Author Archives: tacit

The Dangers of Digital Outsourcing

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Email is hard.

The standards we use for email date back to the 1980s. They were based on even more primitive email standards develiped in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Computer networks were a very different animal back then. The ARPAnet, one of the precursors to the modern Internet, had 50 systems on it. Everyone knew each other. Only a small handful of “email addresses” existed. There was no security and no authentication, because you knew all the other people who had email access.

Today’s email system is a hacked-together, tottering patchwork of different ideas and implementations, with all kinds of additions and extensions bolted on. It’s still woefully insecure, and it still has its roots in an earlier and vastly simpler time.

This means running email servers is hard. Even if you’re a big ISP, running email servers is hard. And it’s expensive. Even the most dedicated sendmail guru will tell you getting all the configuration wibbly bits correct is difficult and tedious, and it’s easy to make mistakes.

So more and more people are outsourcing their email. Even large ISPs are turning to Google to run their mail servers. Everyone knows about gmail, but most people don’t know that gmail can also take over your company’s mail services, dropping the “@gmail” bit for whatever you want. Google is good at email and it’s a lot cheaper to have them run your email than it is to do it yourself.

Which creates a problem.

Most email is spam, by a huge margin. About three-quarters of all the email sent anywhere is spam. The only reason you can still use your email is filtering, filtering, filtering. The stuff that lands in your inbox is the tiny drip, drip, drip of spam that gets through the filters holding back the torrential flood.

This happens because email standards were invented in a time when there were 50 computers on the entire net and everyone knew everyone else, so there is absolutely no authentication built into email. I can send you mail from any address I want and your server will blindly accept it.

Now, most of the Internet doesn’t like spam. Or, at least, it pretends not to. (Many mainstream ISPs and affiliate advertising companies turn a blind eye to it, because profit–but that’s a post I’m working on for another day.)

ISPs have certain “role accounts”–email adddresses that are always the same, such as postmaster@whatever, hostmaster@whatever, and abuse@whatever.

The abuse@ email address is where you send reports of, naturally, abuse. If an ISP is hosting a Spamvertised Web site, or has been hacked and is being used to spread viruses, or is the source of spam emails, you send notifications and copies of the spam emails to abuse@.

So, naturally, you can’t put spam filters on the abuse@ email address, for obvious reasons. If you spam-filter abuse@ and I try to send you notification of spam that’s being sent from your servers, the notification will get filtered and you won’t see it.

In fact, “thou shalt not put spam filters on your abuse role account” is in one of the documents that specifies what makes the Internet go. The standards and protocols that make the Internet work are outlined in a series of technical documents called “RFC”s, and RFC2142 spells out what role accounts an ISP should have, what they’re used for…and oh yeah, don’t run a spam filter on your abuse@ address because that would be really stupid.

The problem is that more and more ISPs are realizing that email is hard, running email servers is hard, and it’s a lot cheaper and easier to let Google just handle all your email services for you.

And Google automatically filters spam.

Email is hard.

Part of the reason email is hard is every email address can be configured in a zillion different ways with a zillion different options.

Google has built a set of options that make sense for most email addresses most of the time, and when you turn over your email operations to Google, that’s what you get.

One of those options that makes sense for most email addresses most of the time is spam filtering. When ISPs and Web service providers relinquish control of their email services to Google, they’re often not even aware that Google filters spam by default. They don’t know they are filtering their abuse@ address, because who would do that? How dumb would you have to be to put a spam filter on an email address intended for reporting spam, right?

So we get things like this:

Here’s the bounce:

: host aspmx.l.google.com[173.194.64.27] said: 550-5.7.1
[67.18.53.18 7] Our system has detected that this message is
550-5.7.1 likely unsolicited mail. To reduce the amount of spam sent to
Gmail, 550-5.7.1 this message has been blocked. Please visit 550-5.7.1
http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188131 for 550
5.7.1 more information. ny4si6062371obb.164 – gsmtp (in reply to end of
DATA command)
Reporting-MTA: dns; gateway07.websitewelcome.com
X-Postfix-Queue-ID: 0FF09169EDAB
X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822; franklin@franklinveaux.com
Arrival-Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 16:31:17 -0500 (CDT)

This was a bounce that came back from a “phish”–a phony PayPal or bank site designed to trick people into giving up sensitive information–that Cloudflare, a content delivery network, was serving. I reported the phish to them on March 28. When I checked it three days ago, it was still there, still stealing people’s passwords.

