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I was thinking Gur Nezvrf bs Zrzbel as the quote sounds so much like an envoi, but I can believe your cite. I’d have to read Greene to see the succession; more for the TBR pile….
As I said before, Paulk’s interview is amazing in the sense that she is either completely uninformed about everything she is talking about, or she is willing to lie a lot.
Some things that stick out that aren’t lies, but are dubious at best:
Worldcon voting numbers should be very much in the five figures, in the tens of thousands. And they are not.
Why? Why “should” Worldcon voting numbers be in the five figures? She throws “should” in there and doesn’t justify it at all, apparently assuming that this claim is self-evident – and the interviewer just goes along with her.
When you have fewer than ten thousand voters, when you can guarantee a finalist slot with fewer than fifty people who will follow your voting lead, that’s not good for the award, it’s not good for the genre.
The Hugos have become and remained the most prestigious award in science fiction, with nothing that would have changed that until the Puppies came along. They did it with the structure and voting numbers that it had prior to the Pups. How is that not good for the award? The genre has been doing fine as well.
Um, I think there is a very small but very loud and quite influential clique that had thought that they had a lock on quietly arranging things in the background.
This is an entirely unsupported claim made by the Pups. This is one of their lies of repetition – to keep asserting something over and over again without any evidence that it is true.
I think that… that the faction behind those names and their continuous reappearance, when by an objective – by an objective assessment, they are not the best of the best to that extent
What exactly is would an “objective assessment” in this area look like? How does one objectively assess the quality of an author, an editor, or an artist? As happens so many other times in the interview, Paulk makes a patently ridiculous claim, and the interviewer is too clueless to challenge her on the stupidity of it.
I have to say, I expected Paulk to be duplicitous and self-serving in the interview, and she was. But what I didn’t expect was for the SciFi4Me interviewer to be so completely unprepared and, at times, almost incoherent. I watched some of the other videos that SciFi4Me put up, and this seems to not be unusual for the channel. This is a case where more exposure doesn’t do an endeavor any good, as now I will pretty much always think of SciFi4Me as a slapdash and amateurish group.
The BBC reminds us that The Prisoner began filming 50 years ago today.
Relating to the discussion of disasters, they also note a … vigorous … observance of the Great Fire.
And a matter of concern to many of us: why paper cuts hurt so much.
@Kurt Busiek: I’d done the transcribing for this post on Amazing –
Worldcon is over
Then offered my “translation of puppy speak”
Sad Puppy Whimpers
We learned what it was like to hear directly from Kate Paulk, Sad Puppies’ 2016s Grand Imperial Poobah. During Business Meeting debate on 3SV, she had the following to say:
I’m Kate Paulk. Some of you may recognize my name. I don’t care if you do or don’t.
I would like to point out that as written, this proposal is for a vote of all the membership. Since some of the membership are committed, and I’m not naming names, but since some of the membership are highly committed to having works of their choice stay in and works that they dislike stay out, what precisely does this do to prevent a highly motivated antithetical group from taking membership and then using this to knock out worthy candidates?
What does this proposal do to enhance the reputation of the Hugo Awards?
What does it do to increase the membership, which, given the popularity of science fiction as a whole and the increasing popularity with young people, should have a voting base more than double the current base, it should be wildly popular and if there are thousands upon thousands of voters, and thousands upon thousands of nominators, the ability of any one specific faction to dominate anything is massively diluted.
Whereas this proposal is really going to expose the awards to even more likely manipulation and do a great deal of damage in my opinion to the reputation of the Hugos as a whole, to the reputation of the Hugo committee for honesty and to the potential future of the Hugo Awards.
(video: Part 1: Begins at 8:34 and Part 2: Ends at 1:00)
Well. Ahem.
My translation is as follows:
I’m Kate Paulk and I really, really, really, really, really want you to like me.
If you approve this amendment, other groups of voters might very well do what the Sad Puppies have tried to do and have already done – keeping works they “dislike” off the ballot. Oh noes, someone might steal our thunder, we might not be able to game things onto the ballot anymore
Even though this proposal has nothing whatsoever to do with the reputation of the Hugo Awards, I’ll throw that in because folks seem sensitive to it.
