Of all the bad shit Temer (who came to power after Dilma’s coup) did in Brazil, legalizing sports betting without any kind of regulation is probably the worst.
Any economic gain Brazil had after COVID have been funneled out to those sites. Can only hope Lula do something about it soon.
I didn’t expect a struggle session or treat defending in a thread about international corporate-scale fucking sports gambling.
What is even left to be leftist about if someone is totally fine with ever-growing sports gambling conglomerates destroying the livelihoods (and even the lives) of individuals and everyone around them while performing one of the most direct poor-to-rich wealth transfers there is?
it’s driving me nuts lol. sorry to debatelord but clearly people learned that drug prohibition doesn’t work (true) and are drawing a complete false equivalency here.
Also drug prohibition did worked in socialism so there is yet another layer of liberal-churned grey matter on it.
I had actually never even thought of drug prohibition in socialist countries. Fuck my life, maybe the problem isn’t drug prohibition, and it’s bourgeois governments fucking again… Do you have any interesting read on this?
I swear, mate, every time I read your comments you’re unfathomably based, thank you for that
Thank you.
The thing about drugs needs to be really expanded on other similar things - tobacco, alcohol, gambling etc. Sure all those are as old as humanity in this or that form, but you can notice in history, wherever those become a systemic problem, there’s always a ruling class organising, promoting and profiting from those.
As a Pole, great example of this is alcohol. Up till maybe XVII-XVIII century it wasn’t even a problem for most society, because only richer people were able to afford strong alcohol like wine*, peasants and burghers drank beer that had more common with the ancient beer than modern one - that it was very weak but also dense and caloric. Then, during the XVII-XVIII centuries, in the age where nobility was experimenting with myriad ways of exploiting peasants, propination privilege was born. Nobles were forcing peasants to trade only with them, and that include beer, so of course peasants get forbidden for making their own beer, but had to buy from the noble, so quality dropped like stone (there are sources saying it was so disgusting people were afraid to drink it) and price increased, also it was sold obligatory, every peasant had to buy. Then the vodka made from grains appeared and it allowed for even more profits, also nobles started to pay peasants** in vodka. This of course caused immediate epidemic of alcoholism that got way worse when cities get under similar boot, and it was so bad in XIX century that it got enshrined in culture. (all this was very similar in Russia)
This is very important point, because it explains how hard is to get rid of it. Every Polish state, from II RP, through PRL to current Poland tries to do something with it, and, as many opinions here would tell, failed, but it’s only when having binary look at this. You can’t just eradicate plague so entrenched, but even the mere act of state stopping promoting alcohol did a lot to contain the issue. Though you can argue, and you would be right, that all three of those states did promote alcohol by owning or allowing for selling, advertising etc. But then you could notice that after 100 years the issue is much less severe than it was in 1918. There was also some half measures, both in form of antialcohol educational and administrative campaigns in PRL, which did had their effects or even partial prohibition efforts. Last one is pretty interesting, it was prohibition fo selling alcohol before 1PM, which seems superficial but it greatly reduced the most dangerous (and common then) aspect of alcoholism, people getting drunk in work. And this also after a time got into culture and regulations so now drinking in work is very rare (even though the partial prohibition was abolished long ago, arguing that it fulfilled its role).
The similar is with drugs and gambling, there was not much problem with those in socialism, even though PRL did the usual forms of state gambling like lotteries, because there was not much supply, not much promotion and not even much demand. All three increased with liberalisation and increased cultural penetration from the west, to explode when the socialism was destroyed. You probably did saw the horror reports from Russian transformation, Polish was not as horrible but still bad, and it was absolutely clear that all those drugs that suddenly flooded our streets weren’t just conjured from thin air. No, all of this is part of the class war.
*Yes it might sound weird right now, but wine was considered strong alcohol for most of history (and it was usually even weaker than most modern wines) - for example ancient Greeks watered it down so much that getting drunk took them hours of pretty fast drinking, and Gauls shocked entire Mediterranean world by drinking unwatered wine (and they soon learned to water it down so medieval and later French were also often watering it heavily). Of course stronger alcohols like brandy was known, but it was expensive and rare. Vodka appeared on a noticeable scale around XVII century (and it was expensive and real shit, it was falsified with everything from pepper through gunpowder to sulphuric acid). Only mass and incredibly cheap destilation methods invented during the industrial revolution cause strong alcohols to spread like crazy.
