The Hugo Awards Kerfuffle...

Hey, lookit that. Considering 'typical' 'normal' and 'average' can all be synonymous with some form of 'often present' I think we can chalk this part up to 'overly pedantic' and let it die.
I'll accept being called pedantic, as it's true that I can sometimes be over-enthusiastic when being correct. :)

The definition of 'comedy' doesn't include you personally finding it funny, so you not thinking something is funny has no impact on whether a given piece is defined as a comedy or not. Just in case you go Googling for more definitions, the key part here is the 'intent' of the creator(s), not how it's received by the audience.
Some people may confuse their own opinions with having the only valid opinion, but I'm pleased to say that I am not one of them. (In fact, I can't imagine why anyone would ever associate someone having a personal opinion with that person believing that they have the only valid opinion.)

Considering your response indicated you thought only of the Three Stooge, it's better to be safe than sorry.
That's advice we can all take, even in threads on the Chrons.

I would agree that someone who's 'generally incompetent', as in they're incompetent about everything all the time and never learn anything ever (switch that 'something' above 'anything'), is in fact indistinguishable from an idiot, but thankfully that's not what I was talking about.
I think there's a difference between a character who, for some reason, loses it (where "it" includes their own, possibly overdeveloped, sense of dignity), such as is found in the film, Clockwise, and someone portrayed as basically inadequate. Frankly, I'm not that much more inclined to laugh at someone acting at being the latter than I would be if a real-life example of such a person was having an unfortunate experience in front of my eyes. (I think I'd be experiencing a wholly different emotion. But then, that's just me, and I will acknowledge that others' reactions may differ from mine.)

#

In an attempt to get back on topic, here's an updated list of GRRM's posts on the Puppygate:

1. Puppygate.
2. Me and the Hugos.
3. Tone.
4. Blogging for Rockets.
5. Where's the Beef?
6. Stay on Topic!
7. What Now?
8. Hatespeech.
9. Reading for Rockets.
10. A Reply to Larry Correia.

That last one is an in-depth response. There's a lot of interesting stuff there. If you read nothing else by Martin on this topic, take the time for this one.
Thanks for the updated list.
 
Scalzi also fits this profile.
So far, I've only been reading his blog. However, I bought Old Man's War a month or so back, so I'll have to see if it fits that profile. (I wasn't expecting it to, not in the way I'd expect, say, Redshirts to be like that.)
 
Well, that's embarrassing for you.
Not at all. This is the Chrons, where Pedants can be Proud**.

However, there are other personal attributes for which embarrassment is the correct (though very rare) response.


** - Have you never seen one of my fellow mod's taglines, 'resident pedantissimo'?
 
So far, I've only been reading his blog. However, I bought Old Man's War a month or so back, so I'll have to see if it fits that profile. (I wasn't expecting it to, not in the way I'd expect, say, Redshirts to be like that.)

The series is a lot of fun. On one level, it's a quite lighthearted homage to Starship Troopers (and yes, there is a lot of witty/snarky dialogue). But once you've finished the series you can see the underlying critique. I remember when OMW first came out, it was getting accolades from right-wing authors and critics as "something that really gets Heinlein." I suspect one of the reasons the SP crowd hates Scalzi is because they feel betrayed, as they wanted more of a celebration of the soldier thing and fewer questions on whether war/warmongering causes more problems than it solves thing.*

But in my view the series is supposed to be equal parts homage and critique--not one and not just the other. And that's, to me, the big attraction.

*Hope this isn't a spoiler for you, but I don't think it's giving anything away.
 
I think I may have to read Starship Troopers first then. (I obtained a second-hand copy some time ago. I wonder where I put it. :( )
 
I think I may have to read Starship Troopers first then. (I obtained a second-hand copy some time ago. I wonder where I put it. :( )
I read Old Man's War without having read Starship Troopers and didn't feel I was missing anything crucial. It was a really interesting and enjoyable read, though I haven't yet gone further in the series. Might have to check the library...
 
