NEDenver

13 hours ago, KEVORKIANKEVORKIAN said:

Generally speaking it means someone's who's nuts, makes up new rules about everything just for the hell of it, chops off the private parts of humans who should be riding scooters and reading Harry Potter.

And also they like to come onto the internet and pretend that someone "imagined" the concept of woke when they didn't.

That’s not happening.  You’re being triggered by someone’s bad fanfic.

It’s going to be a really rough time if the Republicans get to roll back all the good stuff Biden and his appointees have done.  The CFPB is getting ready to set limits on overdraft fees to something in the $3-15 dollar range.  There’s no way the bankers would let that happen in a Republican Administration.  And that’s 1 tiny thing.

4 hours ago, NeedPOZseedInCT said:

Just a reminder, Fox News is legally considered a parody television show because, per federal judges, "No reasonable person would confuse Fox programming for actual news", and therefore should be treated as such.

Per Fox’s own lawyers, no reasonable person…

What do you mean by “classical liberal?”  Like, I know it’s going to be a difficult, amoral answer, but go ahead.

Republicans have no moral clarity.  It’s been brainwashed out of them.  All that’s left is a sense of grievance.  The job of a Republican president is only to make cishet white conservative Christians feel like they’re back in control and everyone else is being punished for nonconformity.  Stupid or evil.  Nikki is evil,  my relatives are stupid.  
 

if it helps, my relatives are also no longer certain that slavery is a bad thing, and maybe we should bring it back.  She’s just got to try to navigate statements that make a splash on CNN while being ignored on Fox.  Only Fox matters.

1 hour ago, BootmanLA said:

I don't think in this context that it matters much. Either way, she's not prepared for the role of president (not that this same problem stopped Orange Julius). 

I sort of disagree.  She's prepared for the role.  She'd just be an evil piece of shit who left the country worse off than when she walked in, which is to say she's a Republican.  She would very competently remove all abortion rights across the country and women would die.  She would very competently implement the removal of marriage rights at the federal level for anything besides a relationship approved by Christian moralists.  She would very competently end federal welfare programs and people would freeze to death and starve and die of treatable diseases.  All while competently  implementing the evil that Republicans desperately want.

But they don't want her because woman and brown.  They want the tall white slovenly obese guy who reminds them of themselves, or who they wish they could be.

2 hours ago, hntnhole said:

I had no idea that was happening.  Years ago I held a position as music director for a while in a UMC, and found the opposite:  there were plenty of gay members, the pastor was a lesbian, and it seems so refreshing after the church I grew up in.  Everyone seemed to get along well with everyone else, and I felt more "at home" there than any Lutheran Church I ever set foot in.  Plus, I had a 32' bourdon on that organ, which was fun.  You "felt" it as much as you heard it. 

Organized Religion just doesn't seem to be cutting it anymore.   

The ELCA churches are decent.  Some better than others.  In the 70s and 80s there was some moderating in the Missouri Synod, but that got stamped out in the late 80s and early 90s.  Wisconsin Synod, where Michelle Crazy-Eyes Bachman attends has always been batcrap crazy.

Getting kicked out of the Missouri Synod church I grew up in because being gay is really the only unforgivable sin was probably the best thing that could have happened to me.

Hope you feel better and stay healthy.

On 8/11/2023 at 11:59 AM, muscmtl said:

Anyone knows why so many bastards videos won't play?

Try changing the resolution.

On 2/20/2023 at 5:25 PM, BootmanLA said:

By "partly" I mean that I don't think the Republican party can reform itself the way you hope. I think it's an impossibility at this point. 

It probably has one chance,  because the orange ferret stool is old and sick and probably going to die fairly soon of natural causes.  Once that happens, if the Republicans and the country are lucky, the power centers will fight amongst themselves and hopefully remove each other from the political map with no real successor remaining.  (See the aftermath of the death of Alexander the Great.) 

On 6/24/2023 at 6:31 PM, marcum said:

Hi guys, and thanks for your messages making me understand that I wrote mine without knowing how irreconcilable both sides are.

 

We’re locked in the paradox of intolerance at this point.  We’re not alone.  Notably, Russia, the UK, Hungary, Poland, Italy, Uganda are all in the same space.  Other places also I’m sure, but just listing places where the hateful right is flexing or dominant is depressing.  Until you resolve the eliminationist Right, you just can’t move forward.  