(This proposal will enhance the reputation of the Hugo Awards by preventing them from being hijacked by sad and rabid puppies [but I’m not naming the names of the highly committed antithetical group…])
The Hugo Awards should be a popular award because we believe that the vast majority of young voters will vote for US and not for YOU. Because after all, if you sell the most hamburgers, you must have the most popular burger and that means you should win an award.
And, you know, the Hugo Awards are a popular award, not an award presented by an organization that folks have to be members of in order to vote
(The only people who have ever called the honesty of the Hugo Committee into question are a certain highly committed antithetical group.)
If you vote this proposal in, we’ll be less able to negatively effect the future of the Hugo Awards. – Translation ends.
The Business Meeting behaved with astonishing restraint and professionalism as the head of the group that started this whole kerfuffle in the first place attempted to argue that no changes should be made so that they can continue to run their bullshit on the Hugos for another year.
Yes, Vizzini, it is Inconceivable!. Now I think it means what you think it means.
I mostly lurk, so take this with as a massive grain of salt as you’d like. I have an MLS, though I don’t currently work in a library and only ever actually worked as a part time substitute reference librarian.
There is no one monolithic collection development policy for all libraries, though they do tend to be similar.
However, I can say that
1. Many librarians are readers of SFF. Heck, I remember having conversations with a coworker about the Sad Puppies a couple of years ago.
2. Many librarians pay attention to various ways of finding books that will appeal to their readers: book reviews (in Library Journal and so on). Awards lists are definitely among those things.
3. Many reference librarians have made book lists on various themes for readers advisory. I’ve done this myself. Oddly enough, the assignment I was given was to identify the major awards for various genres and compile the complete lists of winners. I started with the Hugos and Nebulas (one can find the lists of winners on the Internet), and then worked my way through the relevant awards for Romance, Mystery, Literary fiction, etc. While I didn’t then recommend the purchase of any of the books in the lists that we didn’t own, I can imagine that some librarians doing similar work might pass the lists on to the collection development department to fill in the gaps.
4. Libraries like it when patrons tell them what books they want to read: why spend precious funds on books people don’t want? (Note that not all requests are ordered, but a patron request is given weight.) It is entirely possible that patrons who see the Hugo or Nebula announcements want to read the books, check their library’s catalog, and put in requests for them if the library doesn’t already own them. (Alternately, they might order them through ILL – I know of collection development librarians who pay attention to ILL requests as a hint about what patrons want and are not finding.) In this case, the librarian doesn’t even have to be aware of the Hugos for there to be an effect on purchasing habits.
Anyway, I can definitely say that librarians do pay attention to the existence of genre book awards. Whether individual libraries buys books based on the award announcements is another matter, but it seems likely enough to me.
@Chip Hitchcock: My not-yet-wife-or-ex-wife had some old Usenet posts from Barnes she’d saved–among the many wonderful things she did for me was turning me on to him–and in one of them, he mentioned being a big fan of Greene. That came as confirmation to me, as there were so many commonalities in their writing. The mainstream cultural character in a foreign land trying to do good but achieving evil. The nature of truth and of trust and of their opposites. The necessary ugliness of change. Even their mutual inability to keep some of the depth of their novels out of their entertainments.
I wish Barnes were doing well enough with his entertainments to find time to write more novels. And I wish he hadn’t changed course in the middle of the Thousand Cultures series, or whatever happened to send those south. The first two were so very great; the third was spotty and the fourth a little better.
That quote comes from near the end of the book, when things are going all to hell but the situation is still undecided.
It’s hard to o wrong with Greene. The End of the Affair is short and heartbreaking; The Human Factor is borderline genre.
So, Gerrold discouraged booing. And he didn’t put a quick stop to the cheering. He is damned when he does, and damned when he doesn’t.
Given that he’s been condemned now for ‘allowing’ and for not ‘allowing’ audience reactions, does anyone believe there was a course of action open to him, short of breaking down on stage like the surprise murderer in a Perry Mason episode, that wouldn’t be bringing down the wrath of all Puppies after the fact?
@Chip Hitchcock: It’s hard to go wrong with Grahame Greene. The End of the Affair is short and heartbreaking; The Human Factor is borderline genre and tangentially relevant to this year’s Hugo awards and immensely sad. The short stories pack a punch.
I’ve never read the one everyone else has, The Power and The Glory. I think I might not like it. I’ve read almost everything else. Some are better than others. Everything I’ve read was worth my time. Your mileage may vary. He’s a Serious a Writer as there’s ever been. I love him.
