(1) MORE ABOUT WISCON’S KILLABLE BODIES PANEL. One of the program participants, Nicasio Reed, put up “a quick mid-WisCon post”. This excerpt is about half of it.
So this morning I was on a 10AM panel at WisCon 42, and it was called The Desire for Killable Bodies in SFF. I’d been very much looking forward to the discussion, even though we’d had little pre-panel discussion about it. It’s a topic that deeply interests me, and that I strive to think deeply about while consuming and creating narratives and characters. The panel was staffed by myself, one other panelist, and a moderator. I was familiar with Molly Aplet, our moderator, who very appropriately made the call to act also a third panelist, because there were just the three of us. Lisa Freitag, my fellow panelist, I knew from one email before the start of the convention, and from a brief conversation in the Dealer’s Room on the Saturday before the panel, when we chatted about texts to bring up. My biggest fear before the panel started was not getting to bring up all the things I wanted to talk about, or not having intelligent responses to the inevitably brilliant audience questions.
Turns out I should be more creative with my fears! As was reported live via Twitter, and then on the WisCon blog, Lisa repeatedly made statements that expressed a desire to sympathize with both individual Nazis (in this context we would be talking about, I believe, Third Reich-era Nazis), and later also individual Confederate soldiers. That this happened once was confusing, surprising, and alarming. That this happened multiple times as the panel went on was flabbergasting, frightening, and finally just damaging.
A lot of people have checked in on me since the panel, making sure I was doing okay, and I appreciate all of you so much. However, I was absolutely not the most affected by what she said, and what she brought into that room. Most saliently, I’m not Jewish. I want to apologize to everyone who was there who was justly rattled, afraid, saddened, or made to feel unsafe. While I gathered myself enough to push back ideologically while on the panel, I didn’t take the step of directly turning to Lisa and saying, in however many words, “That was a fucked up thing to say, and it’s not okay.” The person who did eventually do that was an audience member, who I won’t name here without their permission. (Panelist and moderator names are, of course, public knowledge.) The onus for directly confronting those statements should absolutely not have fallen on the audience, particularly on those most directly and historically affected by the views expressed. That was my failure, and I am extremely sorry for it. So, again, to everyone in the audience who helped to push back, I’m sorry, and thank you….
The blogger Coffeeandink attended the panel and wrote a post detailing some of the discussion.
I don’t feel comfortable naming the panelist, though I wouldn’t say it was wrong to do so, either, and I do link to a post that names them. For this post, though, I’m just going to call them X.
I’m willing to answer questions about what happened. I am not willing to discuss the punishment or the con’s reaction with people who are not targeted by Nazis. If you are not Jewish, Roma, queer, disabled, or nonwhite/a person of color, please have that discussion elsewhere.
- The discussion was focused on Nazis in Third Reich.
- X did not express support for Nazi or Confederate ideology. What they did, repeatedly, was express sympathy for Nazi individuals and stress the need to “humanize” Nazis. They mentioned Confederates in support of this, appearing to think that saying that every soldier on both sides was “some mother’s son” was a convincing argument for extending compassion to Nazis. They argued that some Nazis were “good people”.
- According to Wiscon’s post, X “appeared to posit that disabled or injured people sometimes ‘have to be sacrificed'”, but I was pretty distracted at the point when that came up and can’t confirm it.
- The panel description focused on SFF “killable bodies” that are stand-ins for marginalized people, so I was not expecting the subject of Nazis as killable bodies rather than as killers to come up. It’s not innately problematic for a panel discussion to have a larger scope than its description, but I think a lot of people had this expectation and that it made the approach X took especially unexpected.
- Multiple audience members, multiple times, objected to what X was saying. At the end of the panel, one audience member said bluntly, “There’s a difference between understanding Nazis and sympathizing with them.”
- I remember the audience as being the ones who pushed back most assertively, but the moderator and panelist Nicasio Reed also argued with X after the audience broke the ice. I do not blame anyone for being too startled to respond firmly while in the room. I myself did not speak up.
