Camestros Felapton

FELAPTONL

Dave’s little list

OK, it maybe Victorian cultural appropriation but time for a bit of light comic opera from Gilbert and Sullivan:

As some day it may happen that a victim must be found
I’ve got a little list — I’ve got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground
And who never would be missed — who never would be missed!
There’s the pestilential nuisances who write for autographs —
All people who have flabby hands and irritating laughs —
All children who are up in dates, and floor you with ’em flat —
All persons who in shaking hands, shake hands with you like that —
And all third persons who on spoiling tête-á-têtes insist —
They’d none of ’em be missed — they’d none of ’em be missed!

[Chorus]
He’s got ’em on the list — he’s got ’em on the list;
And they’ll none of ’em be missed — they’ll none of ’em be missed

Still on Dave Freer. In comments at Mad Genius, Dave has been demanding of sceptics of his theory to list others.

I’ll happily consider it IF you come up with set possible alternatives, who fit in ALL of the following subsets, all from Camestros statements or obvious corrolaries (such as for example spending thousands of hours of what has to be work time at times on fandom, sf, hugos, basically requires that the person should be interested in the same) Subset 1) Be an Australian Academic working in academia. 2)From that subset demonstrate a respectable working knowledge and use of Maths, AND Philosophy. 3)Of that now relatively small sample be an ardent follower (or have good reason to be an ardent follower) of sf/fantasy fandom particularly the Hugos – a good reason for example might be having your wife as potential winner. 4) Of that subset – which is by now very small if not down to one — have been in the UK (in Aberdeen) just when the record shows that Toby was and 5)Of that subset having moved back just when both Toby did and Camestros posted about doing. And 6)As both parties claim not to know or have met each other, within the tiny tiny world academics in the same arena, and indeed town, and fandom which is not huge in Oz – for some reason, to never to have attended the same faculty meeting, co-operated on papers, or have attended the same conferences. Come up with a list – perfectly possible to try and do, requiring no genius, just legwork and patience – the records are all public – and I’ll certainly entertain the idea that it could be someone else. But I think you’re going to find it is a short list of one. (sigh)

Dave overestimates the time I spend on things but hey, obviously he is impressed by the quality. On to the list:

  1. “Be an Australian Academic working in academia.” I’m not an academic working in academia. Dave just literally crossed me off his list. I cannot be me. I am an Australian citizen but as regular readers here know – I’m actually British.
  2. “A working knowledge of maths and philosophy” OK granted I have that but not at a PhD level. The technical term is ‘a smart arse’ – I thought that was obvious.
  3. “be an ardent follower) of sf/fantasy fandom particularly the Hugos ” The venn diagram of “likes maths & philosophy” with “likes SF/ speculative fiction” isn’t quite a circle but its close…As for the Hugos, the thing that made me ARDENT rather than just interested was…the Sad Puppy campaign.
  4. “have been in the UK (in Aberdeen) just when the record shows that Toby was” – never been to Aberdeen. Haven’t been to Scotland this century. Moved to Australia some years ago.
  5. “having moved back just when both Toby did and Camestros posted about doing” – the timing was Brexit and it was a joke about people saying they were going to leave Britain and move to Australia. The joke was that I already moved to Australia not that I had just or recently moved. Here’s me drinking an Australian beer, in an Australian pub in…note…an Australian (NSW) beer glass in 2015 https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/monday-beer-coopers-pale-ale/
    And here I am again in sunny Aberdeen…I mean…China in 2015 https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2015/09/27/sunday-beer-snow-beer/
    Now true, I drink a lot of beer from a lot of places (including Scotland) in a lot of places (not Scotland though – not for a longgg time and frankly Glasgow is a bit of a blur). So not a great argument but then good enough to counter balance my Brexit sarcasm as evidence that I’m mirroring somebody’s movement. An astute observer will note many Australian beers in my consumption.
    Oh heck here’s me drinking a British beer in London just before Brexit (confused yet?) https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2016/07/31/sunday-beer-hazel-nutter/ but how! There are a thing called “airplanes”- I don’t like them but my capitalist bosses make me go places in them! So, I’m in Australia and China when I’m supposed to be in Aberdeen and in London when I’m supposed to be in Australia? How’s that supposed to work? I’ve been living in Australia for a many years – I do travel to other places from time to time when work makes me but not to Aberdeen. Never to Aberdeen. Aberdeen is forbidden to me by an ancient spell of interdiction. One day Aberdeen – you know what you did and that old hermit’s spell won’t last forever.
  6. Oh dear, look at point 1 again. I need so need a GIF of Good Place Janet saying “Not an academic”. I mean I’ve talked to people at Universities and things but not regularly and about my actual work which isn’t being an academic. Don’t get me wrong, it would be a good gig and I’d be the BEST at lecturing.

