BootmanLA

You mean that the Supreme Court of Canada is holding that you can't legally fuck someone while intentionally violating the terms of the consent they gave? Shocking. Good for them.

If your advisor has signed off on this destruction of materials, then that's one thing, but if that's something you've chosen to do on your own, I urge you to rethink this, for a couple of reasons. First: it's not unknown for there to be challenges later to your research (not in this area in particular, but in general). It happens not only with academic research, but professional research as well. In particular, in the sciences, some may well question whether your sources were real, etc. Having those recordings, and not just your notes, will help validate your research. What you don't want to do is end up in a situation where someone is alleging you made up most of your interviewees, and you don't have any concrete way to prove they existed. And even if your adviser has signed off on this: remember that you, not he (or she) will be on the hot seat if your research is challenged. All told, I would look into other options for long-term storage of the original material, even if encrypted, so that you can retrieve it if need be.

Again, made-up bullshit. You know this works both ways, don't you? If it weren't against the rules to target another member, one might envision all sorts of fabricated statistics I could make up about "TotalTop" and his sex life and what he enjoys and his criminal history and god knows what else. But I won't, because that wouldn't be right. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data". Assuming this friend exists, and assuming he actually has a wife, and assuming they actually have at least two children, and assuming they actually did this unnamed, undescribed, unknown "test" you mention, and assuming they did not in fact have an abortion, and assuming they had a boy, and that the first was also a boy, and assuming this second child is in fact healthy and assuming he did in fact turn 5 - a LOT of assumptions for which there is zero evidence, I'll note, other than your word - that still doesn't make fetal tests "notoriously inaccurate" any more than the one time you might have theoretically had trouble with an erection makes you "notoriously impotent". 24% of abortions occur in cases where the couple was using a form of birth control - most often condoms - and the birth control failed. That doesn't birth control isn't very effective; it means that sometimes, it doesn't work. In your world, such people are consigned to carry the pregnancy to term, apparently.

There was a time when I would have said "Well, the Supreme Court has already ruled on that" but these days.... There is a case from decades ago precisely addressing that issue. Texas recognizes common-law marriages - if you agree to be married, live together, and hold yourself out as a married couple for two years, you are legally married under common law. Louisiana does not recognize common-law marriages for its own citizens/residents. A couple who were common-law spouses in Texas came to Louisiana to visit relatives here. The husband was killed in a traffic accident, and the surviving wife sued, under Louisiana law, for various damages. Her right to sue was predicated on her being his surviving spouse - if she wasn't his spouse, she couldn't sue the other driver. The other driver's attorneys tried to dismiss the suit on the grounds that they couldn't have gotten legally married this way in Louisiana, so she wasn't eligible to sue. But the courts held that the full faith and credit clause of the US Constitution required Louisiana courts to recognize her marriage, which was valid in Texas where they resided - just as if, say, they were first cousins married in a state that permitted cousins to marry, even if the state where the accident occurred prohibited cousin marriage. But, as I say - with this Supreme Court, who knows what precedent they might throw out?

If I'm reading the thread right, you seem to be saying that people who married in California found themselves "un-married". That's kind of true, kind of not. The circumstance came up twice. The first was when San Francisco unilaterally started issuing same sex marriage licenses in contravention of state law. Ultimately, the courts first ordered the license-dispensing to stop (which SF did) and then later held the marriages null and void because there was no authority for them in the first place. The ruling was, essentially, that a license acquired in violation of law (like one, say, issued to a man and his six-year old daughter) was null and void from the start, and couldn't be retroactively upheld. Later, the state was sued and the Supreme Court of CA held that a ban on same-sex marriages violated the state constitution. and struck down that ban. People rushed to get married while at the same time anti-gay forces pushed a ballot initiative to prohibit same-sex marriages in the CA Constitution. That initiative narrowly passed. This time, the Court held that the marriages had been legally entered into at the time of the marriage, so the state was powerless to void that contract. Later still, the constitutional ban on same-sex marriage was challenged in federal court and it was struck down under the US Constitution. Once that was affirmed at the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, same-sex marriage became legal in all the states in the 9th Circuit (a huge swath of the western US). But at no time were the marriages conducted in California AFTER the courts ruled them legal in the state ever voided - just the ones authorized by San Francisco in 2004.

