Election day

A disclosure: I am not American. Hence, my interests in American elections may be very alien to actual Americans (same as the interests of the candidates may be alien to me). I have a different background, my political views (as in: what should be a priority and what are good means) are clustered differently. I also have a strong hype allergy. Long story short: I have the freedom of not having to choose and the possibility of saying “I strongly dislike both candidates” without having an impact on the outcome. The reasons are manifold, but just to give you a hint: I dislike Trump for his far-right campaign and his attitudes. I also dislike Clinton for the “vote for me, you sexist pile of shit” campaign sentiments and her rather hawkish policy.

I went to sleep on Tuesday with the thought that I missed an excellent opportunity to bet on Clinton against some politically active bloggers. On Wednesday, I woke up and the first word on my phone’s display my mind has recognized was “immigration office”. I then thought that not betting was actually a wise move (and like many wise moves, this one was due to laziness). And then the Internet exploded with pain.

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The Qatar affair

I have been reading on the Qatar Word Cup affair for a while and, currently, I am laughing my head off. So, as it appears, some FIFA guys have taken loads of money from some climatically and otherwise challenged, but financially rather successful country. (NOTE: this is a plausible, but wild guess and there are probable more reasons to hold a World Cup in Qatar. However, there does not seem to be evidence in support of the latter claim, but on the other hand, there is some strong evidence that said country is actively intervening in the regional politics.) Now some people, also from FIFA, very SUDDENLY (this is an important point—nobody thinks about the implications before the decision is made) realize that sports in summer down there is a bad idea and fight a large medial campaign against this idea, and, probably, against the general decision of holding a World Cup in a very hot, both literally and figuratively, region. Holding the World Cup in winter seems also bad since it does not fit in the schedule of the leagues, so there seems to be no really good solution. On top of that sits the great master of balls Sepp B. and does not seem to support either side while promising that a decision will be made somewhere in the future.

In a perfect world, people would decide based on reason and logic. However, this world is not perfect, and things like these happen disturbingly often. If a decision has been made, it is hard to revoke, and very easy to rationalize. Even if it will turn out that the decision has been biased by money, the stakeholders will be likely to say “so what, the decision has been made, costs has been sunk, and now we have to deal with it”.

In any case, 2022 is far away, the Middle East might be subject to some landscape design, and until then we will have a lot of fun. So, if you are a professional football player and fear that your job makes you perform somewhere very hot, chances are, this won’t happen.