Partial quote:
What sort of things were they saying before? No, expelling Correia or Torgersen is easy, but it’s not enough. Not enough! We have to investigate the entire science fiction field and the publishers, we need to find out how the field could have allowed an unsafe environment to thrive in which these cisnormative, sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic authors could operate with impunity. I think, comrades, that we need to send a Hate Crimes commission to Worldcon. And to identify all the unsafe elements that may be present.
So, the field is essentially returning to its Marxist roots. But the starry-eyedness is mostly gone. Now we’re down to the raw hate of the thing: the vengeance-minded outliers and weirdos, determined to punish wrongdoing and wrongthinking and wrongfeeling. Which means, of course, smoking out all the wrongfans having all the wrongfun with their wrongstuff.
If they could clap us in shackles, put us into the boxcars, and send us to the icy wastes to die, they would do it in a heartbeat.
My friend Paul reposted that borderline incoherent comment from Brad on his own blog; read it in its entirety there.
Frankly, I am not interested in wading into the sea of strawmen and attempting to dismantle them. (Shaun Duke’s already taken a shot at it at his blog.) Nor am I at all interested in trying to present the positions of my “side” and offer gentle correction, as has been done nicely here.
All I have to say is this: how dare you, Brad. After you helped garner John C. Wright, a man who not-at-all-coyly talks about gay bashing as an “instinctive reaction” to “fags” a record number of nominations, how dare you project your paranoid fantasies of people wanting to harm you on us. How dare you wrap yourself in a blanket of imagined persecution when to this day transpeople are being murdered for simply existing. How dare you whip up false fears about people wanting you to die over a fucking literary award when right now black men and women are being killed by the police for simply existing. How dare you imagine yourself a second-class citizen when underprivileged women and girls are suffering because their male-run government has decided they have no right to bodily autonomy.
How dare you talk about people being shipped to frozen gulags when, today, gay and trans youth are still subjected to the very sort of reeducation you claim we want.
How dare you.
Real people are harmed every day by the positions those with whom you associate yourself espouse. Real people, who experience real pain, and real suffering, and all too often real death. The number of your faction that has been sent off to a reeducation camp is zero, and it will remain zero.
I’m sure if you dig hard enough, you can find some crazy, leftist asshole out there who says something in line with your beloved delusion. And then you can go ahead and compositional fallacy-it up if it makes you feel all warm and squishy inside. No one can stop you. But this insulting, despicable lie of yours will still not be true.
I’m tired of this. I’m tired of the paranoid fantasies. I’m sick of the pathetic attempts to play the victim in the same world where I suffer the real fear that one of my trans friends will drop off the internet and I will never know what happened to him or her because someone decided ignorance and hatred justified violence. Because this is the real world, you fucking asshole. This happens to real people.
So no, Brad. I do not want anything bad to happen to you. I never have. I have never wanted any harm to come to anyone. Even now, with my hands shaking with anger, I don’t. All I actually want is for you to take a step back, listen to yourself from outside your echo chamber, and understand how basically insulting this melodramatic persecution complex over a goddamn literary award is while outside, tire irons are not a coy little non-metaphor.
Failing that, I want you to fuck all the way off. Because that is an expression of my anger that suggests no action and has no power to do real harm.