Gormongous

Yeah, and the Sad Puppies conscripted Beale to do their fighting for them, only to have him lose it for them, by his very involvement, and poison any goodwill towards the objectives of their movement forever. It's a very clear loss for Torgensen and Correia, who are largely persona non grata in sci-fi now, whereas Beale has been striving mightily to move the goalposts for his own shit-stirring from "taking over" the Hugos in the short term to burning them down in the long term, ever since he discovered that his 390 stormtroopers or whatever are an order of magnitude fewer than just the most devoted of his opponents.

Eh, their "win" was really months ago, when they gamed the nominations. Yesterday's outcome was fans of all types rejecting the Puppies' methods and agenda, in record numbers. Sure, there were examples of "no award" being used — maybe slightly unfairly in the case of "Totaled," which wasn't terrible like almost every other Puppies nominee, and... well, that's a discussion for the Books subforum — but overall it was the Hugos functioning as well as they possibly could, given the Puppies' sabotage. The entire situation isn't ideal, for sure, but the "new normal" settled in with relative consensus and calm.

A narrative of speculative fiction that excludes women has always been at work, though. It's why people still bother to remember Terry Brooks, despite the extremely derivative nature of his writing, because otherwise the bridge between Tolkien and Jordan is all women: McCaffrey, Norton, Bradley, Lafferty, Kurtz, and so on. Good reading on this is Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing and its addendum, "She Wrote It, But It Was A Fad." Personally, I'm thrilled at the outcome. Whenever the reactionary side of nerd culture tries to stage a showdown, they fail. I don't expect them to learn, but it's a little bit good to see that they only have power in the shadows (and their own minds).

This article just came up on my Facebook. It's being actively updated, too: http://www.meta-activism.org/2015/08/sensible-responses-to-white-nonsense/

I think they're just catching wind of it. The actual con itself is happening right now, which is something about which NPR is much more likely to report than a couple of intersecting online conspiracies to fix the most prominent award in sci-fi. Overall, it seems mostly like good coverage, although I'm wincing at the bluntness of it all. They really make it seem like outsiders vs. insiders, near the end. For those who haven't been following the saga of several right-leaning authors forming a conspiracy to get them and their friends nominated because they felt they deserved a Hugo now, and then that conspiracy getting hijacked by easily the most hateful person in sci-fi and fantasy literature, it starts here in this thread and continues intermittently. Thanks to Merus, my favorite piece of writing on the movement has been by Philip Sandifer, although Eric Flint has really impressed me, too. I always thought that the latter was your typical neocon fantasist, given that his most successful series is a modern American town getting transported wholesale into the midst of the Thirty Years War and kicking a ton of ass, but apparently he's been getting his head cracked for the left since the early seventies.

I don't think it was to avoid witnesses, but it definitely was to force a demonstration to disperse or turn violent through direct confrontation with armed officers and then get broken up after they'd spent the entire day antagonizing it with heavy-handed but mostly futile attempts at control. The protesters blocked I-70 for a while, but they had returned to the intersection on their own. It was the police line attempting to force them to move off from there that turned the crowd ugly and gave the excuse to drop tear gas. Police sources claim that there were warnings, but I've found no civilian sources that corroborate that. Regardless, I'm not particularly sympathetic of a police force that integrates tear gas into its standard crown-control doctrine, considering that its use is banned in international warfare, and I have several friends whose lives have been endangered from its reckless deployment by police in St. Louis, especially when they "hotboxed" MoKaBe's Coffeehouse on South Grand last year by throwing in canisters and then blocking all exits after there were reports that protesters were taking refuge on that supposedly neutral ground.

The video doesn't help, either. It sells itself as an action movie, but it ends up looking terrible to me because the physicality that you expect in an action movie is totally absent. Like Argobot says, it's just a bunch of universally waifish women holding weapons and trying to look tough, like a bunch of children dressed up as soldiers for Halloween. If there's any motion at all, the camera's cutting around to make it happen; most of them just stand there to give the editor a break. Ugh.

