(1) TAKEDOWN. The New York Post tells how “Accountant embezzled $3.4M from famed literary agency”.
A Manhattan accountant cooked the books at a prestigious literary agency that represents top writers, including “Fight Club” author Chuck Palahniuk, bilking its clients of millions and leaving the company on the brink of bankruptcy, according to legal papers.
Darin Webb, 47, faces 20 years in jail on wire-fraud charges for embezzling $3.4 million from storied Manhattan agency Donadio & Olson, according to a recently unsealed federal criminal complaint.
Although the agency, which also represents the estates of “Godfather” writer Mario Puzo and radio legend Studs Terkel, was not named in court papers, a lawyer representing the firm confirmed to The Post that Donadio & Olson was the subject of the alleged theft.
…The stolen money — allegedly lifted between January 2011 and March of this year — was earmarked for author royalties and advances, the complaint says.
But the theft could be exponentially more, a source told The Post, noting that a forensic accountant is combing through Donadio & Olson’s books all the way back to 2001, Webb’s first year at the agency.
He allegedly fessed up to the theft in March in a videotaped interview with company executives and their attorneys at the agency’s Chelsea office, saying he filed monthly financial reports that “contained false and fraudulent representations in order to accomplish the theft and evade detection,” the complaint states.
Webb was arrested May 15 by the FBI and is out on $200,000 bail.
The Guardian reports on a celebrity victim: “Chuck Palahniuk ‘close to broke’ as agent’s accountant faces fraud charges”.
Palahniuk – one of many starry authors represented by the firm, including the estates of Mario Puzo and Studs Terkel – said his income had dwindled for several years. He had blamed multiple factors, including piracy and problems at his publisher, for the decline in earnings.
More recently, Palahniuk said, “the trickle of my income stopped” and payments for titles including Fight Club 2 “never seemed to arrive”. He wondered if the money had been stolen, but told himself he “had to be crazy” – until the news broke.
“All the royalties and advance monies and film-option payments that had accumulated in my author’s account in New York, or had been delayed somewhere in the banking pipeline, [were] gone. Poof. I can’t even guess how much income. Someone confessed on video he’d been stealing. I wasn’t crazy,” wrote Palahniuk in a statement on his website.
The novelist said that “this chain of events leaves me close to broke”, but that he had found himself to be “rich … with friends and readers who’ve rushed to my rescue”.
“On the minus side, the legal process will be long and offers an iffy reward. On the plus side, I’m not crazy. Nor am I alone,” added the author.
(2) WISCON. Sophygurl, a Tumblr blogger, was present at a controversial WisCon panel and has written an account of what she heard: “WisCon 42 panel The Desire for Killable Bodies in SFF”. The post begins –
This is going to serve as my panel write-up for this panel, but it also a copy of what I wrote as a report to the Safety team about the panel. I am posting this on DreamWidth and Tumblr and will be linking to Twitter and Facebook. Please feel free to link elsewhere. This should all be public knowledge, imo.
For anyone who doesn’t know – this panel included a panelist who ended up talking about the importance of sympathizing with Nazis. This is obviously not the kind of thing you expect to find at an intersectional feminist convention. It was upsetting and disturbing. Most of the panel was actually very interesting and even funny, and I appreciated what the other two panelists had to say. I even appreciated *some* of what the panelist in question had to say. All of this was overshadowed by the awful things she said, however.
(3) BRANDON SANDERSON WARNS FANX. Utah author Brandon Sanderson has raised his voice against “Harassment at FanX”. (For background, see “FanX Salt Lake Comic Convention Sharply Criticized for Handling of Anti-harassment Complaint”.)
I don’t normally discuss charged issues on my social media, but I do find harassment at science fiction conventions a topic that is very important to discuss. It is also very relevant to my fans, as conventions are often how they interact with me.
Recently, Salt Lake City’s biggest media convention (FanX, formerly called Salt Lake Comic Con) has made some troubling missteps. First, it grossly mishandled harassment claims—then it doubled down on its mistakes, bungling interactions with voices that have called for reform.
Some authors I respect deeply have composed an open letter to FanX, calling for them to do better—and I have co-signed it. Many of these authors have spoken better about this specific issue than I can, and I encourage you all to read what they have said. I believe that conventions like these (alongside the smaller literary conventions that were so instrumental in my road to publication) are important parts of our community—and it is essential that they provide a place where victims are not silenced and harassment is not tolerated.
For now, I am still scheduled to appear at FanX this fall. My team and I have been evaluating whether or not this is a position we can still take—and it will greatly depend on how FanX responds to this letter in the next few weeks. I will keep you informed of our decision—and if I do decide to bow out of FanX, I will try to schedule some replacement signings instead.
