So there I am, in my office, when suddenly I hear this godawful loud “BANG!” and the entire building shakes. It feels like the building’s been hit by a lightning bolt or a bomb’s gone off or something. I stick my head out the door, look around, don’t see anything, and go back to work.
Ten minutes later, i hear noise outside, I stick my head out the door again, and see this:
So. A few months ago, i was talking to datan0de about his family, and he said something that in one moment really solidified some ideas Shelly and I have been exploring for quite some time, and which illustrated what has always been a fundamental flaw in my relationship with my ex-wife. I’ve been poking at what he said, and its implications, ever since, and the more I think about it, the more I believe that it represents what is arguably one of the most important axioms of an ethical non-monogamous relationship.
We were talking about relationship rules,and specifically about veto power–a relationship rule which gives one partner the right to “veto” another partner’s relationship. datan0de‘s relationships are based on rules, which explicitly include veto power; superficially, some of the rules between he and his partner resemble many of the rules that existed between me and my ex-wife. My relationship with Shelly is not rules-based; neither of us has any explicit veto power, nor any rules which explicityly govern who we may become romantically involved with or under what circumstances. Instead, our relationship understandings center around the idea that each of us has a responsibility to do what’s right for the other, and if either of us fails to take care of our relationship with the other properly, then it will result in consequences that hurt the relationship.
These seem like two different approaches; and as a result of my experiences with my ex-wife, during which she on many occasions would veto relationships that I and my partner had invested a great deal of emotional energy in, sometimes many years after the relationship started, and often for little or no reason she could articulate, I became inherently suspicious of rules-based relationship structures and most especially of veto power.
datan0de‘s relationship with his partner explicitly permits him to veto her relationship, but something he said during the cours eof our conversation really made it clear just how different in conception, if not in superficial form, his relationship structures are from the ones between my ex-wife and I. He said, “I could veto femetal‘s relationship with zensidhe, but if I did, there would be serious consequences for the relationship between femetal and I.”
That, in a nutshell, is the most crucial dfference between his relationship with his partners and my relationship with my ex-wife, and i think it’s an attitude that is crucial and fundamental for any ethical relationship at all. Just in that one sentence, i believe datan0de hit upon a key for any reasonable system of ethical relationships.
In my relationship with my ex-wife, there was never that sense of consequence–never an idea that “I am ethically responsible for the consequences of my decisions even if the rules we agreed to permit me to make those decisions.” In hindsight, it should have been obvious; when you make a decision that hurts your partner or that breaks your partner’s heart, you can reasonably expect that to have consequences regardless of whether or not your partner agreed to those rules or agreed to give you that power. All the things you do have consequences.
To some outside observers, it seems like the breaking point in my relationship with my ex-wife came about when i started dating Shelly. Some of the people who’ve known me well for a long time recognize that the seeds for the end of my our relationship were planted much earlier, when she arbitrarily vetoed a relationship between me and another partner, Lori, I’d been seeing for abou two or three years. Not only did she end that relationship, she also explicitly forbade me ever to speak to Lori again–not something that was originally a part of our negotiated framework, but something that it’s actually quite easy for one partner to enforce on another. Lori and I were both devastated by the loss of that relationship; the fact that I had agreed to give my ex-wife the authority to make that decision does not change the reality that if you break your lover’s heart, particularly if you break your lover’s heart on multiple occasions over an extended period of time, you’re going to damage your relationship with your lover, no matter what reason you have for doing it or what your relationship agreements say.
datan0de understands this on an intuitive level. My ex-wife does not; she maintains to this day that she did nothing wrong and bears no responsibility of any kind whatsoever for any part of our breakup, as everything she did was within the rules. Because of this, the relationship structures that exist in datan0de‘s family are, in operation, much closer to the structures within my relationship with Shelly than with my relationship with my ex-wife, even though they look similar to the rules between my ex-wife and I, because the behavior of the people in datan0de‘s family is governed by a sense of personal responsibility for the consequences of their decisions.
The difference between a rules-based relationship and a relationship not based on rules is, I think, far less significant than the difference between a relationship based on responsibility for the consequences of indifvidual decisions and a relationship based on a sense that anything permitted by the rules is okay. It is possible to buld a rules-based relationship in which the people involved take responsibility for the consequences of their actions, and I think datan0de and his family have done that. In fact, there are a lot of things about their relationship that both Shelly and I admire, and as we develop our relationship with phyrra and nihilus, thee are aspects of datan0de‘s relationship structures we are deliberately and consciously emulating. My own skepticism about veto power aside, datan0de and his family have built something quite remarkable, and a person could do far worse than hope to construct a relationship as well as they have built theirs.
