My dear fellow liberals: PLEASE stop being know-nothing dumbasses

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A short while ago, CNN published an explosive story about a group of men coordinating with each other on Telegram and porn sites in what CNN calls an “online rape academy,” exchanging tips and techniques to drug their wves and then rape them or invite others to rape them. These men exchanged photos of their wives being raped along with adivce on drugging them.

Horrifying stuff. Decent people all over the internet are reacting with shock and sorrow and rage. As they should.

And yet…and yet…a lot of folks in social justice communities are doing what folks in social justice communities do, getting so worked up into a towering inferno of rage that they behave like the most ignorant MAGA dumbasses they deride, spouting absolute rubbish that is not only not true but cannot possibly be true, and of course shouting down anyone who tries to correct them.

Folks, don’t do this.

Yes, a large group of men did this. Yes, it’s abhorrent. No, it was not 62 million men. If you’re one of the countless people taking to the Great Online to scream your moral outrage that sixty-two million men could do such a horriffic thing, you are being a dumbass, you do not care about truth, and you are playing into the hands of conservatives who wish to mock, ridicule, and ultimately trivialize moral atrocity.

This is a trend I’ve noticed in social justice communities in North America over the last decade or so: moral outrage first, fact-checking later, truth never.

So let’s take a look at the CNN article and figure out where this “62 million men” idea comes from, shall we?

Here it is, in black and white:

Now, yes, this is poorly written (shame on the CNN editors!) and could have been much clearer. So, in the interests of fact and truth, let me spell this out clearly:

There is a site called Motherless. It gets about 62 million visits a month.

On this site was a group of people posting rape content.

That does not mean 62 million people were visiting rape content per month. C’mon. If you’re screaming outrage on the internet, you should know how the internet works.

There is a site called Reddit. It gets about 394 million visitors a month. If someone creates a subreddit called “How to Torture Kittens,” that does not mean that 394 million people a month visit that subreddit. It does not mean 394 million people a month want to learn how to torture cats.

Motherless, like Reddit, is huge. Motherless, like Reddit, has communities of people with different interests. Motherless calls them “groups,” Reddit calls them “subreddits.” Nobody visits every single Motherless group, just like nobody visits every single Reddit subreddit.

I thought this was obvious. Apparently it is not.

Yes, this Motherless group is horrific. Yes, any number of men visiting such a group is too many.

Truth. Matters.

Truth fucking matters. Going into hysterical screeds about “62 million men visiting a r@pe academy” makes those of us who care about social justice look like dumbasses. It makes us look like hypocrites when we insist on fact-checking conservatives. “Hahaha lookit these dumbass liberals, always saying ‘facts this’ and ‘fact-check that’ but when it’s their side they don’t give a shit about facts, LOL.”

It allows social conservatives to weaponize our own insistence on truth and facts against us. It allows people to ridicule and dismiss what we say. “ROFL these liberals, yapping about a ‘r@pe academy’ but they don’t even understand how the internet works, you can’t believe anything SJWs say.”

There can be no justice without truth. The truth is that 62 million men did not visit this Motherless group.

If you think I’m trying to trivialize this horror, you’re dead wrong. There can be no justice without truth. It gets right up my fucking nose when social justice liberals insist on facts and reason when we address the other side, then do the same things we accuse the other side of doing: playing fast and loose with reality in order to score cheap emotional points.

Yes, I know that the CNN article is ambiguous. I see how people acting in good faith reasonably came to the conclusion that 62 million men wanted to learn how to drug and assault their wives. But that’s not what happened, and now that you know that’s not what happened, if you continue to claim that’s what happened, you’re practicing accountability for thee but not for me. We are all accountable to the truth. There can be no justice without truth.

My fellow liberals, do better.

I started down this rabbit hole when I saw a comment on Facebook, where someone had posted about how “62 million men want to r@pe their wives” and then flew into a rage when someone else left a comment basically saying “I wish people would fact check, that number is not correct.” I switched over to my mobile browser to read the original CNN article and when I switched back,t hat post had scrolled off my Facebook feed.

If you’re pissed off about being corrected over something like this, you are the reason so many conservatives view us like this:

You may not see yourself in this meme, you may sincerely believe this meme doesn’t describe you, but other people see it.

If you expect the other side to listen to facts when you fact-check them, then you damn well have to be willing to listen and accept accountability when someone fact-checks you.

Do better. Be better. Facts matter. There can be no justice without truth. We do not win a culture war with the cheap emotional tools of the other side.

Anyone coming into the comments to try to excuse or justify deliberate factual misstatements or to argue that it’s okay to say things that aren’t true because our outrage is pure and our cause is just or that insisting on facts is the same thing as “defending rape” will be blocked permanently and without hesitation.

When Fantasy Sex is Not Just Sex

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Eunice and I have written four novels and one collection of short stories in a far-future, post-scarcity world that emerged from a fantasy she had, a woman atop a ziggurat, strapped to an altar, given forced orgasms from sunup to sundown.

From that one image, an entire world, with fusion power and drones and near-Culture-level AIs and an entire society and religious system arose, the backdrop of five books (and counting!).

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today. I want to talk about that big consumer magic show in Las Vegas.

So I ran across a question on the social media site Quora, What’s your go-to fantasy? And the thing is, I don’t have one of those. In fact, I kind of envy people who do…it must be nice to have something that always works for you, something that gets you off reliably.

My fantasy world is a weird place, where the thing that does it for me changes all the time. I answered the question with the fantasy that’s currently doing it for me right now:

The one that’s doing it for me right now involves me and one of my current real-life lovers going to that huge consumer magic expo in Las Vegas every year, you know the one I mean.

