I never found any of then funny, since they always boiled down to either a change of mind about wanting to spend time with me at all, or worse.

Most of the excuses on my list, happened when I was very young. One girl had a "better offer" at an afternoon gathering, and so claimed to have "lost her car keys" somewhere far away. Another claimed to have been in the meeting place at the same time, for the long time I waited in vain, but been magically unable to find me. No certainty what she was really doing.

I always found such cover stories depressing, not funny. Being rejected is never fun, and being rejected with an obviously silly reason is even worse, really, since it means that not only don't they want to spend time with you, but they aren't even interested in, or respectful enough for you, to come up with a cover story that sounds true.

Insult heaped upon disappointment.

I think you mean Epstein.

And no,it isn't double jeopardy. They aren't charging him with molesting the same very young girls as before. And his previous deal didn't include admitting to any of the crimes he is charged with now. That was different crimes.

This and the other report, don't quite match up with your opening assertion. The laws described (while still likely unconstitutional), don't say that all criticism of Israel is prohibited. They say that the State government wont do business with any private concern that participates in boycotts against Israel.

Very wrong of those state government to meddle in that way I think.

My overall reply still stands: wrong is wrong, regardless of who commits the wrong, and regardless of whether they are committing a wrong in retaliation to another wrong or not.

Asking which of two things is "better," is the same as asking which of two things is "closer."

The answer depends entirely on your point of reference.

What is your GOAL in the case of choosing between sex for hire and sex for free just once?


If you're trying to avoid spending money, for example, the one night stand would be the ticket.

Since paying isn't legal in many places, avoiding jail might be a factor.

The one thing I can think of that's pretty good, is that if paying for sex and having a one night stand are both viable options for you, you're pretty lucky.

Lots of people aren't able to simply "choose" to have one night stands at will, or to afford to pay for sex instead.

Which is exactly the reasoning used by some who say they want to move things along quickly in the early stages.

I think that when people are very young, and make such claims, many really are just sniggering and using it as a manipulative ploy to have lots of carefree sex. But I think more of the older folks really do see the sense of it, as a way to avoid investing too much time, too much money, and too much hopeful emotion into someone who may turn out to be all talk and wishful thinking.

Just so you know, I'm not advocating anything, I'm just reporting the actual facts about what I've witnessed real people doing.

On the other hand, I don't think there's any way other than having sex with someone, to find out if HOW they enjoy sex is something you can live with.

Oh, believe me, "being in a rush" is very much an expression of desire, interest, and even seriousness. Again, not JUST sexually.

I've been searching for friends and a possible mate through this method for a long time now, and I've seen woman after woman and man after man, complain in forums like this, that too many people want to talk for a long time before agreeing to a face to face meet. The complainers tend to be looking at their own lifetimes ticking away, and want someone who is dedicated enough to having a serious relationship to take all the steps needed to build one.

By extension, the same thinking leads to eagerness to test sexual compatibility as soon as possible as well, for many people.

Naturally, as I have noticed from a very early age, for every logical and good idea someone has in the world, there are hundreds of people eager to use it as an excuse or a disguise, to simply greedily grab at whatever personal rewards they enjoy.

So make no mistake, I am an easy does it kind of person myself, but I understand why some others aren't inclined to take the time that I require.

Media Bias Fact check reports :

"Overall, we rate the Free Thought Project a Strong Conspiracy website and Low for factual reporting due to a very poor fact check record."

Not a worthwhile site to use to source your claims. Especially not by itself.

That said, the errors and misdeeds of one group, never excuse the errors and misdeeds of another.

Something to take into account with this, is that HOW someone goes about getting to know you also varies a lot.

It's quite possible that some of the men who you took to be "in a hurry," were pursuing a different approach to "getting to know."

Although I myself am slow to move towards sexual experimentation, for example, I have known many people who were the opposite, women especially included. Males who failed to make a sexual advance of some kind at the time the woman expected, were discarded as being "obviously not focused enough."

I've seen many people, again, male and female alike, be in a hurry on some aspects, and willing to go slow on others, even to want to go VERY fast on initial things, and THEN slow down. Essentially, they wanted to save as much time as possible by getting through their personal collection of "red flags," so as to be able to be more confident that the LONGER time commitment might be worth it.

Inspired by what Riverspirit1111 posted, I want to suggest the addition of another word to use about this, as opposed to "fear."

