I’ve got work to do. I’ve got to finish the rough draft of a novel for a gaming IP by the end of February, and then I’ve got two short stories due the first part of March, but Monday morning I see this nonsense. How could I not take a minute to fisk it?
As usual, the original is italics and my comments are in bold.
I Challenge You To Stop Reading White, Straight, Cis Male Authors For One Year
Bold headline. Short answer? No.
I thought: what if I only read stories by a certain type of author?
On purpose? Then you’d probably be a racist.
K. Tempest Bradford
Pick any whackadoo Social Justice Warrior controversy in sci-fi/fantasy publishing over the last few years and you’ll find K. Tempest Bradford in the middle of it. She is perpetually outraged that someone may be out there, right now, having fun wrong.
Let’s start by analyzing this picture of Tempest giving America a good scolding.
Now, you might be wondering why Neil Gaiman is the designated bad guy this time. By all accounts, Gaiman is a brilliant, entertaining, extremely successful author, who also has a reputation of being a very nice guy to his gigantic fan base. Not only that, but I believe politically he is on the left, so you’d think he would be at least marginally more sympathetic to the various SJW causes.
But he’s Tempest’s Evil White Cismale Oppresor because of this other recent bit of SJW nonsense by Hugo winning feminist Kameron Hurley. http://www.scifinow.co.uk/interviews/kameron-hurley-on-neil-gaimans-trigger-warning-responsibility/
Sadly, I don’t have time to fisk the one I’m fisking, let alone fisk the background fiskings, but that Hurley article is very fiskable. My favorite part is where a SJW laments how awful it might be to have other creators attack you in social media… Yes… I can’t possibly imagine what that would be like.
Basically, Gaiman wrote a book called Trigger Warnings, which triggered SJWs. Now, Gaiman has offended these people before by saying that maybe they shouldn’t be so quick to form angry lynch mobs against innocent people, like when they attacked and slandered his friend comedian Jonathan Ross into resigning from being the Hugo MC because he *might* hypothetically, in the future, tell a fat joke.
For those of you just joining us, not I’m not making that up. SJWs are really that paranoid and vindictive.
But anyways, because he stood up against witch hunts, and was in favor of telling the truth about someone rather than the narrative, Gaiman equals Satan-Hitler.
But the ironic thing about that picture? Tempest is wearing a Dr. Who shirt. A TV show about a white man and his white female sidekick, created by some white men, with episodes written by… Neil Gaiman.
Back in 2012 I faced a conundrum. I write short fiction, and I wanted to get better at writing it. To do that I had to write, write, and write some more.
I actually agree with that. The more you write, the better you get.
But just as important was reading, reading, and reading a lot more.
Also true. Authors need to read in order to become better writers. Exposure to other styles will help you improve your own.
Reasonable so far, but don’t worry, she’s about to go off the rails into racist crazy town.
And I tried. But every time I thought about delving into one of the many science fiction and fantasy magazines at my disposal, or even reading compilations of the “best” stories that had been nominated for and/or won awards, my brain resisted.
Her brain resisted? But, remember, it is my side that is supposed to be small minded.
Also, I want you to think about what kind of stories have been nominated for and/or won awards in recent decades. Plus, I’d invite any of you to go check out some of the various years best compilation anthologies. Go through them with a critical eye and see how they skew politically.
Because every time I tried to get through a magazine, I would come across stories that I didn’t enjoy or that I actively hated or that offended me so much I ragequit the issue.
She RAGEQUIT? (anybody who ever played Call of Duty knows that word is spelled all caps).
Now normally people, when investing their valuable free time into something, when they find that item isn’t to their taste, stop, and simply switch to something else they think they’ll like better. There is after all, a whole lot of things to choose from competing for your entertainment dollar.
But not Tempest. She is powered by RAGE. I bet she RAGEQUITS lots of things.
Go through enough of that and you start to resist the idea of reading at all.
Uh huh… It must suck to be confronted by such dangerous badthink that it would cause a professional writer to give up reading. That would be kind of like an artist saying she was so offended by someone’s painting that she wanted to pluck her eyes out. Or in other words, complete bullshit.
But hang a minute… She doesn’t name any names, but If you look at award winning/nominated short fiction, and Best Of compilations of short stories, you’ll find tons of them that already cater to Tempest’s world view, and yet she still RAGEQUIT. What was she reading exactly? FIRE HOSES & ATTACK DOGS. Bull Conner Presents the Best Fiction of 1965?
Then I thought: what if I only read stories by a certain type of author? Instead of reading everything, I would only look at stories by women or people of color or LGBT writers. Essentially: no straight, cis, white males.
I suppose that would make sense, if you’re a huge bigot blinded by irrational hatred.
Cutting that one demographic out of my reading list greatly improved my enjoyment of reading short stories.
Now just flip that “that one demographic” to Jews and see how much that sounds like a skin head.
That’s not to say I didn’t come across bad stories or offensive stuff in stories or other things that turned me off. I did. But I came across this stuff far less than previously.
So, Gay and Lesbian People of Color, you still offend Tempest, but not enough to cause RAGEQUIT. Don’t worry. Once all the White Cismales are gone, you will be reeducated so that there is no danger of you having fun in an unapproved manner and causing microaggressions.
Limiting myself in this way also made me aware of how often certain magazines published whole issues in which no women or POC authors made an appearance.
Fun Fact: Did you know that when you submit a story to an editor, there is no place on your query letter to tell them about your Race/Sex/Orientation?
And pretty soon I didn’t even bother looking at those magazines when I went on my monthly search. When I ran out of known-to-me magazines, I went on the hunt and discovered several that published new-to-me writers and also a surprising number of magazines dedicated to underheard voices.
The key here is the known-to-me and surprising bits. Most Social Justice Warriors aren’t well read. They like to pretend they are, but when you start talking about what is actually out there to choose from, they are shockingly ignorant. But what do you expect from people who RAGEQUIT when exposed to offensive opinions? This is why when you see them attacking other authors’ works, it is almost always stuff gleaned from the Wiki summary or something completely fabricated.
I ended that year with a new understanding of what kind of fiction I enjoy most, what kind of writers are likely to write it, and how different the speculative fiction landscape looks when you adjust the parallax.
People like different things. That’s fine. Everyone is going to gravitate toward whatever kinds of work pleases them the most. Some of us like action, exploration, or drama. Others like character driven works, or big questions, or even strong message fiction. Tempest hates white men. So, whatever works.
This past week Sunili Govinnage wrote in The Guardian about her experience reading only novels by writers of color for a year. It’s a challenge she set herself at the end of 2013 inspired by a similar project by Lilit Marcus who read only books by women for a year.
Now, most of us read whatever books sound the most interesting to us, and truly don’t give a shit what skin tone the author is, or who the author likes to have sex with. But then again, we don’t write for the Guardian.
Just like opening up space for more stories from women,
No anthology editor anybody who has ever heard of is trying to keep women out of anthologies. This is one of those things SJWs like to toss out, figuring people will accept it as truth.
Recently I was speaking with an editor who put together a charity anthology. The sales of this anthology went to pay for another author’s medical emergency. The authors who contributed stories to it were not paid. They were volunteers. Because time was of the essence, the editor put out a rushed call for submissions and said he would run with whatever he got by a certain date. Many authors volunteered stories (again, without pay!) and the editor went to press in a hurry (again, medical emergency!), only not a single female author volunteered a story. So of course, when this anthology came out the editor was attacked by SJWs as misogynist woman hater trying to keep female voices out of fiction.
there needs to be a conscious effort to support multicultural voices and fight the assumptions surrounding what the mainstream market supposedly wants.
I like the “supposedly” there. Stupid markets. With their freedom and choices. What the mainstream market really needs is to have people like Tempest Bradford scold them for having fun wrong.
The mainstream market wants to enjoy itself. It doesn’t like to be yelled at. It gets annoyed when you call it racist. Since most books don’t even have back cover photos anymore, the mainstream market probably doesn’t know what color the author is. The mainstream market has zero clue what culture the author grew up in, and if that information is available at all, the mainstream market probably doesn’t give a shit.
The mainstream market buys books based on the following criteria:
- This cover looks cool. I will pick it up/click on it.
- The back cover blurb/description interests me.
- It has good reviews/word of mouth.
- I will purchase it with my money.
- If I liked it, I may purchase other books from this author.
Govinnage is a writer of color herself,
Writer of Color is a stupid term. I hate the term People of Color. It is just Colored People backwards.
yet she still learned a few things from the experience, including “just how white [her] reading world was.” Even when you’re coming from the viewpoint of a marginalized identity, the privileged view is everywhere and pervasive. It’s easy to buy into it without really knowing that you are.
Privilege huh? From what I’ve heard about Tempest, she grew up in a rich family. Luckily one of my readers copy and pasted some stuff from her bio into the comments. She attended NYU—which I believe is the most expensive undergraduate program in America—to study opera. She then dropped out to attend the “Gallatin School for Individualized Study” where “There we had no “majors”, only “concentrations”. My concentrations were in performance, writing, the history of mythology, interstitial art (though we didn’t call it that, then), and the collective unconscious”
But wait, there’s more about what it means to live such a life of marginalized hardship: “After leaving college and realizing that the life of a corporate drone is horrendous, I decided to throw it all away so I could attend Clarion West in 2003. I left my job, left New York, and left any notion that I’d be leading a normal life in the dust. After Clarion West I wandered around the country for a few years visiting friends, writing, and discovering that all one needs to survive in life is confidence, charm, and many well-off friends. In 2006 I returned to New York City and took up freelancing to support myself.”
I know when I think of marginalized lives, I think of mooching off your rich friends while playing tourist.
I only say that because I grew up with all that fancy Portuguese Dairy Farmer Privilege, where I got to have an alcoholic mother and a functionally illiterate father (who is way darker skinned than Tempest), where I got to spend my formative years knee deep in cow shit at 3:00 AM, so that I could later work my way through Utah State (only after getting a scholarship for my freshmen year because I knew a whole lot about cows), to then spend my adult life working corporate drone jobs of increasing difficulty and skill requirements, all while writing on the side while I supported my family, until I could make it as a professional author.
Lecture us more about privilege, Tempest. It’s fascinating.
It doesn’t help that most high-profile venues that exist to alert readers to new books and their worthiness are skewed heavily toward privileged voices.
Who? Publishers Weekly? Locus? Io9? Tor.com? GoodReads?
No, seriously. Name some high-profile venue names here, Tempest. Or is this the Bull Conner Upcoming Books of 1965 Alert List? Because I didn’t sign up for that one either.
The funny part is when Chaos Horizon did an unbiased breakdown of the pro review sites comparing my last release to Scalzi’s novel coming out around the same time, despite our selling about the same, all of the pro places reviewed him, and none of them talked about me. So if there’s a bias there, it sure as hell isn’t in the way Tempest is thinking. (But to be fair, Scalzi may be a SJW, but he is super white and has professed to living life on the easiest difficulty setting.)
A few years ago some best-selling women writers pointed out that the New York Times reviewed significantly more books by men than by women.
Which is funny, since the New York Times is so super right wing. Oh, wait…
The problem is not limited to the Times. Nor limited to just men vs women. If the majority of books being held up and pronounced Good and Worthy are by white, straight, cis men, it’s easy to slip into thinking that most good and worthy books are by authors that fit that description.
You know, in all the time I’ve been doing this and fighting with these people, I can’t find a single mainstream example of anybody of note holding up a book and declaring it good and worthy because it was written by a white heterosexual male. Normally, when regular people declare a book good, it is because they thought the book was good.
I have however seen hundreds of examples of Tempest’s side holding up a book as being good and worthy because of the author’s racial/sexual identity.
Most of us judge books on their content, not the color of their author’s skin.
And, of course, that’s bull.
Nope. And as we’ve already established, because of my Portuguese Dairy Farmer Privilege, I know more about bulls than Tempest does.
“Slowly but surely, the world is noticing that ‘meritocracy’ in the arts and entertainment industries is as fictitious as Westeros,” Govinnage says.
You can declare merit a myth all you want. You can do the same thing about gravity. Doesn’t change reality. Falling off a roof still hurts, and you’re more likely to make a living as a writer if you entertain people. At the end of the day, regardless of their genetic makeup, Neil Gaiman has more talent in his pinky finger than Tempest Bradford has in her whole body.
The fact they used Westeros as an example of fictitious is illuminating, because it was created by a straight white cismale, but everybody knows who George R.R. Martin is and has heard of his work, because it is popular, and people like it.
The “Reading Only X Writers For A Year” a challenge is one every person who loves to read (and who loves to write) should take.
No. We shouldn’t. Because we’re not boring racists.
You could, like Lilit Marcus, read only books by women or, like Sunili Govinnage, read only books by people of color.
How do you guys even know? For example, it wasn’t until last year I learned that Steve Barnes is black. I first read his stuff in high school. When you see an interesting book, do you rush off to Google to make sure the author is racially acceptable?
Or you could choose a different axis to focus on: books by trans men and women,
Is there like a special search box to check for this on Amazon that I don’t know about?
books by people from outside the US or in translation,
I’m a Akira Kurosawa junkie, doesn’t mean I’d want to only watch his movies for a whole year.
Side note, do you think it would pain Tempest to know how much money I’m making off of foreign translations?
books by people with disabilities.
Or how about we read books because they look interesting/entertaining, rather than because the author checks some arbitrary box on an EEOC form? It wasn’t until I saw a Facebook thread this morning that I found out two writers I’ve known online for years are disabled and one is in a wheelchair.
Because who gives a shit?
After a year of that, the next challenge would be to seek out books about or with characters that represent a marginalized identity or experience by any author.
No. They don’t have to do anything. We’re entertainers. Our job is to entertain the readers. Tempest is getting this backwards. The writer works for the readers. Not the other way around.
In addition to the identities listed above, I suggest: non-Christian religions or faiths,
Again, how do you know? I’ve plugged books by everybody from Atheists to Asatru, and I only know their religion because of conversations in real life.
working class or poor,
Kiss my ass. This one in particular really pisses me off. Working class or poor describes most writers.
and asexual (as a start).
No shit. For a year? Only books by asexual authors. How few books do you read?
Whichever focus you choose,
I choose the “this book looks interesting” focus myself.
it will change the way you read and the way you go about picking things to read.
That’s certainly an understatement.
When I settle in to read a magazine now, I read in order of stories I think I’ll like best. And if I do decide to read one by a new to me author who appears to be a straight, white, cis male, it’s usually because I trust the editor and the magazine.
Read that sentence again and mull over how incredibly racist and sexist that is.
Feel free to change it around. Change it to Black or Jew, but it’ll be okay if she sees a Jewish sounding name or a Black sounding name, because she trusts these editors, and they’ll probably be one of the good ones.
My reading sessions are filled with much less stress these days.
What a vapid, useless screed.
This whole thing really bugs me. Why would you limit your exposure to books and ideas based on such asinine, superficial things?
Louis L’Amour saved my life. He taught me to love reading. I didn’t care that he was whiter than I was, or that we were from different cultures, religions, and backgrounds. Nobody engrossed in a story gives a shit about that. I was expanding my mind, not artificially limiting it.
From there I went on to read whatever I could get my hands on, and I’m sure most of those books were written by old white guys, because at the time most writers were white guys. As demographics change and there were more writers who weren’t old white guys, I read more books by people who weren’t old white guys, and again, didn’t give a shit.
The super evil mass market consumer doesn’t finish a book and say to themselves “This was an excellent read. I’d go tell my friends, but I suspect this author has slightly more/less melanin than I do, or might possibly come from a different socio-economic strata so I’d better throw it away.” That’s the kind of nonsense SJWs fret about.
Do you want to know the best way to get more people from diverse groups to be writers? Get them to be readers. Readers become writers. Populations with more readers will produce more writers. Some of us are compulsive story tellers, and get them immersed in the medium, and they’ll want to tell stories of their own in that medium.
How do you get people to become readers? Introduce them to books you think they will enjoy. The sexual/racial identity of the author is irrelevant to enjoyment (unless you’re a flaming bigot, because it will make you RAGEQUIT). People tend to keep doing stuff they enjoy.
How do you know what books people will enjoy? That’s the trick. Everybody is different. Everyone has differing tastes. That’s why you introduce them to a wide variety of books. I’m talking real diversity, not the skin-deep superficial diversity SJWs glom onto, but real diversity of thoughts, ideas, and imagination.
SJWs love diversity as long as everybody is diverse in an approved manner. My side welcomes everybody and thrives on competition, whether it is art or ideas, the more the better. I want more people from every possible group writing books. Because the more books that are created, the better the odds that there will be something truly brilliant.
Come to think of it, I’ve got a sneaky suspicion that Tempest’s motivations aren’t exactly purely on behalf of social justice, but rather in the naïve hopes that if fewer people read Neil Gaiman or other white heterosexual males, they’ll buy her stuff instead. That’s one problem with statists. They think the pie is finite. If George Martin gets another dollar, they feel like that dollar was stolen from them.
Sadly, they know as much about economics as they do about literature.
To counter Tempest’s racist challenge to only read books based not upon their content, but upon the color of their author’s skin, I offer a different kind of challenge.
I challenge you to read books based upon what you think sounds awesome, and never give into the finger shaking scolds.
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If you wanna see ego in action, just check the comments. Someone mentions the fact that the author is wearing a Dr. Who t-shirt (show made by white people, starring white people, etc…etc…) but “THAT doesn’t count because she’s specifically talking about books!” She’s got the whole “SJW air of smug superiority” bs down pat.
Wait, check this irony.
Neil Gaiman writes for doctor who. Two episodes I can think of at least
Take a break from reading privileged Jews, because, like the larger white instrumentality they are a part of, they are “diabolical.”
The comments section there is horrible, well actually shes being horrible. Shes just putting down people and acting like a child.
It just tickles me nowadays. I try to tell everyone; if you HAVE to deal with someone like that, just smile, mock, and ridicule until they go away.
There’s a good reason I read very few blog’s comment sections — and xojane aint in the top million.
“Child” seems to cover many of the more vocal SJW’s. Adults have the ability to understand, and deal with the fact that people think, look, act, believe, and do things differently than them.
I loved the bit where you cannot read Neil Gaiman because his wife was in a band that offended me.
What in the holy name of Frick? I’m hard core reformed, read Correia (Mormon, Methinks) Williamson (NeoPagan) and Ringo (not enough mind bleach) because they write good. I read Gaiman and Stephenson for the same reason. I read Charles Stross and Ken McLeod because they are equally good.
And I don’t care who they sleep with or what skin colour they have. I leave that up to God and them: I have enough crap in my own life to clean up.
These people want to make us neat where we are not designed to be, as if they can make people to be better. Now, I do not hold with that. I aim to misbehave.
And the only apology I’ll give is for misquoting.
Absolutely spot on. Myself I have been and still am a lifelong atheist and politically I consider myself closer to those guys then Larry. But they disgust me. Their jackbooted mindless victim plays are the most anti-liberal nonsense I can imagine. They are truly corrupt politically and morally. It grosses me out, that I a liberal feel more welcomed at Vox Days blog where I can comment freely than at liberal bogs or tor.com where any dissenting opinion gets erased.
My honest belief, one that I will defend if challenged is that people like Tempest are nothing but opportunists. They don’t believe their own nonsense, it’s all a marketing ploy to get shit list authors publicity and money. “Stop EVIL white man privilege! Buy our books by privileged upper class white women who went to colleges most readers couldn’t dream to afford!” Divisive marketing to make up for pitiful writing.
Tempest and her crew are the genre writing version of the gay black militant in Chasing Amy, pretending to be angry for sales.
You mean the gay black militant who was secretly gay?
Loved that character.
Gay black militant who was secretly gay? So was it a secret from himself, or what?
Nope. When the public wasn’t around, he cut loose and was a total flamer and proud of it. But if a fan was around, he made Farrakhan look tolerant.
https://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/319852003645874176
That’s right. He’s appalled at segregated high school proms.
Heck, I’m appalled at the idea of a segregated prom. Sort of like being appalled at segregated rooms at Wiscon…
I like his writing, but he kind of lost his sheen for me when he vigorously defended Laurie Penny, up to and including suggesting authors up rate her book to “combat the trolls”
Laurie Penny is a mental case of a sociopath.
Some of the folks on the other side of this write books that I will read anyway, because I enjoy them.
Didn’t care to finish American Gods, but Good Omens is something I reread.
And yet, they don’t seem to realise that, for its day, Doctor Who was radical since it’s first executive producer was a woman. The Daleks and other bits that became tropes of the show she pushed.
I invite people to look up Verity Lambert.
They even put the story of the creation of Doctor Who in movie format. Well done, IMO. David Bradley really kills it as William Hartnell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Adventure_in_Space_and_Time
My favorite thing is when they say it’s acceptable to read things translated from foreign languages. So basically, Japanese people are minorities in Japan as well as the U.S.? I’m a white guy, but I speak/read/write several languages. Does that mean I can write something in Spanish, translate it later into English, and it will be worthy of her time?
What a sad and empty place their bookshelves must be. And what a sad and empty thing their lives must be, to be so psychotically obsessed with other people’s ethnicity and sexuality. Don’t they have ANYTHING else to do?
But if they did anything else, people would stop paying attention to them. That’s unacceptable.
Wow, I just figured it out. This must be what an atheist martyr looks like. They know there’s no eternal Paradise waiting for them when their suffering and persecution is done. The best they can hope for is the approval of their peers, the attention of the masses, and the smug satisfaction of knowing they’re Doing the Right Thing because they’re being so viciously opposed by the thugs and barbarians who scoff at their Utopian vision. So they’re going to draw out their crusade for as long as they can, because that’s as good as it gets.
Sad indeed.
But of course these martyrdoms can’t occur against people who might actually physically hurt them…
There’s little doubt Bradford is following the Scalzi plan of lighting up straight white men to boost their nominal talents as authors. Bradford is known for only one thing: race. Not art, not writing.
Oh, Chris I imagine they have plenty of books on their bookshelves, because it seems to be pretty easy to find that type of author, the message author… But how many do they have that have been read till the cover comes off? How many are the second or third purchase of that book, because they went to a friend and said, “You have GOT to read this book!”, and then never got the book back? I see a lot of pristine books, read maybe once through, if that, on their shelves
My 12 copies of MHI that I’ve loaned out and never gotten back says a little something about what people want versus what SJW’s want to require people to read…
That’s because you have failed to tell them about the evil things Larry believes.
For example, he likes GUNS!!!!111!!
twelve? I stopped loaning them after 3, and started buying them as gifts.
Far as bookshelves go, I’m rereading my Norman Spinrad right now to decide which ones to keep (not going well for him). I’ve got Jemisin and Elliot coming up (they’re racist bigots, but maybe they can write, don’t know yet), and just looking through one shelf I can find people from different races, religions, genders and whatever easily. Most of these I read before there was an easy way to get information on the authors, because they had STORIES. Not because of race, gender, religion or whatever. If a book makes me ‘ragequit’ I get rid of the book, I don’t look up the author, find out it’s a cismartian Buddhist acrophobe, and stop reading books by cismartian Buddhist acrophobes for a year to ‘remove stress’. What is she smoking?
Tom: that’s nothing! I’ve heard he’s . . . Libertarian. *shudder*
WHAT?
All that talk about freedom? Everyone knows that they don’t really believe that. They all get together in secret meetings and talk about how they REALLY want to exterminate all the left handed transgendered acrobats!!!!
> never gotten back
I keep a small stack of books just for that purpose. Nothing by Larry in there yet, but over the years I’ve probably “loaned” a dozen copies of L. Neil Smith’s “The Probability Broach” to people who had never voluntarily opened a worked of fiction in their lives.
The required research astonishes and appalls me. Even granted that as someone plugged into the writing community she would know some of the writers, there’d still be a lot of cases in which she’d have to judge sex, ethnicity or sexual orientation based on either name or someone’s web page. And she’s assuming, of course, that everyone who is gay or lesbian discusses this prominently on their web pages.
The point is not to be obsessed with other people’s ethnicity and sexuality, but to open your mind to other works from points of views that are underrepresented. I agree with the essence of what she’s saying, but I don’t think you have to cut out white cis-genered men as well.
Well, good, we agree about the part where she sounds like Heinrich Himmler railing about how the Jews run everything.
But note, Tempest is the one obsessed with ethnicity and sexuality. Meanwhile, over here in angry, red state, flyover country, clinging to our guns and bibles, my comment thread is full of “Oh, so and so is race X or sexuality Y? I didn’t know that. I love those books!”
Did you miss the part where she’s obsessed with thise things?
Read more of X == Read none of Y
But that is what she’s saying, not just the essence but exactly .
Great.
You see, we don’t give a shit either way. Over here? We’re obsessed with good stories, and if a black transsexual rhino otherkin writes a good one, we’ll probably read it.
There are others, like K. Tempest Bradford, who are obsessed with race. Hell, she’s the one who RAGEQUIT stories that challenged her assumptions and says that skipping white men’s writings made it all go away.
Who is obsessed with race?
Ah, ye auld “Skim Until Offended”.
Remember kids, Reading is Fundamental!
What a racist comment.
She is not even thinking of points of views that are underrepresented. It would be trivially easy to keep to her standards and keep within a point of view so narrow that the Thought Police would approve of her self-regulation. If she actually wanted underrepresented points of view, she would go straight for that.
Choose, for instance, to read only conservative SF. That would be different.
“[whatever combination of not white and/or straight and/or male and/or cis] doesn’t have to go all the way to white straight cis male’ to shake up their reading lists. And also, and again as a practical matter, the number of people only or primarily reading [whatever combination of not white and/or straight and/or male and/or cis] is likely relatively small compared to those reading only/primarily straight white cis males.” – John Scalzi on the subject of not reading whites, Jews, cis-hets, male cow milkers, Christian Albanians and rodeo clowns for a year.
Oh good. Scalzi managed to straddle the fence, excuse an actual racist’s racist challenge, and dismiss the people who made fun of the racist, but it’s okay, because the number of people stupid enough to listen to the actual racist’s racist challenge is relatively small compared to the number of people who aren’t imbeciles.
A bold stance.
But remember, Vox Day using a racial slur against a person with a history of using racial slurs was a crime against humanity, and possibly the worst thing that has ever happened in literature, so foul and repugnant that Scalzi threatened to resign from SFWA if it wasn’t remedied. But Tempest’s racist screed is okay, because the numbers of people she might cow or intimidate into following her racist example are relatively small.
Glad we got that cleared up.
As far as I can tell my biggest crime is that I’m rude to the racists they like.
And to think that I’d never even heard of Vox until that happened.
Day’s an amateur compared to Bradford and Jemisin. If he’d switch targets to white cis-hets cow milkers, and amped the racism up about 100 notches, he’d probably have a Nebula by now. Scalzi’s probably trying to figure out how to write The Fuzzy White Ape Turner Diaries.
Reblogged this on and commented:
BWAAHAHAHAHA, another masterful takedown of Princess Tempest Teacup by the great Larry Correia
I’m going to Amazon right now and buy Gaiman’s book. I believe in letting my money talk for me. I’m not a white, male, whatever. I am an avid reader/ purchaser of books.
It is a good one. Not great like Fragile Things perhaps, but good.
I really enjoyed it too. Go forward and read American Gods, just to piss Bradford off and not feel bad about spending the money.
I rather like Neverwhere, myself. He wrote the novel and the TV series at the same time. The TV show is good, if a bit low budget. Great cast, though, especially the villains.
‘American Gods’ is a good book. But you should read ‘Good Omens’ as a starter instead. It’s a collaboration between two straight white males – Neal Gaiman and Terry Pratchett – and is just as awesome and hilarious as you’d think based on the presence of those two writers.
Then you can go read American Gods.
Well, it was the only Gaiman thing I don’t own. It was just a really good excuse to buy a book by a white did male. Bwahaha
That’s two hits on Gaiman in a week. You see, when these birds take over a fortress and find it was abandoned, that makes their achievement less worthy. When Gaiman thumbed the Hugos, the gender-brigade took it personally. They don’t want to beat each other, they want to beat cis-gendered white males. I vote the next WorldCon be held in Cairo because Islamophobia, the non-West, color of people and love.
Not only are Pratchett and Gaiman white males, they’re both Btrits – so they must have even more privelege.
I can honestly say I have never given a second – or even a first – thought as to the gender, ethnicity, sexual alignment, or whatever-the-hell else of whatever authors I have read. if, as you say, Larry, the blurb looks interesting, I read the book. If the book was good, I find more books by the same author. If the author recommends other authors, I look into them. And so on.
And if the book was not good or was not something I enjoyed, I shrug my shoulders, donate it / sell it, and move on. I never realized those actions were so hard for some people.
If you go through life seeing everything through the lens of race / gender / sexual alignment / etc., guess what? You are racist / sexist / etc. It is entirely possible the people you are whinging about are likewise racist / sexist / etc., but if you cannot even be honest with yourself, why should I bother paying attention to your mewling?
My first thoughts about this when finding about these issues were….authors have genders? Never even registered. The books just appear magically on the shelves at the bookstore and library.
Precisely! I wasn’t even aware Larry C. was a white guy until I saw him on a Youtube video. Moreover, I didn’t give a rat’s ass. I read his stuff because I enjoy it, period.
Well, technically, he’s only an honorary white guy because he’s a Conservative Latino. And they have to call him white because that does not compute.
You probably don’t go through life thinking about race / gender /sexual alignment because you’ve never felt it affect you. For some of us there are things that happen on a daily basis that brings awareness to our “otherness,” so yes, it is something that we think about every day. It’s not racist to say “Hey! Try reading books from colored women too!”… It’s completely naive to think we live in a post-racial world. Let’s not try to deny racism exists, but embrace that it does, that we are all a bit racist and that we should work to open our minds to other genders, races, and sexualities.
“You probably don’t go through life thinking about race / gender /sexual alignment because you’ve never felt it affect you.”
You probably don’t know what it is like to have people avoid you during your 20s because they profile you as a hulking, terrifying, swarthy 6’5″ brute, or had women cross the street when they see you coming, or hear the car doors lock when you go through the parking lot, or been judged a dumb brute because of how you look without them having heard you say a word, because you’ve never felt it affect you… Oh, wait. I have. Which is why I know that argument is total bullshit.
For some of us there are things that happen on a daily basis that brings awareness to our “otherness,”
Yes. There are things which bring awareness to your otherness. Like life, on planet earth. Because we are all unique individual humans who are different from each other in a variety of ways. Just because your particular otherness is championed by social justice warriors doesn’t make you a special snowflake in the human condition, nor should life be a competition of who can out victim each other.
so yes, it is something that we think about every day.
That’s on you, because truly most people nowadays don’t care what boxes you check as long as you don’t annoy the shit out of us about them.
It’s not racist to say “Hey! Try reading books from colored women too!”…
Except for one tiny problem. THAT ISN’T WHAT SHE SAID.
Hey, I’m all in favor of reading books by everybody. In fact, my Read Whatever Looks Awesome To You Personally method doesn’t seem to care who wrote the damned book. Fascinating how that works.
If Tempest had said you should go read books by group X, here is a helpful list, FANTASTIC. But she didn’t. Don’t try to explain away her racist screed. She said don’t read books by a particular group because of their race and skin color. Scroll up to where somebody replaced all of her references to white males with Jew and tell me it doesn’t sound like Himmler.
And if you sound like Heinrich Fucking Himmler, you might want to pause and examine your life choices.
It’s completely naive to think we live in a post-racial world.
Where did I ever say that? I’ve got plenty of real philosophy to choose from without you need to make up new dumb ones for me.
Let’s not try to deny racism exists, but embrace that it does,
Duh… Look at Tempest.
that we are all a bit racist
Nope. Most Americans nowadays aren’t racist, and as time goes on it becomes increasingly meaningless. Unless of course, you use the idiotic definitions presented above where because of privilege and invisible microaggressions, everybody is always guilty, all the time, somehow. Unless apparently if you are SJW, because then you can sound like Himmler and come out smelling like a rose.
and that we should work to open our minds to other genders, races, and sexualities.
Again, I truly don’t give a shit. I’m not the one telling people NOT to read authors from a specific gender, race, or sexuality.
You want to preach about inclusion, go talk to Tempest.
hey Larry…
6’2″ 275 lbs. had people cross the street, women clutch their purse closer, etc… some similar experiences to yours…
but i guess its just lower-class white privilege?
I’m bisexual, and have to deal with the ‘fallout’ of it plenty, including from the homosexual community in some cases. It still doesn’t make me agree with her proposal though.
I don’t agree with it because diversity is not promoted by the exclusion of people, with the distinct implication that these people are bad and somehow responsible for the world’s ills by the virtue of their race, gender or sexuality. True diversity and inclusion is NOT caring what anyone looks like or what they sleep with, for bad or supposed good, and judging them solely by merit. In fact, picking out writers based on these criteria of hers cheapens them, in my opinion, as it boils them down to simple checkboxes rather than judging them on the merit of their storytelling. ‘Is this a good story?’ should ALWAYS be put over ‘Is the writer black?’. Like I said above, I’m bisexual, and I’d be pretty dang disappointed if I found out someone read my stories, which themes and worlds I obsess over in their detail, simply because I fit some socially concious LGBT criteria.
You probably don’t go through life thinking about race / gender /sexual alignment because you’ve never felt it affect you.
Or we weren’t indoctrinated into thinking about it.
You probably don’t go through life thinking about race / gender /sexual alignment because you’ve never felt it affect you. For some of us there are things that happen on a daily basis that brings awareness to our “otherness,” so yes, it is something that we think about every day
Step off the horse, the poor animal needs a break. Piling such a load of narcissistic twaddle on high would give anybody a backache.
You probably don’t have enough awareness of other people as discrete and separate beings to realize that your arbitrary categorizations don’t shield anyone from ostracization or otherization.
You’ve established you don’t have enough awareness to realize simple categorizations do not define people or their experiences.
I guarantee there are people in this community who have suffered far harsher experiences than the spoiled bigot who penned the divisive screed under discussion. Her incidental characteristics be damned. But — you’re not going to hear from them because they grew up and moved on.
So take your PC sanctimony and concerned apologia and fuck off. Your philosophy angers me, your bigotry disgusts me, and your lecturing bores me.
Tell us how you really feel, Eamon.
It’s not good to keep your emotions bottled up like that.
You know me, T.L., always trying to be polite.
This is true.
Victor: If you speak against SJWs and approve of wrongfun, then you are no longer considered bi by SJWs, but are now trans-cis.
Nor is it racist to choose a book that is written by a white author over a book written by a black author (assuming you bother to look up the so called race of the author) because the former looks interesting while the latter doesn’t. Unfortunately Tempest doesn’t bother with the last part of that statement. While I don’t think she actually came out and said it in the article she strongly implies that the choice of the former author in my example IS racist.
You’re sadly right, Kristophr.
These SJWs, their hypocrisy is nothing short of staggering. She can take her challenge and go screw off. I plan on reading many white cishet authors this year and enjoying the hell out of them. And good lord, but she has Anna Grodzka hands.
Now that I look at the pic again, she and Grodzka could be sisters, too. *shudder*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Grodzka
Thanks, Dave W. I can’t unsee that. Talk about needing a trigger warning.
You’re welcome!
Also she kinda reminds me of Andrea Dworkin… bad character will eventually show, I guess.
