hold the phone
how, exactly, is this guy going to determine whether a gay fictional person is legitimately gay
like, what
this is the part I will confess to literally always being baffled by, is that the only time the regressives are offended by the presence of Others is... anytime you're able to actually detect their presence.
"If he was really gay, he'd be completely invisible to me!"
yeah, I don't know what thread you are reading, tin, but this thread has been pretty much:
*critiquing the methodology behind the perfectly legitimate maneuver, and what that means for the rules of the Hugo Awards
I wouldn't call it perfectly legitimate. It's gaming the system. They are voting to make a political point, not for the books they think are the best which is the whole point of the award. It's a violation of the spirit and intention of the rules. It's the filibuster of award voting.
I don't think that's accurate.
Part of the point that people like that make is that they think SJWs are actually ruining stories by injecting their values.
As an example, I was talking with someone angry about the inclusion of gay characters in BioWare games. He believed that they were included to check a social justice box. Rather than making an honest and natural romance, BioWare thought "Oh no, we don't want to risk offending liberals! We better take this character we had planned on being straight, and make him gay instead." He also claimed he has nothing against homosexuality, and would be fine with the inclusion of a gay character who was actually meant to be gay.
I find that whole point of view silly. I'm sure most people here would. But they do truly believe that stories with traditional values are better than stories that have been (in their minds) influenced by the SJW agenda.
Yes, that's what proves my point. They are voting for books to stick it to the SJWs and/or to make Beale money (though the second mostly unwittingly).
But "voting for books to stick it to the SJWs" is not the same as voting against "the books they think are the best." They think the two categories, left wing scifi and good scifi, are mutually exclusive, and that the Hugos have previously been dominated by left-wing (and therefore bad) scifi.
I mean, your entire previous post about gaming the system to make a political point is exactly what the Puppies say about liberals all the time!
I don't even know wtf you are talking about anymore. Your post does not make any sense.
The Puppies think that those damn SJWs have been gaming the system for years (obviously wrong).
They created a slate this year to stick it to the SJWs.
By doing this, they are not voting for what they think is best, they are voting for the works that will send the message they want.
Because they are doing this, they are violating the spirit of the awards and the voting process for those awards.
Let's say that every scifi work can be divided into one of two categories: good scifi and bad scifi. The "spirit of the awards", as you put it, is to vote for the best of the good scifi. If you are voting for bad scifi, then you are violating the spirit of the awards, irrespective of the reason for your vote.
Now, let's also say that every scifi work can be divided into one of another set of categories: SJW or not. The Puppies believe that "SJW scifi" is a subset of "bad scifi." That is, if a work is influenced by SJW ideas, then it destroys the story and it is bad. They don't believe a SJW scifi can possibly be good. See the story I told above. The guy believed that because BioWare "made a character gay", they were destroying his characterization. In his view, a SJW idea (trying to shoehorn a gay character into every work) made Dragon Age or whatever into a bad video game.
With me so far?
They believe that the Hugos have been politically manipulated in the past. SJWs ensured that only SJW works had a shot at winning. In the view of the Puppies, SJWs were intentionally voting in bad scifi, even though it violated the "spirit of the awards", because they wanted to make a political point. That's the exact same accusation you're making.
They wanted to counter that. They wanted to ensure that only good scifi won. From their perspective, that necessitates voting in non-SJW works (because, remember, they believe no SJW work can possibly be good). Of course, their view of what makes up SJW scifi is so broad that they're left primarily (not totally) with openly conservative works by openly conservative authors. But they're still voting in what they see as good works. They honestly like John C Wright. They honestly like Kratman.
From their point of view, voting in good works, satisfying the spirit of the awards, and "sticking it to the SJWs" are all the same thing.
hold the phone
how, exactly, is this guy going to determine whether a gay fictional person is legitimately gay
like, what
this is the part I will confess to literally always being baffled by, is that the only time the regressives are offended by the presence of Others is... anytime you're able to actually detect their presence.
"If he was really gay, he'd be completely invisible to me!"
Yeah, it's a completely alien viewpoint to me. Like, of course he's gay only because they made him gay.
He's a fictional character! Any trait he has is only because they gave him that trait!
And it's such a small aspect of the game that it really doesn't hinder the story. They're making the game more inclusive at precisely no cost.
yeah, I don't know what thread you are reading, tin, but this thread has been pretty much:
*critiquing the methodology behind the perfectly legitimate maneuver, and what that means for the rules of the Hugo Awards
I wouldn't call it perfectly legitimate. It's gaming the system. They are voting to make a political point, not for the books they think are the best which is the whole point of the award. It's a violation of the spirit and intention of the rules. It's the filibuster of award voting.
I don't think that's accurate.
Part of the point that people like that make is that they think SJWs are actually ruining stories by injecting their values.
As an example, I was talking with someone angry about the inclusion of gay characters in BioWare games. He believed that they were included to check a social justice box. Rather than making an honest and natural romance, BioWare thought "Oh no, we don't want to risk offending liberals! We better take this character we had planned on being straight, and make him gay instead." He also claimed he has nothing against homosexuality, and would be fine with the inclusion of a gay character who was actually meant to be gay.
I find that whole point of view silly. I'm sure most people here would. But they do truly believe that stories with traditional values are better than stories that have been (in their minds) influenced by the SJW agenda.
Yes, that's what proves my point. They are voting for books to stick it to the SJWs and/or to make Beale money (though the second mostly unwittingly).
But "voting for books to stick it to the SJWs" is not the same as voting against "the books they think are the best." They think the two categories, left wing scifi and good scifi, are mutually exclusive, and that the Hugos have previously been dominated by left-wing (and therefore bad) scifi.
I mean, your entire previous post about gaming the system to make a political point is exactly what the Puppies say about liberals all the time!
I don't even know wtf you are talking about anymore. Your post does not make any sense.
The Puppies think that those damn SJWs have been gaming the system for years (obviously wrong).
They created a slate this year to stick it to the SJWs.
By doing this, they are not voting for what they think is best, they are voting for the works that will send the message they want.
Because they are doing this, they are violating the spirit of the awards and the voting process for those awards.
Let's say that every scifi work can be divided into one of two categories: good scifi and bad scifi. The "spirit of the awards", as you put it, is to vote for the best of the good scifi. If you are voting for bad scifi, then you are violating the spirit of the awards, irrespective of the reason for your vote.
Now, let's also say that every scifi work can be divided into one of another set of categories: SJW or not. The Puppies believe that "SJW scifi" is a subset of "bad scifi." That is, if a work is influenced by SJW ideas, then it destroys the story and it is bad. They don't believe a SJW scifi can possibly be good. See the story I told above. The guy believed that because BioWare "made a character gay", they were destroying his characterization. In his view, a SJW idea (trying to shoehorn a gay character into every work) made Dragon Age or whatever into a bad video game.
With me so far?
They believe that the Hugos have been politically manipulated in the past. SJWs ensured that only SJW works had a shot at winning. In the view of the Puppies, SJWs were intentionally voting in bad scifi, even though it violated the "spirit of the awards", because they wanted to make a political point. That's the exact same accusation you're making.
They wanted to counter that. They wanted to ensure that only good scifi won. From their perspective, that necessitates voting in non-SJW works (because, remember, they believe no SJW work can possibly be good). Of course, their view of what makes up SJW scifi is so broad that they're left primarily (not totally) with openly conservative works by openly conservative authors. But they're still voting in what they see as good works. They honestly like John C Wright. They honestly like Kratman.
From their point of view, voting in good works, satisfying the spirit of the awards, and "sticking it to the SJWs" are all the same thing.
No. The point fo the award is to vote for what you think was the best sci-fi or fantasy or whatever novel/novella/short-story/editor/artist/etc of that year. This idea of "good sci-fi" and "bad sci-fi" is coming outta nowhere and makes no sense. There's no two groups here. There is simply sci, a continuum, and you vote for the one you think is best.
Rather then voting for the work they think is best though, they are voting a slate, a specifically predetermined list, in order to make a political point. They are voting for these works because they are on the slate, not because each members thinks they are the best X of 2014. You can tell this cause it is a slate.
If this was about voting for what they thought was best, there would be no slate. All you'd need to do was encourage more voters and it would simply happen. The very fact that there was a slate proves that this is not about what they think is best, it's about sending a political message. The very fact that the slate worked as it did, of course, shows that their grievances are nonsense.
yeah, I don't know what thread you are reading, tin, but this thread has been pretty much:
*critiquing the methodology behind the perfectly legitimate maneuver, and what that means for the rules of the Hugo Awards
I wouldn't call it perfectly legitimate. It's gaming the system. They are voting to make a political point, not for the books they think are the best which is the whole point of the award. It's a violation of the spirit and intention of the rules. It's the filibuster of award voting.
I don't think that's accurate.
Part of the point that people like that make is that they think SJWs are actually ruining stories by injecting their values.
As an example, I was talking with someone angry about the inclusion of gay characters in BioWare games. He believed that they were included to check a social justice box. Rather than making an honest and natural romance, BioWare thought "Oh no, we don't want to risk offending liberals! We better take this character we had planned on being straight, and make him gay instead." He also claimed he has nothing against homosexuality, and would be fine with the inclusion of a gay character who was actually meant to be gay.
I find that whole point of view silly. I'm sure most people here would. But they do truly believe that stories with traditional values are better than stories that have been (in their minds) influenced by the SJW agenda.
Yes, that's what proves my point. They are voting for books to stick it to the SJWs and/or to make Beale money (though the second mostly unwittingly).
But "voting for books to stick it to the SJWs" is not the same as voting against "the books they think are the best." They think the two categories, left wing scifi and good scifi, are mutually exclusive, and that the Hugos have previously been dominated by left-wing (and therefore bad) scifi.
I mean, your entire previous post about gaming the system to make a political point is exactly what the Puppies say about liberals all the time!
I don't even know wtf you are talking about anymore. Your post does not make any sense.
The Puppies think that those damn SJWs have been gaming the system for years (obviously wrong).
They created a slate this year to stick it to the SJWs.
By doing this, they are not voting for what they think is best, they are voting for the works that will send the message they want.
Because they are doing this, they are violating the spirit of the awards and the voting process for those awards.
Let's say that every scifi work can be divided into one of two categories: good scifi and bad scifi. The "spirit of the awards", as you put it, is to vote for the best of the good scifi. If you are voting for bad scifi, then you are violating the spirit of the awards, irrespective of the reason for your vote.
Now, let's also say that every scifi work can be divided into one of another set of categories: SJW or not. The Puppies believe that "SJW scifi" is a subset of "bad scifi." That is, if a work is influenced by SJW ideas, then it destroys the story and it is bad. They don't believe a SJW scifi can possibly be good. See the story I told above. The guy believed that because BioWare "made a character gay", they were destroying his characterization. In his view, a SJW idea (trying to shoehorn a gay character into every work) made Dragon Age or whatever into a bad video game.
With me so far?
They believe that the Hugos have been politically manipulated in the past. SJWs ensured that only SJW works had a shot at winning. In the view of the Puppies, SJWs were intentionally voting in bad scifi, even though it violated the "spirit of the awards", because they wanted to make a political point. That's the exact same accusation you're making.
They wanted to counter that. They wanted to ensure that only good scifi won. From their perspective, that necessitates voting in non-SJW works (because, remember, they believe no SJW work can possibly be good). Of course, their view of what makes up SJW scifi is so broad that they're left primarily (not totally) with openly conservative works by openly conservative authors. But they're still voting in what they see as good works. They honestly like John C Wright. They honestly like Kratman.
From their point of view, voting in good works, satisfying the spirit of the awards, and "sticking it to the SJWs" are all the same thing.
No. The point fo the award is to vote for what you think was the best sci-fi or fantasy or whatever novel/novella/short-story/editor/artist/etc of that year. This idea of "good sci-fi" and "bad sci-fi" is coming outta nowhere and makes no sense. There's no two groups here. There is simply sci, a continuum, and you vote for the one you think is best.
Rather then voting for the work they think is best though, they are voting a slate, a specifically predetermined list, in order to make a political point. They are voting for these works because they are on the slate, not because each members thinks they are the best X of 2014. You can tell this cause it is a slate.
If this was about voting for what they thought was best, there would be no slate. All you'd need to do was encourage more voters and it would simply happen. The very fact that there was a slate proves that this is not about what they think is best, it's about sending a political message. The very fact that the slate worked as it did, of course, shows that their grievances are nonsense.
You guys are talking past each other. @shryke accurately describes reality, and @Solomaxwell6 describes the puppies motivation. Two things that are quite independent from each other.