**For their grain usually, not for labour, at this point serfdom was so far going that a peasant family was obligated to unpaid work even 32 workdays per week. Even totally landless and destitute peasants were obligated to work 4-5 days per week.
Finally, i’m currently reading excellent book about serfdom and generally condition of peasants in Poland, i might write a short review after i finish.
Thanks for the detailed comment, and I’d love to read your little review on the book when you’re done.
Thinking about it, you make a very compelling point. How do we pretend to try and fight gambling, while allowing literal private companies to profit from it. I didn’t think about the complexity and price of alcohol distillation up until the industrial revolution, and it’s interesting to know that for most of history, distilled drinks weren’t a thing for the vast majority of the population. Honestly, good for them. Low alcohol content beers are much much harder to get alcoholic on, than hard liquor. I lived in Germany for a while, and I was horrified at a common practice in supermarkets: next to every cashier, they have a little shelf full of little booze bottles and cigarette packs. How is that fucking legal, it’s extremely obviously targeted to addicts, and it’s honestly shameful that people in Germany don’t fight to forbid that.
About wine being considered high alcohol content, I did know that too, reading some historic novels about the second punic war (the trilogy of Scipio, by a Spanish writer called Santiago Posteguillo) and about Julia Domna (also by Posteguillo), it was clear thay Romans considered drinking wine without watering down to be a thing for barbarians. Funnily enough, in contemporary Spain, a very popular summer drink is “tinto de verano”, which is a mixture of wine with a slightly sweet soda water called “gaseosa”, so I guess we still run with it at least partially (many people do drink wine with meals).
All in all, yeah, I’ll definitely dedicate some time and possibly research to looking into prohibition of certain addictions such as some drugs or gambling in socialist countries… Interesting shit. Thanks again mate, always a pleasure to see you around
I lived in Germany for a while, and I was horrified at a common practice in supermarkets: next to every cashier, they have a little shelf full of little booze bottles and cigarette packs.
Same in Poland, and all the cheap fruit wines, commonly called “brainscrambler” or “brainfucker” - on a sidenote, Janusz Palikot, one of most notable Polish liberal succdem politicians (though now he’s sidelined) made a fortune producing and selling them.
Also drug prohibition did worked in socialism
Did it?
“Sergei Lebedev, the Chairman of the Association of Independent Advocates in Leningrad at the time, argued that the steady escalation of criminal penalties for drug use was ‘indicative of the Soviet authorities’ resignation to their complete inability to solve drug problems in a constructive and humane way’.” (Wikipedia).
Yes it did. Increase was involved with growing liberalisation of USSR and allowing more and more culture from the west. This do happen when you have imperialist powers and capitalist class using and promoting drugs against working class. You can compare to what happened in all socialist states after system change. Better would be looking at modern China and hundreds of millions of opium addicts in it. Wait, there aren’t hundreds of millions opium addicts there now, i wonder what happened after 1949, surely Mao just didn’t forbid them their fun?
There’s a consistency at its core: “making something illegal doesn’t make it impossible, therefore nothing should be illegal, especially if it’s a treat I like.”
i have to say i get the urge cause I’m an alcoholic and a smoker but I recognise in a utopian view of the future those things are hopefully going away lol. it’s a knee jerk reactionary urge that ppl need to learn to recognise and fight in themselves
I feel the same way.
I have my own vices, and it would be particularly selfish of me to believe that because they’re my vices that they aren’t harmful ones and everyone should be into mine.
I forget the exact stats on it, but gambling addiction is especially destructive to people’s lives even compared with other major addictions. Also, on a petty treat-fiend note, it has made sports so much fucking shittier.
Also, on a petty treat-fiend note, it has made sports so much fucking shittier.
Any restrictions on the treats whatsover is wrong and bad because Prohibition and everything can be compared to Prohibition so regulations bad in general. I am very leftist.
It’s also ruining sports, the advertising is everywhere and extremely tacky, while contributing to the financial ruin of the poorest in society. If I see another HollywoodBets advert I will
Specifically, for every $1 spent on betting, households put $2 less into investment accounts. States see big increases in the risk of overdrafting a bank account or maxing out a credit card. These effects are strongest among already precarious households.
