Sad Puppies Update: Outrage Edition

     I wrote only yesterday that the ability to outrage your adversary is an important weapon in political combat:

     The attitude of superior wisdom and morality is itself a weapon in the Left’s hands, in that it enrages us in the Right and deflects us from making our own cases. Such an outraged reaction has been observed among many conservatives, including some of demonstrated intellect and wide knowledge....

     The proper reply to the Left’s attitude is amusement, with or without audible laughter. Mind you, we must never become arrogant about our own positions; that would constitute jumping into the moral-intellectual pit with them. However, an amused dismissal of their positions and of them as well is something leftists find massively humiliating. It enrages them, which nullifies their proselytizing powers.

     Recent events in the world science fiction stand as examples of the power of outrage induced within the Left. Let’s start with this microcephalic twit:

     An award whose nominations are, in six categories, dominated entirely by neofascists, and where Theodore Beale has that kind of influence has already lost legitimacy. The phrase "2015 Hugo Award Winner" is already not one that anybody should want. It is not something that anybody should desire for a work they love. "Listen" and Ms. Marvel are too good to win this award.

     Obviously progressive voices within the sci-fi/fantasy community have to fight, and fight hard to reclaim fandom from the neofascist entryist movement that has just stolen it. But until that fight is won, it is also the moral duty of progressive voices to form a blocking majority, and to loudly admit that fandom as it stands is broken, and that any work proclaimed to be the best of the year by a fandom this broken is demeaned by the association.

     I purely love that “neofascist” stuff, don’t you? Because the Sad Puppies 3 slate included a number of writers of conservative and libertarian views, and because enough actual readers of SF and fantasy liked those books to submit nominations for them, this whiner shouts that “progressive voices...have to fight!”

     Have a little more outrage, this time from a “progressive” who doesn’t like democracy and openly says so:

     The problem with democracy in general isn’t so much that people are “stupid” or “evil” or the other nasty things that people who rag on democracy like to throw out, it’s that there’s a ton of decisions to make and people are busy. The “vote” doesn’t end up being among everyone but among the tiny subset of people who really care about that question, which isn’t necessarily correlated with being right about that question–often, in fact, it’s the opposite.

     The people who pay the most attention to these questions are the people who have some deep emotional investment in the issue at hand combined with a great deal of time and emotional energy to burn making their “voices heard” about it. That can happen on any end of the political spectrum, but in practice? It tends to be a space dominated by privileged reactionary jerks....

     Today’s longest-lasting, most determined trolls have a real ideology behind their trolling, and it usually takes the form of a feeling of betrayal and resentment of the world around them and a knee-jerk rage against the idea of progress.

     The worst trolls are almost universally hard-right conservatives, in other words, and they generally care about their pet causes with a breathtaking fervor that their enemies can’t possibly hope to match.

     So you “progressives,” with your superior wisdom and virtue, are too heavily outnumbered by us “privileged reactionary jerks” to withstand an open election? Therefore, forbid the “privileged reactionary jerks” to participate, so the right – meaning Left – candidates are guaranteed to win? Riiiiight! Maybe we should let Stalin count the ballots.

     But these are hardly alone among outraged “progressives.” A few of them persuaded Entertainment Weekly to publish this:

     The Hugo Awards have fallen victim to a campaign in which misogynist groups lobbied to nominate only white males for the science fiction book awards. These groups, Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies (both of which are affiliated with last year’s GamerGate scandal), urged sci-fi fans to become members of the Hugo Awards’ voting body, World Science Fiction Convention, in order to cast votes against female writers and writers of color.

     ...which, after someone with actual reading skills troubled to inform EW that the Sad Puppies’ nominations included both black, Hispanic, and female writers, forced EW to publish this retraction:

     After misinterpreting reports in other news publications, EW published an unfair and inaccurate depiction of the Sad Puppies voting slate, which does, in fact, include many women and writers of color. As Sad Puppies’ Brad Torgerson explained to EW, the slate includes both women and non-caucasian writers, including Rajnar Vajra, Larry Correia, Annie Bellet, Kary English, Toni Weisskopf, Ann Sowards, Megan Gray, Sheila Gilbert, Jennifer Brozek, Cedar Sanderson, and Amanda Green.

