wingnuts – Page 2 – Wis[s]e Words

Asking SF readers to try something new is asking for trouble

Published on February 26, 20151 Comment

K. Tempest Bradford has a modest proposal for (science fiction) readers ot broaden our reading horizons:

The “Reading Only X Writers For A Year” a challenge is one every person who loves to read (and who loves to write) should take. You could, like Lilit Marcus, read only books by women or, like Sunili Govinnage, read only books by people of color. Or you could choose a different axis to focus on: books by trans men and women, books by people from outside the U.S. or in translation, books by people with disabilities.

Science fiction readers responded to this with the openmindedness and willingness to explore new things for which they’re kno-oh gods who am I kidding:

Recently I wrote a thing which brought all the trolls to the yard. I’m used to it, but I wondered what it would look like if I just started saving the hateful tweets people send me in one place. Hateful being attacks on me personally, name calling, threats, etc.

The repeated chorus of how racist or sexist it is to not read white male authors is followed by racist, sexist slurs is …precious. Horrifying but unsurprising to see the slurs, but do these people actualy understand “racist” and “sexist” have an actual meaning?

Sady Puppy wrangler Larry Correia contributed his own very special brand of stupid (from File 770):

But the ironic thing about that picture? Tempest is wearing a Dr. Who shirt. A TV show about a white man and his white female sidekick, created by some white men, with episodes written by… Neil Gaiman.

Never mind that the good Doctor has also had a black British sidekick, or regularly has had adventures with a lesbian lizard woman from the dawn of time and her companion, the idea that reading only writers of colour or only women for a year meaning that you swear off all white men is just so incredibly dumb that you hope Larry doesn’t believe it himself, but you fear he does.

Professional kulturkampfers like Correira of course have to oppose anything that smacks of enlightment, but is it really too much to ask from grownups to stop being so incredibly defensive and be open to new reading experiences?

WTF, have you even seen it?

Published on February 20, 20154 Comments

One William Lehman wrote something stupid about Star Trek:

Say what you will about the SJW Glittery hoo ha crowd, they get this. I speculate that they get it because while we (the guys that grew up watching STOG and said “Hey those doors are COOL, how would you do that for real? Those communicators, could you do that?) went to engineering and hard science classes and started building the future that we wanted, the aforementioned individuals where going to the soft sciences (not real sciences at all in my NSHO) and studied how cultures work.

David Gerrold who, as you know Bob, was actually there at the time as one of the scriptwriters, slapped him down quickly:

I was there. I know what Gene Roddenberry envisioned. He went on at length about it in almost every meeting. He wasn’t about technology, he was about envisioning a world that works for everyone, with no one and nothing left out. Gene Roddenberry was one of the great Social Justice Warriors. You don’t get to claim him or his show as a shield of virtue for a cause he would have disdained.

Most of the stories we wrote were about social justice. “The Cloud Minders,” “A Taste Of Armageddon,” “Errand Of Mercy,” “The Apple,” “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” and so many more. We did stories that were about exploring the universe not just because we could build starships, but because we wanted to know who was out there, what was our place in the universe, and what could we learn from the other races out there?

A very Annie Hall moment:

Of course for those of us who paid attention to sf fandom during that time and long after, the idea of Star Trek of all things hold up as an example of hard science fiction ruined by the social justice warriors, is hilarious. Quite a few fans, the sort of people now screaming about SWJ’s, had no time for the series whatsoever while its fandom was literally run by their greatest enemy: women.

It’s all part of an inept kulturkampf of course, run by people with the barest connection to science fiction fandom as a sort of out of control offshoot of Republican fundraising. The worst part about it is that useful idiots like Lehman actually believe the nonsense they spout.

GamerGate will get somebody killed someday soon

Published on February 2, 20153 Comments

This is horrifying:

Game developer Brianna Wu has been stalked, tormented, and harassed by GamerGate—the amorphous reactionary movement centered around video game journalism—for months now. But it’s never been as frightening as it was this weekend—when she watched a terrifying video made by a deranged fanatic who claims he crashed his car on the way to her home. “I’m worried my husband and I are going to die,” she tells me.

