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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35547 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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Just as follow on, and in the spirit that everything related to Trump is culture war:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/19/politics/trump-voters-of-color-analysis/

Pull quotes:

The fact that Trump is doing considerably better among Republican voters of color than White Republicans flies in the face of the fact that many Americans view Trump as racist. I noted in 2019 that more Americans described Trump as racist than the percentage of Americans who said that about segregationist and presidential candidate George Wallace in 1968.

This fact should be the smoking gun that we're not talking about the same thing that we used to with the term "racism". The american public pretends to believe that Trump was more racist than Wallace.

Indeed, the Republican Party as a whole has been improving among voters of color. The party’s 38-point loss among that bloc for the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterms was a 5-point improvement from 2020. Its margin among White voters stayed the same in exit poll data.

This is political realignment from the inside. It's slow, it could reverse or it could continue. I believe very strongly that the political coalitions are going to change composition quite a bit in the coming decade. I don't know what the issues will be, but the separation between the working class (see our discussion in last week's thread) and the middle class is becoming big enough to win elections on. The question is which party will get which side, and in what quantities.

As a point for discussion, if (and it's a big "if) the Republicans fully take up the flag of the working class, would that make them the left-leaning party?

I don't know what the issues will be

It will be very interesting to see if AI will lead to any realignment of the existing political blocs.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that leftists will be more hesitant about AI, because it's going to threaten their types of jobs first, and rightists will be more optimistic about AI, because they want to own the libs. But it's also hard to imagine Bible Belt evangelicals filling up pews on Sunday morning to listen to sermons from the robo preacher. It just doesn't seem to fit well with a socially conservative worldview.

As a point for discussion, if (and it's a big "if) the Republicans fully take up the flag of the working class, would that make them the left-leaning party?

Although I'm still prone to engaging in such discussions myself, I no longer think there's much of a point in trying to discern the true Platonic essence of "left" and "right". I now view "left" and "right" as two arbitrary designators for two political factions that just so happen to contingently exist in the modern West, much like the terms "Tory" or "Whig". Leftism is just whatever leftists say it is. Call it "the establishment", "the cathedral", "the PMC", whatever you want to call it - it's that thing. The content of the ideology itself can be freely changed based on political expediencies. If rightists take up the cause of the working class, then that is a rightist position, by definition.

I no longer think there's much of a point in trying to discern the true Platonic essence of "left" and "right".

I agree, but I think there is merit in looking for the most parsimonious and general explanation. There are no inherent "left" or "right" policies, but there's a pattern over time, if one can maintain context which vanishes quickly with time.

But it's also hard to imagine Bible Belt evangelicals filling up pews on Sunday morning to listen to sermons from the robo preacher. It just doesn't seem to fit well with a socially conservative worldview.

Maybe they won't have to worry about that? Could be a literal kind of "Baptists and Bootleggers" situation somehow: AI destroys the more progressive bits of society, religious conservatives ignore the technological revolution somehow, kick back, and grill.

But it's also hard to imagine Bible Belt evangelicals filling up pews on Sunday morning to listen to sermons from the robo preacher. It just doesn't seem to fit well with a socially conservative worldview.

"Preacher" seems likely to me to be one of the most resilient jobs against AI. It's a job that's explicitly religious, which means there are no issues with declaring by fiat that a living, breathing human is meaningfully "better" than an AI that could perform all the same tasks in all the same ways. In contrast to secular jobs, where if an AI could do all the same tasks as a living, breathing human, then that human is just shit out of luck.

I do wonder about how, if at all, AI will realign political blocs. I think that conventional wisdom has some truth because of that jobs issue, and the robotics tech to replace blue collar work is less far along than the AI tech to replace white collar work. That said, improving AI will surely be used to accelerate the development of robotics tech, and so that difference might not be a difference very soon.

I feel like I see a sort of alignment developing in the AI image generation space right now, though, with the biggest pushback against stuff like Stable Diffusion coming from people who are very firmly on the left "woke" side. I think this could largely be historical accident, due to most small-time illustrators who are most threatened by the tech being on that side, rather than an issue of ideology. After all, there are leftist/progressive reasons to be in favor of the tools, such as giving greater access to the least well-off and capable to create high quality illustrations. However, I don't see much indication of right-wing love for these tools, and most of the space is still fairly left-wing; I'm guessing it's because tech adoption and illustration both tend to have more left-wing people. It's still very early times - Stable Diffusion was released publicly only 8 months ago - so there are a lot of possible ways things could go. I imagine just one politician from one party coming out with one piece of legislation in relation to this tech could have very large effects downstream.

Assuming there are no physical limits I quickly suspect that AI will render all humans obsolete for the reasons you articulated unless there is something that augmented humans can do better than AI.

However, I don't see much indication of right-wing love for these tools, and most of the space is still fairly left-wing

Well, some of the earliest adopters have been 4chan's /g/ and I think their Stable Diffusion thread is still one of the more popular communities. 4chan posters may not qualify as right-wing per-se, but they do tend to be anti-SJW. The developer for Automatic1111, by far the most popular UI, attracted some controversy a couple months ago when people discovered his Rimworld mods included one mocking the George Floyd riots and others like White Only/Yellow Only/Black Only. And one of the up-and-coming UIs is the node-based ComfyUI, which is made by a /g/ poster.

Channers are South Park republicans. They only align with the right as long as it’s contrarian to do so.

Although I'm still prone to engaging in such discussions myself, I no longer think there's much of a point in trying to discern the true Platonic essence of "left" and "right". I now view "left" and "right" as two arbitrary designators for two political factions that just so happen to contingently exist in the modern West,

Yes this would be the standard post-modernist boiler-plate take. It's all arbitrary, nothing is true, all words are made up, blah blah blah. No wonder you seem so worried about GPT.

For my part I don't buy it. I think that once one digs beneath the [current year] sophistry to get at the origin/root of the terms one will find that they still hold a great deal of explanatory and predictive power. Far too much for them to be plausibly dismissed as "arbitrary".

Yes a bourgeoisie Marxist might tie themselves in mental knots trying to come up with a convoluted definition "working class" that will support whatever pet theory and/or policy they are trying to push as being for the benefit of the proletariat, and yes that definition will likely be arbitrary. But that does not mean that there is not a class of "people who work" nor that descriptions of such people are inherently arbitrary and not useful.

This fact should be the smoking gun that we're not talking about the same thing that we used to with the term "racism".

Does anybody dispute that what we mean by "racism" in 2023 is different than what people meant by "racism" in 1968? That's a whole one year post-Loving v. Virginia. I'm confident if you asked a bunch of Americans if anti-miscegenation was "racist" in 1968 they would say "no." I suspect a large majority asked the same question today would say "yes."

The american public pretends to believe that Trump was more racist than Wallace.

Why "pretends to believe?" If our understanding of racism has changed why isn't it the case that more Americans today authentically believe Trump is racist than believed Wallace was racist in 1968? Note that your quote isn't comparing Americans today calling Trump or Wallace racist. It's comparing Americans today calling Trump racist with Americans in 1968 calling Wallace racist.

As a point for discussion, if (and it's a big "if) the Republicans fully take up the flag of the working class, would that make them the left-leaning party?

I guess it depends on what policies they advocate that involve taking up this flag. Most pro-working class policies seem pretty left-coded in the United States to me though.

I suspect a large majority asked the same question today would say "yes."

Depends on who you ask. I suspect BIPOC would give very different answers to white people.

According to Gallup non-white Americans have been more supportive of interracial marriage than white Americans any time they've ever been asked.

Break down the demographics a bit further......

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-apes/202003/how-racial-minorities-view-interracial-couples

In fact, the participants’ responses depended not only on their race but also on their gender. In the case of Black-White marriages, Black men showed roughly equal warmth for both Black male-White female and White male-Black female couples. Black women indicated a similar level of warmth for White male-Black female couples, but they were quite cool toward couples where the husband was Black, and the wife was White.

When the researchers looked at the data from the Asian participants, they found the opposite pattern of results in terms of gender. Specifically, Asian women were equally warm to couples where the husband was White, and the wife was Asian and to couples where the races were reversed. In contrast, Asian men indicated high warmth toward Asian male-White female marriages, but they were quite cool to couples where the husbands were White, and the wives were Asian.

Define ‘pro-working class policies’. Working class people broadly support the police, immigration restrictionism, tax cuts for themselves, and picking jobs over environment.

Fair enough. I suppose I was thinking along the lines of "policies that improve the material conditions of working class people." Stuff like universal health care, increased business safety regulation, unionization, things along those lines. I think SSCReader's comment upthread has a good enumeration.

1.) This is true, but they also support common sense reforms the GOP opposes. Like, a lot of working class white people, especially in rural areas where there are basically no minorities have had run-ins with terrible cops.

2.) I've seen no actual evidence of immigration support based on income.

3.) Sure, everybody is selfish. OTOH, I'm sure if I looked into local ordinancs and bonds and other things, I'd actually bet lower-income working class voters consistently support increasing taxes on themselves far more than rich people do.

4.) Again, depends on the specific policy. Yes, coal miners in West Virginia are going to continue to support coal mining, but is a construction worker in Sheboygan? Probably not so much. Of course, everybody is selfish, but I guarantee you the vast majority of working class people do not want to go back to the pollution level of even the 90's, even if it meant working class jobs.

If there's in recent news to show that #4 is true, we only have to point to the train derailment in East Palestine. It's definitely a white working class area, and there's no love lost for Norfolk Southern having to foot a large cleanup bill, and people are still concerned about the water despite tests repeatedly coming back without showing any increase in pollutant levels. Contrast this with the days when companies would have dumped chemicals of a similar hazard level in an open pit and not told anybody about it, the residents not knowing anything until people started suffering adverse health effects decades later. Republicans can be a little more proactive about this than in the past since environmentalists are now almost exclusively concerned with climate change, but my guess is there would be broad conservative opposition to new environmental regulations if they weren't connected with a specific incident. I have a friend who worked for an environmental contractor and he said that the EPA turned into a joke under Trump, with operators totally unconcerned about being dinged with Federal violations. State environmental agencies had more teeth in those days, and in Pennsylvania, that's saying something, since DEP is viewed as notoriously dysfunctional among people in the know.

and people are still concerned about the water despite tests repeatedly coming back without showing any increase in pollutant levels.

That or they're savvy enough to recognize that the feds are almost certainly lying about the true extent of the damage

local ordinancs and bonds

Voting to tax yourself and have those taxes administered and spent in your local community, is very different than sending taxes off to the blackholes of statehouses or DC.

As a point for discussion, if (and it's a big "if) the Republicans fully take up the flag of the working class, would that make them the left-leaning party?

No, for the same reason the torries failed, the mainstream right parties are the parties of corrupt oligarchs who signal to the working class by making fun of woke people. The democrats are portrayed as the elite party among online right wingers, but the republicans are to a great extent the party of Boeing, Raytheon, or Exon mobile. Boris Johnsson could be funny, but in the end his brexit ended with replacing polish workers with Pakistani cheap labour, since his donor class voters want open borders. The working people who supported brexit weren't specifically hating eastern Europeans, they didn't want immigration. The republicans will be more loyal to the military industrial empire and wall street than to their working class voters. Four years of Trump, and he delivered on everything he promised to Israel and almost nothing he promised his base.

Most left voters are not online twitter mobs. Most of them want cheaper health care, they dislike extreme wealth disparity, and they want to protect the environment. Instead of having an honest discussion surrounding the grievances of most democrat voters, the online right fights bipolar 21-year-olds having a meltdown on a college campus, ignoring that 29950 out of 30000 students on that campus were not protesting some event.

The mainstream right has tanked all over the western world. In the anglosphere the right as a whole has tanked because of the first past the post voting system. In the rest of the west, newer right wing parties have picked up the slack.

Boeing, Raytheon and Exxon all contribute fairly equally to Dems and Repubs. All favored Biden over Trump.

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/raytheon-technologies/summary?topnumcycle=2022&contribcycle=2022&lobcycle=2022&outspendcycle=2022&id=D000072615&toprecipcycle=2020

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/boeing-co/summary?topnumcycle=2022&contribcycle=2022&lobcycle=2022&outspendcycle=2022&id=d000000100&toprecipcycle=2020

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs//summary?topnumcycle=2022&contribcycle=2022&lobcycle=2022&outspendcycle=2022&id=D000000129&toprecipcycle=2020

The republicans will be more loyal to the military industrial empire and wall street than to their working class voters. Four years of Trump, and he delivered on everything he promised to Israel and almost nothing he promised his base.

It is true that the left and their allies in the military industrial empire did prevent Trump from ending existing wars and conspired to mislead the American people about him (ze russkies!!!). Wall St has been solidly part of the left for 20 years.

You might be confusing Trump and the populist right with Liz Cheney.

You might be confusing Trump and the populist right with Liz Cheney.

Trump didn't even manage to run the party when he was president. Trump really didn't deliver on much, where is the wall? Two years of republican presidency and congress under Trump and not much to show for it. Trump could make funny tweets until he got banned but when it comes down to it it is the Liz Cheney types that run the show.

Three SCOTUS judges. Although they'll certainly rule mostly in ways favorable to the Cheney wing, things like Roe are also very much not what the Republican elite care about.

Overall, though, you're right: Trump was wildly ineffective. Which is why lazy and undisciplined isn't what you want if there's a better alternative on offer (I suspect most of the populist right would say there wasn't an alternative.)

Three SCOTUS judges. Although they'll certainly rule mostly in ways favorable to the Cheney wing, things like Roe are also very much not what the Republican elite care about.

The three SCOTUS judges were much more an accomplishment of McConnell and the FedSoc than of Trump. It's just that the only thing the Trumpist wing of the party hates more than Democrats is Mitch McConnell, so he's conveniently left out of that part of the narrative.

No. McConnell was centrally important in getting Trump's nominees confirmed, and Leonard Leo from the FedSoc was in charge of vetting the nominations, but it was Trump that put Leo in charge and selected candidates from Leo's short list. Putting Leo in charge of judicial nominations was a key part of Trump's strategy to attract the votes of the Republican base--which was not part of his initial core support--to the benefit of both.

Trump will get credit for the actions of his Supreme Court appointments as part of his legacy, just like every other President. He also deserves this credit no less than any other President, as Leo was his choice to vet nominations, and Trump himself decided which candidates made the final cut.

Recall that the question you were answering is premised on the Trump wing beating the Cheney wing. You are now saying the Trump wing has not successfully beaten the Cheney wing yet.

That's true, but kind of a non sequitur.

Trump didn't even manage to run the party when he was president.

Of course not, you seem to be forgetting that we are talking about Republicans and not Democrats. The Republican party is specifically organized in such a way no one candidate can "run the party". That decentralization of power is one of republicanism's core tenets and also the primary reason that an "insurgent" candidate like Trump could even win the nomination first place.

In an alternate universe where the Republican party was organized along more "democratic lines" Jeb would have crushed both Trump and Cruz under his boot-heel with the same ease that Clinton crushed Sanders under hers.

Nah, the issue was that Hillary was near the median Democrat's views on things, plus she was well known, while Jeb was far to the left of the median Republican primary voter. Ironically, Citizen's United has been terrible for the GOP Establishment, because any weirdo billionaire with wacky views can back a candidate in a primary.

Citizens United was about corporate independent expenditures, not individual.

Ironically, Citizen's United has been terrible for the GOP Establishment, because any weirdo billionaire with wacky views can back a candidate in a primary.

...and from the perspective of a lot of ordinary Republicans this is a feature rather than a bug. Which part of the "decentralization of power is one of republicanism's core tenets" bit did you not understand?

That's people who work for those companies, not the companies themselves.

Yes, the links I provided also explain that.

An HR manager at Exxon or an accountant at Boeing sending a couple of hundred bucks to Biden, Hillary, or Bernie does not equal the tons of SuperPAC spending in favor of Republican candidates that all three of those companies have backed for decades. Especially Exxon. Rayheon and Boeing are slightly more split, due to home state concerns and making sure congresspeople in military base districts keep the pork coming, but the idea that Wall Street and Exxon are left-wing now, because they don't fully buy into the fever dreams of the right-wing fringe of the country is frankly, kind of silly.

It seems in your world a group is part of the "left" if they accept non-white, LGBT, and women exist, and thus, can be important parts of a capitalist economy. Which is all Wall Street really does.

The reality is your talk about how Trump was "stopped" from ending the wars (weird how "ending the wars" turned into heavily expanding dronee warfare) just shows how non-existent the populist right actually is, and how few actual populist right voters there are, at least in the way you're talking about. Because even if I disagreed with him, a true right-wing populist who truly cared about ending wars, instead of getting distracted by 89 different issues would've had a speech on TV every day about ending the war, fired members of the Joint Chiefs until he got who he wanted, and actually compromised on other issues to say, get left-wing people who wanted out of Afghanistan behind him.

Instead, he failed, and the true dove Joe Biden, got us out of Afghanistan, basically ended the drone war, and is currently beating down another power, without a drop of American blood, all with basically the equipment we've had sitting in the back of the DOD's garage for a decade.

and is currently beating down another power

Ukraine is not another power. Just because Biden Jr and Sr both have a history there does not mean the Ukrainian people have to die over it.

Oh and he ended Roe v Wade too! Praise to Biden!

the idea that Wall Street and Exxon are left-wing now,

Is a straw man you invented, along with the rest of your comment.

I think we're not far away from explicitly race-based campaigns by Republicans in some blue districts. Imagine a Hispanic candidate, running as a Republican, campaigning for the following:

  • Jobs, not welfare

  • Traditional families

  • End of anti-Latino racism

Debate catch phrase: "I dare you to say Latinx one more time, Senator."

Hispanics and Republicans seem like natural allies on the culture war at least. All the woke stuff is Anglo imperialism. Successfully tarring Democrats as imperialists would also have the effect of demoralizing progressive white voters.

This has been the establishment right dream for a long time, not just in the US but in the UK and EU as well. The end result is an ever more 'left' leaning right wing. A secondary result is a more classical 'class' based political landscape.

The problem with that for the establishment right is that through the process of becoming more 'left' they alienate a part of their base. Which opens the door for, as we have seen: Nigel Farage and Brexit, Trump, and to a lesser extent the 'rise of populism' in Europe. Notably Le Pen, Swedish Democrats, AfD and so on. Some of these became a lot more notable than others. But regardless of anything else, giving these things space to operate poses a threat. In the case of Brexit and Trump, the entire right wing establishment had to reorganize itself. They still 'rule'. But it's a pitiable sight to see all of the Republican establishment career politicians mouth off about how much they love Trump when they very sincerely don't.

A more general question is what the point of the establishment right is in the first place. If it just exists for its own sake to maintain power, sure, make alliances, build bridges, co-opt the popular rhetoric of your opposition and steal their supporters. But what does that functionally entail? Becoming left wing? Does the right honestly have any power as a 'right wing' element in that form?

You can attribute the degeneration of right wing political ideals to a host of things. But at its core it is the same as when the left wing sees a degeneration in its political ideals. When reality meets ideals, reality wins and the political parties have to bend and contort their ideals so they can save face and continue to exist. The reality that faces the Republican party of the future is a white minority voter base. No more dog whistles about 'the boarder'. All you have left is class. And there's the final nail in the 'Republican' coffin.

America isn't going to be a majority 'middle/upper class' society anymore. It's instead moving towards ever greater stratification. With an ever growing underclass and an ever richer and diverse upper class. The 'jobs, not welfare' mantra is a middle/upper class ideal. The 'I'll give you money if you vote for me' mantra works much better on the underclass. This isn't a prophesy or anything. As I understand it, looking across the Atlantic, It's just California.

The goal of a functional Republican Party is to ensure we indeed have a republic, wherein no sector of society, public or private, can easily run the lives or abuse the rights of any other sector. That takes the identification of power and the disarming of it.

Since Reagan left office, that has meant the centrist wing abusing the business community through tax subsidies and breaks and strategic regulation to mold it into the picture of bad-faith capitalism while the right wing focuses on trying to ensure good-faith government.

I don’t have much faith that the Republican Party ever represented that, nor that it claimed to do so.

That is because you are young.

Look, I'm sure I'd have been impressed by Reagan. Probably voted for him.

His campaign wasn't particularly concerned with the integrity of the republic, nor with "identifying" or "disarming" competing interests. There were bigger fish to fry. The Republican party used its 1980 advantage to implement economic policy first and foremost.

His campaign wasn't particularly concerned with the integrity of the republic

It was quite concerned with the integrity of the Republic. Of course it was set in the middle of the Cold War, the Iranian hostage crisis, and Carter's economic downturn, so there were a lot of other things intertwined.

Bigger fish indeed.

Campaigning on those was sensible. It also wasn’t framed as some sort of separation-of-powers realpolitik. What promises or slogans made you think Reagan campaigned on the latter?

Agree. It's certainly not an enviable development. It's just my speculation on what needs to happen for a stable two party equilibrium to remain in place. Democrats now dominate all aspects of elite culture and business, so clearly the Republicans will need to find pivot leftward and add new coalition members find balance. Either that or we become a one-party country. Elite whites have completely abandoned the Republican party. Working class whites and evangelicals are not enough to sustain what remains.

