Really, I never thought about it before, but Ann Coulter is truly an Internet Troll operating in a different medium.

Water, among other things, finds its own level.

Hm. Folks say that about me sometimes, so I can't ding him for that. (plus I've never directly experienced it.) That picture of him in the link though, shows him wearing a pro-Reagan tshirt (-10), standing in front of some war porn books he wrote(-1). That's -11 on my tally so far.

Yeah, I'll back you up on that.

I mean, he wasn't in the same league with J______, G________, or S_______, but, in his own way, he had a good, honest, naive approach to being a boor that was, at a minimum, heartfelt; and could on occasion sweep one away with the purity of its audacious cluelessness.

And we weren't all that impressed by him back in those days, either.

"They think he knows what he’s talking about. He subs for Michelle Malkin."

I suspect he is as sharp and journalistically competent as Ms. M.

(As a final note, I went to a dinner with Dafydd, Tom Dupree, and several others a ways back [when Tom was still editing sf at Bantam]. After the dinner, Tom commented, more of less, than Dafydd "doesn't listen." This appears to be a skill that will serve him well.)

My god, they're doing "Good Gop-Bad Gop!"

The one story of his I definitely recall reading involves, ahem, boy-dog love.

*sigh*

He is also, in case anyone was wondering, not Welsh.

Ya know, I wasn't going to say anything, but when I read:

Lefties and liberals make almost a religious fetish out of claiming to have received death threats.

I wondered if the guy might be a little... off.

You forgot the "women are all liars until proven otherwise and even then not" caveat.

I swear, this country is looking more and more like a mirror-image (right swapped with left) of Atlas Shrugged every day. Maybe someone should market cigarettes with the hammer and sickle imprinted on them.

On the "They think he's brilliant" line, um... well, just saw a video of Limbaugh and Coulter attempting comedy. It has scarred itself into my psyche.

Brilliance, as with all things, is relative.

Although I think I know which way to bet, I still hope it is, and if so I hope that the Wingnut Welfare system does as much due diligence ever after in choosing whom to support.

But the fact was, being clueless and idiots they didn't realize that. They just kept at it, and kept at it, until the whole discussion was an endless repetition of, "well, are you going to agree that the grass is green?" arguments. One by one, people got fed up and left.

And they got to rule the roost.

(As for the damage and hurt of these attacks, I know: I was expelled by Italian fandom through one. It still hurts, and it undermined my capacity for emotional self-reliance permanently.)

If so, might he spend less time writing letters to the SFWA Forum? I ask, you understand, in the attempt to find any shred of silver lining in this event.

Teresa@OP: That’s the intended effect. It’s meant to hurt—to be so nauseating and dispiriting that the person who’s the target shuts down and stops communicating. [...] If you cry out, we will hurt you for that, too.

Oh, yes. If you dare point out what's being done, you'll be beaten up for that, too, because it's about destroying your will as well as ability to defend yourself. It is exactly analogous to police screaming, "Stand up and stop resisting!" at someone they've repeatedly Tasered.

I watched this be done in a forum I used to love, by people I used to respect. And the soul-killing aspect is that you know that if you speak up and object, you're the next target--and the length of time you hesitate because of that makes you hate yourself. And that's part of the whole dynamic.

My only experience with DaH was watching him a panel at Dragoncon in '94 or '95, and he seemed mostly harmless, but also was speaking on a "publishing your first horror novel" panel or somesuch, and not talking about politics.

From the bits of his "writing" you quote, it's already spent...and not for Helen of Troy either.

Skink 33: We don't discuss Orson Scott Card here.

Once I made the mistake of biting, and found him a genuine scientific citation. Of course he denied its validity. The subject was, IIRC, public health statistics, and the journal was the New England Journal of Medicine. This being a medical journal and not a statistics journal, he declared its research on statistics to be scientifically worthless, never mind that public health, a field that relies heavily on statistical research, is covered by medical journals all the time.

Ever since then I've learned to drop immediately any argument with someone who insists on scientific citations to back up basic propositions.

I did learn inadvertently, however, the one way to get this particular troll's goat, and that was to call him "Dafydd Uck" - rude, I know, but it did make him shut up and go away, so it turned out to be invaluable.

I know I shouldn't judge a person by one short story, but when I started reading this post, my hindbrain was not remotely surprised.

At times, when he was in his sane, calm mode (yes, he did have one!), he could be witty and engaging. I always hoped he would slip into that mode one day and not leave it.

On the other hand, in response to a page on my Web site lampooning Dubya, Dafydd referred to me as "behaving like a cement-headed traitor." I think that was the phrase.

Jesus Christ, Dafydd.

I followed up:

Gregory Feeley wrote:

>Jesus Christ, Dafydd.

Name two people you should never argue with.

Ken (10), I don't know that he's gone. He's still got an agent.

Debra (11): she shoots, she scores.

Ken again (12): We have a clean-minded bunch here. Everyone read "He subs for Michelle Malkin" correctly.

Amanda (19): "You forgot the 'women are all liars until proven otherwise and even then not' caveat."

Has he taken to doing that? He never did it back on the SFRT. Of course, doing that on the SFRT that would have been a good way to get handed your head.

Anna (26), I'm sorry to hear that. Did you get your prose style back? I've known writers whose voices permanently changed after going through one of those ordeals.

Aconite (30), I hate that pattern. It's one of the reasons I'm such a heavy-handed moderator. One of the nastiest things about it is that it takes the top end off the community of discourse. The more sensitive, intelligent, and engaged the participant, the more likely they are to take damage in a situation like that.

Skink (33), sorry about that. Not your fault.

Xopher (34), thanks. Does anyone ever sell their soul for something worthwhile? Faust mostly uses his powers for cheap tricks. Then there's Thomas More's line to Richard Rich in A Man for All Seasons: Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world ... but for Wales?

Jim (36), I remember you having lengthy and vivid opinions on that subject.

David (38), he called you a traitor for making fun of Dubya? I'm shocked. Does the man know nothing? Making fun of high officials is one of our most durable political traditions.

Steven (39): Thank you! I had forgotten that one.

Robert Johnson seemed to get a pretty good deal.

