Trekking With the Green-Eyed Monster – David Pascoe

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Trekking With the Green-Eyed Monster – David Pascoe

This weekend was a busy one at Caer Dave. Mrs. Dave had a thing Saturday morning on base through our gym. Lots of lifting things, and some paddling thing, and then a run thing. Also, fun being had. Wee Dave enjoyed it, too. There were puppies, and other small creatures. After a brief (well, for one of us) round of naps, yours truly got to cooking in preparation for a dinner at a friend’s. With that endeavor accomplished, the adults mounted a trusty steed, and headed north, skirting the Wretched Hive (seriously, the place is a moral singularity) until we landed at the Wolf Trap Center for the Performing Arts.

Wolf Trap is a part of the national park system, and home to several (like the name says) performing arts venues. We were at what I think is the main stage: an enormous wood-and-steel open air concert/opera hall. We went to the movies. Star Trek (’09, not the Motion Picture) was showing, and the National Symphony Orchestra played the score. Immediately prior, there was a brief discussion/Q&A session with the composer (incidentally, same guy that did the score for Jurassic World, as well as *many* other recent films. Guy’s kind of a machine).

Brief aside: should you have the opportunity to attend such an event, I highly recommend it. Even if you’re only meh about the film or the score themselves, it’s worth it for the appreciation of the players’ skills. I particularly liked watching the string players’ arms moving in unison through the dramatic points.

But one thing the composer said during the discussion period struck me. When he and the director were working up the primary theme for the score, he was having trouble nailing it down. Until the director told him that at base, Star Trek ’09 is a buddy film, albeit one where the buddies don’t start off that way. At that point, everything started falling together.

But something else start working in my back brain as I watched the film, and it wasn’t until I read Sarah Clithero’s  [Pat Richardson forgot to byline it.  Bad Pat. – SAH]post at <a href=http://otherwheregazette.wordpress.com/2015/08/02/envy/>Otherwhere Gazette</a> yesterday that it started to crystallize. For those unfamiliar (SPOILERS! Well, vague ones, at least), the villain of the film works to destroy a planet so that one man will feel the same pain he does.

The Green-Eyed Monster sure is an ugly one. It’s a classic motivation in plots throughout literature, film, and the high school experience. So and so has a thing, and this other person wants it. It doesn’t much matter what “it” is, but as long as the first person has it (confidence, the captaincy of the football team, a crown, a shiny and truly un-weather-worthy hat), the person of the second part yearns for it. Or, at the least in the case mentioned above, desperately wants for the first person to NOT have it.

It’s universal in humanity (What’s that? Humans and Vulcans are cross-fertile? I guess that makes Vulcans just pointy-eared humans, then, doesn’t it? Of course that just demonstrates my humanocentric bias. Speciesissss!). It’s a prime driver of, well, lots of things. Before anybody goes there, seeing the fortunes of another and using that as a motivation to achieve is zeal, per <a href=http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3036.htm>Thomas Aquinas</a> (See Article II), and isn’t necessarily problematic.

It occurs, what with the Hugo voting just finished, and the results to be announced in a couple of week, that most of the Puppy Kickers are suffering from an excess of envy. I mean, think about it: the prospect of Jim Butcher (or Kevin Anderson, etc.) receiving a shiny, rocket-shaped object is so painful to them that they’re willing to ruin the award’s (remaining shreds of) credibility to prevent it. It’s accepted wisdom at this point that a move to limit voting to attending memberships will be advanced at the WSFS business meeting at Sasquan. While there’s a good deal of speculation over whether such a motion will even get approved (what then, would supporting members get for their hard earned filthy lucre? How could WorldCon possibly garner any kind of diverse, international support by shutting out anybody who can’t afford to fly across an ocean to come to the majority of conventions?), that it’s not reduced to backroom rumor mills is a sign of how strong the desire is to keep out the undesirable types.

And why? So “those kind of people” can’t get awards that are meant for our kind of people. Dress it up how you will, the Puppy Kickers so strongly identify with owning the rocket award that they’re willing to see it sink into the realm of ridicule – and ultimately complete obscurity – in order to prevent the wrong sort from even being involved in the process. And that will somehow increase diversity in scifi.

I don’t blame them (well, actually, I do. They’re the ones feeding the outrage machine and spreading lies about my friends) as this is just what they’ve been taught. The rise of Marxism as the du jour guiding philosophy of the intelligentsia coincided with the rise of postmodernism. The Modern Project failed (for reasons better kept to the comments) and instead of looking objectively at why, humanity tossed out the notion of objective truth. If there isn’t a Standard to which people should be held (I’m cutting so many corners, here, but it’s Monday morning, I haven’t talked to herself, and I’m completely uncaffeinated. That last is the important part, really. I think.), then nothing is truly opprobrious, and so any behavior at all becomes justifiable.

I’d love to say this is a new thing, but the Puppy Kickers (also the race baiters, the SJWs, the left in general, and the greater world of progressiveness) are simply humans being the way humans be when nothing restrains them. An even cursory read of history suggests that human critters want what they ain’t got, and what someone else does, and that without something to inhibit, they’ll do what it takes to get it. Or see that that other poor bastard doesn’t have it long.

I don’t really have a hopeful ending to this. Partly that’s fighting the black dog, and partly that’s looking at the world as things grow ever darker. As those with eyes to see, it’s up to us to be a light shining in the gloom. That’s why we write, and why we fight. Keep your powder dry, friends.

213 thoughts on “Trekking With the Green-Eyed Monster – David Pascoe”

  3. “… and some paddling thing …”

    TMI, meine freunde. What ye and ye Missus gets up ter is nae anything the rest o’ us needs ter be thinking about. ‘Oar, ‘oar, ‘oar.

            1. Classic form: “I’d rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.”

          1. Isn’t makeup sex supposed to be hotter? Or have all those rock and country songs been lying all these years? 😉

  4. It’s accepted wisdom at this point that a move to limit voting to attending memberships will be advanced at the WSFS business meeting at Sasquan.

    There’s isn’t such a proposal that’s on the current WSFS business meeting agenda, and as the deadline for submitting proposals is Thursday, August 6th, I’m fairly certain no such proposal will be made.

    More here: http://sasquan.org/business-meeting/agenda/

    Kevin Standlee says there is a way to add proposals after the deadline though, but it’s not likely that it would pass muster:

    There are two other ways to get things on the agenda if you miss the deadline:

    1. Convince me personally that the proposal is sufficiently important to be allowed onto the agenda.

    2. Convince 2/3 of the people voting at the Business Meeting that the proposal is sufficiently important to Suspend the Rules and allow it onto the agenda.

    More here: http://kevin-standlee.livejournal.com/1480953.html

    1. Please note:
      “It’s accepted wisdom at this point that a move to limit voting to attending memberships will be advanced at the WSFS business meeting at Sasquan.”

      Emphasis added.

      The term “accepted wisdom” is commonly employed to indicate a thing widely believed regardless of its factual accuracy.

      For example, it is accepted wisdom that Planned Parenthood provides essential services, such as mammograms, at its many clinics — this in spite of the demonstrable fact that not one single Planned Parenthood clinic owns a mammogram device.

