Okay. This is not going to be my usual well-constructed Reasoned Discourse thing, only because I am laughing too hard, and I think that we could all share in the laugh.

So, a thing did happen at the traditional Loser Party after the Hugo Awards. That thing was George R.R. Martin, the man who sits upon the Iron Throne of the whole tongue-in-cheek affair that is the Hugo Awards Loser Party, showed up with a sack full of literal, actual vintage car hood ornaments and started handing them out like they were trophies.

Get it? Because award night trophies look like hood ornaments?

He handed them out to whoever it pleased him to, which I guess included the people he felt had been most hurt by the Sad Puppy shenanigans and the people whose tact and grace had impressed him: the people bumped off the ballot, the people who dropped off the ballot after having been bumped on, the even-handed blogger Eric Flint, people like that.

Obviously, this private individual carrying out a touching but still tongue-in-cheek private joke chose to honor people of his own choice.

So naturally, the Sad Puppies and even more so their allies in Gamergates went wild, screaming all over Twitter and their sub-reddits and the rest of the internet that THE FIX WAS IN ALL ALONG, that THE VOTING DIDN’T MATTER, that THE NO AWARDS WERE JUST A SHAM, because here was George R. R. Martin, handing out trophies at a private party and these were clearly the ~*real*~ awards, arranged by the Social Justice Hivemind…

I remind you: sack full of hood ornaments.

Not a figure of speech. Not hyperbole or a metaphor.

Actual hood ornaments.

This is old news at this point, though they’re still talking about it.

Today I discovered something new.

Okay, honored guest and Hugo host David Gerrold made a joke some time ago about this year they’ll have to hand out asterisks with the trophies. So at the pre-party, they had these commemorative coasters, with an asterisk and the Hugo logos printed on, which they gave out to the nominees. It was a gift, not an award. Its meaning was a joke. Some people thought it was a tasteless joke. I think it was a little off-tone and ill-considered, a rare misstep from David Gerrold, but it was not part of the award ceremony. Nobody got an asterisk next to their name on the ballot or in the results.

Nevertheless, there’s been some conspiracy-mongering around it, of a similar type to that which surrounded what I’m sure somebody will start calling #HoodOrnamentGate any minute now… well, I say “of a similar type”, but I’ve just learned it’s the exact same thing.

Yes.

There are people out there saying that because the Hugo logo appears on it and it was given to nominees, it constitutes a Hugo Award, one that was issued in defiance of the WorldCon by-laws governing such things. I wonder if there were also gift bags that have the Hugo logo on them? I’m quite sure there were programs and other sundry items bearing the WorldCon and Hugo logos on them. I’m also quite sure that alone does not make something a Hugo Award.

So far, it seems to be mainly one person pushing the theory, and the comments on the page are both few and not exactly clamoring to uphold his nonsense.

But we can always rely on the good folks at Gamergate to roll up their sleeves and do what no one else will do… which is take the thinnest, most obviously wrong and easily disproved ~*theory*~ on the internet and immediately start touting it as “evidence” of something. Collusion, probably. Notably while the blog post asks the (extremely leading, and also easily answered “no”) question of “Did Worldcon defraud its members?”, Gamergate’s link to it trumpets, “Hugo Awards Under Fire for Disenfranchising Voters” as if this were a factual description of one person, on the internet, asking questions based on false premises.

I’d ask how they square this with their insistence on the highest standards of journalistic ethics, but I’ve asked Gamergate about its lack of ethics before, so I already know what the answer is: they’re not journalists, so it doesn’t count.

This is the one respect and one respect in which Gamergate is superior to the Sad Puppies. The Sad Puppies are complete and utter hypocrites. Gamergate slightly less so, in that they are honest about their hypocrisy. They fully admit that their goal is to foist what they call ethics on everyone else, not themselves.

In short, they come by their dishonesty honestly.

