Writing Scandals

Origins and the Canary in the Coal Mine

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I think what bothers me more than just the whole “weak woman” thing (and, once again, thank you so much for setting us back again, Whitney!) is the chilling effect that dis-inviting folks like Larry Correia, Jon del Arroz, John Ringo, and Tim Bolgeo from conventions has on free speech and free thought. I mean, let’s assume for the moment that every negative thing said about these guys is true. Let’s assume — again, for the sake of argument only — that they are the horrible things that the crybullies say they are.

Does silencing them do anything to prove them wrong? Hell no. All you’ve done is show that you don’t have an effective argument against whatever it is you are strawmann-ing them to have said/thought/believed. You are, in essence, saying that they are right. Do you want to know how we got the Civil Rights Movement to work? It wasn’t by silencing the segregationists — it was by answering their speech with our own and proving them wrong. It was about refuting their arguments. It was about reaching out to them and connecting with them as humans and helping them to see that segregation was a bad thing for whites and blacks. And it took a long time to get where we are and, while we still have a ways to go, we’re all in a much better place than we were in the 1940s and 1950s.

In a way, this bothers me so much because gaming and sci-fi/fantasy have become the new canaries in the coal mine for the free speech movement. Everywhere else, people have caved in to the crybullies — tech, science, literary works, romance, horror, religion, history and historiography — but the geek world fought back. The geek world said “we really don’t care what you have in your pants, who you like to hump, or what the melanin ratio in your skin is — if you like our stuff, we like you” and refused to bow down to the crybullies and the Stalinists who would, quite frankly, like it if everyone to the left of Mao got sent to the gulag. When our world starts getting invaded by people who are NOT part of it — and seriously, a playboy billionaire and his rich bitch probably do not spend their Saturdays playing D&D — and who insist that we have to exclude people for wrongthink instead of engaging them, it’s time to fight back and to tell them to go back to their segregated, gated neighborhoods where the domestics are invisible and leave the rest of us the hell alone.

We are the gutter genre — we’re where everyone mixes together, tells good stories, experiments with exploring cultural problems by substituting elves and dwarves and whatever else for humans, and who honestly don’t care that much if you’re male, female, transsexual, gay, straight, bi, poly, white, black, yellow, red, purple with green stripes. We’re the place where all the outcasts are safe to hang out and talk. We are the United States of the writing world — a place for the oddballs to mix, have more oddball kids, and then dream up awesome stuff that the elites can’t think up because they’re too trapped in their boxed-in, fenced-in, invitation-only worlds. We need to stay what we are and not let the mainstreamers screw us over by imposing their whitebread blinkered view of reality on us and hemming us in with boxes — check boxes, tick boxes, political boxes, socio-economic boxes — and keep mixing it up. We need to bring in people who are interested in telling great stories with great characters — characters and stories that can appeal to many different audiences.

If we let them win, if we give up and let them segregate this last place where we all meet and mix, we’re boned. Big time. So, roll up the sleeves and let’s start building a new place for people of all races, genders, creeds, and socio-economic brackets (not just the chardonnay sippers from the “right” neighborhoods in the “smart” cities) to meet up, talk games, swap stories, and to have all the cultural miscegenation we want.

— G.K.

Weak Woman Ruins Origins

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Weak Woman Ruins Origins

So, I know I’ve not been blogging much. First year teaching, wrapping up a MAT program, writing, life… However, after hearing about Origins dis-inviting Larry Correia (one of my favorite authors and people) because some woman got her feelings hurt because Larry fisked her fiancé’s article on GenCon four years ago and decided that a fisking means she’s “not safe” at a convention with Larry goes to the con organizers and gets him dis-invited, I knew I had to come back because this. is. bullshit.

See, crap like this is why women don’t get taken seriously in male-dominated industries. So, screw you, Whitney Beltran. Screw you for setting us back with your inability to control your “vapors” and deal with the fact that not everyone thinks your HoneyBooBoobear is right. Screw you, you stupid fucking Mrs. Brady “my man knows best” for this.

You are a special kind of stupid

Women — real women — like Sarah Hoyt (an actual real minority and an immigrant to boot!), Cedar Sanderson, and even Cat Romero can handle the fact that not everyone thinks their husbands/boyfriends/girlfriends/whateverbecauseIamnotajudgymcjudgerson are right and perfect. These women can do remarkable things — like work with people they may not agree with, go to conventions that have Guests of Honor who might disagree with them, and can live without needing the world to think that their SOs are right about everything and that only wisdom and truth come from their men’s mouths. But you… you make us all look bad. Women like you are why women in tech can’t get mentors — we might get the vapors or make false accusations and try to ruin a man’s reputation or cost him opportunities if he says something we don’t like. Women like you are why we have trouble getting our games developed or having our voices taken seriously in gaming development. After all, we’re just going to make a mushy game all about feelings and where the characters have to navigate a minefield of never offending the perpetually offended and dealing with womanish vapors and no one wants to play that or walk on eggshells around other developers — not that you’d understand the desire to play a game that doesn’t involve the heroine being rescued by someone else.* Easier to just keep it all male. Women like you are why we have a hard time making it in the sciences — after all, if our hypotheses (or our boyfriend’s hypotheses) gets proven incorrect, we may lash out and do everything we can to ruin that person’s life, bringing it up years later and talking about how we don’t feel “safe” using the same grocery store as them.

