Soon after the 2021 Hugo Awards finalists were announced, Chris Logan Edwards asked in comments here, “How is ‘George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun’ not a violation of the DisCon III Code of Conduct?” That eye-catching phrase is attached to a Best Related Work finalist whose complete title is “George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun, Or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition)”, Natalie Luhrs (Pretty Terrible, August 2020).
The specific issue is that DisCon III disseminated this phrase on its website, in press releases, and on YouTube – and in doing so the committee itself (not Natalie Luhrs’ blog publication) violated their own Code of Conduct.
The applicable parts of DisCon III’s Code of Conduct are —
We do not tolerate harassment of convention attendees in any form. Behavior that will be considered harassment includes, but is not limited to…
Comments directly intended to belittle, offend, or cause discomfort including telling others they are not welcome and should leave…
We require attendees to follow the CoC in online interactions with the convention (including the volunteer mailings, wiki, and other online facilities), at all convention venues and convention-related social activities.
I sent Edwards’ question to several committee members together with the request, “If your immediate thought is that the Hugo voters can trump your Code of Conduct, please explain why you think that.”
DisCon III’s decision to broadcast this phrase on their own platform means they also are committing to having it repeated over and over again in all their venues. As Elio M. García, Jr. explained in another comment here:
Websites around the world have amplified that a member of the WSFS should fuck off. Every official publication that lists the nomination is telling a member of the WSFS to fuck off. The Hugo Nominees discussion panel will have people talking about how GRRM (and Robert Silverberg) should fuck off. On the night of the ceremonies, the screen, the presenter, the sign language interpreter will be announcing to an audience of hundreds that specific members of the WSFS should fuck off.
(Garcia is webmaster of Westeros, a George R.R. Martin fan site not run by the author.)
Tonight Adam Beaton, the Worldcon’s Outreach Division Head, emailed the committee’s reply to my question:
Our response for publication is, “DisCon III does not publicly comment on potential Code of Conduct matters.”
Have a great day, Mike!
The leadership is going to find out how hard it is to administer a Code of Conduct they are unwilling to publicly account to themselves.
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(Long-time reader delurking) I’m beginning to think one problem here is simply the interpretation of the meaning of “fuck off”. I have always understood it and used it and seen it used by others with the meaning, “STOP IT” or “LEAVE ME ALONE,” with something like “into the sun” as an amplifier of that message. Which is very, very different than “go away and die.”
FYI, I stopped using Stylish when I found out that its new owner collects browsing data.
https://www.ghacks.net/2018/07/03/it-is-time-to-get-rid-of-stylish/
Hampus Eckerman:
I was grievously disappointed that a book I loved did not get the Hugo that went to Jeannette Ng’s speech, but at the same time I thought her speech was important, heartfelt, and worthy of recognition, not just for itself but for what it said about the direction fandom was moving in. I don’t have strong feelings about where things like blog posts and speeches go, but I’d prefer it wasn’t in Best Related Work.
Cheryl S. says I was grievously disappointed that a book I loved did not get the Hugo that went to Jeannette Ng’s speech, but at the same time I thought her speech was important, heartfelt, and worthy of recognition, not just for itself but for what it said about the direction fandom was moving in. I don’t have strong feelings about where things like blog posts and speeches go, but I’d prefer it wasn’t in Best Related Work.
Conversely there could be a Hugo category simply called Non-Fiction Works which would very nicely restrict it to books and documentaries that were indeed just of of a non-fictional nature. The Best Related Work could be a catch all for everything else however miscellaneous in nature.
Just found out that chrome extensions do not work on android phones.
Thanks for the info. I am trying out Styler, another Chrome extension that does the same thing with the same CSS styles as Stylish and is open source.
@Cat Eldridge: It sounds like your suggestion of replacing “best related work” with “best nonfiction work” would move documentaries like Apollo 13 out of “dramatic presentation.” That might be a good idea, but should be considered explicitly.
The larger issue is that “nonfiction” is defined by exclusion: collections of blog posts or sf/fantasy art would still fit in “best related nonfiction book,” though speeches, conventions, and websites wouldn’t. I’m not sure whether the new Beowulf translation would squeeze in because of the critical material the translator included, or whether “it’s a retelling of a legend about a monster” would make it fiction. (Poetry doesn’t really fit any other category, but we could create another dozen categories, and something would still turn up that people wanted to nominate for the Hugo and that didn’t fit anywhere.)
