210 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 5/30/18 Pixels, Scrolls…I’m The Guy With The Book”

1. @Chip: Yep. William Tenn’s brilliant “Servant Problem”

2. The term “virtue signalling” is also used by those of us who identify as SJWs. And, well, like the term “SJW” used by us SJWs, and the term when right-wingers use it — it actually kind of denotatively means similar things, even if connotatively, it’s completely different.

   To me, “virtue signalling” is when you retweet all the right things to sound liberal, repeat all the talking points, say all the platitudes, but aren’t willing to actually DO anything about it that takes any effort or risk. You remember that whole “safety pin” thing a while back — “wear a safety pin to let people know that you are a safe person and will back them up if they are being harassed by racists”? A bunch of people were saying, “Okay, before you wear one of these things, decide what you’re willing to do for it — does that mean you’ll take a bullet for someone? Or a punch? Or get arrested? Or stay with a stranger and keep them company when they get arrested? You don’t have to be willing to do all of these things — or even ANY of these things — but you should think about it ahead of time — what are you willing to risk, what are you willing to spend, in order to wear that safety pin?”

   And it turned out that the vast majority of people who were all excited about wearing safety pins to show that they were good people got a lot less enthusiastic when you pointed out that, if you weren’t willing to back up your signals with action, you were going to make things worse.

   I totally don’t blame anybody who can’t afford to stick their neck out, by the way. A lot of people have a lot of responsibilities on their plate, a lot of things they are honor-bound to do, and/or have limited enough resources that they’re barely keeping themselves together WITHOUT pulling on another task. That’s totally fine. The issue comes when you’re willing to claim that you can and will do stuff that you can’t or won’t do. It’s hypocrisy, but worse than that, it’s misidentifying yourself in ways that might screw over other people, in order to try to make yourself look better.

   So, from where I stand over here, that’s what virtue signalling means — when you’re willing to wear a safety pin if it means people will think you’re a good person, but not if it means you’re expected to stick your neck out when things get dicey. It’s the thoughts-and-prayers of the Left.

   The way that Correia uses the term and the way I use it aren’t 100% different, to be honest. We both mean “virtue signalling” to mean “actions which are basically pointless and done to make yourself look good to other people who identify as liberal.” The big difference is what actions we consider fall into that category.

3. Well, the Wiscon discussion has certainly been confusing. Every time I read it, it seems that the facts have changed.

   Also, I don’t see the point of violent video (or other) games. Does anyone want to explain what the benefits are?

4. Ian D Osmond: The term “virtue signalling” is also used by those of us who identify as SJWs.

   The safety pin issue is more complex than your simplistic description of it.

   I recommend that you stick to speaking for yourself, instead of claiming to speak for me and other people who consider themselves SJWs. 🙄

5. @robinareid: “. . . there was a strong current of calling people writing hobbit/man slash pedophiles on the grounds that hobbits were described as the size of a child.”

   OH GOOD GRIEF! That’s about the stupidest thing I’ve read this week. Idiots who need a dictionary and some training to learn how to be adults. Le sigh.

   (6) SOLO ACT. Yay, Mur Lafferty! 🙂

6. Of possible interest from The Atlantic:

   For me, nonfiction has always been about the brain. If story is the motor of fiction, than the motor of nonfiction is thought. And so in nonfiction, it seems very natural that you follow your thoughts wherever they take you, even if it means going into other people’s perspectives. That’s a good thing. As people, it’s so easy for us to start feeling that people of X political party aren’t human beings—or that this guy committed murder, he should get the electric chair. It’s unfortunately easy for us as a species to place others outside the zone of what we feel comfortable calling human. But literature is an attempt to do the opposite. It’s an attempt to locate humanity where we might least expect it, an exercise in broadening the scope of what can be said to be “like us.”

7. jayn on May 31, 2018 at 5:01 pm said:

   Still, as a spectator at the Wiscon panel itself said, the panelist was asking for sympathy for Nazis as a group – and understanding motivations and sympathizing with them are two different things.

   …

   Which is why the panelist saying that Nazis as a group merit sympathy met with such pushback, IMO.

   Do you have a citation for that? Because here is the relevant part from coffeeandink:

   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.

   It very explicitly says individual Nazis and Confederates, not “as a group.”

8. @Darren Garrison: I thought you had decided that coffeeandink was unreliable.

   I suspect jayn is referring to this account of the panel.

9. Rail on June 1, 2018 at 5:56 am said:

   @Darren Garrison: I thought you had decided that coffeeandink was unreliable.