(4) OPEN LETTER. The “Open Letter to FanX” that Sanderson refers to calls on the convention to do the following thigs:
One: In a public statement, and without disclosing her name, apologize to the victim who filed the sexual harassment report for disclosing their private report to the media without their knowledge or consent. Admit that the victim’s trust was violated, and promise future attendees who may report incidents that they will never undergo the same scrutiny or mishandling. Assure everyone that all reports will be heard, evaluated, and confidential. Keep the victims’ names confidential at all times.
Two: Hire a professional with experience writing, implementing, and upholding sexual harassment policies. Clarify the consequences for breaking the policy and reiterate that those consequences will be upheld. Removal and banishment from the conference should be among those ramifications.
Three: Address harassment complaints quickly. The past complaint was filed in October, and the complaint was not investigated until January. This shows a lack of concern and a reluctance to address the situation, as well as disregard for the seriousness of the issue.
Four: Recognize that trust is earned not through words, policies, and statements, but by a proven track record of implementation and action over time.
It’s signed by Robison Wells, Shannon Hale, Bree Despain, Emily R. King, Ally Condie, and Dean Hale, and co-signed by Brandon Sanderson, Maureen Johnson, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler, Annette Lyon, Mette Harrison, J. R. Johansson, Jessica Day George, Courtney Alameda, Lindsey Leavitt, and Sarah M. Eden.
(5) BOMB DISPOSAL. The Washington Post’s Steven Zeitchik, in “How Disney could get Star Wars back on track”, says the relative failure of Solo at the box office shows that Disney will have to take steps to make Star Wars films more appealing, including spacing them out more, making them edgier, and not releasing Star Wars films in May or June.
Fewer movies. Five months is not a long time for Star Wars to be away. Certainly it’s not the year that stretched between the previous three movies, or the 10 years between the last of the George Lucas movies and “The Force Awakens” in 2015. With Marvel that seems to help — releases in quick succession enhance one another. But with Star Wars, seen less as the rapid-fire sequel, novelty and absence may be the key to the game. Disney could do better by going back to the 12-month spacing — or even longer.
Why it’s tricky: This sounds good to fans. The problem is it doesn’t sound good to Wall Street or Disney financial executives. Star Wars movies are such juggernauts that Disney wants to cash in whenever it can. Waiting that long doesn’t help in that bid. Disney and Lucasfilm are encountering a major paradox here. Modern Hollywood says when you have successes you should replicate them early and often. But making Star Wars movies early and often may make them less successful.
(6) SOLO ACT. Guess who’s writing the tie-in? “’Solo: A Star Wars Story’ Novelization Coming In September 4th, Written By Mur Lafferty”.
The Solo novelization is continuing the trend that The Last Jedi novelization started of being released several months after the film. Previously the novelizations have been released closer to the films theatrical releases. The original and prequel novelizations were released before the films, while The Force Awakens and Rogue One adaptations were released as e-books the same day as the film and as hardcovers shortly thereafter.
(7) SFWA STUFF. Security protocols may have been breached….
I feel you are overly careless with the @SFWA Top Sekrit Plans for Total World Domination.
— Cat Rambo (@Catrambo) May 29, 2018
(8) BIG BOX STORE. Adweek reports “Amazon Is Driving Around a Jurassic-Sized Box, and You Can Ask Alexa What’s Inside”. (Registration required to read full article.)
The last time we noticed Amazon driving around a giant box, the mysterious delivery turned out to be a Nissan Versa. But this time, perhaps it’s something a bit more … carnivorous?
(9) COMICS SECTION.
- Chip Hitchcock thinks those penguin prognosticators might be right about what’s coming: Arctic Circle Cartoons.
- Not sure whether I should thank Chip for also making sure I didn’t miss a horrible pop-culture pun at Bliss.
(10) THE DIRECTOR VANISHES. Comics shop owner Cliff Biggers showed this photo to his Facebook friends.
UPS employees like Alfred Hitchcock so much that they opened our package, tore open the action figure packaging, stole the figure, and then re-taped the box and sent it to us.
(11) LISTEN UP. The Parsec Awards Steering Committee is accepting nominations for the 2018 Parsec Awards through June 15 – submit nominations here.
Any material released between May 1, 2017 and April 30, 2018 is eligible for the 2018 awards. Material released needs to be free for download and released via a mechanism that allows for subscriptions. Thus, YouTube, Facebook, etc.. series are eligible.
If you are a podcaster or author, please feel free to nominate your own podcast or story. It is one way we know that your contact information filled is correct.
(12) KEEPING SCORE AT HOME. Seanan McGuire, in the area for ConCarolinas this weekend, took time to rate Ursula Vernon’s cats. Start the thread here —
CAT #1: Smoky. Bluepoint Siamese. Loves love. Does not like to be picked up. Practically perfect in every way. A+.
