Category Archives: Noisy Nonsense

The Essential Truth of Vox Day

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

A while back, I challenged any Puppy on Twitter to show that they really valued truth and honesty and factual reality as so many claim by acknowledging that the idea—widely promoted by Vox Day, including with a made-up quote—that David Gerrold had threatened the career of Brad Torgersen was not supported by facts. I asked them to either cite Gerrold doing so or label Day’s pronouncement a lie.

No one did. When pressed, one person said he couldn’t call it a lie because he felt that what Day had said was “essentially true”. He couldn’t cite facts or quotes, but it was “essentially true”. Its essence was true, or at least, it rang true to him.

Now, in fact-based reality, David Gerrold did not threaten Brad Torgersen. He did not imply that Puppies wouldn’t be welcome at Worldcon or the Hugos ceremony in particular, or that they would be treated discourteously as winners or losers. In fact, when it came to the ceremony, he laid down the law in the opposite direction: all are welcome, all are welcome. Connie Willis turned down a presenter gig specifically because she didn’t feel like she could abide that directive.

But if he didn’t do those things, the feeling among the Puppies is, he ought to have. It fits their worldview, their narrative, so much better if he did, so it doesn’t take much prompting from even a middlingly talented wordsmith to get them to believe that he did.

“If it’s not true, it ought to be!” could be given as a summation of it.

I’ve been calling Day out obliquely (as in, I’m not challenging him directly so much as pointing out what he’s doing) on Twitter for a while, whenever he engages in these lies. I don’t know if I’ve actually made anyone think by doing so, but I believe he’s afraid that might be happening. I mean, I don’t flatter myself to believe his blog post entitled Bi-Discoursality is entirely a response to me. Rather, I believe I’m a part of the general situation he is attempting to defend himself from.

Day’s supporters like to trot out “You don’t understand Vox, he’s a troll. He’s trolling. It doesn’t count.” when someone pins them down with something he said that is 1) too egregious, 2) too much of a lie, or 3) too egregious a lie for them to defend. This response ignores the fact that we do understand him, we know he’s a troll, and that’s irrelevant to the point at hand.

Well, Day is attempting to codify “Was trolling, didn’t count!” into a defensive shell against people calling out his lies. See, they’re not lies, they’re rhetoric, which is the only language those silly emotional irrational SJWs understand, you see? He has to use rhetoric to deal with, even though as a creature of pure logic and reason it’s such a foreign language to him that if he wasn’t also a certified supergenius he would never have been able to internalize its principles in order to communicate with us!

He would much rather use the reasoned method of dialectic to communicate with everyone, except he has to reserve that for those minds that are susceptible to reason and influence, you see, and…

Wait.

Wait.

Wait a minute.

Vox… Mr. Day… when you said “SJWs always lie.”, the example of a rhetorical statement that you put forth in that post, were you addressing us, those you call “SJWS”… or were you addressing your followers?

When you made your famous essentially true statements about David Gerrold, were you trying to convince those wily SJWs they were allied with a skunk, or were you trying to whip up your own base?

And regardless of your intention when you engage in these, ah, rhetorical flourishes… take a look around. How many of supposedly overly emotional, irrational SJWs that you claim to be trying to persuade with them wind up being persuaded? And how many of your own followers wind up repeating the lines and running with them like they’re God’s own truth?

God’s own essential truth, that is. The facts may not bear it out, but emotionally, the target of the rhetoric knows it to be true.

The post I’m referencing is itself a piece of rhetoric. It lays out no actual logical premise, no evidence, and no conclusion. It’s just a pre-emptive defense against anyone questioning his lies, wrapped up in hollow flattery towards his audience: you are so reasoned, so rational… and because I’m writing this dialectically, anyone as smart as you will understand that it is true! It’s a hedge against the day when the intellectual debt incurred by one of his lies overcomes the emotional investment his chosen audience has in agreeing with him.

He winds up the post by predicting that those who only speak rhetoric will see his post as nothing more than a man attempting to sound smart and then attack it. I suppose that, grade school gamer that he is, this is what he regards as a particular cunning trap and he takes this post as a sign that it worked. Or that’s what he would say, anyway.

In reality, it’s just another hedge. It gives his followers an out for ignoring any criticism. Don’t listen to the child who says the emperor is naked. The wise can totally see the clothes!

Sad Puppies Review Books: THE MONSTER AT THE END OF THIS BOOK

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

monster

The Monster at the End of this Book

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)

I remember when the cover of a book used to mean something. When you could look at the cover of a book and know exactly what you were getting. If you saw a gleaming chrome spaceship over the shoulder of an intrepid, chiseled explorer holding a ray gun, you didn’t even have to buy the book and read it because you knew exactly what the story would be just by looking at it. But you bought it anyway! And you read it, and liked it! Because that book was an objectively good book, and you knew it by looking at it.

People used to know how to tell stories back then. They knew which plot was the good plot, and they used that plot. They knew what dialogue was supposed to sound like. Sometimes I buy a book today and the dialogue is different than in other books. People, if I wanted different dialogue, I’d read something else. Stop signs. Trees, maybe. I don’t know. Not books! Books are supposed to be one way, not another way.

