New Hugo Award categories for puppies

Vertical video is perfectly acceptable between consenting adults, provided they keep it the dirty shameful secret it should be, and not shove it down our optic nerves by posting it on Youtube.

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Welp, Iā€™ve been following boing boing for a very long time. Never really commented much, but as of late, itā€™s become basically troll level material with jarden envenoming anything she doesnā€™t agree with, Doctorow less and less reliable by the post, random plastic shovels being sold, and other worthlessness.

Itā€™s a good day to eject that part of my life. Iā€™ll just show myself the door. You folks stick to your little uninformed echo chamber, Iā€™ll find something more interesting to do.

Doctorow, if you decide to find your journalistic integrity again, it would be lovely. You used to be a reliable and entertaining read. Not so much anymore. Sad, really. Gā€™day.

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Indeed. We currently drone strike folks with the same basic philosophy as Beale.

Ooh ooh ooh this one needs to be added to that google doc. Anything that starts with ā€œwelpā€ is surely amazing.

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As well as folks who happen to be in the vicinity of said folks with the same basic philosophy as Beale, and folks who have similar last names to them, and folks who are distantly related to them, or wear the same kinds of towels on their heads, but I digress. Drone strikes sound great in theory, but, as with most application of violence that sounds like a totally awesome solution to a problem, itā€™ hard to be as selective as youā€™d (hopefully) like.

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You should really check out Bealeā€™s website if you are looking for a new place to hang out. Lots of stuff about how educated womenā€™s hypergamy is ruining society because there are not enough alpha males around to marry. And thus if women are kept uneducated they would get and stay married, and then, uhh, I guess dudes like Beale could pass their tax cuts and enjoy their bronies while their uneducated wives and daughters bring them nachos and eventually they all go to heaven, including the women who sin less frequently because they are uneducated. Or something like that.

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Agree 100%. Just like to point out to our conservative friends that if they espoused this ideology on another continent and with a slightly different ethnic/cultural backdrop they could be on the explody end of a hellfire missile.

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Well, you know how it is. Kind of like thereā€™s nobody an orthodox communist hates more than a Trotskyite.

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Maybe the troll bots crawl slower on the weekend.

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Vox Day is not part of SP.

Sad Puppies, rabid puppies, whatā€™s the diff?

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Oh yeah, heā€™s the dude with the slightly different logo and list. VD, STD, sad, rabid, they definitely seem related to me. Again, that nearly identical logo and name thing, similar grievances, and so on, kind of connect VD with these guys.

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This is sad, not to mention scary.

Mr.Doctorow, if W1n5t0n had read the following he would be looking at you right now with an expression of disbelief and horror. How could the author of Little Brother, Homeland and For The Win, be tricked into writing

ā€œā€¦coalition of right-wing and white-supremacist groups who pushed a slate of ideological pure nominees onto the Hugo Award ballot, complaining that you could no longer judge books by their covers, and that science fiction had changed to reflect the world since the 1970s.ā€

when an hour in honest research would have cast doubt on what was not simply refuted.

First the Prevent Sad Puppies campaigns were not the work of groups ideological or otherwise, but of individual authors, Larry Correia and Brad R. Torgenson. Neither of these men are white-supremacists (I believe Larry is Hispanic and Brad is married to an African-American and the father of their ā€˜mixed raceā€™ daughter) and neither are, strictly speaking, right wing.

They did not push a slate of ideologically pure nominees, they recommended books and stories they themselves liked to the readers of their blogs and suggested that if those readers liked what they read, then nominate those books for a Hugo.

They didnā€™t complain that you couldnā€™t judge a book by itā€™s cover, they complained that they couldnā€™t rely on a Hugo Award blurb as indicative of a good story.

Indeed their chief complaint is that they think stories in the last few years have been picked, not because lotā€™s of people enjoyed them, but because quality has taken a back seat to political correctness.

Itā€™s worth noting their claim that the books they recommended were written by a diverse group of authors, in terms of gender and political leanings, and the stories had protagonists and plots that do not fit the categories of white-supremacist or right-wing, but instead the whole wide world and everyone in it. (I canā€™t comment on the stories yet, I got distracted
by Heinlein but Iā€™m going to by God STOP after I finish Have Space Suit Will Travel and start working through them)

And I donā€™t know where you got the 1970ā€™s thing from.

Since discovering these writers, ironically because of the Hugo brouhaha, Iā€™ve read 9 and Ā½ of Correiaā€™s novels. These books have ranged from decent to really good, to stalling out about Ā½ through the last.
Iā€™ve also read some of Torgersenā€™s short stories, and found them readable if not impressive.
(As a metric I loved Little Brother and For The Win, enjoyed Homeland, Down and out in the Magic Kingdom, and
Eastern Standard Tribe, and was repelled by Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.)

Iā€™ve also spent a lot of time reading their blogs, and the blogs of their adversaries, just trying to figure out what the heck is going on.

