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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
He included hairdressers, not barbers.
I am working on a variation of that very idea.
Yes some did. Want to drive their BP up? Inform them that The Black Speech of Mordor (which I will not utter here) is based on Turkish.
Larry posted again, with this little nugget at the end.
The left is gonna regret having to play by the rules they have set up.
I’ve noticed this when I was a frequent Everquest player, and the explanation is simple. We are humans in real life, but we enter a fantasy world to be something different. I don’t think it’s a fault at all, rather people wanting to be something they’re not already.
In Everquest, I only had one human toon. The rest consisted of a dark elf, high elf, wood elf, half-elf, dwarf, and barbarian (which is sort of human).
You mean the vandread and robotech animes?
When I see an orc, I see an elf that was captured by the fell Vala, Melkor, in the First Age and who was then twisted into a foul parody of their former selves in the black dungeons of Utumno.
Right on!
I see the mortal instruments of Gruumsh’s aggression.
They have LSD in D&D?
They don’t not have LSD in D&D. Granted, they don’t call it that.