948 thoughts on “That Hell-Hound Train 5/20”

1. Politics is what we call the bundle of activities we use to influence the behavior of others. You’re confusing it with governance and policy-making, which are subsets.

   And no, it requires very little training to read mysteries (as distinct from horrors) for the very simple reason that lived experience gives us most of the training we need. We cannot observe everything, so we have to infer, reason, and judge the personalities of the people around us. That’s the essence of mystery fiction.

2. Nick, I read Marcuse a long long time ago and I’m not going to dispute an argument that everything can be political, but you really want to characterize a bunch of book-blogging authors and their fans trying to get their friends and favorites on a fan award ballot a political party?

   Mysteries: “we have to infer, reason, and judge the personalities of the people around us.” You mean we can’t be trained to do that, so we have to learn it for ourselves? Interesting.

3. @Nick Mamatas

   “Politics is what we call the bundle of activities we use to influence the behavior of others.”

   The advertising agencies will be delighted to learn that you’ve raised their collective status.

4. @SocialInjusticeWorrier:

   Would advertising agencies consider that a promotion?

5. A party is just a group that is looking to influence politics that calls itself a party. There are parties in the US right now that are smaller than the pool of Hugo voters, and some of them have outsize influence. Socialist Alternative did an amazing job getting the idea of $15 minimum wage into the public consciousness and passed in a few cities with 300 cadre in the US, tops. (Their campaign also influenced other cities to raise wages, and also pressured large companies into giving their lowest-paid workers raises.)

   If the Hugo Awards are less important than $15 per hour, they’re more important than weather the toddler park in town should have wood chips or grass, and that’s a political decision as well.

   I didn’t say that one *cannot* be trained to read mysteries; I said that one needs only a little training to read mysteries—reading two should do it, really. The mystery is a fairly easy genre to apprehend.

6. Advertising agencies are in the business of selling ad-making services to companies seeking ads. The effectiveness of any particular campaign is almost impossible to determine. Surely you’ve heard the old saw: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

7. @influxus

   I suspect they would, just as the monkey would probably prefer to be thought in charge of the organ-grinder.

8. Brian Z: “OK but wouldn’t you still need to train yourself to read the mysteries?”

   Do you actually have to train yourself to read different types of books?

   Wow. That’s bizarre. After I trained myself to read at the age of 3, I’ve not had any trouble reading any sort of book, regardless of genre or subject. There hasn’t been any more “training” involved.

   Maybe you want to consider signing up for Remedial Reading Lessons.

9. Nick, I’m still not sure whether you think “Sad Puppies” (or any other flavor) share a substantive ideological framework or practical political platform. “No Affirmative Action” perhaps was such a thing if it was to be taken seriously, but I for one don’t think that it was particularly well thought through, and to whatever extent they have doubled down repeating that phrase I suspect it may be a defensive reaction to being attacked more than a key item in their platform.

   (My sole objection to Ancillary Justice, by the way, was that the writing was annoyingly clunky in places just like you’d expect from a first novel.)

   I’m not sure a guiding principle that you should let your characters demonstrate any message without beating your reader over the head with it qualifies as a political agenda. So if they are a party, can we figure out exactly what their agenda is?

10. @JJ

    Just don’t let the Puppies know about the mandatory How To Read Redshirts proseminar at the SJW Summer Camp. If that got out of the bag….

11. Brian,

    What’s the ideological framework of the Democratic or Republican Parties? You’ll find a fair amount of differences within them and a fair amount of overlap between them. They’re both broad coalitions with essentially regional and aesthetic distinctions, plus a little rhetoric to please various true believers under the umbrella.

    The Puppy platform is quite simple—it’s basically a populist appeal to political and aesthetic reaction. Thus the idea that the Hugos are divorced from “the market” because of “Affirmative Action” (and diversity generally) and that a groundswell of small-f fans (in tune with the market) must be activated to save the award from the Big F-Fans who are elitist tastemakers sitting on their thrones somewhere in the Flatiron Building. It’s the SF version of the 1992 Reform Party, which was a dog’s breakfast of resentments and grudges and maybe even a kernel of rational critique here and there.

