Nathaniel launched Difficult Run in November 2012 and ran the website alone until August 2013, when he invited the first Difficult Run Editors to join him in adding content to the site.
Nathaniel has a background in math, systems engineering, and economics, and his day job is in business analytics. His real interests are science fiction, and theology, however. He is an avid runner, but not a very fast one. He is married to fellow DREditor Ro and they have two little children.
In addition to Difficult Run, Nathaniel blogs regularly for Times And Seasons and writes a lot of reviews on Goodreads.
Unless you’re living under a rock, you’ve heard of Kim Davis. She’s the county clerk in Kentucky who is still refusing to give out marriage licenses to same sex couples, despite losing various court battles and having her case rejected by the Supreme Court. She is currently facing contempt charges, but what you really know about Kim Davis from the news media is that she’s been married four times. The hypocrisy is delicious, and reporters cannot get enough of it. Here are a variety of tweets from professional journalists about the story:
Here’s the thing: it’s not unusual to have Christians guilty of hypocrisy. Christians are guilty of lots of things. They are, as a general rule, no better or worse than anybody else from any other faith tradition or none at all. And I don’t think it’s even necessarily out of bounds to comment on it. The glee with which the journalists are relishing in it is a little unseemly, but the fact itself is fair game, in my mind.[ref]And, while I’m at it, I don’t support Kim Davis’s position. I’ve seen someone make the analogy that you can cite religious pacifism as a reason to be exempt from the draft, but you can’t expect to join the military, become an officer, and then refuse to fight based on your religious beliefs. I’m not sure it’s quite as clear-cut in this case–giving out licenses to same-sex marriages wasn’t in the job description when Davis took her job–but all things considered I think the logic is that she isn’t actually marrying anyone, she is merely certifying that these people meet the legal requirements. Which, they do. So she should give out the licenses, even though I am also opposed to same-sex marriage.[/ref]
However, this is the one thing that these journalists aren’t telling you: Davis converted to Christianity about 4 years ago and all of the behavior they are ridiculing her for–all of the divorces and affairs–happened before that point. Since becoming a Christian, Davis has been married to one and only one person. Isn’t that fact also relevant? And yet it tends to get buried in these stories about her, if it is mentioned at all.
The article also makes the point that, in general, journalists don’t really have a clue about religion. And they don’t. It’s just another aspect of life in 21st century America. All the folks making the movies, deciding what news to cover (and how), and writing the books we read tend to come from a small class of people who don’t know the first thing about religion and yet–at the same time–have a visceral antipathy towards it and especially towards any forms of religion that bear even a passing resemblance to historical traditions. Perspectives like this one, therefore, are all too rare:
There is plenty of Christian hypocrisy out there, folks. And I don’t have a problem with fouls being called when they occur, even if I know the refs like one team more than the other. All I ask–and I don’t think it’s too much to ask–is to actually wait for a foul to occur before dishing out the penalties.
The Friend is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints monthly magazine for children. Since I have kids, I should probably subscribe, but I’m a bad Mormon so I don’t. Which means I didn’t see this wonderful story until I came across it online: Prayers and Cathedrals. It’s a beautiful little story about a Mormon family visiting an Anglican cathedral to participate in Evensong. Told from the perspective of a child, it points out differences between Mormon and Anglican worship styles, but strongly emphasizes commonality, love, and unity.
The Church has long emphasized it’s distinctiveness for a variety of reasons, including our missionary emphasis and–I think–a little bit of having a chip on our shoulder as a young faith with a relatively recent history of persecution that is still not taken very seriously by many older and more established denominations. I’m a big believer in distinctiveness. You can’t have real diversity or tolerance without distinctiveness. But I’m also a big believer in making friends and finding common ground with those who come from different perspectives. And so, for me, an article like this was both exciting and heartwarming. You should definitely give it a read.
I came across a Real Clear Politics post the other day by Cathy Young: Mutiny at the Hugo Awards. It’s surprisingly fair coverage from a mainstream outlet, but I guess that makes sense since Young also writes for Reason.com. In any case, I was particularly interested when I got to these paragraphs:
Perhaps the real issue isn’t the quality of any specific work, or even the prevalence of “message fiction” in the genre; it’s that, as cautiously Puppy-sympathetic nonfiction writer and data scientist Nathaniel Givens has argued on his blog, “the message has never been so dogmatically uniform.” What’s more, Givens argues, the current crop of pro-“social justice” authors who dominate the field not only use their fiction as a vehicle for ideology but seek to enforce conformity throughout the fandom, posing a genuine threat to intellectual diversity. He points out that, by contrast, the Sad Puppies “went out of their way to put some authors on the slate who are liberal rather than conservative.”
Givens’s observations are echoed by Hoyt, who has written on her blog about the “state of fear” that has existed for a while in the speculative fiction community—the fear of being blacklisted for having the wrong politics. While Hoyt says that this fear has lost much of its grip now that independent publishing has allowed writers to make a living outside the “establishment” sci-fi presses, the elites still control recognition and legitimacy within the fandom. Hence, the Hugos rebellion.