Vicki Rosenzweig: collections of blog posts or sf/fantasy art would still fit in “best related nonfiction book,” though speeches, conventions, and websites wouldn’t
The question is whether works like The Vorkosigan Companion and The Wheel of Time Companion would qualify as “non-fiction”. They’re not really nonfiction, but they don’t qualify in the Novel category, either.
JJ says The question is whether works like The Vorkosigan Companion and The Wheel of Time Companion would qualify as “non-fiction”. They’re not really nonfiction, but they don’t qualify in the Novel category, either.
Why aren’t they non-fiction? These are concordances which are non-fictional references to fictional works.
Not that anyone probably cares, but according to the town history page, Cheektowaga comes from Ji-ik-do-wah-gah and means “place of the crabapple tree” or “land of the crabapples” in the Seneca language.
When I was a freshman in college, the student paper had an insert with a coupon for a free sample of Tylenol. So I thought it would be good sport to fill out and send in multiple coupons with the full names of French revolutionaries. Some poor data entry person had to enter Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre and Emmanuel Marie Michel Philippe Fréteau de Saint-Just.
Après moi, le pixel scroll
The Best Related Work definition in the WSFS Constitution has a clause to allow works that might not be otherwise perceived as non-fiction because they make use of fiction (emphasis added):
skadu:
Possibly. I use “fuck all the way off” as a substitute for “go away now.” But even if the title were “GRRM, please yeet yourself at your earliest convenience,” I’d still think there was a very good chance that Worldcon’s role in saying, advertising, or otherwise promulgating the title of the blog piece was a violation of its own CoC.
Cat Eldridge:
I think a blog post would still fit under that category, although like JJ, I’m not sure concordances would.
It doesn’t really matter what the various categories are called (we can borrow “George” from Meredith), but it does matter what they include and don’t include, maybe in a way that still allows in previously unthought of forms.
rcade says The Best Related Work definition in the WSFS Constitution has a clause to allow works that might not be otherwise perceived as non-fiction because they make use of fiction (emphasis added)
Has an annotated work ever garnered a Hugo in this category? There’s certainly been some brilliant work done annotating such works as The Wizard of Oz. Not to mention the lyrics of the Grateful Dead which I grant you aren’t genre, but might be considered genre adjacent if you’ve taken the right drugs.
Cat Eldridge: Why aren’t they non-fiction? These are concordances which are non-fictional references to fictional works.
But they are fiction. Unlike an encyclopedia of the real world, everything described in them is fictional. In fact, a good definition for such compendiums would be “encyclopedia of a fictional universe”.
JJ says But they are fiction. Unlike an encyclopedia of the real world, everything described in them is fictional. In fact, a good definition for such compendiums would be “encyclopedia of a fictional universe”.
Are you saying the framing is explicitly fictional? Is the wrap-around narrative presented as a Story?
“Of course you could take only four of the fiction books, which were the best, but Jane liked plays and they were nonfiction, and Katharine liked poetry and that was nonfiction, and Martha was still the age for picture books, and they didn’t count as fiction but were often nearly as good.” –Edward Eager, Half Magic
@Mike Glyer–I just routinely, automatically, spell my name, first and last, because apparently no one can spell my fairly simple name even when they are looking right at it typed out correctly. This is before we even get to such issues as the fact that people from outside New England, or at least a bunch of places outside New England, really can’t hear the difference between the way New Englanders say Carey, and the way we say Kerry. Vowels are the hardest thing to hear correctly if the sound is outside the phoneme set you grew up with.
A quick survey suggests not. Biographies, autobiographies, histories, art books and encyclopediae have mainly won.
There was an annotated bibliography of Jack Williamson in 1999, but that the only book that helpfully put “annotated” in its title.
Cat Eldridge: Are you saying the framing is explicitly fictional? Is the wrap-around narrative presented as a Story?
If it was presented as a story, it would be eligible as a Novel.
Instead, the “wrap-around narrative” is “here’s a dictionary of fictional things, an encyclopedia of fictional people, places, events, and cultures”. It’s fiction.