- It’s important to recognize and acknowledge the humanity of people who do terrible things. However, when doing so, it is a moral imperative to center the victims of those terrible things. X centered the emotions and conflicts of the perpetrators–directly in the face of survivors or people who would have been targeted, who repeatedly pointed out that this is what X was doing. I do not believe X did spoke out of malice, but this is a topic that requires great care. If X has considered the topic with that care, it was not apparent during the panel….
(2) THE LAST OF LE GUIN. David Naimon on working with a legend at Literary Hub: “Ursula K. Le Guin, Editing to the End”.
Ursula’s final words to me, her final edits on the manuscript of our collected conversations, were in pencil. We had talked in one of these conversations about technology, about how, in her mind, she was unfairly labeled a Luddite. That some of the most perfect tools—a pestle, a kitchen knife—were in fact perfected technologies. I had just received the manuscript from her days before, and the pencil on it reminded me of the aura of in-the-world magic this whole endeavor, bringing a book into the world together, had assumed.
The manuscript had traveled in the world as an object, one carried by foot and passed hand to hand. Our publisher, Tin House, located literally in a house of tin on the corner of a leafy boulevard in Northwest Portland, was just down the hill from Ursula’s home. And by a remarkable twist of fate, as if sharing the same street were not enough, Ursula’s own granddaughter worked as an intern there. It was often her or the book’s editor Tony who would walk up the hill to deliver the pages, or walk up the hill to walk them back down again. …
She could have published most if not all of her books at one of the big five publishers in New York. She could’ve economized and maximized her time by only granting interviews to the likes of Terry Gross, Bill Moyers, and Charlie Rose. And yet she continued to choose small presses, and often ones distant from the hierarchy of the publishing powers in NYC, whether an anarchist press from San Francisco or a feminist science fiction press from Seattle. Similarly, she never said no to her hometown community radio, KBOO, a station that is not Portland’s NPR affiliate, but whose mission statement is to give voice to the voiceless, with shows like Rose City Native Radio, Transpositive PDX, and Black Book Talk. By conventional metrics, KBOO is a small station, both in reach and listenership, and yet you wouldn’t get that impression when Ursula speaks of it…
(3) CALLING ALL HOLLYWOOD ACCOUNTANTS. We Got This Covered puts its flopologist to work: “Disney Responds To Solo: A Star Wars Story Flopping At The Box Office”.
Although the full four-day estimate won’t be released until later today, it’s probably safe to say that the Anthology pic won’t be gunning for the Memorial Day holiday weekend record anymore. As you’ve surely heard, the Ron Howard-directed space western hauled in $83.3 million in its opening weekend and will finish off Monday with about $110 million, nowhere even remotely near the current record holder, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End ($140M).
In a year that’s seen three releases enter the domestic top thirty for all-time opening weekends, Deadpool 2 ($125M), Black Panther ($202M) and Avengers: Infinity War ($257M), the box office failure of Solo: A Stars Wars Story is only amplified that much more.
(4) DANCING IN AND AROUND THE MAY POOL: At Featured Futures, Jason has compiled another month of choice reading to dip into with “Summation: May 2018”.
This month’s baker’s dozen of noted stories (four recommended) comes from the pool of ninety (of 440 Kwds) published between April 30 and May 28. The print zines were individually strongest with Analog and F&SF each contributing multiple tales but the web combined to contribute seven.
While not applicable to the monthly recommendations, I did review a collection this month which had eight reprints (three recommended) that I especially liked.
(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY REDWOMBAT
- Born May 28, 1977 – Ursula Vernon
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY SPOOK
- Born May 28, 1908 – Ian Fleming. Happy Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!
(7) COMICS SECTION.
- Mike Kennedy says Over the Hedge explains Westworld.
(8) WORD TO THE WIS(E)CON. I wish I could transplant this axiom to the comment section here. Beware the free-floating harshers of squee.
God. I can’t believe it has to be said, but don’t pop into threads where someone is obviously happy to make them feel like garbage because you have a bone to pick with an organization. Read the damn room.