So, that’s a cite in Real Clear Politics to go with the one in The New Republic on this issue. Pretty neat.[ref]The TNR reference was not quite as neat, since the article cherry picked from my analysis while rejecting most of my conclusions. Oh well. Still pretty neat.[/ref]
The whole post is definitely worth reading. It’s a good perspective, and she has some original–and very interesting–quotes from some of the main participants.
Image of the 9-11 attacks from space, taken by NASA. (Available from the Wikipedia entry on the 9-11 attacks.)
In the wake of another shooting of unarmed American servicemen, the Navy (according to NBC) “plans to station armed guards at all of its reserve centers across the country.” That might be a good idea, but it falls far short of what most Americans have been calling for as an apparently common-sense reaction to attacks on servicemen and women on their bases: let them carry guns. I mean, these guys are trained to handle firearms, right? What could be more obvious than giving a gun to a soldier or marine?
Yeah, it’s not actually that obvious. And it’s not just politics that are stopping that from happening:
Here’s an amazing number that I had never seen before: Since the beginning of the U.S. operation in Iraq [through May 2011], more than 90 U.S. military personnel have been killed there by negligent weapons discharges.
In the past 18 months, troops in Afghanistan have accidentally killed themselves or others at least six times and wounded nearly two dozen more troops through unsafe weapons handling, according to Army statistics released to Stars and Stripes.
There are other reasons for not issuing weapons to on-base personnel (the logistical headache is immense, especially when considering that bases have to get locked down whenever a weapon is misplaced), but the big one is the simple one: handing out guns is liable to end up killing more folks than the terrorist could accomplish.
Terrorist attacks are scary, but in many cases the irrational reaction of people to scary things is more dangerous than the thing that they are afraid of. Fear might not be the only thing we have to fear, but it’s definitely near the top of the list. Another example: more folks probably died in car crashes they took to avoid flying after 9-11 then actually died in the 9-11 attacks.
In the months after the 2001 terror attacks, passenger miles on the main US airlines fell by between 12% and 20%, while road use jumped. The change is widely believed to have been caused by concerned passengers opting to drive rather than fly. Travelling long distances by car is more dangerous than travelling the same distance by plane. Measuring the exact effect is complex because there is no way of knowing for sure what the trends in road travel would have been had 9/11 not happened. However, Professor Gerd Gigerenzer, a German academic specialising in risk, has estimated that an extra 1,595 Americans died in car accidents in the year after the attacks – indirect victims of the tragedy.
That was just the first 12 months after the attack. If the trend continued for another few years–even at a reduced rate–it could easily be the case that the number surpassed the 9/11 death toll.
As human beings we like to pretend that we don’t put a price tag on human life, but that’s not true. We do. All the time. We just don’t actually look at it. In my systems engineering courses, for example, we learned various ways to extrapolate a price value for a human life based on indirect decisions. Simplistic example: suppose there’s a dangerous portion of a highway with no physical barrier between opposing lanes, and every year 5 people die in accidents there. Installing a concrete barrier would lower that to 4 lives, and would cost $100,000. If the barrier doesn’t get installed then, willingly or not, we’re saying that a human life is worth less than $100,000 in this case.
Of course you can’t actually derive a “real” value of human life that way, but that’s actually one of the most interesting things: if you apply this kind of analysis across a wide range of examples–from road safety to asbestos removal–you will easily see that when the threat isn’t scary (as with traffic deaths) the value of human life is very low. But when it is scary–as with asbestos–we will often as a society decide to spend millions of dollars or more per life saved.
It’s not just about money, of course. I’m only using that as an example of the fact that–even when we don’t like to admit it–we have to make these kinds of trade-offs. They are unavoidable. This is why, every time I hear someone say something, “We have to do whatever it takes to save even one life,” I have to stifle an urge to smack them. Anyone saying that is a fool or a liar. In either case, the last person that should be in charge of deciding what we’re willing to spend to save a life is the kind of person who pretends we don’t have to make the decision at all.
It’s not just about money, by the way. There are other things at stake. How many of our civil liberties and our culture of openness have we already sacrificed in the name of preventing terrorist attacks? What are we getting for those sacrifices? Not much, most estimates seem to say, but the real answer is: no one knows. No one knows ’cause we’re not even supposed to ask the question. We’re not supposed to admit that there’s a tradeoff. That there’s a cost.
This kind of emotional decision-making is double-edged disaster. We spend billions on scary things that aren’t that dangerous, and then refuse to spend smaller sums of money on things that could save large numbers of lives. I was in Hungary for the last two weeks and, in trying to explain why most of America doesn’t have effective public transportation networks–I got to explaining our culture of cars. I pointed out that, because transportation to school and sporting events and other activities is so complicated and (time) expensive, we continue to let kids start driving at 16 in large part as a way to offload the burden on their parents. My Hungarian friend–where the minimum driving age is 18 and lots of people don’t get licenses until much later (if at all)–asked if the 16-year old drivers were good drivers. Of course they are not, I said. They have very little training, very little experience, and are dangerously immature. Doesn’t that result in danger? Well, yes it does. Off the top of my head, there are about 30,000 fatalities related to driving in the US every year. Of course, a lot of those don’t have anything to do with teenage drivers (drunk driving is a pretty huge portion of it), but there’s no doubt that thousands of kids are killed or seriously injured every single year. What would it cost to save them? Who knows. Where’s the rhetoric about, “If we can save even one life…”? Nowhere. Because it’s not scary.