That word is "wary." I am WARY of getting involved in an official "relationship," because I have so often discovered that the other person (or I) had a set of unspoken expectations all along, that I now had to contend with on a daily basis.

Among the most common "annoying" (as Riverspirit accurately called them) expectations, are things like how much faster a "mate' is required to respond to emails and text messages than a "friend" is; and how much of one's own income one can spend on a personal item, before involving the "mate" in the decision. That kind of thing.

Another sort of "reverse" mate-expectation worry, are the assumptions many people have about what they DON'T have to do anymore, once their "friend" becomes their "mate." Obvious old examples, are the proverbial old-fashioned sexist males, who assume the female mate will instantly become their personal maid; or the proverbial old-fashioned sexist females, who assume that the male "mate" will instantly take over all the tasks and duties they think men are supposed to handle.

Many a time we've seen young marriages founder on the rocks of those kinds of "everybody knows X" kinds of things.

Well, something to recognize, is that "having to give things up" is a relativity kind of thing.

Basically, if two (or however many you have in mind) people are COMPATIBLE enough, it wont feel as though they are giving much of anything up. If they are significantly different, especially in general ex-actations about life, one or both are likely to feel as though they have to give up all kinds of "freedoms" to keep things going. The person who thinks they have to adjust the most, will likely complain about being restricted by being in the relationship the most.

If you get lucky, and you complEment each other well enough, joining forces can actually be incredibly freeing. I've never had that myself, but I've known people who were that lucky.

My personal greatest fear associated with getting serious with someone, isn't what I'd have to give up. Anyone who got involved with me, would be the one taking on the bigger challenge that way, I think. The only thing I really have any fear about, is being a disappointment.

Oh, and of course, we are often never "ready" the same way we were before. Things like "giving the benefit of the doubt" to someone new is often severely restricted following problematic relationships. And most people have some post-mistake short list of "never again that" stuff.

In my experience, no one actually correctly knows when they are "ready."

I've found that with all kinds of emotional recovery, that the only way to find out how ready you are is to try, and see what happens.

Lots of people (including me in the past) feel plenty "ready" to be in a relationship again, and so they forthrightly launch into some small adventure or another, only to be brought up short by all the still unresolved worries and assumptions that they had left over from the past "adventures."

And on top of that, I've found that just as with recovery from a physical injury, a certain amount of painful testing and mistakes are a necessary part of the healing process.

More than anything else, I don't think anyone can BECOME "ready" without trying to involve themselves again.

Nonsense.

Sorry, I know it has been popular to claim this since as far back as I have been alive and before, but it's just plain not supportable by facts.

Yes, I know well that certain males claim that exactly this is true, but not all males are as honest or as self-observant as they would have to be to have this kind of report be functional.

In my life experience, I have unfortunately seen plenty of males AND females, saying exactly this, or the opposite, and then those same people proceeded to prove that they were full of crap the whole time. Women who went off with some guy just because they were horny in the moment, and wanted to get THEIR "rocks" off, and plenty of males for whom sex was an important bonding thing, and not just something to do for laughs with whoever happened by.

I myself tried very hard when I was young, to have mindless sex with strangers, as everyone around me seemed to be saying I should (since I was male), but after only a couple of events, I realized that I must not be a man, if that's what men are supposed to be about.

If you were with me, and told me that I had to woo you, seduce you, and generally coax you into having sex with me every time, I would logically conclude exactly one thing:

you don't like me as a sex partner.

I'd be gone the next day.

I'm egotistical in this way. I want to be wanted because of ME. I want a mate who likes me, and has sex whenever we can, because we both like having sex with each other. If I have to put on a show of some kind every time, then that means she doesn't want me as I am, she wants someone else, and only grudgingly allows me to occasionally take a stab at pleasing her, as a temporary stand in for the real guy.

I've been in relationships like that, and tried damn hard to believe in it, and to be actively pleasing and wooing all the time. Nothing good came of it. I'll never bother to try that again.

That doesn't mean I expect to slouch in smelling like cat urine and looking like a scarecrow that got dragged through a garbage dumpster, and have my mate coo and keen for me. It just means that as soon as someone takes out a calculator and a measuring rod before wanting to be with me, it means I've already lost her esteem and desire.

Frankly, if a possible mate assumes I'm "just another guy," then we do NOT belong together.

