DisCon III isn’t the first science fiction convention to flourish wokeness in front of fandom, but it does appear eager to be remembered as the first Woke Worldcon, for which aspiration it will doubtless receive the gushing plaudits of the segment of SF fandom that sees only evil in all of history before yesterday and whose vision of the future is one in which life will once again be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, short – and supervised 24/7 by the Overlords of Twitter.
Let me emphasize at the start that I don’t mean to cast aspersions on the worker bees who ran DisCon, who include many fans whom I have known personally and cordially for a long time and regard as friends. From all that I have heard (I wasn’t at the convention myself), the committee, staff and volunteers worked diligently and successfully to make the event enjoyable for all members in the face of challenging circumstances, which included the loss to bankruptcy of the original venue, the resulting postponement from August to the middle of the Christmas season, the resignations of both of the original co-chairmen, and the need to cope with the effects of the panicdemic.
No, wokeness was infused, as it usually is, by a handful of the Woke Faithful. In this instance, one person, the current convention chairman, has proudly claimed sole responsibility. I see no reason to dispute her.
Here is the background:
The presentation of the Hugo Awards, often described as SF’s counterpart to the Oscars, is one of the big events of the World Science Fiction Convention. This year, Raytheon Intelligence and Space donated money to the convention and sponsored a “Red Carpet to the Hugo Awards”, where fans could be photographed in “your Hugo best” before the ceremony. The announcement on the DisCon twitter feed led inevitably to nasty comments along the lines of “Mind the knife missiles, and try not to look like a wedding or bus full of orphans!”
There followed the standard groveling apology, signed by the convention chairman. Three points about it are worth noting:
- We are told that “accepting funding from Raytheon Intelligence and Space and partnering with them for the members’ red carpet event . . . has caused harm and damage to people: the finalists, who were unaware; the people in our communities; the members and staff of Worldcon, who trusted me to make good choices”. What comprised this “harm and damage” is left unstated. The activities of RI&S (which, by the way, doesn’t manufacture drones) include missile warning systems, cybersecurity and GPS, none of which is likely to “harm and damage” anybody but missile-wielding terrorists, hackers and sellers of road maps. RI&S also sells “air dominance solutions” to the U.S. Air Force and American allies, presumably putting them in a better position to inflict “harm and damage” on our enemies. It would be interesting to know just what part of these goods and services the chairman finds so obviously objectionable that she upbraids herself for having overlooked their offensiveness.
- To atone for “the harm that my actions caused”, the chairman announces that “DisCon III is making an anonymous contribution to an organization dedicated to peace, equal to the amount we received from Raytheon”. Anonymous? The chairman may be unaware of mundane tax law requirements. If so, she will at some point learn that tax-exempt educational organizations cannot make anonymous donations. Both the amounts and the recipients must be reported on their Form 990’s filed annually with the IRS. Those forms are public documents. Meanwhile, we can speculate about what the chairman counts as “an organization dedicated to peace”. The Red Cross? The Carnegie Endowment? Code Pink? Hamas? We shall find out in due course.
- Finally, the chairman urges future Worldcons and, indeed, science fiction conventions in general, to develop “a sponsorship policy for your organization that reflects the values and concerns of our community”, backed up by “a robust plan for doing due diligence on potential sponsors” and “a mission and value statement against which to measure actions”. (In the course of a career most notable for authorship of fantasy romance novels, she has somehow picked up corporatespeak as a second language.) The key point here is “reflects the values and concerns of our community”, as if science fiction fans form a community with a uniform set of “values and concerns”.
I, who believe that I can claim to be a member of that “community” (I did chair a Worldcon once), agree with Barack Obama that drone strikes play an important role in the fight against Islamofascism and that the vast majority of civilian casualties that they inflict are the fault of jihadists who utilize innocents as human shields. The DisCon chairman obviously regards that view as outside the bounds of acceptable “community” opinion and calls on conventions to enforce her position as organizational dogma.
Not very long ago, SF fans were proud of the intellectual diversity of fandom. Now the chairman of fandom’s most significant gathering implies that all fans, or at least all whose “values and concerns” are worth taking into account, think alike. If that is true, fandom is dead.
Further reading: Martin Berman-Gorvine, “The World Science Fiction Society Betrays Humanity”
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