The following discussion was seen on G+, where a significant portion of the most interesting discussions on the internet is taking place outside the view of most of SF/F fandom. The impetus for the discussion was GenCon's list of Featured Presenters for 2016, which consisted of 50 percent women, and 10 percent people you've heard of. Blogs such as gomakemeasammich (Google it yourself, we don't link to whiners here) were lamenting that this huge win was actually a sign of how bad things are because all too many people questioned the wisdom of putting no-names, activists, and community organizers on panels at a game convention instead of, you know, actual game designers and writers.
At any rate,
Misha Burnett (linked to because we do link to excellent writers here) hit a grand slam, out of the park home run with this observation about the insidious forces at work within the culture:
Rick, these people are there for scalps. It's not lack of management. It's lack of spine.
Yeah, it's not about wanting something, it's about wanting to take something from someone else.
We could start a group devoted to men carrying buckets of mud around, start posting pictures of ourselves lifting buckets of mud and walking from place to place with them, start writing columns about mud-carrying, with arguments about which kinds of mud are best to carry around, and what kind of buckets are the coolest, and make up an award for the guy who carries the most mud and another for the guy who carries the mud the farthest, and so on.
Inside six months we'll get an outraged group of SJWs who are insisting that we recognize them as being mud-carriers and award the mud-carrying award to their designated person, and if we don't it's proof that we're racist/sexist/homophobic.
These people don't care about games, what they care about is proving that they can take away anything that we can build.
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I have withdrawn from the arts, academia, journalism, and entertainment because of these people. Now they want gaming. There's no place else to retreat to.
Jeffro's shot is included as a firm endorsement. I'm honored to play a small role in the fight to retake ground from the perennial sourpusses that have come to dominate our modern culture.
Note also that conversations like this flourish in areas where the SJWs have very little penetration. Some social media sites are going to be a lot harder for them to converge than others.
