BootmanLA

As someone (and I can't remember who, unfortunately) put it: it's like being on an airplane where meals are still served, and the flight attendant tells you that your choices are chicken, or a shit sandwich filled with shards of glass. Being undecided at this point in the election is like looking at those choices and asking "How is the chicken prepared?"

Tolerate corruption? You mean the way the Democratic leadership pushed hard on Sen. Menendez until he resigned before going to trial? The way we pushed Anthony Weiner out of office? Where, exactly, is this toleration for Democratic-specific corruption manifesting itself? Let's compare Menendez with, say, oh, I don't know, George Santos, who had to be expelled by the House because he was so corrupt he refused to resign - only to then admit his guilt and plead guilty to felonies trying to avoid a very long prison sentence. See how it works when you do direct comparisons? You made casual reference to Pelosi and insider trading, without a shred of evidence (or maybe you just don't understand what "insider trading" actually is). If it were up to me, members of Congress and their spouses would be forbidden from owning individual stocks at all, and presidents would be required to put all personal assets (except, perhaps, one home) into a blind trust. But that's never going to happen when you have someone like Trump as president, or when members of both parties own substantial stock holdings, even if those are tilted towards Republicans.

I suspect you're right, if only because his work (at least, that which has been made public) is professionally done, and no professional studio is going to come within a hundred feet if they know anyone in the scene is underage. (That obviously has not always been the case, but it has been true for decades.)

Possibly, possibly not. The vaccine works against certain strains, and if you have a DIFFERENT strain, the vaccine might still offer protection against the ones it does work on.

As a general rule, vaccines are covered under the preventative medicine mandate ONLY if the vaccine is specifically indicated for the patient in question. So, for instance, Gardasil, one of the main HPV vaccines, is indicated for females and males ages 9 to 45 who have NOT been infected with particular types (or strains) of HPV. So if you're over that age range, you may not be covered under the "preventative medicine mandates" (although your insurer may still cover it).

Bull. Small governments can be heavily tilted toward one pole or the other just as readily. And not all legislation is legislating "morality". I don't want Gaza leveled either, it might surprise you to know. But that's the thing: in this country, we elect people to make choices for our government, and for good or bad, successive governments on both sides have chosen to support Israel, while only sometimes expressing support for Palestinians. If I were making the decision solely for myself, we might or might not have a very different relationship with Israel. Or with a state of Palestine. If I disagree with the status quo, it's up to me to urge change. But that doesn't mean I get to "opt out" of things simply because I don't like some of the choices my government makes. That doesn't follow. There's actually no consensus on ANYTHING - I can guarantee you that I can find people opposed to just about every policy choice in the entirety of government - so we go with a "majority rules" system, with the exception that certain policy choices are invalid because we've written or amended our constitution to say so. If we had to limit things to "the smallest possible sphere" we couldn't get taxes appropriated to pay for declaring when or if we go on Daylight Savings Time. That's ONE thing that can lead to inflation. So can the mere act of jacking up prices when you (or you and your fellow corporations) simply decide you can charge more for something and people will pay it because they have to. Mises and Rothbard and Hayek believed, or pretended to believe, that consumers could temper that by simply refusing to pay inflated prices and finding cheaper alternatives, but that doesn't work any more. No startup can afford to establish, say, a textiles factory in the US to make socks to compete with ones produced for pennies in southeast Asia, and couldn't sell them at a competing price if they could build the factory. And given how the GOP, in particular, has hollowed out our anti-monopoly laws to allow a handful of giant companies to dominate practically every industry, there's not much chance of that changing, either.

With certain responses here, I guess one shorthand way of answering "what is woke" would be "The opposite of all those people saying 'I got mine, fuck the rest of you'".

TDS, of course, is "Trump Derangement Syndrome" - the psychological disorder that makes people support and trust a man who's been held liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud, has had to file six bankruptcies, who's been convicted of 34 counts of fraud in the state of New York, who faces dozens of other felony counts in state and federal court, and who, at last check, thinks illegal immigrants are killing and eating pet dogs, thinks "political asylum" is the same thing as "insane asylum" (and that immigrants seeking asylum are thus Hannibal Lecter-clones), thinks the army under George Washington captured the airports to defeat the British, and that having electric-powered boats means having to choose between electrocution and being eaten by sharks. Yeah, his supporters are pretty deranged.