"Many"? Please cite an authoritative source for this adjective. My description for this characterization is "bullshit". I'm not calling you a liar but it sounds to me like you hang out with a rather seedy crowd, if that's actually true. Again: please cite an authoritative source for your bullshit claim that "kill[ing] the infant after he or she is born" occurs in abortion clinics in the USA. "Hi, I just had this baby, and I meant to get an abortion but forgot. Can you take care of killing it for me? Kthanksbye" It's true that the fetus dies. The rest of this paragraph is again fertilizer-quality bullshit. Prior to the horrible Dobbs decision, two-thirds of abortions took place in the first eight weeks of pregnancy, and 88% took place in the first 12 weeks. Others have already pointed out that abortion in the first trimester has a much lower complication and much lower fatality rate than pregnancy, so I'll leave aside your false statement about safety otherwise. I will note, however, that at 12 weeks - less than a trimester - a baby is not "almost developed". If they were, such babies could be saved in a miscarriage in a neonatal care unit. As it is, the youngest developed fetus to survive a premature delivery was 21 weeks, 1 day along. Anything before that, by definition, the baby is not "almost developed". More importantly, by that point, nobody's using abortion as casual birth control. A woman who has gone 20 weeks into pregnancy is almost guaranteed to want the child, but tragically, abortion is sometimes the safer and saner option. Abortions at this stage almost always involve something like severe fetal abnormalities that, IF the fetus survives to delivery, will almost certain end in a painful death. Sometimes the abortion is to remove a fetus that is already dying and has no chance of survival, and removing it from the mother is her only chance at survival as well. The point ought to be obvious: these are decisions that a woman should make, in consultation with her health care providers, and what you or I or anyone else thinks about it really shouldn't matter one fucking bit. Now, would I agree by the third trimester, absent such a clear reason, abortion shouldn't be permitted? I could be persuaded. But the thing is, under Roe and Casey, states could ALREADY prohibit such abortions, because they're past the point of viability. What the Supreme Court said in Dobbs is, in essence, a state can prohibit all those circumstances you say you'd support a right to abortion in - that states can, in fact, prohibit it entirely, even to save the life of the mother, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop a state from doing so. And in fact, that's effectively what some states have already done. So don't pretend you're some sort of reasoned moderate who recognizes that there are some limited circumstances where it should be protected - because you cannot, repeat cannot, square that with the Dobbs decision. It's not possible.

It is true that MANY DECADES before the Civil War, there were some slaves in the Northern states. Let's look at the numbers, shall we, since we have the census data for every decade starting with 1790. In that first census, there were zero slaves in Massachusetts (which then included Maine). There were 475,327 persons in Massachusetts (more than any state except Virginia). There were 16 slaves in Vermont, 158 in New Hampshire, 948 in Rhode Island. In total, in that first census, for states above the Mason-Dixon line, there were 49,257 slaves out of a total of 2,027,248 persons, so roughly 2.4% of the population north of the Mason-Dixon line was a slave. By contrast, none of the states south of the Mason-Dixon line had fewer than 12,430 slaves (Kentucky, which was sparsely settled at that point). The 49K slaves in the entire northern US pales in comparison with South Carolina (107,094 slaves), North Carolina (100,572 slaves), Maryland (103,036 slaves), or Virginia (a whopping 292,627 slaves). All told, there were 645,023 slaves in the six southern states out of a total population there of 1,866,387 people. In other words, 34.5% of all persons in the six southern states were enslaved. Let's leap ahead to the eve of the Civil War, to 1860. In that year, there were a grand total of 18 slaves in New Jersey and 1,798 in Delaware. Those were the only states of the original 13 where slavery was still legal, and only tangentially so (the reason numbers are so low). That's a total of 1,816 slaves in the northern states, out of 18,912,763 persons, or roughly one in every 200,000 people. In the slaveholding (that is, southern) states, there were 3,948,713 slaves among a total of 12,128,077 persons, or 32.5%. Now, as to making money off slaves: it's true that for a time, the slave trade flourished in both northern and southern ports, and banks in the north made a profit financing the purchase of ships and their human cargo. But the importation of slaves was illegal after 1808, or in other words, for more than 50 years before the Civil War. Thereafter, northern banks continued to profit by financing land purchases, slave acquisitions, and agricultural pursuits, that's true. But that enriched, as always, the wealthy banker class and not the average Northerner. And it's worth noting that by 1860, a lot of that finance had moved south, to New Orleans and Charleston and other southern port cities. In other words the north had largely purged itself of the limited stain of slavery those states had incurred by the founding of the country. The South? Not one bit. Zero. Nada. Pretending you know something about history when you display this sort of ignorance of what the actual numbers show only betrays one's ignorance.

