The U.S. and world have reached a new high/low in moral turpitude: gambling on war [View all]

[usonian]

Iran: The First War With Live Odds
Prediction markets give war a live score with side bets. Iran is the first prediction market war.

https://www.dopaminemarkets.com/p/iran-the-first-war-with-live-odds

Polymarket has 246 active markets on Iran and over $1 billion traded on Iran-related markets. These markets are incredibly granular: not just questions like “will US strike Iran” but the specific count of ships running through the Strait of Hormuz, whether the Shah’s son will return to Iran, whether a ceasefire will be achieved by certain dates, whether Iran will strike Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and whether the nuclear option will be used (though this market was removed after pushback).

snip

With the Iran war, the medium is the money. And money is a fundamentally different kind of medium than a photograph, broadcast, or tweet. It doesn’t show you suffering, it doesn’t show you anything at all. It gives you a number. When you look at Polymarket and see that the probability of a ceasefire by March 31 is 24%, you are not feeling anything about the people living under bombardment, you are processing a probability, evaluating whether 24% is too high or too low, maybe thinking about placing a trade, or maybe refreshing the page the way you’d refresh a score during a playoff game. Most people watching these odds aren’t betting, they’re spectating. Watching these numbers move is engaging the way a stock ticker is engaging or a live score is engaging, not engaging the way a photograph of a bombed hospital is engaging.

Last week, Polymarket made that experience physical: they opened a pop-up bar in Washington DC called “The Situation Room”.




Eighty screens, a six-foot globe, Bloomberg terminals, flight radar, live prediction market odds on the walls, and they described it as “a sports bar, but just for situation monitoring.” War is now entertainment: watching live odds change when a leader announces a military strike is not so far from watching a wide receiver score an unexpected touchdown.

Neil Postman spent the 1980s warning that television would turn all serious public discourse into entertainment, framing it as a contest between Orwell and Huxley: Orwell feared the government would ban books and suppress truth, while Huxley feared nobody would need to ban anything because the public would be so drowned in information and amusement that truth would become irrelevant, lost in a sea of noise. Postman thought Huxley was winning, and he was right.

I have to wonder. To SOME, brutality and murder are entertainment.





To others, everything is wagering.



Flabbergasted.

Will people be flabbergasted enough to stop the orange monster?



Or just wager on the time and manner of his demise, and whether or not he drops a nuke (a wager which Polymarket won't take)

A little over 80 years ago...
https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-53648572



Lives? They don't matter. Just

and Thank you for your inattention to my madness
I count on your complacency,