BootmanLA

I'm not sure I understand 100% here. You're on a road trip, and when you reach your destination, your partner is staying there (his home base) for a couple of months, while you return to where you live, right? Or are you saying you're on a road trip, and you'll both return to where you live, then he's heading home for two months? If it's the first option, then no problem: you'll be able to play with those other guys on your way home, and for now you can focus on your partner during your time before "the goodbye". If it's the latter option, ASK. Tell him you want to spend as much time together as possible, but being on the road is a rare opportunity to play with others together, and see what he says. Tell him you're not urging it, but just noting it's an option. If he doesn't want to, you can drop it, focus on him, and go back to sex with others once he's gone for a couple of months. In my view: if two guys are in an open relationship and each has *reasonably ample* opportunity to play with others, time with the partner should almost always take precedence over outside play. For me, reasonably ample doesn't mean you get to play with every single guy who shows interest, but that you get enough on the outside that you don't feel stifled on the inside.

You may want to think long and hard about that. Right now, supposedly, he's undetectable. You can't be 100% certain that he'd tell you if that changed. I'm not suggesting he's not trustworthy; I'm saying that ANY man might turn out to be not trustworthy, and right now, if you're having unprotected sex with him, it's only safe as long as he stays in that condition. What if he decides it would be hot to see you become poz, and he stops taking his meds for six months, but keeps breeding you? What if he develops a resistance to the meds he's on, and doesn't find out about it until months later, when he goes in for a check up and he learns he's now very much detectable? I do agree that keeping you off PrEP is his way of controlling you. But I don't think that's a particularly healthy way to do it. You're the one bearing 100% of the risk if he decides to become detectable, if he becomes detectable without his awareness, if you slip up and succumb to temptation, or whatever. And he's restricting you from doing the ONE thing that could protect YOUR health. If I were in your shoes, that would be a dealbreaker for me.

Very non-helpful advice. It's fine if the couple is in an open relationship, but advising someone who's not to cheat is, to put it politely, ethically challenged (and to put it bluntly, a shitty thing to do).

The exact formulas for how many posts and how long a member = how much freedom to participate aren't published anywhere. The site owner set that up, presumably deliberately, to prevent people from gaming the system to try to get to higher levels faster (to then cause trouble). The universal recommendation is to keep posting and participate in the forums. Find things that interest you and comment on them. The more you do, and the longer you do it, the faster you "level up" (in gaming terms). Your posts don't have to be masterpieces of insightful thought, but you'll get a better reputation, I suspect (even if it doesn't directly impact your level) if you put a bit of thought into what you write. The thing about this site is that it's not primarily, at heart, a hook-up site. There is a personals section, divided geographically, but most of the interactions are topical and discussion-based rather than "looking for someone to fill this hole". That's why the system requires participation in order to advance to the levels where you can interact more directly with other members.

I'm not intolerant of people who think it should "still be Boystown". I understand very much the desire to keep things the same. I've simply pointed out that it should also be understandable why a significant portion of the community might find it non-inclusive, and my personal belief (and yes, it's just an opinion) that inclusivity is a higher value than sentimental tradition. I'm tolerant of those who feel differently, even if I think they're valuing something trivial.

