solacesoul

I have liked the title of this autobiography.

Nope. You’re just a retired academic blowhard with endless disposable time to troll the gay sex trade message boards — and to doxx other board members who aren’t interested in communicating with you offline.

Those are the times they should be grateful that they don’t speak or understand much English!

With due respect, I really doubt that’s how it actually went down. He, sensing that not only his multiple user names across several platforms but also his offline ID were known (which, hey, what else did he expect when he personally contacted posters off-board without consent, and began to be intrusive to and annoy them?), went to the mod complaining that he was being exposed / outed on the board (which wasn’t happening, but when you’re guilty and a cornered rat, just accuse others of what you’re guilty of — seemed to work for Trump for a lifetime up to now). The mod did a ban on the poster he bitched about (me, I don’t change usernames) AND him (or at least THAT username, he’s used / uses several — but as you already pointed out, can’t or refuses to hide his blathering, blistering, nonsensical communicative style, because he likes to think it’s some outward sign of hyperintellect). I don’t know who the others are, if any, who received the ban.

It’s gotten to the point where I can almost tell if a brasileiro is cearense, or from Ceará, the state where Fortaleza is. It’s almost an identical tribal look. There are quite a number of cearense now working in the southern states of Rio and São Paulo. That cearense dialect is a tough nut to crack, though. Imagine learning English in the NE USA and then being thrown to fend for yourself in rural Mississippi. It’s kindasorta like that.

It’s like the very common late 20th Century PR statement release: “Artist / Actor X checked into Cedar Sinai Hospital due to exhaustion.”

Leave the man alone? If only the man you oddly defend could do the same. That man has doxxed and made inappropriate offline / off-board contact with multiple posters. Not one. Multiple. You support that kind of inappropriate contact? Unfortunately, there have been quite a few posters over the years with very broken moral compasses, so it would come as no surprise to me to discover you’re totally cool with it. Remember the crew here who thought it would be totally neat-o to file a false claim of bribery against a Brazilian Passport Control officer in order to get their tourist visas extended?

I actually loved this movie (a fictional tale), until the ending. The final scene was not very believable at all. The rest of it could’ve very well been a documentary. Very attractive casting as well. 10-15 years ago (when the film was released), the jineteros / pingueiros in Havana did indeed look like that. But now? Um… not so much. I believe it’s still currently available for purchase / rent on Amazon Prime Video. Synopsis: A married male prostitute (Reinier Diaz) and a soccer player (Milton García) who works for a debt collector begin a dangerous romance. The Last Match (2013) - IMDb M.IMDB.COM The Last Match: Directed by Antonio Hens. With Milton García, Reinier Díaz, Jenifer Rodríguez...

Brazil. Public transportation in the entire State of Rio de Janeiro (subway, tram and buses) — not just the City — is free for people over 65. As of December 15, public transportation for seniors over 60 years of age in the City of São Paulo (but not the State) is back in effect.

Says The Queen Mother of Post Editing. Except when Queen Mother does it, Her posts still aren’t any more legible, or sensible — just more talking to Herself. Bobert’s gonna Bobert.

He’s so triggered that he started his own thread about the word I used in my comment — “topophilia”. Which said post was immediately relegated to another forum by the mods. It seems even they are over his sorry schtick. He should just start his own blog. But then who would read it but he?

It wasn’t just suggested. It was clearly stated.

Let’s address this piece. Although this site / board and a couple of others cater to sex tourists and are going to attract discussion principally about it, there are many reasons other than just sex that tourists would want to visit Rio / Brazil, and a foreigner might decide to relocate / expatriate / retire there. Some of us here may tend to believe that because one thing is important to or prioritized by us, then there couldn’t possibly be anything more important to others. Of course, this isn’t the case. Some people come to Rio or other parts of Brazil and fall in love with the city or country, in spite of its issues. Others, and this is surely most, can visit and feel very little to no connection or attachment to it — and that should be okay, too. In my particular case, upon landing in Brazil for the first time almost a decade and a half ago (this was after even more years of study and reading about it), I immediately developed an indescribable love for and connection to the land, the people, the language, the culture, as if it already were my first or second home. I have since learned that this is actually a thing. It’s called “topophilia” — defined as “a strong sense of place, which often becomes mixed with the sense of cultural identity among certain people and a love of certain aspects of such a place”, or “the affective bond with one's environment—a person's mental, emotional, and cognitive ties to a place.” I have lived many places on four separate continents, and never felt such a way before Brazil. Mind you, Rio was not even my first visit. That was Salvador. Since then, I’ve been to at least 12 different cities in Brazil — all of which have different charms and setbacks (crime and safety being a consideration in all of them, to varying degrees). I agree that Rio or even any other part of Brazil might not be everyone else’s cup of tea. There are places worldwide I have visited after others have sung their praises, and although I am glad for the experience and the checkmark on my bucket list, I probably wouldn’t ever pay to return there. I have some friends and colleagues who, after visiting, were not as enamored with Rio or Brazil as I am. And that’s great! They should spend their vacation money somewhere they actually can enjoy and appreciate. And if safety or crime issues are deterrents, then no one should lie and blow smoke up their asses by telling them they will not be targeted for crime in Rio (or Brazil). It’s a big world out there.

