514 thoughts on “The Effect of Puppy Rays on Fan-in-Spokane Rocketships 5/26”

1. They funded the Honey Badgers’ foray into con attendance to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. And that was just so a small group of people could attend a con and disrupt a couple of panel discussions. The idea that several dozen might fork out $40 to mess with an award that has been around for sixty years seems almost pedestrian in comparison.

   It is certainly the kind of thing I can see them doing. What I maintain is that there is no evidence of them doing it. The necessary increase in Puppy supporters from last year to dominate the ballot was minimal. There isn’t a lot of chatter in the usual places about crashing the Hugos. When the final Hugo results are released we’ll have a pretty strong piece of evidence either way, and I reserve the right to change my opinion based on that evidence.

2. Lou:

   And did you think the people who did the threatening were assholes, and also kind of laughable? Or a reasonable response to whatever you did to provoke them?

3. Here’s the Twitter exchange, back in April:

   Aaron: Dear Larry Correia, Brad Torgersen, John C. Wright, and Lou Antonelli: People don’t like you because you’re assholes.

   Aaron: Aww Lou Antonelli, I already knew you were an asshole. You didn’t need to send an email proving you are dumber than a box of rocks too.

   Lou: My Mensa membership number is 1091105. First thing arrogant elites like you like to toss out at people like me is “stupid”.

   Lou: I’ll be stopping by the GSA Friday to drop off copies of your tweets and make sure they know what kind of person your are.

   Aaron: Anyone who uses Mensa membership to “prove” their inteliigence is an idiot.

   Aaron: I passed your e-mail around the office. We had a good laugh at your expense. Expect to be publicly ridiculed some more.

   Aaron: By the way, responding to being called an asshole by trying to threaten someone’s job just proves you’re an asshole.

   Aaron: So good job confirming my original tweet.

   Lou: OK, so you’re doing this while on the government payroll? And you wonder why people hate bureaucrats?

   Aaron: Just in case anyone needed confirmation Lou Antonelli is an asshole, he’s called my office because I called him an asshole.

   Aaron: Responses from those in my office to recent threats made range from “Wow, that person is nutty” to “That’s hilarious”.

4. NickPheas: “Teddy sure does pick ‘em.”

   Hell yes. I think the worst thing done to some of these guys has been to put them in full glare of everyone. They’re used to behaviours that would be, if not acceptable, but brushed off in a more close knit group.

   Being out of that, among a larger/ more different audience, they keep running into the failure mode of clever more frequently.

5. Wow, if I had been watching that real time on Twitter, I’d have been making popcorn.

6. I think this subject has hijacked the thread, and it’s not fair to File 770. Besides, we’re not really getting anywhere. There are nuances in tone and intent that are impossible to relay on-line. I do find some comments interesting in their opinion of what happened and what’s going on, and that’s food for thought. But I think I’ll just scuttle off for now.

7. I didn’t justify losing my temper, I explained it. I didn’t say it was right, I said it happened.

   No you didn’t, you said:

   you say certain things to people, you will get predictable reactions

   That is trying to put the onus on your overreaction on the other party, in this case the guy you tried to get fired, which is not a predictable result to being called an asshole by a stranger on the internet.

   You might have your job threatened all the time, but it’s not a normal thing, especially by strangers who, presumably, don’t live anywhere near each other. If you’re getting constant calls for your firing(I know several newspaper editors, and this is not a thing with them), maybe it’s like that saying “if you meet one asshole you met an asshole, if everyone you meet is an asshole, you’re the asshole”.

8. In sweden, we have an expression that goes “Men who do things together”. I find that that expression fits perfectly for the twitter conversation above.

9. Lou Antonelli: “No, he called me an asshole on twitter. THEN I popped my cork.”

   Seriously, is being thin-skinned a thing with the Puppy nominees? There certainly seems to be a high predilection for it.

10. @hampus I’d be interested in what that means!

11. Oh, and here is popcorn bunny.

    http://i.imgur.com/ZXLTT.gif

12. @Aaron: whoa.

