…I went and left a comment on chief puppy Brad R. Torgersen’s blog, after reading the excerpt on the daily File 770 round-up.

My comment was prompted by his repeating a saw I’m pretty sure I’ve already seen multiple times from him: the idea that “social justice warriors” is a real thing that the people he spends his time taking written potshots at called themselves.

It’s a little thing, in the long run. But the insistent way in which the chief puppies stick to their guns about this is such a perfect representative example of the alternate reality they have constructed for themselves and from which they are conducting their campaign, and I just keep thinking—probably foolishly—that if they can manage to recognize the truth of this matter, it might make them more amenable to questioning the other fallacies they’ve taken as articles of faith regarding who their chosen opponents are and what we’re about.

I may be a poor choice for emissary, given how much time I spend skewering them… but the truth is the truth, whether it comes from a clown or a priest. The truth is still every bit as true when it comes from your most hated enemy as when it comes from your closest friend.

While hope springs eternal, my previous forays in bringing the truth to Brad Torgersen’s blog have not convinced me it’s worth sticking around to engage over there. So to that end, I’m reproducing my comment here (with a few typos and errors cleaned up). If anybody wants an actual discussion about it, I’ll be happy to have it here.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to try to tell you this, but the people who spew hot air about “warriors for social justice” are all over here with you. That’s not a thing people called themselves. It’s a pejorative made up to dismiss people, a la calling someone “PC patrol” or “feminazi” or “thought police”.

Some people have taken it as an ironic badge of honor or made geeky riffs on it (like “Social Justice Paladin” or “Social Justice Bard”), but by and large, you’re chiding people for not living up to the standards of a label that was foisted upon them in the first place.

Which is actually part of the function of the label. Most of the people I have seen getting slapped with the “SJW” label not only don’t describe themselves as social justice warriors, they don’t describe themselves as activists. They’re just people, living their lives, dealing with their own problems, and acting their consciences.

Example: I’m not an activist. I’m a writer. Like most writers, I try to write the books that I want to read. As a reader, it’s really kind of important that books 1) acknowledge the reality of my life, that people like me exist, or failing that, that they don’t 2) openly insult me, or 3) portray people like me in laughingly unrealistic ways that jar me out of the story. For “people like me”, you can read queer, women, disabled… any of that.

Now’s the part where you blather on about I-Dentity Politics and PC Police and imaginary quotas and the censorship you think I’ve just called for and wonder “What ever happened to telling a good story and not caring about politics?”

But is a story a good story if it is otherwise good yet portrays Christians all as being wrongheaded, narrow minded superstitious fools? I mean, can it be a good story if a significant cross section of humanity is rendered in an extremely unrealistic—say nothing of meanspirited, let’s focus on whether it’s realistic—fashion?

Some of this is subjective, obviously. We all have different life experiences, which means different things will ring hollow to us (which is one reason that so many thoughtful writers suggest having beta readers with different experiences). One example that I believe came up in the comments on File 770 is that it’s a sure sign a man wrote a piece if the female viewpoint character is described admiring her perfect breasts in the mirror. That’s a very small, very mundane, and fairly innocuous example of bad writing that happens essentially because of an empathy gap or experience gap, but it’s not going to jar every reader the same way.

Now imagine a book full of things that are all just “off” by that same amount.

Well, you probably don’t have to. You’ve probably read books that are like that, in their treatment of men, or Christians, or the military. And it didn’t just strike you as insulting, but also as bad writing. Right? Your ability to enjoy the story suffered, because while disagreeing with a writer’s politics is one thing, seeing yourself replaced by caricatures page after page is another.

When you talk about taking politics out of writing, what you’re doing is demanding everybody else stops noticing these things as they affect us, but you haven’t announced any plans to do the same.

Anyway, if all you wanted to do was open wide the tent flaps, then you weren’t competent. You were horribly inefficient. You stirred up a ton of bad will, you’re still spending your time and effort fighting the negative impression of you and yours that your actions have fostered, and you only succeeded in the wrong goal (getting a slate of nominees on the ballot isn’t “opening the tent flaps”, is it?), and if we are to take you at your word, you only did that accidentally (because it was demonstrably only the push from that totally-not-with-you guy and his rabid pack of dreadful elks that got any of your nominees on the ballot).

As I said on my blog: next year, if you want the world to believe that your goal is to raise awareness that anyone can nominate whoever they want for the Hugos, make a blog post that says, “Hey, everyone! Did you know that the Hugo Awards, one of the top awards for science fiction, is awarded by the members of WorldCon? And did you know that for $40 you can buy a supporting membership in WorldCon? Now’s your chance to nominate whoever you want!”

That’s all it takes. It won’t succeed in getting a slate of hand-picked nominees on the ballot and blocking people you think don’t deserve to be on the ballot because the wrong people like them for the wrong reasons…

But hey, that’s not what Sad Puppies is about, is it?

There is a game children play—or more often, try to play at—when they are caught doing something they know they shouldn’t. It’s called “I WAS JUST”.

Running around the pool deck? “I WAS JUST walking quickly.” No rule against that, right? The sign says not to run, not to walk slowly.

Teasing the new kid? “I WAS JUST talking to them.” Geez, don’t you want them to feel welcome?

