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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25145 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 27, 2025

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But on the other hand, some forms of protecting people from the damage they can do to themselves and others in a fit of passion seem to be very popular. We have laws against drugs

I guess I've just hardened against these arguments, as I've watched all the people we protect from themselves drag society down. Also, I clipped this quote where I did because, per the article, 2 out of 3 of the anecdotes in the article about "Stand your ground gone 'wrong'" involved drugs. The drugs we allegedly protect people from themselves from.

I almost want more people to die at this point. I'd be for regulating gambling because it doesn't even kill anyone. But lets lace more drugs with fentanyl, lets give everyone with a clean record who can pass a piss test a gun for free and free legal counsel about self defense. I want more poor life choices to have immediately fatal consequences, not less. Our polity needs some drano.

I'm all for more aggressive policing of drugs. The current legal metagame has sprung downstream out of 'let's not ruin the lives of promising college students for trying some weed and LSD' then with 50 years of iteration has reached the point of insanity, especially in the form of the strength and risks of modern drugs.

Gambling more complicated. I do think some people are degenerates but also slamming everybody all the time with gambling ads whilst trying to watch sports is just exacerbating standing societal issues. I'd rather that particular rock required a bit more upturning and less automatic takeover

I feel like one thing that has been lost in modern life is the ability to have something that is disapproved of, but still permitted. What I'm thinking of here is that we can't just tolerate that some people are making different choices - we must celebrate them and take them up to 11.

We aren't permitted to say "Nothing wrong with gay men, but I wouldn't want my son to be gay" - that's considered hate speech.

We aren't permitted to say "It's fine if people take drugs, but it's an indicator of low class." Instead, we must have legal dispensaries and be unable to arrest the fent zombie screaming at me about the KGB.

We can't say "You're unattractive because you're overweight and unclean" - instead we have to celebrate "healthy at every size."

And we apparently aren't permitted to allow gambling without turning it into an aggressive in-your-face advertising blitz.

I long for the days where things could just be "not your cup of tea" (or as my sister puts it, "Not everything has to appeal to my delicate sensibilities"). Friction can help people avoid ruining their lives, while still permitting people who really want it to achieve what they want.

Who exactly is “we”?

Out of the five things you “aren’t permitted to do,” three of them are speech restrictions, one is a resource-allocation problem, and the last is due to the free market. Those are categorically different.

  • You can say you wouldn’t want your son to be gay, or worse; large swathes of society will just be very upset with you.
  • You can express that drugs are low-class. There aren’t even that many people who will be upset!
  • You can’t always arrest the fent zombies, but it’s not because people will be upset with you. More like they’ve set up systems to disincentivize it.
  • You can fat-shame. We’re back to things society will complain about, but not imprison you over.
  • You can run a subdued gambling business so long as you aren’t trying to compete with the big dogs. If they’re luring people via ESPN and you refuse out of principle, you will never match their reach.

See the different categories? There is a vast gulf between things society will complain about and things it’ll materially punish. The complaints are friction.

In Canada, #1 and #4 count as hate speech. #3 is actually an example of what I'm talking about - we aren't arresting them, and we can't meaningfully defend ourselves against them (in Canada).

So perhaps by "we" I mean "Canada and Canadians".

What I'm thinking of here is that we can't just tolerate that some people are making different choices - we must celebrate them and take them up to 11

Yeah, but a lot of that's just the standard warfare between the redistributionists (generally because they lack the thing but can still convince someone sympathetic to take it away from someone with more) and everyone else.

Fat people want beauty redistributed.
Stupid people want [the fruits of] intelligence redistributed.
People without self-control want [the prosocial effects of having] self-control redistributed. ("If I'm not trustworthy with the right to self-defense then you should go without too.")

If you've lost the ability to say that some things are better than others it's a sign that they've taken over.

Gambling can be very, very nasty. An extended family member was a mathematician, very cheerful chap, into horse-racing and various other things long before internet poker started blighting the world. Then when he died, we discovered that he'd lost everything. The house, the car, everything. His wife of 50 years was left destitute, almost literally penniless, so now she survives on the government pension and the charity of friends and relations. Everyone loved him but now it's a bit hard to talk about him without that casting a shadow over everything.