On the one hand it’s tempting to laugh at a wanker like “Jace Connors”, who embody all the stereotypes of the Internet Hard Man, up to and including saying was in the navy SEALS but still has to drive his mom’s car, but it becomes less funny if you’re the intended victim of this wackadoodle. A bit like ISIS has done in the Middle East, GamerGate is providing angry losers with an “ideal” to harass, threaten and possibly kill for, a direction for their rage. Most of it is sound and fury signifying nothing, but there only needs to be one loon who’s slightly better organised than “Connors” to create a tragedy.

And judging from this incident, it is not an idle worry. These people are tapping out of the same reservoir of rightwing anger that e.g. anti-abortion activists are drawing from. There are a lot of angry, confused young men who’ve latched on to GamerGate or similar causes in other parts of nerddom *cough* Sad Puppies *cough*, who are clearly comfortable with harassing women on Twitter in the worst possible ways and who are only one step away from continuing that harassment offline.

#MetalGate: you’re joking, right?

Published on December 16, 20141 Comment

I saw some brief references to #MetalGate on Twitter before the weekend and assumed it was GamersGate loons trying to stir shit. I was right:

Similar to how “#Gamergate” was coined by Adam Baldwin while linking to videos about Zoe Quinn’s sex life, then famously retconned to actually be about ethics in journalism, the origins of #Metalgate seem to be unimportant. #Gamergate has established a template. Throw a hash in front of a word and a “-gate” behind it, and you send out a veritable Bat-Signal to thousands of angry people on the internet: “Social Justice Warriors are doing… something. We may not be clear on what they’re actually saying or doing, but they must be stopped.”

Proof once more, if any was needed, that GamersGate is just another rightwing kulturclash project, just another attempt by “South Park Republicans” and professional culture warriors to seem even vaguely relevant and use the fears and prejudices of unthinking white men to get some sort of rightwing cultural backlash going, gain some foothold in youth culture. Yes, it’s all sound and fury and rape threats that accomplishes nothing except the harassment of more women but hey, it beats working for a living.

So much for the inevitable truth of the market

Published on September 19, 20141 Comment

Vox Day has been talking smack about John Scalzi and his sales again, you know the schtick: “nobody really likes him the real proof of a good writer is how well he sells all a conspiracy he’s on the bestseller list people like Larry Correira sell much better blah blah blah”. Funny thing that, according to John Walker in a comment at File 770:

Well, according to Bookscan Larry’s sales are in freefall. His first mm pb book sold some 51,000 copies, but that was back in 2009, which was an entire different publishing world, then. His latest book in mass market? 3500 copies, at best. He seems to be trading on past success,but honestly most of his books (and his compatriots) are selling poorly. Hoyt’s latest? 200 copies. Freer’s? 600 copies. If anything a lot of this is just knee-jerking on their part, and suggestive that perhaps they should figure out why their sales are plummeting, instead of picking on others for their misfortunes.

Whoops.

Worse, as Nick Mamatas shows in comments at James Nicoll’s, Sarah Hoyt isn’t doing well either, downright awful in fact:

231 copies for a book released in July by a mainstream publisher, by an author with a number of series and award nominations, and whose blog posts receive 100s of comments, is a big problem. But it doesn’t appear to be far from wrong, given the other available information.

The only possible conclusion you can draw from this is that all the rightwingers who like to hang around at Day’s, at Hoyt’s, like to talk a lot and give it all that with their circlejerks about how nobody likes all those politically correct gamma authors and it’s only the effeminate critics at whatever the latest target of their ire is who pretend they are popular, seem damn reluctant to acually, you know, buy the books of the authors that they supposedly support.

Rightwingers are moochers. They only wage culture war if it’s free or if they can get wingnut welfare for it, but actually spending money? Never.