Silence by default

Since I have been talking about being polyamorous on my blog I have had a lot of conversations with people about the decision to come out publicly.  There have been some people who have been actively supportive of the decision but there are a lot of people who reacted negatively.  Unsurprisingly my poly friends generally reacted very positively but the negative reactions came from all quarters - family from both sides, work acquaintances, and other friends.  The negative reactions generally focused around the issue of Wendy not being eager to be public about polyamory on my blog.  There was a consistent assumption that if Wendy didn't want me to talk about it that the issue should have been done and settled; her right to privacy absolutely trumped my right to talk about myself in my own space.

It isn't as if my family comes from a tradition of keeping secrets from everyone about everything - generally I think they have fairly normal standards that way.  My friend group is mostly the same.  I am definitely the crazy outlier sitting comfortably 3 standard deviations from the norm in this regard.  Even now with me talking about relatively openly about sex and relationships here I am still holding an awful lot back that I would very happily slap up on the internet if it wouldn't upset those close to me.  I often think about embracing radical honesty but I couldn't do that without renegotiating an awful lot of my relationships.

Deciding what to post and what to keep secret is a tricky thing.  I don't make those decisions in a vacuum because I want to be sure that if I am sharing someone else's secrets that they are on board with that decision.  However, I won't allow anyone veto power over talking about my own secrets.  I can and do show restraint sometimes when asked though.  For example, I waited more than a year to make the first post talking about my own polyamory even though I was itching to spew it forth immediately.

The thing that doesn't add up in my mind is why so many people seem to place privacy as on an entirely different plane of importance than disclosure.  There seems to be an assumption out there that if anybody doesn't want a thing being said then it shouldn't be said.  I don't buy into that view at all.  Rather I strongly prefer the assumption that all things are fair game instead; silence should exist but it should be exception, not the default.  That doesn't mean you have an obligation to divulge your own secrets, just that you won't dump on me because I choose to talk about my own stuff.

This extends to the things I want to hear as well as the things I want to say.  Other people often say "Ewwwww, TMI!" when somebody else starts talking about their sex life even when it is cloaked in metaphor and indirect references.  My reaction is the total opposite - I just want more details!  This stark difference is especially obvious when other people express a desperate desire to not know anything about their family members' sex lives as though somehow it would be better if everyone related to them was asexual.  In my own head "So this is the new thing I am knitting" and "So X and I were bangin' on the kitchen table and this hilarious thing happened" are equally appropriate dinner conversation for family gatherings.  Not that I am more curious about my family's sex lives than my friends', it is just that I see them as equally interesting while the rest of the world seems to see one as utterly taboo and the other as merely a bit risque.

These preferences do not blind me to the obvious; I am able to easily determine what the world thinks is appropriate.  I just disagree with the standards I see to such an extent that I can hardly fathom how we ended up the way we are and I can't be happy hammering myself into the box that other people seem to inhabit quite comfortably.  Secrets sit inside me and fester, burning away like terrible heartburn that has but one cure - setting the secret free into the world.

Steamroller

A tragedy has occurred in France.  The satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was attacked by several people using assault rifles and 12 people are dead.  The attack was explicitly in retaliation for pictures published by the magazine mocking Islamic State and the attackers shouted about prophet Muhammad during their assault.  Needless to say this is a terrible event, not just for the personal tragedy but also for the state of affairs between radical Islam and the rest of the world.

I think though that the perpetrators are going to learn that their attack will not have the effect they intended.  They are, I hope, going to receive a quick and dirty lesson in how the Streisand Effect works.  I had never heard of Charlie Hebdo before today nor had I seen their latest post that is assumed to be the flashpoint behind this attack.  Now I have and I will share it in an attempt to push awareness of it as far across the world as possible.

I hope others will share it too.  Those who would try to suppress expression such as this must learn that all their despicable actions accomplish is to spread the very images they are trying to suppress far and wide.  Acts of violence against free expression must not only be fought back against with weapons but also with more expression.  The greater part of society, both Muslim and not, does not tolerate such atrocity and we outnumber the lunatics by a great margin.  We can and must show them that we will steamroller right over their feeble attempts to terrorize us.

Frame of mind

I have been sick as hell the past week with some kind of demonic nanotech futuristic magical evil necromancer spawned flu.  The first part of it was the worst as it entailed the age old question "Which end of me do I need to point at the toilet for the next 30 seconds?" and that is pretty much the worst time there is.  In the last few days though I have only had a modest cold in terms of physical symptoms but the brain effects have been *interesting*.

