76 Responses so far

1. 1. Michael Canfield on Jul 11th, 2008 at 12:56 am

   Yep all the usual emotion-inciting barbs are there: you’re a feminazi, a socialist, a PC, a pedophile-supporter, a cat-loving tea drinker. It’s a cheap bag of tricks to depend on in an argument, but when one doesn’t have any other defense ad homonym is the way to go. Witness Ann Coulter, and Michelle Malkin.

2. 2. Greg van Eekhout on Jul 11th, 2008 at 1:27 am

   I’m finding the defense of Sanders’ bigotry and the associated idiocy and ugliness very useful. It makes it easy to figure out with whom I’ll want no personal or professional contact.

3. 3. Samuel Tinianow on Jul 11th, 2008 at 1:36 am

   I don’t know how anyone can be surprised at this behavior. We live in a country that’s literally ruled by it; if there’s one thing this whole debacle has proved it’s that people are just as prejudiced now as they were before the largely superficial progress of the civil rights movement. The fact that it’s mostly just discussed behind closed doors, with people who agree while insisting publicly that they don’t (except by a small, tenacious elite like our Mr. Truesdale), just makes it that much more impossible to crack. And people wonder why my generation has defeatist attitudes about America.

4. 4. Tlönista on Jul 11th, 2008 at 3:40 am

   Thank you. I just went over there from Making Light and…wow. That themasterknitter person is a real piece of work, to say nothing of the others. But I’m glad that forum isn’t representative of how people are responding.

5. 5. Paul Raven on Jul 11th, 2008 at 4:46 am

   What bothers me most is the pragmatic two-facedness of these people. ‘themasterknitter’ has been hanging out at the TTA Press forums under a different handle since Interzone published a story by him, but for some reason he doesn’t feel the same need to crank out the same bigotry there. Which strengthens my assumption that almost all his ire is directed at people who have rejected his fiction, and that all the communo-leftist feminazi crap is delusional self-justification.

   The really sad thing is that the hatemongers on the Asimov’s forums appear to be, if not an outright minority, fairly small in number. But there, just as in much of the real world, they’re the ones who shout the loudest, as if drowning out the sound of reason will make logic dissolve. I tend to avoid the place completely; I’m never particularly fond of hanging out in places that make me feel ashamed to be human.

6. 6. bellatrys on Jul 11th, 2008 at 5:36 am

   This IS David Truesdale, remember: I didn’t know the guy from Adam (or Steve) a few years ago, until I accidentally read one of his rants at the F&SF website – and isn’t it interesting that they never put those into the print edition??? – after which I didn’t know whether to laugh at someone who was such a walking, typing stereotype of a Rush Limbutt listener, or cry that such a jerk got paid by the genre to publish this tripe. (Seriously, he makes the RL Rush listeners I’ve been forced to work for/with over the years seem mild and moderate and sensible-centrist.) There was so much gunk there I didn’t even feel up to pulling a World O’Crap “Shorter Wingnut” on it, so in the end I just bookmarked it against such time as I should have more fortitude and nothing else to post about, crying “Monsters! Monsters from the Id!” and forgot about him until K Tempest mentioned his name yesterday.

   After that, I googled and found a collection of his past offenses here, including rants about how SF is ruint as a genre because it’s Just Too Gay – I want to know where he’s reading all these Effete Metrosexual Skiffy stories, because that sounds like what I’ve been looking for in the welter of reactionary pseudo-retro he-manly chest-thumpers – as well as just too full of icky icky girl cooties. He’s got about as much self-awareness as, oh, Bill Bennett, or Pat Buchanan – both of whom a) insist that they’re not racist (just ‘realist’) and b) have their defenders making the same claims for them, sans evidence.

   Now, that’s where the problem in fandom comes in – DT isn’t a Joseph Askew (notorious headcase in old rec.arts.sf-written days) ranting away from his little desk, like the crazy guy on the streetcorner, he has a gang of professional defenders who will defend his sexist ravings and pay for them and denounce his opponents.

   And I *strongly* suspect that DT is going after Tempest because he (imo wrongly) perceives her to be the weakest target, just like any predator or social dominator always will: because he can appeal to the shared stereotype set of the in-group, OMG an Angry Black Woman! Make her go away, she’s Not One Of Us and doesn’t belong here! reactions instead of actually, you know, looking at what *Truesdale’s* said and what’s wrong with it…

7. 7. Delux on Jul 11th, 2008 at 5:43 am

   I find it amusing (and by amusing I mean sadly typical) that these people are engaging in the same sort of identification with being victimized and general paranoia that they accuse everyone else of doing.

   Projection much?

8. 8. Catherine Shaffer on Jul 11th, 2008 at 7:07 am

   (reposting a misdirected comment here)

   OMG. I am shocked to the core. This scandal is really rocking my worldview. How can we support Tempest, who seems to be taking the brunt of these disgusting attacks? What positive things can we do to affirm the goodness of 99% of science fiction writers, and, I think, people in general?

9. 9. Kathy Sedia on Jul 11th, 2008 at 7:45 am

   “PC Nazi” — because criticizing bigotry against ethnic groups is just like killing millions of people based on their ethnic group. Gotcha.

10. 10. Nick Mamatas on Jul 11th, 2008 at 8:37 am

    Oh Toby, you and your all-Negro lynchmob just hate America, don’t you all

11. 11. Steve Buchheit on Jul 11th, 2008 at 9:07 am

    Started reading some of that last night (but had too much work to read through it all) and just found my head shaking, not just from the blatant crap being flung, but also from the “the letter was Sanders copyright, you can’t post it” from people that should know how it is legal to use copyrighted materials under fair use. Granted, posting the whole letter was out, but IIRC, the original post was just a few lines.

    I’ve also had those moments where I’ve tossed off a causal comment, not thinking the phrase all the way through; only afterward to think, “You know, that was really asshat of me, I should watch out for it later.” I guess that’s the difference between someone cognizant of the outside world and those locked in their own psychosis.

12. 12. Mark Terry on Jul 11th, 2008 at 9:26 am

    Most of the time I think the world is a moderately tolerant place, then I get outside my own circle of acquaintances and am reminded yet again that I tend to live in a bubble.

    I’m also reminded, yet again, that many people say things on the Internet–an essentially public forum–that they might not say in a face-to-face forum. Sometimes I think the Internet would be a lot better place if pseudonyms and anonymous posts were banned.

13. 13. bellatrys on Jul 11th, 2008 at 10:04 am

    Mark, I don’t notice that Sanders has been notably better behaved for acting under his own name, all these many years.

    I take offense at your statement, in fact, offered as it is sans evidence beyond your personal feelings, since blogging under one’s own name is a luxury that not all of us – particularly those of us who are stuck working for reactionary rightwing bigots – can afford.

14. 14. bellatrys on Jul 11th, 2008 at 10:12 am

    Sometimes I think the Internet would be a lot better place if pseudonyms and anonymous posts were banned.

    See also: Joseph Askew, Adam Yoshida, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Pat Buchanan, David Truesdale, Dr. Mary Grabar, Dr. Alan Keyes, Dr. Mike Adams, every single poster / columnist at Town Hall and Renew America and World News Daily…

    (against which I give you, okay, Vox Day, who was sort of quasi-pseudonymous, but who hasn’t slowed down the vile crazy one bit since his real name and association with WND became widely known.)

15. 15. Deb on Jul 11th, 2008 at 10:28 am

    Thanks, Toby, for saying all of this so clearly and so well.

    It’s a constant job to point this stuff out and to watch for it in one’s self. It’s tiring and frustrating and maddening. And that’s one reason it’s so persistent–because everyone just gets tired. So, you’re right it’s really important to keep on seeing it and saying it and helping others see it too.

16. 16. S. F. Murphy on Jul 11th, 2008 at 11:01 am

    Paul, for the record, I’ve always contained my more abrasive aspects at Asimov’s. The main reason is that Andy and Interzone really do not need this grief. And I don’t see any real reason to go over there and use the same tactics.

    BUT, if something like this came up at IZ, I’d probably be there in short order.

    So never count civility in one place as two faced behavior. I’m capable of both at need.

    Tempest is taking fire because she accused Gardner of racism and then retracted it ONLY because people like me said, “What the fuck?” Apparently she didn’t know Shelia said essentially the same thing about the reject letters before Gardner did.

    editor comment: actually, now that the comments link has pointed out, her own friends in her comment section indicated they felt uncomfortable with it, and Tempest backed down.

