There's No Crying in the Casino

Or, Oh What Fun it is to Live in Our Modern World

Javier Milei – President of Argentina and another of the poisonous toadstools sprouting atop the world order these days – recently uttered the finest and most erudite summation of our age I have yet seen. Talking about people who lost money in a cryptocurrency scan he helped promote, Milei said, “The reality is if you go to the casino and lose money, I mean, what is the claim if you knew that it had those characteristics?”

His language is a little convoluted, so I'll help out by boiling it down to a bon mot popular in the darker corners of the internet:

"There's no crying in the casino."

What does this mean? Why would I say it's a perfect summation of our age? To start, let's talk a bit about crypto.

This wonderful invention (perhaps best understood simply as fake electronic money) was once celebrated as the inevitable future of currency itself.

Its proponents argued it was revolutionary, mind-blowing, earth-shattering, an invention based on something called "block chain" technology to which we should all bow down as if before a holy sacrament, a system so complicated and yet so perfect that it would entirely replace actual money…and then everyone realized it was a pain in the ass to deal with and offered no real benefits at all.

Because of this, crypto has been relegated to serving two rather tawdry functions in our culture.

One is as a medium of exchange for criminals who want to make untraceable transactions. And from China to Europe to America business is booming for these folks, because they can turn massive amounts of real, illegally gained money into this fake money, move it around, and then turn it into real money again without the authorities being able to figure out what they're doing.

The second function of crypto – and this is where Milei saw his opportunity – is as a way to scam credulous people out of real money.

Fraudsters do this by announcing they're going to launch a cryptocurrency – say, like the $TRUMP – and because they fraudsters are famous and wealthy and ordinary folks like to associate themselves with fame and money (often to the their own mental and even physical detriment) these ordinary folks buy the cryptocurrency.

This drives the price up, and when the price gets high enough, the founders of the cryptocurrency and their friends all sell theirs (for real money), and then the value of the cryptocurrency plunges and all the regular people who bought it (for real money) are now holding worthless fake money cryptocurrency. (Just last week, the Telegraph in the U.K. announced that the investors in Trump's crypto had lost in the range of $12 billion.)¹

This is the exact scam that Milei was involved in, and when he was asked about it, he had the balls to say:

There's no crying in the casino.

Sorry, you came and you gambled and you lost your money. You knew you were in a casino, didn't you? Really, if you think about it, it's your fault you lost that money. So don't cry.

Now, you may be tempted to say that this is an odious response. But actually (as the internet ads are always claiming) it's genius!

You see, unintentionally, Milei just laid down a clean, clear articulation of the way he and every one of his fellow wretcheds see the world.

How does a casino work? It's based on games of chance. You go in with some money and play something like blackjack or craps or roulette or the slots, and sometimes you win really big and leave with a lot of cash.

But a casino is a profit-driven enterprise, not a charity run for people's entertainment. So how do casinos make this profit? They set up the games so the odds are always in their favor.

Which is to say, for every hundred dollars that players put down, the casino is going to win somewhere over fifty of them. In any specific moment, then, you might walk into a casino with a hundred bucks and walk out with a thousand. But over a long enough timeline, all of us, aggregated, are going to come out with less money than we entered with.

Another way of putting this is that in a casino, the risk is all being taken by the players.

So what's behind the metaphor that Milei was articulating?

It was not, mind you, that he was one of the regular people walking into the casino of life and had just as much of a chance to lose money as the rest of us did.

Because guys like him – and it's almost always guys, although the ghost of Maggie Thatcher is still hanging around in the ether somewhere – don't set things up so they are players. They set it up so that they're the owners of the casino.

Milei wasn't taking any chances with his crypto scam, any more than Trump was with his. No, the metaphor Milei was articulating is that regular people are all players in his casino: we take the chances, they take the money.

Now, if this were just something that applied to the realm of crypto, it would be one thing. (And one of those things, as we'll see, is a potentially a large share of U.S. taxpayer dollars. More on that in a second.)

But what's important to understand is that this view of existence isn't only about fake electronic money. Instead, it's an articulation of the political philosophy (both of which words – "politics" and "philosophy" – are of course degraded by appearing in the same sentence as words like "Trump" and "Milei," but we can only use the language we have) of the entire current ruling class.

There's no crying in the casino.

This is the way they approach the world itself and everyone in it – including, unfortunately, dear reader – you and me.

The animating belief of people like Trump and his fungal stain of a sidekick (or is it overlord?) Elon Musk is that they should get to own the casino of life.

Look, for instance, at Trump's tariff gymnastics of the past month or so. He threatens tariffs on Canada and Mexico and China, then delays them, then imposes them, then allows carve-outs, then imposes them again, then delays them, and on and on.

Look at the treatment of Ukraine and the Europeans. He ambushes Zelenskyy in the most shameful American political act of our lifetimes, demands that Zelenskyy thank him for what amounts to being blackmailed, stops American intelligence sharing with Ukraine, allowing for the Russians to launch a cruise-missile and drone attack for which Ukraine was unprepared, then tries to berate the Russians, then claims he wants peace, and on and on.

Look that the firing and re-hiring of federal workers.

Look at the announcement that the U.S. will be sending some 240,000 Ukrainian refugees back into a war zone.

