New Post has been published on https://fox-info.net/fox-photo/archives/28918

満月狐

In general, histories of a genre can’t be written by looking at a list of award winners. Most awards are decided by committee, and consequently, they represent nothing so much as the taste of a few people. By contrast, the Hugos are awarded by a much larger group of people that anybody can join: WorldCon.

Sadly, Space Raptor Butt Invasion wasn’t nominated based on its literary merit. Its inclusion on the Hugo slate was a joke, one meant to protest the failure of the previous year’s Sad Puppies nominees. Beginning as a blog post in 2013 where Larry Correia suggested bloc voting as a way to get his own works nominated, the Puppies quickly ballooned into full-on fandom warfare, with hotly contested battle lines and objectives. For Correia and like-minded Sad Puppies, the Hugos were unjustly favoring “literature” over “pulp,” the latter of which is the true sci-fi.

Other political actors were perfectly willing to use the Sad Puppies movement as a pulpit for unabashedly right-wing politics. I am referring, of course, to Theodore Beale a.k.a. Vox Day. Like Correia, he benefitted personally from voting slates, ones he promulgated under the moniker Rabid Puppies. Unlike the more moderate Sads, Beale was and is quite forthright about his alt-right political views. He embodies the ironic racist channer routine we’ve all come to detest encountering online. Perhaps the most notable quote from the previous link is his defense of Anders Breivik:

Five years later on one of his blogs, Beale praised Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik’s “highly effective blow against the political machine,” and wrote that he could be considered a “hero.” Conceding that Breivik “did a terrible thing” by murdering 77 people, mostly children, Beale then argued that the children weren’t innocent, but “larval” politicians akin to Young Republicans or Hitler Youth. “In any event, my expectation is that if the West, and Norway, survive the ongoing clash of civilizations, Breivik will be considered its first hero,” he writes.

This is one of the few moments in the profile where Beale expresses any genuinely-held beliefs without the defense of irony. He began the piece by saying he identifies as Native American and therefore a description as “white supremacist” would be culturally insensitive, but that’s only the foot in the door.

He has to boil the frog. Even a clicks-driven business like The Daily Dot wouldn’t continue profiling a proud racist after he admitted it in 2020. He has to play coy, to act like he totally doesn’t want the attention a profile in a respectable publication will bring him, so that he can give the real pitch to as many listeners as possible. The pitch: you can be a hero. If you help me push non-white degenerates out of the public sphere, then, when we win, everybody will know your name.

This is the sort of future-forward thinking we should expect from any sci-fi author who wants their work to age well. At present, that calculus is deeply political, and perhaps it always was.

As I've gone over my car is kind of fucked right now and not drivable or repairable at the price I can afford. I'm fundraising for next months transit costs roughly, the expense of the tows/"repair"/first week of ubers, and for some of the down-payment. Ubers on my commute average $25-30, and I have a little saved for the down-payment, so for this week the goal is $250 at least, as well as ideally the unmet goal from last week. I'm making weekly posts in hopes that this will encourage donations.

Unmet goal from last week: 291

Combined goal of last week and this week: 541

This one hurt, her work had such a profound effect on my life, thoughts, and politics.

May her memory be a blessing

"dead" -- obv to the users of these hebrews they weren't dead, so it seems ill-fitting. also loses points bc i don't think i've ever heard this one used seriously

"literary" -- not really the literary mode of choice anymore because of. soemtjing happened

"historical" -- also partially wrong in that all are still used and studied, if not spoken as a vernacular

again, these three periods comprise a long stretch of the language's history, so any unitary label for the three has difficulties. but, wherever you come down on the "modern hebrew is still hebrew/a mixed language/something else entirely" question, native speakers of it still can't understand torah/mishnah/liturgical hebrew without special training. so there's clearly a utility in distinguishing here