Cool! Banned by Vox!

I had to give Vox a little lesson on Aristole and logic the other day and now he seems to have got a tad upset with me.

“Second, while Camestros Felapton has gotten himself banned elsewhere in the Puppyverse, he’d always behaved himself here and never done worse than embarrass himself by demonstrating his inability to understand the core difference between rhetoric and dialectic, and between enthymemes and logical syllogisms. However, he’s been blatantly lying about both me and Castalia House elsewhere, so he’s now permanently banned from commenting here as well.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20200803211957/http://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/05/sjws-strike-back.html

Oopsie!

The rationalization is because of the point I made on File770 regarding the Castalia House published work on Gene Wolfe:

“I’ve been a fan of Gene Wolfe for a long time. I love the idea of the work you are doing and from what I have seen the scale of work and scholarship you have put into is impressive. However, I can’t vote for your work when your publisher is promoting it by attempting to exploit issues like child-sexual abuse. There isn’t some neat way of separating ‘Castalia House’ from the actions and strategies of Theodore Beale/Vox Day and there is a qualitative difference between authors who have been unwillingly nominated by the Rabid slate and authors who have willingly chosen to work with Castalia House. I understand that for you it was a matter of getting your work published and promoted and I understand why any author would want that for their work – but in the case of Castalia “promoted” necessarily includes stunts like slating the Hugo awards and attempts to trash whole categories, and it includes slurs and defamation of *other authors* people who, like you, have poured sweat & scholarship and long days/nights into their work. However, I also get that Vox Day perceives criticism as betrayal and that he has a tendency to ‘punish’ what he perceives as betrayal. So I am certainly not asking you denounce Day or withdraw from the awards or any other kind of symbolic action, but I am saying I can’t vote for your work and I can’t see it as a legitimate nomination because there is no way of seperating what is published by Castalia from how Castalia promotes itself and its published works.”

Vox claims this somehow ‘proves’ Larry Correia’s point about politics and the Hugos or something. Which is odd because the focus of my point was not Vox Day’s admittedly unpleasant and confused politics but his active campaign against the Hugo Awards and other science-fiction writers.

He also says:

“But, as Felapton admits, since he can’t separate the work from the publisher, the merit of the work does not matter and he will not vote for any Castalia-published work on the basis of the genetic fallacy.”

Sigh. That isn’t the genetic fallacy. The genetic fallacy is a fallacy of IRRELEVANCE that confuses the SOURCE of a claim with its VERACITY. There isn’t a factual claim at stake here – I’m not saying a factual claim made by an author is false by virtue of his publisher (e.g. if somebody was to say that a claim about Gene Wolfe in the book was false purely on the basis that the book was a Castalia House book THAT would be the genetic fallacy).

My claim is that I can’t reward obnoxious behavior by Castalia House. Nothing to do with the genetic fallacy. Vox concedes that I raise one valid point, which is that “there is no way of separating what is published by Castalia from how Castalia promotes itself and its published works.” That is the ethical basis of my position and Vox concedes that it is valid and not fallacious.

What is more interesting is Vox losing his cool. That is a major departure from his play book and poor tactics. He is actually rattled? Surely not by me, so I assume it must be by El Sandifer’s campaign.