Back In the Day when FullTilt Poker was going, I played on it a lot. I miss those days. I built a $10 initial investment into about $1500 (and got fucktons of writing done at the same time; how cool is that?). Mostly, I played small “Sit and Go” tournaments. I’m a long, long way from the best tournament poker player you’ll meet, but I am a consistent winner. Because I was taught to be, mostly by two people: Adam Stemple and Chris “Pokerfox” Wallace–who, by the way, wrote an excellent book together that I can’t recommend too highly.
Okay, so, the commercial part of this: Chris is teaching a master class in tournament poker. Rack rate is $300, but you can get it down to $180 by using the code “foxdreamcafe”. It is worthwhile if and only if you are serious about tournament poker.
End of commercial. I now return you to your regularly scheduled political rants and writing natter.
Well, the older I get, the more convinced I become that the working class is sitting on a winning hand. So far, the ruling elite have successfully bluffed them out of playing it.
“…but the time has come when we’ll not be fooled anymore.”
The people always hold the winning hand. Unfortunately, they all too often don’t realize this. This leads to the “meeting the new boss, same as the old boss.”
An awakened populace who realize that they themselves hold the keys to removing bosses forever is what we need.
In other words, don’t muck that winning hand.
Nice. :-)
I think the metaphor is all wrong here, if you’re talking about the working class having a winning hand. The system and the wealthy aren’t other players in the poker game; they are the house, and as long as you accept the rules dictated by the house, the best you can do is take money off of another player while the house smiles and takes their cut of the pot.
What the working class has is the chance to stop playing the game, to threaten to run the casino out of business if the rules aren’t changed and the games made fair. But they can only do that by laying down their cards and walking away from the table, rather than playing with a “winning hand” that, even if it does win, will only hurt those who should be their allies.
From THE people WHO said they wouldn’t be fooled again:
If I told you what it takes
To reach the highest high
You’d laugh and say nothing’s that simple
But you’ve been told many times before
Messiahs pointed to the door
And no one had the guts to leave the temple!
Metaphors only extend so far (It’s a snake, no a wall!). I think we are saying roughly the same thing from slightly different views.
The capitalist class controls the means of production and do their best to tilt laws and means of enforcement in their favor. In this respect, they could be said to be the house.
The working class makes up the vast majority of the population. (Interestingly, the nobility + clergy made up about 1.5% of the population in pre-revolutionary France) In a democratic system, having 98% of the people should give one the means to create the laws one wishes to create. So, one could say they could deal any hand for any game that suited the purpose of the people.
Unfortunately, the people are often disunited via various combinations of inertia and confusion. The confusion often originates from the actions of the capitalist class in aiming at splitting and sowing confusion amongst the working class.
It’s hard for large groups of people to organize.
Sometimes they see that things are so wrong they won’t put up with it. But it’s hard for them to organize a good replacement system.
Far easier for them to accept some other small group that organizes things for them. And that tends to lead to “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”. Not that it’s really the same. But the new guys don’t know how to organize things so it works, and its easiest to take pointers from how the old system worked. Also everybody knows what to expect from that, and they all tend to be more comfortable when they know what to expect than when new things are happening that nobody knows how to respond to.