The cover of The Monster at the End of This Book is full of false promises and overblown hype, just like a woman. I remember when if a book told you that there was a monster in it, you knew what you were getting. There would be a hero who didn’t make any namby-pamby wishy-washy apologies for being a hero. There would be a princess or dame or broad of some description and she would be beautiful and love the hero after saying many times that she doesn’t, because he loved her and love conquers any objection.

There wouldn’t be any of this pandering PC crap that people spout just to get cred with the in-crowd. I know we all hate that, right? Pandering, right? It’s awful, right, when people pander? When they just say what they know is safe and popular, just repeat what their audience wants to hear? Well, I for one have the guts to stand up in front of an audience of people who hate that, and say that I hate it, too, and I don’t care who in my intended audience knows it!

The cover of this book promises a monster, which implies there’s going to be a battle. But there’s no battle. There is barely even a monster! Just some blue gamma male wimp who begs and pleads with you to stop reading the book on every page.

Looking at the obviously inflated Amazon reviews I can only conclude that a number of weak-willed liberal readers gave in to this blue cuck’s loathsome SJW bullying tactics and stopped reading before the disappointing reveal. Of course this doesn’t stop them from lavishing it with glowing reviews. These people care only about politics and demographics, not merit or value.

Well, I read it all the way to the end. The last thing you want to do is tell this red-blooded American he mustn’t do something or shouldn’t read something because I believe in the first amendment and I will read whatever the hell I want.

So I can tell you that according to the last page, the blue wimp is the monster. Allegedly. Typical self-flagellating gamma male posturing. Don’t you know that ALL men are monsters according to the Feminazis? Agreeing with this sexist sentiment is the only way a pathetic gamma male like this “Grover” character (named after Demo(n)cRAT president Grover Cleveland, I suppose) has of getting laid. I got news for you, Quisling: your complicity will not save you. The foundation of all modern feminism is in gender abolition radical feminism.

I did some digging and it turns out this book was produced by an entity called the “Children’s Television Workshop” and now known as the “Sesame Street Workshop”. Well, if you consider that children are tiny people, you might get a better name for it: People’s Television Workshop. This indoctrination factory produces books and television shows and movies and games for your children using your tax dollars. They air their main shows on PBS (or as I like to call it, “Public BS”), in case you needed any proof of the socialist agenda that underpins this thing. They’re targeting your children The whole thing is straight out of a Saul Alinksy Rules For Radicals-style playbook.

Also, apparently this Grover character is a Muppet. A family entertainer like Jim Henson must be turning over in his grave to know that his creations have been turned to a leftist political purpose.

Misandry and the promotion of a culture of fear and illiteracy are what you get if you buy this book. Since I already have a copy, I’ve decided to give it to my kids just so they know what they’re up against. I am pleased to report that they have read it through a dozen times and show no signs of stopping now. They laugh when the blue gamma cuck tells them to stop reading. They laugh right in his stupid, weak face. You hear that, Saul Alinksy? Your little gambit failed! What was supposed to be an indoctrination manual for the left turned out to be a training ground for those who love freedom! We the living read what we want, and we don’t stop just because some emasculated Feminazi puppet-man tells us to.

Two stars.

Puppy’s Progress

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

The Puppies keep describing the enemy they imagine they’re fighting in Orwellian terms. Well, if you want to see an example of groupthink setting out to punish badthink in action, head on over to Vox Day’s blog. Actually, that statement could probably stand on its own at any random instance in time, but I’m thinking in particular of this post, where Day wants to contrast three reviews he says are by “Social Justice Warriors” with one that isn’t: http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/05/smells-like-success.html

He starts the post by saying that the first review “precisely underlines the central point made by the Sad Puppies campaign and single-handedly serves to justify it”.

Now, I’m not sure which central point it so perfectly illustrates, as the central point of the Sad Puppies changes from day to day. Is it supposed to prove that there’s a clique that judges books by demography rather than merit?  Is that which central point Day is saying it supports? If so, I’d like to know how, as the critique is specific and refers to the text and not the author. Is it supposed to be a counterpoint to Brad Torgersen’s famous lament that he can no longer judge a book by its cover? If so, I would think the third review would serve better, as it points out that the ending of the story is explicitly spoiled by the title, Turncoat.

No, taking the three “SJW” reviews in total, I believe the specific one of the Sad Puppies’ nebulous and ever-shifting “points” which Day believes is being proven is just the general idea that some people who are reviewing books (and nominating them for awards and such) are choosing to lie about what’s good and bad on the basis of how they feel about the author or other externalities.

This is not actually something that I’ve seen articulated by any central personality of Sad Puppies, but by those lurking in the comments and on Twitter. It’s more Gamergate thinking than Sad Puppy thinking, at least in its explicit form.

The shortest review and Day’s response to it really hammer it home.

