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The “Othering” of Conservatives in Sci-Fi and Fantasy
The new tactic by some on the left is to accuse people that they disagree with politically that they make them feel “unsafe.” The goal of this is to ensure that people that they disagree with are banned from social gatherings. Recently there have been three examples of this tactic being used with success.
First, author Jon Del Arroz was banned from attending WorldCon because he had received threats of mistreatment and wanted to wear a body cam to prevent others from claiming that he had attacked or insulted them. WorldCon claimed that wearing such a recording device violated their rules because bystanders would not be giving their consent to being recorded.
Next, one of the best selling authors in SciFi, John Ringo, was disinvited as the Guest of Honor for ConCarolinas because one of his characters in a series was into BDSM and someone accused Mr. Ringo of trying to solicit underage women to come to a BDSM party in his room with his wife. This was completely false and fabricated, of course, but that didn’t matter to those spreading the lies. In fact, the story around why the Con security was with Mr. Ringo all weekend was actually insanely sweet.
This week, Origins, one of the largest board gaming conventions had invited Larry Correia, another best-selling author, to be their Guest of Honor. Within a couple of hours of making this announcement, Origins had disinvited Mr. Correia because people had felt unsafe and that inviting him was encouraging various ills. The most direct accusation was made by a person who claimed that Mr. Correia had “attacked” her boyfriend. It turns out that in 2014, Larry, fisked an article her boyfriend had written at Tor.com that claimed that the largest gaming convention (GenCon) in specific and gaming in general. Larry’s takedown was hilarious to read and dissected his arguments point by point. Evidently, this is what constitutes as an “attack” to some on the left…disagreeing with their premise that every white person is racist…all the time. You can read Larry’s response here.
When I read Guy P. Benson and Mary Katherine Ham’s book End of Discussion, it was disturbing to see how far our political discussion has degraded to where people essentially just want to shut the opposition down. When I read The Intimidation Game by Kimberley Strassel, it was even scarier to see how the organs of government were used to shut down dissent. Now we see the next stage…the libelous exclusion of people from public events because of their views. The very accusation that they are “rape apologists” or homophobic/transphobic/etc. is enough for some to buckle to pressure from a small and very vocal minority.
A word of caution, this rabbit hole can go pretty deep. When you get into the Hugo Award situation that started the Sad Puppies campaigns, it’s amazing.
Published in Entertainment
C’mon on that one. Consider what the two have in common. Both are accountants, gun buffs, and have hot wives. At least in the MHI stories I’d say Correia wrote what he knew. Yeah, there are differences, but there are a lot of similarities.
But remember Tom Kratman is the real deal. I wonder what would happen if we got Tom and Kurt Schlicter in the same room together.
There’s someone who doesn’t hold back his opinions! (Krautman, that is.) And again, able to articulate them in a way few others can match.
And Owen is also part Portuguese IIRC. I’ll admit that the similarities might outweigh the differences. Then again, I’ve never seen Larry reverse time and send the whole world 5 minutes into the past or shake off a zombie bite just by thinking he could. And to the best of my knowledge he’s never claimed to be The Chosen One.
Just wait, oh skeptic. Give it time.
Didn’t some leftwingers go nuts on the last LOTR movie because the Orcs were supposedly racist caricatures of blacks?
Gnomes. You can’t eat just one.
They did. Goldberg pointed out that if you look at an orc and see a black person you are the racist.
Well, in D&D you can have human subraces, but they usually turn into national differences, there are also no gender distinctions either. Frankly I don’t understand why anyone would complain about D&D in this way because you can always make up whatever character rules you want. The rules in the books are suggestions of a balanced set, in the end everything kind of evens out assuming you are getting a proper mix of obstacles and monsters. Now if you happen to always be fighting in a dark cave against poisonous tripping monsters yah, the dwarf will have an easier time than a human character.
So, did Chang call them “Pepsis” or does that date me?
In my brief sojourn in mid-1970s Montreal, the anglophones I mainly spent time with referred to French-Canadians as “Pepsis” after what was apparently the preferred francophone cola. I heard a lot of the same ethnic jokes as I had heard in California, but with a stupid Pepsi as the butt. (Or sometimes a Newfie.) Didn’t stop these guys from being huge Canadiens fans, though.
Tribes can overlap in strange ways these days.
A dwarf may have an easier time than a human, sure, but that is no reason to violate the diversity standards set down by the Council of the Wise. We cannot consider Middle-Earth civilized until dwarves achieve parity in the sailing industry.
