• beardown@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    They probably will bet on it.

    How does that dispute their underlying point?

    Also, I very much doubt that NFL game fixing is so hard to believe. The United States has a strong history of game fixing in all of its nationally popular athletic leagues. From boxing to baseball. (Say it ain’t so, Joe)

    So we should not be surprised at the possibility that the NFL would do the same thing, particularly after happily integrating gambling into their entire product at an unprecedented rate over the past 5 years.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_match-fixing_incidents

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sox_Scandal

    Regardless, this is legitimately the most important presidential election in US history. Trump’s victory would destroy the United States. Given that, it would be malpractice for the American and Western intelligence agencies not to utilize the most watched 3.5 hours of 2024 American television to diminish Trump and boost his opponents.

    I hope that Taylor Swift/The Chiefs are a psychological operation of our intelligence agencies. Our agencies need to be doing things like that to ensure Trump loses. Because if he wins then The West will end. And I have to live here in The West, so I would prefer that it didn’t end.

    • tmyakal@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      Wait, so you’re hoping that the American government is covertly manipulating the roughly 1 in 3 Americans who watch the Superbowl expressly to retain the incumbents power because it means we’d avoid a fascist autocracy?

      • beardown@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        Yes, because the alternative would be even worse

        I fully agree that our current system is incredibly broken though. It’s just that Trump, and the Heritage Foundations Project 2025, etc, would make things drastically worse than they already are

        We aren’t a meaningfully “free” country, at least not by any charitable definition. But that doesn’t mean we can’t get worse. We can, and we will if Trump wins

        • miak@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          But if you become a monster just so you can destroy a monster, have you really accomplished anything worthwhile?

          • beardown@lemm.ee
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            10 months ago

            Depends how bad the other monster was, I suppose.

            Becoming Tony Soprano as a means of stopping Sauron, for instance, would likely be worth it.

            Here, the combined intelligence agencies of the West appear to think that Trump is an existential threat to Western civilization. If they’re correct about that then I guess that justifies rigging the Super Bowl. Especially when you consider that there are significantly worse things (Gaza Genocide) going on right now. To say nothing of the bad things that they/we did in the past

    • gardylou@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      That is possible for some game some where to be corrupted at some time isn’t evidence that it is easy to rig NFL games. Much more likely an individual player is compromised in a way that affects game integrity (or at least betting fairness) than nonsense whole cloth rigging of the game.

      • beardown@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        The officiating has been historically horrific this year. Multiple objectively wrong calls have been made or have been missed that have had game altering implications.

        Players themselves don’t need to be on the take. The officiating is all that needs to be altered to ensure games reach the desired outcome. And the NFLs officiating process is about as untransparent as it gets

        At minimum, the league needs to be investigated for fixing games to enrich itself and its partners. But maybe a nonprosecution agreement was reached between the nfl and federal government wherein the nfl agreed to allow Taylor Swift and others to be used in certain ways to assist Biden and diminish Trump. If I was the Western Intelligence State that’s exactly what I’d do - blackmail the most watched product in the United States into cooperating to protect the country from Trump.

        This is more important than “the integrity of the NFL.” This is about preventing the United States from being utterly dismantled by our adversaries, and utilizing any means necessary to achieve that result