Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Grizzly on April 12, 2015, 11:19:10 am
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Or, reactionary conservatives react onconservatively, depending on your preferred title.
I am talking about the Sad Puppies (http://www.inquisitr.com/1993752/george-r-r-martin-the-hugo-awards-are-broken-and-i-dont-know-if-they-can-be-fixed/). People who have, for some reason, decided that the Hugo awards are being rigged by liberals voting for liberal authors, and have decided that therefore the only way to counter this by even more vote rigging to a ridicilous level.
Which is weird, as the hugo awards are simply a bunch of geeks (no offense intended, geeks are awesome!) who paid 40 dollars so they could get together and promote good works of science fiction. The notion of "liberal vote rigging" seems more like a "Reality is left-wing" kind of thing rather then anything else, and...
Well it's bad. With the last reactionary conservative group in another form of entertainment still fresh in anyone's mind, it's sad to see that a smilar thing is happening to SFF writing.
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yeah its bad that bad people get their bad opinions expressed, everyone knows that bad people count as less, what with all their crimethink. geeks are by definition allowed only to goodthink, if they are not goodthink then they are not geeks and therefore ineligible to vote for the geek award. there are no disagreements amungst the superior progressive geek race of which I am a representative. if you disagree with me then you are a racist and homophobe and sexist.
The Hugos still are simply a bunch of geeks who paid 40 dollars so they could get together and promote good works of science fiction. That is exactly what just happened, in spite of hyperbolic misrepresentations of who they are and what they represent. (BTW, good luck to anyone trying to find a straight forward explanation about what we are talking about). There are more of them than you, they have been in these fandoms as long as you have, they voted for good works, it's just their definition of "good" and your definition of "good" do not perfectly overlap. and they outnumber you. and now you are afraid you might not have been right all this time. and worst of all you might loose the argument and hegemony of thought.
I'm wondering, have you ever considered the possibility that, you were wrong about something? Ever? You seem awfuly certain that you are the good guy and they are the bad guy. Maybe the people you are witch hunting here have good points, unrelated to this, that their "reactionary conservative" is actually liberal, and you are the reactionary? After all you are the one who wants fewer voices heard. All I ever see from the people who think they are working for the greater good, "progressives", is intimidation, mockery, fear, disingenuous misrepresentation of people they disagree with, and arrogance. That isn't what I would consider progress, so you've lost me in your little army with that.
and... What does reactionary even mean? You seem to be using it as a synonym for bad or evil. Isn't it just something that comes as a consequence of change? Wouldn't Germans opposed the rise of the Nazis have been considered reactionary? why not? If you actually talk to some of these people you demonize you could find that many of them do not bear much similarity of the totem you have made to represent them. but what do I know, I used the wrong buzz words in the wrong way, flagging me as part of the out group therefore I'm wrong and full of crimethink. post discarded.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary
It's a specific political term.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary
It's a specific political term.
thank you.
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After all you are the one who wants fewer voices heard. All I ever see from the people who think they are working for the greater good, "progressives", is intimidation, mockery, fear, disingenuous misrepresentation of people they disagree with, and arrogance. That isn't what I would consider progress, so you've lost me in your little army with that.
About that fewer voices thing... Have you looked at the actual result of this bloc voting campaign? John C Wright is suddenly nominated 3 times in a single category, very definitely crowding out at least two other writers. Bloc voting Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies style (And make no mistake: While the Sad Puppies slate is certainly slanted away from what is normally nominated for the Hugos, Vox Days' Rabid Puppies campaign (which is to the SP's as the Tea Party is to US republicans) was the actual winner here.
If we accept the SP's thesis, that the Hugos should be an indicator not only of goodness in the field, but also relative popularity, why is it that Castalia House, Vox Day's micro-publisher, is nominated this often?
There's an argument to be made about the Hugos being dominated by Tor. There's certainly some truth to that, as there is to the assumption that ideology does play a larger role than it should in terms of who gets book deals at the big houses and who doesn't. However, by dominating the Hugo nominations in a much more openly political way, with very clear political goals, SP/RP are radicalizing this whole thing to a huge degree.
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Bobbau: I think the irony and/or newsworthy part of this is that a group concerned with political bias in science fiction writing awards decided to fix the problem... by removing any and all doubt of political bias and jamming it in there with a shovel.
It's a fairly dumb, obviously designed ploy to get views and attention by pointlessly radicalizing the issue.
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Bobbau: I think the irony and/or newsworthy part of this is that a group concerned with political bias in science fiction writing awards decided to fix the problem... by removing any and all doubt of political bias and jamming it in there with a shovel.
This.
It is possible that there was some left wing bias in the awards. Then a reactionary stance is the correct one. But, certainly not a reaction like this. It only makes the possibility of an apolitical awards less likely, as both sides turn their stupid tug of war up to eleven and make a mockery out of the Hugos.
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Been following this for a while now.
It's been kind of remarkable the kind of reporting the media has been throwing at this, calling the Sad Puppies basically every ism in the book, when if you look at the slates themselves is ridiculous.
Then you have the calls of no awards for authors which have been included in the slates, it's kind of obvious that the whole thing was politicized before the Sad Puppies even appeared.
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Came looking for puppies, was disappointed...
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Been following this for a while now.
It's been kind of remarkable the kind of reporting the media has been throwing at this, calling the Sad Puppies basically every ism in the book, when if you look at the slates themselves is ridiculous.
Then you have the calls of no awards for authors which have been included in the slates, it's kind of obvious that the whole thing was politicized before the Sad Puppies even appeared.
The Sad Puppies are not easily distinguished from the Rabid Puppies and they know it. It wouldn't have been hard for them to renounce Vox Day, who is a straight-up white supremacist. Instead they put him on the ballot twice.
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Been following this for a while now.
It's been kind of remarkable the kind of reporting the media has been throwing at this, calling the Sad Puppies basically every ism in the book, when if you look at the slates themselves is ridiculous.
Then you have the calls of no awards for authors which have been included in the slates, it's kind of obvious that the whole thing was politicized before the Sad Puppies even appeared.
The Sad Puppies are not easily distinguished from the Rabid Puppies and they know it. It wouldn't have been hard for them to renounce Vox Day, who is a straight-up white supremacist. Instead they put him on the ballot twice.
I don't see Theodore Beale on the Sad Puppies slate. The fact that he started his own slate suggests he is acting independent of the Sad Puppies.
But let's disregard that. Let's say EVERY entry on the Sad Puppies ballot is Theodore Beale. Why should the fact that he is a "straight-up white supremacist", affect his chances if the Hugo are supposed to be (for the most part) awards for the work they've written?
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No one should support white supremacists. No one should invite them to award ceremonies where they will share the room with people they've threatened to murder. I am a big advocate of complexity, but this is morally elementary.
I'm loathe to mix hobby and my day job. If you want to talk about this further please hit me up by email.
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I don't see Theodore Beale on the Sad Puppies slate. The fact that he started his own slate suggests he is acting independent of the Sad Puppies.
But let's disregard that. Let's say EVERY entry on the Sad Puppies ballot is Theodore Beale. Why should the fact that he is a "straight-up white supremacist", affect his chances if the Hugo are supposed to be (for the most part) awards for the work they've written?
I agree, ideally it should have zero impact. Because if you start in with "everyone except X is eligible", who gets to decide who or what "X" is? We have in our guidelines here "judge the post not the poster." Similarly for works, judge the work not the author I would say. Meritocracy. All equal on a level playing field.
Of course, something like the Hugo Awards isn't going to have that kind of robust neutrality in place, which is how something like this happened in the first place.
I think it will be very interesting to see how events unfold after this.
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I don't see Theodore Beale on the Sad Puppies slate. The fact that he started his own slate suggests he is acting independent of the Sad Puppies.
But let's disregard that. Let's say EVERY entry on the Sad Puppies ballot is Theodore Beale. Why should the fact that he is a "straight-up white supremacist", affect his chances if the Hugo are supposed to be (for the most part) awards for the work they've written?
I agree, ideally it should have zero impact. Because if you start in with "everyone except X is eligible", who gets to decide who or what "X" is? We have in our guidelines here "judge the post not the poster." Similarly for works, judge the work not the author I would say. Meritocracy. All equal on a level playing field.
"Everyone except bigots are eligible."
This sentence is valid, makes sense, and is a good idea. It's pretty easy to define "bigot" and this is not a case of disallowing legitimate opposing political views.
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I don't see Theodore Beale on the Sad Puppies slate. The fact that he started his own slate suggests he is acting independent of the Sad Puppies.
But let's disregard that. Let's say EVERY entry on the Sad Puppies ballot is Theodore Beale. Why should the fact that he is a "straight-up white supremacist", affect his chances if the Hugo are supposed to be (for the most part) awards for the work they've written?
I agree, ideally it should have zero impact. Because if you start in with "everyone except X is eligible", who gets to decide who or what "X" is? We have in our guidelines here "judge the post not the poster." Similarly for works, judge the work not the author I would say. Meritocracy. All equal on a level playing field.
"Everyone except bigots are eligible."
This sentence is valid, makes sense, and is a good idea. It's pretty easy to define "bigot" and this is not a case of disallowing legitimate opposing political views.
No one should support white supremacists. No one should invite them to award ceremonies where they will share the room with people they've threatened to murder. I am a big advocate of complexity, but this is morally elementary.
I'm just gonna quote these because :yes:.
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I disagree. How do you define "bigot"?
As a football (soccer) fan, I see the ridiculous fines dished out to players for certain tweets.
How much do you have to do to be labelled a bigot and what proof is required? One bad tweet? The word of a bunch of people? A criminal record?
And who gets to determine what is and what isn't? The definitions will vary with different people. How many people you'd call bigots would call themselves bigots? How many people might be seen as bigots in one culture and not in another?
And there's always the risk that people decide to spread the net further. Who knows who or what could be included. Money could change hands to change the rules and ice rivals out of contention. Someone with their own agenda could get into the seat of power and start spreading that agenda.
And finally, why discriminate anyway? Because that's what this would be, discrimination. What harm does it do to have someone pick up an award if their work is deserving? They're not going to be a threat to anyone. I'd rather have someone who was truly a bigot spending their time creating fiction, especially if it was good enough to be up for awards and people could enjoy it, than spending time on creating hate.
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Useless muddling the point.
If you don't know what we mean by "bigot", Lorric, then the conversation is beyond you. This is not an instance where equivocation will reach a better verdict.
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No, it's beyond you. Obviously you don't understand the point I'm making. Or just couldn't be bothered to try.
Useless muddling the point.
Classy.
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I understand the point you're trying to make Lorric.
I'm telling you that your point is wrong.
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Then please explain why.
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No. Explaining issues has empirically not helped.
Lorric, this is your invitation to leave the thread without me making you leave.
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This is me, saying that I don't agree with that invitation being issued.
This isn't an issue about the definition of the word "bigot" but more about the idea of how/when/where it gets applied and under what consideration/discretion vs. just by presumption. Especially with social media making it a lot easier for people to instantly jump on pretty much anything in a heartbeat and flail the **** out of it and suddenly somebody ends up dead, and for what reason?
If you can't see the discussion well enough to have determined that, then maybe both of you need to take a bit of a break from the thread for a while.
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Theodore Beale speaks about a black SF/F author:
…it is not that I, and others, do not view [Jemisin] as human, (although genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens), it is that we simply do not view her as being fully civilized for the obvious historical reason that she is not...
...The laws are not there to let whites “just shoot people like me, without consequence, as long as they feel threatened by my presence”, those self-defense laws have been put in place to let whites defend their lives and their property from people, like her, who are half-savages engaged in attacking them...
Unlike the white males she excoriates, there is no evidence to be found anywhere on the planet that a society of NK Jemisins is capable of building an advanced civilization, or even successfully maintaining one without significant external support from those white males.
John C Wright (nominated by Sad Puppies) reacts to the ending of Avatar: The Legend of Korra, in which two women hold hands
Mr DiMartino and Mr Konietzko: You are disgusting, limp, soulless sacks of filth. You have earned the contempt and hatred of all decent human beings forever, and we will do all we can to smash the filthy phallic idol of sodomy you bow and serve and worship. Contempt, because you struck from behind, cravenly; and hatred, because you serve a cloud of morally-retarded mental smog called Political Correctness, which is another word for hating everything good and bright and decent and sane in life.
I have no hatred in my heart for any man’s politics, policies, or faith, any more than I have hatred for termites; but once they start undermining my house where I live, it is time to exterminate them.
Yeah, clearly we have a very hard time determining whether these people are bigots.
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Theodore Beale was expelled from SFWA for using official SFWA channels to transmit that writing to everyone in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He has indicated that if his picks are not given a Hugo Award he will ensure that no future Hugo Awards are given.
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In this thread: Lorric defends white supremacists.
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Larry Correia was nominated for the Campbell Award for Best New Author at the Hugos in 2011, long before 'Sad Puppies'. He was nominated fairly. He lost fairly.
Brad Torgersen was nominated for the Campbell Award for Best New Author at the Hugos in 2012, long before 'Sad Puppies'. He was nominated fairly. He lost fairly.
Clearly the Hugos were biased, and authors like Correia and Torgersen could never have made it onto the ballot. Except they did.
Theodore Beale/Vox Day bought his way onto the ballot last year. His story was given the same chance as any other nominee. It was outvoted by 'No Award.' This is a meritocratic verdict.
George RR Martin analyzes the history of the Hugos and determines that there was never any anti-conservative bias (http://grrm.livejournal.com/418285.html), contrary to the Sad Puppies claim.
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The rules that govern Hugo nominations and voting are extremely vulnerable to bloc voting. Any group willing to organize a voting slate will dominate the awards. No group has previously been willing to organize a voting slate. Despite being given a fair and equitable shot in past years, the Sad/Rabid Puppies decided to organize a voting slate.
The only possible outcomes are:
1) The Hugo nomination and voting rules are changed
2) The award continues to be dominated by this voting bloc
3) Rival, more successful blocs outcompete this bloc, and dominate the awards
I do not have a viable candidate for Case 1. In Cases 2 and 3 the Hugos are finished as even a weak barometer of critical worth (which they are, currently, just as all the major SF/F awards and arguably even other entertainment industry awards).
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And now I'll be taking a ban for a while. Taking a stance on this stuff in public is dangerous for my career.
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Battuta, are John C. Wright's views legitimate grounds for denying him a Hugo nomination?
And have you read any of his works? I have read One Bright Star to Guide Them, and I can unreservedly say that it is fantastic, in both the literal and metaphorical sense of the word. It is beautiful and imaginative. I would proudly put it on the shelf next to my Chronicles of Narnia collection.
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Battuta, are John C. Wright's views legitimate grounds for denying him a Hugo nomination?
And have you read any of his works? I have read One Bright Star to Guide Them, and I can unreservedly say that it is fantastic, in both the literal and metaphorical sense of the word. It is beautiful and imaginative. I would proudly put it on the shelf next to my Chronicles of Narnia collection.
Goober are you seriously, seriously saying that John C. Wright should be nominated for or have the potential to receive an award of any kind despite his public declaration that black people aren't socially evolved enough to have developed a real society (among many other, equally or even more heinous things)?
What the ****, man.
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I believe goober's point, and one of the major points of the SPs, was that a work should be judged by its own merit. There have been many talented yet flawed people through out history. If someone is able to make a compelling sorry it should not matter that they are a horrible person personally. An authors beliefs, no matter how insane or offensive, should not factor in, unless they make it onto a page.
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The Swashy Award nominees for best self-characterization in this forum thread are:
Joshua, "OP"
Bobboau, "Reactionary"
Lorric, "Muddling"
Scotty, "Gonna Ban You"
Zacam, "Ban-dage"
General Battuta, "Ban Me"
Goober5000, "Supremely FANTASTIC"
swashmebuckle, "Useless Awards Post"
The voting period is now over and the winner was write in candidate:
Scourge of Ages, "Puppy disappointment"
Better luck next kerfuffle!
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I believe goober's point, and one of the major points of the SPs, was that a work should be judged by its own merit. There have been many talented yet flawed people through out history. If someone is able to make a compelling sorry it should not matter that they are a horrible person personally. An authors beliefs, no matter how insane or offensive, should not factor in, unless they make it onto a page.
This is paradoxical. Say Mr. Scumbag Steve is a talented author with a number brilliant works, very provoking stories that push the boundaries of the imaginations of its readers and overall masterpieces. He is, unfortunately, a completely vile human being. A peerless man who scorns any and all close to him, very impolite, a puppy killer, likes to eat baby chicks, and took our jerbs!
In a capitalist, consumer driven economy, readers buy works that they feel are well made, entertaining, informative, etc.. The money from the sale of these works then help drive the production of similar works by the same author. But of course the money do not solely go into the further production of works, no, humans are not simple machines where money goes in, products come out--the money also goes into the general livelihood of the author.
Thus, this presents a paradox to the ethical consumer who is aware of the author's antics. Does the money from the sale of the book go more into the production of more works, or does it go more into feeding the vices of a bottom-feeder that is a detriment to society (if it were not for the presence of his works)? From the viewpoint of the consumer, "Should I buy this book, because it is good, and I want more books like it?" or "Should I not buy this book, because its author will spend it all on dildos so he can superglue them to the butts of pigs?"
[Edited for better English and added a funny viewpoint]
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OK then if that's the case then they were right, the award is and has been highly political. You just proved them correct. Congratulations.
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The Swashy Award nominees for best self-characterization in this forum thread are:
I just gave you a Gold Star for that, I don't think I've laughed that hard in a while now.
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Goober are you seriously, seriously saying that John C. Wright should be nominated for or have the potential to receive an award of any kind despite his public declaration that black people aren't socially evolved enough to have developed a real society (among many other, equally or even more heinous things)?
What the ****, man.
Of course he should be nominated. Hugo awards should be apolitical, the work should be judged solely on its literary merit. Not by political views of the author. It should not matter whether the author is a white supremacist, black supremacist, anti-womens rights, radical feminist, far right activist, bigot, communist, anarchist or islamic fundamentalist.. if she writes great stories, then thats all that should matter.
As I said earlier, if there is leftist bias in the awards (and posts like yours demonstrate there could be), then a reactionary stance is justified. No matter what your personal political stance is, but purely to keep the awards apolitical. I do disagree with Sad Puppies methods, tough.
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Would, under the current climate, Starship Troopers (or any other awarded work by Heinlein) have received a nomination (much less won) if published today? Or Ender's Game by Orson Scoot Card? Or any other work by a bigoted author?
And the most important question since we are going down this path, how much of a bigot do you have to be to be excommunicated from being nominated?
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Would, under the current climate, Starship Troopers (or any other awarded work by Heinlein) have received a nomination (much less won) if published today? Or Ender's Game by Orson Scoot Card? Or any other work by a bigoted author?
I think this is a severely flawed argument. All it does is to point out that SF culture has changed over the past decades, which is pretty obvious. The great works of the past, if they were transplanted unchanged into a modern setting, will always come up short against stuff that is written with current sensibilities in mind. One of my favourite novels, Dune, would have little chance against modern works, with a modern audience. Why? Because it was written with the explicit intent to subvert the Campbellian stereotype hero, and since that stereotype isn't as relevant now as it was when Herbert wrote the piece, the impact of this thing would be much reduced.
As I said earlier, if there is leftist bias in the awards (and posts like yours demonstrate there could be), then a reactionary stance is justified. No matter what your personal political stance is, but purely to keep the awards apolitical. I do disagree with Sad Puppies methods, tough.
Please read the piece by GRRM that was linked to earlier in the thread. If there is a bias, it doesn't really seem to manifest itself in who gets nominated (and as GRRM points out, the awards where not works, but people get nominated and which are thus more liable to be influenced by the politics of the person being nominated show no giant slant towards any particular ideology).
There's also this long piece by Matthew Sturridge, one of the writers who was on the puppy slate, but declined the nomination: http://www.blackgate.com/2015/04/04/a-detailed-explanation/
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*looks in*
*sees all the mess*
*laughs at swashmebuckle's post*
*Gets the **** out*
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*looks in*
*sees all the mess*
*laughs at swashmebuckle's post*
*Gets the **** out*
It's so nice to have good, nuanced arguments furthering the thread and enlightening its readers like this.
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I think that when it comes to art, personal views of the author do not need to be factored into a decision whether something is good or not. H.P. Lovecraft was ridiculously racist by modern standards (less ridiculously so by contemporary standards), you can tell that from his works. Yet it doesn't take away from them, and "colored" people read and enjoyed his works just like white ones. Indeed, given the era his works are set in, this gives them a feeling of authenticity few modern writers would dare to evoke (indeed, many of those touches often get left out of adaptations, not always for the better).
If a work is good, then it is so regardless of whether the author is a prick or not. If he smuggles too much of his political views into the work, it'll simply stop being good, especially if those views are bigoted (or not, but writing something where you'd hate the message, yet can't help to admire otherwise takes a true master). As such, awards should be given out regardless of the author's personal rants. If he's too bigoted to share a room with people he hates, he can simply decline the award. Literary awards are given for literature, not social conduct.
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<stuff>
Scotty worded my point in his post a lot better then I could have done. However, I am curious about one thing: "Witch hunting"? I thought that witch hunting is focussing on one individual and painting her as the source of all evil, whilst I am denouncing a campaign because of it's methods. Vote rigging to counter vote rigging is a terrible idea, esp. as the original claim of vote rigging seems to be unfounded as the infamous George RR Martin so neatly explains in this particular notablogpost (http://grrm.livejournal.com/418285.html).
Since reading that blogpost though (I follow GRRMs (not-a-)blog quite a bit), I also read this particular blogpost (http://grrm.livejournal.com/419232.html). That, along with General Battuta's posts here in this thread, made me realize that people are getting hurt over this. Your post makes a lot more sense in that context. I hate the justify the means approach, especially since lately the means seem to run counter to the ends. I apologize for having contributed to that in the OP, and I shall now excuse myself from the thread as I do not want to contribute to this extremely toxic issue in any way.
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This isn't an issue about the definition of the word "bigot" but more about the idea of how/when/where it gets applied and under what consideration/discretion vs. just by presumption. Especially with social media making it a lot easier for people to instantly jump on pretty much anything in a heartbeat and flail the **** out of it and suddenly somebody ends up dead, and for what reason?
This.
In this thread: Lorric defends equality.
Ftfy.
Goober are you seriously, seriously saying that John C. Wright should be nominated for or have the potential to receive an award of any kind despite his public declaration that black people aren't socially evolved enough to have developed a real society (among many other, equally or even more heinous things)?
What the ****, man.
Of course he should be nominated. Hugo awards should be apolitical, the work should be judged solely on its literary merit. Not by political views of the author. It should not matter whether the author is a white supremacist, black supremacist, anti-womens rights, radical feminist, far right activist, bigot, communist, anarchist or islamic fundamentalist.. if she writes great stories, then thats all that should matter.
This is an excellent summary of my stance on this.
@z64555
There is no contradiction. This isn’t about the individual consumer. They can spend their money on whatever they please, for whatever reason they please. This is about integrity of giving out awards. It should be based purely on the work. Judging the work, not the author. A level playing field for one and all.
The Swashy Award nominees for best self-characterization in this forum thread are:
I just gave you a Gold Star for that, I don't think I've laughed that hard in a while now.
