Adidas have confirmed no contact was made between the World Cup matchball and Cristiano Ronaldo, thanks to a 500Hz IMU sensor and Connected Ball Technology housed in Adidas’s Al Rihla used in the tournament…
Is Qatar better or worse overall than the United States of America? I believe Qatar is better as a society. They kill far fewer people, which should be right at the top of the list when it comes to judging moral values.
You can deem it trolling if you like, but it’s a completely valid view point (and sincere viewpoint from my perspective). Qatari society has significant defects, but it is way better than American society when judged from a moral or ethical viewpoint. That isn’t even debatable - America kills and tortures on an industrial scale. Americans don’t care because they’re on the other side of those abuses. Those of us on the receiving end are clear eyed about how hollow the US concerns about human rights in Qatar are.
If the US allowed anyone to immigrate, how many people would move to America? Ask the same question for Qatar. Now tell me which nation is better.
Is that the definition for “better”? According to that definition Turkey and Pakistan are the best countries in the world.
Tommy Vietor's pod save the world podcast has been very interesting on this theme - not just Qatar but also the insanity of Russia '18 What has been interesting over here is an alternative movement to watch other games while the world cup is on. Some women's and lower level club games got insane attendances in the last week while TV viewing has been in the toilet. Walking around, and unlike '18, you wouldn't even know the world cup was on.
I think it's similar to whether it was the fault of chelsea fans that their club was acquired by a genocidal war lord. It's 99% the fault of gate keepers for allowing corrupt killers to poison the game as part of their soft power play in Londongrad - and especially the fawning media who licked the mobster's balls like public school boys on their first day of fagging duty However one can certainly criticise Genocide FC fans who took it further and went around positively fapping over RA as if he was a great guy instead of a crime capo for a murderer.
LOL I am very much reminded of the Rugby Blazers in the 70/80s who went round saying politics and sport didn't mix, when the Apartheid regime expressly used sport to normalise and promote South Africa to the world Of course this mantra was a good way of being able to enjoy rugby while ignoring apartheid - which at one point actually excluded brown all blacks from the games - go figure, I was always less surprised that the Blazers went along with it, because they got the corrupt trips to Sun City, and the players got paid - but why did fans go along with it? (about half of us didn't). In the end it took the horror of actual violence on the 1981 Springbok tour to bring about an end to it.
FIFA giving it to Qatar AND having to move it to November/December instead of playing in July is biting a lot of broadcasters and sponsors in the wallet right now.
Yep. The time of the games is also an issue as most of them are happening in the working day euro time. I think the germany vs spain game is the first one that had any viewership as that was actually in the late evening.
Aside from it being in the Winter and all the baggage with it in Qatar, Doha is in the same time zone as Moscow. Some World Cup! Two in a row in the same time zone. Terrible
The fingers in Iraq and Afghanistan were poked in by the US, not Pakistan or Turkey. The Turkey situation now is more Syria than Iraq, but Pakistan is down to the terrible situation in Afghanistan. Afghanistan perfectly shows the hypocrisy of US foreign policy. Afghan government has funds frozen and sanctions imposed because of “concerns for women’s rights” whilst some Afghans are selling their own organs and children because there’s no food partly due to sanctions. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022...ns-resort-to-selling-kidneys-to-feed-families
Dude, you are an American living in a Trumpy return to traditional American values. There ain't enough difference in this country for you to clown like you're doing.
Wonder why they chose today to release this. Iran has for the first time reported that more than 300 people have died in over two months of protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in morality police custody. The Islamic republic has deployed state security forces against what it labels "riots" that broke out after the 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian died on September 16, three days after her arrest for allegedly breaching Iran's dress code for women. Thousands of Iranians and around 40 foreigners have been arrested and more than 2,000 people have been charged, according to judicial authorities. Among these, six have been sentenced to death, with their appeals set to be heard by the Supreme Court.
Qatar isn’t Putin, and Qatar needs to fix its own problems. I am well aware that Qatar needs to rebalance its economy so that workers have more rights. But America is worse than Qatar. It probably isn’t worse than Russia.
Currently sitting in a bar in the airport watching...oh, the bartender just turned on the match. Now I'm okay.
It’s an idiotically simplistic measure to compare countries. In general I’m not sure how you can reasonably compare a tiny country consisting primarily of foreign workers ruled over by a tiny homogeneous minority to a massive diverse country of several hundred million. Though it would be interesting to ask the female half of the human population which country they’d prefer to live in. And the answer is even more obvious for gay people.