BootmanLA

I honestly don't know what Harris' position on Israel v. Hamas is, though I assume she's at least nominally in favor of a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians, whomever ends up being their leader. That said, I don't think Netanyahu has any intention of allowing a two-state solution - he won't come out and say "Never" or "Over my dead body", but that's essentially his position given the way he keeps expanding settlements in the West Bank and further cordoning off Palestinian towns and cities from one another. But I do know this: If allowed to return to office, Trump will gladly allow Netanyahu to take whatever steps he wants in Palestine, and will exercise the US's veto on the Security Council to ensure that Israel pays no price for it. For a movement with a huge antisemitic and anti-globalist base, his party sure seems indebted to people like Miriam Adelson and other prominent supporters of Israel, including many who support giving the entirety of historical Israel in the region over to the Israeli state. Harris cannot be worse than that. And in a binary choice, while I might push her harder once elected to limit our support of what's becoming a genocidal state, I'd still vote for her.

Scientists have unveiled a potential treatment for HIV infection, about to enter human testing, that could radically change the way HIV is treated. In experiments with monkeys infected with a primate version of HIV that usually kills within weeks, the scientists injected each monkey with the new treatment, called Therapeutic Interfering Particles, or TIPs. The TIPs infect a cell that contains HIV, causing it to burst open, but releasing several times as many TIPs as HIV particles. The single injection quickly reduced HIV in the monkeys by a factor of 10,000. Moreover, at least in monkeys, it appears that one dose is enough, period - not daily, weekly, monthly, or whatever - a single dose. Obviously in humans it might require boosters, but even that would be far less repetitive and prone to failure if doses were missed. More here: [think before following links] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/08/science/engineered-virus-steals-proteins-from-hiv.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Bk4.BW3J.YFiQkeBu9_du&smid=url-share

NTA. And I say this as someone who'd probably end up in the same situation as that guy, as I'm painfully reluctant to "make the move" in person. I recognize that in situations where there's any sort of competition for [whatever], I'm more likely than not to lose out. But I recognize that's my problem, not the problem of the guy(s) who move faster or more assertively. As you correctly assessed, he's looking for someone to blame for his own shortcomings. He needs to look inward.

I think it's perfectly OK to fly any of the LGBTQ+ flags for a Pride event. It might be considered a little odd if you flew one you weren't affiliated with (directly) on a year-round basis, but even then, there's no gatekeeper organization that determines who "gets" to fly particular flags.

Again, just because your cell phone is *connecting* to a tower in Chicago doesn't mean that it's getting its *IP Address* from Chicago, or even from Illinois. An internet service provider (which your cell phone company is, insofar as you can use it to access the internet) can distribute its infrastructure anywhere. For fast responsiveness, that infrastructure is (usually) distributed around the country, so that the ISP can determine where you're located and get the relevant IP address to bestow on your device fairly quickly. Given Chicago's proximity to the Indiana state line, it's very possible that your phone service provider's nearest DHCP server farm is in that state. Conversely, when you're on WiFi, the ISP who provides the wired signal to your facility (office, home, coffee shop, whatever) will provide you an IP address from ITS infrastructure, which may be somewhere else entirely.

Yes, and I should have been more precise, so thank you for the correction. I was strictly comparing "safety to be openly gay" between western countries (in general) and the Middle East (in general). I would say in most of the west (the US especially excepted), police brutality is less of an issue in the West than the Middle East. As far as gun violence is concerned, again, most of the West, the US specifically excepted, is pretty safe, though I can't compare it to the Middle East for lack of information. I'm fairly certain that gun violence in the U.S. is worse than any other first-world Western nation, by a long shot.

Billy Bean, a former MLB player for the Detroit Tigers, Los Angeles Dodgers, and San Diego Padres, who after coming out served as MLB's "ambassador for inclusion" and later Senior Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, died Tuesday of acute myeloid leukemia. He was 60. Bean was only the second major league player to come out of the closet. He came out publicly in 1999 in an interview with the Miami Herald, and later wrote a memoir, Going the Other Way, in collaboration with journalist Chris Bull.

