Some thoughts on rape culture

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A couple of days ago, someone on a (closed) Facebook group I belong to posted a link to a blog post about rape culture.

And, predictably, one of the first comments to that link was along the lines of “this is just another attempt to say that male sexuality is bad.”

It doesn’t even really matter where the linked blog post is (though if you’re interested, it’s here); the “you’re just demonizing men” reaction comes up on any conversation I’ve ever seen about rape culture, as sure as night follows day. And it’s annoying.

It seems to me that if that’s your take-away from discussions about rape culture, you aren’t paying attention.

Male sexuality is not inherently evil, and acknowledging that rape culture is a thing isn’t the same as “demonizing male sexuality.” This seems obvious to me, yet it’s a persistent trope: saying that we have a culture that normalizes, trivializes, and to a large extent even excuses sexual violence is conflated with demonizing male sexuality, as if, I don’t know, male sexuality were somehow inextricably tied to rape or something.

I personally have never met any women who believe that male sexuality is tied to rape, though I keep hearing from other men about that’s what “feminists think”.

When I see a trope become that deeply embedded in a conversation about something, I tend to wonder who it benefits. I definitely think there are men who benefit from this trope. There are some men who want to conflate “discussing the cultural component of sexual violence” with “demonizing all male sexuality.” These men want you to read articles like the blog post that led to all this and respond with “you’re saying men are evil! You’re saying all men are rapists!” That’s the interpretation they want you to have.

There are two kinds of men who want you to have that response: rapists, and men who want power over women.

Not all men are rapists.

There is, for some people, a knee-jerk response to any conversation about rape culture that goes “You just think all men are rapists!” That isn’t what this (and articles like it) say. What they say is that women have to act like all men are potentially rapists, because rapists don’t wear a special hat or have a special handshake or anything.

A strange man is probably not a rapist, but he might be. Since there’s no telltale signal that lets you tell a rapist from a not-rapist, women have to assume that a stranger could potentially be a rapist, simply out of self-preservation. A common analogy here is that not every strange dog will bite you, but it’s usually a good idea not to approach every strange dog you see with reckless abandon–because some of them might bite you, and you have no way of telling which.

Rapists and men who want power over women are quite pleased when people deflect conversations about rape culture with “you’re just saying male sexuality is evil,” because it shuts down conversation about the reality of rape culture…and that suits them just fine. It allows things to continue on exactly as they are–which is to say, allows society to continue blaming victims of rape for their own attacks (“did you see what she was wearing??!), allows rape victims who come forward to continue being disbelieved, allows the courts to continue under-prosecuting rape.

All of this serves the needs of men who rape and men who want to control women, and the only side effect (other than the fact that, y’know, women are marginalized) is that some men are treated like they might possibly be a rapist.

You’re a guy, and you don’t like it? You don’t like the idea that women who don’t know you might respond as though you are a potential rapist, even though that’s something you would never, ever, do? Do something about it! Do something to make our society less welcoming to rapists. Don’t trivialize rape. Don’t whine “but what about false accusations?” when women talk about how claims of rape are rarely taken seriously. Don’t treat tape as a punch line.

Look, this is not rocket science. If you’re a guy, you have a disproportionate amount of power, even if you personally don’t feel like it’s true. It’s not enough to say “Well, I’m not a rapist, and I don’t trivialize rape, so I don’t like it when women treat me like I might be a rapist!” You have to do more. You have to stand up to the people around you who do trivialize rape. You have to stand up to people who are rapists–yes, I’m talking to you, and yes, statistically, unless you live as a hermit in a one-room cabin in Montana you probably know at least one rapist in your social circle. Even if you don’t know who he is.

You don’t like the implications of discussing rape culture? Don’t dismiss those discussions; that doesn’t serve anyone except rapists. Do something about it.

Onyx 3.6 is now available!

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After great feats of hard labor deep underground in the data mines, I have used my mighty hammer and anvil to forge a new version of Onyx, the Game of Sexual Exploration: version 3.6!

This new version fixes some minor bugs in 3.5, but more importantly, it retools things under the hood for improved compatibility with Windows 7 and 8, and versions of Mac OS X beyond 10.8.

Onyx is a free download for Mac, Windows, and Linux. It’s a fun, sexy party game for 2-6 players you’re close to, or would like to be. Explore new sexual activities, spice up your life, get closer to the people you know, and who knows? Maybe even find true happiness!

GoDaddy, malware, and an ISP’s fall from grace

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Some time ago, I posted about a malware attack hitting a large number of sites all across the globe, in which hacked Web sites were subverted into distributing a Windows-based bit of malware called W32/Kuluoz, which attempts to steal banking, PayPal, eBay, FTP, and other passwords from your computer.

In that post, I charted the ISPs hosting the most malware-infected sites, and noted that US ISP GoDaddy was, by far, hosting the most active malware droppers.

I used to be a GoDaddy customer. I hosted many Web sites on their servers, some of them for eleven years, and I recommended them to my clients as well. A couple of years back, I started pulling my sites off GoDaddy and recommending that my clients do the same because they began experiencing severe performance issues affecting their shared hosting database servers.

In all the time I have hosted with them in the past, though, the one thing I’ve really liked about them was their abuse team. At the time, it was one of the swiftest, most savvy, most responsive abuse and security teams of any major ISP on the market.

Those days appear to be gone.

The post I linked to above was written in April. Right now, as I type this, many of the malware droppers I saw back then on GoDaddy’s servers are,unbelievably, still active.

GoDaddy, in the spam span of just a couple of years, seems to have gone from being one of the top anti-abuse ISPs to being one of the worst. I have, quite literally, seen tiny ISPs in normally spam and malware friendly havens like Romania deal with security and abuse issues better.

One one level, it might be assumed that large ISPs are just getting worse about security and abuse issues in general. After all, an ISP’s abuse and security team are paid to reduce the company’s revenue, something that’s hard to stomach in a world where hosting providers are becoming part of Wall Street, particularly in an economic downturn.

Or it could be a statistical fluke. As ISPs host more sites, the number of sites with security problems might naturally be expected to increase.

But neither of those ideas seems to explain GoDaddy’s problems. Other ISPs, even large ISPs which have in the past had serious issues with security (like Dreamhost, a hosting company which has in the past had serious security problems of its own), are actually getting better–more responsive, more secure, faster to take down malware-infected sites.

