NYT really can't stand this Republican field

Bizarre Responses to a Plea for Reason - The New York Times

Look at this editorial piece from the NYT, and enjoy its withering  dismissal of this bunch of Republican candidates:

Donald Trump, a bigot without foreign policy experience, showed that there is nothing he won’t say or support to sow hatred. On Monday he outrageously proposed barring all Muslims from entering the country. There is no precedent for denying immigration based on religion, experts say, and any such test would surely be used as an excuse to attack Muslim Americans.

Ted Cruz, Twitter warrior, pledged after Mr. Obama’s speech to “direct the Department of Defense to destroy ISIS.” He played soldier all weekend in Iowa, spouting “We will carpet bomb them into oblivion,” to a tea-party crowd in Cedar Rapids, adding “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out,” whatever that means.

Marco Rubio took to Fox News to remind Americans that they are, or should be, “really scared and worried.” He also said that “people are scared not just because of these attacks but because of a growing sense that we have a president that’s completely overwhelmed by them,” as if he alone had his finger on the pulse of America.

“Bolder action across the board is needed because our way of life is what’s at stake,” was the nonprescription from Gov. John Kasich of Ohio. “Also, when terrorists threaten us, our response can’t be to target our own constitutional rights. Our rights aren’t the problem, our unwillingness to act to defeat extremists is the problem. We need to decisively and aggressively protect our nation and our ideals. We can’t delay.”

Greenpeace does something useful

Exposed: Academics-for-hire agree not to disclose fossil fuel funding - Energydesk

I don't pay much attention to Greenpeace, but this investigation was good and useful.

Don't believe everything said at a police conference...

As it happens, I have some personal knowledge of the family beset by tragedy yesterday in Brisbane (daughter suffering a "violent death", mother believed to have committed suicide, father said to have been asleep until police arrived.)   I did, in fact, contact the police.  No return call (yet).

Suffice to say that certain things said by the police officer conducting the press interview yesterday afternoon were not accurate.   Of course, I do not know what happened on the night; but it was more of a matter of a comment or two made at the conference about the background of the family situation.

I guess this is not unusual in the early stages of an investigation, but it is still a bit annoying to not see more care taken in comments made.   

Update:  police statement given.   

How your teenager will get lost

How Fallout 4 took over my life — and gave me a new one - Vox

I have to say, this writer does a great job of explaining why he finds the recently released Fallout 4 so engaging and addictive.   But in doing so, he also inadvertently serves as a warning to parents as to how "dangerous" this game may be if your teenager gets it, at least if you want them to have a recreational life away from the computer.

A bit of a reality check

Drug tests wouldn't prevent deaths: expert | SBS News


Also, read this article at Vice where the English seller of testing kits says the same thing - they have to be very cautious about not over-promising about what can be done with crude on site testing.

Of course it's sad for the family when a young person dies from a drug.   But people in grief are not the best judges of public policy, particularly when they have the added grief that their child deliberately took something (and merely for fun, not due to any addiction) not knowing whether it was safe.   

 

Kant in 8 minutes

I quite liked this recently created short discussion of the life and (some of the) works of Kant:



The only thing I would say, though, is that the video gives no attention to his Critique of Pure Reason, which modern philosophers tend to like more than his moral philosophy. 

Deadly talk radio

Dead Air — The California Sunday Magazine

Actually, it's about The Philippines, where being a talk back radio has an usually large role, and can be very dangerous:

The Philippines has about 600 radio stations, generally small affairs held together with hope and duct tape. To defray costs, many stations rent out “blocks” of transmitter time to freelancers. In the provincial Philippines, where radio is king, “blocktimers” are often the only source of news and political criticism people can hear. At its best, blocktiming is a mix of political theater, social commentary, and yellow journalism. Some blocktimers are loudmouthed demagogues (think Rush Limbaugh). Some are serious journalists producing shows akin to 60 Minutes. Some are zealots and crusaders, fighting corruption and environmental degradation. Some are hacks working for the families that run the Philippines. A good blocktimer — one who stirs up some controversy and gets a good audience and a sponsorship deal — can earn a middle-class living.

