“The Serbian Lottery has not had a winning combination in weeks now. Tonight’s possible win is worth about 3.5 million Euros, and ‘lotto-mania’ is slowly becoming ‘
“He goes on to explain that the possibility of drawing the winning combination of seven numbers is one in ten million, or 0.000000016, which is a very small possibility, even if tens of millions of combinations are paid in. A great number of paid in combinations does not guarantee that all the possible ‘sevens’ will be covered.
“’I believe that chances for tampering are almost non-existent and it doesn’t seem likely to me. The one doing the tampering has to know what he’s about, and in this country there is no such computer equipment’, says Bozic adding that swindling does not pay for all those who organise lotteries and own gambling casinos because they earn the most money from trade.
“’We Serbs are well known for being paranoid, but cheating doesn’t make sense to me. However, that doesn’t mean that somebody isn’t being crooked, and if so, then he has abilities of cosmic proportions’, claims Bozic.
“Director of the State Serbian Lottery, Bojan Kristo, is sure that the people generally believe that this is an organised robbery of the people, but this he vehemently denies. He repeats that it is not in the Lottery’s interest not to have a winning draw for so long, because there has already been a drop of interest in the last four weeks even though the jackpot is growing.
“’Lotto is a game of fortune organised for three reasons: fun, filling up the Budget and financing salaries for the employed. Out of suspicion, the people have been buying tickets less and less, which is certainly not in our interest’”, says Kristo for Glas Javnosti.
Perhaps I’m being naive, but your last paragraph seemed odd to me.
“It seems to me that you can prioritise the Union (or a United Ireland, or a confederal Belgium for that matter) as a constitutional concept, or you can promote a state which is generally nice to all of its citizens, but you have to choose one as the priority over the other, and my choice will always be for the second, with deep suspicion of anyone who tells me that the only way to achieve that is by accepting their vision on the first.”
But surely that, to a large extent, is what political parties are for? If all the parties were simply about being generally nice to people, there would be little to choose between them. It seems to me that most parties have an ideology, with the understanding that they believe this ideology is the best thing for the people they represent.
I see no contradiction in a party that is Unionist and also wants the best for the people; it just requires that those in the party believe that Unionism is inherently best for all the people.
The fact that you (or I) don’t see the validity of that belief is neither here nor there; you could equally say the same about the Nationalist parties’ belief that Nationalism is inherently best.