    You have yet to show the same level of class.

    Since Shelia’s a female, I guess she gets an exemption.

    Now, I really don’t give a shit if I am held in high regard by most of you. Really don’t. But Tempest taking a shot at Gardner Dozois was way over the fucking line. She basically implied he was a racist, something which has absolutely zero basis in fact.

    You all want to chase after Sanders, fine. Using sheet head probably wasn’t smart (precisely because the PC Nazi brigade is always on five second standby as evidenced by just this entry) but I’d argue (as someone who has been to that God Forsaken Part of the Planet) that there is some validity to question a religion where it is perfectly acceptable to screw nine year olds, chuck planes at skyscrapers and strap on explosives to blow up pizza parlors.

    editor: Again, because speaking up against epithets is morally equivelant to killing millions of Jews. Your use of the word PC Nazi brigade doesn’t magically make the issue at hand go away.

    I’ve not heard an apology out of Tempest for attacking Gardner, whose only crime was to say it wasn’t right to post the reject. She goes on further to say he is old guard SF and apparently has a problem with technology.

    Which makes me wonder how she got to that point, since Gardner was the one who bought the work of Charles Stross, hardly a luddite.

    And none of you have taken her to task for attacking a prominent editor with such a baseless accusation.

    So, do I use the term PC Nazi. You betcha. As for the quota bit, there is one. Everytime somone loses their mind over the gender stats in a TOC it is carte blanche arguing for a quota.

    they argue for awareness. You’re so blind with rage and hate you can’t even wrap your head around the fact that women and minorities are allowed to speak up now. Any speaking up is to hit down like a whack-a-mole

    If the shoe fits.

    Finally, yes, there are many of you here in the open saying, “Well, those people like Dave and Murph must be few in number.”

    We are not.

    I’d keep that in mind.

    And you end on a threat. Wow, yeah, so we’re *minorities* you’re saying. Are you suggesting we get back in our places.

    You’re a racist little shit. You’re the second person banned from my website. You’re out.

17. 17. Steven Harper Piziks on Jul 11th, 2008 at 11:13 am

    Asimov’s forum seems to be an aberration. Everywhere else I’ve been reading about this, the comments are turning against Sanders.

18. 18. Eric Honaker on Jul 11th, 2008 at 11:47 am

    I have not been following this at all. The behavior of the forum members is beyond the pale regardless of how it started.

    I am curious, though. Was the pejorative used in character voice, or authorial voice? Because sometimes one wants to use bigoted characters. Makes them easier to dislike.

19. 19. Craig on Jul 11th, 2008 at 11:56 am

    Have any of those people defending Sanders actually said anything about the racist term being used? Because, unless there is a highly visible disclaimer of some kind, it sounds like they’re approving the use of a racial epiphet in a professional capacity.

    Here’s another thing: these people might be really talented writers with really awful worldviews/behaviors/ideas. And there is some leeway with tolerating an author’s biases — i.e. Salinger’s homophobia, Pound’s fascism, Lovecraft’s racism. But that leeway doesn’t really apply to small time authors. Do they really not want people of color or women or gay people not to read their fiction or criticism?

20. 20. Luke Jackson on Jul 11th, 2008 at 12:27 pm

    To be perfectly honest, my Muslim extremist was to a large degree BASED ON those very zealots in the Asimov’s Political/Religious Discussion, as well as religious right extremists in my own extended family.

21. 21. Mark Terry on Jul 11th, 2008 at 12:46 pm

    I take offense at your statement, in fact, offered as it is sans evidence beyond your personal feelings…

    Bellatrys… no offense intended.

22. 22. Hannah Wolf Bowen on Jul 11th, 2008 at 2:39 pm

    I wish I had a hat, Toby, so I could take it off.

    Thank you.

23. 23. Tempest on Jul 11th, 2008 at 2:59 pm

    People like you are the reason why I don’t just unplug the internet and live life as a Buddhist nun.

24. 24. Rob Davies on Jul 11th, 2008 at 3:33 pm

    Thanks for posting this, Tobias.

25. 25. E Thomas on Jul 11th, 2008 at 3:40 pm

    I normally don’t post on controversial issues like this one, but I am going to speak for Sheila Williams, Gardner Dozois, and all of the wonderful people I have interacted with on the Asimov’s forum who are in places getting lumped together as though we are all the same person.

    First of all (in response to recent posts on Tempest’s journal)–Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams are excellent, professional people who are kind and professional to everyone. I would never write anything in correspondence with a magazine editor that I would be embarrassed to see in print, and I’m sure neither Gardner Dozois or Sheila Williams would write anything to their authors that they would be embarrassed to see in print. However, I would still expect correspondence to be private. It’s common sense and common courtesy. They don’t deserve insinuations that this professional behavior indicates they have something to hide, even if someone is just using this to try to draw attention to the issue of prejudice in the SF field. It is harmful, because a lot of people who haven’t interacted with them might assume something erroneously bad about the editors from posts, when all they were doing was trying to clarify a specific legal question. Both of these editors are people who try to encourage people to submit to them, and instead these insinuations might make some authors feel unwelcome to submit to Asimov’s (in Williams’ case) or any original anthologies (in Gardner Dozois’s case). This would be doing both of the editors, the authors, and the SF field in general, a disservice.

    I think some things are being taken out of context, which is I guess what happens when blogs do this kind of linking to forum threads.

    The first thing is that the person who wrote the original thread on the Asimov’s forum, S.F. Murphy aka themasterknitter, was the one who framed the thread to be about posting rejection letters in public. Murphy has a long history with the forum. In the last year, he has created a vendetta in his mind against _Asimov’s_, so his posts on the forum have become more and more incendiary and bizarre, I’m afraid to say. The title, the first post, everything in the thread, was framed in the manner that it was about the rejection letter being published online. He was also using it as an excuse to simultaneously attack Luke (the writer who posted the rejection letter) since he disagrees with Luke’s politics and doesn’t get along with him AND to blast a group that he sees as an overly PC people who attack editors. He hates Tempest from previous interactions and so that is why he has picked on her out of all of the responses to focus on. In an earlier thread about the Strahan anthology, he pushed Dave Truesdale’s political buttons which got Truesdale going on Tempest in the previous thread, which easily migrated to this new thread. This is a poster who has burned almost all his bridges on the forum, and he wants to burn all of them. As almost the entire forum either is at odds with him or in a position of scratching their heads/pitying the path he has chosen, I don’t think it would be fair to say he represents the forum.

    Secondly, the thread was also published for quite some time in the section of the forum that is *NOT* the Political/Religious section. Most regular posters on the forum were responding to the original topic as forum rules dictate, avoiding the political issue and responding only to the copyright issue for that reason. As a regular poster, I actually expected there to be another topic created in the Political Section regarding the actual content of the letter. (Of course, what eventually happened was the original thread inevitably became political and was moved to that section.) Both Williams and, afterwards, Dozois were responding within that capacity to specific questions that writers were asking about the legality of posting rejection letters. They were trying to help and encourage new writers in the field. Nothing sinister should be seen in that.

    Another thing to keep in mind is that there are a number of us on the forum who try to purposefully avoid the Political/Religious section of the forum and also any threads that are going to end up with people flaming, cursing, insulting, or otherwise talking crazy at each other. I could see how to an outsider that silence in certain threads on the forum might seem to be acceptance, but over the years many of us have discovered that responding merely feeds certain posters’ hatred and delusions and causes them to post it more. There are also a number of posters who will not respond to specific posters AT ALL any more, so even if one of those posters is on a thread, they might ignore offensive posts or posts that they disagree with. I am starting to move in that direction with some posters. Are we creating a dangerous culture of silence? Perhaps unintentionally we are, and perhaps we need to be aware of it. But on the other hand, regulars on the forum KNOW that lack of response from some of our most respected posters is often a message–it means that those respected posters don’t think the post *deserves* a measured response. Alternately, in some cases it might mean that posters are willing to discuss books and favorite foods online on the forum, but they will avoid at all costs threads and topics that they know will become flame wars.

    I’m going to be crossposting this on Tempest’s and Tobias Buckell’s blog in the comments section (assuming it is approved).