So screw you. I hope that your fiancé protects your weak-minded, lily-livered, thin-skinned, meek self from the real world. I hope he’s provided you with the June Clever/Carol Brady cotton-wool-wrapped existence that you need, you delicate little fainting lily. I hope that you and your sister-in-spirit Rose Eleveth — who went out of her way to prove that women aren’t concerned about or interested in science; we’re all about what people are wearing and celebrity gossip! — are able to live in a bubble world where nothing ever happens to you and you never encounter any kind of disagreement. I really hope that is how it is for you and I really wish that you would stay in that bubble world and quit trying to bring your whole patriarchal “My Husband Knows Best” attitude on those of us who actually do believe in things like freedom of speech, having disagreements civilly, not ruining people’s lives over them not worshiping our husbands, and that women can deal with encountering things that they may not like or people with whom they may not agree without getting the vapors.

Don’t get me started on your ignorance regarding the Sad Puppies and the Hugos. Seriously — if you’re thick enough to think that “all whites + one Asian” counts as representing PoCs, then you’re too thick to be able to understand something as complicated as the politics behind the Hugos. Get your husband to explain it to you, Whitney, because I have neither the time, the inclination, nor the crayons to do it myself. I’m too damned busy working in an impoverished school district teaching students of color — the ones you probably shudder at and cross the street to get away from — and actually making a difference in the world, you chardonnay-sipping, privileged, white, limousine liberal.

I don't have the time or the crayons for this shit

— G.K.

*Seriously — Twelve reviews on Metacritic is all that thing got? Right. That’s beyond sad.

MRSA and Marx — the Hugo Aftermath

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MRSA and Marx -- the Hugo Aftermath

Sorry for the silence last week. My friend and business partner Vic, the founder and majority owner of Rooster and Pig, had a stroke back at the end of July which means that I’ve been stuck with the fun of formatting all the books slated to go out now as well as handling all of the Q2 reports, trying to get the royalties and the staff paid, and trying to port the company to a new website since we’ve long since outgrown the system we’re on. Vic is handling all of this with his usual inability to chill the hell out and let someone else worry about everything so those of us who are his not-real-but-kind-of-really-real family get the fun of dealing with him both IRL and via the Internet.

Vic’s one of my buddies. He’s been there for me when no one else was. He knows that I’m quirky and weird and that, on some political issues, he and I are complete opposites (I want a government too powerless to do much of anything; he doesn’t). End of the day, we’re friends and I’d do anything for him. Race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, veteran status, the kind of books we read and write — none of that matters because he’s my friend.

And, by the way — he’s a gay, black, Messianic Jewish Iraqi era veteran who reads and writes a lot of gay erotica. Hell, I’ve edited some of it and spent hours wondering “can you actually do that though? I mean, wouldn’t it hurt if it got bent and twisted around like that?” Which is why he and I always have a little chuckle when folks like John Scalzi, PNH, TNH, and more say that I must be racist and homophobic. It’d be kind of difficult for me to be in business with someone like Vic if that were true.

But then, truth matters little to these people. They’re impervious to it the same way that MRSA is impervious to penicillin. All of the women writers in the Sad Puppies group (and there are a lot of us) could stand up naked to prove our womanhood and we’d still be told we were men. I can go hang out with my lesbian sister or my gay business partner and I’m still a homophobe (and a racist). We can gather all of the black, Asian, Indian (subcontinental), Native American, Middle Eastern, Latin, Hispanic, and Chicano authors we can find (not to mention a few of us who are from areas that are actually so poverty-stricken that they’re routinely cited as “one of the most poverty-stricken places in the United States”) and none of that will matter. We can writer stories involving women (have done), gay characters (have done), minorities (check), overcoming great odds (CHECK), and very long-lasting and their actions here in the immediate aftermath are doing a lot more to discredit their side than the Sad Puppies ever could.

So, the question becomes: can WorldCon and the Hugos be salvaged? At this point, it’s debatable. Sarah Hoyt, Kate Paulk, and others intend to try next year with SP4 and I’m volunteering to help out. Maybe if we show them an effort led completely by women that will be savaged by men, it might just cause enough cognitive dissonance to wake a few people up. That said, I’m not going to put all my eggs in that basket because, like the Eloi, I don’t think the Hugos are going to last that long. I think that at this, the first real show of resistance on the part of the over-arching geek culture, WorldCon is just going to whither away and die. Sarah, Kate, et al are trying to save it but me, after seeing the way the Puppy Kickers acted this year and behaved at the awards ceremony?

Fuck that shit. Let the fucker burn and sow the earth it was on with salt. I’m going to help out with SP4 in hopes of convincing them to consider launching a parallel convention system that would actually bring in the rest of the fandom that WorldCon shuts out. You know — the comic geeks, the gamers, the Trekkies, the dabblers, the people who got into sci-fi from something that the CHORFs think is “lame,” (like The Walking Dead or Twilight) — the folks who are keeping the geek culture going with new ideas, new stories, new mediums, and more. Those who could care less about politics and who want a convention that is fun and welcomes them instead of telling them they’re WrongFans having WrongFun.