In an attempt to get back on topic, here's an updated list of GRRM's posts on the Puppygate:

1. Puppygate.
2. Me and the Hugos.
3. Tone.
4. Blogging for Rockets.
5. Where's the Beef?
6. Stay on Topic!
7. What Now?
8. Hatespeech.
9. Reading for Rockets.
10. A Reply to Larry Correia.

That last one is an in-depth response. There's a lot of interesting stuff there. If you read nothing else by Martin on this topic, take the time for this one.

Done. :) Thanks for the linkage.

A big and repetitive part of Martin's A Reply to Larry Correia boils down to "citation needed" and there are certainly reasons for Correia not to enumerate or to be unable to exactly quote everybody he feels has wronged him but I agree that some better substantiation would help. That said, there's a sort of implicit, "I'm not calling you a liar but I don't have to because I've pointed out that this is unsubstantiated and this means it's false," attitude which doesn't follow. Besides which, reading the "other side's" blogs provides plenty of substantation for Correia.

Moving on, I'm nobody but I still wanted to address some of Martin's points to Correia. I'm kind of disappointed in this one from Martin, though. Other than possibly some somewhat passive-aggressive subtle things, he does maintain civil discourse, which is great, but many of his points are weak. For convenience (even though it makes this post look even more crazily long than it is), I will quote them as they quoted each other, except for heavy abridgement, some noted position changes, and just initialing everybody like it's a play. (Which it feels like - a Jacobean one.)

C: After my first experience seeing how the sausage was made, I publically said the same thing you said there, that the Hugo Awards don’t represent all of fandom, they represent one tiny part of fandom. I was called a liar.
M: The SMOFs who run worldcon made a conscious decision to slow down and even stop the growth, so as to preserve the unique character and flavor of worldcon, the sense of community, the "amateur status" if I might use a sports metaphor. It is not a decision I agree with, truth be told, but I respect their reasons.
J: So when C says they are a small insignificant clique M agrees with him wholeheartedly. He says C is right. I'm moving this part up because it's the corrolary:

M: It's history that gives the Hugos their prestige, not statistics.
...
So far as I'm concerned, the Hugos are the Big Deal still. There's no other award in the field with half as distinguished a list of previous winners. The Nebulas challenged for a time, but now they are a distant second.
J: I agree with the Hugos historically but the whole history is irrelevant to the present. The previous winners taken as an average are irrelevant. (And I'd like to know the argument for the Nebulas having failed of late while the Hugos supposedly haven't.) M himself says that Worldcon locked itself up and ceased to grow with the field and has thus become proportionally incapable of representing it since the mid-80s - exactly when I said I noted the first significant decline in the Hugo awards. Since that time, the Worldcon can no longer lay claim to that history which was predicated on the size and openness of the Worldcon in relation to the field any more than Italy is the Roman Empire or that its heads of states have been as historically significant as the Roman Emperors.

C: Within a few days of the nominations being announced I not only knew that I was going to lose, I knew that I was going to be last place. Only it had absolutely nothing to do with my writing, but rather, who I was, and what I was.
M: Actually, I was pretty certain I was going to lose as well.
J: This is another main tactic of M's post aside from the "citation needed" method: the "I'm going to appear to address your point but glance off it obliquely" method. C's point was not that he was going to lose, which he was as fine with as anyone can be, but why he was going to lose, which M doesn't address at all and certainly couldn't have suffered from himself.

C: I’m betting that you were always really excited to hear what readers had to say about your creations. Right?
M: Sure. Of course, we had no internet in 1973, no emails. I had to make do with a few passing comments in print fanzines, and the occasional encounter at a con with a fan who had actually read one of my stories. Egoboo (as we called it) was hard to come by in those days.... Paying our dues, we called it. Acclaim was hard to come by; it had to be earned, and earning it took YEARS.
J: Yeah, and I had to "allow 6-8 weeks for delivery" of my stuff when I was kid where now it comes in days. Times change and things are faster and people are less patient and none of this merits the implication that C hasn't paid any dues. This is a third method that appears more than once: the implication that C wants something undeserved when that's not what he's saying. Again, moving this up, because it's a variation on the same theme:

C: But I’m betting before your first WorldCon a whole bunch of malignant lying bastards didn’t spread the word to thousands of complete strangers that you were a racist, sexist, homophobic warmonger who deserved to be shunned.
M: Nobody rolled out the red carpet for me. Nobody gave two shits that I was a Campbell Award finalist. So we all have our traumas, Mr. Correia.
J: Patronizing, much? C wasn't asking for a red carpet, he was asking not to be excluded as a villain. C seems to be saying he would have liked for "nobody to give two shits" about him - the problem is that it was worse than that.