The future of American politics probably looks a lot like Mexico or Brazil: a small, quite comfortable upper middle class elite and a large disaffected working class whose votes are effectively bought.

I know this is kind of beside the point, but has anyone ever won a political debate by “daring” their opponent? If so, I hope it’s on film, because it must be part of a larger smackdown.

This has been a Republican pipe dream for a long time, not just for Hispanics but for other minorities as well. The problem is that these kinds of politicians are too beholden to a national party apparatus that is opposed to the kinds of things that would make such a candidate successful. Most voters are savvy enough to realize that "Jobs not welfare" is just code for cutting social services without any plan to replace them with anything. If politicians actually had the ability to deliver jobs with good enough pay that people would get off benefits then there wouldn't be any need to cut services to begin with, since everyone would take the jobs over the welfare. Add to that the fact that actual welfare is already restrictive enough that further cuts aren't really on the table and you're left with a host of ancillary programs like food stamps, CHIP, subsidized housing, etc., and a good number of these beneficiaries already have jobs anyway, just not ones that pay enough to obviate the need for some forms of public assistance. "Jobs not welfare" is a good applause line for people who already have good enough jobs that public assistance isn't really part of the calculus (Except as a drain on their tax dollars), but it doesn't exactly inspire hope among poor people that electing you will improve their position.

Something similar goes for "End of anti-Latino racism". Well, okay, I have no doubt that the Republican establishment isn't opposed to ending anti-Latino racism in theory. But in practice... it's hard for me to think of a single new policy that the GOP would get behind to serve this end. First you have the rank and file Republicans who will tell you that anti-Latino discrimination isn't a problem and that they all benefit from affirmative action anyway. The most obvious way in which Latinos experience distinct challenges on account of their ethnicity is that many of them don't speak English, and bilingual support is absent in a lot of places. I don't know how one begins to address this through legislation but the GOP has been the party of "if you're in America you should speak English" for some time now, and I don't see that general sentiment going away any time soon.

And as for Latinx, that ship already sailed. A lot of Democrats jumped on that bandwagon in 2020 but the term has been in steady decline ever since. It was kind of big news when polls started being released that showed only a few percent of actual Latinos preferred the term, but contrary to conservative belief, this resulted in most Democrats curtailing their use of it. These days the only people who use it are dyed in the wool wokesters like AOC, who got into a spat with fellow Bronx Democrat Richard Torres this past summer after the latter lambasted the Yankees for using the term. Torres's comments were indicative of a growing trend among Democratic politicians to use "Latino" or "Hispanic" for the simple reason that most members of the community prefer it. In any event, just because a group may not prefer a term doesn't necessarily mean they actively oppose the use of it, much less that such a term would actually affect a voting decision. The fact that most black people prefer "black" over "African American" doesn't seem to have made too much of a political impact, even if the latter is just as much a piece of contrived political correctness as "Latinx". It's just not that big a deal.

If politicians actually had the ability to deliver jobs with good enough pay that people would get off benefits then there wouldn't be any need to cut services to begin with, since everyone would take the jobs over the welfare.

They do in fact have this ability! Politicians absolutely can deliver jobs that pay enough to get people off benefits.

The problem is that in practice politicians have a galaxy of confounding special interests, donors and misaligned personal incentives, and actually giving those jobs to people means not getting fat donations and cushy sinecures once they're out of office - which is why it rarely happens. They don't use that ability, but they absolutely do have it.

A few jobs, yeah. Not enough to make a meaningful impact, especially since the kind of jobs they can deliver tend to be ones that require a greater degree of skill, like political appointments or jobs in the politician's office. Civil service has eliminated most of the sinecures, and in any event the machine politics of the past didn't exactly eliminate poverty, it just provided enough positions that it gave the community the impression that the politicians were serious about eliminating poverty, at least compared to their opponents who sought to eliminate the sinecures.

No, I am talking about enough jobs to make a meaningful impact, not just the free handouts they give to their friends in office. There are real, serious policy changes that can be made which create new jobs on a larger scale in the community. But again, the problem is that doing so involves going against the interests of the donor class and so it doesn't really happen.

Like what? If you're the mayor of a city like Buffalo (or a rep from the district) with some 80,000 people in poverty, what kinds of policy changes, at either the local, state, or Federal level, do you implement to, say, halve that, or provide 40,000 well-paying jobs?

I don't have an answer to your specific question and have no idea what the situation in Buffalo is like, but the actual policies I was thinking of were along these lines:

  1. 10 years in prison for hiring illegal immigrant labour, with a policy that specifically pierces the corporate veil. If your company has any illegal immigrants getting paid or doing work, the people in charge go directly to prison and they're forced to pay a fine of triple the costs "saved" from hiring illegal immigrants. If your boss is hiring illegal immigrants and you report him, you (ideally) get his job, though this isn't always the case due to qualification requirements et al. I'm sure the left will love this policy - it directly attacks bosses and prevents exploitation of economically vulnerable populations!

  2. Mandatory regulation equalisation tariffs on all imported finished goods. If a product is more expensive to manufacture in the USA due to government regulations, the cost of compliance with those regulations is multiplied by 1.2 and added onto imported products as a tariff. All proceeds from these tariffs are earmarked for government investment in local manufacture of the goods in question.

  3. Supply-chain reinforcement - we can dip into the military budget here, but the goal would be to shore up supply chains in the USA and make sure that important and essential products can be manufactured with no reliance on external companies, countries or chip fabrication plants. In uncertain times and with the global economic/trade systems experiencing crisis after crisis, this would ideally be a top priority even without any additional jobs being created.

  4. Major effort to repair US infrastructure. Modernise, repair, replace and maintain all major rail lines and roads, as well as water and power supply infrastructure.

  5. And as a bonus I'd throw in marijuana and psychedelic legalisation - let the industries growing in some parts of the country expand and create a bunch of new jobs.

The first one would most likely create well over 40k jobs even without setting up an enforcement agency, but I'm sure you can appreciate why a politician would be unable to get an agenda like this passed - there are too many special interests making sure that these problems remain unfixed.

The first one only works if you buy into the idea that the only participation illegal immigrants have in the economy is through labor. Think of a city with 40,000 people and everything that has to exist to support those 40,000 people, not just locally but all the stuff that comes in from far away to ensure that there's actually, say, stuff that's on the shelves for the people to buy. Get rid of 40,000 illegals by whatever means you want and you've just shrunk the local economy by as much. Except your means is worse. I know you mean for this to be more of a deterrent than anything but a lot of deterrents don't work so if a company employing illegals gets busted now the entire company is probably finished since most companies that employ illegals aren't corporate but independently-owned restaurants and roofers and the like who now have to dip into the assets of the business to pay whatever fines are levied, which may pose a problem if they're on the hook for other debts (which most small businesses are), and then you get into issues of collateral and the like and before you know it they'er in Chapter 7.

As for the rest of them, they're all of the same "creates jobs" rhetoric that both parties have been spouting for decades now, and that the kind of people who are on public assistance aren't exactly inclined to believe. At least when Democrats do it, the presumption is that the jobs will enable them to get off welfare when they're making enough money to afford to. Contrast this with Republicans, where the implication is that people are too lazy to work and the first step is eliminating or greatly reducing assistance programs to force them back into the workplace.

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If politicians actually had the ability to deliver jobs with good enough pay that people would get off benefits then there wouldn't be any need to cut services to begin with, since everyone would take the jobs over the welfare.

Why? If one can get $X for merely being alive, one would have to be offered stricly more than $X to work, certainly not less than $X.

But what happens in reality is that due to a phemenon called "welfare trap" sometimes abstaining from work, brings in more bucks than working, as in the latter case one would no longer be eligible for some means-tested programme.

Yeah, sorry if I wasn't clear but I'm well aware of the welfare trap, hence the language "good enough pay that people would get off benefits", which would be the amount where it wouldn't make sense to turn it down to preserve benefits.

As a point for discussion, if (and it's a big "if) the Republicans fully take up the flag of the working class, would that make them the left-leaning party?

Probably the best idea would be to breakdown the individual positions. Taking my working class neighbors at their word the positions they are roughly in favor of are (not a complete list of course):

  1. Reduced immigration - Right coded

  2. Traditional morality/End of wokeness/American values taught in schools - Right coded

  3. Universal Healthcare for Americans - Left coded

  4. Regulations on businesses to prevent them screwing over workers pensions/workers comp - Left coded

  5. Cheap college for their kids - Left coded

  6. Federal money into rural/rust belt communities - Both?

  7. Protectionist trade/manufacturing policies - Right coded nowadays?

I live in a rustbelt town where my neighbors are ex miners/steelworkers and the like. Notably Bernie Sanders got a pretty good reception nearby when talking about holding big businesses accountable for pensions and better access to healthcare. My neighbors don't want their kids to be miners or steelworkers because they have the injuries, missing fingers, limps, bad backs and the like to show for it. They want their kids to have "better" careers and options than they did. And for most that means they want them sitting in an office. And that means mostly a college degree. That's why so many want to send their kids off to college. Not all of course and I think if you look at plumbers and other tradesmen it changes somewhat. But most of the manual workers emphatically do not want their kids to have to do what they did. For better or worse, they have bought in, I think to the American dream, which involves higher education.

Trump was popular here for campaigning on/towards 1,2, 6 and 7. Bernie Sanders would have hit 3, 4, 5 and 6 perhaps. 6 is unclear politically because farm subsidies and green subsidies are in play for both sides so depending on framing spending could be either. Though it would probably annoy the Libertarian leaning wing of the Republican party. 7 used to be more left wing Union sides leaning but is probably more associated with Trump style populism now.

Interestingly the poisoning of the idea of unions has been very effective. My neighbors might wish there was a group that would advocate for the workers and protect them against rich business owners outsourcing their companies to India or Mexico, but they don't want unions because they associate that with corruption and the like. Trust in the Federal government is low, but the idea that the Federal government SHOULD protect it's working people over business owners is pretty strong, they would be likely to call big Business leaning Republicans as RINOS and the like. Whereas a century ago miners unions fought near wars against mining companies for workers rights.

Some excerpts from Sanders town hall in "Trump Country"

"He (Sanders) reminded everyone of how hard he was working to get Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to restore pensions and health care that they had been cheated of by the mining companies."

"They applauded Philip Lucion, an almost painfully sincere coal miner, recently rehired (Thanks, Mr. Trump!), when he told them, “I love being a coal miner, that’s what’s in my blood.” They also applauded when he said that most miners he knew would quit and do something else for the same pay and benefits if they could."

"They agreed with Bernie that climate change is real"

"Coal mining, they knew, killed you quick or killed you slow, and the only way to get anything out of it was to make a serious demand on power."

"Their support for “Medicare for all” seems genuine,"

This one was from a different town hall in PA:

"When the town hall moved to Medicare for All, the single-payer health-care plan that Sanders backs, Baier asked for a show of hands from everyone currently getting health care through their employer: Most of the hands in the room went up, Baier's and Sanders's among them. Then came the follow-up. "Of those," Baier asked, "how many are willing to transition to what the senator says, a government-run system?" Hands fired back up and the crowd began cheering."

A working class Republican party would be like a Trump/Sanders unity ticket. Trump's immigration and MAGA and protectionism combined with targeting the proceeds at the working class through healthcare, pensions and siding against big business/ the 1%.

I wonder how Medicare for all would poll against literally just giving everyone checks. Across the entire political spectrum, helicopter money from the government seems to be very popular. Getting something for nothing is always an easy choice. I think free stuff is what's popular here, not the prospect of being roped into a bloated government healthcare scheme. Given the choice, would a typical working class American rather have Medicare or $10,000/year?

One of the concerns about drastically changing the health care system is that, despite it's flaws, people using the system are concerned that changing it could make it worse in at least their local case. People want to "keep their doctor," and aren't sure whether their doctor covered by their current insurance would take Medicare For All. For better or worse, the folks shouting about "keeping government out of my Medicare" don't directly care that the government is paying, but they do care if they have to change doctors or pay more out of pocket: major changes to reimbursement rates or rules could absolutely cause their doctor to drop Medicare patients.

While insurance companies often mix things up (changing in-network providers to out-of-network annually), there isn't much trust that a federal solution would be better. Witness the SNAFU that was the launch of the ACA exchanges, or that the states promising to move to single-payer at the time have all quietly dropped those plans.

Helicopter money for healthcare probably polls better because it changes these things less directly by distorting the market and is difficult to compare.

Yes, exactly. Here's my model of the preferences of an average person.

  1. Government gives me $10,000/year per family member (average cost per beneficiary is $15,000 in 2021 FYI)

  2. Government gives me free health care

  3. Nothing changes

  4. Government forces me to pay $10,000/year government health care

Demagogue politicians like Bernie Sanders frame the issue as a choice between 2/3, when it is more accurately a choice between 1/2 or 3/4. If we're going to do helicopter money, we should just do helicopter money not spend it on the most wasteful health system imaginable.

Manual job working class people are likely to be greater consumers of healthcare however. Unless you are also reducing pricing as well as giving cash 10 grand might not cover a great deal, for people at risk of manual injuries. A 25 yo in an office is likely to consume less health care than a 25 yo on a construction site or down a mine.

A low paid working class worker also isn't the one paying the 10 grand either for 4) It more accurately might be seen (by my neighbors at least) as Government forces middle class/rich people to pay 10 grand per year to subsidize MY healthcare because I am the one building the America they profit from. They often feel the urban centers profit from hollowing out US industry and resource production at the expense of the people who gave their painful time and energy making it work. That they have been deliberately left behind.

Now would they trust the current Federal government to do it? Seems highly unlikely. But in some future where Republicanism has gone working class and somehow managed to take control of the government regardless, that might indeed be exactly what they want.

The main issue is that the left have been successfully propagandized to that they need both socialized medicine and UBI, and the right has been succesfully propagandized to that they need neither, ensuring no one on either side notices here that a better, perhaps the best, solution is spending as much money as is currently spent on the safety net on UBI instead, being in the process more generous in general to recipients (less money being lost in administrative matters) while at least partly preserving market incentives.

Is it a realignment? This article doesn't really provide evidence of that. It shows that Trump is doing better among non-whites when looking at Republican voters and comparing to other Republican candidates. This doesn't necessarily generalize to doing better among non-whites in general, or doing better compared to non-Republican politicians. I believe that Scott has a few posts that show some evidence that he did (or e.g. improved his performance among non-whites from 2016 to 2020), although the effect is not as strong as the one described in this article.

Your caution is correct, this alone proves nothing and this could go either way.

But I think there's a little more meat on it than that. As the article notes, the breakdown is more economic than racial, but race correlates with income. It means the working class is the margin of victory within the Republican Party, which also means that the (relatively small number , currently) minority Republicans have increasing influence. In the same way a Democrat has a tough path to the presidency if they do not do well in the heavily black south, so Republicans have a hard road if they do not win the working class of the Midwest.

The realignment will hit its stride when one party manages to break down the barriers to whichever side of the working class isn't in their coalition. Either the Republicans convince working blacks/hispanics that they can represent their interest better than the Democrats, or the Democrats convince working whites that they can represent their interests at all. Either way, this process is probably going to inform the next thirty years of politics.

The word racist means whatever the media wants it to mean. Bears no resemblance to 60+ years ago.

Both sides claim to be for the working class yet this is like paying lip service for votes. I don't think either care that much.

I agree. This is about judging the advertising, not the underlying corruption.

I notice this poll is compatible with whites angry at Trump for not being racist enough. Or COVID-skeptic enough, or loud enough, whatever. Dissatisfied, in some way, but unwilling to jump ship and register D. It’s not so surprising that different Republicans want different things from him.

For that matter, there aren’t that many nonwhite Republicans, period. That’s one obvious avenue for selection bias. If you think Trump’s a racist, by God, the Democrats will be happy to agree. No realignment necessary.

I remember thinking that the Christian right would collapse in the wake of Obama’s re-election. If it’s even done so, it’s been in slow motion, more shelved than imploded. Any realignment to right-populism is going to be just as slow and noncommittal.

I remember thinking that the Christian right would collapse in the wake of Obama’s re-election. If it’s even done so, it’s been in slow motion, more shelved than imploded. Any realignment to right-populism is going to be just as slow and noncommittal.

What would that have looked like?

Take all of this with the grain of salt: I was definitely just discovering libertarianism as a political force, with all the pretension that entails.

At the time, I viewed the 2012 election as a referendum on the negative tactics of the GOP. There had been two major attempts to repeal the ACA with, as I saw it, no credible attempts to build something else. The Tea Party was in full swing, milking the debt ceiling crisis for all it was worth. It was the time of the weaponized filibuster. And it was the time of birtherism and Dijon mustard.

So when all this “negative” politics failed to oust Obama, I concluded that the GOP must be in shambles. I figured that its coalition was going to splinter before dropping the parts that weren’t pulling any weight. Since my exposure to the party planks was largely filtered through Fox News, that meant Christianity. I’d just watched Rick Santorum get thrashed in the primary by a big-business moderate. Roe v. Wade wasn’t on the table. The religious squabbles of the early 2000s seemed so thoroughly settled. Clearly, the libertarians were going to get folded into a new, more constructive Republican Party.

And yes, I realize this evidence could have been taken the exact opposite way: a sign Republicans needed to double down on social conservatism. Arguably, that’s what ended up happening, as the party struggles with a Democratic insistence on idpol. I don’t claim that my youthful political theorizing was very good.

I notice this poll is compatible with whites angry at Trump for not being racist enough.

Is it? In what way? That richer, more educated voters are more racist than the poorer, less educated ones? And they think DeSantis is more racist than Trump, and so prefer him as a potential candidate?

I can see half of that, but the other seems ridiculous.

I was thinking in terms of dissatisfaction. If whites saw Trump as betraying his initial campaign, say, by mellowing on race or on vaccines, they might poll against him. Depending on which issues pulled minorities to vote Republican, those same factors may not apply.

My confidence in any conclusion is pretty low.

I think a lot of this is people leaving the Democratic Party not so much because they agree with the GOP, but because the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class on almost every issue, and has become the party of the elites and sneering at the working class.

Hispanics are Catholics generally, and thus are pretty strong Christians (at least culturally), strongly pro family, and are thus pretty conservatives on most social issues. They also fled parts of the world run by criminal gangs and would thus be fairly strong on law and order stuff. Blacks are usually conservative Protestants and thus also pro family, and so on. They might also want the supposed left-leaning economic policies, but on social issues, they’re pretty conservative.

Which gives the democrats two major problems. First, they’re not only against these more conservative social policies, but they often sneer at anyone not fully on board with them. They aren’t just generally in favor of LGBT stuff, they insist on drag queen story hour, full on drag shows in elementary schools, and so on. Secondly, they are not even trying to deliver any of the kinds of policies that would help the working class. The last minimum wage increase was just after the financial crisis of 2008. Biden had both houses and all he really needed to do was ignore the parliamentarian— who he can outright fire — to put a minimum wage increase in a budget bill where it might have passed. He chose not to. Instead the big economic policies of the moment are environmentalist infrastructure and paying off student loans (and he was blocked on the loans).

Now if you oppose the woke stuff, and don’t like being lectured to about it, that’s a strike on the democratic side. They aren’t upholding your beliefs and values. In fact the6 often mock you for holding them. They’re teaching things in your kids schools you don’t like, and often at the expense of very necessary skills that your kids need for their future.

And there’s nothing gained by holding your nose for them. They’re not working on making working class lives better. They sold out the train engineers. They aren’t raising the minimum wage at all, they’re not paying for trade schools or on the job training. They’re not teaching your kids to read. They’re not even doing anything about drugs and crime. They care about Ukraine, they care that the upper class failsons are unable to pay back their loans. They care about the cultural interests of the laptop class.

There’s a misconception that Hispanic Catholicism is a driving force in Hispanics moving towards the GOP(which does appear to be a trend over time, but one with lots of spikes and stops and steps backwards)- in reality, while church attending Hispanic Catholics probably vote more GOP than non-attending Hispanics, a lot of the GOP’s recent strength with Hispanics has been their ability to run up their margins among Hispanic evangelicals until they’re voting almost like white evangelicals. I don’t deny that the recent prominence of the abortion issue has probably hurt the democrats among Hispanic Catholics(who I would, BTW, not associate with particularly strong homophobia compared to either white Catholics or other Hispanics), but the trend is utterly swamped by the rightward lurch among Hispanic evangelicals.

If Desantis/Abbott/Trump/whoever is in Arizona can figure out how to get church attending Hispanic Catholics voting like Hispanic Protestants, that’s huge and also unexpected.

Yeah, I think that's it. There are a lot of normal "voters of colour" and the people who owned/worked in small businesses and saw them get smashed up in rioting for the whole BLM circus, and the Democratic Party defending all that, are the ones likely to say "Oh hell no" and look for an alternative.

When even the white liberal parents are questioning what is going on in school districts, do you think black and Hispanic parents are going to be "Oh how delightful, I get to Drag My Kids To Pride"?

