If there’s anything I find more disheartening than seeing myself treated unfairly, it’s seeing friends or loved ones treated unfairly.
Right now one of my friends is getting picked apart by a certain sector of the internet, because he’s a) outspokenly conservative and he b) landed on the Hugo ballot in a deliberate fashion. Pretending for a moment that campaigning for awards isn’t done all the time anyway, by people who like to hide and deny the fact, I’d like to point out that Larry Correia is a person. He has skin, and bones, and muscle, and nerves, and blood, and he has a lovely wife whom he adores (and she adores him) and he has four wonderful children. Cut him, he bleeds. Tickle him, he laughs. Feed him ice cream, he smiles. He’s a God-fearing, church-going man. A hard-working man. A man of integrity. Loyal to his friends. And who has helped I can’t name how many people through his unending generosity and willingness to put his reputation on the line for those whom he believes he can help — because that’s just the kind of guy Larry Correia is.
Now, I get it that Larry Correia’s web site isn’t to all tastes, and I get it that Larry can and does ruffle feathers with his blog.
But really, there comes a time when I have to say that the invective wielded against Larry is so outlandish, so unrecognizable, so completely and obviously disconnected from the Larry Correia I am proud to call a friend, that I have to conclude one thing: everybody who is in a hurry to say bad stuff about Larry Correia knows nothing about Larry Correia the human being. They have a cheap cardboard cut-out of Larry, at which they throw rhetorical darts. Or a voodoo doll with a Larry Correia bobblehead on it, and through which they thrust hat pins.
Disagree with him, sure. Fine. Larry will never demand conformity, because Larry is a libertarian at heart; not an authoritarian. He’s not shy about disagreement. In fact, he loves it when people think for themselves.
But at least disagree with Larry honestly please? Make your complaints at least semi-coherent, and reflective of who Larry Correia actually is, instead of the ridiculous bogeyman parody that some people wish Larry would be.
Brad R. Torgersen 
He can at least take comfort in knowing he’s in good company. That “certain sector” of the Internet treats ALL political conservatives in exactly the same shabby, infantile, hateful fashion, especially if they’re minorities or women.
I don’t know Larry Correia personally, and in fact never even heard of him until about four months ago, but I’ve read enough of his blog over the three of the past said months to form my own opinions of his character…
…and they pretty much match what you’ve described.
The majority of the people maligning him either haven’t read any of his stuff in context, or haven’t read any of his stuff. Larry seems to have tough skin, so I think he can handle it, though it’s probably worse for his friends and family than for him. They’ve got to watch the whole thing, and sometimes have their own names dragged into the fray. Still, bad publicity is good publicity, right? I bet his book sales have actually increased since the Hugos blew up… his name is all over the ‘nets.
Not to mention making into USA Today…
Larry’s the shit. If he doesn’t know how many people come to him to see him call a spade a spade, he’s not paying attention to the right people. I suspect that those trolls who show up on his blog looking for a fight would get one without him wasting his proverbial breath. People got all butt-hurt because Larry was right about the Hugos, and if he doesn’t win (or Brandon doesn’t–which is possibly due to TOR’s own dot com essayists downing him and the WoT for being on the ballad), it will further go to show the corruption thriving in the SFF community today. How is it unfair for Larry to use his popularity to get on the ballad of a popularity contest? And, furthermore, if he’s popular enough to win a popularity contest, how can they call it unfair? Whether he realizes it or not, Larry’s leading a small army. And, good luck to you both, Brad,
@Rick: So your argument is that if Larry wins it’s because he’s a great writer, and if he doesn’t it’s because of unfair commentators and corruption in the SFF community? Wow, you got all the possibilities covered. 😀
I guess he could counceivably lose a popularity contest because someone else is more popular and has bigger audience. But we’ll see what happens.
Larry knew he wouldn’t have a chance at winning — especially when Wheel of Time made the ballot. Larry’s initial point (which I think has been proven beyond any doubt) was that the Hugo voters tend to display rather predictable proclivities where the yearly ballot is concerned, and that there would be a substantial amount of sourface if “outsiders” crashed the party. Now, one might say that was rude of Larry to deliberately attempt to put himself and others onto the ballot against the good will of the usual Worldcon voting body. One might also say that any body of voters walking beneath the banner of Worldcon shouldn’t be surprised when somebody from the world comes in their front door, and brings several hundred fans with him. As Sanderson said so well, you can’t invite people in the front door, then reject them for being the wrong kind of people. That’s . . . a bit of a problematic attitude.
@Brad: I think Larry’s initial argument is not necessarily a correct one. He suspected that Hugo nominees and winners get elected because of their political leanings, not artistic merits or entertainment value. It strikes me as a weird conclusion.
Different people have different tastes, don’t they? It’s quite clear that there’s a sizeable audience which likes to read books that mr. Correia and his fans don’t like (the Scalzis, the Jemisins etc.). Now there are new people voting and a little bit different shortlist, and next we’ll see who wins.
Popguy, the tidal wave of “Larry Correia is evil, and although I’ve never read him I’m putting him below no award” is, perhaps, pretty good evidence that he was right.
Explain to me how Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas, John Scalzi (Tor) won? I have read and enjoyed Scalzi’s first novel but Redshirt is a simple Star Trek Fanfic of which I’ve read better.
Well, what’s the tidal wave? How many people have publicly stated that they will do it? I come from the opposite corner of the political spectrum, and I plan to read his book and put it below no award only if I think it sucks. That’s the thing all commenters I have read (such as John Scalzi) say they’ll do. But I certainly don’t read everything, so there might be some bad talk out somewhere.
Vox Day may be another matter, and I guess many people would find it quite impossible to vote for him in any case for obvious reasons.
I’m assuming I’m “Rick”. And my response is simple: If a popular author uses his popularity to get on the ballad of a popularity contest, how is that wrong? (The argument is moot.) If he or Brandon (who have out-sold all of the others on that ballad) don’t win, and someone who doesn’t have an eighth of the fan base does, the conclusion is simple (something is not right). And, those who write essays for tor.com have condemned TOR’s top selling fantasy epic (a thing quite frankly I’m surprised they weren’t dismissed for), starting a campaign against Larry, Brandon and Vox Day, based not on their writing, but the unfairness of their popularity and person politics. Can you smell the corruption? I can. It’s as bad as a fisherman’s wharf in the middle of summer.
@Rich: Oops, sorry I misspelled the name. I didn’t say it is wrong to use author’s popularity like that.
I have no clue about any sales figures. Maybe you’re right. The size of someone’s fanbase is not the thing that matters, though, but the number of fans among the Loncon crowd.
I’m sure even people writing for Tor can openly tell what they think about stuff without it being “corruption”.
It’s quite clear that there’s a sizeable audience which likes to read books that mr. Correia and his fans don’t like (the Scalzis, the Jemisins etc.).
I believe this statement presumes facts not in evidence. (Or at least when applied to this specific case. There is certainly a market for Harlequin novels, and I presume most Correia fans aren’t in that demographic.)
I like Larry as a person. (I’d count him as a friend, and I’m pretty confident that’s mutual.) I like Larry’s books. I mostly agree with Larry’s politics.
I don’t know John Scalzi. What I’ve seen of his politics I mostly don’t agree with. I like his books.
I know Steven Brust. (Used to play D&D at his house on Thursdays when we both lived in Las Vegas.) I definitely don’t agree with his politics. I do think of him as a friend. I adore the hell out his books, and have for as long as I’ve liked Scalzi and Correia’s work combined.
I would not hesitate to vote for any one of them, or anyone else whose work I liked, for an award, if I thought they were the best on the ballot.
“How many people have publicly stated that they will do it?”
I don’t know an exact number, but I do know of at least 2. Both of whom were taking great delight in saying they would do just that, *and* were suggesting that others do the same.
Tidal wave? Perhaps, perhaps not. But the fact is there are people making such a request. And it is wrong. Work should be judged on its merit, not the personal opinions of the creator. I despise R. Wagner’s position regarding Jews. Should I turn away from his music?
In Israel, people do still walk out of concert halls when Wagner’s music is played. (Franz Liszt seems to get a free pass, though.) To me, it’s a somewhat guilty pleasure: I would not leave a concert for one opus in the performance, but neither would I attend an event that was primarily his music.
