SDCumPup

My condolences on both the losses of your dear friends and your ability to further process this experience with the key participants you shared it with. I can certainly empathize with the loss of friends in the kink community who you’ve shared a special experience with, especially if you’ missed an opportunity for something more. *hugs*

Slight correction regarding the Catholic countries and their involvement in the Western Hemisphere, Spain, Portugal, and France all built numerous and extensive civilian colonial settlements throughout the territories they occupied. The Portuguese were limited entirely by treaty negotiated under the auspices of the pope and only had Brazil. The French, unlike the other European nations didn’t approach their venture by attempting to conquer, instead they attempted to cooperate and coordinate with the indigenous peoples which was a considerably slower process but far less costly. They were also dealings with some other issues back in Europe at the same time. The Spanish on the other hand went hog wild on the colonization of pretty much everywhere they could lay claim to. The entire state of California has a string of cities built around and named after mission churches built by the Spanish colonial powers. There’s an entire genre of architecture called Spanish Colonial Revival based on their buildings. Mexico City is a colonial city literally built on top of the previous Aztec city of Tenochtitlan. The cathedral in Mexico City is literally built right on top of the primary temple of Tenochtitlan. St Augustine, Fl is the oldest city in the United States and is a Spanish colonial city. There’s an entire string of theme parks called Six Flags which takes its name from the fact that several Southern states have had the flags of six different countries flying over them with Spain being one of them. They didn’t just come here mainly to exploit the resources. They didn’t treat the Americas like they treated subsaharan Africa. They came here deliberately for land to expand into. The Spanish conquistadors were promised land grants from the crown with titles of nobility to accompany them here.

I would like to point out that the Louisiana Purchase which was a sizable chunk of land that is now several of the states that make up the central portion of the continental United States was purchased from France. The French, much like the Dutch, didn’t conquer when they came to the Western Hemisphere as explorers and traders. Unlike the Spanish, Portuguese, and British, they legitimately did come here strictly to explore, set up trade networks, and build colonies where the indigenous populations would permit them to. Unlike the Dutch they did not attempt to barter for land, the French simply looked for potential locations and made certain that the indigenous peoples were OK with them establishing a colony or trading location there or if it would disrupt a preexisting local agreement. I’m uncertain about what the situation in Alaska was with regarding the Russians before they sold that to the US government. Of course the worst case wasn’t actually conquering so much as an illegal overthrow of a legitimate government at the request of private business interests owned by US citizens and enabled by the use of US military personnel. That would be the annexation of the kingdom of Hawaii btw. The sugar barons, all of them US citizens, who were private citizens and private business owners requested that the US government provide them with US Sailors and Marines in order to depose Queen Lili’uokalani the last and rightful monarch of the kingdom of Hawaii, establishing the short lived Republic of Hawaii, which very quickly became the US territory of Hawaii. A few decades later, after enough White people had moved to the islands to outvote the Native Hawaiians, it became our 50th state. I should also mention that the entire concept of there being separate races of Homo sapiens with vast differences that can be scientifically detected and measured is complete nonsense. It’s totally founded in the debunked pseudoscience of eugenics and has absolutely zero scientific evidence supporting. There is only a single extant species of human today, Homo sapien, and there are no subspecies within that species. The distinctions that are detectable are quite literally only skin deep, and that’s it. They’re pretty much just limited to the amount of melanin that is present in the epidermis, the way in which the hair grows, and eye color. There are a couple of things like sickle cell anemia which is more common in people whose ancestors were from areas that had large amounts of malaria, but that’s related to the fact that malaria was present and nothing else. Since malaria was extremely widespread from Africa to the Middle East, and the entire Mediterranean basin, that’s going to include a huge number of people. A couple of other extremely location specific adaptations have arisen in particular populations, but again that’s more because of the specific location than anything else. This whole argument about immigration is nothing more than racism based on pseudoscience mixed with xenophobia and nationalism. No nationalism isn’t patriotism, and it isn’t better than patriotism either. It’s worse than patriotism, and it’s actually worse than hating your own country. Nationalism is worse than hating your own country because, when you hate your country at least you’re able to notice & acknowledge when it’s making a mistake. Nationalists are simply incapable of recognizing that their country is even capable of making mistakes in the first place, let alone recognizing that it’s making one in the moment. Thus when it’s doing exactly that there’s no one to keep it from going past the point of no return. Nationalists always doom themselves to failure and defeat, ALWAYS. They can’t see their own mistakes, so they can’t learn from them, they can’t improve themselves, and they can’t think outside of their own tiny little boxes, or I should say echo chambers. They wallow in groupthink and don’t understand that they’re stuck. That’s why they don’t understand that diversity actually is a strength. They view it as a weakness, but their ideology of having everyone assimilate into one homogeneous culture is the weakness. If everyone looks, talks, thinks, acts, and believes the same and a problem is encountered, what happens when they try everything they can think of and none of it works?

