Comments on: Diversity in SF, a zero-sum game?

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 19:04:03 +0000

Indeed. That’s why I think “No platforming” is a wrong tactic; for starters you’re sending a signal that you are afraid of their “dangerous ideas”.

What finally did for Nick Griffin and his fascist British National Party wasn’t no-platformng him. It was Bonnie Greer and Saeed Warsi running rings around him on prime time TV.

Best way to deal with Vox Day isn’t to clutch pearls and have fits of vapours; it’s to put the bastard on panels and demolish his arguments in public.

By: Serdar Yegulalp

Serdar Yegulalp — Fri, 13 Jun 2014 13:16:26 +0000

What I see are both sides adopting the attitude that this is a power struggle, and in a power struggle you have the right to use whatever weapons are at your disposal, because the other guy is likely to do so as well and to not do that simply puts you at a crippling disadvantage. But it isn’t like that. By taking on the tactics of one’s alleged enemies, one simply emulates everything about them one professes to hate. The answer to hateful speech is not speech codes; it’s intelligent, dissecting speech that shows hate speech to be fundamentally emotional and intellectually invalid. And the answer to one kind of suppression of dissent is not another variety of it.

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Sun, 08 Jun 2014 20:10:06 +0000

Seems to be a big change from a decade ago, many of the worst wingnuts are now on the left rather than on the right.

Was a scales-falling-from-eyes moment when I realised that some of the social justice warriors were using the same playbook as Tony Smith and Jon Biggar ten years ago with selective out-of-context quote-mining, straw-man arguments and above all lying.

By: Amadan

Amadan — Sun, 08 Jun 2014 17:01:32 +0000

I am actually more worried about the censorship and witch hunts than I am about the racist homophobes. The latter continued to be an alienated minority, while the former are making their notions of “safe spaces,” “triggers,” and “hate speech” increasingly mainstream. I stopped being sympathetic to their goals when I realized that the majority of SJ warriors really and truly do not believe in free speech, but would happily make it a crime to express views that offend them.

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Sun, 08 Jun 2014 09:38:30 +0000

Seems to me that both “sides” are part right and part very wrong.

One side doesn’t seem to understand why people who are not straight white males might have a problem with the racism, misogyny and homophobia expressed by Vox Day or Orson Scott Card.

At least some on the other side don’t seem to have a problem with censorship or witch-hunts either.

I don’t agree with the concusions of May’s screed at all, but I think he does nail some of the individuals whose behaviour and exclusionary rhetoric is part of the problem.

By: Amadan

Amadan — Sat, 07 Jun 2014 21:08:44 +0000

I have been reading all the controversies the past few years, from Race!Fail to the Vox Day/Larry Correia Hugo nominations, and while I think the conservatives have frequently been assholes, everything I read from “Social Justice” warriors makes my teeth ache. They really are ruining the genre, and not because I only like reading books by and about white men.