A Comment, Briefly

So, after lots of kerfluffle, Elizabeth Moon is no longer invited as Guest of Honor to WisCon.

And, rather quickly, Juan Williams is no longer employed by NPR.

Good.

Some people are crying about free speech and all that, but that's silly.  If an avowedly feminist, anti-racist, and progressive/left/whatever convention doesn't want to honor somebody who posted what seemed to lots of folks (including me) an Islamophobic and blazingly ignorant screed ... that seems like a fairly predictable outcome, one that maybe should have even happened sooner.  It's not like Moon had been invited as guest of honor to the Newt Gingrich Sing-a-long -- it's WisCon!  (And as Nick Mamatas points out, this is not the first con to disinvite a GoH.)  She's welcome to attend WisCon if she wants, she just can't do it as a guest of honor.

With Juan Williams, NPR doesn't want to pay a guy who says he's scared of Muslims when they get on planes.  NPR's not destroying his freedom of speech; they're deciding who they want to spend their money on.  (And Fox News promptly gives him $2 million -- they, too, are deciding who they want to spend their money on.)

If my posting this causes the White Supremacist Sci-Fi Convention to decide not to make me a guest of honor in the future, that's okay.  And if Fox News decides not to hire me, I'll understand.  Really.

There are plenty of discussions of both of these topics happening all over the place (e.g., the WisCon News blog), if you're looking for more depth and chat about it all -- I particularly liked Cat Valente's post on Moon and Ta-Nehisi Coates's on Juan Williams.

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