I mean, maybe this is me being down on Ridley Scott's questionable directing chops, but I can't help but think that a big-budget movie is going to strip everything that's hypothetically interesting about the book out of it. It's much more difficult to convey the thought process and procedure of one-man problem-solving in a movie and the closest thing that Scott has to a movie like that in his filmography is Blade Runner, with its infamous "zoom and enhance" sequence. Matt Damon's fine, but it feels like this movie has the wrong pedigree to do justice to what most people like about the book, and instead seems like it'll focus on emotional stakes that the book was actually embarrassingly bad at establishing.

Zeus, all your posts are making me nostalgic for the period from the mid-nineties to the mid-naughties when full-cour shows were a given. There's something weirdly charming about a show that has between fourteen and eighteen episodes of material, but has to fill up twenty-odd episodes to round out the season. In comparison to the rush of the last two or three episodes in a half-cour show, I almost miss the dead zone starting after the midpoint of a full-cour show...

Wow, that's exciting. Anything to have more creative and interesting people releasing video content on Crusader Kings!

I mean, that's the problem with a lot of sandbox management games. Crusader Kings 2 has its sweet spot as a multi-title duke or a mid-level king during maybe the first century of play, at least for me, because my attention works best handling between six and ten vassals at the head of lineages with under two dozen members. Small enough that you know everyone's name, large enough that they interact with each other regularly. The problem, like with Fallout Shelter, seems to be that the path of least resistance for playing the game is to expand: the core mechanisms for doing so are the clearest and best supported, and expansion insulates you as the player against negative events that cause frustration and wasted time, even if those events tend to be the "interesting" part of the game. The biggest flaw with both games is that playing them gradually draws the fun out of them. With Crusader Kings 2, the solution might be a bit more straightforward (I've seen mods showing Bisson's estimated three- to five-generation die-out for noble patrilines to be a better model for fertility, for example), but it's definitely an issue faced by all sandbox management games, I think. I'm going to use this opportunity to suggest King of Dragon Pass again. It's on Steam now, too, and I think it's quite volatile for a sandbox-type game, which is refreshing.

Man, I was worried that RightStuf's current sale on Media Blasters merchandise would fuck me over before I could get paid, but instead I'm just reminded of how far Media Blasters has fallen from the company that once licensed Rurouni Kenshin. I mean, I remember when they had the license to Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei and Squid Girl?!, everyone thought they were making a bid to be at least on par with the fragments of ADV, but that's so far from what they are now. They've transitioned almost entirely to shitty Asian and sub-Asian live-action horror, and to hear the owner talk, it pays better than anime ever did. Depressing! Anyway, if you want to own Bible Black, Eiken, or random volumes of Genshiken, now's definitely the time.

Okay, I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt before, but now it's fairly apparent to me that you're being purposefully dense out of a desire to score rhetorical points. The problem is, you're so willing to ask any question but why? Why would white musicians succeed so radically at a new form of music, regardless of their level of skill or innovation, when a large preexisting community of talented black musicians has toiled in obscurity for at least half a century (more, if you count ragtime) and would continue to toil for decades more? Why were black musicians unable to sell their own music or performances directly to audiences, but were able to sell them to white musicians who could? If the white musicians weren't offering a superior product, outside of their own whiteness, then why did "white jazz" succeed in a marketplace where popular acceptance of "black jazz" took decades to catch up — and even then mostly through the efforts of select white musicians who recognized their own cultural debt? Well, whatever it is, it surely doesn't have anything to do with cultural appropriation and white supremacy, and it surely doesn't show how cultural appropriation can be harmful to a culture by devaluing its output once appropriated by other cultures. It's all just a forum of free exchange and may the best man win. Yeah, I'm out, guys. Sorry!

