BootmanLA

I *believe* you just "find out". I would note, however, that you don't need to be checking every day; sufficient participation to gain that permission isn't specified (like all such), but it's a good bit higher than the 17 posts you're showing as having made thus far.

You are correct. I shouldn't post when I'm tired and aggravated.

There are numerous discussions about tips for this, what often doesn't work, and the like. Instead of reinventing the wheel just for you, why not do a search here and see what dozens or hundreds of people have already contributed?

To this excellent point I would add that on the liberal side, everything below the orange-yellow line (where things cross over to problematic) is a niche, small-market item. Nothing below that line is anything but a website or podcast, and all with limited reach. But below that line on the "conservative" side? You've got the entirety of the FOXNews Channel, as well as two of its most popular shows (Hannity and Carlson), plus InfoWars. You have the Supreme Grifters of Turning Point USA and the Charlie Kirk Show. Not to mention Epoch Times and (as you noted) OAN on TV (soon to be dead) and Newsmax TV. In other words, the sites and people the right holds up as paragons of information are - by your own admission, by linking this here - among the worst of the worst. It's especially noteworthy that the "journalistic" personalities most admired on the right are also squarely among the least reliable AND farthest right. By contrast, though no one doubts Rachel Maddow is a lefty and Joe Scarborough is leaning in that direction, they're head and shoulders above Hannity, Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, and Alex Jones in terms of accuracy and quality of their work.

Please re-read this thread, and the others on related topics. Simply being a member for a year doesn't do anything. You have to participate, and a fair amount at that, before you can message other members directly. You have made 19 posts in this time, or slightly more than one a month. That's certainly not a great deal of participation.

A4A is full of spambots and fakes, in addition to flakes. I don't see how anyone ever uses it for anything productive, but as they say your mileage may vary. Recon focuses on fetishes, and I think the problem there is that there are lots of guys curious about certain fetishes, but not curious enough to actually pursue them in any real way. That's certainly not true of all, or even a majority, of Recon members, but even a small number of flakes can make one wary of a site.

Six years ago, the idea that the Senate majority leader would be able to get away with a year of a vacancy on the Court was unthinkable - especially a vacancy with a single, highly qualified nominee waiting virtually the entirety of that time. Before the Garland standoff, only one "long" vacancy had occurred since about 1875, when Abe Fortas's seat came open. And in the case of Fortas's successor, the problem there wasn't a majority leader sitting on the nomination; it was Nixon's nomination of two successive unqualified and bigoted individuals who both had hearings and were brought to a floor vote. Only once he nominated a less repulsive judge was Nixon able to get Fortas's replacement confirmed. World of difference between that and McConnell just sitting on the nomination - and if he can do it for 14 months, why not 24 or 36? What, really, could stop him, as long as his party backs him? No dispute there. I don't see where the Supreme Court has "legislated" anything, really. That's another right-wing euphemism for "interpreting the Constitution in a way we don't like." Sandmann got a nuisance settlement. While the amount was/is confidential, most legal scholars believe, for good reason, it was in the low six figures - a couple of hundred thousand dollars. That's hardly enough to make him "one of CNN's highest-paid". Not even close. Then explain how originalism exists as a school of "thought" and how it's a school inhabited solely by the far right. In "originalist" thinking - and Thomas is the premier example of it - he simply believes that if the words of the Constitution as understood in 1787 were not seen to encompass something, that's it - game over, the meaning as written at the time is the only thing that matters (or, for amendments, as understood at the time the amendment was adopted). Many of Thomas's noted dissents are exactly on this point. Nope, we cannot agree on that. It's true that the op-ed parts of the cable news networks lean left or right - as op-eds in print and broadcast have always done. That includes Rachel Maddow and Tucker Swanson Carlson alike. But the parts of CNN and MSNBC that are "straight news" - which occupy far more of the 24-hour cycle than "straight news" does on FOXNews - are not notably biased. The "straight news" on FOX is biased in multiple ways - not least of which is their deliberate ignoring of any news story that doesn't fit the op-ed narrative they present in the non-news portions of their broadcast day. As for the Equal Time rule - it was obsolete by the time it was abolished, because it did not and could not ever apply to cable TV. Define "recent". What's important is that Thomas is recorded as in dissent from the majority's opinion more than any other justice, and frequently dissents even in 8-1 cases because his way of thinking about the law in question is so far removed from even his conservative compatriots on the Court. He's well-documented as willing to overturn precedent far more often than any other justice he served with, even including the arch-conservative Scalia (who said "I'm a conservative, but I'm not nuts"). Thomas believes, unlike almost any other justice in history, that prior decisions are owed no deference if he thinks they were wrongly decided. THAT is a sign of politics on the Court - the notion that you just appoint enough justices to get 5 who think in one way, and they'll just overturn anything that they disagree with, regardless of how much havoc that might cause. I do agree we're unlikely to agree. But I can point to many an issue on which I've changed my mind, when more actual evidence supporting a different outlook is presented.

