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(To avoid any confusion, Iâll make it clear that this is not a response to albill, but rather to the person, and I use the term loosely, he was quoting)
Descending on a gay couple and beating them to death with axhandles and tire-irons would seem to be either the instinctive reaction of somebody whoâs family was threatened by a clear and present danger, or violent thugs who get off on any chance to beat up somebody different from them.
The only reason I could see for men to feel their family is threatened by a gay couple is if they were overwhelmed by such sexual attraction that they were afraid they were in danger of breaking up their own family to indulge in it if the option were available. But Iâll take you at your word that you do not feel such things, so Iâm left with option B.
This is not the type of person who belongs in society. Please, Mr. Wright, be a responsible citizen and get yourself locked up until you have been cured of these impulses. Itâs perhaps the most heroic thing you can do. (Self-sterilization would be going the extra mile!)
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You know what they say, âgive a man a fire and heâs warm for a day, set a man on fire and heâs warm for the rest of his life.â
(also: Ninjaâd by @TobinL 
)
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Well Nelsie, I donât know what to tell you. Iâve found that generally when I want to find out what someone wants itâs a good idea to start by seeing what they say they want.
This is one of the things that really bugs me about the internet, (and Iâm not trying to be a jerk here, Iâm writing this while waiting for the sleep med to kick in, so Iâm trying for non-judgmental and non-hostile) but the answer to your question is easily found. Just go to Larryâs blog and read his words.
That you ask the question means either you suck at reading for comprehension or you havnât bothered to do so. I didnât have to scroll more than 1/3 down to find.
"I started Sad Puppies a few years ago. My goal was to demonstrate that the awards were biased, represented the likes of only one small part of fandom, and that authors with the wrong politics who got on the ballot would be attacked. All of that has been demonstrated rather conclusively.
Brad Torgersen ran Sad Puppies 3, and I was one of the people who helped. The mission changed, and Bradâs main goal was to get deserving, worthy authors who would normally be ignored onto the ballot, regardless of their politics."
So what the Stop Sad Puppies campaign wanted this year was âto get deserving, worthy authors who would normally be ignored onto the ballot, regardless of their politics.â
Reading the rest of the things Larryâs written about the Stop Sad Puppies campaigns, I have to attest that this is a fairly accurate summation of Larry and Bradâs stated goals.
Of course, if you read the above having already decided that Larryâs a lying posâŚ
The crazy thing is that I have no idea whether I would agree with their tastes, some things I really like and some things I donât, I donât know an objective way to determine some kind of absolute platonic ideal of âqualityâ SF.
But I donât see how anyone can deny that Larry had a point when he said, âMy goal was to demonstrate that the awards were biased, represented the likes of only one small part of fandom, and that authors with the wrong politics who got on the ballot would be attacked. All of that has been demonstrated rather conclusively.â
When this thread in itself demonstrates he was right.
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tl;dr
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Uh, not really. It demonstrates that people think heâs a dishonest sack of shit who moves goalposts around.
Heâs yet to show any real evidence that only certain political beliefs win awards and that there is some conspiracy to make it so. What he really demonstrates is that he and similar fans are out of touch with what most fans are actually interested in. Books in line with what most voters want and like? They win awards.
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I also think that he and Beale have demonstrated what horrible examples of humanity are and that they think SF is only for white dudes into pew pew spaceships.
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Maybe science fiction isnât a good place for hatemongers, makes a person think.
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The data does not support this. At Stack Exchange, my previous company, we did extensive data analysis on participation there. (Stack Exchange is a top 50 network of worldwide Q&A sites) What we found is that the number one way to get someone to go away⌠is to ignore them. All the data we have shows that Interacting with a user in any way, even downvoting them, makes it far more likely that they will return. For example:
While I agree that obvious evil should be handled, ideally through flagging and removal, every time you reply to someone you are sending them an engraved invitation to reply back â and possibly even return over time to hang out here.
I recommend only replying to posters that seem to be participating in reasonable good faith, that is, they appear receptive to hearing other points of view, potentially evolving their own point of view, and are not here to endlessly recite talking points or parrot extremism. Before replying, ask yourself: do I really want this person to come back?
While âburning trolliesâ might seem like a sick kind of fun, all youâre really doing is destroying the environment here. And that hurts everyone. If anything, we should kill trollies with cloying kindness and patient rebuttals, or even better, absolute silence followed by flagging and removal of their posts.
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Iâve got screencaps of him and Larry Corriea tweeting back and forth with Milo Yinanopalous trying to get the puppies event off the ground and get Gamergate involved - Beale was Corrieaâs gateway into Gamergate, which is how both slates got any real traction other than one nomination (what they managed last year)
Itâs a different name for the same movement with a new bunch of SJW hating voters whoâd mostly never cared about the Hugos before. Almost all of them never would have voted in the Hugos before unless Beale dragged them in telling them they could upset SJWs, and Corriea wanted that to happen
Feel free to search twitter. Unless theyâve deleted the conversations, theyâre all still around.
