Wall Street Journal on Sad Puppies

Sad Puppies, John Scalzi and Larry Correia feature in a new Wall Street Journal piece “The Culture Wars Invade Science Fiction” by Michael Rapoport.

Mr. Scalzi likens the Puppies’ campaigns to the backlash that women and minorities have faced in other geek-culture arenas—notably “Gamergate,” the videogamers’ campaign widely associated with threats against feminist videogame critics.

But Larry Correia, another Sad Puppies organizer, doesn’t see the Puppies’ campaign as a backlash against diversity. “That’s a narrative they came up with to try to discredit us,” he says. He and Mr. Torgersen have distanced themselves from Mr. Beale’s extreme views, but the Rabids are “still fans, they’re still people, their votes still count.”

In an e-mail, Rapoport says a slightly shorter version will appear in the Review section of Saturday’s print Wall Street Journal.

34 thoughts on “Wall Street Journal on Sad Puppies

  1. I’m fascinated by all the mundane press coverage our feud has gotten. Most of it has been in liberal publications, so it’s great that the Wall Street Journal has now taken notice.

    Also, the WSJ coverage may prompt the New York Times to do a story as well. Maybe I’ll even get interviewed again!

  2. I wonder if any of the regular newspapers which are actually running articles about this brouhaha are getting any letters asking if they’ve gone out of their heads to be giving those sci-fi weirdos so much attention?

    Or do any of them at all understand that this is the fundamentalist Christian/neo-Conservative persecution self-misperception culture-virus, a meme, finally infecting the science fiction field?

  3. Pretty balanced story, actually.

    When even the WSJ can’t find a way to tilt things outright, you may want to re-examine your right-wing cause.

  4. The WSJ isn’t Fox. It’s journalism adheres to the same standards as other mainstream news outlets, like the NYT or CBS.

    Editorially, of course, it is conservative, just as the NYT is editorially liberal.

  5. I subscribe to the WSJ because it’s good to get more than one perspective on events. The WSJ is certainly no Fox News; I find its journalism to be on the whole clear-eyed, honest, and relatively unbiased.

    (Its editorials are a different matter …)

  6. David – If the comments section is anything to go by I’d bet they would welcome such rational correspondence.

    The linked article about how the Puppies dragged culture wars into Sci-Fi. It’s fun to read how spastic their goals sound in an article like this, you’ve got claims that the Hugo award is an important symbol in the culture wars that needed to be take, as though this were a game of capture the flag. Here I thought it was a symbol of award worthy writing! Torgerson tries the Hugos are for hipsters line saying they ignored popular, less literary work. He cited Michael Crichton and Jurassic Park as an example, though he didn’t say why he thought it should’ve won rather than The Vor Game in the 91 Hugo awards or that the movie won the Hugo in 94. I mean not to mention the fact that he still continues to make it seem like people who vote for the Hugos aren’t also fans of popular sci-fi and fantasy (or the number of bestselling books and blockbuster movies that are nominated each year).

    But then if you strip away all the contradictory statements and kabuki theater your left with noticing that what Sad and Rabid Puppies have in common is nominating friends, colleges, or those contracted to their own publishing house.

  7. Actually, the Wall St Journal, along with the Financial Times here in Britain, tend to be good on facts; their readership is mostly composed of people who understand that facts actually exist, and that facts are important.

    It’s unsurprising, therefore, that the WSJ has published a facts based article; it’s also unsurprising that it concludes that the claims made by puppydum are not based on facts.

    And it can spot a blatantly rigged market when it sees one; if puppydum was hoping to convince the WSJ that Beale’s numbers reflect anything other than a rigged market then they were deluding themselves…

  8. Beale seemed pleased about having been interviewed by the WSJ, if his posts of the end of April were anything to go by.

  9. @peace It’s that old saw about no publicity being bad publicity. In fact, it’s one of the main ways I consume news now: If I see something that seems absurd, ridiculous, or incomprehensible, I try to think about whom the message’s speaker is trying to reach. It works remarkably well to think of all messages as deliberately what they are.

    Very often I catch myself thinking, Why would a person say that? Doesn’t he know it won’t persuade me? And the answer is: of course he knows it. He’s not talking to me.

  10. Basically, news stories like these end up being ads for the various extreme voices within them. I shouldn’t give the wrong impression of what “balanced” means these days.

  11. Stevie @ 1:58 pm- Where exactly did the WSJ conclude “that the claims made by puppydum are not based on facts”?

    I see where it quotes GRRM on the point, but I failed to see where the WSJ agreed with him.

    I actually thought the WSJ article was pretty fair, in total.

  12. Excuse me, how can you, at the same time, claim that the “popular” stuff isn’t making the awards over thee best sellers, but that SF is “taking a nosedive” in sales?

    This also from the same person who claimed that Dhalgren “is a massive POV thing that went nowhere?”

    SF/F is, from what I understand one of the fastest growing genre’s in sales?

    And I see that the puppies kennel mates wasted no time in quite cynically playing their own version of the “race card”

    No time wasted at all in the coordination. Of course, it’s all just a coincidence that “If You Were A Dinosaur” was raised. And a lot of the people who will read the WSJ will look at IYWADML and say “what’s the problem?”

