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Mike Glyer's news of science fiction fandom
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I see the File 770 System Upgrade GoFundMe is trending, whatever that means!
Re: panel moderating. I am firmly of the opinion that moderating a panel should be like refereeing a sporting fixture: if no one remembers you were there, you’ve done a good job.
@ Lori Coulson
Even more than his talents as a writer, Bob Asprin had a talent for generating communities and pulling people into them. I first encountered him, and filking, at Iguanacon, which was my first WorldCon. I met a few other people who showed short bursts of the same thing, but not as consistently as Bob, who had a track record as well as ongoing activities when I knew him.
(Basically, at a sprinkling of cons in the Northeast from Iggy through about 1981 or 82)
Dark Horde, Dorsai, lots of Filking.. I remember he instigated the first Filk Con.
@emgrasso — He was a joy, and I swear he knew everyone.
He made a point of tracking down the pros I’d expressed an interest in just so I could meet them. He even got me into the SFWA party so he could introduce me to Poul Anderson. Without him, I wouldn’t have met Gordy and Kelly and all the Dorsai, and my life would have been SO much poorer.
And he showed me how to find the filksings — which were pretty much private parties when I joined fandom. I love music as much as SF, so that was a priceless gift!
I disagree with that comparison.
The puppies did not invent overbearing behavior. I listened to the whole panel and do not believe Truesdale’s actions merited expulsion. He gave up on his plans to deliver his rant with 45 minutes left in the panel. He shut down an audience member who yelled an abusive remark at Neil Clarke.
After that, all panelists were able to speak at length and Truesdale’s primary contribution was to ask questions or steer the conversation to a panelist who had not spoken in a while. It became a normal con panel.
Was he boorish? Yes. Did he do a disservice to the panel’s premise by steering it to his hobbyhorse? Yes. Should he be asked to moderate Worldcon panels in the future? Probably not.
But in my opinion this expulsion was too extreme, and if Truesdale is telling the truth that he was never contacted before he was kicked out, the con broke its policy for talking to the people involved before taking action.
@Soon Lee, @rob_magic
@rob_magic,
Welcome to the Vorkosiverse! For years I avoided them because of their garish covers. But I became an instant fan when I finally gave one a try
Yes, welcome! I stumbled into that uni decades ago when I picked up a used copy of Shards of Honor and was hooked by the first page. I just ignore the covers, they are truly awful.
I’ll read anything Bujold writes at this point. I’ve never found her stories less than ‘very good’.
Instead of(or, in addition to) Best Related Work for Chuck Tingle, I’m thinking I’ll nominate Mark Oshiro’s Convergence reading of Chuck Tingle’s “Slammed By the Substantial Amount of Press Generated By My Book ‘Pounded by the Pound'” for Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form.
@rcade: Here’s my criteria.
1) Did he intend to make the con a worse experience for a group of people? The answer is clearly yes here. He walked into that room with the specific intent to be disruptive, aggressive, petty and mean-spirited.
2) Are those people paying con members? Yes.
Therefore, the question should be, “Why is his right to attend the con being privileged over the right of dozens of other people to enjoy the con?” Because that’s ultimately what he was setting out to do. He wasn’t setting out to speak, he wasn’t setting out to share an opinion, he was setting out to harangue people he disliked and make at least one full hour of their con a miserable experience.
You point out that other panelists stopped him and got the panel on track. Yay for them! Guess what? Their job does not include moderator-wrangling, and they’re just one more group of people he set out to make miserable.
So my question is this: Why do you feel that his membership is better and worth more than those of the people whose experience he was trying to ruin?
With regard to the File 770 system upgrade, thanks to the recommendations of various people, I’m looking at the
Dell XPS 15 9550-4444SLV Signature Edition Laptop
15.6-inch 4K UHD touchscreen, Intel Core i7-6700HQ, 16GB memory/512GB SSD, Up to 10 hours battery life, on sale for $1999.
