Larry Correia won’t be one of the guests when the Origins Game Fair takes place June 13-17 in Columbus, OH. Shortly after publicizing that Correia had been added to the lineup, John Ward, the event’s Executive Director, received so many negative social media comments (on Twitter, particularly) that he announced Correia’s invitation has been rescinded.
Ward wrote on Facebook:
I want to discuss our invitation to Larry Correia a guest at Origins. By all counts he is a very talented author.
Unfortunately, when he was recommended I was unaware of some personal views that are specifically unaligned with the philosophy of our show and the organization.
I want to thank those of you that brought this error to our attention. Origins is an inclusive and family friendly event. We focus on fun and gaming, not discourse and controversy.
I felt it necessary to recend [sic] his invitation to participate in the show. I apologize again to those of you that were looking forward to seeing him at Origins.
John Ward, Executive Director
Many of the critical tweets mentioned Correia’s history with Sad Puppies.
Correia subsequently responded on Facebook with a statement that begins:
So I’m no longer the writer guest of honor at origins. My invitation has been revoked. It was the usual nonsense. Right after I was announced as a guest some people started throwing a temper tantrum about my alleged racist/sexist/homophobic/whatever (of course, with zero proof or actual examples), and the guy in charge (John Ward) immediately folded. He didn’t even talk to me first. He just accepted the slander and gave me the boot in an email that talked about how “inclusive” they are….
His statement also says “none of these people can ever find any actual examples of me being sexist, racist, or homophobic.”
BEFORE AND AFTER:
@Mark
Nothing wrong with that. Sometimes it takes a few go rounds before you get somewhere.
@Hampus
If making a side comment to your own mention of a subject is a gish gallop, then a cornucopia can be defined as a single saltine cracker. Duane Gish was nothing if not a cornucopia of B.S.
ETA: Moon’s disinvitation was subsequent to Racefail 2009, but was certainly influenced by it.
Please note that I updated a comment, because I used the racefail name erroneously.
ETA: I see that you noticed.
Dear David W.,
Once again: an explanation is not an excuse.
“But… reasons…” is condoning prejudice and bigotry, and nothing more.
“Perceived differences,” more of the same.
Yes, yes, myriad marginalized groups in US history have been faced with the same thing… and it was bigotry then and it is bigotry now.
pax / Ctein
@ Ctein,
I think you have to make the good faith effort when countering prejudice and bigotry. At least then no one can later say they didn’t know better. I can understand WisCon’s decision to disinvite Moon given the passions that resulted from her initial comments, as some did make a sincere argument to her about why she was wrong to oppose the mosque near Ground Zero. The WisCon concom was initially open to her still being GoH as well – IF there was a constructive discussion that could be had. It turned out there wasn’t and that was that. So it goes.
Dear Robert Wood,
100% agreement.
~~~~~
Dear David W.,
“…It’s just to make clear that the debate continues elsewhere, whether it takes place at WisCon or not….”
Oh. Oh my dear. Thank you, thank you so very much, because clearly I was living in ignorant darkness and you have led me into the light.
In fact, I think I may speak for the whole class in thanking you, because none of us, not a single one of us living in the era of TRUMP and RINGO and CORREA and WRIGHT and HOYT had even the faintest notion, any glimmering of that. In our profound unawareness, we all thought these were settled matters, well beyond debate and everyone existed in comity and consensus.
There is no way to thank you enough for bringing us out of our woeful and unforgivable ignorance.
I am sure that it is merely an unavoidable and insignificant side effect that the sum total function of your posts is to enable and condone prejudice and bigotry. Collateral damage, easily ignored in light of the huge victory you have achieved over our ignorance!
Yes, I’m calling bullshit.
– pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. Dragon Dictate in training! ]
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— Ctein’s Online Gallery. http://ctein.com
— Digital Restorations. http://photo-repair.com
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@ Ctein
Sarcasm duly noted.
@Ultragotha:
*Loud applause.* The “whatabout Women in X” derailment tactic is always boring.
Let’s talk about the possibility of Christian sharia
All the attempts to enshrine the right to discriminate based on “religious freedom” are horrifying.
@Robert Wood @ Ctein:
I also think that all attempts to communicate between humans will have messy lingustic dimensions to them There! Fixed that for you!
Seriously, though, I agree!
Re: anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish bias in America. I moved to rural Texas to teach 25 years ago, and the first year I taught here assigned a group exercise on Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine which asked the class to compare the Christian and the Chippewa religious beliefs in the novel. Stunned silence fell. One brave student finally raised their hand and asked me what Christians? I was perplexed but pointed out the nuns in the convent who taught the children. There was a collective gasp, and several students said, CATHOLICS?????????
