At Least CONVergence Is An Appropriate Name

It’s sad watching the convention scene take playbooks from the shrieking weirdos and further dive deeper into losing their purpose — gathering to promote fun, science fiction and fantasy, and for their attendees to have a good time.

It’s a cultural gathering, and they should be taking a look at LibertyCon’s model, as that convention sells out faster and faster every year, and doesn’t have a lick of politics involved in it. Everyone has the best time there.

A little converged cancer from CONVergence’s website:

For many of us, the past may have been rough or bleak, characterized by bullying, marginalization or even exclusion. We, each of us, found a home within the CONvergence Community, connecting with people with similar passions and similar background.  We found people with life experiences that if they didn’t parallel, at least related on some level to give us some common ground and an overall common link to one other. Because of that, we have strived to build a safe community with zero tolerance for the negative things we have each faced in the outside world.

But that’s no longer enough.  As times have changed, our understanding of issues, of boundaries, of behavior have also changed, as have our understanding of what it takes to create a safe space, to create a welcoming community that embraces everyone.  It is no longer enough to merely put words on paper or create a policy, we have to engage our core values; not just at the convention, but in our everyday lives; we have to do more than welcome or even celebrate diversity, we have to seek it out and bring it into our community in order to help our community thrive.  We have to strive to be better.

For these reasons, as we embark on the Next Celebration in a new space, we will be boldly going where no convention has gone before. From this point forward, we will challenge everyone in our community to be their best selves and in doing so, charge all of our members to embrace the core values of CONvergence both inside the convention and out, and we will hold ourselves accountable to those standards. Our purview will no longer stop at the end of the convention, but rather we will hold our members to account for their behavior and themselves year round.  Unacceptable actions and behavior will not be tolerated whether they happen at the convention or abroad; if it is harming people, if it is damaging to our community, it is not acceptable, and we will address such actions and behaviors swiftly and fairly.

After the word salad, they let attendees know that they will be MONITORING YOUR SPEECH year round, outside the convention, to make sure they don’t have anyone who wrongthinks inadvertently attend their convention.

How creepy is this?

We already have big tech monitoring us and recording us through our devices, but now these little conventions that are just supposed to be about folk showing up and talking sci-fi are going to make sure they watch us. They’ll call it “behavior” but what they mean is that you have to have sufficient woke extreme left-wing politics to be welcome. As they elaborate further:

Lastly, we will put stronger, more direct efforts into diversity, equity and inclusion to help those most marginalized by our society, who are often missing from our community, to be a larger part of it, and for our programming, guests and services  and convention as a whole to reflect these priorities. It is no longer enough to merely leave the door open; we must engage underrepresented groups, especially the communities of color, and not only welcome them but actively recruit and engage them in being a part of our community until it is recognized as their community as well.

Gee, doesn’t this convention sound like it’s going to be loads of fun?

They won’t exist in 5-10 years, because what normal family would go spend their weekend dealing with this nonsense?

‘They’d much rather read one of my books — where there’s no identity politics, just a ton of fun. The Blood of Giants is the best example of my work, and it’s finally out on audio too. Make sure to pick it up now!