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BootmanLA

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Everything posted by BootmanLA

  1. I wouldn't say that the justices are ignoring the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. Rather, they are holding that "due process" in this case means "procedural due process" - which is how the phrase was interpreted for the first hundred and fifty or so years of the country - and not also "substantive due process" - which is a legal concept that did not arise until the 20th century. This shouldn't be a surprise considering that Thomas, Alito, and some of the rest claim to be "originalists" and believe that words in the constitution have to be given the meaning that they had when they were written. And again: no, you can't say that a decision rests "partly" on A and "partly" on B - at least, not Loving. That decision makes it perfectly clear that even if the words "due process" had never appeared in the Fourteenth Amendment, bans on interracial marriage *independently* fail (not "partly" fail) because of Equal Protection issues. Full stop. That fact is *precisely* the basis for Thomas's view that substantive (as opposed to procedural) due process is a myth created by the Court in the 20th century that needs to be eradicated - as he made clear.
  2. But that's the point. Saying "the former references the latter" is diametrically opposed to "the latter references the former". That's how time works. And as I pointed out. the primary basis for the Court's decision in Loving was Equal Protection. Substantive due process was an afterthought insofar as that decision was concerned, and the entire decision would stand even if the justices had never referenced substantive due process at all in Loving. By contrast, Roe was based entirely on substantive due process - because it held there was a right to privacy (this opinion first gave that name to this right) and that right emanated from substantive due process - that there are certain areas of life that government simply can't regulate. In Roe, they cited multiple cases in this area, and Loving was only mentioned briefly (by name only) twice and was not discussed in any detail at all. By contrast, Griswold (the contraception case) was referenced no fewer than five times, including the basis for its holding. So regardless of what Thomas et al. think about substantive due process - and we know he and some of the others reject it from the beginning - that would NOT affect Loving, because Loving was decided on Equal Protection. It's right there in the opinion. So saying, as you claim, that Thomas is being a hypocrite by gutting Roe's reliance on substantive due process while ignoring what it means for interracial marriage is simply false, and saying that Roe cited Loving is, while technically true, rather misleading.
  3. Facebook is roughly akin to an open sewer in which people can and do dump anything and everything. That suits some people, I'm sure. Another key difference: as I remember it (it's been years since I was active on Facebook), you can either "like" something, or you leave it alone. Here, you have the ability to like, dislike, or give several other reactions to a posting, and some of them affect the internal reputation points of the member who made the post. So imagine these two scenarios: A) a person who likes to be disruptive signs up and either creates a bunch of other "sock puppet" accounts or enlists the help of a bunch of friends. The disrupter signs on, makes a controversial post, and all his sock puppet minions "like" the post, boosting its value and the reputation of the poster. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Before long, you have a member who's got a high reputational score inflated strictly by essentially fake accounts. Kind of like the way the Russian military's disinformation team uses Twitter. B) a person who has a grudge against another member for something he imagines that member said or did does the same thing, except now he and his minions are "disliking" everything that member has ever posted. Before long, that member's reputational score is in the toilet. Unfortunately, both sorts of problems can and will exist unless people prove themselves on here.
  4. That's actually exactly what you should NOT do with respect to PrEP. It's not just "wise" to get a full STD screen; you need to have a conclusive HIV test before starting PrEP, because if you're already infected with HIV and you're not on meds, taking PrEP (which isn't capable of fighting an already-active HIV infection) can end up producing HIV that is resistant to the two meds that make up PrEP - and those two meds are (with a third or fourth component) the basis of standard HIV treatment. If a patient ends up resistant to those two meds, any HIV treatment based around those two will be ineffective. Seeking out and taking PrEP without the afore-mentioned screenings is a bad course of action.