And it’s not isolated. This is an incredibly common problem:

: host alt2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.com[74.125.29.27] said:
550-5.7.1 [67.18.62.19 12] Our system has detected that this message
is 550-5.7.1 likely unsolicited mail. To reduce the amount of spam sent to
Gmail, 550-5.7.1 this message has been blocked. Please visit 550-5.7.1
http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188131 for 550
5.7.1 more information. x7si1316702qaj.209 – gsmtp (in reply to end of DATA
command)
Reporting-MTA: dns; gateway01.websitewelcome.com
X-Postfix-Queue-ID: C61B24C69D52
X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822; franklin@franklinveaux.com
Arrival-Date: Sat, 3 May 2014 15:54:51 -0500 (CDT)

: host ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.com[173.194.64.27] said: 550-5.7.1
[67.18.22.93 12] Our system has detected that this message is
550-5.7.1 likely unsolicited mail. To reduce the amount of spam sent to
Gmail, 550-5.7.1 this message has been blocked. Please visit 550-5.7.1
http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188131 for 550
5.7.1 more information. ij7si5132986obc.180 – gsmtp (in reply to end of
DATA command)
Reporting-MTA: dns; gateway05.websitewelcome.com
X-Postfix-Queue-ID: 9FB7A4A9184F7
X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822; franklin@franklinveaux.com
Arrival-Date: Mon, 5 May 2014 02:07:56 -0500 (CDT)

Most folks, when they see the bounce message, are like “d’oh!” and find a way to turn off filtering their abuse@ message. (Cloudflare seems to be a bit of a special case; they tend to get defensive and snarky instead. That’s disappointing, as their founder was an early anti-spam pioneer.)

The dangers of outsourcing bits of your business is that you necessarily lose control of those bits. When you’re an ISP or a Web service provider and you outsource your email services, well, losing control of your email services can have some unfortunate consequences. When you filter your abuse@ address, you soon become a haven for spam and malware and phish pages and all sorts of other nasties…because you don’t know you’re hosting them.

So what’s the solution?

Ideally, a complete overhaul of email. Since that’s about as likely as Elvis stepping out of a flying saucer in Times Square and handing me a winning Powerball lotto ticket, I’m not holding my breath.

Another solution is for ISPs to acknowledge that the work they do is hard, and just doing it. That’s a bit more likely, but it still involves things approximately as probable as Elvis and flying saucers–perhaps Elvis handing me a chocolate bagel rather than a Powerball ticket–so I’m still not holding my breath.

But it might be in the realm of possibility for Google to set up their configuration to turn off spam filtering by default on any email address that contains the word “abuse.”

Anyone know anyone who works in Google’s email services department?

“I’m not a feminist. I love men!”

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If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you’ll know I hold very little in common with the Religious Right. I do not, for example, believe that homosexuality is a sin, or that Teh Gayz are all destined for the fires of Hell. I don’t much cotton to the notion that the government of the United States should be replaced with a Christian theocracy. Nor do I believe there is a hidden secret agenda of the Godless to drive this great nation into the ground–I think the anti-intellectualism displayed by so many on the Right is doing that job well enough, thanks.

But there is one thing I admire about the Right, and that is their fearsome, epic ability to frame discussion about any topic they care about by crafting a point and then keeping tenaciously, ferociously on point.

“I’m not a feminist. I love men!”

One of the ways the Right has been brilliantly successful at framing the public discourse is in the way they’ve controlled how we think about women. And by “we” I don’t mean “people on the right,” I mean everyone.

Even folks who ought to know better.

“I’m not a feminist. I love men!”