I had not realized how adamantly anti-Catholic the Southern Baptist denomination was (that has changed a bit in recent years as the fundamentalist extremists in both groups bonded over the common cause of denying women reproductive health rights).
@David W.,
All you seem to be saying is that “there are, and have always been, people who have misgivings; these people’s misgivings have to be addressed”. That doesn’t follow, though; there are misgivings that are misguided, irrational, or similar, and where “addressing” those “misgivings” could only be done by doing an injustice to the people who are the target of the “misgivings”, and would also never resolve them precisely because they are not rational in the first place.
Xenophobia remains xenophobia, whomever it is directed towards, whatever the context or timeframe.
One thing to remember is that everyone carries prejudices and biases – many of which we’re not aware that we carry. That is why Unconscious Bias and Implicit Stereotype have become well-known concepts, and Unconscious Bias Training is about helping people recognize those unconscious biases in themselves (and in others).
In the case of what Elizabeth Moon wrote, I have a sense that it showed precisely an unconscious bias on her part – a bias against muslims that she probably wasn’t even aware she was holding (since it all seemed so logical and rational to her until it was pointed out).
The important thing when discovering that you (not a particular ‘you’ but the general ‘you’) hold an unconscious bias is really what you do next: do you double down and defend your prejudice? Or do you recognize that you hold this bias, and try to work on getting rid of it? (The latter will take time, and effort.)
@ Christian Brunschen
Let’s switch the subject to global warming, which isn’t tied up with bigotry so much, and how frustrating it can still be to have a discussion with a skeptic who has been fed misleading information from some denialist source. I think to counter that it’s necessary to find some point that they can understand which gets around said bias. You still have to perhaps explain the physics of greenhouse gases and why alternative explanations like stones falling into the oceans don’t explain why the oceans are warming as well as rising (yes, it’s that simplistic sometimes!). It certainly takes effort, but it’s a little easier when it doesn’t involve a lot of emotional baggage too.
@David W,
no, let’s not shift goalposts.
// Christian
@Christian Brunschen
It’s not shifting goal posts to look at the problem of bias through another lens. It’s still about coming up with facts and an explanation that for someone else makes sense. I think you’re correct about Moon’s perhaps unconscious bias, BTW.
@David W: I suggest you go read this article and follow all the links to the studies to see why so many of us think what you seem to be proposing is a total waste of time: Denial Science
Yes, Mother Jones is EEK liberal bias BUT I chose it over other articles reporting on the same topic because of all the links to the studies.
Plus, it gets a good evaluation from the Media Bias Fact Check site (which should be required reading for everybody these days):
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/mother-jones/
(my emphasis)
@Meredith
Thank you.
Also, I enjoy hearing about the books you enjoy as well.
A question on Brexit. I didn’t spend a ton of attention on it for obvious reasons. One factor that did make it through was that the EU has gone a bit overboard when it comes to regulating trade. I perceived that some folks were a bit peeved about a trade agreement that was increasing regulatory compliance issues rather than making it easier for people to sell goods to a broader market. Was this a mistaken perception on my part? Was it a lesser factor?
@johnstick & @imnotandrei
Thank you for the giving folks a reason to smile.
@kathodus
FWIW, I share that perspective. I’ve tried out a couple of conservative/libertarian SF/F groups. Their ratio of engagement to “hur hur – their stoopid” was low enough that I left. I was a contrarian there as well.
So thanks to you, Meredith, Lis, Lenore, Mike, and a few others for elevating things a bit here.
@Lenore Jones
Does it have to be one or the other? Can I approve of some of her comments and not others? Can I note that some of her comments were appropriate at the time, but might be inappropriate in another 5 or 10 years?
The short version is that she carefully delineated her concerns about Islamic extremism and not about Muslims in general. At that point, it wasn’t Islamophobia, IMHO.
There were a couple of points in her essay where I think she wandered close to the point where that might have been a concern. Or put another way, while I may disagree with calling her Islamophobic based on that essay, I appreciate where others might be concerned.
She was talking a bit about the responsibilities of citizenship. (Heinlein!!) I think there are some elements in that discussion that are worthwhile. Not all of them, but some. Please note that she broke out the broad brush against Tea Partiers and Libertarians which allowed her to splash paint on my shoes.