The review reads:

“I hated Turncoat – compared to how Iain Banks, Neal Asher, Peter Hamilton write sentient battleships and describe space warfare it was unbearable, then there were lines like ‘the men who…’ versus ‘the people who’ really jarred against me – it felt like a story written about AIs written by somebody who has ignored any progress in fiction, computing and so forth in 20 years. The opening battle scene at the start of The Reality Dysfunction is better than Turncoat in every way, and that was written in 1996.”

And Day’s response reads:

“I found that to be rather amusing, considering how spectacularly boring Iain Banks’s space battles are. But considering that Daveon hates Sad Puppies and hates Rabid Puppies, how surprising is it that he – mirabile dictu – just happens to hate ‘Turncoat’ as well?”

The first line is great: “I found it amusing that you profess to like A Thing, when I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that A Thing is unlikeable!” Yes, Day has caught another lying liar in another filthy lie! SJWs are so dedicated to the cause they will lie and say that boring things are interesting!

Or, y’know, different people find different things interesting.

See, the actual central point of the Sad Puppies that Day proves with these four reviews—all of which seem perfectly fair to me, as they all are rooted in the specifics of the text and all seem to honestly reflect how the reviewer received it—is the new central point that Brad Torgersen pivoted to last week when he said there’s no such thing as an objective standard and that the Sad Puppies are about packing the Hugos with people whose tastes reflect his own.

Because that’s what these reviews demonstrate: differing tastes. And given that there are three of them where the story is not to the reviewer’s taste and one where it isn’t, maybe Day is right and this does prove the need for a Sad Puppies campaign, from the point of view of the Puppies.

I know that’s not what Day means, of course. His own commentary on the post reflects his inability to grasp the concept of differing tastes, differing yet honest opinions. Understanding those things would require Day to possess some shred of empathy or a working theory of mind, neither of which he shows any evidence of. I suspect that like many people who rely on being able to brag about what society has told them is an objective measurement of their superior mental ability, Day has never bothered much with actual mental development. Why not? The test says he’s already at the top. There’s nowhere to go except for down.

This puts me in mind of a blog post by Christian blogger slacktivist, which started off as part of a scene-by-scene sporking of the first Left Behind movie and digressed into a meditation on Kirk Cameron’s progress as an actor, contrasting Cameron as an actor who believed that he was at the top of his form as a child on a sitcom and had no more room for improvement with fellow sitcom actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, who has never stopped trying to improve himself.

And this brings me to one of the more curious things found at Day’s post, in the comments. One of the reviewers is quoted as saying that Turncoat reads like it was written by an AI that ignored the past decades’ worth of progress in writing. One of the commenters responds to this in part with, “Progress in fiction, HA!” He would like us to read a book published 24 years ago and concerned only with the shape of plots, which he considers to be not just the last word but the only word in what makes writing good.

Progress? Ha! This is what the Puppies represent: people who believe there can be no advancement in the state of the art of storytelling, because to them there is neither state nor art. No room for improvement, and nothing to be improved.

I know Vox Day has something of a fanboy’s interest in the history of Rome. If he ever gets past the “playing with tin soldiers” phase of things and looks into it a little more deeply, he might notice that there was a trend during the late decline of the empire of poets and authors who trafficked in little more than polite and politic rearrangements of what had come before. No new ideas, no new forms, no new shapes. Aldous Huxley might have been thinking of a grammaticus of this age when he had a teacher in Brave New World ask pupils if they thought they knew better than the World Consensus Textbook: “Do you think you know better than Virgil? Do you think you can do better than Catullus?”

Despite Torgersen’s latter-day admission that it’s actually a matter of taste, this state of art in decline is broadly what the Puppies (and their incestuously close ideological cousins the Gators) are fighting for: stability to the point of stagnation, based around a global consensus of what a story is allowed to be.

Oh, sure, the zealous believers in free speech found in both camps will wring their hands and say, “No, no, no! We want people to be able to both make and enjoy whatever art they want! It’s just the dishonesty of it all that we’re fighting against!”

But when you define “dishonesty” as anyone who evinces an opinion that deviates from the accepted consensus… well… you wind up with things like this, where three reviews that independently arrive at similar conclusions, each making explicit reference to the text, are used as evidence that the reviewers are lying, which is used to justify a “revolutionary” campaign to root out such liars.

As I said, this is the triumph of “groupthink” over “badthink”.

Well, “triumph” might be too strong a word. It remains to be seen if the group is big enough to actually enforce and maintain their consensus reality, outside the carefully insulated protective aegis of their own spaces. Day likes to boast about his millions of monthly page views, yet when he was handing out numbered badges to his “minions” he ran out of takers in the low three hundreds. I suspect he has yet to learn the difference between browsing at someone and browsing with them. I’m also suddenly curious how many hits the Time Cube guy was getting at the height of its notoriety.

Oh, brave new world that has such people in it!

Progress? Ha!

WHAT?! YOUR SAD PUPPIES ARE EVOLVING!

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

So, the past week saw both camps of Puppies, Sad and Rabid, evolving their narratives in significant ways.

Vox Day, over on his blog, made a post declaring that burning the Hugos to the ground is “now a sub-optimal strategy” for the Sad Puppies, which is a weird thing to say given that this was never stated as the Sad Puppies’ goal, but was associated with his own campaign, the Rabid Puppies.

