jamesworrad.blogspot.com

Saturday 16 March 2013

A Common Or Garden SF Twitter Conversation...



21 comments:

  1. Clearly, Tidhar would've been happier if they'd hired white dancers.

    The racist logic of ideological antiracism is so fucking insane it's impossible to parody. Interracial romance in books is racist. Hiring black dancers is racist. I do not dare venture to speculate what they may deem racist next, but I am beginning to wonder if a better name for them would be neosegregationists.

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  2. So, do you think Tidhar would prefer Celtic folk dances or Israeli ones at Eastercon? I'm just not up on what's popular with people who object to black dancers.

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    1. Does it matter? These hardworking people are just pieces on a chessboard of snark and self-applause to these guys aren't they?
      The thing that gets me is the assumption Eastercon went 'Ooh, let's get some Zulus! More likely there's some friend who knows a friend or--dare I say it--someone in or connected with the dance troupe takes an interest in SF? It's the assumption that couldn't be the case that speaks volumes to me.
      Funny thing is I've always rather liked the guy. But dickish things should be pointed out.

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    2. I keep meaning to try his work. Being an idiot in a few areas doesn't preclude being a fine artist overall. Might even help it. But, dear God, the politics of identity are painfully facile. I just did a quick google to see what he's said about Palestinians, and the few sentences I saw seemed reasonable, but one of the problems with reading social justice warriors is their words don't always jibe with dictionaries, so what sounds reasonable becomes gibberish as you dig deeper.

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    3. His central station stories, at their best, have a knack for really immersing the reader into the world- there's times you can almost feel the dust under your fingernails.
      But, yeah, there's a noticeable disconnect between the language and the reality. The whole 'person of colour' thing, for instance. I'm sure whoever came up with it meant well, but I live in officially THE most ethnically heterogeneous city on the crust of the planet and the harsh fact is if I used that term walking around my street I'd get slapped.

      Why? Because, if you're not up with the lingo, it's sounds like something a snide 1930's Alabama hotel receptionist would say.

      I'm tired of having my morality dictated to me by, say, some woman educated way beyond her intelligence, living in her daddy's mansion in Thailand and putting her feet up on broken sweatshop workers. Or, say, some guy using twitter as a passive-aggressive auto-cannon who then runs like a rabbit from a gun as soon as anyone pulls him up on it.

      21st century Science Fiction deserves a better class of liberal.

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    4. So true about the lingo. I use "of color" in writing sometimes when it's a useful shorthand, but I'd never say that shit out loud to a black person who wasn't a bourgie academic. I think if I did, they'd just pity me.

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  3. I'm starting to think SF's 'progressives' only treat non-whites as individuals if they are university educated and politically reliable.

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    1. Those are the ones targeted by the US fannish community's outreach program, Con Or Bust. I only know the name of one of its recipients, a self-identified upperclass woman from India.

      There's a development in the US that fascinates me which identitarians ignore: a Pew study found a few years back that 40% of our black community think there are effectively two races now, a poorer one and a richer one that has abandoned the poorer one. We're seeing the development of black Eloi and black Morlocks. SF's "progressives" are all about the Eloi.

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  4. (This is Liz W) I'm pretty sure this is via a friend of mine, who is their tour agent in this country and a SF writer and fan. They're a highly professional group who were very badly treated by their management here at one point, and my friend stepped in to raise funds for them. They've had gigs all over the place, and I fail completely to see why this is racist: they are an actual Zulu dance troupe, not some group in blackface.

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    1. Try telling it to Lavie. He'll just pretend you didn't say it, run away and move on to his next outraaaaageous statement. And then he'll run from that too.

      The fact is he was so busy trying to fire yet another shot at SF's old guard that he let his tank run over a bunch of innocent, hardworking entertainers.

      I honestly think he's an honorable man--I can't state that enough--but if he's true to himself and what he stands for he should either defend his statement or apologize to those people.

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  5. like Lavie, he's a good writer and he's been a friend for years, but I kicked him off the FB f-list for supporting Requires Shite. If you think I ought to be killed for writing SF, you're not a friend of mine, kind of by definition. I wouldn't have objected so much if he hadn't had death threats of his own from some anti-Semitic asshole the week before, and responded with fear and squealing.