Puppies are voting to make a political statement, but they are doing so because they have been told that SJW did it first.
yeah, I don't know what thread you are reading, tin, but this thread has been pretty much:
*critiquing the methodology behind the perfectly legitimate maneuver, and what that means for the rules of the Hugo Awards
I wouldn't call it perfectly legitimate. It's gaming the system. They are voting to make a political point, not for the books they think are the best which is the whole point of the award. It's a violation of the spirit and intention of the rules. It's the filibuster of award voting.
I don't think that's accurate.
Part of the point that people like that make is that they think SJWs are actually ruining stories by injecting their values.
As an example, I was talking with someone angry about the inclusion of gay characters in BioWare games. He believed that they were included to check a social justice box. Rather than making an honest and natural romance, BioWare thought "Oh no, we don't want to risk offending liberals! We better take this character we had planned on being straight, and make him gay instead." He also claimed he has nothing against homosexuality, and would be fine with the inclusion of a gay character who was actually meant to be gay.
I find that whole point of view silly. I'm sure most people here would. But they do truly believe that stories with traditional values are better than stories that have been (in their minds) influenced by the SJW agenda.
Yes, that's what proves my point. They are voting for books to stick it to the SJWs and/or to make Beale money (though the second mostly unwittingly).
But "voting for books to stick it to the SJWs" is not the same as voting against "the books they think are the best." They think the two categories, left wing scifi and good scifi, are mutually exclusive, and that the Hugos have previously been dominated by left-wing (and therefore bad) scifi.
I mean, your entire previous post about gaming the system to make a political point is exactly what the Puppies say about liberals all the time!
I don't even know wtf you are talking about anymore. Your post does not make any sense.
The Puppies think that those damn SJWs have been gaming the system for years (obviously wrong).
They created a slate this year to stick it to the SJWs.
By doing this, they are not voting for what they think is best, they are voting for the works that will send the message they want.
Because they are doing this, they are violating the spirit of the awards and the voting process for those awards.
Let's say that every scifi work can be divided into one of two categories: good scifi and bad scifi. The "spirit of the awards", as you put it, is to vote for the best of the good scifi. If you are voting for bad scifi, then you are violating the spirit of the awards, irrespective of the reason for your vote.
Now, let's also say that every scifi work can be divided into one of another set of categories: SJW or not. The Puppies believe that "SJW scifi" is a subset of "bad scifi." That is, if a work is influenced by SJW ideas, then it destroys the story and it is bad. They don't believe a SJW scifi can possibly be good. See the story I told above. The guy believed that because BioWare "made a character gay", they were destroying his characterization. In his view, a SJW idea (trying to shoehorn a gay character into every work) made Dragon Age or whatever into a bad video game.
With me so far?
They believe that the Hugos have been politically manipulated in the past. SJWs ensured that only SJW works had a shot at winning. In the view of the Puppies, SJWs were intentionally voting in bad scifi, even though it violated the "spirit of the awards", because they wanted to make a political point. That's the exact same accusation you're making.
They wanted to counter that. They wanted to ensure that only good scifi won. From their perspective, that necessitates voting in non-SJW works (because, remember, they believe no SJW work can possibly be good). Of course, their view of what makes up SJW scifi is so broad that they're left primarily (not totally) with openly conservative works by openly conservative authors. But they're still voting in what they see as good works. They honestly like John C Wright. They honestly like Kratman.
From their point of view, voting in good works, satisfying the spirit of the awards, and "sticking it to the SJWs" are all the same thing.
No. The point fo the award is to vote for what you think was the best sci-fi or fantasy or whatever novel/novella/short-story/editor/artist/etc of that year. This idea of "good sci-fi" and "bad sci-fi" is coming outta nowhere and makes no sense. There's no two groups here. There is simply sci, a continuum, and you vote for the one you think is best.
Rather then voting for the work they think is best though, they are voting a slate, a specifically predetermined list, in order to make a political point. They are voting for these works because they are on the slate, not because each members thinks they are the best X of 2014. You can tell this cause it is a slate.
If this was about voting for what they thought was best, there would be no slate. All you'd need to do was encourage more voters and it would simply happen. The very fact that there was a slate proves that this is not about what they think is best, it's about sending a political message. The very fact that the slate worked as it did, of course, shows that their grievances are nonsense.
You guys are talking past each other. @shryke accurately describes reality, and @Solomaxwell6 describes the puppies motivation. Two things that are quote independent from each other.
Puppies are voting to make a political statement, but they are doing so because they have been told that SJW did it first.
And since those SJWs started inserting wrongthought into their science fiction novels in 1895, they've got a lot of catching up to do.
I missed this blog post by Jason Sandford when it first came out, which is a shame. Because A) it's an excellent write-up on the situation IMO, and it has a comic in it from Chainsawsuit by Kris Straub that made me laugh my ass off.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
yeah, I don't know what thread you are reading, tin, but this thread has been pretty much:
*critiquing the methodology behind the perfectly legitimate maneuver, and what that means for the rules of the Hugo Awards
I wouldn't call it perfectly legitimate. It's gaming the system. They are voting to make a political point, not for the books they think are the best which is the whole point of the award. It's a violation of the spirit and intention of the rules. It's the filibuster of award voting.
I don't think that's accurate.
Part of the point that people like that make is that they think SJWs are actually ruining stories by injecting their values.
As an example, I was talking with someone angry about the inclusion of gay characters in BioWare games. He believed that they were included to check a social justice box. Rather than making an honest and natural romance, BioWare thought "Oh no, we don't want to risk offending liberals! We better take this character we had planned on being straight, and make him gay instead." He also claimed he has nothing against homosexuality, and would be fine with the inclusion of a gay character who was actually meant to be gay.
I find that whole point of view silly. I'm sure most people here would. But they do truly believe that stories with traditional values are better than stories that have been (in their minds) influenced by the SJW agenda.
Yes, that's what proves my point. They are voting for books to stick it to the SJWs and/or to make Beale money (though the second mostly unwittingly).
But "voting for books to stick it to the SJWs" is not the same as voting against "the books they think are the best." They think the two categories, left wing scifi and good scifi, are mutually exclusive, and that the Hugos have previously been dominated by left-wing (and therefore bad) scifi.
I mean, your entire previous post about gaming the system to make a political point is exactly what the Puppies say about liberals all the time!
I don't even know wtf you are talking about anymore. Your post does not make any sense.
The Puppies think that those damn SJWs have been gaming the system for years (obviously wrong).
They created a slate this year to stick it to the SJWs.
By doing this, they are not voting for what they think is best, they are voting for the works that will send the message they want.
Because they are doing this, they are violating the spirit of the awards and the voting process for those awards.
Let's say that every scifi work can be divided into one of two categories: good scifi and bad scifi. The "spirit of the awards", as you put it, is to vote for the best of the good scifi. If you are voting for bad scifi, then you are violating the spirit of the awards, irrespective of the reason for your vote.
Now, let's also say that every scifi work can be divided into one of another set of categories: SJW or not. The Puppies believe that "SJW scifi" is a subset of "bad scifi." That is, if a work is influenced by SJW ideas, then it destroys the story and it is bad. They don't believe a SJW scifi can possibly be good. See the story I told above. The guy believed that because BioWare "made a character gay", they were destroying his characterization. In his view, a SJW idea (trying to shoehorn a gay character into every work) made Dragon Age or whatever into a bad video game.
With me so far?
They believe that the Hugos have been politically manipulated in the past. SJWs ensured that only SJW works had a shot at winning. In the view of the Puppies, SJWs were intentionally voting in bad scifi, even though it violated the "spirit of the awards", because they wanted to make a political point. That's the exact same accusation you're making.
They wanted to counter that. They wanted to ensure that only good scifi won. From their perspective, that necessitates voting in non-SJW works (because, remember, they believe no SJW work can possibly be good). Of course, their view of what makes up SJW scifi is so broad that they're left primarily (not totally) with openly conservative works by openly conservative authors. But they're still voting in what they see as good works. They honestly like John C Wright. They honestly like Kratman.
From their point of view, voting in good works, satisfying the spirit of the awards, and "sticking it to the SJWs" are all the same thing.
No. The point fo the award is to vote for what you think was the best sci-fi or fantasy or whatever novel/novella/short-story/editor/artist/etc of that year. This idea of "good sci-fi" and "bad sci-fi" is coming outta nowhere and makes no sense. There's no two groups here. There is simply sci, a continuum, and you vote for the one you think is best.
Rather then voting for the work they think is best though, they are voting a slate, a specifically predetermined list, in order to make a political point. They are voting for these works because they are on the slate, not because each members thinks they are the best X of 2014. You can tell this cause it is a slate.
If this was about voting for what they thought was best, there would be no slate. All you'd need to do was encourage more voters and it would simply happen. The very fact that there was a slate proves that this is not about what they think is best, it's about sending a political message. The very fact that the slate worked as it did, of course, shows that their grievances are nonsense.
You guys are talking past each other. @shryke accurately describes reality, and @Solomaxwell6 describes the puppies motivation. Two things that are quite independent from each other.
Puppies are voting to make a political statement, but they are doing so because they have been told that SJW did it first.
No, we aren't. Solomaxwell6 is saying they are voting for what they think is best and that's simply not accurate. They know they aren't cause voting for a slate is not that and they know it. It's a slate specifically because it's about sending a message. The very idea of a slate vote is to ignore your own specific opinions in favour of collective action.
More simply, I think it's ridiculous to pretend these guys didn't know what they were doing when they decided to get together and vote on a specific list put forth by a politically-active blowhard.
yeah, I don't know what thread you are reading, tin, but this thread has been pretty much:
*critiquing the methodology behind the perfectly legitimate maneuver, and what that means for the rules of the Hugo Awards
I wouldn't call it perfectly legitimate. It's gaming the system. They are voting to make a political point, not for the books they think are the best which is the whole point of the award. It's a violation of the spirit and intention of the rules. It's the filibuster of award voting.
I don't think that's accurate.
Part of the point that people like that make is that they think SJWs are actually ruining stories by injecting their values.
As an example, I was talking with someone angry about the inclusion of gay characters in BioWare games. He believed that they were included to check a social justice box. Rather than making an honest and natural romance, BioWare thought "Oh no, we don't want to risk offending liberals! We better take this character we had planned on being straight, and make him gay instead." He also claimed he has nothing against homosexuality, and would be fine with the inclusion of a gay character who was actually meant to be gay.
I find that whole point of view silly. I'm sure most people here would. But they do truly believe that stories with traditional values are better than stories that have been (in their minds) influenced by the SJW agenda.
Yes, that's what proves my point. They are voting for books to stick it to the SJWs and/or to make Beale money (though the second mostly unwittingly).
But "voting for books to stick it to the SJWs" is not the same as voting against "the books they think are the best." They think the two categories, left wing scifi and good scifi, are mutually exclusive, and that the Hugos have previously been dominated by left-wing (and therefore bad) scifi.
I mean, your entire previous post about gaming the system to make a political point is exactly what the Puppies say about liberals all the time!
I don't even know wtf you are talking about anymore. Your post does not make any sense.
The Puppies think that those damn SJWs have been gaming the system for years (obviously wrong).
They created a slate this year to stick it to the SJWs.
By doing this, they are not voting for what they think is best, they are voting for the works that will send the message they want.
Because they are doing this, they are violating the spirit of the awards and the voting process for those awards.
Let's say that every scifi work can be divided into one of two categories: good scifi and bad scifi. The "spirit of the awards", as you put it, is to vote for the best of the good scifi. If you are voting for bad scifi, then you are violating the spirit of the awards, irrespective of the reason for your vote.
Now, let's also say that every scifi work can be divided into one of another set of categories: SJW or not. The Puppies believe that "SJW scifi" is a subset of "bad scifi." That is, if a work is influenced by SJW ideas, then it destroys the story and it is bad. They don't believe a SJW scifi can possibly be good. See the story I told above. The guy believed that because BioWare "made a character gay", they were destroying his characterization. In his view, a SJW idea (trying to shoehorn a gay character into every work) made Dragon Age or whatever into a bad video game.
With me so far?
They believe that the Hugos have been politically manipulated in the past. SJWs ensured that only SJW works had a shot at winning. In the view of the Puppies, SJWs were intentionally voting in bad scifi, even though it violated the "spirit of the awards", because they wanted to make a political point. That's the exact same accusation you're making.
They wanted to counter that. They wanted to ensure that only good scifi won. From their perspective, that necessitates voting in non-SJW works (because, remember, they believe no SJW work can possibly be good). Of course, their view of what makes up SJW scifi is so broad that they're left primarily (not totally) with openly conservative works by openly conservative authors. But they're still voting in what they see as good works. They honestly like John C Wright. They honestly like Kratman.
From their point of view, voting in good works, satisfying the spirit of the awards, and "sticking it to the SJWs" are all the same thing.
