aka Don’t ask for whom the puppy barks, it barks for thee.
Today’s roundup brings you K. Tempest Bradford, David Gerrold, Redneck Gaijin, Spacefaring Kitten, SL Huang, Brandon Kempner, Alexandra Erin, and Robert J. Bennett. (Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editors of the day James H. Burns and John King Tarpinian.)
K. Tempest Bradford
Unintended Consequences – A Post About The Hugos – May 11
There’s a fun irony in the fallout from the Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies Hugo thing.
There are now over 8,000 members of Sasquan (WorldCon). The con gained over 2,600 supporting memberships since March 31st of this year and about 350 attending memberships. I think it can be safely assumed that several of the 1,948 people who bought supporting memberships before March 31st were slate voters and GamerGators. Not a majority, perhaps, but a sizable chunk. And some of the post-March 31st folks might be puppy supporters. However, I’m fairly sure that an overwhelming majority of these new members are anti-slate or anti-puppy.
That’s thousands of people who don’t think that diversity is a dirty word, who don’t consider the larger number of women and authors of color on previous year’s ballots to be affirmative action or diversity for the sake of diversity or political correctness gone wrong.
That’s thousands of people eligible to nominate for next year’s Hugos, and with a big incentive to do so.
Uh oh. *giggle*
David Gerrold on Facebook – May 11
If we see 3000 or 4000 or even as many as 6000 (or more) Hugo votes and no sad-rabids win, then that will have to be seen as a very aggressive smackdown not only of the slate nominees, but also of the thinking behind the slates.
Seeing as how people on both sides are now saying, “Read the nominees, vote your conscience,” if such a smackdown occurs — even to the point of a couple “No Award” categories — then what?
(The day after the ceremony, it’s traditional for the committee to release the vote tallies. It will make for some very interesting reading and there will likely be a great deal of discussion and analysis.)
There are several possibilities:
1) The sad-rabids could acknowledge that people voted their consciences and the best works won. Because some of them have claimed they are for diversity and inclusion (insert eye-roll here) they might then pat themselves on the back for at least getting some of their candidates on the ballot and promise to come back next year.
2) Also possible, the sad-rabids could double down and claim that the voting was somehow unfair and that the secret cabal of leftist Social Justice Warriors had gamed the vote. (Insert another eye-roll here. Anyone who’s ever tried to organize fans knows that herding cats is easier. With cats, you only need an open can of tuna. With fans, you need pizza, beer, and a sneak preview of the next SF blockbuster, and the results still aren’t guaranteed.)
….If we have 3000 or more fans nominating for the 2016 awards, then it means that anyone trying to run a slate and game the nominations is going to have a much harder task.
So the unintended consequence of the sad-rabid exercise will have been to put more money in the Worldcon treasury and energize fandom to be more engaged in nominating and voting for Hugos. This is a good thing. (The analogy of white blood cells rushing in to fight an infected wound might be appropriate.)
Adult Onset Atheist
“Post Nuclear SNARL” – May 10
I personally don’t think the No Award option is nuclear enough. I would kinda like a refund on the purchase price of the books, and I would certainly like to prevent people in the future from being hoodwinked into purchasing any of these novellas by reading the endorsement implied by seeing “Nominated for a 2015 Hugo Award” on the cover. I would like these novellas to have never been nominated, and I believe that could be done. I almost would like for these novellas to have never been written, but I am afraid that is not possible.
Because Worldcon owns the Hugo trademark intellectual property they can manipulate it in order to maintain its value. They have done this incrementally in the past by adjusting the rule-set needed to be nominated for, or win, a Hugo. They can do it again by removing nominees that loose to “No Award” from the list. This would prevent unscrupulous publishers from realizing an increased prestige or profit as a result of stuffing the nominating ballot boxes.
I have no idea how to go about creating such a rule, or even proposing such a rule for that mater, but I do think it would be a good move. It may even be necessary, as the puppy thought police are not the only ones who might gain from a critically injured Hugo award process. The puppies are not the only ones who have the wherewithal to corrupt the nominating process for their own gain, and they are not even the ones who could do it best.
