Plans to make transcribed data from the 2015 Hugo nominating ballots available upon request have been put on hold.
E Pluribus Hugo advocates, who want to use the data to demonstrate the EPH vote tallying method is effective at coping with slates, got the Sasquan business meeting to pass a non-binding resolution (item B.2.3) asking for the release of anonymized raw nominating data from the 2015 Hugo Awards.
When the resolution passed, Sasquan Vice-Chair Glenn Glazer announced Sasquan would comply with the request. The intent was to provide equal access to the data, and those interested in receiving a copy were invited to e-mail the committee.
However, Glazer confirms he recently e-mailed the following update to a person who requested the data, as reported by Vox Day:
Back at Sasquan, the BM passed a non-binding resolution to request that Sasquan provide anonymized nomination data from the 2015 Hugo Awards. I stood before the BM and said, as its official representative, that we would comply with such requests. However, new information has come in which has caused us to reverse that decision. Specifically, upon review, the administration team believes it may not be possible to anonymize the nominating data sufficiently to allow for a public release. We are investigating alternatives.
Thank you for your patience in this matter. While we truly wish to comply with the resolution and fundamentally believe in transparent processes, we must hold the privacy of our members paramount and I hope that you understand this set of priorities.
Best, Glenn Glazer
Vice-Chair, Business and Finance
Sasquan, the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention
And Hugo Administrator John Lorentz added information in this follow-up e-mail:
What wasn’t included in Glenn’s statement is that this year’s Hugo system administrators are working with a committee composed of proponents of EPH, so that proposal can be tested without any privacy violations that might occur by releasing the data with no controls.
As Hugo administrators, we have always assure members that their votes are private and secret, and we don’t want to do something that might change that. That is our primary responsibility.
John Lorentz
Sasquan Hugo Administrator
On September 1, in an exchange between several commenters, Lorentz remarked the difficulties of anonymizing voter data, here at File 770:
[Commenter] “With the Hugo data, the only identifying info is the membership number. Remove that, and the ballot has been anonymized.”
[Brian C] No, it’s not nearly that simple.
You also need to eliminate any nominations that are unique to one or a handful of people, as otherwise those nominations could be used to identify people. But then those ballots aren’t actually representative for the purpose of testing the algorithm. So you need to actually replace those with other nominations, that happen not to perturb the algorithm in any way.
[John Lorentz]And that is the problem that our Hugo system admin folks have been running into. When one of them generated a draft of anonymized nominating data, it didn’t take the other very long to determine who some of the voters were, simply from the voting patterns.
Vox Day terms the latest development a “scandal.” Peter Grant was equally prompt to accuse Sasquan of having something to hide in “What, precisely, is going on with the Hugo Awards data?”
Folks, back in the 1980’s I was a Systems Engineer at IBM. I’ve had well over a decade in the commercial information technology and computer systems business, in positions ranging from Operator to Project Manager, from Programmer to End-User Computing Analyst to a directorship in a small IT company. Speaking from that background, let me assure you: I can ‘anonymize’ almost any data set in a couple of hours, no matter how complicated it may be. To allege that ‘it may not be possible to anonymize the nominating data sufficiently to allow for a public release’ is complete and utter BULL. Period. End of story.
However, one of Grant’s commenters pointed out: “Anonymizing data is harder than you think, if your goal is to actually make it truly anonymous. See what happened when AOL tried to anonymize search results, or when Netflix tried to anonymize movie recommendations.” And he cited a 2009 ArsTechnica article, adding “and metadata analysis hasn’t exactly gotten worse since then.”
The article says —
Examples of the anonymization failures aren’t hard to find.
When AOL researchers released a massive dataset of search queries, they first “anonymized” the data by scrubbing user IDs and IP addresses. When Netflix made a huge database of movie recommendations available for study, it spent time doing the same thing. Despite scrubbing the obviously identifiable information from the data, computer scientists were able to identify individual users in both datasets. (The Netflix team then moved on to Twitter users.)…
The Netflix case illustrates another principle, which is that the data itself might seem anonymous, but when paired with other existing data, reidentification becomes possible. A pair of computer scientists famously proved this point by combing movie recommendations found on the Internet Movie Database with the Netflix data, and they learned that people could quite easily be picked from the Netflix data.
EPH backers want to use the data to demonstrate their voting system. In comparison, a commenter at Vox Popoli said he wants to analyze the data to learn —
- How many slates there were in competition
- How good party discipline was for the various slates
- How many voted mixed slates of sad/rabid, TOR/SJW, etc.
- How the 4/6 and EPH proposals would have affected the outcome of the competing slates
Update 09/08/2015: Corrected the attribution of Brian C’s comment.
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In the US there are private colleges and universities, and state colleges and universities, which are generally funded (mostly) by government and have government representatives on their managing boards.
One point: In the U.S., at least in the last decade or two, state funding for state universities and colleges has dropped off considerably. Many states have had budget cutting legislatures and one of the easiest places to cut is the state’s funding for higher education. In many cases, state universities get only a few percent of their budget from state funding.
