6 ms·

While everything you wrote I agree with, I’m not sure I arrived to the same conclusion. Alcohol, cigarettes, workaholics, social media apps all ruin the lives o

While everything you wrote I agree with, I’m not sure I arrived to the same conclusion. Alcohol, cigarettes, workaholics, social media apps all ruin the lives of the weak and those around them. Should we make them all illegal?

vincnetas 2y ago
This boils down to a two question "should we as society allow a person to destroy his life." And because there is also a big external pressure from financially interested parties to convince a person to do things that are not beneficial to him, second question is "should we as society let smarter people fool less educated people out of their money/health/ happiness" (second one is more tricky) but low hanging fruits are advertisement for alcohol, gambling, smoking and other obviously non beneficial activities.
- achenet 2y ago
  that's a good point. Ban advertising for gambling, tax the hell out of gambling companies... possibly create some sort of regulation for actual gamblers, i.e. check their ID against a national database everytime they bet to ensure they're not over-doing it... seems more likely to fix the issue than outright prohibition, which, at least for other things like drugs and prostitution, doesn't really seem to solve much.
andrepd 2y ago
Well, you cannot advertise cigarretes, so yes, why can you plaster the Internet, primetime TV, and player's jerseys with gambling ads?
nuancedquestion 2y ago
It is nuanced. Take alcohol. It is a drug, a poison, addictive, acute severe health problems are rare - although it can kill via the stupor it imposes but long term health and affects on productivity etc. Really bad. So society may be better off without it. But then mind altering substances may be good even if they are bad for social cohesion and self medication. It is hard to be sober you have to take life as it actually is. Make it illegal? Well that is almost orthogonal... why? What does it achieve to make it a moral outrage ... and who is the criminal? The brewer, the distributer or the drinker? Then even if you decide that incarceration is a good think to do to people who do one of the 3 things - the prohibition shows that people will do it anyway. As a drug alcohol in particular is probably the easier to synthesize. You just need readily available pantry items and a jar. Other drugs need chenistry labs, precursor chemicals or plants. So that effects the affect of criminializing alcohol. Then mix in its deep root in culture! Now alcohols is discussed, what next... too much work... That will have a different set of problems, solutions, unintended consequences of fixing the issue and so on. So just treat gambling like its own thing. Even then casino poker vs. Slots vs. Lottery vs. Physical Bookie vs. Online booke vs. Crypto vs. Backstreet all have different subissues and may need to be legislated individually.
eek04_ 2y ago
If we can, and it works out to less harm vs benefit than otherwise: Yes. But it turns out we can't for alcohol and cigarettes (except regulation). We fairly much can for workaholics - Norway has laws that stop working overtime except in certain situations, and they actually work fairly well. I don't know if we can for social media, though I see California is trying to stop some of the addictive forms of social media.
mlsu 2y ago
Of course. Freedom and all. My uncle gambled away a successful business, a beautiful house, his family, his friends. In my early memory he was a giant who carried me in the ocean, flying just above the breaking waves. Later on, when I was in elementary school, he lived with us for a bit. Some time later he lived in his Buick. He died alone and with nothing. In my mind, we all should not allow a man to do that.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  That still leaves you with a question if harm reduction is better approach than criminalization. At least you don't attract the mob into the business with the former. Banning addictive things isn't as straightforward as people love to believe. Even during the worst theocratic times, you could get alcohol in Saudi Arabia by asking the right people; and Saudi Arabia had way harsher means at its disposal than democratic countries do. (For the complete picture, my grandpa drank himself to death at 57 and even though he used to have a good income, on the order of 3x as much as an average Czechoslovak worker of that time, he left almost nothing behind. All "liquefied". Other people were able to build family houses for their kids with less money.)
- wallawe 2y ago
  Many such similar stories, except where the crutch is alcohol. Back to the original question, would you propose banning alcohol as well?
  - joshlemer 2y ago
    Perhaps ban is too strong. I think Canada has had a really positive result in how it has dealt with tobacco. Cigarettes are by no means illegal, you can get them at any gas station, grocery store, 7-11 or pharmacy. But they are heavily taxed, the packages have to be covered in graphic warnings, the branding has to be plain and just use a generic font of the brand name. Commercials aren't allowed. Advertising isn't allowed. As a result, a lot less people just take up smoking, and it's almost completely fallen off culturally. That might be the best solution to gambling. At least in Canada, casinos are very well advertised and glamorized. They're often run by the government, but they still market themselves to attract customers in a way you wouldn't expect of say, a safe opioid consumption site. Their slot machines are just as addictive. Sure, there's lip service paid to preventing gambling addiction, eg a piece of paper on the wall instructing patrons to play responsibly. But if we took the same attitude towards it as we do to tobacco, it might just fade away without all the downsides of prohibition.
komali2 2y ago
I hold the strong belief that gambling companies are evil and make the world worse and I wouldn't find the burning of them down by the loved ones of people's lives they ruined to be unethical. However people should know what regulating ethics to this degree looks like: the modern PRC. In the PRC you get a government mandated timer on your MMOs to ensure you don't spend too much time playing videogames. In the internet cafes there's 24/7 a CPC bureaucrat prowling around keeping an eye on your chats - plus automated mandated filters which depending on the implementation can auto kick you from a multiplayer match, hence the entirely viable strategy when playing against PRC players to spam "FREE HONG KONG REVOLUTION OF OUR TIMES CCP COMMITS GENOCIDE AGAINST UIGHUR MUSLIMS XINJIANG" into chat to get them kicked from the match. There's industry level morality controls as well such as not being allowed to make a tv show featuring "feminine men" and the implicit ban on showing LGBT couples. Personally I don't trust a State to choose the correct morals, be it aesthetically communist or aesthetically capitalist. We can look at America's history of moral laws to see another example, such as prohibition.
- School-Cotton 2y ago
  There’s a readily available example proving your slippery slope isn’t guaranteed to happen: gambling was illegal in most of the US very recently and it wasn’t anything like China.
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    The gambling bans in the US weren't that effective. People who wanted to gamble went to crypto casinos or other online gambling games.
    - School-Cotton 2y ago
      They still stopped the vast majority of casual people.
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago
  So instead, you trust for-profit companies to direct the morals of society? Surely the reason prohibition failed so badly was that it wasn't democratic. You can't mandate against vice unless you have the support of the majority.
NobleLie 2y ago
Some people believe that their beliefs and way of life should be enforced. Here, which human habits or activities are allowed or "OK" even if partially or very deletorious. The desired force vector varies in magntitude and orientation, but can, in the extreme include removal of independence / imprisonment or less extreme banning and fining etc Because a single or group of people believe it, it must be for everyone, equally.
- CodeGroyper 2y ago
  So? Literally the entire political apparatus depends on a few people enforcing their ideas of how the rules should be, and everyone else has to play by them.
interludead 2y ago
The question of legality isn't just about the potential for harm; it’s about balancing individual freedom with societal responsibility

