Bush's "Abstinence-Only" AIDs Ambassador and Prostitutes Sittin' In A Tree...
...f-*-c-k-i-n-g...
Too bad for Randall Tobias. If he'd merely dodged the draft, tried to steal an election, or lied us into a war, he'd be fine. But it looks like he had him some s-e-x, which as we all know is a d-i-r-t-y activity that makes the baby J-e-b-u-s weep.
And now Tobias is, er, s-c-r-e-w-e-d. [at Metafilter (well, he's not screwed at Metafilter, but that's where you can find all the links.)]
Oh, and he p-a-i-d for it, which you'd think would be the free market at work--like, ya know, an invisible hand job--but somehow isn't, perhaps because s-e-x is d-i-r-t-y (see above).
I've got to say I really do marvel at how bent so many of these hyper-puritans actually turn out to be. A lesser man would find this so bleeding hilarious that he would, in an effort to stifle a laugh, emit just a wee bit of Gatorade out of his nose when he read this. But not me.
Does anybody else find it astounding that you can be a complete nut and people hardly even seem to notice...but if you're a hypocritical nut, violating your own crackpot principles, suddenly it's no longer o.k.? I say: better a hypocritical nut than a nut that sticks to his nutty principles.
...f-*-c-k-i-n-g...
Too bad for Randall Tobias. If he'd merely dodged the draft, tried to steal an election, or lied us into a war, he'd be fine. But it looks like he had him some s-e-x, which as we all know is a d-i-r-t-y activity that makes the baby J-e-b-u-s weep.
And now Tobias is, er, s-c-r-e-w-e-d. [at Metafilter (well, he's not screwed at Metafilter, but that's where you can find all the links.)]
Oh, and he p-a-i-d for it, which you'd think would be the free market at work--like, ya know, an invisible hand job--but somehow isn't, perhaps because s-e-x is d-i-r-t-y (see above).
I've got to say I really do marvel at how bent so many of these hyper-puritans actually turn out to be. A lesser man would find this so bleeding hilarious that he would, in an effort to stifle a laugh, emit just a wee bit of Gatorade out of his nose when he read this. But not me.
Does anybody else find it astounding that you can be a complete nut and people hardly even seem to notice...but if you're a hypocritical nut, violating your own crackpot principles, suddenly it's no longer o.k.? I say: better a hypocritical nut than a nut that sticks to his nutty principles.
posted by Winston Smith at
12:20 PM
27 Comments:
It's like, you couldn't possibly write a worse administration into a play. If you wanted to write a play where you made the president and his administration of the United States into the worst group of..um..fuck ups.. that you could imagine, you would stop short of writing this administration into the play because you would think to yourself "Nah, this isn't even believable".
And yet..
P.S.: Moral of this story? As we've suspected for a long time - you can be successful in politics if you are a psychopathic creature of unimaginable horror so long as you refrain from having sex. Once you have sex, you are boned.
Yes. Boned.
Well, it depends on whom you have sex with, Mr. Mystic. When you have a history of rewarding your partners with government jobs, it's a bad idea to diddle the other help, too. B-A-D idea, and predictably leads to trouble, as does contracting sex workers when your job is advocating abstinence.
(But, BTW, I'll admit it is humorous that the top 3 Democrat presidential candidates are still all on their first spouses, whereas in the GOP, the only one who is...[wait for it]...is the Mormon.)
To move on, odd that I should write the other day that membership in a church (or other belief system) is no "prophylaxis" against corruption. An apt locution, and prescient.
Although it must be, um, liberating to have little in the way of standards, I wouldn't deny that someone their schadenfreude at someone coming up short, or in this case, violating theirs. It's only human.
The abstinence question is nettlesome, of course, and can easily be reduced to a rejection of any ideal for the lowest common denominator. However ineffective abstinence programs may appear (and I'll stipulate that they are only for the sake of discussion), it cannot be denied that only abstinence can prevent AIDS. The ideal, the 100% solution.
The hole in the rubber, if you will, is that condoms aren't 100% effective, and 90% is pretty much as generous as estimates get (and 5-10% less in male-to-male relations).
It might be true that Africa could be educated on proper use, into a higher percentage, but the fact remains that in the media- and sex-education saturated US, the failure rate is pretty much the same. By the light of reality-based metrics, how much improvement we can reasonably expect is questionable.
Further, even if condom use could be successfully be framed as safer, not safe sex, the failure rate in the face of a fatal disease is unacceptable by any standard we use for safety in any other hazardous situation, like crossing the street or climbing a ladder, not to mention keeping a gun in your nightstand.