One of the funny things about her appearance is that she doesn’t look particularly black, even though she rants on about it and once famously claimed that in America it was legal to shoot people like her. What did she mean by “people like her?” (Obvious replies to my own question occur to me, but most are just RUDE).
If I read a bunch of white cis male authors this year it’ll be by accident. The idea of picking books purposely by the author’s pigment and plumbing isn’t something that exists, or that I want to exist, in my mind space.
The only reason the authors I mentioned are male white cishets is pure coincidence and the fact that I’ve previously enjoyed their work. I plan on reading Sarah Hoyt and Cherie Priest as well because I’ve enjoyed their work in the past. Bradford and her “challenge” can go suck lemons.
Curse you for exposing existence of our natonal shame to the world. We hoped that if nobody notices he/she will go away.
Curse you for exposing existence of our natonal shame to the world. We hoped that if nobody notices he/she will go away.
LOL! You can hardly watch an episode of Wiadomosci without a mandatory appearance by either Grodzka, Palikot or Leszek Miller! It’s an ongoing joke in our house.
Gah, I messed up the quote marks.
Why would I question the motivations of a black radical lesbian feminist who has referred to a white woman on Twitter as “cracka ass cracka” and who has teamed up with an Asian feminist who referred to a white actor as “sour dough-faced” who together created a racially segregated non-whites-only room at the feminist WisCon SF convention?
I must be paranoid.
She’s just asking you to open your mind to other authors that you may not directly relate with (I’m assuming you’re a white man).
We can read, Amber. Her words are all right there. The original link is right there. I quoted the whole damned article.
See, unlike when the SJWs need to fabricate quotes from me to fit their narrative, I like to let my opponent’s words stand on their own.
No she isn’t. She didn’t say “read this.” She said “don’t read that. That’s not opening your mind. It’s closing it.
She’s just asking you to open your mind to other authors that you may not directly relate with (I’m assuming you’re a white man).
No, no she’s not. We’re capable of reading her words, so you don’t need to try to be an apologist/distort what she said.
Sounds like she’s saying that people shouldn’t buy any of my stuff, let my family suffer because I happened to be born white and male, simply because I was born white and male.
What do you know? That’s EXACTLY what she’s saying.
Happened across Michael Z Williamson elsewhere on the internets in a thread for an article with approximately this exact same call to exclusionary-by-race reading (at first, when I saw this, I thought… doesn’t Larry realize this is OLD?) and one of the commenters there proclaiming that she would never never never read any of the crap that he wrote.
I explained that if she wanted *something different* and if she wanted something that would *challenge her* and if she wanted to stretch her horizons in ways they hadn’t gone, if she valued diversity in her reading, and *even* if what she was looking for was superficial diversity in character’s ethnicities or orientations… the person she *ought* to read was Williamson.
But she was very certain that she didn’t WANT TO. Which was her right. None of us should spend precious time (or money) reading stuff that doesn’t interest us. But please don’t pretend that it’s about diversity.
Tempest wasn’t rage-quitting stories because they were too much LIKE her own experiences, but because they were different. So she went out trying to find stuff (as someone pointed out) with HER in it. Stuff that she wanted to read, that she liked, that made her comfortable with her ideas. Fine so far, really. Why not? And (as someone also pointed out) had she appended a list of recommendations, that would have been useful. For anyone, if they were looking for something they were *comfortable* with, as she was… or if they were looking for something different than what they usually read.
For a whole lot of people… reading something they don’t normally directly relate with would be reading Williamson… like that woman who swore she’d NEVER do so.
And may we ask just how many books you have read that go against your world view? Are you able to open your mind to other viewpoints, ideas, or stuff you don’t relate to?
Or are you sliding back into the old pre-liberal area where the sum total basis of a person’s merit was entirely based on their background?
Joe, you have to understand. They don’t mean that THEY should open their minds and seek about books that challenge their preconceived ideas.
That’s for the little people like us.
She’s just asking you to open your mind-
No, she isn’t.
Oh sorry, am I interrupting your script?
Doubleplusungood crimethink, Larry.
Amber has consigned Ms. Bradford’s actual text to the memory hole, therefor calling attention to the oldspeak is treasonous.
Amber,
Why are you incapable of accepting Bradford in her own words? She is not saying, in addition to your normal authors here are some underrepresented ones I think you will like. She is directly asking the reader to not read any books for one year based solely on the race, sex and sexual orientation of the author, period, full stop, end of sentence. Now how is exluding authors based on race and sex “opening your mind?” Isn’t it really closing it? Please acknowledge what she actually said (not the ridiculous re-write you came up with) and tell us why she shouldn’t be seen as a grotesque bigot.
Do a quick Ctrl-F search for “Amber” on this thread. She posted comments at 12:09 AM, 12:14 AM, 12:16 AM, and 12:18 AM of February 25th… and that’s it. No more comments. Classic drive-by commenter (not to mention a classic “skim until offended” pattern) who shoots off a few comments and leaves the thread, never to return. She’s been fully answered by the other people in this thread, and there’s no point in writing anything further to her as she’s never going to come back and interact with anyone’s responses.
That is, in part, because she can’t. We’ve addressed her comments in ways she’s unable to refute with any success.
Even if she were inclined to return, she’s been taken to school but is too intellectually dishonest to admit it outwardly, so instead she’s just stay away.
Why do the way her hands look matter?
Once a writer starts bringing up personal appearance, genetic heritage, and skin tone, it’s certainly fair to talk about her hands’ resemblance to someone else’s hands. Also, it’s funny.
Meanwhile, my icon picture clearly warns people that I’m an Irish bitch.
Yep. Read what you want. Write what you want. Don’t try and push your stuff by blocking or tearing down others.
Such a radical concept. Sigh.
The only time I “gave up” reading any sort of book from a publisher or person for a year was when I lived in Thailand and couldn’t get a hold of them.
Why limit your reading materials in such a way by stating the ethnic/sexual identity/political guidelines that you won’t consider reading? How will cutting off an avenue of potential enjoyment benefit you? Being widely read is a wonderful thing, and that includes reading stories by white, cis-males or whatever group gets your dander up.
I hate these people, if they can be called people. They seem absolutely determined to keep me from enjoying anything that I want to enjoy. This past year and a half have been dismal in video games, and I blame the SJW contingent almost entirely (as well as EA, but whatever). If they get into publishing in such a way that my favorite authors feel pressured to produce this bull, I don’t know what I will do.
You’ll do what they did in the Eastern Block, smuggle in things from Americ….oh…
We’ll smuggle in things from the former Eastern Bloc.
Companies from Eastern Europe and Russia have been quite busy developing new video games. The primary downside is that the Russian companies sometimes they tend to take a slightly… more positive… view of the Soviet end of things during the Cold War (unsurprising, given that it is ultimately themselves that they’re talking about).
I would expect Russians to be the heroes in the cold war… and Japan to be where all the aliens land… and Chinese film to have Japanese or English villains.
It’s part of the fun.
Aliens aside, Japan also tends to refight WW2 a lot in its fiction. There is a good chunk of popular opinion that sees themselves as the righteous victim of that conflict. One of the behavioral quirks that underlines the difference in relationship between Germany and its neighbors, as opposed to Tokyo.
For the Japanese, it’s a bit more. They have a real problem addressing the many atrocities that the Japanese Army committed during the war. I suspect that the majority of Japanese citizens aren’t aware that the Japanese were particularly worse than any of the other nations involved in that conflict. And given the surrounding nations still have scars from that conflict that were inflicted by the Japanese, coupled with the periodic attempts from China to guilt-trip the Japanese over what happened… it’s a real problem.
I personally suspect that atrocity in warfare is inversely proportional to material wealth in the nation committing the atrocity.
Have to disagree on that. I think it has more to do with who is on top right now. The West has evolved a set of morals that discourages atrocities. It also is where the wealth is primarily concentrated.
But if the West wasn’t at the top of the pile, then China might very well be. And, well… Tianenmen Square. Need I say more?
‘If they get into publishing in such a way that my favorite authors feel pressured to produce this bull, I don’t know what I will do.’
They’re already in publishing. They have been for a very long time.
If your favorite authors haven’t bowed to the pressure that the publishing establishment exerts on content creators to write PC dreck, chances are they’re either midlisters who’ve escaped notice (for now) or best sellers with enough clout to tell the SJWs where to shove their demands (like our host).
Take heart. Recent developments have put the power where it should’ve been all along–with the readers. You can support reader-oriented publishers like Baen, or indie authors who cut out the gatekeepers and sell stories directly to their audience. You can keep reading legacy authors who refuse to compromise their integrity.
The future’s looking bright.
Thank goodness for indie. We are fully at the point where I’m not even seriously considering submitting my books to the trad houses (aside from Baen, but they’re not big enough to take all the awesome things) nor am I considering joining the SFWA – what’s the point?
It’s not like I had any say in being born white or male, nor would I want to change my attraction for the ladies.
For people like Tempest that alone means I will be discounted out of hand, before they’ve read anything I’ve actually written.
Who knows? Maybe my writing does suck, (Heck, it’ll be my first novel. I fully expect it to be less good than the one I write next. I would be very cross were it be otherwise) but I would at least like the courtesy of my work being judged by the work, not the incidentals of my birth or genetics.
‘Thank goodness for indie.’
Hear, hear!
‘Maybe my writing does suck, (Heck, it’ll be my first novel. I fully expect it to be less good than the one I write next.’
A writer friend-of-a-friend once offered this sage advice to newbies: “You’ve got to get the suck out.”
By most accounts, draining the suck from one’s system means writing about a million practice words.
Excelsior!
Oh, Chris I imagine they have plenty of books on their bookshelves, because it seems to be pretty easy to find that type of author, the message author… But how many do they have that have been read till the cover comes off? How many are the second or third purchase of that book, because they went to a friend and said, “You have GOT to read this book!”, and then never got the book back? I see a lot of pristine books, read maybe once through, if that, on their shelves
As a white cis male (I’m not straight, though) I can safely say I’ve never given a damn about the race, gender, or sexuality of any writer. One of my favorite writers in the fantasy genre is Tanith Lee, a woman. One of my favorite writers in the action/thriller genre is Andy McNab, a guy who’s an ex-SAS soldier. Other writers I enjoy are everything in between, including some mongrel dairy farmer dude who writes about big guys with Saiga shotguns shooting vampites. Read what you like, not what social justice checkboxes it hits.
He also shoots vampires.
So… vampites…
Is that a tribe composed of hot, sexy women? Because I’d certainly hope that you’re *not* reading books about shooting them with Saiga shotguns!
I wouldn’t dare!
No. They’re vampires who take tiny bites. “I was nibbled to death by vampites.” You’re confusing them with vampettes, who are pocket size vamps.
I thought they were bite sized vampires.
nom nom nom nom nom — bet you can’t eat only one.
Especially when there’s hummus to dip them in.
Nah, the small-sized suffix would be -ette, as Sarah notes. -ite means tribe or nation, ex. Israelite. So a tribe of hot, sexy women.
Of course, I suppose that they might be vampires that take tiny bites masquerading as a tribe of hot, sexy women.
Of course, coincidentally, -ette also means female. Hmm…
Either way, they certainly do not deserve being Saiga’d in the chest and/or face. I’m not a bigot.
I am laughing so hard at this exchange right now!!! Pocket-sized tribe/nation/coven of smokin-hot female vampires that prefer to nibble and taste great with hummus!!!! Larry, this has to end up in an MHI novel somewhere!!!
I prefer french onion dip over humus… Oh! Hey! These are better than Doritos!
Hummus has garlic. I’m not sure other alliums would work.
“Vampite” is a portmanteau word that refers to nanites that cause vampirism in their hosts.
Whatever Vampites might be, they deserve our understanding, and we should make sure we check our non-Vampite priviledge and work towards the full inclusion and acceptance of Vampites in society. I propose that for 1 year, we shake off our subconciously Vampitephobic preconceptions and we avoid books by non-Vampite authors. Sound good?
Bravo Two Zero is a fantastic read.
Agreed! I also love his Nick Stone series. The poor man’s James Bond.
In addition to the identities listed above, I suggest: non-Christian religions or faiths.
Right, because it’s not like novels with overtly Christian messages are stuck in a tiny ghetto of the bookst–
Oh, wait.
And wow, the SFF shelves are just loaded with books that treat the Christian religion and religious people with respe–
Oh, wait.
This really, really irritates me. As a person of faith, I actually stopped reading SFF for a long time, because every other time I picked one up, I found that faith (and by extension, me) being denigrated, made fun of, and derided as some uneducated, backwards crutch that no one would “need” in the future.
I get enough people in the mainstream media telling me I’m ignorant and wrong for my beliefs. I don’t need it in the stuff I do for fun.
Intersectionalism is this simple: it reviles males, whites, heterosexuals, the West, and Christians.
(Nods)
I was going to comment on that, but you beat me to it. That ticked me off.
There’s almost nothing but non-Christian authors in the mainstream these days. The default setting for writers seems to be “atheist shading to agnostic.”
And, while I didn’t stop reading as a result, the potshots at organized religion taken by authors like Heinlein and Piper get annoying very quickly.
Fortunately, they don’t happen all the time, and the stories are good.
As a Christian myself, the problem I’ve found is that even Christian fiction is so over-the-top message-heavy that I’ve given up reading anything in that section of Amazon unless I’m looking to research a specific theological topic, at which point I’m not interested in the “fiction” side of religious writing. Its not hard to write a decent good-vs-evil book without beating me over the head with a Bible. Case in point: Larry Correia, who will never be found on the shelves at Lifeway based on his book covers alone.
Which is why I read Larry Correia.
Yes. I find it quite tiresome.
However, there are exceptions–Stephen Lawhead, for instance.
Occasionally he’ll bring out the Axe Handle of Message, but he uses it sparingly.
Except in Pendragon Cycle, in which he clubs you to death with it.
Didn’t read that one.
Heck, I’m agnostic, and among my favorite authors are Tolkien, Gemmell, Correia, Torgersen, Dalglish. I don’t seek out Christian fiction, but I’ve got no problem with fiction by Christians.
I won’t say I ever RAGEQUIT anything over it, but for a long time there seemed to be a heavy trend toward “In the future we’ll be beyond the foolishness of religious faith… and also eating meat.” It didn’t make me MAD it just made me think that the author was sort of stupid. It’s one (of many) reasons that I thought that Bujold and Weber were so great. The stories about Miles and Honor weren’t about religious faith, but religious faith and superstition exist in those worlds, because humans exist in those worlds.
And don’t forget: no more money, plus we’ll have group marriage! Gag.
Group marriages? This is one thing I’ve never quite understood. Why would I ever want to have more than one wife? Is there some secret about marriage that you only find out after the ring is on your finger that makes having more than one wife desirable? And what happens in a divorce? What if you and wife c want to divorce but wife a and b don’t want to divorce spouse c? Does that mean you have to divorce spouses a, b, & c to get rid of c? I mean, are all of the spouses of equal status and have equal rights? Who gets what stuff? And how do you split the spousal support? What about the kids?
Okay, I’m going to just back away from this rabbit hole because I’m actually starting to visualize group marriages as algebraic equations now…
What always bugged me, in the “threw me out of my suspension of disbelief” was when the future society didn’t have any Jews. I’m not Jewish myself, and I can see a future Christian church that looks mighty alien to us now (or so marginalized as to be story-wise, invisible, see also Japan), but no Jews? That’s a tribe that kept its culture and religion nearly unchanged from the Bronze age to the present:multiple millenia and in the face of often relentless coordinated efforts to expunge it. Unless you’re writing something like the Instrumentality of Cordwainer Smith or super-super-far-future like the Night Lands, there better be Jews, or I call B.S.
Bruce, I’ve said for years that the number of suicide bombers who are Islamic is directly tied to Muslim polygamy: the ones without wives are depressed and the ones with more than one are desperate to escape…..
So clearly, they need spouse distribution.
And now that I think about it. I wonder if the “humans in the future will all be atheists” thing is another of the reasons that science fiction shrank and fantasy grew.
I think there might be something to that idea. It’s unfortunate that many lack an education in the contributions of religious people to science over the millennia *as part of their faith*.
Most of the SF dismissals of religion I’ve encontered are not there principled Athiesm of Russell etc, but rather the smug “I know better than you” playground taunt. Fantasy starts with the presumption that there is something supernatural, and while there are a lot of poor caricatures of religious orders, at least the idea of being a believer is prima facie possible.
Contrast that with Babylon 5. The episode The Rock Cried Out No Hiding Place includes a scene with a black gospel group singing the titular song. It’s interspersed with a rather brutal unrelated murder happening elsewhere, but the fact that JMS wasn’t afraid to include modern day religions in his universe was unusual.
This calls out for Earth’s Dominant Belief System from a much earlier episode of the same show:
And Gaiman wrote an episode for that show, too.
Heck, one of the alien races is named for him.
A huge number of my Christian friends who wouldn’t watch a lot of TV would watch Babylon 5 because JMS, though an athiest himself, never made them feel like he was mocking them.
A-bloody-men, sister.
Heh. I was reading a short in SciPhiJnl. Two instances of uncapitalized, singular “god”, then I got to some blither about “gender”. I removed the thumb from my eye and moved on to the next story. Now that’s eclectic editing!
Good point. Contrary to the opposition’s projections, we’re not an ideological monolith (the essay defending determinism in the Matrix trilogy is another example).
I’m an atheist, but some of my favorite authors are Christians of some variety, and I don’t mind including religion in my own stories in a non-negative light.
I hear you. Nothing makes me abandon a book, tv show, or movie faster than the ‘evil religious cult’ trope. Yes there is some truth in it, but it is so distorted and never presented with any balance to the 99% of folks who aren’t planning on murdering you because you think differently
I don’t mind the cult thing so much.
Provided they don’t make every religious person out there look like brainwashed cultists.
I think that Wen Spencer did about the best treatment of “evil religious cult” I’ve ever seen in fiction. There was the “evil religious cult”, the “hostile atheist government agent” good guy, the group of good guys with an old fashioned “profound faith and belief in God,” and the “don’t ask me, I’m Unitarian,” hero. And even the “evil cult” had members that ran from manipulative evil bastiches to earnest sorts faced with actual “demons” to fight.
All hipsters are into Dr. Who. Seriously, let’s look at the picture here. She’s wearing a Dr. Who shirt and is wearing the hipster glasses. This is her cause of the minute, and is hilarious, because I am betting that she did nothing of the sort as far as this “reading challenge” she is bragging to have done. To be honest I’m thinking she needed a topic and this one sounded good.
Truthfully, as long as she can get her ego stroked and be patted on the back by the others in her dreadfully tiny circle (I mean, it must be tiny right? She clearly likes to exclude others) I’m sure that she has achieved her goal here.
**Disclaimer: Just because all hipsters like Dr. Who, it does not follow that all who like Dr. Who are hipsters…that stereotype would just be mean.
I look at it this way: most of us (who are not hipsters or SJWs) enjoy Doctor Who because, most of the time, it’s ripping good entertainment. If someone is enjoying it for SJW and/or hipster reasons…well, that’s their call, but they damn well better keep it out of MY enjoyment of Who!
I honestly have never watched Dr. Who (the old, or new version), but that’s okay. I watch The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, and both of those are enjoyed by a large hipster contingent as well…and my childhood hero, Wonder Woman has been taken over by them as well, and my love of bacon…but enjoying these things does not make us hipsters. I agree with you (hence the disclaimer)
Hipsters: the REAL culprits of “cultural appropriation”!
Call me a heretic, but the appeal of Doctor Who escapes me. Never have really been able to get into that show; it just seems kind of silly.
Now the DW spinoff show “Torchwood,” on the other hand, I liked a lot. It was just as over-the-top as Doctor Who, but had a more serious, adult tone that seems to work for me.
Wes S: I speak for no one else, but I enjoyed 1960s-70s Dr. Who for the sheer unapologetic goofy low-budget pulp-adventure campiness of it all. But then, when Tom Baker, Jon Pertwee, and Patrick Troughton played the character, it was just that–silly adventure-serial style cliffhanger stories about narrow escapes from the scenery-chewing Master, or the Daleks, who somehow manage to chew the scenery despite not having faces or more than a single (shrill, enraged) tone of voice.
Dr. Who in post-2005 version, so-called nuWho, is an obnoxious, unsympathetic, tiresomely politically correct fellow whom one wishes would get eaten by the Silurians. My admittedly limited viewing of the 21st Century version leaves me unenthusiastic and uninterested in seeking out any more.
To each his own, of course.
Growing up we didn’t have cable, so we had four channels that came in clear, and if we were really lucky sometimes we could get the PBS channel in from a city about 80 miles away. I was almost six years younger than my next youngest sibling…and in a lot of ways he was my best friend. I remember the trying to watch the snowy Dr. Who episodes our old black and white console TV that was put upstairs in our room when mom & dad bought that fancy color TV for the living room downstairs. Normally the audio was really clear, but the video was crap. That’s why I started watching the new Dr. Who. Now if only they’d bring back the Saturday Morning Science Fiction Theater…
Sadly they didn’t at the end of the Eleventh Doctor. The Twelfth is too new to notice yet, but there were some distinctly homophiliac stories at the end of the Eleventh (I think that’s why they had to kill off Amy and Rory, they were getting a bit too heterosexual for the writers to deal with).
no one important: ” Daleks, who somehow manage to chew the scenery despite not having faces or more than a single (shrill, enraged) tone of voice.”
Daleks are SJWs!
As someone who’s a fan of “classic” and “new” (thought since it’s been around a decade now, “revival” might be a better term) Who, who may or may not have roughly two hundred original Doctor Who audio dramas stacked up in his closet, I’ll just say I think all variations of the show have their charm, though it is an acquired taste.
And I don’t think it’s a taste only hipsters of SJW types can acquire.
It’s kind of like the way a mother hen loves an ugly chick. Despite it all, even the cheesiest episodes have something I can love.
Except for Dimensions in Time and Love & Monsters. They can both be locked away in a vault.
@frompennsyltucky and Wes S.
Ya this sketch pretty much sums up Dr. Who for me
Which is what really bothered me in the last three seasons, with the sudden appearance of cross species homosexual characters in Doctor Who. It seemed so forced, like they were ticking off a SJW checkbox.
I challenge you to read books based upon what you think sounds awesome, and never give into the finger shaking scolds.
Can we give the finger shaking scolds the finger?
Gonna invoke my Black Irish privilege and give her four fingers, because that’s just how obnoxious she is.
I challenge Bradford to live in a black neighborhood for a year. Living in whitesville has obviously turned her into a racist.
Wonder which one of us would get along better in North Birmingham? Oh, wait. Already did that. I got along fine in North Birmingham.
I’ve been to some great parties up in favela Doña Marta. Trust me, they’d kick out a thing like Bradford in 2 seconds, skin or no skin.
I challenge Bradford to live in AFRICA for a year. Sub-Saharan. It would be amusing hearing her go ballistic about being called “white” all the time.
SJWs dote on Muslims and non-whites to the exact extent they refuse to live around large numbers of them. They love issuing challenges but won’t actually walk the walk. Meanwhile I’ve lived among more Muslims and what these jerk-offs call “people of color” than SJWs will ever dream of, and for that Bradford calls me an “MRA,” a men’s right’s activist, a thing I have absolutely no interest in.
Nothing new- Marxist have always professed to be for the interest of the Worker, while despising actual workers for more than a century and a half.
SJW’s have a made up idea of what “real” minorities, workers, and other are supposed to be. Contact with the actual tends to hurt their world view, so they dismiss them as not being the real thing.
I lived in a black neighborhood for 4 years. Prince georges county maryland is majority black. It wasnt a big deal. When i first moved in one of myneighborhoods said he doesnt see to many white people around here. Only comment I ever got. Really wasnt a big deal. I dont recall my neighbors crossing the street in fear when I had my hood up.
It really wasnt a big deal.
Some of the classic sci-fi and fantasy worlds were the creations of female authors. McCaffrey’s Pern. LeGuin’s Earthsea (which has even had multiple bad adaptations). The latter had a non-white protagonist (whose one true love – who he eventually shacked up with – was a white woman). Maybe Ms. SJW should stop for a moment and wonder what it means for her arguments if the people she’s whining in favor of are the ones who *used* to be popular. Maybe, just maybe, the consumer market long ago learned to not automatically read books written by straight, white, males?
I’m so damn tired of the bigotry and ignorance.
Such thin, dreary standards to fly, this obsession with skin and sex.
K. Tempest Bradford, you’re a bigot and a scold. The bigotry I might forgive…
The funny thing about posts like Bradford’s is SJW Twitter feeds boil like an anthill and one can gather enough hate speech to fill a truck.
I know, it’s repugnant.
I don’t know how you do it, man. My (low average) blood pressure would pop my brain if I mined that quagmire for long.
I respect you for it, I just don’t know how you do it.
I want the KKK out of SFF and it’s as simple as that. They not only have no business being in this great literary movement, they are a thing SF used to routinely warn against. If you ever wondered how hate speech was mainstreamed in Nazi Germany or Rwanda, wonder no more.
Cole you’ve been tearing Glyer a new one. You’re right of course. It’s just hate cloaked in fancy words and justifications. There is nothing complex about these people or hard to understand. Imagine a police force that never caught and prosecuted anyone but straight white males and you have social justice warriors and the racist feminist cult which powers them. How hard is it for these morons to look in their holding pens and see they keep catching the same fish?
Thanks. I’m sure Glyer’s perspective on the thread is different, but so far all I’ve seen are attempts to discredit with mockery and shifts to less pointed aspects.
The reason that is so is because Glyer’s target – like Bradford’s – is predetermined. Like I said, it’s like a police force that only ever catches people over 5 ft. 9 inches tall. Their report will have to jump through hoops of logic to make that reflect “reality.” You are reading such a report at Glyer’s. That’s how “privilege theory” works. It’s like a automatic targeting mechanism that always keep straight white men in the cross-hairs and pretends that’s a form of logic. In fact that form of rhetoric is typical of the kind of meticulously worked out persecution fantasies of people with mental health issues. People like Glyer, Hines, Scalzi and all the rest have adopted those logic trains for themselves. For some reason they never notice the roulette wheel always lands on 19 red.
I know, I’m not surprised. I just figure I’ll play through and see what develops.
T.L. and I were discussing this earlier. I’m not arguing my case against Glyer or the other commenters, I’m arguing it before the silent majority.
@Eamon: what you’re describing is a man who has no ammunition against your rational arguments, so he resorts to bullying.
Which is exactly where you want him. Calling Glyer, Gerrib, et al. on the carpet and making them explain their defense of Bradford has forced them to publicly endorse bigotry.
Like you said, the core issue is the racism and sexism that motivated Bradford’s challenge. Glyer & co. know that, hence their circumlocutions. Keeping them talking made their exposure inevitable.
Except for the terminally morally retarded, anyone who reads that comment thread will walk away knowing Bradford’s apologists excuse bigotry against “that one demographic”.
You’ve been tenacious too, Brian. Glyer should change the name of his blog to “The Black Hole of Logic.” You’re right too. Whether Glyer is aware of it or not, he is endorsing and defending naked bigotry. That speaks to the power hate speech has when it’s mainstreamed behind a phony facade of oppression. This cult thinks if they call everything “privilege” we’ll go belly up because the KKK now wears plaid. Most of the comments at Xojane are anti-racist in the true sense of the word. This is a new hate speech form of blogging that gets a lot of clicks but in the long term it is doing irreparable harm to women’s rights. These people forget that the entire world can see this shit and trust me, they are alarmed at what they are seeing in America.
“These people forget that the entire world can see this shit and trust me, they are alarmed at what they are seeing in America.”
Amen to that, and these bigots’ false claims of martyrdom. I trust you, and I trust my own eyes. People are hearing the wake up call.
If nothing else, an important lesson to take away from this clown funeral is to never piss off you or Cole.
The discussion is ongoing over there, for the interested.
Well, these folks thought they were going to take over a genre I invented, boot me out, and use racial slurs on the way out the door. Reality doesn’t work like that. I’m like Bugs Bunny at the bottom of his hole minding his own business. I’m not ragging anyone and everything’s cool. Suddenly the construction guy comes along and decides he’s going to put up new housing because I’m a racist, woman-hating, homophobe. This means war.
I’m not listening to these hysterical mental midgets and their stupid ’50s French ideology melded with the paranoia of women who hate heterosexuality and think all men are out to hamstring them, even to the point of cleverly constructing a language and Buck Rogers just to piss them off. These are people who belong in a lunatic asylum. For folks who say they dread the ’50s they seem to love the idea of living them all over again, and re-fighting every crime they imagine a white male heterosexual ever did. They call for boycotts like people did with Beatles records, they want video games keel-hauled just like happened to E.C. Comics with the Comics Code Authority. They want Frank Frazetta banned from the genre, and everyone from Heinlein to Howard placed in a hall of shame. They spit on truth, justice, and the American way while insisting on superheroes from an ideology that saws peoples heads off and puts it on the internet like my cousin does a casserole she just made. They’re using “privilege theory” to dismantle the Constitution from colleges to the NFL by re-inventing the Inquisition and racial segregation.
There is nothing noble about what SJWs are doing. They have constructed a one-sided race war out of whole cloth, successfully destroyed the Nebula Awards in the space of less than 5 years and the Hugos are about dead. They have gutted SFF’s core institutions like a fish while putting out new webzines like Uncanny where I marvel at how many names are in the line-up you’d usually see in a thing like the KKK. From sheer lack of principle, SJWs have successfully re-imagined David Duke and awarded more stinking racists awards nominations in the last two years than the entire history of the genre. And all of this is because they don’t understand how law or a strike zone works. And they think minds like that are going to write searching and perceptive SF? Pwahhahahah.
Let me re-arrange a quote:
“The Chamber of Culture must not only determine the lines of progress, mental and spiritual, but also lead and organize the professions. The chambers could expel – or refuse to accept – members for ‘political unreliability,’ which meant that those who were even lukewarm… could be, and usually were, excluded from practicing their profession or art and thus deprived of a livelihood…”
The question becomes how many fake trigger warnings about Reichstag Fires, Sudetenlands, Mukdens and Gulf of Tonkins this hysterical group of rape-hoaxing, statistics-bending liars will employ to make us believe the world according to Audre Lorde must come about.
Where’s the original quote from?
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Worse, Cat Rambo (next SFWA president?) links us to an article (also retweeted by current president Steven Gould) titled “The Perils of Reading While Female” wherein a woman literally destroys a Saul Bellow book she disapproves of and acknowledges understanding writers who “actively hate your entire gender.” That woman is daffy feminist Sadie Doyle. She sarcastically observes she is wrongly portrayed as “an identity-politics philistine who values gender-based axe-grinding above aesthetic or intellectual concerns.”
But she writes about “books by women that helped them to orient themselves within the maledominated canon or to form their own ideas of what ‘good writing’ looks like. Judith Butler comes up in more than one conversation, as does Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick—a book about ‘solving heterosexuality’ and the self-enforced oppression therein—and the work of Eileen Myles, of whom Marcus says: ‘I was diligently trying to find some brilliantly written prose that didn’t respect boundaries between fiction and nonfiction and that dealt with young queer women hanging around in cities and fucking up.’”
Anyone who mentions Judith Butler and then calls non-gender-ideological literature by men “sexist” “dudelit” is a moron. Doyle wrote a piece about George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series. It is no coincidence she wrote “…imagine me dumping all your comic books and action figures and first-edition hardback Song of Ice and Fire novels INTO the bonfire, and cackling wildly.” That’s because “(white) men” and “(white) women” are too high profile and “people of color were mostly invisible” and “racism and sexism have been built into the genre ever since Tolkien” and that all equals badthink not-art. The idea that Tolkien and the genre which followed him is racist and sexist is as paranoid as asserting the same thing about Jonny Quest, and trust me – the PC do.
Does Doyle even have self-awareness? She adds more about the “right to create your own vision of what is best in the culture and to have that vision influence what books other people read and value.” All this gender bullshit isn’t coming out of nowhere. Doyle and the people promoting this are a “Chamber of Culture.”
“The discussion is ongoing over there, for the interested.”
You, sir, are a wrecking machine.
As for your gracious invitation, I already got exactly what I wanted out of Glyer and friends–just enough rope to hang themselves.
But if the exhibition’s still going on, I might stop by later to see how badly you’re thrashing them.
You’ll enjoy it.
Glyer essentially admits to a double standard, but it’s OK because he doesn’t think any of us white male authors are going to be pushed from the field…no matter how much Larry “abuses” Bradford.
Yes, he used that exact word.
I do not think it means what he thinks it means.
Wow. That’s “abuse”. I’m guessing somebody lived life on the Easiest Difficulty Setting.
Their tiny little rabbit amygdalas can’t handle harsh language.
I would think so.
And I don’t think it’s who Bradford and Glyer try to claim it is.
I’m trying to imagine a black person verbally abusing a member of the KKK. I can’t. That’s a legitimate free-fire zone there.
She must really HATE Doctor Who then…. You know, that horrible show written by that white cishet Steven Moffat…..
Oh hey… Larry noticed that too…. Perhaps I should read the whole fisk before commenting on it……….
She must have loved it when it was written by Gavies, er, Davies.
Sorry, was that intolerant? But that was a perfect example of agenda trumping story or character. It was more than obvious that Jack Harkness was Davies’ personal Marty Stu.
“After leaving college and realizing that the life of a corporate drone is horrendous”
Judging from her credentials, she really should add “lowest-level” to “corporate drone.” Because she doesn’t appear qualified for anything but a clerk’s job. Or HR work, perhaps, double-checking the diversity quotas. Which is still a lot less horrendous than wading through cowshit at 3 a.m., or unloading rail cars by hand and such.
By “corporate drone”, she meant “Starbucks barrista”.
Mr. Knighton, that’s hardly fre. Starbucks barista at least actually serve me coffee, and as a consumer, that’s useful to me.
Which is why she couldn’t do it.
She’d be damned if she served the Patriarchy coffee!!!!!!!
The fact that it was all she was qualified for with her degree in “individual study” or whatever is completely irrelevant.
No matter how challenging corporate accounting could get, all I had to do was remind myself that at least I wasn’t arm deep in a cow.
Clearly having been arm deep in a cow gives an entirely different perspective on things.
The best I can claim is having assisted someone *else* arm deep in a cow.
For me it was however boring warehouse work could get, at least it wasn’t working on the chicken farm.
Hey, now – some of us still get paid for being arm-deep in a cow, doctorate and all.
OK, to be fair, I gave it up in favor or small animal medicine about 6 years ago. And, on days like this, I stare out at the -25 wind chill and thank my lucky stars. There were days where arm-deep in a cow was the only way to prevent hypothermia.
My first to leave home called me to tell me how awesome it was to be a corporate drone… full time on a regular schedule after working as a cook for a year. I have thought before that someone who can’t stand to be a “drone” hasn’t actually tried “labor”. Maybe whatever is better than a “drone” is better… but “drone” is no where near the bottom.
Couldn’t agree more. I HATE reading all the comments from writers in my community about “Soul-sucking” jobs. EVERY job sucks at one point or another. Period. To claim otherwise is dishonest. You do what you have to in order to pay your bills. If you don’t like what you are doing, work toward another job that will provide what you need.
You know what? The first thing I look for in a job is the benefits so I can take care of my wife and kids. Heaven forbid I take care of myself instead of expecting the government (ACA anyone?) to take care of me.
I have thought before that someone who can’t stand to be a “drone” hasn’t actually tried “labor”.
