So, I just wrote an obnoxiously long FB post, in response to someone who supports the Pups. And as it occurs to me she might not want to answer, and it was obnoxiously long, I figured I’d post it here. And yes, it is on a topic I cover in greater depth in Welcome to the Doomsphere: Sad Puppies, Hugos, and Politics
I don’t feel much sympathy for Brad–he picked a fight. I agree he changed over time. He ended up with that stuff about SJWs taking him away to gulags in the night, which was a far flight from where he started. But you speak as if he started nicely, and that anger changed him. He picked a fight in his very first post (before he’d gotten any grief). He was not just talking about getting good stories awards. He started–very first post–attacking those he didn’t like.
A good place to look is Ken Burnside’s long post Hugo essay over on Mad Genius Club, because he is a Pup to the hilt (Pup nominee for related work), supporting a ton of things I don’t. But he points out that everything was doomed to trouble and fights from moment one, by Brad, that half of that very first Puppy post was about stories, and half was “Let’s turn this into a culture-war front.” Brad picked a fight where there wasn’t one, and then got upset that the fight he started was a fight. He started Sad Puppies 3 with an insult and a statement that it was as important to hurt others as get the stories he liked nominated (which was also Larry’s line–his was to “explode the heads of the literati”). Brad didn’t start with an innocent post, he start, knowingly as he later admitted, a fight.
It was also in that very first post that he started with his “affirmative action” line. He said later, in a defense against the Sad Puppies just being a bunch of people complaining that their favorites didn’t win (which is true of pretty much everyone) that the affirmative action bit is the heart of the Pups. And here is the point every Pup has to answer: That’s the heart, to stop people getting nominated just due to who they are, due to their gender and race. And the question is: which people? I went back, for 8 years prior to the 2 main Pup years; in that time 87 people have been nominated for a literary Hugo (some mutliple times–Resnick does well). 87 people. Of those, only 7 are not White.
So first, us SJWs are terrible at affirmative action only getting 7 in. Wow, those are terrible numbers. Now this whole race thing was brought up by Brad and the Puppies (I had no idea the racial makeup before–even though as an SJW, I was responsible for it somehow).
So, Brad looked at 7, mostly Asian people in a group of 87, and came to the conclusion that those 7 just didn’t belong and could only have gotten there by affirmative action. There is no way that Brad, or the Pups, can come out of that looking good. Either he is mindboggling stupid (perhaps he heard someone on the Internet who said they vote by race and he was so very dim that he took that to mean something), or he’s a special type of unpleasantly stupid, or he’s coniving. There is no, “Gosh, he’s a good guy” option with that. 7 of 87.
And that’s the thing, if you are going to defend the Pups, you have to find some way around that 7 of 87 issue. (And no, he didn’t mean it isn’t a way around because he repeated that he did mean it, and was backed up by many Pups. And no, he didn’t intend to discriminate against other races isn’t a way around either–because he did discriminate.) So, if you are saying the Pups are really OK, and that Brad was nice before the kickback begun, there has to be an out for that 7 of 87, and I sure can’t see one.
The gender side of things doesn’t help either (the numbers are way off there as well), but looking at the 7 or 87–that must be too many for the Pups to be other than the bad guys is all this–will do nicely. Before this, race never came up in my look at the Hugos. Nor did it for most people I know. But Brad and the Pups are obsessed with it somehow keeping them down. So, how do you defend the 7 of 87? Without a defense of that, there is no defense of the Pups.