So he froths VX mixed with excrement -- that makes him rather typical of someone that would defend Donahue's vile behavior.

Two of them were Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, both during the Spanish Civil War; Hemingway arranged Dos Passos's abuse, but participating, and becoming a defender of Stalinism damaged him, too. Afterwards, Dos Passos had his famous conversion to conservative; Hemingway was never as strong a writer. And Orwell's voice may have been the voice of permanent injury in childhood, but he was there, too. I suppose you could say he gained from it, but it marked him. I think the heartbreak took years from his life.

Hunh. I suppose this is one way the political becomes personal. Somewhere there must be an expletive to describe it.

It's the Kool-Aid. Makes you go along with whatever stirs the pot most chaotically.

A friend and I went. It was generally pretty fun. We sat at a table and handed out badges to attendees. This is a pretty simple process where somebody identifies themself and we hand them a piece of plastic with that very same name on it. Sometimes, we'd shake a hand when we were excited.

One guy walks up to the table and asks for his badge, we ask for his name. He says something like (it's been too many years for the word-for-word, which me and my friend were rather fond of quoting for a while), "Don't you know who I am?"
"No sir, I'm just a volunteer, if you'd just tell me your name, I can give you your badge."
"I was the secretary of this organization last year!"
"Right, well, we aren't even members. We're volunteers, and if you'd just give us your name..."
If I remember correctly, this exchange went another full round before he lowered himself enough to admit that his face was not famous enough to get him correctly identified by the people at the table with the badges.

The faces he made and huffiness stuck with us long enough that we felt a strong desire to look him up and figure out if we should have known him. Obviously, you all know the answer, and when we discovered it, it made the whole situation entirely too comical.

Since authors are you know... not actual celebrities (no offense, right?) the truly famous ones (that went) still needed to tell us who they were. But that guy...

But then Daffy's definition of civilized is everyone is supposed to gather around him in a circle, singing hosannas of praise about how lucky we are to have him shedding his light of enlightment, and that how he is absolutely perfect and is always right and has never made a mistake, while he sits upon his throne, having assumed the mantle of Papal Infallibility...

[repeat for several screens worth]

...and arguing, and arguing, and arguing...

[several more screens worth]

...and arguing and arguing, online... and that was just ONE discussion thread!

He was never, ever, willing to lose an argument, or even declare a draw, or agree to disagree. He always won, even if "winning" meant everyone else in the discussion finally simply left in frustrated exhaustion.

If he'd devoted just one percent of the energy he put into online arguments into his fiction writing, he'd have been a much more productive fiction writer. (Not necessarily a good writer; I use his HEROING as a textbook example of a man trying to write a female character, and doing it very, very badly.)

But the story that really lowered my opinion of him was when he sucker-punched a guy at a convention and bragged about it online.

Fuckin' Scouter (want to annoy "Daffyd", call him Scouter). I recall him from my youth at the LASFS. He was annoying then, and he'd yet to rise to the present level of his incompetence.

When I saw, some month's ago, his name surface, I was gob-smacked, because unlike the Goldbergs, the Hitchens, the Podhertz of the world, I know Scouter, and that they would think him smart just croggles me.

Why this should be, when the Malkins, the Limbaughs, the Coulters and the Yamashita's are praised, I don't know.

I've gotten hate mail, and the odd death threat, and yes, the PTSD nature of it is a valid comment. There's a reader of my Lj, whom I just gave up on, because his, intentional, misrepresentations of my words (and the worse when he does it at a remove, taking my APA writings, and then mistating my positions on his blog; to readers who have not the original to check against) pained me to the point that seeing his name in my inbox knots my stomach.

Hapless is a good word, but in all truth, the malignity was always there.

Wouldn't you want to read a genre that brings forth such interesting political commentators?

Many of the most vicious right-wing commentators have no science fiction in them. Coincidence? You tell me.

Gods, how small the world is, and how petty those who get notoriety often are.

"Colbert would later describe himself during [his early teenage life] as detached, lacking a sense of the importance of the things other children around him concerned themselves with. He developed a love of science fiction and fantasy novels, especially the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, of which he remains an avid fan. During his adolescence, he also developed an intense interest in fantasy role-playing games, especially Dungeons & Dragons, a pastime which he would later characterize as an early experience in acting and improvisation."

My favorite (?) recent instance (which I didn't have to publish, since the prodigy posted it on Wikipedia) was a muddled blackmail attempt based on the contents of my stolen video camera. (The "evidence" in the camera does not support my correspondent's conspiracy theory but the camera was reported stolen in July.)

The runner-up for my recent fav was the blogger (who has been making nearly daily posts mentioning my name) who called me stupid in the same post as declaring herself to the right of Adolf Hitler.

Even the most patently ridiculous of these hurt; they sap time and energy when one has better things to do and think about.

People do this because they want you to be upset and they want to be the focus of your attention. Some of them do it because they want you to turn tail and get off what they think of as their internet.

I have mixed feelings about singling out DAB for discussion, since there are so many out there like this. Yes, it is disturbing that someone we actually KNOW would get involved with the Dark Side of the Force. I stayed off of GEnie and haven't participated in the discussion lists cited. I remember liking a story of his I wrote about in the intro of a Nebula volume (was it 12 years ago?).

There is a systemic problem out there underlying this general kind of internet behavior, which is that some of the big ISPs will not enforce their harassment policies even in extreme situations. If their customer is a spammer or posts unauthorized imaged off Mickey Mouse, BAM the site is down. But Godaddy requires you to get a note from your local FBI agent to get their Clause 7 enforced, even when the target is a minor and the agressor is in jail. (My favorite line from that conversation was "But he's not in jail for that.)

Colbert's nerdosity is the subject of this very funny interview by Conan O'Brian which was a Sidelight a while back. Top clip, and start at about 5:50.

Gregory Feeley
shouldn't, really;
we can only trust
if he didn't, he'd bust.

It was with Francis T Laney a
species of mania;
that the life of the fan bachelor
should be naturaler.

Incidentally, to anyone reading this who might have emailled me recently, I've been unable to access my account for several days now.

I've always wondered if he picked up that name from being in the SCA at some point.

