The Puppies of Terror (Editorial, NYRSF 320)

Approximately 2.73 million words have already been written about the *Puppy attack on the Hugo nominations list; Mike Glyer’s still-indispensable online fanzine File 770 <file770.com> has daily roundups on who is saying and/or lying about to whom. I don’t know that I have anything particular to add to the specific discussion except perhaps to bemoan the near-total destruction of the short fiction categories this year.

Okay, there’s one point I feel I have to hammer on. The entire Puppy movement, rhetorically, is based on the idea that the science fiction enterprise has changed tremendously and not for the better, since the fabled Golden Age when all of the Puppies were young. The head Sad Puppy himself, Brad Torgersen, has taken to referring to his enemies as CHORFS, “Cliquish, Holier-than-thou, Obnoxious, Reactionary, Fanatics.” So, yes, the person who is bravely positioning himself as the force that will stop the people who want to change things believes that his opponents are “reactionaries.” This is, apparently, someone whose understanding of words is limited to “what sounds like an insult?”

Leading to a broader topic, I’ll point out that the Best Graphic Story category consists of four superb non-Puppy finalists. I’ve also been told the Fan Artist category is a good selection of candidates, though I’m not personally qualified to judge them. These categories mostly escaped unscathed because the slates listed only one Graphic Story nominee and no Fan Artist nominees, apparently because the Puppies didn’t deem them worthy of attention.

That’s how this works now. There is a small community of people online who are dedicated to inflicting damage on targets of opportunity. This group, which I think of as Panzergroup Asshole, is reactionary, virulently anti-woman, and racist whenever it suits them. Their tactics include online harrassment in a variety of forms, identity theft, death threats, exposure private information, SWATting <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting>, and whatever else they can do without actually leaving their chairs. GamerGate is just one instance of PA, a cadre of PA wrapped in a protective layer of the clueless and the easily duped. The ideas are dumb; the threats are real and terrifying. And if there is one lesson that Panzergroup Asshole wants to convey, it is to live in terror at the possibility of attracting the attention of Panzergroup Asshole. They are terrorists—they want people, especially women, to be so afraid of drawing attention that they just sit silently.

(In the 2008 comics series Necronomicon, by William Messner-Loebs and Andrew Richie, the narrator, who has been tasked with translating the eponymous work in English, is learning how to warp reality to his own purposes. The danger, he says, is that “In order to see, one must be seen.” Because my mind tends towards Lovecraftian images, I sometimes picture Panzergroup Asshole as a long Mountain Dew–colored tentacle capped with a bloodshot eye, slithering through the tubes of the Internet.)

The Puppies deliberately sought the attention of GamerGate. They gathered monsters around themselves and said, “Here is a target which you should attack, because it does not give enough honor to the right kind of people.” And they attacked.

The Puppies have a number of advantages in their fight. It is easier to attack a broad target than to defend it at every point. Much of the society works on assumptions of commity and reciprocity that the Puppies simply eschew. They don’t care what damage they cause as long as their ears are filled with their own cheers. And even if it is impossible for them to “win”—whatever that might mean—they can still cause a lot of damage even while losing every battle. If the Hugo Awards are left a smoking ruin in their wake, what’s it to them?

This is not to counsel despair. But we need to be aware that the battle against the arrayed forces of assholery will, at times, be unpleasant to watch and wearying to fight. But the fight is genuinely important, and it won’t win itself.

—Kevin J. Maroney
speaking for himself

Comments

[Shermer]

Here is Brad Torgersen's excellent commentary on your sadly ill-informed editorial: https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/05/17/fisking-the-broken-narrative/

[John Popham]

I expect this sort of off the rails vitriol, name calling and unreasoning McCarthyism from Vox Day and his lot. I am increasingly angry at the amount of it I see coming from the the long-time tru-fans I'd supposed were the good guys in this fight.

Do you really want F&SF fans to have nothing but a choice between your flavor of assholery and theirs?

Every time I read something like this, I start to agree with GRRM: You're making the puppies case for them.

Get a grip, Kevin.

[Kevin J. Maroney]

John:

The only substantial regret I have about my editorial is that it moved too seamlessly from discussion of the *Puppy movement to discussion of Panzergroup Asshole, making it seem as if I thought they were the same people. I don't.

Let me elaborate on Panzergroup Asshole and online harassment. PGA is a real thing--probably 400-500 people who participate in systematic online harassment*, a weapon waiting for a target. There's a larger body of casual trolls among whom PGA hide--sometimes PGA follow the other trolls and sometimes PGA's activities attract the other trolls.

*This can run the gamut from purely online attacks like verbal abuse, tweet flooding, sealioning, comment spam, account takeover, and DDOS attack to offline dangers such as publishing personal information, leaking nude pictures, elaborate death threats, bomb threats, credit card fraud, and SWATting. I've had multiple friends say to me that they won't mention certain names online for fear of attracting the attention of GG and the abuse it brings. Using the fear to silence one's opponents has a name: "terrorism".

I do not believe the *Puppies--the leaders and most of their supporters--are themselves members of Panzergroup Asshole. However, the Puppy leaders (Correia, Torgersen, and Day) deliberately and repeatedly invited an alliance with GamerGate, a movement inseparable from Panzergroup Asshole.

Asking people to block-vote for the Hugos (as the Puppies did) was a dick move, taking advantage of the good will assumptions inherent in the Hugo process. This is not significantly different in kind from the outright ballot-box stuffing that got Black Genesis and The Guardsman onto the nominee lists in 1987 and 1989. It's shameful and nasty, and if they had stopped there, the second half of the editorial wouldn't have been present. But by deliberately positioning themselves as part of GamerGate-writ-large was a step beyond.

And if it's "assholery" to point out that someone is allying themselves with terrorists--I think I can live with that charge.

[John Popham]

The first rule of anti-insurgency is to avoid behaving in a manner that created more insurgents.

'Nuff said.

[James May]

You're just digging yourself deeper. The idea Mercedes Carrera, Syrian Girl, Sargon of Akkad and Milo Yiannopolous among many others including game deveiopers are monsters doesn't wash and you know it doesn't wash. So why do it? Why purposely confuse anonymous goofball cybernuts with people with legitimate gripes about silly feminist critiques of gaming? Do you think there aren't other blogs where people can't see the truth?

Has it ever once occurred to you the same pushback against silly feminist critiques has occurred in SF? Am I really supposed to take comments about my "white male colonial gaze" seriously? I can produce a thousand quotes like that from the highest to the lowest figures in this silly movement in SF. Org. presidents, editors, award-winners, the whole nine yards.

And if I push back I'm a woman-hating racist?

In case you didn't notice it, white people running around a black dominated awards show taking selfies and posting them with hashtags like #WeDontLookAlike is crass. Saying Three Body Problem Asiansplained and appropriated white SF is racist. Saying black SF authors blacksplain white SF literature is bigotry. Asking people to not read gays for a year is inflammatory. Advancing theories about Jewish privilege is incitement.

Double standards that explain that all away if done in reverse is moronic.