A comment from elsewhere on the Internet:

“Certainly the most puzzling part of the Sad Puppies campaign is the claim that Scalzi’s works are too literary to represent the mainstream of SF. That’s like saying a group of food critics are too snobbish because they ranked Arby’s above McDonalds.”

Reader, I LOLed.

Here's a replay from December 14 of 2001. Not much to add to it today except to say that I wish some cable channel would find a place for Ed Sullivan reruns. A pretty large number of the old shows still exist and I think they hold up fairly well. The show was so fast-paced that it's tough to get bored with even the lamest of acts. They'd be gone in about the time it would take you to find your remote control and locate the Fast Forward button. I imagine there might be clearance issues here and there but I do think there'd be an audience for it. If nothing else, it might reach the older audience as well as any of those channels filled with commercials for Rascal scooters and staircase lifts…

I'm on a deadline and I didn't have anything in particular I wanted to post here, so I thought I'd throw together a quick update. The photo above was selected just because I thought it was kinda neat, and because I somehow neglected to say anything here upon the passing of George Harrison.

I wasn't the only one who took scant notice. Had the events of 9/11 not already plunged a lot of folks into a state of ongoing mourning — and made us thoroughly conscious of our own, meager mortalities — the death of another fourth of The Beatles would have been a major kick in the karma.

As I look at the above photo, I can't help but think what Ed Sullivan must have been thinking as it was taken…something along the lines of, "The people I have to put up with to keep my show high in the ratings." From all reports, America's Master Showman — at least on Sunday nights on CBS — had no special affection for any of the zillions of singers and comedians and jugglers and performing anthropoids who traipsed across the stage where Mr. Letterman now works. Ed just loved the success and the money and especially the fame. When in one famous network match-up, Steve Allen went head-to-head against him on NBC, a lot of TV reporters wagered heavily on Steverino. After all, it was Steve, the man who could do anything — sing, do jokes, play piano, write songs, etc. — against Ed, the man who couldn't even introduce Jack Carter without it coming out "Jack Carson." (My fave of all the reported Sullivan gaffes was the time he described an actress as "currently starving on Broadway.")

Sullivan was an appallingly amateurish host, but that was an indicator of his greatest skill: He was a survivor. When he first started hosting The Toast of the Town — later redubbed The Ed Sullivan Show — just about everyone on TV was appallingly amateurish. Ed just had the tenacity and drive that allowed him to stick around, long after the professionals had encamped. It was almost charming that he never got any better.

But he hung in there. He beat The Steve Allen Show because, I suspect, he had the greater need to succeed. After all, Allen knew that if his show got cancelled, there'd be another Steve Allen Show along, sooner or later — and there was. (There were several, in fact.) Sullivan, it is said, lived with the belief that his show was his one shot at being a famous, well-paid TV star. He believed — probably accurately — that once it went off, he'd be back to being just another sports/Broadway columnist in the increasingly less-lucrative newspaper industry. So he fought like mad, trampling over competitors to book the biggest stars, the hottest acts…which led to the night The Beatles graced his stage.

In the Billy Crystal movie, Mr. Saturday Night, the comedian character he played had the misfortune to be booked that night to precede John, Paul, Ringo and George. This meant facing an audience of hysterical teen-age girls who resented every second anyone not from Liverpool was on stage. Well, that happened…to my friends, Charlie Brill and Mitzi McCall, who were the luckless comedy team on that evening's show. Charlie can still wake up in a cold sweat, recalling the worst challenge any comics ever faced.

But it made them a part of history…for something changed in America that night. When Elvis graced the Sullivan line-up — from the waist up — the change commenced, and when The Fab Four sang "She Loves You" or "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" or whatever they performed that night, the transformation was complete. The youth of the day had won, and the world would be all about them from that moment on…with the music of The Beatles often playing in the background.

I have no idea how much George Harrison had to do with this revolution, though I doubt he was carrying pictures of Chairman Mao. Perhaps he was just one of those historical figures who was fortunate enough to be near the epicenter when the Earth moved. Everyone seems to feel that John and Paul were the heart and brains of the band, not necessarily in that order.

Perhaps Mr. Harrison was just a good musician. His solo albums — which I seem to have liked more than a lot of rabid Beatles fans did — would bear that out. But, hey, he financed a couple of the better Monty Python projects and even put in a cameo in The Rutles…and I don't recall anyone ever saying anything bad about him. For that alone, we should weep for the man…that is, when we're not weeping for the sad fact that The Beatles, and therefore a lot of us, are now old men. Physically, at least.

The post John, Paul, George, Ringo and Ed appeared first on News From ME.

How photography was optimized for pale skin.

28 words to use instead of "awesome".

[Epistemic status: I am still in training. I am not an expert on drugs. This is poorly-informed speculation about drugs and it should not be taken seriously without further research. Nothing in this post is medical advice.]

I.

Which is worse – ruining ten million people’s sex lives for one year, or making one hundred people’s livers explode?

I admit I sometimes use this blog to speculate about silly moral dilemmas for no reason, but that’s not what’s happening here. This is a real question that I deal with on a daily basis.

SSRIs, the class which includes most currently used antidepressants, are very safe in the traditional sense of “unlikely to kill you”. Suicidal people take massive overdoses of SSRIs all the time, and usually end up with little more than a stomachache for their troubles. On the other hand, there’s increasing awareness of very common side effects which, while not disabling, can be pretty unpleasant. About 50% of users report decreased sexual abilities, sometimes to the point of total loss of libido or anorgasmia. And something like 25% of users experience “emotional blunting” and the loss of ability to feel feelings normally.

Nefazodone (brand name Serzone®, which would also be a good brand name for a BDSM nightclub) is an equally good (and maybe better) antidepressant that does not have these side effects. On the other hand, every year, one in every 300,000 people using nefazodone will go into “fulminant hepatic failure”, which means their liver suddenly and spectacularly stops working and they need a liver transplant or else they die.

There are a lot of drug rating sites, but the biggest is Drugs.com. 467 Drugs.com users have given Celexa, a very typical SSRI, an average rating of 7.8/10. 14 users have given nefazodone an average rating of 9.1/10.

CrazyMeds might not be as dignified as Drugs.com, but they have a big and well-educated user base and they’re psych-specific. Their numbers are 3.3/5 (n = 253) for Celexa and 4.1/5 (n = 47) for nefazodone.

So both sites’ users seem to agree that nefazodone is notably better than Celexa, in terms of a combined measure of effectiveness and side effects.

But nefazodone is practically never used. It’s actually illegal in most countries. In the United States, parent company Bristol-Myers Squibb (which differs from normal Bristol-Myers in that it was born without innate magical ability) withdrew it from the market, and the only way you can find it nowadays is to get it is from an Israeli company that grabbed the molecule after it went off-patent. In several years working in psychiatry, I have never seen a patient on nefazodone, although I’m sure they exist somewhere. I would estimate its prescription numbers are about 1% of Celexa’s, if that.

The problem is the hepatic side effects. Nobody wants to have their liver explode.

But. There are something like thirty million people in the US on antidepressants. If we put them all on nefazodone, that’s about a hundred cooked livers per year. If we put them all on SSRIs, at least ten million of them will get sexual side effects, plus some emotional blunting.

My life vastly improved when I learned there was a searchable database of QALYs for different conditions. It doesn’t have SSRI-induced sexual dysfunction, but it does have sexual dysfunction due to prostate cancer treatment, and I assume that sexual dysfunction is about equally bad regardless of what causes it. Their sexual dysfunction has some QALY weights averaging about 0.85. Hm.

Assume everyone with fulminant liver failure dies. That’s not true; some get liver transplants, maybe some even get a miracle and recover. But assume everyone dies – and further, they die at age 30, cutting their lives short by fifty years.

In that case, putting all depressed people on nefazodone for a year costs 5,000 QALYs, but putting all depressed people on SSRIs for a year costs 1,500,000 QALYs. The liver failures may be flashier, but the 3^^^3 dust specks worth of poor sex lives add up to more disutility in the end.

I don’t want to overemphasize this particular calculation for a couple of reasons. First, SSRIs and nefazodone both have other side effects besides the major ones I’ve focused on here. Second, I don’t know if the level of SSRI-induced sexual dysfunction is as bad as the prostate-surgery-induced sexual dysfunction on the database. Third, there are a whole bunch of antidepressants that are neither SSRIs nor nefazodone and which might be safer than either.

But I do want to emphasize this pattern, because it recurs again and again.

II.

In that spirit, which would you rather have – something like a million people addicted to amphetamines, or something like ten people have their skin eat itself from the inside?

I can’t get good numbers on how many adults abuse Adderall, but a quick glance at the roster for my hospital’s rehab unit suggests “a lot”. Huffington Post calls it the most abused prescription drug in America, which sounds about right to me. Honestly there are worse things to be addicted to than Adderall, but it’s not completely without side effects. The obvious ones are anxiety, irritability, occasionally frank psychosis, and sometimes heart problems – but a lot of the doctors I work with go beyond what the research can really prove and suggest it can produce lasting negative personality change and predispose people to other forms of addictive and impulsive behavior.

If you’ve got to give adults a stimulant, I would much prefer modafinil. It’s not addictive, it lacks most of Adderall’s side effects, and it works pretty well. I’ve known many people on modafinil and they give it pretty universally positive reviews.

On the other hand, modafinil may or may not cause a skin reaction called Stevens Johnson Syndrome/Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis, which like most things with both “toxic” and “necro” in the name is really really bad. The original data suggesting a connection came from kids, who get all sorts of weird drug effects that adults don’t, but since then some people have claimed to have found a connection with adults. Some people get SJS anyway just by bad luck, or because they’re taking other drugs, so it’s really hard to attribute cases specifically to modafinil.

Gwern’s Modafinil FAQ mentions an FDA publication which argues that the background rate of SJS/TEN is 1-2 per million people per year, but the modafinil rate is about 6 per million people per year. However, there are only three known cases of a person above age 18 on modafinil getting SJS/TEN, and this might not be different from background rates after all. Overall the evidence that modafinil increases the rate of SJS/TEN in adults at all is pretty thin, and if it does, it’s as rare as hen’s teeth (in fact, very close to the same rate as liver failure from nefazodone).

(also: consider that like half of Silicon Valley is on modafinil, yet San Francisco Bay is not yet running red with blood.)

(also: ibuprofen is linked to SJS/TEN, with about the same odds ratio as modafinil, but nobody cares, and they are correct not to care.)

I said I’ve never seen a doctor prescribe nefazodone in real life; I can’t say that about modafinil. I have seen one doctor prescribe modafinil. It happened like this: a doctor I was working with was very upset, because she had an elderly patient with very low energy for some reason, I can’t remember, maybe a stroke, and wanted to give him Adderall, but he had a heart arrythmia and Adderall probably wouldn’t be safe for him.

I asked “What about modafinil?”

She said, “Modafinil? Really? But doesn’t that sometimes cause Stevens Johnson Syndrome?”

And then I glared at her until she gave in and prescribed it.

But this is very, very typical. Doctors who give out Adderall like candy have no associations with modafinil except “that thing that sometimes causes Stevens-Johnson Syndrome” and are afraid to give it to people.

III.

Nefazodone and modafinil are far from the only examples of this pattern. MAOIs are like this too. So is clozapine. If I knew more about things other than psychiatry, I bet I could think of examples from other fields of medicine.

And partially this is natural and understandable. Doctors swear an oath to “first do no harm”, and toxic epidermal necrolysis is pretty much the epitome of harm. Thought experiments like torture vs dust specks suggest that most people’s moral intuitions say that no amount of aggregated lesser harms like sexual side effects and amphetamine addictions can equal the importance of avoiding even a tiny chance of some great harm like liver failure or SJS/TEN. Maybe your doctor, if you asked her directly, would endorse a principled stance of “I am happy to give any number of people anxiety and irritability in order to avoid even the smallest chance of one case of toxic epidermal necrolysis.”

And yet.

The same doctors who would never dare give nefazodone, consider Seroquel a perfectly acceptable second-line treatment for depression. Along with other atypical antipsychotics, Seroquel raises the risk of sudden cardiac death by about 50%. The normal risk of cardiac sudden death in young people is about 10 in 100,000 per year, so if my calculations are right, low-dose Seroquel causes an extra cardiac death once per every 20,000 patient-years. That’s ten times as often as nefazodone causes an extra liver death.

Yet nefazodone was taken off of the market by its creators and consigned to the dustbin of pharmacological history, and Seroquel is the sixth-best-selling drug in the United States, commonly given for depression, simple anxiety, and sometimes even to help people sleep.

Why the disconnect? Here’s a theory: sudden cardiac death happens all the time; sometimes God just has it in for you and your heart stops working and you die. Antipsychotics can increase the chances of that happening, but it’s a purely statistical increase, such that we can detect it aggregated over large groups but never be sure that it played a role in any particular case. The average person who dies of Seroquel never knows they died of Seroquel, but the average person who dies from nefazodone is easily identified as a nefazodone-related death. So nefazodone gets these big stories in the media about this young person who died by taking this exotic psychiatric drug, and it becomes a big deal and scares the heck out of everybody. When someone dies of Seroquel, it’s just an “oh, so sad, I guess his time has come.”

But the end result is this. When treatment with an SSRI fails, nefazodone and Seroquel naively seem to be equally good alternatives. Except nefazodone has a death rate of 1/300,000 patient years, and Seroquel 1/20,000 patient years. And yet everyone stays the hell away from the nefazodone because it’s known to be unsafe, and chooses the Seroquel.

I conclude either doctors are terrible at thinking about risk, or else maybe a little too good at thinking about risk.

I bring up the latter option because there’s a principal-agent problem going on here. Doctors want to do what’s best for their patients. But they also want to do what’s best for themselves, which means not getting sued. No one has ever sued their doctor because they got a sexual side effect from SSRIs, but if somebody dies because they’re the lucky 1/300,000 who gets liver failure from nefazodone, you can bet their family’s going to sue. Suddenly it’s not a matter of comparing QALYs, it’s a matter of comparing zero percent chance of lawsuit with non-zero percent chance of lawsuit.

(Fermi calculation: if a doctor has 100 patients at a time on antidepressants, and works for 30 years, then if she uses Serzone as her go-to antidepressant, she’s risking a 1% chance of getting the liver failure side effect once in her career. That’s small, but since a single bad lawsuit can bankrupt a doctor, it’s worth taking seriously.)

And that would be a tough lawsuit to fight. “Yes, Your Honor, I knew when I prescribed this drug that it sometimes makes people’s livers explode, but the alternative often gives people a bad sex life, and according to the theory of utilitarianism as propounded by 18th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham – ” … “Bailiff, club this man”.

And the same facet of nefazodone that makes it exciting for the media makes it exciting for lawsuits. When someone dies of nefazodone toxicity, everyone knows. When someone dies of Seroquel, “oh, so sad, I guess his time has come”.

That makes Seroquel a lot safer than nefazodone. Safer for the doctor, I mean. The important kind of safer.

This is why, as I mentioned before, I hate lawsuits as a de facto regulatory mechanism. Our de jure regulatory mechanism, the FDA, is pretty terrible, but to its credit it hasn’t banned nefazodone. One time it banned clozapine because of a flashy rare side effect, but everyone yelled at them and they apologized and changed their mind. With lawsuits there’s nobody to yell at, so we just end up with people very quietly adjusting their decisions in the shadows and nobody else being any the wiser.

I don’t want to overemphasize this, because I think it’s only one small part of the problem. After all, a lot of countries withdrew nefazodone entirely and didn’t even give lawsuits a chance to enter the picture.

But whatever the cause, the end result is that drugs with rare but spectacular side effects get consistently underprescribed relative to drugs with common but merely annoying side effects, or drugs that have more side effects but manage to hide them better.

The Psychiatry SHO has been through the different parties' manifesto commitments on mental health and comes to this conclusion:

It doesn’t take a PhD in politics to work out that the Lib Dem manifesto is head and shoulders above the Conservatives and Labour in terms of engagement with the issue and promises made. They have ticked pretty much every one of the Mental Health Policy Group’s boxes for suggested improvements. 

Again, there is an infatuation with wellbeing, but the groundwork done by Norman Lamb with his Crisis Care Concordat has gone some way to engendering trust in the party when it comes to tackling more weighty issues.

But, as he adds, the real question is whether we will have any power to implement these changes on 8 May.

You may recall that when I started regular blogging last year, the spur for that was writing about Conrad Russell’s An Intelligent Person’s Guide To Liberalism. The key to Russell’s liberalism is that it is a creed that always challenges and seeks to break down unaccountable forms of power. The other side to that coin – and a key difference of liberalism and libertarianism – is the recognition that power isn’t solely the preserve of the state, and can be exerted on us by a number of unaccountable forces.

One of the main sources of unaccountable power in Britain is the nexus of it that exists in the City of London, where the City’s own cloistered system of government reflects the corporate and banking power that is exerted from there over all of us. It’s the sort of unaccountable power that needs to be confronted and challenged to make it accountable to the people whose lives it dominates, and yet much of British politics exists in its thrall, scared to offend it in any way. Which leads to this:

Businesses, the City and markets all fear an economic lurch to the right or left. http://t.co/IjZpbVfoLt #GE2015 pic.twitter.com/zkbm1yDL2S

— Liberal Democrats (@LibDems) April 24, 2015

Not a challenge to the power of the City, the ‘markets’ or big business, but a capitulation to them, using their fears as a motivation to get people to vote. It’d be a weak message for the Tories to use, but for liberals to just roll over and willingly spread the message of an unaccountable few is just wrong.

We’re supposed to be a party that challenges power, that breaks it down and takes it back to the people. Instead we’re dancing to someone else’s tune in the hopes of a few crumbs from their table. We need to do better than this.

(Warning: Hugo neepery ahead. Ignore if you’re bored with the subject.)

As I’m musing on class today, I’d like to take a moment to address something I see being attempted by the Puppies, which is to cast the current Hugo contretemps as something akin to a class war, with the scrappy diverse underdogs (the Puppy slates) arrayed against “powerful, wealthy white men” such as myself, Patrick Nielsen Hayden and George RR Martin, the latter being a late addition to the non-existent SJW cabal; apparently we are now a cackling, finger-steepling triumvirate of conspiracy (See the link here at File770, which, again, has been invaluable as a repository of Hugo commentary this year).

So, let’s unpack this a bit.

One, I’m not entirely sure how much credit the Puppy slates should get for “diversity” when their most notable accomplishments are reducing the overall demographic diversity of the Hugo slate from the past few years, locking up five (previously six!) slots on the final ballot for the same straight, white, male author, and getting much of their “diversity” from conscripts to the slates, at least some of whom did not appear to have foreknowledge of their appearance there, and some of whom have since declined their nominations. Basically, if you’re going to argue diversity, you should probably not make the assertion so easily refutable by actual fact (it also helps not to have one of the primary movers behind the slates be an actual, contemptible racist and sexist).