Yeah, that right there.
With the exception of a few careers, most work is not fun. That’s why they have to pay you to show up.
She was very obviously a rich girl with rich friends, which is why her claiming that everyone ELSE lives a life of “privilege” is pretty damned funny.
I don’t check all the boxes on the EEOC form for the white power club or whatever. Larry, I know I mentioned it to you a while back. You’re one of the few who knows that particular part. I’m also ADHD and dyslexic, meaning I meet the definition of disabled (though not legally since I refuse to get a damn handout). I’m also working class and have been my whole life.
According to Bradford, I’m one of those who meet her requirements.
Tempest, do me a favor. DO NOT SPEND A FUCKING DIME ON MY BOOKS. I don’t want your damn money. If I were to find out, I’d donate all the money I get from you to the NRA on general principle.
When I was submitting to magazines, there wasn’t anywhere to announce whether I was gay, straight, hermaphrodite, or whatever. There was no way to determine I was male except by my email address that I used at the time. No way to determine I was white except to make assumptions based on my name.
They expected me to volunteer all the ways I could meet their “oppressed people” quota. I refused.
Buy and read books because they sound good, like Larry said. Do nothing else. I can’t speak for other writers, but I personally would rather people not read my books because of some “oppressed” label, but because they think they’ll be entertained.
If anyone reads my (hopefully future) books based on the fact I’m bisexual, likewise disabled, or even non-American, I’ll be sorely disappointed, because I’d rather people would enjoy the stories I have to tell and the worlds I painstakingly crafted. People like her are the bane of real creativity.
I think most of us feel that way, really.
We might meet her alleged “requirement”, but we’d rather succeed based on our ability rather than something so superficial.
Heck, I’m legally capable of checking off the “Native American” block. By line of male descent, I’m Iroquois enough to be legally recognized a member of the Iroquois Nation. Even been to pow-wows and sweat lodge.
And, for the most part, most of the people I met there don’t check off the block either.
We consider it unworthy, and a breach of the Way of the Warrior.
Yeah, people like her really just help detract from the value of the ones they supposedly support, in the end. Making their merit and contribution in the art seem shallow.
Well dang. I didn’t know you were an author T.L. I’ll go buy one of your books right now. Hopefully many more soon after that.
Viktor, let us know when you get some out there as well and I’ll buy some books from you too.
So strange to want to read books that are interesting and fun. Oh yeah, never forget the author GETS PAID of course!
Yep. I’ve got two short stories, a novelette, and a novel up on Amazon right now.
If you get them, let me know what you think.
I should also note that Clamps things my stuff is awful, so you KNOW it’s got to be entertaining.
You have a deal there!
SJW read Atlas Shrugged and thought Looter’s plan of guarantee politically acceptable plays and books being legally forced consumed by the subject of the country as a good idea. It’s not the content of the art that matters, only the politics of the ‘Artists’.
If it makes you feel better, you probably don’t meet her requirement, since you’re a race/gender/abilist-traitor.
Well, I’m still white, regardless of everything else, so that does make me automatically evil most times.
Am I the only one who reads these articles/fisks/comment sections, and uses it to add more books/authors to my already over-bloated Amazon wishlist?
I swear, Amazon has a server just for my wishlist. “Ooooo….SJW this this author is bigoted/racist/ciswhateverthatis/blahblahblah? They must be good!” “Oooooo…author with one or two books/short stories came here and publicly spoke out against SJW and didn’t rant/rave/misspell words? Gotta add them!”
…now to just find that winning lotto ticket so I can afford all of these books!
FWIW, mine are cheap.
Just sayin’.
RabidAlien, you’re not alone at all. My backlog of books keeps getting longer. And longer.
Not that that’s a bad thing, just tough to find the time to read them all.
Hmm. Most of the books I read are from the fantasy/science fiction genre. Does that make me genreist?
Yes. Self confessed , the very worst sort at best.
Great idea. I’m not going to read any work by ignorant racists throughout all of eternity. Let the chips fall where they may because, unlike Bradford, I don’t assign an ideology to skin and sex. I do this funny thing where I use words. Meanwhile take John Scalzi’s advice and “bone up on the concept of intersectionality” so you too can turn into a clueless Orwellian KKK of straight man-hating racists dedicated to abolishing gender and the nuclear family as if it’s slavery. You can see how that’s helped SJWs so much when it comes to clarity of thought and anti-bigotry. What a bunch of loose screws. By SJW definitions the Nazis actually did have some important points to make.
“DON’T READ JEWS CUZ JUSTICE AND FREEDOM!”
I did not know about Steven Barnes’ skin color either. Has anyone informed Niven and Pournelle?!? If I’ve learned anything from the SJWs, it’s that white, cis male (and in at least Pournelle’s case, Christian) do not like to mingle with people who are not.
(Well, at least I think Niven is white, cis male. I have seen a picture of him once, but he does live in California where anything can happen. Everything I know about Pournelle I learned from his Chaos Manor site and I think I can be more certain of his evil oppressor status. Strangely, Pournelle has never mentioned any one of his co-author’s race, ethnicity, religious inclinations, etc that I can remember. Maybe he’s losing his ability to oppress in his advanced age.)
Steven Barnes is black? Now I gotta burn a bunch of books.— wait I’m not a bigot, I’ll just keep enjoying what he writes cause its entertaing.
That changes everything. Where can I go to have someone unremember it for me wholesale?
Philip K. Dick came SO close to imagining Brain Bleach!
I actually saw a picture of Steve Barnes shortly after his second book was published. So I’ve known since at least then that he is black. Didn’t alter my enjoyment of his books in the slightest. I still like them.
Amusingly I read a bunch of white female authors when I was first starting. I think the Paradise, California library back in the 70”s had someone buying and then donating books to the children’s sections. There was a very good selection of young adult British editions of books. I read all of the Greenknowe books and many others from that library.
Frankly the color of the authors skin nor the sex of the author ever mattered to me. All I cared about was if the book was good I wanted to be able to find more books by that author.
Which is probably why the best marketing is still a friend running up to another friend shoving a book at them going “YOU’VE GOT TO READ THIS!” (The one on one version of a book bomb.)
I cheated, I met him in the 80’s.
When it comes to reading I do not care about the author’s sex. I do not care about the author’s skin color (both “warm beige” and “spun gold” are fine.
). I do not care about the author’s religion. I do not care about the author’s politics. I do not care about who the author likes to boink. I care about one thing and one thing only: the words on the page and whether they entertain (fiction) and/or inform (nonfiction) me.
Or in other words, you’re biased against non-ableist writers.
H8T3R!
Are we SURE those are photos of “K Tempest Bradford” ?? Or perhaps a cousin of CorreiaTech CFO Wendell ???
(evil grin)
Wendell ain’t gonna like this…
What did Wendell do to you to warrant such an insult?
Just saying, looks like a family resemblance. . . .
I think it was out of line and demand an apology for the entire species of the noble manatee.
Miss Bradford is probably a mammal, though her calculated lack of warmth may suggest reptilian descent. That is where the likeness ends.
In contrast, Wendell is objectively so much more appealing that I can only call his adorableness ‘phenomulous’. On the empirical scale I’ve devised to measure cuteness, Wendell buries the needle at over 9,000 mega-Grovers.
Which would you rather have- a Wendell plushie, or a Princess Tempest plushie?
Obviously, a Wendell.
A Princess Tempest would make me too afraid to sleep.
Wendell would slap you with his flipper for suggesting such a thing.
Hmm. . . are we SURE there’s not a Tempest in Wendell’s coral reef ????
Mr Glass, for even suggesting such a thing you should count yourself lucky that Master Wendell does not horsewhip you. To even insinuate such a distasteful scenario is outside the bounds of propriety.
You sir, should be ashamed.
It could be worse- Wendell has CM’s cell number, your address, and CM understands Manatee perfectly.
Shh. Don’t mention the word between B and D. The world isn’t ready for him to show up again, not so soon. Last time he took out a whole neighborhood in seconds. Seconds!
Yeah, and they haven’t even finished clearing the bodies, much less start rebuilding my house. :/
You *do* know Wendell carries a Combat Wombat, right? I sincerely hope you were not aware of this when you posted the comparison, for your sake….Wendell *may* forgive you.
Side question: Larry, have you ever specced out the Combat Wombat, or is it more on the order of a “By the Power of Grayskull!!!!” weapon?
I think that we need to hear from Wendell on that. He may be very open minded. Heck, some of the models on the Hot Manatees Swimsuit Edition of S.I. appeared to be in wrestle in the same weight class as our colleague in science fiction, Bradford.
If female Manatees even remotely resemble Mrs. Tempest, the mystery as to why Manatees are endangered has be SOLVED.
Did you know that I did not realize that C. J. Cherryh was a lesbian or a woman for forever! Now that I know, I’m… going to keep buying her stuff because it’s entertaining. Damn that woman’s cismale white privilege!
That changes everything. Where can I go to have someone unremember it for me wholesale?
Now don’t be Dick-ish about this sort of thing, sir.
I see what you did there! >.>
I loved Demons at Rainbow Bridge, and from the initials had no idea what sex Cherryh was. I don’t think I found out she was a woman until it came up in conversation years later.
I didn’t find out until I was in an anthology with her.
I generally work on the theory that any author using the ‘initial(s) + surname’ formula is female, so I figured both Friedman (whose books I love) and Cherryh (none of whose books I can recall) were. I just never cared (and still don’t, TBH)
Well, I do it because “Tom Knighton” and his politics are all over the web, and I had this silly notion starting out that I’d want people to read my stuff and ignore my politics.
Then I realized the people who give a damn about that kind of thing aren’t likely to read books like mine anyways, and got over it.
In high school I thought Andre Norton was male and A.E. van Vogt was female. Neither (mis)belief ever stopped me from reading them.
I didn’t know that C.S. Friedman was a woman until she came to a local convention. Her Coldfire trilogy was one of my favorites in high school.
I was also the same with C.J. Cherryh. The woman can tell a rip roaring good story.
And the thing is, no one who enjoyed their work gave a shit either way.
Cherryh I’d always figured was female. Which was rather odd, considering that the only thing we had was her initials.
I had no clue on C. S. Friedman, though. And given that her Coldfire protagonists were males, I don’t think they’d make the SJWs very happy.
I knew Cherryh and Friedman were women from day one, which would be Kesrith and In Conquest Born. The whole community knew it.
I had no idea C.S. Friedman is a woman until right now. I loved the Coldfire books, except maybe the ending. The first book in the trilogy is on my nightstand waiting patiently for me to read it again, actually. Weird how it didn’t matter.
Robin Hobb is a writer I really enjoy that I didn’t know was female until after the first trilogy I read. Weird how I read the rest of her books.
I’m sure there are plenty of good authors I’d be surprised to learn about their ethnicity/gender/sexual orientation, only I don’t care what it is as long as they keep writing good books.
For years, I thought Robin Hobb was a man and S.M. Stirling was a woman. Didn’t stop me from reading either one. Nor did I know Cherryh was a lesbian, Tracy Hickman was Mormon, Steven Barnes was black. And oddly, none of their writing is better or worse because of any of that.
I knew she was a woman, but had no idea she was a lesbian until I read the wikipedia entry on her (because I wanted to know if she was of Russian descent. She doesn’t seem to be–so I suppose that would make Rusalka and Goblin Mirror, what, cultural appropriation? Pffft.)
Now that I do know…I don’t care! She writes some of the best aliens there are, and her fantasy is pretty damn good too. I never picked up her books on account of gender or orientation, I picked them up because Michael Whelan does awesome book covers. (And then the blurb got me to buy them.)
Precisely my point. She keeps writing, I keep buying.
So she’s a commie too? Oh, lord.
@James May – Nothing in the Wikipedia article I read (nor her books) suggested that Cherryh had any communist leanings. Where did you get “she’s a commie” from? You appear to be mistaken.
C J Cherryh is a lesbian? Oh no, how will my fragile cismale heteropatriarchal identity cope with this crushing news?
Very easily, it turns out.
C.J. Cherryh is a talented writer who tells exciting, involving stories and has the ability to write about a wide variety of characters and viewpoints that are nothing like her.
You know, like an author of fiction is supposed to do.
Why in the world do the Tempests of the world want books where everyone and everything looks, thinks, talks, and acts exactly like them? That’s not reading. That’s masturbation.
Masturbation is rape.
I think.
Damn, it’s really hard to keep all this shit straight.
T.L. Knighton — I believe masturbation would be considered “self-rape.” Unless you’re transgendered female. Then I think it’s considered male patriarchial oppression (if your male side oppresses your female one).
Or something – I can’t keep these genders straight.
Luckily, the easy thing to remember is that if you’re a white dude, you suck.
So enjoy that, Jim Hines. You’re in the boat with us, whether you like it or not.
You ever notice that pasty white Hines is the first guy to swoop in and “mansplain” what these crazy SJWs are *really* saying?
Like End Binary Gender Lady:
“I want to end binary gender!”
“Holy shit! She wants to end binary gender? What a nutball.”
“No, no, you horrible bigot. That’s not what she meant. She just wants people to see beyond such things and expand their minds and reading choices to be better people. Nobody wants to end binary gender.”
“No, I really want to end binary gender!”
“Shhh… I’m a soothing white man, trying to explain what you really meant to this horrible libertarian so you don’t make us look bad.”
Or this one:
“Don’t read books by white men!”
“Holy shit. She doesn’t want you to read books by white men?”
“No, no, you hateful bigots. That’s not what she meant. She just wants you to expand your horizons and try authors from other cultures.”
“I HATE WHITE PEOPLE!!!!”
I’m such a terrible bigot, the way I quote people, and use their actual words. Good thing we’ve got the White Knight to come in and explain away the crazy.
And saying not to read white men isn’t the same as burning books? Well, no shit. I didn’t say it was burning books. It was saying not to read somebody based upon their race and sex, and I pointed out that is stupidly racist.
Plus, you had the audacity to point out that it’s incredibly difficult to tell who is what these days. You apparently missed that the way this is supposed to work is that you’re supposed to go to approved sources for “suggested reading” lists that are put together by the right people.
Silly, cisgendered heteronormative fascist…thinking people should figure out what to read themselves, Tsk, tsk.
Hahaha. LC shifts perspectives in the way good SF writers do. SJW’s lack that ability. That’s where the gulf between us comes in. We see right and wrong. SJWs see race and gender. That’s it. For example, anyone who’s read MacFarlane and knows how much she’s into the Judith Butler “performative” thing knows she does in fact want to end the binary gender. She has a post on her site that imagines a world without men. The funny thing there is SJWs imagine we think of worlds without blacks and gays. They base that on principled expressions of old SF that concentrated on larger human failings and successes and so ripped out obvious cultural markers and defaulted to generic humans. To SJWs that translates into KKK. They’re that stupid.
C. J. Cherryh is a lesbian? You know, this would be so much easier if there was a checklist. That’s nothing though, compared to the upset of finding out that her name was “Cherry” and the impossible to figure out how to pronounce in order to gush about her books to all my friends thus making my life as a fan difficult “h” at the end was *made up*… now *that* was annoying. (Understandable, all told, but annoying.)
Once I realized David Cherry was her brother (after she praised him for his work on the covers for some editions of the CHANUR novels), I’ll admit to vast relief on finally knowing how to pronounce her name.
I had a boss once (he was a complete jerk, but anywho) that upon finding out one of his employees was a lesbian, when on to remark that he’d finally found common ground to connect with her on – they both liked chicks. I wasn’t there at the time, but I was told that she sprayed beer across the bar and nearly fell off the bar stool laughing so hard.
I knew she was a woman, though I didn’t find out for a few years after I started to read her books. I didn’t know she was a lesbian until last year. And I’ve been reading her stuff since the mid-1980s. Truth is, it never occurred to me to even speculate on her orientation or gender.
The librarian at my local library was a SF fan and recommended her books. I read them and discovered I just liked her books and now own at least 3/4ths of her sci-fi and much of her fantasy.
See? I think this is what Larry is talking about.
The funny thing is I partitioned off some of my reading to read every iconic radical feminist from Simone de Beauvoir to Andrea Dworkin to Charlotte Bunch. What I learned is they are virtually all insane lesbians. Then the racial addendum called intersectionalism came along about 25 years ago and has really gained steam in the last 4 years. So I read Rebecca Walker, bell hooks and Kimberle Crenshaw too. I learned they may not be racists but they sure as hell don’t like white men.
ATTENTION WRITERS:
Are you looking for more Social Justice brownie points? Have you been told your diverse cast of characters isn’t diverse enough? Worry no more! For the low, low monthly price of $—— you can join the Disadvantaged Minority of the Month Club. Our monthly newsletter will offer tips on including these disadvantaged minorities in your fiction without falling afoul of tokenism, cultural appropriation, or other crimethink. (In the interests of fairness, straight white cisgender males are not eligible for membership.)
…
Excerpts from last month’s issue:
A reader writes: “It’s incredibly difficult to say whether a character is asexual if they don’t explicitly define as asexual, for the simple reason that it is much easier to make an argument for the presence of attraction as opposed to the absence of attraction.”
Editor’s reply: “I want there to be more explicitly asexual characters.”
So, the characters go around announcing how uninterested in sex they are? Sounds . . . pointless.
Do Golden Age skiffy heroes count, if they were more interested in assembling a proper circuit from vacuum tubes to create a proper sine-wave signal to feed into the story’s MacGuffin?
Wanting asexual characters is just more Heinlein-hate.
You know, I’ve been reading a web serial where one of the characters does just that. It was a little annoying because it did feel like the author was pounding out some checklist. On the other hand, it also kind of worked because the character in question is a super inventor and (I believe) Issac Newton was asexual and quite proud of it.
Since it’s serial fiction, I don’t know what will come of the character’s disinterest in sex. Hopefully something. It seems like the author might be trying to set up some conflict because there’s another character that’s attracted to the sexless protagonist.
But, anyway, yeah. “Just announcing it” is one approach some authors take, and it’s quite possibly an example of how this sort of thing hurts an amateur writer.
… and how are we supposed to know that an AUTHOR is asexual? Seriously … that’s the sort of personal detail that very few writers would bother to mention on their bio pages, unless they were absolutely TROLLING for idiots like Bradford to put them on reading lists.
I Challenge You To Stop Reading White, Straight, Cis Male Authors For One Year
—-
Yeah, I won’t be doing that.
How dreary these people lives must be! All I care is that my book be entertaining.
I challenge you to stop reading K Tempest Bradford for a year.
Well, I’ve managed for 41 years. I think I can manage for a little longer.
Hardly a challenge.
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!
I just figured out what I’m giving up for Lent….
Hey, I’ve won that challenge for half a century now! I’ve NEVER read anything by K. Tempest Bradford!
“Why I’m Not Watching Any Hollywood Movies Made By Jews For One Year” – by KKK Dude-Broad.
Reblogged this on The Worlds of Tarien Cole and commented:
You know what, I don’t even say people like K Tempest Bradford are allowed to be fans. Even though by her definition, I’m everything that’s wrong with sci-fi. Mind you, she grew up with infinitely more money, went to an elite university, and was able to mooch off rich friends when she discovered her degree program was pointless. While I served in the Navy 8 years to finance my own Masters degree, did 2 years of my life LITERALLY underwater in service to this ‘individual’s’ right to slag me off. And still work paycheck-to-paycheck with my wife. Like my parents did before me. And their parents.
Which one of us was ‘privileged’? Oh wait, me. Because ‘patriarchy.’ What. A. Joke. Why is it always people with every benefit in life telling the majority of working class families that THEY need to check their privilege. Sanctimonious doublespeak.
Why is it always people with every benefit in life telling the majority of working class families that THEY need to check their privilege.
Because the cure for ‘privilege’ is for the government to give masses of goodies to the non-‘privileged’ groups. And the goodies will go to those who are rich, educated, well-connected, and therefore know how to work the system. A creature like Bradford has no intention of, for instance, making black people in the inner cities better off. That would take away one of her self-proclaimed victim categories and reduce the number of things she can pretend to be oppressed for. The last thing she wants is for any help to go to people who are genuinely hurting.
Indeed. What’s more, it would take away a voting block from the Progressive Coalition. (Such as it coalesces around anything.) And they can’t have THAT. People thinking for themselves? *gasp*
Paging Miss Bradford: Cthulhu called and wants his insane chaos backs.
I am torn between being offended at the hypocrisy and amused by the total lack of self awareness Ms. Bradford demonstrated. I am a lifelong addict of the printed word, and can’t think of a single instance where an author’s gender/race/sexuality negatively impacted my decision to read something. In fact, I am always looking for grist for the mill, and the most sincere compliments I can pay a writer are rereading their work (sometimes multiple times) or buying their new work in hardback because I just can’t wait to read it. I’ll read a phonebook before I do without.
I suppose that I’ll re-read some of those stories about strong, intelligent, empowered women (Friday Jones, Maureen Smith, Hazel Stone, et al) or trans-women(Andrew Libby Long, Joan Smith) created by that militant, white, cis-gender libertarian R.A.H. four or five decades ago to get my social justice dose today… (yes, that old white man that wrote about transgender folks before the word existed)
I am very, very sorry but I can’t accept this challenge.
Because in my country we rarely see photos of authors on books I even don’t know how most of them look like. I don’t know (and care) about their gender, color, sexual orientation, social background or their opinions on politics, global warming, lesbian humpbacks or forced migration of lemmings oppressed for their darker fur.
I’m just reading books and judging them by words on their pages.
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh KKKthulhu WisCon wgah’nagl fhtagn.
‘In His House at WisCon Dead-from-the-neck-up feminists wait dreaming, yet the neckbeardless shall rise and their cis-het-less kingdom shall cover the Earth.’
Um… are you a Cthuloid writer? I wonder how many of those Princess Tempest Teacup reads? Maybe you should suggest yourself.
he prefers the term “trans-mythos”.
I’m a Person of Tentacles myself.
Dude! You’re really big in Japan.
I’m big in France, look to be doing okay in Germany, am a rock star in the Czech Republic, and fingers crossed to see how it goes in China pretty soon.
Larry’s big everywhere except possibly Brobdingag.
Actually, you’re big.
I mean, I’m short, you’re…not.
Everything’s big in Japan. It’s that gravitation warlock trans-flux thingy plus hideous mutations.
Japan: Nuked too much, or not enough?
he prefers the term “trans-mythos”.
Ok, that one got a real bark of laughter outta me in the office, glad my door was closed! Though my dog looked at me funny.
Back in 1942, I faced a conundrum.
I write short fiction, and I wanted to get better at writing it. To do that I had to write, write, and write some more. But just as important was reading, reading, and reading a lot more. And I tried. But every time I thought about delving into one of the many science fiction and fantasy magazines at my disposal, or even reading compilations of the “best” stories that had been nominated for and/or won awards, my brain resisted.
Because every time I tried to get through a magazine, I would come across stories that I didn’t enjoy or that I actively hated or that offended me so much I quit the issue. Go through enough of that, and you start to resist the idea of reading at all.
Then I thought: What if I only read stories by a certain type of author? Instead of reading everything, I would only look at stories by Aryans. I would especially stop reading stories by Jews.
Cutting that one demographic out of my reading list greatly improved my enjoyment of reading short stories. That’s not to say I didn’t come across bad stories or offensive stuff in stories or other things that turned me off. I did. But I came across this stuff far less than I did previously.
Limiting myself in this way also made me aware of how often certain magazines published whole issues where only Jews or women made an appearance.
And pretty soon I didn’t even bother looking at those magazines when I went on my monthly search. When I ran out of known-to-me magazines, I went on the hunt and discovered several that published new-to-me writers and also a surprising number of magazines dedicated to Aryan voices.
I ended that year with a new understanding of what kind of fiction I enjoy most, what kind of writers are likely to write it, and how different the speculative fiction landscape looks when you adjust the parallax.
The “Reading Only X Writers For A Year” a challenge is one every person who loves to read (and who loves to write) should take. You could read only books by Aryan or only books by members of the white race. Or you could choose a different axis to focus on: books by men only, books by only Europeans, books from the British Empire.
After a year of that, the next challenge would be to seek out books about or with characters that represent superior physical specimens, or the extremely intelligent. Whichever focus you choose, it will change the way you read and the way you go about picking things to read.
When I settle in to read a magazine now, I read in order of stories I think I’ll like best. And if I do decide to read one author who appears to be an Aryan, it’s usually because I trust the editor and the magazine. My reading sessions are filled with much less stress these days.
A. Hitler
Member SFWA
Author, “The Lord of the Swastika”
That paper-hanging son of a bitch is hanging out at Xojane now.
Hee hee … like the reference. Among the funny things about it is that if he’d done that, he would have missed quite a lot of good science fiction, including EVERYTHING by Isaac Asimov, who was writing the Robot stories and was about to write the Foundation trilogy.
I laugh at the idea a really smart guy like Asimov who was a Jew writing in New York in the early ’40s imagined a Foundation future without ethnic groups because he was a white cis-het supremacist, which is what SJWs assert. He’d certainly experienced quotas trying to get into college and I’m pretty sure he knew about WW II cuz newspapers. SJWs are incredibly stupid people.
Ultimately (in one of the Foundation and Empire novels he wrote later) Asimov had an enclave of Jews living on Trantor. Which meant that the religion had endured for some twenty thousand years, outlasting even the memory of the Earth’s historicity and location.
Had a couple of encounters on the information superhighway with Tempest. Pretty much wrote her off as a nutter. Then someone actually pointed me to some of her websites and posts. Good lord… Makes you wonder how she can possibly enjoy anything since she’s always seeing life through such distorted and ugly lenses.
Okay, maybe I’m having an off day, but….
I actually feel bad for Tempest. Really, I mean it. In mid fisking, it hit me. This woman is totally joyless. It kind of made me sad to think about just how poisoned and twisted she has become. I guess that if you have no joy, no happiness, and no fun she feels forced to make as many people as miserable as she is in order to not be so alone in that dark, dank, and vile void that is her life.
I’ve never “check boxed” a single writer of any of the thousands of books I’ve read. Its either a good story where I look for more or “Meh…” shrug shoulders and ignore.
The saddest thing about Tempest is that she deserves every last bit of the mocking, has nobody to blame but herself, and will never, ever acknowledge that.
I agree: Bradford is a more mobile version of Clamps. She is to be pitied as a profoundly broken human being.
I check box writers all the time. I have a form printed on note cards that I fill out for every book I read.
Did I enjoy it? Do I still trust the writer? How was the pacing? Theme? Ideas? Craft? Did it have enough explosions? Would I read it again?
I refuse to read writers with the wrong boxes checked.
Seriously, I’m not organized enough or quite interested enough in record keeping to do this.
The simplest way to never read a book by someone of a particular demographic is never to read.
I read stuff on FFN. Being certain of writer demographic information there is simply unfeasible.
What a hateful bigot she is, a downright horrible human.
What this latest attack on Neil Gaiman along with the one from last week do is illustrate the level of self serving psychotic group mentality these pepople put forth. It easily illustrates that even as a liberal, social justice oriented writer eventually you will come under attack from these people.
Gaiman is your typical liberal poster boy. He’s pretty much a SJW, he goes to Africa with femminist icon Tori Amos to help the poor, writes liberal soft fantasy/scifi. Growing up he was the darling of every sjw type. You could not go to a goth club, Hot Topic, gamer crowd without seeing Sandman stuff. Every single alternative lifestyle type individual I grew up loved his stuff, including myself.
What did he do to piss off the militant wing? Simple, he got married to an opinionated strong woman. All the Gaiman hate started when he married Amanda Palmer(a femminst herself). If you look at his attackers, Tempest, and the other one they are calorie priveledged womyn who lost their dark haired, gothy, writer, dreamboy to a straight woman who has no problem expressing her sexuality and being proud of being a wife. It’s pure and simple jelous rage.
Correct. As soon as he married Palmer, despite her bleeding-heart liberal, the SJW types went full moon crazy. This has nothing to do with his writing and everything to do with the most petty, base and hateful human emotions.
Unless things are changed or I terribly misunderstood their own words, Amanda Palmer is bisexual or polyamorus and the two share an open marriage. That said, I have seen a great deal of nastiness directed her way by his fans, so I don’t doubt that the sentiment still applies.
I don’t keep up with them now as their political flavored posts went above my saturation level and I never counted myself a “superfan” of either, though I enjoy their work and even drew fan art of them once. Neil himself personally thanked me for it minutes later… before I even had time to work up the courage to contact him about it. Those who seem close enough to touch and willing to make the first move must attract a lot of fans who go rabid when the pretty illusion in their head is tarnished.
Part of the issue is that Palmer apparently shared a screenshot of a men’s website. Possibly boorish, possibly trolling. Don’t know, don’t care. Either way, she shared it.
Unsurprisingly, some of the women who say it wanted to shoot the men who run the site. Others called for castration. (It’s worth noting that NONE of the articles on the screenshot called for violence in any way, shape, or form).
Palmer, to her credit, said no. She believe the best way to handle it was to “smother” the guys with love.
And apparently, some thing the calls for murder and grievous assault on people was “reactive” violence, and that she’s against that.
Tell you what, princesses. You want to know the difference? You come here and try to castrate me, and I’ll illustrate exactly what reactive violence is.
They’re dwarfs attacking a giant for his very stature. And what’s driving them crazy is that the giant knows it, and doesn’t care.
I love how she tosses out that stat about more men being reviewed than women authors. What were the stats that year for submissions by male authors as opposed to female? Completely out of context, that statistic is meaningless.
These people are so insane. They demand equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity because they’ve been taught their whole lives that all they have to do to get the trophy is show up. When it turns out there’s actual work involved, effort, talent, skill, they demand the trophy anyway. And when they don’t get it they go completely bugnuts insane and claim that it’s all some conspiracy to keep them down. Tempest Honey, you’re the only one keeping you down. Sit down and write a story that people, real, regular people, will find entertaining. Believe it or not, most people in this country still respect a good work ethic. Most people in this country still respect honesty. Stop browbeating them with your dishonest rhetoric, put in the effort to really entertain them, and you won’t have to shriek about ‘privileged’ people getting a larger slice of the pie than you. You won’t have to try and convince people to stop reading those others in order to get them to read you.
They look at the outcome and automatically assume that it’s because of unequal opportunity, but they never really look at it. They’d much rather complain about how oppressed they are than to realize that they may actually be living on the easy setting these days.
Man, I guess I should stop doing research on American Military and Foreign Policy history. Because much of the writing on that topic that’s worth a damn was written by CIS white men.
Or, I could just go buy the next Honor Harrington that I haven’t read and continue with that. Because this person is insane.
The RAGE QUIT thing just sticks with me. I can only think of one book I ever read that I even came close to rage quitting. I can’t recall the name of it but the main character trusted his minor children with his older estranged son. After steam had previously threatens their well being. And continued to the display mental and emotional instability he left the younger children with his son and it blew my mind.I can only assume that the author had no children no experience with childcare. And I’ve never gone back to the book. Though I did take a moment to give it a one star on Amazon.
Now, see, there you go judging a book by … the book. Badthink, comrade!
Tempest must not be aware of the existence of Kindle. Virtually none of their books come with author photos, and quite a few don’t have bios. So how am I supposed to know the important facts about the Kindle authors?
I agree with Larry. I think Tempest is trying to guilt people out of buying Gaiman in hopes they’ll buy somebody else, her, perhaps. I don’t think her approach will work, but I could be wrong.
Her and Hurley and other members of the self-proclaimed les-posse are bitter that Gaiman showed up Seanan McGuire, one of their own.
Yeah, but so have a lot of other writers.
Larry Neil Gaiman Dr. Seuss Various people working at Hallmark The list goes on.
Larry, I knew you couldn’t resist this. Now get back to work.
Actually, I love your site, but I know you don’t get paid for it, and I know Purina Manatee Chow doesn’t come cheap.
I’m pretty sure Wendell does better on Manatee Science Diet. Because science!
Wendell lives on a strict diet of clubbed baby seals and liberal tears. But only if the club is made of old-growth Amazon trees harvested by indigenous pygme hot-babe vampiric nibblers, and served on a dining set stolen from various non-vegan restaurants.
Its actually pretty healthy.
When I was a kid first discovering the joys of sf and fantasy, I was so oblivious of authors that I didn’t even notice who wrote what, let alone the identity politics of the authors — I just read what I loved. Eventually I did start to take note, but there are still some books I’d love to re-read, but I can’t seem to track down because title and author quite completely zoomed past me, like the one about a young man helping build a space station. It wasn’t one of the Heinlein juveniles, and doesn’t seem to be one of Silverberg’s either (Silverberg’s _The Lost Race_ was my first chapter book, which my dad read to me one chapter a night before bedtime), but I remember to this day the incident where they were having trouble with the life-support systems and were sedating everybody who couldn’t offer some kind of suggestion for ways to deal with it. The protagonist figured out that if they put silver paint on one part of an atmosphere loop, it’d freeze the carbon dioxide and buy them enough time to get a more permanent fix together.
The closest thing I can think of is one of George O. Smith’s “Venus Equilateral” short stories, where an officious new manager had ordered the destruction of what he felt was entirely too much greenery aboard a space station without realizing that it was an integral part of the air recyling system. The station engineers rigged up a system to freeze the CO2 out of the air until they could get replacement plants from Earth.
The stories are more than half a century old, from the old Campbellian vacuum-tube tech days, but they’re wryly humorous and quite readable despite their age. Even if it wasn’t one of Smith’s stories you remembered, you might want to find an old copy of “The Complete Venus Equilateral”, which had them all collected.
Heh! Just bought a copy!
I love Amazon.
“Venus Equilateral” taught me what an Engineer should be!
You know what, now that I think about it she’s right. But, I challenge her to keep it real and go all the way. She should forgo everything created by evil hethero cis people of European descent. I suggest she starts with the internet, electricity, and the English language sparing us from her drivel.
Nah- she should start by giving up English, that most white and imperial of languages. Let Mz. Bradford explore the wonderful possibilities of going all Bantu in her daily life.
I’m wondering, and will never find out, and please don’t think I’m defending anything this fruit loop said/wrote/will say/write.
Maybe to her, the New York Times, is a right wing paper??
I’ll not be one researching her either. Just was a thought.
The t-shirt with Dr. Who is frak’n hilarious though.
To quote Larry,
But the ironic thing about that picture? Tempest is wearing a Dr. Who shirt. A TV show about a white man and his white female sidekick, created by some white men, with episodes written by… Neil Gaiman.
It’s quite possible. I read once that Pelosi’s district thinks she’s conservative. And quite a few libs seem to think that the press is conservative (but not as conservative as Fox!), and hard on Obama.
Honestly, she might. With her psychotic streak, the New York Times may well be too right wing for her.
Doesn’t make it so, however.
Well, to be completely fair, a few of the Doctor’s companions have been non-white, both on TV and in the media spinoffs.
…and Romana was a Time Lord, and Kameleon was a robot, so they weren’t evan all human.
Turlough and Adric were also not human, though you had to look pretty human to manage as a companion.
Except for K-9.
Personally, what I think would be interesting and different would be an actual child, or an elderly person — would have to be spry of course.
Drat. I entirely forgot about K-9!
Mary: Big Finish Productions (which has been producing audio dramas using the cast and characters of Doctor Who for over 15 years) introduced my all time favorite Companion, Evelyn Smythe back in the year 2000. An elderly history teacher who helps the Sixth Doctor to mellow out.
