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Also the amount of gays that did not (and still don't, though anti-retrovirals have changed this somewhat) care about having and/or spreading AIDS gave and still gives a lot of people pause.
The "standard fuck party" clip from this documentary about bugchasing still makes the rounds on /pol/ from time to time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_(2003_film)
Worth looking up the clip, it doesn't show any actual sex, it's some middle-aged gay guy giving a tour of the house where he hosts gay orgies. One of the other guys in the video, who is visibly very sickly, talks about how he doesn't care about being sick or potentially spreading it, he just wants to have fun.
I realize that "not all gay people" are like that, but given the massive amount of gays that do engage in such behaviors I think homophobia can be completely justified. But like you said, the "We just want to get married and live like normal people!" gays are carrying water for their hedonistic fellow gays. It also doesn't help when news stories of the "nest builder" gays being pedophile rapists come out, like this disgusting example:
https://au.news.yahoo.com/qld-boys-horror-raised-global-075915383.html
And the (now deleted) article titled "Two Dads are Better Than One" about the same gay couple adopting a kid:
https://static.life.ru/posts/2013/07/115738/Snimok_ekrana_2013-07-01_v_12.40.27.png
Edit: BONUS ROUND, turns out the female journalist that wrote the puff piece about the gay pedophile couple wrote a response to the controversy. Accountability is nowhere to be found, but getting mad at American conservatives is! https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-07-10/gorman-second-thoughts/4809582
I have a "want to get married and live like normal people!" gay brother, and even before he came out to me, the people who reliably made my skin crawl were the moralizers, the ones who can't watch someone live an alternative lifestyle without reaching for the pulpit. That impulse disturbs me more than anything happening behind the bush.
And yes, there are millions of gay men getting their backs blown out and gagging on cock behind that bush, and I seem to know half of them. That's what happens when you spend a questionable amount of time in gay spaces because the conversation is genuinely good (and the drinks are cheap). I'll keep it simple. When two consenting adults do something gross in a way that touches only the two of them, the harm doesn't fuck you in the ass or to the kid down the street. When their lifestyle does turn harmful, the fallout lands almost entirely on the people who opted in. I have zero appetite for assless chaps or golden showers. As long as nobody touches me up, which has never happened because I'd sock them, it stays squarely none of my business.
I'll turn my gaze to the strongest version of the other side, because I'm an even handed and bored person. Bugchasing is "real". The documentary exists. The visibly sick guy saying he doesn't care if he spreads it exists. The tail of the distribution is not empty.
There. Done being even handed. The "standard fuck party" clip recirculates on /pol/ for the same reason 2003 Rolling Stone "Bug Chasers" article went viral. It happened to be lurid, enraging, and claimed bugchasing accounted for up to a quarter of new HIV infections among gay men. That figure was downstream of a single source and fell apart on contact with reality, in part because Freeman had casually reclassified every barebacker as a bugchaser regardless of intent. When researchers actually combed profiles on a bareback-centric site, the share of HIV-positive men actually trying to infect partners came out around 1 percent. Most self-described "bugchasers" were roleplaying a fantasy they never acted on. Your feed is tuned to churn up that 1 percent because it enrages you, which means the sample is poisoned before you ever start counting. Base rates people. Look them up.
The most questionable things get signal-boosted to awareness. That is how the internet works. Nobody forwards clips of a gay accountant making lasagne for his husband, two mildly overweight lesbians arguing over oat milk, or some HIV-positive man taking his ART, remaining undetectable, and living a life so boring it would put /pol/ into a coma. The transgressive, and morally alarming material travels. Normality is busy tying laces. You can build an entire worldview out of the most alarming 0.1% of a group, but at that point you've given up on sociology. You've ended up producing pornography for your prejudices. And whoever enjoys that hobby should take up yoga and go fuck themselves.
My own anec-data, for whatever an n-of-my-social-graph is worth? I have the ethnographic essays, and after snowball sampling through the gay men I actually know, nobody could name a living bugchaser. Only the gray-haired ones remembered a few, and those few were dead. AIDS, obviously.
