#but this football crap + the backlash to the backlash of the football crap + that meme picture of her whispering... | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

coochiequeens · 2 years

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Iceland is often labelled the best place in the world to be a woman, as well as the safest country on Earth. But many Icelandic women roll their eyes in frustration at such claims.

“That is crap,” says 35-year-old Hulda Hrund Guðrúnar Sigmundsdóttir. “This has been shoved down our throats ever since we were little. We’re told we’re so safe, while at the same time our mothers are warning us not to talk to men.”

Sigmundsdóttir is a member of Öfgar, a new feminist group made up of nine Icelandic women who have been collating and sharing anonymous stories of sexual violence by powerful men. Their recent actions have taken the small country by storm and sparked a resurgence of the #MeToo movement.

Over the last year, several Icelandic men in positions of power have stepped down or been fired over allegations of harassment, misconduct or sexual offences. The list includes men who had been working in the media, politics, business and football, as well as others in positions of power. Some have apologised but most have denied the allegations against them.

Sigmundsdóttir says Iceland’s long-held reputation as a feminist paradisehas prevented women such as her from speaking up about abuse. “It’s a silencing tactic,” she says. “We are told we should be grateful because other countries have it worse than us.”

One in four women in the country have been raped or sexually assaulted, according to a study by the University of Iceland, which had more than 20,000 participants. That is higher than estimates for the EU and the UK.

On top of this, many women feel the justice system works against them when it comes to allegations of gender-based violence, with the vast majority of cases reported to police not making it to trial and few resulting in a conviction. A number of women have even gone as far as to sue Iceland at the human rights court, accusing it of failing to protect them from gendered violence.

That’s why Öfgar – which means “radical” or “extreme” in English – decided to take the matter into its own hands when it formed last summer.

Öfgar began when the women, who are all survivors of sexual assault, started to talk on a feminist Facebook group and decided to start a TikTok account together. At first, they posted educational videos about consent and sex education. But when they say they received 32 allegations of assault against the same Icelandic musician, they decided to post the women’s stories. He has denied the allegations.

“Overnight, the ball started rolling really fast,” says Helga Ben, 28, one of the members of the group. Since then, hundreds of survivors have shared their stories.

They have also taken on Icelandic football, promoting an allegation of sexual abuse against a forward for the men’s national team. Following their campaign, the entire board of the Icelandic Football Association resigned over the alleged cover-up.

Öfgar says it checks that the women who write to them are real by looking up their names in the “Book of Icelanders”, a database that contains genealogical information for most of the Icelandic population. It says it also fact-checks the claims by trawling through old social media posts.

On top of sharing allegations, Öfgar has had meetings with members of the media in Iceland and tried to persuade them to change the way they write about survivors of sexual iolence. “We had a meeting with one of the biggest media in Iceland [DV] and we held a masterclass,” says Sigmundsdóttir. “They promised to do better – and they have done.”

In Iceland, women who speak out against abuse are often “slut shamed”, Ólöf Tara Harðardóttir says. So people find it easier to speak anonymously with Öfgar as a buffer. “Survivors feel they can trust us,” says Ben.

In a small country where everyone knows everyone, the women have met with a backlash. “The media have portrayed us as angry women, and as money-greedy attention whores,” Harðardóttir says. “They use the ugliest pictures they can get of us.”

The women in Öfgar also say they have received death threats, along with calls begging them to stop. “I have had phone calls, saying they knew where I lived,” says Harðardóttir. “I also had messages on Instagram saying I should kill myself. We got an email saying someone will end up dying if you don’t stop.”

Þórhildur Gyða Arnarsdóttir, 26, says she has also been the subject of abuse. “When you step forward with your name, you get these vicious attacks. The comment sections are horrible. You get slut-shamed,” she says.

In public forums, people have written that they should be shot, raped or sent to Afghanistan. Ben says some posts also imply people are following them and taking photos.

Sigmundsdóttir says some of the abuse scares her. “I loved the time that Covid [rules] made us wear masks,” she says. “Because we were hidden.”

However, the group insists it won’t stop them. “For me, it isn’t a choice,” says Tanja M Ísfjörð, 27, another member. “We need to do this.” “We have had enough,” says Harðardóttir. “We need to stand up and say, ‘this is going to stop here, we’re not going to be afraid of you’.”