Morat20 said
Erm. I happen to have a shopping bag from Siegling’s of Vorbarr Sultana. It’s cloth, as is proper for the environment, and it’s, um, only slightly stained. I may have entertained ideas about using it for Hallowe’en.
I also own three copies of Curse — well, three physical books, plus an e-copy — and at least two of Paladin.
Yes. Well. Carry on!
@ginger Come to think, I’ve asked you about that bag when I saw you with it. 🙂
@paul: Really? Which con was this? (My memory cells, they are fading — I must need to reboot the warp drive or replenish the dilithium crystals or, um, recharge during the next eclipse?)
ETA: In the past 50 years, I’ve read about 233 books, short stories, novellas, and novelettes. I didn’t count the graphic novels or the best associated works, or I’d still be slogging through the lists…
@ginger 4th Street Fantasy!
…unless you aren’t the Ginger I think you are who also owns a bag from Sieglings…
Wait, I think I conflated you with Liz Vogel, who also has one. Whoops. Sorry about that.
Random comment because I seem to have unticked the godstalk box somehow.
Apologies to all I offended with my question.The lack of agreement struck me as strange given that Vivienne is a gendered name. It would be rude not to use the appropriate gender. and So I decide to ask . It did not occur to me that I was asking indirectly.I simply meant to indicate could not be bothered to look back through so many posts to see if Vivienne had expressed a preference.
Actually come to think of it. I probably would have asked indirectly even If I had noticed. There are some questions that feel confrontational to me and what gender are you feels like one of them to me.I think it is a Brit thing.But maybe Its because Im a fuddy duddy. Whatever, I find it embarrassing to ask someone their gender.
@Paul: Ah, there’s more than one of us? *innocent look*
Mark Dennehy on September 9, 2015 at 3:11 am said:
That.
The greatest threats to freedom of speech from the government in the US are, on the federal level, the post-9/11 security and surveillance laws and the Supreme Court decision that corporations are people and money is speech. On the local and state level, attempts to interfere with the teaching of evolution, climate change, sexual health, and history from anything less than a 100% uncritical standpoint. The Tennessee state legislature attempted to ban the use of the word “gay” in schools.
Public (state) universities are so beholden to private and corporate donors that the line between them and private institutions gets fainter ever day. Right-wingers tend to perceive the norms of civil speech that develop on campuses as a threat to freedom of speech. But most of those norms are not punitively enforced and their goal is to create an environment in which many different opinions can be expressed productively.
A more relevant example of suppression of free speech than Tim Hunt is the case of Prof. Salaita who was fired by U of Illinois shortly before he was to start teaching there because of his intemperate statements on Twitter during Israel’s bombing of Gaza in 2014. Please, lets not argue Mid-East politics—the point is that he was fired for statements he made as a private individual after strong pressure from wealthy donors on the university president.
Vivienne Raper: And shouting at a guy making a dumb remark isn’t going to help either – it just draws attention to the remark and hurts people 🙁
This is untrue.
First of all, it wasn’t “a dumb remark”. It was a whole bunch of dumb remarks.
Secondly, just as it’s important for people to speak up in online forums when someone engages in awful behavior toward another member, it’s important for people to speak up in real life when someone engages in awful behavior toward women.
Why? Because if no one speaks up, the silence is taken as tacit approval and acceptance by those watching — and the watcher gets the message that it is acceptable for them to behave this way toward others and/or that if someone behaves this way toward them, they must accept it.
If no one speaks up when someone engages in online bullying, not only does their target get the message that the bullying is okay, but everyone else watching gets that message, too.
When someone says demeaning things about women in a public forum, as Tim Hunt did, and no one speaks up, then all the girls and women watching are sent the message: “What he’s saying is okay. It’s acceptable for people to talk about women in this way. You should accept this as normal.” All the men watching are sent the message “It’s okay for you to behave this way toward women”.
The fact that you regard VD’s vicious, racist and misogynist hate speech as merely “entertaining polemicism”, and that you claim that his behavior and John Scalzi’s are equivalent, pretty much nullifies any credibility you might have with me.
Supporting free speech does not require suspending judgment on that speech, nor does it require silent acceptance of that speech.
You would not have had all this garbage if it were not for increasingly unhinged call out culture.
Yama: All which garbage?
I think the outrage culture is a bigger problem. Everyone wants to be a victim so much that they even make up enemies to be outraged about. “SJWs”, “CHORFs” and other fantasy figures.
Time for all outrage mongers to take off their victim cardigans and just learn to behave like civilized people. If you behave like an idiot, you are not a victim when people tell you so.
Given that gamergate began as a targeted harassment campaign by men who hate women, who were directed at a particular woman by her ex, this comparison is…not apt.
I see a difference between twitter mobs that decide to moonwalk in Liverpool Street Station and twitter mobs that decide to send threats to people. Does anyone see a way to make them go away?