    Now you may point out that the Puppy slates don’t match Puppy rhetoric. What else is new when it comes to politics? Neither Democrats nor Republicans explicitly run as “the party of multi-millionaire” but in practice the Dems and Reps who end up in office are millionaires who perform the work of making policies that suit millionaires.

12. SIWier, you went to SJW Hugo camp too? I think I was a couple years ahead of you, back then they were still handing out dog-eared copies of The Zanzibar Cat.

13. SocialInjusticeWorrier: “Just don’t let the Puppies know about the mandatory How To Read Redshirts proseminar at the SJW Summer Camp. If that got out of the bag…”

    Are you going to Sasquan? Because I’d love to buy you the beverage of your choice, just so I can hear more of your bon mots.

14. Nick, I don’t know. We’ve agreed that Puppytalk doesn’t always match their canine gait, and somewhat similarly, politicians talk a bunch of baloney. But I’m still not comfortable calling “the campaign to end puppy sadness” a political party except perhaps in the most Discordian of senses. (Which may be what they want, come to think of it.)

    I’m afraid I’ll have to have a schism.

    (To hell with your Social Justice Warriors, I’m a Social Warrior for Justice.)

    (Splitter!)

15. Well, as this goes on you’ll find yourself increasingly confused and I’ll find myself increasingly confident. I’m not saying that the Puppies are a political movement for fun, or to smear them, I’m saying it because that understanding is more useful for explaining and predicting their behaviors than your model, which just seems to be “Uh Brad says stuff sometimes and then people do things.”

16. @JJ

    If I were, I would be delighted to accept and, indeed, to reciprocate. I am busy working on my Puppy Hunter series, in which a scifi fan discovers that her peaceful town is under attack by canine monsters foaming at the mouth and is approached by the mysterious SJW corporation to hunt them down in return for bounties.

17. Brian Z on May 21, 2015 at 11:22 pm said:
    Nick, I’m still not sure whether you think “Sad Puppies” (or any other flavor) share a substantive ideological framework or practical political platform.

    My own observation is that SP has a very specific campaign, but it’s a negative one – they’re defined by opposing SJWs, where “SJW” is their tag for a certain type of culture, behavior, and activity pattern.

    So it’s not “We want X,” it’s “We don’t want Y,” or to wit – “We don’t want SJWs.”

    And that’s a lot of the problem – because the concept of an “SJW” is an amalgamation of a huge variety of people, behaviors, and specific instances – many of which may have been misunderstood, taken out of context, or filtered through a hostile worldview.

    So if you say “An SJW is somebody who admonishes me, saying the fiction I like is bad and worthless,” then yeah, people who do that are really annoying! But if you say something like “An SJW is somebody who reads the fiction I like and doesn’t like it, and then says so,” or “An SJW is somebody who actively seeks out diversity in the fiction they read, and claims to enjoy it” — well, in that case, you’re basically opposed to people leading their own lives and having their own reactions to things that they read. And while you certainly don’t have to share that taste or those opinions, saying “It’s not OK that [people with these opinions/SJWs] exist” is not going to end well.

    But by all appearances, that does seem to be precisely what the SP and RP folks are saying – “we want to be free of the influence of SJWs.” The various puppy posts talk mountains and mountains about how awful the SJWs are – and very, very little about anything else, including the fantastic fiction they apparently want to see more of.

    That’s what this boils down to, I think:
    The pro-diversity movement has been a positive campaign – “Here’s stuff that’s worth reading; here’s why we think it has unique, worthwhile qualities; here’s what you’re missing if you stick to just mainstream fiction written predominantly by white hetereosexual males.” You may disagree with this campaign, and also, this campaign does quite often veer into negative campaigning – “These people are oppressive; these people are insensitive; these people are mean” – but the core and bulk of the movement is a positive and constructive one.
    Whereas the Puppy campaigns have mostly been in reaction to the pro-diversity movement, and their core and bulk has been to complain about how awful the pro-diversity folks are. That’s most of what they talk about – and it’s very, very difficult to get a coherent goal other than fighting SJWs from the various pro-Puppy writing I’m seeing.