#Iceland #Öfgar #One in four women in the country have been raped or sexually assaulted #Men protect men

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diegoalvesisgod · 2 years

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Last week, a second league club here posted a video where they spoke crap about women’s football. One of the players said the “women belong to the kitchen” thing. There was a massive backlash, and then a Sparta B player posted this to congratulate our women’s NT for their draw against the Netherlands, with the caption “Big congrats from the kitchen!” 🤣

#i suddenly respect sparta a bit more #lukas vacha #women's football

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palaugranetes · 4 years

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🔵BLAUGRANETS🔴

22 OCTOBER 2020

Riqui: Well I guess there is no other choice than doing this..

Pedri: Do what?

Riqui Added Arnau

Riqui: Well we have another one here. At this rate, we might as well just include the whole squad. BUT Welcome to this adult free mess bro!

Iñaki: 💙❤💙❤💙❤

Carlitos: Benvingut nanu!

Ronald: MANITO!!!!

Ronald: Look at you using those braincells @Riqui

Riqui: Nothing new

Ansu: BRO!!!! @Arnau 💙❤

Arnau: What even is this?

Frenkie: Adult Free Space.

Frenkie: WELCOME!! ❤💙

Arnau: Why is this even?

Francisco: Well I really am not quite sure of that yet.. But welcome!!!

Carlitos: This exists because we are sick and tired of the grown-ups.

Arnau: Who are the grown-ups? Aren't we all technically grown-ups?

Arnau: Well beside Ansu and Pedri.

Ansu: BOY DO NOT.

JC: 😂😂😂😂😂

Dembz: 😂😂😂😂😂

Ansu: 😒😒😒

JC:"Dembz: 😂😂😂😂😂"

Dembz: 🤜🏿

Ansu: I hate both of you so much.

Frenkie: It's only a week.. Just hang in there🤭🤭

Ansu: 😒😒

Pedri: 🙄🙄🙄

23 OCTOBER 2020

Carlitos: Anyways.. What I meant is that we are sick and tired of the ones in charge, their incompetence and their stupidity.

Riqui: Here here 🍻

Ronald: Thought popcorn was your TM

Riqui: 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿

Riqui: Happy Now?

Ronald: Elated!

Arnau: Ahhh I get it now. I see your point.

Arnau: So how long has this been going on?

Pedri: Like a month or so

Francisco: We still don't know what is happening here most of the times

Sergiño: Hey dude!! Another newbie here!! Welcome @Arnau

Arnau: 🤗🤗🤗

Ansu: What we do know is that El Clasico is tomorrow and I am about to jump out of my skin!

Riqui: I mean...

Carlitos: What do you guys think?

JC: Well what version of FCB is going to show up.. It depends on that.

Arnau: I really cannot sit through another Getafe type match... there aren't enough hugs in the world.

Iñaki: I feel ya bro.. pure torture.

Ronald: Look we tried..

Riqui: No Ronald.. You did.

Carlitos: And now that Jordi is back .. Y'all need to try harder.

Carlitos: I mean I love the guy but he needs to remember how to football.

Riqui: You say y'all as if any of us not named Frenkie Ansu and Sergiño is going to start.. Don't drag all of us into that mess..

Ansu: 🙄🙄

Carlitos: Oh no no Nanu I am happy for you.

Riqui: We'd be dead were it not for you kiddo.

Sergiño: I am just glad I'll be back to the right flank tbh

Sergiño: Like I'll play wherever I'm asked but...

Pedri: Exactly.. Imagine me playing on the left.. I'll do it sure of course, I'll try my best but it is not my favorite.

Francisco: Well I think it's natural.

Riqui: Ever since Antoine spoke he has been benched 🤭

Carlitos: Are we sure that is the only reason?

Riqui: Jeez

Dembz: 😐😐😐😐

Carlitos: Sorry.. But I only say this because I know what he can do..

Dembz: I guess we are all rusty...

Riqui: I wouldn't know.. I've played all of 10 minutes..

Carlitos: 🙄

JC: Well y'all better not make me watch for nothing.

Riqui: Again.. Can't help you there bro.

JC: WHOEVER IT IS. DO NOT.

Riqui: Sometimes I wish Puyi is here just to like make them focus.

Carlitos: Remember when he yelled at Geri? 😂😂

Riqui: Which time 😂😂

Carlitos: All of them 😂

Ansu: OMG GUYS!!

Ansu: We should ask for his help.

Francisco: To come and make 'us' focus??

Pedri: It doesn't work that way dude.

Ansu: NO! With Geri

JC: I'm listening

Dembz: Are we really going to go ask for help from Carles Puyol?! Ansumane are you nuts!?

Ansu: GOT ANY BETTER IDEAS OUSMANE!?

Dembz: No..

Dembz: And stop yelling @Iñaki is probably asleep.

Frenkie: We all should be ...

Ansu: BUT my Puyi idea.

Ronald: Can wait till after El Clasico.