Look at the dismantling of USAID, with the result that people around the world are dying.

Look at the attempt to convince people of a new reality, in which Trump is more successful and important than George Washington.

What is the effect of all of this? The creation of a society that works like a casino.

The owners sit in their gold thrones in their offices, looking down through their surveillance cameras, using pit bosses to ensure order.

All the rest of us sit at the tables, with no choice but to place bets on our future. Because there's one big difference between this world and an actual casino: we can't leave if we want to.

You are an American with a 401K? Sorry, the economic stability of the country is less important than the whims of the casino owner.

You are an American without a 401K but with a blue-collar job doing construction work or putting things in boxes in an Amazon fulfillment center? Sorry, Trump's economic madness is going to crack you around like the end of a bullwhip, and Jeff Bezos is going to do everything he can to prevent you from unionizing, to keep you living in that precarious state where you're so dependent on working for him that you have no choice but to keep doing it.

You are a European who has counted for generations on the idea that America will provide at least some bulwark against authoritarian aggression? Whoops, sorry, we just switched sides and are going to team up with one of the handful of most degenerate men in the world (Trump, Musk, and Vance being in that exclusive club as well), good ol' Vlad Putin, who will go down in history as our generation's Mussolini.

And you know what? We had an election and we're in control now and those are the rules, so don't cry about it, because…

There's no crying in the casino.

Now, here's the really maddening part.

We have, many of us, been trained by fifty years of unfettered free market horseshit – aka the casino owners standing in front of the players and explaining to them how this setup is actually good for everybody – to somehow see this as the normal order of things.

You see, they tell us in the same tone of voice they use to talk to their children, this dog-eat-dog competition in which everyone at the bottom scrambles to play a game that is just so slightly tilted against them is actually the most efficient way to do things. It helps us all!

This is the lie that they perpetrate on us, the magic wand they wave at us to ensure our compliance.

And so we buy the mantra. We tell ourselves that this is just the game of life, and that complaining about it is a sign of naivete. Slowly, we begin to whisper the mantra to ourselves as we walk through our day:

There's no crying in the casino.

But sometimes, despite their best efforts, the truth slips out. If you watch closely enough, and listen closely enough, you can discern it.

Don't believe me? Take a look at what Joe Rogan (whose ability to shape American thought is as clear a sign of our debasement as any there is) had to say recently about Elon Musk's crusade to turn the entire American government into the Sands Las Vegas Casino and Resort owned by none other than himself: "He’s a super genius that’s been fucked with. And when you’ve been fucked with by these nitwits that hide behind three-letter agencies, and you’re dealing with one of the smartest people alive, you fucked up."

Here's one would-be casino boss (for that is clearly Rogan's aspiration) explaining in the clearest possible way the world view he shares with another would-be casino boss.

Elon's crusade is not about efficiency. It's not about any sort of political stance. It's about the fact that Elon is furious that he was ever forced to be a player himself, instead of the owner.

As Rogan makes clear, Elon is doing this because he's mad at the government. He feels like he's been fucked with, so he's going to fuck things up. He's on this crusade because he wants revenge.

Why? Because the government made him follow the same rules as everyone else.

But Elon doesn't want to have to sit at the tables like everyone else.

He wants to own the joint, so he's the one with all the money and power, while all the rest of us live with all the risks.

Since it's Monday, let's close with some really bad news.

And let's do that intentionally, because this is not the moment to close your eyes and say you'd rather just take this week to think about puppy dogs and rainbows: if we do that, Trump will end up killing all the puppy dogs and buying all the rainbows.

The bad news is this: one of Trump's newest strokes of genius is to create a "strategic cryptocurrency reserve." He has, in fact, already put this plan into motion.

What will this consist of?

Well, it will consist of taking our money – the money that we all bitch and moan about giving to the government every year in the form of taxes, but, despite all that bitching and moaning actually do go ahead and give them by actually paying those taxes (unlike the very richest among us) – and investing that money, the money of the U.S. Government, into crypto.

Unless you are very silly, you are not currently asking the question: Why in god's name would we do that? Because you already know the answer.

But I'm going to pretend you're very silly and answer anyway:

To make Trump and his family and the wealthy people around him even wealthier.

For they will, of course, buy lots of crypto in the run-up to this, and then when the United States of America itself uses billions of dollars that could otherwise be put to the purpose of paying down the debt or feeding poor children to buy crypto, the price will skyrocket.

And will Trump and his investor friends then just leave their money in that crypto? Of course not. They will sell it for real money, making that thing they value more than anything else on this green earth, including their own souls: a fantastic profit.

And when the crypto inevitably crashes, and the value of our "strategic reserve" craters, who will take the loss? You and me, folks. You and me.

And when we complain, what will they tell us? That's easy:

There's no crying in the casino.

1. Here's a question I wonder if anyone has ever asked someone who's a proponent of cryptocurrency: If you have so much crypto, bro, and your crypto is so cool and so incredibly useful and important and valuable, why the hell do you even need real money? You already have your goddamn fake money! Oh, I'm sorry, it's not fake money? Really? If it's so real, then remind me one more time why the hell you keep trying to trade it for real money?!