People arguing for #gamergate would have you believe that they were protesting about her game getting favourable coverage. I have played the game, and it was (for me) a bit of a non-event. So game criticism, great. Death threats, rape threats, and attempted swatting – that should never have happened. It is a mob mentality.
The interesting cultural question, for me, is why these mobs are forming and becoming so vicious…
I’m not trying to gain credibility with you. I read *problematic* material and I find disagreeing with it *entertaining*. It is possible, for example, to read the sexist comments on Vox Day’s blog, as a woman, while not being remotely offended or disturbed; I just think People are being Wrong on the Internet.
Vox Day is a professional troll who gains blog readership – in part – by being offensive, and by people doing his publicity for him by calling him out. I think the TV term is ‘shock jock’.
Both he and John Scalzi are celebrity bloggers. They have a long personal back history, which I won’t go into here, and – every time the bad blood between them kicks off – they both (presumably) gain readership and book sales. As such, you can take sides, but I’m (personally) not going to defend either of them.
Vivienne Raper: I read *problematic* material and I find disagreeing with it *entertaining*.
Where’s that Stylish script posted?
So just to re-post, Tegans compilation of the various killfile / highlight codes are here:
http://realtegan.blogspot.com/p/file770-stuff.html
If you’re using Stylish, you can use the following link in Userstyles.org to install the killfile automatically:
https://userstyles.org/styles/118122/aan-s-plonk-file-script
And yet earlier you seemed to be offended by Anita Sarkessian?
On the one hand we have a woman simply critiquing video games from a relevant perspective and on the other we have a man who advocates for the state to enforce policies that would be deeply oppressive.
Again I’m puzzled by whose free speech you defend and whose free speech you do not.
People arguing for #gamergate would have you believe that they were protesting about her game getting favourable coverage.
They were either lying or simply willfully ignorant. There was no favorable coverage. There was no review. Almost everything that has been alleged by GGers to justify GG has turned out to be a complete fabrication.
Both he and John Scalzi are celebrity bloggers. They have a long personal back history, which I won’t go into here, and – every time the bad blood between them kicks off – they both (presumably) gain readership and book sales.
You are a master of the fallacy of false equivalence. And of simply saying false things.
This is not evidence of systematic bias, but merely that some scientists remain sexist jerks in a manner that doesn’t lead to the twitterstorm:
http://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/discrimination-against-women-in-science
Speaking out against jokes like Hunt’s are relevant: they’re an example of a time and place where people can comment, so it is useful that they comment. Cases like the above are not that time or place, despite being more serious for all concerned.
____
I’m late to the party due to timezones again, but I hope this is a useful contribution.
@Camestros
Of course I’m not offended by her. I’ve watched all her videos 🙂 I’m very equal opportunities about reading/viewing material.
@JJ If you’re still around, I meant Vox Day’s blog. I wasn’t insulting you 🙂 How many wars have been started by the failure to line break… And it’s fine to disagree about sexism in science, and the causes. Here’s a completely different study, larger sample size, more recent, saying there’s a preference FOR hiring women.
P J: Re California, the three tiers are also managed differently. The US/Cal State system are statewide, and managed by a sate-level board of Trustees. Overseen to some degree by the legislature. The Community Colleges are Districts (for those not clear about California’s administrative subdivisions of political management, Districts are a regional function, not tied to any other municipal body; independent of geographical boundaries).
So each CC District has it’s own board of trustees, own charter, etc., while the CS/UC are subordinate to a more uniform oversight (most CC districts are for single schools the largest is the LACCD with nine). This is most evident in pay scales (when I was at Pierce one of my advisors was at the top of his pay-scale, his wife taught in Moorpark, and was 1: earning more than he did, and 2: several steps below the top of her districts pay scale).
Also the CC’s are funded on the K-12 model, “butts in seats” so instructors have to take attendance, because each “contact hour” is paid, and having incorrect attendance = fraud. They can also float bond-measures, but only against the property taxes within the boundaries of the district. UC/CS, of course can do that against State Revenues.
Which means the effective budget/facilities/instructors can be very different across very slight distances.
But I digress.
Vivienne: People arguing for #gamergate would have you believe that they were protesting about her game getting favourable coverage
Yes, that is what they would have you believe. That doesn’t mean it’s the truth. The Tories would have you believe they are for helping the working class. As to what individual gators think, I don’t know but (and this relates to the arguments you make regarding other criticisms of public speech), “What you walk past is what you accept”, and the fora which discuss GG are full of people bragging about the various acts of harassment they’ve done, what to do, want to have done.
So when someone says I support GG because Ethics in Journalism, I don’t care. Because what GG, as a whole, does is harass people for being women; or for supporting those who are being harassed. So supporting GG is supporting that.