And now that weâve done away with that nonsense, any other objections to lumping them into the same bucket?
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OMG! The meme has meta-stasized!
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Letâs say we take Torgersen and Correiaâs goals at face-value, and that they started Sad Puppies for those reasons. Great, yaaay, way to go! (Well, assuming one agrees with those goals, but thatâs no neveryoumind.)
Then, they decide to rope in Beale and Gamergate.
At that their original motives no longer matter - they have shown that they are willing to bed down with racist misogynistic assholes. Thatâs their game. They no longer have laudable* goals, they only have hate.
* and thatâs only assuming you ever agreed it was laudable.
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Which is not to say itâs not a place for the usual primate bickering you have when you get a large and disparate group of big-brained apes together.
Thatâs why I say it isnât clear to me that what the Sad Puppies say they want is even self-consistent, even considered individually, never mind if you consider Correia, Wright, Torgersen, and Beale as allies.
Even the approach of trying to prove that âSJWsâ are manipulating the award by capturing the award for oneself is pretty problematic. They couldnât do it in the first two years by being just as disorganised as the low ape politicking thatâs a feature of any large group; they only managed it this year by linking up with the conscience-deficient Beale with his minion-organising skills and thirst for disproportionate (and indiscriminate) vengeance for insignificant slights. But besides that, whereâs the moral high ground in proving that somethingâs vulnerable by wrecking it? âHmm, this punch would taste pretty awful if I spilled bleach in it⌠See, I was right, it does taste awful. See?â
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I can believe thatâs what generally happens, but it totally misses the concern. Anyone who has paid attention to this sort of issue knows there are enough accounts that show up for the one topic, and regardless of interaction very few return. That we might encourage one or two to stay longer is little risk, because the real problem is that they are replaced by near-identical confederates whenever the issue is mentioned again. What do we do about that?
You can trust my first choice is flagging, every time it looks like a rule might have been transgressed. But you also get sealioning, just asking questions, and other circuitous ways of defending hate groups where individual posts donât quite seem to qualify. If there is any driving trollies still here that could have been flagged, I would appreciate having it pointed out, so that I can do so next time. Beyond that, there is the question of how to handle whatâs left over.
Your advice on this is apparently to meet it with kindness, patience, or silence, and all I can say to that is that I completely disagree. I donât prefer an environment where defenses of hatred are either allowed to stand, or treated as an appropriate subject for debate, to one where they are forcefully rejected. Yes, the latter ends up messy, and that can wear on people; but then so does seeing your worth questioned, or such questioning treated as if it were normal polite conversation.
I donât think you can have a party where people calmly discuss whether women belong in the kitchen, whether someone who says theyâre too irrational to vote is really so bad, and so on, without making it very unwelcoming to women. Those are my priorities. Not the small number of returning accounts but the large number of new ones, and not the vague chance some might be won over but the real possibility they can render places unwelcoming to their targets.
Iâm sorry if it conflicts with your priorities, but ultimately I care much more about that then about the supposed harm from yelling at such people. So Iâm happy to see posters respond accordingly, and contribute as I see fit; in the end I think itâs a better environment than where misogyny, racism, and excuses for them are treated in genteel fashion.
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I still think we should just ban or auto-hide (until moderators free them) all posts from new accounts for the first 48 or 72 hours after account creation. It is a marginal cost on people participating in good faith (they can wait) and completely stops the typical âdrive byâ fanboy haters.
Let us retire to the âDonât Feed The Trollsâ thread and discuss this over a scotch, shall we?
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Like if the feeding way had any better results than the not-feeding way. Except of costing more resources.
âŚwhich could be spent in other threadsâŚ
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Surely experiments that return negative results are as informative as those that return significant results? Non?
Murph was clearly a trolley, and it didnât take long to realize that. I eventually flagged him rght about when I started responding in mostly just memes/gifs. And Falcor took care of it, which was expected and also very much appreciated.
This user is suspended until September 13, 2042 7:38am.
Reason: Ranting trolley
So yeah, Iâm definitely for flagging when appropriate @codinghorror, and I probably would have done it a little sooner if I wasnât also having a bit of fun, and I donât see anything wrong with that. And forgive me if I have a little fun with misogynistic assholes. Yeah, I think I and others have deserved a well-placed penis gif or two in response to this shit.
Also note that I was the only one to flag murph (I think). Not all the trollies are going to get flagged. Even when itâs âobviousâ.
And what is a trolley, anyway? I mean murph was kind of obvious, but they all arenât. We even have a few long-timers with accounts beginning in 2013 who are coming from ridiculous pro-gamergate and/or puppies points of view, and not always kindly. Identifying trollies isnât black and white, necessarily, @chenille is right.
Note that I was suspended once for a month or two and Iâve never complained about it.
Just wanted to respond specifically about driving trollies in this thread, but will take any additional comments to the other thread linked above.
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