BootmanLA

Most things that can be called "political correctness" can be redefined that way (and usually should be). Denigrating something as political correctness, to me, always comes across like the segregationists who never quite got over black people eating in the same restaurants as them.

I'd quibble with the details here - I think it's reasonable, as the richest country in the world, to help defend our allies, especially when it means the enemy is fought over there, not here. But I'm fully in favor of reducing our military budget by a few hundred billion, easily. As for health care, we already spend more (actually, about double) per capita on health care than the next most profligate-spender, Great Britain, if you add up insurance premiums, deductibles and copays, private pay, veterans benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, and all the miscellaneous sources of health care spending. That means we could, for instance, adopt a totally-government-run system like Great Britain's but spend DOUBLE the amount per patient, the vast majority of which would go to actual care (because you eliminate all the inefficiencies of hundreds of separate billing systems, etc.). Don't want a program where everyone works directly for the government? Then we could adopt a single-payer plan like Canada's, which is somewhat like our Medicare but it covers everyone. But with that, we could spend two and a half times as much as Canada does per person (again, FAR more actual treatment) without taking any more money out of the economy. Yes, taxes would go up dramatically. But you eliminate insurance premiums and deductibles, and a lot of overhead (my prior GP's practice had two full-time people just to handle billing all the different insurance companies, work that one part-timer could do if there was a single reimbursement schedule and one payer). Finally, it's true neither party's mainstream supports this, yet. But the Democrats will get on board with it long before the Republicans will. There's no perfect candidate or perfect party, but I suspect one of the two is still a lot closer to what you believe in.

I don't think the straights are running the show in Boystown. I think that gay men ran it for many years just like straights run most of the world - with no concern about how their choices affected people who weren't like them. The fact that gays are - clutch their pearls - having to learn to deal with other parts of the LGBTQ community the same way that they themselves made the straight community deal with them, is ironic and delicious.

Kinda like how the heterosexuals have a stronger identity than any of the LGBTQ community, and therefore their experience should be honored instead of any of ours? Gay men rightfully protested and demanded change when gays were excluded from virtually all of society. We demanded recognition and the right to associate freely in what had historically been hetero-only spaces. Until we achieved that (to the extent we have; there's still work to be done), we were relegated to a handful of "safe spaces" in major cities, this being a prime example. We now have far more freedom to go anywhere "as we are", with the list of exceptions, where we're not welcome, shrinking every day. And yet some of us are wanting to be exactly that exclusionary towards other marginalized groups - telling them to "have Trans Town", as though Balkanization is what we need more of. Sad.

It helped that he's a pathological liar who pretends to be a billionaire successful businessman when in reality he's a bankrupt carnival barker who couldn't get even a basic security clearance with his financials if he weren't president.

You do realize that pretty much anyone in government, anywhere, can submit a nomination for anyone, right? Like, that consummate brown-noser, Tom Cotton, could send in the "nomination" and it's just as valid as one from the Dalai Lama or the Pope? These are not nominations that are vetted by a committee, or the top contenders among a larger group. It's *literally* a case of "someone who holds office, somewhere, writes your name on a piece of paper and sends it in." A nomination for a Nobel prize, especially the Peace Prize, is pretty much meaningless. For instance, Adolf Hitler was nominated for one, while he was "Herr Furher". So was Benito Mussolini. Stalin was nominated twice. Trump was nominated by a right-wing, anti-immigrant Norwegian parliament member, Christian Tybring-Gjedde.

Now that the New York Times series on Trump and his tax returns (and the earlier series on his handling of his father's companies in the years the father was mentally incompetent to do it himself) have exposed what most reasonable, intelligent people have always known, I'm wondering where all the Trumpanzee fan boys are. Far from being a savvy businessman who took a small amount of money and became a billionaire through tough negotiations and brilliant strategy, we know: 1. That far from a "small amount of money" Trump received hundreds of millions of dollars from his father over the years, much of it through tax fraud designed to avoid massive inheritance taxes; 2. That virtually all of the assets Trump actively manages, from his golf courses to most of his hotels to some of his office buildings, lose buckets of money even before favorable tax treatment; 3. That he only started making money in the 21st century when he was hired to portray a "billionaire" on NBC, and he used that fame to strike a huge number of licensing deals that paid him for the only skill he has - bullshitting; 4. That even his own sister thinks he's a fraud (and she should know, since she helped him with some of the defrauding before his father died; 5. That far from being massively wealthy, he's in hock right now for somewhere around a billion dollars that we know of, possibly more, and his assets are probably worth not a whole lot more than what he owes, across the board; 6. That he has basically no way to pay off the loans that are coming due in the next year or two without a massive infusion of cash (to the tune of around $425 million), and most of his valuable assets are already leveraged; 7. That he's only staying marginally solvent on a going basis because his campaign, the GOP, its various arms like the national Republican Senate Campaign Committee, its House counterpart, and foreign governments are all pouring money into his companies via overpriced memberships, hotel rooms, and the like; 8. That he happily traded his measly $400,000 salary as president for the untold millions the government is pouring into his businesses by having to foot the bill for Secret Service protection on all his properties when he's there, at many, many times the cost of his salary. In other words, he's exactly the con man we always knew he was.

