2016 Hugo Awards Shortlist Dominated By Rightwing Campaign (theguardian.com)

Dave Knott quotes a report from The Guardian: The annual Hugo awards for the best science fiction of the year have once again been riven by controversy, as a concerted campaign by a conservative lobby has dominated the ballot. The Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies movements, which both separately campaign against a perceived bias towards liberal and leftwing science-fiction and fantasy authors, have managed to get the majority of their preferred nominations on to the final ballot, announced today. Since 2013, the Puppies factions have posted recommendations of works to combat the Hugo tendency to reward works that leaders of the movement deem "niche, academic, overtly to the left in ideology and flavor, and ultimately lacking what might best be called visceral, gut-level, swashbuckling fun." The Rabid Puppies has been successful in getting its nominations on the shortlist again this year; out of 80 recommendations, 62 have received sufficient votes to make the ballot. At MidAmeriCon II this year, it was announced that more than 4,000 nominating ballots were cast for the 2016 Hugo awards, almost double the previous record of 2,122 ballots. This news was initially greeted with cautious optimism, but the shortlist shows that the Puppies and their supporters have redoubled their efforts to "game" the awards. The shortlist will be voted upon and the winners revealed at the forthcoming Worldcon in Kansas in August.

Comments

Idiocracy was prophetic

[suupaabaka]

Elon, get a move on, I want out.

Re:Idiocracy was prophetic

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds like a great sf plot. right wing nutjobs take over the planet, forcing the barrel chested, stentorian liberal science hero Evian Muskmelon to create an interstellar colonizing flotilla. he also creates an armada of quick attack ships, the I-regulars, to defend the flotilla, against the poorly designed conservative ships, the Reagan Reserves, who are trying to stop the spread of liberal values throughout the universe. Emperor Trump III fails in his effort to stop the flotilla. It returns a century later, with the support of the alien version of the Algonquin Round Table, which promptly retakes Earth, names it New Atwood, and places the conservatives in Coventry, until they choose psycho-rehabilitation.

Re:Idiocracy was prophetic

[someone1234]

Interesting, but who would want to retake a world which was under 100 years of ultra conservative rule. I would wait 200 years and the problem solves itself. One more century of terraforming and Earth probably will have breathable air again.

Re:Idiocracy was prophetic

[CreatureComfort]

Methusalah's Children

Re:Idiocracy was prophetic

[mcgrew]

Looking at the shortlist it looks like I'll be voting "none of the above" in most categories. Right wing takeover? I don't see it and haven't since Heinlein died in 1988. I do see a lot of right wing and left wing stuff on the list.

I don't want either right or left wing politics in my science fiction.

That said, I did write one story with a hint of politics and religion, basically with the message "you can't eat gold." Left or right? I don't know but I doubt it's right wing.

I nominated my own Mars, Ho! but it didn't make the shortlist. I nominated C.C. Finlay, Editor in Chief of F&SF as best editor. He's not on the list, either but damn it, he should be. His magazine has the best SF IMO and he even occasionally sends personalized rejection letters. No other magazine does that, at least that I've seen (granted, there are quite a few I don't submit to).

Oddly, four of five in the "semipro" list are counted as professional markets by the SFWA (the folks behind the Nebulas).

The Guardien calls the Hugos "biggest prize in science fiction and fantasy", but I disagree. Fans vote for the Hugos, science fiction and fantasy professional writers ("professional" being defined as selling three 1000 word or longer stories for a nickle a word or more, or a novel (at least 40k words) that earns $3000 from self-publishing profits, an advance, or royalties) vote for the Nebulas. If they were movie awards, the Hugos would be the Sundance Film Festival's Audience Award and the Nebula would be the Oscar.

Re:Idiocracy was prophetic

[mcgrew]

I read that decades ago, but can't for the life of me remember any of it. But it was a Heinlein story and he was pretty right wing... his Jerry Was a Man was downright racist, and a humorous story about an intelligent whirlwind I can't remember the name of was pretty Trumpian.

Re:Idiocracy was prophetic

[ravenshrike]

You might want to reread that story. The entire point of the story was that if genetically engineered actual apes were sapient and deserving of the same rights as man, treating black people as subhuman because of their skin color was the fucking height of idiocy seeing as they're actually human. It's just Heinlein doesn't bludgeon the fuck out of his audience with a point.Though my favorite bit was this:

"The honorable Augustus Pomfrey looked every inch the statesman as he bowed to the court and to his opponents. "It is indeed strange," he began, "to hear the second-hand voice of a legal fiction, a soulless, imaginary quantity called a corporate ‘person,’ argue that a flesh-and-blood creature, a being of hopes and longings and passions, has not legal existence."

Re:Idiocracy was prophetic

[Toad-san]

Damn! I'd PAY to watch that movie!

Re:Idiocracy was prophetic

[robkeeney]

That's like saying "Huckleberry Finn" was racist because it depicted slavery and used the N-word. Only morons who can't see the point would think so.

Re:Idiocracy was prophetic

[Hankenstein]

The Hugo voted by the fans, who are the ones paying money to buy the books is obviously the "biggest prize" More money means you can afford to write more of the stories "you" want to write.

An author might appreciate the Nebulas because it is a vote from his peers but that doesn't pay the bills.

The Oscars are everybit a popularity contest as the Hugos

Re:Idiocracy was prophetic

[Salgak1]

Well, I know the reverse situation was written: Michael Z. Williamson's "Freehold". It's even free to read, in ebook form.

All hail the Baen Free Library!!

Re:Idiocracy was prophetic

[crunchygranola]

I read that decades ago, but can't for the life of me remember any of it. But it was a Heinlein story and he was pretty right wing...

It is a bit misleading to simply label Heinlein as "right wing".

He started out championing liberal causes and was quite active politically then. He was a Democrat until he was 47 years old. He completely rejected conservative ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and religion throughout his entire life.

He adopted Libertarian ideas in his 40s, (the 1950s) and became increasingly involved with right-wing anti-communist activism during the McCarthy Era. During the Cold War being opposed to the Soviet Union, it allies, and the Communist political front organizations found in democratic countries did not make you right-wing, "Cold War Liberals" felt exactly the same way. But the right-wing focused on florid anti-communism to an extreme degree, and that seemed to attract Heinlein into their orbit, so that he became a supporter of Goldwater in 1964.

Despite his devotion to individualism he seemed to be attracted to heroic imagery, and so to the politics of the "strong leader" that everyone falls in line behind that drives the right-wing. He became an ardent supporter of Ronald Reagan and the (genuinely) science fictional "SDI" program.

Certainly his shift to the right occurred at the height of his career, but in his later years he got ever more deeply embedded in increasingly fringey right-wing political and social causes during a clear decline in his mental faculties.

Re:Idiocracy was prophetic

[mcgrew]

The Oscars are like the Nebulas, in that you have to be in the industry in the case of the Oscars and a writer in the case of the Nebulas. Fans can't vote for an Oscar or a Nebula, they can for a Hugo.

And not all of us have to grub for money, some of us don't need the money and do it because we love doing it.

Re:Idiocracy was prophetic

[mcgrew]

Huckleberry Finn was an anti-slavery abolitionist book written by an abolitionist. Jerry Was a Man was written by a racist who used a talking monkey in place of a black man.

Re:Idiocracy was prophetic

[mcgrew]

Jerry Was a Man was, according to wilipedia, published in 1947, five years before I was born and fifteen before I was reading Heinlein. But that story's not just far right wing, but blatantly racist.

booky mcBookyFace

[Anonymous Coward]

If they do not like the results of public balloting then they should not have public balloting. Allowing broad public campaigning undermines things because it becomes either a popularity contest or a place for people to grind their collective gripes. This goal of public participation is fine if it is for something that lacks meaning, like political elections, but that is another story. Oh wait,I forgot some of you folks are from the US. Sorry about that.....

Re:booky mcBookyFace

[lgw]

By design the Hugos are a popularity contest. The Nebulas are chosen by critics, the Hugos by fans. There's no "stacking the vote" in any way, just voting (it's not like this is an internet poll or something silly like that).

While the only important popularity contest is book sales, the Hugos do sometimes help less-known authors get discovered. Even then it's about the books you like, not the books you're supposed to like - the latter was always the Nebulas.

Re:booky mcBookyFace

[Anonymous Coward]

But it's okay for the final voters to do the same thing, as they did last year with the record number of "No Award" categories? That is very hypocritical.

Re:booky mcBookyFace

[dbIII]

There's no "stacking the vote" in any way

Until now where a bunch have turned up with what is effectively "how to vote cards" - which is why people are pissed off about that bunch.

Basically what is indistinguishable from grubby and petty student politics has hit the Hugos. Left wing and right wing are not the issue, a bunch of low rent political hacks manipulating things is the issue no matter what breed of politics they screech.

Re:booky mcBookyFace

[Oligonicella]

The Hugos have always had how to vote cards. It's just now it's common knowledge.

Re:booky mcBookyFace

[taustin]

Allowing broad public campaigning undermines things because it becomes either a popularity contest

An award voted on by whoever chooses to participate is a popularity contest. That's the whole point.

Re:booky mcBookyFace

[taustin]

This entire controversy is about a small group of elitist pricks trying to hijack a meaningless award away from another small group of elitist pricks. The only difference between the Hugo inner circle for the last couple of decades and the Puppies (of either variety) is which books they're hawking. None of them want general participation on the part of the book buying public.

It's been decades since there was any detectable connection between what the sf buying public is buying and either the Hugos or the Nebulas.

Re:booky mcBookyFace

[serviscope_minor]

There's no "stacking the vote" in any way, just voting (it's not like this is an internet poll or something silly like that).

There is stacking the vote for now, based on common voting patterns. The nominations are a vote with tens of thousands of options. In normal circumstances people's ballots ae somewhat uncorrelated, because there's such a broad choice. Therefore using the "slate" tactic where a smallish people vote with identical ballots has a very large effect and does in fact stack the votes.

It's stacking because in previous years when people aren't trying to game the system, no one does it. Last year, two different anti-slate methods were proposed, and likely one will get final ratification this year to apply to the 2017 awards.

Re:booky mcBookyFace

[Antique Geekmeister]

> trying to hijack a meaningless award away from another small group of elitist pricks

It's not meaningless if you're a reader, a writer, an agent, or a publisher. For new writers especially, a Hugo award can help open a lot of doors to publishers who might not have time to sort through the slush pile on their desks.

Re:booky mcBookyFace

[tsqr]

Until now where a bunch have turned up with what is effectively "how to vote cards"

This is a pretty apt description of elections in early American politics, where the various political parties printed and distributed their own ballots.

Re:booky mcBookyFace

[arth1]

For quite a while the public ballots worked, but where a group decides to undermine the process by intentionally stacking the vote, well yes, it gets undermined. All these right wing goons are doing is destroying the Hugos.

You must be new to the Hugo Awards. The "vote stacking", i.e. grassroot campaigns to get voters to vote based on WHO instead of WHAT were done by the social issues wing, not by the old school sci-fi guys.

(There's nothing left-wing and right-wing about this - there's a substantial leftist political view in both camps. The fight is on whether writing about social issues is a goal to be rewarded, and whether Sci-Fi world views that's not kosher should be shunned.)

Re:booky mcBookyFace

[serviscope_minor]

This entire controversy is about a small group of elitist pricks trying to hijack a meaningless award away from another small group of elitist pricks.

Yeah those elitists (the second lot) are suck pricks for bothering to vote in the nominations, the bastards. They should have done what the perpetual whiners did in the preceeding years and not voted at all!

It's been decades since there was any detectable connection between what the sf buying public

The Hugos has always been a member's vote.

Re:booky mcBookyFace

[mcgrew]

That's why I'd rather have a Nebula than a Hugo. Anybody can vote for the Hugos, only SF&F members can vote for Nebulas and their membership is closed to everyone but professional authors. It does cost a whole lot less than Worldcon and anyone can go, just not vote.

Re:booky mcBookyFace

[MightyMartian]

As opposed to the regressive right, right?

Re:booky mcBookyFace

[mcgrew]

The Nebulas are chosen by critics, the Hugos by fans.

INCORRECT. The Nebulas are chosen by SFWA members. The requirements for membership are that you have to have sold three 1000 word or longer stories at a nickle apiece or earned three grand from a novel.

The Nebulas are not chosen by critics. They're chosen by professional science fiction and fantasy WRITERS.

Someone please mod that incorrect post down, it's bullshit as you can see from SFWA's site that lgw has obviously never visited.

Re:booky mcBookyFace

[Kierthos]

I'd also argue it's much easier to promulgate "how to vote" cards.

I mean, think about it. In the '50s, how would you promote the idea of a mass of people voting the same way for the Hugo slate? Massive letter writing campaign, probably.

Now, it takes a ding-dong with a blog post.

Re:booky mcBookyFace

[mcgrew]

Indeed, the more money you have the more votes you can LITERALLY buy. I bought two and gave one to my daughter (we're going to Worldcon in August). They're damned expensive, too.

Re:booky mcBookyFace

[mcgrew]

It's not meaningless if you're a reader, a writer, an agent, or a publisher.

ESPECIALLY if you're a writer.

For new writers especially, a Hugo award can help open a lot of doors to publishers who might not have time to sort through the slush pile on their desks.

A Hugo will certainly help one get more easily published, but you're not going to win one unless you've already been published. The slush piles are indeed huge, a magazine like Asimov's or F&SF gets a thousand submissions a month and print half a dozen. But they do read them. I've only submitted one to Analog because it took six months for them to get to it. Some reply in a day or two.

Re:booky mcBookyFace

[Kierthos]

The problem is, WHAT is highly subjective.

Here, I'll show you.

I consider myself a decent sci-fi and fantasy fan. Not the biggest fan in the world, but more than a casual fan. I've read a lot of Heinlein, some Asimov, practically all of Pratchett's Discworld series, a chunk of David Drake's work, stuff by Ellison, Gerrold, etc. and so on.

But you know what? I've never read any of the Foundation books from cover to cover. Just can't get into them. I've read other Asimov stuff. Just never got into the Foundation series.

Does that mean I don't think the Foundation series is worthy of having won a special Hugo for "Best all-time series"? *shrug* Doesn't concern me one way or the other. Heck, I've read most of the other series that were in consideration for that award when Foundation won it, and they're all pretty good, so I assume that the Foundation series is too.

But I don't know.

See?

I know there are sci-fi fans out there who can't stand Heinlein's "Future History" books. Hell, I used to live with one.

The problem is that the * Puppies groups are treating subjective opinion like objective fact. "I didn't like this, therefore it's not good, and that it got nominated is a sign that the secret liberal reptilians have taken over the nomination process. Therefore, we have to act against them." (Or something like that. I'm not really sure what their reasoning is.)

Re:booky mcBookyFace

[gzuckier]

This entire controversy is about a small group of elitist pricks trying to hijack a meaningless award away from another small group of elitist pricks. The only difference between the Hugo inner circle for the last couple of decades and the Puppies (of either variety) is which books they're hawking. None of them want general participation on the part of the book buying public.

It's been decades since there was any detectable connection between what the sf buying public is buying and either the Hugos or the Nebulas.

The more meaningless and unimportant the cause, the greater the controversy.

Why does it need to be political at all?

[BitterOak]

Why does it have to be either "left wing" or "right wing" books that win? Why not just choose good books, regardless of politics? I think a feature of some of the best books written is the politics is left up to the reader. Is the Lord of the Rings left-wing or right-wing? I've seen commentaries taking both positions.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[Jiro]

The claim that people want "right-wing" books to win rather than just good books is basically being made up. It's not symmetrical.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the "left-wing" label mostly only exists in the minds of these activists - it's a catch-all for "any work that discusses topics or espouses positions that we are uncomfortable with". For instance, I would absolutely classify most of John Scalzi's books as "swashbuckling fun", but they hate Scalzi. I suspect they don't like Lois McMaster Bujold very much either, since she frequently explores gender issues - but most of her books are also pure space opera.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried to read the top puppy nominee in novellas from 2015 which lost to no award. The claim seems truthful enough to me.

https://www.analogsf.com/pdfs/Stories/Flow_ArlanAndrew-HUGO.pdf

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never been into reading science fiction, but I've watched plenty of it on TV. I'll take Star Trek for example, which had a clear left wing bias to it. When it's done right, the end result can be very entertaining. When the message is too overt, it takes away from the story. Balance of Terror was one of the great TOS episodes. Racism was a major theme of that episode, but it was also one of the great TOS episodes because of how it makes its point and the overall quality of the story. Birth control was the major theme of The Mark of Gideon, which began as a rather creepy and interesting episode, but generated into a very overt point about birth control. Kirk's speech about birth control before the leaders of Gideon and the conclusion of the episode really took away from things. TNG didn't feel as political, but it had its moments. When done right, in stories like The Drumhead, it was also really good.

DS9 was all about politics and war, but it was, IMO, the best of the Star Trek series. The writing and acting were excellent, and it certainly wasn't a soap opera in the Delta Quadrant. They didn't portray it as a battle of good (the Federation) and evil (the Dominion), but characters that were all somewhere in between. The Ferengi were certainly representative of modern capitalists, but they were interesting, entertaining, likeable characters who weren't portrayed as buffoons like in TNG. The views on war weren't overt but rather shown through their effects on characters you cared about. It was absolutely left wing, but it was also really good.

It's not Star Trek, but I really didn't care for Torchwood. Doctor Who certainly touched on politics in plenty of episodes. Terry Nation created the Daleks as an allegory for the Nazis, which was really developed in later episodes from the classic series. Genesis of the Daleks was an outstanding story, which certainly had a political theme to it. Torchwood just seemed way too much in your face to be likeable.

I think a lot of good science fiction has a left wing bias to it, based on what I've seen. I'm okay with that. I'm sure it can be done well with a conservative bias, though it seems to be less frequent. I think left wing politics in science fiction are fine, but it can take away from the story when it's too overt.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[MightyMartian]

There has been a long identified syndrome that seems to infect SF writers as they get older; they tend to become more Libertarian, more reactionary, more socially conservative. The likes of Larry Niven and Heinlein were transformed into pretty reactionary types as they aged. Some, like Jerry Pournelle and Orson Scott Card have always been that way, but most certainly the tension between the more liberal elements in SF and the more conservative elements has been their for decades.

That's not counting the SF writers who just get plain fucking weird. Philip Jose Farmer and Robert Heinlein both wrote some pretty disturbing eroticism in later life.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[ultranova]

Why does it have to be either "left wing" or "right wing" books that win?

Science fiction is a vision of how the world could be. Or visions, which is a huge problem if you happen to be an authoritarian with political agenda.

Is the Lord of the Rings left-wing or right-wing?

Idealized feudal past and its Divine Right of Kings vs. vilified Industrial Revolution and its robber barons. Or, if you prefer, how right wing wants to see themselves vs. how they actually are.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I think the "left-wing" label mostly only exists in the minds of these activists

The funny thing is that I could sub left-wing and right-wing in your post without changing anything.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[Applehu Akbar]

"There has been a long identified syndrome that seems to infect SF writers as they get older; they tend to become more Libertarian, more reactionary, more socially conservative. "

This is true for humans in general.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[Sarten-X]

Ignoring any bias in the demographic itself, it seems to me that it's just harder to write right-wing sci-fi.

It's easy to write about an enemy that has all of the money, power, and control, providing a convenient struggle for the protagonist. It's much more difficult to write (and thus, more rare to find) a good story where the enemy is given the same circumstances as the protagonist, and both are given the same life choices. Sure, you can say that the antagonist was given too much freedom... but then you have to establish why he chose that way, and if you try to use any variation on "because he's evil", your story goes from being a thought-provoking philosophical adventure to being a heavy-handed morality essay.

You could more generally make a strong leftist state be the enemy. That's the dystopian road blazed by sci-fi in the 1960s, and several movies since the 1970s, notably Logan's Run and Soylent Green. It's a time-honored genre, but that's also the problem. It's old. Dystopian fiction dates back a few centuries, and combining it with science is hardly groundbreaking.

For a while, a popular trend was to base such stories on real people and events, who could be suitably framed for conflict while keeping their political slant. Of course, the reading audience quickly grew tired of every Nazi and Soviet alternate-history piece, and those have waned in recent years.

To more directly address your point, consider the alternative: Writing left-wing sci-fi is easy.

The plot is simple: An underdog wants freedom for himself against the oppressive regime of the evil overlord, who had freedom and used it to oppress others. What makes the underdog different is that he will stand for justice for everyone, show kindness to everyone the audience could identify with, and never miss a chance to help others. Relying on teamwork and everyone's unique (identifiable and presence-justifying) abilities, the protagonist establishes a utopian foothold, where all of the characters that the audience identifies with are loved and cared for.

In fiction, that plot is sufficient for a story. In reality, things are much more complicated. What happens if one of the protagonist's allies was really only following because his girlfriend was? What if the rules of the protagonist's new state really screw some of the wealthier folks? What if the protagonist himself is genuinely a right-wing capitalist who just wants to make money and retire in obscurity?

You're right - Political strife isn't where really good fiction comes from. The best sci-fi works are ones where every character has their own motivations, and they don't boil down to "be good" or "be evil". Rather, they reduce to things like "sleep safely", "get back to stability" or "avoid the consequences of a mistake". One particularly good sci-fi space opera work, itself nominated a few times for Hugo awards, has spent nearly two decades dealing with the indirect results of a mistake. Characters have come and gone through the series, and politics has been an issue, but by that time every character had their own long-established reasons to hold their preferences. At no point was the story ever purely about morality, even when the "definitely evil" characters were introduced - they eventually got their own motivations.

Those deep-rooted, long stories that take the time to establish characters and motivation are great sci-fi, and can avoid bias toward either political slant.

That's hard, though.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[AJWM]

That's not counting the SF writers who just get plain fucking weird. Philip Jose Farmer and Robert Heinlein both wrote some pretty disturbing eroticism in later life.

Many of the SF writers of that era wrote erotica even early in life, they had bills to pay. Most of it under pseudonyms, unlike Farmer's stuff (IMHO a lot more disturbing then Heinlein's, if you're talking about something like Blown). I've got a porn book (tame by today's standards) written by Robert Silverberg back in the 60s -- published of course under a pen name. (Heh, I should try to get him to autograph it while he's still around to do so.)

And Heinlein's "'-- All You Zombies --'" was written in 1958, a story involving gender reassignment and (thanks to time travel) self-impregnation, which David Gerrold expanded on in his The Man Who Folded Himself.

A good SF writer leaves nothing unexplored, no matter how disturbing, although it may be tough to market. That was kind of the point behind Harlan Ellison's 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[lgw]

You do realize that an underdog wanting freedom for himself against an oppressive regime is the fundamental belief of the Right,right? Complaining about government overreach? Arguing for smaller government? Warning of the dangers of too much government power?

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[edibobb]

I see the opposite. Maybe people tend to become more moderate, with less "fire in the belly" as they get older. Whether that's socially more liberal or conservative depends on where they started.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[youngone]

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

I would too, and I would also classify Scalzi as pretty right wing also.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[Sarten-X]

Last I knew, the fundamental belief of the right was that individual liberty is preferred over being beholden to a collective. Most of the Republican complaints you mention are variations on the theme of wanting lower taxes, less regulation, and generally having less interaction with the government's pesky rules. To the right, those goals are more important than the left-wing preferences for social welfare, demographic equality, and a science-based life.

If the "regime" to which I refer were purely a democratic state, ideally with many unproductive committees, that's be a good start to a right-wing tale, but it's far more likely to be an oligarchy or dictatorship where a very limited number of people abused their individual liberty to get more power for themselves. It could be a government, corporation, headless militia, or even disorganized marauders, but the key is that it's oppressing one one group more than another, increasing its own hegemony.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[sg_oneill]

an underdog wanting freedom for himself against an oppressive regime is the fundamental belief of the Right,right?

Ah , now I know why the right wants to ban gays from everything, punish women for getting terminations, break the unions and increase criminal penalties. Its because freedom.

MEANWHILE IN BIZARO WORLD.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[Orgasmatron]

A "science-based life"?

I think you are going to need to explain that one.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[SuricouRaven]

Left, right... there are no clear definitions for them, really. They are labels of convenience, and both sides have tremendous internal complication and conflict.

If I were starting this topic over, I'd have taken a different route - and it's no more right or wrong. My definition of right-wing fiction would be that which has a clear absolute moral element: There's a good guy and a bad guy, the bad guy is very very bad, and there's no doubt at all about who is in the right. It supports the view that there is a right and a wrong side in every conflict. The left-wing fiction would include elements of relativism: Yes, the aliens might be morally abhorrent to us at first sight, but that just means we don't understand them and why they do what they do.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[steveha]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[Darinbob]

It's a popularity contest basically. One guy (ONE) has gotten a group of followers who probably don't even read science fiction to vote for his choices. All he has to do is say "help me fight SJWs" and the morons line up to do his bidding.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[meburke]

You make such a good point...

The presumption is that Literature has "influence" and if people buy literature based on marketeering describing the prestige of awards, then the influence from the authors' biases influences the individual.

The answer would be to have a set of standards for the award, but that is very difficult for Art of any kind.

