by Eric Flint | May 14, 2015 | Hugo Controversy | 172 comments I swore to myself—again—that I was I was going to stay away from this ruckus after my first two essays (one long, one short) but some of the posts put up on my web site have worn down that resolve. A friend of mine once said “ignorance can be fixed; stupid is forever.” I suspect he’s right, but I will sally forth once again in the hopes that some of these seemingly-stupid statements and arguments are really just the product of ignorance. Let me start with this statement, from a recent poster named James May (and don’t complain, dammit; once you post on MY web site, you’re fair game): “The social justice warrior argument is not specious but right on point. When you have SF authors writing posts about white privilege and others saying straight out they won’t review white men then that represents a sea-change, and a very new one, only 3 years old or so. That sort of thing is not occasional but obsessive and daily and it is not the usual right vs. left, although it is often couched in those terms. That is why people make the mistake of stretching this conflict years and even decades back rather than the months back it deserves.” I have two points to make about this, one of which is: Who the hell are you talking about outside of your right-wing echo chamber where idiot acronyms like “SJW” mean something? But I’ll get back to that. My first point—picture me spluttering my coffee all over the place when I read it—has to do with this statement: “When you have SF authors writing posts about white privilege… that represents a sea-change… This is why people make the mistake of stretching this conflict years and even decades back rather than months it deserves.” Excuse me? SF authors have been writing about racism—AKA “white privilege”—for decades. And they came…