Abstinencers are guilty of being naive, but what they preach is empirically true. The (well, they claim to be anyway) better-informed condom crowd does not have that excuse. Once you have sex---even with a condom---especially in a country with 10%+ HIV infection rates (most? all? of Africa), there is a statistically significant risk you are, as Mr. Mystic so elegantly puts it, boned.
invisible hand......job.
that is pure gold! it made me laugh loud enough to be obnoxious in a computer lab on a saturday night
Hehe. Obnoxiousness is apparently the most effective condom of all, Niemand.
Abstinencers are guilty of being naive, but what they preach is empirically true.
One thing in this is definitely true: Abstinence advocates preach.
The real truth, as seen in their continuing willingness to coerce conformance to their conservative sexual mores, is that they substitute their moral judgements for practical, empirical findings, however imperfect those may be. Abstinence-only is intellectually equivalent to creationism.
Furthermore, the "perfection" of abstinence and the acknowledged imperfection of condoms compare apples and oranges. Condom effectiveness is measured as use effectiveness - what proportion of of couples who use them avoid pregnancy or infection.
What's the use effectiveness of abstinence? Recent studies done by an administration that advocates it say that it is no more effective than nothing.
Last, I look at all the religious hypocrites (note: by no means all believers) who would force the rest of us into their narrow mold but who cannot themselves conform to that mold. It would be perfectly fine with me if they aimed for a standard that is hard to attain. What I can't abide is that they hold me responsible, based on metaphysical (and frankly often absurd) beliefs I do not share, to meet standards that may in fact be impossible for ordinary mortals like me.
The problem isn't necessarily that abstinence programs are completely useless and ineffective, but the refusal of those who promote them to educate about methods of safer sex.
I've taken the lame sex ed courses in high school and middle school, and I can tell you that they always say "Obviously the best way to avoid contracting an STD or to avoid becoming/getting someone pregnant is to not have sex."
This is where the abstinence course differs from the semi-worthwhile sex ed course. The semi-worthwhile one adds "But, if you're going to have sex, you must use a condom, as it reduces your risk of contracting a disease. There's a 5% chance you'll get an STD if you use a condom with a partner who has one whereas the risk if you aren't using the condom is [insert actual statistic - I presume it's around 97%]."
If it were true that sex ed classes taught that you could have all the sex you want so long as you use a condom, then you might have a semi-point, Tom. But the fact is, they teach that abstinence is the best way to avoid disease and pregnancy too - everyone knows that. That's basically the moron's obvious solution. If activity x potentially causes result y, then the best way not to get result y is...
don't do x.
Duh.
But abstinence classes fail to fully educate - they simply reinforce the moron solution and move on. So, when people have sex, which they invariably will, as we can see, they won't have any idea how to do it at least a good deal more safely.
Am I disagreeing with Tom that, with a risk of fatal disease, 90-95% success rate is inadequate? No. Am I disagreeing with him that this makes it useless to teach, as he seems to be indicating? Yes.
Would you rather have people utilizing a 90% successful method, or a near-zero percent successful method?
That seems pretty easy.
I'm actually shocked you'd stand up for the abstinence programs, Tom. Am I just not understanding what you were saying?
Yeah, Tom, you're just flat-out wrong here.
Condoms are very effective in preventing AIDS.
Furthermore:
You falsely presuppose that only a method that is 100% effective in preventing x is effective in preventing x. But, of course, this isn't true. A method that is 99% effective is, well, 99% effective, etc.
Furthermore, sexual abstinence is not 100% effective, as one can still contract AIDs from e.g. rape, tissue transplants, and blood transfusions.
I mean, really Tom. I can't believe you could endorse what you wrote above upon reflection.
Am I supposed to return that discourtesy by you and yours, WS, and say you apparently think everyone has thought about this issue as little as you have and similarly lashes out reflexively? I don't deserve this.
What I wrote has occurred to others, like this fellow.
The book seems to have been well-regarded, including sources that you might feel comfortable enough to challenge your own orthodoxies.
