Hugos!
It's sometimes fun to note that I have *votes*, not just strong opinions, on the Hugo Awards. As you probably already know if you're the kind of nerd to be reading this, there was a concerted attempt by neo-fascists, white supremacists, hyperreactionaries, men's rights activists, literal neo-nazis, and some just plain garden-variety jerks to hijack the World Science Fiction Society's Hugo Awards this year, and they managed to pretty thoroughly stuff the ballot with terrible works that would never have gotten a legitimate nomination.
So I figure, let's make my ballot (and my notes on the ballot) public. I've got a few rules for myself this year:
#1: No Award goes above *all* works brigaded onto the ballot, full stop.
#2: No legitimate nominee goes below any brigaded work, full stop.
#3: I *have* been reading and ranking the nominees who didn't make it onto the ballot honestly, and I have ranked them. That rank has most often been "last" because MOST (not all) of the dishonest nominations are for really genuinely terrible work, but where I think a work might have made it legitimately if it had only been given the chance, I ranked it not-last.
(As a note, I'd do the "below No Award" thing if *anyone* had brigaded nominees onto the ballot. The fact that the people trying to cheat this year are gators and shitheads, and the stuff they got onto the ballot is so bad, just makes my voting delicious.)
And now, the ballot.
Best Novel:
Three legit nominees.
1. Ancillary Sword - a perfectly cromulent sequel to the best book of last year, greatly enjoyable and made me excited to read the next one.
2. The Goblin Emperor - clever plotting, interesting characters, neat worldbuilding. I'm not actually done this book. I'm about 30% through it and greatly enjoying it, and if it stays this good I might need to swap it with #1. If it suddenly goes terrible I might have to swap it with #3, but I don't expect that to happen.
3. NO AWARD
4. The Three-Body Problem - I waffled, hard, about where to put this. The first (Cultural Revolution) section of the book was gripping and I wanted very much to read the rest.... and then we come forward to the modern era and it became a *slog*. The translation (ESPECIALLY dialog) became extremely stilted, the characterisation suffered, and there were a number of direct-to-reader tell-not-show infodumps of a kind I haven't seen since Ayn Rand or Jerry Jenkins. I kept trying because so many people told me they loved this book, but I kept wanting to throw it against the wall and I was reading it on my phone so that was kind of not good. I eventually gave up, and because it was unfinishable it goes below No Award. My waffling: it's a much worse book than Skin Game, but Skin Game got on the ballot by slate.
5. Skin Game - if this had gotten on fairly I would have voted it above No Award, not just on its own merits but also as a kind of "honouring the series as a whole" Hugo. But it didn't, so here it is, below the real nominees and below No Award, but above the Generic Extruded Science Fiction Product.
Best Novella:
No legitimate nominees made it onto the ballot.
1. NO AWARD
2. Flow. It would take a great deal of concentrated, diligent effort to produce something as bad as the excretions of the whimpering terrified homophobic reactionary asshole and the quasiliterate neo-nazi who make up the rest of this category. Arlan Andrews has not made that effort, and thus gets my "if anyone has to win this, he should" vote.
Best Novelette:
One real nominee got on the ballot, and it deserves it.
1. The Day The World Turned Upside Down
2. NO AWARD
Short Story:
No legitimate nominees
1. NO AWARD
2. Totalled: A neat concept piece about a brain-in-a-jar going all Flowers For Algernon while trying to complete a great work. Not bad; I'm not sure it would have made the ballot without cheating, and I wouldn't have nominated it, but I also wouldn't have been surprised if it had made the ballot in a normal year. Much better than...
3. On The Spiritual Plain: heavy-handed, clunky, exposition-rich, and riddled with minor errors like saying 1:4:9 is the Golden Mean. Desperately needed a few more editing passes and would never make the ballot in a normal year as-is. There's an interesting story in there and it shines through in a few places. It still gets my #3 spot because, bad as it is, it's not as bad as....