I put a lot of emphasis–I’ve done it in this post and we do it in many of our blogs at Difficult Run–on the kind of quantitative analysis that you get from economics (my background) or engineering (Bryan’s) or business (Walker’s) or computer science (Ro’s). Sometimes I even go out of my way to take a swipe at the humanities–especially modern art and academia. But I understand very well that these are not fundamentally quantitative questions. Neither economics, nor engineering, nor business, nor computer science can answer questions about the tradeoffs we have to make between dollars or hours or civil liberties on the one hand and lives on the other. These are fundamentally philosophical and moral questions, and we have to seek philosophical and moral answers. And, like all philosophical and moral questions, they will probably never have a clear, objective, final answer.
But seeking those answers is worth it. It’s worth it from a practical standpoint because the kind of emotionally-driven policy that arises in the absence of clear-eyed analysis is Pareto inefficient. Sorry for the econ jargon, but it’s an important term. If a situation is Pareto efficient, it means that you can’t make one person better without taking from someone else. So Pareto efficiency isn’t necessarily a good place to be. It could be very unfair, for example. If you give $10 to Tom and $90 to Sue, that’s Pareto efficient, but it’s not fair. But the one thing that Pareto efficiency gets you is no waste. If you give $10 to Tom and $10 to Sue and then light the other $80 on fire, that’s Pareto inefficient. So Pareto efficiency shouldn’t be a final goal but it should be a bare minimum. And right now, there’s no doubt that our patchwork response to security is far, far from Pareto efficiency.
Simple example of Pareto efficiency from the Wikipedia page. All the red dots are Pareto efficient because there’s no waste: you’re getting all you can out of Item 1 and Item 2. The only way to get more of Item 1 in that case is to give up some of Item 2 (or vice versa). The gray dots are Pareto inefficient. You can get more if Item 1 without sacrificing Item 2 (or vice versa). If you imagine the two items are “Safety” and “Civil Liberties” you can see that picking which of the red points is difficult, but picking *ANY* of the gray points is insanity.
Seeking the answers is also worthwhile from a philosophical standpoint. Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. I believe that’s because if you don’t examine your life it’s not really your life. You’re just acting out the social conditioning you’ve been raised with. You’re not an independent agent in that case. You’re just a conduit through which cause and effect flow. Once you examine your life–once you adopt certain principles and attitudes and goals based on your own deliberation and values–you start to truly live. And this is true even if you don’t actually change very many of your decisions or actions. You might take a hard look and decide that the values and goals you ended up with from your parents and society are actually fairly reasonable and keep things more or less as-is, but–even in that case–there’s been a tremendously important shift because now they are your values and your goals.
So, when I write posts expressing cynicism about modern art or academic philosophy[ref]Like: Why I Don’t Trust Modern Art or Professional Philosophers[/ref], it’s not because I think that art or philosophy are dispensable. It’s because I think that they are indispensable, but that (1) the modern incarnations have often lost their way and become empty shells and (2) they become monstrous in the absence of a commitment to including hard data where applicable.
From my perspective, it doesn’t take a lot to remind an economist that art isn’t accounted for in the GDP figures. Physicists ignore air resistance in an awful lot of their models, but it’s not like they actually get confused and forget that it exists. Economists ignore lots of human foibles in their models for the same reason, and they are just as unlikely to somehow become confused and mistake the simplified models for the real thing. In fact, I would argue that very few people are more aware of human foibles than economists precisely because they are so routinely reminded of the incredible gap between their simple models and messy reality. Thus, we get books like Nudge or The Myth of the Rational Voter or Predictably Irrational: all investigations into how economic models of human nature fail written by economists.
On the other hand, I have routinely had to sit through painfully ignorant scientific or economic diatribes by humanities scholars who literally don’t have the first clue about what they are talking about. There’s a reason Marx is not taken seriously as an economist by economists and yet you will still find plenty of Marxists in English departments who either don’t know or don’t care to separate from his philosophical stances (which continue to be relevant and interesting) and his economic theories (which are about as relevant for modern economic policymaking as Copernicus’ model of the solar system is to getting an astronaut to the moon[ref]In case anyone is confused: Copernicus gets credit for putting the sun at the center of his model, which is good, but he also assumed the planetary orbits were circular. They are elliptical. So actually trying to plot out a trajectory based on his model would be extremely silly, even though he’s hugely important historically.[/ref].)
In simple terms: I know lots of economists and engineers and scientists who are conversant with, for example, pragmatism, but I don’t know of any humanities professors who could give you a cogent explanation of, say, marginalism.
Maybe that assessment is off base. It could be.