The areas of the Internet I frequent are not areas where the Right often appear. I tend to spend my time online in forums that talk about non-traditional relationships, progressive social issues, technical and scientific subjects, and skepticism.

And there’s something really striking about all these places. The Right may not be present there, but the ideas of the Right are. Even, interestingly, in people who claim to despise the Right.

“I’m not a feminist. I love men!”

There’s no place this is more obvious than in conversations about the Dread F Word. No, not that Dread F Word, the other Dread F Word.

Find yourself a progressive, generally respectful, tolerant, otherwise with-it person. Man or woman, it doesn’t make much difference. Just find someone who thinks there’s room for a multiplicity of views in the public ideosphere. Someone who, if he or she is religious, doesn’t think God commands converting the heathens at the point of a sword. Someone who thinks that people ought generally to be treated well,and that religion isn’t the basis for the formation of a Western representative government. Someone who will agree that racism is a bad thing, even if it’s not entirely clear what we should do to get rid of it.

Now ask that person a simple question: “What is feminism?”

See that? Something very strange happens. For a brief moment, when that otherwise progressive, generally agreeable person starts talking, it’s as if Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity stuck his hand up your interlocutor’s ass and made his or her lips move. For that brief instant, that person, that otherwise agreeable and not at all racist or sexist person, becomes a meat puppet for Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Hannity, and his ilk.

Even if that person would be horrified at the thought of listening to their shows.

“I’m not a feminist. I love men!”

Think about what goes through your mind, dear reader, at the word “feminist.” Do you think “shrill”? “Strident”? “Misandrist”? “Humorless”? “Man-hater”? “Feminazi”? Does an image pop into your head of a woman who wants to get ahead by tearing down men, a woman who blames men for her own shortcomings, a woman who wants to cause trouble because she can’t succeed on her own? Do you picture someone who, even if she perhaps has the right intentions, has totally gone overboard, accusing all men of being sexist (or worse, of being rapists)?

Guess where those ideas come from? I’ll give you a hint: Not from actual feminists.

Now, don’t get me wrong: any sufficiently large group of people is going to contain extremists, bad apples, and destructive folks. If you look at doctors in general, you’ll find the occasional cynical lying fraud like Andrew Wakefield–but we don’t say all doctors are frauds who deliberately publish articles they know to be fabricated. There are probably a small number of extremists out there somewhere who hold something that might reasonably be within spitting distance of some of the stereotypes about feminism.

But the idea that this is what most or all feminism is about? Sheer, brilliant, amazing PR by the Right. Where did you get those ideas? You got them from the Right, even if you don’t know it.

You probably think you didn’t get them “from” everywhere. You simply know them to be true. Everyone knows them to be true, right? And that’s the crux of the brilliance: if you repeat an idea often enough, everyone, even folks who ideologically despise you, will come to accept it as just true.

Feminists hate men. Everyone knows it. Because we’ve all heard it, even if we don’t exactly remember where we’ve heard it from.

Are there women who are angry? Oh, yeah, you bet. What’s amazing is not that women are angry, but that more women aren’t more angry. All the dudebros I’ve personally met get a whole lot angrier about things a whole lot more trivial–for instance, the notion that they shouldn’t grope those hot somethingsomethings at that con without, you know, asking them first. (Scientist Hope Jahren actually had a colleague ejaculate in an envelope and leave it in her mailbox when she dared to think that she might be worthy of a spot on a serious scientific research team…and this isn’t even an isolated or extreme example of the kind of shit women deal with every day. And men say women are angry? Seriously, what would we say about women if they thought it was appropriate to protest the presence of a man on a research team by shoving a used tampon into a mailbox? Seriously, it amazes me that every woman on earth does not, at some point, climb a clock tower with a rifle. I guaranfuckingtee you that if the roles of men and women were reversed tomorrow, we’d see a whole lot of dudebros doing exactly that.)

“I’m not a feminist. I love men!”