On things such as Hunt, I don’t want to accpet a world where saying, “women in the lab, is bad, because they distract you from working, and then they cry” is just a “harmless indiscretion”. So I’m going to call it out. If I’m the only one who gives a shit, my refusing to walk past it isn’t going to matter. But if lots of others think the same way, and they also refuse to walk past it, well actions have reactions.
It is possible, for example, to read the sexist comments on Vox Day’s blog, as a woman, while not being remotely offended or disturbed;
Ok. I am not so sanguine as that. I can read it without wanting to throw things because I’ve pulled a Mithridates and spent a lot of time immersed in some of the baser aspects of human nature (esp. in the Manosphere). The thing is, from reading a lot of his writing (in a lot of places), I don’t think he does it to offend. I think he means it. That it offends is icing on the cake. But when he says killing certain women would improve the world. He means it. When he says he thinks non-whites are (at best) half-savages; and whites ought to be allowed to kill them, he means it.
When he says his ends state goal is to “burn down the Hugos”, he means it. And even if he’s just “doing it for the lulz”, well if one acts like a troll, one is a troll. If one spends years advocating for a consistent set of things… one is advocating for those things.
I was trying to avoid getting into the weeds on the college systems, believing that a basic answer was what was wanted.
I suppose that shows the perils of me trying to infer people’s emotional states from their writing. My excuse is that you seemed to have taken offense when you wrote about Sarkeesian earlier. It didn’t read like a measured, analystical critique but rather a series of strawman (strawwoman?) arguments in which you appended the wider politics of contemporary feminism specifically to the work that was in play for nomination for a Hugo.
To recap:
Vivienne Raper on September 8, 2015 at 1:12 am said:
Isn’t a claim made by Sarkeesian in the work that was up for nomination.
Also isn’t a claim made by Sarkeesian in the work that was up for nomination.
Also isn’t what Sarkeesian does in the work that was up for nomination.
Again, a counter argument to a position not advanced by Sarkeesian in the work that was up for nomination.
Here you really do sound like you have taken offence. And again it is interesting to contrast who you target for strong criticism and who you don’t.
On one hand you seem to be taken a strong free-speech defense of some people and on the other you seem to take a stance that certain people should watch what they say and choose their words carefully and attempt to avoid giving offense etc etc.
The first group seem to be men saying sexist or extreme rightwing things (and not just any old things but things that would lead to various group ability to speak freely to be more curtailed)
.
The second group seem to be women objecting to being marginalised.
That doesn’t seem to add up to a broad commitment to free speech but rather the use of a ‘free speech’ argument as way of limiting what women and people on the left say.
I don’t wish to make assumptions from what is, after all, a relatively short internet conversation, but when someone says they’re a liberal and not-a-Puppy but then praises and links to primarily right-wing sources, defends right-wing movements (like Gamergate) in ways that tie in directly to their myths rather than the facts, criticises feminist videos that she says she’s watched in ways that don’t reflect the content of the videos but do reflect right-wing claims, and spouts Puppy myths repeatedly…
The actions don’t seem to match the statement.
I also wish to draw a contrast with (I won’t name him because he isn’t in this thread that I recall) a regular here who has an extremely thick skin and cheerfully admits that it takes a lot (anything short of physical actions probably doesn’t cut it) to get to him on a minority vector he and I share, but also stands up for the right of those who do not have that extremely thick skin to put their hands up and criticise.
All that being said, I’m happy to discuss books with anyone, I just won’t talk about politics or political subjects with someone who I’m halfway convinced is trolling. Books are enough. I appreciate the walking back of the comments about short fiction.
Vivienne Raper: @JJ If you’re still around, I meant Vox Day’s blog. I wasn’t insulting you
I’m aware of that. My point is that I don’t think that there’s any constructive point to further engagement to you.
You claim that VD just says what he says because he’s a “shock jock” and it gets him blog views/PR/sales, but as Terry Karney has pointed out, that’s the icing: the cake is that he really does believe the horrible racist and misogynist things he says. He spreads poison, and he’s an inciter of bad actions in his followers. That you dismiss this all as mere “entertainment” is disturbing. It indicates to me that your worldview and mine are so far apart as to make useful discourse impossible.
As Aaron has pointed out, you have repeatedly made false equivalencies on here. I am probably more aware of VD and Scalzi’s back history than you are. I am well aware of just what the differences are between them. That you place them on an equivalency is, again, very disturbing.
As Meredith pointed out, you came in here spouting GG and Puppy Talking Points; you falsely claimed that people had to “bow and scrape” to get a Supporting membership to Worldcon; you’ve repeatedly ducked legitimate questions and tried to misdirect with your responses; you’ve linked to a bunch of far right-wing blogs and articles as if they’re objective sources; you’ve minimized and excused and trivialized some really, really awful things that people have said and done.
I don’t think that you’re participating here in good faith — or if you are, it’s not the sort of “good faith” with which I have any interest in interacting.