Looks like Zacam wants to win the next Swashy Award. Blatantly buttering up the judge! Conspiracy! ;)
It was nice to see someone try and inject some levity into the thread.
*looks in*
*sees all the mess*
*laughs at swashmebuckle's post*
*Gets the **** out*
It's so nice to have good, nuanced arguments furthering the thread and enlightening its readers like this.
I expect he has better things to do with his time than get dogpiled on and have his words twisted and be vilified and told he is wrong by The Clique.
Do such things qualify as good, nuanced arguments in your World I wonder?
As for the rest of you I am very happy to see that there are plenty of you who don’t subscribe to this imo insanity. It's agreeable to not tolerate intolerant behaviours. But you don't reverse or correct that intolerant behaviour by delivering against it the same format of intolerance.
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*looks in*
*sees all the mess*
*laughs at swashmebuckle's post*
*Gets the **** out*
It's so nice to have good, nuanced arguments furthering the thread and enlightening its readers like this.
I expect he has better things to do with his time than get dogpiled on and have his words twisted and be vilified and told he is wrong by The Clique.
Do such things qualify as good, nuanced arguments in your World I wonder?
If he has better things to do, which I would totally understand, then the done thing is to not post in the thread at all. To ignore it, and move on. Not to drop in, claim that everything's a mess, and drop out again. Can you understand why doing what Luis did does not do the discussion any good?
See, I know for a fact that Luis has opinions on this. We talked about them on Twitter. I would have liked to have his perspective here, where thoughts can go for more than just 140 characters. Instead, he ****posted and got out. That's not what I want to see in this, or any, thread.
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Ah, I understand. :)
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On topic:
Goober are you seriously, seriously saying that John C. Wright should be nominated for or have the potential to receive an award of any kind despite his public declaration that black people aren't socially evolved enough to have developed a real society (among many other, equally or even more heinous things)?
What the ****, man.
Of course he should be nominated. Hugo awards should be apolitical, the work should be judged solely on its literary merit. Not by political views of the author. It should not matter whether the author is a white supremacist, black supremacist, anti-womens rights, radical feminist, far right activist, bigot, communist, anarchist or islamic fundamentalist.. if she writes great stories, then thats all that should matter.
This is an excellent summary of my stance on this.
In principle, I have no issue with voting on merit alone, judging the work independent from the author. It's a good, useful stance.
But let me introduce you to a bit of a dilemma I recently encountered. Have you heard of Benjanun Sriduangkaew? She was one of 2012's big revelations, a young, female, lesbian author from Thailand who wrote stunning short fiction. She was a progressive SF's poster child, an aggressive and loud voice on social issues and a highly skilled writer, culminating in her being nominated for the John Campbell award for best new writer (Which is one of the Hugo awards) in 2014.
But that's not all she was. Under several pseudonyms, she was also an intensely toxic part of SFF fandom. She was trolling, manipulating, deceiving and has, together with the substantial following she gathered, driven other people out of fandom, and writing. There's a comprehensive report about her and her activities here (http://laurajmixon.com/2014/11/a-report-on-damage-done-by-one-individual-under-several-names).
Now, does that change her writing? Does this make Chang'e Dashes from the Moon worse? Of course it doesn't. But it does raise the question whether an individual like Sriduangkaew is someone we want to be honored or validated through awards. Whether we're willing to accept the toxic influence she, or someone like her, brings to the table in addition to her literary achievements. Personally, knowing what I now know, I cannot in good conscience recommend her work, even if it is good. The same mechanism is true for people like John C. Wright and Vox Day: I cannot disassociate their creative works and the rather toxic stuff they say and do elsewhere. These are not people I want to have as ambassadors for SF/F, as representatives of the best the field can do in this particular year.
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*looks in*
*sees all the mess*
*laughs at swashmebuckle's post*
*Gets the **** out*
that's probably the correct response.
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@ The E
I Haven't heard of her.
I know what you mean. In terms of honouring people, I look at it differently. Yes, the author claims the reward, but I look at the work. The work will survive after the author's bones have turned to dust. Should we lose great work just because the author is a bad person?
In terms of the damaging impact someone might be having, I don't think the awards ceremony is the place to be opposing that. Let them claim the award if they have earned it. This individual did something positive and deserves the acknowledgement. That doesn't mean the bad things they have done just get swept under the rug. If the person is doing horrible things, then resistance to that should be through the proper channels. Through the law if it warrants it. I've got no issue with someone being exposed for what they are to the World. But it's credit where credit is due. Whether that is for producing great work or for being a horrible person.
In terms of your moral dilemma, I would advise to separate the work from the author. That doesn't mean you can't give your opinion on the author and the work at the same time. Give both. Then let the person decide what they want to do with all the information at their disposal.
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In terms of your moral dilemma, I would advise to separate the work from the author. That doesn't mean you can't give your opinion on the author and the work at the same time. Give both. Then let the person decide what they want to do with all the information at their disposal.
I am perfectly capable of that. I read John Ringo for fun, for crying out loud (and that dude's personal politics, which quite frequently enter his writing, are lightyears away from my own). And if it was simply a question of "is this book good or not", I have no problems recommending them while adding appropriate caveats.
But when it comes to figuring out whether a person should get an award, with all the prestige and sales-boosting that implies? That's a different issue. Not when the disagreement is over normal politics, of course. But when Wright goes on an epic rant over one of the tamest, most family-friendly portrayal of a bisexual couple, or VD calls people of color inhuman, then I'm going to firmly say no. Those people are NOT the best SF has to offer, and regardless of the merit of their work, dickishness on that scale does IMHO disqualify them for receiving awards like the Hugo, at least temporarily.
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In principle, I have no issue with voting on merit alone, judging the work independent from the author. It's a good, useful stance.
But let me introduce you to a bit of a dilemma I recently encountered. Have you heard of Benjanun Sriduangkaew? She was one of 2012's big revelations, a young, female, lesbian author from Thailand who wrote stunning short fiction. She was a progressive SF's poster child, an aggressive and loud voice on social issues and a highly skilled writer, culminating in her being nominated for the John Campbell award for best new writer (Which is one of the Hugo awards) in 2014.
But that's not all she was. Under several pseudonyms, she was also an intensely toxic part of SFF fandom. She was trolling, manipulating, deceiving and has, together with the substantial following she gathered, driven other people out of fandom, and writing. There's a comprehensive report about her and her activities here (http://laurajmixon.com/2014/11/a-report-on-damage-done-by-one-individual-under-several-names).
Now, does that change her writing? Does this make Chang'e Dashes from the Moon worse? Of course it doesn't. But it does raise the question whether an individual like Sriduangkaew is someone we want to be honored or validated through awards. Whether we're willing to accept the toxic influence she, or someone like her, brings to the table in addition to her literary achievements. Personally, knowing what I now know, I cannot in good conscience recommend her work, even if it is good. The same mechanism is true for people like John C. Wright and Vox Day: I cannot disassociate their creative works and the rather toxic stuff they say and do elsewhere. These are not people I want to have as ambassadors for SF/F, as representatives of the best the field can do in this particular year.
Then why keep naming the best new writer award, the Campbell award? If the issue is sullying the name of the awards, the fact that one of the awards is named after a bigot makes it a moot point.
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But when it comes to figuring out whether a person should get an award, with all the prestige and sales-boosting that implies? That's a different issue. Not when the disagreement is over normal politics, of course. But when Wright goes on an epic rant over one of the tamest, most family-friendly portrayal of a bisexual couple, or VD calls people of color inhuman, then I'm going to firmly say no. Those people are NOT the best SF has to offer, and regardless of the merit of their work, dickishness on that scale does IMHO disqualify them for receiving awards like the Hugo, at least temporarily.
No, it doesn't. You advocate bringing politics into something that is a purely literary award. Especially in light of what you said before (that this doesn't make the work any less good), it's hypocrisy. Credit is where credit's due, and awards should be given out fairly. If a racist tennis player wins a tennis match, would you disqualify him because he's racist? No, as long as he didn't do anything unsportsmanlike during the match, the ref has no right to deny him the cup. it's up to his manager or club (or, in extreme cases, authorities) to punish him for public displays of racial hatred. But, regardless of all that, he still won the match. He might be a prick about it, but if he didn't break any rules on the court, he won and that's beyond question.
Also, it's up to media to bring up the winner's dirty laundry in the aftermatch of the ceremony and let people know he's not a good person. This usually happens anyway, press loves doing that. A literary award committee should be impartial and is definitely not supposed to incite people boycott an author because of his views. People are free to do that on their own, if they so please. Judges should stay out of all disputes like that. Leave behind-the-scenes stuff to someone else. If you allow judges to engage in politics, then you'll have the award lose credibility.
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No, it doesn't. You advocate bringing politics into something that is a purely literary award. Especially in light of what you said before (that this doesn't make the work any less good), it's hypocrisy. Credit is where credit's due, and awards should be given out fairly. If a racist tennis player wins a tennis match, would you disqualify him because he's racist? No, as long as he didn't do anything unsportsmanlike during the match, the ref has no right to deny him the cup. it's up to his manager or club (or, in extreme cases, authorities) to punish him for public displays of racial hatred. But, regardless of all that, he still won the match. He might be a prick about it, but if he didn't break any rules on the court, he won and that's beyond question.
Okay, here's the thing.
I am explaining my personal preferences when it comes to these awards, and how I would vote if I had a vote. Yes, there's a political component. Yes, there's a difference between me voting on an award, and me recommending something to a friend or in a thread on the internet. Because I do believe that award winners for awards like the Hugo should be representative of the field. Homophobes and internet trolls? Not representative. People who used outrage mongering to get a nomination? Not representative (And yes, from what I can tell, SP/RP is outrage mongering at its finest).
I am voting, as I should, based on my personal preferences. Those preferences do include a preference for award winners who are non-****ty persons.
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In terms of your moral dilemma, I would advise to separate the work from the author. That doesn't mean you can't give your opinion on the author and the work at the same time. Give both. Then let the person decide what they want to do with all the information at their disposal.
I am perfectly capable of that. I read John Ringo for fun, for crying out loud (and that dude's personal politics, which quite frequently enter his writing, are lightyears away from my own). And if it was simply a question of "is this book good or not", I have no problems recommending them while adding appropriate caveats.
But when it comes to figuring out whether a person should get an award, with all the prestige and sales-boosting that implies? That's a different issue. Not when the disagreement is over normal politics, of course. But when Wright goes on an epic rant over one of the tamest, most family-friendly portrayal of a bisexual couple, or VD calls people of color inhuman, then I'm going to firmly say no. Those people are NOT the best SF has to offer, and regardless of the merit of their work, dickishness on that scale does IMHO disqualify them for receiving awards like the Hugo, at least temporarily.
I don't know if I can dissuade you from your personal in an ideal World opinion on this, but what about the issues of actually implementing such a thing? Even if we imagine you get your vision, it wouldn't stay like that. Besides the issues of how to actually manage such a system and where to draw the line, you'd get pressure groups wanting their personal blacklist put in place, people running the awards tweaking the eligibility rules to their liking, and then suddenly Award X is cut off to atheists and homosexuals, Award Y has restrictions on the content of the books crippling creativity, Award Z is a mess of Political Correctness gone mad. People might be innocent victims of smear campaigns to render them ineligible. It's Pandora's Box and once it's open I don't think you can put everything back in the box and shut it again.
If you have no discrimination, then no one will be treated unfairly. There won't be any victims. There won't be any preferred ideologies or people valued less than others. It is safe, clean and fair. Objective not subjective.
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In principle, I have no issue with voting on merit alone, judging the work independent from the author. It's a good, useful stance.
But let me introduce you to a bit of a dilemma I recently encountered. Have you heard of Benjanun Sriduangkaew?
Give her the award if her work is up to it. I have no problem with an author being recognized for the quality of their work, and at the same time being shamed by sci-fi community as a toxic person. "Separating work from the author" is not just useful, it should be the main paradigm of any self-respecting awards, otherwise we risk Hugos degenerating into a popularity contest and a political slapfight.
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See, I know for a fact that Luis has opinions on this. We talked about them on Twitter. I would have liked to have his perspective here, where thoughts can go for more than just 140 characters. Instead, he ****posted and got out. That's not what I want to see in this, or any, thread.
I'm sorry The_E, it didn't come out well I agree. My sentiment was not so much "stoopid thread", more like "minefield thread, just *don't*".
Regarding my own views, they have been swinging and your own words and retweets and whatnots have indeed influenced my take on it. It also doesn't help that while I have my own views, I see here Battuta posting his own much more "insider" opinion on the matter (he is a TOR sci fi published author, after all!) and I just think that in this particular case, my words won't help many people anyway.
As a last sentiment, and take this with all the grains of salt of the world, I'd wish worldcon could finally come to terms what the Hugo's are actually about, if they are to be taken as seriously as an Oscar or a Pritzker, or if they are just this small sci-fi convention fans' thing. If the latter, well, rewrite the rules and make sure only those they approve of can win the prize. If the former, then a serious rethinking of the prize could be in order.
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I don't know if I can dissuade you from your personal in an ideal World opinion on this, but what about the issues of actually implementing such a thing? Even if we imagine you get your vision, it wouldn't stay like that. Besides the issues of how to actually manage such a system and where to draw the line, you'd get pressure groups wanting their personal blacklist put in place, people running the awards tweaking the eligibility rules to their liking, and then suddenly Award X is cut off to atheists and homosexuals, Award Y has restrictions on the content of the books crippling creativity, Award Z is a mess of Political Correctness gone mad. People might be innocent victims of smear campaigns to render them ineligible. It's Pandora's Box and once it's open I don't think you can put everything back in the box and shut it again.
And that the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies used explicitly political means towards an explicitly political goal, at the expense of a whole slew of novels and writers which under normal circumstances would have gotten their nominations and potential wins doesn't bother you? As far as I can tell, based on the pieces by GRRM and Storridge linked to in this thread, the politicization of the awards that the Sad/Rabid Puppies are fighting against doesn't exist. Now it does. Now the awards ARE politicized, quite blatantly so, because now there's an actual equivalent to a political party operating where there was none before.
What, I ask you, is more in keeping with the spirit of these awards? Me expressing my preferences, or me voting on a slate of works approved by party leaders?
If you have no discrimination, then no one will be treated unfairly. There won't be any victims. There won't be any preferred ideologies or people valued less than others. It is safe, clean and fair. Objective not subjective.
Dude. This is about matters of taste. The only objectivity here is in the aggregate, and the SP/RP people have thoroughly destroyed any possibility of it. There was discrimination at the Hugos this year. On an unprecedented scale.
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how is this for a compromise, give horrible people the award if their work merits it and use the occasion to shame them?
not officially, or at the moment of them receiving it, but other than that fair game?
them winning the award gives you an opportunity to bring up all of their bad stuff?
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I don't think a compromise is needed. I'm talking about my personal stances on these issues, I am not trying to outline a code of conduct or anything for the Hugos.
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Just a small tidbit here. You claim that it wasn't politicized, well isn't that the exact accusation from sad puppies? That the whole enterprise was skewed politically in a way that perhaps just felt natural and lacking in ideology in any way to those who were inside of it like a fish being unaware he is inside water? Kinda reminds me that particular Errant Signal's video about politics in video games. There's never "politics" when things are just running well to you, it just feels "natural".
And if you look at the last page filled with violent attacks of certain particular people due to their ignobil opinions on any matter (absolutely zero to do with Hugo awards), the last thing that comes to mind is "wow, this field is really apolitical, just look at these words, so void of politics". Beale, for all his .... ahhh... ideas, might not be 100% wrong in his take that there were machineries at work. Look at his numbers on his blog.
Regarding Beale's ideas... well. I have read many many things in my internet life. I like to proudly think I've stomached a lot of shenanigans just so I can try to understand the world from the writer's own point of view. Beale is at the forefront of the crazy, not entirely the nastiest of the nasty, but then I've read Unreserved Qualifications as well, so there.
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Thing is, are the Hugo awards any different from any other ceremony along similar lines? They are all popularity contests and political slap-fights at the end of the day.
I think the issue is not that the awards are politicized in some way, that's inevitable, the issue is that this is not how you deal with it, you'll just turn the Hugo awards into a kind of Eurovision song contest, and no-one takes that seriously any more. This kind of thing is far more likely to break something that has a problem rather than fix it.
This always happens when something that was considered 'niche' becomes more mainstream, look at Punk Rock, 'mainstream' Punk is practically an oxymoron in the first place, and the same goes for sci-fi/fantasy, it's big business now, not just the arena of kids and spectacle-wearing 'geeks' a-la George McFly, there's more money to be made, and that creates industrialization of the industry with its inevitable power-plays and conceptual battles and ends up killing the thing at the very heart of it, the love of the story.
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E, so do I understand correctly, you're just talking about your personal taste rather than wanting that taste imposed on award ceremonies?
About the Puppies, I don't know enough about the subject matter to know if they actually were discriminated against, but I do think that the belief was sincere. I don't think this was some cheap grab for awards, and a lot of people seem to have bought into it. It looks like they thought they were being discriminated against and so took matters into their own hands to combat that discrimination.
I said early in the thread that I think it will be interesting to see what happens after. It's unfortunate, and this year's awards will certainly have taken a heavy hit in credibility due to it. But what's done is done. Now people need to sit down and start talking about where this all went wrong and fix it. It's counterproductive to all involved if this degenerates into a politicised farce. The Hugos would soon lose all credibility and maybe even collapse completely and then everyone loses. And no one wants that.
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Just a small tidbit here. You claim that it wasn't politicized, well isn't that the exact accusation from sad puppies? That the whole enterprise was skewed politically in a way that perhaps just felt natural and lacking in ideology in any way to those who were inside of it like a fish being unaware he is inside water? Kinda reminds me that particular Errant Signal's video about politics in video games. There's never "politics" when things are just running well to you, it just feels "natural".
That is certainly a possibility. Still, I find the analysis Storridge and GRRM did to be compelling, more so than the case Correia et al have made.
E, so do I understand correctly, you're just talking about your personal taste rather than wanting that taste imposed on award ceremonies?
Yes, I am. I have no desire to impose my views on these matters on anyone, and I have certainly no desire to have another's opinion imposed on me.
About the Puppies, I don't know enough about the subject matter to know if they actually were discriminated against, but I do think that the belief was sincere. I don't think this was some cheap grab for awards, and a lot of people seem to have bought into it. It looks like they thought they were being discriminated against and so took matters into their own hands to combat that discrimination.
Oh, the belief was certainly sincere, but again: So far, it doesn't look particularly justified to me. Please read this (http://www.blackgate.com/2015/04/04/a-detailed-explanation/).
I said early in the thread that I think it will be interesting to see what happens after. It's unfortunate, and this year's awards will certainly have taken a heavy hit in credibility due to it. But what's done is done. Now people need to sit down and start talking about where this all went wrong and fix it. It's counterproductive to all involved if this degenerates into a politicised farce. The Hugos would soon lose all credibility and maybe even collapse completely and then everyone loses. And no one wants that.
Here's the thing though: The awards haven't been awarded yet. That happens in August.
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The Hugos are so biased against right-wing authors that Orson Scott Card won back to back Hugos for Best Novel.
I'm going to let that sink in for a second.
If you still aren't convinced, read George R. R. Martin's posts that were linked earlier in the thread.
On the subject of who should be considered for Hugos, no, political stances alone should never, ever be grounds for disqualifying someone for nomination for a literary award, doubly so if the awards are for speculative fiction, where an everything goes attitude needs to be encouraged.
But if you don't even think that some of the individuals you're going to be sharing the stage with are people, and have made statements about harming their kind due to that fact, you deserve to have your ass thrown out. I think that goes beyond political opinion.
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I'd argue that the reason Eurovision isn't taken seriously is precisely because all those machinations are deniable, they just feel wrong. If some crazy actor started saying it was all a scheme and proved it with his actions by winning it, then people would suddenly become interested again, just like when a sham is exposed.
I agree with the "love bit" though.
The Hugos are so biased against right-wing authors that Orson Scott Card won back to back Hugos for Best Novel.
He won his last Hugo award 24 years ago.
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Regardless of what people think about what the Hugo Award's political biases were previously, it all pales in comparison to what the 'puppies have turned it into: Only one or two writers in each catagory of the awards are not on the SP or Vox Day lists.
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Also, was KJA's nomination the work of the sad puppies?
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Well, he was on the SP3 slate.
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I'd argue that the reason Eurovision isn't taken seriously is precisely because all those machinations are deniable, they just feel wrong. If some crazy actor started saying it was all a scheme and proved it with his actions by winning it, then people would suddenly become interested again, just like when a sham is exposed.
I agree with the "love bit" though.
The Hugos are so biased against right-wing authors that Orson Scott Card won back to back Hugos for Best Novel.
He won his last Hugo award 24 years ago.
The thing is, the reason that Eurovision became such a joke was because of bloc voting that was obviously designed to meet political goals rather than artistic ones, that's why nobody really makes an effort any more, because they know it doesn't matter how good or bad they are, the relationship between their governments has far more impact on the vote, if you inject the same mentality into the Hugo awards you'll get the same result.
The ironic part is, it won't damage sci-fi any more than Eurovision has damaged music, but it will just make the whole award thing less relevant, so at the end of the day, it just seems a case of people firmly taking aim at their own feet.
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This suggests there may have been some collusion with a member of the award committee and an editor from Tor (http://madgeniusclub.com/2015/04/13/nostradumbass-and-madame-bugblatterfatski/)
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There's a comprehensive report about her and her activities here (http://laurajmixon.com/2014/11/a-report-on-damage-done-by-one-individual-under-several-names).
I read that. Ugly stuff.
I wonder if there might actually be a legitimate case to blacklist this one. Since she's been attacking her fellow writers directly, that could be seen as damaging the competition. The personal and the professional are entwined.
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This suggests there may have been some collusion with a member of the award committee and an editor from Tor (http://madgeniusclub.com/2015/04/13/nostradumbass-and-madame-bugblatterfatski/)
Also a bunch of very angry rhetoric and capital letters and a measly two links. Not really that credible, by my estimation.
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Have you actually read it? Why should I be expected to read the links you posted when you can just write "lol, TLDR"?
Summarizing it for you, how did Teresa Nielsen Hayden know that Larry Correia had been nominated before he rejected the nomination and announced it?
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I read it. And the author manages to blow that question up into several paragraphs worth of angry ranting. And all of that not to prove that the Hugo organizers are corrupt or manipulating votes or anything that would actually matter, but no. It's all about the evil Teresa Nielsen-Hayden and journalists writing hit pieces.
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I read it. And the author manages to blow that question up into several paragraphs worth of angry ranting. And all of that not to prove that the Hugo organizers are corrupt or manipulating votes or anything that would actually matter, but no. It's all about the evil Teresa Nielsen-Hayden and journalists writing hit pieces.
I was going to write that TNH knowing about the results before hand could mean in terms of corruption of the Hugos. But you know what? I'm tired.
If in the end you will ignore anything I write in favor of "Well, the author is obviously angry and biased" I might as well not waste my time.
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I'd been tangentially following this for a while, read GRRM's piece before it was posted here. Whether Sad Puppies / Rabid Puppies have a point I'll leave to others to work out. From GRRM's analysis, it appears not.
