White cis male weighing in, so I know the only acceptable position I can take is to defer the decision to others, but I'll chance it.

It seems pretty obvious to me the people taking the most abuse in and having the most anxiety on the subject are going to be anyone transgendered.

I am however a bit reluctant to rule out the concern that might be held by the female half of the population of using public bathrooms alongside males. I know, most of the proposals are all based on simply allowing transgender people who identify as female to use female restrooms. I don't however think it's fair to straight out reject concerns from females that male predators, or more probably 'mere' perverts, can pretty easily 'fake it' and walk right in.

The argument of just get over yourself or you phobias also cuts both ways. Anyone insisting this is a world altering vital battleground over freedom and privacy is maybe taking things too far.

That's kinda the point. You'll get colossal douchebags in any gas station restroom. This one won't get trashed as well by the people that are less than colossal douchebags.

When I first started volunteering to serve at a homeless shelter, many years ago, I didn't know exactly why I was doing it. Certainly it felt like the "right" thing to do. I was at least confident that I wasn't doing it for personal gain because I didn't wear it on my sleave, didn't brag about it or hang my ego on my personal identity of being a good person. When dissillusionment set in, when I realized just how many of the people I was serving were homeless by choice, I pushed through and carried on...and I still didn't know why. I just trusted that I would get it one day.

Eventually I made a connection to the time I spent living in Sweden. In the town I lived in, every night a group of vagrants assembled in the market square. Every bit as dirty and drunken as the worst homeless person that most people imagine them all to be. Fighting, having sex in the public restroom, vomiting and carrying on loudly all night. But this was socialism, so they went home every night to their government payed for apartments. I realized that no matter what you do, there will always be a segment of society that just doesn't give a Fuck and is happy to take and never give back. We've all known these people. Family members, friends, acquaintances, who use up the good will of everyone they meet until they've got no one left to use and it falls to the larger community to support them. No economy, government or community planning will ever compell them to support themselves. We loathe them and shun them. Politicians with ulterior motives tell us that ALL homeless and disadvantaged ARE them. But it's a lie. There are the mentally and physically ill who have no support structure, who NEED their communities to help them. Most of these people were once functioning members of their communities who no longer have the ability to survive on their own.
And so I came to understand that it's better to feed a hundred leaches to serve a single helpless individual.

Boy was I proud of myself for realizing that.

And then I was layed off and my job shipped to India, followed closely by my wife spending a year in and out of the hospital, with no insurance. A careers worth of hard work, reduced to a data point on a corporate profit sheet. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, when the medical debt comes for me and everything I've built in my life is taken, to become a line in someone else's ledger. Betrayed by the greed in the system. Because I upheld my end of the social contract. I worked hard in school, excelled in my career, had two kids and bought a house in a neighborhood with good schools. But the system is run by the greediest and most power hungry. Politics and business is the domain of the high functioning sociopath. And to a sociopath, you're not a real person like them. You're a data point, a line in the ledger.

Then I came to respect the other segment of the homeless. The ones who rejected the social contract, who don't feel societal pressure to give more than they take. Because they got it right. It's all a lie. You don't earn anything in America. You don't deserve the fruits of your labor. You subsist at the whim of the people with money and power. And when it serves them, you get nothing.

We are all standing in line for food, hoping there's a room for the night.

Except the obviously better way to avoid waste in public bathrooms is to not have paper towels in them at all--like here in Japan. While a few restrooms have air driers, everyone is expected to bring their own hand cloth about the size of a handkerchief with them that serves as a towel after you go to to restroom. You chuck it in the wash at the end of the day and grab a clean one off the rack (most people have half a dozen or so at home).

We watched a movie in police academy about two young girls who were murdered in Mansfield Ohio. Profilers had determined that the killer was a sexual deviant. The police knew that homosexuals frequented a public bathroom near the city center, so they installed hidden cameras in the men's restroom. We got to watch the results. Men fucking each other in the ass, sucking other men's cocks, it went on all day long. No foreplay, just bend over like you're gettting a drink of water. Quite disturbing. The police then FIR'd (field interrogation report) each of the gay men until the killer was caught. I have no desire to visit Mansfield, Ohio.