No. The point fo the award is to vote for what you think was the best sci-fi or fantasy or whatever novel/novella/short-story/editor/artist/etc of that year. This idea of "good sci-fi" and "bad sci-fi" is coming outta nowhere and makes no sense. There's no two groups here. There is simply sci, a continuum, and you vote for the one you think is best.
Rather then voting for the work they think is best though, they are voting a slate, a specifically predetermined list, in order to make a political point. They are voting for these works because they are on the slate, not because each members thinks they are the best X of 2014. You can tell this cause it is a slate.
If this was about voting for what they thought was best, there would be no slate. All you'd need to do was encourage more voters and it would simply happen. The very fact that there was a slate proves that this is not about what they think is best, it's about sending a political message. The very fact that the slate worked as it did, of course, shows that their grievances are nonsense.
You guys are talking past each other. @shryke accurately describes reality, and @Solomaxwell6 describes the puppies motivation. Two things that are quite independent from each other.
Puppies are voting to make a political statement, but they are doing so because they have been told that SJW did it first.
No, we aren't. Solomaxwell6 is saying they are voting for what they think is best and that's simply not accurate. They know they aren't cause voting for a slate is not that and they know it. It's a slate specifically because it's about sending a message. The very idea of a slate vote is to ignore your own specific opinions in favour of collective action.
More simply, I think it's ridiculous to pretend these guys didn't know what they were doing when they decided to get together and vote on a specific list put forth by a politically-active blowhard.
That coincidentally is the publisher for most of the slate.
Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion.
yeah, I don't know what thread you are reading, tin, but this thread has been pretty much:
*critiquing the methodology behind the perfectly legitimate maneuver, and what that means for the rules of the Hugo Awards
I wouldn't call it perfectly legitimate. It's gaming the system. They are voting to make a political point, not for the books they think are the best which is the whole point of the award. It's a violation of the spirit and intention of the rules. It's the filibuster of award voting.
I don't think that's accurate.
Part of the point that people like that make is that they think SJWs are actually ruining stories by injecting their values.
As an example, I was talking with someone angry about the inclusion of gay characters in BioWare games. He believed that they were included to check a social justice box. Rather than making an honest and natural romance, BioWare thought "Oh no, we don't want to risk offending liberals! We better take this character we had planned on being straight, and make him gay instead." He also claimed he has nothing against homosexuality, and would be fine with the inclusion of a gay character who was actually meant to be gay.
I find that whole point of view silly. I'm sure most people here would. But they do truly believe that stories with traditional values are better than stories that have been (in their minds) influenced by the SJW agenda.
Yes, that's what proves my point. They are voting for books to stick it to the SJWs and/or to make Beale money (though the second mostly unwittingly).
But "voting for books to stick it to the SJWs" is not the same as voting against "the books they think are the best." They think the two categories, left wing scifi and good scifi, are mutually exclusive, and that the Hugos have previously been dominated by left-wing (and therefore bad) scifi.
I mean, your entire previous post about gaming the system to make a political point is exactly what the Puppies say about liberals all the time!
I don't even know wtf you are talking about anymore. Your post does not make any sense.
The Puppies think that those damn SJWs have been gaming the system for years (obviously wrong).
They created a slate this year to stick it to the SJWs.
By doing this, they are not voting for what they think is best, they are voting for the works that will send the message they want.
Because they are doing this, they are violating the spirit of the awards and the voting process for those awards.
Let's say that every scifi work can be divided into one of two categories: good scifi and bad scifi. The "spirit of the awards", as you put it, is to vote for the best of the good scifi. If you are voting for bad scifi, then you are violating the spirit of the awards, irrespective of the reason for your vote.
Now, let's also say that every scifi work can be divided into one of another set of categories: SJW or not. The Puppies believe that "SJW scifi" is a subset of "bad scifi." That is, if a work is influenced by SJW ideas, then it destroys the story and it is bad. They don't believe a SJW scifi can possibly be good. See the story I told above. The guy believed that because BioWare "made a character gay", they were destroying his characterization. In his view, a SJW idea (trying to shoehorn a gay character into every work) made Dragon Age or whatever into a bad video game.
With me so far?
They believe that the Hugos have been politically manipulated in the past. SJWs ensured that only SJW works had a shot at winning. In the view of the Puppies, SJWs were intentionally voting in bad scifi, even though it violated the "spirit of the awards", because they wanted to make a political point. That's the exact same accusation you're making.
They wanted to counter that. They wanted to ensure that only good scifi won. From their perspective, that necessitates voting in non-SJW works (because, remember, they believe no SJW work can possibly be good). Of course, their view of what makes up SJW scifi is so broad that they're left primarily (not totally) with openly conservative works by openly conservative authors. But they're still voting in what they see as good works. They honestly like John C Wright. They honestly like Kratman.
From their point of view, voting in good works, satisfying the spirit of the awards, and "sticking it to the SJWs" are all the same thing.
No. The point fo the award is to vote for what you think was the best sci-fi or fantasy or whatever novel/novella/short-story/editor/artist/etc of that year. This idea of "good sci-fi" and "bad sci-fi" is coming outta nowhere and makes no sense. There's no two groups here. There is simply sci, a continuum, and you vote for the one you think is best.
Rather then voting for the work they think is best though, they are voting a slate, a specifically predetermined list, in order to make a political point. They are voting for these works because they are on the slate, not because each members thinks they are the best X of 2014. You can tell this cause it is a slate.
If this was about voting for what they thought was best, there would be no slate. All you'd need to do was encourage more voters and it would simply happen. The very fact that there was a slate proves that this is not about what they think is best, it's about sending a political message. The very fact that the slate worked as it did, of course, shows that their grievances are nonsense.
You guys are talking past each other. @shryke accurately describes reality, and @Solomaxwell6 describes the puppies motivation. Two things that are quote independent from each other.
Puppies are voting to make a political statement, but they are doing so because they have been told that SJW did it first.
And since those SJWs started inserting wrongthought into their science fiction novels in 1895, they've got a lot of catching up to do.
I think it's pretty convenient to ignore the birth of the puppies coinciding with the great "Why you should boycott Enders Game" push. Was that the opening shot in the sci-fi culture wars? Idk who can say with these sorts of things. But it was certainly the largest salvo before or since.
it is the ultimate irony that the Puppies are apparently railing against people voting for works because of author politics and to combat that they nominate their own slate of works ...based on author politics
yeah, I don't know what thread you are reading, tin, but this thread has been pretty much:
*critiquing the methodology behind the perfectly legitimate maneuver, and what that means for the rules of the Hugo Awards
I wouldn't call it perfectly legitimate. It's gaming the system. They are voting to make a political point, not for the books they think are the best which is the whole point of the award. It's a violation of the spirit and intention of the rules. It's the filibuster of award voting.
I don't think that's accurate.
Part of the point that people like that make is that they think SJWs are actually ruining stories by injecting their values.
As an example, I was talking with someone angry about the inclusion of gay characters in BioWare games. He believed that they were included to check a social justice box. Rather than making an honest and natural romance, BioWare thought "Oh no, we don't want to risk offending liberals! We better take this character we had planned on being straight, and make him gay instead." He also claimed he has nothing against homosexuality, and would be fine with the inclusion of a gay character who was actually meant to be gay.
I find that whole point of view silly. I'm sure most people here would. But they do truly believe that stories with traditional values are better than stories that have been (in their minds) influenced by the SJW agenda.
Yes, that's what proves my point. They are voting for books to stick it to the SJWs and/or to make Beale money (though the second mostly unwittingly).
But "voting for books to stick it to the SJWs" is not the same as voting against "the books they think are the best." They think the two categories, left wing scifi and good scifi, are mutually exclusive, and that the Hugos have previously been dominated by left-wing (and therefore bad) scifi.
I mean, your entire previous post about gaming the system to make a political point is exactly what the Puppies say about liberals all the time!
I don't even know wtf you are talking about anymore. Your post does not make any sense.
The Puppies think that those damn SJWs have been gaming the system for years (obviously wrong).
They created a slate this year to stick it to the SJWs.
By doing this, they are not voting for what they think is best, they are voting for the works that will send the message they want.
Because they are doing this, they are violating the spirit of the awards and the voting process for those awards.
Let's say that every scifi work can be divided into one of two categories: good scifi and bad scifi. The "spirit of the awards", as you put it, is to vote for the best of the good scifi. If you are voting for bad scifi, then you are violating the spirit of the awards, irrespective of the reason for your vote.
Now, let's also say that every scifi work can be divided into one of another set of categories: SJW or not. The Puppies believe that "SJW scifi" is a subset of "bad scifi." That is, if a work is influenced by SJW ideas, then it destroys the story and it is bad. They don't believe a SJW scifi can possibly be good. See the story I told above. The guy believed that because BioWare "made a character gay", they were destroying his characterization. In his view, a SJW idea (trying to shoehorn a gay character into every work) made Dragon Age or whatever into a bad video game.
With me so far?
They believe that the Hugos have been politically manipulated in the past. SJWs ensured that only SJW works had a shot at winning. In the view of the Puppies, SJWs were intentionally voting in bad scifi, even though it violated the "spirit of the awards", because they wanted to make a political point. That's the exact same accusation you're making.
They wanted to counter that. They wanted to ensure that only good scifi won. From their perspective, that necessitates voting in non-SJW works (because, remember, they believe no SJW work can possibly be good). Of course, their view of what makes up SJW scifi is so broad that they're left primarily (not totally) with openly conservative works by openly conservative authors. But they're still voting in what they see as good works. They honestly like John C Wright. They honestly like Kratman.
From their point of view, voting in good works, satisfying the spirit of the awards, and "sticking it to the SJWs" are all the same thing.
No. The point fo the award is to vote for what you think was the best sci-fi or fantasy or whatever novel/novella/short-story/editor/artist/etc of that year. This idea of "good sci-fi" and "bad sci-fi" is coming outta nowhere and makes no sense. There's no two groups here. There is simply sci, a continuum, and you vote for the one you think is best.
Rather then voting for the work they think is best though, they are voting a slate, a specifically predetermined list, in order to make a political point. They are voting for these works because they are on the slate, not because each members thinks they are the best X of 2014. You can tell this cause it is a slate.
If this was about voting for what they thought was best, there would be no slate. All you'd need to do was encourage more voters and it would simply happen. The very fact that there was a slate proves that this is not about what they think is best, it's about sending a political message. The very fact that the slate worked as it did, of course, shows that their grievances are nonsense.
You guys are talking past each other. @shryke accurately describes reality, and @Solomaxwell6 describes the puppies motivation. Two things that are quote independent from each other.
Puppies are voting to make a political statement, but they are doing so because they have been told that SJW did it first.
And since those SJWs started inserting wrongthought into their science fiction novels in 1895, they've got a lot of catching up to do.
I think it's pretty convenient to ignore the birth of the puppies coinciding with the great "Why you should boycott Enders Game" push. Was that the opening shot in the sci-fi culture wars? Idk who can say with these sorts of things. But it was certainly the largest salvo before or since.
This has been going on well before that time frame but I am posting from my phone so finding a time line that's more exacting will have to wait
yeah, I don't know what thread you are reading, tin, but this thread has been pretty much:
*critiquing the methodology behind the perfectly legitimate maneuver, and what that means for the rules of the Hugo Awards
I wouldn't call it perfectly legitimate. It's gaming the system. They are voting to make a political point, not for the books they think are the best which is the whole point of the award. It's a violation of the spirit and intention of the rules. It's the filibuster of award voting.
I don't think that's accurate.
Part of the point that people like that make is that they think SJWs are actually ruining stories by injecting their values.
As an example, I was talking with someone angry about the inclusion of gay characters in BioWare games. He believed that they were included to check a social justice box. Rather than making an honest and natural romance, BioWare thought "Oh no, we don't want to risk offending liberals! We better take this character we had planned on being straight, and make him gay instead." He also claimed he has nothing against homosexuality, and would be fine with the inclusion of a gay character who was actually meant to be gay.
I find that whole point of view silly. I'm sure most people here would. But they do truly believe that stories with traditional values are better than stories that have been (in their minds) influenced by the SJW agenda.
Yes, that's what proves my point. They are voting for books to stick it to the SJWs and/or to make Beale money (though the second mostly unwittingly).
But "voting for books to stick it to the SJWs" is not the same as voting against "the books they think are the best." They think the two categories, left wing scifi and good scifi, are mutually exclusive, and that the Hugos have previously been dominated by left-wing (and therefore bad) scifi.
I mean, your entire previous post about gaming the system to make a political point is exactly what the Puppies say about liberals all the time!
I don't even know wtf you are talking about anymore. Your post does not make any sense.
