Wait 'till the fire turns green

I have no real news to add concerning the incidents concerning Lou Antonelli's letter to the Spokane police concerning that international criminal mastermind David Gerrold or his earlier outbursts of irrational anger aimed in the general direction of Carrie Cuinn and Aaron Pound (subjects covered in a far more exhaustive manner by Natalie Luhrs on Pretty Terrible); what I do have is an opinion on Sasquan's decision to let Antonelli attend later this month.

The decision's a bad one. Here's why: despite Antonelli's apology (one which I really have my doubts about - saying "I'm sorry" seems to be the least of your problems if you openly libeled someone and tried to get them in trouble with a police department weeks before that person was even due to set foot in the city in question), what he did not only put Gerrold in potential jeopardy but the rest of Sasquan's attendees as well. This wasn't merely the action of a complete asshat with serious anger management issues; it was the action of someone who apparently has no regard for any of the other people going to a function he was going to attend as well.

I'm not sure what's more disturbing - the fact that an alleged adult was going to do this to a well-known author merely because he wrote something he didn't like or that he was apparently willing to cause all sorts of potential mayhem to other attendees in the process. Sure, Gerrold accepted his apology. That's what the bigger man does when confronted by this sort of crap. But that's not the same thing as giving him tacit permission to do it again by not reminding him of the consequences of such actions, and that's what Sasquan effectively did. In a time where all manner of deeply unpleasant shit is breaking out all over the place over the Sad Puppies 3 campaign, this was not the signal a Worldcon needed to send to its attendees or SF fandom in general.

Frankly, I'm more than a bit puzzled by this. What would happen if Antonelli had phoned in a bomb threat or called in a false active shooter report to the cops some time during the con? Would that have been okay with Sasquan's concom as well?

Back in the day, most tiffs between pros and fans ended up being confined to email and online flame wars; these days it's almost as if you have to pack a flak vest before heading off to one of these things. Sasquan's actions didn't help that perception one bit.

Although I think that Laura J. Mixon says what most needs to be said about the Puppy-proposed  boycott of Tor books (mentioned here by Laura Resnick via Facebook) in her letter to Tom Doherty, a few choice bits about the individual most responsible for initiating it need to be repeated here:

(Theodore) Beale has been pursuing a personal grudge against several people, including Tor author John Scalzi and the Nielsen Haydens, for years. The reason he has targeted them is that they have stood up for those who have been bullied and harassed by Beale and his supporters.

Beale was booted out of our professional trade organization, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), in 2013, after using official SFWA channels to promote a series of deeply offensive, blatantly racist remarks against SFF writer and SFWA member N. K. Jemisin. He has a long history of horrific reactionary public statements, not only against people of color, immigrants, and non-Christians (including citing Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, who gunned down 77 people, mostly teens, as a national hero for his acts, and suggesting that we look to Hitler to solve our immigration problems [he has since deleted the offending paragraph from his article, but the original pro-Nazi text appears here]). His views on women (“a few acid-burned faces is a small price to pay for lasting marriages,” “[A] purely empirical perspective on Malala Yousafzai, the poster girl for global female education, may indicate that the Taliban’s attempt to silence her was perfectly rational and scientifically justifiable”) and gays (“Correcting the gay defect;” “How ‘gay marriage’ harms you”) are equally repugnant.

All of the above has been documented over and over again, but that's not the point: the point is that there are apparently people out there who've decided to still make Beale the champion of their cause despite the fact that he has repeatedly proven that all he seems to be is a singularly repulsive scumbag whose supply of grudges never seems to end, either in terms of the number or the expiration date. Mixon, again:

But there is no getting around the fact that a misogynistic, homophobic white supremacist, who has spoken approvingly of shootings and acid attacks on women, and of Hitler and the Holocaust, who has called a respected SFF scholar and popular writer an ignorant, “not equally human” savage, stands at the heart of this conflict. Beale’s followers and fellow travelers may not themselves hold all the bigoted views he does, but information on who he is and how he feels about women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and others has been widely shared by now. If people are emailing you calling for Irene to be fired, they are unavoidably supporting Beale’s hate-filled agenda.