This stuff has been rattling around in my head for months, but it took this post in the Polyamory community to really demonstrate to me how universally applicable the idea of responsibility is. The post concerns the question about whether or not it is socially acceptable to invite one or two members of a poly family to a function without inviting all the members of the family.
Many of the answers focus on manners and etiquette, and quite honestly, i think that misses the point. It doesn’t really matter what the rules of etiquette say. What matters is that a person who invites part of a poly family but not the entire family to a function is asking the people he’s invited to choose between him and their partners. By extending the invitation, he’s saying “I want you to make a choice: you may spend this time with me, or you may spend this time with your sweeties, but not both.”
Does he have the right to do that? Sure. A host may choose to invite or not invite anyone to a function as he pleases. But the law of unintended consequence is as universal and insecapable as the law of gravity; and in this case, the unintended consequence of inviting only some members of a family to an event is that if you make a person choose between you and someone he cares about enough times, eventually he’s going to stop choosing you.
Etiquette permits you to invite who you please, just as our negotiated rules permitted my ex-wife to veto who she pleased. In both cases, though, the decisions carry a price tag, and the person making those decisions is responsible for those consequences regardless of what the rules say. Invite only part of a family often enough, and you will eventually hurt your friendship with those people–people don’t like being put in a position where they have to choose between friends and partners. Veto enough people and sooner or later you’re going to break your lover’s heart, and you will eventually hurt your relationship–people don’t like having their hearts broken. In each case, it’s not the rules that are the most relevant; it’s whether or not you accept reponsibility for the consequences of the decisions you make.
Consequence is what shapes relationships. Responsibility for those consequences, not adherance to the rules, is what defines an ethical person.
My response: Continue reading
…and I’m still paying nearly $2.50 a gallon for gas? WTF is up with that??
So now the Bush regime has finally formally admitted that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (warinng–big-ass PDF download). None. Nada. Zip. I still remember watching CNN as Colin Powell heroically kept a straight face as he put on the WMD dog-and-phony show for the United Nations, waving around vials of confectioner’s sugar and pointing gravely to flip-charts of Iraqui “mobile germ warfare laboratories” that, as it turns out, existed only in the fevered imagination of some of the CIA’s tinfoil-hat brigade. I knew we were being duped; the rest of the world knew we were being duped; but the American public just ate this shit up and asked for more.
So. Here we are, sending people to die in the Middle East, for…um, no reason whatsoever. Weapons of mass destruction? Never existed. September 11? That was this guy named Osama somebody, not Saddam Whatshisface. Bringing stability to the Middle East? Iraq is more unstable now than at any point in the past hundred years. Securing ourselves from terrorism? Saddam Hussein was Al Quaeda’s biggest enemy in the Middle East; with him gone, Iraq is now ripe recruiting grounds. One hundred and sixty billion dollars spent to date, and we have nohing to show for it except a bunch of cars driving around with lopsided “Support Our Troops” stickers on them.
And I’m still paying nearly $2.50 a gallon for gas.
Man, that’s fucked up.
…at least not at the godawful hour of ugh o’clock in the morning, when one has staggered out of bed after a couple hours’ sleep and faces an hour and forty-minute drive to an indescribably dull trade show in Orlando on behalf of a client.
But there it was, staring up at me from the lid of a bottle of Snapple:
The starfish is the only animal that can turn its stomach inside out.
Ugh. Thank you, Snapple. Exactly the vision I needed in my head to ease the pain of a way too early morning.
“That’s a definitional issue. The solution to the equation ‘y squared equals negative one’ is not a real number by definition.” I actually got to say that in the course of conversation today. 🙂
Snow Crash seems to have recovered from the trauma of his trip to the vets quite nicely, though being neutered doesn’t seem so far to have made the slightest difference in his personality; he’s just as frisky and playful as ever.
At least somebody’s having fun this weekend…
– I have a new laptop–the result of an accident with the old one (Shelly tripped over the power cord, and it landed face-down, breaking rather dramatically). The new one is capable of playing World of Warcraft (bonus!). I didn’t really want to replace it right away, except…
– …spending the weekend at a trade show with a client, demoing high-end prepress software. Said client is paying rather well for the weekend–not completely enough to pay for the new laptop, but it really helps. However, this means…
– …I won’t be able to help S move this weekend. Fortunately, though, phyrra and nihilus will be helping the moving project, and speaking of which…
+ …we’ve been spending even more time with the two of them lately, which has been absolutely wonderful, and still taking tentative steps toward the idea of a romantic relationship, which is good because…
+ …it will make it that much easier to keep raiding their large and diverse library…
+ …of such books as David Brin’s Kiln People, an amazing novel and study in the nature of consciousness, identity, and non-destructive uploading…
+ …which I just finished, while in the car…
+ …on the way to St. Pete to look at a used car which we want to get for Shelly, which is cheap and in perfect condition…
– …but won’t be available ’til the third week of April. This means three months of waking up way too early to drive her to work. Today, her trip was particularly early, because…
+ …Snow Crash is at the vet getting neutered today. I have to pick him up this evening, after I…
– …get a rental car…
+ …which my client is paying for, for the trip to Orlando. The only downside is…
– …the client wants me there at eight AM.