Regards,
Dann
@ robinareid
Thanks for the cite. I recall reading Mooney’s article(s) back then about the wall of denial that people can and do erect. I won’t waste my time (at least not any more) with an out-and-out denialist for the reasons you’re clearly familiar with, but I think it’s worth engaging people who aren’t totally in the denialist camp, as well as counter denialists in other ways. That’s what politics is about, after all.
Let’s switch the subject to global warming
Is that the £8 rate?
https://youtu.be/uLlv_aZjHXc
For Contradictions, go down the hall, past the loo…
@Dann
That is certainly a claim that was made. Unfortunately, a lot of the supporting “evidence” was either entirely made up or misleading at best. A famous example (in British terms) was when the Leave campaign somehow managed to convince a number of particularly credulous voters that the EU had indulged in totalitarianism by banning bananas that were too straight or too bendy for no reason.
@Meredith– I never did understand the fuss about the bananas. Couldn’t figure who wanted them straighter, or curvier, or why (though I could imagine a number of wholly theoretical reasons why it might matter.)
It left me very, very amazed that they weren’t talking about things that mattered more than the degree of curve on a banana, like the effects of being outside the customs union that the US has the trade deal with.
There actually is a sound reason behind the banana thing. Because if bananas are too curvy, it makes them more difficult to pack and so you can pack fewer of them into a crate. However, if e.g. a grocery store buys a banana crate and finds that it contains a lot fewer bananas than expected, even though they paid the same, then of course they will be very annoyed. And this is the reason behind regulating banana curves, to ensure that a given crate always contains roughly the same number of bananas.
Now I agree that the EU is occasionally prone to overregulation or rather to passing regulations that are aimed at big multinationals and instead end up harming small businesses, such as the VAT regulations and the new data protection guideline.
But the main reason behind the Brexit vote was pure xenophobia aimed mainly at Eastern European immigrants, particularly immigrants from Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, all of which are white and Christian (Catholic and Orthodox) and work in the UK, often in the agricultural sector. There were claims that many of these immigrants were criminals, a horrible prejudice against certain Eastern Europeans that is difficult to root out, that they were a drain on social services and the NHS (wrong, since the NHS largely runs on the work of EU immigrants, while pretty much everybody who can avoids dealing with them), that their children were a burden on British schools (children going to school. How shocking!). It had very little to do with Islam, though the wave of hate crimes following the Brexit vote didn’t just affect Eastern Europeans, but any Europeans, including those who had lived in Britain for decades (one case was a military veteran in his 80s who’d fled Poland and fought for the UK in WWII), as well as immigrants from Commonwealth countries who have nothing to do with the EU at all.
@David W
In this case, that’s a huge shift. I get that you aren’t trying to shift the goalposts in the debate sense, but you are comparing apples to oranges. Getting people to grok “controversial” scientific facts – relating to global warming, vaccines, evolution, etc. – is a whole different deal than dealing with xenophobia. One of the first articles discussing this to pop up: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds
On the other hand, xenophobia – whether it’s anti-Muslim, anti-gay, anti-black, anti-semitic, or what have you – can be addressed very easily: normalize it. My grandmother became much less homophobic when she started going to a gay hair dresser regularly. My father’s take on marijuana users as shiftless no-gooders changed drastically when he started white water kayaking (and therefore interacting with pot smokers). My niece’s reaction to hearing about or seeing Muslims is cringe-inducing (admittedly, she’s at a melodramatic age), because she only sees them rarely, and never in her tiny hometown. Facts will never change a closed mind – only hands-on experience does that. And most people aren’t big-R racists – they consider individuals they meet as individuals, it’s unfamiliar groups they hate and fear.
@David W.: My late aunt was an islamophobic Catholic, who forwarded anti-Muslim screeds that were identical to the screeds against Kennedy during the 1960 election, yet she was completely unable to comprehend the arguments were identical except for the names that had been filed off when I pointed it out. But it’s possible that part of the problem is that I called her a religious bigot, and I suspect most religious bigots totally shut down rational thought when you call them out for it.
@Paul: I happen to like Nelson’s Ice Cream shop on Snelling, partly because they are within walking distance, and partly because their servings are enormous for the price. However, they don’t make their own ice cream, they sell Kemps and ice cream from another local creamery whose name I’ve forgotten.
@JJ: Yikes! Mine was nowhere near that bad – but all I’ll say is, never link PayPal to any other account or it’s used as an excuse not to authorise refunds by other companies (they take the pre-existing authorisation as meaning “always legitimate payments, even when provably otherwise”. Basically my Sony PSN account got brute-forced and someone used the existing PayPal authorisation there to spend over $300 on FIFA points (a game I’ve literally never owned) and transfer them to another account, but not before he changed my email address(!) and password associated with my account.