The Puppies think that those damn SJWs have been gaming the system for years (obviously wrong).
They created a slate this year to stick it to the SJWs.
By doing this, they are not voting for what they think is best, they are voting for the works that will send the message they want.
Because they are doing this, they are violating the spirit of the awards and the voting process for those awards.
Let's say that every scifi work can be divided into one of two categories: good scifi and bad scifi. The "spirit of the awards", as you put it, is to vote for the best of the good scifi. If you are voting for bad scifi, then you are violating the spirit of the awards, irrespective of the reason for your vote.
Now, let's also say that every scifi work can be divided into one of another set of categories: SJW or not. The Puppies believe that "SJW scifi" is a subset of "bad scifi." That is, if a work is influenced by SJW ideas, then it destroys the story and it is bad. They don't believe a SJW scifi can possibly be good. See the story I told above. The guy believed that because BioWare "made a character gay", they were destroying his characterization. In his view, a SJW idea (trying to shoehorn a gay character into every work) made Dragon Age or whatever into a bad video game.
With me so far?
They believe that the Hugos have been politically manipulated in the past. SJWs ensured that only SJW works had a shot at winning. In the view of the Puppies, SJWs were intentionally voting in bad scifi, even though it violated the "spirit of the awards", because they wanted to make a political point. That's the exact same accusation you're making.
They wanted to counter that. They wanted to ensure that only good scifi won. From their perspective, that necessitates voting in non-SJW works (because, remember, they believe no SJW work can possibly be good). Of course, their view of what makes up SJW scifi is so broad that they're left primarily (not totally) with openly conservative works by openly conservative authors. But they're still voting in what they see as good works. They honestly like John C Wright. They honestly like Kratman.
From their point of view, voting in good works, satisfying the spirit of the awards, and "sticking it to the SJWs" are all the same thing.
No. The point fo the award is to vote for what you think was the best sci-fi or fantasy or whatever novel/novella/short-story/editor/artist/etc of that year. This idea of "good sci-fi" and "bad sci-fi" is coming outta nowhere and makes no sense. There's no two groups here. There is simply sci, a continuum, and you vote for the one you think is best.
Rather then voting for the work they think is best though, they are voting a slate, a specifically predetermined list, in order to make a political point. They are voting for these works because they are on the slate, not because each members thinks they are the best X of 2014. You can tell this cause it is a slate.
If this was about voting for what they thought was best, there would be no slate. All you'd need to do was encourage more voters and it would simply happen. The very fact that there was a slate proves that this is not about what they think is best, it's about sending a political message. The very fact that the slate worked as it did, of course, shows that their grievances are nonsense.
You guys are talking past each other. @shryke accurately describes reality, and @Solomaxwell6 describes the puppies motivation. Two things that are quote independent from each other.
Puppies are voting to make a political statement, but they are doing so because they have been told that SJW did it first.
And since those SJWs started inserting wrongthought into their science fiction novels in 1895, they've got a lot of catching up to do.
yeah, I don't know what thread you are reading, tin, but this thread has been pretty much:
*critiquing the methodology behind the perfectly legitimate maneuver, and what that means for the rules of the Hugo Awards
I wouldn't call it perfectly legitimate. It's gaming the system. They are voting to make a political point, not for the books they think are the best which is the whole point of the award. It's a violation of the spirit and intention of the rules. It's the filibuster of award voting.
I don't think that's accurate.
Part of the point that people like that make is that they think SJWs are actually ruining stories by injecting their values.
As an example, I was talking with someone angry about the inclusion of gay characters in BioWare games. He believed that they were included to check a social justice box. Rather than making an honest and natural romance, BioWare thought "Oh no, we don't want to risk offending liberals! We better take this character we had planned on being straight, and make him gay instead." He also claimed he has nothing against homosexuality, and would be fine with the inclusion of a gay character who was actually meant to be gay.
I find that whole point of view silly. I'm sure most people here would. But they do truly believe that stories with traditional values are better than stories that have been (in their minds) influenced by the SJW agenda.
Yes, that's what proves my point. They are voting for books to stick it to the SJWs and/or to make Beale money (though the second mostly unwittingly).
But "voting for books to stick it to the SJWs" is not the same as voting against "the books they think are the best." They think the two categories, left wing scifi and good scifi, are mutually exclusive, and that the Hugos have previously been dominated by left-wing (and therefore bad) scifi.
I mean, your entire previous post about gaming the system to make a political point is exactly what the Puppies say about liberals all the time!
I don't even know wtf you are talking about anymore. Your post does not make any sense.
The Puppies think that those damn SJWs have been gaming the system for years (obviously wrong).
They created a slate this year to stick it to the SJWs.
By doing this, they are not voting for what they think is best, they are voting for the works that will send the message they want.
Because they are doing this, they are violating the spirit of the awards and the voting process for those awards.
Let's say that every scifi work can be divided into one of two categories: good scifi and bad scifi. The "spirit of the awards", as you put it, is to vote for the best of the good scifi. If you are voting for bad scifi, then you are violating the spirit of the awards, irrespective of the reason for your vote.
Now, let's also say that every scifi work can be divided into one of another set of categories: SJW or not. The Puppies believe that "SJW scifi" is a subset of "bad scifi." That is, if a work is influenced by SJW ideas, then it destroys the story and it is bad. They don't believe a SJW scifi can possibly be good. See the story I told above. The guy believed that because BioWare "made a character gay", they were destroying his characterization. In his view, a SJW idea (trying to shoehorn a gay character into every work) made Dragon Age or whatever into a bad video game.
With me so far?
They believe that the Hugos have been politically manipulated in the past. SJWs ensured that only SJW works had a shot at winning. In the view of the Puppies, SJWs were intentionally voting in bad scifi, even though it violated the "spirit of the awards", because they wanted to make a political point. That's the exact same accusation you're making.
They wanted to counter that. They wanted to ensure that only good scifi won. From their perspective, that necessitates voting in non-SJW works (because, remember, they believe no SJW work can possibly be good). Of course, their view of what makes up SJW scifi is so broad that they're left primarily (not totally) with openly conservative works by openly conservative authors. But they're still voting in what they see as good works. They honestly like John C Wright. They honestly like Kratman.
From their point of view, voting in good works, satisfying the spirit of the awards, and "sticking it to the SJWs" are all the same thing.
No. The point fo the award is to vote for what you think was the best sci-fi or fantasy or whatever novel/novella/short-story/editor/artist/etc of that year. This idea of "good sci-fi" and "bad sci-fi" is coming outta nowhere and makes no sense. There's no two groups here. There is simply sci, a continuum, and you vote for the one you think is best.
Rather then voting for the work they think is best though, they are voting a slate, a specifically predetermined list, in order to make a political point. They are voting for these works because they are on the slate, not because each members thinks they are the best X of 2014. You can tell this cause it is a slate.
If this was about voting for what they thought was best, there would be no slate. All you'd need to do was encourage more voters and it would simply happen. The very fact that there was a slate proves that this is not about what they think is best, it's about sending a political message. The very fact that the slate worked as it did, of course, shows that their grievances are nonsense.
You guys are talking past each other. @shryke accurately describes reality, and @Solomaxwell6 describes the puppies motivation. Two things that are quite independent from each other.
Puppies are voting to make a political statement, but they are doing so because they have been told that SJW did it first.
No, we aren't. Solomaxwell6 is saying they are voting for what they think is best and that's simply not accurate. They know they aren't cause voting for a slate is not that and they know it. It's a slate specifically because it's about sending a message. The very idea of a slate vote is to ignore your own specific opinions in favour of collective action.
More simply, I think it's ridiculous to pretend these guys didn't know what they were doing when they decided to get together and vote on a specific list put forth by a politically-active blowhard.
While they don't do this as a group, there should be a sub-group within who aren't that self aware of what's going on and when confronted with that head on refuse to accept it. By doing that it'd break down their entire belief system and their own identity, which many see issues like this as one and the same thing. Though there are some, like Correilla, who I'm unsure what camp he belongs to. It's hard to tell when the bullshit starts and his real beliefs begin with him.
it is the ultimate irony that the Puppies are apparently railing against people voting for works because of author politics and to combat that they nominate their own slate of works ...based on author politics
Mr. Beale's chief strategy for instigating a fight can be reduced down to "I'm not kicking you, you're just standing where I'm kicking"
Essentially this cognitive dissonance eventually causes people like Mr. Scalzi to reply in kind and then it's all about "see how mean those SJWs are when they claim they want equality for everyone!"
yeah, I don't know what thread you are reading, tin, but this thread has been pretty much:
*critiquing the methodology behind the perfectly legitimate maneuver, and what that means for the rules of the Hugo Awards
I wouldn't call it perfectly legitimate. It's gaming the system. They are voting to make a political point, not for the books they think are the best which is the whole point of the award. It's a violation of the spirit and intention of the rules. It's the filibuster of award voting.
I don't think that's accurate.
Part of the point that people like that make is that they think SJWs are actually ruining stories by injecting their values.
As an example, I was talking with someone angry about the inclusion of gay characters in BioWare games. He believed that they were included to check a social justice box. Rather than making an honest and natural romance, BioWare thought "Oh no, we don't want to risk offending liberals! We better take this character we had planned on being straight, and make him gay instead." He also claimed he has nothing against homosexuality, and would be fine with the inclusion of a gay character who was actually meant to be gay.
I find that whole point of view silly. I'm sure most people here would. But they do truly believe that stories with traditional values are better than stories that have been (in their minds) influenced by the SJW agenda.
Yes, that's what proves my point. They are voting for books to stick it to the SJWs and/or to make Beale money (though the second mostly unwittingly).
But "voting for books to stick it to the SJWs" is not the same as voting against "the books they think are the best." They think the two categories, left wing scifi and good scifi, are mutually exclusive, and that the Hugos have previously been dominated by left-wing (and therefore bad) scifi.
I mean, your entire previous post about gaming the system to make a political point is exactly what the Puppies say about liberals all the time!
I don't even know wtf you are talking about anymore. Your post does not make any sense.
The Puppies think that those damn SJWs have been gaming the system for years (obviously wrong).
They created a slate this year to stick it to the SJWs.
By doing this, they are not voting for what they think is best, they are voting for the works that will send the message they want.
Because they are doing this, they are violating the spirit of the awards and the voting process for those awards.
Let's say that every scifi work can be divided into one of two categories: good scifi and bad scifi. The "spirit of the awards", as you put it, is to vote for the best of the good scifi. If you are voting for bad scifi, then you are violating the spirit of the awards, irrespective of the reason for your vote.
Now, let's also say that every scifi work can be divided into one of another set of categories: SJW or not. The Puppies believe that "SJW scifi" is a subset of "bad scifi." That is, if a work is influenced by SJW ideas, then it destroys the story and it is bad. They don't believe a SJW scifi can possibly be good. See the story I told above. The guy believed that because BioWare "made a character gay", they were destroying his characterization. In his view, a SJW idea (trying to shoehorn a gay character into every work) made Dragon Age or whatever into a bad video game.
With me so far?
They believe that the Hugos have been politically manipulated in the past. SJWs ensured that only SJW works had a shot at winning. In the view of the Puppies, SJWs were intentionally voting in bad scifi, even though it violated the "spirit of the awards", because they wanted to make a political point. That's the exact same accusation you're making.
They wanted to counter that. They wanted to ensure that only good scifi won. From their perspective, that necessitates voting in non-SJW works (because, remember, they believe no SJW work can possibly be good). Of course, their view of what makes up SJW scifi is so broad that they're left primarily (not totally) with openly conservative works by openly conservative authors. But they're still voting in what they see as good works. They honestly like John C Wright. They honestly like Kratman.
From their point of view, voting in good works, satisfying the spirit of the awards, and "sticking it to the SJWs" are all the same thing.
No. The point fo the award is to vote for what you think was the best sci-fi or fantasy or whatever novel/novella/short-story/editor/artist/etc of that year. This idea of "good sci-fi" and "bad sci-fi" is coming outta nowhere and makes no sense. There's no two groups here. There is simply sci, a continuum, and you vote for the one you think is best.
Rather then voting for the work they think is best though, they are voting a slate, a specifically predetermined list, in order to make a political point. They are voting for these works because they are on the slate, not because each members thinks they are the best X of 2014. You can tell this cause it is a slate.
If this was about voting for what they thought was best, there would be no slate. All you'd need to do was encourage more voters and it would simply happen. The very fact that there was a slate proves that this is not about what they think is best, it's about sending a political message. The very fact that the slate worked as it did, of course, shows that their grievances are nonsense.
You guys are talking past each other. @shryke accurately describes reality, and @Solomaxwell6 describes the puppies motivation. Two things that are quote independent from each other.