It’s always a rather dreary affair, giant corporations with a trillion-dollar market cap trying to convince you that this year’s new grimoires are, like, this radical new development in magic that’ll change the world when really they’re about the same spells as last year but with less mana requirements and maybe a bit less material components, or the new model scrying stones are some radical new earth-shaking invention when really they’re about the same as last year’s model but maybe with a bigger viewing crystal or something.

But hey, we’re there for work, and the hotel restaurant has real unicorn steaks (the kind where they dust the meat with powdered unicorn horn before they grill it so you get that tingle) and top-shelf fae cider, the kind that gets you high af and turns your eyes golden for a few hours…and it’s all expense accountable.

So anyway, we’re exploring the vendor hall when we find a little booth in the back advertising Eros magic, staffed by a cute but surly goth girl watching Shoot ’Em Up on Netflix on her iPad. (Yes, I know Netflix doesn’t have Shoot ’Em Up, it’s a fantasy, okay?)

The booth has all the normal tat you’d find at a place like that, love potions, lust amulets set in cheap brass jewelry, desire charms that have so little magic in them that you can resist the compulsion in your sleep. But we find some little black vials with a holographic moon on the label that look kind of interesting, and the sign on the display stand offers exquisite ecstasy beyond imagining, so we’re like, why not?

We get two of them and take them up to our room. The vials have those peel-to-open labels with all the instructions and contraindications and such printed in four-point type on the inside: do not take more than four doses in 24 hours, do not take if you’re allergic to pixie dust or succubus essence, yadda yadda yadda, not legal for sale or use in AR, MI, or AL, check state and local ordinances, blah blah blah…

So we both down the contents, halfway expecting a cheap gas-station aphrodisiac, something that makes you all frantic but leaves you with a hangover and itchy skin the next day, but this is not that.

It comes on slow, subtle at first, but absolutely irresistible, until I get an intoxicating buzz just looking at her. Every touch, however slight or fleeting, sends this long slow wave of indescribable ecstasy rippling through me. And kissing? Dear god, just the lightest touch of her lips is like the heavens open up and, for just that moment, I see the whole of the cosmos.

I won’t bore you with the rest, but yeah, that’s the fantasy that’s working for me right now.

Here, have a ghastly AI generated image that probably accelerated global warming by three months, because that’s the time we live in.

So anyway, there’s a guy I know from The Online who asked me, “Why does you need all these non-sexual details in your wank material? A lot of this context isn’t even very relevant to the foreplay.”

Which is a good question, one I started answering over on Quora before I realized it really needed a full fledged essay to answer.

Eunice and I share one thing in common: grunt-n-thrust doesn’t work for us. (In fact, this is something I share with my Talespinner as well; we’re currently a third of the way through co-authoring a hyperurban retrofuturist gangster noir novel that started as a sexual fantasy and became an entire world.)

There needs to be something beyond two (or more) people fucking. Who are they? Why are they fucking? Where are they fucking? What’s the context of the fucking they’re doing?

The context is actually, for me, part of what makes it hot. Every element of that fantasy changes the nature of the sex. So let’s look at it, and I’ll explain why.

Me and one of my current real-life lovers…

So this is about a rela person, someone who’s already an intimate partner.

…going to that huge consumer magic expo in Las Vegas every year, you know the one I mean.

Right away, this isn’t the real world. It’s a world where magic is real, and is as humdrum as electronics (which, seriously, are magic!) are here in this world.

It’s always a rather dreary affair, giant corporations with a trillion-dollar market cap trying to convince you…

So it’s this world’s equivalent of the Consumer Electronics Show. Right away that tells you even more about the world, but also that my lover and I are away from home. There’s something just a little extra about sex in a motel room, isn’t there?

But hey, we’re there for work,…

Which also adds an element of spice to the sex. Is this an illicit workplace tryst? Are we there from different companies? Dunno, but either way it changes the sex.

…and the hotel restaurant has real unicorn steaks (the kind where they dust the meat with powdered unicorn horn before they grill it so you get that tingle) and top-shelf fae cider, the kind that gets you high af and turns your eyes golden for a few hours…and it’s all expense accountable.

It’s a nice hotel, with an expensive restaurant that serves a high-end (and presumably very pricey) menu, but someone else is paying for it! Again, changes the nature of the tryst.

…we find a little booth in the back advertising Eros magic, staffed by a cute but surly goth girl watching Shoot ’Em Up on Netflix on her iPad.

Magic and consumer electronics are real. Oh, and the consumer electronics expo was, for a while, actually famous for having tons of little booths advertising sex toys, until the organizers actually changed the rules to ban them. (Why were they there? Because you get a whole bunch of people there on business because their companies made them go, far from home with hot co-workers or partners, it was A Thing™. Why did they get banned? They started overshadowing the big consumer electronics giants.)

…all the normal tat you’d find at a place like that, love potions, lust amulets set in cheap brass jewelry, desire charms that have so little magic in them that you can resist the compulsion in your sleep.

So basically the equivalent of those ridiculous penis pills or whatever, or cheap vibrators that break after the second use. And also, this is a world where recrational magic is a bit like recreational pharmaceuticals are in the real world.

But we find some little black vials with a holographic moon on the label that look kind of interesting, and the sign on the display stand offers exquisite ecstasy beyond imagining, so we’re like, why not?

We didn’t plan to investigate the tat at the little sex booth; this was a spontaneous decision. We didn’t come to the expo expecting to try some dodgy sex magic and shag. But we weren’t closed to it, clearly.

The vials have those peel-to-open labels with all the instructions and contraindications and such printed in four-point type on the inside: do not take more than four doses in 24 hours, do not take if you’re allergic to pixie dust or succubus essence, yadda yadda yadda, not legal for sale or use in AR, MI, or AL…

So these vials, whatever they are, occupy that legal limbo that cannabis products did for a while. Hmm, interesting. Means they probably legit have some effect, then.