Whether they're justified in putting forward groups of candidates... well, yeah. Anyone is free to conduct advocacy work, whether or not we agree with it, on what work deserves recognition and what does not. We all have different tastes, whether politically-motivated or not, and are free to act on them. If the people who are so vociferously against SP and RP don't like those slates, they are free to (1) advocate for a rule change, (2) nominate their own slates, or (3) both. Or they can ***** online and trash their opponents reputations (not that ****heads like Vox Day haven't done all the damage they can do to themselves). There's a far bit of hashtag activism in this whole thing which isn't accomplishing much at all... much like certain other online movements/counter-movements whose names shall not be uttered.
On the notion that we should judge a work independent of its author, I actually agree. There are a lot of ****heads that write really compelling work; there are also a lot of really awful works written by some otherwise great people. Awards should be for merit. On the other hand, I fully support activism and boycotts of people who are REALLY ****ty, their word notwithstanding. For example, Orson Scott Card, despite having written some things I've found interesting, will never see so much as a cent from me because of his political views and who he uses his money to support. Does that mean his work doesn't deserve an award? Not necessarily - but I wouldn't have a problem with people promoting another on-par-for-quality work over his on an award slate.
I grow increasingly wary of online campaigns against the injustice-du-jour because I'm not entirely convinced that there is truly a right or a wrong side to many of them, just slightly different perspectives being blown way out of proportion in social media. And as far as the Hugo's go, there seems a relatively straightforward fix that either hasn't occurred to the people opposing SP/RP, or simply hasn't been acted on, to which I say: stop hashtagging and do something about it already. All awards ceremonies are political *gasp*. If you want your politics to win, start doing something about it. Irate tweets, blogs, and Facebook posts without a course of action don't count.
But Vox Day is a straight-up bigoted asshole, lest there be any confusion on that point.
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I find it hilarious how butthurt the conservative folks are about their ideas sucking so much that they can't legitimately win awards. I wonder if this 'controversy' has a conservapedia article.
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@MP-Ryan:
You would not believe how refreshing it is to hear a reasonable attitude such as yours presented here. Thank you.
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It seems like there's kind of an awkward tension between SciFi's pluralist "lets explore lots of different ideas with our imaginations!" current and the basic idea of an award, which is a pretty unicultural "There can be only one victor!" jam. These cracks in the foundation are there in all art awards to a greater or lesser degree though (the Annual Biggest Statue Awards being the notable and ironic exception), so maybe the Hugos' problem is really that there just isn't enough money to hold everything together at the moment.
$40 buys you a vote? What the dunkey dung is that? All the legit awards are transparent 'money-grabby under a thin veneer of artsiness' affairs where the people voting have (or at one point had) a vested interest in the promotion of the medium. Your voting strategy has to either be only the people who are paying serious dues and really want to promote it or otherwise let anybody vote with as low a barrier as possible a la Kids Choice Awards. Putting up a middling barrier to voting is the worst possible method. If legit award shows worked that way, you would see "The Passion of the Christ" taking home the Oscar for Best Documentary.
You think I'm done ranting?! I've gota GOld StarrOK. People think the Hugos are about "norming" and exercising social control? That's a joke, home slice! Those chumps can't even exercise proper control over the people who win! As the recent recipient of HLP's prestigious Gold Star, there have already been several occasions where I've kept my mouth shut because the Gold Star Award can be revoked at any time and I didn't want to risk losing that sweet added bit of luster in my late posting career. Can a Hugo even be taken away? If Battuta wins a Hugo and then we figure out he's a genocidal robot, is Hugo gonna come to my house and pick up my Kindle and rip off the cover of all of his Ebooks that were sold with their badge on it? The Gold Star is ten times the award the Hugo is! Even in this very thread I've wanted to give Goober and Zacam and Karajorma WHO I NOTE IS CONVENIENTLY ABSENT a piece of my mind but that shiny star by my name has held my tongue. You know what?... NO LONGER! I'm tired of this tyranny, it's time to stand up for femalnism and let slip some choice words!
Ah, but the star, the star. Well, maybe just one choice word:
Marmaduke
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basic idea of an award, which is a pretty unicultural "There can be only one victor!" jam.
Quote sniping FTW
But... As the Hugo Loser's club shows, being nominated in itself is a great honour - it's a bit like the olympics - sure you want to be the best of the best, but if you lose, you are still part of the best.
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I agree with that, I just think that any group that tries to position itself as an authority on a given (highly subjective) subject and goes about making a show of picking out winners and losers isn't ever really going to be in sync with the artistic side of things, especially in a field founded on an infinite diversity of "what if" types of ideas. What an award system is in sync with is industry-wide promotion and making a lot of money. The Oscars rake in colossal sums of money for the movie industry every year because not only do people watch the show, they've gone out beforehand and seen all the movies that got nominated or even just got Oscar buzz. I suspect Science Fiction readers are just as passionate as movie buffs if not more so despite the much smaller nature of the business, but if the Hugos are their main award then the industry seems to be doing a pretty bad job of protecting their collective brand.
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Welp, I actually have little to say about the Hugo Awards except Social Media is full of idiocy that it makes mah brain hurt.
While social media was supposed to an ideal place for people to exchange and share information, not all that info is going to be pretty and people don't agree. (I would argue in the wake of GG and Twitter hashtags, grandstanding IS a thing now because people recognize it generates buzz, no matter the message or intent, however, sooner or later people will stop giving a damn when the fad grows old).
Authors can say wacky things, and even be utter cynical degrading pricks, but it opens a can of worms if a work of literature should be judged on its merits or its connotations with its authors?
I'm just going to say that social media has its boons, and its busts for things we love or hold very dear as our hobbies.
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That's the whole reason that having a sane, mature discussion on the Internet is so hard, controversy=attention, and there seem to be a LOT of attention whores out there these days.
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There isn't any more attention whores these days than before, it's just that they internet gave them a whole slew of ways to attract attention. Previously, you could make an idiot of yourself and end up on some local newspaper, but you had to work hard even for that unless news were really slow that day. :) Now, you can make an idiot of yourself and post it on YouTube for the entire world to see.
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In response to the stuff going on, Connie Willis has declined her invitation to become a presenter (http://azsf.net/cwblog/?p=116).
It is an interesting bit as it does show how far things have come all of a sudden.
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And in further news, Annie Bellet (Nominee for best short story for "Goodnight Stars") and Marko Kloos (Nominee for best novel for "Lines of Departure") have both withdrawn their nominations. Both of these authors were featured on the Sad/Rabid Puppies slates.
Bellet says: (https://overactive.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/hugo-story-withdrawn/) I want to make it clear I am not doing this lightly. I am not doing it because I
am ashamed. I am not doing it because I was pressured by anyone either way or on
any “side,” though many friends have made cogent arguments for both keeping my
nomination and sticking it out, as well as for retracting it and letting things proceed without me in the middle.
I am withdrawing because this has become about something very different than great science fiction. I find my story, and by extension myself, stuck in a game of political dodge ball, where I’m both a conscripted player and also a ball. (Wrap your head around that analogy, if you can, ha!) All joy that might have come from this nomination has been co-opted, ruined, or sapped away. This is not about celebrating good writing anymore, and I don’t want to be a part of what it has become.
I am not a ball. I do not want to be a player. This is not what my writing is about. This is not why I write. I believe in a compassionate, diverse, and inclusive world. I try to write my own take on human experiences and relationships, and present my fiction as entertainingly and honestly as I can.
Kloos: (http://www.munchkinwrangler.com/2015/04/15/a-statement-on-my-hugo-nomination/) It has come to my attention that “Lines of Departure” was one of the nomination suggestions in Vox Day’s “Rabid Puppies” campaign. Therefore—and regardless of who else has recommended the novel for award consideration—the presence of “Lines of Departure” on the shortlist is almost certainly due to my inclusion on the “Rabid Puppies” slate. For that reason, I had no choice but to withdraw my acceptance of the nomination. I cannot in good conscience accept an award nomination that I feel I may not have earned solely with the quality of the nominated work.
I also wish to disassociate myself from the originator of the “Rabid Puppies” campaign. To put it bluntly: if this nomination gives even the appearance that Vox Day or anyone else had a hand in giving it to me because of my perceived political leanings, I don’t want it. I want to be nominated for awards because of the work, not because of the “right” or “wrong” politics.
He further posted this on facebook: "My withdrawal has nothing to do with Larry Correia or Brad Torgersen. I don’t know Brad personally, but Larry is a long-time online acquaintance and friend. We’ve known each other since before our writing days. I have no issue with Larry or the Sad Puppies. I’m pulling out of the Hugo process solely because Vox Day also included me on his “Rabid Puppies” slate, and his RP crowd provided the necessary weight to the ballot to put me on the shortlist. I think Vox Day is a ****bag of the first order, and I don’t want any association with him, especially not a Hugo nomination made possible by his followers being the deciding factor. That stench don’t wash off."
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This will therefore probably reach a critical mass in which all the remaining authors who were nominated by being in the slates will be naturally pressed (not literally, but in matters of conscience, etc.) to withdraw as well. It's a proper response. The puppies were too successful for their own good, and while they have demonstrated that the whole process was flawed to begin with, they were incapable of showing the way forward. Especially rabid puppies. So all the while Vox is gleefully watching the Hugo process burning to the ground, the Hugos are burning to the ground.
Is it still possible to create a system that enables real inclusivity (and not just "for show" all the while suspicions of cliques dominating the processes are handwaved off) or are the Hugos killed for good? Because even if they somehow manage to kill the puppies and solve this problem by officially shunning away the conservative side of sci-fi for good as some kind of retaliation, then the Hugo's become effectively dead as an universal symbol of merit. They will become increasingly progressive for the mere inexistence of conservative pressure, and will very slowly (decades) turn into a ridiculous parody of itself.
This is why Beale thinks this is a no-lose situation for him. Either way the status quo responds to this crisis will mean a win for his agenda. Either the Hugo reforms itself and starts including conservatives more, or it decides to turn into tumblr sci fi awards, and it will happen in the name of getting rid the "scene" from "bigots and bigoted points of view", (it's always for good reasons that things go to ****, just watch the sad puppies go as an example), etc. It will be a ride to watch it unfold through the years.
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There's a post by Bruce Schneier on alternate voting systems over on Making Light (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016206.html). The thing is, every voting system can be gamed by a sufficiently determined and organized group. I think trying to determine eligibility by judging according to some arbitrary standard of "bigoted" is wrongness incarnate, this is not something the organizers of the awards should be in a position to do. If this is to be fixed, then the new system must be prepared to deal with slate voting as a constant and adjust for it.
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:bump:
And the results are in!
So, what did the people who actually showed up at Sasquan vote for? Turns out, while the Puppies were apparently great at doing the bits of Hugo influencing that doesn't actually require any real effort, they really sucked in the more important "Actually show up at WorldCon to vote" part.
End result: In all categories where the only nominees were from the (Sad|Rabid) Puppies slates (Best Novella, Short Story, Related Work, Editor Short Form, and Editor Long Form), they were outclassed by noted author No Award.
The other winners are:
BEST NOVEL: The Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu, Ken Liu translator (Tor Books)
BEST NOVELETTE: "The Day the World Turned Upside Down”, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Lia Belt translator (Lightspeed, 04-2014)
BEST GRAPHIC STORY: Ms. Marvel Volume 1: No Normal, written by G. Willow Wilson, illustrated by Adrian Alphona and Jake Wyatt, (Marvel Comics)
BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, LONG FORM: Guardians of the Galaxy, written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman, directed by James Gunn (Marvel Studios, Moving Picture Company)
BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, SHORT FORM: Orphan Black: “By Means Which Have Never Yet Been Tried”, ” written by Graham Manson, directed by John Fawcett (Temple Street Productions, Space/BBC America)
BEST PROFESSIONAL ARTIST: Julie Dillon
BEST SEMIPROZINE: Lightspeed Magazine, edited by John Joseph Adams, Stefan Rudnicki, Rich Horton, Wendy N. Wagner, and Christie Yant
BEST FANZINE: Journey Planet, edited by James Bacon, Christopher J Garcia, Colin Harris, Alissa McKersie, and Helen J. Montgomery
BEST FANCAST: Galactic Suburbia Podcast, Alisa Krasnostein, Alexandra Pierce, Tansy Rayner Roberts (Presenters) and Andrew Finch (Producer)
BEST FAN WRITER: Laura J. Mixon
BEST FAN ARTIST: Elizabeth Leggett
JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD FOR BEST NEW WRITER: Wesley Chu
It should be noted that this marks not only the first time a chinese Novel won Best Novel, but also the first time a translated work did so.
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So, what did the people who actually showed up at Sasquan vote for? Turns out, while the Puppies were apparently great at doing the bits of Hugo influencing that doesn't actually require any real effort, they really sucked in the more important "Actually show up at WorldCon to vote" part.
End result: In all categories where the only nominees were from the (Sad|Rabid) Puppies slates (Best Novella, Short Story, Related Work, Editor Short Form, and Editor Long Form), they were outclassed by noted author No Award.
Fascinating. I think this decisively proves the very point the Puppies were trying to make all along.
I will begin stocking up on popcorn for next year.
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I'm at Sasquan and got my hands on the nomination data. Hilariously, Brad Torgersen would've been nominated fair and square...except that he was bumped off by his own slate.
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So, what did the people who actually showed up at Sasquan vote for? Turns out, while the Puppies were apparently great at doing the bits of Hugo influencing that doesn't actually require any real effort, they really sucked in the more important "Actually show up at WorldCon to vote" part.
End result: In all categories where the only nominees were from the (Sad|Rabid) Puppies slates (Best Novella, Short Story, Related Work, Editor Short Form, and Editor Long Form), they were outclassed by noted author No Award.
Fascinating. I think this decisively proves the very point the Puppies were trying to make all along.
I will begin stocking up on popcorn for next year.
Really? I think all it proves is that for all the talking Torgersen, Beale, Wright, Correia et al did, they weren't able to actually get their supporters to put in more than a token effort of support. Consider: Sasquan had an unprecedented number of memberships, and record attendance. As it turns out, most of the attendees were people who rejected the puppy slates; If the Puppy assumption that they represent some form of silent majority longing for the good ole days was true, one would think that they would have been able to motivate people to attend the Con and vote.
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So, what did the people who actually showed up at Sasquan vote for? Turns out, while the Puppies were apparently great at doing the bits of Hugo influencing that doesn't actually require any real effort, they really sucked in the more important "Actually show up at WorldCon to vote" part.
End result: In all categories where the only nominees were from the (Sad|Rabid) Puppies slates (Best Novella, Short Story, Related Work, Editor Short Form, and Editor Long Form), they were outclassed by noted author No Award.
Fascinating. I think this decisively proves the very point the Puppies were trying to make all along.
I will begin stocking up on popcorn for next year.
Really? I think all it proves is that for all the talking Torgersen, Beale, Wright, Correia et al did, they weren't able to actually get their supporters to put in more than a token effort of support. Consider: Sasquan had an unprecedented number of memberships, and record attendance. As it turns out, most of the attendees were people who rejected the puppy slates; If the Puppy assumption that they represent some form of silent majority longing for the good ole days was true, one would think that they would have been able to motivate people to attend the Con and vote.
I think this token effort stuff more explains most politically-motivated abusive behavior. People don't like <group>. They believe <group> is actively harming or posing some future threat to them/society/their dog. But people shy away from the intimidating amount of work to combat that problem correctly... and instead appropriate whatever 'tools' might be on hand to fight that fight at the moment.
It's really one of the more disgusting trends I've seen lately, and a mockery of the kind of political organization and change I was hoping to see the internet make possible and more common.
I started to agree with the idea of 'not supporting' some of the really distasteful people mentioned by keeping them out of awards (hell, I strongly dislike Larry Correia as a person precisely because of the toxic effect I've seen him contribute to political discussions)... but doing that would, admittedly, be doing the same thing I was just railing against. The real solution isn't about barring Vox Day into the awards room/ceremony/whatever. It's about addressing his behavior directly. Make clear that anyone can get into that room via merits of their work but the second they start causing harm to others there, they can be booted right the hell out. And I am well aware, the mechanics of making fair rules for that kind of thing are difficult, but it's a difficult discussion that needs to happen.
And fight the fight in the greater social sphere about how we feel about certain cultural values and behaviors. That's where things belong.
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As it turns out, most of the attendees were people who rejected the puppy slates
Thus showing their bias and proving the puppies right. Unless the quality of works in puppy slates was abnormally low (I do not believe so), then in an absence of politicized voting we should expect them to win categories as usual. Obviously, many were voting "no award" only because the alternative would be voting for one of puppy nominees. That is not what should happen in a fair system.
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Or they just simply didn't think anything on the slate was the best thing they'd read that year. If you asked me to choose between the various Sharknado films for best action movie ever made, I would simply say "none of them".
Are you claiming you'd pick one?
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What are the odds of that, Karajorma? The very five works that were poised to win were outnumbered by an almost unprecedented rally of "No Award"s? Man, I feel I could sell you so many ****ing bridges.
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To be fair to the Puppies, there was no way they would lose this thing. If they had gotten the awards, they would have proved that their brand of "good ole SF that totally is not message-driven or literary" has a larger following than whatever the Conspiracy That Ate Fandom wants to nominate; if they didn't, they would have proven that they were barred from winning the Hugos by the Conspiracy That Ate Fandom.
It's a nice little setup, isn't it? Not at all biased or unbalanced or anything.
But yeah. Let's listen to these 500-odd people led by a ****ing racist, they are certainly the true voice of fandom here.
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To be fair to the Puppies, there was no way they would lose this thing. If they had gotten the awards, they would have proved that their brand of "good ole SF that totally is not message-driven or literary" has a larger following than whatever the Conspiracy That Ate Fandom wants to nominate; if they didn't, they would have proven that they were barred from winning the Hugos by the Conspiracy That Ate Fandom.
It's a nice little setup, isn't it? Not at all biased or unbalanced or anything.
But yeah. Let's listen to these 500-odd people led by a ****ing racist, they are certainly the true voice of fandom here.
This is the typical thing I've encountered with this kind of behavior. The situation is usually a hedged bet or self-fulfilling prophecy. It has to be to keep people motivated since the worst thing people that aren't doing something meaningful like to hear is that they're not doing something meaningful, frustratingly. So it is best to be either successful or persecuted :D
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As it turns out, most of the attendees were people who rejected the puppy slates
Thus showing their bias and proving the puppies right. Unless the quality of works in puppy slates was abnormally low (I do not believe so), then in an absence of politicized voting we should expect them to win categories as usual. Obviously, many were voting "no award" only because the alternative would be voting for one of puppy nominees. That is not what should happen in a fair system.
The thing is that the Puppies introduced politicized voting by mass-nominating SFF writers that follow their particular viewpoint. As such, the result was always going to be influenced by that. For the same money, hwoever, the voters subscribed to the notion that no awards should ever be given to people who rig awards for political purposes --- which is something I can relate to anyhow.
The puppies wanted to prove a political bias in the system. They decided to do so by introcing a massive political bias in the system. As such, any result of their 'experiment' is automatically flawed, as refusing to subscribe to a political act (in this case voting for "No Awards") is in itself a political act, albeit a far more fair one.
edit: added a bit for clarity.
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Thus showing their bias
Bias, like douchebaggery, is not a zero-sum game. There is never only one answer as to the bias being expressed.
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It should be interesting to note that Black Gate withdrew from the hugo awards (https://www.blackgate.com/2015/04/19/black-gate-withdraws-from-hugo-consideration/) because they felt that,
In short, over the last two weeks I have come to agree with those arguing that the use of a slate — and particularly a slate that has 11 nominees from Vox Day’s Castalia House, and nominates him personally for two awards — is a serious threat to the perceived integrity of the Hugo Awards.
They did this after they found out they were on one of the ballots (iirc the Rabid Puppy ones)).
It does explain why people voted no award: The growing sentiment among many Hugo voters is to respond to this perceived threat by placing “No Award” ahead of every one of the Rabid Puppies and Sad Puppies on the ballot, which would deny the members of those slates a Hugo Award. A number of sites offer guidance on exactly how to do this, including Deirdre Saoirse Moen’s “The Puppy-Free Hugo Award Voter’s Guide.”
The vast majority of fans I’ve spoken with have no particular animosity towards the Puppies’ stated objectives, or their right-wing leanings. The “No Award” movement is broad-based response motivated by a sincere desire to protect the integrity of the Hugo Awards, and is not politically-motivated.
As the E mentioned, this sentiment is shared by other writers who withdrew as well (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=89518.msg1782925#msg1782925)
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What are the odds of that, Karajorma? The very five works that were poised to win were outnumbered by an almost unprecedented rally of "No Award"s? Man, I feel I could sell you so many ****ing bridges.
Actually the odds are pretty damn high. How many of the books on that list do you feel would have been nominated on merit?
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Really? I think all it proves is that for all the talking Torgersen, Beale, Wright, Correia et al did, they weren't able to actually get their supporters to put in more than a token effort of support. Consider: Sasquan had an unprecedented number of memberships, and record attendance. As it turns out, most of the attendees were people who rejected the puppy slates; If the Puppy assumption that they represent some form of silent majority longing for the good ole days was true, one would think that they would have been able to motivate people to attend the Con and vote.
That assumes this year is the high-water mark of the Puppies effort. I don't believe that will be the case.
Or they just simply didn't think anything on the slate was the best thing they'd read that year. If you asked me to choose between the various Sharknado films for best action movie ever made, I would simply say "none of them".
Are you claiming you'd pick one?
I certainly would. Out of the Best Novella nominees, I've only read One Bright Star to Guide Them, but there's no question I believe it should rank above No Award. Ditto "Turncoat" for Best Short Story.
And the No Award categories weren't limited to published works. The fact that No Award beat out Mike Resnick and Toni Weisskopf defies logic.
What are the odds of that, Karajorma? The very five works that were poised to win were outnumbered by an almost unprecedented rally of "No Award"s?
It was not only unprecedented - the number of No Awards this year equals the total in the entire history of the Hugo Awards (http://www.thehugoawards.org/2015/08/2014-hugo-award-winners-announced/). Prior to this year, the most recent No Award was in 1977.
The puppies wanted to prove a political bias in the system. They decided to do so by introcing a massive political bias in the system. As such, any result of their 'experiment' is automatically flawed, as refusing to subscribe to a political act (in this case voting for "No Awards") is in itself a political act, albeit a far more fair one.
That's a ridiculous line of reasoning. You can't punch someone and then cry foul when they punch back.
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The puppies wanted to prove a political bias in the system. They decided to do so by introcing a massive political bias in the system. As such, any result of their 'experiment' is automatically flawed, as refusing to subscribe to a political act (in this case voting for "No Awards") is in itself a political act, albeit a far more fair one.
That's a ridiculous line of reasoning. You can't punch someone and then cry foul when they punch back.
Problem is that that's what the Puppies are doing.
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That's a ridiculous line of reasoning. You can't punch someone and then cry foul when they punch back.
You can totally accuse the system of bias, introduce a biased slate of candidates to vote for to prove it, and then cry foul that people organized against you.
Douchebaggery is not a zero-sum game. No one should ever approach an argument assuming the side whose positions they favor is due special deference or special excuse. There are very few arguments that occur between black and white hats, and it is entirely possible that despite whatever cherished ideal or point of law is in contention both groups are composed of assholes and will be eager to prove it.
Just because you agree with someone doesn't make them tolerable or even sane human beings.
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So, are you both saying that the Hugo awards were unbiased prior to the Puppies getting involved?
