265 thoughts on “2016 Rabid Puppies Picks”

1. Tasha, Dahlgren sounds quite bizarre.

   It seems to have been a conscious effort on Delany’s part to create a work inspired by a combination of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

   Delany’s earlier works like Nova, Babel-17, and The Einstein Intersection are much more accessible.

2. I know that wild-animal “burial” is attested in Tibet, but I’ve never heard of endocannibalism being attested there.

   I don’t know about the cannibalism part, but “sky burials” is still done in some parts of the world. Zoroastrians in India do it, for example. And there is a little known “silent spring”/DDT-type crisis going on there where vultures have been driven nearly to extirpation thanks to a drug called diclofenac that was given to cattle. The drug is fine for the cattle, but when they die and the vultures eat them, it kills the vultures. This leads to dead cattle lying around uneaten and rotting, and an increase in rat and wild dog populations as they move in to replace the vultures, bringing diseases with them. It also causes problems for sky burials, where the corpses aren’t eaten. Some communities are using large parabolic mirrors to concentrate sunlight on the corpses, accelerating decay, and some are resorting to “ground burial” instead of sky burial.

   BTW, it is possible that Göbekli Tepe (IMHO, one of the most interesting and significant archeological finds in the world) was used for sky burial.

3. Yet Dhalgren sold over a million copies and was apparently quite popular with young readers, who can’t all have been familiar with his earlier and more accessible works.

4. I think that quite a way back in this thread I said that the Castalia House “expose” was a trap to gather comments that could be converted into rabid talking points.
   So, yeah, it was.

5. Mark, confirming once again just how big an idiot John Wright is.

6. @Mark-Kitteh
   It’s sad how quickly we fell into the trap so we could be used. Next time some puppy comes to spew nonesense perhaps we could honor those that who’ve been abused and refuse to get into their rhetorical Aristotle BS.

   ETA: simply post “we don’t discuss nonsense with bad faith people on the internet”

7. So, yeah, it was.

   Given what’s in JCW’s Orphans of Chaos books, he doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

8. @Aaron

   If only the prospect of being seen as an outrageous hypocrite was capable of stopping JCW from spewing nonsense.

   (But, yes, it’s just a storm in a teapot. Unfortunately we’ve seen that they can make stuff like this run and run and run)

9. JCW takes but he also gives. He equates witches with gay people, and calls for murder (again).

10. Actually, someone should probably take a screen shot of that post before he wises up and deletes it.

11. I predict that if he gets called on that on he’ll point to the phrase “a modest proposal” and say that it’s satire. And write a long screed about illiterate thermagants who neither recognizes nor understands satire.

    I admit it, though: I’m to illiterate to understand exactly what it’s supposed to be satire of and what the underlying meaning is supposed to be.

12. “A decline in sexual disorders is a central factor in increasing the law, order, peace and security of a society. Since there is allegedly no cure for the condition, burning would seem to be a harsh, but logical, application of Darwinian principles all we atheists hold so dear.”

    So Wright wants to burn all non-vanilla or non-heteroies. Ok. That was one blogpost that would have given him time in jail in Sweden.

13. I admit it, though: I’m to illiterate to understand exactly what it’s supposed to be satire of and what the underlying meaning is supposed to be.

    ‘we atheists’ would seem to imply that it’s a satire of atheism. He himself does not propose such actions, but atheists and ‘Darwinists’ (he claims) would, if their principles were consistent.

14. Thus showing he doesn’t understand either atheism or evolutionary theory.

15. Thus showing he doesn’t understand either atheism or evolutionary theory.

    Not understanding the things he talks about is kind of Wright’s specialty.

16. And I don’t doubt we’re now in for an Easter post from Wright where he dislocates his shoulder patting himself on his back and crowing that Jesus would hate exactly the people he hates.

17. It makes no skin off my pocket what “talking points” Puppies gather. I don’t care what they think.

18. Eight corporeal and eight spiritual Works of Mercy and the only one JCW can get into is the admonishment of sinners. Which, that’s not even quite what the Gospel says.

19. In the U.S., the age of consent is usually between 16 and 18, but Romeo and Juliet laws in some states push the age as low as 12.