   I suspect jayn is referring to this account of the panel.

   Okay, let’s work from that one:

   Another audience member said, not to keep bringing up the Nazis but – how do you remember to humanize individual Nazis or Confederate soldiers while acknowledging their horrible acts?

   …

   This is the point at which Lisa really began to push back about how she does care about individual Nazis. … I do not believe she meant in any way sympathizing with political motives, but that she personally was attempting to sympathize with difficult choices that individuals made between death and complicity.

   That account also says individual Nazis and Confederates, not “as a group.”

10. @Darren Garrison: No, it doesn’t, but there are two things that mean I won’t be continuing this. First is that I’m out on errands for the next few hours. Second is that I don’t think you’re arguing in good faith.

11. Rail on June 1, 2018 at 6:34 am said:

    Second is that I don’t think you’re arguing in good faith.

    I am genuinely baffled at why you feel this way. I am literally quoting the accounts provided to show that they explicitly say that the panelist was talking about individuals, not the group. I’m not manipulating anything, I’m not quoting out of context, all my ommissions are clearly marked by ellipsises. If you have read material in either of the accounts say that the panelist said that she was sympathizing with Nazis and Confederates as a group and not answering a question from the audience about “how do you remember to humanize individual Nazis or Confederate soldiers while acknowledging their horrible acts” then you should feel free to point those passages out.

12. Jeff Jones –
    Also, I don’t see the point of violent video (or other) games. Does anyone want to explain what the benefits are?

    Ok. Video games are an entertainment medium like books, TV shows, movies, plays, etc, only with an interactive benefit through player input. This allows for different forms of storytelling that takes player agency into a situation, puzzle solving in three dimensional space, and/or unique perspective opportunities.

    Take for example a game like Portal (spoilers for that game ahead). In it there are puzzles that involve manipulating space in order to escape a research facility. Sometimes that involves transferring physical objects by ripping a tear in the fabric of reality in order to move a metal cube so that it pushes a button. The puzzles are clever and at one point a character gives you a new cube, a Companion Cube. Same as all the others but this one has hearts on it and you use it to solve puzzles and are told to take care of it like it takes care of you. Then at the end of that level to euthanize it. Then the game does a good job at making the player feel guilty for potentially destroying a fictional object.

    Spec Ops: The Line does a similar job at using the interactivity to question morality at the end of the game by showing that the player assumed the only options were ones where they used violence when sometimes the best option was to do nothing at all. Though inaction also had consequences.

    Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons tells a great story with no words. Journey is a game which requires players to work together to traverse a land only there’s no voice chat and you have to use the in game motions in a way to learn how to communicate with each other.

    And yes much like movies, tv shows, books, etc, violence is often used as a framework for the story being told and while there are exceptions nuance isn’t a major thing and the writing is too often an afterthought (sometimes not even that), however the medium is still much younger than most others and yet also evolves much faster in terms of the leaps in technology ever 5 years which leaves people constantly relearning the tools in which to create the work in.

    Also blowing stuff up is fun.

13. Jeff Jones:

    Also, I don’t see the point of violent video (or other) games. Does anyone want to explain what the benefits are?

    Well, as Matt Y said, blowing stuff up is fun. I tend to use them as a bit of stress relief as well. When I was in college, Doom was the game of choice for this — and not because of the thin veneer of story, but because things happily went splat. (I’d also use the cheat codes to get ahold of some of the more destructive weapons.)

    More recently, GTA San Andreas has been my go-to game for stress relief. I had a habit of loading it up, entering the cheat code to get the rocket launcher, and proceed to get myself in enough trouble to warrant the police helicopter, which I then would blow out of the sky — repeatedly. This is not because I want to kill cops in *real* life — to be honest, I’m a rather meek and quiet person IRL — but because it provides a bit of stress relief without hurting folks in meatspace.

    MattY:

    Then the game does a good job at making the player feel guilty for potentially destroying a fictional object.

    I’ll admit, my whole motivation after that incident was to utterly destroy the character that gave me that order. Granted, the next game in the series let me know that I’d done less of a good job than I thought…

14. @Matt Y: Thank you for the interesting and detailed response.
    @katster: Thank you as well. I guess not everyone can use piano playing or language construction as stress relief.

15. Jeff Jones
    @Matt Y: Thank you for the interesting and detailed response.
    @katster: Thank you as well. I guess not everyone can use piano playing or language construction as stress relief.