      I could provide enough more such examples to ignite a flame war that would incinerate the interwebz. The point is that people tend to act on “accepted wisdom” without regard to it being factually true or false.

      Your rebuttal only addresses the facts of the matter (important but not actually relevant to the assertion) rather than the perception which is what Dave addresses.

      1. Accepted wisdom is something that needs to be based on more than blithe assumptions. Having followed this subject for a couple of years now, every time I’ve seen the suggestion of not allowing supporting members to vote on the Hugo awards, it was quickly countered by many others saying it was something that shouldn’t be done because they wanted to let people who weren’t attending Worldcon to still meaningfully participate in the Hugos as well as the site selection vote.

        What I’m afraid has happened in this case is rumor-mongering, and the accepted wisdom about that is that it’s not a good thing to do.

        1. oh the proposal is out there. It was written and figured out[at least one such proposal anyway] on the Nielsen Haydens making light forum. It was written up a couple months ago actually and proposed to bring it before the business meeting at Sasquan. the fact it was written at all and proposed, whether it makes it to the business meeting agenda or not…is heinously stupid.

      1. See Kevin Standlee’s post about the likelihood of such a proposal being submitted below. I’ll take the bird-in-the-bush fact that no such proposal has been made yet over the two-in-the-bush prospect about there being one made by next Thursday.

      2. Any rule change proposed this Worldcon has to be ratified at MidAmericaCon before it takes effect. There’s also a rule change pending from LonCon that would add another year’s delay and a popular vote by everyone eligible to cast site selection ballots before a rule change would take effect. That bit is going to be the canary in the coal mine.

        1. If the Popular Ratification Amendment (of which I’m a co-author, so I’m biased, which is why I’ll be recusing myself from Chairing during the debate on it) is ratified, it would first apply to new business first passed next year in 2016. Anything that gets first passage this year can be finally ratified in 2016 regardless of whether or not Popular Ratification is ratified.

            1. EPH was submitted some time ago, along with the supporting documentation and explanations. It’s not a last-minute proposal. The other proposal in the same “class” was “4/6” which was actually the first item submitted. (Items aren’t going to be considered in the order submitted. I expect 4/6 and EPH to be considered at Sunday’s meeting.)

              Including the four constitutional amendments awaiting ratification and three routine committee-continuation requests not shown in new business on account of it’s in the committee reports, there are 20 items of new and continuing business on the agenda. Not all of them are related to the Hugo Awards. It may surprise people to whom this is all new this year, but not everything the WSFS Business Meeting does is directly related to the Hugo Awards.

            2. Yes and the people who designed it think it will diminish the strength of slates. At least that’s what the people over at Making Light have posted on-line. It’s another way of complicating Hugo voting.

              1. From what I can determine. This (1) Calculation Phase: First, the total number of nominations (the number of ballots on which each nominee appears) from all eligible ballots shall be tallied for each remaining nominee. Next, a single “point” shall be assigned to each nomination ballot. That point shall be divided equally among all remaining nominees on that ballot. Finally, all points from all nomination ballots shall be totaled for each nominee in that category. These two numbers, point total and number of nominations, shall be used in the Selection and Elimination Phases.
                Means that if your ballot has say 3 finalists in best novel. Each one would get a third of a point while if you only get 1 into the finals that novel gets a full point towards winning the award.

                1. None of the calculations in EPH apply to the final ballot, so the statement “if you only get 1 into the finals that novel gets a full point towards winning the award” is not correct. Nominating votes have no application to the final ballot. The final ballot will continue to be Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) as it currently is. EPH applies only to the nominating stage and determining what works make it to the final ballot.

                  The current nominating ballot system can be described as “first five past the post” in that the five largest pluralities (more in case of ties) “win” the nominating phase. EPH seeks to modify the nominating ballot system.

                  The current final ballot uses used Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), where you rank your choices; the consequent winner therefore always has the support of a majority of the voters even if it isn’t the most-favored choice of a majority. EPH does not make any changes to the final ballot counting system. (In fact, none of the proposals on the agenda modify the final ballot IRV counting system.)

                  Note that I’m not advocating any proposals. I’m addressing factual issues about proposals and explaining the current system.

                  1. So when does it apply? Are you saying if a person only nominates 1 novel and another person nominates 5 the first novel gets 1 point and the other novels get one fifth each?

                    1. No, it is more complicated than that.

                      I’m not one of the proponents of the proposal (remember, I’m the chairman of the meeting), so I’m not in the best position to address it either technically or substantially; I only addressed something I know to be completely outside of the scope of the proposal.

                      Your questions are best directed at the FAQ the proposal’s sponsors submitted with their proposal. (Your question is addressed by FAQ 7, I think.) Failing that, you’ll have to ask the sponsors directly or come to the Business Meeting and raise the question in debate. Assuming the proposal is not “spiked” at the Preliminary Business Meeting on Thursday of this year’s Worldcon, the current plan is for a technical discussion (“how it works”) at the Friday meeting and a substantive discussion (“should we implement it”) at the Sunday meeting.

                    2. That is as I understand it. There’s a guy doing an algorithm on Larry Correia’s site, but he doesn’t seem to have taken the ‘I can vote for one thing, effectively, five times!’ into consideration.

                    3. I wonder how that would work. if I cast a ballot:

                      1. Novel A
                      2. Novel B
                      3. Novel C
                      4. Novel D
                      5. Novel E

                      The count would obviously be 1/5 vote each. But what if I vote:

                      1. Novel A
                      2. Novel A
                      3. Novel A
                      4. Novel B
                      5. Novel C

                      Would that be 1/3 vote each or 3/5 vote for A and 1/5 each for B & C?

                    4. Marking a ballot with the same work two, three, four, or five times is exactly the same as marking it once. You cannot nominate the same work in the same category more than once; it won’t count more than once, not now, and not under EPH.

    3. Your ‘rebuttal’ relies on the strength of Kevin Standlee’s reputation. Isn’t he a vicious white supremacist?

      1. Never heard that. But it is pretty obviously true, since he’s trying to grow the voting body, rather than shrink it…

        1. The last bunch of apparent trolls coming by that I suspected to be white supremacists seemed to dance around the recent matter of Baltimore. If you look at the autopsy reports, and how weak Mosby’s case is, it is easy to conclude that once more the Democrats have contrived to burn down minority neighborhoods, and have managed to get away with it right in front of the national eye.

          1. Generally they seem less concerned over the burning down of minority neighborhoods than with being able to blame conservatives for it.

            That has long been a trademark of the modern Liberal; as observed in this NY Times editorial from 1987 (asserting that the proper minimum wage is zero):

            If a higher minimum means fewer jobs, why does it remain on the agenda of some liberals? A higher minimum would undoubtedly raise the living standard of the majority of low-wage workers who could keep their jobs. That gain, it is argued, would justify the sacrifice of the minority who became unemployable. The argument isn’t convincing. Those at greatest risk from a higher minimum would be young, poor workers, who already face formidable barriers to getting and keeping jobs. .
            http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/08/ny-times-on-the-right-minimum-wage-zero.php

            HT Power Line. Emphasis added.