Nearly all the ISPs I have seen be targeted by the Kuluoz malware attacks have grown better at detecting them and better at shutting down compromised sites quickly.

Nearly all, that is, except GoDaddy.

It’s hard to say what’s happening inside GoDaddy. What’s happening from the outside, however, is plain. Its abuse team does not respond to malware and security reports. Reported malware sites stay active for months. There’s a site I first reported to GoDaddy in November that was only finally fixed in May, and I’m not sure it was GoDaddy’s doing; the site owner may have secured the site himself. Repeated complaints to GoDaddy’s abuse team, in email and using their abuse Web form, produce few or no results.

Meanwhile, the entire Internet suffers. GoDaddy customers have their sites compromised and taken over by organized crime. Web surfers get directed to malware droppers hosted by GoDaddy. GoDaddy appears to be aware of the situation, at least if they monitor their Web forms and abuse address (something which has not been conclusively demonstrated, I’ll admit), and chooses not to act.

For a short time, GoDaddy’s Twitter team was responsive to these problems. When I started tweeting about GoDaddy-hosted malware droppers which had been active on their servers for months, I would receive responses like this:

I was briefly hopeful, but the infected sites remained active, still spreadingthe Kuluoz malware.

It’s hard to understand why, as many ISPs move in the direction of being responsive and security-conscious, GoDaddy is moving in the opposite direction.

At the moment, as I type this blog post, I am aware of at many malware droppers on GoDaddy’s servers, many of which have been active for four months or more, including malware droppers on sites like www.buysynthetic.com and www.wiredprojects.com which GoDaddy has been notified of multiple times and which continue to remain active.

At this point, it appears the best course of action is to avoid GoDaddy and to advise others to do the same. I no longer recommend GoDaddy to my clients, and I’ve pulled my own sites off their servers. I am also transferring my domains away from GoDaddy as they come up for renewal.

It’s disappointing to see a large company that was once so responsive to abuse and security issues sink to the point where they’re now worse in that regard than ISPs in Romania and Kazakhstan.

There is a saying in the anti-spam community: the normal course of business of a spam-supporting ISP is to go out of business. It will be interesting to see if GoDaddy follows this course, or if they are able to change direction before their inability to act against compromised sites costs them significantly.

UPDATE: Two days after posting this, I received the following email from GoDaddy:

Dear Franklin

Thank you for sharing your feedback with us.

Please rest assured that GoDaddy takes security and malware issues seriously. We have fully investigated your concerns and at this time all reported malware has been removed. We encourage CMS users to follow best practices, keeping core and secondary components such as plug-ins and extensions up to date. We welcome any additional feedback you wish to share in reply.

Thank you for your time and as always, thank you for being a GoDaddy customer.

John M.
Office of the CEO, GoDaddy
14455. N. Hayden Rd. Suite 226
Scottsdale, AZ 85260
CEOTeam@GoDaddy.com
480-505-8828

I’ve checked the emails I’ve sent them, and sure enough, all the malware droppers are gone.

Movie Review: Star Trek Into Plot Holes

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J J Abrams, the visionary director who brought you such cinematic masterpieces as Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Star Trek: A New Hope Reboot, returns to his director’s seat for Star Trek: Into Plot Holes.

The movie goes something like this:

CAPTAIN JAMES T. KIRK and BONES are RUNNING ACROSS A FIELD OF WEIRD RED TREES being CHASED BY PRIMITIVE ALIENS

BONES: Why are these aliens chasing us?
CAPTAIN JAMES T. KIRK: Because I stole their sacred scroll.
BONES: Why did you steal their sacred scroll?
CAPTAIN JAMES T. KIRK: To distract them from looking up at the shuttle we are sending into the volcano.
BONES: Oh, right.
BONES: Wait, what? If they were in the temple when you stole the scroll, which we know because they all came swarming out of it, they wouldn’t have been able to see the shuttle we’re sending into the volcano. So you got them all outside to chase us, where they would be more likely to see it.
CAPTAIN JAMES T. KIRK: …
CAPTAIN JAMES T. KIRK: Jump off this cliff now.
BONES: Okay.

Clicky here to see more! Caution: Spoilers and bad plot choices beneath.

The world’s first 3D printed gun: Ho hum.

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Today, a landmark in improvised engineering was reached. Plans for an (almost) entirely 3D printable firearm went up on the Internet, able to be freely downloaded by anyone.

The reactions around the Net are predictable. Libertarians and gun nuts are ecstatic, gushing all over themselves about how this will be the “end of gun control” and usher in some kind of “new age of freedom” or something.

Law and order types, gun control advocates, and the government are wetting themselves with the prospect of legions of terrorists printing up virtually undetectable firearms and taking over airplanes or something.

And it’s all completely ridiculous. Neither a new age of freedom nor a new age of terror are in the works; in fact, I’m quite confident in predicting the total impact of this technology will be statistically undetectable. Self-congratulatory (on the one side) and paranoid (on the other) ravings aside, this thing simply does not make any meaningful difference whatsoever.

First, let’s see this harbinger of freedom end of civilization toy for rich white kids:

It’s printed from ABS plastic on an $8,000 3D printer. Almost everything is plastic, including the barrel; the only non-plastic parts are an ordinary nail (for the firing pin) and the bullet itself (in this case, a .380 caliber).

Now, I’ve owned firearms and shot recreationally for most of my life,1 and the first thing I can say upon seeing this thing is that I wouldn’t want to fire it. My instinct is that it’s probably about as dangerous to whoever’s on the trigger end as whoever’s on the business end.

The one shown here was test-fired three times. The first time, it misfired. The second time, it successfully fired a .380 round without destroying itself. The third time, when the .380 was replaced with a 5.7×28 cartridge, it exploded.

Could it survive multiple shots with the smaller round? I don’t know. Maybe. I wouldn’t bet my life on it. Doesn’t really matter. Not only is this thing not a game changer, I reckon it’s about as significant in terms of its overall impact on society as whatever toy they choose to put into a box of Cracker Jacks next week.

