My comments on BasedCon
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It's not like they are trying to hide their agenda.
Of course politics should be out of the scope of a SciFi Con, any Con.
But hosting your own "Super-Alt-Right-Con" doesn't seems like an adecuate response, and going to such a conference seems naive for someone that wants to stay "out of politics"
People freaking out about politics in sci-fi do not seem to know much about the history of the genre.
Perhaps a good example is the original Star Trek, which depicts an utopian society where there is no money and beings from all across the universe live and work together in harmony.
It was shot in the sixties.
And nowadays it is controversial to have a gay couple in the latest movie sequel.
This seems to have at least some basis in fact, given that the polls have missed the mark when Trump is on the ballot. Pollsters are already grumbling about how they're going to get any sort of accurate predictions for the 2024 election.
Right, because if there's anything that's been historically unimportant to the interpretation of literature, it's politics[1].
That seems ridiculous to me. Literature, and science fiction especially, has always been about telling interesting stories about the way people interact and consructing allegories to help us understand the real world. None of those facts change just because the story being told is something you don't agree with.
[1] Which in the sense we're using it isn't even strictly "politics" (i.e. things that pertain to the selection and operation of government). These are all issues of social change and conflict, which are to first approximation all any interesting literature is about.
If you want to discuss future dystopian alien governments or the racism against the Norbutis of Gahndlon , go ahead
People are open about this. A twitter response says “if there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis”. Following this principle, if any of those 10 other people leaves that table and sits down with 10 different people, all those people must turn into nazis too, and must likewise be shunned, etc.
> Who represents people with those beliefs if not?
Generally what people would consider to be alt-right politicians, although the alt-right is basically the mainstream powerhouse of the republican party now so maybe we're due for some new labels. Perhaps the better question is "who represents people with "regular conservative" beliefs and I guess the answer is people like Joe Manchin and Romney.
What's true is that "median" political discourse in conservative circles has swung pretty hard on the sneering side over the past few years. But this doesn't so much reflect the views of "regular" voters as it does an attempt to use this as a wedge issue to pry a small handful of voters from the other side.[1] But "median" discourse is aimed at a tiny fraction of the population! "Regular" politics is boring, so no one reports that stuff. Only voter-motivating controversies make their way into press conference material.
[1] Basically: there are a lot of people, mostly older voters, who hate gender pronouns and all the new social conventions, but who might otherwise be tempted to vote for a democrat.
In Europe everyone who needs to state that things so seriously is usually a fascist nutjob. Not that you can not hold some of that views (well the guns one is definitely US-centric) , I myself may be not so far from some of them (as they are stated, which seems like a trap) but if you need to make them the issues to die on a hill for... yes you are really, really leaning fascist.
Besides borrowing language from 4chan, it sounds like a cringe con for milquetoast Republicans who feel targeted for their political beliefs.
That describes Carmack to a tee, but he apparently wanted to support ideologically disloyal art without provoking conflict. The organizers were clumsy, and this mea culpa is unhelpful.
For anybody who cares about this sort of drama, I think it's worth giving him the benefit of the doubt and maybe it was just a poor judgement call to speak at this conference. That said, I think he's too smart to not have suspected what type of crowd attends something called "BasedCon".
https://www.pcgamer.com/doom-co-creator-john-carmack-is-head...
Attending a convention is a pretty unremarkable thing most of the time, but BasedCon isn't like most. Its website claims the convention "isn't about pushing any particular ideology," while at the same time listing examples of "based beliefs" that the organizers subscribe to:
Men cannot give birth
Guns don’t kill people; people kill people
A fetus is a human being
Socialism has failed everywhere it’s been tried
Discriminating against white people is racism
[Cons] were places where people of all colors and creeds could get together to talk and learn about science fiction and fantasy books, games, movies, and TV shows. Then, starting a few years ago, things changed. Cons became increasingly dominated by a small clique of authoritarian jerks who made them into venues for pushing social justice dogma and, in the name of “inclusiveness,”
So cons went from being inclusive to... more inclusive?
Compare the "about" page for the more mainstream Worldcon with the one for BasedCon:
https://www.worldcon.org/about-worldcon/
https://www.basedcon.com/?page_id=85
BasedCon's "about" has hot takes on guns, socialism, abortion, etc. Worldcon's "about" doesn't say anything about those topics at all.
Here's the Registration FAQ for next year's Worldcon in Glasgow:
https://glasgow2024.org/get-involved/registration-faq/
There are no hot-button American political topics mentioned either way there.
The last time I was at a science fiction convention there was a wide variety of political views among attendees, just as there have been among Hugo-winning SF authors. BasedCon seems unusual not in what sort of views it permits but in what it explicitly rejects.