Martin told us to set up our own award. Well, why the hell not? And why not make the voting pool so massive it can’t be gamed, make the thing so open it’s financially solvent, and make it an actual stamp worth having on your book cover. The Hugo used to be that way — back when WorldCon wanted to have a larger audience. Obviously, they don’t want that anymore so screw ’em. Let the Hugos become exactly what the WorldConners want it to be — an award given to old, white Marxists by other old, white Marxists for books written for the enjoyment of other aging, white Marxists. Meanwhile, we work on making something where anyone can win it — not just the Toads at Tor who think anyone who lives outside of the Coastal Enclaves should be subject to summary execution for “lack of diversity.”

Imagine a con that embraces the audiences of Comic Con, BlizzCon, GamesCon, DefCon, and LibertyCon instead of a con like WorldCon that says hangs a sign on the door and says “Non-Marxists Need Not Apply.” Which one would you go to? And more importantly — which one would you take your children to (because the future belongs to those who bother to reproduce, yo).

— G.K.

Sad Puppies: Why I Don’t Do Cons

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Sad Puppies: Why I Don't Do Cons

First, allow me to fangirl a little bit. Cedar just added me on G+ so I’m kind of doing this right now:

But then I started reading Sarah’s entry from today which led me to reading Vonda McIntyre’s entry which has led to a round of head-scratching, several cigarette breaks, a few consultations of Wikipedia’s entry on Arrow’s impossibility theorem, a lengthy session back on Khan Academy which involved a lot of swearing at parabolas (which seems to be the only aspect of algebra II I’m doomed to fail), and the realization that I’ve got a 2:30 appointment so I need to wrap this up already.

People: shit like this is why I don’t do cons. Okay, I went to BlizzCon (twice). I went to the WWI when it was in Paris. But for all of those — I worked for Blizzard and I was at the convention working. I’ve never been to E3, Gamescom, DreamHack, GenCon, IndyCon, any of the ComicCons, WorldCon, or WalkerStalker Con. I had wanted to go to LibertyCon this year but did not have the money. I may go next year if I can scrape together the funds and if work permits but that will probably be the only convention I’ll go to.

Why? Several reasons.

1) I hate traveling. Flying anywhere is a hassle. It’s expensive. Hotels are insanely overpriced and the food is crap (the Internet is generally shitty, too). Driving is a little better but the price of gas is insane.

2) So. Many. People. And you have to talk to them and you can’t hide from them.

3) Where there are a lot of people, there’s going to be a lot of noise. If I want a migraine, there are cheaper and more efficient methods to give myself one.

4) It’s become pretty clear that the people running these conventions don’t like people like me. If you think that the Sad Puppies had a point (that the Hugos were being given out based on the author’s politics and were going to sermon-fics that delivered a particular sermon instead of to stories/books that were well-written or told interesting stories with interesting characters regardless of the author’s politics), then you’re clearly not welcome at these conventions. At best, you’ll be just asked not to show up (and maybe made to feel like an unperson the way Johnathon Ross was). At worst — you get forced out for no reason with baseless and false (and malignant) allegations lodged against you (as happened against the Honey Badger Brigade). Being a minority, a woman, a lesbian, a non-American, or even all of the above does not protect you from this. You could be an African-born male-to-female transgendered post-operative black lesbian Rwandan socialist Muslim and if you happen to think “hey, Larry Correia had a point,” you might as well be a WASP man for all the good it will do you if you try to turn up at a con.

5) It’s actually getting borderline dangerous for those of us who don’t toe the SJW “Brianna Wu is our Goddessa and we shall sucketh Scalzi’s cocketh, Massa” line to live, let alone show up at cons. I really don’t want to get arrested, SWATTed, or have my car run off the road and die on the side of the highway.

So, I avoid them. I mean, why bother? The panels are just going to be about how people like me are evil, how stories I like are stupid, how I and my whole family should be killed, etc, etc, etc. It’s nothing I didn’t hear in the grievance-mongering circles at college. I’m not going to piss thousands of dollars away just to hear it while surrounded by cosplayers.

Still, it gets on my nerves. That one side or the other needs protection from the other. How about we all do the sensible thing and talk about the giant elephant in the room? The SJWs are crazy, they’ve got no problem with violence as a means to an end, they’ve got no problem with wishing death/torture/pain/rape/whatever on their political or philosophical opposition. It’s illogical to put yourself anywhere near them or in any place where they control ingress and egress or security. Not because they’ll kill you outright (they’re crazy, not stupid) but because they can make your life a living hell. Once you’re where they control the security systems, they can chose what the police see (and don’t see). They don’t need to win their cases in a court of law, people — for some things, the mere accusation is enough.

And you really want to go to where they’re going to be? Shit, I avoid being in the same ZIP code as them if I can. So long as I’m out in the middle of Bumfuck Nowhere, Landmassia — and can prove I’m there — they can’t accuse me of doing jack to them.