The calculus of harm has gone to bed, while some of the panic remains like a bad hangover from 2003. A virally suppressed person on antiretrovirals transmits HIV to sexual partners at a measured rate of zero. Howdy, PARTNER: we've logged tens of thousands of condomless acts between serodiscordant couples and recorded not one linked transmission when the positive partner was suppressed. "Undetectable equals untransmittable" is the CDC's official position, and that happens to be backed by the largest prospective evidence we have. Is there any problem better drugs can't cure?
Sigh. I really can't spare more effort for the old "some members of group X do something disgusting, therefore contempt for all of X is warranted." Run it against any large population and watch it generate nonsense. The worst 1 percent of evangelicals, of soldiers, of parents, of whatever demographic you happen to belong to, or dislike. That's where the ruin lies.
So sure, go off, kings (or queens) who disagree. I've made my peace with being one of the rare freaks in this thread who is actually open-minded and willing live, let other people live, or die.
Godammit, dude.
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I know you'll be annoyed to read this.
Back, say, as little as three years ago, I might have read this short, evocative metaphor placed among longer sentences and thought it was an interesting image. Now--and I am not entirely sure why--it reminds me of LLM output. Which is not to say I'm pointing a finger at you. Rather, this is what flags (to me) writing as LLM these days. Something about it. Like the calibration "write with style and a touch of wry humor." I think that perhaps for some of us, if we are to write in the age of LLMs but distinguish our own writing from output, we are going to have to purposely start not writing like they do. I'd feel happier if you said this actually was an LLM tweak to your own original passage.
To your point: For about a decade due to circumstances somewhat outside my control I hung out socially almost completely with either gay men or lesbians or what we used to call fag hags (as far as I know this is a term coined by gay men.) I saw all types, I was youngish and a pretty boy, and I was often plied with booze and told, as you say you've been told, that I was really a bit gay myself, wasn't I?
I wasn't. Nor was I ever curious enough to test the waters, as it were. But it was a gay gay gay gay world, and mostly not pretty. I'm not even going to go into it. You know what I'm talking about. I would take issue with your comment in another reply actually, that straight men don't engage constantly in illicit sex because they can't. Yes, some would, and I know them. I wouldn't, could have (perhaps even still could) and haven't, and even for those who might say "yes you have" I'd counter not nearly to the same degree as the gay dudes I've known who have had triple or more digit partners. There's something else going on. I could be wrong of course.
I am, in fact, annoyed to read this. But only slightly, and neither of us need to lose sleep over it. That sentence is, unfortunately or fortunately, entirely human written. With the thumbs I've been twiddling. There are only so many ways to rephrase or repurpose "A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.”—Mark Twain. That em-dash being part of the Google search snippet I've snipped and pasted.
I suppose you must have been prettier or more twink-passing than me, because I can't say I've been plied with booze on a regular basis. Not that I would accept the booze, really. I can buy my own drinks, and to quote myself:
I do think you're wrong. And most gay men don't have triple digit body counts. Google informs me that depending on who you ask, the median is 19-23. The mean is higher, because some of them really get around.
That is why I chose "[straight] male supermodel" as the reference class. I've done pretty well with the ladies, and I am quite keen on shacking up and settling down. But if I could get away with, I would very much have racked up or stacked up similar numbers by that point. Unfortunately, I'm only decent looking, funny and in possession of a modest amount of social status, not a supermodel. I have to work for it.
In other words, straight male sexuality is bottlenecked by the lack of women willing to really exercise it. That is not true for the gay men. The straight men who are hot enough to have as many women as they desire tend to sleep around a lot. Good for them. I don't deem it pathological in either instance, as long as it doesn't make them bitter and unhappy (which it sometimes can). And I can't pity them, because I would trade places in a heartbeat with the straight ones.
For ze record, I never accepted bought drinks at a bar, usually I was at someone's apartment, either before, during, or after some home party. I'm surprised mildly that you trust self-reported statistics of this sort; it seems to me that there would be a bunch of reasons to over- or under- report one's sexual stickers on the fuselage. But the alternative is believing my opinion based on what others have also self-reported to me, so you're probably fine.
