The Horror Writers of America (HWA) seem to have had a controversy this week about the service of David Riley on their anthology jury based on his membership in a conservative political organization from 1973-1983. I support the HWA views, so I’d like to re-blog their statement on this. This was posted on their Facebook page 13 April 2016 by Lisa Morton.
I have asked both HWA’s Board of Trustees and the chair of our Diverse Works Inclusion Committee to advise on a recent situation surrounding a member who is serving on a Bram Stoker Award jury who holds certain political views. After considerable discussion and research, here is the official response:
The HWA does not support discrimination of any kind, including discrimination based on political views. Not only is this form of discrimination specifically illegal in a number of U.S. states, HWA’s Board of Trustees also does not believe it’s in keeping with our principle of supporting and practicing freedom of expression. In specific regard to HWA’s Bram Stoker Award juries, the HWA will certainly act if/when a juror’s personal views have a provable impact/bias against a writer or his/her works.
Thank you to everyone who has voiced concern over this issue, especially those who have taken the time to contact me privately.
After the controversy developed, Riley did step down. So, was it appropriate for activists to complain? As various comments have pointed out, there is no indication that Riley is unqualified to sit on the anthology jury because of conservative political views. He has never crossed my radar as an extremist. The fact that he is being attacked smacks of McCarthyism and the days of witch hunts against socialists in the US. During that time, Hollywood maintained a “blacklist” of actors who were suspected Communists and kept them from working in their field.
Fascism is a creeping evil.
Apr 15, 2016 @ 11:59:23
As you said over on 770 (I missed Vox’s link, but I’m behind and have been skimming… ordinarily I’d be more likely to arrive from there) …
“This isn’t free speech. It’s coercion.”
Funny how some people can’t see that when it’s their own mob doing the coercing.
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Apr 15, 2016 @ 14:59:31
Thanks for the comment. Ideology does tend to make folks a bit blind, doesn’t it?
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Apr 15, 2016 @ 16:17:12
Sure does… I have the opposite problem. When I hear someone decry some modern horror — in the spirit of perversity, I immediately go look up the other side’s view.
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Apr 15, 2016 @ 17:46:14
The characteristics of a critical thinker.
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Apr 15, 2016 @ 19:12:12
A bit too critical for some folks. 😉
BTW I love your chicken painting. 🙂
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Apr 15, 2016 @ 20:27:26
Hey, thanks. I’ve been in a bit of a chicken period for a while. This year I’ve moved on to cows, though.
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Apr 15, 2016 @ 19:30:56
Well, File 770 has given you a taste of how the larger community sees these matters. They literally think there is no such a thing as misandry, heterophobia or anti-white hate speech. To me, that’s just mind-boggling. There are easily 100 of them who rise to their standards of Riley or Vox Day. I could list 50 in the SFWA and another 30 (many also SFWA) who got booted out of the Hugo noms last year by the Puppies alone, and yet 770 couldn’t find even one of the writers they support who obsessively uses racial and sexual hate speech. Even the biased Southern Poverty Law Center isn’t that insane, since they list the New Black Panther Party as a hate group. That puts the vast majority of Nebula and Hugo voters as well as magazines like Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Uncanny and Strange Horizons as far to the Left as one can get. Considering the obsessive flood of hate speech day and night from these people, the entire crew is easily eligible for SPLC consideration.
Keene himself claims an innocuous apolitical post about what a pro writer is was offensive to Chuck Wendig and John Scalzi, both activist supporters of Third Wave Feminism and so people who could not be farther on the extreme Left. He also claims he is equally against the far Right and Left. I can make no sense of that.
Nothing these people say makes any sense to me. There are no rules, common touchstones, principles or a moral ethos in play. As far as I can tell their ethos is that whites, men and heterosexuals are always in the wrong on these issues and non-whites, women and gays are always right. Needless to say, in principle, that is the exact same ethos the KKK and neo-Nazis abide by.