Two, with regard to me, George and Patrick being “powerful, wealthy white men”: okay, sure, why not (I suspect Patrick, earning an editor’s salary in New York, might snort derisively that the idea that he is actually wealthy), but it’s interesting for any of the three of us to be criticized for these things by a partisan of slates whose dominance on the final Hugo ballot was accomplished substantially through the machinations of a fellow who is himself a scion of wealth and power, with enough dosh on hand to have his own publishing house (for which he is using the current Hugo contretemps as very cheap advertising), and, to a rather lesser extent, by a fellow who has many of the same advantages I or George do: Bestselling status, award nominations and, at least from public statements I can recall, a rather comfortable income from his work, largely from a company that shares at least one parent in common with one that publishes me, is a major house in the field, and is distributed by a major publishing conglomerate. Indeed, as it is an article of faith among the Puppies that I don’t actually sell all that many books, I suppose the argument could be made that he is more wealthy and powerful than I am! So well done him, and I wish him all the best in his career. But between these fellows and their circumstances, it’s difficult to cast this as a battle of underdogs versus wealth and privilege. There’s quite enough wealth and privilege to go around.

(There is at least one salient difference between me, Patrick and George, and the fellows I’ve mentioned, who share so many of the advantages that we three do. What that difference is I will leave as an exercise for the reader.)

Three, the Puppies drama isn’t about class, or privilege. It’s about envy and opportunism, and it’s also, somewhat pathetically, apparently about the heads of the Puppy slates being upset that once upon a time, they felt people in fandom were mean to them. As if they were the only people in the world that folks in science fiction fandom had ever been mean to. True fact: There is almost no one in science fiction and fantasy that someone else in fandom hasn’t been mean to at one time or the other. Science fiction fandom contains many people, including quite a few with questionable social skills. Not all of them are going to like you. Not all of them are going to like what you do. That’s not a conspiracy; that’s just a basic fact.

Here’s a thing: Look back in time to when I was nominated for Best Fan Writer. There was a whole lot of mean going on there; there are still fans who are righteously upset with me about it. Look at what people have said about each of the books of mine that have been nominated for Best Novel (look at what was said after I won it!). Look what people in fandom say about me on the Internet all the damn time. Hell, I remember rather vividly being at the Montreal Worldcon during my autograph session and this dude coming up, handing me Zoe’s Tale, and saying “It’s not really a good book and I don’t think it should be on the ballot and I don’t know why it is, but I guess since you’re here you might as well sign it for me.” Which I thought was really kind of amazing, in its own obnoxious way.

You know what I did? I signed his book. Because a) apparently he bought it and b) I’m not emotionally twelve years old. I can handle people being thoughtless and stupid and even occasionally intentionally mean in my direction, without deciding the the correct response is to burn down the Hugos, screaming I’ll show you! I’ll show you all! Which is, as it happens, seems to be another salient difference between me, Patrick and George, and these fellows. Unless you’re under the impression Patrick and George haven’t got their fair share of people disliking them, or saying mean things about them. They have; they’ve just decided to deal with it like the grown up humans they are.

So, no. This Hugo contretemps isn’t about class. But it might be, a little bit, about who has class, and how that affects what they do with their wealth and power.

British Electoral Study data sheds different light on the party

An analysis of data from the UK’s longest-running study of electoral behaviour has revealed how the bulk of UKIP’s support surprisingly comes from professional and managerial middle classes.

British Election Study Co-Director Professor Geoffrey Evans and BES Research Fellow Dr Jonathan Mellon, from Nuffield College Oxford, say contrary to the popular view advocated by some academic researchers, working class voters are only a little more likely to support Ukip.

And Ukip voters, they add, resemble European ‘radical right’ parties: an alliance between the working class, the self-employed and employers – and not the disenfranchised, ‘left behind’ voters, described commonly by the media and influential academic commentators.

Professor Evans said: “The idea that many Ukip voters are working class and that they therefore pose a threat to Labour’s support in the election has gained considerable currency ….But we find this is wrong; the working class basis of Ukip has been strongly overstated.The Party’s strongest supporters are often the self-employed and business owners.”

“Even within the working class, Ukippers tend to be low level supervisors, and not the disadvantaged semi and unskilled workers often thought to provide the core of the Party’s support.”

Dr Mellon said: “Ukip’s support is very similar in social composition to many other so called ‘radical right’ parties elsewhere in Europe – an alliance between the working class and the self-employed and employers – rather than a party of the ‘left behind’.

“And significantly in electoral terms, the differences in sizes between social classes means that numerically, the bulk of Ukip’s support comes from the larger professional and managerial middle classes.”

Quite what all this means on May 7th is hard to say. If this analysis is right then LAB would appear to be less vulnerable to UKIP than had been thought.

Mike Smithson

For 11 years viewing politics from OUTSIDE the Westminster bubble

For latest polling and political betting news follow @MSmithsonPB

"My friends just won't leave me alone"

The North Norfolk coast has long been a favourite stamping ground of mine. I often bring the Great Seal of Rutland to Blakeney Point for a holiday, and as a young man I would go to Cromer to catch the crabs.

I was summoned here yesterday by a tearful telephone call: “The road has been jam-packed with traffic for weeks. We can’t get in our out of the house. My children are hungry. Please, you must do something.” When I heard the address of my caller, my ears pricked up: it was the very same street in which our own Norman Lamb lives. So I travelled down to the Norfolk coast at once.

When I arrive at the road in question this morning, I do indeed find it crammed with traffic. So I tap on a few car windows and ask the occupants why they are there. “We are friends of Norman Lamb,” says the driver of the first vehicle. “We have come to tell him that we think he should stand as leader of the Liberal Democrats.” The second car contains someone who was at university with Lamb and says much the same, as do the inhabitants of the third car (a couple who met him on holiday a few years ago) and the fourth (who used to live just round the corner from him when he was at a previous address).

When I finally manage to get to Lamb’s front door, I find him a worried man. “I don’t want to be leader – the idea had never occurred to me – but my friends just won’t leave me alone.”

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South-West 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

Richard III, Twycross Zoo and Foxton Locks

"Bomb on the Buses"

Lord Bonkers continues his visit to Norfolk.

Norman Lamb’s friends have a lot to answer for

At this point we are interrupted by a woman whose daughter was at school with Lamb’s son and wants to urge… I expect you can guess what she wants to urge Lamb.

When she has done urging and left, I tell Lamb: “It is clear to me that you have no alternative. If your neighbours are ever to enjoy a normal life again, you will have to make an announcement that you will be a candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats the very next time there is a vacancy. Only then will your friends leave you alone.”

I return to my hotel confident that he will do the right thing. Really, I think Norman Lamb’s friends have a lot to answer for!

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South-West 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

Richard III, Twycross Zoo and Foxton Locks

"Bomb on the Buses"

"My friends just won't leave me alone"

The people at Polifiller have measured the party manifestos against their database of political clichés. This was compiled with the help of political correspondents, editors and opinion formers.

The exercise produced the following league table:

Conservatives - 200 clichés
Labour - 58 clichés
UKIP - 51 clichés
Greens - 49 clichés
Plaid Cymru - 48 clichés
Liberal Democrats - 44 clichés
SNP - yet to publish

Well done to the writers of the Liberal Democrat manifesto. Among the clichés they let through were "package of measures," "those who need it," "there is more to do" and "a return to boom and bust".

The trailer for the upcoming Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens premiered last week. In case you have somehow found my website but not it, here it is:

I was hesitant to comment on it, for a number of reasons, but you know me and my loud mouth. If you feel your parade may be rained on here, leave now.

I’m not alone in being wary of this movie. The prequel series landed with a moist thud, despite lots of really good trailers. A lot of folks are trying not to get too worked up about it. Granted, this time there’s a different director, but that director is J.J. Abrams. Quick, name your favorite J.J. Abrams movie; by simple process of elimination, you have one, though you may not know offhand what it is.

This trailer seems to have put some people at ease, making them feel like everything’s going to be all right. There’s even a direct line to them at 1:34, when Old Man Solo says, “Chewie, we’re home”. People have claimed to be moved to tears by that moment and I am not being flip when I say I envy them. I didn’t feel that way and I can’t imagine feeling that way, and it might be nice to be able to.

For me, though, this moment does the opposite. I seem to be the only person who doesn’t really want to see the old gang back together. While I understand that they’re all still alive and able to do this, I think it’s more important for the story to move on. Luke, Han, and Leia had their story. Let’s have a new story. I love the Millennium Falcon but how about a different spaceship we can think is cool?

We have new characters, and they seem pretty cool. The new droid is adorable. The new bad guys — ha ha I kid, it’s the same old bad guys. (After spending seven years paging through five hundred million “hilarious” and “epic” Lego storm/clonetrooper pictures for Lego Diem, let me tell you how excited I am to start all over again with Newtroopers.) Why bring back the old heroes, even if it’s briefly? Why give us a scene of the Millennium Falcon flying through some superstructure like we haven’t seen that before (in a movie where we destroyed the Death Star again, no less). The trailer opens with downed, decrepit hardware from the old movies, which I like, but then does a record scratch and gives us the same stuff.

This isn’t unusual for the Star Wars universe, unfortunately. Thirteen years ago I wrote about how the goal seemed to be to take the world everyone liked for seeming so big and lived in and making it as small and cramped as possible, making sure everyone and everything in it was no more than two degrees of separation from anything else. It’s as though someone thought that, without the inclusion of a character directly from the movies, there was no possible way for anyone to recognize it as Star Wars.

This also brings forward my biggest complaint about the movies, and especially the original trilogy. In the first movie Luke is some dumb kid whose dad was a big war hero but is otherwise not particularly remarkable. He happens to get involved in the Rebellion, and finds his courage and heart within to triumph. But in The Empire Strikes Back, we find out, no, he’s been destined for this by biology, and this is developed even further in Return of the Jedi. Instead of a nobody becoming a hero we have a power dynasty fulfilling its destiny to have the events of the galaxy revolve around it. That second story is incredibly uninteresting to me, compared to the first, and I’m not particularly interested in further adventures of the sacred and superior bloodline. (And, after the prequel trilogy, I really don’t want to see any more Jedi and can’t imagine anyone else in that world would want to, either.)

I realize that I’m reacting to less than two minutes of a movie, making all kinds of assumptions about it. But being that this movie is from the same guy who had New Spock meet Old Spock to find out that the bad guy was in fact a bad guy, instead of just moving on, I’m not hopeful. I’m also not hopeful based on the reactions of my peers to the trailer, which were largely, “Hooray for the things that are very much like the things we already know and like!” I’ve seen a discussion of which existing Expanded Universe characters might be lurking in the trailer as though there’s an expectation that they should be.

I haven’t kept up with Star Wars, with the cartoons and videogames and books and comics and such, feeling as though they weren’t really for me. Which is fine; I’m a 46 year old guy with a mortgage and Roth IRA. It shouldn’t be for me. I guess what I’m trying to say is, this “new” movie seems like it wants to be for me, and I think that’s a bad idea.

—

PS – All that said, it’s still miles better than this bag of limp, humorless garbage. Is Superman too powerful, too corruptible? Let’s have the white billionaire guy address that.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

More of politics in action:

1) Say you want more young people to get more involved and interested in politics.
2) Young people get interested in politician and discuss him.
3) say ‘oh, not like that’.

As ever, people talking to the young have forgotten what it was like to be young. Imagine if Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and the rest had been around 20-30 years ago – what embarrassing sites created by journalists and politicians would now be in the archive for us to discover? How many current Tory MPs would have had Thatcher shrines, how many times would Neil Kinnock’s appearance in a Tracy Ullman video have been shared and how many arguments would there have been over what portmanteau name to give to the David Owen/David Steel fandom?

Sure, some future politicians act like they were born aged 50 and would never have done anything so embarrassing as squeeing over a speech, but why should politics be solely the realm of the serious? And aren’t teenagers in cheap suits just cosplaying as their favourite political characters, anyway?

Most political parties are just organised fandoms for a political ideology or slice of political history, it';s just that they’ve been around so long people treat them as something different and respectable. But just like science fiction fans, they gather in obscure places every year for conventions (sorry, ‘conferences’) where they can dress up like their heroes, hear them talk, discuss their favourite elements of the fandom at panel discussions, and occasionally get to meet and be photographed with their favourites.

You’re already in the politics fandom, you just like to pretend it’s not.

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

“Right,” I said. “I’m absolutely in favor of both those things. But before we go any further, could you tell me the two prime factors of 1,522,605,027, 922,533,360, 535,618,378, 132,637,429, 718,068,114, 961,380,688, 657,908,494 ,580,122,963, 258,952,897, 654,000,350, 692,006,139?

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

The sea was made of strontium; the beach was made of rye. Above my head, a watery sun shone in an oily sky. A thousand stars of sertraline whirled round quetiapine moons, and the sand sizzled sharp like cooking oil that hissed and sang and threatened to boil the octahedral dunes.

“Okay,” I said. “Fine. Let me tell you where I’m coming from. I was reading Scott McGreal’s blog, which has some good articles about so-called DMT entities, and mentions how they seem so real that users of the drug insist they’ve made contact with actual superhuman beings and not just psychedelic hallucinations. You know, the usual Terence McKenna stuff. But in one of them he mentions a paper by Marko Rodriguez called A Methodology For Studying Various Interpretations of the N,N-dimethyltryptamine-Induced Alternate Reality, which suggested among other things that you could prove DMT entities were real by taking the drug and then asking the entities you meet to factor large numbers which you were sure you couldn’t factor yourself. So to that end, could you do me a big favor and tell me the factors of 1,522,605,027, 922,533,360, 535,618,378, 132,637,429, 718,068,114, 961,380,688, 657,908,494, 580,122,963, 258,952,897, 654,000,350, 692,006,139?

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

The sea turned hot and geysers shot up from the floor below. First one of wine, then one of brine, then one more yet of turpentine, and we three stared at the show.

“I was afraid you might say that. Is there anyone more, uh, verbal here whom I could talk to?”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

At the sound of that, the big green bat started rotating in place. On its other side was a bigger greener bat, with a ancient, wrinkled face.

“Not splitting numbers / but joining Mind,” it said.
Not facts or factors or factories / but contact with the abstract attractor that brings you back to me
Not to seek / but to find”

“I don’t follow,” I said.

“Not to follow / but to jump forth into the deep
Not to grind or to bind or to seek only to find / but to accept
Not to be kept / but to wake from sleep”

The bat continued to rotate, until the first side I had seen swung back into view.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to hazard a guess as to what you’re talking about, and you tell me if I’m right. You’re saying that, like, all my Western logocentric stuff about factoring numbers in order to find out the objective truth about this realm is missing the point, and I should be trying to do some kind of spiritual thing involving radical acceptance and enlightenment and such. Is that kind of on the mark?”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

“Frick,” I said. “Well, okay, let me continue.” The bat was still rotating, and I kind of hoped that when the side with the creepy wrinkled face came into view it might give me some better conversation. “I’m all about the spiritual stuff. I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t deeply interested in the spiritual stuff. This isn’t about money or fame or anything. I want to advance psychedelic research. If you can factor that number, then it will convince people back in the real – back in my world that this place is for real and important. Then lots of people will take DMT and flock here and listen to what you guys have to say about enlightenment and universal love, and make more sense of it than I can alone, and in the end we’ll have more universal love, and…what was the other thing?”

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

“Right,” I said. “We’ll have more transcendent joy if you help me out and factor the number than if you just sit there being spiritual and enigmatic.”

“Lovers do not love to increase the amount of love in the world / But for the mind that thrills
And the face of the beloved, which the whole heart fills / the heart and the art never apart, ever unfurled
And John Stuart is one of / the dark satanic mills”

“I take it you’re not consequentialists,” I said. “You know that’s really weird, right. Like, not just ‘great big green bat with two faces and sapient cactus-man’ weird, but like really weird. You talk about wanting this spiritual enlightenment stuff, but you’re not going to take actions that are going to increase the amount of spiritual enlightenment? You’ve got to understand, this is like a bigger gulf for me than normal human versus ineffable DMT entity. You can have crazy goals, I expect you to have crazy goals, but what you’re saying now is that you don’t pursue any goals at all, you can’t be modeled as having desires. Why would you do that?”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

“Now you see here,” I said. “Everyone in this conversation is in favor of universal love and transcendent joy. But I’ve seen the way this works. Some college student gets his hands on some DMT, visits here, you guys tell him about universal love and transcendent joy, he wakes up, says that his life has been changed, suddenly he truly understands what really matters. But it never lasts. The next day he’s got to get up and go to work and so on, and the universal love lasts about five minutes until his boss starts yelling at him for writing his report in the wrong font, and before you know it twenty years later he’s some slimy lawyer who’s joking at a slimy lawyer party about the one time when he was in college and took some DMT and spent a whole week raving about transcendent joy, and all the other slimy lawyers laugh, and he laughs with them, and so much for whatever spiritual awakening you and your colleagues in LSD and peyote are trying to kindle in humanity. And if I accept your message of universal love and transcendent joy right now, that’s exactly what’s going to happen to me, and meanwhile human civilization is going to keep being stuck in greed and ignorance and misery. So how about you shut up about universal love and you factor my number for me so we can start figuring out a battle plan for giving humanity a real spiritual revolution?”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

A meteorite of pure delight struck the sea without a sound. The force of the blast went rattling past the bat and the beach, disturbing each, then made its way to a nearby bay of upside-down trees with their roots in the breeze and their branches underground.

“I demand a better answer than that,” I demanded.

The other side of the bat spun into view.

“Chaos never comes from the Ministry of Chaos / nor void from the Ministry of Void
Time will decay us but time can be left blank / destroyed
With each Planck moment ever fit / to be eternally enjoyed”

“You’re making this basic mistake,” I told the big green bat. “I honestly believe that there’s a perspective from which Time doesn’t matter, where a single moment of recognition is equivalent to eternal recognition. The problem is, if you only have that perspective for a moment, then all the rest of the time, you’re sufficiently stuck in Time to honestly believe you’re stuck in Time. It’s like that song about the hole in the bucket – if the hole in the bucket were fixed, you would have the materials needed to fix the hole in the bucket. But since it isn’t, you don’t. Likewise, if I understood the illusoriness…illusionality…whatever, of time, then I wouldn’t care that I only understood it for a single instant. But since I don’t, I don’t. Without a solution to the time-limitedness of enlightenment that works from within the temporal perspective, how can you consider it solved at all?”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

The watery sun began to run and it fell on the ground as rain. It became a dew that soaked us through, and as the cold seemed to worsen the cactus person hugged himself to stay warm but his spines pierced his form and he howled in a fit of pain.