I don't think that returning to historic trends can really be counted as a realignment. Looking at the black vote since 1932 gives us these numbers:

1932: 77%

1936: 28%

1940: 32%

1944: 32%

1948: 23%

1952: 24%

1956: 39%

1960: 32%

1964: 6%

1968: 15%

1972: 13%

1976: 17%

1980: 14%

1984: 9%

1988: 11%

1992: 10%

1996: 12%

2000: 9%

2004: 11%

2008: 4%

2012: 6%

2016: 8%

2020: 12%

Blacks largely turned to Democrats during the New Deal; they had largely been wary of them before due to the historic association with the Republicans and concern that national leaders were too beholden to the racist Southerners who comprised their base. The next big drop was in 1964, when Goldwater specifically opposed civil rights legislation while Johnson explicitly supported it. Then it recovered to a stable equilibrium on either side of 10%. before dropping again in 2008. This was due less to anything McCain or the Republicans did, though, than to the presence of Barack Obama in the race. With Obama out in 2012, Trump was bound to get a larger share of the black vote, though it took until 2020 for the numbers to recover to near the historic average. Similarly, looking at the Hispanic vote since 1976 we get:

1976: 18%

1980: 37%

1984: 34%

1988: 30%

1992: 25%

1996: 21%

2000: 35%

2004: 44%

2008: 31%

2012: 27%

2016: 28%

2020: 32%

Here it's even worse since the party isn't getting huge swings so much as staying consistent over time. The big news was that in the 2022 midterms Republicans got 39% of the vote, which would be a sizeable increase (though still not the record). But that overlooks that looking at midterm results is more than a bit misleading since not all states vote in major midterm elections. There are obviously House races everywhere, but these races aren't big enough to get a decent sample size for exit polling, a lot of them involve candidates running unopposed, and redistricting makes direct comparisons difficult, so where they do exist they're usually excluded from comprehensive numbers. Only five states with a population greater than 8% Hispanic had gubernatorial elections, and only 4 had Senate elections. And the gubernatorial races are already suspect because they often don't really tell you anything about how a state feels nationally—Vermont, Maryland, and Massachusetts all have Republican governors, and Kansas, Louisiana, and Kentucky all have Democratic governors, and none of those states are even swing states, let alone identified with the party of their respective governors. Anyway, FWIW, DeSantis got 58% of the Hispanic vote in Florida, but from there it drops off a cliff, with Republicans getting 47% in Arizona, 40% in Texas, 37% in Nevada, and 25% in Pennsylvania. The Senate, which is probably a more accurate signifier, looks a little worse, with Republicans getting 55% in Florida, 40% in Arizona, 33% in Nevada, and 31% in Pennsylvania.

But there's something missing from this breakdown. Actually, quite a few things. California had no elections that counted, and it has the largest Hispanic population in the country. Ditto New York, the number four state, as well as number 5 Illinois, number 7 New Jersey, and number 8 Colorado. The Hispanic uptick is dominated by massive numbers in Florida and above average numbers in Texas. Arizona held its own as well, but it's only a recent addition to the swing state club, and the numbers in Pennsylvania and Nevada, neither particularly blue, are about in line with 2020. I think it's a bit premature to say that there's a relalignment going on among Hispanic voters. There's certainly somewhat of an uptick in GOP support, but 2020 wasn't really an abberation from historic averages, and 2022's uptick was limited to certain places that may not be representative of the country as a whole, and one year does not make a trend. I'd want to see more consistent growth before coming to any conclusions.

That is a generally upwards trend in the Hispanic GOP vote, though. There was a spike with bush, which dropped off a Cliff with McCain and Romney, and trump brought it back to near bush levels.

There was a spike with Bush...

I feel like a lot of people have forgotten that Bush spoke Spanish and actually did a few campaign events "en espanol", that shit was big deal back in '95 and 2000.

As a point for discussion, if (and it's a big "if) the Republicans fully take up the flag of the working class, would that make them the left-leaning party?

No, because the "working class" (as in the class of people actually doing physical work) has historically always been more right-wing and/or conservative than their counterparts in the bourgeoisie.

Are you talking about America or generally? Because at least in Europe, during Cold War times, the socialist and communist parties genuinely were working class parties by any definition one might choose, both regarding their voter base, membership and leadership.

I'm Primarily thinking in terms of the US but from what I gather that the politics of the UK and France have followed roughly similar paths. Support for "Revolution!" or any other "latest new thing" always seems to be most pronounced amongst the leisure and academic classes. Where as the core of conservative electorate ends up comprised of craftsmen and cab-drivers.

At least the biggest Western European Communist parties were, during their glory days, firmly working class in, as said, electorate, membership and leadership. For instance, there's a paper here detailing the correlations between worker representation in electoral areas and Communist party vote ("worker" here being basically a very strict definition, ie. non-retired, non-academic urban manual worker; much of the rest of the CP support came from already-retired workers and peasants and other rurals). This started changing in the 70s, as educated "technical" workers started replacing manual workers, but this is also generally associated with the deradicalization of the Communist Parties. The most notable French CP leaders also came from the working class, Manuel Thorez was a coal miner and Georges Marchais a mechanic.

Anglo countries are different, since they never really developed Communist Parties as a force, so the academic utopian segment - always present in all CPs, but as a minor force in actual mass parties - was considerably more important in their consistency. Labour had a strong working-class base until fairly recent times, as well.

Shhhhh, I'm baiting here......

Congratulations, it worked, now stop being an ass.

Have we met?

The question is legitimate, the answers interesting. The fact that "leftism" most commonly presents as the middle class cosplaying as the working class to try to join the upper class is context for later.

A new New York State Covid-19 Dataset was released a few days ago. I thought it was a good opportunity to see the progress of the vaccination campaign. I think it's great data for an attack on the performative ritual of getting 'vaccinated' to encourage others to get vaccinated as well (which is what a lot of people were convinced to do). Obviously, those who got vaccinated to "protect other people" stand on shakier ground now.

https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-updates-new-yorkers-states-progress-combating-covid-19-467

First, let's establish something important. mRNA vaccines have a established, not fully understood connection to peri-myocarditis. mRNA can cause heart damage in a way that other vaccines seem to avoid. I would say this is an important explanation for the following data:

Percent of New Yorkers ages 18 and older with completed vaccine series - 85.5%

We all know how this was done. OSHA directed mandate, NYC mandate, banning people from shows, restaurants, bars until they receive an EUA injection, healthcare worker mandate, bribing people 100$ a shot. Science communication and incentives couldn't get people to take a novel vaccination method. NYS is almost 20% unionized, and the mandate was really helpful in boosting the low minority vaccination rate, since so many of those individuals work unionized, mandated jobs.

Now that these incentives are gone, let's see what the uptake is:

**Percent of all New Yorkers who are up to date - 14.1%

**

Most New Yorkers ignore CDC guidance now. Covid-19 will be gone in a few years. Covid-19 will be retired as a word for "novel entry of pathogen SARS-2," SARS-2 will be renamed HC-391237 or OC-32871 (random examples) or something, and the "covid-19 vaccine" will be rightly seen as a genetic version of a "flu shot" like intervention.

Consumers who want "flu shot" like vaccines, will eventually come to prefer conventional, protein adjuvanted vaccination methods.

Why would a 19 year old ever get an mRNA injection, when they could get a shot of Covaxin? The main purpose of the shot being to end the harassment from the public health infrastructure, and gain employment or education.

**Percent of New Yorkers ages 0-4 with completed vaccine series - 7.9%

**

This makes me think the vaccine could be seen as dangerous to parents. Keep in mind that all high-risk (on ventilator) children have probably been vaccinated, but some likely have not.

The vaccine campaign was a performance. Young healthy people were asked by the CDC to pretend that genetic Covid-19 vaccination was completely benign and well understood, with the goal of ultimately getting high-risk patients to take the higher risk vaccine.

If 20-29 year olds were allowed to say "no, that vaccine causes heart damage, obviously not worth getting," skepticism would trickle up to individuals who should arguably take advantage of the more advanced vaccination method. May the benefits outweigh the risks. No one believes in "do no harm" in the age of state-mandated genetic injections.

Why would a 19 year old ever get an mRNA injection, when they could get a shot of Covaxin?

Why is your example alternative vaccine Covaxin, which is not available in the US, and not Novavax, which is actually available in the US? Do you think the protein subunit technique used by Novavax is also not a sufficiently old-fashioned way of making vaccines? My understanding is that it looks to be on par with the mRNA vaccines for effectiveness while having much less in the way of side effects, while the inactivated vaccines like Covaxin work significantly worse.

Percent of New Yorkers ages 0-4 with completed vaccine series - 7.9%

This makes me think the vaccine could be seen as dangerous to parents. Keep in mind that all high-risk (on ventilator) children have probably been vaccinated, but some likely have not.

This is an incredible failure of public health messaging. While risk goes down for older children, COVID-19 is significantly more dangerous for children under 4. This CDC table shows triple the rate of hospitalization on somewhat fewer cases.

significantly more dangerous

From an incredibly low baseline, and even then it's still a <1 multiple.

I guess that was part of the show. Vaccines were already so safe and bullet proof, people cannot notice when one that's 10x dangerous is released, and information censored online, and physicians told to be disinterested.

This is an incredible failure of public health messaging.

How so? The table you linked shows children ages 0-4 having higher death rates than children ages 5-17, but lower death rates than adults. The stats @Inflamed_Heart_Liberal linked shows children ages 0-4 having higher up-to-date rates then children ages 5-11 and 12-17, but lower rates than adults. This seems like exactly what we would expect from a well- informed population: groups with higher death rates are more likely to be up to date.

7.9% is an extremely low vaccination rate. Normally when people talk about being worried about "low" vaccination rates, they mean 95% or 90%. And COVID-19 is both more dangerous and more common than many of the illnesses we vaccinate children for. If you for some reason decided you had a limited number of vaccinations budget and were rationally optimizing which childhood vaccinations to omit to maximize wellbeing, COVID-19 would not be your first pick (not sure exactly what would be... probably chickenpox? They all suck, this is a terrible choice to be making.). But that's clearly not the optimization people are making; somehow they (and/or their pediatricians) haven't gotten the message that it's actually an important vaccination. And we're going to have a lot more children with long-term health consequences (some of them dead) because of that.

(I'm having trouble finding definitions on their website of what they mean by "up-to-date": the relevant thing to care about is getting the full 3-dose series; past that, for most people, additional doses at best give an ~3 month window of protection from infection, but no significant additional protection from severe disease/death, so the public health benefit is minimal.)

Fair point. There's a lot of public health messaging that gets ignored.

Most childhood vaccines have a 90%+ uptake; I think that's a pretty clear success. While the recent increase in norovirus prevalence shows we could do better, handwashing is at least accepted as something you're expected to do (as opposed to, say, public health campaigns about the amount of alcohol you're "supposed" to drink which no one takes seriously). Talking of vices, smoking has gotten a lot less popular, which probably counts as a successful public health campaign. Not exactly in the same realm, but seatbeats also now fairly widely used.

Novavax is a novel virus-like particle. I personally would much prefer Novavax over mRNA, and probably over adenovirus vectors.

I just don't like the threat of heart problems that mRNA presents. Such a large, dark downside to the products, to remodel your heart.

I thought the adenovirus vector vaccines had a higher incidence of heart problems than the mRNA vaccines. Am I misremembering? I could also see there being a lack of data on head-to-head comparisons given where the different vaccines got used.

obviously

we all know

no one believes

…that something you don’t like could be good?

Look, I understand why you think the mRNA therapies are Problematic. And why you want to talk about them. But I happen to completely disagree with you on the “why” and “how” they were adopted, so I have to object when you bulldoze in and assert that right-thinking people are all on board with your worldview.

If you don’t understand why people might want, or have wanted, the vaccine, especially when they weren’t hooked directly into the same vitriolic channels as you, then you are missing an important piece of the puzzle. And if you won’t understand, as your continued consensus-building suggests…then I think you’re just here to evangelize.

Most of my vitriol came from my education. I've been wear of mRNA since summer 2020 when it was announced as a candidate. I've taken undergraduate STEM, but most importantly, I worked with "science and technology studies," where we looked into a century of scientific ethical dilemmas.

So many people got the vaccine when they were told it would stop transmission - I had read the original clinical paper, and saw this was a messy conclusion. Then data from Israel came out that protection was waning, then the censorship began, and later on the mandating piggy backed on the censorship of waning efficacy.

We all know how this was done. OSHA directed mandate, NYC mandate, banning people from shows, restaurants, bars until they receive an EUA injection, healthcare worker mandate, bribing people 100$ a shot.

This isn't how it happened. The greatest period of vaccination uptake was the sweet spot in the rollout period where the vaccines first became widely available, around March, April, and May 2021. After that the growth in vaccine uptake slowed considerably; if it hadn't it's unlikely a mandate would have been put in place. When New York State first announced a vaccination mandate for certain employees at the end of July the state's 2-dose vaccination rate was at 57%; by the time the vaccination deadline hit in late November, the rate was 69%. Even if we assume that absolutely everyone who got vaccinated during this period only did so because of the inducements, it's still only a relatively small percentage of those who got vaccinated.

Well yes. But those last hold outs were the hardest to get. They resisted the "the vaccine protects you from other people" misconceptions of herd immunity being pushed. It's an important percentage, and without mandates, the data gaps would have been ammo for the "dissenters" of public health.

Besides the consensus building (already pointed out) and the highly partisan and inflammatory tone (without corresponding evidence), I take issue with your use of phrases like "genetic injections". Are you implying that mRNA vaccines can modify someone's genome?

Is there a wage gap in fraud?

New court documents have revealed how much money each FTX executive received.

  • Sam Bankman Fried: $2.2 billion

  • Nishad Singh: $587 million

  • Gary Wang: $246 million

  • Caroline Ellison (guess): $6(six) million

I honestly feel bad for her. Forget jail time, that’s barely worth the disgrace brought to her family (who are well-regarded academics). Ryan Salame, who wasn’t even in on the fraud got more than that. The only explanation I can think of is that she was a true believer in the effective altruism thing. If everyone is earning to give, it doesn’t matter how the loot gets split up right? Except everyone else was buying yachts.

Idk, maybe this is just what happens when you never ask for a raise.

that’s barely worth the disgrace brought to her family (who are well-regarded academics).

Many academics who supported the Iraq War or backed related causes did well

I think Caroline Ellison was mostly involved with Alameda, not FTX. The others were paid more for their work with FTX.

She seems to have been the fall guy for Alameda. SBF insists (almost certainly lying) that the two were separated so she wouldn't have much to do with FTX to maintain appearances.

Besides losing all of the customer money.

Those three were the founders, so it makes sense they put all the spoils assets in their names (and if you look at the breakdown of the three 'silos' Bankman-Fried made sure he was the main guy) while she was only hired on. Then she became co-CEO and then her co-CEO (Mr. Salame there) obviously figured out something skeevy was going on, cleared out, and she was left as CEO.

Really, she was left holding the bag while the others either got out or went higher. Makes sense she'd turn state's evidence against the lot of them, looks like they did use her as a cat's paw (or I should say Bankman-Fried did, he used their friendship/romantic relationship to have her be the name in charge of Alameda Research while she dutifully signed off on whatever Sam wanted).

I have to laugh about Ryan Salame; having seen his non-explanatory tweet as to why he was stepping down from FTX as co-CEO, turns out the urgent family time he needed was to... open restaurants:

Ryan Salame has become synonymous with Lenox hospitality since he purchased his first restaurant, Firefly, in July 2020. Since then, he’s founded the Lenox Eats Collective and added three more Lenox-based favorites to his stable of local businesses. Restaurants include Olde Heritage Tavern (“The Heritage”), Sweet Dreams (formerly The Scoop), and, making its debut in late 2022, Campfire (formerly Café Lucia).

I can't say that Salame was in on the fraud, but it's pretty clear that he sniffed something rotten in the state of Denmark and got out while the going was good. Maybe he just realised that the entire house of cards was not sustainable and he decided to leg it with his dough while there was still dough flowing.

EDIT: Whoops, I was wrong, Salame was not co-CEO of Alameda, that was John Trabucco. I can't keep track of all those with their hands in the till, sorry!

EDIT EDIT: And I shouldn't be attributing dodgy motives to him; if he treated FTX not as "earning to give, EA" but simply Just A Job, then he signed up to make a ton of money fast and got out when he did that in order to pursue his true passion, being a restaurateur.

Except everyone else was buying yachts.

Or expensive holiday homes for their parents, throwing money at their brother's charitable foundation, backing a no-hoper campaign in Oregon 😁

Before stepping down last August, Trabucco bought property worth $10 million in cash, as well as a 52-foot yacht. Court documents filed Wednesday show he transferred $2.5 million from Alameda to American Yacht Group in March 2022, with the cited reason "for the benefit of John Samuel Trabucco."

Gotta admire his neck, that was one guy whose definition of Effective Altruism was "me first" and "charity begins at home" 🤣

Becoming Radicalized by the Hugos

A Very Culture Warrish Review of A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys

In which my fellow nerds will recognize the battlefield and everyone else will roll their eyes and not know who the fuck these people are.

Wordy Pretentious Preamble About My Reading Habits

Everyone remembers the Sad Puppies affair (and the sequel, the Rabids), right? It's been covered here (well, at the old place) before. At the time, I admit to some schadenfreude at the wailing and gnashing of teeth, but I thought Vox Day and Larry Correia were making entirely too much of the fact that phallic rocketship stories don't win Hugos anymore. I actually read some of Vox Day's "Hugo Nominated" fiction. He is… not a good writer. I enjoy Larry Correia, but it's bubblegum bang-bang shoot'em up wish fulfillment, which is all well and good, but the same caliber as Ian Fleming's writing – entertaining and marketable and would make for great movies, but not really, well, whatever the Hugos used to represent. Ditto Brad Torgerson; serviceable prose, but fanzine-level execution.

As for the three Johns (Kratman, Ringo, and Wright), I've read all of them, and Kratman and Ringo tell rippin' good yarns with execrable prose and plotting. Only John C. Wright is actually a really good writer (though he does get a bit up his own ass, especially since his conversion to Catholicism).

I'm just saying, if the right wants to reclaim any creative spaces, they need to find better creatives.

Conversely, I used to really like John Scalzi. I watched Vox Day beat him like a pinata online, and though I hadn't gone full anti-SJW yet, I started to think…. "VD is right." His cruel but accurate takedowns were intensely petty, spiteful, and personal, and yet he had the squishy little man pegged.

Scalzi has since become ever more pretentious, ever more virtue signaling, ever more… well, VD would say "effeminate," I'd just say I started to recognize the sight of someone rolling over to show his belly, someone desperate to stay in the good graces of a clique where being a straight white male who cites Heinlein as an inspiration means he's always one bad Tweet away from being consigned to the outer darkness. My fondness for his books curdled, as I started to see his smarmy potato face in all his characters.

As went Scalzi, so went the Hugos, where for the past few years it seems like there's a little bit of straight white guy affirmative action so that John Scalzi and Clarkesworld can stay relevant, but basically it's a women's fiction award now, and if there's ever a white dude-dominated slate again (yet alone a white dude-dominated winners' list), Worldcon will burn.

And ya know, I don't hate women's fiction, or women in SF. I really am an omnivorous reader. But over time, some things have become hard not to notice. Like the fact that N.K. Jemisin is a fanfic-level hack who's fawned over and feted and cooed adoringly as the next Octavia Butler (she's not). Like how Kameron Hurley and Seanan McGuire and Ann Leckie are all decent writers but such insufferably hateful harpies that, like Scalzi, I can't stand to read them anymore.

Vox Day and the alt-right say "Don't give money to people who hate you," but I am not alt-right and have remained determinedly apolitical in my media consumption. But gods help me I'm becoming one of those guys who side-eyes anything written post Great-Awokening by a chick.

Which brings me to…

A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys

A literary descendent of Ursula K. Le Guin, Ruthanna Emrys crafts a novel of extra-terrestrial diplomacy and urgent climate repair bursting with quiet, tenuous hope and an underlying warmth. A Half-Built Garden depicts a world worth building towards, a humanity worth saving from itself, and an alien community worth entering with open arms. It's not the easiest future to build, but it's one that just might be in reach.

I know, I know, I should have paid more attention to that blurb.

I picked this up because it's a First Contact story that got batted around as some new hotness in SF, and I like alien stories with a modern perspective that are more original than "How will we repel the invaders?"

(I like alien invasion and other MilSF stories too, but like I said, I am an omnivorous reader.)

A Half-Built Garden is very likely going to wind up on the Hugo shortlist this year, and probably has a decent chance of winning. It's a well-written, creative story that brings some interesting ideas to the table, it's innovative science fiction…

.. and it's also a meandering, actionless piece of women's fiction dwelling on pronouns, interstellar consent culture, lactating breasts, and internal monologues that all but drowned me in estrogen.

I've seen this book compared to Becky Chambers. I haven't read any of Becky Chambers's books, but they sound exactly like the kind of story I am not interested in (people go to space, have problems which they solve by talking them out in a civilized fashion, the end?).

A Half-Built Garden is "Aliens arrive, people have problems which they solve by talking them out in a civilized fashion, the end."

(1/3)

(2/3)

The Bitter Review I Would Not Post on Amazon

The year is 2083. Earth's climate has suffered and we're not out of the woods yet, but the world is finally getting its shit together enough to undo some of the damage.

