Panto_Villan

It’s two separate points. Russia is a genuinely terrible place, Qatar is merely a bad one. You’re free to complain about both, but classing them as equally bad is ill informed and / or racist. The second point is if you then take an incredibly simplistic view about what constitutes an “unworthy” country - in this case the guy explicitly said any authoritarian regime is unworthy simply because they’re authoritarian regimes, despite 70% of the world’s population living in them - then you end up in a situation where very little of the world meets your standards. That’s insane. The World Cup is a world event. You can’t have a situation where most of the world isn’t eligible to host it, even if that means you sometimes have to host it somewhere that doesn’t have a perfect human rights record or isn’t a model democracy. I mean, if you can’t see that most of the world is going to have a problem with the idea that the entire of Africa, Middle East and most of Asia aren’t allowed to have a World Cup because a bunch of guys in Western Europe have decided they’re not pure enough then I don’t know what to tell you.

Cool. Can we put the World Cup in the British Museum along with all the other global heritage items that rich white countries took from places we looked down on for not being sufficiently enlightened? Being serious for a moment - I understand the point you’re making and in moderation it’s a valid one. However, frankly, I think it gets ridiculous and more than a little racist once it reaches the point you want to exclude most of the world (almost all of it non-white) from being able to host the World Cup, which you apparently do. I’m genuinely surprised you want to go that far. Anyway, I think we’ve both made our views clear so I’ll bow out of the discussion. Should also add I’m not calling you a racist here, just how far you’re willing to take that specific view.

Well, this is the thing. As I mentioned in the post above, I don't put Qatar in the same category as Saudi Arabia or Russia or Iran in terms of being totally beyond the pale regarding human rights. I put it in a category above that where the country is flawed but I think should be considered for the World Cup (although then immediately disqualified for logicstical reasons in the case of Qatar). Here's a fun chart. I'm not quite sure why they've split democracy into liberal and electoral, but the former are the rich Western countries + Japan / Korea, and the latter is Eastern Europe, Latin America, Indonesia and the best governed parts of Africa. If you rule out countries purely based on being autocracies then you've just said it's morally unacceptable if 70% of the world's population have a chance to see the World Cup in their home country (and that's even before you start discounting countries like Poland and Hungary and Israel). Doesn't that make you a bit uncomfortable?

I agree to an extent. Personally, while I think Qatar getting the World Cup was a travesty, I don't think the human rights issues alone are enough to disqualify them. I think it's fair to raise and discuss the issues, but a boycott based on them would be too far for me. The reason why is the same reason I'd be happy with Thailand getting the World Cup (with its Freedom House rating only slightly higher than Qatar). It's an authoritarian police state too, but I reckon they'd put on a great tournament and if you refuse to allow the World Cup anywhere except democracies and / or places with impeccable human rights records then there's very few places you can actually host it, and fewer still that aren't rich white countries. Also, even if FIFA was a completely clean organisation we probably still wouldn't find ourselves in a situation where North America, Europe and Australia pass the World Cup around between themselves, because people from other countries get a vote too.