Ronald: Go to sleep now

Ansu: 😒

24 OCTOBER 2020

JC: 4 OUT OF 11!!!

JC: Oh for fuck sake😒

JC: ANSU YOU BRILLIANT GENIUS I COULD KISS YOU!!!

..........

JC: I AM GOING TO KICK HIM! PHIL WHAT!!!!?!?!?!?!?!

JC: What the fuck was that shit....

JC: But it wasn't...

JC: I give up.. Screw this..

...........

Arnau: This blows.

Iñaki: Once again.. pure torture.

Arnau: No but we were doing actually okay..

Iñaki: I mean.. relatively so-so.. we could have had it...

Arnau: What even was that 2nd ..

Iñaki: Bro.. Let it go..

Arnau: 🤦🏼‍♂️🤦🏼‍♂️

Iñaki: 😐

Ansu: I hate us so much.

Pedri: I should not have said anything the other day..

Pedri: I jinxed myself.

Francisco: That was horrible

Sergiño: Truly awful

Riqui: I am going to keep my comments to myself.

Riqui: Because if I speak, I will get in trouble.

Carlitos: Okay José.

Riqui: HOW DARE YOU.

Carlitos: It was a José move.

Ansu: I just... WHY TAKE ME OUT SO EARLY!

Dembz: A Mess.

Frenkie: So we are just going to get a penalty every time we breathe next to a player!?

JC: BS. Just that.. BS.

Ansu: Siempre igual.

Frenkie: I hate this.

Riqui: We all do.

25 OCTOBER 2020

Ronald: On the bright side..

Riqui: There is not one bright side in this

Ronald: There is.

Ronald: The fact that it's over.

Riqui: Okay one bright side to this. And now we have Juventus next.

Riqui: Without Gerard

Riqui: Which means he will have time...

Riqui: Which means we are screwed.

Carlitos: I would like to go back to the match please.

Riqui: So I was right.. There is no bright side.

Dembz: Dammit.

Riqui: Good night.

Pedri: Night!

JC: See ya later

Carlitos: Nanit!

Sergiño: ✌🏽

26 OCTOBER 2020

Frenkie: They did not just say that.. 🤦🏼‍♂️

Frenkie: As if we needed more backlash...

Carlitos: WHY WOULD THEY EVEN SPEAK!??

Carlitos: WHEN HAS THAT EVER HELPED ANYONE?!

Riqui: Just leave already for the love of everything good...

Riqui: We are a meme Club I swear...

Riqui: When has complaining ever benefited us ever?!

Carlitos: As if they don't know

Ansu: Did he really say that or did I hallucinate it!?

Riqui: They did kiddo

Carlitos: They did kiddo.

JC: Yikes

Francisco: What is the point?

Arnau: What is the point of their existence really

Iñaki: They have so many problems coming their way, the guys say they are taking action against them

Arnau: Well they should have let them finish the season and not just send them off like that.. They deserved to play the play-offs.

Iñaki: Don't remind me.

Arnau: Can the president just issue an arrest warrant against them already?!

Riqui: I wish

Carlitos: THE AUDACITY OF THEM TRYING TO POSTPONE THE REFERENDUM. THE AUDACITY.

Riqui: I hope they end up in Jail. Or like exiled.. whichever can happen quicker..

Ansu: We cannot have one day of peace in this place.

Riqui: How else will the time pass..

Ansu: I rather not have it pass in stress.

Carlitos: Well.. tough.

Riqui: And another one tomorrow.

Riqui: AND FOR WHAT... JUST LEAVE

Sergiño: I am having such a dèjà-vu..

Riqui: About?

Sergiño: Tr*mp..

Riqui: Well.. Kinda.. sorta..

Riqui: Like.. take away the mania and psychopathic behavior and total lack of human empathy and decency... yeah it could be him

Sergiño: I meant the desperate need for him to just leave.

Riqui: Oh well yes that... spot on.

Carlitos: we have to wait more I guess.... But now Juve.

Frenkie: Exactly. Juve.

Ansu: Ronald's big moment. Hope he doesn't screw it up.

Ronald: Appreciate the vote of confidence.. really. So sweet.

Ansu: Anytime broski Anytime.

Pedri: Did you really just say broski?

Ansu: And what about it?

Pedri: Nothing..

Ansu: Mhm...

27 OCTOBER 2020

JC: Another meeting today?

Riqui: Yep

JC: Evening?

Riqui: Yep

JC: You think he will?

Riqui: Who the hell knows.. He might be coming out to announce a new sponsor for all I know

Carlitos: I hear he will

Ansu: Will he though?

Carlitos: Well I'm not his babysitter but I hope so.