On 6/21/2023 at 7:01 AM, marcum said:

Hi, guys, and thanks for this enriching debate,

Coming from a less bipolar society where being a citizen remains more important (and rewarding) than belonging to a community, I have a question about the strategies chosen by American decision makers of the group of interest representing us.

They have chosen to open the door to sex education for minors, which is better than ignorance, without closing the one of their sexualization, claimed by marketing strategists as a way, among others, to gather more consumers.

Such a decision, accompanied by a blackmailing criticophobia ─ "if you aren't unconditionally with us as 'progressists', you are a homophobic bigot against us" ─ links "contradictors" to "haters," which is the best incitement to civil war.

Was it impossible that more moderate adults from both sides reached a compromise preventing people who are less aware :

- of homosexuality from fighting it?

- of "non-(homo)sexuals" from imposing to them, to their incomprehension, a model extending 'sexual freedom' to minors' sexualization and drugs?

That's my humble question to all of you 🙂

Take care xxx

Marc

Thanks to 3 decades of Limbaugh and Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda, we’re here.  I, the first veteran in my family generation and only second including the two older than me, was first told by a family member that I was the enemy of America in 1994.  There are no conservative adults.  

There’s no moderation on THE ONE SIDE and hasn’t been for at least 3 decades.  I had a friend in college intern for moderate Republican Senator Slade Gorton as a moderate pro-choice Republican in 1991, and already by then, she was telling stories of hushed meetings and quiet lunches with other moderate Republicans even knowing that moderate right wing Republicans were getting challenged and purged in primaries.

Until and unless normal R people take out the entire Republican infrastructure and convince voters to quit scapegoating everyone else, nothing will change.  Given how useless the Lincoln Project is, there’s no hope.  Regardless, the only one hurting young people are conservatives wanting to starve and de-home them, inflict conversion therapy on gay teens, and just support their parents kicking them out, remove funding for Medicaid, and then leaving them with conservative male role models who do groom and molest them.

10 hours ago, BootmanLA said:

Age? It might be any age, because I don't think there's some magic age where kids suddenly are "old enough" to face a person in costume. If there is, we need to ban kids going to Chuck E Cheese, McDonald's, Burger King, any sort of Trick-or-Treating (groomers! groomers!), and more. Kids see a man in drag, and IF they're astute enough to realize it's a man, they understand it's a form of dress-up play, not something sexual in and of itself.

And yes, drag can be sexualized, but then so can gym workouts. So can walking down the street. So can... almost any activity in which humans engage. If you want to limit kids' exposure to sexualized behavior, that's fine, but be prepared to (A) distinguish that from drag per se, and (B) apply it evenly across the board to a huge swath of human undertakings. Because if you don't, you're just basically saying you object to drag. And not liking drag is fine, just as not liking sushi or pesto is fine; just don't try to ban drag or sushi or pesto for other people.

And how would you define "LGBT content"? Does that mean any story in which there is a gay character, or two characters of the same sex in a relationship? If so, do you also object to "heterosexual content"? In other words, are you saying Prince Charming and Cinderella are fine, but not Prince Charming and Cinderfella? There's a huge difference between acknowledging that same-sex couples exist - that's a societal reality - and going into detail what EITHER of those couples - gay or straight - do in bed. 

For perspective, they’re banning the gay penguin book in red states.  There’s no sex in the gay penguin book.  The penguins are as abstractly gay as Will from Will and Grace.  If a drag queen reads the gay penguin book there’s no sex.  Shrek had more sexualized content, and no one is banning Shrek.  The one Florida teacher got in trouble for showing Strange World because teh ghey!!,!!!! There’s no sex in Strange World.  No one is banning Shrek and Donkey has sex with a Dragon with offspring.

16 hours ago, Negpupboipussy said:

If some of these “organizers” had their way they probably try to make little boys have to visit venues and festivals like Folsom and make them watch whatever kink display is going on

No.  That’s stupid.  Republicans are trying to get people to conform to white cishet norms.  So if you want to be in with them just stop having sex with men.  It’s the only way they’ll be happy with you.

