zlacker

Gambling is terrible, and I'll never do it, but unless casinos are holding people at gunpoint and coercing them to play, they aren't depriving anyone of anything against their will. Marketing needs to be truthful of course, and sane regulation is OK, but anything pleasurable can be addictive.

The whole puritanical notion that anything pleasurable is dangerous and needs to be strictly regulated/outlawed is not a good reality, doesn't really do anything except make people lie about what they really want to do (which causes obssession and addiction), and honestly needs to be buried with all the other outmoded concepts.

I'm getting tired of "addiction" being used as a justification to reduce freedoms. If you want to fix addiction, fix the underlying causes instead of banning shit. This involves designing societies where everyone's basic needs are easily met, where people who run into problems can get help easily, where people are encouraged to treat each other equitably, and lowering anxiety and panic. It's hard and doesn't make anyone any money which is why it's not the default state in many societies, but it does prevent these societies from collapsing

But all this howling in this whole topic about how gambling hurts the poor, yet no one is actually talking about how to stop creating poor in the first place - is just sanctimonious virtue signaling. Even if you have a poor friend or relative who got bit by a gambling loss - why is he/she addicted - what did you or society do to address that?