26. 26. Tobias Buckell on Jul 11th, 2008 at 3:55 pm

    E. I’m sorry to hear that the forum has become dominated by a couple of loud, hate-filled people. I’ll add a portion of your comment to the original post, and thank you for writing it.

27. 27. E Thomas on Jul 11th, 2008 at 4:15 pm

    I wrote this as kind of a blanket response, but I did want to mention that I appreciate your thoughtful post and the fact that people care so passionately about this.

28. 28. John-Mark on Jul 11th, 2008 at 4:39 pm

    Hello, I’m a first-time poster here.

    Even though I left the Asimov’s Forum after only 8 months of posting there, I would simply like to reiterate what E Thomas said; there are a lot of good people there, such as Gardner, Sheila, Tom Purdom, Ted Kosmatka, Berry Hendersen, Clint Harris (whom you quoted in this entry), Bill Moonroe, William Preston, Marguerite Reed, Sam Hidaka, Marian Powell, Sarah Edwards, and a few others.

    These people made me feel welcome the entire time I was there at the forum, and a few of them even became LJ buddies of mine who have helped and encouraged me in these extremely early stages of my writing career.

    Ultimately, however, because of a small few, I decided that the Asimov’s Forum — such as it is — is simply too toxic a place for me to continue there any longer. It caused an intense amount of guilt and regret for me when I even allowed myself to say things, in the heat of anger, that I still feel intense remorse about. When that happened, I had to go, for my mental health at least — even with all of the good people there, I made a decision to discontinue my participation there.

    I would say (as I tried to say while I was at the Asimov’s Forum) that the problem is not that people aren’t allowed to express themselves. Quite the contrary, there are a wide variety of opinions there, as anyone can clearly see. The problem is this: there is an extremely lax attitude towards members who verbally abuse one another, repeatedly.

    Usually (or at least I always thought), forums have certain policies in place where members are told they can freely express their views, but to do so respectfully and not to verbally abuse or insult one another. The Asimov’s Forum seems to have little to no policy — and what little it does is not enforced adequately — towards members who are allowed to run rampant in their abuse of fellow members.

    When I was there, I felt almost completely alone in this regard, as if it was “every man (and woman) for themselves” — as if no one cared and it wasn’t really a community at all.

    Indeed, every forum will have problems with people who are abusive, no matter what kind of policy you put in place; but at least something could be done or tried.

    Even with the wealth of knowledge and insights from people like Gardner and Mr. Purdom, my feelings towards that place are still quite bitter, and I really can’t see myself every returning. Until there is some serious measures taken towards the repeated abusers, who have no respect for fellow members, I’ll never go back.

    Anyway, I just thought I would add my little opinion. Thanks.

29. 29. John-Mark on Jul 11th, 2008 at 6:02 pm

    I just wanted to make a correction to my above post:

    I made an error in the spelling of one the names I mentioned in my post.

    Berry Henderson. (With an ‘O’ — not an ‘E’)

    I apologize to him for that.

30. 30. Bill Preston on Jul 11th, 2008 at 6:29 pm

    Thanks for your thoughtful post, sir.

    It was at my blog that Luke Jackson first posted Mr. Sanders’s e-mail; I immediately questioned the language; someone else browsing the site took notice and . . . this, with some jump-cuts, brings us to the present. My own responses to all of this as it developed have appeared in various places and are of no more consequence than anyone else’s.

    The Asimov’s forum is something of a puzzle. As people who’ve been there longer point out, there’s always been a remarkable amount of license in the public speech. Whether that has attracted certain personalities or merely pushed people to be their worst selves, I can’t say. (I believe, with Dorothy Day, that “we need to make a world in which it is easier for people to be good.” The way that site has been run hasn’t encouraged such human goodness.)

    The people there who are fighting what might be painted as the “other side” of this discussion shouldn’t be seen uniformly, and I doubt the term “bigot” applies as broadly as it might seem. At least one poster is simply argumentative and contrarian; another, in my view, speaks and misspeaks from a position of fear; one, as I think is pretty obvious, probably suffers from a narcissistic personality disorder. Some discussions have taken place there in which people listen to each other. The more “conservative” (the term is fairly unhelpful) speakers are less likely to “give ground,” but that’s not uniformly true, and a few people are equally pushy with their form of “liberalism.”

    I think one thing that’s become clear is how often the internet impedes us in our search for connection. I’m a writer, as are many others who have posted; the writer’s existence, regardless of why one writes or what kind of writing one does, requires that we communicate, bridge the gap between ourselves and . . . anybody else. The internet (like our world) is too full of people who insist on communicating, but who lack the more hard-won skill, the weighty virtue, of listening.

    The only thing that allows me to, in good conscience, simply stop commenting at that forum is the knowledge that the people constructing palisades in this conflict are not in charge of anything, have no power over others, make no laws, and are fairly universally viewed with suspicion. Whenever the worst people–whether bigots, cynics, fear-mongers, or madmen–do have power and position–as they often do–then I hope all people of good will and compassion will, once they too have truly listened, both speak up and act. Always, always, with humility.

31. 31. Al Billings on Jul 11th, 2008 at 7:55 pm

    The fact that anyone makes an argument *defending* the use of racist terms, especially by an editor in a professional capacity, boggles the mind. Everything else is just a side issue and people making fools of themselves or showing their own racial bias (or misogyny). At the end of the day, a racist term (and more than just the term, the whole paragraph was racist) was used.

    I’d like to say I live in a bubble and haven’t encountered this before but that would be untrue. I’m a white and heterosexual male and you hear stuff like this from time to time. Most people seem to have learned, regardless of how they may really feel, to watch their mouths and not disparage black people or hispanic people in public but it seems to be open season on Muslims (and occasionally Jews) since 9/11. Homophobia still rears its head and hatred of women seems to never go out of style. I take a personal stand when I hear it but it makes me wonder what really lurks in the psyche of middle of the road white America and what they do behind close doors when they think it is “just us” here. I wonder how much of this you hear about as someone who is multiracial, Tobias, but I hope that you interact with the kind of people where you don’t run into this sort of thing.

32. 32. Marguerite on Jul 11th, 2008 at 9:52 pm

    John-Mark, thank you.

33. 33. Larry on Jul 11th, 2008 at 10:26 pm

    Interesting to see what fear of the possible loss of their hegemonic influence will do to some people. Not surprised at all that Truesdale was involved, considering his asinine rant around Datlow’s recent anthology and especially Margo Lanagan’s “The Goosle.” There’s a reason why people like him with those viewpoints are often called “tools.”

34. 34. bellatrys on Jul 12th, 2008 at 7:57 am

    Apology accepted, Mark. It’s a matter of justice, and of privilege blindness both – remember, a poor video store clerk was hunted down and fired for the crime of having committed lese majeste against Tucker Carlson a couple years ago, in his private blog. There is a long, and honorable, tradition of political blogging under pseudonyms.

    To be perfectly honest, my Muslim extremist was to a large degree BASED ON those very zealots in the Asimov’s Political/Religious Discussion, as well as religious right extremists in my own extended family.

    ROFL, Luke! Ye olde ‘write what you know’, eh? Okay, that’s the ironic cherry on this infernal sundae.

35. 35. Jason Sanford on Jul 12th, 2008 at 12:37 pm

    I would like to second E Thomas’s words above. Because I don’t have many opportunities in my day-to-day life to discuss SF/F, I enjoy the Asimov’s forum and have posted there quite a bit. When this issue came up in a forum titled ” Do Not Post the Reject Letter in Public, Idiot!,” I posted a short comment about how people shouldn’t upload rejection letters to the internet then expanded on that item in my blog. I was speaking from my experience as an editor and how I’d feel if people posted a personal critique I’d written for a writer. I was also specifically responding to the forum topic.

    The problem was that I hadn’t read Sanders’ rejection letter at that point. Because I felt an editor’s communications were private, and because there wasn’t a link to his letter in the forum at that point, I hadn’t bothered tracking it down. Later, when I learned about the actual content of the letter, I went and read it and then revised my blog post to say I agreed with what Tobias’ words about Sanders’ racist behavior. Still, I repeated my general feeling that under normal circumstances–this not being one–people shouldn’t post an editors’ words.

    I hope no one took my silence on the Asimov’s forum as any kind of support for Sanders’ words. Anyone who knows about my personal life easily understands how I have zero tolerance for racist behavior and words.