But let that go.

What does our master gamesman see as the optimal strategy now? Ah, he sees it as a big win if no slate fails to have any impact beyond the nomination process because there are too many people involved in voting now…

It’s weird, I’d swear I’ve heard that before. Oh, right. In their more moderate moments, that what the Sad Puppies have claimed to be fighting for all along.

He’s declaring it a firm victory because he either believes or is depending on the cattle that stampede behind him believing that there is a powerful clique that the Puppies are a countering force to, so if no one controls the final voting this doesn’t mean the Puppies win, it means their invisible enemies lost.

But of course, part of his meta-strategy is to declare everything a victory for him. He keeps referring to this as a “Xanatos Gambit,” which is a term for when someone engineers a situation so that all possible outcomes ultimately benefit them. It’s named for a fictional mastermind, though, not someone who simply doesn’t care what actually happens as long as his followers still think he’s cool, so I’m not entirely certain it’s the most accurate application of the term.

But let that go

This is a significant shift from Day for two reasons.

The first is that it signals what he thinks is most likely to happen. He rode high on the sweeping fantasy vision of himself as a Roman general leading a slavering horde of berserkers across the frozen river to assault the well-fortified position of his enemies (note to self: suggest history lessons for Vox), but he has just enough self-awareness to know that his strategy of lying and repeating the lie could come back and bite him if he tried to claim a sweeping victory where none existed, so he’s starting the spin now.

The second is that—as mentioned before—the endgame he now endorses is something the Sad Puppies have claimed to have wanted as their ultimate endgame.

I will not speculate as to the extent to which Day worked with the Sad Puppies. It is apparent from the timeline that he either did not read all the works he nominated or he had an advance look at their slate, since he nominated the same works within a day. It seems likely that there was similar cooperation in coordinating the official campaign artwork.

But let that go.

As the strangely moderated Vox Day’s stance melds seamlessly with the more moderate version of the Sad Puppies’ stance, it’s no longer necessary to try to tease out how their origins may have intertwined, as they’ve ended up in exactly the same place. If Day has enough awareness to even be conscious of the fact that he’s now thrown in completely with the Sad Puppies, I have to think he imagines this some sort of complex flanking operation he’s just completed, or maybe a pincer maneuver where two columns come together to the surprise of… well, absolutely no one, in reality.

And then the two columns get lost in the mcHe’s declaring it a firm victory because he either believes or is depending on the cattle that stampede behind him believing that there is a powerful clique that the Puppies are a countering force to, so if no one controls the final voting this doesn’t mean the Puppies win, it means their invisible enemies lost in the crowd? The wargame metaphor breaks down pretty quickly, to be honest.

But let that go.

On the other side of the increasingly illusory divide, we have Brad Torgersen. In what looks like a Facebook conversation, he appears to have dropped the central contention of the Puppy campaign. That is, he’s no longer maintaining that there was an organized effort by “SJWs” to nominate works and authors for “PC cred” reasons or to reward members of a clique and that the Sad Puppies were conceived to make sure that the nominees and winners really deserved them.

Nope. Now it’s just a matter of taste. You can read the comments in full at http://www.deathisbadblog.com/brad-torgersen-goes-full-post-modern/, where I read them, but I’ll excerpt the most significant lines here:

“Gents, thing is, there is *no* objective standard. None. Pretense to the contrary, [it] is just that: pretense. […] Year after year, a great swath of SF/F’s audience watches as the Hugos parade off to works which leave that swath cold. […] Again, no objective standard. Just taste. If people with taste similar to yours can vote in sufficient numbers, then your taste prevails. If those with a different taste can vote in sufficient numbers, your taste does not prevail.”

I kind of doubt at this point that Torgersen is either honest enough nor self-aware enough to be consciously admitting that the Puppies were founded on a pretense, that the lines that have been used to rally up a small army of small-minded followers were essentially lies, but there you have it. Just as I’ve been saying all along, just as many others have been saying: different people like different things for different reasons.

No need to imagine a clique or conspiracy or cabal or collusion or whatever scary c-word you want to slap on it this time. It’s just differing tastes.

The post I’m linking to is already almost a week old, so I’d expect if this admission were to herald a serious change in the Puppy discourse we’d have seen it already. But why should they start being self-consistent and internally coherent now? The Puppies are an apolitical group, except when they’re not. The Puppies don’t care about diversity, except when they’re its true champions. What exactly they did and why they did it changes from day to day, and I’m not even just talking about if you ask different members of the effort.

That is because at the end of the day, what we’re dealing with is people rationalizing away an irrational response to their feelings at not having their tastes represented as best/most mainstream. When defending its own naked, ugly self-interest, the human brain can and will pivot smoothly from one position to another and just not acknowledge the contradiction between the two but not acknowledge that any movement occurred at all.

They love to throw around the word “Orwellian”, but the way the Puppies constantly shift and evolve their narrative would leave the Ministry of Truth dizzy. If today the Puppies are about subjective taste, then the Puppies have always been about subjective taste.

But let that go.

How do we judge books?