The Left is afraid of books like "Fahrenheit 451," "1984," and "Starship Troopers" for good reason: A well-written story bypasses the reasoning parts of the brain. They would rather people be exposed to only those stories that reflect their point of view, and those are the stories that the Right is afraid of. Thus, the conflict.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[serviscope_minor]

It would be more accurate to say that the Hugo Awards have been trying to move away from just rewarding

I don't think that would be more accurate: the Hugo awards don't as such do anything at all.

Nominations come from the membership only and then votes come from the membership only. The latter happens at the convention and gets moderate participation, the former, especially for anything other than the popular "best dramatic presentation long form (i.e. film)" , short form (i.e. tv) and novel is extremely low, because frankly, very few people care enough.

The only people who care enough are/were in fact those with some particular interest, and it just so happened that those people who still cared enough to vote had a personal liking for non white, LGBT stuff etc.

HOWEVER! And there's a big however. And this is also of course why the puppies were so effective. Flat-out lies are usually not as effective as lies with a kernel of truth, because people will latch on to the kernel of truth, especially if it's one that resonates.

What those people nominated (and what won!) in previous years was in many cases was the most atrocious drek. I mean just bloody awful. Weak stories, very poor on the speculative element, bad characters and in many cases flat out boring. For instance the risible "The water that falls on you from nowhere[*] won in 2013 and pretty much the only thing that distinguished it from the average scrapings from bottom of the barrel is that it didn't have the usual straight white man protagonist. Likewise "if you were a dinosaur my love". And others too. Were any authors pandering to that, knowing that that sort of thing gets nominated? Probably? It's a big world after all, but either way it doesn't matter because it was that sort of thing getting nominated anyway, and enough authors seemed to want to write it.

Having something other than the usual and rather heavily over-done perspectives is great, but it's not an excuse for poor writing. It seems however that the small community who gave a crap enough to vote didn't feel the same as me, or have different standards for "good writing". They're wrong of course because they disagree with my opinion. But I can't complain too much (define: too much) since I never voted but anyway.

So here's the silly thing. So OK, some small community were the only people voting (and there's no evidence of collusion), and the puppies (in many cases rightly) thought what they were voting for was bad. Heck, many people who weren't puppies agreed that really awful stuff was winning. But that's about as far as it got before it descended into farce. So they stacked the slate, and they had a golden opportunity to see all these marbellous speculative or space opera or mil SF (pew pew!) pieces that we'd been missing out on because no one bothered to vote and... well all they chose was yet more drek! About as bad as whatever had been winning before, arguable worse! And a good bit of it wasn't mainstream stuff, it was Jesus fan-fic (see John C. Wright's entries). What a wasted opportunity.

That also proves that the puppies are in fact a right bunch of nitwits and don't apparently actually care about good writing.

[*] John Chu. I've not read a single thing of his I like or even find passable.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[serviscope_minor]

The Sad Puppies like entertaining books.

They don't apparently like entertaining short stories though, based on the 2015 noms. I've not checked out the 2016 ones yet. The stuff they nominated was *terrible*.

I mean if they were going to whine and bleat about all the "SJW crap" that was being published, the least they could have done was nominate something actually good. But no, apparently they wanted to compete with dinosaur and water for the worst things at the Hugos.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[SQL Error]

If the "regime" to which I refer were purely a democratic state, ideally with many unproductive committees, that's be a good start to a right-wing tale, but it's far more likely to be an oligarchy or dictatorship where a very limited number of people abused their individual liberty to get more power for themselves.

So, communism.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[pipingguy]

Fair (meaning "enforced") representation of diversity. The presentation of concepts foreign and uncomfortable to current ProgThought must be minimized.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[Antique Geekmeister]

> Maybe people tend to become more moderate, with less "fire in the belly" as they get older.

Some of us have also seen a few cycles of boom-bust, war fever, and of having friends die wastefully. Others of us started out radical, and had society stream past us in the directions we were once proud leaders of, or we've actually had to bring home a paycheck and raise kids and learn to agree with our parents, about things we never could have imagined agreeing about. And some of have learned to _scheme_ at politics, to more subtly plan for the future with less noise about it.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[Warma]

The government has also ripped off most of my income and blocked me from earning anywhere near my potential

If they made up a new Hugo category for the most self-serving and narcissistic comment on Slashdot, I'd vote for this one.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[Nikkos]

This is a fantastic writeup of examples by steveha that demonstrates the very problem - the cliquish pseudo-academic types have been screaming their bloody heads off, acting like American millenials. They're hypocritical and mindless, and if they don't get their way they resort to name-calling and claiming that the other side gamed the system.

steveha used Baen as an example, and it serves perfectly. Baen has long published some of the most libertarian 'right-wing' authors, but in those books they've had the strongest female characters along with the widest variety of ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientations I've come across. The problem is that they're set in worlds in which hard work, rugged individualism, independence, logic, - all those 'right-wing' and/or 'conservative' values - rule the day.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[houghi]

Idealized feudal past and its Divine Right of Kings vs. vilified Industrial Revolution and its robber barons. Or, if you prefer, how right wing wants to see themselves vs. how they actually are.

As the winner writes the history books, that is hard to tell. I see it as a group that wants to keep the races separate. Pure appartheit with the results that in the end only men are left.
The ones that lost where the ones that wanted to let all live next to each other and among each other.

It is fun to read the books with that in ,ind as well as the fact that the winner wrote history, so heroes might not be heroes.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see a parallel with "faith-based" movies. If you've ever seen one, you know what I'm talking about. Movies that sacrifice story-telling in order to be faith affirming. They are super popular among mormons and evangelicals because "god comes first." But anybody else who is not part of the cult finds them tedious as fuck because preaching to the choir is no fun if you aren't in the choir.

The puppies see the world through a reductive lens that assumes people are all in factions. I think part of it is that they are so thin-skinned, so sensitive to anything that challenges their world-view that they can't help but see those challenges as a grand conspiracy. So it is only 'logical' that the proper way to counter teh SJW conspiracy is to promote stories that affirm the puppy belief system. It is a fundamental misread of reality to believe in the conspiracy but if you are convinced there is a conspiracy then everything else makes sense.

Notice how all the alt-right movements like the puppies and gamergate have SJW conspiracies as a central of their grievances. Its because the internet lets them congregate in their own little worlds and they soon start to believe that their little worlds are reflective of the world at large. It's kind of like that old Colbert joke where he was parodying a Bill O'Rielly rant: "I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well-known liberal bias."

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[T.E.D.]

They hate Scalzi because his books are crap. He wins because he's got a big megaphone. Redshirts was at best an ok send up of a really old joke, but somehow it won the Hugo for best novel. Why? Not because it's good

I picked it up in a bookstore because it looked fun. I wasn't disappointed.

Was it the best SF book I read that year? Probably not. Was it "crap"? Hell no. Was it better than its competition for the Hugo that year? Since I never even heard of those other books, I'm going with a "yes".

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[serviscope_minor]

Since you're languishing at 0, I'm just going to say that you nailed it completely.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[Stuarticus]

Logic and the right wing have long since parted ways.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[serviscope_minor]

I love it how you don't let facts penetrate your arguments.

aen has long published some of the most libertarian 'right-wing' authors, but in those books they've had the strongest female characters along with the widest variety of ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientations I've come across. The problem

What problem? For all of your complaining about "cliquish pseudo-academic types", McMaster (published by Baen) is in fact tied in first place with Heinlein for largest number of Hugo wins ever.

So, the Hugos have in fact been recognising stuff published by Baen, and that was before the puppies of any sort got involved.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[Sarten-X]

I figured I would when I wrote it... It's worded very poorly.

To contrast with "generally having less interaction with the government's pesky rules", a better phrase would be a "consensus-based life". The left-leaning folks are more likely to take the consensus of an expert group (such as scientists) and apply it as the rule for everyone else. On the other hand, the right-leaning folks feel they should be able to decide what's best for themselves, and others' opinions don't really hold any authority.

Of course, we should remember that the expert opinion at one point gave us eugenics programs, and individual opinions give us religion-based education curricula.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[mcgrew]

The government healthcare bureaucracy has drastically impeded the research necessary for prolonging life and restoring youthful characteristics and will most certainly spike any such treatment, at least until most of us boomers are safely killed off.

In 1900 you were lucky to reach 50, my dad died at age 84 and my mom still goes bowling twice a week at age 88. Her brother is in his late nineties. That was almost unheard of a century ago.

When you're faced with limited remaining life in a fragile body on miniscule after-ripoffs savings, with a healthcare system that looks to be dedicated to killing you while retaining plausible deniability

Funny, my mom says Medicare is the best health insurance she's ever had. I'm looking forward to being eligible next year because my insurance REALLY sucks.

You're crazy, Louie. See a doctor about that early onset Alzheimer's.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[mcgrew]

Many of the SF writers of that era wrote erotica even early in life, they had bills to pay

Indeed insightful. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says âoeSturgeon was a central contributor to and shaper of John W Campbell Jrâ(TM)s so-called Golden Age of SF, though less comfortably than his colleagues, as even in those early years, while obeying the generic commands governing the creation of Campbellian technological or Hard SF, he was also writing sexually threatening, explorative tales, which he found difficult to publish domestically; Bianca's Hands (May 1947 Argosy), for instance, never appeared in an American magazine.â

Phillip K. Dick was a poor man during most of his writing career, despite the fact that he was very prolific, publishing forty four books and well over a hundred short stories.

Lester del Rey worked as a short order cook, among other jobs, when his writing wasnâ(TM)t selling well.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[werepants]

I haven't read a lot of Baen stuff, but the authors I have read (Larry Correia, John Ringo, David Weber) write stuff that's basically B-movie fare. Lots of wish-fulfillment violence and military fetishism. There's nothing wrong with that, but none of them had a female protagonist, and the majority of the female representation was there merely to provide a love interest or motivation for the male lead.

There's nothing wrong with novels along those lines. They are entertaining and fun (and Larry Correia at least is very open about the fact that he loves B-movies and guns and writes fiction to match). However, you wouldn't expect Sharknado to win an Oscar and based on my sampling I wouldn't expect most Baen stuff to be Hugo material.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[CAIMLAS]

In 1900 you were lucky to reach 50, my dad died at age 84 and my mom still goes bowling twice a week at age 88. Her brother is in his late nineties. That was almost unheard of a century ago.

Not true. More people died in childhood than today, or child birth, but barring those two things, people lived healthily to a similar age as they do today - 60, 70, 80. It's how things like the oldest Civil War veteran living to be 106 happens.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[Daetrin]

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

I didn't personally think those were the best works those years either, but do people really need to get so riled up about it? The things i really like rarely make the semifinals and even more rarely win, but i don't feel compelled to invent some "SJW" conspiracy to explain it. (The fact that people _still_ insist on using that term to create a singular enemy out of nothing is just mind boggling.) A bunch of LGBT people and their friends got on a celebratory high because of the social progress their cause has been seeing lately. Because they're a relatively small part of the overall voting base they had a disproportionate effect on the awards for the shorter works, which usually get less attention. (For the exact same reason those are the categories that the Puppies have had the most success in.) Did they go a little overboard in their enthusiasm in this case? Maybe. But it is far from the first time the Hugos (or any other awards) has gone through some kind of phase, nor will it be the last i expect. It would have blown over soon enough, but the Puppies made things infinitely worse by deciding to stage their campaign and have only prolonged the problem.

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

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

Many of the people who ended up founding the Puppies had a hate on for Scalzi years before the Hugo kerfuffle. I don't know what started in back in the day, but it's certainly been long standing and mutual. A lot of the stuff i've seen from the anti-Scalzi side has been filled with bile and hate, while i rarely see that from the pro-Scalzi side. But like everyone else i do have a biased viewpoint.

I've got to say though the goodreads link you shared doesn't really make a good case for what you're claiming. Scalzi's tweets, are certainly silly and juvenile (and really, you don't expect people to be silly and juvenile on twitter from time to time?) but they don't actually seem to be directed at Correia, just the Puppies in general. And Correia himself isn't coming off sounding very well in his response to it.

" I've never met anyone who genuinely believed that Redshirts was the best novel of its year, deserving of Hugo status; I've heard it is a light and fun read ("swashbuckling" maybe?) but it can't have been the best novel published that year."

See, this is conflating two different issues, and is probably a fundamental part of the whole problem to begin with. There is a group of LGBT people amongst the Hugo voters (not an organized groups trying to control the vote in some sinister manner, just a Venn diagram type group of people who happen to have similar viewpoints) but there is a far larger, far older overlapping group, the "fen". These are the people who have been going to conventions forever, who _run_ the conventions and who hobnob with the authors and each other at those conventions, and write the fanzines and do the podcasts and all that other stuff. They participate heavily in WorldCon and the running of the Hugos and so of course the results of those awards tend to reflect their tastes.

And i can tell you that for any self-selecting fan group that runs their own awards if you create something that panders to that group it has much higher odds of winning. The degree and style of pandering varies between contests, but it's always there. Tha

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[Bohnanza]

It's "Leftwing" and "Rightwing" now.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[alexandru_preoteasa]

Wait, let me guess... this triggered you, huh? Tsk tsk... SJW.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[rochrist]

That would be pretty hilariously wrong.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[steveha]

What problem? For all of your complaining about "cliquish pseudo-academic types", McMaster (published by Baen) is in fact tied in first place with Heinlein for largest number of Hugo wins ever.

As I understand it, the Sad Puppies think that a cabal has been rigging votes for about a decade and a half or so. Let's assume that the rigging started around the year 2000.

Lois McMaster Bujold is the one author by Baen that can be nominated for a Hugo. She also hasn't won a Hugo for best novel since the year 2000. Only two books published by Baen have ever won a Hugo, both of those were Lois McMaster Bujold, and both of those were over two decades ago.

Since the year 2000, three books published by Baen have been nominated (all written by Lois McMaster Bujold), plus the Sad Puppies campaign nominated one book by Larry Correia in 2014. That's 4, or 3 if you don't want to count a Puppies nomination.

Also since the year 2000, 24 books by Tor have been nominated, with 6 winners. Some of those were no doubt on the merits (I hear nothing but good about last year's Three Body Problem and even Vox Day thinks it was the best novel of 2015) but again, I refuse to believe that Redshirts was the finest novel published in 2013.

So, the Hugos have in fact been recognising stuff published by Baen, and that was before the puppies of any sort got involved.

Yep. Before. Long, long before.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[russotto]

I haven't read a lot of Baen stuff, but the authors I have read (Larry Correia, John Ringo, David Weber) write stuff that's basically B-movie fare. Lots of wish-fulfillment violence and military fetishism. There's nothing wrong with that, but none of them had a female protagonist, and the majority of the female representation was there merely to provide a love interest or motivation for the male lead.

Both Ringo and Weber have had female protagonists (Ringo with a female co-author in the Cally's War series). Weber has had several in the Honor Harrington series alone, including at least two who were the major focus of a novel (the eponymous Harrington, and Michele Henke). There's also Shannon Foraker, Eloise Pritchart, Alice Truman, and many others.

Correia writes a good range of B-movie fare, at least; Grimnoir to Dead Six to Monster Hunter. Certainly better than "Sharknado", but if you prefer your SF to be heavy, this ain't it.

Ringo isn't really to my taste; I'm not really into BDSM porn mixed with my SF (Ghost series), and the rest of his stuff gets really repetitive (Posleen and March to the... especially), it's almost as if he's being paid to crank out... oh, right, he is.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[steveha]

I didn't personally think those were the best works those years either, but do people really need to get so riled up about it?

Well, I agree with Larry Correia: the Hugo award could be the award for the best work, or it could be the private award of a group of people who attend WorldCon every year, but it can't be both. And if it's going to be the award of a clique, they should be up-front about it, and not try to claim that it represents the "best" anymore.

It used to be every SF writer's dream to win the Hugo. It has now become clear that if the clique doesn't like you, you can't win a Hugo. Remember, the justification for the voting slate last year was that the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies had to be stopped to "protect" the Hugo, and multiple people publicly bragged that they didn't read any Puppy-nominated books before voting against them.

the Puppies made things infinitely worse by deciding to stage their campaign

What should they have done instead? "Just accept that conservative or libertarian writers will never win" is not a good answer.

Scalzi's tweets, are certainly silly and juvenile (and really, you don't expect people to be silly and juvenile on twitter from time to time?) but they don't actually seem to be directed at Correia, just the Puppies in general.

The Sad Puppies 2 campaign was pretty much a solo effort by Larry Correia. That year, taunting over the results was taunting Larry Correia.

If you disagree, then please tell me whom you think Scalzi had in mind when he wrote: "I NEVER WANTED THE AWARD THAT'S WHY I'VE WHINED LIKE A KICKED DOG ABOUT IT FOR A COUPLE YEARS RUNNING."

So Among Others and Redshirts were not part of some "SJW conspiracy." They were just "good" pandering to the fans who usually vote for the awards.

First of all, Sad Puppies posits a "cabal" of those "fen" you mention, who noticed how few votes it would take to sway the Hugo awards and started voting in blocks behind the scenes. The cabal tends toward liking SJW stuff and favors various specific people and companies. This is different from saying that some "SJW conspiracy" infiltrated fandom and started controlling things.

Anyway: you give a plausible explanation. However, this doesn't convince me that there's no cabal, because Tor Books got so many more nominations than other publishers, Scalzi and Glyer get so many Hugo nominations.

Should Scalzi have 30% more Hugo nominations than Arthur C. Clarke? Does Glyer deserve 51 Hugo nominations, when Stanley Schmidt was an editor for three decades and didn't get nominated until he retired?

http://www.scifiwright.com/2015/04/did-i-get-too-many-nominations/

The thing is that the fen are not being intentionally cliquish. They're happy to welcome new _individual_ members with open arms.

This whole thing started when the cliques failed to welcome Larry Correia with open arms.

...my first book had made a big splash with Baen readers, so they nominated me. Most of WorldCon didn't despise me then because at that point they hadn't heard of me yet.

Then my name showed up on the shortlist so they looked me up... Hoo boy. It was the end of the freaking world. Most of them didn't actually read my book to know they needed to vote against me. They found out I was an outspoken, right wing political blogger, and gun rights activist. Critics came out of the woodwork. Smofers actively campaigned against me. If you voted for Larry Correia, you were a bad person. I was accused of misogyny, racism, hatey-hate-mongery, and why wouldn't I keep my Jesus out of their uterus! My favorite post however was from a British blogger who said that "if Larry Correia wins the Campbell it will end literature forever".

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[werepants]

Both Ringo and Weber have had female protagonists (Ringo with a female co-author in the Cally's War series). Weber has had several in the Honor Harrington series alone, including at least two who were the major focus of a novel (the eponymous Harrington, and Michele Henke). There's also Shannon Foraker, Eloise Pritchart, Alice Truman, and many others.

Correia writes a good range of B-movie fare, at least; Grimnoir to Dead Six to Monster Hunter. Certainly better than "Sharknado", but if you prefer your SF to be heavy, this ain't it.

Ringo isn't really to my taste; I'm not really into BDSM porn mixed with my SF (Ghost series), and the rest of his stuff gets really repetitive (Posleen and March to the... especially), it's almost as if he's being paid to crank out... oh, right, he is.

Ok, good to know. That roughly matches my observations, although I've only read a book or two from each of those authors so I certainly haven't made an exhaustive survey. Correia was all about big guns and cheesy one liners, but he's up front and unapologetic about it so I can respect that - do what you love, etc. Weber had some interesting ideas to go along with his occasionally gratuitous battles, so I could see myself reading him again. I did read something from Ringo's Posleen series, though, and the entirety of the plot was "big tank kills expendable alien hordes". There were a bunch of inconsistent rules about the way the technology seemed to behave, and essentially it came across as a near-future military promo video but less tasteful. Overall that left a bad taste in my mouth for the quality Baen accepts.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[david_thornley]

It is fun to read the books with that in ,ind as well as the fact that the winner wrote history, so heroes might not be heroes.

In universe, LOTR was a translation of part of the Red Book of Westmarch (IIRC), which was written primarily by Bilbo and Frodo Baggins. Tolkien's main work was written by an unreliable narrator, and is not (canonically) necessarily truthful about what happened and why.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[david_thornley]

The underdog wanting freedom is neither right-wing nor left-wing. Back in the Nineteenth Century and earlier, people wanting freedom from oppressive regimes were typically considered left-wing.

From a libertarian point of view, the current US right wing wants government overreach and more intrusive government. Current Republican parties are fighting hard to legislate who uses which rest room, regardless of common sense, and are actively anti-science and in favor of intrusive health and education policies that act to increase the number of abortions. From a left-wing point of view, the right wing wants to impose their religion on the country and encourage oppression of minority groups they don't like.

Approximately nobody sees government overreach when the government is doing what they want it to do, and an oppressive government is usually one that the other guys are running.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[david_thornley]

Speaking as a left-winger, I very much enjoyed Starship Troopers, despite disagreeing with it on many points. I've read 1984 several times, and think it an important book. I just don't like Bradbury in general. The left-wingers I know who are into science fiction tend to agree with me.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[meburke]

That makes you a "left-winger" I can respect.

I actually object to the phrases left-winger and so on, because they are gross generalizations and lack precision. In fact, I probably should not have been drawn into commenting because the OP was so lacking in content.

I still respect and admire anyone who is open-minded enough to examine more than one side of an issue and discuss it rationally.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[Warma]

I just read the two stories that you linked, and while I kind of enjoyed The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere (it establishes a quite abstract concept and explores it as a part of another story - I like that), I also expected that the best story of any specific year would be somewhat stronger than this.

This has completely changed my attitude towards the Puppy movement. The accusations seem to have merit after all - this is quite surprising.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[serviscope_minor]

I just read the two stories that you linked, and while I kind of enjoyed The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere (it establishes a quite abstract concept and explores it as a part of another story - I like that),

Ugh, no it doesn't!!! OK begin RAGE! Obviously this is my opinion, and clearly many people agree with you. But for what it's worth, here's my rambling critique of the story.

The base idea is fine for spec fic: plot device which flags truth telling.

After that it all falls apart. It's extremely poor speculative fiction because it doesn't explore the device in any way. All it does is use it as a story backdrop for a whiny guy with a Mary Sue boyfriend suffering some minor family issues.

The thing that annoyed me possibly the most is that it had promise then threw it away. For example the definition of "truth" is a rich and interesting one, especially when it comes to telling the truth. Is a truth something that is in some sense universally true, and what does it mean, or is it something that the teller genuinely *believes* to be the truth?

There is much promise to be explored there, especially as apparently people are actually capable of semi-consciously causing themselves to believe something they originally know to be false. And that doesn't take into account false memory and simply being genuinely mistaken. Lots of opportunity to explore how people with no intent to decieve nonethelss can do.

Or, if it's literal, universal truth that implies a computation oracle: you can state "this program halts" and the presence/absence of water is the answer from the oracle. Imagine where that leads! "P = NP" sploosh! "the first character of the P=NP proof is T" (nothing). The seconf character is A sploosh! etc...

And that's ignoring the mechanical aspect of being able to generate water in demand at any location.

So to recap, the point about spec fic is to take some speculative element and see where it leads, often in the context of revealing something interesting about people, be it in this case the nature of truth or the results of exploiting a computation oracle or some sort.

The story did none of those. It had a speculative element and did precisely zero of interest with it. In that sense it made me hate the story more than if it had been plain bad.

I also didn't like the characters. The protagonist was a completely wet blanket (even when he was telling the truth! geddit? see? water har har), his BF was a complete Mary Sue and everyone else was obnoxious.

The accusations seem to have merit after all

There's a kernel of truth. There were an awful lot of terrible stories nominated and winning. They were right about that. Everything else, however...

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[Warma]

Fair critique, rage or not.

Though I have to say that the boyfriend character was vague enough that I didn't feel one way or the other about his Mary Sue -ness. He did seem like an ideal one in the sense of how I'd imagine people with a very convoluted inner emotion stack would like to see their mates (impossibly considerate, for once). Also in general, I feel that overexplaining/overexploring the gimmick of the story takes away from the story instead of giving to it (like using the lie obtain mathematical truths would, but the problem with this would have been that such would trivialize the world), but you're absolutely right in that the concept was barely explored at all here.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[serviscope_minor]

Fair critique, rage or not.

Thanks. The rage is mostly because the story made me angry for what I felt was lost opportunity.

Though I have to say that the boyfriend character was vague enough that I didn't feel one way or the other about his Mary Sue -ness.

Fair enough. I like background characters to be believable within what's described of them. I can see how for weakly described characters you could sort take that to be an incomplete/intentionally inaccurate description, or just ignore since the character is too minor for it to matter.

I, personally can't do that, so unless it's meant to be an inaccurate description for plot reasons, then I find it jarring and breaks the suspension of disbelied. Things that break that suspension are personal preferences, though of course strong patterns exist.

He did seem like an ideal one in the sense of how I'd imagine people with a very convoluted inner emotion stack would like to see their mates (impossibly considerate, for once)

How they'd like to possibly, but not how they do I suppose, and I feel an internal dialog has to be somewhat believable. Also, it seemed that not only was he impossibly considerate, he was incredibly hunky and had a 12" dick (ok I'm over egging the pudding there but you get the idea).