You sort of lost me when you said straight male supermodel. I know of one, I think. But he's old now. Sorry about the LLM thing, but if you give the reply you wrote a while to get cold and go back and read it, you might see what I mean. Maybe you will. Possibly you won't.
The gay male promiscuity thing may indeed have to do with just being male, but being male following an ethos that has to some degree thrown off social mores regarding sex. Very few men who are straight (exclusively straight) have done that, at least in my experience. Once all is permitted, if the whole of the law were Do what thou wilt sexually, and if the gates were open to us to almost any woman, well it's hard (cough) to say. But that's a hypothetical. It does seem to me that gay men get around a lot more than straight men, though it's true in the finger-pointing there is probably some hypocrisy.
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This is meandering.
When I was younger we used to call gay people "faggots," which was the style at the time. Increasing acceptance and exposure (as well as the same stuff that eventually created "woke") rendered that inappropriate and impolite and the world verboten.
For a time in between those two states you would call someone a faggot if they were gay and obnoxious about it. You don't do that anymore but you can have some very important adjacent insights. Plenty of gay people are just like "straight men" who have sex with men. Plenty of are flaming gays and it's those who have a disproportionate mindshare in the minds of straight men and conservatives.
This is for good reason - they are socially aggressive, much more likely to sexually harass, culturally evangelical, beloved by straight women and therefore a distraction and a bunch of other shit.
Psychologically once you establish a culture without shame (and especially if it has widespread support like you see for gay and trans communities right now) things can go off the rails very fast. Drag queen story hour is fundamentally the same stuff as a gay couple who refuse to stop having sex in public (and unlike a straight couple make no effort to hide).
That couple is rare, as bug chasers are - but they have no guilt or shame and a social milieu which fully supports bonkers and inappropriate behavior.
Most gay people may in fact not be like this, but as many of my gay friends complain - they are culturally marginalized by gay men who are assholes or inappropriate (and those get support from the woke victim complex). Bug chasers are also rare but they are real and like any rare but high impact group they can cause problems.
Some of the bad behaviors are by no means rare however. Sexual harassment by gay men is crazy common. Once I stopped being young and athletic women stopped sexual harassing me (yay?) gay men never stopped. It's not a lot of them (but sadly it's more like 10% then 1%), but the ones who do it harass enough that it's a common experience.
Like most modern Americans I don't really have any issue with gay men (or any other demographic) that acts within the bounds of polite and appropriate behavior, but again enough people from these groups exist and they are metaphorically forced down our throats by pride initiatives and the woke (a similar annoying demographic is the militant lesbian who ex complains about manspreading on the subway but sits with her legs as far apart as she can because "men do it" and doesn't understand hip morphology).
Some of the bad behavior does have more direct impact on the rest of the population though. AIDS is a disease of the gay that took a lot of work to get into the straight population and this was caused by gay men who made zero effort to change their behavior.
Another similar problem (in the U.S. at least) is a rise in STIs and drug resistant STIs because gay men have hundreds of partners, refuse to use condoms and then fuck bi and "straight" people. Because they can't get pregnant and HIV is no longer a death sentence they refuse to use safe sex practices. Shut the fuck up and wrap your shit or have a reasonable number of partners, "benign" STIs are significantly more problematic for the female population.
So I do think some of the aggravation in this thread is coming from a reality based place.
I've logged an unfortunate number of hours in "gay" environs. Sadly I can't put that in my actual logbook or portfolio. Perhaps I'm not young (and was never particularly athletic), but I've never been sexually harassed. The closest was some four-eyes weirdo friend-of-an-acquaintance who was coked up, drunk to his man-tits, and convinced by the coca-ethylene to attempt to convince me that I wasn't straight. Very intense. Very retarded. I sat there in increasing discomfort, trying to tell him (politely) that I wasn't interested. Eventually he gave up and went off to go hit on other straight men, or I went off to get a pint and throw darts. I suspect I had a better hit rate. This was just a regular pub, on the seedy side - it had both pensioners and people propping up the Albanian GDP in the toilets.