13. That ‘s my Sad Puppy posted on the wall,
    Looking as if it were alive. I call
    That piece a wonder, now: Artraccoon’s hands
    Work’d busily a day, and there it stands.
    Will ’t please you sit and look at it? I said
    “Artraccoon” by design: for never read
    Trufen like you such high grandilioqence,
    Fanaticism for an earnest stance,
    But on my site they click’d (since Captain Bligh,
    No mutineer’s faced Noah Ward but I)  
    And seem’d as fen should nominate, at worst,
    The stuff they like to read; so, not the first
    Are you to castigate us. Ser, ’t was not
    To fight injustice Ilk and League
    Of Evil joined the Puppy slate: perhaps
    Correia ’d bloviate “That message crap
    Obscures the story’s plot too much,” or “Paint
    Can never hope to cover up the quaint
    Logrolling Standlee won’t discuss:” such stuff
    Was obvious, we thought, and cause enough 
    To mock your rabbitology. You had 
    Fanac—how shall I say?—too soon made glad,
    Too easily impress’d; you lik’d whate’er
    You look’d on, and you tumblr’d everywhere.
    Ser, ’t was all one! LeGuin’s The Dispossessed,  
    A Princess of Mars, Gene Wolfe’s An Evil Guest,
    The mediocrity factitious fools
    Pimped in award posts for you, the Old School
    Who would not game the system—all and each
    Would draw from you alike the approving speech,
    Or votes, at least. You link’d back,—good! but link’d
    Somehow—I know not how—as if you rank’d
    My “Op’ra Vita Aeterna”’s acclaim
    With anybody’s dreck. Who ’d stoop to blame
    This sort of trifling? And had one skill
    In speech—(which I have not)—to make one’s will
    Quite clear to lefty fen, and say, “Just this
    Or that excess disgusts; here you miss,
    Or there exceed the mark”—and if you let
    Yourselves be lesson’d so, nor plainly set 
    Your wits to ours, forsooth, and made excuse,
    —E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose
    Never to stoop. Oh Ser, you mock’d, no doubt,
    Whene’er I troll’d you; but who pass’d without
    Much the same smile? This grew; the flames I fanned; 
    Then ballots all were counted. In strange lands
    The Pup abides. Will ’t please you rise? We ’ll meet
    The bid party below, then. I will tweet,
    Worldcon and Dragoncon’s concomitance
    Is ample warrant that no just pretence 
    To choose Helsinki will be disallow’d; 
    And more excellent books, as I avow’d  
    At starting, is my object. Nay, we ’ll go
    Together down, Ser. Here’s Stross’s Neptune, though,
    A first edition. There’s the rocketry. 
    Which Peter Weston cast in bronze for me!

14. @snowcrash

    Considering the earlier talk about GG, it really puts it into a weird perspective. Lou Antonelli can’t stand being called “asshole” and “stupid”, but Anita Sarkeesian has had a near constant barrage of death and rape threats, wiki graffiti, and a video “game” made about her that as just her getting beat up. Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu and driven out of their homes(along with the rape and death threats) and conspiracies made about them. But, god forbid, Lou was called an asshole by one person and he tries to get him fired.

15. @Lou Antonelli, you are being called an asshole because you act like an asshole. You also sound potentially dangerous, based on your own descriptions of your own behavior.

    It is not normal behavior to respond to an insult, real or perceived, by tracking down someone’s workplace and attempting to threaten their employment. That behavior is either corrupt, or deranged. Or, you know, both.

    And no, it is not a good use of my tax dollars to have an Congressional investigation, or even a small piece of one, focused on a tweet sent to you that hurt your fee-fees over your bad behavior on Deirdre Moen’s blog.

    And yes, you did call her a Nazi, and that is in no way justified, excused, or even explained by her decision to ban you from her blog because she found you annoying or troublesome.

16. @brian z You have a gift for that form.

17. Oh, ergh. Even with the preview I’m doing weird things to my words in that last post.

18. Rcade: Thanks for saving some of us the effort of going to hunt up the tweets ourselves. The more context we get, the worse off Mr. Antonelli looks in it all.

    It’s tempting to call the Puppies’ activities in general a display of Confederate values, showing the same obsession with honor and status that led to one senator attacking another with a cane on the floor of the US Senate and to countless feuds, duels, and lynchings. Or ISIS values: Hugo vandalism is a much smaller-magnitude kind of destruction than what ISIS is doing to historical monuments but of the same spirit, and various Puppies have been only too glad to explain the reasonableness of murderous attacks on people on the side of the hated modernism.