[This part is out of order even within the section, because M reacts to the term before he quotes it:]
C: They were wrongfan having wrongfun.
M: Take this "Wrongfan" moniker I now see popping up on Puppy sites. Neither I nor any of the other SMOFs or trufans or worldconners that I know have ever called you or your friends "wrongfans." You guys made that up and applied it to yourself. I wish that would stop.
J: I want to say this is strangely obtuse on M's part but that could be unfair as I think everyone's going cross-eyed from all this verbiage and maybe he just missed the obvious. Still, M should be able to understand that a characterization is not an attribution and that there's nothing particularly vicious about it even if it were. C doesn't say anyone called them "wrongfans" (would that they could be so clever as "wrongfun" has seeped into my head permanently because it's so apt and funny) but he's saying that a pithy synopsis of the sorts of things they do say boils down to this attitude. And like "trufen" doesn't invite the concept of a "wrongfan"? I know the trufan is adopted in humor but it implies there must be falsefen (and see below on "cool kids").

C: I had belligerent drunks challenging me at [Worldcon] room parties because “Oh, it’s that jolly thing”.
M: How many belligerent drunks? One? Two? Ten? I think it matters.
J: Because one would be okay? I don't think it does matter. Yes, you could say a single incident was a bizarre aberration but, still, I don't consider it acceptable and the idea that two or ten makes any possible difference at all (other than how tired you'd be after finishing with them (assuming they were sequential)) is appalling.

C: Then I went to the award ceremony, and the parties, and the various schmoozefests, and I discovered that the Hugo Awards were like one great big In Joke. And the cool kids told their cool stories to the other cool kids, and lorded it over those who weren’t part of the In Joke. Honestly, it reminded me of high school, and I was the poor fat kid who had inadvertently pissed off the mean girls.
M: Come on, Larry. The cool kids? Surely you have been around fandom long enough to realize that there are no cool kids. We're all the fat kids, the nerds, the computer geeks, the guys who always had their nose in a book, who loved comics and played chess and couldn't get a date for a prom. And the girls are the geek girls, our female counterparts.
J: Again, M being oblique and attributing overrreach to C. It would be great if outcasts would never cast out anyone else because they knew what it was like but every subset has its hierarchy - as Anthony Michael Hall says (I believe it's in Sixteen Candles or some such) "I am king of the nerds. They look up to me." No, there are no cool kids amongst geeks compared to cool kids, but some geeks are less "cool" than other geeks to geeks. (As someone who was spectacularly mobile as a kid, I spent some time in geekery - try to conceal your shock - as well as other strata and I know. And so does M and C and U.

C: The Hugos represent greatness, worthiness, and all of fandom. WorldCon is inclusive. How dare you question it? So I said I would prove it, and I did.
M: You didn't, though. At least I do not believe you did. I am not calling you a liar, I am just saying that I believe that statement to be false. In fact, I think my own "Where's the Beef?" blog post pretty well demolished the Sad Puppy claims. Your supporters may not think so. Does that mean they are calling me a liar? My supporters think I was totally convincing, so...
...
You say you just wanted a seat at the table. But you kicked over the table, and took ALL the seats.
J: I've already addressed that I'm not a supporter of either M or C but that I don't think M "demolished" anything. (And where does the equation of "wrong" and "lying" come from - maybe that's part of the problem: people can't just be "honestly wrong" anymore.) Speaking of, I'll allow this to be an honest misunderstanding: M may genuinely be confused here as he's conflating Correia and Torgersen and SP2 and SP3. Once more with feeling: SP2 was C saying he was going to get someone nominated in most every category and didn't give a crap if they won. He did just that and all his nominees lost and his opponents disgraced themselves with unseemly mockery of the losers and declared C to have failed. (Again, I can't cite chapter and verse of the bloggers and all but I saw this with my own eyes.) SP3 was Torgersen proposing a slate and, lo, virtually everything got on. These are two different aims, results, issues, etc., and the 3rd is directly attributable to the opposition reaction to the second. And even SP2 derives from C making comments such as M now confirms regarding the smallness of the Hugos and being attacked for making them. That led directly to SP2 - that's why he didn't care if the nominees won as such, because the point was only to prove how easily manipulable the Hugos were and thus how easily they could have been "managed" by the intentionally small Worldcon group that still claimed the Hugos were SF's most prestigious awards.