— Renay? (@renay) May 28, 2018
(9) HARDLY A MARVEL. Nicholas Whyte chimes in with his preferences for “The 2018 Hugo finalists for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form”. Landing well below No Award is —
7) Thor: Ragnarok
This is the fourth Marvel Universe film I have seen, but only the third in chronological order – the others were the first Iron Man, which didn’t impress me much, and nor did Captain America: The First Avenger, which I also ranked below No Award. On the other hand there is also Black Panther, made after Thor: Ragnarok but which I saw earlier this year, and loved. I’m afraid Thor: Ragnarok is back to the usual form for me. Not being terribly invested in the characters of the Marvel Universe, let alone the Thor storyline, I could see that the whole thing was trying to be funny but it wasn’t really my fandom. At least Jeff Goldblum was treating it with the approriate level of seriousness. I am sure it will do better than seventh place in the overall vote.
(10) DINING (WAY) OUT. NPR reports “Great White Sharks Have A Secret ‘Cafe,’ And They Led Scientists Right To It”.
“We expected it to be the desert that the textbooks sort of advertised it would be,” said Bruce Robison, a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.
But this was no desert.
A layer of nutrient-rich plant life exists deeper under the ocean than satellites could detect. Tiny creatures feed on it, and larger creatures feed on them. And up and up. It represents “a complete food chain, a ladder of consumption, that made us believe that there was an adequate food supply out here for big animals like tunas and the sharks,” Robison said.
(11) LET’S ALL TWEET LIKE THE ROBOTS DO. Too sensitive: “Bulgarians tweeting in Cyrillic confused for Russian bots”. Twitter has several criteria, ANY of which can cause a tweet or account to be suppressed; using Cyrillic is one of them, despite it being used in 11 countries beside Russia.
Speaking at a United States Senate Committee inquiry into extremist content and Russian disinformation online, Twitter’s acting general counsel Sean Edgett shed some light on why this might be happening.
He said in October 2017 that Twitter’s tools “do not attempt to differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ automation,” when looking for Russian-linked accounts.
“They rely on objective, measurable signals, such as the timing of tweets and engagements to classify a given action as automated.”
What can qualify as a Russian-linked Twitter account?
- Created in Russia
- Registered with a Russian phone carrier or email address
- User’s display name contains Cyrillic characters
- Tweets are frequently in the Russian language
- Logged in to Twitter via a Russian IP address even once
“We considered an account to be Russian-linked if it had even one of the relevant criteria,” said Mr Edgett.
(12) DINO DANDER. Might be evidence of the first step towards birds: “Dinosaur dandruff reveals first evidence of skin shedding”
An analysis of fossilised dandruff fragments has given scientists their first evidence of how dinosaurs and early birds shed their skin.
Found among the plumage of these ancient creatures, the 125-million-year-old flakes are almost identical to those found in modern birds.
It shows that these dinosaurs shed their skins in small pieces, and not all at once like many modern reptiles.
It’s more evidence that early birds had limited flying skills, the authors say.
(13) FUN FOR ALL. Here’s video of the Anime North 2018 religious protesters. (There’s several posts about them in Reddit’s Anime North thread.)
These guys show up every year. The congoers also do this every year [play songs on a loudspeaker].
[Thanks to JJ, Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, Brian Z., Chip Hitchcock, Carl Slaughter, Andrew Porter, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories, Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]
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Franklin on May 29, 2018 at 7:21 am said:
And it sounds to me like you want to maintain an entirely simplistic view of complex issues. For instance, did you know that by 1936 membership in Hitler Youth was mandatory for all “Aryan” youths, even if their parents objected? And that families that didn’t allow their children to join were investigated by the government, the children harassed in school, sometimes refused a diploma, sometimes unable to get jobs? Did you know that by 1943 Hitler Youth members were being used as drafted soldiers and by the end of the war they were using boys as young as 12? Or did you already use this and still think that people forced into the Nazi party and forced into battle are still entirely evil, undeserving of sympathy, and okay to kill without qualms? Again, not everybody to fight in an army is there because they share the ideals of the military leadership–there are many reasons someone might end up fighting in a war, and many of them are ones they might not have had a choice in.
Darren Garrison: You just told a person they are not feeling what they are feeling. Quit digging now.
I understand your concern, but you have hit the point where you are going too far in defending your point, and doing damage to fellow commenters.