    That’s an ideological framework. It’s a practical platform. It’s just a hostile one.

18. Hang on, we’re finding common ground here. I’d be more willing to call “puppies” “a political movement”, which more than “party” captures what I see as a couple of the key or at least most striking elements: decentralized; is not composed of people subscribing to a specific common manifesto; hasn’t entered into coalitions with other parties (and despite efforts to accuse SP of doing this, I still haven’t seen evidence of it); takes the form of a distributed internet-based and at least potentially global network beyond the reach of any individual leaders no matter how impressive their page views or bookscan numbers; and members who identify themselves by a sprig of rosemary in their hats, or no wait, I think that last one was the Levellers.

    Hey, we might still actually agree. Surprise again.

19. (That was common ground with Nick at 11:43, not Standback. I need to ponder Standback’s remarks for a bit.)

20. SocialInjusticeWorrier: “I am busy working on my Puppy Hunter series, in which a scifi fan discovers that her peaceful town is under attack by canine monsters foaming at the mouth and is approached by the mysterious SJW corporation to hunt them down in return for bounties.”

    Okay, that’s the third keyboard this month ruined. I’m sending you the bill.

    But hey, the puppyhunternation.com domain is still available! Grab it quick!

21. All those things also describe parties, especially broad-based ones which are themselves coalitions, like the Democrats and Republicans. Where are their manifestos—it’s trivial to find members of the parties in office, and especially in the electorate, who disagree with the platforms. There have been global parties since the days of the First International, and the Internet is where everything is these days.

22. Standback, I think your remarks are very well considered. I’m not sure yet I agree with all of them. Do you think that ALL the “sad puppy” fellow travelers buy into the sjw-mongering and chorfspeak? I’ve heard some (Lou Antonelli comes to mind) saying that they aren’t comfortable with that kind of talk at all.

    the concept of an “SJW” is an amalgamation of a huge variety of people, behaviors, and specific instances – many of which may have been misunderstood, taken out of context, or filtered through a hostile worldview.

    This is (of course!) an excellent point. But can I ask you to clarify: do you think we can (as a community, or even just between you and me in conversation right now) arrive at a useful definition of “SJW”? If possible, should we? Does anything change if someone does?

23. Lou Antonelli also managed to call Deirdre Saoirse Moen a Nazi.

    http://deirdre.net/the-puppy-free-hugo-award-voters-guide/#comment-19034

    But lots of people dislike nasty talk like CHORF…once one of their powerful friends or acquaintances makes unpleasant noises about it. But for everyone else, why not just go right for the swastika?

24. Pretty sure that was just a google translate, though I don’t speak anything but English myself.
    Accurately assessed. “neamhliteartha tú” is meaningless. Is léir nach bhfuil Gaeilge ag Darby, ní thuigeann sé/ sí nach ionann aidiacht agus ainmfhocal, nó fiú go bhfuil an Tuiseal Gairmeach ann.

25. All those things also describe parties, especially broad-based ones which are themselves coalitions,

    OK, we are disagreeing on basic terms then. I define a political party as having a central leadership structure and some kind of charter (even if the folks who wrote it were lying through their teeth) and a coalition of parties as when a group of parties thus constituted work together to achieve common interests.

    (Whereas I think any respectable, comprehensive list of leaders of political movements would also have to include, for example, Kerry Thornley.)

26. Nick, I thought that comment from Lou Antonelli was way out of line too, but it looked to me like it was made spontaneously in anger, and was not part of anybody’s premeditated political strategy, so I’m not sure it speaks to the “platform” question.

27. You make an infinite number of excuses for Puppy rhetoric and to be blunt, I don’t believe any of them. There’s no such thing as spontaneous typing in anger, especially not as Lou did it—leaving one venue for another, pasting in a prior conversation, and then adding “Nazi” as a conclusion. That takes time, effort, and multiple browser tabs. I like Lou fine, but I haven’t noticed any apology announced (I may have missed it; please point me to it if I have) and he should offer one.

    Same with Brad’s lengthy blog posts—these aren’t verbal blurts, they’re essays by a published author.