Since there are no agreed upon rules in advance which everyone can benefit by, there can be no discussion. Anything can be anything, and that is exactly what you got at 770. They will say one thing today and reverse themselves tomorrow. They are fanatically attached to an anti-straight white male narrative to a degree I find astonishing in adults. I have never met people like this anywhere in the world, and I’ve been to more places than most. I see no solution to this.
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Apr 15, 2016 @ 19:41:26
Well, not gays anymore. One or another of the big feminazi groups (I’ve forgotten which and can’t be arsed to listen to a dozen podcasts to find it) has proclaimed that gay men are part of the oppressor class, or some such BS, and need to be kicked out of their safe space bubble world.
Virtue signalling has become more important than actual virtue.
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Apr 15, 2016 @ 20:40:01
Rez: Really? Gays are oppressors? Dang. I’ll have to look that up.
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Apr 15, 2016 @ 22:29:08
It’s made the news.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/education/article4720163.ece
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2016/03/22/nus-tells-lgbt-societies-to-abolish-gay-mens-reps-because-they-dont-face-oppression/
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Apr 15, 2016 @ 23:05:45
Not sure where the heck the threading will put this…no reply link where I want to be. Anyway… yeah, that’s the one. Makes my brain hurt.
Truth is, they want to be the only ones who are *special*, so once they achieved enough power to oppress someone else… down came the boot.
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Apr 15, 2016 @ 20:38:46
James: Keene thinks he’s a moderate, maybe? I’ve dropped in to File 770 a few times, and it was clear right away that my opinions rubbed people the wrong way. A couple of folks have been spoiling for a fight. This was an occasion when I had a strong opinion so went with it. I’ve been on the Internet a long time, so I’m not exactly a novice at it.
The discussion about racism was interesting. I was surprised at how many people see the issue in black or white. Nobody seemed willing to admit to all the shades of gray.
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Apr 15, 2016 @ 21:02:13
Lela: The demotion of gays got discussed on … (I thought it was on the GayPatriot.net blog too, but now can’t find it; but anyway) … either Honey Badger Radio or Kraut and Tea somewhere in the past week, but couldn’t tell you which or when.
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Apr 16, 2016 @ 01:09:10
http://www.jamesmaystock.com/essays/Pages/SFFRacistQuotes.html
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Apr 16, 2016 @ 02:27:20
Yeah, I’ve seen those comments, some from individuals I know in Real Life, and all I can do is shake my head. And there’s no talking sense to ’em, because they are interested in right-feelz, not in facts.
And virtue signalling can always be counted on to make one feel superior to lesser mortals.
http://acculturated.com/virtue-signaling/
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Apr 16, 2016 @ 02:40:30
No doubt Keene does see himself in the middle. Based on his own words, the truth is otherwise. How does one converse into such magical thinking? It is the same magical thinking which allows Cirque du Soleil to cancel its North Carolina performance because of the transgender bathroom issue while continuing to perform in Dubai where it is illegal to be gay. You cannot converse with that magical thinking. There are no rules to appeal to. Hundreds of racist quotes by editors and authors become invisible at will. Others are accused of being neo-Nazis with no quotes whatsoever. Even crazier, one is accused of racism and misogyny just for opposing the documented racist quotes. There is no conversation to be had there. What there is in its place is a massive amount of lying in order to prop up a false history of SFF. There is no amount of reason, logic or facts which will push these people off their positions, though that is the exact carrot they hold out when asking for quotes they subsequently ignore or gerrymander like a congressional district. There is nothing in the 100 year history of SFF to match the quotes I provide below which come from just a few years. To maintain the opposite is true is delusional. Nothing becomes something, something becomes nothing. It is Orwell’s world of 1984, and from SFF writers no less.