For starters, what you’re looking at here is not only a shoddy firearm of dubious reliability and ruggedness; it’s an $8,050 $9,000 shoddy firearm of dubious reliability and ruggedness. This prototype was printed on an $8,000 3D printer with about $50 worth of materials, making it arguably the single most expensive zip gun that’s ever been fabricated. A person looking for cheap, untraceable guns would be able to buy an arsenal on the street for less than the cost of the printer that produced this thing. (Edit: It turns out that this gun actually requires $1,000 worth of plastic toner to print, making it arguably the most expensive zip gun ever made even if the cost of the 3D printer isn’t factored in.)

Now, I already know what you’re going to say. The cost of 3D printers is dropping quickly. People can rent one or use one at a school. Companies will 3D print parts for you.

All of which is true, but irrelevant; the ability to make crude, cheap firearms for a lot less than just the cost of the plastic alone for this thing has existed…well, for about as long as firearms have existed. Prisoners have been known to build guns from parts available in prisons.

It has never been lack of availability that has kept people from using small single-shot firearms like this. The reason every criminal in town isn’t sticking up convenience stores with zip guns isn’t that they have been languishing in wait for a Libertarian college student to design one that can be 3D printed and put on the Internet; it’s that these things are virtually worthless as weapons. They tend to be used in prisons but few places besides, because they’re unreliable, prone to failure, inaccurate, and dangerous to the operator.

Just like, ahem, the 3D printed version.

Seriously. Even when they work, you have to be at point-blank range (or better yet, in contact with your intended target) for them to be terribly effective.

Which leads to the next hand-wringing objection: OMG this is made of PLASTIC you can take it onto an AIRPLANE through a METAL DETECTOR!

Which is, err, only kind of true. It’s a bit bulky to hide on your person, and there’s still the fact that the firing pin and ammunition are metal. Now, you might be able to get a nail through security on some pretext or other, but I doubt many folks will let you carry ammunition onto a plane.

If they notice it, which is a different matter; I’ve had friends who’ve carried brass knuckles and switchblades onto planes without difficulty. The reality is that few people actually want to, and have the means to, attack an airplane; nearly all of what happens at the airport is security theater, not security.

But let’s assume just for amusement that you can get one of these onto a plane. So what? What of it?

If I wanted to attack an airplane with a weapon I made on a 3D printer, it wouldn’t be this gun. Even if it works, it only works once, and I doubt the other passengers would sit around idle while I reloaded it and prepared to fire again. Assuming that the first shot actually did any good anyway.

The guy who designed this says “You can print a lethal device. It’s kind of scary, but that’s what we’re aiming to show,” as if this is the first time that’s been possible. Sorry, kid, but you’re a ridiculous wanker; a 3D printed knife or spear is actually a lot more lethal than this toy gun. (There’s a reason shivs rather than zip guns are the preferred weapon in places like prisons, and it’s not all down to scarcity of ammunition; given how easily drugs flow into American prisons, ammo isn’t that much of a stretch if there were a demand for it.) The 9/11 hijackers, who were well-funded, used…box cutters.

But I wouldn’t carry a 3D printed knife, or even a cheaper and better ceramic knife, onto a plane with mischief in mind either, because I’m not suicidal. Post 9/11, one thing has actually made air travel safer: the fact that the other passengers aren’t about to sit quietly by and hope for the best if someone tries to take a plane. All the other security changes that have happened since then have paled in effectiveness next to passenger attitude.

So, here’s the million-dollar question. You take a plastic gun onto an airplane, and…what, exactly? What in the name of the seven holy fucks and the twelve lesser fucks do you do then? What’s your plan?

If your goal is to destroy the plane, you can’t do that with this thing. If your goal is to take over the plane, well…good luck with that. You might survive what the other passengers do to you, maybe, if you’re lucky. Everybody is shrieking about how this thing can defeat airline security…and then what?

In fact, that million-dollar question can be extended to just about any possible use for this thing. You’ve bought yourself an eight-grand 3D printer, or somehow got access to it. You download the plans like an eager little hacker and you print this out, and then you…um, what do you do then? Go online and brag to your Maker friends?

You aren’t going to use this for home defense. I mean, seriously. A baseball bat or a tire iron makes a better home defense weapon, and the baseball bat probably has a longer effective range.

You’re not going to use it to outfit your secret militia that’s pining for anticipating the day that the Federal government starts rolling the tanks down Main Street. You aren’t even going to use an AR-15 for that, because, listen, seriously? The government has drones. They can blow your ass to hell and gone and you’ll never even see someone to shoot at.

You aren’t going to take it down to the range and pop off a few rounds in the general direction of paper cutouts of zombies or Trayvon Martin. No gun range is going to let you anywhere near the firing line with this; it’s too dangerous to the other shooters.

And please, please tell me you think you can go hunting with this thing. Bring a video camera and let me know when the video is up on YouTube. You can’t get enough of that for my entertainment dollar.

So you’re going to print it out, you’re going to put it together, and then…what, exactly? I’m still not clear on that.

Now, if you designed it, what you’ll do is obvious: you’ll get media exposure for congratulating yourself on what a clever Libertarian you are. And as near as I can tell, that’s really this thing’s only usefulness.

1 Full disclosure: I’ve been a private firearm owner on and off since 1988. I like guns, I like target shooting, and I’m neither opposed to nor afraid of guns. All that being said, I still won’t fire one of these.

New essay on Promiscuity Keepers: Ending Rape

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I’ve just posted an essay over on Promiscuity Keepers, Some Thoughts on Ending Rape. Here’s a teaser:

Recently, I started noticing references in my Twitter feed to a Twitter account called @EndingRape. The account belongs to a man named Richard Hart, who has a Web site and book called Keep Your Daughter Safe.

Now, I don’t think Richard Hart is a bad guy. I don’t think he’s evil or malicious. I think he probably sincerely believes that rape is a Bad Thing and he probably genuinely wants a world with less of it.

But his approach is deeply troubling, and in some cases even destructive, for a number of reasons.

Feel free to respond here or over there.

Stealth WordPress attack: How to get hacked without even knowing it

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Lately, one of the contact forms on a Web site I run has started to get hammered with spam form submissions. The spam submissions appear to be able to defeat common CAPTCHA programs (those things that won’t send a Web form unless you type a blurry, wiggly word to show that you’re a person, the idea being that a computer has trouble reading the word).

