Mitt Romney, high school bully?

[Alcon]

And if this John Lauber was really a homosexual, he'd probably be dead by now given what happened to most homosexuals his age in the '80s and '90s (e.g., Freddie Mercury, Liberace, Rock Hudson, etc.)

...

You are assuming this story is fabricated, because you find it highly unlikely that a gay guy would have lived to 60?  Do you have statistical evidence for this or do you think creating a list of 4 dead gay dudes is sufficient?

You'll be happy to know, I guess, that he died at 56 of liver cancer.

edit: a little late on the draw there.

[Alcon]

Of course I am not happy to know that he is dead. I presumed he was the source of this story. Now I am hearing he never even brought it up.

This whole thing reeks just like the fake Bush AWOL letter did. The political timing cannot be ignored.

I really doubt that this is turn-around since the gay marriage story, considering that would literally be an overnight fabrication.  I think this is a virtually unfalsifiable story (in the scientific sense), but there are points of suspicion -- Romney basically non-denied this, and not remembering something like this is pretty un-charming; and the independent verification doesn't really scream snow-job.  Like I said, unfalsifiable, but...

AIDS destroyed a whole generation of gay men. Are people, especially informed people on here, really not aware of this? It is common knowledge, I thought, even amongst young people today.

You are apparently presuming that they likely made up this guy's being gay, because he lived to middle age.  What percent of gays who were alive before 1992 do you think died of AIDS, exactly?

[Alcon]

Is somebody innocent unless proven guilty, or guilty unless proven innocent?

What about "it's unfalsifiable" makes you presume I think Romney should be assumed guilty?  Do I think he probably did it?  Yes.  Do I accept unfalsifiable claims because they seem intuitively likely?  No; that's obviously your racket.

No, I am assuming somebody sat on this story, and thought it would be convenient to claim the guy was "presumed" gay now that gay marriage is a hot issue. Surely everybody on here can take off the partisan blinders and see that the timing is not coincidental...

...I think you're kind of missing the irony between this and your last paragraph.

That would be a wild guess for anybody, especially when you factor in all of the Roy Cohns of the world and such, but I am quite confident it is well over 50% for those who were born before 1960 and were sexually active before 1980. A potential proxy may be comparing the number of open/closeted gay celebrities born before 1960 who died of AIDS compared to those who are still alive.  Obviously there is a whole list of the departed. In comparison, somebody ringed off two names that fit the criteria, and I am not sure we can consider Barney Frank a celebrity per se, and it is my understanding that Elton John was not sexually active in a gay way until the late 1980s.

...exactly why does it matter if Barney Frank is a "celebrity" considering the population you're attempting to estimate?  I'm not one to accuse others of over-thinking, but you think pretty weirdly about this.

You seem to assume by default secondhand information about people being gay is false if they were of age to be sexually active in the 1980s.  What percentage of gays would have had to die of HIV before you consider your presumption to be valid?  What is the "cut-off" point, and what is your intuitive guess about what the number likely is?

Another thing to consider is that most people no longer die of AIDS in America. They take excruciatingly debilitating medication to keep their HIV from causing AIDS. For most of them, their ticker goes, or they die of cancer, before they officially develop AIDS. It's really bad, and it's awful the type of things people go through. The numbers are quite misleading. Ask people who are involved in this area of health care.

Or you could, you know, find statistics instead of making these anecdotal leaps you're making.

[Alcon]

I believe somebody is innocent unless proven guilty. I know things work differently in some places, but I thought that's how it worked in America.

I am failing to understand why you think I disagree with you.  I said it's unfalsifiable and I didn't mean that positively.  However, my personal sense of judgment is not the same as the legal system's sense of judgment.  I get to be a bit more actuarial, you know?

Then you're overestimating the importance of our posts on here, not to mention over-analyzing them. This place is first and foremost about quantitative election results, and secondly about entertainment. IMHO, anyway.

I'm not sure why you think apparent internal inconsistency is "entertaining."

Like I said, the best we can do is come up with a proxy to help answer your question. I suggested gay/closeted celebrities born before 1960 and sexually active before 1980. You are free to come up with a better proxy.

I assume you're looking at gay celebrities because information on them is accessible, even though it's obviously an unrepresentative sample.  Then, you exclude someone from the analysis because they're not in the unrepresentative group, even though information on him is accessible.  It doesn't make sense.

If forced to give a hypothesis, 60% +/- 15%.

So, a 60% chance of a gay man of his age dying of AIDS -> assuming that his gayness was fabricated, because 60% is so overwhelmingly probabilistic?  What exactly is your cut-off for probabilistic enough to presume fabrication - 50.0001%?

I would love to use statistics, but when somebody dies of a heart attack or cancer their death is classified as death due to heart disease or cancer regardless of the HIV status of the deceased. The only way to even know what's really going on is to talk to health care workers who are involved with treating HIV patients.

You need to watch more cop procedurals.  Underlying causes of death are also listed.

[Alcon]

Everybody is entitled to their own opinions, but nobody is entitled to their own facts. The fact of the matter is that this story is both unverifiable and unfalsifiable. Some people will believe something that can never be proven nor disproved. I choose to not believe something that is not proven and cannot be proven, especially when political timing is all so convenient.

uh, ok, but I asked why you seem to be operating on the assumption I disagree with you...

I am not being inconsistent. We are merely having a communication breakdown, and it's probably my fault because I am exhausted and have a lot on the go.

You're complaining that you shouldn't make presumptions of guilt based on unfalsifiable/unverifiable information (although the latter is a subjective standard), and then proceed to do that in your next paragraph.  No?