C: And sadly, the moderate, rational, normal WorldCon folks rarely seem to condemn them [radical "SJW" attack people] for their antics. So from over here on the Sad Puppies side, they take your silence and lack of condemnation against the hate mongers as tacit approval, and then they tend to lump you together.
M: Perhaps. Maybe there is altogether too much "lumping together" on both sides. From over here, on the other side, it seems as though the "moderate, rational, normal" conservatives rarely seem to condemn the Vox Days and Rabid Puppies on your side, so we take your silence and lack of condemnation against the hate mongers as tacit approval.
...
You can't control the assholes on your side and I can't control the assholes on my side. I fear we will both just have to live with that.
J: Given the last line, why is M even asking him to reign in VD? But there's a further misunderstanding here. While I don't "side with" the Sad Puppies and it would seem I would loathe VD's statements and behavior (I actually try to pay no attention to him and don't know all details but everybody on all sides seems to want to make him famous) I do side with the ironically "conservative" position that the "liberals" have largely abandoned regarding free speech. And it's somewhat inconsistent for the SPs to rein in VD, unlike the ASPs who should be all over "Requires Hate" and anything similar. Be that as it may, does anyone really think VD would listen to anyone he didn't want to? Still, maybe some more expression of personal antipathy from the SP side of things would be helpful to all sides as would more ASP disapproval of the fringe of that side.

C: LOCUS I think it has like 40 or 50 books but ZERO from Baen (a publishing house that gets a bad rap because it is willing to publish any author regardless of their politics, from capital L Libertarians to card carrying Communists as long as they can tell a good story).
M: Do you think that makes Baen unique? It does amuse that so many of your Sad Puppies seem to revere Baen Books and despise Tor Books, which reveals an astonishing ignorance of publishing. Both Baen and Tor were financed by the same guy, Tom Doherty. You know who the first editor was at Tor? Jim Baen. Tor publishes your Puppy favorite, John C. Wright.
J: Again with the misdirection and lack of historical sense. Sure, Tor may publish Wright just like Worldcon nominated Schmidt but the idea that Tor is anything like it was when Baen was editor there is simply preposterous. Tor was very proto-Baen-like then (naturally) and is not at all now. I'm trying to cut slack and be nice but this is either kinda dumb or outright disingenuous on M's part. And doesn't address the absence of Baen anyway, even if the Tor part were valid.

M: I see a feast there, a table laid out with all sorts of different meats and fruits and cheeses. Diversity all over the place.
J: I basically said this earlier (maybe all of this) but, yes, there's Stan Schmidt with his perpetual nomination so it's not 100%. And, yes, Dallas and Pittsburgh are completely different football teams but they look the same to people who don't watch football and do watch baseball. Left looks at right and sees an anti-left monolith while right-wingers fight amongst themselves and vice versa.

M: Had Vox Day not been on your ticket, I suspect the backlash would not have been a tenth as vociferous as it was.
J: Nonsense. VD gives perfect cover to the ASPs which is why they make such use of him but he's not at all necessary.