Here's another point that Barrett's non-answering glossed over: Even if you don't think a particular case challenging a prior decision is ever going to reach the court, refusing (internally) to accept that prior decision as fixed precedent means you can be aggressive at limiting its reach. Barrett noted a couple of cases that she classified as "super precedent", by which she meant they were so widely cited and the basis for so many further decisions that they could never be overturned. Among those she included Marbury v. Madison (establishing the principle of judicial review) and Brown v. Board of Education (striking down "separate but equal"). One case she refused to comment on was a case from 1965 called Griswold v. Connecticut. At that time, Connecticut state law forbid the sale of contraceptives, even to married couples. In striking down that law, the Supreme Court found that there was, inherent in the Constitution, a right to privacy that was not precisely defined, but which (at a minimum) encompassed the right of a married couple to control their own procreation. They clarified this right had been described, in various terms, in earlier cases such as affirming the right of parents to control the upbringing of their children. It's true that it's essentially inconceivable that any state, in the 21st century, would ever try to pass a law like this again (the one in question had been enacted in 1873 and was almost never enforced). But that's not the important part. This case, establishing a right to privacy over certain aspects of one's life, serves as the underpinning of numerous other decisions, including Roe v. Wade, Lawrence v. Texas (barring states from criminalizing private, consensual gay sex), and Obergefell. If you reject Griswold - if you refuse to acknowledge it as a precedent that can't be overturned, like Brown or Marbury, it may not mean you'd overturn the decision or that it's likely a challenge urging overturning it would come up. But if you reject its central holding - as some "textualists" like Barrett do - then you have no reason to ever, ever find that any other situation presents a right to privacy. At a minimum, you put that decision in a storage box, never to be used as the starting point for future cases. Say, for instance, a state passes a law that refuses to recognize a sex-change for legal purposes. Using Griswold as a guide, you would probably hold that such laws are unconstitutional, as there's little that could be more private than how you define yourself genderwise. But reject Griswold, and suddenly there's nothing to hang that opinion on in prior law; you just say that Griswold's holding applies to the facts of that case alone. In fact, five textualists can argue that the constitution is completely silent on that issue and so states can do as they please, even though you haven't overturned Griswold at all. That's why answers like hers are so disingenuous and dangerous. There are already two justices on the court - Alito and Thomas - who have on multiple occasions called for abandoning precedents they think were wrongly decided. Kavanaugh has exhibited some tendencies in that direction and so has Gorsuch, though less so. Add Barrett into the mix and you have five justices who are solidly committed to sharply limiting, if not outright overturning, any precedents they don't like, with the exception of a few "super-precedents", the criteria for which are poorly defined. This isn't to say she should isn't qualified to be a justice (that's a separate argument). It's to say that she is going to shift the balance on the court dramatically, and yes, gay rights issues are likely to be in the crosshairs of this Court's decisions.

Based on this post, here's what you don't understand about the Supreme Court and overturning precedent. Yes, it's true that a case has to make it up to the Supreme Court, through either all the levels of a state court system, or through both a federal district court and the appellate court above it. So no, nobody's likely to sue the state of New Jersey claiming same-sex marriage is inherently unconstitutional and get a ruling that makes its way to the Court to overturn Obergefell (the same-sex marriage decision). But there are many other ways to challenge it and undermine it until the decision falls on its own. For instance, let's say I own a reception hall rental facility, and I refuse to rent to a same-sex couple for their reception because they're gay. The federal district court rules against me, saying I have no right to discriminate based on the sexes of the people getting married. I live in a state under a progressive appeals court - say, the Ninth Circuit - and that court upholds the district court, saying that companies cannot treat different marriages differently as long as they're legal. At the same time, someone in the same situation across the country is also sued for the same reason. But he lives in the notoriously conservative Fifth Circuit, and that court rules that even though the state can't stop the couple from getting married, private companies are free to treat those marriages differently. Now you have what's called a circuit split, which is the most common reason the Supreme Court takes up cases, as they aim for uniformity of federal law across the country. So they take the case, and Alito, Thomas, Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Roberts decide to parse the Obergefell decision carefully. Sure, they say - states cannot actually prohibit same-sex marriage. But they note that the FACT of being married and the BENEFITS of being married are not the same thing, and that states treat married couples differently based on different factors. For instance, they might note, a state might (as mine does) give a married couple a property tax freeze on all property taxes once they reach the age of 65. So two married couples get treated differently based on some factor other than that they are married (ie age). Or, they might note, a state might (as mine does) place restrictions on how a divorcing married couple must divide community assets, like a retirement account that is nominally in one person's name, based on how long the couple was married. If you're married more than ten years, for instance, the account must be divided in a divorce between the spouses like any other community property. So the state treats couples differently based on length of marriage. Under those circumstances, the conservative bloc might say, states can clearly decide what benefits, if any, attach to WHICH KINDS of marriages, as can private companies (if the government can do it, certainly private companies can). And in one swoop, they gut Obergefell. Sure, you can get married in all 50 states. But Alabama? You're free to pass laws that say same-sex couples don't have automatic visitation rights in hospitals. Texas? You can pass a law that says same-sex couples don't qualify for family coverage under state employee group benefits plans. Louisiana? Those broad community-property laws you have under your Civil Code don't have to apply to same-sex marriages. In other words, if they're determined to gut a ruling, they can find a way. Once they've sufficiently gutted the ruling, it may not matter if it still stands but without practical effect.

I pointed out that Biden's use of "inshallah" wasn't a coded signal for support of Shariah Law or anything else the nutball right wing seems to think it was, and you called me "intolerant" in response. You were, as I read it, effectively endorsing the position of those nutcases that one can't use an Arabic phrase without it being a sign that one is secretly controlled by some Islamic cabal. If that's not what you meant, fine. I still don't see where I'm intolerant of anything except other people's intolerance. Being a tolerant person does not mean accepting other people's intolerance, especially when it's based strictly on religious bigotry.