As Viking noted, messaging is a privilege. But beyond that: again, the point of this site is not primarily for members to communicate on-on-one with each other. It's to develop a community. Once you prove yourself part of the community, you get the privilege of private communications.

Indeed, but depending on what you mean by "old", it's important to remember that probably the majority of those who were big in the 1980's and 1990's are now dead.

Dude, with all due respect - look at the date on the last post of the actual story, from August of 2011. Chances of another chapter of this story emerging from the author are somewhere around the odds of Donald Trump getting re-elected and then nominating Hillary Clinton to the Supreme Court.

But she wasn't nominated. Bush had the option of submitting her name even knowing she might not get confirmed. That's what Obama did with Garland, even after Yertle the Turtle declared he was going to hold that seat for the next Republican president, whoever that might be (if you think he'd have let Clinton get a justice confirmed on the Court, you're on some sort of substances). Nope. I will freely admit I think a strict conservative approach to the Constitution is wrong (if it were, television, radio, and internet news media would not be covered by the First Amendment, because the First Amendment guarantees freedom "of the press", and in "originalist" thinking - what the conservative wing insists on - a "press" is a physical piece of equipment producing printed material. It's only because we consider the "evolving" meaning of things - something the right wing routinely denounces when it comes to things like sexual orientation being a protected characteristic - that FOXNews enjoys First Amendment rights. Be that as it may, I think a variety of viewpoints on the Court are a good thing, within a reasonable range. I'm no more in favor of a radical leftist approach than I am of the extreme right-wing positions of Clarence Thomas. I'm not the only one - by far - who thinks Thomas is outside the mainstream. The fact that he is frequently - by an order of magnitude more than any other justice he's served with - standing alone in dissent on matters of long-settled jurisprudence tells any disinterested observer that much. He routinely has staked out positions so far to the right that not even Rehnquist, Scalia, or Roberts would go for. Unlike most cheerleaders for one side or the other on here, I actually have to read the opinions issued by the Court - not only majority Opinions, but plurality ones, dissents, partial dissents, and the like, and it's patently clear to anyone who's read Thomas's work that he is outside the mainstream. Or was, until a couple of more recent appointees - the Handmaiden among them - have joined the Court. I assure you that you don't have to explain to me who Preet Bharara is. I agree he would probably make a good choice for an appellate judge at any court, and possibly a SCOTUS justice as well. Odd choice, for a politics forum, but hey, you do you. You may not want to make this political, but every confirmation decision for the US courts is political. Right now, we can HOPE that the replacement for Breyer is more like Breyer than, say, Thomas. If somehow the GOP manages to drag this confirmation out past the midterms (if even one Democrat isn't present to support the nominee, you can bet the GOP will block whoever it is), and the Republicans regain control of the Senate, I have no doubt that McConnell will decide that the Court got along with 8 justices just fine while Scalia was dead, so another two years is no big deal. You're once again parroting right-wing bullshit. Let's get the facts straight. The victim in this VA case was a female student raped by a male student who was her former dating partner. He was not a transgender girl nor was he posing as one, and the school in question had NOT adopted a policy regarding trans persons using restrooms, so that bullshit about liberal policies leading to this is just that - bullshit. The female victim CHOSE the girls' restroom to talk with her former dating partner (I use that term because while they had had consensual sex on more than one previous occasion, I don't know if she considered him a "boyfriend" or what). He assaulted her in the rest room out of opportunity, not because he used a liberal policy to sneak his way in there. Once transferred to another school during the disciplinary process (separate from the criminal process), he sexually assaulted ANOTHER student. The girl's father was arrested at a school board meeting after he got violent and threatened another parent with a fist in her face. I get that he was upset about his daughter's case, but violence towards other parents is not the way to handle it, and he was appropriately arrested for the assault. Garland's memo about parental attacks on school boards, etc. had nothing to do with this case. It had to do with the growing number of right-wing brainwashed people who refuse to wear masks and want to prohibit schools from even allowing masks for the students who feel vulnerable, and who want to prohibit any vaccination requirements, because these dumbfucks have been conditioned by FOXNews and even sleazier right-wing outlets that there's something dangerous about the COVID vaccines, even as over 900,000 people have died from the disease in this country in just two years. THOSE are the parents the AG was warning people to be on the lookout about - the kind that are likely to organize, show up and disrupt meetings, and otherwise terrorize - yes, terrorize is the right word - others into acquiescing to their idiotic view of the world. The VA case, by contrast, was a local incident, not something that would normally rise to the level of notice by the attorney general of the United States. That's like expecting the president to know your fucking birthday and send you a card. Top federal officials have a little bit more on their plates to worry about than a single incident of a domestic violence/rape case in a school.

