I love this bit from their website:

[Cons] were places where people of all colors and creeds could get together to talk and learn about science fiction and fantasy books, games, movies, and TV shows. Then, starting a few years ago, things changed. Cons became increasingly dominated by a small clique of authoritarian jerks who made them into venues for pushing social justice dogma and, in the name of “inclusiveness,”

So cons went from being inclusive to... more inclusive?

I think it's fair for the alt-righters that put this convention together to say they were excluded. Probably fair to exclude them too, but imo making their own con in reaction to being excluded seems like a reasonable decision. the rage bait stuff is lame though.

Were they actually excluded, or did they feel excluded because they didn't like the new philosophy? I'm not sure if they were actual rules actually excluding them.

There weren't actual rules excluding them.

Compare the "about" page for the more mainstream Worldcon with the one for BasedCon:

https://www.worldcon.org/about-worldcon/

https://www.basedcon.com/?page_id=85

BasedCon's "about" has hot takes on guns, socialism, abortion, etc. Worldcon's "about" doesn't say anything about those topics at all.

Here's the Registration FAQ for next year's Worldcon in Glasgow:

https://glasgow2024.org/get-involved/registration-faq/

There are no hot-button American political topics mentioned either way there.

The last time I was at a SF convention there was a wide variety of political views among attendees, just as there have been among award-winning SF authors. BasedCon seems unusual not in what sort of views it permits but in what it explicitly rejects.

I would think that they excluded themselves because of what they perceived as too much inclusion, which is ironic in a weird way.

(OP) Thanks for that, the BasedCon "philosophy" page is here fwiw

https://www.basedcon.com/?page_id=85

It sounds - as Carmack says - "intentionally provocative" and not a constructive way of countering what the organisers might object to in other conferences.

"Based beliefs"? But they are so clichéd, so mainstream even. Let's try some really based beliefs:

Men cannot give birth, unless they go through some amazing, to come synthetic biology transformations. Are you afraid by women with a penis today? Just you wait for the tomorrow man with a penis, two vaginas, tail, two wheels, and tentacles.

Guns don’t kill people; people kill people, but let's just melt all the guns. We tried some centuries with pistols, rifles, and such, let's see what happens if we melt all the guns for the next few centuries.

A fetus is a human being, and we should kill that human being if we want just as we kill hundreds of thousands of people through whatever: from pollution to housing policies. Don't want a fetus to die? Sure, take those cells evacuated from the formerly pregnant body and grow them in a tube, inject them into your own body, go wild.

Socialism has failed everywhere it’s been tried, so let's try just making food, shelter, and healthcare free, just for kicks: self-planting/harvesting bots in the fields, 3D printed houses, automated medical diagnosis and surgeries, and while at it, let's just cancel all the pharmaceutical patents and general biochemical restrictions, let everyone print elexacaftor/tezacaftor/ivacaftor or heroin in the comfort of their own home.

Discriminating against white people is racism, so let's start solving racism: start with the largest group of victims, you know, the minorities.

>"Based beliefs"? But they are so clichéd, so mainstream even.

That's what's so funny about the modern generation of redpilled alt-right iconoclasts. They're literally just regurgitating beliefs that were banal in their grandparents' time. You're not radical if everything you believe was already being lampooned by All in the Family back in the 1970s.

I don't know why they are afraid of just coming out and saying they are a conservative or right-wing convention.

A lot of them have trouble admitting that their cultural stances are increasingly unpopular and what they view as "common sense" is not and is actually reflective of their politics.

Plenty of right-wingers like to talk about being moderate and not wanting to "make things political" while making political statements. Its a bit mind-blowing that someone can name an event "BasedCon" and try to claim that its trying not to be political with a straight face.

I wonder what they consider socialism? Socialism forms as in Nordic countries, Germany, Canada, France, or (some of) unions in USA or full Cuba and Soviet Union?

currently living in a small town with a lot of folks with similar 'based' opinions. Anything they don't like is socialism, full stop.

What an unpleasant article! We can quibble about the finer points of the first three but definitely not about the last two.

> Discriminating against white people is racism

Yeah, not like we haven't learned anything from the Yugoslavia war. But that's too far away from the place this nonsense is playing.