BootmanLA

It sounds like there is a shitty implementation of RCV then in Australia's House races. In no case should ANYONE'S vote be cast for ANY candidate he didn't rank. That's a fundamental violation of people's ability to control their votes, which ought to be (but sadly, sometimes isn't) fundamental. I don't dispute the result of your numbers in your US example. But the reality is that there's no way those numbers would ever reflect reality. RFK would never pull close to 10% - he'd be lucky to get 2%. Stein got 1.06% in 2016, In fact, only one third-party candidate (Ross Perot) since 1970 has gotten over the 10% threshold, and that was back in 1992. And if Stein and RFK advised their followers to vote Trump, I guarantee you some number of voters would switch from voting for them, because a small but measurable number of those voters are pretty far leftist and their beef with Harris is that she's not leftist enough. As for "How to vote cards" - we call those sample ballots, and they're already abundantly provided by organizations and parties here.

But your system IS fairer - you don't HAVE to rank every single candidate, right? You can rank the ones you know about, and ignore the rest. I don't see anything unfair about it at all. With first past the post, you get one shot at it. If you vote third-party, and that person gets a low vote percentage, you've essentially thrown away your ability to affect the actual outcome (which, to me, is the whole fucking point of voting - to affect the outcome in a way favorable to your interests). But with RCV, if there are four candidates, and you find you like one of the minor ones best, you can rank her first, and the results will reflect that she was someone's first choice. But then once that person is eliminated, you can have your second-place vote count for the next best option - if nothing else, as a way of helping defeat the WORST candidate who's got a good chance of winning. And RCV (generally speaking) makes sense to everyone - it's not hard to explain how to rank your first choice as #1, second choice as #2, and so forth. (All of that, of course, is beside the point for the Electoral College, which is an anachronistic byproduct of pro-slavery forces during the writing of our constitution. Unfortunately, it's the only way our Republican party can win the presidency any more, even when a substantial plurality prefers someone else.)

Aside from being downright ghoulish (no surprise, since it's coming from a Republican), diabetes is not always the result of dietary issues. For someone who thinks government shouldn't be regulating morals, you sure seem content with letting insurers (who aren't accountable to anyone) effectively regulate morals - or what YOU seem to think are moral issues, at any rate. By this logic insurers should never cover STI treatment, since slutty people (to paint them all with the broad type of brush you seem to prefer) should be allowed to fuck "themselves to death without burdening other's [sic] with the pitfalls of their poor choices and existence." Should we not cover injuries from sports, since those people are clearly choosing to put themselves at risk playing an optional activity for fun - do we just let them "play themselves to death"? How many hamburgers can a person eat before you decide they're eating themselves to death? How about drivers who get injured in a car accident? Clearly if they'd been riding mass transit they'd have been safer, so no injury treatment for them, right? There are almost ALWAYS choices that lead us to needing health care. If you're going to pretend to have principles, at least make them consistent.

There is some evidence (scant, but some) that regular prostate massage actually helps with things like benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH). Your doctor is correct that generally speaking bottoming doesn't injure the prostate. That said, in cases of acute prostatitis, being fucked can spread the infection.

This is the main thing. You can't "strengthen" the walls of your rectum. So use lube, and if you use toys, make sure they're relatively smooth, or at least no more "rough" in texture than a man's cock. Veiny dildo yes, spiked dildo no.

I don't know how often you get to have sex, but if you've been topping bareback for twelve years, you've almost certainly fucked more than one poz undetectable guy (and possibly even some who were not undetectable). As noted, an undetectable person generally* can't pass along the virus, even if he's topping, and the risks when he's bottom are even lower for the guy topping him. It's just not a realistic worry. *I say "generally" because having said it can't happen, there's probably some unique set of circumstances (a top who has an open sore or lesion on his cock and an already compromised immune system fucking an "undetectable" bottom who just got fucked by someone who was himself detectable and with a high viral load, for example) where it *could* happen. Few things in science are absolute, other than -273 degrees Fahrenheit (absolute zero).

The Branch Davidians were armed. I doubt your arms are sufficient to stand up to, say, an M1 Abrams. Or a Predator drone. Or any number of other things the US still (thankfully) doesn't let citizens have.