  13. Well we are getting close to one of the great doublethinks of Puppyism.
    1. That capitalism/the free-market is a great and wonderful thing for multiple reasons stated by genuinely notable thinkers of the right and center
    and
    2. That large commercial entities, dedicated to making money, gaining market share and generally trying to sell sh-t loads of stuff are deliberately biasing what they sell and promote to propagate the views of people who think point 1. is wrong, apparently with the full knowledge that by doing so they will make less money, gain less market share and generally not sell sh-t loads of stuff anymore.

    In other words Puppyism requires the dual belief in the infallibility of the market and the market failing utterly.

  14. If you were a dinosaur, my love, you would be a time-traveling dinosaur, who retroactively justified Sad Puppies 1 and 2, launched before your nomination was known. Your scales would shimmer with tachyons.

    If you were a dinosaur, my love, you would be all puppies could talk about, because dinosaurs are freaking cool, and big and scary, and puppies are small and easily frightened.

    If you were a dinosaur, my love, you would be free on the internet, and short enough to read quickly, with an easily digested precis, so that all your critics could get through you or at least take the word of someone who had without being obviously wrong on the facts. So you would be an easy example of What Has Gone Wrong With All Reptiles even though you were but a single dinosaur. You would be the dinosaur that stops all conversations before they start.

    If you were a dinosaur, my love, you would be a magic dinosaur that irradiates a field that makes some people reeeeeeaaaaaaalllllyyyyyy lazy. “What about all the other dinosaurs?” others would say. But the people in the field would respond, “Hey, man. Why do you keep nagging me?”

  15. Steve

    It is very obvious that you don’t read the WSJ, and that you are not familiar with facts based analyses; if you were then you would know that when the writer says that someone has exhaustively analysed the facts and quotes one blindingly obvious example to refute claims then the only way that could be rebutted is by another exhaustive analysis of the facts,

    There is no other exhaustive analysis of the facts. There are a number of unsupported assertions by various members of puppydum, but no analysis of the facts, much less exhaustive. Unsupported assertions are not facts, a fact which sadly puppydum has not yet managed to grasp.

    Peace

    If Beale thought the WSJ was going to look kindly on rigging the market then he must be even more deluded than I had thought…

  16. Nyq Only: It’s not an entirely either-or choice. They could feel that capitalism is working fine for, say, gun and ammo manufacturers, while only publishing is impaired.

  17. Mike Glyer: Don’t be silly. Obviously all supporters of capitalism and libertarianism support all premises of those positions in the most extreme forms possible.

  18. Craig R.: Thank you! I realize now it should have been “puppies are small and easily alarmed” rather than “frightened”. First drafts are tragic.

  19. @Nyq Only
    “In other words Puppyism requires the dual belief in the infallibility of the market and the market failing utterly.”

    When the free market does not behave in a way they like then the only recourse for people who treat the free market as a tenant of faith, rather than an economic theory, have to fall back on is a conspiracy subverting the natural order. This is demonstrated by, for example, Andrew Trembley, who thinks that the only reason someone may draw a different conclusion from him is because they are part of The SJW Conspiracy. It’s a common flaw in a lot of postmodern right-wing thought. Facts don’t matter, only adherence to the One True Narrative.

  20. Andrew

    I agree entirely that there is a huge disconnect between the ‘tenet of faith’ school and the way markets work in the real world; the interesting thing about people unfamiliar with the markets is that they do not realise just how much regulation has to exist for free markets to exist in the first place.

    Adam Smith wrote quite a lot about it but it’s generally ignored; without regulation in place to prevent the ‘combinations of masters’ then there can be no free markets…

  21. Mike Glyer: “They could feel that capitalism is working fine for, say, gun and ammo manufacturers, while only publishing is impaired.”

    Ah, but of course 🙂

    And naturally Mr Beale/Day as the proprietor of a publishing house feels it necessary to explain to his commercial competitors exactly where they are going wrong. That is naturally what any astute business person would do when if they managed to identify a substantial gap in a market that their competitors were failing to exploit – point it out to them very loudly and repeatedly…

  22. I think it would be entertaining, and possibly enlightening, to have Scalzi, Correia, and Beale meet in a moderated debate.

  23. Engaging in debate, even moderated is just pointless. It’s like debating creationists. If the discourse here is anything to go by it’s just a waste of Time and Scalzi knows it.

  24. @ Stevie on May 15, 2015 at 5:15 pm said:

    I agree entirely that there is a huge disconnect between the ‘tenet of faith’ school and the way markets work in the real world; the interesting thing about people unfamiliar with the markets is that they do not realise just how much regulation has to exist for free markets to exist in the first place.
    Adam Smith wrote quite a lot about it but it’s generally ignored; without regulation in place to prevent the ‘combinations of masters’ then there can be no free markets…

    Good point. It amazes me how many people who worship the free market and even laud Smith have never actually read what the man said.

  25. “They could feel that capitalism is working fine for, say, gun and ammo manufacturers,”

    You know how I can tell you dont know much about Gun and Ammo manufacturing or the commentary upon said activities…

    😉

  26. Noam Chomsky once remarked that WSJ readers care more than most news consumers about accurate presentation of the facts, even ideologically uncomfortable facts, because when those readers are businessmen, and when businessmen don’t have accurate information, they lose money.

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