racism – One Thousand And One Parsecs

In Defense of Black & White Morality

I was born in 1984, and for most of my life, stories with black and white morality—in other words, stories about the struggle between good and evil, with good guys who are good and bad buys who are bad—have been considered unfashionable and out of style. This is especially true of fantasy, where grimdark has been the ascendant subgenre for basically the past two decades. The Lord of the Rings movies gave us somewhat of a respite from this, but the popularity of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones seems to have turned everything darker and grittier, to the point where I just don’t enjoy reading most new fantasy anymore.

I remember going to conventions like World Fantasy 2009 and talking with other aspiring writers, most of whom could not stop gushing about this George R.R. Martin guy and how he was subverting reader expectations in new and innovative ways. So I picked up a copy of Game of Thrones, and after finishing it, I thought: “yeah, the writing was pretty good, and the story did have a lot of unexpected twists… but I hated literally every character in this book who was still alive by the end of it.”

Looking back, it seems like the greatest reader expectation that GRRM subverted was the expectation that he would finish the damned books. Then again, the books only really took off after the TV series got big, and I suspect that the real reason the TV series got so big was because of all the ~~porn~~ sorry, the sexposition that the writers threw in. (Sex + exposition = sexposition. Seriously, the term was coined because of Game of Thrones.)

So for at least the last three decades (Game of Thrones came out in 1996), grimdark fantasy has been in style, with its morally ambiguous characters and its gray-on-grey or gray-on-black morality. Meanwhile, stories that are unambiguously about the struggle between good and evil have been considered trite, passé, or otherwise out of style. We live in a modern, complex world, and stories with such black-and-white conflicts are far too simplistic and unsophisticated to speak to our times.

That’s a load of horse shit, and here’s why.

But first, because we live in the stupidest of all possible timelines, I need to preface this discussion by stating what should be obvious to anyone capable of free and independent thought: namely, that talking about morality in terms of “black” and “white” has not a damned thing to do with anyone’s race. Seriously. It is not racist in any way to use “black” to symbolize evil and “white” to symbolize good, and the term “black and white morality” is not an example of white supremacy or whatever. Frankly, only a racist would think that it is.

But if you’ve only recently recovered from the insane left-wing cult that dominates every aspect of our society right now, and terms like “black” and “white” still trigger you, perhaps it will help to keep these two images in the forefront of your mind as we talk about morality in terms of black and white:

Now, on to something of actual substance.

The biggest complaint against black and white morality is that it divides all of the characters into black hats and white hats. In other words, all the bad guys are unambiguously bad, and all the good guys are unambiguously good, with no room in the middle for moral ambiguity or complex ethical dilemmas. So in other words, the spectrum of morality in your story looks something like this:

Now, while that may work for a certain kind of story, I will concede that it’s usually a sign of poor writing. This is especially true of epic fantasy, where complex worldbuilding and an expansive cast of characters is typical for the genre. Black hats and white hats might work for a twenty minute episode of a classic western, but not for a multi-book epic fantasy series.

However, when black and white morality is done well, it looks a lot more like this:

Notice that every shade of gray is contained within the spectrum. Indeed, allowing for the extremes of good and evil is the only way to hit every shade of morality and have it mean anything at all.

Think of Lord of the Rings. Yes, there are purely evil characters like Sauron, and purely good characters like Gandalf, but in between those two extremes there is a lot of moral ambiguity. For example, you have Boromir, who falls to the temptation of the ring but redeems himself with his sacrifice; Gollum, who ultimately rejects the last remnants of good that is in him, but still ends up serving the good in the end; Sam, who isn’t particularly noble or heroic, but bears the ring without succumbing to its temptation because of the power of friendship; Faramir, a noble and heroic figure who nevertheless knows his own limits and recognizes that the ring will corrupt him if he takes it; etc etc. Even the hero of the story, Frodo nine-fingers, succumbs to temptation in the end, and only succeeds in his quest by a brilliant subversion of the reader’s expectations.

Now, let’s contrast (pun intended) black and white morality with gray and grey morality, which TV Tropes defines as “Two opposing sides are neither completely ‘good’ nor completely ‘evil’.” Here is what that looks like when it’s done poorly:

…and here is what that looks like when it’s done well:

Does anything about those two images stand out to you? Because the thing that stands out to me is that they look almost identical—which means, as a newbie writer, it’s much easier to get away with a badly written gray-and-grey story than a badly written black-and-white story. Little wonder that all those aspiring writers at World Fantasy 2009 were gushing about George R.R. Martin.

Of course, since there’s only so much of this morally gray soup that readers can stand, two other sub-tropes of graying morality have emerged to satisfy the readers’ unfulfilled needs: black-and-gray morality, which TV Tropes defines as “Vile villain, flawed hero,” and white-and-gray morality, where “the best is Incorruptible Pure Pureness, and the worst is an Anti-Villain.”

Representing both of those visually, here is what black-and-gray morality looks like:

…and here is what white-and-gray morality looks like.

Much more satisfying than the nihilistic, soul-sucking soup that is gray-on-grey morality, but taken individually, neither one truly represents the full spectrum of moral complexity. The only way to include every shade of gray within your story is to do black-and-white morality, and to do it well.

Also, do you notice how the gray on the right side of the black-and-gray spectrum looks a lot darker than the gray on the left side of the white-and-gray spectrum? Those are both identical shades of 50% gray, but they appear darker or lighter than they actually are, simply by association with only one of the extremes.

Likewise, even if a black-and-gray or white-and-gray story is done well, it will still feel like it’s totally black or white. And if you read a white-and-gray story for the contrast reading after a black-and-gray story, the effect will be more similar to reading a badly written black-and-white story, regardless of the quality of either one.

To get the full spectrum of morality, with all of its finer nuances and shades of gray, you must include both extremes of good and evil. Remember, here is what that looks like:

Which is why it’s a load of horse shit to say that black and white morality is “unsophisticated” or “simplistic.” Done poorly, perhaps that’s true—but you can say that of any book done poorly. Done well, though, a black-and-white tale of good and evil is more satisfying and complete than any other kind of tale is capable of being, even if done well.

“But Joe!” some of you may be saying right now. “What about blue-and-orange morality? What about that most bizarre of moral codes that is neither good nor evil, lawful nor chaotic, but bacon and necktie? What does that look like, represented visually?”

Fine. Here’s your blue-and-orange morality, which TV Tropes defines as “morality that’s bizarre, unconventional and distorted by human standards”:

He who takes the bacon path shall be with dinner blessed,
But he who takes the necktie path shall be for dinner dressed.

And here’s a poem by ChatGPT to explain the finer nuances of it:

In bacon’s sizzling embrace, flavors shall dance and sing,
A feast for the senses, a delightful offering.
Juicy and savory, its aroma fills the air,
Blessed is the one who follows the bacon’s dare.

Yet the necktie path, with elegance and grace,
Leads one to adornment, a refined embrace.
In formal attire, he walks the path of class,
Dressed for the occasion, ready to raise a glass.

For bacon nourishes the soul, brings joy and delight,
A savory indulgence, a culinary highlight.
While the necktie adorns, a symbol of esteem,
Preparing for gatherings, where memories gleam.

So choose your path wisely, with heart and desire,
Whether blessed with bacon or dressed to inspire.
For in the journey’s choice, a tale shall unfold,
Of dinners blessed or dressed, both stories worth being told.

Confessing My White Privilege

From the title of this post, you’re probably expecting a snarky takedown of the concept of “white privilege” and a good solid fisking of critical race theory. And while I thoroughly despise everything having to do with CRT, liberation theology, and Ibram ~~Henry Roger’s~~ X Kendi’s ideas of “anti-racism,” I do have one point of white privilege that I do need to confess. That is to say, I do indeed have an undue advantage because of the color of my skin.

I get to be the boogeyman.

