BootmanLA

And that's a good thing. And I'd say that your observations may be somewhat circumscribed from the total of reality. One of our two major parties has repeatedly, throughout my adult life, reached out to the other side for input and to accommodate its concerns. For instance, Bill Clinton implemented a drastic cutback in welfare assistance, shifting to block grants to the states (which was a Republican demand). He also was the first president in decades to balance the federal budget, by the end of his term - and a balanced budget is - or rather, USED TO BE, a key Republican goal. In return, Clinton got impeached and most of his legislative priorities died on the table. Barack Obama also reached out, repeatedly, to the other side. During the long, extended negotiations to produce the Affordable Care Act, he watered down the legislation dramatically to appease Republicans, gutting some of the things his own base were demanding (like a public option, aka something like Medicare for people under 65). But before Obama had even put forward any agenda at all, the Republicans publicly avowed not to vote for ANY of his proposals - including the ACA he tailored to their demands - because they wanted him to fail and thus become a one-term president. Biden is finding much of the same to be true. He spent his entire career in the Senate trying to bring his party around to support any reasonable proposal of the GOP's, and the MAGA nuts cast him as the devil incarnate because he doesn't kiss Mango Mussolini's ass and had the gall to defeat him. On the other hand, the other major party has made a career of not compromising with the Democrats at any turn, from Newt Gingrich to Mitch McConnell to Mike Johnson to Donald Trump. So, yeah, you're half right; one party plays for its base. The other, not so much. You wouldn't read so many stories about how liberals and progressive are frustrated with Biden specifically because he's NOT a hard-liner, if in fact your perception of "both sides" were valid. Hair Furor made a mockery of infrastructure by promising at least 30 times during his failed term in office that the next week upcoming would be "infrastructure week", where the GOP would finally unveil its plan to invest in infrastructure. "Infrastructure Week" became a running joke as emblematic of just how dysfunctional the Trump White House was - and much of that was during a period when the Republicans controlled the House AND the Senate and could ram through whatever they wanted - like they did with Supreme Court justices, twice. When Biden came to office, he actually PUSHED a major infrastructure bill - and while the final version wasn't as big as most of us would like, that's solely due to GOP opposition and the defection of two Democrats from supporting it (Sinema and Manchin). Billions of dollars of new infrastructure projects are coming online now and over the next couple of years, and it's NOT thanks to the Republican party in the slightest. That's all the Republicans do - TALK. They were offered a bill to address border security that was 100% "stick" - that is, all penalties and more border guards and all the things the GOP claims are critical, and 0% of the things Democrats want, like fixing the situation for the Dreamers and starting some sort of workable guest worker program (to accommodate the massive need for laborers for jobs in things like agriculture and construction). The bill was custom-tailored to Republican demands for what's needed on the border. Then Trump demanded that the GOP kill the bill, because if they actually PASS something to solve the problem, right-wing assholes can't run campaigns screaming about how the border is out of control. It's Schroedinger's Border: simultaneously a threat to the safety of the entire US and something that can wait until after the next Congress takes office in January 2025. So, no, it didn't grind to a halt because of Democrats. It ground to a halt because of Trump desperately wanting an issue to run on that will motivate his racist base. Those are facts. Inconvenient facts for the Republicans and their quisling apologists, but facts nonetheless.

And referring back to the post that you were replying to: If you don't consider yourself "any particular ideology", then what DO you believe in? Do you believe in anything in particular, or just "what works"? Because if you don't have principles by which to evaluate "what works", you end up with things like the Holocaust - it certainly "worked" to achieve the goals of the Nazis, which was to largely eradicate Jews (and other undesirables) from Europe. "Just works" can be used to justify all sorts of awful things, and it seems like a pretty piss-poor way to evaluate what's right and what's wrong.

What are the tenets of classical liberalism, as you see them? And in what specific ways do you think most Democratic leaders differ? I'm not saying I would agree with you, but I'd like to know more about this shift you seem to have detected.