Ansu: We shall see.

Frenkie: Ready to take off to Torino?

Pedri: YES!!

Francisco: Cannot wait tbh

Francisco: I saw Gerard today and he was being very suspicious.

Riqui: I do not need this now

Sergiño: I hung out with him during training this morning.. He seemed normal

Dembz: So what is the truth...

Ronald: All I know is he has time now.

Ronald: And I feel sorry for you guys..

Ronald: Not you @Riqui 💙 and Sergi would agree

Riqui: 😒 I hate you 💙

...............

Arnau: HOLY CRAP HE DID IT!!!

Arnau: WE ARE FREE!!!!!!

Carlitos: I cannot believe it. Someone slap me.

Carlitos: I DID NOT MEAN IT LITERALLY RONALD!

Ronald: You asked.

Riqui: I JUST... I WOULD LIKE TO SAY....

Riqui: 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

Carlitos: WAIT A FUCKING MINUTE! WHAT DO YOU MEAN A EUROPEAN SUPER LEAGUE.. BRO!!

Ansu: Like I said.. We cannot have not 1 moment of peace.

Riqui: Is he really playing a victim?!

Carlitos: Great... more games for us not to play😒

Ansu: But things are changing.. so

Frenkie: Oh wow.. oh wow.. OH WOW

Francisco: What even is the point of a Super league?!

Francisco: It's like the Nations' League.. What is the point of that

Pedri: Money.

Pedri: 🤷🏻‍♂️

Francisco: Fair point.

Iñaki: Isn't everything?

Francisco: Yep.

Dembz: So now what guys?...

Riqui: Now we are free. We wait for the new President.

Riqui: And maybe a new coach 🙄

Dembz: I dig that.

Pedri: How do you guys think Leo is feeling??

Ansu: I wonder what the adults gc is like right now.

Ansu: Dammit Carles when are you going to be useful!

Carlitos: RUDE MUCH

Ansu: We need to know

Riqui: 😂

Frenkie: So now that he is gone.. What are we going to complain about in this Club.

Riqui: It's us.. We always have something. But enjoy this Win bro

Frenkie: I am.

Sergiño: I hope we can enjoy more wins

Francisco: Leo must be very happy.

Riqui: I wanna post something.. but I don't know if I should.

Dembz: Do it subtly.

Arnau: Have you met him? He doesn't know subtlety.

Riqui: I brought you here to back me up dude not join them😒

#fc barcelona #blaugranets gc #babies gc #riqui puig #carles aleña #ansu fati #frenkie de jong #ronald araujo #jean clair todibo #pedri #francisco trincão #ousmane dembele #iñaki peña #sergiño dest #arnau tenas #he finally left #football #football imagine #episode 9

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qqueenofhades · 4 years

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I love the term militant idealism from your last post. I wonder how you think about the ongoing removal of names on buildings and statues as Americans become woke about eugenics, systemic racism and sexism, and other fuck ups across white American history?

A couple years ago in August 2017, at the height of the furor over removing Confederate statues/imagery from public places, and after the Charlottesville white supremacist riots, I wrote this post in response to a similar question. It outlined extensively what the rationale for the “we should preserve history and keep those statues up!!!” defense is (i.e. racism and systematic amnesia). My position hasn’t changed much, and I think it demonstrates the depths of white fragility in this country and the utter inability of white Americans to think about what their history really consists of and what the construction of this geopolity has entailed, apart from all the fuzzy feel-good stuff and giant flags and slogans about Freedum!! and so forth. We… we realize that we live in a hyper-capitalist fasciso-patriotic militarized nightmare land, right? The giant flags and flyovers and the fact that the entire month of November in the National Football League is now “Salute to Service,” after they couldn’t stand one black man taking a knee for the national anthem? Where coaches wear camo on the sidelines and everyone acts like they actually give a crap about veterans aside from their use as convenient propaganda? We… we know this isn’t normal, right?

See, I do think there is a useful application and a genuine need for militant idealism. It just isn’t in throwing slogans or personal attacks at each other on the Twitter echo chamber, or any argument at all on social media about politics, culture, entertainment, fictional ships, etc. Most people picking fights on social media really aren’t doing a whole fuck of a lot of anything useful in the real world. The internet has brought a lot of use into our lives, and indeed we cannot function without it, which is a little terrifying (turn off the internet for 24 hours across the entire world and welp, nice knowing you civilization). But it’s also morphed into a giant, ravenous beast that you really, really have to approach with caution in a whole different way from the “oh no you might meet a pedophile” panics of the 90s. (And I mean, there are still trash men everywhere, so it’s just with extra Terrible now. Winning?) You are not going to change this overwhelming, violent, omnipresent system by holding hands, playing nice, and singing Kumbaya. Sometimes, a little violence and militancy is needed in return. You need to stand up and play hard and not back down. And since the general liberal ethos is that “violence is always bad!!!/if you use violence you’re Just As Bad As Them!!!”, that is cut off and stigmatized in the name of social order.