28. I made no excuse at all. Lou Antonelli should apologize (and I haven’t seen him do it). I said the Gang of Pups didn’t sit down at Pup Central to make a list of terms to fling at their enemies and go “SJW’s getting old, CHORF sounds kinda funny, oh hey, Nazi, that’s a good one.”

    Likewise there is no excuse for some of the things Brad wrote. Although I don’t think he compared anyone to Hitler. I said his rallying readers by complaining about “affirmative action” was not well thought through and doesn’t stand up to close inspection, not that I excuse it. I also wrote a poem in protest when John C. Wright made a flippant reference to genocide. So I’m starting to feel like I’m not sure how much more clear on this point I can be.

29. Brian,

    The pre-meditation is in picking the Puppies. Brad and Lou are long-time pals, and even co-founded and ran a tiny alternative SFWA together. I don’t know if it still ongoing. Brad knew that Lou wouldn’t fall prey to the whispers and pressures of the horrible SJWs and their unshaved pubic mounds.

30. I wouldn’t be so quick to discount the idea of having to “train” oneself to read different genres. At least, I personally know people who have point blank said they can’t read SF/F. In some cases it’s because they can’t suspend disbelief for the fantastical element, in others because they can’t build a coherent idea of the story’s world from the clues, hints, and bits of info the writer drops. To me, it seems perfectly natural, but I’ve been reading science fiction and fantasy since I learned how to read, so I’m biased. It’s a little like the way someone like me, with an Atari 2600 in the house since I was 5, finds it weird to run into someone who needs to be trained in how to use a computer mouse.

    There’s a set of skills, or maybe comprehension tropes, that each genre requires of its readers. They’re learnable, but they do not necessarily come in a package with “has learned to read in one’s native language.”

    ..

    John Seavey: @Nicole: My literary sin is overuse of the word “just” as a modifier. I think I cut a 10,000 word story down by 500 words by removing extraneous uses. 🙂

    I think I can see where you cut one out even in that second sentence! 😀

    Mine is “manage.” My characters always somehow manage to do things. “Somehow” is kind of a bugaboo too.

    ..

    All hail Leslie C’s Fox In Socks! I had to read it out loud to my husband, and now, yes, my tongue is numb.

    ..

    Going to Maine: Nick Mamatas: “Does Butcher still think Wrigley Field has a very large parking lot?” I am dying right now. Dying. I am on the Red Line going past Addison and I am dying.

    And now I am remembering Nightlife by Brian Hodge. A fun read, don’t get me wrong! But I had to stop to laugh my ass off during the main character’s flashback to some nefarious deeds done in a French Quarter sub-basement. Through which the characters had access to a subterranean channel that might carry a dead body to the Mississippi River.

    (I stopped what I was doing and expressed my amusement and dismay on Twitter. A high school friend got back to me: “Do you think scuba equipment was involved?”)

    I continued to enjoy the book, but I did cast a skeptical eye at other locations in which the plot was set. I wondered if they might have similarly outrageous howlers in them that I just didn’t have the knowledge to notice.

31. Nicole, I didn’t say that people didn’t require training to read genres, I said that people didn’t require much training to read mysteries.

    SF/F often does require a bit of training, actually.

32. That’s interesting, and obviously I don’t know much about it. Though he also picked people who were not dependable allies including some he says he considered friends, so the selection strategy seems inconsistent.

    Nick, I am not defending Brad and like everybody else I have also watched him make all those mistakes. But although I may not know all the precise reasons you and others don’t like him, his tenure as puppy in chief may be already over, since Kate Paulk seems to have stepped up to the plate. Maybe we can analyze her stats instead. (And I know little about her beyond that she is a silly person who also throws around chorfspeak far too carelessly for my own comfort.)

33. I like Brad just fine, in the same way I like squirrels just fine.

34. @BrianZ: Yay!

    Do you think that ALL the “sad puppy” fellow travelers buy into the sjw-mongering and chorfspeak?

    Not categorically, no.

