Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Forums

That's pretty much the way I feel; you've described it beautifully.

The 1955 winner was actually They'd Rather Be Right, which can be obtained in ebook form for 99 cents here.

The Forever Machine is a collection consisting of They'd Rather Be Right with its two prequel stories, Crazy Joey and Hide! Hide! Witch!. If you're a completist and wish to own a physical edition, the paperback can be had for $8.95.

Interestingly, They'd Rather Be Right is widely regarded as the worst book to ever win a Hugo Award.

This is a false equivalency, one the Sad Puppies have been trying to spread all over the net. The usual claim is that Scalzi and Stross have been doing the same thing for years. I've debunked that above, so now you've switched to claiming that GRRM does it. This is also a false equivalency. Here are GRRM's posts with this year's recommendations: 

For Your Consideration: Stuff By Me
For Your Consideration: Stuff Not By Me

Here's what he's recommended:

Novel: lists 1 suggestion
Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: lists 1 eligible series and 3 eligible films
Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: lists 5 favorite GoT episodes, plus 6 other TV shows
Editor, Short Form: lists 5 eligible people
Professional Artist: lists 6 eligible people
Fan Writer: lists 1 eligible person

This is not a slate. This is not anything even remotely similar to what the Puppies did this year, which requested supporters to vote an entire slate "to stick it to the Social Justice Warriors".

SAD PUPPIES 3: the 2015 Hugo slate
Rabid Puppies 2015

Notice the word "slate". Not "recommendations", not "suggestions". SLATE.

And several Puppies around the web have even admitted that that is exactly what it's intended to be, an attempt to stuff the nominating ballot. Here's an example from one of the slate members who is listed for Related Work:

If you wish to make a case for anything different, you're going to have to provide actual examples, rather than making the usual vague Puppy handwavery claims.

I await this with bated breath. I have not yet seen anywhere where a Puppy has been able to provide legitimate specific examples of their spurious claims.

My argument is quite coherent, and you have not provided anything concrete to counter it. I certainly see the fallacies in your claims. The Puppies did not "suggest" more works than Martin. They set up a slate, and they encouraged supporters to nominate it wholesale. Suggestions were taken in an earlier thread; but strangely, most of those suggestions never made it onto the slate, and the slate includes a significant number of entries which did not appear in the suggestion thread. In other words, the slate was drawn up with significant disregard for the suggestions which had been solicited supposedly in order to create it.

Why weren't all the suggestions included on the slate? Why were a bunch of non-suggested entries added in? Why were the categories on the slate limited to no more than the number of positions available on the ballot?

No, the main complaint is that the Puppies gamed the nomination system to stack the ballot. What they did was legal -- but it was certainly not ethical.

Hugo nominators/ voters have been well aware for a long time that it was possible for the system to be gamed this way -- but they have deliberately chosen not to do so, because letting everyone have their say, and getting a genuinely wide range of nominations, was the goal. The reason the Hugos have been widely regarded as The preeminent Spec Fic award for many years is not because absolutely everyone who reads spec fic has nominated and voted. The Hugos have attained that high regard because the people who were nominating and voting were extremely conscientious about not gaming the system. While not perfect, it has worked well up to this point because the vast majority of participants operated in good faith.

The Puppies have deliberately chosen to destroy that integrity and conscientiousness.

Of course you don't have time to go find real examples of the claims you have made, because the claims you have made are false and you don't have any real examples to provide.

What the Puppies themselves say (as I quoted above) about the intent of the slate certainly does have a bearing on the intent of the Puppies.

You only get to say your claims are factual if you can provide evidence to back them up. You have provided no such evidence. Therefore, your claims are not "facts", they are claims -- and spurious ones, at that.

People are "bent out of shape" because the Puppies gamed the system. You may call this "success". I call it reprehensible.

I've provided real, actual data points and facts. This is not "jumping to conclusions". It is evidence which supports my statements.

People who appear on the Puppies slate are not "random people on the internet calling themselves Puppies". They are Puppies. And what they say does speak to the Puppies' intent.

"Talking Points" are statements made with no facts to back them up. That is what you have been doing. Thanks for pointing out the vacuousness of your own statements.

The putative reason for specficwriter's original post was to gain some understanding of why people were unhappy with the Sad Puppies and their methods.

Several posters then responded with substantive explanations laying out their concerns. At this point, the appropriate response would have been something along the lines of "Oh, I see now, thanks." or "I disagree with your thinking, but now I have a better understanding of why there is a hullabaloo." Instead, specficwriter is dismissive of people's concerns and starts arguing with them.

There is a word for this sort of behavior, and that word is trolling.

The Puppy minions have been doing this on posts all over Facebook and in comments on blog posts all over the Internet. They pop in, act as if they are disinterested observers trying to figure out what's going on, and drop in all of their spurious claims and Talking Points in the hope that no one reading has any idea what's going on and will be gullible enough to buy into their nonsense without bothering to check into it.

Puppies are severely allergic to logic, facts, and evidence. When you use these on them, they have no intellectual defenses. They break out into a bad case of hives and run away. 

It's here, in a comment on File770.

My take on it is that reports of VD's omnipotence have been greatly exaggerated. The Puppy attention span isn't that long (GamerGate is already dying a slow death), and a very large number of people who love spec fic and who genuinely care about the integrity and future of the Hugos have now been roused from their slumber.

It's all very much a bunch of spoilt, infantile brats throwing a big tantrum because everyone else won't just hand over all their toys, isn't it?

Just catching up on the forums after being buried in work for the last few months. I’m very glad to see that this debacle has increased awareness of how the Hugo works and the importance of the nominating process. The hope is that more people will get involved, so that such tactics become less likely to succeed in the future. I’ll be voting “no award” in some categories, but there are three novels on the ballot that IMO could be worthy winners (which is actually not unusually low, based on past shortlists), so they’ll move up the reading list. For a good discussion/review of the novel nominees, see this week’s Coode Street podcast!