    Just like E Thomas, I tend to avoid controversial forum postings at Asimov’s because my time is limited. I enjoy SF/F and prefer to talk about that subject when I post–and there are many others on the Asimov’s forum who do the same. But that doesn’t mean we support Sanders’ words, or the attacks on people in that forum, in any way.

36. 36. Irene Delse on Jul 12th, 2008 at 6:23 pm

    Apart from his mindless ranting about the “PC Nazi brigade” (i.e. all the people who find racist slurs uncool), S. F. Murphy’s comment at #16 is very revealing about what certain kind of bigot believe about Islam:

    “I’d argue (as someone who has been to that God Forsaken Part of the Planet) that there is some validity to question a religion where it is perfectly acceptable to screw nine year olds, chuck planes at skyscrapers and strap on explosives to blow up pizza parlors.”

    Way to tar 1 billion of human beings with the same brush!

    1) Not every Muslim person on the planet is a jihadist. Does that still need to be said? Not every one of them believes it “acceptable” to kill people of other religions. In fact, the majority of Muslims are ordinary, peaceful people, more preoccupied with everyday stuff than with “holy wars”. Just like everywhere in the planet, really… To put them in the same category as the violent extremist groups would be akin to blame all Catholics because of the IRA terrorists, for instance.

    2) A religion is not a “part of the planet”. There are countries where Islam is the predominant religion and others where Muslim are a more or less important minority (including the USA, Canada and several European countries), but even the predominantly Muslim countries are not a single, featureless block. They are culturally and politically diverse, ranging from a secular republic in Turkey to a theocratic monarchy in Saudi Arabia (both being, ironically, political allies of the USA). Muslim countries include indeed some really “godforsaken” countries like Afghanistan, which has been in a state of either war or dictatorship or both since nearly 30 years and where backwater tribal customs like marrying 9-years-old is still common. And other countries (Iran and Saudi Arabia spring to mind) are governed by groups (in one case, clerics, in the other an aristocracy) who are founding their power on a literal interpretation of Quran, disregarding the fact that it was written in the Middle Ages. In comparison, a fundamentalist Christian sect would create an equally backwards, bigoted and odious society if they separated from a modern Western country and started using the letter of the Bible as a text of law: it would mean, among other things, legalizing slavery and polygamy, and death penalty for cheating wives and children who were insolent to their fathers.

    I must add one thing: I feel strongly about this issue because, though I am not religious myself, I have some close Muslim friends, including a brother-in-law who is among the sweetest, smartest and funniest guys I’ve ever known.

37. 37. Soon Lee on Jul 12th, 2008 at 11:55 pm

    I am glad that Asimov regulars like E. Thomas have been posting here.

    It may be helpful to point out that because Asimov’s Forum is not moderated, it is being used as a launchpad for hateful attacks. S.F. Murphy is doing an excellent job cultivating the excuses for his soon-to-be failed career as a SF writer all on his own, but in the meantime, he’s taking innocents down with him.

38. 38. bellatrys on Jul 13th, 2008 at 6:05 am

    “Auto-da-fe, what’s an auto-da-fe?” Do we really want to go into the whole whose house is more vitreous of composition? Amusingly, given my family’s occupation as conservative Christian promoters of a “Christian nation”, I recently found out that some of my Christian ancestors were ethnically cleansed and sold into indentured servitude by their Christian neighbors of another sect, which is how that side of the family ended up (eventually) as dirt farmers in the Colonies long before most people from that same patch of Western Europe did. And seriously, since when is firebombing cities more *civilized* than self-immolation on a smaller scale? This is not a contest anyone can win, at least not honestly, unless totally ignorant of Western history.

    Here’s a question: I’ve googled a bit, and I can’t find any stories written by either Truesdale or this S.F. Murphy chap.

39. 39. bellatrys on Jul 13th, 2008 at 6:06 am

    …in a spirit of scientific curiosity, can anyone point me in the direction of fic of theirs?

40. 40. Luke Jackson on Jul 13th, 2008 at 11:33 am

    Dave Truesdale writes a regular web column at the F&SF, but not any fiction that I’m aware of.

    Steven Murphy published the story “Tearing Town Tuesday” in Interzone and has another coming up in Apex Digest, and also posts stories at the online zine Bewildering Stories (http://bewilderingstories.com/bios/murphy_bio.html) and at his blog (http://sfmurphy.journalspace.com).

41. 41. Soon Lee on Jul 13th, 2008 at 5:09 pm

    S.F. Murphy’s strongest work is “Tearing Down Tuesday” in Interzone #210

42. 42. bellatrys on Jul 13th, 2008 at 8:16 pm

    Thanks for the links, I appreciate it since I kept coming up with medical journal articles instead!

43. 43. C.E. Petit on Jul 15th, 2008 at 11:40 am

    <sarcasm> What’s really annoying is that Sanders didn’t even use the correct racial epithet. It’s “towelheads” (or sometimes “ragheads”), you moron; “sheetheads” are the Klan. So much for spending time in the so-called “Middle East”. </sarcasm> We’ll leave aside the note that most “terrorists” and “jihadists” who get caught are not wearing “traditional” dress.

    (”sarcasm” tags for the oblivious) And for all the time he purportedly spent in the Middle East, I wonder just how much of it he spent conversing with Muslims.

44. 44. Thomas R on Jul 15th, 2008 at 1:45 pm

    I’ve known Sanders online for several years. He has many opinions I consider offensive, but he also has many admirable qualities. He’s been pretty good to me and I don’t think he deserves to be condemned. If any defense I made of him hurt some good people I apologize. (I don’t think I attacked anyone though)

    As for the Asimov’s forum itself it started getting political sometime around 9-11, but I think Gardner Dozois retiring may have also made it worse. The centrists seemed to be scared away easier than the more loud-mouthed right-wingers, and some might count me as one of them, so it got imbalanced. Still as mentioned there are many sensible and civil people at the place.

45. 45. Rick Novy on Jul 15th, 2008 at 11:30 pm

    It’s been a very long time since I posted here. I’ve been living in that deep dark cave called 60-hour work weeks, so I only learned of this tonight. I’m not going to blog about it, largely because most of what needs to be said has already been said. The only thing I’ll add is: “appalling” from all angles. Going back into my cave now.

46. 46. Chris Baldwin on Jul 16th, 2008 at 4:29 pm

    Socialists aren’t wussy, we are hard as nails.

47. 47. Amy Sterling Casil on Jul 17th, 2008 at 12:24 pm

    Hi Toby – I missed this awesome fun. I did see Kynn’s posting of that rejection letter a while back. Kind of tempting to want to post the tale of the Nebula “incidents” regarding William Sanders. The gist of the story was that his upset at not-winning the award was on full display from the night of the awards to the following morning.

    I might as well say it now – William Sanders not only has posted his online rants for many years, and sometimes in public, has said and done things that upset others – he also likes to participate in and spread gossip about people’s personal problems.

    He sent me a nice condolence card after my baby Anthony’s death and for a long while, I thought he was somebody who had an obnoxious online personality, but was a decent person as a private individual.

    This is not the case. He could not have been more eager to spread false gossip about Anthony’s death that he couldn’t possibly have had any personal knowledge about. I have never met him in person (hey, let’s be grateful for some favors). Apparently this was in retailiation for my speaking out publically against sexual harassment, which enraged him, his friend Bud Webster, and the commercial novelizer Steve Perry. Discovering this “weakness” of losing my baby was a golden opportunity to prove through gossip and insults that I was making up being sexually harassed. I guess can include Down Syndrome, infant death, and hating on others’ suffering on the list of things he has no problem talking about. Most, if not all, comes from resentment of “not being a famous sci fi writer.” That’s the root of a tremendous amount of this evil, in my opinion.

    Luv ya Toby. Y’all keep up the good fight.

48. 48. Wyman Cooke on Jul 17th, 2008 at 2:41 pm

    Yikes, Amy. I knew he was an SOB from personal experience, but I didn’t know he was that much of an SOB.

49. 49. bellatrys on Jul 19th, 2008 at 7:43 am

    Amy, that’s just vile. I’m sorry you had to go through it, but I’m not sorry to *hear* it, because it confirms what other people have been saying about their experiences of *being* sexually harrassed by Sanders himself – he was reacting defensively out of his own guilt, clearly, in his attacks on you in defense of Ellison and other sexual abusers.

