David Gillon

(Just wrote this in response to a nicely reasonable post over here defending the Sad Puppies, but then realised that with a couple of edits to make it standalone it articulated everything that I've been wanting to say about the Sad Puppies since I first came across them last year)
 
What disturbs me most about the Sad Puppies isn't so much the Hugo aspect as the contempt for other fans. Even the name is an attack on their hated 'social justice warriors'. I'm a long-time fan of military SF, I love Correia's Monster Hunter series, but that's about all we have in common, because I'm also disabled, and the hatred I've experienced just for being disabled, up to and including physical assault by passing strangers for walking while disabled (never mind the calculated hatred that destroyed my career in aerospace) together with the hatred I see routinely directed at disabled friends and acquaintances, mean that I spend my life campaigning for disability equality, and when I'm not talking about that I'm talking about the need for SF/F to get its collective head out of its ass over disability and start talking and writing about it like adults. TL:DR I'm a social justice warrior, I'm proud to be a social justice warrior, and anyone who treats me with contempt for confronting ableism/disablism in our society, and in our genre, is someone who is part of the problem, not part of the cure.

It sickened me the other night to see a Sad Puppy trying to bait TNH and Charlie Stross on Twitter by claiming that it was the Sad Puppies trying to support diversity, not everyone else, and when I challenged him on it he seemed unaware that diversity was anything but ethnicity, making clear that the only interest the Sad Puppies have in diversity is in exploiting minority groups for their own ends. Their attempt to bring in that well-known, diversity-friendly group the Gamers-gaters (you know, the ones trying to drive female voices out of gaming, the ones who hate any woman who dares to speak for themselves, or any man who dares to back them, and who show it through harassment, rape and death threats and the reckless endangerment of SWATting), goes beyond sickening into actually frightening, people are being seriously hurt by the Gamers-Gaters and there's a real chance someone will end up being killed if the SWATting continues. What on earth convinced someone in the Sad Puppy camp that injecting this hatred into SF/F fandom would be a positive step? And why haven't Correia, Torgersen et al tried to rein back this dangerous development? Or is it that they don't see 'social justice warriors' as actual people?

Fandom isn't perfect when it comes to inclusion, our genre isn't perfect when it comes to inclusion, as the fact I need to campaign on making people like myself visible in our writing shows, but fandom is better than most at inclusion, and it's trying to clean up its act in places where there have been problems in the past, by ensuring that cons are safe places for women and minority groups, by ensuring that access provisions for people like me are in place, and so on. Yet everything I see from the Sad Puppies says that they have a massive contempt for those changes, the needs that drive them, and, ultimately, for the right to equality of people like me. Sad Puppy supporters may disagree, but from where I stand the Sad Puppies seem little better than the thugs who attacked me in the street.