I often feel fairly high when I have a cold.  Weird thrumming underneath my kneecaps, temporal discontinuities, frame of reference shifts, and other facets of the cold are very much in keeping.  One thing that I have had friends describe as a part of being high that I never experienced myself though is extreme paranoia.  I don't get anxiety or paranoia issues in regular life at all - it just isn't an issue I deal with.  What that might have to do with feeling that while under a cold high I don't know but the last couple nights I got it in a big way.

Between sleep and awake I found a very bizarre place where I was dreaming but not quite.  I could wake up at will and be as functional as one would expect from a sick person but as soon as I lay back down images would flood my mind and everything seemed to be wrong.  I was certain I had done everything incorrectly, let everyone down, forgotten all the things that needed doing.  Things weren't totally out of control though and I would constantly reach to try to fix all the swirling disasters around me only to fail over and over.  The world was unfamiliar, frightening, and all things were off kilter by just enough that I could never feel relaxed.

I spent many hours in this state, often waking up to verify that I could still do so, then lying down again hoping for sleep to claim me.  I finally did sleep but only once dawn was ready to break in the morning.  You would think that such a bizarre mindset that never really touched sleep would leave me hideously tired and unhappy in the morning but it was not so.  I feel slightly tired, I know my sleep was not ideal, and I recognize that I passed hours in the grip of terror and yet things are fine.  Somehow all that madness actually did bridge the gap between restorative sleep and being awake.

What I can say for certain is that I have had enough of this cold high.  I want my brain back now.  I want to be able to think properly, I want to be able to sleep properly, and I want to be able to properly delineate the border between sleep and awake because not being able to do so is a teensy bit strange.

Not a special case

Romantic relationships are often thought to bring out the best in people.  True love conquering all and such.  I am not convinced that this is actually true though, and I think that more of the time they give people excuses for being awful than create good behaviour.  It is easiest to see in the case of serious physical abuse since we all know that when we see someone with a black eye the most likely reason they got it is a blow from their romantic partner rather than anything else.

That assumption that it is okay or normal to pull all kinds of crazy out on your partner certainly holds true when there is no physical violence though.  Jealousy in particular is something we often hold up as a virtue even though in non romantic relationships the idea of forbidding a partner to spend time with half of the population or demanding exclusivity would be shocking and bizarre.

This is kind of interesting when you consider it in the context of a monogamous relationship that is beginning to be polyamorous.  In that situation many people seem to become the worst partners possible, making all kinds of demands and feeling justified in exploding over the tiniest issue.  Ferrett wrote about this a bit and the very fact that he feels it necessary to clarify that being poly isn't an excuse to treat your partner like crap is very telling.  We shouldn't need to make it explicit that blowing up at people you love over small misunderstandings isn't okay... and yet it seems we do.

Being in love with someone is powerful.  It generates very intense feelings and those feelings can very easily be tipped over from adoration to hatred.  While I love being in love and I think that for me it is definitely great to be in lots of romantic relationships we should recognize that these relationships don't automatically make us better people.  Our feelings aren't magically correct and righteousness does not spring from romantic attraction.

Unfortunately we too often seem to think that romantic love removes the need for us to behave well and grants some sort of infallibility when instead it magnifies the need for consideration and good deeds.

A demon placated

I have often talked about my money demon.  I think about it as a tiny red monster on my shoulder that is constantly yelling at me to never spend money, to buy the cheapest option, to be paranoid about debt.  It doesn't want me to cheat anyone else mind you because it sees that as debt and as such it is a thing to be desperately avoided.  It has been there as long as I can remember but sometimes it is sleeping, dormant sort of.  I know it is there during those times but its exhortations are silenced.  Back when I was in university the demon was at full strength but it took a long nap while I was working selling beds as I had more money than I had any pressing need for at the time.

Over the past eight years the demon has been agitated, bouncing around and shrieking at full volume.  This month though Wendy finished her PhD and got a job and the demon took this as a cue to sit down, relax, close its eyes for just a minute, and finally nod off.  This has been a pleasant change that influences all kinds of small things in my life.  I don't worry about bus fares anymore and I go out and spend a little money to go to a movie or something like that without feeling tense about it.  Best of all though my desperate need to balance the books between me and everyone else in the world has faded dramatically.  I no longer worry about incurring debt quite the same way.

That shouldn't be taken to mean that I am now going to become a spendthrift that tosses money around like water.  Even in the years when I was working and making good money I literally spent one third of my take home pay and put the rest aside for later - I am always going to be frugal.  This change is just a small alteration in my habits, a pulling back of fear and doubt, worry and stress.  The demon going to sleep means I can do things that are well within my means comfortably and buy things I need without concern, secure in the knowledge that my bank account is on the way up.  It is going up slowly but the demon only really gets excited about the direction of the money vector not the magnitude.