Because this isn't a hookup, one-on-one based site. It's a discussion forum, so discussions should, overwhelmingly, take place on the public boards, not in private messages between users. That's not to denigrate such services, of which many, many exist. That's to say that this isn't designed as one of them. And I'd note that one of the problem such sites face is a massive number of fake profiles and spam messages. On one of the "apps" out there, I can't log on without getting at least 3-4 messages within the first minute, all from bots spamming me to come check out some other site. That's the reality of the internet today, and that's not what the owner of this site wants. By focusing on the public discussions, and limiting the ability of members to communicate privately until they've proven themselves, there's more of a sense of community here (in my opinion) than on any "meet your flavor-of-the-week guy here!" site out there. And for the record, it's not "indefinitely". There's an algorithm that controls what access each member has, based on a number of factors (primarily based on the number of postings you've made, but also factoring in how many reactions you've made once you get that ability, reactions others have given to your posts, and so forth). It's not "indefinitely", but the site owner is deliberately vague about how much participation gets you X level of access, precisely to defeat those bot/spammer types who would use that information to target getting sufficient access as soon as possible.

If I had the time, I'd offer to RawTop to temporarily take on moderator duties to clean up the Health forum (not deleting things, just moving the non-health topics to appropriate places). But I don't, and in any event, I'd probably prune more ruthlessly than most would appreciate.

I respectfully disagree. He gave a statement about himself - having no choice in the matter - and then described a group in which he INCLUDES himself ("we", not "they") as having chosen this route. Those are inherently contradictory viewpoints. It's like saying "I'm a carnivore and can't stop myself from eating red meat" and then saying "We carnivores choose to eat red meat instead of other foods."

I'd note that the person you're saying "Amen" to is no longer a member of this site, despite his raving about "strong bonds" and such. If he feels such strong bonds, why ditch one of the biggest sites specifically for barebacking? My guess - an informed guess based on watching a lot of people come and go here - is that he's gotten his jollies pretending to be a member of some sexually liberated "brotherhood" bound by being poz, and he's moved on to some other masturbatory fantasy. In decades of being around poz people - since the early/mid 1980's - I've found plenty of poz men - LOTS of poz men - who were accepting of their status and felt it was nothing to be ashamed of. I've found some who claimed "poz pride" but when queried on it, expressed that they meant they weren't going to be shamed into hiding it. They were going to be "out and proud", but not in the sense of "See what I accomplished"; more in the sense of, in the words of the song, "I am what I am, and what I am needs no excuses." I've even met quite a few who admit to fantasies involving pozzing, both for chasers and for non-consenting others, but the key word is "fantasies". I've known a small handful who actually were willing to undertake pozzing someone AFTER a serious discussion of the cons and risks involved. I've never known anyone who actually relished the idea of expanding this so-called "brotherhood" on a wide scale in real life. My experiences, of course, are my own, and quite limited, and I'm sure that "I've never known anyone who" is not the same as "There is no one who". Still, I'd say I look with a very skeptical eye at people posting to that effect online. Even here.

This is the one part of your (otherwise spot-on) post that I'm not so sure about. There are populations that might well benefit in that circumstance - for instance, a homeless person who has a pretty fixed abode, who wants to stay healthy but has issues with remembering to take pills, or who doesn't want to carry them on him because of fears of losing them and/or having them stolen. It's been discussed that in such cases, someone with a social services outreach team could make a point of treating those patients in the field, so to speak, either by having a regular day when people can show up, or by visiting certain encampments or whatever on a regular basis. That won't be everyone, of course - it's something that would work best with patients who don't have severe mental illnesses that can make them uncooperative. And of course, when you get to older people (as we're getting to folks with HIV hitting their 70's and 80's), some patients won't remember to take all their medications and don't have anyone checking on them to remind them. Having a social services medical worker come by every couple of months with a shot might be just what some people need. Again, that won't be everyone, of course, but I think there definitely will be cases where inability to adhere to a daily pill regimen will strongly suggest the injectable route.