Redneck Gaijin on Redneck Gaijin’s Pitiful Little Life
“A post, in which I waste time and annoy Puppies” – May 11
It’s entirely possible to obey all the rules and still take an unfair advantage. It happens all the time in real life, which is why children of rich people get richer and children of poor people generally stay poor. It’s why black people in America are generally confined to slums and low-paying jobs and considered as criminals until proven otherwise.
Obeying the rules doesn’t mean you played fair. It might just mean you’re a very successful weasel.
“It’s your fault we won, because you didn’t bother to vote, because you didn’t organize your own slates, so nyah!”
Maybe so. As I said in my prior post, the Hugos themselves are not really important. I’ve never voted in the Hugos because I have better uses for my money, and also because I haven’t much interest in reading 90% of what gets nominated.
Neither I, nor anybody else, thought the Hugos were so important that it was necessary to devote the time and energy into campaigning for people to spend $40 or more simply to ram through a super-slate of politically acceptable works- until now.
Now that it’s happened, a lot of people are appalled- but the most appalling thing is that it was done with less than 20% of the vote.
Or, to put it another way, over 80% of voters casting Hugo nomination ballots did not vote for a single Sad/Rabid Puppy recommended work or creator.
So the 20% get to rule over the 80%, and in the minds of the Puppies, this is fair… because it’s them doing the ruling.
Spacefaring Kitten on Spacefaring, Extradimensional Happy Kittens
“Preliminary Thoughts Before Embarking on an Expedition to Planet Wright” – May 11
I’ve decided to read — or try reading — everything on the Hugo ballot this year, and that means there’s more than one novel’s worth of fiction by Wright I have to slog through. There’s a human experiment aspect to all this, as well: it will be interesting to see a) if I can make it at all, b) if I can give a sensible account of the experience and c) if I can do a more-or-less balanced review of this stuff knowing what kind of a person has written it.
I don’t hold any delusions of being completely objective, of course, because there’s no such thing as complete objectivity outside mathematics. Acknowledging Wright’s beliefs probably affects my judgment of his fiction in some way. What the effect will be exactly, remains to be seen.
Reading SFF
“Review: On a Spiritual Plain by Lou Antonelli (2015 Hugo Nominated Short Story)” – May 11
On a Spiritual Plain by Lou Antonelli is the second story from this year’s Hugo Awards ballot that I have read. I did not have high expectations of this year’s short story ballot because all nominees were nominated because of their presence on the sad and/or rabid puppy slates. (I did not like a single one of last year’s sad puppy nominees.) Totaled, the first story I read, was not a great story, but at least it had some positive moments. In contrast, On a Spiritual Plain fits right in with last year’s sad puppy nominees.
The story’s protagonist is the chaplain of a small human outpost on an alien planet. This is a bit familiar. One of last year’s sad puppy Hugo nominees by Brad R. Torgerson also featured a chaplain of a small group of humans on an alien planet. Now, this year Brad Torgerson put together the Sad Puppies slate. I guess he has a thing for chaplains in the military. Hm. I don’t have to understand this, do I?
Cirsova
“Post-mortem of A-to-Z challenge & Hugo Awards” – May 11
Based on some of the nominating numbers I’ve seen and taking into account a large section of the sci-fi blogosphere’s determination to nuke the Hugos from space, I have some worry for the smaller categories. From what I understand of how No Award works, if it gets a plurality in a category simply because of people who are voting a straight No Award ticket, it will knock out all of those works in minor categories voted on by folks who were actually approaching each category in earnest and trying to vote out of the five based on individual merit. Hopefully the number of jerkass ideologue who REALLY want to spend $40 just to vote a no award straight temper tantrum ticket and smash the trophies so that no one can have them constitutes such a small fraction of the Hugo voters that they won’t edge out even the most obscure categories.
SL Huang on Bad Menagerie
“Statistics of Gender on the Hugo Writing Nominees: Probabilities and Standard Deviations” – May 11
This will tell us whether a given gender distribution is within what we’d consider an expected year-by-year fluctuation from 50/50, or whether, assuming a 50/50 gender split, it would be…well, an extreme outlier.