It comes on slow, subtle at first, but absolutely irresistible, until I get an intoxicating buzz just looking at her. Every touch, however slight or fleeting, sends this long slow wave of indescribable ecstasy rippling through me. And kissing? Dear god, just the lightest touch of her lips is like the heavens open up and, for just that moment, I see the whole of the cosmos.

Fuuuck me, this is way more of an intense experience than either of us expected, and way, way better, too. We’re off in an expensive, swanky hotel room in an expensive, swanky hotel that neither of us is paying for, with an expensive, swanky restaurant serving from a menu that normally we’d never even consider buying from, and now we’re set to have this amazing sexual experience.

Every part of the fantasy informs the nature of what’s about to happen.

For me, when I say that I need the context and the setting to make a sexual fantasy work, that’s what I’m talking about. Whi is it with? Why are we shagging? How are we shagging? What informs the shagging? What sets the stage? What’s the context? Sex at home is different from sex in a hotel is different from sex while traveling to another country. Sex in the normal everyday world is different from sex in a dystopia where every sexual encounter is a subversive act is different from sex in a world where magic is real and is routinely used as part of the sex.

Everything changes the quality and timbre of sex. All these little background details influence the nature of the sex in the fantasy.

Stories from the Past: Beth

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As I move into my sixth decade of life, I’m posting a series of stories from my past. This is part of that series.

Fresh out of my rather disastrous first year of uni, during which I got caught hacking the school’s DECsystem-20 mainframe and was…well, technically not expelled, but I was told if I returned the next year they’d be trying out some of Pennsylvania’s shiny new computer tresspass laws on me, I came back to Florida, where I got a job working at McDonald’s.

While I was there, I met a woman named Beth.

She started working at McDonald’s after I did. She was gorgeous and charming and smart and engaging, and she spoke with a subtle musicality, a kind of lilt in her voice I’d never heard before. Not an accent, precisely, but an understated cadence that I couldn’t quite place. When I asked her about it, she laughed and explained she’d grown up in China, speaking both English and Mandarin, and she unconsciously imposed some of the tonality of Mandarin (a tonal language) on English. Her parents worked in China, apparently, and had since she was a toddler.

We became friends quite quickly. She came over to visit me one afternoon whilst I was working on my Volkswagen Bug (one of the old ones, not the neo Beetles, so of course I was always working on it), and brought cookies.

I only knew her for a couple of months. She left McDonald’s maybe two or three months after she arrived, back to China apparently. I got a letter from her a year or so later, covered in writing in both Chinese and English, saying she’d been delighted to know me and was now traveling about in China.

This happened before the age of the Internet, so I never saw her or heard from her again. I still think about her occasionally, almost thirty years later, evidence that she left an outsized mark on me from our brief friendship.

The subtle, random strands of fate sometimes bring us together and then pull us apart again in unexpected ways. Wherever she is, wherever her life has taken her, I hope she’s happy and well.

Stories from the Past: Tacit Rainbow

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As I move into my sixth decade of life, I’m posting a series of stories from my past. This is part of that series.

A few weeks ago, as I waled to the coffee shop where I spend a lot of my writing time, a woman coming the other way pointed to me and said “Tacit Rainbow!”

Normally I answer people who randomly greet me on the street (when you wear bunny ears everywhere you go, this happens a lot), but on this occasion I was so gobsmacked I just stood there with my mouth hanging open until she’d passed.

So, a little backstory. “Tacit Rainbow” was the code name for a US Air Force project in the 80s and 90s. The plan was to create a cruise missile that could be launched near suspected enemy surface-to-air missile batteries, to replace Wild Weasel pilots.

The missle (by today’s standards, it would be considered a cross between a missle and a drone) would loiter, flying circles around the area until the enemy activated its anti-aircraft radar. At that point, the Tacit Rainbow would automatically lock on to the enemy radar and follow it down, destroying the SAM battery’s control and tracking capability.

AGM-136 Tacit Rainbow, the only one left in the world, on display in a museum. The Tacit Rainbow was the world’s first loitering munition.

Flight test of an early Tacit Rainbow prototype. It has two sets of wings to give it tons of lift for extended loiter.

The Tacit Rainbow project was canceled some time in the early 90s without ever going into production. I wasn’t particularly a military buff or anything, but when I heard about the project in the 1980s, I really liked the way those two words, “Tacit Rainbow,” sounded together. I adopted Tacit Rainbow as my handle on old-school computer BBS systems. For a time, more people knew me as Tacit Rainbow than knew my real name.

Thing is, I only used that name from about 1988 to about 1996 or 1997 or so. Classic computer bulletin board systems were text-only, no graphics. To my knowledge, there are no photos of me from those days attached to the name “Tacit Rainbow.”

Not that it would matter. I looked a lot different back then. Here’s a photo of me from the days I ran a BBS called a/L/T/E/R r/E/A/L/I/T/Y:

Today, not only have I not used the name Tacit Rainbow in 30 years, the only vestige remaining is my AOL email address “tacitr”. I got that email address in 1992, truncating it because at the time AOL dodn’t allow names as long as “Tacit Rainbow.” I still have it, and even still use it occasionally.

The idea that someone randomly wandering down the street would recognize me from a computer BBS handle I used thirty years ago was so jaw-droppingly improbable I just stood rooted in place until she was gone.

Had I had my wits about me, I would have been like, “Wait, hang on, do we know each other? Were you a BBS regular back in the day? How on earth do you know that name?”