So again — do you really want to go to WorldCon and give them the chance to accuse you of theft, harassment, rape, murder, human trafficking, drug trafficking, or whatever else they come up with? Or do you want to do the sensible thing and stay at least three ZIP Codes and a time zone away from any SJW/CHORF whenever possible?

— G.K.

PS — If you must go, here’s a list of criminal defense attorneys in Spokane, WA. And, if you are going, add me on Facebook or Twitter and let me know. We can exchange contact info and I’ll volunteer to be your “one phone call” if you do get arrested on trumped-up BS charges.

We Didn’t Start The Flamewar — Part Five

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We Didn't Start The Flamewar -- Part Five

*twirls drumsticks and adjusts shades before singing*

George R. R. Martin, Guardian, Stats ‘n’ lies, Twittermobbing, Puppycide
Torgersen, NoTruFenThenDom, Noah Warding Bloc

*chorus repeats*

I told you, the lyrics are the most difficult part of the post! If you don’t like ’em, find me a songwriter who can come up with better ones and I will be happy to turn that part of this series over to them because I fail at songing almost as hard as I fail at adulting.

So, on to part the fifth of this series wherein we will delve into the first part of Sad Puppies 3 (which is going to be a multi-part year since it is A Very Big Deal). As mentioned in my earlier entries, Sad Puppies 1 and 2 were “organized” (and I use that term loosely) by Larry Correia. Once again, to recap, the goal of Sad Puppies was to prove the following points:

1. The Hugo awards were politically biased, and dominated by a few insider cliques.
2. Authors who didn’t belong to these groups or failed to appease them politically were shunned. If authors with “unapproved” politics were to get nominations, the quality of the work would be irrelevant, and the insider cliques would do everything in their power to sabotage that person.

It would seem that, in light of this year’s events, Correia’s hypotheses have been proven, would it not?

At any rate, Sad Puppies 3 saw the mantle of organizing being passed from Correia to Brad Torgersen. Larry Correia considered the controversy that SP2 had raised sufficient to prove his point and was ready to call it quits. However, Torgersen believed that the Hugos could be salvaged and that by increasing awareness and continuing the work Correia had started, only this time by expanding the list to include more authors and to move away from ideology as the selection criteria and instead to go solely on the basis of “is it good or not?” with the discard qualification being message-fic/preach-fic (meaning that SP3 didn’t care a whit what an author’s politics were or what the story was about so long as it was good and wasn’t an anti-human sermon-fic in the SJW tradition). SP3 saw a huge increase in participation both among authors and among the public. However, as it turns out, much of the success was due to Vox Day’s Rabid Puppies campaign which will be covered in depth in a future entry.

The success of the puppy slate took everyone by surprise. However, when the Nielsen-Haydens knew days ahead of the official announcements that “their” people hadn’t made the ballots and the butthurt from Scalzi and the insider crowds started, complete with a libel-laden article that made its rounds through the mainstream media (with its layers and layers of fact-checkers, yo). The SJWs weren’t content to chalk it up to simple mathematics, no. After all, the WorldCon memberbase had been dwindling for years with the Hugo voting pool growing smaller and smaller, making it much easier for smaller numbers of people to skew the results. There’s probably some mathematical name for this phenomenon but I don’t know it so I’m going to call this the “Kiddie Pool Phenomenon.”

Now, most of us, when we were growing up, learned that, in popularity contests, victory often goes to those who show up. SP2 and the resultant fall-out established a strong case for the Hugos being little more than a popularity contest among the WorldCon membership and not “the” definitive award of great science fiction and fantasy literature as they purported themselves to be. Nathaniel Givens’s data analysis shows that there is a reason to believe that there has been a divergence between what the reading public considers “good literature” and what Hugo voters consider “good.” What happened with SP3 is that the two puppy groups managed to have a lot more people “turn up” than they (or anyone else) was expecting.

One would think that the WorldCon crowd, though a bit surprised and maybe a little upset that their favorites didn’t make it that year, would be thrilled to see their convention growing and perhaps on the cusp of flourishing again, right? After all, the SP3 slate consisted of a lot of truly diverse authors including several Latino and Latina writers, many women, people of high melanin content, people of LBGTedness, and probably a few demi-elven-dwarven-dragon-half-vampire-werewolf-Sith-Jedi-wizards of non-indeterminate gender born under a new full moon in comparison to the lily-white slate offered by the SJWs themselves in previous years.

The success of SP3 kicked everything into high gear but isn’t due solely to SP and Torgersen’s efforts. So, we’ll talk about Vox Day and Rabid Puppies and their role in this in the next entry in this series so stay tune!

— G.K.

Matters of Honor, Power, and Illusions

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Matters of Honor, Power, and Illusions

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about honor and rules when it comes to combat, debate, arguing, and society. I’ve half-written about a dozen entries on this so I decided to come back and do an intro since it’s going to be a pretty lengthy subject. Others have written about it before and a lot of what they’ve said is worth reading. However, recent events — the fight over the Hugos, the issue with white-washing the entire Civil War out of American history, the Balkanization of society, and so on, has made me do a lot of thinking which starts out around honor.