Nothing else ever happened. I find it very funny when the gay men in actual gay places hit on me. It's good for my ego, or at least it was before I worked out, put on nice clothes, got a nice haircut and enjoyed attention from actual hot women. It's been known to happen. I don't blame them for trying (by which I mean the men). Yeah I'm fucking sitting there in a gay bar, notorious for hosting straight men first and foremost.
I can only say that I've done more time than you have, probably. But the world is a big place, and I don't claim to have performed an exhaustive or representative sampling of homosexual behavior on a global scale. All I can say is that the UK is as or more friendly to the gays than the States is. And it's fine. It's fucking Pride Month and I haven't seen anything ridiculous. I would have, I suppose if my little brother had shown up and I had a reason to expand his horizons. But no, as far as I'm concerned, things are fine.
Do I approve of this? You can guess. But there is no point to getting angry about it. The average straight man or even the above average straight man doesn't fuck hundreds of women raw because the latter have standards. The mid gay man can (but not necessarily does) fuck like a straight male supermodel because he's not restrained by feminine sexuality. You are complaining about men being manly men with other men. The straights would do it if they could. They just can't.
I'm not convinced this is the case, or that this is a full account of what male sexuality is like. You can't simply look at what gay sexual practices look like and assume this is what straight men would be like if women had more casual sex. Gay hookup culture came into existence under certain conditions (particularly ones where you had to grab whatever sex you could get because it was so rare, and could not be connected to intimacy or commitment because homosexuality was clandestine and often criminalized), and persists both because of cultural inertia and because the scripts people are handed limit what they can conceive and expect from others.
Le'ts assume you're a gay man like your brother, or perhaps someone like your brother but without his good and firm insight into what he wants. What does gay culture railroad him into? What will the men he meets on grindr/tinder with gay settings/a gay bar offer him? What will their sexual expectations be like? They're likely to be body-first, push relationships towards casual trysts rather than long-term commitment, emphasize sexual contact over emotional intimacy, and most importantly get bored of him and find someone else if he doesn't put his dick immediately on the table. Because the assumptions of gay culture are body-first, anyone who doesn't play along is presumed to be a liar or simply not that interested. And like straight men learning the Game, people are very good at picking up what is necessary to get them the intimacy they crave and contorting themselves towards it.
Inevitably obligate homosexual men under these conditions, whatever their theoretical desires, will end up having to get on their knees for this system, which they did not create and may not even meet with their aspirations. And especially if you're purely gay, the entire cultural and social system of gay culture will put every pressure on you to believe that hookup culture is liberatory and fun, while monogamy is internalized homophobia.
Like most people under social pressure, it's far psychologically easier to come to believe in the system than to stand aghast at it, especially if your sexual access becomes absolutely dependent on accepting it. The gays don't run "pray away the frigidity" camps, but like every culture this one has its own means of forcing misfits into a tight orifice.
This process has been going on for a long, long time in gay culture, while cultural movements towards restraint, safe sex, dating before fucking, or STD awareness is pattern-matched by many gay men either to dastardly heteronormativity or to Republicans calling AIDS a punishment from God, and therefore resisted.
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The male sex drive is so strong because it has to be to deal with female frigidity. You can clearly see what would happen if both partners had a woman's sex drive in lesbian couples; it's called lesbian bed death.
It is only by combining male horniness and aggression with female selectivity and passiveness that you get a healthy relationship. We're complements, designed by Gnon to bring out the best of each other. Gays demonstrate the worst of mankind; male sexuality unrestrained.
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It's certainly possible my community was particularly aggressive, that it was an American thing, or that that time is now over - but for a good decade or so if you were in a gay space you'd get groped, or get comments that were rather unacceptable or forward. Some of this is the lack of time wasting in the gay community but even gay men will complain about this - someone who wants a more heterosexual romance can often find it hard or impossible to find and just end up barraged with dick picks, promiscuity, and harassment.