This may sound odd but her statement does sort of match her actions. Political typology is a bit of a hobby of mine and I mentioned in an earlier email a group from the UK in the 1980s called the Revolutionary Communist Party who were ostensibly a Trotskyist group who sold newspapers and went on demonstrations and all the usual things. What was odd about them was that they took somewhat contrarian positions, even by the standards of fringe Trotskyists groups. Those positions often tended towards what in the US would look more like the positions of anarcho-capitalists, objectivists or more hardline liberatrians.
The Revolutionary Communist Party sort of evolved as its core leaders moved from student activism and into media and PR style work. They started a magazine called ‘Living Marxism’ (later rebranded as ‘LM’) that took several further steps towards a really odd mix of leftwing cosplay with libertarian-like positions. They often took a strong line against leftwing movements that were not core-socialist-marxist-theory style movements – in particular environmentalism and feminism. The kind of rhetoric Vivienne is using sounds an awful lot like an updated version of that but updated for the age of GamerGate.
The Living Marxism/RCP people went onto do other things. I don’t know to what extent they still exist as a movement or a party. I’m not saying Vivienne is associated with them, just that taxonomically everything she has said fits a box in my head that has ‘Revolutionary Communist Party’ written on it. They were batsh!t crazy ideologically but they were quite stylish for Trotskyists back in the day.
@Camestros
Then I look forward to when the liberal elements are in evidence and can be pieced together with the right-wing stuff that seems to be the only thing so far!
The Revolutionary Communist Party are a bit before my time, but I am pretty familiar with the modern Liberal Democrats (I’m no longer associated but my Dad was fairly important on a local party level for awhile) and I can see how a left/right mix might fit in. The Lib Dems always have been a weird combination.
For the record, saying awful things just because you want to upset people is not actually, in itself, any less objectionable than saying awful things because you sincerely believe them.
The question of sincerity has relevance when you’re talking about how far someone’s going to take their expressed beliefs — a sincere believer seems like more of a material danger, as in, more likely to turn violent. But even there, the “I’m just trolling!” people aren’t off the hook. Their frothing insincerities provide both cover and encouragement for the truly unhinged.
The Elliot Rodgers of the world are egged on by the VDs of the world.
Sort of like the LibDems but from that Star Trek parallel universe were everybody is the evil doppelganger. The LibDems are all sort ‘lets find all the nice bits from the centre of left and right’, whereas the RCP were more like ‘lets find all the nasty bits from the extremes of left and right’ 🙂
Anyway here are a couple of articles from the Guardian about the post RCP history of this curious bunch:
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2003/dec/09/highereducation.uk2 (2003)
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/jul/08/davidpallister.johnvidal1 (2000)
I don’t know what happened to do them after that time. I assume they have evolved into something else now. Radical cheesecake manufacture? Revolutionary reactionism?
@Meredith:
Not at all a stupid question, and it’s one whose answers involve some initially non-obvious bits. I see Richard Gadsden quoted that excellent list of Fannish Inquisition questions commonly asked of bids, but that gives only a slight idea of the practical necessities. There aren’t strictly speaking any absolute requirements — except for what’s in WSFS Constitution Section 4.6, which mostly amounts to adequate evidence of proposed facilities, written statement of intent to bid, and the proposed operating rules for the concom — but there are de-facto requirements.
Some of the most stringent practical requirements involve facilities, as it’s one of the first metrics people use to rule out a candidate city/town as even practical at all. The usual size of Worldcons, around 5,000 attending members, is awkward because it’s too many to accommodate in almost all single-facility sites (such as a single hotel with included function space), and not big enough that using hotels plus a convention centre for large events (Masquerade, Hugo Award Ceremony) is easy to make work economically. If Worldcons were reliably as large as San Diego Comicons, the cost per member would be lowered and the concom would have greatly more leverage in contracts.
There is also hotel and convention centre pricing as a general issue: A number of cities would be very desirable as Worldcon sites, but the required facilities would be just too expensive. This is part of why no bid for New York City since 1967 has succeeded, and why the San Francisco in 2002 bid had to switch to being the San Jose in 2002 bid (San Francisco convention businesses being unreasonable). It is also why London was deemed infeasible for decades, until the surplus of function and hotel space in the Docklands following the building of ExCeL London and many surrounding hotels for the 2012 Summer Olympics suddenly made that specific part of London a bargain.
(As someone once resident in Southwark, London, back in Ted Heath’s administration, I lent perspective to my wife’s and numerous other fans’ enthusiasm for ‘enjoying a Worldcon in London’, pointing out they’d be an hour and a half’s ride on two public transit systems from Trafalgar Square — and that they’d probably see central London only about as often as #6 saw his flat in Westminster.)
Interested parties will want to know how much hotel rooms will cost. A bid will enter contention with a signed hotel contract specifying an attractive price per room, that is spec’d to require that convention members will book a specified minimum number of room nights, else penalty clauses will kick in. In any event, it matters a great deal how expensive accommodations are.