    But neither ISIS nor the Confederacy invented the sort of unhealthy fixation on honor and status; heck, Mark Twain wrote well on precedents for popular Southern views, and the day I outwrite Twain on anything is a day not happening. It’s a recurring failure mode for aristocrats threatened by class mobility and by relatively entrenched middle and lower classes threatened by previous suppressed minorities and outlying groups. It’s a persistent kind of foolish ugliness.

19. The behavior of so many of these authors is mind-boggling to me. It makes the whining in that post yesterday about trying to deprive authors of their living even stupider. There doesn’t have to be a conspiracy to blackball anyone.

    Like a lot of people, I’m not going to spend time with people I dislike. That goes for in-person socializing, and enjoying entertainment. I don’t watch Real Housewives shows or Mel Gibson movies because I find the people repugnant. People who are repugnant but brilliant tend to get more of a pass in general from society (like Roman Polanski or Woody Allen) but I still don’t want to spend time with their creations.

    There’s too much stuff out there. My dollars and my attention are tiny votes in the vast sea of potential consumers, but they are both finite resources under my control and I get to decide what to spend them on.

    Which is a long-winded way of saying that before the Puppies thing, I vaguely knew of Larry Correia’s work, having read one of his books, and thought it was ok. Torgerson, Antonelli, Wright, and Kr*tman — never read anything by any of them. And now I won’t.

    They are doing a great job of negating any potential income and profile boost they may get from a Hugo nomination or win because an awful lot of people who are intrigued enough to find out more about them are going to be turned right off. Their names will be on a lot of fans’ radar in the bad way. They may think that it isn’t fair to not give their work a fair shake and let it stand on its own merits, but that’s not how things work.

20. Brian Z, another great entry. Thank you for those. 🙂

21. Brian Z., I am in awe.
    I memorized “My Last Duchess” back in highschool, just because I could. Still remember all of it but a few lines just before the end.

22. Will:

    Originally the expression comes from a TV show with a weird sense of humor. It is just a throw off line, if I remember correctly. After that, it has been common to say when men do slightly weird things together. The type of things that you only find men doing. Often it is connect to men who seem a bit lost and are trying to find their way to their inner maleness in some way, either by doing macho things or by doing overly sensitive things.

    Last time I saw it used, it was about men going out into the woods, playing drums and screaming at each other. It was supposed to connect them to their inner man.

23. Brian Z, you have outdone yourself, sir!

24. Brian Z composing a Sad Puppies 4-slated verse collection on File 770 in real time is going to be quite the controversy in 11 months when it takes all five slots for Best Related Work, five more in Best Short Story, one Fan Writer and one Campbell Award place.

    I’d like to be the first to ask him to drop out.

25. @Kimberly K

    For me Puppydom is currently GG writ small. From the ever changing narratives for their reason to exist, to the *constant* special pleading, to the cut and paste arguments being shoehorned in (I see that someone did the journalism code of ethics thing in the previous thread-uhm, guys you’re getting confused – GG is about media ethics, Puppydom is about awards), it’s basically the lower budget sequel.

26. There are nuances in tone and intent that are impossible to relay on-line.

    Sometimes arguing about someone’s tone has merit. This is not one of those times, especially since -until the phone call- all of the interactions were themselves online.

27. Last time I saw it used, it was about men going out into the woods, playing drums and screaming at each other. It was supposed to connect them to their inner man.

    That sounds like Robert Bly’s Iron John movement from the 1990s.

    We should all find our maleness by going into the woods with other men to beat on something.

28. “I wasn’t doxxing Aaron, I was checking a mailing address.”

    That is actually doxxing.

29. My Last Duchess! Brian Z, you are a treasure.

30. @snowcrash
    My post was less about GG and more about how it’s a good example of how much shit these women, and many others in most of the rest of the internet have to put up with compared to Lou’s ridiculous overreaction to being called the, very pedestrian, insult “asshole”. And women are told, well, you “just have to deal with it”. “Why are you so thin-skinned?” “Oh, just ignore them, they’ll go away.” “But being told you should be raped is a compliment!” And so on, and so forth.

    In the case of the Hugo’s it’s been more dog-whistling than outright insults or threats (she/he/they only won/were nominated because of Affirmative Action, that’s not real SFF), but the intended result is the same: to make the recipients feel unwelcome so the (white) boys can have their playground back.