4. A Single Samurai: No voice, cartoonish characterisation, a bleedingly obvious continuity problem that makes the whole thing headdesky in a way that I have trouble suspending disbelief over. This is a bad story, completely unworthy of the Hugo ballot. And even with that, it's not as bad as...
Turncoat: Author is clearly jerking off to back issues of Guns&Ammo while writing. If this was a chicken recipe it would involve no seasoning and include an hour of yelling at women on twitter.
Parliament of beasts and birds: Wishes it was CS Lewis, barely manages to be Tim Lahaye.
Best Related work:
1. NO AWARD
2. Letters From Gardner: This seems like the kind of work that might have gotten a legitimate nomination. Too bad it didn't.
3. Why Science Is Never Settled: While it's got an admirable goal, in practice the author fails to understand several of his own examples, and falls for a couple of truly classic long-since-debunked frauds. It's clear he wrote this without researching. Still, despite deeply flawed specifics it's okay generally, and it's WAY better than...
The Hot Equations: oh dear fuck, it's a short story collection by neo-nazis and their "I'm not a neo-nazi because they're just not fascist and bigoted ENOUGH" fellow travellers. If you're looking for something badly written, poorly edited, deeply stupid, or where the author was clearly jerking off to Guns&Ammo when he wrote it, you can find it here. Oh, I should dig the Burnside out of this collossal mound of goat diarrhea and see if it's as bad as the rest of the book? Well, it's actually a moderately good, if basic, analysis of some of the simpler energy/motion problems of space travel and hard-SF space combat, but it's also *completely* surrounded by goat diarrhea and the author made a truly monumental ass of himself promoting it. The work is unobjectionable but unexceptional, and *nowhere near* good enough to be considered "best of the year". I'd No Award this *any* year, and the author's behaviour and choice of publication are just gravy.
Transhuman And Subhuman: You know, when you're *most famous* for your online homophobic meltdowns and calling the people you irrationally hate "subhuman", maybe sticking that in the title of your book is not the best idea? The entire book is typical Wright: longwinded, pedantic, and unsubtle, full of unquestioned (and dumb) assumptions and proceeding poorly from them to unsupported conclusions accompanied by the kind of musings a deeply stupid person thinks of as smart.
(Bonus: First page, first paragraph, check out what made it past the guy who nominated himself for "best editor")
But this category is MOST notable for containing Wisdom From My Internet, a collection of racist tweets, long-since-debunked right-wing email chain letters, manufactured offense, and general stupidity that not only isn't a related work, but is so bad that *the author himself* has publicly declared he's voting No Award over it. And this from a guy who called his self-publisher "patriarchy press" because he thinks sexism is funny: even THAT GUY thinks this book is so bad it deserves not just to lose, but he'd rather no award be given at all rather than give it to his own book.
Best Graphic Story:
Holy shit, what a refreshingly GREAT category! Saga is very much not my thing, but it's certainly worthy of a Hugo, and I would love for *any* of the other three nominees to win. My eventual ordering of the top 3 is basically "in order of audacity". Ms Marvel, while a great comic, makes a lot of safe choices in narrative and character. This is perfectly appropriate for a Marvel book aimed at teenagers, but also makes it feel a little less ambitious than Rat Queens, which takes more risks. And Sex Criminals has a large "if we screw any part of it up we're going to hell, or at least New Jersey" feel to it, and they nail each point. So while I would be happy for *any* of those to take the award, I'm going to reward winning the big gambles over the small ones.
And if they all lose, well, Saga was pretty good.
1. Sex Criminals
2. Rat Queens
3. Ms Marvel
4. Saga
5. NO AWARD
Best Dramatic, Long:
1. Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Gee, a movie where the antiauthoritarian hero fights authoritarians behaving badly, disliked by the neofascist slate? How did THAT happen? And it's also a really great movie.