"Russiagate" is the right-wing's nickname for a very real thing: the documented fact that Russia was working behind the scenes to get Trump elected in 2016. What the Mueller investigation found is that (a) there wasn't evidence that the Trump campaign was aware of those efforts, nor was there evidence they were NOT aware of it; (b) they were eager to meet with foreign agents who claimed to have "dirt" on Clinton, even if it turned out that they did not; and (c) there was a seriously open question as to whether Trump obstructed justice in the course of the investigation (which AG Barr chose not to follow up on). That's the truth. The lie is Trump's claim that it was all a hoax. As for Covid vaccines, well, if you're part of that nutball conspiracy theory, there's nothing really to discuss there. I'd suggest you debate some of the million-plus people killed by Covid but oops, you can't, they're dead. Nepotism? Do you HEAR yourself? Biden didn't give any of his kids jobs in his administration, and while some of his relatives may have tried to cash in on their family name, it was (a) essentially all AFTER Biden left office and (b) not with Joe Biden's cooperation. Unlike, say, Jared and Ivanka having administration jobs AND continuing to do business with American adversaries like China, and cooking up deals with foreign nations like Qatar and Saudi Arabia for private profit. And Trump - unlike every other president - tried to overturn the duly chosen electors of several states he lost, all in a pathetic attempt to cling to power, and whipped a crowd of supporters into a frenzy and set them loose on the Capitol while the electoral votes were being counted. They overran the Capitol, did millions of dollars of damage, caused the death of several police officers, and all the while Trump sat back watching the carnage from his office and refused to address them to tell them to stop for hours - despite pleas from his chief of staff, attorneys, and even his family. I have EVERY confidence that the Democratic leadership - in Congress and in the White House - is thousands of times better than that.

But as noted: it's ordinarily NOT offered as a first-time option, because it's a lot pricier (for now) than oral PrEP.

From a legal perspective, yes - it's a very long-established antibiotic approved by the FDA. That said, use as post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) for sexually transmitted infections (STI) is what's classified as an "off-label" use. For those who want the longer explanation, read on; the short version is that use as PEP may not be covered by insurance. The longer version: the FDA approves drugs for use, and they also regulate the labels on those drugs, including a section called "indications". These are the conditions or diseases which the FDA has decided are reasonable uses for the medication in question. And indications can be rather loose and generic, or very tightly controlled. So Drug A's approved label may list, in its indications section, that it's intended for use for treating conditions B and C. That doesn't mean it's illegal to prescribe the medication for condition D or E - it just means that an insurance company may not approve payment for A for a patient with D or E, because treating D or E is considered "off-label". For example, ivermectin is a drug many of us became familiar with during the pandemic. It's a medication that has a formulation approved by the FDA for treating infections caused by certain parasitic worms, specifically Strongyloidiasis and Onchocerciasis. Treatment of those two infections with ivermectin is, thus, an "on-label" use - one that's blessed by the FDA - and that's usually, though not always, enough to trigger coverage under most insurance policies. I say "usually" because some insurers cover what's called "step therapy", where the least expensive medication that is indicated for a condition has to be tried first. That way, doctors aren't always prescribing the newest and most expensive medications as soon as they become available when something tried-and-true may work just as well. In addition, insurers often put newer and more expensive medications on a "prior approval" list, meaning that the prescriber must request permission from the insurer to prescribe the particular medication and provide the reason it's preferred over a less expensive alternative. (Insurers do recognize that there are sometimes good reasons for this - for instance, the patient may have a documented allergy to one of the components of a less pricey drug, or the less pricey drug may have proven ineffective in a previous bout of treatment - but they want to be sure doctors aren't always shooting for the newest and flashiest thing. And sometimes insurers are just dicks who want to force people to go the cheap route as long as possible even if it's not effective.) Anyway: COVID-19 was not an "on-label" indication for ivermectin, and there's really no reason it should work, since it's an anti-parasitical and COVID is caused by a coronavirus. And in fact, there was never any valid* medical evidence that it worked for COVID at all. (People took it, recovered from COVID, and gave credit to the drug when in fact most people who caught COVID recovered even without treatment. The few studies that showed it might work turned out to have been largely faked.) It was still perfectly legal for doctors to prescribe it for COVID, but by and large insurers wouldn't cover it, especially once the limited positive evidence turned out to be fraudulent. Technically, DoxyPEP is in that same boat - it's not an approved indication, although there are efforts being made to get approval in place (the FDA issued clinical guidelines in June of this year, which is often a precursor step to approving the indication). But because Doxycycline is routinely prescribed anyway, especially for treatment of STIs, it's pretty easy for a cooperative doctor to prescribe it, officially for an STI, and insurance isn't going to bat at eye at it, especially since it's a pretty cheap antibiotic.