Interestingly, these spam submissions seem to go to sites that are just fine; ordinary, everyday sites, most but not all running WordPress, with no spam in sight. The majority of the sites that aren’t running WordPress are, naturally, running Joomla.

Of course, being the suspicious bastard I am, I immediately suspected a subtle attack like the one I talked about in October of 2010, where modifications were made to the main WordPress loop PHP file that would serve up ordinary blog posts to ordinary visitors and serve up redirectors to spam if the visitor was a search engine or if the visitor came from a search engine.

And sure enough, a quick Google search showed I was right.

Here is one of the spam submissions I received on my contact form:

wkgFqTcoAqy

Where do you come from? <a href=” http://www.construction-accident.us “>cheap stendra</a> helpings of Peninah’s food are hard to resist. Peninah also runs the store in the Miti House 2. This is a major

If you visit the site www.construction-accident.us you see a perfectly ordinary WordPress site that appears to have nothing wrong with it.

Ah, but now let’s see what Google sees!

The site has been hacked and the main WordPress loop has been tampered with. When Google looks at the page, keywords advertising prescription drugs are inserted into the page’s code.

If you click on the link in Google, you’re sent to www.construction-accident.us and then promptly redirected back to Google. It seems like the redirection is based at least in part on the browser you are using; when I use Safari on Mac, I end up at Google, but changing my browser’s user agent to Explorer 7 results in no redirection, Explorer 8 and 9 redirect to Google. I haven’t quite figured out the magic combination of browser and platform user agents to see where the hostile redirection leads to.

I downloaded the page using wget (a terminal-based Web downloader) and looked at the file that was downloaded. Whenever the hacked site sees Google as the referrer, it modifies the page by adding pharmacy keywords to the Title tag:

<title>Buy Stendra Online | Construction Accident|Oil Rig Explosion|Dallas|Texas|Gulf Mexico|Construction Accident Lawyer|Construction Accident Lawyers|Construction Accident Attorney|Construction Accident Attorneys|Construction Accident Law Firm|Construction Accident Law Firms</title>

and then it inserts the following code after the WordPress header:

<div class=”post”><p>stendra</p>
</br><p>avanafil</p>
</br><p>stendra for sale</p>
</br><p>stendra (avanafil)</p>
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<p>stendra avanafil</p></div>

You can see this if you do a Google search for

site:www.construction-accident.us

and then look at the cached version of the first hit.

So that’s how the attack works. WordPress sites are hacked. The WordPress files are modified so that ordinary users and the site’s owner are not aware that anything is wrong. The site continues to look and work as normal.

But oh, people who find your site by using Google? They see ads for fake pharmaceuticals! If they visit your site from Google, they get redirected to God knows where.

There are a lot of sites that have been hacked this way. I’m getting buried under a blizzard of spam Web form submissions advertising WordPress sites that have been hacked.

A partial list from the last few days includes:

http://www.thevisualexperience.org (the hack is only visible in Google if you do a search that includes pharmacy keywords; for example:
accutane site:http://www.thevisualexperience.org
http://www.fro2012.com
http://javajitterprint.com
http://www.grouna.com
http://www.nutria.com/ (This one isn’t using WordPress; it’s using a CMS called Website Gadget by an outfit called Firefly Digital, but it looks very WordPress-like. It may be a WordPress derivative or clone.)
http://www.info-kod.si/ (Also not using WordPress)
http://autofinancedfw.com (Also not using WordPress)
http://www.guylaramee.com/ (If visited from Google, redirects to http://www.pharmacymall.net/prozac_generic.php, hosted in the Ukraine)
http://sedrez.com/ (If visited from Google, redirects to http://goldenpharma24x7.com/order-topamax-online.html, hosted in the Ukraine)
http://www.joomx.com/ (a professional Joomla developer’s site–oops!–that has been hacked; if visited from Google, redirects to http://goldenpharma24x7.com/order-topamax-online.html
http://www.fremantlefishingboatharbour.com/ (Running Joomla; if visited from Google, redirects to http://goldenpharma24x7.com/)

Once again, if you are running a WordPress or Joomla site, it is absolutely essential that you keep on top of all security patches PROMPTLY and that you use very strong admin passwords.

With this hack, it’s likely that you could be hacked and never even know it–at least until Google starts flagging your site with a “This site may be compromised” tag.

Some thoughts on appropriation of another sort

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The complaints about cultural appropriation by the polyamory community that I talked about in my last blog post got me to thinking about a different kind of appropriation. It often takes place in the same places and the same contexts as cultural appropriation, and a lot of the same people do it, but it’s a very different animal.

I’m talking about science appropriation.

Science appropriation is what happens when someone uses a garbled, factually incorrect, and/or completely unintelligble statement about science in an attempt to justify or rationalize something that has nothing to do with science at all.

This isn’t directly relevant to polyamory, except insofar as there are some folks (particularly in the New Age crowd) who are polyamorous and do it. I’ve also seen it in religious groups, in alternative “medicine” communities…hell, even among conspiracy theorists.

Science appropriation typically goes something like this: A person with little or no formal background in science wants to believe something. What he wants to believe isn’t especially important. Maybe he wants to believe that fluoridated water is a secret conspiracy of shadowy government agencies trying to control us with mind control drugs, or that diseases can be cured by the waving of hands and the application of spiritual energy, or that benign beings from another dimension want to make us all better people, or that after we die things become wonderful forever. Whatever it is, the person attempts to support the belief with a bizarre and often nonsensical application of some poory-understood scientific principle, or at least sciencey-sounding words like “quantum” or “frequency” or “DNA.” The result makes a hash of science, and in the few cases where the belief might have some kernel of validity, completely obfuscates its validity under a blizzard of intellectual rubbish.

This plays out in practice in a number of ways, and often involves other forms of appropriation as well.

Take this Web site. Please.

It talks about raising our “spiritual awareness” to a higher plane by using the powers of the twelve chakras, possibly related in some manner I’m not entirely clear on to the pyramids, to activate the hidden powers in our DNA.