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

Another way of looking at it is that maybe they have a point. That some people have taken politics into fandom and awards, and that they are judging writers by the color of their skin, their gender and their politics, rather than by the stories they write.

This was part of a comment left on the preceding post, “Sad Puppies and magical thinking“, which used a rather extreme yet pointed example furnished by John C. Wright to illustrate a phenomenon.

The idea that people have been judging stories politically rather than by their contents is an example of this phenomenon, which is assuming there must be a sinister explanation for when reality doesn’t conform to one’s expectations.

The idea that there’s a horde of “Social Justice Warriors” who judge stories not on quality or enjoyment but only on political agenda is oft asserted, but has never yet been demonstrated. This is an example of what I’m talking about when I say it appears the Puppies have fallen into the trap of assuming there must be a sinister explanation for when reality doesn’t conform to their expectations. It’s touted about as a proven fact, but any time this proof is offered round, it’s… not compelling.

In the first place, even when we find people discussing the identity and background of an author or character, this does not amount to judging these things “rather than” quality, does it? You might suspect that quality is being ignored, but you cannot objectively say that it is proven by the fact that other things are discussed.

And really, how likely is it that people would bother with work they don’t actually enjoy instead of work they do? I know that the stereotype of an “SJW” is someone who is soulless, joyless, and completely immune to (or opposed to) fun, but… what’s the motive to read at all, then? The very existence of the stereotype and the attributes… attributed… to it are part of the process.

If you just can’t understand how someone else might not enjoy the things that you enjoy, but enjoy things that you don’t, you have to explain it away when people say or demonstrate that this is the case. The people who said they liked that story did so for the wrong reasons! The people who said they enjoyed that game were lying! The sales figures, however modest they may be, are too high for a thing that you found to be un-fun, so they must be propped up artificially! And look, positive reviews! Award buzz! Why, isn’t that the proof of what you suspected? All these people wouldn’t be lying about their enjoyment of this thing without a reason, after all, and a mass campaign like this would account for the obviously inflated sales…

If you’re immersed in the viewpoint, then it all seems so reasonable. You miss the fact that there’s a step missing: proving that the people who review/praise/nominate/whatever the thing are lying. You’re using the unsupported premise that no one could actually enjoy a thing you didn’t enjoy as “proof” that people are lying, and using that “fact” to prove the rest.

“But why do you care at all if the book has a feminist perspective or queer characters or a Black author?” You might ask. “Why not just focus on quality, like we do?”

Well, there are two reasons, only one of which could be written off as “affirmative action”: in order to counter the extent to which books like these are ignored for reasons having nothing to do with quality.

Oh, here you think I’ve just confirmed what you’re saying? Nope. The reality of the situation (and even the reality of most formal affirmative action) is that it only means giving consideration to a book/candidate (which in this case means giving it a read, or at least starting to), not deciding it has merit before you’ve even seen it. Something like Ms. Bradford’s reading challenge doesn’t call on people to pretend to like books that they otherwise find bad. It asks them to give said books a read. If any of them wind up nominated, the balance of probability is that the nominator found them good enough to be worthy of that, isn’t it?

The second reason is what I suspect the more powerful and more common reason, given that we do read for pleasure and diversion and self-fulfillment. And that is… well, you know how sometimes people want to read books with, say, a Christian perspective? You know how sometimes people want to read a book with military settings and characters? You know how sometimes people reading a military science fiction story or a Christian SF/F story are interested in knowing before they plunk their money down if the author has lived the life they are describing?

The predictable response to this is something like, “Well, but nobody ONLY wants to read those things! I like mil-sci stories but I don’t read them to the exclusion of others! And yes I might think a story is more likely to be authentic if it’s from an author who has served, but ultimately what I care about is quality and if a good story is told!”

Just so!

And this is why when somebody asks you for a military SF recommendation, you don’t assume that’s all they ever want to read. You don’t assume they mean, “Tell me any random military SF story and I will read it. I don’t care about quality, only this one superficial characteristic.” No. You recommend something you think they will like and that fits the requested parameter(s).

This is the function of a book recommendation. That a person is asking for a book of quality or a person recommending a book of quality, a book that’s enjoyable, according to their tastes, is the most basic function. It doesn’t need to be stated as a parameter.

If you can see people talking like, “Can you recommend some books with a queer protagonist of color?” and you can only conclude that they’re ignoring quality and asking others to do the same, you’re ignoring the basic meaning of “to recommend” in association with books.

You might not understand why they care if the protagonist is a queer protagonist of color. But maybe they wouldn’t understand why you prefer libertarian-leaning heroes with military backgrounds, or whatever it is you prefer.

Maybe you’d look at the books that are put forward as fitting the bill and you wouldn’t enjoy them. They don’t do it for you.

And that’s fine.

Where you lose the plot is when you conclude on the basis of your own personal taste that the books are objectively unenjoyable, THEREFORE the people who praise them are lying and the people who recommend them are doing so only for reasons having nothing to do with quality, THEREFORE any success or acclaim it garners must be undeserved, THEREFORE if several of these books continue to garner any success or acclaim there must be some entrenched cabal with the power to make this happen…

Let me put forward an alternate explanation for why, year after year, book after book, people keep buying and reading and praising things that leave the Puppies puzzled and—unaccountably—sad:

Different people enjoy different things for different reasons.