     You simply have to love it, as much for the spittle-flecked faces of the “progressives” who’ve succeeded at stuffing the Hugo ballot boxes for several years now as for the red faces at Entertainment Weekly, whose editorial staff must be pondering whether it can ever again trust a known “progressive.”

     David French adds a concurrence:

     Correia, Torgerson, and their Sad Puppies allies are living arguments against cultural defeatism. With humor and verve, they’ve taken on the allegedly unstoppable Left, stopped it, and thrown it into spasms of impotent rage and amusing disarray. In its rage and self-righteousness, the Left always overreaches. Always. I’ve seen that reality in 20 years of on-campus battles, we’re seeing that reality as their hate campaign against Memories Pizza helped make the owners a pile of money, and we saw it when we watched unhinged rhetoric help turn American Sniper into the top-grossing movie of 2014.

     Congratulations, Sad Puppies. Long may you reign.

     But let’s not, in our jubilation, lose sight of the part salient to political combat: These outraged “progressives” have been reduced to whining to one another. That’s an anti-persuasive stance. It can even evoke disaffection among one’s supposed allies, as conservatives should know from experience. The moral should be clear:

     Laugh at them.
     Ridicule them when they deserve it – which is most of the time.
     Needle them by caricaturing their positions: “What? You only want a $10 minimum wage? Why not $100, so we can all be rich!”
     Above all, restrain your own impulses to become outraged. Remain cheerful and upbeat at all times -- especially when the “progressives” seem to have won one.

     Rumor is a more potent weapon than too many of us have ever realized. Saul Alinsky realized it:

     “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

     Let’s learn from our enemies’ icon and turn this weapon against them.

The Letter And The Spirit

I've just read one of the most remarkable, even critical documents of our time. It's so vitally important to the future, not merely of the United States but of Mankind as a whole, that not to proclaim it far and wide would be a sin of omission for which no penance would be sufficient.

Wait for it. I have a couple of other things to say first. I trust you'll appreciate the perspectives they afford.

---

First, allow me to recount an episode from more than a decade ago. It occurred at the home of some friends, who had invited us over for dinner. They'd also invited another couple, about whom I’d been told nothing except that the husband, Abe, was someone "you might enjoy talking to, Fran."

Abe was a left-liberal of typical left-liberal opinions and arrogance. We fenced verbally for an hour or more -- apparently our mutual friends had told him a little about me and my proclivities -- during which:

• The topics were many and various;
• Abe repeatedly made factual assertions I could easily disprove, but which he insisted were true, while freely dismissing my factual assertions as "nonsense;"
• Despite severe temptations to do otherwise, I remained courteous. I was in someone else's home and felt an obligation to maintain the peace.

But there came a point where Abe felt he simply had to address what he deemed the inadequacies of President George W. Bush. Now, whatever Dubya's missteps were -- and I'll allow he made a number of them, some of which were quite serious -- he was a man of sterling character. You could believe that he meant what he said. When he proposed a plan of action, you could be confident that he was sincere about it and would prosecute it to the limit of his ability and authority. When Abe lit off in that direction, I could sense that trouble was on the horizon.

And indeed it was. I managed to hold myself in check throughout most of Abe's tirade, but when he sneered at Dubya for his Christianity -- for "needing the comfort of an imposed structure," as Abe put it -- I snapped.

"Do you have any idea," I said in a tone that might have issued from the bowels of the Earth, "what you just said to a devout, practicing Catholic?" I didn't wait for an answer. I turned on my heel and walked away. We exchanged no further words that evening. Indeed, my wife and I left without wishing him a good night.