Also in general, I feel that overexplaining/overexploring the gimmick of the story takes away from the story instead of giving to it (like using the lie obtain mathematical truths would, but the problem with this would have been that such would trivialize the world), but you're absolutely right in that the concept was barely explored at all here.

OK, I wasn't saying that he should have explored it in that manner.

What I mean is that you set up some speculative element, and that implies changes in the world. You then use that to shed light on humanity. However, while one can suspend disbelief over the most unlikely things (water appearing from nowhere or sapient candy coloured ponies to give two example) the world still has to be in some sense believable.

Or to put it another way, you have your speculative elements set out somehow but after that the world has to behave as you'd expect, such as people acting like people (probably the most important one), physics being generally physics like (e.g. water appearing doesn't imply people can levitate) and so on.

But the speculative element also has various implications. If the reasonably obvious implications aren't followed then I find it breaks that suspension, possibly because at that point I feel people would follow them and therefore people aren't behaving like people so all bets are off and I no longer care.

Now, back to the story, I feel he prevaricated very badly between "truth" being subjective truth (what the person saying it believes) and absolute truth (the thing with maths for example). Both of those have implications, with the latter being weirder and probably harder to deal with, however I felt that the author sort of smooshed between them in order to make the plot what he wanted.

At that point the world stops making sense even within its own rules and becomes "whatever random thing the author wants to do", at which point again all bets are off and the suspension of disbelief is broken.

So to me, the speculative element had little bearing on the story and the speculation was done very badly. The reason for the particular frustration is that the nature of truth is a really interesting topic and there's so much which can be done but instead the author didn't even bother to decide what nature of truth the speculative element was and then used the result as a kind of pointless backdrop to a rather mushy family drama.

Just Stop Having the Hugos

[bistromath007]

The people in charge of them have no respect for the voting public and vice versa. Continuing to struggle on as though these groups should be part of the same literary ecosystem is ridiculous. Whichever side you believe introduced a deleterious political bias to the genre, it's clear that they should really just be two different genres now. Let each clown in this circus go and make their own award ceremony with blackjack and hookers, and anyone left fighting over the Hugos can be safely ignored, as they were just there for the fight.

Re:Just Stop Having the Hugos

[spitzig]

It's not two different genres. SF is large. It's one genre, and it's filled with lots of variety. I have no interest in some(books for kids and books heavy on the romance). I like some "swashbuckling". I like some political novels.

The people organizing the either need to reorganize them so campaigning doesn't work or people need to get used to campaigning for books. To me, the second seems like it would suck the fun out of the prize, but it also seems a lot like what authors currently do marketing their novels to get people to buy them.

Re:Just Stop Having the Hugos

[Austerity Empowers]

Continuing to struggle on as though these groups should be part of the same literary ecosystem is ridiculous

It's been irrelevant for a long time. SciFi has bene bad for quite a while too, most of the greats just got old and died, and weren't replaced. As with most other forms of books, word of mouth remains the best way to find good stuff.

Re:Just Stop Having the Hugos

[AJWM]

The people in charge of them have no respect for the voting public and vice versa.

Wow, a few misconceptions to clear up here.

The people in charge of the Hugos (ignoring the SMOFs*) are the people running the particular WorldCon in the year that they're awarded. Which is to say, they're the folks responsible for running the nomination procedures, the voting, tallying the votes, etc, all within the "constitution" of WorldCon itself (which rules are, by design, NOT easy or quickly changed.) These people are in turn chosen by the "voting public" at a prior WorldCon as (part of the) con committee associated with a city competing to host the con that year. Oh, they're also responsible for the design and manufacture of that year's Awards (within certain constraints; the spaceship is a must).

This is NOTHING AT ALL like the professionally-run, for-profit cons like ComiCon. (In many ways its more fun -- no ridiculous lines, no charging for autographs or pictures, room parties and bid parties, ...)

The "voting public" comprises, for the sake of nominations, anyone who has purchased a supporting or attending membership for the con. Actual voting (which also includes voting on a couple of other awards and the location of the next worldcon) is limited to those with an attending membership (although you don't have to show up, voting is by mail/email beforehand). If you want to vote on WorldCon business matters (like changing rules), you have to show up and attend the business meeting.

(* SMOF -- Secret Master Of Fandom. It's a long-running joke.)

Not "Right Wing"

[Anonymous Coward]

Not right wing, rather, opposed to social justice snowflakes, whiners and crybullies.

Re:Not "Right Wing"

[taustin]

So just regular old right wing crybullies, then?

Why is it so hard to realize that you are doing the thing you complain about

Er, dude, they do realize that. In fact, that's the whole point: they're doing what they have seen the inner circle doing for decades. (Whether or not said inner circle is actually doing so is a different question.)

The funniest thing is how many people believe it matters. That the Hugos matter. That's funny no matter who you are.

Re:Not "Right Wing"

[serviscope_minor]

The "inner circle" is simply the people who could be arsed to (a) join the society and (b) vote in the nominations. Because of (b) it was a very small number of people, but there was no inner circle. No one voted for the stuff the puppies liked (ignoring novel and dramatic presentation where they had little effect overall) because most of it was pants.

Re:Not "Right Wing"

[Warma]

I'd like to hear an example too.

Obviously as the viewpoint is so rigorously established that the Puppies can stand behind it, there should be a long list of entries which are of dubious quality, yet got nominated or awarded because of their political statements. Could someone refer us to this type of a list?

Re:Not "Right Wing"

[91degrees]

"Queers Dig Timelords", perhaps. Really quite a tedious book, the only thing going for it is that it's gay positive. Also "If you were a dinosaur, My love" really isn't science fiction. Nor is it a story.

Re:Not "Right Wing"

[serviscope_minor]

Also "If you were a dinosaur, My love" really isn't science fiction. Nor is it a story.

Agreed on both points, but do you have any particular evidence that it was nominated for political reasons as opposed to the nominators having staggeringly poor taste and being few enough in number that it got through?

Re:Not "Right Wing"

[91degrees]

Not sure why it was nominated. I guess, to get a nomination in the short story category, you don't need a huge number of nominations. It only needed 65, so really all it needs is a single blogger with the right followers to promote it.

I don't see this, on its own as a problem. People have always been promoting works they like for the awards. I think there may be a problem with some people being frozen out by cliques. All I can really say is we can't prove there isn't. Still, I think a more representative nominations system is a good thing even if it doesn't actually change the nominations.

Holy Shit! this is opposite world!

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't read TFS nor TFA but...

>This is sad seeing republicans... distort literature like this.
Yeah, the left wing just bans literature they don't like. ...

>They already control nearly every moment of our lives.
I don't know in Amerika, but in the rest of the world the LEFT is the one trying to control everything you do, lest you say something somebody wouldn't like

>And the media.
Wrong. Everything you see and hear in the media is anti-right-wing propaganda.
Music, movies, news, series, etc

Re:Holy Shit! this is opposite world!

[Anonymous Coward]

I was about to comment this, but you beat me to it.

Republicans have Fox News. Democrats have, well, everything else. I'm not even a Republican and I can see the clear projection happening here. Whenever either side gains power politically or socially, they flex their power in an authoritarian way. You just don't mind it so much when it's the "right" person controlling you.

Re: Holy Shit! this is opposite world!

[thesupraman]

You havn't studied much history have you..

Or perhaps you think the Chinese cultural revolution and Stalinist Russia were right wing?

The reason you are dead wrong of course is the neither left not right is the enemy. Totalitarianism is.. And that can be either..

And the world is rushing to become more totalitarian year by year at present.. In the name of making us safe from ourselves.

The opposite of totalitarian is freedom.. Just remember that.

Re: Holy Shit! this is opposite world!

[Salgak1]

I'm a Sad Puppy too, and have been since it all started. What's amusing, is that, last year, Vox Day and his alt-right people decided to leverage the "Sad Puppies" with their own "Rabid Puppies" slate. And, of course, both have been conflated, despite the fact that they come from VERY different places.

Besides, the Hugo Awards, and Worldcon, have been dying for years. The announcement of the Dragon Award by DragonCon in Atlanta is just another nail in the coffin. When the "WorldCon" got 5,171 attendees last year, while DragonCon got over 70K attendees. . . the argument than the WorldCon is representative of Fandom tends to fail. . . similar attendance is seen consistently at the San Diego Comic Con, the Salt Lake City Comic Con, and the New York ComicCon.

That would suggest that perhaps the Hugos and the WorldCon are NOT representative of SF and Fantasy fandom. . .

Re:Holy Shit! this is opposite world!

[murdocj]

Have you ever listened to talk radio? I normally don't, I was on trip driving a few hours and tuning around, and it was all right wingers bashing Obama and wanting to see the "real" birth certificate. There's plenty of right wing media out there.

Re: Holy Shit! this is opposite world!

[Anonymous Coward]

Reality including human behavior. That is why it is a grand conservative conspiracy when Republicans accurately predict the ways a Democratic policy will fail. They can't rub to sticks together for fire, but if they put their minds to stopping the Democrats then they are capable of undiscoverable Machiavellian level conspiracies. If you think reality has any bias, then you have a misplaced notion of where the bias lies.

Re:Holy Shit! this is opposite world!

[Bartles]

When? If they were talking about a birth certificate, it was years ago.

Re:Holy Shit! this is opposite world!

[rochrist]

Sure. Look at Fox! Dedicated to anti-rightwing propaganda!

Re: Holy Shit! this is opposite world!

[whitroth]

How many ways can you manage to be *wrong*?

1. More than *twice* as many nominating votes came in for the Hugos this year than last year... and last year was a new record. This year, over 4000 nominations. That's "shrinking" and "not representative"?
2. I went through the list a bit ago on file770, and one thing I noticed is that the puppies were also recommending folks who might well have been put on the list *anyway* - I mean, Lois McMaster Bujold? Neil Stephenson? (And, btw, I also nominated Slow Bullets, published by WSFA Press... of which club i am a member, and out GOH at Capclave last year.)
3. Last year, there were people who were put on, and then withdrew because they Puppies had pushed them... clearly repudiating the Puppies. If I had one up, I wouldn't withdraw it... but I would *sure* post something that told Vox Toilet what I thought of him and his schemes, and his stooges.
4. Worlcon was *huge* in 2014. I'm interested in seeing how big it is this year. So much for "shrinking".
5. If you don't like the Hugos, or Worldcon, GO THE FUCK AWAY, AND STOP BOTHERING THE REST OF US.

          mark, been a fan since probably before you were born,
                          and have *zero* intention of being forced out

Re:Holy Shit! this is opposite world!

[ncc74656]

They already control nearly every moment of our lives.

I don't know in Amerika, but in the rest of the world the LEFT is the one trying to control everything you do, lest you say something somebody wouldn't like

It's no different here. Outside of who you screw, whatever "gender identity" you imagine yourself to be, and your wife's/girlfriend's/mistress's options if you get her knocked up (assuming for the sake of argument that you swing that way), Democrats are all about micromanaging your life.

Re:Holy Shit! this is opposite world!

[gzuckier]

I was about to comment this, but you beat me to it.

Republicans have Fox News. Democrats have, well, everything else. I'm not even a Republican and I can see the clear projection happening here. Whenever either side gains power politically or socially, they flex their power in an authoritarian way. You just don't mind it so much when it's the "right" person controlling you.

Leaving aside the question of whether the Democrats have all nonFox media, nobody's made this a law. The liberal nanny state isn't supporting CNN with your taxes. The cable police don't come around to make sure people are watching liberal media. We don't even have a fairness doctrine any more. What's the suggested solution; that the small government free market folks pressure the government to require more rightwing media outlets?

Re:Holy Shit! this is opposite world!

[gzuckier]

They already control nearly every moment of our lives.

I don't know in Amerika, but in the rest of the world the LEFT is the one trying to control everything you do, lest you say something somebody wouldn't like

It's no different here. Outside of who you screw, whatever "gender identity" you imagine yourself to be, and your wife's/girlfriend's/mistress's options if you get her knocked up (assuming for the sake of argument that you swing that way), Democrats are all about micromanaging your life.

Forcing you to stop spewing mercury into the air, or stop selling drugs that kill you rather than cure you, or stop slavery, or not require your employees to do things that kill them isn't quite the same as regulating allowable sexual positions.

Re: Holy Shit! this is opposite world!

[gzuckier]

You havn't studied much history have you..

Or perhaps you think the Chinese cultural revolution and Stalinist Russia were right wing?

The reason you are dead wrong of course is the neither left not right is the enemy. Totalitarianism is.. And that can be either..

And the world is rushing to become more totalitarian year by year at present.. In the name of making us safe from ourselves.

The opposite of totalitarian is freedom.. Just remember that.

Indeed. At some point both left and right circle around and meet at totalitarianism.

Starship Troopers

[jfdavis668]

Anything by Heinlein or Jerry Pournelle would fall into the right wing Scifi genre.

Re:Starship Troopers

[SNRatio]

Starship Troopers (the novel): right wing.

Starship Troopers (the movie): taking the piss out of the right wing, but still plenty of viscera and guts.

So where does Mad Max: Fury Road, which is actually on the ballot, go?

Re:Starship Troopers

[rossz]

The movie had very little to do with the book, and out of respect, should never be mentioned in the same breath as Heinlein.

Re:Starship Troopers

[Jeremi]

So where does Mad Max: Fury Road, which is actually on the ballot, go?

Hmm, the movie seemed a bit libertarian to me...

Re:Starship Troopers

[AJWM]

Really? You'd put Stranger in a Strange Land into the right wing subgenre? Time Enough for Love? What about Glory Road? And the rest of his stuff is more libertarian than right wing (of course from the left, there may not be much difference). Starship Troopers was written as it was in part to get out of a long-term publishing contract, because he was tired of writing juveniles. He knew the publisher would reject Troopers as a juvenile which would end the contract.

Pournelle maybe, although for example his (and Niven's) Lucifer's Hammer is a pretty broad mix. Again, I think much of his stuff is at core more libertarian than right wing.

Re:Starship Troopers

[lgw]

Starship Troopers (the novel): right wing.

Only if you believe the character's voice is the author's voice, which is frankly a childish view. Do you imagine Heinlein was endorsing the fascist society in Starship Troopers merely because the characters inhabiting the world accepted it? Was he then also endorsing the libertarian society in Moon is a Harsh Mistress? And where does Stranger in a Strange Land fit in?

Man, I'm tired of people trying to convince me Heinlein was fascist libertarian hippie. He wrote about the good and bad aspects of a society taken to the extreme in some direction. Sorry, no child-safe black-and-white there, just an attempt at an honest examination of how these societies would look from the inside, leaving up to you how to view them from the outside.

Re:Starship Troopers

[I'm New Around Here]

Do you mean the book or the movie of the same name?

Re:Starship Troopers

[lgw]

What a simplistic view you have. A book about X must either be an endorsement, condemnation, or satire of X? Do you only read children's stories?

Starship Troopers was a book about how people living in a fascist society would view living in that society. The book made it plenty clear that they were brainwashed throughout schooling, so of course the characters accepted the society as normal, even admirable.

There no preaching either way about fascism in Starship Troopers, as it wasn't a bedtime story. It was an insightful exploration of why a fascist society holds together despite being so evil as seen from the reader's perspective. The book was published just 14 years after WWII - everyone in his target market hated the fascists, preaching about that would have been very shallow and trite (not that Heinlein was above shallow and trite for a buck, but that was Number of the Beast, not Starship Troopers).

Re:Starship Troopers

[wisnoskij]

That just does not make any sense. The book, very clearly, lays out an anti-fascist rhetoric. It is far to in depth and honest sounding to ever be sarcastic. Read the book, it's not long, you will have no doubt on it being an honest attempt to put forward a moral philosophy on how a society should be governed. And it is outrageously anti-fascist in this rhetoric; that is its main, and pretty much only, theme.

Re:Starship Troopers

[dbIII]

It looked more Roman set in the future to me than anything else, and it seemed description instead of advocacy. Personally I think those who see it as fascist should read at least a little bit about earlier history. There's some popular novels that represent Roman society accurately.
Perhaps reading "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" immediately afterwards, as I did recently, is also a good antidote for taking away an impression of advocacy of fascism from Heinlien.

Re:Starship Troopers

[Maxo-Texas]

Starship troopers isn't facist.

It's a democracy where the right to vote is awarded to those who put the good of society ahead of their own well being for a few years.

Many democracies have not given the right to vote to all citizens.

And democracies which give the right to vote to all citizens are classically predicted to vote themselves out of business ( and not just thru social programs - this is not an anti left wing statement. I'm a strong liberal ).

Volker was also fairly true to the books (outside of lacking budget for power armor). He played up the fascist symbolism but left the valid arguments that

a) power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
b) people who won't sacrifice their own good for society probably shouldn't be running society.

Re:Starship Troopers

[steveha]

Personally, I think the book Starship Troopers is more libertarian than right-wing. I have argued that point here on Slashdot.

Reason also counts Heinlein as a libertarian. "I'm so libertarian I have no use for the libertarian movement," said Heinlein.

P.S. It's a sobering thought to realize that Starship Troopers couldn't possibly win a Hugo today. I'm certain that people would literally bus in additional voters if that was what it took to make sure it didn't win, because the modern SJW thinking is that Heinlein was a right-wing fascist misogynist racist. Never mind that he wrote Stranger in a Strange Land, never mind that he wrote strong women (possibly modeled after his wife, who was a strong woman in real life), and never mind that his works do feature minority characters. (In the short story "Water is for Washing", written not very long after World War II, the protagonist rescues two children and himself from a watery disaster, with help from a hobo. One of the children is a Japanese-American, and the protagonist says something like "He's a Jap!" The other child, a white girl, says "No, that's Tommy." Heck, the novel Starship Troopers has a Filipino protagonist and the future armed forces are completely racially integrated.)

Re:Starship Troopers

[Uberbah]

It's a democracy where the right to vote is awarded to those who put the good of society ahead of their own well being for a few years.

With an emphasis on military service and jingoism, or fascism for short.

Re:Starship Troopers

[Maxo-Texas]

fasÂcism
ËfaSHËOEizÉ(TM)m/
noun
noun: fascism; noun: Fascism; plural noun: Fascisms

An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization.

---

auÂthorÂiÂtarÂiÂan
É(TM)ËOETHÃrÉ(TM)ËterÄ"É(TM)n/
adjective
adjective: authoritarian

        1.
        favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom.

---

Militaristic, yes. Nationalistic? Nope. Authoritarian? Some-but mostly driven by the war and otherwise nope.

The society has considerable freedom. In most ways equal to our own (and in some cases greater than our own).

It's simply a democracy with limited right to vote. Anyone can earn the right to vote. They just have to pass one moral test- are they willing to put the good of society ahead of their own.

You know-- like being a democrat, hispanic, or black in florida (where they incorrectly disenfranchised 89,000 voters) or the mid west (where they disenfranchised per their own statements 5% of democratic voters with a combination of voterid+closing voterid offices all but 4 days a year).

The united states was a democracy between 1941 and 1945. The war drove certain authoritarian policies.

Re:Starship Troopers

[taustin]

. . .Verhoeven made some pretty good movies (Robocop, Total recall, Flesh and Blood)

Starship Trooper wasn't one of them.

Re:Starship Troopers

[dunkelfalke]

True, but still better than the book.

Re:Starship Troopers

[NitsujTPU]

This whole "taking jabs at the original material" bit was engineered on later. They had a plot. They had a property with a recognizable title. They stuck the two together.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Nobody engineered that movie to take swings at the "source material." They changed the names of the characters in an entirely different script to cash in on the recognizability of Heinlein's book.

Re:Starship Troopers

[Maxo-Texas]

Actually, I think you are looking at Verdorhovens overlay.

The book had a high degree of individual freedom, service was only 1/9 or 1/10 military (the rest of service was basically peace corps).
People were assigned to their skill set so a math expert might end up teaching.

In fact, Radick was a high school teacher. The kids in his class were allowed to use free speech to express their opinions.

Does the book rely on magical reality? Maybe to some extent- but as a non-religious person, I must say that the U.S. relied on religious moral values to keep it going. Corruption and cheating was "just wrong" by fiat. It was also oppressive to many citizens. As shame fell to the wayside, we see many people prey on other citizens without any moral limitation.

I dislike religion telling me to not buy skillets on sunday and where I can stick my dick. But I also dislike the loss of restraint and civility that kept the wheels turning. There isn't a best path. Having multiple truths mean that some are going to disagree on what's cheating and bribery or even if cheating and bribery are wrong.

The society in Starship Troopers is free, well run, has low corruption, has good public services, clearly a lower GINI than ours, the wealthy don't own the system of government so it's not an oligarchy like ours. It was one form of stable democracy. And stable democracies pretty rare.

The biggest problem with it is that it probably wasn't realistic. Not that it's facist.

Re:Starship Troopers

[AmiMoJo]

If the Puppies are right then Starship Troopers would be very likely to win a Hugo, on account of it being so diverse and featuring a non-white protagonist. If there was any upset over it, it would be over the casting of the movie.

Re:Starship Troopers

[SQL Error]

The story is about military service, but the book clearly states that any public service counts.

Re:Starship Troopers

[drinkypoo]

Starship troopers isn't facist. It's a democracy where the right to vote is awarded to those who put the good of society ahead of their own well being for a few years.

By one particular definition, and where you're not allowed to even espouse beliefs contrary to the party line. Fascism. Read it again, kiddo.

Many democracies have not given the right to vote to all citizens.

Wrong. Those are not democracies. They are something else, usually republics. Republics are referred to as "representative democracies" but there is in fact no such thing. Those are not democracies but oligarchies. Our own government functions not as a democracy, but as an oligarchy. If you think that we live in democracy, you are officially Part Of The Problem, at best because you are an idiot: A useful one.

And democracies which give the right to vote to all citizens are classically predicted to vote themselves out of business

The problem with your idea is that it is stupid. There are examples of countries which actually have one person one vote (shit, some of them let you vote on your cellphone) and they are doing fine.

Volker was also fairly true to the books (outside of lacking budget for power armor). He played up the fascist symbolism but left the valid arguments that
a) power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Power grows not out of the barrel of a gun, but out of the will of people. A number of times in history, people have been willing to resist their armed occupiers. Also, if you are sneaky, you can kill people without guns.

b) people who won't sacrifice their own good for society probably shouldn't be running society.

Joining the military is not for the good of society. It is for the good of the wealthy. Murdering people in foreign countries for profit is not good for society.

Re:Starship Troopers

[murdocj]

The movie was clearly satire, but given everything I've read about Heinlein, and how it fits in with his other work, the book was quite serious.

Re:Starship Troopers

[mccalli]

Do you imagine Heinlein was endorsing the fascist society in Starship Troopers merely because the characters inhabiting the world accepted it?
Yes.

Was he then also endorsing the libertarian society in Moon is a Harsh Mistress? And where does Stranger in a Strange Land fit in?
The forward he wrote himself covers Stranger in a Strange Land - he deliberately set out to write a sympathetic character and story which was entirely opposed to his own beliefs. He states this explicitly.

Am afraid have not read Moon is a Harsh Mistress so cannot comment.

Re:Starship Troopers

[DarthVain]

Well not everything... but a lot of it I would agree.

I would add Ben Bova to that list as well... Heinlein, Bova, Rand all had multiple protagonists that were "boot-strapped" hard working, common sense people, that became ultra rich, while snubbing their nose to governments and authority, being adventurous industrialists which also happened to be pretty over the top sexist. Then again it was a different time when most of those books were written also.

That said I do like some of their works...

One last thing to add, one persons "right wing ideology" is another's parody...

Re:Starship Troopers

[Kierthos]

You know, I've never been able to understand how people can think Heinlein was a misogynist. It's like they either haven't read his books, or willfully misinterpreted them.

Re:Starship Troopers

[CAIMLAS]

Starship Troopers 3 was actually fairly similar in voice to the book...

People seem to miss the irony with which Heinlein wrote.

Re:Starship Troopers

[orgelspieler]

You really need to read Harsh Mistress. It's one of my favorite AI books ever. A lot of the economics/physics/politics makes no sense, but it's still interesting. I rather like the idea of alternative family structures, and a society where everybody is expected to participate in the justice system.

Re:Starship Troopers

[werepants]

I just read Glory Road, which is Heinleins's one attempt at straight-out fantasy and is absolutely horrendous. It's blatantly misogynist, the protagonist is a great guy who handles disagreement with women by beating them, the plot constantly manufactures weird reasons for nudism, and there's some really preachy and shallow right-wing political diatribes at the end. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is one of my favorite books, but there's no question that Heinlein had a big streak of libertarian nutjob.

Re:Starship Troopers

[TangoMargarine]

You can have a direct democracy where not all citizens can vote. That was how Athens worked, wasn't it?

Re:Starship Troopers

[david_thornley]

Stranger in a Strange Land is right-wing? Coulda fooled me. It didn't seem to fall anywhere on the spectrum.

Re:Starship Troopers

[david_thornley]

You do know where Mussolini got the word "fascist" from, don't you? Roman fasces.

Re:Starship Troopers

[rossz]

I don't know what you read, but you certainly did not read Heinlein's Starship Troopers.

Re:Starship Troopers

[goose-incarnated]

There is debate as to whether Starship Troopers was actual a defense of fascism, or an attempt at satire. I tend to lean towards it being a pro-fascist piece, because it doesn't seem to be very tongue in cheek at all.