As a straight white cisgender male conservative Christian, the woke intersectional left may mock me, attack me, or otherwise attack me rhetorically for my values, beliefs and opinions, but they do not ignore me or pretend that I do not exist. For example, if I write a blog post that criticizes the wokeness of science fiction, File 770 will often pick it up. I’m not on social media anymore, but if I were, I’m pretty sure that my anti-woke posts would similarly spark a very hot debate, and get passed around by intersectional leftists as an example of white supremacy.

If I were a straight black cisgender male conservative, all of those people would treat me as if I didn’t exist.

Their entire system of belief depends on black people fitting into a role defined by neo-Marxism, which separates everybody into racially-defined groups and declares that certain races are the oppressed, while other races are the oppressors. Black conservatives, especially black Christian conservatives, repudiate this theory by their very existence, which is why you’ll often hear people on the left claim that they aren’t “black enough.” Which of course is just another way of saying that they don’t exist.

You’ll often hear woke social justice types accuse conservatives of “denying the existence” of people who are trans, or queer, or in one of their other intersectional victim groups. This is nothing less than confession through projection. If you’re gay and you’re conservative, you aren’t really gay. If you’re trans and you’re conservative, you aren’t really trans… except, if your skin color is white, they can always chalk it up to “interalized whiteness” or some other such nonesense. But if you’re black? No such thing.

Of course, there are some black conservatives who are prominent enough that the woke types cannot ignore them. Justice Clarence Thomas comes to mind, as well as Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, Candace Owens, Justin Whitlock… but here’s the thing: because these prominent conservatives are black, they get WAY more hate and vitriol from the left than white conservatives. Ridiculous amounts of hate. Larry Elder, for example, was called “the black face of white supremacy” and nearly got egged during his run for governor of California. By a leftist. Would that have happened if he weren’t black? Probably not.

Here’s the thing, though: for every black conservative who is too prominent for the woke intersectional left to ignore, there are hundreds—perhaps thousands—of small fry like me who they can effectively unperson and ignore. Which isn’t to say that every black conservative creator’s struggles are due to woke racism, but it is definitely a factor, and one that I personally don’t have to deal with because I am the great white boogeyman. Any publicity is good publicity, especially when you’re small.

Of course, there is a way to remove this white privilege and equalize the opportunities for black conservatives and white conservatives alike… and that is to remove anti-racism, CRT, liberation theology, and all of this other woke garbage from our society. If our culture were not dominated by these ideologies, I would not be privileged above black conservative creators in this way. And frankly, that’s a world I’d much rather live in.

But this does make me want to find more conservative, black authors like me who are finding it difficult to get any traction in this industry because they are black and conservative. Indie is (to my knowledge) still a pretty level playing field, but traditional publishing is not, especially with the short story markets. And of course, promo sites and newsletters are going to be a mixed bag.

So if any of you know of some black conservative authors (or if you happen to be one), please let me know! I’d like to check them out.

Why I won’t be watching Amazon’s Rings of Power

Believe it or not, I actually did not have an opinion on Amazon’s latest boondoggle, the Lord of the Rings TV series called “Rings of Power,” until about three days ago. I expected it to be a disappointment, partially because I expected it to be woke, but mostly because all the major TV series seem to suck these days and I didn’t have any reason to believe that this one would be an exception. Amazon doesn’t strike me as being as insufferably woke as Disney or Netflix, though I did hear a lot of things about their Wheel of Time series (didn’t watch it, just because I haven’t read the books yet and plan to read them soon), but when people started complaining about the wokeness in Rings of Power, it didn’t surprise me either.

With that said, it seems that most people aren’t complaining that the series is overly woke, but that it’s just badly written. Kind of like how the thing that made Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi was so terrible just because the storytelling was so bad. A lot of people also hated it for being woke, but I’ve also heard it argued that the movie wasn’t woke at all, and if you really dig into the underlying message you’ll find that it actually repudiates many key woke tenets. But whether or not that’s true, it was just an objectively terrible movie, with plot holes large enough to drive a Death Star through and protagonists so unlikeable they make Jabba the Hutt look like a sympathetic figure. But I digress.

So anyways, I didn’t really have an opinion about Amazon’s Rings of Power yet, and was actually planning to watch the first two episodes… until I read the show’s official response to all the negative reviews it’s been getting.

Just for fun, let’s fisk it together:

We, the cast of Rings of Power, stand together in absolute solidarity

“Solidarity” is a lefty word. The left tends to favor certain words more than others (for example, they could have used “support” here instead). Also, they’re constantly trying to twist words in order to give them some advantage, however slight it might be. So right away, this word choice was a yellow flag for me.

and against the relentless racism,

Yeah, but is it really “racism” though?

threats, harassment, and abuse

Again, I can’t take these accusations at face value because most of the time, “harassment” is just lefty-speak for “someone who disagrees with me.” These people claim that speech is violence, and then turn around and use violence to try to silence—or worse, compell—the speech of everyone else.

Also, what about the fans who came to this show in good faith and were genuinely disappointed? Every book, movie, game, or TV show gets at least a few one-star reviews. Even the best ones do. Some people just have different tastes. Are you seriously lumping all of those fans into the same box with the trolls and the racists?

some of our castmates of color

Every time I read “X of color” now, I inwardly hear “colored X.” The two phrases mean the exact same thing, but one of them signals woke virtue, while the other will get you banned from the Nebulas hours after they name you a Grand Master (and against the express objections of the supposed victim, no less).

But honestly, “people of color” is just the lefty way of saying “people who aren’t white.” Which is often just another way to be racist against white people.

are being subjected to on a daily basis. We refuse to ignore it or tolerate it.

Do you remember when “tolerance” was supposed to be a virtue, and anyone who was “intolerant,” for any reason whatsoever, was considered a terrible person? But one of the key tenets of wokeism is that rules that apply to non-woke people don’t apply to you.

Also, whatever happened to being “diverse”? Because if diversity is truly the goal, then there are going to be people who genuinely hate your show—and that’s okay. It doesn’t make them racist. It just means that they have a diversity of tastes.

So once again, why are you calling everyone who hates the show a racist, abusive harasser?

JRR Tolkien created a world which, by definition, is multi-cultural.

He created a fantasy world with a lot of different cultures. That’s completely different from being multi-cultural, or promoting the ideology of multi-culturalism.

I’ve only read Lord of the Rings twice, but I don’t remember it being political or ideological. Why are you trying to make it out to fit your own political views? Have you read the books at all?

A world in which free peoples from different races and cultures join together, in fellowship, to defeat the forces of evil.

Yeah, but that’s not multi-culturalism. When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, we made a coalition with many different “free peoples from different races and cultures,” but that wasn’t multi-cultural because 1) we organized the coalition outside of, and actually in contravention of, the UN Security Council, and 2) the multi-culturalists condemned the invasion at the time, and still condemn it to this day.

It sounds to me like these people are twisting the word “multi-cultural” into pretzels to suit their own rhetorical ends. Which is typical of how leftists twist language.

Rings of Power reflects that. Our world has never been all white, fantasy has never been all white, Middle-earth is not all white.

Actually, Tolkien’s explicit goal with creating Middle Earth was to provide England with a founding mythology that was free of all Norman French influence. So that’s debatable.

But more importantly, who ever said that the goal is to make Middle-Earth, or the fantasy genre as a whole, “all white”? Are you seriously implying that everyone who hates Rings of Power is somehow a white supremacist?

BIPOC belong in Middle-earth and they are here to stay.

Yep, that’s exactly what you’re saying. Everyone who hates Rings of Power, for whatever reason, is actually just a white supremacist. Way to piss all over the Tolkien fans who just don’t like your show.

Finally, all our love and fellowship go out to the fans supporting us,

…but not to the Tolkien fans who don’t like the show. They can fuck right off.

especially fans of colour

…because if you don’t like our show, you obviously aren’t black.

who are themselves being attacked simply for existing in this fandom.

As you have just demonstrated by literally accusing all of the disappointed Tolkien fans—including the black fans—of being white supremacists. How dare those people exist!