    Which is a video game as well, recently the Nintendo Labo construction set came out which allows people to use cardboard along with the game system to construct a small piano and then learn to use coding language to program it 🙂

16. @Darren
    Using sophygurl’s account, the panelist began the issue with this:

    She said that “Nazis were a convenient” other for this trope that are “maybe not evil” but that “as we become more tolerant of others” – we’re running out of other people to use in this way. [For me, this was the first red flag, and I noted it in the margins of my notes but continued on in good faith. Already, I was noting mutterings from the audience around me.]

    Right there, she’s referring to Nazis as a group. Not the German people as a whole, not even the Wehrmacht, Nazis. She’s saying they’re ‘maybe not evil’ and that as people grow ‘more tolerant’ it becomes less acceptable to use them or other people as mass unindividualized targets in a game. She’s saying that it was ‘maybe’ lack of tolerance that made people perceive Nazis as evil in the first place, as if the Nazis were the Scottsboro boys or something.

    Sophygurl notes that this is when the audience starts muttering.

    The panelist seems to be the one who brings it up a second time, in a discussion involving Galen Erso, who another panelist feels acted criminally in helping build a machine that killed billions of people, and that him building a nearly inaccessible way to destroy it did not redeem him.

    Lisa then spoke directly to me, with eye contact, leaning forward to see around Molly who sat between us. She said that some LGBT people (unsure if “LGBT” or “gay” was used here) enlisted in the Nazi’s army in order to escape their own persecution. She asked me, directly, that she just wanted to know what my choice would have been: join the army or die. I said I’d die. She said ok, she just wanted to ask….In retrospect the underlying assumption was that the question of whether you should turn on your own people and actively participate in their slaughter, or instead not do that, is a difficult choice. And the…pressure behind that question felt like an encouragement to come over to her way of thinking about Nazis as people sometimes deserving of our sympathy despite their horrific actions.

    …and probably these interventions were one of the reasons why questions kept being asked about the Nazis throughout the rest of the talk, as you deplored.

    However, the theme WAS killable bodies, and the Confederates were brought up as well in a very pertinent question…the Nazis and Confederates may be depicted as a faceless undifferentiated mass in war games, but they were real and their bad actions were real, so is it wrong to depict them as ‘killable bodies’ in war games? A panelist who had ancestors who were slave owners said that he did not care about this, that he had no sympathy for them and their bad actions. Freitag differs.

    She said that her ancestors were Nazis and she was trying to understand them and sympathize with their choices.

    Now, there is certainly a case to made that there were many people among Nazis who were not evildoers and good people. If your ancestors were among them but their cases are too personal to discuss, you could use obvious cases like Oskar Schindler and Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, both members of the Party. Many other cases could probably be added. If you want to talk of the battlefield instead (which is, after all, where most of those video games are set) you could bring up cases of coercion into fighting. You could elaborate on what penalties were faced for refusing conscription. You could even bring up the most unanswerable cases of coercion, boys fourteen years old and younger being conscripted into the tragically hopeless defense of Berlin at the end of the war. These were kids who could not be said to have any real responsibility for fighting, unless you’re the kind of person who thinks ten-year-olds should be tried as adults.

    But the panelist doesn’t make that case. She doesn’t give a reason why the individual Nazis she defends should be excused from responsibility besides saying that some were coerced and some were her ancestors and she wants to sympathize with them.

    Now, of course, it may be quite true that all of her ancestors were coerced to the extent of having no guilt in what the willing actors did, and it would be unreasonable to expect her to give personal stories of why she felt they deserved sympathy (which is why I suggested historically known cases could be given instead). But the fact remains that the core original group of Nazis were quite willing to do terrible things for terrible reasons, and a still larger number of people who might not have cared about the reasons were willing to go along with it for political or other gain – the Nazis could not have taken power if it were not so. So saying ‘some people were coerced’ is by itself not a convincing argument for sympathy and ‘tolerance’ for the whole group, which she stated at the beginning that she felt they merited.

    When you add to that the statement of Wiscon’s that she “appeared to posit that disabled or injured people sometimes “have to be sacrificed,” which seems to defend Nazi ideology as opposed to individual coerced Nazis, the impression that the rules were broken were understandable. Mind you, I asked Sophygurl if she had heard that part about sacrifice, and she said she did not, but that she was taking notes during much of the time (her detailed recall of the discussion of non-Nazi items about video games and stories backs this up) and was upset during a lot of it and could have missed that part. AFAIK, it has not been denied by anyone even though it was the main reason Wiscon gave for her ban to begin with, but I haven’t kept up with any recent updates and I could be wrong about that.

