Well, your specific OP example was the Senate pool thread, and I was making the point that it seemed like an odd choice to take this particular stand on, since it’s in much less bad taste than say, the death pool, which I could understand being upset about.
And your example of betting on whether a kid is starved or beaten is a spurious comparison to betting on Senate elections. The result of an election is not a crime or a tragedy, no matter how much you may disagree with the outcome. And you can take steps to try to influence the outcome of the election, but you can’t stop it from happening. The child abuse, if you are aware of it you don’t allow it to happen so you can bet on it, you call the police or take whatever action you can to stop it.
Well, for me personally I submitted my entry in that “contest” in order to provide one person’s (relatively limited) insight into the likely outcome of the fall elections. Perhaps others will provide different insight that may enlighten me in some way. Collectively, perhaps, we will arrive at some sort of consensus regarding the likely outcome which may or may not be better than other “expert” forecasts.
For example, I hadn’t realized how far Mandela Barnes had fallen off over the last few weeks - that may encourage me to focus some of my efforts on WI (or, perhaps, NV) this fall. It’s certainly not going to reduce my propensity to vote (not that it matters in MO) or work to get others to vote.
It’s really just another form of punditry, masked as a contest. You could argue that punditry isn’t useful (which I might agree with). But we have plenty of threads that are simple punditry (including one on the Senate 2022 elections).
Death pools are different, as we can have no impact on what individual people die. And the only possible informational value is in knowing what famous people are sick, which is of rather limited value. Those are pretty basic gallows humor.
I have a certain amount of empathy for the OP’s position. While I’ve been (justifiably) accused of having a certain amount of gallows humor (which is, more than anything else, probably a coping mechanism), I’ve never had any interest in participating in any sort of contest related to real-world events, like speculation on elections, death pools, etc.
In particular, I find the idea of a death pool a little morbid; however, it doesn’t offend me or bother me that others engage in something like that – I simply don’t share in the interest.
Similarly, I don’t care to watch “real crime” television shows (something that my wife is addicted to), nor do I care to participate in conversations here which focus on speculation about murders and the like (such as the Gabby Petito thread). All of that is just something that engaging in, from an “entertainment” standpoint, doesn’t appeal to me at all.
Feel free to offer “more bad” examples. I just posted after seeing the thread that prompted the idea. I didn’t say it was definitive or exclusive. I said it was an example.
My OP explains that this is not true, in my opinion. Elections today are matters of life and death or possible tragedy, and they have often been so, at least in American history. It would be rare m, privileged times in which an American election was no more consequntial than a parlor game.
I don’t participate in those threads, but I don’t see anything wrong with them. Perhaps it’s because in my heart of hearts, I’m an asshole. I’m perfectly okay with that.
OK, an asshole being elected to Congress may be a tragedy, but it’s not a crime. And, other than voting and campaigning for your state’s / district’s candidate, it’s not something you can control. Maybe control is the central issue: a lot of bad things happen in life that we have little or no control over. Beloved celebrities die, and assholes get elected. We do things like bet on outcomes and engage in gallows humor as a way to cope with what we can’t change.
I reject the proposition that I’m delivering a broadside attack on gallows humor generally. I’m focusing on a very specific practice: Making a game, specifically a type of gambling, about potentially grave outcomes. So, I’m going to ignore anything that just generally talks about gallows humor.
Doesn’t ‘gambling’ require payment of goods or services to the winner of a wager? Even when the Duke brothers bet on the result of young Winslow and a street hustler forced into trading their positions and status there was $1 at stake. What is at stake here? Are you suggesting that Dopers are violating the rule against actual betting in any form?
Could you clarify the difference between making a “game” about a dark subject and making a joke about a dark subject? Is one more acceptable to you then the other? Why?
I have found that everyone has their own subjects that are not acceptable topics for joking or games. If someone you know tells you that a subject is off limits, then it’s polite to steer clear. But on a public message board almost everything is fair game (subject to the rules of the board). If you personally are offended by jokes or games about a particular subject, you can always just ignore that topic and move on.
In casual settings it could be anything of value; it may be nothing more than the regard of your peers or bragging rights, or just a jolt of endorphins. If that’s not important to the exercise–if it is, for example, just to discuss a subject or to predict outcomes or to make morbid jokes–then why set the discussion in the form of gambling? That is specifically what makes it distasteful to me.