The thing is, this is the first time in American history that there has been even any kind of visible and sustained public debate on whether these things that we’ve just all gone with for so long are actually acceptable. That’s why we have “OK Boomer” and similar movements, because young people are taking a long hard look at what they’ve been left with and are understandably being like are you fucking kidding me. But as I have also been discussing, a certain subset of young people are also extremely insistent on having the Right Opinion and Only The Right Opinion, and that demonstrating any uncertainty or looking like they’re not sufficiently Woke is Unacceptable. This is why I can never get students to talk in class. They have been raised in a culture where they will be mercilessly punished for being Wrong, and it’s hard to conceptualize a space, i.e. a university classroom, where you’re allowed to start at zero and work your way up with dialogue and engagement. That just isn’t how it works anymore, and frankly, we have to blame social media for a lot of it. Especially when combined with CEOs (why yes, I am looking at you, Twitter not banning Nazis and just all of Mark Zuckerberg) who are more willing to cater to the alt-right in the name of “freedom” than to enforce any kind of standards for public discourse or try to tell 21st-century Americans that they can’t have something they want. Our society is built on the maxim that All Consumption Is Good Consumption, Consume More Now. And… that’s a problem.

I feel like I may be getting away from the point of what exactly you asked, but these things are all interconnected. If someone is going to actually translate internet outrage to real-world action, and actually put some skin in the game and fight against the terrifying normalization of these narratives: please. We need more people to do that. But real life is scary in a way that the internet isn’t. You might face immediate consequences for something. You might have someone tell you that you’re wrong and you can’t just block or mute them. How do you change someone’s mind without the two of you just yelling pithy, polarized slogans at each other? It’s fuckin’ hard work. So it’s easier to just retweet someone that you agree with, to other people who agree with you. And so the cycle goes.

Obviously, I 100% support any and all efforts to bring to the collective American conscience just how fucked up American history actually is. But I sometimes worry that the shortcomings in the methods used to do so make it easier for the tired old class of establishment bigots to dismiss as “snowflakes.” After all, I’ve just been ripping into the self-righteous infighting and tendency to rigid ideological purity and insularism in the left, and… what do we do about that? I don’t know. We can’t just immediately remove people from the entire contextualising framework in which they’ve grown up and made meaning and understood themselves. We can try to educate them, but presenting people who have already made up their minds with conflicting information really does not do much. It usually makes them double down on the positions they already hold, because they can feel unfairly victimized by the people who Just Don’t Get It. It can oftentimes feel hopeless, but we have to do it anyway.

So yes. We should take down statues of Confederate generals. This goes without saying. The “we shouldn’t pretend it never happened” defense is functional only to a point. As I said in the other post, Confederate statues can go into storage. They don’t have to be destroyed, if it’s really so vital that we keep them. But their enforced presence in public life is an act of white supremacist violence, and their defenders know it. Besides, how about, uh, we try goddamn being able to talk about what the Confederacy really stood for first, instead of clinging to it as a token that is specifically intended to deflect public debate or constructive discourse on the issue?

This also reminds me of the recent backlash happening on historic plantations in the South. These are often beautiful manor houses with grounds, and they are tourist attractions. They are also, brace yourself for grossness, popular locations for weddings. (I don’t know why, but White People.) The tour guides at these places have finally been empowered to talk somewhat more honestly about how all this beauty was built by slave labor, and white tourists hate it. They tie themselves into knots about how slavery wasn’t that bad or how the Civil War was about “states’ rights” or why are you bringing this up now, that was Just What Our Bad Ancestors Did. This… this is the level we are still at. It’s bad. The white tourists seem to feel that they can go to, again, a plantation in the South and just enjoy the beauty and not to be “forced” to hear about slavery. It spoils the illusion. They want to keep living this way, so they throw fits, and why shouldn’t they? The entire establishment of this country thus far has supported them. It threatens their whole identity. It must be destroyed. And I just… sigh.

Anyway. This has gotten away from me, and I’m still not sure if I answered your question. Sorry. But there you have it.

#politics for ts #i have Things to Say today i guess #anonymous #ask

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zoe-cat · 6 years

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I was just wondering how you felt about the current state of D2? Do you like it? Do you want it to be better? Did you enjoy the Dawning?