M: Got it. Politics, race, religion, and sexual orientation, OUT. Damned good stories, IN. And for this year's Damned Good Story standard bearer, you chose... John C. Wright SIX TIMES!!! John C. Wright, a writer famed far and wide for having no opinions on politics, race, religion, or sexual orientation, and would never dream of injecting such messages into his Damned Good Stories. Because, after all, the Puppies get sad when they are made to read Message Fiction.
J: On the other hand, this (finally) is a pretty good counterpunch. On this, too, I've said that Dozois has praised and published Wright, a variety of reviewers have praised him, he supposedly does tell the Good Old Stuff and M's point is not at all conclusive (or a "demolishing"), any more than that people who like Card are promoting his homophobia or Mormonism rather than his fiction, but it is an odd thing for the SPs to do and the number of nominations for that one author is ridiculous.

M: I like to think the Hugo represents a starship, not a nuclear missile.
J: And on that happy note of total agreement, I'll stop.
 
I am downright concise compared to Correia who has responded to Martin's response. To be fair, I should respond to it (I should have looked for it when I read the Martin but it didn't occur to me until after) - he's possibly disingenuous in a couple of places and rebuts some points quite differently than I did and so on, but I'm just too tired and probably folks don't want to read it even if I weren't.

Anyway - lest I seem to be saying "Tor sucks!" when I say it's not "anything like" it was, I agree with the gist of Last SP post for the week, to my people, don't blame Tor.

(BTW, I hate that "my people" expression.)

And then the reply to the reply: George R. R. Martin responds

--

Okay - it also occurred to me to look up Torgersen's blog since I'd neglected to read Correia's as well as Martin's. And this is freakin' essential stuff. Regarding the whole SP3 thing as a thing, I've been sort of moderate, standing on the sidelines, trying to see both sides just be reasonable, pointing out pros and cons, whatever.

But in this, I'm in substantial agreement - however many nits might be picked (such as the quality of the title):

Flaming rage nozzles of tolerance

(As a digression, in another blog post, he proposes yet another rationale for not unpersoning even someone as toxic as VD.)

And a link within Torgersen's "nozzle" post is perhaps even more important than the post itself: we were talking about ESR earlier in this thread - sometimes a wingnut (well, maybe not, but not shy and uncontroversial) and sometimes freakin' brilliant - and here he is being freakin' brilliant several years ago (how has this not memed until now?): Kafkatrapping.

It's actually even worse than even he says sometimes:

"No one can ever be innocent. The subject must be prevented from noticing that this logic convicts and impeaches the operator of the kafkatrap!"

Actually, that's just it - the operator cannot be innocent but his expiation comes from his admission and the coercion of others to admit their guilt. That is his self-righteousness and his release. If he can admit guilt and drag everyone else down, then all are guilty and he is no longer worse. Total guilt absolves specific guilt. But it takes everyone agreeing.

I rambled beyond that and in another place, but removed those parts of this post. Maybe best to let the BRT and ESR stand by themselves.
 
I don’t have the time or inclination to respond to all of this (good on you for doing so, J-Sun: my soul starts to wither if I read this stuff too long). I hate the “witty” little names everyone has for one another in particular. Strange how these discussions inevitably end up being conducted in Newspeak: “cishet trufans badthink wrongfun”. Draw your own conclusions.

A small point about “damned good reads”. Many of the best older SFF novels are “damned good reads” and “issue books” at the same time. In fact, the two are inseperable: if the issues weren’t there, they wouldn’t be such good reads. Dracula is about Victorian sexuality and, arguably, disease; The Island of Doctor Moreau is about religion, eugenics and society (if not more); 1984 is about tyranny (although it’s hardly subtle about getting the issues in); Invasion of the Body Snatchers is about paranoia (either about Communists or the McCarthy witch hunts, as you see fit); The Forever War is about the experience of soldiers struggling to readjust; ‘Salem’s Lot is about the collapse of small town America. All of these books are highly entertaining and easy to read. While the degree to which they explicitly discuss the issues behind them varies, none is undeniably “left” in tone, despite the range of politics of the authors. None preaches a message (at least, nowhere near the extent of, oh, Starship Troopers, for instance).