Are blocktimers trustworthy? It is hard to say. A political system built on double-­dealing and conspiracy breeds a paranoid style. That federal report a blocktimer is reading, which provides evidence of a politician’s theft from a road-building fund: Is  it accurate or ginned up by one of his rivals? And the blocktimer himself, fulminating against corruption: Who is paying him? All too often, it’s another politician buying his voice the same way he might buy a hit man....

The Philippines is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists. Depending on how you count, only Syria, Iraq, and Somalia are more lethal. According to the Philippine Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility, at least 168 journalists have been killed since1986, when the Marcos dictatorship fell and democracy was restored. About half of the dead have been freelance broadcasters, like Damasco. By the time Damasco took to the air against Hagedorn, the murders had developed a certain ritual. As the broadcaster leaves work, a motorcycle with two men drives up. The passenger fires. The journalist falls. The motorcycle speeds away. Whoever hired the hit man goes unpunished.

An assessment

I've been meaning to say this for quite a long time:  I find Helen Razer a verbose, tedious commentator  to read or hear, and usually lose interest in understanding her idiosyncratic takes on matters long before I understand exactly what they are.  They might be interesting, but I for one don't care.

Bernard Keane, who can write well, seems to think she's fantastic.  I have never seen it myself.

Mug shot

Oh look:..

everyone who voted for David Leyonhjelm's  party on Saturday got to pose in one photo...

(This blog might never be mentioned by Jason Soon again...)

The likely end of denial

The satellite temperature record of the lower troposphere has been the last refuge of the climate change deniers/lukewarmers, and lots of people have been wondering when the likely rise in it due to the current strong El Nino would start to appear. 

Hotwhopper shows via a simple graph of the last El Ninos that it is indeed likely to happen early in the new year:

And given where the temperatures currently are in the UAH series (the green line) compared to 97-98, there would seem to be pretty good reason to suspect that the old 1998 high is going to be broken.

Nothing would delight me more.   While it may be too late to influence the Paris talks, such a broken record should be extremely useful to show up the appalling and dangerous anti-science of the Republican party for the US election (and, for that matter, the Australian election , where I the anti-science is probably highest in the Nationals.)  

In other satellite temperature posts over the weekend, Nick Stokes at Moyhu looks at the very big adjustments that have been made to the UAH series, compared to the small adjustments made in GISS.   Yes, Lamar Smith's "objective record" is anything but.  This is why people are furious about the harrassment of NOAA - it is based on ignorance.

Michael Tobis makes a fair analogy about the intellectual bankruptcy of Lamar (what a name, by the way):

Imagine if your scale is telling you you are putting on weight, and your doctor’s scale says the same, but your belt is still on the same notch it has long been on. Your belt is certainly a measure of your weight — heavy people have longer belts than lighter people. But it doesn’t measure exactly the same thing as your scale does. It’s a discrepancy that may need to be worked out. Perhaps you are gaining muscle tone. Perhaps your belt is stretching.

Suppose, though, that you are adamant about not changing your diet, and you decide to resolve the discrepancy by lawyering up and issuing subpoenas to the manufacturer of your home scale. (You also choose to ignore that your doctor’s scale agrees.) Is this an “investigation”?

Clearly, it is not an investigation in any reasonable sense. If you were fairly investigating the question you’d be as interested in the internal workings of the belt’s manufacturer as of the scale’s.

Most relevant of all, you would not accuse the scale’s manufacturer of fraud on the grounds that the scale does not account for your belt.

Karl et al’s purpose in the disputed publication is to analyze the surface record. Analyzing the satellite record is somebody else’s job. Reconciling the two if they are inconsistent is yet other people’s job in turn. The idea that the surface record is politically motivated because it isn’t the satellite record is hopelessly indefensible.