The community is degenerate, and to some extent that is okay - but it's a problem when it impedes on people outside the community (it does) and has reached the point where some people in the community are mad about degeneracy (see: growing number of gay Republicans).
With respect to the STIs - yes many straights are just jealous and straights would have similar behaviors if allowed (and celebrities do do that) but celebrities are small in number and the rest can't so gay people are currently causing a public health crisis (and did in the past when parts of the community declined to acknowledge the existence of AIDs).
It's selfish and anti-social behavior that does in fact hurt others and while I don't think it should be banned it does annoy me that we don't have the social technology to make things better. Likewise I don't agree that we should just let them die from venereal disease but it should be doable to understand why some people feel that way.
Most STIs are much, much more of a choice than the average lifestyle disease. Avoiding addiction and overeating is hard. Putting a goddamn condom on is easy.
Social technology is grossly inferior to medical technology. We couldn't shame or blame or diet away the obesity epidemic. Ozempic is doing what no amount of moralizing can.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/
How prescient. Lucky that I've made my peace with never being as good as Scott. Well, I'm content with being the fourth best psychiatrist blogger on the internet. I can only name two who are better, but eh, humility is clearly my greatest strength.
I understand these people, on an intellectual level. I understand why schizophrenics are the way they are too, but I don't relate to them from a phenomenological perspective or like their actions.
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Uh, I'd caveat that the summary has 20% of HIV-negative men in the sample not caring about the HIV status of their partners, and the full document has 7.5% as HIV-negative seeking HIV-positive specifically. That's not the strict definition of bugchasing -- they could theoretically just practice very safe sex -- but it's closer than the HIV-positive-seeking-HIV-negative 1% number (actually 0.4% in the full paper).
On the other hand, I'll also point out that the sample was selected from a 2003/2004-era bugchasing-specific website, and that the total N=1228. That's... not representative, and while it's probably not the strict maximum (ie, I think there were probably more than a hundred bugchasers in the United States in 2003), it's closer to that than a good population-level estimate. I'm... not sure there even is a modern equivalent -- in addition to the survival pressures, a lot of the reasons behind bugchasing-as-a-kink just collapsed as it became understood HIV could be avoided or managed.
I'm aware of one bug-chasing-adjacent incident (technically, just an HIV-positive guy being incredibly careless, but close enough for government work) in the furry fandom, and the convention circuit treated the guy more seriously than they did a fellow who brought a loaded gun. Even as a fantasy, there's only two-digits worth of bugchasing images on e621; that doesn't just get dwarfed by (other) snuff or gore as a category, it gets dwarfed by extremely specific forms of gore. A quick google search pointed to a modern descendant of the website Grov-Parsons monitored... with <500 members. I couldn't find many others, and none of them were bigger.
The end result of the mix points heavily to "if you want to stop X from happening, stop X from happening", not fucking around three or five levels distant.
((Conversely, there are serious financial and resource allocation arguments. PReP spending is a nonzero line item, and while the actual breakdown by orientation and location gets complicated because it's nonlinear, but the Ryan White CARE Act started in the hundred-million range and got to the billion range. Not the worst payoff compared to some other public health spending, at least if you buy the metrics at face value, but neither would they be topping the chart at effective altruism metrics, nor do them seem immediately better turn than 'dudes, just go with frottage'.))
Separate from the bugchasing thing, I'd also point out that many of the people who seem extremely transgressive in summary aren't necessarily so in actual sexual practice. There's a thirst trap fursuiter on youtube with a recent output titled things like "How to FLUSTER your BOYFRIEND", "GOOD BOYS sit on your LAP", "I got EXPOSED for this..." and has a body count of six, total. I'm not going to say that all of the extreme and transgressive people aren't, in reality, but a lot of people who seem like a lot are much more boring than it looks.
This really is a "More than I ever wanted to know" post, but thank you, sincerely. I did look at the Ryan White figures at about the same time, and I knew that someone would show up to nitpick the bugchaser stats. Didn't think that someone would be you, but I'm not really complaining.