"Sorry," she said "I thought you were on a local freecycle group or something"

You see, since we moved to Wales last year, anything vaguely welsh looking gets her attention.

Since we've been recently succesful in stopping a fraud passing herself off as a doctor, can we stop DaH passing himself off as welsh? It's causing confusion, frustration and despair.

The Czechoslovakian judge gives the Big Lizards piece a 1.8.

Skink @54: John Varley's Gaea trilogy (Titan, Wizard, Demon) immediately comes to mind.

Jo Walton @78: quite.

And Salman Rushdie, which is still a net plus. Excellent political commentary.

I confess, I was actually slightly sad when Dafydd left the Dueling Modems boards, because it meant the place was dying. Even while being greatly relieved. Yeesh.

Jim: Marty Grabien has (or had) archives from the GEnie SFRT.

---L.

If this is breaking the ban then I will retract the question and apologize. But I'm curious as to why. Is there some sort of history behind this? I mean, I know he's an SF writer with right-wing views, but so is Dafydd ab Hugh, apparently. So I presume there's something more to it than that.

(Again, if the ban on disussing OSC extends to discussing why we don't discuss OSC, then I will retract the question. I don't mean to be rude. I'm just curious.)

Caroline 89: haven't gotten it yet.

Annie G 92: not at all. Long as I don't miss my train to Bos[t|k]on[e]!

You could eat well on this at Boskone, you know: some delicacy of choice in return for the OSC/ML story.

Please, folks, don't declare your intention to email me about it here...kind of defeats the purpose. Just email me.

I remember when I still had a lot of the textbooks from my Asian history studies, and Dafydd would hold forth with something just plain stupid and wrong within my field of study. I'd write up a refutation, and keep at it, and my reward would be his going silent about it. Then he'd bring it up again a few weeks or months later as if the last exchange never happened. I ended up with half a dozen or so text files I could just paste in to save myself some effort.

About his name: is he pretending to be some kind of hard-core Welsh Nationalist, or was he born with it?

I went through the rather limited Wikipedia entry, no problem. Frothing a bit, isdn't he.

I also wonder how long it would be before he noticed anyone editing Wikipedia...

He wasn't born with it (I don't remember what it was originally, though). Wiki says that his mother is Welsh.

http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/002635.html

Whenever I hear his name I think of that picture.
It's mean, I know. But it matches his rhetoric.

So we're bloggers and the wingnuts are alternative media? What's up with that?

My most recent memory of Dafydd (still difficult not to type Daffyd, which would insult a Warner property) is that he was pontificating on the U.S. military. I believe it ended with Jerry Pournelle "conceding" something to the effect of "Well, glad to be informed you know more about our military and its technology than I do."

Fortunately I don't remember much about him from Many Thursday Evenings. A motion to table for 17000 years might be in order, though.

And then there's the story of the time Bubbles Broxon encountered Roger Ellwood at the Westercon in Oakland in, what, 1975?

Oh, yes. If you dare point out what's being done, you'll be beaten up for that, too, because it's about destroying your will as well as ability to defend yourself. It is exactly analogous to police screaming, "Stand up and stop resisting!" at someone they've repeatedly Tasered.

I watched this be done in a forum I used to love, by people I used to respect. And the soul-killing aspect is that you know that if you speak up and object, you're the next target--and the length of time you hesitate because of that makes you hate yourself. And that's part of the whole dynamic.

That's how bullies, wife abusers, and child abusers work, and that's what these people are. They're abusers, plain and simple. Point that out, and anyone who isn't totally cowed by them or drinking their kool-aid will realize it. That's what we have to do to break their power and get some of our freedom back.

He is with Quetzocoatl now, fighting the Monkey, the Jaguar, and the eeeeeevil Jesus.

ah, cripes. it always gets me when raving right-wing types have such jewish names.

you welsh people are off the hook, & us christ-killers are back on it.

/sarcasm

Dafydd not a Christ-killer, after all, because his mother isn't. Always remember that.

He prefers to think of himself as his mother's son rather than his father's son, or something like that, which is why he chose to identify with her Welsh ancestry.

Of course, none of that means anything. He's just an American.

yes, that is a comfort. but as far as shanda fur de goyim goes, a jewish name is probably enough.

i mean, jews are allegedly behind capitalism and marxism. & these days we are behind godless-liberal-hollywood as well, of course... i wonder if there are people who claim neoconservatism is an evil jewish plot. probably.

of course it doesn't mean anything. but some people get great mileage out of meaningless things.

Ah, that would explain a lot about where he's ended up. Hasn't that been one of the favored neocon tactics for the past 20 years or so? No matter how many times an assertion gets refuted, just keep bringing it up again as if it were unquestioned fact.

Also, evolution, the big bang theory, and heliocentrism.

Darn Pharisees!

To the broader issue, I don't think it's only the radical right that has put ideas into public consciousness by endless repetition; so far as I can tell this is one way that beliefs become part of the mass consciousness. And I can see there's a lot more thinking to do about that.

Anna@26 - I'm sad to hear your story. Hope your confidence is reintegrating itself. I was a target of opportunity for several months, back when the National Writers Union was worth a damn. The endless factional assault had an effect, and it takes real work on my part, every day, to undo it. Some days I succeed, some days not. Ma domani, domani e un otra giorno.

Thanks to you all. These insights about trolls and bullies and mobs are quite useful to me.

Clearly, he's getting paid more than the Pope. What for?

Enigma from Tantalus, by John Brunner

Bios, by Robert Charles Wilson

New only insofar as it takes place on the internet. Don't know about the US, but print media has done its variants of "will no one rid me of that troublesome priest" before.

Ah well. Another slip of paper in the suggestion box.

Upthread, someone asked after the fabled DAH archives. Was anyone successful in digging these up?

And when someone brings it up, I have to mention this: at one point, I and some others were going through a veritable pile of (mostly Star Trek) media tie-ins, trying to find ones worth keeping by virtue of either historical interest (here's a pre-1978 novel about how they all died!) or otherwise-important authorage (these were frequently also in the first category). His author's blurb was largely "I double the letters in my pseudonym without rhyme or reason, and I am not Peter David." I was under the impression, and remain so, that the ONLY reason to have such an "About the Author" is to convince readers that this is, in fact, a thinly veiled pseudonym for Peter David.