Here is a link to the story:
http://filmbunnies.wordpress.com/2011/01/30/the-child-molester-1964-the-highway-safety-foundation-beyond-the-road/

I usually waste a bunch of toilet paper and toss it in before shitting to avoid the splash damage.

Or if you have disposable toilet seat covers, like in public restrooms, cover the seat but don't break the middle part. Instead, let that middle part act as a net, to ease in the deuce. Then just wipe away and the toilet paper acts as the net, coupled with the toilet seat cover.

I haven't had splash damage in quite some time using this method.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'public, restroom, how to, gregory brothers, schoyoho' to 'public, restroom, how to, gregory brothers, schmoyoho' - edited by calvados

Tags for this video have been changed from 'public, restroom, how to' to 'public, restroom, how to, gregory brothers, schoyoho' - edited by brycewi19

@VoodooV

Well, I could see your point if there was any sort of allusion in the video to how women are portrayed in the media/culture. But there isn't any that I can notice. And on top of that the title implies all women are like this--it doesn't matter what the creators believe in real life, it's the title they chose for the video.

I suppose this video struck a nerve with me because back in my single days I used to do a lot of clubbing (2-3 times a week most weeks) and I always went with a group of friends, mostly female. While some of those female friends were single, they just wanted to go and have a few drinks and dance--they weren't looking to make a "love connection."

Of course, guys don't know that and so of course they're going to make an approach, but some of them (admittedly usually fueled by too much alcohol) just wouldn't take a hint. Like the supposedly "nice" guy in this video, even after being politely told that the woman has no interest in them would come back and try again. And yeah, my female friends would find that shit creepy! Because, in general, the guys approaching them are physically bigger and stronger than them and the ones that don't take the hint (again fueled by the alcohol) tend to stand way too close. In a dark club, it can be very intimidating, especially if the female in question gets separated from her friends (ie she's coming back from the dance floor or the restroom) and has a guy who isn't taking a hint pressing up on her.

So basically, based on my personal experience, I don't find the premise of the video funny. I don't empathize with the "nice" guy because the awkward pickup line and inability to take a hint remind me of the guys my friends used to have to put up with. And also because I find the whole "he's a stalker but it's okay because he's cute" thing so incredibly implausible and demeaning to women, as its implied all women are like this. I suppose if the title were "Asshole Girls" I'd find this video somewhat more funny because the character in question basically then becomes a victim of her own assholish-ness (and not "women's assholish-ness" as a whole) by willingly throwing herself into the arms of her stalker.

If anyone wants to read more about Stephen and LGBTQIA youth, here is the NYT article.

The New York Time's

Generation LGBTQIA

By MICHAEL SCHULMAN

Published: January 10, 2013

STEPHEN IRA, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College, uploaded a video last March on We Happy Trans, a site that shares "positive perspectives" on being transgender.

In the breakneck six-and-a-half-minute monologue - hair tousled, sitting in a wood-paneled dorm room - Stephen exuberantly declared himself "a queer, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist and a guy who needs a haircut," and held forth on everything from his style icons (Truman Capote and "any male-identified person who wears thigh-highs or garters") to his toy zebra.

Because Stephen, who was born Kathlyn, is the 21-year-old child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, the video went viral, garnering nearly half a million views. But that was not the only reason for its appeal. With its adrenalized, freewheeling eloquence, the video seemed like a battle cry for a new generation of post-gay gender activists, for whom Stephen represents a rare public face.

Armed with the millennial generation's defining traits - Web savvy, boundless confidence and social networks that extend online and off - Stephen and his peers are forging a political identity all their own, often at odds with mainstream gay culture.

If the gay-rights movement today seems to revolve around same-sex marriage, this generation is seeking something more radical: an upending of gender roles beyond the binary of male/female. The core question isn't whom they love, but who they are - that is, identity as distinct from sexual orientation.

But what to call this movement? Whereas "gay and lesbian" was once used to lump together various sexual minorities - and more recently "L.G.B.T." to include bisexual and transgender - the new vanguard wants a broader, more inclusive abbreviation. "Youth today do not define themselves on the spectrum of L.G.B.T.," said Shane Windmeyer, a founder of Campus Pride, a national student advocacy group based in Charlotte, N.C.