I eventually got them to a point where they’d agree to refund the money to my PSN account, but that would mean the money would still be with Sony and not where it belonged (ie in my bank account or somewhere I could use it for things other than Sony products, which I’ve decided I’m no longer buying). Eventually I convinced PayPal to get the money back for me, but it took a long time, at a time where I wasn’t particularly liquid and only just got my rent paid.
Given the thousands of dollars I’ve spent on Sony Playstation products over the years, you’d think they’d be more willing to not piss me off – I know that profit from specifically me isn’t even a rounding error to them but I was still worth more to them as a paying customer and it would’ve cost them very little to maintain that goodwill.
@Bruce A
We get a lot of this here. Some of the worst anti-refugee rhetoric comes from people who have been refugees or immigrants themselves, whether it’s old people who had to flee from those parts of Poland, the Czech Republic and Russie that were once German, people from former East Germany (including those who actually fled across the iron curtain), or ethnic German from Russia who immigrated in the 1990s. And when you point out that they used to be refugees and/or immigrants themselves and that a lot of people didn’t want them here either, so maybe they should show some empathy, the answer you get is, “But that’s different. We were Germans.” Sigh.
Dann:
She pretended to do thay at the start, then directly went into islamophobia territory, saying that muslims weren’t normal. So no. She totally failed to delianate betwen extremusts and Muslins in general.
I can only conclude, again, that you have a high acceptence of bigotry.
@johnstick (with apologies to David W) Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
Welcome to the Hotel Scrollifornia
Such a lovely place (such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face
They’re livin’ it up at the Hotel Scrollifornia
Any time of year (any time of year)
You can file ’em here
(skipping to the third verse, which always struck me as the most SF/F. Don Henley is a master wordsmith.)
Mirrors on the ceiling, depict Godstalks on ice
(and she said) “We are all just prisoners here, of our own device”
And in the Pixel’s chambers, they gathered for the feast
They stabbed it with their scrolly knives, but they just can’t file the beast
Last thing I remember, I was running for the door
I had to find the passage back, to the place I was before
“Relax,” said the Mike-man, “we are programmed to see”
“You can tickbox any time you like, but you can never leave”
@Bonnie.
Applause! That was fantastic.
Well done, Bonnie! *applauds*
Or to put it another way: “Islamo…phobia.”
“Islam is considered a threat”
One is 15,000 Muslims is a violent extremist or terrorist.
More than 1 in 15,000 white christian males in the US are murderers. In truth, ten times as many (give or take).
I know who should be “considered a threat,” if we;’re going to brand any subset of the population as a threat, based on the actions of a minuscule fraction.
Deciding it’s Muslims? That’s bigotry. Nothing but prejudice.
pax / Ctein
Ah, yes. Take one sentence. Strip it of context. Claim that it is the only idea present. A sadly omni-partisan approach.
Regards,
Dann
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome. – Isaac Asimov
I think we can all see the context, Dann. We can read. Sometimes isolating a sentence is stripping it of excuses not context.
@JJ and now I am earwormed. 🙂
^what Lenora said
Paul Weimer: @JJ and now I am earwormed.
What??? DID SOMEONE LINK TO THAT DAMNED RADIO SFWA VIDEO AGAIN???!!
All we hear is Radio Sif wa
Radio goo goo
Radio Sif wa
All we hear is radio SIf wa
Radio blah blah
Radio, what’s new?
Radio, Sfwa still loves you
Dear Lenora,
What you said. Plays the same way with or without “context.”
Thanks!
pax / Ctein
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@ Paul Weimer:
Slight possible riff on your version:
All we hear is Radio Sif Wa
Radio Scroll File
Radio Sif Wa
All we hear is Radio Sif Wa
Radio Pix El
Radio what’s scrolled?
Radio, Sif Wa still scrolls you.
Oh, Danny Boy,
The pix, the pix are scrolling
With apologies to Chief O’Brien, Thomas Moore, Ireland, and the Union army (and Kip W for kicking this off with Danny Boy, though, perhaps, that’s apportioning blame 😛 ):
The filer fen to the scrolls are gone,
In the stacks of books you will find them;
Mike Glyer’s words they hath posted on,
And their wild fifth slung behind them;
“Blog of Scroll!” sang the filk-i-er bard,
“Though all the words pixelled be,
One post, at least, thy tick shall stalk
One faithful mark shall mail me!”
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