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Separation By Degrees
Nov. 7th, 2006 10:57 amAbraham Lincoln may or may not have uttered something about fooling a certain percentage of the population a certain percentage of the time, apparently thinking that everything would end up ok because you couldn't fool all of the people all of the time.
The problem with the eternal optimism of the heroes of American history, that everything will turn out okay in the end so long as you work hard and live a good life, is that it's a load of bollocks. I'm sure that part of the reason that the American legal system is litigation-mad is that when something goes wrong for a person who has worked hard and lived a good life, the entire unfairness of it all becomes impossible to cope with.
"I work hard for 15 years, come home to my wife and kids and I am a good father, and then I get in this car crash and lose my legs, and my job. This isn't fair. Surely I deserve compensation?" says some Joe from Ohio to his accident lawyer. The compensation is not against the person or company whose fault this is (it might be nobody's fault) but a whole part of the American concept of "justice". Of course, this concept of justice paradoxically results in a complete distortion of the judicial system, where "justice" is often the last thing to be considered.
Meanwhile, the heavy drinker who has neglected his wife and kids for a decade goes out and wins the lottery. Perhaps the American system of fairness should demand that lottery winners be hard-working upstanding citizens.
Anyhoo, back to the all-of-the-people-all-of-the-time thingy. What Lincoln missed was that in a democracy, all that matters is fooling 50.1% of the voters, which, in mid-terms, amounts to about 20% of the people. And you don't need to fool them all of the time; just for that short period when they are actually voting. Unfortunately, if Lincoln had said: "You only need to fool a fifth of the people a 10th of the time", I doubt that he would have been in politics; he would have been in marketing.
Bush, meanwhile, is engaged in marketing, and the "let's get that Saddam verdict out the weekend before the mid-terms" strategy seems to have succeeded in fooling a 50th of the people a 50th of the time, which will probably be enough to help the Republicans retain control of the Senate and might, just might, keep them in charge in the House. Now, since I consider the Democratic Party to be run by a bunch of money-grabbing lawyers who want nothing but to cripple the country under the pretence of standing up for "the little man", I don't really care whether they or the Republicans win control of the House, but it would be nice if the voters, just once, weren't fooled in sufficient numbers, a sufficient amount of the time, to keep some of the biggest donkeys on the planet in charge of the show.
++++++
Postscript:
This isn't worth an entry of its own of whinging, so I'll just add it as an adjunct. Another horrible evening. Although this downswing is a mere $1,200, it's nigh-on $2,000 when I take out the bonuses. And although it's only since October 17th that this horrible run started, it really feels like forever. After all, 15,000 hands is a bit of a long time.
I mean, I look at the stats on the players, and I leave when I know the games have got tough. I'm making few mistakes that I can see, and I'm getting out when I get tired. If I make a little bit of a "tilty" move, I get out quick.
And yet, and yet, I just can't win, at anything. 3-6, 5-10 and 8-16 were all equally bad tonight and, for the first time since this run started, I'm feeling that sad moment of despair. Looking at the stats since October 17th, if I strip out bonuses and rakeback, I've had 18 losing days out of 23, and the winning days haven't been that hot. This is like nothing I have encountered before in six years. It's a perpetual swim upstream and I am, quite definitely, not enjoying life. I really am getting that "give it all up, you're like those other losers. You just aren't good enough and you haven't got the guts to admit it to yourself". I mean, the feeling is so bad that when I see people making plays that I "know" to be wrong, I start to wonder whether perhaps all of a sudden, in the modern game, these plays are correct, and it's me that's wrong. After all, everyone else seems to be winning apart from me. :-)
The normal recommendation here is to "take a break for a few days", but that really isn't an option for my type of unbalanced personality. My usual strategy is to switch levels, or switch the number of games played, or switch sites. But I've tried all of these and none of them seems to have worked. I don't know what to do and I don't know where to turn. It's a miserable miserable feeling.
And, hell, I'm still more than $6K up on the year. It's only a 303% downswing. So how on earth do people who suffer far greater swings than this cope? Do they have bottomless reserves of self-confidence? Do they never reach that moment (which I have read described by other people, so at least I know that here I am not alone) when you sit down in the evening accepting that you are going to get slaughtered? When you just pray that you can break even? I thought that I had a solution to all the bad breaks that could be thrown at me by the poker gods, but at this one, I have absolutely no answers at all. At the moment I just don't want to see a computer, a blog, a keyboard, or a poker table, ever again.