ETA: That is to say, in the rush to defend Nazis from being treated as a faceless mob, you are dehumanizing the local people you know.
@Cliff Ramshaw/@Paul Weimer/@Peer: Solo didn’t just fail to match a record, it failed to match Disney’s expectations, which suggests it may not pay back its legitimate costs. (Remember the rule of thumb that 2/3 of the gross are eaten by distribution, retail, etc. (just as a publisher doesn’t get paid anywhere near the cover price of a book), although Disney was reported to be armtwisting those numbers for SW8.) It’s not a bomb, and they may not even notice the underperformance on their annual results, but it means we might be spared the threatened Boba Fett movie. I’m unconvinced that Deadpool 2 was a huge factor; it’s playing on a lot of screens but IIRC didn’t gross as much.
@bookworm1398: the problem is identifying bots in 280 characters or less, added to the near-certainty that some Russian bots have been designed to cause political chaos. They aren’t the only ones — there was a report on the BBC of a chaotic-posts factory (albeit human-driven) in I-forget-where, the-former-Yugoslavia — but they’re certainly the ones about which Western nations are communicating their unhappiness to social media magnates.
Lenora Rose on May 29, 2018 at 8:19 am said:
Much as the panelist at Wiscon did. It’s not that she pointed out that Nazis and Confederate individuals are people, too. If that was all we wouldn’t be having this conversation. It’s that she kept digging that hole so broad and so deep and so fast, the flying dirt injured others all over the room.
Lenora Rose on May 29, 2018 at 8:19 am said:
Could you point out where I said that?
Darren Garrison – Or did you already use this and still think that people forced into the Nazi party and forced into battle are still entirely evil, undeserving of sympathy, and okay to kill without qualms?
I’m ok with holding people accountable for evil actions they did even if they didn’t really want to do them. If they’re holding a gun in battle then they’re willing to die for their cause instead of turning their guns on those forcing them to battle. I don’t believe a person holding a rifle has no agency in the action to pull the trigger.
Darren:
No, you don’t.
What is that but telling a person their lived experience and feelings are not their own?
And this exchange, immediately following, comes darn close, plus is villainizing a fellow commentor.
And it sounds to me like you want to maintain an entirely simplistic view of complex issues.
“No, you don’t.”
LOL, I guess that’s one way to read Darren’s comment. The opposite way it was intended, but you do you.
Ryan: Did you read his whole comment? The “no you don’t” isn’t in response to the thing it would look grammatically like it’s in response to. He’s literally telling the other person their friend was not injured by neo-Nazis but by individuals, and they’re not allowed to be upset enough to blame the collective evil of White Supremacists on the march.
It doesn’t have a single damn thing to do about feelings, it has to do with facts. I jumped to the wrong conclusion that his injured friend was one of those injured by the car attack–if that had been true, blaming the rally for the injury (and not the driver of the car) would have been no more legitimate than blaming (to pick an example out of the air) whoever that country music singer was that I’m not going to bother googling up because of the gunman that shot 50+ people. I was wrong in my assumption of how the injury took place, but I was disputing the facts, not the feelings. Feelings don’t trump facts if the feelings don’t fit the facts.
Since when has it ever been the case here that people can’t voice disagreements with another poster? I stand by what you quoted 123.74%.
So nobody killed or injured by a white supremacist on the march is ever killed by white supremacy on the march. Got it.
There’s a difference between voicing disagreement and villainizing.
THAT is how you write a sympathetic individual WWII German soldier without excusing Naziism in general, or worse, trying to *sympathize* with Nazis. Anton was a very sympathetic character, but not an excuse for then saying “Naziism is not a terrible ideology just because some people who lived with it were human beings.”
But that doesn’t seem to be close to what she said.
True, she didn’t, if you mean the person who started this back at Wiscon. But, for context, I have been told in the last two days in a different discussion that we should try and understand white supremacists, and on a similar bent, that I can’t blame all police for shootings because 98% of officers never fire their guns, and because a lot of shootings are good shoots, or all of ICE for kids being taken from parents at the border because most ICE pickups are of people already in jail. I’m currently feeling very sensitive to where the idea we should sympathize with Nazis can lead, and how much beyond “understanding that many German soldiers were conscripts” that really goes
Plus there was a conversation at Camestros’ about how easily people start to slip into talking about genocide. Again, not directly of a piece, but probably influencing my responses to this line of thinking right now.