Accusation = projection = confession with these people. In every case. No exception.

We see you,

No, you don’t.

your bravery,

No, you really don’t.

It’s much braver to speak up and be honest about what you think about shows like this, especially when all of the Big Tech and social media sites censor you and falsely accuse you of being a white supremacist for your opinions.

and endless creativity. Your cosplays, fancams, fan art, and

In all fairness to the publicity folks who wrote this, they did use the Oxford comma properly. So kudos for that.

insights make this community a richer place and remind us of our purpose.

The inverse of this is that when you call everyone who disagrees with you a white supremacist, your community becomes a poorer place, your creativity dies, and you ultimately forget your purpose. Which is exactly what is happening right now with every corner of the arts that has gone woke.

You are valid,

Once again, the left seems to favor this word. Not sure why.

you are loved,

Sorry, but I don’t turn to corporations or TV shows for love and affection. When I do need love and affection, I turn to the actual people in my life, thank you very much.

and you belong.

Unless you disagree with us, of course.

You are an integral part of the LOTR family—

Fandom is many things, but it is not and should not be a substitution for family. And frankly, given how toxic most fandoms have become, if I needed to find a new family, why would I choose such a dysfunctional one?

thanks for having our backs.

And thanks for stabbing us in our backs, you woke corporate shills.

So yeah, I won’t be watching Rings of Power at all now. Any show that turns on their fans and calls them all racists and white supremacists for not liking the show is totally undeserving of my time, attention, or respect.

But it wasn’t a total loss. We did get this from it:

“It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

So I DNFed Timescape by Gregory Benford today. I didn’t like any of the characters, and the retro-future view of the 90s as a dystopian post-climate catastrophe wasteland was predictably bad. But this quote from the afterword got me to thinking:

Habitual readers of science fiction will feel right at home with some features of Timescape: the ecological crisis, the contact between past and future and resultant time paradox, the scientists working to solve a scientific puzzle and save the earth [sic], and even a certain amount of scientific theorizing.

For 70s science fiction, the idea of an imminent, inevitable, and nigh-apocalyptic environmental collapse was thought to be so ingrained in the genre that it was accepted as a foundational trope of the genre. As a consequence, 70s science fiction tends to age very poorly. Almost all of the “important” works of the era, like Timescape, are infused with this Malthusian nonsense, and accept as axiomatic that all of the big crises of the 70s would only get worse and worse.

In contrast, the science fiction of the 40s and 50s was all about how science could help us to overcome the crises of their time, not how those crises were fundamentally insurmountable. Small wonder, then, that authors like Heinlein and Clarke inspired us to put men on the moon and satellites into orbit. And what did the authors of the 70s inspire us to do? Certainly not to tear down the Iron Curtain, pull the world back from the brink of nuclear war, or reduce global poverty at the most extraordinary rate in history. And yet, all of those things actually happened.

It makes me think of this apocryphal Mark Twain quote:

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

So what are some of the current assumptions of the science fiction field that will make future generations of readers scratch their heads? What are the things that will make the “important” works of 2020s science fiction age rather poorly?

Racial essentialism is probably a big one. I sense a growing cultural backlash against the racism of the intersectional left, especially in the wake of the George Floyd riots of 2020. That’s why the term “white supremacy” is in vogue right now, because the word “racist” has lost all of its power through overuse. If Worldcon doesn’t survive the pandemic, then I suspect that at least a few future SF historians will draw a connection between the Hugo’s demise and N.K. Jemisin’s three consecutive Hugo wins in the 2010s.

Transgenderism is probably another. Laying childish things aside, a society that rejects the biological essentialism of gender is not even metastable, as we’re seeing right now with all of the rapes in transgender bathrooms and prison facilities, with the obvious social contagion driving LGBTQ trends in the rising generation, and with all of the ways that political correctness demands that we reject basic science, typified so perfectly by the pregnant man emoji. That doesn’t necessarily mean that gender norms will revert to what they were in the 50s—in fact, I tend to think that the norms of that era were only metastable at best—but I do think that there’s a major cultural backlash on the horizon.

There’s a lot of other low-hanging fruit: the cli-fi of our era will probably age just as poorly as the apocalyptic visions of climate catstrophe written in the 1970s, and books that are based on 20s feminism will probably age just as poorly as 20s feminism itself. But what about some of the more difficult things to predict?

One of the more subtle ways that our current science fiction may age poorly is the complete ignorance of worldviews that clash with the established narrative. I would say that there’s a refusal to engage with contrary narratives, but it actually goes much deeper, as many writers are so deep in their own echo chambers that they don’t even know that contrary viewpoints exist. This has less to do with partisan politics and more to do with all of the ways that social media has re-engineered our society. Future generations will probably see the effects of this re-engineering much more clearly, and will wonder that the science fiction writers of our age were so unaware of how it affected them—both on the political right and on the political left.

Another less obvious thing is our generation’s lackadaisical and often schizophrenic attitudes on the importance of the family. When the chaos of the 20s is finally in the rear-view mirror, I suspect that there’s going to be a major groundswell of public interest in forming, cultivating, and maintaining strong families—largely because I suspect that’s how we’re ultimately going to find our way out of all this chaos. There’s a reason why Augustus Caesar, founder of one of the greatest empires in world history, placed such an emphasis on the importance of the family. Much of today’s science fiction takes it for granted that “love makes a family,” which was never true in any age—not even our own. It also takes for granted that found family is an adequate substitute for the real thing. With mutual commitment and great personal sacrifice, it can be, but that isn’t usually expressed on the page.

Does this feel a bit too much like wishcasting? How am I wrong, or what are some of the other things that I’ve missed? It’s probably just as difficult for us to answer this question as it is for a goldfish to comprehend what water is, but it is an interesting exercise, and hopefully a useful (or at least entertaining) one.

White Science Fiction and Fantasy Doesn’t Matter

If you are white, and you write science fiction or fantasy, it is only a matter of time before you are cancelled.

This is the logical end of intersectional identity politics, which is really just the resurrected, zombified corpse of Marxism. White people are the oppressors. People of color are the oppressed. All white people are racist, and the only way to fight racism is with more racism. Black lives matter. White lives don’t.

The United States of America is currently engaged in a violent struggle that will determine whether this hyper-racist intersectional ideology will defeat the populist uprising that has its champion in Trump, or whether the country will reject this new form of Marxism and come back from the brink of insanity. But in science fiction and fantasy, the war is already over, and the intersectionalists have won. It is now only a matter of time before they purge the field of everything—and everyone—that is white.

The last chance for the SF&F community to come back from the brink was probably in 2015. The intersectionalists were ascendant, but they hadn’t yet taken over the field. (That happened in 2016, when N.K. Jemisin, an avowed social justice warrior and outspoken champion for anti-white identity politics, won the Hugo Award for best new novel for the next three consecutive years.) A populist uprising within fandom known as the Puppies attempted to push back, and were smeared as racists, sexists, misogynists, homophobes, and Nazis. Whatever your opinion of the Puppies (and there were some bad eggs among them, to be sure), they did not deserve to be silenced, ridiculed, shouted down, and threatened with all manner of violence and death threats for their grievances. After the Puppies were purged, the intersectionalists took over and began to reshape the field in their image.

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer wasn’t renamed the Astounding Award because Campbell was a racist (even though he was). His name was stripped from the award because the people who renamed it are racists—not in the bullshit way the intersectionalists have redefined it, but in the true sense of the word: discrimination based based on race.

Before I get smeared as a white supremacist for writing this post, I want to make it absolutely clear that I welcome racial diversity in science fiction and fantasy. I’ve been very pleased to read some excellent stories from people of color in Lightspeed Magazine recently, including “Miss Beulah’s Braiding and Life Change Salon,” and there have been several excellent stories from Chinese authors in Clarkesworld recently as well. I just don’t think it’s necessary to tear down white authors in order to make space for non-white ones. That’s the racism of intersectionality, and I reject it.