Puppies are voting to make a political statement, but they are doing so because they have been told that SJW did it first.
And since those SJWs started inserting wrongthought into their science fiction novels in 1895, they've got a lot of catching up to do.
I think it's pretty convenient to ignore the birth of the puppies coinciding with the great "Why you should boycott Enders Game" push. Was that the opening shot in the sci-fi culture wars? Idk who can say with these sorts of things. But it was certainly the largest salvo before or since.
This has been bubbling below the surface for years in conservative circles of fandom. It probably started with comics getting more inclusive, then we had Gamergate - all the forms of media are being noticed being inclusive medium by medium and every format has its own conservative backlash and now it's finally the novel industry's turn. This activity isn't hard to believe in coming from Correilla, and Baen's conservative group. This is what Toni Weisskopf, Baen's present publisher, said in 2014.
The Problem of Engagement — a guest post by Toni Weisskopf
Posted on March 10, 2014 | 1,012 Comments
*As you know, I’ve been worried about the direction of conventions, of fandom, of the… public face of our field. Those of you who are in the Baen Bar know Toni Weisskopf, publisher of Baen Books posted about it in her conference. I thought her perspective on the field was important — particularly for me, who know next to nothing of the history of fandom — partly because it echoed my own views of where we stand and asked her if I could echo it here. She has graciously given me permission to do so. The raiding party post by David Pascoe will run tomorrow morning.*
The Problem of Engagement — by Toni Weisskopf
The latest fooforaws in the science fiction world have served to highlight the vast cultural divide we are seeing in the greater American culture. SF, as always, very much reflects that greater culture.
It is also nothing new. When fandom was first starting there was the “Great Exclusion Act” when a group of young, excitable, fanboys attempted to spread their political/fannish feud propaganda at the first Worldcon in New York, and were not only prevented from doing so but not allowed back into the con. All fandom was aflame with war! (The fact that this line is a cliché is also a clue that fandom is not, and never has been, a calm peaceful sea of agreement.)
The reason we have a fandom to disunite now, is because calmer heads prevailed. Bob Tucker in particular, with intelligence and humor, led fandom to the idea that it ought have nothing to do with greater world politics, but should concentrate on the thing we all loved, that being science fiction. (Mind you, his sympathies were with the ones who were excluded, but he was able to overcome his own political inclinations for the best of fandom.)
The fact that fandom as an open culture survived more than seventy years is a testament to the power of that simple, uniting concept. That we are once again looking to be rift by a political divide was perhaps inevitable. But as fandom has grown, expanded and diluted itself, we may have won the überculture wars and lost our heart. We have not been able to transmit this central precept to new fans. Geeks are chic, but somehow we’ve let the fuggheads win.
And, from my observations, this is an inevitable consequence of the creation of any kind of fandom, from tattoos to swords to us. There is a thing people like. Thing people make initial contact with each other to discuss things and thingishness. At some point a woman (and it’s usually women, no matter what the thing) organizes gatherings, and thing fandom grows bigger and better. At some point, the people who care not about things, but merely about being a big fish in a small sea, squeeze out the thing people. Sometimes thing fandom just dies, sometimes it fissures and the process is recreated. So the fuggheads always win. The only question is how long can we delay their inevitable triumph?
SF fandom has managed to stave it off for a long time. Sadly, we no longer have a Bob Tucker. We don’t have one fan who is so widely respected and loved that his pointedly humorous yet calming voice can soothe the waters. Again, simply a reflection of the greater culture. When SF was aborning, radio and the pulps created huge mass audiences for entertainment. All of fandom read and were influenced by essentially the same small pool of creative endeavor. Now we have not only 300 hundred channels of cable (and nothing on), but the vast output of the Internet, both pro and amateur. It is possible to be a science fiction fan and have absolutely no point of connection with another fan these days.
For instance, a slur that has been cast at people who dare criticize the politically correct, self-appointed guardians of … everything, apparently, is that they read Heinlein. Well, Heinlein is one of the few points of reference those fans who read have. Of course we all read Heinlein and have an opinion about his work. How can you be a fan and not? The answer, of course, these days is that you can watch Game of Thrones and Star Wars and anime and never pick up a book. And there’s enough published material out there that it is entirely possible to have zero points of contact between members of that smaller subset of SF readers.
So the question arises—why bother to engage these people at all? They are not of us. They do not share our values, they do not share our culture.
And I’m not sure there is a good enough argument for engaging them. There is only the evidence of history, which is that science fiction thrives on interaction. Artists, readers, authors, editors, all united in discussing the things that are cool and wonderful, together. We share a belief that the future is worth engaging. It’s an on-going conversation, and it’s worked well that way. Take the example of Eric Flint’s Ring of Fire series. It started out as one novel, not especially envisioned to be the first of a series, an alternate history. The author asked for help researching some abstruse historical points, and did so on an on-line forum of readers. Fourteen years and sixteen novels and nine collections later (not even counting 40+ issues of the on-line professional magazine), a huge, intricate and rich SF world has been imagined and developed.
That process would not, could not, have occurred within any other genre. Yes, it took the brilliance and guidance of one person to set it in motion and shape it throughout, but it is the result of hundreds of people pulling together to explore and create on their own. Not as some side “fan fiction” endeavor, but as part of the—commercially viable—whole. And when I say “commercially viable” it is shorthand for: “lots of people like it and are willing to show this by paying money for it to continue.”
So the core of science fiction, its method, is still a valid way of creating the cultural artifacts we want. But is it necessary to engage those of differing political persuasions to get this method? I feel the answer is probably yes. You don’t get a conversation with only one opinion, you get a speech, lecture or soliloquy. All of which can be interesting, but not useful in the context of creating science fiction. But a conversation requires two way communication. If the person on the other side is not willing to a) listen and b) contribute to the greater whole, there is no point to the exercise.
And this, I think, leads to why the awards are important. They are a resource for continuation of culture. They are a reward for work that is approved of by the field, and a sign to those outside the field that this is what we, the insiders, think represents the best we can do. Awards become instant history. You make Wikipedia.
But awards lists only maintain their legitimacy so long as they in fact accurately reflect the field. So if a large part of the field feels that its interests are not being served–and they do–the award is compromised.
What to do? Fight to reestablish legitimacy? Establish a different awards list? I have long argued that winning the George Washington awards (every royalty period) is all the recognition needed—living well is the best revenge. And that is one reason Baen is publishing a “Best of Military and Adventure SF” reprint anthology next year—it’s a way to get more money into the hands of writers who write what we feel is the good stuff. It will in its way be a “juried” award with cash prize awarded by a small pool of experienced editors.
But are the popular awards worth fighting for? I’m not sure our side has ever really tried, though there are indications that previous attempts to rally readers of non-in-group books were thwarted in ways that were against the rules of the game. And yet, to quote Heinlein, “Certainly the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you. If you don’t bet, you can’t win.”
I think the problem is that folks just really feel they have no possible conversation with the other side any more, that the battle for this part of the culture isn’t worth fighting. And I think again SF is mirroring the greater American culture. Our country is different because it, like science fiction fandom, was built around an idea—not geographic or linguistic accident, but an idea—we hold these truths to be self evident. And it is becoming more and more obvious that the two sides of American culture no longer share a frame of reference, no points of contact, no agreement on the meaning of the core ideas.
And yet, I can’t help but think that at some point, you have to fight or you will have lost the war. The fight itself is worth it, if only because honorable competition and conflict leads to creativity, without which we, science fiction, as a unique phenomenon, die.
That coincidentally is the publisher for most of the slate.
I don't think that's all that unusual. If you were a book publisher, you'd probably try to publish books that you think are good (for some value of good). They might also vote for junk that they hate but would sell well, but from what I hear it doesn't to apply to this situation. I'm going to guess that the people who run Castalia House do think most of the books they publish are great.
Vox Day is only really prominent because he's the lead editor and one of the major authors of Castalia House. It makes sense that people who read his blog like the work of Castalia House... what other reason would they have for reading it? Even the vanity votes for best editor... he probably honestly thinks he's a great editor, and his readers probably honestly agree.
Sure, there could certainly be an element of greed or a desire for notoriety in there. But it's not the only motivation.
You guys are talking past each other. shryke accurately describes reality, and Solomaxwell6 describes the puppies motivation. Two things that are quite independent from each other.
Puppies are voting to make a political statement, but they are doing so because they have been told that SJW did it first.
We're each talking about both. He's saying they're not voting for the books they think is best. I am. The argument is about whether or not they can vote for the works they think is best while making a political point, and I think they most certainly can.
No. The point fo the award is to vote for what you think was the best sci-fi or fantasy or whatever novel/novella/short-story/editor/artist/etc of that year. This idea of "good sci-fi" and "bad sci-fi" is coming outta nowhere and makes no sense. There's no two groups here. There is simply sci, a continuum, and you vote for the one you think is best.
Rather then voting for the work they think is best though, they are voting a slate, a specifically predetermined list, in order to make a political point. They are voting for these works because they are on the slate, not because each members thinks they are the best X of 2014. You can tell this cause it is a slate.
If this was about voting for what they thought was best, there would be no slate. All you'd need to do was encourage more voters and it would simply happen. The very fact that there was a slate proves that this is not about what they think is best, it's about sending a political message. The very fact that the slate worked as it did, of course, shows that their grievances are nonsense.
First of all, let's address the fact that "the point of the award is to vote for what you think was the best sci-fi or fantasy or whatever" is more or less exactly what I said in my previous post in literally the second sentence. You're trying to make a point of contention where none exists. Categorizing based on good or bad is just a way of saying that they believe left-wing works are, by their nature, undeserving of the award. They think it hurts the story, and that's why they think a left-wing work would never actually deserve a Hugo. Again, that's why I gave the BioWare example. The guy thought that what could've been a good video game became lousy because the possibility of a same sex relationship hurt the characterization. The Puppies apply that reasoning to anything with what they perceive to be left-wing elements.
You know, of course, that winning a Hugo is a two-stage process. There are the nominations first, and that's what's relevant here. In the nominations, people can vote several times. They aren't restricted to what they think is the best (single) work. They vote for a whole bunch of works they think are good, not just the one they think is best. Recommendations in general are not only common but have the explicit of approval of the award committee, which provides links to several recommendation websites. Go to any active blog run by scifi author or editor, and you can probably find some Hugo recommendations in there.
A possible distinguishing feature between the slate and a typical recommendation is that the slate doesn't care about the specific works, it's just a unifying feature. That is, someone making a recommendation might say "These are the best novels I read last year, you should read them and nominate the ones you like." Someone making a slate might say "Vote for these works. Don't worry about reading them, it doesn't matter how good they are, we just want to win."
You can correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that that's where our biggest disagreement is. You think that to the majority of voters, the slate is all about the latter case. I think the slates are more like typical recommendations. Here are some quotes from Sad Puppies 3:
As noted earlier in the year, the SAD PUPPIES 3 list is a recommendation. Not an absolute.
If you agree with our slate below — and we suspect you might — this is YOUR chance to make sure YOUR voice is heard.
Sad Puppies 2 involved over two months of public recommendations and discussions culminating in a slate that consisted of, at most, two nominations per category and skipped a number of categories.
The Rabid Puppies recommendation was a lot closer to a slate done purely for political reasons ("I encourage those who value my opinion on matters related to science fiction and fantasy to nominate them precisely as they are"), but if you look at the discussion people do talk about reading and reviewing the recommendations if they have not already read them:
The funny thing is I've actually read/heard of 90% of the authors up on this slate. ... Also I'm pretty sure I won't have to suppress my gag reflex while reading the stories of the authors I hadn't heard of on this slate
I look forward to reviewing all the material to see if my conclusions match yours above.
I have read quite a bit of the rabid puppies slate. Will endeavor to read all i have missed
And so on. Clearly the Puppies voters are actually reading rather than just automatically nominating everything. And the results of the nominations seem to support this. There was a lot of variation, some of the Puppies nominations got several times more votes than others. If there was a large and totally unified Puppy team, votes still wouldn't be identical but with some exceptions (eg the new Dresden book) you wouldn't be seeing such a huge disparity. What's actually happening is that there is a relatively large group of people, each with pretty similar tastes (works from Castalia House, Torgerson, etc), each reading the same small set of works (because they're checking out the various Puppies recommendations), and primed to enjoy those works (because of the recommendations from authors/editors whose taste they respect). So you get a few dozen or a couple hundred extra nominations for a given work, which was often enough to push it into the top five. This wasn't some massive fascist conspiracy with hundreds of conservatives marching lockstep behind Vox Day.
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That coincidentally is the publisher for most of the slate.