Part of the solution has been to add more letters, and in recent years the post-post-post-gay-rights banner has gotten significantly longer, some might say unwieldy. The emerging rubric is "L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," which stands for different things, depending on whom you ask.

"Q" can mean "questioning" or "queer," an umbrella term itself, formerly derogatory before it was appropriated by gay activists in the 1990s. "I" is for "intersex," someone whose anatomy is not exclusively male or female. And "A" stands for "ally" (a friend of the cause) or "asexual," characterized by the absence of sexual attraction.

It may be a mouthful, but it's catching on, especially on liberal-arts campuses.

The University of Missouri, Kansas City, for example, has an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Resource Center that, among other things, helps student locate "gender-neutral" restrooms on campus. Vassar College offers an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Discussion Group on Thursday afternoons. Lehigh University will be hosting its second annual L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Intercollegiate Conference next month, followed by a Queer Prom. Amherst College even has an L.G.B.T.Q.Q.I.A.A. center, where every group gets its own letter.

The term is also gaining traction on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr, where posts tagged with "lgbtqia" suggest a younger, more progressive outlook than posts that are merely labeled "lgbt."

"There's a very different generation of people coming of age, with completely different conceptions of gender and sexuality," said Jack Halberstam (formerly Judith), a transgender professor at the University of Southern California and the author, most recently, of "Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal."

"When you see terms like L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," Professor Halberstam added, "it's because people are seeing all the things that fall out of the binary, and demanding that a name come into being."

And with a plethora of ever-expanding categories like "genderqueer" and "androgyne" to choose from, each with an online subculture, piecing together a gender identity can be as D.I.Y. as making a Pinterest board.

BUT sometimes L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. is not enough. At the University of Pennsylvania last fall, eight freshmen united in the frustration that no campus group represented them.

Sure, Penn already had some two dozen gay student groups, including Queer People of Color, Lambda Alliance and J-Bagel, which bills itself as the university's "Jewish L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Community." But none focused on gender identity (the closest, Trans Penn, mostly catered to faculty members and graduate students).

Richard Parsons, an 18-year-old transgender male, discovered that when he attended a student mixer called the Gay Affair, sponsored by Penn's L.G.B.T. Center. "I left thoroughly disappointed," said Richard, a garrulous freshman with close-cropped hair, wire-framed glasses and preppy clothes, who added, "This is the L.G.B.T. Center, and it's all gay guys."

Through Facebook, Richard and others started a group called Penn Non-Cis, which is short for "non-cisgender." For those not fluent in gender-studies speak, "cis" means "on the same side as" and "cisgender" denotes someone whose gender identity matches his or her biology, which describes most of the student body. The group seeks to represent everyone else. "This is a freshman uprising," Richard said.

On a brisk Tuesday night in November, about 40 students crowded into the L.G.B.T. Center, a converted 19th-century carriage house, for the group's inaugural open mike. The organizers had lured students by handing out fliers on campus while barking: "Free condoms! Free ChapStick!"

"There's a really vibrant L.G.B.T. scene," Kate Campbell, one of the M.C.'s, began. "However, that mostly encompasses the L.G.B. and not too much of the T. So we're aiming to change that."

Students read poems and diary entries, and sang guitar ballads. Then Britt Gilbert - a punky-looking freshman with a blond bob, chunky glasses and a rock band T-shirt - took the stage. She wanted to talk about the concept of "bi-gender."

"Does anyone want to share what they think it is?"

Silence.

She explained that being bi-gender is like manifesting both masculine and feminine personas, almost as if one had a "detachable penis." "Some days I wake up and think, 'Why am I in this body?' " she said. "Most days I wake up and think, 'What was I thinking yesterday?' 

"Britt's grunginess belies a warm matter-of-factness, at least when describing her journey. As she elaborated afterward, she first heard the term "bi-gender" from Kate, who found it on Tumblr. The two met at freshman orientation and bonded. In high school, Kate identified as "agender" and used the singular pronoun "they"; she now sees her gender as an "amorphous blob."

By contrast, Britt's evolution was more linear. She grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and never took to gender norms. As a child, she worshiped Cher and thought boy bands were icky. Playing video games, she dreaded having to choose male or female avatars.