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Pretty sure they're (NGTM-1R and Kara) not. Also pretty sure that you already know that, Goob.
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If they acknowledge that the system is biased against the works that the Puppies favor, then they should have no cause to complain when the Puppies organize - within the rules - to counteract that bias.
And if they acknowledge that the system is biased, then they acknowledge that the system threw the first punch.
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So, are you both saying that the Hugo awards were unbiased prior to the Puppies getting involved?
That's the most cretinous response you could possibly have given to a post whose entire point is that everyone can be bad guys.
It doesn't really matter whether the Hugos were biased or not (in my personal opinion they probably are, but such a bias is inherent to their genre nature: forward-looking science fiction and the fact that Cthulhu only swims left/moral arc of history); the response of Vox Day et. al. is itself significantly biased not only in terms of political leaning but also towards a specific organization and author.
This is not as simplistic as the self-defense metaphor you're pushing. An award given in acknowledged and intentional bias is worth less than nothing. The bias that "threw the first punch" is passive at worst, and likely a bias reflective of the reality of the genre and its fans. If it exists.
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And if they acknowledge that the system is biased, then they acknowledge that the system threw the first punch.
And that gives the sad puppies the right to drag the entire system all the way to their side? By that logic women should be removing the right to vote from men and all white people should be slaves. It's a ridiculous overreaction to fill the entire slate with only their authors and then complain that people get annoyed at that.
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The Cthuluh always swimming left might be something you feel as manifest destiny of some sort of inevitable history or whatever, but bear in mind that others might feel incredibly different than that. Let me expand on this point, because I feel is the most interesting one to me.
Thing is, conservatives *do not feel* that the way Ctuluh is working is something that is either random or an inevitable historical necessity, nor even that it is a good thing at all. And conservatives are, as I last recalled, still human beings. They are or should be allowed to imagine the future, or other realities, or fantasies, where the progressive storylines of all the ideological necessities that the core leftist wing demands of them, simply do not exist, or are even refuted, countered. Why not, it seems to me, is the pertinent question here. It's as if the biggest problem here is not *just* one of mere politics between cliques, but also a battle on the landscape of the imagination of possibilities for the future.
And we all know that this is the issue. Progressives can't stop talking about this. How certain narratives are not "enabling" certain demographics, how certain stories are "limited" from a diversity point of view, not being sufficiently open to certain possibilities and futures of sex, genders, racial identities, and any other identity-laden issues you might imagine. Thus one might infer that this struggle is about who gets to define what is a *good* imagination from not just an artistic, literary point of view, but more than that, to a political and moral issue.
Returning to Ctuhluh swimming left, YES, I could even accept this sort of metaphysical inevitability (I don't, my pessimism doesn't allow it), but Vox Day and friends don't. And I refer to Vox Day especially here, because he is indeed the extreme reference here. And perhaps you don't know this, but he's not just a "rabid" right wing lunatic, he's a guy that is involved in the Dark Enlightment movement. And this movement proposes that this Cthuluh exists and its name is The Cathedral, which is a huge ideological edifice being maintained by academia and promoted by the "Public Opinion" (not the real public, mind you, but of those who are the real Opinion Makers, that is, the Media, the Schools, etc). Everything being discussed by the Academia at a certain point in time will eventually trickle down to the media and opinion makers who will hammer down the point until the public accepts it. This is a decades-spanning phenomena.
Now, I'm not the kind of person who accepts such weird theories, but I do accept that they believe these things, which can be summed up as saying that Ctuhluh always swims left because the system makes it swim Left (In a way, it's a paranoid theory that mirrors the "Patriarchy" quite well).
If you accept that Ctuhluh swimming Left is not the work of Inevitable History, but rather the combination of wilful acts of the society at large, then you are forced to accept that People can affect this direction themselves, and that's what these people are trying to do.
From MY point of view, I don't subscribe to this point of view, but I REALLY don't want to be left in a world where the only allowed imaginations are those who are pre-described ideologically, who all point to the same direction (OR ELSE), where all must abide to the new social justice checklists of approved talking points, tokens and thematics. I don't welcome a world where not only Ctuhluh rides Left, but we can't even imagine it going anywhere else.
Regarding Karajorma's point that all the slate books were terrible (did he read them at all?), let me just state that I find that statement incredible, that I don't buy that whole reasoning one bit, and that I would much rather have people tell me (like The_E for instance) that what *really* happened was that people disapproved of the Puppies' tactics and decided en masse to vote against it for these political reasons. I see a lot of contradictions here (people shouting on twitter in utter unironical or self-aware mode that it had nothing to do with politics, it was just our "community" that decided to keep these "people out" and so on and so on, you can't make this **** up), but at least I respect it.
Yes, the Puppies have shown that it is politics. I commend them for having made everyone aware of this situation. I am not convinced that they are able to do anything else in the future. Solutions, real solutions must come from elsewhere. Or not. I mean, it's not inevitable that the whole Hugo Awards and the whole sci fi genre doesn't go to the ****ters. My pessimism is way less censorial in its imagination than any social justice inclined voter at the Hugos was.
It's a ridiculous overreaction to fill the entire slate with only their authors and then complain that people get annoyed at that.
Talk about overreactions, just look at your rationale for god's sake.
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Regarding Karajorma's point that all the slate books were terrible (did he read them at all?), let me just state that I find that statement incredible, that I don't buy that whole reasoning one bit, and that I would much rather have people tell me (like The_E for instance) that what *really* happened was that people disapproved of the Puppies' tactics and decided en masse to vote against it for these political reasons. I see a lot of contradictions here (people shouting on twitter in utter unironical or self-aware mode that it had nothing to do with politics, it was just our "community" that decided to keep these "people out" and so on and so on, you can't make this **** up), but at least I respect it.
Yes, the Puppies have shown that it is politics. I commend them for having made everyone aware of this situation. I am not convinced that they are able to do anything else in the future. Solutions, real solutions must come from elsewhere. Or not. I mean, it's not inevitable that the whole Hugo Awards and the whole sci fi genre doesn't go to the ****ters. My pessimism is way less censorial in its imagination than any social justice inclined voter at the Hugos was.
It's a ridiculous overreaction to fill the entire slate with only their authors and then complain that people get annoyed at that.
Talk about overreactions, just look at your rationale for god's sake.
From where I'm sitting, it looks more like a rejection of Vox Day in particular than any given conservative viewpoint.
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1) Shunning people by association is politics in itself.
2) Rejecting Vox Day is entirely politics.
3) The reasons why Vox Day was rejected is also about politics, namely his.
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From where I'm sitting, the Puppies viewed it as a travesty that so many great conservative writers went unrecognized for their works. So they organized to get some conservative writers on the ballot to right that wrong. And the response of Worldcon is to hold them in such contempt that they would rather not give out any award than give one to a Puppies candidate.
And I know Vox Day is everyone's favorite boogeyman, but don't forget that this is as much Torgersen and Correia as him.
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Harmful Opinions got it right. As much as one could ever try to make the point that the Opposition to the Puppies' Slates didn't exist, that they were a kind of paranoid delusion from right wing schizophrenics (a claim that I personally still laugh at with contempt), the real opposition to every proposal by these Slates and the way they did it firmly established that indeed this opposition exists.
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Regarding Karajorma's point that all the slate books were terrible (did he read them at all?), let me just state that I find that statement incredible.
Imagine that, you find the strawman you've constructed incredible.
I did not say the books are terrible. I asked how many of them would have been nominated on merit i.e how many of them would have gotten through in an unbiased world. I suspect the number is less than half and probably a lot lower than that since the sad puppies were only voting for people who agreed with their politics and that is always a minority, no matter what you believe in.
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Less than half is not 0%. Again, you are not analyising this with your brain in full power here. The odds of this happening without politiking is zero. ZERO. And all that even if we *didn't* have so many people on the record with recommendations to burn the whole puppies' books down because they were Puppies, NOT because they were of "poor quality".
If you remain in the corner that all of this backlash from the Hugo Awards to the Slates is entirely about Quality, I won't comment. Not even the majority of people who are deeply aghast by the Puppies would even manage to get themselves to even think about that justification. It wasn't and it isn't.
I repeat here. If the position anti-Puppies is that "We won't stand for these tactics and that's why we did what we did", at the very least I'll respect it. Not your position, I just find that ridiculous.
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The Cthuluh always swimming left might be something you feel
It isn't.
It's objective fact that the last ten generations have seen Cthulhu swim left. To predict the future, our only implement is to study the past. And the future being more left than the past has held true for a considerable length of time. The left is identified as progressive, as forward-looking. The right is identified as conservative and by either its respect for the present or its faith in the institutions of the past.
A genre that speaks to and of the future must both acknowledge the trends of the present, and bear in mind the sort whose eyes are turned to the future. And in general that isn't a favorable pair of obstacles to the right.
You want this to be about my beliefs and your beliefs and Vox Day's beliefs. So you babble about them for irrelevant paragraphs.
It isn't.
Beliefs don't matter. This is a statement about environment.
Was Vox Day's response going to change the environment? No. It was a pointless temper tantrum in comparison to the forces that shape the sci-fi-reading public. Was it going to make the awarding of the Hugos somehow more fair if it worked? No, the exact opposite.
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Regarding Karajorma's point that all the slate books were terrible (did he read them at all?), let me just state that I find that statement incredible.
Imagine that, you find the strawman you've constructed incredible.
I did not say the books are terrible. I asked how many of them would have been nominated on merit i.e how many of them would have gotten through in an unbiased world. I suspect the number is less than half and probably a lot lower than that since the sad puppies were only voting for people who agreed with their politics and that is always a minority, no matter what you believe in.
I'd argue that there's none. The rabid puppies' ballot consisted almost entirely of books published by Vox Day's micro-publisher. The few people that were not published by Vox Day but were on the slate have withdrawn from the hugo awards.
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NGTM,
And you confuse your own beliefs about Ctuhluh for the reality. You do not speak for Reality. Yes, Cthuluh has been swimming Left for ten generations. If I accept that statement alone as a brute fact, then it follows that 11 generations ago, it didn't swim left. Which means it's not inevitable, it's not fate.
The Left is "forward looking" and the Right is "conservative looking" because of the French Revolution, it's a purely historical thing. In hindsight and in very naive terms, it does seem that the Left gets "its way" and the Right has been conceding terrain. Except that in many ways, the Left has been stopped from doing many really nasty things by either historical facts or by the Right's insistence that they should not get away with it.
That is, the Left is not an Oracle. And unless you propose that the Left is an Oracle that Gets It Right Every ****ing Time, then it definitely should not have the hegemony of our imaginations of the Future. Hell, you just have to look at the past and see that the Right Wing did have their influence on Sci Fi. Michael Chricton's warnings about technologies, George Orwell's warnings against Communism (yes, I know he was a leftist but his warnings were extremely influential in a conservative way), etc. etc.
I'd argue that there's none. The rabid puppies' ballot consisted almost entirely of books published by Vox Day's micro-publisher. The few people that were not published by Vox Day but were on the slate have withdrawn from the hugo awards.
Only one "No Award" displaced a Castallia House edited winner. So your argument falls.
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It's fascinating to me that so many people are supporting making things objectively worse.
The result of the slate is not that bias is corrected; the slate expresses active bias itself, and bias beyond the merely political, but into the personal. If there was some kind of left-wing conspiracy blocking the Hugos before, it might, perhaps, have been an appropriate response, but I haven't seen that alleged.
Since we seem fond of terrible metaphor, we have here a situation where someone has decided that since the local African population outnumbered them and people were hiring from their friends and social circles just because, the only correct response to this is to start staging cross-burnings and declare a Klan rally lead by the one white guy who runs a store in town.
Respond to a passive problem by creating an active one. Instead of working to change things so they are more fair, declare that fairness is impossible in the current system and start lighting things on fire. Don't emulate MLK; be a Black Panther.
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And you confuse your own beliefs about Ctuhluh for the reality. You do not speak for Reality.
And yet I do. You agree with me on trends and definitions. You're still talking about it like what else you said matters. It doesn't. Your beliefs are not relevant to the environment in which science fiction is written and read. No individual's beliefs are relevant.
11 generations ago doesn't matter. One generation from now does. And the trends of now aren't slowing.
No one is locking the right out, either, as you have amply demonstrated. Your argument is incoherent and self-defeating.
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Less than half is not 0%. Again, you are not analyising this with your brain in full power here.
And you've failed to follow my argument yet again. It doesn't need to be zero. The entire argument fails if even one other non-sad puppy book would have been on the slate. Cause if one other book was there, you can't argue "Well the entire list was sad puppy books that were there on merit and yet none of them won. That can only be due to politics" any more.
The odds of this happening without politiking is zero. ZERO. And all that even if we *didn't* have so many people on the record with recommendations to burn the whole puppies' books down because they were Puppies, NOT because they were of "poor quality".
If you remain in the corner that all of this backlash from the Hugo Awards to the Slates is entirely about Quality, I won't comment. Not even the majority of people who are deeply aghast by the Puppies would even manage to get themselves to even think about that justification. It wasn't and it isn't.
I repeat here. If the position anti-Puppies is that "We won't stand for these tactics and that's why we did what we did", at the very least I'll respect it. Not your position, I just find that ridiculous.
And we're back to the strawmen again. And a world view that encompasses everything being black or white.
I'm arguing that the fact that they were on the puppies slate had something to do with it, but not the simple "They're only puppies books on the slate, so I'm voting No Award" which you are insisting is the only possible reason for this.
I'm sure some people did take that stance. But I doubt that it was everyone. Hell, I doubt it was even the majority. I think it's very likely that a lot of people knew the background for the slate and did the very human thing of voting "No Award" because they felt that none of those books deserved the prize they were up for.
If you were in a position to vote and can think of 3-4 novellas you read that year that were better than anything on the puppies slate it's quite possible that the reason you'd vote "No Award" simply because you feel that none of the novellas you could vote for were best of the year. Not that they were terrible, simply that none of them deserve the title "Best Novella of the Year".
If you find that ridiculous, perhaps it's not me working with half a brain here.
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Karajorma, we have people parading the fact that they hadn't even read the books they had fought against. I'm over with it. You are now making a much more moderate stance, but one that I don't feel is true. Most people that did vote like they did they did so because they were either *told* to do so (ah, but that ain't a slate I tells ya!), or they simply felt that they didn't want Vox Day to have his way, period.
The result of the slate is not that bias is corrected; the slate expresses active bias itself, and bias beyond the merely political, but into the personal. If there was some kind of left-wing conspiracy blocking the Hugos before, it might, perhaps, have been an appropriate response, but I haven't seen that alleged.
This I do agree, and I think there's a wider phenomena taking place, mostly stemming from american politics, which is a trend of increased polarization on every single situation. And I do believe that social media is just amping up this trend into whole new levels.
And yet I do.
Riiiiiight.
You agree with me on trends and definitions. You're still talking about it like what else you said matters. It doesn't. Your beliefs are not relevant to the environment in which science fiction is written and read. No individual's beliefs are relevant.
I don't agree with your trends. I just accepted them as brute facts temporarily to make the simple point that 10 generations is not an infinite number of generations. I've just now come from reading another article where the reader was also all like "this X doesn't matter, Y doesn't matter, Z doesn't matter", and I was like, wtf, why do people think they are somehow some kind of incredible Oracles that can determine by fiat that people should just accept the fate of some ill defined trend of some vague general ideological direction because they are irrelevant somehow?
It just blows my mind. No, you don't get to be so sure of this. Trends are not even smooth in their speeds, they are a lot more chaotic.
11 generations ago doesn't matter. One generation from now does. And the trends of now aren't slowing.
If all of this were just inevitable, we wouldn't have the massive social mobilizations to worry about how books and media are written and produced because of the effects of the imagination within them imply and affect the new generations.
Clearly, these things do matter. And if they matter it means that the "Trend" only works if people are working on it - just like Moore's Law. Moore's Law is not a Natural Law, in many ways it's rather a Program. And if the Trend only works if people work on it, then it necessarily follows that if you work on the opposite direction, you will affect the Trend.
This is not rocket science.
No one is locking the right out, either, as you have amply demonstrated. Your argument is incoherent and self-defeating.
Chricton is dead and he would never win a Hugo these years. The struggle is in the present, not the past.
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Only one "No Award" displaced a Castallia House edited winner. So your argument falls.
How many Castallia House nominees ended up on the voting lists?
edit:As it turns out, ehrm... quite a lot of Castallia House edited works were displaced by "No Award", so I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. (http://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2015-hugo-awards/)
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I think it's very likely that a lot of people knew the background for the slate and did the very human thing of voting "No Award" because they felt that none of those books deserved the prize they were up for.
If you were in a position to vote and can think of 3-4 novellas you read that year that were better than anything on the puppies slate it's quite possible that the reason you'd vote "No Award" simply because you feel that none of the novellas you could vote for were best of the year. Not that they were terrible, simply that none of them deserve the title "Best Novella of the Year".
This sounds like a reasonable, dispassionate position, but the reality of the vote was anything but. The Worldcon attendees cheered each time No Award was announced, instead of murmuring or sighing.
And your position is contraindicated by both the history of the No Award vote...
the number of No Awards this year equals the total in the entire history of the Hugo Awards (http://www.thehugoawards.org/2015/08/2014-hugo-award-winners-announced/). Prior to this year, the most recent No Award was in 1977.
...as well as the fact that George R. R. Martin held his own parallel awards ceremony after the show which was based on the statistics if the Puppies nominations were not included.
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The problem is that Correia, and similar authors, and followers (I know about the first because of passionate friends saying 'is so intelligent') shoe horn all opposition, everything they don't like, into this package deal enemy group called Liberals. It's pretty easy to see a monolithic group crowding out all choices when your definition for what it is, is horrendously unfair. And please don't trot out the over-tired 'Liberal Academia' line, that's much of the same thing. It's not anything as ego-inflating to say that reality has a liberal bias, it's that sense of " when you see most discourse as unfairly against you, you'll see enemies everywhere". I've had a lot of family trot out that line after I went to college about biased people 'infecting me', even when it was something as simple as when someone posted a video about tax reform, I did the math the person proposed, and pointed out it was hilariously off on the end results.
I don't think the Left is some magical always right sort of thing, in fact my calling out the low-effort style activism trend directs a lot of anger towards that group falling to this, but when a lot of people repeatedly box things into 'everything other than what I say is liberal', and carry around a big box of "these, concepts, no, these very WORDS, belong to the other side, and we can never support anything in them"... well, I guess when faced with that choice, I'll end up being part of their artificiality constructed, fake, monolithic, enemy 'group'.
Gotta keep feeling persecuted, after all. Think this is all crap? Think for a second. No matter what is proposed, it's hard to construct some plan of "I want to make a big change that helps people" and not have it fall under these people's "Liberal" box.
Sci-fi is extremely often written with that drive in its soul. The people that dream either bright dreams, or fearfully warn about nightmare situations, are looking at, either positively or negatively to what great lengths humans can go. We might laugh about stories from the past generations that were set in the "hyper advanced future year of 2015", but the date is often set quite nearby because the writers wanted to picture themselves as living to see that change. Or at least their children seeing it.
As people keep making this stronger and stronger line in the sand, stand offish situation with rest of the discourse of ideas, they're going to find themselves increasingly more isolated when it comes to sci-fi.
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It seems perfectly possible for me to see Karajorma's statement (people voting for No Award because they felt none of the novellas deserved to win) and to see Goober's statement (people cheered for the No Award) and see that they are not contradictory at all. People cheered at No Award because they felt none of the novellas that were nominated deserved to win, and indeed had not won.
That people feel strongly about this because those novellas appeared on the nominee list via means considered illegitimate doesn't matter in that case.
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Only one "No Award" displaced a Castallia House edited winner. So your argument falls.
How many Castallia House nominees ended up on the voting lists?
edit:As it turns out, ehrm... quite a lot of Castallia House edited works were displaced by "No Award", so I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion.
(http://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2015-hugo-awards/)
Because I looked at the lists and compared the No Award winner to the second place.
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But why would you look just at the second place? There's a disproportionate amount of Castallia House edited books on the list. Look at the Novella catagory: If you don't care much for the type of books Castallia House edits, you only have one other option before voting for No Award.
That is something that should be kept in mind: For as much as people shout that renouncing Vox Day is political or whatnot, that he went forward with a list of works that consisted almost entirely of works where he earns money from should not be overlooked as a major factor in his motivations. Meanwhile, Vox Day having a very different taste in what books are good vs, say, that of the better selling publishers should not be overlooked here either.
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I looked at the second place because it proved the point I was making: that the No Awards displaced people who were *not* from Castallia House.
All of your other points remain, and that's why I said I respect their position. However, the awards where this thing about Castallia was relevant were not the only awards, and they still pissed on the others, just because.
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and they still pissed on the others, just because.
I'm not sure if the widely publicized stance of not supporting the puppies in any way because doing otherwise would affect the integrity of the hugo awards (as is the reasoning of those withdrawn) can be considered "pissing on others just because".
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And your position is contraindicated by both the history of the No Award vote...
the number of No Awards this year equals the total in the entire history of the Hugo Awards (http://www.thehugoawards.org/2015/08/2014-hugo-award-winners-announced/). Prior to this year, the most recent No Award was in 1977.
I don't see how that proves I'm wrong though. The very existence of previous No Awards is actually evidence that in the past the slate hadn't contained any entries that people considered to be the best one. And funnily enough, when the slate was manipulated so as to almost certainly not contain the best candidate, suddenly it happens again.
...as well as the fact that George R. R. Martin held his own parallel awards ceremony after the show which was based on the statistics if the Puppies nominations were not included.
And did any of the Puppies nominations win there? Cause it's only if they won there, that you might have an argument.
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To add to my previous point with courtesy of Karajorma: The chance that people wanted to vote a nominee that was bumped off the nominee list due to vote rigging and therefore just decided to vote no award is a very real possibility which, again, does not show political motivations persé.
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I don't see how that proves I'm wrong though. The very existence of previous No Awards is actually evidence that in the past the slate hadn't contained any entries that people considered to be the best one. And funnily enough, when the slate was manipulated so as to almost certainly not contain the best candidate, suddenly it happens again.
Well, it's not mathematics. One can prove bias against conservative writers in the Hugos; one cannot prove that voters had a particular motivation for voting the way they did.
But the pattern of commentary is very telling. Those who are celebrating No Award are specifically citing the motivations and politics of the Puppies. None of them are citing the quality of the works themselves. And according to people who have run the numbers, the Amazon rankings of Puppies-nominated works for this year are higher than the Amazon rankings of Hugo award winners of recent years.
And nobody has disputed my point (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=89518.msg1793921#msg1793921) about No Award being chosen in the two Best Editor categories, which are about people, not published works.
...as well as the fact that George R. R. Martin held his own parallel awards ceremony after the show which was based on the statistics if the Puppies nominations were not included.
And did any of the Puppies nominations win there? Cause it's only if they won there, that you might have an argument.
:wtf: I'm not sure how you expect any Puppy nominations to win in a ceremony where Puppy nominations are excluded.
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:wtf: I'm not sure how you expect any Puppy nominations to win in a ceremony where Puppy nominations are excluded.
He's alluding to the fact that Martin's ceremony was one without the obvious and deliberate Puppy vote stuffing for nominations. If one of the Puppy nominations deserved to win, it would have at least been nominated in the other ceremony.