  5. I'm not sure that's entirely true (though I am absolutely, positively in favor of legal requirements for equal protection/treatment, regardless). It was certainly true for the Civil Rights movement in the 1950's and 1960's - integration came, where it did, at the barrel of a gun held by U.S. marshals and in the form of court orders that dared local officials to defy federal courts at the pain of imprisonment for contempt. But public opinion on gay people shifted in spite of lacking legal requirements to do so. Certainly not for everyone; there are, of course, still bigots out there enraged that gay people can get married (or even that they can legally have sex without being arrested), just as there are bigots who are enraged that Black people don't have to defer to White people across society. But the overall view of gay people has changed faster, and without as much legal pressure, such that by the time sodomy laws were struck down, they were only in effect in about 13 states (out of 50) and were increasingly rarely enforced. When the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had to recognize same-sex marriages (US v. Windsor, in 2013), only twelve states had legal same-sex marriage. By the time Obergefell was decided, two years later, thirty-eight states did. Granted, much of that change came about because lower courts began to require states to recognize same-sex marriage, but still: public opinion was shifting rapidly, and when Obergefell was decided, the Court (for once) was behind public opinion, which was already at 60% when the decision was handed down. In 1997, only 27% of Americans supported same-sex marriage. 25 years later, in 2022, that approval rate is now 70%. Contrast that with, say, interracial marriage; in 1958, just 4% of people supported mixed-race marriage rights. In 1967, when Loving v Virginia struck down state bans on the practice, approval was still well below 20%. It took until 1995 for approval to reach just 50%. It didn't reach the 70% mark - the current approval rate for same-sex marriage - until the early 2000's, 35+ years after Loving. All of this is to say: sometimes legal action pushes society, and sometimes legal action follows society.
  6. I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume you didn't understand the point made: Loving v. Virginia could NOT possibly have referenced Roe v. Wade, because Loving was decided in 1967, and Roe was decided in 1973, six years later. Linear time, what a concept. I would quote your comment about "facts that exist counter to your beliefs" but I think that would be unsportsmanlike. Moreover, Loving was (as I noted above, in a post you must not have read) based its decision primarily on the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and only partly on the Due Process portion of that amendment. Roe was not - absolutely NOT - predicated on the Equal Protection Clause at all. Here's the "money quote" from the Roe decision: "A state criminal abortion statute of the current Texas type, that excepts from criminality only a life-saving procedure on behalf of the mother, without regard to pregnancy stage and without recognition of the other interests involved, is violative of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment." THAT is the holding of Roe - and that is the holding that was specifically overturned in June in the Dobbs case.
  7. Hard-core fetish discussion seems perfectly appropriate to me. I see no reason to post them in the Health area because they never accompany a genuine health question. Anyone who photographs a prolapse knows what it is; anyone who doesn't know is much more likely to have freaked out and gone to the ER instead of calmly finding a way to get that pic.
  8. I recognize that prolapse pics aren't against the rules, but there certainly ought to be a rule of some sort that pictures, if added to a post, need to be relevant to the topic and post. If there isn't such a rule, I hope @rawTOPwould consider adding one. Otherwise, once people see they can post extreme pics anywhere regardless of topic, we're going to be overrun with them. Mark my words.
