Houston Astros pitcher Lance McCullers had to get the Houston Police Department involved after a drunk overseas bettor told him they would “find my kids and murder them” after his start against the Cincinnati Reds on May 10th, where he gave up seven runs in the first inning. FanDuel said this week that they banned a bettor who posted a video of himself heckling Olympic gold medalist Gabby Thomas at a recent track event. This sad sack of flesh posing as humanity claimed that harassing her “made my parlay win.” These are not isolated incidents, as last year, Los Angeles Clippers forward P.J. Tucker said “it’s getting outrageous…hearing fans yelling at guys about their bets. It’s unreal. It’s a problem. I think it’s something that’s got to be addressed.”
I have a plan to address this shockingly common anti-social behavior from supposed members of civilized society.
Any good political scientist knows that part of your ideology is plotted along an authoritarian-libertarian axis, and ideology can be a messy thing. My past in crypto and my love of the decentralized aspects of socialism (but not the centralized ones of communism) reveal how much I lean towards the libertarian side of things, but I have found my authoritarian side with sports gambling hecklers. It evokes a rage inside me that much of politics is unable to reach, as the unreasonableness demonstrated by people trying to win a pathetically small amount of money relative to the impact and message of their actions makes me want to build my own Palantir, but for good instead of evil.
All sports. Everywhere. On planet Earth.
Do this shit once, and one of Good Palantir’s drones will staple a microchip with a speaker to the back of your head. We will then set up digital fences around every sporting event at every level around the world in an attempt to keep you away from them forever.
Try to turn on the NBA Finals at home? Tough shit, Good Palantir’s microchip has all your sports channels blocked. Want to walk down the street to your favorite bar to watch it? Good Palantir’s microchip will sense the sports taking place in range of it, then activate your speaker to emit an ear-piercing siren that makes everyone yell at you to go away forever. It will stop shrieking if you do.
Want to get away from DraftKings promotions and enjoy the local high school football game? Too bad, you gave up your opportunity to make one of mankind’s last few shared spaces a better place to be. Get ready for more ear-piercing screams from just behind your ears holding the game up. Ten-year-old girls’ soccer? Ditto. No sports for you anymore, go find another hobby and try not to ruin that one for other people.
To those who brave the sirens and demand that everyone else allow themselves to be alienated by their presence, Good Palantir’s drones will airlift them out of the area, and drop them inside of a facility they must escape by running through a seemingly endless amount of Oklahoma drills at every position against sports’ best athletes who would like to take some aggression out on the unreasonable jackasses yelling at them about their bets.
As you would expect in a socialist paradise, Good Palantir also has a product to address the C-suite criminals and the scale of their crimes, because in a way, these people doing awful things then being microchipped by Good Palantir are swept up in a system that enriches a lot of wealthy people while immiserating a lot of other folks. This is not unique to gambling, it’s basically the story of modern capitalism, but it is a mathematical feature of any addictive product, not a bug.
Every time a commercial or an in-game ad for gambling shows up during a sports broadcast, Good Palantir will hack into the nation’s elite bank accounts and zap a zero off a random sports or gambling executive’s net worth. If it happens on a weekend, we’ll zap two zeros off two executives’ bank accounts. If we find any gambling executive lobbying Congress to pass new laws that enrich them, we will take a hundred times the amount they “donated” to a politician out of their bank account and reward them with a mountain of debt for their efforts to undermine society. The goal of Good Palantir’s enforcement will be to still allow sports gambling to be legal, but make it like the old days where it was a semi-shady place you had to have enough shame to leave your house and show your face at. Also, you can only make bets in cash. Also, we’re passing a constitutional amendment declaring that anything over a four-leg parlay is illegal.
Sports are too precious to let gambling ruin it, and this is a lesson the Black Sox taught society a century ago that our modern one must learn again. This type of shit will only get worse as sports betting becomes more firmly ingrained in society, and we really do need to take measurable steps to curb gambling’s influence on sports. I am a lifetime lover of sports and sports gambling, but I would be in favor of banning sports gambling altogether at this point over continuing down this path of depravity. This type of alarmingly common anti-social behavior is so abhorrently fucked up and tacitly encouraged by these gambling companies and the leagues happily in bed with them that it almost makes Good Palantir sound reasonable by comparison.
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The Truth Hurts