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Apr 16, 2016 @ 02:58:03
The worst thing about the attacks on white men/white privilege is that they’re misdirected. I wrote an blog recently about this. “Whiteness” is really about power relations and the average white guy is just a little cog in the greater society, with no more privilege than anybody else. Interestingly, I’ve got an article on black male privilege that I intend to feature sooner or later.
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Apr 16, 2016 @ 06:46:15
You can always tell a supremacist by the fact they talk about the target group as if they are one single immoral person whose psychology can be dissected. “Privilege” is an example of that. Let me show you how John Scalzi’s famous 2012 post on straight white male privilege sounds when you substitute the word “Jews” for “straight white men”:
“I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to Jews how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word ‘privilege,’ to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon.”
Put in “women,” “blacks,” “gays” – whatever group you wish.
These people are sick in their minds and hearts and fighting an imaginary war, as if gum-chewing sheriffs with sunglasses kept women, non-whites and gays away from SFF. Scalzi talks about privilege as if he were in Alabama in 1912, not Ohio in 2012. He throws a Mark of Cain onto any ethnic European man alive, even if their parents were murdered for the crime of being Polish or Jewish in 1945, or a Greek expelled from Istanbul with nothing more than a suitcase 1955-65. The respective numbers there are 3 million, 6 million and 100,000. In the world of these people, there are no Armenians, Copts, Albanians or Irish. It is the childish and insane worldview of a paranoid Third Wave Feminist cult of identity-worship.
As for the consequences, imagine social justice folks were in charge of All-Story Weekly Magazine from 1912-19. That’s where and when we first see E. Rice Burroughs, Francis Stevens, Abraham Merritt, Ray Cummings, Homer Eon Flint, Murray Leinster, among others. If they had affirmative actioned in preferred groups and driven others away with their segregated policies and racial-sexual insults, there never would’ve been the talent which created the excitement which created Weird Tales in 1923 and Amazing Stories in 1926. In short, SFF would’ve died in the cradle. You are seeing that process taking place right now. That’s why I always laugh that Glyer admires Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling. They never would’ve even existed if File 770 were the letters section of All-Story Weekly.
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Apr 16, 2016 @ 09:55:01
Having read a bunch of Scalzi’s posts, and having watched this develop — I think he, and most of these people spewing this crap, do it solely because it’s fashionable. Disdaining straight white males is currently the height of social fashion, and is the biggest virtue anyone can signal to show they belong to the “right” class. Everyone *who ranks themselves according to what others think of them* aspires to say the right things to show that they too have this superior social fashion sense, and whether they actually believe it or not is irrelevant. If it were instead fashionable to say the same of blacks, or Jews, or women, or any other general class, that would be the class getting the brunt of their disdain.
It really is that shallow, which I think in turn fuels the associated moral panic — which by definition requires that people do not think beyond the most shallow assertion.
And naturally today I can’t find it again, but a couple days ago I read an interesting article on how having a place to complain about “microaggressions” is the sole factor in whether people complain about same and raise up these moral panics. If they’re told “grow up” and otherwise ignored, the problem goes away. But no, everyone is so afraid of being on the wrong side of this fashion that they validate and enable these public tantrums, instead of smacking ’em upside the head to teach ’em better. Thank you so much, “self-esteem” parenting.
I belong to a class that can be (and often is) lawfully persecuted in most of the U.S., so unlike these socially-just people, I actually have a clue about -ism in action. I watch these privileged young tw*ts ranting about how someone said meanies to them, or at least might have thought meanies about someone like them, and feel an urge to ship them en masse to Somalia, so they can learn about REAL aggressions.
Hmm…. maybe we can make a deal with one of those slave markets in Qatar…
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Apr 16, 2016 @ 11:19:27
I’m thinking I need to go back and read Fahrenheit 451 again.
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Apr 16, 2016 @ 11:27:58
If burning books were fashionable, that’s what they’d be doing instead.
Oh, wait….
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Apr 16, 2016 @ 12:42:38
Hey, thanks for the ideas, guys. Blogs coming. 🙂
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