Did you actually *read* Starship Troopers?

Re:Starship Troopers

[lgw]

You me Heinlein wasn't politically correct? Color me shocked (also: you have no idea). He was born in 1907 though, and so was fairly progressive when it came to nudity, sex, polygamous marriages, and so on. He certainly believed in strong gender roles, but wrote repeatedly that any woman with half a clue would be the one in charge of the relationship, despite the man "always getting his way" as the man saw it.

Also, Heinlein was no libertarian (or do you just use that word as a random insult?). His stories routinely feature a bunch of disorganized people floundering until the Big Strong/Smart Hero takes the lead and saves the day. He was certainly pro-individual-liberty, but at the same time believed real problems would only be solved by following strong leaders. He was also a bit nuts, but that's a longer story (did you know he paid for a full page ad in the NYT warning of the dangers of communism?).

Re:Starship Troopers

[lgw]

Well, that's certainly a compelling argument.

The book was written from the perspective of teenagers raised and fully-bought-into the system. Heinlein has talked about this: he takes an idea for a society, and runs with it to the logical extreme, to explore what it would be like.

The characters weren't always happy with how events unfolded, but they almost never questioned the system itself, certainly less than people high school/college age usually do.

It sure read like the first half of most dystopian novels, where events seem appalling to the reader but seem normal to the protagonists who are making their way as best they can through that society.

Re:Starship Troopers

[dbIII]

Yes but Mussolini didn't provide Roman style rule did he - just like the Tsars were not really Caesar.

Re:Starship Troopers

[Maxo-Texas]

It's been over 20 years since I reread the book the last time so it's entirely fair to say my memory is not likely entirely accurate (esp. since I've seen the movie about 5 times since I last read the book).

I don't see communism as applicable. It's clear that all property wasn't publicly owned and that individuals could become wealthy even if they were not citizens.

Re:Starship Troopers

[SNRatio]

and never mind that his works do feature minority characters.

Quite prominently in Farnham's Freehold.

I like Charles Stross's description of it: "a privileged white male from California, a notoriously exclusionary state, trying to understand American racism in the pre-Martin Luther King era. And getting it wrong for facepalm values of wrong, so wrong he wasn't even on the right map ... but at least he wasn't ignoring it."

Re:Starship Troopers

[werepants]

You should check out Glory Road - the central premise is that the empress of the multiverse has no actual authority, adheres to a central principal of "hands off" governing, and basically just makes recommendations to subjects which they adhere to... out of the goodness of their hearts and respect for tradition?

Point is, it's Heinlein's picture of a libertarian utopia where people are left to their own devices and everything just works out. And no, I don't mean "libertarian" as an insult, but clearly "nutjob" is intended thus. There are rational libertarians as well - only some libertarians go overboard.

And, I do still regard his stuff really highly, like I said, TMIAHM is one of my favorites. Glory Road was just atrociously bad though.

Re:Starship Troopers

[russotto]

I like Charles Stross's description of it: "a privileged white male from California, a notoriously exclusionary state, trying to understand American racism in the pre-Martin Luther King era. And getting it wrong for facepalm values of wrong, so wrong he wasn't even on the right map ... but at least he wasn't ignoring it."

Because a white man from the UK, born only 4 years before King's assassination, has a better perspective on it. Right.

I haven't been reading much sci-fi lately...

[westlake]

But if you are looking for a movie that delivers on it promises of "visceral, gut-level, swashbuckling fun," what you want is Marvel and Disney. The problem, of course, is that Disney is evolving into the most liberal, subversive, and prosperous studio on the block.

Re:I haven't been reading much sci-fi lately...

[glwtta]

The problem, of course, is that Disney is evolving into the most liberal, subversive, and prosperous studio on the block.

Is it really? I wonder if you had anything specific in mind?

Maybe I'm just not as familiar with their movies, but my impression seems to be quite the opposite, especially with Disney/Marvel - war is awesome (fuck yea!), women are for decoration and/or manpain, gay people don't exist - isn't that about as non-liberal a viewpoint as it gets?

Aren't they just now starting to get out of the "token black guy" phase?

Re:I haven't been reading much sci-fi lately...

[nanoflower]

Perhaps, but Disney is also very much a capitalistic organism and as such very buys into the right wing values of corporations are more valuable than the people that make them up. Much like people Disney is a complicated beast with aspects of both right/left/libertarian.

Re:I haven't been reading much sci-fi lately...

[lgw]

The movies are telling stories published decades ago (remember how a liberal becomes a conservative). They're successful because they don't twist the fun story just to insert political footballs. (Well, OK, the entire original point of Tony Stark was to add a hero who was fundamentally a successful CEO, an arms dealer no less, just to mess with lefties at the time, but he was the exception.)

I'm not sure why Disney is seen as a hated agent of the left by the crazy end of the right, but it's not about the Marvel movies.

Re:I haven't been reading much sci-fi lately...

[serviscope_minor]

"visceral, gut-level, swashbuckling fun," what you want is Marvel

ehhhhh... :(

I like superhero movies, I do. The problem is that Marvel is just oversaturating the market and I'm finding it harder and harder to get excited about another retread of the hero-origin-story-big-evil-rises-hero-saves-the-world. I liked Deadpool, it felt rather fresher than many of the recent ones. But it's all getting awfully samey just with larger fight scenes.

Re:I haven't been reading much sci-fi lately...

[Cytotoxic]

I'm not sure why Disney is seen as a hated agent of the left by the crazy end of the right, but it's not about the Marvel movies.

Wait, I thought Disney was a hated enemy of the left. I'm confused. Won't someone please tell me what is acceptable and who I should hate?

Re:I haven't been reading much sci-fi lately...

[serviscope_minor]

I'm confused.

Perhaps you should try introducing some nuance into your worldview and not assuming that a single article on a single website is representative of a large group of people.

Re:I haven't been reading much sci-fi lately...

[goose-incarnated]

But it's all getting awfully samey just with larger fight scenes.

Not just the superhero movies; most of the blockbusters. See this for the formula that all recent blockbusters have.

I don't care either way

[ltbarcly]

but I think it's not really so evil to organize. This is a system that is getting like 2 to 4 thousand votes, and this so called conservative cabal still didn't get all of their candidates into the final.

We are talking about nothing. This is nothing. This is a world with 7 Billion people in it. The margin of victory in this ballot is like 400 votes.

The short version is, maybe conservatives are 'gaming' this, but the thing they are gaming is completely meaningless. It's a stupid award and nobody should care who wins it. Read what you like, sheeple!

Re:I don't care either way

[I'm New Around Here]

https://xkcd.com/1013/

Wait. You're waking them so they can read? I don't know if they will go along with that plan.

Re:I don't care either way

[ltbarcly]

Yes... so they can read..... MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

Re:I don't care either way

[I'm New Around Here]

You're so evil. :^P

Or...

[cirby]

Maybe it shows that the people who have BEEN gaming the awards for the last couple of decades are finally being outnumbered by people who actually vote for good writing, instead of politically-acceptable dross. Up until a year or so ago, there was a huge amount of campaigning for Hugo awards. Now, the same people who used to get nominated regularly by doing so are whining because someone else is also campaigning - and getting nominated instead of one of their friends.

The people running the Hugos whine about ""Republicans" - but go and actually LOOK at the nominees from the Sad Puppies. There's actual political diversity there, not the progressive sameness of a typical Hugo ballot.

Re:Or...

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped following the Hugos years ago, because it's been all crap and bad writing. I guess the SJW trash has been ruining it.

Now, where is my latest John RIngo sci-fi.

Re:Or...

[steveha]

go and actually LOOK at the nominees from the Sad Puppies.

Yes, but I think this is now mostly about Rabid Puppies, who successfully nominated Space Raptor Butt Invasion.

The Rabid Puppies pretty much packed the nominations... some of the nominated works were on the Sad Puppies list so they are likely good, but some of them are just trolling in-jokes. I'm pretty sure the Space Raptor one is just trolling.

Every slot filled by Rabid Puppy trolling is a slot that wasn't filled by a good work worthy of a Hugo. This is much worse than last year.

Re:Or...

[hyades1]

As a Canadian, I would never have used the word "Republican". "Right wing dickheads who think Star Wars is SF"...now that's an epithet I could support.

Re:Or...

[GeekBoy]

Totally agree. All this shows is that another segment of the market that reads sci-fi has finally taken an interest in the awards ceremony process.

It's analogous to the same rise in reported crime that happens when you put more cops on the street. Does that mean that there is really more crime or do you just have more people to report what is there? I view this the same way, you're just seeing 'conservatives' who read sci-fi actually come out to vote. I'm a conservative and I've been reading sci-fi/fantasy all my life; the same goes for most of my family and extended family.

Re:Or...

[Darinbob]

Rabid puppies is about voting for who you're told to vote for. People who've never been interested in science fiction before are being asked to join up and vote in a sci-fi version of the culture wars.

Re:Or...

[serviscope_minor]

Now, where is my latest John RIngo sci-fi.

Oh John Ringo, NO!

I read a John Ringo book, not one of *THOSE* ones: "The Last Centurion". The voice was top notch. Great writing there. What the voice was talking about however... It kind of read like an extended internet rant by a right wing blogger with lashings of Fox News fanfiction. Sort of a right wing fantasy where all the liberals DIE because they're WRONG. Also, farmers are the best.

Re:Or...

[russotto]

I'm pretty sure the Space Raptor one is just trolling.

It's an obvious response to "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love". I imagine a lot of the Sads joined in the vote for it for that reason.

Re:Or...

[david_thornley]

who think Star Wars is SF

It isn't hard science fiction. You could classify it as space opera or epic fantasy in space, much like the Lensman series. Both subgenres are often considered science fiction.

The shame is that

[Rinikusu]

There are actually some really good books in the lists that are now "tainted" by these shenanigans. Hell, I like Jim Butcher and I know he's got some right-of-center politics, but best novel? No way. And Seveneves? Good book for about 3/4, then falls a bit, also not a good pick for any cause.

Re:The shame is that

[rossz]

Is the book better than Scalzi's Red Shirts? He got the 2013 Hugo for a fun popcorn read, but was no way deserving of a Hugo, but that seems to be the standard if the author is of the right politics and/or demographics.

Also, if you you believe the books are now tainted, then you are an idiot. The entire point of the Sad Puppies was not to fix the Hugos. They simply said, "read these books you might otherwise ignore and if you think they deserve it, vote for them." The SJW fools lied about that and spread the false rumor that the intent was to overload the Hugos only right wing stores and authors. Some of the SJWs went so far as to say that only books by women of color should be considered.

Re:The shame is that

[dbIII]

Early in his first Dresden files book he says something about "the modern religion that is science" - I just about threw the book at the wall. Is it the character being an asshole or the author?
I think that's where people get the impression of his politics when it's probably just the character.

Re:The shame is that

[Oligonicella]

"...when it's probably just the character."

Yet, you just about threw the book at the wall. Why so volatile about a fictional character's pov?

Re:The shame is that

[SQL Error]

Also, that character lives in a world where science is often wrong and in denial of the evidence.

That was something of a theme in the early books, less so after Murphy left the Chicago PD.

Re:The shame is that

[ravenshrike]

So, a WIZARD who literally destabilizes tech and makes deals with Mab, the Queen of Air and Darkness, makes an in character comment about the nature of science in his universe, where people actively ignore the supernatural, and you "almost threw the book against the wall". Given the nature of his universe what about that statement is wrong?

Re:The shame is that

[SQL Error]

If I remember correctly, that line came before we saw that it was a pretty accurate summary of how things really were in Harry Dresden's world. It annoyed me at the time too.

Re:The shame is that

[Orgasmatron]

Please tell me more about the puppy demographics.

Re:The shame is that

[AmiMoJo]

If you want to poke the establishment in the eye

I love sticking it to the man, and having Monster Hunter Legion get nominated for best novel would make literati snobâ(TM)s heads explode

(just imagine with me⦠Should I vote for the heavy handed message fic about the dangers of fracking and global warming and dying polar bears and robot rape as a bad feminist analogy with a villain who is a thinly veiled Dick Cheney? Or should I vote for the LAS VEGAS EXPLOSION SHOOTING EVERYTHING DRAGON HELICOPTER CHASE ORC SACRIFICING CHICKENS BOOK!?! Grglglgggggsllllâ¦â¦â¦BOOM!)

http://www.webcitation.org/6aR...

Stop lying. It was a political movement from the very start and never about voting for deserving books, unless you think Monster Hunter Legion is worthy of one of literature's highest awards.

Re:The shame is that

[ravenshrike]

The character is a WIZARD. Here's the blurb on the back to refresh your memory.
"Harry Dresden is the best at what he does. Well, technically, he's the only at what he does. So when the Chicago P.D. has a case that transcends mortal creativity or capability, they come to him for answers. For the "everyday" world is actually full of strange and magical things—and most don't play well with humans. That's where Harry comes in. Takes a wizard to catch a—well, whatever. There's just one problem. Business, to put it mildly, stinks."
Let's see, "transcends mortal creativity or capability" and "the "everyday" world is actually full of strange and magical things—and most don't play well with humans". Why, both of those things would appear to be beyond the bounds of science. I guess if you just looked at the front cover before reading such offense at the line might be excused.

Re:The shame is that

[ravenshrike]

Y'know, your reading comprehension needs some fucking work. If anything, the line you quoted was an anti-political stance. The "literati snobs" LIKE their heavy-handed political message fic. Whereas Correia and the SP think politics and rightthink should be jettisoned out the airlock when it comes to Sci-Fi fantasy awards.

Re:The shame is that

[russotto]

Yes, wrongfen having wrongfun. Ask George R.R. Martin, who claimed that the Puppies crashed someone else's party.

Re:The shame is that

[rossz]

I see you are one of the people who believed the lie that I had pointed out in my previous post. You are an example of why the Hugo is no longer a prestigious award. It's now only about "the right message" and not about good books.

Re:The shame is that

[rossz]

Stop lying. It was a political movement from the very start and never about voting for deserving books, unless you think Monster Hunter Legion is worthy of one of literature's highest awards.

Was Monster Hunter Legion better than Red Shirts? Because Red Shirts seems to be the very low standard for best novel. I'd say, yes, MH was better. However, I don't believe either of them is good enough for the Hugo.

Also, don't accuse me of lying when the facts show that you are a fucking moron.

Re:The shame is that

[david_thornley]

The first couple of Dresden books are really not particularly good. I think it was about book four when I got the impression of a cohesive world rather than disparate elements thrown together at random.

Re:The shame is that

[dbIII]

Please tell me more about the puppy demographics.

Easy, just read Vox Days page for details.
Hatred of fiction that mentions women, gays, politics from anywhere other than the far right or people of ethnic groups from other than a few from the north of Europe is the relevant bit.
The real problem however is that bullshit similar to grubby undergraduate student politics has blighted the Hugos. I'd see it as a just as much of a problem if a far left group did the same - as ironically has been the accusation by a few as if the kickback happened before the thing it kicked back against.

How about this - since you keep whining about SJW strawmen what do you think about preventing both them and the right wing loonies from inflicting grubby politics on the award? Or will that get in the way of people you like being able to play grubby politics?

Re:The shame is that

[dbIII]

Really? Quote from my post where I am writing about the "right message".
It's amusing that mentioning a wide range of "messages" is being labelled as restrictive - please act your age.

Re:The shame is that

[dbIII]

Initially it appeared that the author was pushing an agenda from page one as would be done in a anti-science polemic, which is not what I was interested in reading - so I was very annoyed.
However it was the character.
I am of course referring to the post above mine with the line you "know" he's got right of center politics? and how it is difficult to "know" based on fiction and how it often doesn't really matter anyway.
Does it make sense now that you know the context?

Re:The shame is that

[dbIII]

Context. Read the post above mine and you'll see that I was referring to the difference between the authors supposed politics and what the characters get up to.

Re:The shame is that

[dbIII]

The entire point here is that people are assuming the author's politics are the same as that of a fictional wizard and I gave an example of how that assumption can happen. See the posts above mine to get an idea of why my post was written.

I think people saw that annoying "science is religion" first impression and took it as the authors personal politics being shoved down the reader's throats instead of a one-off thing to define the setting - hence the post that kicked off the thread in the first place.

Re:The shame is that

[Cyberpunk Reality]

To me, it looks a lot more like Correia and the various dogs are just angry that they're not the ones winning.

Re:The shame is that

[rossz]

Vox is the rabid group. He does not represent the Sad Puppies. Also, Vox is an asshole. Every group has one.

Re:The shame is that

[dbIII]

Fair enough, but what do you say about my point in the second paragraph?

I'm more pissed off with a group of political hacks pushing their "slate" and asking people to vote for stuff unread than their actual politics.

Re:says who?

[I'm New Around Here]

That's why I stopped reading certain authors. Their books were "this poor guy is picked on because he's gay, and that's not fair, so let's make him the hero fighting for the girl -- oh, I mean the boy -- oh, wait, I mean ... uh ... for .. uh ... justice. Yeah, that's it, he's fighting for justice with his boyfriend ... uh ... I mean his companion".

One book I read a while ago handled "the gay issue" much better. There was a group of people on a ship/research station. One was gay, and liked to give blow jobs. Another guy was not gay, but liked getting blow jobs. No big deal, and no cause for fight for, just the way people are.

Where is the science in any scifi lately?

[jfdavis668]

Scifi used to be based around some science concept or a science concepts impact on people or society. Now it just seems to be a backdrop to some action adventure movie.

Re:Where is the science in any scifi lately?

[jfdavis668]

/. needs a "like" button

Re:Where is the science in any scifi lately?

[I'm New Around Here]

And give us videos showing how mermaids evolved.

Re:Where is the science in any scifi lately?

[cfalcon]

> /. needs a "like" button

Pls no

Re:Where is the science in any scifi lately?

[serviscope_minor]

I liked your sentiment and I agree.

Re:Where is the science in any scifi lately?

[clarkholmes]

Where is that like button again?

Key points to understand

[steveha]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re:Key points to understand

[steveha]

How about defending a puppie nominee which lost to no award rather than straw manning? Try to read this novella, I dare ya.

Okay, I took your dare. I didn't read the other nominees so I don't know that I would have voted for it to get the Hugo, but I liked that story pretty well. I didn't like the beginning, but I stuck with it, and a few pages in it hit its stride and was pretty engaging. It's an old-fashioned sort of story, a kind of travelogue where we are seeing a world through the eyes of someone from outside that world (someone from the frozen north visiting the "Warm Lands"). As a story it was pretty good once you got past the rough beginning, and as world-building I thought it was excellent.

It sounds, however, like you are claiming that the story is so bad that there is no way it was nominated in good faith, that it must have been nominated to prove some kind of political point. If that is your theory, please explain just what that point might be, because I didn't see one.

Re:Key points to understand

[cbhacking]

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

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

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

Re:Key points to understand

[serviscope_minor]

Then the science fiction fandom got really organized and burned the Hugo Awards to the ground.

That's a really astonishingly melodramatic take on what happened. Nothing got wrecked or burned or damaged in any way. A bunch of terrible stories got nominated and they were given no award. In other categories, awards were given. Everything went on as normal, and the first in the two stage process of altering the voting process to reduce the effect of slate voting began.

I suspect he's trolling because his statements are so perfectly calculated to enrage.

Well, partly is is a real right wing nutjob, and partly he's trolling. He's a decently competent troll, but not a true master of the art.

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

The slate voting only works on the nominations, not on the final votes. And there was no "anti puppy" slate, only an "anti shit story" slate. The puppies threw their tiny weight behind the three body problem and it still won. Arguable they tipped the balance because it was a very close run thing. But who cares? Lots of people, puppy and non puppy liked it, the rabid puppies officially supported it and that didn't do any harm.

but how would denying the Hugo to Three Body Problem have protected anything

The thing is, that never happened outside some fantasy of yours.

Re:Key points to understand

[iris-n]

You seem to assume that there is an "organized fandom" voting on an "anti-Puppy" slate. Care to provide evidence about that? Since the Puppies seem to have made a huge amount of nominations, I conclude that if there is such an anti-Puppy conspiracy it is a rather incompetent one.

Re:Key points to understand

[ravenshrike]

Yes, for SP2. The stated goal of which was that the 'literati snobs' would flip their shit if badthink people were included in the ballot. Lo and behold, shit was flipped. At which point VD forked into Rabid Puppies whose goal was to burn the fucker to the ground, and SP3's goal was to nominate good books. Considering the MC was name dropping Vonnegut while passing out asterisk coasters, it's pretty fucking clear the establishment managed to burn the thing down to the ground without Day's assistance.

Re:Key points to understand

[Cyberpunk Reality]

You're leaving out who and what started all this (even as you reference his website as though it were an unbiased source): Larry Correia, and his campaign to game himself a Hugo rather than earn one by writing well, and his enraged butthurt when his scam failed.

Re:Key points to understand

[steveha]

And there was no "anti puppy" slate, only an "anti shit story" slate.

Factually incorrect. The slate that won was advertised as the "Puppy-Free" slate, only they didn't call it a slate. They claimed to be against slate voting.

http://deirdre.net/the-puppy-free-hugo-award-voters-guide/

Of course the Sad Puppies nominations had vote totals all over the map, and then the "Puppy-Free" list was exactly followed in actual votes by 2400-3500+ people.

There was one exception: Guardians of the Galaxy was so popular that it was voted for even though it was recommended by Puppies. That was it. No other Puppy-nominated work won anything.

The thing is, that never happened outside some fantasy of yours.

As documented above, exactly one Puppy-nominated thing won, and that was the hugely popular movie Guardians of the Galaxy.

On what basis do you think something different would have happened for Best Novel? Why do you think that Best Novel, arguably the most prestigious Hugo, would have triumphed over the slate when the rest of the Puppies nominations were defeated at roughly 2:1?

Re:Key points to understand

[steveha]

Apologies but my reference link to document the votes didn't work... I must have made a typo in the HREF tag or something.

Here's the URL so you can check on the vote totals: http://www.thehugoawards.org/content/pdf/2015HugoStatistics.pdf

Re:Key points to understand

[steveha]

Try to read this novella, I dare ya.

It turns out that if you took away the "No Award" votes, "Flow" was the clear winner. http://www.thehugoawards.org/content/pdf/2015HugoStatistics.pdf

Clearly there are at least 1179 people who disagree with you on the merits of this story.

Re:Key points to understand

[steveha]

You seem to assume that there is an "organized fandom" voting on an "anti-Puppy" slate. Care to provide evidence about that?

"The Puppy-Free Hugo Award Voting Guide" blog posting still exists; see it for yourself: http://deirdre.net/the-puppy-free-hugo-award-voters-guide/

It didn't call itself a "slate" but I call it that. The recommendations in that slate were followed and Puppy-nominated works were outvoted, by 2:1 in several cases. It was an unprecedented number of votes any way you look at it and the anti-Puppy slate voting absolutely was organized.

http://www.thehugoawards.org/content/pdf/2015HugoStatistics.pdf

In the entire previous history of the Hugo awards there had been only 5 "No Awards" voted. Then last year the "Puppy-Free" slate recommended "No Award" in 5 categories; enough people voted the slate that all 5 categories passed "No Award" rather than allow even a single Puppy-nominated person to win any category.

There was exactly one deviation from the "Puppy-Free" slate. The popular movie "Guardians of the Galaxy" was voted for best movie Hugo.

Since the Puppies seem to have made a huge amount of nominations, I conclude that if there is such an anti-Puppy conspiracy it is a rather incompetent one.

It's true that the Sad Puppies surprised everyone, even themselves, by sweeping several categories in the nominations and getting most of their picks on the ballot. After that, the anti-Puppy faction really got organized, with the results shown above.

Re:Key points to understand

[cbhacking]

Maybe he's turned over a new leaf, but I'm skeptical. It's hard to take a claim of being for quality over politics when you make explicitly political nominations while accusing "the other side"* of being too politically motivated.

* Is there, in fact, anything like a reasonably centrally-organized non-puppies slate out there that people are being told to vote for?

Re:Key points to understand

[serviscope_minor]

The slate that won was advertised as the "Puppy-Free" slate, only they didn't call it a slate. They claimed to be against slate voting.

Yeah because it isn't a slate. Look: you dont seem to know entirely what a slate is in the context of the Hugos and why it matters. If you're actually interested in knowing why I'll tell you. However, if you've already decided, the thread is more or less over, so there's no point me just yelling into the void.

There was one exception:

The exceptions were all in the very popular categories, too popular for the puppies to have any significant effect on the nominations. Mostly people wanted to vote for stuff they liked.

On what basis do you think something different would have happened for Best Novel?

Because the dramatic presentation long and short form and novel all get vastly, vastly more nominations than everything else, so given the best guesses for the estimated puppy numbers there's not nearly so much opportunity for influence. And lots of people liked the 3 body problem: they voted for it in the nominations when the puppies didn't like it and they voted it in the main poll when the pupies did like it.

Re:Key points to understand

[iris-n]

My bad, I thought you were talking about manipulating the nomination process, but you were talking about manipulating the voting itself. There was clearly a big campaign for people to vote on an "Puppy-Free slate", and they were rather sucessful. I'm not sure I'd call it "organized fandom", though, as they don't seem to form a coherent political group, like the Sad Puppies or the Rabid Puppies.