    And it confirms my experience of the Intersectionality of Hate – yes, there are some non-racist sexist/homophobes, and some non-sexist/homophobic racists, but I haven’t met many, IRL or in written communications, past or present. All these privileges to be defended go together, as we see clearly from the rants of David Truesdale, too.

50. 50. S.M. Stirling on Aug 1st, 2008 at 12:15 am

    Will Sanders can be… let’s be tactful… very, very abrasive. He’s an extremely talented writer whose career has been less successful than it might because his talent for pissing people off is almost as amazing as his literary skills.

    However, calling him “racist” is very implausible. For starters, he’s a “person of color” himself — Cherokee, as I recall, and racially mixed. Something he’s always made quite plain.

    White racists tend to figure rather heavily as the villains in his work, for obvious reasons. Read “The Wild Blue and the Gray”, sometime, which like many of his stories has an Indian/Native American protagonist.

    (It’s a hoot, too, worth the price for the complex web of literary references alone; the sort of work that reads effortlessly and is a stone bitch to do.)

    In person or correspondence, Will says what he thinks at that moment without much filtering and just doesn’t give a damn or a thought to how others react or feel.

    This can be infuriating, but there’s no Constitutional right not to have someone hurt your feelings; and there -is- a Constitutional right to hurt other people’s feelings, if they’re willing to listen to you. Will does that with disconcerting abandon sometimes, but that’s his privilege.

    Will has casually said things about my work and abilities which I consider hurtful, but hey, I’m a big boy now and it’s a free country, and I just suck it up. My feelings = my problem.

    I might not invite him to a party, but I’d certainly buy his work for an anthology. In fact, I -did- buy one of his stories for an anthology a decade or so back.

    Much of his writing is plain brilliant — I recommend “The Undiscovered” for a start, and it richly deserved an award.

    Neither “is he a nice person” nor “do I agree with his politics” alters this one iota, however you answer those questions. Good story is good story.

    I’m not very familiar with his work as an editor at Helix, but it’s probably technically good — though I don’t envy anyone who gets the rough edge of his tongue. The man really knows and loves the field, and the craft of writing; and anyway, an author is well advised to develop a thick skin.

    As for the rejection letter, publishing it was certainly within the rejected author’s legal rights. It was also extremely rude — the letter was obviously intended as a private communication and contained no insult directed at the author — and probably a bad career move.

    Not nearly as bad as it would be if Will were more powerful (Helix is not exactly Asimov’s or F&SF), and/or if he were more popular in the field but not great. It shows bad judgment as well as bad manners.

    Writing in general, and genre fiction in particular, is a buyer’s market and has become steadily more so over the past few decades.

    The gatekeepers are few, they all talk to each other, and if they take against you, you’re toast. Why should they put up with anyone who’s hard to work with? There are literally -millions- of people waiting in line, manuscript in hand, ready to take your place. A small proportion but a large absolute number of them are quite talented — talent is cheap. Short of the best-seller lists, you’re entirely expendable.

    Publishing a rejection letter, particularly with apparent intent to embarass the editor who wrote it, shows what other editors will probably think of as “bad attitude” on the part of the rejected author.

    Will’s unpopularity and the things he said might be enough to compensate, or might not. I couldn’t say. I certainly wouldn’t have done it at any stage in my career, though, for reasons of both principle and expediency.

51. 51. Wyman Cooke on Aug 2nd, 2008 at 8:41 am

    Steve, racism is not the exclusive property of whites. I’ll leave it for others to say if what Sanders said was racist. It is for certain that, in the context of professional business e-mail, this was an unprofessional reply. Had he conceded that point, he would avoided a lot of the grief that followed. Not all; there still would have been the racism charge to face. A hard charge, made even harder by Sander’s pattern of behavior. This was not his first time at the rodeo.

    As for the etiquette of reposting rejection letters, there’s some debate. Personally I wouldn’t do it, but there’s a thread on this blog about Posting A Rejection Letter Friday. And there’s this:

    http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Reject.html

    So I doubt that there will be any blowback against the author. He made a newbie mistake. He apologized. I expect there will be more consequences with any future career, such as it is, of Sanders.

52. 52. Flaime on Aug 2nd, 2008 at 2:21 pm

    Strangely enough, with the addition of Dave Truesdale and other commenters, they’ve moved out of condemning the legality of the posting (maybe because, oh, writers have been posting rejections at places like their own blogs, sites like rejectioncollection.com and the rumormill.org for years before the spectre of suing a bad rejection note into silence was ever dragged out by the people in the Asimov’s forum) and into straight hate filled rants.

    I’m sorry but after my experience with Truesdale on Tangent, I can only believe that nothing good will come from his entering a discussion. He has ample hate to go around and little sense to create a cohesive argument to the contrary.

    To the whole controvery: Sanders was stupid to defend his use of the term, and wrong to think he has absolute control over the authors’ work in his archives…But I also think it’s simply time to punish him and move on. If his actions truly offend so many, they should refrain from submitting to Helix while he is an editor. That will punish some who are innocent in the affair (though maybe complicit). But if Helix wants to continue to exist, Sanders will be gone.

53. 53. S.M. Stirling on Aug 3rd, 2008 at 12:33 am

    Actually, to get technical what Will showed was cultural-ideological, rather than racial, prejudice.

    Far too many people these days confuse culture with race; hence loose use of “multicultural” to mean “multiracial”, which is unintentionally (or intentionally, in come cases) misleading and prevents coherent thought or dialogue.

    Insofar as “race” means anything in the real world, it’s things like your skin color or facial features or hair type — stuff you’re stuck with.

    Your culture is not like your skin color. Your culture is more like your clothes.

    And like clothing, you’re born without culture, you acquire it later, and you’re not stuck with the same set.

    A newborn baby has no culture, no language, no heritage, no religion, no nationality — all these things are acquired. Newborns have only our common human genetic nature, and humans are a strikingly uniform species in genetic terms, much more so than most other large social mammals.

    Adults can change their cultures/ideologies/whatever, with a little more effort, and do so with innocent calm if ideologues and fantatics are kept out of the picture.

    Eg., I know someone in Canada all four of whose grandparents were Japanese.

    She speaks about twelve words of Japanese — “tempura” and “kabuki” among them — and is married to a tall blondish guy all four of whose grandparents came from England. “Racially”, she’s East Asian. Culturally she’s not significantly different from her husband; they’re both Overseas Europeans, Anglophone Canadian subvariety.

    Their kids are racially mixed (like Keanu Reaves — which was a surprise when I found out) but culturally they’re quite monochrome. Some of my ancestors were Indians (and so were some of George Washington’s and Jimmy Carter’s, by the way) but that doesn’t make me or them Indian; it’s just an interesting geneological curiosity.

    The people Will was talking about are Middle Easterners, and most Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians, Palestinians (and Turks and Iranians and so forth) are common-or-garden variety white people, physically indistinguishable from Sicilians or Greeks.

    (The minority who aren’t are usually the product of the African slave trade, which went on for a very long time in that area.)

    “Muslim” is of course a religious — hence ideological — term, not a racial one. Muslims, like Christians or Buddhists, come in all colors.

    You can no more be racially prejudiced against Muslims than you can against the adherents of other ideologies — Christians or Communists, for example. You can certainly denounce them -ideologically- but that’s a different matter.

    “Arab” is a linguistic-cultural term — it means simply people who speak Arabic (or one of the related dialects lumped under that term) as their native language.

    It’s like “English-speaker” not like “black”, “white”, or “East Asian”.

    And just as Anglophones include the residents of Prince Edward Island and Barbados, so Arabs include the Lebanese (white) and the northern Sudanese (black, in our terms).

    Hence you can no more be racially prejudiced against Arabs than you can against “English-speakers” or “Americans”.

    You can certainly be politically and culturally hostile to “English-speakers” (listen to a lot of the French about “Les Anglo-Saxons”), or politically/nationally hostile to Americans, but again, that’s an entirely different thing from hating a real or supposed descent-group.

54. 54. S.M. Stirling on Aug 3rd, 2008 at 12:50 am

    One should also be careful about using terms like “hate” loosely.

    The fact of the matter is that everyone hates, and virtually everyone hates some -group-, however defined. That’s human nature. The group may be “people with dark skins” or “people of Nationality X” or “people who support political party Y”, but it’s all hate and it’s all us-vs.-them tribalism.