So, one of the Sad Puppy Hugo picks—and thus one of the people shut out of the awards this year—is Toni Weisskopf, an editor at Baen Books. The Sad Puppies, in their post-mortem attempts to twist the rebuke fandom gave them into “Evil SJWs Doing Evil Things”, have turned this woman into a political soccer ball, kicking her down the field and then demanding we either kick her back or let them score a point.

I think most people are quite sensibly refusing to play soccer with these creeps.

Myself, I have no opinion on whether or not Toni deserves a Hugo award in the greater sphere of things, though I will say that some commentators at File 770 give a pretty solid defense of their decision to vote No Award over her on the merits, given that she was nominated as best long form editor but it wasn’t clear what her actual contributions in the field were this year, and she declined to list any. Some of them point out that they personally didn’t vote No Award over Sheila Gilbert, a Puppy Pick in the short form editor category who provided clearer examples of her handiwork.

But of course, nobody acknowledges this, because this destroys the Puppy narrative. The Sad Puppy spin on this situation requires us to believe that nobody voted for any of their picks except for them (which makes their numbers look a lot bigger), that all the “SJWs” voted in lockstep, voting down the Puppy picks out of “spite”, that every vote for No Award is by someone who didn’t read or look at the nominations.

None of that is terribly surprising.

What is a little surprising is the next wrinkle.

A man named David Lang in the comments section I mentioned above had this to say:

“So why is Toni Weisskopf who head Baen so undeserving to win the best editor award?

She’s been part of Fandom, attending Cons since she was very young. She’s no outsider any way you look at it.”

I thought this was a little odd when I read it, like someone had got his propaganda twisted around in his head and mixed up a couple of Sad Puppy talking points. Surely, even if they believe that the Hugos tend to reward insiders, they wouldn’t expect it to be so naked? Then I saw a quote from a post on the blog of Larry Correia, the founder of the Sad Puppy campaign:

“Toni Weisskopf has been part of organized Fandom (capital F) since she was a little kid, so all that bloviating about how Fandom is precious, and sacred, and your special home since the ‘70s which you need to keep as a safe space free of barbarians, blah, blah, blah, yeah, that applies to Toni just as much as it does to you CHORFs.  You know how you guys paid back her lifetime of involvement in Fandom?

By giving 2,496 votes to No Award.”

This… this is what they’re actually going with.

The Sad Puppy narrative is that Toni Weisskopf was owed a Hugo for being a good member of fandom for decades. They nominated her in the category of best long form editor in particular only because that’s what she does, but the “CHORFs” or “SMOFs” or “SJWs” really owed her a Hugo because she’d put in her dues. The Puppies viewed it her nomination as putting her up for a lifetime achievement award for a member of a community.

Now, they all along have been claiming that this is basically what the Hugos have been reduced to. This is the narrative they’ve constructed to explain the discrepancy between their personal tastes—the tastes of those in the niches they cater to—and the work rewarded by the larger fandom community that WorldCon represents.

“They’re just giving awards to their friends,” they say. “They’re just giving awards to the people who voice the correct opinions. They’re just giving awards to people who go with the program. They just give awards to people who tick the right demographic checkboxes”

So they found a woman who was part of the community, and they kicked her down the field. They themselves obviously didn’t think her editing in 2014 was particularly notable as when they talk about why she deserved a Hugo, all they can mention is her years of “service” to fandom.

And you know what? If she had won while the other Puppy-packed categories were torpedoed, they would be crowing right now that they were right. Larry Correia says in that blog post, “I wanted the mask to come off and for the world to see how the sausage was really made, but even I was a little surprised by just how vile you are.”

Meaning he was expecting Toni Weisskopf to win an editing award for being a member of a community rather than merit, and that didn’t happen.

And he’s disgusted?

No, he’s disappointed.

But rather than admitting that the data has verified his hypothesis is false, he’s just adjusted his hypothesis. He and his flunkies are calling his imagined enemies hypocrites for not giving an award to someone he thinks should “deserve it” by what he thinks is their reasoning.

