Anger Leads to Hate

Vox Day notes that he's the subject of an article at the Black Gate that calls him a neo-nazi. He's more than adequately capable of defending himself, and certainly has a horde of minions that are capable of assisting him.

No, I actually want to address two other things she wrote, two underlying assumptions that show both her complete inability to understand the world, and how little self-awareness she has.

Right now, we don’t need a Jedi Master to tell us that fear leads to anger, anger to hate, and hate to suffering

It's possible that Yoda, as a character, had one bit of actual wisdom to pass on - and given how badly he fucked up in the prequel trilogy, it's certainly arguable he was anything but wise -  but this is not one of them*.

If you look at the seven deadly sins, you'll notice that many of them are rooted in things that are not only virtues, but necessary to survival. Gluttony? If you don't eat, you starve. While you can argue the paradox of the sandpile as to exactly where anger becomes wrath, every one of the seven deadly sins is something normal dialed up "to eleven" through obsessiveness.

A little bit of "pride" in one's handiwork is fine when tempered by humility, but this one, called by some the greatest of sins as it usually leads to the others, was the downfall of Walter White in "Breaking Bad."

Anger is a normal reaction to a perceived injustice against oneself. Wrath is the inability to let go, obsessing over it. It doesn't matter if it's after discovering that the perceived wrong was only that, perceived, or tearing down the rest of your life to avenge a small matter. Letting go is not necessarily forgiveness, but to everything, there is a season, and there is far more to life than pridefully, narcissistically, harboring anger and stoking it.

Then comes the main thrust.

For the past few years, the Sad and Rabid Puppies – guided by an actual neo-Nazi – have campaigned against what they perceive as the recent politicization of SFF as a genre, as though it’s humanly possible to write a story involving people that doesn’t have a political dimension; as though “political narrative” means “I disagreed with the premise or content, which makes it Wrong” and not “a narrative which contains and was written by people.”

What pisses me off about this, and to a degree about that stupid Yoda quote, are that they are bullshit. Not blatant lies, but something that almost sounds like truth, like something profound, but misleads. In the second case it is because of what I've come to call "but I was just".

For example. "But I was just telling him to move over". Oh, really? If that was all you were doing, then you could have said "Excuse me, can you move over?" and left it at that. The three sentences after that, the insults, and so forth? No, you were not "just".

Let's break it down.

as though it’s humanly possible to write a story involving people that doesn’t have a political dimension

Leaving aside the assumptions of making the personal political, no-one - not Vox, not Larry, not Sarah, not Kate the Impaler, not John C Wright, have made any claim that having politics or a viewpoint is an inherently bad thing. For that matter, they would almost certainly agree with this statement, as written, in plain english. It's a reasonable sounding statement.

The devil of course, is in the details. "a political dimension" in SJW-speak means explicitly checklisting story, characters, etc. based on how they adhere to the shibboleths of the day rather than reading the story first to see if the people, characters, etc. make sense and draw you in. If you're tempted to take their denials at face value, you don't have to dig far to find articles at Tor.com and other places on how one or another commenter doesn't ever want to read books with a default binary gender, or anything by straight white men.

It's motte and bailey. They make politics primary while pretending that all they want is the reasonable position of being able to express their viewpoints - which no-one actually disagrees with. Larry, Vox, Sarah, John, etc. have all spilled enough pixels on the subject.

Of course, by conflating the reasonable with their actual position as demonstrated by their behavior, they then turn around and paint those who oppose their actual behavior as horrible, unreasonable monsters: white supremacists, neo nazis, etc.

Like I said in the intro - Vox can defend himself. What angers me here is the pure bullshit on display to facilitate the lie and the attack.

That is all for now.

* The one I'll agree with is "Do, or do not, there is no try".