App providers can't offer asylum. They can't offer police/security protection. They ARE providing awareness about risk reduction, by making it harder for bad actors to figure out they're gay by using geolocation to target them. For fuck's sake, they KNOW it's not safe to be gay - they already LIVE that back home. The idea that we should present a false idea that hey, it's completely safe to use geolocation even though the secret police are probably using it to see how many users it can identify in the dorm housing their athletes, because getting you laid is a lot more important than ACTUALLY keeping you safe, is just stupidity. Sheer stupidity.

I've seen some really dumb takes on things this week but this - so far - takes the cake. 1. The west is still much safer a place to be, overall, than virtually any country in the Middle East. 2. The fact that the west is till not perfect - and moreover, is going to have lots of morality police types from "back home" trying to catch these athletes in compromised situations - means that, contrary to your bleating, Grindr is proactively taking steps to make it HARDER for the morality police to target their countrymen while in a foreign country. Whereas in many of those countries, the Secret Police would RELY on those geolocation features to pinpoint where gay men are so they can arrest, torture, and kill them. Maybe I'm naive but I think when presented with the choice of an app that isn't fully featured but which is making proactive steps to protect these foreign athletes from danger back home, vs. an app that exposes their location to a level that could easily be used to target them, most would choose the former.

The people it's meant to reach got it.

This was discussed ad nauseum in one of the porn threads. Bottom line is that some guys like to see the cum shot, even their own, and so they pull out. Some don't. If it's important to you to take the load in your ass, TELL THE FUCKING TOP BEFOREHAND. Expecting him to read your mind and know what you want and what will be "a disappointment" is lame.

Thank you - me too. This is just one more variant on "REAL bottoms do THIS" or "REAL tops do THAT", which is just another subset of "REAL gay people do SOMETHING ELSE." None of us are gatekeepers of what kind of underwear are appropriate for any particular proclivity, and it's just - well - pointless.

I sort of agree, with a major exception: any population, whether defined by national origin, ethnicity, religion, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, or whatever, gets a veto over names bestowed by those outside the community. The various indigenous peoples of the Americas never consented to being called "Indians" (nor, in fact, were they consulted about lumping them all into one huge category). Many such terms applied by the white majority in power were (and/or are) intended as pejorative at best, vile slurs at worst. In such cases, there's no agree to disagree; we call people what they ask to be called.

If your local paper is a weekly, that's understandable, because (IIRC) you live in a relatively small community, where weekly or semi-weekly papers have long been the norm. But there are plenty of people who live in a substantially larger (population-wise, that is) area and yet there is virtually no local news coverage - nobody to cover the local city council, school board, or county governing body on a regular basis. If there is, it's steno journalism - just writing down the surface appearances and never doing any digging, because in a month that person will be covering something else entirely.

Part of that is the demise of actual local news. When I became an adult, most decent-sized cities (say, >100,000 people) in the U.S. had a daily newspaper that usually had at least 8-10 major articles of local/state importance. If the city was larger than, say, 250,000 people, it not infrequently had two such papers (often one morning paper and one afternoon paper), and even when the two papers were owned by one company, the papers themselves competed to break stories quickly and thoroughly. When they were owned by separate companies, the competition was even fiercer. While the New York Times and the Washington Post have long been the two biggest "national" newspapers, there were several others that filled a similar role - the Houston Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner, the Dallas Morning News, and more. Weekend editions of each were almost an inch thick (granted, with lots of inserts and ads, but still), and even the daily editions had 50-60 pages of mixed ads and news. At the same time, most larger cities had TV stations affiliated with the three major networks (CBS, NBC, ABC), and invariably those local stations had early morning local news, evening news, and late night news, and many also had a noon news show. Local radio stations might also be owned by the same company as a local TV station (or newspaper), and the radio station would have news breaks that were fed information from the TV or newspaper reporters. There are many reasons why those things have broken down, but the bottom line is that many cities barely have a single local newspaper at all. Major companies like Gannett have bought up scores of local papers and replaced the collective army of reporters those papers once had with a handful of stenographers who dutifully transcribe press releases and a handful of right-wing writers who reflect the company line. Likewise, big companies are buying up local TV stations and replacing the local news with less relevant information (because doing the digging to cover local stories, especially political ones, is expensive). Radio is almost 100% nationalized, except for public radio stations, and while the national public radio networks (NPR, APM, PRI, etc.) do excellent coverage of national and international issues, it falls to struggling local affiliates to cover local news, the quality of which varies tremendously. Part of that is due to the internet. Papers were cheap because of economies of scale and advertising underwriting the majority of the cost, but once the internet started letting companies market much cheaper, if less effectively, the days of multi-page ads in the papers was over. Direct shopping has all but killed department stores, which used to take out those multi-page ads. Classifieds went by the wayside as people found much cheaper ways to sell stuff. And so on. Those of us who still have a locally-owned newspaper that is committed to covering local politics and government are exceptionally fortunate. Sadly, there are fewer and fewer of us in that situation, and we've now raised at least an entire generation who has no idea what that looks like.