Hell I call myself a faggot while getting pounded and fisted.

I know that this is several months old, and all of that, but I have wanted to add some perspective to this discussion from a bit of distance. I don’t intend any offense or insult to anyone involved with the original discussion, quite the opposite I’m simply hoping that since some time has passed and some grieving has occurred, it can be assessed and processed in a new light. Both Ellentonboy and Brian Bonds brought up valid points in their respective posts, but each of them also reacted to the behaviors of others with anger which is extremely common during the grieving process. Neither of them did anything wrong, they were just humans being human. Ellentonboy mentioned that Brian had no idea how someone else was connected with the deceased, and that’s true, even Brian somewhat acknowledged that in his own post before making statements that Ellentonboy disagreed with. I find that Brian’s message was a little mixed there, and he really didn’t have the right to demand that other people behave in specific ways. No one has the right to dictate how another person gets to behave , thus it would have been better if Brian had worded it as a suggestion. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened, he was dealing with his own grief over the death of a friend of his and when humans grieve we often get angry for no reason and lash out at anyone and everyone for no discernible explanation. It’s just something that humans do, as if it’s hardwired into our brains. Brian Bonds did make a good point though, about what is generally considered appropriate or inappropriate as a topic of public discussion when someone has just died. Ellentonboy’s discussion of Colton’s music career was completely appropriate for public discourse, and I would think wholly welcome by both Brian and the late Colton. Remembering the person who has just passed through something that brought joy to a wider audience than another career they had pursued would have been the preferred choice for many such artists I think regardless of what that alternate career was. In fact, just before responding to these posts I was thinking about what I would have written at the time, and I include it below … Colton Ford was, like all people, a complex human being, who definitely marched to the beat of his own drum. The beauty of it is that he decided to share that with the world by changing gears and launching a music career. Thank you, Glenn, you were truly a wonderful person who was genuinely kind and true pleasure to be around. You are sorely missed.

He was born in the US, making him a citizen by birth thus he can’t be deported. However he did grow up in South America and would travel back and forth as an adult.

So far no one has come across any sort of death certificate or obituary for him under his real name anywhere either here in North America or in South America. He was born in the US but grew up in South America before returning as an adult. What the reality is no one knows.

I wonder why the Department of Education has never fully succeeded? Let’s see, it was created under Jimmy Carter, who was replaced shortly thereafter by Ronald Reagan. Reagan was all about slashing the budget as far as some discretionary spending went, but not the areas where it really should have been cut, which simply rewarded large government contractors. Reagan had also teamed up with Pat Robertson’s “Christian Coalition” and Jerry Falwell Sr’s “Moral Majority”, both extremely conservative Evangelical Christian organizations which either directly or via subsequent organizations have pushed an anti-intellectualism agenda for decades. On top of that they’ve pushed for public funding for private Christian K-12 schools for decades as well, barring that they have strongly encouraged Evangelical Christian parents to homeschool their children and have produced their own curricula for this purpose, these curricula it should be noted are extremely substandard as far as the quality of the information they contain. Add to this the fact that the GOP has consistently cut funding to the Department of Education at every opportunity they’ve been able to locate ever since it was established. Finally, there was the absolute disaster that was the George W Bush admin’s program called “No Child Left Behind” which forced teachers to pass students at the end of the year even though those same exact students were failing so badly that they couldn’t grasp a single concept in the curriculum. Even now the Congressional Republicans have been voting to cut more and more funding from educational programs around the country, including programs that provide free lunch to students who need it. They would literally have students go hungry and fail because of that than see the Department of Education actually succeed at any aspect of their job. That’s not a failure within the Department of Education! That’s a massive failure within the Republican Party!