A meme currently circulating among the Social Justice Warriors in their relentless attempts to made poor, poor big-eyed puppies sad with their heaping awards upon talent-free uberleftist message fiction is that Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen and Vox Day, merely by asking fans to read and nominate worthy works, have violated the strict and scrupulously observed unwritten code of gentlemen forbidding the crassness of asking for votes in public.

Asking for votes in private, or if you are a Politically Correct leftist in good standing, of course, provokes no furor, as it is evidently not a violation.

I call it a meme because it is a thoughtless and absurd white noise of words, a self replicating sentence phrase that means nothing and says nothing. It is an accusation leveled because the accusers have run out of other, more credible, accusations, and they are not well behaved enough to shut their mouths with dignity after their case has been argued and lost.

Need I answer this hairball of absurdity they have coughed up?

No, but I shall:

I do not consider myself to be bound by an unwritten code that binds only me and leaves rivals and illwishers free to work their will as they see fit.

The unwritten code did not protect me when I and mine were grossly libeled in the Guardian, Slate, Salon, io9 and Entertainment Weekly with the most outrageous and perfidious defamation imaginable.

My crime is that I have a sufficient number of fans who admire my work to put me on the ballot. It was all aboveboard, scrupulously honest, legal, cricket, and according to Hoyle.

In return, I am accused of being a White Supremacist motivated by race-hatred, being a sexist motivated by misogyny, being a homophone (or whatever their make-believe word is) motivated by a psychopathological paranoia, and being a flying purple people eater motivated by aerial aubergine anthropophagy.

No less a person than Mr George RR Martin accused me of hypocrisy, saying that because I was a conservative who held strong opinions, therefore I had no right to object to science fiction awards being given to dreary and substandard politically-correct message-fiction penned by untalented hands and containing no particle of science fiction.

He offered no retraction even when it was pointed out to me that he has worked with me in the past, and none of the stories I submitted to him were message stories. Nonetheless, he preferred to believe rumors about me voiced by enemies rather than consult his own experience, judgment, and memory.

To date, I have received not one note of reconciliation, not one apology, not one retraction from the opposition; nor have I overheard even a single moderate asking the slanderers to check their wild slanders.

Moral equivalent calls for calm that blame equally both sides (the SJWs for the affront of libeling us as racists, and the Sad Puppies for the affront of forcing the SJWs to libel us as racists) of course I simply discount. Logically, dividing the punishment in half and distributing both halves equally between innocent and guilty parties is still an injustice, namely, punishing the innocent.

The opposition and the undecided moderates are, so far, not willing to condemn nor silence those who call me a White Supremacist &c, but are willing to condemn me for failing to silence and rebuke my fans for exercising their dearly-purchased member right to vote for SFF work on its merit, not on its political correctness.

As best I can tell, the argument runs that the votes of my readers do not count and their voices must be silenced on the grounds that Vox Day was falsely accused of being a racist by a shameless, contumelious lying harridan-of-color. I confess the logic here is too elliptical, indeed, too non-Euclidean, to follow.

These accusations are pointless and comically so. I assume some indifferent and gullible folk far from the core of controversy might be fooled for a short while, or people unrelated to the science fiction community, but what good does that do the slanderers?

The effort seems disproportionate to the result: a vast elephant matriarch rearing, writhing and trumpeting in the travail of childbirth only to give forth a mewling shrew.

No, my rivals say my fans must be silenced not because of some unwritten code — that is merely one more in a long series of unconvincing and ineffective lies — but because I am a faithful Roman Catholic, who correctly calls sodomy a perversion, and suicide a mortal sin.

For speaking these simple truths known to all men in public, I am excoriated by the race I jokingly call Morlocks. The name is apt, for these are creatures once human, but who now fatten with victims with lies and feed off their helplessness and ire and pain, and who seek now ever the remotest caves and holes farthest from the hated brightness of the sun.

But what does my opinion on these matters have to do with the admiration of my fans (who are not obligated to know, much less share, any of my religious convictions) for my stories about space princesses and exploding planets, yarns which I write primarily to amuse and entertain?

It is not my secret soul or private personality which is standing for an award (and I assure you my crabby personality is hardly worthy of any award) but my published writing.

Nonetheless, I am on record extending the olive branch to the opposition here: they are on record scorning and dismissing the offer, and redoubling their lies and libels, in many places, including here and here.

So, let us hear no more, please, about an unwritten code. Gentlemen and ladies honor unwritten codes in regard to their treatment of each other, because their respect is mutual, and their desire to preserve civilized forms of conduct is mutual.

Houyhnhnms, creatures of logic, do not share a code of mutual respect with yahoos, creatures who fling dung.