Not funny (revised)

[the_archfiend]

(WARNING: this is going to be a mostly visceral reaction to what I consider a disgusting response to a national tragedy; you were warned in advance. If this doesn't bother you, read on.)

Sometimes I get the feeling that certain members of the human race were just put here to test the limits of my anger; this, unfortunately, is one of those times.

As mentioned on James Nicoll's More Words, Deeper Hole, a certain Hugo awards nominee who got there largely due to the efforts of the Sad/Rabid Puppies slate-voting him in under the Best Related Work category decided to have a massive brain fart and posted two nauseating comments about the Charleston mass shooting of June 18th. The two comments (reproduced here and here) were, apparently, an attempt to be funny to someone.

And I'm sure they were funny. To utter psychopaths, though. Not to human beings with anything approaching normal levels of actual empathy.

Seriously, what the hell is this?

A steaming turd that was posted by an emotionally deficient individual is one thing - there are plenty of those to go around on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. - but here's the problem: the guy who posted this particular serving of Antisocial Personality Disorder du jour is a Hugo nominee who got there with the help of a faction of "fans" and pros who have done everything in their power to game the Hugos and get people nominated who don't deserve to be there. They don't even deserve to have their alleged reasons for gaming the nomination process taken seriously anymore - if they ever did in the first place.

Do you know what they do deserve, though?

Derision. Contempt. And your hard-earned money going to authors who write far better books and stories than they do.

The fact that the particular author in question here has a Hugo-nominated book made up entirely of his similar wit and wisdom should serve as a warning that this was never about anyone trying to reclaim a space in the SF universe for cracking good old-fashioned Golden Age tales, as Brad R. Torgersen said in his Sad Puppies 3 manifesto. That might have been what Torgersen claimed, but it's not what the Sads (as well as V*x D*y and the rest of the Rabids) wanted. What they wanted was for their pet bull to take a shit in the middle of the floor and dare people to call it what it obviously was.

Guess what? Mission accomplished. All the Sad/Rabid Puppies stand for in my opinion is utter bullshit. The nomination of books such as Dysentery from my Internet (a book, BTW, that was a nominee on both the Sad and Rabid lists; originally, I thought that only V*x D*y's sycophants would stoop so low as to nominate it, but no such luck) is irrefutable proof of that.

Happy?

What's worse is that that those "jokes" about the Emanuel AME Church mass shooting was posted by someone I've known on and off in Chicago-area fandom for years. That fact alone makes this especially difficult to stomach. I wasn't more than a friendly acquaintance and I certainly never shared his politics, especially recently; however, I never realized what sort of a complete asshole he is deep down. And if he meant any of what he wrote, he is a complete asshole. If not, he's a tone-deaf publicity freak who doesn't care how he comes off as long as he gets enough followers and like-minded "fans" online. Both of those facts are sad and pathetic, but for him to take a national tragedy and try to crack wise about it in order to be King of the Dickheads isn't merely sad and pathetic - it's a sign that the man is mentally FUBAR.

As to anyone who wants to take issue with my language in this post, go right ahead and do that. I'm not the one mocking nine dead people who were killed by a fucked-up kid who was either a nascent white supremacist or psychologically addled to the point of committing mass murder. Too many people take issue with profanity even when it's fully deserved, and in this case it is. It's also funny that you didn't read garbage like this in the wake of the Sandy Hook or Aurora shootings. It couldn't be because the victims were - you know - black, could it?

Nah. Of course not. It was just a coincidence! And I just need to lighten up!

Both of which are utter bullshit as well, of course.

Comments

[tandw.livejournal.com]

Here after a comment you made over in James Nicoll's LJ. I, too, have encountered the nominee you mention at Windy and Duck (when Duck was still A Thing). Despite his universally repulsive t-shirts, I had at least one reasonable exchange with him at some panel or other. I don't think I can do that any more.

[the-archfiend.livejournal.com]

Okay, there are three ways of looking at his tweet and FB post, and none of them are particularly endearing:

1) He meant what he said and meant to be as crude about it as possible;

2) He did it to garner publicity and really doesn't give a rat's ass about how he comes off to anyone else in doing so;

3) The guy's got some serious delayed adolescence issues to work out, since both read like the work of a snotty teenager who's either a burgeoning sociopath or is merely pretending to be one. It just doesn't read like something a fully realized adult would write.

Regardless of all that, his "evolution in action" (yep, someone else who doesn't understand the meaning of that word) crack is an indication that if he *is* completely serious in what he said Clementa Pinckney pretty much deserved it for taking the position he did on concealed carry.

Let's just say that my respect for the author has dropped precipitously as a result of all of this and leave it at that.

[the-archfiend.livejournal.com]

This review might be just a bit of a warning on his book (cite: http://subversivereader.com/tag/hugos/)

"What the fuck was this? It’s like someone’s twitter feed threw up and someone decided it was a piece of work. It’s full of *jokes* which are sexist, racist, xenophobic, right-wing US-centrist. There was a vague ‘chapter’ with some relation to SF, but mostly it was just gross. And not even proper writing, let alone good writing."

(The author of that review isn't given to sudden explosions of hyperbole and/or mighty oaths of profanity, AFAIK.)