What seems to be ignored in this debate is that you don’t just drop a load of issues on top of a plot to make a story (“like Top Gun, but with lesbians discussing lesbianism and no planes”). All the books I’ve mentioned are fuelled by issues the way a car is fuelled with petrol. And they are all accessible, entertaining, readable stories. It is also worth pointing out that none of these books gives a clear answer to the problems it discusses (“If only we did X and not Y, everything would be fine”). It is quite possible that, beyond the banal (“Women are people too” etc) the issues are complex and situation-specific. Sometimes, banal statements do need to be made, of course. But I’m not sure that making them produces great fiction, just as adventure for adventure’s sake is rarely memorable.
 
A small point about “damned good reads”. Many of the best older SFF novels are “damned good reads” and “issue books” at the same time. In fact, the two are inseperable: if the issues weren’t there, they wouldn’t be such good reads. Dracula is about Victorian sexuality and, arguably, disease; The Island of Doctor Moreau is about religion, eugenics and society (if not more); 1984 is about tyranny (although it’s hardly subtle about getting the issues in); Invasion of the Body Snatchers is about paranoia (either about Communists or the McCarthy witch hunts, as you see fit); The Forever War is about the experience of soldiers struggling to readjust; ‘Salem’s Lot is about the collapse of small town America. All of these books are highly entertaining and easy to read. While the degree to which they explicitly discuss the issues behind them varies, none is undeniably “left” in tone, despite the range of politics of the authors. None preaches a message (at least, nowhere near the extent of, oh, Starship Troopers, for instance).

What seems to be ignored in this debate is that you don’t just drop a load of issues on top of a plot to make a story (“like Top Gun, but with lesbians discussing lesbianism and no planes”). All the books I’ve mentioned are fuelled by issues the way a car is fuelled with petrol. And they are all accessible, entertaining, readable stories. It is also worth pointing out that none of these books gives a clear answer to the problems it discusses (“If only we did X and not Y, everything would be fine”). It is quite possible that, beyond the banal (“Women are people too” etc) the issues are complex and situation-specific. Sometimes, banal statements do need to be made, of course. But I’m not sure that making them produces great fiction, just as adventure for adventure’s sake is rarely memorable.

"Damned good reads" vs "issue books" is a demonstrably false dichotomy.
 
And a link within Torgersen's "nozzle" post is perhaps even more important than the post itself: we were talking about ESR earlier in this thread - sometimes a wingnut (well, maybe not, but not shy and uncontroversial) and sometimes freakin' brilliant - and here he is being freakin' brilliant several years ago (how has this not memed until now?): Kafkatrapping.

It's actually even worse than even he says sometimes:

"No one can ever be innocent. The subject must be prevented from noticing that this logic convicts and impeaches the operator of the kafkatrap!"

Actually, that's just it - the operator cannot be innocent but his expiation comes from his admission and the coercion of others to admit their guilt. That is his self-righteousness and his release. If he can admit guilt and drag everyone else down, then all are guilty and he is no longer worse. Total guilt absolves specific guilt. But it takes everyone agreeing.

Yes, a lot of people have come to recognize the religious theater of the most ardent social justice warriors. As the author of the blog post frames it:

“Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}.”

It takes a certain mentality to embrace that kind of dogma, and it's usually confined to the extreme right and the the extreme left (who tend to have very similar psychological profiles). It's one of the reasons why I'm confident that the SJW movement will eventually burn out of its own accord. Liberals (in the classical sense) will tire of being told how awful they are, and the true believers will turn on one other in a savage contest to demonstrate their unequaled piety and zeal. We've seen this all before. Robespierre's neck ended up on the same chopping block as his enemies.
 
Nope, he's totes been taken out of context. The itchy and burny VD is now claiming he was taken out of context and isn't really a racist, so someone got the bright idea to quote him for a few paragraphs. Yeah, doesn't make it better. Makes it a lot worse. Context is king.

I almost choked when I read that paragraph. Martin was right. Someone should pull a Laura Mixon on him. This is just ridiculous. People like that shouldn't be spreading their filth around.
 
I can't make my mind up.

Is it Spacebunny or Vox Day who also goes under the name RequiresHate...?
 

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