugos, and, in fact, Hugos have been won by works that some people consider horror or even mainstream. There will never be universal agreement about the precise distinctions between genres and sub-genres, so WSFSâ(TM)s position is that eligibility is determined by the voters. To paraphrase the great SF editor and writer Damon Knight, a Hugo winner is what the Hugo voters point to when they award a Hugo.
The idea of voting for a work based on the gender, race, skin color, sexual identity, etc. of either the author or characters is stupid. How about basing it off the plot, character development and writing quality?
For example, Citizen Kane was a great movie and that isn't impacted by the fact the main characters are all heterosexual and white. It wouldn't be improved -- nor detracted from -- if the characters were of a different race or sexual orientation. The story stands alone.
Conversely, Gigli was a steaming pile of fecal matter. Replacing everyone in it with a wide variety of LGBTQ people of a random variety of races, skin colors and genders wouldn't help. It would still be shit all on the merits (or lack there of) of plot, writing and character development.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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."
What you have written here makes no sense at all. Here are some facts for you.
1. Anyone may register (I think it costs $40);
2. Anyone who registers can nominate any work they like;
3. Anyone who registers can vote for any work(s) they like in each of several categories;
4. If someone thinks that nothing in a particular category deserves an award, there is a "No award" option;
5. The voting system for nomination is different from the voting system for the awards;
So how can "SJWs" (or anyone else for that matter) affect the awards of the Hugos? This is a serious question - I really want to know what you think.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Neither side can "stuff ballots". It's a free vote and anybody can register to vote. This year, the Sad Puppies (and another group I think) created a "slate" to get a number of works nominated. In the main vote, those works did not win.
But anyone can register, so nobody can "stuff ballots".
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
The Hugos are not being destroyed. You have to pay $40 to register to vote, so it's not like an Internet poll. The system isn't being "gamed". Anybody can register and vote. The same people who vote also get to nominate for next year's Hugos.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
I remember watching the New England Patriots play the Chicago Bears in SuperBowl XX (1986). This was in the pre-Belichick/Brady era, and the Patriots got clobbered 46-10. Here's the thing: there were points scored on both sides, but that doesn't add up to some kind of moral victory for the Patriots.
The Sad Puppy case always struck me as weak; if you look back over the entire history of the awards what you see there was never much of a preference for the kind of stories they write. The overall pattern is one of eclecticism; Starship Troopers wins Best Novel one year, Canticle for Leibowitz the next. Occasionally there's run for a couple of years for one kind of story or another.
I don't think Torgeson, Correia et al are racists, homophobes, or misogynists. Their feelings were hurt by not winning. Writers are sensitive, even writers of manly adventure stories. It's abundantly clear that they're in denial about their hurt feelings, so they're trying to advance the idea that there's some kind of conspiracy against them, but they don't really care that much.
I don't even think Vox Day is a racist or misogynist. He's a griefer out for attention. That's why he feels he's won no matter what the ballot outcome. It's not a victory that an ordinary person would recognize as such (which would involve the other guy realizing he's lost). The Sad Puppies weren't victims until they decided to play footsie with Day; it's not SJWs or CHORFs doing the victimizing, it's the Rabids.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Here is an issue with a single transferable vote(STV) that is caused by voters not using it properly. Say there are five candidates and they are almost equally popular so each would initially get about 20% of the vote. The problem comes in if the voters do not make a second choice and the default is "none of the above". In this case basically stating their book is the only one qualified. By the third round of eliminations "none of the above" wins. That is why most elections have a runoff rather than using STV.
Write well.
The Puppies groups got a lot of objectively poor writing nominated. That writing got included in the packet that is made available to all voters to ensure that the voters can read all of the material before casting their vote. Everyone got to see the poor quality of the works they were offering.
The nub of the story is the definition of SF. Since Jules Verne and HG Wells a certain type of fan has build a clubhouse for like-minded people. They have evolved their own idea of the SF genre. Now fringe genres want in, and are being resisted. Whether this is good or bad is a matter of opinion.
Mine is that just claiming 50 Shades, Noddy, Teletubbies, Dianetics, Marxist Manifesto or The Fountainhead as SF, does not automatically make it so. Because if so, then we would soon see Heinlein fans submitting his works for Feminist awards and wailing when they are inevitably rejected. The SJW are rejected not because of their beliefs, but because they are not SF fans and cannot unilaterally define SF.
We end up with LGBT cake shops being forced to bake confederate flag cakes - is that really what we want?
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
"The problem is that definitively this year politics took over from both side."
There is still no evidence that anyone other that the Puppies were politically motivated.
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.
Less than six thousand people actually voted and this makes for interesting reading: http://whatever.scalzi.com/201...
Fair enough. If people voted to have no award given then I've no problem with what happened.
I will merely point out that there does seem to be an issue with "brigading" going on with these awards and apparently both these sad puppy people as well as some past winners of these awards have used that as a mechanism to secure an award.
We know how this works on social media... its not constructive. Something possibly needs to happen to control block voting or cliche voting.
I'm not advocating for either of these fellows. I've read quite a few of Scalzi's books and Stross's books... those are two of the guys the Sad puppy people are attacking apparently. Both are good authors. Though, I will grant that they both let their politics get away from them at times. Scalzi has basically destroyed the Old Man's War series by trying to pull the story in a direction it isn't going to go in. And if you read Stross's Laundry series you can see his politics get the better of him in a few consistent places.
I'm also not especially aware of these people organizing the sad puppy thing. I've never read them. Though they cite people getting blackballed for politics like Card and that's a valid point. Card is Christian and he doesn't support gay marriage. I mean... hold any opinion you want on that but that has nothing to do with whether someone should or shouldn't get an award for writing.
As I said, I think there is an argument on both sides and I think what is happening is a consequence of people not working out some sort of acceptable protocol for dealing with what might have been a simple thing without the heavy handed power plays.
A lot of these dramatic shit shows are the result of censorship or people being dicks to each other or other offenses that ultimately piss people off so badly that whatever started it doesn't matter any more. People are just mad at that point. That really should be avoided. Even if people are full of shit and whatever they want is something they shouldn't have... don't slap them down unless you're prepared to deal with the consequences of pissing them off.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
There is a stark difference between what consenting adults do in a private place and what consenting adults discuss doing to other, non-consenting adults. Some of those discussions are even illegal (not many in the US though, and I hope it stays that way).
In fairness, they're saying that there is a new pattern of brigading and block voting going on where previously that was not a feature of the awards.
I think you're right that the Sad puppies probably do have a weak argument. That said... I think they do have one and possibly the way the award system is structured should make the voting system less vulnerable to manipulation by cliches.
Just do that. No recriminations. No admissions. No punishments. Just change the way the votes work so that cliche voting is harder.
How to do that? I am not familiar enough with their voting system to really have a clue. I can think of a few ways its done in other voting systems but I don't know which method would be applicable without studying their situation in some detail.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Tinfoil hat theory?
The conventional wisdom about SJWs is that they're often middle-class to upper-class white people. That's not always the case, but both sides create strawmen so, I'd continue with my reductio ad absurdum here.
So, if the SJWs make more money/have greater media connections, they can influence anyone with $40 to burn to vote on their slate because it supports the kind of media they want to see propped up by awards as if to say "see, our side is the right one, and winning the award proves it. Ha ha, we're popular AND prestigious!"
And if you happen to believe that this particular theory is patently absurd (again, not that I'm saying that's what happened here), I direct you to the last Oscars awards ceremony, in which there was outrage that "Selma" wasn't nominated for "Best Picture" or "Best Director" (a film about Martin Luther King, and directed by a black woman), because the awarding simply wasn't "diverse enough".
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
Hmmm... if you strip out the overwrought opinion, did the fellow say anything that was inaccurate? Can you cite something factually incorrect or misleading?
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
If you think the Hugos are irrelevant, then what exactly is it you have a problem with here?
If you are a real sci-fi fan and not another SJW who sees sci-fi as just another medium to broadcast his (ahem, "her") cis-gendered religious beliefs, then how can you not love this one from TFA?
--- quote ---
Going forward, he [Beale] said, no matter how the Hugo administrators modify the nominating process to try to prevent manipulation (and there are two proposals being considered), he will still have enough supporters to control future awards. Specifically, “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.’” When I asked him how he might deploy those people in the future, he continued, “It’s very simple. The dark lord speaks, the minion acts.”
--- end quote ---
The other TFA from Wired, not the main one.
After a several year break, I decided to come and give Slashdot a try again. And on my second time checking the site, I find *this* crap on the front page? Offensively misleading summary on an article by "anonymous coward". It would be hard to find a less worthwhile "news" website.
Rule 35 of the internet: "If it can be hacked, it will be". - Charles Stross
Yet despite your claims, during years 1 and 2, when Vox was not running any campaign, the Correia was called racist, sexist, Nazi, and almost every other insult the SJWs can think of.
Why, if was only Vox's fault?
I never claimed Correia was racist, sexist or Nazi. Nor did I claim it was only Vox's fault; I claimed the Sads' association with Vox is a result of their own actions and inactions; it's not fair, put it was predictable.
As for "why", I always say to my kids that there's at least one actual example of any kind of person you can imagine, somewhere in the world. So what some person on the Internet says doesn't prove anything about society as a whole or other people you might associate that person with. If you looked hard enough on the Internet you'd find a Jewish neo-Nazi -- or at least someone who claims to be one.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Welcome back!