(And, thanks to Moffat, the audio dramas are now totally canon. It warms the cockles of my geekish heart.)
There have always been plenty of child companions (children other than Susan, that is!) in the UK Doctor Who comics and annuals aimed at kids.
@junior: I’ve seen claims that people like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and others were “right wing” or “conservative”… O_o;;
I believe that there was a Cold War-era joke that went something like this:
Q: Why is Stalin a hero to the Poles?
A: Because he killed more communists than anybody.
Say what you will about Uncle Joe, he would have wasted no time putting the Social Justice Warriors to work doing something useful, such as mining uranium somewhere above the Arctic Circle.
This one was a jaw dropper to me. For real.
Oh yes. One SJW I know called the USSR “State capitalism.”
Never mind that that’s where communism always ends up…
“right wing” means “opposes them.” They’re still shilling Uncle Joe’s line that National SOCIALISM is right-wing.
“Right wing”, much like Fascism in Orwell’s day, has come to mean simply, “Something undesirable.”
Although if they’re calling Stalin right-wing, I guess that means they’re acknowledging him as a bad guy. That’s progress of a sort…
Everyone – except for Russians remembering when the rest of the world feared the USSR – admits these days that Stalin was a bad guy. The trick now is that they claim he twisted Lenin’s communism into a cult of personality dominated by himself. That way they segregate the bad stuff onto Stalin, and keep the supposed good stuff with Lenin and communism.
…and (what a coincidence) the people the SJWs hate are claimed to be just like Stalin!
How convenient! O_o;
Actually, the Doctor isn’t HUMAN.
So who’s this Cargosquid asshole?
Having seen more than a couple of these screeds pop up recently, is there a literati version of Journolist or GamesJournoPros?
Wouldn’t need them in this case. Journolist-type groups are primarily so that you can ensure all of the members roll out with similar stories at the same time. When you’re writing for a periodical, this is important. If you aren’t in lockstep with everyone else, then you might end up waiting a week or a month before you can get an article out parroting what everyone else is saying. If your sole form of advocacy is via blogs, then you can write whatever you want, whenever you want. The fact that you posted an article 15 minutes ago doesn’t keep you from publishing another one.
She’s probably part of one or more communities that discuss what is “wrong” with Western society. But they don’t need to coordinate like the members of Journolist did.
Here is my pledge. I will not read a book by anyone who uses the term “cis” in a non-joking way. I’m excited about the coming expansion of my mind.
When writing about ancient Rome, I will use the term ‘Cisalpine Gaul’ in a non-joking way. I hope you’ll make an exception for that.
Are you going to talking about how much better Transalpine Gaul is? Without making a good case for it?
Are you going to talking about how much better Transalpine Gaul is?
Only in the French edition.
Memo to self: See if I can come up with a good idea for a serious chemistry short.
There actually is cis-lunar space.
Which means this side of the moon, and trans-lunar space is the other side.
What about geneticists who need to talk about “cis-regulatory elements”?
I don’t want to be That Guy here.
But she looks like a darker version of the albino from the Princess Bride.
Again, what did the albino do to you?
He didn’t tell me how to get into the six fingered man’s hidden lair.
That’s hardly sufficient reason to compare him to she-beast there.
An uglier, stupider, and much more abrasive version of Andre the Giant’s character…
[…] the one book of Mr. Correia’s I picked up didn’t do it for me. But oh my sweet Lord, THIS is how you do a fisking. I really have to buy one of his books, even if it sits unread for ever, […]
https://twitter.com/jimchines/status/569941756063715328
Because you’re the people who claim a photo of white people is racism you fucking moron. If that’s the case with an accidental demographic, what would it be if I actually called for more reading of white men, which is exactly what you jerk-offs say we do anyway, and without a stick of proof to back it up?
SJWs are incredibly dense. They have no principles whatsoever. That literally have no means of comparing one thing to another. And Hines has done about as much to destroy the viability of his own genre than anyone.
Seriously, he’s right that “I challenge you to read non-white, non-male, non-straight” is not the same as “Book Burning!” (which I haven’t seen anyone saying), but… “not allowed to read men” is *exactly* what the challenge was, right? Or didn’t he read the article? I mean, it’s right there in the title FFS….
He’s assuming a radical feminist stance: that straight white men don’t read gay, non-white, women because they hate women, gays and blacks. He has absolutely no proof of such a thing – that is group libel. How in the hell do these morons account for a thing like the National Hockey League? Why do I even have to bring this up to an adult?
Second, he needs to address that to people who he can prove are actually doing what he asserts, not tens of millions of people.
Third: even an all-male all-white book display gets these people riled. How does that does that compare with actually saying “we’re going to have an all-male, all-white book display for a year because radical intersectional feminist ideology represents all black gay women.
My eyes are bleeding at the stupidity on display. This is breathtaking, it really is. How many more thousands of words must I present for people to understand this core group acts no differently from a KKK? They’re not in any kind of struggle. Book displays – reviews? Are you kidding me? Gendered misogynist english? These people are nuts.
Someone else already said it but I’ll say it again… telling people not to read white male authors for a year is pretty much… telling people not to read white male authors for a year.
Which just happens to be you, Jim Hines. White male author. You’re the problem. How do you sleep?
Because he knows no one will really do this? Or at least not people who love books, because if the next Jim Butcher comes out I am reading it. Period.
This kind of challenge would only work on people who don’t actually read a lot or at least don’t get really interested in books.
Hines ain’t Butcher. This is important.
Heh. That’s true enough!
[…] Fiction author Larry Correia took a few moments to tear apart the pseudo-intellectual social justice […]
She has been credentialed, but she missed an education along the way. That’s the biggest problem with these Intersectionalist SJW types (including Sarkesian of Gamergate fame): they spout the terms as markers of Goodthink. They refuse to believe that they are projecting the same nonsense they criticize so heavily, because….Goodthink!
I might want to read her books, but I cannot see any indication that they would be entertaining reads. Why would I want to read a book that isn’t even appealing to me, and is likely instead to attack everything I hold of value?
It never ceases to amaze me how utterly…adolescent…the Left truly is.
“RAGEQUIT?” In all caps, yet?
Did this person ever grow up or is she emotionally stuck at age twelve?
The all caps was actually Larry correcting her misspelling – “(anybody who ever played Call of Duty knows that word is spelled all caps)”; in the original article it was “rage-quit”.
Your point still stands… book/magazine & rage-quitting… to me, that would have to be one *REALLY* bad book (I can only think of one time in my life that it happened to me, and it really was immaturity on my part [I think I was 12ish]: when I re-read the same book as a senior in high-school I didn’t have anything close to the same reaction). The impression I get from her in this article makes me think she just has an unbelievable hair-trigger.
There’s the classic “book meets wall” meme. I’m sure everyone has had a “wow, this is really really dumb” experiences while reading. But rage? I don’t think that I’ve ever managed to get *enraged* while reading a stupid, wall meeting, book.
Of course not. It’s too easy to stop before getting to the point of rage.
Honestly, I don’t think she RAGEQUIT a damn thing. I think she read something she didn’t like, got miffed, and calls it rage. You’d think someone who claims to be a writer wouldn’t be so cavalier with words.
She’s obviously spent a couple decades boycotting ingredient labels, exercise and disciplined, rigorous, principled thought. I wonder how aware she is Xojane puts her out there precisely because she is a clown that will invite anger. It’s like a freak show at the carnival.
I did, one time, go into a full-blown book-meets-wall rage. It was an ostensibly non-fiction thing called “Black, Red, and Deadly.” BRD purported to be a study of mixed-race black/Amerinds in the old west, which I picked up because it sounded like interesting historical info and possible character research fodder. What I found when I started reading was pages and pages of racist intersectionalist claptrap that even the writer admitted he hadn’t done much actual research for. I’ve encountered hundreds of badly-written books, but that’s the only one I’ve ever actually tossed in a trash can rather than donate it to the FOL or trade it in at a local bookstore for something better.
I have BOREDOMQUIT many times, but can’t recall ever having RAGEQUIT.
I was probably hate reading by the time I finished ‘The Handmaids Tale’ because it was so politically annoying.
I didn’t ragequit though. I think I’ve only ever boredomquit.
Try reading Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, a non-fiction book about French Queer Theory. Sometime after you run out of toothpicks to keep your eyes open you’ll develop narcolepsy.
Usually books that bore me (typically because they’re filled with stale rehashed talking points) get unceremoniously set aside and forgotten. I only “ragequit” Zinn, the same way, and for the same reason I ragequit “Pearl Harbor”.
I couldn’t ragequit Zinn, I *had* to finish it, for a class
I’ve disgustquit a few books, mostly over hitting a big chunk of “Hurrdurr, Christians/Middle Americans r teh stooopid”. Sorry, I don’t pay money to be badmouthed by a cretin. The only book I’ve ever actually tossed, though, was the third book in a technothriller series I had liked, when the author had felt obliged to completely alter the main character’s personality in order to insert an embarrassingly badly written d/s sex scene. It was like biting into a hamburger and hitting a lugnut.
The funniest thing about that to me is that she’s using a *GASP!!!!!* gamer term. I thought that gamers are amongst the ostracized by third wave feminists now?
I don’t have a problem if someone wants to promote what they feel are underrepresented, but she takes it a step further and suggests that people essentially boycott straight, white, male authors and deprive them of their livelihood. How does she see herself? She doesn’t seem very effective at promoting her point of view.
Right. And it’s different, too, than saying, “I have a hard time finding books I like but this worked for me to find more authors that I like. So don’t give up on reading. Instead go out there and search a bit to find something new.”
I mean… that’s the main message of, “If you gave up on science fiction, try Baen.” Try something you haven’t tried.
The new publishing paradigm allows for truly fringe markets to grow.
[…] The Social Justice Warrior Racist Reading Challenge, A Fisking. […]
Actually looked up her stuff.
A dozen stories in a dozen years. Some editorials and editing work.
Except for the editing, that’s Monster Nation’s last, what, eighteen or nineteen months?
Poor little oppressed rich girl.
Let’s take up a collection of f***s to give about her.
No. My f***s are too important to waste on her. Now, I don’t even have a spare sh*t I might consider donating.
I’d donate, but I don’t have any.
Funny, she would ostensibly read me because by the Fauxcahontas Standard, I’m not white, I’m disabled, and stuff…
There’s quite a few of us here who fall into the category of people she thinks folks should read…
…and we’re not the people she wants folks to read.
She’s about as helpful to minority authors as Clamps is as a pro-woman anti-stalking advocate. /sarcasm
Naturally we’re not the people she wants folks to read. We write fun things. I’d tick a number of her required boxes (Asian, female, non-Christian) but I’m more focused on writing fun stories than navel-gazing race/gender/sex/sexuality centric stuff.
Also, I fully intended Sparrowind as a family-target-audience book, so sexuality for it would really be out of place. I’m still selling copies, which is a pleasant surprise considering I’ve had no
…*sighs at WordPress*
…chance to even think about promoting my novelette or any other books.
Just how that goes.
And no, none of us are what she would want to read.or want anyone else to read, probably because our characters don’t identify with a single superficial aspect of their lives as a primary driver of it.
*tongue in cheek* A nonhuman protagonist would theoretically be appealing to them, right? Because they think of humanity as a plague. =3
Probably not, because if there’s not a message they approve of, they’ll just say the non-human is a proxy for “white”.
Remember that they know the real reason we wrote what we wrote. It comes of copious amounts of English lit training that demands you find symbolism in various works…even if the author didn’t put any in there.
Haven’t seen it mentioned here but Andre Norton was the very first science fiction writer I ever read and I couldn’t have been more than nine back in 1964. I had to look it up but it was the Witch World series.
I didn’t know she was a woman until I was probably in my late 20’s. I don’t know that I’ve read all her stuff but probably pretty close. The other female writer I followed was Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books.
I’m thinking I’m not unusual here. So, if white male heterosexual readers don’t like women writers how did they succeed except by writing very appealing stories?
Gotta take it back…it was Star Guard…Mechs and Archs and Spider-silk armor. That book was in our 3rd grade library. First of thousands of sci-fi and fantasy reads….
“In addition to the identities listed above, I suggest: non-Christian religions or faiths”
I’ll be happy to send K. Tempest Bradford a reading list of orthodox Jewish writers.
I know about Michael Burstein, but that’s it. Would you please send me this list?
*wickedgrin* Gaiman identifies as ethnically Jewish (though not culturally or in terms of faith), if I am not mistaken. Enough to be included in an anthology called People of the Book, a collection of stories by Jewish authors.
I’d recommend Louis Cha’s old Wuxia novels but there’s no diversity – only Chinese, cuz Chinese are racists. Well there are Manchus, but they’re just to beat on. Anyway, they look just like the Chinese cuz micro aggressions.
Don’t forget to spay and neuter your civilization and then burn it to the ground. If you catch any patriarchy trying to escape – smash.
Shared. Highly amusing, despite the fact that this creature really halfway flsis itself. All Larry had to do was draw a diagram with the arrows connecting the dots. Gobsmacking that people, ANY people, think this way.
You made Twitchy, again!
http://twitchy.com/2015/02/23/correia-fisks-no-straight-cis-white-male-author-reading-challenge/
Reblogged this on Knights of the Geek Realm and commented:
This is the one of the problems with people who think being White automatically makes you a racist. I love the fact that Larry will take the time and knock them down a peg.
I can just imagine, me being a West Virginia boy, that if I wrote a post like this, I’d automatically be told I was a racist redneck.
Wow… I posted a simple concept over there in that thread. I pointed out that maybe the best reading challenge is simply finding things to read that are entertaining and or/informative, and that this was probably good enough since that’s what actually mattered. A women comes along and says that my proposal was be fine so long as I didn’t want any books that were thought provoking, exposed me to new ideas, challenged my assumptions, or built a richer understanding of our diverse world.
I pointed out that I put no qualifiers on my list of any kind, none about gender or race, when it came to finding works by writers that were entertaining and/or informative. I pointed out that it was somewhat amusing that seeing “entertaining and or/informative” apparently automatically translated to both “white male” and to being the opposite of being able to be thought provoking, exposing me to new ideas, challenging my assumptions, or building a richer understanding of our diverse world.
So now I’m some mean guy “punishing” poor Tempest. That’s one hell of a definition of punishing someone.
If you are incapable of being ‘thought provoking, exposing [others] to new ideas, challenging assumptions, or building a richer understanding of our diverse world’ and also being entertaining? You probably shouldn’t be writing books. And I definately won’t be reading you.
I’m fairly disappointed that Gaiman is okay with being Bradford’s prop for that nonsense. Make up your mind, Neil!
Maybe he’s thinking… cool… I’ll sell more books.
Hmm…. could be. I hope it’s pure pragmatism like that and not that he actually agrees with that BS.
I’m thinking it’s more that Gaiman has more important things to do this week than actually read what she wrote, so he did a quick skim and thought “Try new authors? Cool!”
Instead of “Never read anyone who thinks differently than you? ..lame.”
He may have had a few vinos if you know what I mean. What the hell is a “posterbook”?
I think that might have to do with his stance of defending the freedom of icky speech. He doesn’t necessarily agree (or disagree, or maybe cares at all) but Tempest-in-Teacup has the freedom to say what she wants, which, if I recall, Gaiman is big on.
Besides the fact that him acting the bigger person makes Tempest look like the shrill, hysterical scold that she is, I figure that it’ll net him more sales.
Btw, somewhat off topic I noticed that Gaiman’s the face of Amazon’s ‘make an audiobook’ section of advertising. Interesting, ne?
The word “epic” is unfortunately overused these days.
But this post . . . Larry, I do think this is epic.
According to my Amazon/Audible stock inflation program, I read 60 books last year. Today, I learned that Terry Pratchet is a guy. This challenge sounds like a lot of work for no good benefit.
[…] got sidetracked by a number of things, with the highlight being the latest fisking (read it, it’s brilliant) by Larry Correia of K. Tempest Bradford’s challenge to only […]
See, this is what makes the attacks on Lovecraft so utterly bizarre.
Lovecraft literally grew up in a third world country. 1920s America didn’t even have penicillin, let alone a modern health infrastructure. The average American made less money in real terms than the average welfare recipient today. Heck, the average American made less in real terms than the average citizen of most modern Middle Eastern countries. America also had levels of income inequality that put today’s to shame…and Lovecraft died in poverty of a medical condition that he could have received treatment for today.
Both of Lovecraft’s parents were institutionalized, and then died. He was frequently ill. He suffered from various forms of mental illness, and suffered a nervous breakdown as a teenager. He was a high school dropout. He spent five years isolated in his parents’ house. He scrabbled in New York — supporting a sick wife whose family business had failed — for less money than the average day laborer makes today.
K. Tempest Bradford and John C. Wright actually have much more in common with each other than either has with Lovecraft.
What’s amusing is that one of those two would be horrified at the comparison…
…and I don’t think it’s John C. Wright.
I would think that someone hassling Gaiman would have to be a good writer. So A quick Wikipedia check later, and I read “Until Forgiveness Comes”. Well, to say she’s no Gaiman is like saying a match isn’t the sun. It also fails the made-up words test: http://xkcd.com/483/
The ‘made-up words test’ is pretty much bollocks, though, isn’t it? I mean, you’re perfectly free to think that any book with made-up words in it is no good. As for me, I may be no slan, but at least I grok the concept of tanstaafl. So I will sit here while the elanor is in bloom, munching my lembas, and I’ll thank you not to stick me with a gom jabbar while I wait for the Kwisatz Haderach.
Shiny!
It’s like everything else – it can be done well, or it can be done badly. As a strict test, yes the ‘made-up words test’ is pretty much bollocks. As a loose guideline to take care & try to do it well (Lewis Carroll & Tolkien are given explicit passes in the xkcd alt-text – and IMO you don’t have to aspire to their level to earn a pass) or just to avoid the issue by keeping made-up words to a minimum, I think it’s reasonable advice. Definitely better than the ‘Bechdel test’.
Ah the Bechdel test. Interesting how largely useless it is, especially if you test it on things like Romance novels.
I hadn’t actually thought about it with regards to my current work, but on a lark I just checked.
My main character is female, and as it happens the second character that pops up is female, and they’re talking about a mining accident. So I guess I pass in chapter one. Yay?
Granted, that tells you basically nothing about my book, nor is it an indication of it being sexist or not, so how useful the test actually is is marginal. Especially since that second character is a one scene wonder, and beyond her being roughly the same age as the protagonist nothing about the character’s background matters. She could just have easily been male, but I gave her the original name I gave the MC as a little joke for myself.
Bechdel test is self falsifying, if you squint and use both ideological extremes in your analysis.
To be authentic women, the characters have to be feminist, bluntly and without any ambiguity. Meaning that it is possible that every dialogue might have feminist subject matter.
Feminism effectively is talking about a man.
I once noted that the first Captain America movie passes the Bechdel Test. Specifically, it’s the brief exchange of code words between Peggy and the old woman running the storefront hiding the SSR base where Steve gets the treatment.
Conversation that only includes women? Check! (Steve’s standing passively in the background throughout, but doesn’t say a word)
Men are not discussed at all during the conversation? Check!
Heck, 70’s jigglefest & MST 3K fodder “Angel’s Revenge” passes the Bechdel test.
“…the first Captain America movie passes the Bechdel Test. Specifically, it’s the brief exchange of code words between Peggy and the old woman running the storefront… Conversation that only includes women? Check! …Men are not discussed at all during the conversation? Check!”
True, but I’ve read versions of the test which require that both female characters have to be named, which disqualifies that exchange.
To be fair, I have also read versions of the test which allow the topic of conversation to be a man if the man in question is not discussed in a romantic or potentially romantic context, or if any relationship with the man is non-romantic. Two sisters talking about taking care of their senile father would pass the Bechdel Test in this context, as would a female detective and a female medical examiner discussing how to catch a male criminal (good news for Rizzoli & Isles fans).
So the plot furthering conversations between Faye, Jane, Whisper, Hammer, and Lady Origami in the Grimnoir novels pass this arbitrary Social Justice test. Yay! I’m sure they’ll retract all the horrible things they say about me now.
[…] again to add: This article from Larry Correia is a great fisking of a monumentally dumb article that shows some of the mentality that I think pervaded Korra’s […]
Show of hands of those who think Tempest will be reading Sarah Hoyt anytime soon?
But Sarah is straight, and libertarian, and thus disqualified.
Probably further disqualified by Tempest’s ilk for being not just a mother, but a mother of sons, and refusing to write ‘Portuguese stories.’
“Maureen O’Danu cargosquid • 6 hours ago
Correia is a fierce defender of the status quo. The status quo differentially awards white, cis, male folks for equivalent work in a variety of fields more than it awards people who are not one or more of white, cis, and male. That makes him a defender of racism, sexism, and homophobia. It doesn’t matter whether he has friends or family that are not white, or that he has genetic markers of a heritage other than white. “Racism” is not hatred of individuals, it is support of a system that differentially rewards and punishes based on perception of race.
I have not read his work, because his personal writings indicate that no possible future that he would write in fiction would be one where his view of me and mine, and the vast majority of people in the world who are not white, cis males is not distorted.”
___________________________________________
Had to post this gem of a comment.
The complete and utter fail at self awareness in both paragraphs is just absolutely stunning!
That last paragraph is ………. I have no words…..
And I thought that gun control bigots were stupid…….
Wow. So we’ve already seem them take “Story first, message later,” and turn it into “No protagonists that aren’t white straight guys.”
Now “Read stories you like regardless of the author’s background,” becomes “Defending racism, sexism, etc.”
Frak me.
Which means they can’t deal with what was actually said and lie about it.
It’s more – “Because the book doesn’t emphasize Owen’s race every ten pages or so, we’re going to assume he’s white.”
Those racists.
And somehow they think that circular black pit of logic is insightful. How much you want to bet she’s a goofy feminist with mental health issues. The entire bunch seems to feel they are under siege with irrational suspicions of white straight men that show them in the worst possible light.
For people interested in SF, they don’t seem to understand that if you extrapolate out Bradford’s world into one where her attitudes control a nation, you have something like Rwanda, not America. Extrapolate out an America with John Scalzi’s in control.
Extrapolate out my America and it’s live and let live. SJWs are extremely aggressive racial and sexual bigots with constant in-your-face collusions to do what they think everyone is doing to them but can never show: institutionally discriminate against great groups of people based on nothing more than race and sex-hatred. And their version of SF looks like the empty work of almost 25 years of really bad Tiptree Award winners.
‘Don’t exclude anyone based on race, sexuality, or gender, read what you like.’ – ‘You’re a bigot!’ Classic.
Yeah, MHI books, with their multi-cultural, interesting, conflicted and diverse casts are just SO DANG DISTORTED.
As in, Larry prefers to assume the best of people not like him. Even the government flunkies eventually turn out to have some vestige of decency.
The only exceptions are…villainous straight white males. HMMM!
One of the biggest assholes in the books, Agent Franks, turns out to be pretty dang cool, so yeah.
Here’s the thing. If people believing in monsters means there are more monsters and hastens the day when the Dread Old Ones return and wipe out all of humanity (one of the premises under which the MCB operates) then they are right to do whatever it takes to keep that knowledge secret, including discrediting, intimidating, or even killing those who attempt to “spread the word”. And so, while I can disagree with their approach (including their tendency to use metaphorical nukes when hand grenades will do), I can at least understand it.
thewriterinblack: Oh, I quite agree. In fact, I felt it made them even better antagonists, because now I knew that their motives and ideals actually were something they were willing and able to do ANYTHING to achieve and defend.
As opposed to your typical Evil Cisgendered Heteronormative White Male With Privilege(tm) who in Very Important Message Fiction is the antagonist merely by existing.
….BORRRRRING.
One of my favorite characters to play/write in X-Men games is Henry Gyrich, for that very reason. Come right down to it, the man is right — superhumans are dangerous, and a lot of them are irresponsible jackasses.
What’s more, Correia has the people in charge of the whole charade being specifically recruited to the task, which means they can select for people dedicated to it.
Most urban fantasy keeps up the Masquerade, such that all the non-humans are hidden for us, without any adequate reason given, and those in charge of enforcing it are those who happened to be born into the Masquerade, with the usual variations of character.
Not all urban fantasy. Indeed, I think L. Jagi Lamplighter’s Prospero’s Daughter trilogy develops the “disaster if people believe in magic” theme even better, though partly that’s because it’s a different point of view on it.
Wow. That’s bug nuts.
So, Larry Correia is probably not racist, and hasn’t ever actually done anything racist, and doesn’t come from a regular white bread American culture anyway, and has a dad who is darker than Al Sharpton, but he is racist, because he argues with statist trust fund babies who are actual racists. Plus he believes in merit, hard work, and loves America. And those things are evil because we say so, and thus he is racist. So I won’t read his stuff, because it might expose me to bad think. Because racist.
Don’t forget, Larry, that despite how they won’t read your stuff because they don’t want to be exposed to BadThink, the whole purpose of Bradford’s screed is to allegedly get us to expose ourselves to challenging ideas.
Or something.
I tend to tune people out when they’re preaching at me unless I’m sitting in a pew on Sunday morning.
You also like guns. That makes you a criminal and mass murderer in waiting on top of it all. Isn’t it grand?
Basically, “anyone who disagrees with a member of a minority whom I agree with is a racist.” So the commenter is robbing the word “racist” of any objective meaning.
They’ve been doing that for years at this point.
When I’m told that there’s racism and then there’s racism, I know the term has no meaning any longer. To me, that’s the worst crime imaginable. Real evil exists, and one of the forms it takes is in the form of racism. The fact that the trivialize it to just to score political points.
Yeaaaaaaaaah apparently all those things make us racist and sexist now.
Or in my case, ‘slaves of the patriarchy’ or something equally strange.
The only thing that gives me hope is that creatures like the one who posted that bilge are unlikely to reproduce, unless somehow they can manage to fission. . . .
They figure they can reprogram a host body like any other virus… and they count on people sending their kids to public school to be reprogrammed.
As a child, I used to make the same type arguments and counter points to justify my position, but with much fewer words. Namely….
“Because I said so”
and
“Nuh Uh”
“And I thought that gun control bigots were stupid…….”
I’m sure that the overlap on that Venn Diagram approaches unity.
I find this particularly ironic, given how “Sad Puppies” is all about shaking up the status quo and literally trying to get awards to people who wouldn’t otherwise be nominated for them.
Reblogged this on faalon and commented:
This is one of the most thoughtful, relevant answers to SJW that I’ve read. It really does tear back the skin and reveal the ugly underneath of the SJW movement; that they’re a bunch of truly racist, self-flagellating “people” who need to show you how you’re having fun wrong.
Very entertaining read. This type of guilt fed behavior is a serious point of hilarity for me in this country. The social system we adhere to when it comes to being PC is so pussified that every sub culture needs its own name and college scholarship with a free toaster included. On a personal note, Mr. Correia, please keep pissing people off! Also, I started reading the Monster Hunter books because the cover was badass. Cheers!
Just the first few sections of that was enough for me to know that the fisked article was going to be stupid, and that I was going to agree with Larry, so I decided to stop reading, leave this comment, and then go buy Trigger Warning.
You’ve just seen why it’s comments off, ban and delete for SJWs when it comes to their idea of debate. They operate from a base assumption SFF and American itself is controlled by immoral white men who occupy the same target territory as Jews do for neo-Nazis.
SJWs don’t go after actual individuals who do actual immoral acts but great groupings of people as if they are whites in a Jim Crow county. SJWs always talk about a “system” but can never point to it. Sure, stipulating all whites are guilty of what the worst of them do is a “system” if you’re paranoid mind works like that.
It’s pretty obvious SJWs don’t understand the basis for law or have any use for it. Take Bradford’s racial hostility and encase it in institutions (which she clearly does – See: safer-space) and you’d have a return to Jim Crow, not a moving away from it, and all done on the most spurious of reasoning. Why wouldn’t it be since it’s all based on intersectional hatred of men and whites.
Jim Hines Tweets about “an article challenging readers to move beyond straight white male authors” as if that in and of itself is an explanation. Well, it certainly is if you believe diabolical Jews control Hollywood and look at everyone else as an underclass of Fremen living in caves while Jews steal the spice.
The worst of this is SF is supposed to be gifted with principles that provide a warning tool of self-criticism by allowing us to step outside ourselves and look back at danger in order to see it more clearly. This is what happens when a cult ignores “white” SF like “The Pedestrian” and indulges in literature that is the exact opposite: identity scapegoating. No wonder the worst SJWs don’t like the Golden Age: it’s anti-oppression.
Lordy, i’ve been dealing with a migraine since 10:30 Sunday night. I got it to back off so, in the interests of trying to see her POV, I tried to read the linked article. About halfway thru it, I felt my neck muscles tensing again as I read the same sentence for the third time, trying to make sense of it. Headache returning. No thank you.
One can only laugh at the con game SFF’s racist feminist ideology hides behind. SJWs stipulate white straight men have created an atmosphere in SFF hostile to the emergence of gay, non-white and women’s voices. The problem is they can’t actually present any proof of that. There is no trend of quotes in the SFF community that would speak to that.
The SJW Orwellian solution to that is to simply present the imagined prominence of straight white voices as a de facto racial conspiracy. They do that to not only account for an accidentally skewed demographic, but on the assumption it’s obvious straight white men are misogynist homophobic racists. When SJWs in SFF wanted to present proof of racism at the Oscars they did nothing more than point out the membership of the Academy was over 90% white, as if that in and of itself constituted an indictment, because white=racism. The truth is there is no such formal Jim Crow-like structures at the Academy. To find that you only have to visit SJW institutions. It is not I recommending and supporting a year-long racial and sexual boycott, but SJWs themselves.
Meanwhile I have quote after quote after quote from SFWA members ranging from their top officers to the rank and file membership that conclusively shows an atmosphere hostile to men, whites and heterosexuals is not only completely acceptable but considered a necessary purge to account for meaningless unquantifiable words like “underrepresented” and “diversity” which have no set parameters as to what would be “representative” or considered an actual goal. In fact it is simply sheer irrational hostility and empty paranoia mainstreamed from the psychosis that is radical intersectional feminism and passed off as “anti-oppression.” As always, if the SFWA is looking for a conspiracy of collusion to discriminate, they have no further than themselves and the endless racist sexist quotes of their membership to look at.
The truth is there is a range of magazines that state right out in their mission statements and calls for writers that they prefer non-whites, women and gays. Some state right out they both read and review according to either a casual or strict policy of no men and no whites. That includes Lightspeed, TorDotCom, Apex, The Book Smugglers, WisCon, Clarkesworld, The Carl Brandon Society and many other organizations I could name.
The fact this wrong-way KKK of social justice can’t figure out they are by far the worst formal institutional racists and sexists in SFF is mind-boggling. SJWs have formal hard boundaries that segregate anthologies, web sites physical spaces and awards into the actual Jim Crow-like structures they claim to be against. By contrast, their “reactionary” “right-wing nutjobs” have no such institutions – none. Not one of these truth-to-power SJWs have mentioned that no less than 3 current TorDotCom bloggers left sympathetic comments at Requires Hate, the most racist blog in SFF history. Milo at Breitbart has an upcoming expose of Requires Hate. I hope it includes the revelation that RH is almost certainly a white Englishwoman.
And she’s complaining on Twitter that (1) we are so stupid not to understand what her article is really about and (2) we refuse to engage her arguments. Holy sharks, these people have broken minds.
What I love is how they’re now spinning her stinking racism as “a challenge to read more.” That’s like saying offering to not serve blacks for a year is a challenge to serve more whites. When she referred to a white woman on Twitter as a “cracka ass cracka” was that a challenge for that woman to examine her privilege? There is no proof – none – that blacks are underrepresented in SF, no more so than Irish Dancing. The interest these morons have in SF in minimal to non-existent, as anyone who’s read the new Nebula-nominated anti-white barely fantasy “The Devil in America” knows. These people aren’t exactly making it a secret what they’re obsession is and it ain’t SF. And can any of these idiot SJWs point to any SFF literature like “The Devil in America” obsessed with taking down blacks, women and gays? Nope. But in SJW-land, it’s an actual sub-genre.
Unfortunately, I have no idea what she means by cis male, so I have no way to avoid it.
97% of the time it means the same thing as “male”.
I’m pretty sure it’s more than that. Just how many men have eunuchized themselves? I doubt it’s anywhere near 3% of the male population.
The first I don’t know how many times I used the term “cis male” my husband thought I was joking.
It is derived from transsexual.
Cis and trans are prefixes that have opposite meaning in Latin and the sciences.
The naive conversion would have been cissexual, which wasn’t used because it could’ve also been understood as an attack on homosexuals. So, terms like cisgendered, cismale, and cisfemale are used for people who are not transsexuals.
Does this ranting bint actually produce a product aside from screeds that have all the charm of a Guantanamo Torturer dragging her nails down a chalkboard?
Ooh! I forgot a funny assed story from a convention a few years back…
I was at Fandomfest 2011 (worst con ever, for the record) and I was sitting in a room party bullshitting with this really cool dude. Someone yells out “Holy shit, Maurice. I didn’t know you were black!”
The cool dude sitting across from me replies “Naming my son Malcolm X. Broaddus didn’t clue you in?”
Random guy: “Yeah, but…”
Me: “You’re Maurice Broaddus?”
Cool dude: “Yep.”
Me: “Holy shit, you’re black!”
Laughter all around. We kept drinking.
There’s a somewhat amusing story about Mike Pondsmith from a while back. Similar punchline, but very different situation.
Mike Pondsmith is the owner of R. Talsorian Games, which once upon a time was known for classic pencil and paper RPGs like Cyberpunk and Mekton (technically, it still is; but the company has had a rough couple of decades…). So a guy who was an R. Talsorian fan was attending a Con and noticed that Mike Pondsmith was listed on the program, and was supposed to be delivering an address on some game-related topic at a particular time and place at the Con. So the guy went to the room, took a seat in the audience, and listened politely. And then about ten or fifteen minutes in, he raised his hand to ask a question.
“Isn’t Mike Pondsmith black?”
He is.
And the white guy who’d been addressing the room and claiming to be him left in embarrassment.
Whoopsie. LOL
Ooooh, PWNED. Hard!
What happened to the fake?
Dunno what happened to the fake. The guy telling the story ended it with the fake leaving the room.
The real question, imo, is how the fake got there in the first place. They would have had to have known that the real Mike Pondsmith wasn’t going to show up. That would mean that either he somehow intercepted the invitation (including if the con sent it to him by mistake; I once read about a college student who “accepted” an invite to lecture in China that had been mistakenly sent to him instead of an Econ Prof with the same name), or the convention actually was in on the whole thing and included him in order to have another recognizable name on the guest list (possibly after the real Mike Pondsmith declined).
I recall a similar story in Dragon magazine from Kim Mohan.
I can’t say anything. Not being involved in fandom, I though Terry Pratchet was a lady until yesterday.
I thought Tracy Hickman was a woman for _years_.
You too?
Well, when I was younger, I thought that – other than Stephen King – only women were writers. I don’t know why. I was 8, give me a break.
Well, I didn’t go to that extreme.
I knew about Tom Clancy too.
I’m a lot younger than you.
Oh, rub it in.
Yep, young young youngity young…
Has anyone told you to die in a fire today?
Yes, actually. It’s a strange and recurring pattern.
Can’t imagine why?
Me neither. Strangest damn thing.