In addition to a staggering amount of cultural appropriation (I’m not sure the authors of this stuff are even aware that the idea of chakras comes from an entirely different culture than the one that gave us the pyramids), the level of science appropriation reaches nosebleed proportions. For example (I can not make this up):

Most people know that DNA is the ‘blueprint of life’ and is located in every cell of the body. In addition to each chromosome’s 2 strand double helix of DNA, there are an additional 10 etheric strands of DNA available to each human, which have been de-activated and dormant since the beginning of recorded history. Each additional strand possesses attributes that permit the individual to perform greater human accomplishments. Scientists acknowledge that we currently only use 3% of our current 2 strand DNA. Thus we live in a society where people are sick, unhappy, stressed out, create wars, have difficulty experiencing love, and are totally disconnected with the universe. Most people have to meditate for many years just to have a so-called ‘mystical’ experience, that’s how disconnected we are now. Imagine activating 100% of your 2 strand DNA, PLUS 10 additional strands! You will go from using 10% of your brain to becoming a multi-dimensional being with psychic, telepathic, and manifestation abilities beyond anything you’ve ever dreamed of. Plus, you will stop the aging process and actually start to rejuvenate to look and feel YOUNGER. […] The portions of the DNA chain that science has presently identified as the “Double Helix”, represent only the SURFACE portions of the chemical, elemental, and electrical components of the active DNA strands. Science has yet to identify the MULTIDIMENSIONAL spectra of DNA manifestation, and has yet to realize that within the structures of detectable DNA, there are levels of structure and function that direct the operations of the entire genetic blueprint, which are not currently detectable by the contemporary scientific method.

This quote hits pretty much all the hallmarks of science appropriation.

First, there’s the garbled misunderstanding of science facts. Science says that a small percentage of the human genome is made up of “coding DNA”–the percentage is actually closer to 20% than to 3%, but never mind–which is DNA that directs the cell to make proteins. However, that doesn’t mean the rest is inactive! Non-coding DNA is involved in many functions: activation and deactivation (usually through epigenetic methylation) of protein-coding sequences of DNA; coding for strands of RNA that affect the translation of messenger RNA into proteins; and more. Many areas of non-coding DNA aren’t well understood but are highly conserved, indicating that they play an active and essential role in biology.

Then there’s the faux pop-sci mythology that we only use 10% of our brains, a nonsensical superstition remarkably resilient to the light of disproof. This and other popular science superstitions (like the notion that science says bumblebees can’t fly) are common in science appropriation.

And then there’s the hint of secret knowledge–information beyond what science can see, or facts that transcend the current state of knowledge–that’s part and parcel of science appropriation.

And finally, there’s the bizarre, anti-intellectual hatred of science and the scientific method that almost always accompanies sience appropriation. The folks who appropriate scientific-sounding language and ideas for unscientific or pseudoscientific notions seem to have a love-hate relationship with science; on the one hand, they speak with derision and contempt about the scientific method, but on the other, they seem eager–even desperate–for the validation of science.

In fact, about the only thing missing from this particular example is the word “quantum,” which as near as I can tell is what science appropriators use when they mean “magic.”

A great deal of science appropriation comes from folks who seem to genuinely want to make the world a better place, but don’t want to invest in the tools to do it because making the world a better place is often very hard work. Folks who want to be healers but who don’t want to get a medical degree or invest the serious amunt of time and money it takes to understand biology are big offenders here. There’s a Web site (and, I gather, a set of beliefs) called Healing Heart Power that’s a great example of science appropriation:

The heart’s electrical field is about 60 times greater in amplitude than the electrical activity generated by the brain.

The magnetic field produced by the heart is more than 5000 times greater in strength than the field generated by the brain

The electromagnetic energy of the heart not only envelops every cell of the human body, but also extends out in all directions in the space around us […]

Research conducted at the Institute of HeartMath suggests that the heart’s field is an important carrier of information.

Our mental and emotional state impacts the quality of contact we offer to another person. When we touch one another with safe, respectful, loving intention both physically and emotionally, we call into play the full healing power of the heart. The greater the “coherence”–a sense that life is comprehensible, manageable and meaningful– one develops, the more sensitive one becomes to the subtle electromagnetic signals communicated by those around them. […]

Heartpower and our genetic make-up: Dorothy Mandel writes, “Genetically, cells adapt to what they perceive their environment to be. Because an event experienced in the midst of a heart response will be perceived and interpreted very differently than an event experienced in the midst of a stress response, the heart can also powerfully affect genetic expression”

Becoming more heart aware and working towards authentic emotional expression and inner peace may positively impact our genetic health.

Anyone who has any backgrund in biology at all is probably cringing and eyerolling right now. The notion that human beings benefit from positive interaction with one another is pretty straightforward, but here it’s dressed up with a level of science appropriation that’s almost physically painful to read.

We see unsourced, vaguely-defined claims about the heart’s electrical and electromagnetic field that are remarkably content-free (what units are we talking about? What’s the absolute strength of these fields?) and that we are expected to infer are important. (If it’s significant that the heart’s electromagnetic field is stronger than the brain’s, what are we to infer from the fact that the bicep’s electromagnetic field is also stronger than the brain’s?) The biological basis for these claims is not presented (I would reasonably expect the brain to have a weak electromagnetic field, as the activity in it is electrochemical rather than electromagnetic!), yet the claims are used to try to support other claims, such as the heart’s electromagnetic field being a “carrier of information” (what information? in what form? From where to where?).

This particular Web page does do one thing that a lot of science appropriators don’t do, though, which is to make a falsifiable prediction (“the heart can also powerfully affect genetic expression”). Unfortunately for the creators of healing heart power, this prediction doesn’t have any evidence at all to support it.

That does bring up an important distinction between science and science appropriation, though. People who appropriate science for non-scientific or pseudoscientific ends don’t actually know what science is.

Science isn’t a body of knowledge. Science isn’t a collection of facts or books. The Theory of Relativity isn’t science; nor is Western medicine or the Hubble Space Telescope.

These things are the products of science. Science itself is a process, not a library of theorems. It’s a way of looking at the world. It’s a carefully designed system for figuring out what’s true and what’s false that s founded on a simple idea:

Human beings suck at separating truth from falsehood. When we want to believe something, we will find ways to fool or trick ourselves into believing it, even if we’re not consciously aware that’s what we’re doing. Therefore, actually separating what’s true from what we want to be true means systematically dealing with our own cognitive shortcomings, confirmation biases, and predilection for fooling ourselves.