Lis Carey says I just routinely, automatically, spell my name, first and last, because apparently no one can spell my fairly simple name even when they are looking right at it typed out correctly. This is before we even get to such issues as the fact that people from outside New England, or at least a bunch of places outside New England, really can’t hear the difference between the way New Englanders say Carey, and the way we say Kerry. Vowels are the hardest thing to hear correctly if the sound is outside the phoneme set you grew up with.
On the phone, Cat sometimes becomes Kent which makes absolutely no sense. And of course oft times Cat gets misspelled as Kat all the time when I give my time over the phone. No idea why.
@Vicki Rosenzweig
I instinctively tend to pronounce German or Dutch names the German or respectively Dutch way, though if we’re talking about people, I usually ask them how they pronounce their names. The towns of Spuyten Duyvil and Van Wyck probably won’t mind how I pronounce their names.
I also have to spell my name all the time. Indeed, I learned to spell my surname in German and English, because I heard my parents doing it over and over again.
There’s a difference between a fictional reference work–the Encyclopedia Galactica, the Final Encyclopedia, The Originist’s library–and a reference work about fiction.
The Vorkosigan Companion is not fiction.
John A Arkansawyer says The Vorkosigan Companion is not fiction.
Nor is The Wheel of Time Companion as it’s explicitly a reference guide to that series which collects the reference material that Jordan includied in each of the novels with other material written for this Companion. Neither is no more fiction than was the Dune Companion: Characters, Places and Terms in Frank Herbert’s Original Six Novels.
Something like Star Trek technical manuals, or a Necronmicon, which claim themselves authentic documents, that I’d agree is at least fiction-adjacent. Their object of study is the fictional world as though it were real. A reference work’s object of study is the fictional world as though it were fictional. What might be both? A Klingon grammar?
In Turkey, I quickly learned to stop introducing myself as Rob because it’s too difficult to understand. So, now I’m Robert but with a weird European phonetic pronunciation. And my surname has an extra syllable now.
rob_matic: And my surname has an extra syllable now.
Matiac? 😀
Something like that 🙂
A few days ago (earlier in this thread?), someone made reference to some sort of problem or controversy with respect to Tolkein’s The Silmarillion and the Hugos.
Can someone point me to an online summary or explanation of the issue, or possibly give a quick description here? It went right over my head.
Thanks
I’ve routinely spelled out my last name for as long as I can remember – it still sometimes gets … spelled in interesting ways, but spelling it out explicitly right from the start at least reduces the frequency of that. My first name less often, but I usually mention that it’s ‘the usual spelling, with CH at the beginning’ – because in Sweden, for example, a ‘K’ at the beginning is also common.
Bill, maybe we can send up a bat-signal for Jeanne (Sourdough) Jackson, who’s been commenting here recently.
Jeanne (Sourdough) Jackson: Hairsplitting, pedantic definitions can sometimes create problems. Back in 1978, when I was peripherally connected to the Iguanacon committee, I asked Jim Corrick, the person in charge of the Hugo Awards, why The Silmarillion missed the final ballot. Corrick told me he threw out all nominations for The Silmarillion because it wasn’t a novel. He said it was a story collection, which happened to contain a novel-length story (“Quenta Silmarillion”). He then said that if there had been a sufficiency of nominations for “Quenta Silmarillion,” he would have put that on the ballot. There weren’t any. Corrick had a Ph.D. in English literature, specializing in the novel, and his overly-pedantic definition of “novel” cost the Tolkiens, father and son, a good shot at a Hugo. At the very least, it would have given Frederik Pohl’s Gateway a run for its money. I had been planning to vote for J.R.R. Tolkien’s final work, and I was disappointed.
@JJ That is an absolute pity and tragedy about The Silmarillion. I’d never heard that story before.
Paul Weimer: That is an absolute pity and tragedy about The Silmarillion. I’d never heard that story before.
It’s pretty shocking, isn’t it? It’s my understanding that Hugo Award Administration is more of a collaborative effort these days; even if there’s one person in charge, there are a few other people on the team, and if there are questions of eligibility or other issues, they hash them out via discussion rather than the Chief In Charge just issuing a decree.
I expect that is an evolution that occurred specifically because of things like this. A Hugo Admin who pulled a stunt like this now would get ridden out of Worldcon on a rail (just ask the Admins who moved novelettes around).