  9. To add to @NEDenver's excellent response: HIV testing is complex; there are tests which are fast, and cheap, but not 100% accurate, and there are tests which are not quite as fast, and are more expensive, but which are much more accurate. The first kind of test includes home testing kits and what's known as the ELISA Test (which stands for enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay). The ELISA test looks for antibodies in your blood that indicate your body is trying to fight off a specific infection (like HIV). Because antibodies are not produced immediately after infection, an ELISA test may report a false negative for a while after infection occurs, and it may report a false positive if something else has triggered an immune response in your system. (If you get a negative ELISA test but you think you still may have been exposed to HIV, you should get another test a month or more later.) The second kind of test includes what's called the Western Blot test, which is far more sensitive than ELISA. Generally, health care providers order a Western Blot test IF you get a positive ELISA test. This helps rule out false positive ELISA results. Those are the binary, yes/no tests that look for signs of HIV infection. Viral load testing, on the other hand, is not binary but quantitative - it counts the number of HIV virus particles in a given volume of blood, once it's confirmed that the person is in fact infected with HIV. There are several different tests that can be used for this, but all are similar in technique and produce similar results, although the exact numbers can vary. When viral load testing produces a number below a given threshold, the patient is said to have an "undetectable" viral load. The official designation for "undetectable" has gone down over the years; it used to be that anything under 200 copies per milliliter of blood was considered undetectable, but more sensitive testing nowadays can detect levels as low as 20 copies per ml. Still, a person can be considered "undetectable" at levels above 20/ml, and anything below 200 copies/ml is considered "virally suppressed" - basically, that HIV is prevented from replicating at a rate capable of infecting someone else. It does NOT mean there's no HIV present - it's just that it's not enough to cause an infection in someone else through sex. But - as @NEDenver noted, the viral load only stays that low when the person stays on medication that keeps the viral load suppressed. It's like taking blood pressure medication - if you stay on it, it helps keep your blood pressure from rising to dangerous levels, but if you stop taking it, high blood pressure can and probably will return. The difference is that with HIV, there's no "probably" about it - a person with HIV who goes off medications WILL see his viral load increase back to detectable and then infectious levels. So an HIV+ person who wants to stay undetectable has to stay on his medication.
  10. I would suggest reporting posts that have irrelevant pictures in the post - the moderators have the capability to remove the picture, if it's truly irrelevant and if, in their judgment, it doesn't belong in that particular forum. I for one second the notion that prolapsed rectums and the like don't belong in general discussion forums at all.
  11. You probably have nothing to worry about. If this guy is taking one pill a day, where he was once taking 38, that's a reflection of the advancement of medicine, not that he's slacking off on his medication. Virtually all HIV treatment today consists of a single pill taken daily; those pills contain 3 or 4 separate medications that, together, do what it used to take a mass of medicines to do. Moreover, in most cases, those single-dose-per-day medications typically render the patient "undetectable", meaning that while he still has HIV, the level is so low in his system that it's not possible under any normal circumstances to transmit HIV to a partner. I can't advise you as to where you could find PEP in Berlin, but it honestly shouldn't be necessary, unless he was lying to you about being undetectable, or about being on medication, or he somehow managed to ejaculate in you in those five strokes. Incidentally, being a virgin does not make your rectum "a weak sucker for diseases".
  12. Generally, I'm of the "If what's done violates the terms of consent that were given, then it's non-consensual sex, which is rape" opinion. But this one (like it has for others) gives me some pause, and it took a while to figure out why. Also generally speaking, we impose terms of consent to protect ourselves from something we don't want. Receptive partners (whether men bottoming, or women getting fucked) might insist on a condom to prevent (some) diseases or pregnancy (in the case of the woman). The receptive partner might insist on the insertive partner pulling out before orgasm for the same reason(s). A woman might say "no anal" (or conversely, "no vaginal") sex to avoid a type of sex she doesn't want to risk. But while I'm not sure risk is necessary for the terms of consent to be valid - they may not be terms explicitly to protect us from something - that's their general purpose in most cases. What came to mind as an example was this: suppose the receptive partner only wants bareback sex, including the insertive person orgasming while inside. If the insertive partner pulls out before orgasm, does that violate the consent terms? Or if, for whatever reason, he just can't get to orgasm? I don't think even the strictest concept of terms of consent cover "does not complete the job to my satisfaction" as a violation amounting to rape. So one way to view it might be: if the action taken introduces an element that wasn't agreed to (as opposed to failing to deliver one that was), then maybe that's rape. But even still, it's hard to see condom-covered penetration (when the bottom is willing to get penetrated) as rape. Maybe it is - possibly a philosophical definition that's above my pay grade - but it just doesn't "feel", instinctively, like the same sort of violation as the reverse. And I think, as others may have suggested, that the solution may simply require that a person only have sex in conditions that allow him to ensure that no one enters him with a condom. That, unfortunately, might eliminate dark rooms for the most part.
