This afternoon I crossed an amazing threshold: I officially shipped out my 1,500th free “Resist” and “Empathy” stickers.
I started this project because I felt helpless about the wholesale dismantling of the United States government and the slide into authoritarianism. I designed two vinyl stickers, one saying “Resist” and one saying “Commit the Sin of Empathy,” which I started sending out for free.
I had no idea this little project would run away from me like it did. Fifteen hundred stickers! Wow.
Today, on the day I passed the fifteen hundred mark, I received some Resist enamel lapel pins. These are now up on my online store too. They’re $10, including shipping in the US and Canada ($3 shipping elsewhere in the world).
I have rainbow holographic foil versions of the stickers, also.
I’ve been absolutely blown away by all the support you all have given this project. I’ve received so many donations so that I can keep printing and distributing more stickers. I would never have been able to do it without this amazing outpouring of help.
I’ve set up a Tips capability in the shopping cart, and I can also take donations at franklin@franklinveaux.com on PayPal or @Franklin-Veaux on Venmo. All of the donations go to printing and distributing more stickers.
In November of last year, I noticed something interesting.
For the past three years, the #1 source of spam reaching my email inbox has been Salesforce, which bought out a bulk email provider called ExactTarget quite some time ago, and took off all the constraints. ExactTarget customers were, post-acquisition, permitted to spam, and the abuse team stopped enforcing anti-spam policies. Result: spammers flocked to SalesForce (hey, SalesForce needed to make back the $2,500,000,000 they spent on ExactTarget somehow!) and my inbox was flooded with crap.
Starting last November, however, the flood of crap from Salesforce dropped to second place. The new #1? An outfit called Mailchannels.
As near as I can tell, Mailchannels is now the preferred email delivery service of choice for the lowest of the low: scammers, people sending fake phish emails to steal passwords, romance and Nigerian prince fraud, you name it.
Over the past few weeks, 46 of the 48 phish emails I have received (95.8%) came through Mailchannels. 100% of the Nigerian prince scam emails I’ve received? Mailchannels. 100% of the romance scam I’ve received? Mailchannels. 92% of the spam overall? Mailchannels.
I took a screenshot of the Mailchannels emails I’ve received a while back, and the results are rather grim:
Wow, that’s a lot of scam, fraud, and phish emails! With percentages like that, Mailchannels must be so proud.
There’s a particularly delicious irony here. See the highlighted entry at the bottom, the one in blue? I have been reporting all the spam emails to Mailchannels. That is a bounce email, when I reported a computer virus I received through Mailchannels. It bounced.
In other words:
Mailchannels knew the email was malware. They sent it to me anyway, but refused to accept it themselves.
Which really tells you everything you need to know about this organization.
What is Mailchannels?
Mailchannels is an “email delivery company.” In English: You pay them money, you send an email to hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of email addresses, and they do everything in their power to make sure your emails don’t get flagged as spam.
A list of their services includes:
Sending emails from “clean” IP addresses not in any spam blocklists.
Switching the servers an email comes from should emails start getting flagged as spam
Using scalable cloud servers to send vast quantities of emails
In other words, if you’re sending Nigerian scam or romance scam or password phish emails, which have a very low rate of return, a service like Mailchannels is exactly what you want.
How do they respond to spam reports?
Ah HA ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
I’ve sent hundreds (literally) of spam reports to Mailchannels. Every single one received the same reply:
From: Swathi Karun <skarun@mailchannels.com> Re: Spam Hi, Thank you for contacting MailChannels support. I have taken necessary action against the reported abuse activity. Thank you for your time and attention to this matter.
And the spam still rolls in. Every day, often from the same spammer with the same content. They don’t even block phishers who send identical phish emails through their servers over and over again.
It cannot possibly be more clear: Mailchannels is a bulletproof spam service provider, that through deliberate action or negligence permits their service to be used by the lowest criminals on the Internet.
What can you do?
Mailchannels doesn’t care. They know they’re in the spam business; they make money from delivering phish and scam emails. They don’t accept spam reports from spam-fighting services like Spamcop.
And repeated emails to Mailchannels abuse doesn’t do anything. There’s one email phisher in particular who sends out fake emails to Dreamhost customers, trying to steal their webhosting passwords; I’ve received more than two dozen of these phish emails from this same phisher through Mailchannels, reported every one, and they keep rolling in.
Fortunately, emails from Mailchannels are easy to spot. If you view the headers, you’ll always find a line like this near the top:
I strongly recommend setting up an email filter using your email program. If the headers contain the word “Mailchannels,” auto-delete the email. Your inbox will thank you.
