South African consequence, from hosting WC 2010

[davidalanreese]

Celtic, your missing the point. S. Africa used to be great - a beautiful country, with resources and industry, a good economy, and an extremely well-defined, well-defended, socio-political economic demarcation line that keep the poor black people in the ghettos and left plenty of living room for the white minority. Now it's like all those other African countries - it's no longer white-ruled so by definition it's any and everything bad you can imagine. Don't try to talk actual experiences, we know all we need to know - the ANC is in charge and it's virtual anarchy. They'll be using tire necklaces on World Cup tourists right after they rob us and rape our wives and children to infect us with their African AIDS blood - and that's just at the airport. Just you wait and see what they'll be doing after the games later in the tournament. S. Africa is really no better than Haiti - in fact statistics prove that it's worse than Haiti.

Tell me how many people were mugged during the 1995 Rugby World Cup and the 2003 Cricket World Cup, both held in South Africa?

[tomwilhelm]

Celtic, your missing the point. S. Africa used to be great - a beautiful country, with resources and industry, a good economy, and an extremely well-defined, well-defended, socio-political economic demarcation line that keep the poor black people in the ghettos and left plenty of living room for the white minority. Now it's like all those other African countries - it's no longer white-ruled so by definition it's any and everything bad you can imagine. Don't try to talk actual experiences, we know all we need to know - the ANC is in charge and it's virtual anarchy. They'll be using tire necklaces on World Cup tourists right after they rob us and rape our wives and children to infect us with their African AIDS blood - and that's just at the airport. Just you wait and see what they'll be doing after the games later in the tournament. S. Africa is really no better than Haiti - in fact statistics prove that it's worse than Haiti.
You're not helping with the snippy hyperbole. That's not what people are saying and you know it.

[uclacarlos]

You're not helping with the snippy hyperbole. That's not what people are saying and you know it.
What's sad is that... no, he doesn't know that he's setting up a strawman, even though "strawman" is prolly an entry in Wikipedia.

Are you joking, or do you still not get it?
Dave of the Super kind:

Maybe you should set up an entry in Wikipedia that explains this whole thing.

[uclacarlos]

Celtic, your missing the point.
I guess I must've missed that UCLA phone call when they switched the possessive adjective and contraction spellings in the English language. Maybe you should edit this grammar entry in Wikipedia. :rolleyes:
S. Africa used to be great - a beautiful country, with resources and industry, a good economy, and an extremely well-defined, well-defended, socio-political economic demarcation line that keep the poor black people in the ghettos and left plenty of living room for the white minority. Now it's like all those other African countries - it's no longer white-ruled so by definition it's any and everything bad you can imagine.
Is there no Wikipedia entry that explains that we're talking about the need to serve the populace and not the tourists?

[davidalanreese]

You don't think that's what they are saying? An entire thread predicated on the assumption that South Africa won't be able to host the tournament with the proof being that South Africa is too poor (by GNP, not true), has too little infrastructure or the capability to build such infrastructure (again not true), has too high a crime rate (coming from people that live in a country that has murder capitols like Washington D.C., N.Y. City, Los Angeles, etc.), or is too sick (which amazingly enough hasn't seemed to slow economic growth or effect S. Africa's overall economic standing and is seemingly unrelated in any way to football matches). I don't think it's too far a leap to say that there is something else going on considering the lengths to which people seem to think this World Cup is going to fail. Now, obviously, there are those that are so nativistic that they want to believe it's going to fail so that there will be another World Cup hosted in the U.S. - which I can understand the wanting to host another World Cup but find it a bit slimy to base one's hope on another country failing in it's quest to host the Cup. The others, though, that unremittingly continue to beat down any idea that there could possibly be any possible rationale for hosting the Cup in S. Africa give me cause to think they've got some other kind of problem for which they want to use some over-exageratted physical threat to explain their misgivings or some sort of paternalistic philanthropic sense of decrying the misuse of S. African resources as if they know better what S. Africa needs than the S. African electorate itself.

So, anyway, that's what I'm saying and I figure I'm as entitled to my opinion as anyone else is so I'm saying it here.

You're not helping with the snippy hyperbole. That's not what people are saying and you know it.

[davidalanreese]

It's right next to the entries about "white man's burden", "missionary", "ethnocentrism", and "cultural imperialism".