This is the new improves /. with the overt right-wing, libertarian, whiny, misogynist agenda!
Actually you put your finger on what I think the real problem is: the voting system for selecting "the best" in each category.
No matter how you tweak it, you're going to run afoul of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, which basically establishes there's no rational, consistent, fair way for a group of voters to select the most preferred anything if there's more than two candidates. Occam's Razor prefers this as an explanation for the occasional inexplicable result to one that posits a widespread secret conspiracy to subvert the vote. If you want me believe somebody orchestrated a campaign like that in the modern age, show me the digital footprint of that campaign and I'll believe you. The Sads and Rabids after all left a substantial one; are the SJWs and CHORFs that much smarter than them?
The option I like is approval voting, in which each individual voter is allowed to vote for *all* the candidates he thinks are good enough. This works because it doesn't even attempt to select the "best" candidate; it selects the candidate the greatest number of people would be happy with. So you amend the voting system to ask people to select all the candidates that they think should be remembered for all time as a great story.
Mathematics tells us that "best" is a concept best left to individual critics, not voters.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
SJWs say that these books shouldn't exist.
Examples please. And show me how these particular people are managing to steer the course of fandom.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If you look in on Beale's blog, it has an angry screed denouncing "Stranger In A Strange Land."
there's apparently been blatant brigading going on... and brigading is a real thing.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
there's apparently been blatant brigading going on... and brigading is a real thing.
I can't evaluate this statement or respond to it without specific examples.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This is Slashdot, not Twitter. You can't just make shit up and expect people to believe it. Or, to put it another way,
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
...turns out, it isn't as easy as you thought to rig an election. it's not their authors being "conservative" that makes those books lose. incidentially they are all - sometimes entertaining - pulp novels. it's the quality, stupid.
The Hugo awards are a part of the Worldcon, nominated and voted on by members of the Worldcon. Anyone can be a member of the current Worldcon by paying a membership fee. Supporting membership usually costs $40. That doesn't get you physical access to the con itself, attending membership is a lot more.
Joining the Worldcon makes you a member of the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) for that year. As part of that membership you get nominating and voting rights for the Hugos including the right to nominate the next year but not vote. If you want to vote next year (that con will be in Kansas City in 2016) you need to pay for a supporting or attending membership for that specific convention.
I was a member of the 2014 Worldcon, nominated and voted that year and nominated this year but I couldn't vote this year since I didn't join Sasquan.
As I understand it a lot of people joined Sasquan as supporting members after the nominations closed simply to vote for the Hugos, generally opposing the slate nominees. They couldn't change the nomination lists but they could vote against the slate nominees. In the end the opposition was strong enough that most slate nominees ended up below No Award (or as David Gerrold calls it "Noah Ward").
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".
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
If Orson Scott Card got his act together and wrote something on the order of Speaker for the Dead, or Ender's Game, again, I'm pretty sure he'd claim both the Hugo and Nebula. Unfortunately, the main reason he didn't get more awards was because most of what he wrote later was rather crappy. Xenocide, anyone?
Correia - I enjoy his books a lot, but they aren't in the same league as Stross or Scalzi. Correia takes the old fantasy plot of monster hunters and upgrades it rather well, but still... no. Comparing it to The City and the Stars is awful. Then again, MHI by Correia is miles better than Redshirts. I've never understood that particular award. Actually, *anything* by Scalzi is better than Redshirts. A miss, IMO.
But once Correia (or John Ringo, or Travis S. Taylor) create something that's really different from "upgraded western or war story" I'd be all for it. It's not that they can't write, it's just that their characters are so.. cardboard. Women are fuckable housewives, the "real" men are muscled jocks, we have the nerds, ... and let's not discuss the bad guys. If they aren't union organizers, or environmentalists, they're Democrats. If you read a lot of Ringo in one go, even the characternames start to become predictable.
Anyway, I didn't vote. But I'm curious to hear from the voters - anyone here?
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
What would you accept as an example? There is lots of evidence of a campaign to vote that way on social media. People that are self identified as SJWs saying stuff like "SJWs burned the village down to save it" and
""Your VOTE is not wanted.
Your BOOKS are not wanted.
YOU are not wanted.
Period.""
Say what you like about the SP, but clearly there is an ideological opposition here. You don't get people self identifying as SJWs and then saying things like this unless such people feel invested in the outcome.
And there is of course evidence of coordination. As the Breitbart article points out, the SP votes were often split between four different authors while the opposition put all their votes into "no one".
Frankly, the more I look at this... the more it looks like typical social networking brigading in action.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The Sad Puppies put together nominations they thought deserved to win and said "Hey, read these, and if you like them, vote for them." Mostly they encouraged folks to go buy a membership to vote. (I had no idea I could vote on the Hugos, frankly. I figured it was like the Oscars or the Academy Awards in that respect.) The Rabid Puppies, lead by Vox Day, said "This is our slate! Minions, march!". While there was some overlap, it was mostly Rabid Puppy-dominated categories (Short Story comes to mind) that got "No Awarded."
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
"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."
I don't even think Vox Day is a racist or misogynist. He's a griefer out for attention.
Might be true. But quotes like this make it hard to distinguish the one from the other: I've been reading his blog (yuck) and most of what people quote from him is missing bits and parts, that obscure the intention of the original text. I have not yet found a single instance of any racist of mysogynist quote in over 2 hours of reading through his posts. Yes, he does make the case that women should not be able to vote and are only good for bearing children - as hypothetical argument in response to another discussion. The list goes on and on with stuff like that.
I think he's a far right wing ideologue, but not stupid. Certainly not stupid enough to post something that could be construed as outright racist or mysogynist writings.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
But quotes like this make it hard to distinguish the one from the other:
That was a preface to one of the quotes mentioned, before I discovered the originals and removed the butchered quote. My post reads better if you remove that line :)
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
I think it's pretty valid to make a distinction between authors saying "Hey, BTW, my book is eligible to be nominated!" which a ton of people from all kinds of backgrounds do, and for that matter "Hey, this is a bunch of cool stuff I've read that you might want to check out that's also been eligible," to putting together a slate. There's an argument to be made as to where the sad puppies fell. There really isn't one with the rabid puppies.
(And really, as many people have pointed out, when you have so much stuff being published, and a relatively small body of people nominating things, it's a system where even a very small organized voting bloc can get something on the ballot. This isn't the first time this has come up, even, though it's the first time there's been a slate that I know of. There are a number of reforms to the nomination system being looked at, so things might be changing.)
Card... So, you do know that opposition to gay marriage is only one of the more recent bits there? And he takes it an awful lot further than a lot of people seem compelled to by their faiths. He was, at one time, one of my favorite authors. I attended one of his Secular Humanist Revivals way back when. He seemed to be a great guy. I mean, this was back when the net was flat, and I was a young thing, but still. ...and I guess I should be glad that the quality of his writing had been falling off by the time I heard about him writing about how there should be laws criminalizing homosexuality, which should then be selectively enforced to keep the unruly ones in their places. *boggle* The volume has increased and decreased at various times over the years, but I do think there's a difference, at least in degree between someone thinking that their own religion is a great reason some other people entirely shouldn't be able to get married, and their own religion is a great reason those people should be thrown in fail unless their keep their heads and voices down. Ew.
(Of course, as a bi woman it's perhaps not surprising that I'd take this a bit personally.)
Milo Yiannopoulos
"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
Seriously have you not read anything on the Tor editor blog called Making Light, or the numerous hit pieces by the media? Every attempt has been made to call Sad Puppies a conservative, misogynistic, and just plain evil group. If that isn't politics at its worst then I'd love to hear your definition of politics.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
Have you not read anything that the Sad Puppies wrote about themselves? They would have been well served to let the Nielsen Haydens do their PR; at least then people would not be confusing the Sad Puppies with the Rapid Puppies.
I would accept a name of an identifiable person (or well-known pseudonym) that can (a) is actually social justice causes (other than trolling) or has extensive connections with people who do; and (2) has organized/participated in a documentable campaign of intimidation or hate-mongering beyond opportunistic trolling or cyberstalking people they know personally.
What I won't accept is "some troll somewhere said something mean and unwelcoming." It's not that I don't believe that trolling happened or that the person targeted felt bad, it's that I don't believe most trolls are who they say they are or support what they say they support. If you can't stand up to a random troll there's really no hope for you. People who put serious effort and organization into persecution are a different matter. Show me that widespread prevalence of those people and you've convinced me this is a real problem.
That's a starting point; I can even give you an example: Benjanun Sriduangkaew (aka "Requries Hate"). The thing is, like I tell my kids there's at least one example of every kind of person you can imagine out there. It's like Jefrrey Dahmer, who proves there are such things as cannibal necrophiliac serial murderers in the world. And it's obviously a big deal if you run across one personally. But cannibal necrophiliac serial murderers are not a major society problem.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The terribly slanted summary aside, I think ultimately this has shown that the process is borked to high heaven. Even if I give every point the No Award crowd seems to be pushing, which I certainly would not, they have shown that they will vote as an ideological block themselves to a degree that completely eclipsed the 'problem' group. All you have proven is your system is woefully broke and subject to ideological influence over all else. It is rather sad. It has proven to me that unless the Hugos completely overhaul there methodology, they are worthless, and just a matter of who can rally the biggest crowd of supporters, rather than anything to do with actual worth of the work.
