Moon, WisCon Covered in Mundane Press

Elizabeth Moon was interviewed by NewsOK, the Oklahoman online, on October 23 about WisCon’s decision to drop her as one of its guests of honor. Here are the first four paragraphs:

A best-selling Texas science fiction author has been un-invited as a Guest of Honor at a literary convention in the wake of controversial remarks she posted on her personal blog Sept. 11 on the subject of citizenship, assimilation and Islam.

Elizabeth Moon is a best-selling author who lives in Florence, a small town of approximately 1,000 people in Williamson County, 40 miles north of Austin. She said she received a phone call Wednesday evening from a representative of WisCon, the self-described “world’s leading feminist science fiction convention”held in Wisconsin every spring, stating her invitation as a Guest of Honor had been rescinded.

Moon’s comments in her Sept. 11 posting, specifically on assimilation and Islam, has generated a firestorm of controversy among the science fiction community of authors.

Moon said she felt her comments were centrist and really didn’t expect them to generate as such controversy as they did. The polarization of American politics, world politics, for that matter,she said, decreases the opportunity for civil discourse. What we dare not mention – because of fear of backlash – and cannot discuss calmly, because of the actual backlash and the feeding frenzy, is often what most needs to be brought into the open….

The article also reports that after the convention’s decision was announced Moon stated on her blog: “WisCon management has the right to make whatever decisions they think best for the convention. I do not and did not dispute their right to rescind the invitation.”

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster for the story.]

46 thoughts on “Moon, WisCon Covered in Mundane Press

  1. “Responding to allegations that the convention’s action in dis-inviting might have a chilling effect on free speech, Moon agreed it might, “One, by intimidating or disgusting some who would otherwise have made useful contributions to a topic and thereby enriched the knowledge base. We lose the contributions of those who don’t participate.”

    If this is a direct quote, it is devastatingly ironic that she should assert this after deleting all the comments of those who were participating on the topic at her blog.

    If you want to “enrich the knowledge base”, you don’t begin by deleting all discussion and dismissing it as “slag”.

  2. At a certain point Elisabeth Moon closed off blog comments on the topic and deleted it all from her site. Engagement happened and she finally was done with the repetition and done with the endlessness of it all. Deleting comments and accepting no more of them on her personal blog wouldn’t seem too unforgivable a sin.

  3. Dave: Deleting comments and accepting no more of them on her personal blog wouldn’t seem too unforgivable a sin.

    I didn’t say it was. Moon had every right to do what she wished with comments on her own personal journal.

    (Though Livejournal, where her blog is hosted, gives the option of freezing comment threads and thus ending discussion if it’s getting out of hand: or disabling comments, thus ending discussion but preserving the commentthreads for later resurrection after tempers have cooled. Moon opted instead to delete all comments permanently.)

    Engagement happened and she finally was done with the repetition and done with the endlessness of it all.

    Yes. And my point is: Moon clearly cares so little for useful contributions to the topic she herself raised that she deleted all she could delete and referred to them as “slag”. She cared so little for “enriching the knowledge base” that she did her best to delete all contributions on her journal from the knowledgebase. So if that’s a direct quote, it’s ironic, because she plainly didn’t care if contributions to the debate were lost – she deleted them herself.

  4. Yonmei: Your last paragraph is answered by the sentence of mine that you’re responding to.

    No, it’s not, Dave. My last paragraph is about the irony of it: your sentence does not appear to notice that the irony exists.

    Do you yourself perceive the irony of Moon shutting down debate & deleting contributions to the knowledgebase – and then bemoaning how her disinvitation as GoH might lead to … er, shutting down debate and deleting contributions to the knowledgebase? Irony is subjective: I recognise that. But this did seem quite clearly ironic.

  5. It’s only ironic when you distort what she actually said, as you do here. The article noted: “Responding to allegations that the convention’s action in disinviting might have a chilling effect on free speech, Moon agreed it might, One, by intimidating or disgusting some who would otherwise have made useful contributions to a topic and thereby enriched the knowledge base. We lose the contributions of those who don’t participate.” You did notice, didn’t you, that this was said in the context of disallowing centrist viewpoints and opting only for one flavor of polarized opinion?