There are basically three factions in the late 21st century:

  • Environmental Cooperatives, sort of NGOs on steroids who have vaguely-defined authority over most environmental concerns and are doing the actual work of repairing the environment. How exactly they obtained their authority is never really explained, but presumably it's something like "Everyone finally realized we're all going to die if we don't listen to the environmentalists." Okay. They have lots of virtual meetings and talk about species and ecology preservation, carbon emissions, virus containment, and weather forecasting. They invented this whole new kind of networking called the "dandelion networks" which are kind of like Twitter except very peaceful and everyone reaches a consensus and they are resilient against disinformation and wrongthink.

  • Governments. The old nation-states (including the USA) are still around, creaky old dinosaurs who are kind of obsolete except they still have armies and nukes so you can't exactly ignore them. When the aliens arrive, NASA is ecstatic to become relevant again.

  • Corporations. When the environmental cooperatives effectively took over the world (it's never put this way, but it seems like basically they run everything and the governments with… armies and nukes just… let them) the corporations had the choice of getting with the program or fucking off to their own micronations. They decided to fuck off to literal and/or figurative islands. So the remnants of late-stage capitalism now exist in little "aisland" enclaves of their own where everyone plays status-seeking corporate reindeer games while trying to stay relevant by offering goods and services to the environmental cooperatives and governments. They aren't literally given black hats but the author's voice heavily implies they are bad guys who want to go back to the bad old days of despoiling the Earth. (Spoiler: They are the bad guys and they want to go back to the bad old days of despoiling the Earth.)

Aliens Arrive!

They land on the Maryland shore, just outside of Washington, D.C., and are stumbled upon by our first person POV protagonist Judy Wallach-Stevens, a Jewish lesbian who lives in a large manor house with her polycule, including her wife and their infant daughter, a they/them, and a transman (who have a they/them toddler of their own whose gender is pointedly never specified). Judy does ecology stuff for the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Network, but mostly she cooks. She seems like a really interesting and original char-

About the Author:

Ruthanna Emrys is the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots, and the Imperfect Commentaries collection. She writes radically hopeful short stories about religion and aliens and psycholinguistics. She lives in a mysterious manor house on the outskirts of Washington, DC with her wife and their large, strange family. She creates real versions of imaginary foods in her crowded kitchen, gives unsolicited advice, and occasionally attempts to save the world.

… okay, well, Larry Correia writes himself as his MC too, so anyway.

Judy and her wife happen to be carrying their infant daughter while out for a stroll, and this turns out to be significant, as the aliens are matriarchal and bringing your children to diplomatic negotiations is a sign of good faith. So by sheer coincidence, while baby and hir two mommies are staring at the spaceship that landed on their front lawn, they have initiated peaceful contact with their visitors, who respond in kind by sending out one of their own with her children.

Or Hor or Its or Zis… this book was full of neopronouns, though actually the humans were more varied than the aliens.

The "Ringers" are actually two species, who made contact with each other ages ago. Since then, they have searched the galaxy for other intelligent races, and found mostly dead worlds where civilizations once existed. It turns out that most races fall into an industrial death spiral: their technological advancement outpaces their ability to manage their environment, and they all wind up making themselves extinct. The Ringers avoided this by going into space, treating their homeworlds as mere raw materials, and have thus concluded that intelligent species are not meant to be planet-bound. When they picked up radio signals from Earth, they sent an expedition to save us.

This is the central "conflict" of the story: the Ringers believe that humanity has to leave Earth or die. Judy and her eco-coops insist they're actually fixing their world (yes, the whole book is literally a Tikkun Olam meme), but the Ringers claim that Earth is already doomed.

I put "conflict" in scare quotes because it's implied that the Ringers might try to force humans to leave Earth. Except.. other than a few tense conversations where Judy says "What if we don't want to?" and the Ringers say "But you have to!" there's never really any kind of threat. The Ringers sent a diplomatic mission, not a warship, and while there's some talk of nanotechnology and how the Ringers could conceivably start disassembling Earth right out from under us (they are apparently advanced enough to have started building a Dyson sphere back home), there's never any indication that this was actually something they had in mind. They just sort of assumed they'd explain the situation to us in a reasonable manner, and humanity would agree that their solution makes sense.

So all that is interesting enough as a setup. The rest of the book is mostly about the nation-states and the corps and the coops all jockeying to influence the aliens, while the aliens are playing politics in return. Eventually Judy and her wife and child and some corp reps go to the alien home system, there is a bit of nefariousness, but nothing that can't be solved with impassioned speeches inspired by Star Trek (literally).

And that's pretty much it. There is a lot of talking and soapboxing. Every conflict is solved by talking and being more empathetic.

The first is when Judy is invited to visit one of the corporate "aislands" with her new alien friends (who insist on Judy coming along because having made the proper initial diplomatic overtures, they consider her to be Earth's spokeswoman, more or less), and she brings along a weapon that will DDoS the corporate networks. See, the coops' computer network was almost taken down by a virus, which they are pretty sure was caused by the corporations, so Judy's activist parents from a radical Jewish commune cook up a poorly thought-out plan to stick it to the corps. But the whole time Judy is carrying the device around in her pocket she's feeling really bad about using it and feeling sorry for all these capitalist planet-rapers who are, after all, still people just like her. Then one of the capitalist planet-rapers detects the device in her pocket and they talk it out and Judy hands over the device. Then they go to a party and eat lots of food and Judy and the aliens go back to Maryland.

Later, there is another conflict where some of the coop folks want to sabotage the aliens' communications gear. There is some scuffling – someone actually uses a judo throw on someone! Judy lectures everyone about what an immature species we're being. They talk it out.

Finally, they go to the aliens' home system, and the aliens and humans argue a lot, and then the humans demand that they not be "colonized," and the aliens recognize their demand for affirmative consent. They talk it out. The end.

Sigh.

(3/3)

DEI…. in Spaaaace!

You've already picked up all of the major Culture War points, but I cannot emphasize just how very, very much a product of a bonafide card-carrying SJW this book is.

Pretty much everyone is queer and/or genderfluid and/or female, except (you guessed it) the unambiguously villainous corporate types (the ambiguously amoral corporate types are genderqueer, and the sympathetic ones are female) and a few government drones. Oh yeah, and the aliens. The male aliens get to be likeable, because the females are in charge.

There are multiple conversations about pronouns and nametags. A minor plot point is that the aliens are matriarchal and so it matters to them who actually gives birth, and Judy's transman housemate is really upset that she didn't put her foot down when the aliens were asking hurtful questions. We also learn that her transman housemate was (of course) abused and almost driven to suicide by bigoted parents who live in one of those conservative enclaves where people are still technophobic, transphobic, and religious.

The wrong kind of religious, I mean. We get multiple digressions about Judy's Jewishness. Growing up in an ultra-leftist Jewish commune, one of the defining moments of her childhood is that some asshole kids drew swastikas on her schoolbooks. In the 2060s. At the corporate-hosted reception for the aliens, she stands around angsting about whether the food (made out of corp-paste or something) contains shrimp or pork. And there's a long talk with the other human mommy in the book (I'll get to that) about the Holocaust. See, the governments and corps put on a display to summarize Earth's history for the aliens, and Judy is very upset that they didn't mention the Holocaust. Like, very upset, in tears.

I don't care about a lot of the woke shit and the neopronouns. I mean, realistically, transpeople are not going away. A writer who writes a story set in 2083 that isn't post-apocalyptic might try to wave away genderspecials as a fad that died out in the 30s, I guess, but otherwise, sure, they are probably a part of the landscape for the foreseeable future, whether you like it or not.

The character is Jewish and Jewish identity (and anti-Semitism) is still Very Important in 2083 - okay, I'll buy it. Our resident Joo-posters I'm sure will have much fun with this, but I mostly shrugged it off, other than, ahem, noticing it. Yes, I did also notice that no one else gets to be religious and not a backwards technophobic asshole. (The aliens have some sort of "spiritual but not religious" thing going on and they even have what I suppose is supposed to be a touching scene with Judy and her transman housemate. The alien wants to do a ritual, Judy can't because she's afraid it might violate her own religion, so the transman, after carefully questioning the alien about what exactly their beliefs entail, overcomes his childhood religious trauma to participate.)

There's also a sex scene. With an alien. Judy (the lesbian) falls in love with one of the male aliens. He's such a good talker and such a good listener, you see. So she discusses it with her wife and they agree to invite the alien into their polycule. This is before they've decided whether to actually have sex with the other humans in their household. But they have a very serious relationship talk with the alien in which they say hey, we kind of like you, and he says well, I kind of like you too, and then they have a threesome.

So human dick is out of the question, but two lesbians are totally DTF with a headless alien spider-thing who is male enough to make hentai jokes.

Even that didn't really squick me much, though. (Larry Niven was writing about alien sex in the 70s.) What did squick me? What made me want to DNF it? (I did finish it.) The many, many, many fucking mommy moments. Yes, I get it, the author is trying to make mothers important characters, not like groty old white dude engineers. Lactating women (and aliens) will save the world.

Judy and her wife literally change a diaper at the moment of first contact. We are constantly treated to descriptions of Judy nursing, how her breasts are feeling, taking nursing pads out of her gear, checking medications for nursing safety, hey, did I mention yet that the main character is a nursing mother nursing throughout the book? (So is the alien girlboss in charge of their expedition.)

One of the other characters, who is so brilliant and important that she's called back from leave to help talk to the aliens, is a NASA engineer who's also a nursing mother. She and Judy talk to each other about aliens and the sociological ramifications of Star Trek captains (yes, seriously) as they "gently sway in sync" while nursing their babies.

Like, hitting on this once or twice would have been an interesting non-traditional perspective. Hitting it as often as Emrys does, I started expecting the book to lactate.

If a man wrote this, we could probably call it a fetish.

The greatest sin of A Half-Built Garden as science fiction is that it turns the entire saga of mankind's (hah, see what I did there?) first contact with aliens into a bunch of table talks about boundaries and consent. And I mean this literally, in every sense – one of the big table talks is on Earth, where the aliens come to Judy's Seder gathering. There's another on a corporate "aisland" (the one where Judy is worried about whether corp-food is kosher.) The last one is in the Ringers' home system, where besides asserting their right to self-determination, the humans lecture the aliens about their wrongbad gender essentialism and explain that humans aren't actually sexually dimorphic and give a speech about gender fluidity that could have come straight out of a LGBTQ+ DEI session. At the end of this speech, one of the aliens comes out as nonbinary (no, I am not making this up), and then we get the big reveal that Judy's wife is, in fact, a transwoman.

Congratulations Earthlings, you've spread ROGD to the stars!

For all my snark and bitterness, the real crime here is that Emrys is not a bad writer. The aliens are genuinely interesting (and alien), the situation that she sets up is plausible and has plenty of potential for actual conflict (which does not have to be armed), and I have to admit that her prose was above my usual expectations for SF&F. A less hyper-woke writer could have written a pretty good book. Instead, she wrote a Hugo-worthy one.

Are there any write-ups on the Sad Puppies situation you would recommend? I find myself wanting to actually have a clear understanding about it, but I don't want an explanation that favors one side or the other.

Also, good book review, but I honestly wish you had actually posted to Amazon. Would make for something interesting at least, and maybe even a response from the author.

I never watched Bridgerton, but I'm told it's about wanting to have a black noble family in the British upper class. I don't mind that in the least, and this book seems to be the same. "What if the biggest issue when dealing with aliens was defeating gender binaries?" and all that. People write fanfics to let characters engage in gay sex literally all the time and some of the best fanfics I've ever read are about homosexual relationships between canonically straight characters.

But damn, you make it sound like there's honestly nothing radical in the discourse itself. Like, if you want to explore gender and whatnot, at least do something more creative than assuming the literal aliens are also gender essentialists in the way humans are. Maybe the aliens are a hivemind which doesn't have gender because the hivemind doesn't see itself as made up of individuals, but merely puppeting bodies who can reproduce.

I never watched Bridgerton, but I'm told it's about wanting to have a black noble family in the British upper class. I don't mind that in the least, and this book seems to be the same.

You missed nothing, it is ordinary regency romance, except set in alternate world where British empire was always racially diverse and completely color blind.

Because old European kingdoms and empires were awesome, and their only flaw was racism. If people of color were equally represented among European royalty and nobility, it would be true paradise on earth.

Very conservative and "trad" attitude, called "progressive" today.

Because old European kingdoms and empires were awesome, and their only flaw was racism. If people of color were equally represented among European royalty and nobility, it would be true paradise on earth.

I was just reading about Haitian history...:

While the French settlers debated how new revolutionary laws would apply to Saint-Domingue, outright civil war broke out in 1790 when the free men of color claimed they too were French citizens under the terms of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

In Paris, a group of wealthy mulattoes, led by Julien Raimond and Vincent Ogé, unsuccessfully petitioned the white planter delegates to support mulatto claims for full civil and political rights. Through the efforts of a group called Société d'Amis des Noirs, of which Raimond and Ogé were prominent leaders, in March 1790 the National Assembly granted full civic rights to the gens de couleur.

Vincent Ogé traveled to St. Domingue to secure the promulgation and implementation of this decree, landing near Cap-Français (now Cap-Haïtien) in October 1790 and petitioning the royal governor, the Comte de Peynier. After his demands were refused, he attempted to incite the gens de couleur to revolt.

However, the mulatto rebels refused to arm or free their slaves, or to challenge the status of slavery, and their attack was defeated by a force of white militia and black volunteers (including Henri Christophe).

Systemic slavery internalized by strong people of color smh.

Are there any write-ups on the Sad Puppies situation you would recommend? I find myself wanting to actually have a clear understanding about it, but I don't want an explanation that favors one side or the other.

I honestly don't know of a good source that makes a credible attempt to present it in a non-partisan manner. You can find fairly comprehensive writeups from both sides from which you can piece together what happened, but just about every summary I have seen is hopelessly tainted by the biases of the writer.

Also, good book review, but I honestly wish you had actually posted to Amazon. Would make for something interesting at least, and maybe even a response from the author.

I doubt the author would respond except possibly to demand that Amazon remove the review. I'd have to clean it up a lot to avoid probably triggering some TOS violation.

I honestly don't know of a good source that makes a credible attempt to present it in a non-partisan manner

There can't be one. Anyone conceding the Puppies had any kind of legitimate grievience is effectively a pro-puppy partisan.

I doubt the author would respond except possibly to demand that Amazon remove the review.

My view on that is "feck the begrudgers" but then I'm a lot more confrontational than you are 😁

This one is a more neutral overview about hugo's from Eric Flint

Flint’s commentary leaves me with a much better impression than his books. That’s kind of unusual for an author.

It seems exceptionally difficult to find a good non partisan discussion of it because it is so very "inside baseball" and emotions surrounding ing it have since come to run so high.

The extremely abridged version is that there came to be a perception that the hugos had become "captured" by Tor and Random House and that they had been using thier positions/market share to freeze out independent authors and those affiliated withother publishers that had previously refused to bend the knee, namely Baen. The specific mechanism being about who was allowed to vote in the nomination process, something about attendence at specific cons and such.

Anyway an effort lead by a few Baen authors most notably Larry Correia ("sad puppies" refers to a running gag on correia's blog) sought to break the Tor grip on the nomination process by getting thier fans into the cons and having them canvas the attendees and harvest ballots, to get more independent authors on the ballot, displacing some of Tor's favored authors

This is decried by the head of Tor as politicization of the Hugos, it was already political claims Correia.

The Hugos subsequently change the voting and nomination rules to aviod a repeat.

This is the basic outline, but it's worth mentioning that all this played out over the pattern of Social Justice driving community closure, as it was doing to countless communities at the time. 2013-2015 was when Social Justice hit critical mass, and started enforcing its preferences on online and offline communities. People who weren't on board became aware that it was happening, and tried to push back; in almost all cases, this resulted in a fight over legible, objective mechanisms of power and status; moderation positions, awards, control of events and so on.

The specific mechanism being about who was allowed to vote in the nomination process, something about attendence at specific cons and such.

WorldCon didn't require physical attendance, but it did require membership, and few people realized how open the membership requirements were. Even for people who were in the know, most were aware of WorldCon membership as a great deal for voracious readers, since an annual remote membership (I think 40 USD?) would get you a free copy of most of the nominated works in a big folder, than for the ability to vote remotely.

Correia et all's claim was that regardless of who was allowed to vote, the actual voting for both nominations and final round was actually done by a pretty small and intellectually-cloistered group, turning from the 100 sort of people who read the WorldCon constitution to the 500 sort of people who'd read Scalzi's and Glover's blog and somehow stay awake. Moreover, because of the nature of the nomination phase, it was very easy for a fairly small amount of coordination to overcome a lot of other more popular works.

Bridgerton is pure fantasy, it's taking the romance novel genre of Regency Romance and dialling it up to eleven (it's not even based on Jane Austen, though the Pride and Prejudice TV adaptations clearly have an influence).

So if the author wants to put in black nobility and everyone is race-mixed and so forth, that's fine - it's not pretending to be our world and forget all the blah about representation and diversity, it stands or falls on 'do the romances work, does the audience find the characters attractive and interesting?'

"What if the biggest issue when dealing with aliens was defeating gender binaries?" could be done well, but by the sounds of it the novel is one long lecture (the heroine has to be gay and Jewish and anti-capitalist and so on and so forth). Honestly, if they had the Marines out of Aliens being the ones to do the lectures about defeating gender essentialism (while being kick-ass with big guns and the aliens are the hippy commune free love poly matriarchal society) it would be ten times funnier and I might even read that!

Okay, that’s one I might actually enjoy. Play it straight (ha!), no irony, “make the galaxy safe for liberalism.” Wait, we’ve reinvented some of Banks’ more militant Culture novels.

For a less extreme example, this might be what I liked about Ancillary Justice.

Putting the "WARRIOR" into "SJW" 🤣

Unfortunately, I don't think it's really possible to learn in enough detail with developing judgements. I'm more pro-Sad than anti-Sad, though I'm also pretty heavily anti-Rabid. To give as neutral a summary as possible...

The Hugo Awards (and a few separate non-Hugo Awards like the Campbell/"Astounding Award for Best New Writer") are annual awards given at WorldCon. Since the 1960s, the process has the worldcon membership submit (up to) five works for each award category for nomination, the nominations were checked for eligibility, and then totaled up. Until 2016, the finalist round consisted of the top three (minimum) or up to five works (sometimes requiring the work to receive at least 5% of the nomination-round vote); since 2016, they use the top six works with no minimum threshold.

((The categories themselves were originally selected by WorldCon committees, but they've since been defined into the WorldCon constitution and members can change them over a couple years.))

There were always some awkward bits to this process: They'd Rather Be Right was widely believed to have been a Scientologist op in 1955 back when the initial nomination was open to the public, a number of the lower-relevance categories tended to be starved for nominations due to the 5% threshold, Best Related Work was kinda a wasteland of garbage 'how to write' and bad fictional encyclopedia for decades at a time, and a few very good works and their voters got screwed over due to the arcane eligibility rules (Lady Astronaut of Mars most famously, but it's also one of the reasons Iain Banks was only seriously considered once, and at that for one of his lesser-known works).

But for the most part, it worked and was considered mostly respectable. Not every Hugo Award-winning novel was great, and a lot of the less-well-known categories tended to collect dreck or be little more than popularity contests, but they were the sorta thing you could point toward as a novelist and be pretty happy.

However, because of the award's relatively insular nature, it tended to get a little tactical when it came to voting. There were only hundreds of nominating ballots, and it wasn't unusual to see (non-Dramatic Fiction) rockets break by twenty to fifty votes. Some of this becomes pretty obvious, like the fifth time the same person wins the Best Editor award with near-identical breakdowns, or from the other direction where Girl Genius starts refusing nomination so someone else can finally take a rocket. But even a lot of the bigger-name awards became hard to clear as the number of published eligible works increased: when there are literally hundreds of good works being written every year, the vote becomes more and more diluted without some coordination mechanism. For the most part, this was just 'award eligibility posts' in the nomination phase (or... less subtle things) followed by highly-publicized reviews of the nominee, but there'd been some rumors of vote-trading for some of the final rounds.

In 2011, Larry Correia was nominated for the Campbell award, a (non-Hugo) WorldCon award for new writers. While Campbells don't cite specific works, he'd published Monster Hunter International in 2009 and that was the work in the eligibility period. While not exactly high fiction, it's a pretty good World Of Darkness-style slightly ridiculous work and got some moderate acclaim. He lost, and lost honestly, to Lev Grossman's The Magicians, which I personally hate but had a pretty widespread fandom at the time, along with some other strong competition.

Correia also claims that at least some opposition to him was motivated by his religion (Mormon) and politics (he's the sort of person where the gun-nut self-insert daily-carry dude is toned down from his real life persona), and that even had he lost naturally, this separately reflected an increasing exclusion within WorldCon insiders over anything that remotely smelled of right-wing and, more broadly, of science fiction and fantasy that didn't match a very specific worldview and flavor, to a point of excluding many works that once would have been Hugo-worthy. Correia uses SMOF (Secret Masters of Fandom) as a joke-term for this faction and viewpoint, but also because it was pretty much the explicit stance of the Science-Fiction Writers Association (SFWA).