Like I said, the best we can use is a proxy to give us an idea of how devastating it was to a whole generation of gay men before medications became readily available. Everybody knows that homosexuals tend to dominate the arts. And clearly a whole generation of homosexuals in the arts were devastated by a deadly disease. Now perhaps it hit homosexuals in the arts harder than homosexuals outside of the arts, but I still believe it's a pretty good proxy after you downgrade the figures by 20 or 30 points in order to give a conservative guess.

Um, OK.  Let me walk through this:  You're trying to estimate the HIV death rate for the population "gay people."  You have a convenient subsample -- celebrities -- that are convenient because they're highly accessible, although probably not representative.  That's fine.  However, accessibility is the only criteria you're accepting celebrities for.  To exclude Barney Frank because he's not a celebrity makes no sense.  You're excluding him because he's not a celebrity, even though you limited your sample based on an issue (information accessibility) that is not a problem with Frank.  Basically, you're eliminating Frank because he makes your sample too representative.  It doesn't make sense.

No, I am suggesting that 60% +/- 15% of homosexual men born between 1940-1960 who were sexually active before 1980 became victims of AIDS/HIV.

Were you not suggesting earlier that this story was probably fabricated, because someone of that age was likely to due of HIV/AIDS?  A 2-in-5 chance is so improbable you're willing to assume fabrication?  You are definitely invited to my house to come over and gamble whenever you like.

When somebody with HIV dies of a heart attack, they are added to national statistics as being casualties of heart disease, not AIDS. When somebody with HIV dies of cancer, they are added to national statistics as being casualties of cancer, not AIDS. If somebody with HIV never develops AIDS, they cannot be listed as having died of complications from AIDS. The medications of the past twenty years are largely preventing HIV from causing AIDS in most cases, but they are only prolonging an inevitable death, although by a considerable amount (on average, they are probably adding 10-15 years compared to if one went without treatment). Eventually the heart goes, or cancer develops, and takes out the victim. The bottomline: It's not diabetes, even if most everybody wants to pretend it is.

...Did you just ignore my response about underlying causes, or do you think this addresses it somehow?

[Alcon]

boys pull girls pony tales, it usually means they like them. 

girls put gum in other girls hair, it usually means they're jealous.

girls have slumber parties and do all kinds of stuff

guys cut other guys hair, typically in some kind of "team/tribe" context. 

This has gone on for hundreds of years  ...breaking NEWS, put it on the front page!!!

Do you really think any of those are analogous to the social dynamic going on with a group of near-adult males forcibly cut the hair of someone who's allegedly ostracized?  I'm not saying that happened, but if it did, do you really think it should be treated the same way?

[Alcon]

I'm also not clear on why irregular recreational cocaine use, which might be dumb but is unlikely to directly affect others, is being treated as worse than severe bullying here.

[Alcon]

I'm also not clear on why irregular recreational cocaine use, which might be dumb but is unlikely to directly affect others, is being treated as worse than severe bullying here.

Go tell the families of victims of the Mexican drug cartels that the cocaine market does not directly affect others. It's ignorant to believe the current cocaine market, or the one back when Obama was doing cocaine, does not impact anybody other than consumers/producers.

FYI: I believe all drugs should be legalized in order to curb the gangsters.

"Does not directly affect others" is NOT what I said.  I know of the Mexican drug cartels and have researched this issue.  I said it is "unlikely" to directly affect someone else, which is absolutely true, unless you mean that in the marginal sense.  However, I still think it is ridiculous to claim that the marginal effect of purchasing a small amount of cocaine is "obviously" worse than the effect of directly bullying someone.

Please do not extend your inattentiveness to analysis to reading my posts.  Thanks.

[Alcon]

I apologize for any misunderstanding, but you said that "recreational cocaine use" is "unlikely to directly affect others." I am sorry, but you do realize how cocaine is bought and sold, right (i.e., how the market currently works)?...

Yes.  Do you understand what "unlikely" means?

Every time someone buys cocaine, the cost of the cocaine they bought reflects the costs involved in getting the cocaine to them (along with a profit margin, of course). Part of those costs include extreme violence among warring drug producers (e.g., gangsters like Pablo Escobar in Obama's era, and the Mexican drug cartels today). There are few cocaine producers who are NOT involved in violence, and there are few recreational cocaine users who did not pay for their cocaine. In other words, recreational cocaine use is LIKELY to directly affect others in a violent, harmful way. Of course, the only remedy to ending the violence is by ending the black market via legalization. But that will not happen anytime soon.

Yes, but these are big piles of cocaine we are talking about.  Purchasing cocaine certainly has a marginal effect on all these negative consequences of the drug trade, but my statement was that any individual, discrete cocaine purchase is unlikely to itself have a direct effect.  You're right that it contributes to the overall effect on the margins, but is the effect of its overall portion of the contribution obviously greater than the negative effect of tormenting someone socially?  That's not necessarily evident to me.

The winning argument here is that Mittens was in F'ing High School, and we all did stuff there to one degree or another, and folks grow up. After you "win," you let go. It's really easy.

Yes. Let's get back to this. The whole AIDS thing is what it is, and there's no point talking about it anymore. I've said my part.

not really...even at your pre-revised figure of 60%, your original assertion still stands as really bizarre

[Alcon]

I'm surprised no one mentioned the family of the kid knocking down this whole thing and ripping the post.  Also, a "witness" wasn't there and the "long bothered by it" was he heard about it 3 weeks ago... classic hit piece collapse. 

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