Saw this today and laughed:
http://newsthump.com/2018/05/29/uk-brexit-proposals-nominated-for-hugo-award-in-fantasy-category/
The ‘conscript’ reasoning is also flawed. You always have a choice to resists.
“But they would have been killed” is the argument. Well, at the front they have a good chance of getting killed too, plus they do their best to hold up an evil regime, and increase their own chances of becoming involved in its atrocities.
No, it’s not an easy decision to make. Yes, it might be interesting to look at this in literature. But a Con panel? Where, after making the first maybe incautious remarks you continue to dig deeper?
What people tend to forget is that before the modern era of elective military service, serving was not a choice. My whole family, save my father who was born in 1934, was drafted. My youngest uncle after my dad, when he was 18, was drafted into the SS, refused to serve, and was sentenced to death for desertion as a result (he escaped, long story). Refusing to serve was possible but very few were willing to pay the price, which was often death.
Which is not to say that many in the German Army didn’t do unforgivable things, clearly against any law governing warfare at the time, and I’m talking the regular army not the Nazi party machine here. So did the Italian army, and I would have stuff to tell about the Brits as well, but let’s say that the Germans military went above and beyond. Including around my hometown, in case anybody thinks I’m engaging in apologia myself here.
I think that a con shouldn’t have a panel called “killable bodies” if they aren’t prepared to talk about killable bodies.
@Hampus:
Well yeah. It’s obvious that even in the context of fantasy enemies the concept of ‘killable bodies’ is troubling (look at Tolkien’s feelings of guilt over his Orcs). You end up with a problematic panel any way you try.
Re: free-floating squee-harshing
Context is important. If one posts a public, open-ended question asking, “If you aren’t attending event X, what would it take to get you to attend event X?” it is not entirely unexpected if the responses include people saying, “Event X has characteristic Y, which would have to change for me to attend.” I don’t consider that squee-harshing; I consider it answering the question as asked (if, perhaps, not as intended). I can see how it might feel harsh if the OP intended a cheerleading thread, but the reaction felt out of proportion.
Heather Rose Jones: That’s worth considering, too, although I have in mind a more common and much less nuanced experience when someone writes an enthusiastic comment about what they like, and another person, seeing the subject raised, homes in on the opportunity to tell everyone they think it’s crap.
My thought is “We’re here every day — if you want to say something’s crap, fine, start the subject yourself, don’t just impulsively jump on somebody else who just said they love it.”
Mart –
Well yeah. It’s obvious that even in the context of fantasy enemies the concept of ‘killable bodies’ is troubling (look at Tolkien’s feelings of guilt over his Orcs). You end up with a problematic panel any way you try.
I think a SFF is probably the least problematic way to discuss the trope considering the vast supply of fictional enemies to choose from rather than going for ‘they were just following orders’ with real atrocities. Considering how often fantasy uses metaphors for race and societal issues it might’ve been less honest that way as well though.
@MattY
Yes, but note that even you say ‘least problematic’.
And if the panel had stuck to pure fictional examples, it would not have escalated as it apparently did.
A muster of Meredi! Merediths? A bank of bargains?
Goodreads can be absolute murder on my TBR pile. Among todays “deals” are:
Virtual Light
by William Gibson
US$1.99 – Expires in 5 days
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
by Harlan Ellison
US$1.99 – Expires in 3 days
Swords and Deviltry (Lankhmar, 1)
by Fritz Leiber
US$2.99 – Expires 0700 GMT on 20180530
Swords Against Death (Lankhmar, 2)
by Fritz Leiber
US$1.99 – Expires 0700 GMT on 20180530
Busted Flush (Wild Cards, #19)
by George R.R. Martin
US$2.99 – Expires in 3 days
Lots of other interesting things at the first link, FWIW.
Regards,
Dann
There is no substitute for a militant freedom. The only alternative is submission and slavery. -Calvin Coolidge
Mart-
@MattY
Yes, but note that even you say ‘least problematic’.