It's hard to say "lucky", but yes, crabs are a lot more common than most other STI's, with about 3 million people in the US getting them each year, way more than the annual number of new syphilis cases (200,000) or gonorrhea cases (650,000) or herpes cases (between 500,000 and 1 million). The lucky part is that they can be treated with an over-the-counter solution. They can be spread by shared towels, bedsheets, etc. but they can't survive off the body for more than about 24 hours or so, so simply putting any such fabric items aside for 3-4 days should mean any crabs (which are body lice) will be dead. Then just wash the items.

Ozempic isn't being prescribed so that "chubby" guys can look like twigs. It's a drug originally created for Type 2 diabetes management that proved to also provide some benefit for weight loss. When it's prescribed for the latter, it's generally for people who are clinically (or morbidly) obese and who have trouble managing their weight through diet and exercise alone. For HIV-positive people, management of weight is especially important as obesity is a complicating factor for diabetes and kidney function, which in some cases can already be impaired to some degree by HIV medications.

FWIW: I am, or will be, new to DoxyPEP as my sexual activity level (since it was introduced) hasn't justified it. But I'll be making a visit to a much more "active" climate soon, so I decided to broach the topic with my HIV doctor. I was a little hesitant as his practice is owned by AHF, which was downright negative about PrEP at first and very cautious about DoxyPEP. But to my pleasant surprise he said immediately it was a good thing, and wrote a prescription on the spot for me. I don't know whether or not I'll actually need it, but I'm very pleased it's going to be an option.

One of the best things about Trump sycophants is how very many of them eventually reach that "Fuck Around, Find Out" moment.

Here's the thing: you don't get to decide for yourself what's "moral" for everyone else. Sorry, but nobody died and made you king. Every homeowner would have to pay a buttload of money to pay off their mortgages, car notes, and credit card debt, too, but we don't denounce people for buying houses, cars, and other items. Debt is a tool, and like any tool, whether it's used wisely depends in large measure on what you're using it for. When you use it to finance buying an asset, like a house or car, you're investing in something that returns a benefit, whether it's shelter or the ability to get to work to earn money to pay off the house and car (and to eat, and to buy soap, and whatever else you spend your earnings on). When government spends money on highways, it's investing in infrastructure. When it spends it on education, it's investing in the future productivity of upcoming generations. When it invests in pollution remediation, it's investing in the health of those future citizens. When it provides health care or food or shelter for those who can't afford it, it's helping protect a workforce to help support future generations. I'm not saying all government spending is wise; I'm saying that just because YOU think it's not a "core function" doesn't mean it's not worthwhile spending.

There was some discussion earlier about the likely sentence in the event of a conviction. Here's a relevant example from an appeal I read today. A man pled guilty in federal court to ONE count of possession of visual depictions of sexual activities by minors (the official name of the particular offense). He received 240 months in prison (20 years), a $250,000 fine, $10,100 in restitution and special assessments, and supervised release for life (ie, if he lives to be released, he'll have to report to a parole officer until he dies). He was appealing parts of the sentence. Sounds stiff? Sort of, but not really. It's a within-guidelines sentence (at the high end), at the statutory maximum, given the particulars of his crime. His pre-sentence report (PSR), which provides the relevant background and facts alleged by the prosecution, found that the man possessed 3,699 images of what we call collectively "child porn" - which could include anything from nudity involving the genitals to actual sexual activity with the child (the evidence shows that it included all of the above). He also tried to hide one laptop and phone containing some of the images, leading to an enhancement on his sentence for obstruction of justice. So it doesn't take conviction of having thousands of such images for those thousands of images to actually affect the sentence. In a case like this, I believe that the prosecutors provide the evidence of the additional images to the court, for instance, so as to establish their relevance, without having to actually prove each and every one of them he downloaded himself (because possession is the particular crime being charged). That's also why the sentencing guidelines are so steep for a single offense and why being charged with one count is pretty much as bad as being charged with everything they find. The only part of his appeal with merit was that the sentence barred him from the internet or using a computer for life. The appellate courts have found that given how much of modern life requires the use of a computer and/or the internet, and given that it's possible to use software that restricts what you can do, a blanket ban on access for life is not permissible. So the appeals court sent that provision alone back to the sentencing judge to change - notably, without telling him HOW to change it, which the judge will have discretion to do within the limits set by the court.