But at the same time, I will readily state that Wagner belongs on just about any list of the greatest composers in history.
I don’t know any of my favorite authors personally, but from what I have seen and heard of Larry Correia, he is a generally good person who likes to figuratively tweak the noses of some pompous people (my wife would say he sounds like me in that respect). His campaign to illustrate the hypocrisy of the Hugo awards also got some people who are very good at their jobs nominated as well, who might never have even gotten nominated in a “normal” year. So even in this he has done a “good deed”.
I like Larry’s books, some more than others, but he hasn’t put out a stinker yet. I can’t say that about all my favorite authors, some of whom include Scalzi, Brust (to mention other authors named in this comment section), Ringo, Heinlein and dozens of others (I read a LOT).
Awards should be given out to those who do the best work or the best works, otherwise it is just a popularity contest. But Larry is being attacked for shining the light on the truth (which happens a lot in our world).
My mother (a Belgian who married an American GI as a war bride) wouldn’t attend any Mengelberg-directed concerts either, but that’s because he was something of a Nazi sympathizer. Wagner, of course, is not. Just because the Nazis co-opted him has never struck me as a sufficient excuse to boycott his music. I’m sure the Nazis liked ice cream and puppies, too.
Here’s a comment from someone at the Nielsen-Hayden’s blog/forum Making Light; it’s a comment typical of the PC community in SFF. Can anyone spot its Orwellian nature which folds back on itself? Keep in mind: that is a forum that lays great claim to intellect, subtlety, and nuance.
“I sometimes wonder if people who espouse extreme racist/sexist/homophobic notions are convinced that the POCs and women and QUILTBAG people they denigrate so are actually incapable of feelings.”
The opinion I have of Larry I have from his own words. He might be very sweet in person, to straight white men who share his ideas, but he’s very unpleasant on Facebook–at least if you don’t agree with every thing he says.
Now, I have no problem with “I wrote this thing; I’m proud of it; if you like it too I hope you will nominate it.” I have no problem with “I found this thing by someone else; I think it’s great; if you’re planning to nominate please give it a look.”
But “Vote for my slate to make people’s heads explode,”–in other words, vote for me to make people unhappy– yeah, I have a problem with that. Frankly I don’t understand why you don’t. So there we are. Supposing I sympathized with someone who had been writing Five. Whole. Years. thinking the only reason he hasn’t got a Hugo yet is that the nasty liberal voters are prejudiced against him, I still wouldn’t sympathize with his “Vote your hate” slate.
Personally I bought a supporting membership for the first time ever. I’m going to read all the entries, including the “hate slate.” (Even WoT but that goes last because if I don’t have time for everything I don’t want to leave out whole categories and I did read the first few books way back when.) Then I’m going to vote. Correia apparently think’s he’s as good as Bujold (at least he thinks he’s being shorted because he didn’t win a Hugo as fast as she did.) Well and good but that’s a high bar to get over. If he makes it I’ll read anything he’s ever written despite his jerkishness. But I do assume the conservative fans splashing out 42$ each really do mean “this is the best of the best of conservative SF for this year” because I will assume it is–and if it doesn’t make the grade I won’t be wasting my time with that part of the genre in the future.
Cat, you are going to put all the conservative/libertarian SciFi authors in one basket and judge all their writing by Larry Correia? Um, okay. I’ve been reading it for years and have read authors all over the political spectrum. I just happen to enjoy Larry’s writing. He’s pretty funny and has a way with words. There are a LOT of those authors out there and they all have different writing styles. Sounds like you are cutting off your nose to spite your face. Which kind of proves his point.
In truth, Susan, it seems to me more that Cat is cutting off her nose to spite Mr. Correia’s face. Perhaps she thinks she can start a fashion for being noseless, and make him look silly by being out of style.
“straight white men.” Rhetorical question for Cat: what is a “principle” and what is a racist bigot who doesn’t know they’re a racist bigot?
Emerson notes that being misunderstood is a sign of greatness and that a man who is self-reliant (has the courage and capacity to do his own thinking) is a threat to society.
Thank you for confirming that what Emerson wrote still holds true today.
Cat are you aware that Larry was told that when he was up for the Campbell that a voter told him that he wouldn’t vote for him because he was published by Baen? Are you aware that Ringo when eligible for the Campbell was told his votes were thrown out because they thought he had been around too long? It seems in the 2 years of legibility he had too many books published.
Cat: the “hate slate” contains a fairly broad spectrum of authors. Also, I am not sure I remember Larry complaining he should have a Hugo, when I’ve never heard him say that in person. He has complained that, for conservative authors, it’s an uphill climb in traditional SF/F publishing. And that’s pretty much a fact even many liberals will agree with. An out-and-out conservative struggles much more (come awards season) than an out-and-out liberal, because the conservative has a very significant ideological stumbling block that the liberal authors don’t have, where voter preference is concerned. In the end, I get it that Larry has upset some people, and if all you’ve seen of the man are some of the more vitriolic things on the internet, then I understand why it’s easy to assume that’s all there is to Larry: fighting words. Which is a big reason I put this post up. Because unlike 100% of Larry’s detractors, I know both Larry and his family, and I am telling the world: this guy you’re assuming is the devil, he’s actually really cool.
Broad spectrum = crappy and crappier.
Now, now, Marston. If crappiness were the sole and sufficient requirement for a writer to be nominated for the ‘hate slate’, you’d be very high on that list.
The truth is, you are adjudging an entire category of writers to be ‘crappy and crappier’, based entirely on the fact that you find their politics repugnant. That fine and honourable Leftist, George Orwell, had this to say about people like you:
To say ‘X is a gifted writer, but he is a political enemy and I shall do my best to silence him’ is harmless enough. Even if you end by silencing him with a tommy-gun you are not really sinning against the intellect. The deadly sin is to say ‘X is a political enemy: therefore he is a bad writer.’ (‘Literature and the Left’)
Brad, the Larry you know and the Larry I… encountered… are *both* real. What you don’t understand is that just being nice to you doesn’t actually make Larry a nice guy. I know it feels that way to you, because that’s the only side of him you’ve seen–but he isn’t nice to me, and I shouldn’t be expected to act, for your sake, as though he had been. And neither should anybody else.
Sitting silent while a bully ridicules people–in Larry’s case women and minorities and gays and trans people–and then scolding the victims for being too mean to the bully? That *is* taking a side.
And yeah, people, if you splashed out money to, in your perception, “crash the party” and prove the excellence of your part of the field–and *didn’t* bring your best game? That was a bit of a blunder. And while I will sometimes go to an effort to help people correct their blunders with a minimum of embarrassment to themselves, I do that for friends, and for reasonably well behaved strangers, and Larry has, by his own actions, moved himself out of those categories.
Cat, the Larry Brad knows and the Larry you . . . encountered . . . are *both* real. What you don’t understand is that just being nasty to you doesn’t actually make Larry a nasty guy. I know it feels that way to you, because that’s the only side of him you’ve seen—
Point received yet?
Now, a person who ridicules people is many things, but is NOT, by that mere fact, a bully. If that were so, every successful comedian who ever lived was a bully, with the possible exception of Bob Hope. I don’t really think you want to draw your line in the sand all the way over there. Because frankly, if you’re going to call people bullies for nothing more than that, you’d better be prepared to look in the mirror and say that you are a bully yourself.
Here’s the My defense of Larry Freaking Correia. I step in to set the record straight.
http://minimumwagehistorian.com/2014/04/25/larry-correia-the-true-history/
Larry Correia is not a racist. He’s not even technically Caucasian. I’ve also never seen him put down women or minorities or gays. If you can provide links to this effect, Cat, then I’d be happy to consider them. See, this is where the internet is stuck on stupid: if you can get enough people to repeat a tall tale, it becomes “truth” even when it isn’t. Larry’s had so many people calling him bad names, few people have stopped to consider the veracity of the indictments.
Brad, you’ve called it: ” See, this is where the internet is stuck on stupid: if you can get enough people to repeat a tall tale, it becomes “truth” even when it isn’t. Larry’s had so many people calling him bad names, few people have stopped to consider the veracity of the indictments.”
When Cat said: “Sitting silent while a bully ridicules people–in Larry’s case women and minorities and gays and trans people–and then scolding the victims for being too mean to the bully?” It showed her ignorance (meant literally, not as an insult). Larry has never propagated hate, but rather honest discourse.