vincnetas 2y ago

This boils down to a two question "should we as society allow a person to destroy his life." And because there is also a big external pressure from financially interested parties to convince a person to do things that are not beneficial to him, second question is "should we as society let smarter people fool less educated people out of their money/health/ happiness" (second one is more tricky) but low hanging fruits are advertisement for alcohol, gambling, smoking and other obviously non beneficial activities.

achenet 2y ago
that's a good point. Ban advertising for gambling, tax the hell out of gambling companies... possibly create some sort of regulation for actual gamblers, i.e. check their ID against a national database everytime they bet to ensure they're not over-doing it... seems more likely to fix the issue than outright prohibition, which, at least for other things like drugs and prostitution, doesn't really seem to solve much.

andrepd 2y ago

Well, you cannot advertise cigarretes, so yes, why can you plaster the Internet, primetime TV, and player's jerseys with gambling ads?

nuancedquestion 2y ago

It is nuanced. Take alcohol. It is a drug, a poison, addictive, acute severe health problems are rare - although it can kill via the stupor it imposes but long term health and affects on productivity etc. Really bad. So society may be better off without it. But then mind altering substances may be good even if they are bad for social cohesion and self medication. It is hard to be sober you have to take life as it actually is. Make it illegal? Well that is almost orthogonal... why? What does it achieve to make it a moral outrage ... and who is the criminal? The brewer, the distributer or the drinker? Then even if you decide that incarceration is a good think to do to people who do one of the 3 things - the prohibition shows that people will do it anyway. As a drug alcohol in particular is probably the easier to synthesize. You just need readily available pantry items and a jar. Other drugs need chenistry labs, precursor chemicals or plants. So that effects the affect of criminializing alcohol. Then mix in its deep root in culture! Now alcohols is discussed, what next... too much work... That will have a different set of problems, solutions, unintended consequences of fixing the issue and so on. So just treat gambling like its own thing. Even then casino poker vs. Slots vs. Lottery vs. Physical Bookie vs. Online booke vs. Crypto vs. Backstreet all have different subissues and may need to be legislated individually.