As for RCV itself, I'm very much in favor of it. With it, those people who know, say, Trump is a bigger disaster waiting to happen than Harris ever could be, could vote for Stein or Kennedy or whomever as their #1 choice, and when that waste of genetic material is eliminated, their second choice (or third, or however many times it takes for a winner to be reached) would count. It would mean that the winner has the greatest approval rating overall, which would correct the situations like 2000 and 2016 where the plurality winner clearly was one person but their opponent won. Surely that - the person who is approved the most - ought to be kind of the guiding factor, no? As others have said, 24+ candidates is ludicrous. But you do NOT have to assign a vote to all 24, in any case; if you only know something about, say, five of them, rank them 1-5 and leave the rest unvoted. And maybe the problem is voters not caring enough to learn even the basics about their candidates - surely there are newspapers and other forms of news about who's running for what? And no, RCV doesn't mandate a coalition tying up the winner with compromises. RCV has nothing to do with assembling a parliamentary majority to choose a prime minister, which is the only case I can think of where a coalition gets to share power.

No offense caused, but you didn't get it exactly right as far as what I'm saying. To clarify: under the US system of elections, where (in most cases) there's no runoff election, if there are three or more candidates, voting for a third party (as opposed to Democratic or Republican) is mostly a waste of a vote. That's because in virtually all elections, only the candidates from those two major parties stands a chance of winning; if either candidate is worse than the other, then voting for someone else essentially makes it harder to defeat the worse one. That's especially important in our presidential elections, given the power that the presidency here holds.

I *think* he was saying that "LGBT identified out black men will benefit" if Harris is elected, but the average Black man - counting among them the DL black men - won't. I disagree, but I can see his point that being pro-LGBT is less helpful if your life is such that you have as much or more to fear from your own family and community than you do from society at large. Of course, to me, that's more of an argument for working to change your community than it is to vote for a bigot who's going to harm millions with his policies. But as I say, your mileage may vary.

Exactly. I'm not going to defend Harris' positions - to date - as particularly principled. Compared to the stated goals of the Trump/Bibi/Likud faction, her positions are about the best any Palestinian can hope for.

As long as court decisions like Lawrence v. Texas remain intact, deeply closeted Black men will benefit too, because it means the police can't use vague statutes to arrest closeted people for a private sexual act and ruin their lives with the attendant publicity. You don't have to be OUT in order for that to help you. And the more of us who are out - Black, White, Asian, Hispanic, whomever - and the public sees, over and over, that we're not a threat to them, that will help reduce that homophobia that (to me) seems more pervasive in the Black community, in general. Moreover, Trump has surrounded himself with preachers who condemn gay sex acts loudly and publicly, and those people will have his ear during his administration if he makes it back into office. Is that what you want for your "closeted brothers"? Tell me what policies will be best for Black men. Both in general, and for closeted Black gay men in particular. I'm open to learning, but I can't find anything on which Harris isn't better than Trump, any day of the week.

And there have been policies galore. Moreover, there are a lot of policies coming from the other side, awful ones. So what is it you want to hear?

Outdated stereotypes that outsell all other entertainment within the Black community? I must have missed the part where Black people have guns held to their temples and are ordered to buy Beyonce albums and attend Megan Thee Stallion concerts and pour so many billions of dollars into rap and hip hop artistry that. well, some people in the community end up behaving as badly as rich White guys have for centuries. Like it or not, the Black community wholeheartedly embraces these artists. If they weren't so popular to begin with, politicians like Harris wouldn't be seeking their support to generate enthusiasm and votes. Point taken, and thank you for at least acknowledging that white liberals are out here doing the civil rights work for the LGBT community (not alone; there are many, many people of color deeply involved in this issue). I'll remind you, though, that a lot of the reason that advances were made in civil rights for Blacks in the 1950's and 1960's was that they convinced a lot of white people to join their cause, so it wasn't just "us vs. them". Demanding - by the people affected - SHOULD have been enough, but it wasn't. The Black civil rights leaders of that era succeeded, in large measure, because they convinced enough White men - who held the power - that a push for equality was the right thing to do, and they did that in part by convincing some of their ardent white supporters to join them in pressuring White politicians to do the right thing. And I do get that for a Black man, his Blackness may well come first, always, as a cause (for lack of a better way of expressing it). But even so, I can't see where *anything* Trump has done is better for Black men than *anything* Harris has done. Even Harris's prosecution of a lot of Black men, in California, for crimes committed there pales in comparison to Trump's calls for executing the Central Park Five, who even today he believes are guilty despite a confession and DNA evidence linking the confessed criminal to the crimes. I keep hearing terms like "emasculating" and such being tossed around, but I don't see anything "emasculating" about someone telling you - or me - why they should vote for a particular candidate.

