In an effort to remove the jackboots of the Social Justice Warrior crowd off the neck of the Hugo awards and writers who don’t play politics the way the SJW want them to (including those who don’t want to play politics at all)- a campaign called Sad Puppies 3 was started- more about the back story of that later. BAsically, the Sad Puppy people decided to get the word out (in a more formal and cohesive way) that there were good writers in the sci-fi world who deserved Hugo award hominations and were not going to get them because of the dominations of the award by the Politics First SJW fascists. Naturally, SJW’s are angry. One of the things that they are angry about is a little strange. The Sad Puppy people did not tell everybody they were nominating that they would be on the Sad Puppy slate (they meant to, but a couple slipped through the cracks, as happens). Think about why that matters. Every year, there are the Homeschool Blog Awards. Most years I’ve been nominated. Some years I’ve won. At no time, ever, has anybody nominating me asked me if that’s okay. Why should they?
“…ten years ago, I lived in a state of fear. And the fact that my fear was real and serious is justified by that accusation to Brad, “You bad bad man, when you decided these people deserved awards, you didn’t TELL THEM you were putting them on a recommend list.”
I lived in fear because of the implied end of that sentence “And you knew that because you associated them with you, a known conservative, we would make their lives miserable and do our best to end their careers.”
And that, my friends is what I realized when I sold my first novel in the late 90s. Most Americans might not be that sensitive to the “climate” but I was. I had after all grown up in a socialist (at best, during the better times) country where to graduate you had to present the proper progressive front. I knew the signs and the hints and social positioning of “further left than thou.” For instance, my first SF cons, as an author, in the green room, I became aware that “a conservative” was a suitable, laughter inducing punchline for any joke; that all of them believed the Reagan years had set us on course to total dystopia; that the US was less enlightened/capable/free than anywhere else; that your average Republican or even non-Democrat voter was the equivalent of the Taliban.”
You have to read the rest. Don’t miss the priceless story of the nonsensical attitude about Libertarians. My story is not as good, but I still am just a strange combination of horrified and amused when, in the course of arguing with some Obamadolators about the CPSIA and how it was going to devastate the children’s crafted toys industry (which it did, by the way, but they just disappeared quietly into the night, like any bad socialists, sent away to reflect and repent, so you don’t even realize they are gone). The thing is, that many of the Obamaphiles were pefectly aware of how bad the law was going to be, but they were equally sure it didn’t matter because now we had a new President and he could just make the law not be a law any more.
I tried to explain why he couldn’t do that (yes, I was naive about his hypocrosy over executive orders) and discovered that I needed to explain the three branches of government in the American system, because these adult business women had no idea that the Constitution (presuming it were followed) prevented the President from just doing what he wanted.
Most of the responses were shrill, incoherent, bit on emotion, and utterly lacking in logic, but one stands out. “You sound like a libertarian,” she said. And it was clear she was holding her nose to type those words.
Alrighty then. Understanding that we have a Consitution and three branches of government, and knowing what they are and what they do defines a Libertarian- yes! But it’s a *bad* thing.
At least she got libertarianism better than Hoyt’s editors.
Part of this post is ostensibly about the Sci-Fi genre, but like the few posts I’ve done on Gamer-gate, that’s really not it. It’s about the increasing fascism of the left, of the ‘Social Justice Warriors’ and how the world they are making is world of thought police and braying pod-people, pointing and squawking at all those who don’t think exactly as the SJW demands, or, in some cases, they do think exactly like the SJW, but they don’t squawk loudly enough at non-pod-people. And the braying is for the purpose of singling out, bullying, and attacking, isolating, shaming, and punishing.
Author Larry Correia said this about the Hugo awards- the sci-fi world in general, loudly, bravely- and to prove his point, three years ago he started what he called ‘Sad Puppies,’ a way to nominate the sad puppies, authors he felt wrote ripping good stories, but weren’t getting the love from the SJW for reasons he believed have nothing to do with the literary quality of their books.
“I started this campaign a few years ago because I believed that the awards were politically biased, and dominated by a few insider cliques. Authors who didn’t belong to these groups or failed to appease them politically were shunned. When I said this in public, I was called a liar, and told that the Hugos represented all of fandom and that the awards were strictly about quality. I said that 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. Again, I was called a liar, so I set out to prove my point.”
He said that it was really just him and some blog posts where he listed some of his favorite overlooked authors. Last year was Sad Puppies 2, and it wasn’t just him, and they had fun:
“Sad Puppies is a campaign to get authors and artists nominated, who would normally be shunned by the politically motivated Social Justice Warriors who had become an insurmountable voting block. .
Last year I did a big push with several blog posts and cartoons (featuring Wendell as our spokesmanatee) to try to get people who aren’t typical WorldCon attendees to participate. We managed to get people and things despised by SJWs nominated to almost every category. The ensuing public freak out was hilarious and proved my point.”
This year is Sad Puppies 3, and it’s been, apparently, wildly successful and the subsequent melt-downs and take-downs are popcorn worthy.
It’s not just the sci-fi world. The pizzaria in Indiana didn’t actually turn down any gay customers- and they said they wouldn’t. When a spitefully minded SJW type reporter ambushed them by asking what they would do if they were asked to cater a gay wedding, they said they wouldn’t. And for that, the SJW all over the nation went into shaming mode and issued death threats and put the family out of business. Thanks to go-fund me, they will probably be just fine. But there are other people who know they can’t count on that every time, that there are such things as compassion fatique, and they are counting on the fact that if they cyber-bully enough people long enough, hard enough, everybody who disagrees with them, or just doesn’t agree quite as loudly and as passionately as the SJW believe is appropriate, they will be able to successfully all dissent. Success here is measured by how afraid they can make you be, how they can frighten people out of thinking what they wish to think and out of the free expression of those thoughts.
(Irony: condemning Sad Puppies for politicizing the process and urging everybody not to vote on any nominees who were on the Sad Puppy slate. Read about that here.)
Correia was nominated, but turned it down:
“This is just one little battle in an ongoing culture war between artistic free expression and puritanical bullies who think they represent *real* fandom. In the long term I want writers to be free to write whatever they want without fear of social justice witch hunts, I want creators to not have to worry about silencing themselves to appease the perpetually outraged, and I want fans to enjoy themselves without having some entitled snob lecture them about how they are having fun wrong. I want our shrinking genre to grow. I think if we can get back to where “award nominated” isn’t a synonym for “preachy crap” to the most fans, we’ll do it.
That’s what I want. Strategically, we get there faster without them trying to spin it as all about me.”