And if the panel had stuck to pure fictional examples, it would not have escalated as it apparently did
Shame no one was able to chart their DNA back to their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-Grandfather who was a Stormtrooper in a galaxy a long time ago and in a place far far away.
(Actually I am willing to believe that Stormtroopers might’ve actually had some good guys forced into it and they intentionally missed their shots all the time as a form of rebellion.)
What happened in Charlottesville wasn’t a random group of unaffiliated people chancing to be in the same place and some stuff randomly happened. It as an explicit, planned, organized Unite the Right March, of which the Nazis were welcome participants.
The murderer of Heather Heyer was not denounced; he was celebrated.
Those who engaged in less lethal assault were also commended by their fellows.
Regardless of any speculation about draftees in Nazi Germany, people today, marching with Nazis and the KKK and cheering them on, are not coerced. They are making a free choice. And yes, I am going to judge them harshly, and not have much patience with excuses.
I think Wiscon probably intended a really interesting and useful discussion, but there was no way it was going to be well as a panel at a convention. Nazis, actual fucking Nazis, are marching in the streets and being called “very good people” by the demagogue in the White House, and too many people have far more reason than a white, cis, heterosexual male of middling to upper income, to be seriously worried.
This is not a good topic for casual, abstract discussion in a setting that’s not professional or dedicated amateur historians.
Insisting that it is, is just insisting that the viewpoints, experiences, and emotions of people who aren’t cis, white, heterosexual males are less valid, important, or relevant.
To which I say…something rude, that I’ll on it out of respect for OGH.
Bottom line: there is a huge difference between othering people because they’re different, and othering people because their primary characteristic is othering people who are different. Even though it’s othering people in both cases, which is not good, in the second case, it can at least be argued to be karmic justice. I mean, isn’t turnabout supposed to be fair play?
This, in turn, is why I have no sympathy for the people jumping up to shout #NotAllNazis. :eyeroll:
@Adoptees. Wow. To my experience, there’s an awful lot of us all in one place.
I wanted to respond to each individually, but no time right now. I did, however, want to make sure that anyone considering going the DNA testing route should know that almost, if not all, of those companies are selling the data they gather to, among others, law enforcement agencies.
Sorry to say, I do not believe their statements of privacy or anonymity (argue all you want, it’s a faceless corporation with fallible people working there and lots of money is involved. That’s always a recipe for not always following the rules.)
As they used to say about hacking “if there is a way out, there is a way in”; I prefer not to be arrested for a bank theft in Switzerland because my DNA was found at the scene (it wasn’t, but the hacked database says it was) when I’ve never been to Switzerland.
So I have to forego that particular service. (Yes, all of these invasions and potential invasions of personal privacy are inevitable, I just believe in fighting them ALL the way.)
I’ve encountered a few reviews of Solo which complain the film is “dark”. Not in tone, but in visuals. Makes me think that this would allow for some cheapness in special effects.
The opening sections of Solo, at least, are pretty murky, yes.
@Robert Whitaker Sirignano,
That was my experience. I liked what I could see of Solo, but for the first half of the movie, I often couldn’t see much.
I find the discussion of conscription interesting. Especially because people refer to the consequences for resisting it in Nazi Germany.
You know what that means? People did resist it. Anyone who didn’t, complied with the Nazi regime. They supported Nazism. Yeah, that is because of a complex calculus, but what can be said is: they supported it.
That doesn’t make them not human. It does mean I’m not here to SYMPATHISE with them, because they made the decision to be Nazis. They made the decision to aid in and support the extermination of people very much like… say… me.
~~~~~~~
Separately, there’s the question of a confusion of empathy and sympathy. A lot of people here are defending sympathising with individual Nazis as if we’re saying you shouldn’t think they’re human. Here’s the thing. Sympathising isn’t empathising. Empathising with a Nazi is one thing, and it’s a complex thing. It isn’t easy to draw lines around understanding their humanity and empathising with them, and how far that goes. But sympathising? Having common feelings with them, as Nazis? No. Sorry. I refuse to offer my common feeling to someone who denies me my ACTUAL HUMANITY, thanks.