But the point–and this is true regardless of my perception of whether the humanites or the sciences are in deeper trouble today–is that we need an approach that embraces both and rejects fear-based decision making. We need folks to be conversant in the elementary basics of statistics and math and have an intuitive desire to base their analysis on hard data and then be willing to use that as the foundation for moral and philosophical arguments about how to set policy based on open-eyed analysis rather than emotionally-driven instinct.
Is that asking a lot? Maybe. But come on, people. How much time do we spend watching cat videos or reflexively sharing political memes that assume the other side is all composed of evil morons?
“Alien Crater” by Flickr user Serendigity. Click image to see original on Flickr.
I have spent an inordinate amount of time following the Hugos this year, including over a dozen interviews with writers and editors in the sci-fi community[ref]Those were for an article that was canned at the last minute, so I’m still hoping to find them a home[/ref], and so I was up until 3am on Sunday morning looking through the results. I’ve read a lot of reactions since then–from both pro-Puppy and anti-Puppy sources–and my main take away is that there are an awful lot of losers this year and very few winners.
One of the winners is Liu Cixin, the author of this year’s Best Novel: The Three-Body Problem. There’s no doubt in my mind, as someone who read all the best novel nominees and voted in the awards, that Liu’s novel deserved to win. But how it won is probably the most important take away for me from this whole fiasco.
First, of course, a brief recap. A group of conservative / libertarian authors–originally led by Larry Correia and this year by Brad Torgersen–led an initiative called Sad Puppies 3[ref]A humorous reference to the idea that message fiction (ideological propaganda) is “the leading cause of puppy-related sadness.” This is the third year the campaign has run, although it has grown and changed every year.[/ref]. Their goal was, according to Torgersen, to strike back against a small social-political clique of social justice warriors who had dominated the Hugos in recent years. The Sad Puppy strategy was to nominate authors who (1) were good, (2) were ideologically diverse, and (3) wouldn’t have otherwise made the ballot. Another group–the Rabid Puppies–mirrored the Sad Puppies slate almost exactly but had a much harder edge to their rhetoric. Their leader, Theodore Beale aka “Vox Day”is a very controversial figure. His real beliefs and actions are often distorted by an unfriendly media, but the reality is that even without distortion he’s not an appealing character.[ref]Exhibit A – His argument that marital rape cannot exist because marriage, according to him, includes 24/7 consent to have sex in perpetuity. Exhibit B – His name is a play on Vox Dei, which means “voice of God” in Latin. Who uses a name like that?[/ref]
Things exploded in April when the nominations were announced and it turned out that the Sad Puppies / Rabid Puppies slate had basically swept the ballot, pushing almost all other works by all other authors off the slate. This was not intentional, in the sense that nobody–not Torgersen or Correia or Day–believed that their slate would be so successful. This meant, among other things, that The Three Body Problem was initially not on the ballot thanks to the Sad Pupppies / Rabid Puppies campaign.
At this point, the reasonable thing would have been for the Sad Puppies to state publicly that sweeping the ballot was not the intended goal of the Sad Puppies and that they would take steps (Sad Puppies 4 had already been announced) to avoid slate-sweeping next year. They did not.
At this point, the reasonable thing would have been for prominent critics of the Sad Puppies to concede that the Sad Puppies were reacting to a legitimate grievance. The insular sci-fi community is highly susceptible to favor-trading (aka “log rolling“) and the high percentage of social justice warriors in the community made an unwelcome atmosphere for conservatives or libertarians and could certainly have had an effect on the composition of the awards in recent years. They did not.
Instead, the critics of the Sad Puppies launched a truly breathtaking campaign of slander and intimidation that focused on calling the Sad Puppies campaign misogynist, racist, and homophobic. The best example of this is the Entertainment Weekly article that had to be “fixed” almost beyond recognition when Torgersen threatened a lawsuit over the obvious lies. (Original version. Current version.) As a result of these tactics, Torgersen and other Sad Puppies supporters were in absolutely no mood to concede their mistake and make concilliatory gestures. So nobody from Sad Puppies suggested that their tactic had been a mistake or made promises to alter the tactics for next year. In addition, several Sad Puppies nominees backed out of their awards when they saw how angry many in the sci-fi community were, including Marko Kloos. He pulled his novel Lines of Departure (which was really, really good and deserved to be on the slate) and as a result The Three-Body Problem was placed on the ballot instead.
And yet the Sad Puppy / Rabid Puppy tactics obviously were a mistake. First, as I said, there’s the immense problem with The Three-Body Problem not even making the ballot. Sure, taste is subjective, but this book was really, really good. More importantly, however, it’s a book that was originally published in China in 2008. You want real intellectual diversity? Well there you go: a book that is literally off the American socio-political map. Additionally, the Sad Puppies again and again defended many of their choices (like Kevin J. Anderson’s The Dark Between the Stars) by referring to the author rather than the work. Best novel is an award for best novel. It’s not some kind of lifetime achievement award. So the repeated references to Anderson’s contribution to the genre (he’s written over 100 books) were not only irrelevant, but a real give-away that the Sad Puppies 3 slate had basically no serious thought behind it. It was just a haphazard collection of books a few of the Sad Puppies folks had happened to read last year, without sufficient regard for quality of the individual works.
