Charlie

I am spending more time here now than I did before CoViD, because I have fewer other things to occupy my time. I check in at least once every day when I am at home with my desk top computer; I have NEVER accessed the site on any other device, so if I disappear, it probably means that I am traveling, hospitalized, or dead. I haven't actually logged out of the site in so long that I am not sure that I remember my password (Hooboy gave it to me in 1999). I do use private messaging, though not a lot. I think there is a fair amount of enjoyable camaraderie here, and I usually like meeting the people here in person, although it doesn't happen very often. (BTW, Oliver called me yesterday to say he is back in PS.) Of course, I get annoyed, but no more than I do with interactions with people I encounter in person. I have never used the "ignore" function, but I certainly don't read every post by everyone, even those posters I like--I have learned to pick and choose only topics that interest me or are likely to interest me. I don't even read every post that you make, my dear Lucky!

You missed your chance to be affiliated with The Donald!

Shaved my head with an electric razor three weeks ago. Barbers here had been closed for a few months, and I was tired of trying to trim it myself.

How did you tell that he was the same guy in the photos? Was he wearing one of those outfits?

I stopped watching pro football when I no longer lived in a city with its own team; it's hard to get excited about any team in southern California. Tomorrow is Monday in Australia, so I will be watching the first day of the Australian Open on Tennis Channel.

I thought it was "B to C" ("na" is "to" in Czech)

VaniaX only joined rent.men on Xmas Eve, but his old ad showed him in NYC. Yordan has been on the site for a couple of years. If you use the "Map me" function, you can see that Yordan is located on 18th St in South Philly, while VaniaX uses the generic City Hall location. I have no idea whether they are working together.

VaniaX only joined rent.men on Xmas Eve, but his old ad showed him in NYC. Yordan has been on the site for a couple of years. If you use the "Map me" function, you can see that Yordan is located on 18th St in South Philly, while VaniaX uses the generic City Hall location. I have no idea whether they are working together.

Like Lucky, I have answered this before (some topics on this site never seem to get old). Charles is my middle name, so my college roommate used to call me "Cheerful Charlie," an ironical reference to my inclination to study rather than party with him and his friends. Some of his friends thought Charlie was really my name, and frequently called me that. When I joined this site back in the last century, I needed a handle, and Charlie was simple and easy to type (I am a very slow typist).

Some people will continue to believe a conspiracy theory about AIDS for the same reason that some Trump supporters will continue to believe the election was "stolen." Even though they have no evidence, and can't give credible explanations of who did it or how it was done, it just feels right to them, because it fits their preconceived suspicions about vague forces like "government scientists" or "socialists." Religious beliefs often have the same effect: when a natural calamity occurs, it must be that "Satan" wants to torture the innocent, or "God" is punishing sinners. It seems to be an inherent factor in human psychology.

Some people will continue to believe a conspiracy theory about AIDS for the same reason that some Trump supporters will continue to believe the election was "stolen." Even though they have no evidence, and can't give credible explanations of who did it or how it was done, it just feels right to them, because it fits their preconceived suspicions about vague forces like "government scientists" or "socialists." Religious beliefs often have the same effect: when a natural calamity occurs, it must be that "Satan" wants to torture the innocent, or "God" is punishing sinners. It seems to be an inherent factor in human psychology.

Whose "political intent" are you referencing? You are suggesting something that happened during the Carter administration, which was not notably anti-gay.

Whose "political intent" are you referencing? You are suggesting something that happened during the Carter administration, which was not notably anti-gay.

Thanks. I am sending this info to her.

Thanks. I am sending this info to her.

Yes, but Agent Orange was never intended to be used against American citizens. There is a difference between a government experiment that has unintended consequences and one that is intended to harm the government's own citizens, as your scenario posits for AIDS.

Yes, but Agent Orange was never intended to be used against American citizens. There is a difference between a government experiment that has unintended consequences and one that is intended to harm the government's own citizens, as your scenario posits for AIDS.

Actually, I don't think it is a wedding ring, because he moves it back and forth between hands and on different fingers.

The President is a "responsible individual" in the technical sense, not in the sense of necessarily behaving "responsibly." Likewise, his appointees and other civil servants are "responsible for" their actions. Words can have more than one meaning, which is why I used the wording "the responsible individual or committees" rather than just "responsible individuals."

The first time I voted for a President who was younger than I was. A colleague of mine used to start one of her standard lectures about how memory works with, "Of course, we all remember where we were when Kennedy was shot...." A student tentatively raised his hand and said, "Excuse me, professor, but I wasn't born then." She never used that line again.

I do get tired of writers referring to "the government" as "they," as if "the government" were a human being or group of people who all thought alike, which is a logical fallacy. Decisions about government actions have to be made by the responsible individuals or committees, and when one ascribes particular activities to "the government," they ought to be prepared to name names and back it up with evidence, or with at least reasonable deductions. The assumption that "the government" wanted to perform an experiment which they expected would harm or kill a specific group of citizens, and that those who would perform the experiment were capable of inventing the agent and carrying out the execution, undetected at any time by any other members of "the government," is pretty far-fetched, especially at a time when many homosexuals who worked for the government were closeted. They would need at least one willing and able scientist (probably many) to produce the agent, plus the cooperation of those whose responsibility it was to carry out the transmission of the agent to the intended target, and someone capable of monitoring the result. That scientists would be incapable of recognizing the likelihood of serious collateral damage, for which they had no remedy, is also unlikely (they didn't know that gay men had sex with non-gay men and women, or that they might be drug-users who shared needles?!) There is also the matter of finding a medication that was only given to gay men (?), and finding a way to "taint" it with the virus so that it would work to infect the gay men who got it. This whole experiment does not in an way resemble the "Tuskegee Experiment," except in that the subjects did not know that they were being used in a way that the experimenters knew would be harmful to them. Of course, if you can believe in the above conspiracy theory, you can probably believe that Jewish blue lasers caused the California wildfires, which is based on the same kinds of assumptions.

He's actually in Trenton.

+1!

And you are way too quick to leap to conspiracy theories without reading your sources carefully. "Government malevolence" is a combination of two vague concepts. The links you have provided are not about malevolence, but about secret actions the federal government took to test out scientific theories. Most of the actions were not expected to harm anyone, and in most cases they didn't. When they did cause harm, it was unintentional, and was not directed against any specific group of people. The purpose of the interview with Leonard Cole was not to talk about a government action but a crime committed by a person unknown, the sending of the anthrax-laden letters through the mail to specific individuals. The major exception in which people were deliberately harmed, mentioned briefly in one of your links, occurred almost a century ago, in which black men were used without their knowledge as subjects in a test of the effects of untreated syphilis, at a time when there was no cure for the disease. It was totally unethical but was not recognized as such by many American scientists at the time; government scientists would not be able to get approval for the same kind of experiment today. What you are suggesting about AIDS, however, was not an experiment but a purposeful act by "government" (which you don't define), acting our of hatred and ill will, to harm gay men.

You are comparing two very different things: an attempt by bureaucrats to stifle information that was widely known within the scientific community from reaching the general public, to a secret plot by the "government" to kill a specific group of citizens, with a weapon which was somehow engineered by a scientist or scientists within the government. There has never been any scientific evidence that HIV could have been invented in a lab, or that it could somehow be used to "taint" a medication that would somehow transmit it to gay men.