Essentially Smith attacks the people releasing the surface record on the grounds that it is not the satellite record. Does Lamar Smith actually believe this makes sense?

One is left with the impression that he has passed the task off of defending his behavior to dyed-in-the-wool internet deniers who really don’t much care whether the drivel they are spouting could even possibly hold together in the real world. Maybe Smith is not smart or well-informed enough to know better, but the idea that nobody on the majority side of the House Science Committee can figure this out is enormously discouraging.

I see that Krugman wants a spade called a spade when it comes to the Republican Party denialism.  He's quite right.

And back on the ground a Google search of "record rainfall" indicates that, apart from the newsworthy floods in the North of England, Florida and Indian both have some local intense rainfall, too.  (It has only taken Miami five days to become the third wettest December on record.)

But yeah, let's go for another 1 degree global temperature rise and see what that does to rainfall intensity, shall we?

The days of climate change denialism being able to continue persuading the gullible are numbered, and some of the ringleaders know it.

Maybe he should try "don't look at me"

I regularly post disdainfully about David Leyonhjelm's "this will get me some attention" Senate speeches and quips to the media (and sweary and embarrassing things said on Twitter), but I also assumed they were all part of some plan of highlighting the enlightened, libertarian values of his party, so as to give it a reputation as a serious political player.

Well, once again, we have proof the public just aren't buying it.

The LDP yesterday ran a business man with a familiar name (and who has long lived in the electorate) as its candidate in a well educated, presumably highly taxed, part of Sydney that could therefore surely appreciate the value of a small government, libertarian style party that really hates taxes. 

So his primary vote?  At the moment:  2.06%.  Worse than the Sustainable Population Party, Fred Nile's mob, and only 8 times less than the Greens.   

I'm starting to suspect that if the LDP changed its name to the "We Like Cats Party" it could gain more votes.  (Would be less deceptive, too.)

Oh! My! God!

Is it possible to actively dislike Taylor Swift?   I don't think so; and long time readers might gather from the fact that I posted a video of her last year that I am kindly disposed towards her.

She is presently gracing my fair city for a stadium concert tonight.   I was wondering which hotel she would stay in - and it looks like the penthouse at the Stamford might be the premium site now.  It does look nice:

After a really non-cynical review of her Sydney show last weekend from aging music journalist Bernard Zuel, I actually suspect seeing her concert  might be enjoyable, even if taking a pair of binoculars might be necessary:

But my daughter is not as big a fan as would be useful to get me entry as a non-committal parent half grudgingly accompanying her.  Pity.

Finally, the lovely pic of her and a cockatoo on her twitter feed.  Which I don't follow.  Honest:

Age appropriate content will now resume....

About those guns

It is, of course, an indictment of where the political Right in America has gone that they now simply cannot contemplate action on guns in the way that Ronald Reagan once did.  (Yes, he did support the decade long ban on assault weapons, despite having been a gun rights defender at other times.  Unfortunately, it seems that getting shot is about the surest way an American politician can be driven to enthusiasm for gun control - see Gabby Gifford's site, for example.)

The media if full of fascinating stuff about the guns used at San Bernardino, and other mass shootings:

*  the New York Times pictorial list of what weapons they used (which actually shows a preponderance of pistols, it seems);

*  The Australian notes this morning that despite having "tough" (by American standards - ha!) gun control laws, Californians can still buy assault style rifles provided they are slightly harder to re-load:

Included in the ban were rifles that can use detachable ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds and have other characteristics. Magazines that hold more than 10 bullets are also outlawed.

But rifles that aren’t specifically listed in the ban are considered legal, as long as a tool is required to release the ammunition magazine. The change is intended to effectively limit the number of rounds the gun can fire because it presumably takes extra time to reload.