To be honest reading this makes me doubt the Scandi media is covering Qatar fairly after all. Apologies if this message sounds hostile but this is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about - drawing false equivalence between a really, really awful place and a place that’s just flawed. Yes, there are Arab monarchies with genuinely atrocious human rights records. Saudi Arabia is worse even than Russia (although that’s almost entirely due to the way it treats women). But not all Arab monarchies are alike; all are autocratic police states but there’s a big difference between Saudi and Qatar or Oman or Jordan. Lumping them all together does you no favours. If you want numbers for it, Freedom House is a nonprofit that measures the relative freedom of countries and they’ve scored Saudi as 7/100, Russia as a 19/100, Oman as 24/100 and Qatar as 25/100. For reference, China is 9/100 and Thailand is 29/100. Even if you’re talking only about how it treats people within it’s own borders, Qatar is markedly better than Russia. Clearly the migrant worker situation needs improving, but you certainly can just say a certain number of healthy young people will die each year. Migrant workers are 90% of the population of Qatar and over 200 people die in road accidents there per year. Construction work is dangerous; in Thailand where they have better human rights 4500 people die on construction sites a year. Pro rated for population that’s another 180 expected deaths. I’m sure sinister forces were at work in some of the deaths (and that should be improved) but the statistics seem intentionally misleading. Lots of people do just die. And then Russian foreign policy is murderous in the extreme, as I’ve already noted. I don’t think you can just assume Qatar would have attacked it’s neighbours three times in the past twenty years if it had a larger population, nor that it would be shooting down airliners, etc. Russia is one of the most aggressive countries in the planet and the stuff Russia (particularly Wagner) have got up to abroad is horrific, frankly. Even the Amnesty report shows the gulf between the countries. Their examples of Qatari repression were that some political blogger got arrested and got a big fine, or that a journalist was wrongly imprisoned for a few days then deported. We both know Russia just murders critics of the Kremlin, even if they’ve moved abroad. Other quick examples: Freedom House says torture is illegal in Qatar and rarely occurs. Russia frequently tortures Ukrainians to death these days (including civilians). Homosexuality is illegal in Qatar but rarely prosecuted, whereas in areas of Russia gays are tortured and / or murdered. Etc. Ultimately if you think Qatar is as bad as Russia you’re just factually wrong. You can criticise both but don’t draw false equivalence between them. And if someone is doing that I think it’s worth asking why.

Yes, I'd agree with that much. However I just think the extent of the change is disproportionate to how bad Russia is relative to Qatar, even taking into account the fact that it's a more prominent issue these days. And while Qatar isn't up to Western standards, it's not *that* bad by global standards. The actual facts and figures behind the mistreatment of migrant workers and the number of deaths aren't quite as bad as they initially seem - e.g. the 6500 deaths widely reported is actually the number of deaths of migrant workers from any cause over a 10 year period, etc. I don't want to whitewash them too much because it's still bad over there, but they just seem so much better than somewhere like Russia that the relative amount of condemnation they are getting seems wildly out of kilter. And the most obvious explanation to me is that some people are bitter at FIFA for having this joke of a World Cup and probably also all the Arab countries buying successful football clubs and are translating that into saying "this country has weird customs and the people that live there are bad and backward". And if so, that would be racism. As well as what Hiney said above, there's the military coup they had recently and their extremely strict laws on drugs and disrespecting the royals, etc. I really liked Thailand the times I've been and I think you're right it'd be a very fun place to have a World Cup, but there'd still be human rights issues to complain about. Which is kinda the point I was making in that post; there's not actually many countries that are completely above board in terms of human rights and I think you have to give some leeway if you want to see the World Cup hosted in the developing world sometimes.

Well, I personally think I have grounds for it. Other people in the UK are equally well placed to put forward other arguments. I'm just saying media coverage from abroad doesn't necessarily disprove my argument - although I do take your point that overseas people probably do read UK media more than vice versa.

Not really, because you're talking about 2018 like it was a lifetime ago. Trump had been in office for 18 months at that point. Russia was an authoritarian police state with a terrible record on homosexuality, and had invaded Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 where they shot down a civilian airliner. They'd been murdering tens of thousands of civilians in Syria since 2015, and they literally murdered a British citizen on British soil with a nerve agent about three months before the World Cup kicked off. I really don't think it's plausible to argue that people didn't realise that any of that stuff was bad until George Floyd was killed or tanks started rolling across the Ukrainian border. Morality isn't a recent invention.