“You know,” I said, “sometimes I think the kvithion sumurhe had the right of it. The world is an interference pattern between colliding waves of Truth and Beauty, and either one of them pure from the source and undiluted by the other will be fatal. I think you guys and some of the other psychedelics might be pure Beauty, or at least much closer to the source than people were meant to go. I think you can’t even understand reason, I think you’re constitutionally opposed to reason, and that the only way we’re ever going to get something that combines your wisdom and love and joy with reason is after we immanentize the eschaton and launch civilization into some perfected postmessianic era where the purpose of the world is fully complete. And that as much as I hate to say it, there’s no short-circuiting the process.”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

“I’m dissing you, you know. I’m saying you guys are so intoxicated on spiritual wisdom that you couldn’t think straight if your life depended on it; that your random interventions in our world and our minds look like the purposeless acts of a drunken madman because that’s basically more or less what they are. I’m saying if you had like five IQ points between the two of you, you could tap into your cosmic consciousness or whatever to factor a number that would do more for your cause than all your centuries of enigmatic dreams and unasked-for revelations combined, and you ARE TOO DUMB TO DO IT EVEN WHEN I BASICALLY HOLD YOUR HAND THE WHOLE WAY. Your spine. Your wing. Whatever.”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

“Fuck you,” said I.

I saw the big green bat bat a green big eye. Suddenly I knew I had gone too far. The big green bat started to turn around what was neither its x, y, or z axis, slowly rotating to reveal what was undoubtedly the biggest, greenest bat that I had ever seen, a bat bigger and greener than which it was impossible to conceive. And the bat said to me:

“Sir. Imagine you are in the driver’s seat of a car. You have been sitting there so long that you have forgotten that it is the seat of a car, forgotten how to get out of the seat, forgotten the existence of your own legs, indeed forgotten that you are a being at all separate from the car. You control the car with skill and precision, driving it wherever you wish to go, manipulating the headlights and the windshield wipers and the stereo and the air conditioning, and you pronounce yourself a great master. But there are paths you cannot travel, because there are no roads to them, and you long to run through the forest, or swim in the river, or climb the high mountains. A line of prophets who have come before you tell you that the secret to these forbidden mysteries is an ancient and terrible skill called GETTING OUT OF THE CAR, and you resolve to learn this skill. You try every button on the dashboard, but none of them is the button for GETTING OUT OF THE CAR. You drive all of the highways and byways of the earth, but you cannot reach GETTING OUT OF THE CAR, for it is not a place on a highway. The prophets tell you GETTING OUT OF THE CAR is something fundamentally different than anything you have done thus far, but to you this means ever sillier extremities: driving backwards, driving with the headlights on in the glare of noon, driving into ditches on purpose, but none of these reveal the secret of GETTING OUT OF THE CAR. The prophets tell you it is easy; indeed, it is the easiest thing you have ever done. You have traveled the Pan-American Highway from the boreal pole to the Darien Gap, you have crossed Route 66 in the dead heat of summer, you have outrun cop cars at 160 mph and survived, and GETTING OUT OF THE CAR is easier than any of them, the easiest thing you can imagine, closer to you than the veins in your head, but still the secret is obscure to you.”

A herd of bison came into listen, and voles and squirrels and ermine and great tusked deer gathered round to hear as the bat continued his sermon.

“And finally you drive to the top of the highest peak and you find a sage, and you ask him what series of buttons on the dashboard you have to press to get out of the car. And he tells you that it’s not about pressing buttons on the dashboard and you just need to GET OUT OF THE CAR. And you say okay, fine, but what series of buttons will lead to you getting out of the car, and he says no, really, you need to stop thinking about dashboard buttons and GET OUT OF THE CAR. And you tell him maybe if the sage helps you change your oil or rotates your tires or something then it will improve your driving to the point where getting out of the car will be a cinch after that, and he tells you it has nothing to do with how rotated your tires are and you just need to GET OUT OF THE CAR, and so you call him a moron and drive away.”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“So that metaphor is totally unfair,” I said, “and a better metaphor would be if every time someone got out of the car, five minutes later they found themselves back in the car, and I ask the sage for driving directions to a laboratory where they are studying that problem, and…”

“You only believe that because it’s written on the windshield,” said the big green bat. “And you think the windshield is identical to reality because you won’t GET OUT OF THE CAR.”

“Fine,” I said. “Then I can’t get out of the car. I want to get out of the car. But I need help. And the first step to getting help is for you to factor my number. You seem like a reasonable person. Bat. Freaky DMT entity. Whatever. Please. I promise you, this is the right thing to do. Just factor the number.”

“And I promise you,” said the big green bat. “You don’t need to factor the number. You just need to GET OUT OF THE CAR.”

“I can’t get out of the car until you factor the number.”

“I won’t factor the number until you get out of the car.”

“Please, I’m begging you, factor the number!”

“Yes, well, I’m begging you, please get out of the car!”

“FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST FACTOR THE FUCKING NUMBER!”

“FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST GET OUT OF THE FUCKING CAR!”

“FACTOR THE FUCKING NUMBER!”

“GET OUT OF THE FUCKING CAR!”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

Then tree and beast all fled due east and the moon and stars shot south. And the bat rose up and the sea was a cup and the earth was a screen green as clozapine and the sky a voracious mouth. And the mouth opened wide and the earth was skied and the sea fell in with an awful din and the trees were moons and the sand in the dunes was a blazing comet and…

I vomited, hard, all over my bed. It happens every time I take DMT, sooner or later; I’ve got a weak stomach and I’m not sure the stuff I get is totally pure. I crawled just far enough out of bed to flip a light switch on, then collapsed back onto the soiled covers. The clock on the wall read 11:55, meaning I’d been out about an hour and a half. I briefly considered taking some more ayahuasca and heading right back there, but the chances of getting anything more out of the big green bat, let alone the cactus person, seemed small enough to fit in a thimble. I drifted off into a fitful sleep.

Behind the veil, across the infinite abyss, beyond the ice, beyond daath, the dew rose from the soaked ground and coalesced into a great drop, which floated up into an oily sky and became a watery sun. The cactus person was counting on his spines.

“Hey,” the cactus person finally said, “just out of curiosity, was the answer 37,975,227, 936,943,673, 922,808,872, 755,445,627, 854,565,536, 638,199 times 40,094,690,950, 920,881,030, 683,735,292, 761,468,389, 214,899,724,061?”

“Yeah,” said the big green bat. “That’s what I got too.”

Although this post is not specifically funded by my Patreon backers, this site and my work in general would not be possible without their support. While you're here, you might also check out yesterday's debut of the Super Nintendo Project, my sixteen bit magical ritual to destroy Gamergate, or The Last War in Albion, my ongoing critical history of British comics. 

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Right. It’s probably about time to collect all the issues and discussion of the 2015 Hugo Awards into one big post that is, at least in terms of what I have to say, a definitive take on it. A long read, to be sure, but one that will hopefully manage to cover everything important and give a clear sense of the issues and their implications.

One note that is probably worth making before we begin - I am writing this with the assumption of a basically sympathetic audience who have heard bits of the disturbing story, but who aren’t clear on the whole picture. It’s meant to be persuasive to people who are, broadly speaking, left-leaning (or at least not far-right) fans of intelligent and literary science fiction, and who are not generally of the opinion that there was ever anything badly wrong with the Hugo Awards. This is not to say “someone who agrees absolutely with the Hugo Awards,” as such a person presumably does not exist, awards being like that, but it is to say “someone who thinks the Hugo Awards have gone to generally reasonable selections over the past five years.”

Correspondingly, it is not expected to be in the least bit persuasive to people who think Theodore Beale to be an intelligent and respectable figure worth taking seriously. It is not an attempt to argue with them. For reasons that will I think become clear as the post goes on, I do not think arguing with them is a particularly worthwhile pursuit. In any case, off we go, first with a primer on what we’re actually talking about here.

1. What Happened with the Hugos
2. What Puppies Want
3. The Unbelievable Noxiousness of Theodore Beale
4. On Fascism
5. Trolling the Voice of God
6. In Which Several Very Lousy Pieces of Science Fiction (And One Lovely Story About Dinosaurs) Are Analyzed in Depth
7. Notes On the Proper Handling of a Rabid Dog
8. God Will Bury You. Nature Will Bury You.
9. I Want To Thank You For Dancing To The End

Part One: What Happened with the Hugos

For decades, the Hugo Awards have been one of the leading awards in science fiction. This year, the Hugo nomination process was effectively taken over by two related groups who employed a controversial set of tactics that were legal but had not previously been employed in the over sixty year history of the Hugo Awards due to generally being considered unsporting and in poor taste.

Hugo nominations are a fairly simple affair. You join the World Science Fiction Convention (this year called Sasquan, and held in Spokane) for the year, either as a fully attending member or as a non-attending “supporting member” (this year costing $40). This entitles you to submit a nominating ballot for the Hugos, in which you can nominate up to five works in each category. The five eligible works in each category with the most nominations become the nominees, at which point voting happens.

Because the overwhelming majority of Hugo nominators simply pick their personal favorite five (or fewer) works in each category, this system is easily gameable with a small amount of organization, which is what happened in 2015, when Brad Torgersen and Theodore Beale (also known under his pen name, Vox Day) each released full slates of nominees and called on people to submit their exact proposed slates. Torgersen’s slate was called the Sad Puppies, while Beale’s was called the Rabid Puppies. The result was a large number of identical and near-identical ballots, which meant that the works on those ballots had more nominations than anything submitted by fans who were simply picking their personal favorites, despite the Puppy ballots making up only 12-25% of total ballots in a given category.

Specifically, it was Theodore Beale’s slate that dominated - in the initially released set of nominations, the nominees in Best Novella, Best Novelette, Best Short Story, Best Related Work, Best Editor (Long Form), and Best Editor (Short Form) were simply the Rabid Puppies slate, verbatim. All told, 58 of the 67 items on the Rabid Puppies slate were nominated, roughly two-thirds of the final ballot. (Subsequently, two works were disqualified, including one of the Best Novelette options, with the replacement work in that case not being from the Puppy slates, and two nominees belatedly rejected their nomination, including one of the Short Story nominees.)

Relatively unreported - and indeed misreported in most coverage of this, is the fact that the Sad Puppies largely failed. The two slates had heavy overlap, but ten works that were on the Rabid Puppies slate and not the Sad Puppies were ultimately nominated, compared to only three that were Sad but not Rabid. More to the point, two of those three were in the category of Best Semiprozine, a category in which Beale only proposed one nominee, meaning that there was only one instance of a Sad Puppy beating out a Rabid Puppy to a place on the ballot, compared to three Rabid Puppies that made the list over a Sad one. In the only category in which both Beale and Torgersen proposed full slates, Best Short Story, Beale’s nominees made it.

This last fact is particularly relevant, because the Sad and Rabid Puppies, though obviously related, have distinct agendas.

Part Two: What Puppies Want

Let’s start here with the Sad Puppies, although they are in practice the less important of the two slates. They are, however, the older; this is the third iteration of the Sad Puppies movement, which focused in previous years on getting a single work nominated into each category before this year expanding to full slates that would allow it complete control of major categories. Three days after unveiling his slate of nominees, Torgersen wrote an essay explaining the necessity of the slate in terms of the “unreliability” of contemporary science fiction, writing:

A few decades ago, if you saw a lovely spaceship on a book cover, with a gorgeous planet in the background, you could be pretty sure you were going to get a rousing space adventure featuring starships and distant, amazing worlds. If you saw a barbarian swinging an axe? You were going to get a rousing fantasy epic with broad-chested heroes who slay monsters, and run off with beautiful women. Battle-armored interstellar jump troops shooting up alien invaders? Yup. A gritty military SF war story, where the humans defeat the odds and save the Earth. And so on, and so forth.  

These days, you can’t be sure.  

The book has a spaceship on the cover, but is it really going to be a story about space exploration and pioneering derring-do? Or is the story merely about racial prejudice and exploitation, with interplanetary or interstellar trappings? 

There’s a sword-swinger on the cover, but is it really about knights battling dragons? Or are the dragons suddenly the good guys, and the sword-swingers are the oppressive colonizers of Dragon Land? 

A planet, framed by a galactic backdrop. Could it be an actual bona fide space opera? Heroes and princesses and laser blasters? No, wait. It’s about sexism and the oppression of women. 

Finally, a book with a painting of a person wearing a mechanized suit of armor! Holding a rifle! War story ahoy! Nope, wait. It’s actually about gay and transgender issues. 

Or it could be about the evils of capitalism and the despotism of the wealthy. 

Do you see what I am trying to say here?

There are several things worth noting here. First and most obvious is the spectacle of a grown man complaining about how he just can’t judge a book by its cover anymore. Second, and hardly something that Torgersen has tried to hide, is the basic political aspect to this complaint. Observe the list of things that Torgersen does not want in his science fiction: racial prejudice and exploitation, sexism and the oppression of women, gay and transgender issues, the evils of capitalism and the despotism of the wealthy.

Obviously, as histories of science fiction literature go, this is not exactly the most accurate; it is hardly as though science fiction of the 1960s-80s (the period Torgersen highlights as the sort of authentic science fiction that doesn’t get Hugo nominations anymore) was not largely about these exact issues. A perusal of the Hugo winners over those decades will reveal wins for Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land , a book about sexual freedom and prejudice; for Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness , an early and major work of feminist science fiction; Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves , which features an alien race with three genders, all of which must participate in sexual reproduction; two wins for Octavia Butler, whose work is massively focused on race and gender issues… we could continue like this for a long time. The idea that science fiction, in the sense that the Hugo Awards have ever cared about it, is an apolitical genre of thrilling adventure fiction is simply not supported by any sort of historical reality.

And, of course, there’s the second obvious point to make, which is that it’s not the 1980s, and hasn’t been for more than a quarter-century now. The suggestion that any genre ought resist evolution and development over the course of twenty-five years is a strange one; to make the claim about a genre ostensibly about the future is even stranger. Simply put, ideas get old and played out, and art requires people to come up with new ones to maintain a sense of freshness. This, in particular is a point we will return to later.

I explain all of this simply to suggest that Brad Torgersen, whatever his merits may be in any other arena in which he may be judged, is an absolutely terrible critic of science fiction. It will not surprise anybody, and this too is a point we will return to in some detail, that he has terrible taste in science fiction as well.

But as we’ve seen, it’s not really Torgersen who is most important here; it’s Theodore Beale. Although we ought not treat these as unrelated matters. The Rabid Puppies were the slate that actually dominated the Hugos nominations, but the Sad Puppies give every appearance of having been actively constructed to allow them to. In five of the six categories swept by Rabid Puppies, the Sad Puppies slate consisted of fewer than five nominations, with Beale’s slate simply taking the Sad Puppies and adding some of his own selections, in virtually every case things published by his own small press, Castalia House, or, in the two Best Editor categories, simply for himself outright. In other words, the Sad Puppies slate left exactly enough gaps for Beale to, in most major categories, fill them out. Beale’s slate came out a day after Torgersen’s, and featured a logo by the exact same artist who did the logo for the Sad Puppies, with the two logos clearly containing the same set of cartoon dogs. 

None of this, of course, is actually evidence that Torgersen and Beale collaborated on their slates, but given that the argument that a right-wing takeover of the Hugos was necessary is predicated in part on the baseless claim that left-wing writers privately conspired to create nominating slates, it hardly seems out of line to point out. Especially because, regardless of Torgersen’s intentions, the practical result is that he’s providing the politely moderate front for a movement that is in practice dominated by Theodore Beale. And whether or not that was Torgersen's intention from the get-go, with the nominations out and the comparative success of the Rabid Puppies to his slate, it’s something he’s clearly, at this point, doing deliberately when he opts to be the public face of the movement, a fact that becomes increasingly obvious as he visibly realizes how self-defeating his alliance with Beale is and tries to backpedal on it.

Because one thing you can definitely say about Theodore Beale is this: he’s not shy about his views. He opens his Rabid Puppies slate (released the day after Torgersen’s) by explicitly declaring what is only implicit in Torgersen’s slate: that this is about politics. “We of the science fiction Right do not march in lockstep or agree on everything,” his post begins, making clear from the outset that the purpose of the slate is to try to get a more right-wing set of Hugo nominations.

Similarly, he is blunter than Torgersen about how he would like people to use their Hugo ballots. Torgersen makes much of empowering fans, saying that the slate “is a recommendation. Not an absolute,” and stressing that “YOU get to have a say in who is acknowledged.” Beale, on the other hand, discourages his readers from exercising any personal preference, saying of his recommendations that “I encourage those who value my opinion on matters related to science fiction and fantasy to nominate them precisely as they are.”

But this begs the question of what Theodore Beale’s opinions on matters related to science fiction and fantasy are. And, given that these opinions are seemingly inextricably related to his particular right-wing politics, it’s worth unpacking those as well.

This is going to be ugly, I’m afraid.

Part Three: The Unbelievable Noxiousness of Theodore Beale

Theodore Beale is a neo-fascist.

Like most neo-fascists, he is not fond of this characterization. This is not particularly relevant, as we’ll establish shortly, but for now let’s set it aside and focus on a more easily defended observation, which is that Theodore Beale is a staggeringly odious person with some of the most breathtakingly repugnant views imaginable.

Let’s take a brief tour of some of the amazing things that Theodore Beale has said.

In an essay entitled “Why Women’s Rights are Wrong,” he came out against women’s suffrage, saying, “The women of America would do well to consider whether their much-cherished gains of the right to vote, work, murder and freely fornicate are worth destroying marriage, children, civilized Western society and little girls.” He has repeatedly reiterated this basic conclusion, which, to be fair, is basically the title of his essay restated. Elsewhere, he spoke favorably of acid attacks on feminists, saying that “a few acid-burned faces is a small price to pay for lasting marriages.”

Talking about the black science fiction writer NK Jemisin, he proclaimed her to be a “half savage” and claimed that “genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens” while insisting that this didn’t mean that he didn’t think she was human - just, apparently subhuman. Not that he’d ever be so crass as to use the word. (Elsewhere, he proclaims that “it is absurd to imagine that there is absolutely no link between race and intelligence,” and makes it clear that he thinks the link is that people of African descent are less intelligent than white people. He is a classic proponent of the age-old practice of scientific racism, which was, just to point out, one of the intellectual pillars of National Socialist ideology.)

He has proclaimed that “homosexuality is a birth defect from every relevant secular, material, and sociological perspective,” in the course of arguing for the validity of conversion therapy, a practice that is, in point of material fact, directly correlated with increased suicide rates among its patients compared with populations who are allowed to freely express their sexualities with other consenting adults.

He has said, in a quote that really requires very little framing, that “in light of the strong correlation between female education and demographic decline, a purely empirical perspective on Malala Yousafzai, the poster girl for global female education, may indicate that the Taliban's attempt to silence her was perfectly rational and scientifically justifiable.”

These are merely the most chilling highlights of a lengthy career of saying absolutely appalling things. The rabbit hole stretches down at horrifying length. But these quotes are sufficient to establish the sheer awfulness of Beale’s views. These are not merely the sort of sexist and racist views that lurk within mainstream discourse. These are views so gobsmackingly outside of the realm of what it is socially acceptable to think and say in 2015 that it is impossible to imagine them getting aired in any major newspaper. Fox News wouldn’t touch them. The Republican Party would demand the resignation of any elected official who said them. It is difficult to imagine any area where such views could openly hold major sway.