I love this, by the way. I love this trope. You see it so often whenever a horde of outraged reactionaries doesn’t get their way. They’ll start calling everybody else hypocrites, and it will be for one of two reasons. If they lack imagination, they’ll call the other side “hypocrites” for violating beliefs that only they themselves hold. If they have more imagination than discernment, though, they’ll accuse the other side of being hypocrites for violating the beliefs that they, in their feverish fantasies, have projected upon that side.

“You’re such a lousy thief, you’d probably steal my wallet if I gave you half a chance,” the Sad Puppy says.

“I’m not a thief, and I don’t want your wallet,” says everyone else.

“Hypocrites,” the Sad Puppy says. “To call yourself a thief and not steal a wallet! That makes you thieves and liars!”

And the sad thing is that in all of this moral and philosophical contortionism, Larry has revealed that he and Brad are still stuck on the idea that put them down this path: that it’s possible to be owed an award. Not deserve an award in the sense of being award-worthy, but be owed an award in the sense that it belongs to you by default and showing up is just a formality.

When this honor was denied to them and/or their favorites, they didn’t give up on the idea of the world owing people awards, they only gave up on the idea that it could be due to merit. And if they could just figure out what the magic formula is, they could expose that formula to the world and bring the whole system down to replace it with one where merit is the magic formula, meaning—in their heads—that the awards belong to them/their favorites by default.

On the subject of magic formulas, the Puppies also use the presence of Toni Weisskopf and Sheila Gilbert among others on their slate as a sort of protective charm. “You can’t say that we’re sexist,” they say. “You can’t say that we’re trying to oppose diversity. You can’t say these things. We have protection.”

They think of their opponents as people who are interested in quotas, so they do their best to fill them, and then call their opponents hypocrites (see above!) for not respecting the quota.

I’ll call the Puppies sexist for this reason alone: the frequency with which they use women as props.

They’re using Toni Weisskopf as a ball, kicking her themselves and setting her up to be kicked back.

Brad Torgersen used his wife as a shield when he was accused of racism, in a very public and very obvious way. Notably, when people pointed this out, he chose not to defend himself against the charge. Instead, he pretended he had been accused of something far worse (having married her as a sham, only to use her as a shield) and loudly decried that this idea was ludicrous. Yes, it is, Brad. Which is why nobody said it. The fact that you jumped from what people actually said—what actually happened—to defend yourself against a ridiculous but imaginary charge suggests that you know what you did, and you yourself find it indefensible.

Over on his blog, John C. Wright is managing to simultaneously hide behind his wife and threaten to beat other men’s brains in with her.

And there’s something very obviously deliberate in the choice of next year’s lead Sad Puppy, Kate Paulk. Ever since the choice was announced, they’ve been saying things like, “Let’s see anyone call us sexist now.” and “If they try to fight back next year, they’ll be violating their own principles!”

(“You probably want to steal my wallet right now!”)

There’s a scene near the end of the series Angel, when the title character is having a climactic battle with the season’s Proxy Big Bad, Marcus Hamilton (played, fittingly enough, by Gamergate celebrity darling Adam Baldwin).

Hamilton says, “Why do you keep fighting?” He points out that Angel has signed away his happy ending, the reward for which he has theoretically been fighting all these years. He points out, “There’s nothing in it for you anymore!”

Angel replies, “People like you, who don’t care about anyone or anything, will never understand the people who do.”

And Hamilton comes back, “Yeah… but we won’t care!”

The Sad Puppies, at the coaching of their antispiritual leader Vox Day, have actually made, “We don’t care.” into a sort of motto. They’re never going to understand the principles of the people they’ve decided to try to drive out of fandom because they don’t care enough to try. Any attempt to explain, any prelude to a meeting of minds, is met with a practiced, “We don’t care.”