This isn't entirely true -- Bujold got a ton of rockets for literal Baen-style writing, sometimes in preference to the (often-better) most fem-progressive works -- but she was very much an exception. Baen, mil- or action-focused scifi, or more gonzo works, including a lot of pretty mainstream fantasy, had become very disfavored outside of Dramatic Long-Form (which ended up doing Doctor Who for fucking ever) and a (very small) block of voters. And this was post-Racefail WorldCon: there absolutely was a pretty significant number of voters who thought about their votes in Broader Context Of Harm, especially given the politics around gay rights (which Correia was mostly holding his tongue on) and gun control (which he very much wasn't) at the time.

In 2013, Scalzi won the Novel award with Redshirts. Some of that reflects a lackluster competition (eg Captain Vorpatil's Alliance is a comedy and not Bujold's strongest), but most of it was Scalzi being a Tor writer with a big following and putting a ton of effort into getting people to vote for him and a slate of other people who also advertised his work in turn. Redshirts... is an awkward book. It's kinda funny, but it's a worse Galaxy Quest in a lot of ways, and while that's praising with faint damns it made it a weird Hugo award. Correia made a joking "Sad Puppy" request for Monster Hunter Legion, which missed the nomination by <20 votes and... well, I don't think I'd have voted for it on the Rocket, but it's a lot closer than Redshirts.

In 2014, Correia submitted to his fandom a Sad Puppy II slate, along with information on voting requirements and options. While this was mostly a bunch of generic (and not always especially-great) conservative or libertarianish authors (I'll admit a guilty pleasure in Hoyt's writing, but it's... uh, not going to appeal to the general scifi audience), one notable problem point was Opera Vita Aeterna by Vox Day (aka Theodore Beale). Where Correia or Hoyt were just Boomer (if Mormon) Conservatives, Beale was an asshole.

I mean, charitably, 'alt-right'? But mostly asshole. Like, 'oh, I didn't call that African-American person names, just made a comparison that was very easy to read as such'-level, /r/culturewarroundup founders think he's a bit too much-level. He got attention for getting in a fight with (and kicked out from) the SFWA in 2013, and turned that into a business model, which to be as fair to him as I can at least meant a lot of his enemies were jerks too. So that Got Some Attention.

Once those effects shook out, Sad Puppies II got absolutely clobbered. There's a bit of weirdness in the votes for novel because the Wheel of Time also separately got a ton of protest votes/anti-votes because its eligibility was very complicated, but about 300 general Sad Puppies and about 150 more that were willing to vote for Beale were largely crunched by a pretty active Tor/McGuire/Glover faction that tried to raise as much outreach as possible to vote against them. Opera Vita Aeterna was somewhat unusual for getting smashed so hard it lost to No Award, then pretty much unheard of because of the necessary coordination.

Correia et all took this as pretty clear evidence of his thesis: even assuming that Beale's writing is atrocious, so was and is Scalzi's, and that didn't result in a giant outcry or mainstream media coverage or a near-industry-wide effort to absolutely smash any chance at victory. Nor was it just Beale's (odious) politics; Torgersen and Correia seemed to be getting similar repulsion. John C Wright said he didn't get fired he quit, but it's not exactly subtle. Nor was even not having public political positions or the wrong gender the issue, as Toni Weisskopf went from second-place to fourth in the ranked choice voting despite having picked up more votes than Correia's writing did (and imo had at least as reasonable a claim as Ginjer Buchanan, and definitely over Gorinsky in 2014, given Tor's problems at the time). Likewise, a lot of the 2014 winners and high-ranks weren't great sci-fi/fantasy, or even sci-fi fantasy: "The Water That Falls on You From Nowhere" has little to recommend it besides the politics, "We Have Always Fought"... uh at least it's actually Related, which isn't always something Best Related Work hits.

Beale took it as an opportunity.

((About this point, there's a campaign for women's representation starting at the Nebula Awards, a more insiders-focused awards system, eventually culminating in 2016's awards.))

In 2015, Torgersen ran the Sad Puppies III slate, specifically as recommendations after Correia had been accused of trying to crowd out other works. There's a few stinkers in there (why on earth is Kevin J Anderson near your awards list?!), but intentionally mixed as much political, racial, and gender mix as Torgersen could come up with while still finding good(ish) names who wouldn't have won otherwise. The day after that, Beale published the Rabid Puppies I slate, with some overlap but a very explicit 'fill exactly this' setup, and things got complicated, not least of all because no few of the Sad Puppies recs were only willing to be on the Sad Puppy list if Beale specifically was not. And, uh, Beale also pushed a lot of works from either him directly, or his print shop Castilla House.

Later, the actual nomination results came in, and everything went to hell. Rather than struggling to even get some pieces nominated, a majority of works in both slates went forward, and in many cases they made up all five slots. And because of how the nominations procedure works, it was really hard for people to tell if they made it because of Torgersen's recommendation, Beale's recommendation, or a combination of both. A number of authors -- including many of the progressive ones -- declined nomination after the votes were tallied, specifically to avoid the taint. Correia himself dropped out.

Then the media got involved. Sad Puppies II had gotten some mainstream press coverage, but mostly in a 'look at the dweebs' sense. This time, it was a good deal more. For an example, The Guardian wrote about "The Puppies’ real beef is that SF, and society as a whole, has become too feminist, too multiracial, too hospitable to gay and trans voices" while Sarah Hoyt's nomination was one of the gayest and fanficiest things ("All the President's Men" is exactly that pun) I've ever read, and I read furry porn. But pretty much every major mainstream newspaper had something on it, all with the same framework and about the same interest in accuracy.

Internal to the scifi/fantasy world, it got heavier. Everyone remotely involved had to have politics somewhere to the right of John C Wright; the slate as a whole was a couple full Gamergates. An unrelated attempt to clean up some of the leftover problems of the Wheel of Time snafu underwent revision lest it benefit Old White Guys. And there was a massive campaign to No Award every slot any Puppy candidate had, even over non-Puppy votes.

In the end, No Award picked up over half of the total ballots for some awards, and the only big Puppy nominee to win was Guardians of the Galaxy. Laura Mixon's report on MsScribe won, but still got over 1k No Awards votes and an asterisk, despite not being a recommendation from either Puppy Slate, because she was perceived as Puppy-adjacent or at best a tool of white people. The finalists that scraped through that got delightful little "Asterisk" awards, complete with a slideshow presentation mentioning how sports leagues would mark questionable victories or records with an asterisk; a number of other bits and pieces were set up to humiliate them as much as possible. The voting membership rushed through a couple changes to the nomination and voting system specifically to resist this form of slate, which would apply after the 2016 year -- penalizing multiple nominations in the same category, got the most coverage, but there were other rule changes that reduced slate- or slate-looking votes.

This absolute sucked for the Sad Puppies (even many of the ones who pulled out still have a Reputation today), and was absolutely hilarious for Beale specifically, who got a ton of publicity even outside of the fandom. And it turned up the evaporative cooling at the Hugos directly.

In 2016, Kate Paulk ran Sad Puppies IV. It... mostly focused on being as unobtrusive as possible; technically, they promoted Neil Gaiman and I'm not sure Gaiman noticed. Beale ran Rabid Puppies II, but wasn't particularly successful either. A lot of Sad Puppies started to promote the DragonCon awards, a separate and already-extant setup that ran the same weekend as WorldCon and had long had a feud. The Dragon Awards are going ok, as are most of the Hugo Awards, although Best Related Work remains absolute garbage.

((The 2016 Sad Puppy Slate ended up including or promoting Chuck Tingle's Space Raptor Butt Invasion for the short story rocket, which is a) exactly what it sounds like and b) still felt more scifi/fantasy to Sad Puppies than If You Were A Dinosaur My Love. This could have ended up raising some interesting questions about the relationship between Hugo awards and the increasing prominence of adult pornographic media, but it didn't win and most of the time progressives (including Tingle) and Sad Puppies only really brought it up to bash each other.))

Why do you hate The Magicians?

The Sy-fy show is also way better than the books fyi.

Why do you hate The Magicians?

The Magicians proper has a complex relationship with magic. It's advertised as about an Hogwarts-for-Adults with Bakebill, and Narnia-for-Adults with Fillory. ((The Magician King also adds in not!urbanfantasy with the hedge witches and Underground.)) It's also about how they all kinda suck. That's not necessarily bad as a story decision, but the execution is awful and undermines the central themes of the trilogy (which are at least in theory about wanting things and depression), or the critiques of the original fiction.

This is most obvious with Fillory. No, it's not legally defamatory to have the thinly-veiled CS Lewis stand-in as a literal pedophile who diddles his own male family member into cannibalistic monstrosity, especially as you can't legally defame the dead, but it's doesn't feel like a particularly strong send-up of Narnia so much as an insult for insult's sake. Having his sister turn away from not!Narnia out of misplaced allegiance to your Aslan-analogues is a bit on the nose; having them do so to become a Texan evangelical is just stupid. I'm not opposed to atheist stories, but when you make a story where the crux eventually becomes "what if lionram!Jesus won't sacrifice himself for the world" (in Land) it runs into the problem where the author doesn't believe it, the author's fellow atheists don't believe it, and the religious nuts adherents that they're criticizing also don't believe that. It doesn’t really matter if the atheists and the religious disbelieve it in different ways: it doesn’t leave any meaningful discussion ground.

About the most clever beat for Fillory involves the Watcherwoman's time shenanigans, and it's still the sort of thing that would get mockery were it written by M Night Shyamalan. There's definitely ways to parody Narnia, and to do it well, just as there are ways to critique religious fiction and do it well. But Grossman isn't really trying a parody or serious critique; he's throwing his characters into a knockoff of the setting and giving them things (things Grossman doesn't like) to emote at.

Bakebill... nostalgebraist has a review that focuses more on it, but the tl;dr is that it tries to send-up the hidden magic school as hard and boring like normal school, and the students being assholes. Which is absolutely something that could happen, but it's neither interesting nor particularly compelling. The ways that they're assholes aren’t even that interesting; there's so many more varied ways even an anhedonic magician could do things that the students come across as prats at best and bullies at worst.

These decisions undermine each other, rather than simply being incoherent. The best defense I've seen describes the first book as resonant for someone with severe depression, as an understanding of the feeling that nothing fixes things and all the promises you've had given were lies. And that could be interesting! There's nothing wrong with a slow-burn drama story about interpersonal interaction. It's even possible to mix it with the sudden existential dread of the botched prank leaving a fellow student eaten, or life-threatening final exams; it's anathema to a story where the protagonist is getting a lot dropped in his lap. Depression's hard enough for focused works like Catcher In the Rye (which became far more famous for 'phonies' and the prostitute scene than for the protagonist have had a cancer death in his family and a suicide literally in his view); without being handled very carefully you end up with a protagonist who comes across as a whiny little sod or cause of many of his own problems, and Quentin definitely falls here.

On its own, this'd just make the story 'not for me'. The trick's that The Magicians isn't a bad book. I want to say it could have easily been a great one! There's a few pacing problems, but overall it's technically very well-executed, and there's a few individual scenes that are absolutely excellent prose. It's just the glue holding these portions together's just missing, in a way that’s far more disappointing than a merely bad or disagreeable piece wouldn’t bug me.

The Sy-fy show is also way better than the books fyi.

I could believe that.

The Sy-fy show is also way better than the books fyi.

Then the books must be bloody awful. The only thing I saw about the show were fan posts on Tumblr, and they were more enthused about the four main characters(?) all being in some version of a pansexual polycule(?) but since the enthusiasm dropped off when the show stopped airing (has it?) I don't care.

Even just looking at the photos and clips of the characters, they seemed so drippy that I can well believe book Quentin is a whiny little sod who causes most of his own problems.

As for better opposition takes on Narnia, heck yes. See this artist, who has their own complicated relationship to Christianity from what I can make out of their history, but they get it in ways that I can agree with as well:

https://www.tumblr.com/tomato-bird/674387478831120384/tomato-bird-inexorable-2020-taylor-leong-some?source=share

I found the fanlore write up did a good job covering the timeline. Predictably, it quite enjoys making fun of the Puppies.

The dinosaur porn got nominated as a potshot at the whole diversity-in-SF concept - like, a YOU WANT DIVERSITY??? HERE, HAVE SOME FUCKING DIVERSITY type thing. However, that has kind of backfired because a) pretty much everybody loves the dinosaur porn, b) the dinosaur porn is also excellent SF and c) the Puppies are now not only known as the people who voluntarily named themselves "the Sad Puppies", but are also the people who nominated gay dinosaur erotica for a Hugo award.

The actual reason it was nominated was to mock If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love being a Hugo nominee in 2014. It's short so it's a quick read if you want to better understand why its nomination was mocked.

Heh.

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.

Horseshoe theory strikes again!

I unironically say that Chuck Tingle, whom God preserve, wrote a story that was much more traditional skiffy with his astronaut dinosaur porn than "If I Weren't Such A Crybaby And Gave You Back Your Balls, My Love" and so it was perfectly cromulent for the Sad Puppies to nominate him. Also, the Sads did have a sense of humour about the entire affair, which the blow-up ignored or never noticed, wanting to lump both camps in together as fascist white supremacists and so on.

Conversely, I used to really like John Scalzi. I watched Vox Day beat him like a pinata online, and though I hadn't gone full anti-SJW yet, I started to think…. "VD is right." His cruel but accurate takedowns were intensely petty, spiteful, and personal, and yet he had the squishy little man pegged.

Do you have a link for this?

Vox Day used to write about Scalzi a lot on his blog, Vox Populi. I haven't followed him for a few years, so I don't know if he's still going on about him, but you can probably search his archives.

If you aren't already familiar with Vox Day, I wouldn't recommend digging deeper. He's fairly smart, but he's a lot more arrogant and mean, and it seems to me that the later outweigh the former decisively. I don't think he's a good-faith communicator; similar to Scott Adams, if you're reading him you need to assume that anything he says is meant to manipulate you, not to get at the truth. I followed his blog for a while, but watching his comments on the 2020 election I concluded that reading further was not going to be a net-value proposition.

I was just kind of hoping there was like one big rant post/series on the topic I could binge without really investing much into it. Impassioned niche rants where the author is totally right about an unpopular belief are a guilty pleasure of mine.

I would expect almost all of it to be found under this tag, though the rivalry petered out in the last several years, so you'll want to go back at least 4 or 5 years go get to the relevant posts.

Thanks you,

edit: Oh yeah, this is good junk food ranting.

Starts are page 22 for other going down the rabbit hole

edit 2: Eh, kind of petered out in quality.

Thank you for your service.

https://voxday.net/2013/06/25/mailvox-on-scalzi-author/

Something along these lines I'm assuming?

@atelier came along with the goods

A less hyper-woke writer could have written a pretty good book. Instead, she wrote a Hugo-worthy one.

Best burn I've read in a while.

I... I just can't do fiction written by most female authors. I wrote before how in a mostly male dominated Battletech fiction library, a female author snuck into a short story compilation. It was immediately obvious. I got 4 pages in before I had to thumb back to the table of contents and check the credit.

There are a grab bag obvious tells. Long introspective monologues. Often a touch of female chauvinism around motherhood. And of course all the characters emote like a knitting circle full of menopausal aunts. But undergirding all of it is an undercurrent of neuroticism that utterly stifles anything from actually happening. I'm not even talking about big fancy testosterone boosting action sequences. I mean even simple causality flies out the window. Things happen, characters feel. More things happen, with no one exercising any agency what so ever. More feelings. Something resembling a conclusion occurs, but I can only tell because the book is almost out of pages. Once again, without anyone exercising any agency at all. Some more feelings end the... story? Is that a story? Or was it a therapy journaling session?

I can't do it. I simply cannot do it. I refuse to read fiction by women. Frankenstein gets a pass, and that's about it.

I can't do it. I simply cannot do it. I refuse to read fiction by women. Frankenstein gets a pass, and that's about it.

This is funny, because I didn't like Frankenstein very much, precisely because it was so full of histrionic monologues and Dr. Frankenstein acting like a dude written by a woman.

Frankenstein is about as Romantic as it comes, but it should be understood that this was the prevailing style of the time - overwrought and emotional. Men wrote this way back then too.

I was going to bring Madeline L'Engle up as a counterexample, but she's a fantasy author with a few (very few) sciency-themes; no more of a sci-fi author than Susan Cooper.

For me, this is a things/ideas vs. people interest problem. If I want very acute novels about people's personalities and interactions, I can read classic literature and get something far beyond what a sci-fi author will manage. I go to sci-fi for either descriptions of cool stuff (paradigmatically, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) or explorations of ideas (paradigmatically, Frank Herbert or Isaac Asimov).

EDIT: For kid's sci-fi, I suppose some of Gillian Cross's work is good in every respect, though even it tends to be more fantasy e.g. the Demon Headmaster books have a lot of sci-fi, but the Headmaster himself is fundamentally a fantasy figure, since there's no scientific reason for his powers.

I agree that Madeline L'Engle is more of a fantasy author than a sci -fi author, but to be fair the statement wasn't "I refuse to read sci -fi written by women", it was all fiction written by women. So L'Engle is a good counterexample here.

antasy author than a sci -fi author, but to be fair the statement wasn't "I refuse to read sci -fi written by women", it was all fiction written by women. So L'Engle is a good counterexample here.

Good point. Say what you like about L'Engle novels, but plenty of stuff happens in them, and in my opinion it's often (bizarre) fun stuff. It's hard to say what L'Engle is interested in most of the time, which is part of the joy of her books, but she's definitely interested in something other than just people and their inner lives.

Come on, this is ridiculous. Are there books that meet that description? Unfortunately, yes. But there are many quality female authors, both classic and modern, who are perfectly capable of writing competent plots and characters with agency. I've read romances that defeat your description in detail. Random example--no exploration of the mystery genre is complete without hitting Agatha Christie.

I can't guarantee you'd like any book or author I'd recommend, but your tastes are extremely narrow if no female author would qualify.

I have limited free time, or reading time for that matter. If I grab a random female authored SF or Fantasy book that comes "highly recommended" or has won a bunch of awards to get it in front of my eyes, what do you think are the odds it affirms all the terrible and odious stereotypes I've come to loath? Greater than 50%? Greater than 80%?

This isn't the trite old talking about about the bowl full of M&M's with a few poison ones sprinkled in. It's a bowl of poison with a few... mediocre candies. The juice simply isn't worth the squeeze.

Motte, meet bailey. This is a very much narrower and more defensible claim--yes, the awards are owned by woke activists. "Hugo-winning" is still an unmistakeable mark of quality, but not good quality. But even if we narrow to SF/Fantasy--you originally made claims about fiction written by women generally--there are still female published authors who are not woke, or are even anti-woke. Baen is the obvious place to start; Sarah Hoyt is one example. (No promises that you'll like her writing, but if you don't, it won't be for woke reasons, and she actually likes men!)

There's also good stuff to be found outside traditional publishing, both indie and web serial, though as always, a random grab will not serve you well. The Wandering Inn is a web serial with a pseudonymous author (though I have high confidence she's female), and it's excellent. Unfortunately, "The Wandering Inn" and "limited reading time" are not concepts that work well together.

you originally made claims about fiction written by women generally--there are still female published authors who are not woke, or are even anti-woke.

My complaints about what I perceive to be the female writing style are orthogonal to complaints about wokeness. You'll notice I didn't mention politics at all.

I also didn't say it's all trash, or terrible, or that women can't write. I laid out a list of characteristics I've found endemic in women's writing, and said I can't do it. I simply cannot. I'm not sure how well you digested my tastes, since you went off about "wokeness" instead of addressing my specific dislikes.

But there are many quality female authors, both classic and modern, who are perfectly capable of writing competent plots and characters with agency.

Already addressed.

I'm not saying you should like or even tolerate a lack of plot or agency--I agree that any work meeting your original description (or even close to it) is crap. The common modern failing is to replace the missing plot and agency with wokeness, which is why I brought it up. But you are painting with too broad a brush to say there aren't any female authors in SF/Fantasy worth reading, which is exactly what you did here:

It's a bowl of poison with a few... mediocre candies.

I was once five books into a series of police procedural mysteries with a sci-fi setting when the librarian checking out number six informed me I was reading Nora Roberts.

I quickly switched to self-checkout kiosks, which respect my desire to read male authors like Robert Galbraith or C.J. Cherryh.

You should try Deanna Dwyer, Danielle Brown, and Madeleine Brent.

I've heard good things about this new guy, James Tiptree Jr., as well 😁

If you like historical fiction I would consider the Wolf Hall books. Told from the perspective of Henry VIII's Prime minister. Written by a woman but no wokery or historical anachronism in sight.

Written by a woman but no wokery or historical anachronism in sight.

Uhhhhh...

Okay, admission of bias time up front: I am a St. Thomas More stan and Catherine of Aragon stan, so a novel which is a love letter to Thomas Cromwell is going to have a hard time winning me over from the start.

The trilogy is good, and it's a great primer in the absolute snake-pit that the Tudor court was (I was going to say "under Henry VIII" but I think that during the War of the Roses and when his father, Henry VII, was the last man standing, things were not too peachy either). It deals with the religious upheaval and the rise and fall of great families, as well as Henry's marital travails and why these mattered, and it's all from the viewpoint of Thomas Cromwell, one of Henry's New Men who came from humble beginnings, rose to the heights and - like his patron Wolsey - fell at the moment his influence and power was at its zenith.