Some people frame my discipline surrounding money as a laudable virtue but I don't see it that way really.  It has its advantages but others often don't see the cost of having a demon on my shoulder all the time.  There is a perfect middle ground where one makes ideal long term decisions about money but is not subject to lots of extra stress and I go far beyond that most of the time.  I hope now that the demon is slumbering once again I can be sensible and disciplined without all the monetary paranoia that has so often dogged my steps throughout my life.

An insufficiency of broadness

Sometimes when when people hop online and turn on the flamethrower they hit too many people by accident.  On the other hand sometimes they hit far too few.  I read an article yesterday talking about the issues with radical revolutionary left wing politics written from the perspective of someone who had once been an ardent adherent but now is much more moderate.  The author's viewpoints these days are very similar to my own - radical leftist social policies without revolutionary or communist viewpoints.  She spent time talking about all the issues she saw with her particular former brand of radical left politics, namely dogmatism, groupthink, a crusader mentality, and anti intellectualism.

The thing to remember though is that these issues aren't something especially attributable to one branch of radical left wing politics.  They are present across humanity in pretty much every setting available.  People gather together with others who support their viewpoints, refuse to deem other ideas worthy of consideration, feel the desperate desire to convert everyone to their way of thinking, and dismiss any theory that speaks about nuance and situation instead of unequivocally supporting their position.

It isn't a crime to want to hang around people like yourself.  I don't exactly have a lot of close friends that believe in trickle down economics!  However, when in a group where everyone feels the same about something it is hard to avoid the tendency to dismiss all other opinions as ridiculous and that makes it hard to break away from a way of thinking even when it is sorely mistaken.  It is also very challenging for anyone to admit that they have doubts about the things their in group believes in because it will be seen as an attack on the righteousness of the group itself instead of a desire to refine and test ideas.

No matter if your group is held together by a love of pastries, communism, Tarantino movies, or Catholicism these trends are going to hold.  People will want to hear that their ideas are right, that anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong, that everyone ought to think this way, and that no theory is required to see the inherent rightness of their views.  When painting a particular group as problematic we really should take time to consider if the problems we see are unique to that particular group or if instead it is just that we have had more personal exposure to them.

So yes, the radical revolutionary left does have issues with dogmatism, groupthink, a crusader mentality, and anti intellectualism.  Everyone else does too though so if we are going to criticize a movement let us criticize their specific beliefs rather than employing ad hominem attacks that can quite reasonably be applied to nearly every group out there.

The thing to do

People often want to help out, to make the world a better place, but it is a damn tricky thing to figure out what sort of help is best and how much help exactly you need to deliver to feel good about yourself and be justified in putting your feet up and relaxing.  If I volunteer at the food bank is it enough, or should I be working a second job to have more money to donate to educating young girls in developing countries?  This article has some great thoughts and the beginnings of answers and it got me thinking a lot on this topic.

Simply put there will always be problems and no matter what any individual does everything will not be fixed.  That leads to decision paralysis and people giving up because they can never reach the point of feeling like they have done enough - there is no obvious signal to tell you it is time to head to the bar.  What we do have though is the knowledge that if everyone gave 10% of their income to effective charities we could wipe out pretty much all of the world issues easily solved with money immediately.  So there you go, we have a straightforward, measurable, reasonably achievable objective.

More is needed than that of course because you not only need to help but also avoid doing more damage in the first place.  Donating a lot of money to charity is obviously not a licence to go about saying "Dude, that is just so gay!" as an insult while maintaining impeccable moral standing.  You need to listen, learn, and adapt your habits to try to do less damage with your passing.  Giving charitably is a wonderful thing but no amount of it can remove the need to not be an asshole.

I had a discussion with Pounder awhile ago on this topic and he asked how I felt about the moral implications of someone who makes a lot of money and donates a huge amount of it to charity (Example:  $100,000 salary of which $30,000 is donated) when compared to someone like me who spends a lot of time yelling about social justice and puts in a few volunteer hours here and there.  I think the clear answer is that the $30,000 trumps my contribution in terms of raw efficacy but that doesn't translate necessarily into the moral high ground - after all, I have much less money to give.

This really reinforces a very important point about trying to improve the world:  People will contribute in any number of ways and as long as they are in fact helping we must respect those contributions even when they are not the contributions we would choose ourselves.  If you can't figure out if you are helping enough or how you should help that simple benchmark of 10% is a fantastic guide.  It isn't as though is it objectively right but it certainly meets the standard of being plenty good enough.