EDIT: this is no reason not to approach regulation with caution, just an indication that a gambling addiction, like a drug addiction, can happen to many people and has a damage radius considerably greater than just the person with the problem.

I recently came by a quote about comparing gambling to drugs - "Even at the height of my using I could never blow $10k in 20 minutes on drugs."

AFAIK truly great fortunes are almost always lost on investments and stocks (for lesser men it's the 3 F's). Even the most profligate spender finds it hard to spend more than a few million on cars - where do you put them? And there is only so much Dom Pérignon that a man can shove down his gullet before it comes back up.

I have heard it said that 1MDB fraudster Jho Low was the only person ever to spend a whole billion dollars on debauchery and loose living. And he had to do things like paid dates with Miranda Kerr in order to do it.

AFAIK truly great fortunes are almost always lost on investments and stocks

Above the "sufficient to endow an upper-middle class standard of living for life" level, the biggest destroyers of generational wealth are division (which overlaps with the 3 F's in that one of the things that divides fortunes is divorce settlements, but the central case is division between children) and confiscation. Investing your entire life savings in pets.com is what retired dentists who think they are smart do. The failure mode of dumb old money is to halve a fortune over a generation by overpaying for mediocre investment advice, which does about the same amount of damage as the entirely standard practice of splitting it between two siblings, and a lot less damage than being in the wrong place at the wrong time when Lenin or Harold Wilson comes calling.

This is why old money tends to be more present in societies where estates can be entailed- prevented from being divided in a regulated inheritance regime. The extreme form is titles of nobility, but you also see a pattern in the US where leaving aside actual robber-baron descendants, who are usually tracked into very high income jobs anyways, you tend to see medium-level old money in unexpected places due to historic preservation laws more than actual wealth generation. This is why newcomers to DFW are surprised that the actual old-school high culture is mostly on the fort worth side, for example- historic preservation status makes it a PITA to subdivide(although it could be sold entirely) some subset of land used for cattle in ~1900, and almost all of this land has oil on it, so a higher percentage of the fort worth elite were elites back when cattle was the main industry.

Yeah. To a certain degree I think that's one of the 'benefits' of the Gambling industry in that it allows that money to be recirculated, especially before the modern eras where a lot of the big gambling operators were also insane degens in their own right so there was a natural recycling effect for failsons to turn large fortunes into nothing. Also generally the sort of personality that's capable of massively running it up is going to be a bad combination of addictive and prone to all-inning which doesn't mix great when exposed to gambling.

Also people end up gambling since they've essentially capped out their local scenario. If you're sitting on a pile of crypto obtained shadily, already paid for maximal lifestyle in Albania, Costa Rica or whatever (which really doesn't cost that much in grand scheme of rich person things) and can't travel that much due to potential sanctions then you might as well start blasting 200k a hand blackjack. Atleast I've seen a lot of ultra highrollers that essentially describes.

While gambling is definitely addictive, I'd assume that a harem and a menagerie and de facto immunity from Kosovar law is a more appealing prospect to shady millionaires. Obviously you'd expect less attachment to normie status symbols because these people are almost definitionally not normies.

I mean the point is more that once you've established your harem, unlimited party passes and mansion in the balkans that a lot of that stuff doesn't really cost thaaaaat much by shady black market millionaire standards. You can probably get it all set for a couple M a year, inclusive of bribes to relevant local parties. So you've got a massive inflow of cash coming from whatever you're running in the background to make you the top dog and nothing else to really spend it on but gambling. Plus there's maybe some laundering effects but in my experience it's more 'I have huge amounts of money stuck on the blockchain/in cash, what else am I gonna do with it' than really explicitly trying to turn it into legal tender.

Also these people are turbonormies. Generally what makes you top dog in these things is a combination of ruthlessness, timing and being compulsively prone to go all in. It's a lot more 'Guy who owns 50 car dealerships' energy than 'this is a delicate political operator who used deft genius to climb the ranks of crime'

Stupid question but how did this not become apparent till after he died? Was everything reverse mortgaged to the hilt or was he trying to outrun markers?

You can just... have bad credit. It's pretty easy to be in debt up to your eyeballs, and if you're smart you can put off the day of reckoning for a while.

Reverse mortgage. And his background, age and personality made it easier for him to pass himself off as ‘liking a flutter’ rather than having a serious problem, so people didn’t go looking.

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