The op-ed (NOT a news story, mind you) you linked to was from Marc Thiessen, who is an idiot. He slavishly adores everything that a Republican president does, even when it is directly opposite to what the last Republican president did; he supports everything a Republican president stands for, even if it's exactly 180 degrees from what the last Republican president stood for. The man is an unprincipled hack, so I put no stock whatsoever in his "opinions". That said: I look at Janice Rogers Brown as the female Clarence Thomas: someone far outside the legal mainstream. Her record in California was ghastly; she was rated "not qualified" by the Bar Association at the time of her nomination to the California Supreme Court (she'd never served even as a trial or appellate judge at that point). She wrote, at various times, that minimum wage laws represented a socialist revolution in this country, and that post-Lochner court decisions on economic regulation were inherently wrongly decided - in fact, a position that even the ultra-right judge Robert Bork rejected. When she was first nominated to the DC Circuit (again, leaping ahead of far more qualified judges), she was opposed by bipartisan coalition of senators, and her nomination was returned to the president. She was renominated the next term, where she again faced opposition over her abysmal record; she was only confirmed to the DC Circuit as part of a deal worked out between centrists in the Democratic party and the hard-line Republicans, when the Democrats agreed not to filibuster judicial nominees except in the most extraordinary circumstances. (Note that when the Democrats took control of the Senate, the Republicans pointedly refused to honor that same agreement, beginning to block virtually every judicial nominee. No honor, that's what the Senate GOP has.) With barely ONE month under her belt as a DC Circuit judge, Bush began floating her name to replace Sandra Day O'Connor. In other words, just as Bush the First replaced Thurgood Marshall (the first black Justice) with the ethically and morally challenged stain that is Clarence Thomas, Bush the Second wanted to replace O'Connor, the first female justice, with this inexperienced and radical woman, thinking he could pull the same trick as his daddy - blunting criticism of the candidate from the Democrats because she was a Black woman. It's in THAT context Biden made his remarks, which Thiessen DISHONESTLY characterizes as saying "he would filibuster and kill her nomination." The average person won't go back and look up what Biden said, but I did, and what he said was he would probably endorse a filibuster to prevent Brown from becoming a Supreme Court justice. NOT that he would personally lead the filibuster; not that he definitely would "kill" her nomination; that he would JOIN a filibuster, which might or might not succeed. As I said, Thiessen is a hack. Interestingly, Thiessen also bewails the fact that Brown probably had "majority support" in the Senate - as though majority support should be enough to guarantee confirmation. Of course, he's the same asshole who gleefully endorsed Mitch McConnell's blocking of Merrick Garland's nomination, despite the fact that Garland's prior nomination to the DC Circuit was UNOPPOSED - far more support than Brown EVER had, for ANY nomination. As always, Thiessen the Hack is saying "do what I say, not what I do". You're right that no one remembers Janice Rogers Brown. That's because she was an utterly forgettable failure as a judge.

This makes no sense. How can you say that BB is your "nature and cannot change it" and then in the same paragraph go on to say "We choose to be cumcraving faggots"? If you are choosing it, then it's not something you can't change; and if you can't change it, you aren't choosing it.

To be fair, it should fall on Putin AND on his circle of oligarchs. None of them came by their wealth honestly; they all had help from the government (particularly, Putin) in robbing the nation blind. And in return, they have helped keep him in power by cutting him in on the take, giving him the resources he needs for his propaganda. So while I don't want the punishment to affect ordinary Russians any more than is unavoidable, I'm fine with every one of the rich baddies in Putin's inner circle losing everything and then facing legal consequences.

I agree they need (and deserve) a lot of rebuilding assistance. But the oligarchs generally speaking got their money by stealing it from the Russian people, not the Ukranian people; right now, an awful lot of Russians feel for Ukraine and hate this war being levied against them, but if the ill-gotten gains of the oligarchs are showered on Ukraine and not the people from whom they were stolen, there's a serious potential for animosity. Remember that one of the many things that led to WWII was the crushing reparations load placed on the Triple Alliance, particularly Germany, after WWI. A lot of everyday Germans were heavily taxed to pay the reparations demanded by the west, in large measure to compensate France for how much of its farmland and other resources were destroyed. No need to provoke the same response.

