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People being outraged that teams were prevented from wearing the OneLove armbands (to show solidarity with LBGTQ rights amid the backdrop of Qatari views on homosexuality) are ignorant, arrogant, and dogmatic. This is part of what other regions of the world mean when they say the west forces our values onto other people. You don't get to go into another region of the world for a sport as global as soccer and then shit on them for not sharing the same views as you. Not everything needs to be about activism. I don't have the stats, but I have to imagine most people are not in favor of gay marriage in the middle east and, as much as i am in favor of gay marriage, you have to respect that. I mean it wasn't even codified legally in the US until fairly recently. If you want to interact with other countries, you have to accept that they see things differently than you and have different values. This strikes me as being a strong instance of 'i am so open minded that i am close minded'.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-21/european-teams-won-t-wear-pro-lgbt-armbands-at-world-cup?cmpid=BBD112122_MKT
What if they said no wearing any crosses or anything else indicating religious beliefs? What if they were in China, which I have no doubt would prohibit any pro-Uyghur or pro-Tibet sentiments? What if they were in Russia (assuming Russia ever gets to hold a world event again) which I am sure would prohibit Ukrainian flag armbands?
I agree that we cannot enforce our values on other countries, but fuck countries that host world events and then tell the people of the world what they're allowed to say while there.
All of these examples are unacceptable. This is sport not politics, and the more you make it about one the less it is about the other, thus compromising the whole point of the exercise. Even, ironically, it's political point of bringing people together under a common activity.
Shut up and kick the ball. I don't give a shit what you were told to think about world politics.
Athletes are more than just sports players though. Like you, I'm assuming you're not in charge of creating federal policy, so should I just tell you to shut up and do your job? This ideology is wildly antidemocratic and definitionally authoritarian.
Of course, democracy is the worst of political regimes.
Of course not, the levels of control enacted by informal propagandists and democrats has always been insanely higher than that of any formal autocracy.
Has it not occurred to you that conscription, an edict which was considered to be one of the most inconceivably tyrannical things a government could ever do, has been enacted, justified and normalized by and for democracy? Shall we look at comparative tax rates perhaps? Size of administrations? Wherever you look but in the realms of ideology, there is no justification to oppose democracy and authoritarianism, they marry themselves at every turn.
I submit to you that you are, in supporting the rule of anyone at large, the extreme authoritarian and that I am merely, in the grand scheme of things, a sensible centrist for wishing the realms of power to remain separate from literally all of society. I'm against totalitarianism, if you will.
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Do you think Holocaust denial laws paused in Germany during the World Cup?
No, but I'd be very surprised to learn that athletes have been wearing Holocaust denial armbands elsewhere.
Presumably, this would be against the FIFA's own rules (just as I'm sure most professional sporting leagues would not allow an athlete to wear a swastika).
Well, now wearing a "love" armband is against FIFA's rules.
I'm sorry, this just seems like a side-step: if someone were to do it, Germany would enforce its norms regardless of cosmopolitanism and "welcoming the world". And, if necessary, they would prevail on FIFA or some other body to help.
Did FIFA actually make it against the rules everywhere, or only for the World Cup in Qatar?
Your gotcha is not clever because you're well aware of the material differences. No one is claiming universal free speech is an entitlement to everyone everywhere or that countries can't impose their own laws on visitors. For example, Qatar also has rules against immodest dress and behavior, and I don't think anyone has argued that World Cup athletes should be allowed to walk around in bikinis or engage in public make-out sessions.
The principle I am arguing is that censorious regimes who want to enforce censorship even to the extent of forbidding athletes to wear political expressions they don't like during world events they are hosting should receive pushback, and the point I am making is that people defending the precious sovereignty of Qatar would normally be in favor of this pushback if the censorship didn't happen to be directed, this time, at their enemies.
It actually is against the rules in general. No political or religious speech on the uniforms. The “expected” sanction is apparently a fine, which Wales at least claimed to accept...but they drew the line at yellow cards. Not clear on whether that’s happened before or if this was one of those gentlemen’s agreements where FIFA reserved the right.
I agree with you that FIFA shouldn’t have escalated, especially not on behalf of the host.
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What makes you think that Qataris find public immodesty bad but not public advocating for immodesty and immorality?
I mean, I agree that banning public immodesty feels more reasonable to me than banning "OneLove" but then, I swim in the same waters as you do and I don't think I can actually debunk that view without digging into axioms.
I personally don't care if people "push back" at Qatar. Seems like there were plenty of avenues to do that more effectively (e.g. boycott) but nobody wanted to sacrifice. Well, here we are.
I've already stated that I have less problem with "Qatar is just wrong and we're right" so long as it's not couched in terms of welcoming the world or whatever.
I just don't think there's any actual universalizable standard of hospitality that can be pulled out from this* . It's just about who has power to determine what's considered "normal" and "reasonable".
* Well...except don't lie and salami-tactic your way into a World Cup. That is the most obvious sin here. It looks different if they announce all this on Day 1.
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Have you seen the ridiculous speech Infantino gave? Apparently he knows what it is like to be a gay disabled migrant worker because he's a ginger (or was, when he still had hair) and was bullied for it as a kid.
It's no secret FIFA is corrupt to the marrow of its bones and cares only about money, and the only reason Qatar got to host the World Cup was that it out-bribed everyone else. I think the PR campaigns about kick racism out of football and LGBT+ rights and BLM kneeling and rainbow laces and all the rest of it is simply performative virtue signalling, and if a Muslim player doesn't want to wear a rainbow jersey for his club match then his rights should be respected too, but this is just pulling away even the fig leaf that FIFA cares. As pointed out, they'd happily bully a Western country about not having a Pride flag waving in every stadium, but Qatar can get away with human rights abuses because money money money.
I do think that Qatar does have the right to say "our country, our rules, no rainbow flags in the stadium" but it's not like FIFA have any actual principles about any of this, and the clubs/teams from Western countries are doing as much PR signalling as they are genuinely caring about the topic.
Then the French government would happily back them up, because laïcité. The most recent fights around this have involved Islam, but it started off applied to Catholicism.
And I'm sure you could find people in America who would enthuse about rainbow flags in the classroom if a teacher wanted to put one up, but would be equally adamant about "no way" if a teacher wanted to wear a visible cross.
Bullying is serious enough that this is not absurd (aside from the absurdity of being disabled and a migrant worker at the same time; migrant worker jobs are not generally ones that can be done by disabled people.)
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I don't GAF about FIFA or the World Cup, honestly, and I know 90% of the LGBT+ stuff is virtue-signaling. I don't expect any integrity from sports organizations, but it's not wrong to call them (and Qatar) out on it.
I am unswayed by the argument that we should respect Qatar culture and their right to exercise their sovereignty over what visiting soccer players wear. I don't think anyone outside Qatar actually cares about these things. But I tire of the pettiness of defending literally anyone and anything just so long as what's being defended is that they're pissing off your outgroup.
You say that as if the only reason anyone is attacking isn't that someone pissed on their ingroup.
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