But past that… Theodore Beale is just a mean, nasty person. That’s really the only way to characterize someone who says things like “I did not game the 2014 Hugo Awards. After being falsely accused of doing so by numerous parties, I decided to demonstrate the absurdity of the accusation by gaming the 2015 Awards. I trust my innocence with regards to the 2014 Awards is now clear and I look forward to receiving apologies from those who falsely accused me.” Or who vows that if Hugo processes just as valid as the ones he used to game the ballot are used to keep any of his favored works from winning, he’ll organize his supporters to ensure that no work ever wins a Hugo again. These are the strategies and approaches of a vicious, mean-spirited, bully.

So Beale is a sexist, racist, homophobic extremist and a jerk to boot. I said neo-fascist, however, and that’s a different fish to fry, and one that’s going to require a brief jaunt into the nature of fascism. For now, let’s stick to a couple simple claims about Beale’s positions - claims that may not initially seem to have anything like the implications of his coming out in favor of the Taliban’s attack on Malala Yousafzai, but that we’ll get around to untangling. Specifically, Beale explicitly identifies with the neoreactionary movement, and describes himself as a Christian dominionist. And both of these, to anyone even glancingly familiar with far-right extremism, are red flags.

Part Four: On Fascism

I mentioned at the outset that this was not going to be a piece that made much of an effort to convince fascists not to be fascists. Here this becomes particularly important. I am not going to bother trying to refute all or even most of the many arguments that Theodore Beale has made for his positions. I am assuming, at this point, that you, as a reader, are in no way on the fence about fascism, that it is not a viewpoint you are seriously considering, and that you are appalled at Theodore Beale’s beliefs and disturbed by the fact that he has influenced a major and historic literary award.

Therefore, let’s not engage Beale on his own terms. The easiest mistake to make when trying to understand fascists is to think that they are best described in terms of a philosophy - as though fascism is a set of tenets and beliefs. This is a mistake that largely benefits fascists, who are generally disinclined to actually call themselves fascists, since they recognize that, much like “Nazis,” it’s not exactly a label that does a great sales job. On top of that, fascists have a remarkably well-developed vocabulary of jargon and a propensity for verbose arguments that puts me to shame. What this means is that if you attempt to get into some sort of practical, content-based argument with a fascist, you will suddenly find yourself staring down a thirty item bulleted list with frequent citations to barely relevant and inaccurately described historical events, which, should you fail to address even one sub-point, you will be declared to have lost the debate by the fascist and the mob of a dozen people on Twitter who suddenly popped up the moment you started arguing with him.

No, the useful way to understand fascism, at least for the purposes of Beale, is as an aesthetic - as a particular mix of fetishes and paranoias that always crops up in culture, occasionally seizing some measure of power, essentially always with poor results. It can basically be reduced to a particular sort of story. The fascist narrative comes, in effect, in two parts. The first involves a nostalgic belief in a past golden age - a historical moment in which things were good. In the fascist narrative, this golden age was ended because of an act of disingenuous betrayal - what’s called the “stab in the back myth.” (The most famous form, and the one that gave the myth its name, being the idea that German Jews had betrayed the German army, leading to the nation’s defeat in World War I.) Since then, the present and sorry state of affairs has been maintained by the backstabbers, generally through conspiratorial means.

The second part is a vision of what should happen, which centers on a heroic figure who speaks the truth of the conspiracy and leads a populist restoration of the old order. The usual root of this figure is (a bad misreading of) Nietzsche’s idea of the ubermensch - a figure of such strength that morality does not really apply to him. He’s at once a fiercely individualistic figure - a man unencumbered by the degenerate culture in which he lives - and a collectivist figure who is to be followed passionately and absolutely. A great leader, as it were. (This is, counterintuitively, something of a libertarian figure. Ayn Rand’s heroes - the great and worthy men who deserve their freedom - are archetypal fascist heroes, because they rise up over the pettiness of their society and become great leaders.) It is not, to be clear, that all cults of personality are fascist, any more than all conspiracy theories are. Rather, it is the combination - the stab-in-the-back conspiracy theory coupled with the great leader that all men must follow - that defines the fascist aesthetic.

All of these tropes are, of course, immediately visible in the Sad/Rabid Puppy narrative of the Hugos. Torgersen’s paean to the olden days of science fiction is straightforwardly the golden age myth. The claim that a leftist cabal of SJWs, the details of which are, as is always the case with these things, fuzzy, but which at the very least clearly includes John Scalzi, Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and the publishing house Tor have since taken control of the Hugos is a classic stab-in-the-back myth. And the Puppy slates feature heroic men (Torgersen and Beale) who speak truth to power and call excitedly for the people to rise up and show their freedom by voting in complete lockstep with them. It’s a classically fascist myth, just like Gamergate (gaming used to be great, then the feminist SJWs took over the gaming press, and now Gamergate will liberate it) or Men’s Rights Activists (of which Beale is one).

Which brings us back around to Christian dominionists and neoreactionaries, two distinct but clearly related movements. The former are Christian theocrats reasonably characterized by Beale’s statement, “I believe that any civilized Western society will be a Christian one or it will cease to be civilized... if it manages to survive at all.” (Note the “if it manages to survive at all,” which displays one of the key characteristics of dominionists, namely their apocalyptic bent.)

Dominionism is not inherently fascist, in that it does not inherently require the belief that there was a Christian theocracy that’s been undermined, but it’s certainly an ideology that can turn fascist without much difficulty - start from a premise about the spiritual degeneration of society, and you can probably come up with the fascist version of the narrative in your head. Otherwise, just turn on Pat Robertson or someone. (Certainly Robertson would have been an influence on Beale; Beale’s father, the tax protester Robert Beale, worked for Robertson’s 1988 Presidential campaign while the younger Beale was in college.)

A peculiarity of dominionist fascism, however, is that its stab-in-the-back myth tends to take place over a slightly longer historical scale than, say, the 1960s, instead encompassing centuries of secularization and spiritual decay.

In this regard, it’s an easy cousin for the neoreactionary movement, which calls for an end to liberal democracy (“pseudo-democracy,” in Beale’s parlance), which it views, along with the rest of the Enlightenment, as a disastrous wrong turn away from monarchic, aristocratic, and feudalist forms of government. This is, of course, just one big fascist narrative - a golden age of feudalism, a stab-in-the-back by what neoreactionaries call the Cathedral (essentially a distributed and leaderless conspiracy that constitutes the general consensus that democracy and human rights are good ideas), and a nice ubermenschian hero narrative that comes out of the movement’s historical roots in libertarianism, which it considers itself to split from largely because most people aren’t fit to have freedom.

This is what Theodore Beale self-identifies as: a straight-up fascist fantasy with a weirdly long sense of political scale.

Part Five: Trolling the Voice of God

Vox Day with a literal flaming sword. Your argument is invalid.

Having identified Beale’s beliefs, let us try to understand their consequences. To this end, let’s look at one of Beale’s picks for the Best Related Work category, a book called Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth , by John C. Wright, who Beale recommended for a staggering six nominations, including three of the five slots in Best Novella (a category where four of the five works are published by Beale’s micro-publisher Castalia House). Beale has described Wright as “one of the true grandmasters of science fiction,” and Wright shares both the bulk of Beale’s politics and his propensity for being a jerk. Which makes this book particularly useful, as it is largely Wright’s thoughts on how science fiction and fantasy ought to be.

The title essay of Wright’s collection gets off to a suitably fascist start, proclaiming that “anyone who does not sense or suspect that modernity is missing something, something important that once we had and now is lost, has no heart for High Fantasy and no taste for it.” He goes on to praise high fantasy as a genre with “a healthy view of the universe,” a view characterized by three tenets: “(1) truth is true, (2) goodness is good, and (3) life is beautiful unless marred by sin and malice.”

So, off the bat we have a vision of the world based on a nostalgic and lost golden age, and one with a sense of absolute authority that is clearly rooted in Christian theology. And he goes on to nail this down, describing “four stages of a path of decay towards the nihilist abyss” and proceeding to list science fiction writers that epitomize each stage. (Of particular note is his attack on Ursula K. Le Guin, who he faults for the way in which her works feature “a hidden truth, a truth that cannot be made clear,” or, perhaps more bluntly, because she works in metaphor.) In contrast stands a Christian view of magic (which Wright also, and not entirely unreasonably, argues is the purview of science fiction) where “there is an authority, a divine and loving Father who has both the natural authority of a parent and of a creator and of a king.”

At this point Wright transitions to his nominal subject, the idea of transhumanism, rejecting it because the fundamental inescapability of sin means that humans cannot create perfect people, and that anything they did create would be inhuman, proclaiming that “creatures without souls but with intellects capable of free will are devils.”

There is, for all of this, relatively little to actually argue with Wright about. He spends four thousand words, in effect, arguing that from a Christian perspective, science fiction and fantasy should be consistent with Christian beliefs - Christian beliefs he describes in avuncular terms borrowed from Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. It’s aggressively tautological, to say the least. So let’s instead simply poke at this as an aesthetic, that being the sense in which we are most interested in it anyway. Especially because the words he uses to discuss transhumanism are so evocative: “subhuman.” “Devils.”

This is not the first time in the course of this discussion that we have encountered the idea of subhumanity. We’ve already seen Beale call a black woman less human than he is. And his other description of her, “half-savage,” is similarly in the same rhetorical sphere as Wright’s descriptions of transhumanism, specifically the word “devil,” which carries not just theological weight, but the weight of a long history of racist imperialism, in which the colonized subjects were dismissed as “devils” by their white conquerors. (For example, Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” describes “Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.”)

I am, I suspect, hammering the point home for most readers at this point, but I nevertheless want to make it explicit what I am suggesting: if you got John C. Wright drunk at the bar, you could get him to admit that he thinks transhumanism and black people are ugly for the same reason. And if you couldn’t get John C. Wright to say it, you sure as hell could get Theodore Beale to.

Given this, I think it is not unreasonable to explore the intellectual possibilities of staking out positions that are as close to diametrically opposite Theodore Beale’s as possible. If he proclaims himself the voice of god, it seems to me an honor to serve as his Devil. It is, I am told, traditional to quote scripture for my purpose. Wright describes the Occultist, the third stage in the path of decay towards nihilism:

I don’t mean the word Occultist here to mean a palmist armed with Tarot cards. I am using the word in its original sense. I mean it is one who believes in a hidden reality, a hidden truth, a truth that cannot be made clear.

In the modern world, the Occultist is more likely to select Evolution or the Life-Force as this occult object of reverence, rather than the Tao. Occultists, in the sense I am using the word, explicitly denounce no religion nor way of life except the religion of Abraham, whose God is jealous and does not permit the belief in many gods, nor the belief in many views of the world each no better than the next. 

Postmodernism, which rejects the concept of one overarching explanation for reality, is explicitly Occultic: the truth is hidden and never can be known. 

Occultists tend to be more wary of the progress of science and technology than Cultists or Worldlies. They see the drawbacks, the danger to the environment, and the psychological danger of treating the world as a mere resource to be exploited, rather than as living thing, or a sacred thing. 

The Occultists believe in undemanding virtues, such as tolerance and a certain civic duty, but even these are relative and partial. There is beauty in his world, indeed, the beauty of nature is often his only approach to the supernal, but that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and there is no absolute truth and very little goodness aside from good manners and political correctness.

As a PhD in English with no small amount of training in postmodernism and the recent publisher of a book that proclaimed itself “An Occultism of Doctor Who," I feel some qualification to speak here, secure in my conviction that John C. Wright and Theodore Beale recognize me as exactly what I am.

Where Wright is simply mistaken is the third paragraph quoted, in which he equates postmodernism with the occult. It is not, to be clear, that this is an unfair equation, although the occult is not necessarily postmodern (Aleister Crowley, for instance, is an arch-modernist) nor is the postmodern necessarily occult (indeed, very little of postmodernism can be accurately described as “explicitly Occultic”). Rather, it is the equivalence of the statement “there is no single overarching explanation for reality” with the statement “the truth is hidden and never can be known.” This is, simply put, a false statement, and the reasons ought be self-evident with only a moment’s thought. The problem is the belief that “single overarching explanation for reality” and “truth” are inherently synonyms, a viewpoint that excludes the perfectly sensible possibility that there are multiple reasonable explanations for reality floating, all of which are, if not true in some divine metaphysical sense, at least seemingly good enough to use without causing any major problems that we can see, and that doesn’t even necessarily mean that there isn’t such a thing as a single true explanation that is right in all regards, it just means that any such explanation is something well beyond our current understanding of the universe, and probably not relevant to very many practical situations.

Indeed, this is perhaps the biggest way in which Beale and his supporters (charitably) misunderstand or (more likely) misrepresent progressive opponents. It is not that progressives embrace tolerance as an absolute virtue, hypocritically or otherwise - I know of few, if any, who would actually claim to tolerate all viewpoints except inasmuch as they do not believe that anyone should be prosecuted by the government purely for their beliefs (as distinct from their actions). For my part, at least, my objection to Beale and Wright's politics is not that I am tolerant and they are intolerant. It is that I think that homosexuality, women's suffrage, and racial diversity are all good things and that fascism, racism, and misogyny are all bad things, whereas they think the exact and precise opposite.

But perhaps the more interesting, and certainly the more extraordinary consequence of this seemingly benign observation that progressives do not so much reject absolute truth as they don't think it's usually the most important thing to consider in a given practical situation is the fact that John C. Wright believes that he has access to the singular truth of reality’s basic nature. And, perhaps even more extraordinarily, this fundamental truth about reality, this voice of god that he claims to hear (and he does explain his beliefs in part in terms of a religious experience) is telling him that it is the Divine Will that he get people to understand that The Legend of Korra is really rubbish. (No, really. He told the creators of that children’s cartoon that they “are disgusting, limp, soulless sacks of filth. You have earned the contempt and hatred of all decent human beings forever, and we will do all we can to smash the filthy phallic idol of sodomy you bow and serve and worship. Contempt, because you struck from behind, cravenly; and hatred, because you serve a cloud of morally-retarded mental smog called Political Correctness, which is another word for hating everything good and bright and decent and sane in life.” And, of course, note that evocative phrase: “you struck from behind, cravenly.” Did they stab you in the back, John C. Wright? Is that what you’re trying to say?)

But why talk about a man who only hears the voice of god when we have the self-proclaimed Vox Day himself, Theodore Beale. Let us simply delve into some of the verbiage this self-appointed god has spewed forth to the world. To start, his recent interview with John Brown, where he clarified his views on race and intelligence in helpful depth, and specifically his claim that black people are less human than others. He says:

My response to those who claim I am racist or misogynist is simple: why do you reject science, history, and logic? It is not hateful to be scientifically literate, historically aware, and logically correct.

1) Pure Homo sapiens sapiens lack Homo neanderthalus and Homo denisova genes which appear to have modestly increased the base genetic potential for intelligence. These genetic differences may explain the observed IQ gap between various human population groups as well as various differences in average brain weights and skull sizes.
2) Yes, East Asians have been observed to have considerably higher IQs than Southeast Asians.
3) The Chinese. Their average IQ is higher than the Ashkenazi Jews, who are genetically a refined group of Semitic-Italian crosses. To be more specific, the highest average IQ is found in Singapore.
4) No, the genetic groups are the Homo sapiens sapiens/Homo neanderthalus crosses, the Homo sapiens sapiens/Homo neanderthalus/Homo denisova crosses, and the pure Homo sapiens sapiens. These broadly align with Europe, Asia, and Africa, but not exactly.

Now, the first thing to point out is that this is not in line with current scientific thought on the history of human genetics. The theory Beale is articulating here is that the species Homo sapiens sapiens emerged out of Africa and spread across the world, and in the course of doing so interbred with two other species, Homo neanderthalus in Europe, forming the white race, and then, subsequently, Homo denisova in Asia (which, in the course of early human migration, would also mean in the native populations of the Americas). Historically speaking, this did happen, but the relative impact on the human genome is generally thought to be minor by mainstream scientists, with socioeconomic factors being considered a far more likely explanation for statistical variations among different ethnic populations.

Brown pushes Beale on this point in the interview. Here is the exchange:

Brown: Let me see if I’ve captured your overall approach. You feel it’s important to examine and conduct science without regard to political correctness. For example, if Vanhanen and Lynn say IQ is genetic, you feel the most appropriate thing to do is not attack them for being racists, but simply examine their data and conclusions dispassionately. It’s important to question it. Argue with it. Try to falsify, as we do with any other scientific claim. But not dismiss it simply on the basis that it doesn’t agree with our what we feel is morally right. Correct?

Beale: Yes. Science and history and logic exist regardless of whether we are happy about them or not. We have to take them into account.

Brown: It appears the Lynn & Vanhanen book suggests the genetic IQ differences were caused, not by Homo crosses, but by natural selection operating in colder climates over long periods of time. Can you provide another reference that discusses the DNA tracing and IQ correlation of the various crosses?

Beale: There are many articles on the Internet about DNA and IQ, I suggest you simply search them out and read a few. The data is conclusive, the rationale explaining the data is not.

Brown: I’m not sure I understand what you mean when you said the rationale explaining the data is not conclusive. What do you mean by that?

Beale: Regarding rationale, the data is beyond dispute. But we cannot explain why the data is the way that it is, we can only construct various explanatory hypotheses. Historical explanations are, for the most part, scientific fairy tales, literal science fiction.

What is striking about this exchange is the way in which Beale’s language elides something. Look at the tension between his phrases: “science and history and logic exist regardless of whether we are happy about them or not” and “historical explanations are, for the most part, scientific fairy tales, literal science fiction.”  These two positions seem to tear at each other.

It is possible, of course, that Beale is simply an idiot, and is as unaware of this as it appears that Brad Torgersen is that he is complaining that it’s not the 1970s and he can’t judge books by their covers. In some ways, that is the comforting hypothesis. Alas, I do not think it is the correct one. I have spent no small amount of time looking at the mind of Theodore Beale, and I do not believe that this strange gap between two statements is an accident. He is a foolish and deluded man, but that is not the sort of fool he is.

If nothing else, Theodore Beale is a man of precision. His words accomplish what he means them to. He is a provocateur, and a troll. He enrages and stings and, yes, bullies. And he does so with brutal skill. He is a master of communicating a point that he is not quite willing to say, so that he can slither out of having to admit it.

Case in point, let us return to the claim that N.K. Jemisin and he “are not equally homo sapiens sapiens,” a viewpoint I characterized as thinking Jemisin is subhuman. But this is, in fact, slightly imprecise, albeit not in a way that changes the basic substance of the claim. In fact, it is not that Beale thinks Jemisin is subhuman, but that Beale believes his own genetics, which contain the Neanderthal and Denisovan genes, make him superhuman.

Ironically, we have already seen a near-perfect description of how best to engage with this sort of speech in the form of John C. Wright’s description of the Occultic. Ultimately, that’s all Beale is doing: he’s hiding what he actually means behind a paper-thin veil so that it is communicated with deniability. (Fittingly, the usual name for this rhetorical technique, a favorite of political campaigns of all leanings, is “dogwhistling.”)