In middle school, she started calling herself bisexual and dated boys. By 10th grade, she had come out as a lesbian. Her parents thought it was a phase - until she brought home a girlfriend, Ash. But she still wasn't settled.

"While I definitely knew that I liked girls, I didn't know that I was one," Britt said. Sometimes she would leave the house in a dress and feel uncomfortable, as if she were wearing a Halloween costume. Other days, she felt fine. She wasn't "trapped in the wrong body," as the cliché has it - she just didn't know which body she wanted.

When Kate told her about the term "bi-gender," it clicked instantly. "I knew what it was, before I knew what it was," Britt said, adding that it is more fluid than "transgender" but less vague than "genderqueer" - a catchall term for nontraditional gender identities.

At first, the only person she told was Ash, who responded, "It took you this long to figure it out?" For others, the concept was not so easy to grasp. Coming out as a lesbian had been relatively simple, Britt said, "since people know what that is." But when she got to Penn, she was relieved to find a small community of freshmen who had gone through similar awakenings.

Among them was Richard Parsons, the group's most politically lucid member. Raised female, Richard grew up in Orlando, Fla., and realized he was transgender in high school. One summer, he wanted to room with a transgender friend at camp, but his mother objected. "She's like, 'Well, if you say that he's a guy, then I don't want you rooming with a guy,' " he recalled. "We were in a car and I basically blurted out, 'I think I might be a guy, too!' "

After much door-slamming and tears, Richard and his mother reconciled. But when she asked what to call him, he had no idea. He chose "Richard" on a whim, and later added a middle name, Matthew, because it means "gift of God."

By the time he got to Penn, he had been binding his breasts for more than two years and had developed back pain. At the open mike, he told a harrowing story about visiting the university health center for numbness and having a panic attack when he was escorted into a women's changing room.

Nevertheless, he praised the university for offering gender-neutral housing. The college's medical program also covers sexual reassignment surgery, which, he added, "has heavily influenced my decision to probably go under the Penn insurance plan next year."

PENN has not always been so forward-thinking; a decade ago, the L.G.B.T. Center (nestled amid fraternity houses) was barely used. But in 2010, the university began reaching out to applicants whose essays raised gay themes. Last year, the gay newsmagazine The Advocate ranked Penn among the top 10 trans-friendly universities, alongside liberal standbys like New York University.

More and more colleges, mostly in the Northeast, are catering to gender-nonconforming students. According to a survey by Campus Pride, at least 203 campuses now allow transgender students to room with their preferred gender; 49 have a process to change one's name and gender in university records; and 57 cover hormone therapy. In December, the University of Iowa became the first to add a "transgender" checkbox to its college application.

"I wrote about an experience I had with a drag queen as my application essay for all the Ivy Leagues I applied to," said Santiago Cortes, one of the Penn students. "And I got into a few of the Ivy Leagues - Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn. Strangely not Brown.

"But even these measures cannot keep pace with the demands of incoming students, who are challenging the curriculum much as gay activists did in the '80s and '90s. Rather than protest the lack of gay studies classes, they are critiquing existing ones for being too narrow.

Several members of Penn Non-Cis had been complaining among themselves about a writing seminar they were taking called "Beyond 'Will & Grace,' " which examined gay characters on shows like "Ellen," "Glee" and "Modern Family." The professor, Gail Shister, who is a lesbian, had criticized several students for using "L.G.B.T.Q." in their essays, saying it was clunky, and proposed using "queer" instead. Some students found the suggestion offensive, including Britt Gilbert, who described Ms. Shister as "unaccepting of things that she doesn't understand."

Ms. Shister, reached by phone, said the criticism was strictly grammatical. "I am all about economy of expression," she said. "L.G.B.T.Q. doesn't exactly flow off the tongue. So I tell the students, 'Don't put in an acronym with five or six letters.' "

One thing is clear. Ms. Shister, who is 60 and in 1979 became The Philadelphia Inquirer's first female sportswriter, is of a different generation, a fact she acknowledges freely, even gratefully. "Frankly, I'm both proud and envious that these young people are growing up in an age where they're free to love who they want," she said.