That is if their meaning hasn't changed since this morning or if they aren't being used metaphorically, literally

I guess I must've missed that UCLA phone call when they switched the possessive adjective and contraction spellings in the English language. Maybe you should edit this grammar entry in Wikipedia. :rolleyes:

Is there no Wikipedia entry that explains that we're talking about the need to serve the populace and not the tourists?

[davidalanreese]

I don't think it's time for the hysterics I've seen in these posts. I guess if you assume FIFA doesn't care about having a successful World Cup, South Africa doesn't care about how it's perceived while hosting a World Cup, South Africa is actually poor (not per capita poor but actually poor in capital resources), that South African politicians aren't accountable to their constituencies, that South African politicians don't care about their constituencies, and that Soweto is the same thing as Johannesburg then, yeah, I'd say it was appropriate to be concerned.

No nation is ever completely ready for the size and scope of the World Cup - even Germany had to engage in construction and that ran behind schedule. Brazil is going to have a hard time bringing it all together for 2014 if they are named hosts like everyone expects - everything everyone says in this thread can be said about Brazil. If your looking for the perfect country, it doesn't exist. You can always find some way to complain about who wins the Cup. That's why they vote on it and then we move on.


I don't think that's what many are saying. Sure there are a few ignorant xenophobes... this IS BigSoccer. But I didn't get the impression at all that the people on this thread were being mean, disingenuous, or ridiculous in their criticism.

You really don't think there is any room for criticism of SA's winning bid or current state of preperations?

[uclacarlos]

No nation is ever completely ready for the size and scope of the World Cup -
Um.

The US is, hence this thread. :D
Brazil is going to have a hard time bringing it all together for 2014 if they are named hosts like everyone expects - everything everyone says in this thread can be said about Brazil.
Um.

Yeah. And it's been said in this thread and the other threads about this topic that have appeared and reappeared over the last 5+ months.

But the reality is that Brazil is a more likely to happen than RSA for a variety of reasons.
If your looking
Rrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnngggggggggggggggg.

"Hello. Yeah, sure thing. I'll tell him."

That was the grammar police. They want you to turn in your badge b/c you think that "looking" functions as a noun, when it's a verb, and you're using a possessive adjective instead of a contraction of a subject pronoun and a verb.

Oh, and they said that if you can't keep that straight, PLUS you're incapable of keeping up to date w/ your vocabulary, that you should give up being a vocab/grammar police.

Thanks for playing though.

[davidalanreese]

Regarding the AIDS pandemic, let's just assume that:

more jobs = better health care in the future

No argument there.

However, w/ a contagious disease, you need to focus on the problem NOW, not in 2012 when the final tab comes in and when economic indicators might show that RSA gained from the Cup.

No you don't - the money that is going to be spent on infrastructure, security, service industry jobs, etc. is going to be spent from now until the end of the tournament with the largest amount spent during the construction phase. Secondly, HIV is a predominately sexually transmitted contagious disease. Money is not going to alleviate the problem - safe sex is going to alleviate the problem. You could build a hospital every square mile of the entire country and the rate of HIV infection isn't going to change until individuals realize HIV isn't like the flu - it's a sexually transmitted disease and practicing safe sex, both homosexual and heterosexual, is the only effective way to prevent the spread of the disease.


Regarding sports and high profile events, voting populaces and politicians don't always think w/ a critical eye. Nationalistic or regionalistic sentiments cloud judgement, or politics plain and simple run the day.

yeah, that's a democracy....



Spain, 1992. Seville, World's Fair. Barcelona, Olympics.

B/c the olympics are/were so high profile, sevillanos felt pissed that they weren't going to get as much attention. Combine that w/ the leaders of the ruling party (PSOE) hailing primarily from Andalusia (the southern autonomous region), and they decided to have RENFE, the national train system, build a high speed train (AVE) connecting Madrid and Seville in order to "encourage tourists" to go to the Fair.

They didn't. And Seville spent a ton of money to host an event... for themselves.

Then, the Catalans upped prices everywhere to try to milk every last dime out of tourists in Barcelona. PLUS, the govt kept the peseta artificially high so as to milk every last dime coming into Spain that summer.

The result: tourists severely limited their spending, and outside of hotels, every industry got leveled by the disappointing economic windfall.