17. @Nickp Re: Seanan and the lap full of turtles. I’d be leery about holding a turtle on my lap, myself.

    I think also the penultimate verse of Chuck Berry’s “My Ding a Ling” is on point here . . .

18. jayn on June 1, 2018 at 10:09 am said:

    She’s saying that it was ‘maybe’ lack of tolerance that made people perceive Nazis as evil in the first place, as if the Nazis were the Scottsboro boys or something.

    That’s certainly a way of interpreting it. Not the one I reached, though. I interpreted it as “fewer and fewer groups are socially acceptable to use as faceless masses, but Nazis remain.” (And, I’ll say, there remains a problem with ambiguity about what is meant by “Nazi.” Does “Nazi” in the WWII context mean “member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party”, or does it mean “all members of the German military?” Because I have been thinking in terms of the second, not the first.)

    Lisa then spoke directly to me, with eye contact, leaning forward to see around Molly who sat between us. She said that some LGBT people (unsure if “LGBT” or “gay” was used here) enlisted in the Nazi’s army in order to escape their own persecution. She asked me, directly, that she just wanted to know what my choice would have been: join the army or die. I said I’d die.

    A perfectly reasonable question. Of course the other panelist, sitting safely in what is still for the moment at least a freeish country and never having faced the choice of “comply or die” immediately concluded that he would bravely choose to die as a Big Damn Hero, unlike all those weak cowards in the past.

    And the…pressure behind that question felt like an encouragement to come over to her way of thinking about Nazis as people sometimes deserving of our sympathy despite their horrific actions.

    Yes, that is kind of the point of questions–to make you think more deeply about and reexamine your position.

    When you add to that the statement of Wiscon’s that she “appeared to posit that disabled or injured people sometimes “have to be sacrificed,”

    There’s nothing to say about this because nobody has elaborated on details of it, even if it was in the context of Nazis in games or some other gaming context. I find it very unlikely that she was trying to defend eugenics, though, and find it more likely that an Outrage Brigade was interpreting something in the least charitable way possible.

19. Lisa then spoke directly to me, with eye contact, leaning forward to see around Molly who sat between us. She said that some LGBT people (unsure if “LGBT” or “gay” was used here) enlisted in the Nazi’s army in order to escape their own persecution. She asked me, directly, that she just wanted to know what my choice would have been: join the army or die. I said I’d die.

    BTW, this brings to mind the Sonderkommando, death camp prisoners who had to choose between disposing of the bodies from mass executions and becoming one of the executed, and chose to be cleaners. One of them buried letters about what he was required to do, hoping that they would be recovered some time in the future, that were recently published. When faced with the choice to help their jailers and live one day more or to die immediately, were they wrong to choose to live? Would the panelist have said “thanks for the job offer, but I’ll take death?”

20. Thanks for the football stuff! I should have thought about unseen academicals, since Ive read it and liked it quite a bit (at least more than any diskworld book that followed)…

21. @Darren

    That’s certainly a way of interpreting it. Not the one I reached, though. I interpreted it as “fewer and fewer groups are socially acceptable to use as faceless masses, but Nazis remain.”

    No, she specifically used the past tense,

    “Nazis were a convenient” other for this trope that are “maybe not evil” but that “as we become more tolerant of others” – we’re running out of other people to use in this way.

    In other words, she’s taking it for granted that Nazis being evil as a group is a trope that is being or has been superceded because of ‘tolerance.’ The panelist can be defended on the grounds of being misunderstood, but not by changing the plain sense of her words.

    Of course the other panelist, sitting safely in what is still for the moment at least a freeish country and never having faced the choice of “comply or die” immediately concluded that he would bravely choose to die as a Big Damn Hero, unlike all those weak cowards in the past.

    It’s true that none of us knows for sure what we would do if faced with such a difficult choice, and few of us do. But the fact remains that there IS a right choice and a wrong even then, and also true that many people DID make the right choice even with the threat – like the people of Denmark in WWII. Like sophygurl said: “Plenty of people were informed by their morals that certain things were wrong and were able to make the choices not to engage with those wrong things at the time, whether we’re talking about the Nazis, or slavery, or colonial forced assimilation, or bullying in schools, or police brutality, or whatever. Just because a large percentage of people in a specific time and place either didn’t see the wrongness or ignored the wrongness or went along with the wrongness out of fear – doesn’t make the wrongness … not wrong.”

    If she meant that thing about ‘sacrificing the disabled’ to be necessary strictly in a video game and not in real life, and it was clear when she said it in her own words but someone misinterpreted it in their report to Wiscon, then I could see how she might have been misunderstood. Saying it MUST have happened so AND that it was done in bad faith – without either of us seeing the words that were actually said and their context – seems a bit premature to me.