That is certainly true, and the way he uses it (as an all-purpose pejorative against anyone who disagrees with his position of the day) is a far cry from what it initially meant. But there are, or can be, multiple meanings to a word (or a symbol, or any other form of communication). "Woke" had one meaning in black American culture. Its meaning shifted somewhat as it was more broadly adopted, but it still meant, in essence, being awake to, and aware of, historic injustices - and for white people, at least, it carried with it kind of a moral obligation to help in the fight to end those injustices. When the right took it up, it was more as a slur, as I noted with DeSantis. Sadly, the right has a long history of doing that.

Granted - but that was my point, the responses were kind of going all over the place - specifically recommending events like Folsom Berlin and CumUnion parties, which aren't really the sort of "visit a local bathhouse" thing the OP meant.

The "former Democrats" who became MAGAts, in my experience, were the ones who always held views like "we need to do something about all THOSE people coming here" and "I believe in social programs but not when it's all wasted on THOSE people". They're the ones who cheered Reagan for denouncing mythical "welfare queens" and who thought Clinton's "welfare reform" was a great idea. A few came to realize, after Dobbs, that the MAGA/GOP group were serious about their threats about same-sex marriage and sodomy laws, but far too many still think "it won't happen" - just like far too many educated women voters felt comfortable voting for Republicans because they thought Roe was secure.

Many cities in the US hold their Pride celebrations in June, to coincide with the anniversary of the Stonewall raid. That said, not every place does - spreading them out helps boost attendance, for one thing. If everyone's Pride celebration was the last weekend in June, then either they'd all only attract locals, or the smaller, less popular places would have no turnout as all their local gays went to a bigger city for a bigger event. Plus, it's just too damned hot in mid-summer in the deep south to have any sort of outdoor celebration. Palm Springs, for instance, holds its Pride the first weekend of November. Atlanta holds its Pride in October, as does Phoenix. Miami has its festival in April. Of course, not all southern cities have wised up. Houston insists on having its Pride festival in the traditional month of June, even though 2022's festival almost collapsed under the severe heat wave then ongoing, with the spillover effect of cancelling the 2023 event entirely. (This year, TWO Houston groups are planning separate Pride festivals, BOTH in June. Doh.) For Pride events, your best option is the google "<Name of City> Pride 2024" and see what comes up.

I think it's probably helpful to distinguish between sex trips to an event (whether it's a Pride, leather, bear, sex party, whatever event), sex trips to a city to visit "club" venues (bathhouses, etc.), and sex trips to a place (perhaps just to be "new meat" somewhere) and hope to have sex with a variety of men. One might also consider "sex trips" to visit a particular friend or friends and have sex with them. These are three (or four) different kinds of sex trips, and while any of us might approve of all of them, experiences and recommendations may vary considerably with the type.

As I say, over and over and over, voting is not electoral masturbation. It's not designed to make you feel good. It's designed to choose between the choices offered. Smart voters understand that not all choices are viable - that there is no way Jill Stein, or Robert F Kennedy Jr., or Ralph Nader, or any other third-party candidate is going to get 270 electoral votes, or anywhere close to it, or (most likely) ANY electoral votes at all. Smart voters understand that means choosing between a Republican and a Democrat. Smart voters also understand that in most states, where one party has a significant edge in membership and where the state's entire electoral slate is awarded to the winner of the popular vote in that state, that their individual vote doesn't affect the outcome, but it CAN affect the perception of the winner. (Ronald Reagan got 525 (or 98% of the) electoral votes, from everywhere except Minnesota and DC, but he only got 58% of the popular vote. So while it appeared virtually everyone approved of him, in reality more than 40% DISapproved of him.) Smart voters also understand that, if you DO live in a state where the balance of voters means the state could go either way, it's important to vote, and if you dislike both major party candidates, to vote for the one you dislike LEAST. Because not voting means one less bit of support on the "less horrible" side to offset a bit of support on the "more horrible" side. (If the same number of people who voted for Obama in 2012 in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania had simply turned out to vote Democratic again, we'd never have seen a President Trump - it's not that Obama voters switched sides, it's that they didn't bother to turn out.) Smart voters can look at things like @BlackDude's comparison chart and EVEN THOUGH it (rightfully, in some cases) points out flaws in the Democrat's history, it CLEARLY shows that voting for a Republican isn't going to result in a better country. Minimizing black history (which I dispute, but for the sake of argument) is better than erasing it or banning discussion of it. For that matter, I'd dispute most of the assertions about the Democrats he made, but in every case, nonetheless, he points out how the Republicans are worse. WHY anyone would actually consider voting for the WORSE platform, the WORSE party, the WORSE candidate, is beyond me. And likewise, I can't imagine how anyone who claims to care about the results could withhold a vote for the faulty but less bad option, knowing full well from recent experience that this can lead to the election of someone worse. Sadly, though, not all voters think like this. Too many think that their vote has to be courted, and if the two major candidates don't kiss their ass enough, they just won't vote. They're the ones who, as I call it, love electoral masturbation.

