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So the Hugo Awards were last night, and, as many of you no doubt already know, the Puppies went down in defeat.
For those who haven’t been following the ongoing culture war in the world of science fiction, a group of cultural reactionaries decided to try to strike a blow against what they see as the Social Justice Warriorization of the SF world by essentially stuffing the ballot boxes for the Hugo Award nominations with two slates of their own candidates, dubbed the Sad and the Rabid Puppies. They succeeded in this ignoble task, with many of the categories in the final ballot filled entirely with writers put forward by one or the other of the Puppy slates.
But there’s one peculiar thing about the Hugo ballots: if you don’t like any of the nominees, you can vote for “no award” instead.
And last night, that’s what everyone fed up with the Puppies did. In the five categories where all the nominees were Puppy-nominated, voters picked “no award” over all of them. The only Puppy-endorsed winner? Guardians of the Galaxy, which was such a charmingly entertaining popcorn flick that it transcended Puppy politics altogether
Naturally, the Puppies and their supporters claimed … victory? Well some of them did, anyway.
Doesn't the super-villain always set off the self-destruct when his underground lair is overrun by heroes? Just a thought. #HugoAwards
— Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) August 23, 2015
Meanwhle, Vox Day — the famously reactionary, racist, woman-hating fantasy author who headed up the Rabid Puppies — tried to spin the giant loss as a sort of nihilistic victory for the forces of reactionary chaos.
In his first blog post about the results of the Hugo votes, Day managed to sort of admit that the Puppies had, yes, failed. Of those voting for “no award,” Day wrote,
They are practicing a scorched earth strategy, and we can certainly assist them in that since we do not value their territory. I still think it was worth trying to take Berlin and end the war in one fell swoop, but even though our attempt break them once and for all failed, that only means that the victory was less than complete.
But in later posts he banished the f-word and tried to convince the world, like Pee Wee Herman after his famous bicycle spill in Pee Wee’s Great Adventure, that he’d “meant to do that.”
In his second post on the Hugo results, Day declared
The five categories burned last night are only the first sparks of the cleansing conflagration that is coming.
In a later post, he wrote
It’s fascinating to see SJWs desperately trying to cling to their Narrative on Twitter and elsewhere. They’re insisting that we’re mad, that we’re crying, that we’re upset, when the fact is that I knew this would be the result this year prior to creating Rabid Puppies.
He knew it all along!
Pee Wee, take it away:
For more details on the Hugos, and more of Vox’s spinning, check out the accounts on Wired and the Wall Street Journal.
@ Falconer
That’s better. Also glad to see he’s wrapping the cable properly; if you don’t do it right you kink the shielding; and that’s one kink that should be shamed.
@Alan Robertshaw
As I always enjoy a good Googling, does “Men Without Bones”, by Gerald Kersh ring a bell? It was in the Fifth Pan Book of Horror Stories, and though it doesn’t exactly deal with a disease, it does have jelly-like people.
If not, I found Pandaemonian – a blog which has summaries of all of the stories contained within the different volumes.
Ooh thanks for that Parse (cool name BTW)
From the Wiki summary it’s not that one but I can trawl the site you found. Cheers.
Just in time for his ignominious defeat comes Theodore Beale’s latest travesty SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police.
Indeed, Sad Puppies was such a great resistance against social justice that people overwhelmingly voted for no winners in protest of them and then went to work coming up with ways to prevent this from ever happening again and likely destroyed any credibility Trogersen and Correia had. Smashing job there, Puppies.
From a wargamming site that i frequent
[blockquote]
For years the (Deleted by Moderators) shut out competition as being too commercial or not diverse enough.
This lead to the birth of the SPs.
The Hugos are supposed to be awarded by the fans, but manipulation of the nomination machinery made sure that only “acceptable” work was on the ballot.
This year the nomination machinery was seized by the sad puppies and for the first time in a while actual work that the fans enjoy was on the ballot.
The (Deleted by Moderators) response was to “no award” five of the categories.[/blockqoute]
Yes because its impossible that the stuff nominated in the past was stuff enjoyed by others.
Snark answer: Wow, we “SJWs” have done pretty fucking well considering that the bigot patrol only came up with that dumbass name for us last year. Good to know the time travellers of the world are on our side.
Serious answer: Abraham Lincoln died exactly 150 years ago and that’s not a coincidence. Abraham bloody Lincoln was the first “SJW” to this twit. Struth almighty.
Yes, that realisation was so facepalm-worthy I dropped into Aussie-speak. Oops.
@SFHC
I always write the American, so you can always write in the Australian. Or whenever. IDK. You can write whatever you want.
So, if SJWs always lie;
and the Doctor always lies;
and I am an SJW;
therefore,
https://youtu.be/K7VmOZ4Ppj8
QE fuckin’ D *sonic screwdriver flip*
Isn’t it convenient that VD and his ilk just assume anyone against them is “always lying”? It’s almost like that’s a convenient excuse for them not to listen to anything anyone else has to say!
@Falconer: And you’re Epimenides as well, it seems. Quite a life you’ve lived.
@rikalous: It’s easy to live such a life, at least when I can steer my ship.
Well. If THAT’s not a textbook example of why you should never play chess with a pigeon, I don’t know what is. Because that is some primo pigeon-knocking-over-the-chesspieces-and-shitting-on-the-board-before-strutting-away stuff, right there.