22. jayn on June 1, 2018 at 11:20 am said:

    The panelist can be defended on the grounds of being misunderstood, but not by changing the plain sense of her words.

    Well, to be fair we are quibbling over the wording of margin notes written as someone listened to someone else speaking off the cuff during a dynamic conversation, not a carefully crafted position paper. And if there was a “plain sense” to the words, we wouldn’t be disagreeing over them. One person’s “plain sense” of doesn’t necessarily agree with another person’s “plain sense” of words (for example, see the 27 bazillion sects of Christianity, each dismissing the clear misinterpretations of all the other groups.) To me, your interpretation of the “plain sense” of the words looks like it is being shaped to fit conclusions that you have already reached. Mine probably look the same to you.

23. Darren – When faced with the choice to help their jailers and live one day more or to die immediately, were they wrong to choose to live?

    I don’t know what a good choice would be for a victim of that situation but I sure wouldn’t want to tell the future generations of relatives of the prisoners that the jailers were possibly good people as individuals who took a bad job offer.

24. Given the subsequent thoughtful discussion here about the issues raised in the controversial panel, I’m more inclined to believe that WisCon’s banning of Freitag was not just wrong, but was a mistake.

25. I can’t look for the source right now, but one of the audience members on Twitter explained that the comment about disabled people was describing the content of a specific (nazi-free, so far as I’m aware) game, not an endorsement or a suggestion. I’m… uncomfortable with how that comment was initially reported, firstly because it was inflicting a painful reminder of our lack of societal worth in some people’s eyes for no good reason, and secondly because if that was misreported, what else was?

    I hope very much that whoever reported it that way misheard it rather than deliberately misrepresented it to shore up their argument, although given how few other people reported it at the beginning… I don’t appreciate the idea of getting whapped on the nose for the sake of getting someone else thrown out.

    Re: World of Warcraft, I immediately assumed that the torture sequence described by the panelist was a specific quest in the Death Knight starting zone, since that’s the point that I know a lot of players noped out of. You start that particular area as evil and don’t break the mind-control until later on. There’s a quest where you torture people for information and it’s a quest that suffered from terrible RNG upon release, so you often had to torture quite a lot of people. It made a fair minority of players deeply uncomfortable. WoW isn’t the sort of game most people play wanting to be the bad guy… Forsaken players sometimes aside.

26. Meredith on June 1, 2018 at 12:52 pm said:

    I can’t look for the source right now, but one of the audience members on Twitter explained that the comment about disabled people was describing the content of a specific (nazi-free, so far as I’m aware) game, not an endorsement or a suggestion. I’m… uncomfortable with how that comment was initially reported, firstly because it was inflicting a painful reminder of our lack of societal worth in some people’s eyes for no good reason, and secondly because if that was misreported, what else was?

    I think I’ve found it, in this series of tweets (third tweet from the end):

    Frostpunk: you are trying to keep alive a community of survivors in a frozen dystopia, have to make choices to prioritize resources, includes people who have or gain disabilities

    For those (like me) who have never heard of Frostpunk, it is a game set in an alternate 1886 where erupting volcanoes has led to global cooling, crop failures and mass starvation. In-game, you have to allocate resources including medication and food, and–apparently–have the option to not feed people who can’t be productive in working towards survival.

27. @Darren

    BTW, this brings to mind the Sonderkommando, death camp prisoners who had to choose between disposing of the bodies from mass executions and becoming one of the executed, and chose to be cleaners. One of them buried letters about what he was required to do, hoping that they would be recovered some time in the future, that were recently published. When faced with the choice to help their jailers and live one day more or to die immediately, were they wrong to choose to live? Would the panelist have said “thanks for the job offer, but I’ll take death?”

    The Sonderkommandos, IMO, are a poor comparison. They belonged to a powerless minority (Jews) who were were offered an unequivocal ‘Do this or die’ after a long process of being deprived of rights, thus ‘othered,’ dehumanized and imprisoned by the Nazis themselves, and thus had absolutely no reason to believe it would not happen. And IIRC, many offered the job DID choose suicide. And in the end, even the Sonderkommando rebelled – hiding testimony and pictures that would have been death to them if they had been discovered at it, and openly revolting in Auschwitz and other camps, despite the near-complete lack of hope of success.