It is much easier for these intersectional racists to cancel you after you’re dead, but they’ll come after you while you’re still alive if they can. That’s what’s happening to George R.R. Martin right now. Frankly, I would have a lot more sympathy for him if he hadn’t made his bed with these people back during the Puppygate debacle. Behold your “true fans,” Mr. Martin. The fact that you’re the biggest name in epic fantasy right now isn’t going to save you.

But if the intersectionalists are all anti-white racists, why are so many of them white? Because for decades, crunchy liberal white folks have been taught that everything bad in the world is their fault, and the world would be better off without them. Climate change. Racism. Colonialism. It’s the white man’s burden 2.0. I know, because I was raised in this milieu. I was forced to read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States in high school, and I know just how false and dangerous it really is. Besides, the revolution always eats its own. If you think you’re going to get a pass because you’ve read How to Be an Anti-Racist, you’ve posted a black square to your social media, and you’ve donated money to any of these social justice causes, you’re deluding yourself.

If you’re white, they’re coming for you. It’s not just your “whiteness” that they want to purge—that’s just a motte-and-bailey tactic to make their racism less overt and more palatable. The only thing they need to know about you is the color of your skin. If they know that, they think they know everything else about you, because they are the true racists—and in the world they’re trying to create, everything white must be purged.

The good news is that the cultural tides are turning, and the racist ideology that drives these folks is at or near its zenith. Marxism always fails, and cancel culture cancels itself in the end. If you play your cards right, getting cancelled can actually boost your career, rather than destroy it.

But the next ten years are going to be very tricky to navigate. Even if the intersectionalists lose on the national level, as I hope and pray that they do, they have already taken over the SF&F field so thoroughly and completely that the only way forward is to abandon all the old institutions and rebuild them from scratch. The indie publishing revolution has made this much more possible, but Amazon still dominates the indie publishing world, and they’ve already donated tens of millions of dollars to these Marxist causes. How much longer do we have before the intersectional ideologues within Amazon rewrite the algorithms according to their ideology? It’s only a matter of time.

Fortunately, if you are resilient enough, time is on your side.

Marxism is the new Black

The 21st century disciples of Karl Marx have a problem: all of Marx’s theories have been debunked, and all of his predictions have failed.

The workers of the world never rose up.

Capitalism never gave way to communism.

The class wars ended because extreme poverty ceased to be a global issue.

The labor theory of value was slain by the free market.

Materialism, not religion, proved to be the opiate of the masses.

So what’s a Marxist gotta do?

In the 00s and 10s, the Marxists made a subtle but insidious change to their ideology. They created a bunch of victim groups, and invented a thing called “intersectionality” to determine who was the greatest victim based on how many victim groups they could claim. Anyone who ranked too low on the victimhood scale was deemed “priviledged” and an “oppressor.” In this way, the Marxists created a new opressor class, and transposed their whole ideology onto the framework of identity politics.

Their greatest success came on the issue of race. The Democratic Party—the party of slavery, Jim Crow, and the Ku Klux Klan—had, through government handouts and welfare programs, created a dependent black underclass. In 100 years, these policies had done what 250 years of slavery could not: destroy the black family. With their families thus shattered, their communities fell apart, and the members of this black underclass found themselves trapped in a multi-generational cycle of poverty and violence.

Marxist ideology depends on envy and resentment in order to survive. That’s why it found such fertile ground in this dependent black underclass. But there was a problem: race relations in the United States were getting better, racism was on the decline, and through hard work and self-reliance (both of which are anathema to Marxism) an increasing number of black Americans were escaping the Democrat plantations. In fact, things had gotten so good that the United States had just elected their first black president.

So the Marxists spun a new narrative, calculated to foster as much envy and resentment as possible. They told the black underclass that all of their problems are due to racism, that all white people are racist against them, and that no matter what they do, they will never be able to get ahead—because racism. They sowed fear and dischord between blacks and the police, proclaiming falsely that the police were killing blacks in disproportionately large numbers. And when blacks who had climbed out of the underclass rose up to challenge this new narrative, the Marxists derided them as “Uncle Toms” or “not black enough.”

At the same time, the Marxists told white Americans that they were all guilty of “privilege” and “systemic racism.” They turned white supremacy into a boogeyman that was under every bed. They used hate speech to silence free speech, and replaced real justice with social justice. They forced us to hire them as diversity directors, and used Maoist struggle sessions to force us to confess our “white fragility.” Those who dared to challenge the intersectional narrative were fired from their jobs, removed from the internet and social media, and otherwise driven into the wilderness. The ensuing fear of cancel culture kept everyone else in line.

Which brings us to the Coronapocalypse.

Marxists work on a four-step playbook to subvert the societies that they want to control. The first step is demoralization, and it takes about a generation. The second step is destabilization, and it takes about 10-15 years. However, the third and fourth steps—crisis and normalization—happen very quickly.

If there’s one good thing about this global pandemic, it’s that the ideological masks are coming off even as the n95 and face masks are coming on. Whether or not the virus itself was engineered, the Marxists certainly aren’t letting this crisis go to waste. They see an opportunity to get everything they want, and they are doing all they can to seize it, setting our cities on fire and leaving hundreds of dead black Americans in their wake.

At this point, I can only see one way to defeat the Marxists, and that is for black America to rise up and reject this new narrative. It has to be the blacks, because it is their story that has been hijacked by the toxic Marxist ideology, and they need to take it back. No one else can do it for them. In the 20th century, the rallying cry was “we shall overcome;” in the 21st century, it needs to be “we already overcame.” Otherwise, I think we may see the fall of the republic and the end of the American experiment, which is exactly what the Marxists want.

It would make me profoundly sad if the American story turned out to be a tragedy, but such could very well be the case. If the American Revolution was the beginning, then the seeds for America’s collapse were sown in the patriots’ failure to reject slavery. The first civil war was the end of the beginning, Woodrow Wilson was the beginning of the end, and if black America fails to stand up for the republic, the tragedy will come full circle and the Marxists will win.

But what makes this so insidious is that the new Marxism is far more racist than anything else this country has ever seen. Under segregation and Jim Crow, blacks still had a place in society. They were treated as second class citizens, but they still had a place. Even under slavery, blacks were generally praised for being loyal and hard-working. But within the intersectional narrative, there is no place for “whiteness.” If “people of color” are the new proletariat, then whites are the new capitalists and need to be purged for the crime of being white.

That is why, in true Orwellian fashion, they had to change the dictionary definition of “racism.” The most racist people in American history are now in the streets chanting “black lives matter!” and attacking—sometimes even killing—those who dare to say that all lives matter. And when you try to point out that all black lives matter, they reject that as well, because at the end of the day, it isn’t about black lives at all. It’s about ideology.

War is peace.

Freedom is slavery.

Ignorance is strength.

Marxism is the new black.

Speaking Out Again

Hello there.

It’s been a very long time since I posted on this blog. I wonder if anyone is still following it. About a year ago, I pivoted from the blog to my newsletter, and while that’s going well, this blog has been mostly neglected.

And it would have continued that way, if not for recent events. I’m talking, of course, about the ~~peaceful protests~~ ~~race riots~~ ~~Marxist insurrection~~ ~~domestic color revolution~~ whatever the hell is happening in the United States right now. But the thing that really pushed me to action was Kris Rusch’s latest business post: Speaking Out.

Until that post, Kris was one of the people I admired most in the publishing industry. I’ve followed her business blog since 2010, and she was one of the most influential people in convincing me to take the plunge and self-publish. It’s been one of the best decisions of my life, not just from a career perspective, but from a personal perspective as well.