Basically, one side believes in honor and the other side believes in “the end justifies the means.” We’re not even really fighting over the same thing here and it’s taken me quite a while to realize it. It didn’t strike me until I was re-reading We and got to thinking about dystopian literature (which, of course, always leads back to Orwell’s 1984). This isn’t about freedom vs slavery, capitalism vs socialism, statism vs dynamism, red vs blue, Democrats vs Republicans — that’s all just a front. It’s all smoke and mirrors.

It’s about power. Who has it? Who’s going to keep it? What is power, really? And does it even truly exist or is it just another illusion? Is it just another shadow on Plato’s cavern wall? I honestly don’t know but it’s got all my little INT lights just a-flickering so I’m hoping some of you will stick around with me while I knock these ideas around. They’re not going to be perfect and I welcome honest discussion on the matter because I get the sense that this is something the Founding Fathers “got” intuitively. That power (outside of actual physical power — as in “laws of physics” kind of power) is just an illusion. It’s a kind of mass mutually-shared hallucination we participate in by agreement and if enough of us decide to stop playing the game — like in the Matrix — we might be able to bring the entire system into a state of crash or some kind of kernel panic.

It’d be interesting, at least. That is if I’m even anywhere near correct on this (which isn’t a given).

So, anyone up for it?

— G.K.

Oh Good Grief…

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Oh Good Grief...

I found this particular piece of stupidity over at Peter Grant’s site.

I don’t know if Moshe Feder lives in an echo chamber, has difficulty reading English, or what, so, here goes.

Here is why I am no longer going to buy any books published by Tor:

  1. Contrary to Irene Gallo’s statements, I am not a neo-nazi. My paternal grandfather fought the Nazis in WWII and was at the D-Day landings in Normandy, on Omaha Beach. He came over with the third wave in the afternoon, I believe. His force was part of the Big Red One. They were part of the Saint-Lô breakout, the liberation of France, the Battle of the Bulge, the push to Aachen, the liberation of the concentration camps Zwodau and Falkenau an der Eger. He was probably in Germany or Czechoslovakia when the war in Europe ended in May 1945.

    He would have been twenty-one years old on VE Day.

  2. Calling someone a neo-nazi and saying that the works they like are “bad-to-reprehensible” when your own employer publishes those works and then expecting them to keep buying said works is a bit stupid.

  3. Calling someone a neo-nazi and then saying “I’m sorry if you were offended” is not an apology. For example, were I to say that Tor’s senior staff consists of a high number of pederast- and/or pedophile-sympathizers in light of their lack of condemnation for Marion Zimmer Bradley’s admitted sexual abuse of her son and daughter and then turn around and say “I’m sorry if that offends you,” would that be considered a sincere apology or an insincere one? Please explain and defend your choice of answer logically and show. your. work.

    For the record, I honestly, hand-to-Albert-Einstein believe that Tor’s senior staff feels nothing other than complete disgust at MZB’s actions and that their lack of statement has to do with the length of time since the events took place and possibly could have something to do with contracts they signed or non-disclosure agreements along with the general tendency people have not to speak ill of the deceased — even when the deceased did despicable things.

  4. I’m also not sexist (I’m an equal-opportunity mistrust-er), racist (my black and Latino friends can attest to it), or homophobic (my gay and lesbian friends would get a real kick out of that one). I’m not transphobic (one of my business partners can vouch for me there) and I’m certainly not parochial (scads of witnesses on that one). I’m probably better-traveled, better-educated, more well-read, speak more languages, and just all-around more knowledgeable in general than most of the senior staff at Tor.

So, about the only thing they can hang on me is that I’m from Mississippi and Mississippi has the something-that-kind-of-looks-like-the-Stars-and-Bars in its state flag. Sort of. If you squint. And look at it through special goggles. Of course, this ignores the whole history of the State Flag* and the history of the “Rebel Flag” as it’s called (btw, the actual Confederate Flag is the Bonnie Blue Flag — a single white star on a field of blue).

If being from Mississippi automatically makes someone a horrible, terrible, no-good person, then, well, the world is in a whole lotta trouble. See, William Faulkner is from here. Eudora Welty is, too. Same with Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Morgan Freeman, James Earl Jones, Jim Henson, Medger Evers, Brandy, Jimmie Rodgers, Tennessee Williams, Tammy Wynette, James Meredith, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddly, Richard Wright, Carl Westcott, Sela Ward…

Just to name a few.

You’re welcome, by the way, for the music and the stories. What can we say? It’s in our blood, black or white, it “don’t make no difference” because we’re all the same under the skin where it matters.

At any rate, I’m sick and tired of being called a horrible person. I’ve made the rational choice not to award my money to someone who calls me a horrible person. I’m quite proud of my grandfather — who fought the Nazis in World War II and would probably take umbrage at my being called a neo-nazi — and I’m also proud of all the women I’m related to who bucked the trends in their lives and lived on their own terms. Some of them got divorces back when a divorce made you a virtual pariah — but better that than living with an abusive drunk. Some of them worked outside of the home and owned businesses when that was Simply. Not. Done. My mom and her older sister are two of the smartest women I know and their older brother is probably the smartest person in that part of our family (I might have a high IQ but I can be a complete idiot in a lot of ways). They’ve all worked hard to fight for equality for all people and to make a world where you’re judged solely on how hard you’re willing to work and on your merits alone and I’m proud of that. To continue to give money to a company that calls me a racist, a neo-nazi, a sexist, or a homophobe would be to spit on my own gay, trans, black, and Latino friends as well as three generations of my family who have fought oppression.