@Kip W: I misremembered the booing part. He handled that well.
@ JJ: You think a kitten is bad, try having one who weighs 11 pounds and still does that — and can climb onto almost any high point in the house to boot! Our most recent rescue isn’t called Captain Chaos for nothing. We thought he was about a year old based on his size when we acquired him, but now we think we were seriously over-estimating. He’s a very nice cat, and he was a godsend to our timid-and-bullied one because he made friends with her, but OMG.
@ Hampus: Of course the cheering was coordinated! The entire ceremony is coordinated by the Evul Librul SJW Cabal, after all. [/sarcasm]
@ John A. Oh, get real. Everyone who saw that ceremony “had a side in the fight” unless you want to ask the convention-center employees who were tending the bar. Maybe you should do that.
Side note: Your analysis of Barnes, by comparison with my own reading experience, is… interesting. I consider Kaleidoscope Century valuable only for its ability to make me read a book with an asshole protagonist (and believe me, that term is an understatement of monumental proportions — “a protagonist who should have been drowned at birth” comes closer) all the way through, and the only reason it did that was that he wasn’t requiring the reader to identify with said protagonist. The ending of it was weak, and the sequel fell into the “hit the cull box as soon as finished” category. I love A Million Open Doors, but Earth Made of Glass was so disappointing and unmemorable that I had to look it up to see if that was the one I actually finished. (I did — it was the next one in the series that was a lame rehash of the first and caused me to lose interest altogether.) I’ve heard that Barnes was writing those books during a particularly stressful period in his own life, which probably explains a lot.
What Naomi Parkhurst said regarding how we select materials is very accurate.
If one wanted data, one could conduct a comparative study about library collection development policies, librarians discussion of how they use these policies, and actual acquisitions.
Those of us whose focus includes collection development and readers’ advisory (and there are many librarians whose jobs do not) spend a lot of time keeping up with trends, patron interests, genre awards (including short-lists and long-lists), etc. It’s part of the job. Also, we have very good search skills. Information retrieval and access is part of our business. If we want to find info about materials in a genre, we will find it. The idea that we would have trouble discovering Hugo winners (or any other major genre award), is hilarious. Really, I don’t even need to look for the information because I subscribe to professional book news sources that are sent to my work Inbox. Usually, more than a couple report long-lists, short-lists, and the actual award winners.
@JJ – I adore Siamese cats! All cats have attitude, but theirs is particularly vocal. =^.^=
Re: asterisks, ceremony insructions etc.
I’m fairly sure that whatever happened, Puppies would have come up with ways to fit that to their narrative of martyrdom.
Kate Paulk, courtesy of @steve davidson: What does it do to increase the membership, which, given the popularity of science fiction as a whole and the increasing popularity with young people, should have a voting base more than double the current base, it should be wildly popular and if there are thousands upon thousands of voters, and thousands upon thousands of nominators, the ability of any one specific faction to dominate anything is massively diluted.
Other than her opening, which immediately tripped my empathy button (don’t judge, because it doesn’t ;-)), I hadn’t remembered the specifics of what Ms. Paulk said during her first speech at the mic. I was just left with the impression that any EPH supporter could have pretty much made the same speech, albeit with a different conclusion, except for this one bit. Having heard it twice now (the second time in the SciFi4Me interview), I think it may encapsulate the central fallacy of every part of SP that isn’t about getting Correia a Hugo, which is that popularity is the same thing as merit and if popularity isn’t sought then it’s because of cliquishness and poor marketing. I suspect every other fallacy (and there are a bunch) probably starts from that wellspring.
I am pretty sure that Cedar Sanderson is or was a librarian and that may be a source of librarians don’t look at the Hugos. I’ve never been a librarian, but I worked at a bookstore with owners who didn’t like or understand SFF and even they purchased and featured books that won the Hugo, Nebula and (I think) the Clarke awards. It was back in the dawn of time and the news came from the distributors, probably via fax.
eta, because apparently I can’t hold a thought for more than four minutes, I watched the Sasquan livestream from a Michael Franti concert and cheered the first No Award. It was relief. I also cheered the No Award for Best Related this year, because I read the entirety of all but the Wolfe book (and I would have read that if it hadn’t been a dense forest of verbiage on a subject that doesn’t particularly interest me) and I had feelings.