    Historically, it’s been as low as 10 in at least one state.

20. “A decline in pathologizing sexuality disorders…”

    FTFY, JCW. 😉

21. A decline in sexual disorders is a central factor in increasing the law, order, peace and security of a society.

    A premise unsupported by evidence. So much for JCW’s vaunted “Vulcan logic”.

    Since there is allegedly no cure for the condition, burning would seem to be a harsh, but logical, application of Darwinian principles all we atheists hold so dear.

    One might note that JCW’s preferred denomination was heavily in favor of this sort of thing for quite a while, and under its watch society was considerably less peaceful, secure, and less orderly than it is now.

22. Aaron: One might note that JCW’s preferred denomination was heavily in favor of this sort of thing for quite a while, and under its watch society was considerably less peaceful, secure, and less orderly than it is now.

    Uhh? Except for being a slap at JCW (I understood that part) this is practically nonsense.

23. Except for being a slap at JCW (I understood that part) this is practically nonsense.

    Are you saying that the world is less orderly, peaceful, and secure than it was when religious groups were able to condemn people for sexual deviancy and potentially burn them? Because everything that I’ve seen on the subject says that contrary to popular belief, the world of the past was considerably more violent, more dangerous, and less law-biding than it is now.

24. I don’t miss the days of the crusades or the Inquisition. Might be because I’m Jewish.

25. Aaron: That’s right, I’m saying you’re making up your own evidence and not even sharing with me what that is.

    I grew up in a world which included the Soviet Union, and Mao Tse-Tung’s China, where the rulers were neither worshippers of any supernatural deity nor noted for making the world a safer place to live.

26. That’s right, I’m saying you’re making up your own evidence and not even sharing with me what that is.

    I’d start with The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, and go from there. There is a lot of evidence that the world now is much less violent than it ever was before, even when one accounts for the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.

27. @Mark (kitteh) – I think that quite a way back in this thread I said that the Castalia House “expose” was a trap to gather comments that could be converted into rabid talking points.
    So, yeah, it was.

    @Tasha Turner – It’s sad how quickly we fell into the trap so we could be used. Next time some puppy comes to spew nonesense perhaps we could honor those that who’ve been abused and refuse to get into their rhetorical Aristotle BS.

    ETA: simply post “we don’t discuss nonsense with bad faith people on the internet”

    Eh, it’s not a trap if you know it’s coming. It was either going to be selectively pulling quotes to “prove” somethingsomething, or a refusal here to discuss because complicity. The only surprise is that it’s JCW firing the shot. I wouldn’t have expected his purple frothiness to be thought suited to the material, because it looks spectacularly ridiculous whenever he writes anything emotional. VD would have been better off doing his own grunt work.

28. Aaron: Throwing a book link at me and bailing is not showing your evidence. Throwing a book link at me and repeating your conclusion is not even an argument. Dropping your rather blinkered focus on religious groups and retreating to a merely “the world is now much less violent than it ever was before” is an abandonment of your original assertion.

29. Dropping your rather blinkered focus on religious groups and retreating to a merely “the world is now much less violent than it ever was before” is an abandonment of your original assertion.

    The world was more violent in the past than it is now. I’m not having a “blinkered focus on religious groups”. I’m saying that back in the good old days that JCW hearkens back to when religious groups held enough political power to condemn “sexual deviants”, the world was less orderly, less peaceful, and less law-abiding. If you don’t care to examine evidence, then don’t bother to read things like Pinsker’s book. I will quote Pinsker:

    Historical data from past centuries are far less complete, but the existing estimates of death tolls, when calculated as a proportion of the world’s population at the time, show at least nine atrocities before the 20th century (that we know of) which may have been worse than World War II. They arose from collapsing empires, horse tribe invasions, the slave trade, and the annihilation of native peoples, with wars of religion close behind. World War I doesn’t even make the top ten.

    He goes on:

    According to the most recent compendium of history’s worst atrocities, Matthew White’s Great Big Book of Horrible Things (Norton, 2011), religions have been responsible for 13 of the 100 worst mass killings in history, resulting in 47 million deaths. Communism has been responsible for 6 mass killings and 67 million deaths. If defenders of religion want to crow, “We were only responsible for 47 million murders—Communism was worse!”, they are welcome to do so, but it is not an impressive argument.