I think this is part of why the Puppies have been characterizing the five unawarded Hugos the way they have been, using imagery like “scorched earth” and “nuked” and “they burned the village to save them.” To them, it’s all about the trophies and it’s only about the trophies. It’s only bigger than that insofar as they want to be the ones who hand them out, missing the point that there isn’t any one individual who has that power and that the trophies would lose their meaning if there was.

They’ll never understand why we fight.

And they won’t care.

Two years ago, Larry Correia started the Sad Puppies campaign with one goal and one goal only: to get himself the award he thought he deserved. He hadn’t exactly been snubbed by the science fiction community, but he never quite got that “it’s an honor just to be nominated” is more than just a platitude.

Last year, Larry—having realized that not only wasn’t going to work but didn’t play very well outside his most ardent fan base—decided he really didn’t want a silly award anyway and instead ran the Puppy campaign again with a slightly different goal: to poke a stick in the eye of the people he thought were responsible for denying him awards.

This year, he handed off the torch to Brad Torgersen, who tried to powerwash the evidence that the Sad Puppies was nothing more than a tantrum and gild it with a coat of noble paint. The Sad Puppies exist, he says, to bring freedom to science fiction fandom. They have always existed for this reason. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. We love Big Brad.

The Sad Puppies have come to free us from the people who tell us what we’re allowed to write, what books we’re allowed to like. The Sad Puppies have come to liberate the Hugo awards from the tiny clique of people who have organized in order to control it.

Freedom to write whatever we want, though, comes with a responsibility. It means we must not pander. Pandering is defined as writing anything other than what Brad Torgersen thinks is exciting. It means we must not give in to thought police. Giving in to thought police is when we put characters or themes in a story that Brad Torgersen does not see the point of. We can like whatever books we like, so long as they are good books.

If we like books that Brad Torgersen does not think are good, then we are either Commissars pushing an agenda by telling people what books to like, or frightened and cowed proles who need Brad Torgersen to free us from the Commissars.

And so, in order to liberate the Hugo awards from the small but powerful clique that seeks to control the nomination process, Brad Torgersen assembled a slate of nominees chosen in a transparent, democratic process where he picked the nominees himself, but each and every person involved could see that he was the one who picked them.

In order to make sure he sent a message to those people who would try to misuse the Hugos to advance their careers and prop up their cronies, he enlisted the help of internet rabble rouser Vox Day in getting his hand-picked slate onto the ballot, along with Vox, works published by Vox’s publishing house, and works by Vox’s protege writer.

Through the midst of all this high-minded liberating that was going on, Brad Torgersen said that his real goal was to shake things up and get more people involved in the Hugo voting process so it wasn’t just the same old people making the pick every year. He said that whether his picks won or lost, no result would please him more than to see more people voting.

Well, right away, it seemed like Mr. Torgersen was getting his wish. WorldCon voting memberships started selling like hotcakes. Torgersen et al had a lot of bold predictions about what this meant. Clearly, since the previous situation was that a tiny, insular clique that was out of touch with real people in the real world was manipulating things, the hundreds and then thousands of new people who were putting money on the line to participate must have been The People, Rising Up As One to re-take their award from the tiny, tiny clique that had subverted them.

But, Torgersen said, he would be happy no matter who won.

WorldCon took place this past weekend. The Hugo Awards were presented Saturday night. The truth is now known.

The truth is, Brad Torgersen got his wish in one regard only: there was a record-breaking level of both WorldCon attendance and Hugo voting.

Is he happy?

He told us he’d be happy if this happened.

I’m having a hard time telling from here, but I don’t think he’s happy.

Approximately 3,500 people voted for “No Award” over almost any of the works or individuals that the Sad Puppies rammed through the Hugo nomination process. This was not only a victory for No Award, but a landslide. While some Puppies have tried to spin this by saying that their “enemies” the “Social Justice Warriors” were “voting in lockstep” while they, free men and tokens of good conscience, were voting their individual will, the truth is that No Award didn’t just get more votes than any other option, it got more votes than all the other options.