  13. Technically, that's not quite right. Loving v Virginia, which is the case that struck down interracial marriage bans, was decided on the basis of Equal Protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, which requires that distinctions drawn on the basis of race must be subjected to the "most rigid scrutiny" - that is, strict scrutiny, or as the Court has formulated it, a distinction drawn to effect a compelling state interest, where no less restrictive means could effect that compelling state interest. The "right to privacy" didn't factor into the Loving decision. The Court also held that the right to marry was a fundamental right (one of those unenumerated rights mentioned by the Ninth Amendment) that implicated due process concerns. Lawyers refer to this as "substantive due process," and that's important for this analysis. There are two kinds of due process: procedural and substantive. Procedural due process refers to processes established by the government with respect to criminal law: under procedural due process, you have a right to an attorney, you have a right to a trial by jury, you have the right not to testify against yourself, and so forth. Procedural due process protects you from unfair procedures like a biased judge. Generally, procedural due process protects an explicit, enumerated right, even if the required due process is not itself mentioned in the Constitution. For instance, you have a right to an attorney when you are being questioned in a criminal matter. Procedural due process, per the Miranda v. Arizona decision, requires that arrestees be informed of that right. In other words, the Constitution guarantees you the right; procedural due process is how that right is enforced. Substantive due process is less clearly defined - it's (broadly speaking) a right to be free from governmental policies that go beyond the power of government to create - for instance, a law that compelled everyone to wear a red hat on Mondays would be a violation of substantive due process, because the government doesn't have the power to compel that behavior. Why is that distinction important? Because some radical conservatives, including Justice Thomas, do not believe in substantive due process AT ALL. His belief, as he has clearly articulated in the past, is that the "unenumerated" rights protected by the Ninth Amendment are not federal rights that can be vindicated by federal courts, but instead rights that people can vindicate via state legislative processes - ie, if the people of Virginia want to protect same-sex marriage, they're free to do so by passing a state law that does just that, or to write that into their constitution, or to choose (by whatever means) a state Supreme Court that will recognize that right under state law. But in his view, federal courts have no power to provide substantive due process. He said as much again in his concurrence in Dobbs. In other words: Thomas' marriage would be safe, in any event, under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. But rights that are (under Court decisions) protected by substantive due process would be, under Thomas's view, swept aside. Add to that Thomas's view that erroneous (in his view) precedent should ALWAYS be struck down, and even a sceptic should be able to see the danger. Because Thomas isn't alone in this viewpoint, and it's one shared by most "originalists". Alito would sign onto this in a heartbeat. I'd think Barrett would sign onto this sort of opinion, as would Kavanaugh. I'm not so sure about Gorsuch and kind of skeptical about Roberts, but I wouldn't count them out.