Life, she is a mixed bag, you see.
Okay. So, Google’s founders have an unofficial slogan, which is a part of Google’s genetic DNA: Don’t be evil. Nice idea, that; do well and do good.
But in my experience, “don’t be evil” has become more of…well, a suggestion than a statement of corporate policy. No, I’m not talking about the way Google records information about searches or how the Goolge toolbar inserts paid links into other people’s Web sites–frankly, I don’t care about any of that.
I’m talking about something different: spam. And the fact that Google likes it.
Oh, now I’m not suggesting Google engages in spam itself; when you’re Google, you don’t need to spam. Everyone uses you anyway. I’m talking about the fact that Google supports spammers. And it’s not even a question of supporting spammers for profit, like Savvis does, or allowing people to host spam software, like MCI Worldcom does, or allowing people to host virus and malware droppers, like Peer 1 does. What those companies do is reprehensible, of course, but it’s also understandable: they profit directly from it. The spammers give them cash, they look the other way (or in Savvis’ case, actually help shield the spammers).
No, Google supports spammers, but doesn’t even do it for profit. Google supports spammers because it simply can’t be bothered to hire anyone to do anything about it.
The entire net abuse community shuddered when Google took over Deja News and started Google Groups. Google, of course, insisted that Google Groups would serve a valuable function, and would not be used by spammers; they set up an abuse address, they promised that spammers would not be tolerated, and so on, and so on.
Now, a few years later, it seems that Google’s motto has changed from “Don’t be evil’ to “Don’t bother.”
Google Groups has become, as many people predicted, a wretched hive of scum and spammers. I’ve personally seen more spam coming from Google Groups in the past few months than from any other single newsgroup source in the world–Google has dethroned the previous reigning champions of UseNet spam (Skynet.be, newsfeeds.com, and usenetnews.com) in the sheer volume of spew and in their stubborn refusal to stem the tide. In just the past few hours, I’ve collected some nuggets of Google’s outstanding offerings to the Internet community here
[name withheld]: So what is polyamory? You get to fuck whoever you want?
tacitr: Not exactly. Polyamory is not about fucking anyone you want; it’s the practice of maintaining multiple simultaneous long-term, committed romantic relationships.
tacitr: It’s about relationships (which may or may not be sexual), rather than about sex.
[name withheld]: okay
[name withheld]: Do you have a picture of your cock?
Sigh.
World of Warcraft is actually quite a lovely game. Blizzard has done a good job with the “look” of the game, not trying for photorealism but not cartoony either. These images (rather old; my character is significantly higher level now) come from a low-end video card without advanced texture or shader support; on a higher-end system, the visuals are even better.
I love the atmospherics; the environments they’ve created are both exceptionally diverse and quite pleasing to look at.
…damn nihilus for being interesting, anyway.
Shelly and I have been spending a lot of time with phyrra and nihilus these days, often until ridiculous hours. We’ve settled into a kind of pattern; Shelly and phyrra do girl-type stuff like dying their hair, nihilus and I work on our laptops on the couch, and occasionally nihilus looks up to say something interesting about database architecture or the physics of zero-point energy or the history of early Gnosticism. That usually starts a conversation that ends with me taking home a book from their library on, oh, the history of Gnosticism or some such thing, which I get sucked into, and dammit, I don’t have time, y’know?
Then after that we watch Lexx or Farscape, and stuff.
Speaking of Farscape…you’d think the Peacekeepers, who belong to a species that is extremely sensitive to and intolerant of temperatures above eighty degrees or so, would develop climate-controlled space suits, since it does little good to have turned your entire civilization into a great lumbering war machine if your elite crack special forces can be stopped from boarding an enemy vessel when the people aboard that vessel…turn up the heat. But I digress.
Last weekend was the annual St. Patrick’s Day party hosted by khepra and fangly. On the entertainment menu was a rather bizarre movie called “Immortal,” a French flick in English, on a Russian DVD, about a future society that’s Blade Runner meets Fifth Element with a dash of Tetsuo the Iron Man thrown in for good measure, and the arrival of an Egyptian god, and a blue-haired chick who can read minds, and…well, it’s kind of complicated. Anyway, turns out it’s based on a French graphic novel…which happens to be in nihilus‘s library. Kinda figures, really.