So here is a revised list:

  1. British
  2. Travels
  3. Drinks a lot of beer
  4. A smart arse

camestrosfelapton

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97 responses to “Dave’s little list”

  1. “Someone who works in IT for a living couldn’t possibly have lots of time to spend on the computer, only people in academia have time to do that!” 🙄

    Liked by 4 people

    • My husband’s an academic.
      He doesn’t have anything like “lots of time” to spend on the computer.
      Busy teaching, researching, lecturing, grading – that stuff.
      Works like a dog – I mean, a good-hearted real dog, not a Puppy-type dog
      (Accept no substitutes!)

      Liked by 2 people

  2. I can’t even read the comments over there anymore. It’s filled with nothing but pats-on-the-back for their own cleverness without a shred of actual self-introspection to see if… just maybe… they might have gotten a few things wrong.

    I mean, the fact Freer won’t call off his own self-immolation until someone provides him another target for his ire that matches all the rest of his preconceived notions of who you are…. I think you’re right: You aren’t the point of this at all. If you were, he’d be interested in actually finding out who you are.

    It’s all about Foz and that’s a baaaaaad look.

    Liked by 2 people

  5. They think because you have a busy blog and are active online you have to be an academic? Seriously? That’s the premise of… a clique of people who spend…. even MORE time online?

    Liked by 3 people

  6. Freer’s list fits Rupert Murdoch. An Australian who goes to England and drinks beer. Not sure if he’s a sci-fi fan, but Fox Entertainment does carry some shows in the same vein and 21st Century Fox makes sci-fi and fantasy films.

    Liked by 4 people

  7. Hm. So, according to this Freer dude, you’re spending an inordinate amount of time online with this here blog — so much you’re neglecting your day job! — but somehow you must *also* have enough time to maintain enough of a social media presence under your wallet name to publicly establish your interest in SF fandom, the Hugos, and particulars thereof.

    A logical knot, that.

    Liked by 4 people

  8. I don’t drink beer or travel a lot so I’m not you!

    But I do have an interest in mathematics and philosophy without being an academic or having a PhD (I’ll admit to a BSc)

    Liked by 1 person

    • “Freer’ behaviour is beginning to reach the depths of Teddy Beale’s Scalzi obsession.”

      Oh, I don’t think we can say that. No, that’s not fair at all.

      TB has invested YEARS in his obsession with Scalzi. He has been cyberstalking John for more than a decade. His adorable mancrush on Scalzi, this burning yearning of his for John to pay attention to him goes all that way back to 2005.

      That is COMMITMENT, people.

      I don’t think we can compare Freer’s obsession with Camestros with that. Not yet. Freer has to show staying power. We don’t know yet whether he’ll be steadfast and show real devotion to this obsession, or just casually move on to being obsessed with someone else in a few months.

      Liked by 4 people

      • That’s true. The sheer longevity of Beale’s mancrush makes it stand out. The usual pattern has a more circular nature:

        1. Make an outlandish claim along the general lines of “In a year’s time we, the voice of the silent majority, will have taken over/burned down/thoroughly exposed/replaced/etc. X!”
        2. Use the ensuing kerfuffle to feed your persecution complex.
        3. Don’t bother to wait a year, rather forget all about your outlandish claim, except for the burning feeling of resentment that people’s baffled reaction to it has kindled in you.
        4. Make a new outlandish claim, without ever referring to how it went with the one before, but if possible, be even more boisterous about it.

        Liked by 6 people

  10. Based on this I can confidently state you are either: Skippy the bush kangaroo, Kyle Minogue or Ernie Dinklefwat

    “frankly Glasgow is a bit of a blur”

    Don’t worry, it always looks like that. I think it is slowly dissolving due to all the rain.