Because it's hard to fuck in a fursuit without getting heatstroke? Should I even ask? Do I really want to know? Tell me anyway.
Sorry about the nitpick.
Just picky about his hookups (cw: nsfw audio). Dude's pretty built, so I guess he can afford to be, but pretty far from what the stereotype would say.
There's a social conservative complaint that 'demisexual' just describes normal sexual functioning, and from a social conservative perspective that's probably not wrong so much as overloading the definition of 'normal'. But when the uwu maid outfit gay guy is less comfortable with a one-night stand than urquan, it points to something that exists as a meaningful distinguishing marker.
I'm not opening that video, unfortunately. Instagram seems to think I'm a gay Chinese woman, and YouTube shouldn't get any ideas.
I shall not intervene in a lovers tiff. Unless you pay for couples counseling.
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So that's why it seems so much more common in Nordic countries!
Indian furries either never existed, or like the Asiatic cheetah, have gone extinct. They won't even survive the journey to the air-conditioned convention center.
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Who pays for these antiretrovirals and other PLWH costs?
You, me and everyone else who is a net positive tax payer. In theory, I'm not subsidizing the lifestyle of an American with HIV, or even just their life.
But we subsidize a lot of things dawg. Old people. T2DMs hitting the soda fountain while their kidneys spit out sprite. Children with leukemia. Not smokers, since they pay for their sins by saving the taxpayer money by denying themselves old age <3
In the US the tab runs through the public ledger far more than the private one (your healthcare system is deeply in the closet, and claims to be privatized). Medicaid is the single largest payer of HIV care, Medicare second, and the Ryan White program bottoms underneath both as the "payer of last resort," funded at roughly $2.6 billion in FY2024. Domestic federal HIV spending sits around $28 to $33 billion a year, the large majority of it mandatory entitlement money that swells with caseload. Per head, lifetime care runs about $420,000 discounted and north of a million undiscounted, with something like 60 to 68% of it being the antiretrovirals themselves. So yes. It is socialized. I'm not going to pretend otherwise to protect my flank. Or my ass, which is unviolated by anything but NHS negative-ply today.
But you gotta spend money to make money. And in this case, you do make money.
Then the part that should actually interest a cost-conscious person, because it cuts the other way from how you're swinging it through implication. Because U=U holds (UwU) and a virally suppressed person does not transmit, the single most cost-effective prevention tool available is putting positive people on the drugs and keeping them there. Every suppression is an infection that never happens, and every averted infection is another ~$420k to $510k lifetime tab that never opens. The modelling supports this, AFAIK: in the Botswana combination-prevention work each averted infection saved about $9,200 in downstream care and pushed the whole intervention into cost-saving or near-cost-saving territory.
ART buys a lot of QALYs for the treated person, and viral suppression also prevents expensive future infections. At U.S. drug prices, the treatment itself is costly, but interventions that get people diagnosed, treated and suppressed often become cost-saving once avoided transmission is counted.
ART for diagnosed HIV? A fucking bargain at about $21k per QALY.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23318310/
Well below the usual threshold of $100k per QALY.
ART for prevention? Even better, because you're averting transmissions and secondary QALY/financial losses. HIV is highly contagious (surprising nobody here, I hope, there's a reason it's everywhere and has been for decades).
Finally, ART costs money because people live for decades and keep taking drugs. Duh.
Untreated HIV is not free to the pool. You must consider opportunistic infections, ICU admissions, and onward transmission, all of which cost more than the pills. If your genuine concern is my wallet (doing fine) or yours (can't say) the wallet-minimizing policy is more treatment, started earlier, not less. I'm libertarian-adjacent, and I'd prefer that people pay for themselves really, but if we're going to pool risk and expenses, we might as well do it sensibly. Why yes, I work for the NHS.
If you're trying to pray away the gay, or AIDS, it's not going to work. Things were worse in the 80s and 90s, when the disease was a death sentence. I have little interest in considering "solutions" that involve trying to get rid of gay men being gay men (good luck, even immense social stigma and a near lethal disease couldn't do it), and it's not like most countries don't spend on primary prevention or awareness programs. I'd suggest cutting the budget for expeditions in the ME first, not that anyone listens to me about that. The drugs continue to get cheaper, and I continue to get drunker while the Ritalin wears off.
