co-signed, strong letter to follow
- June 10th, 2015
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More insane puppy-related, but not just puppy-related, bullshit is going on this week.
First, let’s co-sign this commentary from Kameron Hurley about Tor Books’s decision to publicly reprimand one of their editors, Irene Gallo, for saying actual true things on her personal Facebook page about the Sad/Rabid puppies debacle. I repeat: true things, on her personal Facebook page.
But I particularly want to call out this quote:
I read once that the real cost of racism was in keeping folks affected by same from doing their work. This works for stuff like feminism and homophobia, too. Instead of doing the work we were meant to do, bigots want to keep people spinning in circles, spending all their time writing endless think pieces that refute their insistence that we can’t and have never done anything. Yes, ::yawn:: we exist, yes we can do these jobs, yes we are human, and yes we matter. It keeps us defending simple bullshit truths that – if some dude said them – would go unchallenged. And those unchallenged dudes get to go off wanking about life, saying whatever fucking thing they want, doing whatever work they want, because they don’t have to sit around defending their right to exist and speak the truth.
But everybody else is constantly challenged and bullied with the threat of erasure, and most of our work is just fucking digging out from under that bullshit.
I have raged about this so many times. When I was a software developer, I literally sidetracked my career so that I could spend quite literally another full-time job’s worth of time fighting against groups trying to make me illegal. And by illegal, I mean fucking illegal, as in direct threat to my life and freedom, by design. That was the intent and goal, so it’s not like I had any sort of goddamn options.
When I talk about spending “blood and treasure” on this, the blood comes from the street assaults, the treasure comes, in part, from this. All that lost time and money, fighting off people who not only enjoyed but actively made a living from trying to make my existence illegal.
And just as much, the people trying to make me and people like me at best into sub-citizens and at worst into dead people? They enjoyed their work, and made money at it.
Just like the Puppies enjoy their bullshit. They’re having a great time.
(See also Angela Highland in this post about “the endless cycle of having to defend oneself over and over and over and over again, to seemingly no avail.”)
Let’s also co-sign this post by Chuck Wendig at Terrible Minds:
If you’re an employer faced with a mob of bigots because a female employee said a true thing in public, maybe take a step back and ask how you’d have responded (if at all) if they came after one of your top dudes for saying the exact same thing. You may not even have to think very long because they probably already have.
Then ask yourself how awesome you really are now that you’ve publicly named and shamed her and basically threw her out to the Gamergate/Puppy wolves to be harassed online and in the comment sections of your own post. Ask yourself how awesome and fair-handed you are to do that.
And back to Kameron:
This shit is going to change, but it’s going to hurt.
If you’re an ally, I’d like to remind you it’s not you it’s going to hurt. You’ll come out of it just fine with your fucking career intact.
It’s us. Every time. Always us. It’s us they will come after. We pay the price.
One of the driving points in Jupiter Ascending – a post that I still, yes, intend to make – is that the most fundamental limit on resource is time – how much time you have, or do not have, in your life. The Entitled of that universe steal lives from others to gain more time for themselves. These cretins can’t achieve that, so they steal the time of others to gain enjoyment. For sport.
Sendhil Mullainathan said recently that poverty is a tax on cognition. He’s right, of course, and his assertion comes down, in no small part, to a tax on time. Computational time of the brain, existence time of life, they’re both the same thing. This, too is a tax on time, one assessed by ressentiment-driven self-proclaimed “alpha”-master wannabes, one that’s assessed intentionally, driven mostly by the pleasure of seeing others in oppression, by the love for Orwell’s aphrodisiac of power. And it is contemptible. It is anti-thought, it is anti-achievement, it is anti-creation, it is a vile sadism, and it is no accident that the most fervent supporters of torture drink from this same well.
You want to talk about where the “rage” part comes from in my music? There are a few sources. This is a big one.
eta: See also Jessica Price’s post on Tumblr. It’s worth reading.
eta2: See also Vox Day (the oberpuppyführer that Tom just threw Irene Gallo to, linked via We Hunted the Mammoth), see also Tim Hunt (as a published research scientist, may I just say to blow it out your ass, you fucking douchebag). It’s just a continuous hail of this kind of rampant horseshittery.
eta3: flake_sake’s commentary on Livejournal is of relevant interest, including the first direct appearance of Jim Butcher in this mess.
eta4: Can Tor let Ms. Gallo take back her apology yet? No? How about now?
This is one of a continuing series of posts on sexism and racism in geek culture.
1 comment on Livejournal.
I linked to this in a previous post, but I wanted to make sure that Eric Flint’s commentaries on Rabid Puppies like Vox Day and John C. Wright are visible here, too, because it’s all deeply relevant to Irene Gallo’s brief comment about the various Puppy factions.
This is just appalling! I hate read vox and he is doing this just to prove his power to his mouth breathing “dread ilk”. Coincidentally (I’m sure) he released this comment of Gallons and started this campaign just when he’ trying not so successfully to monetise conversations with foul misogenists like Return of Kings Roosh.
