Yes, the special snowflakes are in shock that wafting the special-issue Feminist Glittery Hoo Haa has failed to make the world bow down to their awesomeness, so they’re getting their friends to flog the dead horse some more.
For your edification today we have the spectacle of the German whose English comprehension is as bad as her writing (trust me, her samples make The Eye of Argon look polished. No I’m not going to critique them here. I don’t need my eyes bleeding any more than they already do) and the friendly alleged media outlet she references a couple of times managing to completely misconstrue a lively discussion about the merits or lack thereof of having an editor report to a board of nebulous goals. You know, a bit like the way all the media in the Communist countries have to follow the Party line or they’re history – or rather, not history, just disappeared.
For an alleged media outlet, they show a disturbing lack of concern for little things like correct attribution, linking approvingly to a tumblr feed which leeches the discussion and posts the “best bits” without attribution or context. Now sure, the original discussion is in a public venue, and the original posters know this and have no objections to being quoted – providing the quotes are attributed and in context. They wouldn’t mind being asked before repostings, since even publicly posted comments are still subject to copyright law.
Oh, but I forgot. Legal only matters to these idiots if they can use the law against the people they don’t approve of. The people they don’t approve of have no right to use the law against them. It might might tarnish the glitter their hoo haas are supposedly spewing.
I can’t possibly top Sarah’s magnificent summary of the whole sordid business, so I’m not going to try. Just go and read it if you haven’t already. And make sure you have nothing in your mouth at the time. I’d also advise emergency breathing apparatus, because I swear it took me several minutes before I could breathe again after I read it, I was laughing so hard.
As for Frau (or Fraulein – and no I am not going to attempt umlauts so sod off) Cora, I have to admit to a good deal of unseemly giggling at her imagining I’m using the term “hoo haa” because I’m scared to call it a vagina.
Cora dear, I’m Australian. I’ve lived in the USA for over ten years and I still regularly shock Americans by using what I’d consider the polite terminology. You know, take something like asking the way to the toilet. Folks I know here get all flustered over that, where if I was relaxed or in Australia I’d be asking for the loo, or the dunny, or the bog. As for anatomy, glittery hoo haa has a certain ring to it. Glittery vagina or glittery vulva just doesn’t have that same feel, and glittery cunt, well that combination doesn’t work at all.
Yes, dear, I write. I’m an author who comes from a culture with one of the richest and least comprehensible dialects of English there is (Glaswegian Scots might have it beat, but it would be a close run). Rhyming slang, taking half of a colorful simile and trimming it back to a fraction of its original form, taking words and using them in a way that’s so loaded with irony and sarcasm a hipster would choke… That’s my normal mode of speaking darling. I can’t help it if you don’t have the brain to recognize any of it – I’m not actually talking to you because I don’t give a flying fuck what you think. After all, you’ve demonstrated that you’re only looking for something to be offended about and you can’t even be bothered to check the basics.
Sexist? Ya dopey sheila, you’re the ones insisting that women can’t cut it in the real world and need special consideration. A while back that was why women weren’t allowed to vote: they were too special to risk straining themselves thinking about politics or something. Now you drongos are telling me that you’re too special to face any kind of criticism?
Only babies get that privilege, sweetheart. So go ahead. Be a big whiny baby. And I’ll just keep on mocking until you grow up and join the world of adults who actually want to be recognized for their achievement instead of their vagina. Or their penis. Or both, if that’s how you swing.
Mad Genius Club 
77 responses to “SFWA Glittery Hoo Haas Bravely Flog Dead Horse”
[…] a slightly saner (?) view on this whole thing, Kate Paulk (my fellow worst person in the world) over at Mad Genius Club takes on the daily dot article which claims all the signers of that anti-cen… (Since C. J. Cherryh, Mercedes Lackey and my friend Amy Sterling Cassil signed it, I have to […]
Frau works, given the individual is of undetermined status and rank. Although arguing that women still need special consideration because our writing isn’t up to the standards the guys write to is pretty rank.
Exceedingly rank, yes. That’s what they’re arguing when you strip out all the fluffy buzz-words.
All I know is that the little frau screwed up if she wants to tangle with Larry Correia. He’d swallow her whole and spit out the bones.
Her little rant had all this about how she doesn’t have to respect anyone, while at the same time being part of a movement telling me not only who I should respect but how I should show that. Really?
You put a mistaken p when you described what Larry would do with the bones.
I didn’t figure their bones are worthy of passing all the way through Larry’s digestive system.
This. Squared.