I don't think that's all that unusual. If you were a book publisher, you'd probably try to publish books that you think are good (for some value of good). They might also vote for junk that they hate but would sell well, but from what I hear it doesn't to apply to this situation. I'm going to guess that the people who run Castalia House do think most of the books they publish are great.
Vox Day is only really prominent because he's the lead editor and one of the major authors of Castalia House. It makes sense that people who read his blog like the work of Castalia House... what other reason would they have for reading it? Even the vanity votes for best editor... he probably honestly thinks he's a great editor, and his readers probably honestly agree.
Sure, there could certainly be an element of greed or a desire for notoriety in there. But it's not the only motivation.
You guys are talking past each other. shryke accurately describes reality, and Solomaxwell6 describes the puppies motivation. Two things that are quite independent from each other.
Puppies are voting to make a political statement, but they are doing so because they have been told that SJW did it first.
We're each talking about both. He's saying they're not voting for the books they think is best. I am. The argument is about whether or not they can vote for the works they think is best while making a political point, and I think they most certainly can.
No. The point fo the award is to vote for what you think was the best sci-fi or fantasy or whatever novel/novella/short-story/editor/artist/etc of that year. This idea of "good sci-fi" and "bad sci-fi" is coming outta nowhere and makes no sense. There's no two groups here. There is simply sci, a continuum, and you vote for the one you think is best.
Rather then voting for the work they think is best though, they are voting a slate, a specifically predetermined list, in order to make a political point. They are voting for these works because they are on the slate, not because each members thinks they are the best X of 2014. You can tell this cause it is a slate.
If this was about voting for what they thought was best, there would be no slate. All you'd need to do was encourage more voters and it would simply happen. The very fact that there was a slate proves that this is not about what they think is best, it's about sending a political message. The very fact that the slate worked as it did, of course, shows that their grievances are nonsense.
First of all, let's address the fact that "the point of the award is to vote for what you think was the best sci-fi or fantasy or whatever" is more or less exactly what I said in my previous post in literally the second sentence. You're trying to make a point of contention where none exists. Categorizing based on good or bad is just a way of saying that they believe left-wing works are, by their nature, undeserving of the award. They think it hurts the story, and that's why they think a left-wing work would never actually deserve a Hugo. Again, that's why I gave the BioWare example. The guy thought that what could've been a good video game became lousy because the possibility of a same sex relationship hurt the characterization. The Puppies apply that reasoning to anything with what they perceive to be left-wing elements.
You know, of course, that winning a Hugo is a two-stage process. There are the nominations first, and that's what's relevant here. In the nominations, people can vote several times. They aren't restricted to what they think is the best (single) work. They vote for a whole bunch of works they think are good, not just the one they think is best. Recommendations in general are not only common but have the explicit of approval of the award committee, which provides links to several recommendation websites. Go to any active blog run by scifi author or editor, and you can probably find some Hugo recommendations in there.
A possible distinguishing feature between the slate and a typical recommendation is that the slate doesn't care about the specific works, it's just a unifying feature. That is, someone making a recommendation might say "These are the best novels I read last year, you should read them and nominate the ones you like." Someone making a slate might say "Vote for these works. Don't worry about reading them, it doesn't matter how good they are, we just want to win."
You can correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that that's where our biggest disagreement is. You think that to the majority of voters, the slate is all about the latter case. I think the slates are more like typical recommendations. Here are some quotes from Sad Puppies 3:
As noted earlier in the year, the SAD PUPPIES 3 list is a recommendation. Not an absolute.
If you agree with our slate below — and we suspect you might — this is YOUR chance to make sure YOUR voice is heard.
Sad Puppies 2 involved over two months of public recommendations and discussions culminating in a slate that consisted of, at most, two nominations per category and skipped a number of categories.
The Rabid Puppies recommendation was a lot closer to a slate done purely for political reasons ("I encourage those who value my opinion on matters related to science fiction and fantasy to nominate them precisely as they are"), but if you look at the discussion people do talk about reading and reviewing the recommendations if they have not already read them:
The funny thing is I've actually read/heard of 90% of the authors up on this slate. ... Also I'm pretty sure I won't have to suppress my gag reflex while reading the stories of the authors I hadn't heard of on this slate
I look forward to reviewing all the material to see if my conclusions match yours above.
I have read quite a bit of the rabid puppies slate. Will endeavor to read all i have missed
And so on. Clearly the Puppies voters are actually reading rather than just automatically nominating everything. And the results of the nominations seem to support this. There was a lot of variation, some of the Puppies nominations got several times more votes than others. If there was a large and totally unified Puppy team, votes still wouldn't be identical but with some exceptions (eg the new Dresden book) you wouldn't be seeing such a huge disparity. What's actually happening is that there is a relatively large group of people, each with pretty similar tastes (works from Castalia House, Torgerson, etc), each reading the same small set of works (because they're checking out the various Puppies recommendations), and primed to enjoy those works (because of the recommendations from authors/editors whose taste they respect). So you get a few dozen or a couple hundred extra nominations for a given work, which was often enough to push it into the top five. This wasn't some massive fascist conspiracy with hundreds of conservatives marching lockstep behind Vox Day.
It's a bit of both really. While some or maybe a lot of the puppies might really go for what they like best(and I'd say Butcher and Sanderson are a safe bet), for some of them it is clearly about showing those SJWs how it's done.
This becomes proportionally more in the Teddy Beale camp, where I suspect a large number of trolls, that just want to rig the awards. His gamergate buddies don't care about the Hugos.
It's a bit of both really. While some or maybe a lot of the puppies might really go for what they like best(and I'd say Butcher and Sanderson are a safe bet), for some of them it is clearly about showing those SJWs how it's done.
This becomes proportionally more in the Teddy Beale camp, where I suspect a large number of trolls, that just want to rig the awards. His gamergate buddies don't care about the Hugos.
I've heard stories about people buying supporting memberships for friends, or using supporting memberships as contest awards, just to help the slate they support.
That I think is very distasteful (also heavily precedented). I don't think any of the main Puppies figures have done that, though, and I don't think it's fair to attribute that motivation to anywhere near the whole group.
It's a bit of both really. While some or maybe a lot of the puppies might really go for what they like best(and I'd say Butcher and Sanderson are a safe bet), for some of them it is clearly about showing those SJWs how it's done.
This becomes proportionally more in the Teddy Beale camp, where I suspect a large number of trolls, that just want to rig the awards. His gamergate buddies don't care about the Hugos.
I've heard stories about people buying supporting memberships for friends, or using supporting memberships as contest awards, just to help the slate they support.
That I think is very distasteful (also heavily precedented). I don't think any of the main Puppies figures have done that, though, and I don't think it's fair to attribute that motivation to anywhere near the whole group.
It's a bit of both really. While some or maybe a lot of the puppies might really go for what they like best(and I'd say Butcher and Sanderson are a safe bet), for some of them it is clearly about showing those SJWs how it's done.
This becomes proportionally more in the Teddy Beale camp, where I suspect a large number of trolls, that just want to rig the awards. His gamergate buddies don't care about the Hugos.
I've heard stories about people buying supporting memberships for friends, or using supporting memberships as contest awards, just to help the slate they support.
That I think is very distasteful (also heavily precedented). I don't think any of the main Puppies figures have done that, though, and I don't think it's fair to attribute that motivation to anywhere near the whole group.
Isn't that what Hubbard did at one point?
Maybe! The one I had in mind was They'd Rather Be Right, which was a terrible novel and won because it was one of the first Hugos, there were only a couple hundred attendees that year, and the publisher bought a bunch of memberships. Quick Wiki check says that the authors had a connection with Scientology. We might be thinking of the same thing.
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Scientology tried after Hubbard's death.
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And you just have to read through the comments on the blogs of Torgersen, Correia and Beale, to get an idea about the motivation of those people. They are full of hate and their main concern is fighting the SJW cause. A lot of them also believe that gamergate is a good thing.
And you just have to read through the comments on the blogs of Torgersen, Correia and Beale, to get an idea about the motivation of those people. They are full of hate and their main concern is fighting the SJW cause. A lot of them also believe that gamergate is a good thing.
I mean, I did. I actually directly quoted several of those comments.
It's a lot of "I hate SJW crap, I look forward to reading your recommendations and seeing if they're worthy of a nomination." They are not simply saying "I don't know these people, but I will vote for them because fuck SJWs."
That's my whole point, that for them the two goals (screwing over liberals, voting for the best scifi) are identical. It's not a matter of choosing one over the other.
And you just have to read through the comments on the blogs of Torgersen, Correia and Beale, to get an idea about the motivation of those people. They are full of hate and their main concern is fighting the SJW cause. A lot of them also believe that gamergate is a good thing.
I mean, I did. I actually directly quoted several of those comments.
It's a lot of "I hate SJW crap, I look forward to reading your recommendations and seeing if they're worthy of a nomination." They are not simply saying "I don't know these people, but I will vote for them because fuck SJWs."
That's my whole point, that for them the two goals (screwing over liberals, voting for the best scifi) are identical. It's not a matter of choosing one over the other.
You expect them to say that out loud? They're not that stupid. Not that it's difficult to make the connection, Correila's blog is rife with bullshit claiming to have the upper hand on morality on social issues while switching between outright saying horrible things then backtracking with weasly words about he's not a bad guy, honest, those SJW's are liars who are besmirching his honor * Three paragraphs later * VOX DAY IS TOTES COOL YOU GUYS FUCK THE PC POLICE FOR RUINING OUR FUN.
And you just have to read through the comments on the blogs of Torgersen, Correia and Beale, to get an idea about the motivation of those people. They are full of hate and their main concern is fighting the SJW cause. A lot of them also believe that gamergate is a good thing.
I mean, I did. I actually directly quoted several of those comments.
It's a lot of "I hate SJW crap, I look forward to reading your recommendations and seeing if they're worthy of a nomination." They are not simply saying "I don't know these people, but I will vote for them because fuck SJWs."
That's my whole point, that for them the two goals (screwing over liberals, voting for the best scifi) are identical. It's not a matter of choosing one over the other.
You expect them to say that out loud? They're not that stupid. Not that it's difficult to make the connection, Correila's blog is rife with bullshit claiming to have the upper hand on morality on social issues while switching between outright saying horrible things then backtracking with weasly words about he's not a bad guy, honest, those SJW's are liars who are besmirching his honor * Three paragraphs later * VOX DAY IS TOTES COOL YOU GUYS FUCK THE PC POLICE FOR RUINING OUR FUN.
I think that once you get to the point where you're assuming that they aren't even reading the scifi (even though they consistently say they are, even though they are posting on sites dedicated to scifi authors and publishing houses) then you're getting really deep into a conspiracy theory.
I mean, I'm sure some of the people that the CoS bought memberships for had actually read Mission Earth, too. Fact is, when a vote costs forty bucks, it isn't that expensive to stuff the ballot box.
That coincidentally is the publisher for most of the slate.
I don't think that's all that unusual. If you were a book publisher, you'd probably try to publish books that you think are good (for some value of good). They might also vote for junk that they hate but would sell well, but from what I hear it doesn't to apply to this situation. I'm going to guess that the people who run Castalia House do think most of the books they publish are great.
Vox Day is only really prominent because he's the lead editor and one of the major authors of Castalia House. It makes sense that people who read his blog like the work of Castalia House... what other reason would they have for reading it? Even the vanity votes for best editor... he probably honestly thinks he's a great editor, and his readers probably honestly agree.
Sure, there could certainly be an element of greed or a desire for notoriety in there. But it's not the only motivation.
You guys are talking past each other. shryke accurately describes reality, and Solomaxwell6 describes the puppies motivation. Two things that are quite independent from each other.
Puppies are voting to make a political statement, but they are doing so because they have been told that SJW did it first.
We're each talking about both. He's saying they're not voting for the books they think is best. I am. The argument is about whether or not they can vote for the works they think is best while making a political point, and I think they most certainly can.
No. The point fo the award is to vote for what you think was the best sci-fi or fantasy or whatever novel/novella/short-story/editor/artist/etc of that year. This idea of "good sci-fi" and "bad sci-fi" is coming outta nowhere and makes no sense. There's no two groups here. There is simply sci, a continuum, and you vote for the one you think is best.
Rather then voting for the work they think is best though, they are voting a slate, a specifically predetermined list, in order to make a political point. They are voting for these works because they are on the slate, not because each members thinks they are the best X of 2014. You can tell this cause it is a slate.
If this was about voting for what they thought was best, there would be no slate. All you'd need to do was encourage more voters and it would simply happen. The very fact that there was a slate proves that this is not about what they think is best, it's about sending a political message. The very fact that the slate worked as it did, of course, shows that their grievances are nonsense.
