BootmanLA

Here's the problem with your perspective (which may be because you're not, as you acknowledge, American. The way laws get written here, they ordinarily don't get "names" unless someone is trying to get cutsey with an acronym - and the name doesn't matter. What matters is what the law DOES. And the Florida law in question prohibits ANY reference to sexual orientation in public elementary schools. Sounds simple, right? But what is a "mention" of sexual orientation? If a straight married female teacher makes a reference to "my husband" (or an unmarried one makes a reference to "my boyfriend" or "my fiance"), nobody is going to say that's discussing sexual orientation. But if a gay male teacher says "my husband", you can bet your ass he's going to be hauled into some administrative office somewhere and berated for discussing sexual orientation - and very possibly fired for it. Because heterosexuality is so pervasive in culture that no one even NOTICES when people make references that clearly indicate a (hetero) sexual orientation. It's baked into the environment; it's the air that people breathe. It's only when the "sexual orientation" is NOT hetero that suddenly people start to notice and say children shouldn't be exposed to that. And when pressed for why, we're told that children that age are too young to learn about sex. But again, Mrs. Heterosexual can mention her husband - which is just as much teaching about sex as Mr. Gay mentioning HIS husband. Hell, pregnant women are allowed to teach - shocker! - and if that doesn't tell little kids something about the fact that sex exists, then how does a man mentioning his husband? And THAT'S why it's called "Don't say gay" - because it's only the people who make reference to an LGBTQ orientation, not those who outright flaunt their hetero orientation, who will be restricted under the law. It's a very accurate way to describe that law.

Talk about simplifying and distorting arguments: this one takes the cake. I did NOT say "nothing that transpires while a given individual holds power is directly attributable to him." I said - as you quoted, but may not have comprehended, "pretending that anything that transpires while a given official holds power is directly attributable to him, is silliness." Sometimes things are attributable to the official in power; sometimes they aren't. I certainly would hold Trump accountable for his actions on January 6. But the point you seem to be missing is that mere temporal proximity - "this" happened while "he" was in power, thus "he" caused "this" - is silly. Specifically, you're saying that because Lincoln made some political compromises that went against his moral compass in order to try to achieve what he considered a bigger goal - that is, keeping the Union intact - his moral compass is meaningless and we can't give him any credit for it. The world is a bit more complex than that. You seem to grasp this concept when it comes to FEMA responses or gas prices - that the person at the top can't control all the variables - but you seem completely blind to the variables Lincoln was facing trying to square his personal opposition to slavery (even if he was, in fact, not a believer in racial equality) with the political reality of keeping the nation whole. Oh, maybe by the collective - through our elected representatives - finally doing something to eradicate the entrenched racism that is at the heart of so many of our pathologies in this country? There are all sorts of "collective" actions the government can take that none of us, as individuals, can. We just lack the political will to force our government to do the right thing. "I've said MY piece and made MY provocative arguments and now I'm going to flounce out of here and pretend this thing I spent so much energy and effort on isn't worth my precious time any more"