That's fine. I notice many of the people debating this point with me are from the scandi countries and if your media and population has been equally critical of human rights abuses in other countries hosting sporting events then I'm not suggesting any racism is present. Then it's just a consistent principle being applied to all countries equally, which is fine. Obviously any criticism of Qatar / FIFA due to the award process and the logistics of hosting a football tournament there is also fair game too. My issue is specifically with people who apparently have a real problem with the human rights situation in Qatar but were nowhere near as bothered by the human rights situation in Russia, given Russia is a much worse place. And just as I can't comment on how the scandi media and population have treated that issue and will have to take your word for it, I don't think people from abroad can comment on the situation in the UK. And ultimately what FIFA want here is kinda irrelevent, it's not a sensible approach to try and brush things under the carpet because they might help out FIFA.

Yeah, I've watched it now. Sounds like we agree anyway. I was just talking about Wagner in terms of pure military effectiveness; their attitude towards wounded comrades or those that fail their missions is kinda beyond that and you're right that it doesn't seem like they're willing to risk much to help one another out.

Also, there’s another issue at play here. If we established that Qatar is an unsuitable host because of their human rights issues, where does that leave us in terms of acceptable hosts? Africa is out. The few places that might have an acceptable human rights record don’t have the infrastructure and / or couldn’t guarantee security. Middle East is out for social reasons. The best options would be somewhere like Jordan or Israel but neither would be considered appropriate. Asia has a couple of democracies like South Korea and Japan that would work. Everywhere else is too small, or has human rights issues (China/India/Pakistan etc). Maybe Indonesia at a push. South America has a lot of small countries that might struggle to afford it, many of which have security issues. Argentina would work (assuming they’re not being bailed out by the IMF), Brazil could work (depending on deforestation and indigenous rights), or Mexico (depending on security). And then you’ve got the Western countries full of white peoples. USA, Canada, Australia, plus the EU (but not Poland or Hungary because they’re bad). I get why moral concerns matter but if you make too much of them you end up with a situation where the Western world decides the only acceptable venues are rich white democracies plus a few select allies, and about 3/4 of the world population isn’t eligible to see their country host this world event. That’s not to excuse the process of Qatar and Russia being awarded the World Cups, because that appeared to be naked bribery.

Nobody is claiming people shouldn’t criticise the tournament being held in Qatar. The problem is that the vast majority of the criticism I’ve seen is coverage of Qatar’s human rights record, with very little coverage of the fact that FIFA were clearly bribed into choosing an unsuitable host country (in terms of climate and infrastructure). If the problem is actually FIFA then the negative coverage should be about them. If you genuinely think that there’s been a fundamental change in the world and any future World Cup held in a country with a patchy human rights record will receive this level of criticism, fine. I don’t agree. Feels to me people feel more comfortable criticising Qatar because it’s some far away country full of brown people with a strange culture, whereas China and Russia are evil in more familiar ways. And if that’s the reason why the criticism is happening, it’s not whataboutism at all. It’s pointing out racism, which by definition always involves comparing the treatment of two different groups and criticising the double standard.

I read quite an interesting longform article on this a couple of weeks back. It went a bit counter to the narrative I've been reading on Twitter, which is basically that the Russians sent over these massive salvos of missiles and then the Ukrainians get everything fixed up and there's no real harm done. The article was saying that Ukraine still uses the Soviet style of power grid, which uses transformers that run on a different voltage (or something to that effect) than the Western / EU countries do. All these missile strikes are being targetted at essential infrastructure and although the Ukrainians quickly repair most of the damage inflicted, when one of these massive twenty-ton transformers gets blown up there's basically nothing they can do. Nobody in the EU builds transformers that work with the Ukrainian style of power grid because we don't use them, and even the old ex-Soviet countries in the EU have moved over to Western systems in the past decade or two, so they don't have any either. It was saying Ukraine is already short at least fifty of these things and the problem just gets worse with every new wave of missiles, so there's potential this turns into a really serious issue going forward.

I think Wagner are actually meant to be some of the most effective troops on the Russian side. Obviously the prisoner conscripts less so (they're just sent in to die), but I don't think there's any indication the proper Wagner troopers don't know how to fight together as a team.