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As Battuta pointed out, one of the authors on the puppies slate was nominated on merit anyway. Did he win?
But the pattern of commentary is very telling. Those who are celebrating No Award are specifically citing the motivations and politics of the Puppies. None of them are citing the quality of the works themselves.
Oh come on. Those celebrating No Award are political. Really? What a surprise!
What about those who aren't celebrating, i.e the exact same group of people who would fit my argument.
And according to people who have run the numbers, the Amazon rankings of Puppies-nominated works for this year are higher than the Amazon rankings of Hugo award winners of recent years.
It's like you have no understanding of how cause and effect works. Can you not see that if you have something like Sad Puppies, where a lot of books are suddenly talked about, a bunch of people will go and review those same books and therefore inflate the ratings somewhat? That doesn't require any conspiracy, it's a natural outcome of something being popular. Sorta like how when a pop star dies their album becomes number one.
And nobody has disputed my point (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=89518.msg1793921#msg1793921) about No Award being chosen in the two Best Editor categories, which are about people, not published works.
What's to dispute? People thought there were better editors.
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If one of the Puppy nominations deserved to win, it would have at least been nominated in the other ceremony.
As Battuta pointed out, one of the authors on the puppies slate was nominated on merit anyway. Did he win?
So the opinions of Puppy supporters should not count when determining whether a nomination deserves to win? I thought the Hugo awards were supposed to represent all of SFF fandom?
Oh come on. Those celebrating No Award are political. Really? What a surprise!
What about those who aren't celebrating, i.e the exact same group of people who would fit my argument.
Those voting on No Award are a subset of those celebrating No Award (not the other way around), as evidenced by the cheers and applause at the convention. You know, the same convention attended by the actual voters.
It's like you have no understanding of how cause and effect works. Can you not see that if you have something like Sad Puppies, where a lot of books are suddenly talked about, a bunch of people will go and review those same books and therefore inflate the ratings somewhat? That doesn't require any conspiracy, it's a natural outcome of something being popular. Sorta like how when a pop star dies their album becomes number one.
It's like you thought I wouldn't have anticipated that contingency. The nominations were announced April 5th. The analysis (http://www.castaliahouse.com/2015-hugo-award-nominees-break-records/) was posted April 7th. The Amazon ratings at the time of the analysis predate all of the post-nomination publicity.
What's to dispute? People thought there were better editors.
So, there exist editors who were not on the nomination list that are better than those nominated, and better to such an extent that No Award was preferable to honoring any of the nominees?
I'll quote Brad Torgersen (https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/democracy-numbers/#comment-16377) here:
Toni Weisskopf got 1,216 first-line #1 votes. Arguably the most of any editor in the history of the Hugo awards.
Sheila Gilbert got 754 first-line #1 votes. Again, second only to Toni, arguably the most of any editor in the history of the Hugo awards.
By contrast, Patrick-Nielsen Hayden won a Best Editor Hugo in 2010, with just 140 first-line #1 votes.
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If one of the Puppy nominations deserved to win, it would have at least been nominated in the other ceremony.
As Battuta pointed out, one of the authors on the puppies slate was nominated on merit anyway. Did he win?
So the opinions of Puppy supporters should not count when determining whether a nomination deserves to win? I thought the Hugo awards were supposed to represent all of SFF fandom?
Ladies and gentlemen, the incredible moving goalposts.
If the Hugo awards were supposed to represent all of SFF fandom, then apparently all of SFF fandom decided that the Puppies nominees were inferior to giving out no award.
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:rolleyes: Apparently you can't keep straight the difference between the Puppies position and your own.
What you and karajorma are saying is that the Hugo awards "deserve" and "merit" consideration based on a subset of the votes that excludes the Puppies. Which effectively means that a subset of SFF fandom should be excluded.
What the Puppies are saying is that the Hugo awards, currently, do not reflect the entirety of SFF fandom and therefore the Puppies votes are needed. (Implying that more Puppies will join and vote next year.)
There is no contradiction here. The goalposts have not moved.
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@Luis
Censorship? The right being somehow frozen out? Controlling imagination? These are words you have used and demonstrate you have neither sense of proportion nor understanding of what is at hand.
This is an awards ceremony, by mass vote. This is the marketplace of ideas made about as literal as it can get.
None of these works were forbidden from being present; even with the bomb-throwing method chosen by their supporters to attempt to push them through, a method that's either the product of idiots or thinks it's more important to make a show than to effect any kind of change, all were present and could be voted for. Nobody was held out. No speech was prohibited (which is literally the basic necessity of censorship!).
It was shouted down. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to be called on your bull****, as Flipside had in his signature before his departure. Speech perceived as bad was countered by others who used the numbers of their speech to outweigh it. People saw bull**** and they called it. That's the underlying principles of free speech in action.
You're talking nonsense and trying to cloak yourself in some holy crusade against censorship that didn't happen, and you need to stop and take a good look at yourself in the mirror.
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What the Puppies are saying is that the Hugo awards, currently, do not reflect the entirety of SFF fandom and therefore the Puppies votes are needed. (Implying that more Puppies will join and vote next year.)
I'm a bit late to this whole thing, but did the members of the puppies just not vote before or something? Or do they make up such a small minority of the SFF community that they just can't get nominations without conspiring?
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From where I sit, the overall point Goober and Luis Dias are making is that the puppies were being deliberately excluded from the Hugos based on their political views. From what I see of the huge amount of "No Awards" being handed out, as opposed to something, anything from a competing author, that really tells me the voters would much rather have no award period than one going to a deserving author despite his political views, which is just reinforced by the huge break from the last No Award in 1977. NGTM-1R's statements about the political inevitability of left-leaning policies are also just confirming a lot of my own suspicions, namely that there is indeed a strong cultural movement by left-leaning members of society to frame the cultural struggles we have now as hopeless and futile, and their opponents just should give up before history leaves them behind. Language shapes perception after all, and if you control the language of a debate, you control people's perceptions of it.
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NGTM-1R's statements about the political inevitability of left-leaning policies
Hey so maybe you should go back and read them again because that's sure as hell not what happened.
It's not about them being inevitable; it's about trying to project the future based on what's going on right now. Right now, the world's getting more left and doesn't seem likely to slow down. We went all Gay Marriage and I'm Cait and if I'd told you that was gonna happen in six years in 2008 you'd think I was crazy and start waving Proposition 8 at me. It's observable. Therefore, people who predict the future is more left are presented with a lesser burden to prove they are right.
Will the world be more left? **** if I know. I do know that anyone who's out to write a story is going to have an easier time convincing people it will be, and an easier time writing that story.
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You're talking nonsense and trying to cloak yourself in some holy crusade against censorship that didn't happen, and you need to stop and take a good look at yourself in the mirror.
Will you stop attacking strawmans? I never once stated this was the world war of literature, gimme a ****ing break. It's just that as small as the kerfuffle might even be (I don't think the Hugos are "little", but HEY if that rocks your boat, it's fine), the reasons behind it are not, especially for those who are fighting it. And thus, all I did up there was trying to bring forth the more .... political notions that reside under this kerfuffle.
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Will you stop attacking strawmans?
I'm literally quoting you. You can't turn Karaj's arguments around on me when instead of making **** up it's a literal quotation. Here, have some.
... but I REALLY don't want to be left in a world where the only allowed imaginations are those who are pre-described ideologically, who all point to the same direction (OR ELSE), where all must abide to the new social justice checklists of approved talking points, tokens and thematics. I don't welcome a world where not only Ctuhluh rides Left, but we can't even imagine it going anywhere else.
My pessimism is way less censorial in its imagination than any social justice inclined voter at the Hugos was.
These are the words you have spoken, and you are on record as speaking them. If you wish to say they were straw men, to where have your goalposts moved now?
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I stand by them, what the hell NG are you telling me there's not a culture war happening in sci fi right now, regardless of who shot first?
You seem to have a problem connecting the concept of a localized kerfuffle and the concept of its ideological significance, as if they are in contradiction, but they are not, especially in a world so deeply connected in social media we have today.
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NGTM-1R's statements about the political inevitability of left-leaning policies
Hey so maybe you should go back and read them again because that's sure as hell not what happened.
It's not about them being inevitable; it's about trying to project the future based on what's going on right now. Right now, the world's getting more left and doesn't seem likely to slow down. We went all Gay Marriage and I'm Cait and if I'd told you that was gonna happen in six years in 2008 you'd think I was crazy and start waving Proposition 8 at me. It's observable. Therefore, people who predict the future is more left are presented with a lesser burden to prove they are right.
Will the world be more left? **** if I know. I do know that anyone who's out to write a story is going to have an easier time convincing people it will be, and an easier time writing that story.
It doesn't really matter whether the Hugos were biased or not (in my personal opinion they probably are, but such a bias is inherent to their genre nature: forward-looking science fiction and the fact that Cthulhu only swims left/moral arc of history); the response of Vox Day et. al. is itself significantly biased not only in terms of political leaning but also towards a specific organization and author.
(Emphasis Mine)
Please tell me how that statement is not a declaration that your political views are a historical inevitability, and therefore culture must adapt to propagate them.
EDIT: You're also acting like this whole Brian/Caitlyn Jenner media thing is universally a good thing, when I can speak from some pretty painful personal experience that these actions can have consequences on those around the one transitioning, and asking family members to just accept it won't always end well.
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From where I sit, the overall point Goober and Luis Dias are making is that the puppies were being deliberately excluded from the Hugos based on their political views. From what I see of the huge amount of "No Awards" being handed out, as opposed to something, anything from a competing author, that really tells me the voters would much rather have no award period than one going to a deserving author despite his political views, which is just reinforced by the huge break from the last No Award in 1977.
But did the voters reject the given choices because of the authors' political views, or because said choices were generated by a targeted--and decidedly political--orchestrated campaign? And if you can't answer that question definitively either way, why jump straight to assuming the worst?
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It's like you thought I wouldn't have anticipated that contingency. The nominations were announced April 5th. The analysis (http://www.castaliahouse.com/2015-hugo-award-nominees-break-records/) was posted April 7th. The Amazon ratings at the time of the analysis predate all of the post-nomination publicity.
:facepalm: This is getting silly. Do I really need to explain how the day the nominations were announced wasn't the start of this nonsense?
So, there exist editors who were not on the nomination list that are better than those nominated, and better to such an extent that No Award was preferable to honoring any of the nominees?
I'll quote Brad Torgersen (https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/08/21/democracy-numbers/#comment-16377) here:
Toni Weisskopf got 1,216 first-line #1 votes. Arguably the most of any editor in the history of the Hugo awards.
Sheila Gilbert got 754 first-line #1 votes. Again, second only to Toni, arguably the most of any editor in the history of the Hugo awards.
By contrast, Patrick-Nielsen Hayden won a Best Editor Hugo in 2010, with just 140 first-line #1 votes.
Is it really so hard to understand why the numbers could be misleading? Notice how both numbers are so high? Do you honestly think that Brad Torgersen is such a good editor that this fact alone is responsible for him getting 10 times more votes than Patrick-Nielsen Hayden? Are you saying he's a 10 times better editor than Patrick-Nielsen Hayden? Or is it more likely that the entire hoopla surrounding the nominations resulted in more votes on both sides.
That really tells me the voters would much rather have no award period than one going to a deserving author despite his political views, which is just reinforced by the huge break from the last No Award in 1977.
As I pointed out, it's probable that most of the people involved don't think they were a deserving author though. Your logic seems to simply be that they were on the slate and therefore that automatically makes them deserving. But the fact that the slate was deliberately rigged to push out other more deserving awards could also explain that.
Look at it from this perspective. 20 years from now, all this nonsense will be nothing more than a footnote on the Hugo Awards Wikipedia page. But books that win the title will still have "Hugo Award Winner!" stamped all over them. Some people feel that wouldn't be fair when there were better books around which didn't get the chance cause of politics.
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From where I sit, the overall point Goober and Luis Dias are making is that the puppies were being deliberately excluded from the Hugos based on their political views. From what I see of the huge amount of "No Awards" being handed out, as opposed to something, anything from a competing author, that really tells me the voters would much rather have no award period than one going to a deserving author despite his political views.
The thing is, the puppies were not excluded from the hugo awards because of their political views. They were excluded because they were puppies. When you look at the statements of the authors endorsed by the rabid puppies who have withdrawn, you can see that it's not the political views of the puppies that is being rejected here (esp. since, as GB mentioned, Brad Torgerson would have been nominated fair and square if not for the puppies). It's the methods they tried to use in order to win the awards.
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I changed my mind a bit, if the "no award" votes were just protest votes against slate voting regardless of politics then it is justifiable. I dont like the puppies methods either. Still, I am not sure fighting vote manipulation with more vote manipulation is ethical or good for the awards in the long run. Many of those nominated authors still deserved the Hugos on merit, IMHO.
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I suspect that the reason for the large number of No Award votes is a mixture of both kinds of protest vote. Both the protest against a rigged slate but also the more simple "The best novellas weren't even on the list, so I'm going to vote No Award". It's worth remembering that the latter of the two is going to happen regardless of who buggers up the nominations. So even if an anti-sad puppy movement springs up, it's probably not going to have much luck.
What you and karajorma are saying is that the Hugo awards "deserve" and "merit" consideration based on a subset of the votes that excludes the Puppies. Which effectively means that a subset of SFF fandom should be excluded.
I'm not saying anything of the sort.
The Sad Puppies claim that the Hugo voting system means that certain books never win or even get nominated because of the politics of the story or the author. Battatua has already pointed out that one of their candidates would have been nominated anyway, so that is already proven to be at least partially incorrect.
So if a fair vote is taken and that particular candidate wins, then the Sad Puppies might be able to argue that they have a point. If on the other hand their candidate loses, it kinda shows that they're simply sore losers. Which is why I asked if their choice won in a fair vote.
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Your regularly scheduled reminder that the Puppies movement is a catspaw of Vox Day, who also started his own publishing house to create SFWA- qualifying authors who could then slate vote for the Nebulas, all as revenge on SFWA for kicking him out for being a white supremacist :frogout:
GRRM's analysis was solid evidence that there hasn't been a political bias in the Hugos over recent years. This is about Vox Day's ideology.
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The Sad Puppies have been around for several years, to no effect. This year Vox Day got on board.
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You contradict yourself there, Batts. First you say the Puppies are Vox's "catspaws", then next you say the sad puppies were "to no effect", but now Vox Day got on board and it blew everything away. You also point to an analysis as being evidence. But we can look at the data, and I'm really highly skeptical that a very few amount of people could hoard so many awards without either being geniuses or ... something being afoot. You can also look at the data, and while I'll readily agree that seeing Castallia with so many nominations is indeed a farce, it is a farce that followed the silent tragedy of watching so many Tor books year after year after year. Perhaps they're basically the only publishing house doing quality work in the world. Or perhaps something else.
e: If we are bringing GRRM to the table though, we should also remember that he warned everyone to *not* do what they ended up doing.
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Luis, the biggest publisher of SF/F getting more nominations than smaller houses is perhaps not the statistical anomaly you think it is.
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Didn't I acknowledge that caveat in my statement?
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You contradict yourself there, Batts. First you say the Puppies are Vox's "catspaws", then next you say the sad puppies were "to no effect", but now Vox Day got on board and it blew everything away.
The Puppies are Vox's catspaws. They may not have started that way, but now they are.
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I don't think they are. I just think that all the moderate voices in any of this were just completely overwhelmed by the loud angry polarizing voices. I also think (and said) this is part of a wider problem of increased polarization everywhere.
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No contradiction. The Rabid Puppies were the successful slate. You'll note that where Sad and Rabid differed, Rabid came out ahead.
Vox Day is a reprehensible person whose values are anathema to any humane creed, liberal or conservative. It's not 'immoderate' to oppose him.
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And lol at this alleged Tor-Baen rivalry, the owner of Tor helped found Baen and John C Wright is published by Tor
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You're not seriously suggesting there wasn't a massive rift between the Wrights and the Haydens. You know we can google, right.
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Is he, or is he not still published by Tor?
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He is - he's actually with the same editor as me right now. Tor has like a zillion editors (sixty plus? eighty?). Don't confuse Twitter and blogs for business.
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I don't think they are. I just think that all the moderate voices in any of this were just completely overwhelmed by the loud angry polarizing voices.
The Sad Puppies are not easily distinguished from the Rabid Puppies and they know it. It wouldn't have been hard for them to renounce Vox Day, who is a straight-up white supremacist. Instead they put him on the ballot twice.
This is not a case of being overwhelmed, this is a case of joining in with.
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@Batts, Fair enough.
@Joshua, I thought the point about the Sad Puppies was that politics shouldn't matter? Therefore they placed the work ahead of the author's / editor's politics?
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doublepost, for NG.
It's not just me that thinks this is a battle for the minds, you can cross every aisle and see that every camp thinks this as well. For instance, like this one:
Historically, every time there’s an advance in the rights of a disenfranchised group, whether that’s women’s lib or desegregation, there’s a corresponding pushback by the dominant group because it feels like it is losing power.
What we’re seeing with the Hugo awards is that readers & writers who have not been represented in SFF (women, PoC, LGBT) are becoming prominent because of a larger zeitgeist that is trying to redress historic imbalances. Again, we see this in other communities as well. The pushback by the various Puppy contingents matches other historical pushbacks. On their side, they think that fiction is being dominated by “checkboxes” rather than quality, which is the same reaction people had to hiring women during women’s lib or minorities during the civil rights movement.
The reason that the Hugos are more important than just a rocket ship, is that the Puppies also reflect the larger societal pushbacks that we’re seeing against women, PoC, and LGBT. So the Hugos represent a battle in a much bigger fight.
That’s why not just a rocket ship. The Hugos are a reflection of our culture. So the battle that we’re seeing isn’t about “what fiction is best” but rather “what future do we want to live in?”
What future do we want to live in.
Exactly. That is the battleground everyone here is apparently fighting for.
e: sorry, lacking link http://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/the-hugos-the-puppies-and-why-this-is-more-important-than-just-a-rocketship/
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Please tell me how that statement is not a declaration that your political views are a historical inevitability, and therefore culture must adapt to propagate them.
You don't seem able to distinguish between "seeing the way the wind appears to be blowing" and "supporting the way the wind appears to be blowing". I used a pair of quotes from very different sources (Ghandi and Patrick Non-White from Popehat (http://popehat.com/)) to describe the situation as it would appear to most people who are currently alive. Patrick's actually a Vox Day supporter and has called the man a friend.
Is it a historical inevitability? I dunno. But even a relatively right-wing source is willing to say that the world has and is moving left, and that's the point of that statement. Aside from its excellent imagery, anyways. (I daresay from the time of its posting, Patrick was indirectly talking about this very issue.)
EDIT: You're also acting like this whole Brian/Caitlyn Jenner media thing is universally a good thing
How? I said it happened and people saw that it happened, and that it was a move left that would have been unthinkable less than a decade ago. Two of these are verifiable facts I don't think you would challenge and the third is something I'm not convinced you'll disagree with either. Six years ago the lettered crowd was deeply shaken by Prop 8 and the idea of someone coming out as trans and getting a show over it was very far from anyone's thoughts.
Now, I have, in the past, voiced support for the cause of people accepting Trans people. I still hold that belief. But it's not something expressed inside that post. You're reading things into it from your knowledge of me that aren't actually expressed inside it.
It's not just me that thinks this is a battle for the minds
But it is you, and the Puppies, that chose to express it as though people are having their voices stolen and their freedom taken. Is it a battle of the minds? Probably so, show me something that isn't. Though it's far less life and death than either you or he is trying to portray it as. As hills to die taking go, the Hugos is probably about ten feet high.
But in pretending to a grand crusade and oppression you are, at the least, engaging in willful exaggeration. As I said earlier, an award by mass vote is effectively the proverbial marketplace of ideas made as literal as it can get. That your favored is losing such a battle is distressing, but it is not an excuse to abandon reason. Battles for the mind are won by the skillful presentation of ideas.
The skillful presentation of an idea is not yelling "THEY'RE CHEATERS" as a first option. It abandons alternate explanations, only one of which you've even made the slightest effort to discredit. Your chosen battlefield could be against you; your strategies could be ineffective or even counterproductive; your numbers just too few. All three charges will fit the available evidence.
It is also not a winning strategy. The man who escalates first and furthest in the culture wars is usually the one who loses. Sulla seized power with the Optimates to save the Roman Republic by purging it of those elements he thought were destroying it. Instead he ensured its destruction. Invoking the wrath of God hasn't stopped gay rights. And moving from passively to actively political has inspired horror and intense backlash in awarding the Hugo.
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I'm a bit late to this whole thing, but did the members of the puppies just not vote before or something? Or do they make up such a small minority of the SFF community that they just can't get nominations without conspiring?
It was not widely known until Sad Puppies began that the Hugo awards can be voted on by anyone who is a member of Worldcon. And anyone can become a voting member by paying the membership fee. A lot of people thought it was some professional organization or a jury of panelists, like many other awards (including the Nebulas).
It's like you thought I wouldn't have anticipated that contingency. The nominations were announced April 5th. The analysis (http://www.castaliahouse.com/2015-hugo-award-nominees-break-records/) was posted April 7th. The Amazon ratings at the time of the analysis predate all of the post-nomination publicity.
:facepalm: This is getting silly. Do I really need to explain how the day the nominations were announced wasn't the start of this nonsense?
You're trying to have it both ways. This is what you said before:
Can you not see that if you have something like Sad Puppies, where a lot of books are suddenly talked about, a bunch of people will go and review those same books and therefore inflate the ratings somewhat?
Do you really expect us to believe that there was no discussion whatsoever of books under consideration for Hugo nominees until the Puppies came along? Or that such discussion was only limited to Puppy-favored books? If there is a bias which lifts the rankings of prospective nominees, then the bias would occur during every nomination period and for every prospective book. All data points in the graph would be subject to the same effect.
Is it really so hard to understand why the numbers could be misleading? Notice how both numbers are so high? Do you honestly think that Brad Torgersen is such a good editor that this fact alone is responsible for him getting 10 times more votes than Patrick-Nielsen Hayden? Are you saying he's a 10 times better editor than Patrick-Nielsen Hayden? Or is it more likely that the entire hoopla surrounding the nominations resulted in more votes on both sides.
Let's do a thought experiment and toss out the entire Puppies contingent, which Vox Day estimates at 1015 (http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/08/blog-post.html), comprised of 565 Rabids and 450 Sads. Let's further assume that they all voted for Toni Weisskopf (which is highly unlikely as there were 166 votes for Vox Day in that category). 1216 minus 1015 is 201 which is still more than Patrick Nielsen Hayden got. And yet she was still swamped by the 2496 votes for No Award.
Here is what Larry Correia had to say about it (http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/08/24/sad-puppies-3-looking-at-the-results/):
Now, a little background on Best Editor, and why there is a Long and Short form. It used to be just Best Editor, only it usually went to short fiction magazine editors. Until Patrick Nielsen Hayden complained one year that he’d edited most of Best Novel nominees (well, that’s a shock) and he didn’t ever get to be Best Editor, so they made a category for him to win every other year (literally).
But there are no cliques or bias!
Editor Toni Weisskopf is a professional’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 you’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. Toni’s problem was that she just didn’t care and she didn’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. She’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 isn’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 (don’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 ‘70s 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.