What makes this worse, IMHO, is that the nonsense he's orchestrating about demanding Gallo's firing doesn't just stop there. Laura Resnick:

One of their explicit demands is that Tor must publicly apologize for "the attitudes, lies and libel expressed by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Moshe Feder and Irene Gallo, all current or former employees of Tor, and by the Tor-published author John Scalzi, concerning supporters of the 'Puppies' slates for the Hugo awards."  A second demand is that Tor must publicly reprimand those individuals. With so many different Puppies involved, I can't tell at this time whether they're still demanding that Irene Gallo's employment be terminated.

If anyone thinks that I was being far too harsh in my language when I called the RSHD a singularly repulsive scumbag, please feel free to tell me how. Come to think of it, my forgetting to use the term "egomaniacal" earlier is a bit of an oversight. My bad.

To be perfectly honest, the people who support his little campaign aren't much of an improvement, at least in terms of the outrageous chutzpah they're showing in demanding an apology here and a reprimand there. Okay, they may not be as hate-filled and venomous as he is. Few people are who already aren't in a prison cell, psychiatric hospital or currently running a torture program in a third world dictatorship. But let's face it - they let him take the lead in all of this despite knowing exactly what he is. Why they did so is beyond me, but the history of SF is chock-full of people who are more than a bit tightly wound. The RSHD is just one of the latest examples. I'm also sure that by the time this all ends he'll also go down as one of the worst.

Granted, I think that Tor won't just roll over in the wake of this bullshit. Too much of their reputation as a publisher is at stake for that to happen, and if you were thinking of picking up a book published by them over the weekend it couldn't hurt. Just keep in mind the following: a fanatic has a right to his views, but that right ends at the range he can punch someone who wants to violate it. The RSHD has gone way past that range.

But nothing bad can happen when you continue to incite people to such levels of hatred, right?

Nine people might disagree with that point if they could.

To Felicity Savage:

October 1st, 2013:

Ms. Savage:

The overall point of your article at Amazing Stories (found, I must admit, through this particular LiveJournal page) seems to be that it's perfectly acceptable for someone like V*x D*y (i.e., the Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipstick*) to engage in some incredibly repugnant public behavior as long as he doesn't use those naughty, naughty scatological words you dislike in doing so. Such is not the case with anyone choosing to take issue with him, however. They're far worse people for calling him some unpleasant names in response.

Too bad they seem to be fully deserved, questions of profanity aside.

To wit:

For examples of racism, there's his post attacking N.K. Jemisin (which is the same one that got him in trouble with the SFWA when he used one of their Twitter accounts to propagate it) or his post discussing - and I kid you not - "the merits on anti-semitism". Or his
post on WND defending massive deportations of illegal aliens by stating that - wait for it - "If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society". Granted, that's either one seriously poor analogy he's choosing to employ or he's merely doubling down on what a great guy Hitler was. Your choice.

Sexism? Well, there's his singularly odd defense of men mutilating women because - in the RSHD's own words - "a few acid-burned faces is a small price to pay for lasting marriages, stable families, legitimate children, low levels of debt, strong currencies, affordable housing, homogenous populations, low levels of crime, and demographic stability". 

Homophobia? Say no more. Too bad for him that employing it really seems to have backfired badly, though.

Dipstick*? There's any number of beliefs he has that fall into this catch-all category, including his loving embrace of the anti-vaccine movement, his creationist tics and his complete inability to understand astrophysics.But, as a member of MENSA no such thing as the Dunning-Kruger effect really applies to his pet theories, correct?

But I digress. Obviously, the biggest crime in all of this is that people took issue with him and chose to employ actual obscenities to do so. For shame! Nothing he wrote could possibly compare to that!