Somewhere around, I don’t know, 1998 or 1999 or so, I was sitting in front of my computer when a chat window popped up asking me if the name “tacitr” came from Tacit Rainbow. When I said it did, the guy was like “OMG, were you on the project at Northrop? I was one of the lead engineers, retired after it got canceled. Did we work together?”

I explained that I wasn’t part of it but I knew about it and took my name from it because I liked the way those words sounded together, and we ended up chatting for about two or three hours. Really interesting guy. The project was fascinating and had some incredibly advanced avionics for the time, though apparently it was plagued by mismanagement, which is apparently one of the biggest reasons the DoD canceled it.

I still would dearly love to know why a random woman on a random street in Portland looked at me and said “Tacit Rainbow!” There’s a story there I will likely never know.

Sex as Fuel for Creativity

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Back in 2019, Eunice and I spent some time in New Orleans, a place I’d never visited before. We did all the normal New Orleans touristy things: explored an abandoned and partly-flooded power plant, did some urban spelunking in the ruins of an old mansion…you know, the usual.

While we were there, we also officially broke ground on immechanica, our near-future, hard-SF post-cyberpunk novel. We officially started working on the background of the world in a laundromat whilst waiting for our clothes to dry.

A couple weeks ago, a random troll on social media informed me, with the cast-iron certainty of those who make their home on the rugged and inhospitable slopes of Mount Dunning-Kruger, that I would never accomplish anything because clearly my entire life revolved around sex. (I’d include a screenshot, but honestly I’ve only had one cup of tea so far today and I absolutely cannot be arsed to go find it.) The dude is, and I’m sure this will come as a surprise to nobody, a conservative Evangelical Christian, and he also exhibits this weird quirk where he (randomly) puts words in (parentheses) whenever he (writes).

I’ve long suspected that folks who do that sort of weird inappropriate (emphasis)—sometimes it’s random Capitalized words, sometimes it’s random ALL caps—have a defineable, quantifiable mental illness, because it’s so overwhelmingly common amongst a certain type of Internet troll—but I digress.

Anyway, the thing is, he’s not exactly wrong, but he’s so wrong he has accidentally looped all the way around to right, in a manner of speaking, kind of like what happens in that video game Asteroids where you go off one side of the screen and reappear on t’other.

But I digress.

Whilst we were there, we went out one evening to a very nice seafood teppanyaki dinner. Before we left for the restaurant, I took some PT-141 (bremelanotide), a potent aphrodisiac that works gangbusters on me.

It started to hit in the restaurant. We walked back to the AirBnB through the French quarter hand in hand, with Eunice whispering the most delicious filth at me the whole time. We got back, got naked, spread out a huge collection of sex toys all over the bed, and…

…started talking about the book.

Then I got out my laptop.

The next thing you know, it’s past 2AM and we’re both sitting on the bed naked, writing, the toys forgotten around us.

See, here’s the thing: I like sex. A lot. I mean, yeah, a lot of folks like sex, but I might like sex more than the average bear.

But when I say I like sex, I don’t necessarily mean I like having sex, or having orgasms, or doing the bumping of squishy bits. Don’t get me wrong, I like all those things, but what I really like, what really drives me, is that the impulse toward sex is, in a literal sense, the most fundamental expression of the creative impulse. I do not see how it’s possible to separate sex from creativity.

Which is kind of a big deal, because co-creation is my love language.

I like sex, yet two of my lovers are on the asexuality spectrum, and that’s fine. They’re both creative, and all creativity is sex.

When I look back over the things I’ve created and am creating, sex is intimately tied up in all of them, even if the connection isn’t necessarily visible from the outside.

I mean, yes, often it is. Sometimes it’s pretty heckin’ obvious.

But sometimes it’s not. There’s basically no sex in our novel immechanica, but the writing of it was a highly sexual act, even though it literally, not figuratively, prevented us from having sex.

Last time I visited my Talespinner, a lover with a sex drive so breathtakingly vast and deep she makes me look like a celibate monk in a monastery, I got an idea for a novel I’m working on that I’ve been stuck on for a while.

In the middle of a very kinky threesome with her other boyfriend.

So I did what anyone might do in that situation: I excused myself for about an hour or so and banged out about 1200 words on the novel whilst they carried on doing their thing. When I was done, I rejoined them and the kinky sexy festivities continued.

Which is kind of my point. Yes, my life is, from a certain point of view, very much about sex (and caffeine), because sex (and caffeine) drives my creativity. My normal background emotional state is basically happy and basically horny pretty much all the time. I turn sex and caffeine into words…even when those words aren’t about sex or caffeine.

To be fair, they sometimes are; I write about sex rather a lot. But in the Passionate Pantheon universe, a series of novels that contain a lot of sex, we use sex to explore philosophy, radical agency, consent, justice, and morality. We’ve received feedback that sometimes people are left a bit confused by the novels because they skip over the sex, but important plot points, character development, and ideas happen during the sex—you can’t take the sex out of the stories and still follow what’s going on.

Right now, my Talespinner and I are writing a novel with the working title A Long Kiss Goodbye. It’s a hyperurban retrofuturist court-intrigue gangster noir. I’ve written before about how we created the book’s setting and plot during sex.

We’ve formally started working on it, and man, it’s been a ride. Indah Tan, our protagonist, is headstrong and stubborn and not at all afraid to tell us “no, I’m not doing that” when we try to write her scenes. I told my Talespinner it kinda feels like this book has three co-authors—her, me, and Indah—and of the three of us, Indah is the most well-armed. Still, it must be working, we’re already a quarter of the way through the first draft.

So yes, sex is an important part of my life. No, it’s not preventing me from accomplishing anything…it’s fueling the things I accomplish.