The immense entertainment value of Larry’s work on such precious snowflakes has me hoping he will do it soon.
You and me both. It will tickle me in unseemly ways that generally are reserved for good Irish whiskey and fine firearms 🙂
Indeed so – although alas my medications mean alcohol of any kind is a nono
That’s alright. I can’t drink the Irish whiskey anymore myself. Luckily for me, not all alcohol is off limits.
Oh, yeah. I wonder if he’d let us know in advance so we can sell tickets?
I think he’s partial to surprise 🙂
The German obviously fails to realize the misogynist loading of the word Vagina. Kate is actually being more PC in using hoo haa than her supposedly purer critics.
Ah, but I disagree with them, so I can’t possibly be PC (which is a good thing. I might break the universe if I did)
Yes, but per the thread on Amanda’s desire to be evil, the word ‘vagina’ is inherently hetronormative and a tool of patriarchy.
Every time you use it, you become less PC and more misogynist. Every time you refrain from using it in favor of a synonym, you become more PC.
So these hoo haa posts have increased your level of PC, unless you have been using words originating from Latin, or endorsing hetronormative values enough to offset that.
I’ve a misogyny credit trading scheme to keep feminism from collapsing the planet into a singularity.
Now Kate. There’s no need to get worked up. She’s obviously right. What published science fiction author, who also happens to be female, wouldn’t want to keep women from writing science fiction?
Jim, after a hard day trawling through databases, my brain isn’t up to that kind of twisted thinking. 🙂
I think the good Frau Doktor has missed the fundamental point. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you fucking have to fucking do every other fucking word.
Pre-fucking-cisely!
“As for anatomy, glittery hoo haa has a certain ring to it.”
And a certain Doctor Seuss quality to it as well, which is really kind of perfect.
There was a glittery hoo haa
That I didn’t want near my doo daa
It was angry and mean
And it really did seem
That the glittery hoo haa was hate
But then tried to take issue with Kate
Too bad for her intellect
That it was the size of an insect
And all she had was a glittery hoo haa.
Sorry, I’m sleep deprived, and that’s the best I’ve got
OOOOH! This is great.
As in right on the money.
BTW, have you ever seen the Call of Cthulhu for beginning readers on DeviantArt?
No, but I’m looking at it now 🙂
Oh, that is awesome. Thanks for the link!
I see your DeviantArt and raise you a Cthulu Chick Tract…
I somehow find the whole deal with SFWA very… Familiar. I read these the stuff they put out, and I’m taken back to that morning I was too sleepy to realize I was letting the Jehovah’s Witnesses into my apartment…
That was awesome too!
(applause and giggling)
(bows)
Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here all week. Try the veal (or is that not a PC meal? This stuff is hard 🙂 )
Been swamped with work and didn’t see this until now, Tom. But it was exactly what I needed as a “coming up for air” break. Especially since for some reason I heard it all in the voice of Morgan Freeman.
I can’t say I intended it that way, but Morgan Freeman narrating just ups the awesome 🙂
On my second reading, it was George Takei.
Yeah…that’s not really any worse 🙂
When my mind gets to Gilbert Gottfried, shoot me. 🙂
Gladly!
Oh, man. I’m going to have to re-read it in that voice now.
Indeed. It’s a lovely phrase and I’m forever in the debt of those who coined it.
Translating to strine:
Kate. you’re a fair dinkum sheila, and don’t let those arseholes get you all in the dunny. That’s where THEY live. . . .
Switching back to ‘murican. . .
And I’m at a loss to see what these politically-correct nobodies are actually getting out of this whole brouhaha. Outside their own echo chamber, people are laughing at them, loudly: hell, we’re having a blast. . .
Thanks, mate! May all their dunnies be infested with redbacks…
Down South we prefer dirt-dauber wasps….
May there chooks turn into emus and kick their dunny down
This is great. You keep posting and I’ll keep popping popcorn.
Since there’s little chance of them acquiring any kind of sense, I suspect that’s just what’s going to happen.
I did write a reply to her, which I repost here:
Cora Buhlert I appreciate you are an ESL writer and that humor, sarcasm, subtleties, puns and multilayered writing, let alone idioms, double entendres, kennings and in-jokes and cultural references are hard for you to grasp. As a translator I would think you’d be aware of this, and be wary of not making a fool of yourself. There are usually clues to anyone but the incredibly dense and in this case the self–mockery and self-denigration are marked by some little crossing out. So I suggest you go and have a long careful look at the title to Mad Genius Cub. But to help you, That was a joke, Joyce (yes, I know your name isn’t Joyce.) http://everything2.com/title/It%2527s+a+Joke%252C+Joyce . The English and Australians particularly like laughing at themselves. It’s rarer in Americans, but present. I don’t think it’s very German, and absent entirely in totalitarians. Try to imagine the distinctly ridiculous little fat boy of Korea laughing at himself. Or old ‘Eva why did you put superglue on my toothbrush? It’s stuck under my nose.’