So, if they talk dung to Larry, it’s okay, but when he retorts, *that* makes him a bully? He has every right to defend himself from the attacks of Feminist/BDSM/SJW/Leftist antagonists. I don’t think what your sexual preference is, your political standpoint or your ideology gives you any freedom to spout vitriol without reprisal. Equality is all or nothing. As for *victims,* that’s become as much a misnomer as *bigot*. I haven’t seen Larry attack anyone, although his responses may have the same sarcastic edge to them as everything he writes–that’s his *voice* and you either like it or don’t.
“He might be very sweet in person, to straight white men who share his ideas,..” I do believe that I was just co-opted. Cat, don’t do that. It’s insulting and rude of you to do that and I did not give you my permission to co-opt me for your purposes.
I realize that just now you’re saying you did no such thing… but you did.
The most deliberately biting that I’ve read Correia being, was in response to someone insulting his fans. What happens, all that I’ve ever seen, is that instead of brushing off insult or biting his tongue and being non-confrontational when the normal sort of slander slips into conversation, he jumps forward and points out the fault.
I’m glad he does that, because it’s hard for me to do that. And in the end, if you don’t point out immediately that someone has actually just said something insulting or, for example, they just posed a statement in a manner that subtly moves you to their side to provide moral weight (don’t *do* that!)… people think that what they said wasn’t uncivil, that it wasn’t insulting, and it would bother no reasonable person. And in general terms, we’re not talking microagressions, we’re talking full out macroagressions, insults and demeaning words… like “hate slate”. There’s constant rhetorical and discourse power-moves to take away agency from “my” side of things and I like when someone is braver than I am and takes this on directly. Not only does the label “hate” remove any social obligation to engage ideas or even simply admit that others have other ideas, it implies the need to shun (as Brad talked about a couple of days ago) to treat those people as un-people, because no more need be known about them or what they think.
This rhetorical warfare is ubiquitous and often employed by people who have a great deal invested in what good people they are… so someone calls them on it, explains it, well, darn it hurts. It hurts bad.
That doesn’t make it not *true*.
I thought Portuguese people were white but what do I know? I only live in southeastern New England.
@Synova Oh, Larry is less patient with what he call, willfully stupid. This is mostly with the gun control crowd who went out of their way to flaunt their ignorance and held his actual experience and expertise on firearms and self defense as a negative when debating it. Prior to the End Sad Puppies II, his biggest Internet hit was his very long Gun Control article after the Sandy Hook massacre. When you’ve been debating on something he know quit a lot of for as long as he had, at some point, you basically have to just jot down your point and just point people to it. Debating the willful stupid is pointless.
It’s not a question of whether the Portuguese are visually white or not, but the stupid racial classifications the PC routinely indulge in that so resembles the apartheid they so claim to hate. I’m not surprised when you don’t understand sarcasm when you see it or the PC having their own shit flung back in their faces. Any fool who actually believes there is such a thing a “people of color” in any real world sense needs to have their head examined.
Quite so, Mr. May. Historically, the English, for instance, did not regard the Portuguese as white. The Portuguese regarded themselves as white, but not the Arabs; the Arabs regarded themselves as white, but not the northern Hindustanis; the Hindustanis… and so it goes. In just the same way, as I am told, the Czechs consider themselves Europeans, but call the Slovaks Asians; the Slovaks say that they are Europeans, but the Magyars are Asians; and wherever you are in Central Europe, the cultural boundary of Asia will always (according to the locals) be just a short distance to the east of you.
It’s sort of the reverse of the old joke about Yankees. You probably know it: To the world, a Yankee is an American. To an American, a Yankee is a Northerner. To a Northerner, a Yankee is a New Englander; to a New Englander, a Vermonter; and to a Vermonter, a Yankee is someone who eats pie for breakfast.
I have an idea, Brad. Why don’t you link to Larry being nice to somebody? Because it seems like the same standard should apply to both sides.
http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/01/28/ending-binary-gender-in-fiction-or-how-to-murder-your-writing-career/
It’s long so let me draw your attention to some relevant bits:
“What is this “default of binary gender” he wants to end?” –The person he is responding to is female. I should note that it’s possible this isn’t deliberate nastiness, but the result of a contempt so deep he couldn’t do thirty seconds of research to check his pronouns.
“HARDLY! Well, there you go. I know when I’m looking for professional advice about how to succeed as a professional writer, I’m going to listen to somebody in their mid-twenties.
Hey, you’d better listen up. I’m betting this blogger went to COLLEGE!”
“Of course, the literati won’t be happy until everything is boring ass message fic and nobody reads sci-fi anymore, because then they’ll be super special snowflakes”
“The typical WorldCon voter, when presented with 5 nominees for a category, and their clique’s personal favorite writer isn’t on there, and not having actually read any of the works, will go through the authors and rank them according to the order that best assuages their hang ups. Oooh, a paraplegic transsexual lesbian minority abortion doctor with AIDS who writes for Mother Jones? You’d need a wheelbarrow to carry all the Hugos.”
So what I’m wondering is, why is he trying so hard to ridicule Alex into silence? Why shouldn’t she point out that speculative fiction ought to speculate about gender too? It’s not like a new idea like that has a serious chance of getting so much traction that nobody writes manly male gun porn, anymore–his favorite reading, whatever it is, is in no danger. Supposing readers start seeking out such stories and writers start writing them–how does that hurt Larry? Why is he reacting as if the very discussion must be stamped out? If he really didn’t care, why respond at all? If he really thinks “well, I wouldn’t advise it because I think the stories wouldn’t be as interesting” why the contempt for people who go to college, why call us “special snowflakes,” why accuse us of voting our hang ups rather than honestly having tastes in stories he doesn’t share?
It looks to me as if Larry sees an SF story as a kind of road, where white men may walk freely, and women and minorities and so on may use the road provided they have a good reason and a written pass from the author. And Alex proposes changing that. I think she has a good idea. Women and minorities and gay and trans people don’t need a reason to exist or to use the road, or to be in a story.
And you know, word to the wise–if you want to win awards, it will be easier if you don’t run around insulting the judges all the time. Like it or not, lots of SF readers are liberals, so if a book makes a big deal of every liberal character being an evil bad guy or a stupid dupe of the evil bad guy, that makes it hard to pick up votes from them. Bujold did well because she writes great stories that don’t make a particular political ideology the permanent bad guy. Now I don’t think Correia’s writing is as good as hers, but I haven’t seen much of it yet–that will change when I get the Hugo packet. But even if it is, if he makes a big point of making it anti-liberal that makes me less likely to enjoy the story. And unlike Larry’s mental construct of a typical Hugo voter, I won’t vote for a story I don’t enjoy.
But enough of that–I look forward to seeing you link Correia being nice. Extra points if he’s being nice to someone you think I wouldn’t expect.
Why shouldn’t she point out that speculative fiction ought to speculate about gender too?
Maybe because it’s been doing it, at this point, for at least fifty years – arguably longer. That mega-evil arch-sexist uber-patriarchal oppressor, Heinlein, wrote about aliens with six distinct sexes in Tunnel in the Sky. He was not graphic about the functions of those sexes, but his editor, Alice Dalgliesh, would certainly have bounced the book if he had. She came near to rejecting Red Planet because the submitted manuscript dared to mention the sexuality of Heinlein’s Martians.
However, all this is wide of the mark. What the article said was not that speculative fiction ought to speculate about gender, but that it must stop assuming that gender is binary: in other words, no more writing as if humans had two sexes. It was, in effect, a call for a moratorium on any kind of fiction except speculations on ‘non-binary’ gender. This position is so extreme that it is difficult to respond without ridicule – unless you are a True Believer.
Mr Simon, you are probably familiar with Ambrose Bierce’s version of this joke (from his The Devil’s Dictionary) but it’s too good not to repeat now and again:
Well, Cat, I have had more than 30 seconds to look into these people and so I have a fun drinking game for you called “Mein Kampf or Politically Correct?” Words have been changed to protect the guilty, so all you have to go by is naked principle, something so lacking in the world of PC it’s like a frickin’ dodo bird.
The question for you is this: is writing “homooooo people” because one is frustrated with what a homosexual wrote bigoted?
