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Winning the World Cup of Football in 2010

Published by marco on

Fans would give up food, jobs for World Cup glory? (Reuters) is a tremendously fluffy and stupid article. Did they actually interview people or did they just make this shit up based on gross cultural stereotypes?

“It found that a majority of English respondents – 93 percent – would give up food for a week to see England win, while some 70 percent of Italians would give up their job for an Italian victory.

“Americans were most willing to sacrifice their homes, while South Koreans were most ready to sacrifice their love life.”

  • First of all, 93% is not just a majority, but an overwhelming majority. It’s a near-certainty.
  • Second off, the classic canard is that English food is utter crap, so of course they’d be willing to give it up for a week.
  • That 70% of Italians would give up their jobs is also wholly unsurprising—it’s actually surprisingly low—given their penchant for striking at the drop of a hat. (Again, that’s according to the classic canard.)
  • Since a quarter of American homeowners are underwater—they owe more on their mortgage than their house is worth—it’s unsurprising that they’d be willing to part with said houses. Reuters, however, forsook the scientific accuracy of a percentage and went with “most” instead. Not only that, but they applied it to that which Americans were willing to give up rather than to the number of respondents. That is, it’s possible that only 1% of Americans were willing to give up anything at all—who cares about soccer in the U.S. anyway?—but of those, most were willing to give up their house first.
  • I have nothing amusing to write about the love lives of South Koreans.

The astute reader will not that this article of a paltry, few-hundred words had not only a credited author, but an explicitly credited editor as well. Kudos to Reuters for their journalistic acumen.