As a result, the anti-puppies movement was able to easily cast the Sad and Rabid Puppies as invaders who had come to ruin the Hugos. Their hysterical accusations that the Puppies were Nazi’s were silly, but their accusation that the Puppies were ruining the awards had real validity. Sad Puppy opponents insisted that the only solution was for fandom to rise up in righteous wrath and repudiate the incursion by voting “No Award” above any and all Sad / Rabid Puppy nominations.[ref]Google “rabid puppy slate” and your #1 search result will be The Sad Puppy-Free Hugo Voter’s Guide.[/ref] This surge was quite strong. Nobody knew how strong until the votes were announced this past weekend, but–according to some preliminary analysis at Chaos Horizon–the breakdown of the record-breaking 6,000 voters went as follows:
Core Rabid Puppies: 550-525
Core Sad Puppies: 500-400
Absolute No Awarders: 2500
Primarily No Awarders But Considered a Puppy Pick: 1000
That sums up to 4600 hundred voters. We had 5950, so I thin the remaining 1400 or so were the true “Neutrals” or the “voted some Puppies but not all.”
My take away, thus far, is pretty simple. The Puppies absolutely have a legitimate grievance, and the vile slander that came out vindicates them. Furthermore, the “No Award” campaign clearly crossed a line from a legitimate attempt to punish the bad tactics of the Puppies to a witch hunt when, for example, it No Awarded the Editor categories. Chaos Horizon again:
I’m stunned at the 2500 No Awarders in the Editor categories; there were some mainstream, decent editors on that list. If 2500 people were voting No Award on that, that’s out of principle.
A lot of those editors had no affiliation with Sad Puppies and may not have given permission to be on the Sad Puppy slate (or even been aware of it). Punishing them is going too far.
On the other hand, the Sad Puppy tactic was a terrible tactic and their refusal to acknowledge this and/or pledge not to repeat it justified a lot of the negative counter-reaction. They also, in my own opinion, picked some really terrible works that didn’t deserve to be nominated on strictly apolitical, aesthetic grounds. (I will include my votes at the end of this post.)
But there was one more thing in the Chaos Horizon data that really, really stuck out to me:
What the Best Novel category would have looked like with No Puppy votes:
Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie
The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison
The Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu
Lock In, John Scalzi
City of Stairs, Robert Jackson Bennett
Other initial Best Novel analysis: Goblin Emperor lost the Best Novel to Three-Body Problem by 200 votes. Since there seem to have been at least 500 Rabid Puppy voters who followed VD’s suggestion to vote Liu first, this means Liu won because of the Rabid Puppies. Take that as you will. [emphasis added]
So, as I said at the outset, the fate of the eventual winner speaks volumes about this entire sordid fiasco. First, the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies kept Liu off the ballot. But in the end, it was their votes that put him over the top. That lineup also speaks volumes, I think, about the Sad Puppy’s original accusation. There’s really no way that Ancillary Sword should have won this year. I don’t think it even should have been nominated. It’s mediocre. But it’s also far and away the most politically palatable book and its presence at the top is a strong indication to me of exactly what the Puppies are complaining: politics ahead of quality.
In short, we’ve got two fairly extreme factions (the Sad / Rabid Puppies and the SJWs) who are basically wrecking the Hugos for everyone at this point.[ref]I’m much more sympathetic to the Puppies, but I can’t support their current tactics.[/ref] If either of these groups had had it their way, The Three-Body Problem would not have come out on top. I am very pleased with the best novel winner this year, but neither of the factions gets credit for this happy outcome.
Next Year: Sad Puppies 4
I support the stated goals of Sad Puppies, and I hope they run the campaign again next year, but only on the following conditions:
Pick better books. Some of the picks were great. Others were… really not.
Pick the books for the right reasons: because the work is good, not because the author is important / wrote a lot / etc.
Make the pre-nomination process more transparent.
Do not ask for or notify any authors that their works will be included. This puts the authors in a terrible position and is not a standard practice.
In every category, nominate either 1-2 works or 8+ works. Doing this prevents the accusation of slate-voting and will also make it very unlikely that the Puppies will sweep any categories.
Tell people that this is the plan, and do so earlier.
If they don’t do this–and it looks like they won’t–then I’m going back to my default position: A pox on both your houses. Damn the SJWs for making this award about politics or identity instead of quality and also for their intolerant witch hunt tactics when confronting anyone who disagrees with them. And damn the Puppies for their disregard for the traditions of the Hugo award and their stubborn refusal to be good neighbors.
My Votes
I’m including my votes for the literary categories: Novel, Novelette, and Short Story. I ran out of time and couldn’t finish all the novellas, so I didn’t vote in that category. My approach was to vote based strictly on quality. I couldn’t always remember who was or was not a Puppy nominee, and I didn’t care. Based on my approach and voting pattern, I would fit as a “neutral” in the Chaos Horizon analysis.
Also: I’m kind of a strict voter. I used “No Award” more than once when I felt that the work just didn’t deserve a Hugo. This is my first year voting, but I’ve read a lot of past Hugo winners (novel and shorter length) and there have definitely been several that I feel are blemishes on the award. So I had an attitude going in that if the book wasn’t one I could be proud of as a sci-fi fan, I would no award it, but only for that reason. Politics had nothing to do with it for me.