  11. :Shakes head sadly:

    Maybe Mr. Freer was jealous of the negative attention Mr. Del Arroz has been getting lately, and decided to get in on that action. The problem is, as with Jon, is that he’s screwing horribly with real people’s lives.

    Liked by 6 people

  13. For some inexplicable reason I am reminded that in the Divine Comedy, when they are on the threshold of Hell, Virgil tells Dante that here he will be among “souls who have lost the good of intellect.”

    Liked by 1 person

  14. I’m feeling conflicted here.

    On the one hand, there is a nice ego boost in the fact that a few days ago I pointed out how, in the conspiranoid world of the Pups, Cam had to be someone like Toby, and now Freer is repeating almost all of my points while confirming that his “logic” is both as predictable and looney as I had said it would be.

    On the other hand, being correct when predicting that terrible people will engage in predictable but laughably stupid “logic” to attack someone for no rational reason means that innocent people are being attacked for no rational reason.

    Notice how Freer is displaying the primary attribute of conspiracy theory thinking: No matter what the actual facts are – even if they completely contradict what he was saying before – he just incorporates them into his original theory and continues on as if there was never a contradiction.

    Also note just how insane Freer’s list is – Cam has to be an academic and has to have a “working knowledge of maths and philosophy”. Exactly why both of these need to be true isn’t really explained, but the real reason is apparent – Cam has to be an intellectual heavyweight with “establishment” credentials to be important enough to bother the Pups. The idea that Cam could just be some guy with the understanding of the subjects that a reasonably bright and interested undergraduate student would have never crosses his mind. Cam also has to be someone who not only has a connection to fandom, but someone who has a connection to fandom that they could supposedly personally profit from. The Pups’ world is entirely transactional – no one could possibly spend their time satirizing the Pups because they thought it was kind of fun. No, the only reason someone would do that is if they had a way to profit from it. The fact that the alleged “profit” is based on a theory that is entirely insane is not an impediment to their thinking, because they lack the self-awareness to realize that their assumptions put them on the lunatic fringe of humanity.

    That said, this whole “they must know each other” thing is a wrinkle I didn’t really see coming. Freer seems to have an odd idea about how people interact, and how often people come into contact with one another. As a case in point, I have a science fiction related blog that I have written for the better part of a decade now, but a coworker who I have had for a decade and a half only figured out that I am a science fiction guy last year when she was looking for people to talk about Game of Thrones with. This is someone who has an office literally down the hall from me, and she spent years not having any idea that we might have shared interests. I’m a member of WSFA (the Washington Science Fiction Association), and have been for a few years. I don’t even know all of the other members of the club. Even if all of Freer’s assumptions about Cam were true, the idea that they have to know one another and know they have a common interest is completely ludicrous.

    Freer’s idiocy would be funny if it wasn’t directed at harassing someone.

    Liked by 3 people

    • They seem to believe that anyone who knows anything about either math or logic MUST be an academic — because, of course, NORMAL people don’t go in for any of that thar book lurnin!

      Liked by 1 person

      • But aren’t they also claiming that Camestros is _wrong_ about philosophy and logic? Did I miss the part where they laud Camestros as a (near infallible) expert in logic – or at least admit that he’s much better at it than they are themselves?

        Like

        • @Johan —

          “But aren’t they also claiming that Camestros is _wrong_ about philosophy and logic?”

          Don’t confuse the issue with logic. Remember, “normal” people don’t DO logic — “normal” people evidently just throw feces to see what sticks.

          Liked by 3 people

        • Also, Dave alluded to his Petunias & Whales argument re: the Hugos and how people not accepting his argument was evidence that everything was biased against him…Now that argument of his was the first lengthy set of posts I did here. He’s still sore about them.

          Liked by 2 people

      • Yeah but Dave has a technical background in marine biology (?) and isn’t an academic. So it isn’t like he doesn’t know people who have knowledge of a field without being an academic.

        Like

        • Please. Fishing/hunting/ag/fisheries and the like don’t count. I’ve taken classes at an ag school — entirely different from “them eeeeevul librul pansy academics”.

          Liked by 1 person

    • It probably just fits in the mental narrative that Freer has created. He uses academic as a slur – which is a bit rich coming from a SFF writer, hardly a salt of the earth profession.