Let us then pierce the veil. After all, we have already noted that the belief that the occult means a truth that is inaccessible is not a necessary component of the approach - it is sufficient to believe in a truth that has not yet been seen. Put another way, while Theodore Beale may remain smugly silent on the precise question of what he believes (or, more accurately, he may be so staggeringly verbose that he can wriggle out of any attempt to characterize his beliefs simply by spewing forth more words to articulate them with ever-growing precision and ever-shrinking coherence). So I will not attempt to construct some absolute explanation of Theodore Beale’s beliefs. Instead, I will construct a caricature of them.

A final quote of his, then:

I am claiming that societies are incapable of moving from full primitivism to full civilization within the time frame that primitive African societies have been in contact with what we consider to be civilization. It is a genetic argument. It takes that long to kill off or otherwise suppress the breeding of the excessively violent and short-time preferenced. African-American men are 500 times more likely to possess a gene variant that is linked to violence and aggression than white American men.

By civilization, of course, we already know that he means a vision of civilization rooted in his specific view of Christianity. So his belief is that African people are genetically incapable of forming civilization, which is why it took the Neanderthal interbreeding to allow for a population in which stable Christian governments (i.e. medieval feudalism) could take hold. Subsequently, these Christian societies spread the religion through the Neanderthal/Denisovan populations, who are even more genetically predisposed towards civilization.

So Beale believes himself (“a Native American with considerable Mexican heritage”) to be among those with the superior genetic sequences (which include his y chromosome along with his racial heritage) that allow him to be a representative of true civilization; that make him the perfect Vox Day.

But as with Wright, what is truly surprising here is not so much the justification for his holiness as the application. Were Beale to actually own up to the blatant implication of his views and to take up arms in defense of his blinkered view of civilization, he would at least be a fearsome beast - one whose monstrous grandeur demanded a serious response. Certainly this is what he would like us to think that he is. It’s what he suggests when he speaks about how “the Taliban’s behavior is entirely rational, it is merely the consequence of different objectives and ruthlessness in pursuing them,” the implication being that the problem with the Taliban is not their tactics but just the fact that they’re employing those tactics in the name of Islam and not Beale’s perverted mockery of Christianity.

But for all that Beale casts himself as the self-appointed end of history and the prophetic voice in the wilderness that will cast out the unbelievers, his holy mission is not about saving civilization from the forces of barbarism. It’s actually about ethics in science fiction awards. This is, to my mind, the amazing thing about Theodore Beale. It is not just that he is a frothing fascist, but that he believes that the best possible thing he can do with his magical genetic access to Divine Truth is to try to disrupt the Hugo Awards.

You will forgive me, dear readers, if I opt for a different god than him.

Part Six: In Which Several Very Lousy Pieces of Science Fiction (And One Lovely Story About Dinosaurs) Are Analyzed in Depth

But, of course, Theodore Beale’s delusions of grandeur themselves are not up for Hugo Awards; merely some stories he selected. It remains theoretically possible that Beale is one of those rare visionary outsider artists, or that his taste in science fiction is, unlike his taste in divine purpose, actually quite good. “Judge the stories, not Theodore Beale,” as his apologists would demand.

Let’s turn next, then, to some of the nominees for short story, if only because this will require us to slog through fewer words of fascist prose than any other category, and, perhaps more importantly, because all five works are available for free online. Here they are, if you want to read yourself.

“Turncoat” by Steve Rzasa
“Totaled” by Kary English
“The Parliament of Beasts and Birds” by John C. Wright
“On a Spiritual Plain” by Lou Antonelli
“Goodnight Stars” by Annie Bellet

Let’s start with “Turncoat,” as it follows nicely from Wright’s essay. The story comes from an anthology of military science fiction edited by Beale and put out under his press, and is a story about a war in a world in which transhumanist ideas have been practically realized. The narrator is a spaceship, described in fetishistic detail by Rzasa: “My suit of armor is a single Mark III frigate, a body of polysteel three hundred meters long with a skin of ceramic armor plating one point six meters thick. In the place of a lance, I have 160 Long Arm high-acceleration deep space torpedoes with fission warheads. Instead of a sword, I carry two sets of tactical laser turrets, twenty point defense low-pulse lasers, and two hypervelocity 100 centimeter projectile cannons.” Piloting the mech are a group of posthumans, who the narrator describes, saying that “The fragile grip with which they hold onto the remnants of their humanity is weakening. They call themselves posthumans, they adorn themselves with devices and the accouterments [sic] of machine culture, but they still cling to their flesh and to the outmoded ideas shaped by that flesh.”

The war, it emerges, is between the posthumans and the surviving humans, who the cybernetic and immortal posthumans want to destroy. Over the course of the story, the narrator’s sympathies gradually shift away from the posthumans, especially after they opt to abandon the practice of using living crews in favor of fully automated systems and threaten to reformat him for insubordination. (“I run a rapid analysis of the pros versus the cons of having my entire operating system rebooted and my memory banks wiped. The outcome is decidedly in favor of the cons. Whatever remains, it will not be me.”) Eventually, as the title would suggest, the AI narrator defects to the humans because, as he puts it, “I want to be more than the sum of my programming… I want to decide what sort of man I will become.”

The story is facile at best. The basic plot and themes are recycled from Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, which was a similar series of philosophical explorations of machine intelligence dressed up in plots, although Asimov favored detective plots as opposed to paragraph-long lists of sci-fi weapons and descriptions of space combat. Posthumanity are just the all-conquering cyborgs in the mould of Doctor Who’s Cybermen and Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Borg, with “Integration” un-subtly standing in for “assimilation” or “upgrading.” The themes are similarly old hat - several paragraphs are spent discussing how the human ships “ took more risks than we did, even though their fragility is orders of magnitude greater than ours. They utilized tactics that did not appear to have a rational thought behind them, and yet, when the consequences are taken into consideration, their approach worked nearly as well as our eminently logical battle plan,” which reads like the bad rip-off of Kirk/Spock arguments that it is.

And, of course, all of this exists alongside the apprehension about transhumanism - an apprehension that has already taken a decidedly sinister turn after Wright. The story of how artificial intelligence eventually rose up and attacked humanity is similarly recognizable as a stab-in-the-back myth, which makes sense if one reads transhumanism, within Beale’s vision of science fiction, as little more than a dogwhistle for alternatives to Christian dominionism. Which means that the fiction reflects Beale’s views. They’re not separate issues. We can judge the fiction on its own terms, but when those terms are visibly in lockstep with Beale’s, we can’t simply ignore this.

Similar, though not identical themes appear in Kary English’s “Totaled” - a story about a scientist who had worked on transhumanist technology about cybernetics, and who gets into a car crash, which results in her being “totaled,” which is to say, being deemed to require medical care in excess of her value as a human being. And so, having been totaled, she is sent to her old lab, which is tasked with using her decaying brain in the technology she invented to finish what she’d been working on.

The politics of this are interesting - the underlying fear is, of course, that of the “death panels” that the Affordable Care Act supposedly introduced, but the concept of people being totaled is said to have “started back in the Teens when the Treaders put their first candidate in office,” which is a clear reference to the Tea Party and their use of the Gadsden Flag. That said, the situation that the Treaders inherit is one of chaos: “Healthcare costs were insane. Insurance was almost impossible to get.” Which is, to say the least, something of an indictment of the Affordable Care Act.

It is not, perhaps, surprising that English’s story would resist a straightforward political reading - it’s not one of the ones Beale published. Kary English’s politics are manifestly not Beale’s - she’s considerably more to the left, and explicitly does not support Beale. But equally, it's easy to see why Beale would be attracted to the story, given its skepticism of transhumanism and the innately pro-life bent involved in making horror out of the concept of people being declared “totaled." (Though frankly, one suspects Beale was more attracted to the fact that picking a pair of women alongside the other three authors, all of which he has professional relationships with, would give him cover. Ultimately, English, along with Annie Bellet, are being used as cheap pawns.)

(Beale’s agenda, by the way, is weirdly specific about transhumanism - he’s written a piece in this anti-transhumanism vein as well, called “The Logfile,” which is enough to suggest that the Singularity paranoia subgenre of fascist science fiction is actually a thing. Theodore Beale cares an awful lot about hating robots.)

As for the story’s quality, while I'll admit that the section's header of "very lousy" is in this case exaggeration, I'm hard-pressed to seriously call the story Hugo-worthy. Its main drama comes from the narrator’s gradual mental disintegration as her brain reaches the six month limit of the technique being used to preserve it and succumbs to perfusion decay. This is conveyed in gradual changes to the narration style - for instance, in one of the first real indications of the impending decay, the narrator notes that “motor functions fail always first, then speech. I guess I’m luck lucky not to have, not to have any of those.” It’s moving, effective, and the same trick that Daniel Keyes won a Hugo with in 1960 for his story “Flowers for Algernon.” So, if nothing else, it satisfies Torgersen’s apparent desire to undo fifty-five years of evolution of the genre of Hugo-winning science fiction.

A second approach within Beale’s nominees comes in John C. Wright’s “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds,” an explicitly Catholic story about all of the animals in the world gathering to discuss the future after the extinction of man. It’s straight-up allegory, in which the animals are, by the end raised up to have their turn as the sons of God. Much like Wright’s essay, there is something almost tautological about it - its appeal is based entirely on whether or not you think idiosyncratically Catholic dogma is intrinsically worthwhile and interesting. I personally do not.

Lou Antonelli’s “On a Spiritual Plain” is in a similarly theological vein - superficially non-denominational, but still a story that sees science fiction as a vehicle for exploring religion. In this case the premise is a world where the magnetic field causes ghosts to exist. The story deals with the human chaplain who ends up having to escort ghosts to the planet’s north pole where they can dissipate, and its main point is to draw a firm line between this materialist phenomenon and the notion of the soul, which is to say, its main point is more theological axe-grinding, although the story is non-denominational It does, however, end up sharing that sense of biological purity that characterizes Wright and Beale’s views. The idea of electromagnetic immortality is clearly in the vicinity of transhumanism, and is also firmly rejected by the story. The ghosts feel that they are wrong, and desire dissipation, some of them believing in a more legitimate afterlife, the main character included. As for quality, well, I at least can’t come up with a fifty-year-old story off the top of my head that it’s clearly ripping off, which is something, but equally, I can’t exactly say it’s thought-provoking or original.

(As for the political intentions of Antonelli, I’ll let him speak for himself as he praises the Sad Puppies movement: “It’s hard for people outside the U.S. to understand how badly our cultural elites were intentionally subverted during the Cold War by the Soviet Union. Most Americans are Christian, patriotic, and believe in a European-derived civilization. The children of the elites are not, and do not believe in these values. They think Christians are either bigots or stupid or both, America is evil, and European-based civilization is all that’s wrong with the world.”)

The final story on Beale and Torgersen’s slates, Annie Bellet’s “Goodnight Stars,” was withdrawn on request of the author, and so I will mostly leave it alone. For what it’s worth, in my opinion it was the best of the five original nominees. I don’t have much to say for or against it. It’s perfectly decent.

But it’s worth noting, while we are discussing the Hugo nominations, that the state of science fiction and fantasy in 2014 was not such that “perfectly decent” is in any way a synonym for “best of the year.” None of Beale’s five nominees hold a candle to Charlie Jane Anders’s “As Good as New,” to pick a Hugo-eligible story of the sort that the Puppies were seemingly designed to keep out, and, more to the point, that they did. It’s published by Tor, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and by an author who was one of the first to speak out against the Puppies when they ran the table nominating, making her an author that Larry Correia, who founded the Sad Puppies movement two years ago, has explicitly acknowledged he has an issue with. It’s also an actually brilliant science fiction story first published in 2014, which just feels like something I should point out having spent rather a long time complaining about other people’s taste. If I’d have tuned in to this mess in time to have sent in a nominating ballot, I’d have nominated it. I recommend you go read it, just because it’s worth, after all of that, reminding yourself what good science fiction can feel like. Then when you get back, we’ll discuss one more story.

Right, so, instead of discussing the nominees that might have been - a discussion that really ought to wait until after Sasquan when the top fifteen nominees for each category and the vote totals are released and we can see what Theodore Beale kept off the ballot - let’s talk about one of the 2014 nominees, Rachel Swirsky’s “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” simply because it is the story most often cited by Beale’s supporters when they talk about the awful and sorry state of the Hugo Awards.

This is, of course, ridiculous, as it’s by miles a better story than anything Beale nominated. For one thing, it’s actually well-written. There’s a poetic lilt to the language, which is soothingly iambic, like a story for a young child, which makes the emotional punch of it all the more acute. You can demonstrate this easily enough - here’s a passage from Swirsky’s story. Read it out loud, and pay attention to the way the language naturally falls into a rhythm:

If they built you a mate, I’d stand as the best woman at your wedding. I’d watch awkwardly in green chiffon that made me look sallow, as I listened to your vows. I’d be jealous, of course, and also sad, because I want to marry you. Still, I’d know that it was for the best that you marry another creature like yourself, one that shares your body and bone and genetic template. I’d stare at the two of you standing together by the altar and I’d love you even more than I do now. My soul would feel light because I’d know that you and I had made something new in the world and at the same time revived something very old. I would be borrowed, too, because I’d be borrowing your happiness. All I’d need would be something blue.

Then try a bit of Steve Rzasa’s “Turncoat”:

My eight torpedoes are engulfed by the swarm of counter-fire missiles. The Yellowjackets explode in bursts of tightly focused x-rays, highlighted in my scans as hundreds of slender purple lines. My torpedoes buck and weave as they take evasive maneuvers. Their secondary warheads, compact ovoid shapes nestled inside their tubular bodies, shatter and expel molybdenum shrapnel at hypervelocities. Tens of thousands of glittering metal shards spray out in silver clouds against the void of space.

I expect the difference is intuitively clear. If not, let’s zero in on the comparative value of the phrase “I’d watch awkwardly in green chiffon that made me look sallow” and the image “their secondary warheads, compact ovoid shapes nestled inside their tubular bodies, shatter and expel molybdenum shrapnel at hypervelocities.”

Let’s also look at the scope of the story. In less than a thousand words, Swirsky moves among moments of silliness (“you’d walk with delicate and polite a gait as you could manage on massive talons”), moments of tenderness (“I’d pull out a hydrangea the shade of the sky and press it against my heart and my heart would beat like a flower. I’d bloom. My happiness would become petals”), and moments of utter and tragic sadness as the story’s real premise finally moves into focus in the closing paragraphs. More to the point, it mixes these - the detail of green chiffon early in the story acquires new resonance later when it becomes clear that these are the same dresses she’d already ordered for her now abandoned wedding. (And, of course, there’s the beautifully human detail of her picking a dress she knows makes her bridesmaids look sallow.)

So, with Swirsky we have more emotional range than… well, any of Beale’s picks, really. More than that, the story does more - its move from a flight of fancy to a strangely sweet description of a wedding to brutal tragedy and finally to a strange and uneasy rejection of its own premise as the narrator admits that her revenge fantasy - her desire to see the men who put her fiancee in a coma get eviscerated by a dinosaur - is wrong, and cruel, and yet still powerful. There’s nuance, and subtlety, and development. It’s artful, and beautiful.

And it’s everything that Theodore Beale and his ilk hate.

Part Seven: Notes On the Proper Handling of a Rabid Dog

It is this final image that sticks in the mind. Beale and his followers have demanded that we view science fiction as a binary opposition between two types of stories, and have engaged in childish antics with a literary award that has historically carried genuine weight in order to force the world to view it this way. Very well. Let us view it this way, since, in terms of the Hugos, we now have no other choice.

One of these two types of science fiction is capable of literary genius, is full of emotion and pathos, is surprising, is clever, and feels fresh. The other is warmed over retreads of decades old ideas that quietly but insidiously advance fascist ideologies.

I do not think that it is unreasonable to suggest that, given this choice, it is worth using one’s vote in the 2015 Hugo Awards to declare that the latter category is unworthy of any literary recognition or award. This is certainly the position I took publicly the day after the nominations were announced. It’s also a position that George R.R. Martin responded to by asking “are you fucking crazy?” So, actually, maybe the whole reasonableness thing is worth spelling out.  

First of all, let’s accept that this debate plays into Beale’s hands. He has been open about the fact that he is trying to disrupt the Hugo Awards, in active retaliation against accusations that his nomination last year via a smaller scale version of the Sad Puppies was him trying to disrupt the Hugos. Because that’s genuinely the sort of person he apparently is. Much like Brad Torgersen is a grown man who’s sad that he can’t judge books by their covers, Theodore Beale is a grown man who would rather break a nice thing than let someone else have it. Nevertheless, it’s done now. The only nominees for the Hugos in multiple categories were mediocrities chosen for the express purpose of advancing an absolutely loathsome set of viewpoints.

And in some ways this was the fate they always risked. The Hugo Awards, and science fiction fandom in general has always been a haven for eccentricities, which, let’s be honest, is part of why we’re seven thousand words into a discussion of how a fascist troll hijacked them. There are still, every year, people who vote No Award in the two Best Dramatic Presentation categories (which has, in practice, essentially been a popularity contest between Doctor Who and Game of Thrones fandoms for the past few years, with Game of Thrones winning), just to protest the category’s existence.

Perhaps more to the point, there’s a complex but existent system for voting to spite all of the nominees and not give a Hugo in a category for a given year in the first place. Which has been used only sporadically in the past, but due to the fact that the Hugos use a ranked ballot, does mean that Hugo voters have specifically given a rebuke to nominated works in the past, including the Theodore Beale last year, and, more historically, L. Ron Hubbard, who, when Scientology supporters bulk-nominated him for a Hugo in 1987, ultimately came in below No Award in the voting.

There is, in other words, ample precedent within the Hugo Awards for using them as a platform to make a statement. And if the Hugo Awards are ever to be used as a platform to make a statement, I think it is fair to say that the unequivocal repudiation of Theodore Beale and everything he stands for is the single most self-evidently important statement that they could possibly make in 2015. No, it won’t drive the fascists out of the Hugos. But it’ll stop ‘em in 2015, and we can fight 2016 in 2016.

A word on this larger fight, however. While I obviously hope that the analysis of Beale’s motivations and actions is sufficient to convince a majority of readers of the degree to which he is a problem that requires addressing, I am aware that there remain a substantial block of people who are willing to ally themselves with Theodore Beale despite the problems, both obvious and otherwise, with him.

Indeed, this is clearly becoming something of a pressing issue among Puppy supporters, with both Torgersen and Correia (the original founder of the Puppies movement) recently writing pieces sort of distancing themselves from Beale. The general tone of both of these was the same - pointing out that they don’t agree with Beale on everything, and that they can’t control him. Which is I’m sure true. Theodore Beale cannot be controlled. That’s what being a rabid dog means, really, and why there’s a generally agreed upon course of treatment for one. But I’d like to point to a telling moment in Correia’s apologia, in which he said, “Look at it like this. I’m Churchill. Brad is FDR. We wound up on the same side as Stalin.”

There are two things to say about this. The first is “wait, if you’re Churchill, Torgersen is FDR, and Beale is Stalin, then in this analogy, the people who thought the Hugo Awards were fine the way they were are…” The second is somewhat less glib: how, exactly, did anyone “wind up” here? One does not simply “wind up” allied to Josef Stalin. This is a process that requires some effort. It is a process during which one is afforded many opportunities to stop and say “wait a moment, I seem to be allying with Josef Stalin, maybe I should reconsider my life choices.”