And my point remains: What one personally believes, and what one is able to accomplish within the political realm given the political realities of the local, state, or federal system in which one is operating, are two different things. Conflating the two, or worse, pretending that anything that transpires while a given official holds power is directly attributable to him, is silliness. You're definitely doing the first. I can't speak for the second. You phrase this as though "taking responsibility for" (or not) is the only relevant response, in order to shoot down the idea that we are personally responsible for what happened before. Of course we're not. The problem is that today's suit-and-tie white supremacists use that argument to say we can't then actually look at the system to see how whites benefitted (and blacks were harmed), because we don't have to "take responsibility" for those actions. These people don't even want us acknowledging those systems existed, because it utterly destroys their narrative that black people have been free to better themselves for generations and we have no responsibility to fix those problems. Individually, no, we don't have to "take responsibility for" something we didn't do. But COLLECTIVELY, as a society, we sure as fuck OUGHT to, morally speaking. I know that anecdotes are not the singular form of data, but I will give a little of my own background as one example. Of my four great-grandfathers, one was a dirt poor farmer with about a third-grade education, one was a traveling sharecropper, one was a general laborer on a plantation, and the fourth - the only one to have made a little "something" of himself, managed the livestock at a different plantation. The first one's son, my paternal grandfather, managed to get at least a partial high school education and ended up working for the postal office, rising over the years to the local superintendent of carriers. His wife, my paternal grandmother (one of 11 children) somehow managed to finish high school and got a clerical state job. On the other side of the family, my paternal grandfather left school in the 6th grade and went to work for a window and door company owned by his uncle by marriage, then started his own glass business in his 1930's. His wife, my maternal grandmother, was one of 7 children who lived to adulthood, and the six girls ALL got a higher education of some sort, even though for some it was business education (like stenography, typing, or bookkeeping) - my grandmother was a teacher until she got married and had kids. None of that would have been possible if my four great-grandfathers had been black, not white. Higher ed was closed to black students at that time (the only historically black college in La. at the time was more like a high school because so few students had a secondary education worth a dime). Starting a business like my grandfather did wasn't an avenue open to blacks, either - at least not one that would serve white customers. The post office was segregated and hired very few blacks at the time - especially in the south - and most state jobs (other than basic manual labor), like my grandmother's, were white-only. And none of them started with any material advantages. My mom's dad died rich, because he made a small fortune in glass contracting as our home city boomed dramatically in the 20th century. My dad's dad retired with an extremely comfortable pension from the post office and played golf. My own parents and most of their siblings got higher educations. My generation basically lacked for nothing (and some of my cousins grew up in comparatively wealthy families). And yes, each generation along the way worked for what they got. But they at least had the opportunity to do that work, and to advance, in ways that for 100 years after slavery was impossible for almost any black person. To acknowledge that slavery and its racism/discrimination progeny is responsible for a big chunk of the gap between my economic status, and that of some of the black kids I grew up around, is the LEAST I can do. I don't have to "take responsibility" for what the people in power did in 1870 or 1890 or 1915 or 1940. But I'm certainly not going to say I didn't ultimately benefit from it. Focusing on what one "takes responsibility for" and nothing but that misses the point entirely.

Oh absolutely. Not denying that in the slightest. My point was merely to refute a poster's notion that because his own ancestors (save one) didn't own slaves, they didn't benefit from that institution and its progeny (like de jure segregation/discrimination).

Certainly not going to dispute that. But there is a distinction between "I believe in white supremacy" and "I believe slavery is a moral good" (or, if you prefer, between "I believe in racial equality" and "I think slavery is a moral abomination"). It's possible to believe that one race is "superior" to another while not believing the "inferior" one can morally be enslaved, which I think probably accurately reflect Lincoln's views (as far as I have been able to determine). It's possible to admire some characteristics or viewpoints of a person while loathing others. Very few people, if any, have no moral flaws. Unfortunately, one legacy of the traditional way of teaching history in the west is elevating people as "heroes" because of some significant accomplishment while ignoring the problematic side of the same individual.

Indeed. If Eros's daughter marries a black man and has children, most of society is going to consider those children black, Even if the parents may sometimes use the term "mixed" or "bi-racial" on forms, or whatever, people will see those kids and say "black". I think it might be useful to draw a distinction between feeling personally ashamed for something you didn't yourself do (which is admittedly silly) and being cognizant of the advantages you've enjoyed because of generations of mistreatment (both slavery and discrimination) of people not like yourself. Thus far, in my limited genealogical research, I've identified no slaveowners in my lineage, but I know absolutely that my forebears benefitted from that system. One of my great-grandfathers worked as the livestock (mostly horses and mules) manager on a post-bellum plantation. Not a single black person ever worked in a supervisory capacity on that plantation, ever. Even now, when the plantation is almost totally mechanized, I don't think there are any African-American supervisory people there. In 2023. I can't say I'm "ashamed" of any of my ancestors for benefitting from this kind of system, but at the same time, I am disgusted by the social fabric that created the system and allowed it to flourish for so long.

The problem, again, is that you are confusing the reasons that *individuals* chose to fight, or not, with the reasons that the **governing bodies with the actual ability to wage war* chose to enter into that conflict. It's like the difference between why Johnny becomes a civil engineer and why BigCo Giant Engineers, Inc. is in business. Johnny becomes an engineer because it's a skill he has, or a talent, or something he enjoys doing, or because his father was an engineer and he's following in the footsteps. It could be any number of things. BigCo Giant Engineers is in business to make money, period. It sees a market for what it does and tries to get whatever market share it can. Not just apples and oranges, but apples and an Antarctic glacier. Not even in the same general realm. Granted. But in Russia, everyone in the country doesn't benefit, in comparison with [fill in the blank] simply because they're Russian. White people, in this country, always had a status that exceeded that of blacks. If nothing else, as the Supreme Court clarified in Dred Scott, blacks couldn't even be citizens of the country. Period. What an incredibly simplistic and poorly conceived idea. By this "logic", no minority in any country could ever dominate society, or business, or economics, or anything else, because sheer numbers were the only thing that mattered. Ever looked at who had power in South Africa prior to the end of apartheid and what numbers were in each group? More than 3/4 were black, and whites never more than 20%, less than 13% by the time the system finally started breaking down. Rest assured that long after white people become a numerical minority in this country, they will still undoubtedly control the vast majority of the power, even before you account for gerrymandering. When white households own >85% of the wealth of the country, Lincoln was on record as early as 1854 saying he was personally opposed to slavery, period. I agree he wasn't "perfectly fine with the status quo" but it's a slur to suggest he had no feelings on the issue. He was simply resigned to the fact that keeping slavery where it existed was almost certainly a prerequisite to maintaining the union, despite his clearly and unequivocally stated opposition to the institution.