I am sure that your annoying bigoted (it’s one t – oddly enough also a mistake Sarah Hoyt makes all the time.) relations who hate foreigners and homosexuals, which they know nothing of, but assume are inferior must be beaming with proud delight at your post “Look Horst, she’s just like us after all!” “Yes Daphne, I knew it was the genes.” “Nonsense, Horst. If it was your genes she’d have a moustache like a Shetland pony’s tail. It’s our fine upbringing. Look at the way she laid into that Kate with a mere two (or is it 3) Science degrees in fields almost totally dominated by men, used to be a field geologist in Australia – you know, probably one of the toughest most foul-mouthed 99.8% male environments –and told her she couldn’t bear to say ‘vagina’. That’s just pure… genius. Not even you at your best could do as well.” “Well, yes, but that wonderful, wonderful part where she told people she knows nothing about, whose complex and varied culture she barely has seen, and that through the lens of those who detest them, as an insular German who, in her own words, was born Bremen and still lives there, that she knows they’re stupid, inferior and perfect for sneering at. Oh if only the Kaiser were still alive and we could send her to Africa to keep up our wonderful reputation. I’m so proud Daphne, I could burst.” “That’s just three helpings of Baunkohl und pinkel, Horst.”
You know, I find it bizarre that you attack three women (and I feel left out and so does Amanda. Can you please label us as evil too?) who, without asking for free rides, have proved themselves the equal or better than most men. Women who DO what feminism talks of demanding (and then wants someone to do for them). Who have done more for sf reading numbers than any three of your sidebar list of authors. Kate took on the toughest of degrees, and most male of environments, and did well and was liked and respected, and still does well, despite dealing with a debilitating illness that would cripple me, or you. She’s a lot brighter than I am and lot more sarcastic. At the age you were having tantrums about having to listen to your staid relatives, Cedar was working gutting salmon on a poor homestead in Alaska. She’s busy as a mature student supporting herself, taking a Science degree – a lot harder challenge than your arts degree was. And she still manages to behave like an old fashioned lady – polite, honorable, generous to those weaker than her, even those she does not like and willing to take hell with a fire-bucket for her family and friends. I grew up in the harsh egalitarian meritocracy of commercial line-fishing boats, where the skipper didn’t care if you were black, white or something between. He only cared about fish: one for the boat, one for the skipper, one for you. I am great believer in merit and earned respect. I’d take her as crew any day, because I know she could do the job as well or better than almost anyone else. Do you think you could cut it? You talk about having a lack of respect for these old codgers. Well, respect is something that has to be earned, and I see no signs in your biography that you have or could do as much. If you think you deserve it and can do as much or more than old useless people… I’ll happily arrange you a job crutching sheep here. It’s a filthy, hard, and entirely male-done job. That’ll do more for establishing female equality than any or all of your feminist writer friends, and anything you could write. And afterward you’d have had a life outside your sheltered one to write about.
For the record I personally frequently am in need of disgruntling, even without eating curly kale, but that’s about the only remotely accurate part of your description of MGC – It’s a writing blog for writers, which largely deals with technical issues in writing and getting published – there are a several thousand blog posts on those subjects. Most of our readers are self-published authors. In this we do differ markedly from SFWA. They refuse to consider self-published authors – no matter how many copies they sell or how much they earn as good enough to belong to their ‘elite’. Oddly, the person campaigning to change this was Vox Day. There are other issues to take with him, but he was actually trying for writers and writing. Your saints, on the other hand, were and still are doing their level best to declare self-pubs as second class citizens never to be allowed into their hallowed little clubhouse – which it is all it really is, as publishers and agents are part of the organization, and have prevented any action to improve contracts, payment time, non-compete clauses, and better rates of pay for authors, just for a start of the list of outright employer exploitation. They got your idols to orchestrate boycotts against Amazon – which pays us a lot better and faster than publishers do. Meanwhile, those ‘disgruntled right-wing writers’ are on record as saying they wanted it to be an effective union-type counterbalance to the traditional publishing exploitation of the writer. Typical right-wingers, eh, Cora, wanting to union build! Disgusting.