In conclusion, I'd like to say that although I was greatly disturbed by what you wrote and what you strangely chose to focus on in your essay, I will not employ any actual profanity in doing so. I will merely use words like "obtuse", "insipid" and - unfortunately - "inane" instead. However, no obscenity. And those are proper words of usage in the English language, after all, so no harm, no foul.

(*The actual word Dips*** was not used in deference to Ms. Savage's high-borne standards of decorum)

Old news by Internet standards after ten days, but just when you thought that things couldn't possibly get any stupider in life, this happens:

Now this is exactly the sort of self-justifying sexual predator who completely, utterly deserves to be locked up behind bars as a danger to society, right?

...or not.

While the claim of raping in order to make the victim sexually pure is novel, rapists having their sentences reduced to virtually nothing is not. Girouex's drastic sentence reduction follows closely behind the heels of the actions of a Montana judge, who sentenced a convicted rapist to serve just  30 days in jail, and made comments about how his 14-year-old victim was an active participant in the sexual relationship. The victim, a girl in this case, subsequently committed suicide, and the judge apologized for his remarks, but left the light sentence in place.  

My, what a fantastic pair of examples of our judicial system at work in that staunch homeland of family values, Middle America.

Pardon me while I find a nice, quiet place to throw up.

I really wasn't going to harp on this subject all over again, but the things you find via Google...

A while ago, a certain individual who ran as a dark-horse candidate for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Presidency (yeah, this guy again) who's been previously labelled by some as the Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit (or RSHD, if you're trying to be polite to mixed company), mainly due to the fact that no one's really been able to prove otherwise. The latest controversy involved a Guest of Honor's speech by N. K. Jemisin at Continuum 9 that involved the subject of racism, but the RSHD's typical tunnel vision kicked in and he decided to post a genuinely repulsive screed merely because he was used as an unnamed (but nonetheless identifiable) example of same in the SF community. The irony is that his response completely proved Jemisin's point about him.

Now consider the following: the vast majority of people in this little subculture of ours who blog took serious umbrage at the RSHD's ham-handed tactics. It's one thing to post racist crap that personally attacked a fellow writer as subhuman; as sickening as that stuff was, if he had just restrained himself and posted it to one of his own blogs everyone would have just thought that the RSHD was acting out again and would've not paid much attention after that. The problem, however, was a bit more complicated than that, since he used the SFWAauthors Twitter Feed to spread the manure around. This was, and is, not particularly smart since there are rules against that sort of thing (Article IV, Section 10 of the SFWA bylaws, for one); as it is, there's a growing consensus in some quarters that the RSHD has to be tossed out of the SFWA on his ear. Except for the following people who should know better:

While googling the term "SFWA" a few days ago, I noticed that there was a handful of pros - both affiliated with the SFWA and not - who were strongly taking his side despite the fact that he seems to be everything his detractors make him out to be. I won't name names, because - let's face it - people make mistakes. Even professional writers. Those who remain this clueless on the subject of an incredibly nasty piece of work like the RSHD should feel embarassed. I mean, if this is the sort of guy you're going to waste energy defending, you just might come to regret it later on when you actually have a chance to think about it.

But hey, if any of those pros need more examples, there are plenty around. Oddly enough, quite a few correspond to the letters of the guy's new acronym:

Racism? Sure. The Jemisin controversy again, and this thing he wrote in 2005 called - wait for it - "The merits of anti-semitism", What a charming guy.

Sexism? Yep. His repulsive essay on how much he likes Taliban-style tactics in keeping women barefoot, pregnant and uneducated is a good example of same.

Homophobia? He hasn't really graduated beyond the level of fifth grade "you're a fag" taunting, but you've just gotta love it when he aims it at the candidate who beat him the last time he ran for SFWA President and it backfires so spectacularly.

Dipshit? Well, he's an anti-vaccine loon, to boot. And a creationist. And apparently not smart enough to avoid taking on Phil Plait on other subjects the RSHD apparently knows nothing about, either.

