174
Legalizing Sports Gambling Was a Huge Mistake
(www.theatlantic.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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Lmao, I just started listening to this and they immediately compare it to legalizing heroin and giving control of the heroin industry to tobacco companies, with the implication that that would obviously be incredibly bad.
Turns out half the people in this thread think that that's a great idea actually.
Oh my God then they started talking about self-identified socialists now having a libertarian streak and thinking restrictions on people's actions by a Nanny State are bad.
Many such cases, including on Hexbear. Fucks' sake, I once had an ugly prolonged knock-down drag-out posting fight with some asshole that insisted they absolutely needed their two-stroke gas powered leaf blower and gave me the full arsenal of "no veggies for dinner, no bedtimes" selfish bullshit talking points all the while.
Yeah, just it felt like deja vu listening to it. It's like they used a time machine to read this thread before recording their intro.
citations needed don't miss
It's a lot less than half, judging by the upvotes. Still, didn't expect this to be controversial at all.
Yeah, that was a bit of an exaggeration, I think I was just shocked a bit by how much pushback "giant particularly evil capitalist enterprise bad" got
I got a lot of shit for talking about treatbrain before, but I am going to keep talking about it because that shit stops any attempt to improve society somewhat before it can even start.
See how much mass rejection there was for covid restrictions once treats felt too inconvenient to access? That reactive effect could doom us all, nonjokingly.
I'm not going to lie, I've been very anti treatbrain rhetoric in the past but I think this thread has broken me of that. I'm genuinely unsure how we got to this point, never expected so many Hexbear to defend DraftKings like this
It's a simple but powerful motivational force: they got theirs. That's all there is to it. The sports betting app went beepbeep, pleasure centers of the brain activated, defensive tendencies engaged if the source of pleasure is criticized.
Many such cases.
EDIT: Or, maybe, it's just some ideological puritanism that requires no restrictions on absolutely any treats because of dae le Prohibition bad.
I don't really see much "treatbrain" here, I doubt many people here enjoy sports gambling, or gambling in general. I think it's just that, somewhat understandably, the failure of the war on drugs in the US has made most western leftists hyper-libertarian on vice regulation. It's an attitude I've seen a lot even with otherwise smart comrades. Decades of people getting thrown in jail for possessing a small amount of marijuana kinda does that to people.
Why doubt it?
Is there some specific inoculation present in the people on Hexbear that makes them less likely to gamble or to become addicted to gambling, particularly from addiction-intended phone apps?
I never see people here talk about it. Unlike other "treats". If they were defending it out of personal enjoyment I'd expect people to cite that more rather than argue more from an ideological libertarian point of view.
I haven't actually seen it talked about, or defended, until this thread. Reading the text of the defending here makes me wonder if it was just a low-profile thing for some users until it got brought up here and needed to be defended with misanthropic statements about not caring about the suffering of others and other such examples of "maybe in deep with gambling apps."
EDIT: I just did a closer read of the poster I was thinking of, and maybe you're right. Maybe it's just some broad-brushed ideological puritanism that absolutely demands "no veggies at dinner, no bedtimes" abolishment of any and all restrictions on anything.
There's that one guy, but besides him most people seem to be drawing parallels to drug prohibition. Which again is understandable because the war on drugs has been an utter failure in the US.
I agree, it has been a failure, but as another poster mentioned, non-Burgerland restrictions on some of the most harmful drugs (as in actually harmful, not some kid with a joint) did have a positive societal effect under socialism.
I suppose the memory of Prohibition (and the ever-vaguer legend of it as it fades further into history) is something some people cling to no matter what, as a sort of indirect American Exceptionalism that implies that if Burgerland failed at it (and how could it not fail considering how easily accessible and everywhere alcohol has always been, and how corrupt the cops were all along) that no restrictions are possible whatsoever, nor should any ever be put in place no matter how harmful the thing in question.
EDIT: The "war on drugs" has technically been a success if one considers it started under Nixon as a means to imprison black people.