On the way to dinner with the Smoosh on Thursday night, we passed a Porsche SUV.
A Porsche. SUV.
A Porsche. SUV.
Dinner was very good, however, and I gained valuable intelligence on the army of robots datan0de is building to try to destroy me.
…taken from a reply in a thread in polyamory, borrowing in turn from a similar conversation thread on a mailing list I read.
Many, many people feel special in a relationship because of the things their partners do. For example, some people feel special by exclusivity–“I am special because he does not love anyone else,” “I am special because he only does thus-and-such with me.”
The danger in doing this is that if you’re not careful, sometimes what happens is you end up placing your sense of worth, your sense of value, and your sense of “specialness” on things outside of yourself.
If you need certain exclusive things in order to feel secure with your lover and in order to feel unique and special and valued, then you will never really be secure and you will never really feel unique and special and
valued–because you will always know that these things can be taken away from you.I feel secure in my relationships because I know, deep down in my heart, that nobody else is like me and nobody can ever take my place. If my partner Shelly does everything with her other boyfriend that she does with me–if she goes to the same restaurants, watches the same movies, has sex in the same positions–it does not bother me and does not make me feel jealous or insecure, because I know that the things that make me special and irreplaceable are inside myself, not outside.
My specialness does not come from the exclusive things we do. My specialness comes from *who I am.* Knowing that makes me secure, and it also means I don’t need tokens of my specialness, like exclusive things from my partners; my specialness is assured, is concrete, and can never be taken away.
It’s been my observation that the more you place your sense of value and worth on things outside yourself–the more you need, and rely on, tokens of exclusivity in order to feel special–the more you will struggle with jealousy and insecurity. Real security, in the end, can come only from within.
I think that many problems people have with their partners’ behavior, especially in polyamorous relationships (but sometimes in monogamous relationships as well), come from the need to have their partner make them feel special. If you are in fact special to your partner, then there should be no need to set boundaries or controls on your partner’s behavior in order to feel it; it will shine through in everything your partner does, all the time. If, on the other hand, you are not special to your partner, then controlling your partner’s behavior isn’t going to make you special.
“Hey! You can touch my boobie, but you can’t make silly sound effects when you do it!”
So lately, I’ve noticed a trend.
More and more often, on various unrelated forums I read, it seems that anti-vaccination activism is becoming the trendy topic du jour. Decrying vaccinations as “dangerous” and “unproven” is hot these days; and worse yet, people are now advocating not immunizing children.
I keep seeing the same claims posted again and again on all these different forums…sometimes, word-for-word the same, which suggests that people are copying the information from one place and pasting it into another, without actually doing any research to verify the authenticity of this information.
This points, I think, to the same kind of credulity that lets people believe in the Loch Ness monster and the notion that human beings were created by space aliens from the tenth planet who used us as slaves to mine gold, but at the same time not believe that the world is round. Credulity pisses me off, as long-term readers of this journal will no doubt have noticed.
So I did some legwork. I visited a bunch of anti-vaccination Web sites, and made a list of the claims I’ve seen posted on many of these sites, and then tracked down the truth. I’ve invested, at this point, about seven or eight hours into looking up each of these claims, reading very dry articles, doing Google searches, looking at links, and compiling an assessment of whether the claims are true or false.
As it turns out, not all the claims are false. Some of them are true, though often not true in the way the activists campaigning against vaccination might think. And I found some surprises, too.
Computer viruses. If you’re running a Windows computer, the odds are slightly more than 9 in 10 that your machine, right now, is infected with at least one virus. If you’re not behind a firewall and you’re on broadband, odds are good that when you leave your computer at night, spammers take control of your computer and use it to send spam, and Russian mafia roots around in it at will.
Microsoft would have us believe that there is nothing wrong with Windows, that there are many Windows viruses and zero Mac viruses because more people use Windows than Macs and virus writers go for the most popular platform, and that there are just as many known Mac security flaws as Windows security flaws.
This argument breaks down for a number of reasons. it’s commercially useful to Microsoft, of course; if people actually knew how badly and terminally insecure Windows really is, fewer people would use it, so it is very important to Microsoft’s bottom line that people accept the standard “nothing wrong here, it’s just because Windows is so popular” myth.
For starters, the number of “Windows computers” targeted by a particular virus is not necessarily higher than the number of Macs. People make the mistake of thinking all “Windows computers” are all running the same operating system–an operating system called Microsoft Windows.
Problem is, there is not an operating system called Microsoft Windows.