    And Lou is that upset at being called an asshole after acting a bit like an asshole.

31. Unwin the Goof:

    No, it isn’t. Doxxing is when you make the information publicly available to others.

32. ….hooooollly crap. That is messed up.

    Dude, seriously, that is NOT normal behavior. You should talk to someone about that if your response to a tweet about being an asshole is to try to track them down and call them at work. This is not me trying to score points, this is me saying “you are outside socially acceptable behavior.” If your temper is making you dox people, your temper is getting you in trouble. You are a grown-up, you can change that behavior and I strongly, strongly urge you to do so.

33. Saw this on the #SadPuppies:

    http://adventuresfantastic.com/the-women-other-women-dont-see/

    I do not think it has come up yet on File770.

    It is not about Hugo awards, but it is about women authors in Science Fiction and fantasy. So, it should be interesting to read regardless of whose banners you carry.

    Now, lets see if I have time to go over whatever was posted today.

34. @Kimberly K

    Oh, don’t get me wrong – I agree completely, and that’s one of the things I was referring to when I mentioned the constant special pleading – the constant discounting of threats faced by other people, especially women together with the idea that anything negative said to them – oh no, someone called Larry/ Lou an arsehole – is so far beyond the pale as to justify almost anything (doxxing, Kr*tm*n’s Stand Your Ground fantasies) in response.

    BTW, I’m of the opinion that saying that someone got where they are only because of affirmative action to be an actual insult, but I agree with the point you made – it’s about shoving others out of the way.

35. Wow, Lou Antonelli called Deirdre a Nazi, and he thinks that’s okay, but Aaron called him an asshole and that was so beyond the pale that he went straight to doxxing and intimidation.

    1) Here we see a common Puppy trait–anything they call other people is acceptable, but when it comes to their own precious selves they have extremely thin skins.

    2) Their first response is Gator tactics–which might explain why they get mistaken for Gators.

36. And here I was thinking that Mr. Antonelli – Godwinning aside – was one of the more reasonable of the Puppies. There is absolutely nothing reasonable about trying to get someone fired over a tweet as mild as that!

    Aaron: I’m glad that it seems you won’t suffer any professional consequences over this. I’m sorry you had to deal with it at all.

    Re: Hancock – my main impression of that film is that its the closest I’ve ever seen to a committed poly threesome on the big screen.

    I also think it was very clear that while we’re meant to sympathise with Hancock (I disagree that we’re meant to think he’s a sociopath), his behaviour is considered bad (and self-destructive) within the film and not at all something someone might want to emulate. Being called an asshole is no excuse for promptly doing your best to prove the insult correct.

37. It’s a shame that for full irony this didn’t happen in the “Disney’s “101 Nominations” 5/25” thread that quoted … Dave Freer claiming that “the Puppies, both sad and rabid, and their followers have avoided attacking things which make people a living.”

38. @Hampus That’s fascinating, and really pertinent. I wish I had seen the show to get the full appreciation. (And you’re in the part of the world I probably ignorantly think of as “the Nordic countries,” right? I really get a kick out of the humor that comes from there. Did you see the movie “In Order of Disappearance”? Anyway, me trying to say I think I catch the vibe.)

    Anyway, this and subsequent comments here make me think there’s an element of “Fight Club” to all of this. Fight Club is a kind of nostalgia, too. (And since I’ve learned I’m only defined by my most recent comment, let me be clear I don’t think anybody “needs” Fight Club. And yet, people actually did go out and start some afterwards.)

    Let’s not forget either that the word nostalgia has the word “pain” built into it.

    This is the kind of thinking exercise that really helps, IMHO. Even saying we don’t get it is a beginning. Nothing says anyone has to do it, but it almost always yields something useful.

39. Hampus: “Doxxing is when you make the information publicly available to others.”

    That’s a fair criticism, but I’d still err on side of doxxing (as per Wikipedia, hahahaha): “researching and broadcasting personally identifiable information”. Antonelli has described that he was researching personally identifiable information, i.e. place of work. From the twitter exchange that Aaron reported, Antonelli then went on to say that would be “stopping by the GSA Friday to drop off copies of your tweets and make sure they know what kind of person your are.” That seems more like narrowcasting rather than broadcasting – but it still looks like doxxing to me.