In her latest post, however, I feel that Kris went over the cliff with the rest of our fractured country. Here are the parts that got to me:

The letter [Jeff Bezos] posted on his Instagram page from some racist named “Dave” (last name redacted) told Bezos he would lose customers if he continued supporting Black Lives Matter. The letter is breathtaking in its racism…
…the people who bother me the most are the folks who, for economic or political reasons, can ignore the racism and hatred that spews daily from the White House…
I draw the line at hatred, racism, and bigotry in all its forms. I can’t respect a bigot. I don’t want to be near a racist…
If this post makes you feel the urge to write me a screed or tell me that I should tolerate the bigots for the sake of unity, please do me a favor and just leave.

What is a “racist”? What is a “bigot”? To the left-wing ideologues who control the cultural narrative right now, it’s anyone who dares to oppose their radical agenda. The mayor of Minneapolis is “racist” because he won’t abolish the police, in the midst of the most violent and destructive riots that city has ever seen. White people who refuse to literally kneel before people of color and denounce their white privilege in communist-style struggle sessions are now considered “bigots.” Anyone who dares to utter any sort of criticism or counter-argument to the narrative of Black Lives Matter is fired, canceled, humiliated, doxxed, and destroyed.

Does Kris not see this? When you are so ideologically possessed that a “bigot” is anyone who refuses to (literally) kowtow to your ideology, a tolerant and diverse society becomes impossible? When speech is violence and violence is speech, violence will be used to silence speech. Those who are kind to the cruel inevitably become cruel to the kind.

I tried to post a comment on her blog, explaining that some of these “bigots” who have unfollowed her or withdrawn their Patreon support aren’t doing it because they want to “silence” her, but because they feel she doesn’t recognize that they have legitimate reasons for disagreeing with her, and aren’t the bigots she thinks they are. Yes, Kris, it’s important to speak out, but it’s also important to listen.

What happened next was all too predictable. On a blog post about the importance of speaking up, Kris silenced me. The only comments that she has allowed are the ones that fawn over her and tell her she’s right. Typical.

I can endure a lot of bullshit, but two things I absolutely cannot abide: gaslighting and hypocrisy. So ultimately, it was this episode with Kris, a person I used to admire and respect, that spurred me into action.

This blog is going to become a lot more active in the coming weeks and months. The newsletter will still be my main vehicle for reaching out to readers and cultivating fans, but the blog will be a place to share my more controversial thoughts and opinions. That said, I intend to be very deliberate and conscientious about what I post here, and avoid shitposting, spewing outrage, or going off on political rants.

My working assumption is that the chaos engulfing our country will continue to escalate through the 20’s, and that things will get much, much worse before they get better. We may see an American holocaust. We may see American gulags. We are already experiencing the digital ghettoization of libertarian and conservative voices—or, more accurately, voices that refuse to conform to the cultural and ideological narrative of the progressive left.

That said, I am still optimistic about the future. I believe that after the chaos and violence plays itself out, we will return to the core values that make us Americans. The Republic will survive. Liberty will prevail. Enough of us will refuse to go over the cliff with everyone else that we will, when all of this is over, restore our country.

When that happens, the only people with any moral authority will be the ones who refused to bend the knee—the ones who had the courage to speak out at the risk of losing their careers, their livelihoods, and in some cases even their lives. People like Jordan Peterson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin, and others who stand in the face of cancel culture to call out the lies—the gaslighting and hypocrisy—and serve the truth.

This is my mission statement for my writing career:

To serve the truth and empower my readers to be better people for reading my books.

I cannot remain silent and accomplish this mission. The forces that push us to bend the knee are the ones that compel us to speak out, because we must speak out if we refuse to go over the cliff with the rest of humanity.

I recognize that this is essentially the same argument that Kris was making. And on this point, I think she’s right. Where she goes off is in calling anyone a bigot who falls outside of her narrow echo chamber. I despise echo chambers and don’t intend to fall into any of them.

So I’m going to set some rules.

First, I’m going to assume that anyone who engages with this content is a reasonable person who has come in good faith, no matter their views. No matter how vociferously you disagree with me, I will always strive to see the best in you, and to be generous with the benefit of the doubt.

Second, I’m going to assume that most of my fans and readers are going to disagree, on some level, with the more controversial things that I post here. Some of them will agree and voice support, but others will roll their eyes and click away. I’m not going to fall into the trap of thinking that all good people see the world the way that I do, because that way lies madness.

Third, and most importantly, I’m going to bet that if I keep the first two assumptions on the forefront of my mind with everything that I post here, my readers and fans will stay with me even when I share an opinion with which they vociferously disagree. In today’s hyper-partisan atmosphere, that’s a very dangerous assumption to make, but I don’t think my readers are the kind of people who would jump off the cliff with the rest of humanity.

I think there’s still a majority in this country who see the insanity for what it is, but don’t know what to do about it. That’s the person I’m writing this blog for: the one who’s wondering if they’re the only sane one in a world gone mad. Until just a couple of years ago, that was who I was. But now, I believe that even with all the craziness right now, there are a lot more people like us than we realize.

So yeah, the blog is back, and it’s going to get spicy. I may lose a few readers because of it, though hopefully not too many as I keep to the three rules that I listed above.

And if you have any thoughts or reactions, I’m interested to hear from you! Like I said at the start of this post, I have no idea if anyone still follows this blog, but I guess we’ll find out soon enough. The newsletter will remain my main focus, but I’ll post to this blog as often as the spirit moves me, which may be sporadic but won’t be never. And I’ll try to keep it as timely and interesting as I can.

2019-11-14 Newsletter Author’s Note

This author’s note originally appeared in the November 14th edition of my author newsletter. To subscribe to my newsletter, click here.

So the latest controversy in SF&F fandom is the stripping of John Campbell’s name from the Campbell Award. The latest issue of Locus magazine has an op-ed from Cory Doctorow defending that decision, and it was so deserving of a fisking that I went ahead and fisked it myself. You can find it on my blog.

That said, I do think there were some good things in Doctorow’s piece. The message in the second half of the article, that people are neither wholly good nor wholly evil, and that we should learn from our misdeeds and set them right, is a message that I think we really need to hear, especially in today’s cancel culture that defines everyone by the worst thing they’ve ever said or done.

However, the good parts of the article are completely contradicted by the bad parts, where Doctorow argues that Campbell’s entire legacy is tainted and therefore needs to be cancelled. He also (surprise surprise) brings up the Sad Puppies and calls us all “white nationalists,” “Nazis,” and “the misogynist/white supremacist wing of SF.”

It’s not that I want to defend Campbell’s sexism and racism. I’m sure he had many odious views. I could even be convinced that it’s appropriate to retire the Campbell Award and replace it with something else, similar to moving offensive Confederate statues out of the public square and into museums instead.

The problem is that Campbell’s detractors are just as odious in their worldviews as he was, if not more so. When accusing someone of being “male” and “white” is enough to get them cancelled, how can that be anything but sexist and racist?

Which brings me to the ugly parts of the article: the naked hypocrisy. Doctorow stops just short of calling for the digital equivalent of a book burning, but he left me with the impression that he’d be the first to light the match. I don’t think that’s a misread either, because of this line:

Campbell’s impact on our field will never be truly extinquished (alas), but

Yep. And all the moderates, conservatives, libertarians, and old-school liberals in the field are part of the “misogynist/white supremacist wing of SF” too. Who’s the fascist again?

That’s about as far into politics as I care to go. I know you probably aren’t into science fiction for the politics, but if you want to read a more detailed fisking of this ridiculous article, you can find it on my blog. In the meantime, I’ll be back to more important things, like writing.

A Much Deserved Fisking

In the November issue of Locus magazine, Cory Doctorow wrote an op-ed piece defending Jeannette Ng and the decision to strip Campbell’s name from the Campbell Award. At least, that’s how it started out, but it quickly devolved into a hatchet piece against everyone in science fiction whose politics lie somewhere to the right of Stalin.

Ever since Sad Puppies III, I’ve more or less gotten used to the gaslighting, hypocrisy, and projection that has become de rigeur in the traditional publishing side of the field. But somehow, Doctorow’s hit piece manages to hit a new high water mark for leftist insanity.