    IMO, the automatic and unappealable death sentence for a prospective Jewish Sonderkommando refusing to obey Nazi orders doesn’t compare to the consequences of a non-Jewish German refusing to join the Nazi party. There were other consequences – one could be deprived of a job or even a profession, deprived of advancement in a job, socially ostracized, presumably other worse consequences – but there was no automatic, inevitable, immediate death sentence for all those who refused. Hence there was, I think, different gradients of guilt – from no guilt and even merit for those who only joined to be able to feed their families and otherwise acted against the worse Nazi directives, to those who did nothing to aid or abet, to those who joined for some material benefit, small or large, to those who did it out of full agreement with Nazi aims.

    Of course the other panelist…immediately concluded that he would bravely choose to die as a Big Damn Hero, unlike all those weak cowards in the past.

    As I mentioned before, I don’t remember gay men being offered the choice of joining the Army to save their lives as a historical thing that happened much in Nazi Germany, if at all. So using that choice as an example of a choice that all those who joined the Nazis faced seems inaccurate.

    I, myself, hope that I would never have to face such a choice of EITHER giving up a profession and livelihood, being socially ostracised, or worse, OR collaborating with serious injustice. If it did happen, I hope I would have the courage to refuse, regardless of the penalty, though I don’t know that anyone could accurately predict that they would choose death rather than do the evil thing until they were faced with the choice in the flesh. Regardless of how hard the choice IS, though, there is still a right choice and a wrong one. Making the wrong one under the circumstances may be more or less extenuable depending on the duress involved – but the fact that the choice may be hard doesn’t change the fact that it is wrong.

    God willing, NONE of us will ever have to make a life or death choice of that kind. And even if we are faced with a less difficult but still onerous penalty for making the right choice, I hope most of us would still be willing to make the right choice. Like Sophygurl said:

    Right, again the distinction between understanding a motive and sympathizing with it. I think the danger in sympathizing, specifically, is that it sends us the message that it is okay and excusable and therefore when it comes time for us to make a similar decision, we can allow ourselves to do the same.

    As to this…

    And, I’ll say, there remains a problem with ambiguity about what is meant by “Nazi.” Does “Nazi” in the WWII context mean “member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party”, or does it mean “all members of the German military?” Because I have been thinking in terms of the second, not the first.

    …the only person who can know what the panelist meant in this panel when she used the word ‘Nazi’ before anyone else did is the panelist herself.

28. In-game, you have to allocate resources including medication and food, and–apparently–have the option to not feed people who can’t be productive in working towards survival.

    Sounds like The Fifth Season universe.

    The twitter you mention doesn’t say who was the one who brought it up or if this was the context of the remark about how disabled and injured people sometimes have to be sacrificed.

29. I have my own form of virtue signaling, but I don’t think it’s included in Puppy usage. Mine is along the lines of sometimes mentioning when I eat whole grains and vegetables and always neglecting to mention when I eat a third helping of pizza or chocolate cake.

30. @jayn

    One of the tweets/comments I saw was explicit about the game being the context for the remark, although again, I can’t look for the source right now, so you are perfectly within your rights to wait for one before believing it. I wouldn’t have said it was the context if the tweet from SamFromInternet’s livetweeting thread was the only mention I’d seen.

31. I don’t think this is where I saw it, since it isn’t as explicit as I recall (and I’m pretty sure it was a tweet), but it’s mostly clear about the context in combination with the tweet linked above.

32. @Laura Resnick: “I have my own form of virtue signaling, but I don’t think it’s included in Puppy usage. Mine is along the lines of sometimes mentioning when I eat whole grains and vegetables and always neglecting to mention when I eat a third helping of pizza or chocolate cake.”

    I’ve never eaten a third helping of pizza, or even a second. One pizza, one helping, right?

33. @Jayn

    As I mentioned before, I don’t remember gay men being offered the choice of joining the Army to save their lives as a historical thing that happened much in Nazi Germany, if at all. So using that choice as an example of a choice that all those who joined the Nazis faced seems inaccurate.

    There were closeted gay men in Wehrmacht, both conscripts and volunteers, who usually came from career military families. What is more, the Nazis were also willing to overlook some things to satisfy the need for killable bodies to feed to the war machine. For example, there is the documented case of two mixed race brothers, who’d been jazz musicians (and jazz was forbidden during the Third Reich) before the war and were nonetheless “allowed” to serve in the Wehrmacht and die for the Reich (which both of them sadly did).