  14. As I noted: the point is that when a fringe member of the Court (and yes, Thomas is on the far-right fringe of the Court) writes a concurrence to a decision, and said concurrence goes way beyond the actual decision in the particular case, and the party that appointed him lauds him for his cogent views, then yes, it's a concern. It's a sign that this is the direction the party wants to move the Court, and they'll do what they have to (including refusing to consider a liberal president's nominee for the Court as well as ramming through a nominee from a conservative president who's about to lose an election) in order to carry that out. Consider this: Roe had already been supplanted, in large measure, by Casey v. Planned Parenthood in 1992, when the "trimester" system was abandoned. Casey held that states couldn't prohibit abortion pre-viability, but regulations relative to health and safety were subject to a balancing test considering whether the regulation imposed an "undue burden" on women seeking abortions. The five justices who voted for Casey were ALL Republicans - because the entire Court, except for Byron White, were appointed by Nixon, Ford, Reagan, or Bush I. The GOP, having realized what a great wedge issue abortion was for ginning up outrage among their base, knew they'd have to appoint different kinds of Republican justices in order to get the result they wanted. And they did. If you don't think people will bring those cases - look at abortion. Casey was settled law, and yet state after state after state passed a law to chip away at abortion rights until they had the majority they needed to just do away with it. Do you seriously think that these people won't also go after low-hanging fruit to chip away at the right to same-sex marriage, until it's eviscerated too? Picture this: a company wants to offer spousal benefits but only to heterosexual spouses, and claims a religious right to refuse to endorse same-sex marriage as the basis. This Court has already indicated that the religious rights of employers and businesses are sacrosanct. I can easily see this Court saying that while states can't ban gay marriage outright (yet) they can't force businesses to treat spouses alike. And then the next Kim Davis type will come along, saying that while maybe the state can't ban gay marriage, court officials can refuse to marry people, and the Court will take up that case. And then, giving a green light to local court officials to refuse to perform same-sex marriages, they'll become unavailable in vast swaths of Red America. And so on, and so on. And eventually, there will be five votes on the Court to say "Well, at the founding, there certainly was no consensus that same-sex relations were protected in any way" and BAM - Obergefell is overturned, and all the states whose restrictions on same-sex marriage were ended by federal courts (which is about 2/3 of them) will suddenly be free to ban gay marriage - or, since they never repealed their bans, it'll be banned immediately. That's EXACTLY why red states that banned gay marriage by constitutional amendment in the early 2000's have never repealed those bans - they hope (with good reason) that the Court will reverse itself. This is the long game the GOP is playing, and if anyone is convinced it can't succeed, just look at what they did to Roe/Casey just last week in Dobbs. This is not fear-mongering. It's an accurate depiction of where the GOP wants to take America, and if they have to do it by stealing Supreme Court seats, gerrymandering the fuck out of states in order to keep the legislature and their congressional delegations Republican, and imposing so many restrictions on voting that Democrats can't win in large districts or statewide, then that's what they'll do. They are ALREADY doing it. They have been doing it for the last fifteen years. They ADMIT it. Why people won't take them at their word is beyond me.
  15. Really? One of the first things legal analysts look at, in close decisions of the Court, are the concurrences and dissents. Lots of people will be focused on the actual decision, but concurrences and dissents, especially when several justices join in them, can be extremely helpful in predicting the direction the Court will be moving. Back when the liberals plus Anthony Kennedy could make up a majority (especially on LGBT issues), the foaming at the mouth dissents from Justices Alito, Thomas, and Scalia were predictable rants about how the founders (or the people who wrote the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for that matter) could not possibly have meant to protect anything related to LGBT people, and thus any "right" to same-sex anything was constitutionally invalid. Thomas is still very up front about that position. He noted in his concurrence in Dobbs that the Court should re-examine not only Roe, but Obergefell (same-sex marriage), Lawrence (consensual private sodomy), and even Griswold (contraception). How is it "fearmongering" or "paranoia" when the senior-most Justice on the Court has written in plain English that he would vote to overrule those cases if given the opportunity? After all, for right-wing Christianists, "marriage" is a sacrament instituted by God, not a legal arrangement between two adults. Thomas would vote to overturn Obergefell in a heartbeat - he's made clear his judicial philosophy is that if a prior decision of the Court is wrong, the Court has the duty to overturn it, no matter how much it may upend life for ordinary Americans. Alito has a similar view. Kavanaugh and Barrett haven't gone THAT far, yet, but they've also made it clear they're not opposed to overturning precedent even when it's well established, and Gorsuch may or may not be willing to join them. At this point, Chief Justice Roberts is almost an afterthought; he's in favor of precedent but there are (as we saw this month in Dobbs) five votes to ignore precedent entirely if they care enough about the issue. When Hillary Clinton said, point blank, in 2016 that voting for her was the only thing that could save Roe, she was right. Some of your misogynistic twits are apparently perfectly okay with the result; all I can say is, wait till it's your turn.
