I Stand With Irene Gallo - but that's not enough

So: the quote that managed to get Irene Gallo in such hot water is this one, as reproduced by Chuck Wendig:

There are two extreme right-wing to neo-nazi groups, called the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies respectively, that are calling for the end of social justice in science fiction and fantasy. They are unrepentantly racist, sexist and homophobic. A noisy few but they’ve been able to gather some Gamergate folks around them and elect a slate of bad-to-reprehensible works on this year’s Hugo ballot.

Now here's the problem, and it takes more than a bit of nuanced thinking to fully get it.

If Gallo had taken one word out of that paragraph, she'd have been fine. Problem is, she left the Godwin-friendly term in, and that complicates the issue to the point where defending her becomes a bit difficult. It is not, however, impossible.

As much as either group of Puppies deny it, a lot of the stuff they've posted is exactly what Gallo calls it. Her problem is that she didn't pay enough attention to the difference between the Sads and the Rabids. The Sad Puppies have come across repeatedly as a group of tireless (and tiresome, IMHO) self-promoters who decided that a strange dual attack on "the literati" and racial diversity in fandom was going to win them oodles of readers and supporters and thereby make them the unquestioned kings of book sales in the SF universe.

Probably not, but you can dream, can't you?

Except when the dream becomes a waking nightmare.

Then you've got a problem.

Enter one person we will call the RSHD, as it's a euphemism he seems to have earned.

The RSHD does not seem to know when to leave well enough alone, you see. He had already earned himself a reputation for unsavory behavior and the promotion of crank beliefs even before he used a Twitter feed belonging to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America to defame fellow SFWA member N.K. Jemisin for daring to point out that he wasn't really all that nice a guy in a Guest of Honor speech she gave at Continuum 9. For that action, the RSHD got his lifetime membership in the SFWA revoked, which led to what you'd expect: more evidence of his inability to leave well enough alone. This time, though, he got a new bunch of friends in the form of the creeper lobby gamergate, and they decided that they'd ride the coattails of past Sad Puppy bloc voting efforts in order to get a bunch of people nominated for Hugo Awards that, in all reality, probably don't deserve them - one of them being the RSHD himself. Another one was John C. Wright, who seems to fit the definition of "homophobic" in the old "there's a picture of him in the dictionary above that entry" sense of things. Come to think of it, if Gallo had just specified that the Rabid Puppies were racist, sexist and homophobic in their orientation she'd be completely right.

Unfortunately, all this amounts to is another distraction from the overriding ridiculousness of this clown show.

This is a debate in which men - grown fucking men, mind you - are willing to engage in vituperative attacks and even borderline-illegal online and in-person harassment against people whose only crime seems to be that they disagree with them. Or gained their ire on a more personal level. Or are even breathing the same air as they are. Shit, I don't know where any of this starts or stops any more and I've been involved in more than one internecine fandom-related war myself. I just haven't been involved in one where this sort of thing becomes the norm, and I don't like Irene Gallo's chances at being passed over for harassment now that she's become a target.

So she wrote something that should've been edited more wisely. Big deal. She wrote it on her own Facebook page, on her own time, and that's more than what the RSHD has done in the past.

So I stand with Irene Gallo. I also think that it's time that we didn't just stand with her; we need to tell the people who are now insisting on her being fired from Tor to get off their high horses, knock off  the selective outrage and think real hard about the sort of people they're allying with -such as the RSHD, for example:

"[I]n light of the strong correlation between female education and demographic decline, a purely empirical perspective on Malala Yousafzai, the poster girl for global female education, may indicate that the Taliban’s attempt to silence her was perfectly rational and scientifically justifiable."

And that would be the sexism that Gallo brought up doing the talking there, of course.

Ultimately, the right tack to take about all of this was written by katster in this post:
It strikes me that Beale doesn’t want dialogue. He doesn’t want us to understand each other, because if we can understand — if we can glimpse that the other side of the screen sits another human being not all that much different from us — then his culture war is dead. He cannot afford to lose that — it is his driving force and his motivator.

I’m a science fiction fan because I like to read, Beale. I’m not here for your bullshit culture wars, and I really wish you’d take them somewhere else.