“Make your complaints at least semi-coherent, and reflective of who Larry Correia actually is…”
That’s asking a lot out of your average Social Justice Warrior, Brad. Most of them will give you an argument about what “is” is. Right before they freak out and have a melt-down because your cismale gendernormative presentation (John Deere tractor hat) “triggered” them.
I think we should collect up all this liberal poo they’ve been flinging, and have a contest to see who can find THE most heinous remark that’s been made about Larry. Names will of course be named. Never let a crisis go to waste.
Sounds like Cat won’t read an author she doesn’t enjoy. Kind of makes Larry’s point.
And by “enjoy” I mean agree with politically
Cat, you really ought to read Larry’s explanation about the “hate slate” and the Hugos this year: http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/04/24/an-explanation-about-the-hugo-awards-controversy/. (The comments section is huge, and although the post is long, it’s not as long as the scroll bar makes it look. :))
Please pay special attention to the reason that Larry decided to “hoist the black flag.” You might not like Larry—and I’m not necessarily asking you to—but at least try to see things from his perspective. Sure, he steps on toes (stomps on them sometimes), but he’s not the “International Lord of Hate” that people are making him out to be.
The fact that Larry beat them at their own game is funny as hell… And yes, I voted for him! The hate filled invective is to the point that it’s actually funny now…
Larry being nice to someone? Since I’m in a rush ATM, here’s something from last week: http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/04/21/important-altered-perceptions-a-charity-anthology-for-mental-illness/
Plus there’s his Book Bombs every month to help out author friends.
@Cat (as I see no-one has replied to your simple challenge): Here’s a search to multiple posts of Larry being nice to some people:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Amonsterhunternation.com+book+bomb
If you want a more specific one:
http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/04/21/important-altered-perceptions-a-charity-anthology-for-mental-illness/
Sorry, no bonus points for me as I don’t have time to trawl through looking for people I would be surprised to see Larry being nice to.
Cat said: “So what I’m wondering is, why is he trying so hard to ridicule Alex into silence? ”
Because Alex came out with a blog post saying she wanted to END binary gender in Science Fiction writing (despite the inconvenient fact that gender is, I’m sorry, binary). Not that Alex would stop referring to gender in the binary, but that all of science fiction should and must also do so. Like, Right Now. And anybody who didn’t follow along was a cismalegendernormaitvefascist/racist/bigot/homophobe Bad Person. And meanie.
So Larry gave her both barrels, as it were. Well deserved, IMHO. (I’d have been meaner, but then I’m Scots and so less civilized than the Portuguese. Something to do with woad, I think.)
But I fail to see where Larry is trying to silence her. Ridicule certainly, but if you go back and read the link you left again (which I just did) I believe you’ll find he never tells her to shut up or go away or any such thing. He does complain that Tor.com “grooms” their comments, but that’s Alex shutting people up, not people shutting Alex up.
Then Cat said: “Why shouldn’t she point out that speculative fiction ought to speculate about gender too?”
That’s not what she said. She said, and I quote: “I want an end to the default of binary gender in science fiction stories.” That’s the first sentence in the article.
What she said was the assumption of binary gender must end. Which is different from “speculate about”. And furthermore, who is Alex Dally MacFarlane to be telling anybody what they MUST do or ought to do as an author?
I don’t know if you’ve noticed Cat, but the SFF shelves at Chapters and Barnes & Noble have been steadily shrinking in number these last thirty years. It could have something to do with the quality and type of stories being told. In my -massive- reading experience, the more propaganda an author tries to jam into a story the more likely I am to drop it out of sheer boredom.
Cat also said: “I have an idea, Brad. Why don’t you link to Larry being nice to somebody?”
Once a month Larry does a Book Bomb. Look it up. Its a nice thing that even has actual money in it. You’d have to be trying pretty frickin’ hard to miss it.
Which of course brings us back to Brad’s point, that you and a host of others on the web are reacting to a made-up boogyman that doesn’t exist, being “triggered” by things which were not said, and generally acting exactly as Larry Correia predicted you would.
Hence the mockery.
If you’d care to join the rest of us here in Reality(TM) where the sky is blue and words mean things, somebody like Larry Correia will probably buy you a beer and talk all night about Alcubierre warp theory applied to pistols. Which would be ‘way cool, you ask me.
Cat, I direct to you search the comments of the link you posted and the comments in this thread: http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/01/29/5687/
for one Jennifer Thompson (searching for Jennifer is probably easier). Read her remarks and the replies to her, both by Larry and by the other commenters, and tell me if you still think Larry is hateful towards the transgendered.
“The opinion I have of Larry I have from his own words. He might be very sweet in person, to straight white men who share his ideas, but…” Well thank God you don’t judge people based on their race and sexual orientation! /off sarc/
How very judgmental of you! Do you reserve the same prejudices for other groups of people? Do you assume all black people must speak jive? Asians must be super good at math? Hispanics wear sombreros and eat tacos? And, obvy, Larry Correia’s fans are all straight white men.
For the record, stop calling me a straight white man. I (most of the time) agree with Correia politically, I’m a huge fan of his work, and I do not fall into your convenient little box. I happen to know that he has quite a few fans like myself who don’t fit into your little box. I know this because I read Correia’s actual blog and comment section- I don’t assume things about him based on what other people say and I don’t “skim until offended.”
“hate-slate” <– a term obviously meant to prove just how much Cat's willing to judge the books, editors, etc based on merit alone!
"“What is this “default of binary gender” he wants to end?” –The person he is responding to is female. I should note that it’s possible this isn’t deliberate nastiness, but the result of a contempt so deep he couldn’t do thirty seconds of research to check his pronouns." You're being ironic on purpose, right?
"I have an idea, Brad. Why don’t you link to Larry being nice to somebody? Because it seems like the same standard should apply to both sides." -setting aside the fact that you still haven't linked or quoted him actually denigrating anyone in a racist or sexist manner- Sure! We'll do that work for you since you're too lazy to get to know Larry and learn it yourself!
Here we have Larry Correia raising money for a young man needing a kidney transplant! http://monsterhunternation.com/2010/08/26/give-the-gift-of-kidneys-so-that-larry-correia-can-murder-you-for-charity/
Here we have Larry Correia raising money to send care packages to troops overseas! http://monsterhunternation.com/2010/08/21/combat-wombats-for-charity/
Here we have Larry Correia donating work, raising awareness, and promoting a charity anthology to benefit those suffering from mental illnesses! http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/04/21/important-altered-perceptions-a-charity-anthology-for-mental-illness/
Here we have Larry Correia promoting a book after an author's son was in a coma following a bad snowboarding accident! http://monsterhunternation.com/2013/04/10/charity-book-bomb-help-out-the-wolvertons/
Here is Larry Correia raffling off a pretty pink gun to benefit breast cancer research! (oooooh! A Stag 15!) http://monsterhunternation.com/2008/08/01/breast-cancer-charity-gun/
Here is Larry Correia promoting a charity to help raise money for an artist who was losing her vision! http://monsterhunternation.com/2012/06/20/charity-nancy-sutters-vision-relief-fund/
Here is Larry Correia raising money to fight prostate cancer! http://monsterhunternation.com/2012/09/28/get-killed-by-agent-franks-for-prostate-cancer/
Here we have a regular feature on Larry Correia's blog: Book Bombs! Where Larry Correia helps to promote a long, long, long list of talented authors who could use a little PR! http://monsterhunternation.com/?s=book+bomb
And this is just the stuff ON THE BLOG. I can't link to the actions he's done in person, but if you pay attention, you might find out that Correia has spent a lot of his time doing things like, oh, teaching women to defend themselves from a rape attack. Teaching teachers how to defend their students from a mass shooting. Teaching homosexuals and gays and blacks and hispanics and- yes- straight white men- how to safely carry and operate a gun for self defense. You MIGHT say that he's one of those folks who doesn't JUST go online to rant about victimhood, he's done something about it. To be specific- he's done his part to lessen the number of victims out there by making sure they don't become victims in the first place.
How much do y'all want to bet that none of this will matter one whit to Cat? That she'll skim through this comment as quickly as possible (if she reads it at all) and instead of saying "yes, maybe folks are being too harsh. Maybe I should get to know this person before I assume he's the devil incarnate"- instead we'll have a moving of the goalposts? Lame excuses? More wild accusations and a complete and total lack of self-awareness?