ChiBtm2Breed is one of those seriously intolerant people who thinks gays and lesbians have to reject all Muslims because some of their leadership in some Muslim-majority countries are highly intolerant of homosexuality. And laughingly, he has the nerve to suggest that if we object to that broad brush-painting, we are the intolerant ones. He's just another bigot.

What that tells me is that you're not naturally submissive; you're naturally anti-confrontational. A truly submissive person knows he has a choice, and chooses to submit. Someone non-confrontational pretends he has no choice so that he avoids confrontation.

Anyone can ask you to do anything, whether or not it's legal for you to do what they ask. In a prior post on another topic, you bragged about having "voted both sides and still in the middle". Were you referring to voting in another country, where it's legal for you to do so? Or was that a confession that you vote illegally here? In that topic, you also made a comment about what "this country" needs to do, electorally - do you think that's really appropriate if you aren't a citizen? I have no idea where you ARE a citizen, but I can assure you I'm not going to tell the voters of that country how they need to vote. In yet another post, you referred to the United States of America as "our country". If you are not a citizen, why do you consider this "our country"?

Stay sober. If you do, you'll remember it. Case closed.

"normal" is the most useless word I can think of to describe human behavior in cases like this. You have choices: 1. Ask him to shower/clean up after sex with others so that your time with him is free of reminders of other men. If you don't, you can 2. Accept that this is how he treats his partners, and cope with it, or 3. Break up with him. Wondering if it's "normal" is a stupid, pointless waste of time. It doesn't matter if that's what 99.99% of other couples do, or if he's the only one. It's what you two do, and what you accept from each other, that matters. Period.

It's important to note several things which make this posting completely out of date. First, the Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 DOES protect people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, ruling that both are covered in the plain English meaning of the word "sex". The referenced brief from August 23, 2019 had already been rejected by the court's opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County. Second, there are only three liberal appointees currently, and only one can plausibly be described as "elderly" - Justice Breyer (age 82). The other two liberals are Sotomayor (age 66) and Kagan (age 60). By contrast, on the conservative side, Thomas is 72, Alito is 70, and Roberts is 65 - so all three are as likely or more so to face health issues during the next term or two. In fact, if Biden wins and the Senate flips to the Democrats, I hope fervently that Breyer retires at the end of this Court term so that he can be replaced. I'd never hope that Thomas (who is obese, but not in ill health as far as is known) dies suddenly or anything, but it would not break my heart to see him incapacitated in some way that forced his resignation.

Even better, Rawtop: the precedent you're referring to is from this past June - and it was a 6-3 decision written by Justice Gorsuch, who was joined by Chief Justice Roberts. So for now, at least, THAT precedent is safe from Barrett, even though I'm pretty sure she'd vote to overturn it in a heartbeat.

The sad thing is that so many people buy into the garbage take that Republicans are fiscally cautious and Democrats profligate spenders. The real truth is that at least since Reagan tripled the deficit under his watch, Republicans have always spent like frat boys trying to get a coed drunk to rape at a frat house party while cutting taxes so that the deficit and debt skyrocket. They end up causing a recession, which a Democrat gets elected to clean up, and of course then Republicans fight tooth and nail against spending any money to help repair the damage and then point to the deficit and debt as "proof" that Democrats are bad at governmental finance.

Simply not true. Perhaps you do not understand what a recession or a depression is. A recession is two or more consecutive quarters in which economic growth is negative, ie the economy produces fewer goods and services than it did before. That's a nice, clean definition accepted by governmental economists across the spectrum. By that measure, there was a brief recession in early 1980, lasting the first two quarters of the year. GDP decline, peak to trough, during this recession was 2.2%. That recession was over five months before Reagan was even elected. By contrast, you can look at the 1973-1975 recession under Republican Gerald Ford, which lasted sixteen months and during which the economy declined 3.2%. Or look at the Reagan recession, which also lasted sixteen months, from July 1981 through November 1982 and during which GDP shrank 2.7%. We had THREE recessions under Eisenhower - ten months in 1953, where the GDP fell 2.6%; eight months, in late 1957-early 1958, GDP falling a whopping 3.7%; and another 10 months starting in the spring of 1960 where the GDP lost another 1.6%. Jumping forward, GHW Bush presided over a recession from July of 1990 through March of 1991, including the GDP losing 1.4%. Clinton's entire presidency consisted of economic growth, every quarter. Under G.W. Bush, he had two recessions, one at the start of his presidency (8 months, fairly mild at 0.3% loss) and one at the end (disaster, lasting 18 months and a GDP fall of 5.1%). So no, the one short, mild recession in Carter's term was in no way the largest since WWII. Not even close to the *average* Republican recession since WWII.