The idea that those voters were marching in lockstep is also hard to credit. I’ve seen Puppy supporters saying, in so many words, “What else do you call multiple people voting for the same choice?” I’m not sure they understand how voting works, to be honest.

There’s a difference between bloc voting and a landslide, and this was a landslide. At the point where there are enough people for one choice in a field of six to capture a true majority, no trickery or politicking or procedural shenanigans or even much in the way of coordination is even needed. There’s a clear winner. There’s a clear favorite. At that point, it would take considerable cheating for the frontrunner to not win.

Now, the No Award option exists in part because the nomination process is not perfect and in part because the idea of the award is not just to recognize the best work in a year but the best work that is deemed by the Hugo voters as Hugo worthy. It gets invoked on at least some ballots in every category every year, as the instant run-off system the Hugos has used allows people to rank their choices in order. If you rank two out of the available five selections in places 1 and 2 and then put No Award in rank 3, you are signaling that the choices below that (or that you don’t rank at all), you’re effectively signaling that you found the first two works award-worthy and the other three not so.

What makes an individual work “award worthy”, of course, is highly subjective, which is why every member of WorldCon has the privilege to decide for themselves.

And last night, some three thousand people—the vast majority of members who cast votes—decided that none of the works that the Puppies had picked were award worthy, save Guardians of the Galaxy.

Now, for eight months, we have heard the Puppies shout about how there’s no rule against doing what they did, about how you can’t simultaneously say something is wrong while allowing it under the rules. Interestingly, this strikingly stark streak of legalism appears to have disappeared completely from the Puppy camps. They have, in the past 36 hours or so, managed to discover how something can be done within the rules and still be called unethical, unfair, and wrong.

“They didn’t even read the books!” they yell, never mind that some people made it their very public business to read everything before voting (there are reviews of the Puppy picks all over the web because of this) and never mind that there’s no rule that says they have to and never mind that objecting to their odious tactics and the numerous falsehoods and slanders they have used to excuse said tactics is a perfectly good reason to vote to throw a penalty flag.

Some people were assuredly voting No Award on principle (an idea which confuses the Sad Puppies, who are as sure of their moral superiority as they are their literary superiority), but some were voting on merit. All of them were voting as individuals acting their own conscience, which means they don’t have to answer for their votes to anyone.

Strangely, the Puppies—who speak of “commissars” they think want to control the vote—think they now have the right to call people to account for how they voted.

Strangely, the Puppies—who spoke of wanting to throw open the gates of participation, shake up a moribund sci-fi fandom, and get more people involved in voting for the Hugos—now see something sinister in the fact that more people came out to vote for this year’s Hugos than ever before.

All along, Brad Torgersen, Larry Correia, John C. Wright, and Vox Day have been talking about a “tiny clique” of people, a very small and very non-representative minority of the science fiction fandom, who have taken control of the Hugos through secret means, through coordinated bloc voting behind the scenes.

The fact that their campaign to stack the ballot succeeded so wildly with only a few hundred participants behind it strongly suggested that they were completely in error about this. The data from the nomination round shows us there was never any actual opposition for them to overcome.

Yet now they want us to believe that a “tiny minority clique” that couldn’t muster enough nominating votes to get anything on the ballot against the united camps of a couple hundred Puppies somehow managed to get 3,500 to turn out to vote in lockstep in the final ballot?

“Well, how else do you explain such an unprecedented outcome?”

The Sad Puppies created an unprecedented situation, and they have thus received an unprecedented rebuke.

From the beginning, Brad Torgersen’s premise has been that the Hugos have been awarding the wrong books for the wrong reasons.

“Such projection!” the Puppies howl. “That kind of mindset is what we’re fighting against!”