The United States is, by the standards of Western developed nations, Puritan and prudish to such a degree it’s almost self-parodying. There’s a deep, reflexive hatred and fear of sexuality wired into our collective consciousness, which of course makes us simultaneously fascinated by and repelled by sex. Our advertising is drenched in sex, but serious talk about sex and sexuality shocks us to our core.

In this kind of society, using the sexual impulse to fuel creativity is by itself almost an act of defiance.

Stories from the Past: Xtina

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As I move into my sixth decade of life, I’m posting a series of stories from my past. This is part of that series.

We met at a point of transition in my life.

For nearly two decades, I’d been with my first wife, a woman I met in the late 1980s, in a time before the word “polyamory” was in circulation. My wife (now ex-wife) and I had no benefit of community or a roadmap for non-monogamy; we were making it up as we went along.

We started out, my ex-wife and I, in what would now be called a “polyamorous quad” with my best friend (who was also my wife’s lover) and his girlfriend (who I had a crush on, and who was a snogging friend of mine). Like many people back then, my ex-wife and I had a veto relationship, an agreement that if either of us became uncomfortable with the other’s lover, we could demand a breakup.

I never used my veto. My ex-wife did.

Then I met a woman named Shelly Deforte, a woman who blew me away with her intelligence and insight.

Shelly asked me out. I said yes. Very quickly, Shelly chafed under the idea of veto, the Sword of Damocles hanging over our relationship, a weapon terrible and cruel, always there, always looming like a dark shadow over anything we built together, ready to pierce our hearts without warning. She saw my ex-wife veto another of my lovers, saw what it did to us, and she was rightfully appalled. Veto, she said in many conversations that extended long into the night, was intrinsically destructive, a weapon barbaric and vicious, one that eroded trust, destroyed all hope of a building anything stable and meaningful.

Her ideas, which went straight at the root of my relationship with my ex-wife, forced me to see things in a completely new way, to reconsider the impact of the arrangement I’d made with my ex-wife without any input from anyone else. As you might imagine, this drove the relationship with my ex-wife to the brink of ruin. Even though my ex-wife had more “outside” lovers than I did, and for longer, from earlier in our relationship, she still felt threatened whenever I took a new lover.

It was against this backdrop that I went to a friend’s birthday party.

The place was absolutely jammed, perhaps fifty people packed shoulder to shoulder in an apartment, drinking from plastic cups, chatting while they scarfed down handfuls of potato chips.

I didn’t know anyone there except the host.

That’s when it happened.

Hollywood movies call it “love at first sight,” though of course that’s nonsense. You can’t love someone you don’t know. Biologists talk about major histocompatibility complexes and reproductive compatibility, but that doesn’t give you any sense of the urgency of it, the immediacy, the overwhelming knock-your-socks-off emotional power of it that stops your heart in your chest and makes the rest of the world pale and insubstantial.

She was reading a book on applied cryptography. We saw each other. The universe (or major histocompatibility immune molecules, it’s hard to tell from the inside) sang a song of “Yes!” The host took a photo.

I’d never before experienced anything even remotely like it. For the first time, I understood why people believe in “soulmates” and “twin flames” and “love at first sight,” even though those things aren’t real. Those emotions? Heady stuff.

So we started dating.

None of this is new to anyone who’s read my blog for a long time. You’ll find fragments of this story all through my blog if you look—the good, the bad, the deeply stupid and bitterly regrettable. Funny thng about life: your collection of regrets always increases, never decreases.

She introduced herself as Xtina. We started dating. She and Shelly started dating. She and Shelly stopped dating, for reasons I should have paid more attention to.

“Isn’t it funny that Xtina still thinks she gets to be with you?” Shelly said. “Stop seeing her.”

The woman who argued passionately that veto is and always will be wrong, is and always will be morally inexcusable, is and always will be nothing but evil, demanded a veto. The man who’d come to believe her, to believe that veto is in fact a form of intimate partner abuse, complied.

I saw her only once after that, years later, in Portland, I don’t know why. I messaged her out of the blue. She agreed, more charitably than I deserved, to meet at a bar.

I choked.

We said little. In the car on the way back home, I broke down.

For years after Shelly vetoed Xtina, I did everything in my power to convince myself it was all for the best, that Xtina and I were not compatible, that it never would’ve lasted anyway. It even fueled a deep and lingering distrust of instant connection. It’s often the case that we will employ these sorts of psychological self-deceptions to avoid acknowledging the shitty things we do to people who don’t deserve the shitty things we do.

I have done shitty things in my life, of course. We are all made of frailty and error, which is why it’s important that we learn to forgive one another’s transgressions with grace, at least insofar as we can without compromising our own ethics.

I have made shitty choices. There are two shitty choices I’ve made that I would, were it possible, give almost anything to be able to make again. One was to agree to the veto of Xtina, the other to start dating someone I never shoud’ve dated in the first place.

I still think about Xtina way more than you might expect, considering I ended the relationship decades ago.

How to Make a Christian Movie that Doesn’t Suck

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A couple of days ago, I saw a question on Quora asking why Christian movies always suck. Thing is, Christian movies don’t (necessarily) suck. American Evangelical propaganda movies tend to suck, but there are some extraordinary Christian movies out there, and I say this as an atheist.

I refer, of course, to Knives Out 3: Wake Up Dead Man, which is a brilliant, entertaining, and very Christian movie—probably the best Christian movie of the last two decades.

“But Franklin!” I hear you say. “Wake Up Dead Man has an atheist protagonist! The antagonist is a corrupt religious preacher who builds a dysfunctional cult of personality around himself! This is in no way a Christian movie!”