That is all I have time for, because I'm at a straight pub and I intend to enjoy myself.
These are a lot of words to say that "spreading HIV actually costs the taxpayer a ton of money and even the best way that we know how to reduce the costs still costs a ton of money and all things considered it would be better for society if people didn't engage in risky behaviors that spread HIV."
And yes, this is also true for a lot of other things - simple overeating is a much larger drain on the taxpayer than HIV, and you shouldn't pretend like that doesn't have negative externalities either.
And I never have. I'm voting for the party that supports Universal Public Ozempic.
Are you surprised that I am internally coherent and know the facts? Don't be. The nerd who calculates QALY figures isn't. You can also use more words too, really, but I'd presume that if you found an actual logical flaw in my argument you would have pointed it out.
You said "[w]hen their lifestyle does turn harmful, the fallout lands almost entirely on the people who opted in" during your assessment of the damages of HIV in this specific context of gay men. I think that's misleading: the fallout of HIV is very expensive, and society picks up some of that tab. And furthermore (as you doubtless also know) HIV is not randomly distributed across the population (nor is it distributed evenly across the population of gay men). People who get HIV are more likely to be materially disadvantaged, not less, so the taxpayers are more likely to pick up the tab.
I don't consider this a logical or process flaw in your argument so much as a factual or directional mistake.
You are welcome to calculate the relative burden or expense in terms of costs swallowed by the gay men vs externalities. The hard numbers I've quoted (with citations) are fucking chump change. Less than HSR. 1.5 Bridges to Nowhere.
A few hundred billion dollars? Then we'd be talking real money. Or a nice week in Tehran. Where exactly are the additional costs that are being imposed on the general populace? I'm sure they exist, but I don't think they sum up to very much. And the alternative of people dying of HIV is not pretty or cheap either.
I'm sure someone with more spare time (or Ritalin) can take a crack at reverse-engineering financial figures or willingness to pay to avoid being around gay people. It's not going to be me.
And what difference does that make to anything? I have quoted the bill, we know the tab that's paid at taxpayer expense. This adds nothing, changes nothing. It's not like there's one gay dude with super-AIDS costing you $30 billion, who you could knock on the head and save everyone a lot of hassle.
I think it makes your argument worse, not better. Sure, maybe as measured by the stingy metric of financial balance in the general treasury, the benefits of gay men as a whole outweigh the costs, but "[w]hen their lifestyle does turn harmful" the (financial) cost isn't almost entirely borne on the group of people who opted in; it's disproportionately likely to be borne by society.
(To be clear, from what I can tell, realistically the group of people opting in to HIV risk can be diced finer than "gays.")
You're shifting the goalposts here. It's as if you said "the horrible impact of dragons being able to breathe fire is almost entirely limited to dragons" and then I pointed out that no, dragons mostly don't fight each other, they are more likely burn down people's homes and steal their gold, and you said "well they mostly avoid populated provinces and steal from monasteries, so the general treasury is not really impacted" which I am sure is a relief to our lord the king (supposing for the sake of illustration that we're court wizards or something I guess) but doesn't really mean you were right to say that dragons breathing fire is mostly something that isn't a human concern now does it?
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While your contributions are undeniably positive, if you work for the NHS, you can't be a net positive tax payer.
I can and I am. In the wrong tax bracket. Mostly being taxed of patience and the will to live.
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yep it's all fun and games until we remember we live in a society with mandated health insurance with no pre-existing condition exclusions that socializes costs.
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She's also a Jewess with roots in present-day Slovakia and described on Wikipedia as a 'Australian social justice journalist'. Jokes are surely still just writing themselves.
Another example was the so-called Patient Zero of the AIDS epidemic in the USA:
"Shilts interviewed epidemiologist Selma Dritz, who reported that in 1982, she informed Dugas that he was infecting other people, but he refused to cease having casual sex in spite of this."
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