I’m still pissed off at the Hugo Admin who thought it was a brilliant idea to post the final Hugo statistics on his academic university website instead of on the convention’s website. There are archived copies of the con’s website pages, but the statistics for that year are just… gone. 😐
That Silmarillion thing is extra strange because the constitution doesn’t use the word “novel” as a requirement for eligibility. The category is titled “best novel”, but the criteria uses the word “story” and a minimum length.
(I couldn’t find the constitution from 1978, but the one from 1975 says
“2.02 BEST NOVEL: A science fiction or fantasy story of 35,000 words or more appearing for the first time in the previous calendar year. A work published [more about eligibility for translations]”.
http://www.wsfs.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/const-1975.pdf)
So a literature professor might argue all he wants that The Silmarillion doesn’t qualify his academic definition of “novel”, but it’s not relevant for Hugo eligibility. He would need to argue that it’s not a story to defend the position that it’s ineligible.
Counterquestion to the one asked in that tread. Is there any one, who doesn’t often spell his name out?
Stefan is easy (a with f is often enough) but I don’t normally wait to spell my surname.
Re The Wheel of Time Companion(not talking about The Vorkosigan Companion because I don’t know it) I never taught about that one other than non-fiction. By your definition JJ some Wikipediasites dealing with fictional work, would be non-fiction.
I don’t have a strong argument here, because never taught much about it.
Re The Silmarillion: It shows a case were the people in charce were very pedantic in not including a work on the ballot, that a lot of people wanted there. I assume that this and the backlash that the decision got, are one reason that administrators are very careful to disqualify work.
Edit: And Ninjad but a bunch of people, I did only read JJs first post about The Silmarillion before writing this. I think it means the I duplicated somethink said above but I don’t mind that.
Edward Eager.
Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.
@ StefanB:
I have had to spell my name out (while in the Anglosphere) frequently enough that even spelling it out is now borderline too fast. “India-November-Golf Victor-Alpha-Romeo” is pretty quick once you’ve said it a couple of hundred times (yes, I normally make a short pause every three letters, and a longer pause between words, when doing phonetic spelling).
At the company where I work, we had a salesman (now, sadly, deceased) named Horst. We spelled his name CONSTANTLY but nobody ever got it right. “Wes”, “Hoss”, “Hurst” “That German guy….” (He was a WWII refugee as a child and even after fifty or sixty years living in the US he still had a strong German accent.)
His son Kirk now works at my company; to forestall endless iterations of “Kurt” and “Curt”, I say, “like the captain of the USS Enterprise” which works rather well, even fifty years after TOS has gone off the air.
I love reading the variations people come up with of my last name. It’s not even the proper Norwegian spelling. And there are some folks from the same family line who simplified it even more when they immigrated to the United States.
But yes, I do spend a lot of time spelling it out. Or pronouncing it when people are reading it (“It’s Joe-vog, like ‘the frog'”). Of course, the American pronunciation isn’t like the proper Norwegian either.
My husband, a teacher, usually goes by “Mr. G” to keep kids from being too confused. Although once he taught a Kindergarten class and for some reason gave them his full last name. By the end of class every one of the students were calling him “Mr. The Frog” and he was doing his Kermit the Frog impression, which I gather made him extremely popular with them.
@Mike Glyer:
I’ll do my best. I’m going to start by saying that I am extremely glad that I don’t have to officially adjudicate this. I think this is actually a hard problem. I will also point to my primary conflict, which is that I am very concerned about Codes of Conduct being weaponized and undermined so that they are no longer viable. However, if the system is going to survive, it needs to be robust, it needs to not back away from hard problems, and it needs to be able to withstand a certain amount of bad faith attacks.
It is not clear to me that the report of a CoC violation was in bad faith. While that was my knee-jerk response, I don’t really have anything to back that up. I do not know who made the report, I do not know what they said as support for their claim, and so I really can’t make judgments about their good or bad faith. I will say that because this is a new social technology, we are, as a community, busy trying to figure out what it can and cannot be used for. I have seen, personally, several instances of people trying to use it to address bog-standard rudeness. I do not think that is a good or wise use of CoC. People gonna people, is the thing. Nor do I necessarily think that people trying to expand the uses of the CoC are acting in bad faith. Some are, some aren’t. In the end, the system needs to be able to respond to both good and bad faith reports in constructive ways, without being overly concerned about the state of the soul of the complainant.