I might have to rewatch Rogue One. I thought it was decent but not amazing. I really liked the visual style and the feel of the film, but I didn't find the plot that engaging and Saw also rubbed me up the wrong way. Perhaps it'll hit a bit different after watching Andor though. Although Krennic and his office politics with Tarkin were something I enjoyed a lot too, thinking back to it. Anyway, I really liked the way the space battle in Andor in ep11 had the same style as Rogue One - very visually clean, easy to see what was happening, felt "realistic" - whereas most modern Star Wars battles look an absolute mess. That's part of the reason why I was (and am) hoping for more action in Andor. It's much higher quality than the new trilogy. I'd rather watch half a dozen spaceships have a fight than one thousand Star Destroyers fighting every fighter in the entire galaxy like in Rise of Skywalker. One thing that was interesting is some of the equipment on the friendly ship in ep11 was actually quite silly (I think everyone who has seen it knows exactly what I'm talking about) and if I'd seen it in one of the other modern SW films / shows I'd probably have rolled my eyes pretty hard. But in Andor I just laughed and thought "that's cool", so I guess most of the show having a serious tone means they can get away with stuff like that.

Let's hope they do!

Yeah, I don't have any personal dislike for Southgate but it does kinda feel like how it did when we had Gerrard. Just putting a bunch of good players out on the pitch and hoping one of them does enough to get us some points. But he's got no answers if that doesn't happen.

Yeah, but to be fair I was replying to a post talking about how people are angry because we've gone through Brexit, BoJo and Liz Truss. Unless I've really not been paying attention, you Norweigans probably weren't covered by that comment

I feel like that's apples and oranges though. No major world leaders are actually expected to attend Qatar, and I don't think it's normal for any major western power to send ministers along either? Whereas even the Winter Olympics is a bigger deal where governments often have official representation. From skim reading the news it seems like the World Cup just got the leaders from other Gulf states and a few random places like Rwanda and Liberia turning up. It's nice to know that the abuses in China got coverage in Norway but in the UK at least I don't remember seeing anywhere near the level of coverage. Clearly some of that is because the winter olympics are a lower profile event, but that's true even relatively speaking - in the UK it seems like there's more coverage about Qatar itself than there is about the football (admittedly potentially because we're so bitter FIFA screwed us over).

This might be plausible if the 2022 Winter Olympics hadn’t happened at the start of this year without any serious calls to boycott it.

What’s their justification for the boycott? Because FIFA awarded the tournament to a patently unsuitable country due to corruption? Or because Qatar is unfriendly to homosexuals and has a poor human rights record?

It’s stuff like presenters being asked to justify why they’re even going to the country to cover the World Cup. I’ve never seen that before.

Could be if it’s being posted on here, yeah. But very little of the general media coverage I’ve seen mentions FIFA and its issues. Most of it seems squarely aimed at Qatar.

I’d argue you’re the one pulling the whatabout card here though. You’re saying that Russia’s World Cup and China’s Olympics were bad but really none of the coverage at the time reflected that, whereas all the coverage of Qatar for the same issues has been extremely negative across all the media. Even this thread is full of people celebrating that viewing figures for Qatar are down compared to Russia, a place even worse than Qatar. Claiming that people pointing out that this seems indicative of a racist viewpoint are indulging in whataboutism just seems a lazy way of dismissing criticism (or any need for self reflection).

Again, I’m not sure that’s a problem that’s unique to Qatar or even the Middle East. Russia gets huge amounts of migrant labour from the various stans and they’re not treated particularly well. Recently they’ve ended up being conscripted into the Russian army and sent to die in Ukraine, for example. Also, the wages paid in Qatar are way better than those people would earn in their home countries; that’s why so many people go there to work. The conditions are pretty grim but it’s not slavery for the most part. People coming from less developed countries and working in dangerous jobs with little legal protection from mistreatment happens all over the world. It even happens in the UK to some extent. It’s something that the world should make a fuss about, of course - yet it’s odd it’s only Qatar that has been singled out for this sort of treatment.