It’s disheartening watching so many willfully obtuse people here.  The Republicans aren’t trying to save children, or they’d be looking at food stamps, housing, and cutting child poverty.  Instead they’re looking to blame other people when their children occasionally turn out to be trans or gay.  And the gay and bi people here supporting this as some kind of “pick me” are sad.  I’d say pathetic, but more syllables.  
 

These discussions are as depressing as old family dinners in the 80s, 90s, 00s (when I stopped going), and family Facebook discussions in the 10s and 20s where people discuss if Latinos will ever work as hard as white people, why won’t black people let them use the n word, why are black people so violent, followed up with why are black people upset when a black person is shot by the cops for failing to signal a lane change in a white neighborhood, why don’t gay people just marry someone of the opposite sex, anyway?  Every once in a while, the right wing reminds Ben Shapiro that he’s not white, that Dave Rubin is not straight and shouldn’t have kids, that Blair White should still just stop being trans, and they just bow and scrape meekly.  And conservative gays think they’ve got a place?  After what the Texas GOP did to the LCRs, what CPAC does every year to them?

Just a bunch of sad try hards hoping to be seen as useful, but as soon as they can, the conservatives will take your jobs, home, family, and set your number for the gallows.  Or just a fun game of beat the fag with the hockey stick.

On 2/28/2023 at 9:26 AM, topblkmale said:

American and Western European men. The culture no longer promotes male masculinity in any form of media.

May I suggest watching “Yellowstone” or “The Last of Us” or any of the new Star Wars series?  Whole lot of masculinity going on.  And that’s just three pieces of entertainment in our media promoting masculinity.  

2 hours ago, JimInWisc said:

Or, perhaps, they're neither stupid nor evil.  Perhaps they just have differing priorities than most of us here.  

No.  If their priority is to funnel resources from the bottom 99% of society to the top 1%, they're evil.  If they're pretending it's not happening or something else is more important, they're stupid.  "It's more important that gay people can't teach in schools than that I can eat and have a roof over my head."  Stupid.

Republicans (conservatives elsewhere also) are best understood using the Republican dichotomy:  All Republicans are either stupid or evil.  Then you just need to figure out for any Republican which category they fall into.  And then, really, because they serve no other purpose, you have to decide if you’re willing to fuck a guy who is stupid or evil.

I don’t think it’s as true that Democrats suck at messaging as it is that the people who control media apparatus are determined to minimize the spread of the Democrats’ message.

Moondreamer, you also mention that things are this way in your country.  Some countries are very hostile to LGBT people, mostly because scapegoating is a good way for authoritarians to maintain power.  You are under no obligation to risk your safety.  If the potentially former friend can cause you harm, then please make a plan for your safety.

Went through it 15 years ago.  Probably the hardest part was cycling through a half dozen pcp’s to find one that’s not homophobic.  Haven’t had the homophobic doctor problem since moving to the VA, at least.

13 hours ago, tallslenderguy said:

This. You are seeing the point now. i do not see half of US voters on the extreme end of the spectrum, i do believe a large enough portion of the voting population will blow in the direction of the wind that fills their sails at the time, and times change.  Not the kind of bj i'd want to see happen. 

This has some interesting info. [think before following links] [think before following links] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx

 

I think that another couple months of Fox cherry-picking stories to be anti-gay/trans and they’ll be primed for sodomy laws.  Especially if it removes 10% of the voters from a reliable Democratic voting pool.

On 9/5/2022 at 6:51 AM, TwistedPrince94 said:

gott protect myself from HIV, dont want bugged yet

Yeah, my hiv pill is twice the size of my husband’s prep pill.  If you’re struggling with the former, you don’t want to need to take the latter.

12 hours ago, JimInWisc said:

I think I could easily get behind Adam Kinzinger.

He still votes 100% for all the Republican things like starving children, corporate takeover of agriculture, pre-existing conditions in healthcare, monopolization of every industry, bonuses to companies that move overseas, and shifting tax burdens from large corporations and wealthy individuals to the vanishing middle and working classes.  Same with Cheney.  There are no good Republicans.  There are just two who aren’t quite ready to murder the Republic.

The states congressional districts are still massively gerrymandered.  Colorado just redistricted after a referendum that said every district should be as competitive as possible and they still packed Denver into one district and are giving most of the states to Republicans.  There are really only two ways to counter that, strategic moving and finding new unaccounted for voters, and the Democrats seem to be passively hoping post Dobbs the latter will happen.