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Comment by drngdds | Hacker News Reader

The con explicitly promotes transphobia, there's really no defense for participating in it. If you think it's a non-political decision to speak at a con that announces "men cannot give birth" on its about page[0] and says people shouldn't expect their preferred pronouns to be respected, that's a good signal that you're either wildly ignorant or actively hiding bigoted beliefs.

[0]https://www.basedcon.com/?page_id=85

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> and says people shouldn't expect their preferred pronouns to be respected

It says "made-up pronouns", not "preferred pronouns".

What do you consider the difference between the two?

Not made up: her

Made up: xer

In 2023, the fights among millions of Americans is about "men cannot give birth"? That's not promising.

From 3000 year old universe to this blasphemy

> In internet parlance, “based” means something like “in touch with reality.” Based behavior is the opposite of social justice activism, which is about meaningless virtue signaling and beating up strawmen. Some based beliefs include:

> - 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).

But at a science fiction convention, this is a smell.

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'm not inserted into their niche hobby to evaluate. It wouldn't surprise me if other sci fi conventions leaned really progressive, and perhaps stories that appeal to the demographic of the "based" convention are smothered in such places. (Writing "based" convention made me sort of cringe).

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.

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