  6. You did notice, didn’t you, that this was said in the context of disallowing centrist viewpoints and opting only for one flavor of polarized opinion?

    Yes; Elizabeth Moon certainly appears to be in favour of opting for only one flavour of polarised opinion, her own. At least, on her own blog, when she disallowed all other viewpoints as slag and deleted them. Which, as we’ve agreed, was her right; BUT it’s ironic that having done so, she then suggests that WisCon’s decision not to honour her because of her own actions in shutting down discussion, might lead to other people behaving, in effect, just like she herself did when faced with intelligent dissent.

    In short, Elizabeth Moon appeals to be afraid that other people will act like she did, now they’ve seen that WisCon won’t choose to honour them if they do…

  7. @Yonmei: So far as I know no one commenting here was involved with WisCon/SF3’s decision (you weren’t, correct?)

    It would surprise me if that decision depended as much on Elizabeth Moon’s deleting comments from her blog as one would assume after reading the exchange here. What if she hadn’t deleted them, and let people post contrary views to their hearts content, while she moved on to discuss other things? Is there some reason to think this wouldn’t have reached the breaking point, short of her recanting the opinions she expressed?

  8. Thank you for the mind-reading act, but you really don’t get it. It was her type of centrist opinions which didn’t meet the hive mind, and having her remain as GoH would be seen as endorsing those kinds of opinions on the part of others.

    By the prevalent model of third-wave feminism, finally deleting comments and accepting no more of them even on her own personal blog was deemed a rejection of their particular and peculiar brand of the ‘consensus’ process.

    Thus, a “refusal to (forever) engage” that offended them. Not their way.
    Obviously they had to disinvite her. She wasn’t One Of Them.

  9. Mike; What if she hadn’t deleted them, and let people post contrary views to their hearts content, while she moved on to discuss other things?

    Well, she had other options on LJ. The simplest one would be to disable all comments on that entry, which would have “disappeared” them until she enabled comments again. She could have posted a notice to the effect that she was not at the moment able to deal, hence comments disabled. The next-simplest would have been to announce that she had frozen discussion because she felt it was getting out of hand, and to use the LJ freeze tool, which prevents people from adding comments to a thread. She opted instead to delete them all – which is actually a layer more complicated than freezing them – and then posted a derogatory notice in her journal about the comments. This absolute unwillingness to allow for respectful/intelligent disagreement with her views, I think had quite a bit to do with the disinvitation. One can deal with someone who is prepared to agree to disagree, to acknowledge that other views exist and respectful/intelligent debate on the issues deserves encouragement: but not someone who dismisses opposing viewpoints as “slag” and deletes them all.

    Dave: It was her type of centrist opinions which didn’t meet the hive mind, and having her remain as GoH would be seen as endorsing those kinds of opinions on the part of others.

    Well, yes, she openly stated she held racist, anti-immigrant views and regarded those views as “centrist”: she didn’t see what the problem was about declaring Muslims unfitted for citizenship or expressing the belief that American Muslims need to appreciate their mistreatment post-9/11 as “forbearance”. Those beliefs did not make her a good fit as a GoH for WisCon, which strives to be feminist and anti-racist.

    As someone noted on another blog, normally when a writer holds controversial views which make them an unsuitable fit to be GoH for a convention, they have made those views clear all along – and the decision “not to invite” is made in private concommittee discussions. Members of a convention are in effect all jointly paying to bring the GoH to the convention. They aren’t given a vote – the concommittee assesses privately who will be “good value”. If the GoH outs themselves post-invitation as someone who will not be a good fit – when members of the convention and members of the concommittee are suddenly declaring they will stay away if the bigot is honoured on their dime – well: what exactly do you propose the concom do? It’s their job to make sure that the GoH is a good fit – they’re spending their members money to bring the GoH to the con.