The idea that feminism means hating men has been so skillfully inserted into the public discourse that it’s accepted as a premise in almost any dialog about men and women. And it’s a corrosive idea. It distorts conversation. If you accept this premise, a whole lot of things that would otherwise seem unreasonable–indeed, even offensive–start to sound reasonable.

What is feminism?

It’s the idea that men and women are both people, equally deserving of agency. That’s it. That’s the whole package.

What separates feminism from humanism, then? Centuries of institutional, systematic inequality, that’s what. Saying “I think men and women are equal” is all fine and dandy, but if you ignore the fact that we live under a system that treats, in a thousand ways, men and women as decidedly unequal, congratulations! You’ve just won a Nobel Prize in Missing The Point, which you will be sharing with approximately two and a half billion other luminaries in point-missing.

If you think women are people, congratulations, you’re a feminist! And if you don’t, well…the alternative, it seems to me, is “asshole.”

If you reject this notion of feminism, because everyone knows it means something else, ask yourself: How do you know? Do you know from actually talking to women, or because you’ve heard of this one person who said this feminist this one time said all men are rapists and should die? And if it’s the latter, ask yourself…how did he know that? And more to the point, who benefits from this particular notion of feminism? (I’ll give you a hint, bro: it ain’t women.)

End note: At this point, I know, I just know, that some of you have fingers already all a-tingle to send me a private email telling me pretending to be a feminist is a great strategt for getting laid. Seriously, don’t bother.

The return of Badass McProblemsolver!

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I know that you all have felt an empty, gaping void in your lives since we stopped releasing the Badass McProblemsolver videos we made for the crowdfunding campaign for the polyamory book More Than Two.

Well, weep no more. Badass McProblemsolver is back, and he’s taking on questions asked by our backers. This first installment answers a question about dealing with family members who are totally out:

What my cat teaches me about divine love

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This is Beryl.

Beryl is a solid blue Tonkinese cat. He shares a home with (I would say he belongs to, but the reverse may be true) zaiah and I, and spends a good deal of each day perched on my shoulder. I write from home, and whenever I’m writing, there’s a pretty good chance he’s on my shoulder, nuzzling my ear and purring.

He’s a sweetheart–one of the sweetest cats I’ve ever known, and believe me when I say I’ve known a lot of cats.

Whenever we’re in the bedroom, Beryl likes to sit on a pillow atop the tall set of shelves we have on the wall next to the bed. It didn’t take him long to learn that the bed is soft, so rather than climbing down off the top of the shelves, he will often simply leap, legs all outstretched like a flying squirrel’s, onto the bed.

Now, if I wanted to, I could get a sheet of plywood, put it on top of the bed, then put the blanket over top of it. That way, when Beryl leapt off the shelves, he’d be quite astonished to have his worldview abruptly and unpleasantly upended.

But I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that for two reasons: (1) I love my cat, and (2) it would be an astonishingly dick thing to do.

That brings us to God.

This is a fossil.

More specifically, it’s a fossil of Macrocranion tupaiodon, an extinct early mammal that lived somewhere between 56 and 34 million years ago and went extinct during the Eocene–Oligocene extinction event.

Now, there are very, very few things in this world that conservative Orthodox Jews, Fundamentalist Muslims, and Evangelical Christians will agree on, but one thing that some of these folks do have in common is the notion that fossils like this one do not actually represent the remains of long-vanished animals, because the world is much younger than what such fossils suggest. Most conservative Muslims are more reasonable on this point than their other Abrahamic fellows, though apparently the notion of an earth only a few thousand years old is beginning to take hold in some parts of the Islamic ideosphere.

That presents a challenge; if the world is very young, whence the fossils? And one of the many explanations put forth to answer the conundrum is the idea that these fossils were placed by a trickster God (or, in some versions of the story, allowed by God to be placed by the devil) for the purpose of testing our faith.

And this, I find profoundly weird.

The one other thing all these various religious traditions agree on is God loves us* (*some exclusions and limitations apply; offer valid only for certain select groups and/or certain types of people; offer void for heretics, unbelievers, heathens, idolators, infidels, skeptics, blasphemers, or the faithless).