Oh, he won’t have to. His fans (us…) will do it for him.
What kind of anti-dwarfite are you to assume that dwarves don’t have parity in the sailing industry? What just because they live under ground? You assume they don’t sail the vast seas and rivers of the Underdark? Or that they do not industriously manufacture the great flying ships that navigate the Astral Sea?
Also my bring Middle Earth into this we are talking D&D and the two are very different.
“In Canada, we have more than a passing familiarity with confusion. We’re comprised of ten provinces and two territories, communicating across six time zones in two official languages. The English don’t understand the French, the French don’t understand the English, and the Inuit, quite frankly, couldn’t give a damn about either of them. Added to the equation is the Assembly of First Nations, with a total of 633 separate Indian bands speaking 180 sub-dialects among their fifty linguistic groups. And as if that weren’t enough, there are some fishermen on the East Coast with a remarkably whimsical accent.”
Due South, Season 1: Chinatown.
Middle Earth because it and the Council of the Wise predate and inform D&D like Greece and the Magna Carta inform America.
Me anti-dwarfite? No way – I love those little guys! They’re some of my best friends and I never talk bad about them or talk down to them (Rohirrim shot!) I can’t concern myself with the Underdark and those people down there, when every day dwarven sailors are literally overlooked by corporate ship-owners whose unfair hiring practices give dwarves short shrift.
#getwoke4dwarvenfolk, #wee@sea, #shrimpboats
[Edit: Italic tweak]
I have no choice but to link this.
Even if they were, I wouldn’t have a problem with most of those choices.
I was talking about dwarves. I don’t care where they come from.
If I may say so, you guys have gotten way too deep into the ins and outs of gamer discriminations, and have not looked at the larger issue. The issue does not begin and end with gamers.
In almost every domain of life these days, the SJW want to shut down free speech that is adversarial to their bias, and unfortunately they have become very successful. The SJW, if you haven’t noticed yet, particularly like to destroy activities many believe to be “fun”, gaming being one of them.
In related new Twitter announced a new draconian filter designed to censor free conservative speech, from Zerohedge:
Conservatives In An Uproar After Twitter Deploys Draconian Shadowban Filt
“Conservative Twitter users are in an uproar over draconian new “behavioral filters” which will start hiding tweets that “detract from the conversation,” and which CEO Jack Dorsey says are designed to “significantly reduce the ability to game and skew our systems” (less than six months before midterms, we might add).”
So true. It’s the same for a huge number of people I’d place in the category of Rent-a-Protester. This amorphous, easily swayed ‘group’ has played a role in everything from Rachael Carson madness to the VN war to nuclear power policy to Wall Street and onward to current issues. Funding – probably Soros, et al.
Mad Mike Williamson had a terrific post on this.
Killer line:
Twenty years ago, writers needed the cons to meet fans. Now, they can do a Google Hangout or Facebook Live and meet 20x the fans they could meet at even the biggest cons.
The times, they are a changin’.
Or Emperor of man
I loved that show.
So they’re just making public what they’ve been secretly doing for the last couple years.
There were also folk who claimed that the Orcs were simply doing what they had to do to survive. They overlap nicely on the Venn Diagram with the “what’s wrong with The Empire, really, when you stop to think about it” crowd.
It went downhill when Fraser started communing with his dead father.
Traditionally, Pepsi was more popular in Quebec because it was slightly cheaper than Coke. Calling ’em “peppers” was basically a way of making fun of them for being poor. Sorta the Canuckistani equivalent of “redneck”. (There are quite a few similarities between Quebecois culture and Southern US culture, and not just because the Acadians were deported to Louisiana.)
“Anywhere else in the world if someone says bonjour the response is usually, that’s French isn’t it? Ooh la la. Let’s have sex. In Canada, if someone says bonjour the usual response is f**k you, Pepper.”
– joke I heard once at the Montreal Comedy Festival
I *loved* the dead father – especially in the later seasons when he built the office in Frasier’s closet.
Gordon Pinsent played the role perfectly.
I would like to point out that in the role playing game Rifts there are dwarves from a world that has a 17th century buccaneer culture and craft ancient weapons into runic magic items and are serious, high sea sailing, true blue pirates! That is my kind of Dwarf!
See, that dimension is doing it right. But you can bet that Rift Dwarves were unionized and only overcame the rampant sizeism inherent in multi-racial pre-modern cultures with great effort before being able to actualize themselves in a field of endeavor usually reserved for the elite.