If history is any guide, the age gap won't be so easy to overcome. As liberated gay men in the 1970s once baffled their pre-Stonewall forebears, the new gender outlaws, to borrow a phrase from the transgender writer Kate Bornstein, may soon be running ideological circles around their elders.

Still, the alphabet soup of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. may be difficult to sustain. "In the next 10 or 20 years, the various categories heaped under the umbrella of L.G.B.T. will become quite quotidian," Professor Halberstam said.

Even at the open mike, as students picked at potato chips and pineapple slices, the bounds of identity politics were spilling over and becoming blurry.

At one point, Santiago, a curly-haired freshman from Colombia, stood before the crowd. He and a friend had been pondering the limits of what he calls "L.G.B.T.Q. plus."

"Why do only certain letters get to be in the full acronym?" he asked.

Then he rattled off a list of gender identities, many culled from Wikipedia. "We have our lesbians, our gays," he said, before adding, "bisexual, transsexual, queer, homosexual, asexual." He took a breath and continued. "Pansexual. Omnisexual. Trisexual. Agender. Bi-gender. Third gender. Transgender. Transvestite. Intersexual. Two-spirit. Hijra. Polyamorous."

By now, the list had turned into free verse. He ended: "Undecided. Questioning. Other. Human."

The room burst into applause.

Correction: January 10, 2013, Thursday

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article and a picture caption referred incorrectly to a Sarah Lawrence College student who uploaded a video online about being transgender. He says he is Stephen Ira, not Stephen Ira Beatty.

Source NYT

Fair Use

so what this and other videos have taught me.

1. don't bother locking your car doors.
2. don't leave anything you like inside your car.
3. pray that no one uses your car as a restroom.

@0:58, that's what happens when you violate rule #2.

>> ^bareboards2:

The very first minute of this report says these planes have never been used in combat.
Why we are risking the lives of these pilots for a training plane? It is seriously nuts.
I think of it as penis waggling. Boys and their toys. Even the pilots said they were happy to fly again at first.
Who in the Pentagon is so invested in keeping these in the air and why? It isn't rational.


Dunno about penis waggling, politicians of all genders are generally of the mindset if we paid for something we should use it no matter how wasteful/dangerous/stupid it is.

That's why so many projects end up going over budgets and never working, because they are too "invested" either corruptly or politically to say enough is enough.

They need a bunch of kids getting cancer or born with birth defects (BP oil spill and all those non-harmful chemicals they dumped in the water *wink wink nudge nudge*), or a school being demolished by a plane falling out of the sky to give them the proof they need to not look like they screwed up in the first place and instead look like they gave it a chance but obviously the people advising them are fools...never the politician or people in charge.....never.

We're talking about the same people who generally promote family values and hetero relationships while they are heading to the restroom for a little rough and tumble with a random dude they just met or whatever other devious example you want to use. Bunch of corrupt mfers basically, who give no shits about you until it makes them look bad when they don't.

So we have a Videosift guy who is whining about having to pay 35% on his wages but Mitt only had to pay 13.9% on his capital gains. Mitt's lower rate has nothing to do with him being 'better' or anything of the sort. It is entirely because Mitt's wealth is earned in an entirely different way.

@Winstonfield_Pennypacker Spoken like someone who gets a tax refund in April instead of having to write a big check.

No fucking shit it was taxed differently because he earned it in a different way. That's the core of the dispute: most taxpayers want all types of income taxed the same way.

And it wasn't always this way. The capital gains rate was dropped in '97 from 28% to 20%, and Bush pushed it down to 15% with his devastating (because it wiped out the surpluses we had) tax cut.

As to your rationale:

This is because capital gains investments are (A) risky and (B) directly benefit the business sector.

Anybody in the workforce can say the same. Having a job is highly risky, especially these days. And what job doesn't directly benefit the business sector? Even the guy scrubbing the company restroom is adding value.

Your second comment was about his charitable contributions. There is no way I could reduce my tax to 13.9% by giving 15% of my money to charity. If I could, I would. And half of Romney's charity was to an institution he's an insider of, the Mormon Church. I don't mind considering church donations as charity, but clearly Romney is not some ordinary parishioner giving to his church. He was an elder of that institution and still has a large influence.

Next assignment: the abhorrent state of gas station restrooms