The irony in all of it is that both Scalzi's Old Man's War and Card's Ender's Game, are really good sci-fi both deserving of awards. The politics is ruining their achievements by turning the award into a faction war. Neither SJW nor * puppies are really helping anyone.
No, it's because the overwhelming evidence was that they didn't vote for books they liked. They voted for books they were told to vote for, blindly following a slate, instead of voting for the their own preferences. I suspect that many of them never even read the works they nominated. They didn't have to—their great leader, whose ass they have their heads firmly wedged up, told them to vote for it, so they did.
What was the best reading/watching this year? The nominees, or some stuff that didn't clear the nomination cut? This whole thing seems kind of confusing.
Interestingly, Heinlein holds a record of five Hugo awards, including one for the "nazi" Starship Troopers and another — for the "libertardian" The Moon is a Harsh Mistress .
Clearly, there was a point, when Hugo Award was given for other than "progressive" works. But then, again, there was a point when Nobel Peace Price was given for actual contributions to world peace too...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
SJWis a favorite acronym of the SIWs! ;)
Poor Trigger - he should have known that Roy rodgers.
Now he's completely stuffed.
When "progressives" (new age term for socialist, liberal, communist) don't get their way, they just pick up their ball and go home.
The option I like is approval voting, in which each individual voter is allowed to vote for *all* the candidates he thinks are good enough.
It sounds like you don't know how the voting actually works. It's ranked balloting, you rank your favourites in order and if you're #1 choice doesn't win, your second choice gets your vote and keeps going until you reach the last choice you approve of. In my opinion, it's actually a better system than approval balloting because it produces fewer ties.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
So, why did the female game developer get all the hate and threats? What guilty game journos were GG going after for this same debacle?
Ask her. After all, every time her paetron numbers started dropping she injected herself right back in, just like brianna wu.
Om, nomnomnom...
On the other hand, maybe it's a simple as people become pissed off when they think other people are trying to cheat?
Fanatically anti-fanatical
It's fantasy as well these days - so much so that a guy that wrote a sequel to a small part of "Gulliver's Travels" accused Greg Egan of having too much science in his fiction for it to be SF! Apparently Greg Egan's aliens are a bit too alien as well, perhaps they should have been like little people who behaved exactly the same as full sized people.
Where was the cheating? Even George RR Martin admits that the Sad Puppies did everything within the rules. The issue here is a clique of Social Justice Bullies have taken over the Hugo's and it was exposed over the last 3 Sad Puppy campaigns. Now we see that the SJB's will burn the house down around them to prove that they are a clique and hostile to fans that aren't "trufans".
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
Science Fiction is largely a vision about the future, and often it is used to promote particular political views. There are communist and socialist futures, corporatist futures, libertarian futures, militaristic futures; authors explore these futures from a utopian, dystopian, or neutral point of view. Science Fiction also validates or contradicts scientific and economic predictions like climate change. Depending on your own political leanings, you may find a particular science fiction story interesting and insightful, or manipulative and propagandistic.
Occasionally, there are stories that straddle political lines and are interesting even if you disagree with them. For example, although I think Ursula LeGuin is wrong on many political points, but her stories are still interesting and thought provoking. On the other hand, I find Arthur C. Clarke's politics utterly naive; I think he thought himself above politics and I can see why people who aren't very much interested in politics might like his stories, but I find him an utterly naive technocrat and really don't enjoy his books very much anymore (I used to enjoy him more when I was younger and didn't really understand much of the political dimension).
I think it's a bit too much to expect a single convention or set of awards to be able to cover all those different political views. We'll have to accept the fact that there is going to be at least a split between progressive, libertarian, and apolitical science fiction fans. There is even some Christian and conservative science fiction (arguably, the ultra-crappy "Left Behind" falls into that category, in addition to the only slightly less crappy C.S. Lewis), though perhaps not enough to support large conventions or awards.
In my youth, I was a voracious reader of Scifi and it is still my area of choice in reading and other forms of entertainment.
But I've never given two shits about the Hugo awards so hearing there's a dispute among several factions about.... something that isn't entirely clear, just made me realize I still don't give a shit about the Hugo awards and by extension I care even less about the people upset about it. My life up to now has been just fine in blissful ignorance of the entire thing. I suspect a lot of other people have gotten along just fine too.
And if that is the case, if people can lead meaningful lives without knowing about the Hugo dispute, then do the Hugo awards need to exist at all? Not existing would solve everybody's problems all at once.
Sig for hire.
Others have in the comments, quotes about turning the Hugos into a smoking hole, but don't take it from me or them - take a look at "Vox's" website so that you can find out what is going on instead of wasting time guessing about it and wasting time writing down your guesses.
Yes I know the "stop wasting my time" is just movie inspired shit to try to look tough, but it's pretty funny since you are so busy wasting it instead of spending far less time looking at the source to see what is going on.
Strawman? Vox rants about it length so I'm describing a real man pointlessly charging at figurative windmills. While Vox is possibly just an attention seeker trying to stir up trouble that is still the centre of this ridiculous vortex of shit - pointless hate of feminist SF for the sake of it.
Let's say I really wanted Dick to have won, so I have my 100 friends all come in from out of state to vote. They all buy a ticket and vote No Award. There are another 100 people at the state fair voting, and they all vote how they choose. The award goes to no one.
Well, that sounds like a nice synopsis of what actually happened here. So what's the problem? The system is more or less working, and probably this won't happen again next year. People who are against social justice usually get discouraged and go back to complaining about not being able to own slaves or whatever when you foil them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The fact that I can make you respond on command pretty much proves I own your worthless pathetic whiny ass.
You dance just like a fucking puppet.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Hmmm... if you strip out the overwrought opinion, did the fellow say anything that was inaccurate?
If you strip out the deliberately inflammatory bullshit, a lot of people start to make sense. But if you do that, you're not reading what they wrote.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You know that a science fiction book won best novel this year? I don't think hard science fiction needs a separate award.
This is a really bad year to make this complain. A hard science fiction book (The Three-Body Problem) won the award for best novel. Very far away from a low rent soap opera in some vague dimensionless settings.
(and re-posted ACTUALLY logged in this time. Sigh.) Literally anyone could vote if they signed up. The Puppies lost a POPULAR democratic vote. Their original argument was that their preferences were more populist and would win the popular vote, but the nominations process was being secretly block voted by a small shadowy liberal cabal to keep populist authors off the nominees list if favor of more preachy, pro-liberal agenda authors. This was the stated reason for their publicly arranged block voting of nominees, to provide the popular vote with a choice they felt was lacking. The voting fandom responded massively against them. So now, they are arguing that the popular vote is rigged by the shadowy cabal as well, except it's now not a tiny cabal, it's the majority of fans. Which is less a sneaky cabal of so called "SJWs" and more, you know, most people. If their actions had supported their "populist" argument, they would provably have carried the day. But putting up people like Kevin J. "suncrusher-I-ruined-star-wars-long-before-jar-jar" Anderson and highly divisive figures like John C Wright and the Rabid Puppies Vox Day up on their slate as the poster boys for their "populist" argument probably didn't help, if they'd put up more genuinely popular, genuinely decent authors like Jim Butcher then their argument may have been a hell of a lot more compelling and effective. John C Wright and Vox Day were up their simply to provoke outrage at their views, not because of the quality of their writing. Which, at least in the case of Vox Day, is objectively terrible. Many of the puppies chosen authors (not all) were...not actually all that good. Not innovative, or exciting, or fun, or smart. They did not make me think, or shout with Joy, or smile (with, of course, the exception of the excellent Jim Butcher). Most of the winners did. The no awards were mostly, as far as I can tell, a reaction to the politicization of the awards. And whatever the puppies argument that the awards were always political, these campaigns are what made them so in the public consciousness. By making a political argument for the vote, the puppies forced everyone else to consider the awards in a political, rather than creative context. the trouble there was, when people did consider the issue politically, they decided they didn't agree with the puppies, as evidenced by, you know, the POPULAR VOTE!
So people who vote for things that you don't like are "voting as an ideological block". What do you call people who vote for the things that you do like? "Fine, upstanding fans of sci-fi"?
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
You can't have it both ways. The Sad Puppies were within the rules. So was the electorate in rejecting most of their nominations. You can't say that one side was "bullying" and the other was not if both "sides" followed the rules.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Ok so the summary was really confusing, and the articles linked were obviously one-sided, and talking about "sad puppies" right away (wtf are you even talking about?), but some of the comments here clarified the situation. The only question is, how were these groups able to control who got nominated in the first place? Are the nominations picked by one group of people? Are these the people that rule the awards, will they pick the same way next year? How can they win at the nominations and lose at the final vote?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Just as useless and pointless at the Oscars, Emmys and Tonys...
If all that you focus on is the opinion then you're clearly not reading the facts.
I read them both. I take it like this:
Here are facts
Here are my opinions of these facts
If the facts are valid then I can look at the opinion and see if that makes any sense.
I don't just read something "think oh this has a biased opinion" and discount all information in it.
If I did that, I'd never read anything. The vast majority of news stories by anyone contain a lot of opinion and attempts to influence. Read/watch/listen to PBS... its FULL of opinion especially where they're telling you it is JUST news.
Get a couple other sources to verify facts... things line up or not... then you draw your own opinions.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The quotations I cited both came from this guy:
http://daddywarpig.com/
He appears to be more than some troll. And he was apparently very active in the whole thing.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Or, you know, vote to nominate the story you like, which is how all this started.