40. Tuomas VAinio on May 27, 2015 at 7:05 am said:
    Saw this on the #SadPuppies

    There’s some fantastic strawmanning going on in that article.

    Also, why are Puppies so bad at statistical analysis? If someone is going to claim that women were responsible for a ‘significant proportion’ of published works over a period of several decades, they could at least give us some percentage figures.

41. Doxxing is what Margaret Pless did to Mike Cernovich.

    Koretzky’s panel at the SPJ Live Conference is going to be a watershed moment for the GG movement. Which direction remains to be seen though.

42. @rcade
    I’ve been hoping that Brian Z collects his various stylings on somewhere easy to link (a blog or a tumblr), and considering nominating him for one or the other of them or as Fan Writer next time.

    @Brian Z
    See above, hint hint. 🙂

43. Andrew P

    Doxxing is what Margaret Pless did to Mike Cernovich.

    Are you referring to the time someone posted his publicly available business address without knowing it was his home residence?

    Mike Cernovich’s relationship with the truth is elastic. He’s also been claiming he was “swatted” because Ms. Pless reported him to a non-profit.

    References:
    http://idledillettante.com/2014/10/20/mike-cernovich-gamergate-lawyer/
    http://idledillettante.com/2014/10/24/how-to-report-mike-cernovich-to-the-lapd-wo-a-single-deadlift/
    http://idledillettante.com/2014/12/27/juice-bro-co-internet-stalkers/

44. Will:

    Yep, I am from sweden. No, I haven’t really seen swedish movies for the last 10 years or so. No idea why, but I guess I get my dose of swedish humor anyhow. 😉

    You can see some parts of the TV series on Youtube with english subtitles. I have no idea if it is understandable outside of sweden. All episodes together were named “Adult men who do things together”.

45. I find these attempts to change the rules utterly hysterical. The reason the puppies were able to dominate the nominations is because worldcon is a tiny event, and even most of that tiny group doesn’t bother nominating. The solution is not to change the rules (except maybe in the context of “the final solution”) because that will only make the con even smaller, less relevant and easier to game regardless of the rules. The solution is to bring more people in to the system and to grow it beyond a size that can be gamed. One side has done this, the other is trying to prevent it from happening.

    But the numbers don’t lie. The puppies have brought in thousands of new voters. Does worldcon really want to prove to them that it doesn’t want them around?

46. @Hampus Thanks–will look forward to watching.

47. One thing I will say is that Lou Antonelli did the right thing by leaving the thread. Now let’s hope that next time he can do that without calling anyone a Nazi on his Facebook page, stalking people, or threatening them with a congressional investigation for tweeting.

48. Also, why are Puppies so bad at statistical analysis? If someone is going to claim that women were responsible for a ‘significant proportion’ of published works over a period of several decades, they could at least give us some percentage figures.

    Well, there are bits like:

    The Unique Magazine, 127 known women writers published 365 short stories and serials, or 13.45% of the fiction. 

    I just thought to see if Davin’s book is in any of the local libraries I have cards for. Yep, so it gets added to the TBRMS list.

    This passage caught my eye:
    And in Chapters 8 and 9, Davin examines (respectively) anti-Semitism and racism in the field, and shows that these things may have been exaggerated, especially where accusations against a certain editor are concerned.

    If that’s John W. Campbell, we’re talking the same fellow who published an editorial with this bold assertion:
    The Caucasian race has produced super-high-geniuses by the dozen in the last five thousand years; the Oriental race has, also. The Negro race has not.

49. Oh, and for you people who read Thor and think it has anything to do with nordic mythology, skip it. This is the real nordic version, dubbed in english, showing the nordic gods as they should be shown. Loki is just fantastic in this version:

    http://trutube.tv/video/6137/Valhalla-1986-Animated-film-English-Language-Version

    There are also some fantastic comic albums by the same cartoonist. Strongly recommended.

50. The solution is not to change the rules (except maybe in the context of “the final solution”) because that will only make the con even smaller, less relevant and easier to game regardless of the rules.

    I think it is interesting that the Pups seem to think that “smaller”, by definition means “less relevant”, when Worldcon has been plenty relevant at the size it is, and the Hugo Awards managed to be the most prestigious award in science fiction without any influx of new voters – even when there were far fewer voters than there were in 2010.

    Size does not equate to relevance. This seems to be hard for Pups to grasp.

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