Brandon Kempner on Chaos Horizon
“Hugo Award Nomination Ranges, 2006-2015, Part 3” – May 11
Even though the number of ballots are soaring, the % ranges are staying somewhat steady, although we do see year-to-year perturbation. The top nominees have been hovering between 15%-22.5%. Since 2009, every top nominee has managed at least 100 votes. The bottom nominee has been in that 7.5%-10% range, safely above the 5% minimum. Since 2009, those low nominees all managed at least 50 votes, which seems low (to me; you may disagree). Even in our most robust category, 50 readers liking your book can get you into the Hugo—and they don’t even have to like it the most. It could be their 5th favorite book on their ballot.
Alexandra Erin on Blue Author Is About To Write
“Sad Puppies Review Books: Corduroy” – May 11
Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)….
I take it back. This bear isn’t even a delta male. He’s a full-on gamma. His sad little quest ends in a pathetic anticlimax as the night security guard—a proper man—literally puts him back in his place, where he stays until the girl comes for him.
And then the little girl does come back and buys him, and sews a button on him anyway. The Feminazis talk about agency, but where’s his agency in all of this? He never found his button. He never got a chance to be a man. Instead he needed the girl to “fix” him, playing mind games on him all the while.
“I like you just the way you are,” the temptress coos, “but I’m sure you’d be more comfortable if you let me, oh, I don’t know… change everything about you.”
@RichardFPenn I suspect that very few voters for the Sad Puppies slate were literally dogs. Though it's hard to tell on the Internet.
— Not-So-OK Boomer (@Rand_Simberg) May 11, 2015
Hush Puppies community created on Facebook – May 11
Hush Puppies is for fans of science fiction, fantasy & other geeky pursuits who do not want the drama generated by Sad or Rabid Puppies.
the hugo awards grind to a halt as an excited @SamSykesSwears runs in and squeals he seen a big green lizard outside
— a taction for the take-tack on the terror shank (@robertjbennett) May 12, 2015
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Another suggestion:
Stealing the Elf-King’s Puppies
Puppy! Puppy! (a.k.a. The Hugos My Destination)
The Puppies On the Borderlands
The Puppy That Shouted Slate at the Heart of the Hugos
Howl’s Moving Rationalizations
““Is Cory Doctorow wrong to say that the Sad Puppy slatemakers were right wing? That VD is a white supremacist? Or that the slates were ideologically designed to exclude anyone they considered a SJW?””
No. Yes. Yes.
The Evil Legion of Evil is more or less right wing. Some are conservative, some are libertarian. Some are Lawful, others are Chaotic. The spectrum ranges from Lawful moderate (Brad) to Chaotic libertarian (me).
I am not a “white supremacist”. I am not even white, being part white, part Mexican, and part Native American. I don’t believe in the concept of intrinsic racial superiority nor do I believe in the concept of equality. This should not be a surprise, considering that I edited and published the Israeli historian Martin van Creveld’s book, EQUALITY: THE IMPOSSIBLE QUEST, last month.
And for the Nth time, RABID Puppies are entirely focused on opposing SJWs. SAD Puppies are opposed SJWs, but they have other objectives that are not directly related to SJWs in mind. Mike is correct. We may be ideological, but the slates are not.
David Goldfarb:
You aren’t the first person to propose what amounts to year-around voting. It’s not prohibited. It would, however, almost certainly lead to people nominating works in the wrong year, because there would be two separate elections’ nominating periods overlapping each other. That by itself is not a reason to reject it, but it is one of the administrative challenges.
Kevin Standlee: You surprised me there. I was expecting an answer that would set the parameters for administering Hugo activity as being the same as the period of a seated Worldcon.
Laertes @ 11:44 am- You are correct in that I’ll do whatever I want. But I won’t blame anyone for it. I’m in control of my own actions. There might be information I receive which influences me to choose option 2 as opposed to option 1, or vice versa, but the blame or credit is mine alone.
rcade @ 12:34 pm- I believe many are not interested in the merits of the novel, but the association of the novel with a “slate”. So since the standard is no longer “best novel”, but the actions/behaviors of others, don’t be surprised if others adopt that same standard.
A Transatlantic Puppy, Hurrah!
Sure, some people think it should be “Tunnel Through the Puppies”, but that’s just boring.
For those interested in VD’s opinion on the subject of race and gender in his own words: http://www.johndbrown.com/what-vox-day-believes/
VD
Fascinating.
Over the years I have learned that I don’t deal well with irrationality; I have read your post and it’s so mind bogglingly irrational that in my native land I would be so concerned about your mental state that I would probably call the ambulance.
