Betting abattoirs

IMAGINE being a 50-year-old South Asian or someone from the Middle East, especially the Levant; most of your life has been shaped by a three-letter word more offensive than any four-letter word: war.

When they hear the Western media talk about the ‘coming war’ or the ‘Armageddon’, they ask, ‘when did it leave?’ Surge, shock, awe, ethnic cleansing, genocide, death and destruction are some of the terms that define their era. The foreign villains who bring these horrors almost always have local accomplices. The process of otherisation necessary to justify violence often turns into self-alienation. If you don’t care about yourself, what chance does the rest of creation have? There are no winners; all sides lose their humanity.

In this context, the debate about the loss of human agency to AI, chatbots, robots and other machines seems rather alarmist. What is it that we are afraid of losing to machines? The machines lack consciousness; we lost conscience a long time ago. If it’s just jobs we are worried about, then the prophets of technology have already assured us that ‘work would be optional’ not too far off in the future.

That war is a business is well known. The military-industrial complex and its allies, who pretend to be the governments regulating them, co-opt every civilian technological advancement for war and use their military prowess to oppress civilian populations at home. The Epstein files provide a look into human depravity and show how power corrupts anyone. It demonstrates that demonising and dehumanising the ‘other’ has gone so far that the vulnerable are treated no better than pests.

Some betting sites profit from death and chaos openly.

The word ‘safari’ brings to mind images of the African savanna, complete with hunting lodges and big game trophies. Those who oppose hunting, shoot with cameras from the safety of vehicles and discuss it around campfires at night. However, there was an atrocity known as the ‘Sarajevo Safari’. During the Balkan war from 1992 to 1996, while populations of the former Yugoslav republics were fighting each other, wealthy Europeans and Americans devised a sickening adventure in collusion with Serb militias. The foreigners allegedly paid to hunt humans. Women and children had the highest value tags, reaching hundreds of thousands of dollars. Cases related to this are pending before the International Court of Justice in The Hague and prosecutors’ offices in Italy and Bosnia and Herzegovina. There have been no convictions so far and the names of the accused remain undisclosed.

War symbolises chaos and the collapse of order, exposing the most ignoble emotions. Even nations not officially at war face chaos; for example, consider extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances. Some law enforcers have become notorious as ‘encounter specialists’, with their lists of victims in the hundreds. Imagine someone tasked with a nefay mein pistol (a handgun believed to discharge in the waistband of the suspect) trick — they might aim to co-accuse as many people as possible and spread responsibility to avoid investigations when political moods shift. Who knows if safaris in Karachi and Lahore are also arranged?

While the dark web hosts a range of shady and dangerous activities for sickos worldwide, some betting sites profit from death and chaos openly; they are disguised as prediction markets. On one such platform, a bettor won $400,000 by correctly predicting the capture of the Venezuelan president. Another betting site offered favourable odds to attract those placing bets on the ‘removal’ of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Kha­menei resulting from a US-Israeli attack on Iran. As much as $54 million was wagered; however, the company later clarified that by ‘removal’ they meant Khamenei’s stepping down, not his assassination, stating that “‘event contracts’ like these are not offered ‘directly tied to death’”. The company then offered to pay the bettors the difference in value between the time of betting and before the confirmation of the Iranian leader’s killing.

PolyMarket, the largest prediction market platform in the world, enables betting on future outcomes of political, sports and economic events. Donald Trump Jr, the son of the US president, is on the company’s advisory board. Betting analytics firm Bubblemaps believes that six suspected insider traders earned $1.6m by accurately predicting the Feb 28 attack on Iran. Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat, has pledged to introduce legislation to ban such markets; “this is American commercial immorality on steroids. Once events that involve good and evil simply become a financial product, I don’t know how right and wrong matter any longer … People shouldn’t be rooting for people to die because they placed a bet.”

The writer is a poet. His latest publication is a collection of satire essays titled Rindana.

shahzadsharjeel1@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, March 14th, 2026

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