— Seanan McGuire (@seananmcguire) May 30, 2018
(13) THE LAW & ANN LECKIE. A little known fact (in some quarters).
https://twitter.com/ann_leckie/status/1000128319474536448
(14) SPEAKING OF WHOM. Joe Sherry launches his Nerds of a Feather post series with “Reading the Hugos: Novel”:
Provenance: This is a novel which took a while to settle out from under the weight of unfair expectations that I placed on it. Once it did, I was able to engage more fully with Leckie’s story of truth, lies, and cultural identity. Provenance is a strong novel in its own right, and in the end, I appreciated Leckie’s light touch in how she connected it to the larger Ancillary universe.
It’s just that when we look back on Leckie’s career in twenty years, I suspect Provenance will be viewed as minor Leckie. It’s good, please don’t take this the wrong way, but the Ancillary trilogy was a major accomplishment and Provenance is “just” a very good book. I appreciated how Provenance pushed me to think about historical documents and relics, how their perception of importance could override the truth they should represent. There’s great stuff to chew on here
(15) SOLO REVIEW. And Nerds of a Feather contributor Dean E. S. Richard sounds relieved as much as anything in “Review: Solo: A Star Wars Story”.
The good news: it doesn’t suck! I mean, there’s some forgettable stuff, and Han Solo isn’t, like, Han Solo, but if you’re willing to watch it for the sake of itself and not expect Harrison Ford, it’s fine. It tries a little too hard for quips, and his against-odds/I-don’t-actually-have-a-plan moments come across a little forced, but, again, we’re measuring this against complete disaster, so I’ll take it.
(16) SIPS OF CEASELESS. Charles Payseur comments in “Quick Sips – Beneath Ceaseless Skies #252” —
Competition can bring out the worst in people, but as this issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies proves, it can also bring out the best. Both stories this issue are about races, and magical ones at that, featuring women who find themselves squaring off against their lovers (former or current) for the chance to win a great prize. In both stories, though, the actual prize might not matter as much as the competition itself, as the thrill of the race. Because when these characters are faced with what they’d do if they won, the results are…interesting. It’s a wonderfully fun pair of stories, expertly paired, and I’ll stop yammering on in introduction and just get to the reviews!
(17) THE ORIGINS DEBACLE GOES ANOTHER ROUND. According to Larry Correia, who was dropped as a GoH of Origins Game Fair two weeks ago, “Origins sent out yet ANOTHER message about me, and my response” [Internet Archive link].
At Monster Hunter Nation he cites this as the text of Origins’ Executive Director John Ward’s message to educate vendors about the social media uproar following the “disinvitation.”
Good afternoon Exhibitors,
We are a few weeks away from Origins and the anticipation is building!
Things are looking great for this year’s show. The Exhibit Hall is officially sold out and badges are currently trending 15% above pre-registration numbers from 2017.
We have taken a brief hiatus from social media but are fully prepared to continue promoting the show and its exhibitors starting this week. Before we begin communicating through social, there are a few things we wanted to bring to your attention.
Some individuals have rallied online with plans to harass companies exhibiting at the show—this is in response to the disinviting of Larry Correia as a guest at Origins.
To provide you with some background: our original decision to invite Larry as a guest at Origins was simple—he’s a successful author, has been a guest at other conventions in previous years, and any one that knows him knows that he is big into gaming.
Unfortunately, we were not aware of Mr. Correia’s online presence and following. Upon further research we found an abundance of confrontational discourse and polarizing behavior online.
We have nothing against Larry as a person or as a professional, but we have seen the drama that follows him, and we do not want that at Origins.
As an exhibitor at Origins, we wanted you to be aware of the general MO of the group we are explaining:
Company pages are inundated with comments and negative rankings
Employers and publishers are contacted
Messages with keywords regarding to the show are targetedTime has passed, and things have calmed down, but we should all still be aware of these potential behaviors. If you receive any threats or libel regarding you or your company, please send them to John Ward.
Thank you for your support. Good luck with the final preparations for the show!
Correia explains that he actually believes vendors should be left alone. Except for the ones that deserve what’s happening to them, that is.
My only comments during this entire debacle concerning the vendors was that they should be left alone. The vendors are just small businessmen trying to have a good sales weekend, and they have nothing to do with the incompetence of John Ward. I’ve specifically gone out of my way to say that to my fans on multiple occasions.
The only vendors I’ve seen animosity directed at were the ones who specifically went out of their way to virtue signal on Twitter about how booting me for having the wrong opinions was So Brave. And that’s a short and very specific list who did that usual social media thing where they decided to throw punches, and then cry about getting punched back afterwards.
But hey, toss that out there. The important thing is that everyone knows Origins is the real victim here.