At the time, we thought it might well be, and put it in the "hang on to" column. What would one think of a YA fantasy author named "K. Rowl Johnson", whose blurb was, in full, "Spelling it K. Rowl Joanson is fine too, and I AM ABSOLUTELY NOT J. K. ROWLING."?

Or are there two? (checks wikipedia) Ah, there are.

Friedman is not a lucky name is it?

And, come to think of it, is it fiction when you believe your own lies? Maybe they're not doing so well with the "fiction" part either....

I've written about rightwing bloggers and I've written about guys with guns who have reputations for killing people for sport. Guess whose followers leave the death threats?

Donohue is using a technique pioneered by the Freepers and by Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs. The current instance is structureally similar to the LGF assult on the Kerry campaign for advertising on Daily Kos (which was then followed by an orgy of Internet assults on other bloggers as Johnson's "lizaroid minions" gloried in their own self importance). This sort of behavior should be covered by the RICO statutes, but law enforcement isn't up to speed and is too bewildered to know what to do about it.

The way it tends to work is that a fuss is stirred up and then the actual threats tend to be made by a very small group of individuals associated with the instigators. Those making the threats hide in the mob and because they used proxies and dynamic IP numbers, and so they are confident of their anonymity.

Secure in their virtual hoods, they threaten things they are too cowardly to actually do.

My fondest memory of Daffyd was shooting his ass in a paintball game or two. (I’m a good shot. He was leaner in those days.)

Best thing about him is that his writing screams for itself…. which is why his career–like his ability to reason–is in remission.

Well, neo-conservatism started as a movement among Jewish ex-Trotskyists. For some nutters, that would be enough to incorporate it into the evil Jewish-Catholic-Freemason-Negro-People Who Can Spell Conspiracy to Overthrow the Universe.

Also, the "proper" Welsh form of that name is Huw, and the normal Welsh form of that (fairly common) surname is Pugh. Using "ap" these days tends to be a way of staking out a political position -- one it seems unlikely Mr ap Hugh supports. One of the things that tends to irritate Europeans in general (and me in particular) about Americans claiming the nationality of their ancestors as their heritage under the same name is a tendency to forget that the place their ancestors came from has had history since they left, and is now a modern place every bit as complex as the US, and one they don't necessarily know all that much about, however influential their original immigrant ancestors may have been on their culture and upbringing.

Jo Walton, did you notice that DaH spells his name with ab, not ap?

Not necessarily. You're attributing to the Right qualities that you would be looking for in a pundit. They're not looking for brilliance. They're not looking for expertise.

e.g.: Jonah Goldberg went directly from bringing Ben Wattenberg his coffee to the very heart of the conservative enterprise.

e.g.: Newt Gingrich - third-rank history professor - is considered an intellectual giant on the right. (Newt wears that look of "I'm the smartest guy in the room" because in the rooms he frequents, he often is the smartest guy in the room.)

To qualify as a RW pundit, all that is needed is shamelessness.

Michael @ 132: You know, I swear I remember that SFRT posting. I don't remember the argument, I don't remember the rest of the content, and I only dimly remembered "Daffyd" but I remember that preface to him.

Speaking of loonies, did other Making Light posters get spammed with a "9/11 was a government conspiracy" email this morning?

I'm at a con right now, and everything they say about what happens when you haven't got enough sleep or eat at a con is true, I tell you.

OK. Off to devour a hot dog now.

While it's true that many evangelicals are pro-Israel for just this reason, I find it hard to believe that they have all that much of an effect on the US's support of Israel, which has been ongoing for decades, since before we had an a born-again Christian in the White House.

The US's political support for Israel can be explained by the fact that Israel is a liberal secular democracy in the Middle East, a region which can use all the liberal secular democracy it can get. Our military financial support for Israel mostly dates to 1973 (the Yom Kippur War), when the USSR was backing the Arabs.

That's how bullies, wife abusers, and child abusers work, and that's what these people are. They're abusers, plain and simple. Point that out, and anyone who isn't totally cowed by them or drinking their kool-aid will realize it. That's what we have to do to break their power and get some of our freedom back.

Abusers, bullies, and wife-beaters is a rather harsh characterization of a situation that might well be not nearly so clear cut as all that. One forum's freedom-fighter being another forum's malcontented control freak.

Hypothetically speaking.

You've lost me. Just what kind of "support" is the US currently giving to Israel that somehow makes the old-fashioned kind of support (which I'm pretty sure we're still giving) irrelevant?

> Hullo. I've, er, had a full night's sleep now. Would like to apologize for the unwarranted snark and presumption of my previous post[...]

Well, your snark reflected my interior state. Maybe I'm that "silent majority" Spiro Agnew used to go on about.

Enjoy the hot dog.

Sorry.

An unswerving dedication to Truthiness doesn't hurt.

Hypothetically speaking, that's a good example of the kind of tactic I was talking about: the personal attack designed to both publicly discredit and personally hurt the target, as both punishment and object lesson.

I have too much respect for our hosts to continue this here, since it has been moved from the realm of the general to the specific.

Its name… was Arthur War Lord.

And lo and behold, in Mr. Hugh's linked-to post, he references himself as the author.

I'm sorry, I can't take this man seriously anymore.

He wrote ARTHUR WAR LORD.

A book so bad, it made me realize it was okay not to finish reading books.

#136: I suspect (but I'm not sure) that the 'ab' is either a mistake or predates the standardisation of Welsh spelling in the 1950s.

#152: An unswerving dedication to Truthiness doesn't hurt.

Back in the 1970s when the world was young, and before RW pundits turned so toxic, George F. Will had a column in Newsweek condescendingly explaining what awful, pernicious, left-wing claptrap the movie The China Syndrome was; the movie was leftist garbage, because the Nuclear Industry Was In Fact Utterly Safe And Everything Was Best Left In The Wise Hands Of Our Corporate Masters.

This column was on the newsstands the morning of the Three Mile Island accident.

I was young and naive, and foolishly expected G.F. Will to either resign in embarrassment, or be fired for incompetent punditry. Of course, he was back the following week, spreading more lies.