A short time ago, I started thinking about the fact that I will often do things that are Type 2 fun when I’m having sex.
Quick recap for those who aren’t familiar with the types of fun: Type 1 fun is stuff that’s just fun. Things you enjoy. Things you like doing in the moment. Type 2 fun is fun that isn’t enjoyable in the moment, but that you enjoy the memory of, or telling stories about later. (For many marathon runners, for example, actually running in the marathon itself isn’t fun; it’s painful, uncomfortable, exhausting, and miserable. But there’s joy in having run the marathon—joy in being able to reminisce about it later and in the knowledge that you did it.) Type 3 fun is stuff that just isn’t fun at all—not in the moment, not in the remembering of it, and you are not likely to do it again.
My girlfriend Maxine says there’s also a Type 4 fun: something that isn’t fun in the doing or the remembering, but that a third party has fun telling others about. “Hey, you remember that one time when Bob had that firecracker, and there was that big pail of fish heads…?”
Anyway, I saw an online article that suggested you should never do anything sexually that makes you uncomfortable, which frankly I thought was terrible advice. That got me to thinking about my personal sex onion: the layers of things I will and won’t do in sex.
It looks something like this. Everything inside the largest circle is stuff I’ll do; everything outside it, stuff I won’t.
There’s a lot of stuff inside the circle I don’t enjoy. I’m not a masochist; I don’t get aroused from pain, and it never feels good no matter how sexy the context is. But I will allow lovers to do things like needle play or impact play on me if they’re into it.
I spent years developing the Xenomorph Hiphugger Strapon because my wife, who knows my parents took me to see the movie Alien at far too tender an age and it terrified me for decades, suggested the alien facehugger could be made into a strapon sex toy:
My wife wearing a prototype (photo by author)
I am what Eunice calls a “reaction junkie.” It gets me hot seeing my lovers get hot. If there’s something that really really does it for you, something that lights you up and revs your motor, something that turns you on to the point of incandescence, I can probably make it work for me even if it’s not my thing. There’s something amazing and unbelievably sexy about seeing someone you love light up.
Even if it’s uncomfortable in the moment.
In fact, hidden beneath the layers of“ooh, sexy!” is a profound truth of the human condition, one that people who explore kink and people who run marathons share in common: Sometimes, in those moments of discomfort, you learn something about who you really are. Intense experiences bring out hidden parts of us.
As far as intimacy goes, it’s the most intimate thing I can imagine: allowing your lover to push your buttons, or being with a lover who allows you to push theirs, to see you in those moments of genuine authenticity.
I’ve allowed lovers to spank and crop me, to put needles into me, to give me forced orgasms one after the other until I pass out. All those things are inside my personal sex onion. I won’t say I enjoyed them in the moment of doing them, but I feel like all of those experiences have value—they’ve given me insight I might not have any other way.
Life’s cost of entry
The cost of entry of that insight is being willing to do things that challenge you. Which isn’t common, thanks in no small part to the number of people who will tell you, with apparent sincerity and the right intentions, never to do anything that makes you uncomfortable.
Which is advice we apply to no other area of human activity. (Can you imagine someone saying that about running a marathon, signing on for the Marines, learning to sail, learning ballet, or going mountain climbing?) We accept discomfort as the price for many valuable experiences…except sex.
Of course, none of this means you should allow yourself to be pressured into doing things you genuinely don’t want to do. I will almost certainly never run a marathon. Doing something onlyi because it’s uncomfortable…well, that’s the road to madness.
But rejecting something only because it might be uncomfortable? That’s not a way, I think, to live an interesting life. (You may not agree, and that’s okay. Your life, your body, your rules.)
Outcome vs Consent
See that circle down in the bottom right, the one labeled “things I’ve tried at are now a hard no”?
A long long time ago, in a whole different digital age, when LiveJournal was new and social media seemed alight with possibilities beyond political tampering by hostile state-level actors, I saw a conversation online where a guy said he’d never do anything sexual he wasn’t 100% comfortable with, because what if he tried it, he didn’t like it, and then his girlfriend asked him to do it again?
I told him, “then you say no. It’s okay to try something and decide you don’t like it.”
Boom! Mind. Blown.
But it’s true. It’s okay to say no to something you previously said yes to. Again, we understand this intuitively with everything except sex.
I’ve talked about this before, but many people also do a terrible job of separating consent from outcome. If you say yes to something, and decide that oyu hated it, even felt violated by it, your consent was not violated. If you say no to something, and someone does it anyway, then you decide you actually kinda liked it, your consent was still violated.