    There’s also a contractual obligation once the invitation has been issued, and I think Elizabeth Moon would have been well within her rights to ask for what the concom were contractually obliged to provide – airfare, con membership, hotel room, or value equivalent to. Separately from everything else, I think she behaved decently in not insisting they do that.

  10. LiveJournal itself has a 5,000 comment limit after which no more can be posted. I suspect that the full 5,000 would have occurred had she left comments open, even if she chose to ignore the responses and let the commenters have their heads.

    The problem is that in situations like this, a lynch mob mentality forms if the situation isn’t stopped — I have myself seen it happen — and by deleting the existing comments, of which I have been told there were already over 525, she forestalled that from happening.

    I think Ms Moon did the wise thing under the circumstances, cutting off the debate once things got repetitious and stopping it before it could get dangerous, then moving on with her life. She clearly has enough strength of character that being snubbed by WisCon isn’t going to cause her long-term harm on its own, and has plenty of other things to give her self-satisfaction besides a free trip to Madison, Wisconsin in the harshest part of the winter where she could spend an entire weekend being ganged-up on.

    It’s time for everyone else to drop this and move on as well.

    P. S.: Greetings to my old LJ Friend Yonmei, who herself was ganged-up on at LiveJournal, with the help of the abuse-facilitating “Abuse Team”, which is why she is no longer there herself. She’s a good person who did not deserve one second of what she got there.

  11. Not that the blogosphere lacks for provocative comments on this subject, but people who are interested the full spectrum of response will find at Cheryl’s Mewsings S.M. Stirling’s starchy comment in support of Moon.

  12. @Mike: When I tossed “starchy” into WordWeb it drew up “rigidly formal” as in ‘a starchy manner’, which didn’t at all fit S.M. Stirling’s posts on this subject at Cheryl’s blog. “Stiff and unyielding” wouldn’t seem to fit well, either. Apparently we need to find at least a third dictionary…

  13. G: That would be, I guess, because I pointed out that I am an expat in a foreign culture and go to school every day to learn the language (as my kids do) and think that integration (known here in Germany as accepting the Constitution, equality of genders, and learning the language) is something every immigrant should do.

    Hard to “integrate” when you’re told that your religion unfits you for citizenship, G. Ever been told that in Germany? Moon was telling all American Muslims – immigrants and citizens by birth – that their religion unfitted them for citizenship and it didn’t matter that some Muslims had died in the terrorist attack on 9/11 – Moon argues that all Muslims should be held responsible for it. Like holding all Germans responsible for World War II….

  14. @Dave: Oh come on, Dave, surely you must admire Yonmei’s display of geometric logic in disposing of Moon’s argument with stuff “Like holding all Germans responsible for WWII.”

    I’ve been on the receiving end of this particular trope, by which I mean a collective statement about a group composed of many individuals. A group whose defining characteristic I share. Most people have had that experience.

    We’ve also seen that collective statements may appear to be discredited, or actually be discredited, by pointing to individual exceptions.

    When I was at the Australian Worldcon in 1985 I ran into an Australian fan who was quite willing to hold me responsible for the war in Vietnam. In the same way that he held all individual Americans responsible for the collective actions of the country. Was he right or wrong to apply that generalization to me? Should he have asked first about my personal views and experiences, or did my citizenship make culpability automatic? For most of the duration of the war I wasn’t old enough to serve in the military or vote, so what power did I have over those events. However, throughout my grade school years I approved of what the US was supposedly trying to accomplish. Yet for all the Australian fan knew, I might have been one of those teens in the street demonstrating against the war like some of my schoolmates did. Should he have tempered his generalization to take those exceptions into account? Would fine arguments about all these points have had the effect of trivializing the legacy of a real historical event?

  15. I knew somebody had to be responsible for the war in Vietnam but it never occurred to me that it might be you, Mike. Now I have to wonder what else I’ve been missing around here…

  16. Mike, not only are you responsible for the war in Vietnam, by extension of your employment you created “trickle-down” economics during the Reagan Administration; you violated George H. W. Bush’s promise of “No new taxes!”; you created the Internet bubble of 1999 and the crash which followed; you caused lowered the taxes on George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s rich cronies after you stole the election for them; you ran up ruinous deficit spending during an undeclared war on the other side of the planet; you authorized all those sub-prime house loans; you sliced them up into financial sausage which you then sold as if it were prime rib; you caused the financial crash which followed; you created the TARP program, bailed out General Motors and Chrysler, borrowed the money from the Red Chinese for the non-shovel-ready stimulus package, and cast the deciding vote for Obamacare!

    IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT!

  17. Mike, not only are you responsible for the war in Vietnam, by extension of your employment you created “trickle-down” economics during the Reagan Administration; you violated George H. W. Bush’s promise of “No new taxes!”; you created the Internet bubble of 1999 and the crash which followed; you lowered the taxes on George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s rich cronies after you stole the election for them; you ran up ruinous deficit spending during an undeclared war on the other side of the planet; you authorized all those sub-prime house loans; you sliced them up into financial sausage which you then sold as if it were prime rib; you caused the financial crash which followed; you created the TARP program, bailed out General Motors and Chrysler, borrowed the money from the Red Chinese for the non-shovel-ready stimulus package, and cast the deciding vote for Obamacare!

    IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT!

  18. @David: I’d have to agree. On a fan mailing list today someone noted that Marty was very nice in person, really. He asked that they don’t actually tell anybody that or they would ruin his reputation. You know, he was defending his dishonor.

  19. So if I have this correctly, Mike, you felt it was OK for Moon to blame all Muslims for extremist Islamic terrorism, but quite unfair for all Americans to be blamed for the Vietnam war?

  20. @Yonmei: So you have no interest in adding value to the discussion? Just going to troll around and pretend that I am proposing false dilemmas?

  21. Mike – It isn’t clear to me _what_ you think here, and maybe you don’t want to say. But you show a welcome awareness of the subtle problems caused by the insensitivity of the Australian who threw all Americans into a bucket indiscriminately. What Yonmei wants to know is whether you realize that Moon’s great offense was treating Muslims in the same manner. It’s certainly what bothered me about her post; that, and the fact that either dismissing or retaining a GoH who talks this way would cause insoluable problems.

  22. DB – Yonmei has attributed to Moon a position (“blame all Muslims for extremist Islamic terrorism”) that Moon said explicitly she does not hold. So her question had that quality of have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife about it.

    Otherwise you’re right that by starting with comments like “not only did the Islamic world in general show indecent glee about the attack” Moon set a tone that seemed to render insignificant her distinction that “many Muslims had nothing to do with the attacks, did not approve of them, would have stopped them if they could.” Since “many” is neither “most” nor “nearly all,” what other impression could a reader take away than that she meant her generalization extended to a large number of the people she discussed next, Muslims living in this country.

    What if Moon had written only the last paragraph of her post and omitted the rest? I’d think there would have been exactly the same controversy, for many writers on the internet have taken issue with that paragraph, but without the world-girdling preamble it would be easier to look at it as a statement from Moon’s heart prompted by reactions to personal experiences.

    When people make statements from the heart it’s possible to acknowledge the flaws in expression (which may be offensive flaws) without avoiding considering the causes that prompted the statements.

    I could have enjoyed a momentary success in deflecting the Aussie fan’s complaint if I had attacked it with this series of exceptions. Was I responsible for America’s actions in Vietnam despite my youth at the time? Were all American’s responsible, even those who opposed it politically, or in some cases violently? Etc. From a rhetorical point of view I could have made him look bad, for after all, he had taken a logical fallacy for a starting place. (Or at least I could if this had happened on the internet with a broad readership to enjoy my performance, not at 5 a.m. after being up all night in the midst of breakfast with the fan and four of his friends.)

    But I sensed he was making a statement from his heart, first about how offensive the Vietnam War had been to him, and second, about how frustrated he was that Americans had allowed it to go on for a long time, and lastly, that any American would have been in a better position to stop it than he was in Australia so why hadn’t I?

    That’s a complex subject that he had chosen to approach in a highly oversimplified way, and we could have had a better dialog if he’d taken a different approach, but I still understood that he had reasons for being upset. I don’t have to agree with Moon’s opinions to try and understand what she’s upset about.

