Dave “Cool Beard but Incoherent Rants” Freer

Category: Fan Writer
Blogs on: Mad Genius Club
Slates: Sad Puppies

Dave Freer has an awesome beard of Alan Moore caliber. Actually, they look quite a bit alike. I just hope that the anarchist comics genius hasn’t lost his mind, turned conservative and moved to Australia. (On the other hand, that would perhaps be not so unlogical conclusion to what Moore has been onto recently with the snake gods and magic business.)

Okay, let’s start with something positive: Freer has managed to include in the Hugo package one blog post that is actually about SFF books and in which the acronym SJW is mentioned (in the comments) only once. Well done!

Freer seems passionate, and I do like passionate people. Too bad he’s passionate about things I find reprehensible, such as defending sexism with this incoherent rant which consists of satire quotes of nobody knows what and run-of-the-mill anti-feminist bullshit that never stops to make an understandable point. The post is turbocharged with obscure references to cases of supposed “misandry” I may not be familiar with. However, after reading the post, I wasn’t inclined to do any research.

In another post, Freer rambles about the Puppies’ favorite subject: why so few conservative writers and so many leftist ones do so well in the Hugos. The allegation is arguably false, but even if it wasn’t, the lengthy post fails on logic due to its being built on the nonsense premise that science fiction writers’ political views are distributed on a Gaussian curve. Which they are of course not. But even IF they were, and the distribution of left/center/right was roughly 15%/70%/15% as Freer assumes (and the ifs are starting to stack up quickly here), you can’t decipher who individual writers are going to be among the leftmost 15 percent and who are not. As far as I can see, Freer lumps into that category people like John Scalzi who don’t have a single socialist bone in their bodies while ignoring the fact that — as Eric Flint points out — actual left wing authors, such as himself, Mercedes Lackey and Steven Brust, are continually passed over. So, Freer’s tedious math doesn’t really add up there.

In his last gem of blog wisdom, Freer assures how constructive force he and the other Mad Genius Club members are in modern SFF. That’s nice to hear, of course. Freer states:

Admittedly, as people who love books, support writers… we do get snarky in some posts with people and groups who are trashing a genre we love. But that’s here. We do not call for boycotts, or for individuals to hounded, persecuted and harassed. We regard organizing anonymous lynch mobs and pile-ons for the enforcement of our ‘group-think’ as utter anathema.

His denunciation of boycotts and lynch mobs is quite hilarious if we check what he wrote last Monday. Now he urges his readers to swamp the email box of somebody at Tor with angry emails and is calling for a boycott unless something is done to an art director he disagrees with about Sad and Rabid Puppies. Oh, the irony.

Score: 1.5/10