"The history of my people". LOL

I wasn't aware that the naming of a neighborhood was so vital to the "thoughts, interest, execution, or expression" of your sexuality.

Dude - I have repeatedly stated, over and over, that I respect your right to refuse medical advice and to stay off meds. I'm not attacking you; I'm defending the doctor(s) you're attacking for "having an agenda". Denigrating doctors for, well, being doctors - which includes providing the best medical advice they know - seems like kind of a dick move to me. I get that for you, meds may present issues that most people don't face, but to rail on the doctors (possibly discouraging them from being aggressive in treating OTHER people who don't have the "these are toxic to my system" rationale) goes beyond looking out for yourself.

I'd only quibble with this one statement. It's true that doctors "writ large" don't have a lot of experience assisting such patients. But HIV specialists do, or at least many do; and it's dramatic how much can still be done even after a guy has let his health deteriorate dramatically. That's not to suggest people SHOULD wait, but there are doctors in most major metro areas, at least, who know how to treat such patients.

FWIW: I find that older model tablets tend to not be able to use the more recent versions of browsers - ie the browser maker simply doesn't support an OS older than <x> and the older tablets can't get past <x> because <x+1> isn't backwards-compatible for whatever reason. It's a problem I see with both IOS and Android machines.

I'm sure that if you'd done a survey in 1858, the overwhelming majority of people surveyed in southern states would have been just perfectly fine with keeping slavery. I'm sure that a survey done in 1945 in southern states would have shown a huge majority in support of Jim Crow laws. No, the nickname for a neighborhood isn't like slavery or discriminatory laws. But the point is, a significant number - a minority, but nonetheless a significant one - found the name exclusionary. And given how that minority - females - have had a long, long history of being excluded from pretty much everywhere that matters; and given that nobody's actually HARMED by changing the name - a name that (as noted) is not particularly grounded in history; it seems to me to be awfully churlish to insist on hanging on to it, even more when it's under the dubious rubric of "women ruining everything". When I first started hearing stories about how much misogyny there was within the gay community, some decades back, I thought surely that must be an artifact of an earlier time. But threads like this remind me it's alive and well.

What they should have done is sell Tumblr and start a PG-rated clone. The price for Tumblr would have been a pretty penny back then, before they destroyed its value.

Don't get me wrong - I can see the appeal of the idea. I just think from a practical standpoint it's highly unlikely to be successful. Many, many bottoms would find it thrilling to be strapped to a fuck bench or in a sling with a dozen muscular, hung, dominant tops with stamina ready to take turns all day and night. But that happens for very, very few people. I think trying to remotely whore/pimp out people, especially across an ocean in different time zones, has about the same chance of success.

Very true, and I'd give the same response to anyone whose issue involved medical recommendations for those or other diseases. For instance, I would expect a person with Type 2 Diabetes to be advised by his physician to reduce sugar intake as much as possible, including carbohydrates that break down into glucose, whether or not that person "wanted" to be advised to cut back on sugar. He's free to ignore that advice, but an ethical doctor will remind his patients of his best medical judgment. Whether it's a medication or a lifestyle change isn't particularly relevant for a doctor's ethical obligation to advise his patient as to his best medical options. This is a lot to unpack, but I'll give it a shot. 1. HIV medications are not "trivial" in terms of effect on your body, but they're also not, for most people, the havoc-wreaking toxic cocktails they once were. The majority of people on most HIV medications experience few if any side effects, so I call "bullshit" on the idea that they "hit quality life just as hard as without." That may be the case for the rare individual, but that person won't know unless & until he experiences those side effects. 2. "A few years longer" is relative. A person who becomes HIV positive at, say, age 24 is generally unlikely to live past 40 without treatment, perhaps considerably less. If he goes on medications reasonably soon after infection, or when his immune system begins to show signs of stress, he could well live to be 80. Obviously some will live longer than others without meds, some people on meds will die of other causes, and so forth, but all other things being equal, antiviral therapy could well extend a lifespan to its otherwise normal length, and a shift in expectancy from (as in this example) 40 to 80 is not "a few years longer". Now, if you're already 65 when you're first infected, and you have a history of other health complications anyway, yes, maybe it might seem like not a lot of gain. 3. And I'll concede that doctors want to reduce the prevalence of HIV, because it's an infectious disease. Spread of infectious diseases can be calculated by the risk factor of a particular act (ie anal sex with an unmedicated poz person) multiplied by the rate of partner change (the more men an infected person has sex with, the greater the possibility of spread) multiplied by the prevalence of the unchecked disease in the community (if there are lots of people already infected, the rate of spread will be exponentially larger than if it's very limited). Getting that final number down - through treatment that renders people undetectable - means fewer other people have to face the choice and outlook you do. OF COURSE doctors want to see the prevalence of disease reduced - why wouldn't they? Their entire profession's existence is predicated on healing people and keeping them healthy. That's not some secret, hidden agenda. It's like saying auto mechanics have an agenda of their own to make cars run better and more safely.

