Tag: elections

Why Doesn’t Offler Forbid Chocolate?

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments

Offler is the Crocodile God from Discworld. He is known for his crocodilian features, mumbling speech, and pragmatic rules. He knows how to keeps his followers. One of the pillars of his faith is that he wouldn’t impose a ban on chocolate because people wouldn’t listen anyway.

Nuggan, the God of paperclips and unnecessary paperwork, forbids Chocolate. Chocolate, among other 100s of things, is an abomination, perhaps because it stains the unnecessary paper. Funnily, as a result of that, his country is a main exporter of chocolate.

The book, although I don’t quite remember which one, implies that a God who forbids chocolate will eventually be forgotten and replaced by another God who doesn’t forbid chocolate. Nuggan, as of the last Discworld novel, is still around. He outlived his creator, Sir Terry Pratchett, and the spiritual disconnect between him and Offler remained unresolved.

Why I’m writing all of that? Spent last 24 hours wtf-ing with Bulgarian election news. There’s no Offlers in our political scene.

Elections Time

~ Veselin ~ 12 Comments

Tomorrow is the election time in Europe and double election time in Bulgaria. We’ll vote for a national parliament on top of the EU one. Elections bring political discussions into daily life and expose the divisions we have. I’m unsure about the proper way to handle that. My country’s society is very divided on many topics.

  • Shall we send weapons to help Ukraine
  • Was Communism good or bad
  • More roads or higher pensions
  • Are immigrants good or bad
  • Shall we adopt the Euro

And the list continues. Any random person I meet can hold extreme beliefs on any of the subjects, and learning about that, or exploring it, can lead to changing the perception of that person, or them changing their perception of me if I express extreme beliefs.

For example, a plumber comes home to fix something, fixes it, and drops that whatever random thing has been bad for 35 years, implicating it was good before that, and before that was communism. I immediately recognize this person is radically in the “Communism Good” camp, while I’m in the “Communism Bad” camp.

Over the years, I have slowly learned that the best strategy for me is to avoid the subject outside of the family. It may not sound right, but it is the best strategy I’ve found so far.

Today I posted a comment about politics on some random blog and feel like I swam in poop. I posted it in the Reader and didn’t realize it’s some conspiracy blog. It’s a good reminder to me to not engage in politics until I find a way to engage without feeling that way.

In any case, it’s the peak of politics talk for the year for us. Time to vote.