Re:Key points to understand

[steveha]

Look: you dont seem to know entirely what a slate is in the context of the Hugos and why it matters.

Oh, feel free to educate me. I will read what you write and give it due consideration.

IMHO a negative slate is still a slate. "You can vote for anything you want to, as long as you don't vote for anything the Puppies nominated" is a slate.

lots of people liked the 3 body problem

So what? There were at least 2000 people voting in lockstep to slap down anything nominated by the Puppies. The "No Award" vote total was over 3500 in some categories. Now, look at the vote totals for Three Body Problem; I gave you the link. I don't fully understand the way the voting system works, but I think that 2000 to 3000 votes for "No Award" would have locked in the win on the first cycle, leaving Three Body Problem and the others recalculating for second place.

Why do you think it matters whether people liked the novel? They were on a crusade. Do you really think that Toni Weisskopf is such a horrible editor that "No Award" is a reasonable choice rather than voting for her? Nobody thinks that, but plenty of people felt that it was more important to slap down the Puppies than to give out a Hugo. (I read on a blog comments to the effect that the Sad Puppies should feel ashamed for nominating Toni Weisskopf, since now the true fans were going to slap her down; they should have left her to be nominated by someone else so it wouldn't be necessary to vote against her.)

The self-appointed protectors of the Hugo felt that the Puppies must not be allowed to "get away with" nominating things because the Puppies did it "wrong". The crime the Puppies were accused of: nominating a slate. The solution was to vote perfectly for a pre-arranged list, which wasn't a slate, no not at all.

Maybe people liked Three Body Problem but voting it for Best Novel after Vox Day nominated it? That would never happen. The slapdown was nearly perfect, just a popular movie escaped from it... would they hand Vox Day a victory? Would they leave Vox Day able to say "the Sad Puppies were shut down completely, but I and the Rabid Puppies were able to pull out a win for the most presigious category, Best Novel." The answer is no, no chance of that, none.

If you really believe that the crusade would have given Vox Day a win just because the novel is good, you haven't read the same blogs I read right around the Hugos last year. But I'm guessing you didn't read them because you seem to genuinely believe that "there was no anti-Puppy slate, just an anti-s*** slate". And I've spent far far too long writing on this and I'm not going to try to persuade you further.

P.S. I plan to register to vote for the Hugos, and vote for whatever I like from the nominated works. I will not vote against something because of who nominated it. I don't believe that "protects" anything... they tried it last year and look where we are now.

Re:Key points to understand

[serviscope_minor]

I will read what you write and give it due consideration.

OK, here goes.

The problem with slate voting is very specifically at the nomination stage, not at the award stage. At the award stage, there's very little choice (just 5 entries) so it's much harder to influence the votes.

First, that list isn't at the nomination state.

At the nomination stage, it's much much easier to influence votes. The reason is that nominations are spread over literally thousands of works. As a result the ones receiving the top 5 number of votes actually get a quite small number of votes even of a large pool of people nominate. Because of that a slate, which is pretty much saying "vote for precisely these 5 works regardless of whether you have read/liked them" can easily overwhelm the normal nominations because there is no spread of votes over random things the voters likes as there is with normal voting.

What you have posted is a list of things for the final vote stage which is quite different. Secondly, the slate only works well if there's no choice in it. Once choice comes into it, then the votes get diluted by a factor of N (N= number of choices) and it's much less efficatious.

So in conclusion (a) it's not a slate for nominations and (b) even if it was it's nothing like as bad as the Rabid Puppy slate.

There were at least 2000 people voting in lockstep

You have absolutely no evidence of that, and I in fact have counter evidence. People voted "no award" because the stories were crap. Even the one non-puppy nomination which got through in its category, "the day the world turned upside-down", which indicentally was also crap lost the popular vote to "no award".

It actually managed to eventually win an award juuuuust because of a quirk of the voting system (see Arrow's theorem), but to be very clear that is a very unusual case and stories very, very rarely lose to "no award" in the popular vote.

If people were voting "anti-puppy" as you claim, then why did they also no-award a non puppy crap story? And if people were voting in lock-step as you claim then how come they didn't all vote for that story or all vote "no award"?

Do you really think that Toni Weisskopf is such a horrible editor that "No Award" is a reasonable choice rather than voting for her?

Been a while since I looked at this, but from what I recall she did not submit a list of books which she has edited. How is one supposed to judge her as en editor without details?

The self-appointed protectors of the Hugo

Thing is though the only grand consipracy was the puppies slate stuffing the nominations. There was no other conspiracy. A bunch of people simply disagreeing with you is not a conspiracy.

Maybe people liked Three Body Problem but voting it for Best Novel after Vox Day nominated it? That would never happen.

Yeah it would, because lots of people simply didn't care that much. The novel is a much more popular category than almost any of the others and as a result gets many more votes. The other categories tend to be more dominated by people deeper in the community and more aware of it's drama. That's not the case for the big 3 categories.

If you look at the dramatic presentation ones, you can see that plenty of people voted for ones that were also puppy nominations, so your "that would never happen" claim is clearly false.

If you really believe that the crusade would have given Vox Day a win just because the novel is good, you haven't read the same blogs I read right around the Hugos last year.

I read some of those blogs, I just thought they were silly and often rather too melodramatic for my tastes too. And just because someone writes it on a blog, doesn't make it true.

P.S. I plan to register to vote for the Hugos, and vote for whatever I like from the nominated works. I will not vote against something because of who nominated it. I don't believe that "protects" anything... they tried it last ye

Re:Key points to understand

[steveha]

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

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

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

Larry Correia summarized it:

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

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

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

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

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

By giving 2,496 votes to No Award.

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

Re:Key points to understand

[serviscope_minor]

I still disagree that the anti-Puppy slate was not a slate or was okay somehow or was justified.

Well, I agree that telling people to or voting non-puppy for the sake of voting non puppy was not justified and some people did that. Notwithstanding the differences between nominations and final votes, I don't agree that a random blog post is same as an actually organised slate.

And I have never said anything good about the Rabid Puppies.

OK. There is a difference. The Sad Puppies last year and actually more so this year were motivated more by "this is the kind of thing we think is good" than the Rabid ones. The Sad puppies have actually improved this year, having not only a transparent vote, but also not haveing a full slate (there's a choice of 10).

I also agree there's a huge difference between "here's thins we like, read them and vote if you like", and "vote for these because I hate SJW".

This year they gave us Space Raptor Butt Invasion, which I'm sure they think is very funny, but I am not amused. ... well it is pretty funny on two accounts. Firstly, it seemed that Vox Day thought it would it would make SJW's heads explode. Many people seem to think it's pretty funny, so it failed on that account. Secondly, Mr Tingle's response has been marvellous.

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

There's two ways of writing what you wrote:

1. Weisskopf received a record number of votes.
2. A record number of votes for the category were cast.

Given that 2 happened, it's not surprising 1 happened. And no, I don't think there was an orchestrated campaign because unlike the Rabid Puppies where there was a specific person orchestrating it, a central point for organisation and a single set of instructions on how to vote, there was no such central controlling authority for everyone else.

What the Puppies (misc) spat did was raise the profile substantially of all of the remaining (not the big 3) categories and as a result a much larger number of people overall voted.

You also ignored my point that the supposed anti-puppy organisation actually on average no-awarded the only non puppy entrant in the short stories section too. How does that fit in with an orchestrated anti puppy campaign?

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

Fair enough: we both know what happened and there's no point going for wikipedia style [cite] wars. I won't disagree that there were all sorts of people calling for all sorts of things. But opinions on blog posts alone does not constitute an orchestrated campaign.

"swashbuckling fun"

[PopeRatzo]

I'm OK with the Hugos being about "swashbuckling fun". They've always been a fan's choice award anyway, for the lowest common denominator. There are other awards for serious science fiction. The Hugos are for people who think Star Wars is science fiction.

Let's see how much attention the Hugos get once they start giving awards to talentless self-publishers like Vox Day.

Re:"swashbuckling fun"

[cirby]

They've been doing that for a few years now, it's just that they've been giving it to left-wing talentless self-publishers.

So, apparently, the only thing that outrages you is that they're coming from the wrong flavor of politics?

Re:"swashbuckling fun"

[Oligonicella]

Some of the most serious science fiction is some of the worst science fiction.

Re:"swashbuckling fun"

[serviscope_minor]

Why are people like you weirdly obsessed with "outrage". Certian people often seem to claim "SJWs" are "outraged", it's like you categorise people using a silly categorisation, then instead of reading what they write, you assume they must be acting a certain way based on your opinion of them. It's a good way of switching off your brain to be sure, but it doesn't make you appear terribly observant.

There's not the slightest hint of outrage in PopeRatzo's post.

Re:"swashbuckling fun"

[PopeRatzo]

They've been doing that for a few years now, it's just that they've been giving it to left-wing talentless self-publishers.

Yeah, it's as meaningless as a "teen's choice award" that gives Justin Bieber an award every year because he's cute.

It's basically the equivalent of an online poll, except "fans" have to pay to vote. The Hugos are about "swashbuckling fun" which to me sounds a little bit like "do you like gladiator movies, Tommy?"

Re:"swashbuckling fun"

[PopeRatzo]

Some of the most serious science fiction is some of the worst science fiction.

But almost all of the best science fiction is serious.

"Swashbuckling fun" sounds like something you'd read in a review of gay porn.

Re:I'm Supposed To Read A Sci-fi Book Every Year??

[SNRatio]

No one reads all that crap. How many entrants?

Just 5 for best novel.

Hmmm. Where do I sign up for this job?

Line forms after me. At any rate I seem to be out of fashion: the SF I find most memorable is the SF that is the most amazing in its ideas: Greg Egan, Peter Watts, Stanislaw Lem. Authors that go beyond projecting the seven basic plots onto reshuffled tropes.

Second verse, same as the first

[93 Escort Wagon]

I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice I cared so little about!

Right wing bias?

[mi]

So, not only the reality, fiction also has a Right-wing bias?

Re:Right wing bias?

[Mashiki]

Well you are talking about a group of people who are so far on the left-wing that everything is right-wing. And that they also include people who are centrists or even left or right of center as "right-wing" or "far right-wing'

Re:Right wing bias?

[david_thornley]

Right and left wings are a matter of viewpoint and perspective. From the point of view of much of Europe, Sanders is the only Presidential candidate who's more or less centrist, the rest being seriously right-wing.

Re:I'm Supposed To Read A Sci-fi Book Every Year??

[AJWM]

Fans read an SF (not skiffy) book a week, or at least I did when I had the time. The "job" is volunteer, and you get to vote by buying a membership in the con.

The Hugo Awards have always been a popularity contest, since they're nominated and voted on by the fans (or, anyone else willing to pony up the money for a membership, although there are a couple of rules to discourage organized (vs disorganized, like the Puppies) bloc voting.

For that matter, the Nebula Awards, which are nominated and voted on by SF/F writing professionals (ie, SFWA members) are also something of a popularity contest, it's just a different crowd.

I suppose it's inevitable that any kind of award for the "best" in a subjective field like the arts (whether writing, filmmaking, whatever) ultimately devolves to a popularity contest of some kind.

In some objective sense the only contest that counts is who has more readers. As Jerry Pournelle put it when one of his books was nominated but didn't win, "New York Times best sellers [which his was] will get you through times of no Hugos better than Hugos will get you through times of no best sellers."

And while I'd love to have one of those little silver spaceships sitting on my mantle, Jerry has a point. A Hugo by itself isn't going to let me quit my day job and spend more time writing.

Re: Yeah, that sums it up alright

[ArmoredDragon]

That description doesn't really seem to fit Heinlein's works.

Indication

[SuperKendall]

There are actually some really good books in the lists that are now "tainted" by these shenanigans.

How are they "shenanigans" if lists are simply good books to read?

Doesn't variation from a list of good books to read mean that the OTHER lists are the ones that are "shenanigans"?

I voted for the Hugo for the first time the last year. Not because I was a member of the Sad Puppies per se, but because they opened my eyes to the fact it was supposed to be a fan award, and how easy it was to vote. How is that a BAD thing for a fan award? I think their actions are laudable.

The great thing is that if you register to vote you get a packet with ALL of the nominated material, so you can actually read what you vote for. I did not vote for any category that I had not read through all the entires - many times my favorites aligned with some from the Sad Puppies list, but again that just shows the validity of that list as stuff that is enjoyable to read. Who doesn't like to enjoy reading?

The really sad thing to me is that some people are so closed minded they simply cannot take a complement from the "wrong" people. One of my favorite author nominees last year for short stories withdrew her name from the choices just because she was on the list. Why be so bigoted? I still like her as an author but I lost some respect for her actions.

Re:Indication

[Beezlebub33]

There are actually some really good books in the lists that are now "tainted" by these shenanigans.

How are they "shenanigans" if lists are simply good books to read?

Because of the inclusion of "Space Raptor Butt Invasion" and similar ilk. If the puppies wanted to make a list of the best books / stories regardless of political bias, that would be great. If they want to make a troll list and get it to win to indicate the absurdity of a literary popularity contest, that would be good too (and potentially funny). But, if you mix them, then you are just sowing confusion and diluting your message.

Serious question: Is 'The Commuter' any good, or is it a troll? It's in the same category as "Space Raptor Butt Invasion" and promoted by the same group. Should I read it or not? The promoted list has Sanderson and Bujold and then some people I dont know, but based on book reviews I think maybe I should read them, and then I look at the short form, and they have the "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic". WTF?

Yeah, I know, I should not use the Hugos or the Nebulas to adjust my reading list, but honestly there is sooooo much to read and so little time, that I'd like to think that they might be useful.

Re:Indication

[serviscope_minor]

"My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic".

Yeah I know, right? Season 5? WTF.

Re: Yeah, that sums it up alright

[lgw]

Plenty of swashbuckling fun in Heinlein, at least in the 90% of his work that was somewhat schlocky (mostly metaphorical swashbuckling, but some actual swashes were buckled along the way).

That is what it is now

[SuperKendall]

Why not just choose good books, regardless of politics?

That is what has happened, if you actually READ the list of recommended books from the Sad Puppies list for example, it's not really a set of "right wing" books at all. It's simply good books.

The issue is that for many years beforehand it HAD been a politically chosen set by a tiny minority with no diversity of thought, and so the "normal" became a set of overwrought heavily left-wing oriented books. Now that it's reverting to center it's being portrayed as political, when what is occurring is the opposite of a political movement. It is a QUALITY movement.

Re:That is what it is now

[Anonymous Coward]

This is correct.

Posting anonymously, as I work at a university and do not want to be seen defending conservatives.

The Sad and Angry Puppies started as a measure to counteract SJWs stuffing the ballot box and preventing good sci-fi from winning Hugo awards. If you look at the history of what left-wing activists have done to this award, you'll see that they were rigged to promote books that were not popular and that did not sell well, but which featured characters or causes that the left found important.

Last year, "No Award" was the most common award, as in, in many categories, no award was given. This was because activists would have preferred for nothing to be awarded over the books that had been nominated which did not promote their value system. Many participants voting were simply voting on a slate of left-wing literature that they were told to vote for, and voting "No Award" was intended as a dig to censor not only literature whose views they disagreed with, but literature that did not promote their point of view.

This post is a gross distortion of what happened, and Slashdot should be ashamed that it made it through the filter. Do not left SJW activists further pollute our community. The result will not be a kinder, gentler, more understanding world. It will be censorship and oppression. We know, because these are the tactics that they use now.

Re:That is what it is now

[iris-n]

Good books? You mean "Space Raptor Butt Invasion"? Or maybe "SJWs Always Lie"?

Re:That is what it is now

[Beezlebub33]

I would like to see the Vox Day response to these questions.

I kind of get the argument that the Hugos were being previously dominated by people with left-wing agendas. The Puppies (in their various forms) rebelled against it and so made their own slate, and claimed that it was a better list because it was better science fiction, without the bias. Got it; great; good idea. But, why add "Space Raptor Butt Invasion"? What is the point that you are trying to make with that?

Re:That is what it is now

[iris-n]

Unfortunately I think George Martin is right about this. They are simply trying to destroy the Hugos.

Re:That is what it is now

[russotto]

Last year's Sad Puppies had women on it too (and also some women removed at their own request). Annie Bellet, who is certainly not right-wing. Toni Weisskopf, Anne Sowards, Sheila Gilbert, Jennifer Brozek, Amanda green, Cedar Sanderson, Kary English.

But yes, it's a different group this year; different organizers, different methods.

Re:That is what it is now

[david_thornley]

I find this very difficult to believe. I don't see a conspiracy big enough to determine who wins the Hugos (as opposed to getting on the ballot). Anybody who is interested can buy a membership and hence vote, which means the conspiracy would have to be over half of the people interested, at which point it's hardly a secret conspiracy, but instead reflects the views of the majority of fandom.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[MightyMartian]

Republicans haven't meaningfully stood for small government... ever. It's a trope passed out to the Libertarian wing of the party, but it's just a load of shit. As to freedom, well, so long as it isn't women looking to control their own bodies, or cis individuals picking the bathroom of the gender they identify with, oh no, not then.

Anything beyond the centrist moderate wing of the Republican party is a pack of frothing-at-the-mouth reactionaries that hate just about everything about the modern world.

Not that hard

[SuperKendall]

Some of the categories (like short stories) I could get through all the submissions in a few hours.

For the books, I can easily read a book (or two depending on length) in one solid day if I set my mind to it, so it's just a few weekends of effort.

Also of course if there's a book you plainly do not like after a chapter or two in, why read the whole thing? It's obviously not going to be your choice.

That said I didn't vote in every category, because I couldn't read through all the nominations. But it doesn't matter as you are still helping and it matters even if you only vote for some categories.

That alone does not satisfy

[SuperKendall]

There are a number of books in the "Sad Puppies" slate that have gay/lesbian characters. It's just that they "think wrong" according to how gay and lesbian people are supposed to think, and that is the ultimate crime.

Never has the echo of "Uncle Tom" been heard so loudly across the land, issued forth by people who pretend to be for diversity while growing the most singular monoculture ever conceived by man.

Wonder

[liqu1d]

If the reverse were true it would even be news. Especially on slashdot.

Informed opinions

[Livius]

I think it's sickening to have these puppy factions undermining the awards process.

Which books are the kittens recommending?

Re:says who?

[lgw]

The sorry arse losers who only want gay and lesbian sci-fi characters? :(

I've read exactly one good SF book with a central gay or lesbian SF (not skiffy) character was Lois McMaster Bujold's Ethan of Athos, written 30 years ago long before it was a political football. The central character "just happened to be gay", rather than that being important to the plot, though because he came from a colony of only gay men there were some "fish out of water" moments (a classic SF angle to comment on society - introduce a true outsider), and some humor at the expense of people who thought only in stereotypes.

Importantly, the character was utterly confident in his sexuality, and this was a novel about being gay or any nonsense like that. Instead it was a SF novel.

Sadly...

[cirby]

The anti-Puppy people couldn't manage to come up with anything better.

That should worry you more.

(Although it does remind me of a lot of late-70s sci-fi I read in various major publications...)

Jesus fucking christ, we're doomed..

[swb]

I'm willing to advocate for war, and for war fought cruelly, with scorched earth tactics when necessary to win.

But in my heart, I hate conflict and value understanding. At night I really do dream of a peaceful understanding among men and wonder how conflicts like Syria or places like Afghanistan can be made less broken. And sometimes I hope there will be a way.

But then I read this story and realize it's hopeless. If the world of fucking science fans can't manage to run their awards ceremony because of nitpicking and infighting, what fucking chance does the rest of the world have?

We are doomed.

OH NO! Right wingers have opinions!

[Anonymous Coward]

As a leftist, I cannot and WILL NOT allow ANY RIGHT WING NUT to have a say in ANYTHING. EVER! I believe all people should have the right to express their beliefs, but RIGHT WING NUT JOBS should be jailed and beaten on a daily basis until they AGREE WITH EVERYTHING I HAVE TO SAY.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[tsotha]

Republicans haven't meaningfully stood for small government... ever. It's a trope passed out to the Libertarian wing of the party, but it's just a load of shit.

It's certainly true there are a lot of Republicans that would like to see a smaller government. There just aren't enough to control the party. There are, however, far more small-government Republicans than there are small-government Democrats.

As to freedom, well, so long as it isn't women looking to control their own bodies, or cis individuals picking the bathroom of the gender they identify with, oh no, not then.

Yeah, this is a load of horse shit. A baby's freedom to live certainly supersedes the mother's freedom to kill him or her. As to the bathroom thing, again, there are two freedoms at odds. I don't have any interest in sharing a public restroom with women regardless of how they view themselves.

You have a child's view of freedom.

Campaign against a perceived bias...

[BrookHarty]

Perceived?! When they vote "No Award" so to not give an award to someone based on their views, that is text book bias.

The hugos have been a mix of political correctness in the 5+ years. Why the fuck has a left wing political view have need to be pushed in an awards meant for best scifi/fantasy... Why do they have to censor what we read to not offend someone. This PC crap has been getting out of hand since they gave a Nobel peace prize to someone because of his lefty party affiliation and not his works.

Re:Campaign against a perceived bias...

[radarskiy]

"When they vote "No Award" so to not give an award to someone based on their views, that is text book bias."

"No Award" was in response to two explicit conspiracies to manipulate the nomination process. In addition the conspiracy pushed a lot of objectively poor writing which previously would not get nominated so it would never get a change to be placed below "No Award".

Re:Campaign against a perceived bias...

[tbannist]

Perceived?! When they vote "No Award" so to not give an award to someone based on their views, that is text book bias.

What if they voted "No Award" because all the choices were terrible? Is that still bias?

Re:Campaign against a perceived bias...

[russotto]

"Conspiracy" is an odd thing to call a campaign run on the public Internet.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Applehu Akbar]

Trump went five for five today so expect their control of our lives to only increase.

It is highly unlikely that Trump has a SF plank in his platform.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[whoever57]

Many of those "Small government Republicans" are deluded Tea Party members. They don't realize that the whole "small government" meme is driven by the super-wealthy and aimed at gutting the good things that government does. Like protecting the environment, collecting taxes from those who have the means to hide their income, etc..

Except...

[cirby]

...that's wrong.

While some of the folks behind the Sad Puppies movement are definitely right-wing, or Libertarian, or something similar, their nominations are all over the map, because they didn't run their nominations through a political filter before putting them up.

On the other hand, the left-wing types who have been running the Hugos process for a long time have been... less honest about it. They whine about the Puppies "promoting" books for the award, while people like John Scalzi have been doing it for years. For that matter, touting books for the Hugo has been a part of the process as far back as I can remember (and I've been in and around fandom most of my life).

Re:Except...

[Oligonicella]

Two years ago on Scalzi's blog he had a screed about how this and that should be included in people's stories. In particular I found it amusing his take on using xir ad naus.

So, I published a comment that basically said "Write your stories the way you want. They're *your* stories. People will buy them or not." Within minutes I got comments like "So you don't want people to criticize your writing?"

Telling people *how to write* their stories is not criticizing, it's control. And that, in a nutshell, is what has been happening in SF.

Re:Except...

[hyades1]

Sorry, but they pretty much did. They aren't stupid enough to push exclusively right wing or libertarian books. They provided enough exceptions to the rule that they can point at them and say, "See, we aren't one-dimensional!"

And while touting books has most certainly been a part of the Hugo process going right back to when the ghost of John Campbell still had a vote, this kind of "slate" approach is a somewhat different phenomenon.

Re:Except...

[serviscope_minor]

They whine about the Puppies "promoting" books for the award, while people like John Scalzi have been doing it for years.

No one has any problem with people promoting stories, and it's deeply dishonest to claim that. What people have a problem with is the "vote for precisely these 5 whether or not you have read/liked them" which is what the Rabid Puppies did.

Re:Except...

[cirby]

No, they don't. They're pretending they do, but it's really just an excuse to block wins by People They Don't Like.

While Vox did urge people to vote for his recommendations, he did it like this:

"What follows is the list of Hugo recommendations known as Rabid Puppies. They are my recommendations for the 2015 nominations, and I encourage those who value my opinion on matters related to science fiction and fantasy to nominate them precisely as they are."

The only difference between this and "business as usual" is the suggestion to nominate his favorites en bloc. Generally, it's just "here's my list of people I think should be nominated." No real practical difference, there.

On the other hand, when the anti-Puppies decided to fight back, they did it by voting "No Award," which is very much a worse thing to do.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[MightyMartian]

Translation: Women are breeding machines. Oh, and because it's all so very Libertarian, pregnant women shouldn't get any publicly-funded health care either.

Fucking Jesus, who died and made you God, that you can impose your will on the decision a woman and her doctor makes? What makes you so fucking special? Considering the numbers of actual babies who die or suffer every year, even in the US, due to poverty and a lack of decent health care, why not show some fucking compassion for them, rather than fetuses.

Re:This is sad seeing republicans...

