Yet Another Polemic about The Hugos - collect them all! (updated)

So. A bunch of guys got together, voted as a bloc and...

Ah, skip the intro, already. This has been detailed by so many people in the fannish community in so many different ways that it's not funny, but then again, it really shouldn't be. Why? Mainly due to two reasons which I'll go into in detail:

1) Like most people who happen to read these odd, antiquated things called "books" as a form of entertainment I have a finite amount of both time and money to spend on those books. That means that I pretty much read what I want to. Quite a bit of it would be termed "literary science fiction", for want of a more accurate description. That being said, the one thing that will not convince me to read a book is having someone engage in the online equivalent of screaming at the top of their lungs with a bullhorn outside my window at 3 in the morning about how "YOU'RE BEING A LITERARY ELITIST/SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIOR/CRAPTACULAR JUDGE OF SCIENCE FICTION FOR NOT READING MY BOOK INSTEAD THE ONE YOU'RE CURRENTLY ENJOYING, DAMNIT!!!"

That's pretty much what the entire Sad (and even worse, Rabid) Puppies crowd did with the 2015 Hugos. A number of more deserving nominees probably got knocked off the ballot as a result of all this, which directly leads to this observation:

2) All of this wouldn't be as grating on my nerves except for the following: although there was nothing particularly illegal in terms of  Hugo nomination rules as laid down by the WSFS in what the Sad/Rabid Puppies did, they chose to ignore the following truism: just because you can doesn't mean that you should. The Sads, in my opinion, were looking to continue a strategy of self-promotion that goes back to the first two Sad Puppy campaigns that Larry Correia organized in 2013 and 2014. Unfortunately, the current Sad Puppy front man is Brad R. Torgersen, who seems even more naïve than Correia about the company he keeps. Tactics like theirs would have pissed me off regardless of who engages in them, but the fact that the organizers of the Sad and Rabid campaigns are all to the right of my own political views (in the case of the Rabids very far to the right, since they make the likes of Bill O'Reilly seem like Bernie Sanders in comparison), have a very narrow definition of what constitutes proper SF and also undertook this as a politically motivated attack on certain corners of SF fandom is just icing on an already huge cake. I have a saying that if you scratch an Objectivist you'll find a Stalinist underneath. I think it's been more than adequately proven here.

Also, consider their online belligerence: if they hadn't ratcheted up the "you better listen to us because we're really angry and we'll call you names if you don't" element of their campaign, I wouldn't have cared all that much about this mess. Since they did, my response is this: if the Puppies' only way to present an argument is to engage in personal attacks against other pros in the field (such as here, here and here), they've pretty much lost my interest in reading anything they publish or even in taking them all that seriously as polemicists in the first place. Not only is it a complete non-starter in term of debating tactics, but it makes them look like a pack of emotionally stunted escapees from the Asshole Factory. That's not a particularly pleasant turn of phase, mind you, but I calls 'em as I sees 'em and what I see from them is behavior indicative of a bunch of supposedly grown men who are acting like anything but. 

So if the SRPs were looking to win any points with a run-of-the-mill, not particularly SMOFish Joe Fan like me by doing this, they didn't. Quite the opposite, in fact. As to whether they realize that there's an actual lesson in that fact...