“This is a book that tries to focus on those successes in AIDS prevention rather than the failures, even though the successes may not be as dramatic as one would hope in this stage of the pandemic. It is these successes that others in less developed countries can learn and hopefully be successful in their prevention efforts. The focus of this book is on heterosexual transmission of HIV in less-developed countries and on just sexually transmitted AIDS. Based on the findings that are reported in the book, it is reasonable that prevention programs should follow the ABCs: Abstain, Be faithful, or use Condoms if you cannot follow A or B. It is the C that is stressed the most with little resources going into A and B. More recently, the dependence on D (Drugs) has become the norm, resulting in the total disregard of A, B, and C....This is an excellent book that should be in all academic libraries.”–Aids Book Review Journal
“If Green's analysis is correct, we are faced with a troubling paradox: while our technologically sophisticated system often operates at the margin of acceptable cost efficacy, halfway around the world, secular bias and biomedical fiscal power are responsible for discouraging and discrediting simple yet effective solutions, at the cost of millions of lives.”–JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association
“Rethinking AIDS Prevention is a brave book, critical yet hopeful, aiming to put HIV prevention firmly back on the global agenda. It has achieved this in record time by providing analysis that appeals to both sides of the political spectrum, with a genuine interest in Africa.”–The Lancet
The right isn't the only side capable of cultural imperialism, you know. Do the math on condom failure and Botwana's 35% HIV infection rate and tell me that's a risk any reality-based community would find remotely acceptable if the perceived free lunch of condoms weren't involved.
(And no, WS, you're talking about involuntary risk of exposure, which is unrelated to the question of abstinence.)
Tom -
"Am I supposed to return that discourtesy by you and yours, WS, and say you apparently think everyone has thought about this issue as little as you have and similarly lashes out reflexively? I don't deserve this."
Goodness. If saying that you're wrong is "lashing out", you need some thicker skin. Also, you constantly insult people, which is apparent in your quote above.
Calm down.
Secondly, "The right isn't the only side capable of cultural imperialism, you know. Do the math on condom failure and Botwana's 35% HIV infection rate and tell me that's a risk any reality-based community would find remotely acceptable if the perceived free lunch of condoms weren't involved."
I don't get it. Free lunch of condoms? What?
Here's all I'm (and I think Winston) is saying:
1) Using condoms prevents one from contracting AIDS from a sexual encounter at a very high rate (90-95%).
2) People have sex despite having classes on abstinence. Studies show that these classes have absolutely no effect on keeping people from having sex. The exact same percentage of people have sex whether or not they've had abstinence classes.
3) Given 1 and 2, it seems obvious that people should be educated about condoms, their proper use, and how they can help to prevent the spread of AIDS.
That is about as obvious as it gets, but if there's an error, point it out. We can discuss.
Furthermore, I'd like to reinforce the fact that sex education classes that liberals support do not simply leave out abstinence. They teach that that is the only surefire way to not contract AIDS through sexual relations. However, they continue to teach safer sex practices because they understand that people are going to do it anyway. This is what makes them effective.
No one is saying that condoms are perfect. All we're saying is that they're better than nothing, which studies show is exactly what "abstinence only" programs equate into. Nothing.
Another way it might be put:
1) People are going to have sex whether or not they're taught about abstinence, as studies show.
2) Teaching people how to have sex in the safest manner possible is therefore better than teaching them nothing about how to more safely have sex.
Simple.
Or perhaps simplistic. For some reason you think I wouldn't already be aware of your arguments, which are boilerplate and unobjectionable as far as they go. Conversely, you didn't read what I linked to, or if you did, it rolled off your back because you showed zero acknowledgement of what I actually wrote, which was not a defense of "abstinence only."
If you had a pill that could make smoking safe for 90% of people but would leave the others still at great risk, would you dispense it?
---Certainly.
Would you stop urging people to quit smoking?
---Ridiculous.
Would you be afraid that dispensing the pill might make people less apt to quit?
---Human nature being what it is, I'd have to say that's possible, if not likely.
That people might actually be less afraid to take up smoking?
---Again, human nature being what it is...
Not simple at all.
Now, if I felt that the social science/reality-based/NGO community were as committed to abstinence as quitting smoking (a laughable proposition), we wouldn't be having this discussion, if we can call it one. If I felt they'd done the math on the true risk of sex in Africa even with condom use, and showed a true appreciation of just how many deaths a 10% failure rate amounts to, I wouldn't be writing, and neither would Edward C. Green.
How about a real success story in combatting the spread of sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS?:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/12/opinion/12beyrer.html?ex=1177992000&en=4dbc3e69a6e3b796&ei=5070
And Botswanna is a great example too, because of the cultural prejudices against condom use; it's primarily for that reason that AIDS has been so devastating there, particularly in the heterosexual population.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3852/is_200401/ai_n9429766/pg_1
No reasonable person suggests keeping the recommendation for abstinence out of worldwide STD prevention programs. But the realistic person realizes that it's a hell of a lot easier to change a few individual behaviors, ingrained as they may be, than to change people's entire moral system or convince them that they need to change to save their soul.