Fans evaluating the bid are going to look closely at transportation including airline flight connections to nearby airports from elsewhere, so host cities with non-stop connections to major hubs have an advantage. (This was a weak point of the Spokane bid for 2015: Critics including my wife Deirdre pointed out that the bid’s talking-up of ‘Spokane International Airport’ failed to mention that it’s called ‘international’ only on account of freight, and has no direct passenger connections
to non-USA locations at all.)
Fans also like to be assured that there’s an adequate supporting base of local SF-fan volunteers who are willing to staff the convention. ‘Local’ is somewhat flexible: When the Reno in 2011 bid appeared, everyone knew that there are very few known fans in Reno, Nevada, and that this was a bid proposed primarily by fans living in Portland, Oregon. But the point is that they believably convinced people they could ‘do’ Reno as an out-of-town bid.
It helps a great deal if most or all of the facilities, and relevant public transportation, is wheelchair-accessible. Loncon 3 was largely forgiven for limitations in this area in, say, major parts of the Underground system: Greater London is an ancient city, and so these things happen — but it was a significant problem.
I suspect that videos of past Worldcon Fannish Inquisitions (sessions where representatives of bids answer questions) are available online. You might find those useful.
To Lori Coulson:
Thank you. And I apologize as well for any and all actions on my part that offended you.
Y’know, it just occurred to me:
Here I am, a self-confessed noob first-time voter who has never been to a Worldcon (but has spent the last few months the repeated beneficiary of the Kevin Standlee Signal), talking about a fantasy Worldcon bid and how does one go about that anyway…
And quite a few people, despite having every right to tell me I’m being an idiot and to quit putting the cart before the horse and stop playing around with something I have no right to or idea about, have come forward with: Here’s some information, here’s links to other bids, there’s videos you can watch, and on and on and on. Very kind, not a hint of condescension, very informative.
And I’m a total noob.
I’ve been talking about this stuff for a few months now, and its been like this the whole time, so when I see someone claiming that they’d have to bow and scrape (and this isn’t directed at Vivienne in particular, I’ve seen similar things a few times, mostly from Puppies), it doesn’t match my reality at all. I guess its possible that I just happened to meet all the nice fans and really most people who run and attend Worldcon’s are horrible gatekeepers, but it doesn’t seem especially likely that I wouldn’t have met any of the horrible ones.
But the people I see claiming these things also tend to turn up in this space – I don’t know about their experiences elsewhere – being really rude about one or other aspect of Worldcon, the Hugo’s, and its members. So… Maybe it isn’t Worldcon that’s got the attitude problem.
@Meredith: For my part, you are extremely welcome — and you are absolutely right in crediting the tireless good work of Kevin Standlee in doing public outreach and assistance to newcomers. I try to follow his good example, to best ability — though Kevin is deeply clued in many areas, and I’m just an intellectual magpie in many of them.
And, speaking for WSFS fandom in general, thank you for the conclusion. Yes, WSFS people like Kevin, for example, are in my experience delighted to share, with total disregard towards the newcomer’s ideological bent.
To put it in context of personal experience, my second convention ever was my very first Worldcon, 1996’s LACon III in Anaheim, California, where I arrived by driving 800 km to the convention and immediately volunteering to help do pretty much anything that needed doing, starting with move-in and many days later concluding with move-out. I merely said ‘Hullo, I would like to help’, was immediately made to feel entirely welcome, and made friends whom I cherish to this day. And that’s genuinely what Worldcon fandom is like, Rolf Nelson’s recent claims notwithstanding.
(My first Worldcon was chaired by… guess who?.)
There’s a saying of David Brin’s that I think of frequently, concerning Worldcons: ‘I am a member of a civilisation.’ (Actually, Brin would say ‘civilization’, but I’ll give him credit for good intentions.) Point is, it’s a community and a culture, and we WSFS stalwarts care a great deal about it. And absolutely everyone is welcome at our party, but, if generic-you launch an attack on our institutions, we will just as politely end that.
(I’ve just written up the WSFS narrative from July 31st to the present for a private mailing list, so recent history has been much in my mind. That’ll probably appear soon-ish as a sidebar to my wife Deirdre’s Hugos Roundup blog post, which she says she’ll post Real Soon Now.)
Camestros,
Vivienne is a left-leaning, feminist science journalist. Plenty of moderate, mainstream people felt the Tim Hunt media storm was wrong. It might be shocking that she admits to finding entertainment value in being infuriated by Vox Popoli, but on the other hand she’s not alone – those site visitors aren’t all right-wing trolls and editors of Living Marxism.
Read her Hugo reviews. Spot on. 3BP is magical and could inspire young women to become scientists. Skin Game is sheer entertainment. The words in TDBTS disappear from your brain faster than you can read them, TGE is interminable pseudo-medieval claptrap. Ancillary Sword is boring middle-class people on spaceships. She’s not a Revolutionary Communist, she’s a straight shooter. When Marxists grow up they just stop seeing everything in black and white.
