And "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law", does not mean "you can do anything you want", it's much, much closer in meaning to the famous quote from the Upanishads (Crowley largely felt that much of esoterism was basically, as Dion Fortune put it "Yoga of the West"):

> “You are what your deepest desire is. As is your desire, so is your intention. As is your intention, so is your will. As is your will, so is your deed. As is your deed, so is your destiny.”

But HN has increasingly been about having vigorous, opinionated discussion on a surface level understanding of topics (plus a growing number of AI participants), so I'm not sure there's much benefit to pointing it out.

> generally speaking, gambling more than a token sum (say, less than $100) should not be legal exactly because any benefits of gambling is far outweighed by the mountains of externalities it brings. Yes, this includes the obvious incentives to threaten random people. It's bad for society, so it should be effectively banned.

I agree with you in theory, but remember that people frequently do illegal things, just illegally. If we assume that people will in practice gamble whether or not it's legal, I'd rather the gambling not be run by organized crime free from the ability of everyone else to oversee and regulate. That would be the same thing which happened with alcohol during Prohibition and which happens now with the many illegal drugs fueling today's Mexican cartels and US gang networks.

> The only reason why it has suddenly become legal everywhere in the US is because many states have found themselves under mountains of deferred liabilities and are scrambling to raise revenues however they can without raising taxes.

And because of a SCOTUS ruling overturning a federal prohibition on states' ability to legalize sports betting, but otherwise yes.

Excuse my ignorance if otherwise obvious—but how does legalized but untaxed gambling raise any public revenue? Bookie licensing?

Small nit but you probably don't mean to say that you are a "capitalist" here, even if you maybe own some significant capital. Not because its wrong, but it's not what your trying to appeal to (ideological commitment). A "capitalist" can believe in anything really, they are such by virtue of their relation to the overall economy. Its kinda like saying "I'm a digestor of food" instead of "a patron of restaurants."

You are, quite succintly, a liberal in your beliefs here. This is not liberal in the CNN/Fox News sense, in case this comes off offensive.

Name one (1) human activity in your opinion that isn't bad for society

People taking care of cats have done large damage to bird populations and many people are infected with pathogens carried by cats. How many people are killed by dogs each year? Should we ban caring for animals too? There are no 0 harm activities.

Reasonably splitting activities up into subcategories and regulating those makes way more sense. Your $100 attitude is just a shitty, less enforceable and more harmful way to regulate it. Calling the behavior of a system "shameful" is a total copout. You know what else creates negative externalities? (besides everything) DEBT! Why not ban debt, besides a token $100, I'm sure states will function just fine!

Do you have a religion that works on systems/corporations/states? If so I'd love to see it, cause the past 2000 years has been dogshit failure after pathetic failure

Pendantry -- unhelpful and qualitative particularly when we largely agree -- as you clearly reveal in your 2nd paragraph.