Rational thought is the only true freedom
If the Puppies had won, this would mean they were right, and they represented the true breadth of fandom, that populist work was underrepresented in the Hugo awards in favor of stuffed nominations for a socially "progressive" agenda. This would be proof of "SJW" conspiracy at nomination stage. If the Puppies lost to "no vote", this is the "SJW's" cutting off their noses to spite their faces. Proof that the SJW anti-puppy campaign (any evidence of this existing, please, provide links, that I cannot find it does not mean it does not exist) controls the actual voting (better than the three active puppy campaigns influenced their voting slates anyway). If there were no "no awards", but all categories with a non puppy approved author went to that author, this would presumably mean the SJW machine was also in effect, they just corralled their voters into voting tactically in favor of SJW approved writers and threw a bone in the puppy dominated categories to maintain the illusion of a democratic vote. It seems to me, whatever the result, the puppies would just declare "Mission Accomplished" But, I may well be wrong: Please tell me, what would a loss for the puppies look like? What outcome of the vote would be evidence that the puppies are wrong and that there is no evil SJW conspiracy? Is that even an acknowledged possibility? Or is this conspiracy simply accepted fact?
In fairness, Scalzi was doing a bit more than that. He was saying "who else should get nominated in this year's hugos"...
That seems innocent but the question isn't being asked in a neutral political space.
As to your problems with Card... I haven't really followed him in years either. I enjoyed ender's game and a few other books but he doesn't seem to have written anything in awhile worth reading.
As to not liking authors because of their politics... it depends on how you deal with that.
For example, I don't much like Scalzi's and Stross's politics. Scalzi has ruined his Old Man's War series with his politics. He's written FIVE books in that series and the first one was an action packed romp as a space marine. It was full of these hilarious situations where he was fighting people... fully formed people... but they were 3 inches high... alien obviously. Just an example of the nutty aliens he was being sent in to kill. And sure, the Colonial Union which was the Human force organizing the whole thing was of dubious moral value. But the whole galaxy was full of creepy crawlies that didn't mind killing humans either.
He's written four books after that. Each one has been pretty boring. Books 2 and 3 had him basically telling the same story from different less interesting perspectives. Very little action... and all of it coached in this " this is what I meant to say" subtext. It was sad. Book four and five are better... but nothing near as good as the first one because he's still trying to walk back what the first book was... which was FUN... and ENTERTAINING.
But do I blacklist Scalzi? No. Would I say he shouldn't get Hugo awards? Absolutely not.
As to Stross... he basically hates Americans. He's so anti American he doesn't know he's Anti American. He thinks its like hating cockroaches or something. Its sort of funny how thick his cognitive dissonance is on the issue.
In the Laundry Series, he has a British anti demon government service. They protect the British people from horrible nightmares beyond time and space. And to do that, they use Zombies as inexpensive guards, they put mental control spells on people so they must obey orders... total mind control, some of their more powerful agents are soul eating monsters, and his main love interest is a woman that uses a violin made of human bone that is possessed by a demon which she uses to unravel the soul of anyone she turns it on.
Those are the British and their force is called "the Laundry"... the American force which doesn't do anything even remotely as fucked up is routinely referred to as utterly without moral compunction... always referred to as "well you know how those people are"... and the name of their organization is "The Black Chamber". All of this excluding that the UK and the US when it comes to intelligence and high level government are very friendly with each other. But in Strosses work... the Americans are soulless monsters... even though by all indication the British are up to some very dark shit.
Now would I black list Stross even though he has a strong bias against my country, culture, and people?
No. He's a very entertaining writer and if I ignore the stupid digs at America in there, then his books are very well written and very fun to read.
And that's my attitude. I don't black list people because I don't like their politics. I don't like Michael Moore as a very polarizing example. the reasons are something I'm not going to get into, but I'll still listen to him he gets to the point quickly.
We have a big country and a big world. If you just exile everyone not of your politics then you're going to very quickly find yourself in a hug box.
You don't like that Card has issues with homosexuality? Let me tell, a lot of the world has such issues. Go to eastern europe. Go to the middle east. Go to Asia. Go to South America.
Would you want to black list everyone from those regions of the world? Because I assure you most of them would agree more with Card than you.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I generally agree about Card, that said... I do question that he would win if he did write something that good. You saw how many people were pissed that they were making an Ender's Game movie.
As to Larry, I'd never heard of him before now.
As to the treatment of women in the stories... speaking merely of Ringo, he wrote quite a lot of stories with women that were not fuckable house wives. They were war stories so they had to be able to hang in that environment. They were tough cold fighters.
As to the men... they're not all muscled jocks either...
Remember Full Metal Jacket? Remember all those guys that showed up at boot camp. All different sorts of people. But once they went through training and then got dropped in the shit... they HAD to be tough... or they died.
And that's basically what you find with Ringo's characters. Its not that the characters are card board it is that our personalities are plastic to our environment. You put someone in a situation and they're going to try and adapt to it. And if you're constantly in life and death situations it is going to have a certain effect on your personality.
For one thing you need to be able to deal with the fear of getting killed. And the best way to deal with that is not think about it. A certain amount of bravado is psychologically useful. Beyond that, you will have other things to deal with... depression... despair... horror. And each of these has to be dealt with in a sustainable manner. We have video of US soldiers talking to each other in Afghanistan while manning positions that are coming under attack from Taliban.
What do you think all those guys sound like? They're making jokes... they say "fucking eat it" kill a guy, they're telling dirty jokes to get each other to laugh...
Think they're happy to be there? No... Its miserable, scary, and horrifying. But they have to wake up every morning and hold that position against people that want to kill them. So they do what they do to balance out their mental state.
Something you have to keep in mind about a lot of these authors is that they either personally went to vietnam, had some kind of military background, or at least studied it to some extent. And the the way they're writing about these people... it sounds the way it sounds if you don't understand what is below it.
War is scary, horrifying, and depressing. How do you do it every day for years on end?
See?
Anyway, most of these authors don't write something I'd consider hugo worthy. though each of them probably has written something that should at least be nominated. They have their moments.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It seems to me that the essential conflict here, if you ignore all the "racists vs SJWs" rhetoric, is this:
Some people think science fiction should be primarily about action, inventing amazing new gadgets, and people fighting aliens in space. This is called "hard" SF.
Some people think science fiction (or fantasy) should be more about telling stories that allow the exploration of real-world issues in a world whose cultures, asumptions, and in some cases even the laws of physics or magic, are constructed to throw them into sharp relief. This is called "soft" SF.
While there's some overlap - a notable example being the new Battlestar Galactica show - most authors fall primarily into one or the other camp. So having one set of awards for two genres, many of whose fans on both sides consider them opposed, is like trying to support a one-state solution in Israel / Palestine instead of a two-state solution: naïve.
This is analogous to how some tabletop gamers prefer RPGs that are "crunchy" with a lot of combat and mechanics, and others prefer rules-light systems that tend to gloss over the mechanics a bit. Neither style is "wrong" or "bad", they just may not be be compatible with each other.
I'm not sure whether separate awards for hard SF are the solution, or just separate categories (or a "hard" and "soft" winner in each existing category, maybe). But that's how I see this playing out in an ideal world.
Wtf? TPDR = Too Partisan Didn't Read.
The text was dripping with digital spittle. Feel free to get a tetanus shot at your earliest opportunity.
Requiem for the American Dream
I'll take it that you are an expert on the topic and also somewhat passionate about it, so I'll ask you. How does the single transferrable vote thing work?
It's also known as "Australian ballot." You rank your choices numerically. The number one votes (and only the number one votes-- that's the "single" in the name of the voting system) arecounted. If any candidate has a majority, they win. If there is no candidate ranked number one by a majority, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Everybody who voted for that candidate has their number two vote moved up to number one, and the votes are tallied again. The process is repeated until a candidate has a majority.
Someone below stated that if you only chose one work, your second choice defaults to "No Award".
No.
In the Hugo balloting, "No award" is an actual choice on the ballot, not a default for abstain.
Therefore an evenly divided electorate that had a majority of voters failing to select a second choice would give results exactly as you have listed. Is that how it works?
But that's not how it actually works. You have to positively vote for no award; it's not a default. (In any case, though, "no award" won on the first ballot-- there was no transfer.)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Maybe I should have dumbed it down to politics not being a huge deal in voting for who gets an award for a work in SF than it is now with a fucking voting guide from manipulative pricks who are politicizing the process instead of readers voting for what they like independently.
Now do you get what this is about instead of rolling out Diamond Age and some out of touch Russian that saw the capitalist system in a republic as a dystopia?
I find it funny that all these people are saying that the puppy noms didn't win because 'They sucked', when so many of them, and their leaders freely admitted that they did NOT READ any of the puppy noms.
Because the politics of the author are more important than the story written.
Three Body Problem only won because the 'Rabid Puppies' voted for it as a block. Does that mean Three Body doesn't deserve it's award? That it sucks? And what about 'Guardians of the Galaxy'? That was a puppy nom, why didn't that get blackballed as well?
And lets not even mention the months and months of harassment and libel that has been taking place. I find the lying of the establishment to be pretty funny.
http://whatever.scalzi.com/201...