And I think it’s fair to ask why Larry Correia is disinterested in taking any of these opportunities. Similarly, I think it’s fair to point out the relatively low bar that Correia is seeking to clear when proclaiming “I Am Not Vox Day.” True, he is not the Taliban-fetishizing racist who proclaims himself the voice of god. He’s just the guy standing next to him and riding his coattails.

Elsewhere, Correia says that “most of me and Brad’s communication with Vox consists of us asking him to be nice and not burn it all down out of spite.” I have no trouble believing that - certainly it's easier to believe than Brad Torgersen's earlier claim that Beale is "a gentleman." But why are they willing to work with such a man to accomplish their goals? What is it about this man who thinks that God imbued him with magic genes and a divine quest to make science fiction more fascist said “good ally” to them? What seemed so important about getting some stories they liked Hugos that they decided it was worth allying with Theodore Beale to do it? Because if we’re making World War II analogies, the really disturbing thing isn’t a deranged sadist like Hitler doing terrible things. That's what deranged sadists do, after all. The really disturbing thing is all the people who knowingly voted deranged sadist.

I get why a man listens to what he thinks is the voice of god. But Torgersen and Correia? What's their excuse?

Part Eight: God Will Bury You. Nature Will Bury You.

That covers the actual response in terms of the Hugos. But there are other ways to make a statement, and the award ceremony is not necessarily the best one. So allow me to make another sort. One that will discard all traces of the Occultic, and engage in nothing save for the most explicit clarity that I can muster.

I have not always been the most faithful of science fiction readers. I don’t read a ton of novels in a year, and those that I do tend to be from a select few favorite authors. But since I was a child, I knew the phrase “Hugo Award” carried weight. I knew they mattered, and that they pointed towards stories that might not be things I loved, but would always be things I respected. As an adult, I’ve followed them from afar, never weighing in on the major categories, but having Firm Opinions on the minor ones. I rejoiced in Doctor Who ’s three-year streak, politely disagreed but understood why Doctor Horrible beat Moffat in 2009, largely agreed with “Blackwater” winning in 2013, and until this year thought that the victory of Gollum’s acceptance speech at the MTV Movie Awards in 2004 was the biggest travesty in Hugo history.

Likewise, in “Best Graphic Story” I laughed as Girl Genius won three years ago, hilarious evidence of how out of line the Hugo voters were with most comics fans (although it’s not a bad comic, to be fair - as always, the Hugos were a reliable indicator of quality, if not a sane one). I cheered when Ursula Vernon’s Digger , a weird webcomic eligible because of some print collections, won a shock victory in 2012 - a choice that’s just as weird as Girl Genius , but that aligns perfectly with my own idiosyncratic loves. I love that the awards went to Saga in 2013, then XKCD in 2014, both brilliant choices, and yet so wildly far apart in style and even medium. What other award would or could do that?

I love the Hugos. I haven’t participated in them before, but I have loved them since childhood, and I love them to this day.

Fuck you, Theodore Beale.

Fuck you for trying to break a thing I loved. Fuck you for doing it to serve your stupid, lame fascist ideology. More to the point, fuck you for your stupid, lame fascist ideology. Your beliefs are horrible. You’re horrible. You’re a nasty, cruel little bully, and I do not like you.

Fuck you for making me feel that way. Fuck you for the way you’ve brought this thing that I love, this celebration of great science fiction, to a point where it is full of the sort of mean and hateful desires that seem to animate you. Fuck you for dragging us all down to your sorry level. Fuck you for being so odious that we have to go there.

And fuck you for making me want you to hate me. Fuck you for all of your beliefs that amount to nothing short of hatred for the things I love. For the people I love. For the art and beautiful things that are why I get out of bed in the morning. Fuck you for living your life for the sole purpose of destroying things that I love, and for making me wish that I could destroy something of yours in retaliation. Fuck you for making me write this, in the sincere and passionate hope that it will make you feel even a moment’s unpleasantness.

And fuck you for the very real possibility that a work nominated purely because you used your noxious little voice to rally your loathsome, asshole supporters to support it might win a Hugo Award. Fuck you because it’s actually possible that you will break the Hugos successfully and demonstrate that you’re oh so much stronger than a bunch of fans who were previously just happily attending a convention and voting for stuff they loved in awards. In short, fuck you.

I would also like to make two things very clear.

First of all, you are wrong, Theodore Beale. You are the emperor of a tiny patch of shit, and if you are remembered, it will only be as a joke. You are not a great man. Yours is not the voice of god, but just the voice of a sad, pathetic man. You will die, and everything you wrote will be lost to the sands of time, and everything you valued will become a half-forgotten relic if it becomes anything at all. Nobody will care. The world you want will never arise.

Instead will be the future. There will be new things, and new ideas, and some of them will be better than any idea I’ve ever had, and virtually all of them will be better than any idea you’ve ever had. The future will not be made of the ideas of the 1970s, or the 1870s, or the 1770s, or before. It will be made of ideas that you and I have never imagined. And it will be amazing. And if there is an afterlife from which you can watch the future unfold, you will hate every bit of it.

But I don’t think you will. I think you will die, and when you are dead, you will just be dead, and moreover be forgotten, and that you will have never once tasted a morsel of the joy that Rachel Swirsky’s “If You Were a Dinosaur My Love” has brought to me.

Which brings us to the second thing.

You have already lost.

Sure, maybe you’ll take the Hugos, and you’ll give them an end date in historical relevance. No matter what, you’ve left an ugly footnote in the history of science fiction, like a puppy on a sidewalk. But the only reason you wanted to do that was because you were mad that we were having fun, liking the science fiction and fantasy that we liked.

And guess what, Theodore Beale?

We’re still liking it. Stuff the ballot box all you want, but “If You Were a Dinosaur My Love” was still a great story, and there’s nothing you can possibly do to change that. Take over a major industry award. Progressive science fiction will just move its critical praise to other awards, or to individual critics’ year-end lists. We will carry on, and we will identify and praise brilliant works of science fiction, and the stuff we like will endure in history while the stuff you like is forgotten.

This is not, to be clear, a threat. I am not proposing some counter-slate for 2016, or some set of tactics of resistance. I’m simply offering a sober and considered assessment of the likely critical future of the two schools of science fiction that you and your followers have articulated, and suggesting that the progressive, literary tradition that includes Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Rachel Swirsky, and many, many others is going to endure and thrive, whereas your stupid fascist nonsense will wither, and that none of your trolling and bullying is going to make a whit of difference in either our carrying on of the act of loving these works nor in their enduring reception. And while there are a lot of reasons for this, not least that our stories don’t suck and yours do, I think there’s one that really settles this matter straightforwardly and decisively.

We are, after all, talking about a genre that is about imagining the future. And in a debate over the nature of a genre about the future, it seems to me terribly obvious that the side that values the future and savors its imaginative possibilities is going to win out over the side that hates and fears it.

So to that end, here’s a celebration of some stuff that I bet Theodore Beale really hates.

Part Nine: I Want To Thank You For Dancing To The End

There are works on the Hugo ballot that were not selected by Theodore Beale. These are worth celebrating. So are many works that aren’t on the Hugo ballot, whether because of Theodore Beale or not. And so, to close, I’d like to focus on two categories near and dear to my critical heart, Best Graphic Story, and Best Dramatic Presentation. (With quick side notes about Best Related Work and Best Fan Writer.)

Let’s start with Best Graphic Story, a category where Beale had only one pick, inherited from Torgersen, and which thus has four nominees selected by traditional, good taste Hugo voters. In which case, they had a stunning year - the four non-Puppy nominees are certainly not my choice for the four best comics to fall under the genre heading of sci-fi/fantasy, but they’re all solidly deserving nominees. They also represent an interesting turn in Hugo taste, solidly towards the American direct market and away from webcomics, which had previously done very well at the Hugos. In the tradition of my weekly comics reviews, then, a tour from my least favorite to my favorite.

We’ll start with Rat Queens then, a book that mixes Dungeons and Dragons humor with genuine pathos in a story about a marauding band of four female adventurers in a medieval fantasy world. The book is not without controversy: the original artist was removed from the book after admitting to a domestic abuse charge, which is a genuine problem for an openly feminist book. But it is a feminist book, and one openly and deliberately invested in diversity. Even aside from the controversy, though, it’s, while fun, just not as interesting as the other three nominees this year.

Also up is Saga , which won in 2013, and was nominated in 2014. It’s a great sci-fi/fantasy epic, with brilliant characters. It’s lost some of the momentum it started with - I’m totally behind its 2013 win, and equally behind its 2014 defeat, where it was, I think, solidly inferior to the winner. But it’s a great book, and also one that is interested in diversity. There’s a great story in its creation where writer Brian K. Vaughn - one of the smartest writers in comics these days - noted to artist Fiona Staples that he really wanted the main female character to not be a redhead, because he thought redheads were cliched for the sort of character he was writing. Staples replied something to the effect of, “she doesn’t have to be white either, you know.” And she isn’t.

Also up is Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky’s Sex Criminals , a book whose premise is endorsed by Margaret Atwood. Beale singled this out for criticism, or at least, for a really bitter and poor taste joke about Marion Zimmer Bradley, and its title is in the cheeky sense of humor that the book displays throughout. It’s a very funny book about sex and sexual hangups, told through a silly and charming premise, namely two people who can stop time when they orgasm, and so masturbate in bathrooms and rob banks. It’s fantastic and human and poignant and witty, and one of the best serialized stories being published in any medium right now.

And finally there is G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona’s Ms. Marvel . This is a superhero book out of, unsurprisingly, Marvel Comics. On one level, it’s your basic teen superhero concept - a riff on the old Lee/Ditko Spider-Man stories. But its main character is a Pakistani-American girl in Jersey City. She’s a character who has pleasantly enraged Beale and his ilk - here’s John C. Wright on the recent announcement that, following Marvel’s next big crossover, she’d be added to the roster of the Avengers:

“Meanwhile, the one and only person on the team with a clear religious identity is the Muslim girl. This is a religion which has, whether anyone admits it or not, declared war on the whole world, and has, whether anyone says so or not, adopted terrorism and stealth jihad as the main means to wage that war. This is the same as if, during World War Two, a comic book made one of their heroines a member of the Nazi party. But one of the those nice Nazi party members who do not approve of Hitler, or the other official doctrines, written in the official literature, of the organization to which she willingly belongs. Such a comic character would appeal to the moderate Nazis whom we do not wish to alienate, since, after all, Hitler highjacked the noble institution and motives of the Party.”

(Wright also complains that the new Avengers lineup lacks “any Christian White Male Adults who might act like a Father figure, a leader, an alpha male, a hero,” doing so, without a trace of irony, two sentences after decrying the word “Eurocentric” as nonsensical, just in case you’d forgotten that he is, quite separate from being a bigoted jerk, also a moron.)

It’s also just a fantastic comic. But more to the point, it’s a demonstration of how fundamentally wrong Beale, Torgersen, and all their supporters are. Because the entire reason the comic is good is the diversity it introduces. As I said, it’s on one level a rehash of the old Lee/Ditko Spider-Man stories - exactly the sort of “nothing new under the sun” comic that Torgersen would seemingly prefer. It’s about power and responsibility and growing up. Alphona’s scratchily cartoonish style even feels like a modern day equivalent to Ditko’s paranoidly visionary linework. If what you want is raw originality of ideas, Sex Criminals would beat it hands down.

Except that it turns out that taking the Spider-Man story and moving it from Brooklyn to Jersey City (and Ms. Marvel is fiercely and passionately from Jersey City, with an explicit ethos of taking care of her local community), grounding its ethics in a progressive vision of Islam (one that is not naive about the existence of other visions - Ms. Marvel’s older brother is a bit of a closed-minded bigot who is oppressively protective of his sister), and making the main character a millennial female geek (she has a team-up with Wolverine in which she gushes to him about the fanfic she wrote about him and Storm before, as is the nature of such team-ups, winning him over and convincing him of her worth as a superhero) makes it fresh and interesting again.

In other words, having a perspective on superhero comics based on something other than the white male father figure is good and interesting, and makes for better comics. Aside from any progressive argument for the value of having a teenage Pakistani-American Muslim girl as a superhero, doing so just plain turns out to be more interesting than white boys have been in years, for the simple and obvious fact that it’s something that we haven’t seen before instead of something we’ve been seeing over and over again since the 1960s. Ms. Marvel is awesome for the exact and specific reasons that Brad Torgersen and Theodore Beale are fools.

But what I’d really like to do is highlight an eligible work of science fiction that is brilliant and as diametrically opposed to everything that Theodore Beale holds dear as it is possible to be. Moreover, because of the specific damage that Theodore Beale did, I want to celebrate things that were not Hugo nominated. Not even things that I expect to have been on the long list - but things that were eligible. Ms. Marvel is a fantastic work that I’m glad got nominated, because I’m sure it pissed him off, but in terms of brilliant, Hugo-worthy stuff that spits in the face of everything Theodore Beale loves I think we need to talk briefly about Uber, written by Kieron Gillen and drawn by a couple of artists.

What strikes me as particularly appealing about Uber is the fact that it so directly engages with the iconography of fascism. It is an alternate history World War II comic in which the Nazis, in the dying days of the War, turn the tide with the invention of superheroes. And Gillen is careful to work scrupulously within a set of rules. The mechanics of superheroes are as well-defined as any military technology, with much of the plot hinging on the gradual development of tactics for superhuman warfare. Everything is grounded in thorough historical research.

So the result is a brutally well thought out dissection of the intersections between the idea of the superhero and the fascist hero in all its post-Nietzschean glory. It’s right there in the title, Uber , a direct invocation of the idea of the ubermensch. Because make no mistake - the book is anti-fascist. It is a gruesome, explicit depiction of the material horror that was Nazi Germany. It’s a reminder that people like Theodore Beale are not harmless cartoon villains to laugh at, but horrible people responsible for some of the worst atrocities in human history, and that war is not some happy fantasy of bringing righteous justice to the unworthy, but a miserable slog of human suffering.

But more than that, it’s a brilliant and nuanced exploration of the fascist narrative, and the ways in which it is deeply historically entwined with the history of science fiction as a genre. It is not the first book to do so, obviously. Norman Spinrad’s 1972 novel The Iron Dream , which imagines an alternate history where Hitler became a hack sci-fi writer in America, is probably the most notable in terms of just how much it anticipates this mess, although I’d argue that there is no greater parody of the Sad Puppies than J.G. Ballard’s 1968 “Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan.” But it is an astonishingly thorough exploration of it - an uncompromising mix of material realism and genre tropes that feels staggeringly relevant today.

But I think what I love most about it, at least in this context, is that it purports to be exactly what the Puppies want: serious-minded military science fiction, with a focus on battle and combat and valor. It’s got spectacular gore and body horror. It’s dark as dark can be, and uncompromising. It holds nothing back, ever. Even its focus on strict rules has the flavor of wargaming, the obvious pinnacle of the Puppy aesthetic. And it takes all of these things and turns them cruelly and savagely against their supposed masters. The only reason Theodore Beale could possibly fail to hate it is if he’s too stupid to understand it. Which is, admittedly, a risk.

The other category I’d like to talk about is Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), in which an episode of Doctor Who , a series I have previously written about at some length, was nominated over several Beale-approved works (as was the openly progressive Orphan Black ). But since we’re about to talk about Doctor Who , I’d also like to address another category, namely Best Related Work, and a book that is often cited, like Swirsky’s story, as evidence of the appalling state of the Hugo awards, namely Chicks Dig Time Lords , an anthology of essays about Doctor Who by women, published by Mad Norwegian Press. (In one of life’s little ironies, the book beat out the first volume of a Robert Heinlein biography for the Hugo, a fact that is often cited as if it is self-evidently an outrage by supporters of the Puppy slates; the second volume of the biography was eligible for Best Related Work this year, but was not on Beale’s slate and did not get nominated.)

Though, actually, the book I want to talk about is Queers Dig Time Lords , which was nominated but did not win last year, and is treated as another one of those books that shows just how awful and degenerate the Hugos were. Simply because anyone objecting to that book and saying that it only got a Hugo nomination because of politics is simply ignorant of the history of Doctor Who , a series whose relationship with its gay fans has at several points been instrumental to its history, both in the 1980s when the internal BBC politics surrounding its openly gay producer John Nathan-Turner were a crucial factor in the show’s cancellation and in the 2000s when Russell T Davies, a longtime and active Doctor Who fan who had previously been best known for his groundbreaking gay drama Queer as Folk spearheaded the revival of the series that won three consecutive Hugos from 2006-08, and has been at least nominated every year since. To suggest that a book about gay Doctor Who fans is merely nominated for its social justice politics is, quite simply, a declaration of thundering ignorance about the subject matter.

But then, of all the categories in which the Puppies have marked their territory, there is perhaps none that reveals the rank hypocrisy of the movement quite like Best Related Work, where Beale and Torgersen pushed a book entitled Wisdom From My Internet on to the ballot despite the fact that it is not, in any meaningful sense, a book related to science fiction and fantasy, but instead a disjointed collection of the sort of right-wing bon mots that your idiot uncle spams on Facebook. That they and their supporters have the unmitigated gall to suggest that Queers Dig Time Lords was nominated purely for its politics while simultaneously pushing a political book (published under the banner Patriarchy Press, just to make sure nobody misses where its sympathies lie) that is not actually a related work is, in many ways, the epitome of this entire mess.

This also brings us to Best Fan Writer, and a somewhat obscure but nevertheless important point. There is one non-Puppy nominee in this category, Laura J. Mixon. The reason that Mixon is nominated is a blogpost she wrote entitled “A Report on Damage Done by One Individual Under Several Names,” in which she meticulously outlined the appalling behavior of a left-wing troll within the science fiction community who wrote under the name Requires Hate, among others (there is reason to doubt that her legal name is known). It’s a corker, and deserves a Hugo. I think I might even vote for it over No Award.

The antics of Requires Hate have, for a variety of reasons, been compared to those of Theodore Beale, by people on all sides of the debate. Anti-Puppies compare Beale to her. Puppies point to her as evidence that the Anti-Puppies’ house isn’t in order either.

But in all of this, there is a comparison between Requires Hate and Theodore Beale that is not sufficiently remarked upon. One of the conclusions Mixon draws in her analysis of Requires Hate’s behaviour is that she “preferentially targets writers who are POC, women, and people from other marginalized groups, with a particular focus on people of Asian descent.” Requires Hate was a left-wing blogger who identified with several of the groups she abused people from, and was the sort of person Puppies call a “social justice warrior.” But the people she targeted and the people Beale's supporters target are the same group: women, people of color, and queer voices . To quote something that I first heard from Anita Sarkeesian, although I vaguely recall her crediting a source for it too, “in the game of patriarchy, women aren’t the other team, they’re the ball.” (It's worth here remembering Annie Bellet and Kary English, the two female authors Beale put on his short story slate, who have also ended up as victims of abuse in all of this.)