    Many religious massacres took place in centuries in which the world’s population was far smaller. Crusaders, for example, killed 1 million people in world of 400 million, for a genocide rate that exceeds that of the Nazi Holocaust. The death toll from the Thirty Years War was proportionally double that of World War I and in the range of World War II in Europe.

    He goes on, and the data points to the world being much less violent now, both in terms of war and state-sanctioned killing, and in terms of extralegal violence. The murder rate of today is substantially lower than what historical estimates show it was in the past. According to the New York Times:

    New data presented at the conference by a Dutch scholar, Pieter Spierenburg, showed that the homicide rate in Amsterdam, for example, dropped from 47 per 100,000 people in the mid-15th century to 1 to 1.5 per 100,000 in the early 19th century.

    Professor Stone has estimated that the homicide rate in medieval England was on average 10 times that of 20th century England. A study of the university town of Oxford in the 1340’s showed an extraordinarily high annual rate of about 110 per 100,000 people.

    The world used to be a much more violent and dangerous place. The danger and violence has not gone away, but there are multiple lines of evidence showing that the world today is a safer place than it has ever been before.

30. Well, Mike, you could look at people charting the data

    http://ourworldindata.org/data/violence-rights/homicides/

    http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/06/long-term-trend-in-homicide-rates.html

31. Aaron: Now here something substantial we can discuss.

    When do you say were “the good old days that JCW hearkens back to when religious groups held enough political power to condemn ‘sexual deviants'”? When are you saying they ended?

    And you conjoin this with the idea that, before this hypothetical period ended, the “world was less orderly, less peaceful, and less law-abiding,” with the evidence being (1) mass atrocities throughout recorded history, and (2) the current homicide rate in parts of Europe contrasted with the medieval homicide rate.

    I have two problems with using mass atrocities statistics to support your claim. First, they are black swan events involving millions of deaths. Most people throughout history have lived in the “peaceful” trough between the last one of these and the next. And yet we have many people still alive today who can remember the most recent one you name (WWII), and many more who grew up hearing about it from those who lived through it. You aren’t going to be able to successfully argue mass death events over centuries against a snapshot of recent crime statistics — apples and oranges. Second, playing scoreboard between religious and communist atrocities obscures that they may have something in common rooted in human nature. You assume a unique cause, even in the face of your own evidence that it is not a unique cause.

32. I wrote:

    “Consider me an emissary from civilization. Dulany has been apparently been advocating this crap for like 30 years”

    Nigel responded:

    “Whatever civilisation it was that sent you needs a higher standard of truth-telling. ‘Dulany’s’ interview, pretty much roundly condemned here, was in 2014, post-dating his awards. Unless you’re insisting that the fictional works cited count as advocacy (which you seem to be), in which case please show your work. For once. Unless your civilsation believes that assertion trumps proof or analysis.”

    I counter with this Delany quote from 1994:

    ““I read the NAMBLA [Bulletin] fairly regularly and I think it is one of the most intelligent discussions of sexuality I’ve ever found. I think before you start judging what NAMBLA is about, expose yourself to it and see what it is really about. What the issues they are really talking about, and deal with what’s really there rather than this demonized notion of guys running about trying to screw little boys. I would have been so much happier as an adolescent if NAMBLA had been around when I was 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.” — Samuel R. Delany, June 25, 1994.
    ”

    NAMBLA of course (as its name makes plain) advocates for pederasty. That is the one and only thing that it does.

33. @Cheryl S.

    Indeed, looking at the actual libel itself, the last page is entirely utterly specious attempts to link a wide area of vocal women or LGBT folks to condoning pedophilia. That this group was going to wipe the Cheeto dust off and start cackling about their 14 dimensional sooper genius-ry was a given.

34. @Dan, you still haven’t answered my other question, which was: And who else (because I’m not reading that Castalia House POS unless I have to) am I supposed to reject? Since I haven’t nominated Delany for any awards and don’t read his work, I’m pretty sure I’ve done everything in my power to reject him, so now I’m looking for others to shun. Please help me out here.