    There seem to be a number of writers on the net at the moment who are doing the net equivalent of dancing up and down with their underpants on their heads, and Lavie has chosen to become one of them. He's getting a reputation in publishing as a bit of a twat as a result. Still, it's not our problem - he can take it up with the Zulus when he meets them and see what they say.

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    1. I don't know if this is a barbaric opinion or not, but there's times I read that stuff and think 'Christ, it's just a book/story.' Am I crazy for thinking that? The social media-era has led to this simplistic conflation of the writer with the book, something they told me not to do on day 1 of English class.

      What gets me is, when Vox Day, a real card-carrying white supremacist and woman-hater starts going on the warpath, all these people who'll happily leap on a problematic piece of fiction suddenly (and very tellingly)evaporate.Funny that.

      I think that's pretty poor he could support someone threatening to kill you(even jokingly)after he'd received death threats himself. You'd think there'd be a learning curve...

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  6. >I think that's pretty poor he could support someone threatening to kill you(even jokingly)after he'd received death threats himself. You'd think there'd be a learning >curve...

    There's no way that Requires Shite would carry through - far too busy being a keyboard coward. But this is typical of the social justice lot - it's fine if one of them does it, not so much the oppo.

    I've been having a look at Day's blog (I engaged briefly and rudely, and was treated reasonably, I thought) and apart from possibly one person, the SJ crowd leave him well alone. He's presumably not a soft enough target. Beale also falls short of making death threats, which he appears to regard (rightly) as uncivilised, and he is not, in my experience, particularly personally abusive. But the SJ 'warriors' would far rather turn on their own - it's been a problem with the Left since the year dot, and few of them seem aware of that as a historical process.

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    1. Yep, it's that old tune all right. Every time I nose around Live Journal I think, if contemporary SF was 30's Spain, half these people would be sat in Barcelona making lists of all the 'wrong sort' of socialists fighting in the trenches. An uncharitable thought, arguably, but...

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    2. I know I should technically respect Vox Day for not threatening or throwing abuse like RH (and this is NO judgement on you, Liz, I totally see where you're coming from, especially after what you've been through)but he really is the enemy of everything I stand for.

      If it came to a stand off like the end of The Good The Bad And The Ugly (spoiler alert!) and I'm Clint, I shoot Day (Bad) and work with Requires(Ugly). Of course, after that I'd try to run off with the treasure and leave her teetering atop a grave stone, rope noose around her neck (but not actually tied to tree)screaming 'Hey! Privileged mansplaining butthurt! You can't do this! We're pal's yeah? Pal's! You can't leave me, you white f**king savage! We're pals!' Then the titles go up.

      OK... weird daydream. But it's sooo fun to imagine!

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    3. >but he really is the enemy of everything I stand for.

      Likewise - I completely agree. But I despise RH more, because she's a coward and a hypocrite - your Spanish analogy is bang on the money.

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    4. Yup. And to stick with James' spaghetti western fantasy, I would shoot RH first 'cause there's no way you can trust her, while Vox has a code which he might break if he needed to, but at least he would try to honor it. To nerd out for a moment, I'd rather work with Saruman than Wormtongue.

      Dang. Now I'm trying to imagine Sergio Leone's Lord of the Rings.

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    5. A Fist Full Of Mithril.

      Actually this 'The Spool, The Vox and The Hatey'(Insert your own blog's personal 'Good')is a fascinating online SF debate waiting to happen! Do you shoot the person who is everything that disgusts you (but is nominally honorable) and work with the person who is essentially in your political camp (but is a total underhand arsehole with it) or vice versa?

      I kind of wish Blogger had a voting thingy like you get on some forums. Maybe it does. Maybe I should have a look...

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    6. I'm wanting to see A Fist Full of Mihril now.

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  7. Oh and that last spaghetti western vignette? It's a lot less psychotic and more amusing if you've seen the film. So don't start, blogosphere!

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  8. >Do you shoot the person who is everything that disgusts you (but is nominally honorable) and work with the person who is essentially in your political camp (but is a total underhand arsehole with it) or vice versa?

    Pretty much sums it up!

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