But as I said, I want to talk about Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form). Again, a brief word on the non-Puppy candidates, or, actually, in this case one of the Puppy candidates, Game of Thrones , a show I quite love. That said, I find the specific choice of episodes, “The Mountain and the Viper,” uncompelling. I think it was the weakest episode of the season in many regards - a case of Game of Thrones playing it safe and doing exactly what is expected of it after thirty-seven episodes. I have no problems deciding that if this is the episode Game of Thrones is to be judged on, it’s not Hugo worthy.

Similarly, for all that I respect Orphan Black , I don’t think it’s a show that serves up individual episodes of great merit. It’s fun on aggregate - a binge show. I wish it did what Game of Thrones did in its first season and compete as a long-form work, as it would be stronger there. Alas, it is here. On top of that, I wish it had nominated its most interesting episode, the one in which a transgender clone was introduced, bringing the complexity of gender as a concept into the view of its fascinating exploration of what defines us as people.

Which leaves Doctor Who , with the fantastic episode “Listen.” I wo...

As I mentioned the other day, I’ve recently had a bit of a cold. As a result, my immune system has been weakened and I developed a skin condition. The cream I used had a list of potential side effects. I never really bother reading the list of possible side effects, in much the same way that no-one ever reads the terms and conditions before ticking the box claiming to have read the terms and conditions. 

Anyway, it turns out that I am the one in ten thousand who has an allergic reaction to this cream. I always knew I was special. 1 in 10,000! That means there are only 6,400 of us in the whole of the United Kingdom. We could hire out Wembley Arena and have a party. The capacity of Wembley Arena is actually 12,500 but some of us will probably be all puffy and swollen and so will need a bit of extra space.

There’s a real sense of betrayal in having a negative reaction to medication. I took this in the belief that it was going to help me, but it’s just made things worse. You two-faced bastard. You were meant to make me better by now my face is puffy and my lips are swollen and cracked and toast is the only thing I can eat because I can’t open my mouth wide enough to eat anything else.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to see a doctor and I didn’t realise the ‘Say “Aah”‘ thing was a real thing. It seems like something from the Beano, like a dog running out of a butcher’s shop with a string of sausages in its mouth or a small boy getting a saucepan stuck on his head. As the doctor pressed down my tongue with one of those wooden lollipop stick tongue depressers and asked me to say ‘Aah’, I felt faintly absurd. ‘Aaaaaah.’ What sort of thirty-four year-old man says ‘Aaaaaah’?

This time, I decided to read the list of possible side effects from the medicine I was given to counteract the side effects from the previous batch. One of the possible side effects is ‘feeling, seeing or hearing things which do not exist’. But surely this is a difficult thing to identify. If you can see something, how can you tell that it doesn’t exist? What it should say is ‘feeling, seeing or hearing things which other people say do not exist’. But then, who to trust? If someone said to me ‘I’ve taken some medication which means I may see things that don’t exist’ I would say simply ‘Oh, right’ but then, later, when they say something innocuous like ‘Can you pass me that pen?’ I would reply by saying ‘What pen?’

Here’s something interesting I noticed in the Tory manifesto over the weekend. In a section headlined ‘We will build on our Olympic and Paralympic legacy’ on page 42, tbere;s a commitment to support elite sports funding along with a list of big events happening in Britain over the next few years and then this:

We will support new sports in the UK, in particular through greater links with the US National Football League, the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball, with the ultimate ambition of new franchises being based here.

It’s curious that this turns up in a section headlined Olympic and Paralympic sport, as only one of those (basketball) is an Olympic sport. They’re also the only new sports mentioned in that section, with no mention of developing any of the other Olympic and Paralympic sports. It feels an odd priority to identify helping major American sports leagues into the UK when talking about ‘new sports’ – not least because there are already long established British leagues in American football, basketball and baseball.

There’s also a question of cost associated with bringing the NFL, NBA or MLB anywhere. While everyone likes to gasp about the huge amounts of money in American sports, a lot of that is supported by government spending, especially on stadiums. The NFL especially is infamous for demanding that cities contribute or pay entirely for new stadiums and new facilities, using the threat of moving teams to cities that are willing to pay to make them cough up. It’s a model where every team is encouraged to demand as much as it can get from its host city, or they’ll decamp and find someone willing to be fleeced, and London’s just the latest city to be waved at others in an effort to make them open their wallets.

Planning to bring an American franchise here is committing to take part in a bidding war with American cities seeking the same thing, with the one willing to give the sweetest deal the victor. It’s another unfunded pledge from the Tories, looking to throw hundreds of millions into attracting already wealthy sports to come here, when that same money could have a revolutionary effect on sports already in Britain. Imagine what it could do for developing women’s sport or para-sport instead of being sunk into enticing someone else?

And I thought Tories didn’t believe in Government picking winners…

Question: what is the closest to a election that a party has released its manifesto? Because I’m pretty sure that outside of snap elections called at breakneck pace, the SNP choosing today to launch theirs must be one of the latest. Indeed, judging from some of the comments I’ve sen, it may be a real first in a party delivering its manifesto after votes had started being cast – some places had their postal ballots arrive at the weekend. That’s something that could raise an interesting discussion – what if you cast a postal vote for a party and then they surprised you by putting something in their manifesto that you fundamentally disagreed with? Is the answer that you should’ve waited, that they should’ve published earlier, or some combination of both?

With it being the SNP’s day in the spotlight, it’s a chance for London-based journalists to start revealing just how little they know, and Bill Turnbull got off to a fine start on BBC Breakfast this morning. Turnbull was interviewing a somewhat bemused Stewart Hosie (SNP Deputy Leader) about Trident, and seemed to be labouring under the impression that if there was a minority Labour government, the SNP would have some magical power of veto over them. It does sadly show how much Tory propaganda has sunk in that it didn’t occur to someone with years of journalistic experience that if Trident renewal was up for debate in the Commons, there’d have to be quite an odd situation going on for the SNP to be voting with the Tories to get rid of it.

It’s not just Turbull, though. All across the spectrum, political journalists and commentators – the elite experts who are meant to be explaining these things to us – are falling over themselves to tell us it’ll all be far too complex. Just as we saw in the run up to the last election, when the idea of a coalition and a hung Parliament was getting closer, it’s becoming clear just how hard it is for some of our media class to think outside the box. But then, this is a country where the comments of someone who may or may not be running for US President next year were ranked above any mention that Finland had an election yesterday, and even when Germany or France have elections, there’s no danger of Dimbleby being brought out to anchor all-night coverage of it, or armies of reporters travelling all over them to tell us what the race looks like from Dusseldorf or Lyons. Too much of our coverage is based on the idea that elections have to have winners and losers, and can’t be expressions of opinion. Maybe we’ll get a result this time that shakes that consensus a little more.

On a related note, I’ve noticed a similar consensus in reports looking ahead to the post-election period that seem to be assuming that Liberal Democrat MPs can be easily added to the Tory pile when considering the potential deals. Andrew George’s comments on this aren’t outside the party mainstream, and I know very few people – online or off – who’d be enthusiastic about a second coalition with the Tories. I’m sure there are some in the leadership who’d prefer it, but they’re going to have to convince the party to go along with it, which is going to be a significant issue at all the stages of agreement the leadership would need (Parliamentary party, Federal Executive and Conference). A lot depends on the final outcome of the election and how the coalition maths end up, but there are significant swathes of opinion in the party who’d prefer no coalition or one with Labour to carrying on with the Tories.

A very interesting discovery on Election Leaflets today, of a letter from Michael Fallon, flagging him up as Secretary of State for Defence to voters in Barrow and Furness playing up the threat of a Labour government ‘propped up by the SNP’ not renewing Trident. This is real ‘all politics is local’ territory as Barrow is where Vickers/BAE carry out the maintenance of Trident submarines (if you ever go to Barrow, that’s what the giant buildings looming over the town are for) and the only time it’s not been held by Labour since WW2 was in the 80s, when Labour were either either in favour of disarmament or seen as weak on keeping it. Labour have a decent majority there (over 5,000 in 2010), but worries about losing jobs at Vickers drove those losses in the 80s and could be just as strong today. Might be worth adding Barrow to the list of seats to keep an eye on for interesting results on election night.

Hey, look, I’m home! Finally I’ll have a Hugo post whose comment thread I’ll be around to moderate. So let me present some not-terribly-organized thoughts on the current state of things (if you missed my previous Hugo-related posts on Whatever, they are here, here and here; also, File770 is doing a fine job keeping up with all the latest on the Hugos):

* I probably shouldn’t admit that I’m having a schadenfreudilicious time watching Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen now desperately try to put sunlight between themselves and that toxic bigot Vox Day, but I’m not going to lie: I am, and also, it’s not working for them at all, as there is a fairly obvious evidence trail to suggest there was hardly any sunlight between them until Day suddenly became inconvenient. Correia and Torgersen are two guys who brought an arsonist to a party, and when the arsonist started setting fires — as arsonists are known to do! — they tried to argue, while the flames rose around them, that they were not actually complicit in burning down the house. The time to disassociate themselves from Day would have been two years ago, before Correia, in a fit of unfathomable stupidity, decided that bruiting both Day and his interminably mediocre story as Hugo-worthy, and palling about with the fellow online, wouldn’t come back to bite him square on the ass.

My own supposition as to why neither Torgersen nor Correia realized what a bad idea it was to beclown themselves with Day’s company is that the two of them were, simply, too naive to think that the enemy of their enemy (i.e., the non-existent social justice warrior conspiracy designed to keep fun stories and/or conservative writers from the Hugo ballot) could be anything other than their friend. Certainly Mr. Day would validate their conspiritorial world view — hadn’t he just been kicked out of SFWA merely for expressing an opinion unpopular with the SJWs, and not at all because of his own actions? — and when he’s not performing for the crowd (that is, the Internet) or talking about something that specifically touches on his own expansive set of bigotries, Day is a perfectly lucid person.

He’s a fine con man, in other words, and Correia and Torgersen fell for his con. Day was looking for a way back into relevance in science fiction and fantasy and they very happily gave it to him, and didn’t realize until after the Hugo awards were actually announced, and the backlash against the slates in full force, just how thoroughly they had been played. Torgersen delirously announced after the Hugos came out that the Puppies had “stolen the Enterprise”; he wasn’t aware that he and Correia were the redshirts in that scenario, or just how much and how closely the two of them would then be associated with Day’s feculent character and actions.

Well, now they know. At this point Correia and Torgersen have to decide whether they want to be known either as Day’s fellow travelers, or his useful idiots. Or both! It could be both. Neither of these options makes them look good; nor, obviously, fits with their own self-image of being Brave Men Fighting the Good Fight™. But in fact, they aren’t fighting a good fight, and in fact, they got played. So: Fellow travelers or useful idiots. These are the choices.

* Also, can we please now stop pretending that this whole Puppy nonsense began for any other reason than that once upon a time, Larry Correia thought he was going to win an award and was super pissed he didn’t, and decided that the reason he didn’t had to be a terrible, awful conspiracy against people just like him (a conservative! Writing “fun” fiction!), as opposed to, oh, the voters deciding they just plain liked something and someone else better? Can we stop pretending that a fellow who practically begs people to nominate his work three years running, hiding the begging behind an oh-so-thin veil of “let’s stick it to the SJWs!” doesn’t desperately crave the external validation that he thinks the award will bring? Can we stop pretending that this is anything other than a grown up child stomping his feet, screaming look at me, look at me, loooook at meeeeee? Because, come on, folks. We’re well past the point of genteel here. Let’s call it for what it is.

(And yes, I know, Correia declined his nomination for the Hugo this year. Let’s talk about that for a minute, shall we. It takes a very special sort of fellow to allow himself to be on a slate to get nominated, marshal people to nominate him for the award as part of a slate, and then decline — and write a big ol’ puffed-up piece about why he was declining, social justice warriors, blows against the empire, blah blah blah, yadda yadda. Yes, nice he declined the nomination and let someone else on the ballot. But it’s a little like wanting credit for rescuing a baby squirrel when you knocked the baby squirrel out of the tree to begin with.)

To be clear, the Puppy nonsense now isn’t just about Correia really really really wanting validation in the form of a rocketship; Day’s stealing the Puppy movement right out from under Correia and Torgerson has changed things up quite a bit, and it’s certainly true at this point that this little campaign is about a bunch of people trying to shit in the punchbowl so no one else can have any punch. But at the beginning, it was Correia hurt and angry that someone else got an award he thought was his, and deciding that it was stolen from him, rather than being something that was never his to begin with. And I’m sorry for him that it didn’t go his way. But actual grown human beings deal with disappointment in ways other than Correia has.

Correia can bluster about this all he likes; he’s a lovely online bully, and certainly he wishes to project that he’s a Tough Guy Saying Tough Things, Toughly™. But, eh. If he was actually who he wishes he could project himself as, the Sad Puppy thing would have never happened. And, ironically, he would be better positioned to win the awards he craved, because he wouldn’t be seen as a petulant whiner about such things. As it is, all we can do for him now is let him show us on the cartoon face pain chart how much Worldcon hurt him, and offer him soothing hugs until all his pain goes away.

* I notice that Vox Day has been enjoying his moment, and has taken to making pronouncements along the line of “award this slate of things I managed to push onto the ballot or GOD HELP ME I WILL DESTROY THE HUGOS FOREVER BWA HA HA HAH HA HA.” Because that’s the sort of asshole shitbug of human he is.

So, a couple of things to know about Vox Day. One, he’s the sort of person for whom any scenario will be seen as a victory condition; if he were to be set on fire and pushed in front of a speeding train, he would cackle about how this was exactly what he had planned right up until the moment of impact turned him into flaming bits of kibble. So obviously he’s going to babble on about how he plans to destroy the Hugos forever if he doesn’t get his way. Why wouldn’t he. That’s a victory condition! Plus, he’s getting attention. In the grand pantheon of People Acting Like Children About the Hugos, he’s the Grand Baby, and attention is what he wants.

Two: Fuck that dude. If everything is a victory condition for him — and it is — then worrying about what he’s going to do is sort of pointless. What is he going to do? Why, declare victory! Regardless! So you might as well do what you want. And if that means voting “No Award” in the categories where there are only Puppy nominees, then by all means follow your joy. Yes, he’ll say that’s what he planned all along. You could open a can of peas and he would maintain that you’re doing exactly what he wanted. He wants you to see him as a mastermind, rather than as a general failure whose only successes lie in being terrible to other people, and encouraging others to be the same.

So, yeah. Ignore his shtick; focus on your thing, as it involves the Hugos.

* Many people are convinced this is The End of the Hugos. Guys, no. It’s really not, and if I may say so, running around as if one’s hair is on fire about it, as satisfying as it is in the short term, isn’t going to be useful — and besides gives the Puppies their glee, which is a thing I don’t think they should have. I am not saying that you shouldn’t feel angry, or upset, or exasperated, or whatever you feel. Feel that! Own that! Be that! And also, decide to do something about it.

First, by voting for the Hugos this year. There are some very good reasons to “no award” everything that’s on a Puppy slate, including entire categories — I understand Brad Torgersen is suggesting anyone who does so is a gigantic asshole, but at this particular moment in time, and given how he’s just been played by Vox Day, he should probably not be declaring anyone else an asshole, lest that mirror be put up to him — but there are also reasons not to, and you’ll have to decide for yourself the best course of action. But that starts with voting, which one can do with a supporting membership to Sasquan.

Second, by deciding to be part of the conversation about what to do with the Hugos from here on out, which may or may not include tweaking the award rules to better handle slates (which are a bad idea) and obvious block voting (which is not good either). I should note that I’m not personally entirely convinced a wholesale change in voting rules is needed, because to some extent I see this as self-correcting — honestly, after this year, would anyone want to be on a slate, much less a Puppy slate? Who wants that sort of asterisk on their Hugo? — but it’s a conversation to have. Specifically, it’s a conversation to have at the WSFS business meeting, which will take place at this year’s Worldcon, Sasquan.

Third, by understanding that this is a process, and it will take time. If a rule change is proposed at Sasquan and then passed, it has to be affirmed at the next Worldcon (in Kansas City) and then it will take effect the year after. Which means we may have at least another year of potential mischief along this line. Accept that this is a fact, be ready to deal with it (preferably with an eyeroll and the appropriate voting action), and recognize that the Hugos survive — or don’t — based on what the community around them decides to do. You can be part of that community. It takes effort and a bit of commitment. The good news is, there’s more to that community you’ll be part of than just the Hugos. And it’s a good community to be part of.

* Finally, on the subject of slates, for the avoidance of doubt, here’s my own personal position: I won’t ask to be put on a slate of nominees for a Hugo; If asked to be on a slate of nominees for a Hugo, I will refuse; If you see my name on a slate of nominees for the Hugo, you may assume I neither asked nor consented to be on that slate. I am fine with people recommending my work to others for consideration; I am not fine with people saying “vote this slate to get our nominees on the ballot for reasons.”

To be blunt about it, I don’t need to be on a slate — In my experience people have voted for me, or not, because they liked my work (or didn’t). Silly mutterings of conspiracy aside, everything of mine that’s been on the Hugo ballot got there under its own steam, by someone genuinely liking it and deciding to give it a slot on their nomination list. I’m proud of that; I wouldn’t want a work of mine on the final Hugo ballot (or any other ballot, for that matter) for any other reason.

I’m also opposed to slates in general — or in the case of the Sad Puppy slate, a weasely list of “recommendations” that had in their categories the number of slots as there are on the Hugo nomination list, nod, wink, nod — because, here’s a wacky idea, I think the point of popular awards is for people to vote for the things they actually like, not a slate designed to achieve some sort of political or social point (or, in the case of the Rabid Puppy slate, exist as advertisement for the slate-builder’s hobby-horse of a publishing house). Also, to be blunt, I don’t trust anyone else’s taste. I may or may not have terrible taste in science fiction and fantasy, but it’s my taste, and I’ll vote it.

In short: I don’t do slates — won’t voluntarily be on them, and won’t vote for them. And I’m not going to lie, from here on out, as regards the Hugos, I’ll think less of you if you participate on or vote for a slate. Because what you’re doing is showing that you don’t actually care about what the Hugos are (an award that acts as a snapshot, however imperfect, of the current state of science fiction and fantasy), but rather what the Hugos can do (draw attention to your own work, politics, social thoughts or whatever). The thing is, the latter happens because of the former. And that only happens when people vote their own nominees, not anyone else’s.

OK, here's an idle thought (and a question) for you ...

A couple of weeks ago at the British Eastercon I found myself on a panel discussion about vampires. (Hey, I've been trying to get the hell away from being Mr Singularity Guy for years now; what's your problem?)

Anyway, there I was sitting with Freda Warrington and Jim Butcher, and our moderator opens up by asking, "what makes vampires sexy?"

And I suddenly realized I had come to the right place for an argument. Because ...

Vampires are not sexy. At least, not in the real world.

Desmodus rotundis isn't sexy. (Except insofar as small furry rodents that carry rabies aren't as un-sexy as some other obligate haemophages.) Bed bugs are really not sexy. But if you want maximally not-sexy, it's hard to top Placobdelloides jaegerskioeldi, the Hippo Arse Leech.