Let's see what happens. In the meantime, I'm getting my Shocked Face prepared.
when your job is being the “International Lord of Hate”, I kind of think that being the target of the poo flinging apes goes had in hand with all the perquisites and glamour accorded thereto…
Remember, Alex didn’t say she wanted to END writing about binary gender–she wanted to end that being the *default*. Reading what she actually wrote, it’s quite clear that she’s not insisting that there be zero male or female characters–she’s saying writers should think about what they’re doing and why. She’s saying that some characters can be both, or neither, or change during the story–and in my opinion (I don’t recall MacFarlane saying so in so many words) there doesn’t have to be a reason for that. Like Bujold has herms in Beta Colony, and ba in the Cetagandan Empire, and there doesn’t have to be a good reason for a given character to be one. More books like that. To which I’d say yes please, and if you’re like, “no I want my gun books majority-male” your reading material really isn’t in danger so calm down.
Next, to those people who posted links of Larry being nice, thanks and I’ll have a look at those. It would frankly be really nice to stop wading in the meanness I keep seeing from his supporters, so I look forward to the refreshing change you are trying to provide.
Also from the link in my last response:
“(I’m assuming Alex is a dude, but then again, that is just me displaying my cismale gendernomrative fascism)”
I really should have included this one before; my bad, because this is one of the more obvious bits. This is the part where Correia admits that it wasn’t an honest mistake. This is the part where he makes it perfectly clear that he understood that Alex might be female but didn’t bother to check–presumably because the expectation of basic politeness to people who dare to express an idea you didn’t like in public is some kind of oppressive liberal plot.
Note, while we are at it, that Alex didn’t attack Larry personally. Indeed, she didn’t refer to Larry at all in her column. The impoliteness here is not a response to an attack; it comes straight from Larry’s nature. Also notice that I haven’t gone through these responses referring to Larry as “she” (and neither to my knowledge has anyone else.) It would be an obvious tit-for-tat, but most of us are better people than that.
So, Larry is a nice guy to you, and that doubtless makes your life more pleasant, but the people who don’t like him see a real side of him that you have missed, and they have a right to bring it up.
Remember, Alex didn’t say she wanted to END writing about binary gender–she wanted to end that being the *default*.
A distinction without a difference. If anybody anywhere writes a story in which there is binary gender, she can, and presumably will, accuse them of doing so by default.
This is the part where Correia admits that it wasn’t an honest mistake. This is the part where he makes it perfectly clear that he understood that Alex might be female but didn’t bother to check–presumably because the expectation of basic politeness to people who dare to express an idea you didn’t like in public is some kind of oppressive liberal plot.
No, this is the part where he works off the assumption that ‘Alex’ is usually short for ‘Alexander’, and therefore didn’t bother to check further. This was a serious error on his part; in my experience, in North America at this time, the form ‘Alex’ is nearly always short for ‘Alexandra’ or some cognate thereof, and is nearly always the name of a female. He stepped in that one; but there is not sufficient evidence to convict him of having done so deliberately.
Actually, I don’t think this was a “serious error” at all. It was a mistake, sure, but not really out there. In the world, “Alexander” is ranked 91st most popular name. {https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=number+of+people+named+Alexander+} It makes the top 100. “Alexandra,” by comparison, is ranked 266th. { https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=number+of+people+named+Alexandra+ } Far more Alexanders out there than Alexandras.
So, like I said, not completely weird for him to assume she was a he. All this is sort of amusing, of course, when you consider we’re talking about a person who wants to end pronouns period… but I digress.
Correction, Alex didn’t want to end pronouns (I assume), she just wanted to completely eliminate the use of binary gender in sci-fi.
My apologies, my mind was elsewhere. 😉
Book,
The thing is that in North America at this time, Alexanders are likely to call themselves Al or Alec, and people who call themselves Alex are probably more likely to be Alexandras. (And in my personal experience, the female Alexes are likely to be rather mean about it. It seems to be a particularly popular name among people who raise their daughters to be doctrinaire feminists with a chip on their shoulder for having been born female. Perhaps that’s also why they shorten their name to something traditionally considered masculine.)
Cat,
I know you didn’t mean to sound all racist and bigoted there when you go off about “straight white men”, but you really did. When you’re the only one who can’t stop bringing up and classifying everyone by how you perceive their race and sexual orientation, you’re the person with the problem.
And for the record, Larry is very sweet to bisexual goth geek mixed-race women who don’t share all his views. He’s very fun to argue with, and he gives some of the best hugs!
Cat said: “So, Larry is a nice guy to you, and that doubtless makes your life more pleasant, but the people who don’t like him see a real side of him that you have missed…”
Yeah. Raises money for cancer vs. mean on the Intertubez to people who loudly hate his guts. What a -bastard-!
You know what Cat? You, my dear are arguing dishonestly. You do not mean what you say. This is something I keep running into with people of your political persuasion, and it does not reflect well upon you or the causes which you espouse.
Consider yourself called.
It’s really quite ironic that Cat is making such a big point of Larry not checking so that he could get the correct gender pronoun, when the “binary gender” author was all about how gender shouldn’t matter. Or maybe I got that backward, and it was all about how instead of doing other useful or fun sorts of things we should all spend immense amounts of time checking which pronouns whoever we’re interacting with would like to use… Ugh. How boring.
Strange, how perceptions change with world view. I’m sure that Cat thinks that she’s the “tolerant” one here, but after reading all the comments, it sure seems to me that it’s she who’s the one who cares the most about what race/gender/nationality or whatever group you belong to then the other commenters, and is therefore the most racist/sexist/whatever-ist.
Haha! From Cat’s blog, http://catsittingstill.livejournal.com/ : “I think this is a priceless opportunity to evaluate conservative science fiction. Basically what we have here is a bunch of conservatives putting $42 each on the line to say “these. These ones are the best of the best we have to offer. Read them and see what you think.” So I will. This is a win-win situation for me–if the books are good I’ve found a new source of good reading material. If the books are insulting degrading boring schlock, I’ve given the best of the best of conservative science fiction a fair try and established that it’s lousy, which will save me time in the future.”
So I guess we know how she’s prejudged Larry and Brad and the others….
Tom Simon:
Funny aside: I have Three family members named Alexander (one goes by Alec, the other Alex, the last is Xander) and another family member named Alexandra. She goes by another of her given names. Since she’s my daughter, I can say without a doubt that her parents are not doctrinaire feminists with chips on their shoulders. 😀 We picked the name because we found it pretty.
BTW- no offense taken or meant. I’m not the type to be easily offended.
Which brings me to my point, I guess. In case the perpetually outraged folks haven’t noticed: This is the internet. There is no gender here, unless you decide to claim it. There is no race, no sexual orientation, not unless you claim it. It’s not at all uncommon for people to assume that, for example, any random person is a straight white male. Or an American. Or a Packers fan. It’s not uncommon for people to assume genders, orientations, or any other number of things about people online. USUALLY all it takes is to inform someone where they made their mistake, and then move on.
If Cat’s outrage on Alex’s behalf seems overblown- that’s because it is. Larry wasn’t being a mean old meanie. If you squint your eyes real hard, at the very worst he could be called lazy for not looking into the gender of the person he was talking about…because here’s the thing: Larry didn’t look into the gender because, Alex’s gender? Really doesn’t matter. Larry was critiquing Alex’s IDEA. When it comes to ideas, gender is irrelevant. It just is. She stated that all binary gender should end in SF. Larry was making the point that making your politics of the moment more important than the story is a really bad idea, and not likely to sell you many books.
His entire post could have been summed up in this, abbreviated way:
Message Fiction < Story Fiction.
That's it.
But instead of debating that point, we have people all up in arms over the fact that he accidentally called a "She" a "He."
Because the rules of the Perpetually Outraged say that if you've lost the debate and can't argue against the idea, then it's important to find offense by something completely irrelevant!
Book: thanks for linking! That’s a great list! And, really, indicative of something I’ve been pondering for a few days. Because an associate in the biz had cited someone I consider to be rather noxious as a “good person” and he went on to explain why. And I had to admit that my experience (on-line) with that person has been terrible. Now, for him, that person has been great. And I think that his experience is 100% valid. I myself still have my reservations about the individual for whom I’ve not got much nice to say. But I don’t think this invalidates the good that this person enjoys with others.