That’s all it takes to explain what’s happening. No inventing entities in direct contravention of Occam’s razor. No conspiracy theory boards of imagined or intuited connections. None of that is necessary.

Sad Puppies and magical thinking

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

So, I’ve characterized the line of thinking behind the Puppies’ discontent as being unable to understand when reality runs in ways that are counter to their tastes/beliefs without imagining some kind of dark conspiracy or cabal (or “clique”, to use their preferred term).

This belief is so strong that a combination of confirmation bias and the effect of “believing is seeing” causes them to interpret all available information in ways that point to the existence of the cabal, even when this requires them to imagine that people are meaning the exact opposite of what they say.

Given that, this tidbit by John C. Wright (and yes, I double checked sources this time) on the subject of the growing support for same-sex marriage equality is perhaps less surprising:

Considering the miniscule number of people who suffer from the objectively disordered passion of same sex attraction, considering the logical impossibility of living chastely within an oath to pursue unnatural sex acts, considering the absurdity of insisting on a mating ritual for partners who cannot mate, and considering the lack of penalty for divorce of such unions or betrayal of the oath, one is left with no choice but to conclude that there is no human reason for this surprising and surprisingly victorious social movement. It is a supernatural effect, and it does not come from the regions of the unseen order favorable to human life.

Hence, prayer and fasting is the most logical response, and the most effective.

Got that? Given that all the things he believes about marriage and gay people [MUST BE BOTH OBJECTIVELY TRUE AND MANIFESTLY OBVIOUS TO EVERYONE ELSE], there is no conclusion we can draw except that evil magic is responsible for the current state of affairs, wherein it looks like his irrational prejudices backed by selective readings of culture-specific religious texts and pseudoscience are held by a shrinking and increasingly irrelevant minority.

The natural world won’t allow him to be wrong about this, so if it seems like he is, then the cause can only be some malignant force beyond the natural world that is selectively overwriting the laws of physics in order to bring it about.

The thought process amounts to:

  1. I can’t possibly be wrong.
  2. I appear to be wrong.
  3. Therefore, magic.

Now, before we get too far ahead of things, I should mention that I am not discounting the existence of the supernatural. The older I get, the more spiritual I find myself becoming and the more value I find in the moral lessons of the Bible (where “moral” refers to questions of how we treat each other as human beings, and not specific codes of conduct for particular peoples who lived thousands of years ago).

So the point here is not “Let’s laugh at the silly Christian for believing in silly things.”

The point here is, let’s have a moment of pity for the man who is so up in himself that when he finds himself on the wrong side of history he can only account for the discrepancy by imagining an inimical force has rejected actual reality and substituted something else, and then let’s consider what this (admittedly rather extreme) example an tell us about the general psychology among the Puppies and Gators who are currently making such a noisy mess of the hobbies/genres that so many other people are just trying to simply enjoy.

Popular opinion and the course of history are going against him on something, so John C. Wright imagines the fiery claws of that popular Christian fanfic character, The Devil, must be at work against him, which allows him to both contextualize what’s happening in a way that’s more acceptable and imagine himself as a sort of spiritual warrior actively fighting against what is essentially a magical conspiracy.

Isn’t that essentially what’s happening with much of Gamergate and the Sad Puppies? They see a game or book they don’t approve of or get the appeal of getting some buzz, and they can’t make sense of it, so they reject the straightforward reality of the situation and imagine there is something MORE going on. Not something more than natural, as is the case here, but… more than what’s visible on the surface. Cabals. Cliques. Conspiracies.

Nobody could really like games like Gone Home or Depression Quest. Nobody could really think authors like Rachel Swirsky or N.K. Jemisin or John Scalzi deserve nominations. No, there must be something else going on. It’s obvious, so obvious that they have no choice but to believe it.

That’s a scary idea.

No choice but to believe.

This is how deep an invisible ideology can be.

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

Today on Twitter, a screen cap made the rounds that showed part of the peer review that accompanied a rejection of a paper by a scientific journal. This is the cap:

Now, that in and of itself is prima facie sexism, and an example of an ideological bias in action. Even if the rest of the review had been full of cogent, specific, and objective criticisms of the rejected paper, the belief that men would inherently serve as a “possible check” against bias where women wouldn’t is a biased belief that can be explained only by sexist ideology.

Really, it’s so obvious a case that I didn’t see any point in commenting on it when it first made the rounds. Then a science news website picked it up and wrote about it, giving a more complete picture of what’s going on.

And, hoo boy.

It’s even worse than it looks on the face.

It seems the subject of the paper was a gender gap among Ph.Ds who make it to the post-doctoral level. The person who returned that review seemed to refute the idea that such a gap was remarkable, writing:

Perhaps it is not so surprising that on average male doctoral students co-author one more paper than female doctoral students, just as, on average, male doctoral students can probably run a mile a bit faster than female doctoral students.