And I can’t quite wrap my head around the notion of deliberately playing this sort of trick on the folks one loves.

Yes, I could put a sheet of plywood on my bed and cover it with a blanket. But to what possible end? I fear I lack the ability to rightly apprehend what kind of love that would show to my cat.

Which leads me to the inescapable conclusion that a god that would deliberately plant, or allow to be planted, fake evidence contradicting the approved account of creation would be a god that loved mankind rather less than I love my cat.

It seems axiomic to me that loving someone means having their interests and their happiness at heart. Apparently, however, the believers have a rather more unorthodox idea of love. And that is why, I think, one should perhaps not trust this variety of believer who says “I love you.” Invite such a person for dinner, but count the silverware after.

Holy shit, you guys! This thing is real!

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The polyamory book More Than Two my partner Eve and I have been writing is available for preorder from Amazon! It’s a monster–a 500-page book that covers everything from ethics to hierarchy to finding poly partners to dealing with insecurity to solo poly.

The foreword was written by Janet Hardy, of The Ethical Slut fame. Here’s part of what she has to say about it:

Dossie and I have been described as big sisters (if your big sister is a slutty kinky aging hippie); Franklin and Eve are more like wise neighbors. Think of the guy on the other side of the fence on Home Improvement, calm and wise and funny. Dossie and I write primarily about the sexual aspects of poly; Franklin and Eve are more interested in the day-to-day living part. Dossie and I like to indulge ourselves, just a little, in high-flown realms of abstraction and idealism; Franklin and Eve like to keep their feet on the ground.

I am really, really proud of this book. We’ve worked incredibly hard not just to make it happen, but to give concrete, real-world experiences, ours and other people’s, to illustrate what we have to say.

It’s a bit of a change for me. In my writings over the years, I’ve tended to focus on pragmatism and boots-on-the-ground poly without really talking very much about my own life and experiences. In this book, I talk more about myself and my experiences than I have anywhere else, and I’ve tried to be unflinching about the places I’ve screwed up and the things I’ve done wrong along the way.

It’s only been up for preorder for a little while and it’s already selling strongly. I have a sneaking feeling this thing might just run away from us.

Anyway, I hope you guys like it. Writing it was certainly an adventure.

A treasure you cannot frame

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Eve and I are in a log cabin deep in the woods, finishing our book on polyamory, More Than Two. The forest is quite lovely. I took this during one of our regular afternoon walks.

An Open Letter to Brogrammers

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Computer programming is a tough job. It’s not for the faint of heart or the fair of sex. It’s grueling, high-stress work, demanding that you sit on a comfortable chair in an air-conditioned office for hours on end, typing on a keyboard while looking at a monitor. Women just aren’t rugged enough for that.

Plus, as everyone knows, women can’t code. At best, they can maybe contribute in their small way to large open-source projects, but really, they’re much better suited for accessorizing PowerPoint presentations written by real coders. Manly coders.

If this is the world you live in, bro, I’m afraid I have some really bad news for you.

I’d like to introduce you to someone. This is Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. She was a lady’s lady, an aristocrat who lived in the 1800s and who did all of the things young women of noble birth did back then–danced, wrote poetry, and penned long flowery letters to her tutor.

She also wrote the world’s first computer program in 1842, in the margins of a technical document she was translating from Italian into English.

Yes, you read that right. Ada was so fucking baller she wrote code before computers had even been invented. You think you’re hardcore because you can use agile development strategies to link a big data repository to a high-performance querying front end without SQL? Pfaff. This woman invented coding before there was anything to code on.

And then there’s this woman, who could kick your ass sideways, steal your lunch, and then fart out code better than anything you’ll ever be capable of if you live to be a thousand years old.

This is “Amazing” Grace Hopper. She took leave from Vassar to join the Navy, where she invented or helped invent the entirety of all modern computer science, including nearly every wimpy-ass tool your wimpy ass laughingly refers to as “coding.” Compared to her, you’re nothing but a little kid playing with Tinker toys. Tinker toys she invented, by the way.