You're very welcome. As @Poz50something noted, there's some sort of myth about a "community" of poz barebackers that you can join by becoming poz, but it's just that - a myth. It wasn't always necessarily so. Back when AIDS was first discovered - and when HIV was identified as the cause - the affected community DID have to come together, because we were shunned not only by panicked straight people, but also by other gay people who weren't poz. You're way too young to have seen the reaction to the world as a whole when gay men suddenly started dying of a mysterious illness, one that couldn't readily be diagnosed until the onset of one or more of what were called "opportunistic infections" - the kinds of infections that were killing gay men whose immune systems were completely collapsing, even though these infections were almost unknown in the broader world (or were easy to treat in other cases). I was fortunate, if one can call it that (and I hate that word in this sense) that I lived in a relatively small city far from the big population centers where HIV initially spread rampantly - New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Once HIV was identified and a test developed to detect its antibodies, we learned that as many as HALF of gay men in San Francisco - one of the two centers of gay culture in the US - were HIV positive. Virtually every one of those people tested then are dead, many decades ago. The problem for the rest of the country, of course, is that thousands and thousands of gay men traveled to those cities from other places every year, having sex with locals, and bringing the infection back to their local community. Local mores being what they are, it didn't usually spread as far within those smaller towns and cities, but it didn't stay contained to the original person, either. Public reaction was predictably horrible. One very prominent conservative pundit called for mandatory tattooing of a "positive" indicator on the asses of gay men who tested positive, so that at least anyone who had sex with them would be informed (as though most of us weren't being up front anyway). Ambulance companies would refuse to transport early victims to the hospital because they didn't know if the disease was transmitted by air or not, and gay people weren't important enough, generally speaking, that anyone was outraged by that kind of behavior. In that kind of environment, the healthier poz guys stepped up to help care for others (along with, to be fair, a lot of negative gay men willing to help). Even more so, lesbian groups did even more; since they were (broadly speaking) far less likely to get infected, they did a lot of the "on the ground" work of caring for their poz friends and brothers. They were often the only reason gay men didn't literally die in the streets, as they helped establish some of the earliest hospices to care for the dying. That was then. Importantly, even though there WAS a community of people coming together in the face of being poz, it was a community none of us WANTED to be in. There's only been this "eroticization" of HIV in the last couple of decades. In fact, I'd say there were perhaps five main overlapping periods: --Panic and fear, because we didn't know what was going on (until about 1985); --Resolute fighting and demands for improved care and treatment (1985-early 90's); --A kind of resignation that if becoming poz is likely or inevitable, we might as well let it happen so we can stop stressing after every sex act (early 90's to about turn of the century); --Dawn of hope that new medications could extend life by some substantial unknown amount of time (1996-2010 or so); and --The discovery that getting to undetectable meant inability to transmit the virus, coupled with the development of PrEP to prevent infection in the first place (early 2010's - present). As far as I can tell, the eroticization of HIV infection didn't begin to take hold until the third and fourth periods - people began fantasizing that, well, if I'm going to become poz, let's make it deliberate and something done knowingly to me, making me part of that community. The irony is that the "community" was already on its way out, because government had finally sort of gotten its act together and was helping provide treatment, and being able to become undetectable meant HIV-positive people didn't have "that look" that outed them as poz. Most of the things that brought us together - fundraisers for HIV care, to pay for special HIV hospices, demonstrations to demand research and action - were going by the wayside.

Okee dokee. You wrote: That would come as a shock to any number of societies that existed in millennia past, having invented money but which had zero socialist features. Given that most of the rest of your ill-informed screed descends from this gross misunderstanding of economics, I really could leave it at that and consider your argument debunked. Every government that does *anything* is "redistributive". Roads built with taxes redistribute money. Public buildings, including the courts needed to vindicate private rights, redistribute money through their very existence. Taxes exist as a means of providing societal good. The fact that they're sometimes abused doesn't mean that by definition, they're a failure. And as @NEDenver pointed out, the overwhelming majority of people who don't pay *income* taxes do not, AT PRESENT, make enough to hit the lowest level of taxation. That includes disabled people and those too sick to work, children, full-time students, retired people, and more. That's the only way anyone can get anywhere close to claiming that "51%" of people are taking the other 49%'s money, and even then, that's still a specious claim. Beyond that: almost all of those people still pay other forms of tax, including sales and use taxes (state and local), property taxes (state and local, either directly or included in their rents, because as an expense of renting property to others, that's going to be calculated in), tariffs (federal, which drive up the costs of imported goods for domestic consumers), plus a wide variety of "fees" (state and local) that are as often as not taxes by another name. You should have stayed hating her. The fundamental flaw in her (and most conservatives' thinking) is that she and they think society exists to benefit themselves, so they can get rich off the labor of others. The truth is that society exists - or should exist, at any rate - as a way for a population to band together to jointly make and create the things that make it possible to live together peacefully. We have courts and police so that someone in every family doesn't have to stay awake all night guarding one's house and livestock. We have regulation of agriculture so that we don't all have to grow our own wheat and zucchini and sheep and chickens to have food to eat but can still be reasonably assured that the food we buy is safe. Money provides a relatively stable means of conducting trade between people, so that I can trade my work (physical or mental) for money, which I can then trade for food and housing (or a computer or a vacation). Almost every person on earth depends on others to survive. Even among the most "primitive" (by western standards) tribes engage in trade, and have for millennia. I sincerely doubt you'd survive six months if you had to do everything on your own, including somehow preventing the pollution of whatever land you claimed as your own (or even being able to hold onto that claim).