[guises]

It's not republicans, it's not conservatives, there's nothing right-wing about the Sad Puppies. I can't blame the submitter for the terrible summary, because it's just copied from the article, but maybe I can blame the submitter for linking to a terrible article? The Sad Puppies are just a group who felt that sci-fi was getting too preachy and wanted to promote some lighter fare. That's it. the website. I had a ridiculous time finding that, since the top search page is just full of articles talking about how awful these people are. It's appalling how one-sided the reporting on this is.

The Rabid Puppies are something else. They seized on this idea and decided to make it more political - I'm not sure that calling them right-wing is accurate, more like anti left-wing, but these are separate groups with separate goals.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Anonymous Coward]

A baby's freedom to live certainly supersedes the mother's freedom to kill him or her.

Very true. The problem comes from people who use the term 'baby' to describe a zygote or fetus.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Nutria]

so long as it isn't women looking to control their own bodies

Because obviously killing babies is A-OK, right?? Heck, squalling brats and constantly changing disgustingly stinky diapers is pretty damned stressful, so after-birth abortions should be legal, too.

or cis individuals picking the bathroom of the gender they identify with

When did "slots in this bathroom" and "tabs in that bathroom" get sooooo controversial?

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[chipschap]

And the Dumbocrats are better?

Not much to choose from.

The Hugos have become part of the ideology wars

[khelms]

Are the Nebulas still good to go by?

Re:The Hugos have become part of the ideology wars

[SQL Error]

Look for books that win both. Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (2011 Hugo & Nebula) is excellent. Looooong, but worth it.

Both are the problem

[dbIII]

Factional bullshit from grubby student politics infested the Hugos whether one faction was worse than another, whether splits happened or whatever. All of those "puppies" were a plague, Vox Day faction or not.

Simple

[dbIII]

Why the fuck has a left wing political view have need to be pushed in an awards meant for best scifi/fantasy

It isn't
It's just that there is a lot of stuff published with that viewpoint and some of it won awards, just as has happened for years. Vox Day and others stepped in the try to "correct" that and argue that only things conforming to their ideology deserved awards instead of just what people enjoyed reading.


Some people have been pretending the kickback against Vox Day etc was how it was before - that's dishonest.

Re:Simple

[Orgasmatron]

Speaking of dishonest, I present you with a quote from the biggest liar of the day (so far):

Vox Day and others stepped in the try to "correct" that and argue that only things conforming to their ideology deserved awards instead of just what people enjoyed reading.

For the last few decades, a small cabal has run the Hugos as their own personal award mill, and they ensured that nearly nothing could win if it didn't fit their ideology.

And guess what, sales figures show pretty damn clearly that people do NOT enjoy reading that crap. Go check the long tail sales figures on some winners and nominees. It isn't hard to find single books by pre-SJW writers selling more copies per year than a decade's worth of Hugo winners.

And the claim that Day is pushing for ideological purity is totally fucking insane and can be trivially disproved by reading nothing more than one-paragraph summaries of the nominated works. There is no common ideology in the puppy lists.

You are a lost cause, but I urge anyone else reading this to go see for themselves.

Re:Simple

[thesupraman]

Actually no, as someone who has actually READ most of this stuff for several decades, there was a sudden and huge shift of both nominees and awards, specifically to 'minority rights' content, over more general interest stories, and to the EXCLUSION of general interest stories.

Should those books exist? Of course!
Are they general interest enough to be winning Hugos? Almost certainly not.

Remember, it has never been a lack of other options, there was a very specific stuffing going on, and then a reaction by the general reading public to that.
The people were trying to take control of the Hugos then got all prissy that their politically motivated work got blocked by the majority.
Boo Hoo, its an award, I'm afraid the true majority IS right in this case.

The only unfortunate thing is that it took so long to notice/correct, and that a number of very worth books did get caught up in the fallout, both before and
after.

But the claims of block voting for no award being bad are just laughable - they were a direct relation to an attempt to limit the nominees to a selected PC subset of options, to control the outcome.

As to trying to pull out the 'Right Wing' label for the majority of SciFi fans, that just STINKS of standard SJW label bashing - if they cannot win, they have to destroy. They have exactly zero respect for the actual Authors, SciFi in general, or the general public.

Re:Simple

[serviscope_minor]

For the last few decades, a small cabal has run the Hugos as their own personal award mill,

And by that you mean of course that a small group of people actually could be arsed to vote for nominations and that caused annoyance with another small group of people who never bothered.

Because that is what actually happened.

and they ensured that nearly nothing could win if it didn't fit their ideology.

And they ensured that by voting for stuff they liked, the darstardly SJW commienazi cowards! How dare they!

Re:Simple

[serviscope_minor]

Are they general interest enough to be winning Hugos? Almost certainly not.

Did any of the people whinging about those books winning actually you know get of their arses and vote for nominations? The general answer is "no".

The Hugo's isn't some platonic ideal of popularity, it's what the members of the society vote for.

The people were trying to take control of the Hugos then got all prissy that their politically motivated work got blocked by the majority.

Well yeah. Turns out that in opposition to what the puppies claimes there was no silent majority. When the actual majority got off their collective arses and voted the popular opinion was clear: and it rejected most of the puppies nominations with "no award".

of standard SJW label bashing

As opposed to precisely what you did there which is precisely label bashing.

Re:Simple

[T.E.D.]

You lost me at "SJW". Smart of you to hide it until near the end.

Re:Simple

[Orgasmatron]

When Larry started talking about it, the reply was, "well, get your fans involved then, if you don't like it."

He took their advice, Vox ran with it, and here we are.

Re:Simple

[dbIII]

Where is my "lie"?
To simplify it even more - Vox Day was pissed off with various forms of writing winning awards and suggested a voting "slate" of things he did like. Things progressed from that.
What is incorrect about that description of events?

If the genre needs to take a political stand...

[Applehu Akbar]

By their very nature, stories which explore future scenarios are going to speculate about every imaginable type of social and political system, and the human cultures that might inhabit them. The one core value I do expect the genre as a whole to hold sacred is a deep-seated respect for science itself and the potential of mankind to use it for its own improvement.

Go ahead and make your spaceship captain a lesbian, if you think your take on such a character would interest the target audience. But make her a person who appreciates science to the extent that she would be far more interested in what new things could be seen through the Thirty Meter Telescope than any reasons the SJWs can come up with to prevent it from being built somewhere.

The opposing position to this basic appreciation for science, in case you think I'm speaking in vacuo, is here: http://dgrnewsservice.org/civi...
This is the kind of thinking I want to see the Rabid Puppies blow to hell.

Re:If the genre needs to take a political stand...

[SuricouRaven]

The respect for science isn't really needed. There's a subgenre of dystopia based on a projection of technological advance.

Re:If the genre needs to take a political stand...

[Applehu Akbar]

A dystopia is just another setting, which the characters have an opportunity to push back against. What I'm concerned about here is the futility machine, bred in academia but now broken out into general society, that detests science itself and - looking at the climate issue as an example - automatically rejects any solutions that scientists and engineers might offer.

Re:If the genre needs to take a political stand...

[russotto]

Go ahead and make your spaceship captain a lesbian, if you think your take on such a character would interest the target audience.

I recently read a book that did indeed make a spaceship captain a lesbian. For no apparent reason other than to make pirate queen jokes as far as I can tell.

Who was it by? Mike Kupari... a Baen author and Larry "International Lord of Hate" Correia's co-author on _Dead Six_. But you'll never see the puppy-kickers mention it or him favorably, that's for sure.

(Book was _Her Brother's Keeper_)

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[tsotha]

Translation: Women are breeding machines. Oh, and because it's all so very Libertarian, pregnant women shouldn't get any publicly-funded health care either.

Not at all. Conservatives simply don't believe in infantilizing women by pretending they simply have no way to avoid pregnancy.

And yes, people should pay their own way. They only people who should get publicly funded health care are people who can't afford it.

Fucking Jesus, who died and made you God, that you can impose your will on the decision a woman and her doctor makes? What makes you so fucking special? Considering the numbers of actual babies who die or suffer every year, even in the US, due to poverty and a lack of decent health care, why not show some fucking compassion for them, rather than fetuses.

Fucking Jesus, who died and made you God...

That's pretty funny coming from someone who spends his time thinking up new ways to spend my money.

... that you can impose your will on the decision a woman and her doctor makes?

Aren't we forgetting someone? ... a woman, her doctor, and the baby, right? The woman had ways to avoid the situation. So did the doctor. The baby? Not so much.

Considering the numbers of actual babies who die or suffer every year, even in the US, due to poverty and a lack of decent health care, why not show some fucking compassion for them, rather than fetuses.

More horseshit. Infant mortality rates aren't any higher in the US than they are anywhere else. In a lot of places babies are counted as stillborn if they die within 24 hours. That's the benefit of socialized medicine - you don't get better care, but you do get comforting statistics from the medical bureaucracy.

Beyond that, if you want a kid, have a kid. But taking care of that kid is your responsibility, not mine. I'm under no obligations to see that your kid is fed and clothed and has proper medical care. That's your job as a parent, and if you can't swing it don't have kids.

But I have questions for you, Mr freedom-loving guy. Why is your party so intent on taking away my freedom to defend myself, and my freedom of speech?

And get off my lawn

[huckamania]

Two of my favorite authors died recently, Pratchett and Banks. I still have about 5 Banks books, although none of them are science fiction. I have about 8 Pratchett books left. I'm not going to stop reading and saying there is a shortage of good authors is about stupid. I remember a flame war on the old SciFi Weekly site where some idiot said women can't write. I listed off about 8 women who can hold their own with any man, and I didn't even include Heinlein. The Sad Puppy website that someone posted didn't seem to have any overt political overtones. It seemed more like a bunch of nerds talking about what books they read that they liked. I'll probably go back and write some names down after I finish off the last of my Pratchett and Banks books.

I remember when the Hugo and Nebula would award the same book with their awards. I can't think of one book that did win that after reading didn't appear to deserve it.

Re:And get off my lawn

[Austerity Empowers]

Octavia Butler was a black woman who can write good SciFi, I particularly enjoyed the Lilith's Brood series. She's not very optimistic and certainly not afraid to murder some sacred cows, but she manages to tell a good story. I do not think she had even half the political motivation as say Heinlein, who though I disagree with his politics, also managed to tell many great stories. Asimov remains my personal favorite.

It is all bullshit and the politics ruined the value of the award. If you can tell an entertaining gung-ho libertarian scifi story filled with heteronormative white people, more power to you. If you want to tell a communal, hedonistic onmisexual gender bender, and can make it entertaining, I'll probably read it. I think I read a book from Asimov once about a tri-gender species that masturbated with rocks, it was entirely bizarre but a fun read (it happened to win both Hugo and Nebula I think).

But that was long ago. These days I read whatever I hear is good, but I have found that "Hugo Award Winniing" has been meaningless for quite a while.

Re:And get off my lawn

[huckamania]

Octavia wrote the first Sci Fi book I ever read, Patternmaster. Not particularly great, but I still remember the plot and the characters.

As far as Heinlein politics, I don't think they are consistent in his works. Starship Troopers was marshall law, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was ultra capitalism and Stranger in a Strange Land was kind of communal, hippie style. His characters had politics.

Pournelle maybe

[huckamania]

Read Stranger in a Strange Land or To Sail Beyond the Sunset and then get back to us. Heinlein, like every human ever, was a product of his times and a lot of his juvenile works (including Starship Troopers) were written as serials, often to specifications by the publisher. A lot of his later novels are not right wing at all.

It is the hubris of the living to cast shade on the morality of the past.

Re:I'm Supposed To Read A Sci-fi Book Every Year??

[Michael Woodhams]

Pournelle: "New York Times best sellers [which his was] will get you through times of no Hugos better than Hugos will get you through times of no best sellers."

There was a quote from a counter-culture comic book The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers
"Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope."

Clearly these are related. Does anyone know the origin?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Anonymous Coward]

Except when women exchange the terms as a matter of convenience. Assault? Baby. Abortion? Fetus. Pregnant Women Assistance programs? Baby

If women can't even make up their own minds about the status, you can hardly blame anyone else for being confused.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[MightyMartian]

Translation; I'm going to force you to have an unwanted baby, but I bear no responsibility for the end result of the force.

Good old reactionary conservatives. Quick to tell people waht to do, but greedy sociopaths in every other way.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point, somehow I've never heard someone walk up to a pregnant woman and ask "so how is the fetus?" or "how is your body?"... only "how is the baby?" Odd that.

Re:This is sad seeing republicans...

[HaZardman27]

Thanks for commenting. I had no idea what Sad Puppies was prior to reading the summary, and after visiting the website, their stated goals seem genuine to me.

Re:I'm Supposed To Read A Sci-fi Book Every Year??

[Maxwell'sSilverLART]

“The acme of prose style is exemplified by that simple, graceful clause: 'Pay to the order of. . . .'”
--Robert A. Heinlein

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Sarten-X]

When did "slots in this bathroom" and "tabs in that bathroom" get sooooo controversial?

I know someone who was born with a slot and a tab, and a 50% mix of cells for each... where do they go? The bushes?

For about the first 14 years, the "tab" was dominant, and he was a mostly-healthy boy, starting to form the preferences that boys do at that age. Then puberty struck hard, and the "slot" parts started making hormones that would have been lethal to suppress, so he became she, and her "tab" is now in the process of being suppressed so it can eventually be cut off completely.

So now there are many complicated questions to be asked. She still has both kinds of parts, has adjusted to looking and behaving like a "slot", prefers to be assembled with other "slots", and eventually will have only a "slot". What bathroom would she be comfortable in? In which bathroom would her presence make others uncomfortable? Does any of that coincide with her (tab-indicating) driver's license, or her (duality-indicating) birth certificate, or her (slot-indicating) recent medical records?

On an unrelated note, I am hereby starting a petition to revoke your euphemism privileges.

Next year:

[Black Parrot]

Boxers vs. Briefs

At least we'll get a new story every year for Slashdot.

Do you complain on the 'war on Christmas'?

[Uberbah]

The faux-victim mentality would be a match.

Ancillary Mercy?

[ljw1004]

I'm confused. TFA says that "Ancillary Mercy" is in the Sad Puppies' list. But I thought the earlier books in this series were books that the Puppies specifically disliked and thought represented the weird academic leftist trend they were complaining about?

Re:Ancillary Mercy?

[91degrees]

There are two groups. Sad Puppies, and Rabid Puppies.

Sad Puppies are based off a belief that the nominations are dominated by a clique, and wanted to get a broader spread. It was run by a different organiser this year, who offered a public poll of the works that should be nominated in the list. A lot of them actually liked Ancillary Mercy, so it's in the list.

Rabid Puppies motives are a lot harder to work out, but generally anything that's seen as too liberal will not make the list.

Re:Ancillary Mercy?

[Gryle]

The Sad Puppies evolved. I've followed this whole shebang for the last few years, mostly out of curiosity. The most civil response I saw to Sad Puppies last year was "Recommendations are fine, but you didn't have a large enough list of recommendations, so you're really just slate voting." To counter that, this year the Sad Puppies basically ran a mini-nomination. They put up a website (http://sadpuppies4.org/) where anyone could post a nomination recommendation for whatever they believed was worthy of a Hugo nomination. Ancillary Mercy ended up on the list: http://sadpuppies4.org/the-lis....

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[AvitarX]

Are you saying Republicans are pro birth control?

Or teaching the facts about sex and birth control?

Irrelevant Hugos

[Roger W Moore]

Until now where a bunch have turned up with what is effectively "how to vote cards"

If that's what they had done it would be hard to argue with them but instead they have "how to vote for the people we think should win" cards which is not quite the same. Until both sides can put aside their politics and vote based on who writes great science fiction the Hugo awards are not worth paying attention to.

This is particularly sad because one of the things which great science fiction often does is translate a current issue into a setting where the entrenched baggage of the real world does not get in the way of thinking about it. Science fiction which rams one ideology or another down your throat is a wasted opportunity and, I would argue, not at all prizeworthy.

Re:Irrelevant Hugos

[jenningsthecat]

Until both sides can put aside their politics and vote based on who writes great science fiction the Hugo awards are not worth paying attention to.

Until both sides can put aside their self-serving agendas and vote based on who creates great policies and shows outstanding leadership the Presidential race is not worth paying attention to.

I know this seems off-topic; but with voting being turned into a mockery of process that defies the original intent, the parallels between the Hugos and current national politics seem too obvious to ignore.

Re:Irrelevant Hugos

[1_brown_mouse]

Damn, I wish I had points to give you today.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[religionofpeas]

I guess we draw the line at the level of complexity

I draw the line at "is anybody actually suffering ?" Well, baby itself doesn't care, and nobody else knows the baby. So, I think it's fair if we leave the decision to the mother.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[religionofpeas]

When did "slots in this bathroom" and "tabs in that bathroom" get sooooo controversial?

The bigger question is why Americans can't have decent bathrooms where you can't peek into a stall ?

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[DNS-and-BIND]

A government powerful enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have.

Your reaction is a common "poison pill" fallacy committed by government agencies ordered to cut their bloated budgets. They immediately cut the things that will hurt while keeping the fat safe. Small government conservatives don't want to get rid of the fire departments or the police departments (but a lot of leftists want this one) nor the environmental departments (admittedly this one has become a nest of far-left hate). They want an out-of-control federal government to be reined in, and the best way to do that is the same way you get rid of a cancer, i.e. stop its blood flow.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Opportunist]

But don't you remember, how good life was in those older days? Think back of the 1950s and 1960s. Everything was better then. Ok, if you weren't a woman. Or black. Or gay. Or pretty much anything but a white protestant male. But if you were, life was better. You had a house, a chicken in the pot and two cars in every garage! And even if you were just a normal worker! You had a job that you could feed your family on, your wife didn't go to work (the mere idea alone, a working woman! Can't get a husband, eh?).

This all changed for the worse, and Republicans want those glory days back! Is that really so bad? Ok, granted, it's not so great for non-white, non-hetero, non-religious non-men, but for us it's going to be great again! Ok, maybe not all of it because we sure as fuck aren't going to get working wages that can sustain a family again from Republicans, but at least we'll get that those black atheist fags will have it worse!

Now ain't that something?

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Harlequin80]

There isn't an easy way to split this argument as both sides sit with fundamentally opposed positions. Even then both sides have massive levels of graduation between what is acceptable and what isn't. For example, the morning after pill, ok or not? And for pro-choice people, 12 weeks is ok, 20 weeks getting a bit close for comfort there, 28 weeks nope thats wrong.

Add in to that things like Chromosomal abnormalities and the puddle of mud gets worse.

Interestingly though there is a correlation between a countries wealth and the availability of legal abortions.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[I'm New Around Here]

I guess we draw the line at the level of complexity

I draw the line at "is anybody actually suffering ?" Well, baby itself doesn't care, and nobody else knows the baby. So, I think it's fair if we leave the decision to the mother.

A baby "doesn't care" an hour after its birth either. Are those ones still fair game?

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[I'm New Around Here]

Don't forget we had also just destroyed most of the infrastructure of two continents. Shall we do that over so you can have a chance to change how people lived?

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[SuricouRaven]

At least after birth you can err on the side of caution - protecting the baby doesn't unavoidably infringe upon anyone else's rights. Before birth there is an unavoidable conflict with the rights of the woman.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[SuricouRaven]

Even the pro-choice side generally don't like abortions (Which is why I find it so annoying when their opposites refer to them as 'pro-abortion.'). They either regard abortion as something which must be legal for reasons of principle, or as something which must be legal as it is sometimes the least-worst of a set of bad options.

Example plots?

[Tablizer]

What's right-wing sci-fi exactly? Tax-cuts kill Darth Vader and blow up the Death Star?

Re:Example plots?

[Revek]

Any plot that doesn't have some downtrodden minority sexual preference as a hero as far as I can tell. On the other side we have old hardliners who We must admit, some of them are outspoken bigots. What both sides of foaming fanatics are doing is ruining an awards process to further their own polarized agendas. I've read some really old sci-fi that integrated other sexual preferences as far back as the fifty's. Its was a robot or a alien but you could see what they were driving at.
Today however the lefties insist it must include their ideals to be real sci-fi. The righties? They insist on their missionary style of writing to be the only real sci-fi. Personally I'm in the middle. And as a straight up het, I can take or leave some of this hermaphroditic crap I see nowadays. The best I've read lately has included a little of both.. So the answer to you're question is, If it doesn't have LGBT flowing out of every page its right wing.

Re:Example plots?

[serviscope_minor]

What's right-wing sci-fi exactly?

Try reading "The Last Centurion" by John Ringo. Spoiler alert: lots of liberals die because they believe in global warming and the protagonist army guy educates the world about how the media is evil and global warming is wrong using Fox news.

That is not an exaggeration or joke. But for what it's worth, it's well written otherwise.

Re:Example plots?

[Revek]

I like John Ringo but the politics in his books are way to the right of me and I don't consider myself a leftist in everything. I just wish he would finish a series. The last centurion didn't appeal to me at all.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[SuricouRaven]

The pro-life movement as a whole has graduations, but the politically active subset tend to be the most extreme no-abortion-no-exception types who will only with great reluctance allow the option of abortion even if it's the only way to save the life of a woman.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[SuricouRaven]

Trump is having a difficult time adopting the language of right-wing political culture, something evidently quite foreign to him but essential in getting the nomination.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not? We seem to be making laws based on people's internal feelings these days.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[TheEyes]

A government powerful enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have.

In a vacuum, yes this is true, a powerful government can take everything from you. Keep in mind, though, that the alternative is to allow powerful individuals to control everything instead; in that case, a state which humanity has languished in for thousands of years, those powerful individuals will take everything from you.

The large middle class that we've seen rise in America and other modern countries has only come into existence thanks to the tireless work of powerful governments holding back the power of the very wealthy. It's no surprise that, now that those very wealthy have managed to subvert the government, we are seeing the middle class shrink, battered by high costs imposed by the rent-seeking rich.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[I'm New Around Here]

While that is a valid point, that wasn't the point that religionofpeas was basing his argument on.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Nutria]

Then puberty struck hard, and the "slot" parts started making hormones that would have been lethal to suppress

I'm sure that a rational conversation with the school's principal could work things out. After all, the NC law doesn't say "burn the witches!!!"

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Nutria]

It's urinals that are (probably) the issue.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Nutria]

Even the pro-choice side generally don't like abortions

Though I can't speak for others, I don't believe "them" saying that on TV, because it's activists pushing abortions trying to sound reasonable. (Show me NARAL running a string of adoption placement centers and I'll start to change my mind.)

Individuals saying things like "I'm personally against abortion, but think it's a woman's right to choose" makes me want to retch at the intellectual vacuousness, since what it really means is, "I'm personally against sucking babies through tubes into biohazard bags / taking pills to flush them down the toilet / have their heads crushed and then sucked out, but think it's a woman's right to choose".

or as something which must be legal as it is sometimes the least-worst of a set of bad options.

Paradoxically, that's why I think that abortions should be legal: women are going to have them anyway, whether we like it or not.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[corwinsr]

I live in Texas you idiot and you're repeating what you've been told. Hard right conservatives in Texas write and approve the overwhelming majority of high school textbooks. THATS why American exceptionalism has been declining for forty years. What do you expect from school curriculums that are hostile to science but treat sports like a religion.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[corwinsr]

I understand what you're saying but the problem is back one step - which is that any effort to tip the scale in favor of a vocal minority - no matter how benign - is an in democratic (small c) distortion of how the voting should be. This is also a failure on the part of the Hugo's to have a more balanced and stable voting process. It needs to be redesigned.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[SuricouRaven]

I don't see any conflict. It's the old Voltaire position on free speech: I may not agree with your decision, but I believe it must be your decision to make.

I find it very frustrating that the pro-life side generally opposes contraception and sex education, even though these are the best mean we have to reduce the need for and number of abortions. I think it's because they have such a strong religious element - almost all of the major pro-life organisations and leaders are explicitly Christian and devoutly so, which means they must regard their mission as not only to eliminate abortion, but to eliminate the evil of non-marital sex too.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[tsotha]

Do you need birth control to avoid pregnancy?

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[corwinsr]

And you have a child's view of the issue. A person that identifies as male dresses that way and the same with female. By this ridiculous laws standard we'd end up seeing a person that outwardly appears male going into a women's restroom and an apparent female going into a men's restroom. Yeah, that won't cause any confusion. Then what about the significant portion of transgenders that are born with both male and female genetic traits? X and Y. Yeah, probably didn't know that right? Who decides which they have to pick? Because by this law it has to be the gender you're born with. They have both. And the right talks about the left wanting to control our lives. Uh huh, right. Finally, to address the "real" reason so many on the right hate the idea of transgenders using the restroom of their identified sex - there have been zero cases of a transgender assaulting, molesting or in any way harrassing anyone in a restroom, male or female of any age. Zero.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Harlequin80]

The issue will be where you set the line for very early term. It is very possible for a woman to be unaware she is pregnant for a lot longer than what I suspect many would consider early term.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[guises]

This certainly does represent a distortion of the process... One of the points the Sad Puppies make is that typical voting for the Hugos is only 5,000 people out of the millions who read these books. With their campaigning they have more than doubled that, so it's no wonder that they're dominating the list of nominees. The point they make is that such a small voting pool can't possibly represent the views of the readership at large, but of course flooding the voting pool isn't exactly representative either.