Well, if I figure anything out, I’ll be sure to let you know.
Appreciated. You can send it via Twitter- you old folks know what that is, right? The thing with the funny little bird?
*raises his middle finger in a gesture of friendship*
You mean like this little bird?
Yep!
Awesome!
Talk about thread drift…
I seem to be pretty good at it.
We took a perfectly good Sad Puppies post and turned it into the Second Great Cookie Monster thread, so anything can happen at Larry’s.
Yet somehow the SJWs think that I have any control over what you people do?
Yeah, running a blog with us here makes cat herding look like a relaxing past time for fun and profit.
Oh, wait, profit is bad.
Damn, I keep slipping up on this shit. Oh well.
They get all the blood off your walls, yet?
Nah. They just knocked down the walls.
It was easier.
Yeah, I can see that. They were — saturated.
Not to mention, do they sell spackle in tubs large enough for all those bullet holes?
There was more space than drywall.
Really isn’t any point, considering.
Didn’t you say you always wanted an open concept house?
Actually, no. No I didn’t.
But I did want skylights, so at least there’s that.
Huh. Must’ve been me.
I tried to wrangle the mortar team, but — Pomeranians are both excitable and stubborn. Sorry about the roofline.
And the carpet.
Nah, it’s cool.
Roofs are SOOOOOO overrated anyways.
Yesterday’s Order of the Stick seems appropriate.
Shopkeeper, “Our business is going broke.”
Heroes rush into shop. “Weapons, now!”
Shopkeeper, “sure I have…”
H, “Those!”
SK, “That’ll be…”
H, “Money!” Heroes toss a whole bag of gold at the Shopkeep.
Tough golem bursts into the shop (through the wall) “I will kill you!”
Heroes stab golem, fight goes back outside.
Shopkeeper, “We can afford to fix the wall.”
SK Wife, looks at bad, “We can afford to retire and move to the topics,”
SK, “Let’s do that one.”
I’d do it.
In my defense, ah… hmm.. nope, got nothing.
hehehw
You know, we probably had more fun reading/writing the Second Great Cookie Monster Thread than a lot on her side has had reading/writing anything in recent years.
Too many people in the world have had funectomies.
This is true.
I, for one, had an absolute blast with that thread.
That should be the follow up art to The Seal Tetsubo.
Cookie Monster flanked by the Penguins of Madagascar with a grizzled old mutt with an eye-patch, and some birds holding bombs menaced by a cat-shaped mecha.
Shadowdancer?
Can you make it so??
‘Twas a good day.
Indeed, ’twas.
Today’s vocabulary word on Twitter is WRONGFUN. Wrongfun= having fun in a manner not approved by Social Justice Warriors.
Synonyms for wrongfun: actual fun, enjoyable, pleasant.
Feels off topic now, but…Tracy Hickman’s a guy? Learn something new every day.
Margaret Weis is a lady, right?
Wait, Tracy Hickman ISN’T a woman??
I got variations of that a few times, because yay for online interactions.
“I didn’t know you’re a woman!”
“…wait, you’re not American? Where ARE you from?!”
Nothing like being an online handle and anime-centric avatar to strip one of skin color/sex/nationality and then being taken simply based on one’s interactions to be really meritorious / equallizing, right?
Come to think of it, that’s how I approached author names back in the day. Unless it was obviously a male or female name on the cover, to me the name was “This person writes books I like! I don’t have this one yet!” which leads to “my lunch money can buy this book, yay!”
~~“This person writes books I like! I don’t have this one yet!” which leads to “my lunch money can buy this book, yay!”
Yep, that was high school.
I remember books being that affordable. *sigh* I remember going out on outings with friends / family and blowing nearly all my money on books, skipping the fast food outing, and having just enough for fare to go home, and the fare being loose change.
…hey whaddaya know. I found something I’m actually fondly nostalgic for from my high school years outside of my nice teachers.
I remember getting $5 a day for lunch money, scrounging up some change from around the house, and ditching lunch and picking up a $4.99 fantasy paperback on my way home from school.
I remember picking up soda cans to sell to the recycling folk for cash that I saved up to buy my Elfquest comics (which, I have no idea where they are these days… ;_; ) and returning the glass soda bottles for loose change deposits which would be hoarded for books and comics.
At no point did I think ‘oh, poor me'; but rather looked forward to the reward of the book. Heck, I wish I could still do the ‘sell cans and bottles to recycling for money'; it’s a great way to teach kids the value of money. The state of Australia I live in now doesn’t pay you for recycling.
When I was a kid, when I helped my mother out at her job (she worked at the school I attended — my brother and I couldn’t get away with anything), she paid me in books. Every Friday, we’d go to the bookstore and I’d pick out a paperback for my ‘wages.’
*grin*
[…] For a full window into that controversy, if you feel you must, Larry fisked her very thoroughly and competently. […]
[…] Everyone is linking to this, and so am I: I love the sound of a good fisking in the morning. […]
FIRE HOSES & ATTACK DOGS. Bull Conner Presents the Best Fiction of 1965?
I can’t seem to find this on Amazon. Can anyone send me a link? Sounds like great reading.
You might find a cover image here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/subtropicbob/sets/72157622346775400/
Larry, you are at the top of your usual top form with this one.
However, I take great exception to the term “Social Justice Warriors.”
They aren’t ‘social’ at all, because they’re too busy screaming at people over their microaggressive cisgendernormative heteropatriarchal racism.sexism/ableism/whateverthefuckism to actually interact socially with any sane person.
Whatever they call ‘justice’ is a twisted fantasy of vengeance towards Christianity, America, heterosexuality, Whiteness and the kids who ran their underwear up the flagpole back in junior high.
And, ‘warrior?’ Oh, HELL no. They don’t deserve the title, not even doused in sarcasm and set ablaze by the light of snark and irony.
I call them the Butthurt Brigade. Will it offend them? Undoubtedly. Do I care? Absolutely, since that’s exactly what I’m aiming for.
That’s why I love the term Social Justice Warriors. It is three obvious lies at one time.
Yeah, isn’t it kind of like calling a big guy “Tiny” or a bald guy “Curly”?
In my humble but infallible opinion, it’s the best triple oxymoron since ‘Holy Roman Empire’.
Remember, in most cases “social” used as an adjective is semantically equal to “not”
Social Science
Social Justice
See how it works?
Social Security
Socialism
Remember, adjectives modify the meaning of a noun to represent a different concept. There’s an adjective there, as in Social Justice, to let you know that you’re not talking about “Justice”, but a modification of that concept.
There’s an adjective there, as in Social Justice, to let you know that you’re not talking about “Justice”, but a modification of that concept.
As Mark Twain said, ‘Morals consist of political morals, commercial morals, ecclesiastical morals, and morals.’ Mutatis mutandis and all that.
working class or poor, wait, did she just tell us to read Correia for a year? Challenge accepted!
I failed the challenge. I read too fast for it to take a year to read everything Larry’s written. WAIT! It’s Larry’s fault I failed this challenge! He hasn’t written enough to keep my insatiable reading habit…satiated. WRITE FASTER, DAMN IT!
You can read some Sarah Hoyt as as well.
I have a better challenge. Let’s use the same rules of racial and sexual harassment SJWs love so much and not read anyone does that on, let’s say, on at least a weekly basis. That would at least be neutral. Oh, dear, that lets out almost all of the Hugo and Nebula winners from last year.
I like this challenge. Challenge accepted!
… now to get more Correia works.
Also Trigger Warning, because Gaiman’s not Christian if I remember correctly *wicked grin* and he worked his way up to where he is now too.
Bradford hates Jews.
Even the black ones?
Probably particularly the black ones, given that a good-sized chunk (likely a majority) of the world’s black jews are African – as in, they were born in Africa, or are within two generations of ancestors who were – as opposed to an American black. They have a slightly different take on this sort of nonsense.
A few thoughts.
I do not, in general, pay much attention to the skin color/gender/orientation/religion of the author when choosing a book. However, I have found that people from different backgrounds do tend to write differently about things, or choose different topics to write on. One example I would offer: The Three-Body Problem, an SF book written by a Chinese author. This is something we don’t get a lot of here, and I am psyched to check it out. But, of course, I have also heard that it is good.
People observe that a lot of the reviewed/acclaimed books out there are written by ‘white cis males’. I can believe that, and I don’t think it’s a result of bias on the part of the reviewers…but there is an issue here. The reason that more books by men are reviewed is because men write more books. Why is that? Some of this comes down to cultural/social issues.
But it’s not an easily solved problem.
“The reason that more books by men are reviewed is because men write more books. Why is that?”
If Jerry Seinfeld is to be believed it’s because we want to impress women.
Why is it even a problem? Sorry, but I see a lot of non-issues there. “Different” could as easily be worse than better; it is not a sign of quality or art or anything like that. Maybe someone stumbles onto Arab pop music and starts listening to that because of Western burn-out. Fine. But not doing so is not a “problem,” sign of provincialism, lack of sophistication, “better” or racism. It is not a “solution.” In the way that is stipulated by SJWs, it is a “solution” looking for a “problem” because in fact the whole thing is powered by anti-white, anti-Western dipshits trying to pass that off as social justice.
If a guy in China writes SF, how does that immediately become an imbalance or my racism here?
People are missing the larger perspective and truth here: America, especially compared to the so-called marginalized of the Third World, is by far the most top-to-bottom sophisticated wellspring of diverse and aggressive interests in the world. The fusion of America and European culture is a powerhouse of innovation that began to stun the world about 100 years ago, and on every level imaginable. For reasons too complex to go into here, some people don’t like that, both here and abroad. What we call “political correctness” originally sprang up to redress the illusion this was not so, perhaps powered by the myth of the “ugly American,” the ugly tourist who went to Brazil or Guatamala and said, “Hell, back home it’s so much better.” Ugly to say that to someone’s face – but true.
SJWs are dedicated to the idea that what they call American “cultural imperialism” has simply been a matter of superior signal-boosting. That’s not so. Javanese Legong and Brazilian pop-samba music haven’t captured a world market because they are static expressions, or based themselves on American music. Forro music of N. Brazil is an American fusion from WW II because of American military based there. There is no Japanese version of Elvis we celebrate; they celebrate ours. Rockabilly is big in the U.K. That’s ours, so is Bettie Page and so is SF.
America dominates everything, not because of marketing, but because of better, more innovative and exciting ways of doing things. The world started wearing jeans because they work. ESPN is the standard for sports around the world. So is NFL-style camerawork and production innovated by ABC sports way back when. Every sports page in the world was innovated by USA Today in 1982. All freeway signs in the world are standard American. All airlines use standard American practice. When film began to go big in Hong Kong in the ’60s, it was based on American film. Godzilla and that entire Kaiju is based on The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. That’s how that started. Manga doesn’t exist without Marvel Comics. All pop music and television is based on standard American innovations. I could go on and on and on. I could fill a book with this.
This is a perspective you can only get if you’ve spent years traveling around the world. In some respects it is a perspective that is unique. How can I show how kids in Guatemala way back when were fascinated by a Zippo lighter they’d never seen, or a Frisbee? I was once surrounded by a crowd of Guatemalans who were so polite and quiet I never noticed 100 of them had gathered behind me, fascinated by my taking a pix on a tripod at night. I can’t show kids in Batur Caldera going to the one TV in town and watching Woody Woodpecker cartoons. There was no such thing as pizza delivery in the Third World until they learned it from us. Sure, they do it on motorcycles, but it’s the same logos: Hardees, McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Dominos. They had A&Ws and Wendies in Kuala Lumpur back in ’86. What do we have from them?
Now it’s a new world and modern times and people are forgetting where all this stuff came from, ironically because of “cultural appropriation,” a thing which sprang up from anti-white, anti-Western racists acutely embarrassed by their own culture’s lack of energy and innovation. I don’t care; that’s not my problem and I’m not apologizing to some fem dingbat like Jaymee Goh or Bradford who would be selling Bic pens and razor blades on a plastic tarp by the side of a muddy dirt road were it not for me. Goh isn’t even a citizen and studies here and complains about a white supremacy every day. Fuck her. Her amazing ethnic Chinese-Malaysian national contribution to my innovative human rights society has been to reintroduce racial segregation at WisCon. Meanwhile in Malaysia they have “bumipatra,” thing which legally discriminates against ethnic Chinese and she is well aware of it. In other words she doesn’t even understand our Constitution. Gee, what a surprise they don’t have one in Malaysia. A Christian can’t even be president in Egypt – the most influential and largest Arab country in the Middle East – and I’m supposed to be stunned by Arab SF? Why? How’s a Ray Bradbury going to emerge from that cultural mess? That SF won’t warn – it needs to be warned AGAINST.
SF as we know it today is an American mid-century ethnic European invention no different than rock music or studio production. It’s our Elvis. Just deal with it. I’m not having someone bang back ESPN or Buddy Holly on me and say “Oh, look what I did.” In fact, you didn’t. That’s mine, and it will only truly change when I change it, because that’s what America does. I can’t help it others don’t. That’s not my “problem” and I’m not a cultural Marshall Plan to prop up the egos of asshole racist feminists embarrassed they’re too stupid to notice they never cry about diversity in Vet’s Hospitals even while they’re lugging home Hugos based on a lie they fought. Fuck them. Fuck every SJW and their dumbfuck anti-white, anti-Western KKK. “Diversity” means “white men suck,” and it’s just as simple as that. Go innovate something instead of always Tweeting “Someone should…” Just do it yourself. That’s the America way.
You want to boycott white male SF? Fine, boycott every other white male thing and go pray to a fucking volcano when your teeth hurt. Every single thing you see on the internet worldwide is us. Go boycott that too. I don’t need you, you need me. You don’t like that and I don’t care. Star Trek isn’t Chinese and Heinlein wasn’t a Guatemalan. Tough, it is what it is.
That was a damn great post, and I’m not even American, so according to SJW’s I should probably be offended.
Hi James —
(I’ll try to address your points — if you think I skipped over something, feel free to point it out.)
Note that I didn’t say that a Chinese guy writing SF was any sort of problem or imbalance, whether five or five million US citizens read it. My point here was simply that I enjoy reading books that bring new perspective to things. It doesn’t *have* to be a book written by a Chinese author, in China — but such an author strikes is likely to have different influences and may well produce something that someone growing up in the US would not. It could be good, it could be lousy.
I don’t buy your point about repressive societies not being good cultivators for groundbreaking SF (or other fiction) — historically, a lot of great literature has come from some pretty messed-up places.
OK, so. The fact that US culture is far-reaching is not in dispute. It’s also not exactly what I was asking about. It doesn’t surprise me at all that the vast majority of SF available in the US is written by US citizens — while acknowledging the contributions from other countries, we do have the numbers.
But what I’m interested in is the proportion of white male authors as compared to the proportion of white males in the general population of the US. After all, we are one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world (the most? probably). And yet, our SF author population (and, to be fair, the population of a lot of other professions) still skews to the white male. And that’s the question I was asking — why is that? Whether you think it’s a problem that needs solving or not, I think it’s a question worth asking.
I answered your question in the blog post itself. Why are there more white authors? I’m going with white here because there isn’t an imbalance between male and females, just that statistically they tend to gravitate toward different genres to write in, and some genres are overwhelmingly female, while others are more male, and some are split.
Populations with more readers produce more writers.
I talked about this a lot in my post explaining why GenCon wasn’t racist because there were more white gamers. Same exact thing.
In many American cultural subgroups, reading is looked down upon (for example, the one I grew up in, where fiction reading was seen as a sissy activity). Historically, “white” culture has been more approving of reading as a pastime. Thankfully that is changing. (want to see a really interesting take on books in the black community, read what Ben Carson has to say about it, though I’m betting he doesn’t make Tempest’s list of acceptable black authors!)
Readers are usually people with more access to books, which means more education, more disposable income, and more free time. All things that historically whites have had more than other groups.
As time goes on, other groups have gained more disposable income, more free time, more educational opportunites, and more access to books. As a community gets more readers, it produces more writers.
However, it takes time for readers to become writers, and then for writers to become professionals and achieve success in the market (meaning more readers). So, the longer a group has had lots of readers, the more likely it is going to have more authors, and the longer it has had more authors, the more likely it is going to have more widely read authors.
You can see a perfect example of this with Utah. People always ask me how come Utah has such a high number of authors and successful authors disproportiante to our relatively tiny population. That’s because Utah is one of the nerdiest states in America, where reading is considered a good thing, supported, and respected. Utahns read a ton. We also have high levels of education, free time, disposable income, and access to books. We’ve had all that stuff for a few generations, and now we’ve got hundreds of authors and more bestsellers than states with 10x our population.
Compare that to where I grew up, with one tiny, outdated library, in a culture where reading was for sissies, and nobody had time to read because that was time you should have been working. And when real men had free time it was best spent drinking and then punching other real men in the face.
It is like I said, you want to increase the number of writers in a community, increase the number of readers. Cultivate and encourage them.
Larry, have you done this as a FB post or blog entry? If you haven’t, you should. If you have, anybody got a pointer?
Actually you did use the word “problem” which is why I put it in quotes. And we’re not talking about “great literature” per se but specifically an SFF literature which not only traditionally engages in societal warnings but has the ability to engage in unique perceptual shifts. So one doesn’t have to buy my “point” but instead point to actual work, when and by whom. We’re the ones who have a Constitution and at the same time had to stare contradictions like Jim Crow right in the face. We are uniquely equipped to talk about this because we not only talked the talk but eventually walked it. We have a Civil War burned into our memory as an exclamation point. They never had that in Islam because we ended slavery for them. We ended slavery in India too and they’re still burning down Christian churches. They’re imprisoning Christians in China. There may be outliers in repressive countries who write dystopia but here it’s not an outlier but a living, breathing society and genre that is par for the course. In other words it’s easy to write about repression when you’re repressed. But to do so out of conviction is different. Hippies didn’t have to have long hair and risk being beaten, discriminated against or run over – they did it out of conviction. That spread from here to there, not the other way round. Kids had Rod Stewart shag hair cuts and Scorpions (the band) t-shirts in Indonesia in the ’80s. American SF is a genre of conviction, not necessity.
As for your last paragraph, it is either a question worth asking across the board or it is not. Why do SJWs restrict this to only white expressions or SF? Does the 78% black NBA need “solving”? What about rap music or the National Hockey League. Why is SF some pie-charted United Nations and everyone else skates? The entire question is ridiculous. Does Arab and Taiwanese films need diversity? What about all of Africa? This is an initiative that shows its racism by what it never challenges as much as by what it does.
Whoops, you’re right, I did say problem. I was referring not specifically to the issue of the proportion of white male SF writers, but rather to the underlying social and economic issues that contribute to it.
So, in that sense, I think that the question is one worth asking across the board. Understanding why things are the way they are is how you get to the point where you can decide whether there is a problem or not.
I do think that the economic imbalances in this country are a problem. I don’t know how to solve it.
And I want to be really, really clear about something: there is not a single thing SJWs ask for I am against. What I am against is their constant assertions that everything they want is a reflection of the innate failures and bigotry of men, whites and heterosexuals. That’s just a KKK and my interest in what SJWs want dries up right there. They can take their “diversity” and shove it.
I truly cannot imagine going to a foreign country and bitching at them about why there aren’t more whites and Western stuff in their hobbies. What in the world is wrong with a Campbell Award-winner born in Indiana going on about a “white supremacy” and talking about “our colonizers” in referring to a soccer game between England and Italy? That’s like me being born here and talking about the Soviets as “our occupiers.” You have to just make that shit up to be angry. Do you think that daffy broad will ever talk about her real colonizers in that sense: Turkey and S. Arabia when they play? That will never happen and racism is why, not reality.
There have been women-only or this or that-only things for decades in America. I never cared cuz they didn’t use it to demonize and scapegoat me the way Nazis do Jews. That is a huge difference. Live and let live. Diversity is one thing. Diversity equal me racist – forget it. I’m not interested in that conversation any more than Jews want to sit down with neo-Nazis.
And three-body planetary ballistics? Oh, yeah – that’s me too. I’ll take fries and a milkshake with that. I declare a violation of U.N. Charter 4.4499 under the “Cultural Appropriations Act.” Where are my reparations and piece of the pie-chart. I have a stunning new idea for an SF novel no one has ever thought of. It’s called Shaolin Lensmen Eagle’s Claw on Mars.
There is a reason I like anime and kung fu movies. There is a certain feel to Russian sci-fi that makes it feel just a little more alien. Have you happened to notice the number of non Americans or immigrants write for Baen?
I love anime and kung-fu movies too. I saw Akira first-run and started watching Shaw Bros. back in ’79. My classics are Clan of the White Lotus (in which women kick ass by the way) and 8 Diagram Pole Fighter. I even visited the Shaw Bros. building in Singapore and they gave me a tour of their offices and some posters. I doubt many people knew why Cheng Pei Pei (the old evil woman) was in Crouching Tiger… or Gordon Liu in Kill Bill. I did. And if you ever want to watch women kicking tons of ass and a completely weird film complete with kung-fu gorillas and men with 18 inch long tongues, Shaolin Invincibles from 1977 is for you.
My housemate keeps inviting me to watch him play / play Metro Last Light – a game based off a Russian post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel – because he knows I’d appreciate the details of the story and the graphics. I keep refusing because the one time I did sit down to watch, I got so creeped out I had nightmares, it was so detailed. Also, great attention was paid to the atmospherics (the background noises. Yeeee~)
I tend to watch more anime and read more manga so I keep wondering why the whole freaking Japanese, Chinese, and Korean sci-fi and fantasy gaming/literature/media industry is wholeheartedly ignored by Tempest, Quinn, Sarkeesian and Wu.
Oh wait, actually I know. They ignore it all because then they wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. CLAMP, one of the most well know n manga/creator circles, is composed of four women, and started out writing boys love indie comics. They write slice of life, sci-fi, fantasy and more, regularly have heterosexual and homosexual and indeterminate gender characters But they have a tendency to portray love as love, versus ‘sexuality’ and that love is more important than sexuality. I guess that would disqualify them?
Kaoru Mori would probably be kicked out of consideration because she’s an avowed Anglophile, as evidenced by Emma: Victorian Romance, but the current focus of her richly illustrated and incredibly detailed historical fiction, Otoyomegatari are minority women who, while adhering to the traditions and norms of their era, are strong willed and powerful characters while retaining their feminine attributes. The first bride we are introduced to hunts game with a bow from horseback. Her bow is considered part of her bridal kit (evidenced later on by the family matriarch also having one) and her husband’s family observe that she’s ‘raised according to the old traditions’ of their once-nomadic people. Except, oops, maybe she’ll be disqualified because she draws beautiful women… of various body types, and women with a wide variety of attitudes and demeanor, but stay feminine.
The protagonist of Metroid is Samus Aran, a woman, but while playing the game you didn’t know … or cared! But ‘there aren’t enough women characters in games’ or if they are they’re ‘hypersexualized.’ Yeah, sure, that power armor Samus wears totally reveals lots of boob… not.
I could go on, but I suppose there’s enough here for Clamps to mine and misrepresent over in FSTDT as me being an anti-feminist, racist homophobe.
“K Tempest Bradford @tinytempest
· 23h 23 hours ago
The Larry Corriea/Sad Puppies crowd has found that xoJane post.”
Did she think we somehow wouldn’t?
They have the internet on computers now!
Found it? Hell. Check my FB page. Within minutes of her posting about it I had a bunch of people tagging me with links. It is amazing who well informed an author can be when he actually has a large number of fans who tell him stuff.
“Why in my day, the Internet ran on foot couriers!”
There actually is an RFC Internet specification for packet delivery via carrier pigeon. Of course, it was written on April first, in the long tradition of joke specs. But it comes in handy for detecting BS by Network Equipment salesmen if you ask them “Does it Support RFC 1149?” and they say “Yes, Of course!”
I begin to see why all the SJW types are jumping on the “Net neutrality” bandwagon.
Dark days ahead, I predict.
Please don’t stop fisking these mental midgets. I rely a bit on folks like you and Michael Z Williamson to keep me even keeled when my head wants to explode from witnessing such incandescent stupidity. Heh it also keeps me from destroying my young sailors with misplaced rage. Im sure that they would thank you if they only knew.
[…] then talked about how great it was that she stopped reading white authors for a year. Larry Correia tore her a new one. It was […]
It’s hilarious to realize that one of the only writers who fits all of Princess Tempest’s (hat tip to Sarah for that, btw) criteria is . . . Requires Hate.
Yep. And both Tempest and Kameron “Trigger Warnings” Hurley are notable RH defenders. I sense a trend.
Requires Hate is a white lesbian living in England.
Reblogged this on Cirsova and commented:
It’s amazing how cartoonishly racist so-called progressives are. I’m reminded of when I realized that if you switched out gender with race with what interweb feminists were saying that you got some really gross stuff.
I am not a cis het white male, but I don’t think I’ve ever been reading a book and thought to myself “This would be such a better read if it hadn’t been written by a white man.” As I make my way through Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, I have not once thought, “This is good, but what would really improve it would be some more diversity.”
The whole “Sci-fi and fantasy is the realm of white men!!?” tripe is a meme that is as wrong as it is bizarre. Some of the most successful, beloved and prolific writers in Fantasy & Sci-fi have been women. Jane Yolen? Ursula K. Leguin? Andre Norton? Anne McCaffrey? J.K. Rowling? Suzanne Collins? Hell, even Stephanie Meyers? And those are just the obvious off-the-top-of-the-head ones. The genres are full of diversity; you can easily find something you’ll enjoy and maybe, if it’s really that freaking important to you, it’ll be written by someone who looks like you. But to go and say “Fuck everybody who’s ________, I don’t need to read their shit and you don’t either; broaden you damn horizons!” hardly seems necessary or even sane, in some cases.
With all the prohibitions decreed from on high (no binary-genders, nothing written by straight white dudes, nothing by Sad Puppies authors or nominated by them), could someone, say from Tor.com, please do us a favor and post the entire Index Librorum Prohibitorum for science fiction and fantasy? It’s getting a bit difficult to know what I can and cannot read.
That’s the List of Forbidden Books (not the anime character), for those who wish to revive the concept.
I expect it to be a long list.
Wonder if there’s a way I could have my amazon wishlist auto-populated from the List of Forbidden books?
But that would defeat the entire purpose!
I can’t say anything. If they published the list, I’d just use it as a checklist.
Hate to be that guy but… wouldn’t it be easier to simply make a list of books that it is okay to read. Okay so it would be more of a pamphlet.
are*
how embarrassing
Dunno if that’s an error, given how short the list would be.
I’m going to avoid reading books written by dumb, talentless racist bitches.
That speciest! What if the dog happens to be a good writer?
You just made my day. I thought I was the only person that thought that SJWs were racist, sexist assholes.
Hang around, you’ll find a lot of folk here share that opinion.
Nope, you’re not alone. Welcome to the Dark Side. We have puppies.
Sometime i just have to ask… What the Hell Is wrong with these people?
[…] also a “writer of color” who grew up in disadvantaged circumstances. As he relates in a recent post, “I grew up with all that fancy Portuguese Dairy Farmer Privilege, where I got to have an […]
[…] post was inspired by a Twitter conversation with Scott Lynch, and reading the reactions to K Tempest Bradford’s post, in comments, and in the Sad Puppies blogs. The vehemence in […]
Reblogged this on crystaldawn0603's Blog and commented:
Exellent, thought-provoking article.
[…] also a “writer of color” who grew up in disadvantaged circumstances. As he relates in a recent post, “I grew up with all that fancy Portuguese Dairy Farmer Privilege, where I got to have an […]
How is this not an SJW form of book banning? Or at least the first steps toward that idea, just using social pressure and finger-wagging instead of a big bonfire?
It’s just another example of how racists use flimsy excuses to attack their opponents. Bradford has learned one thing: when it comes to outright racist remarks, she is untouchable with her constituency so to speak. But trust me, there’s people out there going “Oh, really?” I hope she’s a trust fund baby cuz she’s going to need it. You’ll notice Bradford’s getting some support from other SJWs but it’s not the same as a year ago, when they’d be coming at us en masse. They’ve come to realize they are literally destroying their careers for essentially no reason. Why would an author be willing to cut their own readership in half over something as goofy as white privilege? What does that have to do with SFF in any real sense? These idiots have some idea we hate diversity and fear it. Hell, we don’t fear it. It’s been there for ages. Godzilla dates from 1954 and Americans love those crazy films – they don’t fear them. Bring me more I say, and more Ghost in the Machine. And I loved the Chinese Painted Skin 2. I’ve loved the Brazilian urban fantasy Black Orpheus for years, and that dates from the early ’60s. SJWs are liars. They like to pretend we’re a pack of racists who’ve don’t know other countries exist, but they do that cuz they’ve adopted an ideology that itself is racist and specifically targets men, whites and heterosexuals. It loves painting us in the worst light. Requires Hate wasn’t an outlier – she was the perfect symbol of SJW ideology: a racist, sexist, supremacist cult of liars.
Men, whites, heterosexuals, capitalists. etc…
No, Requires Hate was an outlier…
…because she would turn the hate on them.
Remember that much of the argument wasn’t that she was hateful, but that she attacked women and “people of color”. It’s fine when it was targeted at white dudes who didn’t give a shit what she thought, but the moment that she turned onto “safe” people, she had crossed a line that allegedly should never be crossed.
Here’s a list of people RH went after on her blog. Show me the preponderance of women of color.
April 17, 2012 R. Scott Bakker
April 14 Jay Asher Carolyn Mackler
April 3 Tolkien
March 16 Eric Juneau
March 2 Mike Carey
Feb 19 R. Scott Bakker
Jan 31 Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist
Jan 29 Tolkien
Jan 27 Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist
Jan 3 Ann Bishop
Dec. 20, 2011 Mark Lawrence
Dec. 8 Joe Abercrombie
Nov. 22 Drew Karpyshyn
Oct. 8 Mark Carey
Sept 19 Cindy Pon
Sept 1 Aleksandr Voinov and Rhianon Etzweiler
Aug 20 Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon
Aug 16 R. Scott Bakker
Accord, The: Keith Brooke
All Together Dead: “Charlaine Harris is a misogynistic, racist fuck”
Altered Carbon: Richard Morgan
American Gods (and other identikit titles): Neil Gaiman
Archangel Protocol: Lyda Morehouse
Ascension: Christie Golden
Ash: Malinda Lo
Beauty: Sheri S. Tepper
Best Served Cold: Joe Abercrombie
Birthday of the World, The: Ursula le Guin
Black Blade Blues: JA Pitts
Black Jewels: “Anne Bishop really likes writing about rape and pedophilia as romantic”
Bloody Chamber and Other Stories: Angela Carter
Borked Kingdoms, The: NK Jemisin
Bright of the Sky: Kay Kenyon
Burning City, The: Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
City of Dragons: Robin Hobb
City of Saints and Madmen: Jeff VanderMeer
Dark Edge of Honor: Aleksandr Voinov and Rhianon Etzweiler
Dark Wife, The: Sarah Diemer
Dead Witch Walking: Kim Harrison
Deathless: Catherynne M. Valente
Deceived: Paul S. Kemp
Deerskin: Robin McKinley
Delirium’s Mistress: Tanith Lee
Desideria: Nicole Kornher-Stace
Disturbed By Her Song: Tanith Lee
Double Vision: Tricia Sullivan
Dragon Haven: Robin Hobb
Dreams Made Flesh: Anne Bishop
Dust: Elizabeth Bear
Earth Logic: Laurie J Marks
Eisenhorn: Dan Abnett
Electric Forest: Tanith Lee
Embassytown: China Mieville
Everneath: Brodi Ashton
Eyre Affair and the Sexist Romance Tropes, The: Jasper Fforde
Fevre Dream: George R. R. Martin
Fire Logic: Laurie J Marks
Fox Woman, The: Kij Johnson
Fudoki: Kij Johnson
Fury of the Phoenix: Cindy Pon
Future of Us, The: Carolyn Mackler and Jay Asher
Graceling: Kristin Cashore
Gun, With Occasional Music: Jonathan Lethem (“is a misogynistic fuck”)
Habitation of the Blessed: Catherynne M. Valente
Heart of Iron: Ekaterina Sedia
Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, The: NK Jemisin
Huntress: Malinda Lo
Inside Out and Back Again: Thanhha Lai
Iron Angel: Alan Campbell
Kingdom of Gods: NK Jemisin
Last Argument of Kings: Joe Abercrombie
Lilith’s Brood (plus Fledgling and partially Seed to Harvest): Octavia E. Butler
Liveship Traders Trilogy: Robin Hobb
Living Next Door to the God of Love: Justina Robson
Luck in the Shadows/Stalking Darkness: Lynn Flewelling
Matriarch: Karen Traviss
Melusine: Sarah Monette
Midnight Robber: Nalo Hopkinson
Mirror, Mirror: Gregory Maguire
Mr Fox: Helen Oyeyemi
Nekropolis: Maureen F McHugh
Neuropath: R Scott Bakker (SPOONS)
Palimpsest: Catherynne M. Valente
Pretty Monsters: Kelly Link
Prince of Thorns: Mark Lawrence
Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden: Catherynne M. Valente
Rats and Gargoyles: Mary Gentle
Ravenor: Dan Abnett
Redemption in Indigo: Karen Lord
Revan: Drew Karpyshyn
River of Gods and the Cultural Appropriation: Ian McDonald
Road of the Patriarch: RA Salvatore
Saint Fire: Tanith Lee
Secret Book of Paradys, The: Tanith Lee
Secret History of Moscow, The: Ekaterina Sedia
Silently and Very Fast: Catherynne M. Valente
Silk: Caitlin R. Kiernan
Silverfall: Stories of the Seven Sisters: Ed Greenwood
Silver Phoenix: Cindy Pon (bonus quotespam)
Skin Folk: Nalo Hopkinson
Steam-Powered II: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories: Joselle Vanderhooft (ed)
Steel Remains, The: Richard Morgan
Stories of Ibis, The: Hiroshi Yamamoto
Storm Front: Jim Butcher
Swordspoint: Ellen Kushner
Tender Morsels: Margo Lanagan
Throne of the Crescent Moon: Saladin Ahmed
Triptych: JM Frey
Venus Preserved: Tanith Lee
Wicked Lovely: Melissa Marr
Wind-Up Girl, The: Paolo Bacigalupi, or RACIST RAPEYNESS THIS WAY COMES
Zoo City: Lauren Beukes
Show me were I said anything about a preponderance?
I can read. You didn’t. That’s M. J. Locke’s (Laura Mixon) argument. She achieved that by using data prior to RH’s blog that is completely anecdotal and unreliable. Even calling it “data” is a joke. RH said straight out on her blog”…though I’ve called R. Scott Bakker a shit-eating roach (and will happily continue to!), you can be sure I won’t be calling any minority writer anything like that, and have never done so.”
And there are quotes to back it up.
Look, I’m not saying that was her M.O. by any stretch of the imagination. No, we were her favorite target by a long stretch.
They just didn’t give a damn about that. She could say whatever she wanted about white guys and women who don’t toe the party line. What got her targeted was that she failed to limit her attacks. May have only been a couple of them, but that’s two too many in their eyes and those couldn’t be tolerated.
Had she simply kept coming after us, I doubt they’d have cared.
But whatever.
I really don’t feel like arguing with you over it.
If i remember correctly, RH didnt really go after Eisenhorn by Abnet, I want to say she liked it…which I found strange. But i could be misremembering.