Fortunately there were the likes of Scalzi, Hines, and Kowal to make sure SFWA did really important stuff like fight about the editorial of a magazine with a circulation slightly smaller than a suburb’s newsletter, keeping the self-published riff-raff out, and all that diversity stuff that really matters to the membership. And it really does. You see only a very small percentage of SFWA are actually working writers. Look at the membership lists – and especially those in the politics of the organization. Even if you last wrote a short story 25 years ago for a disappeared market, and are a dilettante who teaches for a living or relies on your trust fund or rich partner, you’re in, and in forever. It’s a shiny I-made-it badge. Yay. MGC on the other hand are 40% full time trad published, 60% self-published and making a substantial (and growing) part of their income from it. And we try provably very hard to help, support, and promote other writers. No, we don’t like SFWA because it seems actively damaging for sf/ fantasy, and that is what we do and try help others do. But never mind, if your vulva gets you onto that TOC, I am sure they’ll let you in SFWA. You’ve got the ‘cool kids’ sneering at the ‘lower classes’ (who are better qualified and more able and sell more books) just about perfect already. See you push up sales (which have dropped steadily in comparison to the reading population) by 50% (for all those women and diversity that you’ll add) and maybe one day we’ll respect you for that.
Actually, I’m not true believer in Heinlein. I’m more of Zelazny/Sharpe/Heyer fan, myself. But your sneer there at something you haven’t read and haven’t fully understood is on a par with your grasp of American politics. I don’t understand it either, but at least I have the sense not to dictate to others who do understand it on what I don’t understand.
Okay, Dave. Someone gave me this internets thing. You get it. This comment wins it.
Respectfully,
Sarah
You’re going to have to share it with Dave, Sarah. You *both* win the internets today.
I came to this late today (early this morning?). Well said, Dave, not that she will understand or accept anything you said. You and Sarah win the internets today and for the rest of the year.
Oh, there’s none so blind as those who do not wish to see. She hasn’t and her little friendies haven’t, and I don’t think they have the capacity to do so. But hopefully some of the arbs have.She hasn’t been able to argue coherently against the points made, and I think they’re the important thing. And of course generating a few laughs. I think humor is the sixth dimension there, with thinking for yourself and not following a party line being the fifth. In case of doubt I always plead the the fifth. Of Scotch 🙂
Absolutely, Dave. That inability to to argue coherently against the points made is something that seems to run rampant with all too many of those like her. I’ve read too many posts this week from the other side where they are whining and crying and calling names because we’re being mean to them and we just don’t understand. Yet not once have they tried to actually discuss our counterpoints. It really does remind me of junior high — or even elementary school — where the most cogent argument coming out of someone’s mouth is “do not!”.
Oh yeah. “Waaaah! You’re mean! How DARE you bring logic and facts into this!”
I suspect too much conforming to the mainstream (even when you think you’re being iconic and rebellious like these poor things) destroys any ability to think that someone might have had.
The passers by might pick up something – and I hope they do.
excellent
Heck, I just popped over to Fraulein Buhlert’s little blog (WP Twenty-Ten, I’d know that template anywhere, it’s one of the free ones and easy enough to edit) and scrolled down the comments. Oh, my; Dave Freer has just got done schooling her. No response yet. Dear oh dear oh, dear … I was actually driven enough by curiosity to look at her various offerings on Amazon. Short stories/novelettes gotten up with a nice enough cover, and flogged for .99. I still don’t think she and her pals know how much people are poking fun and laughing.
And, did you notice, everything she wrote is a Kindle ebook. Unless she has something published in the educational field, she too is a ‘self published outsider. I doubt if this will get them to wave the rules.
I did that, Rob. Yeah, screams indy author, having established a Little Publishing Bidness, and making every short story a book of itself. No skin off mine, it’s what I’d suggest any ambitious indy author to do.
But sitting in Germany and affecting a knowledge of American pop-culture? Not a good idea, I think. But she may have enough glittery hoo-haa fans to go along with it.
I thought I left a comment– mind farting again. Anyway, enjoyed the post Kate.
And Australia, as everyone knows, is inhabited entirely by criminals.
Not just that, but we’re PROUD of it!
You know… this. Really and honestly. You take (we take?) insults and *play* to them. They don’t have to be true, or not *personally* true but something closer to true than mere random name calling, and we say things like… “I’m in the “Chair” Force,” then we smirk and say, “because they’ve got air conditioning.” And then turn around and mock the Army for jumping out of “perfectly good airplanes”. People call you a “bible thumper” or “bitter clinger” and it’s all… oh, yeah… that’s me! Proud of it! Or “fundy”… I can’t think how often I’ve accepted “fundy” and called myself a fundamentalist when it isn’t precisely true but “the other side” was sneering so… what choice did I have? I’d love to be a “swarthy menace” but I’ll probably have to settle for a “scandi scurge”… on second thought it doesn’t scan… oh, nevermind. Oh yeah, I’m a “chick in chainmail” and I’m a “babe in battle armor”.
