A blogger finds fault with my moral calculus equating paypigs who sell out their culture for a pot of message fic to Americans who aided and abetted communists.
“Stop giving money to people who hate you.”
Brian Niemeier has taken this to an extreme:
From now on, I will regard anyone buying a Marvel or DC comic or a ticket to a Disney movie as morally equivalent to an American who gave aid and comfort to known Communist spies during the Cold War. SJWs want me banished from society and killed. If you buy their products, you advance their goal.
Is Brian going to treat the people who buy his books on Amazon like Communist sympathizers too? Because this is what I saw on Amazon last night:
Just because Amazon isn’t as converged as Disney doesn’t mean that they’re not going to go down a similar path in the near future and screw over all of us. Clearly they’re already working on their part to destroy western civilization. But I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for all the right-leaning indie authors to pull their books off Amazon. That’s where the money is.
How do you stop giving money to people who hate you when everybody hates you?
It’s a sadly common scene in America these days: The addict lashes out at friends trying to cure him of the vice that’s destroying him. This clumsy effort to paint me as a hypocrite by drawing a false moral equivalence between proximate cooperation with Disney and remote cooperation with Amazon sounds more like the squealing of Disney paypigs wallowing in the muck, shivering for their next fix of poz slop.
That’s the problem with trying to deflect attention from the beam in your eye by pointing out the motes in others’.
But the accusations have been leveled, so I’ll dispense with the charges in turn.
1. Brian Niemeier has taken this to an extreme…
The accusation of extremism, a shopworn rhetorical jab of the Left. I could stop right here since my accuser is clearly proceeding in bad faith, but he’s given us an excellent teachable moment.
Communist infiltrators of yesteryear sought to converge American cultural institutions to destroy Western civilization. Anyone who financially supported them–say, a Hollywood studio chief who employed commie screenwriters–rendered proximate material cooperation to their diabolical project.
Disney–not just the writers; the whole studio–has been fully converged by cultural Marxists hellbent on destroying Western civilization. Paying them for their movies renders proximate material cooperation to their diabolical project.
These statements take nothing “to an extreme”. They point out a real moral equivalence. It’s not on me if being confronted with the true moral character of your entertainment choices triggers your amygdalae.
2. Is Brian going to treat the people who buy his books on Amazon like Communist sympathizers too?
No.
Again, I could stop right there. Anyone who’s paid any amount of attention to this blog knows my position on an author’s relationship to his readers.
But because this false moral equivalence is even stupider than dismissing a readily observable fact as “extreme”, I’ll lay this out for anyone who might be tempted to take this guy’s pearl-clutching seriously.
First, implying I’m any kind of Amazon sycophant is just dumb. I’ve never hesitated to call them out when they’ve messed up before, and I won’t hesitate to call them out in the future if they mess up again.
Speaking of which, the Amazon Stories ad above definitely qualifies. Bad Amazon! For shame.
With that shit test out of the way, the OP himself admits that a) Amazon is not fully converged and b) Amazon is where the money is. The point of getting into any business, publishing included, is to make a profit. There are always edge cases, but for 99.999% of authors Amazon is the only game in town.
But since they’re not fully converged–Nick Cole and Vox Day agree it’s mainly just some mid-level SJWs who’re easily bypassed–dealing with Amazon is at worst remote material cooperation with evil; not proximate cooperation like paying to see Soylo.
The OP does make a valid point. The situation has deteriorated to the stage where it’s impossible to conduct our daily lives without cooperating with evil in some small way. The Bible forewarned us this would happen.
How did it come to this? I’ve written about that, too. The founders of our institutions, largely conservatives by today’s standards, gave away the farm to the Left. I’d love to avoid dealing with Lefties altogether, but thanks to the Right’s incorrigible tendency to sell out, that’s not an option.
Western civilizationalist authors like Nick Cole, John C. Wright, and myself have to play the cards we’re dealt at the only available table, and right now Amazon runs that table. Luckily they run it pretty fair, so guys like us at least have a chance to win. Which we are. Bigly. We can keep winning at Amazon’s game, or we can cave to false moral equivalencies, fold, and go home. Which would you prefer, dear readers?
3. Just because Amazon isn’t as converged as Disney doesn’t mean that they’re not going to go down a similar path in the near future and screw over all of us.
This shit again. It’s just a political twist on the old zombie meme deployed by Stockholm syndrome-riddled legacy pub authors. “Amazon pays great royalties now, but they might not later, so you’d better stick with the Big Five publishers who pay eight percent!”
To crib from Stefan Molyneux, the atheist who somehow manages to be holy to his fingertips, that’s not an argument. Next!
4. But I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for all the right-leaning indie authors to pull their books off Amazon. That’s where the money is.
The OP is telling right-leaning authors to pull their books from Amazon, even though he admits in the same paragraph that they’re not as converged as Disney and they’re the only way for us to make money. Dealing with Amazon is a requirement of my job–much as it is for millions of others. Shelling out ten bucks to be insulted by Disney isn’t (yet) mandatory.
If he’s got that much free time he doesn’t know what to do with, might I suggest he check out the cornucopia of public domain movies available for free online. The classic noir film The Big Combo comes highly recommended.
Much as I’d love to jump through more rhetorical hoops, I’d rather keep making a living while doing my small part to rebuild the canon of science fiction.