What this demonstrates is that democracy doesn't work when voter participation is too low, but I don't think that's a revelation. Unless the book publishers start sticking pre-addressed voting card inserts into their books, I'm not sure what the Hugos can do about this.

Re: Holy Shit! this is opposite world! No. It's

[sphinx.graphix]

Testing. FYI "Anonymous Coward" is Slashdot's corporate slang for mining your friends and contact list for info to sell. I wrote the above post.

Re: Holy Shit! this is opposite world! No. It's

[sphinx.graphix]

Holy Carp. I posted using Anonymous (because lazy) & it appeared as Anonymous Coward. Fair cop. So take the (minimal. I said "lazy") extra effort to log in and post a follow-up This Wuz Me comment. And I get a warning message that Slashdot will be mining contacts for Lulz and $$$$. Fine. I post anyway. ....and all the thread goes away. " comments hidden cos preferences" F I tell you true no preference of mine EVER has included censorship. So I expect this comment to mysteriously disappear, too. Yay screen caps.

The Sad Puppies are a sad story

[cbhacking]

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

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

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

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

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

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[AmiMoJo]

The real crux of the issue is at what point does a fertilized egg become a human being? The answer is that there isn't an answer, it's a continuous process.

Consider that 200,000 generations ago your direct paternal ancestor was a fish. If you met him today, you would probably consider eating him with some tartar sauce. There is clearly no way a fish and a human could reproduce together. And yet, over 200,000 generations there is a direct line, each ancestor getting a little closer to being a human being. At what point do you consider your ancestor to no longer be a delicious fish supper and killing them to be murder?

We set an arbitrary time period for abortion, but framing it as killing a human being is just strange. It's killing a foetus, which is somewhere between a collection of the mother's cells and a human. The debate should be about what point we consider a foetus to be protected as a human being.

Re:This is sad seeing republicans...

[cbhacking]

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

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

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[jcr]

Trump's no Republican. Republicans don't give money to the Clintons.

-jcr

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[jcr]

They don't realize that the whole "small government" meme is driven by the super-wealthy

Bullshit. The super-wealthy (like Gates and Buffett) know full well how much they gain from their cronies, and they line up to give money to the Ruling Party.

-jcr

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[TheSunborn]

A government powerful enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have.

True. Any effective government will always be powerful enough to take anything I have. But that is not at all the same as "The government does take all i have".

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[r0kk3rz]

Personally, I would consider the choice of whether or not to abort ones own pregnancy is a decision that nobody takes lightly, and the effects of that choice is going to stay with that person for the rest of their life. This meme that it's somehow water off a ducks back, or used as a backup to cheaper methods of birth control, seems to be quite incredulous to me.

With that said, I support a Woman's right to choose, however hard that choice may be. But you may also consider what kind of society we have created, that places Women in a position where they feel that the only desirable outcome is to abort their pregnancy.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[murdocj]

Weird... so women have babies on their own? Somehow I thought men were involved. My bad.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Salgak1]

In a vacuum, yes this is true, a powerful government can take everything from you. Keep in mind, though, that the alternative is to allow powerful individuals to control everything instead; in that case, a state which humanity has languished in for thousands of years, those powerful individuals will take everything from you.

You appear to believe this is an either/or situation. I would suggest that, as significantly smaller governments HAVE existed, would prove that we do not have a binary solution set, but that there is an entire range of solutions. Some of which would be acceptable to the vast majority of the population. . .

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[DRJlaw]

I understand what you're saying but the problem is back one step - which is that any effort to tip the scale in favor of a vocal minority - no matter how benign - is an in democratic (small c) distortion of how the voting should be.

Of course! The solution is to prevent distortions by suppressing small minorities that get out their vote! Not to prevent distortions by getting a so-called silent majority to get out their own vote.

You're calling for governance by statistical polling. Valid concept, but let's not pretend that it's democratic. People who can't even be arsed enough to affirmativelty cast a vote have opted out of participation. The fact that you can extract an opinion -- concerning anything from anyone -- does not mean that that person has been excluded from a democratic decision.

Re:This is sad seeing republicans...

[Salgak1]

Likewise, I'm a Sad Puppy. And am amused, that, IMMEDIATELY, the narrative came out again about this being a right-wing effort. if you go back to the start, Larry Correia started the Campaign to Stop Puppy-Related Sadness as a tongue-in-cheek parody of a relatively standard campaign for the social cause du jour, which always seems to be "for the children"

The point was, boring fiction used as a vehicle for social messaging and virtue signaling had been increasingly dominating the Hugo Awards, and he, and those of us that joined him, wanted the Hugo to be about the BEST Science Fiction of the year. Since then, it's become a source of repeated One Minute Hates from "trufandom".

As I've said elsewhere in the topic today, the Hugo and the WorldCon and "Trufandom" are of increasingly less significance every year. SF and Fantasy Fandom are no longer tiny, cloistered groups, and the rise of Indie Publishing is slowly killing off the gatekeepers of "TradPub". i.e. "traditional" publishing.

Me, I really don't care about the Hugos, but AM highly amused that, amongst the nominees, is "Space Raptor Butt Invasion". Never read the book, don't plan too, but am laughing at the reaction. . .

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Applehu Akbar]

That's why conservatives are just as afraid of Trump, but for the opposite reason, as the liberals. He's the first candidate to be getting Hitler and Stalin jokes at the same time.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[sumdumass]

No. The gender on the birth certificate is or can be changed after gender reassignment surgery so you can use the restroom marked there. These laws fall back to designation on your birth certificate.

What you cannot do is claim transgender when yyou are not or claim to identify as a different gender and walk into a girls bathroom to sneak a peek with some defense to being a pervert.

As for your abort comment. I think most pro life people recognize the difference between killing a baby or anyone and the state killing someone out of punishment. Even religious idiots can look to the bible's though shall not murder commandment and see that death was an ordained punishment prescribed under some circumstances.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Major Blud]

Very true. The problem comes from people who use the term 'baby' to describe a zygote or fetus.

So when does it quit becoming a "zygote or fetus" and become a "baby"?

that you can impose your will on the decision a woman and her doctor makes

Shouldn't that be a woman, her doctor, and the father? You're making it out like he has no say-so in the matter, until she decides to have the kid and he's stuck paying child support for the next 18 years. I guess some people are more equal than others.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[SpankiMonki]

Women have no agency. Of course we should allow them to kill babies - they can't help it if they don't have any self control.

Preach it bro! Women in this day and age are in complete control of their bodies and should never need abortion as an option!

Dumb paternalist Marxists. What a bunch of maroons. Good thing we conservatives are prepared to intervene with force when a woman and her doctor are about to do something stupid.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[110010001000]

So when does it quit becoming a "zygote or fetus" and become a "baby"?

After the third trimester. Moron.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[110010001000]

No one is pushing abortions. No one. However some people live in the real world and don't rely on a fairy figure in the clouds that is "going to make it all ok". You God-worshippers aren't going to adopt all those babies.

Re:This is sad seeing republicans...

[T.E.D.]

I'm not sure that calling them right-wing is accurate, more like anti left-wing,

That's pretty much what "right-wing" means these days.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Nutria]

God-worshippers aren't going to adopt all those babies.

Amazingly, the determination whether or not life begins at conception is divorced from one's concept of the supernatural.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[OakDragon]

At least after birth you can err on the side of caution - protecting the baby doesn't unavoidably infringe upon anyone else's rights. Before birth there is an unavoidable conflict with the rights of the woman.

Why do you say that? If a mother gives birth to a baby, feeding, clothing, taking care of the baby, could be said to infringe up on her right of free determination. Why shouldn't she be free to terminate it after birth?

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[AvitarX]

Most people do if they want to be normal functioning members of society.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[serviscope_minor]

Amazingly, the determination whether or not life begins at conception is divorced from one's concept of the supernatural.

I'm not getting into a definition of precisely what is or is not life because it's not about life anyway, it's about mind. If you were concerned about "life" then killing anything, be it animal, plant, fungus, protozoan, chromists, archaen or bacteria would be off limits. All of those are equally alive.

The reason people treat human life separately is because of human minds.

Those do not exist at conception.

I'd like to read a book of these

[stud9920]

Republican Space Rangers https://youtu.be/xZuZShxJq8M

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[serviscope_minor]

Shouldn't that be a woman, her doctor, and the father?

When the father has to actually carry the baby to term, then sure, he can have the final say in the matter. Until that time no.

You're making it out like he has no say-so in the matter

Yes.

until she decides to have the kid and he's stuck paying child support for the next 18 years

It's called: taking responsibility for your actions, something I thought people on the right were fond of. If you set events in motion, you do not always get to unset them, you simply have to deal with the fallout.

Boaty McBoatface

[DarthVain]

Meh. People that feel the most strongly about something vote, the fact that twice as many people voted this time around is probably just a good thing. Left or right doesn't really matter so long as the writing is good, and it is thought provoking. I mean one persons ideology is another's parody.

Heck just look at things like the Oscars, even they have difficulties "getting it right". Odds are nothing will. There will always probably be a divide against fundamental issues of populist choices VS little heard of gems.

I've been currently been reading the Silo Series by Hugh Howey and I am enjoying it immensely. It has apparently been around for a long time now, and it didn't get any hugos or nominations for anything yet eventually through word of mouth I've heard of it. One might say it is a bit derivative to the Fallout video game series, but then again I am sure Fallout lifted ideas from elsewhere also. At any rate it's enjoyable.

4000 votes is still a pretty small sample size, which is how this can be easily manipulated by someone. If they want to have a more "centrist" voting structure they really need to open up the voting to all fans, not just the rabid ones that attend conventions. Then again, as my subject line implies having totally open internet voting has its own perils... Then again it will probably be dominated by populist vote, only because many of the options no one will have heard of. It might be interesting if the nomination process was also open (perhaps it is, I never checked)....

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[OakDragon]

God-worshippers aren't going to adopt all those babies.

Amazingly, the determination whether or not life begins at conception is divorced from one's concept of the supernatural.

And God-worshippers adopt a fair amount of babies. But they obviously could not do enough to keep up with the numbers of unwanted children.

Re:Yeah, that sums it up alright

[Kierthos]

Because it's not like the definition of "good science fiction" has changed at all in the last 70 years.

I mean, think about it. You probably couldn't get a publisher for the Lensman series if it was being written today. And science fiction has always contained a reflection of the times it was written in. Stuff written during the early part of the Cold War is going to have a very different feel than stuff written today.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Oligonicella]

Your argument is disingenuous, as the entire concept is understood to revolve around human life, not other animals. You simply attempted a goal post movement by specifically excising the unspoken understanding.

But to work with your goal posts, the human mind does however, exist far earlier than most people believe (around the twelfth week of pregnancy). Would you then be against aborting a twelve week unborn child?

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[godefroi]

I'm totally cool sharing the men's room with women. It's the pedo hanging around in the women's room while my daughter is in there that I don't like. I'm not sure I'm willing to make a huge issue out of it, though; I'd probably be willing to accept all bathrooms becoming unisex.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Oligonicella]

"My body, my choice" is so very scientific.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Oligonicella]

baby
n. pl. babies
a. A very young child; an infant.
b. An unborn child; a fetus.
c. The youngest member of a family or group.
d. A very young animal.

Not everyone agrees with your particular interpretation.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Beezlebub33]

Theoretically, no. Practically, yes.

The overwhelming majority of people enter sexual relationships. And if you are in a sexual relationship, then you need birth control to avoid pregnancy. (Yes, you can argue 'what if you are gay', 'what if you are too old to get pregnant', those are a minority).

Sure, you can pretend that you can avoid pregnancy by just not having sex. "How hard is that?" Pretty much impossible for the most people. If you think that not having sex is a reasonable way to avoid pregnancy, then you are living in a fantasy world. In the real world, where people actually act like people, they have sex and in order to not get pregnant, they need birth control.

Honestly, reading your posts, I think that you have an idealistic view of the world that just doesn't work.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Beezlebub33]

I would not consider myself a "pro-lifer" (well, I am pro-life but not in the politicized sense), but I do consider an act like abortion to be pretty sad. So if you have some sort of argument that would allay this conflict, please share.

I myself am rather conflicted. I'm all for killing babies, but I don't like the idea of giving women a choice about anything.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Beezlebub33]

I would feel better if the people that were so against abortions were also pro-contraception. Unfortunately, the same people that want to keep women from having abortions seem hell-bent in making it more difficult to prevent the pregnancy in the first place. See this

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[alexandru_preoteasa]

"How hard is that?" That is, indeed, what she said.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[alexandru_preoteasa]

Right on, tried debating some leftie acquaintances on this one and they just couldn't get past the feminist dogma. LEFTIES: "Well, **he** chose to have sex." ME: "But so did **she**! Why is he the only one paying for their (hopefully mutual!) choice?" *crickets* LEFTIES: "But **he** CHOSE TO HAVE SEX." Then I switched from beer to whiskey in an effort to numb the awareness of just how deep the brainwashing goes.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[dywolf]

Actually I posit the opposite is true. That there ARE more small-government democrats than small-government republicans.

But the key difference between a small government republican and a small government democrat, is that where the democrat simply wants enough government to do the jobs given it and acknowledges that government has legitimacy to do those jobs and that the list may grow since government is a reflection of society..the republican simply wants no government at all, and denies that government has any legitimacy whatsoever.

No democrats actually want to instate totalitarian or authoritarian government with 100% control over everything.
More of us think like Bill Maher and are closer to left-libertarianism (aka real libertarianism, not the RW abomination that worships Ayn Rand and co-opted the name), than they are to Lenin, regardless of what conservatives like to tell us we think.
--

As to the 2nd half and naming it a "child's view of freedom"...the word for that is projection, because forcing one person to endure slavery in the name of another's freedom (specifically another that isn't actually a person, a separate entity, and will not be until born) is not a grown up view of freedom. Nor is forcing a child to be born, but refusing to help or enable that childs freedom following birth. Rather like allowing discrimination against a group in order to accommodate the religious freedom practices of another group.

The grown up view of freedom is that if your outward freedom of action should not affect the intrinsic or inward freedom of another.
IE, my right to not be punched in the nose trumps your right to punch me in the nose.

As for the bathroom, no freedom is being threatened here, other than your prudish 17th century mindset that makes you scared of peoples naughty bits.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[dywolf]

Not at all. Conservatives simply don't believe in infantilizing women by pretending they simply have no way to avoid pregnancy

because conservatives are such noted supporters of contraception...

as for paying their own way...what do you suggest for poor women? sterilization?
actually no need to ask, because yes, conservatives have said that, past and present.

few more things:
-the baby isn't a baby until its born. until then it's a fetus, and part of the woman's body
-yes, infant mortality rates are higher in the US than most other OECD countries, especially the ones with national healthcare
-other countries, again the ones with national healthcare systems, show little difference between rich and poor infant mortality rates. in the US however, there is a big difference, with the poor ones being much more like to die in infancy.

basically, you're just full of BS.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[dywolf]

98%.
The number of women in the US who use birth control.

So, yes.

Re: Wrong. Those are not democracies.

[FlaSheridn]

Uh, you’re claiming that classical _Athens_ wasn’t a democracy? You’re certainly free to criticize it for slave-holding and sexism, but saying that the word doesn’t apply to its main referent suggests that words mean only what you want them to.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[zieroh]

Small government conservatives don't want to get rid of the fire departments or the police departments (but a lot of leftists want this one)

No they don't. That's just utter bullshit.

Re:This is sad seeing republicans...

[CAIMLAS]

Personally, the fact that John Ringo isn't on the short list pretty much says it all, to me. I don't know anyone who's into SF/fantasy who doesn't like his work.

Re:I'm Supposed To Read A Sci-fi Book Every Year??

[russotto]

Best I can tell, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers coined it.

The Republican brand has eaten itself

[fyngyrz]

Trump's not electable. He's getting the Republican nomination because a majority of Republicans will accept him. A majority of independents won't; and a majority of democrats won't. There's no way he can get around that.

Brandon Sanderson's take

[shawn2772]

Brandon Sanderson has posted his view on Google+ and I think it's insightful and well thought-out. His novella "Perfect State" was included in the slates of both the Sad Puppies, which he found out about before the nominations were submitted, and the Rabid Puppies, which he didn't hear about until after. Last year, he asked the Sad Puppies to remove him from their slate, but this year he decided that although he disagrees with bloc nominations and some of the methods of the Sad Puppies, he feels their hearts are in the right place and they're nominating works they really feel are good. However, if he'd known he was on the Rabid Puppies' slate, he'd have asked to be removed, and he has seriously considered withdrawing his book from the award entirely merely because the Rabid Puppies put him forward. He's decided not to do that, though, because if many authors remove their works for being put forward by this group of trolls, that gives the trolls too much power.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Bartles]

And the korporaaayyyshuunns. Don't forget those!

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Bartles]

Don't forget Zuckerberg, Musk, Cook, Jobs, Brin, etc.

The Inner Voice oif Truth

[fyngyrz]

SciFi has bene bad for quite a while too

I gesserit's true.

I must not guess.
Guessing is the mind-borer.
Guessing is the little-nap that brings temporary self-deception.
I will face my guesses.
I will permit them to pass over me and through me.
And when they have gone past I will turn the inner eye to see their path.
But because I am aphantasic, I will see nothing.
Only narration remains.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Bartles]

Actually they are. There is a push to make birth control available in the US over the counter, like it is in most of the world. But the abortion lobby doesn't want it to happen, because they would lose a revenue stream and the power that comes along with statutory middle-man status.

Re: Wrong. Those are not democracies.

[drinkypoo]

Uh, youâ(TM)re claiming that classical _Athens_ wasnâ(TM)t a democracy?

Not as the word is defined today, no. And not then, either; it was always a Republic.

Youâ(TM)re certainly free to criticize it for slave-holding and sexism,

and I do.

but saying that the word doesnâ(TM)t apply to its main referent suggests that words mean only what you want them to.

Athens was and was not the birthplace of democracy. What was unusual was that they had citizen representatives. However, they still had representatives, and those citizen representatives did not make up the entirety of the council. Until you actually count individual votes, and all of them, you don't really have a democracy.

Re:What?

[alexandru_preoteasa]

Well, shit, he was a straight cis white shitlord, of COURSE he complained about it! He wouldn't have complained if his ideology had been pure! /s

Re:This is sad seeing republicans...

[Salgak1]

John Ringo, amongst others, have publicly stated that he is NOT interested in the Hugos, and would not accept a nomination. Correia and Torgersen have done the same.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[orgelspieler]

I have a problem with this. On one hand it seems sick that a father-to-be should be granted the right to terminate. After all, it's a medical procedure for the mother-to-be, and it's not exactly pleasant. On the other hand, it also seems wrong to be stuck paying child support for 18 years for a baby he didn't want. Maybe the guy (and gal) should not have had unprotected sex until they both wanted kids. You assertion that the father has to take responsibility for his actions implies that the woman had no say in the matter. (I assume we're not talking about a rape case here.)

What about the case where a woman lies and says she's on the pill because she actually wants a baby? I know at least one guy who this happened to. Luckily the baby-momma was in a different state and couldn't find him to come after him for child support, but still... hey wait a second, weren't we talking about sci-fi awards...!?!?!

Ummm... no.

[denzacar]

Starship Troopers was a book about how people living in a fascist society would view living in that society. The book made it plenty clear that they were brainwashed throughout schooling, so of course the characters accepted the society as normal, even admirable.

...

There no preaching either way about fascism in Starship Troopers, as it wasn't a bedtime story. It was an insightful exploration of why a fascist society holds together despite being so evil as seen from the reader's perspective.

At best you could argue that the book (and its author) are not CONSCIOUSLY praising fascism - but militarism.
Which, to an outsider to military life, like say... someone with a more intellectualist, university, more opened exchange of ideas, philosophical, but with not enough experience, or someone living a more sheltered life provided by a civilized society... may seem the same as fascism.
Or more crudely - to a foureyed bearded commie pinko hippie any uniform is a fascist uniform.

And the book really does read like a book on how army will "make real men out of boys" and about "brotherhood of men" and how such a bond transcends any other - including love of family.
Hint - story culminates with the main character BOTH outranking his own father AND being praised AND exonerated by him - while his father admits (through tears, no less) that he was the one who was wrong all along.
So they hug - but not as a father and son, but as soldier-brothers. The happy few.
And that's AFTER all the numerous baptisms with fire that the main character goes through - becoming a new and stronger man with each one, until he ultimately outranks BOTH his fathers.
I.e. Both his dad and his instructor.
Isn't army great? Where else can you become both your dad's and your boss's boss simply by being better?

BUT...
That does not make only Rico superior to his father - it makes TRUE values of a military life superior to a soft LIE of civilized life.
Civilization is a lie - war is the truth. Just like "20th century's democracies" were a lie, so they met their ultimate failure.
Which is why citizens are NOT indoctrinated and "brainwashed throughout schooling" to accept such a society.
Oh no siree!
Rico doesn't join up cause he's indoctrinated into the story how great it is in the army. He joins out of youthful rebellion.

And then he keeps "discovering" how wrong all his acquired ideas of the army really are.
How all that pain and torture is actually out of love and how much the superior officers actually care and self-sacrifice for their subordinate soldiers.
Just like how those military instructors are placed in highschools TO DISSUADE the weak-minded from ever taking up military service.

In a society where you are free to lead your little life of pretend-importance.
While real men do all the real fighting and real standing on them real walls so you could live a luxury of comfortable ignorance.
So, because you are too soft to handle the truth you are handed a LIE.
A construct created by the military in order to have a place for all the good-for-no-military-role runts.
Kids' pool where they can splash about without actually endangering themselves or others with their own ineptitude.
A lie those runts call "civilization".

And that's not just fascism - that's a FASCIST UTOPIA.
Society where not only does the elite rule by banding together and holding both all the strings AND all the axes of the society... Oh no.
It also has NO internal opponents as they are not only emasculated of any real power - anything but fascism is "mathematically provable as wrong".
AND on top of that it is a society which MUST remain in a state of permanent war forever - as long as there is any other hostile species out there.
So not only is fascism presented as the only way - it is also the only MORALLY CORRECT way for ANY species.

Heinlein MAY HAVE started the book as a purely militaristic one, but he fell into his

Re:Ummm... no.

[CrimsonAvenger]

becoming a new and stronger man with each one, until he ultimately outranks BOTH his fathers. I.e. Both his dad and his instructor.

Umm, no. Reread the book. Zim outranked our hero Juan ultimately.

And for a militaristic society, they certainly had a tiny military. A couple of divisions in a society numbering in the billions does not make for a militaristic society. Nor does a top income tax rate down around 2% (yes, he mentioned the income tax rate at one point) pay for much of a military.

Re:Ummm... no.

[denzacar]

A couple of divisions in a society numbering in the billions does not make for a militaristic society.

A - that's called a social elite.
B - book starts with our man Rico leveling half an alien city all by himself.
C - yet, despite "not" being a militaristic society, his middle-aged father somehow breezes through the training created to make teenagers into career soldiers.
How does the logistic work out for that exactly? He lies about his age? Dyes his hair or something?
Quits smoking and starts taking vitamins which give him the abilities of a teenager again?

Zim outranked our hero Juan ultimately.

And his father outranked him in the beginning.
But he still got the be the boss of both of them. And to keep on advancing in the ranks.

It doesn't matter if your superior-made-inferior eventually rises to the same or similar level as you or even higher - what matters is that YOU got to be his boss.
I.e. You were better, you got better, you are better and you will always be better than him.
That's how the juvenile power fantasies work.
And that's what awaits you if you join up! Pure meritocracy! Isn't army great?

Nor does a top income tax rate down around 2% (yes, he mentioned the income tax rate at one point) pay for much of a military.

A - Colonies. Lotsa paychecks.
B - Army is made out of 1-man city-leveling flying tanks. How many of those are needed exactly?
C - Who ever said that Heinlein thought it through? He supposedly also thought that he was not describing a fascist society - but he was.

And most importantly...
D - It's not 2%. It's just described as "poll tax". In the same breath and on the same page that exults this as the ultimate authority.
Wait... isn't that... Oh...

Major Reid paused to touch the face of an old-fashioned watch, "reading" its hands.
"The period is almost over and we have yet to determine the moral reason for our success in governing ourselves.
Now continued success is never a matter of chance. Bear in mind that this is science, not wishful thinking; the universe is what it is, not what we want it to be.
To vote is to wield authority; it is the supreme authority from which all other authority derives - such as mine to make your lives miserable once a day.
Force, if you will! - the franchise is force, naked and raw, the Power of the Rods and the Ax. Whether it is exerted by ten men or by ten billion, political authority is force."

"But this universe consists of paired dualities. What is the converse of authority? Mr. Rico."
He had picked one I could answer. "Responsibility, sir."

"Applause. Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal - else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential.
To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy.
The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority... other than through the tragic logic of history.
The unique 'poll tax' that we must pay was unheard of.
No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority.
If he voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead - and responsibility was then forced on him willy-nilly and destroyed both him and his foundationless temple."

Irrelevant Election

[Roger W Moore]

Fortunately I'm not American so the US presidential race is not worth paying attention to under any circumstances...unless it is to get a sense of relief that even though our own politicians are bad at least they are not THAT bad! Good luck with the Great Wall of Mexico! ;-)

Re:This is sad seeing republicans...