I noted which stories were nominated by the Sad or Rabid Puppies (had to look that up), and I also bolded the actual winner.
Best Novel
1. Skin Game (Sad Puppy, Rabid Puppy) 2. Three-Body Problem
3. No Award
4. Goblin Emperor
5. Ancilliary Sword
6. The Dark Between the Stars (Sad Puppy, Rabid Puppy)
After reading The Three Body-Problem, I was sure it would get my #1 vote. But then I reread Skin Game (to have them all read at more or less the same time), and it really is one of Jim Butcher’s finest. I would have been really happy either way.
I think Goblin Emperor is very, very close to being Hugo-worthy, but it wasn’t quite there. I wouldn’t have been upset by that one winning. Ancilliary Sword was just mediocre in my mind. And I really, really didn’t like The Dark Between the Stars at all.
The Sad and Rabid Puppies both nominated Marko Kloos’ Lines of Departure and–since it made the ballot before he withdrew it–I read it. I thought it was great, and would have put it right after The Three-Body Problem.
Best Novelette
1. The Day the World Turned Upside Down
2. The Journeyman: In the Stone House (Sad Puppy, Rabid Puppy)
3. Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium (Sad Puppy, Rabid Puppy)
4. The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale (Sad Puppy, Rabid Puppy)
5. No Award
6. Championship B’tok (Sad Puppy, Rabid Puppy)
I can’t overstate how much I loved “The Day the World Turned Upside Down.” I’m quite happy that it won. The rest were pretty good to OK. Except “Championship B’tok.” I am very confused as to how that got nominated. It felt like it could have been part of a decent novel, but it didn’t seem to function as a stand-alone story at all. It was as though someone literally just grabbed a few random chapters out of the middle of a book and packaged them as a stand-alone story.
Best Short Story
1. Totaled (Sad Puppy, Rabid Puppy)
2. Turncoat (Rabid Puppy)
3. The Parliament of Beasts and Birds (Rabid Puppy)
4. A Single Samurai (Sad Puppy)
5. On A Spiritual Plain (Sad Puppy, Rabid Puppy) 6. No Award
“Totaled” had a lot of hype going into the Hugos, and it lived up to the hype. The author is also not remotely politically conservative and is, oh yeah, a woman. The fact that the No Award crew took her story out is an example of their defense of the Hugos turning into a witch hunt. It’s really quite indefensible that they No Awarded her story.
Additional Reading and Final Thoughts
I’m kind of running out of steam on this topic, to be honest. When you don’t really feel like there are any good guys to root for, you just want to walk away. But–if you would like to know more!–here are some current articles / blog posts. I’m sure there will be a lot more coming, but I think this gives you a sense of the spectrum:
The Breitbart piece is pretty hard to read because of how one-sided and kind of delusional it is. It’s rather hard to claim victory when your group nominates a bunch of works to win an award and you win 0 awards, but Yiannopoulos sure gives it the ole college try.[ref]It’s not that I don’t understand his argument. The idea that they had to burn down their award to save it just doesn’t actually work, however. Several of the most important categories–best novel and novelette–were awarded. And it’s just not plausible to act as though the award is destroyed after this year. If that were so, why would they be running SP4? I understand the argument, it’s just not a good one.[/ref] I’ve seen a lot of this kind of thing from the Puppies, and–as a sympathetic outsider–nobody’s buying it. The Wired piece is, by mainstream standards, relatively fair. It definitely has a bias, however, and frequently passes along as gospel truth fairly tenuous allegations against the Sad Puppies or, in this instance, flat out omits relevant facts to spin a particular narrative:
Consider: A woman named Adria Richards Twitter-shames two white dudes for cracking off-color jokes at PyCon, a tech developer conference (and then is fired and fields murder threats).
What Wired doesn’t tell you is that the two white dudes were fired first. Wired also gives you the impression that only liberal women faced death / rape threats from social conservatives. That is false: conservative women often face identical harassment from liberals. The sad reality is that threatening to kill or rape women over the Internet is a politically neutral activity engaged in by both the left and right. During the Hugo controversy, for example, relatively moderate social justice warriors had to call on their own supporters to stop issuing death threats at the Sad Puppies (men and women) more than once.
And the last piece is from John Scalzi, one of the most prominent SJWs in the sci-fi community. Some of what he says is dead on accurate “They [the Sad Puppies] gloated about the slates getting on the ballot, and the upset that this caused other people. That’s a jerk maneuver.” Yup. I talked to some very prominent writers[ref]They wished to remain anonymous.[/ref] who didn’t care about politics but hated the Sad Puppies for their tactics and attitude. But then a lot is spin, including his denial that there is any legitimacy to the Sad Puppy complaints about socio-political collusion within the sci-fi community that is quite plain for any unbiased observer. So, as a not-quite-as-sympathetic observer, no one is buying that either.
Well. I hope this is the last thing I write about this for quite some time.
I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.