Technically, I think the supervised period after you leave prison is called "parole" rather than "probation" - probation being time you serve in lieu of going to prison in the first place. But effectively, the restrictions on the two conditions are similar if not identical in some cases, and in many places the supervising officials are "Probation and Parole Officers" who may have both types of individuals under their supervision. That said, state restrictions and federal restrictions (which Miles would be subject to in this case) can be very different. One parolee I know has told me that although he's required to seek permission from his PO to travel outside the state where he lives, the PO told him, after the first month, that he'd generally give permission whenever sought as long as he hadn't had any infractions. Some PO's are very understanding that way. Others are more hard-nosed. And although I can't point to any statistics to validate this, I would not be surprised in the least if there were racial disparities in parolee treatment, the way there are disparities in almost every aspect of our justice system. The guy I'm talking about was in for a very long sentence for a non-violent drug conviction (which is how he eventually got paroled after something like 17 years) but he's also white.

Here's another morsel to chew over: For decades, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (as amended and re-enacted repeatedly) bars discriminatory practices in elections, including voter registration, districting, or any other election-related laws, and it provided two main methods for enforcement - that is, ensuring that states provided fair elections. Section 5 of the VRA required certain jurisdictions with a history of voting rights violations (as defined in Section 4 of the VRA) to submit all proposed changes to election laws for preclearance, either by the US Department of Justice or by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. That ensured that states couldn't just keep making minor changes to unconstitutional voting laws, and forcing the government to sue anew after every change, dragging out resolution of the underlying discrimination. Unfortunately, while the Supreme Court long ago upheld the constitutionality of Section 5, in 2013 it decided Shelby County v. Holder, which held that the formula in Section 4 was too old to be legally relevant any longer, which effectively gutted Section 5. In theory, Congress could pass a new Section 4 with an updated formula that addressed only more recent discrimination, but Republicans in Congress are dead set against that, because - to no one's surprise - most cases of governments trying to violate the Voting Rights Act have been by conservative - which, in modern terms, means Republican - government officials. And again, to no one's surprise, Republican governmental officials went on a spree of passing new restrictions on voting after Shelby County, because there was nothing stopping them. That leaves the second means of enforcement - Section 2, which allows lawsuits against governmental entities which enact or administer discriminatory election practices. Historically, a large number of those challenges were filed by affected individuals - someone who lived in a district that was allegedly drawn in violation of the VRA. Or someone who would have to provide a different kind of ID to vote. It's been understood since the beginning of the VRA that individuals had that right - called standing - to sue. And in reports from both chambers of Congress accompanying passage of amended versions of the VRA, Congress has expressly declared its understanding that individuals can sue under this law. But the Department of Justice can also sue to enforce federal laws, and some far-right legal minds have seized on this, claiming that since the statute doesn't specifically SAY that individuals have standing to sue, they can't. Only the DOJ can, according to this line of thought. And that is a huge problem, because the DOJ doesn't have the resources to bring lawsuits against every discriminatory election practice, even more especially now that preclearance is dead. And a Trump-appointed judge in Arkansas, followed by an appellate court decision written by another Trump-appointed judge, have held that, in fact, Section 2 does NOT provide an individual right to sue. That's a decision the Supreme Court will almost certainly have to take up, because at least some other circuits have expressly held that individuals CAN sue under Section 2. If this conservative-tilted Supreme Court - which is even more so than the one that decided Shelby County - agrees with this appellate decision, it will mean all but the most egregious discriminatory practices in election laws will go unchecked, because the DOJ just doesn't have the resources to sue in every case. Which means more and more Republican state governments will pass laws to ensure they will ALWAYS win a majority in state elections (because it's so easy, with modern computer tools, to gerrymander a majority (or even a supermajority) in a state legislature even when the population of a state is much more evenly divided - or even when it leans more to the left. And one reason there are so many Trump-appointed judges willing to follow these fanciful legal theories is that in the last two years of President Obama's term, the US Senate (under Mitch McConnell's control) simply stopped approving judicial nominations Obama submitted, leaving scores of seats unfilled for the next president (including a Supreme Court seat that went vacant for a year). I suspect if Clinton had won in 2016, McConnell would have kept all those vacancies open for another four years - or until a Republican president was elected.

