So much of the current political climate seems to revolve around people somehow validating themselves by being super angry at something.
Remember when the political climate consisted of voter apathy and lack of meaningful differences between candidates? Good times.
Anything can be turned into a religion. I remember a time when political correctness was a valid thing. For me, growing up as a socialist it was part of a valid struggle, and it did a lot of good in altering the tone of public conversation, media, etc. But it overshot the mark long ago.
I think what happened was that it became formulaic as taught in schools and colleges, and the formula becomes something like a religious creed, and a tribal badge, and a means of feeling superior to and trolling other people - especially when combined with the costless anonymity of the internet. Also, the “it’s eating itself” phenomenon recent commentators have noted is inevitable when something becomes a mindless, rote algorithm.
I think proper Leftists are waking up to the disrepute it’s bringing to the Left though. It is not to be borne that a great political tradition should end in pettifoggery.
I think it’s reasonable to link to this in this thread:
Fucking brilliant
The Trevor Noah thing of course has been filling my feed recently.
and amazingly, outright support from one Guardian columnist.
a balance to the tone set by their earlier articles.
Trending in the UK is a politician Simon Danczuk reporting pundit/troll/columnist Katie Hopkins to the police for saying something offensive.
Now I actually like Danczuk, he’s said all the right things in regards to Rotherham, Chris Huhne, establishment paedophiles, and his wife has awesome boobs but I find myself in a state of cognitive dissonance here, both supporting Katie Hopkins right to be offensive and supporting everyones right to hate her for being offensive. She and her fanbase represent everything wrong with Britain at the moment but a politician running to the police over stupid tweets during an election is foolhardy and damaging.
The Nerdist recently had a great discussion on politics and the media with Kal Penn, and his experiences in both Washington and Hollywood. Not all politics, but very interesting and encouraging. http://nerdist.com/podcasts/nerdist-podcast-channel/
pwk - And if the police tell him to go away, it’s one thing, but there probably IS a case there.
The main uses of PC today in the UK are the right, against the poor, minorities, “lefties”, immigrants, etc.
(Labour being right wingers, yes, some of Reeve’s right-of-the-Tories PC shit…)
THE PATRIARCHY IS investing more time in girls’ cognitive development than boys’.
Trigger warnings: cishet white male study authors, forward time orientation, quantitative methods
Have you been around preschool aged boys though? They’re awful and never sit still. No wonder they don’t do much studying with them.
This is a good point. I have no idea how it is that we have close to a 50/50 gender balance – preschool boys are near-suicidal in their actions and their behavior pretty much invites murder from most bystanders.
“Sadpuppies” organised by (Brad Torgersonand Larry Correria) is a 3 year ongoing campaign within the ranks of the Hugo Awards (science fiction) committee and voters countering what they believe to be undue influence by the identity politics warriors, who were alleged to have previously pushed to ensure only titles ideologically acceptable and inclusive would be nominated. This year Sadpuppies have achieved full success dominating the nominations, with only a handful of titles not being nominated by Sadpuppies campaigners.
Allum Bokhari provides a useful summary of the campaign
Yes, before anyone mentions it, it’s a stupid campaign name.
So that would seem to imply one of two things - either the Hugo nominating process is trivially easy to manipulate and hence largely worthless, or the “sad puppies” list is in fact the best candidates and would have won anyway.
As noted, they’re just following in the footsteps of Scalzi and Stross, who while decent enough authors are both personally unpleasant, and have been so to me - when I was supporting their general viewpoint, no less!
My view is that the awards are a waste of time, because they’ve become little about the quality of the writing and the people doing the gaming with campaigns like Sad Puppies are not helping, especially when they whine. (Also, a lot of it is the personal sparring between people who plain don’t personally like each other)
Tin - It’s trivially easy to manipulate, for a lot of historical reasons. The Sad Puppies slate is quite widely read, but there’s some equally well-read stuff not nominated.
Ironically, I’m a big milscifi fan and I think some (certainly not all) of the Sad Puppies slate is good. And I like Baen…first up, because they have sane eBook policies! (Some of their authors I won’t read, but hey)
The endgame to this is going to be one group or the other declaring the Hugo awards useless, and we end up with two competing Hugbox awards, which is going to hurt the genre as a whole.
Sad, but inevitable in this age of backlash, and bullies trying to out-bully each other.
So I had heard about Vox Day before and knew people were bothered he was all over the Hugo Awards this year. I assumed that most of what I was hearing was hyberbole or satire. But as it turns out… it’s not? He’s straight-up opposed to women having the right to vote? He’s a Creationist, he’s against vaccines, AND he has side blog as a pickup artist. Is this guy real?
It’s so weird to see GamerGate partying-up with 10 Commandments types.
Manipulating the Hugo nominating process is basically, “Hey, all of you spend $40 on a World Science Fiction Society membership so you can vote.”
I’m surprised that nobody’s bothered by how the Hugo is for English works only, and yet is administered by a group with ‘world’ in the name.
Quaro - He’s…well known.
And disliked - “In 2014 Beale’s novelette, “Opera Vita Aeterna”, was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novelette.[17] It came in sixth out of five nominees, behind “No Award.””
I’d be surprised if he does better this year.
Vox ISN’T on the Sad Puppies list.
(Vox of course promoted himself on his own “Rabid Puppies” list, which is of course indicative)
And I’ve been doing some reading up on this - and suffice to say that the list was…more inclusive…before people asked to be removed from it. Which frankly is their loss. Again, Scalzi and Stross offered slates in previous years, and yet only now reform is indicated…sigh.
(As I said it’s all **** waving anyway, sadly)
That godawful article pwk linked aside, I think it demonstrates pretty clearly that “identity politics” does not and probably never really has had an undue influence on the hugo awards.
Scalzi as usual is the voice of reason.
What? He’s the one who started with slates, and he’s taken strong stances in the past.
I’m with Eric Raymond, who takes issue with both sides.
I’m a left winger whose fiction tastes strongly run to mil sci-fi. I sure as heck wouldn’t like to live in the worlds posed (even the ones which are not Crapsack Worlds), but they’re fun to read about! (And yes, Mr. Scalzi had a problem with me defending his views, so I have a problem with him)