Yes, there was an organized "vote no award" block.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Really? Those being called out as SJWs are the ones I see marginalizing other's viewpoints. The whole thing about GG and anti-GG was the anti-GG people trying to shut down the other group rather than even discussing what they were saying. In this thing, you have the same thing, those who have subverted the voting system in order to shut down another person's viewpoint. These are the SJWs, the ones preferring to vote no award because they don't like the politics of those that were nominated. Hell, many of them didn't even read the entries and were bragging about it. How can you vote in a best of award without even reading the material?
http://whatever.scalzi.com/201...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The stuff the puppies nominated that was genuinely great mostly did well: Pretty sure lots of people voted for GOTG because of all the awesome, puppies or no. The rabids seemed to have about 500 votes total (https://chaoshorizon.wordpress.com/2015/08/23/2015-hugo-stats-initial-analysis/) so, less then 10% of the total vote. Three Body Problem was well received by all and was not part of the puppies original slate. The rabid puppies jumped on, after the nominations, instead of their own nominated Skin Game (a genuinely great book by a class act of an author) just so they could declare a victory and we all know it. Skin Game, by the way, awesome book: Would have finished a lot higher if the rabids had not abandoned it in favor of jumping on a winner for the sake of point scoring. (http://www.thehugoawards.org/content/pdf/2015HugoStatistics.pdf) "Parkour, Bitch". As for not reading the stuff, I read a lot of the books despite not voting, but for one. For one I drew the line. No, not the objectively terrible Vox Day stuff, a few snippets were enough to know that was rubbish. I'm talking about the one author I will never read ever again. Never. Not one more penny from me. In fact not even for free: I'm talking about Kevin J Anderson! Why? Because he's Kevin J. Anderson, ruiner of franchises, creator of the sun crusher and the darksaber and fucker-up of Dune. His latest stuff may be 100% gold plated genius (I'd lay odds it's not) but I'll never, ever know, because he's Kevin J "my-jedi-is-a-bigger-jedi-than-yours-Kyp-Durron-was-fucking-terrible" Anderson! I'm proud not to have read his book. Because fool me once Mr Anderson, shame on you, fool me five damn times because you're attached, lamprey like, to franchises I love and just...no. No more of my money. Not ever. So, I didn't read that book. But not because: Puppies. Not because: Ideology. Because: Oh God I just remembered the end to the meandering pointlessness of Darksaber where the fucking thing just crashes into a rock in total anti-climax. *weeps*.
I can't believe that the voters haven't acknowledged No Award before now; it's not perhaps Zelazny's best work, but it's up there (first published in The Saturday Evening Post, then in Last Defender of Camelot).
Though they cite people getting blackballed for politics like Card and that's a valid point. Card is Christian and he doesn't support gay marriage. I mean... hold any opinion you want on that but that has nothing to do with whether someone should or shouldn't get an award for writing.
I dunno...Card has been phoning it in for a while now. I had been reading his new stuff more out of habit (it's easier to read the next book in a series than it is to go and discover new writers). 2008's Ender In Exile lost the 'fire' that the previous post-Bugger-War Bean-series books had; I was willing to suspend my disbelief regarding the implausible political victories achieved by Peter and Bean in the earlier books, but the Ender-versus-Achilles'-son subplot in Exile tied off too easily. All of the main characters just felt over-powered.
And don't get me started on the Formic Wars books. The first one (2012's Earth Unaware) put me off the series for life. The physics were just so nails-on-blackboard bad. The idea that ships in interplanetary space need to come to a stop (relative to where, exactly?) before a spacewalk...arghhhh! You get the impression that he thought ships docking in space would be like semi-trucks side-by-side on the highway, fraught with danger and the risk of swerving or getting blown off course by the wind. What happened to the Ender's Game author who so thoroughly grasped zero-gee combat and advised us that the enemy's gate is down? Is he getting lazy, or arrogant, or not listening to his beta readers, or what?
I didn't find out about Card's execrable views until after I had already paid for, and was thoroughly irritated with, the weakness of his later books. I can get my pulp somewhere else; learning about his hateful attitudes (and actions) just cemented a pre-existing feeling that sending him more royalties was a poor investment for me.
~Idarubicin
Because the SJWs organized people to vote NA en mass. The Puppies proved their point: the Hugo voters are a clique. They would rather burn the house down by organizing to vote NA than give an award to someone who doesn't share their political ideology. And we know they did that, because they posted about it on their blogs. Charlie Stross (whose work I very much enjoy) was crowing about it on twitter.
Now the SJWs can claim "nuh uh, the voters just didn't think any of these books were any good!" That seems hard to believe, particularly given the popularity of some of the novels that were passed over. They proved the Hugo voters (and yes, I know anyone can vote. I'm saying the people who choose to vote) are motivated by politics before quality.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
When Paul Kantner's Blows Against The Empire was the first rock album to ever be nominated for a Hugo Award, in the category of Best Dramatic Presentation.
In voting, the album garnered the second most votes for the award, losing to "No Award", which received the most votes.
Because you can't have dirty hippies winning anything.
Fuck the Hugos.
Maybe not... but maybe the conflict will make it clear that politics are operating in the awards.
The opinion of the Puppies remember was that politics was playing a part in who won or not. And the SJW thing rather proved they were right.
Now was the sad puppy campaign the best way to go about it? I don't know. Vox Day for example appears to be a racist asshole. But there is clearly some politics going on in the Hugos and the Hugos need to understand that they're having their votes manipulated.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
"You yellow bastards! Come back here and take what's coming to you! I'll bite your legs off!"
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Whether Card could win would depend on what WorldCon attendees thought, and quite a few of them don't seem to mind conservative authors. Mike Resnick has gotten five, for example.
I suspect that if Card did something really, truly great, and didn't include any overt anti-gay stuff, it would be virtually impossible to beat him. He's OSC, and the extremely gray WorldCon audience is probably not very gay. It could easily turn out like the Sad Puppies campaign -- piss off all the voters for bringing politics into their little world and fail miserably.
Not voting for them because their writing is shitty is one thing. In Card's case, I'd agree... he hasn't written anything worth reading in a long time.
My point is that there is clearly politics operating in the awards and that is something the system has to take into consideration.
Its not going away. The politics were there before and they'll be there in the future... you just need to appreciate that going forward.
The whole rivalry between the SJW and sad puppy people makes it clear that this is the new normal.
So just adapt. That's all. Just adapt.
As to where we get our pulp... that's fine. I'm the last person to tell anyone where they should get it. I'm just saying... keep an open mind.
If I were bisexual as you said you were... I'd have to be very tolerant of people that didn't understand or accept that. There are too many of them. Much of the world doesn't understand or accept bisexuality or homosexuality.
And however you might feel about that, consider that I personally hold a lot of views that I believe are moral imperitives that many other people don't ascribe to. You don't have to be homosexual or of some given race that has had discrimination issues to feel persecuted on occasion.
We all have to live with each other. I don't blacklist people for not ascribing to my views about everything. If I did that, I'd black list most people because my views are not especially common. I have to be tolerant with people and I don't hold their not sharing my views against them personally or professionally.
I don't think it is practical for bisexuals or homosexuals to do that either. We have a big wide world with a lot of interesting, clever, and wonderful people in it. We just need to get along.
The sad puppy thing was bigger than card in any case... I think there was soemthing in Science fiction where people were saying "Science fiction needs to grow up" or break old patterns. And the problem with that attitude is that its often an outside element trying to impose a narrative on a subculture.
We saw this recently with the whole drama over gaming and sexism. Where an outside group was trying to turn video games into casual narratives about sex issues or lesbianism when the existing market was more interested in space marines, shooting hookers, or quietly building cities by yourself.
And we've seen this in other subcultures. We've seen in comics where every depiction of women in a skin tight outfit is decried as sexism despite the fact that the male characters are similarly clad.
We even saw some of this hit the table top gaming world.
Its a thing. There's this weird culture war going through geekdom and you're seeing push back in certain segments. That's it.
Now if people want to hold view X or Y that is fine. Believe whatever you want and consume whatever you want. But don't try to take it over and tell everyone that enjoys something else that they're bad people for it.
Just leave people be. Maybe we should split the hugos?... have it be the SJW hugos versus the puppy hugos... I don't know. If people can't tolerate each other and coexist then we have to separate and that would be sad.
You see these signs all over the place about coexist... get along... but they seem to only mean that when it comes to the middle east or something. That sort of thing starts at home. It starts HERE. If you can't coexist with some guy because he has views on homosexuality that you don't like... then how can you coexist with anyone that isn't in lock step with you? That's a very common view... right or wrong... its common.
We have to get along. No?
And just in case you're curious, I have no problem with homosexuality what so ever. Be as gay as you want. It doesn't matter to me. Get married, divorced, adopt a kid, whatever. I don't care. The only time I have trouble with homosexuality is when people play the gay card to get favoritism. I had a coworker that sexually harassed another coworker. Other guy was married... to a lady. A
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Well, some of us prefer hard science fiction to the squishy stuff.
I honestly rue the day the all-inclusive crowd decided to re-designate SF as "speculative fiction." All fiction is speculative as it is all an exercise in what-if. The difference between hard science fiction and the rest, as I see it, is that based upon the objective reality currently understood at the time of authorship, the hard stuff is actually within the realm of known possibilities, because, you know, science. I find that to be a significant enough distinction to distinguish these works from those containing gods, elves, magicians, macro teleportation, ESP and so on.
That is in no way to imply that the squishy stuff cannot be fine work -- it most certainly can, and often is. But the bottom line for me is that it is different on a fundamental level, providing a different kind of experience from, say, "The Martian" or the technically flawed, but scientifically sound, "Red Mars."