Ah, but watch this scene, where our atheist protagonist, Benoit Blank, first meets another major character, Father Jud Duplenticy, who is sent out to the corrupt priest’s parrish:

The entire movie has some absolutely marvelous dialogue, but this scene in particular stands out. When Blank enters, and Father Jud asks him what he thinks of the church, he has something pretty scathing to say:

Well, the architecture, that interests me. I feel the grandeur, the mystery, the intended emotional effect. And it’s like someone has shown a story to me that I do not believe. That is built upon the empty promise of a child’s fairy tale, filled with malevolence and misogyny and homophobia. And it’s justified untold acts of violence and cruelty while all the while, and still, hiding its own shameful acts. So like an ornery mule kicking back, I want to pick it apart and pop its perfidious bubble of belief and get to a truth I can swallow without choking. Telling the truth can be a bitter herb. I suspect you can’t always be honest with your parishioners.

Not a very Christian bit of dialogue, right?

Ah, but wait. Here’s Father Jud’s reply:

You can always be honest by not telling the unhonest thing. You’re right, it’s storytelling. This church isn’t medieval. We’re in the middle of New York. It has more in common with Disneyland than Notre Dame. And the rites, the rituals, the costumes, all of it, you’re right, it’s storytelling. I guess the question is, do these stories convince us of a lie, or do they resonate with something deep inside us that is profoundly true, that we can’t express any other way except storytelling?

I, as an atheist, found Father Jud’s answer quite moving.

But it goes so much further than that. This scene is a masterclass of cinematic storytelling, of show rather than tell. You could teach an entire course in composition and visual design just from this one scene. Let’s go through it, shall we?

At the start of the scene, Benoit Blanc, our atheist, walks into the church. The door is behind him; the aisle down through the center of the church is shrouded in darkness. He, as he says at the scene’s start, “worships at the altar of the rational.”

He’s confident, self-assured, secure in his position.

Father Jud stands facing him, literally rather than figuratively standing in the light.

Father Jud approaches Benoit, asking him questions about himself, listening to his reply, meeting Benoit where he is.

Benoit walks past him. At this point, the two of them, atheist and reverent priest, have traded places.

“How does all this make you feel?” Jud says. At this point, Jud and Benoit have traded places, and you’ll see some astonishingly good face acting on Daniel Craig’s part.

Craig (Benoit Blank) asks him, “truthfully?” “Sure,” Jud replies, giving him permission to be frank. Benoit launches into his tirade: “I feel the grandeur, the mystery, the intended emotional effect. And it’s like someone has shown a story to me that I do not believe. That is built upon the empty promise of a child’s fairy tale, filled with malevolence and misogyny and homophobia.”

While he speaks, pay attention to what happens around him. The formerly bright part of the church grows dark. The saturation is reduced, leaching the color from the scene. His words spin a veil of darkness that fills the space around him.

More incredible face acting from Craig as his words become more biting, more angry: “And it’s justified untold acts of violence and cruelty while all the while, and still, hiding its own shameful acts,” every word delivered like a bullet from a gun.

As he speaks, there’s some amazingly clever camera work. Benoit in the foreground, Father Jud in the background, the camera moves around so that Benoit, again literally and not figuratively, eclipses the pious priest, completely removing him from view. Benoit is not talking to Father Jud. He’s not even facing Father Jud. He’s talking to us.

It’s subtle but oh so well done, and it is absolutely intentional.

At the end, Benoit, realizing he’s said probably more than he intended to, and with more venom, offers to leave. Father Jud tells him, no, stay, I told you to be honest.

At this point, the entire church is shrouded in darkness. Father Jud isn’s standing in the light anymore. He and Blanc are cloaked in shadow, the darkness of Benoit’s words given physical form.

What is happening here? Father Jud has literally, not figuratively but literally, joined Benoit Blank in the darkness. He’s met Benoit where he is. He hasn’t stood above him, talking down to him. He is there, on the same footing, in the same place as Blanc. He pauses for a moment, and then he begins to speak.

What is the first thing he says? “You’re right.” He reiterates Benoit’s opening thesis: It is storytelling. The church itself, its physical form, is a story, and a false one, an illusion of a Medieval church built in modern times, as much an ancient cathedral as Cindarella’s castle is a real fortification.

Watch what happens as he speaks:

The light returns, shining from above him, almost passing through him. And when he’s finished…

…the atheist stands illuminated, bathed in the light of his words.

Father Jud doesn’t preach at the atheist detective from some higher plane. He meets Blanc where he is, he stands with him, he acknowledges the parts of Blanc’s argument that he believes are true, and then he offers a new way to interpret Blanc’s central thesis—all without condescention, judgment, or self-righteousness.

I am not a believer, but this scene still gave me chills. It’s immensely powerful. It resonates. It vibrates. This is masterful visual storytelling.

The reason people don’t recognize Wake Up Dead Man as a Christian movie is that too many of us have been conditioned by Christian™ movies, movies made by and for low-information, insecure American Protestant Evangelicals.

These movies are like the Chick tracts I used to collect back when I collected religious propaganda. They’re cartoons for the uneducated, caricatures in which every atheist is a slavering buffoon, every religious person clever and righteous, told to an audience so insecure in its faith that no atheist can ever be allowed to make any point and no religious character can ever be permitted the slightest doubt or fault.

American Evangelicals are a weird breed, convincing themselves they’re the persecuted ones at the same time they deliver a venomous mix of hatred and bile to all those who are not like themselves. They believe, they actually believe, that university professors demand their students sign statements renouncing Christianity in order to get a passing grade, then go home and drool over all the people they’ve deconverted that day.

By their standards, Wake Up Dead Man is not A Christian movie, because Christian movies have to look a certain way, a way that seems written by a drooling eight-year-old who’s never read more than three Bible verses for a Sunday School class.