Not to mention to turn my back on all of the people from my state who have worked so hard to make an equal playing field and share our rich heritage with the world.

So no. I’m not going to buy any more books from a company based out of New fucking York that calls me a neo-nazi based on zero evidence and refuses to issue an actual apology. New York has more money than Midas. Tell you what, though. I will up the ante. If all of these so-called “social justice warriors” really want to prove their credibility, how about they quit giving their money to people who can afford to live in New York and start donating it to groups working to provide computers, Internet access, and better educational facilities and economic opportunities to students and recent graduates in Mississippi?**

Time to fish or cut bait, y’all.

— G.K.

*Mississippi adopted the current flag in 1894 — way before the Rebel Flag became racist. Also, the canton has thirteen stars in the MS flag, not eleven (the nitwits never seem to notice this) because they stand for the original 13 states of the Union, not the 11 states that seceded. Back in 2000, the NAACP sued the state to try to force us to change the flag. Their first argument was that the canton was the Rebel Flag and that since it’s against the law to fly the Rebel flag as an official flag, it violated their right to freedom of speech and due process. However, the MS Supreme Court threw that out because 13 != 11 in base10. Still, back in 1906, the MS legislature did a general repeal of all laws and kind of forgot to re-add the flag back when they re-did the new legal code. So, on that technicality, it was found that the flag in use since 1894 was not the “official” flag and we had to have an election to decide if we were going to make it official or change it.

So, in 2001, we voted to keep it the way it was. Not because we’re all a bunch of racists but because we’re the poorest goddamned state in the Union and we’ve got better things to spend the thirty million dollars it would cost to change the state flag on. Hell, it cost over two million dollars just to have the election on the issue and it was a nearly 70% support to keep the current flag.

Biggest reason? Because it’s a piece of cloth. It’s not even the stupid Rebel Flag in the canton. Because no one freaking cares. Because changing it isn’t going to change anyone’s attitudes. Because we’ve got better things to spend that money on — schools, teachers, hospitals, roads — than what a bunch of rich lawyers in California who may or may not ever set foot in our state get a bug up their butts about.

…but I digress.

**I’mma love to hear the excuses on this one. We already have taxes in-state about as high as we can set them without causing businesses and individuals to flee and we’re already redistributing as best we can but since school funding primarily comes from local property taxes, it’s hard to make that stretch very far without causing taxpayer revolt and our state sales tax is already among the highest and the most widespread in the nation (it even is levied on food) so, yeah, we are already taxing the shit out of ourselves and the rich and still coming up short. However, “rich” in Mississippi would be “can afford to eat cat food every other day and live in a fleabag extended stay roach motel” in NYC so we are talking different orders of magnitude here, folks.

We Didn’t Start the Flamewar — Part Four

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We Didn't Start the Flamewar -- Part Four

*drumming on a table that looks like it belongs in a kitchen from the 1950s*

New McCarthy, Loads of bitchin’, Monster Huntin’, Internetin’
Trad Publishing, Indie Pubbing, and Jeff Bezos

Blacklisting, Barflies, Evil League and Rabbit Guys
eBooks, ePub, mobi rise — nook flames out in Kindle’s fires

*chorus repeats*

I am so not a songwriter so the lyrics are actually the part of the post that takes me the longest to come up with, guys. 🙂 I hope you’re enjoying them.

So, this post is going to look at the Sad Puppies 2 era. SP2 was a lot more organized and successful than SP1 and it caught much more attention. It was headed up by Larry Correia and announced in this post over at his site. As with SP1, SP2 did not initially advocate for any specific works and, from that post, the central theme was this:

The ugly truth is that the most prestigious award in sci-fi/fantasy is basically just a popularity contest, where the people who are popular with a tiny little group of WorldCon voters get nominated and thousands of other works are ignored. Books that tickle them are declared good and anybody who publically deviates from groupthink is bad. Over time this lame ass award process has become increasingly snooty and pretentious, and you can usually guess who all of the finalists are going to be that year before any of the books have actually come out or been read by anyone, entirely by how popular the author is with this tiny group.

This is a leading cause of puppy related sadness.


The only thing missing is “Think of the children…”

However, while nomination and discussion about who should be nominated was going on, a very fun thing happened in the sci-fi/fantasy world. Tor.com started a rather big dust-up over ending binary gender usage in sci-fi and fantasy works. From that post:

Conversations about gender in SF have been taking place for a long time. I want to join in. I want more readers to be aware of texts old and new, and seek them out, and talk about them. I want more writers to stop defaulting to binary gender in their SF—I want to never again read entire anthologies of SF stories or large-cast novels where every character is binary-gendered. I want this conversation to be louder.