I do find it interesting that so often, the voices most clearly supporting Republican policies tend to belong to relatively new accounts (I mean, literally, the ONLY forum in which @suBBcuBB4DOMBBear has posted, so far, is this one, and ONLY on this topic). It's almost as though someone were creating accounts specifically to come articulate a point at odds with most of the members here (which, to be clear, is certainly a right anyone can exercise). But again - as @hntnhole and @viking8x6 and so many others have asked: why? What policies - and not nebulous, generic, bland statements like "commonsense infrastructure in security" - do you think will be different, and beneficial to society, under a Republican administration? And more importantly, why do you think those policies are more important than, enough to outweigh, the clearly documented anti-LGBT positions that the GOP is itching to implement - and that the Dobbs decision should demonstrate they WILL implement, as soon as a conservative Supreme Court allows them to?

Not only that, but they often give the impression (to me at least) that the only way they have sex any more is by "collabing" with someone else, so they can cross-promote each other.

An awful lot of right-wingers are racists, whether outspoken about it (rare) or more circumspect. Hair Furor's legal career (as a defendant) started back in the 1970's when he and his father were sued by the Department of Justice over their racially discriminatory rental practices in New York, and it continued right through "They're not sending us their best" in 2015 and "very fine people on both sides" in 2017 and "shithole countries" in 2018. His right-hand man on immigration, Stephen Miller, aka Santa Monica Goebbels, is a Jewish man who's about as big a racist as I've known.

That's only true in a vague, general sense, if you include oral herpes (cold sores) as well as genital herpes. While both may be caused by either HSV-1 or HSV-2, there's not necessarily much crossover; and while between 50 and 80 percent of adults in this country have oral herpes, only about 1 in 6 has genital herpes. It may be true that the prevalence is higher among people with multiple partners (which makes sense), but even that's not a "most". And things like this vary greatly with geography. When you're in a large metropolitan area that has both a big sexually active population of men having sex with men AND a lot of visitors and tourists passing through, the changes of an infection spreading quickly among a lot of people is a lot higher than if you live in East Bumfuck, West Virginia. And even then, a sexually active bottom may take a lot of fucks from a lot of men, but if most of them are the "sneak off once a year from the wife to fuck some guy's ass" type, chances are good most of them aren't going to have herpes either, which has to be accounted for in the odds. I don't think that's what people are saying. Rather, if a person, FOR WHATEVER REASON, decides that a particular load isn't worth the risk, any reasonable person should accept that and move on; we're not entitled to fuck someone just because many other have, and a bottom ALWAYS has the right to refuse access to anyone, anytime, for any reason. He made that decision, and people (as I see it) are supporting his right to make it, against the top (in his case) getting bitchy and trying to tell the OP how he should live his life ("Don't be a cumdump, then"). I'm not shaming the top for disclosing (I applaud that) but I'm shaming him, in absentia, for being a dick about being turned down. You seem to be extrapolating a lot from your experiences, assuming they're what everyone else here does.

Well, he's now a convicted felon, which will bar him from countless jobs in the future, including most of the right-wing favorites like police officer and security guard.

The battle cry of those who can't defend anything the man did.

That may be true, to some extent. But as I always say: Elections are not held to make you feel good. That's what masturbation is for. Elections are for choosing, among VIABLE choices, a person for a particular governmental role. In this election, barring the death or incapacitation of one of them, the viable candidates will be Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Assuming you are serious when you say "Biden is certainly not Trump" (which I take to mean you think he's at least marginally better of a choice), then: 1. Voting for any other candidate, especially if you live in a swing state, is electoral masturbation and can only help Trump. 2. Not voting also helps Trump, especially if you live in a swing state, because his base will turn out. 3. Even assuming Biden makes little progress toward a progressive future, you can rest assured that a Trump victory will mean backsliding on that same path - in some cases, in a major way. I know people hate the formulation "vote for the lesser evil" but that's how our system is designed to work.

The issue, though, is that I think that presumption is misguided. I'm as open as you to someone offering a clearer explanation of "woke", but @hntnhole's characterization of it as "anything that liberals and progressive support" seems to be the only thing that fits. And yes, I realize that's from where I'm sitting, but I do try very hard to see things from other perspectives. In this case, though, given that in several YEARS of reading extensively about this kind of thing I've NEVER seen "woke" defined by anyone who seemed to understand what he was objecting to, I'm not sanguine about the prospects of anyone here providing an answer to your question.

Plenty of things have happened to San Francisco, including multiple earthquakes, a great fire about a century ago that destroyed much of the city, the siting and then later removal of several military bases, the beginnings of more than one major social justice movement - which one of these, or others, did you specifically have in mind?

and Which is it? MAGA and conservatism have zero overlap. Conservatism, at its heart, recognizes that change and progress are necessary, but should be undertaken at a reasonable pace so as not to disrupt too much at once, and so that unintended consequences can be handled. MAGA is radicalism - knee-jerk, reactionary radicalism, which at its core is based on nothing more than fear or loathing of "other" - as in, "them". Trump said it on the first day of his campaign, in 2015, when he talked non-stop about "them" (ie the governments of poorer, browner nations) sending us criminals, rapists, murderers, and he's never shut up about it. That's the core of MAGA - "us" vs. "them". And that's been Trump his entire life - always fighting, always suing, always bullying, always trying to throw his weight around. Sometimes it works and he gets his way; other times he gets nothing but publicity, which he still considers a win. But always - ALWAYS - it's "us" (meaning HIM) vs. "them". And he sold that garbage to millions of Americans, pretending that he was just like them, always fighting the oppressor, while hiding the fact that HE is exactly the kind of person who's oppressing the working and middle class. What's sad is how so many LGBT people jump on that bandwagon, whether it's because they, too, share his bigotry and prejudices, or whether they believe his thousands of outright lies and thousands more misleading statements. Even when the party he represents makes no secret of the fact that they are committed to destroying LGBT equality - overturning same-sex marriage, reinstating sodomy laws, etc., they pretend that will never really happen. That's what people who believe in abortion rights thought (not the activists, who recognized the danger, but the millions of suburban women who thought It Could Never Happen Here). Those people thought Roe was settled law, even if the courts were chipping away at the edges, and "they" would always be safe - because they're moderate to conservative white women in America. And then the Republican Senate stole a Supreme Court nomination from Obama to give to the next Republican president, and then rammed through another just a few weeks before the 2020 election, all to pad a majority on the Supreme Court that would do EXACTLY what Republicans had been promising to do for decades, and which too many people believed they just wouldn't. The Republican platform still calls for repealing same-sex marriage. For reinstating sodomy laws. Even if blue states decide to protect LGBT people, red states - Florida, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, etc. - either still have bans on same-sex marriage and laws criminalizing sodomy on the books or will rush to pass them the moment the Supreme Court again decides that "well, back in 1789, these weren't protected, so they aren't protected now either." And that's just the selfish, personal reason LGBT voters should reject Trump (and GOP candidates for Congress) - self preservation. That doesn't even touch the massive giveaways of taxpayer money to the wealthy, many or most of whom pay much lower tax rates, in total, than teachers or police officers or bus drivers. Or auto workers or tech support people. Or Trump's stated, clear intention to abandon NATO, where he unequivocally said he'd invite Russia to invade any of its neighbors and not stand up to support this nation's allies - with whom we have a fucking treaty, mind you, obligating our support. Or Trump's horrific ripping away children from undocumented immigrant families at the border WHILE NOT EVEN KEEPING RECORDS OF WHERE THE CHILDREN WERE SENT - with hundreds still unaccounted for. A president who screamed about human trafficking actually CONDUCTED human trafficking, and his supporters cheered - proof that they support him because they hate the same people he does. Or the fact that Trump keeps calling for more and more tariffs, knowing that his supporters are too dumb to understand that tariffs are NOT paid by the producer of the goods in question, or by the producer's country. They're paid by the US importer who brings those goods into the country, which has to then raise prices as he sells them to wholesalers and manufacturers, which raises prices to the consumer. Yes, YOU, the consumer, are the ones who pay tariffs, and yet MAGA nuts go wild, thinking that their guy is gonna stick it to them Commie Chinese bastards! I could go on, and on, but: I know it's useless. Most MAGA supporters lack the will to understand what their pseudo-Lord-and-savior is pushing, or else they lack the capacity, but they do respond to the raw emotional appeal he has, encouraging them to hate and blame "them" - foreigners, liberals, whomever - for their troubles.

That's just false. Absolutely, categorically false.

I would note, for the benefit of those drawn to this folder: this is the LGBT Politics forum, so political discussions are clearly welcome here. Like all parts of the site, the rules about politeness to other members apply, but one can be quite critical of ideas - even with heated words - as long as you aren't attacking the person expressing those ideas. As I understand it, for instance, "You're a dumbass for supporting X" is against the rules. "I can't understand why any dumbass would support X", presumably, would not be, because it's not addressed at a member or members specifically. "X is a really dumbass thing to support" is even safer, because it's directly attacking the idea, not the people who support it.

I agree with almost all of this. My only (very mild) complaint is that if a writer has a bunch of lines of spoken dialog in a row (quotes from the characters, as opposed to exposition, describing what the characters are doing), then it helps to regularly attribute the quote to a particular character, by name. As in: "I really like the way you fuck," Peter said. And try to avoid too many cases of "he said" when you haven't specified, in that paragraph, who's speaking. It doesn't have to be by name necessarily, as long as the context makes it clear. So "The cocky jock paused as he looked over my bookshelf. 'I didn't know you liked to read science fiction,' he said, as he pulled one book after another from the shelf." works even without repeating that "cocky jock" means "Brandon". With fifteen or twenty lines of dialog in a row, it can get difficult to keep track of who's saying what. And to this, I would add: Please, people, for the love of God learn to break things up into paragraphs. There's nothing that will make me hit "back" on a story faster than seeing forty lines of text with no breaks. Even more of a problem is not knowing how to actually make sentences, as opposed to a long string of words that just rolls along like a tumbleweed in the desert. I can live with occasional typos, misspellings, and even grammatical goofs - none of us are perfect. But breaking things into discrete sentences and paragraphs makes your work readable.

Particular words that are banned often seem to spur online conversations into forbidden topics. That polynesian-derived term I mentioned, for example, might reasonably be construed to include things like blood play, fisting, etc. - which themselves are not forbidden topics. But someone who posts that he's interested in [that Polynesian word] will almost always spark public replies about people into things that ARE forbidden topics. So it's a way to keep topics from spiraling into that sort of thing. That particular word, which means (essentially) "forbidden", isn't really necessary to discuss the range of acceptable "forbidden" topics that are not actually forbidden here.