Science insists on falsifiability because without it we tend to persuade ourselves that anything we want to believe is true. We learn about the Scientific Method in school (at least if we got anything even remotely approximating a decent education), but the version we learn in school is dry and not very illuminating. The scientific method, put more plainly, looks something like this:

  1. You are not as smart as you think you are.
    1. If you want to believe something, you’ll find a way to make yourself believe it.
    2. If you think you are rational, you’re probably good at making yourself believe what you want to believe.
    3. You are gullible.
    4. If you think you’re not gullible, you’re really, really gullible.
  2. If you want to know what’s true, you shouldn’t believe things without reason.
    1. “I really, really want it to be true” isn’t a reason.
    2. An anecdote isn’t a reason.
    3. Your feelings aren’t a reason.
      1. Feelings can lie to you.
      2. Your emotional self isn’t very good at fact-checking.
  3. Reality doesn’t care very much about what you think.
    1. Reality is really, really complicated.
    2. Reality doesn’t give a hairy flying fartknuckle about politics.
    3. Reality isn’t human-centric.
      1. If a person in New York and a person in Tehran both measure the universal gravitational constant, the result better be the same.
      2. If you get different results when the “negative energy” of “unbelievers” spoils the experiment, your results aren’t worth a fetid dingo’s kidney.
  4. if you want to understand how the universe works, you have a lot of work to do.
    1. The universe doesn’t fit human stories.
      1. Storytelling isn’t science.
    2. If it can’t be quantified, it isn’t science.
    3. If you can’t figure out a way to test whether an idea is wrong, it isn’t a scientific idea.
      1. The best way to see if an idea holds any water is to try to prove it wrong, not try to prove it right.
      2. Your own tendency toward confirmation bias will lead you to see evidence that your ideas are true even when it isn’t really there.
  5. Sometimes, the answer to a question is “we don’t know,” and that’s okay.

The things I’ve talked about so far are all examples of pseudoscience, so it might seem like sciece appropriation is simply another expression for pseudoscience.

All pseudoscience is sciene appropriation, but not all science appropriation is pseudoscience. Science appropriation also happens when something that isn’t science claims that its principles have been “scientifically proven,” something that happens often in the world of religion.

My sweetie Eve has remarked about how Westerners are quick to appropriate elemets of Indian culture, what with Tantra this and chakra that and having sex is all about spirituality, really it is, I’m being so sincere right now. But when she was in India, she saw the same thing happening in reverse; Indian mystics ad religious people often tried to claim scientific legitimacy for their religious practices, saying that science has “proven” beliefs such as cutting one’s hair is wrong.

When I was working prepress for a living, one of my clients was a book publisher that specialized in supplying books to Christian bookstores. Every year I worked on their catalog, which had an entire section devoted to books that claimed to show how science “proves” that Christianity is the true religion or that Jesus was the son of god or something.

I don’t think of these examles as pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is when something claims to be a science but isn’t, like phrenology or DNA activation or dowsing. The Christians who claim that science supports the divinity of Jesus or the Sikhs who say that refusing to cut their hair is scientifically proven to be beneficial aren’t saying that Christianity or Sikhism is a science; they’re appropriatng the respectability of science to try to support an idea that at its core has nothing to do with science. To me, that’s a it different from prenology and similar systems that claim to be scientific fields but aren’t.

There are overlaps, of course. Creation “science” is a religious belief that’s also a pseudoscience. Sometimes the boundaries get fuzzy. That doesn’t change the fact that some folks claim scientific legitimacy for a belief without saying the belief itself is a science.

Science appropriation also happens in pop culture. An astonishing number of people believe that humans only use 10% of our brains, that the left brain is rational and the right brain is creative, or if you rescue a baby bird that’s fallen from its nest you shouldn’t return it to the nest or its mother will reject it. None of these ideas has any basis in science, but they’re incredibly, annoyingly persistent and many people pass them off as science fact.

Science appropriation is more than annoying; it’s harmful. We live in a technological, post-industrial society with a public school infrastructure that is crap at teaching basic science. Thanks to that, we’ve created a society uniquely vulnerable to science appropriation. When a person with diabetes uses homeopathic “treatment,” the diabetes goes untreated. When someone spends time and money on “DNA activation” in the hopes that it will let her unlock the other 90% of her brain (whatever that means; ae these folks saying that someone with a 110 IQ will have a 1,100 IQ after DNA activation?), she gets fleeced by a scam. The fact that the scammer might also believe the scam dooesn’t make it any less of a scam; it simply means the educational system has failed the scammer, too. Public policy decisions based on science apropriation have the potential to harm lots of people.

So, as part of my own personal crusade to make the world a better place, I’ve created this handy-dandy Science Appropriation Bingo card. Keep it with you when you read New Age Web sites or browse the alternative healing section of WebMD. If you want to print it out, clicky on the picture for a link to a PDF version!

Some thoughts on poly identity

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As I write this, I’m in Olympia, Washington. Alas, thanks to a signficant user interface misfeature in the program (Caron Copy Cloner) I use to sync my laptop with my desktop, I don’t have my laptop with me. I’m posting from an iPad. Which has a keyboard quite poorly suited to typing long bits of text (anyone who has a BlueTooth keyboard you’re willing to donate to the cause, see me after class). And I suspect this might get long. In other words, buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!

A short time ago, I discovered an essay over on the Boldly Go blog called Why I’m No Longer Poly. It’s about seven or eight months old as I type this, but if you haven’t read it yet, it’s worth the read. It’s a critique of the poly community, and there’s quite a bit in it I want to respond to. (This blog post started as a comment over there but quickly overran what can reasonaly go into a comment.)

The critique as I read it breaks down into four main points:

  • Poly is a form of privilege. The time, resources, and attention necessary to find and maintain multiple romantic relationships are most available to middle and upper class people; hence, the poly community tends (unsurprisingly) to be very middle-class and very white.
  • The poly community, possibly because of point 1 above, is guilty of a great deal of appropriation. Some poly folks consider themselves ‘queer’ just based on having non-traditional relationships, which does a disservice to LGBT folks. Gay, bi, and trans* people have been murdered for who they are; to date, that hasn’t happened to anyone for being poly (at least not as far as I know; if you’ve heard of this happening, I’d love to hear about it in the comments). This appropriation is cultural, too, with some poly folk integrating a wishy-washy, Westernized, wildly inaccurate understanding of things like Tantra into the fold of polyamory.
  • The poly community shelters abusers. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, the poly community has failed to create a robust culture of compassion and consent. Serial abusers operate with impunity within the organized poly community.
  • People in the poly commmunity tend to see polyamory as a superior alternatve to monogamy, and therefore (accordng to the Transitive Property of Smugness1) polyamorous people as superior to monogamous people.