    Human beings can no more escape this than they can outrun their own sweat; chase it out the door in one form, and it’ll climb back in the window in another.

    Separate any group of human beings into two and they’ll start feeling ingroup-outgroup towards each other; Swift memorably satirized this with the “big-enders” and “little-enders” of Lilliput, who fought wars against each other over which end of a boiled egg to open first.

    What the term “hate” really means, as a rhetorical tool in common use these days, is “hate which has a target which is disapproved of by my social/ideological reference group or tribe, and which I therefore consider illegitimate”. The “hater” is always the “Other”, never oneself.

    When it’s a hate socially sanctioned by your own in-group, it’s just righteous anger at evil or whatever.

    You know, “he has a wicked, evil, false ideology; I don’t have an ideology, ’cause I know the truth and am devoted to Goodness”.

    This is a form of bias, and virtually nobody can see their own bias; it’s like water to a fish. Other people’s bias, on the other hand, is exceedingly obvious.

    But in fact bias isn’t what happens when you lie; it’s what happens when you express what you genuinely believe to be the truth.

    Outside the physical sciences (and even there only by great effort and with elaborate control protocols) there IS no capital “T” Truth.

    There are only fads, fashions, and (temporarily) prevailing opinions — and opinions are like the posterior digestive orifice; everyone has ‘em, and few bear close examination.

    A Persian king once asked his wisemen to come up with a saying that would be equally true in all times and places. They thought for a while, and came up with: “This, too, shall pass.”

55. 55. Ross on Aug 3rd, 2008 at 3:31 pm

    Nice “moral equivalency” take on “hate,” Stirling. I guess you find no essential difference between a nigger-hating Klansman and a Klan-hating liberal. That tells me a lot about you.

    If, as you believe, everything outside of the physical sciences is merely fad, fashion, opinion, then your view that everything outside of the physical sciences is merely fad, fashion, opinion is itself only fad, fashion, opinion—so why are you wasting our time?

    Incidentally, “elaborate control protocols” are also frequently used in the social/behavioral sciences.

56. 56. Ross on Aug 3rd, 2008 at 3:43 pm

    In my previous posting, I should have enclosed the word nigger in quotation marks (to read “nigger”-hating Klansman). I want to make it clear that I don’t view blacks as “niggers.” I was using the racist epithet of choice.

57. 57. S.M. Stirling on Aug 3rd, 2008 at 11:33 pm

    “Nice “moral equivalency” take on “hate,” Stirling. I guess you find no essential difference between a nigger-hating Klansman and a Klan-hating liberal.”

    – actually I strongly dislike Klansmen; if you want to know my real opinion of ‘em, see Ch. 7 of “Dies the Fire”, where a trio of survivalist Aryan Nations/Christian Identity types show up.

    But I don’t pretend that’s the inverse-square law, or something handed down by God/Allah/Big JuJu/Whatever.

    It’s just my opinion.

    My opinions are important to me because they’re mine… and the same is true of everyone else’s opinions… to them.

    This provides me with a certain detachment, spares my stomach lining, and means I don’t get my knickers in a twist when I run into someone with a different worldview or culture, which apparently you do.

    So I end up hating people a lot less than those who aren’t as reflective.

    Morals exist — but they exist within human heads and nowhere else. They’re feelings and opinions; entirely subjective, and largely the arbitrary result of cultural evolution through history… which like the biological form, is pretty random within the limits of natural law.

    In other words, if you’d been born in another time and place, or if history had taken a different contingent path, you’d have different moral assumptions. I strongly suspect that if you’d been born in 1880 rather than… what, 1980?… you’d be someone your 21st-century persona would hate.

    I make moral judgements all the time, like every other human being; we can no more help doing that than we can speak or think without using metaphors.

    But just as literalizing a metaphor (eg., “the brain is like a computer”) is a bad idea, so is fetishizing your subjective emotional states and the socialization reflexes you internalized at your mother’s knee or in school.

    The reason you’re getting mad and replying to reasoned argument with anger and personal attack is that I have, to use contemporary jargon, refused to “privilege your discourse” and have deconstructed and problematized it.

    In other words, by stepping outside the terms of your argument and instead focusing on its underlying assumptions I’ve turned your rhetorical machine gun into a plastic water-pistol and that makes you cranky.

    I’ve also subjected you to the pain of cognitive dissonance, when you expected validation and and the warm reinforcement of in-group consensus.

    Human beings are designed to live in small, face-to-face societies with a high degree of consensus and a strong us-vs.-them orientation. Hence they hate value disagreements and their ‘default’ response is anger and threats.

    Which brings us to…

    “That tells me a lot about you.”

    – and that translates into something like: “You’re a BAD person for disagreeing with me and my social reference group, who are the GOOD people. So SHUT UP or I will do something NASTY to you! Not one of us! Not one of us!”

    And the bigenders are superior to the littlenders… every right-thinking person can see that!

    And that’ll probably make you even madder; I’m doing the deconstructing/problematizing/refusing-to-privilege-your-discourse thing again. You might surprise me, but the odds are long.

    Oh… and you realize, of course, that every time you respond with fury rather than engaging in elenchos — showing some fault in my logic-train or evidence — you reinforce and in fact illustrate my point about humanity’s instinctive tribalism?

58. 58. S.M. Stirling on Aug 3rd, 2008 at 11:51 pm

    “Incidentally, “elaborate control protocols” are also frequently used in the social/behavioral sciences.”

    – but seldom to much effect. These days they’ve mostly given up their physics-envy and settled down to be a branch of literary criticism, in its current unfortunately ‘theory’-laden form.

    You see, there is no connection between “is” and “ought”; a shnattering discovery made during the First Sophistic and periodically brought to general attention again, often with amusingly drastic results.

    We can prove what “is”, to a limited extent. You can never prove what “ought” to be.

    Whenever you take the dissecting scalpel to an attempt to derive normative positions from things in the “is” category (Bentham or Rorty’s, for example), you come across hidden gaps, and ultimately a “well, because it just IS right to feel/do/believe that”, sort of the equivalent of “because God said so”.

    You can trace the evolutionary roots of altruism (and selfishness), for instance. But you can’t get from that to saying why any individual human being should -want- to behave either way in any given situation.

    Values aren’t something you think, though like anything else you can think about them. They’re something you -feel-.

    For example, you can say that “enslavement is bad because it makes people suffer unjustly”, which is true.

    But that argument has no comeback to the counter: “Why should I care if other people suffer unjustly?”

    In point of fact I -do- care if other people suffer unjustly.

    But that’s because at a critical latency period in my childhood my parents taught me to do so.

    If I hadn’t been exposed to that instruction at the crucial period, or if I’d been born without that potential path in my synapses, I’d be a sociopath and simply wouldn’t care. And so would you.

    It’s pretty much the same reason most Westerners find the thought of eating dog meat disgusting.

    Not because there’s anything “objectively” disgusting about it; nothing is objectively disgusting and Koreans quite rightly dismiss our feelings in the matter as a mere arbitrary taboo.

    Disgust is a -feeling-. Certain things activate that feeling in you because you’re taught that way at an impressionable age.

59. 59. Joey on Aug 4th, 2008 at 4:25 am

    S. M. Stirling argues well, and I agree with quite a bit of the substance of what he says, but it ignores the simple fact that disliking being on the sharp end of bigotry doesn’t really have anything to do with cultural background. It’s wanting to not be treated harshly – which is not necessarily just down to how you were raised.

    The consequences of bigoted behaviour have often been as tangible and as far from subjective as you can get outside of the tightly controlled physical sciences, from not being able to choose where you live or work to being assaulted or killed.

    It also seems to me that a good proportion of the reasons that many forms of bigotry are less pronounced now than they were 100 years ago (and why we might thus frown upon our 1880-born alter-egos) owes a lot to people getting upset about and refusing to put up with bigoted attitudes.

60. 60. Bort on Aug 6th, 2008 at 2:43 pm

    Frankly, this all seems crazy. All this over “sheet head?” Sure, it’s crass, but come on. This backlash is ridiculous.

    It reminds me of the Jon Voight thing. He expressed some unpopular views in a newspaper column and somehow offended everyone in Hollywood, and there’s talk of him being on a blacklist now.

    Maybe it’s not exactly the same situation, but I can see why the people defending Sanders (who I’ve never heard of before this) launch into the anti-liberal, anti-PC rants. It’s scary to think if you write something crass somewhere, anywhere, that everyone will come after you.