Why the… heck!… would it bother me (I dropped an f-bomb in front of my teenagers today, so I’m trying to shape up) if someone tries to dig at me to make me smaller by looking down their nose and saying….
Girl.
Not just that, but PROUD of it!
Damn straight. Take the insult and make it a term of endearment – then turn around and use it as an insult to the clueless. IT confuses the hell out of them
“[Australia], fuck yeah!”
You know, I mentioned this to a female Aussie police type who laughed her (frankly, quite attractive) butt off over it. Then I mentioned it to a retired two star, who had a stick up his ass and reminded me of nothing so much as a particular class of limey. He was quite offended.
Yep. Most of us are the more relaxed type, but we do get a few of the wannabe aristocrats with the stick up their arse.
I mentioned this story to my Mother, a second wave feminist and psychiatrist from a lower middle class family who was born before WWII and managed to go to Med school at a time when she had only four female classmates. Oh and she started out there as a secretary started out at that school as a secretary.
She immediately sent me a story from the Nation, which should tell you her politics
http://www.thenation.com/article/178140/feminisms-toxic-twitter-wars?page=0,0
This is what happens when you make being offended a sacramental act.
The sad thing is there is truth in that article. The modern feminist banner holders seem to think they must castigate anything that doesn’t meet their standards – which leads to losing the real gains the early movement made and becoming the bad joke that we’re seeing all the time, the one that’s basically trying to get women put back up on the pedestal in the gilded cage because women are so very very special.
Yes, and as someone who dealt with REAL sexism, in Portugal, they’ll make me a precious flower after I’m dead. NOT before.
Sarah, you would rise from your grave to haunt anyone who tried to make a precious flower of you after you die. Anyone who tries it before then had better have their funeral prepaid.
You’d probably be like the dear lady I once knew who swore that if they insisted on playing “In the Garden (He Walks with Me and He talks with Me)” at her funeral, she’d stand up and march out because she was so d-mn tired of that hymn. I haven’t seen her roaming the street, so I assume the undertaker took her seriously. 🙂
This.
Sexist? Ya dopey sheila, you’re the ones insisting that women can’t cut it in the real world and need special consideration.
This is it, in a nutshell. This is the thing that really offends me about the whole thing – it’s like it’s the antithesis of the original feminist movement, which was about Take Me Seriously, Treat Me Like an Equal, and all that. (And how relatively easy it all was, because just about everyone was all, Oh, yeah, of course. Yes, there were some years of adjustment – wearing all those ugly big-shoulder-padded power suits, for one thing. Now we have bimbos in vagina suits (or, as I think of them, “dancing twats”) – and they say WE’RE the “War on Women”?)
Exactly. I’ve never asked for more than to be taken on my merits, whatever they might be. The only special consideration my anatomy warrants is the extra buttressing my bra needs.
“Now we have bimbos in vagina suits (or, as I think of them, “dancing twats”) – and they say WE’RE the “War on Women”?)”
OMG! Flinder’s Reef!
http://nudibranchcentral.blogspot.com/2013_01_01_archive.html
Darn… it didn’t link to the specific picture of the Hexabranchus sanguineus. So scroll down.
“trust me, her samples make The Eye of Argon look polished”
You really think so? I found the beginning of The Iron Border, at least, intriguing. I’ll probably pick up a copy once I’m back in the States and out of weird Amazon-travel-mode (I’ve been in Japan for a couple weeks giving some training. Some weeks I love my job 😉 ). I haven’t looked at the rest of her stuff; that was the one that stuck out at me.
*shrug*
Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
🙂
There’s that. The one I looked at managed to stuff damn near every crappy, trite, bad fantasy meme into the opening pages, then had characters spouting “as you know Bob” and being stupid as well. I’m not going to claim that means that everything else she does is that bad. Maybe she was just having a bad day.
You mean…
…crap. Gotta go rewrite. 🙂
Core should go read “The Girl Who Was Plugged In.” She will slink back to her lair in a heartbeat. Especially after reading the author’s bio – CIA, author, and a woman.
People like her demand respect but offer none in return.
More likely she’d claim the author was a traitor to her gender or some such nonsense.