You cannot label something you agreed to do and then decided you didn’t like a consent violation. You can label something you never said yes to a consent violation, even if after the fact you enjoyed it.
If you freely consent to something, decide you don’t like it, and claim your consent was violated, you’re a shitty person. If you do something to someone who didn’t consent to it, then claim that it was okay because they liked it, you’re a shitty person. I feel like this ought to be obvious, but no matter how many times I say it, it’s not.
If no means no, then yes has to mean yes.
There are things I’ve tried I won’t do again. There are things that I didn’t agree to that weren’t terrible, that I even kinda liked, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was not okay to do something that violated my consent.
It’s okay to agree to things that you later find you didn’t like. Just don’t do them again. Your body, your rules, remember?
Taking apart the onion
The point here is that sex is a lot of things. You can have fun (Type 1 or Type 2!) during sex, yes, but you can also learn about yourself, and your lover, from sex. We know that we do all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons…maybe we simply need to remember sex is no different. We know marathons are uncomfortable, but also that people choose to do them anyway, and running a marathon last year doesn’t obligate you to run another next year.
We are living through historic times right now, and I mean that in the worst possible way. We’re witnessing, in real time, a slow-motion coup against the United States government, one that may already have reached a point of no return.
We’re also seeing unparalleled propaganda, Soviet-state-level propaganda, become woven into the social discourse, which is terrifying but also fascinating to watch.
Some of the propaganda has historical parallels. Ssome of it does not. Unfortunately, those of us who care about the preservation of the Union tend to play into the propaganda. We reinforce it without intending to, without even knowing that’s what we’re doing.
The current Administration makes no secret of the fact it wants to annex Canada. The idea seems laughable on its face, but nearly every war, every act of atrocity in human history, starts with an idea that’s laughable on its face.
This is what propaganda is for: making the absurd seem inevitable.
It starts, of course, with demonizing the Other. That’s how atrocity works. You never go from zero to this:
Right here, right now, we get to see the start of the process.
Of course, I’m not comparing Trump’s rhetoric about Canada to anti-Jewish agitprop in WWII, but I am saying that the ideas, the fundamental process of propagandizing a society, are the same.
In both cases, the target is made out to be an enemy, inflicting ruin on the peaceful citizens of this great nation, without cause or pity—ruin that demands retaliatory action (in the name of self-defense, of course), ruin that constitutes a national emergency…and with it, emergency power.
The current Administration is in the process of declaring a national emergency against Canada on multiple fronts: there’s an emergency because Canada didn’t like Trump’s tariffs, there’s an emergency because fentanyl something something, there’s an emergency because Canada isn’t keen on selling electricity to the US after the Administration talked about conquering Canada to make it a state. I wish I could say this was all a South Park parody, but it’s not.
It’s fascinating, in a morbid kind of way, to watch this unfolding before our eyes, rather than reading about it in a history class.
Let’s talk about just one part of it: “We need to protect ourselves against Canada because they’re sending fentanyl into the US.”
This ticks all the ticky-boxes for effective propaganda:
✅ We have to protect our children from the evil scourge!
✅ They’re poisoning our people!
✅ The enemy is at the gates! They’re right at our border!
✅ We need to secure our border from the invasion!
The problem, of course, is the fact that less than 1% of the fentanyl coming into the US flows across the Canadian border; we send far more fentanyl to Canada than they send to us (though of course that doesn’t make us the bad guys; we’re the USA, everyone knows the USA is never the bad guys).
Liberals play into this propaganda
I’ve seen a lot of liberals try to push back against this narrative with information about fentanyl smuggling into the US, like the fact that almost all of the fentanyl coming into the US originates in China, or that the fentanyl that doesn’t originate from China tends to come in from Mexico and Central and South America. “Only 1% of the fentanyl that comes into the US crosses the border from Canada!” they say. “Canada is barely a rounding error on DEA statistics!”
Please stop doing that. It doesn’t work. It only reinforces the propaganda.
How?
When you say “Only 1% of the fentanyl that comes into the US crosses the border from Canada,” what you think you’re saying is “stop demonizing Canada. They aren’t the problem.”
That isn’t what die-hard MAGA hears.
What die-hard MAGA hears is something more like this:
See? Trump is right! Canada is the problem! Even the liberals agree! Oh, sure, the liberals want to argue about this percentage or that percentage or blah blah blah percentage, but they don’t deny Canada is sending us fentanyl that’s killing American children. They quibble over numbers, but they still admit he’s right. Fentanyl is coming from Canada. We have to defend ourselves from the Canadians poisoning our children.
And boom! By pointing out facts that you think prove Trump wrong, you have reinforced the propaganda.
