If you’re a Lefty, you have to be a Lefty all the way. You don’t get to be heretical* on things like the 9/11 Mosque and expect to keep your GoH status at a major feminist SF convention. You just don’t. And it doesn’t matter how much you qualify your statements**, either: once you’re past the heresy line, that’s it.
Well, live and learn, right? It’s not like many of those people read military science fiction
Via Instapundit.
Moe Lane
*Although having to call that position ‘heretical’ is a insult to Giordano Bruno.
**Or going for crowd-pleasing by sneering at the Right. Notice which side’s more sympathetic to her on this? Yup, the Tea Partiers and the libertarians.
And she did sneer at the right, erroneously in my opinion. She said, fairly early in her rant that if the founders felt the same way as right-wingers do now, we wouldn’t have a republic. She then goes on to decry, correctly, the attitudes of those who don’t produce, and wishes that the way things should be that the hard-working, honest folk should be rewarded. Her problem is that she tried to link it to us, and not the left.
I’m with Jeff; there are no good guys in this fight. Ms. Moon also said in the same essay:
“It would be helpful for [Muslims] to show more understanding of the responsibilities of citizenship in a non-Muslim country.”
Well, sure. She then states, as an aside:
“(And the same is true for many others, of course. Libertarians, survivalists, Tea-Partyers, fundamentalist Christians, anyone else whose goals benefit only their own group. There’s been a huge decline in the understanding of good citizenship overall.)”
Ms. Moon is, apparently, a typical lefty who has no fracking clue what the goals of Tea Partiers are: apparently fiscal responsibility in government is a goal that benefits only Tea Partiers. Not turning the US into Greece benefits only Tea Partiers. Avoiding socialized medicine like Britain’s 2 year waiting lines for cancer treatments: that only benefits Tea Partiers. Whatev.
And never mind the jab at “fundamentalist Christians” — I doubt Ms. Moon has ever met one.
She’s just another lefty who accidentally crossed an uncrossable line, just like Juan Williams. She’ll apologize, and eventually go back into the fold as a proper holder of the approved GoodThoughts.
Such a shame to see such a concerted effort from FailFandom to drown an actual, burgeoning thought in a flood of misconceived group”think” that misstates the thought and misattributes all sorts of nasty impluses to it. Though I don’t know, Bob and Jeff — I think we have to be a little more tolerant of people like Ms. Moon when they say things like that. People’s minds only move a little bit at a time. She’s just trying to reassure herself that she’s still as left as she thinks she is. Today it’s “The Ground Zero Mosque was a really misguided idea, even though those crazy right-wingers think so too”; tomorrow it may be “We have to be fiscally responsible and pay our debts, even though all those right-wingers didn’t have a problem with Bush doing the same”; and hopefully the change will keep going incrementally from there, until a day comes when she realizes she’s not really that left at all.
I do recall that it took me about three years after 9/11 to bite the bullet and just admit that I was a Republican. Hell, I didn’t start voting a straight party line until 2006.
Sorry…that should be “impulses.” Sometimes my mind goes faster than my fingers.
I read the “offending” essay. She bends over backwards to insult as many Righties as she can, usually without reference to reality. And she’s still not Lefty enough for the Purists. (I thought it was the Tea Partiers who are the purgers?)
This may bring Moon to an epiphany and a conversion. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
“I don’t know, Bob and Jeff — I think we have to be a little more tolerant of people like Ms. Moon when they say things like that. ”
Fuck that. She’s not on our side; she’s just hated by the same people who hate us. And I think that all of human society has been a refutation of the aphorism that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’.
This is not a new ally in our fight; this is an example of how liberals, like dogs, will happily turn on a wounded pack member. The instinct to savage weakened prey overwhelms any established bonds of friendship or solidarity.
Mostly it’s because they spend so much time and effort repressing aggression. If you never get mad, then the times you *do* get mad are shockingly intense.