As has been pointed out repeatedly: ALL white people, not just those who owned slaves, benefitted from the institution because it gave them a leg up in terms of status. The poorest white had a higher social status than the wealthiest black in virtually every part of the south, and nowhere is that more solidly true than in the rural south. That held true long after slavery and repercussions of that still pervade American society and applied equally to your ancestors as well as the richest plantation owners. That may have been the reason those individuals eventually joined the fight. But the war itself - the secession, the attacks on federal facilities that kicked off the fighting, the organized efforts of the southern states - that had everything to do with slavery. Pretending it didn't and focusing on the motivations of a bunch of hayseed rednecks here and there, instead of the bigger picture, is a lot like asking a group of random US servicemembers why they were fighting in Iraq and assuming that (whatever it is) was the reason for the Iraq war. True, insofar as that goes. But Lincoln's position changed once he realized that the South would not rejoin the union even under the circumstances of preserving slavery. The impetus was the so-called "border states'" rejection of the idea of gradual emancipation, It's also important to note that while Lincoln might have been willing to tolerate slavery where it existed as the price for maintaining the union, he was clearly and emphatically on record that it was morally reprehensible and that it should not be allowed to expand into the remaining territories. He repeated his opposition to slavery and his intent to eradicate it during his re-election campaign. Tell the whole story, not just selected parts.

There's no need for a separate topic on this; way more than half of the posts on this site are by "cumdumps" who post so many stories about how depraved they are - LOOOK AT MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE - that I wonder how any of them have time to eat or sleep given all the sex they're allegedly having in bookstores, alleys, bathhouses, cars, trucks, vans, churches, homeless shelters, mall restrooms, and the like. They all seem to think it's a right dandy type of life - more power to 'em, I guess - so what problems could they possibly have to handle?

More information is needed in order to answer this accurately, but in any event, only YOU can decide what you "SHOULD" do. Asking someone else what you should do, in a matter of extremely personal choices, is simply handing control of your life over to random strangers on the internet. That's a dumb thing to do. You don't say whether you and your wife still have sex, or whether such sex, if any, is unprotected. You don't say whether she's aware that you are (apparently) bisexual, or whether she's aware you want to bottom for guys, bareback or not. The more she knows, the less you have to protect her directly. But if you and she are still having sex, that sex is unprotected, and she doesn't know that you're gay/bi or she doesn't know you bottom with men, you really, seriously need to consider PrEP. It's one thing if she knows and runs conscious risks herself. It's another thing entirely if you're putting her at risk for HIV without telling her.

I have zero experience with sniffles or sniffies or whatever it's called, nor with doublelist, so I can't say. BBRTS has a moderate number of active profiles from the New Orleans area. Bear in mind that New Orleans' economy is almost totally based on tourism, meaning a lot of guys are visiting the city at any one time, looking to cut loose, and approximately 168% of those people are bottoms looking to get fucked, preferably gang-banged. It's more than the six or seven tops in the city can handle, most of the time.

Then I have no idea what you consider 'masculine'. Or maybe it's because you live in a densely populated metropolitan area with millions of people that are almost uniformly office workers or service workers. Maybe if you got out of your closed world and met, say, some blue-collar men - of whom there are millions in this country.