Really? You’re drawing parallels between puppies raging over an award and people who wanted to make you illegal and dead?
“for saying actual true things”
Oh… you think it’s true to call them Neo-Nazis and extreme rightists? Well neo nazis would want you dead so I guess from that perspective it would be true.
Have you read this?: https://www.affsdiary.com/shadow/2015/06/10/nazi-is-not-a-term-you-throw-around-lightly/
Sarah: Yeah, I am. The Rabids in particular. Look: Vox Day’s writings espouse the same racial theory underpinnings as those held by the Nazi theorists, and his views on the oppression of women through force (acid in the face is rational, etc) are actually worse, at least for those in-group. For me, that’s enough right there. Now, I’d call him more of a neo-fascist, myself, because he’s only called for centuries of breeding the inferior stock rather than outright extermination. But then, that was part of the actual nazi Nazi programme through the war for some variations of “subhuman” peoples, particularly the Poles in the General Government area, so maybe not.
All that is plenty enough for me to agree that “neo-Nazi,” while not necessarily the most precise term, a reasonably accurate one in casual conversation – which, of course, the commentary was at the time.
And as a rightist, if you ally yourself with people like this – as the Sads actively did, going out and recruiting him, and freely associating with him until it got too embarrassing – then I think you’ve earned the term “extreme.”
Datestamp on this reply edited for placement in reply chain
John Scalzi recently called this process of attack “punch down, suck up.” It’s generally the way some people increase status in a hierarchy. Rather than responding to what they say, individuals who are attacked should respond to their meaning and intent.
Excuse me but how does a person become illegal. Was it an illegal conception.? An artificial intelligence . Even illegal immigrants are legal people just they are illegal immigrants. IF it about sexuality then it is the action that was a crime not the person. Just as in any crime. The founder of Silk Road got life for creating a blackmarket ebay. Sure it was money laundering but life?
People are never illegal, just the actions they do can be illegal. Sodomy used to be illegal, but I am struggling if lesbian sex ever was . Any way, Ms. Hurley is right any fall out will come upon the marginal players .Authors who do not have a loyal fan base. SF has always been more accepting of the unusual for example ; Mr Delaney and MZB MZB proclivities were known, just ignored. It was the writing that matter not the writer. Same for Mr Correia it is the writing not that he is right wing that matters.
Ms Gallo ideology leanings do not matter. She did the sin of trashing the customers and providers. The writers of her own publishing house and the reading public who may like the writers and stories of those who are on the SP slate. Insulting the reading public is not good idea.
RAH: Have you ever been handed a pamphlet calling for your execution?
I have.
So shut the hell up, since you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about. I mean, you can entertain the pretence in your own mind that calling for the death penalty for “homosexuality” is somehow different to calling for the death penalty for LGBT people all you want. But it’s a sophism I will not accept.
And for the record, the political battles where I did ground work and occasionally door-to-door weren’t, themselves, calling for execution. They were calling for official sanction against on lessor degrees, including mandating public school education condemning us in explicit terminology as, oh, what was it – illegal, unethical, immoral, and wrong? I’m doing this from memory, so I may have the exact working wrong, I’d have to look it up in the text of the four initiatives I worked against trying to instate this particular phrasing.
Many of their backers were in support of stronger actions, of course – in Idaho, to fight off one of their initiatives – a very close battle, in fact, we won by two percentage points – the campaign had to stress that voting no didn’t repeal the “sodomy” laws making us already illegal.
Can you have any idea how humiliating that is? Campaigning, “Don’t worry, you can vote no, there will still be plenty of laws against us?” I’m sure the fine folks at the Oregon-based Idaho Citizens Alliance had their cockles pretty warmed over that.
So no, do not come here and espouse that line to me. I will not have it.
Dagnabbit, I wanted to be the one to call her on “for saying actual true things on her personal Facebook page about the Sad/Rabid puppies”…
Because Ms. Gallo wasn’t reprimanded for saying “There are 2 groups, the Sad Puppies & the Rabid Puppies” (or however she phrased that bit), but for the bits of it involving “Neo-Nazi”, “Misogynist”, & “Homophobic”, & aiming them solidly at everyone involved with both groups, making her apparent willingness to admit there *are* two groups a “distinction without a difference”, in addition to generally being inaccurate (odds are there is at least one “misogynist”, one “homophobe”, & one “Neo-nazi” supporting both groups, but since this is the interrnet, odds are they’re over-represented on your side too).
For the record, I’m probably the Sad Puppies “homophobic” supporter, but when I use “phobic” there I mean “irrationally afraid of”, as in “I am aware my fear (& it is _fear_) is not rational, but my rational mind has so far failed to override it”), though I may not qualify as an SP supporter not having forked out for Worldcon membership at any level.