            The sacrifice of the few for the benefit of the great seems to be a bedrock tenet of proglodytism.

            1. And the willing dupes are always surprised and butthurt that they are part of the “few”. They never recognize that to the Party, the many are the ones that suffer so a few leaders don’t.

            2. Every increase in the minimum wage causes a decrease in the employment of those who are least employable. If there was no minimum wage young people could more easily get a first job to start their lifetime of employment.

              1. I have long advocated (as did once the NY Times) that if “The Public” endorses a minimum wage, then The effing Public should underwrite it, offering tax credits or other support to make up the difference between what an employer thinks the labor is worth and what The Public thinks a laborer should be paid.

                This would have multiple benefits which need not be gone into here and now.

                1. Eh, how about a small surcharge on every piece advocating an increase? It would be a tax not a penalty, so it’s constitutional.

      1. It’s been talked about, sure, but it’s not at all popular on all sides since the overwhelming preference is to have supporting memberships be able to let non-attending fans participate in both the Hugo and Site Selection votes.

      2. Is it possible that the SJWs __________?

        a) are delusional

        b) are lying

        c) make [fecal matter] up

        d) have difficulty distinguishing between “what they wish” and “what really is”

        e) all of the above

        1. e. With the provision that I don’t think they really believe that they are lying. It is a mental disorder, yes, but they were indoctrinated into it at a very young age. (Either that, or ‘truth’ is just another of those dead-white-male privilege constructs to keep the ‘victims’ in their place.)

          1. Eh, they lie to themselves first. Which makes them as guilty as if they knew the truth, or possibly more guilty owing to the hardness of heart involved.

            “Dog whistles” and all the rigamarole they put up to ensure that what we say does not sink it. . . . .

          2. I had one as a friend once. When we were discussing the results of a poll, she told me in all seriousness that the results were false because if they were true they could be used by the conservatives to advance their agenda.

            I think that that pretty well says it all.

        3. Or is it possible that this “accepted wisdom” is nothing but paranoid twaddle cooked up by a small band of resentful loons circle-jerking each other?

          After all, as has been pointed out, out here in the real world there’s nothing to indicate any such proposal is being made.

          I like the real world. Some people should visit it more often.

          1. I like the real world too, in which in several puppy-kickers blogs such a scheme has been mentioned proposed and praised.
            As for paranoid twaddle and the bunch of resentful loons — I see your Gerrolds and your editor who called an entire group of people who disagree with her ON AN AWARD neo-nazis. You can’t raise that.

            1. — I see your Gerrolds and your editor who called an entire group of people who disagree with her ON AN AWARD neo-nazis. You can’t raise that.

              Thank you for proving my point so effectively, Sarah.

              Here’s what Gallo actually tweeted : “There are two extreme right-wing to neo-nazi groups, called the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies respectively, that are calling for the end of social justice in science fiction and fantasy.”

              You will note the use of the word “respectively”. Gallo did not call the Sad Puppies “neo-nazis”. She did call the Rabid Puppies “neo-nazis” but, as was documented on File770, they’re mainly associated with one person who has made anti-semitic, neo-fascist comments which make this fair comment – and a person of whom you yourself have written trying to separate yourself from his opinions.

              Once again, Gallo did not call the Sad Puppies “neo-nazis”. That you seem to think she did shows the level of epistemic closure in which you have enshrined yourself.

              Once again, thank you for proving my point, Sarah.

              1. Tsk — before you correct somebody of being reading impaired you should first master the art.

                Are not the “Rabid Puppies” an “entire group of people who disagree with [Irene Gallo] ON AN AWARD”? That Day has “made anti-semitic, neo-fascist comments” is not a demonstrated fact — those are allegations hurled by the kind of people inclined to dismiss those with whom they disagree as … what was that phrase … “a small band of resentful loons circle-jerking each other” and therefore not determinative.

                There can be many reasons for Sarah to separate herself from Day that do not concede him to be persona non grata on account of anti-semitism nor neo-fascism, such as the wish to avoid collateral damage from the sort of baying mob which routinely engages in character assassination through misrepresentation, misattribution and quotes against context.

                OTOH, Gallo’s attack was undeniably ad hominem and devoid of reason or evidence. She did in fact call ” an entire group of people who disagree with her ON AN AWARD neo-nazis.” Your effort to “prove” Sarah was not referring solely to the RP voters is an astounding bit of intellectual dishonesty, although I suspect many observors would defend you on the grounds it was not dishonest, merely ignorant and stupid.

                But it does nothing to “prove” the point you claim, no matter how loudly you shout it.

              2. You will note the use of the word “respectively”.

                Doesn’t that just prove that Gallo needs a proofreader?

                “extreme right-wing to neo-Nazi” establishes a range. “Respectively” suggests distinct groupings. Since the two don’t match, either interpretation is equally valid based on what she wrote at the time.

                Of course, I’m not a professional writer, and I expect to be thoroughly excoriated if I’m wrong. 🙂

                1. Since by strict definition Nazi would be fairly extremely far to the left, wouldn’t “extreme right-wing to neo-Nazi” necessarily include most of the human race?

              3. Not to be rude but you left out the part where Gallo says that a large section of the people who used to read Tor books is “unrepentantly racist, misogynist and homophobic.”
                https://theartsmechanical.wordpress.com/2015/06/09/is-it-smart-to-piss-off-your-customers-and-vendors/
                In the real world people lose their jobs over saying things like that about their customers. Apparently, from what has happened since, Tor doesn’t care about their customers, yet.

              4. I do not take issue with the Neo-Nazi statement. As is well known, Neo-Nazis, being imitators of a bunch of dirty foreign losers, are left wing. Saying that Puppies range from right to left wing is not controversial. There are plenty of extreme left wingers like Vox Day, Sarah Hoyt, and Larry Correia associated with a Puppies campaign, even if none are of that flavor of leftist. My concern is Gallo’s statements claiming Anderson’s book, published by her employer, is of poor quality. At worst it is of moderate quality.

                  1. You and Larry have views on marriage that belong in the nineteenth century at the earliest. No true reactionary has views on marriage matching later than the eighteenth century. 🙂

                    It may seem I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, but it is a slippery slope. One minute someone thinks it might not be desirable to have a Republican in every office, the next they are calling themselves a Mugwump and wanting to ‘reform’ the civil service system. 🙂

                    2. Yes, as currently run, it makes the spoils system, which concerned the Mugwumps, look attractive. It is a festering mess; defense is kept in operation by entitlement spending compromises, which drive debt high, eventually resulting in inflation that will FUBAR defense much of the economy.

                      My apologies. Thinking about the Civil Service right now leaves me in a very intemperate place.

              5. And thank you too, RES, bearcat, Mary, BobtheRegisterredFool, and Sarah (again). I couldn’t ask for better illustrations of epistemic closure.

                1. The only epistemology closed is your own, CPaca.

                  BTW, repetition does not constitute an argument. Not that you are concerned with argument, evidence or reasoning, eh? it isn’t as if you’ve offered any rebuttal of the demolitions of your initial feeble assertion.

                  Your having resorted to even more tautological assertion does not validate your claim. here’s a tip: nobody said Gallo called the Sad Puppies “neo-nazis” prior to your claim she hadn’t — so you’re circular argument puts your head in a very safe place but not anywhere useful.