Potato, Potahto.

I agree, with the slight modification that: Trump cared not one whit about conservative judicial priorities as articulated by McConnell and the Federalist Society et al. - it wasn't that he didn't necessarily believe in it, he just didn't give a damn, because his experience with the courts has always been delay, delay, delay, and eventually things go away or settle for a pittance. Notice that he's almost never the plaintiff in any action - he threatens to sue constantly, but he never did when it was his personal or corporate money. He only got involved as a plaintiff when it came to his campaign, because that was all someone else's money. To the extent he cared about judicial nominees at all, it was with the expectation that they would be "Trump judges" and rule in his favor all the time. That was his big miscalculation, because the FedSoc judges that they crammed onto the federal bench have a dim view of executive power. Right now, it's Biden's regulations they're striking down, but these ideologues (on the appellate courts, that is) are just as likely to strike down Trumpian overreaches if he gets back into office.

I think this highlights a distinction that of which people should be aware. When health officials opine on the difficulty of a man getting pozzed through topping, they're referring (in general) to a man fucking an HIV+ bottom and being directly infected by him. That is relatively hard to do (but not impossible, certainly; it generally requires there to be some sort of tear in the process, where blood comes in contact with the top's cock, either through a tear of his own, or by leaking up into the urethra, which is easier to infect). But when the top is fucking a bottom (of any status) and there are already loads in that bottom's rectum, the calculus is changed. If those loads are all undetectable, pozzing is highly unlikely. But if any of those loads has a high viral content, then yes, pozzing is definitely possible.

FWIW, although I use an Android phone day-to-day, I have an iPhone I connect to wi-fi to use to test websites under development to see what they look like in Safari. When I go to [think before following links] https://breeding.zone directly in the Safari Browser, it takes me to this site. That makes me think that you're probably trying the wrong URL (the address in the title bar) - for instance, if you're using "breedingzone.com" that won't work. If that isn't the problem, I can't really suggest why Safari won't work directly for you. It should never be necessary to go through Google to get to a website if you're using the correct URL.

Kinda wonder, then, how you would have had sex before HIV was a thing, because the "risk" simply didn't exist.

First: Just because *you* don't believe in "bi, str8 curious etc." doesn't mean those things don't exist. Sexual orientation is a spectrum, not a black or white issue. Just because *you* can't imagine yourself being attracted to women as well as men doesn't mean there aren't plenty of men out there who are (and women who are attracted to both, as well). It's true that in some societies, it's more acceptable to be bisexual (especially if you mostly are interested in the opposite sex) and thus some actually gay men will claim to be bisexual and publicly date women (although not actually have sex with them). That was a common thing in the 70's and 80's here in the U.S., when "experimenting" young men would declare themselves to be "bi" before later admitting they were gay and had no interest in women. BUT - not all people who say they're bisexual are, in fact, gay or straight. More importantly, it's not your place to decide that they are - as you correctly note, it's none of your business. As for "bromance": Here in the U.S., as I understand the term, it's used to describe a relationship between two men that has a "love" component without a "sexual" component. Two guys who are mostly inseparable but who aren't having sex (whether they identify as straight, gay, bisexual, or whatever) are said to be in a "bromance" - a kind of love that is like a brotherhood (hence the "bro" part) where the guys have emotional attachment (the "romance" part). Whether that's what your gossipy friends at work were talking about or not, I can't say. On a side note: based on your description, it sounds like everyone in your workplace is spending an inordinate amount of time worrying about who is sleeping with whom and what gender each person there is attracted to. Or is it just that *you* spend a lot of time thinking about this, so you ask a lot of people about it, and then it seems to be all they talk about? You might consider whether you're just adding fuel to this fire of gossip.

