I can’t get over the fact that people were casting bets on whether the US would bomb Iran the other day. It just says such dark things about the type of civilization we are living in.
In this dystopia, Americans are never given the option to vote for a president who won’t bomb foreign countries in wars of aggression. But they do have the option to gamble on when those bombs will be dropped.
They’re not allowed to vote against war, militarism and imperialism, but they can go to an app on their smartphone and place bets on how the war, militarism and imperialism will unfold.
Preventing your government from raining military explosives onto foreign countries full of civilians who are just trying to live their lives? No. Thumbs down. You don’t get to do that.
Pouring money into “prediction market” scams like Kalshi and Polymarket with bets on when those military explosives will end the lives of those foreign civilians? Yes. Thumbs up. You are encouraged to do that.
You’re allowed to get rich making an app which lets westerners gamble on military atrocities of immense humanitarian consequence.
You’re allowed to get rich starting a company that manufactures missiles, sells those missiles to the US government, and then pays think tanks and lobbyists to convince US decision makers to use those missiles in gratuitous acts of mass military violence.
You’re allowed to get rich buying stocks in the arms industry and then funding the political campaigns of politicians who pledge to help start wars.
As long as it’s profitable and sits within the extremely broad parameters of acceptable liberal norms, it’s perfectly legal. But when it comes to doing anything that might eat into those profits by making the world a less violent place, there’s not even a viable option at the ballot box.
Our world looks the way it looks because our entire civilization is driven by the mindless pursuit of profit.
It’s profitable to start wars, so the wars never end.
It’s profitable for corporations to destroy the ecosystem and offload the costs of industry onto the environment, so it keeps happening.
It’s profitable for capitalists to keep wages down and worker’s rights at a minimum, so wealth inequality gets worse and worse.
It’s profitable for plutocrats to manipulate legislation and government policy using campaign funding and corporate lobbying, so the government gets more and more corrupt and oligarchic while society gets more and more unjust and oppressive.
As long as we have systems in place which cause mass-scale human behavior to be driven by the pursuit of profit, things are going to keep getting more and more violent, abusive, poisoned, polluted, unjust, unhappy, and dystopian.
This will continue until we as a collective decide we’ve had enough and force new systems into place. Until then the object in motion shall remain in motion.
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