California’s law prompted the gun industry to start marketing military-style rifles with so-called bullet buttons, a sort of sleeve that blocks quick access to the release button. Users can use the tip of a spare bullet or a tool to release the gun’s magazine, although a small magnet can be attached to the ­button so that users can quickly press it using just their finger.

The executive director of the Violence Policy Centre in Washington, Josh Sugarmann, said the gun industry was “cynically ­exploiting an inadvertent limitation” of California’s assault weapons ban.

*  As usual, the paranoid reasoning - both (I assume) that having your own gun will help protect you in a gun massacre, and that the Feds under Obama are about to swoop in on their black helicopters and disarm the wingnuts of the nation - is expected to lead to an increase in sales. 

*  Despite the Australian gun control experience getting an extensive airing in the US media again (as it does after every massacre), even I can see that if you are starting with a base of an insanely armed society, you can't expect the Australian method to be replicated there   Vox has a good bit of commentary on this:  What no politician wants to admit about gun control.  But that is not to say that there is nothing to be done, of course.  The stupidest of all arguments, which appears regularly in Catallaxy, of course, is that because some crimes still happen with guns in Australia, our gun control measures are a failure.   It's such an insanely dumb attempt at a debating tactic, you have to wonder about the brain size of those deploying it.

*  In a broader sociological context, another Vox piece looks at the gun control problem in the US as part of the broader polarisation of American society: 

...to gun enthusiasts, mass shootings are not arguments against guns but for them. The rise in mass shootings is only convincing both sides that they're right, causing them to dig in further.

It's not even clear that opinions on guns and gun violence remain amenable to argument. Over the past few decades, gun ownership in the US has evolved from a practical issue for rural homeowners and hunters to a kind of gesture of tribal solidarity, an act of defiance toward Obama, the left, and all the changes they represent. The gun lobby has become more hardened and uncompromising, pushing guns into schools, churches, and universities.

This has taken place in the context of a broader and deeper polarization of the country, as Red America and Blue America have become more ideologically homogeneous and distant from one another. The two sides are now composed of people who quite literally think and feel differently — and are less and less able to communicate. The gun issue is a salient example, but far from the only one.

 The article, which is quite fascinating, goes on to look at the argument that the polarisation is partly based on a Conservative/Liberal personality divide - but then it also lists the reasons to be skeptical of such arguments too.

I don't doubt that the polarisation has happened, and as I have said frequently, it has been more of a case of the Right moving into an eccentric, ideologically motivated, evidence free, corner, than the Left going more Left.   (Even allowing for the silly revival of extreme political correctness on US campuses.)  

I seriously think there is inadequate blame for this to be put on the internet, and the Fox Network.    

Self induced boredom

I had been meaning to comment that Andrew Bolt had become quite the intense bore, with his continual whining and hand wringing about the loss of Abbott and the rise of the "Left" in the form of Malcolm Turnbull.  But perhaps I don't have to, as Andrew admits this today:

I’ve boring even myself in criticising this lurch to the Left, and the pleasure of saying “I told you so” isn’t compensation enough. 

Of course, the Gold Ribbon for nutty ratbaggery in political commentary still comes from Steve ("everyone else has been wrong about economics for the last 80 years") Kates, who's now suggesting that Turnbull should make "shirtfront" Abbott the Foreign Minister!

An absolute hysteric on Muslims; a person who simply can't understand why so many politicians can't see through the climate change fraud by scientists, like he can;  it's rare to see such foolery on such regular display by an academic.  (I also can only assume that economics students who go to RMIT are either Right wingers full of the worst youthful arrogance, or silly enough not to have checked out the internet material put out by their lecturers.)   

Fascist Saturday

The Android app Zite has always been good at flagging odd and interesting content in a list that is easy to quickly scroll; but sadly, it is about to close and be absorbed into the less easily scrolled Flipbook.  I guess I'll try setting up a Flipbook account and migrate my Zite preferences to it, but I don't expect it to be as good.