Since my own politics lie somewhere between Boadicea and Genghis Khan, I thought it would be fun to give the piece a good old-fashioned fisking. I can’t pretend to be as good at it as Larry Correia (and I sincerely hope he fisks it himself), but damn, if anything ever was written to be fisked, it was this ridiculous piece.

Doctorow writes:

At the Hugo Awards ceremony at this summer’s Dublin Worldcon, Jeannette Ng was presented with the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Ng gave an outstanding and brave acceptance speech

Translation: Ng reinforced the dominant far-left narrative in the science fiction field, telling the gatekeepers exactly what they wanted to hear and earning widespread praise for it.

True bravery is Jordan Peterson deleting his $35,000/month Patreon in protest of their hate speech policies, or Kanye West coming out as a devout Christian, producing a worship album, and announcing that he will no longer perform any of his old songs.

in which she called Campbell – the award’s namesake and one of the field’s most influential editors – a “fascist” and expressed solidarity with the Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters.

You know who else shows solidarity with the Hong Kong protests? That’s right—everyone’s favorite deplorable frog!

Now that’s a dank meme.

I’m curious: does this make Ng a white supremacist for showing solidarity with people who use such a rascist hate symbol? Does it make Cory Doctorow a dog whistler to the far right for appealing to these obviously racist deplorables?

Of course not, but that’s the level of insanity we’ve fallen to.

I am a past recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (2000) as well as a recipient of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (2009). I believe I’m the only person to have won both of the Campbells,

All red flags to deplorable readers like me,

which, I think, gives me unique license to comment on Ng’s remarks, which have been met with a mixed reception from the field.
I think she was right – and seemly – to make her remarks. There’s plenty of evidence that Campbell’s views were odious and deplorable.

There’s that word: “deplorable.” Whenever someone uses it unironically, it’s a sure sign that they hate you. It’s also a sign that they don’t actually have a good argument.

It wasn’t just the story he had Heinlein expand into his terrible, racist, authoritarian, eugenics-inflected yellow peril novel Sixth Column.

I haven’t heard of that one. Thanks for the recommendation, Cory! I’ve already ordered it.

Nor was it Campbell’s decision to lean hard on Tom Godwin to kill the girl in “Cold Equations” in order to turn his story into a parable about the foolishness of women and the role of men in guiding them to accept the cold, hard facts of life.

Okay, I call bullshit. “Cold Equations” wasn’t about the “foolishness of women,” it was about how when our inner humanity comes into conflict with the hard realities of the universe, the hard realities always win.

Switch the genders—a female pilot and a teenage boy stowaway—and the story still works. Switch the endings—have the pilot decide to keep the stowaway, dooming himself and the sick colonists—and it does not.

In fact, it makes the girl even more of a hapless, weak feminine stereotype. Stepping into the airlock voluntarily is an act of bravery. In some ways, she’s stronger than the pilot—and that’s kind of the point.

The thing that makes “Cold Equations” such a great story is that it functions as something of a mirror. It’s the same thing with Heinlein: those who see him as a fascist are more likely to be authoritarians, while those who see him as a libertarian are more likely to be libertarians themselves. After all, fascism is “citizenship guarantees service,” not “service guarantees citizenship.”

It’s also that Campbell used his op-ed space in Astounding to cheer the murders of the Kent State 4. He attributed the Watts uprising to Black people’s latent desire to return to slavery.

Was John Campbell a saint? No, and I don’t think anyone’s claiming that. In the words of Ben Shapiro, two things can be true at once: John Campbell had some racist, sexist views, and stripping his name from the award is wrong. (Also, that Doctorow is full of shit.)

The Campbell award isn’t/wasn’t named after him because he was a perfect, flawless human being. It was named after him because of his contributions to the field. If we’re going to purge his name from the award, are we also going to purge all of the classic golden-age books and stories that he edited, too? Are we going to have the digital equivalent of a book burning? Because that strikes me as a rather fascist thing to do.

These were not artefacts of a less-englightened [sic] era. By the standards of his day, Campbell was a font of terrible ideas, from his early support of fringe religion and psychic phenomena to his views on women and racialized people.

What are the standards of our own day? In what ways are we less-enlightened? Are future generations likely to accuse Doctorow of being a “font of terrible ideas,” just like he accuses Campbell here?

Do unborn black lives matter? If Trump is truly a fascist, why does the left want him to take all our guns? Is it okay to be white? Is Islam right about women? Is transgender therapy for prepubescent children just another form of conversion therapy? Are traps gay?

When you free your mind to explore new ideas, a lot of them are bound to be terrible. It’s simply Sturgeon’s law. So is Doctorow criticizing Campbell for having an open mind, or for not conforming to Doctorow’s values and beliefs?

Who’s supposed to be the fascist again?

So when Ng held Campbell “responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day.

I’m pretty sure that taking hormone blockers and getting your balls cut off makes you a hell of a lot more sterile than anything else. Lesbians, gays, transgenders, queers—all of these tend to be sterile as a general rule. Most babies are still made the old-fashioned way.

Male.

Isn’t her word choice kind of sexist here? I mean, she could have used the word “patriarchal,” but she didn’t. She. Deliberately. Used. The. Word. “Male.”

White.

Is she saying that it isn’t okay to be white?

Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonisers,

Come on, Ng. Let’s not be racist. There were plenty of imperialists and colonizers who weren’t white Europeans. After all, how can we forget Imperial Japan and the Rape of Nanking? Now that was an ambitious massacre. The Turks also ran a pretty brutal empire, as did the Zulus and the Aztecs. You can’t tell me that cutting out the beating hearts of more than 80,000 prisoners to rededicate your temple isn’t ambitious.

settlers and industrialists,”

Find me one place that was not built by “settlers.” Find me one human being on this planet who has not benefitted from “industrialists.” Who do you think makes the vaccines and antibiotics? Who do you think makes machines that harvest your food?

Just for a single day, I would like to see all of these anti-capitalist types live without any of the benefits that capitalism and modern industry provide.

she was factually correct.

And yet, so completely full of shit.

In the words of Andrew Klavan, you can’t be this stupid without a college education.

Not just factually correct: she was also correct to be saying this now.

Because it’s [current year]!

Science fiction (like many other institutions) is having a reckoning with its past and its present. We’re trying to figure out what to do about the long reach that the terrible ideas of flawed people (mostly men) had on our fields.

The best way to fight a terrible idea is to allow it out in the open while fostering freedom of speech. In the words of Andrew Breitbart, sunlight is the best disinfectant.

The reckoning that Doctorow is calling for is something that’s already built into the field. Science fiction is constantly evolving and revisiting its past. Good science fiction not only builds on the stuff that came before, it critiques it while taking the ideas in a new direction.

We don’t need to tear down the legacy of the giants in the field who came before us; we simply need to build up our own legacies for the generations that come after us. But that’s not what Ng and the social justice warriors want to do.

It isn’t a coincidence that the traditionally published side of the field is rapidly losing market share as the SF establishment seeks to purge everything that could possibly offend their progressive sensibilities. The people doing the purging can’t compete on the open market because their toxic ideologies don’t resonate with the buying public, so they’re forced to resort to the digital equivalent of burning books and tearing down statues. Meanwhile, indie publishing is eating their lunch.

Get woke, go broke.

We’re trying to reconcile the legacies of flawed people whose good deeds and good art live alongside their cruel, damaging treatment of women. These men were not aberrations: they were following an example set from the very top and running through the industry and through fandom,

Future generations will struggle to reconcile our good deeds and our good art with our cruel and inhuman treatment of the unborn.

None of this is new. All of us are flawed; every generation is tainted with blood and sins that are reprehensible to those that follow. Realizing all this, you would think a little introspection is in order. But the people today who are so eager to throw stones are completely lacking in self-introspection that they can’t—or rather, won’t—see their own blood and sins.

to the great detriment of many of the people who came to science fiction for safety and sanctuary and community.