Let’s put this together, shall we?

We have a person who believes that it is due to natural physical differences between men and women that male academics wind up with their names on more papers than female academics, and on the basis of this belief, this person is advising two female academics to let a couple of fellas put their names on their paper.

You want to talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy?

There it is, right there in action.

No, it’s not even that. It’s actually much more of a straight line than typical circular logic. It’s not a person inadvertently making the thing they predicted come true. It’s a person saying, “This is inevitable, it just sort of happens, no one makes it happen! Now make it happen.”

Someone who’s not a big fan of critical thinking about systemic problems might look at this and say that I’m accusing this unnamed scientist of telling the researchers to add male co-workers in order to prop up the status quo, which I’m not.

I’m not accusing anyone of a conscious agenda.

But if we work under the assumption there was no agenda, we’re still left with the fact that the reviewer—in the course of a single document—attributed a phenomenon to natural causes and then attempted to artificially engender that phenomenon.

How does this happen?

If it’s not due to a conscious agenda, then it seems pretty obvious that we must conclude it is possible for people to internalize a systemic bias without realizing it, doesn’t it?

 

“Be careful out there.”

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

We’re told over and over again that we can’t hold the police responsible for the actions of a few bad apples, even when those “few bad apples” remain in police employ and receive accommodations and promotions. Yet how many people out there are blaming thousands of peaceful protesters for the actions of a small handful of vandals?

We hear a lot about the cycle of violence whenever there is property damage and injuries attached to a political protest. We hear less about this when worse property damage and injuries are attached to a sports team’s win, or loss, or existence.

We do hear about the cycle of violence when a body—usually Black—lies in the street, slain at the hands of men who wear the flag on the shoulder and a shield over their heart and drive around in cars emblazoned with the motto “to serve and protect,” but what we’re being told isn’t “We need to stop this from happening again.” It’s, “This is an unfortunate incident, but if any windows are broken it’ll become a full-blown tragedy.”

You know what the real cycle of violence is?

The cycle of violence is police hearing that students are planning a peaceful walk-out and then running to ambush them with military-grade equipment, simultaneously paralyzing the transportation network that would be necessary for them to actually disperse as ordered and then punishing them for not dispersing. People gathering to peacefully protest violence, being met with inescapable violence.

The cycle of violence is the police learning that major street gangs have ordered a ceasefire and then concocting a story that it is so they can team up to hunt cops.

The cycle of violence is police captains and trainers telling their officers to go for the kill when dealing with criminals “so there’s only one story”.

The cycle of violence is the police relying on stereotypes and unconscious biases for designating who is a criminal who needs to be taken down and who is a citizen who may be be talked down or brought in but must ultimately be protected, if only because it’d be too much of a headache if they were killed.

The cycle of violence is the police forces across the country who, whenever this happens—and it is now very close to a daily occurrence—respond by telling their officers to “be careful out there”, meaning not “Try to understand that this is a sensitive time and there are a lot of wounds out there, old and new.”, and meaning not, “One of our own just killed a person… maybe a criminal, maybe not, but they were still a human being and part of the community that we’re sworn to protect and we bring more dangerous people alive every day so this could have been avoided and it should have been avoided, so by God, let’s do better.”

No, they tell their officers, “Be careful out there because are at war now.”

And what happens?

Seriously, the gap between extrajudicial killings by armed officers in the United States is sickeningly short under the best circumstances, but look at how quickly the bodies pile up in the wake of the highest profile-cases. When their victims are in the news, our nation’s cops don’t get any more reflective. They don’t become any more cautious or judicious in their deployment of force.

Instead, they become more militant. They become more trigger-happy. They become more aggressive and quicker to escalate.

And what happens?

The cycle of violence.

In times like this, yes. Let’s pray for peace. Let’s pray for understanding. But let’s turn our pleas towards those who are actually employed to keep the peace, and who are the ones whose response to crisis is to bring war to those who are looking for peace.

Let’s pray that the cops do learn how to take care.

A Problem of Scale

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

Eric Flint, author of the time displacement/alternate history 1632 series, has written a really interesting essay in support of his original comments on the Hugos and the Puppy mess. In his attempts to clarify a point that was apparently misunderstood in the original post, he has a lot to say about the actual size of the genre fiction audience.

I feel like this is an important point that is often overlooked, not just in this brouhaha but in general. We aren’t really wired to grasp the size and shape of things as large as an industry, or a global community, or the internet, or even smaller communities within the internet.

This inability to grasp a gigantic scale is why people outside the industry like to ask authors they’ve never heard of but just been introduced to questions like, “What have you written that I’d have heard about?”

It’s why those of us who hang out on websites like Twitter, Tumblr, or Reddit that act as a sort of mega-community have a tendency to imagine that the feeds we watch reflect the website as a whole, which is what leads to the assumption that anything we see all the time must be well-known in an objective sense, and any opinion that is shared by a majority of those around us must be widespread.

It’s also why, absent a little reflection, so many people conclude that any opinion with which they disagree that has any kind of penetration at all must be unfairly propped up somehow. Because it doesn’t reflect the composition of the community as a whole (as extrapolated by the view of our own virtual living rooms) but it keeps cropping up all the same.