2. NO AWARD
A pox on all the rest of them. The only other legitimate nominee is a Tom Cruise movie, and fuck Tom Cruise. Since I don't want to rank a Stupid Bigot choice over a legit choice, and I don't want to rank a Tom Cruise movie over *anything*, the rest get no rankings. It's Captain America: Fuck The Fascist Shitheads or nothing.
Best Dramatic, Short:
1. Orphan Black
2. NO AWARD
3. Doctor Who
The only good thing the creepy bigots managed: driving enough *other* bad choices off that *only one* Doctor Who episode made it into the Best Doctor Who Episode Written By Stephen Moffat category.
Fuck giving Hugos to Doctor Who. Especially fuck Listen, which wasn't even the best Doctor Who, let alone best TV. But even though I think No Award should be given before giving one to Doctor Who, if one HAS to be given out Doctor Who still gets a vote over the Whining Asshole slate.
(within the slate: the Flash pilot was unobjectionable but not great, Grimm has never been my thing, Game Of Thrones loses many points because there's clearly two groups of writers: the ones who write good scenes, and the ones who are just all YAY BOOBZ. So I have no opinion between them, although in a normal year I'd flip coins and rank them just so I could put Doctor Who below them.)
Best Editor (Short)
No legit nominees. However, some of the didn't-earn-it nominees might have made it on legitimately, had they been given the chance to.
1. NO AWARD
2. Jen Brozek
3. Edmund Schubert (who withdrew because his nomination was fake and he didn't want to compete for an award he didn't earn fairly.... but whose work was still better than the rest of the ballot.)
Best Editor (Long)
No legit nominees, yadda yadda yadda.
1. NO AWARD
2. Anne Sowards
3. Sheila Gilbert.
It's hard, as a reader, to rank good editors. Finding *bad* editors is easy - look at the poorly edited pieces published by, say, Castalia House, and you'll clearly see the results of having a feckless and incompetent editor looking over the ninth-rate works of mediocre authors who couldn't get them published by a non-vanity company. But ranking GOOD editors? That's hard, for me as a reader, because it's often hard to tell, in a good work, how much the editor mattered.
I've read several perfectly acceptable works edited by both the people I ranked, and basically flipped a coin to determine the order.
Best Pro Artist:
There's only one legitimate nominee. Did she produce eligible work? Did she get on the ballot due to honest nominations? I trust the judgment of the people who felt strongly enough to get a real nomination through the shit. Done.
1. Julie Dillon
2. NO AWARD
Semiprozine
Magazines are really not my thing? This is a category I'm conflicted on: There's a couple of brigaded noms, but at least one of them was incredibly offended that they'd been included on the racist sexist homophobic dipshit slate without being informed or asked. And I really don't know any of them. So for now I've got this one completely unvoted, but I plan to change that in the next week or so.
Fancast:
Two legit nominees, I don't listen to many podcasts so I flipped a coin to determine which went first on my "real nominees yes, fake nominees no" vote.
1. Galactic Suburbia Podcast
2. Tea and Jeopardy
3. NO AWARD
Best Fan writer:
Whoo boy.
1. Laura Mixon - The only legit nominee. Samples are a personal and smart story and an exhaustively researched troll expose. I can see this as a good win.
2. NO AWARD
3. Jeffro Johnson - excellent-in-comparison writing, interesting analysis, only sets up a very few strawmen to attack on sexist grounds. Not great, but *way* better than the screaming bigots and his choice of something other than screaming bigotry to include in his sample packet is refreshing.
Amanda Green - Sample work: creepy bigoted factually-incorrect complaints about Star Trek canon that show she hasn't read the work in question and isn't familiar with Star Trek canon. Impressively bad, even for a dipshit fake nomination.
Dave Freer: 40 characters wide by 19 lines per page in your sample is NOT a good look. Neither is prefacing your package with a rant about how non-bigots are just the worst people, then following that up with sample posts about how non-bigots are the worst people.