    @TheYoungPretender – That this group was going to wipe the Cheeto dust off and start cackling about their 14 dimensional sooper genius-ry was a given.

    Yup, but are you sure about actually wiping off the Cheeto dust?

35. I said:
    “(5) Why on Earth are the people here so morally ambiguous about this stuff? Those excerpts from Dulany’s writings would be utterly horrifying to any normal person. Folks here are strangely sanguine about it. I speak again as an emissary from civilization: you may lack the neurological hardware to see the problem, but trust the rest the of humanity when they tell you pedophilia is really bad.”

    This was misunderstood. To be more specific, I saw a fair amount of apologetics regarding Delany’s literary pedophilia porn on this thread, explaining why his shocking literary pedo porn (which goes back decades and isn’t from 2014) is actually okay. Geez!

    Among a normal community, one would expect a little less empathy and relating, and a little more horror and dismay. I guess that is what the author of SSaRR meant by safe space.

36. @Dan

    I can’t say this enough, but if you’re going to contribute your going to have to show a better grasp of the English language. No-one here said pedophilia is okay, and if you don’t have the English language abilities to parse that fact, you really can’t contribute.

37. Cheryl said,

    “@Dan, you still haven’t answered my other question, which was: And who else (because I’m not reading that Castalia House POS unless I have to) am I supposed to reject? ”

    I am not speaking about you specifically but rather the community. Who else? The community certainly hasn’t even rejected Delany. He remains a SFWA Grandmaster, a rarified group indeed. TheYoungPretender keeps insisting that nobody in this community is okay with pedophilia, but Delany’s honored status says otherwise.

38. Forgive my ignorance. Is Delaney a pedophile?

    Because the major cases of pedophilia in science fiction I know of are Walter Breen and Marion Zimmer Bradley, and so far as I know once that became known both of them became nonpersons within the community.

39. @PIMMN

    You’re correct; the only real fire here is that Delany has some really, really distasteful fetishes that he writes about. They’re distasteful, they are not present in anything he wrote when he was big, and he hasn’t gone over the line into actual acts.

    However, if you stop at the truth, there’s no way to smear John Scalzi, or various women Teddy likely views as acid-attack worthy, or various (more successful than Teddy) writers that Teddy hates, so thus some libels. Libels with enough wildly out of context quotations that “show” nothing so much as Teddy and his little followers desperation.

40. Dan:

    You have admitted your total lack of knowledge of SF history. You only read about this a few days ago the first time, so you believe these few days of reading since then makes you know things. You are wrong.

    You write now as if Delaneys writing from 1994 was common knowledge at the time in the SF community. It was not. His comments were part of an internal discussion in the gay community. NAMBLA was at that time part of the International Lesbian and Gay Association, but were expelled that year when knowledge about pedophilia started to spread. It was not a part of the discussion in the SF-world. Delaneys statements didn’t became well known until summer of 2014, 20 years later.

    So what do you think people should have done different the last two years? What awards during the last two years shouldn’t they have given him? Please explain.

    I also agree with Greg Hullender above that I wouldn’t have voted him to be a grandmaster now. But now is now and then was then.

    As you yourself are an admitted reader of Beale who thinks it is good for the civilization to throw acid in the face of small girls, take the voting rights from women and honour known terrorists you should get down from your high horses. Start with condemning Castalia House and Beale, then we can talk

41. I do think it weird that people who want to remove Delaneys title of Grandmaster are the same people that wants a bust of known racist and hatemonger Lovecraft to be an award.

    So let me say this: Both Lovecraft and Delaney deserves to be called Grandmasters. Both of them have expressed horrible opinions. None of them should have their image placed on a bust and given away as an award. We shouldn’t burn the books of anyone of them.

42. @Dan – I am not speaking about you specifically but rather the community. Who else? The community certainly hasn’t even rejected Delany. He remains a SFWA Grandmaster, a rarified group indeed. TheYoungPretender keeps insisting that nobody in this community is okay with pedophilia, but Delany’s honored status says otherwise.

