This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
((About this point, there's a campaign for women's representation starting at the Nebula Awards, a more insiders-focused awards system, eventually culminating in 2016's awards.))
In 2015, Torgersen ran the Sad Puppies III slate, specifically as recommendations after Correia had been accused of trying to crowd out other works. There's a few stinkers in there (why on earth is Kevin J Anderson near your awards list?!), but intentionally mixed as much political, racial, and gender mix as Torgersen could come up with while still finding good(ish) names who wouldn't have won otherwise. The day after that, Beale published the Rabid Puppies I slate, with some overlap but a very explicit 'fill exactly this' setup, and things got complicated, not least of all because no few of the Sad Puppies recs were only willing to be on the Sad Puppy list if Beale specifically was not. And, uh, Beale also pushed a lot of works from either him directly, or his print shop Castilla House.
Later, the actual nomination results came in, and everything went to hell. Rather than struggling to even get some pieces nominated, a majority of works in both slates went forward, and in many cases they made up all five slots. And because of how the nominations procedure works, it was really hard for people to tell if they made it because of Torgersen's recommendation, Beale's recommendation, or a combination of both. A number of authors -- including many of the progressive ones -- declined nomination after the votes were tallied, specifically to avoid the taint. Correia himself dropped out.
Then the media got involved. Sad Puppies II had gotten some mainstream press coverage, but mostly in a 'look at the dweebs' sense. This time, it was a good deal more. For an example, The Guardian wrote about "The Puppies’ real beef is that SF, and society as a whole, has become too feminist, too multiracial, too hospitable to gay and trans voices" while Sarah Hoyt's nomination was one of the gayest and fanficiest things ("All the President's Men" is exactly that pun) I've ever read, and I read furry porn. But pretty much every major mainstream newspaper had something on it, all with the same framework and about the same interest in accuracy.
Internal to the scifi/fantasy world, it got heavier. Everyone remotely involved had to have politics somewhere to the right of John C Wright; the slate as a whole was a couple full Gamergates. An unrelated attempt to clean up some of the leftover problems of the Wheel of Time snafu underwent revision lest it benefit Old White Guys. And there was a massive campaign to No Award every slot any Puppy candidate had, even over non-Puppy votes.
In the end, No Award picked up over half of the total ballots for some awards, and the only big Puppy nominee to win was Guardians of the Galaxy. Laura Mixon's report on MsScribe won, but still got over 1k No Awards votes and an asterisk, despite not being a recommendation from either Puppy Slate, because she was perceived as Puppy-adjacent or at best a tool of white people. The finalists that scraped through that got delightful little "Asterisk" awards, complete with a slideshow presentation mentioning how sports leagues would mark questionable victories or records with an asterisk; a number of other bits and pieces were set up to humiliate them as much as possible. The voting membership rushed through a couple changes to the nomination and voting system specifically to resist this form of slate, which would apply after the 2016 year -- penalizing multiple nominations in the same category, got the most coverage, but there were other rule changes that reduced slate- or slate-looking votes.
This absolute sucked for the Sad Puppies (even many of the ones who pulled out still have a Reputation today), and was absolutely hilarious for Beale specifically, who got a ton of publicity even outside of the fandom. And it turned up the evaporative cooling at the Hugos directly.
In 2016, Kate Paulk ran Sad Puppies IV. It... mostly focused on being as unobtrusive as possible; technically, they promoted Neil Gaiman and I'm not sure Gaiman noticed. Beale ran Rabid Puppies II, but wasn't particularly successful either. A lot of Sad Puppies started to promote the DragonCon awards, a separate and already-extant setup that ran the same weekend as WorldCon and had long had a feud. The Dragon Awards are going ok, as are most of the Hugo Awards, although Best Related Work remains absolute garbage.
((The 2016 Sad Puppy Slate ended up including or promoting Chuck Tingle's Space Raptor Butt Invasion for the short story rocket, which is a) exactly what it sounds like and b) still felt more scifi/fantasy to Sad Puppies than If You Were A Dinosaur My Love. This could have ended up raising some interesting questions about the relationship between Hugo awards and the increasing prominence of adult pornographic media, but it didn't win and most of the time progressives (including Tingle) and Sad Puppies only really brought it up to bash each other.))
More options
Context Copy link