I am sure, however, that there are plenty of people who will be happy to receive your pearls of wisdom, and don’t have my hang ups about the need for evidence and reason in decision making. That is, of course, your problem not mine..
The Transatlantic Puppy reminds me of The Stainless Steel Puppy, and all of its sequels.
Twenty Thousand Leaks Under the Sea
A-hound the World in Eighty Bays
Mike Resnick-themed names
The Three-Legged Puppy Dancer
The Best Rootin’ Tootin’ Shootin’ Puppy in the Whole Damned Galaxy
Puppy with an Alien
Will the Last Puppy to Leave the Planet Please Shut Off the Sun?
His Award-Winning Science Fiction Puppy
The Boy Who Cried “Puppy!”
Stalking the Puppy
A Most Unusual Greyhound
Question for you: have you ever tried to nominate for the Hugos? It’s difficult.
Now we’re talking. Ask what you can do for WorldCon, not what WorldCon can do for you. There are thousands and thousands of fans coming out of the woodwork who very much want to read and participate and they are being dismissed with excuses like “you haven’t done the hard work of volunteering for WorldCon.”
Well the hard work is READING. We all remember reading? Things that are pure fun, things that challenge you, things that make you uncomfortable, things that you can’t make heads or tails of.
If we are not here to do that, what’s the point of the exercise?
I’m not sure either SP and RP respectively were how many parts culture war, how many parts nepotism or (apparently in the latter case) how many parts revenge. But I just saw on Making Light, in a post ostensibly aimed at reaching consensus on a rules change, a regular participant raise a useful and fairly critical but also fairly dry, technical point, and then be chastised and put back in his place by a community leader on the grounds that one of his early remarks was supposedly quoted approvingly on a “pro-puppy” site. We can’t have that. The puppies should be approving what we are doing without being engaged in discussion because we are inherently right and good, and if they have ideas of their own then something must be wrong with them.
And where do they get off objecting to being called white supremacists by Cory Doctorow and the mainstream media. (I don’t think you are even hearing yourselves.)
If the Hugos sink because we refuse to simply patch the hull and give a modicum of consideration to the whole field, everyone in it, and for Ghu’s sake the stuff that they like to read, then we deserve to go down.
And if all of you respond to this by calling it Puppy filth I may throw in the towel myself.
@Chris Hensley
Thanks for the link. It was interesting to read what VD has to say when he isn’t frothing at the mouth. The analysis by the interviewer is the best part.
I’m surprised to see VD implying that communists and fascists are better looking, though. Weird:
“The reason women shouldn’t vote in a representative democracy is they are significantly inclined to vote for whomever they would rather f***. Hence the studies about height and hair being relevant to US presidential politics. That’s why women’s suffrage was pushed by the Communists and why it is the first plank of the Fascist Manifesto”
Have you seen the legs on Stalin?
In all seriousness, VD likes to thump his chest about how he’s not a white supremacist. Technically, he is correct. That doesn’t mean his opinions are sound or psuedoscientific clap trap.
“I’ve been involved in this process. I can tell you that someone gets to do the prep work to get that information into the computers”
Apparently there were THREE paper ballots cast in the Hugos last year.
That information is already going to be in the computer. Yeah, you’ll still have to match up misspellings and the like but…
Rather I mean to say that VD’s opinions are psuedoscientifc claptrap. To clarify his scientific claims about race are as grounded in empirically observable reality as his claims about the dangers of vaccines.
Uh… I certainly didn’t expect that link to embed the video. Wierd.
Is that cool, or what?
Brian Z,
Let’s not misrepresent things, shall we? The reaction on ML was not for the proposal and his reasoning but because of the last 2 paragraphs in that comment – which were basically discussing evading any scrutiny, stonewalling, destroying the ballots after the winners are found and so on – how much was said in jest is another story but considering what we had seen last month or so, taking things out of context is very easy and such comments even in jest are counterproductive.
Chris Hensley: I regret this before I’ve even typed it: I don’t and won’t defend Vox Day. He is wrong about many many things, I don’t think wanting to end the strangehold of the SJWs is a particularly enough excuse for engaging in the deliberately provocative and often hurtful rhetoric he uses, and I really don’t like his attacks on fellow writers, whether he thinks they fired the first shot or not.
