Thoughts on the “gay community” and Monkeypox as “experts” recommend vaccination to gay men first.
WARNING: This post will be controversial and likely offensive to LGBT people. I’m gay myself, and I don’t like what I’m seeing, and I really wish I didn’t feel compelled to talk about this.
I consider myself to be the product of when we could still sit down and watch hard-hitting fact-based journalism, and talk about things like adults, without a total media circus, or worry that someone will take offense to facts.
George Carlin warned about “soft language” in a video from a long time ago that I believe everyone should watch. It hasn’t gotten any better.
So, I’ve sat down and thought a little bit about Monkeypox and how it spreads. I’ve decided that I won’t be getting my vaccine in the foreseeable future.
Why? I’m not at much risk.
A NewsWeek article says “experts” are recommending vaccines go to gay men first.
Web / Gemini (NewsWaffle)
I’m married, and neither one of us are cheating on each other or in an “open relationship”, so these kinds of things are very unlikely to hit home for us, and most of the people getting Monkeypox who have been interviewed by the news describe themselves as the “village bicycles”.
You know, “Everyone’s had a ride.”.
I’m sure that they had enough fun for 10-15 minutes with someone from Grindr, which they won’t be able to identify to the Health Department contact tracers as they’re sitting there in “debilitating pain” looking like the Elephant Man, to be worth it.
NBC News ran an article, interviewing a bunch of gay men who got themselves in a whole heap of trouble, and they pretty much all had a similar story. Web / Gemini (NewsWaffle)
My personal favorite was the guy who went hoebagging his way across Europe, having sex with men in seven different countries, capped off by a stop over at the bathhouse in Germany. He speculates that he may now have Monkeypox because someone wasn’t wiping down the sex swing.
A close runner-up, of course, was the guy who described lesions on his anal area and said, “I do remember there being a little hard spot [on that particular man’s] penis.”.
Stories like these anger and frustrate me in a number of ways, but mostly at fellow gay men.
I’ve been around long enough to know that at least half don’t value being in any kind of a relationship at all, and that half of those that do are usually cheaters or pressure the other one, or agree to, having an open relationship.
My thinking on being in an “open relationship” is that it’s just a total lack of respect that people have for each other.
It’s like telling each other “You’re not important to me and I’d rather you just brought home some money and didn’t say anything while I bring all of these other people in to bang me like a Salvation Army drum.”.
The reason why Monkeypox vaccines and the disease itself do not concern me or my spouse is because we don’t “get around”. We respect our marriage vows.
If you care about your “partner”, you should get married and agree to exclusivity. It’s a part of this overall mental maturity that I see so often lacking in the “gay community”. I respect my spouse and I respect the legal contract that I swore to uphold in a court of law.
Unfortunately, as a sign of the times, many states in the US either decriminalized Adultery or don’t enforce it, even if it’s a felony or misdemeanor.
In Illinois, it’s a misdemeanor, and nobody has been charged with it since 1997. It’s there because no politician wants to say they’re the ones who took it off the books. I think they should go back to enforcing it as an offense that involves a fine payable to the state, some probation, and grounds for the other party to dissolve the marriage and leave with 100% of the assets.
Marriage is a great and stabilizing factor that benefits society. People who are too immature to enter into a commitment like that are people you probably want nothing to do with anyway.
There’s some free advice from someone who had to learn that the hard way.
Back to the pox….
There will be victims of Monkeypox who didn’t bring it on themselves.
The media is drawing attention away from the people who should get the vaccine first.
Healthcare professionals, school children (shared playground equipment, toys, etc.), and the Homeless.
Not people who go on sex vacations across Europe, Thailand, and the Philippines, and use Grindr, then blame the bathhouse for not bleaching down the communal sex swing.
The “gay community” has known that there were way worse things out there than Monkeypox since the AIDS crisis, 40 years ago, and I’ll bet you most or all of the men in the NBC article didn’t wear a condom.
Not that they bothered to report such, because it would just confirm that these people are as gross as you suspected already.
If you’re not afraid of what’s already out there, why would you be creeped out by Monkeypox?
Is it because it could leave lesions all over you and that doesn’t sit well with your sense of vanity?
Monkeypox is just going to be another animal at the zoo by the time our idiot President is finished eating ice cream cones while it spreads across the United States.
The entire shortage of vaccines is due to the corrupt Biden Administration.