This is about feelings, not fact. Feelings don’t care about your facts.
In fact, countering false narratives with facts is likely to make the false belief stronger, thanks to a psychological phenomenon called “entrenchment” or “the backfire effect.”
Put simply: When a person encounters a fact that contradicts a belief, that person is likely to rehearse—that is, to replay in his mind, over and over, all the reasons he believed that thing in the first place. Reinforcement strengthens the synaptic connections in the brain that correspond to that belief; it literally, not figuratively, reinforces the false belief.
The stronger the contradictory evidence, the more the person rehearses, and the stronger the false belief becomes.
What’s the answer, then?
Stop quibbling over facts and statistics. Facts and statistics don’t matter. Too many people don’t make decisions based on empirical reality.
The University of Pennsylvania has an excellent article on countering propaganda and entrenched narratives: bypass, don’t refute.
Instead of contradicting the false narrative with statistics that directly refute the false belief, find other avenues, other paths to the truth.
If people hold the false belief that GM food causes allergies—a common bit of misinformation among anti-GM circles—don’t talk about allergies. Find other ways to highlight the advantages of GM food.
If people hold the false belief that we need to retaliate against Canada for poisoning our children with fentanyl, don’t attack the idea that fentanyl is coming from Canada. Talk about the other sources of the drug problem. Talk about the reasons Canada, our largest trade partner, is vital to the US economy. Talk about the people who will suffer if Canadian trade breaks down.
Bypass the issue of “Canadian fentanyl.” The people who believe the narrative about “Canadian fentanyl” will only entrench in their false belief if you try to approach it head-on.
Don’t reinforce the propaganda you’re fighting against.
Almost exactly two years ago, when I was in Florida helping care for my mom who had terminal cancer, I tweeted a photo of myself wearing a Stand Up for Science T-shirt. Cape Coral, Florida is antivax central, ground zero of the know-nothing Ron Desantist anti-intellectual craze, so I made a point of wearing that shirt around town.
Three days ago, that two-year-old tweet went viral, which was weird. Retweeted and commented on all over the place. So, curious, I took a look, and apparently it got picked up by the antivax/moon landing deniar/flat earth crowd. Here’s but one of the threads of retweets and comments, posted by a person who’s a moon landing denier, antivaxxer, and Reptilian conspiracy nutter:
The US has a long history of weird anti-intellectualism, going all the way back to the vicious streak of religious Puritanism that runs through American society. We’re so used to it we don’t even see it, but my European friends who visit are always a little shocked by how deep know-nothing, Fundamentalist Protestantism runs in US culture.
Evangelical religion is inherently incompatible with science. A lot, a lot of Americans truly, sincerely believe that the world is 6,000 years old, all the animals were made exactly as they are now, and people and dinosaurs once lived side by side. This is not in the least bit unusual in US society.
This has led to an ongoing, generations-long war against science education in the United States. The Scopes monkey trials are just the tip of the iceberg.
In the last 40 years, that war on education has been joined by American populist political conservatives, who see value in an uneducated population. It used to be that American conservatives, all the way up through Ronald Reagan, were 100% behind cold-eyed, factual science education; this fit with their idea that the US should lead the world in science and technology, because you can’t do that without an educated population.
It took a liberal in the form of JFK to promise to get us to the moon, but the engineers and rocket scientists who made it happen were overwhelmingly conservatives. Not in the current “populist know-nothing party” sense of conservatives, but old-school, pre-Reagan conservatives.
Nowadays, what passes for a “conservative party” in the US is isolationist populists. They want to withdraw from the world stage, so American technical and scientific leadership doesn’t matter to them. They openly embrace the most extreme Evangelical Christians, the Prosperity Gospel, Christian Dominionist movement that seeks to create a theocracy to replace the US government. Their goals are aligned: Education has got to go.
That’s created a huge backlash against science education. Educated people are “elitist.” Universities are “liberal indoctrination centers.”
This isn’t new, of course. What’s new is the alliance between political conservatives and the Evangelical right on opposition to science and knowledge, an unholy union where each of the two sides sincerely believes it is using the other for opportunistic gain.
It exists at least in part because we live in a time of prosperity and unprecedented safety. Very few people alive today remember a time when children weren’t expected to live to be adults, even though that was a frighteningly short time ago.