                  By your own logic Gallo did denounce the Sad Puppies as “right-wing extremists” which I suppose was intended as a compliment?

                  Can you defend such a denunciation? Can you provide instances of “extremism” by any material number of Sad Puppies supporters, right-wing or otherwise? Or is that just one of those examples of “secret knowledge” employed by bigots of all stripes?

                2. Ooooo — big words. Unfortunately, “having opinions and not altering them without reason” is not “epistemic closure.”

                  It does help to use them right.

              6. And thank you as well, RES, bearcat, Mary, BobtheRegisterredFool, and Sarah (again). I couldn’t ask for better illustrations of epistemic closure.

                1. The only epistemology closed is your own, CPaca.

                  BTW, repetition does not constitute an argument. Not that you are concerned with argument, evidence or reasoning, eh? it isn’t as if you’ve offered any rebuttal of the demolitions of your initial feeble assertion.

                2. Someone who reads space opera can reasonably think that Dark Between The Stars is competent.

                  Both the NSDAP and the international communists were riding the prestige of the industrial revolution in their efforts to fundamentally transform human society. They shared some fallacies and delusions, which can be seen as a basis for considering them similar and classifying them as leftist.

                  American culture, traditionally, values winners highly. An American who picks a loser to identify with over a similar winner is a deviant, more innovative and revolutionary. It is also more conservative to pick an organization that one has ancestral ties to. There is a native American murdering white supremacist organization. This organization has practiced terrorism, has a history of victory, and has killed substantially more American minorities than the NSDAP. For these reasons, an American who picks some dead end European knock off organization over the people who will actually deliver might be considered a leftist.

                  If I squint, I can legitimately wiggle my classifications to show Correia, Hoyt and Beale as being clearly to my left. Maybe also John Wright.

                  1. Rolls eyes. If you squint while doing meth, maybe. I’ll grant you Beale, the rest of us are American Don’t Thread On Me and leave the the f*ck alone whatever you call us, but not leftist.

                    1. I have no kids, might be younger, and am probably less settled in my career. These are reasons to think I might be less conservative.

                    2. Shucks, I freely acknowledge my liberalism — I’ve admitted to being a Classical Liberal for a few decades now. If folks like me seem “far-right” it is only a measure of how far to the Left the Progressives have moved.

                      Keep in mind that to them “affirmative action” means quotas and “non discriminatory” means discriminatory, but against the right people.

          2. I like the real world too, and have been living in it for some sixty years. You should visit it sometime.

            Failure to grasp the importance of perception in determining the reality of social construction means you are not living in the real world, no matter how heavily you HTML tag it.

            For example, the widely accepted belief is that the GOP is a racist political party in spite of the fact that it has since its founding refused to differentiate Americans on the basis of superficial racial characteristics. It is the Democrat party which defended slavery, supported the KKK and lynching, imposed Jim Crow, segregated the military and civil service, has elected multiple KKK members to high political office, filibustered and voted (by larger percentages) against Civil Rights acts, insists on counting Americans by race and fights to keep African-American communities in thrall to violent criminal gangs,

            And yet it is Republican candidates who must defend against charges of racism.

            And any Republican candidate who ignores that widely accepted perception and runs a campaign free of any effort to combat that false belief is not running in the real world. Nor is declaring it “paranoid twaddle” an effective means of refutation.

            AGAIN, as you seem slow, Dave did not say there was … err, excuse me; let me rephrase: Dave did not say that “a move to limit voting to attending memberships will be advanced”; nor did he say that he believed such a move to be underway. So hurling about denunciations about “a small band of resentful loons circle-jerking each other” is misdirected ad hominem argument of the sort which has been leveled by the “Puppy Punters” since the beginning of the nomination process.

            Such over the top extreme derogation undermines credibility, demarking its propagator as unreasonable. You will find it is item #3 under “How to lose arguments.”

          3. Or maybe like far too many of the puppy kicker it was all talk and abuse, but actually making things work is just something they can’t do.

      3. I haven’t seen it talked of with any degree of seriousness in months. Near as I can tell, some people suggested it, the idea was loudly shot down from many directions, and people moved on to other proposals like e pluribus hugo. Limiting the franchise has so very little support that I doubt it would long survive even if proposed.

    2. Considering that the “epluribus Hugo” made it from making light, I have to wonder if a bunch other proposals were squelched by the consequences of the Gallo fiasco. Looking at making light, the Hugo discussion sort of died at that time. Maybe none of the other blogs had the connections to get the proposals into the business meeting.

      1. The only “connections” you need to get business onto the agenda of the Business Meeting is at least two members (including supporting members) of the current Worldcon willing to submit it. I always recommend that you work with the Business Meeting staff to get your proposal into the correct technical form, but it’s not required, and it’s not like the Business Meeting is secret, you know. The contact information and a whole lot of information about it is posted on the Worldcon’s web site. It’s not really that difficult.

        What you may not realize is that people float possible constitutional amendments every year. Lots of them never get past the trial-balloon stage. There’s no conspiracy here, just pretty open debate, and people deciding they don’t see enough likely support to go to the effort of trying to get something passed. Democracy is hard work, you know.

  6. > It’s universal in humanity

    …and in dogs.

    Dogs don’t always seem to grasp “individual property” (though some do), but they’re always alert to anyone else getting something they’re not.

    1. Oh, yeah; I had a dog tried to get between me a girl I was saying goodnight to; but then again, she dumped me later, so maybe the dog was smarter than I was.

  7. Also… keep your stories sharp. Stories stick in the mind much longer than diatribes. A witty turn of phrase, a section of a story that strikes home crops up in the mind long after the rest of the story is forgotten. This is why some of them (not all, but some) attack stories… it is why in ancient times the first step of tyrants was to silence the tellers of tales be they Bards, Skalds, or any other form.

  8. It’s accepted wisdom at this point that a move to limit voting to attending memberships will be advanced at the WSFS business meeting at Sasquan. While there’s a good deal of speculation over whether such a motion will even get approved (what then, would supporting members get for their hard earned filthy lucre? How could WorldCon possibly garner any kind of diverse, international support by shutting out anybody who can’t afford to fly across an ocean to come to the majority of conventions?), that it’s not reduced to backroom rumor mills is a sign of how strong the desire is to keep out the undesirable types.

    You refer to Article II of the section on Envy in Aquinas’ Summa. Envy can ultimately case the envious pain — surprise, surprise.

    Envy acts as a blinder to the unintended consequences their proposed actions might bring. Even is vaguely aware of, in it’s thrall the victim the is unable to give proper weight to the logical outcomes of the actions driven by envy.

    1. “You refer to Article II of the section on Envy in Aquinas’ Summa. Envy can ultimately case the envious pain — surprise, surprise. ”

      So that explains why they’re so happy to taunt us with our (presumed) enemies’ success. I’ve often wondered why they persist when the response is usually “Good for him.”

  9. “If there isn’t a Standard to which people should be held, … then nothing is truly opprobrious, and so any behavior at all becomes justifiable.”