    You used the plural about people within the SF community who should be rejected for pedophilia, only naming Delany, whose connection to the crime of child rape is in wanting to be a victim, or at least wishing he’d had that option, not in being an actual pedophile. Since I’ve done everything in my personal power to reject Delany, I am still waiting to hear who else I should be shunning. Heinlein? Piers Anthony? Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven?

43. There will always be Stalinists who’ll insist on removing people whose history they don’t like from the photos. I guess Dan represents this group here.

44. I counter with this Delany quote from 1994:

    Disturbing. A particularly well-known interview that, was it? Show your work.

    To be more specific, I saw a fair amount of apologetics regarding Delany’s literary pedophilia porn on this thread,

    To be precise, you saw no apologetics whatsoever. If you’re going to keep lying about what people say there’s seems little point in carrying on a discussion at all.

45. “Because the major cases of pedophilia in science fiction I know of are Walter Breen and Marion Zimmer Bradley, and so far as I know once that became known both of them became nonpersons within the community.”

    Incorrect. Breen was first convicted of child molestation in 1954. His problems with sexually abusing children scandal erupted publicly in a major way with the 1963 publication of “Breendoggle”. He continued to be a part of the community, molesting children at SFF conventions, until his 1990 imprisonment after multiple further molestations.

    Regarding MZB, she was exposed as an abuser in 2014. But died in 1999.

46. “There will always be Stalinists who’ll insist on removing people whose history they don’t like from the photos.”

    Oh Hampus, but what about Hitler?

    Stalin wasn’t Stalin for editing photos. Spurned lovers do that to exes on Facebook every day. The problem was that Stalin killed people and removed them from photos.

    Regarding removing honors from authors, that obviously applies only to the Lovecrafts and never the Delanys.

47. @Dan

    As a new poster I don’t expect you know the history here. MZB came up in a greatest books discussion a while back. Like a lot of folks, the posters here publically expressed their abhorrence and mentioned getting rid of her books. They couldn’t read them untainted anymore now that they knew her history. I think if you walk through a used book store you’ll find a pile of Bradley’s sitting on the shelf from people with that reaction.

    Breen was known in a small circle of the con-going public. As not part of that circle I hadn’t even heard of him until the last few years. That’s probably true of the majority of sci-fi fans. Like a lot of families with abuse there was certainly a component of denial in con-going sci-fi that enabled him. That was also almost thirty years ago. I don’t think you’ll see anyone defending him now.

    Delany is in that weird valley of expressing horrible thoughts but there is no evidence of acts. His views also weren’t known all that well until recently. If they were I expect he would not have earned Grandmaster at the least. In any case, no one here has the power to strip that honor from him.

    You seem to have made a leap that not commonly known facts were common knowledge and just ignored. You make another leap from that to tarring a whole community. I think you are mistaken in your assumptions and should examine them.

48. @Dan
    You’ve still ignored an actual survivor of sexual abuse at a young age asking you to stop this conversation as it’s hurtful to Real people who’ve been abused.

    You’ve ignored the response of what the SFF community is doing at conventions by having Codes of Conduct.

    You are going on and on and on about Delany who was Sexually abused at a young age by an older man and writes about his feelings on it. The feelings of survivors of sexual abuse at a young age, especially when they don’t get therapy, are queer, are black, are treated badly by society are going to be difficult for unabused SWM to comprehend unless they have lots of compassion.

    You show little understanding of abuse, compassion, or the English language. If you give a shit about children being abused by pedophiles please stop engaging in this discussion as your behavior and words show the opposite.

    ETA corrected rape comment

49. Samuel Delany, SFWA Grandmaster, in his own horrifying words:
    “The consent of a seven-, eight-, or nine-year old is not the same thing as the consent of a seventeen- or eighteen-year old. And the “consent” of a three, four, and five year old means much less—especially if it’s negative. But it must count for something, otherwise you are just saying the child is not human and has no feelings or agency whatsoever—which, in itself, is abusive”

    So Delany is saying it’s, like, abusive not to abuse a three-year-old… Surely he can’t mean that.

    “Will, in these letters I pretty much stand by what I’ve said. ”

    O.

50. @Tasha — Interesting take. Rejecting pedos constitutes abuse, by talking about it. Better to leave them be. Safe space indeed, for whom?

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