You might be surprised at how many people are blind (unwillingly or otherwise) to the obvious, especially when it comes to colonialism, the African slave trade and their long-lasting effects.

That’s not what racism is. But ok. I don’t know you. I only know you by your words. As a person who is self-identifying as white and rich, and assuming English-speaking, you should have plenty of access and ability to be clearer about your language and what you choose to convey. I ask you to try to more careful in how you word things. Otherwise, you run the risk of being like another poster here and elsewhere who doesn’t seem to care at all if anyone else understands him, as long as he does.

You can edit that to include other parts of the globe as well.

Your comment, worded “The favellas [sic] full of drugs and crime are a sad blight on a beautiful country,” reads as if your criticism is principally about the favelas, not the drugs and crime. If your intent was otherwise, a better wording would’ve been, “the drugs and crime in the favelas are a sad blight on an otherwise beautiful country.” Visiting a favela as a casual tourist is not the same as living in one — which millions of Brazilians do.

Leave it to a blowhard to proclaim himself to be The Smartest Person In The Room. Most retired academics I know aren’t as insufferable.

The bloody Cuban Revolution began because Guevara, Castro and a number of others were tired of the rich white Americans and Europeans flaunting their wealth in excess and treating the black and brown Cubans like serfs or property. Tourists should be a bit more circumspect about their words and behavior. Everyone might not be as impressed or in admiration as they like to think they are.

There are over 950 favelas in Rio and more than 23 percent of the city's population lives in one of them. 70% of the favela residents are self reported as black, and that’s just those who self-identify as black. In São Paulo, 20 percent of the metropolitan-area population (almost 2 million people) live in the favelas. More people live in favelas in Salvador than in any other Brazilian city: 607,000. 21 percent of Salvador lives in favelas. Favelas are the working class poor, the laborers, the housekeepers, the restaurant workers, the families of beach barraca owners and workers. The art, culture, music and literature of Brazil largoly originated from the favela. Not to mention, these are mostly Afro-Brazilians. To ascribe only drugs and crime to them is not only wrong but classist snobbery. And you as a tourist will never HAVE to visit one, so to call them a “blight” is unnecessarily maligning.

We probably have different viewpoints on muscularity. Rio is much more of a bodybuilding culture than Salvador and other areas. Men in the Bahia tend to be “fit” and lean and built more like soccer players or surfers. There are a lot more men and women in Rio that have that bodybuilding / physique competition look because it’s more a part of the culture there (although the other look is just as common). Regarding your personal observations about crime, it’s good to know that you can accept that your personal anecdotes or feelings don’t override the statistical evidence.

As mentioned in another thread, the overwhelming majority of these occur in areas outside of the tourism realm. Although gay tourists are being robbed — street crimes and crimes of opportunity in more intimate settings — they aren’t being murdered for being gay in Zona Sul.

The tourist areas of Salvador are also surrounded by favelas.

Salvador has a greater crime problem than Rio, even if only negligible — as do most of the major cities in the Northeast. Violent crimes in the NE of Brazil are worse and more frequent than in the South. This is verifiably true from available crime stats. The garotos in the NE are not 1/2 the cost of those in Rio but they are less expensive. Maybe about 3/4 the cost. As for “just as sexy”, that’s a matter of personal taste. Because it’s not as much of a gym culture there, the available GPs tend not to be as muscular. And of course, there are less GPs in saunas an in ads. But 90% of the residents of the Bahia are of African descent, so you’re most likely to see black men there than anywhere else outside of the African continent.

It depends on what you think is infrequent or unusual. In Copacabana and Ipanema, these happen maybe every 5-7 years. Anything like that in the tonier districts of Rio where most tourists stay and where most expats live make the national and international news. They happen much more often in the favelas, Zona Norte, and Western Rio, but because the “wrong” people live there (read: blacker, browner, poorer), it’s never covered beyond local TV news blurbs — unless it’s a mass shooting / killing, the size of the ones that occur in the USA weekly at this point. The Farme do Amoedo incident (at least the one I am referring to) occurred in the early 2010s, if my memory serves me correctly. You might be mistaking your timeline with the gang warfare from rival favelas Cantagalo and Pavão-Pavãozinho that bled out into the street entrance on the edge of Copacabana and Ipanema. Or maybe the beach riot in 2019 near Posto 4 in Copacabana during Carnaval time that ended in police dispersing the large crowd of party goers and beachers with tear gas. In Rio, post-pandemic there’s been recurrent wave of mass robberies known as “arrastoes,” or “dragnets”. An ‘arrastao’ is when a big group of people, usually teenagers and kids, from the favelas go to the beach and in a group rob everyone they can see. Since the group is often the majority, sometimes people cannot do anything about it. The popular beaches are mostly in Zona Sul, including Copacabana and Ipanema, and other than Leblon that’s where the money is, so these beaches are often targeted. Sure, police presence is heavy by those beaches, but that only acts as a deterrent, not a prophylactic. In any event, any type of drug gang activity or violence in Zona Sul neighborhoods is typically confined to the favelas. The trafficantes don’t want the problems from the UPP police that are caused when things bleed out into the streets where the rich residents and tourists are. And none of the favela residents want problems with the drug lords because they run their favelas and they can exact their own level of justice. Crimes against tourists and residents of Zona Sul are almost always confined to petty thefts and robberies (street crimes).