      Liked by 3 people

      • It’s all a part of the anti-education, anti-intellectual, pro-ignorance slant of the alt-right. If you know anything about anything, you must be one of them eeeeeeeeeeevul academic librul pansy brainwashers.

        Liked by 1 person

      • He’s insistent so that it can be Toby Meadows who is married to his target, a queer author. The other Pups may drop off on this eventually but Freer will keep going until Foz Meadows gets harmed. The important thing is not to make a logical or consistent accusation, but a targeted one that keeps repeating, that person is an Other, that person looks down on you (academic), that person is bad, that person will be destroyed. So that somebody will go and do that last bit for him, whatever kind of harm might be managed.

        Unfortunately, this sort of thing is probably going to be happening more often from bigoted Australians in the wake of marriage equality in Australia. We’ve certainly seen it spike in the U.S. after marriage equality here, with a concerted effort to legalize discrimination against LGBTQ people and violate their rights.

        Liked by 3 people

      • Yeah, that’s what galls them. So he went after Foz. And it’s a two-for I guess since you’ve satirized him in the past? He knew you weren’t going to be outing yourself, so he could say whatever he wanted about the Meadows. And the Pups are stuck in it, though at this point there will be some attrition with some of them declaring that they’re fed up bothering with this and moving on to something else as their way out. I suspect that other queer authors in SFF are going to be getting potshots from Freer for some time to come, however.

        Liked by 4 people

  17. ” …for some reason, to never to have attended the same faculty meeting, co-operated on papers, or have attended the same conferences.” Which just proves that Freer doesn’t know anything about academia, either. Big surprise, I know.

    Liked by 5 people

      • Sure. But that’s a town** which (according to Wikipedia – I’ve visited Australia many times but have never been to Brisbane) has a metro-area population of 2.4 million and is home to at least eight major universities. You know, the tiny tiny world of Australian academia in the tiny town of Brisbane. And unless Australian academia is radically different from American academia (and in my moderate experience of it, it is not), if you’re not in the same department as another person, there is a high probability that the two of you will never meet even if your departments are located in the same building. Freer’s claims about academia are as utterly fact-free as the ones he makes about everything else.

        **In American parlance, Brisbane would not be referred to as a town, it’s a major city.

        Liked by 4 people

        • Good point. Also, Freer’s theory assumes that both and I the Meadows’s are lying but also assumes we are both telling the truth on some most matters. For example, let’s say Meadows was telling the truth EXCEPT about the not knowing bit…then inevitably they would know other people with similar interests with many overlaps (e.g. both SF & logic). Assuming I was also lying about not living in Brisbane (which again Dave has to) then I could be anybody in that circle of people they know with similar interests – a PhD candidate for example or a former student. It really is very poor reasoning – a kind of fallacious type of abductive reasoning.

          I guess this is why he’s had to lie about having evidence that I lived in Aberdeen. Very odd though – it is the one point where he is overtly lying to his friends rather than just being perhaps (maliciously) mistaken or prone to bad reasoning.

          They’ll find a way to rationalise it, of course but I wonder if any of them will reflect on that fact that he intentionally lied to them on this point just to save face. It is the silly lies that trip people up.

          Liked by 3 people

          • Yeah, there’s people who work in the same field as me in Sydney (and it is a small field) who I know must exist (i.e. a different company must have somebody who does my job) but I don’t know who that person is. We would presumably know people in common but I literally don’t know who they are. Academia is different in that getting your name known is important but T Meadows apparently only moved to Brisbane sometime in 2016 – so not a lot of time to get to know others or become known.

            Liked by 2 people

            • Yeah, I don’t even know everyone who shares my profession and my employer, and that’s probably a pool of hundreds at most, albeit nationally. Or everyone in my profession and town, and that’s tens of people at most.

              Liked by 1 person

    • I’m kind of enjoying the continual claims that academics have HR departments that they are terrified of and which can “fire” them, etc. It’s like a toddler trying to explain the science of sunsets to you.

      Liked by 7 people

  18. Where did the math come from? I don’t recall seeing any math beyond a typical STEM oriented background, other than the formal logic and some R plots.

