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because ranting to housemate.Dave is funny but inadequate	Oct. 22nd, 2010 @ 11:59 am

Dear Morons,

Rescinding an invitation to be a Guest of Honour is not equivalent to or in any way similar to any of the following things:

- censorship
- book-burning
- suppression of discussion
- suppression of ideas
- fascism
- ideological puritanism
- acts of hate

It is the following:

- rescinding an invitation to be a Guest of Honour

I'm pretty sure Elizabeth Moon would be welcome to buy a ticket and attend WisCon on her own. I'm absolutely sure that her absence will in no way hinder the attendees' ability to talk about her and why her invitation was rescinded.

This doesn't mean that WisCon is enforcing a particular set of "left-wing political views". Hostility to people putting forth extensive screeds of flagrantly racist crap and refusing to acknowledge even the slightest error in their words or deeds isn't even a political stance, it's standing up for good manners.

Oh, and posting a Robert Heinlein quote is kind of failtastic. Especially a bombastically pompous one. I love me some Robert Heinlein, truly I do - there's about three Robert Heinlein books I haven't read, and it's only because I never got around to them. (Podkayne of Mars, Assignment to Eternity or whatever it is, and maybe one other. They were on my parents' bookshelf with the rest, I just... yeah, never got around to them. I was always too busy rereading Space Family Stone, Space Cadet, Starship Troopers, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, The Number of the Beast (man, how awesome would that book have been had his brain not broken and the book subsequently just derailed halfway through)... I've even read Time Enough For Love and The Cat Who Walked Through Walls more than once. And Stranger in a Strange Land. Which, by the way: cannibalism.)

That list is already getting to part one of why RAH is not the "I Win" button you think he is. Part one being: same dude you're quoting as a great moral authority about censorship and so on wrote a bunch of books featuring extensive incest. Seriously. There is so much incest in some of those books.

Part two: Heinlein doesn't think you're a worthwhile human being. If you're a man, you don't know enough maths, or if you do know enough maths, you don't know how to fire enough guns, or if you do, you're probably still not going to know how to slaughter hogs, deliver babies, or build a house. If you're a woman, well, unless you're being a genius at everything (including maths) while also popping out unsustainably large numbers of babies, he hates you too. Oh, and you should be gorgeously beautiful, obviously.

Part three: He was a hardcore "freedom is when everyone has guns" Libertarian, who believed that corporal and capital punishment should be systemic and only veterans should have the vote - assuming that democracy was going to be involved at all, since really, the world should be run by people who know better than you. And that society would be better off if everyone had guns so they could shoot people who were wrong and criminal justice was dispensed by "whoever was around at the time".

No, really. In Heinlein's ideal societies, everyone's polite because not being polite gets you killed by vigilantes, and if there is a court to deal with something, the judge is whoever's handy at the time, even if they're imposing a death sentence.

Part four: In Heinlein's societies there are the Real People and there are the yammerheads. Everyone who's bitching about someone getting disinvited from something is a yammerhead. If you are complaining about something at all, really, you're a yammerhead. This means you don't count, and should be disenfranchised.

Robert Heinlein wrote a bunch of good books, but ideologically he was somewhere to the right of Ann Coulter. Citing him is about as much proof of how correct your position is as, well, citing Ann Coulter.