  23. Yonmei has attributed to Moon a position (“blame all Muslims for extremist Islamic terrorism”) that Moon said explicitly she does not hold.

    Where has Moon said explicitly she does not hold this position, Mike?

    Because I’m delighted to hear she has retracted this part of her “Citizenship” post, where she did explicitly say she holds all Muslims responsible for the actions of a few extremists – a position even more grossly foolish than holding one American responsible for the actions of the US during the Vietnam war.

    But I was genuinely not aware that she had posted any further expansion or retraction of her anti-Islamic views since then.

  24. Mike: But I sensed he was making a statement from his heart, first about how offensive the Vietnam War had been to him, and second, about how frustrated he was that Americans had allowed it to go on for a long time, and lastly, that any American would have been in a better position to stop it than he was in Australia so why hadn’t I?

    One of the further ironies of Elizabeth Moon’s attack on the Cordoba Centre in particular, in the context of 9/11, is that it was the exact stupid equivalent of your foolish Australian walking up to one of the original six Mothers Against the Vietnam War and demanding to know why they hadn’t done something about it.

    Moon’s post about the Centre didn’t just display a degree of Islamophobic bigotry against American Muslims for being somehow connected with Islamic extremist terrorists – a position in itself as idiotic as blaming my Presbyterian next-door neighbour for the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill – but she also repeated some untruths about the Cordoba Center, its founders and its purpose, that I would honestly have expected her to acknowledge and retract because she was just plain factually wrong. That was, in Slacktivist terms, a bad Jackie moment when she didn’t.

    I believe in assuming goodwill/ignorance rather than malice/bigotry, but her failure to correct what she had just plain got wrong called her goodwill and her honesty into question. It was also untrue that the majority of Islamic countries or Muslims worldwide displayed any “indecent glee” about the attacks on 9/11, but in a better context that could just have come across as the usual American misinformed by your own media: it was not set in a good context.

  25. @Yonmei: She said in that post “many Muslims had nothing to do with the attacks, did not approve of them, would have stopped them if they could.” That means “not all.”

  26. That I can understand what Moon really wanted to say makes it all the more bothersome that she phrased it as she did. She’s a professional writer; she gets little slack here, especially on such a sensitive matter.

    You’ve caught the point: Technically she didn’t blame all Muslims for the attacks. But she treated them as guilty until proven innocent, which is how the Australian treated you regarding Vietnam. The corrosiveness of this deeply concerns me. I easily forgive the Australian his concern and rage about Vietnam; I do not think that excuses his treatment of _you_. Prejudice may be defined simply as the application of a generalization about a group (even if it’s accurate as a generalization) to apply to any individual in that group, and that was prejudice.

    Similarly, it throws a ridiculous burden on the 99.9% of innocent, patriotic Muslims in the U.S. to require them to be constantly ready to prove their innocence, especially because in the eyes of many accusers, nothing seems to be good enough. And among those accusers I count Moon. She objects to the Park51 project, which was completely uncontroversial until rabble-rousers gingered up an artificial fuss.

    This “proving that you’re not a terrorist” is disturbingly like the times in which anyone who fell under suspicion was required to meet a constantly moving target of proving that they were not Communists. (And “anyone who fell under suspicion” went up to and included President Eisenhower; now today, our President is equally ridiculously called upon to prove that he is not a Muslim, and it only matters because “Muslim” is deemed to equal “terrorist”.)

    Moon does not perform the full monty on this, but she throws fire on the flames and must know she does it. Were she just some hacker on the Internet, she could be dismissed; there’s lots of ’em. But when it comes from someone you previously respected, when it comes from a forthcoming GoH, it raises the insoluble dilemma of what to do about it.

  27. (That’s even beside the point that the situation of an average American regarding Vietnam is not at all like the situation of an average Muslim concerning terrorism. The 9/11 attacks were not some kind of official Muslim government policy. Requiring all Muslims to atone and disavow this would rather be like requiring all U.S. Army veterans to atone and disavow the Oklahoma City bombing. And those who say that it’s not comparable because the general sense of Islam favors terrorism both caricature Islam and ignore the number of veterans in the likes of the Michigan Militia movements.)