And no reasonable person would suggest that reasonable people suggest keeping the recommendation for abstinence out of worldwide STD prevention programs.
But let's not pretend that the "reasonable" people have any genuine enthusiasm whatsoever for the concept. If they did, they'd be disappointed, not gleeful, that Randall Tobias failed his duty.
I'm actually shocked you'd stand up for the abstinence programs, Tom.
That's really where it's at, let's face it, and just drop the lip service about abstinence. It's a) a joke because b) it don't work. But don't think the "students" aren't fully aware of that attitude or discount the possibility that a) leads to b).
And neither did I drag in moral systems or God forbid, souls. You got the wrong guy---I wouldn't waste my time or your time. No turnip truck here. I know where I am and who you all are.
But even tho I'm confining myself to your language, you're just not hearing me. I asked you to do the math on Botswana, but you googled it instead looking to refute me. I could have saved you the trouble. I'm not disagreeing with a single counterargument that's been offered. I just find them inadequate.
Modern social science is and must be content to reason from worst to best. But that approach never gets anywhere near its destination, because what is not easily and universally achievable must be discarded.
(I paraphrase a philosopher here who must needs remain nameless. But I, like he, am not willing to hand the conduct of human events over to [by definition] mediocrity, or more etymologically correct, meanness of the social sciences.)
It's possible y'all are being obtuse, but it could very well be that altho you fancy yourselves the rebels, the converse is likely true. Most people scoff at new ideas, and even harder at old ones. But there might be an open-minded person out there somewhere, so I'm glad I brought this up.
And I do apologize to all here gathered for what appears to be a certain stridency on my part. It's actually just passion, thumos, perhaps. I have serious questions about what I think have been easy and complacent answers to what is after all a life-and-death issue. The smoking pill analogy was the best I could come up with to illustrate the complications.
And if any of you can tell me with a straight internet face that you or some NGO could teach abstinence in the US or Africa with the same passion as you could an anti-smoking class, perhaps I'll change my mind. But I just can't entertain that mental image without laughing out loud, not derisively (honest), but admittedly somewhat obnoxiously. We all know where we are, and who we are.
Well, you've lost me, Tom. There's so much here that this might call for a post at your digs.
(In general, I think we all--me included--may be getting a little long-winded in our comments...and I, for one, vow to cut back. Right after this comment...)
I'm not inclined to sift through this again, but it seems that you're discussing abstinence as a component of a strategy, whereas what this post touched on was the *abstinence only* approach.
Not to try to address every point, but I don't think any sensible person would have a problem with a program that had, as a component, advice that went roughly like this:
"Be careful about who you have sex with. Don't just sleep with any old body. The more careful you are, the more you know about your partners, and the less casual your sex, the safer you are."
One problem with the puritannical and programmatic emphasis on abstinence is that it's driven by a particular, weird, and not-well-supported moral/religious theory.
Another, of course, is that it doesn't seem to work, though studies point both ways. But that's a whole 'nuther thing.
In liberal societies, one goal is to aim at (as Rawls says) "overlapping consensus"--find the stuff we can pretty much all agree on, and shoot for that.
But here Bush has, as usual, aimed for something on the crackpot fringe instead of a better, more sensible, more well-supported, more effective policy about which there IS overlapping consensus.
TVD,
You expended a lot of words just to skirt the core issue. Namely, that attempts to change basic human nature are difficult if not impossible endeavors. And though I can't speak for other commenters here, I'm not willing to experiment with peoples' lives just to prove my point.
The fact is that, empirically, ABC programs, and even just condom promotion, have proven successful at saving lives. So, yeah, I know who I am. I'm the guy who's going to use what WORKS, rather than what I THINK or HOPE might work (though it has shown no efficacy thus far).
P.S. As someone who worked for UNICEF for ten years, and has been to Botswana, Sierra Leone, Uganda and the DRC, I didn't need to do any googling to refute you. And the article I had and posted a link to already *did* the math in a scientific way, which you might have realized if you had bothered to read it.
From the article:
"In the late 1980’s, Thailand experienced the first H.I.V. epidemic in Asia, and one of the most severe. By 1991, 10.4 percent of military conscripts from northern Thailand were infected by the virus, the highest level ever reported among a general population of young men outside Africa...
It worked. By 2001, fewer than 1 percent of army recruits were H.I.V. positive, infection rates had fallen among pregnant women, and several million infections had been averted...