Anyhoo, it was via Zite that I found this entertaining article from Atlas Obscura (a site that deserves a spot on my blogroll):  The Sex-Obsessed Poet Who Invented Fascism.  It starts:

It can be hard to reconcile the incredible charisma of Hitler written about in history books with recordings of his speeches in which he looks like a madman. Some might conclude that perhaps Germans didn't notice how off-putting he was because his style of declamation was widely used at the time and has simply fallen out of fashion.

But Hitler's speeches weren't normal or spontaneous. Neither were Mussolini's. Both of them were to a large extent imitating one man: an Italian poet named Gabriele d'Annunzio, who lived between 1863 and 1938. He was a war hero and famous libertine, and he essentially invented Fascism as an art project because he felt representative democracy was bourgeois and lacked a romantic dramatic arc.

D'Annunzio was a thrill-seeking megalomaniac best described as a cross between the Marquis de Sade, Aaron Burr, Ayn Rand, and Madonna. He was wildly popular. And he wasn't like anyone who came before him.

It's a great read.  Apparently, after WW1, he set up a purported mini nation in a city in what's now Croatia,  where his leadership style is described as follows:

Being d'Annunzio, he of course turned it into a sex-positive corporatist libertarian art commune. For 15 months. In the aftermath of a long war of attrition, nobody but d'Annunzio wanted to jump back into battle—and Fiume's eventual nationality was still on the negotiating table.

D'Annunzio believed that a country was sustained by faith, not trust. Therefore, instead of trying to govern kindly or honestly, he thought a leader should act like the head of a religion—not simply a pope or grand mufti, but a Messiah. It’s unclear whether he structured his government as a personality cult because he thought it would be effective, or because he was so self-obsessed it was inevitable.

You've seen what it looked like, because you've seen the imitators. D'Annunzio made stylized, inflammatory speeches full of rhetorical questions from balconies flanked with pseudo-religious icons. He outfitted his troops in embellished black shirts and soft pantaloons, and told them to march through the streets in columns, palms raised in a straight-armed Roman salute that would be plagiarized by the Nazis.

He called himself Il Duce. He encouraged his troops to brutalize "inferior" people to rally everyone else's morale, and attempted to found an Anti-League of Nations to encourage continual revolution instead of peace.

No one knows whether d'Annunzio exalted violence because of a Futurist pre-postmodern conviction that new structures could only emerge from complete destruction—modernity lancing the corrupted past like a boil—or whether he simply found the adrenaline arousing. Other of his governing ideals seem incongruously idyllic—music as a central duty of the state, enshrined in the constitution, plus nightly firework shows and poetry readings. In essence, he believed in government by spectacle.

Many artists of the time, including people who really should have known better, thought it was a daring and provocative thought experiment that should be allowed to continue indefinitely. Nevertheless, Italy itself eventually besieged Fiume (or as d'Annunzio styled it, Carnaro) and demanded d'Annunzio step down.

 How fascinating.  I feel I should have known about this guy before now.

Best commentary on the San Bernardino shooting

I think this one is awkward for the gun nuts of America (and Australia.)   Seems likely that it is a case of Islam inspired domestic terrorism, but with high powered weaponry legally purchased.  This removes the "we must identity and treat the mentally ill better" argument, presumably.   And even the desperate, movie fantasy land "if only someone there had their own pistol on them, they could have taken them down" when it sounds like most people were shoot in a initial spray of rapid fire.   (Oh, the gun nuts will still run the argument, no matter the improbability.)    Even our own resident gun obsessive, fantasy prone, Senator hasn't been running any of the usual NRA guff about guns in the light of this one:  his main tweet after it suggests something like this:  "well, yeah, America has lots of mass shootings, but other countries with quite a few guns don't.  Maybe if we let more guns be owned, we'll luck out and be more like those countries."   Yeah, right. In a country where the number of mass shootings took a dramatic drop after tightening gun control, why should we take that risk, other than to give him the thrill of being able "to pat" semi automatics from his attic again.   (I am not making that up.)     