---

I wrote some time ago -- apologies; I can't find the link -- that among the patterns that characterize men of good will is the tendency to assume that others are equally as benevolent. That attitude is one of the main supports to the maintenance of the conventional courtesies: broadly speaking, refraining from calling someone an idiot, fool, dupe, liar, slut, thief, murderer, or otherwise unsatisfactory person in a nominally social setting. Abe felt no such inhibitions, at least when his target was someone who wasn't physically present. When I put him on notice that he'd denigrated my convictions, his face fell apart. He couldn't believe I had reacted in such an unrestrained fashion. Why, it was positively discourteous. And after such a nice dinner, too!

I'd reached my limit. Everyone has one. Abe had found mine, whether or not he'd deliberately sought to do so.

It was the beginning of a rather sharp swerve in my attitude toward leftists who denigrate Christianity. I once felt it was something like an obligation to remain courteous, to try to demonstrate how far wrong they were by my conduct, erudition, and sound reasoning. Beneath that, of course, lay the assumption that they could be led to see their error and retreat from it: if not to the extent of becoming Christians, at least so far as allowing that we might not be the imbeciles, buffoons, and would-be oppressors they'd taken us to be.

The assumption was the problem. Indeed, it still is: far too many men of good will retain it, despite innumerable demonstrations that it is false-to-fact.

President Bush labored under that assumption, too. He repeatedly acted as if he accepted without question that his political adversaries were as benevolently inclined as he. He received numerous rebuffs without ever abandoning that premise. It cost him, and the country, in ways that still burden us and will continue to do so for some time to come.

To cut to the chase: Courtesy toward one another is a formal thing. It's not context-free; sustaining it requires a state of reciprocal obligation, in which all persons strive to remain courteous. It derives from the spirit of the Second Great Commandment: to love your neighbor as you love yourself. But one can maintain the specific standard of the Commandment without straining to remain courteous to an unmannerly boor.

Once Abe had demonstrated that he felt himself unbound by the courtesies, I declared myself free of them as well. But Abe is in no way exceptional among left-liberals. To left-liberals, courtesy and propriety are shackles for conservatives, Christians, and their other enemies. They have no interest in donning those fetters; they might keep them from winning an argument...or an election.

---

The double standard in political and social discourse has never been clearer. One side has declared itself outside all rules. It will lie, cheat, steal, sling unbelievably vile calumnies, and generally do whatever it deems useful to its aims, moral standards be damned. The other side strains to remain within the traditional standards of polite conduct, even to the extent of declining to give true coloration to the adversaries' words and deeds. The height of the madness is captured in this: left-liberals' slanders frequently include accusations that conservatives are doing what left-liberals have already done or are planning to do.

Religion has become a particular battleground. The Left has put its nominal atheism to the side to defend Islam, despite its exhortations to violence and oppression and the savagery of its most visible adherents. That's an outcome of leftist "othering," in which any enemy of American norms is immediately granted sanctuary within the Leftist fold. But Islam has sworn the destruction of its enemies -- Christianity and Judaism in particular -- and the Left, in support of its clients, has taken up cudgels against those faiths, while ceaselessly proclaiming that we whom it would destroy must be "tolerant of other faiths."

If you're familiar with the "Islamic Two-Step," this tactic should be familiar to you as well.

---

The spirit of the Great Commandments is generous beyond measure. As the angels who massed above Bethlehem sang, they proclaim peace on Earth and good will toward men -- all men. But the letter of the Law does not demand that Christians sit meekly and unresistingly before a campaign of annihilation.

Now for a snippet from the essay that I praised so highly in the opening segment:

The degradation of our culture has gone too far, and I’ve fucking had it....

This is the Progressive vision for the future, where fat and unhygienic is beautiful. This is a world in which John Scalzi is the pinnacle of writing talent, where Michael Moore is your script writer and Ben Kuchera is your journalist. Your State Department official is a moron who claims the unemployment numbers in Syria are largely responsible for global terrorism. Your own President cannot name who the terrorists are.

