To be fair to all concerned, a lot of people probably thought that their one comment was just a comment to their followers. There are people in SF who are genuniely vicious, but a lot of what happens is the product of group effects, where everyone does a small thing and no-one realizes how they join up. But that’s how bullying often works, it can be almost unintentional where each person in the ‘attack’ thinks they’ve only done a mild thing, but to the person on the receiving end, they get the flood from many sources. It’s a kind of emotional DDOS attack.

But this is common ground between the sides in this growing rift, because this is exactly how systemic prejudice works (or so I think). It’s not so much that there are many people who are outright bigotted, or that there’s an overarching conspiracy (as so many seem to think) it’s more that little things done by society or by many people add up to one continuous ‘big thing’ for the recipent.

However, I don’t think anyone in the community can achieve common ground. The best thing that can happen now is schism, a total rift into two new communities. The gulf is far to large to be bridged, and things are getting unsafe.

Colum

that’s a very good point, although the point about Ross’s errors, notably ‘Sachsgate’ also rings true. But the thing is that we have someone where who I think most people in the UK, regardless of their age, race and gender, would be okay with, but the SF community isn’t okay with it. We say we’re trying to attract more people this way: who are these people? I think Ross might have attracted more people of allsorts than anyone else we could have gotten.

And I think the radical political culture of SF scares more people, of all types, away from it than almost anything else. Well, no, that’s unfair, it’s not the radical politics itself, it’s the death-threats, witch-hunts and constant fighting. That doesn’t look good to the outside world, as we see with this event.

Colum

I think you paint too clear a divide. I’m fine with some limits on freedom of expression, but I think if you have witch-hunts (and we absolutely do) then you can’t make the genre more inclusive or safe for anyone. Once witch-hunts become the norm there will always be a reason found to attack people, regardless of who they are. We have created a culture in which bullying and name-calling are the way to get ahead and get noticed. ‘Inclusion’ of anyone will soon be forgotten when ‘radical bloggers’ are needing fresh victims to keep their profile up in the community.

Colum

After a week the backlash and the backlash against the backlash have left SFF fandom deeply polarised, which is just what I thought would happen. The “Social Justice Warriors” and the “Dudebros” (to use the words each “side” uses to describe the other) both seem to think events validate their chosen narrative, and neither is willing to countenance the idea that their might have been anything wrong with their own behaviour. The dreaded phrase “Tone Policing” is coming up rather a lot.

I don’t doubt that Ross’ negative reputation as a “bad person” is based on exaggerations and out-of-context quotes. But he’s made enough errors of judgement, most notably that prank call thing with Russell Brand, that I can understand why so many people find him problematic.

My guess is the replacement host will be someone bland and “safe”, who will be guaranteed not to say anything controversial, but won’t be remotely exciting either.

This is what happens when we try to bully a culture change into being, and you nailed it when you said that the face of the SFF community has been diminished by this.