If you play without any strategy, you lose a lot of money very quickly. If you play with perfect strategy, you lose money very slowly. With perfect strategy, you can win enough in blackjack to get hooked on gambling, whereas there’s less of the intermittent reward involved in lottery tickets.

These days, casinos are trying to eliminate “skill” from blackjack entirely. You’ll have six decks, and as soon as a hand is done, everything gets shuffled back together. That makes counting cards practically impossible, even with perfect playing. Counting cards mostly works when you’re playing with a single deck, and it doesn’t get shuffled immediately after each hand.

Politics are an interesting issue, although not a class. California, for instance, prohibits employment discrimination based on engaging in certain protected political activities. So if you attended a Nazi rally, you might be legally protected in California from having your employment terminated.

See my other comment.

It is not a recognized disorder.

…It’s present as “a condition for further study”, which is not the same thing as an official diagnosis. (source)[https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/here-there-and-everywhere/201407/internet-gaming-disorder-in-dsm-5]

Sure, it’s ‘present’ in the DSM-V, but it’s still not a diagnosis.

Cite your sources.

The same “problems” would apply to video games, Facebook/IG/TikTok, etc., and even reading books. It’s certainly true for people that are avoidant and use shopping or gambling, and yet those aren’t addictions either.

No, you didn’t. You believed you did, because Judeo-Christian fundamentalists convinced you that you did, in order to sell you their cure. You’re actively promoting their talking points, as well as the talking points of the alt-right.

How many people can you find that are licensed clinical psychologists, that are trained and specialize in sexual disorders, that use an evidence-based approach to treatment–not a spiritual-based or spiritually-aware approach–that promote the idea that there is “porn addiction”?

I’ve met people with behavioural disorders, sure, but not “mental addictions”, since an addiction requires a physical component.

I think you can broadly say that a genuine addiction starts because it’s pleasant, and then continues because stopping causes you to actively feel bad. E.g., you keep smoking because the withdrawal from nicotine is pretty shitty, and takes a week or so to get past (although the behavioural component to the addiction can take weeks or months). Masturbation and porn use doesn’t fall into that model at all; the consequences of not masturbating is that you don’t feel something pleasant, not that things start hurting.

It’s simply not in the same category as alcoholism, or addiction to nicotine, opiates, etc. People that call it that do so for for moral reasons, not because it’s a legitimate medical issue. If you speak to a psychologist that is trained in and specializes in sexual disorders–again, not one that’s using a religious/spiritual approach, but one that’s evidence-based–you are unlikely to find anyone that regards it as a legitimate disorder unless you’re doing things like masturbating at your desk at work 3-4 times/day, or needing to pull your car over on the way to work to compulsively masturbate.

And yet you’re the one following Judeo-Christian beliefs about morality.

Huh.

Found the Christian.

You think you consume an unhealthy amount of pornography, because that’s the message that you’re hearing from religiously-motivated sources. (Groups like “Fight The New Drug” are funded and staffed by Mormons, which meets all the criteria for a high-demand religion, AKA cult.) It’s the way that you conceptualize your use of pornography, rather than your consumption of pornography, that is the problem. When you compare self-described “porn addicts” to average people that do not label themselves as addicts, their consumption is most typically either identical, or slightly below average.

Your anxieties about “[not] be[ing] able to get it up for a real person” are what is likely to cause problems because that’s going to interfere with your arousal levels.

There is no such thing as “mental addiction”.

Porn addiction isn’t a thing. It’s made-up bullshit by people that buy into Judeo-Christian morality regarding sexual “purity”. There are reasons that it didn’t make it into DSM-V, and won’t make it into DSM-VI either. The porn and masturbation isn’t the problem, it’s how people feel about it, and how they reconcile it with their own beliefs in morality, which is not even remotely the same as being addicted to opiates or nicotine.

I’m confused here. To me, it looks like China has entirely sacrificed communism in favor of commerce, and is using the power of a one-party system to keep workers lives shitty in order to dominate global manufacturing. There’s no communism at all, there’s just power and wealth being grabbed by the governing party.

Sometimes on Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, or similar. If you like mid-century modern, and are willing to reupholster, you can often find 50 year old pieces at estate sales and such. But new? Ain’t happening.

OP has clearly never priced out solid wood furniture. A single mission-style sofa–by which I mean something made using Gustav Stickley’s plans–will typically retail for well over $3000 US. …Such as this version–from the original Stickley company–that has an MSRP of >$9000

I’ve heard this same concept expressed as, “we walk backwards into the future”. We can’t see what’s coming, only what has happened. (We can predict what’s coming based on what’s happened, but there’s always uncertainty.)

…And?

Murder can be just without being legal.

The murder of billionaires, and CEOs of oil companies (along with all other oil executives) is morally justified, even if it’s not legal.