(18) GAME LOSES STEAM. Who thought this was a good idea? “School shooting game Active Shooter pulled by Steam”.
A game pitched as a “school shooting simulation” has been ditched from Steam’s online store ahead of release.
The title had been criticised by parents of real-life school shooting victims, and an online petition opposing its launch had attracted more than 180,000 signatures.
Steam’s owner, Valve, said it had dropped the game because its developer had a history of bad behaviour.
But the individual named has denied involvement.
Active Shooter came to prominence after the BBC revealed that an anti-gun violence charity had described it as “appalling” last week.
CNN subsequently reported that the families of two students killed in February’s high school attack in Parkland, Florida had described the game as being “despicable” and “horrific”.
(19) LE GUIN FILM. I’ve linked to the trailer before, but here’s a new Bustle post about the project: “This Ursula K. Le Guin Documentary Reveals How Much The Author Struggled To Write Women In Sci-Fi”.
Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, a new documentary by Arwen Curry about the life and legacy of the late author, explores Le Guin’s long career as a pioneer in speculative fiction, including the role of feminism in her work and the struggles she faced teaching herself how to write women into her novels. In the film, which Curry worked on with the author for 10 years, Le Guin admits that “from my own cultural upbringing, I couldn’t go down deep and come up with a woman wizard.” According to the author, she had been “a woman pretending to think like a man,” a behavior she had to unlearn before she could create some of her best work.
As Le Guin tells Curry in the film:
“I had to rethink my entire approach to writing fiction … it was important to think about privilege and power and domination, in terms of gender, which was something science fiction and fantasy had not done. All I changed is the point of view. All of a sudden we are seeing Earthsea … from the point of view of the powerless.”
(20) BIG HERO 6 THE SERIES. Coming to a Disney Channel near you. (Which means not very close to me, but maybe to you.)
Hiro, Baymax and the Big Hero 6 team are back and ready to save San Fransokyo! Big Hero 6 The Series premieres Saturday, June 9 at 9A on Disney Channel. The adventure continues for 14-year-old tech genius Hiro and his compassionate, cutting-edge robot Baymax. If dealing with the academic pressure of being the new kid at the prestigious San Fransokyo Institute of Technology weren’t enough, it’s off campus where things really get tricky. Hiro and Baymax, along with their friends Wasabi, Honey Lemon, Go Go and Fred, unite to form the legendary superhero team Big Hero 6, protecting their city from a colorful array of scientifically-enhanced villains intent on creating chaos and mayhem!
(21) EXPANSE. Already linked in comments, but let the Scroll Record reflect: “It’s official: Amazon has saved The Expanse”. The Verge story says —
It’s official: The Expanse has been saved. After the Syfy Channel canceled The Expanse earlier this month, Alcon Entertainment has confirmed that Amazon will pick up the show for a fourth season, after after outcry from the show’s fans.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Andrew Porter, Cat Eldridge, Carl Slaughter, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, IanP, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories, Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Paul Weimer.]
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@Chip: Yep. William Tenn’s brilliant “Servant Problem”
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.
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?
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. 🙄
@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! 🙂
Of possible interest from The Atlantic:
jayn on May 31, 2018 at 5:01 pm said:
Do you have a citation for that? Because here is the relevant part from coffeeandink:
It very explicitly says individual Nazis and Confederates, not “as a group.”
@Darren Garrison: I thought you had decided that coffeeandink was unreliable.
I suspect jayn is referring to this account of the panel.
Rail on June 1, 2018 at 5:56 am said:
Okay, let’s work from that one:
That account also says individual Nazis and Confederates, not “as a group.”
@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.
Rail on June 1, 2018 at 6:34 am said:
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.
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.
Jeff Jones:
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:
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…
@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.
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 🙂
@Darren
Using sophygurl’s account, the panelist began the issue with this:
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.
…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.
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.
@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 . . .
jayn on June 1, 2018 at 10:09 am said:
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.)
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.
Yes, that is kind of the point of questions–to make you think more deeply about and reexamine your position.
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.
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?”
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)…
@Darren
No, she specifically used the past tense,
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.
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.
jayn on June 1, 2018 at 11:20 am said:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Meredith on June 1, 2018 at 12:52 pm said:
I think I’ve found it, in this series of tweets (third tweet from the end):
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.
@Darren
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.
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:
As to this…
…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.
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.
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.
@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.
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.
@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?
@Jayn
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.
@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. 😛
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.
@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.
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)?
@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.
@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?”
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.
@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.
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
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.
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.
I must point out that I made my point before reading Darren’s posts. Am I arguing in bad faith too?
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.
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.
This echos my thoughts pretty much exactly. It strikes me as a massive overreaction.
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.
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.