I will agree with those who say that it's unlikely (though not impossible) for the masses to overthrow Putin. As long as the military and the oligarchs remain loyal to him, he's likely fairly safe. But. The west is going after the oligarchs, to the extent of not only freezing their assets (when they find them), but seizing them - as in, they're not getting them back. They're increasingly being blocked from leaving Russia (except for China, and godforsaken places like Syria and a few others), and when most of your money is frozen overseas and inflation starts running 20% per month, suddenly Putin doesn't look like such a smart investment for those who robbed their country blind when the USSR came apart at the seams. With even the Swiss going in on the sanctions, there's not going to be any safe place for Russians to spend their money outside Russia, where it's going to be worthless. And there are signs the military is not full-tilt behind Putin, either. They bought into (or pretended to buy into) Putin's plan that they could just steamroll into Ukraine, take over, and be welcomed as heroes of the liberation. The reality is turning out to be... quite different. The officially acknowledged (by Russia) death toll among its troops is already far in excess of what they predicted for the entire operation, which means the real number is undoubtedly substantially more than that. The troops are poorly trained (no reflection on them, it's their trainers who are at fault) and the Ukrainians have captured a goodly number of troops who surrendered rather readily. At some point, some generals are going to talk amongst themselves and question whether this dream of reassembling the Soviet empire is actually feasible. At that point, when enough oligarchs and generals decide that the situation is becoming untenable, Putin had best be very certain his inventory of Novichok is up to date and completely accurate, with none missing.

Every president prior to Lyndon Johnson created an artificially limited selection pool - white men. No women or Blacks (or Hispanics, or anyone else) were considered. Moreover, for more than a century, it was an unwritten rule that there could only be one Catholic justice on the Court at a time, and it was well understood by all presidents and the Senates to whom they submitted nominees for confirmation that second or other Catholics would be rejected. For almost a century and a half, there was effectively a "no Jews" rule, and once that "rule" was broken, the same deal applied as for Catholics: no more than one at a time, with the remainder all Protestant (white men). Anyone who thinks that the pool of black women who could serve on the Supreme Court is too thin for consideration, or who think there's some sort of magic "you must be this qualified to ride this ride" measuring stick, is a fool. George HW Bush didn't select Clarence Thomas because he was "the best candidate" for the job; he picked him because he was the only Black judge with any conservative credentials. Ronald Reagan specifically promised to appoint a woman to the Court, at a time when women lawyers represented 8% of the legal profession and an even smaller percentage of the nation's judges.

I notice it's almost always the guys with 10 or 20 (or fewer) posts on here who show up "en masse" periodically and sing the praises of being poz. Almost like someone is coordinating an effort to promote this. Interesting. In any event, all that "oh i'm liberated I don't have to worry any more" can be had with PrEP. So (to my thinking, at least), opting to contract a fatal-unless-treated-forever disease instead of taking a reasonable precautionary medication is, well, evidence of an undeveloped ability to make sensible decisions. Now, if someone is pursuing getting pozzed because he thinks there is some mystical bond between poz people, because some airhead on here told him there was, well, again, evidence of an undeveloped ability to make sensible decisions. None of those people who share your alleged "bond" are going to pay your health insurance premiums or deductibles, and none of them are going to help nurse you through your first opportunistic infection. But sure, go ahead and bask in that "bond" and "freedom".

I might be giving the dolt too much credit, but I think by "Constitutional Minarchist" he might be making a play on "Constitutional minimalist" - as in he thinks the government can only do the minimal things specifically outlined and we have to ignore all the general, broad provisions of power grants found therein.

Your information is faulty. That is not "for extra protection". That is PART (but only PART) of the routine you can follow as an alternative to daily use. This method is called "on demand" PrEP - the idea is to lessen the number of pills you have to take, IF you are not having sex more than once or twice in a week. When you use the "on demand" method, you take two pills anywhere from 2 to 24 hours before you have sex. Not "right before", because they don't have time to spread through your system before you come in contact with HIV. 2 hours seems to be the minimum time needed for the pills to spread through your body, but the effect begins to diminish pretty significantly after 24 hours, so you can't wait more than that for sex. Once you do have sex - in that 2 to 24 hour window after the first dose - you take a single pill 24 hours after the first dose, and ANOTHER pill 24 hours after that. In total, you take 4 pills over the period in question. By that point, the HIV will have been unable to get a foothold in your system and start replicating, and the virus is short-lived, so you're past the infection point. But note the timing - between the first dose and the last may only be a period of 2 days or slightly longer, during which you're taking four pills, or twice the usual daily dosage. If you have sex twice during a week and you use this method, you're already taking 8 pills, or one more than a "daily" dose would require. Having sex a third time - which is hardly unusual for many of us - means you'd be better off just taking one pill each day. Because while these meds are generally safe, they can have side effects. Some of those side effects may take months or years to present themselves, after a long period of use. So limiting intake to the minimum needed to protect yourself is key. So, to recap: if you have sex on average only once or twice a week, or if you regularly go a week or more without sex, the 2-1-1 dosing of "on demand" PrEP may be a workable, better choice for you. If you have sex at least twice a week and occasionally more often? Stick with daily dosing and just try to make it automatic.