@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.