I realized that the fact of his being proven to be 100% WRONG had in fact proven his value to his corporate masters: Will would say anything, no matter how wrong; he would say it voluntarily, and without embarrassment.

The RW hate machine has advanced considerably in the years since.

> It was Nixon who made a catchphrase of "silent majority".

Oops. In that case, put me down as a nattering nabob of negativism.

I am not quite sure what you mean by the question, but there is an SF novel by James Lovelock, Mister Gaia Hypothesis, collaborating with Michael Allaby: The Greening of Mars.

I haven't read it, but I gather it's thinly-disguised scientific speculation (as SF novels by prominent scientists often are) about terraforming Mars. It certainly involves the Gaia Hypothesis.

I am descended from a person named David Jones and a person named Shmuel Ber Zerebchefsky. Both were equally Jewish and neither was remotely Welsh, but I am sure that if they had done similarly obnoxious things, the reactions would have been instructively different.

Time to watch it, here -- this gets the dishing into the category of Seriously Insulting.

Even though it's probably all accurate and True, we really ought not go beyond the bounds of civility.

I'm Another one with a similar thought to your "Harsh" post. However, my similar opinion was also followed with the recollection that when said author has been discussed here, Xopher said several vicious (But mostly accurate) things concerning said author's politics, prejudices, and similar.

Then again, Xopher, who said "we don't talk about..." is also not the moderator, so I chose to take his remark as a slightly over-adamant request, which, aside from this discussion of the discussion, I'm content to oblige.

Urk. This is awkward; addressing this to one person means it reads like I'm talking about you, Xopher, as if you weren't part of this discussion as well. Sorry.

Except that Creationists were more often willing to concede a point (all the better for their tactics: it made them look reasonable and open-minded to the present audience, and the next audience would hear the original assertion, unmodified by the previous concession, and be none the wiser to the duplicity)

I don't think saying that someone's book is reekingly bad is uncivil. For example, Isaac Asimov, beloved of all right-thinking people (IMNAAHO) wrote a pile of textual shit called The End of Eternity, which was my first experience of reading a bad book by an author I like.

Unnamed.

Tor Books.

is not dissimilar to

Robert Jordan.

Tor Books.

My experience on the sci groups was that the worst ones would leave out the "move to the next venue" part. They'd just pop up again in the same place repeating the opening move from the previous iteration of the argument. The fresh audience would just be people who came in late.

The most disruptive cases of this were people who could actually write, and could construct an argument that sounded convincing or at least thought-provoking to a reader who had missed all the previous iterations. Part of what made it disruptive was that it made the naturally peeved reactions from other group regulars seem irrational and prejudiced. To a newbie, it seemed as if this person had come in with a provocative but seemingly closely reasoned argument and had been attacked for no reason. The only way around this that I know of is the compilation of extensive FAQs.

I tend to repeat myself as well (I've written this comment before) but I like to think that if someone completely pulls an argument apart I'll take some notice of that later on.

Where Robert Jordan comes into any of this is a puzzlement to me.

Here's the deal: Making Light is not a Tor website. Patrick and I aren't wholly owned subsidiaries of Holtzbrinck. We emphatically do not feel ourselves obliged to speak no evil of Tor/Forge/Orb/SMP/et cetera/Pan Macmillan/Holtzbrinck books, authors, or policies.

Do we disapprove of some of Orson Scott Card's political beliefs? Sure. No surprise there.

There are a couple of issues in play. One is courtesy. When your company's been an author's primary publisher for years and years, and you've worked together on multiple projects, it feels wrong to host an enthusiastic discussion of all their alleged errors, moral failings, dubious opinions, typos, suspect leanings, social gaffes, idiosyncratic turns of phrase, late deliveries, sinister acquaintances, and bad neckties. While it's true that people can and will discuss all those things, it would be more humane for that discussion to happen elsewhere.

Nevertheless, be assured that if Vernor Vinge and Greg Bear were plotting together to overthrow the government of the United States, and the only way to stop them was to reveal and denounce their pernicious scheme in Making Light, we'd be on it in a minute.

The other issue is professional discretion. There are subjects we sometimes shy away from in Making Light, not because you guys can't talk about them, but because we're somewhat hampered in our ability to join in. You can speculate and extrapolate and hypothesize to your heart's content about how punctually Weenus Abercrombie is delivering his manuscripts, the amount of editing they require, their overall sales, and why we used that cover painting on the second volume of his series. Sometimes we can talk about that stuff. Other times we can't, which usually means that we also can't explain why we can't.

If you see us hit a line and stop talking about some subject, please don't try to derive a general rule from it. Please don't assume that other people in that discussion committed a social faux pas, either. It's quite sufficiently polite to remember that along with everything else it is, SF/f is also our day job.

Personally, I don't think that such a plot could be stopped. The best we could do would be to hope that after the coup we would be allowed to live peacefully in some sort of Brave New World-style nature reserve.

I personally didn't enjoy the "there's a secret forum rule, you just stepped on it, no, you can't get in the treehouse with us unless you ask for a rope ladder via email" routine.

An author with locally unpopular views? Understood that bit, but not why it might be disabling of discussion.

Who publishes whom is pretty "inside baseball" for me, not something I would have ever thought of in this context.

Next time I will privately email the person who brought it up. In fact I can hardly believe, at this point, that I was so foolish as to post about it; it only stirred up curiosity where there would have been none had Skink's question simply gone unanswered.

Hopefully the one where Weenus Abercrombie is interned.

Teresa @173
...bad neckties.

I thought you guys had all gone smart casual over there, and that that was why I can never buy a suit when I come back!

Several years ago, the University of Rochester had been hosting a conference on 'Power', and OSC gave a talk on 'The Power of the Story-teller'. This was broadcast on a regular noon-hour show by the local public broadcasting radio station.

I thought it was an interesting talk. One of the ideas was how the stories we tell define how we see ourselves. He suggested that early in the 20th century, typical Americans viewed capitalism with suspicion. When Russian revolutionaries started describing America as a capitalistic society, we picked up on it and chose to wear it with pride (an example of how we were influenced by the stories others told of us).**

At the time, the station typically repeated the noon-hour show later in the evening. I set up to record it, but that evening the repeat was bumped for one of the Bush/Dukakis debates (placing this patch of memory in 1988).