~~~~~
And you know what? Maybe when an audience member points out that you’re demanding people at a feminist convention, with queer people and people of colour in the room, sympathise with NAZIS, you shouldn’t DOUBLE DOWN and justify it because family members. I have family members back up the ancestry who’ve done all sorts of despicable crap. You know what I don’t do? Sympathise with a single one.
“Or did you already use this and still think that people forced into the Nazi party and forced into battle are still entirely evil, undeserving of sympathy, and okay to kill without qualms?”
Two things are happening here, and they seem to be being confused. Conscripted soldiers in the Nazi army were still fighting fort utterly abhorrent Nazi goals, no matter how individually pleasant some may have been. In the same way, various undoubtedly brave Confederates, such as Robert E. Lee ( who was pleasant and courteous if you were white), raised rebellion against their country in order to found an empire based on treating people like things in order to make money and status out of them. And many of the Confederate rank and file were conscripted, too. The cause is abhorrent, even if some individuals supporting it were not. Yes, the subject of the panel was extremely difficult.
@Hampus
I can’t imagine having a candid, semi-public, and spontaneous conversation about that subject, particularly at Wiscon, which to my understanding is not a forum for amateurs. That’s the kind of discussion I’d need everyone involved in to know me well enough to know my values and my actions, and that I often mangle my words when speaking spontaneously (or otherwise, to be fair).
@Dann
Thanks for the Muster of Merediths! I’ve been wishing for the Lankhmar books to go on sale. I loaned my first out to a friend years ago and have no idea which friend that was.
“Rogue One worked because you didnt know the characters and the story was not very fleshed out. ”
I was talking to a friend last night who’s already seen both and he had the opposite opinion – that there wasn’t enough time to really get to know and care about the Rogue One characters (though they were intriguing enough that he’d have loved a whole series about them, a la Rebels or Clone Wars), so Solo worked better for him because he was already invested in them.
No spoilers on anything, please – I am so far behind on movies I want to see that Solo is way down my list.
@msb
My understanding too is confederate conscripts only comprised 1/4 to 1/3 of their army. There were a lot of exceptions and exemptions available plus some states actively opposed the draft and intentionally undermined it. So that leaves a rather large volunteer majority and a good portion of conscripts that may not have tried all that hard to not serve.
I haven’t received the email notification from the Hugo Award administrators yet, but the 2018 Hugo Awards voter packet is available. According to the website, the 1943 Hugo Awards voter packet will be available in a couple days. I hope you have a fast connection. If you download them all, it’s about 3.3 GB of zip files.
@Stoic Cynic:
While most of what you said is accurate (for both sides, Union and Confederate) one correction is perhaps necessary. The CSA in fact had a lot of trouble getting conscripts to serve, with evasion and desertion rates high. Both sides did, though the north had a larger population base and authorized the enlistment of blacks in order to offset problems with conscription. The CSA instituted their draft almost a year before the Union was forced to do so.
The more it became obvious that rich men could buy their way out while poor men were stuck serving, the more the draftees resented being forced to serve. Couple that with letters from loved ones at home detailing living conditions and you have a high desertion rate in the armies of the Confederacy. Toward the end of 1864 into 1865, upwards of 2/3rds of Lee’s men deserted.
https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2012/11/civil-war-conscription-laws/
@ Xtifr:
Thank you.!!!!!!
Some parts of this discussion are reminding me strongly of the the Paradox of Tolerance which a lot of white supremacists and neo-nazis are committing these days.
Other parts have made me reinstall Stylish, dig up my old list of white-outs, and add a new name or two (though turns out most of those parts were already on the list). [Had a total computer meltdown last semester and have to wipe and reinstall everything–luckily I maintain automatic backups on Dropbox.com for all my files!]
The Hugo packet is available.
http://www.thehugoawards.org/2018/05/2018-hugo-awards-voter-packet-now-available/
The con will send out emails shortly, but if you have your login information for voting you can log in directly.
I haven’t finished downloading and unzipping, but there seems to be quite a lot – in particular Series is divided in five zip files for a total of 900 MB.
