No True Scotsman, Jonathan Ross and the Hugos
I didn't know who Jonathan Ross was last week. I still don't. All I know is what twitter has told me, so I know he tells fat jokes and makes women uncomfortable for a living. At least that's what twitter said.
And that's all I feel the need to know about him. The controversy was over and done before the first article about his controversial Hugo hosting was online.
The issue seems to be that con organizer Farah Mendlesohn resigned over the choice to have Ross host the awards. She then wrote something on her livejournal about it:
It was further made clear to me, as the conversation progressed, that the Chairs knew in advance that I would be unhappy, and that one of the Chairs was not even prepared to discuss the issues of Jonathan Ross’s public abuse of women (that issue specifically: that Chair was prepared to discuss and excuse other issues).
What we can gather from Ms. Mendlesohn is that there is infighting in the committee, and that Jonathan Ross was a bad choice. The infighting doesn't surprise me, really. Fans have been forming circular firing squads for at least as long as I've been around to notice, as Chris Meadows points out, "Any group of people large enough to have internal subdivisions is going to have internal strife."
Again, I don't know any more than I care to about Mr. Ross at this time, which is very little, but I've been on the wrong side of a twitter zeitgeist before. In my case, a couple of strangers read an article about con culture, apparently suffered from acute reading comprehension deficiency coupled with severe out-of-contextism, and then willfully lied in an effort to sic all of twitter on me. That ended with one tweeter saying he didn't know who this jerk was that everyone was complaining about, but he was going to make sure the jerk in question wasn't allowed at his con anymore. (I wrote to the guy and told him I was the jerk. He was surprised, then he actually went and read the article for the first time, then he apologized for taking part in the whole mess without having first learned anything about it.)
Right now, what I'm more worried about than whether or not Jonathan Ross is a sexist is the way the public discussion has now shifted toward a critique of feminism, and that's happened because feminism no longer (or maybe never did) exists in the public consciousness as a notion or collection of philosophies. The perception of feminism now seems to be a collection of feminists, and those feminists are suffering from the No True Scotsman fallacy. And, in turn, the true feminists who are also true nerds or whatever are now out to judge who is and isn't a true nerd.
What's worse is that twitter is involved. Twitter makes everything worse. Or, rather, the people on twitter make everything worse. The people on twitter made the Hunger Games worse. The people on twitter made Cheerios worse. The people on twitter made the Hugos worse. Not because they didn't have a right to their opinions, but because they thought it was a good idea to to bombard a stranger over some hearsay.
Listen, if half of what I've heard about this guy is true, he was a bad idea for a Hugo Awards host. Whichever member of the committee first floated the idea ought to have been told, "No, that's a bad idea. Here's why." All that aside, though, forming virtual camps and waging online battles over who is and isn't a real nerd is stupid, offensive and a huge waste of time.
And that's not because I feel particularly protective of this Ross bloke. It's because I'm particularly unhappy when loud, angry mobs get their way. And too much of twitter is just one angry mob or another, trying to get its way.