From a recent Facebook conversation:
- Please, internet, do not make me explain this again: If you want to defeat something, you have to understand it. Imprecise insults make the choir roar with laughter, but they don't win new members for the church.
“For myself, I want no advantage over my fellow man, and if he is weaker than I, all the more is it my duty to help him.” —Eugene V. Debs
Dear George,
There were no SJWs, then or now. There were only the Puppies... and the rest of us, who weren't Puppies, and did not like having their choices imposed on us.Would that were so.
I had picked Mike Resnick in Short Form and Toni Weisskopf in Long Form, and indeed, each of them finished above all the other nominees in the first round of voting... but well behind No Award. This was a crushing defeat for the slates, and a big victory for the Puppy-Free ballot of Deirdre Moen. Honestly? I hated this. In my judgment the voters threw the babies out with bathwater in these two categories. Long Form had three nominees who are more than worthy of a Hugo (and one, Jim Minz, who will be in a few more years), and Short Form had some good candidates too. They were on the slates, yes, but some of them were put on there without their knowledge and consent. A victory by Resnick, Sowards, Gilbert, or Weisskopf would have done credit to the rocket, regardless of how they got on the ballot. (All four of these editors would almost certainly have been nominated anyway, even if there had been no slates).I agree the Puppies' slates were not in the spirit of the Hugos (though the Hugos have a long tradition of things not being done in their spirit), and I might've voted No Award in the fiction categories (I haven't read the stories, so I have no opinion about their worth), but whatever anyone may think of the reason people rallied behind them, none of the people you mention on the editor ballots are considered "unworthy" by anyone who loves our genre.
Goblin Emperor lost the Best Novel to Three-Body Problem by 200 votes. Since there seem to have been at least 500 Rabid Puppy voters who followed VD’s suggestion to vote Liu first, this means Liu won because of the Rabid Puppies.Which means that thanks to Vox Day, the most important Hugo Award of 2015 is less diverse in gender, but more diverse in race and nationality.
"There were no SJWs"? Who does he think the thousand people who voted No Award over Laura Mixon were?But I don't think all of those voters were SJWs. I would've voted No Award in that case because Laura's piece treats Requires Hate as a deranged opportunist. Anyone interested in systems and justice should analyze the identitarian understanding of justice that was so easy for Requires Hate to exploit.
"Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal." —Anatole FranceToday, a friend on Facebook shared:
“Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.” ― Arundhati RoyIn the comments, someone said, "In my universe it was various flavors of socialism with a little bit of nationalism," and someone else added "The two greatest instances of genocide were Communist China and Communist Russia." So I shared Hitler Explains to GOP Why They Are Wrong about National Socialism, then made these comments:
...if you want to sound informed, you could do worse than this, which begins by pointing out the flaws in the studies you seem to be thinking of:And:
Attempting the Impossible – Calculating Capitalism’s Death Toll | Peter Says Stuff
PS: I'm not recommending that post in particular. There are many places that point out the flaws of the studies you cite, so you should feel free to try others if you don't like that one. It was literally the first that came up when I googled something like "capitalism or communism who killed more".And then I relied on a point that I didn't originate:
...as for your insistence that Nazis must be socialists because of their name, do you also insist the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic?When it occurred to me that this might deserve to be a post, I wondered if I'd blogged about it already (because I've written about it before, in comments if not in posts), so I googled shetterly "black book of communism". On the first page of hits was a Vox Day post that includes this:
MICHAEL BROWN WAS, at best, stopped by police for stealing cigarillos. Sandra Bland for failing to signal a lane change. Freddie Gray for carrying a switchblade.I completely agree with the article's broader topic, but it assumes police killings are primarily a problem for black folks. I just checked my A handy list of white victims of police abuse, or Why #BlackLivesMatter should be #AllLivesMatter for white people who could as easily have been used in that sentence.
I so very much regret contributing to a culture in which knee jerk reactions and call-outs became synonymous with social justice education.
— Suey Park (@suey_park) August 14, 2015
My first reaction: "Oh. My. God. I keep saying these people can grow up, but I never really expected to see it happen." I went to check her timeline, and saw several tweets I liked, including these:
Some only like you because they like that you agree with them. Once you cross them (aka disagree or opt out), then you become vilified.