I think that at a baseline, Sad Puppy founder Larry Correia started out working on the assumption that it should be impossible for an author to enjoy his level of success without being, objectively speaking, A Successful Author. And if someone is objectively A Successful Author, this should be recognized in objective fashion. Awards, plaudits, praise. If he’s not getting them, and/or he sees people who are not doing the things he’s doing (and thus, not legitimately Successful Authors) getting them, then he can conclude that something is wrong.

If you read the blogs of his self-professed allies like Brad Torgersen and Sarah Hoyt, you’ll come away with a very definite sense that they see themselves as playing to the real mass audience. Torgersen in particular has talked about his idea that the SF/F audience is shrinking because the mass audience is over here (where he is) and yet people are writing stuff over there (where he’s not).

Flint’s blog post, although it’s not specifically addressing those claims, serves as… well, I was going to say a great counter, but the thing is, Torgersen’s claim isn’t one that actually needs to be countered. It needs to be dismissed. It’s not just wrong in its conclusion, but mistaken in its premise.

I said in my previous post about the Puppies that I hope they wake up one day and realize that they’re writing to a niche. I don’t say this as a criticism, as I’m also a niche writer. I think it’s one of the smartest things you can do in this world.

 

An indie author I follow recently tweeted the realization that her furry space opera stories outsell the rest by three to one. If you’re viewing the marketplace as winner-take-all and you’re seeing supply and demand in the simplistic, one dimensional terms that many people view it and above all if you’re not contemplating how vast the SF/F marketplace is, you have to conclude one of two things from this: either she is lying or cheating somehow and her stories aren’t really that popular, or there’s three times as much demand for furry fiction as for conventional space opera.

If you reject the second one as not true, then you’re left with the first.

Neither possibility is actually true, of course. The real truth is that the marketplace is bigger and more complicated than either of those conclusions allow for. But if you’re dead set on thinking of it in small, one-dimensional terms, then the only possible conclusion is that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.  This kind of small-time thinking is at the root of both the Puppies’ and the Gators’ discontent.

What’s really happening, of course, is that the furry stories are serving an under-served niche. In the mass market, every space opera story is competing with every space opera story… although the market is so big that in truth, every space opera story is competing for the right to compete with every space opera story, and we could really add a bunch for iterations of “competing for the right to compete” to that.

But if you tell a story that few people are telling, if you put something in your stories that’s hard to find elsewhere, if you address your story to a smaller audience, but one that has a hard time finding what they’re looking for elsewhere… why, you can clean up.

People who squabble over a piece of “the pie” in general terms aren’t likely to get anywhere, and if they do, it’ll be in part by accident. The mass market audience has room for a few big winners and a lot of runner-ups who don’t really go anywhere. But if you realize that “the pie” is actually a bunch of different pies, it’s just a matter of finding a pie you like that has gone overlooked in the general rush for the more obvious choices.

Hoyt, Torgersen, Correia, Michael Z. Williamson, all of those ilk… they aren’t writing for the mass audience. They’re writing towards particular audiences, seeking particular things. And they are doing—by all indications—pretty okay with it. Good for them.

The problem is, they don’t have any real idea how much pie there is in the world out there. They don’t understand that it’s possible (and inevitable) for authors to do the same thing they’ve done but in a different direction (writing from and towards a queer perspective, writing from and towards a feminist perspective, et cetera) because they don’t think of what they’ve done as anything other than “writing quality books that people will want to read”.

They don’t realize that it’s some people who see their books as quality and want to read them. They have no concept of how big and diverse a group people really is, or what an uphill battle it would be to compete for the attention of people generally.

And in fairness to them, nobody really does.

But some of us have at least recognized that we don’t know this.

 

BREAKING: Members of Honey Badger Brigade turned away from airport

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

Self-identified men’s rights advocates and #gamergate supporters Allison Tiernan, Karen Straughan, and Hannah Wallen were briefly detained at the airport and then prevented from boarding a plane bound for the United States after Tiernan reportedly made comments to a security agent about “[each of them] having carefully crafted a persona” in order to “infiltrate” the United States.

The three were already subject to scrutiny due to having initially presented the wrong identification at the checkpoint, which they represented as having been necessary due to “people of a certain persuasion” having it in for them. They maintained that they had done nothing wrong, as they had planned to switch out identification once they deemed it “safe” to do so.

“I can’t believe this!” Straughan said to reporters later in the day. “It was a joke! Since when do security people take jokes seriously? No reasonable person could possibly have seen this coming!”

“Obviously they’re trying to keep out our message that contrary to what we assume feminism claims, women can be more than victims or damsels in distress,” Tiernan said in a subsequent video post. “I can’t believe they would treat us like that just because we’re women! Everybody contact the TSA and ask them why they hate women! How could they treat us like that? WE’RE NOT VICTIMS! WE’RE NOT DAMSELS! SOMEBODY SAVE US!”

At press time, sources report that it is still a terrible idea to make jokes about security issues.

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