Fake society with fake finance. This is terrible.
Looking specifically at online sports gambling, they find that legalization increases the risk that a household goes bankrupt by 25 to 30 percent, and increases debt delinquency. These problems seem to concentrate among young men living in low-income counties—further evidence that those most hurt by sports gambling are the least well-off.
Yeah definitely. I see it all the time with soccer/football.
Matsuzawa and Arnesen extend this, finding that in states where sports betting is legal, the effect is even bigger. They estimate that legal sports betting leads to a roughly 9 percent increase in intimate-partner violence.
…
Legalization isn’t yielding many benefits, either. Tax revenue—one of the major justifications for legalization—has been anemic, with all 38 legal states combined making only about $500 million from it a quarter, less than alcohol, tobacco, or marijuana
Of course, these gambling operations are great at avoiding taxes, setting up their operation to be off shore on official paperwork, in office buildings that don’t exist.
But some fairweather leftists that by their own admission despise most people enjoy the corporate sports gambling treats so fuck you, they got theirs.
Lmao, I just started listening to this and they immediately compare it to legalizing heroin and giving control of the heroin industry to tobacco companies, with the implication that that would obviously be incredibly bad.
Turns out half the people in this thread think that that’s a great idea actually.
It’s a lot less than half, judging by the upvotes. Still, didn’t expect this to be controversial at all.
Yeah, that was a bit of an exaggeration, I think I was just shocked a bit by how much pushback “giant particularly evil capitalist enterprise bad” got
I got a lot of shit for talking about treatbrain before, but I am going to keep talking about it because that shit stops any attempt to improve society somewhat before it can even start.
See how much mass rejection there was for covid restrictions once treats felt too inconvenient to access? That reactive effect could doom us all, nonjokingly.
I don’t really see much “treatbrain” here, I doubt many people here enjoy sports gambling, or gambling in general. I think it’s just that, somewhat understandably, the failure of the war on drugs in the US has made most western leftists hyper-libertarian on vice regulation. It’s an attitude I’ve seen a lot even with otherwise smart comrades. Decades of people getting thrown in jail for possessing a small amount of marijuana kinda does that to people.
I doubt many people here enjoy sports gambling, or gambling in general.
Why doubt it?
Is there some specific inoculation present in the people on Hexbear that makes them less likely to gamble or to become addicted to gambling, particularly from addiction-intended phone apps?
I never see people here talk about it. Unlike other “treats”. If they were defending it out of personal enjoyment I’d expect people to cite that more rather than argue more from an ideological libertarian point of view.
I’m not going to lie, I’ve been very anti treatbrain rhetoric in the past but I think this thread has broken me of that. I’m genuinely unsure how we got to this point, never expected so many Hexbear to defend DraftKings like this
I’m genuinely unsure how we got to this point, never expected so many Hexbear to defend DraftKings like this
It’s a simple but powerful motivational force: they got theirs. That’s all there is to it. The sports betting app went beepbeep, pleasure centers of the brain activated, defensive tendencies engaged if the source of pleasure is criticized.
Many such cases.
EDIT: Or, maybe, it’s just some ideological puritanism that requires no restrictions on absolutely any treats because of dae le Prohibition bad.
Oh my God then they started talking about self-identified socialists now having a libertarian streak and thinking restrictions on people’s actions by a Nanny State are bad.
citations needed don’t miss
Oh my God then they started talking about self-identified socialists now having a libertarian streak and thinking restrictions on people’s actions by a Nanny State are bad.
Many such cases, including on Hexbear. Fucks’ sake, I once had an ugly prolonged knock-down drag-out posting fight with some asshole that insisted they absolutely needed their two-stroke gas powered leaf blower and gave me the full arsenal of “no veggies for dinner, no bedtimes” selfish bullshit talking points all the while.
Yeah, just it felt like deja vu listening to it. It’s like they used a time machine to read this thread before recording their intro.
Gambling is perhaps the most egregious example of a naked wealth transfer from the poor to the rich
Second only to landlording
Is wage labor not naked enough?