Doesn't matter to me personally who, or what, gets a Hugo, or why. I'm sitting about ten feet from three of them, and the shine has worn off after decades of observing the process. All I'm saying is that if hard science fiction is of such consequence to these people that they feel awards should be proffered in that specific category, there are doors that are open, or could be opened. Assuming the story is at all accurate, which, from the other comments here... it very well may not be.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I think you may have missed my point. Perhaps another read, with special attention paid to my closing assessment of "tempest in a teakettle." :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
That link is not to any organized "Vote no award" block. It's a basic description of how voting works, and some commentary on the situation. Scalzi is very clear that when you see a work worthy of a Hugo, it should be listed as a choice higher than No Award.
Scalzi's instructions should be how all Hugo voters vote, at every election, regardless of whether there's an organized attempt to game the nominations or not.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Don't boil everything down to whether or not Card personally gets a Hugo... no one gives a shit about that. Its rather an impression that there are cliches in the awards and only people inside the cliques get them.
What we saw from this rivalry is that there are AT LEAST two powerful cliques operating in the Hugos and that is something the Hugos need to take into consideration in future awards.
Whatever you think about the sad puppies or the SJWs... it doesn't matter.
No no... it doesn't matter. Actually. Because either way... this situation PROVES there are cliques.
So... you need deal with that.
By all means... set up rules to make it harder for the sad puppy people to fill a docket with people they like. That's reasonable.
But you're going to have to make it harder for other cliques to operate in the same way as well. You can't just have a rule that says "if sad puppy, then no vote" So your rules have to be blind to which clique is pushing whatever. And simply by doing that you're going to reduce the power of all the cliques.
This is another of those weird situations where drama happens and then both sides declare victory.
The reality is that both sides probably lost here.
The Sad puppies failed to get anyone they wanted on the list of winners.
And the SJW clique lost because the only way to deal with the situation is to change the rules that will ultimately make it harder for the SJWs to operate in the future as well.
So it was WW3.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
No, but having people vote overwhelming for NOTHING because they don't like the candidate IS ideological block voting. I would say the same damn thing if sad puppies won overwhelmingly. Instead of the qualities of the books being what sets the bar, this clearly shows that it was politics that set the show. Sorry, you can't hide behind it's all personal choice when there was such campaigns pushing these outcomes at play here.
Where was the cheating? Even George RR Martin admits that the Sad Puppies did everything within the rules.
Are you kidding? Do you really think "technically, they aren't cheating" is going to calm anyone who thought the puppies were stuffing the nomination box? Because if you do, you have a lot to learn about human nature.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Mike Resnick is a good editor, a fine writer, a witty conversationalist, a font of wisdom and knowledge in the field, a person who is interested in helping others, and in pretty much every way I can think of, a genuinely nice guy.
If all of the nominations by the sad and the rabid puppies had been people as well-regarded in the field as Mike (and Toni), there would have been far less controversy.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The whole rivalry between the SJW and sad puppy people makes it clear that this is the new normal.
I think that hits the nail on the head, though probably not quite the way you intended. The Sad/Rabid Puppies have chosen to label themselves, and self-selected their membership to only include individuals who pass their own internal litmus tests of conservatism, manliness, or dear-God-not-feminism--and who actually want to appear under their banner. (We know there were a couple of authors who were - apparently without their consent - nominated as part of a Puppy slate and who withdrew from the Hugo ballot because they didn't want to be associated with the Puppy project.)
Then the SJWs - the Social Justice Warriors - who just seem to be...everybody else. They didn't need a banner to crowd behind. They're not a shadowy cabal or powerful movement. They're just...a bunch of fans with a whole bunch of independent (and sometimes mutually contradictory) viewpoints about both SF literature and society.
It doesn't strike me as sensible, or constructive, to reduce it down to Well, it's just A versus B, I guess we should agree to disagree, try to get along, and make sure both "sides" get equal airtime--when we've let one little group draw boundaries and then assign a label to everyone else. It gives disproportionate attention, weight, and power to the loudest argument, rather than the best one. Compromising with extremists doesn't result in an improved consensus, it just tends to encourage the extremists. (Witness all of U.S. politics.)
If I were bisexual as you said you were... I'd have to be very tolerant of people that didn't understand or accept that. There are too many of them. Much of the world doesn't understand or accept bisexuality or homosexuality.
Wow. Not sure where you got that. I didn't say word one about my sexuality. You've gotten it wrong, and it's irrelevant to the discussion anyway. I am impressed, however, that you are willing to helpfully explain to non-straight people that bigots exist and are plentiful (because, after all, non-straight people would be totally unaware of that without your advice), and that non-straight people have to be very tolerant of bigots, in order to keep the world running smoothly.
Incidentally, a word of advice. Adding an "I'm not a bigot" disclaimer at the end of a post never helps, and definitely doesn't work the way you think it does.
~Idarubicin
The way you're using the phrase "SJWs" makes little sense. It's not like anybody would answer the question "Are you a Social Justice Warrior?" with a yes. Gay rights activist, black lives matter activist, progressive, those would all get somebody to say yes, and all three probably have pretty significant overlap with people you'd call Social Justice Warriors, but in general the whole concept of Social Justice Warrior is something that is entirely made up by their opponents.
In this case, for example, there's no progressive slate at the Hugo's. Never has been. There's a Fuck Vox Day vote, but the Fuck Vox Day vote includes a lot of people Vox Day supported strongly enough to get Hugo Nominations.
Whatever you find reasonable, the reality is that you won't be able to shut just one group out. You'll have to tighten the rules to make it harder for ANY group of that nature to operate.
And assuming the sad puppies were honest about their goals... they win if you do that.
Which means you can either maintain the status quo and deal with them coming at you every year doing the same thing over and over again.
OR... you tighten the rules making it harder for groups to brigade and they obtain their stated goals.
Its a no-win scenario for the SJWs. They can't win. That's checkmate.
As to sexuality, then I got you confused with someone else in this thread that said she was a bisexual woman. Sorry.
As to my explaination of to non-straight people... its actually a more expansive point about how unproductive it is to blacklist anyone that doesn't check all your boxes.
I went into some depth to explain that there are more boxes that can be checked besides "your thoughts on homosexuality" etc. And if I blacklisted everyone that didn't ascribe to my own personal beliefs there would be very few people in the world that I found acceptable to conduct business or associate with.
I have friends, family, business associates, etc that don't share my values. I don't hold it against them.
I also don't appreciate your attempt to suggest that my opinions or honest and heartfelt attempts to explain myself are unwelcome because of my gender or sexual orrentation. This is a new phenomon which frankly should be labeled as trending towards bigotry.
There is this notion these days that you can't be racist against white people, you can't be sexist against men, and you can't be sexually intolerant of heterosexual people.
That's logically impossible for that to be impossible. Discriminating against any group is discrimination on that basis. So I frankly don't appreciate you saying this:
"I am impressed, however, that you are willing to helpfully explain to non-straight people that bigots exist and are plentiful"
Either we have a dialog or we do not. You want to tell me your opinions? You get mine in return. Attempts to make it only flow one way will be rejected.
As to saying "i'm not a bigot" meaning that I am a bigot... only for those that like to speciously label people bigots.
If your great goal in any discussion is to try and find out how to label the other side in the discussion a bigot and then claim victory on that basis... then sure. However, you are increasingly seeing that rhetorical technique fail. So i would suggest diversifying into rhetorical arguments and strategies that have a longer shelf life. Just a word of advice. ;-)
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
1. Yes, people do answer to that. I think I quoted some tweets from one of the organizers of the opposition to the sad puppies self identifying as such. I believe his tweet after the vote was "SJWs burned the village down to save it." What is more, my understanding is that the term was actually what some activists were calling themselves initially. It just got co-opted by their detractors. Wouldn't be the first time. I'm further going to point out that playing word games is a trope of both progressives and SJWs... so... arguing they don't exist with semantics might turn out to be a somewhat self defeating argument.
2. As to the "they're not a group they're all different groups" argument. Lets not pretend that there aren't clouds of association here.
3. As to whether there is or isn't a progressive slate... as I said... it doesn't matter anymore. Does it? See... once you've validated that there is a brigading issue... That the sad puppies even got all those names on the list frankly proves the rules need to be changed. And from what I hear, they are changing the rules... tightening it down so brigading is harder. And if you pass rules against it... that undermines a progressive or SJW slate as much as it undermines the sad puppies or whatever else you want to talk about. You can't pass a bill of attainder against the sad puppies. You either change the rules making it harder to brigade or you accept the practice and normalize it. Choose. It doesn't matter what you do or how you justify it or what you argue... checkmate. You either update the rules... which is happening... or you accept the sad puppies as the new normal. And if the rules get updated... and they are... then that undermines any other brigading action by any other group... whether they exist or not. It doesn't matter. Its over.
4. As to Vox Day, I think I said previously that he appeared to be a racist asshole... so... fuck him. But that doesn't really change anything.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Breitbart died on the toilet.
A lot of my friends are writers, and are quite diverse, but we all were glad that No Award was made in the categories where the "slate" got all five positions.
You proved a lot. You proved that there wasn't slate voting before, and also that fuzzy nipples or whatever GG name you're going by this week are a bunch of jerks.
And as someone who's held shiny Hugos and had the hassle of going thru security with them, I'm glad of the result.