    Like

      • See, now that is a series of posts I could get behind. I have had many a philosophical discussion regarding the status of zero.

        Through a twist of fate on birth, however, I cannot successfully claim to be Camestros. Neither British, nor Australian by any means.

        Like

      • I looked over the abstracts for Toby Meadows’ papers, his philosophy of math is better described as the the kind of math that working mathematicians avoid because it is too math-y.

        It is way, way past the sort of stuff you have posted on. (I don’t mean to imply its over your head, just that its entirely different from what you have posted on in the past. Its certainly above my head and I have some small academic math background.)

        Liked by 1 person

      • “I don’t mean to imply its over your head, just that its entirely different from what you have posted on in the past. Its certainly above my head and I have some small academic math background.”

        Speaking as an astrophysicist: while browsing in the mathematics section of our campus bookstore (because I find mathematics of interest), I once picked up a monograph simply because its title (now forgotten, unfortunately) caught my eye. I read the back cover, the introduction, looked at the table of contents, and read the first couple of pages of the first chapter – and I could not even tell what *area* of mathematics it concerned, let alone what the specific topic was. It might just have well been written in an unknown language.

        Liked by 1 person

        • I did start looking at one paper and I can follow it but given the context it is a little spooky in that it is about things I did study and do appeal to me intellectually. In a different timeline, I could imagine following that as a path…but in reality nope and I prefer the variety of things I actually get to do.

          Liked by 1 person

      • One of my friends is a pure mathematician, sometimes ask them what they’re working on and see how many sentences it takes for them to lose me. Even though one of their areas is theoretical computer science (quantum computing!)

        Like

  19. What’s the deal with Freer threatening to unleash an HR-friendly essay proving his… *ahem* theory?

    At least he used an affectionate diminutive of my name when demanding I hunt down some more victims for him. There’s no way he even believes his own theory at this point – he’d have posted his evidence in a foam flecked rant long ago – Freer is not a patient person with a sense of decency.

    Not to make light of his fuckery. I feel terrible for Foz Meadows, who doesn’t deserve this harassment.

    Liked by 4 people

  20. I’m feeling a bit conflicted here.

    On the one hand, there is a nice ego boost in the fact that a few days ago I pointed out how, in the conspiranoid world of the Pups, Cam had to be someone like Toby, and now Freer is repeating almost all of my points while confirming that his “logic” is both as predictable and looney as I had said it would be.

    On the other hand, being correct when predicting that terrible people will engage in predictable but laughably stupid “logic” to attack someone for no rational reason means that innocent people are being attacked for no rational reason.

    Notice how Freer is displaying the primary attribute of conspiracy theory thinking: No matter what the actual facts are – even if they completely contradict what he was saying before – he just incorporates them into his original theory and continues on as if there was never a contradiction.

    Also note just how insane Freer’s list is – Cam has to be an academic and has to have a “working knowledge of maths and philosophy”. Exactly why both of these need to be true isn’t really explained, but the real reason is apparent – Cam has to be an intellectual heavyweight with “establishment” credentials to be important enough to bother the Pups. The idea that Cam could just be some guy with the understanding of the subjects that a reasonably bright and interested undergraduate student would have never crosses his mind. Cam also has to be someone who not only has a connection to fandom, but someone who has a connection to fandom that they could supposedly personally profit from. The Pups’ world is entirely transactional – no one could possibly spend their time satirizing the Pups because they thought it was kind of fun. No, the only reason someone would do that is if they had a way to profit from it. The fact that the alleged “profit” is based on a theory that is entirely insane is not an impediment to their thinking, because they lack the self-awareness to realize that their assumptions put them on the lunatic fringe of humanity.

    That said, this whole “they must know each other” thing is a wrinkle I didn’t really see coming. Freer seems to have an odd idea about how people interact, and how often people come into contact with one another. As a case in point, I have a science fiction related blog that I have written for the better part of a decade now, but a coworker who I have had for a decade and a half only figured out that I am a science fiction guy last year when she was looking for people to talk about Game of Thrones with. This is someone who has an office literally down the hall from me, and she spent years not having any idea that we might have shared interests. I’m a member of WSFA (the Washington Science Fiction Association), and have been for a few years. I don’t even know all of the other members of the club. Even if all of Freer’s assumptions about Cam were true, the idea that they have to know one another and know they have a common interest is completely ludicrous.