There’s another scene that drives this point home even more. Benoit Blanc and Father Jud are hot on the heels of the murderer, a murderer they believe they will be able to identify if they can get one key piece of information from the church secretary, Louise. They’re this close to finding the killer. And, well…

…Louise reveals that her mother is in hospice, dying of brain cancer, and she fought with her mother, and her mother refuses to speak to her.

This scene broke me.

Father Jud is working with Detective Blanc to uncover a murderer, a high-stakes mission, but when faced with someone suffering right now, someone he has the power to help right now, he stops what he’s doing to care for her.

This is the absolute best of Christianity, the thing Christianity promises but all too often fails to deliver. It’s not highlighted, it’s not the centerpiece of the movie, it’s not delivered in a “look how good we Christians are, let’s rub it in the face of the callous evil atheists,” it’s just a thing that happens, because of Father Jud is who he is: a flawed but sincere exemplar of loving kindness, not a Christian™ (or an atheist) caricature of Christianity.

A Christian™ movie will never, can never deliver a scene like this.

Benoit Blanc ends the movie as he started, an atheist. There’s no scene in this movie like there is in every Christian™ movie where the atheist character falls to his knees and accepts Jesus Christ™ as his Lord and Savior™. That’s not the point.

The religious figures in the movie are not perfect. One of them is the film’s primary antagonist. That’s also not the point.

The point is, this movie delivers a blueprint, a template of the best that Christianity has to offer: kindness, humility, calm and patient virtue. It is without question a Christian movie, deliberately so, a Christian movie built and delivered with warmth and compassion. A Christian movie even atheists can enjoy.

That makes it far more effective than any Christian™ movie can ever be.

Stories from the Past: Center for Bioethical Reform

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As I move into my sixth decade of life, I’m posting a series of stories from my past. This is part of that series.

Way back in the dim and distant year of 1992, I started my first paying job in the world of graphic arts, working for a small graphic arts studio in Tampa, Florida called Printgraphics.

My job involved using this newfangled software called “Photoshop” from this obscure company called Adobe to do desktop image editing. Printgraphics had this really fancy gizmo called a “color laser copier” that could make—get this—full color photocopies, one of the first such devices in all of Florida, and it let us charge extortionate rates for something almost nobody else could do: not only could we make color photocopies of something, we could even make printouts from a computer in full color by means of a PostScript interpreter that connected a computer to the CLC, for which we charged $16 a page (if you wanted letter-sized printouts) and almost double that (if you wanted larger printouts).

The CLC also acted as a color scanner, allowing us to do scans at considerably less expense (and considerably less quality) than a drum scanner. We could even scan slides and transparencies!

We also had contracts with print shops to do offset printing and posters and things like that…heady stuff in the early days of desktop publishing that seemed miraculous at the time. This equipment was rare, expensive, and cutting-edge, and people who could use it were rather thin on the ground.

About a year or so after I started working there, a polite, well-dressed man came into the shop asking if we could produce some placards and advertising posters for him. He was cagy about what he wanted, except to say that he was looking for prices on laminated full color materials that could be used for “promotional purposes.” They needed to be weatherproof, he said, and full color.

I told him I’d put together prices for him and he left. He came back a day or so later with a bunch of 35mm slides that, he said, he wated us to scan to make the posters from.

The slides all showed horrific, gruesome images of aborted fetuses, usually late-term abortions of fetuses with grotesque physical defects.

That’s when he came clean about who he was. He said he worked for a “pro-life” group called the Center for Bioethical Reform, a shock group that got a ton of media coverage for picketing women’s health clinics with grotesque, gruesome signs and banners showing the horrors of “infant genocide.”

He offered quite a lot of money if we would make these signs for him, a lot more than I’d quoted.

I told him I wouldn’t do the work for him, and asked him to leave.

Why Grammar Matters (it’s not what you think)

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Image: Devon on Depositphotos

Every so often, I find myself involved in conversations about grammar online. Every time this happens, without fail, someone will trot out some variant of the old saw “grammar is elitist. Who cares if you have every apostrophe or period in the right place? As long as you can make your idea understood it’s fine.”

Inevitably it’s someone with terrible grammar who says this, of course, but no matter.

There are a bunch of standard responses to this argument, but they all miss an important point.

The standard responses are typically something along the lines of “using proper grammar helps make sure your idea is understood,” or “using proper grammar gives you credibility,” or “not using proper grammar makes you look like an uneducated hick, and why should anyone pay attention to an uneducated hick?” All of which are true, but all of which miss an important point, and play into the “grammar is elitist” narrative.

The mistake people make when they talk about the value of proper grammar is in focusing on the person doing the communicating, not the person receiving it.

The most compelling reason I know to learn and understand grammar isn’t about making yourself understood. The real value? Preventing you from being played for a fool.

I spend quite a bit of time tracking down scammers, spammers, malware writers, and other lowlife vermin on the Internet. The Internet started out as a hack on top of a kludge on top of some interesting ideas by brilliant but naïve people who wanted to make a better world but didn’t think about the way the tools they were building could be put to evil use, so it was built from the ground up with no mechanisms for authentication, identity verification, or security. Several fundamental decisions made very early on, when there were only about twenty sites on what would become “the internet” and everyone who had an email address knew everyone else who had an email address, would later make the Internet a haven for criminal activity. (In fact, I’m writing a nonfiction book that talks about this right now.)

The Internet is swarming with scammers and con artists. Many of them don’t speak English natively; in Nigeria, for example, Internet frauds are the nation’s #4 source of foreign income.

Knowledge of English grammar is one of the first, best defenses against being scammed and conned.