I have a lot of emotions about it.First and foremost, I view Bungie the same way people see their football teams. I will always root for them, regardless of how well they’re doing. When they’re doing poorly, I call for them to do better. The Dawning? That was a farce. The event was built around Sparrow Racing in previous years, and the central event wasn’t even there this time around. Instead was this grind mechanic for crap gear that they tried to pigeonhole you into paying for. Now EverVerse is very much pushed by Activision; if it wasn’t, Bungie would take it out immediately because of the immense backlash. A lot of the basic problems in the game stem from Bungie trying to simplify the mechanics to allow easier access for new players, which, while understandable, was a poor design choice. The game is a disaster, but I’m still holding out for Bungie to improve it and pull me back in. I’ve been playing since Day 1, so my falling out of the game has been heartbreaking for me. I love Destiny, I just need Activision and Bungie to do their community justice and show us respect.

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mancitynoise · 4 years

Link

Man City were banned from European competition by UEFA for two years on Friday, and it brought a delighted reaction from Rio Ferdinand.

The former Man Utd defender and now BT Sport pundit shared a similar reaction to many fans from City’s rivals as seen in his tweet below.

SEE MORE: ‘This is a win for football’ – Man City get brutally trolled by rival fans after UEFA ban

In his defence he did post a more serious response shortly after as the decision will of course affect those who did nothing wrong, but it remains to be seen if Man City are successful with their appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

As for Ferdinand though, he managed to spark an angry reaction from some City fans, as they blasted him for his tweet.

Nevertheless, if the reigning Premier League champions fail with their appeal and face a two-year ban coupled with a €30m fine, they’ll only have their board and ownership to blame.

What a shame……? https://t.co/wW66zz4fvf

— Rio Ferdinand (@rioferdy5) February 15, 2020

City will be more successful than United even with 2 seasons of no UCL

— Ryan (@bernardooooV3) February 15, 2020

Utd have half a chance of playing on Thursday nights now! ???

— Lee Westwood (@WestwoodLee) February 15, 2020

Manchester is still blue and Ole is stillat the wheel ???

— Ghazi (@Ultimate_Ghazi) February 15, 2020

Very quick to laugh at the state of another club. How about you help the club you played for get their own house back in order! Start calling out the owners and board for the crap job they are doing! #GlazersOut

— Ian Croombs (@IanCroombs1) February 15, 2020

And United still won’t qualify for CL ???

— Harko1274 (@harko88699620) February 15, 2020

Some are calling it cheating. I call it using the armour at your disposal.

Now missing a drugs test because you’re piled high with PEDs, that’s more like cheating ?

— Dale Harris (@daleharris2203) February 15, 2020

Not quite the same as jumping over the wall at Carrington when the drug testers arrived though is it Rio ?

— CityBaz (@citybaz) February 15, 2020

Your team are never even gonna qualify for the champions league again

— Connor (@Connor_MKD) February 15, 2020

A bit rich coming from a drugs cheat. https://t.co/wBeh0h9vYn

— M20BLUE (@M20Blue) February 15, 2020

Ironic coming from a cheater himself

— Sagar (@sagarmcfc) February 15, 2020

That’s 2yrs of not having to watch your drivel on BT sports, so it isnt all bad ?

— steve bower (@bowermcfc) February 15, 2020

What you laughing for rio when united are in a mess on and off the pitch with debts and old Trafford needs major upgrade and poor owners and ceo and a team of some player who are not good enough. You like the rest . Your silence has been bought. Like the rest #GlazersOut pic.twitter.com/vDsl6RKTA0

— jamie (@glazers30055786) February 15, 2020

tell you whats a shame, they are banned yet still have more chance of playing in next seasons competition…. because your man is at the wheel and the club is getting crippled.

what a weapon #OleOut #GlazersOut

— fatlad (@footboxing) February 15, 2020

The post Rio Ferdinand sparks backlash after reaction to Man City’s European ban appeared first on CaughtOffside.

#CaughtOffside #Blog

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matt-a-sims · 5 years

Text

Reflecting On Life

(Very long Post)

Today my best friend told me how she had to write about the shootings from last weekend for the school paper, and it sorta gave me this moment to reflect back and I guess this is more of a therapeutic thing than anything else, and I’m not so sure if I’ll post it at the end of it all, but it’s a lot to get off my chest. I’ve never really written down my emotions or my past, so this might be a lot but it’s just such a strong emotion I have to.