    Freer’s idiocy would be funny if it wasn’t directed at harassing someone.

    Like

  21. Hmm, I’m not Australian, only an academic in the sense that I have TWO Associates Degrees, one of which is in Paralegal Studies, which does prop up the “logicbrain” argument….but overall, I think I’ve been knocked out of the running to be STEPSON MALEFACTOR. Mind you, this won’t stop me from wearing a “I am STEPSON MALEFACTOR” T-shirt at Worldcon this year

    Liked by 4 people

  22. Amongst the many inanities voiced by the pups during all this, a couple of things in particular really have me scratching my head.

    In regards to the Meadows and their marriage, I keep seeing comments like:

    1. If Foz is married to a man, she can’t really be genderqueer;
    2. If Foz is married to a man and is really genderqueer, then it must be a fake marriage;
    3. If the Meadows marriage looks “normal” by the pups’ definition of normality, then Foz must be a failure as an LGBTQ activist.

    First, how does any of this nonsense compute? And second, why is any of this speculation about the Meadows’s marriage anybody’s business?

    It’s as if they truly think that everybody must fit themselves into the neat little categories that the pups are so fully invested in, and as though you can’t be a “real” LGBTQ and still lead a “normal” life with a spouse and children and profession and so on.

    I mean, do these people even realize that color TV and computers have been invented? They seem to be inhabiting the early parts of the 20th century at the very latest.

    Liked by 6 people

    • It’s similar to the argument that e.g,, Anna Paquin can’t be bisexual because she’s married to a man. (She came to mind just because I’ve actually read someone making this argument.) This is like saying, “How can you claim to be heterosexual when you’re only married to one other person?”

      Liked by 2 people

    • No. I tried it. I can explain the logic behind all three of those numbered comments, but it hurts my brain and I have to type things I consider to be vile and horrible. I can refute them, but I’m pretty sure nobody reading here has any problem understanding why they are all nonsense.

      Liked by 1 person

  23. Phil RM: I’ve had someone tell me that if Bisexuality was real and I was claiming to be made that way by God (this was on a Christian forum, so the presence of God in the equation was taken by him as a given), I must be denying my God-given nature to not be having sex with men and women. The point that heterosexual Christians are not expected to have sex with ALL members of the opposite sex, but rather to pick one person, did not compute. At all.

    Liked by 4 people

  24. I shouldn’t read the comments at MGC, but I diod. And Cam, apparently you shouldn’t be upset at being outed as Toby Meadows, according to Ms Hoyt and Mr. Chupik:

    Christopher M. Chupik #
    And Glyer finally weighs in, accusing Dave of exploiting people’s pain for clicks.

    Irony.

    January 30, 2018 Reply

    accordingtohoyt #
    Yeah, what pain? Oh, the tragedy of being revealed to be the professorial half of a happy couple! The horror, the horror.

    —
    This of course completely ignores the homophobia of Freer’s accusastions. Willfully so.

    Liked by 3 people

    • The new line is that because they also speculated that the Meadows might be a ‘normal’ couple then that’s why people are cross at them.

      Again fails the basic ‘how would they react if it was a Puppy being targeted’ test.

      Liked by 2 people

    • January 30, 2018
      accordingtohoyt: Yeah, what pain? Oh, the tragedy of being revealed to be the professorial half of a happy couple! The horror, the horror.

      Because of course, Hoyt would not be at all upset if people claimed that her marriage is a sham, and that she and her husband are child-abusers.

      Liked by 5 people

      • Hoyt IS a furriner (and a woman), so I wouldn’t be surprised if deep down there are Pup-supporters who wanna MAGA at her, and suggest she shouldn’t be so uppity as to be writing SFF (a MANLY, Nuggety genre) and should just look after her children.

        Note how she got NO support whatsoever when she was in charge of Sad Puppies. SWM native-born ‘Mericans? Plenty of support from their buddies. Foreign-born woman? Crickets and tumbleweeds.

        Like

  25. Kinda late to post this, but I had a hard time ingesting Freer’s Aristotle-worthy list of requirements to either debunk his claim or give him a list of potential victims to harass, so I edited it for clarity.