The Smallpox vaccine that they used to administer with a bifurcated needle is still around. They actually have a Strategic National Stockpile in case Putin or Xi (most likely) release it again as a bio-weapon, and there are enough doses in there for every American.
Just rotting away in a government warehouse, while Biden, Chuck, and Nancy dole out contracts to a company, Bavarian Nordic, that has patented a different vaccine and can’t produce it quickly enough to get out ahead of the disease.
They don’t have to.
They can make a fortune from the monopoly while the entire city of Chicago has to stand in line for an hour on Mondays until that week’s allocation runs out.
(After the politicians buy shares in the company, naturally. Because insider trading….wooohoo!)
If they cared about this being a “global emergency”, Biden, Chuck, and Nancy would open up the government warehouses and get the forklifts rolling and get the Smallpox vaccine rolling out. We know it’s safe. My mom had to take it in 1963 when it was a routine childhood vaccination.
Another upside would be, if Putin and Xi decide to throw the United States into further chaos by releasing a Smallpox pandemic onto us, we’ll already be vaccinated.
(Although I believe such a situation is unlikely. Diseases are hard to control. The Chinese couldn’t stop COVID-19 even with all the options of having a brutal Communist dictatorship on the table. It was far easier for them to control the narrative by throwing out journalists from free countries.)
I’m certainly not “anti-vax”. I get vaccinated or boosted for something at least every year, even if it is just a flu shot.
I just don’t think that rushing to get a Monkeypox vaccine that hasn’t been tested is for me. It’s not like the guy sitting 3 rows back at the movie theater could cough and you’d get it, like COVID-19.
Like all medicines, vaccines are a risk / benefit situation. The risk of Tetanus is not worth foregoing a vaccine. The risk of Pneumonia isn’t.
Something that is mostly going around among a bunch of slobs that the media digs up that are all on a gay f**k app, and the healthcare professionals unlucky enough to have to take care of them when they show up and want their butt lesions tended to, just doesn’t sound like a me problem at this point in my life.
When AIDS was new, public health experts asked for the bathhouses in San Francisco to be shut down, which was mainly where gay men at the time went to do drugs and each other, and they got booed off the stage.
Worse, many gay men accused AIDS of being “trumped up” by the Reagan Administration to “put gay men back in the closet”.
Yes, the first AIDS deniers were gay men who didn’t want to cope with the mess they’d gotten themselves into. Later came the people who wanted to sell worthless supplements. Many of the AIDS deniers who got AIDS were the first to die, since you can’t treat a disease you won’t even admit you have.
Instead, gay men in the 1980s blamed a Republican President that they just didn’t happen to like already, and said that anyone who told them to to wear a condom, and to shut down the bathhouses, was being “sex negative” and “homophobic”.
They didn’t spare gay men who just wanted to put a lid on the AIDS crisis and save lives from the abusive conduct.
There’s absolutely no reason to expect that to change now that the new pandemic is Monkeypox.
I won’t lie, like most young people, I was more “active” when I was younger, but it also wasn’t bathhouses and bonking my way through seven different countries in a couple of weeks, and capping it off in a communal sling in a German bathhouse. Usually it was just with people I knew fairly well.
Honestly, I think that Grindr is one of the worst things to happen to the “gay community”, and I say that as a gay man, and a person who absolutely loves new (open) technologies and is often one of the first people you see using it.
Thing is, Grindr isn’t an open source program. It’s a proprietary program.
It has had so many scandals that it would be difficult and out of the scope of this article to even name all of them. Mostly data privacy issues. Selling HIV status and things to Facebook and drug companies, compiling blackmail for the Chinese government on US citizens, people who have met up with freaks and been raped and tortured.
In many ways, Grindr is actively harmful, and in no way is it ultimately satisfying.
My opinion of the app was already not high, and now the latest gift it gives to the people who use it and the victims of those they touch is a disfiguring ailment.
In Star Trek: First Contact, which is still the peak of Trek movies in my opinion, Captain Picard screamed “Don’t let them touch you!” when the Borg were slowly meandering a swarm. Good advice for dealing with Borg. Good advice for dealing with men on Grindr or at Steamworks Chicago.
The Borg have all the time in the world. Q described them as never being in a hurry because they would just drain the fight out of their victims and then assimilate them.