  16. You won't get a response from a Republican on this site (or many others) because they know there IS NO response that won't come across as patently false. Gay Republicans always try making the point that the problem isn't that the right doesn't like gay people; they just don't like overtly gay, over-sexualized gay, openly gay, in-your-face gay people. In their view, we should all be contented with living mostly in the closet, escorting a lovely woman periodically to public events to quash rumors about being "that way", and confine our gayness to the (tastefully decorated and very bland) bedroom. And if we only did that, they say, all these problems would go away. After all, it works for the rich white Christian gays, so why wouldn't it work for everyone? Failing that, they think we should let the states handle it - rather than give the federal government a fraction of an ounce of power, which Republicans hate. That's also why the gay GOP people tend to live in progressive areas, where they think that everyone has a responsive local or state government that will surely act to protect the rights of the individual. It's complete bullshit, of course.
  17. You're free to find anything "stupid" if you wish. I'd point out two things: a lot of what you read on here, and on other sites on the internet, is purely fantasy/masturbatory fodder and has no basis in reality; and two, most people don't take kindly to their likes/dislikes being called "stupid". These two statements directly contradict each other. Either sex is "simple" and the result of two horny people, OR it requires "chemistry and even love" but they can't both be true. And in any case, what YOU require is not necessarily what OTHERS require. Categorical statements like "sex requires chemistry" as though you were handing down Revealed Truth from on high are just bullshit. If YOU require chemistry for sex, that's your business. Saying it's a requirement in general isn't your place to decree for the rest of the world.
  18. Actually, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. is the Southern Baptist Convention, which split from "mainline" Baptists in 1845 over the issue of White Supremacy (the Southern Baptists being entirely in favor of it). They did not acknowledge their role in maintaining slavery and White Supremacy until 2017. So this is not a problem limited to fringe religious groups. In fact, it's important to remember the history of segregation in US public schools and the response to the Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of private "segregation academies" sprung up across the southern U.S., mostly affiliated with conservative Protestant churches, in order to perpetuate whites-only education. The death knell for most of these schools came when the federal government ruled that a segregated or whites-only educational institution was not entitled to tax-exempt status, and thus all those private schools became taxable entities (and contributions to them could not be deducted by the parents). It was against that backdrop that right-wingers decided to make abortion a central issue for evangelicals. When Roe came out, in fact, most major Protestant churches endorsed it or were at worst neutral on the subject; abortion was seen as an issue that essentially only Catholics cared about. But several politically astute right-wing (and White Supremacist) operatives realized that since evangelicals could no longer use segregation as a rallying cry, abortion would work well as an "issue" to gin up support for conservative Republican candidates. That's how we got Ronald Reagan.
  19. Correct. Thomas is 74, Alito is 72, Roberts is 67, Kavanaugh is 57, Gorsuch is 54, Barrett is 50. Thomas could easily serve another 8 years, putting his retirement in the term of the president elected in 2028. The others could go longer, much longer, or much, much longer.
  20. I'm as horrified (though not surprised) as anyone by today's opinion. But a couple of points: Yes, Thomas is the senior-most judge, and as such, IF he is in the majority AND the Chief Justice is not, THEN he gets to choose who writes an opinion. Don't assume that the Chief Justice will be on opposite sides from Thomas in any particular future case (if they're on the same side, the chief gets to assign). Second, even if Thomas assigns the opinion and writes it himself, he's got to get four other justices to concur in the actual opinion, or else it's not by itself the opinion of the Court. It's complex, but here's an example. Let's say that five justices did vote to overturn Obergefell v Hodges (same sex marriage). Thomas might write an opinion that struck down that right (on which the five justices agreed). But then Thomas writes a lengthy screed with a section saying states have no right to even permit same-sex marriage. If any one of the five objects to that viewpoint, he or she can withhold approval of that section - meaning that section is not binding. In that case, while states could ban same-sex marriage, the part of Thomas's opinion that said "States cannot approve of this" would be, essentially, just his own mini-rant, no more binding than a dissent would be. In some cases, the rulings are so complex that in the end, no five justices agree on anything except the result in the particular case in question - which may mean any other case where the facts are not identical might not turn out the same way. I know that seems like small comfort, and it is only that - but the particular fact of Thomas's seniority isn't meaningful unless and until he and Roberts are on opposite sides and Roberts' side loses.