Ok, none of those are actually high culture and I’m genuinely shocked he didn’t mention universities since we know the left ruined American higher education ages ago. Also, Beale is clearly not done wooing the Gamergate crowd because that’s the only way to explain why video games makes a very short list of key social institutions.
Did Milos GG book actually happen? He’d better hurry up, his potential reading pool is shrinking and very soon will only contain the hardcore malcontents who make endless streams of anti-Sarkeesian Youtube videos.
How cute, he’s trying to create a catchphrase that captures the cartoon villainy of the imaginary SJWs. I was he’s pliable fans would be pushing this but a google search suggests it’s not going any farther than his book title.
https://youtu.be/Pubd-spHN-0
The Ralph Retort did humor him and listed all of “The Three Rules of SJW Behaviour (Vox’s Laws)”.
This are so childish, even for Beale. Do these useless blanket statements somehow make him feel superior? I guess they might, Beale strikes me as the epitome of the Very Smart debater, who seemingly never recognizes that they’re pretty bad at making useful and compelling arguments.
Wowzo, I failed spectacularly at grammar in my last post.
*I was sure his pliable fans would be pushing this nonstop but a google search suggests it’s not going any farther than his book title.
When you spell “wowsa” wrong it’s clearly time to stop posting and go to bed.
How the Pups managed to pack this year’s Hugo ballot
Under the current rules, any paid-up member of Worldcon can nominate anything they please, and what goes on the ballot for Category X is whichever five items got the greatest number of nominations, modulo some caveats about ties, eligibility, yada yada. It’s pure ‘first past the post’, really.
As long as all the nominators are picking things they love, it works great… and nominations are pretty diffuse. But one consequence of ‘first past the post’ balloting is that a small number of disciplined nominators—a slate—can easily grant a higher number of nominations to slated items, than the whole pool of diffuse nominators. If you’ve got, say, 5,000 people whose nominations are semi-randomly distributed across 5,000 different works, it’s not at all unreasonable that a cabal of, say, 200 slate nominators
[gaah! why did my laptop cut me off in mid-comment!?]
Ahem.
If you’ve got 5,000 people who, collectively, nominate a grand total of 5,000 different works, it could well be that none of those 5,000 works gets more than maybe 100-200 total nominations. Well, what happens if a group of 250 people get together, and agree that every member of the group must nominate exactly the same works? Answer: That group of 250 people will end up with all the nominations.
In short, slates are a fairly obvious problem for this ‘first past the post’ protocol for nominations. Fortunately, SF fandom-at-large has always been very opposed to slates; until recently, it was clear that any slate-maker would forevermore be regarded as That Asshole—and nobody wanted to be That Asshole.
Enter: Larry Correia, Brad Torgersen, and Theodore Beale. As it happens, all three of these men were, and are, okay with being That Asshole.
And that’s how the Pups did it: They exploited a known flaw in the Hugo Awards nomination protocols.
When I see someone on the Christian right ranting about “more than 150 years”, I think of the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. I don’t think of Darwin as much of an SJW, but who knows? The modern right often seems to smoosh their enemies into one big ball of bad.
brooked:
That was just the smoke from the wildfires, from which we still don’t have any relief. (hack, wheeze, whine) Given conditions on the Friday of Worldcon, where visibility was down to about a block, I can understand how someone could get confused.
They exploited a known flaw in the Hugo Awards nomination protocols.
Well, that’s a value judgment.
I’m personally an aspiring SF writer (not far beyond fanfiction, truth be told) and the thing I’m currently working on has all the hallmarks of what the reactionary right-wing fandom would love: Imperialism, vague religion and faux-intellectual reasoning for the superiority of man, militarism, hard science, and an overriding space opera.
Except the two main characters are male homosexuals and I (subtly) present it as a horrible place to live.
I would love to see their reaction to that.
The amusing thing is the No Award proved the invalidity of the Canes depubes thesis.
1: The ballots were controlled by a cabal.
2: The Cabal limited the choice for the actual awards.
3: If the works “Fans really like” were placed on the ballot they would win.
So they got together and brigaded the balloting (arguing it was the only way to put works the fans “really” live in front of them because the cabal [or maybe just the Grand High Poobah, Patrick Nielsen, who did all himself; for the past couple of decades] was “already doing it”) and presented the fans with “good works of the sort they want”.
And the fans talked about it, and argued about it, and the consensus was, by and large, that slates are bad, no matter who puts them up. The idea was so anathema to so many fans that more than have ever taken part in the Hugo voting took part.
And the WSFS business meeting (where the rules of the Hugos, nominating, balloting, awarding, etc, are determined) had to be expanded to hash out ways to address the concerns of the community.
The community is not unanimous in its take on what the best solution is, but No Award to slates (and active non-participation by lots of authors/artists/fanwriters) seems to be solid enough that slating will be a death knell until the proposed patches can be ratified into effect.
So their may be one more year of Canes depubes slating leading to No Awarding a lot of things, but I don’t think it will be more than that.
(hi Cubist: I am also on Making Light)
Did you see this tweet: https://twitter.com/voxday/status/637727921566838784? I can’t believe that a published author is so staggeringly ignorant. Like, that’s not how anti-depressants work.