Cedar Sanderson: Defending sexism without understanding it, also not a good look.
Best Fan Artist
I don't know any of these people or their work, but there's no dispshits to vote *against*, so I'm simply leaving this blank for now.
The Campbell Which Is Not A Hugo, Brought To You By Dell Who Are Also Not A Hugo
Again, only one legit nominee, and one nominee who *might* have gotten on in a fair vote but didn't, along with three "very clearly does not deserve to be here" choices
1. Wesley Chu
2. NO AWARD
3. Kary English
And that's that, so far. Gotta finish The Goblin Emperor and read the magazines, but I'm mostly done.
PS: A few preemptive responses:
If you're going to pop up here and argue that the bigoted shitheads were "just doing what other people have done for years", I'm going to laugh and you and block you because you're either knowingly advancing a dishonest argument or you're so stupid that a conversation with you is simply impossible.
If you're going to argue that I should ignore HOW works got onto the ballot because they're here now, I'm going to laugh at you and *probably* block you, because I strongly feel that "you didn't make it onto the ballot fairly" is an indication that you probably weren't good enough to make it onto the ballot fairly, and oh look, an examination of the works bears that out. I respect people who made the choice to pretend all the nominees deserved to be there and to ignore how many good works got pushed off, but I'm not one of them and I'm not on *your* blog telling you you must rank them below No Award, am I? No.
If you're going to argue that I'm somehow "playing into their hands" by downvoting the bigots' nominees, I'm going to laugh at you and almost certainly block you. As they've made abundantly clear on numerous occasions, the bigots plan to declare victory *no matter what happens*, regardless of how much they've previously said they do or do not want any given result. They don't care what the results are, and I don't care what they think about the results. I care about what *I* think of the results.
If you're a published Baen author here to have a phenomenally racist meltdown in the comments section while touting your Baen credits as prove of the value of your opinons, please feel free. Three of your colleagues already have and I will add you to the collection. I don't think you should do that, though, because I suspect at this point the *good* authors Baen publishes are deeply embarrassed by your shitty antics and tired of you dragging their publisher's name through the dirt.
If you've made it all the way to here, have a kitty.
So I figure, let's make my ballot (and my notes on the ballot) public. I've got a few rules for myself this year:
#1: No Award goes above *all* works brigaded onto the ballot, full stop.
#2: No legitimate nominee goes below any brigaded work, full stop.
#3: I *have* been reading and ranking the nominees who didn't make it onto the ballot honestly, and I have ranked them. That rank has most often been "last" because MOST (not all) of the dishonest nominations are for really genuinely terrible work, but where I think a work might have made it legitimately if it had only been given the chance, I ranked it not-last.
(As a note, I'd do the "below No Award" thing if *anyone* had brigaded nominees onto the ballot. The fact that the people trying to cheat this year are gators and shitheads, and the stuff they got onto the ballot is so bad, just makes my voting delicious.)
And now, the ballot.
Best Novel:
Three legit nominees.
1. Ancillary Sword - a perfectly cromulent sequel to the best book of last year, greatly enjoyable and made me excited to read the next one.
2. The Goblin Emperor - clever plotting, interesting characters, neat worldbuilding. I'm not actually done this book. I'm about 30% through it and greatly enjoying it, and if it stays this good I might need to swap it with #1. If it suddenly goes terrible I might have to swap it with #3, but I don't expect that to happen.
3. NO AWARD
4. The Three-Body Problem - I waffled, hard, about where to put this. The first (Cultural Revolution) section of the book was gripping and I wanted very much to read the rest.... and then we come forward to the modern era and it became a *slog*. The translation (ESPECIALLY dialog) became extremely stilted, the characterisation suffered, and there were a number of direct-to-reader tell-not-show infodumps of a kind I haven't seen since Ayn Rand or Jerry Jenkins. I kept trying because so many people told me they loved this book, but I kept wanting to throw it against the wall and I was reading it on my phone so that was kind of not good. I eventually gave up, and because it was unfinishable it goes below No Award. My waffling: it's a much worse book than Skin Game, but Skin Game got on the ballot by slate.