I do know some ex-RCP people. The person I know best, we’ve had some rip-roaring debates about climate change and animal rights. George Monbiot thinks they launched a shadowy conspiracy to takeover science comms. If they are a shadowy conspiracy, I’ve never noticed, and they didn’t invite me 🙂
My observation is they appear to be ‘right-wing’ because they’re into cultural critique, primarily of the British social science intelligentsia. Social science departments aren’t (by stereotype, at least) packed with Tory voters so the ‘right-wing’ look follows. They seem to sometimes take contrarian positions, just to take a contrarian position.
My criticism (I suppose) is that they don’t have a positive agenda – they don’t present an alternative future for society. It’s fine to go ‘this is wrong’, but it’s better to go ‘let’s do this instead’.
I guess I look RCP because I’ve been arguing primarily to do some personal cultural research – I sincerely wanted to understand what was wrong with the Hugos, why the mainstream media had been so willing to accept lies (e.g. the infamous Entertainment Weekly article), whether there was a shadowy cabal of ‘SJWs’, and why this was associated with #gamergate.
My opinions seem to have changed… because they have. I’ve been learning through the debate – it is not to push my own views. You have all been absolutely amazing by engaging with me, and I can’t thank you enough 🙂
As an aside, @camestros, the organisation that is run by some former RCP members now organises an annual two-day debating event in London. And, this year, they have a whole session on #gamergate and the Hugos.
@JJ
I did think about why I found Vox Day less ‘icky’ than – say – the British National Party website. I’m probably giving him FAR more leeway than I should because:
a) I’ve only been following this since April 2015, so I know less about the back history;
b) The ‘he can’t say that, he might incite someone’ doesn’t fly with me personally… Free speech, blah blah. We can debate that all day (we probably shouldn’t – this is a literary forum 🙂 ), but I tend to think it’s fine – provided it’s being opposed. Which, as people point out, it is. Twitterstorms are, of course, a separate issue;
c) I felt there was something sufficiently wrong with the Hugo short story selection in 2014 and Redshirts, that I’m glad some people protested. I wouldn’t be here unless I’d read about Puppygate. As a result, I’m planning to compile a recommendation list (my views on the 2014 fiction similar to ‘From the editor’ here);
d) I enjoyed Turncoat (clunky writing excepted) and Hot Equations, and have read the rest of Riding the Red Horse. It’s not a rabid frothing compilation of racial hate and misogyny – Brad Torgerson even has a story arguing in favour of women in frontline combat (huge diversity issue in the US military). Now, I don’t think Vox Day has much say in the content of that anthology, but he’s publishing it.
e) I enjoyed the Sad Puppy stories far less – on average – than the stories from Riding the Red Horse. As such, the Sad Puppy agenda confused me. I genuinely don’t understand what they were trying to promote. Pulp? Ideas-based hard SF? Whatever people on my website think is a good idea? There was no consistency.
Brian Z.: Vivienne is a left-leaning, feminist
She’s not a feminist, nor is she left-leaning, based on the things she’s posted here. She’s just a different version of Cathy Young.
@JJ: I choose to give people the power to self-identify. Vivienne Raper has explicitly stated she’s a Second-wave feminist, here on this blog. If that’s not a thing on which to base her position on feminism, I don’t know what is.
If you feel that her words and that stated position disagree, maybe you should ask why and not merely dismiss someone out of hand. As this thread developed she explained herself on many topics and moved toward the tone usually used in these parts.
I don’t know enough about the waves of feminism to converse intelligently about the topic, so I will refrain.
Devin: I choose to give people the power to self-identify… If you feel that her words and that stated position disagree, maybe you should ask why and not merely dismiss someone out of hand. As this thread developed she explained herself on many topics
I haven’t “dismissed her out of hand” — far from it. When she first appeared here, I assumed good faith and interacted with her on that basis — as did many other people here. Her “explanations” have convinced me (and, I suspect based on their responses, quite a few others) that she is neither left-leaning nor a feminist.
From my point of view, she has “self-identified” — and it’s not as a left-leaning feminist.
@Rick Moen
Yes, sorry, I should have put a specific thank you at the beginning of that post!
@self
Hmm, I wonder if my ability to wheelchair-ferry boxes would be a help or a hindrance… (Someone would need to lift them on and off at either end, but it might save someone’s back some toting.)
@Brian Z
The thing is, Camestros was defending the (possible) existence of Vivienne’s right-wing credentials from when I suggested they weren’t in evidence. You’re arguing with the wrong person.
@anyone else
Bets please on how long it is until Brian Z tries to use that highly edited excerpt of Camestros’ post to claim that “both sides” accuse people of communism, even though Camestros never said anything of the sort.
@JJ
She claims to be second-wave feminism, but the implied criticism of Sarkeesian’s distinctly second-wave flavoured opinions on prostitution is a little confusing on that front.