So, when I think about Codes of Conduct violations, I think about the target of the behavior, the offender who committed the behavior, and best way to achieve a good outcome. In this case, I find that all three of these are complicated and not easy to define. In a “normal” report (no CoC report ends up being normal) you have a person who was subjected to an interaction that they did not consent to and which negatively affected them, an offender who did this thing, and the goal of supporting the target such that they feel welcome in the community and creating a solution that prevents this from happening a second time. The two goals are linked, if you solve the immediate problem but don’t find ways to reduce or eliminate the problem, your target is not going to feel welcome. Going to the CoC is a big deal, having to do it repeatedly is not a good experience, even if the CoC is responsive each and every time.
Allow me to noodle through each of these. So, who is the target in this complaint? Plausibly, it is GRRM, or the presenters at the award ceremony forced to say the title of the blog post, the people at the award ceremony who are subjected to hearing the title announced, or everyone who gets communications from the Worldcon with the title listed as a nominee. That’s a lot of different possible targets, and that makes it really hard to parse what to do. For a lot of this, I’m going to fall back to my theory that a consent model makes more sense for CoC than a safety model. In which of these cases can the target plausibly opt out, meaningfully withdraw consent. It seems like the presenter would be the easiest case, one could decline to present that particular category, and declining isn’t that big a burden. So, that leaves GRRM, and a bunch of people who are in one way or another a captive audience.
Let’s take GRRM first. He’s in a complicated situation. There are a lot of reasons why he may not want anything publicly said or done. It could definitely look like bullying if he, a very famous and wealthy person with strong ties to Worldcon, put his thumb on the scale of DisCon’s design-making process. And if I were running the zoo, I would want to avoid creating that harm for GRRM. At the same time, I’m sure the blog post hurt his feelings, and I can’t imagine he feels really good about it being a Hugo nominee. But there is literally nothing the convention can do about the nomination. It is also not clear to me if there is anything to be done, here, to improve his feeling welcome within fandom. I mean, he’s been here a really long time, longer than Natalie Luhrs, and seen his fair share of kerfuffles. That’s not to say that it’s all peaches and cream, but I am not sure that the convention has anything to offer, here, in terms of supporting GRRM’s feelings of being welcome.
The obvious response to dealing with the captive audience situation is one that’s been discussed, not using the full title of the blog post. Maybe that is a way forward. I’m not sure. But I will say that it has the risk of backlash. How many acceptance speeches do you think would contain the word “fuck”, as a response? More than one? I’m guessing more than one. So, how do you support the captive audience? By telling the nominees that their acceptance speech may not contain that word? I mean, there was a great deal of joy and approbation when Neil Gaiman acceptance speech was, “Fuck. I won a Hugo.” So, I don’t think that flies, not just for free speech reason, but for reasons of absolute hypocrisy.
I can see deciding the rest of backlash was low enough that one wants to edit the title, but that also runs the risk of alienating the people who nominated Luhrs’ piece in good faith, and the people who didn’t nominate, but who feel that it was a good and proper nomination. People who feel that the nomination is indicative of the community starting to take their concerns seriously. There are absolutely a number of marginalized fans who think of this nomination as a victory, of sorts.
You see why target, in this case, is really a hard problem? There are so many, and they have conflicting equities.
So, who is the offender? This is also really important, since in a normal situation (no situation is normal) that is the person whose behavior you want to affect. Is it Natalie Luhrs? Is it the nominators? Is it the convention who publishes the title? I am honestly not sure. Who are we trying to communicate with, and how are we trying to shape their behavior so as to reduce the number of people who feel alienated. I strongly feel that Luhrs had the absolute right to say what she said on her blog, and I don’t think that she is plausibly the offender. Did she magically become an offender because she was nominated? I can’t make that make sense. Are the nominators the offenders? I think that JJ would argue that they are, but I have yet to see anyone present any evidence that there was a bad-faith campaign to make DisCon say mean things to GRRM.