    I’ve got a lot of understanding for some of the individual claims coming from the Sad Puppies. I do think a lot of the more literary end of the arts skews heavily to the left; I think there are some kneejerk reactions to right-wing politics; I think there have been individual cases which have been problematic, or at very least debatable (such as the rage against Orson Scott Card, which I can understand, but which I think has been simplified to a tribal our-side/their-side argument, where I could argue extensively in favor of either side).

    So I can definitely understand an individual reader or fan who reads some of the Puppy campaign, and finds that it resonates. There are real grievances here; this is the internet, and it’s no difficulty at all to find a fair batch of cases supporting either one side.

    But as I said, as a movement, the Puppies don’t seem to have any common ground except the opposition to SJW – as you say, “sjw-mongering and chorfspeak.” So I certainly think one can identify with the Puppies’ general complaints, or at least with some of them. But if you say, “OK, I’m with the Puppies now, but now let’s talk about things besides how bad the SJW’s are”, I think you’ll be greeted with affable silence at best.

    So “fellow travellers who don’t buy into sjw-mongering and chorfspeak” — sure, they exist; I’ve got a friend in my office who probably meets this definition. But… they’re not actually saying anything, and I don’t think their acceptance of the Puppies has much significance. I will say that I hope any specific complaint arising from Puppy-friendlies will be treated with initial respect, and be weighed on its own merits (and possibly dismissed on its own merits). At the moment — well, at the moment I’m not seeing any such specific complaint, neither from the Puppies themselves nor from fellow travellers.

    But can I ask you to clarify: do you think we can (as a community, or even just between you and me in conversation right now) arrive at a useful definition of “SJW”? If possible, should we? Does anything change if someone does?

    “SJW” is a derisive label; if we want to find helpful definitions, I’d rather start from scratch.

    I definitely think you and I, and probably most of the other people here in the comments, could agree on specific people or instances of behavior as being:
    – elitist
    – holier-than-thou
    – dogmatic
    – exclusionary
    …and other such criticisms.

    But “SJW” in itself is an attempt to define an opposing class which (A) always behaves poorly in these ways, and (B) is doing so maliciously. And in support of this thesis, individual examples are often cherry-picked, and often taken out of context.

    I don’t think there is a meaningful definition of “SJW” if that definition begins with “A group of people who do the following things for the following reasons.” People are more complicated than that. People do different things at different times, and to different degrees. And it’s not easy to understand other people’s rationales or worldviews, particularly when you’re both hostile to one another.

    We could agree on behavior that we both consider bad. (And then we might further disagree on particular cases – whether they fit our criteria; whether there were mitigating circumstances; what motives we attribute to the person behaving badly, etc.) I don’t think we could agree on the definition of a group of people defined by our attribution of bad behavior to them, partially because I don’t think such a classification is fair or constructive to begin with.

35. I don’t think it’s a matter of “training” oneself to read a given genre. What happens, in my experience, is a bit like language acquisition, in that if you stay with a genre for a while your mind gets attuned to the various generic conventions and ultimately, if you like them and feel comfortable with them, you choose to read further.

36. @Standback

    A dogmatic puppy? Inconceivable!

37. But if you say, “OK, I’m with the Puppies now, but now let’s talk about things besides how bad the SJW’s are”, I think you’ll be greeted with affable silence at best.

    I don’t think there is a meaningful definition of “SJW”

    Standback, unless they can somehow square that circle, it doesn’t sound that that’s a movement with much of a future.

38. Pfft, the semantic flexibility of SJW is what makes it politically useful. It’s sort of like a “war on terror”, which is as about as useful as declaring “a war on tactics.” But everyone knows what is meant, even when they disagree about what they know.

39. The War on SJWs is a pretext to radically curtail our civil liberties? I don’t get what it is politically useful for.

    (Unless we count getting a bunch of your friends onto the final ballot of a hoary fan award where they are guaranteed to have no shot at winning the prize as having political utility, which I’ve said I don’t.)

40. CHORF:

    Cliquish, Holier-than-thou, Obnoxious, Reactionary, Fanatics.