Note that she’s not saying “I want people to come up with races where gender/sex traits are different” or “I’d like an exploration of what it means to be a man or a woman in a given culture” or that she wants an end to gendered roles or anything like that. What she wants is to continue the current clusterfuck of chaotic confusion that is crossing between the kink and LGBT community with the genderqueer. However, she’s actually being a few billion magnitudes of order less understanding and tolerant than they are — the genderqueer and those who don’t identify with their apparent physical sex know that they’re going against biological norms (the word norm is being used in a statistical sense just like my being blonde is abnormal) and they do *not* expect everyone to know how to address them on sight. They also know that most people do identify with their birth sex. Further, they’re not demanding that the whole of society change itself and its language to accommodate them without them making any concessions.

I’m pretty damned tolerant and “whatever, so long as I don’t have to pay for it ’cause I’m skint.” I’ve got gay friends, trans friends, genderqueer friends… I even have one friend who is a gay, trans black man. However, none of them have an issue with gendered characters. All of them *write* characters that are binary gendered. If they have a character that is genderqueer or goes against the binary system, that character is the exception (if the cast is human. In cases where we’re dealing with an alien race, all bets are off). Still, when Tor.com posted this little thing, it set the entire sci-fi/fantasy world alight and kicked SP2 into high gear. Larry Correia had a lot to say about this particular bit of social justice insanity.

There’s a reason I mention it here and you’ll see in a bit. At any rate, SP2 continued until the nominations were chosen and then submitted with reminders of how to nominate and reminders about when nominations were getting close to ending as well as when the nominees were announced and the resulting aftermath that followed the awards ceremony. Sad Puppies 2 was the beginning of the deeper reflection on how the Hugos, SJWs, and the trends in sci-fi and fantasy publishing were not just an anomaly but were part of a greater culture war.

Remember the “end of binary gendering” thing I mentioned earlier? Well, 2014 was the year that Larry Correia really started riling up the SJWs (at least that I can see) and the Sad Puppies effort in many ways became a bit of a rallying cry for many sci-fi and fantasy authors across the Internet to discuss the SJW incursion into their realm.

Keep in mind that this happened eight months before GamerGate.

People were getting sick and tired of being preached at. They were sick of token diverity-ism that was being held up as more important than the story and the way that identity politics and the author’s personal life and beliefs were used in place of actually judging whether or not their work was well-written, entertaining, and told a good story where the message played a role.

If you read the discussions, you’ll see that much of it is well-thought-out arguments about the problems of writing non-binary characters as well as the truth about historical depictions of women in sci-fi that flew in the face of the alternate reality the SJWs were advancing.

Not that that stopped them. They went after Larry Correia very hard in 2014 with File 770 and the Guardian attacking him and misrepresenting what he was hoping to achieve with Sad Puppies. The Guardian journalist, Damien Walter continued his attack on Larry’s Facebook page.

In August 2014, GamerGate happened and in November came ShirtStorm which had some overlap with the SP community due to shared interest (just like there is overlap between people who like French cooking and people who like French wine). However, SP2 really just served to underscore Correia’s initial points about the Hugos and caused the movement to gain more attention than SP1 had.

It was the next year’s effort, Sad Puppies 3, that really blew the lid off the entire mess. That will be the subject of the next entry.

— G.K.

On dinosaurs, colossi, golems, governments, and adaptation

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On dinosaurs, colossi, golems, governments, and adaptation

…and why they all tend to die out in the end.

It’s an interesting fact in the history of biological life that the oldest form of life on Earth is the bacteria (and arguably the virus). Not just because they’re simple entities — amoeba are also fairly simple as are many members of the protist branch. It’s also interesting to note that bacteria, protists, and viruses from the Proterozoic Eon (roughly 2500 million years ago) of the are still around. They’re still happily doing their thing, sometimes killing vast swathes of plants and animals, without a care in the world. They’ll be here long after humanity has either turned to dust or departed for worlds unknown.

It’s amazing, when you think about it. These tiny, simple, mindless, invisible things have outlasted the dinosaurs. The KT impact was barely a blip on their radar. The Ice Age? Again, barely registered to them. They kept on keeping on. The dinosaurs had them beat on size, strength, teeth, defensive features (immune systems and thick hides and spikes!), could move around more, reproduce sexually, were more genetically diverse… and then along came a single hunk of rock and it was bye-bye dinosaurs while the little microscopic dudes kept on truckin’. The dinosaurs were the masters of their environment, true, but bacteria and viruses are the masters of adaptation. And, when it comes to long-term, long-scale, universal and planetary survival, adaptation is the key trait if you’re going to be more than just a bit player in the grand game of life.

Humanity has been fighting an on-going war with some members of these groups forever. We have an immune system that fights them and we also use plants to try to counteract them and have done since we figured out we could do that way back during the prehistoric era. It’s been a long-running fight and in all that time, we’ve managed to eradicate one of them. Small pox. The rest are still merrily going about their way. Some of them we need. Some of them kill us. Some of them we are trying to eradicate and can’t even with all our technology, all our grand colossi and skyscrapers, all our golems and governments. And, compared to the dinosaurs, we’re easy prey. I mean, we don’t have big sharp teeth, scaly hides, powerful muscles, we’re not the size of the brontosaurus or the T-Rex. We don’t have the armor plating of the Triceratops or the stegosaurus. We couldn’t outrun a velociraptor if we wanted to.