5. Skin Game - if this had gotten on fairly I would have voted it above No Award, not just on its own merits but also as a kind of "honouring the series as a whole" Hugo. But it didn't, so here it is, below the real nominees and below No Award, but above the Generic Extruded Science Fiction Product.
Best Novella:
No legitimate nominees made it onto the ballot.
1. NO AWARD
2. Flow. It would take a great deal of concentrated, diligent effort to produce something as bad as the excretions of the whimpering terrified homophobic reactionary asshole and the quasiliterate neo-nazi who make up the rest of this category. Arlan Andrews has not made that effort, and thus gets my "if anyone has to win this, he should" vote.
Best Novelette:
One real nominee got on the ballot, and it deserves it.
1. The Day The World Turned Upside Down
2. NO AWARD
Short Story:
No legitimate nominees
1. NO AWARD
2. Totalled: A neat concept piece about a brain-in-a-jar going all Flowers For Algernon while trying to complete a great work. Not bad; I'm not sure it would have made the ballot without cheating, and I wouldn't have nominated it, but I also wouldn't have been surprised if it had made the ballot in a normal year. Much better than...
3. On The Spiritual Plain: heavy-handed, clunky, exposition-rich, and riddled with minor errors like saying 1:4:9 is the Golden Mean. Desperately needed a few more editing passes and would never make the ballot in a normal year as-is. There's an interesting story in there and it shines through in a few places. It still gets my #3 spot because, bad as it is, it's not as bad as....
4. A Single Samurai: No voice, cartoonish characterisation, a bleedingly obvious continuity problem that makes the whole thing headdesky in a way that I have trouble suspending disbelief over. This is a bad story, completely unworthy of the Hugo ballot. And even with that, it's not as bad as...
Turncoat: Author is clearly jerking off to back issues of Guns&Ammo while writing. If this was a chicken recipe it would involve no seasoning and include an hour of yelling at women on twitter.
Parliament of beasts and birds: Wishes it was CS Lewis, barely manages to be Tim Lahaye.
Best Related work:
1. NO AWARD
2. Letters From Gardner: This seems like the kind of work that might have gotten a legitimate nomination. Too bad it didn't.
3. Why Science Is Never Settled: While it's got an admirable goal, in practice the author fails to understand several of his own examples, and falls for a couple of truly classic long-since-debunked frauds. It's clear he wrote this without researching. Still, despite deeply flawed specifics it's okay generally, and it's WAY better than...
The Hot Equations: oh dear fuck, it's a short story collection by neo-nazis and their "I'm not a neo-nazi because they're just not fascist and bigoted ENOUGH" fellow travellers. If you're looking for something badly written, poorly edited, deeply stupid, or where the author was clearly jerking off to Guns&Ammo when he wrote it, you can find it here. Oh, I should dig the Burnside out of this collossal mound of goat diarrhea and see if it's as bad as the rest of the book? Well, it's actually a moderately good, if basic, analysis of some of the simpler energy/motion problems of space travel and hard-SF space combat, but it's also *completely* surrounded by goat diarrhea and the author made a truly monumental ass of himself promoting it. The work is unobjectionable but unexceptional, and *nowhere near* good enough to be considered "best of the year". I'd No Award this *any* year, and the author's behaviour and choice of publication are just gravy.
Transhuman And Subhuman: You know, when you're *most famous* for your online homophobic meltdowns and calling the people you irrationally hate "subhuman", maybe sticking that in the title of your book is not the best idea? The entire book is typical Wright: longwinded, pedantic, and unsubtle, full of unquestioned (and dumb) assumptions and proceeding poorly from them to unsupported conclusions accompanied by the kind of musings a deeply stupid person thinks of as smart.
