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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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