In light of the commentary following, I guess the appropriate response is to feel somewhat sorry for the (probably relatively high proportion) of Americans who fully understand why other countries think their attitude to gun control  is absurd. 

Here's the best piece I have read:

The Most Dangerous Belief is not Believing in Gun Control

Here's an extract:

I actually think that there was some rhetoric that contributed to the shooting. Rhetoric like “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” and “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Did you know that less than a month before the Planned Parenthood shooting, there was another mass killing in the town of Colorado Springs? One woman was witness to both, by the way, and her boyfriend said she cried the first time but not this time because quote, “She’s a veteran now.”

Well in that first shooting the shooter was walking down the street with his rifle—an AR-15, in fact. Concerned citizens saw him and called the authorities and said, “There’s a man walking down the street with a rifle.” And the dispatcher told these citizens, “Well there’s nothing we can do about that because Colorado is an open carry state and the only thing that’s going to stop a bad guy with a gun is—” Oh too late, three innocent people are now dead.

That was Halloween day. In between that mass shooting and the Planned Parenthood Black Friday mass shooting, the website Shooting Tracker chronicled 31 additional mass shootings. Forty-seven dead and scores more wounded. Now these were just the mass shootings. These were not the one-off accidents, the suicides, the targeted slayings, the gangland beefs. No presidential candidates of either party were called on to make statements decrying the Ohio man who killed his neighbors and their 7-year-old son; the quadruple murderer in Kentucky who shot a family then burned their house; the Texas man who shot six at a campsite; the Jacksonville, Florida, man who made the mother of his 5-month-old twins hold their babies as he shot her, and them, and then himself.

Guns. A lot of people have a lot of terrible ideas: Sometimes it’s getting revenge on an ideology, sometimes it’s getting revenge on the police, sometimes it’s getting revenge on people you personally know. But without guns, the death toll would be much lower. I’m not saying that all the hateful rhetoric around Planned Parenthood didn’t unfairly nudge them closer to the crosshairs. But it’s not just bad ideas and angry men that lead to these obscene death tolls. It’s that the ill heads with these twisted ideas can so easily access a means of lethality uncommon in the civilized world. We are an aggrieved, worked up, angry people. But an American who is aggrieved or enraged or unmoored is more deadly that an Englishman or an Australian not because of the extremes of our discourse, or the extent of our aggrievement. The bad idea that people are most dying from is not an anti-abortion idea or an anti-cop idea or anti-Western, anti-Christian. It’s anti–gun control. That’s the deadliest and most ignorant idea of all.

Obvious, but a large slab of Americans need to be reminded.  (Depressingly, they'll also ignore it.)

In other commentary, James Fallows writes touchingly of how saddened he is by this latest shooting.

And from an article that appeared just before the shooting, here's an article ripping into the deliberately intimidating tactics of many "open carry" advocates:   Gun Nuts Are a Threat to Democracy.

Seems pretty important...

Physicists confirm thermodynamic irreversibility in a quantum system

A reminder

I wonder, was yesterday's better than expected GDP figure a good enough reason to remind the world that a certain anti-Keynesian economist was warning about Australian stagflation in 2011? 

Yes; yes.  I think it is.

For the sardine obsessive

I'm still eating a lot of sardines lately (well, twice a week), and on a hunt to find the nicest available in Brisbane.

As I've noted before, the Canadian ones are a major disappointment;  those from Portugal (for which I have to go to a deli in West End) were pretty nice; but the best were the heavily smoked German ones from Aldi, which have tragically disappeared off their shelf.   The old "King Oscar" brand, which are now canned in Poland (I had forgotten 'til I checked a map that Poland actually had ocean frontage), are said to be "lightly smoked", but it's barely detectable.  Still, they are pleasant enough in a small sardine way.  Aldi's sardines are now also from Poland, and one suspects from the same factory as King Oscar's.  They are OK, but I'm leaning towards King Oscar still.