Is science fiction a “safe space,” or is it the genre of ideas? It can’t be both at the same time. Ideas are inherently dangerous.

It’s not a coincidence that one of the first organized manifestations of white nationalism as a cultural phenomenon within fandom was in the form of a hijacking of the Hugo nominations process.

Bullshit. If you think that the Sad Puppies were white nationalists, you’re either stupid or willfully ignorant (a distinction without a difference).

Larry Corriea’s flagship fantasy series, the Saga of the Forgotten Warrior, is set in an Indian-inspired fantasy world populated entirely by brown people. Brad Torgerson has been happily married to a woman of color for decades. Sarah Hoyt is both latina and an immigrant.

If this article was written three years ago, you would have just called them all racists, but you can’t do that now because “racist” has lost its edge. You’ve cried wolf far too many times, and no one pays attention to those accusations anymore. That’s why you use words like “fascist,” “white nationalist,” and “white supremacist” to describe your enemies—not because you actually believe it, but because those accusations haven’t yet lost their edge.

While fandom came together to firmly repudiate its white nationalist wing, those people weren’t (all) entryists who showed up to stir up trouble in someone else’s community. The call (to hijack the Hugo Award) was coming from inside the house: these guys had been around forever, and we’d let them get away with it, in the name of “tolerance” even as these guys were chasing women, queer people, and racialized people out of the field.

Translation: we’re done with paying lip service to “tolerance” and “open-mindedness.” From now on, if you don’t look like us, act like us, or think like us, we’re going to do everything we can to destroy you.

I’m telling you, these people hate us. That’s why they call us “deplorables.” That’s why they paint us as racists and fascists, even when we’re nothing of the sort. They don’t want to listen to us. They don’t want to give us a fair hearing. They want to destroy us.

Stripping Campbell’s name from the Campbell Award is just another example of this toxic cancel culture. It isn’t about reckoning or reconciliation. It’s a naked power grab.

Those same Nazis went on to join Gamergate, then became prominent voices on Reddit’s /r/The_Donald, which was the vanguard of white nationalist, authoritarian support for the Trump campaign.

See, this is why I can’t trust you, Cory. Gamergate had legitimate grievances with Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, and Gawker. Trump supporters had legitimate reasons to want to stop Hillary Clinton from becoming president. Yet you casually dismiss all these people as deplorables, racists, and fascists without even listening to them.

That’s intelluctually dishonest, Cory. It’s also a form of gaslighting.

The connections between the tales we tell about ourselves and our past and futures have a real, direct outcome on the future we arrive at. White supremacist folklore, including the ecofascist doctrine that says we can only avert climate change by murdering all the brown people, comes straight out of SF folklore, where it’s completely standard for every disaster to be swiftly followed by an underclass mob descending on their social betters to eat and/or rape them (never mind the actual way that disasters go down).

I don’t think Cory Doctorow has any idea what actually happens when society collapses. When the thin veneer of civilization gets stripped away, people will eat each other. We’ve seen this just recently in Venezuela, Syria, and Mexico. Here in the US, we can see the seeds of our own collapse in Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, Baltimore, and Detroit (all very blue and progressive cities, by the way).

Also, I don’t think Cory Doctorow has any idea what he’s talking about when he says “white supremacist folklore.” What is that even supposed to mean? Just a couple of paragraphs ago, he called all the Sad Puppies “white nationalists,” and that obviously isn’t true. By “white supremacist folklore,” does he mean all the science fiction that doesn’t fit his radical progressive political ideology? Once again, he’s painting with an overly broad brush.

Also, notice how he uses “white supremacist” instead of “racist.” He can’t use “racist” because that word has been overused. Give it a couple of years, and “white supremacist” will lose its edge as well.

When Ng picked up the mic and told the truth about Campbell’s legacy, she wasn’t downplaying his importance: she was acknowledging it. Campbell’s odious ideas matter because he was important, a giant in the field who left an enduring mark on it. No one questions that. What we want to talk about today is what Campbell’s contribution was, and what it means.

Whenever the people on the progressive left claim that they want to have a “conversation” about something, what they really mean is “shut up and let me tell you how I’m right and you’re wrong.” There is no way to have an honest dialogue with these people, because they will not listen to us “deplorables.” Cory Doctorow has already demonstrated this with his blanket accusations against all the supporters of Gamergate, the Sad Puppies, and President Trump.

These people don’t want to talk about “what Campbell’s contribution was, and what it means.” They want to purge him from the field. Metaphorically, they want to burn his books and tear down his statues.

Look, I’m not trying to defend all of Campbell’s views here. I’m all for having an honest discussion about his bad ideas and how they’ve influenced the field. But I don’t believe I can have that discussion with people who clearly hate me, and will do whatever it takes to cancel and destroy me.

After Ng’s speech, John Scalzi published a post where he pointed out that many of the people who were angry at Ng “knew Campbell personally,” or “idolize and respect the writers Campbell took under his wing… Many if not most of these folks know about his flaws, but even so it’s hard to see someone with no allegiance to him, either personally or professionally, point them out both forcefully and unapologetically. They see Campbell and his legacy abstractly, and also as an obstacle to be overcome. That’s deeply uncomfortable.”
Scalzi’s right, too: the people who counted Campbell as a friend are authentically sad to confront the full meaning of his legacy. I feel for them.

Do you really, though?

It’s hard to reconcile the mensch who was there for you and treated his dog with kindness and doted on his kids with the guy who alienated and hurt people with his cruel dogma.

Did you catch the sneaky rhetorical trick that Doctorow uses here? He assumes that we’ve already accepted his argument that Campbell’s views were odious enough to have his name stripped from the award. Now he’s using an appeal to emotion to smooth it over.

Gaslighting of the highest order.

Here’s the thing: neither one of those facets of Campbell cancels the other one out. Just as it’s not true that any amount of good deeds done for some people can repair the harms he visited on others, it’s also true that none of those harms cancel out the kindnesses he did for the people he was kind to.

Or cancel all of his contributions to the field?

If Doctorow actually believes all this, why does he support Ng, who argues that everything Campbell did should be cancelled out by his most odious views? If anything, this is an argument against stripping Campbell’s name from the award.

Life is not a ledger. Your sins can’t be paid off through good deeds. Your good deeds are not cancelled by your sins. Your sins and your good deeds live alongside one another. They coexist in superposition.

Yes, and you should never underestimate the capacity of the human mind to believe two mutually exclusive ideas at the same time, especially when his name is Cory Doctorow.

You (and I) can (and should) atone for our misdeeds.

Not in today’s cancel culture, where everything you’ve accomplished can be erased by the one bad thing you tweeted or posted to Facebook ten years ago. There’s also no forgiveness or repentance, when you will be forever remembered for the worst thing you said or did.

We can (and should) apologize for them to the people we’ve wronged.

No. Giving a public apology is the absolute worst thing you can do in today’s cancel culture, because your enemies will smell blood in the water and come in for the kill.

Never apologize to a mob.

We should do those things, not because they will erase our misdeeds, but because the only thing worse than being really wrong is not learning to be better.

Oh, this is rich.

You first, Cory. Have you taken a good, hard look in the mirror? Have you really, truly asked yourself “what if I’m wrong?”

I don’t see eye to eye with Vox Day about everything, but he was right about this: you social justice types always lie, you always double down, and you always project your own worst faults onto your enemies. That’s why you’re so blind to your own hypocrisy, even when it’s staring you in the face.

I completely and totally agree that we should all strive to admit when we’re wrong and learn to be better for it, but you’re not in a position to tell me that, Cory. Not after painting all us “deplorables” with such a broad brush.

People are flawed vessels. The circumstances around us – our social norms and institutions – can be structured to bring out our worst natures or our best. We can invite Isaac Asimov to our cons to deliver a lecture on “The Power of Posterior Pinching” in which he would literally advise men on how to grope the women in attendance, or we can create and enforce a Code of Conduct that would bounce anyone, up to and including the con chair and the guest of honor, who tried a stunt like that.