If you were writing in Hindi, or any other language where the concepts of "choose to be gay" and "choose to be out" are expressed with the same words, then it might be "technically correct." But in English, if you use the first phrase to mean the second, then you're not technically correct at all. It's a mistranslation of a concept, at best. That said - given that it's an error of phrasing, not an attempt to mislead, just accept the "L" and move on. I can assure you that if I were to try to translate a very specific thought into Hindi (or Bengali or Sanskrit or Tamil or anything else), I would probably make a mistake as well, perhaps an egregious one; and if I did, I'd certainly do the same.

If you believe he's bad and evil, then do you also believe you have zero responsibility to help stop him from becoming president again? Or do you think you get to be a free rider, hoping everyone else will make sure he doesn't get into office, but not being willing to sully yourself by voting for a less-than-perfect alternative?

No, it's not. When you make an allegation like that, especially one as untethered from reality as you seem to be, it's incumbent on YOU to defend your crazy thesis. Otherwise, it's just the opinion of one .... well, I'd say one "what" but I'd probably deservedly get penalized.

I'm sorry, but no, you were not correct, technically or otherwise. I suspect, based on your postings, that you are French-Canadian, and you are attempting to translate a thought in French into English. But you mistranslated, as far as I can tell. What I think you MEANT to say is that someone can choose to ACT gay, or to BE OPENLY gay, but the English words you used - "choose to be gay" have a very, very specific meaning, and it's simply untrue. And again, to be fair, this distinction may not be readily apparent to someone translating from one language to another. I have a passing ability to read some basic French, and a bit more Spanish, but I know well enough to know that anything I wrote in either language would be subject to contextual errors, perhaps egregious ones. I wouldn't be "technically" correct - I'd be wrong.

@brnbk You said "choosing to be gay". Those are your words. I am not sure if English is not your first language, but those words mean exactly that: choosing to be gay. If, instead, you mean "Choosing to be OPENLY gay" or "Choosing to be OPEN about being gay", that is something entirely different. I'm amenable to chalking this up to a language difficulty, but there's no "other meaning" to "choosing to be gay"; it means someone who made the choice to be attracted to the same sex. And that simply doesn't happen.

I reject your previous post because of its blathering nonsense, positing something demonstrably untrue (that this guy was typical of Democrats) and then using that demonstrably false statement to whine and plead for the attention you crave. You aren't worth it.

I suppose that if one believes that one ONLY votes for someone whom you absolutely support, then voting third party or not voting makes a certain amount of sense. I call this the masturbatory method of candidate selection: you go with the one who makes you feel really, really good, for a brief moment when you're casting that vote. And like any other masturbatory moment, it passes, and you don't get to feel that way again for another four years. It's incredibly self-centered but hey, people are allowed to be self-centered. Certainly Trump is. If one cares about the actual results, however - given that either A or B is going to be in office, then the responsible civic thing is to vote for the candidate you feel will be better than the other, even if you're unexcited about him/her. I'm in the latter camp. I'm not going to tell anyone that they can't belong to the first group, but I am going to remind those people every fucking minute if the worse candidate scrapes by into office, whenever they complain about ANYTHING that administration is doing.