Your regularly scheduled reminder that the Puppies movement is a catspaw of Vox Day, who also started his own publishing house to create SFWA- qualifying authors who could then slate vote for the Nebulas, all as revenge on SFWA for kicking him out for being a white supremacist :frogout:
Regularly scheduled reminder? What is this, Two-Minutes Hate?
GRRM's analysis was solid evidence that there hasn't been a political bias in the Hugos over recent years. This is about Vox Day's ideology.
Please point to this analysis. Because I have an even simpler one (http://file770.com/?p=22547&cpage=4#comment-262942):
I just did a count and found 19 Hugos have been won by conservatives since 1996.
That's 19 out of 266, or 7.14%. No political bias, eh?
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@Joshua, I thought the point about the Sad Puppies was that politics shouldn't matter? Therefore they placed the work ahead of the author's / editor's politics?
Again, methods are important here: The puppies sought to correct a percieved bias by supporting conservative authors in running for the hugo awards. By putting Vox Day on the lists, they supported Vox Day. That they decided to ignore his politics is fair enough, but it does mean that they stood by him, regardless of the reason.
(I could also make a point about that the issue people have against Vox Day is not because of his politics. white supremacy is not a political argument, it's an excuse for bigotry)
That's 19 out of 266, or 7.14%. No political bias, eh?
That would depend entirely on:
How you define the term conservative
How many authors have outspoken political views.
How many authors in the SFF field itself are conservative (if only 7.14% are by metric of point 1 and 2, the hugo has no bias persé).
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In further news: The Hugo nomination procedure has been amended to make slate voting less effective. The full text of the amendment is here (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016262.html).
It should be noted however that these rules will not go into effect until after they have been ratified by next year's WorldCon, so the 2016 Hugos will still be run under the old system.
From the FAQ:
1. Can you explain the system in plain language?
The important thing to remember is that nothing changes in how you nominate. If you think a work is Hugo-worthy, then nominate it. That’s all. There’s no need to rank your choices at the nomination stage, and there’s no reason not to nominate something you think even might be Hugo-worthy. All we are doing at this stage is throwing names into a hat. The final Hugo voting system, which actually chooses the winner, is unchanged. We could, in theory, simply put everyone’s nominations on the final ballot, but that would make for a very long ballot indeed. We therefore need to narrow the nomination list down. This system narrows down the list by eliminating the least popular works until only five (under current rules) finalists remain. Here are the basic steps to the elimination process:
a. You have one nomination “point” for each category that will be divided equally among the works you choose to nominate in that category. So, if you nominate two works in a category, each will get half a point; if you nominate three works, each will get one-third of a point, and so on.
b. All the points given to each work from all nomination ballots are added together. The two works that got the least number of points are eligible for elimination. One of these works is the least popular and will be eliminated. (We call this the Selection Phase.)
c. To determine which of these two works is least popular, we compare the total number of nominations they each received (that is, the number of nomination ballots on which each work appears). The work that received the fewest total number of nominations is the least popular and now completely vanishes from the nomination process as though it never existed. (We call this the Elimination Phase.)
d. We start over for the next round and repeat the process, however, if one of your works was eliminated, then you now have fewer works on your nomination ballot. This means that each work gets more total points, since you aren’t dividing your point among as many works. For example, if one of your five nominated works was eliminated, your remaining works now get one-fourth of a point each instead of one-fifth of a point. If four of your nominated works are eliminated, your remaining work now gets your full point.
4. How does this system eliminate slate or bloc voting?
It doesn’t, exactly, nor should a work be automatically eliminated just because it appears on a slate. On the other hand, any slate which nominates a full set of five works will find that each of its nominations only count 1/5 as much. With “non-slate” nominating, some of your works will be slowly eliminated, so your remaining works get more and more of your support. Since slate works tend to live or die together, they tend to eliminate each other until, in general, only one slate work remains. With a large enough support behind the slate (five times as much), the slate may still sweep a category; however, if that many voters support the slate, they arguably deserve to win, and no fair and unbiased system of nomination will prevent that. The answer in that case is, simply, to increase the general pool of voters. Regardless, with SDV-LPE, slates will never receive a disproportionate share of the final ballot, as occurred in the 2015 Hugos.
12. Couldn’t slates just recommend a single work for a candidate, and it will automatically appear on the final ballot?
Yes, if a slate is large enough that is certainly a viable possibility - it’s also completely fair. It does not force any other works off of the final ballot, and the final Hugo winner is determined by the same voting process we have always had. Just appearing on the final ballot isn’t a guarantee of winning a Hugo. However, if any large section of fandom strongly believes that a work deserves a Hugo nomination, then it should, in fact, be represented on the final ballot.
19. Wasn’t this system just designed by Social Justice Warriors to block the Good Stuff?
It is true that much of the discussion for this system occurred on Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s “Making Light” discussion board, and it is also true that groups such as the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies consider TNH and PNH to be The Enemy, and therefore completely biased and not to be trusted. Other than serving as occasional moderators, TNH and PNH had no real input in the discussions of the system, however. Those of us who worked on the system were very clear that our goal was not to keep the Sad/Rabid Puppies off of the Hugo ballot, and that any system which specifically targets any type of work is inherently wrong and unfair. One of the members of the group is a retired US Naval officer, a combat veteran, a certified Navy marksman, a Christian, and considers Robert Heinlein to be the greatest science fiction author who has ever lived. In short, he is exactly the Puppies’ demographic. But any slate, of any sort, be it a Sad Puppy or a Happy Kitten of Social Justice, breaks the Hugo Award because a small percentage of voters can effectively prevent any other work from appearing on the final ballot. This is a major flaw in the Hugo nomination system, and it is a flaw that must be fixed if the integrity of the award is to be maintained. Politics should play no role whatsoever in whether a work is Hugo-worthy or not.
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Hugo Awards: Introducing alternative vote systems before the UK government does.
(Also, yah! That seems like a very good system).
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Saying that his politics is bigotry is not a falsification of the fact that it is still politics, I find that just too obvious to let it go.
@NGTM, look, I admit to some rethorical flamboyance, but more than half of that was not to expose my own thoughts, but theirs. I do think there's an attempt to curb the entire landscape of imagination. When I used the word censorial it was on a rethorical small jab, referring to the actual censorship that happened with all those No Awards given. But my wider thoughts don't go to the usage of mere censorship, but rather on the shift of the perceived possible imaginations by everyone, something like the Overton Window. You don't need any office for censorship to influence that.
e: @The_E
That's very interesting. I can already guess Vox Day's take on it! It's as if it's designed for a group of slates overruning a single slate with the strategy of "you scratch my back I scratch yours" winning over "so here's my big back now all you minions have to do is scratch it". I personally think it's a viable alternative system. It appears to be, but I'm sure the more mathematical inclined (and skeptically inclined) will have their own theories about it.
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Saying that his politics is bigotry is not a falsification of the fact that it is still politics, I find that just too obvious to let it go.
To agree that bigotry is a brand of politics is to admit it onto the stage for due consideration as a valid viewpoint. It is not and should not be. Bigotry, particularly of the toxic and despicable brand Vox Day so proudly trumpets, should be stamped out wherever possible, regardless of the end of the political spectrum it and the person supporting it occupy.
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Saying that his politics is bigotry is not a falsification of the fact that it is still politics, I find that just too obvious to let it go.
To agree that bigotry is a brand of politics is to admit it onto the stage for due consideration as a valid viewpoint. It is not and should not be. Bigotry, particularly of the toxic and despicable brand Vox Day so proudly trumpets, should be stamped out wherever possible, regardless of the end of the political spectrum it and the person supporting it occupy.
This literally can not be repeated enough, but I will only quote it once for the sake of preserving the forum database.
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Where did I state that "bigotry" is a brand of politics? Bigotry is how some people brand some other people's politics. You find those politics abhorrent? Fine. I wasn't making any assessment on its merits. Also, Joshua, that line about preserving forum databases was silly to the extreme man. Come on you can do better :D.
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Theodore Beale speaks about a black SF/F author:
…it is not that I, and others, do not view [Jemisin] as human, (although genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens), it is that we simply do not view her as being fully civilized for the obvious historical reason that she is not...
...The laws are not there to let whites “just shoot people like me, without consequence, as long as they feel threatened by my presence”, those self-defense laws have been put in place to let whites defend their lives and their property from people, like her, who are half-savages engaged in attacking them...
Unlike the white males she excoriates, there is no evidence to be found anywhere on the planet that a society of NK Jemisins is capable of building an advanced civilization, or even successfully maintaining one without significant external support from those white males.
John C Wright (nominated by Sad Puppies) reacts to the ending of Avatar: The Legend of Korra, in which two women hold hands
Mr DiMartino and Mr Konietzko: You are disgusting, limp, soulless sacks of filth. You have earned the contempt and hatred of all decent human beings forever, and we will do all we can to smash the filthy phallic idol of sodomy you bow and serve and worship. Contempt, because you struck from behind, cravenly; and hatred, because you serve a cloud of morally-retarded mental smog called Political Correctness, which is another word for hating everything good and bright and decent and sane in life.
I have no hatred in my heart for any man’s politics, policies, or faith, any more than I have hatred for termites; but once they start undermining my house where I live, it is time to exterminate them.
Yeah, clearly we have a very hard time determining whether these people are bigots.
And re-quoting for emphasis.
Yeah, clearly we have a very hard time determining whether these people are bigots.
Rejecting these authors, and anything they support in the pursuit of the views quoted above is not harmful bias (though it is bias, technically, by the definition of the word); it is stamping out bigotry. I am making an assessment on their merits, because it is an assessment that must be made for any real discussion of the actual results to have context worth framing the discussion.
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That's all fine Scotty, but I *wasn't*. Politics includes terms like Fascism, Nazism, Communism, Feudalism, you name it. You despise his politics, that's fine. I don't think psychoanalizing the author's political ideas to get him/her placed in some toxic pathological box should have any bearing on the basic truth that these are political ideas.
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wow, this topic came BACK didn't it?
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That's all fine Scotty, but I *wasn't*. Politics includes terms like Fascism, Nazism, Communism, Feudalism, you name it. You despise his politics, that's fine. I don't think psychoanalizing the author's political ideas to get him/her placed in some toxic pathological box should have any bearing on the basic truth that these are political ideas.
And the point we're trying to bring across to you is that it's not Vox Day's political views are the problem, but rather what these political views are the result from.
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Meh, that's just politicking from where I look. IOW, political shunning. You might want to call it something else in order, IDK, to sleep better at night?, but all I see is political dynamics at play here. Also, from what I read, most of his own radicalization is also a result, a product of the politically correct atmosphere that he tries to trollishly shock and antagonize. Reading his old material, it's obvious he wasn't as rabid as he is now.
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Replace "Jasmine" in Vox Day's quote with ANY member here on the forums and pretend he is a forum member. Would you think they last long?
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You better revise that post into something that isn't immediately banworthy then. All good now.
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Yeah, alright, it's just... uggh.
Vox Day would call this censorship I'm sure. But that is where he would be wrong, and I apologize for trying to emulate him just to prove a point.
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I think I'm not the one here being confused about what "politics" means. It doesn't mean "sophisticated opinion about things". It's entirely about the relationship between people, social values, norms, etc. It does include basic bigotry as perfectly illustrated by your example (The_E, FWIW you don't have to worry about me, I totally get his point is about giving an example of VoxThink, not actually being bigoted against me by proxy or by any sleazy under the table manner trolling, etc.)
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Can you answer the rephrased question, please? :)
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Why does the answer to that question have any bearing whatsoever to the current situation down at the Hugos?
I don't like Vox Day. There are many quotes that I just close my eyes and utter to myself "there he goes... f hell". It matters not one iota regarding the values of the works his slate (or others) put to vote in the Hugos, even if it were *his* works.
This all reminds me all too well of all the anti Orson Scott Card shenanigan. I think the problem is due to the "world a village" syndrome. We get to know too much of everyone else nowadays. It didn't use to be like that. Thankfully, because then we wouldn't have the works of Lovecraft to enjoy, or the songs of Presley to please. Or etc.
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@NGTM, look, I admit to some rethorical flamboyance, but more than half of that was not to expose my own thoughts, but theirs. I do think there's an attempt to curb the entire landscape of imagination. When I used the word censorial it was on a rethorical small jab, referring to the actual censorship that happened with all those No Awards given. But my wider thoughts don't go to the usage of mere censorship, but rather on the shift of the perceived possible imaginations by everyone, something like the Overton Window. You don't need any office for censorship to influence that.
If you want things to stay as they are, you know that's not going to happen. Things change; tastes change. Right now they're changing left. It sucks you don't like that, I suppose, but you're trying to argue the process is somehow unnatural and dangerous, and there's nothing aside from your bald assertion to prove it. Nobody's getting choked out by ninja awards squads in the night. Right-wingers can still publish and they aren't exactly hard to find. (Oh John Ringo No! and all that.) They don't turn up at the Hugos as awardwinners. That's interesting, but it's not necessarily indicative of any kind of problem either with the Hugos or at large. (As I've said before, it may simply speak to the demographics of the fandom or the demographics of the writers or both.)
If you think that the No Awards were censorship, you also still don't understand what censorship is. People had a choice and they chose against. Censorship requires them to be not allowed to choose. Learn the difference.
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Why does the answer to that question have any bearing whatsoever to the current situation down at the Hugos?
Well, for one, he's responsible for the current situation down at the Hugos.
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Why does the answer to that question have any bearing whatsoever to the current situation down at the Hugos?
Well, for one, he's responsible for the current situation down at the Hugos.
I don't think you understood my question (your answer is tautological). Read it up again.
If you want things to stay as they are, you know that's not going to happen. Things change; tastes change. Right now they're changing left. It sucks you don't like that, I suppose, but you're trying to argue the process is somehow unnatural and dangerous, and there's nothing aside from your bald assertion to prove it.
Metaphysical discussions of what is "natural" or not aside (vs what, supernatural?), there are some wrong things said here. First, past performance is barely an indicative of the future. Yes, it does have *some* predictive value, but it is by far a very weak one (black swans abound, the fate of the turkey, etc., etc.). Second, the "process" of it being towards Left is not dangerous at all. I actually, and contrary to your assertions, don't mind it at all. What I don't like is how these things are conflated: Ctuluh going Left is not equal to Ctuhluh inevitably going Left, which is itself not equal to the homogeneity of only imagining Ctuhluh going Left. All these three are different between each other, and for the current topic, I'm interested in the latter point, because it's about imagination. You know, fiction.
Nobody's getting choked out by ninja awards squads in the night. Right-wingers can still publish and they aren't exactly hard to find. (Oh John Ringo No! and all that.) They don't turn up at the Hugos as awardwinners. That's interesting, but it's not necessarily indicative of any kind of problem either with the Hugos or at large.
There's not a "necessary" here. There's an "obviously", but you refrain to admit it I don't even have the curiosity to know why. I really don't care. You keep pushing this idea that proposing that a clique group is getting hold of a prestigious award and slanting it towards a particular ideological direction is tantamount to proposing that what is going on is bookstore censorship, etc. There's a name for that fallacy and you know it. Stop doing it.
(Seriously, if you keep doing it, I'll just ignore you henceforth, it's more than tiresome, it's boring)
If you think that the No Awards were censorship, you also still don't understand what censorship is. People had a choice and they chose against. Censorship requires them to be not allowed to choose. Learn the difference.
Jesus Christ, you take everything literally don't you? Even rethorical sentences.
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Why does the answer to that question have any bearing whatsoever to the current situation down at the Hugos?
Well, for one, he's responsible for the current situation down at the Hugos.
I don't think you understood my question (your answer is tautological). Read it up again.
Oh that way, well. You argue that Vox Day's viewpoints are some sort of sacred political thing, whilst I'd argue that they are deeply personal attacks dressed up as "political arguments" in order to score points with the "Anti-censorship" and "Politics are more important then human beings" crowds. I am curious if, would Vox Day come on this forum and say the things he said about an SFF writer to a forum member as the subject, you'd support him not being banned.
Or, to make it shorter, do you consider "politics" to be more important then basic empathy.
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Where did I state his politics are sacred? I stated they should be irrelevant, which is an entirely different position. That many people won't be able to separate the author to their stances on life, it's a moot point. It's also something, I believe, that is going way too far. Scott Card, for instance, was boycotted and reviled for defending a position that the big majority of people in America stood for just a few months ago. Empathy goes both ways, you know. It's not sufficient to demand empathy from what appears to be over-the-top bigots shouting the most shocking things from their hilltops, one must exercise it as well and entertain the notion of a basic level of civility. Such civility would demand that people leave politics outside when one enters a room where you are going to vote for the best fiction material on its merits, for instance.
But such civilized barriers do not exist anymore. The "personal is political", which means that everything has become political. Being a good sport and accept Vox Day's "presence" despite his politics is not acceptable anymore, anything other than destroying any effect he had on the Hugos is tantamount to condoning his political views (as translated: bigotry!) and thus tainting the entire Hugos with his views! Guilt by association is such a darling nowadays.
But here's a damning paragraph from Correia (trigger warning, the guy is ****ing pissed):
The real winner this year was Vox Day and the Rabid Puppies. Yep. You CHORFing idiots don’t seem to realize that Brad, Sarah, and I were the reasonable ones who spent most of the summer talking Vox out of having his people No Award the whole thing to burn it down, but then you did it for him. He got the best of both worlds. Oh, but now you’re going to say that Three Body Problem won, and that’s a victory for diversity! You poor deluded fools… That was Vox’s pick for best novel. That’s the one most of the Rabid Puppies voted for too.
Here’s something for you crowing imbeciles to think through, the only reason Vox didn’t have Three Body Problem on his nomination slate was that he read it a month too late. If he’d read it sooner, it would have been an RP nomination… AND THEN YOU WOULD HAVE NO AWARDED IT.
You know, the first time I skim read that thing, I thought to myself, "well at least the Hugos could reach here a consensus, a beautiful little miracle of people actually getting together and voting for actual quality, despite politics", and only then that last sentence actually made it into my brain. And I can't help but think he's 100% right on that one.
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This seemed a very neutral piece to me, and quite informative: http://difficultrun.nathanielgivens.com/2015/08/24/lots-of-hugo-losers/
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This all reminds me all too well of all the anti Orson Scott Card shenanigan. I think the problem is due to the "world a village" syndrome. We get to know too much of everyone else nowadays. It didn't use to be like that. Thankfully, because then we wouldn't have the works of Lovecraft to enjoy, or the songs of Presley to please. Or etc.
Where did I state his politics are sacred? I stated they should be irrelevant, which is an entirely different position.
Agreed: separating art from artist is the only sensible thing to do. Lovecraft's xenophobia has no bearing on his work's aesthetic value, except when his views infect his writing. Wagner was probably an antisemite, but "Ride of the Valkyries" is still awesome. Saying that Gauss' personal character detracts from his mathematics is just silly.
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You can't talk about Tolkien's work nowadays without some obligatory comment going your way on how perhaps we should be careful in making certain remarks about what really amounts to a racist body of work, "if you think about it". Every single discussion of every classical author seemingly needs to have these sorts of caveats nowadays, as if to assure the audience that the guys doing the commentary in no way, shape or form embody those same particular excentrical beliefs or acts that are (or were) not kosher anymore (except when talking about Turing, of course).
Yeah, thanks. I actually don't think any fan of Tolkien's work is necessarily a racist, or that there is any correlation here. Or that a Charlie Chaplin fan is a pedophilia apologist in disguise. All of these things might be included in our wider body of knowledge, but are they the really juicy stuff that we should get from all these works? Is that how culture is supposed to go forward from now on? "Yeah I never actually read anything from Beale but I can tell its all crap if you think of how despicably bigoted the author is", well bloody damn.
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Three Body Problem wouldn't have been no awarded, because it was good.
It didn't make the ballot because the Puppies ****ed the ballot up. It made the ballot because one of the Puppy authors had the decency and fortitude to pull out.
The Puppy nominations weren't very good, quality-wise. A quick read over them demonstrates that handily. The Hugo's less diagnostic of quality than the Nebulas, in general, but the Puppy slate didn't live up to even Hugo standards.
Correia got a 'Hugo' (the Campbell's technically not a Hugo, but is voted on by the Hugo pool and presented at the same awards) nomination for Best New Author in 2011. The man has no ground to stand on. He's been treated fairly.
Scott Card and Vox Day deserve mass social censure for their political beliefs because their beliefs advocate political, physical, and sexual violence against innocents. This is morally elementary: we vote against the violent. No one remembers or values cries for civility during the fight against slavery, or the Civil Rights movement, or suffrage — they remember those tactics which achieved the necessary, human result, the upswelling of compassion and universal human respect that helped move the species forward. Card and VD have the right to shout, and in return they have the right to be shouted down. This is the exercise of basic civility, the defense of empathy against a man who has advocated rape as a basic dating technique, who denies the fundamental humanity of authors who'd have to share a room with him, and who has organized a political campaign to take over a fan voting pool in retaliation for SFWA's simple decision to respect its own terms of good conduct.
Vox Day participates in a social contract. When he breaches that contract by threatening to kill another author, he loses the right to be treated as just another author with just another voice. When a Sad Puppy supporter calls the cops and asks them to target one of the Hugo MCs, he loses the right to be treated as just another Hugo attendee. Again: morally elementary!
Democracy is an exploitable system. Some of these exploits are pervasive in American politics — gerrymandering, for instance, or disenfranchisement tactics. The Hugo voting system is vulnerable to these tactics. The Hugo voters protected those vulnerabilities by their expressed, democratic will. If voting reforms are ratified, the system will be further protected.
Vox Day aside:
People vote on works according to merit. For a long time that merit has been quality. This year, the Puppies suggested that merit had become correlated to politics. They pushed works on the ground of merit and politics. Is it any surprise the voting pool — larger than it's ever been, implicitly less cliqueish than it's ever been, for if expanding the pool enhances the effect of a clique how can it be a clique? — found that argument lacked merit? Is it any surprise that they said 'we do not want to vote on the merit AND politics of a work, we only want to vote on the merit, and we find no merit in the argument that there's a political bias?
Remember that there are political disagreements on the meaning of 'quality'. You'll find many more left-wing authors in the New Weird and the postmodern, critical styles than you will in the pulp styles. Yet even the debates on this ground have been systemically deceptive — Correia's argument that books 'used to be' apolitical is trivial, instantaneous to disprove, you only have to look at book covers from the 1970s or the 1980s, even the high Golden Age.
The Hugo voters vote on a very small, relatively inconsequential (yes, really) award that's mostly only recognized within shrinking fandom circles. This is not some grand battle in the culture war. It's closer to a town hall argument. The only point of great philosophical interest is Ghyl's — is a work's technical merit separable from its political content? The answer, of course, is sometimes. We recognize great film from Hanna Riefenstaahl, but we do not exclude the political purpose of the film when we speak of it, we are able to discuss a work in multiple ways and with a critical eye. We can look at how Lovecraft's racism and xenophobia influenced his work, and write new Lovecraftiana that challenges and examines those tendencies while also admiring his strengths. We can do the same for Tolkien, or Shelley, or Rokeya Sakkhawat Hussain.
But in a sense this year was not a good test of that: because the work pushed on political grounds was not very good. (How do we evaluate good? We have few universal standards; I think my critical sense is better than most, because I can reliably produce good fiction, and because I can observe that many readers move from certain books towards other books, but not the other way. In the end we rely on mass conversation.)