However, like the viruses and bacteria, we’re great at adaptation and we’re capable of breaking off into small groups. We can mix traits on multiple levels — not just genetic but memetic — and see what works. It’s when we try to be like the dinosaurs that things get bad for us. Yes, we can gather into large groups and become like a tsunami sometimes and sometimes that’s good — think things like food drives, building houses for the homeless, SETI@home, KickStarter — but notice that all of those things are voluntary. They’re also all temporary efforts. No one joins in every KickStarter campaign or builds every house. And, tribes banding together in a common effort isn’t always a bad thing — look at the success the United States and the entire Anglosphere has enjoyed over the past few centuries. But, if we’re not left with room to adapt inside those structures, it’ll all go wonky.

The problem in recent history has been that some parts of human society want us to be more colossal and monolithic because they believe that’s the only way to progress. I’m specifically thinking of the left-wing “progressives” who want to grant the government the power to regulate just about every aspect of life — economic, social, education, cultural, philosophical — to mandate certain outcomes they deem “fair.” However, doing that has always bred the ability to adapt to sudden change right out of the people and the society. Just look at what happened to the Soviet Union and to Eastern Europe. Look at what’s happening in all of the South American and Latin American countries that embraced socialism and communism and their five-year plans. Just look at Cuba and North Korea. Look at the Middle East and most of the African nations. Look at most of Europe that’s embraced socialism. When changes happen, they can’t cope. Birth rates fall — they cannot adapt to the new reality. In Europe, they imported new generations to replenish their falling population rates but could not adapt to the changes that brought and still can’t handle it — look at the riots, the carbeques that are just a fact of life there, the zones sensibles around Paris, the re-emergence of a new underclass and caste system that may be socially and culturally permanent since there’s no way for the French, the Germans, the Britons, or the Swedes to change how “French,” “German,” “British,” or “Swedish,” is defined or how someone can become a member of those tribes other than by birth. The Industrial Revolution ended and was replaced by the paradigm-shifting Digital revolution and these nations cannot adapt.

Industries are having problems as well. The publishing world got hit by the KT impact of Amazon and the Internet just like the movie and music industries and since they’re all populated by rather monolithic corporations who have a lot vested in the status quo ante, they not only don’t want to adapt, but they may not be able to. The Big Five may die entirely just like the dinosaurs did because, while Amazon is a large beast, it’s more like a large colony of bacteria and less like a brontosaurus. If one part of Amazon fails, it won’t bring down the whole thing. Amazon is acing the adaptation thing while the Big Five not only are failing at it but, given some of Tor’s senior management’s recent behavior, they’re doing everything they can to destroy their own food supplies and water sources.

Hell, the United States is having trouble dealing with the chaos that the Digital Revolution has wrought and we’re probably the most flexible and adaptable nation and society on the planet. The genius of the Founders guaranteed that. Which is why I have a really hard time wrapping my head around the idea that we should be like the rest of the world and become more rigid and inflexible. Do we have our problems? Yes. Do we have our imperfections — of course! Are there inequalities? Without a doubt. Is it better to have those problems than to be unable to deal with changes in reality? Is it better to be a bacteria or a dinosaur?

I say it’s better to be a bacteria. I say it’s better to be something that can adapt quickly and rapidly even if that means that there’s going to be a lot of inequality and imperfection and problems because it means at least you’re alive to deal with them instead of being extinct the first time a big rock comes your way. After all, if you’re alive, you can work to try to minimize those inequalities — for instance, make it illegal to discriminate against people based on things like race, religion, orientation, gender, political philosophy; make it so that society and economics is more of a meritocracy. If you’re dead… well, there’s really not much you can do (other than vote Democrat, of course).

— G.K.

Dear Tor: I’m an evil unicorn, not a robot!

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Dear Tor: I'm an evil unicorn, not a robot!

Dear Tor,

I am an evil unicorn, not a bot. Love and kisses! G.K. Masterson

I mean, I am an INTJ which, I’ve been told, means I have a sometimes robotic personality but I promise you, I’m a real person.

My mother swears I was actually born in the usual way and not hatched, dropped off by wandering aliens, beamed down as part of a reconnaissance mission, or delivered by a very confused parcel servicebeing operating out of the Corona Borealis supercluster who just took a wrong turn at the Sloan Great Wall. And, given that my niece looks exactly like me, I’m inclined to believe that my mother is telling the truth so I’m definitely human.

I know, I’m a bit disappointed, too, Tor, but we have to deal with reality as it is, not as we which it could be.

Now, I’ve been a pretty avid reader since I was about two and a half years old. And, I’m definitely a geek as these photos will attest.

[wppg_photo_gallery id=”1″]

As you can see, I have quite a few Tor books in my library. Over the years, I’ve massed a sizable collection of Tor books that is worth around about $3000. On average, I purchased about $50 worth of Tor books a month on my Kindle. So, while I’m not going to put much of a dent in Tor’s bottom line by myself, I’ll bet the authors whose books I bought will feel it and they might decide to move to a publisher who doesn’t call their customers neonazis and bots. And, ultimately, if Tor doesn’t have books to publish, they have a problem, don’t they?

— G.K.