Though, her destruction of Windup Girl/bacigalupi was beautiful…
@James May
Long list. I don’t see Larry Correia there, however…..wise choice on RH’s part, methinks.
You remember right. She didn’t go after all those; she gave positive reviews to some. But the overwhelming majority are so negative the point stands. In fact if you take out the positive ones the racial demographic is even worse.
I don’t know what you guys are arguing about. It’s really not in question, is it, that RH’s behavior toward acceptable targets was… acceptable. RH’s behavior toward non-acceptable, vulnerable, in-group, targets was… an outrage.
Thus, being a good person or bad person depends not on RH’s hateful behavior but on who that behavior was directed toward.
And what “they” don’t get, and might never get, is that it’s about power, and there is no power in attacking people who are not vulnerable. The end will ALWAYS be about attacking vulnerable people. It’s not possible to endorse and support behavior like that of RH without arriving at that very predictable end.
Only the vulnerable will apologize. Only the vulnerable will bow to the will of the attackers. Only vulnerable people who rely on social acceptance within a group can be touched by disapproval from that group. The targets will ALWAYS revert to the in-group because there are no other targets that it’s possible to hit.
From Sunili Govinnage’s article at
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/20/i-only-read-non-white-authors-for-12-months-what-i-learned-surprised-me
“…it seems that people get really angry by the idea of deliberately eschewing white people, no matter the context or reason.”
Imagine the uproar if that had read,
“…it seems that people get really angry by the idea of deliberately eschewing black people, no matter the context or reason.”
But I think I see the real problem, also from her article:
“In 2014, I managed to read 25 novels.”
Twenty-five novels. That’s better than none, but 25 books a year is really minimal exposure to the world of literature (genre and otherwise). How does she even know what’s out there if her reading is limited to 25 novels in what (per her phrasing) I take to be a banner year for her reading habit?
Three thoughts:
[1] I remember when Sci-Fi was anti-fascist. Where thought control, newspeak, thoughtcrime, and rigid philosophical hegemony were the trademarks of the bad guys in the genre. Today I’m pretty sure the SJW’s think that Winston Smith is a dangerous free thinking individual and Big Brother is the hero that is going to correct him. (I call dibs on teaching that as a course at UCLA)
[2] The most horrifying thing of this is, these people are starting to attack technical writing with the same kind of SJW bullshit. It is a little harder though, generally to be picked to author a handbook or textbook on a technical subject, you have to have spend years doing research and/or establishing yourself as an expert in the field. That is being fought by the SJW’s, it is considered too patriarchal. And since STEM hates women and drives them out with inappropriate shirts, such a system only reinforces privilege (/sarc).
[3] I have read the synopsis of some of the books by John Scalzi. They seem like something I would read (I love both Starship Troopers and Forever War), but when I heard his “life on easiest setting” comment it just pissed me off. I am tired of the privilege bull. Yes, I am white. Yes my parents sent me to an expensive private school. You know what? The public school didn’t do crap for a dyslexic but put me in the special ed where I was taught to tie my shoes and prepped for a life as a part time janitor on social security disability. I went from learning disabled to doctor of engineering. Tell me that my life was set on easy.
I think you’ve hit it right on the head, buddy. These intersectional privilege feminists are insane.
Now Ms. Bradford is comparing you to Elizabeth Warren: http://www.xojane.com/entertainment/reading-challenge-stop-reading-white-straight-cis-male-authors-for-one-year#comment-1871551292
Oy vey…..
It’s like watching baby seals club THEMSELVES….
Oops, apparently not Ms. Bradford, but someone going by a similar name.
https://disqus.com/home/discussion/xojane/i_challenge_you_to_stop_reading_white_straight_cis_male_authors_for_one_year_by_k_t_bradford/#comment-1871505490
——————————–
cargosquid • a day ago
Try some Sarah Hoyt.
Or Larry Correia.
While straight, they aren’t “white.”
———————————
Katie B > cargosquid • a day ago
Larry Correia is a person who discovered as an adult, having grown up as a functionally white person in white America, that he fit into one of the government’s non-white statistical groups for certain data gathering purposes, and started throwing that around as a shield against critique of his extremely parochialist views.
Correia is the American conservative who watches Fox News and doesn’t bother to look much beyond that worldview – he might mean well but the information that he takes in serves his mentality of besieged superiority and doesn’t require any intellectual heavy lifting on his part to see where he fits into the world.
———————————-
PavePusher > Katie B • 6 hours ago
Great Ghu, you’re an idiot.
———————————
Katie B > PavePusher • 5 hours ago
Because I have an informed opinion that Larry Correia is unconsciously bigoted in all the old familiar ways and uses an alleged minority status that he has never actually lived with as a shield against criticism?
This is EXACTLY the same as a white dude claiming to be 1/64 Cherokee and thus making it impossible for him to be racist.
——————————————
PavePusher > Katie B • 39 minutes ago
Serious question: On what information do you base your opinion of Larry Correia? Have you read any of his books? His blogs? His FB comments? Have you ever met or talked with the man?
Can you actually cite to any of this alleged bigotry of his, or use of his ethnicity as a “shield”?
Citations needed, please.
Missed one:
——————————————
PavePusher > Katie B •an hour ago
Your “opinion” is not at all “informed”. And he’s apparently 100% an ethnic/racial minority, so your personal bigotry is quite stunningly obvious.
In regard to LC benefitting from white privilege, read very carefully how SJWs compartmentalize their logic so it only in fact works for their target:
“Jamie Schmidt @acrockofschmidt 24h24 hours ago @neilhimself @tinytempest It’d be interesting to read books w/o writer name & see if biases are in writing or our perception based on author”
“Jessamyn Smith @jessamynsmith 53m53 minutes ago @acrockofschmidt @neilhimself @tinytempest It would be. Job apps and academic papers are rated more positively with male names on them.”
“K Tempest Bradford @tinytempest 17m17 minutes ago @jessamynsmith @acrockofschmidt I’d be up for that.”
Unless your last name is Correia. Then, not so much. Anyone who’s read a lot of SJW arguments knows that cold-calling last name thing is big with them. So is being the least bit native-American. In short, SJWs are once again caught lying and violating the standards they themselves set up.
My last name has four vowels and a double R. I didn’t get their fancy resume privilege, yet I still managed to get a bunch of jobs. Must be because of all that other useful stuff I had on my resume.
Of course there won’t be citations. Because I’m not racist.
And I only watch FOX when I’m on it.
But she’s right about one thing. As an adult I discovered that Portuguese was legally Latino. And being a person who thinks that racial boxes are stupid, illogical, artificial constructs, and the EEOC is evil, I took great joy in making fun of their idiotic rules.
But that doesn’t change the fact that I am Portuguese, my family came from the Azores, and I grew up poor in a Portuguese farming town, attending feshtas and eating soapesh with a bunch of other Portuguese Catholic kids. So yeah, I grew up with that culture. I was the only kid in my peer group that wasn’t fluent in the language because my grandpa and then my dad would only allow English in the home BECAUSE WE WERE AMERICANS.
Which I suppose is the big difference. I’m an American who loves America, and so I love to poke their stupid racist bullshit with a stick. The fact that the idiotic rules of privilege they fabricated to support their bullshit actually benefit me more than their typical trust fund baby cheer leaders is just icing on the cake.
“Because I have an informed opinion that Larry Correia is unconsciously bigoted”
Let’s read that again for effect. She claims to hold an *informed* opinion about views that Correia holds *unconsciously*. Holy sharks, these people have damaged minds. They claim special knowledge that they do not have and is frankly radically at odds with observable reality. They are Gnostics on acid.
Remember, “bigoted” in their world means “holds opinions I find objectionable”.
I’m technically a bigot in the real sense, in addition to the other.
I really, really hate recreational drug use. This spills over some to the people who do it. I do not want to be around them, and I tend to dislike them for that activity.
I also think there are a number of jobs that recreational drug users should not hold.
Well, to be fair I did once pretend to be Cherokee to get a job teaching at Harvard, right before I got elected to congress. Then I was all like, jokes on you, DNC!
All you need for evidence is high cheekbones, amirite?
Do I need to bring out the SJW Special Snowflake Harp Seal cartoon again?
It’s always a good time to bring out that cartoon.
Tetsubo of Pwning +9000 vs SJW Special Snowflake Seals
So, how quickly do you think Clamps, stalker of Asian Women will steal this picture again and rehost elsewhere while claiming not to have stolen it, to try crowdsource harassment of me while also claiming we’re the ones stalking him?
He has to sleep sometime…
At least 100%. There’s one reply on this topic that I suspect to be from him.
“Warranty void if seal is broken” cracks me up every time.
That makes me very happy.
It should be noted that Tempest loves to punch down at people she thinks are “beneath” her in the pecking order of the field. She took a big swipe at me (the low-hanging white guy fruit) nine years ago. I confess a certain degree of pride in knowing that I’ve left her in the absolute dust since then. In only 5 years I’ve blown past her.
An opinion: she’s not a writer so much as she is a hyperactive fan and poseur-activist who has a lot of peculiar ideas about how the field ought to be, and she thinks it’s impossible for her to be wrong because she’s the magic unicorn combination of non-straight, non-male, non-white.
Though you could fool me on the last portion. Too many darkened photos. And the video that makes her look as light as a red-headed freckle-faced woman.
I’ve been meaning to read The Chaplain’s War! Thanks for reminding me
And really, there’s nothing at all racist with the name of her blog post there. /eye roll/
Frankly, someone who fancies themselves a writer should probably learn to comprehend what they read before commenting on it.
I saw nothing but success and intellect. See: George Orwell – 1984. Also, See: Lying.
Wait. So on top of everything else she’s insecure about her own skin tone?
(Actually, that is really, really sad. To put so much emphasis on something so shallow – Literally – cannot be healthy for one’s psyche)
The funniest thing it that whole thread was tempest referring to someone else as – your wife – “(kind of) black.” I’m darker than her in my high school prom pictures, and I’m about as European-origins as a person can get…
If I spend enough time out doors, I’m darker than her.
Wonder if I burn off privilege at that point?
Nah, that’s just cultural appropriation
Oh hell, that’s all?
I’m guilty of that shit three times a day at least in my own writing apparently.
Because white people can’t *actually* want diversity. Obv.
Of course not. We’re shitlords if we don’t include a diverse cast of characters.
If we do, we’re guilty of cultural appropriation.
And they wonder why I don’t really give a shit what they think.
Is it cultural appropriation when when a gay actor plays a straight character?
Possibly.
I’m thoroughly confused at this point.
At this point we might as well just accept that all of us white people are just born racists. VD gets a pass, cause he’s Native; oh, the irony.
Glad you’ve been able to thrive in spite of the poo-flingers. One thing I’ve learned the past few years, is that while they sound big and tough and they act like they have the power to make or break you, they don’t. Talent will win out in the end.
Xojane has now resorted to blocking commenters, because they are so into debate.
Well, this never really was about encouraging readers to expand their horizons. It was about trying to make living in an echo chamber seem normal.
“For a year I woke up, reading books that had nothing but MY opinions, written by people who kind of, sort of looked like me, THEREFORE OPEN-MINDEDNESS. Every day, nothing but pages of ME, glorious ME.”
Xojane is nothing more than a swinery.
Figures. They’re all about free speech . . . for themselves.
https://twitter.com/tinytempest/status/570304288553086978
No, I meant why it was straight up racist bullshit from the team that don’t like “cracka ass crackas” and “sour dough-faced” white men.
“OH, please don’t make the Human Torch black cuz then he’s a [redacted] which reminds me of the face of people after they’re blown up in Tex Avery cartoons.”
Yeah, that’s real social justicey, KKK-style.
Sour-dough-faced? I thought it was racist to compare skin color to food?
We may just look like that through the visor of the steampunk hazmat suit Goh wears cuz she has allergies to scented products.
Whenever I see SJW anymore I can’t help but think of the Ozzy Fudd, “Kill the Wabbit” song.
No more Social Justice Wabbits!
[…] Larry Correia, “The social justice warrior racist reading challenge – a fisking” at Monster Hunter Nation = http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/02/23/the-social-justice-warrior-racist-reading-challenge-a-fisk…. […]
I’ve been re-reading Tolkien lately, and it’s always a good reminder that in his stories the villains always begin with good intentions – “I just want things to be nice and orderly/think of all the wonderful things I could do if only I had the Ring because I would use it properly!” and such – but they always lose sight of those intentions in their zeal for reforms and improvement. They’re so convinced of their absolute rightness that all who disagree must therefore be wrong and should be subjugated or even done away with.
I daresay Tolkien would sadly perceive much of Morgoth and Sauron in these SJWs.
http://s13.postimg.org/rtx1gm507/Cracka.jpg
I regret to inform you that I am stealing this picture SO HARD!
I feels SO dirty!
Damn you internets! I just had to look up Neil Gaiman and that harpy he married. I actually feel ill that I might bear some blood relation with Amanda MacKinnon Palmer.
Need to see about changing my last name to something less vile….hmmmm, “Hitler” maybe?
Tempest? Well, more Caliban than Miranda, in this case.
Shakespearean humor for the win!
“After leaving college and realizing that the life of a corporate drone is horrendous…”
You know, on my way to my job as a corporate drone this morning, it occurred to me that she missed a tremendous opportunity. She has all the qualifications needed to earn six figures as a Vice President of Human Resources:
1. Obese
2. Ugly
3. Female
4. Nonwhite
5. Unconnected to reality
6. Totally unproductive
7. Loves to scold the productive
Here’s some quotes from that clownish buffoon. Bradford gets away with this shit while morons like Jim Hines look at a too-white photo of convention organizers and declares a racial problem. Asking someone where they’re from is a racist micro aggression but Bradford’s in your face racism is social justice. Bradford’s a typical intersectionalist feminist. She hates and that’s all she does.
“You know, whiteness is a hell of a drug. It really is.”
“why is it always white dudes who think they are being so ‘brave’ in publishing crap designed to be hurtful that had little artistic value?”
“It’s hilarious & ironic that the F&SF issue full of stories meant to offend has nothing but male writers. Presumably all white, cis, het.”
“Every time I break my rule and read a story by some random white guy author I remember why I stopped doing that.”
“I do remember the No White People hour, hehe”
“I may have to unfollow a bunch of white people today.”
“White male privilege is a helluva drug”
“What is it w/ white ppl who adopt children of color thinking it absolves them of racism forever? Do whites think it works that way for real?”
“Just… Fuck all you white dudes wagging your finger at the community on twitter. It’s not like most of you are helping. Sit your asses down”
“I am all done with white people today. All out of fucks to give.”
“We will once again be in the Solitaire Room (racially segregated room at WisCon science fiction convention) since it affords us an out of the way space with no Gawkers (whites).”
“Cracka ass cracka.”
Has anyone notice how radical feminists always refer to straight white men as if they are a single person, and one to which they attach the most base motives? Against the literally hundreds of such racially hostile comments, I have never seen a single one that depicts us in a positive light. If you think about that, that’s extraordinary. How can people like Bradford routinely indulge in that sort of mass defamation and be unaware of it? Worse, how can a community of Nebula and Hugo voters support this rancid ideology? And they expect us to take this lying down? Good luck with that one.
James,
I was going to drop some of these quotes into the comments on Glyer’s blog, but realized that you must have tried that. When the racist language that they are willfully blind to is posted and attributed there – have they previously responded?
No, go ahead and do that. I’ve never tried to comment at Glyer’s. Those quotes should be spread around as much as possible. I don’t know what you mean by responded. Bradford recently said she “heart”(s) the “cracka ass cracka” comment.
The more of these challenges I see, the more I’m convinced that it’s a public confession in the religious/communist formula.
Confess the Sin: The person posting mentions the fact that they enjoy forbidden acts, in this case, reading white people. Self confession is important. If it came out that they were sinning, that would be something that could cost them status in the faith. If they confess themselves, it’s virtuous.
Repent the Sin: Explain why it’s wrong to do the forbidden. These examples usually center around having a narrow exposure or similar. Then, forswear the act going forward. This both purges the behavior, and acts as self punishment. Flagellation for the cause.
Proselytize: This is the point of payoff, the pleasure of moral superiority that is derived from cleansing, and holding out the actions as a morally pure example. The newly redeemed has completed the ritual/trial/pilgrimage, and you haven’t…poor unenlightened you.
This is exactly the case – except that in their religion, they only ‘confess’ other people’s sins.
You’ll note that she, and all the others I’ve seen make such challenges, all confess their own love of a particular unapproved author first. They talk about how books X,Y and Z are great. Then they renounce them.
It’s just their version of “but I have black friends”.
Besides, it’s only a penance for Lent if you give up something you “like”. Make it something that everyone feels you like only because of the evil mind control and get double coupons!
You’ll note that she, and all the others I’ve seen make such challenges, all confess their own love of a particular unapproved author first.
Ah, but their own sin (loving an unapproved author) is venial. The truly serious sin was the sin of the author himself, for possessing Intersectional Privilege and belonging to an Oppressor Group. They do not so much renounce the authors as denounce them.
Looking at that picture of K. Tempest Bradford, I only have one thing to say: Our spokesmanatee is way more awesome than their spokesmanatee.
Not to mention prettier.
Wow, it took forever to get to the bottom of this page!!
K. Tempest Who?
Can someone please tell me what a ‘cis male’ is?
A “cis male” is someone born with a penis who is really OK with having a penis.
In other words, something like 99% of all guys.
So a Cis male is just a dude? Why don;t they just say that then? Ugh, it’s exhausting trying to keep up with all the rules of PC…
Because they can’t. They have to throw in that they’re a dude who is fine with being a dude. Because somehow that makes us something else because just regular people.
Or something.
Honestly, I can’t keep up with this crap either. First time I ever heard of it was during that whole “non binary gender” thing.
So a Cis male is just a dude? Why don’t they just say that then?
Because they want to make it sound like a disease or a perversion. At the very minimum, they want to give the impression that being ‘cis’ is no more normal than being ‘trans’. It’s a rhetorical trick to denormalize the normal preparatory to attacking it.
Pretty much.
Even stranger, a Gay man can still be a Cis-Male. But that sin is blotted out by being non-straight. Cis-Female is never wrong.
But what really annoys me is how any time there’s some story about a Transsexual, the adjective “Brave” is always applied. But it’s because basically they want to applaud the destruction of masculinity and encourage more of it.
Yeah.
I’m still trying to figure out what’s so brave about saying your a woman trapped in a man’s body, but keeping almost exclusively in a subculture that holds that up as something worthy of praise.
It’s about as brave going out for a burger at that point.
Being a bit of a weirdness magnet in my life, I’ve encountered more than my fair share of trans-people, and the people who enable them, and my view is pretty dim. There’s a REASON the suicide rate among post-op transsexuals is sky high. And the people who egg them on just really piss me off.
Cis and trans were added as labels to add two more labels. Two more labels, two more ways to divide people into more different groups. Divide, isolate, defeat.
Larry,
OK Princess Tempest Teapot want non white whatevers for her reading list. I’ll provide some Catalan and Spanish writer like
Laura Gallego She’s a Spanish speaking Valencian who’s written both sci fi and fantasy novels
Carlos Ruiz Zafon he’s bilingual and writes his novels in both languages (Catalan/Spanish)
Jordi Fabra a super prolific authour who’s written in just about every genre in both Catalan and Spanish and has a foundation which helps poor/delinquent Latin American kids write fiction
Manuel de Pedrolo whose classic sci fi novel Mecanoscrit de segon origen is required reading in all Catalan schools and a movie’s been made from the novel
Ofelia Dracs A collective writer group that included both men and women writers. The output was brief but memorable at least 1 erotic, 1 sci-fi and 1 terror novel were published
Roberto Bolano reader will particularly love La literatura nazi en América ( I think there’s an English translation) because it’s so a propos to SJWs
His posthumous novel 2666 is critically acclaimed and is a personal mediation about utopias
That should keep her busy for at least 3 years
xavier
Tempest: “No, no, NO! What is the configuration of the equipment between their legs?!? And what sort of company do they prefer in the bedroom? Answer that first, so that I’ll know if I can preemptively condemn them. Dur-hey!”
https://twitter.com/tinytempest/status/570617904653320192
Read this thread. It’s funny. What else could it be?
You’re right. She hates Jews, because ‘representation.’ I guess Asians are ‘white’ because of success rates in education / business /media too?
I can’t believe you just figured that out.
Waiting for them to start complaining about how Asians are overrepresented in anime…
*snort-cackle!*
Nah, just highlighting and underlining her hypocrisy.
White people are underrepresented in Kaiju and anime. Imagine some white guy with a history of making racial slurs against Asians by a weird coincidence asking people to not watch Asian cinema for a year. I love the way SJWs are acting as if Bradford doesn’t have that history or the SJW culture itself. By the way I don’t take reading directions from David Duke either.
One of the earliest anime I ever watched was Macross/Robotech. Americans Roy Focker and Claudia Grant’s relationship (yeah, it was Robotech; it aired over AFN when I lived in East Berlin) portrayed in a Japanese cartoon was one that stuck with me as a kid. She was my favorite character – elegant, but easygoing, intelligent and caring, and clearly a strong female character.
Reading over the differences between dubbed Robotech and the original Macross Superdimensional Fortess, Claudia Grant is a communications officer who essentially coordinates everybody in the ship; in Macross she is the weapons and navigations officer. Neither role is something to sneeze at.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia_LaSalle
Oh and in case there’re people unfamiliar with the series… Claudia’s black.
She’s part of the group that is absolutely puzzled as to why Israel doesn’t let itself get bombed into pieces and also has the gall to defend itself from attacks. Of course she hates Jews.
It turns out that the one favorite is Adolf Hitler.
I’ve been proofing a doctoral dissertation (not mine) so something about Princess Tempest’s tweet jumped out at me. “Represented”. That appears to be an agentless passive clause (passive verb with no clear agent aka subject). I know in science writing this sort of thing is normal, but in many fields it is not; and when I taught writing to undergraduates for one year, we stressed they should use active verbs, at the very least passive verbs with subjects. Excessive use of agentless passive or nominalized verbs (hey wait a minute…) often means you are trying to obscure who is doing what.
I know there is a way to parse (or interpret) her statement so it makes some sort of sense (“no no what I mean by ‘are represented’ is an expression… they exist… can be seen…”) the grammar of her tweet grabbed my attention. Because it might obscure some sloppy thinking and unclear assumptions. *Who* is doing the “representing”? And what does that even mean?
You’re right on the money. “Represented” and “underrepresented” are meaningless signifiers and innuendoes where white male racism and sexism assumed. Read enough these people and you’ll realize it is never used in any but a white or male cultural context. There are never too many Asians or Arabs – anywhere – no matter what.
Not quite, at Intel I recently heard of TWO groups of ORMs- Asian Males and White Males- in a big argument on diversity. Everyone else was URMs.
And after starting the big fight, what does BK, the CEO, do? Hires a white male for a CSO. So I guess it matters for everybody except BK.
And then Intel went and partnered with Sarkeesian. I know it won’t hurt them, but my next CPU purchase will be AMD. $300 million? Dammit, Intel.
http://www.reaxxion.com/3912/intel-proudly-announces-diversity-initiative-with-anita-sarkeesians-feminist-frequency
@Dave W – AMD ftw. The only Intels I have are gifts.
One thing that occurs to me is that there’s actually a large class of Americans who do exactly what Ms. Bradford (will she be offended by my calling her that?) wants and read nothing by “White, Straight, Cis Male Authors”: the Americans who don’t read at all. Admittedly, I’m just a naive S-List author who’s never gotten anything more than a form rejection letter, so maybe I just don’t know how “real” writers think, but it seems to me that expanding that particular group isn’t to the advantage of any writer.
Oh, and I was reading National Review this morning and came across this quote from Dorothy Sayers in Jay Nordlinger’s column (http://www.nationalreview.com/article/414351/impromptus-cruelty-comedy-c-jay-nordlinger to give the proper credit). It seemed appropriate to the circumstances:
“What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person. A certain amount of classification is, of course, necessary for practical purposes . . . What is unreasonable and irritating is to assume that all one’s tastes and preferences have to be conditioned by the class to which one belongs….
“I am occasionally desired by congenital imbeciles and the editors of magazines to say something about the writing of detective fiction “from the woman’s point of view.” To such demands, one can only say “Go away and don’t be silly. You might as well ask what is the female angle on an equilateral triangle.””
“From here on in I rag nobody” – Bang the Drum Slowly
(I’m pretty sure that the female angle of an equilateral triangle is 60 degrees… )
Seriously, that is a great quote.
Actually, SJW Feminists might not agree “that the female angle of an equilateral triangle is 60 degrees”. This makes my head hurt:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/398709/new-high-school-physics-curriculum-includes-lessons-white-privilege-katherine-timpf
Privilege does exist.
Yes. Like trust fund baby privilege, and going to Ivy League schools privilege, before dropping out to study interpretive dance, and jet setting around the country playing tourist while mooching off your rich friends privilege, before settling down to write a dozen short stories over a decade, and essays about privilege, privilege.
Meanwhile the rest of humanity realizes what you are born into is a crap shoot, some are more lucky than others, every individual situation is different, and then most of us move the hell on with our lives. Some folks without privilege even go on to create their own, so that their children could be born into a better situation than they were (which used to be known as the American Dream before they declared that stupid and evil). Other people through bad fortune, unlucky circumstances, or bad choices, end up back in the situation they started in or one that is even worse.
And yet, somehow, life goes on. Societies have risen and fallen long before SJWs decided to break everybody up into special victim categories and degrees of original sin, and they will continue to rise and fall long after SJWs fade into the dust.
Though in the meantime, watching people flay themselves over privilege is hilarious. Like watching suburbanite white kids protesting for social justice in Missouri railing against Bosnian immigrants for their white privilege.
You really can’t make shit like that up.
Something I posted regarding privilege earlier today.
http://tlknighton.com/?p=6952
Sorry Tom, I forgot that you had posted this elsewhere & I read it. [Embarrassed Smile]
Ah, it’s all good.
And somewhere bluebirds fly over the rainbow. Let’s see Bradford and her crew of intersectionalist clowns do 54 MINIMUM enforced hours week in a 15 below zero freezer warehouse with one day off and for months on end. Your muscles sing to you when you’re at home and you fall asleep sitting up on your one day off. Throw in some double-shifts. And I put myself through college without one single penny from my family because they had no pennies to give. So if I was a writer I’d make a de-white list? Eff all SJWs.
It may exist, but if you live your life according to that you’ll cripple yourself. It’s a too easy excuse for those without a “privilege” and it’s just another burden to languish under for those with. It’s a doctrine of guilt and envy and it will eat your soul until you have no ability to take joy in aspiration or achievement.
Elsewhere (forget exactly where) somebody pointed out that privilege does exist but so does “disadvantages”.
A person could have some “privileges” compared to another but would also have “disadvantages”.
I have “privileges” related to my education and intelligence but since I’m 60 years old & overweight I have disadvantages especially compared to a college football player.
Mind you, claiming somebody else has “privileges” doesn’t mean that you can whine and not attempt to better yourself.
That would probably be my blog post that’s linked elsewhere in this thread.
I think.
Yep. [Embarrassed Grin]
And yet, not a single, solitary SJW type has been able to give a consistent definition of it, other than “everyone we don’t like has it, and uses it’s invisible, undefinable powers to disagree with us”….which gets frustrating to those of us continually told that we somehow have this benefit, despite having to live in the same wildly uneven, chaotic, ironic, tragic world. :/
And yet, not a single, solitary SJW type has been able to give a consistent definition of it, other than “everyone we don’t like has it, and uses it’s invisible, undefinable powers to disagree with us”
But you see, that is the definition. Privilege is in the air we breathe. It is the luminiferous aether, the quintessence, the phlogiston, the immanency of the eschaton, and the prize in the Cracker Jack box (even when the box is empty). It is the Snark and the Boojum. It must always be fought against, but can never be conquered, because the moment it is conquered, the conquerors will have to admit it no longer exists – and thereupon their whole stupid racket will be over. If it is universal and unconquerable by definition, then it can always be exploited for the purpose of extracting guilt-offerings from the ‘privileged’ or from the state.
Better still, there is no need to actually fight about it, since there is no possible way of defeating it; so all you have to do to be virtuous is be an Activist, which means to squall like a brat and demand that Daddy Government punish the big bad meanies and give you their toys.
Paul Weimer Republic is reading this and sobbing on Twitter. He doesn’t like us but for some reason can never say why or cite anything that could compare to his mentor, Requires Hate. Let me borrow a phrase from RH and say “let’s all roundly shit on” Paul Weimer’s desire to smash the patriarchy. Go read all the books by not-whites you want. Un-cis your library, “de-white” it, un-Jew it, and then pop back onto Twitter to tell us we’re all bigots. Maybe you can start having race-quota book bombs and just choose random gays and blacks and not-Jews to promote. Don’t be surprised if someone pranks you, like a white Englishwoman pretending to be an Asian and sending you all scuttling to worship her albino English Asian-ness. I can make up Thai names too. Let’s see, how about my new story titled “Let’s All Roundly Shit On Cis-Het White Males from Mars,” by Patpong Skidew.
[…] about Bradford’s article stuck in Larry Correia’s craw and provoked him to write “The Social Justice Warrior Racist Reading Challenge, A Fisking” which, excluding the quotes, contains 2,830 of his own words for which he did not GET […]
Oh, Glyer. What would he do without me for material?
But I like how everybody in the approved goodthink blogosphere is bravely restating Tempest’s idiotic racist screed into more palatable things like she just wants us to be open minded, and for readers to be open to new ideas. Well, if that’s what she actually said, then I suppose I would be a horrible person for insulting her. Good thing you guys are there to white mansplain what she really meant about sour dough faced cracker ass crackers.
As for me Getting Paid. Don’t worry, Mr. 50 Hugos. The beautiful think about being the International Lord of Hate is that even when I pause to fisk somebody, I’m still collecting royalties.
But on that interesting thought, if me taking the time to write 2k words on this topic is so outlandish, how does Glyer justify his multitude of posts about me?
Where would we be without him mansplaining for Tempest?
I’ve been struck by a couple of things seeing the “explanations” pop up:
1. Their sheer desperation for inclusion in the cool groups.
2. The sheer condescension of believing they could/should intepret KTB’s bigotry for her. I’ll just do her the courtesy of believing she means what she says.
I wonder what these apologists would say to article challenging readers to take a year off from reading anything written by “Ugly Fat Chicks”?
@David – I’m going to be gender-race-and-whatever-inclusive and refuse to read anything that finger-shaking scolds write.
*grin*
Eamon, you soundly trashed him and others in the comments. It was rather glorious.
Thank you, sir.
File 770 invites more of the unaware in a comment about LC’s “raging bull response to an innocuous reading list.”
First of all, it is true that in isolation, that “list” (there was no list at first) is really nothing. The new Nebula-nominated short story at TorDotCom “The Devil in America,” seen in isolation, is really nothing.
What this fool can’t grasp is the larger context of Bradford’s history of racially insulting white people. She can barely contain her disdain for whites. Throw in her racially segregated “safer-space” at WisCon.
Above all that is the context of the daily harassment and clear efforts to collude and discriminate against whites, men and heterosexuals powered by the new darling of core SFF, radical feminism.
Here we are in 2015 at the apex of civilization. We all agree we want nothing like a KKK squatting in the heart of SFF. But we can’t even agree on what a KKK is because of jackstraw con man kickers like “privilege” create by – you guessed it – a thing like the KKK.
My mind boggles at how fallen in this genre has become. Glyer is just one example. Is he really that stupid? Really? Are we to excuse a KKK because some moron on Paul Weimer’s Twitter feed Tweets “I know if I don’t put in some work, I’ll have a narrow worldview.” Really? And then what would happen? Would the world collapse? Go get on a fucking plane and expand your mind. Do you really think de-Jewing your library is an expanded world view? Well, it certainly used to be.
Liberal males sure do like mansplaining.
Well, of course — it’s the only thing remotely manly that they’re capable of.
@Bob – well, they know only how to be a dick, soooo…
I can sympathize with some of what she’s saying. (Don’t hate me until you read to the end.) Demographics are important. Even if you were selling the same product, you wouldn’t try to reach middle class black females 14 to 18 years old with the same advertisement you’d use on blue collar white males 35 to 45 years old. The two groups don’t like the same things. That’s got to carry over into fiction.
As a reader, at one point I found myself selecting against female authors. I’d been reading a ton of urban paranormal stuff, which was fairly female dominated, and I got kind of tired of some of the recurring themes which I think were gender linked. For example Charlene Harris: the plot of every Sookie Stackhouse novel seemed to be Sookie getting in way over her head and then one of her countless boyfriends would bail her out. Yet people would call Sookie a “strong female protagonist.” Um how?
I eventually decided that men and women probably *tend* (the word tend is important here, I’m not saying this is true of every man or every woman) to view power differently. I think women *tend* to see power more in terms of relationships (who you know and what they’re willing to do for you) and men *tend* to think in terms of direct control (your strong arms or leet fighting skills). In that sense, Sookie is doing very well because she’s got a great many powerful boyfriends. (Oh so many boyfriends- but that’s another issue.)
Likewise, writing is a hobby of mine and I’ve even put a serial fiction project up on the web. I am *obsessed* with my readership demographics. Sometimes they skew exactly how I think they would. I.e male and old. My story is “what if magic was a STEM profession and you tried to make money at it in the modern world.” However, sometimes I get readers in who just mystify me.
Wattpad (one place I’ve got it up) says that 6% of my readers are 14 to 18 years old, over half are female, and nearly 18 percent are Filipino. That last percentage is more than Canadian, British, and Australian combined! This leaves open the possibility that somewhere a 16 year old Filipino girl is really enjoying my story.
I don’t know how to feel about that.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against teenage Filipino girls! I don’t begrudge this quantum possibility of an individual any enjoyment they get out of the piece. However, I feel just a bit sorry for them. It must be a hard life if you are such a person and like stories about wizards in business meetings.
Alternately, I’ve completely failed to understand the appeal of my own writing. I’ve got two main characters, one is female. Maybe she’s relatable? Maybe the conflict inherent in her sub-plot is compelling? I mean, I *obviously* tried to make those things true! Still, they aren’t the core of the story for me and they’ve been the biggest challenge to write so….
I just don’t know.
HOWEVER, what bugs me about the original article is that the author doesn’t seem to have any motivation for her RAGEQUIT. About my demographic choice, I can say ’twas power dynamics in plot and character motivations. Can she say anything other than “I hate white men?”
Second, she wants other people to do this. Why? I’d never tell someone not to read Charlene Harris! Read her or don’t. I’ll tell you what her books are like from my perspective (and I’ve now come back and read the entire Sookie series, it ends quite well, I think part of her problem was Harris got fatigued keeping the series going and the plots got thin), but I wouldn’t tell you not to read them if you enjoyed them. I CERTAINLY wouldn’t tell you not to read them because of who the author is. My official advice is read lots of little samples and then buy what grabs you.
That’s really the worst bit of it. The utter glee at discriminating against any group. The desire to get more people to engage in it. That’s just ugly. I feel it’s a bit of a failing that I got tired of those explicitly female authors. Now I’ve over it, and I was certainly never proud of it. It’s certainly an important failing and an area I’ll need to work on that I don’t understand my own readers. (Be they ever so few in number!)
Sorry that was long. It’s an intriguing subject.