Mantel is a Cromwell stan, there's no denying that; she's half in love with her character (you can always tell when an author fell in love with their character). He was genuinely smart and capable, but she makes him omnicompetent, he's a Marty Stu. The one good trait she gives him that I can appreciate is his loyalty to his old master, Wolsey.

It's very good on how Cromwell both was an innovator, who updated the bureaucracy and laid the foundations for the modern parliamentary system, and how he bent the laws around to serve Henry's purposes in a very nasty way, so that it's satisfying (if you're like me) to see him hoist with his own petard. Bills of Attainder are a lovely little legal device where we don't need to give you a trial, we've already decided you're guilty, now just confess like a good chap (or lady).

Mantel tends to slide over the nasty implications of what her boy is doing; she dislikes More (being a Cromwell stan, and for the same reasons I dislike Cromwell, being a More stan) so he gets to be a bigot fanatic torturer etc. etc. etc. while Cromwell, well gosh gee he just sort of had to do these things, you know? Seemingly she's ex-Catholic so that explains a lot of her attitudes to "bad old church, bad old pope, Reformation great, we'll just pretend it was all about now you can read the Gospels in English and be vaguely uplifted spiritually".

I would recommend the trilogy but with the caveat that Mantel thinks Cromwell was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

EDIT: I'd recommend, as non-fiction, the biography by Diarmaid Macculloch; a 1523 letter shows that politics hasn't changed much in 500 years 😁

Cromwell’s letter rounds up London gossip for his friend in Spain, and demonstrates a relaxed satirical wit on the subject of Parliament, speaking volumes about his capacity for making friends:

by long time I, amongst other, have endured a parliament, which continued by the space of seventeen whole weeks, where we communed of war, peace, strife, contention, debate, murmur, grudge, riches, poverty, penury, truth, falsehood, justice, equity, deceit, oppression, magnanimity, activity, force, attemperance [moderation] – treason, murder, felony [?]concealed – and also how a commonwealth might be edified and also continued within our realm. Howbeit, in conclusion, we have done as our predecessors have been wont to do, that is to say, as well as we might, and left where we began.

I completely agree with your assessment. Mantell definitely seemed like she was trying to rehabilitate Cromwell, and her depiction of Moore was cartoonish.

In particular, the (not) torture of Mark Smeaton before he confessed to adultery with Anne Boleyn was absurd. The idea that he would confess to a crime that guaranteed his death due to being put in a scary cellar wasn't exactly convincing.

The BBC miniseries was also fantastic. They really went all in on the historical realism, including things like not having any artificial lighting, and even refusing to use modern candles in place of historically accurate tallow candles.

I might give Macculloch's biography a read, the reviews on Amazon seem positive.

It is good, and I say that as someone who is probably on the exact opposite of Macculloch in every way (he's English of Scottish descent, former Anglican, Unionist etc.) It's fair to Cromwell and also shows the environment he was working in, the changes going on not just in England but in Europe, and the reasons both for his success and his fall. It does show his flaws, too. And he was ruthless, there's no two ways about that. Throughout his career, he was a fixer for a lot of people, he was lobbied by people for that purpose, and he worked as Henry's fixer and his downfall came when he made missteps and could no longer provide the 'fixes' Henry wanted.

Henry VIII really is a fascinating character and despite reading a couple of biographies, I can't really get a handle on his character because nobody seems to be able to do that; one writer will describe him as a man's man, impatient of the world of women, while another will write him as brought up in a woman's world and thus being less sure of his position in the all-male world of the court. Nobody could really claim to know him, or be able to control him. And whatever one's opinions on their merits, I think More made a better end by standing up for his principles even though he knew this would probably end in his death eventually, as against Cromwell who went with the king on everything he asked and still ended up begging for mercy in one last, pathetic letter because his downfall, too, was assured.

I don't have much sympathy for Anne Boleyn because she did a lot to get herself into the position she ended up in (whatever about family pressure, and all the highborn families were dangling their daughters in front of Henry for hopes of getting advancement, she was - if we believe her supporters - smart and capable, so she was not some delicate blossom forced into chasing the king, she went for it too with her full consent). But her end was miserable, and the list of ridiculous charges was just Henry's ego at work. Smeaton is a victim, too; a bit of a cocky idiot who liked the idea of chasing the queen, did too much bragging, and ended up being used by men much cleverer and more powerful than him because he was a weak link who could be used for their purposes. I don't think anyone really believed that Smeaton was Anne's lover, but he could be portrayed as such, and coerced into a confession about it all, and that was what they wanted: the excuse to prosecute her.

Yes, I don't think it's at all credible that "we'll just sit him in a spooky cellar" was as far as Cromwell went, because (1) he was fighting for his survival against Anne himself and (2) he was not the kind of man to be squeamish about what needed to be done to get what he wanted.

There's a good video about the Holbein Tudor portraits here. I didn't see the BBC series, but I did read somewhere that the visual of Cromwell was, ironically, based more on the More portrait than the Cromwell portrait. It is fascinating to compare the two pictures, the one of More seems a lot more detailed and realistic than the one of Cromwell which is a lot flatter and old-fashioned. Does that mean Holbein preferred More to Cromwell, or that Cromwell made sure the painting would not reveal more than the surface he wanted to present?

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I'm the type to read romance novels, if any on earth were written for straight men -- and trust me, I've looked.

What's the difference between a romance novel for men and a romance novel for women? Is it something like this:

  • regular novel for men: man wants X, gets X (or Y), gets woman as a bonus;

  • romance novel for women: woman wants man, ends up doing X to get him;

  • romance novel for men: man wants woman, ends up doing X to get her?

romance novel for men: man wants woman, ends up doing X to get her?

Man believes he cannot do X, woman sees man's potential and falls in love with him despite not doing X. Inspired, man does X.

romance novel for women: woman wants man, ends up doing X to get him

Man courts woman with low self esteem. Man has severe character flaw or skeletons in closet. Man fixes woman's self esteem, woman fixes man.

Man courts woman with low self esteem. Man has severe character flaw or skeletons in closet. Man fixes woman's self esteem, woman fixes man.

Don't forget the: Woman is presented as ugly or non-atractive at the begining but with a plucking of eyebrows and a wardrobe change everyone else finds out she is beautiful. And first sexual encounter between the love interests being nonRape.

Well, I've heard it said that The Dresden Files are harlequin romance novels for lonely 20something men. But, women who encounter the books also tend to really really like them.

Similar to The Witcher, which is really just a bodice-ripping sex romp with some fantasy monster-hunting thrown in, and also has a sizable female fan base. Maybe this is more a case of dudes getting tricked into reading romance novels.

Both series are also very Detective Noir, so maybe that's the secret gender fandom crossover element.

I do like the Dresden Files, but Harry's track record with romance? 🤦‍♀️ Also, the sure-fire way to lure him into a trap is to dangle a damsel in distress before him. By this stage, he should have copped on but no, he keeps rushing to the rescue no questions asked. It is a very sympathetic flaw, but one of these days it will get him into serious, serious trouble.

Only if Butcher writes more, which seems unlikely. And he's already one of the most powerful beings in creation (that we know about), so how much worse can it get? (LOL, don't ask THAT, Harry)

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romance novel for women: woman wants man, ends up doing X to get him;

This doesn't feel quite right to me. Women tend to be the objects more than the actors in romance novels geared towards women. I think it's more like:

Woman is irresistible to man for some reason. Man, despite being rich and handsome has awful flaw. Man approaches woman. Woman rejects man. Woman is worried man is gone. But man is still irresistibly attracted. Man pushes through objections (could be kinda rapey at this point). Woman is overcome.

Whether the male or female lead gets more attention from the author.

Well. Male Gaze alone isn’t enough to make a romance novel; it still has to have the pursuit/conflict of the relationship front and center. But given that a book is about a couple, the character that’s more fully realized is probably the intended interest. In (female-oriented) romance this is usually the man.

This intersects with viewpoint characters in the form of self-inserting. Romance novels are often 1st or close 3rd person, putting the reader in the head of one character. Obviously, that’s a big clue as to the intended sex of the audience!

It’s not foolproof, especially for slash. Consider MDZS, a famous cultivation web novel. The gay main pairing is front and center despite very definitely being marketed to women. Likewise, romance genres like yaoi which use the more distant 3rd person of manga can’t rely on self-inserting. All bets are off when it comes to lesbian romance.

Maybe men are less likely to self-insert, or maybe there’s an author bias against writing accordingly. I can’t say. But there is definitely a style which tells me a book is intended as romance.

Another thought. Male-oriented romances do exist in droves, but they tend to be chameleons. One, it's easy to mischaracterize a male-oriented romance ("Man believes he cannot do X, woman sees man's potential and falls in love with him despite not doing X. Inspired, man does X.") as a novel about X. Second, the flipside of the open secret that females are hypergamous is that males want to sleep around, or at least be the sort of man who is able to sleep around but virtuously declines. In male-oriented romances, the protagonist will have one madonna they want to prove themselves to, and a gaggle of discreet admirers.

To give an example, Name of the Wind is secretly male Twilight.

I think male romance novels were Westerns. That's the romantic image of the male heroic lead, and the villains he has to overcome, and the woman he wins along the way.

Look at Louis L'Amour's books - some of them are what in other terms would be called family sagas. To take a snippet from a sniffy critic quoted in the Wikipedia article:

His Western fiction is strictly formulary and frequently, although not always, features the ranch romance plot where the hero and the heroine are to marry at the end once the villains have been defeated.

I think male romance novels were Westerns.

Let's test Cormac McCarthy

  • All the Pretty Horses? Check

  • The Crossing? Nope

  • Cities of the Plain? Check

  • Blood Meridian? Nopenopenope

Two out of four ain't bad, but I wouldn't say that his books are entirely full of internal monologues, undercurrents of neuroticism, and sweeping character emotions at all.

I'm the type to read romance novels, if any on earth were written for straight men -- and trust me, I've looked.

I'm not sure if Sir Walter Scott's novels count as romance novels (I imagine that some of them do) and they're usually from a very straight male perspective, though it's true that many women enjoy them, e.g. Waverley, The Bride of Lamermoor, Ivanhoe, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, The Talisman, and Rob Roy. These have non-romantic historical stories in them, but (sexual) romance is ultimately the point, I think.

My main objections to his writing occur in the passages where Scott is writing a romantic ode to Latin, Scots, or legalese, rather than telling the story. See also Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Have you tried Earthsea?

If you do, stick to the original trilogy. The later books are disappointing.

I will highly recommend Robin Hobb's works. Farseer, Liveship Traders, Tawny Man, Rain Wild, and Fitz and the Fool. I haven't read her other works, but the 16 books over 22 years constitute one of the best fantasy series I've ever read. There are stopping points, and the connections don't show up until the last two groups, so you can take it on in groups of 3 at first.

That said, she's the only female author that comes to mind when I think of books I've enjoyed.

Eh, I tried her books and got a good way into the Farseer series but I had to eventually give it up because it was too talky and emotional and all the flaws about women writers above. It reminded me of Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar books, that same kind of treacly 'outsider saves everyone but is universally despised but never mind we know he's heroic' attitude, and there came a point midway through one book where I was just "No, to hell with this, no. Don't do the big stupid elaborate psychological manipulative scheme, just do the clear practical action thing".

But of course you couldn't do that because then you wouldn't have the maaagic and how unfaaaair it is about Fitz being a bastard and all the rest of the glurge. I mean, look at this bloody synopsis extract from the Fitz and the Fool trilogy:

Web asks Fitz to meet a crow who is not bonded with a human, but is in danger from other crows by having white feathers among her black ones. She can speak some words. Through Fitz, she meets the Fool and they connect. The Fool names her Motley. Fitz paints her white feathers black so that she can go out without being attacked by regular crows.

Do you get it, huh, huh? Do you? It's about racism, see! And homophobia and pretty much any -phobia or -ism you want to slap in. With goddamn racist, exclusionary animals. Because of course we must have the cuddly-wuddly animals that are sentient beings too, and make Victorian Moral Lessons out of them.

My God, and this is only off the Wikipedia article, I think if I had read this book I would have clawed my own eyes out. I dunno who the villains of that set of books were, but I'm already cheering them on to massacre the feckin' heroes with their handy pots of crow feather paint.

I admire the Farseer books, although I found them frustrating as a boy. The weakest parts are, as you say, the hamfisted social commentary. Hobb could not have been more blatant about the analogy between closeted gays and wit-bonders if she tried.

What fascinated me was her anti-fantasy approach. From just the plot synopsis, FitzChilvary seems to have gone on a standard set of fantasy adventures and achieved a standard set of fantasy great deeds. And yet he never gains status. Near the very end of the series, he is the equivalent of the CNA in a group care home. No one knows his name. Those who do have a low opinion of it.

But Hobb doesn't present any wallowing by FitzChivalry as valid. He was acting out of selfless intentions, not for personal glory... right?

I thought her basic take on this was original and good: the royal family needs assassins, but who do you trust? Well, your own family. But if you give them that kind of ability, and trust them with those kind of secrets, what's to stop them from deciding the crown would look as good on their head as on yours? You make sure they can't inherit. Thus you have a line of bastards who can't inherit because they're not legitimate, but they are close enough in blood to be amenable to the demands of the royal role.

That's clever. But the way it worked out was poor - so you need people with the royal blood but not too close to the throne? That's what the minor branches of the family are for, as every noble house knows. Put the poor relations to work this way! You don't need to have bastards. And bastards can be recognised and legitimised, this has also happened historically. The set-up where "okay, main line prince, go out and have a bastard or two for us to have our new pool of assassins" was clunky. It could work in a Machiavellian world, but this world was supposed to be" if you're named after a heroic virtue, you embody that virtue" and that doesn't work well when you have honourable people as royals. Prince YesI'mHorrible can do that, but not Prince Generous or Prince Noble or whatever.

But that didn't suit Hobb, because she wanted the "Alas! 'Tis so tragic, the selfless heroism of the exploited bastard who is never valued or given his proper due!" bit, and after a couple of books it grated on me. Fitz was so groovy he should have been acknowledged as a legitimate royal but that's not going to happen because the main line are so ungrateful and they prefer to cynically use him to get his hands dirty so they can keep their hands technically clean.

But that's okay because Fitz is so noble himself, he only did it for the greater good and not for personal gain, even though he totally could have tricked them all and taken over because he's so smart and capable and and and....

Yeah, I get it, he's Marty Stu.

Bujold's Barrayar series does a bit of the female essentialism, especially when totally not a self-insert Lady Vorkorsigan is on the page, but she's very much not going to run into the causality problems: Komarr and Memory in particular are masterpieces in fair-play whodunnits.

From the other direction, Diana Wynne Jones's Dark Lord of Derkholm is far more paternal, but there's a reason she got picked up for a Miyazaki movie in Howl's Moving Castle. She very much is against the menopausal neurotic aunt annoyances.

How do you feel about the Vorkosigan novels? In my experience they have a solid voice, fleshed-out settings, and loads of highly agentic characters. All things which this book seems to lack.

Please stop writing this to what you presumably hope is a sympathetic anti-woman audience who won't laugh you out of the thread, instead go and read Patricia Highsmith, Donna Tartt, Hilary Mantel, Robin Hobb and Gillian Flynn and report back.

  • -10

Please stop telling people what to write or not to write - and you are engaging in the same kind of consensus-building you accuse him of.

Several people have already said pretty much the same thing you did ("this is a bad opinion" followed by recommendations for women writers) without sounding like someone from reddit coming in to wag their finger.

Oh, I guess I am coming in from Reddit to wag my finger. I did consider fully disguising my feelings beneath a more constructive-sounding comment but I decided it would be dishonest; frankly, I was motivated to respond to the comment by a feeling of strong distaste for the bigotry of the comment, so I wanted that to come through at least a bit. (I am perfectly happy to abandon this forum if such things are taboo'd here? Let me know.)

  • -11

Expressing "a feeling of strong distaste for the bigotry of [a] comment" is taboo here because it doesn't actually add anything to the discussion. This is an anonymous forum; none of your friends will be outraged that you tried to engage a neo-Nazi/incel/paedo-fascist constructively instead of dismissing them without a second thought.

Realistically, a large proportion of the users and comments here are bigoted by the standards of Reddit. If you're going to post something that amounts to "yikes, sweaty" under one in every 3 or 4 comments, then you should leave, for your sake and ours. But I believe a constructive and mutually beneficial discussion can be had as long as everyone sincerely tries to "be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary". If you can do that, I urge you to stay. We could use more ideological diversity.

I mostly agree with the policy as far as it applies to completely informationally empty comments. I would say mine was one part salt and one part recommendations of really good authors, however, and was actually mostly well intended (I wanted to make the poster think, "I have gone too far, I am grossing this other commenter out, maybe I need to go and get some different experiences, such as reading the authors they mentioned."

I suppose one danger of this no-expressions-of-distaste policy is that it could leave posters unaware that they are causing contempt/disgust reactions in others. Though to be honest, in the case of someone given to generalisations of the level 'I will not read books by women', said posters are probably getting that feedback elsewhere in their lives anyway, even if they are unable to receive and act on it constructively.

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It's not against the rules to express distaste for bigotry. But you are required to engage civilly with people and avoid unnecessary antagonism (like by going out of your way to express your disgust for someone), even if you do think they hold abhorrent views.

Fair enough, it's your house. I am not sure if you can draw a bright boundary between expressing abhorrent views vs expressing disgust for someone (my disgust for a racist, say, is based on their disgust for others). In my view someone who says they never read female writers is being less civil than someone calling that person a bigot.

Perhaps it's a 'know it when you see it' thing.

There's also a sex scene. With an alien. Judy (the lesbian) falls in love with one of the male aliens. He's such a good talker and such a good listener, you see.

An entirely political lesbian, then. I'm sure a good 'talk' would unlock her creativity.

Cheap shot I know, but the sheer womanness on display is so overwhelming, and since more cerebral criticism is likely to be seen as just as sexist, I find myself reverting to a primitive state.

Given the big reveal is that she's married to a man, it seems like the character is never actually a lesbian.

I've seen this book compared to Becky Chambers. I haven't read any of Becky Chambers's books, but they sound exactly like the kind of story I am not interested in (people go to space, have problems which they solve by talking them out in a civilized fashion, the end?).

Yeah, that's a pretty reasonable summary of A Long Way To A Small Angry Planet. I don't think it's the critical problem, though. A Miracle Of Science actually has a pretty similar big-strokes plot summary (including 'scuffle and then people lecture and stop') and I'd unabashedly recommend it, and am a little disappointed it doesn't have broader recognition.

((Or for more conventional FemSciFi, Chanur does it on a few books.))

But A Miracle of Science is a masterclass in maintaining rising tension and serious threat and explaining reasonable motivations even (maybe especially) for its best heroes and worst villains, where Chambers and Emyrs... aren't.

There's also a sex scene. With an alien. Judy (the lesbian) falls in love with one of the male aliens. He's such a good talker and such a good listener, you see. So she discusses it with her wife and they agree to invite the alien into their polycule. This is before they've decided whether to actually have sex with the other humans in their household.

Tbf, some stuff in the furry fandom suggests at least some sexual orientation stuff is very specific to humans, especially since the plains-folk are implied to tie gender and reproductive role a little more loosely than humans do ("work out who’s going to take what role, and shifting what parts of your bodies are awake to accommodate each other"). Though I definitely agree Emrys doesn't take it nearly with the level of introspection that would be necessary from other authors to avoid a cancelling if she had the wrong politics, nevermind enough to make it seems reasonable.

Like, hitting on this once or twice would have been an interesting non-traditional perspective. Hitting it as often as Emrys does, I started expecting the book to lactate.

If a man wrote this, we could probably call it a fetish.

I think the more damning part is that it never really goes anywhere. There's kink works where the kink reinforces the overall theme (sometimes even the non-sex theme!): games with an exhibitionism kink can say things about honesty, noncon or slavery-kink about disparities of power, (most) coming out games have a pretty obvious connected theme, so on. I won't pretend that's always (or even often) done well, but it's almost always more fulfilling than its absence.

And works where the One Fake Science reinforces the central theme can do a lot more than even great porn authors like Robert Baird's statements about interpersonal interaction do. See Zahn's Conquerors Trilogy for an example here, where one species has ghosts stick around that are harmed by radio waves, and Zahn uses this to make a lot of statements about the difficulty of peace and communication across drastically different species including a 'species' that is neither human nor magic-ghost.

There's a pretty obvious plausible connection to the central conflict about ever-increasing resource demands destroying civilizations! Especially if it's a major shared value, and a value the author proposes as vital. Even if it's something the author wants to have a villain bring up for the reject. And nothing ever shakes loose from it. At most, there's a throwaway line about maintaining populations.

That's not really a problem specific to the sex stuff. You don't need (or even want!) all the details for a story to interact with the overt themes. But the dandelion networks and the EPA (yes, it's literally the EPA in the book) don't really interact, somehow; asexuality seems to just be a missing mood; egg-theft is an Important Thing for the solution to the plot but nothing else. Even the climate engineering vs 'harmony with nature' just kinda flounders when the denouement turns into a 'we can coexist'. Charitably, there might have been some parts of the transguy's interactions that are supposed to be about the conflict between strongly gendered and less-strongly gendered people that the bizarre alien physiology is supposed to resonate with, but if so it's either so subtle or indirect I didn't catch it.