    “There’s a famous passage from “The Grand Inquisitor” section of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in which Ivan Karamazov claims that if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. If there is no God, then there are no rules to live by, no moral law we must follow; we can do whatever we want.”
    http://www.anselmphilosophy.com/read/?p=449

  10. There are three days left to submit business to this year’s meeting, and nobody has submitted any franchise-limiting proposals, nor has anyone asked the Business Meeting staff’s assistance in drafting such proposals.

    As I said (and was quoted above), it’s technically possible to submit stuff after the deadline; however, with the volume of business we’ve already received (20 items including items up for ratification and things I know we’ll get by deadline but haven’t as I write this), I am extremely unlikely to assent to it, and getting a 2/3 vote to suspend the rules and permit late business onto a massively crowded agenda is a very hard sell.

    Just because individuals talk about doing things doesn’t mean that they will do it. The number of proposed changes people talk about on web sites is a lot bigger than the number that actually get submitted, because submitting proposals and defending them in debate and trying to get votes for them in personal debate is a lot of work.

    1. It’s nice to learn this.

      For your info, some people may be commenting before learning this. [Smile]

      1. Just like some people didn’t know how the Hugos were nominated and voted for.

        Before this year. 0:)

  11. Postmodernists don’t even get the joke inherent in the term. That anyone would call themselves post-modern non-ironically is risible. To all those who would strip shared meaning from everything (My art? It’s anything you want it to be. Then the audience doesn’t need you, does it?), I have a simple reply, if you think life is a tale told by an idiot, then you should quit doing the talking.

  12. I do hope Butcher gets the Hugo. There’s apparently a vast number of new voters, and I doubt they could ALL be Puppy-kickers.

    1. > More than 57% of the convention members eligible to vote cast ballots this year, making this the highest level of participation in Hugo Awards voting in the past decade.
      —
      …and that gives an indication of how much the average Worldcon attendee cares about SF books, movies, tie-ins, art, editors, etc.

      What’s Worldcon about nowadays, anyway? Not SF, apparently.

    2. My two credits, FWIW: my own (admittedly, inadequate) sampling of the friends I know who have voted indicates some voting for Noah Ward but not a blanket casting on all the categories. I’m guessing some of the lesser categories (editor, fan artist, etc.) will see a strong showing for NA, but the more popular ones will have actual winners.

      Gut feeling is that 3BP will get Best Novel, as there seems to be broad support from both puppy and non-puppy voters for it. Tho Skin Game getting the nod cannot be ruled out, as that one too seems to have even non-puppy voters considering it (Dresden is just too much fun). None of the others have the same kind of cross-faction support, so I expect them to come short.

      Remember also that the Hugos use a kind of weird variant on Australian Rules Voting, where it isn’t so much who gets the most votes but which choice is more the consensus. Last year MHI Nemesis was ahead through the first two or so rounds of the voting process, but dropped off quickly after that. This was because, evidently, it received a lot of 1st and 2nd place votes, but not many 3rd, 4th, or 5th place votes; thus, it dropped out of the running when lower tiered votes were factored in for the other titles (at least, that’s how it was explained to me when I looked over the results last year). It’s possible that No Award might have the most first place votes in a given category, but ultimately loses because it gets swamped by a general consensus from the remaining votes. Australian Rules Voting can produce some weird results, and in the weird situation the Hugos find themselves in, it’s anyone’s guess how it will all turn out.

      One last prediction: I’m also pretty certain Vox Day is going to wind up below No Award in the two categories he’s nominated, regardless of how the rest turn out. Sorry to the Rabid Puppies, but I think Beale has become so toxic I doubt even his fan base can get him over the No Award threshold.

      Not attacking anyone here. Just trying to make sense of what I’m seeing. 🙂

      1. Ironically, the “Puppy Punters” proselytizing of the Noah Ward vote makes that an instance of slate voting.

        It is also the case that protests and denunciations by the “Puppy Punters” having driven several nominees to withdraw from the voting has confirmed and exacerbated the politicization of the Hugos.

        Sucks to be caught in the middle.

      2. The Hugo Awards are not “some weird variant of Australian Rules Voting, which aren’t really “Australian” — other places use the system, the preferred name for which is “Instant Runoff Voting,” or IRV. All it means is that if your first choice is eliminated, your vote transfers to your second choice, and if your second is eliminated, your third choice comes to the top, and so on. The process continues until a candidate has a majority. It’s not too difficult to simulate with stacks of ballots. The key to it is that the candidate that wins (and No Award is considered a “candidate” in this case) is the preferred choice of a majority of the voters over any of the other candidates. It simulates the process of repeated rounds of re-voting as less-popular candidates drop out and their supporters transfer their votes to other candidates.

        The only odd wrinkle is that after you get an initial winner, you have to do a final test that pits the initial winner versus No Award head-to-head, ignoring any other candidate. But nobody has ever lost in the No Award Showdown.

        An important thing about IRV is that if you are a candidate that is only loved or hated with no middle ground, you’re almost certainly not going to win unless you can somehow score a “knockout” of an absolute majority on the first ballot, because otherwise you’ll start strong and never collect any more votes. There are known cases of a polarizing candidate having the lead (but not a majority) at the end of the first round and eventually finishing last because nobody else voted for that candidate.

        We use the same system for Site Selection, not the “first past the post” system that most Americans understand (and what the Hugo Nominating ballot uses). That’s why this year’s Worldcon is in Spokane. Two years ago, the Helsinki bid was leading at the end of the first round and would have won a First Past the Post election. They didn’t have a majority, however, and thus Orlando (which placed third) was eliminated, and most of their votes transferred to Spokane, which thus won despite having fewer first place votes than Helsinki.

        2. (Blah. Hit post before I meant to.)

          Thank you for the clarification, tho I think I wasn’t too far off above – just probably not explaining it well.

          Looking forward to the results… whatever they will be.

  13. Hot off the pixel presses:

    Sasquan is pleased to announce that it received a record­breaking 5,950 valid ballots for the 2015 Hugo Awards. 5,914 voters used the online voting system and 36 submitted paper ballots. The 5,950 total surpasses the vote total record for previous years (3,587 ballots, set by Loncon in 2014) by more than 65%.

    More than 57% of the convention members eligible to vote cast ballots this year, making this the highest level of participation in Hugo Awards voting in the past decade.

    Sasquan will announce the Hugo Awards winners Saturday, Aug. 22, at 8 p.m. at a ceremony hosted by authors Tananarive Due and David Gerrold.

    That’s a lot of voters.

    1. I wonder how many are GamerGaters as opposed to SJWs trying to keep GGs out?

      2. It doesn’t matter. The primary objective of Sad Puppies III: Revenge of the (word)Smith has been met. Far more people know how easy it is to get works onto the ballot and vote for the Hugo.

        1. And the Puppy Kickers will rejoice at any No Awards, under the impression that they had any chance to win subsequent to Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s pre-ballot-announcement meltdown — since that, in itself, was victory.

          1. And we’ll be watching the reactions of the Usual Suspects very closely in the weeks to come. Maybe they learned from last time and will keep quiet, but I doubt it. Especially if the results don’t go their way. It’s in their nature.