When I was first starting out I thought I was only writing for an audience of gun nuts and monster movie junkies. I realized there might be more to this whole story telling thing than pigeonholing myself into one demographic when I got a 5 star review from a 60 something grandmother that started out talking about how she didn’t like guns, didn’t like violence, didn’t like monsters, but absolutely loved the book.
People are all unique individuals. They’re going to surprise you. For most authors these surprises are nice, and just validate that humans are interesting and exciting, with a wide variety of tastes. If you are a SJW however these things will cause you to RAGEQUIT.
Basically, write the best story you can. Write what makes you, the creator, happy. If you are having fun, that fun is contagious and will come through to your reader. That is far more important than trying to write something you think someone will like.
As for marketing, marketing the book isn’t writing the book. To one potential audience you might accentuate some facets, to a different audience you might want to accentuate other things about the work. That’s just to get them to try it. Whether they like it or not is entirely up to them, and will probably surprise you.
“People are all unique individuals. They’re going to surprise you.”
True that! That review would have been a head-scratcher. If I’d been you I would have spent a lot of time giving it a very confused look.
“Write what makes you, the creator, happy. If you are having fun, that fun is contagious and will come through to your reader.”
And I suppose if it doesn’t make you happy you won’t get it written anyway.
Wattpad (one place I’ve got it up) says that 6% of my readers are 14 to 18 years old, over half are female, and nearly 18 percent are Filipino. That last percentage is more than Canadian, British, and Australian combined! This leaves open the possibility that somewhere a 16 year old Filipino girl is really enjoying my story.
I’ve been told by a friend back in the Philippines that Wattpad is really popular for Filipinos as a platform for writing, which is nice to hear. Reading and writing fiction has also become more accessible and somewhat less ‘nerdy’ from what I remember before I left, and ‘net cafes are everywhere now. Granted if you’re writing in English your readers are likely to be from the middle class and up.
STEM degrees are seen as a key to financial success and stable careers (especially for getting jobs overseas) among Pinoys, regardless of sex, so – and this is my humble opinion – magic as a STEM degree would be coooooooooool – kinda like imagining Harry Potter all grown up.
As for the hard life, this a partially correct observation. Given how expensive a good education is, it is a common story for the parents to sacrifice what would be considered insane amounts of effort and time and hard work to get the eldest child to a STEM degree (usually, medicine or engineering) in the hopes that said child will land a job overseas and help the rest of the family financially – and in some particularly close knit clans, ‘family’ isn’t just your parents and siblings, but extends to your cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents.
A good, personal example of this would be my youngest brother’s fiancee. Her parents – her mother especially – worked long hours selling rice cakes (kakanin) at the open market to be able to pay for her education, and in return she studied hard enough to qualify for accounting scholarships – the financial parts of which she was very frugal with so she could help her younger sister and brother’s educations. Upon graduating, she landed Ernst and Young as her first job, and only very recently was headhunted out of there to Ayala Corporation (I think). Her younger sister is taking up engineering (what type I am unsure of), won her own scholarship and wants very much to work. The brother has a talent for the culinary arts, but those are amongst the most expensive of schools. My mother and I consider my brother lucky – they met in college, worked in the same company for their first job, have compatible personalities and outlooks, both have very diligent work ethics and they adore each other. (Why yes, I’m a very proud big sister / sister-in-law to be)
(pardon me while I faceplant into a pillow and catch some sleep.)
Thank you for the explanation!
You cannot imagine how long I’ve spent scowling at the little map wattpad will provide for where your readers come from thinking “why the Philippines?” It makes more sense if it’s wattpad as a whole that has succeeded there.
Of course, you also make a very good point about the overwhelming importance of education and career success in certain cultures. I can definitely see how what I’ve done might resonate with someone from that background.
“magic as a STEM degree would be coooooooooool – kinda like imagining Harry Potter all grown up.”
Since starting to write it, I’ve learned that such a thing is actually a tiny little nitch out there in the world. If you think you’d like to read a story about that you might check out, “Ra” ( http://qntm.org/ra ) or “Fine Structure” (same author, both free), and “Starship Mage” (on Amazon). And, um, skuffs foot, there’s what I’m writing: http://www.wattpad.com/story/25722056 no doubt of inferior quality but free and some people seem to like it.
I also remember that Wattpad is something of a ‘feedback ground’ for aspiring writers back in The Old Country; if they get enough good feedback on it they try to submit a story to a local publisher. That’s not favorable to reaching a global paying market, but on the other hand, using Wattpad allows them to reach global audiences. deviantArt and Pixiv are popular for the various talented Filipino artists too, most of whom are unknowns outside of the venues mentioned.
There’s a small ebook publishing company that helps aspiring authors and local publishing companies get their books out to the global market via the ebook formats called Flipreads. The thing is, a number of the publications are in Filipino, so they’ll be generally aimed at a target audience that’s either local, or Filipinos living overseas. There are some in English, and not all the publications are fiction. But I consider it a good start and hope it flourishes.
There is also Mahouka. The main character faces certain expectations because of a crappy family situation, but he actually wants to get a formal education in a magical discipline of engineering. He intends to use that as part of his ongoing efforts to develop useful magic that is less dependent on inborn traits.
If you are worried about the incest vibes, the author seems to be coming down firmly on the no side. Between establishing the pressure that caste faces to produce children, and establishing the serious potential consequences of close inbreeding, I don’t see any way to back track that wouldn’t match the other stories poorly.
Of course, I’ve long understood things as the kids being young and not having any close supportive adults in their life.
Certain background details make me think the writer isn’t an engineer, I’m pretty sure he is a salaryman who works with some. He made a detailed magic system that testifies to some knowledge of physical sciences. He also has mildly cinematic R&D that gives me a strong sense of verisimilitude.
Feedback is the great part of putting serial fiction on the web; well feed back and motivation. Once you know someone is going to look at it you’ve *got* to edit the thing.
Speaking of Harry Potter grown up, I’d be remiss not to mention Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians”. It’s very very much a realistic “college of magic”. The book isn’t without its flaws; the plot is a little weak and you may find yourself wanting to slap the characters and shout, “do something with your life you escapist loser!” But the characters and setting are great.
I think that writers, in their own way, are escapists. Coz… yay, imaginary worlds~! Thanks for the recommendation ^_^
Sleep while I can before baby wakes again. Back in a while.
David, that was better and longer than a variety of things I’ve paid for. Even if it is a bleep bleep bleeping cliffhanger. Main peeps are grokable, setting interesting. CLIMAX MISSING
Couple brake break inversions, and weird apostrophes in buss’s and tree’s. A to-to-too or two. But really not a lot given the length.
I might have pushed to yank his Professional Engi… I mean Professional Wizard license, or put him up for review of same. But at least he’s opposed by something less fearsome than lawyers and bureaucrats.
Thank you for writing.
Lol – sorry! Yeah should I have mentioned that, it’s not all done yet. The story should be completely posted by June or July. It’s all written, but now I’m reworking it. Catching as many of those typos as I can and cutting where I’ve rambled.
Anyway, thanks so much. It’s great hearing someone liked it.
http://s16.postimg.org/8ibeev2tx/Ummmm.jpg
At Requires Hate’s site, SJW Jenny Gadget (Thurman) once referred to white men as “privilege piggies.” I’ve never forgotten that one.
Listen to Gerrib at Glyer’s:
“what I find quite irritating with your side of the argument is how you assume that stuff written by straight white males (henceforth SWMs) is inherently of merit.”
Where in the hell are the quotes to back that up? In contrast, he is part of a cult that assumes the inherent immorality and racism of white men. I only have a zillion quotes to back that up, including his.
Has anybody here ever said that?
These people never get old. We quote them. We’re bad and mean for quoting them. Then they tie themselves in knots to explain what the quotes really mean. Then they make up outlandish shit we never said to rail against us for saying.
I don’t automatically assume any book is of merit. I read the fucking book first! How can you go take “I don’t care about an author’s skin or sex” and turn that into “I automatically assume white guys are better!”
Man, no wonder these people hate me so much. Straw Larry really is a dick.
FWIW, I’ve read a butt load of books written by what I assume are white dudes that weren’t of any merit whatsoever.
I’m willing to put down any amount of money Gerrib wants to put down that the vast majority of us here will say the same thing.
Let’s try the Mr. Obvious version for retards:
“Where do black gay women get off thinking their art has any inherent merit?”
The SJW fire engines would come screaming after that one.
Translation: Gerrib just spontaneously combusted.
“FWIW, I’ve read a butt load of books written by what I assume are white dudes that weren’t of any merit whatsoever.”
Is this another case of Larry not specifically saying not to start small animals on fire?
At best I’m only half-aware books *have* an author, let alone a skinsex… mostly they’re an amorphous blob in the imaginary murk beyond where the words end.
“what I find quite irritating with your side of the argument is how you assume that stuff written by straight white males (henceforth SWMs) is inherently of merit.”
As opposed to your side of the argument that assumes writers without penises, the “right” skin colors, and sexual attraction, writes books of merit because of those reasons.
Gerrib can’t process in his brain the writing a list that says “try not reading white people for a year” is inherently racist. He can’t process this because he willfully chooses not to.
Actually, he can’t process it because by endless chanting and repetition, he has hardwired his brain to equate ‘racism’ with ‘being white’. He couldn’t see the fallacy in his own position if he tried. Not that he would try: that would take away all the goodfeels that are the foundation of his self-image.
Right before closing up shop for the night, Glyer finally made the tacit admission that Bradford is limiting the books she reads based on the authors’ sex, race, sexual orientation, and faith.
When asked if her motives are justifiable, he sought refuge in moral relativism:
“She justifies her challenge on the basis of personal pleasure, increased awareness of publishing trends, and heightened self-understanding.”
So pending a contrary statement from him, we can conclude that Glyer thinks it’s fine to base one’s reading habits solely on racial, sex, and creedal criteria–as long as one derives pleasure, increases awareness, and gains self-understanding from the outcome.
They are willfully misunderstanding this. They insist we do what Bradford is calling for and that it is wrong. We don’t. They actually call for that and it becomes right. These are mental cases.
Flip the argument around. Why is anything written by (insert race, creed, orientation, Tumblrette fantasy, etc.) inherently of merit? Or lack merit?
Case in point: I found what Gerrib just wrote to be utterly devoid of merit, despite his SWM status.
They’ve also enrolled us all as Men’s Rights Activists. The white supremacy is assumed.
I have been reading since I was 3. As a child I had to get permission from the library to read the “boys” books, I got it because I had already finished all the “girls” books. (This was the 1960’s) I am an eclectic reader basically if it has print I will read it. What I want is a STORY who cares who wrote it unless he or she has failed me before.
The older I get the less patience I have for writers who can’t make me interested early in the book. I don’t care much for what is called literature now. Too many characters too consumed with themselves to do anything for me thank you. I can not imagine limiting myself to any demographic of authors, although there are several which I will never read again, based on how I reacted to the last work of theirs I read.
This would be like me ranting on line about how horrible it is to watch reality TV shows. I happen to think they represent the decline of Western civilization for many reasons, but I do not imagine that anyone else cares that much about my opinion. Or that I could change anyone’s mind.
I am really tired of angry people who only see their side of an issue, unfortunately this seems to be getting more and more prevalent.
So as a girl, you fought to be able to read books written for boys as well as for girls. Now, as a woman, you’re being told to restrict yourself only to books written for women.
Yes, they really like creating prisons and boxes.
Individuals are messy.
By the time I got to school I think that most people had given up trying so hard to make girls read books for girls and boys read books for boys. I won’t say that I read *everything*… I read all the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys… liked the Boys better. After that I read all the Westerns and Spy novels (we had all of Ian Flemming’s Bond) and all of the romances (I particularly loved the Aussie Outback ones). Somehow I always despised “Baby Sitter Club” type books, never read the “Sports” books, but mostly read the “Horse” books. Ghost stories gave me nightmares. Skipped those. Thor Heyerdahl was my hero. Can girls have men for heroes?
LC. I love you man. In a completely ciswhite kind of way. I was choking on my tongue just reading your response. And in celebration, I’m sharing this with my entire audience.
Here’s more from the master of the English language, Jim Hines:
https://twitter.com/jimchines/status/569946984267833344
Further down in the thread, he writes we’re engaging in an “overreaction.” Keep in mind, this is the guy who saw systemic racism in a group photo of former convention organizers and who is quoted at his Guest of Honor speech at Continuum as saying “I wish I was exaggerating” documented instances of racism he admits in the next sentence he’s never seen.
These are people who are functionally retarded. You cannot engage with people that dull-witted. That’s why I say quarantine the lot of them, throw your own party and make sure you keep these people on the right side of the door. Let them have their KKK. The Hugos and Nebulas are dead and gone. Just deal with it. Wish them a nice time and a hearty “fuck off” and be done with them.
Just remember: they always gravitate to us and our works, not us to them. Just create new spaces and keep them out. Anyone who uses words like “cis” or “privilege” is an automatic “out.” I don’t invite KKK to my parties and them saying they’re really Abe Lincoln doesn’t work. They stay out.
“I challenge you to not read white authors for a year.”
“It’s not racist, guys! It’s reasonable!”
You’re not this clueless, Mr. Hines, surely.
The term is ‘acluistic’. He really is that clueless, because he subscribes to an ideology which insists that there cannot possibly be any such thing as a clue.
I suppose the only non-over-reaction to Tempest is to smile at how adorably earnest she is.
Taking her at her word, as if she’s a fully functioning adult, is just rude.
I’ve often said that “leftwing liberal wacko” (seen here in its larval form, the SJW) isn’t a political position; it’s a learning disability…
http://s9.postimg.org/x25nc4033/Constitution.jpg
I want to only read authors who look like me. So i am going to restrict my reading by BMI. So i am only going to read SFF authors with healthy weights. So if youareabout a 36 onthe BMI i amcutting you loose.
Im pretty screwed on this and my list authors will be very small. Ijust ant identify with all the fatties. Anyone have any suggestions?
This is tongue in cheek so dont kill me.
LOL.
Other than Tempest or George RR Martin? Idaknow.
Oops! Misread the BMI number. HMMM! Maybe Calista Flockhart can write the next Indy novel.
What are the of larry correia doing a couple of rounds of p90x before his new series comes out and going on a liquid diet? So I can read his book….
I gotta say, the “asexual” suggestion is just too, too funny. It’s hard to imagine that Bradford actually wrote that and didn’t even pause to think, “Wait, I can’t go that far, surely.”
I mean, seriously, how would you know? Is there an author database out there somewhere for this? When you first publish, does your publisher send you a form to fill out asking all your sexual desires and habits?
And I’m halfway certain “asexual” was not even a thing just a few years ago. When did “not interested” become its own gender? Or orientation? Or whatever they call it?
I can tag “asexual character” right quick: David Drake, Daniel O’Leary series.
He might not be the author they were looking for, though…
Adele Mundy, one of my favorite characters in all of sci-fi.
However, Drake ticks off nearly all of the “bad” boxes.
1. White
2. Heterosexual
3. Male
4. Cynical about “the people”
5. Soldier, and proud of it
6. Not leftist
Pretty much the only one he doesn’t have is “Christian.”
Main character, strong, female — what’s not to love?
Helluva shot, too.
‘asexual’ has been around for awhile. The new making-it-up-as-they-go stuff is ‘demisexual’ and ‘cupiosexual.’
Give the cycle a bit of time. With all the divisions, sub divisions, and branching, regular heterosexual sex will become hip, edgy, and avant-garde.
https://twitter.com/foxvertebrae/status/569945497089273857
Good lord, that twitter thread was painful to read. Tiniest amygdalas I’ve seen all week (see Anonymous Conservative’s blog if you don’t know what I mean by that)
Those people literally cannot understand an english sentence. I was stunned.
They are literally retarded:
https://twitter.com/fangirlJeanne/status/569947975323033600
*blank stare*
Ok, THAT thread was the stupidest thing I’ll see all day. SMH…..
“K Tempest Bradford retweeted Alex Irvine @alexirvine · 5h 5 hours ago To those in a huff over the @tinytempest challenge: 1, lighten up. 2, expand your reading horizons. 3, pretend you were never in a huff.”
The cult of feminist shits who hounded 3 people away from the SFWA because of the word “lady” and a painting want us to lighten up. The ones who tried to swarm LC over the world “pussy” on the theory it revealed his unconscious hatred of women want us to calm down. The idiots with mental health issues dazzled by trigger warnings want us to calm down. The insane asylum that literally claims PTSD because SFF isn’t safe wants reason. These are the mental cases who go nuts 7 days a week based on the idea we’re all racists but can’t actually find proof of that. Their own racism is bald-faced and obvious. It’s the women of SFF who are in a permanent paranoid huff, and they’re not particularly bright people or mentally stable, to say the least. A better idea would be to wrangle and ride herd on your goofy femmes with self-evident serious sociopathic mental health issues. The KKK asking people to expand their reading horizons by racially cutting out authors is Orwellian on the face of it and the exact racism you look so hard to find but can’t. That’s the funny thing. This is all based on the idea we have been doing what Bradford calls for. In other words, she opposes herself. Daffy.
“It’s the women of SFF who are in a permanent paranoid huff, and they’re not particularly bright people or mentally stable, to say the least.”
I respectfully suggest that you may want to clarify or edit this, unless you meant this as broadly as it reads. Hoyt, for example, is a woman of SFF, and I don’t think she fits into this characterization (unless a person takes the view of a SJW, perhaps). There are many other women in SFF are not in the same camp as the doctrinally driven SJWs.
Not saying that this is your intent, just that it can be read that way.
That’s true. I forgot to put it in quotes. I think it’s pretty clear my feeling is these “women” claim to be feminists who represent all women but are actually a very specific lesbian “queer theory” ideology that probably represents statistical zero of all gay women let alone all women. That’s really the funny part: to see Scalzi and Hines act as fronts for an ideology which hates and fears them. When Scalzi asked us to “bone up” on intersectionality, it’s pretty clear he hasn’t himself read the insane ramblings of the icons of that movement.
Okay, so I’m a little late to this party, but if I read this Right, Tempest’s problem is that reading stuff by Straight White Cis-males made her upset and angry (for reasons never explained, but apparently because they were Straight, White, Cis-males.) So she sought refuge in the writing of anyone but, and was much comforted.
So her Challenge doesn’t seem to be challenging. She has challenged herself and others to spend a year reading entirely in her comfort zone.
(she just ASSUMES that for everyone else, non Straight, Non-white, [Trans-Males|Cis-Females|Trans-Females|etc, etc.], are outside of our comfort zone, and this would be challenging, although there is no actual evidence for this.)
If she wanted to maintain her Challenge parameters, AND read works that would actually challenge her by being outside her Comfort Zone, maybe she could try, Oh, I dunno… Ann Coulter?
That’s a lot of BS she tells herself and in a world full of BS, it was pointless BS.
Now as far as what Larry wrote, you only left out one step in how I tend to purchase books. Give me a free sample, and I’ll likely purchase the rest of the series. That’s how I wound up buying all of John Ringo’s Legacy of Aldenata and Prince Roger books, because I needed to finish reading the rest of the books.
In that same vane, if I get one book in a series I find I must read the rest of it, this is why I’ll also wind up purchasing K.B. Spanglers next novel because I need to know what happens next because I received the current novels she has.(I’m the boring one)
Now what’s wrong with this lady, why doesn’t she like anthologies, they’re like the worlds best mental buffet. That’s just wrong and she should feel bad for being so wrong. If she finds a Sci Fi/Fantasy Anthology she dislikes, I’d be willing to take it off her hands for a nominal consulting fee, because I’m willing to give it a good home on my shelf.
/this may or may not have made the slightest sense, but oh well
Translated from a foggy subdialect of Portlandino-Vancouverite-Bostonesqo-SanFrancisconian:
” I’m K. Tempest Bradford, and I think I should be a crucial trendsetter and gatekeeper who unilaterally decides what kind of fiction you read or purchase. The problem is, nobody has any compelling reason to trust my judgment or take my capricious values system seriously.
Consider that by denying me the power to arbitrarily narrow the focus of what you read, to whatever whims and fads I’m interested in at the moment, you empower and promote suffering, the forces of hate, and racism in the world which retards us all from progressing as a species towards some alien utopia I have farted out in some dank corner of my loopy mind.
I need you to narrow your choice of authors because I know in my big, hippy dippy, quasi-fascist heart that you’re too stupid to concentrate on whatever social action I want to happen if you’re left to explore a diverse literature market on your own. You might even become confused and come to believe that I’m full of shit and a repulsive narcissist.
So slip your head into this yoke please and do your part to help make me the next Oprah-esque book picker to the world. Stop wasting your potential on being a meaningless destructive self directed individual. Take a lesson from the ant and serve a greater purpose at the expense of your own insignificant and often inconvenient self.
Do it for the revolution. If you don’t you’re a homophobic, culturally hegemonic tool of the patriarchal bosses suffering from a false consciousness, and a raaaaaaacist.
I’d thank you, but clearly this is your duty and obligation so no thanks should be necessary. “
For someone who wants to be a writer I think she’s pretty much experienced a cave-in. Her career trajectory there is pretty much the same as Requires Hate and David Duke. Even Ray Bradbury himself wouldn’t have had a career if he was a broken Axlotl Tank who claimed his readers were a bunch of stinking honkies out to undermine his purity and goodness.
Why should we be surprised we consistently run up against Orwellian concepts from SJWs? This time it’s the same theme that equal protection only works with select groups SJWs have deemed “marginalized.” Surprise – that’s a contradiction in terms. Not in the concocted realm of privilege-theory, which is like affirmative action plus wheel chair access to all of known civilization and law.
If you’ve noticed, SJWs have portrayed our reaction as everything but what we are straight out saying: we are tired of daily group defamation and demonization theories from SJWs hiding behind that concept of “marginalized” and “privilege.” There is no such thing as 50% off on Friday’s type of group defamation, although that is exactly what SJWs propose. Defamation is always wrong. There is no “our hate-speech is more real than yours.” We are tired of the radical feminist intersectional cult which is driving all this. The ditzy Foz Meadows just addressed this Bradford stunt and unsurprisingly wrote “as Flavia Dzodan famously said, ‘my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit.'” Remember, Meadows is the Hugo-nominated cis-broad who was dumb enough to write a piece for the Huffington Post about how the gay Arthur C. Clarke and Jewish Isaac Asimov benefitted from anti-homosexual laws and white privilege because she was too prejudiced to do her homework. Her research was basically “Oh, white men, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” She had to revise the post.
And where’s our hate-speech in the first place? Well, SJWs have the quotes about “… we consider buffaloes especially stupid as animals go. The perfect analogy for white men.” SJWs not only simply ignore those quotes, and others like “cracka ass cracka,” morons like Paul Weimer are right now apologizing to Requires (buffaloes) Hate on Twitter for reasons I don’t know because that racist psychopath has her Twitter acct. private. Meanwhile Weimer chastises US as bigots while he Tweets “it is a very white, male, US-centric future. You are unfortunately very right.” What’s unfortunate about that? That’s only unfortunate if you have Stockholm Syndrome and have adopted the racist sexist bullshit the “marginalized” produce like an oil gusher. Now useful parrots like Weimer want to “smash the patriarchy.” How do you get that dumb in a country with a Constitution?
The reason SJWs can’t grasp our anger is because they are so convinced whites are privileged racists, men sexists and heterosexuals homophobes that that isn’t seen as an insult; it’s not even an issue for them.
So they fall back on bullshit: we’re Men’s Rights activists. I’m not. We’re conservatives who long for the good ol’ days when the uppity marginalized knew their place. I’m not and don’t. We don’t like women. Aside from the fact women are the greatest thing in this world, why would I want my mother and sisters to be second-class citizens? We don’t like non-whites. If I engaged in their stupid contests about who had spent more time around the even stupider concept of “people of color,” I’d kick ass on any SJW not actually born and living in a PoC country. SJWs always have some pedantic argument about that but it does pose the question of why I’d head for what I despise; to lord it over them? We don’t like gays, etc.
And where is this demonization literature that can match SJW racial payback fantasies like Vylar Kaftan’s “The Weight of the Sunrise” or the new Nebula nominated “The Devil in America”? Where are those? Ray Bradbury and Edmond Hamilton were the precise opposite of “Wakulla Springs.”
I’m telling you: you can’t talk to these people. They have no brain cells. Reading Glyer, Hines, Scalzi and the rest of them jump through hoops engages my pity, not respect. They haven’t even gotten as far as Hammurabi’s Code, because they’ve decided to dispense with all that claptrap to broaden their horizons into a rat cage that goes around your head.
I read your article and part of Bradford’s, then I went over to Amazon and bought a copy of “Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances” by Neil Gaiman. Thank you for the recommendation.
I haven’t read it, but as a rule of thumb nothing makes an American want to do something more than having some finger shaking scold tell them they can’t. For example, very few of us owned AR-15s until they passed the stupid Assault Weapons Ban. Now it is the most common gun in the country. Thanks finger shaking scolds!
Not just Americans, it gets most people’s dander up, really
“You can’t have this.”
“Whaaaa!!!! Who made you the boss of me?”
If this is what Bradford wants to do, more power to her. Maybe next year she’ll read stories by one-eyed Iranians. I hope she finds a million of them.
In the meantime, I’ll be looking for and reading books by authors who tell a great story.
You mean like, say the Dark God series?
(When IS the next one coming out?!? Write faster!!)
[…] fact that she read a lot of stories she didn’t enjoy. Which is cool. We all do that, but as Larry Coreia notes, normal people just go find something else to read when that […]
How booj-wah of her. I’m too old to chew my way through the crap she insists we read, I want good stuff and I don’t care who writes it. I like Larry and Neil, and Terry Pratchett (would have hunted him down in my wild and foolish youth and planted a kiss on him), and other authors who are what she calls them. I also read and enjoy quite a few female authors, mystery and scifi writers, everone from Christie to Rowling. The only thing I won’t read are books that bore me, and if that happens within the first chapter or so, well, the book gets tossed and I won’t get another one by that author. I buy books I love for re-reading, and some for my Kindle also, though paper rules! Just ignore this broad and get on with your life Larry. You don’t need to stoop to her level, and people who want to read will learn better really quick. Basically she’s mad because they won’t buy her self entitled crap, except other people that think the same way and they run out of money eventually. Teach your kids to read good books, people!
Orson Scott card actually reviewed this a few days ago on his column uncle Orson on the fly. because as far as I know, it’s only available to subscribers, I went ahead and pasted the essay in its entirety for your enjoyment
The Bigotry of Tolerance
I was quite amused when a friend forwarded me a link to Larry Correia’s fisking of an essay by K. Tempest Bradford, in which Ms. Bradford challenges her readers “to stop reading white, straight, cis male authors for one year.”
I hope I’m not the only one who needed to have at least two of the terms in that sentence defined. I had never heard of fisking, but apparently this is the term for taking apart someone else’s essay line by line, point by point. (The story is that the arguments of someone named Fisk were so egregiously wrong that they invited such point-by-point refutation, leading to the generic verb “to fisk.”)
The other term is “cis,” which, after some effort, I learned was a term for persons who maintain a gender identity or role that is in line with their actual genes. In other words, if your parents thought you were a boy, and you now, in adulthood, think you are a man, you are “cis” and therefore, in Ms. Bradford’s view, unworthy of attention.
It should be obvious to everyone reading Ms. Bradford’s challenge that she is a racist, sexist bigot and that no tolerant person would dream of taking her proposal seriously. However, we live in a day and age where even in the act of making such a proposal, Ms. Bradford will be hailed by many as a champion of liberalism and tolerance.
And besides, even if refutation is unnecessary for any thinking person, it is a positive pleasure to read Correia’s evisceration of every notion that Bradford expresses. When I began reading Correia’s essay, I first used the link he provided to read Bradford’s entire essay where it first appeared.
But that turns out not to be necessary, since it is apparently part of a good solid fisking to include the entire text of the original, point by point, each line prior to the refutation.
It is also worth pointing out that Correia uses language that some find offensive. I think he usually uses it appropriately, but there’s a bit of the sailor (or high school student) in his manner.
Here is a link to Correia’s piece: http://sn.im/CorreiaVBradford
From comments some other people have made, I gather that Larry Correia’s politics are regarded in some circles as offensive and/or repulsive. I have no information on his politics and no interest in obtaining any prior to recommending this piece.
I don’t like all of Nietzsche’s ideas, either, or the uses made of them, yet highly recommend Also Sprach Zarathustra; I think Ayn Rand was a political obliviot but still admire Fountainhead. You see my point? I’m recommending this one essay by Correia, not endorsing his entire life’s work.
As for the idea of “fisking” itself, I must say that it seems to me to be a perfectly legitimate way of carrying on a public discussion. It is certainly better than the methods that have been used to attackme: either naked vilification and name-calling, or such highly selective out-of-context quotation as to paint me as having ideas unrelated to those I actually hold.
None of my “opponents” has ever introduced a counter-argument to anything I actually said. All mud, no brains.
When Correia fisked Bradford, we had every one of Bradford’s words and ideas expressed in their full original context, so that we were free to decide for ourselves what we thought of her ideas and Correia’s responses to them. That is public discussion.
By the end, however, Correia’s fisking can feel unfair because Bradford’s ideas are so obviously stupid, bigoted, and self-contradictory that taking them apart so elaborately feels a bit like giving a play-by-play critique of the performance of participants in the Special Olympics.
This may be exactly what Bradford herself might feel, for as a woman of color, she is automatically above the standards of “rationality” that clearly are the creation of dead white males in order to perpetuate their stranglehold on the world of ideas.
And it is certainly true that if Bradford represents the best that the post-modern, post-Eurocentric worldview has to offer, those dead white males are quite safe from accusations of any crime worse than being unfashionable among the smug and stupid.
I love that. And that’s the difference: we directly engage what is actually written and provide quotes. SJWs peer into photos of white people, assume the worst from racial /sexual demographics and generally make up bullshit that’s nothing more than racial/sexual profiling and harassment. That’s why SJW equals KKK.
I was a little disappointed that Card, who’s name’s been dragged through the mud more than anyone in recent years, would take his fans at their word regarding the politics of Sad Puppies. On the other hand, he did give a fair analysis of the piece. Also, I’m going out on a limb and saying that this was probably the first time Larry’s been compared to Nietzche. I’d be interested to see him get into his work, he’s enough of a history buff that I could see him getting into the grimnoir chronicles, for example . also, I suspect Larry could help him get some of the firearm related details right on somega of his more traditional thrillers *cough Empire *
Nice.
If anybody has a way to contact Orson Scott Card, please pass on the following for me.
First, thank you.
My politics are that I’m an active Mormon, registered as a Republican, but who is mostly Libertarian. I love free speech, even when I disagree with it, and I hate bullies. So in some circles, yes, super repulsive.
The swearing isn’t from sailors or high school. I blame it on growing up dairy farming, though working for the Air Force and selling machine guns for a living probably didn’t help either.
As a former sailor, I can vouch that your language in both this piece and in general fail to rise to our salty standards.
However, if you’re interested, let me know and I can give you a quick lesson.
Second sailor checking in: For better or for worse, LC’s language as published here neither ascends nor descends to the level of creative and occasionally incomprehensible nautical profanity. Samples available upon request.
However, I have to believe that getting slapped across the face with a cowpoop beslimed Ayrshire tail at 4am on a cold coastal morning will elicit some heartfelt and descriptive language, redolent with imagery and odor. Samples requested (of the language, not the pooptail).
Hey, Larry, I’m not going to get into the muck of the debate here, just wanted to let you know that I’m a big fan, have read several of your books (and anticipate reading the rest), but that I like this reading challenge, and am going to take it on. I think it will push me to read stuff I wouldn’t otherwise, and I’ll just table the books I otherwise would have read and get to them next year (given how fast reading is vs writing, I would guess that I will catch up to you soon, even putting things off for a year!). I appreciate your thoughts here, and get why you (and others) might see this as a kind of hostile / pushy challenge, or even racist, but I don’t take it that way (my understanding of racism is treating others as less worthwhile or inferior because of their race, which I don’t think is happening here), I just take it as an impetus to read some of the stuff that I often look at but don’t usually read. I’m guessing you won’t be interested, but I will be blogging about doing this here: https://jkeidan.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/beginning-the-challenge/
Anyway, thanks for your writing and your thoughts — keep up the great work! — Josh
I’ve got no problem with expanding out your reading list to other kinds of authors. I think it is fantastic.
My problem is this.
1. Read more group Y.
2. Don’t read group X.
Which of those two is racist? Which did she actually propose? If she’d said #1, which is what I think you’re saying. Bravo. Good for you. But she said #2. And when you substitute in various groups for X she ends up sounding like Heinrich Himmler. That’s where I have a problem.
This is my red flag too. The reason Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian get the amount of pushback they do is because they critique a neighborhood’s potholes by calling most everyone in that neighborhood an n-word instead of concentrating on the potholes. You like diversity, fine. But saying it’s needed because whites are racist is not fine. You want Queers Destroy SF? I don’t care. Saying it’s because heterosexuals hate gays is another thing. You want a women’s anthology? Who cares? But don’t turn that into me being fine with hating and raping women. Every initiative in core SFF by SJWs is an attack on straight white men.
We’ve already established at length it’s because of gender feminist privilege theory that treats straight white men as if they are the laws of a Jim Crow country. Stop doing that and I’ll stop quoting you doing that. SFF is not Selma or a gulag and I am not a Nazi guard of a concentration camp. I’m sick of reading that paranoid and hateful rhetoric. The SJWs defending Bradford are completely ignoring her history of racial attacks on white people and the context of SJW attacks on “white straight cis-male”(s).
For me this all started the day I read Scalzi’s shit-piece about white privilege and Liz Bourke at TorDotCom quoting N.K. Jemisin to the effect that epic fantasy was the result of a tacit 100 year+ collusion by white men to maintain their racial and patriarchal centrality. What gutter-talk. Leave me out of your paranoid fantasies about the white patriarchy and go get the help you need. Treating SFF like a giant therapist’s couch for crazy and obsessive gay theory lady-worship is gutting the core genre.
“For me this all started the day I read Scalzi’s shit-piece about white privilege…”
And so, like the Rabbi of Prague, Scalzi’s undoing comes from a golem of his own making.
You do realize that you can go right ahead and read Larry. He’s not really a White author. He’s only an Honorary White because he’s not a Leftist. Well, okay, those who declare him that actually mean it as a dishonor.
The rest of us don’t care and just read what we like.
And remember:
Choose your friends by their character and your socks by their color.
Choosing your socks by their character makes no sense, and choosing your friends by their color is unthinkable.
— Anon. (although I’ve heard it attributed to C.S. Lewis or Dr. Seuss. I wouldn’t mind a correction in that.)
Not entirely on topic, but speaking of Hurley I recently read “God’s War” based on all the accolades. What a slog – I’m mystified by all the praise that book got. In general I try not to hold an author’s politics against them – in this case, her writing is enough to keep me from sending more money her way.
You realize none of the people praising SJW authors actually READ the books produced, they buy them as totems of their GoodThink, and mouth the words of praise that they’ve been told about these unread books, mush like they repeat lies about Heinlein that they’ve read from excoriating articles written by other SJW Critics who have never actually read him either.
Visit their bookshelves and they’ll be stuffed full of all the right authors, and not a spine will be cracked, let alone a book loved to death.