I’d also like to add in the 2-year extended warranty and support for $100 and a 1-year subscription of Office 365 for $50. With California sales taxes, it will be around $2350 total. The Kindle Oasis was $339 (incl tax etc etc). Because GoFundMe ends up taking around 11% of donations in fees (at least it did with the park benches), that means we will need about $3000 total. So any sharing you can do of the fundraiser with other Filers will be helpful as we are very close to getting there. If we surpass that, I’ll either get a laptop bag or put the excess on an Amazon gift card.
Thanks again to everyone who has so generously donated. It will be awesome if Mike can do his File770 updates from his room at the con hotel in future, instead of having to use the hotel’s business center computer the way he did at Sasquan last year (I would come in very late each night and see him in there, typing away).
rcade, I’ll have to disagree with your disagreement.
Truesdale “gave up on his rant” only because Sheila Williams and others were pushing back strongly against his presumption and preemption of the panel. Without that, he would have continued.
Perhaps you think it’s unfair that Truesdale might have been shown less charity by the concom because he was associated with the Hugo vandals. (I am guessing at that. I haven’t heard anything from anyone with MAC2 to that effect. But I think it’s a reasonable guess, and it would have been a definite factor if I’d been making the decision.) But when someone lies down with dogs, they probably shouldn’t be surprised when they’re made to stay outside until they’ve been dosed with flea powder.
I don’t think any association with Puppies was needed to pull Truesdale’s badge. He didn’t go into a panel intending to do his best and then lose the plot. He went into the panel, having deliberately planned with malice aforethought, to abuse the position of moderator with which MACII had entrusted him, and to use the panel as his own personal soapbox, to insult the other panelists and the people in the audience.
That other people managed to tell him to stop and pull his head out of his ass does not in any way mitigate what he did, and what he had intended to do.
MidAmeriCon II is bound by confidentiality not to release any further information about their decision or their dealings with Truesdale. All I can say is that one of the concom members said, within my hearing, that their decision was fully justified. And I would certainly agree with them, based solely on what Truesdale said at the panel and in subsequent comments on Facebook.
Seriously, that guy needs to learn the First Law of Holes.
I see no evidence that he was intentionally trying to hurt people.
He wasn’t setting out to speak, he wasn’t setting out to share an opinion, he was setting out to harangue people he disliked and make at least one full hour of their con a miserable experience.
The claim he was trying to make “one full hour” miserable is also without evidence. He moderated the panel normally for 40 minutes after his intro went over like a lead balloon.
You’re making it sound like he’s malicious. I find it hard to believe that people who listen to the entire hour will buy that. He’s a fan who has a hobbyhorse against political correctness. I find that kind of rant unbelievably tedious and don’t agree with it, but I don’t believe his remarks rose to the level of being worthy of punishment.
As a fandom we’re getting carried away with how we treat controversial speech. Most of the regulars on File 770 have said something that upset other people in the heat of debate, but we get the presumption of good faith from each other. We’re not accused of intentionally seeking to hurt.
MidAmeriCon II is bound by confidentiality not to release any further information about their decision or their dealings with Truesdale.
They were also bound to talk to him for his side of the story before taking action.
Arriving with a box of literal peals does seem to me pretty malicious.
rcade: They were also bound to talk to him for his side of the story before taking action.
And because of confidentiality, you have no idea whether they did.
You’re making it sound like he’s malicious. I find it hard to believe that people who listen to the entire hour will buy that.
You would lose that bet. Showing up with a preprepared speech in which you start off by telling people they might want to leave the room if they disagree is not only evidence of malice, but evidence that he knew his speech was malicious.
They were also bound to talk to him for his side of the story before taking action.
The only evidence we have that they did not is Truesdale’s claim, and he has a well-deserved reputation for inaccurate reporting of events.
I just finished reading “Roses & Rot” by Kat Howard, and enjoyed it quite a lot. (One of these days I gotta try my hand at a Tam-Lin story, I just haven’t figured out how to work it yet…)
I’ve been having a hard time reading novels these last few months–symptom of burnout, I think, I’ve been whipping my brain like a rented mule to get multiple books knocked out, and it doesn’t have much energy to spare and would really prefer to play solitaire. But “Roses” held me the whole way through, so even though I started it because I was on a seven hour flight and had to do SOMETHING, once I was into it, it kept me spellbound.