But if you think I've become a bit obsessive about sardines, you ought to read this extensive blog (actually, just consisting of one enormous post - but comments are still active!) by a couple of women from Melbourne, rating not only cans available in Australia, but those they have sampled on international trips.   (I have to say, based on those brands they review which I have also tried, their taste seems fairly closely aligned to mine.)

Yes, if you are truly interested in sardine taste comparisons, you should read The Sardinistas - A Comparative Study of Tinned Sardines.

 And if you still aren't sick of sardines by then, go and have a look at this page - Journeys in Canned Fish History.  (Honestly, what would you do without my blog.)   You'll find there many photos of how canned Norwegian sardines used to look in Australia, with this odd example of graphic art from a 100 or so years ago at the top:

And what about this crook looking Kooka, who I suspect not only has a mohawk, but is hooked on ice:

Anyhow, I'll hopefully try another European deli this weekend, to see if I can extend my personal tasting range.

Gay indulgence

The Danger in Comparing the HIV-Prevention Pill to Condoms - The Atlantic

The writer of this article, about the rather vexing issue of gay men going on permanent (and expensive) medication so they can sleep around with as many (possibly) HIV positive guys they want without a condom, has not done his cause any favours:

As a gay man who has receptive sex—and who lives in Miami and Washington, D.C., the cities with the first- and fifth-highest HIV rates in the U.S.—I knew how high my risk was, and for the most part, I wasn’t willing to chance it....

How often do you have sex without a condom? this new doctor asked.

I explained my situation: I was there because I don’t like sex with condoms. I knew it put me at risk, so I rarely had sex. I knew it wasn’t the right reason to ask for PrEP, and I knew it wasn’t 100-percent effective, but I knew asking for it was the right thing to do.....

I swiped my credit card. On the way back to my apartment, I popped a pill in the street.

I took the pill for 30 days. I had sex once. I couldn’t afford to refill the prescription, so I didn’t.

Over the next few months, I tried, unsuccessfully, to find a steady partner so that I could have a condomless sex life without fear. That seemed like my only option: I literally couldn’t afford sex with multiple partners. The truth is, though, even that option seemed suspect: Several of my HIV-positive friends had acquired the virus from boyfriends who’d cheated on them.

Well, this is extraordinarily self indulgent, if you ask me.   Instead of the cheap, simple option that he doesn't even have to put on his own sensitive bit, he prefers to take risks and then use an expensive medication to keep him virus free.  (But won't stop a wide variety of other STDs.)

And people in comments following note the same:

It would seem disingenuous to file this under 'Health' rather than 'Lifestyle', given that at almost every opportunity the author states that medical/scientific experts were wrong, without explaining why, and all to justify his personal (and understandable) preference for condomless sex without feeling bad for the negative externalities it engenders. A study earlier this year already showed resistance mutations in a clinical study. Cavalier usage of prep as a lifestyle drug will only shorten it's efficacy, not to mention increased STI rates in all other areas.

In short, it's a selfish personal essay to excuse and justify behaviour that the author knows deep down is wrong.

 And this:

This article sounds like it was written by a Reagan-era conservative to destroy any sympathy for AIDS patients by portraying them as irresponsible, selfish, and greedy.

On the other hand, some argue that it makes sense to issue this expensive drug because preventing contracting HIV outweighs the lifelong cost of the drugs that keep it from killing those who contract it.

Yet, the point is, if people could have monogamous relationships, and only with those who don't have the disease, it costs nothing to stay healthy, and doesn't even involve a condom.   This works for billions of heterosexual couples on the planet.   And lots and lots of straight people have trouble finding "intimacy" and long term relationships for a period in their lives, too.   Hard to see why so many gay men find their lives need expensive financial medical assistance and worthy of special sympathy.