No, no. That’s been your cover story. There are no actual examples of books that won because some hobgoblin lurking in the cupboards at Tor whispered “make it so“. There is no actual evidence that people have been voting for anything other than what they thought was best.

There are only books that Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen don’t personally see the point of, thus, whose success must be illegitimate.

And, you know, it’s fine for someone to think that. It is. Tastes differ. Opinions differ. It happens.

What’s not fine is to take your own personal tastes, use the difference between them and other people’s as “evidence” that someone is lying or cheating, and try to force them on everyone else. This is what the Puppies have done. This is what they promise: as long as the phenomenon of people liking different things than they do continues, they will continue to fling accusations of corruption and steamroll over any attempts to recognize said works.

Puppies, months ago, someone gave you very good advice. David Gerrold, a remarkably even-tempered man whose insistence that the ceremony be held with the same grace no matter what any individual presenter thought of the choice was twisted by the Puppies into some kind of weird veiled threat, told you that no one likes the guy who comes to a party and does something nasty in the punchbowl. It’s not political. It’s not even really personal.

You just can’t behave atrociously and expect there to be no consequences.

Most adults know this.

I don’t know—and would not fathom to guess—to what extent Brad Torgersen believes the lines of bull that he’s been selling his followers for the past eight months, but at least one part of his narrative should be clearly exploded. If there is an “SJW infestation” in science fiction fandom, it is not a tiny minority that tenuously holds to power by operating in the shadows, and shining a light on the “rot” will not rally the people, “the real fans of real science fiction” against them.

There has been more light shining on the Hugos this year than any year before. Brad Torgersen has had more eyes on his blog, I’m sure, than ever before. Every time he got media exposure and someone new showed up at his blog or in the comments of the blogs of one of his cohorts, he would crow about how even the negative exposure just swelled his ranks.

Now he knows: for every one or two people who were swayed by his words, there were scores of people who looked at what he was selling and not only didn’t buy it, but felt compelled to put their money down for a membership just to stop him.

I said on Twitter that I doubt very much all 3,500 No Award voters were liberals. I believe this to be true.

I don’t think a single end of any political or philosophical spectrum has a monopoly on not liking bullies coming in and telling people what to do. I don’t think conservatives have more patience than liberals with people who come in and say that they don’t like the way a game is going so they’re going to keep turning over the gameboard until we let them win.

While the Puppies’ rhetoric might attract more conservative sympathy on the surface and while it certainly has a tendency to repel liberals—both by design—I don’t think the ability to see through the rhetoric is the exclusive province of the liberal.

Strangely, the Puppies seem hellbent on painting everybody who voted down their agenda as members of that tiny, insular, ultra liberal clique they claim to be here to save everyone else from. They would rather believe that their designated enemies are innumerable than face the fact that the people have spoken against them.

Many have predicted that next year’s Hugos will be even uglier. I’m not making a definitive prediction, but somehow, I don’t think so.

I do think that we might see a bit more politicking and coordination during the nomination process, as people will understandably feel that the only way to have their voice heard post-Puppy is to join a bloc. In this respect, the Puppies have created the monster they claim to have come here to eradicate. Pending rule changes for the year after that will dilute the impact of bloc voting, if they are ratified at the next WorldCon.

But we have seen that the Puppies were not only wrong, they were exactly wrong. Their great big power play has revealed themselves to be the insular clique: small, out of touch with both broader science fiction fandom and reality more generally, yet feeling entitled to complete control of the playing field.

We know that the vast majority people see right through their nonsense, and are willing to stand up and counted to say, “No more, enough.” And while this has been a bad year for the award ceremony, I think history will remember it as a good year for WorldCon, because it did get more people involved, it did sell more WorldCon memberships, and it did spread awareness of how the Hugos are awarded and it did raise interest in the process.

If the Puppies, in their desperation for something they can claim as a victory, can’t find any solace in that, then I don’t know where they’re going to get it.