But I’ll defend his right as a science fiction writer to be an armchair scientist reading widely in a whole bunch of fields he’s not really qualified to be reading in and spinning that into a bunch of pseudoscientific claptrap. Inciting hatred or violence would be despicable. Vaccines are a particularly difficult issue because of public health, of course. But claptrap? Science fiction is a proud edifice built on claptrap.
“I am not a “white supremacist”. I am not even white, being part white, part Mexican, and part Native American.”
As to the first, so you say. I am inclined tp dismiss you as an unreliable narrator. If you were you wouldn’t admit it, so I rate what you have written elsewhere as superior evidence. And you write so much.
As to the second. You are as white as you want to be. If you want to claim you aren’t white, and you need to consult DNA tests, family genealogy, and the assertion that Mexicans are never white to assert someone who is between 3/4 and 7/8 white is not white, well, follow your bliss.
But I just saw on Making Light, in a post ostensibly aimed at reaching consensus on a rules change, a regular participant raise a useful and fairly critical but also fairly dry, technical point, and then be chastised and put back in his place by a community leader on the grounds that one of his early remarks was supposedly quoted approvingly on a “pro-puppy” site. We can’t have that. The puppies should be approving what we are doing without being engaged in discussion because we are inherently right and good, and if they have ideas of their own then something must be wrong with them. [emphasis mine]
Gosh. That sounds a little bit evil. And sounds a little bit out of character for the ML community. So I went to check. And since I don’t know you, I am in fact a bit surprised to find that you’ve completely misrepresented the comment in question.
Here’s the comment to which I presume you refer:
“these are some of the more offensive intimations you’ve made so far…the goal is just the opposite: to make the system as open and accountable as possible….I’ve already seen some of your comments here quoted out of context on Puppy-aligned boards. It undermines everything we are trying to do here. We do -not- want to hide things or be gatekeepers or keep the Puppies off of the ballots. I’d actually like the Puppies to -support- this proposal since it meets their stated aims. Comments like the one made in 122 are just not helpful.”
Your description of this comment is shockingly dishonest.
“… and then be chastised and put back in his place by a community leader on the grounds that one of his early remarks was supposedly quoted approvingly on a ‘pro-puppy’ site.”
It’s interesting to compare what you claim in the above to what actually was said on Making Light by that community leader:
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016246.html#4130786
Since J Thomas was suggesting, either in jest or for reals, that Hugo ballots be destroyed to prevent later scrutiny, he was rightfully chastised for that. It’s hard enough to develop a fair voting process in good faith without some clown throwing that into the discussion.
Annie Y:
how much was said in jest is another story but considering what we had seen last month or so, taking things out of context is very easy and such comments even in jest are counterproductive.
I admit that I have not read every comment from the Making Light discussions though I have done my best to follow along. (One reason is that I am interested in talking specifically about whether it was a good idea to change the rules or not, and the original Bruce Schneier posts carried instructions not to use them as a forum for arguing about whether it was a good idea to change the rules.)
So if I took that exchange out of context, thank you for the clarification.
I do think it would be most effective, if the goal is to create an amendment that all sides will find satisfactory, to try and engage all sides in the discussion. I hope others agree that’s a fair point as well.
“Your description of this comment is shockingly dishonest.”
It’s not that shocking. Puppies gotta leave a mess everywhere they go.
“Mike Glyer on May 12, 2015 at 5:39 pm said:
Kevin Standlee: You surprised me there. I was expecting an answer that would set the parameters for administering Hugo activity as being the same as the period of a seated Worldcon.”
MidAmeriCon II has been seated since August 2014. They could have opened Hugo nominations for 2016 at any point after that, though it would have been pretty useless to do so before January 1, 2015. And very confusing to do so between then and March 10, 2015.
I would *love*, however, to see nominations open as soon as the databases are combined after Sasquan.
ULTRAGOTHA: Hmm. I blush. The right answer was implicit in the term I used to argue the wrong answer. I lose the internet today!
I do think it would be most effective, if the goal is to create an amendment that all sides will find satisfactory, to try and engage all sides in the discussion. I hope others agree that’s a fair point as well.
You know what else would be most effective? If you were to refrain from telling stupid and easily debunked bold-faced lies in hopes that nobody would bother to check.
