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Americans increasingly see legal sports betting as a bad thing for society
(www.pewresearch.org)
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this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2025
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Right, and pro sports influences kids, and gambling makes the pro leagues dirty as hell. So you can think it's irrelevant, but it still influences your community.
It absolutely does not. I'm not American, so all of that is based on weird, unapplicable, culturally-specific fixations.
Sports betting here has been available under government sanction offline for the better part of a century, it has its own complicated history and the way it interplays with online betting is quite different and has different impacts.
Not that it would matter much, it's still fundamentally irrelevant. "Will someone think of the children two steps removed from the thing I'm advocating against" is the oldest, dumbest political manipulation tool and this isn't even a particularly good application of it. But even if that wasn't a huge stretch... man, in the context of... you know, the current state of the planet, it ranks somewhere next to "do you think there's more empy air in Cheeto bags specifically these days" in my personal scale of urgency.
The main market for these apps are 18-25 year olds who are losing a lot of money on it, and like porn I doubt they're just starting at 18. Even if they are i still consider them kids as there brains haven't fully developed yet.
Even the younger children are being bombarded with ads for them whenever they watch a game. Watch any American sports game and you'll see that every other commercial, and every square inch of the screen that's not the game is for sports betting. Children are very vulnerable to advertising.
Cool.
So most of that post doesn't apply to the point I'm making because, honestly, the issue is with sports in the first place, so the argument is about sports being trivial and that whole thing is irrelevant anyway.
But I am setting that aside because "young adults are children because it is convenient to the point I'm making and besides I bet they start before they're 18 anyway and will somebody think of the 25 year old children, and also porn bad" is such an intellectually dishonest argument that suddenly I don't care that somebody at Pew is annoyed at gambling ads during sports to the point of deploying subtle headline manipulation. I'm more concerned with what you're on and trying to make you understand why you should make a genuine point instead of wrapping yourself in demagoguery, because maaaan.
Do you know what betting is? The point is to turn the trivial and irrelevant into high stakes and relevant. Flipping a coin is trivial, but if you bet $100,000 that it will be heads, then that coin flip matters a lot more.
I didn't say porn was bad, I was just using it as an example of something kids aren't allowed to do but obviously do anyway. I don't give a fuck if children watch porn, that's actually trivial because most of the time they aren't losing anything and they arent being bombarded with ads for it everywhere they go.
I stand by what I said about 18-25 year old, especially for young men they're judgement on risk is horrible and having billion dollar companies exploiting that is wrong. I'm not arguing for Banning it, just for the companies to stop the predatory behavior and ads. In general I think we need to ban all ads for addictive substances / behaviors as it harms those with addictive tendencies.
Yeah, well, I stand by that being disingenuous, intellectually dishonest crap. It'd feel weird giving the mostly technically correct Ipsos/Pew survey a hard time for a shaky headline but giving you a pass for outright manipulative demagoguery, so this is me not giving you a pass.
Both your replies seem very light on arguments and refutations and heavy on name calling, so i don't think intellectual honesty is something you're a good judge of.
Absolutely not the case. See, what's happening is you went "will somebody think of the 25 year old children", I said that's a disingenuous argument and you went "will somebody think of the 25 year old children" again. My not engaging with the disingenuous argument isn't "light on arguments and refutations", it's me refusing to argue the issue on the disingenuous terms you are presenting.
Which is an argument I find pointless in the first place because my point wasn't about... 25 year old children being seduced by sweet, sweet sports gambling, it was that the Pew survey results were presented in a surprisingly skewed way that is representative of that exact "think of the children" falacy, regardless of the merits of the argument.