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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2866 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 22, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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On a slight tangent. Is anyone else annoyed by conservatives' vilification of porn and video games?

It's not that I don't see the harm of those things. But they are the effect, not the cause. People turn to porn and video games as an escape from a shitty boring life. They can bring forth a shitty boring life in sufficient quantities, but criticizing the effect seems like pure laziness (and borderline grifting). The real cause is an order of magnitude more difficult to address.

At this point, porn has become an applause light for a subset of the online right. Which they extend to many other forms of technology as well (like AI???).

A shitty life is hard to solve, being poor and sick are real hurdles, being bored is another matter.

If you have a range of options going from fulfilling but difficult to unfulfilling but easy it's hard not to say that going with the latter is the cause and not just the effect of your life being unfulfilling.

And people do have options. Opportunity costs aside books are basically free, volunteering in a totally new type of work and dealing with new types of people is free, travel is expensive but if you've already got a shitty job you won't be sacrificing much in terms of material conditions. There is a whole lot of challenge in these options and they might not provide ultimate fulfillment (though there's something to be learned from the search), but they're surely more fulfilling than being stuck in a rut of heavy gaming and porn addiction.

Books are literally free if you have a computer or a phone. I mostly use annas-archive.org now, it has libgen and zlib's contents

I don’t think that’s right. Gambling has been a problem in every culture where it was permitted. If it is available it will trap men, as it did to important men of history like Tesla and Mozart. It’s a superstimuli, So it will be inherently addictive regardless of what is going on in a culture. Video games are a hyper-extension of gambling, involving all the same cognition but with added superstimuli.

Porn, like gambling, is also a superstimuli. No matter how healthy your culture is, superstimuli activity will always be more desirable by definition. It doesn’t matter how hot your wife is if you can see a variety of the world’s most attractive women by clicking a few buttons.

I would say these things are definitively in the category of “causes”, just like the availability of opiates and alcohol are also causes. If every human had the ability to click a button and be administered an opiate, probably half the world would be addicted, because human nature involves occasional lapses in judgment and willpower.

It’s a bit odd how gambling is hardly mentioned in the Bible. Was the addictive technology that makes it so dangerous not invented yet?

I think gambling preys on what makes people successful in more modern societies.

When people get into trouble it's often best to ignore negative setbacks, focus on the positive, knuckle down and work hard.

In more primitive societies people are at the mercy of the elements. If you're a peasant and there's a major crop failure right before winter, working hard won't make anything better. Starvation is coming and you just have to curl up and endure until spring.

Invasions are similar, hide until the problem goes away.

That is odd.

I wonder when gambling really gains traction in the West. Wikipedia is pretty barren. You’ve got 5,000-year-old dice from the Middle East, then nothing until the Renaissance. Except further down it says that Aquinas and friends were debating the subject.

Ah, here we go. The Romans were, of course, really into gambling.

Maybe it’s an urban thing. The biggest cities, and the most developed economies, were the ones which saw gambling as a larger phenomenon?

The conflict in the Mahabarata, which could be loosely described as a Hindu holy book, is instigated when the evil uncle and cousin lure the emperor into a dice game with weighted dice. The way it's described (at least in the translation I've read) paints the emperor as fairly blame-free as he bets successively more and more on the dice game trying to chase his losses to the point where he loses his kingdom. The responsibility lies chiefly with the uncle and cousin who made the gambling available.

That’s interesting. I did some googling and don’t see a lot of mentions of gambling from Ancient Israel. It would be a sin by consequence though, falling under foolishness / love of money

With gambling I think back to when I was a kid, and it was perfectly possible for a middle class American to gamble any time they wanted, you just had to take a trip to Atlantic City, Vegas, or one of the Indian reservations. Because it was in a designated area, and most people need to take an overnight trip to get there, there was a romance and occasion to it.

There's something miserable about video poker machines in gas stations that I just can't get behind. About windowless off track betting parlors. And gambling on your phone removes all the positives you might be paying for at a casino: the atmosphere, the occasion, the trip, the social conviviality and adventure. It replaces it all with the bare fact of pissing money away.