That being said, my question is this:

Why in the world would anyone - anyone - bother to defend this pathetic creep?

It can't be because of freedom of speech issues, because his freedom of speech wasn't affected in any way: he continues to post whatever the hell he feels like and shows no real signs of stopping. If it's because there's a strong contrarian streak in these authors, there are far better reasons to get your jollies by picking fights. If it's because of politics, they need to remember that any number of other very dumb people have decided that "libertarian" means "I can be a bigot and misusing the term 'libertarian' makes it perfectly okay".

The only other reason, unfortunately, is that some of the people who have taken up the mantle of supporting the RSHD are doing it for the worst reason of all: because they share at least some - if not all - of his prejudices. In that case, nothing I or anyone else can write is going to change that fact. It's just a damn shame if it's the truth.

(NOTE: There's a very simple reason why all of the above links direct to blogs and sites referencing the RSHD's output and not directly to the source material; I don't want to give his personal pile of Internet guano free publicity in terms of hits. Sure, you can go to his site directly if you so wished. Why would you want to, though?)

Ghu knows that there's been tons posted on the subject of the recent SFWA Bulletins over a very short time (a really good selection of some of the blogs that commented on M&R can be found via Jim C. Hines), but a series of paragraphs by the authors from one of the pieces in question irked me in particular.

The background is this: a number of writers and bloggers (quite a few of whom were fellow members of the SFWA) took issue with what they perceived as Malzberg and Resnick's dismissively sexist language from SFWA Bulletin 200 (more on which, here and here), which was on top of a chainmail cheesecake du jour cover painting to boot. Oops. And then there was that singularly odd Barbie reference as well. Double Oops.

The entire thing would've probably been deemed a minor brain fart by Bulletin editor Jean Rabe (who has since resigned), but no. Malzberg and Resnick - for whatever reasons - decided to pour gasoline on what was a minor spark from a malfunctioning 2' tall wind-up robot with predictable consequences in issue #202. M&R, below:

If they get away with censoring that, can you imagine what comes next? I'm pretty sure Joe Stalin could imagine it. Of
course Schicklgruber the painter could imagine it. Even Chairman Mao could imagine it.

But could you? Could you write this kind of seemingly trivial censorship/thought control into a story without
having an editor reject it because those days are over and now that we have an enlightened populace they will of course
never come again.Or is this maybe, just maybe, how they do come again?

Okay, does somebody want to explain the concept of a false dilemma to these two? And quick?

If your immediate desire is to tell M&R to put a fucking sock in it, already, you're not alone. That was my initial reaction, and it had less to do with their feeling angry at adverse criticism they felt was unjustified (which is, after all, their right) and more with the fact that they characterized their critics as a politically correct lynch mob using some of the worst mass murderers in history as comparable role models. Hyperbole, much?

Their transformation of a number of authors and bloggers (quite a few of whom were female, some not) who took issue with a series of editorial gaffes by the Bulletin into an angry mob of feminist Gestapo agents strikes me as an misadventure in conflating criticism with censorship: for one thing, do bloggers actually have the ability to "censor" a publication just by taking issue with something that was written in it? Worse yet, you'd think that both Resnick and Malzberg were about to be dragged off to Lubyanka prison for their crimes. Near as I can tell, they haven't.

Also, considering the ridiculous number of feuds that have occurred in fandom and among pros since the beginnings of the genre, this sort of criticism and infighting is not a rare occurrence. Far from it. Are Malzberg and Resnick somehow unaware of that fact?

Of course, when the dread name of Andrea Dworkin is invoked, it means that the ante is upped almost to the point where odd little people who always type in caps ("ZOMG O NOES EVERYONE MUST AGREE WITH US OR IS A LIBRUL FASCIST JUST LIKE HER!!1!!") end up making their opponents' points all by themselves.

Almost all cranks insist that the Secret Police are coming to get them. Except when they don't exist in the first place, of course

Malzberg or Resnick are hardly cranks: it's just too bad they were all too willing to play the part.