Hey I’m putting it here because it’s Paulk’s words that finally prompted me to make the decision and go through with it:
I am now a Supporting Member of Worldcon 75. Nice milestone con to get me started. Dunno if/how much I’ll nominate, but hell yeah I’m gonna vote!
Be careful, you are now a target for mind-controlling Social Justice cats who will make you vote for stuff that nobody could possibly like.
My Social Justice Felines say “meow”. I think they will mind-control me into voting for the books that are the most comfortable for sleeping on.
Okay, new theory about how The Wanderer got its Best Novel award….
@John A Arkansawyer: I’ve never read the one everyone else has, The Power and The Glory. I think I might not like it.
You might not, but I’m willing to bet you won’t regret reading it.
@Dawn Incognito – Welcome aboard!
@Aaron:
Oh, good. You’re going to save me the effort of making my own list. However, I’ll throw in my two zorkmids, because that’s what we do, nei?
My perspective is probably shaped by having a close relative who is… economical with the truth. As a young’un, I’d naturally concluded she flat-out lies a great deal. Longer reflection made that judgement seem oversimple: She also got things wrong (sometimes with suspicious convenience, more often with apparent innocence), repeated uncritically wrong things she heard, exaggerated a bit here, embellished a bit there. And of course there are matters of perspective and interpretation. And that’s not even taking into account the roles of cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias, which I sometimes think are the twin goddesses of the modern age. It takes a while to overrule one’s judgemental leanings and Scandinavian mania for ‘holde ord’ (keeping one’s word), but eventually I arrived at: Making pronouncement on my dear close relative’s essential honesty was the booby-prize, a moralistic side-show. Sorting out fact from fiction had utility; the other, not so much.
It also seems to me that much fruitless tribalism flows straight from taking the least excuse to hastily assume dishonesty in others, and I’ve rather seen enough of fruitless tribalism.
As I said far upthread, Paulk puts on parade a (frequently seen, lately) utter cluelessness about peripatetic fan-run conventions. We of WSFS encounter this line of patter quite a lot. I can wish that the answers were FAQed somewhere on the worldcon.org and/or thehugoawards.org Web sites, but it would probably be difficult to document without excessively visible wielding of the cluebat, which is deemed indecorous.
The Hugo Awards are a function of the Worldcons, and thus of membership. Members support the cost of running the convention through membership and voting fees, because this isn’t a ‘gate con’. This is staffed entirely by us, run by us on a militantly democratic basis, and owned entirely by us with no professional help. The convention’s the size it is because it moves around the world to whichever group of volunteers has the most credible bid, and it moves because we like it to, because it’s for the world.
Think you can expand that membership without rooting the convention in one place, without dispensing with having an entirely new group running the convention every year, and without your volunteer staff and management dropping dead of exhaustion? Think we at WSFS haven’t figured out the economics and social dynamics of peripatetic fan-run conventions after 74 years of running them? Go ahead and show us. Don’t say ‘SDCC’, as SDCC doesn’t even try that. Don’t say ‘DragonCon’, as DragonCon doesn’t even try that, either.
OGH knows the above par excellence, having chaired a Worldcon (my first! thank you again, Mike!). The rest of us spend time explaining it at intervals, as I recently noticed Ben Yalow explaining some of it on MGC to (ta-da) Paulk.
Is it a bit pathetic to hear Paulk arguing the dumb position on this? Sure, but her having just picked it up uncritically and not thought the matter through is a far more parsimonious hypothesis than is dishonesty.
(As a reminder, my upthread query wasn’t about Paulk’s comments to the clueless interviewer, nor her utterances on MGC or probably many other places, but rather about the assertion that her brief but very odd Business Meeting remarks showed hypocrisy and dishonesty. I’ll not object to thread drift, because mama didn’t raise no fools, but I will again note it in passing.)
I see Steve Davidson has found and transcribed the BM comments, for which my thanks. They went by so quickly at the time, I barely had a chance to register a WTF reaction at her conclusion and then the meeting moved on.
A brief word about librarians: Librarians have super-powers. Probably most know the Hugos a millisecond after they’re awarded, and think ‘Of course The Fifth Season needed the best novel award. What took you so long?” I think they’re actually the Second Foundation.