First, a quick review of the (limited) possible benefits: today's HIV medications, though much more powerful and at the same time milder than early meds, can and sometimes do take a toll on your body's functions. Notably, in some number of patients kidney function gets gradually impaired, but there can be ripple effects in other parts of your body. Those effects may or may not "reverse" if you go off meds, but for someone experiencing them, they shouldn't get worse (unless there are other factors at play). It's important to remember, though, that some changes wrought by being on HIV treatment are much harder to reverse. That said: the negative effects are multiple. Not only does your viral load go up, but your innate immune system keeps trying to fight off HIV, with more limited success than when you're on meds - and that success almost always ends up failing, meaning your immune system largely gives up the fight. And just like HIV drugs can damage other parts of your body, so can HIV itself. But in the interim, while your immune system is fighting and being gradually overwhelmed by HIV, other infections that you might readily fend off otherwise can take hold. At one time, before viral load counts and undetectable statuses were a thing, judging someone as having AIDS wasn't about the numbers; it was having one or more of some well-known "opportunistic infections" - things negative people only rarely get, but which were commonplace in people with advanced cases of HIV infection. Cognitive impairment is certainly possible, if HIV becomes rampant in your system. There are infections that can devastate your lungs, your eyes, your nervous system, and your gut. Some of these are treatable, some are not, and some of them can themselves be fatal. In the long run, it's suicide. That doesn't mean you can't stop for a while, and go back on meds later (though doing so periodically may render those meds or meds made in part with those compounds ineffective), but that's not a decision I would recommend without consulting your doctor. It's possible he or she will agree as long as you continue to get routine blood screenings and commit to going back on meds when a particular threshold is reached. It's possible he or she won't. The question I'd ask is, "Why?" Not saying there are no good reasons to do this in a particular case (and to be fair, no one owes anyone else an explanation for that kind of decision, except perhaps one's partner if one exists). But doing it because you're facing issues with side effects, and doing it because you're wanting to become toxic, are very different scenarios.

Maybe if you read the posts in question more closely you'll see I was talking about two different things. (Or maybe you don't care, you're just looking to try to make me look hypocritical. I can't know which it is because I can't get inside your brain.) The earlier "I get it" post refers, rather clearly, to the fact that I get you are neurodivergent and that you perceive and interact with people differently because of that difference. I don't have to "get," on a visceral level, exactly HOW it's different, to recognize THAT it's different. Just like I don't have to "get" what it's like to be a black man in America to know that his experience and mine are, in many respects, radically different. In fact, I can even identify many of those respects in which many such men and I are different - the need for behaving in certain ways when dealing with law enforcement, for instance, even knowing that behaving exactly as recommended is no guarantee of fair treatment; what I can't "get" is how that feels, what it's like to live like that. I can guess, I can imagine, but I can't KNOW. Likewise: I can identify some of the respects in which many neurodivergent people and I are different - in part because of the work they, and their advocates in the health community, have done to educate us. I can't "get" how it feels to be neurodivergent, nor do I pretend to. I do fairly confident that when such a person tells me "I am unable to pick up on X type of signal from others", I can make that statement with respect to his circumstances and not be pulling shit out of my ass. I may not understand how that affects him, but I can recognize that it DOES affect him.

I fully acknowledge I don't "get" autism the same way I don't "get" what it's like to be Black in the U.S. I can understand some aspects of both objectively, I can observe from the outside to a certain degree, but "get"? No, I don't pretend to. But that also means you don't "get" what it's like to be neurotypical, either - only that you see aspects of it going on around you and it's outside your ability to experience as we do (that's my limited understanding of it). And you drive that home by describing what they are *based on how they feel to you* without qualifying that this isn't some universally agreed upon convention - and in fact, obviously, a lot of people find these things useful or the software apps wouldn't have them in place.

I figure "both" as well. I'm happy to share a face pic here with anyone for whom there's a reason, but since I treat this as a discussion spot, not a hookup/dating/whatever spot, I consider faces less necessary.