I love that all of this started when a couple of techbros started illegal fantasy football betting apps, made a shitload of money by further impoverishing the impoverished, then used their ill gotten gains to buy off legislators. Now i am sure they are billionaires, instead of what they deserve which is execution
Uber basically proved you could operate any app outside the law with impunity. Shit rules.
Yeah - the article says “for the dozen states, including Texas and California, where sports gambling is still illegal, the solution is simple: change nothing,” but because of these apps, it’s trivially easy for Californians to gamble on sports.
there’s a good (extremely bleak) trueanon on this ep 209 , also they recommended a book that sounds great addiction by design haven’t read but on my list a while
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
And the ads are fucking everywhere. Entire train stations with every square inch of advertising space plastered with Jamie Foxx or whatever washed up scumbag piece of shit actor they could find.
If I ever run into someone that’s an absolutist for “let people enjoy things” thought terminating cliches, I am quite likely to point toward sports gambling the way Spongebob pointed at all the dirty diapers hidden around and outside the house.
My response to that is “well I enjoy being a hater”.
I often say “let people criticize things” or remind them that the webcomic maker who first said “let people enjoy things” decided that comic was a mistake.
Rare Adam Ellis W
I also saw this. I wonder how much the legal gambling also just opened up pandoras box. I think that a lot of people, especially whales, end up on offshore sites anyways because of better odds and less overall rake. And of course there are also underground sportsbooks still for the biggest players, like Shohei Ohtani’s former interpreter who got caught gambling millions of stolen money this spring.
And also, even in CA there are “fantasy games” (tickpick, underdog, even jake paul is affiliated with one of them) and there are “social gambling” sites that use the “sweepstakes” loophole, such as fliff sportsbook and chumba casino. These ones, you pay money for a “fun currency” and you also get “sweeps cash” that is basically a premium currency on their site that can be gambled for real cash. But even the off shore sites are pretty heavily advertised on social media, such as stake and bovada.
Regardless of the actual mechanisms of gambling that are available in your state, the prevalence of the advertising is nauseating. Draftkings/mgm/fanduel ads are all over sports stadiums. Beyond that though, some channels, especially ESPN, show tons of actual odds during their broadcast alongside an ad for their own platform, espnbet. The massive influx of gambling money is tainting sports overall.
Im glad my favorite sports franchise has yet to take any gambling ads, but still when they have a game on ESPN i have to put up with the odds bullshit, in addition to everything else that is total garbage about that channel.
Also, players themselves are being harassed on the field and online by people blaming them for a bet that didnt hit. Some players even received cash app requests to pay back a bet that they ruined.
I dont think it will be banned in mosr states, but congress should have the power to at least curb the advertising specifically, because that should fall under interstate commerce.
I live in CA, a state that still hosts a lottery, another form of expooitative gambling that should be banned or severely restricted. No need to have slot machines on paper at every gas station and convenience store.
congress should have the power to at least curb the advertising specifically
All advertisement needs to be banned
making gambling illegal is harm reduction.
Yes
Also, lotteries are horrid and seeing them used to fund basic state functions makes me gag.
I heard somewhere, I wanna say
that the idea that lotteries fund schools isn’t even true.Like, if property tax generated X dollars for local schools, and then a lottery was introduced that produced Y dollars, instead of schools now getting X+Y dollars, they still get X and you either give Y amount of dollars from the budget to something we don’t want to say the lottery is funding, like police budgets or something, since the dollars are all fungible, or you reduce property taxes by Y dollars.
Meaning that generally, what it actually does, rather than providing a new revenue stream for your kid’s school, is move the tax burden from the rich to the poor.
Yes exactly. Anyone who supports this kind of thing needs to listen to this one.
Sports people are more concerning to me than gamers.
Oh no is it time for this struggle session again
Maybe you’re on to something. When’s the last time
burned down a city block over the outcome of a MOBA match?I’ve never seen a gamer eat literal shit as a celebratory act.
I think the question to ask about this is why it’s such a unique problem to america. Much like guns.
Here in the UK 15% of men do online gambling and 4% of women. Ok so the top line of data says that 40% of people do gambling but this is only because of scratchcards at petrol stations. When you remove these it drops to 15 and 4.