Even in Thailand, the government has refused to expand successful prevention services to include gay men and injecting drug users, leading to rising infection rates among these groups."
So in addition to cross-sectional studies of one nation versus another (Thailand vs. Botswana), we also have parallel intra-national evidence of the effectiveness of condom campaigns.
And your admonishment about failure rates of condoms and comparison to smoking cessation programs illuminates the crucial flaw in your argument: that abstention from sex is the natural human condition, the default setting for humans. Is there any evidence whatsoever that smoking is as biologically embedded in human behavior as sex? If there was, your analogy with those programs might be apt.
All you need to do is look at some of the common responses in the Botswana study to see how societal beliefs color attitudes toward sex. Do you really think that a culture that values virility and multiple partners is will be more willing to accept abstinence than condom use? Of course, many of them don't even believe HIV is spread by sex, but that's another problem entirely.
Yes, I'll probably repurpose some of my content here, WS. It's been helpful to put my concerns into another language and dogma system.
One problem with the puritannical and programmatic emphasis on abstinence is that it's driven by a particular, weird, and not-well-supported moral/religious theory.
This of course, is an argument I did not make, but amply illustrates the antipathy toward abstinence by progressives at large. One does not need a bible to hold to dogmas.
ABC would fulfill Rawls' conditions (altho his low solid ground of consensus is inherently anti-philosophical), but my point is, and why I stipulate all the pedictable counterarguments that have filtered in, is that B and particularly A are being subverted in the interest of C.
In fact the Bush Africa AIDS program is not "A only"---it's been made out that way by proponents of C.
And C ain't that great. If my understanding of the math is correct, condom failure rates are annualized---have sex even with one in Botswana, and your risk of exposure of 10 years is 35%.
i figured someone would literalize my analogy with anti-smoking programs, and they did, but it's an analogy, and I'm sorry no one took it up on its own terms. The added complication of condoms investing a false sense of security is a real one, as is any education on abstinence by someone who thinks its bullshit being virtually doomed.
This is Edward C. Green's opinion/account of the Ugandans being caught in the a Western cultural proxy war.
"Condoms have been regarded as the first line of defense for everyone, everywhere, and anyone who disagrees with this orthodoxy has been dismissed as a religious fanatic with "an agenda." "
"...reality is very different from the Western experts' perception. Surveys today suggest that more than half of African males and females between the ages of 15 and 19 are abstaining from premarital sex, and increasing proportions of adults are having sex with only one partner. Yet few who work in AIDS prevention have called attention to these important trends, perhaps because they contradict the image of the hypersexed African that Western AIDS experts have been selling since the beginning of the AIDS pandemic. They depict Africans as "polygamous by nature," and supposedly so driven by hormones and poverty that commercial and transactional sex, and the inability to make responsible decisions about sex, are simply part of what it means to be African. If you accept this condescending view, condoms seem to be the only realistic solution to AIDS.
The trouble with the image of the hypersexed African is that it was never true for most Africans. Meanwhile, sexual behavior in Africa has changed. Not only in Uganda, but also perhaps in Senegal, Kenya, and elsewhere, abstinence and faithfulness have worked better than condoms. I document the evidence for Uganda and Senegal in detail in my 2003 book Rethinking AIDS Prevention. I also show that in about 1999, Kenya switched to a Uganda-style approach. In the past four to five years, casual sex on the part of Kenyan men and women has declined by about 50 percent, and HIV infection rates have fallen...
I think Rawls, who seemed to be a reasonable man, would agree that consensus is useless and may indeed be harmful unless all the facts are evaluated, not just the congenial ones.
For the record, I don't even necessarily accept Green's proposition that A and B are sometimes more effective than C. I myself would not expect that to be the case.
But it issues a serious challenge to the view that people can't or won't change their behavior. Indeed, C itself depends on that being untrue.
Ok, how about this:
Bulletproof vests don't stop all bullets, nor do they protect the head and limbs.
Should soldiers therefore stop wearing them because they instill some sort of "false sense of security"? Should we instead train them not to be shot and just leave it at that?
That's a good analogy.
I'm afraid it's not. If soldiers tended to overestimate their effectiveness and therefore took unnecessary risks, that would be a matter of concern.
But you'd still pass them out anyway. C'mon, man.
...
Is that not exactly what we're saying about condoms?
Yup. And I'm not disagreeing, Mr. Mystic. ABC. I just thought I'd pass my other half-dozen points of concern through this here meat-grinder and they seem to have come through unscathed, but hopefully not unnoticed.