If those are the terms under which you'll accept, then yes. In addition to many other intangibles pertaining to how cultures interact and colonize each other, it's a much bigger finger in the eye for members of a mainstream culture to go around wearing oppressed people's stuff while said people are still being oppressed. I didn't mean to imply that it was a direct process of supply and demand, but the first jazz recording was an all-white band in 1917. Despite being a vast minority of jazz musicians and often less accomplished, white musicians continued to have equal or better representation among labels, bookings, and sales, often even buying up black musicians' music to perform with white musicians in order to meet the demand of white audiences. Contemporary accounts of jazz culture in hotspots like New Orleans speak of almost homogeneously black musicians, with a few white musicians of varying talent, but our recordings and records of the period make it look like the opposite. Some of the acknowledged greats of early jazz don't have a single recording to their name, because they were poor and black. That's just how cultural appropriation and white supremacy have always worked. In general, the odd growth of pre-1920s jazz was due to its "black" reputation as the Devil's Music, and only really the Prohibition, during which black musicians were hired for speakeasies because they were cheaper and less likely to talk to cops, and World War II, during which there were broadly just less white musicians around, helped to weaken that stigma. Even so, the rise of swing bands and "big" bands in the 1930s and 1940s, which represented the mainstream peak of jazz, were almost an all-white phenomenon and it took band leaders like Benny Goodman, who'd spent years subsidizing black bands like Fletcher Henderson's, hiring black musicians for the people who'd invented and grown jazz to enjoy some of its financial success. I would really rather not write a history of race and jazz in a forum post, so I'll stop there, but hopefully you find that modestly convincing.

I'm a pessimist, so I can't help but feel it probably won't be a good thing. It has a chance of being a neutral thing, but... I don't know. The way I see it, a victory for open-carry advocates is a victory for the runaway libertarianism that they mostly represent. It might diminish the power of the police, but their intent isn't to diminish it in order to reduce the amount of state-sponsored violence against oppressed peoples. It's to diminish it so that they themselves have more latitude to carry around lethal weapons and intimidate the local government and citizenry. It's selfish and childish activism, a fact that is reinforced by their brave stance of letting someone else do the protesting and possibly the dying for specious rights that (by and large) the black community isn't interested in defending. Yeah, there might be the media moment of seeing black people armed in identical fashion to white assholes and hence seeing the police's differing reactions, but when the best-case scenario is that no one is hurt and a minor rhetorical point is made... Yeah, I'm not optimistic.

Exactly. When white people are encouraged or permitted to wear hairstyles that black people are discouraged or forbidden from wearing, despite being traditional to the latter and an appropriation by the former, that ends up erasing black culture.

I guess I'm getting frustrated that these articles about the infantilization of something about American culture keep using data as the plural of anecdote. When you lump racist or homophobic comedians excluded for being openly racist or homophobic together with minority comedians excluded because student organizers were being over-cautious, then use the coincidence of both to make the same incredibly tired argument about "runaway PC culture," I'm not inclined to give your article a terribly charitable reading. The main focus of Flanagan's argument is how an organization like NACA causes both students and artists to suffer by restricting their contact with truly good humor, but most of her evidence for how they suffer is built around very specific assumptions of what is good humor and what is not. My inclination, from my own experience as an undergraduate, graduate, and teaching assistant, is that those assumptions about students at least (I'm not a comedian) are somewhat faulty and the conclusions that she derives from them about the state of college campuses ("academic careers destroyed by a single comment," to whom does that literally happen besides idiots like Tim Hunt) are almost entirely so. There is virtually nothing about university administration or finances, save when Flanagan drags it into the conversation to support much more specific points about the development of "political–correctness" on college campuses, almost entirely confined to two short paragraphs in the midsection. It's just not a very good article, far too impressionistic and dragging its narrative arc relentlessly towards preordained conclusions about the awful wages of PC culture. She virtually has to stand on a soapbox and insist that, even though the students look happy and open to new ideas, they're not, because of this undercurrent she's detected in their preference for "anodyne" comedy — an undercurrent that seems to be common in almost all her articles, which are overwhelmingly about misunderstood targets of controversy and the defects of the modern college-age lifestyle.

Uh... The Oath Keepers plan to arm fifty black people with AR-15s to make a statement on open carry. Somehow I imagine that the police are suddenly going to be a lot less welcoming to the Oath Keepers if they go through with what they claim to be planning.