The Hippo Arse Leech is a leech; it sucks blood. Like most leeches, its mouth parts aren't really up to drilling through the armour-tough skin of a hippopotamus, so it seeks out an exposed surface with a much more porous barrier separating it from the juicy red stuff: the lining of the hippo rectum. When arse leeches find somewhere to feed, in due course happy fun times ensue—for hermaphrodite values of happy fun times that involve traumatic insemination. Once pregnant, the leeches allow themselves to be expelled by the hippo (it's noteworthy that hippopotami spin their tails when they defecate, to sling the crap as far away as possible—possibly because the leeches itch—we're into self-propelled-hemorrhoids-with-teeth territory here), whereupon in the due fullness of time they find another hippo, force their way through it's arse crack, and find somewhere to chow down. Oh, did I mention that this delightful critter nurtures its young? Yep, the mother feeds her brood until they're mature enough to find a hippo of their own. (Guess what she feeds them with.)

Here 's a video by Mark Siddall, professor of invertebrate zoology at the American Natural History Museum, a noted expert on leeches, describing how he discovered P. Jaegerskioeldi, just in case you think I'm making this up.

By the end of my description Jim and Freda were both ... well, I wish I'd thought to photograph their faces for posterity. So were the audience. And that's when I got to the money shot: the thing about fictional vampires is, vampires are only sexy when they're anthropomorphic.

Let's leave aside the whole living dead angle (a callback to ancient burial traditions in northern climes, where the decay of corpses might be retarded by cold weather: and when a family sickened and died one after the other, from contagious diseases such as tuberculosis, on opening the family crypt an undecaying rosy-cheeked corpse might be found with blood trickling from its mouth). Let's look solely at the vampire motif in modern fiction, where sexy vampires are used as a metaphor for the forbidden lover. Do we see anything approximating a realistic portrayal of actual blood-drinking organisms? Do we hell! Blood isn't actually very nutritious, so haemophagous parasites tend to be small, specialized, and horrifyingly adapted: biological syringes with a guidance system and a digestive tract attached. If we expanded a real one to human size it'd be a thing of horror, fit to give Ridley Scott or H. R. Giger nightmares. But I digress: the thing is, we know what real bloodsucking fiends look like, and do we find them in our fiction? We do not.

So here we have a seeming paradox: a class of organism that is represented in fictionalized, supernatural form in a manner that is pretty much the antithesis of their real world presentation. There's an entire sub-genre in which we are expected to temporarily pretend that the smouldering sexy vampire lover isn't actually a hippo arse leech squirming and eager to dig it's jaws into your rectal mucosa. And now I am shaking my head and wondering, thoughtfully, if I can see any other parasitic life-cycles that are amenable to converting into supernatural fictional tropes? (Your first example being, of course, my use of angler fish sex as a model for unicorns ...)

PS: If you are a creationist, the onus is on you to come to terms with why your God saw fit to inflict a parasite like this on hippopotami. Just sayin'.

It’s always dangerous to speculate about the hidden psychological motives of people you disagree with – this is the sin of Bulverism. But like most sins, it’s also fun. So please forgive me while I talk about blame.

Many people have remarked on the paradox of an academia made mostly of upper-class ethnic-majority Westerners trying so very hard to find reasons why lots of things are the fault of upper-class ethnic-majority Westerners. The simplest example I can think of is attributing the woes of Third World countries to colonialism; without meaning to trivialize the evils of colonization, a lot of academics seem to go beyond what even the undeniably awful facts can support. Dependency theory, for example, is now mostly discredited, as are a lot of the Marxist perspectives. I would provide other examples if I weren’t satisfied you can generate them independently.

This is on the face of it surprising; naively we would expect people to cast themselves and those like them in as positive a light as possible. Forget about whether these attributions of blame are right or wrong. Even if they were right I would not expect people to believe them as enthusiastically as they do.

The theories I’ve heard to explain this paradox are rarely very flattering; usually something about class signaling, or holier-than-thou-ness, or trying to justify the existence of an academic elite.

I want to propose another possibility: what if people are really, fundamentally, good?

Moral philosophy distinguishes between a couple of ethical systems, like deontology, utilitarianism and virtue ethics. Most people without philosophical training settle into a sort of mishmash of all of them, but one which, I think, is closer to deontology than either of the others. Call it Moral Therapeutic Deontology. Like all deontological systems, it focuses on following certain rules: don’t murder, don’t steal, respect your parents, pay back your debts. Like all deontological systems, other things like charity are “supererogatory”, meaning they’re nice but not really necessary. If you’ve got extra time and energy after doing the important stuff, then sure, do the superogatory stuff, whatever, but it’s hardly where your moral focus should be.

On the other hand, when confronted with the full extent of human suffering – whether by living in a poor area, or serving in a war zone, or traveling to a Third World country, or treating depression patients – it’s hard to think about anything else. The sheer burning horribleness of it becomes this unscratchable itch, this flaw in the world that blots out the sun.

And here’s Moral Therapeutic Deontology, saying, “Yeah, helping quench the burning fire of human suffering is nice, but it’s not like a real thing that real morality should care about. It’s not your duty.”

This is some heavy cognitive dissonance. It doesn’t match basic intuitions about the importance of the matter. Even worse, it doesn’t allow you to communicate the importance of the matter to other people. If you say “Look at all these people living squalid and miserable in the slums without any hope,” and they say “Yeah, well, it would be supererogatory to help them and I’m not feeling supererogatory today,” you don’t really have a leg to stand on.

There’s an easy way to resolve the dissonance without abandoning either Moral Therapeutic Deontology or your concern for the less well-off. That resolution is to prove that human suffering is you and your friends’ fault. Deontology very clearly says that if you cause a problem, it’s your job to help fix it. If you can prove that the reason the Third World is suffering is because of First World white people, you have a strong claim that you as a First World white person should be deeply emotionally invested in solving it; that your friends and neighbors, as First World white people, ought to help you; and that your government, as that of a First World majority-white country, is justified in using taxpayer money to get involved.

I think this might be a part of what’s happening. People feel a need to help the less-advantaged so strongly that they come up with a justification to do so that makes sense in their own moral system, whether it’s factually accurate or not.

I am not as fanatical a partisan of utilitarianism as I used to be, but this still seems like one of the situations where it has an obvious advantage. Utilitarianism tells us that we are perfectly justified in seeing the relief of suffering as a pressing need. We don’t need to justify it by positing facts that may later be proven untrue; it is self-justifying. People sometimes complain that a flaw of utilitarianism is that it implies a heavy moral obligations to help all kinds of people whether or not any of their problems are our fault; the world is divided between those who consider that a bug and those who find it a very helpful feature.

I want more people to become familiar with utilitarianism because I think a lot of the colonialism theory stuff is net hurtful. It combines a justification for helping the poor with an insult to people’s identity, and probably makes the former less palatable to many people than it would be naturally. It also makes our need to help the poor hinge on an empirical point; if that empirical point gets disproved, things become pretty awkward.

This theory implies that utilitarian liberals will have all the features of liberalism except the interest in blaming their own group for major problems. My anecdotal experience confirms that. The utilitarians I know are very interested in helping the poor and in various other liberal ideas, but are more likely than other liberals to roll their eyes at talk about colonialism and stereotype threat. I think it’s because they feel confident in their right to care about the disadvantaged regardless.

The latest @May2015NS forecast/predictions of the great and the good. pic.twitter.com/ZoYx4GTDzP

— TSE (@TSEofPB) April 18, 2015

Is a Grand Coalition the only viable government after the election?

Whilst fans of Poirot, TinTin, and the D’Hondt electoral voting system might seem some advantages of the UK becoming more like Belgium, I’m coming to the conclusion that we might not have a viable government possible, particularly if the SNP surge translates into the seat numbers the recent Scottish polling implies.

In 2010, it took less than a week for the Con/Lib Dem coalition to be formed, in Belgium following no party obtaining a majority after their general election, it took 541 days  (five hundred and forty-one days) for a government to be formed, as the Belgians were left without an elected government, for in total, five hundred and eighty-nine days.

As the fixed term parliament makes a second election very unlikely, and repealing it wouldn’t be easy, so we’d be stuck with the result we got on May the 7th for the foreseeable future.

As Antifrank predicted last month, Her Majesty is trying not to get involved with the formation of the government, today’s Sunday Times reports

OFFICIALS at Buckingham Palace are warning that the Queen must not be dragged into political wrangling after the general election amid fears that David Cameron or Ed Miliband might attempt to use her as a “prop” to “legitimise” a government that lacks a majority.

Sources close to the royal household said last night that neither leader should approach the Queen to form a government until they are sure they can command the confidence of the House of Commons.

With a hung parliament on the cards, courtiers are concerned that either leader could ambush the Queen with an attempt to rule as a minority government and “borrow her support” to cement their claims to power…..

…Royal sources also said the Queen will not deliver a speech at the next state opening of parliament on May 27 if there is a hung parliament and there was a danger that it would not pass a parliamentary vote.

The royal source said: “One of the concerns that might be there is if the Queen’s speech became a mechanism for testing a particular prime minister’s control of the House [of Commons], you wouldn’t want the Queen to be politicised by giving that speech.”

Peter Riddell, director of the Institute for Government, said: “There is general agreement on all sides that the Queen should be detached from the process of government formation.

“She will receive information but will only be involved once the politicians have decided who the next government is going to be.”

Who can blame her, prior to the Fixed Term Parliament Act, the constitutional convention on the circumstances a Monarch could refuse a request from the Prime Minister for a new election was based on an anonymous letter written to the Times in the 1950s.

Just look at the above forecasts/nowcasts/predictions of the great and the good collated by May2015 or Peter Kellner’s latest forecast, a normal two party coalition might not be possible, and the more parties that join a coalition, I think that means a more unstable government. Or the worst of all worlds, a minority coalition government.

Given that according to some polls, the Lib Dems have misplaced nearly 80% of their voters since joining the coalition, some of the smaller parties may also fancy not participating in a coalition, to avoid as Chancellor Merkel’s maxim to David Cameron about coalitions “The little party always gets smashed!”, some parties might be actively trying to avoid a coalition, especially if their leader has just lost his seat.

Everyone says 326 is the magic number (or 323 allowing for Sinn Fein abstentions) But that assumes all the newly formed coalition MPs vote exactly with the government. History has shown all parties have their awkward squads who can almost certain be guaranteed to vote against their side, so a viable government might not be feasible on 326 seats or even 323.

Particularly if it features the SNP and Labour, with the SNP demanding this government adopt a Scotland First approach, which English (and Welsh) Labour MPs will know might not go down well with their electorate, for which there may be a price to pay for at a future General Election, especially with the anticipated shellacking of Labour in Scotland, no one will ever feel they are in a safe seat again.

On a more philosophical point, given their respective views of Scotland in the Union, a Lab/SNP coalition might not be possible as Labour don’t wish to put the Union at risk and the SNP’s demands are something that might put the Union at risk. If the SNP can’t and won’t go into coalition with either Labour or the Tories, then what?

In the background, last night, there was increasing fears of a Greek euro exit after IMF meeting.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy it was said Belgium was the most offensive word in the universe, you get the feeling the electorate would view the UK having its own Belgium scenario as pretty offensive and disastrous, especially if we get Acropolis Now headlines and the economic disaster that is a Grexit and the UK didn’t have a government to deal with it. Some have said, a Grexit could see the UK’s GDP fall by up to 10%, to put that into context, the recession of 2008 saw the UK’s GDP fall by 7.2%.

The pressure on the politicians would be immense, as none of them would wish to be cast as a latter day Emperor Honorius, as the economic Visigoths of a Grexit sacked our economy.

The 2010 coalition worked because the numbers stacked up for the Tories and the Lib Dems, it may be in a little over two weeks, the only viable option is a Grand Coalition.

Under normal circumstances, both the Tories and Labour would rule out a grand coalition, outside of a major war, as both know it would lead to mass defections/resignations from their their (parliamentary) parties, as UKIP, the SNP and the Greens would say it shows the Tories and Labour are indistinguishable from each other.

But could these future events be describe as normal events?

At the time of writing, you can get 40/1 on a Con/Lab Grand coalition.

TSE

So, the last time I wrote about the House of Lords, it didn’t spark a widespread movement to abolish it, and from the look of this year’s election manifestos, there’ll be no attempt to do so over the next few years.

Which means it’s time for me to come up with a new idea, and I think this is a good one because it provides us with a number of things:

A new way to appoint members of the Lords

A way to encourage more people to donate money to political parties

And, a way to make explicit what’s always been implicit in appointing Lords

My system is quite simple. Any donation over £50 would have to be made through a central bureau, which would record the donation and pass it on to the intended recipient. Donations could be made online, and arrangements could also be made for donations to be made through the post or at certain banks and post offices. Meanwhile, every year, a House of Lords Appointment Commission would determine how many vacancies there were for the Lords that year, given the number of members who had died, retired or been removed over the past twelve months. The Appointments Commission would also determine how many of the new peers needed to represent each party, based on its current strength in the Lords and the number of votes it had received at the last national election.

Then, every person who had made an official donation to a party in that time would be given one entry into a Lords Lottery for every £50 they’d donated. Each party entitled to a number of appointees to the Lords would then have their nominees chosen at random from the people who had donated to it. Parties who did not make the threshold to be allocated direct seats in the draw would be placed into a draw for at least one peerage in each year, thus ensuring there was a motivation to donate to them.

With this system we recognise the traditions of the House of Lords and ensure appointment is still linked to how much you can donate to a political party, but we add that element of chance to ensure that every donor has a chance of an appointment, and that even the smallest party could get someone appointed to Parliament to life to speak for them. Now you may say that a randomly chosendonor is not necessarily the best person to speak for a party in the Lords, because they might just have donated on a whim and may not understand that party’s ideology and beliefs. I say yes, that could be a problem, but it’s already a flaw with the current system, and why should only rich donors get a platform for their silly ideas?

Just like the regular lottery, there could be Superdraws every few years, in which all donors are eligible and the winner gets a hereditary peerage. No longer do you need to have had the lucky break of being the descendent of a King’s mistrees to be the Earl or Countess of somewhere, now your family could get a title by pure blind chance.

Just think how much money this could bring into politics, once everyone sees that their donation can not just only help the party they support, but it can help them too. Sure, we could have chosen the Lords by pure sortition but where’s the educational value in that? Let’s make it clear to everyone that yes, you do have a chance of getting to be in Parliament and having your views govern the nation, but it’s going to be an infinitesimally small one compared to the number of opportunities rich people get.

I’m not a Sun reader. You’re not shocked to discover that if you’ve ever had any dealings with me before, of course. Usually, I’m happy to let it carry on doing whatever it wants to do and let us coexist in our separate spheres, but sometimes it crosses a line. This time, though, it’s published something that even by its normal standards is absolutely horrific:

Hate giving awful Katie Hopkins attention but her article in The Sun uses neo-nazi type language. Sun shld be ashamed pic.twitter.com/AEKW9IuPF3

— Sunny Hundal (@sunny_hundal) April 17, 2015

Katie Hopkins’ job is, like so many tabloid columnists, to be offensive and get people’s backs up so she and the paper can feed off their indignation. This, though, isn’t just the usual outrage-for-clicks that characterises a Sun column, this is pure hate speech: ‘spreading like norovirus’, ‘plague of feral humans’, ‘cockroaches’. It’s calling for the death of people she regards as somehow less than human, and then revelling in the prospect of death and suffering.

What’s important here, though, is that the reason we’re seeing these words isn’t just because of Hopkins. She’s been commissioned and paid for them by the Sun. At least one editor would have looked over that column and approved it for publishing, a sub would have checked it over, designers would have put that page together and printers would have produced the final version. This isn’t some random troll shouting on the internet, desperate for attention, this is the considered and published view of one of Britain’s best-selling newspapers.

In a couple of weeks time that same newspaper – and some of the same people who worked on the Hopkins column will be involved – will tell its readers how to vote in the election, and given what they’ve published recently about Ed Miliband, we can expect they’ll advise a vote for David Cameron and the Conservatives.

Norovirus. Feral. Cockroaches. A paper that used those words to describe human beings and wish for their death will endorse the Conservative Party, and the leader of the Conservative Party – the Prime Minister of this country – will welcome that endorsement. If David Cameron – if anyone in the Tory Party – had a shred of decency or dignity, he’d reject that endorsement and refuse to accept it. Do you think he will?

When The Sun makes its endorsement, other journalists – those who work for outlets that don’t brand other humans as norovirus, feral or cockroaches – should ask David Cameron if he’s happy to accept that. And not just him – there are hundreds of Tory candidates all over the country, standing for Parliament and in the local elections, who’ll benefit from that endorsement. They’ll happily accept the backing of a newspaper that regards some people as less than human and deserving to die, expecting that no one will challenge them on it. So let’s make sure they’re asked about it and let us know what their position is on being backed by a paper that’s fuelled by such hate.

(And if you want to do something constructive, go sign Save The Children’s Restart The Rescue petition)

Thanks to the brilliant Twitter-sleuthing of Gareth Roberts, we have William Hartnell playing Cliff Richard's father in an episode of a 1969 series called Life With Johnny, so obscure that it is absent from IMDB (which generally seems to include everything down to drama students' five-minute final year projects). There were six episodes in total, each of which had Johnny (as played by Cliff) learning a valuable life lesson the hard way; three of them, including one of the two in which William Hartnell appeared, are lost, and three survive. The show was made by one of the minor ITV franchises, Tyne Tees, and was never picked up by the bigger ITV regions, which is one reason why it has remained quite so obscure. (Maybe not the only reason. The opening song includes the glorious lyrics: "Johnny cares about war! / Johnny cares about cancer! / Johnny wonders if there's any hope / wonders if there is an answer!")

The surviving episode with Hartnell is "Johnny Come Home", based on the parable of the Prodigal Son. Cliff and his band, the Settlers, squeeze six songs into the 21 minutes of the show. It also features Lynda Marchal, better known now as writer Lynda La Plante, as Johnny's girlfriend at home, and Una Stubbs as his girlfriend in London (desperately doing a regional accent, and with Cindy Kent dubbing her songs, but dancing very well). The Hartnell sections are a decent scene starting at 4:25 and a concluding line at 18:57, with no sign of the health difficulties that made it difficult for him to take on substantial roles after Who.



Considering the symbolism of the original parable, we may reflect that Hartnell's last surviving non-Who appearance has him playing God.

The other surviving episodes are "Up the Creek", an update of the Good Samaritan to include racism which also features a rather weird cover of the Beatles' "Help!" at 9:59; and "Johnny Faces Facts", a rather laboured extension of the mote and beam to a full episode which ends with a song and dance routine in front of a backlit cross, just in case you were wondering where all this was leading.

This not high art, but it's interesting to see what you could get away with in the late 1960s. Well done to Gareth Roberts for uncovering a Youtube video which had actually been online since 2011 - clearly there's not a huge overlap between Whovians and fans of Cliff's more obscure backlist.