If you support voting on merit alone, this year's outcome was the best we could have hoped for.
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It's pretty important to remember, as a means of keeping perspective, that the Hugo Awards are a fan award. The criteria to get a Hugo Award is 'fans like you,' and this has been plain and obvious for the award's entire lifetime. We're not talking a juried award here.
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Basically I just nodded (agreed, not fell asleep) throughout Battuta's post.
They pushed works on the ground of merit and politics.
Ugh.
The only point of great philosophical interest is Ghyl's — is a work's technical merit separable from its political content? The answer, of course, is sometimes. We recognize great film from Hanna Riefenstaahl, but we do not exclude the political purpose of the film when we speak of it, we are able to discuss a work in multiple ways and with a critical eye. We can look at how Lovecraft's racism and xenophobia influenced his work, and write new Lovecraftiana that challenges and examines those tendencies while also admiring his strengths. We can do the same for Tolkien, or Shelley, or Rokeya Sakkhawat Hussain.
I agree completely, though I think we should always separate art from artist, aesthetically speaking.
But in a sense this year was not a good test of that: because the work pushed on political grounds was not very good.
... that's not at all surprising.
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@Joshua: That is a question that I couldn't care less. I haven't read his body of work, nor am I interested. It's also something that it is not for me to decide.
Three Body Problem wouldn't have been no awarded, because it was good.
It didn't make the ballot because the Puppies ****ed the ballot up. It made the ballot because one of the Puppy authors had the decency and fortitude to pull out.
Well, I'm glad you are so sure of it. I'm not as sure of it, because it happened in almost every single other instance of this except for the Guardians. Counterfactuals are ... problematic.
The Puppy nominations weren't very good, quality-wise. A quick read over them demonstrates that handily. The Hugo's less diagnostic of quality than the Nebulas, in general, but the Puppy slate didn't live up to even Hugo standards.
Correia got a 'Hugo' (the Campbell's technically not a Hugo, but is voted on by the Hugo pool and presented at the same awards) nomination for Best New Author in 2011. The man has no ground to stand on. He's been treated fairly.
Again, I'm glad you can make such a judgement on what's fair or not. I'm sorry, I have the utmost respect for you, but can you really answer in the name of Fairness with a capital F and "having grounds to stand on"? What is fair? Perhaps Correia will think that seeing three people getting 39 Hugo awards isn't that "fair" at all, in comparison. Perhaps you disagree. Nowhere here do I see the "grounds" to declare by fiat that people should then shut up about their perceived grievances, that they 'got their share, so be quiet already'.
I will also accept that the pool was probably poorly chosen. Many claims from diverse venues to that effect testify for that truth, and thus it seems more than plausible.
Scott Card and Vox Day deserve mass social censure for their political beliefs because their beliefs advocate political, physical, and sexual violence against innocents. This is morally elementary: we vote against the violent. No one remembers or values cries for civility during the fight against slavery, or the Civil Rights movement, or suffrage — they remember those tactics which achieved the necessary, human result, the upswelling of compassion and universal human respect that helped move the species forward. Card and VD have the right to shout, and in return they have the right to be shouted down. This is the exercise of basic civility, the defense of empathy against a man who has advocated rape as a basic dating technique, who denies the fundamental humanity of authors who'd have to share a room with him, and who has organized a political campaign to take over a fan voting pool in retaliation for SFWA's simple decision to respect its own terms of good conduct.
Determining who is innocent or who isn't is not an easy task. It only seems so in retrospect and with lots of colored glasses, and that bias makes us look foolishly condescending towards our ancestors. To determine this, we *do* require a battle of ideas. This seems to me not just inevitable, but necessary. And it also strikes me that Conservative viewpoints have a moral duty to exist and be defended. Every new idea must be subject to scrutiny, moral, philosophical, empirical. And for that, you need people to engage in it. Scott Card is extremely conservative. He believes that homossexuality is a sin, that it is not a civilized activity, that it should be tamed and prevented. That society should not condone it. I fail to see here any inherent hatred, but rather commitment to one's beliefs. If one loves their country, their fellow friends and civilization in general, he will try to defend it from, amongst other things, bad ideas and bad values.
That Scott got it amazingly wrong is a statement of history. That he should be fought politically, a moot point. That he lost, a pleasure and a relief to know.
However, in everything about this, the work should remain untarnished. His persona should remain untarnished. There's a level of social derision and fundamental witch hunting that degrades the very fabrics of civilized discussions and conversations that allowed these frontiers to be fought and won in the past.
Vox Day participates in a social contract. When he breaches that contract by threatening to kill another author, he loses the right to be treated as just another author with just another voice. When a Sad Puppy supporter calls the cops and asks them to target one of the Hugo MCs, he loses the right to be treated as just another Hugo attendee. Again: morally elementary!
I don't have the details with me. That isn't just elementary, it seems basic duty of any institution. By "accepting Vox Day", I was speaking in wider, symbolic terms.
People vote on works according to merit. For a long time that merit has been quality. This year, the Puppies suggested that merit had become correlated to politics. They pushed works on the ground of merit and politics. Is it any surprise the voting pool — larger than it's ever been, implicitly less cliqueish than it's ever been, for if expanding the pool enhances the effect of a clique how can it be a clique? — found that argument lacked merit? Is it any surprise that they said 'we do not want to vote on the merit AND politics of a work, we only want to vote on the merit, and we find no merit in the argument that there's a political bias?
Remember that there are political disagreements on the meaning of 'quality'. You'll find many more left-wing authors in the New Weird and the postmodern, critical styles than you will in the pulp styles. Yet even the debates on this ground have been systemically deceptive — Correia's argument that books 'used to be' apolitical is trivial, instantaneous to disprove, you only have to look at book covers from the 1970s or the 1980s, even the high Golden Age.
Two things to state here. First, they have their own theories and datas to back their theories about whether if the Hugos were being hoarded or not. You disagree, that's fine with me. I'm not convinced that the smoke didn't signal a fire. The second is something more general, and it's a pattern that I see everywhere. The Left (that resides in all of us?) always sees an inherent oppression within the system itself, that the status quo is Wrong, and therefore a revolution must cleanse it. All its statements, reasonings and judgements stem from these basic principles. The Right doesn't necessarily disagree with this statement, but what it points out is that the revolutionaries are destroying the little civilization we had left with a lack of honor, thuggery, coercion, terror, and eschewing every single decent protocol we "had in place" in order to maintain our society within civilized levels of behavior.
All these assymetric concerns are alive and well in this kerfuffle. I agree with you that the "Status Quo" was already political. But then let's drop the pretense that the awards were not political, and that there weren't battles and agendas being fought in here for a good while now. What the Left does in an extremely competent way is to determine that their own agendas are the Moral Good, and thus to fight them, anyone is automatically deemed as Immoral, as a "Violent" person commiting despicable acts "against the Innocent". There's a religious moral aspect to this that I won't go into, but the way the Puppies were labeled and insulted not only from anonymous sympathizers with Scalzi and co., but more to the point, by the wider media, Tor editors and a lot of other "influential" people really inforced the notion that the Left will do anything in the name of the "Moral Good", whatever it is that it decided today to be.
You italicize the fact that some random anonymous supporter tried to SWAT their enemies, forgetting or disavowing the fact that lots of Puppies themselves were also the target of threats of all sorts, shunnings, dogpiles, lies and defamations, etc. Correia is frothing at his mouth against a "clique" of sorts? Well, he's a mysoginist, even a racist. Let's make all sorts of **** up and print this in all news outlets, it's not as if anyone of importance will cry foul.
If you support voting on merit alone, this year's outcome was the best we could have hoped for.
Others are saying that Toni should definitely have gotten the award, but I couldn't tell.
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I don't know anything about the editorial side, and in fact I have a kind of professional obligation to not speak about it.
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All these assymetric concerns are alive and well in this kerfuffle. I agree with you that the "Status Quo" was already political. But then let's drop the pretense that the awards were not political, and that there weren't battles and agendas being fought in here for a good while now. What the Left does in an extremely competent way is to determine that their own agendas are the Moral Good, and thus to fight them, anyone is automatically deemed as Immoral, as a "Violent" person commiting despicable acts "against the Innocent". There's a religious moral aspect to this that I won't go into, but the way the Puppies were labeled and insulted not only from anonymous sympathizers with Scalzi and co., but more to the point, by the wider media, Tor editors and a lot of other "influential" people really inforced the notion that the Left will do anything in the name of the "Moral Good", whatever it is that it decided today to be.
And this is different from what the puppies are doing how, exactly?
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Lotta scare quotes around things that don't need scare quotes itt
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If The Left means people who stand up against someone who uses death threats to get his way, then roll on The Left.
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Second, the "process" of it being towards Left is not dangerous at all. I actually, and contrary to your assertions, don't mind it at all.
Then stop complaining, because what you are seeing is the result of that process. Fiction does not exist in some holy vacuum untouched by the world around it. It moves with mores and interests of the populace. That's why genres exist in the first place. It's why the Hugos exist by extension. If the population moves left, writers are a part of it, and so are their works. If we've been moving left the time this Hugo Awards covers, so likely will the stories in those awards. It's entirely predictable.
As you are not a writer, you have perhaps not thought on these things; Battuta is a writer, and has. So have I, though I confine myself to the strictly amateur end. You're trying to argue your perspective against people who would have experience relevant to what is at hand you do not; who have first-hand experience of the interactions between author, story, audience, society, and environment.
There's a name for that fallacy and you know it.
There's no fallacy to my mind and I think it'll be quite illuminating to hear you argue for the existence of one, so try.
You're arguing for a clique group (that would have been diluted by a massive turnout increase, that's a fallacy there), you've not established its existence in any way, shape, or form. That's also a fallacy. Would you care to stop then? You've not proved a clique exists, you've not proved this is really not a sample of the population, you've basically built your entire argument on unsupported assumption that some conspiracy or clique is denying the Hugo.
Show me evidence. And don't pull a Goober with the way things are awarded; that evidence cannot be construed only the way you want it to be, and presenting it as if you can is blunt lying. Don't tell me that this Hugo was evidence either, because turning out against Vox Day et. al. is not necessarily turning out for the left or against the right; it can be personal, it can be of genuine belief in the lack of quality of the work, it can be a vote against politicizing the award, it can even be a "get your politics out of my escapist fiction asshole". You've admitted several of these are possible already, so you can't very well claim that it's certainly a vote against the right now. If there's a clique, I want to see the clique itself and hear you explain why it got more powerful when both sides experienced massive turnout increases.
Jesus Christ, you take everything literally don't you? Even rethorical sentences.
If you wish to abandon reason for rhetoric, don't be a part of reasoned discussion. This is part of a long and painful history of the right side of the aisle claiming censorship when they're shouted down and if you want to be part of that tradition, you get to suffer as other members of it have.
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All these assymetric concerns are alive and well in this kerfuffle. I agree with you that the "Status Quo" was already political. But then let's drop the pretense that the awards were not political, and that there weren't battles and agendas being fought in here for a good while now. What the Left does in an extremely competent way is to determine that their own agendas are the Moral Good, and thus to fight them, anyone is automatically deemed as Immoral, as a "Violent" person commiting despicable acts "against the Innocent". There's a religious moral aspect to this that I won't go into, but the way the Puppies were labeled and insulted not only from anonymous sympathizers with Scalzi and co., but more to the point, by the wider media, Tor editors and a lot of other "influential" people really inforced the notion that the Left will do anything in the name of the "Moral Good", whatever it is that it decided today to be.
And this is different from what the puppies are doing how, exactly?
It is not different! It is exactly the same! Again, it's always the same story. Correia + Day + others think that the Left has usurped Culture and Sci Fi through illegitimate corrupt means. The Left cannot win by legitimate means (because they are lazy, insert any typical stereotype of the Left in here), and they are winning? Obvious signal of corruption. Paradoxically then, they establish the Left as being the actual status quo. A revolution is then needed. Thus, they storm the castle and try to overthrow the status quo. Meanwhile, the status quo complains about the "thuggery" of the revolutionaires.
Second, the "process" of it being towards Left is not dangerous at all. I actually, and contrary to your assertions, don't mind it at all.
Then stop complaining, because what you are seeing is the result of that process. Fiction does not exist in some holy vacuum untouched by the world around it. It moves with mores and interests of the populace. That's why genres exist in the first place. It's why the Hugos exist by extension. If the population moves left, writers are a part of it, and so are their works. If we've been moving left the time this Hugo Awards covers, so likely will the stories in those awards. It's entirely predictable.
You are still conflating those three things I mentioned, which you shouldn't. Also, one thing is to not mind that Ctuhluh moves Left, quite another is minding how Ctuhluh is made to be moved Left. That is, the methods. The means. Current generation seemingly has a penchant for witch hunting, thuggery, blitzkrieg social justice movements that **** on people's lives, on facts and on reason in order to "have a larger conversation" and solve wider "problematic" issues that are still systematically devising the oppressive patriarchal system we live in, etc., etc.
I fundamentally disagree with all these methods. They are anti-Enlightenment. Anti-Reason. They are profoundly based on emotional baggage and manipulative ethics. Psychopathic and Sociopathic behaviors abound in all these movements. It's not making the world better, it just parades that it is.
As you are not a writer, you have perhaps not thought on these things; Battuta is a writer, and has. So have I, though I confine myself to the strictly amateur end. You're trying to argue your perspective against people who would have experience relevant to what is at hand you do not; who have first-hand experience of the interactions between author, story, audience, society, and environment.
These things are all true (except the suggestion I haven't thought of these things) and I have admitted to them. So what?
There's no fallacy to my mind and I think it'll be quite illuminating to hear you argue for the existence of one, so try.
It's the most usual type: A Strawman. I never said that censorship of these books was happening. It's a lot more subtler than that, I referenced the Overton Window, not 1984. What is at stake here is what is deemed "acceptable", "sensible" and "popular", and the Hugos, despite Battuta's insistence that they are really irrelevant (lol), they provide one measurement of this Overton Window in the Sci Fi scene. IDK, I'm portuguese and I've known about the Hugos and the Nebulas ever since I started reading sci-fi, that is, when I was a teenager. To claim the Hugos are just a townhall thing is hilarious to me. It really is. I was never exposed to town meetings of, say, Louisville, Mississipi in my life, let alone when I was a parohical teen unaware of the wider world communities.
You're arguing for a clique group (that would have been diluted by a massive turnout increase, that's a fallacy there)
If there's a fallacy there, is one of Composition and it's yours. If there's a clique working there, it influenced what happened until now, and in 2015 those 2500 votes are a testament to a very new and different thing altogether.
..., you've not established its existence in any way, shape, or form. That's also a fallacy.
No, it's not, stop making **** up. An incomplete argument is not a fallacy, it's just incomplete. I'm not making a PHD thesis out here for your entertainment, and we know others have made their own arguments and theories far, far more complete than anything I've written in here. I'm writing with the obvious assumption that we all know that these exist and can easily be reached.
Would you care to stop then? You've not proved a clique exists, you've not proved this is really not a sample of the population, you've basically built your entire argument on unsupported assumption that some conspiracy or clique is denying the Hugo.
I might be entirely wrong, sure. I will merely say that all the evidence I've seen so far tells me that there's (way) more than just smoke in the air. If I am not convincing you, sure, that's perfectly fine. It's not part of "my agenda" to convince or convert you to my truth.
Show me evidence. And don't pull a Goober with the way things are awarded; that evidence cannot be construed only the way you want it to be, and presenting it as if you can is blunt lying. Don't tell me that this Hugo was evidence either, because turning out against Vox Day et. al. is not necessarily turning out for the left or against the right; it can be personal, it can be of genuine belief in the lack of quality of the work, it can be a vote against politicizing the award, it can even be a "get your politics out of my escapist fiction asshole". You've admitted several of these are possible already, so you can't very well claim that it's certainly a vote against the right now. If there's a clique, I want to see the clique itself and hear you explain why it got more powerful when both sides experienced massive turnout increases.
Goober made a good statistical analysis. You call it a "pull a Goober". I can only sigh at that. "Evidence cannot be construed only the way you want it to be", what the hell does that even mean? One works with the evidence one has. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but claims of politicking and clique maneuvers in a tight community isn't exactly an extraordinary claim now is it.
But let me be blunt about it: I'm not the expert that can write you a good teatrise on how and why my "theory" is correct. And thus you'll have to search for it if you are so inclined. I also accept other possibilities because I'm not a fanatic. Of course I accept other possibilities.
If you wish to abandon reason for rhetoric, don't be a part of reasoned discussion. This is part of a long and painful history of the right side of the aisle claiming censorship when they're shouted down and if you want to be part of that tradition, you get to suffer as other members of it have.
Is that a threat?
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Lotta "scare" quotes around "things" that don't "need" scare quotes itt
FTFY
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'entire' userbase of hlp 'replaced' with bbc headline writers
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Here's Scalzi's take: (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/08/24/being-a-jerk-about-the-hugos-not-as-effective-a-strategy-as-you-might-think/)
Why did the Puppies fare so poorly? There has already been much speculation and analysis on the matter, and there will continue to be for some time. But in my estimation (and leaving out issues of literary quality of the nominations, which is super-subjective), the reason for their massive and historic failure is simple:
They acted like jerks, and performed a series of jerk maneuvers.
Specifically:
They created slates for awards that are meant to be about an individual’s personal tastes and choices. That’s a jerk maneuver.
They gloated about the slates getting on the ballot, and the upset that this caused other people. That’s a jerk maneuver.
They created an imaginary cabal of people and asserted without evidence that this cabal indulged in slate-making, and used this assertion to justify their own bad action. That’s a jerk maneuver.
They spent months insulting the people they associated with their imaginary cabal. That’s a jerk maneuver.
They spent months crapping on the writers they dragooned into their imaginary cabal, and crapping on the work those writers created. That’s a jerk maneuver.
They spent months denigrating the award they went out of their way to build slates for. That’s a jerk maneuver.
They spent months pissing on the people who love and care about the awards, and the convention that hosts both. That’s a jerk maneuver.
They expected the people who they’d been treating with contempt to give them the respect they would not afford them. That’s a jerk maneuver.
They pretended they didn’t actually care about the awards for which they put in months and sometimes years of effort to get work on the ballot. That’s a jerk maneuver.
They had the poor grace to whine about people potentially voting “no award,” which is fully allowed by the rules, after gleefully pointing out that slating was not disallowed. That’s a jerk maneuver.
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Correia's take is scathing as well, but towards the "other side". Really horrible blood everywhere. Of course Scalzi ommits quite a lot, and paints the subject matter in his favor. He is right, though, there was a lot of jackassery. Where he is wrong is in ascribing it entirely to the puppies. Events like these are always symbiotic, never one sided.
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I'm sorry, I can't take Correia's accusation that "you CHORFs gave VD what he wanted" seriously. The Puppies (both camps) set themselves up in a way that gave them a way to declare victory no matter what the actual outcome was (If their nominees win, they were obviously right about representing a previously silent majority, if they lose or get no-awarded, there's obviously a cabal working against them to keep them down). To turn around and then complain about their plans working is disingenuous at best.
It certainly is a sign of how deeply ****ed-up this whole culture war mindset is (And I'll restate what I said elsethread about this: I don't think it's particularly useful to call this back-and-forth in culture a war. It's not a war when the only battles you win are the ones the other side doesn't show up for; The land doesn't get to declare victory over the sea because the tide is low anymore than the other way around).
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You are slightly misinterpreting it. I don't think Correia saw this as a win, but rather as an indictment that in 2016 it will be the radicals who will spearhead this "onslaught", instead of the more "moderates". It was Vox Day who took the win because in his head he was already going for the No Awards anyway, and yeah, I do think VD set himself up in a "no-losing" situation, he bragged about that for quite a while now.
I'm not as sure about your culture war commentary, I'm not even parsing it very well I guess.
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"air quotes"
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OK it was kind of funny the first time it got pointed out but people are allowed to have their stylistic quirks.
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I'm not as sure about your culture war commentary, I'm not even parsing it very well I guess.
My point is that calling this thing a war is misleading, as it implies that a) there could be winners and b) it could be over at some point. The right seems particularly fond of calling this thing a war, with troops that have to be rallied, battles that have to be won, campaigns that have to be conducted, all in the service of defeating the enemy.
I think that war just isn't a particularly good term for what is happening. Using it as a metaphor isn't helping matters; I do believe that usage of those terms has an adverse effect on the participants' ability to evaluate the other side. That both sides have a penchant for calling the other the worst since the Nazis doesn't help matters, of course, but it all starts with framing the continual back-and-forth of social values as some sort of fight that has to happen for the good of all.
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"air quotes"
I don't even think Batts would disagree with my scare quotes this time!
@The_E, you got a point there. It might have to do with the american's penchant to call "WAR ON X" in basically everything that moves.
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You're trying to have it both ways. This is what you said before:
Can you not see that if you have something like Sad Puppies, where a lot of books are suddenly talked about, a bunch of people will go and review those same books and therefore inflate the ratings somewhat?
Do you really expect us to believe that there was no discussion whatsoever of books under consideration for Hugo nominees until the Puppies came along? Or that such discussion was only limited to Puppy-favored books? If there is a bias which lifts the rankings of prospective nominees, then the bias would occur during every nomination period and for every prospective book. All data points in the graph would be subject to the same effect.
Seriously? It appears I do have to explain it to you then. :rolleyes:
The puppies discussion of which books should get a Hugo started in January. If you are comparing this against something like a discussion on HLP over which book should get the nomination, you are completely wrong for several reasons.
Firstly, they quickly decided on a slate, a set of books they wanted to nominate. The Hugo nominations have typically been very personal. Each person votes for the books they personally enjoyed. Slate voting is very new, that's why it was effective this year. You don't get this sort of thing on HLP. We don't narrow down the conversation over which books are good here, if anything the list of good books would get longer with the thread.
Secondly, you've failed to consider that the Sad and Rabid puppies are activists. Is it really so hard to believe that a bunch of people who would spend months choosing and lobbying for a certain set of books would be more likely to read those books? And having read them would be more likely to review them on Amazon? Can you really not understand that people who think that books they like are being deliberately excluded from the publicity that a Hugo award would give them to the degree that they would form an organisation dedicated to fixing it, might also do other things to increase the readership of those books?
I'm not even claiming that it was deliberate, it may actually have been, but even organically if you tell a bunch of Sci-Fi fans to concentrate on a certain set of books, I would be very surprised if you didn't see more of them buying those books, and more of them reviewing those books. Can you really not see how that would be different to a discussion on HLP where maybe one or two people might go out and buy a heavily recommended book and where it's likely that no one would bother to review it?
Let's do a thought experiment and toss out the entire Puppies contingent, which Vox Day estimates at 1015 (http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/08/blog-post.html), comprised of 565 Rabids and 450 Sads. Let's further assume that they all voted for Toni Weisskopf (which is highly unlikely as there were 166 votes for Vox Day in that category). 1216 minus 1015 is 201 which is still more than Patrick Nielsen Hayden got. And yet she was still swamped by the 2496 votes for No Award.
That's a really stupid thought experiment though. Controversial issues get more attention than non-controversial issues. You're claiming that the numbers mean something they quite obviously don't. In the years you have claimed mean something, comparatively fewer people even cared about who won the Best Editor vote.