One of the people in my polycule, who wishes to remain nameless, rather brilliantly calls conspiracy thinking “idiot mantras for dopamine mining” and puts it like this:
It’s literally: Step 1: Confusion about actual science Step 2: read/hear confident idiot talk about how everyone is wrong except you, because you are listening to him so you must be smart Step 3: think “I don’t want to believe I’m stupid so I’ll believe stupid things to feel smart” Step 4: I are smart! I’ll just repeat the same things over and over like some sort of argument cheat code, and anyone who disagrees must be stupid, so I will ignore them”
This enshrinement of the idiocracy, this reflexive anti-intellectualism that has its roots deep in the fertile soil of the American ideals of exceptionalism and Rugged Individualism™, is fundamentally at odds with a post-industrial society in an interconnected economy.
As we turn away from learning and knowledge, craving the certainty of the Age of Superstition, we cede our role in the world. But not to worry, someone else will take over. I’m guessing China.
A new billboard appeared recently next to the grocery store where I do most of my shopping.
Image by author
I don’t mean the “now leasing” sign, but the one next to it. The one with the country singer on it.
Back when I was in middle school in Venango, Nebraska, I didn’t know a thing about Dolly Parton except that she apparently had large breasts. I might have vaguely known that she was in a band or something, maybe, but I couldn’t put a face to the name. I knew she had big boobs because all the other kids told me she had big boobs, and if all the other kids are saying something, like they put spider eggs in bubble gum or whatever, you know it’s probably true.
We would get together at recess and tell Dolly Parton jokes, all of them dirty (at least by the standards of a fifth-grader; ah, how little I knew!) and all of them about her breasts.
As I moved into adulthood, I learned that yes, she was a singer, she sung country and western songs, and she had that one hit because of that one movie everyone liked but I didn’t see. I don’t listen to country and western music, so that was about the sum total of my knowledge of all things Dolly Parton.
Nowadays, as I learn more about her, she strikes me as a genuinely marvelous person: kind, generous, giving, and genuinely invested in leaving the world a better place than she found it.
I still don’t listen to country music, but by all accounts she seems quite extraordinary. She is that rarest of things in creation: a genuinely compassionate person.
That’s something the world needs in greater quantities.
As I get older, I become more and more aware of the value of kindness. The truth is, callousness is easy. Indifference is easy. Cruelty is easy. The world is filled with people who see kindness as weakness, but in truth, kindness costs more than insensitivity. To be kind is to see the world from someone else’s point of view, and the ego rebels against that. It reminds us we are not the sun-center of all creation.
Empathy: Humanity’s Secret Weapon
Image by author
Pop quiz time. How did human beings—soft, weak, squishy bipeds with no claws, no massive canines, and thin skin—become the dominant mammals on the planet? Survival of the fittest says we should’ve been wiped out by fiercer, stronger, creatures, right?
No.
Our special sauce, beyond our big brains and abstract reasoning, is our cooperation. We work together. We help each other. We tend to our sick and injured. Where one of us goes, the rest follow.
We have each other’s backs.
That makes us unstoppable. There are many creatures larger, stronger, faster, and fiercer than we are, creatures that can take us one on one in a fight, but the thing about humans is it’s never one on one.
You kill one of us, the rest of us will come for you. We are an unstoppable force of nature.
Losers and idiots think that kindness is a weakness because they see the world in terms of the Rugged Individual™, the lone warrior standing strong against a world red in tooth and claw. They don’t see the army that stands behind that Rugged Individual, making his tools and his clothing and his weapons, nor the entire history behind him that brought him to this place. The Rugged Individual stands on the shoulders of others and says “look how I rose to this lofty height all by myself!”
Today, we live in a world increasingly dominated by loudmouth bullies, people for whom the world is always zero sum, people who believe that every interaction has a winner and a loser.
This attitude appeals to the sort of person who thinks of himself as an Alpha Male™, taking charge through force and strength to leave his mark upon the world, but it’s comedically inept.
And the math is behind it. Entire branches of game theory show that cooperation always wins out in the long run, always…not that the sort of person who sees the world as force against force in a battle royale to the death actually understands the math.
In the end, it comes down to a simple but surprisingly subtle idea: Other people are real. In a world where we act with reciprocal kindness, everyone benefits. We are a social species; we do more acting together than acting alone.
I will admit this has not always been obvious even to me. The Internet makes it easy to forget that other people are real—that the letters we see on the screen come from a real person. I had an experience about ten or so years ago when I met in realspace some people I’d been needlessly abrasive to online, and it occurred to me, holy shit, these folks are actual human beings! Since then, I’ve tried—not always with perfect success—to be more mindful in my online communication.
Bullying is easy. Especially when it’s anonymous, and most especially when it curries favor in our social in-groups. We live in a world where kindness and compassion are increasingly seen as weakness. Let us not forget that it is cooperation that carried us here.