Yeah, I know, I know. You think you’re all badass and shit because you can get your hands right down there and compile a custom Linux kernel with your own task scheduler that reduces overhead for context changes by 16%, and…

Ha, ha, ha, ha, you are just so cute! It’s absolutely precious how you think that’s hardcore. That kind of shit is duck soup. Seriously, no-brains-required duck fucking soup compared to what she did. That C compiler you love so much? Grace Hopper invented the whole idea of writing code in a language that isn’t machine code and then compiling it to something that is. She was the one who came up with the notion of a “compiler” (and wrote the very first one ever), pausing along the way to invent code testing and profiling.

Thanks to her, you’re living in the lap of luxury. you can write code without having to know the exact DRAM timing. You have conditional branches and loops–neither of which existed when she started programming the Harvard Mark 1. (She made loops by taking long strips of paper tape and, no shit, taping their ends together to get the computer to execute the same code again.)

You want to see hardcore programming? I’ll show you hardcore programming:

This is what real hardcore coders do. No compilers, no syntax checkers, just a teletype machine and a bunch of fucking switches that change the computer’s memory and registers directly.

And you know what? For her, that was luxury. She and all the other early computer programmers–almost all of whom were women, by the way–started out programming by plugging patch cords into plugboards, because that’s how they rolled, motherfucker. Fuck keyboards, fuck front-panel switches…those things were soft. If you wanted to code back then, you needed a postgraduate degree in mathematics, an intimate understanding of every single component inside the computer, and the ability to route data with your bare fucking hands.

Grace Hopper was so badass that when she retired from the military, Congress passed a special act to bring her back. Twice. And then when she retired for real (for the third time), the Navy named a guided missile destroyer after her.

Trust me when I say you will never be this badass, bro.

So the next time you see something like this:

and you think that girls can’t code, just remember girls invented coding. And invented the tools that finally let softies like you play at being programmers. They did the heavy lifting so programming could be easy enough for noobs like you.

Movie Review: Captain America: The Winter Wonderland

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I know, as I have mentioned before, approximately fuckall about the Marvel comic universe. I have heard of Captain America, but I’ve never read any of the comic books nor seen the first movie. So when the Internetverse was all abuzz for this new movie, filmed on a budget $95,000,000 higher than the cost of India’s Mars probe currently winging its cold and lonely way to the Red Planet, I was quite possibly the only citizen of the United States not consumed by the fires of anticipation. What wonders would the movie bring? How would it advance the franchise? Beats me. I don’t even know who Captain America is.

I am talking, of course, about the second (but for me, the first) installment of the Marvel cash juggernaut:

As the movie begins, we see Sonic the Hedgehog Captain America out on his regular morning jog, where he’s trotting around Washington’s tourist attractions at an average speed of approximately 40 miles an hour without even sweating, because sweating is gross and Captain America doesn’t do gross things. He zips past the Comic Relief, then zips past the Comic Relief again, then zips past the Comic Relief yet again–you know, just to make the point. The engage in dialog, of the sort that tells you we will be seeing more of the Comic Relief later in the movie. The plot wedges here for a few moments when suddenly, Sonic America Captain Hedgehog is notified that a Situation has developed and he should Prepare For Extraction. Quite why he’s out jogging when it’s clear he is in far better than great shape and has superhuman abilities is never adequately explored, given that we as the audience are left with the distinct impression that failure to get enough exercise is not really on the good captain’s surrealistically short list of character flaws.

The rest of the movie goes something like this…

Clicky here! But beware, here be spoilers.

“We are not given a good life or a bad life.”

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I haven’t been writing much here lately, because I have been hard at work writing our book about polyamory. At 160,000 words, it’s well north of the New Testament and a bit north of The Two Towers in size. It turns out polyamory is complicated, and we have a lot to say about it.

However, I’m taking a break from writing about polyamory because I’ve started seeing this meme pop up all over the Internetverse, and it’s reached the point where I have to say something about it. I think it’s symptomatic of the problem of privilege.