Maybe the most accurate thing that can be said is that all of us are both liked and disliked by various people — none of us can be liked by everyone, and even the most disliked person usually has at least a few friends and family who think the disliked person is an okay individual. And the shocker is that both perceptions (like and disliked) are valid from separate points of view.
I have a very positive view of Larry because I know this man and I know his family and he is a true friend and I’ve enjoyed his loyalty, which means he’s earned my loyalty. My upcoming book from Baen is dedicated to Larry (and Chuck Gannon, and Kevin J. Anderson, and Mike Resnick) because Larry (and the others) were all essential to my journey into the Baen author fold. Larry didn’t have to help me. He had nothing to gain, personally. He’s just a really nice guy who likes to help his friends.
I get it that Larry can be a flamethrower on-line. I am sorry he’s burned peoples’ hair off and this causes them to assume Larry is mean, or not nice, or not deserving of human consideration. I really am. Because that’s not the Larry I know at all. The Larry I know is a giant teddy bear of a man with a child-like sense of fun about life, who delights in entertaining readers, house guests, and friends, and who simply wants everybody to have fun right along with him.
And firearms. Larry really, really wants us all to enjoy firearms. (grin)
Ah, but you see, KarinR, the whole point of the ideology is that racism/sexism/whateverism is immanent and inherent and systemic. So Cat cannot be sexist because she is a woman; only men are sexist, and all men are sexist, inherently. Likewise (as I have been told by True Believers) I am racist because my skin is pale (notwithstanding that my mother is a Costa Rican of nearly pure Amerindian blood); whereas dark-skinned people cannot be racist, because only whites are racist, and all whites are racist. The whole ‘intersectional’ deal is merely a checklist for immunity to criticism: the more victim groups you can claim to belong to, the wronger it is for anyone to say anything against you, and the more you have been victimized by those people who don’t belong to any recognized victim group. Straight white Christian males, of course, cannot be victims of anything or anybody, no matter what happens. They are always maximally doubleplusungood.
@ CMB and Book – nice cites.
@ Rich Wares – whoa – when did the mean ole nasty BDSM crowd get pulled into this furball? That is a new one and I rather doubt it is accurate.
@ Cat – I appreciate that you took the time to enter a potentially hostile comments section – I hope that those cites answer your question. However, no one never ever ever never changes anyone else’s mind during an internet argument, regardless of cites, logic or anything else – so likely it is a waste of your time and those that provides the links. However, at least Brad isn’t ban hammering you (like Scalzi does) or yelling and censoring you (like the Radish blog). However, you are catching a lot of lecturing (like Hines does).
So you got that going for you.
Book,
The mere fact that your daughter does not go by the name ‘Alex’ puts her outside the group of Alexandras that I have such reservations about. So I’m glad that you did not take offence at my clumsy wording.
NOTE: I really dislike “massaging” thread comments. It takes a lot for me to dive in and begin censoring or otherwise meddling with the conversation. Mostly I think people are adults and can argue as they like, depart the table as they see fit, and I don’t muck with it. I try to be considerate in my own commentary — especially to people who are disagreeing with me specifically — because this is “my” house and I want people to not feel like I am personally bashing them, especially if there’s no cause for it.
Again, I am sorry Larry has made people think he’s a bad guy. He’s been a good guy to me and many others. I wish this Hugo fracas wasn’t tarnishing his good guy reputation.
Mr. Torgerson,
I’m sorry if I have said anything out of line, particularly as I am new here. I am a guest and a stranger here, and I have not always been sufficiently mindful of that fact. I hope you can forgive me if I have given offence.
No worries, Tom Simon.
By the bye, I’m honoured to make your acquaintance, even though only online. Thank you particularly for your piece ‘On Not Quitting’. I needed the reminder.
Brad- I’m glad you don’t massage the comments. I’m also glad that your site is so open to folks of varying opinions. Larry’s site is the same way, and I can say with certainty that I’ve learned from people in the comments on more than one occasion. It’s refreshing to not be stuck in an echo chamber.
“Because the rules of the Perpetually Outraged say that if you’ve lost the debate and can’t argue against the idea, then it’s important to find offense by something completely irrelevant!” Usually the cry is “racism” I got bored with that one and now just say things to make them pop off…but first…must go pop some popcorn to watch the show.
The day I turn my blog comments into a self-lurve festival where only the people who agree with me get to have a say . . . is the day somebody needs to lay some wood upside my head! (grin)
Tom: not quitting really is the whole trick to publishing, period. It’s as true for indie publishing authors as it is for trad publishing authors. Being an author is hard work, and sometimes there is little or no reward. It’s an industry filled with 101 types of discouragement. Many pros will even compare it to a form of compulsive mental illness. Because there are certainly easier ways to make more money! You have to burn for this stuff (fire in the belly) and you have to refuse to stop. If you can have the fire, and if you can refuse to quit, you can have a career.
I think ignoring verisimilitude regarding certain characters is obviously false. If you write a story set in day-to-day Cairo, Egypt you can’t just have an Arabic-speaking Norwegian family next door without an explanation. Otherwise why not just have Victorian dust maids with ironing boards or spacemen walk in and out of scenes?
A story isn’t looking out a window – it is a carefully constructed world with internal rules and logic; it is not a census. Nothing is done without a reason. To suggest the sole exception to that in American story-telling should be non-whites and gays is wacky.
That double-standard of logic of too-many whites/straights, too-few non-whites/gays is how one knows this is nothing more than identity advocacy flying under a false flag of no-dog-in-the-hunt diversity. Cat, why even pretend you’re neutral on this? And it’s never done – and I mean never – without submarining the morality and spirituality of the straight white male. So, yeah, just have a white guy in Bollywood films without a reason and see how that flies. Trouble is, the PC never light up Bollywood; wrong color.
So yes, literature has defaults. The fact one has to explain such an obvious concept once again says more about the racialist PC than the immorality of white men.
And Cat – is it or is it not bigoted for a heterosexual to write “Homoooo people” in exasperation over what one gay person wrote disagreeing about diversity in fiction?
@Dorothy Grant “He’s very fun to argue with, and he gives some of the best hugs!”
That’s because us large men(tall, broad shoulder’s, usually have “extra” padding) go to a secret school in Wisconsion were Grandmaster McPeterson teaches us all in the Subtle and fine art of “Laying a Hug Down on Humanity”.
I can personally attest to the grueling nature of the training. Just the 6 months long classes about how much pressure to use in a given hug can cause a sane man to break down and begin sobbing in the corner.
She’s crying, use a firm, but gentle, go for a secure cocoon feeling…
Long time friend who’s big too, go full power with back slaps…
Puppy, be easy and soft, position close to face to allow for licking….
Drunk girl at party walks up and says, “Hagrid, you are real!”, just laugh and go with using the size to power index provided in hand out 3….
and so on, and so on.
Heck I almost failed the, “someone you offended but have reconciled with, but this is the first physical encounter and trust needs to be rebuilt” practical exercise. I went too timid and Grandmaster McPeterson had to break out the “Cane of Motivation”, followed by the “Hug of Reassurance”.
It’s work, damn hard work, but worth every contented sigh and happy look we get when finished.
🙂
Larry was given a break when people started listening to his horseshit. Cat, right on the money. You go, girl.
Hmm… so is Dan Brock just trolling or is he a sock puppet? Maybe one of those ironic ridiculers I keep hearing about? I’m new here so please bear with me as I get a grasp on the local flame warrior population.
Equal chance troll or sock puppet. My money is actually on sock puppet troll.
Troll is a given, based on demonstrated behaviour. Sock puppet may or may not be the case; but I ain’t going near enough to see if that critter smells like socks.
I am announcing the creation of the CisCon SF convention for male SFF literature. The literary award is the Conan Lamentation Award. This year my nomination for that award for best SFF novel of the year is “The Life and Times of Dale Earnhardt.”
Retro award for best all-time SFF character is the unfairly oppressed albino Morlocks from “The Time Machine.”
Best short SFF story of the year goes to whatever a white guy wrote that was edited by a white guy. Just choose your own from our gallery of photos.