  28. Mike says: She said in that post “many Muslims had nothing to do with the attacks, did not approve of them, would have stopped them if they could.”

    Well done, you pick a sentence out of context and exculpate her!

    In context, she said in that post: When an Islamic group decided to build a memorial center at/near the site of the 9/11 attack, they should have been able to predict that this would upset a lot of people. Not only were the attackers Islamic–and not only did the Islamic world in general show indecent glee about the attack, but this was only the last of many attacks on citizens and installations of this country which Islamic groups proudly claimed credit for. That some Muslims died in the attacks is immaterial–does not wipe out the long, long chain of Islamic hostility. It would have been one thing to have the Muslim victims’ names placed with the others, and identified there as Muslims–but to use that site to proselytize for the religion that lies behind so many attacks on the innocent (I cannot forget the Jewish man in a wheelchair pushed over the side of the ship to drown, or Maj. Nadal’s attack on soldiers at Fort Hood) was bound to raise a stink. It is hard to believe that those making the application did not know that–did not anticipate it–and were not, in a way, probing to see if they could start a controversy. If they did not know, then they did not know enough about the culture into which they had moved. Though I am not angry about it, and have not spoken out in opposition, I do think it was a rude and tactless thing to propose (and, if carried out, to do.)

    I know–I do not dispute–that many Muslims had nothing to do with the attacks, did not approve of them, would have stopped them if they could. I do not dispute that there are moderate, even liberal, Muslims, that many Muslims have all the virtues of civilized persons and are admirable in all those ways. I am totally, 100%, appalled at those who want to burn the Koran (which, by the way, I have read in English translation, with the same attention I’ve given to other holy books) or throw paint on mosques or beat up Muslims. But Muslims fail to recognize how much forbearance they’ve had. Schools in my area held consciousness-raising sessions for kids about not teasing children in Muslim-defined clothing…but not about not teasing Jewish children or racial minorities. More law enforcement was dedicated to protecting mosques than synagogues–and synagogues are still targeted for vandalism. What I heard, in my area, after 9/11, was not condemnation by local mosques of the attack–but an immediate cry for protection even before anything happened. Our church, and many others (not, obviously all) already had in place a “peace and reconciliation” program that urged us to understand, forgive, pray for, not just innocent Muslims but the attackers themselves. It sponsored a talk by a Muslim from a local mosque–but the talk was all about how wonderful Islam was–totally ignoring the historical roots of Islamic violence.

    You quote the tiny little “I’m not blaming you ALL for this!” in the middle of the wordy rant that says yes, she is.

  29. If Elizabeth Moon had felt about US military veterans as she does about Muslims….

    When a US veterans group decided to build a memorial center at/near the site of the Oklahoma bombing, they should have been able to predict that this would upset a lot of people. Not only was the attacker a US veteran–and not only did the US military world in general show indecent glee about the attack, but this was only the last of many attacks on citizens and installations of this country which the US military proudly claimed credit for. That some veterans died in the attacks is immaterial–does not wipe out the long, long chain of US military hostility. It would have been one thing to have the veteran victims’ names placed with the others, and identified there as veterans–but to use that site to proselytize for the thinking that lies behind so many attacks on the innocent (insert whatever half-remembered stuff you can dig up out of your head without checking, like Moon did) was bound to raise a stink. It is hard to believe that those making the application did not know that–did not anticipate it–and were not, in a way, probing to see if they could start a controversy. If they did not know, then they did not know enough about the culture into which they had moved. Though I am not angry about it, and have not spoken out in opposition, I do think it was a rude and tactless thing to propose (and, if carried out, to do.)

