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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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