Here endeth the lesson. Cheaters never prosper.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
*bitch slaps fucktard AC Troll with reality*
""
Critical response
Critics received Ender's Game well. The novel won the Nebula Award for best novel in 1985,[10] and the Hugo Award for best novel in 1986,[11] considered the two most prestigious awards in science fiction.[12][13] Ender's Game was also nominated for a Locus Award in 1986.[6] In 1999, it placed No. 59 on the reader's list of Modern Library 100 Best Novels. It was also honored with a spot on American Library Association's "100 Best Books for Teens." In 2008, the novel, along with Ender's Shadow, won the Margaret A. Edwards Award, which honors an author and specific works by that author for lifetime contribution to young adult literature.[14] Ender's Game was included in Damien Broderick's book Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985â"2010.[15]New York Times writer Gerald Jonas asserts that the novel's plot summary resembles a "grade Z, made-for-television, science-fiction rip-off movie", but says that Card develops the elements well despite this "unpromising material". Jonas further praises the development of the character Ender Wiggin: "Alternately likable and insufferable, he is a convincing little Napoleon in short pants."[16]
The novel has received negative criticism for violence and its justification. Elaine Radford's review, "Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman", posits that Ender Wiggin is an intentional reference by Card to Adolf Hitler and criticizes the violence in the novel, particularly at the hands of the protagonist.[2] Card responded to Radford's criticisms in Fantasy Review, the same publication. Radford's criticisms are echoed in John Kessel's essay "Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality", wherein Kessel states: "Ender gets to strike out at his enemies and still remain morally clean. Nothing is his fault."[3] Noah Berlatsky makes similar claims in his analysis of the relationship between colonization and science fiction, where he describes how Ender's Game is in part a justification of "Western expansion and genocide."[17]
The U.S. Marine Corps Professional Reading List makes the novel recommended reading at several lower ranks, and again at Officer Candidate/Midshipman.[18] The book was placed on the reading list by Captain John F. Schmitt, author of FMFM-1 (Fleet Marine Fighting Manual, on maneuver doctrine) for "provid[ing] useful allegories to explain why militaries do what they do in a particularly effective shorthand way."[19] In introducing the novel for use in leadership training, Marine Corps University's Lejeune program opines that it offers "lessons in training methodology, leadership, and ethics as well [....] Ender's Game has been a stalwart item on the Marine Corps Reading List since its inception."[19]
Accolades
Publication Country Accolade Year Rank
Amazon.com United States Best of the Century: Best Books of the Millennium Poll[20] 1999
32
Locus United States Best 20th Century Science Fiction Novels: Reader's Poll[21] 2012
2
Modern Library United States Modern Library 100 Best Novels: Reader's List[22] 1999
59
NPR United States Top 100 Science Fiction, Fantasy Books: Readers' Poll[23] 2011
3
Publishers Weekly United States Bestselling Science Fiction Novels of 2012[24] 2012
1
Science Channel United States Top 10 Sci-fi Books of All Time[25] 2013
5
The weeks ending June 9, August 18, September 8, September 15, November 3, November 10, November 17, and November 24, 2013, the novel was No. 1 on the New York Times' Best Sellers List of Paperback Mass-Market Fiction.[26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33]
""
Don't respond. Just sit there with that red mark on the side of your face and your shame.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Apparently you're beneath shame... I thought scum could at least feel shame...
https://youtu.be/_TxnL5VYgoY?t...
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Your categorization is off. "Hard" SF deals with technology that is at least theoretically possible, "Soft" does away with that limitation.
Somewhere further along the spectrum after "Soft" it fades from science fiction to fantasy fiction.
Traditionally, science fiction involves introducing some technology to the reader and then exploring the world that results from its existence.
Either we have a dialog or we do not. You want to tell me your opinions? You get mine in return. Attempts to make it only flow one way will be rejected.
Then why is it that you're replying to - and arguing with, and lecturing about - so many things that I didn't write?
I guess some of us are able to better handle the terrible burden we heft as straight, white males. And I'm sure that if I were a bisexual woman, I would understand and appreciate your honest and heartfelt attempts to advise me on how to handle bigots.
You can reply, or not. I won't be reading further messages.
~Idarubicin
I didn't say it was a burden... I simply reject the notion that I have less a right to an opinion because of such things.
You're basically trying to use a lot of specious crap to suggest some people don't have a right to an opinion.
That's fine. You shut up too then. Everyone shuts up as well.
You all keep your mouths clamped shut and I'll do the same as well. But the first mother fucker that opens his mouth cancels the deal and everyone gets to talk again.
You either have free speech or you don't. I spit in the face of your absurd presumption to shame me into silence. Who made you an authority on anything? And why would you think that my gender or my race or my sexual orientation would make me more or less valuable as a voice for anything?
As to you not reading messages, you contacted me, shithead... not the other way around.
You can't handle people laughing at your comical world view? The future is going to be hard on people like you. This whole pearl clutching political correctness thing is eating itself alive. Its all down hill for this shit going forward. If you can't handle me, then you're going to have to climb pretty damn far up your own ass to escape the rest of society.
Enjoy the future. I know I will.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Oh I completely agree :)
Rational thought is the only true freedom
Nobody else was allowed to nominate anybody in those categories.
That is entirely untrue.
Anyone could nominate, it just happened to be a voting bock of 300 who got a few slates nominated. The answer is not to have no award (despite good entries being nominated) by 3000 people (out of 5000).
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I think just adding the word 'Voters' fixes a lot of the issues with this terrible headline, and shows why it's terrible. The voters refused to submit to the votes!
Of course the correct statement is, even more clearly, "Hugo Fan Voters Refuse To Award Anyone Rather Than Submit To Fans' Nominations," which points up how ridiculous the whole thing is.
1. I'd believe that somebody who'd been trolled by Vox Day repeatedly might decide to throw the label back in his face. Day's that kind of guy. But, as someone who was on the board of one of the state-level groups that helped push for ObamaCare, I think I'm pretty well informed on how progressive activists refer to themselves. And I can assure you that nobody uses the word "warrior." Somebody somewhere (particularly in the more "I-have-a-PhD-so-you're-stupid" wing) might use the phrase "social justice," but "equality" and "fairness" are much more common.
2. "Clouds of association?" If I started putting the gun-rights guys (and in my experience gun rights ladies are rarer then black conservatives), the pro-life activists, and libertarians all under the same label I'd be an asshole. I've done it before, and I'll do it again, because it's a useful activism tool (people get more worked up about opposing Right-Wing Loonies then they do some reasonable term), but that doesn't mean I'll be right in an objective sense of the term. And those groups are as tightly allied as the so-called SJWs. More tightly aligned then gays and blacks -- those three groups really seem to understand how each-other thing, whereas I have never met a non-black gay-rights activists who has any clue how black people think.
3/4 When Vox Day is involved brigading against him is inevitable. At the actual con more then one attendee was quoted saying they agreed with the puppies, but hated their tactics/Vox Dayish personality so much they'd voted No Award.
Drawing conclusions about the nature of Hugo voting from this is roughly as sensible as drawing conclusions about French elections from that time La Pen managed to squeak through the first round and got whipped by Chirac.
1. by this same logic people might claim the sad puppies title for the same reason. The logic doesn't work in other applications which is a good sign it is invalid.
2. Its not a question of right or wrong... its a rejection of the notion that there aren't factional associations outside stated limited associations.
3/4. This was clearly bigger than Vox Day. Trying to boil everything down to him is inaccurate.
Look, I'll tell you again...
IT
DOES
NOT
MATTER
It doesn't matter. Brigading happened. Both sides. Obvious. The system is being reformed to make that harder. That will prevent ANYONE from brigading again in the future in the same way.
So... Given that the Sad Puppies said their problem was undue influence on the awards and brigading for various authors on political grounds... if the rules are changed to make it harder to brigade... then the sad puppies just won.
No?
Their point was not to get certain names on ONE award. Their point was to reform the system. The system is getting reformed.
So in what way would this not be a total victory?
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
1. White people really are fucking clueless about how they sound to anyone else, probably largely because we don't have to talk to anyone else in a context where they can get away with calling us assholes to our faces. The Sad Puppies call themselves Sad Puppies, except for Vox Days faction who prefer the term "rabid puppies." Their logo is a sad puppy. If I wanted to do what they did, and make up some insulting phrase to dismiss their entire argument, it would actually be pretty easy. They're fighting, and they called me a warrior, so warrior would probably be in it. They explicitly admit that they want SciFi to be like it was in the 60s and 70s, when the only white people in it were Uhura and Sulu. So they really don't want me to make up a bunch of words about them.
As for the brigading issue, look at the reform proposals. They're not doing anything about brigading in voting, they're doing something about brigading in the nomination system. The Sad Puppies have never said the nomination system was rigged (every year at least one Puppy-approved work has been on the final ballot), they've said the actual voting was rigged. That's why they tried to keep all non-Puppies-approved work off the ballot this year, rather then settling for a couple works in each category like they did last year.
Which means the Hugos are now changing the rules to protect the bit of the process that (the puppies say) is rigged, from the process the puppies use to de-rig the awards.
1. I'm not white. And even if I were... that wouldn't matter. The people that like to use racism prop up shitty arguments are mostly on the progressive left these days.
Anyone disagrees with you, you say "RACE" or "SEX" or something else that doesn't actually matter in that situation and try to censor all opposing view points.
I reject your attempt with extreme prejudice.