61. 61. Bort on Aug 6th, 2008 at 3:21 pm

    I just did a little more reading of all the replies here and this is one of the things that’s scary to me about this sort of backlash. In Post 55, a guy says:

    “Nice “moral equivalency” take on “hate,” Stirling. I guess you find no essential difference between a nigger-hating Klansman and a Klan-hating liberal. That tells me a lot about you.”

    He tries to paint the guy as something out of the blue with no evidence and then rail against that character he just made up. Then says “that tells me a lot about you.” Tells him what? He just made it up. It says a lot more about Poster 55 than anyone else.

    Anyway, this Sanders guy seems to be a real jerk. I read Amy’s post and couldn’t believe it. Maybe this backlash was years in coming and this “sheet head” remark was just the last straw. That would make a lot more sense.

62. 62. Tobias Buckell on Aug 6th, 2008 at 3:25 pm

    Bort, it was more than just the word ’sheet head.’ All the man’s actions are described at http://transcriptase.org/what-happened/. It does seem like a big dead, but I’d say that he’s built up a lot of negative kharma in the way he comports himself, and that the letter reveals a lot, as do his following actions and continuing inability to just stop digging a hole.

63. 63. Wyman Cooke on Aug 6th, 2008 at 6:23 pm

    I was reading his posts from last Saturday through the links on Transcriptase. Sheesh! Hasn’t he learned to stop digging? He seems to follow the Evan Mecheam school of thought in handling controversy; whenever there’s a chance of it dying down, start it back up with a new post.

64. 64. bellatrys on Aug 7th, 2008 at 3:20 pm

    Hey, Stirling, remember when you showed up at my blog to yell at us and call us stupid for not being scared enough of the Scary Black Man?

    That was…special. (But not surprising at all, given what I remember of your Usenet posts in the ’90s.)

    And no, there’s no rule that people who aren’t white can’t also be racist against people of different ethnicities than white. In fact, that’s something that does get talked about in our multicultural corners of fandom, quite a bit.

65. 65. bellatrys on Aug 7th, 2008 at 3:24 pm

    Oh, and garrulous sophistry =/= intelligence or reasonableness, FYI. Far from it.

    (Of course, Stirling has a *very* hard time shutting up when his own feelings are hurt, as we who survived the Joat Simeon years at rec.arts.sf-written can attest. Kind of like Joseph Askew and Terry Austin combined into one monstrous shambling monster of verbosity…)

66. 66. William Sanders on Sep 28th, 2008 at 8:34 pm

    I am not here to argue with anyone about the topic under discussion. I have nothing at all to say in response to anything said in here, or anywhere else, concerning the “sheet heads” sheetstorm and related matters. Everything I have to say on this subject may be read at http://www.sff.net/people/sanders/mob.html.

    However, Amy Casil has introduced an entirely new and (as is her wont) irrelevant issue, and I don’t intend to let that pass. I don’t really expect that this is going to do any good, since you people obviously have already made up your minds about me – in your wonderfully unprejudiced way – and indeed I see that some have already accepted her story as factually true. All the same, I’m going to get this on the record:

    I have NEVER, either publicly or privately, said ANYTHING about the death of Amy Casil’s child, other than the normal expressions of shock and dismay which everyone uttered when the news came out. I have NEVER spread any “false gossip” about her in this regard, or engaged in any sort of speculation, or even discussed the subject – except, in private, to discuss with friends what a terrible blow this must have been to her and to Alan Rodgers.

    Furthermore, I have NEVER accused her of “making up about being sexually harassed.” Not directly, not by suggestion or innuendo, NEVER.

    (And I do not even know who Steve Perry is.)

    If it were anyone else, I would simply say, “These are lies and you’re a liar.” However, I’ve had enough dealings with Amy, over enough years, that I won’t go that far – though I won’t dismiss the possibility either.

    I think it possible that she really believes this stuff. It may be that she heard this from some source, in which case I assure her it is untrue and whoever told it to her is a liar. Then again it may be that she is simply delusional, in which case I urge her to seek professional help. It is not for me to say.

    Hic finis fandi.

67. 67. octo on Sep 29th, 2008 at 2:11 am

    I went briefly to asimov’s forums and found them distasteful. It seemed overflowing with right-winged and politically-inclined posters(and not a few authors among them) that had no problems spewing abuse to anyone different.

    Frankly, Im not surprised at this latest incident or the characters involved.

68. 68. Alan Rodgers on Sep 29th, 2008 at 7:24 pm

    Will, I’m not too clear on what’s being said here, but so far as I know, that wasn’t you she was talking about. Email me if you want background.

69. 69. Amy Sterling Casil on Sep 30th, 2008 at 12:21 am

    >>However, Amy Casil has introduced an entirely new and (as is her wont) irrelevant issue, and I don’t intend to let that pass. >>

    No one who would have read your and Bud Webster’s original attack messages to me on the SFF.NET message boards (which are private, not accessed by most on the internet) would say it was irrelevant, Will. Both of you, not ever having met me before, nor being present at any of the events I described, went out of your way to state that I was lying. That the events never occurred, you knew they never occurred, and they were – as you say now – irrelevant.

    One incident was my being slapped in my face by a well-known, award-winning, formerly bestselling SFWA member at yes – an event that was sponsored by another organization, not SFWA – the Writers of the Future Event – 10 minutes before I was to receive an award. Not merely slapped in the face, but also on the ass and groped, and had my companions informed, “With an ass like hers, you just know she loves to be spanked!”

    I kept my mouth shut at that event and I accepted that award with dignity, my face aching and heart pounding. I wrote a letter of complaint two weeks later, the motive being to notify the organization that a person could cause harm in the future to somebody else. This was my motive in 2006 when I spoke out – so that hopefully, something that bad or worse, would not happen to somebody else.

    Regarding my son — his death, my personal dignity, and my daughter’s rights and dignity were violated by a man who would stop at nothing to destroy anyone, and anything in his path – to be a “Famous Science Fiction Writer.” I was personally offended by the letter of Steve Perry mocking me that he wrote following the official letter of complaint that I wrote to the SFWA Forum at Robin Bailey’s request.

    I wrote this letter knowing that I would not receive opportunities, and might be “blackballed” due to speaking out, though I named no names.

    Though I have since received positive comments and input, at the time, I had none. All I had was this mocking letter written by Steve Perry in response.

    Mr. Perry is an online friend of Daniel Keys Moran. Mr. Moran is the man who is married to my lover Alan Rodgers’ ex-wife. The couple, together, has harassed the two of us for the past ten years. Destroying Alan’s home and marriage was not enough. The couple would stop at nothing to destroy anyone and everything around Alan – and that includes me, my baby that died, and even my young daughter, of no relation to them whatsoever.

    Mr. Moran’s initial motives appeared to be that he wanted to “be a Famous Science Fiction Writer,” and today, as he maintains blogs and internet writings, this seems to remain a significant motive for him. Willing to do, and say, anything to achieve that goal. In his writings, he expresses racist, and deeply sexist views. In his actions, there is no writing necessary. He is a brutal, vicious, venal individual.

    No, Will – you aren’t like that. You’ve taken heat like that man deserves. You are a complex, bright, talented man. You stepped into a number of minefields. You’ve said things that have hurt people. You and Webster’s vicious comments hurt me. I knew that many people might not believe me. I didn’t speak out so that I would receive “sympathy.” I spoke out years after the event, which destroyed what should have been a nice evening and experience for me. I wanted to try to help others, and I knew I’d take heat and criticism for doing so. Your kneejerk reaction with no facts at all was hurtful and disappointing – true. When I learned that Steve Perry who wrote that letter was a friend of Daniel Keys Moran, I thought it was deliberately written to humiliate and denigrate me. Mr. Moran, who has not had a “career” for many years, sought to exploit my baby’s death by an internet defamatory blog speculating about how he died. Mostly, this was aimed at trying to harm Alan Rodgers after nearly a decade of other injuries and vicious activities had occurred. In the process, a dead baby with Down Syndrome, an innocent young teen, and an old broken down bitch such as myself were collateral damage.

    But no, Will. You’re no Daniel Keys Moran. You do have talent. You are not a monster. You said a lot of things that hurt other people. That is the truth.