— Suey Park (@suey_park) August 15, 2015
Too tired to engage, but I will say that the violence I have experienced in SJW circles has been greater than that of "racist trolls"
— Suey Park (@suey_park) August 15, 2015
The last tweet will make it very, very hard for her to ever return to the company she kept. I haven't noticed many of her former opponents quibbling about her apology. Had, say, Milo Yiannopoulos regretted his part in #gamergate, his current opponents would be explaining why each letter of the apology and its time stamp was inadequate and should be rejected.
@suey_park Well said. Mean-spirited people will parse your apology forever. Don't let that bother you.
— Will Shetterly (@WillShetterly) August 15, 2015
I've recently been quoting something I asked an identitarian a few years back:
For years, I wrestled with whether Malcolm X was right when he said you can't have capitalism without racism. Clearly, liberals and conservatives are working desperately to create capitalism without racism. But I've finally come to see that Malcolm X was right: if you don't redistribute wealth, the distribution of wealth will be racially disproportionate. If you do redistribute wealth, capitalism ends. It's a Catch-22 that anti-racists ignore. Do you have an answer?I've never met an identitarian who did. The best of them are beginning to admit that social inequality and economic inequality might be more than "intersectional", that perhaps there's something to the argument that economic inferiors will always be social inferiors no matter how politely their bosses treat them, and are joining me on the Basic Income bandwagon.
[EDIT]I have noticed that y'all are not interested in conversation, probably because conversation runs the risk of bringing up facts that do not fit your ideology. When you don't have facts, the only effective option you have is to rage, a common way of coping with the contradictions in your belief system and making ignorant onlookers think that if you're upset, there must be some validity to your upset. The second point is a standard tactic: I just this morning read I get Paid to Chat on Reddit, which notes,
OH, RIGHT.
This isn’t a conversation with the evil or the stupid. You’re all spammed, because I have better things to do with my time. Go have the conversation on your own blogs, AS I DID HERE WITH MINE.
If you vanity-Google yourself, or have alerts for your name, may your life choices bring you all the joy you have earned.
There’s even a script for when the other commenter is winning the argument. We’re told specifically to derail the discussion, throw mud, and in the end, accuse the commenter of being a conspiracy theorist/tinfoil hat wearer. That way, anyone reading the discussion will see those negative points as being associated with weird people.Ah, well. Go in peace.
Yes, racism exists, as a conceptual condensation of practices and ideas that reproduce, or seek to reproduce, hierarchy along lines defined by race. Apostles of antiracism frequently can’t hear this sort of statement, because in their exceedingly simplistic version of the nexus of race and injustice there can be only the Manichean dichotomy of those who admit racism’s existence and those who deny it.Social justice fandom, I beg you. Just ignore me, and I will gladly treat you with the same courtesy.
Probably a majority of American historians think of slavery in the United States as primarily a system of race relations — as though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco. One historian has gone so far as to call slavery ‘the ultimate segregator’. He does not ask why Europeans seeking the ‘ultimate’ method of segregating Africans would go to the trouble and expense of transporting them across the ocean for that purpose, when they could have achieved the same end so much more simply by leaving the Africans in Africa.
No one dreams of analyzing the struggle of the English against the Irish as a problem in race relations, even though the rationale that the English developed for suppressing the ‘barbarous’ Irish later served nearly word for word as a rationale for suppressing Africans and indigenous American Indians. Nor does anyone dream of analyzing serfdom in Russia as primarily a problem of race relations, even though the Russian nobility invented fictions of their innate, natural superiority over the serfs as preposterous as any devised by American racists.
1837 F. A. Kemble Let. 1 Aug. in Rec. Later Life (1882) I. 86 To be sure, if ‘noblesse oblige’, royalty must do so still more.
In Hinduism, the Hijra community (eunuchs) – neither born male nor female, but self-identified as female – are historically believed to have the power to grant wishes and cast spells, and are often present at weddings and births. A transgender presence within Hindu psyche stems back to the essential Hindu epic text, the Mahabharata, where the male Shikhandi (but born the female Shikhandini) was vital in securing the Pandavas's necessary victory over the Kaurava in the great war of Kurukshetra.