@BlackDude - I can't disagree with much of what you've written. But I would note, as I have many times before: if you don't want Trump as president, and you don't vote for his principal opponent (and live in a state that could go either way), you're basically voting for him anyway. I don't mean this as a civics lecture, but when we vote for or against a ballot proposition of some sort, we can choose "yes" or "no" (or "for" vs. "against", depending on wording). With votes for a candidate, in a system (like that for president) where only one of two people has any chance of election, not voting for the (even marginally) better candidate is roughly equivalent to casting half a vote for the worse candidate. I think - and you may disagree, of course - that Trump represents a clear, present, and unique danger to the United States. If he is returned to office, I think most of the norms we have depended on to keep government effective for us will be shattered. If he replaces a resigning Thomas or Alito (or both) with another under-50 justice like Barrett, we could be facing 30+ years before the Supreme Court can be returned to some semblance of sanity. If Kagan or Sotomayor has to retire for health reasons, we could be looking at a 7-2 Conservative Supreme Court for 40 years. I get that some people feel like they have to be "motivated" to vote for someone, otherwise they withhold their vote. And that's certainly one way to look at it. But I have no patience for anyone who does that, and then complains because the worse candidate, who they helped elect through refusing to vote against him, pushes through something truly awful. And it's especially important this election, where our future is at stake.

I believe that the point is not that she was in "a sorority" but she was in the oldest Black sorority in the country. She was a member in the early 80's, and my understanding (though I could be mistaken) is that the sorority at the time was effectively (if not legally) restricted to Black women. In other words, she was Black enough for AKA, which is pretty strong evidence she was considered Black at the time, even if she was also considered Asian.

Some random thoughts on both Kamala Harris's racial identity and Pete Buttigieg's sexual orientation: Harris has always, to my knowledge, acknowledged that she is part Black and part (south) Asian. In fact, I seem to recall - though I could be wrong - that in some of her early local races (when she was an official in San Francisco) that she touted this as an advantage, having been exposed to multiple cultures growing up, and being judged for her assumed identity as part of those cultures. For Orange Julius to latch onto a few instances where she focused on her Indian heritage and decry her as "not Black" not only reveals his inherent racism (and limited intellect), but overlooks the long history of racial identity in this country, where having one great-great-grandparent who was Black was enough to have you declared "Black" in many states. That had significant repercussions in an era of ostensibly "separate but equal" meant the racial identity handed you by the government, as opposed to the one you defined for yourself, either granted you access to certain things or blocked you. I'm not a supporter of pure race-identity politics, where the assumption is that people should vote for a candidate simply because of his or her race. And yet, I do think race is a relevant factor - not because I think people of a particular race are better suited for certain positions, or because people of some other race or not suited for it. Rather, I think that for offices that have historically been held only by people from a particular group - typically, straight white Christian men - opening those offices to qualified people who don't fit that mold can only improve things - because their perspectives as someone from outside the typical governing class can change the way government works. As a simple example from decades ago: Lindy Boggs, the first woman to represent Louisiana in Congress in decades, served on the Banking Committee, and when the committee was marking up the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (which barred discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or national origin in granting credit), she quietly took her copy, added "sex" and "marital status" to the bill, and made copies for all the other members. Then she told them "Knowing the members composing this committee as well as I do, I'm sure it was just an oversight that we didn't have 'sex' or 'marital status' included. I've taken care of that, and I trust it meets with the committee's approval." She was the most junior member of the committee, but her late husband had been the Democratic Majority Leader at the time of his death (and in line to become Speaker), and no one wanted to cross her. The fact that married women can have credit in their own names is directly due to her intervention, something none of the men on the committee had thought about. The same is true when it's not sex, but race, or sexual identity or orientation, or religion, that's the issue. Gay men and lesbians are going to think of how things will affect other gay men and lesbians, even if straight people might not. So having a variety of perspectives among our elected officials is important, and in my view, it rises to the level of a qualification for office. There's this myth we have in this country (and possibly elsewhere, though I can't speak for that) that there is always a single "best" person for a job, an office, or whatever, and we need to focus solely on finding that "best" person. The reality is that rarely is "best" necessary; there's a threshold of "good enough" that needs to be met, and beyond that, a host of other factors can (and should) be considered. Race, sex, sexual orientation, and so forth are among those - not that we should always vote for "one of our own", but that we should strive to see that there's diversity. Because diversity of experience means diversity of viewpoint, and engaging with diverse viewpoints is always preferable to just continuing with the same old same old.