Consider this, a fake Quora profile made by a romance scammer likely somewhere in West Africa:

This is a bog-standard celebrity impersonation scam; needless to say, this account is not owned by TV actress Kaley Cuoco. The man (it’s almost certainly a man) who created this profile most likely speaks English as a second language. Certain tells (“I got this page newly”) point to a native speaker of a West African language.

There are quite a few of these “tells” that can suggest where a scammer is from.

Native speakers of Yoruba, one of the languages of Nigeria, struggle with English first-person pronouns, which work differently in Yoruba than they do in English. So they’ll say things like “am a single woman, am looking for a good man” instead of “I am a single woman, I am looking for a good man.”

Nigerian scammers often have difficulty with English conjugations of “to be,” and rather oddly, will frequently use the word “at” in place of “have.”

Overuse of the word “kindly” usually suggests a scammer in India, particularly when it’s used in the expression “kindly let’s,” as in “kindly let’s talk on Signal.” The phrase “do the needful,” which is strange to English ears, is unique to India. “Please quickly” is another phrase common among Indian scammers. Indian scammers also tend to add a -s to the end of words that are already uncountable plurals, like “stuff” becomes “stuffs” (for example, “I need to get some stuffs from the store”).

Russian scammers struggle with English indefinite articles and often leave them out of sentences completely.

“I need urgently” is a phrase that is common to scammers in Myanmar but almost never seen outside Myanmar. “Against” in place of “at,” as in “I am angry against you,” is also unique to Myanmar.

Standard received wisdom is that Internet scammers make deliberate grammar mistakes in order to target only the least educated, most dimwitted marks. That’s (sometimes) true of phishing emails, which try to trick a mark into visiting a fake website like a phony banking site or a phony PayPal site, but romance scammers and confidence scammers succeed best when they speak convincing English. The romance scammers who make these grammar mistakes do so unintentionally, and at HKs (Hustle Kingdoms, scam academies in West Africa where budding scammers pay to learn scam techniques and buy scam scripts), scammers can learn better English.

The point is, knowing “correct” grammar (I put “correct” in quotes because grammar is a consensus construct that changes all the time; properly understood, grammar is descriptive, not prescriptive) is not just about communicating your ideas clearly, though of course it does help with that. It is also a potent defense against being scammed, particularly by scammers who don’t speak your language natively.

Weird, incorrect, idiosyncratic grammar is often one of the best early warning signs that someone is attempting to scam, mislead, or trick you.

This goes beyond Internet scams, too. Most people, most of the time, prefer to be honest. Few people are comfortable with telling direct lies. However, people are quite comfortable paltering—that is, lying without telling a direct untruth, by carefully constructing what they say to be technically true but to lead you to a false impression. People palter because they can tell themselves “I’m still a good person, I didn’t lie, everything I said was factually true.”

There are a number of ways to detect paltering that are outside the scope of this essay (I talk about that in the nonfiction book I’m working on right now, too), but one of them is grammar that’s just a little bit off. A palterer will torture grammar and syntax to make what he says technically true, by the most rigid definitions of “true,” but also evasive or misleading.

This is particularly the case in direct questioning, where a palterer will offer answers that seem to answer the question, but if you stop to think about it, actually don’t. Palterers may omit important information, add extraneous information that doesn’t actually address the question, or use vague language to avoid some part of the question; in all these cases, strangely convoluted grammar and syntax can alert you to the palter.

To sum up: It’s not about what you say so much as about what you hear, what you as the person receiving the communication perceive. Knowledge of grammar makes you harder to con.

On Not Being Nosey

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A typical nose, the sticky-out bit of the face part (photo by lightwavemedia)

I have, as many who know me can attest, a rudimentary, almost vestigial sense of smell. I’ve always been this way. I can detect really strong smells, like bleach, but for the most part I’m all but nose-blind.

So it came to pass last Friday that I headed home from Lenscrafters, where I’d just picked up a new pair of glasses to cope with the more ordinary sort of blindness. This being Portland, and March, Portland did what it does in March and started to rain.

This isn’t new. I’ve lived in Florida for decades, where it rains all the time, and now live in Portland, where it rains all the time but not as hard. However, on this particular day, something most peculiar happened.

Midway home, rain started falling. That’s not the unusual bit. The unusual bit was the smell. The heavens opened up and for a few brief, glorious hours, I could smell…everything.

Imagine you’re born blind. Imagine that you go to a nightclub one day, and whilst you’re there dancing to the beat of music, abruptly and without warning, you can see. But not just see, like, vague colors and shapes, but something like this…

Everything had a smell. The storm drain I stepped over had a smell. The cars driving by had a smell. People! People have a smell, my God! Who knew? A dude walked past me eating gummy bears and I could smell them! Half the thing I smelled I couldn’t identify, nor figure out where the smell was coming from.

Like our hypothetical blind person granted sight in the middle of a goth club dance floor, I was a bit overwhelmed. You have to understand, in my five-plus decades of life I’ve never experienced anything remotely like this.

It lasted for five hours or so after I got home (it took half that much time to figure out the cloud of scent that seemed to follow me around everywhere was my laundry detergent, which I’d always assumed was unscented), then slowly faded. I woke on Saturday back in my normal state of nearly complete nose-blindness.

The whole thing was weird and freaky and I do not understand it, like, at all. (According to the Internet, a particularly acute sense of smell is called “hyperosmia,” and can be caused by a brain tumor, because we learn from reading Dr. Google that everything is caused by a tumor.)

For one brief, shining moment, an entire sense I’ve never had before opened up, then closed again. Which is a little sad. It’s one thing to live your life without having a particular sense; it’s quite another to have it and then lose it.