I get that the author wanted a lot of it to just be normal, not just in-universe but as a detail to add to a universe, but the more related they get to the story's plot without touching on the story's themes the more they feel like the social-science equivalent of Teching The Tech in the worse Star Trek episodes.

Which, to be fair, is a lot more plausible than most Teching. But "better than Voyager's bad episodes" is faint praise indeed.

"Brazil has decided you're cute."

It really is an underrated series. Well, more underrecognized, as youre the only other person I've met in the wild who's familiar with it, so thats 2 for 2 on rating it highly.

To borrow Evola's vocabulary, this is lunar civilization porn.

One couldn't write a more authentic parody of a world dominated by the feminine principle if they tried. All of it is there: materialistic and decadent, based upon money and sensuous pleasures, and lacking even in the contemplation of the possibility of violence (even, action) as a reality of the human condition.

The temptation of course is to just let it rot in the garbage bin of history as the sycophantic drivel that it is. But anger and reaction, though cruel mistresses in everything else, are powerful muses.

I wish I had the talent to infuse this world with a good dose of solar Heinlein and write the story from the other side of the bayonets. Because while your political lesbian MIT graduates are having interspecies sex and playing at carbon neutral inclusive and equitable court intrigue whilst swapping tips on how to be a smothering mother with our alien oppressors, you know someone, somewhere, is dying in a ditch actually fighting for something they believe in.

Who are they? What's their story? Because however few explosions it contains, it's probably infinitely more interesting than whatever is happening here.

Because however few explosions it contains, it's probably infinitely more interesting than whatever is happening here.

This seems very much an "in the eye of the beholder" thing. People with "lunar" personalities will prefer "lunar" stories and people with "solar" personalities will prefer "solar" stories.

As vain as it is to say when it comes to aesthetics: I disagree.

I pride myself on being able to appreciate both Hard Boiled and Pan's Labyrinth which are sublimations of the respective metaphysical tendencies.

The lunar essence is not inherently bad or in-conducive to art. It just isn't conducive to the same forms of art. I think lunar science fiction is a contradiction in terms in the same way that you couldn't make a lunar action movie or a solar romantic comedy (or if you can it's definitely a tour de force).

If you manage to sublimate sensation to the degree that you transcend your setting, you are not writing science fiction. You are writing classical literature that just happens to contain spaceships.

My criticism of this particular work isn't so much that it is lunar at all, but rather that it is so unabashedly and inappropriately lunar as to be perverse. And that is a failure. I think a more balanced work would better capture the spirit of the human condition and at least have to ability to qualify as art, and not mere propaganda.

The lunar essence is not inherently bad or in-conducive to art. It just isn't conducive to the same forms of art.

Fair enough, and probably true. But granting that lunar currently-called-science-fiction is a fundamentally different form of art as compared to solar actual-science-fiction, it's still not clear to me that one is less worthy of existing than the other, or inferior in some objective sense, as opposed to simply being less appealing to people with taste for the other.

If what you mean is that a work of fiction should not be too tilted toward one...

I think a more balanced work would better capture the spirit of the human condition and at least have to ability to qualify as art, and not mere propaganda.

... then I can't disagree; but earlier weren't you proposing hyper-solar fiction, and describing it as superior art to hyper-lunar fiction? Perhaps I misunderstood your point. Thanks for the in-depth answer, in any case.

For all my snark and bitterness, the real crime here is that Emrys is not a bad writer.

let's see it

"No one on the Chesapeake network is talking about anything else, except for the dedicated monks at the treatment plant. They're reporting the latest energy production figures with great determination. Other watersheds are starting to pick up our news." He waved at screens for the household's secondary networks, projected on the table in between hard-boiled eggs and goat cheese and pu-erh pot. Reassuring, solid things: I turned up the input on my lenses and saw supply chains leading to a neighbor's flock, the herd of goats that kept our invasives in check, and a summary icon that, if I followed it, would show me every step of carbon-balanced tea importation from the Mekong watershed. The networks were familiar, too. Carol's textile exchange and Dinar's corporate gig-work watercooler and Atheo's linguistic melting pot and the neighborhood's hyperfirewalled energy grid scrolled over polished pine. Only the content was strange. The last time they'd all dovetailed on one topic had been when Maria Zhao died and every network devolved into Rain of Grace quotes.

better than all but a few on /lit/. this is not praise.

The first thing I noticed was the air. It might be terrestrial—but kin to the thriving swamp DC had replaced rather than the cool afternoon outside. I'd expected sterility; instead I found something more like Dinar's greenhouse or the aquaculture dome. I tasted humidity, wet leaves, orchids, and something like shed snakeskin. I breathed abundance. [Paragraph break] And then held my breath, too late, as I thought of dangers. Bacteria. Windblown seeds. Insects, or their equivalents, and scuttling scavengers carrying the remains of meals out spaceship doors and into the wide new world beyond. Maybe they couldn't survive here, most of them. But maybe I'd already scuffed my shoe through the spore of some alien kudzu, or coated my lungs with their native E. Coli.

this isn't good writing. it isn't bad. literally well-written, she has technical proficiency. it's uninspired.

i was going to ask you a section you found memorable, then i read a little more:

"Humans really do hide their kids most of the time," said Cytosine. "I thought it was only a taboo in your movies." [Line break] "We could never figure out why so much of your fiction doesn't show children," added Rhamnetin

this is absurd. is there backstory explaining swathes of all human canon was wiped out? or the aliens have a ridiculous standard? or eventual clarification from the humans their picture is incomplete? if not and if the book has more insane lines like this, she's a bad writer.

this is absurd. is there backstory explaining swathes of all human canon was wiped out? or the aliens have a ridiculous standard? or eventual clarification from the humans their picture is incomplete? if not and if the book has more insane lines like this, she's a bad writer.

Maybe the aliens used someone's porn collection to learn about humans? /s

But seriously, I think there is something to that. She's trying to say that a lot of fiction uses parenthood to do stuff like "Rob Schneider is both an X and a parent! And it ain't easy being both!" or simply ignores it the way it ignores shopping or sleeping or studying. Batman isn't a dad because he's a mogul by day and a crimefighter by night, when is he going to spend time with his children? And there's always Robin if Bruce wants to be a father figure for a moment. The aliens could be saying "oh, we didn't know humans actually spent so much time studying in college! We thought they just formed cliques, dealt with relationship troubles and aced through exams by using the powers of friendship and montage!"

Of course, this can be countered by saying, "how come these aliens who aren't that alien and understand parenthood don't understand the law of conservation of detail? Do they even have literature? Or do they just watch unedited reality TV feeds for entertainment?" Which a very good writer would have preempted by showing that yes, these aliens really don't have anything that resembles human literature. Or that they love children and parenthood so much they don't consider that "the boring part" of the narrative.

If motherhood is such a big deal for the aliens, then yeah probably it's an important part of "who the characters are" in their literature and popular entertainment. X has three kids (details about them), Y is pregnant (details about that), Z has no kids yet but is trying for them and so on.

The same way I skip over the pages of detail about exact model of gun and ammo and so forth when reading thrillers 😁 So far as I am concerned, Big Hero Dink Atsom has a Big Gun and is going to shooty the bad guys. That's as much detail as I need, but other readers (men?) seem to want all the details of what kind of Big Gun exactly and calibre of ammo etc.

Or the fashion details (for women) in bad popular fiction, where you get pages of description about what designer clothes, shoes, handbag, perfumes, etc. the characters are wearing. "Sylvia Shiny wore clothes - mostly coloured pale blue, today" is, again, as much detail as I need there.

Or the fashion details (for women) in bad popular fiction, where you get pages of description about what designer clothes, shoes, handbag, perfumes, etc. the characters are wearing. "Sylvia Shiny wore clothes - mostly coloured pale blue, today" is, again, as much detail as I need there.

Oh god, the shopping lists from The Girl that Played with Fire are coming back to haunt me. My pet theory is that when Stieg Larssen died no one edited his books past the first one.

My eyes glaze over at both the male and female versions of this because I don't know anything about guns and I don't know anything about fashion and I don't care about either. I don't know why a Horace de Latté ballgown and machine gun is better than a Sylvain Bompe-de-Bompe missile launcher and tea dress, and I don't want to know.

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Hah I relate to this so strongly, it’s why Tolkein never really did it for me. Endless descriptions of a forest turn me off a series like few other things.

This makes me think of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross (which some of you might better recognize as Robotech), where part of the plot was that the attacking Zentraedi aliens were literally culture-less, having bred themselves for nothing but war. Watching Hikaru /Rick kiss a woman came as a complete shock to them, and Minmay's singing was literally a weapon against them.

this is absurd. is there backstory explaining swathes of all human canon was wiped out? or the aliens have a ridiculous standard? or eventual clarification from the humans their picture is incomplete?

At least in-setting, I think those statements are meant to be relative: due to their biology, the plains-folk (which includes Cytosine and Rhamnetin) are biologically wired to react to having a 'nursing' mother around taking a leadership role, and ideally more than one. Doing that mothering results in as much of a physiological and psychological change as any genetic influence does. The tree-folk have something kinda similar at an egg level.

So it would make sense for motherhood and young children to be far more central in Plains-folk fiction; human fiction tends to emphasize kids, but plains-folk fiction you'd expect to see them showing up in action films or military fiction, so on. This could be considered a ridiculous standard (and as aesoptinium goes, it's not exactly subtle!), but it's not that weird by scifi standards.

sure if that were the line in the book. the line in the book says the aliens saw so few kids in movies they thought it was taboo. the perspective character's feeling is "the alien is right and i don't know what to say." but in the real world we know kids are everywhere in our storytelling. so without explaining it, like "x disaster destroyed a shitload of human canon" or "the aliens are weirded out if 100% of stories don't prominently feature kids" or "actually aliens, you're wrong" it's bad writing. for your note, depicting xenophilic spacefaring races who think their experiences are universal is also bad writing, as is using blue-orange morality to show alienness. everybody does "weird" things to fit in. it will be no different for aliens.

i think it'll be exactly the same. we evolved civilization, off endless competition with animals, with nature, and with ourselves. birds don't need civilization, fish don't need civilization. some arthropods don't need civilization, others have it so innately they've perfected it within their niche. apes need civilization. the human is the product of epochal processes that occur on every single planet suitable for life; the human is the product of universal law. if and when we meet friendly ETs they'll be exo-hominid descendants of exo-simians and their most alien quality will be how very similar they are with us.

I completely understand what you're saying, but I have no idea how to reformulate this in a way to cannot be pulled apart by an unsympathetic audience. Every single piece of criticism is not really damning by itself. You write yourself she's not a bad writer, she's not even bad at the science part of sci-fi, like Koval. Everything else is a matter of taste: who says a good novel needs a violent resolution of the central conflict? Who says the omnipresence of LGBT is worse than Nautilus (long, hard and full of seamen)? Who says lactating breasts are worse than Kirk chasing alien pussy?

There must be something more tangible that makes me enjoy The Tombs of Atuan (woman writer, girl protagonist, minimal violence) and hate most sci-fi/fantasy written by women starting from Blackout/All Clear.

There must be something more tangible that makes me enjoy The Tombs of Atuan (woman writer, girl protagonist, minimal violence)

Because not alone was LeGuin a good writer as regards her prose, she understood what the fuck the purpose of a story was about. Not to be a sermon, even if you do introduce themes of social importance in your day, but to be a story:

Had he not even understood the importance of the distinction between sci fi and counterfactual fiction? Could he not see that Cormac McCarthy — although everything in his book (except the wonderfully blatant use of an egregiously obscure vocabulary) was remarkably similar to a great many earlier works of science fiction about men crossing the country after a holocaust — could never under any circumstances be said to be a sci fi writer, because Cormac McCarthy was a serious writer and so by definition incapable of lowering himself to commit genre? Could it be that that Chabon, just because some mad fools gave him a Pulitzer, had forgotten the sacred value of the word mainstream?

So while the later Earthsea stories did unhappily succumb to the preachiness, The Tombs of Atuan isn't about girl power or anything like that, not so crudely; it's a story about that Earthsea culture and the monsters and what the hero/heroine does to beat them.

Emrys' story is about gender and non-binary and anti-capitalism and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. The SF part isn't really the point, the point is the MORAL MESSAGING ABOUT DON'T BE BINARY BIGOTS GENDER ESSENTIALISTS.

I've seen this book compared to Becky Chambers. I haven't read any of Becky Chambers's books, but they sound exactly like the kind of story I am not interested in (people go to space, have problems which they solve by talking them out in a civilized fashion, the end?).

Based on your review (and having read Chambers), I would guess that the similarity is that both authors very obviously were aiming to write something that exemplified their politics, with telling a good story (or really telling a story at all) being secondary.

In The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, you cannot go more than a chapter without Chambers going out of her way to inject her politics into the book in a very unsubtle way. Neopronouns all over the place is one example, but worse still is that Chambers doesn't just insert them into the world and let the reader draw his own conclusions. She actually has a scene where the main character has an internal monologue about how she calls some alien "xe", because she doesn't know how gender works for that species and using "xe" is just what Good People do when they don't know someone's gender. Never mind that a character who believes that wouldn't consciously tell themselves to do it (they would just act out their beliefs), Becky Chambers wants you to know how she thinks Good People should act no matter how awkward it makes the scene.

It's like that all over the place in the book. Throughout the whole thing, it's hard to not spot the signs that Chambers wanted to preach, not tell a story. And your review here gives me very much the same vibe.

The wrong kind of religious, I mean.

Oh, that's par for the course for skiffy, bless 'em. The wokies have just taken the ball and run with it, but that's (ironically) an old familiar staple trope - religion bad! unless native ancestral mystic wisdom or techo-science rational spirituality or something - so that's the one thing in common with traditional SF this story has.

I can't comment as to the congruence of worrying over 'does this mush contain shrimp by-products because that would be treif' while being a lesbian polyamorous person who (probably) got knocked up by the trans woman she's gay married to and is DTF spider aliens. Strain a gnat and swallow a camel, indeed.

Like the fact that N.K. Jemisin is a fanfic-level hack who's fawned over and feted and cooed adoringly as the next Octavia Butler

Hey now, I unironically loved The Broken Earth, some of the most fascinating and well done worldbuilding I've read in a decade. Sure she gets a lot of credit for being a female BIPOC, but damn that series was good. Credit where credit is due.

Governments. The old nation-states (including the USA) are still around, creaky old dinosaurs who are kind of obsolete except they still have armies and nukes so you can't exactly ignore them.

The lack of focus or care about violence and force will be our generations downfall, unfortunately. I hope we can snap out of it before it's too late.

For all my snark and bitterness, the real crime here is that Emrys is not a bad writer.

This is how I felt about Ann Leckie while smearing Ancillary Justice. The prose and writing is fine it's just the incessant use of pronouns and focus on the feminine that I can't handle. Not sure why.

The character is Jewish and Jewish identity (and anti-Semitism) is still Very Important in 2083 - okay, I'll buy it

Well, Jews have history much longer than 60 years, and for a lot of these years the questions of identity and anti-Semitism were pretty important. It'd be strange if that suddenly stopped right now.

At the end of this speech, one of the aliens comes out as nonbinary

Wait, so they're saying even in alien civilizations, among the stars, on the endless expanses of the Universe, being a "nonbinary" is so controversial and unusual that you need a special "coming out" act to recognize that? It's not some stupid quirk of a patriarchal Western culture, it's actually a universal law of the Universe itself?

A lot of this seems like a role-reversal of Independence Day. You still have the environmentally-aware Jewish Savior with the stereotypically Jewish parents, complete with a virus upload to cripple the enemy- only the corporate aislands are the intended target instead of the aliens.

Instead of First Contact uniting humanity against the alien enemy with violence, it unites humanity with lessons in gender and consent.

Lactating women (and aliens) will save the world.

...

The last one is in the Ringers' home system

Wait a minute. So this alien species name is the Ringers, and some of them are lactating. In other words, we have lactating Ringers. Are we quite sure the point of this novel isn't just to make a bad IV-fluids-related joke?

Okay, here is where I am going to be very rude. When your blurb goes "A literary descendent of Ursula K. Le Guin", that is a very damn high bar and you better be worth it or else.

Since I have no idea who this writer is, I had to look her up and oh my here we go:

She is best known for The Innsmouth Legacy series, which has Winter Tide as its first novel. In The Verge, Andrew Liptak discusses Winter Tide, writing "Along with a previous novelette called The Litany of Earth, it subverts Lovecraft's notorious racism by making his monsters - which were often thinly veiled stand-ins for people of color - sympathetic protagonists."

...In 2017, Emrys spoke with NPR, stating "In Winter Tide, I wanted to talk about how we rebuild community after genocide, and how rebuilt community is always changed from what we had before. And I wanted to talk about all those readers over the years who didn't question the Deep One concentration camps."

(Here's where I am rude). Having seen the author photo, well yeah I guess if you look like your name could be Marsh and you come from Innsmouth because you got The Look, then you will be inclined to be sympathetic to the fish-monsters wanting to take over the land. I guess she missed the parts about human sacrifice and forced interbreeding when shaking her head over Lovecraft's racist treatment of the gentle, indigenous, underwater monsters. Looking up the story The Shadow over Innsmouth we don't know that there are concentration camps, this is just something bruited in the newspapers:

Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number of arrests, the abnormally large force of men used in making them, and the secrecy surrounding the disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or even definite charges, were reported; nor were any of the captives seen thereafter in the regular gaols of the nation. There were vague statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but nothing positive ever developed. Innsmouth itself was left almost depopulated, and is even now only beginning to shew signs of a sluggishly revived existence.

The people arrested in Innsmouth weren't human, not fully, and the worst of them are the fish-monsters. So wherever the government locked them away, "concentration camp" is not the correct term (and given that this story was written in 1931, it would be Boer War type concentration camps not Nazi ones that Lovecraft was referencing - not great, but not the worst excesses). So saying "oh Lovecraft had his fish-people locked up in concentration camps" is the wrong reading here.

Now, I have read some "sympathetic to the monsters" new Lovecraftian fiction, I don't know if it was by this woman but I don't recognise her name so I don't think so, and it wasn't bad. But it's not Lovecraft, because his world-building is not about "cuddly native species who have as much right to live in harmony with nature as we do, or maybe even more because we're the bad guys", it's about "the universe is a cold, materialist place that does not give a damn about all your high-mindedness, and there are entities out there who are as gods to us, as far above us as we are above an ant, and they care as little. There's nothing supernatural or divine or demonic, this is all science, but we are bugs to be squished and there is no possibility of all joining hands around the campfire and living in peace".

From another review, which thinks that a novella that contradicts everything Lovecraft wrote in his universe is something for Lovecraft fans:

The conceit of the story is that Ruthanna believes the United States’ motivation for destroying Innsmouth was a mixture of racism as well as hatred for the non-Christian religious practices of the townsfolk.

But of course those were the motivations, not the human sacrifice and murder and forced interbreeding 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄 Them pesky Methodees got all riled up about heresy or sumpin':

One must not, for example, linger much around the Marsh refinery, or around any of the still used churches, or around the pillared Order of Dagon Hall at New Church Green. Those churches were very odd—all violently disavowed by their respective denominations elsewhere, and apparently using the queerest kind of ceremonials and clerical vestments. Their creeds were heterodox and mysterious, involving hints of certain marvellous transformations leading to bodily immortality—of a sort—on this earth. The youth’s own pastor—Dr. Wallace of Asbury M. E. Church in Arkham—had gravely urged him not to join any church in Innsmouth.

The Baptists and Congregationalists are doing fine, however:

I could see lights ominously blazing in the Order of Dagon Hall, the Baptist church, and the Congregational church which I recalled so shiveringly.

Or maybe it was the Freemasons, annoyed that they had been displaced?

It was called, she said, “The Esoteric Order of Dagon”, and was undoubtedly a debased, quasi-pagan thing imported from the East a century before, at a time when the Innsmouth fisheries seemed to be going barren. Its persistence among a simple people was quite natural in view of the sudden and permanent return of abundantly fine fishing, and it soon came to be the greatest influence on the town, replacing Freemasonry altogether and taking up headquarters in the old Masonic Hall on New Church Green.

her wife and their infant daughter, a they/them, and a transman (who have a they/them toddler of their own whose gender is pointedly never specified

Oh Amadan, have you never heard of a theyby? Get with the times, grampa! Gaybies are soooo last season, theybies are the new must-have accessory to signal how with-it and super-allyship and woke you are! Why, even in my own country, some idiot fucking politician did an entire newspaper interview about their theyby. Public reaction (well, okay, reaction on a subreddit) was along the lines that this guy was a fucking idiot, so it's not just me 😁

My view on this entire matter is that if you want to write a novel about a lesbian starship engineer, knock yourself out. I'll even shrug if you want to fill out the entire bingo card of trans, multi-racial, differently abled, poly, neo-pronouns and all the rest of it. The only thing I ask is that you write the story about the starship engineer in space, not the LESBIAN in LESBIAN SPACE and did I mention in the last three paragraphs that xie is LESBIAN? Samuel Delany can manage to do that and be kinky and queer, but these modern chumps aren't half the writers he is.