Don’t forget to come to our racially segregated “Heinlein safer-space” and enjoy poppers and white company. We will celebrate the many white heterosexual male characters in the history of SFF and our new CisCon Kickstarter “The Male Book of White Science Fiction.”
This year’s main panel will talk about why there are not more white men in SF. The panel the second day will feature scientists that will celebrate every single thing in the convention room that was created by a white man, from the bonded polymers of the table to the microphones. The third day will feature a panel that proves Mary Shelly was actually a man which then puts the novel “Frankenstein” firmly in NASCAR territory.
You can find more non-racist information here:
http://www.prezzey.net/2014/we-need-diverse-books/
Cat: the last time I saw one person project so much, I was in a movie theater. And the last time I heard this same perpetually-aggrieved, passive-aggressive tone, it was the 1990s and I was on a forum that was being overrun and destroyed by furries and the associated noisome furrydrama that follows them wherever they go. But then there is considerable behavioral similarity between furries and the self-proclaimed Tumblr-SJW/genderqueer/QUILTBAG/LGBTEFGHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIiiiiiii got a gal in Kalamazoo, zoo zoo zoo. See, the rest of us don’t particularly care about, nor want to hear about, their (or anyone’s, frankly) four-sigmas-out paraphilias or bizarre sexual fantasies–all of which were done to death on the skiffy pulp paperback book racks before you were born, and possibly before your parents were born; have you never read Jack Chalker? have you never read Delaney’s “Dhalgren?” or Piers Anthony’s “Cluster” novels? or any of the “Dangerous Visions” anthologies?–but the individuals whom Mr. Correia takes to task will neither change their minds nor take a civil hint and change the subject, and indeed don’t seem to be able to pick up on polite hints, to the point where some of us wonder if they’re all as autistic as the furries gave every indication of being when they whinge about how “victimized” and “marginalized” they have chosen to be, as we quietly start a betting pool about how many posts remain before the thread is Godwin’d.
In other news, the appropriate response to those who choose to behave in a ridiculous manner in public forums is ridicule. Mr. Correia is being pretty restrained about this, all things considered, but then I suppose he’s a pretty busy guy, with books to write and Hugos to win.
No offense meant, incidentally, to any non-binary-gender/speciesfluid/speciesdysphoric/otherkin readers who are able to behave like grownups.
Okay, I’ve seen Larry be nice to his friends, and niceness certainly was a refreshing change in this bunch. The problem is that I was willing to assume from the beginning that he could be nice to his friends–Brad says Larry is nice to him and I never doubted it.
Larry is a jerk because he’s mean to people who never did anything to him, but just dared to express an idea he didn’t agree with, like, for example, Alex. Being nice to his friends doesn’t actually change the bad behavior that people are pointing out now.
Brad, you’re sad about the reactions to Larry’s bad behavior. I get it. But I recommend you take this up with the person behaving badly–Larry. Not with the people understandably annoyed by the bad behavior.
Cat, I’m pretty sure that Larry is not personal friends with everyone who has cancer or every person serving overseas.
Cat’s definition of a racial and gender bigot is a matter of eligibility – only the straight white male need apply. Anyone else can run off racist and sexist rants all they want and yet somehow they’re never racist or sexist. It’s a white straight man only waterfountain.
There’s your principle for you – the bedrock of law. If you think of identity as law. Some day the PC will actually figure out why we call what they do “identity politics.”
She sure as hell didn’t have the courage or honesty to answer my twice-asked question. That’s because Cat knows in advance everything she says is supremacist racialist and sexist BS.
“To which I’d say yes please, and if you’re like, “no I want my gun books majority-male” your reading material really isn’t in danger so calm down.”
Cat- ok, two things. ONE- apparently you’ve not read many “gun books,” whatever the hell that is. If you mean something Correia has written, then it’s clear you’ve never bothered to crack the spine on any of them to discover whether or not your assumptions are true.
TWO- I’m actually trying to be understanding here. The fact that you just assume that we all want our books to be majority male is… how can I put it nicely? It shows a general lack of basic understanding of Larry Correia’s post about the binary gender nonsense. Read it again. Don’t skim until offended. Read it. Read the comments.
We Do. Not. Care. About the genders in the books we read. Alex McFarlane said “I want an end to the default of binary gender in science fiction stories.” and “I want to never again read entire anthologies of SF stories or large-cast novels where every character is binary-gendered.” Crazy people that we are- we took her at her word.
Larry thought that was a terrible idea and responded. Read the response. Here’s the gist: gender, sexual persuasion- all that jazz, is IRRELEVANT to a GOOD STORY. It’s not as if he’s opposed to having females in his stories- one of the two main characters in the Grimnoire Chronicles is a 17 year old Okie girl. It’s not like he’s opposed to writing gay characters- one of the characters in his dead six series was a gay transvestite.
Once again, gender is largely irrelevant. Gender should only come up if it’s important to the STORY. Larry’s point in the article is that if you make story about “message first” (or politics first, or even gender first) then your story is going to suck. According to Larry, the STORY comes first.
Do you get it now? Do you see why coming here and assuming that everyone who reads Larry’s stuff is a “straight white man” who doesn’t like reading about anything other than male characters in our “gun books”? Do you see why we find it hard to take folks like you seriously when it’s obvious you know nothing about what it is you’re outraged about?
Cat: Do you have any documentation proving you’ve been nice to anyone not your friend? Links? Un-altered photos? Testimonials, preferably notarized?
Logan- you sure? Heh
Fail Burtan- Lost it at Mary Shelly in NASCAR territory. 😀
Look at more nonsense and shoddy facts based on gender and race and not scholarship in the article by SFF blogger Foz Meadows where she tries to take down Correia, whites and men at the HuffPo. Meadows claims Arthur C. Clarke is one of “three straight, white Anglophone men” who somehow benefitted from Jim Crow and an era prior to the decriminalization of homosexuality though Clarke was an Englishman who had nothing to do with Jim Crow and was also gay. The PC don’t know anything about SFF’s old era; they simply assume the worst because white straight men were somehow involved and call it research. I have another name for it. Meadows’ research is the same research men in beer gardens used to discuss Jews. Needless to say, Meadows criticism of Vox Day in that article while indulging in the very rhetoric she finds reprehensible in Day is an example of the very Orwellian musings that make the PC so lacking even a shred of credibility.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/foz-meadows/politics-belong-in-scienc_b_5246418.html?utm_hp_ref=books
Meadows logic is delusional. She claims ” stories about a future in outer space populated entirely by white people, who constitute a global minority” is wrong while ignoring the fact that in actual reality that is precisely what has been the case since the first man went into space over 50 years ago. Somehow Meadows thinks that both reality and fiction that reflect that reality is a “political decision, ” lacking in “diversity,” if not flat out racist. What in the world does being “a global minority” have to do with it? IT HAPPENED!
Brazil and Italy have dominated the soccer World Cup. They are a global minority. So what? Meadows is not a very smart woman and nor are the PC. Their disdain, racism, sexism, and general bigotry far precede actual events. All the PC need to predict a future event or depict one in history is have the race and gender involved. Guilt or innocence follows. By a massive coincidence a world of immorality is always the same race and gender.
The level of vitriol on both sides in this “debate” got out of hand in too many cases and I find it really regrettable IMO. But let’s not pretend Correia is an innocent victim. He announced his intention to troll the Hugos, “the literati”, “the SJWs”, etc, and mocked them pretty rudely time after time on his site. Let’s not kid ourselves, he picked Vox’s novellette mostly because he knows this is the best way to troll the “enemy”. Surely there are plenty of better written eligible short stories by conservatives he could’ve chosen to endorse, but this was the best way to make people mad.
He may be a great guy in real life, I don’t doubt that, but his internet persona from what I’ve seen is quite rude and trollish, so no wonder people react.
I’m surprised no pulled these ones up
http://monsterhunternation.com/2013/08/21/publisher-cancels-book-contract-because-the-writer-is-gay/
http://monsterhunternation.com/2013/03/27/this-one-will-probably-get-me-hate-mail-from-both-sides-gay-marriage/
I got this far in the Foz Meadows diatribe: “The backlash against Vox/Beale and Correia isn’t about “purging the heretics”: it’s legitimate criticism of a man who both believes in, and is a political advocate for, the active disenfranchisement and lesser worth of the vast majority of humans on the planet…”
That’s where he/she/whatever gets to #5 “Make Shit Up” and immediately goes straight to #8 RACIST!!!! Its like an avalanche of “hate whitey” exploding on my screen here.