Toni Weisskopf got 1,216 first-line #1 votes. Arguably the most of any editor in the history of the Hugo awards.
Sheila Gilbert got 754 first-line #1 votes. Again, second only to Toni, arguably the most of any editor in the history of the Hugo awards.
By contrast, Patrick-Nielsen Hayden won a Best Editor Hugo in 2010, with just 140 first-line #1 votes.
So since there were only 5 nominees then the total first line votes for all 5 candidates would presumably be somewhere around 1,000. Less than Toni Weisskopf got. Surely you can see that this alone means that the numbers by themselves mean nothing. Only their proportions matter.
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"air quotes"
I don't even think Batts would disagree with my scare quotes this time!
@The_E, you got a point there. It might have to do with the american's penchant to call "WAR ON X" in basically everything that moves.
I though it was very limited to the War on Drugs and War on Terror, which iirc are Bush policy things.
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War on Cancer, War on Women, War on Science, War on Poverty, War on Crime, it's endless.
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Goober made a good statistical analysis. You call it a "pull a Goober". I can only sigh at that. "Evidence cannot be construed only the way you want it to be", what the hell does that even mean?
Goober's analysis is meaningless, as is your supposed evidence, because it does not have to indicate what Goober or you want it to indicate. Goober's analysis, without citing any methodology to its apportionment that would make it worthwhile in the first place (as was pointed out immediately, did you miss that?), offers up a meaningless statistic that could have to do with as much random chance, writer skill, and voter demographics as with some kind of conspiracy or clique. The fact that (according to Goober, anyways) the Hugo only goes right a small percentage of the time does not prove that the process is politicized in itself. It is suggestive, but it can also suggest other possibilities; perhaps the genre skews left itself, perhaps the Hugo voters skew left based on where it's held, perhaps they skew left for some other reason. Perhaps the right-wingers are all doing techno-thrillers or historical fiction or fantasy. Lord knows Clancy could be pretty right-wing at times.
The only Hugos that have been politicized for certain are these particular Hugos, because effort was made to do so. Even then the outcome is not in itself necessarily political as it can represent (as I have previously noted) a referendum on the personalities involved or the mere act of attempting to politicize the award.
Any acknowledgement of the fact there are multiple explanations available for the evidence at hand automatically makes a mockery of the argument that the right is being intentionally denied the Hugo. It becomes no more valid than any alternate explanation. You cling to that argument regardless of the fact that you've admitted there are alternate and from available evidence equally valid explanations. Your attachment to this argument is, bluntly, not rational. You want it to be true, and thus accord it precedence over any other possible explanation.
Yes, at its core this is a battle for the minds, but so is all media. That does not mean that all media is actively politicized or intentionally political, which is the argument you and Goober seem keen to make. It is also far from clear how not getting the Hugos turns certain media into socially contemptible badthink, as you have breathlessly proselytized. This particular year, certainly, the ending Rabid slate was treated that way...but it is entirely possible, considering who a large amount of it came from, that would have happened even if Vox Day hadn't decided to take a torch to the building.
And if you are not the man who can make the argument work, then either find the man who can, or let the damn thing go already. It is one among many equally valid (or equally invalid) explanations until that man does appear.
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Your idea that any hypothesis is automatically rendered a "mockery" because there are multiple possible explanations is, by far, the craziest thing I've ever witnessed you saying.
Regarding "intentionality", for the sake of whatever argument you are making now, I'll happily concede. It's a bigger phenomenon than that, and rarely only one person or two will be able to "control" it. But sometimes, like in every non-linear landscape of phenomena, there are moments where single events or even single persons can make a sufficiently large ripple that wouldn't otherwise exist.
(This is a larger philosophical question that philosophers are still arguing about, how much were certain achievements the result of single genius work by outlier people or were they actually inevitable, but just slightly made to be sooner by these outliers? How much of the 2nd World War is the result of Hitler and how much it was from all the political conditions baggage in Germany that came before it? Quite hard to assess without a control Earth to compare to)
And if you are not the man who can make the argument work, then either find the man who can, or let the damn thing go already. It is one among many equally valid (or equally invalid) explanations until that man does appear.
I had already, if you hadn't noticed it. I wasn't talking.
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Your idea that any hypothesis is automatically rendered a "mockery" because there are multiple possible explanations is, by far, the craziest thing I've ever witnessed you saying.
What makes it a mockery is claiming that your hypothesis must be true because it fits your (very limited) data even though there are quite obviously a large number of other explanations. Remember that the sad puppies haven't acted like it's merely a hypothesis, more like it's a proven theory.
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sidetrack: Isn't the whole point of a hypothesis that there's only one possible yes/no outcome? Otherwise it's not falsifiable.
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You're trying to have it both ways. This is what you said before:
Can you not see that if you have something like Sad Puppies, where a lot of books are suddenly talked about, a bunch of people will go and review those same books and therefore inflate the ratings somewhat?
Do you really expect us to believe that there was no discussion whatsoever of books under consideration for Hugo nominees until the Puppies came along? Or that such discussion was only limited to Puppy-favored books? If there is a bias which lifts the rankings of prospective nominees, then the bias would occur during every nomination period and for every prospective book. All data points in the graph would be subject to the same effect.
Seriously? It appears I do have to explain it to you then. :rolleyes:
The puppies discussion of which books should get a Hugo started in January. If you are comparing this against something like a discussion on HLP over which book should get the nomination, you are completely wrong for several reasons.
Firstly, they quickly decided on a slate, a set of books they wanted to nominate. The Hugo nominations have typically been very personal. Each person votes for the books they personally enjoyed. Slate voting is very new, that's why it was effective this year. You don't get this sort of thing on HLP. We don't narrow down the conversation over which books are good here, if anything the list of good books would get longer with the thread.
Secondly, you've failed to consider that the Sad and Rabid puppies are activists. Is it really so hard to believe that a bunch of people who would spend months choosing and lobbying for a certain set of books would be more likely to read those books? And having read them would be more likely to review them on Amazon? Can you really not understand that people who think that books they like are being deliberately excluded from the publicity that a Hugo award would give them to the degree that they would form an organisation dedicated to fixing it, might also do other things to increase the readership of those books?
I'm not even claiming that it was deliberate, it may actually have been, but even organically if you tell a bunch of Sci-Fi fans to concentrate on a certain set of books, I would be very surprised if you didn't see more of them buying those books, and more of them reviewing those books. Can you really not see how that would be different to a discussion on HLP where maybe one or two people might go out and buy a heavily recommended book and where it's likely that no one would bother to review it?
You completely failed to address the point I made, which is that if there is any boost to book reviews caused by discussion of books under consideration for Hugo nominations, it is not unique to the Puppies nor is it unique to this year.
(And as a reminder, here is my originally stated argument, lest it be lost in the noise. I note that you have not been able to rebut a single one of these points.
1. The Castalia House graph indicates that Puppies works, as measured by Amazon reviews, are more highly rated than Hugo winners of recent years.
2. Since lower-rated works of the past were not given No Award, the Puppies works do not merit No Award either.
3. Thus any voter who chose No Award for a Puppies work did not do so on the basis of merit.
4. Ergo, your your claim (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=89518.msg1793986#msg1793986) that "it's probable that most of the people involved don't think they were a deserving author" and also (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=89518.msg1793947#msg1793947) "I think it's very likely that a lot of people knew the background for the slate and did the very human thing of voting "No Award" because they felt that none of those books deserved the prize they were up for." is refuted.
You've been attacking point #1, claiming that the higher ratings for Puppies works are undeserved or illegitimate.)
Again, by focusing on the fact that Puppies are discussing the books they want to nominate, you are ignoring the fact that everybody else is also discussing the books they want to nominate. It doesn't happen all in one place like on HLP, but it happens on the various author and sci-fi interest blogs. And proposing or recommending slates is not new. Look (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2006/01/02/the-full-extent-of-my-personal-award-pimpage-for-2006/) at (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2007/01/02/the-2007-award-pimpage-post/) all (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2008/01/03/the-2008-award-pimpage-post/) the (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/01/05/the-2009-award-pimpage-post/) award (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/01/05/the-2010-award-pimpage-post/) pimpage (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2011/01/03/the-2011-award-pimpage-post/) John (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/01/03/the-2012-award-pimpage-post/) Scalzi (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/01/03/the-2013-award-consideration-post/) has (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/01/02/the-2014-award-consideration-post/) done (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/01/02/the-2015-awards-consideration-post/), for example.
You're using a very strange argument by saying that the Sad and Rabid Puppies are more likely to read the books and encourage others to read them also. Isn't that what fans do? And the Hugo awards are supposed to represent all of fandom. More importantly, the more people read and review the books, the more accurately the Amazon ratings reflect the quality of those books. Anyone who reads a book can post a review of it, whether Puppy or otherwise.
You're also repeatedly using the bizarre rhetorical trick of implying that I only disagree with your point because I don't understand it. On the contrary, I understand your point perfectly. It's just wrong.
Let's do a thought experiment and toss out the entire Puppies contingent, which Vox Day estimates at 1015 (http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/08/blog-post.html), comprised of 565 Rabids and 450 Sads. Let's further assume that they all voted for Toni Weisskopf (which is highly unlikely as there were 166 votes for Vox Day in that category). 1216 minus 1015 is 201 which is still more than Patrick Nielsen Hayden got. And yet she was still swamped by the 2496 votes for No Award.
That's a really stupid thought experiment though. Controversial issues get more attention than non-controversial issues. You're claiming that the numbers mean something they quite obviously don't. In the years you have claimed mean something, comparatively fewer people even cared about who won the Best Editor vote.
Toni Weisskopf got 1,216 first-line #1 votes. Arguably the most of any editor in the history of the Hugo awards.
Sheila Gilbert got 754 first-line #1 votes. Again, second only to Toni, arguably the most of any editor in the history of the Hugo awards.
By contrast, Patrick-Nielsen Hayden won a Best Editor Hugo in 2010, with just 140 first-line #1 votes.
So since there were only 5 nominees then the total first line votes for all 5 candidates would presumably be somewhere around 1,000. Less than Toni Weisskopf got. Surely you can see that this alone means that the numbers by themselves mean nothing. Only their proportions matter.
I'm not making any value judgement about whether Toni Weisskopf is better than Patrick-Nielsen Hayden, or to what degree. I'm saying that Toni Weisskopf enjoys strong support that cannot be explained by the Puppy contingent alone. Consider that she received 1308 second-line votes as well. No Award is supposed to be used if there is nobody worthy on the ballot. That was not the case here. 2496 voters put politics over principle.
Goober's analysis is meaningless, as is your supposed evidence, because it does not have to indicate what Goober or you want it to indicate. Goober's analysis, without citing any methodology to its apportionment that would make it worthwhile in the first place (as was pointed out immediately, did you miss that?), offers up a meaningless statistic that could have to do with as much random chance, writer skill, and voter demographics as with some kind of conspiracy or clique. The fact that (according to Goober, anyways) the Hugo only goes right a small percentage of the time does not prove that the process is politicized in itself. It is suggestive, but it can also suggest other possibilities; perhaps the genre skews left itself, perhaps the Hugo voters skew left based on where it's held, perhaps they skew left for some other reason. Perhaps the right-wingers are all doing techno-thrillers or historical fiction or fantasy. Lord knows Clancy could be pretty right-wing at times.
Yeah, I did notice Joshua's reply to that. I suspect even if Mike Glyer (not me, I remind you) explained his methodology, you still wouldn't be satisfied. One can always rationalize away evidence that threatens one's perspective. At least you admitted that it was suggestive.
Anyway, this may be my last word on the subject since I'll be away for the next three days. I've pointed out two separate and totally independent metrics (Amazon reviews and statistical representation) that indicate, as the Puppies claim, that the Hugo awards do not reflect all of fandom. I would encourage all independent observers to get their facts from the statements of the people involved, or from the numbers, not from spin-doctoring or speculation.
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1. The Castalia House graph indicates that Puppies works, as measured by Amazon reviews, are more highly rated than Hugo winners of recent years.
Which is irrelevant to the Hugos, because the Hugos only measure the approval a given work can get at the WorldCon of that year.
2. Since lower-rated works of the past were not given No Award, the Puppies works do not merit No Award either.
Irrelevant, as per my answer to point 1.
3. Thus any voter who chose No Award for a Puppies work did not do so on the basis of merit.
This is an unproven assumption. Because voters who have read all works and decided that none of them deserve the award can and do exist.
Not that there isn't a huge contingent who voted No Award simply on the basis that the works they would have awarded were not on the slates. The No Award option exists for a reason.
4. Ergo, your your claim (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=89518.msg1793986#msg1793986) that "it's probable that most of the people involved don't think they were a deserving author" and also (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=89518.msg1793947#msg1793947) "I think it's very likely that a lot of people knew the background for the slate and did the very human thing of voting "No Award" because they felt that none of those books deserved the prize they were up for." is refuted.
No, it's nothing of the sort.
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Amazon ranking/reviews are pretty meaningless and easily gamed (much Iike nearly every other ranking system available for books, excepting, perhaps, royalty checks).
If they're useful to anyone it's Amazon.
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You completely failed to address the point I made, which is that if there is any boost to book reviews caused by discussion of books under consideration for Hugo nominations, it is not unique to the Puppies nor is it unique to this year.
I completely addressed it. It's pretty obvious you failed to understand.
Let me put it simply. Due to the puppies, a very large amount of attention was focused on a very narrow number of books. This process began long before the official nominations were announced. If you truly can't understand how that can increase the rating for those same small number of books, there isn't much point in trying to explain it to you.
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with all the focus on them though, and the SJW outrage, couldn't that have sent the rating the other way just as easily? wouldn't there be a lot of "this rape apologistic patriarchy degenerate filth is unbelievably problematic! one star!"
sorry, just read the last few posts.
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Possibly. But again, there is a difference in how driven both sides are. While I can easily see quite a few people on the Puppies side reviewing several of the books, it would take a particularly psychotic individual to do the same to multiple entries because they disliked the Puppies.
There's a huge difference between the two things after all. The first is merely being a fan. The latter is pretty ****ed up. While I don't doubt that there are some reviews like that, I'd expect them to be drowned out by all the others. It's kinda like people who go on IMDB and give Star Wars a rating of 1 to troll nerds. I don't doubt they exist, but I doubt they affect ratings too much because I doubt that there are that many of them. Especially in a community as small as the one surrounding Hugo voting.
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That might be the correct analysis, but I can't but see a very possible contradiction between the claim that the puppies are way more fanatical than their opposition and the claim that the former completely lost due to the true fans' size, dedication and awareness, who ended up scorching the awards. First, because the claim relies on psychoanalysis, and that's fragile, second because it implies that there aren't fanatics in the true fans side. I've seen those fanatics, so I know they exist. What would matter is their numbers and the difference of willigness to engage in reviewing those books. Better to simply say that the Puppies were way more interested in the slated books, and therefore this reflected on their reviews on Amazon.
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The Puppies were way more engaged in terms of reviewing their books. Their opposition was more engaged in terms of showing up at the Hugos and voting. Guess which is more effective in getting Hugos.
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That's what
she I said.
But I used too many words, I agree.
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That might be the correct analysis, but I can't but see a very possible contradiction between the claim that the puppies are way more fanatical than their opposition and the claim that the former completely lost due to the true fans' size, dedication and awareness, who ended up scorching the awards. First, because the claim relies on psychoanalysis, and that's fragile, second because it implies that there aren't fanatics in the true fans side. I've seen those fanatics, so I know they exist. What would matter is their numbers and the difference of willigness to engage in reviewing those books. Better to simply say that the Puppies were way more interested in the slated books, and therefore this reflected on their reviews on Amazon.
That's pretty much what I said actually. I'm not saying that there wouldn't be anti-Puppies who'd be fairly driven to stop the Puppies. I'm saying that I doubt that desire would manifest in them going onto Amazon and giving the books lower scores deliberately in a large enough number of individuals. There are much better ways of showing your dissatisfaction with the Puppies than this strange and rather oblique method.
I can't see it happening unless it was organised. In which case, same as with the Puppies organising a drive to push up the ratings, we'd probably have heard of it already.
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Yeah I realise it, I have slept two hours today and 5 yesterday, so I apologize in advance for all the further facepalms that I might provide through the rest of the day.
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I don't know, this has been an insanely heated topic, and SJWs have shown themselves to be relentless and meticulous. and down voting books online because of online lynch mobism is a thing. I remember Anne Rice was having some sort of problem with that a few months ago. I think the puppies opposition is no less driven than they are.
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And yet, the absence of such behaviour should tell you something, no?
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well, Goober's point was that the SJW point of view was less popular, and the absence of such behavior would support that, no?
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No. All it proves is that these mythical SJWs are apparently not interested in writing reviews for those stories.
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yeah, but the high rating proves that the totally factual puppies brigaded the ratings. I see how this works ;)
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yeah, but the high rating proves that the totally factual puppies brigaded the ratings. I see how this works ;)
What? No. All it proves is that people liked these books enough to leave positive reviews. But since not enough of those people showed up at Sasquan, their chances of winning Hugos was nil. That's all that happened.
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ok, what I was saying was both were as likely.
I read karajorma's post as discounting puppy opposition, maybe glancing at this between builds at work isn't the best idea.
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If popularity translated into literary merit, we'd be teaching 50 Shades, Twilight, Bayformers...
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expected puppies
was disappoint :(
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(http://www.scifiwright.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/sad-puppy-wallpaper.jpg)
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ok, what I was saying was both were as likely.
I read karajorma's post as discounting puppy opposition, maybe glancing at this between builds at work isn't the best idea.
I never said that it was impossible for SJW to deliberately down vote the Puppies books as a protest, just that it would happen as an organised protest rather than the actions of individuals. Cause a single person posting a bad review is just pissing in the wind, it would take multiple people doing it to have any real effect on the ratings.
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George RR Martin on the "Alfies" (http://grrm.livejournal.com/439932.html), his own awards thing in response to the hugo drama as part of the Hugo Losers Party.
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I'm sure that'll be much less controversial and lead to a more civil discourse in the world.
I never said that it was impossible for SJW to deliberately down vote the Puppies books as a protest, just that it would happen as an organised protest rather than the actions of individuals. Cause a single person posting a bad review is just pissing in the wind, it would take multiple people doing it to have any real effect on the ratings.
right, and I would say the reverse logic would apply just as well? swap puppy and SJW, up and down, and that seems like it would be about the same level of plausibility.
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George RR Martin on the "Alfies" (http://grrm.livejournal.com/439932.html), his own awards thing in response to the hugo drama as part of the Hugo Losers Party.
Okay those trophies are awesome.
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I never said that it was impossible for SJW to deliberately down vote the Puppies books as a protest, just that it would happen as an organised protest rather than the actions of individuals. Cause a single person posting a bad review is just pissing in the wind, it would take multiple people doing it to have any real effect on the ratings.
right, and I would say the reverse logic would apply just as well? swap puppy and SJW, up and down, and that seems like it would be about the same level of plausibility.
I have no idea what point you are trying to make here. I've already addressed the Puppy side of things.
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I just restated the thing I said before, because you seemed to just restate the thing you said before.
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I just restated the thing I said before, because you seemed to just restate the thing you said before.
Yeah, but the thing you stated was a bit stupid. There are more people willing to post positive reviews of stuff they like than there are people who leave bad reviews because they dislike the manufacturer of the stuff for some more or less unrelated reason.
EDIT:
Also, fun fact: If your nominee for best Editor writes a book that includes not one, but TWO Chapter 5s, maybe said nominee is not actually Hugo material.
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hey, you got a problem with chapter fives? do ya? personally I think there should have been at least three chapter fives. I mean everyone knows chapter five is always the objectively best chapter. I bet you would have wanted more chapter 3s.
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Was he the editor of his own book?
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Was he the editor of his own book?
It was self-published so, yeah, probably?
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Did he edit anything other than his own book?
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Well, he was nominated in his capacity as head editor for Castalia House, which in turn was nominated several times in other categories....
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Welp, I've actually got little to say about how the Hugo's crashed and burned. What is evident, is that its slow but steady evolution in a cliquish grouping of byzantine politicking lead to a counter-revolution by stuffing the ballots.
Scalzi is a scumbag who prances around progressive circles and Vox Day's ramblings reminds of self-proclaimed prophet. To spare the usual "Dem SJWs!" my belief is something a bit more simple and sinister - the Political is Personal.
And that ain't some RadFem idea, rather, it's become a commonplace component of mass media and now we see it reach a head in Sci-Fi. I'm in Sci-Fi for the rayguns, atomic explosions, and intricate social parody or criticism of various social norms, not an author's reason to be bigot, asshat, or Bell Hooks sex toy. Personally, the destruction of the Hugo's in a necessary step if we wish to see the democratization of sci-fi, IMO. Cliques must crumble, the oligarchy's must relinquish their supposedly sacred podiums as gatekeepers and a new system that directly talks, speaks, and blasts its way to the fans.
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But, the hugo is democratic. All you got to do is sign up to nominate and show up to vote.
It's literally as simple as pay taxes - get vote.
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Given how the awards went, it was less democratic and more "burn the bridges" sort of thing.
Those in control couldn't stand getting stiffed, those contending for control cried fowl. Better that the apparatus burns down so we can try something new and the old guard can taste the ashes. Hugo awards actually mean little to me, because a lot more of my sci-fi has come from word of mouth, gatherings of fans, and reading previews and listening to free offers on audio tastes.
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Given how the awards went, it was less democratic and more "burn the bridges" sort of thing.
Those in control couldn't stand getting stiffed, those contending for control cried fowl. Better that the apparatus burns down so we can try something new and the old guard can taste the ashes. Hugo awards actually mean little to me, because a lot more of my sci-fi has come from word of mouth, gatherings of fans, and reading previews and listening to free offers on audio tastes.
Good thing that people with clearer heads prevailed and we'll be getting a new Hugo nomination scheme that is more resilient to overt politicization SP/RP style in two years. Meanwhile, we'll also have an unprecedented number of people who are going to be able to vote on next year's nominations, making the result much more relevant to the larger SF/F fandom than the awards have been in years.
EDIT:
And while we're on the subject of reasonableness, here's what Kate Paulk (who will be running the Puppies campaign for next year) had to say:
For starters the word slate is not going to appear anywhere. For second [Cross talk] I am not doing a slate, I am doing a list of the most popular works in all of the various categories as submitted by people who read on any of the various blogs that will have me. And I’m going to post ultimately the top ten of each, with links to the full list of everything that everybody wanted to see nominated, and I’m going to be saying “hey if you really want to see your favorite authors nominated your best bet is to pick something of theirs from the most popular in the list as opposed to the least popular”. That is going to be what it is. I don’t care who ends up on that list. I don’t care if David Gerrold ends up being the top of the list somewhere. That’s not the point, the point is that I want to see the voting numbers both for nomination and for actual voting go up above 5,000 up above 10,000, because the more people who are involved and who are voting the harder it is for any faction including puppies to manipulate the results.
This, I am completely fine with. Would be hypocritical of me not to be, given that Scalzi, Stross and other members of the dreaded cabal of puppykickers have been doing exactly this for years. It also addresses one of the main complaints I had about Torgersen's campaign, in that it excluded works that were in the Puppy wheelhouse just because Torgersen didn't know about them (and that the process through which he arrived at those particular recommendations wasn't exactly open or democratic).