Those of us who have dealt with bullying or harassment know how pernicious the logic of the JUST can be. JUST talking, JUST joking, JUST being friendly, JUST happen to be going the same way…

And while I think most parents don’t fall for the amazingly elaborate web of lies where a child claims they were JUST checking on the cookies to make sure no one else was stealing them, teachers and other part-time responsibility figures don’t feel comfortable moving against the worst, most entitled and self-justified troublemakers without a clear-cut rule and a red-handed violation of it. Challenging the lie doesn’t seem worth the headache. So the kids who make life hell for others while sleeping the sleep of the JUST grow up with the understanding that this is a winning move.

This brings us up to the Sad Puppies campaign, a mean-spirited and divisive campaign whose founders and leaders have never been shy about what they are doing and why… until people start calling them on it, at which point they pretend that no one said anything about poking a stick in anyone’s eye, no one on their side accused anyone of nominating the wrong works for the wrong reasons, no one ever alleged a clique was controlling the Hugos, no, no, nothing like that!

Oh, no. If any of that happened, we are supposed to ignore it because from start to finish, the Sad Puppies campaign has JUST been about raising awareness about the Hugo nomination process, so people know they have the ability to nominate whatever work or writer they think has been overlooked.

And who could object to a campaign that is JUST doing that? That would be like opposing a group that is JUST standing up for ethics in video game journalism. It would be like blaming children for breaking an expensive vase playing football indoors when they were JUST trying to get more exercise like you always said they should. Sheesh, what do you have against kids getting exercise?

To be real for a moment: I can buy the idea that some of the people involved in the Puppy campaigns have bought into this line. I think that even a lot of the children who proclaim that they were JUST have convinced themselves of the truth of what they’re saying.

So if you are a Puppy reading this, here’s how you convince the rest of the world that you mean all those high-minded ideals more than the snipping and sniping:

Next year, try actually spreading awareness of the open nature of nominations. Don’t buy into the slate. Don’t take your recommendations and hand them off to someone who may ignore them while assembling a slate of their own picks. Instead do what countless other people have done for years: post your own recommendations directly, as recommendations.

Add an explanation that anyone who buys a supporting membership to Worldcon can nominate their own picks, and bam… you will have just raised awareness of the nomination process.

What does participating in a slate do that furthers that mission? What does making vague, unfounded accusations that past nominees/winners benefited from some shadowy affirmative action program do to advance the cause? What does all the noise and mess and deliberate provocation and stirring up controversy have to do with anything? What does it add?

If you really JUST want to make sure everyone knows how the nomination and voting process works so more people can get involved, great! Focus on doing that. Some people might grouse about the outcome, but nothing in this world pleases everyone.

But no matter who is pleased or displeased with the final ballot or the perceived demographics of Hugo voters after such an influx, at least you’d be able to enter your house justified instead of JUST-ified.

So, Kate Paulk has been tapped as the standard-bearer of next year’s Sad Puppies campaign. She has declared that next year’s Hugo ballot-stuffing initiative will be done in a transparent and democratic manner. This does not fill one with confidence, since Brad Torgersen has made the same claims about this year’s ballot-stuffing initiative.

It also needs to be pointed out that it hardly matters who leads the Sad Puppies campaign or what they do or how they do it, as this year’s otherwise failed campaign only managed to achieve accidental relevance through the fact that the successful Rabid Puppies campaign largely copied and pasted their agenda.

With all that in mind, I have to say that I’m interested in Kate Paulk’s post about what she considers to be Hugo-worthy work only as an academic matter. If the list she assembles using it winds up being the ballot, it will likely be only because someone truly nasty as well as small-minded got behind her and started shoving, as happened this year.

But relevant or not, her list is interesting. Others have already noted that rather than being markers of excellence, her criteria seem to be more a sort of bare bones minimum quality. She even acknowledges in effect that if a book is excellent enough to pull it off, she’s prepared to be flexible.

So how do you take the entire field of science fiction short stories or novels, apply a filter this broad, and then wind up a list of five nominees? We could assume that she just intends to pick her favorites or, if she makes better on her claims to a democratic process, let the crowd pick its favorites… but she says in the same post that she judges quality separately from the question of whether she likes something, which suggests that she really does see this as a rubric for picking the nominees/winners.

All of which makes me wonder if once again we’re not looking at a failure to grasp the scale of things, the scope of the field.

Sad Puppies got started because Larry Correia conceptualized being nominated for a John W. Campbell new author award as a snub (he didn’t win) rather than a rare honor; this speaks to a sense of entitlement, but it also a kind of parochialism.

Surely he was intellectually aware that there were more new authors in the year than the ones on the ballot with him… but emotionally? Perhaps he felt that as a new author, the nomination was simply his due. Perhaps he cannot conceive of just how much competition he beat out to get there, first in having a novel published in the right year and then in having it noticed, and then making it onto the ballot.

The Sad Puppy campaigns seem to have been based around the idea that the SF/F writing world is a very small place, consisting of basically two groups of people: the authors Larry Correia, Brad Torgersen, Sarah Hoyt, et al, know and like, and the ones they don’t care for but keep unaccountably hearing about anyway. In the moments when they seem to believe their own press, they actually seem to think that the Hugo ballot has room enough for everybody… at least everybody who is not a “CHORF” or “SJW” or “affirmative action writer”. This tells you right off the bat how small their conception of “everybody” is.

So I think this is what we must takeaway when we note that Kate Paulk’s criteria could never be used to winnow down a broad field: it’s not meant to apply to such a field. It’s not meant to come near to such a field. This is a list of criteria meant to be applied in the following fashion: start with the tiny handful of works you’re prepared to accept are Hugo-worthy, then nod approvingly.