Articles with the Tag Vox Day

Having a successful boycott is not the point

Fandom, science fiction
Published on 3 Comments on Having a successful boycott is not the point

Irene Gallo calls the Puppies what they are: nazis

As I predicted, Tom Doherty’s public dressing down of Irene Gallo for her (correct) comments on the Puppies failed. Having scored one success Day and co have doubled down and unleashed the dreaded boycott threat on Tor. All the usual idiots are of course crowing about Tor tasting Puppy power while everybody else has at turns been slightly depressed about it and somewhat upbeat about the slim chances it has of succeeding. And they’re right that the chance of Tor giving in to ridiculous demands like this are small:

Tor must publicly apologize for writings by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Moshe Feder, Irene Gallo, and John Scalzi that “demonize, denigrate, slander and lie about the ‘Puppies’ campaigns”

That’s not going to happen, nor is Tor going to fire anybody about this: there aren’t enough Pups to provide a proper boycott. At best they can hope for a similar “success” as the Southern Baptist boycott of Disney for being too gay friendly. At worst, they shoot themselves in the foot because Tor also publishes John C. Wright. But focusing on whether or not the boycott can succeed is missing the point. The point of the boycott is the boycott.

As I said before, Day is following the Tea Party/Breitbart Culture Wars playbook. Gin up outrage, energise your base, focus their attention on the designated enemy, then fleece the suckers. Vox knows how the game is played because he’d been working for Worldnet Daily one of the low rent rightwing clearing houses his daddy had set up until he became too loony even for them. What are the odds on the next instructions of Day, as “leader of the Rabid Puppies”, will next issue instructions that the only proper way to boycott Tor is to instead buy books by goodthink publishers like Baen or his own vanity press?

The key is not to win, the key is to keep the fight going and make some money doing so. That’s been the career path for whole generations of roghtwing bloviators: fart out articles and blogposts and books about the evil of libruls and blag your way onto wingnut welfare. But to do so you need that red meat to keep the suckers in line. Without the month late fauxrage at Gallo’s comments the Puppies wouldn’t have anything to talk about. But this? This they can spin out until long after this year’s Hugo results are revealed.

It’s hard to deal with this. Just ignoring it is one option, not giving the oxygen of publicity to these people, but can obviously backfire. You can’t deal with this thinking these are normal fans, and that just ignoring it will starve this “controversy” of the fuel it needs. People like Day (and Larry and Brad) are perfectly capable of keeping the fire stoked indefinitely. Not responding just cedes ground and helps them keep up the pretence that they’re speaking for some imagined silent majority.

Rather, their more noxious opinions and writings should be exposed to sunlight, because the natural response of normal people not obsessed with partisan politics like the Puppies is to run the hell away from the circus. That’s also why somebody like Hoyt is so angry at Mike Glyer for accurately quoting her on File 770. Somewhere she’s aware of how she sounds outside her little echochamber. And that’s why Natalie Luhr’s showcasing of Michael Z. Williamson greatest hits is important. It removes the pretence that these are just fans rather than collossal assholes.

Two faced Tor

Fandom, Fantastika, wingnuts
Published on 7 Comments on Two faced Tor

Irene Gallo calls the Puppies what they are: nazis

As you know Bob, I’ve been saying for a long time that the whole Sad/Rabid Puppies operation is just another extention of the American rightwing’s Culture Wars, the blueprint established in the cockpit of partisan politics imported into the arts and now science fiction fandom. This was again confirmed for me over the weekend, as Vox Day and his fellow fascists ginned up controversy over a month old Facebook comment by Irene Gallo, a Tor Books employee, in which she called them rightwingers and neonazis. That’s a move straight out of the Breitbart playbook, where being accused of racism is always a much greater offence than actually being racist and you lie and manipulate your enemies into doing your dirty work for you.

It was clear to anybody who paid attention that the outrage over this comment was wholly artificial, purely done to score political points and energise the Puppies, who had started flagging in enthusiasm after months of not much happening. It was also clear that Vox Day and co were hoping to get Tor to do what Andrew Breitbart made his career with: get them to overreact to this controversy and use that as a way to exact consessions.

The Breitbart method is to identify a weak leftwing target, preferably somebody relatively powerless but able to be spun as “the left”, preferably somebody or some organisation the mainstream left had little feeling for anyway. Then you either got them to do something stupid or you just make shit up, getting the network of rightwing blogs, newspapers and other media to amplify your outrage and trust in the mainstream media and establishment left to overreact. That’s what Breitbart and his organisation did to the voter registration organisation ACORN, and then again to Shirley Sherrod, with the Obama government as patsy doing the actual dirty work of defunding the one and firing the other.

And while Vox Day wants to be sci-fi’s bargain basement’s Breitbart, Tor Books sure seems willing to be his patsy publically scolding Irene Gallo for her comments through an open letter from Tom Doherty:

Last month, Irene Gallo, a member of Tor’s staff, posted comments about two groups of science fiction writers, Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies, and about the quality of some of the 2015 Hugo Award nominees, on her personal Facebook page. Ms. Gallo is identified on her page as working for Tor. She did not make it clear that her comments were hers alone. They do not reflect Tor’s views or mine. She has since clarified that her personal views are just that and apologized to anyone her comments may have hurt or offended…..