Broadly speaking, neither (in this context). By which I mean yes, they are certainly minorities in a general sense, and they have certainly faced their own share of discriminatory treatment over the years. But there are some key differences. While there has been immigration from black/brown countries in the last century, the vast majority of "Black" (ie African-descended) people in this country descend from slaves, and their ancestors experienced not only slavery itself but the century-plus of de jure discrimination, segregated schools, and the like of which we're all aware (and which DeSantis and his ilk want to erase from public education). While some cities with substantial Asian populations (like San Francisco) did have segregated Asian schools, the percentage of Asians in general in the U.S. was small enough that such measures weren't undertaken in most of the country. The number of Asians entering the U.S. was sharply restricted for more than half of the 20th century, becoming substantial only in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Most of those arriving kids, then, entered the public school system after integration. Thus they didn't have 200+ years of it being illegal to teach children of their race to read and write (as was the case for Black slaves), nor did they get pigeonholed into poorly funded and operated single-race schools the way Black children were from the end of Reconstruction to the 1960's. That's not to say Asian children had it easy - children who are in the minority (whether Black, Hispanic, Asian, gay, trans, or whatever) almost inevitably face discrimination and exclusion to some degree. But as someone who was in school in the 1960's and 1970's when Asian students began to arrive in large numbers (especially from SE Asia with the end of the Vietnam conflict), I can remember that white parents both respected Asian families for their dedication to education and feared that Asian kids were going to take over everything because of said dedication. As such, they weren't treated as though they were white - but they also weren't treated as poorly as Black/brown students were.

Neither lazy nor stupid - it's a reasonable question. I use a VPN to access this site, without confirming or denying that I'm doing so from within my home state of Louisiana 🙂

1. Hepatitis is a disease involving inflammation of the liver that comes in multiple forms, the most common/widespread of which are Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, and Hepatitis C (each of which is caused by a different virus). Which type he has/had had a lot of bearing on your risk. Hepatitis A is spread through the stools (ie poop) of an infected person. As such, coming into contact with his stools, IF he had hepatitis A, would put you at risk (though that is not the same thing as "infecting you"). There is no treatment for Hepatitis A, but once you've had it, you can't get it again (generally speaking). Hepatitis B is spread through bodily fluids - primarily blood, although other bodily fluids can contain the virus as well. Because this virus is spread through fluid contact, it's much harder for a top to contract it from anal sex unless the bottom bleeds while being fucked. There is no effective treatment for Hepatitis B, but it can be managed if it becomes a chronic disease. Hepatitis C is also spread through bodily fluids. However, it is much more serious than Hepatitis B. There is a cure for Hepatitis C, but it's expensive and requires a long regimen of oral medication. 2. There are vaccines available to PREVENT Hep-A/Hep-B infections. There is no vaccine for Hep-C, but it is much more rarely spread through sex. 3. You mention getting PEP. It's certainly your choice whether to bareback or not - or to restrict yourself to oral sex. That said, if you get vaccinated for Hep-A/Hep-B (assuming you did not contract them this time), you will be protected from that. You should also look into the HPV vaccine. With those, and with PrEP, you should be protected against most of the viral STIs. 4. The bacterial ones (syphilis, gonorrhea) are harder to prevent (although there is some work being done with antibiotic PEP (taking antibiotics after sex to ward off infection). It's true that only you can determine what level of risk you're willing to take, sexually. But I will note that it's not as easy as it sounds to avoid fucking - the desire will still be there. Unless you have a will of iron, you're better off taking reasonable steps to protect yourself instead. 5. Lastly, I'll note: sticking to "guys you know well" is no guarantee of anything. First, you can't really know who all they may be fucking when you're not around. They may travel and engage in a lot more risky sex while there, or they may "entertain" someone else who has an STI of some sort (even without either of them knowing it) and thus share it around your group of "guys you know well." Closed loops of sexual activity are seldom truly closed.

You could use sandpaper, but I suspect that's not going to help much given the typical weave/knit of the pouch. Sandpapering the crotch of 501 jeans was a thing back in the 1970's and early 1980's, but that fabric is much more tightly woven and the idea was to make the fabric thinner to show a crotch bulge better. I would wash it repeatedly. If it's white, wash it in every load of white clothes you wash, preferably with hot water, In between, you might consider washing it with rougher clothes like jeans. The abrasiveness of the jeans might well soften the texture up some more.

Because you accused me of saying something I didn't say only to shoot it down. THAT is the real "straw man" argument - a concept you seem to not really understand. A "straw man" argument is when you create a straw man - something that didn't exist before - only to shoot it down, and pretend you won the original argument. That's EXACTLY what YOU did, not me. You are free to argue whatever you want, but don't drag me into it by alleging I said something I did not. As for your insane, fucked-up idea that I have "foreskin phobia" or whatever, here's another hint: don't assume how I feel about anything, because you're probably not capable of figuring it out.