The author is talking primarily about the UK poly scene, which I do have some familiarity with, though I’m more grounded in the US poly community.

I think this critique of the poly community has some important points, so I’d like to examine it more closely. Ready? Here we go!

Part 1: Poly Is Privileged

This is an easy claim to make. Look around the poly community in a lot of cities and you’ll see a whole lot of folks who are econmically and racially homogenous. The essay also makes the point:

I’m wondering if non-monogamy is seriously possible for people who are economically disenfranchised or people who blatantly don’t have the time to devote away from work, children, and other social responsibilities to give to other partners. And I wonder now, as I try and create a balance between work, blogging, writing fiction, working out, and all of the other things I have to do if, when I do decide to adopt children, I’ll have the time to devote to more romantic partners.

For a certain model of polyamory, this is true. Maintaining multiple dating-type relationships requires financial and time resources that a lot of folks don’t have. It’s also true that polyamory, as much as it may not be mainstream, is still a hell of a lot more accepted than LGB relationships or relationships with or between trans* people. I know poly folks who have lost custody of their children for being poly, but like I said, I’ve never heard of anyone being killed over it.

But these points, while they are valid, don’t tell the whole story.

One thing it’s important to remember is the poly community is not the same thing as polyamory. The poly ommunity is largely made up of racially and economically privileged folks, but it’s dangerous to infer that polyamory is mostly practiced by that demographic. I’ve met people who are polyamorous who don’t belong to or identify with the organized poly community (particularly when I was living in Florida and Georgia), and there’s quite a lot more variety in socioeconomic class than a look ’round the poly community might suggest.

Likewise, the notion that poly requires a certain level of disposable income and time is true for some models of poly, particularly the I’m-dating-a-bunch-of-people flavor of poly, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that polyamory is therefore limited to the economically privileged. I’ve known–and been involved with!–poly folks who are financially quite poorly off, and who discover in a more communal model of polyamory a way to increase their standard of living.

Indeed, many of the folks in my own poly network have a level of income that’s perilously close to, or in some cases below, the Federal poverty line. Poly people have discovered something that roommates have known for a long time: two can live almost as cheaply as one, and three can live almost as cheaply as two.

The same calculus works for time. A person who’s working two part-time jobs may not have the time to go out on several dates a week, but that’s not the only way to do poly! Both long-distance relationships and communal relationships require much less investment in free time to maintain.

Why is the organized polycommunity so homogenous? That question has a complicated answer. Even the simple version is probably outside the scope of this particular blog post. (That’s not an attempt to handwave away the question; it’s just a really, really complicated subject.) Is the organized poly community a showcase of privilege? You bet. Does that mean polyamory is only for privileged people? Well, that’s a tougher argument to make. The organized poly community does not necessarily reflect the diversity of people who practice polyamory, and identifying as polyamorous does not necessarily mean identifying as part of the poly community.

Part 2: Poly as Cultural Appropriation

This critique breaks down into a couple of broad categories: poly appropriation of the spiritual beliefs of other cultures, usually in a highly adulterated (and somewhat confused) form; and poly appropriation of LGBT identity. As to the first part, from the essay:

I get sick to death of seeing white people in polyamory communities reference a tribe or a culture outside their own, putting white names to their practices, and using them to validate their relationship style or choice. I get sick and tired of the “Ooh”ing and “Aah”ing over appropriated concepts of tantra, chakras, chi, and whatever I’ve seen white people mix together in a fruit salad of whatever cultures they want to build their ignorant burrito out of to try and make their polyamory practice more “exotic” and “sacred”. You shouldn’t have to justify your relationship choice via bigotry. When you act like your polyamory is valid because it’s made of “tiny bubbles of imperfections as proof that it was crafted by the simple, hard-working, indigenous peoples of wherever” you’re being a colonialist jerk.

This gets no disagreement from me. In fact, the urge to validate having multiple romantic partners by mashing together assorted bits of poorly-understood religious traditions from a number of different cultures and wrapping the whole thing up in a ribbon of chakra-expanding tantric sex is one of the more annoying facets of (part of) the poly community.

Does this happen? You bet. I don’t think blame for this rests on the doorstep of polyamory, though. First, most of the offenders I’ve personally seen did it before they became polyamory; they started out involved in alternative New Age spirituality and then, when they started exploring polyamory in the mid to late 90s, they brought their garbled mishmash of other cultures’ spiritual ideas with them.

At least here in the US. I can’t speak for the Tantric/New Age part of the poly community in the UK, because it’s not the bit I interacted with, which brings up a second point:

Not all of the poly community does this. In fact, the poly community is quite diverse in this regard. Most of the community I was part of in Florida, for instance, is made up of rationalists and skeptics with about as much interest in New Age tantric appropriation as they have in six-day-old potato salad.

There’s a polyamory meetup group in Portland for fundamentalist Christians. There’s a group in Vancouver that’s essentially entirely secular. The poly community is not monolithic; to accuse it of cultural appropriation is to miss big chunks that aren’t spiritual at all. Do some poly people do this? You bet. Do most? Not in my experience.

Which brings up the second kind of appropriation. Again from the essay:

I’m sick to death of “allies” telling me that they have a right to call themselves queer just because they date more than one person, especially when they have lipstick parties in middle class suburbia while queer kids are forced into homelessness, nonconsensual sex work, and death. I’ll feel more sympathy for Poly Patriarch not being able to marry all of his concubines when trans* people can get married without having to worry about going to jail for fraud.

I can definitely understand being pretty fed up with this sort of behavior. I personally am not sick to death of it, because so far I personally have not seen it. I certainly would never consider calling myself “queer” because I’m poly; as a cisgendered straight white guy, that would be profoundly nonsensical of me2.

This might be something that’s more common in the UK than the US; I don’t know. I do know that the poly communities I’ve been ppart of have had members who are gay, members who are bi, and members who are trans…all of whm have a reasonable claim to “queerness,” but no because they’re poly.

