bhupy

I don't think you fully understand who you are arguing against.

I also think Olise's yellow card was unjustified. I think it should be overturned also. Even without overturning it, at least he still gets to play, so that's good for all of us as spectators.

The process sucks since it's arbitrary. In a better world there would be a universal appeals process.

Yeesh, this conversation has run its course.

No, those are not at all contradictory, it is entirely consistent.

Two things can be true at the same time:

1. There is no appeals process that USA (or any team) can initiate

2. There is a mechanism that FIFA can initiate to suspend a match ban at their discretion

That is why it's a bad system; as long as it's initiated by FIFA, it will always be arbitrary and capricious.

Correct.

Hence: “which in practice will be arbitrary.”

It’s on FIFA to correct for that governance failure by making it less arbitrary via a more universal appeals process.

In any case, the rules were followed to the correct decision. It’s just that these rules as written are arbitrarily applied.

You're right, it's a failure of governance that FIFA doesn't have a proper appeals process for everyone to use. It is unfortunate that the only rules-based mechanism to suspend the match ban had to come from FIFA, which in practice will be arbitrary.

It was the right outcome, but the wrong process.

> With respect, only an American would think that the competition ceases to be interesting just because the US loses

With respect to you, I'm a lifelong football fan.

And read more carefully, the argument I am making is not that the competition ceases to be interesting because the US loses. The argument I am making is that the competition ceases to be interesting because the US doesn't get to field its best squad on account of a highly controversial on-field decision (itself downstream of a mis-application of VAR).

Let the chips fall where they may, should the USA lose after this, at least they got to make their best attempt at it. That's all I want as a spectator.

> The goal is ultimately entertainment

This is something I see so many people forgetting.

The net result of this decision is simply that the USA gets to play with their full squad and you have an actually interesting competition. The reason we as a world spend hundreds of millions of dollars to let athletes play a game for a living is pretty much exclusively for interesting competition. It serves no other socially useful purpose.

Embarrassing for the Belgians and the Europeans to respond any other way than: "we look forward to beating your best team, game on".

Git operations are 503'ing for me.

To be clear, there is certainly a spectrum/degree for bias.

The best kind of news/journalism informs readers based on factually accurate and unbiased data — and perhaps uses noteworthy current events and human interest anecdotes to corroborate that data.

A worse kind of news/journalism partially misinforms readers by presenting factually accurate data in a biased way.

The worst kind of news/journalism entirely misinforms readers by presenting an anecdote (or a statistically insignificant collection of anecdotes).

Unfortunately the majority of news today (at least in the US) falls into that 3rd bucket.

The biggest problem with news is that it's fundamentally an exercise in elevating anecdotes over data. Every time the news reports on an incident or a happening, it's a deep dive into one single data point — and how that deep dive is characterized can influence how the reader thinks about society as a whole. The narratives used to characterize that data point vary based on the biases of the news institution, but either way it (more often than not) paints a distorted picture relative to the macro reality.