[russotto]

Ringo prefers messing with the Romance awards; he got one for "Ghost", his military porn/actual BDSM porn novel.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[whoever57]

Bullshit. The super-wealthy (like Gates and Buffett) know full well how much they gain from their cronies, and they line up to give money to the Ruling Party.

Giving money to a party is not the same as giving it to the government. In fact, they give money to the parties so that they have to give a smaller amount to the government.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[serviscope_minor]

Your argument is disingenuous, as the entire concept is understood to revolve around human life,

Er, well done, you managed to completely understand the point I was making, but I'll deduct a point for flubbing the landing.

Now you might wish to consider what is special about human life that we treat it differently. A clue: it's got something to do with the mind.

the human mind does however, exist far earlier than most people believe (around the twelfth week of pregnancy)

Exist in what capacity? The brain has started to grow at that point, but is it a mind?

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[serviscope_minor]

On the other hand, it also seems wrong to be stuck paying child support for 18 years for a baby he didn't want.

Well, I don't really think one should be able to disclaim responsibility by simply declaring "I don't want it" after you've started it going. If you didn't want the risk of having a baby then youshould have kept your pecker in your pants so to speak. The fact that it can't be undone part way through is immaterial.

You assertion that the father has to take responsibility for his actions implies that the woman had no say in the matter.

You weren't talking about the mother buggering off and leaving a baby behind, so I don't really see what the mother has to do with the father's actions. You know both people have to take responsibility.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[scarboni888]

Fetuses aren`t babys. Or they`d be 9 months old at birth.

A fetus has no expectation of living any kind of life. A pregnant woman knows when either/both her life and/or the potential babies' life will be a shithole of misery and suffering.

There are many things worse than not being born at all. And when you haven't been born yet you have no idea what you're missing. So no harm done. Unlike killing a person who is already born and therefore has some sense of what life is and therefore some sort of reasonable expectation of it continuing. And so would actually suffer if you were to terminate their life. Fetus don't have any sense of life or expectation of continuing to live. Therefore terminating it is a non-issue.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[tsotha]

Great idea! Let's make policy based on the 0.000001% case.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[SpankiMonki]

Great idea! Let's make policy based on the 0.000001% case.

What great idea are you talking about? I don't believe I expressed one. All I did was put YOUR argument on display. To re-cap, you believe abortion should be illegal, presumably because contraception is widely available and sexually active women either choose to use it or they don't. Have I got that right?

Since you apparently can't be bothered to read the info in the NIH link I provided for you, I'll spell it out for you: It is estimated that 5% of rapes result in pregnancy. Do I need to do the rest of the math for you?

Tell you what, why don't you just tell me how many women you think should be forced by the state to bear and raise the offspring of their attackers. If it's more than zero, you might not be as conservative as you think.

Even more simple

[dbIII]

That is your OPINION and does not make me a liar in any way.
Why so incredibly thin skinned?

Metamod time

[dbIII]

Looks like there is some factional voting shit going on here too.

Read sentence number two of my post

[dbIII]

When that turns up on page one it is not clear if the character is being an asshole, the author is pushing an agenda (my initial incorrect guess hence getting pissed off) or something else is going on. Thus the confusion of people between the politics of the author (which I think the poster way above has imagined and the rest of us don't really know) and the politics of the character. Does that make sense yet?

In other news...

[CmdrTamale]

It turns out Sturgeon was an optimist.
--
I'm pretty sure I've been replaced with a simple shell script.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[SuricouRaven]

Because she can always give it up for adoption.

It's more often the man who is forced by law to pay for the support of a child he didn't want.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[TheEyes]

You appear to believe this is an either/or situation. I would suggest that, as significantly smaller governments HAVE existed, would prove that we do not have a binary solution set, but that there is an entire range of solutions. Some of which would be acceptable to the vast majority of the population. . .

The fact that smaller governments have existed does not mean that those governments were better. The US government in the 1950s and 60s would be considered enormous by today's standards: marginal tax rates on the very wealthy were as high as 90%, with the balance going to building the national highway system and the Apollo missions. Back then the middle class was growing, and poverty was shrinking. As our tax rate flattens, with Reagan and Bush's voodoo-economics inspired tax cuts to the wealthy, we've seen this trend reverse, with the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and the middle class shrinking rapidly.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[tsotha]

15000? How many orders of magnitude wrong is that?

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[david_thornley]

Conservatives simply don't believe in infantilizing women by pretending they simply have no way to avoid pregnancy.

Conservatives don't just want to pretend that, they want to enforce that. Republican ideas of sex education seem to be limited to teaching abstinence, and their ideas of contraception are no further advanced. Some of them oppose any way of avoiding pregnancy caused by rape, which means that the woman indeed had no way to avoid pregnancy.

Abstinence doesn't work, except for some individuals. It never has, and there are very strong evolutionary reasons behind that.. If that's what you insist on, you're not concerned about pregnant women, you're concerned about feeling morally superior to other people. Many conservatives add to that feeling of moral superiority by shaming unwed mothers, after doing their level best to push them into pregnancy.

If you want to reduce the number of abortions, support Planned Parenthood and other organizations. By providing contraception and teaching about it, PP prevents far more abortions than any laws.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[david_thornley]

That never seems to happen until the mother-to-be starts to show, and almost all abortions are conducted before there's going to be a noticeable bump. You can argue that a more developed fetus has rights, but I don't think anything that has never had human brain activity is human.

I've also heard young children addressed as "young man" and "young woman", which isn't a description of them so much as a projection of what they will be.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[david_thornley]

Abortion is about the woman's right not to be pregnant. Once the birth has taken place, the woman isn't pregnant.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[david_thornley]

Exactly how does the change of the birth certificate match what the person is at the proper time? What about someone who has done the transition fully without having the genital surgery, which may be contraindicated for a variety of reasons? (I knew people with a bleeding disorder; one of them had to have surgery aborted because, even after replacing all her blood, she still was bleeding far too much. Given when the surgery happened, she was very lucky not to have contracted HIV. What if she'd been a transsexual?)

Seriously, how many men are willing to go through hormone therapy and dress like a woman in order to sneak a peek in the ladies' room? Heck, how many women in the ladies' room are showing anything unusual outside their stall? (I have absolutely no experience in this.)

As far as "thou shalt not murder", abortion has traditionally not been murder. It's been illegal, but typically with a far lesser penalty.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[david_thornley]

NARAL has a single specific purpose: to push for the right of women to get abortions. People donate money to them on the understanding that it will go to support abortion rights. Why would you expect them to start doing something entirely different? I already donate money for social services that doesn't go for abortion-rights political activism, so why can't I donate money to the activism without having some arbitrarily shunted into social services?

Re: Yeah, that sums it up alright

[david_thornley]

Heinlein had a real gift for putting his political opinions into a darn good story. I disagree with him a lot, politically, and still enjoy his stuff.

Re:This is sad seeing republicans...

[tbannist]

You must be kiddng. I read one of his books and it was terrible. Seriously, half-way through the climatic battle that the entire book had been building up to, Ringo appears to have become bored and wrapped the rest of the battle with what was essentially "and then all the bad guys died". Now, I can't blame him for getting bored with the battle because it was one of those battles where the good guys have every advantage and the bad guys have got nothing. However, I sure as hell can blame him for writing such a boring piece of trash novel that not even the author could stand to finish it.

The horribly disappointing ending was almost enough to make me forget that "aliens" killed of all the liberal white people, all the disabled, and all the non-white people on earth and made every blond woman an incurable nymphomaniac. Sure, everyone who actually mattered was temporarily saddened by their loss, but the economy suddenly grew so much (now that the liberals were gone) that suddenly everyone was rich and having all the sex they wanted.

Sigh, I really wish that the previous paragraph was actually hyperbole...

Re:says who?

[russotto]

You mean wasn't. And that's right. Which made it ultimately a boring and trivial plot detail, with no real meaning or depth to it.

The fact that Athos was a colony of all men, where homosexuality was the norm (the only alternative being asexuality) and children were conceived using artificial wombs and disembodied ova, struck you as a "trivial plot detail"?

Then again, there was precious little in the way of human relationships in the story.

Did you miss the relationship between Ethan and Ellie Quinn? Including the point that they were _attracted_ to one another?

Socialism's Century of Failure

[mi]

From the point of view of much of Europe, Sanders is the only Presidential candidate who's more or less centrist, the rest being seriously right-wing.

Which explains, why most of Europe can not achieve America's standards of living even without the military capable of, for example, keeping Russia at bay.

The further to the Left, the worse off the country.

Re:Socialism's Century of Failure

[dywolf]

JFC you are delusional.

Raw GDP, even per capita, has jack all to do with standard of living because (it even says on that page) "GDP is not an indicator of personal income".

If that's the tack you want to take, at least have the intelligence to use GDP that's been adjusted for purchasing power parity, ie differences in cost of living, giving a closer approximation to the point you're trying to make (Seriously, this is like 101 level knowledge): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Of course...oddly enough...once you look at PPP, the countries you disdain so much look to be doing a whole lot better than you tried to present it initially. Though even that isn't a complete picture because even the GDPPPP still leaves out the other benefits (ie welfare) afforded to citizens living in those other countries. Yes, I mean the welfare. Once those are quantified, they rank even higher.

So no, its not as simple as your little braindead statement that "The further to the Left, the worse off the country."
Moron.

Re:Socialism's Century of Failure

[mi]

has jack all to do with standard of living because

BS, of course it does. Or are you going to argue for some kind of "holistic" approach — whereby a poor Thai is "happier" than a rich New Yorker? Yeah, would be most convenient for you, because it would not be quantifiable...

GDP that's been adjusted for purchasing power parity [...] once you look at PPP, the countries you disdain so much look to be doing a whole lot better

Most of Europe is still well below the US on the PPP benchmark too — only two real European countries (Switzerland and Norway) exceed us. And they did in the list I posted too, so your "braindead statement" about "a whole lot better" is false.

And then comes the military spending — which Europeans can not afford — and the power of Capitalism becomes obvious.

braindead statement that "The further to the Left, the worse off the country."

There is no successful Socialist country — it is a poison. Where there is less of it — like in France — the country can still survive, though not as well. Where there is much of it — like in Venezuela — the country collapses. Where it evolves into its next logical level — Communism — mass murder begins to accompany the economic disaster (as may well happen in Venezuela soon).

Moron.

It certainly is unusually honest for a moron to admit being one by signing his drivels so...

Re:Socialism's Century of Failure

[dywolf]

Again i direct you to your very own fucking link where it literally says "Not a good indicator of personal income or standard of living".
This is econ 101 basic knowledge shit.

If you cant even get this right, there is little point in trying to educate your ignorant ass.
Facts literally do not matter to you.
You are the epitome of an ignorant RWNJ who crafts his own narrative by cherrypicking incomplete data.

Re: Wrong. Those are not democracies.

[FlaSheridn]

Uh, are you perchance confusing Athens with Rome, or Platonic reality with actual reality? I concede that there might be other explanations for your mistake, but it’s hard to take seriously. E.g., to quote from the most easily-accessible source on what shouldn’t be a controversial point, the introduction to the Wikipedia article on, of all things, Athenian democracy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It was a system of direct democracy, in which participating citizens voted directly on legislation and executive bills. Participation was not open to all residents: to vote one had to be an adult, male citizen who owned land and was not a slave

most important

[gzuckier]

Hush Puppies.

Re:Yeah, that sums it up alright

[gzuckier]

the Hugo tendency to reward works that leaders of the movement deem "niche, academic, overtly to the left in ideology and flavor, and ultimately lacking what might best be called visceral, gut-level, swashbuckling fun."

Works collectively known as "science fiction".

more space opera! stuff that makes syfy network movies. that's what we need. a good sf piece should be soothing and not at all challenging.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[gzuckier]

But don't you remember, how good life was in those older days? Think back of the 1950s and 1960s. Everything was better then. Ok, if you weren't a woman. Or black. Or gay. Or pretty much anything but a white protestant male. But if you were, life was better. You had a house, a chicken in the pot and two cars in every garage! And even if you were just a normal worker! You had a job that you could feed your family on, your wife didn't go to work (the mere idea alone, a working woman! Can't get a husband, eh?).

This all changed for the worse, and Republicans want those glory days back! Is that really so bad? Ok, granted, it's not so great for non-white, non-hetero, non-religious non-men, but for us it's going to be great again! Ok, maybe not all of it because we sure as fuck aren't going to get working wages that can sustain a family again from Republicans, but at least we'll get that those black atheist fags will have it worse!

Now ain't that something?

And..... things didn't change, the people who think they need to "take their country back" did. "Our parents worked and saved all their lives and moved up, but we can't because all the immigrants took everything from us". Really? Because it's not the immigrants I see parking luxury SUVs at the malls and loading them up with expensive crap that's currently fashionable and will be landfill next year, then stopping off at whatever overpriced food outlet is current because God forbid that any event in life does not include some sort of purchase of food and drink, then packing all those new vacation clothes to head off to their annual trip to Disney World. I look at those folks at the Trump rallies on TV, and they all seem to be quite comfy in their fashionable outfits and shiny new boots.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[gzuckier]

Republicans haven't meaningfully stood for small government... ever. It's a trope passed out to the Libertarian wing of the party, but it's just a load of shit.

It's certainly true there are a lot of Republicans that would like to see a smaller government. There just aren't enough to control the party. There are, however, far more small-government Republicans than there are small-government Democrats.

As to freedom, well, so long as it isn't women looking to control their own bodies, or cis individuals picking the bathroom of the gender they identify with, oh no, not then.

Yeah, this is a load of horse shit. A baby's freedom to live certainly supersedes the mother's freedom to kill him or her. As to the bathroom thing, again, there are two freedoms at odds. I don't have any interest in sharing a public restroom with women regardless of how they view themselves.

You have a child's view of freedom.

Yeah, even though they may have a beard and masculine clothing and all, if they have 2 X chromosomes they should use the ladies' room. Similarly, those folks with the dresses and makeup and nicely coiffed hair and silicone boobs should be sharing the public restroom with you, because they have a Y chromosome. That would certainly be best to keep the public comfortable.
Tell us more about the adult's view, daddy.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[gzuckier]

A government powerful enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have.

Your reaction is a common "poison pill" fallacy committed by government agencies ordered to cut their bloated budgets. They immediately cut the things that will hurt while keeping the fat safe. Small government conservatives don't want to get rid of the fire departments or the police departments (but a lot of leftists want this one) nor the environmental departments (admittedly this one has become a nest of far-left hate). They want an out-of-control federal government to be reined in, and the best way to do that is the same way you get rid of a cancer, i.e. stop its blood flow.

"Small government" types believe the functions of the government should be limited to hurting people, preferably killing them, whether foreign or domestic. The government has no place helping people. The government may not be competent to collect your taxes and spend them on schools or keeping children from eating lead paint chips, but by God they can certainly decide whether you should get the electric chair or whether we need to invade Iraq. Because after all, individuals are so good with their charity, that's why there never was any poverty or hunger until the government got involved. Even Jesus had to remind the masses to slow down on the charity before they went broke themselves.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[gzuckier]

In a vacuum, yes this is true, a powerful government can take everything from you. Keep in mind, though, that the alternative is to allow powerful individuals to control everything instead; in that case, a state which humanity has languished in for thousands of years, those powerful individuals will take everything from you.

You appear to believe this is an either/or situation. I would suggest that, as significantly smaller governments HAVE existed, would prove that we do not have a binary solution set, but that there is an entire range of solutions. Some of which would be acceptable to the vast majority of the population. . .

However, for good or bad, our society/civilization/economy has become significantly more complex and interdependent as time marches on; the days of the Founding Fathers when a family could feed itself if the economy collapsed and income stopped coming in are long gone. And, just as with biological organisms, bigger and more complex with a lot of more specialized parts working together, like a mammal, requires a lot more information processing and organization than just a bunch of semi-autonomous entities that happen to be attached to each other, like a sponge or a jelly fish.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[gzuckier]

Very true. The problem comes from people who use the term 'baby' to describe a zygote or fetus.

So when does it quit becoming a "zygote or fetus" and become a "baby"?

that you can impose your will on the decision a woman and her doctor makes

Shouldn't that be a woman, her doctor, and the father? You're making it out like he has no say-so in the matter, until she decides to have the kid and he's stuck paying child support for the next 18 years. I guess some people are more equal than others.

Somebody's got to pay for the kid, if you plan on keeping it alive, whether in or out of the uterus. That could be the mother, the father, society, or the doctor I suppose, or some combination of the above. I suggest that limiting it to the mother is neither fair nor practical.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[gzuckier]

Except when women exchange the terms as a matter of convenience. Assault? Baby. Abortion? Fetus. Pregnant Women Assistance programs? Baby

If women can't even make up their own minds about the status, you can hardly blame anyone else for being confused.

Not confused; if the woman wants to abort the fetus, Just Say No. And if the woman wants prenatal medical assistance, like just vitamins that she can't afford so the kid is born healthy and undamaged, Just Say No to that also.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[gzuckier]

Actually I posit the opposite is true. That there ARE more small-government democrats than small-government republicans.

But the key difference between a small government republican and a small government democrat, is that where the democrat simply wants enough government to do the jobs given it and acknowledges that government has legitimacy to do those jobs and that the list may grow since government is a reflection of society..the republican simply wants no government at all, and denies that government has any legitimacy whatsoever.

No democrats actually want to instate totalitarian or authoritarian government with 100% control over everything. More of us think like Bill Maher and are closer to left-libertarianism (aka real libertarianism, not the RW abomination that worships Ayn Rand and co-opted the name), than they are to Lenin, regardless of what conservatives like to tell us we think. --

As to the 2nd half and naming it a "child's view of freedom"...the word for that is projection, because forcing one person to endure slavery in the name of another's freedom (specifically another that isn't actually a person, a separate entity, and will not be until born) is not a grown up view of freedom. Nor is forcing a child to be born, but refusing to help or enable that childs freedom following birth. Rather like allowing discrimination against a group in order to accommodate the religious freedom practices of another group.

The grown up view of freedom is that if your outward freedom of action should not affect the intrinsic or inward freedom of another. IE, my right to not be punched in the nose trumps your right to punch me in the nose.

As for the bathroom, no freedom is being threatened here, other than your prudish 17th century mindset that makes you scared of peoples naughty bits.

It's just a matter of how much you want to think about things. "Government bad!" is a lot easier than "Government shouldn't intrude on people except where people are themselves making problems for other people, and also when small intrusions bring about large overall improvements like building sewers, or similar times, but at the same time we must always be on guard because humans and their institutions tend to follow the same patterns, whether government or private".
The "small government" folks are the ones spending state money to declare official state firearms, for example

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[gzuckier]

Translation: Women are breeding machines. Oh, and because it's all so very Libertarian, pregnant women shouldn't get any publicly-funded health care either.

Not at all. Conservatives simply don't believe in infantilizing women by pretending they simply have no way to avoid pregnancy.

And yes, people should pay their own way. They only people who should get publicly funded health care are people who can't afford it.

Fucking Jesus, who died and made you God, that you can impose your will on the decision a woman and her doctor makes? What makes you so fucking special? Considering the numbers of actual babies who die or suffer every year, even in the US, due to poverty and a lack of decent health care, why not show some fucking compassion for them, rather than fetuses.

Fucking Jesus, who died and made you God...

That's pretty funny coming from someone who spends his time thinking up new ways to spend my money.

... that you can impose your will on the decision a woman and her doctor makes?

Aren't we forgetting someone? ... a woman, her doctor, and the baby, right? The woman had ways to avoid the situation. So did the doctor. The baby? Not so much.

Considering the numbers of actual babies who die or suffer every year, even in the US, due to poverty and a lack of decent health care, why not show some fucking compassion for them, rather than fetuses.

More horseshit. Infant mortality rates aren't any higher in the US than they are anywhere else. In a lot of places babies are counted as stillborn if they die within 24 hours. That's the benefit of socialized medicine - you don't get better care, but you do get comforting statistics from the medical bureaucracy.

Beyond that, if you want a kid, have a kid. But taking care of that kid is your responsibility, not mine. I'm under no obligations to see that your kid is fed and clothed and has proper medical care. That's your job as a parent, and if you can't swing it don't have kids.

But I have questions for you, Mr freedom-loving guy. Why is your party so intent on taking away my freedom to defend myself, and my freedom of speech?

"Infant mortality rates aren't any higher in the US than they are anywhere else. In a lot of places babies are counted as stillborn if they die within 24 hours."
See, that's why some of us trust scientists and professionals and academics and so on, rather than just repeating the assertions of places like the Wall Street Journal editorial page, who invented that particular lie; you know, people who spend a lot of time and effort doing vigorous research on things, rather than just seeing something that says what they want to hear and never even bothering to idly google anything to see if there is any truth.
You're obviously just spluttering "What the heck is this idiot talking about?" at this point, your ignorance of the entire field being a badge of honor, but anybody who has any interest into why this is a lie can certainly look up things like perinatal mortality, a notion that occurred to the folks who have the data to show that our infant mortality is third world quality, even accounting for stillbirths, decades before it ever occurred to some WSJ rightwing editorial writer to just make something up about a field he knew nothing about.
The good question here, is why? What purpose does it serve the rightwing to deny that we kill more babies by neglect after they are born than any other first world country? I can see why it's unpleasant for the layperson to discover that, but the folks who actively deny it without bothering to check it out? That counts as a falsehood and one wonders what's the point? It's certainly not helping the babies at all.
As a footnote, let me refer you to the large body of research sh

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[gzuckier]

I don't see any conflict. It's the old Voltaire position on free speech: I may not agree with your decision, but I believe it must be your decision to make.

I find it very frustrating that the pro-life side generally opposes contraception and sex education, even though these are the best mean we have to reduce the need for and number of abortions. I think it's because they have such a strong religious element - almost all of the major pro-life organisations and leaders are explicitly Christian and devoutly so, which means they must regard their mission as not only to eliminate abortion, but to eliminate the evil of non-marital sex too.

Babies are God's punishment for having sex. See Genesis.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[gzuckier]

Trump went five for five today so expect their control of our lives to only increase.

It is highly unlikely that Trump has a SF plank in his platform.

I don't know; he's clearly some sort of alien. Even those odd cilia topping his cranial protrusion.

Re:says who?

[gzuckier]

That's why I stopped reading certain authors. Their books were "this poor guy is picked on because he's gay, and that's not fair, so let's make him the hero fighting for the girl -- oh, I mean the boy -- oh, wait, I mean ... uh ... for .. uh ... justice. Yeah, that's it, he's fighting for justice with his boyfriend ... uh ... I mean his companion".

One book I read a while ago handled "the gay issue" much better. There was a group of people on a ship/research station. One was gay, and liked to give blow jobs. Another guy was not gay, but liked getting blow jobs. No big deal, and no cause for fight for, just the way people are.

As distinct from every other SF book, where "this poor guy is picked on because he's a nerd, and good in school, and bad at sports, and interested in science, but discovers that he (or rarely she) is really the Prince of Space with Special Powers and save the planet and everybody is sorry then, you betcha"

Re: Yeah, that sums it up alright

[gzuckier]

That description doesn't really seem to fit Heinlein's works.

That's why there weren't no Mean Puppies in Heinlein's day. The reason they're here today is to return us to those glorious days of yesteryear, when men were men and women swooned and aliens had bugeyes. Including human aliens, legal or illegal.

Re: Yeah, that sums it up alright

[gzuckier]

Plenty of swashbuckling fun in Heinlein, at least in the 90% of his work that was somewhat schlocky (mostly metaphorical swashbuckling, but some actual swashes were buckled along the way).

Also, educational. Learned a lot about planning revolutions and such as a young Heinlein fan.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[sumdumass]

I don't really care about the halfway through it crowds. The fact is the parent statement was incorrect and I corrected it. There will be people missed in that, who or how many or whatever, I don't know. But the GP specifically said "total sex reassignment from male to female" so i wasn't addressing those outliers you defined.

As for abortions and murder, the homicide laws have several different degrees or classification so that isn't anything new.

Re:says who?

[I'm New Around Here]

You need to read more science fiction if that is the plot of "every other SF book" you know. Most of the science fiction books I read have people who do things that are part of science, and don't get picked on at all.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[david_thornley]

If you don't care about the halfway-through-it crowds, you've got an attitude I like a lot better than the strict and unenforceable laws that have recently become popular.

As for homicide, there is a reason why you used that word: it's much more inclusive than murder. In all cases I'm aware of (and that certainly isn't all of them), the penalty for abortion has been significantly less than the mildest penalty for murder.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[tsotha]

because conservatives are such noted supporters of contraception...

Conservatives are noted supporters of "Do whatever the hell you want, just don't expect me to foot the bill."

"game" or "counter-game"?

[eric_harris_76]

My very distinct impression is that the Sad Puppies are responding to successful efforts to game the system.

"Gaming the system" has been done for decades, long before the LWNJ/SJW/moonbat/whatever crowd did it, by various sorts of folks. Not a new phenomenon.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[dywolf]

just cold hard truth

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[I'm New Around Here]

You're a genius. If the woman doesn't want a child, why does she let a man come inside her vagina? She's not a fucking rocket scientist either.