Plenty of right-wingers like to talk about being moderate and not wanting to "make things political" while making political statements. Its a bit mind-blowing that someone can name an event "BasedCon" and try to claim that its trying not to be political with a straight face.
https://www.basedcon.com/?page_id=85
It sounds - as Carmack says - "intentionally provocative" and not a constructive way of countering what the organisers might object to in other conferences.
Men cannot give birth, unless they go through some amazing, to come synthetic biology transformations. Are you afraid by women with a penis today? Just you wait for the tomorrow man with a penis, two vaginas, tail, two wheels, and tentacles.
Guns don’t kill people; people kill people, but let's just melt all the guns. We tried some centuries with pistols, rifles, and such, let's see what happens if we melt all the guns for the next few centuries.
A fetus is a human being, and we should kill that human being if we want just as we kill hundreds of thousands of people through whatever: from pollution to housing policies. Don't want a fetus to die? Sure, take those cells evacuated from the formerly pregnant body and grow them in a tube, inject them into your own body, go wild.
Socialism has failed everywhere it’s been tried, so let's try just making food, shelter, and healthcare free, just for kicks: self-planting/harvesting bots in the fields, 3D printed houses, automated medical diagnosis and surgeries, and while at it, let's just cancel all the pharmaceutical patents and general biochemical restrictions, let everyone print elexacaftor/tezacaftor/ivacaftor or heroin in the comfort of their own home.
Discriminating against white people is racism, so let's start solving racism: start with the largest group of victims, you know, the minorities.
That's what's so funny about the modern generation of redpilled alt-right iconoclasts. They're literally just regurgitating beliefs that were banal in their grandparents' time. You're not radical if everything you believe was already being lampooned by All in the Family back in the 1970s.
Yeah, not like we haven't learned anything from the Yugoslavia war. But that's too far away from the place this nonsense is playing.
> How is BasedCon different from other conventions?
> Sci-fi cons used to be a lot of fun. They were places where people of all colors and creeds could get together to talk and learn about science fiction and fantasy books, games, movies, and TV shows. Then, starting a few years ago, things changed. Cons became increasingly dominated by a small clique of authoritarian jerks who made them into venues for pushing social justice dogma and, in the name of “inclusiveness,” shut down any opinions that didn’t align with progressive orthodoxy. You may remember the Sad Puppies saga, which culminated in WorldCon voters selecting “No Award” in several categories of the Hugo Awards rather than reward people outside their tribe. Maybe you’re familiar with the Gamergate debacle. You probably heard about Gina Carano being fired from The Mandalorian because she voiced thoughts outside the acceptable range of opinion. Undoubtedly you’ve heard about the push to get Critical Race Theory and other social justice garbage into schools.
And John Carmack likes the sci Fi bits. Okay cool. I'm content now. The name is sort of a clue but honestly I think I like John Carmack and I don't care much for culture war stuff so I'm going to skip this controversy.
Summarized here only so you can jump forward without having to search. Btw, Bing AI was great to find the answers to "what's going on with BasedCon and John Carmack"
The real reason Carmack attended was because he wanted to see how different these are from mainstream conventions.
He enjoyed it and politics didn't come up as he said.
So I don't see what the problem is.
> - Men cannot give birth
> - Guns don’t kill people; people kill people
> - A fetus is a human being
> - Socialism has failed everywhere it’s been tried
> - Discriminating against white people is racism
I sort of disagree with some of those viewpoints. But what is the problem of people that espouse these viewpoints having their sci-fi convention? A bunch of conventions are super-progressive.
I have friends that are very progressive, and I also have friends that are pretty conservative. Should I be judged as part of which group? Why is guilt by association a thing?
Some people just don't really care all that much about the political talking points in the ongoing cultural war (or about politics as a whole).
Person1: Hi, I believe men can give birth.
ThisConference: Unacceptable.
Person2: Hi, I wrote a scifi novel about a fantastical world where men can give birth.
ThisConference: ???
At best the rule implicitly constrains its writers in a way that is at odds with the ethos of the genre under discussion.
It's not a left/right thing, it's just bizarre form of problem-creation. Like those devs who publish their shit to github then write blogs about why they ignore pull requests.
On a related note-- when I was little there was this dude who had a toy store and hated kids.
In all three cases, I was thoroughly entertained by hearing the complaints from these people about the problems they created.
NB: please don't respond to this comment right away. I'm about to order a pizza, and I have HN hooked up to a raspberry-pi phone I built where the notifications for responses cause the VOIP calls to drop out.
I mean, let's not pretend that the progressive crowd is any less exclusive in what they allow in their spaces. It's called a "cultural war" for a reason.
Honestly, this is almost a non-story. People that lean conservative made sci-fi convention that appeal to their own demographic, and apparently people made enough of a fuss about John Carmack showing up there that he felt the need to issue a statement about it.
This is all really tiresome, and the main reason why I at some point really stopped caring about either side viewpoints. The things that interest me are orthogonal to their interests.
It says "made-up pronouns", not "preferred pronouns".
Made up: xer