2. As to vox day, i'm not letting you reduce everything to one racist dick. Rejected. What was going on was a lot bigger than him. You can't just fine one racist in a group and dismiss the whole thing.
3. As to wanting scifi to be like it was in the 1960s... that doesn't mean anything about race particularly. That is your projection.
4. As to distinctions between voting and nominations.... *laughs* they said there was brigading. That is getting dealt with. If it wasn't then you can expect them to exploit the holes left in it to make the point again until the system is reformed.
They win. The brigading which was their primary objective to stop is being made more difficult. If it isn't difficult enough, then they'll do it again until the system is fixed.
What they did was TROLL you... and they did it to force you to change a position. You see this on internet communities all the time. Some stupid rule will get put in... and someone will exploit that rule simply to show how stupid it is... and that will force the reform.
You don't like that Vox Day is a racist? Great. That gives you extra incentive to actually shut down the brigading. Do it. Shut out the evil Vox Day... and in doing so... you give the movement what it wanted which was reform.
it's checkmate.
Game over. The brigading is done.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
1. I never said you were. I said white guys like them really don't get why anyone with a modicum of manners doesn't make up a word, apply to everyone who disagrees with them, and then act offended when they act offended.
Note that what they're doing is the same thing as you imply I'm doing with race: you're saying that whenever I hear something I disagree with I call it racist no matter what the actual argument is. What they're doing is whenever I say something they disagree with, they say "that's social justice bullshit."
Thank you for proving my point.
2. Who cares whether you "let me" do it. The fact is their slate got rejected by their own voters due to a combination of their over-aggressive tactics and Vox Day. That is what actually happened. Several were quoted at the awards ceremony saying they agreed with many Sad Puppy arguments but voted No Award anyway. The Sad Puppy point lost partly because it was being argued by a guy everyone hates. This is not uncommon. It is the reason nobody has asked Dubya's endorsement for anything since he left the White House.
3. The only social justice movements in the 60s were against sexism and racism. In fact they actually called themselves that back then. If you don't want me to believe you don't oppose the Civil Right movement don't a) say you want shit to be like it was back then, and b) deride your opponents as being Social Justice anything.
Hell if you want to actually have an exchange of ideas at any level don't use that term. You made it up as a slur, which means my response to hearing you say it is not gonna be "he's probably a nice guy, I have a moral duty to give him the benefit of the doubt." It's gonna be "fuck that guy." Particularly if that guy is in any way associated with Vox Day.
4. And what possible rule change can eliminate brigading at voting? It's trivial to do it in nominations. You could restrict everyone to three nominations and still have five nominees. You could eliminate the fan-nomination process completely and have a committee of winners determine the nominee list, or have the guy who runs the con write the nominee list. Any one of those rules makes the Sad Puppy system technique virtually impossible. But you can't have a rule that says "you can't vote for that guy for short story AND that other guy for novel because we found a website advocating both of them" without banning all fan voting or adding a whole bunch of by-laws to prevent the Sad Puppies from producing a bunch of fake internet slates combining all possible combinations of ballot that they dislike.
Which puts this in a completely different tradition: that of trolls dominating something for a short time period, getting themselves banned, and then declaring victory anyway because "we made our point, and we didn't want to not be banned anyway."
And who says one's race is personal information, Bingo?
In my opinion race is an arbitary phenotype... as relevant as the color of your hair, eyes, your height, or what your arm pits smell like after a work out.
I wouldn't divide society on that basis and I view anyone that would as some flavor conman or moron.
Often as not the people pushing this sort of thing are doing an "US vs THEM" divide and conquer political strategy. Have nothing of use to offer anyone? Divide people.. tell people that their neighbors want to stab them in the back or rape their daughters or whatever and then say "I will protect you from your evil neighbor who's dog shits on your lawn!"...
And boom... winning political strategy.
I find differences in personal philosophy more relevant really. Religions often are relevant. And there is always competence.
The one thing few people seem to be able to handle is that there are some people that are competent at certain things and some people that are not. Some people can sing. Some people can do quantum mechanics in their head, and some people can just about manage maintaining their autonomic functions if they don't strain too hard.
I believe in meritocracy. That people should be able to rise to their level of competence and sink to their level of incompetence.
Race doesn't enter into that.
There are competent and incompetent people in all races just as there are incompetent and competent people that are tall or fat or have hairy backs. Dividing societies on that basis might have been how past cultures did things but it is important to note that one of the reasons besides ignorance that was done is that there was a stark cultural difference between people of different races.
A white person was likely to have a western european culture. An asian person was likely to have an eastern cultural perspective. And so on.
And discriminating on the basis of culture is still bigotry but it is at least more understandable.
In fact, the primary differences between the racial groups in the US is that there are lingering cultural differences. You will hear a black person chide another black person by saying "stop talking like a white person"... this makes clear that there is a cultural aspect to the racial dynamics in the US.
And these cultural differences can be found in the jewish community indifferent to whether they're atheists or not, the various European American groups, the various African american groups, and the various Asian American groups.
Korean americans are not the same thing as Japanese Americans or Chinese Americans. They have distinct cultural traits.... moral and ethical codes that differ. Something one group would call rude another group would call polite.
These cultural differences are even found between the sexes. A life time of growing up reading different books, having different heroes, and being asked to live up to different standards conditions young men and young women differently which causes friction when one expects something of the other which makes sense in the context of their culture but not in the context of the other culture.
This dis-unity is what causes a great deal of the friction. Once you understand that, it becomes clearer how to deal with such problems going forward.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I voted. I attended. I read all the submissions before I voted. I was really shocked by how bad most of the Puppy-nominated works were. Several of them were so bad I couldn't believe they got published in the first place--never mind nominated for awards. I did vote for two of their nominees above no-award though--the two that I genuinely believed to be award worthy. One other one I debated about--it was well-written and I liked it, but it seemed to have too little content for the category.
To illustrate some of the problems: 1) several of the works were incomplete. They were part of larger stories, apparently, but simply ended abruptly. 2) A couple of them actually seemed to tell no story--they just preached. WTF?! 3) Some were just really, really dumb. E.g. imagine a planet whose magnetic field is so strong it captures people's souls when they die. 4) One big rule that beginner writers have to learn is not to give "infodumps." About half the puppy nominees never learned this rule.
If the puppy dogs really want to have an impact in 2016, they really, really need to focus on nominating genuinely good works. It's hard to give NA to a deserving work. It's really, really easy to give it to trash.
On the Bingo issue... we'll just let that one lay where it is for now.
As to race being personal... its no more personal than the shape of my nose, height, or shoe size.
Its a basic human phenotype and unlike the length and girth of my penis its something you could tell just by looking at me. As such, I don't see how it could be personal. Penis girth?... a bit personal... race? How is that personal?
If it were such a personal question than why would the US census department ask me that information every time I talked to them?
I actually find the issue of race to be incredibly tedious since it serves a smoke screen to cover up bigger problems or give legitimacy for really really stupid cultural tropes under the guise of "well that's my culture/race"... That's no excuse. Its in the culture of some people's to eat each other. Literal skull cracking cannibals. Now do we judge their culture? Yuuup.
So clearly we have no problem judging cultures. That's as the joke goes, now we're just negotiating price. A reference to the joke where a fellow asks a woman if she's a prostitute, she says no, he says what if I gave you 100 million dollars to have sex with me, she says okay at that price, and then he says okay now we're just negotiating price.
Here's the thing. Why we latch on to race as being relevant is that it historically correlated with culture and various cultures would create culturally unitary poltical units where they would say "fuck everyone else but help your own out."... and you'll find that people were generally pretty fucking nasty to each other even when there was only one race in the area. I mean, in Asia you could all asians in the area but are you Chinese? Are you Japanese? Are you Korean? And people from each of those countries LOOK different they have different cultures, different politics, and different religions.
And the subdivisions didn't stop there. The various provinces/states/kingdoms of Japan or China all thought they were superior to all the other provinces for various reasons.
The point is that people LIKE these US vs THEM narratives because it gives you moral justification to fuck someone else over.
You dehumanize or rob someone of any moral/ethical/political/economic agency and then you just fuck them.
Now dividing us on the basis of race WAS functional when given political units really only had one race in them. However, racial divisions are DYSFUNCTIONAL in cosmopolitan societies.
Thus this whole "oh I'm this race" or that race in the first world is generally detrimental to our socities as a whole.
Here someone will start quoting statistics at me about low achievement or over representation or under representation in one thing or another... and why that is bad.
Statistics should not be cited by people that don't know how to read them or don't know what they mean. They're numbers. And often as not the reason we talk about race is because THOSE are the numbers we collect. Do we have employment stats on people over and under a certain Body Mass Index? I bet we could make as much of a fuss about that as any of this race stuff. People's world views are prisoners of the statistics. Because the US census divides everyone based on race largely as a racial throw back everyone judges the success and failure of the country in those terms.
We don't look at the socioeconomic angles where we judge people by CLASS more than by race or gender. There is an assumption that CLASS is subordinate to race which isn't the case or Oprah wouldn't exist.
Region is also a really interesting way to break people down. People in state X are going to have different socioeconomic characteristics to people in state Y. THAT is interesting.
But your race? Not interesting unless there are institutional barriers based on race. And in the 21st century in the First World... there aren't any. We've done away with that. What we have left are self imposed cultural barriers.
Its like that stupid action movie "the matrix" where people a
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.