The first sentence is partially true. Yes, you have to go to a doctor to have either PrEP or HIV treatment prescribed - they don't just dispense it in vending machines. Yes, you have to either have insurance coverage, or participate in a program designed to make those costs reasonable. But getting a doctor's appointment for these things is not particularly complicated in the U.S., at least, and in most states, there are health office workers whose job it is to assist you in getting coverage under the program. When I first got coverage for HIV treatment, the person assisting me literally filled out the forms as I answered the questions he asked, and he clarified anything I didn't understand along the way. It literally could not have been easier. As for the second sentence, that's really not true. Regulations can change, of course - one of the characteristics of the previous administration was its ham-handed attempts to overturn existing regulations by executive fiat, and the courts repeatedly striking those changes down because there is an established procedure for changing regulations, involving public comment, hearings, and the like. A more competent administration could probably have accomplished far more along those lines, but Hair Furor prized loyalty over competence every day of the week, and as a result, much of what he tried to do never got off the ground. (Caveat: there is a big apparatus being built among conservative groups with plans to "hit the ground running" if Trump or another Republican is elected in 2024, aiming to avoid all those missteps.) Under the ACA, the federal government is charged with identifying and rating preventative health care services based on effectiveness. If a service gets an "A" rating, then it must be provided at no cost under most health insurance plans. In order to change that, a future GOP administration's DHHS would have to reduce that rating, and if they tried, that would almost certainly result in a court challenge to provide evidence that the change was warranted. And I just don't think that is possible - the evidence is what it is. But even so, statutory law doesn't change at the drop of a hat. As we've seen, only certain fiscal items can get through the Senate with a bare majority vote; everything else takes 60 votes to break a filibuster, and changing something like gutting funding for HIV treatment isn't going to get 60 votes in the Senate, period. Your choice, but understand that if things DO change as you fear (I think it's unlikely), it'll be that much harder to get onto meds if you reach the point where they're needed to keep you alive. I don't disagree that many GOP people would be content to see HIV+ die rather than give assistance, but I don't think even all of them would vote to end a program like Ryan White.

There may be 1001 reasons, but not all are valid enough, when dealing with *me*, to justify that. Living in a country where there is danger in doing so is certainly a valid reason. On the other hand, what possible reason could someone living in such a place have for contacting me, in the southern United States? I'm not looking for cyber sex with someone whose first language isn't English, I'm not looking to sponsor someone for immigration purposes, and if it's not safe for him to be open there, I'm sure as fuck not going to travel to that country. Most other reasons - and they all boil down to either "there are people that I'm not out to and don't want to be discovered" or "I have low enough self esteem that I don't think you'll talk with me if you see my face" - can be dealt with by sending a photo with the message (assuming the site allows that, and most do). About the only time I'll consider one of those reasons "valid" enough to continue conversing with the person is if he indicates, first up, that he's interested in talking about something specific and not having to do with finding me physically appealing in some way - such as, he noticed I listed X as a hobby and he shares that hobby. I'm not worrying about what such a person looks like - my friends run the gamut of conventionally plain to ohmygodhesgorgeous, and I am much closer to the "plain" end of that spectrum myself. Otherwise, yeah, I'm pretty much on team "No pic, no chat".

Because you responded with expectations. Here's the thing: you don't know what the person "means" when he taps/oinks/woofs. You just know he's noticed you. Just like in the bar, where it may be "man, that guy is hot" or "man, does that guy know his fly is open?", noticing and acknowledging the notice is just a first step. That's why I respond in a way that acknowledges, but does not impose an expectation of a further reply. If there is one, great. If not, I've done my part, and I move on.

Everything has risks. You pays you money and you takes you chances. So does holding the elevator door for someone coming towards it. So does holding a door for someone approaching it with a package in her arms. It's called living in society, and we do these little things to acknowledge one another's existence and value. Maybe to YOU it's always that way. Assuming the entire world views things the same way as you do is just a little bit self-important. Sometimes a compliment is just a compliment and the person's not interested in more than acknowledging that he finds something about you appealing - even if he has no intent on acting on that appeal. Again, your insistence that it must lead to a suitable transaction or it's an offense against humanity is just... something. I mean, I do get it. You've mentioned before that you're somewhere on the autism spectrum, and that you have a difficult time reading people's signals. That's fair. But neurotypical people (for lack of a better term) do use signals - which we have to evaluate and place in context, and sometimes misstep, but that's life - as a means of navigating social spaces. As I noted, just post in your profile that you don't respond to them, and then you're free to ignore them without worrying that you seem rude - BECAUSE YOU INFORMED PEOPLE, and if they're too stupid to read your profile before tapping/oinking/whatever, that's on them. Complaining that because YOU don't/can't/won't use these things makes them horrible and useless and something that should be abolished is, well, again, something.