Thank you for your time.
I don't know what Uganda Green is talking about, but it certainly wasn't the one I dodged bullets from the LRA to visit years back.
The fact of the matter is that these cultural predispositions DO exist in the country, and the spread of HIV was turbocharged by the LRA's abduction of young girls and forcing them into prostitution as well. Interviewing some of them afterwards was one of the most miserable things I've ever done in my life.
Anyway, the government continued to distribute condoms to prostitutes and soldiers, even when the focus grew on a broader ABC program, and the religious institutions began to stress abstinence.
The numbers bear this out, as evidenced here, among other places:
http://www.publicintegrity.org/aids/report.aspx?aid=806
Quoting directly:
"After becoming one of the first African countries to be hit hard by the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, Uganda won widespread plaudits as the African success story in combating the disease. By the end of 1992, at the epidemic's peak, about 18 percent of Ugandans were infected, and in some areas the rate topped 30 percent. But rather than ignoring the peril, as many other heads of state did, President Museveni became one of the first to speak out to his people about the danger of HIV/AIDS and to organize nationwide prevention programs. With international help, Uganda developed a three-pronged, so-called, ABC approach for prevention — preaching "Abstinence" for those who could manage it, encouraging married and co-habiting couples to "Be Faithful," and providing plenty of "Condoms" to everyone else as a fallback. The strategy worked. By the 2000s, the HIV/AIDS infection rate had dropped to about 6 percent...The increasingly single-minded focus on abstinence for youth alarms both HIV/AIDS activists and Ugandan public health officials, who fear that a whole generation may be at risk. The numbers seem to warrant concern. In the two years since the U.S.-influenced emphasis on youth abstinence began, the rate of new HIV infections in Uganda has nearly doubled, from 70,000 in 2003 to 130,000 in 2005, according to Dr. Kihumuro Apuuli, director general of the Uganda AIDS Commission. And while the infection rate for young people — about 3 percent for those ages 15 to 24 — remains lower than for the population as a whole, there's growing evidence that large numbers of Ugandan youth are engaging in risky sexual behavior. According to UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, for example, nearly three-quarters of Ugandan males between the ages of 15 to 24 as well as 26 percent of females in that age group report having had sex with a casual partner in the previous 12 months. More disturbingly, only about half reported using condoms the last time they had sex."
A better analogy would be seatbelts and airbags. We could definitely reduce the death and injury rates from auto accidents by lowering all speed limits, enforcing them strictly, enforcing reckless driving laws zealously, and prohibiting driving except for essential trips.
And maybe we should do some of those things. But the point is that we recognize that people are going to sometimes drive dangerously and do stupid things, so the more safety we can provide, the better.
Just shooting monologues past each other at this late date. The difference is, I've already heard yours and have said a number of times I don't disagree with a word really, but you don't seem to hear me atall over the sound of your own voice.
You've chosen not to engage Dr. Green, but have taken out the time to spit on him. This is not to your credit.
To everyone else, thanks for the forum. All I can say is that I didn't end up where I started, so the word I'd use for all this is "nourishing," which is what it's all about.
I took WS' advice and congealed my thoughts into a post at my own blog, altho I doubt anyone here will like the results. I used some of your input and you'll recognize yourselves therein, but since y'all prefer to remain nameless, nameless I left you.
The blog itself encourages dissent, so if you want your ideas to try their luck away from your home field, please feel free to jump in. It can be nourishing. In return, I promise, as your host, to get your back against any scurrilous attacks.
But since the scoreboard will read "Visitor," you'll have to get used to not saying "we." That goes with the territory, but most folks can't function without that comfort.
Best to all,---TVD
Well, I'll just echo what The Mystic said above, which is:
"Goodness. If saying that you're wrong is "lashing out", you need some thicker skin. Also, you constantly insult people, which is apparent in your quote above."
You've perfected the modern Republican affect of victimhood, as well as taken it upon yourself to confer that status upon this other fellow too, since I had the temerity to dispel the fantasy that he was spinning about a place about which I have personal experience (thus 'spitting' on him), and whose anti-HIV programs' efficacy have been thoroughly documented. Standard fare for the modern Republican standardbearers, who let ideology guide EVERYTHING.
You didn't engage anything I said either, then spit on me too. I'm seeing a pattern here.
Somewhere, the world's smallest violin is playing...
I vote for ending this thread. It's clearly lost whatever iota of productivity it once had.
Don't make me come back there. I will turn this car, right around.
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