First of all, let's address the fact that "the point of the award is to vote for what you think was the best sci-fi or fantasy or whatever" is more or less exactly what I said in my previous post in literally the second sentence. You're trying to make a point of contention where none exists. Categorizing based on good or bad is just a way of saying that they believe left-wing works are, by their nature, undeserving of the award. They think it hurts the story, and that's why they think a left-wing work would never actually deserve a Hugo. Again, that's why I gave the BioWare example. The guy thought that what could've been a good video game became lousy because the possibility of a same sex relationship hurt the characterization. The Puppies apply that reasoning to anything with what they perceive to be left-wing elements.
You know, of course, that winning a Hugo is a two-stage process. There are the nominations first, and that's what's relevant here. In the nominations, people can vote several times. They aren't restricted to what they think is the best (single) work. They vote for a whole bunch of works they think are good, not just the one they think is best. Recommendations in general are not only common but have the explicit of approval of the award committee, which provides links to several recommendation websites. Go to any active blog run by scifi author or editor, and you can probably find some Hugo recommendations in there.
A possible distinguishing feature between the slate and a typical recommendation is that the slate doesn't care about the specific works, it's just a unifying feature. That is, someone making a recommendation might say "These are the best novels I read last year, you should read them and nominate the ones you like." Someone making a slate might say "Vote for these works. Don't worry about reading them, it doesn't matter how good they are, we just want to win."
You can correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that that's where our biggest disagreement is. You think that to the majority of voters, the slate is all about the latter case. I think the slates are more like typical recommendations. Here are some quotes from Sad Puppies 3:
As noted earlier in the year, the SAD PUPPIES 3 list is a recommendation. Not an absolute.
If you agree with our slate below — and we suspect you might — this is YOUR chance to make sure YOUR voice is heard.
Sad Puppies 2 involved over two months of public recommendations and discussions culminating in a slate that consisted of, at most, two nominations per category and skipped a number of categories.
The Rabid Puppies recommendation was a lot closer to a slate done purely for political reasons ("I encourage those who value my opinion on matters related to science fiction and fantasy to nominate them precisely as they are"), but if you look at the discussion people do talk about reading and reviewing the recommendations if they have not already read them:
The funny thing is I've actually read/heard of 90% of the authors up on this slate. ... Also I'm pretty sure I won't have to suppress my gag reflex while reading the stories of the authors I hadn't heard of on this slate
I look forward to reviewing all the material to see if my conclusions match yours above.
I have read quite a bit of the rabid puppies slate. Will endeavor to read all i have missed
And so on. Clearly the Puppies voters are actually reading rather than just automatically nominating everything. And the results of the nominations seem to support this. There was a lot of variation, some of the Puppies nominations got several times more votes than others. If there was a large and totally unified Puppy team, votes still wouldn't be identical but with some exceptions (eg the new Dresden book) you wouldn't be seeing such a huge disparity. What's actually happening is that there is a relatively large group of people, each with pretty similar tastes (works from Castalia House, Torgerson, etc), each reading the same small set of works (because they're checking out the various Puppies recommendations), and primed to enjoy those works (because of the recommendations from authors/editors whose taste they respect). So you get a few dozen or a couple hundred extra nominations for a given work, which was often enough to push it into the top five. This wasn't some massive fascist conspiracy with hundreds of conservatives marching lockstep behind Vox Day.
You don't seem to get it. By voting for a slate you are by definition making a political point (of solidarity if nothing else) rather then voting for the work you think is best. That's what a slate is.
Regardless of what they might think is good or bad, by voting for the slate they are explicitly saying this is about sending a message not about what they think is the best work. Cause if it was just about voting for the best work, there wouldn't be a slate and they wouldn't have voted for it. They would have just rustled up more voters and those voters would have just done their thing.
And you just have to read through the comments on the blogs of Torgersen, Correia and Beale, to get an idea about the motivation of those people. They are full of hate and their main concern is fighting the SJW cause. A lot of them also believe that gamergate is a good thing.
I mean, I did. I actually directly quoted several of those comments.
It's a lot of "I hate SJW crap, I look forward to reading your recommendations and seeing if they're worthy of a nomination." They are not simply saying "I don't know these people, but I will vote for them because fuck SJWs."
That's my whole point, that for them the two goals (screwing over liberals, voting for the best scifi) are identical. It's not a matter of choosing one over the other.
You expect them to say that out loud? They're not that stupid. Not that it's difficult to make the connection, Correila's blog is rife with bullshit claiming to have the upper hand on morality on social issues while switching between outright saying horrible things then backtracking with weasly words about he's not a bad guy, honest, those SJW's are liars who are besmirching his honor * Three paragraphs later * VOX DAY IS TOTES COOL YOU GUYS FUCK THE PC POLICE FOR RUINING OUR FUN.
I think that once you get to the point where you're assuming that they aren't even reading the scifi (even though they consistently say they are, even though they are posting on sites dedicated to scifi authors and publishing houses) then you're getting really deep into a conspiracy theory.
I attribute that to the courted Gamergaters, not the blog followers. It's also not the first time Correilla has been suspected of fraud either, the industry has been skeptical about his book shipping in large numbers for a while now* and he's not exactly someone whose reputation would suggest he wouldn't do it for lolz. I'm not saying it's true, I simply wouldn't be surprised if it was. This is where it's harder to tell his bullshit persona from his real beliefs, which overlap. Have you read his blog?
edit: Ironically Sad Puppies are attempted a conspiracy themselves on the Hugos and they're up front about it. And being overshadowed by their demented twins Rapid Puppies.
* what's amusing is that he claims to be a huge book seller with a large fan base while his book presence on the internet is miniscule. Google his books, the lack of discussion is amazing. I don't expect him to be as popular as Butcher, but nobody is talking about his books except on Amazon and Goodreads.
I mean, I'm sure some of the people that the CoS bought memberships for had actually read Mission Earth, too. Fact is, when a vote costs forty bucks, it isn't that expensive to stuff the ballot box.
But that's completely different story. No one's suggesting that buying votes for other people with the express purpose that they vote your slate is a good thing.
That's also not what Correia, Torgersen, or Vox Day did.
Stuffing a ballot is very different from making a recommendation to your relatively large audience, who check out the recommendation and then vote the same way as you after making the honest decision that you are right.
Let's remember that the Sad Puppies slate accomplished nothing. The Rapid Puppies slate is the one who's influence you see. Which means the actually slate voters who jumped on board are all Vox Day people.
It's more like one side is the parents of school age children in some small Texas town who wake up one Wednesday to discover that in yesterday's mid-cycle election, all their crazy Christian Evangelist neighbors ran a secret get-out-the-vote operation to stack the local school board in order to force the county junior high to teach the Old Testament during 7th grade science class.
This is not true. This was not done in secret. As has been pointed out by multiple people, this is the third year the puppies have nominated people. Each year, the numbers grew in favor of the puppies, as shown last year by a few nominees making it onto the ballet, until this year where 25% of the ballots came from puppies, sweeping the nominations.
This is more like your neighbors making a fuss in year one, getting onto the ballot in year two, and sweeping the ballot in year three.
You had all the time in the world to see that they had recruited folks to their cause like crazy over the past 3 years, and just ignored it.
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ElldrenIs a woman dammitceterum censeoRegistered Userregular
Let's remember that the Sad Puppies slate accomplished nothing. The Rapid Puppies slate is the one who's influence you see. Which means the actually slate voters who jumped on board are all Vox Day people.
who is the one specifically courting non-readers for explicitly political reasons to vote for his shit
It's a lot of "I hate SJW crap, I look forward to reading your recommendations and seeing if they're worthy of a nomination."
This is true in a literal sense (and probably is the way the Sad Puppies actually feel) but I think that Harry Dresden is right that there's a lot of dog-whistling going on, too, especially considering that Rabid Puppies outnumber the Sad Puppies.
I mean... if the Puppy movement as a whole were really just interested in increasing Hugo voting participation because they thought that WorldCon has become too insular and the attendees aren't representative of the SF&F readership as a whole then they could have just run a "get out the vote" operation and let the new larger voter pool nominate who they wanted.
Instead, they picked a slate, and while the slate they chose no doubt has some stuff that they think is really great, it was also pretty clearly designed to troll the people who the Puppies think are their ideological enemies.
You don't seem to get it. By voting for a slate you are by definition making a political point (of solidarity if nothing else) rather then voting for the work you think is best. That's what a slate is.
Regardless of what they might think is good or bad, by voting for the slate they are explicitly saying this is about sending a message not about what they think is the best work. Cause if it was just about voting for the best work, there wouldn't be a slate and they wouldn't have voted for it. They would have just rustled up more voters and those voters would have just done their thing.
Do you think that every science fiction fan reads every single science fiction work every year? Probably not, that would be ridiculous, right?
So, instead, you read recommendations, you read the subset of works that appeals to you (for whatever reason). That is what the slate is. That's why I posted explicit quotes about it. Torgersen in particular was very emphatic about that, that it was a recommendation rather than something they should absolutely follow. The people who responded very clearly took the slates as recommendations. Again, that's why I posted explicit quotes about it.
So the slate goes out, people examine the works, they honestly enjoy it and think the works are the best in their category, and then that work gets a ton of nominations. Or they examine the work, decide it's terrible despite the recommendation, and then they don't nominate it--which pretty clearly happened in a few cases.
Why do you think that the voters couldn't have possibly honestly thought that those works were the best?
Despite not being its leader this time around, Correia's very vocal at being a massive rallying vector for his followers to participate - at first I thought he was in charge of Sad Puppies 3 from reading his blog!
So, instead, you read recommendations, you read the subset of works that appeals to you (for whatever reason). That is what the slate is. That's why I posted explicit quotes about it. Torgersen in particular was very emphatic about that, that it was a recommendation rather than something they should absolutely follow. The people who responded very clearly took the slates as recommendations. Again, that's why I posted explicit quotes about it.
Torgersen can be emphatic until he turns red in the face, but it's Vox Day who finalized the slate, and it's the Rabid Puppies who make up the bulk of the Puppy movement.
why did some people withdraw once they found out they were on the slate, then?
They've been pretty clear about it. Vox Day is a racist shithole, the slate gave a large boost that helped them win, and they wanted to disassociate themselves from him. I'm not sure what that has to do with anything.
So, instead, you read recommendations, you read the subset of works that appeals to you (for whatever reason). That is what the slate is. That's why I posted explicit quotes about it. Torgersen in particular was very emphatic about that, that it was a recommendation rather than something they should absolutely follow. The people who responded very clearly took the slates as recommendations. Again, that's why I posted explicit quotes about it.
Torgersen can be emphatic until he turns red in the face, but it's Vox Day who finalized the slate, and it's the Rabid Puppies who make up the bulk of the Puppy movement.
Sure, and the quotes I took from people who said they were looking forward to reading recommendations came from Vox Day's blog in response to Rabid Puppies.
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hold the phone
how, exactly, is this guy going to determine whether a gay fictional person is legitimately gay
like, what
this is the part I will confess to literally always being baffled by, is that the only time the regressives are offended by the presence of Others is... anytime you're able to actually detect their presence.
"If he was really gay, he'd be completely invisible to me!"
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Let's say that every scifi work can be divided into one of two categories: good scifi and bad scifi. The "spirit of the awards", as you put it, is to vote for the best of the good scifi. If you are voting for bad scifi, then you are violating the spirit of the awards, irrespective of the reason for your vote.
Now, let's also say that every scifi work can be divided into one of another set of categories: SJW or not. The Puppies believe that "SJW scifi" is a subset of "bad scifi." That is, if a work is influenced by SJW ideas, then it destroys the story and it is bad. They don't believe a SJW scifi can possibly be good. See the story I told above. The guy believed that because BioWare "made a character gay", they were destroying his characterization. In his view, a SJW idea (trying to shoehorn a gay character into every work) made Dragon Age or whatever into a bad video game.
With me so far?
They believe that the Hugos have been politically manipulated in the past. SJWs ensured that only SJW works had a shot at winning. In the view of the Puppies, SJWs were intentionally voting in bad scifi, even though it violated the "spirit of the awards", because they wanted to make a political point. That's the exact same accusation you're making.
They wanted to counter that. They wanted to ensure that only good scifi won. From their perspective, that necessitates voting in non-SJW works (because, remember, they believe no SJW work can possibly be good). Of course, their view of what makes up SJW scifi is so broad that they're left primarily (not totally) with openly conservative works by openly conservative authors. But they're still voting in what they see as good works. They honestly like John C Wright. They honestly like Kratman.
From their point of view, voting in good works, satisfying the spirit of the awards, and "sticking it to the SJWs" are all the same thing.
Yeah, it's a completely alien viewpoint to me. Like, of course he's gay only because they made him gay.
He's a fictional character! Any trait he has is only because they gave him that trait!