Does that mean I'm part female? Not a "Real Man?" Maybe. After all, I AM half female, on my mother's side. 100% heterosexual otherwise, but I do have those mom genetics at 50% in there.

So just a suggestion, you might want to put some more time in on that "all men are horn dogs" and all women are loving saints" concept.

I grew up among the first few generations of tv children. So I heard the word "amazing" used almost entirely to refer to how I was supposed to feel about new commercial products.

I never once actually FELT amazed, I always felt rather annoyed, even as a small child. And not just because they were interrupting The Lone Ranger to "amaze" me, I was annoyed because using that word to talk about junk like kitchen utensils, contributed to my gradual suspicion that I didn't really belong on this planet at all.

Now that I'm ancient, I do actually occasionally feel amazed. Mostly by the huge surprise, when inexplicably, the collection of humans around me actually manage to do something VERY good for each other, that doesn't benefit themselves personally.

Although I must admit, I am also rather amazed when pretty much ANY advertised product of any kind, actually does exactly what it was advertised to do. I'd begun to believe that there was a secret law, that all advertising MUST promise at least fifty percent more than any product can actually do.

I have an overall observation about all this, from another angle.

Human beings seem to have a strong desire to come to hard and fast (meaning fixed, not rapid) conclusions about pretty much everything about life, and they appear to want to do that more than any other fundamental reason, because they want to feel that they are "doing it right."

That drive to come to final decisions about everything, often backfires, because very little in the world actually IS possible to come to hard and fast and ALWAYS CORRECT conclusions about.

I've read everyone's entries here, and many more discussions and arguments from others for decades now. I am well versed in dispassionate logical reasoning, and have been working at that for my entire life. And what I have seen in this subject area, throughout my life, is people who are unable to come to agreements, in part because they aren't all talking about the same thing, and often don't even realize that they aren't talking about what they think they are talking about.

Many people, because of that urgent rush to want to decide things once and for all, actually consciously REFUSE to have a rational discussion about this, because the only way to BE that certain about such a tremendously complex...phenomenon, is to close one's mind to the complexities.

One particular note: the people on each "side" of this are nowhere NEAR as united and in agreement as many want to pretend they are. Even the people who make up their minds that it's all about killing, have many different ideas about what is and isn't killing, and even more divided as to what is and isn't justified killing.

The refusal to recognize all the dozens (at least) of subgroups with separate concerns about this, does more than anything else to keep the problem unsolvable, and to keep the debates from being useful.

I personally have come to the, you might call it, UNconclusion, that some things cannot be decided conclusively. Some "problems" are not subject to logic at all (such as the existence or non existence of supernatural beings); and some problems are not actually single problems at all, and only appear to be such, because humans link things artificially together in their misperceptions.

The issue of abortions certainly falls into the latter category, and touches on the former.

If you decide that it's all about who has the right to decide, you are bridging together religious and moral concerns, with theory of government, and with ideals about freedom and personal responsibility. And those areas of concern have NEVER been possible to coordinate in any firm logical way. Which is why governments have been changed over and over again, throughout our history, and before.

I myself have seen my sense about abortion change many times. When I first learned about it, all I heard, was that because it was illegal, that lots of desperate and often entirely innocent people were suffering horribly, including everything from botched attempted self-abortions, to child abandonment, to angry people attacking young mothers physically, for being frightened. So I at first, completely sided with legalization for anyone and everyone.

But I also learned later, how much I am moved by babies, and how loathe I am to see harm come to any of them. So I could no longer think of abortion as something that didn't involve real lives being decided.

And yet, I am still averse to allowing one group of people to demand control of the lives of everyone else, especially not in the self-blinding way that ALL government actions require. So at the moment, I am opposed to abortions, but I am also intensely opposed to making them illegal.

By now, I have known people who have been through all manner of travails in their lives, including abortions, and including decisions to end the life support of relatives who were dying. I know that EVERYONE I have known, suffered tremendously because they DID have to make the decisions themselves, and because there was no way to know or feel ever, that what they decided was conclusively right.

And that curse, if you will, followed everyone I knew. Whether there was a law involved or not. So if someone thinks that the existence of a law against something, will make the decision to comply with it easy on those who it affects, they are just plain ignorant and wrong.

Our lives as human beings is vastly complex, sometimes, and in many cases, there can be no final right or wrong answer. There can only be what we each suffer and learn from, or fail to learn from.