Part 3: Abusers In the Poly Community

This is the most head-scratching part of the essay to me.

Yes, the poly community has abusers. I don’t see it as a poly problem; I see it as a problem of minority sexual subcultures in general. Ironically, the essay’s author still identifies as kinky, whereas I’ve seen abuse happen a lot more in the BDSM community, as I’ve written about here (trigger warning: rape), here, and here. But saying it isn’t a “poly problem” doesn’t mean it’s not a problem in the poly community. It absolutely is.

And it pisses me off.

A couple of months ago, my partner zaiah and I hosted the first of what’s likely to be a bimonthly poly get-together, whose purpose is to create white papers–papers that an be used by other poly organizers. The very first one? Creating poly communities that are safe and do not shelter abusers. Last month, we hosted the Portland West Side Poy Discussion Group. The topic? Preventing abuse in the poly community.

When I say this is the most head-scratching part of the essay, it’s not because I believe the poly community is a beautific assemblage of saints. It’s because the claims of abuse sound a bit…strange to me. The essay contains this bit…

If I’m dating Tom and Tom is treating his boyfriend Phil like dirt, I can’t possibly tell Tom that I’ll break up with him or I can’t sit by and watch him treating Phil like dirt. Because then I’m being controlling, jealous, and manipulative. I’m stuck in a trap where I have to put up with abusive shit all for the sake of not exercising the dreaded veto. […] Until poly people stop demonising things like “veto power” and start talking and taking seriously how polyamory can work well for abusers, I have a hard time taking on the label…

…which I find a little odd. I’m not sure I get the connection between “opposing veto” and “sheltering abusers.” I am an outspoken opponent of veto3 in poly relationships, because in my experience vetoes are often used as tools of abuse. I almost always see them wielded with indifference of–even contempt for–the needs of the people against whom they are used (people who, most often, are on the short end of a significant power imbalance to begin with).

What I also tend to see in conversations aout veto is a strange sort of either/or, all-or-nothing mentality: if you don’t have veto, that means you have no say at all, and you just have to lie down and take whatever your partner does. You can’t express an opinion or an objection of any sort; to do so is the same as veto.

And don’t psychologists tell us that one of the defining characteristics of many abusers is the fact that they seek to control their partners and particularly control their partners’ interactions with others, cutting their victims off from other sources of love and support?

Frankly, I find the discussion of veto with regards to abuse bizarre. If I were dating Sally and I saw her mistreating Bob, telling Sally I’ll break up with her if her behavior doesn’t improve isn’t veto. Telling Sally “I demand that you break up with Bob”–that is veto.

I don’t do veto, nor get involveed with those who have it. Yet if I’m dating someone who is treating another partner like dirt, or who is being treated like dirt, I’m going to say so. And if someone says that’s “controlling, jealous, and manipulatiive,” that says more about that person than it does about me, I reckon.

Conflating “doesn’t do veto” with “supports abuse” seems…well, I’m not really sure what’s going on there, but in my experience if someone is being abused and won’t leave the abusive relationship if you say “hey, this is abuse,” they aren’t too likely to leave if you say “hey, veto” either.

Just sayin’.

Part 4: Smug

From the essay:

While many poly people acknowledge that “Relationship broke, add people” probably isn’t the best solution, just as many people act like polyamory is the solution for anyone’s relationship problems, or they look down on silly monogamous people who feel things like jealousy and fear (because, you know, non-monogamous people never feel that).

I’ve met this guy. Once. On a Facebook forum. He was roundly (and loudly) ridiculed.

This may be a regional thing. I totally get that there are folks who act this way, but in my expeience there aren’t “just as many” folks who say this as who say exactly the opposite. In fact, the poly groups I’ve belonged to in Florida, Georgia, and Portland, and the poly folks I’ve met in Boston and Chicago, actively frown on the notion that polyamory is more evolved, more enlightened, and/or good for what ails those poor Neanderthal mono folks.

If I were to meet a lot of people proclaiming how backward monogamy iis, I suspect it’d get right up my noose, too. So I’m willing to give this critique a pass; it’s not my experience, but different poly communities, as I mentioned in art 2 up there, have very different attitudes. Perhaps there’s a poly community over across the pond where this idea is prevalent; if so, I can certainly understand opting out of it.

Opting out of a community, though, isn’t the same thing as opting out of an identity. I’ve disassociated myself with the BDSM community, because it has a lot of behaviors and practices I find toxic. I still do BDSM. Distancing myself from others who do some of the same things I do doesn’t, at least for me, change my identity. If it did, the way I see it, I’d be letting folks I don’t like dictate my identity, and that seems an odd choice to me.

1 The Transitive Property of Smugness is what I call the propensity of some folks to talk about how doing some thing like having multiple partners) or being part of some group (like people who practice BDSM) requires skill at a particular thing, and then to assume that because they do that thing, they have that skill. For example: “It takes good communication to be polyamorous. I am polyamorous. Ergo, I have good communication skills. Yay! Go me!” There are variants of this in almost every subculture I’ve ever belonged to; its kink equivalent is “Consent is an important part of BDSM. I am part of BDSM culture. Therefore, I am awesome about consent! Woohoo!”

2 Not to mention insensitive. Rude, too. And kinda stupid.

3 Defined here as a right or agreement by which one person can tell another person “I require you to end your relationship with so-and-so” and have an expectation that the other person will break up with so-and-so. I’ve spoken to some folks who use the term “veto” to mean “I have the right to give you my opinion about whether I like so-and-so.” I don’t think that’s the most common usage of the word “veto,” and it’s not the one I use here.

Evolution of the W32/Kuluoz malware scam

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Well, boys and girls, it looks like the malware distribution I talked about here and here has morphed again. This morning, I started receiving emails that pretend to be DHL delivery notifications, rather than American Airlines ticket sales or FedEx notifications:

As before, the links take you to hacked WordPress or Joomla sites that will examine your browser user-agent. If you’re on a Mac or Linux computer, or you’re using a modern Windows browser, you’ll see a phony 404 Not Found error that looks like this:

If you’re using a Windows browser that has vulnerabilities, the link will download a copy of the W32/Kuluoz information and bank password stealing malware.

Stay safe out there.