            1. Don’t worry, it’s not as if they tell the Hugo winners they’ve won before the ceremony. As I recall, it was Mike Williamson who spilled the beans about his Hugo nomination on Twitter on March 20th, five days before it came up on Making Light. So the gossip was already out there.

              1. Ah, but the thing about the Making Light post is not that they knew who some of the nominees were, it’s that’s they knew everyone else HAD to be a Puppy.

                That means either
                1. They were told in violation of the rules
                2. They knew who were on the REAL slate, that is, those people whom SJWs voted for, and knew that no candidate but a Puppy had a chance against them.

                1. Or 3) someone who is very well connected to all of SF editorial, SF writers, and the Worldcon attending SF fan communities hears of folk bragging about getting nominated who, based on the work, almost certainly wouldn’t have been sans slate, hears from authors and editors and others that they *weren’t* nominated, and knows what works have been getting buzz in the community. In a normal year, I’d expect Teresa or someone with a similar background, to be able to state, oh, call it 10 works in a category and be very likely to match at least 4, likely all 5, of the actual nominees (even if those items would not have been on their own nomination ballot). No conspiracy involved at all.

                  And please, “REAL slate”? The only slates were the Sads and Rabids. Despite repetition of accusation, no one has presented any actual, y’know, evidence that other slates existed.

                  1. Come off it, please. First sad puppies were consider reading this, not a aka te. Second,I ‘ve been inthis field as a pro fifteen years. Telling methere was no slate from the well connected is a good joke. Pull the other one, it plays jingle bells. Even Gerrold and Martin admit there were always slates, only yousad Vile 770 trolls believe otherwise. This might be because you’re virginal of math. We’re not. Go teach your grandma to suck eggs.

                  2. Then other people would have heard the bragging. Witness that the one nominee who was ignorant of the news blackout was well known.

                  3. someone who is very well connected to all of SF editorial, SF writers, and the Worldcon attending SF fan communities hears of folk bragging about getting nominated who, based on the work,

                    Name three of the folk “bragging”? I know of one, who didn’t get the word about “don’t say anything until public release” and who pulled it from circulation.

                    So, who were the rest; where was the bragging?

                    Without that, I call bullshit.

                2. If you read the initial post and subsequent comments at Making Light on the subject of the gossip TNH heard about the 2015 Hugo nominations, it’s clear the results weren’t known before they were officially released on April 4th, but the speculation certainly was that some SPs made it onto the ballot given what Mike Williamson spilled.

                  As for an SJW slate, there wasn’t any, nor has there ever been. If you have facts about that, feel free to share them.

                  1. That is false. We had the definitive statement that two novels were not Puppies — in that case the person appears to have heard from the nominees — and that all the others were.

                    It was not speculation. It was known.

  15. It’s popular to denounce “greed” these days, but I’ve always thought that envy is by far the worse sin. A greedy person can be nasty, but for the most part, he has to be constructive rather than destructive. A greedy man who will be satisfied with nothing less than a Ferrari, for example, needs to live in a world where there ARE Ferraris–and roads to drive them on, and gas stations to fill them, and auto-shops to fix them after you crash them into poles while trying to take a turn at 60mph, and shipping companies to bring over the weird parts from Italy that you need to make them run again, etc.

    The envious man, though, doesn’t really care about any of that. It doesn’t matter so much to him that he gets his Ferrari as it does that no one else gets theirs, so he has no need to keep the world in good condition. The envious man would happily see everything burn as long as he got to be King of the Ashes.

    1. What’s the 10th Commandment? Not “don’t be greedy” but “do not covet” (lo tachmod). Covetousness/”the green-eyed monster”, when it becomes strong enough, will eventually cause a person to violate all the other commandments.

      1. When I was much younger, a religion instructor explained that there is a vast difference between seeing a neighbor’s new vehicle and saying, “Oh, I want that car!” and seeing a neighbor’s new vehicle and snarling, “I want THAT car!”

        1. Which also ties in a bit with the difference between zero-sum and positive-sum competitions… “I want THAT [specific unit] car” is zero-sum by definition.

    2. Excellent point Zsuzsa! Calls to mind the old Russian joke about the man confronted with a Genie who offered him one wish for anything he wanted with the catch that his worst enemy would get double that. He asked the Genie to make him blind in one eye.

      2. There is a Robert Scheckley story along those lines, originally published in Playboy in the 60s. A nice Jewish businessman is approached by a devil who explains things are slow, so they’re giving away three wishes, no strings, the only catch being that whatever you wish for your worst enemy gets twice that.

        Protesting that he has no enemies, the businessman is informed that his partner and “best friend” is his worst enemy and will get twice whatever he wishes for.

        First wish is $5,000 (or whatever — back in the 60s that was a lot of money) and on his way to deposit it in the bank meets his partner who crows about receiving $10,000 from a relative he didn’t know he even had!

        Second wish is for 50 lbs of chopped liver. He is greeted at his door by a caterer delivering the pâté. He eats a pound and sells the remainder back to the caterer who tells him of a similar recent delivery (to his partner) of 100 pounds, of which the recipient ate a half pound and sold back the remaining 99 and a half.

        Driven nearly mad by frustration the businessman thinks and thinks for days about how to make his third wish. Finally he realizes it is not good for a man to remain a bachelor and wishes for a wife, one who is gorgeous, faithful, intelligent and loving, with a sexual appetite as much, to the 99.999999th %, as a man can handle.

        There was a reason I remember the indicia noting it having been first published in Playboy.

      4. I’ve heard that one, but the Russian joke that I’ve always felt summarizes it is this one:

        Once there were two peasants named Pavel and Ivan. Their lives were equally miserable. But then one day Ivan got a cow. He was able to use the cow to help plow the fields, plus it gave milk that he could use to make butter and cheese, and suddenly, Ivan’s life was much better. Pavel looked at this and cried out to God, “It’s not fair! Before Ivan and I were equal, but now he has it so much better than I do.”

        God heard him and said, “You’re right, Pavel. It’s not fair. I promise I will make you and Ivan equal again.”

        Pavel broke into a huge grin. “That’s wonderful. You’re going to kill Ivan’s cow!”

  16. Completely OT: I know what a plotter is; I know what a pantser is. What would you call somebody who starts off with a plot, then modifies it as (s)he revises the manuscript and lacunae become evident?
    An iterative plotter? A back-filler? A plotser? (Oops, already taken)…?

    1. A hybrid plotter 🙂 Though I’d use the terms outliner vs pantser. Anybody who writes fiction (except some forms of litfic) is a plotter.

        1. Whereas my first drafts turn out to be about 12 pages, double-sided, handwritten.

          If I don’t, my first drafts have a tendency to peter out half way.

          1. I think I am going to claim the appellation of “synopter.”

            My synopses are running between 8k and 11k – and then I am (slowly) filling them in from the seat of my pants.

            (Whew. No edit function, no edit function, no edit function… It sinks in eventually.)

            1. It’s not like you are writing something that has to pass muster with an English teacher. (I once ran across someone who thought that a writer’s outline was like that.) Most of them are “synposis.”

              Mine are a list, but solely so I can more easily insert stuff by making it 24 a, b, c.