Without too many spoilers, it’s about what you’d trade to be the best at your field. And I was amused to find that my answer has changed rather a lot since my youth. These days, if somebody said “You can be the best, but it will cost you,” I’d say “Meh, I do okay already,” and continue puttering along as I do. Which would likely be very disappointing to whatever power was offering me the bargain.
@Anna Feruglio: Arriving with a box of literal pearls does seem to me pretty malicious.
Also the prepared speech meant to take up more than half the panel time. The prepared speech which included insults against current SF editors, intended to be read on a panel full of current SF editors.
Seriously, this idea that only if Truesdale could only be held accountable for insulting people whom he had actually named has got to go. We know better than that.
The morning after the panel, he posted an email he got from the chair Ruth Lichtwardt letting him he was banned. He said it had just arrived and he had not heard from the con before that.
Am I 100% certain he didn’t lie? No more than you could be certain the concom had justification.
Maybe. But it seemed to me more like a joke he was attempting as an ice breaker. I think he was clueless about his audience.
As a digression, were they “literal pearls”? I figured they were cheap Mardi gras beads.
If the full prepared speech is online, I haven’t seen it and can’t base my comments on it. I haven’t seen Truesdale or anyone else at the panel say it was intended to take up 25 minutes.
That’s not my position. I think some comments directed at a group rise to the level of being personal insults and others do not.
@rcade – Maybe. But it seemed to me more like a joke he was attempting as an ice breaker. I think he was clueless about his audience.
Ah, I was wondering when that would happen. It’s not that I have a strong opinion about Truesdale’s ouster – based on his account, I wouldn’t have, but I don’t know the basis the ConCom had for doing so – but really, cluelessness and joke misfires are not erasers and I think I’ve reached the point where anyone trying to excuse behavior in that way just irritates me.
I also am more than a little curious about why you’re so engaged in an effort to invalidate the decision to revoke Truesdale’s membership.
@rcade
You are spending a lot of time defending DT. It’s very repetitive. Have you listened to the uploaded audio? Have you tried thinking from the perspective of PoC, women, and queers who deal with microaggressions all the time? It really feels like you are playing this as a SWM rules lawyer with little empathy for those of us who are constantly dealing with comments telling us why we don’t belong.
At least one person who attended the panel started crying. That’s concrete evidence of harm caused even if harm wasn’t intended, and since Truesdale has shown no signs of even attempting to understand what he did wrong I’m not inclined to cut much slack because of the possibility that he didn’t intend to upset anyone. In fact, considering that the entire point of the speech was that some people are too easy to upset (in his opinion), I’d say that he knew perfectly well his speech was likely to upset, annoy, or offend a decent proportion of those present, and that’s not even counting the ones who were just annoyed that the panel they wanted to watch didn’t happen because the moderator had a different agenda.
@RedWombat
That book sounds ace. 🙂
I don’t think anyone has linked to Jim C. Hines’ latest post on the subject.
To add to @JJ’s link – Jim C. Hines previous post has Jim’s breakdown of the first 30 minutes of the audio based on listening to it.
Because I care about Worldcon and think the decision was wrong. My impetus to comment is the same as anyone else’s here, whether they agree or disagree with the expulsion.
I looked across social media for first-hand accounts and never saw that claim. If you have a link I’d like to read it.
I listened to the entire panel. I do think about those things, and I want marginalized groups to feel welcomed and appreciated in fandom.
But I also want there to be room for controversial or unpopular ideas at convention panels, as long as the speaker’s words and conduct do not rise to the level of being personally abusive or offensive.
I’m not an uncaring straight white male who doesn’t care whether you feel like you belong. I love that cons are more inclusive today.
Because I care about Worldcon and think the decision was wrong.
You might note that it appears that many more people think the decision was correct.
@rcade
I can’t, since it was on facebook, but you can find it in the comments on one of Jim C Hines’ posts on the topic. The one where he’s summarising the recording. I believe one person said they were sitting behind someone who started crying, and another person later said that they personally started crying. I don’t know if the posts are about the same individual or if there were two separate people.