(Bonus: First page, first paragraph, check out what made it past the guy who nominated himself for "best editor")
But this category is MOST notable for containing Wisdom From My Internet, a collection of racist tweets, long-since-debunked right-wing email chain letters, manufactured offense, and general stupidity that not only isn't a related work, but is so bad that *the author himself* has publicly declared he's voting No Award over it. And this from a guy who called his self-publisher "patriarchy press" because he thinks sexism is funny: even THAT GUY thinks this book is so bad it deserves not just to lose, but he'd rather no award be given at all rather than give it to his own book.
Best Graphic Story:
Holy shit, what a refreshingly GREAT category! Saga is very much not my thing, but it's certainly worthy of a Hugo, and I would love for *any* of the other three nominees to win. My eventual ordering of the top 3 is basically "in order of audacity". Ms Marvel, while a great comic, makes a lot of safe choices in narrative and character. This is perfectly appropriate for a Marvel book aimed at teenagers, but also makes it feel a little less ambitious than Rat Queens, which takes more risks. And Sex Criminals has a large "if we screw any part of it up we're going to hell, or at least New Jersey" feel to it, and they nail each point. So while I would be happy for *any* of those to take the award, I'm going to reward winning the big gambles over the small ones.
And if they all lose, well, Saga was pretty good.
1. Sex Criminals
2. Rat Queens
3. Ms Marvel
4. Saga
5. NO AWARD
Best Dramatic, Long:
1. Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Gee, a movie where the antiauthoritarian hero fights authoritarians behaving badly, disliked by the neofascist slate? How did THAT happen? And it's also a really great movie.
2. NO AWARD
A pox on all the rest of them. The only other legitimate nominee is a Tom Cruise movie, and fuck Tom Cruise. Since I don't want to rank a Stupid Bigot choice over a legit choice, and I don't want to rank a Tom Cruise movie over *anything*, the rest get no rankings. It's Captain America: Fuck The Fascist Shitheads or nothing.
Best Dramatic, Short:
1. Orphan Black
2. NO AWARD
3. Doctor Who
The only good thing the creepy bigots managed: driving enough *other* bad choices off that *only one* Doctor Who episode made it into the Best Doctor Who Episode Written By Stephen Moffat category.
Fuck giving Hugos to Doctor Who. Especially fuck Listen, which wasn't even the best Doctor Who, let alone best TV. But even though I think No Award should be given before giving one to Doctor Who, if one HAS to be given out Doctor Who still gets a vote over the Whining Asshole slate.
(within the slate: the Flash pilot was unobjectionable but not great, Grimm has never been my thing, Game Of Thrones loses many points because there's clearly two groups of writers: the ones who write good scenes, and the ones who are just all YAY BOOBZ. So I have no opinion between them, although in a normal year I'd flip coins and rank them just so I could put Doctor Who below them.)
Best Editor (Short)
No legit nominees. However, some of the didn't-earn-it nominees might have made it on legitimately, had they been given the chance to.
1. NO AWARD
2. Jen Brozek
3. Edmund Schubert (who withdrew because his nomination was fake and he didn't want to compete for an award he didn't earn fairly.... but whose work was still better than the rest of the ballot.)
Best Editor (Long)
No legit nominees, yadda yadda yadda.
1. NO AWARD
2. Anne Sowards
3. Sheila Gilbert.
It's hard, as a reader, to rank good editors. Finding *bad* editors is easy - look at the poorly edited pieces published by, say, Castalia House, and you'll clearly see the results of having a feckless and incompetent editor looking over the ninth-rate works of mediocre authors who couldn't get them published by a non-vanity company. But ranking GOOD editors? That's hard, for me as a reader, because it's often hard to tell, in a good work, how much the editor mattered.
I've read several perfectly acceptable works edited by both the people I ranked, and basically flipped a coin to determine the order.