Most STI's can be spread by sexual or non-sexual contact. If you touch an open syphilis sore, for instance, you can contract syphilis even if the contact was completely non-sexual. Ditto for herpes. That's less true of gonorrhea, for some reason. They're called STI's not because they ONLY spread through sexual contact, but because they OFTEN (or most often) do. At this point, monkeypox qualifies.

One word: Floriduh. Or two words: Ron DeSantis. I'm not faulting you in particular, but anyone who expects a state to have even a vaguely reasonable approach to monkeypox when it's headed by the asshole governor who did so much to drive Florida into the ditch over COVID isn't paying attention. As long as the main vector for the disease is same-sex personal encounters, I don't see Floriduh's health department responding with any urgency whatsoever.

I look at these things - growls, woofs, grrs, oinks, taps, whatever the site has - as the old-school bar equivalent of catching someone's eye across the room and nodding, or otherwise acknowledging that something about him caught your eye. I suppose one problem of "the apps" is that some people INSIST that the only reason to use them is to get laid and how DARE anyone reach out on them for ANY other purpose because you're WASTING my precious time so fuck you. Well, most such apps have an option where you can (a) post what you're looking for - and surprise! many of them offer choices other than "come fuck me right this minute" - and (b) describe what you're looking for and what terms you're looking under. Someone else's failure to utilize those means to convey a clear message about what they want does not constitute a requirement on my part to refrain from contacting them, even with the dreaded "oink" or whatever. If someone puts in his profile "I don't respond to oinks (growls, woofs, whatever)" then I abide by that. If someone puts in his profile "Only contact me if you want to come fuck me within 10 minutes of your first hello message", then I abide by that too. But if someone wants to get his panties all wadded up because he failed to do either of those things and then - OH MY FUCKING GOD - someone has the temerity to attempt to break the ice with the digital equivalent of that across-the-bar nod, I'm grateful, because that's someone I can immediately block with a clear conscience because he's a fuckhead. As for receiving them: I almost always reply. If I have no interest in the person after looking over his profile, but it's otherwise innocuous, I simply say "Thank you, that's kind of you." Most people can interpret that correctly. If I do have an interest, I thank the person AND either growl/oink/woof/whatever back, or just give the written equivalent. If the person's profile indicates he hasn't read mine (for instance, his clearly says he's only looking for single people and his only "Looking for" is "Partner/husband"), I point out that they really, really should learn to read a profile before expressing interest in someone that clearly isn't what they're looking for.

To the Civil War discussion, I'll add: sure, the North was becoming more economically powerful than the South, but that was only relevant insofar as what the North would DO with that power. And the biggest concern among the powers-that-were in the South was that the North's economic growth would result in more and more free states carved from the west, leading to the majority needed to abolish slavery nationwide. The South had long had power to block this because of the 3/5 compromise boosting Southern numbers in the House, but if newly admitted free states boomed in population, that advantage would erode. In other words, the economic dispute itself turned on slavery. And that's why (most of) the slave states seceded after Lincoln's election: he'd made it clear he did not believe the nation could endure "half slave, half free" - that "it will all one thing, or all the other." And the South knew the North would never, ever accept "all slavery". But far from taking my word for it: the surviving declarations of secession, from those states that formally adopted a resolution in favor of it, are crystal clear that preservation of slavery and white supremacy were the driving factors. Mechanization of agriculture, of course, would have made slavery too expensive to continue, and in any other context, slavery would have gone the way of whale oil lamps and buggy whips when confronted with superior technology. But unlike whale oil lamps and buggy whips, slavery and white supremacy was the very foundation of the social order in the south, and you couldn't simply replace slaves with machines without a massive upheaval in the social order. (In fact, one could argue that with the end of Reconstruction, the old social order was largely restored and it stayed in place until the middle of the 20th century).