I figured if I made a project out of it, I should be able to find a tape of that talk, or at least a transcript; but I never got around to it.

In another context, a few summers ago I bicycled out from Rochester to watch the Hill Cumorah pagent in Palmyra (a free event, which gave me an excuse for a moderately ambitious ride in warm weather). I had heard that OSC had written the current version of the play. Talking with one of the players who struck up a conversation after the play, I found the play used to be six hours long(!); OSC's re-write brought it down to a lean(er) three hours. I have to assume this has made both performers and audiences happier, and in a small way reduced suffering in the world. To be honest, I had difficulty following the story, but I'd attribute that to lacking the background (IANA Mormon).

* I thought a couple of happy stories might reduce the sense that he was an equivalent to "He Who Must Not Be Named". Both of these notions had been tied to his name in my head for some time now.

** The Russian revolutionaries seemed to have had luck or skill with this sort of verbal judo. They named themselves Bolsheviks, meaning 'majority', before they could legitimately make that claim. Their opposition obligingly adopted the name Mensheviks, meaning 'minority' (talk about letting your opponents frame the debate!)

Rob 182: Please stop now. I'm asking nicely and saying please.

Daniel 183: Apology accepted. *uses The Force to crush Daniel's trachea* No, seriously, that's OK. I know how it can feel like people are saying things that you know intellectually they can't possibly mean; witness my posts around Valentine's Day, when I pointed out that I know the happily encoupled are trying to share their joy, but that it feels like they're gloating.

Personally, I don't think that such a plot could be stopped. The best we could do would be to hope that after the coup we would be allowed to live peacefully in some sort of Brave New World-style nature reserve.

We've got a chance unless and until Vonda McIntyre steps in. If she does, we're in the nature reserve so quickly and smoothly we won't even know it happened.

Come to think of it, "we'd be on it in a minute" isn't exactly unambiguous either.

And I, for one, welcome our new SF author overlords.

As long as they get along with the pandas.

Teresa, I appreciate your attempt to defend him, but truly, you don't have to tell me who or what Xopher is. (Lord, that still sounds snarky and I'm trying not to because I don't feel snarky... please read in friendly tone.)

He's a regular, he's invaluable, and I suspect he's done as much to keep the comment threads going smoothly as anyone who doesn't have actual posting rights can.

I do, however, find a gulf between his usual kindly explaining the ropes to newbies and a flat "We don't talk about that."

I mentioned Robert Jordan because I've seen Patrick politely ask people not to get into Jordan bashing, and especially into unwarranted speculations about the publishing side of his books, in much the same way. It was an example of the same "be courteous" Xopher was trying to convey, but with a person who decidedly lacks the dark overtones of OSC's politics; from what I understand, Jordan is a gentleman. Thus the emphasis was not on weird politics but on, "be nice to the hosts and don't talk about things they'd rather not participate in".

Xopher: Actually, I think if you'd put a short explanation in with your first "we don't talk about that", or shortly after when someone asked "Why?", you'd have saved yourself and Teresa more than attempting to turn it to e-mail would have. The second actually made it look even more like there was some Deep Secret behind it, not a simple courtesy.

I could see you were trying your best not to make it seem so, but the moment you say "Look, I'll explain it... elsewhere..." in front of a crowd, speculation happens. We're bad about that, we human beings.

For that matter, I'm sure that if Mr. ab Hugh should ever decide to submit a manuscript to Tor, that he would get the same respectful consideration any other author would.

Was that the one with the dinosaurs and you-know-what? Or was it the incident after we ate the Pygmy Mammoth with Jumbo Shrimp and Big Snorgul got a little wild and ... never mind.

I wonder what happened to whatshisname to make him turn out that way. Very, very sad.

Bruce, I have bad news. It happened last week. We all agreed not to tell you at the time because it would only worry you.

Reuben: Look, we all go way back and uh, I owe you from the thing with the guy in the place and I'll never forget it.
Danny: That was our pleasure.
Rusty: I'd never been to Belize.

-- Ocean's 11

Randolph @ 120 - I'd say it's a new version of an old crime: incitement to cause civil unrest. Or in other words, he's deliberately stirring up a mob. The reason he's getting away with it is because they're not carrying the torches, pitchforks, nooses and placards down the main street of whichever town they're in. Instead, they're writing nasty letters to someone they'll never meet in person (and who is therefore no realer to them as a person than the silhouette people shoot at in a pistol range) and they're safe from reprisals because it's "just words".

I've spent a lot of my life dealing with the proposition that "words can't hurt you". Twelve years of verbal bullying at school; a manager who was very adept at using words to destroy a person's psychological stability; and an internet stalker (he was trying to stop me posting on a particular moderated newsgroup. So each time I posted something, he'd send me an abusive email. The worst of them was over 1500 lines of the same insult repeated over and over and over); I figure I've enough data to reach my own conclusion. My conclusion is the whole thing is so much horse elbows.

The "it's just words" business is a lousy excuse for writing off offensive behaviour. There are a lot of other things which are "just words" - things like Magna Carta, the US Declaration of Independence, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Q'ran, and the legal codices of every single nation on the planet. All of those are "just words" too. Should we give them equal weight with the words of a bully and a coward who acts as part of a mob to verbally assault someone? The words in those documents were written (and often spoken) with as deliberate an intent, and the things they say were just as heartfelt by their writers as the things written by the writer of an anonymous hate email.

We live in a culture where the words of others are *meant* to have an effect upon us, and we can't discard that effect at will. Words which are chosen to hurt generally *do* hurt. They're supposed to.

After one hundred years of psychoanalysis as a discipline, you'd think our judicial systems would be moving beyond the physical bruise as evidence of assault...

(I would have cross-posted it at my site, as well, but the Blogger server is down.)

I very vaguely remember a DAH novel with some rather squicky sex between a warrior woman and her recently deceased gentleman friend...hmm, maybe it's time to scour my shelves if it's still there. Or at least my brain.

