Horse racing is one of those things that in Australia has reduced itself, in my adult lifetime, from a well-understood and broadly popular sport to a rump activity basically patronised by the rich, by anti-social groups, and fuelled by alcohol and host...
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Both function as highly efficient means of transferring men from private schools into the back of police vans
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@liamvhogan In my lifetime that's all it has ever been. Plus a way to launder crime money.
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@Kels_316 there used to be a kind of a theatre of going and putting a bet on, with the chalk tickets, odds boards, leather cash bags, all that stuff. Now that it’s just people getting into debt to an app there’s no salve for the grimness
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My gambling policy is that it should be basically impossible to bet with your phone. If you want to put a bet on you should have to give cash to a man in a flash suit, holding a leather bag with his name painted on it, and have a paper ticket marked with the odds in crayon. Vote [1] Liam and we can make this happen
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@liamvhogan @Kels_316 the romance is gone. You can still get that experience if you go to picnic races but really, who’s going to something like that
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@liamvhogan the bookies are still there, but only the true tragic or money launderer uses them
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@ThermiteBeGiants @liamvhogan I've been around horse racing my whole life, my grandfather was a tragic and owned a horse, my parents had a couple of horses for a while. My sister worked for a bookie. There has never been any actual romance, it's a brutal past time co-opted by organised crime.
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@Kels_316 @ThermiteBeGiants yeah, greyhound racing in my family.
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@liamvhogan @ThermiteBeGiants horse racing for the underclass.
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@liamvhogan You've got my vote!
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@Kels_316 @ThermiteBeGiants greyhound puppies are indescribably cute and fun to be around
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@liamvhogan @ThermiteBeGiants they are lovely dogs
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Gambling and games of risk-chance are fundamentally human, they’re common to almost all cultures. And the social aspect of playing cards or mahjong or whatever is absolutely a socially positive thing, in its place.
There’s a reason gambling ads stress homosocial, matey habits so strongly, ‘bet with your mates’ and so on. It’s because the experience of in-app gambling is exactly not that, it’s furtive and lonely and compulsive. And it has no right to exist. It doesn’t have to be that way.
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@liamvhogan @Kels_316 I met a greyhound owner-trainer once. One of the least-likeable people I have ever met, and that’s saying a lot given my weird job history to date
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@liamvhogan not everyone can get to a pokie mate, this is ableist
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@ThermiteBeGiants @Kels_316 yep, the industry is a culture of scumbags, and is not reformable. I do think greyhound racing can exist, in theory, but not in its current industry.
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@liamvhogan @Kels_316 I don’t think an ethical greyhound racing industry can exist at all. Horse racing and gambling could be reduced to a rump of amateur/picnic races and their associated trappings (i.e in-person betting) but the fact remains that the racing industry in its historical and current form is a nexus of power that engulfs and entangles our societal élite in a way that is hard to precisely excise
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David "Dave" Treloarreplied to Liam :fnord: last edited by
As long as we get the sing the divy-van song, it's all good, we all love a good sing-a-long.
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@liamvhogan *holding on to a small scrap of paper that has “vote [1] Liam | $5 | 1000-1” on it and gazing up at the big elections board to try and find the Grayndler results*
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@liamvhogan @ThermiteBeGiants @Kels_316 There is whippet racing, apparently, I was going to take mine when she was young and fast, but it was in some outer suburb and I couldn't be arsed. Strictly amateur though, just because they love to run. https://wrcv.asn.au/