    I know–I do not dispute–that many veterans had nothing to do with the attacks, did not approve of them, would have stopped them if they could. I do not dispute that there are moderate, even liberal, veterans, that many veterans have all the virtues of civilized persons and are admirable in all those ways. I am totally, 100%, appalled at those who want to burn the US UCMJ (which, by the way, I have read in English translation, with the same attention I’ve given to other law books) or throw paint on military recruitment centres or beat up veterans. But veterans fail to recognize how much forbearance they’ve had. Schools in my area held consciousness-raising sessions for kids about not teasing children of veterans…but not about not teasing Jewish children or racial minorities. More law enforcement was dedicated to protecting military recruitment centres than synagogues–and synagogues are still targeted for vandalism. What I heard, in my area, after Oklahoma, was not condemnation by local veterans of the attack–but an immediate cry for protection even before anything happened. Our church, and many others (not, obviously all) already had in place a “peace and reconciliation” program that urged us to understand, forgive, pray for, not just innocent veterans but the attackers themselves. It sponsored a talk by a veteran from a local base–but the talk was all about how wonderful the US military was–totally ignoring the historical roots of US military violence.

    Can you see now why it was offensive, Mike?

  30. Yonmei:

    ..and exculpate her!

    I missed the words in which Mike did that. Could you quote which you have in mind, please?

    Part of Mike’s response to you, italics for emphasis mine:

    […] Otherwise you’re right that by starting with comments like “not only did the Islamic world in general show indecent glee about the attack” Moon set a tone that seemed to render insignificant her distinction that “many Muslims had nothing to do with the attacks, did not approve of them, would have stopped them if they could.” Since “many” is neither “most” nor “nearly all,” what other impression could a reader take away than that she meant her generalization extended to a large number of the people she discussed next, Muslims living in this country. <

    It’s true that Mike left out a question mark, but that’s a common typo almost all of us make from time to time, and doesn’t significantly alter the clarity of his disavowal of Moon’s position.

    In other words, without retracing all this, Mike has plainly answered “no, you do not have this correct,”without using my precise quote, in response to this query of yours:

    […] So if I have this correctly, Mike, you felt it was OK for Moon to blame all Muslims for extremist Islamic terrorism […]?

    Clearly that is not at all Mike’s position. He’s said so.

  31. @Yonmei: You delight in doing these fine readings of exactly what people said so why isn’t it fair to hold you to the same standard in this case?

    “Do I understand why people were offended” and “Do I understand what Moon said” did not start out as two different questions, you made them two different questions by misquoting her. I have answered both to the best of my ability.

    Your comment implicitly asserts a third question, “Did Moon mean everything she said or only part?” Apparently your answer is she meant only the offensive parts and none of the mitigating parts, and I see the case to be made for that answer. In fact, I paraphrased the case for that answer in my comment. I find it an unsatisfactory reading of the evidence precisely because it requires ignoring part of the evidence.

    Would you happen to know why some people discussed keeping Moon as WisCon GoH and trying to make this a “teachable moment” for her? Am I wrong to think that must be based on the idea of trying to reach the heart of the person who wrote the mitigating parts of the statement, despite her also having written the part that gave offense? At least, I don’t envision WisCon as a community that would bring in a GoH with the intention of creating a scene like some college students when Ann Coulter appears at their school.

    (I’ve also read the comments from some of the people who objected to trying to make this a teachable moment, and clearly that idea wasn’t adopted. My question is about the viewpoint of people who thought some good could be salvaged from this situation by keeping Moon as GoH.)

  32. Apparently your answer is she meant only the offensive parts and none of the mitigating parts

    No, actually: I think she meant the mitigating parts, just as I thinj she meant the tirade of Islamophobic bigotry. I’m just not seeing the mitigating parts as all that mitigating of the venom of her bigotry. I understand you do – hence the rewriting of her rant against Muslims as if she had directed her rant against US veterans. I’d find a rant like that offensive almost no matter who it was directed against – US veterans, British soldiers, French Arabs, German Jews, or – as in Moon’s case – American Muslims.

    Would you happen to know why some people discussed keeping Moon as WisCon GoH and trying to make this a “teachable moment” for her?