I don't believe I did that at all. When I say there is a thread of X, or that X exists in a community, I'm not saying all of that community is X. If you can point to where I said that, I'll happy apologize and issue a correction.

We know (from the historical record) that the primary driving force behind the creation of the Electoral College was to get southern states on board with approving the new constitution. They'd already been handed a major victory when seats in the US House were apportioned based on the formula "free people + 3/5 of slaves" (which meant, effectively, white people plus 3/5 of black people). Each southerner's vote, therefore, counted for 160% of that of each northerner's vote when choosing members of the House. The essence of that arrangement was carried over to the Electoral College, which, contrary to the popular imagination, was not created because the founders "feared democracy". As a matter of fact, a substantial portion of the constitutional convention wanted direct election of the president (albeit by those eligible to vote, ie white men who owned property, only). But just as they didn't want a Congress dominated by free states who might look askance about the institution of slavery, the slave states were adamant that the president not be chosen by a group that, even they could see, would soon be numerically dominated by residents of non-slaveholding states. The EC was in fact a late-in-the-game compromise, where the need to keep selection out of the hands of Congress met the practicality of the two senators, 3/5 slave apportionment compromise. Thus was born the idea of electors equal to the number of senators and representatives, apportioned the same way. There was no grand design suggesting it was an ideal arrangement (and in fact no other nation on earth has adopted it, despite many, many of the other aspects of our constitution being reflected in governments around the world). It's not a slur to call it the White Supremacy Compromise. What's interesting is that even though slavery has officially been over for more than 150 years, there's still a tinge of white supremacy left in the EC, though not in the most obvious place. We've heard a lot about how the GOP desperately wants to increase its appeal to minorities - especially Black people, Asians, and Hispanics. And in fact, they have made some inroads in that respect across all three groups, though it's arguable going from 4% to 7% support among Blacks, for instance, really counts as progress. But what's interesting is that when you look at the distribution of ethno-racial groups across the country, those efforts by the GOP are almost entirely wasted. For instance, looking at Asians: roughly 75% of Asian-Americans live in California, New York, Texas, New Jersey, Hawaii, Illinois, Washington, Florida, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. The GOP could double its appeal among Asians and still come nowhere near winning California, New York, New Jersey, Hawaii, Illinois or Washington. They largely have Texas and Florida in the bag for now, so any gains there are basically wasted in terms of the electoral college. At most, they might get a little closer to flipping Virginia and Pennsylvania. Maybe. Likewise, for Blacks: they're overwhelmingly concentrated in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, South and North Carolina, and Virginia. The GOP already has a lock on the first five of those, so any gains are wasted. They might get a little boost in NC or Virginia (again). Maybe. But then the same policies that appeal to Black people in Virginia aren't likely to be the same ones that appeal to Asians. So appeal to one, repel the other, and vice versa - or come across as so cynical trying for both that neither one really moves your direction. Hispanics present a similar problem. There's no way California's flipping red, even with major inroads among Hispanics there. Conversely, gains in Texas and Florida are wasted. It's unlikely the GOP can take New Mexico, although it could shore them up in Arizona a bit. And this isn't just a Republican thing. The Democrats could boost their share of the Black vote in Mississippi to 99% and still not win the state. They could lose a quarter of their Black voters in California and still win the state in a cakewalk. And so on. Add to all of this that none of the three groups is necessarily monolithic in its interests. So it's very easy for outreach to come across as pandering. Which is why the trio of swing states - Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania - remain so important. They're also whiter than the rest of the country: Wisconsin (86%), Michigan (75%), Pennsylvania (75%), compared with 58% of the US being non-Hispanic White. As the states (in addition to Nevada) that flipped D to R in 2016 and back again in 2020, they're most "up for grabs". And that means, for better or worse, campaigning to white people about their issues. Which makes white voters, once again, more valuable than others. Of course, getting rid of the archaic Electoral College would upend that immediately. But as for now, it's doing what it was intended to do all along.

He was, if I'm not mistaken, making a misogynistic pun re: minstrel and menstrual.

Here's his quote: "She appears to have no recent public connection to any black men. Husband, children, father (if he’s black)." He knows she's married. He's got an issue with her not being married to a Black man. That says "has an issue with being married to a white man" to me. But then I can add 2 + 2 and get 4. As for sexually objectifying a community: He's blaming the Democratic Party for the fact that it uses the popularity of certain celebrities - who THEMSELVES have "sexualized" themselves - to help draw attention to the party. The Democrats didn't sexualize Megan Thee Stallion; she's done that herself, for years, as part of her very public persona. And moreover, as I pointed out, the Democrats also have sought and publicized the support of non-sexualized Black women; of sexualized White women (Taylor Swift, anyone?), sexualized Black and White men, and non-sexualized Black and White men.