@Aaron
Holding a minority opinion is not in itself a reason to change ones mind or back down.
@rcade
This wan’t the heat of the debate though, was it? He wasn’t responding to a panelist or audience member.This was his prepared opening remarks.
He also felt he needed to have a private recording of this. Why?
I’m sure Dave is a nice guy. I’m sure he pets babies and hugs kittens. But this was something done with forethought, with the intent to create a disturbance. It was done by someone that the Con had provided with some level of authority, and should they have been of the opinion that this was either an intentional betrayal of that provision, and/or that this had brought the Con to disrepute, they would’ve been well warranted to undertake disciplinary action.
That’s well and good. I think the expectation from a moderator should be somewhat higher though, particularly when it comes to things that the moderator has clearly planned out.
ETA: @Meredith (Hiya!)
Word. It also plays into the the whole victim mentality that poor Dave seems to be angling for.
rcade – Because I care about Worldcon and think the decision was wrong. My impetus to comment is the same as anyone else’s here, whether they agree or disagree with the expulsion.
But you aren’t satisfied with saying you think it’s wrong and then standing down. Instead, you’re spending lots of time and words on something that is already done and cannot be undone.
This may not be true for you, but in my experience when people argue vociferously about the consequences of someone else’s actions, there’s usually some projection involved. In other words, one of the motivators is concern that one may, oneself, be trapped in a similar shitstorm, even without having ill intent. In fairness, another motivator is often a concern that someone is being targeted, but I’m still sticking with projection and its ensuing concerns as a prime engine.
I’m not taking a census. Here on File 770 most people support the decision. On Jim Hines’ blog too. I’ve read pros and fans on social media who question it and aren’t just right wing axe-grinders. You can find some of them on Moshe Feder’s Facebook wall.
Does one of us win this argument if it’s the view of the majority?
@rcade: He went on a rant about people standing up to being harassed, belittled, and ignored. I honestly fail to see how anyone in any of those groups could not be insulted.
Andrew M: I am always annoyed by the argument ‘There are no young people in X; therefore X will die out soon’, because there are many institutions which people regularly join in later life. Maybe, but fandom hasn’t generally been one of them. \I/ am being annoyed right now by people who feel that certain local organizations are just fine without new/younger members — not to mention by people who think “A implies B” rewrite that to “not-A implies not-B” (which does not have the same truth table).
Anna F: fandom used to be made up of misfits who were not unnerved by a new crowd, arguably because they didn’t have any existing crowd to fit into. I suspect fandom is better for having more-balanced people drift into it, but at least when I was young I found every convention welcoming despite being somewhat of the abovementioned type. Note also that few people \started/ with Worldcons (at least after Worldcons got into 4 figures, by which time there were lots of regionals).
Lori Coulson: And he showed me how to find the filksings — which were pretty much private parties when I joined fandom. That was said to be a regional variation when we got started (Discon II was my first Worldcon also); East Coast filking was mass singing (usually scheduled in function space), West Coast was bardic-circle (commonly in a known room), and the middle was whoever-jumps-in and sometimes less public. Now filking is isolated in time rather than space — it runs until dawn….
rcade: But I also want there to be room for controversial or unpopular ideas at convention panels, as long as the speaker’s words and conduct do not rise to the level of being personally abusive or offensive. So you’d accept a Klansman as long as he didn’t attack individuals?
He covers science fiction on his site, so my assumption is that he wanted to have a recording to pull quotes from. But maybe he always wanted to publish it with his comments expanded into an article. I heard a little speculation along those lines. (If the latter is true, I think the con’s code of conduct forbids that.)
I heard the audio yesterday and posted a couple dozen comments here and elsewhere. I don’t regard that as excessive. There were times here after the Hugo ballot came out I must’ve posted hundreds on the day’s developments. Got a wee bit carried away.
The Truesdale decision can’t be undone, but the concom and the rest of us can learn from it, just like any other controversy that we chew over.