Finally, what is the best response to that kind of bad behavior? What do we do to prevent it from happening again, assuming we accept that it’s bad behavior. Here’s the thing: we all (ok, mostly) agree that standing in the consuite yelling slurs at someone is bad behavior. It is a lot less clear to me that we all agree that nominating a rage-blog with some incendiary prose is bad behavior. So, I’m not seeing a clear offender, here, nor am I seeing a constructive response that isn’t worse than the disease.
I get that this is really a tl;dr post. I apologize. You asked me to unpack, and I’m trying. What I see is that neither the target nor the offender are clearly defined, nor do I see a good remedy, assuming we can define target and offender.
On the other hand, I do think that we do need to talk about these things, a lot, and I am probably wrong about a bunch of things, here. This is much more in the genre of what Dave Truesdale did at MACII than not, and that was also addressed through the Code of Conduct. But I also think that both the Target and Offender were clearer in that case.
The Vorkosigan Companion cites which novels (and short stories) particular events take place – I’d say this makes it non-fiction (it also has essays about the book and an interview with Bujold)
The Dune Encyclopedia (for example) is an in-universe encyclopedia that refers to the events of the Dune books as if they were real (and gets some real-world history wrong due to the passage of time), and the entries are written as if by fictional characters – therefore fiction (and a great deal of fun).
@JJ: two thoughts. My first is that you have absolutely explained why you feel victimized by the title of Luhrs’ piece, but I don’t think you have supported your claim that “hundreds of people” are fucked over by this. I think that there are also plausibly hundreds of people who think this is a good thing and a long time coming, so while I absolutely respect your feelings in this instance, I do not think you should claim to be speaking for other people. Some are offended, some aren’t.
Secondly, I really can’t parse how the title can be a personal attack but the content of the post is not. The blog post does specifically include the suggestion that GRRM and Silverbob both fuck off into the sun where they will bother us no more, which is the same wording as the title, just with a lot of supporting detail. How can the one be a gross personal attack, but not the other? Of the two, I think that the actual blog post is much more vicious than the title. I do, however, also subscribe to the theory that “fuck off into the sun” is vernacular for “leave me alone with extreme prejudice” rather than a desire for harm.
It’s been suggested to me that I am jumping to the island of conclusions regarding “into the sun” necessarily means “and die”
But that’s my interpretation and reading. I could be wrong.
And I can see why Natalie feels that way given all that occurred, why she wrote it in the first place, why she used such vitriol, why she titled it as such, why it garned nominations, etc…
…but its place on the ballot makes me queasy for a variety of reasons articulated here. And GRRM being GRRM sized as a target doesn’t matter in the end.
(Imagine if the trolls and Puppies who plague me somehow gamed a piece called “Paul Weimer is a Perverted P*do” onto the ballot, as an example)
So, yeah.
@Paul Weimer: Just as a thought exercise, and to help me understand, can you tell me what you would like a convention to do if someone nominated “Paul Weimer is a Pervert”? What would make you feel supported? I would never ask this of someone who was in the middle of that kind of trauma, but I’m wondering if you have any thoughts about solutions. (One of the reasons conventions shouldn’t ask targets about what solutions they would like is because it is a way of shifting responsibility. All of a sudden, instead of the convention behaving responsibly, they are saying “Look what the target made me do.”) So if this is not a question you have an interest in answering, please don’t.
I have no idea what the break down of people who read fuck off as a wish for harm as opposed for a wish to be left alone is. I suspect that younger people tend towards the latter, but I could be wrong. I am…not a younger person, gods know. 🙂
I will also say that the size of the target that GRRM presents doesn’t mean he should be ok with being subjected to attack and harm, but it does constrain what kinds of useful responses exist for both him and the convention. It’s not that he’s less (or more) important, but the trajectory of response is affected by the gravity of the situation.
Lydy Nickerson: The obvious response to dealing with the captive audience situation is one that’s been discussed, not using the full title of the blog post. Maybe that is a way forward. I’m not sure. But I will say that it has the risk of backlash. How many acceptance speeches do you think would contain the word “fuck”, as a response? More than one? I’m guessing more than one. So, how do you support the captive audience? By telling the nominees that their acceptance speech may not contain that word?
This is the wrong question. It’s a red herring. A lot of people have been trying to pretend that this is about the word “fuck”. Certainly, for me, it’s not. It’s about the title being an abusive personal attack, regardless of the words used.