Honest question: was the sexual revolution a mistake?

Asimov, Heinlein, Farmer, and all the other science fiction writers who explored questions of sexuality back the 60s and 70s were speaking to a culture that had abandoned traditional morality for a new, “free love” ethic. In other words, having thrown out all the rules, they now felt free to explore their newly “liberated” sexuality.

Was Asimov wrong in his attempt to rewrite our sexual norms? Personally, I believe it was, but I come from a religious tradition that still practices total abstinence before marriage and total fidelity within. Even then, it still depends on context. Groping a random stranger at a science fiction convention is obviously wrong, but playfully pinching my wife when the two of us are alone? Not so much.

I find it really fascinating that the woke-scolds of the left have become far more puritanical and prudish than the religious right ever was. Within the bonds of marriage, most of us religious types are actually very sex positive—after all, where do you think all those babies come from?

And Ng calls us “sterile.” Heh.

We, collectively, through our norms and institutions, create the circumstances that favor sociopathy or generosity. Sweeping bad conduct under the rug isn’t just cruel to the people who were victimized by that conduct: it’s also a disservice to the flawed vessels who are struggling with their own contradictions and base urges.

Fair enough, but there’s nothing generous about today’s cancel culture, which is frankly pathological in the way it defines everyone by their worst flaws and basest urges.

Creating an environment where it’s normal to do things that – in 10 or 20 years – will result in your expulsion from your community is not a kindness to anyone.

But how can we know what will and will not be acceptable in 10 to 20 years?

Twenty years ago, it wasn’t considered hate speech to say that there are only two genders. Ten years ago, “micro-aggressions,” “safe spaces,” and “white privilege” were not a thing. In fact, we’d just elected our first black president, bringing an end to our racially divisive past. /sarc

In the next 10 to 20 years, will we adopt all the theories and ideologies of the radical left? Or will the pendulum swing back in favor of more conservative morals and standards? We don’t know yet, because the future has not been written, and frankly, it’s not our place to write it. Every generation reinvents the world.

There are terrible men out there today whose path to being terrible got started when they watched Isaac Asimov grope women without their consent and figured that the chuckling approval of all their peers meant that whatever doubts they might have had were probably misplaced. Those men don’t get a pass because they learned from a bad example set by their community and its leaders – but they might have been diverted from their path to terribleness if they’d had better examples.

Certainly. I’m just not convinced that these virtue signalling, social justice warrior types are the examples that we should hold up.

They might not have scarred and hurt countless women on their way from the larval stage of shittiness to full-blown shitlord, and they themselves might have been spared their eventual fate, of being disliked and excluded from a community they joined in search of comradeship and mutual aid. The friends of those shitty dudes might not have to wrestle with their role in enabling the harm those shitty dudes wrought.

I’m confused. Does Doctorow believe that women are strong and independant, or does he believe that they’re tender, fragile creatures that need to be protected from socially inept, “larval” shitlords? I mean, I can see how they need to be protected from predators, since all of us—women and men—are vulnerable to various degrees… but you’d think that a strong, independent woman would be able to hold her own against a socially incompetent geek who is simply a “flawed vessel.”

Since her acceptance speech, Ng has been subjected to a triple-ration of abuse and vitriol,

Join the club.

much of it with sexist and racist overtones.

You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

But Ng’s bravery hasn’t just sparked a conversation, it’s also made a change. In the weeks after Ng’s speech, both Dell Magazines (sponsors of the Campbell Award) and the James Gunn Center at the University of Kansas at Lawrence (who award the other Campbell Award at an event called “The Campbell Conference”) have dropped John W. Campbell from the names of their awards and events. They did so for the very best of reasons.

No, they did it because they were bullied into it by the woke-scolds.

As a winner of both Campbell Awards, I’m delighted by these changes. Campbell’s impact on our field will never be truly extinguished (alas),

Yes, because what you really want is to tear down all the statues and burn all the books. Who’s the fascist again?

but we don’t need to celebrate it.
Back when the misogynist/white supremacist wing of SF started to publicly organize to purge the field of the wrong kind of fan and the wrong kind of writer, they were talking about people like Ng.

Bullshit.

The entire point of the Sad Puppies (which Doctorow intentionally and dishonestly mischaracterizes as “the misogynist/white supremacist wing of SF”) was to bring more attention to a diversity of conservative and libertarian writers, many of whom are also women and people of color. We were the ones who were excluded, not the ones doing the excluding. In fact, we invented the words “wrongfan” and “wrongfun” to describe the unfair way that we were treated by the mainstream establishment.

Please stop trying to gaslight us, Mr. Doctorow. Please stop projecting your own faults onto us, and recognize your own hypocrisy which is laced throughout this article. I don’t expect a public apology, since I wouldn’t offer one myself, but do wish for once that you would just listen to the people on the other side of these issues. Just. Listen.

I think that this is ample evidence that she is in exactly the right place, at the right time, saying the right thing.

Meanwhile, traditional publishing and the SF establishment will continue to implode, and indies will continue to eat your lunch.

If all you want is to be king of the ashes, you can have it. The rest of us are off to build the new world.

Racism is trendy again

“People of color” is an inherently racist phrase.

There. I said it. I may get into trouble for saying it, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Before we unpack the phrase “people of color,” let’s first define our terms. This is where the heart of the controversy lies.

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, racism means:

: poor treatment of or violence against people because of their race

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, racism means:

Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.

I refer to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary specifically because they are the two highest authorities in the English language. In the interest of impartiality, I’ll include the Wiktionary definition as well, which anyone can edit:

Prejudice or discrimination based upon race.

Seems pretty clear, right? Racism is discrimination based on race.

That is, unless you’re a progressive. To them, the only people who can ever be racist are whites, because racism is systematic and the systems of oppression benefit whites at the expense of non-whites. This is called “white privilege,” and the fact that most of us cannot see it is further proof that it is true.

(Pay no attention to the fact that a black man became President of the United States—effectively the most powerful man on Earth—in the face of these “systems of oppression.” How do the progressives justify this? I have no frickin’ idea. The mental gymnastics it must take… but I digress.)

Because the system is racist, and all non-white people are oppressed, according to progressive “logic” non-whites cannot be racist. This effectively gives them a free pass to discriminate in almost any way, shape, or form against people who are white.

This is where the term “people of color” comes in. It’s simply a more polite way of saying “non-white.” Don’t believe me? Check out the Wikipedia article. It’s right there in the first sentence:

Person of color (plural: people of color, persons of color, sometimes abbreviated POC) is a term used primarily in the United States to describe any person who is not white.

In other words, it is a term that was invented to discriminate against whites. What do African-Americans, Punjabs, Japanese, Mayans, and Australian Aborigines racially have in common? Nothing at all—except that they’re all non-white, and therefore fall under the catch-all term “people of color.”

I despise the progressive redefinition of racism as much as I despise the term “reverse racism.” There is no such thing as reverse racism, because racism doesn’t have a damned direction! When ANYONE discriminates against another person based on ANY race, whether black, white, yellow, red, green, or purple, it is racism pure and simple.

Lately, I’ve seen the phrase “people of color” come up in the submissions guidelines of a number of short story markets. Usually, it will be something along the lines of a call of submissions for a special issue, though it sometimes appears in their diversity statements as well. To me, it always raises a red flag.

When all of the major markets are regulary running “people of color” special issues, with diversity statements calling for more submissions from “people of color,” then we’ve achieved a system that is racist to the core. If it weren’t for indie publishing and the Sad Puppies, I would be very wary of this trend. And if things change in the indie world to really put the squeeze on writers (subscription services, exclusivity agreements, royalty cuts, etc), I would be very concerned.

Make no mistake about it: “people of color” is a racist term. It’s also quite trendy, but that doesn’t make it any less racist.

I’ll leave you with this hilariously topical video from Sargon of Akkad: