BootmanLA

Growlr (which, for those who don't know, is kind of like Grindr but bear-and-admirer focused) has a huge problem with spam profiles (usually promoting some website like xkink.com). They also have a big problem with what I presume are phishers and other types, messaging people from 8,000 miles away from a profile that talks about how much they seek love from a caring person. But this isn't something new caused by the apps - preying on those seeking sex, love, or companionship has been an activity for centuries. The apps just make it cheaper to expand your reach.

I can't honestly say whether you're right about "the same extent". I do know that when I regularly attended leather events back around the turn of the millennium, every one had a cigar tent or something similar outside (because indoor smoking was already on the way out in most of the cities where they were held). And I know from way before then that cigars had always been a key (if not universal, even today) part of the leather culture. You can see it in Colt photo spreads from the late 60's forward, and old Tom of Finland drawings, and more. Maybe that wasn't the case in Australia or Europe (again, I can't speak to those), but it certainly was here in the U.S. Fetishes do change in popularity, and it may well be that cigars are becoming more popular. But then so are leather pups, furries, and many other things. In fact, one constant of the leather/fetish world seems to be that something starts as an unusual and/or rare interest and over time, more and more people discover the activity and decide they approve. Fisting, for instance, used to be something whispered about, an action that everyone knew was out there, somewhere, but very few of us actually knew anyone who admitted to doing it. There's no such secrecy or mystery about it today. And that trendline shows up outside of fetishes, too. When I came out in the late 70's, things like craft cocktails hadn't been invented. No one drank imported beer at the bars (and they seldom carried more than, say, Heineken), much less the "craft beers" that are now ubiquitous. What people enjoy, whether it's fisting, a local ale, or a good cigar, changes over time. And look - I get that if you're sensitive to the smell, you won't want to be around it. I stopped going to bars at some point in the early 90's because we hadn't banned smoking indoors here yet (and even when we did, bars were initially exempted), and I couldn't stand being around all that cigarette smoke (which IMO is far worse than cigar smoke). And worse, you leave the bar and it's still all you could smell because your clothes were saturated with it. But I'd further note: if you're at a leather bar during a major leather event like Dore Alley, or Folsom, or MAL or IML, and you go into the cigar area, you're going to get far, far more exposure to it than on a typical weekend night. Maybe it's more a function of the concentration of people than of cigars becoming overwhelmingly popular?

I never had a doubt that "Deplorables" was an accurate description of a large part of his base. Clinton said it was half of his support, but I'm seriously thinking it's higher than that.

The simplest explanation for this I've seen is that Trump hates the same people they hate, so he's their guy, no matter how awful he is.

So what I hear you saying is that (a) the bars themselves are smoke-free, (b) the cigar smokers are outside, in a designated area, and (c) most everyone there seemed to prefer being out with them instead of inside the bar. What that says to me is not that cigar smoke is an issue making it difficult to breathe at the leather bars; rather, a significant number of leathermen seem to enjoy cigars (or cigar men), and there aren't enough leather men who eschew that completely to provide suitable hunting grounds (for whatever) in the nice, clean, smoke-free interior spaces. The major factor that got indoor smoking bans approved was that lots of people who weren't smokers nonetheless had to deal with secondhand smoke; in bars, that could include the bartenders, whose work required them to face this health hazard. But in my experience, these smoking patios don't have a bar, so no employees are forced to experience the smoke, and no patrons have to either. Of course, you may not like who's left inside, in the bar, when most of the leathermen are outside with their brethren, some of whom do like cigars or cigar men, but that's no different than not liking a bar because of its music choices, or the way they make a mojito. And although I'm not a cigar smoker myself, I'd much rather be around a guy who's enjoying one outside than the typical drunk/tweaker people who don't smoke but who can't control their alcohol or drug intakes. But I'm not going to gripe and say bars should cut off people after two drinks, or screening for people who are on some other form of enhancement. I just don't go to places that cater to those kind of people.

I'm not sure when the last time you were in San Francisco, but California has banned indoor smoking in bars since 1998. It's true that many places have outdoor patios (where smoking is still allowed), but actually in bars - that stopped more than 25 years ago. Similar laws exist in a slight majority of states here, including some of the most populous.

I would only note that the Mozilla team in no way "started the internet," which dates back to the late 1960's at a time when Mark Andreessen, the guy who created Netscape (and moved on to Mozilla) wasn't even born yet. What Andreessen did was create one of the first graphical browsers - but that was in 1994, by which time the internet was already 25+ years old.

I am, and I'm happy with it in general. I can use the same account on my Android phone and on my Windows PC, which makes things easier. What I especially like about it is that it allows you to specify the site through which you're routed, so you can select a state that BZ doesn't block.

I don't know, although I do know that specific limits (like how many posts does it take to be able to do X) are not revealed, to keep people from gaming the system.

I don't think that's correct. I'm pretty sure I've reacted to far more than that in one day.

My guess would be that NC and SC have enacted similar legislation requiring age verification on porn sites and are now caught up in this. In fact, if you read the title of this thread, it says "and NC soon" - meaning that it would be blocked once the NC law went into effect. Until legislatures stop passing unconstitutional* bills that require people to identify themselves in order to access a website, this will continue to happen for more and more states. *I say unconstitutional because it's settled law** that the First Amendment prohibits the government from forcing people to identify themselves in order to access legal content.

I think you misunderstood the words that I wrote. I did not say that there is no way legislatures or Congress can pass anti-LGBT legislation. I said, specifically, that neither same-sex marriage bans nor same-sex sodomy bans can be passed under current Supreme Court precedent, and unless and until the Court overturns those precedents (Obergefell v. Hodges and Lawrence v. Texas), no laws *on those topics* (emphasis added) can go into effect. In fact, if you look at the ACLU page you yourself cited, and attempt to filter the legislation by topic, you'll see that "same-sex marriage" and "same-sex sodomy" aren't even topics that you can search for - because for now, at least, they are settled law. I say "for now" because the right to an abortion, at least prior to a certain point in pregnancy, WAS settled law until it wasn't. But it didn't cease to be a right because of any legislation passed in Congress, Texas, Mississippi, or any other state; it ceased to be a right when the Supreme Court specifically held that it was not.

If you had half a brain to rub against the other half, you'd know that no "bill" can do either of those things. What has to happen is a court case that the Republican majority on the Supreme Court can use to overturn its previous rulings. Until that happens, no federal law on gay sex or gay marriage can happen. Try learning something about how our legal system works, how the prohibitions on laws on sodomy and gay marriage came about, and then try opening your mouth again. I do agree Andrew Tate is a piece of shit.

I agree she could get a lot done. But any person who can't or won't adequately acknowledge slavery as the cause of the Civil War, for example, isn't prepared for the needed occasional statements of moral clarity, or the ability to manage the hardest-right impulses of her party. Neither was Trump, which is partly why he was such a miserable failure as president; not because he couldn't fully implement the draconian policies his hard-right kook supporters wanted, but because he neither cared nor bothered to stand up to them and tell them the hard truths. Nor could he even remotely pretend to trying to serve as president for all Americans. Biden may be more liberal than most Republicans want, but he's far from the dangerous nutcase that Trump was and is. And I'm not sure that anyone could get through the Republican primaries these days, even if Trump wasn't among the competitors, without kowtowing to the same dangerous elements who support him. They want to rule, not govern, and by any means necessary, because they're tired of having the privilege their white Christian bona fides granted them for over 200 years slip away.

I don't think in this context that it matters much. Either way, she's not prepared for the role of president (not that this same problem stopped Orange Julius).

With all due respect, I'll post on what topics I choose, thank you very much. My point - which you seem to be overlooking in your zeal to paint me as ignorant on autism - is that just as *one* known issue in ability to navigate interpersonal relations (for lack of a better generic term for it) - autism - is not caused by upbringing, there's no proof that another - narcissistic sociopathy - was solely caused in his case by "man". For all we know, his issues, manifest since his childhood, are innate to his wiring. They may or may not have been exacerbated by his upbringing, but it's interesting to note that his older brother, who was subject to even more of the same pressures Donald was, chose instead to abandon the family business and basically drank himself to death, while one of his sisters went to law school and became a respected judge (the other two siblings are less well documented publicly, but that alone suggests they didn't turn out the same way he did, despite all being raised by the same parents in the same house at more or less the same time. So I'm not even hinting that autism is caused by parental upbringing - if you'd read my post more carefully you might have realized that, just as you might have realized I'm not saying society makes autistic people that way. I'm saying that just as we don't know the cause of ONE, we shouldn't ASSUME the cause of the other. As you did.

That's almost certainly true, but it assumes that there isn't some physical difference in his makeup that led him onto this path. As you know, we don't know what causes autism, but we have to assume it's not entirely caused by parental upbringing or other socio-environmental factors. There's presumably something physical/biochemical/whatever going on. Who's to say there isn't something similar in the brains of sociopaths?

Not at all. I'm merely saying that at this point, we don't know, and all the harrumphing from people citing examples of people who engaged in incest later having issues doesn't prove the cause one way or the other. The problem is that it's very difficult to get the number of people needed to do the analysis required to fess up to that kind of activity. Hell, even on this forum I suspect at least half the guys who brag about their brother, father, or uncle breaking them in are just writing fapping material. So it's not that the tools to analyze the data aren't there; it's that the data is very hard to collect, at least a meaningful amount of it.

Caligula was far from alone among the Roman imperials in committing incest. Agrippina, Nero's mother and sister to Caligula, married her paternal uncle Claudius. Rumors (possibly spread by opponents of the family) alleged Nero and his mother Agrippina had a relationship. But then those rumors wouldn't have had much effect were there not, as you noted, a general prohibition on incest. Note, too, that "incest" is a matter of degree; obviously it applies to parent/child or sibling relationships, but what about cousins? In researching our family tree, my mother found numerous records of church dispensations for first cousins marrying. And in the latter part of the 19th century and into the early 20th, cousin marriage was almost universal among European royals, because most of them prohibited (if not by law, then by custom) a member of the royal family marrying a non-royal. In Great Britain, it was only after George V expressly okayed royals marrying noble-but-not-royal individuals that the future George VI was freed to marry his love, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (who most of us would know as the Queen Mother). Prior to that, especially since Victoria's progeny had married into almost every major royal family in Europe, any suitable marriage candidate was almost certainly a relative.

But again, the question remains: is the negative outcome a result of the action itself, or of society's treatment of the action as something shameful or dirty? Gay sex - ALL gay sex - was treated that way in my lifetime. We've come to realize that the problem isn't the sex itself, but the way society treated people who had it. So I'm not taking about adaptation - there may well be negative effects for people who've had incestual experiences. The question remains, though: is that because of the incest, or because society makes people ashamed of incest? Those are two very different things.

The problem with this approach, even assuming there are negative effects for the person, is causality. From the moment psychiatrists and psychologists started studying human sexuality, for instance, there was an assumption that same-sex behaviors were disordered. That created an environment where people with same-sex attractions WERE affected negatively; not because having sex with someone of the same sex was inherently disordering, but because society imposed so much shame and guilt (and criminal penalties) for that behavior that anyone who did it naturally thought they were sick in the head. And that inevitably caused all sorts of problems that "negatively affected" them. But it wasn't the same-sex activities that caused those issues; it was society's rules (which were inherited from religious underpinnings) that caused the issues. The same *could* be true of consensual incest, particularly if we're talking same-generation (ie brothers or cousins) as opposed to intergenerational (dad/uncle/grandfather-son/nephew/grandson), which can introduce more power/control issues that could be problematic.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but... to be fair, when Hair Furor was a young man, he had a very nice head of hair and it was quite stylish. It's just that being the narcissistic sociopath that he is, he's never adjusted to losing his hair, hence the horrific combovers. Wonder why he's so angry about environmentalists? Because they got CFC's banned, which meant no more aerosol hair spray; he's reduced to using the "pump spray" kind and it clearly doesn't work as well.

It doesn't matter much to me, personally. But I'm assuming that porn studios know their markets and what people want to see.

To add to @ErosWired's explanation: Your CD4 count is basically your body's general immune response system for fighting bacteria, viruses, and other infections. They're not specific to fighting HIV; they're what fight off all the other things your body may contract. What happens with HIV is that it uses your body's other cells to replicate, and untreated it eventually advances to the point that your immune system (the CD4 and CD8 cells, among others) is overwhelmed. And when that happens, things that wouldn't necessarily be able to take hold in your system can; in HIV-speak, they're called "opportunistic infections", and there are some such opportunistic infections that are rarely seen in HIV-negative people but which show up in patients with advanced HIV disease/AIDS. Keeping the HIV under control and undetectable means it's possible for the immune system (CD4 and CD8 cells, for instance) to not have to fight so hard against HIV. In many people, then, that can mean the CD4 cells can recover to a normal level, although progressing to AIDS before treatment begins may cause some permanent damage. In @ErosWired's case, that seems to be what happened; it means his immune system otherwise is somewhat compromised (but clearly still functioning to a significant extent). Low CD4 numbers, however, have little or nothing to do with resistant strains of HIV or treatment failure, as long as you're testing undetectable. Resistant strains of HIV are ones that aren't affected by one of the compounds in a particular treatment (most HIV treatments contain either 3 or 4 separate compounds); but another medication's compounds may be completely effective against that same strain of HIV. Treatment failure is what happens when a particular medication becomes ineffective, but again, it's possible changing the medication may make treatment work again. What the low CD4 numbers DO mean is that you might be more susceptible to infections that a person with a higher CD4 count might not even notice. So it's best to consider it sign to be cautious, and know your body, so that when you do pick up something, you can treat it (whether with OTC medications or a prescription, depending on what kind of infection it is).

Thanks for the clarification - I hope this helps CoachPHX understand the process too.