Considering how hard many bottoms find it to locate a top on their own, when they've got access to their own trove of selfies, a phone with which they can take more, and so forth, I can't imagine how this would actually result in more, rather than less, sex.

Generally speaking, the CDC is mostly worried about tracing the spread of an infection, not shaming people who get infected. Notification of partners is not to shame them, but to alert them that they may have been exposed and may need treatment. It's understandable that for some people, this is an embarrassing topic to discuss with a health care provider or official. It shouldn't be, but it often is.

I think most of the answers here have covered the key points. I'm not going to opine whether you should, or shouldn't, let your wife know any of this (that you're bi, that you're actively having unprotected sex with at least one man, that you want to have unprotected sex with other men, and that you want to go on PrEP). I will note, however, that things have a tendency to come out. Even if you're paying your pharmacy for the prescription personally (which can be expensive), they might accidentally bill your insurance, and that may come through on a statement she sees. You have to keep up with testing to stay on PrEP (so that they can switch you off it, if you get infected anyway), and you may slip up and leave a lab result report somewhere, and she finds it. And on and on. If you're counting on being able to hide it forever, well.... let's just say that history is littered with the carcasses of marriages that imploded over things like this. That's not to discourage you from going on PrEP - you should, even if you limit play to your one "buddy" that you trust. You don't know, and can't know, whether in fact he may be taking more risks than you think. You can only protect yourself (and by extension, anyone else you have sex with, including possibly your wife).

You should get tested. Period. If you want, get an over-the-counter home test first, and if it's positive, follow up with a doctor immediately for a definitive test and to discuss your options. If it's negative, you can then ask a doctor to prescribe it, and take their more definitive test with the expectation it will almost certainly confirm your negative status and thus eligibility for PrEP.

I find it difficult to believe that an actual medical doctor would advise to people to have unprotected sex without PrEP. Do you also advise them to skydive without a parachute, to scuba dive without an oxygen tank, or to drive without seat belts? I call bullshit.

I'll grant that we can quibble about the details. But rugby is a violent sport, without question. The players may well be better behaved off the playing field than football/soccer players, American football players, hockey players, boxers, MMA fighters, etc. But in terms of the inherent violence in the game, that's not really a debatable point; the rules may be stricter, but it's still in the same general league as those other sports, and very, very much removed from (for instance) tennis, diving, swimming, skating, golf, and other similar sports.

What you call "have an own agenda" is what a doctor would call "providing the best medical advice possible". As I noted, it's like a cardiologist telling an obese chain-smoker that he needs to lose weight, exercise, and quit smoking. The "agenda" is keeping the patient alive. You are free, of course, to not be interested in keeping yourself alive, but in that case, one might reasonably question why you're seeing a doctor in the first place. And while you don't have to follow a doctor's advice - millions of dead people with heart disease and lung cancer did not follow medical advice to quit smoking, for instance - that does not mean he's supposed to shut up and never give advice as to what he thinks you should do for your health.

Here in the U.S., a patient has the right to refuse medications as well (with some very narrow exceptions involving medications needed to preserve sanity for criminal proceedings). I'd imagine that's the general rule in most western democracies.

To be fair to your doctor: he's doing what he should be doing, which is giving you the best advice his training suggests, while leaving the choice up to you. If, in his considered opinion, it's a bad idea for your health to not be on meds, then he needs to speak up, at least once per visit, to remind you that this is your choice but you're going against medical advice. It's no different than a doctor advising an overweight chain-smoking patient to exercise, diet, and quit smoking. To fail to give those suggestions would, frankly, border on malpractice. Now, you're free to ignore that advice, as you have. And you're free to seek another doctor, of course. I should add, though, that ethically speaking, a doctor can refuse to continue treating a patient if the patient evinces a clear intent to not follow the doctor's guidance. The doctor doesn't HAVE to terminate the relationship, but ethically (and legally) he can, under those circumstances.