How can you expect anyone to engage you in good faith when you dishonestly smear people on a whim like that?
Will McLean: “…the assertion that Mexicans are never white…” When a phrase like that flies by, I’m left scratching my head why you think that helps establish your moral high ground.
That’s OK, Mike. You’ve had Hand of Puppy crap to distract you today.
Have I said lately how much I appreciate what you’re doing here? Thank you very much.
Laertes et al:
Look, I have no intent to smear anyone, and I see you are all working hard on this proposal.
But if there is a fear that comments on Making Light are being cited out of context (approvingly or otherwise), then engaging with people on that other forum is probably one good way to eliminate any possible misunderstandings.
Since I haven’t been following every detail of those threads (some were interesting but too technical for my purposes and some were off topic given my interests) I don’t actually know what earlier comments the poster had been contacted offline about and warned not to talk about in public again.
–
If you are interested in what it looked like to me: I saw a poster making a series of constructive and interesting comments. One important topic was concern over continually going back and re-jigging the results after announcing them. That’s a real question – how many withdrawals and belated rulings of ineligibility were there in 2015, for example? I see how the words “immediately destroy” and “stonewall” might be misconstrued in a negative way, of course. But the time it is OK to destroy ballots is quite obviously any time after there is no possibility of ordering a recount, whenever that is, which I believe is up to the WorldCon (let me know if I’m wrong). So I didn’t find the poster’s comment so completely out of line, either.
I am not working hard on this proposal. I have not participated in any of those proposal threads until about two minutes ago. I wasn’t familiar with the comment that you lied about. And it took me less than a minute to find it and see that you’d lied about what it said. (“quoted approvingly.”)
So you’re more familiar with that thread than I am.
I don’t believe you when you say that that’s what it looked like to you. That comment was perfectly clear: A participant in the thread was being chastised for making anti-puppy statements that were being quoted on puppy boards to make ML look more hostile to puppies than they are, and you turned around and lied about it here, stating that he piled on for being pro-puppy in a puppy-hostile room.
Liar.
@Brian Z:
“I see how the words “immediately destroy” and “stonewall” might be misconstrued in a negative way, of course. But the time it is OK to destroy ballots is quite obviously any time after there is no possibility of ordering a recount”
I don’t think that is obvious at all. If an outcome of any rule change is that complete anonymised data and a record of nomination tallying is publicly available in perpetuity, I think that would be great and help consign all shadowy conspiracy debate to the past.
@Owlmirror:
Thank you so much for that mathfiction site link. You’ve made my day!
I’ll concede that having the nomination periods overlap would lead to confusion. How about having them run from March 1st of one year to February 28th (/29th) of the next? Mail out the paper ballots in late November. (It probably wouldn’t be that hard to mail out paper ballots only to people whose online ballots were empty; that’s a detail.)
I confess to being a Louis L’Amour fan, so in honor of him:
Puppy’s Law
Puppy Run
Education of a Wandering Puppy
The First Fast Puppy
Puppies of the Timberlands
Puppy with a Gun
The Iron Puppy
Last of the Breed
The Lonely Puppy
The Lonesome Puppy
The Puppy from the Broken Hills
The Puppy Brand
Son of a Wanted Puppy
The Puppy’s Path
With These Paws
Laertes, here is the argument the poster was making, which I guessed critics of the Making Light proposal might be approving of since it is a good point:
The big issue I see is the possibility that it takes awhile to find one author who then declines, the new tally produces several new authors, one of them is hard to reach and declines late, the new tally produces several new authors, one of them is hard to reach and declines late, and you’re behind schedule. It’s obviously better to rerun the voting but not with that result. Is there a way to reduce that risk?
That sounds like a big problem to me. Hugo administrators are volunteers, and authors are human beings. The poster added a remark about when to destroy the ballots was tangential and essentially irrelevant, since ballots can’t be destroyed until there is no possibility of a recount, which is by definition when it is OK to destroy ballots (and if there are specific rules about destroying ballots I missed please fill me in).
And as I mentioned above, I don’t know what this poster may have said in the past to justify being warned not to talk in public.
I just think telling people not to talk because the “other side” is listening, instead of going over to the other side and engaging them, is not likely to be an effective approach at building consensus.