@IrishBoi: To answer your question, I'm going to give you what is strictly my opinion, and that is "No, you should not become poz." It's not just that "stay negative" is my default advice, although it is; it's that you have identified several potential issues you'd need to resolve. For starters, you note that all the poz people you know are undetectable. That is, in fact, the status for the overwhelming majority of gay men in the developed western world who are poz and who know it. Of course, there are always poz men who don't know (and thus have never gone on medications), and there are a handful - not many - who avoid meds, sometimes to their detriment. But they're a small minority of poz men in the west. Second, as you note, a lot of undetectable guys want nothing to do with chasers. They became poz not deliberately but because of misplaced trust, a broken condom, substance abuse problems, a drunken fling, or whatever. Some of the ones who've been poz the longest gave up trying to prevent it, back in the days when infection rates were high, so they could stop stressing and worrying about every single sexual encounter. But almost all of them decided they'd rather live a long life, and the introduction of modern HIV medications made that possible. Not a lot of them are going to want to give that up just to help you "cross over." Third, you yourself note that you have issues with taking pills, and while I wouldn't call my HIV pill "massive", it's larger than the ones I take for controlling my blood pressure, my cholesterol, etc. On the other hand it's considerably smaller than my daily vitamin or the handful of joint/heart supplements I also take. If you did manage to become poz, I can assure you: unless you're one of a very few lucky non-progressors, within a relatively short period of time, maybe ten years, you'll likely be fighting to stay alive and active, if you can't take the medication. Fourth, you say you've "fully considered" being poz, but I can assure you, the reality, especially if you can't take medications, is nothing you've thought about. If you don't know anyone poz who isn't undetectable, and haven't watched anyone in the hospital who's wasted away from 200 lbs down to 120 in five months because his body's giving out, you haven't "fully considered" anything. Yes, yes, I get it: there's a forbidden element to HIV conversion, which many of us have eroticized. But the reality is really divorced from the fantasy if standard treatment isn't an option, and it sounds like it isn't for you.

I call bullshit.

You'd be surprised. Things like white supremacy are NOT incompatible with male-on-male sex. (That's not an endorsement of, or even toleration for, white supremacy; just an acknowledgment that there are shitstain people who are turned on by other shitstain people.)

That explains a great deal. As I explain that position to other people, "It means he likes living in a nice world but doesn't want to pay the costs of living in a nice world. It's called freeloading."

"All in the Family" is still widely distributed via streaming, including on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Pluto, and Hulu, among others. I'm not sure what you mean by "dare want to air" the show. In fact, it was more controversial when it was first airing (because it dared criticize the status quo, mocking unthinking conservative viewpoints) than it would be today, when it would be basically mainstream. The problem with Mr. Magoo was that it was mocking those who have poor eyesight. There's this thing about jokes and comedy: they're a lot funnier and stand the test of time better if they punch UP, not DOWN. Mocking people for disabilities may have once been considered "a joke", but I think it's a good thing we no longer accept that, just as we don't accept blackface and other ethnic mischaracterizations - or at least, some of us don't. Great example of a strawman argument. Nobody's arguing that schools should be making all of the decisions and shutting parents out. But parental rights can be taken too far - there was a time when you could discipline a child pretty much up to the point of not quite killing them and officialdom didn't bat an eye. Parental rights have to be balanced against the rights of the child, and the older the child gets, the more important it is to take the child's needs and wants into consideration. What the anti-Trans and anti-LGBT parent groups want is full and unrestricted authority over their kids because it's "Godly". The pendulum is swinging AWAY from the left so fast and so hard it's not even on the left edge of center any more. The federal government issued some mild - exceedingly mild - guidance on how trans issues should be handled in schools to be consistent with recent Supreme Court rulings (including Bostock) and right-wing judges are issuing NATIONWIDE injunctions against the guidance (and similar regulations) based on a handful of parents complaining in one district (though obviously there are such people all over, just not nearly as numerous as they want people to think). There's no massive movement of that pendulum to the left; there's no movement AT ALL to the left any more, because Trump judges keep jumping in and blocking things and overturning long-established law simply because they feel empowered to do so. I don't know what universe you're living in where you think the pendulum has moved too far to the left, but it's not this one.