The Bitter Review I Would Not Post on Amazon

You should post it, and I say that not just because I'm an inveterate contrarian. I leave reviews if something is good or bad, and I think leaving reviews correcting the bad stuff is just as important. If you leave a review saying that you're the type of person who is on the liberal side, likes first contact stories that are not about fighting off the aliens, and read this because you saw it recommended that may be enough to get it not dismissed as "conservative religious bigot transphobe". Criticism from within the tent will always be more impactful than from outsiders.

For any recent literary work, encountering "subverts" in a friendly review for me would be a huge red flag. That usually means a derivative work concentrated on pushing a point while using somebody's else creation as a prop. Very few people can do anything decent with this as a toolkit. Even less among those capable of it would want to - if you are that powerful, you do your own thing, not mock somebody else's. If you are a Creator, you make elves. If you are not, you make orcs out of somebody else's elves.

I've never tried reading any "sympathetic to the monsters" Lovecraft-inspired fiction, but I would argue that Lovecraft himself was good at writing them in a way that was both alien/horrifying and understandable/sympathetic (in the cases where it served the purpose of the story), despite him writing horror in which it was almost never a primary emphasis. So if someone came away from Lovecraft wanting to write a sympathetic treatment without appreciating how Lovecraft himself did it, I strongly suspect they would be worse at it than he was. Most likely by revising Lovecraft antagonists until they are less alien or threatening than even cultures/political-factions/eras other than the author's own, let alone other species. Meanwhile, based on that description for The Litany of Earth, it sounds like the author gave the alien culture of "the 1920s U.S. government" less understandable and sympathetic motives than Lovecraft gave to most of his actual aliens.

Most obviously the protagonist of At the Mountains of Madness comes to appreciate the alien culture and history of the Elder Things through the art and other remnants they left behind and is outright sympathetic to them (which serves the narrative purpose of contrasting with the greater horror), but this applies to antagonists as well. The Great Race of Yith are scholars seeking after science/knowledge and their own survival, the Mi-go are also scientifically inclined and have the more mundane goal of mining resources, and ghouls mostly just want to eat/survive and sometimes serve the role of allies or neutral figures. The reader (and sometimes the characters) can appreciate the wonders and achievements of their civilizations even if they don't share the morality of the early 20th-century United States. (Something much more difficult for SJW writers and readers who tend to have a totalizing view of SJW dictates and taboos, creating a necessity to insert them into fiction where they don't fit.) When beings have goals that aren't understandable, like the godlike beings tend to, he conveys the sense that they have their own reasons for acting as they do, even if they are not reasons that humans understand or appreciate.

The Deep Ones from The Shadow Over Innsmouth are some of his less sympathetic antagonists, in that activities like human sacrifice in service to alien gods seem irrational, but of course human sacrifice is a thing that even humans did, groups like the Aztecs are historical realities, so it is hardly cheating to impute it to a group of non-humans as well. Nor are such activities their only defining feature, just what brings them into conflict with humans. Instead attributing the conflict to "the United States’ motivation for destroying Innsmouth was a mixture of racism as well as hatred for the non-Christian religious practices of the townsfolk" is just flipping it around and having the U.S. government kill people in the name of religion instead, except that the 1920s U.S. government actually existed and not as the author depicts it. Naturally "The Innsmouth people are depicted as victims and the story ignores the Marsh family’s reign of terror over regular humans.", you can't give the "racists" understandable reasons for their actions, so conflicts must be cleanly divided between evil perpetrators and innocent victims. Meanwhile Lovecraft gave "monsters" glorious civilizations that the reader can appreciate even if the incidental consequences for humans produce horror. He was an enthusiast of science who often made his antagonists scientists, which makes sense with the instrumental utility it has for even deeply alien beings. (Compare to the above review for a book where 'non-binary gender identity", a highly specific and recent cultural concept, is immediately adopted by aliens once it is explained to them.) He was an atheist and intellectual who repeatedly wrote stories where the local superstitious traditions contain a kernel of truth that only intellectuals are arrogant enough to disregard (but without depicting science and modernity as having nothing to contribute). The roles of inhuman beings in his stories are shaped by the narrative requirements of primarily writing horror stories, but he could and did write them with complexity and compelling world-building anyway, and that was part of why his stories became so popular and influential to begin with.

I've never tried reading any "sympathetic to the monsters" Lovecraft-inspired fiction, but I would argue that Lovecraft himself was good at writing them in a way that was both alien/horrifying and understandable/sympathetic (in the cases where it served the purpose of the story), despite him writing horror in which it was almost never a primary emphasis.

I haven't read much Lovecraft-inspired fiction, and it's been a while since I've read Lovecraft himself, but I'd highly recommend the PS4 game Bloodborne for a great "sympathetic to the monsters" Lovecraft-inspired fiction. If you don't like games or don't have access to a PS4/PS5. I thought it did a great job of doing exactly what you're describing Lovecraft himself as doing, presenting these elder gods as both alien/horrifying and understandable/sympathetic. And it doesn't go for the obvious "humans are the real monsters" approach, presenting most human characters as parts horrifying and sympathetic, and the whole story just feels very tragic on all fronts for all characters, including the elder gods. This being a Fromsoft game, the story is cryptic and difficult to make out from a single playthrough, though there is no shortage of YouTube videos that dissect it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fromsoft is a Japanese company with Japanese writers and developers, and their style of writing and game design tends not to be heavily influenced by Western/American norms, despite most of their famous games, including Bloodborne (set in heavily fictionalized Victorian London), being set in Western settings with Western characters.

I guess she missed the parts about human sacrifice and forced interbreeding when shaking her head over Lovecraft's racist treatment of the gentle, indigenous, underwater monsters.

Pretty sure she didn't. I think she's making a very intentional comparison to antisemitic blood libel.

Except that in Innsmouth people really do go missing and end up dead (or worse) if they poke around in the affairs of the inhabitants, or are suspected of doing the same. It's not a blood libel if you really are murdering people, and I think if she is referring to that, then she's dumb.

Unless she completely changes the narrative, her version of "we just lived peacefully frolicking with our Deep One cousins in the waves until the wicked fascist US government destroyed our town and dragged us off to lock us up in concentration camps" is totally false.

It's not blood libel if you believe Jeffrey Epstein killed himself either.

The USS Liberty was a misunderstanding and Building 7 just collapsed... Because!

Corporations. When the environmental cooperatives effectively took over the world (it's never put this way, but it seems like basically they run everything and the governments with… armies and nukes just… let them) the corporations had the choice of getting with the program or fucking off to their own micronations. They decided to fuck off to literal and/or figurative islands. So the remnants of late-stage capitalism now exist in little "aisland" enclaves of their own where everyone plays status-seeking corporate reindeer games while trying to stay relevant by offering goods and services to the environmental cooperatives and governments. They aren't literally given black hats but the author's voice heavily implies they are bad guys who want to go back to the bad old days of despoiling the Earth. (Spoiler: They are the bad guys and they want to go back to the bad old days of despoiling the Earth.)

I actually find this kind of thing the most eye rolling that you described. The inability of people to give the opposition it's actual good characteristics is the fastest ways for stories to turn me away. She failed the ideological turing test on a species she is a member of, how can her interpretation of aliens be believable?

Look, you can put political screeds in your sci-if and have good stuff(Orson Scott Card and Jerry Pournelle do/did). You can have self-insert characters and have a pretty good story(Larry Correia does). What the issue appears to be is that she didn’t have a good story.

The difference between Card's political screeds and the screed described in the OP is that Card is actually interrogating his own belief's harshly and the counter positions are treated seriously. I think it's possible to come out of an Orson Scott Card book disagreeing with him about who was right or wrong, it does not seem like the same is true of Emyr's work. Can she write a sequel to 'A half built garden' from the corp's viewpoint where they're the good guys and not have it contradict the original?

I mean it’s possible to be on either side of the view card and pournelle clearly think is correct, but it’s not exactly easy, and I haven’t read this Emyr’s work(it would probably just irritate me, TBH- lefty political subplots often do) so I can’t really judge, but that still seems like an execution problem. Card and Pournelle villains with ‘wrong’ ideas are often not praiseworthy, but they are fleshed out characters with real motivations. It sounds like Emyr just didn’t put in the work of fleshing out her characters, almost.

This is the central "conflict" of the story: the Ringers believe that humanity has to leave Earth or die. Judy and her eco-coops insist they're actually fixing their world (yes, the whole book is literally a Tikkun Olam meme), but the Ringers claim that Earth is already doomed.

So the aliens are just Char Aznable/Hathaway Noa, at least the author could have added gundams to make it mildly interesting.

“Get in the robot Shinji!”

Like how Kameron Hurley and Seanan McGuire and Ann Leckie are all decent writers but such insufferably hateful harpies that, like Scalzi, I can't stand to read them anymore.

Without going into too much detail, Seanan McGuire appeared on my radar recently. What informs your description?

Mostly her Twitter posts. The usual lashing out at all things not-super-woke-and-feminist, with a recent added dose of "I just discovered I am autistic and this is now a very important part of my identity." But she also led the campaign to get Jonathan Ross removed as a Hugo host because he might tell a fat joke.

I've noticed that recently; progressive women claiming to be autistic in addition to their various other identities and maladies. As someone ambiguously spergy, it bothers me slightly. Apparently one of the symptoms of autism in women is being incredibly intolerant of anyone else's autism.

the fact that N.K. Jemisin is a fanfic-level hack

What!?

I wasn't paying attention to the Sad Puppy affair, and didn't read the Broken Earth series until recently.

Is this (NKJ's hackdom) a commonly held view?

I'm not on board with a lot of what the Hugos fawn over (A Memory Called Empire is a pile of trash), but I thought the Fifth Season was an instant classic.

Is this (NKJ's hackdom) a commonly held view?

Well, she's won back-to-back Hugos, so clearly not.

I've read a couple of her books. I thought her debut novel was okay (though it was a debut novel and it showed). But I think she (and her writing) is very full of herself/itself.

Hugos don't mean anything anymore.

My friend, I am sitting back laughing here, because I was around for part of the Sad Puppies fight on Mr. Wright's blog, and while I knew nothing of the Rabids writers or Vox Day or Larry Correia, and wouldn't read them because not my thing, I was generally supportive of the Sads.

Do I agree with them politically/culturally on everything? No, they tend to skew more (American) right-wing and conservative than I do. But as I read a bunch of people in the SF community, especially from the Tor publishers, just smear them all as racists and white supremacists and homophobes and Literally Hitler, the more I went "Okay, whatever modern day SFF is, this ain't what I mean by it".

There's always been the progressive, liberal and even libertarian strain in SF, but the Hugo stories that were being nominated and winning awards at the time weren't even SFF. The well-written one about the magic rain was in fact a coming-out story about a gay Chinese guy worrying about how to tell his conservative, traditionalist parents that in fact he was gay and worse, his boyfriend was white. The magic rain was only a Macguffin and could just as well have been stripped out. The dreadfully written one about the gay lesbian trans BIPOC palaeontologist getting beat up by gin-swilling rednecks - well, comment would be superfluous. Milquetoast revenge fantasies about 'if you were a dinosaur' are what wins Hugos? Okay, but let me off this bus, I'm sticking here behind with Bradbury.

My understanding is that the original trouble kicked off with someone alleging the Hugo and Worldcon committees were pushing a slate of their favourites who were all the liberal LGBT BIPOC progressive sort. The committee(s) said this isn't happening because we have procedures in place. Guy then sets up a slate of his own to show procedures, what procedures? And then the progressives get angry and here we go.

It was very instructive for me. Previously, my impression had been that the Hugos were 'the fans' choice' as distinct from the Nebulas and other awards, and that fandom in general (which in effect always meant American fandom) voted on them. I was educated on that: only Worldcon members who had bought memberships could vote, and the Hugos were the property of Worldcon.

So here we are today, where to even be in with a sniff of a chance, you have to be female/non-white/LGBT+. And people like me now know that the Hugos are meaningless.

I've tried reading Seanan McGuire and Ann Leckie, but I can't get a handle on their writing (and I dislike McGuire, possibly because of her claims to Irish ancestry which may be legit but her first name keeps making me twitch because my hindbrain insists it should be Senan and that's a male name anyway; possibly because of the smug self-satisfied tone of her writing and commentary).

Do we have good demographic surveys of sci-fi readers? Anecdotally it seems like women read more than men, and surveys of fiction readership that I googled in the last five minutes say a larger share of women read books and they read more books on average. Is the reason that books about woke mom's saving the world is that woke mom's are becoming the modal reader? Or at least that women are the modal reader and women are disproportionately likely to be woke and or moms.

Wokeness is usually understood as a top-down imposition of "the cathedral" (or at least the HR department), but genre fiction taking on the characteristics of women's fiction as women become the majority of fiction consumers seems like a bottom-up process.

There aren't any good public surveys, but most of the limited ones out there still show SF readership skewing male. If this is changing, I would suggest it is "publisher push" and not "reader pull"; as publishers refuse to publish books male readers like because of DEI/feminist issues, male readership goes down.

But books make readers like are being published quite regularly by people like John Ringo and Larry Correia.

And thus Baen (which publishes Ringo and Corriea) likely has a more male readership. But

  1. Baen is only one publisher and they don't and can't publish enough to cover the entire range of what men prefer in SFF books (which was never actually their goal in teh first place)

  2. Since Jim Baen's death, they've been sliding towards the publishing mainstream.

In the Kindle Unlimited world there are really low barriers to entry for publishing. If someone could make a lot of money publishing books other publisher's wouldn't they'd be doing that.

I'd say it's a "publisher pull" effect where if you're a sci-fi publisher and you're looking at a world where women account for 80% of fiction sales you really want to raise the profile of works catering to women in your genre in hopes of attracting a larger audience.

In the Kindle Unlimited world there are really low barriers to entry for publishing.

Which makes it damn useless for the reader, because the good stuff gets buried in mountains of crap.

I'd say it's a "publisher pull" effect where if you're a sci-fi publisher and you're looking at a world where women account for 80% of fiction sales you really want to raise the profile of works catering to women in your genre in hopes of attracting a larger audience.

This is a view that assumes there's some fixed demographic ratio of "readers", and therefore SF publishers should cater to women because women are the majority of readers. I don't believe this is the case. Instead, many publishers have catered to women for essentially ideological reasons, and in doing so have caused men to stop reading their output, resulting in that lopsided ratio of women to men.

I just think it's unlikely that a large market with low barriers to entry maintains a large inefficiency like that. If you look at Fanfiction where there's no barrier to entry and no gatekeepers the vast majority of writers and readers appear to be women. That can't be explained by ideological capture of Fanfiction.net or something.

It seems plausible to me that there are gendered differences in entertainment preferences. Are men overrepresented in video games because of ideological capture of gaming studios or because of male preference for competition. Perhaps women are over presented in fiction reading because the competitive edge of the novel over other storytelling media is long form character study which appeals more to women?

I just think it's unlikely that a large market with low barriers to entry maintains a large inefficiency like that.

There are not low barriers to entry to publishing. There's low barriers to entry to putting stuff up for Kindle that no one will or should read, but these are not the same thing.

Are men overrepresented in video games because of ideological capture of gaming studios or because of male preference for competition.

We know it isn't ideological capture of gaming studios because ideological capture of gaming studios goes the other way. On the other hand, with (fiction) reading, reading became more and more female as publishers became more and more captured. And publishers which resisted capture kept their male audience.

If there are uncaptured publishers, and massive demand for male oriented fiction that is not being served, why haven't these uncaptured publishers gobbled up market share? Who do you think is an uncaptured publisher?

If there are a bunch of genius male authors being suppressed why don't they put their stuff on Kindle or Fanfiction.net and go viral? A fair number of female authors have turned viral fanfic into successful novels.

And you still haven't explained the gender disparity in fanfic where no barriers to entry exist.

You're assuming the causation is that publisher's are captured so audience's become female but if our only evidence is timing the causation could run the other way. As audiences become more female publisher's cater to female preferences, and women are disproportionately woke. This explanation fits better with the efficient market hypothesis and so I think has Occam on its side.

If there are uncaptured publishers, and massive demand for male oriented fiction that is not being served, why haven't these uncaptured publishers gobbled up market share?

There is only one I know of (Baen)... and they are limited by how much they can publish, about 5 books a month. And it is becoming captured. Capture is not a market force.

How would one demonstrate which way the arrow of causation points here? I'm not close enough to publishing to tell pull from push.

There were women writers back in the 50s and 60s doing the same kind of SF along the lines of planetary romances but while they may have been more on the politically progressive side, they weren't the above kind of 'sit around and talk about things'. [Leigh Brackett] wrote a series about a kind of Conanesque figure from an inhabited Mercury, Eric John Stark. He may sympathise with the native species being displaced by Terran colonisers, but his solution is to run guns to them, not deliver lectures.

C.L. Moore was another woman writer, with Northwest Smith being another one of the space opera heroes. They were writing alongside male writers such as E.E. Smith and in similar genres, and I'd read ten knock-off versions of Shambleau, outdated Freudian symbolism and all, before I'd read anything by Ruthanna.

I'm not defending the quality of her work or saying it's the only kind of writing female sci-fi authors can produce. I just suspect the modal fiction purchaser in 2023 is a woke woman and the publishing industry reflects that. This is a counterpoint to a lot of other spaces where wokeness is a top down imposition.

The only 2023 Hugo nominee I've read was "Babel, or the Necessity of Violence" and that's a female written alt-history that basically endorses terroristic violence against civilians in a colonizing empire. I'm solidly on the left and I found the extent to which the author's politics made the plot predictable disappointing, though it's definitely not a "sit around and talk" novel. The magic system was a pretty cool idea though.

a female written alt-history that basically endorses terroristic violence against civilians in a colonizing empire

I initially interpreted this the other way, like a Churchillian call for those savages in Mesopotamia to be bombed until they submit.

Yeah no that would be amusing. It's more like let the people of London suffer because the Opium trade exists. They don't actually do violence they just stop preventing bad things from happening.

Imo part of the problem is that the author is Chinese and so her go to example of colonialism is treaty ports and opium. This is a lot less compelling an example of colonial atrocity than the Belgian congo or the good old fashioned slave trade. Give me some handless magic user from the Congo laying waste to Brussels on his way to King Leopold and I'd be more behind it.

Meanwhile in mainland China, we have stories which smile upon outright genocide. I'd love to send the PC police to take a look at what goes on in webnovels over there - problematic content as far as the eye can see!

Of the two Chinese stories I really like, Reverend Insanity, has just about every ism you could imagine, save transphobia. There's probably some of that too, given it's basically in the 'girdle of change gender' stage of gender awareness. We've got varied and exciting kinds of racism between humans and variant humans, those from different regions, sexism, homophobia, plenty of slavery, wanton slaughter. And yet that's really just the backdrop to what the author's actually trying to say politically about individuality and following one's own path.

Then there's the Three Body Problem series, which goes pretty hard on the 'do not let women have positions of power, don't let your civilization turn into a feminized race of soyboys or you will face complete extermination' angle.

I'm mildly more positively inclined to those with their own ideas or even rabid Chinese nationalists than those like this woman who come to the West and then vomit our own ideas about anti-colonialism back against us, when their home countries are behaving far more outrageously.

/images/16794469115442567.webp

Good lord that meme is top notch. Never thought this of all places is where I’d find a high tier cultivation meme. Impressive.

he didn't download it from /tg/ three years ago

ngmi

Saw it on /r/martialmemes, also on 4chan a couple of times.

Then there's the Three Body Problem series, which goes pretty hard on the 'do not let women have positions of power, don't let your civilization turn into a feminized race of soyboys or you will face complete extermination' angle.

I consider 3BP to be more nuanced than that. Liu quite directly says that humans that rejected their soy/lunar/yin aspect to survive became a different civilization. It's the combination of both soy and chad that makes humanity humanity, even if dooms it on a galactic scale. And even then, there's Yun Tianming, soyboy extraordinaire, who achieves much more than Thomas Wade the gigachad, who is ultimately too lawful stupid, too proud to succeed.

If it weren't for Wade failing, Yun Tianming would've been superfluous. Humanity as a whole didn't listen to him anyway and put in the work to be safe. Sure, Wade was wrong to listen to Ms 'I will never do anything correctly' but at least his instincts and goals were right. He would've made a much better Swordholder, as remarked by the Trisolarans.

To me survival is an unalloyed good. Even if you have everything else, happiness and freedom and prosperity and eudaimonia but you don't survive... then it's still a failure. Those chapters of misery and slaughter of the post-scarcity society and relocation to Australia were haunting. They should've woken up after that. If that didn't make them take things a bit more seriously, then what would? I can't fathom a civilization who thinks 'oh we'll just hide behind Jupiter against an enemy with STAR-BUSTER ATTACKS'. If nothing else, they could just fire 2 or 3 more shots at the gas giants!

Leigh Brackett definitely wasn’t on the progressive side. Her The Ginger Star series was very explicitly anti-communist and there are heavy BDSM themes as well throughout.


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