I made the effort to read the comments at big lizards (I couldn't get through the incredible generalisations of the post; being told what I believe; because "all liberals" are this way, when "conservaives" are allowed to be individuals always irks me. I at least try to narrow my sweeping claims to smaller subsets.

The one that got me was the guy who blames Clinton for "stopping the Gov't" for two years. See it was all Bill's fault, because he was having affairs with fellow employees on company time (so it was legit to want to fire him), but the War in Iraq isn't worse than that because Bush was doing his job (not goofing off) as best he could.

So it's just a poor result from a business deal.

Now me, if a guy is having an affair with a fellow employee (which isn't how I would categorize the relationship... there's a big difference between the two, even if taxpayers were paying them both) and someone who does great damage to the company, ruins the brand and runs up huge debts; all while showing no profit.

I know which of those two I'd fire.

nk, if this is your idea of vitriol, I'd avoid Glenn Reynolds, Hugh Hewitt, M. Malkin and Ann Coulter.

Don't even think about looking at LGF.

WTF is all that about?

Huh?

Hunh. I wonder if this man is simply deaf to verbal abuse. I've known people like that, especially from families in which viciousness was the norm. They grow up used to arguments where the volume is set to 8 or 9 and figure that if they're down at 5 or 6 they're doing pretty well, even if everyone around them covers their ears, whenever they speak

Kathryn@131--"Secure in their virtual hoods, they threaten things they are too cowardly to actually do." Some of them are capable of real violence as well--may in fact be RL criminals. We need the equivalent, I think, of net.cops on the beat; to treat threats of violence as the crime they in fact are. Simply responding to documented reports of threats would be worth the trouble.

Meg@198--"incitement to cause civil unrest. Or in other words, he's deliberately stirring up a mob." Different, I think. He's stirring up a mob, and hoping, within the mob, to find the few individuals willing to act on their own. This is new. Better tracking of those individuals seems appropriate and I think also "trolling" for them is itself an act deserving of criminal status. I am dubious of outlawing any speech, beyond stalking and threats of violence.

Now that right-wing pundits are generally recognized as a pack of liars, mendacious twits with no expertise in anything, he's joined them. It's a bad case of arriving late at the dance. If he hadn't worn out my patience over a decade ago, I'd pity him.

I started to get lost after a couple of page-downs.

Blogging has a lot in common with newspaper journalism, especially in the need for clarity--one story at a time, please. From what I see these days, I don't think many contemporary journalists know how to write well, but at least the system stops them from rambling.

"DePaulo once conducted a study in which she asked people to recall the worst lie they had ever told and the worst lie ever told to them. In a reflection of how much our perceptions of lying depend on our particular points of view, the psychologist found that many young people reported that the worst lie ever told to them was by a parent who concealed news that someone they loved was sick or dying. By contrast, DePaulo found, parents never thought of such deceptions as particularly serious ethical breaches -- in fact, they saw them as acts of love."

Always has been. This is, after all, Scouter the Elf -- his previous pretentious nom de fan -- we're talking about. Making messes is all he's ever been good at ("Ooooh, hey, what's this? It's really cool!" *crash* "Er, sorry, Dave.") and he takes a sort of pugnacious, infantile joy in it, not unlike toddler playing with the contents of his well-filled diaper. I think he'd like to be good at something more valuable, but being good at making messes is what consistently got him attention, so it's what he does.

What is monumentally bizarre to me in all this is the way all the great irritating doof fanbois of LASFS past are turning into right wing pundits. First Eugene Volokh, and now Scouter. Er, Daffy. I mean Daffyd. Maybe someone will resurrect Laney next.

It's worse than that--he was, once.

Another one seduced by the dark side...

I'm sort of wondering why you're a self-described "fan" - would you care to elaborate?

I only ran across Daffyd relatively recently -- in the past couple of years, over on SFF.net -- but yes, he strikes me as the specific subtype of conservative who emulated a sea anemone by switching from a smart free-swimming phase to an anchored phase, and digesting their brain at the same time, in the wake of 9/11. It'd be kind of sad if they weren't so poisonous with it. In D's case, I suspect he was looking for a cause to latch onto and an alien to demonize.

So I think we're catching the brunt of his peculiar pathology because he's found a way to make money from it rather than keeping it to himself.

Which leads me to ask: if for every one with a paid-for column there are a million without ... what does that tell us?

Best marine biology political metaphor EVAR. Even though I think you're thinking of the urochordates (sea squirts). The cnidaria tend to have alternation of generations - fixed polyps give birth to free-swimming forms, which give birth to polyps again. Each generation rebels against its parents.

Rather like Chris Hitchens, no? Only he changed causes...

"if for every one with a paid-for column there are a million without ... what does that tell us?"

I don't think there are; publishing is a part of the story. Paranoids seem drive to talk about it for some reason...are we looking at the consequences of alienation here?

The only one I can think of offhand that survived in both versions is 'ap/ab Rhys', which became variously Bryce or Price, and a few other spellings.

Referencing something a bit further upthread - it took me at least five minutes to get the reference in 'Dafydd Uck', until I worked out that he obviously wasn't pronouncing it right.

Charlie: I honestly don't think there are a million would-be pundits for every one who breaks into the circuit like Dafydd. I think it's a fairly rare combination of traits, and that many of those who suffer from it end up serving one machine or another.

Thank you, but I would be considered a troll here.

I like Dafydd's brand of conservative Liberalism even though I disagree with him on some issues such as same-sex marriage. We agree most strongly on national defense issues.

As for his work, it is for younger people than me. I am more comfortable with, for example, Roger Zelazny, Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, John Myers Myers and Glen Cook.

Thank you again for the kind words but my commenting here would be noncupatory.

Yes, he has a green card on file. I think he dropped out of active membership when he got into college and went conservative.

Yep, dead serious. As did his younger brother, a few times. This would have been around the mid-late '80s or possibly the very early '90s (i.e. well after your brother stopped attending) and he went both to meetings and aftermeetings. Unlike PJ, I don't recall Eugene ever not having been conservative, however, even back when he was a code-writing prodigy and skill-gimick rally geek.

If so, it was before or betwixt when I knew him, and I've known Scouter for a very long damn' time, though I do try to keep contact at a minimum.

