I have to hand it to those goons who made up a slate of ‘conservative’ science fiction and slammed it into the Hugo nominations: I’d had this vague assumption that science fiction fans would be generally progressive and tolerant and even enthusiastic about different ideas. The Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies have enlightened and disillusioned me.

Well, actually, it’s been the other side that has brought me awareness. While slapping down the misconceptions of the Vox Day ilk, I’ve been taught so much. For instance, Jeet Heer reveals the dark side of SF professionals. I did not know this about John Campbell; he had an interesting reason for rejecting Samuel Delany’s story, Nova.

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Because, as we’re learning, many of them are incompetent thugs. Here’s a case of a woman who was executed for the crime of being arrested while mentally ill.

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Here we go again. A whining conservative at Breitbart is complaining about How Authoritarian Activists Are Censoring Twitter because they use filtering software.

Unfortunately, unrestricted free speech will always have its malcontents. Authoritarian activists using Twitter’s API have found a way to install themselves as de facto moderators for thousands of users. Twitter’s reputation for openness and free discourse may now be under threat.

The past two years have seen the rise of ‘autoblockers’ – shared lists of pre-blocked Twitter users that others can sign up to. The ostensible purposes of these lists is to block ‘abusers and trolls’ so that subscribers do not need to encounter them. However, as we shall see, this is typically a mask for politically-motivated blacklisting.

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An excerpt from Johann Hari’s book, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs reveals the racist roots of America’s drug war.

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