I’m always a little concerned about my big mouth getting me into trouble.
But I don’t identify with a guy who thinks SF/F has a “special snowflake” problem and uses the term “political correctness” non-ironically. That kind of talk makes me eyeroll until it hurts.
Of course not. The KKK is a hate group.
I’m not taking a census.
You may not be, but the people making the decision pretty much were. The question they had to confront was “do we believe a majority of our attendees feel that this person’s actions insulted, demeaned, or otherwise threatened our attendees or a subset of our attendees”. That’s the standard. In effect, deciding what is or is not appropriate behavior is a census in a situation like this.
You’ve spilled copious pixels explaining why you think what DT did was within the bounds of acceptable behavior. Numerous other people have explained why they believe you are dead wrong, many of whom are in the communities against which actions like those DT undertook are aggressions. I think I’ll side with the people who were directly in his path on this one.
He covers science fiction on his site, so my assumption is that he wanted to have a recording to pull quotes from. But maybe he always wanted to publish it with his comments expanded into an article. I heard a little speculation along those lines. (If the latter is true, I think the con’s code of conduct forbids that.)
Worldcon’s code of conduct prohibited recording without permission no matter what you wanted to use the recording for.
Ah, I do think my last post is lost in purgatory for some reason but on the off chance that this gets through…
Before everyone piles on rcade, and risking the increased irritability of Cheryl S. (for which I do humbly crave pardon), I do believe he’s spot-on. From what I can make out (So far! Video would be conclusive), sorry, yes this is another example of comedy-gone-bad.
There doesn’t appear to be anything terribly disconcerting in the transcript I read above; the problem apparently lies in depth of DT’s visual acting ability. It seems that DT momentarily forgot that he is not a comedian; not John Cleese; and not funny. I’m willing to give him the benefit-of-the-doubt that he truly thought it would just be a scream to mince about with his ‘pearls’ (never understanding for a second that his schtick could be perceived as being ridiculously offensive), and that the audience would rush for and proudly wear tangible expressions of his comic genius for the whole con to see, but, well, the road to Hell, and all that… (that he provided these extra beads even more inclines me to the notion that HE thought he was being witty and urbane while cleverly delivering a serious underlying message), Comedy is hard. Just ask Harlan Ellison about comedy failures.
The Full Code of Conduct allows recording for personal archival use unless you are told someone doesn’t want to be recorded.
I found where he discussed his plans:
That goes beyond personal archival use, obviously.
From what I can make out (So far! Video would be conclusive), sorry, yes this is another example of comedy-gone-bad.
Intent is not magic. Attempts at comedy can be offensive. If what DT was doing was an attempt at comedy, it was offensive.
The key rule is this: “Any action or behavior that is illegal or causes significant interference with event operations, excessive discomfort to other attendees, or adversely affects MidAmeriCon II’s relationship with its guests, its venue, or the public is strictly forbidden and may result in revocation of membership privileges.”
DT caused excessive discomfort to other guests. We know this because other guests have said that he had done so. You, sitting there in your home, listening to a recording on your computer may not feel that way, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is how people on the spot felt, and they felt that he was causing them excessive discomfort.
@Aaron.
Yep, but stupidity is not necessarily malicious in intent.
Yep, but stupidity is not necessarily malicious in intent.
Malice isn’t required for something to violate the code of conduct.
However, I think there was malice, and it was preplanned malice. DT opened his preprepared speech by telling everyone that the “sepcial snowflakes” who disagreed with him should just leave the room. He knew that his remarks were going to be insulting and inflammatory. He just didn’t care.
Re: Moshe Feder’s post (and comments) (sort of, I’m bouncing off a bit)
It isn’t untrue that there are some people willing to use leftist concepts to bully people. We’ve seen that from people like Sriduangkaew, but she’s hardly the only one. The problem with statements like Truesdale’s is we all know perfectly well that he isn’t talking solely about those people, he’s talking about anyone who has ever pointed out that something was sexist, or racist, or contributed to erasure. Anyone who has pointed those things out has probably heard accusations of pearl clutching a sufficient number of times that hearing it yet again is unlikely to be funny and instead is likely to feel insulting. Because it’s an insult.
