“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it”
—George Santayana
I thought that it would be a good thing to link to an article I ran across today on CNet for those who don’t really frequent any tech websites. The ‘War on Gambling’ gets ever closer, so take every chance you get to speak out on it. Write a letter to your representatives and send it multiple times, talk about it with others, anything we can do is better than nothing.
Prohibition in the 20’s didn’t work, and it won’t work now, but I don’t really feel like having to actually go through it before the powers that be finally acquiesce.
CardPlayer’s Roy Cooke wrote a good article this month about the efforts currently underway to get an actual professional organization going for poker. At this point I’m not going to be too critical or picky. Given the choice, I will normally rail against big corporate interests, but at the present find myself cheering the larger players like the WPT and (God help me) Harrah’s.
How can I possibly cheer on Harrah’s knowing (thanks to Felicia) the way they stick it to players with massive juice?
Simple, WPT and Harrah’s both have a lot of money and influence in the sphere. At this point I’ll take anything I can get in order to counter the likes of the Christian Coalition and others of their ilk. After we arrive at the point where we can worry less about the prohibition of our sport, game, pastime, whatever you want to call it, then we can focus all of our efforts onto the likes of Harrah’s for screwing over the player. I’m not saying we should ignore those issues, but I fear that if we get too focused on ‘smaller’ issues like that, we may just miss the forest for the trees.
Since bloggers seem to be organizing into something a bit more official as of late (see: WPBT), perhaps we can help push back the new (well, not exactly new) prohibition tide. Technically, playing online is illegal for many of us in the states that we live in, but right now there isn’t that great of a push to get your door busted down. If things keep going along as they are with the current (and what seems like ever present) ‘morality push’, we could end up being the new poster children of degradation and recipients of a showboating administrative crackdown.
We should try to get in and help out on this issue. We may just end up helping out the poker community more than we ever anticipated.
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