Joshua Kronengold

Not having gone through the data with a fine-toothed comb, let me make a few observations based on what I *have* seen.

1) The situation with the Sandman long-form nomination for the series being DQd is almost certainly a simple foul-up. It was originally DQd in favor of the single episode in short-form (which is what the rules would call for); then when the single episode was DQd from short-form (for "reasons"), the series wasn't restored to long-form, because everyone's brains had fallen out by that point of the process. This smells much more like stupidity than malice.

2) Dealing with Chinese government censorship is complex and I recommend Ada Palmer's article on the subject. Notably, the objective of such a regime is to convince people to censor themselves, occasionally making an example out of someone. Your goal then becomes not to become the example. Dave speaks in at least one email of consulting with his Chinese counterparts on the committee and I find no reason to believe that he was lying about that. The fact that we don't have the paper trail on that only indicates that the Chinese counterparts are better at not leaving a paper trail (for reasons that should be obvious to the casual observer). In any case, the justifiably maligned actions of the Western members of the Hugo committee had a laudable goal: don't get anyone arrested. If you believe that a Hugo Award is more important than someone getting tossed into a Chinese cell because of it, then I suggest that you should reexamine your priorities. You are, of course, welcome to argue that the likelihood of that was small. You might even be correct.

3) While we're on the subject, I personally do not believe that there is any jurisdiction in the United States where censorship would prevent something from being nominated for a Hugo Award, except perhaps in the case of the community managing to nominate something that was child pornography, which I would find both stupid and repulsive. Your mileage may vary and *I* am tired of hearing about your mileage on this subject.

4) EPH strikes me as having made the nominating process *much* less transparent in its attempt to eliminate slates. It may well be that giving the Hugo committee the ability to say "I know a slate when I see it" (as apparently Dave suggested; I'm trusting you on this, as I didn't follow this debate) might have been a better choice, assuming the presence of good actors (as opposed to "bad actors") on the committee.

5) It would be *really* good if the people trying to figure out ways of preventing all this from happening again *very carefully* considered the various ways that the proposed changes might accidentally make things worse. I hope that they do, but I am more than occasionally pessimistic about the wisdom of mobs.