70. 70. Amy Sterling Casil on Sep 30th, 2008 at 10:21 am

    And Will – yes, I was told that you were interested in Mr. Moran’s inter-spewings as “special” gossip. If that was not the case, then maybe you should have been more careful about how frequently your friend Bud Webster insulted me and called me a liar in his efforts to denigrate my speaking out about sexual harassment, and later, against the activities of Andrew Burt that I objected to.

    And this is a very small world. You may recall a “special visitor” to the SFWA Lounge a while back. His name was Sean Fagan. He appeared to be a person highly-motivated to join SFWA and participate in the “thick” of things. Once in the Lounge, he made statements that sounded positive about child molestation, angering others. You went after him immediately, with most, if not all, of your ammunition. Instead of responding back to you as his chiefest, most articulate opponent, Mr. Fagan chose to target a female SFWA member who had made mild, measured comments in opposition to what he had said.

    Mr. Fagan threatened to sue this female writer immediately, and conducted a virtual frenzy of emails, posts and abuse that truly frightened her — and others quickly came to her defense, including you.

    Lawsuit, threats, dark implications of identity theft, etc. Many days of worry and upset for the poor victim of the abuse.

    Mr. Fagan is Daniel Keys Moran’s webmaster. He is still his “interfriend” and comments frequently on Mr. Moran’s weblogs. Mr. Fagan has without a doubt assisted Mr. Moran in maintaining his “backchannel” emails and messages to the small group that follows him. He can’t be the super computer genius as referenced on the older commentary channels such as usenet, if somebody as dumb as I am could have dogged down the majority of the crap.

    You know about war, Will, and you know about a lot of bad things. I was teetering on and off the edge of PTSD since 11 days after my 21st birthday, when I was the victim of a 2-3 hour violent, life-threatening rape. It was no stranger. It was someone in a position of respect and responsibility toward me. After nearly 10 years, off and on, of the sort of low-level attacks and higher-level attacks of the Moran couple – and getting slapped in the face at the WoTF thing, I was pretty paranoid and pretty hypervigilant. Then Anthony died, and I couldn’t save him. I’ve told myself for years that he died in the ambulance or died at the hospital. Because my mind pretty much cannot handle the truth.

    I was on the edge of PTSD when I disclosed the information about being sexually harassed publically. My reasons for it were twofold: 1) to try to benefit others, yes; 2) because I’d kept my mouth shut for years about everything else, including not pressing charges for the rape. I didn’t press charges out of fear. The man had already told officers that it was consensual sex and that I had asked him for rough sex. He had said that I had requested that he do the other injuries that I suffered, including many bruises and cigarette burns.

    People didn’t really believe this, but due to the differences in age and position – he was in a good place to convince others over time.

    I kept my mouth shut and all that incident cost me over time was a Rhodes Scholarship and a Watson Fellowship. And part of my sanity. It implanted fear and nightmares in me that will never go away.

    You can imagine – or maybe you can’t – what sort of message all of these incidents – rape, Moran exploiting Anthony’s death, Moran’s co-opting me and my young daughter for his hate campaign, the slapping/groping incident at the award ceremony – sends to me. What my knowledge of the violence, hatred, threats and insanity that Alan has endured – that I know were largely, originally, motivated by the man’s overweening desire to “Be A Famous Sci Fi Writer” – and I am literally like a weed to be “weed whacked” or sprayed with Roundup in this guy’s estimation, and now that my son died, a helpful aid to his self-promotion and hate campaign via the internet.

    It tells me that I am “not a person.” I commented that it’s sort of like the stipulation in Roe V. Wade. “For the purposes of this decision, the fetus is not a person.”

    If I were a person, in what world would I disclose something like the slapping/groping event and not receive at least some consideration? I did not. You and Webster went out of your way to “argue” with every statement I made. You declared some incidents irrelevant because they did not occur at SFWA events. You said others were irrelevant, because they weren’t that bad. In the wake of the Willis/Ellison controversy, I stated that I had been sexually harassed at an awards event five times in the SFWA Lounge.

    Only one person responded.

    When later, I made the more formal statement, you went out of your way to do as I said above. To make it clear that, on the off chance that I wasn’t lying, it didn’t matter – because my experiences were either not harassment, or not relevant, as they did not occur at officially sponsored SFWA events.

    The discussion here is about people not understanding the effect of the type of actions and events that I listed above.

    It is relevant.

71. 71. William Sanders on Oct 1st, 2008 at 11:52 am

    I don’t give a damn about any of that. You SAID:

    “He could not have been more eager to spread false gossip about Anthony’s death that he couldn’t possibly have had any personal knowledge about.”

    Now you seem to be saying no, that was somebody else. If it was somebody else, then why did you specifically, in the above-quoted words, accuse me of it?

    The other stuff you’re saying is irrelevant, as is all the other babble in this thread. I only want to know why you made this particular accusation against me; and I want a retraction. I ought to get an apology too, but I don’t expect it and it’s not important.

    You’ve done this before; in fact it’s a well-known behavior pattern of yours – make some wild statement and then, when somebody calls you on it, throw out a lot of incoherent and irrelevant nonsense, try to shift the ground, blind everybody with a lot of ink like a frightened octopus. I have no doubt you’ll continue to do it now; I’ve known you too long to have any hope of getting a straight answer out of you.

    I gave you an opportunity to explain yourself. All you had to do was say, “Somebody told me wrong, I’m sorry.” I’d have accepted that.

    Or you could have said, “I didn’t mean that to refer to you – I was talking about somebody else, and somehow I left out his name so it looks as if I meant you. I’m sorry, that was inexcusably careless of me.” I’d have accepted that too.

    Instead you blow the whole thing off and try to change the subject. That isn’t acceptable.

    Contrary to what you say, neither Bud nor I accused you of lying on the occasion you refer to. But since you offer no explanation of how this present libel could represent an honest mistake, I have no alternative but to declare that the statement quoted above is a lie.

    And there really isn’t any need to tell these people lies about me, is there? They’re already plenty upset about the truth.

72. 72. Amy Sterling Casil on Oct 1st, 2008 at 10:50 pm

    Well, Will – I guess I’m going to surprise you. I received over 200 cards and letters and many people made contributions to the charities I thought should receive gifts after Anthony died – the Down Syndrome of Los Angeles and the “Garden of Angels” which provides decent burials for “anonymous” or abandoned babies in Calimesa, California.

    I received a beautiful card from you. That made what you and Bud said hurt a lot more at that later-on time, especially considering I didn’t tell what I did for any type of personal attention, but to save people trouble and hurt in the future.

    I’m going to go with the card, Will. I believe that the person that told me that bad information was lying or exaggerating. I don’t think you did anything bad in that regard.

    I am sorry I thought that. And I apologize for thinking so and saying so.

    For those who are reading, what Mr. Sanders says is true. He recognizes that people are upset for what he did say and do. He didn’t spread rumors about my baby’s death, and he didn’t get caught up in the evil exploitation of that situation.

73. 73. Amy Sterling Casil on Oct 1st, 2008 at 10:55 pm

    I also want to let people know that the overwhelming, beautiful response of everyone in the “community,” including those that I did not know, made a huge contribution to keeping me going after my son’s death. One friend from Australia sent two big, beautiful plants that I still have, that were displayed at Anthony’s memorial service. The people from here in So. Cal. who came touched my heart and will never be forgotten.

    Knowing that the contributions helped other kids with Down Syndrome also kept me going. The Down Syndrome Assn. of LA isn’t a big, rich organization. They are ordinary people that mostly, have had kids with Down Syndrome. They help parents all the time to do the right thing with their children who have Down Syndrome.

    This is the truth of our “community.” This is who people are. They are loving, giving, accepting and caring. This is what I remember, and what I will never forget.

    And yes – if I could give my life today for his, I would with no hesitation. Any disgusting stuff you may have read — if it makes you feel dirty — listen to your gut. Your gut is right. This is not who you are, and not what the community is. It is a much, much better, more beautiful thing.

    I am the least among it, and I am grateful for its support when I had the greatest need.

74. 74. Bud Webster on Oct 2nd, 2008 at 12:07 am

    Amy, over and over while castigating William for doing and saying things you now admit he didn’t do, you’ve brought my name into it as well. I’d like you to stop, please, or quote back to me – publicly – what I said to you or anyone else about the death of your child or your harassment.

    I’ve stayed quiet about this up to now, but enough is enough.

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