Scalzi And Who’s A Jerk

I hate to call ANYBODY a liar.  I  would like to believe that they may be mistaken. Or not have a knowledge about the facts.  Or willfully blind.  Outright lying?  Not usually. That especially goes for authors.  There was a time not too long ago when I held Authors in rather high esteem.  I still do for most.  For some though, like Mr. Scalzi that’s been rather eroded.  Especially when I see stuff like this:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/08/24/being-a-jerk-about-the-hugos-not-as-effective-a-strategy-as-you-might-think/

He starts out saying that the puppies acted like jerks.  As if somehow the puppies created a world wide media smear campaign to smear the clique that ran world cons.  Or pressure authors to withdraw their nominations.  Or derided fans who nominated the “wrong books” as “wrong fans.”  The puppies did all that?  Actually no.  That was Scalzi and his friends.

His primary complaint is that the puppies created a slate.  He’s all angry about that.  As if this was the first time that anybody had a campaign to nominate books.  As if HE, himself had not campaigned to get his stuff nominated.  Or maybe it’s because he wasn’t in this year.  Did he really think that he was ENTITLED to award nominations every year?  I guess so. Anyway, Lets look at his list and maybe get a grasp of the truth here.

1.They created slates for awards that are meant to be about an individual’s personal tastes and choices. That’s a jerk maneuver.

So why did he think that a bunch of individuals can’t get together and make a list that we could all vote on.  Actually, I think that what he’s saying is that the nasty puppies got together with their list and took the industry professionals and their preplanned nominations by surprise.  Sorry, but the Hugos are FAN award, not the sole property of Tor, Locus, Daw and the NESFA to split amongst themselves.  Actually the puppies had been plugging books in PJmedia, their blogs and other places all year.  By the time the noms came around it was pretty easy to make a list up.

2. They gloated about the slates getting on the ballot, and the upset that this caused other people. That’s a jerk maneuver.

I guess poor Johnny took some of the things Larry said too personally.  As if Scalzi hasn’t acted like a jerk in the past. Still I’ve seen everything from the puppies and the reaction over the noms wasn’t gloating, it was surprise.  And things only got nasty after the huge libelous media campaign.

3. They created an imaginary cabal of people and asserted without evidence that this cabal indulged in slate-making, and used this assertion to justify their own bad action. That’s a jerk maneuver.

The cabal is there.  Who else could have created that travesty of an awards ceremony last weekend.  Imaginary things don’t create media campaigns,  don’t spew out thousands of tweets and run a consistent coordinated smear campaign across the science fiction blogs for month.  Guys, you couldn’t have bothered to come up with different ways to say the same things some of the time?

4. They spent months insulting the people they associated with their imaginary cabal. That’s a jerk maneuver.

Really.  Now Larry may have been insulting and argumentative. He’s like that and it was his second getting through the manure pile you people create.  But Brad certainly wasn’t.  Meanwhile there was all that stuff from the likes of Moshe Feder, Damien at the Guardian and all the rest.  I don’t think that Mr. Scalzi know what it’s like to be constantly insulted and smeared.  Brad does though.

5.They spent months crapping on the writers they dragooned into their imaginary cabal, and crapping on the work those writers created. That’s a jerk maneuver.

Now here is an outright lie. And a disgusting one at that.  I’ve been watching this thing from the beginning and at no point did any puppy act in any way other than supportive and compassionately to any of the authors on the list. That includes Annie Bellet and Marko Kloos. The only thing that the puppies didn’t do was tell the authors that they would be the victims of a weird sort of SJW show trial that would go on for months and attempt to destroy them simply for being on the wrong list. Well that was because the puppies didn’t know how much crap the puppy kickers would throw.

 6. They spent months denigrating the award they went out of their way to build slates for. That’s a jerk maneuver.

I’ve seen every post made by a puppy.  ALL of them.  Many of them have been posted here on this blog.  Mr. Scalzi, I challenge you to find even one quote anywhere, by any major puppies where we have anything other than the greatest respect for the award and what it stands for.  I also challenge you to find something on your side that doesn’t advocate dragging the awards through the mud simply because your side doesn’t  have any nominations.

7. They spent months pissing on the people who love and care about the awards, and the convention that hosts both. That’s a jerk maneuver.

Didn’t happen.  Not one bit of it.  Mr Scalzi, if you believe that, you are acting on something that has not one shred of evidence to back it up.

8. They expected the people who they’d been treating with contempt to give them the respect they would not afford them. That’s a jerk maneuver.

Actually, no we didn’t.  We expected what we got, more or less.  The fact that your crew managed to hurt  people we respect and admire, that we elected to put on the ballot, some of us being supporting members for the first time, was what we expected your bunch of selfish people to do.  After all we’ve seen your antics for months we realistically could expect nothing else.  We are disappointed though, at how hard you worked to exceed our expectations. Wooden buttholes, seriously?

9.They pretended they didn’t actually care about the awards for which they put in months and sometimes years of effort to get work on the ballot. That’s a jerk maneuver.

That might have some validity if the puppies hadn’t recused themselves from the nominations.  Larry and Brad both withdrew from their nominations.  So neither of them had any direct object to gain from winning.  The puppies did and do care about the awards and what they represent.  Something that your crew has seems  to have forgotten.

10. They had the poor grace to whine about people potentially voting “no award,” which is fully allowed by the rules, after gleefully pointing out that slating was not disallowed. That’s a jerk maneuver.

Actually the puppies pointed out that “No Awarding” everything in sight would turn the awards into a travesty.  That turned out to be correct.  Watching that show at Sasquan was pathetic.  As was the performance of your crew.   Which demonstrated to the world this, Mr. Scalzi:

Consonantly: If you perform a bunch of jerk maneuvers, you might, in fact, actually be a jerk. Not always. But the correlation is there, and that correlation gets increasingly significant the more jerk maneuvers you perform.

The only people who’ve pulled jerk maneuvers here are your side.  There were no media barrages from the puppies, no slanderous lies, no pressure to withdraw nominations, no “no award” slates(well except from vox and one category), no one star review campaigns or all the rest of it.  That all came from your side.

It’s obvious from your blog post that you and your side aren’t really happy with the results.  Obviously you feel compelled to endlessly explain how virtuous you are in your fight against Straw Larry and Brad TorgersOn.  I can understand it. Those guys are jerks.    Of course they also aren’t real.  Which, in the end makes the only jerk in the room, you, Mr. Scalzi.

The Hugo Awards.