    To be honest, the first thing I think of when I read this is Wright. He is christian of the very christian type. Who talks about how other people should act and behave to follow his own religion. He is nominated for dogmatic christian texts. Holier-than-thou is an apt naming. As a swedish atheist, I think of him as a fanatic. In sweden, people who talk like are usually scary things with unnatural smiles and a weird gleam in their eyes. Best to be avoided.

    Reactionary seems an apt description for rightwingers, thus the puppies. I’m not sure if they understand what “reactionary” means. It doesn’t seem like that. And yes, the puppies usually are kind of obnoxious with their talk about burning the hugos, of warfare, of SJWs and who knows what. And certainly, they are a small clique. We can see that in the nominations, just friends voting for friends.

    To be honest, I think Brad was kind of stupid to create an expression that could just as well be used against himself as towards others.

41. SJW is a word used to demonize, to create strawmen, to drive wedges. It is a word for cultural warriors, not for book lovers.

42. Your definition of politics is narrowly absurd and impossible to take seriously, Brian. You may as well stop appealing to it, because it unique to your brain. Everyone else in the world knows that politics is a general term—thus “office politics” for example.

    Stop saying stupid things.

43. Brian, Nick’s got it exactly right.

    When you say it sounds like “they don’t have much of a future,” you mean they’re at a dead end and they can’t possibly accomplish anything, let alone their stated goals.

    But as long as they can rally support around “fighting the SJWs,” they DO have a future – as a long-lived culture battle founded on anger and frustration. They won’t *accomplish* anything, but they will continue to be around, to make a lot of noise, and to disrupt the rest of fandom in the name of advancing those dead-end goals.

    They might not see the dynamic this way themselves. But as long as they’re a dead-end negative campaign against “people who like different stuff than us,” that’s how it’s going to play out.

44. Nick, perhaps my main beef with calling that politics in general discussion is I think calling it that brings to the mind of many the “politics” of the US Culture Wars (or similar left-right divides elsewhere), which I myself find utterly boring, whereas other long-running ideological currents within fandom are to my mind ever so much more interesting and complex.

    (Starts to dismount.)

    But just to say one last stupid thing:

    Would it really that hard to settle on the meaning of SJW? Let me take a shot. When I hear that term I tend to imagine it means people who accept Friere’s contention that:

    The oppressors who oppress, exploit and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both… True generosity lies in striving so that these hands — whether of individuals or entire peoples — need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.

    Could we agree with that, or not, and those who agree can be the SJWs?

    (Really gets off soapbox this time.)

45. Brian Z:

    How about this definition:

    SJW: A word used to be able to slander anyone seen as to the left of Djinghis Khan, regardless of their opinions, ideology or morals.

46. Hampus, because I don’t think that’s what the accusation is supposed to mean.

47. SJW, once upon a time (until last year) was a term used within the left to mock faux activists who’d pour most of their energy into, say, gay liberation as understood in a LiveJournal fanfic community dedicated to incest-rape fanfiction. The “warrior” bit was ironical—it was a specific political variant of “keyboard warrior.”

    Naturally, some people reclaimed the “warrior” position, and the rise of Gamergate made being an SJW more palatable then being, say, a gamer so committed to his hobby that it made perfect sense to call someone’s father on the telephone, scream, “YOUR DAUGHTER IS A WHORE!” and hang up twenty times a night.

48. Brian, let’s say we were to accept that definition.

    How do we check it? How do we know whether a particular person is an SJW or not? Does simply *believing* in that quote affect a person’s writing? Does it necessarily make any observable difference at all?
    And what about that quote is so objectionable that a movement will rally followers to oppose anybody who agrees with it?

49. SJW isn’t a totally useless term (#FireColbert anyone?), but just barely. It should just refer to one more type of online mob — one from the political left. But the online world is full of online mobs, as GamerGate and the Puppies have demonstrated quite clearly.

    Most of the time, though, the Puppies are using the term in a tribal sense, meaning little more than “anyone not on our side.”

50. Brian Z:

    I have no idea what the accusation is supposed to mean. I go after how it is used instead.

    Nick:

    Is that true? As far as I know, the first known occurance on the web is from 2009 and is used to slander people from the left.

    http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/social-justice-warrior

    Where was it used before?

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