Tor employees, including Ms. Gallo, have been reminded that they are required to clarify when they are speaking for Tor and when they are speaking for themselves. We apologize for any confusion Ms. Gallo’s comments may have caused. Let me reiterate: the views expressed by Ms. Gallo are not those of Tor as an organization and are not my own views. Rest assured, Tor remains committed to bringing readers the finest in science fiction – on a broad range of topics, from a broad range of authors.

It’s incredibly gutless for any organisation to throw their employee under the bus like this, especially so when it is for justifiably calling the Puppies on their politics — if it hurts being called a neo-nazi, don’t be one nor hang out with them. But even worse is that this is the same publisher who has kept Jim Frenkel employed for decades, despite that it should’ve know he was a serial harasser. No apology for that has as far as I can see, only a curt Patrick Nielsen Hayden tweet when he was let go:

So why did Tor cave under Puppy pressure? Because they’re a commercial organisation and those hate controversy. It’s cheaper to throw out some half assed apology and scolding than to defend Gallo. And Vox Day knows this. Some Puppies may believe the propaganda about Tor being the home of social justice in science fiction and being their sworn enemy, but he knows full well that’s nonsense, that like any other company Tor only cares about the bottom line and will respond to anything that might threaten it.

Of course the sad truth is that rightwing threats are almost always more powerful than leftwing ones, because the rightwing in America does have that well honed propaganda machine behind it. No matter how much people hate that Tor publishes homophobes like John C. Wright or Orson Scott Card — somebody who actually activily campaigned for lgbt people to have their rights taken away — that doesn’t stop us from buying their other authors; there were no organised boycotts or other political actions brought against Tor for it. Annoying the left doesn’t cost anything; tell the truth about the right and you can get into trouble.

And what’s even sadder is that this only encourages groups like the Puppies. They don’t appreciate Tom Doherty’s apology, as is crystal clear from the File 770 roundup but instead see that as a weakness, a lever to extract further concessions with. It has now become established fact that Gallo was wrong in posting what she did, that she libeled and slandered the Puppies and damn the truth. This is now yet another cudgel to beat up their enemies with, Gallo’s “crime” being applied to everybody, with the rest of us having to waste time either defending her or throwing her under the bus ourselves.

We shouldn’t play that game. Gallo wasn’t wrong to say what she did, the Puppies are reactionary, sexist, racist and have in Vox Day somebody who is a fascist and neo-nazi. We shouldn’t let them steamroll us into letting go of that truth, but we should learn that organisations like Tor are not on our side. Don’t put your trust into them.

Science fiction gets the reputation it deserves

science fiction
Published on

With representatives like Vox Day:

But the greatest evil of women’s rights is demographic. Europe’s demise is all but assured, thanks to them, as women’s individual choices taken in the collective have stricken European society and brought on successive waves of feminist-friendly Islamic immigration by reducing Europe’s birth rates far below replacement levels. And women’s-rights advocates are now finding themselves in an ironic intellectual bind, as the onset of sex selection technology has them arguing that while a woman has a right to choose abortion, she can only do so for approved reasons.

Leo Frankowski:

I’d been getting less and less happy with America. I mean, I love my country, volunteered to join the service, paid taxes and all of that. But this Political Correctness thing was really getting me down. I was in my late fifties, a company president, a writer with lots of books under me, the holder of seven US patents, and a bachelor. Now, if I couldn’t speak my mind in public, just who in the hell could? The Feminists bothered me, too. It seemed to me that they were trying to be both men and women at the same time and failing badly at both. And there were a dozen other social changes going on that I didn’t like. I suppose that some of it was the way I was getting old, but I was sure that all of it wasn’t. I’ve often looked at the kids goofing off and thought “Amateurs! Hell, I’ve done dumber things than that!”. So there I sat, thirty miles from where I was born, old, fat, and lonely. Getting old just sort of snuck up on me. The fat was because I just didn’t much care about anything any more. Lonely happened because my family was gone, my friends were scattered across the country, and I couldn’t find a woman who wanted anything to do with me. And the more that I looked at the women of America, the less I wanted to do anything with them. I wanted a woman like my grandmother was. Intelligent, tough, and self reliant. Warm, loving, and absolutely straight. Compassionate with all that lived, caring and supportive, but don’t you DARE cross her! There don’t seem to be any of those any more in America.

And John Ringo:

“Well,” he said, grinning, “if you ever see me again, for the first time, be overwhelmed by a wave of lust and need to give me a blowjob right then and there, even if it’s in public. Okay?”
“Sure,” Ashley said, shaking her head. “Men. Maybe not in public, but we’ll talk, okay? This has . . .”
“Don’t let this put you off of men, God damnit,” Mike said, firmly. “I didn’t risk my fucking life to have you go lesbo. All men aren’t these filth. And if you decide they are, you’re spitting on what I did. Because the good guys want to get laid, too. Understand?”
“Understand,” Ashley said, nervously. “Christ, you sound like my dad.”
“Oh, that’s really what I needed to hear!” Mike said, spinning away.

Dialogue from one of Ringo’s latest novels, not the one in which revitalised Waffen SS soldiers save Germany from an alien invasion.

It makes you ashamed to like science fiction, reading these assholes. Especially the latter makes me sick.