So Iā€™m confident when I say, youā€™ve been misled by somebody, because there is no way the author of, especially, Little Brother and For The Win, could make these hateful claims about these two men if you had actually done the same.

And Iā€™m going to be really bummed if youā€™ve somehow drank the double speak Kool-aid and Iā€™m wrong.

Seriously Dude, you are better than this.

As for the openly racist/misogynist/badthink Theodore Bealleā€¦Iā€™ve read his posts about the affair, and the posts of his adversaries, and Iā€™m reserving judgment for now. Because I think the r/m/b labels are toā€¦simplistic to accurately describe him.

And everything Iā€™ve read suggests that the nastier claims about him are fallout from the flame-war backbiting all to typical of fannish political conflicts. I mean hell, what pushing to No Award the Hugo ballets anything but a threat itself?

Now I realize that youā€™re a name author, and Iā€™m just a guy who reads a book a day, so Iā€™m not going to rule out that Mr. Bealle is as unsavory as his enemies claim. But so far the quotes used to damn him are, if not entirely out of context, then definitely massaged.

Right now, from what heā€™s actually claimed to espouse (as opposed to what his enemies claim he really meant to say), Iā€™m leaning toward heā€™s a prickly contrarian (think H.L. Mencken) who uses bluntness like a filter, to shock people into knee jerk reactions and to speak to those who can read his ideas by what he says, not by what people think he must be saying. Again I might be wrong.

So please, do a little research, because if the guy that penned Little Brother can be suckered into buying Ministry of Truth style propagandaā€¦I canā€™t help thinking, isnā€™t that a big blow to any real hope that we can have of a free and decent future?

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welcome to boingboing. check out some of the other stories and spread some likes around for comments and things you like. i encourage you to act like a new member of the community instead of a single issue ranter.

i think you may be the one who needs to do some research because beale reads worse in context than most of the quotes iā€™ve seen around here.

i advise you to read the following essay about beale and the whole sp/rp disruptionā€“

http://www.philipsandifer.com/2015/04/guided-by-beauty-of-their-weapons.html

itā€™s mentioned above in a couple of previous comments and worth a read if you really want to know. beale is a vicious piece of work who is condemned by his own words and it makes you look either naive or vicious to defend him and his efforts.

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Like I said earlier, I just discovered this entire issue today. Spent a few hours reading Beale and Torgersenā€™s sites and I have to say that you may be in denial about these folks. Maybe Torgersen just genuinely wants to keep reading shoot 'em up sci-fi blaster stories, but you donā€™t win literary awards for just repeating the same thing over again. So, at best he is just missing the point of recognizing novel contributions to the field and pushing boundaries. Perhaps he believes in a Platonic Ideal of a sci-fi plot, but I would wager that is boring to most of us.

Beale basically represents the worse aspects of humanity. And he seems quite proud of it. No other way to read it.

It is worth pointing out that both of these guys self identify in clear terms as right-wing, so not seeing how Doctorowā€™s summary is inaccurate.

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Whatā€™s disturbing to me is that Rabid Puppies isnā€™t some also-ran, determined to grab hold of sad puppiesā€™ coattails. Itā€™s that it was the more successful of the two slates.

Sad Puppies 14 out of 17 nominees
Rabid Puppies 19 out of 20 nominees.

Of the 20 Novel, Novelette, Novella and SS nominees, 6 came from Rabid Puppies, 12 were nominated by Sad and Rabid Puppies, and 2 came from other sources.

source

(I should say that I donā€™t agree with my sourceā€™s support for Sad Puppies, but numbers are numbers.)

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The book has a spaceship on the cover, but is it really going to be a story about space exploration and pioneering derring-do? Or is the story merely about racial prejudice and exploitation, with interplanetary or interstellar trappings?


Openly gay characters and an Analogy of governments making some people less than peopleā€”artificial people who donā€™t have feelings and love.

If youā€™re ā€œTrickedā€ by these cover artsā€¦by one of the ā€œold school guysā€ you deserve to have an opinionā€¦But you also have a uninformed opinion subject to people calling you out as a dumbass of galactic proportions.

/Edit: Actually I think Heinlein would be the first to say he ā€œTrickedā€ people into not only expanding their horizonsā€¦but questioning their bigotry and prejudiced. There are long screeds in his novels about this very issueā€¦infact itā€™s one of his central themes. Someone thatā€™s ā€œDifferentā€ gets rejected by people who they thought loved themā€”Friday is an exampleā€¦Stranger has examples, and Moon is a Harsh Mistresses.

//Edit editā€¦Bryan Singerā€¦is directing the Moon is a Harsh Mistress Movie. Yeahā€¦the gay director. Suck it Puppy.

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Only a LIBRUL would be stupid enough to make assumptions of another based on what they say about theirselves.

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One lonely Trot sitting in a hall
One lonely Trot sitting in a hall
And if one lonely Trot should accidentally squall
Thereā€™ll be two lonely Trots sitting in a hall

ā€¦ repeat as necessary

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