I don’t think that is obvious at all. If an outcome of any rule change is that complete anonymised data and a record of nomination tallying is publicly available in perpetuity, I think that would be great and help consign all shadowy conspiracy debate to the past.
I’m not voting systems expert but I understand that this is a valid topic for discussion and there are all manner of opinions about what the ideal approach should be. It is a good discussion to have. Note that we don’t have “a record of nomination tallying” right now, and the information we do have was not always available in the past.
Brian Z: That’s incorrect, though unlike your previous remarks, not obviously a lie since you’re not familiar with ML. The comment you lied about, #133, has a little hook at the top, “JT@122:”, which indicates that he’s responding to JT’s comment #122. The relevant part of that comment is:
To me it seems obviously wrong, but it will usually get the right answer. And if it does go bad, and we stonewall well enough and nobody can get any evidence, then it will all blow over.
This is obviously incendiary phrasing and entirely out of sync with the sense of the room.
He was immediately chastised from a couple different directions for this flippant and offensive suggestion.
And then you come here and lie repeatedly about the whole incident. You lied when you said that he was chastised for being “quoted approvingly” on puppy boards. I hesitate to call what you just did a lie because it’s possible than you only accidentally misrepresented the comment that he was being chastised for in the comment that you paraphrased.
“I am not even white, being part white, part Mexican, and part Native American.”
Has Beale ever said which nation/tribe? Most people I know with Native American heritage generally refer to their specific nation or tribe. His not doing so is uncommon, and makes one think his definition of Native American is “born in Minnesota”.
Laertes, thank you at least for characterizing part of my comments as accidental misrepresentation. At risk of repeating myself, as far as I know I just witnessed someone elaborating on his personal opinion about problems with the proposal (nobody has proposed a rules change that require ballots be destroyed by a certain time), and I don’t know what he said in the past that he was told was inappropriate.
Brian Z @ 6:37 pm and later
Let’s step back here, shall we?
The discussion is open. Noone is excluded.
However – when you decided to bring the conversation here, you got the reaction to an extremely ill timed joke (I still think it was a joke) and decided that everyone there is talking about the copying to puppy boards. The problem is that this comment (the one that was talking about not being accountable) is then taken out of context and we go nowhere. In case you did not see it, I was one of the first people to jump against this. Jokes have time and in the middle of a debate, not clearly marked ones don’t work very well – especially when people copy lines around as crazy.
Everyone is trying to make the process as open and as inclusive as possible – but at the same time solving the issue with Mr X deciding that he needs to control the vote. Do we all agree on that?
Read the whole threads in ML – noone proposes ballots to be destroyed (and when someone does, everyone tells them off as it happened today); everyone is working on a transparent process which is clear to everyone.
Brian Z @t 7:55 pm
Cross posting:)
So you think that the last 2 paragraphs were appropriate? You can see my answer after that (hiding at 129) and then the longer elaboration (at 133) which seemed to have gotten you riled up (my comment was even called there for context).
It is not the ideas that were the problem. It was these last careless sentences that were hinting/pointing/jesting/whatever about destroying ballots and never providing explanations of the system even if someone believes someone made a mistake (or worse). It was not the first time they were posted in that style – thus the comment.
From Cordwainer Smith:
The Kennel and The Glory of Commander Suzdal
The Pack and The Glory of Commander Suzdal
The Game of Puppy and Dragon
Brown The Puppies Were – Yip! Yip! Yip!
The Puppy of Heart’s Desire
Down to A Sunless Kennel
No, No, Not The Puppies!
Think Blue, Bark Two
The Rediscovery of Puppies
Glenn Hauman: VD makes his claim based on the results of genetic testing. I think you’re on point about Native American/First Tribes identity traditionally being closer to an ethnic identity then a racial one. That being said VD seems to be of the opinion that the genetic differences between the races is more significant then what it is, and that culture (or in his own words how “civilized” an ethnic group is) is genetically determined.
“The Ballad of Lost C’Nine”
Morris: That one sneaks up on you.
Has anyone mentioned The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time?
Or are real dog-related titles too easy?
Morris: There have been several attempts at that one.
Annie Y: I do understand your point about things being cited out of context. (I personally feel some of my own comments have been cited out of context.)
Morris Keesan: aha! So who was the Puppy who did not bark?