    3. I think there is a portmanteau of plotter and pantser that describes that: a plotzer.

      (Does that require a Yiddische accent for effectiveness?)

      1. No, but it helps. Otherwise it sounds a bit like plodzer, which is a writer who only manages one novel every ten or twelve years despite being a full-time writer, “because true art [pronounced aht] is so very difficult.”

    4. I’ve occasionally pantsed my way into a corner that I later had to plot my way out of.

      1. And I thought I was the only one whose first thought was of brindle beardogs; whenever of the subject of “plotting” came up.

      3. Wait, there are brindle breeds? I was under the impression that brindle coloring was a quirky mutt trait. That might be partly because most of the brindle dogs I’ve ever seen were half-feral Sao Paulo street dogs.

    1. Given that Michael Weatherly has a daughter in his house, I think this is just a case of a Little Women gaming campaign gone wild. So either it’s Shadowrun/Angel-style Little Women in a dystopian future, or it’s a historical where they move to the big city.

  18. Posted this earlier today on FB. Thought it should be here as well.
    Let’s do the math. From the numbers quoted there are something in excess of 10,000 attending or supporting Worldcon members this year. That’s a minimum of $400k contributions to Worldcon coffers. Given the disparity between those numbers and past records and that the only reasonable cause has to be the whole Sad Puppy kerfuffle, when can we expect a formal thank you from the Worldcon committee to the ELoE?

    1. They’ve worked very hard to keep out of the political sharknado, and I don’t blame them one bit. We know they appreciate the con they’re running being successful, I don’t think public recognition of that would be worth the political flak – and loss of legitimacy – they’d get if they spoke out publicly.

    2. That math (10,000 x $40) appears to assume that every single member of Sasquan joined because of the current controversy. Oh, and that the cost of managing a membership is zero, which is not true. Nevertheless, it is true that this year’s Worldcon has has an increase in revenue, which is welcome and has made budgeting the current Worldcon a little less of a nail-biting exercise than it normally is.

      For the benefit of those who have never run one: Every Worldcon is a legally and financially independent entity. There’s no “reserve from last year” to rely upon. There’s no “making it up next year” to bail you out if you run short. Every Worldcon stands or falls on its own. Last year’s Worldcon just barely made it, and then only by having to get grants from other groups to pay for some of the post-con responsibilities, including providing publications to those supporting members. The 2007 Worldcon lost money quite badly. Those sort of things make Worldcon treasurers very pessimistic when budgeting.

      1. Let’s hope there is even less keratin in the diet next year.

        One point – you got one $40.00 membership this year that no previous WorldCon has ever gotten. You do have David Gerrold to thank for it – because his bilious garbage was the straw that broke this camel’s back.

        Take that how you will.

      2. No, I was simply playing with the numbers and speculating that some portion of that $400k can be attributed to the SP controversy. Have no idea how big that portion might be, but it’s certainly a number greater than zero. And if processing supporting members subscriptions costs more that a couple of bucks someone is doing it incredibly wrong. The system should already be in place after all. We’re talking incremental additions to an established process. Attending memberships OTOH each represent a significant draw on infrastructure, good to a point, but beyond that point can have a negative impact.

        1. Assuming that supporting memberships cost the convention a trivial amount of marginal cost also assumes that every single supporting member will opt to receive every single communication exclusively electronically, and that none of them will want paper versions of the publications to which they are entitled. In fact, any supporting member outside of the USA who wants paper versions of his/her publications runs a good chance of costing the convention more than the cost of the membership, based on historical data.

          It’s only because an increasing number of members have opted exclusively for electronic publications that Worldcons do not consistently lose money on supporting memberships.

          I’m not saying the added revenue isn’t welcome. It is. I’m saying that the amount of marginal revenue (extra money to cover the cost of the convention that wouldn’t have been there if this hadn’t happened) is significantly overstated. It’s certainly not $400,000!

  19. From my lurking at Making Light and various puppy-hating blogs I’ve noticed a strong current of pre-gloating about what kind of awesome burn Tananarive Due and David Gerrold will lay down if any of the Puppy-recommended works win awards.

    Think about that. I mean, really think about that in the real world. Suppose you’re, say, Ken Burnside, and “The Hot Equations” wins the Best Related Work Hugo. You go on up to the podium to pick up the rocket, and Tananarive or David or whoever insults you in public in front of a large audience, on a night when you’ve been honored by your fans.

    Now think about how you’d react. (Aside from braining the culprit with your Hugo Award, of course.) Are you going to decide that wow, the SJWs aren’t such bad people after all? Maybe we were wrong about them? Maybe they don’t hate us and want to drive us out of SF? It was all just some crazy misunderstanding?

    No, you’ll leave Sasquan burning with a righteous hatred and desire for revenge. As would be your right as a human being.

    Do the Puppy-haters understand this, or are they too mired in grievances nursed since junior high school?

    Quite simply, at SasQuan, it’s not the Puppy folks who need to be on their best behavior, it’s the SJWs. This is their last chance to show that they are not the insular, elitist, inbred CHORFs we’ve been accusing them of being. Fail now, and next year will be a tidal wave.

    1. Like I said before, what’s Gerrold going to do if Butcher wins? Spit on the Hugo before handing it to him? Normally, I’d say such a thing was inconceivable, but not this year.

      1. It would be stupid if he did. Of course Gerrold is something of a has-been now.He’s got a series that’s he’e never going to finish. He had a Kickstarter to make Star Wolf a web series that failed. Wanted $650,000 only had $88,000 pledged. Finally it’s been over 10 years since his last novel.

        1. I’ll say this: if we get a Hugo ceremony full of cheap-shots and bashing, it will ultimately prove far more damaging and divisive to fandom than anything the Puppies could possibly do.

          2. I’d be more inclined to think (hope) that any cheap shots will be restricted to the live blogging/tweeting and any after-action blogging rather than at the actual presentation.

            1. TXRed: I think that’s a pretty reasonable assumption, at least as far as the unmoderated, free-form commentary such as you’ll see on Twitter. However, as one of the hosts of the official Hugo Awards web site text-based coverage of the event via CoverItLive, I can state fairly definitively that our comment moderators are not going to be very tolerant of cheap shots and carping from anyone of any persuasion. There were many comments made during last year’s ceremony from people across the ideological spectrum that were never released into the official coverage, and a couple of times we told people that cheap shots of that nature were a waste of electrons.

              1. Thank you. I’ve attended a few academic conferences where the participants managed to act in professional, respectable ways despite well-known philosophical differences, and it was greatly appreciated by the rest of us. I look forward to following the text-based coverage.

    2. Yeah Gerrold enjoys differing opinions so much I’m blocked from his page on the failbook Hell, I’m so blocked it doesn’t even show up in the search window anymore

      1. Perhaps Trimegistus is thinking that Gerrold will “play nice” as guest of honor. Mind you, it is possible that Gerrold would “play nice” because otherwise Gerrold won’t be invited to any other cons.

      2. The Puppy Punters are essentially declaring “To save the Hugos we must destroy them.”

        It’s a fair cop; they manufactured the original quote in Vietnam, and they’re into recycling. Their ideas, their policies, their values and their methods* are all recycled.