I’m a huge fan of hers; have all but maybe one of the books she’s written, and rarely pass up the chance to recommend the Paksennarion stories, so her apparently reflexive anti-conservative tics in that essay were EXTREMELY disappointing. I have no beef if she disagrees — but that disagreement should be on honest terms, not based on caricatures and apparent ignorance.
Oh, well — much like the laughable politics in “For Us, The Living”, I’ll just knock the person down a notch and keep the estimation of the stories.
It depends how she’s defining right-wingers, though. If Gary North (for instance) had his way, the US wouldn’t be a Republic.
Sounds to me like she doesn’t like theocrats. Sounds more or less libertarian to me. So of course I’m on her side. 😛
“(Ms. Moon) should clearly be stripped of her SFWA membership, her books should be publicly burned, after which proceedings she should be stoned on stage at WisCon. I have written SFWA President-For-Life John Scalzi regarding this very serious situation and expressed my expectations that he will not only put this deeply appropriate punishment for holding an opinion contra the SFWA majority in motion, but throw the first stone himself.”
Vox Days’ comments here: http://voxday.blogspot.com/2010/10/more-sf-stupidity.html
@Rob: Tell me about it. I make a special effort to not learn anything about authors or creators whose work I enjoy, because more often than not I find that the person behind the work is really unappealing. (David Drake is one of the few exceptions.)
This is what Moon had to say about Laura and the not-perfect ex-president George W Bush in her essay (Lane linked to it above):
quote: “…the system is obviously creating bad citizens. When a President’s wife (Laura Bush) publicly announces that she and her husband have suffered more from the war than anyone else–a statement I’m sure most brain-injured and amputee vets and their families would take issue with–and then retire to a cushy Dallas home and a cushy central Texas ranch–with a big estate in Patagonia waiting should they wish–we have an excellent example of citizenship failure right at the top.”
Good grief. How vile is Elizabeth Moon? Yes. That vile.
Let the leftards eat each other. It will only lead to more breathing space for the rest of us.
I’ve read a lot of Moon’s books, not every one or anything, but a lot of them.
I’m not surprised that she’s not a right-wing sort. I wouldn’t expect it. I actually make an effort not to know what author’s personal political opinions are. It helps me to enjoy their books. Still, even when an author doesn’t fill the pages of a novel with ideological rants, a person generally has a clue or at *least* the idea that it could go either way.
I just wanted to point out that the issue ought to be the enforcement of ideological purity and how people who do that (like WisCon) are the bad guys and how it’s not good to be a bad guy. Don’t be evil and all that.
There seems to be a portion of what might be considered “the science fiction community” that is hard core intolerant of anything they view as wrong thinking (ie. intolerance). They seem not to have gone away since the last melt-down, probably figured they won that one.
At this point, I don’t care what Moon has said about anything. There is a principle involved that is more important. There is a fascist, controlling element at large that is doing its best to enforce ideological purity though shunning. We are social creatures that *must* connect to others or we die. Shunning is hurtful and outright violent and seeks to coerce conformity. And it usually works very *very* well.
This can not stand.
Did any talented writers condemn her? The ones I saw in the various threads were mostly 2nd tier sorts.
I’d like to know who I’ll be buying used from now on.
Synova — yes, the biggest point is that the shunning of Moon for an unpopular (well, popular, actually, but not with the type that run feminist sf conventions) opinion is wrong. She wasn’t even expressing a very strong version of that opinion.
I’m still looking forward to her next book. Maybe a bit more, now.
I had not encountered “Fail Fandom” before this. (You can learn a lot about these people from the fact that that is _their_own_ name for themselves.) I’ve seen Fans do some really stupid things in my time, but never have I seen so many people with such high opinions of themselves make themselves look so stupid.
Moon is a partisan Texas Democrat and has a slight case of Bush Derangement Syndrome. But she is also one of the best writers of military SF around. Having bought and read all her books, I can tell you that she keeps them free of partisan politics (while making some rather good non-partisan points about politics and technology).
I for one will keep buying her books, and reading them, and enjoying them.
A feminist SF convention? Hmm, that explains a lot about feminism…