Utopia for Progressives is Hell on Earth, possibly worse than any the Bright One who Fell could think up. Your live entertainment will be based on vaginas. Your art is a Crucifix in a jar of piss, or period blood on canvas. Paul Krugman will be your personal banker, with every Western government worth mentioning so far in debt that the entire population could work for well over a year doing nothing but paying it, without coming close to discharging it....

I’m going to say two things in rapid succession, because, again, I’ve had it. My patience has been exceeded. The tank for tolerance is empty, it’s been running on fumes for years now.

I’m a Christian. Okay? And this is a remarkably unChristian thing for me to say, but if you don’t like it… to hell with you (I just realized this is a good pun). I’m tired of being Peter to the rest of the world and skirting the issue, denying it because it’s the fashionable, popular thing to do in a degenerate age, because it might mollify a gatekeeper lording over his own personal pile of waste. I encourage other Christians to do likewise. Proclaim it, loudly and proudly, and say “now what?” Yes, I DJ Industrial-Goth dance clubs, and I am a Christian. We’re everywhere, you know. And there are more of us than there are of them, even today.

Second, and I want to make this as abundantly clear as I possibly can with words, I’ve had enough of the destruction of Western Culture. Progressives have ruined all that is good and Holy on this planet. Wherever there is ugliness, you can be sure to find one of their ilk behind it. Not only do they loathe standards of conduct, beauty and comparison, they actively promote anti-standards. They deconstruct so far, they’ve tunneled straight through civilization and into barbarism, they are the men digging in the ground all the way to China.

They elevate diarrhea to fine wine, while pouring the good vintage down the drain. A beautiful woman in a bikini is an ugly demonstration of sexism, to them, instead of a wonderful example of femininity. A strong man is a patriarchal, heteronormative oppressor. The intellectual is a “mansplainer.”

When you next make use of the bathroom, know that your excrement, your bodily waste, is of higher value than anything they can produce. For at least that waste can become fertilizer for something greater. They are the snake, the worm, the voice of unreason. They are the Autumn People, the product of a century of spoiled children, rotten parenting and failing families. They are reared on garbage, educated by propagandists and coddled by elitist fucks living so far up the Ivory Tower they haven’t seen Terra Firma in their entire lives. Yet, as high up as they are, Dante knew their ilk well enough in the bottom rungs of Hell.

The garden is full of weeds, more wheels are squeaking for the greasing. Civilization is oinkin’ for the boinkin’ while politicians discuss the proper regulations for tree removal in my front yard.

Dystopic, you're my hero. I could not have said it better. Gentle Readers, please read the whole thing. Spread word of it far and wide.

---

A significant number of people look at me, probably because of my tirades here and elsewhere, as an authority of sorts: someone who can certify conclusions, award permissions, and pronounce absolution. In reality I'm nothing of the sort: just one more American with opinions he dares to set forth on the Web. I'm flattered by those who regard my reasoning as sound and my conclusions as important, but in reality the only thing that could make them important is if they were to become your reasoning and conclusions as well. If that's the case, I'm doubly flattered, but remember that it's you that made the critical difference.

All the same, in recognition of the exalted status I don't deserve, I hereby declare, ex cathedra from my bellybutton:

Conservatives and Christians are hereby relieved of any perceived duty of courtesy toward the Left.

Dystopic has stated the case in the strongest possible terms. Perhaps some of you have already experienced what I did from Abe. Perhaps you've cringed before the larger syndrome Dystopic has so passionately denounced. Perhaps you've been wondering "is it time to take off the gloves?" I proclaim it so. Indeed, the time arrived some time ago.

They have placed themselves above the Law.
They are no longer entitled to the protection of its spirit.
Treat them as roughly as they treat you.
Leave them naked before the firehose of your contempt.
They have earned that and nothing more.

Have a nice day.