So far you haven't been. You might inspire disagreement, but so far as I know, courteous disagreement is perfectly all right. Generally, the places I've seen Teresa draw the line are at verbal abuse and outright hate speech: openly expressed bigotry and the like.

Now me, maybe I'm a troll.

If the criterion for not being political is not being as noticeable or loud about it as Jerry, then there ain't none of us is political. If you listened to what Eugene said at aftermeetings, he had strong and vocal right/libertarian political opinions all along, and was quite happy to argue for them. Many of them were quite evidently the result of being a young emigre from a socialist country -- a syndrome I recognized from my own experience.

(Not that Sweden and the Soviet Union are really comparable, but then Eugene and I have emerged from our youthful libertarianism in opposite directions.)

They are both quite political, and always were, it's why Eugene applied to the clerkships he got (a very conservative judge in Pasadena, and O'Connor).

Sasha took a job, for quite some time, as a writer for Reason. Speaking with them on social issues... well it's what put me of "L"ibertarianism, because the tenor of it seems to be, laissez-faire uber alles, and if that means oppressing people, well that's fair... but if you want to do something which interferes (no matter how laissez-faire it is) with my ability to oppress them/exploit my position of power... you need to be crushed.

It's interesting that they both got the "traditional" "White Russian" education (tri-lingual, English, French, Russian, segregated from the larger community; in private schools). Eugene was (IIRC) four when they left Kiev, I'd have to do the math to say for sure about Sasha.

Both of them can be wonderful to spend time with, and reasonable, and persuasive; but ruthless in how they apply their ideals. Abstract ideas trump the ugly facts on the ground. It's how Eugenes seems to have come to his views on the merits of public torture.

Well, perhaps it also explains why I have no face to attach to your name. We were clearly attending LASFS in the same timeframe, but from fairly early on, I tended to avoid the meetings themselves in favor of aftermeetings.

Now that information is essentially free, the remaining bottleneck is our attention: your answer left me still curious as to why someone would spend their finite time seeking information from DaH.

I really have no idea what 'conservative Liberalism' might be. If you'd care to explain your take on what that means, I'd be interested.

Ulrika, I saw some good things in Daffyd's books; they weren't good books, but I saw something there. Lost now, I guess.

I actually made it to the end of that blog entry, though skimming was required in spots; as it happens it is possible to summarize most of the relevant content by quoting one sentence from the second-to-last paragraph:

I refuse to understand why I cannot like -- or at least be pleasant to -- someone I disagree with.

Yep. That would be the problem.

Both entries taken from the Jack Vance Lexicon by Dan Temianka (via, which has a whole discussion thread on it.)

* He's one of mine too, which is how I know this, of course.

Just for the record, "troll" does not mean "somebody who disagrees with the majority opinion." It means "somebody who visits a message board with the intention of starting fights and causing trouble."

...and here we have, "Paul Rhoads has quoted Jack Vance as claiming that 'noncupatory' was his own invention."

I have no face to attach to your name, and I must scre%^$#@% AD$#@&*
+++
NO CARRIER

ROFLMAO

It is nonetheless the case that many trolls are incapable of making the distinction, and so believe that troll means "somebody who disagrees with the majority opinion."

It is nonetheless the case that many trolls are incapable of making the distinction, and so believe that troll means "somebody who disagrees with the majority opinion."

The question of whether or not trolls can recognize their own trollishness is certainly an interesting one. I thought about that.

My final verdict was that it doesn't, in fact, matter if they honestly can't tell that what they're doing is trolling. It's still a problem.

Also, just because a troll says "You only consider me a troll because I'm disagreeing with the majority" doesn't mean that they actually believe it.

I think that every Ameican home should have at least one full-auto weapon. But, nevertheless, I think that hunting prarie dogs with a 5.56mm assault rifle is just plain looney.

Maybe this will make room on Outdoor Life Channel (which must be up in the mid 300's somewhere) for a show about hunting with assault rifles.

Squirrel!
RAT-A-TAT-TAT-TAT-TATplinkplink
No more squirrel!

That wouldn't leave much deer, would it? (Any that survive would, I'd think, move elsewhere.)

Come to think of it, that's the same results I'd expect from hunting prairie dogs with an assault rifle.

Military surplus howitzer & ammo: $6,500.

Introducing pumpkin to howitzer: priceless.

Also, the .223 in a barrel of the correct twist is a wonderfully accurate cartridge. Therefore its attraction for serious shooters including varmint hunters. And it follows that since it's our military issue cartridge most rifles chambering it will be military-styled rifles.

http://messages.yahoo.co.jp/bbs?.mm=NW&action=m&board=552019567&tid=bpa5a4a5ia5afipno9tbbh&sid=552019567&mid=1&type=date&first=1
http://messages.yahoo.co.jp/bbs?.mm=NW&action=l&board=1143582&tid=a5a4a59a5ia5a8a5ka1bfa5qa5la59a5aa5jobjbf&sid=1143582&mid=13218

their username is

physics4dummys
oxnardnokakashi

(I suspect they got more usernames to create their fake conversation.)

their web site is introduced in the profile .
http://profiles.yahoo.co.jp/oxnardnokakashi

they used to use “oxnardnokakashi” a lot but once Japanese found out who they are, “physics4dummys” is used more frequently.

“Every Lie” they presents in Japanese BBS can counter aruge by normal references. and Dafydds and Sachiko just keep on ingoring those facts and call everyone “Jihadist” who represents article that contradicts with their lies.

This couple (Dafydds and his Japanese wife Sachiko) is nothing but psycho who lives in a fantasy world.

SFRT days...I can't recall the number of times he ruined a conversation I was interested in over there...he and a couple of others insured that I spent most of my time on the HWA private area rather than the SFRT - now he's a commentator...that's just ...surreal.

He used to get really mad when I called him Daffy.

D

He booted Dafydd from his own topic and Dafydd howled "UNFAIR! BAD! MEAN! PICKING ON MEEEE!" Nic watched in great amusement the only time I ever posted more than one line at GeNie; it was after the so-called election in 2000. I got into "good lord, who is this moron?" mode and reduced Dafydd to stuttering rage. 'twas fun.

It would appear he's still a moron. Colour me unsurprised.