I get what it’s trying to say. Really, I do.

But it’s wrong.

Yes, some people are given a bad life or a good life. We do not all start from a neutral place. Take this kid, for example. He would, I’m sure, be quite happy to have been given a life that was neither bad nor good:

This photo, by South African news photographer Kevin Carter, won a Pulitzer Prize. It documents the effects of famine in Sudan, in which more than 70,000 people died. Carter later committed suicide; in his suicide note, he wrote, “I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain…of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners.”

Look at this kid. Then look at wealthy heiress Paris Hilton, out doing what she does best (which is, near as I can tell, “getting photographed partying”):

Then look back at the slave labor camps in North Korea, which are used to punish political dissidents “to the third generation.” People are born in these slave camps, grow up, and die (often of torture, beatings, or starvation) here, without ever knowing anything else.

The meme might more accurately say “white middle-class Westerners born into progressive democracies are not given a good life or a bad life.” But to be fair, perhaps that’s what’s meant by “we.”

For those who aren’t white middle-class Westerners in progressive democracies, there most definitely are good lives and bad. Not all lives have the same opportunity for choice and direction. Not everyone can choose to better their conditions; those born into North Korean Labor Camp 15, which is believed to hold as many as 30,000 slaves, certainly can’t.

Like I said, I get the point of the meme. I am a huge believer in empowerment myself; I have written a great deal about how the choices we make affect our lives, for good or ill.

But I also recognize that, to a large extent, this is a privilege–one that should properly belong to everyone, but doesn’t. Not everyone can choose to make their lives good or bad. The way we’re born matters; Paris Hilton can shrug off bad choices that would destroy many people who are born into a less privileged position, and just keep on keepin’ on.

Yes, make choices that make your life better. Yes, move in the direction of greatest courage. But when you do, don’t forget to be grateful that you can. It’s not your fault that people are born into situations horrifying beyond anything you can imagine, but it’s your responsibility to acknowledge that not everyone is in the same position as you are. Some people are given a bad life. If you’re not one of them, you’re fortunate, but don’t forget they exist.

And if your response is “lighten up, it’s just a Facebook meme!”–perhaps you aren’t paying attention.

Winter is coming

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My sweetie Shelly has written another blog post over at More Than Two. I hope one day to be as wise, compassionate, and insightful as she is.

This post is called “Winter Is Coming,” and it’s about how entering relationships that disempower us can destroy us, even if we knew the conditions when we signed on. There’s a good deal of stuff about the relationship history between her and I in there, and some of that was painful to me to read.

I think there are warnings in here for anyone contemplating a prescriptive polyamorous relationship. We often say that any relationship structure is A-OK as long as the people involved consent to be there. I am not entirely sure that’s true. There are some arrangements which, by their very nature, are not only thickly sown with the seeds of coercion, but almost guaranteed to allow those seeds to germinate…and the cost is very high.

You can read the essay here. Here’s the teaser:

But primary/secondary structures tend to leave a special kind of emotional wreckage. While I freely admit that it is often a mutually beneficial model for all involved, there is a hidden trap. Because sometimes we walk into this structure, with heart in hand, and sometimes our partner meets us there. And then the structure becomes a maze of slamming doors and booby traps. When your partner meets you with real intimacy and love within an externally enforced and non-negotiable framework of limitations, the emotional experience of the relationship is of being simultaneously pulled in and violently shoved out. The cognitive dissonance is even worse. Self-advocacy is often interpreted as homewrecking, and disruptions to the status quo are seen as a hostile act. Remember, you signed up for this, you’re breaking the contract, you’re the bad guy. But don’t be cruel and break his heart, don’t be disruptive and speak for your own. just… just want something else, feel something else, BE SOMEONE ELSE.

So, there is a special place, at the bottom of all of that, where you realize that the only truly “right” thing you can do is just… find a way to disappear. But not with an explosion (you drama queen). Just find a way to disappear quietly so that no one notices. Do the right thing and just…go away.