It's true that Israel is nominally a security partner for the US. The reality is more nuanced; there's a limited amount Israel could ever do to help defend or protect the US, whereas we're responsible (through arms assistance) for a substantial amount of Israel's security in general. Where they're most useful is intelligence. Unfortunately, as October 7 showed, either Israeli intelligence has deteriorated significantly, or else it's being sidelined in pursuit of other, larger goals by the Netanyahu administration.

I agree. Not only can she not appear at variance with Biden's position, but honestly, she can't really come out against Israel's actions in any sort of strong way before the election at all. The Jewish people who are part of the Democratic base may not support all of what Netanyahu does, and may well want a peaceful solution that doesn't involve annexation of Palestinian territory, but they're also not likely to respond warmly to outright attacks on Israel's character, etc. She's still going to be better for the Palestinians (and, honestly, for Jewish people) than Trump ever could be.

So: everyone who thinks Harris is so awful on the Middle East, did you catch the news? Miriam Adelson, the major Trump donor whose SOLE interest is promoting Israel - and who, with her husband, gave over $100 million to Trump's campaign and PACs in 2016, and who gave 172.2 million to Trump's campaign and PACs for the 2020 election, has already donated more than $100 million to him for this year's election. Nearly $400 million dollars from a family whose sole interest is promoting Israel. They're the ones who convinced Trump to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, despite warnings from everyone in the diplomatic community. As bad as the Biden administration may have been in handling the Israeli-Palestinian situation - and as bad as you think Harris might be - neither of them can hold a candle to the disaster that will befall Palestinians if Trump is re-elected, particularly if Netanyahu holds off calling for new elections. Trump is likely to endorse all-out massacres - not just airstrikes, but just outright massacres - in both Gaza and the West Bank. And he's likely to provide Israel with whatever weapons it needs to defend itself against its neighbors. There is no "good" candidate on the Israel issue, sadly (not with any chance at winning). But if that issue is important to you - if, as it seems to be, it's the MOST important issue for some number of you - then not trying to defeat the candidate who's bankrolled by the biggest pro-Israel donor in the nation, bar none, seems a foolish choice.

And so much misogyny, too. I'm starting to understand better why Obama is taking Black men to task for their anti-women attitudes.

A guy on a website dedicated to condom-free sex with multiple complaints about sexualization. Complaining that a woman takes charge of her sexuality to have a relationship with a Black man and then also complaining when she breaks that off because she married a white man. Pretending that sexualization is limited to black supporters while ignoring the fact that black female performers, in particular, present a generally more sexualized image (and I have no problems with them doing so). Plenty of more staid, less "racy" Black women have been majorly public supporters of Harris, including Patti LaBelle, Kerri Washington, Viola Davis, Niecy Nash... the list goes on and on. Sure, flashy stars like Cardi B and Beyonce and Megan Thee Stallion are going to get attention when they perform at political events, because THAT'S WHAT THEY DO - they are attention-getters. Don't blame the Democratic Party for the Black community's promotion of liberated, sexually free women as a good thing. Maybe instead ask yourself why you see it as a bad thing.

My vote, in my state, does contribute very little to the presidential race, granted - especially since my state has gone GOP since Shrub in 2000. But in 2016, Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes. Meaning if 5,353 people's votes had changed from R to D, Clinton would have carried that state. Or if a mere 10,705 more Democrats had shown up - in a state where over 4.5 MILLION people voted - Clinton would have won. Similar percentages happened in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and it's ONLY because of those tiny margins in a few critical states that Trump won the electoral college. So yeah, in closely divided states, every vote counts.

That's partly because while Asians and Latinos face discrimination from conservatives, it's usually not as virulent, nor has it been as deep-seated and long-lasting, as that directed against Black people - especially restrictions on voting. That's not to downplay racism against Asians and Latinos, but it's fair to note that liberals - not conservatives - led the push to give Black people the (actual, as opposed to "on paper") right to vote in the 1960's. And it's conservatives - not liberals - who are attempting to make it more difficult for people to vote, targeting those efforts at poor people and students, groups among which Black people are disproportionately represented. And it's the Democratic party, not the "Democrat party".