Strictly speaking, the info for 2001 to 2009 is incorrect. The Democrats held the Senate for most of 2001 and all of 2002. It was "most" because when Congress was seated in January 2001, the Senate was tied 50/50 with Dick Cheney, as VP/President of the Senate, the tiebreaking vote. That summer, Republican Jim Jeffords of Vermont switched from Republican to Independent and announced he would caucus with the Democrats, giving them 51-49 control. In 2003 Republicans reclaimed the Senate, and held it until 2007. In the midterm elections of 2006, the Democrats reclaimed the majority in both the House and Senate for the remainder of GW Bush's term. That said, the seeds of the Great Recession had already been sown and they sprouted well before Bush left office.

Will do.

FWIW, I've voted for Republicans for president, for governor, and for senator in the past, though not every election. The GOP lost my presidential vote during the first GWB term and my vote for governor while Piyush Booby Jindal was our governor. I've never voted for either of our two GOP senators because they're both major hacks and fakes. Now, with Trump, I will not vote for a Republican for dogcatcher, or any other office, until every last Trump enabler has been removed from office. As I have repeatedly stated, I don't care if the Democratic nominee is a) Joe Biden b) the reanimated zombie corpse of Adlai Stevenson c) a dented can of pork and beans on the discount sale rack at Dollar Tree I'm voting for the Democrat. Period.

I applaud you and hope you do this. Here's where your original thought process has some - though not a lot - of merit. It's true that neither candidate ever campaigns much in Wyoming, because it's pretty much a given that under the EC, it's always going to go Republican. That's just the kind of people who live there. That's three electoral votes the Republican can count on without lifting a finger. Likewise, Republicans almost never campaign in Vermont, because the state is solidly progressive and the only Republicans to win there are fairly liberal ones, like its current governor. The last GOP presidential candidate to win there was GHW Bush, and that only by a small margin. That's 3 electoral votes for the Democrat. On the other end of the scale: very little campaigning (as opposed to fundraising) has taken place historically in California, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, or Michigan, because those states were considered "locks" by one party or the other. You could, on election night, one second after the polls closed, award those states to one or the other candidate and have no worries you might look foolish later as the results came in. In addition to those nine, one other state in the top ten, population-wise, DOES get lots of attention (Florida), because elections are often close there and the state has gone back and forth between Republicans and Democrats repeatedly over the last 30-40 years. All the actual campaigning and spending was targeted at a handful of states: those that could flip either way and had a history of doing so, and especially if they had more than 3 or 4 electoral votes. Indiana used to be one. Iowa was one. One of the things Trump did, in 2016, was push additional states into play, especially Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, all of which he won by infinitesimally small margins relative to the overall vote. But they collectively had 46 votes, enough to put him over the top. That was a campaigning mistake Clinton made and I certainly can't defend it, other than to say that as none of those states had voted Republican in more than 5 elections, there wasn't reason to expect to lose them. This time, unfortunately, Trump's managed to push even more states into play, but they're all ones that the GOP used to win handily, including Georgia and Texas (both large states with lots of electoral votes). If he pushes them into the Democratic column - along with several others like Arizona, North Carolina, etc. - the GOP strategy of relying on the electoral college to overcome regular, steady losses in the popular vote will be for naught. And while they won't necessarily all flip this year, it's only a matter of time, demographically. What would change all this is a popular vote. Millions of people voted for Trump in California and even more would have voted for a better GOP candidate there. And if the popular vote counted, a lot of people who skip the presidential race in a state they know their candidate is going to lose might actually show up to vote. Those are votes that currently get wasted. But likewise the million voters who voted Trump in Massachusetts; hell, in recent years they've had multiple moderate GOP governors and a GOP senator. A broadly popular GOP presidential candidate could pick up 1.5 million votes in MA pretty easily. He could pick up another 2.5 million votes in Illinois. Candidates would be fighting for all those votes. Conversely: Clinton got over 1/3 of the Montana vote without campaigning at all in the state. If that state's half a million voters were actually up for grabs, the candidates would pay a lot more attention. Ditto Louisiana, my homestate, which no Democrat has carried since Bill Clinton and no Democrat since has seriously tried to reach; but the 750,000 voters who went for Hillary Clinton in 2016 would be a target-rich environment for a moderate GOP candidate or a Democratic centrist more like Bill Clinton. The reality is that lots of areas where there currently is no campaigning - because the state is considered "safe" for one party or the other - would get attention with a popular vote, not just big states or states with big cities. Because when the margin nationally is only a couple of million votes, you might be able to pick those up almost anywhere with the right message. And as someone else noted: It's fair. It means Mr. Wyomingite's voice is just as important as Mrs. Texan's or Mr. New Yorker's or yes, Ms. Californian's.