Again, my thanks to Steve Davidson for the transcription of (and hilarious translation of) Paulk’s remarks to the rest of the Business Meeting. (At first, I wrote ‘to the Business Meeting’, but it’s fair to include her in the ‘us’ that was the Business Meeting, as she absolutely did respect our democratic process and was received in a respectful spirit, accordingly.)
This is exactly the point where the WTFery began, for me as a fellow WSFan:
WSFS has a name for any faction of fandom with such overwhelming voting power as WSFS members that they are able to summon a ‘Reject’ consensus comprising:
— 60% of the combined total of ‘Reject’ and ‘Accept’ votes, and simultaneously
— at least as many ‘Reject’ votes as the higher of 600 or 20% of the total number of eligible voters
We call that faction ‘WSFS’.
And you know what I call it, every time I lose a vote by an overwhelming margin? I call it democracy.
The rest of Paulk’s brief speech seemed a little unclear on the concept of ‘speech against’ (the exact parliamentary context of her remarks), as she stated her opinion but did absolutely nothing to give anyone reasons to reach the same conclusions. I was left a bit boggled, and think I was not alone.
But again, at least she was entirely civil and respected our parliamentary framework, which I don’t take for granted (**cough** Jo Rhett **cough**).
Rick Moen:
Actually, itbus dishonesty, because she has had the facts explained to her so many times.
Yes, we librarians are the Second Foundation. Obviously.
@Aaron. Getting back to your well-done fisking:
As a habitual Worldcon nominator, voter, attendee, and staffer, I take umbrage at the entirely unsupported assertion of my participation being manipulated by unseen puppets, but calling this a ‘lie’ seems overexcitable — unless you’re prepared to call every case of cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias a lie. Me, I reserve ‘lie’ for the very rare case where you can (and, even more rarely, have incentive to) demonstrate knowing misrepresentation of fact with intent to deceive.
I have perhaps greater faith than you do in people’s capacity to be simply totally, abjectly mistaken, and to copy and paste other people’s errors (fruitless tribalism at its worst), engaging the motor to the mouth without bothering to release the clutch to the brain.
Your objection is non-sequitur to Paulk’s assertion. I don’t accept Paulk’s proposition, but you didn’t address it, but rather talked past it.
(Of course, as we say at WSFS Business Meetings, ‘Debate need not be factual.’ ;-> )
What Paulk asked is: How is it good for the award that logrolling could guarantee a finalist slot? It would be a smarter response to say, Why indeed, Ms. Paulk? Glad to hear you change your mind and, as a keen devotee of logic, support EPH, 3SV, 5 of 6, and EPH+ to make such Hugo logrolling less possible and even less hopeful than the weakly asserted past alleged attempts?
So I don’t call that lying; I call it a bit confused about which side she’s on.
That doesn’t make it a lie, though. That makes it an example of someone with an opinion and an exaggerated notion of how inherently authoritative it is. Which might be also said of her Business Meeting remark. Gosh, someone who thinks her opinion has inherent sacred nature. Must be one of those days ending in ‘y’.
I don’t accept Paulk’s proposition, but you didn’t address it, but rather talked past it.
It addresses her proposition head-on. She claims that the award as it is (and has been) currently constituted is “bad for the award”. Except that it clearly has not been bad for the award, which has prospered and continues to do so.
That doesn’t make it a lie, though.
I didn’t call them lies either. I called those statements dubious.
@Hampus:
That doesn’t follow logically.
Paulk may think WSFS ought to cease tying the Hugos to support of the Worldcons.
Paulk may think WSFS ought to cease being hold peripatetic fan-run conventions.
Paulk may think idly that explanations about why it’s difficult to dramatically increase participation are exaggerated, because she doesn’t have WSFS’s decades of collective experience working on that problem.
Paulk might reject for various reasons any of numerous other premises in the upthread chain of logic about why the Hugos run the way they do, how that flows from the way WSFS and Worldcons are the way they are, and about some of that being what WSFans want and some of the rest being inevitable consequences of the limits of economics, logistics, geography, and volunteer energy.
Failing to accept a line of reasoning is just not synonymous with lying, no matter how often the speaker heard it.
I’d call the line of patter wrong and conveniently so. I reserve ‘lying’ to a higher standard of evidence.