Why is this situation so significantly worse in america? What is unique about american society and culture that causes 33% of americans to be betting on sports, let alone other stuff?
Spanish here, absolutely not a unique problem to the US of A. Betting joints popped up EVERYWHERE some 5-10 years ago
Nor exclusive of the US, Brazil is loosing billions of dollars each year to that.
40%+ of people gambling on scratchoffs or the lottery is also quite bad tbh
I don’t know about the societal effects but you might want to consider if it’s just normalized, not actually better
I really don’t think spending a quid once a week on a scratchcard is much of an issue though.
is that what the data says is happening over there though? genuinely curious bc i worked at a convenience store (in the U.S.) for a while and people would routinely come in and dump their entire paychecks on scratch-offs. and then usually they’d spend their winnings on more.
yeah I mean, if that’s all it is, obviously its a relatively trivial issue. But when you extrapolate that to almost half of the population you are still exploiting people for a huge amount of profit (see elsewhere in the thread about the misleading ways it’s sold as being for funding services or charities when often they receive no additional funds), acting as a regressive tax, and some percentage (at least like 3%) of those people are going to develop a serious gambling problem, and having gambling be widely available and normalized makes it much much harder for those people to stop.
But I believe its more heavily regulated in the UK so it may not be nearly as bad as the new wild west situation in the US.
Supreme court struck down a law banning sports gambling in 2018 on the logic that “illegal gambling is already happening, might as well make it legal and cut out the criminals!”. The now-legal betting companies started pushing a non-stop torrent of pro-gambling ads immediately.
Australia is also pretty bad, see below:
“illegal gambling is already happening, might as well make it legal and cut out the criminals!”
That SAME FUCKING TAKE is in THIS THREAD, RIGHT NOW.
So is the problem marketing?
I don’t know what differences lie in the marketing that is allowed here vs US.
I think the apps originated in silicon valley, so they had tons of money behind them that was willing to make a marketing push. Ads for them were already present as early as 2015 IIRC, even when they were still technically illegal, but nobody got arrested that I know of.
I wonder if it’s a case of them not really having culturally/socially adjusted to it like everyone else has. .
That and there’s also a lot more sports going on that are insanely popular/that people are engaged with. Here it’s mostly just football and horses. There its NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, NCAA and to a lesser extent: MLS, WNBA and NASCAR.
Maybe partially? It’s been legal here since the 60s.
Its also a major issue elsewhere. Australia for example has a pretty horrific gambling problem and the government rolled back promises to ban gambling advertising.
Our brains our broken. I don’t know how else to put it. They turn us into husks. Myself included.
The UK is going to get a lot worse with all the betting advertising in football. Pretty much every second Premier League team has a betting sponsor at the moment. The marketing campaign has intensified and I can see those statistics doubling within the next few years.
“Capitalism with American Characteristics” is a disease that is poisoning every part of society. I believe it breeds desperation and a “fuck it” attitude and drives people to reckless behavior, aggression, and distrust of others.
I’m not immune. I kind of hate most people, especially here. Society sucks, most people suck.
I kind of hate most people, especially here. Society sucks, most people suck.
Considering your already-stated complete apathy toward other people’s suffering because you want unmitigated and unregulated sports gambling because you enjoy it and fuck everyone else you got yours, you’re voluntarily contributing to that “society sucks” problem here.
Capitalism with American Characteristics
I think this is an interesting thing to discuss. Honestly we could do this for a lot of countries but for America especially. It’s probably useful to normalise talking this way about socialism too.
This would’ve been alright if you still had to like go to an official to place bets. The problem is there’s a fucking casino in your pocket now and they’ve been given free reign to advertise to everyone on everything
nah, any bookie or house or casino needs to go. There shouldn’t be any “officials” allowed to take bets whatsoever, as this leads to gambling industry. Small scale bets between individuals is fine, but once a house is involved and taking a cut it’s crossed the line
i mean i agree, obviously gambling is inherently predatory when there’s a house.
my thought is mostly that the concept of “legalizing sports betting” is one thing, while legalizing pocket casinos and smashing you across the head with advertising is another.
like hell, at least if you had to go to a bookie it’s something to do, you’re getting out of the fucking house. this is just sitting on your ass and pissing your money away without even a walk outside to speak of. it’s bleak