Sad Puppies making its point all over da place.
Hmmm… let’s see – a cult of identity that obsesses its stalker like mentality on a single other identity and sees that other identity as the sole source of all the ills of the world and writes thousands of words of reasonable-sounding propaganda dedicated to demonizing that other identity.
The KKK? Well, yeah – but we’ve pretty well marginalized them into the swamps they belong.
The Nazis? Well, yeah – but we and the Soviet Union bombed them into the stone age and they’ve been pretty quiet since.
Fundamentalist Qutbist Islam? Well, yeah – we’re working on that one. Nasser hanged Sayd Qutb for his writings and his supremacist boys still popped up to take over the Egyptian presidency.
QUILTBAG feminism? BINGO!
Whoa… Cat, again… Kick butt and take names. If this posts, which it won’t, I’ll write more after but… Brad… Seriously, grow a pair – if only as some kind of hipster statement.
Larry; he’d be a joke if he was funny.
Re: Vang and Dave W.
More likely that Dan Brock is a like minded fella who went out of his way to protect the young and innocent. Wait, that sounded Patriarchal. Your guess is as good as any.
“Like minded fella” I like that. No, just someone who thinks Larry is a scared, overweight kid who hasn’t quite grown into his big-boy pants yet.
Dan Brock: I challenge you to find Larry at a con some time, and say those precise words to his face. It’s easy to cast aspersions from behind the safety of a screen and keyboard. Trust me when I tell you Larry has a way of winning people over. Even those who are significantly ideologically opposed. Larry is infectiously likable. If you’d met him, you would know this already.
LOL, sounds like Dan’s trying to take Melvin’s job.
I wonder if this is the Dan Brock who had a book published by PublishAmerica the rip off company?
Somewhere Out There by Dan Brock
Feminist SFF author Beth Bernobich wants more women in SF: “Look, I know how easy it is to fall into the default mode of focusing on the men. That’s the narrative we’ve always heard, in books and movies, in the historical records, in our daily lives. Men are more interesting. Men do the important stuff.”
Girls get kidnapped in Nigeria, Beth goes into action by asking men to retweet:
“Beth Bernobich @beth_bernobich · May 4 Last week I asked @jimchines, @scalzi, and @wilw to raise the signal about the missing schoolgirls in Nigeria. No answer yet.”
Given all their tough talk about gritty ninja girls and Kameron Hurley getting nominated for “We Have Always Fought,” why would girls need rescuing? They just have to assert their innate feminist equality and beat up those guys like Xena and Buffy do. Just like when feminists march on draft boards to demand to be drafted and put in frontline combat units.
But Beth laments SFF literature and tells us a story to heal our manly stupidity: “And remember that women must be invisible, or relegated to secondary roles! Fun times! I remember the 60+ woman at our first degree black belt test. She had just recovered from pneumonia. Yes, she passed.”
Send her to rescue girls then.
Beth writes “I make a point of any character detail, sex, race, age, etc. Because if I don’t, many readers assume straight white male,” which is why feminists are all asking straight white male supremacist patriarchy to rescue girls in Nigeria.
Beth doesn’t like new Star Wars: “Lots of white men. Not all, but still discouraging.” But not discouraging for rescue operations.
SFF’s gritty feminists can go take a flying dump in whatever ceramic bowl and sewer system they forgot to invent and implement around the world, just like in books.
DON’T BE RELEGATED TO SECONDARY ROLE, BETH!! GO RESCUE GIRLS. I AM ON VACATION TIL DOOMSDAY.
Don’t forget to take brave Cat along.
Well, that’s the problem with becoming a bean-counter: once identitarianism eats your sensibilities you basically start seeing everything and everyone through that particularly oily lens. Human beings cease to be human beings, and become statistics. Percentages. Numbers. And when the numbers aren’t the “right” kind of numbers, it’s a cause for consternation. Honestly, I don’t think this is where timeless storytelling originates. It’s definitely where activist storytelling originates, but activist storytelling is preaching to the choir: the people you most want to reach with your message are probably the people least likely to read or appreciate the story. Especially if you brand yourself as an activist writer, thwacking your audience with you bona fides right between the eyes.
The Phantom,
Even worse is Foz Meadows attempts at fiction. Her first novel has a protagonist who is a “born” vampire (naturally) raised in foster care and in the intro she gives us this gem:
“Moving with the languor of exhaustion, the woman raised her free hand and bit down hard on the wrist, wincing with pain and effort. There was a slurping sound, a flash of teeth. Carefully, spilling nothing, she reached across and let the redness drip into her daughter’s barely-open mouth, sighing with relief as the baby swallowed. When the woman finally pulled away, the man took over, biting his wrist to feed the child, such succour, whatever else, being gender-neutral.”
Ignoring the ridiculous purple prose, why did we need to be told the feeding was gender neutral other than to check a box? Weren’t we just told that both a man and a woman handled the feeding which would seem to be a pretty obvious example of gender neutrality, but no the story’s flow (such as it is) must stop for the author to proclaim her PC credentials. I’m surprised we don’t get one of the parents saying “Where ever she may go, I hope our child can live the same non-gendered, low carbon footprint life that we have (except for that one default binary gender thing we did by actually committing typical mammalian reproduction)”
You’ve both hit on important points with identity message fiction. Brad hits the first point that old school SF used to disguise, shift, or rip away cultural markers, or in the case of Burroughs, ignore them. That’s why we cheer for a 15 ft. tall beast with tusks, preying mantis eyes and four arms to kill men recognizably like ourselves. It’s easier to make a person shift their perceptions if you can engage them in a perceptual trap and get us to have compassion for what beings do, not what they look like. That’s why I always laugh when the PC say old school SF was racist. In fact, old school SF was classic anti-racist and that’s the lesson it repeatedly taught. That’s why obvious contemporary slang or other things that yank you back into today was considered bad form. If you did that, you couldn’t work your magic. Burroughs ignored that when he had the Venusian Zanis (Nazis) who said “Maltu Mephis” for “Heil Hitler” but that was an exception to the rule, a satire.
KHorn hits another point that when you have an analogy to “Orientalizing” your fiction, all that extra fluff takes up story. SFF world-building is hard enough without making certain you have Asian names for spaceships or tea instead of coffee you might not even mention otherwise. Checkmarking takes away space.
In Van Vogt’s “The Weapon Makers,” you have an example of a not all that well written novel with awkward info dumps that is nevertheless a masterpiece of a blunt, driven, story-telling narrative of endless surprises and shifts in perspective. If he’d had to make sure he’d put in gender this and non-Western that, and not default to white and blah, blah, blah, what happens to that story? It gets stopped dead in its tracks.
The idea old-school purposefully defaulted to white in some supremacist exclusionary racial sense is nonsense other than the fact they were American stories published in an American market. Van Vogt had neither time nor interest in such an agenda, nor did SF authors in general. They had other fish to fry and they did a pretty good job of addressing larger human failings, not those of race and gender, though that is exactly what the PC say they didn’t do. “Not there” is not the same as “stay out,” as if Peter Pan was anti-adult or Treasure Island anti-female.
Sometimes I don’t think the PC understand that America was almost 90% white until the ’60s and that 90% of black folks lived in the deep south when John Carter was written. That’d be like the Chinese or Arabs having Polish heroes in their fiction. Why? Why would they do that? Given the reality Boko Haram’s kidnappings have once again highlighted, old school SF writers were probably bold to have as many women as they did. Are the PC unaware that men have launched private rescue or search-and-kill missions in Iran and Afghanistan on their own initiative? What about endless private expeditions to the ends of the earth? So go rescue those girls. You wanna be in a book – be in a book.
Kameron Hurley’s delusional “We Have Always Fought” (for which she is Hugo-nominated) is tellingly illustrated with paintings, though photography is 175 years old. What does that tell you about the real world and the world radical feminists live in?
I admit to being bored to tears by ALL message fic, liberal or conservative makes no difference. If it isn’t part of the story, it’s boring. Shut up about it.
Political points are best made in the construction of the world, the actions of the characters. If you need an info dump to explain why cismale gender norms are fascist then you’re doing it wrong.