    However, I suspect the example of gay men given the choice to serve in the Wehrmacht or die may be a mixed up version of the story of Bruno Balz, a gay man who wrote song lyrics for UfA film musicals and who was arrested by the Gestapo after stepping into a honeypot trap (not for the first time either) and would likely have ended up in a concentration camp. However, film composer Michael Jayr intervened and said that Goebbels himself had demanded uplifting propaganda songs for uplifting propaganda films and that he absolutely needed Bruno Balz in order to write those uplifting songs, so Balz was set free after a couple of days. According to legend, Balz was literally offered the choice to write an uplifting song or get sent to a concentration camp and chose to write a song. And a really great song it is, too, with slightly subversive lyrics about hoping for a miracle and better times. Indeed, a lot of Bruno Balz’s songs take on a quite different meaning, if you know his background. “Kann denn Liebe Sünde sein?” (Can love be a sin?) is the most obvious example.

34. @David W.: On a purely how-cons-should-act level, IMHO banning anyone without talking with the person first is wrong, period.

    @Outrageous Hypothetical Someone Will Post: Please don’t bother, because my answer will be YES, even if they say outrageous-hypothetical-designed-to-change-my-mind-but-not-actually-reality-based. 😛

35. Reminder: The person in question was banned for the rest of the last day on the spot by safety. The long term ban, how long it should be, or whether there even will be one, is up to an entirely different group who are still reviewing events and the case, and to whom Freitag can speak at as much length as she wants. You can argue the right or wrongness of the on the spot decision as much as you like, but they were working with what they had and had little time to pick it over for days on end and analyze every word — and the possible future repercussions are being given the room to be decided properly.

36. @Lenora Rose: Weird. You seem to be reacting to my comment (based on content and timing), but if so, you’re wildly exaggerating what I said, which is very irritating and seems unlike what I normally see from you here. So I’ll just ignore most of that.

    However, I did miss what day this happened on, so thank you for mentioning it. It doesn’t change how I feel about how cons should behave (no reason it should), but it slipped through my attempts to keep up.

37. Kendall: Outrageous Hypothetical Someone Will Post: Please don’t bother, because my answer will be YES, even if they say outrageous-hypothetical-designed-to-change-my-mind-but-not-actually-reality-based.

    How about a non-outrageous real-life example?

    After Dave Truesdale’s little pearl-clutching panel hijacking tantrum at MAC II, by his own admission, he went and hid out in the Puppy suite, and he wasn’t checking his e-mail.

    How many hours (or days) have to elapse without being able to make contact with the alleged infringer before a con is allowed to take some sort of action (while other con attendees are continually asking the con what their response is)?

38. @JJ: Good and interesting question, not because it’s a real-life example, but because you’re asking a different question about a different sort of problem. Thanks for that!

    If someone’s not findable, it’s kinda tough to actually ban them, or at least, make sure they know, enforce it, etc. It’s like the tree falling in the forest. That’s a thorny logistical issue (if you know you want to ban regardless), I suppose. It’s not like we chip con-goers. 😉 (Yes, I’ve been to professional events where the badges had RFID stuff to track which talks were most attended; lots of people didn’t like that and there were tips on how to make it not work, and they supposedly were not tracking individual attendees.)

    If you know they’re avoiding you, I can understand it tipping a possibly-bannable offense into “We give up, we’re announcing The Ban Of the Evildoer since they’re just avoiding giving their side/taking their lumps/etc.”

    When to actually make that call, though – good question. And what if banning wasn’t even on the table or probably wasn’t, but you can’t track someone down. And what if they’re not avoiding you but had a migraine or went to the movie room to decompress or whatever.

    I have no good answer for these interesting scenarios, sorry. “Days” feels like a lot. “Minutes” seems absurdly short. Possibly replying at this hour instead of going to sleep is a horrible idea, so if this sounds more nonsensical and/or more idiotic than usual, sorry.

39. @JJ: Was it a suite? I know they never ponied up the dough to actually hold a party* like they announced they were going to do for the “Fun Zone”. I guess the Official Recognized Puppy Safe Space might have been a suite.

    *or even bought a bench, unlike certain websites who had TWO, with lovely parks and no agenda other than “Sit down and read books! Maybe have tea?”

40. Lurkertype: Was it a suite?

    I don’t know if it was a suite or just a hotel room, but I saw a photo that one of them posted, showing a sign on the door saying what it was.

41. @Kendall: “If someone’s not findable, it’s kinda tough to actually ban them, or at least, make sure they know, enforce it, etc.”

    Not a bit. All you have to do in that circumstance is tell the staff – even just the door-watchers and security – that his badge has been yanked, but the concom hasn’t been able to locate him for notification. When they see him, they’re to take his badge and contact ops for further instructions… which can include waiting to be relieved and then bringing him and the badge to a meeting with the concom for resolution.