        *List not intended to be comprehensive. Feel free to add additional recycled components as the whim moves.

  20. We know who wants to drive people out of SFF and it sure isn’t the so-called SJW who you hate to much. It is YOU who wants to drive people out, anyone who want more variety and diversity in their fiction. No, not everyone wants to ‘tell a book by its cover’.

    1. Good heavens. you know that? Why? Who told you?
      We’ve always said that everyone should write whatever they want and there should be no other political (or other) color bar.
      But you’ve been delving on vile 770, I guess, which gets its audience from rumor and innuendo.
      You poor thing, you probably also believe I’m racist and homophobic. It would be funny if it weren’t so … vile.
      Now stop listening to the voices in your head and the crazy people on YOUR side and learn some reading comprehension.

      1. To be fair, Sarah, in an open market people like the special cupcake up there, relying on captive markets aimed at what people “should” read, would be very likely to compete against stories that people actually want to read.

        Entertaining and exciting stories, in a free market, will tend to drive out “dull as ditchwater” as people choose to spend their money that way.

    2. Oh, I’m sorry. I treated this piece of insanity as thought it meant something. The appropriate response is pointing my finger and making duck noises.

        1. quackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquackquack

        1. Don’t check the minion pool. They were offended by the way the sea serpent thinks that anyone swimming over the gold is after its treasure.

    3. Oh, cupcake. That’s precious. I’m all for diversity. First and foremost, diversity of thought and idea. I like to read lots of things, which is why my library ranges all over. That’s a side-effect of my degree, though, and I understand there are pills that can clear that right up. I’m not even sure where the cover judging crack came from. You have to judge a book by its cover. Lissome young thing in leather sporting sword or spell effect (tattoo optional) and dollars to donuts it’s urban fantasy trending paranormal romance. An exploding spaceship is almost certainly space opera, probably with milSF tones. Hooded man with sword/staff? Dark fantasy. Oh, did you mean skin color? I can’t really speak to that, as it won’t tell me what an author writes, or how good it is.

    4. Wait, we’re supposed to be driving people out of Science Fiction?!?! There must have been a typo on the memo. We’ve been screwing up for MONTHS! Why didn’t somebody stop us? Instead of driving people out we got 3000 more people signed up and voting for the Hugos! No wonder the Evil Legion of Evil fired Brad and put Kate in charge for next year. This is just going to make it harder to destroy Science Fiction next year. Darn it, why didn’t someone tell us?!? We vile faceless minions can’t think of these things ourselves.

      1. Keep in mind that at $40 per per voter that makes an additional eight of a million dollars, less handling fees*, helping pay for the Sasquan.

        What a nefarious scheme, making cons more financially able to operate, increasing interest and promoting variety in the genre. And we would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids and that sad puppy.

        *While it is certain that each associate membership entails costs to the con, leave us pray that they are not so incompetent as to take a loss on non-attending memberships.

    5. J. R. — you wearing your brown shirt while typing that nonsense? You are aware that tinfoil caps actually intensify the signals?

      Who is this “we” you speak of and what evidence have you that contradicts multiple explicit statements? Those wouldn’t be “fake but accurate” documents given you by Dan Rather at an abandoned fairground in the dark of night, would they?

    6. “Tell a book by its cover”

      Well, we are visual creatures. A cover on a book is an important thing. It needs to catch the eye so that the possible reader/customer will pick it up. If the cover is poor, the possible reader/customer may not pick it up and just keep looking.

      So the cover is important when it comes to the marketing side of novels.

      The other part is the blurb on back. You want it written so that it catches the reader/customers attention. You want them to buy your book so they can find out more about what is inside of the pages.

      Oh…wait…never mind. You aren’t talking about that.

      As for diversity, you use that word, but the way you are using it is incorrect.

      See, I read for entertainment. I don’t care who the author is, or what they believe. All I care about is that they entertain me.

      Are they entertaining? Then huzzah, and I buy their book. Are they boring, piling message into their fiction where I want to throw it into the trash? Well they don’t get money from me.

      1. No, no — you are wrong to reject J. R.’s argument. Clearly it is undeniably wrong to judge a book by its cover, which means that all books by sensitive publishers and authors concerned over increasing the diversity in the genre should immediately stop putting covers on their books and instead produce and deliver them to the stores in simple plain bindings of some randomly selected hue.

        That will protect lovers of diversity from accidentally opening a book for wrong reasons. To further advance this war on cosmic injustice it would probably be a good idea to eliminate book titles and not reveal author’s names. It might even be necessary to print these books in white ink on white paper (or black ink on black paper; we’ll establish a committee to determine that) so as to end discrimination in favor of English-reading purchasers.

        Think of how the money saved by not having art directors at publishers will enable books to be produced at lower costs, thus making them more affordable.

        I must be acknowledged that not all publishers and writers will want to go along with this proposal, clinging bitterly to their covers and their bylines. Happily, this will make it all the easier for fair-minded people to avoid such bastions of privilege and by avoiding end them.

          1. I think it is a fair grade, applying reasonable standards. The righteous indignation content seems about right — not up to an A but better than a C. As J. R. eschewed profanity, egregious grammatical error and employed only minimal character assassination I think it would be unfair to grade their effort any lower and certainly not higher.

            If we were to grade on originality and entertainment value there would, of course, be some revisions required.

    9. I am disappointed, they told me there was a troll to use for a chew to here, all we get is a garden variety moron with reading comprehension issues. Go back where you came from and ask them to send someone at least semi competent, You are not worth the electrons it would take to dismantle you

    10. Last time I checked, it wasn’t the Puppies who drove a bisexual woman out of this year’s Hugos.

      1. Ah, but you see, we nominated one just so she could be driven out. That’s just how perfidious we Puppies are, you see.

    11. This from the people who are upset that “requires hate’ wasn’t nominated for the Campbell. Well I doubt very many people will miss her very much.

      1. But Requires Hate WAS nominated for the Campbell. RH just didn’t win before being exposed to the world.

    12. Drat, foiled again. I was just about to graduate the first class of secret police when you stopped me. They would have required that English language Science Fiction and Fantasy be mostly written in the Latin alphabet. Now you will be free to continue to publish the output of a pseudo-random number generator as science fiction and fantasy. Oh woe and despair!

    13. Except the “we will wreck your career” and “we will make sure you never win a Hugo” types are all on your side.

      It’s not for fear of any backlash from us that people have turned down their nomination.

    14. Right. Sure. Sorta like those people who drove me out of the Green Room at Norwescon with all their “friendly” and “diverse” acceptance of anything other than Liberal thought. When you’re sitting about in your bubble of friends talking about how “awful” all those people are? Go look in a mirror–you’ll see who’s been driving people out.

  21. ” Before anybody goes there, seeing the fortunes of another and using that as a motivation to achieve is zeal, per Thomas Aquinas (See Article II), and isn’t necessarily problematic.”

    Indeed, zeal is considered one of the seven lively virtues, being the opposite of sloth. Of course, it’s the virtue that you probably see in more villains than any other virtue. . . lacking it in the heroes is probably one of the biggest reasons for when the villain is more attractive.

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