eek04_ 2y ago

If we can, and it works out to less harm vs benefit than otherwise: Yes. But it turns out we can't for alcohol and cigarettes (except regulation). We fairly much can for workaholics - Norway has laws that stop working overtime except in certain situations, and they actually work fairly well. I don't know if we can for social media, though I see California is trying to stop some of the addictive forms of social media.

mlsu 2y ago

Of course. Freedom and all. My uncle gambled away a successful business, a beautiful house, his family, his friends. In my early memory he was a giant who carried me in the ocean, flying just above the breaking waves. Later on, when I was in elementary school, he lived with us for a bit. Some time later he lived in his Buick. He died alone and with nothing. In my mind, we all should not allow a man to do that.

inglor_cz 2y ago
That still leaves you with a question if harm reduction is better approach than criminalization. At least you don't attract the mob into the business with the former. Banning addictive things isn't as straightforward as people love to believe. Even during the worst theocratic times, you could get alcohol in Saudi Arabia by asking the right people; and Saudi Arabia had way harsher means at its disposal than democratic countries do. (For the complete picture, my grandpa drank himself to death at 57 and even though he used to have a good income, on the order of 3x as much as an average Czechoslovak worker of that time, he left almost nothing behind. All "liquefied". Other people were able to build family houses for their kids with less money.)
wallawe 2y ago
Many such similar stories, except where the crutch is alcohol. Back to the original question, would you propose banning alcohol as well?
- joshlemer 2y ago
  Perhaps ban is too strong. I think Canada has had a really positive result in how it has dealt with tobacco. Cigarettes are by no means illegal, you can get them at any gas station, grocery store, 7-11 or pharmacy. But they are heavily taxed, the packages have to be covered in graphic warnings, the branding has to be plain and just use a generic font of the brand name. Commercials aren't allowed. Advertising isn't allowed. As a result, a lot less people just take up smoking, and it's almost completely fallen off culturally. That might be the best solution to gambling. At least in Canada, casinos are very well advertised and glamorized. They're often run by the government, but they still market themselves to attract customers in a way you wouldn't expect of say, a safe opioid consumption site. Their slot machines are just as addictive. Sure, there's lip service paid to preventing gambling addiction, eg a piece of paper on the wall instructing patrons to play responsibly. But if we took the same attitude towards it as we do to tobacco, it might just fade away without all the downsides of prohibition.

komali2 2y ago

I hold the strong belief that gambling companies are evil and make the world worse and I wouldn't find the burning of them down by the loved ones of people's lives they ruined to be unethical. However people should know what regulating ethics to this degree looks like: the modern PRC. In the PRC you get a government mandated timer on your MMOs to ensure you don't spend too much time playing videogames. In the internet cafes there's 24/7 a CPC bureaucrat prowling around keeping an eye on your chats - plus automated mandated filters which depending on the implementation can auto kick you from a multiplayer match, hence the entirely viable strategy when playing against PRC players to spam "FREE HONG KONG REVOLUTION OF OUR TIMES CCP COMMITS GENOCIDE AGAINST UIGHUR MUSLIMS XINJIANG" into chat to get them kicked from the match. There's industry level morality controls as well such as not being allowed to make a tv show featuring "feminine men" and the implicit ban on showing LGBT couples. Personally I don't trust a State to choose the correct morals, be it aesthetically communist or aesthetically capitalist. We can look at America's history of moral laws to see another example, such as prohibition.

School-Cotton 2y ago
There’s a readily available example proving your slippery slope isn’t guaranteed to happen: gambling was illegal in most of the US very recently and it wasn’t anything like China.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  The gambling bans in the US weren't that effective. People who wanted to gamble went to crypto casinos or other online gambling games.
  - School-Cotton 2y ago
    They still stopped the vast majority of casual people.
pbhjpbhj 2y ago
So instead, you trust for-profit companies to direct the morals of society? Surely the reason prohibition failed so badly was that it wasn't democratic. You can't mandate against vice unless you have the support of the majority.

NobleLie 2y ago

Some people believe that their beliefs and way of life should be enforced. Here, which human habits or activities are allowed or "OK" even if partially or very deletorious. The desired force vector varies in magntitude and orientation, but can, in the extreme include removal of independence / imprisonment or less extreme banning and fining etc Because a single or group of people believe it, it must be for everyone, equally.

CodeGroyper 2y ago
So? Literally the entire political apparatus depends on a few people enforcing their ideas of how the rules should be, and everyone else has to play by them.

interludead 2y ago

The question of legality isn't just about the potential for harm; it’s about balancing individual freedom with societal responsibility