  21. I think, though, this misses the point. It's true that not all victims go on to abuse others. However, I suspect it's true that most abusers were abused themselves. That doesn't absolve them of their abusive behavior, but it does indicate the need to break the cycle. Some people break it easily, not going on to abuse anyone else. But others need help.
  22. There are undoubtedly "plans" for one, but since the patent doesn't expire until 2026, it may be a while before a generic is approved for use in the U.S. That said, Gilead (the maker of both medications, and the maker of many of the HIV treatment medications on the market today) gave its okay for a generic version of Truvada before its patent has expired. That may have been in part because of pressure from the public to approve a cheaper alternative, and also because they had Descovy in the final approval stages (giving them a new medication they could tout as superior to the old one (and its generic equivalents).
  23. I think this is the best option for just about everyone other than (a) those who use condoms 100% of the time, bottoming or topping, or (b) those who do not take any precautions (PrEP, condoms, or whatever), or (c) those who have sex in situations where there's really no opportunity for discussion. I think discussing these things helps remove the stigma attached to HIV, as well as encouraging people to learn what options there are. There are undoubtedly men having sex with men who don't even know PrEP is an option, or that it's covered (by law) by virtually all insurance, or that U=U; discussion can help educate those people.
  24. I have spoken with friends about this general question before. The most common answer, by far, was along the lines of "I went to bed feeling kind of run down and woke up sick as a dog." Even those who initially said it took a while to really feel bad generally clarified that they meant "within a day of symptom onset" and not "days of slowly getting worse". Based on these reports, and based on what I know of immunology, I'd say that it's a fairly quick progression - HIV starts to replicate in your body, your immune system goes into massive overdrive trying to eradicate it, and the result is the set of symptoms colloquially called "fuck flu" pretty quickly. Thinking about how the body responds to an infection in general - fever spiking quickly, white blood cell production ramping up, inflammation (which causes the aches), and so forth - it would make sense that when the replication ramps up and your body's defenses kick in in earnest to fight it, the onset of symptoms would be rapid.
  25. I'm not sure about the second of those issues - that is, that "reinfection with the same original strain" can cause medication failure. I could be wrong - I might have somehow missed a study on that specific topic - but generally speaking, if a particular medication is good at blocking replication of HIV to the point of keeping a person undetectable, there's really not much chance for a new breeding to somehow overwhelm those meds. When a person is newly diagnosed with HIV - even those who are freshly infected with very high viral loads, or those who have gone untreated for quite some time and are now experiencing runaway HIV replication - can usually be treated with a single pill per day treatment that brings VERY high levels of HIV down to almost manageable within a month or so and then to undetectable within a few months of that. There's pretty much no way I can see how a fresh load of HIV - certainly much less total virus than the originally very high levels spread through the patient's system - of the same strain already being controlled would somehow suddenly overwhelm the drug that had brought it down so dramatically in the first place. Now, a different strain - or a patient who was already sloppy about taking his HIV treatment - might be a different story. But many contemporary HIV medications can treat a range of HIV strains quite well. The issue of medication failure comes from *resistant* strains - which means you have to either get reinfected by a resistant strain (fairly hard to do) or you have to be sloppy with your meds long enough that your own strain becomes resistant to the medication you're on. It's a serious problem, yes, but it's not caused by an undetectable man simply getting barebacked by a poz top.
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