This would be laughable if it weren't so pathetically sad. Honey, if you look at American and western European culture and can't find any examples of "male masculinity" being promoted, you're spending too much time in the drag department. Or navel-gazing.

Also, just for the record: "English" is capitalized when referring to a language. There should be a space after the period, and I have no idea what "cizsing" could possibly mean. Maybe you're trying to give us an example of falling behind in English?

We've been falling behind most developed countries in those areas for more than 40 years - my entire adult life. When I was a teenager the mantra was that the Japanese, particularly, were studying so much harder than our students do that they were going to run the world in short order. Didn't work out that way. But in any event, one of the reasons we've (on average) been so behind other societies in our educational achievements is the appalling history of segregated (and, for the minority kids, grossly inferior) education in this country. And while "legal" segregation - forcing students into separate schools by race - was struck down, "de facto" segregation has continued apace, aided and abetted by governments that have consciously maintained disparate educational systems, mostly in the name of "local control". What that usually means is that each locality - rich or poor - is expected to pick up most of the cost of educating the students of that locality, and so of course areas with lots of richer (and usually whiter) people can provide much better education for their kids than the poorer (and usually browner/blacker) cities or counties. The state officials can simply say "But we're not discriminating against black students - we're just letting the locals decide how much they want to spend on education." If you want an example of Critical Race Theory and how it works in reality, in fact, you'd be hard pressed to find a better one than how we've maintained racial disparities in education despite ostensibly making such discrimination illegal.

This site blocks visitors whose IP address resolves to a Utah or Louisiana location, because of restrictive laws in those states (see this topic for more information).

There are no bathhouses in New Orleans any longer. The last one closed many, many years ago. There are a few ABS's in seedier parts of the suburbs but none in an area I'd want to set foot in.

While the name hasn't changed, southern US history textbooks (and by extension, those used in much of the United States) papered over "slavery as the root cause of the Civil War" for decades. Widely used and approved high school history textbooks taught concepts like "the slaves loved and depended on their masters for protection" and "slavery taught many slaves skills and trades they were able to use to better themselves" and other apologetic horseshit. And when it comes to the war itself, it was frequently painted as due to some vague concept of "state's rights". What right was in question, for the states? The right of the state's residents to own slaves. What right were the Confederate states most worried about losing? The right to own slaves. What rationale did almost every southern state cite, in their declarations of secession, as the cause for removing themselves from the Union? Preservation of white supremacy and the right to own slaves. I support the teaching of Critical Race Theory - AS IT IS PROPERLY DEFINED AND UNDERSTOOD, which means not in any way, shape or form in the caricature presented by GOP idiots and mouth-breathing "conservative" shitheads - in the setting in which it is intended - that is, advanced collegiate courses and law schools. "Critical Race Theory" - again, understood properly - has NEVER been taught in elementary or secondary schools. But opportunistic GOP/conservative divisive operators - like most GOP politicians today - have managed to convince poorly educated Americans that "CRT" is something else entirely AND that it is being used to brainwash young minds. Nothing could be farther from the truth. These politicians attempt to make "critical" mean "criticizing" - and then further twist the phrase to suggest that CRT means teaching white students to be critical of, and ashamed of, their whiteness. "Critical", in this case, means "essential" - as in "Critical Care Unit" in a hospital, or as in "It is critical to eat food regularly if you don't want to die of starvation." And in this case, the phrase, as a whole, means that studying the role of race in American history is critical - that is, essential - to understanding almost any problem in contemporary culture - that racism, historically speaking, underlies so much of what's wrong with America. That doesn't mean "hate white people." It means "Understand what was done in the past, and how those effects linger in hundreds of ways today, often unseen," so that we can solve those problems at their root and not just at the symptomatic level. That sort of understanding, of course, would doom the prospects of the Republican Party, so it's no surprise that they're willing to malign and misrepresent CRT as a threat to children. "Think of the children!" is their go-to method of distorting reality on almost every social issue there is.

Which, specifically, "North American and European cultures" have feminized men? I'd be fascinated to know. Or do you mean any time we socialize men into not grunting, belching, farting, and otherwise being obnoxious boors means they're "feminized"?

I am not saying that circumcision prevents HIV. Please do not attribute statements to me that I did not make. Challenge what I said, not what you imagine, in your mind, that I said. To quote -with extraneous clauses omitted: "the study in question...SUGGESTS that being circumcised provides SOME additional protections over being uncircumcised" (emphasis added). I do not know how you translate "SUGGESTS" and "SOME" into "prevents". Maybe a dictionary is in order here.