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Comment by oceanplexian | Hacker News Reader

The problem is you can’t ban things because a minority of people don’t have self-control. If that were the case, we would ban beer, since it has destroyed far more lives than gambling.

But then, say you do that, the slippery slope gets more and more extreme. Like you have all these middle-eastern countries that ban alcohol, premarital sex, gambling- everything you can think of is illegal but people still need their vices. And then they lash out in dangerous and disturbing ways.

IMO the only free society is one in which people have the ability to act out vices in a controlled fashion. It’s an uncomfortable fact but real life is uncomfortable.

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> Like you have all these middle-eastern countries that ban alcohol, premarital sex, gambling- everything you can think of is illegal but people still need their vices. And then they lash out in dangerous and disturbing ways.

I'm with you most of the way, but there is a middle ground. Every system needs some friction so it doesn't become a runaway train.

Don't ban it, but don't make it so easy either.

Take porn. Before the internet, we (as kids) had to hunt for it. We had to network to find other kids whose dads had magazine stashes we could raid, or corner stores we could sneak peeks at the magazine rack of and rip pages out without getting caught. There was effort and risk involved. Obtaining it was an adventure and reward in itself. By the end of the day, you were tired-- and not always successful! It satiated some primal need for conquest, in addition to being sexually gratifying.

Now you can get to it in two clicks, and the extremity of the content stops just short of snuff. If they're being honest with themselves, nobody's really happy with the current state of porn, which leads to escalating behavior in similarly dangerous and disturbing ways. All roads lead to eventual interest in CSAM, and even that's not enough.

In a weird turn of events, porn is actually contributing to the emasculation of men. We're losing our ability to hunt because we expect everything to just be handed to us in two clicks. There's no thrill in that chase. Incest porn dominates trending pages. Wanting to fuck your mother or sister--a captive audience--is as lazy as it gets. (Cousins would be an improvement...at least you'd have to leave the house.)

Gambling is the same. It's easy to lose. The rewards are fleeting but potent. All it is is clicking a button and wasting away. You're reduced from being an apex predator to prey caught in a raccoon trap-- and held there by your own greed.

Even in a free society, nothing should be this easy. We're supposed to hunt lesser animals, not be predatory toward each other. Making vice so easy makes potential prey of us all.

> All roads lead to eventual interest in CSAM, and even that's not enough.

What??

> In a weird turn of events, porn is actually contributing to the emasculation of men. We're losing our ability to hunt because we expect everything to just be handed to us in two clicks.

Huh??

If that's how porn affects you then I think you needed therapy, with or without the pornography.

> you can’t ban things because a minority of people don’t have self-control. If that were the case, we would ban beer

We did ban beer. Parts of the country still have bans on beer. Almost every part of the country has bans on certain types of beer, or certain behavior by beer makers, distributors, and sellers.

The reason beer is broadly legal is not because it was illegal to ban it, but because the ban was unpopular and got reverted.

We could do the same for gambling or anything else for that matter. There is no fundamental right to make money as you see fit in the United States.

It would be better to make the point that banning beer didn't have the happy results proponents thought it would. Or take the "war on drugs" as a more recent example. Not only does it not prevent addicts from getting it, it leads to a huge increase in crime.

Yeah we did. It was called prohibition, and how'd that work out? People drank anyways but this time without strong regulatory bodies to ensure the safety and manufacture of said libations.

Regulation isn’t perfect but it can do a lot to prevent the worst outcomes.

We can change the incentives of these game makers/designers, through the legal system. As an example, Paypal and credit card companies offer charge backs. What if you could charge back for all the money spent on a game, at the cost of getting your account/IP banned and being forced to uninstall the app? If the 400,000$ the whale spent got returned to them, they would be made whole. It's not like alcohol or tobacco where you've physically consumed resources. You are undoing access to digital resources and returning those to the company in exchange for all the money the player spent.

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