Unfortunately, in the grand scheme of things, that isn't an option. So we carry on. Perhaps tomorrow will be different. But I somehow doubt it.
The problem with the eternal optimism of the heroes of American history, that everything will turn out okay in the end so long as you work hard and live a good life, is that it's a load of bollocks. I'm sure that part of the reason that the American legal system is litigation-mad is that when something goes wrong for a person who has worked hard and lived a good life, the entire unfairness of it all becomes impossible to cope with.
"I work hard for 15 years, come home to my wife and kids and I am a good father, and then I get in this car crash and lose my legs, and my job. This isn't fair. Surely I deserve compensation?" says some Joe from Ohio to his accident lawyer. The compensation is not against the person or company whose fault this is (it might be nobody's fault) but a whole part of the American concept of "justice". Of course, this concept of justice paradoxically results in a complete distortion of the judicial system, where "justice" is often the last thing to be considered.
Meanwhile, the heavy drinker who has neglected his wife and kids for a decade goes out and wins the lottery. Perhaps the American system of fairness should demand that lottery winners be hard-working upstanding citizens.
Anyhoo, back to the all-of-the-people-all-of-the-time thingy. What Lincoln missed was that in a democracy, all that matters is fooling 50.1% of the voters, which, in mid-terms, amounts to about 20% of the people. And you don't need to fool them all of the time; just for that short period when they are actually voting. Unfortunately, if Lincoln had said: "You only need to fool a fifth of the people a 10th of the time", I doubt that he would have been in politics; he would have been in marketing.
Bush, meanwhile, is engaged in marketing, and the "let's get that Saddam verdict out the weekend before the mid-terms" strategy seems to have succeeded in fooling a 50th of the people a 50th of the time, which will probably be enough to help the Republicans retain control of the Senate and might, just might, keep them in charge in the House. Now, since I consider the Democratic Party to be run by a bunch of money-grabbing lawyers who want nothing but to cripple the country under the pretence of standing up for "the little man", I don't really care whether they or the Republicans win control of the House, but it would be nice if the voters, just once, weren't fooled in sufficient numbers, a sufficient amount of the time, to keep some of the biggest donkeys on the planet in charge of the show.
++++++
Postscript:
This isn't worth an entry of its own of whinging, so I'll just add it as an adjunct. Another horrible evening. Although this downswing is a mere $1,200, it's nigh-on $2,000 when I take out the bonuses. And although it's only since October 17th that this horrible run started, it really feels like forever. After all, 15,000 hands is a bit of a long time.
I mean, I look at the stats on the players, and I leave when I know the games have got tough. I'm making few mistakes that I can see, and I'm getting out when I get tired. If I make a little bit of a "tilty" move, I get out quick.
And yet, and yet, I just can't win, at anything. 3-6, 5-10 and 8-16 were all equally bad tonight and, for the first time since this run started, I'm feeling that sad moment of despair. Looking at the stats since October 17th, if I strip out bonuses and rakeback, I've had 18 losing days out of 23, and the winning days haven't been that hot. This is like nothing I have encountered before in six years. It's a perpetual swim upstream and I am, quite definitely, not enjoying life. I really am getting that "give it all up, you're like those other losers. You just aren't good enough and you haven't got the guts to admit it to yourself". I mean, the feeling is so bad that when I see people making plays that I "know" to be wrong, I start to wonder whether perhaps all of a sudden, in the modern game, these plays are correct, and it's me that's wrong. After all, everyone else seems to be winning apart from me. :-)
The normal recommendation here is to "take a break for a few days", but that really isn't an option for my type of unbalanced personality. My usual strategy is to switch levels, or switch the number of games played, or switch sites. But I've tried all of these and none of them seems to have worked. I don't know what to do and I don't know where to turn. It's a miserable miserable feeling.
And, hell, I'm still more than $6K up on the year. It's only a 303% downswing. So how on earth do people who suffer far greater swings than this cope? Do they have bottomless reserves of self-confidence? Do they never reach that moment (which I have read described by other people, so at least I know that here I am not alone) when you sit down in the evening accepting that you are going to get slaughtered? When you just pray that you can break even? I thought that I had a solution to all the bad breaks that could be thrown at me by the poker gods, but at this one, I have absolutely no answers at all. At the moment I just don't want to see a computer, a blog, a keyboard, or a poker table, ever again.
Unfortunately, in the grand scheme of things, that isn't an option. So we carry on. Perhaps tomorrow will be different. But I somehow doubt it.