If someone gets up and gives an acceptance speech at the Hugo Awards Ceremony and uses the word “fuck” in their speech, no problem.
If someone gets up and gives an acceptance speech at the Hugo Awards Ceremony and says “Worldcon member X can fuck off into the sun”, then to me that’s an obvious Code of Conduct violation.
Lydy Nickerson: but that also runs the risk of alienating the people who nominated Luhrs’ piece in good faith
Sure, and how do you balance that with all of the people who are alienated by the fact that Worldcon and the Hugo Awards are broadcasting a title that is an abusive personal attack? Why is one group being prioritized over the other – especially since the second group is probably considerably larger?
Lydy Nickerson: Are the nominators the offenders? I think that JJ would argue that they are.
That you say this tells me that you haven’t been really reading and taking in the comments I’ve made, because this is not at all what I’ve argued. Up to now, I’ve been assuming good faith on your part, but this statement really makes me wonder.
Lydy Nickerson: I really can’t parse how the title can be a personal attack but the content of the post is not.
Sure, the blog post is a personal attack, but people are entitled to their opinions. For me the problem is that the title is an abusive personal attack being published and broadcast repeatedly over the course of 8 months, by DisCon III and the Hugo Awards. “The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition)” is not.
What I keep hearing you say is that you don’t agree with my reasons, and therefore they cannot possibly be valid.
Well, I don’t agree with your reasons. Why are your reasons valid, and mine are not?
How many times do I have to rephrase and repeat my reasons and feelings on this before you’re finally willing to acknowledge that they’re legitimate?
@JJ: I absolutely believe that you feel that the title is a vicious personal attack. I don’t agree with your assessment of that. I don’t disagree that you feel that way, but you don’t seem to accept that I don’t feel that way. I am definitely trying to talk to you with a lot of good faith and I am sorry if it doesn’t seem like that. From over where I sit, I feel like you accuse me of bad faith every time I disagree with you. Something here isn’t working, and I’m not precisely sure what it is. I am sorry that I’m not parsing the situation in such a way that we can communicate without so much pain and anger.
@JJ, please believe me that this is an honest question, and not a gotcha. Was Jeannette Ng’s “fuck Campbell” speech a violation of the CoC? If it wasn’t, and I don’t think you think it was, what makes it substantively different from the title of Luhrs’ piece. I absolutely believe that you see a difference, and I would like to understand what it is.
Additionally, I am confused about how you can say that the nominators fucked over hundreds of people, which you have said several times, and not think that they violated the CoC. You tell me that this was a bad-faith argument, that you have never said this. But I am confused about how one can maliciously set up the Worldcon to violate it’s own CoC without also being a person who is violating the CoC. Again, I plead with you to believe in my good faith, here, because I did not mean to misrepresent you, but I honestly don’t see how you can have the one without the other. Please unpack?
Lydy Nickerson: I don’t disagree that you feel that way, but you don’t seem to accept that I don’t feel that way.
When I have I told you that your feelings and reasons are invalid?
Lydy Nickerson: I am definitely trying to talk to you with a lot of good faith and I am sorry if it doesn’t seem like that. From over where I sit, I feel like you accuse me of bad faith every time I disagree with you.
Up til now, I have never questioned your good faith (and if you can actually point me to anyplace where I’ve accused you of bad faith, please do).
But in this thread, you keep claiming that I’ve said things I haven’t said. Why? Aren’t you reading my comments? Why would you keep misquoting me?
@Lydy. The hell of it is…I don’t know what I could say, reasonably, to Worldcon in that instance. It’s a conundrum. It would be months of living hell, but what tools a convention could reasonably use given what they have…are not clear to me. Simply refer to it euphemistically? (whereupon the writers might raise hue and cry they are being censored, and we’re back in the slough again).
@JJ
Um, I did say it was a hard problem. I wasn’t lying. I think it’s a hard problem. But I also don’t think it’s a CoC problem. Which is a far cry from saying I don’t think it’s a problem, just that the CoC is not the best way to address it.
Lydy Nickerson: Was Jeannette Ng’s “fuck Campbell” speech a violation of the CoC?
John W. Campbell is long dead and not a member of Worldcon. He is now just a historical figure. Ng’s speech was profane, but I wouldn’t consider it a CoC violation.