Monkeypox isn’t spreading quickly, despite the media panic that would have you believe otherwise, because the people most likely to get it are basically self-selecting in order to get to the front of the line.
For most people, reaching the vaccine (especially an untested one) quickly is not an emergency, and the media should quit trying to alarm everybody and just report facts.
But that’s not how the media works anymore.
For most people in America today, the important issue isn’t Monkeypox.
It’s inflation, job loss, problems finding adequate housing if you can even find housing at all.
Corporations spying on them and selling the dirt to their employers and landlords so they can get thrown out like some kind of a felon before they even get an interview.
It’s government gone mad.
But the last thing the media wants is a concerned public about a country that’s falling apart, overrun with crime, with a failing economy, that’s designed to “keep people in their place”, running around like a hamster on a treadmill just to stay where they’re at.
They have to panic people about stupid shit that doesn’t concern them and is only on the periphery of possibly happening to them in the future.
The lengths that the media is going through to try to protect a President that’s so clearly incompetent and a Democratic House Speaker who says what we really need is a “strong Republican Party” is, well, aggravating.
“They don’t believe in governance.” -Pelosi
Well, she’s not wrong. The more I watch her party in action, the less I do believe in the government. Not believing that the government will help you is not a problem the Republicans are making. It’s one they’re winning elections with, after the Democrats have been in office for years and, don’t help you.
While Madame Speaker has blamed being “ungovernable” on the far-right, it’s a problem with people in general. If there’s a problem here of people being “ungovernable”, it’s because they’re being encouraged.
Her own party is encouraging people to flout their state laws. If you find it’s easier to just flout laws regarding abortion, what other law will you respect? It’s not like blue states even manage to govern.
Illinois has some of the worst gun crime in America with some of the toughest gun laws. It only affects people who aren’t a threat and turns them into a criminal by mistake sometimes. (Expired FOID card….while they’re off issuing a valid one to Robert Crimo II)
Summarized: “Sorry about the hyperinflation. Here’s a coupon for the Internet so you can get brainwashed for free!” -Democrats.
I literally have about three or four Web sites that are not my bank that I even open anymore. I can’t remember a time when the Web was worse than it is now. With how boring it is, how much crap and propaganda, how much “content” you can’t use freely because some asshole stuck it behind DRM.
We’re well beyond a time when open source software could access the Web and do much of anything with it. Which is a major reason why Gemini is being constructed.
It’s almost not worth having, and they’re on a mission to finish things off to where it’s not worth having, and now they’re giving it to poor people to distract them with porn and propaganda. It’s Orwellian.
Meanwhile, companies in America complain there’s “nobody to hire” because young people have figured out that they can make more than minimum wage with sex work. (This feeds into the hyperinflation.) The government is also fine with this because porn keeps people stupid and distracted. Anything that keeps you stupid and distracted is good. Anything that informs you must be incinerated.
Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, my cousin had a job at the Indiana State Department of Health. STDs spreading across Internet/Web hookups was just starting to happen, and at that point in time, contact tracing didn’t have as difficult a time at keeping up with it, and notifying people that they need to be tested.
I think states have mostly given up on contact tracing. There’s an unprecedented explosion in Sexually Transmitted Disease in the United States, and while we can speculate as to why, I blame a lot of it on these apps that tell you how close the nearest person who has had sex with everyone else already is. Short of banning these apps, I doubt we’re really going to do much to put a lid on it.
The states could just buy all of the contact tracing data from Grindr about who you’ve been having sex with. No warrant. Grindr does sell it. To anyone. The state doesn’t want to spook people by admitting it can contact trace that way, I guess.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement buys a ton of data from these app companies.
The government “knows” everything it cares to, because you’re leaking it all over the place. They just don’t want to make it so obvious that it creeps you out. You getting Monkeypox isn’t really a problem for them.
I was talking to a Chicago Police Detective about Grindr and he said they love Grindr because they can just serve Grindr with a warrant and get all kinds of stuff and that they do it all the time.
That’s in addition to the fact that undercover cops hide out on it.
You’d think that not admitting you’d do something illegal into a box that popped up in a smartphone app would be a given, but apparently not. 🙂
Like the majority of “smartphone apps” and “social networks”, Grindr is effectively an arm of the state. Why would the state cut off their arm?
“All day long, beating you over the head with their media. Telling you what to think, what to believe, and what to buy!” -George Carlin
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