Probably one of the most unnoticed and unforeseen things to happen in the core SFF community is it has come to resemble an emergency room for a mental ward. Given the strength of the new social media only since 2009, it’s probably no coincidence that when you treat and advertise SFF as a recruiting ground for people with mental health issues, we shouldn’t be surprised when that actually happens. The same is true for people with racist complaints against whites and men. The whole becomes a central gathering place for unhealthy people with unhealthy attitudes and resentments. That probably accounts for the fact the worst of them which present themselves as bloggers and authors put actual SFF on the back-burner in favor of turning SFF into a twisted sociopathic version of the KKK and the National Enquirer. The result is platform for endless gossip about the shortcomings of men, whites and heterosexuals. People like Jim Hines on his blog this week and others are putting out casting calls like they’re the director of a documentary about the most afflicted and damaged people in America and then saying, “Look at the damage hetero-normative white cis-males do.” That’s alongside the endless stream of calls for anthologies for the “marginalized” (read endlessly complaining). SJW SFF is a recruiting poster for an historic class-action lawsuit against straight white males, not art. We shouldn’t be surprised award-nominated work resembles testimony about past and current crimes instead of art.
Given the extreme low cost of self publication today, what is stopping them from producing a “diverse” anthology?
They could, but they know in their hearts that practically nobody outside their little clique of psycho true believers would buy it (both literally and figuratively). Then we would point at their pathetic sales numbers and laugh and laugh, thus kicking off another round of hair-on-fire shrieking about the patriarchy and further gales of merriment from the sanity-based contingent of the fandom.
In a way, I feel sorry for them. Most of them do feel passionately about writing, but the vast majority simply aren’t as good at it as they think they are. When people don’t want to read what they’ve written, their giant egos won’t let them face the fact it’s a flaw within themselves, so they blame it on a flaw within the readers. They tried physically preventing people from having other choices, but Baen and epub ruined that gambit. They tried slapping gold Hugo and Nebula stars on their stuff and declaring everything else unworthy, but people just discounted the awards. They tried badmouthing anyone who read other books, and that didn’t fly, either. Now they’re reduced to incoherent double-dog-dare-ya.
It must be extremely frustrating to be an SJW, living in a toxic stew of bitterness and spite the only way to sustain your self-image. They’re very unhappy people, and precious few of them possess the capacity for self-awareness and emotional fortitude to break themselves out of the cycle they’ve stuck themselves in.
In her extraordinary post called “Patriarch’s Day Part 4, M. J. Locke (Laura Mixon and Steven Gould’s wife) writes “I believe my own writing career has been hampered by unconscious bias within the publishing industry and on the part of readers…”
She goes on to write about “unconscious bias on the part of men/whites” which I found reprehensible. Her two posts (and the crazy comments in the first) about Requires Hate are equally remarkable, and I don’t mean that in a good way. I can never wrap my mind around a cult of people so against profiling groups of people and expressing that by profiling groups of people. It’s just nuts.
Back in the early 1990s there was a vicious to-do about an unwanted member in our local SF club. While he’d pretty much earned his historic ejection, there was a huge blindness to what was really going on.
At the time I wrote a long piece on the problem, which boiled down to:
If you create a culture of misfits, which tolerates every sort of behavior from misfits, don’t be surprised when they behave like misfits. It’s all fine to create a place where misfits are welcome (indeed, that’s a given with a SF club), but if you allow them to *inflict* their misfittery on one another — some will do so, because they can. In short, the club had brought itself to this pass by letting people step on each other’s toes until finally Someone Important got kicked. No one had ever stood up and said, “Hey, stop that!” before things got uncivil for the average folks.
The SJWs are behaving like misfits who enjoy stomping on other people’s toes, *and are getting away with doing so*. So you are right — if this is allowed to go unchallenged, it will lead to worse to come.
I think you’ve hit it right on the head. To make it even worse the people doing the most complaining promote harassment policies that contain the solution. They just never apply it to themselves. Reading the SFWA’s rules on sexual and racial harassment and then realizing the worst racial and sexual harassment in SFF comes from a core of more than 60 of its members makes one shake one’s head.
The problem with fixing it is that we now have a legal environment that encourages misfits stepping on toes. One reason we can’t address bad behavior is that given the ridiculous definition we’ve placed on “public accommodation” there’s a good chance the misfits could sue because “discrimination” and “bullying”.
I do not see this ending well.
Milo at Breitbart has an upcoming piece on Requires Hate. For some reason certain quarters are terrified of it. We didn’t start this, but we’re liable to finish it.
http://dallas-taylor.com/2015/02/26/i-read-only-books-by-women-for-a-year-heres-what-happened/
I have an idea for a year-long project: let’s see how many of these social justice noble people can go a year without talking smack about men, whites and heterosexuals. Go old school and try talking about the merits of your work and the genre you’re supposedly so interested in. That’s what we always did, and for decades. Yup. Straight white men did that from the beginning of the genre until today, so it’s easy. SJWs call that “erasure.” I call it not belonging to a sexist supremacist racist cult of obsession and paranoia. At the very least SJWs would have a year to point to where they could legitimately say they didn’t come off like a Bizarro Superman KKK. In fact I’d be grateful for the “erasure.” I could use a break from the turbine whining of the Butlerian Jihad.
The truth is the worst SJWs have nothing to offer outside racial grievance-mongering. Talk enough bullshit about not reading or reviewing white men and the SFWA will put you on its Nebula Awards Weekend panels before you’re even a member, have published a story, or are even a blogger like they did with Sunil (“no white male authors”) Patel last year. Sunil’s entire claim to fame is lighting up whites on Twitter. Now that’s what I call a career Kickstarter – KKK-style. They didn’t forget Patel, but that weekend they forgot to honor Frank M. Robinson, a guy who did more for SF than 100 Patel’s ever will, because dragging SF into a racial gutter isn’t really all that honorable. Robinson died 6 weeks later. That entire crew is a disgrace to the genre.
In order to see why, just read this:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10103898529083283&set=a.10103898528609233.1073741873.2217431&type=1&theater
This:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10103898529083283&set=a.10103898528609233.1073741873.2217431&type=1&theater
Speaking of Other Cultures, the comments on that are a hoot. It’s like some weird collective Münchausen’s. I need to work that into a story … maybe a fringe religious cult. *wanders off to research and scribble notes*
Sorry, the link didn’t take at first. You can delete the copy if you wish.
I found out yesterday about Elizabeth Bear’s appropriation of Bass Reeves.
I’m pretty sure Reeves died in Oklahoma. Isaac Parker had a lot of Marshals working for him, I think few of the successful ones afterwards found big east coast or west coast cities to their taste.
What is Liz Bear’s interest in Oklahoma or Oklahoma history?
One gets the impression that she only picked Reeves because of her own racism, and the theory that Reeves was /the/ basis for the Lone Ranger. This last seems suspect to me. There were a lot of interesting historical lawmen in the time and place, and the Texas Rangers had already started making a name for themselves. Some of them were still alive when The Lone Ranger was written.
Bear only has one interest: undermining the Instrumentality.
For the Nebulas, I’m already predicting “The Devil in America” will win Best Novelette. Nothing says science fiction to an SJW like whites shooting blacks like dogs. If it doesn’t win, teenage boys in “We Are the Cloud” having sex with each other also screams modern SF.
Bass Reeves is an interesting character in and of his own right. between being a former slave who escaped to the 5 nations during the Civil War, being instrumental in the capture of Belle Star, being tried for murder as a result of an ND, and bringing his own son to justice after the death of his daughter in law, (to say nothing of his staggering arrest record, ) Hollywood could easily make his life into a movie, essentially Django Unchained without the revenge fantasy. They actually went so far as to say as much on Justified a few years back.
The thing with his story is it would have to be done right. throw in angst as needed, but if you’re telling me you can’t figure out how to squeeze some kick ass action sequences into the life of a man with over 3000 arrests and 14 confirmed kills to his name, you’re in the wrong line of work. And yes, that does exclude the vast majority of SJWs. On an unrelated note, he’s totally the sort of character I could see rolling with Bubba Shackleford.
http://www.artofmanliness.com/2011/04/24/lessons-in-manliness-from-bass-reeves/
And it doesn’t occur to this guy that the reason that the authors are defensive is that they expect to get attacked? And then the “classic” if someone says you did it wrong you are required to sit down and listen and (implied) accept as stated whatever you’re told. This theft of agency is abusive because they are not *allowed* to listen and then *consider* and decide for themselves if they need to make changes. They are only allowed to listen and take it. If you’re white and write a white cast, that’s bad. If you’re white and write a non-white cast, that’s probably worse… and if someone, anyone, decides that you did it wrong, you are required to accept what that person says, to subordinate your own mind and judgement to some random person.
And if this guy couldn’t figure out where Nancy Kress got the idea that non-white characters need to be saintly, maybe he ought to be the one to sit down and listen and accept that someone else’s experiences are, by definition, legitimate. Maybe not for everyone, which is where this stupid treatment of people as group-representatives instead of individuals takes us, but legitimate for them.
And then he could *consider* if, perhaps, attacking authors for writing people of color or different cultures “wrong” happens and if something important could be learned from understanding what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes on the receiving end of that AND if the sorts of race-related scoldings that go on are a good way to reach goals of inclusion.
Listen, this is just plain old everyday racial bigotry with a lesbian phobic sidecar borrowed from lesbian European Foucaldian intellectuals. As absurd as that sounds, that’s what it is. Even the guy who writes Anita Sarkeesian’s words uses classic phrasing that originated with Simone de Beauvoir and Monique Wittig – both French.
I don’t know when this all became rocket science. Bigotry is so simple: what they do is take the worst of what an Arab, Jew, white, black, gay, man or woman does and spread it onto the entire group and then talk about that group like it’s one person.
Notice how all these stories about harassment and “racism” at conventions are not only over trivial acts but complete outliers that then taints the entire affair? Why isn’t it ever positive? EVER? Do you mean to tell me none of these non-whites or women hasn’t had people do nice things? Why not spread that around onto everyone?
Of course people do nice thing but then these freaks act like that’s a John Dunbar outlier and “ally” as rare as a dodo bird. You have to be off your rocker to imagine something as innocuous as SFF is a haven for a homophobic women-hating KKK that is a reflection of tens of millions of people. Where’s the quotes and proofs of such things?
On the other hand, the core group of morons flogging this shit don’t number significantly more than 25 to 50 people. Most of those publicly admit to have mental health issues. Who are you going to believe: them, or that a minimum of 100 million Americans have it in for them? Only insane people who are adults think they are the few noble persecuted and define that persecution by twisting reality and facts so cruelly I can’t even recognize them.
When Mikki Kendall writes about our reaction to Bradford’s article, “They expect you to be Mammy. It’s a fatal flaw in their life choices,” what the hell does that even mean?
I don’t expect her to be “Mammy”. I expect her to be a decent human being or, failing that, to at least keep her prejudices hidden.
I don’t have any such expectation.
In the sense of predictions, I didn’t know anything about her, and hence had no information to build a model from. Now, I’d guess she is a bad person who wants bad things. Perhaps more importantly, it seems likely there no useful information to be gained from paying her any mind.
In the sense of standards I would hold her to, I don’t see the point. There are too many nuts on the internet to care about if you don’t share a forum with them. History indicates that I will read books by bad people if the book is worth it. There are a lot of very bad people, too many to make decisions about each individual a part of my life.
Being positive once in a while would require telling the truth: That science fiction and fantasy is greatly about a fascination for the Other. Be it human culture, aliens, superheroes, or anything else. And while publishing (like Hollywood) seems to have had a marketing outlook that favored trying not to appear too “ethnic” it pretty much counts as something “everyone knows that isn’t so.” People who refused to buckle to that also had fine careers and widespread acceptance, even found themselves more memorable, even back in the Bad Old Days.
Telling the TRUTH would require explaining that an “exotic” background in science fiction gives a person a bonus. But how would you ever claim to be oppressed then? People who are so fixated on reading about worlds different from our own, something new, something adventurous, are more likely to think “cool beans!” if they know that the author is from a different background or a different country. Tell new writers *that*. Tell new writers that they can expect nearly anyone they meet to do what they can to help them, because it’s true. That would be the way to do some good in the world.
But since the preferred narrative is that one must be oppressed and will be oppressed and people will try to shut you out… a thinking person has to think… so what is the goal then?
It reminds me so strongly of the street-corner preacher… we all know the one. He yells abuse at people as they walk by and then uses his “persecution” as proof that he’s doing the will of God.
They yell abuse at people as they walk by and then use their “persecution” as proof that science fiction is trying to force out anyone not white, male, and straight.
All over the world millions of women are involved in tough and disciplined sports; what’s tougher than mixed martial arts? There is no sign of a culture interior to those sports that cries and whines over trigger warnings, white privilege and heterosexuals. There is nothing like a KKK-like structure that hides behind privilege/diversity arguments that wouldn’t fool a child.
The simple reason for that is people with sociopathic mental health issues prone to exploiting the compassion of others with fake tears wouldn’t last a minute in those venues. There are rules and it is a true meritocracy and crying and excuses doesn’t cut it. There are women from all walks of life and all colors doing just fine in sports globally, including gay women, but with a notable lack of an Our Lady of Audre Lorde supremacist cult of racism and sexism.
There are also demographic racial anomalies in countries all over the world when it comes to sports. No one questions those because only con men and mental cases reduce everything to a conspiracy.
Why does Brazil have a demographic spike when it comes to mixed martial artists? Well, because a particular style of grappling started there. Why does India love crickett so much compared to soccer? Ask them. Why is baseball so popular in Venezuela and invisible in Brazil? Who knows? Why do ethnic Europeans and Americans dominate SF? That’s how it started. Why do black folks and the delta South dominate blues? That’s where it started. Why does baseball have so many fewer blacks than 40 years ago? Why is hockey white? Why is basketball black?
Pushing back against the bizarre and irrationally suspicious cult that has come to infest SFF mostly consists of re-explaining reality and innocent trends the overwhelming majority of the world takes for granted. When you look at it in this light, you can see how truly crazy these people are. Who in their right mind would boycott a post-game press conference with all black basketball or all white hockey players, or all Latino boxers? Social justice warriors are sick in their minds and in their hearts.
The funny thing is, Julie, this guy clearly hasn’t been ever ‘whitewashed’ for daring to ever disagree with or call out one of these SJW darlings for their crazed behavior. What happened with Neil’s friend Ross, and the whole Requires Hate explosion was illustrative and illuminating. The whole rejection of the people who started saying #notyourshield as a ‘false flag’ and ‘fake’ shows that they cannot ever have anyone leave the Warren* / Plantation. Dare speak against the accepted narrative and refuse to abide by your arbitrarily assigned caste or ‘role’, and suddenly you’re a Straight White Male, regardless of reality.
*I am seriously reminded of General Woundwort’s Efrafra warren with the behavior of the SJWs. Woundwort’s power comes from the emphasis of fear, and to stay ‘safe’ the SJWs obey the rules of the warren.
No one should be surprised intersectionalism reflects some of the same general principles as the Nazi Party. Intersectionalism is racist, sexist and supremacist. It is arrogant. It is intolerant. It has no interest in law or equal rights and in fact uses power/privilege theory to abolish equal protection for others.
Intersectionalism is paranoid and hateful. It has invented a whole new set of demonization theories based on empty European intellectualism. Despite it’s bleating, intersectionalism produces nothing, no new thoughts, new and interesting intersections and perceptual shifts. It is painfully dogmatic, illiberal and sluggish, and above all unaware. It is incapable of true satire, expressing irony or of employing metaphors. Intersectionalism is narcissistic, obsessive, self-contradictory and full of semantic gibberish.
Intersectionalism routinely lies about history and current events with the goal of propaganda. It has no interest in literature or the arts except to advance its world view and stifle those it disagrees with. In fact intersectionalism is almost brutally illiterate, especially in its lack of art appreciation.
Intersectionalism is manic in its myopic outlooks and identity centrism. The narrow spectrum of its provincialism and exposure to and experience with other world cultures is the opposite of what it claims for itself. In terms of events, intersectionalism uses an American-centric parochial lens analogous to an identity laden Jim Crow it smears over the entire world and its history. It considers any contact with its own gay, non-white and female identities to be in itself mind expanding and an exemplar of a range of diverse thought. In fact intersectionalism is conformist and static in its thinking. It is hypocritical to the point of delusion in that it regularly encourages acts for itself it forbids in others, setting up rules only others must obey. Its hatred of men, whites and heterosexuals is phobic, endemic and feral.
In short intersectionalism is exactly the sort of ideology one might expect would be created and taken up by people ranging from the insane and sociopathic to merely stupid, conceited, ignorant and uneducated.
Wow, over 800 replies.
On a not-really related note, Scalzi is vowing to read (or at least listen to the audio version of) Hard Magic this year. I expect it’s a pretext for another one of his all-caps Twitter snark-fests, but we’ll see.
Oh man! I sure hope Scalzi gives the Hard Magic audiobook a good review. I mean, it only has 6 thousand reviews at four and a half stars right now, made #19 on the Audible Essentials list of best audiobooks of all time, won a best novel Audie award, and I’ve only made something like a quarter million dollars off the Grimnoir trilogy so far, but that review could really make or break me.
Scalzi’s come a long way by making calculated overtures to folks in the right places. Taking into account his current lack of a book contract, the continued success of Sad Puppies, and his vague allusions to considering a deal with Baen, I wouldn’t be surprised if he writes a positive review to butter you up.
Besides, the book’s awesomeness makes a completely negative review instantly suspect.
Is Scalzi really that much of a dick? I haven’t looked at anything he’s ever said, really. I just read Old Man’s War and some of the sequels and enjoyed them, and didn’t see any overt SJW messages in them at the time. So seeing his name popping up in that context a lot is kind of interesting.
Vox Day makes a case.
For a recent part of one example:
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/02/fredo-i-knew-it-was-you.html
Vox lost an election to be President of SFWA, and became the first member expelled in decades.
There have been some other controversies regarding the Scalzi and Gould SFWA presidencies.
Old Man’s War was an entertaining Heinlein homage, which is what earned it the positive Instapundit review that made Scalzi’s career. Apparently his recent work has departed ideologically from the early stuff to the point that a lot of folks criticize Reynolds for continuing to support it.
None of this can necessarily be ascribed to dickishness. Shrewdness seems like a better term. Sometimes you’ve got to go along to get along. And with SF in decline among New York publishers, A career-minded SF author would be well advised to normalize relations with Baen.
Isn’t Scalzi one of the people that intentionally misunderstood Toni’s essay awhile back?
Something like that would make it harder to ‘normalize relations’?
I stopped reading the sequels when one of them starting delving into the politics of a colony world or something, rather than green space soldiers shooting scary aliens, and I got quickly bored
As far as I remember anyway. So no clue about the later books. I just got curious about the repeated mentions of him being a SJW jerk.
“Isn’t Scalzi one of the people that intentionally misunderstood Toni’s essay awhile back?”
Let’s keep in mind that his response to Toni’s essay predated SP2’s ripple effect, GamerGate, Lock-In’s underperformance, the Jian Ghomeshi scandal, and the end of his contract with Tor.
These data incline me to think that Scalzi knows where the wind’s blowing and is trying to mend the bridges he burned.
Brad Torgersen’s response justifies you in implying that Scalzi has his work cut out for him.
https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/02/18/sad-puppies-visual-numbers-and-who-gets-to-be-a-real-fan/
Connect the dots. Probably the person most unrecognized as having started all this is Mary Ann Mohanraj, a gay woman from Sri Lanka. She’s the one who started Strange Horizons in 2000, the model for all the gay PoC feminist “inclusive” webzines and anthologies we have.
She’s the one who came at us on Scalzi’s rag in 2009 with a two-part guest post all about white privilege, people of color, the iconic black lesbian Audre Lorde and intersectionalism.
3 years later Scalzi published his dumbfuck piece about white privilege.
The following year Scalzi wrote “Back in 2001 a small online science fiction magazine became my very first publisher of my science fiction: Strange Horizons.”
There’s the two people more responsible for introducing and enabling this bullshit than anyone else. In a few short years the SFWA has become indistinguishable from a racialized lesbian gender studies institute for SFF literature. The Hugos is right behind. As far as I can tell, their main goals are to abolish gender and light up men and whites, because that’s all they ever talk about. Spaceships and Ringworlds come in dead last place in favor of award-nominated stories about dinosaurs killing white men, whites shooting blacks like dogs, lesbians escaping oppressive men, Butlerian zombies who magically can’t see gender, Jim Crow Tarzan movie sets, gay men being rained on and bi-sexual medieval woman. And only one of those is truly SF or F. That’s like calling gender studies “architecture school” and people who clearly hate my very race and sex telling me I’m a bigot cuz I don’t like architecture.
Well, he used to be a lot nicer, back when he was starting out. Glenn Reynolds featured his books a lot and linked to his blog. But either Scazi’s true nature emerged, or he felt the need to impress the SJW crowd and he started getting silly (his lowest default setting post) or nasty (just look at the comments for the Hugo results thread last year for some examples of his tweets). When Reynolds mentioned Scalzi’s latest book the response was . . . quite negative.
Well, he used to at least have his own opinions and would opine in opposition to things he thought silly.
And then he learned his lesson.
Once in a while he seems to *try* to straddle the line of good-think and voice moderating opinions but since being on “easy setting” makes him automatically wrong about everything, he’s got to be careful.
He’s a hilarious guy. Trust me, until it was stuck in his face, he had no idea he had been advocating a racial version of women’s French Queer Theory would make SFF and America a better place. Usually you have to visit a mental ward to see someone who thinks that’s where Jefferson, Washington and the U.S. Constitution went wrong.
Yeah, that was up there with Scalzi’s “difficulty setting” screed in the All Time Most Vapid Essays.
It is not particularly easier to be white, there are poor white people all over the world. It is not particularly easy to be Asian, either, even though Asians in America have higher incomes than whites — there are huge number of Asians living in Third World conditions. And Jewish? Let’s not even go there.
It is, however, undeniably easier to be American — we have the highest PPP GDP per capita of any political group of 300M people in the world you can assemble, be they black, white, Jewish, Asian, Arab, or whatever. American blacks are the richest, freest blacks in the world. American Asians are some of the richest, freest Asians in the world. Ditto for essentially all races, sexes, creeds, colors and religions.
Why? Because the people who founded this country (who, yes, tended to be white cis males) had certain principles and ideals that turned out to be really useful when the Industrial Age rolled around (most people don’t realize that until the 1800s North America was actually the poorest of the European colonies — having no native labor or mineral wealth to exploit meant we were settled by farmers, entrepreneurs, and other people interested in adding value rather than seeking rents). The value of those institutions gifted to us by dead white cis male Americans dwarfs any lingering legacy of racism or sexism. That’s why so few “people of color” don’t go back to places where they’d be in the majority (and by Scalzi’s reasoning, have easier lives) — they’re much more Americans than they are “people of color.”
And frankly, I’m pretty damned proud of that.
Naturally the SJWers will sniff “of course they don’t go back to countries where they don’t know the people or the culture or even speak the language.” But, of course, millions of people do come here to America where they don’t know anyone or speak the language, because of America’s awesome opportunities — the value of those institutions (read Acemoglu on this) is so great that the imaginary lines that define our borders instantly raise living standards by as much as 10x, so much so that it’s worthwhile for people people to learn our strange culture and crazy language even though they’re also moving from majority to minority status.
And of course languages can be learned. My wife came here from a Third World country, she wipes the floor with everyone in her Word games, and volunteers her editing services to Kindle authors.
OK, sorry, I kind of blew my rant budget there. Back to work…
On one hand, bravo. On the other, it really does seem unfair. Statistically, whether from environment or upbringing, some portion of the populace is noticeably insane. They tend to write highly fiskable articles. But, humiliating the mentally disabled hardly seems fair.
Albeit, it may be kinder than my approach, which consists primarily of ignoring their existence.
I will say that, overall, for some reason, the british have done really well in terms of establishing colonies. Maybe the Dutch too. I have always wondered why the Spanish and the Germans sucked so badly.
Probably the best book on this question. http://www.amazon.com/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity-ebook/dp/B0058Z4NR8/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1425138462&sr=1-1&keywords=acemoglu+why+nations+fail
The mentally ill who can’t control themselves need to be kept from harming themselves and others.
If a rabid SJW has enough self control and judgement left, bringing poor choices to their attention may help them change their habits. If they do not, their enablers, who should be managing them, need to be convinced of their lapses in oversight.
Persons of choler and druggies charge at least some of their outrages to the account of tolerance that the naturally mentally ill have earned.
Conceding public discourse to druggies and persons of choler without dispute may well have really severe consequences for the naturally mentally ill when regular folks get really tired of the result.
‘persons of choler.’ I’m totally stealing that.
Colonies like Burma and the Sudans?
Hello Clamps.
Andrew Marston is a mentally ill, troll, and idiot stalker. I’ve banned his IP like ten times now.
Andrew, I’m on that list of people the Marshfield PD told you to quit fucking with. Go away.
“Why Nations Fail” is good, but on a more historical level, IMO, the problems boiled down to time, resources, and culture.
Britain had resources enough that it could invest in its colonies and not just slash ‘n burn, felt secure enough that it didn’t feel the need to slaughter everyone who looked at them funny, had time enough to put their stamp on their colonies (note that both areas cited by the troll were relative latecomers to the British Empire), and actually believed in the White Man’s Burden. Also, they tended to sort of stumble into colonial administration more than plan it.
The Germans arrived late, were much more militaristic, did not devote great resources to their colonies, thereby meaning their administrators felt less secure, and were more into the prestige and resource extraction.
The Spanish were thinking purely in terms of resource acquisition and feudalism.
The Dutch–didn’t do so well. They thought in terms of resource acquisition and trade monopolies, which is part of the reason why Indonesia is as weird as it is today.
Someone once pointed out that if you mark a map of Africa (this was before the upheavals of the past couple decades) with prosperous-and-educated countries vs struggling-and-ignorant countries, the two would equate to “British-colonized” and “colonized by anyone else” — precisely because the British empire thought in terms of long-term local investment, not just pillage-and-leave.
The same was largely true in Asia. The legacy of British colonization, with its schools and hospitals, is why even today India remains a relatively well-educated and healthy country, with a unifying language so their far-flung ethnic groups can nonetheless communicate.
Rudyard Kipling, Kitchener’s School
“That’s not to say I didn’t come across bad stories or offensive stuff in stories or other things that turned me off. I did. But I came across this stuff far less than previously.
So, Gay and Lesbian People of Color, you still offend Tempest, but not enough to cause RAGEQUIT. Don’t worry. Once all the White Cismales are gone, you will be reeducated so that there is no danger of you having fun in an unapproved manner and causing microaggressions”
This, exactly. This is why I’m not welcome in the gay community. Because I’ve looked around and realized alot people are drawing lines in the sand, and I’m taking the side that lets me speak and defend myself and think what I want and pay for whatever goddamn elective surgeries I want with the money I make because I’m in the only place and time that has ever existed that lets someone like me learn whatever they want and do whatever they want to earn a buck (and God forbid I want to keep more of it to afford these medical expenses myself and shudder in terror at the thought of the government paying for and handling it, or to give to charities or my own choice, or for whatever.)
Because I’ve got way too many guns and religious friends for them. And, (gasp!) my religious family is generally okay with me, as are pretty much all of my professors at college, as has been my experience with nearly everyone I’ve worked with. Hell, most people in the army knew something was up with me but almost no-one mentioned it or cared, because I was squared away, a wizard with computers or radios or whatever, and I could jailbreak an iPhone to let it use Asiacell SIM cards and would do it just as a favor cause its important to let people call home. As I’ve said before, gun ranges are pretty much the most welcoming places I’ve ever been, period. Second place goes to restaurants, area or religious stuff doesn’t seem too matter, except for the customers, but service is always great, they know the gay community tips very well. All this makes it very difficult for me too establish emotional warrants with the weepy persecution complex crowd. I grew up dirt poor in a trailer and was paying bills at 15, shooting IDPA at 16, joined the army at 18, Haiti at 20 (actually helping, something the asshole slacktivists don’t understand), Iraq at 21, and now I’m finishing off BA in Information Systems Cybersecurity and busting my ass building a resume. I see the SJW who are supposedly “on my side.” They don’t do any classwork and want my effort in exchange for….kind words? No thanks, the other guys are okay with me actually, and they just wanna get shit done. The real persecution is obvious, and I’m not really feeling it from who I’ve been told I should.
Jennifer,
It wouldn’t be in exchange for kind words. It’d be in exchange for criticism that you’re doing better than them, coupled with the false offer that maybe someday if you got them all honors by doing all their work, you’d be acceptable.
I’ve felt their persecution. It would have been hilarious if I hadn’t been so pissed off about it at the time. You see, the white guys on this board get all the generic hate, but the worst hate is really reserved for the heretical ‘minorities’ who don’t follow their rules. Not just Thomas Sowell and Sarah Palin, no, these little petty power-mongers actually have tables drawn up in their brains of how often a bi person is “allowed” to sleep with a person of the opposite sex before they start “losing their place in the LBGT community.”
Sorry, straight folks. I probably should have put a Class III beverage alert before that one, shouldn’t I?
Yeah, I’ve never gotten THAT at the gun range. Of course, hard to say which makes me more evil: that I’m married to a wonderful man, or that my husband is friends with Larry.
Either way, I’m good. The little idiots are kinda emotionally retarded, but I don’t have to care about them, and can make fun of ‘em now instead of feeling hurt or pissed off.
And boy howdy do they get pissed off when they tell me I have to sleep with another girlfriend, and I laugh, and tell ‘em I’m monogamous, happily married, and they are sick sad little people who will never learn to love enough to be loved like that in return.
Two of the people I most admire in all the world are Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams, and I’m pretty keen on quoting Booker T Washington, too. I brought them up in a forum dominated by SJW, and was told flat out by one of these ‘tolerant’ folks that they don’t count, because they’re “house n****rs”.
Yes, that’s the term the SJW used. Imagine the dogpile if a non-SJW had said that.
[…] Louis L’Amour saved my life. He taught me to love reading. I didn’t care that he was whiter than I was, or that we were from different cultures, religions, and backgrounds. Nobody engrossed in a story gives a shit about that. I was expanding my mind, not artificially limiting it. […]
Another hit piece on whites at NPR where, according to intersectional modes of thought, Bradford blacksplains Arthurian history to whites. “In today’s piece on @nprbooks I talk about blacks in history where whites think we don’t exist.”
“Did you know there was a black knight of the Round Table? You do now, thanks to @tinytempest!” – NPR
Thank you tinytempest. Did you know there were whites where black people think we weren’t? Like when Prester John built the pyramids and sailed to Mars using his own white arrogance as fuel?
In yet a second new NPR hit piece, Bradford claims people mistaking her for N.K. Jemisin at the Calgary World Con is “institutional racism.” Bradford claims that today “prejudice abounds: Whitewashed covers, hostile dismissals of ‘identity politics’ and ‘political correctness’ as a barely veiled attempt to silence us, all-white panels on diversity, all-white anthologies of ‘the best’ science fiction and continual institutional barriers to traditional publication based on appeals to marketability that really reflect the publishing houses’ disbelief in the power.”
There’s more that goes black, black, black, blacks, black, black, black and whites aren’t very nice people. Don’t disagree with Bradford cuz racism. Read it. It comes with smell-o-vision and it’s not “barely veiled.”
http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2015/02/27/387533895/this-month-and-every-month-black-sci-fi-writers-look-to-the-future
[…] The Social Justice Warrior Racist Reading Challenge, A Fisking. I’ve got work to do. I’ve got to finish the rough draft of a novel for a gaming IP by the end of February, and then I’ve got two short stories due the first part of March, but Monday morning I see this nonsense. How could I not take a minute to fisk it? […]
https://twitter.com/jimchines/status/571744815840276480
“I remember always looking for people ‘like me’ in media.
“That’s not too surprising, is it?”
Apparently if you’re white it’s not only surprising but considered racism. Otherwise… not. All hail intersectionality, because it’s all about the love and SF.
“You can’t be too “different,” because you’ll knock readers out of the story.”
How does this make ANY sense in a genre that as someone above points out, is full of and obsessed with “otherness”? What are all these aliens doing in here, some of them as protagonists??
No, I take that back. It makes sense if you want to write boring claptwaddle that no one wants to read, so you have to shame them into reading it by accusing their other reading habits of not being otherly-enough.
Nod. The “different/other” must be written in such a way that the reader will continue to read the story.
http://s18.postimg.org/8kn0cws61/Privilege_Tunes2.jpg
[…] “Everybody is different. Everyone has differing tastes. That’s why you introduce them to a wide variety of books. I’m talking real diversity, not the skin-deep superficial diversity SJWs glom onto, but real diversity of thoughts, ideas, and imagination,” says fantasy fiction novelist, Larry Correia in a blog post. […]
The only thing Tempest has accomplished is to make sure I never read anything by someone named Tempest. My life has improved dramatically!
[…] The mainstream market wants to enjoy itself. It doesn’t like to be yelled at. It gets annoyed when you call it racist. Since most books don’t even have back cover photos anymore, the mainstream market probably doesn’t know what color the author is. The mainstream market has zero clue what culture the author grew up in, and if that information is available at all, the mainstream market probably doesn’t give a shit. The mainstream market buys books based on the following criteria: This cover looks cool. I will pick it up/click on it. The back cover blurb/description interests me. It has good reviews/word of mouth. I will purchase it with my money. If I liked it, I may purchase other books from this author. Govinnage is a writer of color herself, Writer of Color is a stupid term. I hate the term People of Color. It is just Colored People backwards. yet she still learned a few things from the experience, including “just how white [her] reading world was.” Even when you’re coming from the viewpoint of a marginalized identity, the privileged view is everywhere and pervasive. It’s easy to buy into it without really knowing that you are. Privilege huh? From what I’ve heard about Tempest, she grew up in a rich family. Luckily one of my readers copy and pasted some stuff from her bio into the comments. She attended NYU—which I believe is the most expensive undergraduate program in America—to study opera. She then dropped out to attend the “Gallatin School for Individualized Study” where “There we had no “majors”, only “concentrations”. My concentrations were in performance, writing, the history of mythology, interstitial art (though we didn’t call it that, then), and the collective unconscious” But wait, there’s more about what it means to live such a life of marginalized hardship: “After leaving college and realizing that the life of a corporate drone is horrendous, I decided to throw it all away so I could attend Clarion West in 2003. I left my job, left New York, and left any notion that I’d be leading a normal life in the dust. After Clarion West I wandered around the country for a few years visiting friends, writing, and discovering that all one needs to survive in life is confidence, charm, and many well-off friends. In 2006 I returned to New York City and took up freelancing to support myself.” I know when I think of marginalized lives, I think of mooching off your rich friends while playing tourist. I only say that because I grew up with all that fancy Portuguese Dairy Farmer Privilege, where I got to have an alcoholic mother and a functionally illiterate father (who is way darker skinned than Tempest), where I got to spend my formative years knee deep in cow shit at 3:00 AM, so that I could later work my way through Utah State (only after getting a scholarship for my freshmen year because I knew a whole lot about cows), to then spend my adult life working corporate drone jobs of increasing difficulty and skill requirements, all while writing on the side while I supported my family, until I could make it as a professional author. Lecture us more about privilege, Tempest. It’s fascinating. […]