    Basically, to get Freer and his red-pilled trolls to lay off the Meadows(es), you need to chum the waters for Freer with a list of potential Camestros Felaptons who meet the following criteria:
    Each candidate for Freers further harassment campaign must be an Australian Academic working in academia who
    1) demonstrates a respectable working knowledge of the philosophy of math, and
    2) has reason to be an ardent follower of SFF fandom, particularly the Hugos, and
    3) was in the UK (in Aberdeen) when the record shows that Toby was and
    4) moved back (to Australia) when both Toby did and Camestros joked about doing so, and
    5) has never attended the same faculty meeting as, co-operated on papers with, or attended the same conference as Toby.

    This is a pretty difficult set of things to show, given nobody has managed to pull it off yet, Freer included.

    Liked by 3 people

  28. Just saw a clip from Paul Weimer about freer’s latest. Apparently the people who have been really hurting Foz aren’t he and his buddies harassing them and making insinuations that they might be pedophiles. No, according the Freer, the real problem is that people have been pointing out that he’s wrong about Cam being Toby, and people noting that Foz is a monogamous woman married to a dude despite her identification as genderqueer, and that’s what is hurting Foz, for some arble-garble reason.

    It is an amazing level of self-justification Freer is engaged in, and it would be fascinating if it weren’t so incredibly sleazy.

    Liked by 3 people

  29. I’m not entirely sure what pronouns Foz Meadows currently uses, so mixes can happen in references as things develop, though it’s easily adjusted. But for bigoted anti-LGBTQ folk, issues of gender, non-binary gender identities, non-binary sexual orientations, etc. are just trendy political poses, and/or perversions and mental illnesses, not a mix of biology, neurology and cultural identity that should be respected because those people are equal human beings, and they have weird beliefs about supposedly strict rules enforced by “SJW’s” on how those people can operate in the world. Therefore, what I’m guessing Freer is trying to claim is that our noting Foz is in a monogamous marriage with a straight guy, and some referring to Foz as a “woman,” undermines the political “pose” supposedly being made of genderqueerness and reduces the bonafides of it. Which harms Foz’s devious plan of gender and cultural identity for personal profit and virtue points, etc.

    I mean, I’m guessing here. He could mean something else entirely. I don’t go read these people’s stuff except when others reprint the tweets, posts, etc., and even then it tends to burn my eyeballs. But that would be my guess. Likewise the notion they were passing that bisexuals can’t be in monogamous relationships or monogamous relationships that are not gay, and so being married to a straight guy supposedly underminds the political “pose” of bisexuality somehow even if Foz had not reconciled identity as genderqueer. They view those aspects of Foz as credentials on the opposing side, and so we are supposedly harming Foz’s posing credentials as LGBTQ, rather than those things being what Foz actually is and gets to determine.

    But mainly Freer is a bigot who is being called out for his violence and so is backpedal flailing. That’s actually a good development, as it may mean he backs off on the stalking harassment — which he only took over because Antonelli and Co. flamed out on it. But everybody who was paying attention is going to remember it. There was a lot of dithering about whether the Puppies actually full out formed harassment mobs or just let others loose to do them for them (gamergaters) somewhat cluelessly in the past. But this was very clearly them forming a harassment mob to go after a queer author, complete with ginned up McCarthyism.

    Liked by 4 people

  31. Now that it won’t explode my eyeball (long story) I’ll probably be going to Australia this year sometime.
    No Scotland, though.
    Does that make me partially Camestros Felapton?
    I sort of fall down on the math/philosophy part, though I am academia-adjacent, which ought to count.
    Maybe we could sort ourselves into pairs to cover all the bits together?

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  32. It’s disturbing how well I fit the criteria:
    British – I started reading Len Deighton and John Le Carré in my early 20s. And my wife is a total Brit-sniffer – excuse me! I meant Anglophile. So I feel I have a kind of British soul.
    Travels – Weekly! Almost all of my travels are to same three American cities, but I’m going to a concert in Baltimore this Tuesday. Also, I used to listen to the Kinks album, Arthur, quite a bit, and the very first song on that record is called? Australia!
    Drinks a lot of beer – Look let’s not get too petty about details.
    A smart arse – Q.E. Fucking. D!

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