And it's such a small aspect of the game that it really doesn't hinder the story. They're making the game more inclusive at precisely no cost.
Shesh.
All Bioware characters are Hawkesexual by default.
I thought that everyone knew that.
No. The point fo the award is to vote for what you think was the best sci-fi or fantasy or whatever novel/novella/short-story/editor/artist/etc of that year. This idea of "good sci-fi" and "bad sci-fi" is coming outta nowhere and makes no sense. There's no two groups here. There is simply sci, a continuum, and you vote for the one you think is best.
Rather then voting for the work they think is best though, they are voting a slate, a specifically predetermined list, in order to make a political point. They are voting for these works because they are on the slate, not because each members thinks they are the best X of 2014. You can tell this cause it is a slate.
If this was about voting for what they thought was best, there would be no slate. All you'd need to do was encourage more voters and it would simply happen. The very fact that there was a slate proves that this is not about what they think is best, it's about sending a political message. The very fact that the slate worked as it did, of course, shows that their grievances are nonsense.
Everybody's Shepcurious on the SSV Daddy Issues.
You guys are talking past each other. @shryke accurately describes reality, and @Solomaxwell6 describes the puppies motivation. Two things that are quite independent from each other.
Puppies are voting to make a political statement, but they are doing so because they have been told that SJW did it first.
And since those SJWs started inserting wrongthought into their science fiction novels in 1895, they've got a lot of catching up to do.
I missed this blog post by Jason Sandford when it first came out, which is a shame. Because A) it's an excellent write-up on the situation IMO, and
No, we aren't. Solomaxwell6 is saying they are voting for what they think is best and that's simply not accurate. They know they aren't cause voting for a slate is not that and they know it. It's a slate specifically because it's about sending a message. The very idea of a slate vote is to ignore your own specific opinions in favour of collective action.
More simply, I think it's ridiculous to pretend these guys didn't know what they were doing when they decided to get together and vote on a specific list put forth by a politically-active blowhard.
That coincidentally is the publisher for most of the slate.
- John Stuart Mill
I think it's pretty convenient to ignore the birth of the puppies coinciding with the great "Why you should boycott Enders Game" push. Was that the opening shot in the sci-fi culture wars? Idk who can say with these sorts of things. But it was certainly the largest salvo before or since.
it is the ultimate irony that the Puppies are apparently railing against people voting for works because of author politics and to combat that they nominate their own slate of works ...based on author politics
This has been going on well before that time frame but I am posting from my phone so finding a time line that's more exacting will have to wait
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Those darn SJW's and their time travel!
While they don't do this as a group, there should be a sub-group within who aren't that self aware of what's going on and when confronted with that head on refuse to accept it. By doing that it'd break down their entire belief system and their own identity, which many see issues like this as one and the same thing. Though there are some, like Correilla, who I'm unsure what camp he belongs to. It's hard to tell when the bullshit starts and his real beliefs begin with him.
Essentially this cognitive dissonance eventually causes people like Mr. Scalzi to reply in kind and then it's all about "see how mean those SJWs are when they claim they want equality for everyone!"
It is a sad and tired refrain worthy of ridicule
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This has been bubbling below the surface for years in conservative circles of fandom. It probably started with comics getting more inclusive, then we had Gamergate - all the forms of media are being noticed being inclusive medium by medium and every format has its own conservative backlash and now it's finally the novel industry's turn. This activity isn't hard to believe in coming from Correilla, and Baen's conservative group. This is what Toni Weisskopf, Baen's present publisher, said in 2014.
http://accordingtohoyt.com/2014/03/10/the-problem-of-engagement-a-guest-post-by-toni-weisskopf/
I don't think that's all that unusual. If you were a book publisher, you'd probably try to publish books that you think are good (for some value of good). They might also vote for junk that they hate but would sell well, but from what I hear it doesn't to apply to this situation. I'm going to guess that the people who run Castalia House do think most of the books they publish are great.
Vox Day is only really prominent because he's the lead editor and one of the major authors of Castalia House. It makes sense that people who read his blog like the work of Castalia House... what other reason would they have for reading it? Even the vanity votes for best editor... he probably honestly thinks he's a great editor, and his readers probably honestly agree.
Sure, there could certainly be an element of greed or a desire for notoriety in there. But it's not the only motivation.
We're each talking about both. He's saying they're not voting for the books they think is best. I am. The argument is about whether or not they can vote for the works they think is best while making a political point, and I think they most certainly can.
First of all, let's address the fact that "the point of the award is to vote for what you think was the best sci-fi or fantasy or whatever" is more or less exactly what I said in my previous post in literally the second sentence. You're trying to make a point of contention where none exists. Categorizing based on good or bad is just a way of saying that they believe left-wing works are, by their nature, undeserving of the award. They think it hurts the story, and that's why they think a left-wing work would never actually deserve a Hugo. Again, that's why I gave the BioWare example. The guy thought that what could've been a good video game became lousy because the possibility of a same sex relationship hurt the characterization. The Puppies apply that reasoning to anything with what they perceive to be left-wing elements.
You know, of course, that winning a Hugo is a two-stage process. There are the nominations first, and that's what's relevant here. In the nominations, people can vote several times. They aren't restricted to what they think is the best (single) work. They vote for a whole bunch of works they think are good, not just the one they think is best. Recommendations in general are not only common but have the explicit of approval of the award committee, which provides links to several recommendation websites. Go to any active blog run by scifi author or editor, and you can probably find some Hugo recommendations in there.
A possible distinguishing feature between the slate and a typical recommendation is that the slate doesn't care about the specific works, it's just a unifying feature. That is, someone making a recommendation might say "These are the best novels I read last year, you should read them and nominate the ones you like." Someone making a slate might say "Vote for these works. Don't worry about reading them, it doesn't matter how good they are, we just want to win."
You can correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that that's where our biggest disagreement is. You think that to the majority of voters, the slate is all about the latter case. I think the slates are more like typical recommendations. Here are some quotes from Sad Puppies 3:
Sad Puppies 2 involved over two months of public recommendations and discussions culminating in a slate that consisted of, at most, two nominations per category and skipped a number of categories.
The Rabid Puppies recommendation was a lot closer to a slate done purely for political reasons ("I encourage those who value my opinion on matters related to science fiction and fantasy to nominate them precisely as they are"), but if you look at the discussion people do talk about reading and reviewing the recommendations if they have not already read them:
And so on. Clearly the Puppies voters are actually reading rather than just automatically nominating everything. And the results of the nominations seem to support this. There was a lot of variation, some of the Puppies nominations got several times more votes than others. If there was a large and totally unified Puppy team, votes still wouldn't be identical but with some exceptions (eg the new Dresden book) you wouldn't be seeing such a huge disparity. What's actually happening is that there is a relatively large group of people, each with pretty similar tastes (works from Castalia House, Torgerson, etc), each reading the same small set of works (because they're checking out the various Puppies recommendations), and primed to enjoy those works (because of the recommendations from authors/editors whose taste they respect). So you get a few dozen or a couple hundred extra nominations for a given work, which was often enough to push it into the top five. This wasn't some massive fascist conspiracy with hundreds of conservatives marching lockstep behind Vox Day.
It's a bit of both really. While some or maybe a lot of the puppies might really go for what they like best(and I'd say Butcher and Sanderson are a safe bet), for some of them it is clearly about showing those SJWs how it's done.
This becomes proportionally more in the Teddy Beale camp, where I suspect a large number of trolls, that just want to rig the awards. His gamergate buddies don't care about the Hugos.
I've heard stories about people buying supporting memberships for friends, or using supporting memberships as contest awards, just to help the slate they support.
That I think is very distasteful (also heavily precedented). I don't think any of the main Puppies figures have done that, though, and I don't think it's fair to attribute that motivation to anywhere near the whole group.
Isn't that what Hubbard did at one point?
Maybe! The one I had in mind was They'd Rather Be Right, which was a terrible novel and won because it was one of the first Hugos, there were only a couple hundred attendees that year, and the publisher bought a bunch of memberships. Quick Wiki check says that the authors had a connection with Scientology. We might be thinking of the same thing.
I mean, I did. I actually directly quoted several of those comments.
It's a lot of "I hate SJW crap, I look forward to reading your recommendations and seeing if they're worthy of a nomination." They are not simply saying "I don't know these people, but I will vote for them because fuck SJWs."
That's my whole point, that for them the two goals (screwing over liberals, voting for the best scifi) are identical. It's not a matter of choosing one over the other.
You expect them to say that out loud? They're not that stupid. Not that it's difficult to make the connection, Correila's blog is rife with bullshit claiming to have the upper hand on morality on social issues while switching between outright saying horrible things then backtracking with weasly words about he's not a bad guy, honest, those SJW's are liars who are besmirching his honor * Three paragraphs later * VOX DAY IS TOTES COOL YOU GUYS FUCK THE PC POLICE FOR RUINING OUR FUN.
I think that once you get to the point where you're assuming that they aren't even reading the scifi (even though they consistently say they are, even though they are posting on sites dedicated to scifi authors and publishing houses) then you're getting really deep into a conspiracy theory.
You don't seem to get it. By voting for a slate you are by definition making a political point (of solidarity if nothing else) rather then voting for the work you think is best. That's what a slate is.
Regardless of what they might think is good or bad, by voting for the slate they are explicitly saying this is about sending a message not about what they think is the best work. Cause if it was just about voting for the best work, there wouldn't be a slate and they wouldn't have voted for it. They would have just rustled up more voters and those voters would have just done their thing.
I attribute that to the courted Gamergaters, not the blog followers. It's also not the first time Correilla has been suspected of fraud either, the industry has been skeptical about his book shipping in large numbers for a while now* and he's not exactly someone whose reputation would suggest he wouldn't do it for lolz. I'm not saying it's true, I simply wouldn't be surprised if it was. This is where it's harder to tell his bullshit persona from his real beliefs, which overlap. Have you read his blog?
edit: Ironically Sad Puppies are attempted a conspiracy themselves on the Hugos and they're up front about it. And being overshadowed by their demented twins Rapid Puppies.
* what's amusing is that he claims to be a huge book seller with a large fan base while his book presence on the internet is miniscule. Google his books, the lack of discussion is amazing. I don't expect him to be as popular as Butcher, but nobody is talking about his books except on Amazon and Goodreads.
But that's completely different story. No one's suggesting that buying votes for other people with the express purpose that they vote your slate is a good thing.
That's also not what Correia, Torgersen, or Vox Day did.
Stuffing a ballot is very different from making a recommendation to your relatively large audience, who check out the recommendation and then vote the same way as you after making the honest decision that you are right.
This is more like your neighbors making a fuss in year one, getting onto the ballot in year two, and sweeping the ballot in year three.
You had all the time in the world to see that they had recruited folks to their cause like crazy over the past 3 years, and just ignored it.
who is the one specifically courting non-readers for explicitly political reasons to vote for his shit
This is true in a literal sense (and probably is the way the Sad Puppies actually feel) but I think that Harry Dresden is right that there's a lot of dog-whistling going on, too, especially considering that Rabid Puppies outnumber the Sad Puppies.
I mean... if the Puppy movement as a whole were really just interested in increasing Hugo voting participation because they thought that WorldCon has become too insular and the attendees aren't representative of the SF&F readership as a whole then they could have just run a "get out the vote" operation and let the new larger voter pool nominate who they wanted.
Instead, they picked a slate, and while the slate they chose no doubt has some stuff that they think is really great, it was also pretty clearly designed to troll the people who the Puppies think are their ideological enemies.
Do you think that every science fiction fan reads every single science fiction work every year? Probably not, that would be ridiculous, right?
So, instead, you read recommendations, you read the subset of works that appeals to you (for whatever reason). That is what the slate is. That's why I posted explicit quotes about it. Torgersen in particular was very emphatic about that, that it was a recommendation rather than something they should absolutely follow. The people who responded very clearly took the slates as recommendations. Again, that's why I posted explicit quotes about it.
So the slate goes out, people examine the works, they honestly enjoy it and think the works are the best in their category, and then that work gets a ton of nominations. Or they examine the work, decide it's terrible despite the recommendation, and then they don't nominate it--which pretty clearly happened in a few cases.
Why do you think that the voters couldn't have possibly honestly thought that those works were the best?
Torgersen can be emphatic until he turns red in the face, but it's Vox Day who finalized the slate, and it's the Rabid Puppies who make up the bulk of the Puppy movement.
They've been pretty clear about it. Vox Day is a racist shithole, the slate gave a large boost that helped them win, and they wanted to disassociate themselves from him. I'm not sure what that has to do with anything.
Sure, and the quotes I took from people who said they were looking forward to reading recommendations came from Vox Day's blog in response to Rabid Puppies.