    As soon as he shows up at a con function, he gets denied access and may get the chance to plead his case. If he doesn’t show up at one, he’s functionally removed himself from the event anyway.

    I’ve been staff at small, medium, and huge cons. Small enough, and the staff can pass the word pretty quickly in person. Medium, and the security guys typically have walkies and can be notified instantly, whereupon they can use roamers to notify other personnel. At a big con, it’s basically the same as the medium scenario, just with more people on staff. Either way, the word can be spread in a hurry if it’s given a high enough priority.

    There’s also the possibility of contacting the hotel management to get his room number and paying the offender a visit that way. The con can’t kick him out of his room, but depending on the offense, the hotel has that power.

42. Not about this conversation, but apropos of some few conversations here and elsewhere, how to identify arguing in bad faith.

    https://mobile.twitter.com/WordMercenary/status/990939871287169024

43. Ultragotha, I can’t help but consider how the so-called “call-out” culture puts people down after reading Karl Rove’s little laundry list of how to discredit and discount the opposition.

44. Still, as a spectator at the Wiscon panel itself said, the panelist was asking for sympathy for Nazis as a group

    Actually no, she is repeatedly alleged to have expressed sympathy for Nazis as individuals. There is a lot we shall never know about what went down in that panel but this is a detail all the sources agree on.

45. Rail on June 1, 2018 at 6:34 am said:
    @Darren Garrison: No, it doesn’t, but there are two things that mean I won’t be continuing this. First is that I’m out on errands for the next few hours. Second is that I don’t think you’re arguing in good faith.

    I must point out that I made my point before reading Darren’s posts. Am I arguing in bad faith too?

46. Lenora Rose on June 1, 2018 at 6:23 pm said:
    Reminder: The person in question was banned for the rest of the last day on the spot by safety. The long term ban, how long it should be, or whether there even will be one, is up to an entirely different group who are still reviewing events and the case, and to whom Freitag can speak at as much length as she wants. You can argue the right or wrongness of the on the spot decision as much as you like, but they were working with what they had and had little time to pick it over for days on end and analyze every word — and the possible future repercussions are being given the room to be decided properly.

    The person in question was not just banned, she was branded as a Nazi and Confederate apologist in a post which I think is still standing, and people who have left comments on that are still to see them get out of moderation, despite a promise that they woukd be moderated for no more than 12 hours.

    Indee, to quote one of the witnesses to te panel, Wiscon has been given lots of opportunities to walk back their statements, and haven’t done so yet.

47. Also, may I add: banning somebody for what at worst seems a very infelicitous excess of solicitude for historical villains all long dead on the grounds of safety cheapens and dilutes the very real, very legitimate concerns about safety that CoC were supposed to address. This is the same comvention where Freankel harrassed people for decades, an interloper took pictures which she published to shame members, and one trans person was raped.

    Say that you are banning X while you investigate the claim she’s indulged in hate speech, but invoking safety plays into the hands of the Jordan Peterson of this world.

48. This echos my thoughts pretty much exactly. It strikes me as a massive overreaction.

49. I don’t know anything about a rape at WisCon, though it is certainly possible that one happened and I didn’t hear about it. As for Frenkel, has it occurred to you that the con moved quickly here because it learned from previous experience not to let things sit? This was not a minor problematic incident. Those happen all the time, and people are not banned for them. And even in this case, the panelist was only sent home for the rest of the con. A decision about any future repercussions awaits a proper investigation.

    It might be time to break out my comparison of a con to a party. If someone at your party says or does things that upset a bunch of your other guests, you might well ask them to go on home. You might even decide this while they’re out on the deck or in the bathroom, before you’ve spoken to them. The question of whether to invite them to your next party can wait for more investigation, after people have cooled off.

    Cons are kind of stuck in the middle, you know: blamed if they act, and blamed if they don’t. Often by the same people. This is hard stuff, especially when the person in question is a long-time attendee with many friends. In the past such a person would likely not have been called out for what they said or did. And the con would have rightly been blamed for that.

50. “And even in this case, the panelist was only sent home for the rest of the con. A decision about any future repercussions awaits a proper investigation.”

    What is “only” in this? It is a pretty big thing. Especially with hanging them to dry on the internet at the same time. For me, that decision would mean a permanent ban, because why would I ever again go to a convention that wasn’t even prepared to listen to me, saying that someone else might want to do that another year.

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