And maybe I'm just glorifying my childhood, addicts still fucked things up, but it seems like we had a good compromise and fucked it up.

A funny modern development is gambling streamers. Twitch, the incumbent in streaming, banned gambling a while ago, but it draws enough users to gambling that Stake, an online gambling company, funded an entire twitch competitor - Kick - just to bring back gambling streams. They also pay popular streamers to gamble on kick. The streams themselves are apparently entertaining enough to draw tens of thousands of viewers per stream, which is comparable to e.g. many millions of youtube views. To me, it's strange - you're just sitting there as slots, tiles stream by and sometimes match up, and someone else's finances do a random walk. (While the losses the streamer makes are real in one sense, it's more than compensated for by their pay). And the streamer isn't even pulling a 'lever' with their finger, it's fully automated. (As this vod demonstrates - letters and colors fall for a full hour next to an empty chair). I understand the appeal of watching the talented play sports and esports. I understand the thrill of gambling. But when you've taken out both the skill and the risk, what's even left?

I found a few years ago that I enjoy watching gacha pull streams and videos on Twitch and YouTube, much to my surprise. Gacha pulls being video game slot machines where in-game currency (purchasable with real currency, of course) is exchanged for a chance at acquiring an in-game character or item. I had expected to have no interest given the purely random nature of it, but that was not my experience at all.

One big thing I noticed was that there was a lot of fun in the vicarious thrill of both the high highs and the low lows. IRL and in video games, I hate gambling. The last time I went to a casino, I stuck to the $1 tables, and I don't spend money for pulls in gacha games. The streamers and YouTubers whose pull videos I watch tend to be whales who regularly spend $hundreds in a sitting just for a chance at getting some video game characters (and sometimes just for minor buffs for characters they already have), and it's fun to vicarious experience someone else's thrill of winning big or their despair of an extended losing streak without actually putting my money on the line.

Another big thing is the streamer or YouTuber themselves. Creating reaction content is a skill, and the way these people react to their randomly-generated victories and defeats can be quite entertaining to watch. I imagine these are factors that provide appeal for streams involving actual gambling.

But when you've taken out both the skill and the risk, what's even left?

Distraction? Sort of association with money?

100% There's a already lot of good evidence already backing the idea that gambling in a convenience store, or even worse, on a phone, is uniquely addicting in a way destination gambling is not. I actually turned down a job with DraftKings earlier this year because I think their business model is hugely predatory.

No I agree, unfortunately it became an arms race between the states and municipalities for tax revenue until most restrictions on gambling location were removed.

They are both the effect and the cause, as are most things. Those underlying causes have their own underlying causes too; is it thus illegitimate to truly blame anything but the boundary conditions of the universe?

If we legislated that everyone carry around syringes of morphine in their pockets at all times, a lot more people would get addicted to morphine. From a consequentialist standpoint I see no issue with blaming porn, which is actually fairly low-level, e.g. closer to cause and farther from effect than most things we villify.

This is a longstanding problem on the American right, Moldbug discussed it back in the day (and he was far from the first). American conservatism (since 1776) is essentially saying “👉👈what if we just stopped liberalism right here?”, where ‘here’ is Current Year Minus 10/20/50/100. Admitting that 1776 leads pretty inexorably to 2023 is beyond the pale for the American right (even the far right) outside of hardcore tradcaths and NrX types like Yarvin.

Because of this, it’s always about the symptom rather than the cause. Soyfacing about abolishing Drag Queen Story Hour makes them feel good, even though to a child raised in modern American culture its presence or absence will make exactly 0 difference to their own political or cultural (or sexual/gender) identity when everything else is saying the same message, even on the right (“be who you want to be”, individualism, freedom, personal liberty prioritized above community and society). As perhaps the English-speaking world’s most famous late 20th century conservative said, “there is no such thing as society”. US ‘conservatives’ take this to heart and so are incapable of diagnosing the root causes you describe.

And while hypocrisy is universal, it’s very important to remember that the young men cheering on porn band or whatever are usually current or former hardcore gooners themselves and so are really talking about themselves and their issues with self control more than the grand arc of liberal modernity.

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