I think you messed up the link, here's the actual article, and I agree that it's excellent and quite detailed. However, as always, the comments are worthless, although mostly unoffensive this time, since they're all #GamerGate people harping on minor factual inaccuracies and a general failure to accept their movement on the terms that they themselves set...

You could easily say it, but do you have any proof at all, even anecdotally, or are you just arguing from the abstract? Because I can name dozens upon dozens of aesthetics and objects that have been appropriated from black culture just during the past century, and I don't think that any of them "helped by providing a data point" that contradicted prevailing cultural attitudes. Did the century of white-appropriated jazz and half-century of white-appropriated rock 'n' roll improve the fortunes of black people in America, even just in the music industry, or did they suffer as white people crowded them out, destroying their market and the cultural prestige that came from what was once their unique music? What you're talking about, that's just not how cultural appropriation works, even centuries ago with ancient Christianity borrowing from pagan cults or medieval Spaniards borrowing from Moriscos, unless the peoples doing the borrowing are themselves oppressed, a minority, or both, in which case the borrowing fosters integration into the dominant culture, which does sometimes improve the standing of a people even as it dilutes their identity. As for the rest of your post, I don't think we can have a useful conversation if you can't acknowledge that, yes, the politics of privilege mean that positive action is ineluctably important, but furthermore that there is a special kind of "fuck you, got mine" attitude that is core to the very nature of white supremacy in not only doing nothing to help, but also claiming a unique feature of an oppressed culture as your own.

A good follow-up on this conversation, more directed towards comic acts than trigger warnings on college campuses, but still: https://bitchmedia.org/article/college-students-dont-want-hire-racist-or-homophobic-comedians-why-problem-exactly

Because when a white person with an afro "passes" as neat, clean, and polite, owing entirely to their white privilege and not to anything that they're actually doing differently, it further reinforces to uncritical observers that those negative traits you mention are essential to black people themselves and not necessarily the culture that they produce and partake in. It's taking only the aesthetic object and leaving its baggage behind for black people to keep dealing with. It's the exactly same mentality of white imperialism that ultimately justified the taking of millions of square miles of land from native peoples because "they weren't using it" or "they weren't using it right," because when white people settled and farmed the land to great success, it demonstrated to them and to others the net "good" to humanity of taking native peoples' lands. It's still just about taking what's not yours without asking, mostly because you've seen other people do the same. I mean, the whole deal with privilege is that it's impossible to set aside privilege. Even the ability to do so is part and parcel of privilege. So yeah, you're right on that level , but even though intent isn't magic, I think an important part of being a person invested in social justice is recognizing and calling out the ways you benefit from your privilege, as well as just trying not to benefit more than you do just by default. There's probably a situation where a white guy wears an afro and is a great ally to black people in terms of grooming practices and in general, but still makes an effort to point out the principal reason that he gets respect from other white people while adopting parts of a black cultural aesthetic is because of his privilege being white, but... I don't know, that seems really complicated and exhausting and can't he just ditch the afro and simplify the discussion?

This isn't a gotcha, but can I just ask you to deepen this particular statement for me, before I respond more in depth? What cultural force perpetuates double standards, if not large groups of people electing to benefit from them rather than reject them and call them out?

No, you're right. It's truly terrible, in a show that I'd otherwise rate maybe a B+, and I don't really see the purpose at all. It's funny that The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan does almost the same thing with amnesia and yet, for all the show's gaping faults, that's charming and builds the character up, whereas in Golden Time it just reveals that the generally likable Banri used to be an annoying and spineless asshole before he lost his memory, which fails to make me terribly invested in any questions about whether he'll get it back.

I ended up watching Golden Time instead. I've had a weird week, gearing up for the semester to start, so I've only gotten about a third through. It's a funny show to watch, so far, because the premise is something that I should find revolting (Amnesiac Potato-kun x Manic Pixie Dream Bitch, anyone?) but the execution is generally solid and even a bit subtle. It does not surprise me at all that the source material is from the same mangaka as Toradora.