Looking back, I guess I was hiding everything about myself outside my home. I was born and raised in Odessa, Texas, and not many people have been positive to those who weren’t either white, straight, or Christian. We were involved in the church so much I was being groomed to be an altar boy in the pre-school they hosted each Sunday and my older sister sang in the choir. Ironically my sister and I are bisexual, so growing up we were kinda scared to tell people about ourselves.

In elementary school I had my first boyfriend. His name was Jamie and he was kind of a scrappy kid who was always fighting the other boys in class and a jock-in-the-making in a sense. The school bullies made fun of me a lot for it, but whenever he was around they’d shut up quick or he’d fight them and usually win. We were young and didn’t understand love or reality or anything really, and in all honesty he may have been my “boyfriend” just to share everything with one another.

Still in fourth grade he was my first kiss, and almost immediately it was a parent call and a trip to the school counselor. The counselor told me that it was a phase to grow out of and that he would try to “limit what our parents heard” about our relationship and I remember crying to my mother over how the school treated me different cause I liked Jamie. The next day Jamie told me we couldn’t even talk anymore and that he didn’t want to see me again, and I sort of guesses that’s what he would say. It still stung but I just nodded my head and stood there. After then, we’d make eye contact in the halls and he would look away and ignore me. I used to be a runner for the office so I delivered slips and passes to classes, and once I gave one to him and he would even speak to me as we walked back to the office.

Eventually he started bullying me as well, quite brutally honestly, and would throw my sexuality in my face. Then a group of girls I never even met accused me of assaulting them, and one girl said I groped her. I was in the principal’s office for a month straight with my parents and the counselor having to explain I didn’t even like girls (at the time I was believing I was gay), and afterwards the girls said they did it so I would get expelled just for fun and I was sent to a class with a monitor to make sure “nothing further happened,” which I still feel made me into this little criminal who was just being treated like crap by everyone.

Middle school was a little better. I started dating another boy named Reece, who was a gentle giant of sorts. He was as tall as some of the teachers and would usually have to bend his knees just to give me a hug or a kiss. I had my first proper date with Reece, where we went to the mall and ice skated at the rink for hours, and during my eighth grade year after a formal dance we had sex for the first time. Looking back, I’m not even mad we split because I’m genuinely happy to have had a person to be my rock after so much shit, especially since that was the year I was formally diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and clinical depression.

A close friend of mine came out as transgender and was beginning to transition from male to female, so we taught her how to do makeup, went shopping at the mall for clothes and shoes, and generally were supportive friends, which I still find one of my fondest memories. Her stepdad was the only member of her family that was supportive and with the help of his sister he got my friend to begin treatment and eventually moved out of state to help her get easier access to surgeries without the backlash from the town.

Middle school was also the first suicide that we had in my schooling years. A girl in our class had hung herself from her back balcony and the only way the found out was when the parents came back to town two days later. There was a vigil at the front of the school and I was scared that maybe someone else would do it too. Reece comforted me but I was so scared I took a week long break which I spent sitting on my bed texting everyone I knew and writing down notes they sent me from class. I didn’t eat for a couple days and eventually we went back to my therapist, who said I had been exhibiting Agoraphobia, which is fear of traveling outside my home.

At the beginning of high school Reece and I amicably split because he felt we were growing apart, and he was right. All of my issues had piled on top of us and at the end of it all it was too hard for a little relationship from middle school to handle. I sorta spiraled out for my rebellious phase, smoking weed and drinking on campus while having little flings with both guy and girls and discovering I was bisexual along the way. I got caught drinking behind the gym one day, and got some serious punishments, and after a panic attack when I got home to an hour long lecture and beratement I so totally deserved, I decided to attempt suicide. Classic slit wrists you see in movies and television, and failed miserably.

After a lot of intense counseling we finally gained some leeway and I was cleared by both him and the alternative education center I was sent to for my substance use on campus to return to my high school, and I realized what a shit show my friend group was. I falted back to my childhood friends and tried to be the nice guy again, but couldn’t keep my mouth shut and couldn’t stop smoking or doing drugs. In junior year I had a month-long period where I didn’t sober up. I would ditch home and go crash at a friend’s place for random amounts of time, I skipped entire days of school to go get high and drink until the next morning, and I began peddling my medication off to buy more shit from dealers.

Eventually, my mother threatened to give me up for adoption since there wasn’t any other thing that threatened me enough for me to listen, and honestly she had tried and I ignored her. My sister and her husband stepped in and I lived with them for the rest of junior year, and my sister quite literally beat me straight. Whenever I would yell at her or mock her to her face she would slap me so hard I’d have bruises the next day. Looking back I know it was extreme and harsh but it was what I needed.

