Year: 2005

The Onion has the scoop.

Today happens to be my twelfth anniversary of being diagnosed with HIV. I guess it’s as good a time as any to stir up another shit-storm with an article that responds to one of the more breath-taking comments from those in the AIDS establishment. I refer to one Michael Weinstein, who told the New York Times recently, “People are in such denial about how serious HIV is. Unfortunately, the best prevention is seeing people die.” The usual suspects have said the usual outraged things about my celebration of survival with HIV and, of course, my apology for staying alive is meant only partly tongue-in-cheek. But the truth is: it’s a good thing that many more of us are thriving and living well with this disease. The problem that this creates for HIV prevention is a real one, as I’ve written many times on this blog, but it’s what my many dead friends would call a good problem to have. Money quote, once you get past my sarcasm:

We could always be thrilled that so many people are living longer and better lives with HIV. We could celebrate our reclaiming of sexuality after years of terror. We could even try new strategies for risk reduction among gay men – strategies that emphasize positive ways to care for our health rather than negative ways to scare the bejeezus out of everyone. But then we’d have no more people to scapegoat and blame, would we?

No, it’s not a good thing to have HIV. I went through hell and many others are going through awful things. But gay men are not in denial about how serious this disease is. The AIDS establishment is. It’s much less serious than it was. From being an automatic death sentence, it’s now in the diabetes spectrum, if you get tested early and treated effectively. The question is how we devise better prevention methods that acknowledge that fact rather than deny it.

EMAIL OF THE EVENING: “I just wanted to say that I read your article in The Advocate “Still here – So sorry!” and I agree with everything you say 1000%. I have been HIV+ for 23 years and have been in very good health the whole time, but like you and am about to restart a combo after being on nothing for three and a half years. There were some pretty bleak years in the late 80s and early 90s when I felt like people kept expecting me to disappear – and they were almost disappointed that I just kept rising up the corporate ladder and refused to let HIV defeat me. Of course the meds made a big difference later.
Back in 1988, the people in my support group who were busy writing wills and going on long term disability died very quickly. People like me who insisted on living a normal life – seemed to keep on trucking. But it seems like now all the powers that be care about is painting HIV as being so hopeless and horrible that it is supposed to scare people from doing naughty things and of course it all feeds into the anti-sexual morality play we seem to be seeing more and more of. No one seems to care about the feelings of people with HIV themselves who have good reason to feel hopeful. It’s almost like our existence is inconvenient.”

You can’t beat Instapundit for blog reactions.

If you grow pot in your attic solely to help you survive chemotherapy, you can be prosecuted by the feds under the “inter-state commerce” rationale. Now you can have your property stolen by Walmart and be unable to get any recompense either, as long as your local representatives, financed by the real estate lobby, go along. Is this an unfree country or what? And, of course, none of this breaks new ground. That’s the really depressing part. It seems to me that the most inspired pick for the Supreme Court would be a thoroughgoing economic and social libertarian. The freedom-loving part of the Republican coalition has already been alienated in so many ways by this administration. A libertarian SCOTUS pick would go some way to winning them back.
UPDATE: I’m also guilty of hyperbole. As one reader reminds me: “I’m with the dissent. Nevertheless, ‘unable to get any recompense’ is flat out wrong. They still have to compensate the owners for their property.” Point taken. It’s just a lot easier for the government now than it was.

“Turing might be known primarily as a mathematician and the founder of computer science, but he was truly a full-fledged scientist of incredible insight. A decade ago, as an undergraduate student, I stumbled across some articles on “Turing structures,” which were Turing’s theory as to how certain complex biological patterns (zebra stripes, cow spots, etc) could arise from relatively simple (and well-understood) chemical equations. Some 40 years after his theory, scientists discovered that his hypothesis had real-world application. Looking at his original paper, I was amazed at how clearly and concisely he wrote, with an obvious concern for the lay reader who lacked his mathematical brilliance.
For a long but entertaining read, I recommend Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon,” which includes some highly enjoyable historical speculations on the breaking of Enigma.”

Today is the late math genius’s birthday. Turing was a brilliant Englishman, one of the founding fathers of computer science, and a patriot whose cracking of the Nazis’ Enigma Code was critical to winning the war against Hitler. His amazing work was rewarded by being offered the choice in 1952 of choosing chemical castration or imprisonment for being gay. Two years later, a broken man, he killed himself. Today is a day for honoring him and the countless men and women over the centuries whose gifts and dignity were obliterated by ignorance, oppression and hate, hate that is still being excused and perpetrated today. May those of us lucky enough to have been born in their wake never forget what they went through, never forget the cruelty and evil they had to confront, and do everything we can to prevent these wounds being passed to the next generation.

Two great columns today from David Brooks and Max Boot. I second both. I don’t think withdrawal of any troops is an option in the current presidential term (I think we need more troops, not fewer); and we need, as Max says, to do a far better job of securing the borders. But we have an absolute moral obligation to stand by those Iraqis who risked their lives to vote last January; and the president needs to do a far better job of being honest with the American people about the huge commitment still required for several years to make this a (by no means assured) success. His policy of Pollyannaish platitudes has failed. And if he doesn’t turn around American public opinion on this, we will lose.

Ever since a key rationale for the war to depose Saddam – existing stockpiles of WMDs – was debunked, the interesting theoretical question is: if we’d known then what we know now, would we still have launched a war? In general, I agree with Bob Kagan. We too often forget the consequences of the alternative: hideously cruel and corrupt sanctions, the maintenance of Saddam’s barbarism, the entrenchment of despotism in the Arab world, the encouragement of Jihadists who could interpret inaction as weakness, and the fact that sanctions would eventually have collapsed and that Saddam could have gotten his WMDs in the near future anyway. It would be dishonest to say I’m not chastened by the inept post-war, Abu Ghraib, the abandonment of the ban on “cruel and inhumane treatment” of prisoners, the resilience of the insurgency, the ineffectiveness of reconstruction and the loss of 12,000 Iraqi lives while we were responsible for their security. But I still think that, even knowing what we know now, the war was worth it, if only for the potential for Arab democratization that has opened up; and the end of Saddam’s brutality. Nevertheless, Spencer Ackerman makes some good cointer-points here. I link; you mull it over.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I agree with you about Durbin. While ineloquently phrased, the sentiment is true. We don’t expect our troops to do the things we hear about them doing in Gitmo. Still, any politician shoud be smart enough to know that comparisons to Nazis, Stalin, Khmer Rouge, et. al. are not only inaccurate, but going to create a terrible shitstorm. Instead, I’d recommend the words of the most America loving author, and a true literary giant. Here’s what he had to say about the Spanish-American War, and the Philippine rebellion:

“We have invited our clean young men to shoulder a discredited musket and do bandits’ work under a flag which bandits have been accustomed to fear, not to follow; we have debauched America’s honor and blackened her face before the world …” (Mark Twain, “On the Damned Human Race”).

I don’t think that even the far right is going to castigate Mr. Clemens for insufficient patriotism.”

How will Hillary vote on the flag-burning nonsense?