A significant portion of the people who left the workforce during the Great Recession and in the aftermath were people who opted to retire early. It wasn't because of anything Obama did; it's because when you're 62 years old and laid off from a job that paid a pretty decent wage, and a recovery begins, your company's going to fill that job with some 24-year old that they can pay a fraction of what they paid you. That 24-year old's health care costs on the company plan will almost certainly be substantially less, and they're getting an employee who might be around 15 or 20 years. The 62-year old would have almost certainly retired anyway by about 65 or 70 at the most. This isn't a secret. The SSA noted that the number of people who chose to retire at the reduced benefits age (between 62 and 66) jumped significantly over prior years when the Great Recession hit - because those people faced little prospect of returning to a good paying job, and SS would at least keep a roof over their heads. They're people who would have been in the working-age population for anywhere from 4 to 8 or 9 more years. You make it sound like 14 million young to early middle-aged people went on permanent welfare. Aside from the fact that there is no such thing any more, that's simply not what happened. Incidentally, labor rate participation is always diminished for both women and minorities after recessions. For women, there are several factors at play: if she has young children, any job she gets has to cover the costs of child care (something those social democracies pay for, by the way); if she can't make enough to cover that cost, it makes more economic sense to seek public assistance and care for the kids herself. Women also earn less than men for the same work with the same experience (adjusted for those variables, it's still nearly a 10% penalty; unadjusted it's closer to 25% less), they're more likely to be laid off and less likely to be rehired. Minorities just face more discrimination (overt or subtle) across the board in hiring - not at every place, but at enough that it impacts the statistics in a noticeable way. So there's often a lot more story behind numbers if you care to actually dig and find out what it is.

The problem is that right-wingers in this country (and for the sake of argument, I'll accept your assertion that you are not one of them) refuse to distinguish between "socialism" and "social democracy". They lump them together, and too many poorly educated simple-minded Republican supporters buy into that. There are plenty of people here who point to the number of billionaires we have in this country as "proof that anyone can make it", ignoring that if you're NOT one of the favored top few, you probably have a lower standard of living than people in those "awful" social democracies. And sorry, but you're wrong about what "type of socialism" leftist Democrats are pushing. We're not pushing for state takeovers of private industry. And the Green New Deal is actually capitalism at its finest: it tells people who pollute and cause the problem of climate change - to the extent that it's caused by humans, ie for the most part - that they have to pay the costs of cleaning up their mess. The Green New Deal, like most progressive environmental policies, aims to align the COSTS associated with the economic model with the PROFITS made under that model. By contrast, today's right-wing (and many Libertarians) want to privatize all the GAINS made economically, but everyone around the world has to bear the COST that those gains are imposing on the world via environmental degradation and climate change. Does the GND mean that companies would be less profitable? The money to fix the problem has to come from somewhere. If not from the companies who are causing the problem, then who?

On A4A in particular, but also on other app-based sites, I block the person if they're 6,000 miles away and all they have to say is that I'm <fill in the blank>. Invariably their profiles say they're looking for love, they have unrealistic stats, and no reason whatsoever to be targeting a person in as remote a place as where I live. As for what they're trying to accomplish: it's phishing of some sort. Sooner or later, you'll get a message that says something like "I have more pics of me here" or "I thought this was the funniest thing" or "Is this you in this picture I saw online?" - all with masked links to some site that will download some malware to your phone or computer. Sometimes they start with the solicitation up front, which makes it easy: report it, then block.

On a related topic: I've decided the "haha" reaction is the appropriate one for 'This post is such bullshit", so I expect to use it a lot often. Mostly on the ones like "My first time ever was a gang rape by sixteen escaped convicts who were doing time for murder, all with BBCs, they made me crave BBC forever and ever afterward".