This is exactly the kind of doggedly pragmatic idealism that causes my spirit to resonate in sympathy. The stubborn refusal to give up on striving for a better world while keeping a pretty cynical view of human nature is–for me at least–one of the really deep, definitional aspects of the right wing of American politics. We’re not Utopians, but that’s not because we don’t care.
Black Lives Matter protesters at Netroots Nationa. Photo fom Al Jazeera coverage: http://america.aljazeera.com/blogs/scrutineer/2015/7/27/netroots-movement-confronts-a-protest-and-its-future.html
About two weeks ago, Bernie Sanders (who is challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination) had a run in with protesters at Netroots Nation, and things got controversial.
If you’re not familiar with Netroots Nation (I wasn’t), it’s an annual political convention for progressive activists run by the Daily Kos. (Netroots Nation used to be called YearlyKos.) The hecklers came from Black Lives Matter, an activist group that was founded in the aftermath of George Zimmerman‘s acquittal (in 2013) for fatally shooting Trayvon Martin. So you might be a little confused that Black Lives Matter was protesting at a convention of their allies, and that confusion is exactly why the story garnered so much publicity. So, why did Black Lives Matter target Netroots Nation? I’ll leave that to BLM cofounder Patrisse Cullous, who said (in an interview posted at Daily Kos), that part of the reason was that “we wanted to stage an intervention in the progressive movement that’s largely led by white folks around the conversation of having a new racial justice agenda.”
The protest took place during a session which was scheduled to have a pair of interviews two Democratic presidential contenders: Martin O’Malley (former governor or Maryland) and Bernie Sanders. Journalist Jose Antonio Vargas was doing the interviewing. While O’Malley and Vargas (but not Sanders) were on stage, Black Lives Matter demonstrators streamed into the room and began taking over. As CNN covered it:
“What side are you on my people?” they sang in unison as they approached.
Tia Oso of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, who represented the demonstrators, climbed onto the stage, secured a microphone, and delivered a speech while O’Malley looked on.
“We are going to hold this space. We are going to acknowledge the names of black women who have died in police custody. And Governor O’Malley, we do have questions for you … As the leader of this nation, will you advance a racial justice agenda that will dismantle — not reform, not make progress — but will begin to dismantle structural racism in the United States?”
“Yes,” O’Malley replied, but before he could say more, the demonstrators in front of the stage shouted over him by reciting names of black women who have died in police custody. While they shouted, O’Malley stood in silence.
The event really showed the tension and strain in the coalition between white Democratic politicians and black Democratic activists. This comes across in lines like this one: “Conference organizers begged them to allow O’Malley to respond.” Then there was O’Malley’s attempt to align with the protesters, which they rejected out of hand:
“I think all of us as Americans have a responsibility to recognize the pain and the grief throughout our country from all of the lives that have been lost to violence, whether that’s violence at the hands at the police or whether that’s violence at the hands of civilians,” O’Malley said, before being interrupted again.
“Don’t generalize this s***!” one person shouted back.
O’Malley’s biggest mistake, however, was replying to the “Black lives matter” mantra by saying, “Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter.” This was a big mistake, politically at least, and as CNN goes on to report:
O’Malley later apologized for the remarks, telling This Week in Blackness, a digital news site, that he “meant no disrespect” to the black community.
“That was a mistake on my part and I meant no disrespect,” O’Malley told the outlet. “I did not understand the tremendous passion, commitment and feeling and depth of feeling that all of us should be attaching to this issue.”
Things didn’t go any better for Bernie Sanders when he took the stage, and his back-and-forth with the protesters was even more prickly. “Black lives, of course, matter. I spent 50 years of my life fighting for civil rights and for dignity,” said Sanders. “But if you don’t want me to be here, that’s OK. I don’t want to outscream people.”
There’s a lot going on here, and I don’t want to try and analyze every aspect in this one post. I have mixed feelings, and I’m still mulling things over. I have tremendous respect for the passion of those who stand up and scream “black lives matter” with obvious pain and commitment. I also think the fundamental critique of white Democrats as co-opting and/or ignoring black interests is valid. It’s very close to my own opinion of social justice ideology. I was struck, for example, by the protesters reviling notable figures like Al Sharpton and saying instead that, “My sisters got this.” Most conservative analysis of this protest has been superficial, as far as I’ve seen, never getting beyond schadenfreude in seeing progressive protesters interrupt progressive politicians.
On the other hand, the idea that you have to apologize for saying “black lives matter, white lives matter, all lives matter” is disconcerting even if it’s understandable, and a lot of the criticisms of Bernie Sanders (O’Malley doesn’t get criticized as much largely because he’s not as politically relevant, I think) are problematic. This article from The Week gets into why: What Black Lives Matter gets wrong about Bernie Sanders.
In the article, Ryan Cooper argues that focusing on race to the exclusion of class is a mistake. He concedes that “upwardly mobile or even wealthy blacks are still routinely victimized by the police,” but then digs deeper into the differences between race and class with some cold, hard numbers.