And this is one of those kinds of things for sure.

Well, yeah, sort of. Most people think of "sex" as involving significant physical effort, of the same general sort as is involved with most energetic physical activities. So in that very narrow sense, since sexual intercourse can involve physical exercise, it certainly CAN be "good" for a person who needs exercise.

But ultimately, so what? Every few minutes, somewhere in the world, some relatively young person stumbles across the recognition that sex often involves panting, just like jogging can, and because they'd much rather be having sex than jogging, they eagerly try to convince their potential "exercise companions" to do more of it with them, just because of the benefits of exercise. The thought behind this, is of course, a manipulation, to get someone to have sex with them, who perhaps doesn't want any serious emotional involvement with them.

So my take is, if someone comes along and declares "Sex is good for you," unless you wanted to play that game with them anyway, just come back with "so is putting a new roof on my house. Hop to it!"

I think that the more important thing to understand, is that people really don't "hate" countries. Not in a really functional way.

What I mean is, that there's actual hate, which is an emotional reaction to someone or something, and then there is something that gets CALLED "hate," but which is actually closer to being a crafted, purposeful assault of sorts.

It's the difference between FEELING hatred for someone or something because of something that happened because of that person or thing, and DECIDING to make a show of your ANGER about or at someone or something.

No one can "hate" and entire country in the real reactive emotional way, because in the sense that people feel actual hate, countries don't exist. That is, a country is an IDEA of a collection of people in a given place. Unless you look at a drawing (a map) telling you what the shape of the boundaries are, or unless the government of the country actually draws a physical line all the way around it and makes all their citizens wear the same color clothing or whatever, you wont be able to tell you're looking at a whole COUNTRY.

And no one who says they DO hate a whole country, really mean they hate those drawings and lines and so on. What they are angry about, is certain behaviors by certain people who they have personally decided REPRESENT the ENTIRE country.

The reason why it's important to see the difference with this, is that because it IS functionally impossible to "hate" a country, it's logically impossible to DO anything about someone who claims to "hate" and entire country. Especially since these people aren't just reacting to the US, they have consciously DECIDED to hate the US, as a country, in order to try to solve whatever problems they have with whoever upset them.

The same thing is true for individuals who hate anyone or anything, in many cases. They don't REALLY hate even entire single human beings; rather they are angry at someone for some specific reason, but decide to make up an entire conceptual collection of antagonisms, as a sort of attack or PUNISHMENT of that person.

And that's my main point. Hate isn't something that happens on its own, it's a chosen ACTION that people take. Often understandably, but nevertheless, until you recognize that people who hate are DECIDING to hate, rather than suffering from hate as a sort of affliction, you wont be able to address it successfully.

It actually is, for some. That is, they think they are "in True Love" as soon as they have a really fun time with someone...they declare mutual Forever After, run off together chattering about True Love Conquering All...

then they stumble across ANOTHER wonderful person, declare the first one to have been a faint illusion that only anticipated this next one, and proceed to run off with the NEW whatever.

I can't really see the point of marriage on a temp basis either.

What's the goal involved? Seeing to children? If that's it, then set aside the idea of marriage altogether, and just set rules that require people to properly care for their offspring for at least twenty years, regardless of how well they treat each other.

Frankly, the whole idea of "time-limit marriage" reminds me of the insanity of the 1970's, with all that "open marriage" crap that went around.

Marriage is an adventure of its own: to challenge yourself to a lifelong commitment to another person. If you're not up for it, don't set out on the adventure at all.

If anything, I'd go for making the laws about it all more consistent on each end. Divorce should be exactly like marriage in reverse, and not involve the State government being allowed to have a financial interest in what people do with their private lives.

That, or go the other way: make it as much of a challenge to GET married legally, as it is to get divorced. If I have to prove to a bunch of State lawyers that I can't live with my wife any longer, and she with me, then I should have to go before the same bunch of people and prove that I have what it takes to get married in the first place. That it's not just a whim of the moment, that I am willing to pay the state (and a private lawyer for each person) thousands of dollars, in order to be allowed to say we're married.

Or you could decide to set up legalized shacking up: anyone who wants to move in together has to contract legally for whatever their financial behaviors together will be. They can do whatever they want, they just have to be clear about it, and make sure that there are no loose ends as far as responsible behavior goes.

Guess I'm stubborn, old fashioned, and snooty about logic.