@Aaron:
No, she specifically claimed (via rhetorical question) the ability of fifty people to ensure a finalist slot, in a situation with (in her view) a small nominating pool, is bad for the award.
You talked past that. Quite well, and I appreciate what you said, but it ignored the thrust of what it quoted.
Fair enough, so noted. And: Those statements would be the dubious monarch, by acclamation, of the kingdom of the dubious, I would opine.
No, she specifically claimed (via rhetorical question) the ability of fifty people to ensure a finalist slot, in a situation with (in her view) a small nominating pool, is bad for the award.
Which is how the award is currently constituted, and pretty much always has been. She is saying that how the award has operated for decades in which it has become and remained the most prestigious in genre fiction is somehow bad for the award.
@Aaron:
That’s a very pretty stump speech, and deserving of respect to exactly the same limited extent that any ‘This produced a good result, therefore it is comprehensively good’ argument is — but the fact is, you did not address Paulk’s assertion that the past potential for (not to mention alleged past reality of) nominations logrolling was A Bad Thing.
Me, I’d have seized the opportunity to agree with her and thank her for further supporting the case for 3SV, EPH, 5 of 6, and EPH+, but I’m probably just that much more cruel a critic.
you did not address Paulk’s assertion that the past potential for (not to mention alleged past reality of) nominations logrolling was A Bad Thing.
Because it is orthogonal to her claims. She says that having fifty nominators be able to get someone on the ballot is bad for the award. The reality is that it manifestly has not been over the life of the award. Her crocodilian tear-shedding over alleged (and entirely unevidenced) logrolling is not even worth addressing.
@Aaron: You quoted and then ignored her assertion and talked past it, because it’s orthogonal to her claims? Oooh-kay.
But your alleged counter was to merely point out the long and prosperous history of the award. I don’t mind that you’re retroactively shifting your argument, but will note in passing that you’re doing it.
For the rest, AFAIK, it’s actually possible that there was some minor coordination of nomination picks from time to time, to get a finalist onto the final ballot. Also, some folks have relied quite a bit on the BASFA, NESFA, and Locus recommendations list. It’s possible to concede that people were doubtless human without agreeing with Paulk about a Sinister Shadowy Conspiracy That Always Arranged Things.
But your alleged counter was to merely point out the long and prosperous history of the award.
The counter is that despite this alleged flaw that she claims is a huge problem, the award has prospered and continues to prosper. She says “there are too few people nominating and voting, and that’s bad for the award”, except that it hasn’t been bad for the award and there is no evidence that it is bad for the award.
Look, you’re being a dense motherfucker for reasons that are apparent only to you. You can go snipe about something else now, because I’ve had it with your dumbass routine.
I’m wishing stylish worked on the iPad. Being able to whiteout people whose comments one doesn’t want to read is a wonderful feature when it’s available.
@Aaron:
Which is simply non-responsive to her assertion that there has been a flaw.
No, (obviously) that is not what she said. She said: ‘When you have fewer than ten thousand voters, [and] when you can guarantee a finalist slot with fewer than fifty people who will follow your voting lead’, then [blah blah blah bad for the award].
I think it self-evident that the potential for brigading works onto the final ballot is bad for the award — which is why IMO by far the smarter answer to Paulk is to agree with her premise and thank her for impliedly supporting the various proposed Hugo nominations reforms, which would logically follow.
Don’t like that logic much? OK. At this point, I believe the standard response to the sudden gratuitous name-calling would be to pronounce you hypocritical and/or dishonest or something like that, and then we’d each pseudo-excommunicate the other, declare each other antipopes, stomp off to our respective Avignons, etc. But I’m cruel, so I’ll just say the gentleman here holds various differing views, with which I do not happen to concur. ;->
Rick Moen … said:
You write things that are reasonable, and then you write things that sound like the juvenile canines. Try to see it from out here where we have only your comments to judge you by.
Tasha Turner: I’m wishing stylish worked on the iPad. Being able to whiteout people whose comments one doesn’t want to read is a wonderful feature when it’s available.
You might want to spend some time thinking about why you apparently felt that it was so important to post that passive-aggressive comment. 😐
Try to see it from out here where we have only your comments to judge you by.
Or, perhaps, just a big empty white space.
Rick:
In case you’re wondering why I didn’t respond when you said:
…your subsequent response when other people brought up stuff has pretty well justified my instinctive reaction of “Yeah, sure, he doesn’t want to argue.”