Consider the criminal justice system, a major focus of Black Lives Matter. One rough way to consider the bias of this set of institutions is by overall lifetime likelihood of imprisonment of men by educational attainment — reasonable proxies for the levels of oppression and income, respectively. A 2009 statistical comparison between two cohorts of men on this measure, one born from 1945-49, and another born from 1975-79, provides a window into how such rates changed, since the latter cohort came of age just as the incarceration rate was reaching its peak.
Over that time, the overall imprisonment risk for men with some college, either white or black, didn’t change much, increasing from 0.4 to 1.2 percent, and from 5.3 to 6.6 percent, respectively. That is a large disparity to be sure, but the numbers are nothing compared to the staggering rates among black high school dropouts, which increased from 14.7 to 68 percent. (White dropouts went from 3.8 to 28 percent.) As Berkeley sociologist Loïc Wacquant points out, this implies that the class gap within race groups is larger than the gap between them. In the 1975-79 cohort, blacks are five times more likely to be imprisoned than whites overall, but black high school dropouts are 10 times more likely than blacks that have completed some college.
Cooper goes on to say that while “there is much bald racial prejudice revealed here… poverty is an equal if not greater factor” and concludes that “Money, quite simply, is power.” He’s right. And, what’s more, the difference matters.
It matters for two reasons. First, because to the extent that we misdiagnose social inequality, we can’t propose policies to fix it. Policies proposed based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem are just as likely to make things worse as to make things better, and can’t possibly succeed other than through sheer, dumb luck. Second, misdiagnosing social problems can, in this case at least, make them worse. To the extent that racism rather than poverty is seen as exclusive or even primary driver of suffering, the understandable reaction is a lot of rage. Which in turn leads to lack of communication, lack of cooperation, and in the end becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of mutual racial alienation.
My point is not that racism doesn’t exist, isn’t a problem, or shouldn’t be addressed directly. Neither is Cooper’s. My point is that there’s a lot more going on than can be explained by racism (even by systemic racism) and that we are in grave danger if we do not acknowledge that fact.
Brandon Flowers, Neon Trees, Imagine Dragons, Lindsey Stirling, and now another Mormon superstar: Kaskade. Or, as the Daily Beat puts it, The Straight Edge Mormon DJ Taking Over the World. As the article’s lede puts it:
Kaskade has been DJing dance parties for 20 years, and last year was the No. 8 highest-paid DJ in the world, raking in $17 million. But he isn’t like other DJs.
Why is he not like other DJs? Well, because he doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, and is married with three kids. I’m not one of those who cares overly much about Mormon celebrities perfectly representing our faith (who can do that?), but I’m always happy to see someone willing to go public about their commitment to our basic ideals.
“I don’t party at all!” he says. “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke. I’m a bit of a freak that way because I’m completely different from what you would think. Look, you can’t put all electronic musicians or DJs or whatever you want to call us in one pot. A lot of these guys live in the night and party, but with me, I’m married and have three children. I have a life outside of this.”
Not that that’s all there is to him; the article goes into his years of struggle and honing his craft to build the career he has today:
I mention the booming business of EDM and what exactly the word “DJ” encompasses these days, since many of the so-called “world class DJs” of today are programmers who don’t actually know how to spin records.
“It’s a little insulting,” he says. “Right now, the landscape of what encompasses the word ‘DJ’ is so broad and vast now. You have guys like me who learned on vinyl, know the technique, and know what this really is. I witnessed the whole rise of it. I was friends with Frankie [Knuckles], and I was going to his weekly parties at Medusa’s when I was in high school in the mid-’80s.”
“It’s changed the landscape of what this is. The entry point used to be so much higher, and there was so much more respect for the art of DJing and what it was. We’ve lost some of that now.”
So, if you’re curious to check out some of his music, here’s the track that Buzzfeed featured in their article, “Let Me Disarm You.”
John McWhorter continues to really impress me with his political commentary.[ref]I was first impressed by his linguistic books, however, like this great history of the English language: Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue[/ref] His most recent piece is Antiracism, Our Flawed New Religion. In it, McWhorter continues his attack on White Privilege theory, primarily for being (1) practically useless and (2) largely designed to appeal to comfortable white folk.
Antiracism as a religion, despite its good intentions, distracts us from activism in favor of a kind of charismatic passivism… Real people are having real problems, and educated white America has been taught that what we need from them is willfully incurious, self-flagellating piety, of a kind that has helped no group in human history.
Of course, it’s a little interesting–as a religious person–to see religion used as basically a pejorative, but I’m kind of desensitized to the stereotype of religion as pathological irrationality. One thing at a time. And, in this piece, McWhorter does a good job of explaining why antiracism fails to benefit poor black people, and who it really does benefit.
One of the winners is Liu Cixin, the author of this year’s Best Novel: 
Instead, the critics of the Sad Puppies launched a truly breathtaking campaign of slander and intimidation that focused on calling the Sad Puppies campaign misogynist, racist, and homophobic. The best example of this is the Entertainment Weekly article that had to be “fixed” almost beyond recognition when Torgersen threatened a lawsuit over the obvious lies. (
After reading The Three Body-Problem, I was sure it would get my #1 vote. But then I reread 
[/ref] His most recent piece is 