And Spain went into recession, b/c the "jobs" created were short-lived, the money spent on infrastructure took most of the profit out of the events, the govt was in debt b/c they were banking on more expenditures, more sales tax and more income tax.

yeah, that's a democracy...nothing about being democratic means that there is some protection from being wrong. In fact, part of the beauty of a democracy is you have the right to be wrong. Opportunity and the way an individual, business, government, or country take advantage of the opportunity can end up being good or bad - no guarantees in this life. In the end, it's their decision to make, not ours. Go back and look at ethnocentrism, white man's burden, cultural imperialism, and missionary and you can see how successful one group is at running another groups country.

Hospitals, schools, public works, public safety, you name it, in the aftermath got leveled.

God, people on Big Soccer love that bold tag. What is it - the darker the font the more you prove your point. Look, I know next to nothing about Spain's World Fair so I'll take your word for it.


Taking the simplistic view that "WC=jobs" really reduces the debate to simpleton terms. It's far more complex than that.

Typically, the most successful Olympics/WC are the ones in developed nations in which there are modest upgrade expenditures.

Yeah, it really is that simple when your poor. You need money now - let the future take care of itself. The beauty of S. Africa is that it is so well positioned that they can afford to take this on and the future is taken care off by good financial practices over the last number of years. The overall economic picture of S. Africa is excellent and the public works projects from a World Cup are well within their economic capacity. S. Africa is sitting on 20 billion dollars of gold and foreign reserves. Does anybody on this board realize just how much money that is and how much more it is than all but very richest countries in the world. Their debt is minimal - most G14 nations wish their debt was as low as S. Africa. So not only are jobs now good policy but an overarching wide-range public works project that will help put money into black communities and black workers hands is affordable for S. Africa and the country is well positioned even if revenues from the tournament itself proved to be disappointing.

RSA is proof that you cannot cherry-pick the leading components of the definition of a "developed nation" b/c you must look at the overall picture. W/ RSA, that overall picture lies in sharp contrast w/ the "first world". For 80%, they're a quintessential under-developed, poor country.

I can say the exact same thing back, but in reverse - S. Africa is proof that you cannot cherry-pick national data to show that a "developed" nation is actually a non-developed nation. The overall picture is that the country is prosperous, industrial, and financial solid and prepared to spend on large public works programs that will pull a large mass of poverty stricken black citizens from below the poverty line and into the middle-class.

The other thing is that this is their choice. It really is the height of arrogance to assume that not only are you more intelligent than everyone in FIFA that championed this bid, but that your smarter than everyone in S. Africa about what is best for their country.

[davidalanreese]

I don't know - what additional jobs have occurred in Greece since the Olympics? What additional jobs will London have after they host the Olympics? Tourism has only been lightly tapped as an industry for S. Africa - the vast majority of their economic strength comes from mining, and other industrial sources. Maybe their tourist/service industry becomes larger and more established. Maybe people that get ahold of some money for the first time will be able to start their own businesses since they finally have capital. Maybe more kids get to go to school because families can afford their education.

Getting money into people's hands is a dynamic force and the results are inconsistent and unpredictable. Some will drink it away or whore it away or drug it away. Some will sock it away and it will provide a little extra cushion. Some will be able to use it to buy some key material item that enables them to make a better living. Others will buy TVs and video games. Some will use it to build a business and create new more new jobs. Overall, though, getting money to people opens up opportunities that don't exist now and that means there are millions and millions of people with an untold potential that never even get to make a mistake or show their genius.

Fine...first, you're making the assumption that tackling the AIDS crisis or improving schools won't also create jobs. But let's leave that aside for now.

What Cup-related jobs will there be in August 2010?

[babytiger2001]

Posts split from the main thread in the USA Men's forum.

[davidalanreese]

Um.

The US is, hence this thread. :D

Um.

Yeah. And it's been said in this thread and the other threads about this topic that have appeared and reappeared over the last 5+ months.

But the reality is that Brazil is a more likely to happen than RSA for a variety of reasons.

Well, there is the one problem that other countries may not want to play here. They do have a regular vote on the matter and for some reason the U.S. isn't the unanimous choice much less a perennial option. Is that because they don't really know what they want, too stupid to know what's best for them, or part of a conspiracy? I know it couldn't be something simple, like they want to hold the tournament in new regions where soccer has emerged as a powerful movement over the last 20 or 30 years or so.