ETA @ Devin
To elaborate on that, since you say you’re not familiar: Anita Sarkeesian and secnd-wave feminism are both critical of sex work, with the assumption that it is always exploitative. Vivienne made a comment about how the videos (paraphrasing, edit timer!) say that 50% of the population share the same opinions of prostitution, and that’s a bad thing. (The videos don’t say that, by the way.) Which to me implied that Vivienne disagreed with the second wave view on prostitution.
@JJ
I’m not in favour of massive income inequality, kicking the poor, nuking the UK welfare system so disabled people have to use food banks, keeping women out of the workplace by providing inadequate childcare, etc. etc. 🙁
I don’t like self-identifying people for them 🙁 You’ll notice that a couple of early commentators had a confusion about my preferred pronoun. From past experience, I’m often taken as male on the net. If people had tried to ‘self-identify’ for me there, I’d have been gendered against my preferences. That’s a bit rude.
In the UK, I self-define as ‘liberal’ (I’m centre-left economically). In the US, that doesn’t work because ‘liberal’ means ‘socialist’. I haven’t found out how to explain my political views to Americans.
Well a few things here. Firstly I didn’t say that she was a Communist or a revolutionary nor did I say she was a member of or in anyway associated *with* the organization called ‘The Revolutionary Communist Party’ *and* I’m not convinced that said organization was either revolutionary or Communist. What I said was that being 1. ostensibly left wing and 2. overtly critical of modern feminism, while atypical is not unknown.
My point was not to demonize Vivienne’s views or marginalize or to create a rhetorical stick with which to bash her comments but simply to point out that in the great sea of ideology there is a spot that includes a sort of mix of lefty wingness and hardline-libertarianism that is critical of modern feminism.
This was not done to either defend or attack her views but just to show that she wasn’t some sort of krypto-conservative just pretending to have left wing credentials. I do not doubt her views are genuine. I do think they are confused.
If she is associated with the RCP/Living-Marxism people I would not be surprised, if she isn’t I would not be surprised either and my opinion regarding her wouldn’t change either way.
I wouldn’t have mentioned it except that I used to treat fringe ideologies like pokemon.
I normally use ‘Second-Wave’ deliberately to explain that I’m in favour of pro-women positions like equal pay for equal work, votes for women, against sexual abuse, and generally for the position ‘women are people too’.
The problem is that, if I criticise a Third-Wave feminist position, and don’t make the ‘Second Wave’ rider… Someone jumps in with some bizarre strawman position like ‘Ah, you want to chain women to sinks. YOU HATE WOMEN VOTING’. And I don’t. Obviously.
I probably don’t agree with all Second-Wave positions… For example, I’m cool with sex work, provided the women are consenting. It is a rhetorical device.
@Vivienne
Riding the Red Horse was also Vox Day’s entry for Best Editor Short Form, so I sort of hope he chose everything in it.
The motivation for the Puppy choices is easy, though: They were all friends, colleagues, or mentors of Brad Torgersen on the Sad Puppy slate, and on the Rabid Puppy slate they were friends, colleagues, or mentors of Brad Torgersen, plus things Vox Day published with Castalia House.
Personally, I loved the 2014 winners for Short Story and Novelette, but I haven’t read any of the Novella nominees or all of the Novelette ones yet so I don’t have the full picture. I at least thought all the ones I’ve read are okay, even if they weren’t my thing. Any of them were better written than Turncoat!
@Camestros
They’re not confused. They’re not obviously right/left-wing, in the way the terms are most frequently used. When I was a student, I wrote an entire book explaining what it meant to be (UK) liberal – philosophically.
My ideology is unusual (and thus, yes, fringe), and that’s why it’s so frequently misunderstood. And I’m sorry for coming in so hostile at first 🙁
Vivienne Raper: I don’t like self-identifying people for them.
My apologies. Other posters referred to you as “she” and “her”, and in responding to them, I continued that rather than choosing the neutral form, as I usually try to do. I should not have done this, and I apologize.
However, when it comes to not questioning or disputing someone’s “self-identification”…
JCW has repeatedly made posts loudly insisting that he is not a homophobe — posts which are filled with homophobic verbiage. I reserve the right to say that he has self-identified with his homophobic verbiage, just as I reserve the right to say that you have self-identifed with your non-left-leaning, non-feminist verbiage.
I can say that I’m a sports fan — but if I loudly denigrate people for participating in sports, for going to games and matches, and for watching sports on TV, saying that they are wasting their time, then I have self-identified as not a sports fan.
@ Meredith
Turncoat was not going to win a ‘good writing’ award. I’m not arguing about whether it should have won a Hugo. I’m saying I enjoyed it. I’m not sure what’s wrong with the Hugo short story categories, but neither the slates nor the 2014 entries were cutting the mustard – in my view. And that made me sad because I love SF.
And I’m doubtless wrong about Vox Day and the anthology – I thought that the minute the timeout happened. Thanks for calling me out on it.
@JJ
I promise you, if you put me in a room with some UK Tories, I look as left-wing as heck…