    Well, in my case – not that I had anything to do with WisCon – it was because she couldn’t have dodged the “crowd” or delete them as “slag” when she was meeting them at WisCon. Short of hiding in her room, she would have had to face the “crowd’s” questions, to listen to their correction of her egregious errors, and to take in their view of her outrageous bigotry. It wasn’t my business to have an opinion, but since you ask, that was why I thought it would be good still to bring her to WisCon. But I wasn’t part of the group she had attacked, and I wasn’t going to be at WisCon anyway.

    Am I wrong to think that must be based on the idea of trying to reach the heart of the person who wrote the mitigating parts of the statement, despite her also having written the part that gave offense?

    It is always tempting to think that this time you can reach the heart of a bigot: who hasn’t dreamed of being stuck in a lift with Nick Clegg to make him see why his allying with the Tories was so wrong? Or trapped in a locked car with Tony Blair? Or stuck in a buried underground room with no visible exit with George W. Bush? But you know, I’m pretty certain that the non-listener who deleted the comments of those who disagreed with her would have found some way to ignore or deny the anger at WisCon, too.

    At least, I don’t envision WisCon as a community that would bring in a GoH with the intention of creating a scene like some college students when Ann Coulter appears at their school.

    Well, no. I presume that given some people were talking of staging a walk-out during her GoH speech, and challenging her on every panel she appeared on, that was itself a valid reason for the conCom to disinvite her – just as Ann Coulter would never be invited as GoH to WisCon. They would likely never have invited her in the first place if she had made public her feelings about Muslims and immigrants before the invitation could be extended.

  33. Speak for your own dreams, Yonmei. I cannot think of any questions to ask Mr. Bush to which he has not already given a completely unsatisfactory answer. Why beat my head against that wall?

  34. I cannot think of any questions to ask Mr. Bush to which he has not already given a completely unsatisfactory answer.

    Oh fair enough. Still, they say I can talk the hind legs off a donkey. I could totally out-talk such a mediocre rhetorician as Dubya. But that’s no guarantee I could get him to listen – even in the underground room with no visible exit. Mainly it would be an interesting situation to be able to vent about everything from the stolen election to the lack of concern for a Scottish policeman he knocked down when he went biking at the G8 Summit.

  35. I think what bothers me the most about all this hoorah is that none of it has changed the science fiction Elizabeth Moon has written. It is presumably because of her fiction that she was originally invited to be a Guest of Honor at WisCon, and none of that has changed in the slightest. The books are still out there as written and published, for anyone to purchase or borrow from a library and read.

    Lots of people half a century later get upset by the politics of Starship Troopers, or love the politics of Starship Troopers, but neither of those change its quality as a work of fiction, which I, perhaps in naivete, presume is why it won the Hugo for Best Novel for Robert Heinlein.

    And why I, again perhaps again in naivete, as I said above, presume Ms Moon was originally invited to be Guest of Honor at WisCon.

  36. David K. M. Klaus: I think what bothers me the most about all this hoorah is that none of it has changed the science fiction Elizabeth Moon has written.

    See On reading Vatta’s War in the light from Park 51 for an outline of how (for me) becoming more aware of what a writer’s politics are can change how I feel about their writing.

    <I<It is presumably because of her fiction that she was originally invited to be a Guest of Honor at WisCon, and none of that has changed in the slightest. The books are still out there as written and published, for anyone to purchase or borrow from a library and read.

    And why would this bother you? Surely this is a positively good thing? While Elizabeth Moon herself made clear that she was not a good fit as a GoH for WisCon and shouldn’t have been invited as such to a convention that opposes bigotry and supports free discussion, her books can still be read.

    And why I, again perhaps again in naivete, as I said above, presume Ms Moon was originally invited to be Guest of Honor at WisCon.

    Well, neither of us were party to the discussion. I presume that being a SF writer was a basic requirement for being a candidate for GoH, but that many SF writers wouldn’t have been considered to be a good “fit” for what the con strives to do. A writer who is an open bigot is not a good fit for a con that opposes bigotry: a writer who regards fans of her books as the “crowd” to be dismissed and their views deleted, is not a good fit as a GoH for any con.

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