I don’t think I’d have cried, but I’d certainly have felt frustrated and angry that a panel I was interested in had been hijacked to insult me instead.
I’m soft on people, in some ways, so I expect if I were making the decision I’d just have removed him from any and all programming, but I’m not convinced that removing him entirely was a truly bad call. Sometimes people are just more trouble than they’re worth, and from what I understand Truesdale has a history of causing issues similar to this.
@rcade
What would you consider personally abusive or offensive?
@Jonathan K. Stevens
Malicious does feel like a strong word, but it isn’t totally inaccurate. It seems quite clear from the framing that he knew his remarks would be insulting or even upsetting and he did it anyway; surely that counts as intending to do harm?
@Snowcrash
Hi. 🙂
@Aaron.
I’d like to think he knew he was going to be controversial, but malicious? Naw, I just don’t buy it. Delusional, maybe.
He didn’t directly call people in the room snowflakes. He said, “If you’re easily offended, you might not want to stay for all of this, or you may want to.” Then he said a few more sentences and said, “I’m titling this ‘Science Fiction is Not for Snowflakes.’ Snowflakes being those people who seem to have graduated from the university of the perpetually offended with honors in microaggression.”
Lots of white males points of view don’t change how those most effected by microaggressions are likely to feel. This is one of the most frustrating things for many of us. Told by white men how welcoming fandom was to them. Told by white men how they see/hear something means our voices/perceptions don’t matter or not as much as their better educated/experience does.
We are getting tired of it. Really, really tired.
1. He had good intentions. Intent isn’t magic.
2. I don’t think it was that bad – your not the target.
3. We are cracking down too hard and it’s going to set a bad precedent – yeah because we see ConComs lining up to enforce their CoCs or even have them published before registration if at all.
4. I might say something wrong and get thrown out like that person was – really? You go out of your way to be an asshat? Or can’t deal with consequences from accidents with the same class MRK did? I’m so sorry the world might inconvenience you – it’s an inconvenience for me anytime I’m awake due to microaggressions or actual abuse, as well as being punched in the stomach too often from books, movies, TV, games – welcome to my world.
@rcade
Now your being disingenuous.
@rcade
That’s a level of hairsplitting I really can’t get on board with. There were absolutely people in that room who knew damn well who he was referring to and whether they were in that group. Whether he pointed them out is irrelevant to whether it was insulting to those people.
If he’d said ‘women are hysterical’ I’m sure you wouldn’t be claiming that any women in the room shouldn’t feel personally insulted..?
Rcade:
Panels at Worldcon were only 50 min, so no. More like 40 min left. He took a sizeable part for himself before letting anyone else speak. And that is not ok.
@ Meredith.
Not ever going to split hairs with you, pal! I remember you from threads long past, last year. Insensitive, uncaring, or just plain dopey: his motives are open to scrutiny. I’d just prefer not to believe that worst without conclusive proof.
I’d like to think he knew he was going to be controversial, but malicious? Naw, I just don’t buy it.
As I said before, you, sitting in your home listening to the audio on your computer, are not really in a position to judge. For one thing, you aren’t in the group of people that he was launching his broadsides against. For another, what can seem not so threatening while sitting in your home can seem quite different when you are there in person. Finally, malice isn’t the standard – excessive discomfort or creating an adverse relationship between the con and its guests is.
The further issue is that he showed up with a preplanned act that, by his own statements, he knew would be offensive and insulting to members of the audience. That is malicious.
That’s not easy to quantify, but I’ll try:
1. Negative comments or characterizations directed at people in the room.
2. Negative general comments or characterizations so strongly worded that they draw an immediate rebuke from the crowd or a panelist.
3. Patently offensive language such as a racial slur.
I was just quoting what he said for accuracy. He didn’t directly call people “special snowflakes” and warn them to leave. If he had done that, my opinion would be the same as yours.
It hasn’t stopped you from judging him as a person worthy of expulsion. Obviously, the Not There have less credibility than the There.