You may be curious about what the logic was, but apparently only so you can take a shot at debunking it at great length.
In any case, I’m perfectly content with you disagreeing as to what words best describe what I was describing. To try to satisfy your genuine curiosity and lack of desire to argue strikes me as an exhausting proposition.
JJ:
I’d guess Tasha knows why she posted it. But I may be confused, but are we only supposed to post stuff here we think is very important to post?
If so, man, I’ve been doing it all wrong.
As someone who has a proven track record on this site of being happy to disagree with both Aaron and Rick, I think we can all agree that I am the ultimate neutral arbiter. Also, I am a straight, cis-gendered, middle-aged white man, so my opinion must be relevant and desired.
I’m calling this one for Aaron. It’s not even close. Good job, everyone, we can all go home now.
😉
Most of my comments with regard to Paulk’s duplicity, disingenuousness, and dissembling have pretty much been covered already.
One of the things that really struck me about this:
Paulk: When you have fewer than ten thousand voters, when you can guarantee a finalist slot with fewer than fifty people who will follow your voting lead, that’s not good for the award, it’s not good for the genre.
… is Paulk’s implicit assumption that people have been guaranteeing finalist slots by getting a group of 20 to 50 people to “follow their lead” as a matter of course — when in fact, that behavior has been limited to the Puppies (and possibly a very ardent small fan base for Olde Heuvelt).
Rick, maybe it was because you couldn’t actually hear what she was saying, but I know you said you thought her presentation at the WSFS Business Meeting was “rather charming” or words to that effect. I was sitting there with my jaw dropped, listening to her quite offensively insulting the integrity of Worldcon members as a group — including accusing “us” of doing all the things that were actually being done by the Puppies.
And yes, I found that incredibly dishonest and hypocritical.
Kurt Busiek: I’d guess Tasha knows why she posted it. But I may be confused, but are we only supposed to post stuff here we think is very important to post?
And yet, that is exactly what Tasha was complaining about — what other people were posting.
@Jim Henley
I second although I probably don’t count as I’m a disabled woman.
@Tasha:
But you’re agreeing with a man! So just like the occasional woman who posts that, “Well I’m not bothered by cheesecake illustrations in RPG rulebooks,” your opinion suddenly matters. 🙂
ETA: Men are the worst.
But was she posting that it wasn’t important enough to post?
People here complain about what other people post reasonably often, and many were delighted with the whitelisting add-on. Doesn’t work for my browser, sadly, but I make good use of blocks and mutes elsewhere…
@Rick Moen said: I think it self-evident that the potential for brigading works onto the final ballot is bad for the award — which is why IMO by far the smarter answer to Paulk is to agree with her premise and thank her for impliedly supporting the various proposed Hugo nominations reforms, which would logically follow.
Eh. Who knows what the smart answer is, or even the right answer (which is a shame, because wouldn’t affirmative action give my opinion extra weight?), but, yes, I thought her argument worked better as one in favor of EPH, etc. Also, I thought it was a wonderful example of cognitive dissonance.
But…yeah, I continue to think Paulk was very brave to stand up in what must have felt to her like a den of lions. I also thought the lack of hissing and booing is probably a contributor to her notion that it was a room full of mostly nice people deluded by a few evil overlords.
@Jim Henley
Thanks I needed the laugh
@Kurt Busiek
Exactly. Thank you.
Cheryl S.: I also thought the lack of hissing and booing is probably a contributor to her notion that it was a room full of mostly nice people deluded by a few evil overlords.
You know, you’re probably right. She expected that if people were disagreeing with, or feeling insulted by, what she was saying, that they would have reacted the way Puppies do — booing, hissing, shouting insults, instead of maintaining a respectful silence.
Since nobody did any of that, she probably thought we were all just fine with what she was saying.
@Jim Henley: “I’m calling this one for Aaron. It’s not even close. Good job, everyone, we can all go home now.”
OH THANK GOD! When it went into overtime, I was afraid it’d never end.
::looking around:: Hey, who’s gonna give me a ride home? This is why I hate “away” matches; getting a ride is a pain.
@Kendall:
This is not capitalism, Kendall.
::waving wallet:: Can I pay someone to give me a ride home? ::grumbles about capitalism::