@Robert Reynolds: As I recall, the duration of service for conscripts in the South was also extended ex-post-facto which was (of course) also a major factor in desertion (I don’t think the Union extended service in that way, though I may be mistaken).
Yay for the Hugo packet – well timed too, I’d just finished a book.
Only had a quick peek so far, but I’m seeing quite a few that are using the Netgalley method pioneered by Seanan McGuire last year, so if you only see a pdf file it may actually contain a netgalley link.
For Best Novel, the packet contains complete copies (in ePub, MOBI, and PDF) of The Collapsing Empire and Raven Stratagem. It also contains ~100 page PDF-only excerpts of the remaining novels.
For Best Related Work, the packet contains complete copies of No Time to Spare and Luminescent Threads and excerpts (in some cases very brief) of the remaining works.
For Best YA Book, the packet contains complete copies of In Other Lands, Summer in Orcus, and The Art of Starving, as well as instructions to access A Skinful of Shadows via NetGalley and an excerpt from In Other Lands.
For Best Series, the packet contains full copies of The Way of Kings, Words of Radiance, and Oathbringer (as well as a 264-page sampler for those that don’t want to read ~3000 pages); Penric’s Fox and The Curse of Chalion; A Natural History of Dragons, In the Labyrinth of Drakes, The Tropic of Serpents, The Voyage of the Basilisk, and Within the Sanctuary of Wings; The Cloud Roads, The Serpent Sea, and the novella The Dead City; protected copies of each of the Divine Cities novels via NetGalley; and copies of each Incryptid short story and NetGalley downloads for each InCryptid novel.
Haven’t had a chance to look through the rest of the packet yet.
Contents of the Hugo voters packet in fiction categories:
Best novel:
Scalzi, Lee full novels, the others in excerpts
Best novella, novelette, short story:
all full texts
Young Adult:
Hardinge, Brennan, Kingfisher, Miller full novels
Okorafor excerpt,
no Pullman
Campbell:
Ng, Arden, Solomon full novels
Kuhn full novel available via Netgalley
Prasad, Roanhorse shorter texts
Best series:
Sanderson: complete series
Bujold: Curse of Chalion, Penric’s Fox
Brennan: complete series
Wells: The Cloud Roads, The Serpent Sea, The Dead City
Bennett: complete series available via Netgalley
McGuire: all novels available via Netgalley, all short stories.
Many, many thanks to all the authors and publishers who made this possible!
(There is more in the other categories, of course.)
ETA: Ninjaed.
Thank you, Dear Rightsholders, for sharing your works with Hugo Voters. I appreciate it very much!
And I completely respect those who did not choose to participate. I *really* don’t want the Hugo packet to become a requirement for rightsholders.
@steve davidson: You do you. I advocate for DNA testing because so many of our bio-families lied on the paperwork.
Your specific scenario, though, won’t happen. I’ve been discussing this with a forensic chemist I know ever since the news broke about the Golden State Killer arrest. There would have to be another test, with a confirmed chain of custody and a direct comparison to the sample, which would make the hacking of the database obvious.
Familial searching via genealogy databases is going to be challenged as unreasonable search and seizure. I don’t know who will be challenging it, but that’s the gist of the discussions that have been going on in the testing communities.
My enthusiasm for the Packet is considerably subdued because they have posted versions of my files in which the hyperlinks to this blog DON’T work. (Specifically, are gone.)
Yay for the Hugo packet, ugh for Netgalley. I have not had good experiences with Adobe encrypted PDFs.
I think there is a point being quietly missed in a corner here. It’s not a question of determining if Nazis past or present (or Germans past or present) are good people. It’s a question of determining if any human, no matter how evil and rotten and repellent, is a killable body. To which the answer of any civilised being should IMHO at the very least be “no, not unless there is absolutely no other way to stop their ideology become the law of the land, and even then, as quickly and humanely as possible.” That’s not sympathy: that is the recognition that humans have some inalienable rights, not because they are good, or American, or useful, but because they are human. Even if you loathe and despise them.
@Mike
I can’t get links in any of the Fan pdfs to work, so it might not just be you. (On the other hand I’m using mobile right now so it might just be me)