Best Pro Artist:
There's only one legitimate nominee. Did she produce eligible work? Did she get on the ballot due to honest nominations? I trust the judgment of the people who felt strongly enough to get a real nomination through the shit. Done.
1. Julie Dillon
2. NO AWARD
Semiprozine
Magazines are really not my thing? This is a category I'm conflicted on: There's a couple of brigaded noms, but at least one of them was incredibly offended that they'd been included on the racist sexist homophobic dipshit slate without being informed or asked. And I really don't know any of them. So for now I've got this one completely unvoted, but I plan to change that in the next week or so.
Fancast:
Two legit nominees, I don't listen to many podcasts so I flipped a coin to determine which went first on my "real nominees yes, fake nominees no" vote.
1. Galactic Suburbia Podcast
2. Tea and Jeopardy
3. NO AWARD
Best Fan writer:
Whoo boy.
1. Laura Mixon - The only legit nominee. Samples are a personal and smart story and an exhaustively researched troll expose. I can see this as a good win.
2. NO AWARD
3. Jeffro Johnson - excellent-in-comparison writing, interesting analysis, only sets up a very few strawmen to attack on sexist grounds. Not great, but *way* better than the screaming bigots and his choice of something other than screaming bigotry to include in his sample packet is refreshing.
Amanda Green - Sample work: creepy bigoted factually-incorrect complaints about Star Trek canon that show she hasn't read the work in question and isn't familiar with Star Trek canon. Impressively bad, even for a dipshit fake nomination.
Dave Freer: 40 characters wide by 19 lines per page in your sample is NOT a good look. Neither is prefacing your package with a rant about how non-bigots are just the worst people, then following that up with sample posts about how non-bigots are the worst people.
Cedar Sanderson: Defending sexism without understanding it, also not a good look.
Best Fan Artist
I don't know any of these people or their work, but there's no dispshits to vote *against*, so I'm simply leaving this blank for now.
The Campbell Which Is Not A Hugo, Brought To You By Dell Who Are Also Not A Hugo
Again, only one legit nominee, and one nominee who *might* have gotten on in a fair vote but didn't, along with three "very clearly does not deserve to be here" choices
1. Wesley Chu
2. NO AWARD
3. Kary English
And that's that, so far. Gotta finish The Goblin Emperor and read the magazines, but I'm mostly done.
PS: A few preemptive responses:
If you're going to pop up here and argue that the bigoted shitheads were "just doing what other people have done for years", I'm going to laugh and you and block you because you're either knowingly advancing a dishonest argument or you're so stupid that a conversation with you is simply impossible.
If you're going to argue that I should ignore HOW works got onto the ballot because they're here now, I'm going to laugh at you and *probably* block you, because I strongly feel that "you didn't make it onto the ballot fairly" is an indication that you probably weren't good enough to make it onto the ballot fairly, and oh look, an examination of the works bears that out. I respect people who made the choice to pretend all the nominees deserved to be there and to ignore how many good works got pushed off, but I'm not one of them and I'm not on *your* blog telling you you must rank them below No Award, am I? No.
If you're going to argue that I'm somehow "playing into their hands" by downvoting the bigots' nominees, I'm going to laugh at you and almost certainly block you. As they've made abundantly clear on numerous occasions, the bigots plan to declare victory *no matter what happens*, regardless of how much they've previously said they do or do not want any given result. They don't care what the results are, and I don't care what they think about the results. I care about what *I* think of the results.
If you're a published Baen author here to have a phenomenally racist meltdown in the comments section while touting your Baen credits as prove of the value of your opinons, please feel free. Three of your colleagues already have and I will add you to the collection. I don't think you should do that, though, because I suspect at this point the *good* authors Baen publishes are deeply embarrassed by your shitty antics and tired of you dragging their publisher's name through the dirt.
If you've made it all the way to here, have a kitty.