My senior year I got back on track because even more of my friends had died. A guy named Nate, who I had been crushing on at the time, died when a drunk driver struck his car and drove him to brain death. His family pulled the plug and not even a week after his funeral two girls committed suicide via car wreck, racing as fast as they could down a highway unbuckled and eventually swerving off into a ditch, dying on impact. After so much death I felt like I owed it to them to see it through and be responsible, and I didn’t want to revert to the hermit-like state I was in during middle school.

As a surprise to me I didn’t date anyone my senior year, I focused too much on my classwork to even have time to date. I skipped out on homecoming, prom and every pep rally there was taking courses to help me graduate quicker. I also met my best friend Samantha, who helps me stay grounded and get through my darkest points and even was the one who told me about the court reporting classes I’m taking today, so I owe her so much it’s unreal. We would write beautiful stories for the school paper and I would always go to interview with her and we would talk about life, random gossip, advanced courses and even our mental health as casually as someone would talk about a football game or tv show.

Today, I’m still single and clean, and everyday I talk to Sam at any chance I get. My sister and I are those close “lovey-dovey” siblings where she’ll randomly walk up and hug me while I practice my stenograph and I’ll hold her hand while we watch a movie as a family. My parents and I have a less than stellar relationship but my mother and I bond over gardening and baking, and I’m still trying to convince my father to DM a game of Dungeons & Dragons, a college passion of his, for the family so we can be closer and to just try it and see how much we enjoy it. My mental health is an immense struggle and lately I’ve been losing to my agoraphobia, but that is kinda hand-in-hand with having a shooting not even a month ago and Odessa being generally unsafe.

I’ve been struggling with so many things for so long it just came to a head today and I’m still unsure why. I’m guessing that’s just a quirk of mine - internalizing until I explode. I just needed to type it all down and put it somewhere in its unadultered glory, and I figured why not here?

Thank you anyone whose read this far, you now know so much more about me than most people could even guess!

#aspergers #breaking point #mental health #venting #so much #long post #emotional #life story

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hellofastestnewsfan · 5 years

Link

For Martin Law, Marie Kondo’s tidying regimen was life-changing, until it wasn’t. Law, a 32-year-old Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge, went through with most of Kondo’s popular tidying method two years ago. “I managed to get rid of a great deal of items that I previously had found difficult to let go of,” he told me, including about half of his clothing.

After Law’s big cleanout, though, the stuff gradually crept back in. His kitchen gained a series of useful but not vital devices: a new cookie cutter, a larger whisk, a machine for making peanut butter. The accumulations of the past two years have added up. “The house is probably no better than it was—perhaps marginally better, but in reality probably no better,” he says. His commitment to having very little has, he confesses, petered out.

“If you adopt this approach—the KonMari Method—you’ll never revert to clutter again,” wrote Marie Kondo in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, published in the United States in the fall of 2014. Millions of people have bought her book, and many of those millions have since learned whether her promise holds for them as they systematically purge their homes of items that do not bring them happiness, or “spark joy,” as Kondo famously puts it.

I recently checked in with more than a dozen people who did their first KonMari-style cleanouts in 2015, 2016, or 2017. They were generally enthusiastic (even Martin Law) about the way Kondo’s book made them reconsider their relationship to material things, although many of them lamented the onslaught of new stuff that must always be kept at bay.

[Read: Marie Kondo and the privilege of clutter]

That process has come more easily to some than to others. “My house has never gone back to the way it was before I started doing this three years ago,” says KK Holland, a 37-year-old who lives in Santa Barbara, California. Yes, clutter occasionally mounts, but she works to keep it in check. “I remove items that no longer spark joy on an ongoing basis, and I am a pretty fierce guard of what comes into my house,” she told me.

At the end of 2017, she and her husband had a baby girl. “I’m happy to report our KonMari survived an infant,” Holland says. She insists that nothing makes her uniquely good at vanquishing clutter, but that Kondo’s approach has staying power because it prompts people to fundamentally revisit why they own what they own.

Most people I talked to, though, carved out exceptions to or ignored certain recommendations in the process outlined in the book. A couple of them kept more books than they thought Kondo would want them to. And two women—one in Massachusetts, the other in Hanover, Germany—independently told me they thought it was too onerous to remove everything from their handbags each day upon returning home, as Kondo prescribes.

And for some people, the project of going through every last thing they own, one by one, was too much to handle. Mike Fu, a 33-year-old Brooklynite, estimates that he made it through about three-quarters of the KonMari method three or four years ago. “I probably chickened out at the point where it was going through all the papers and non-clothing or -book objects,” he told me. Fu says he was at one point enticed by minimalist “lifestyle porn,” such as an image of a “sparsely decorated all-white living room with an iMac,” but he’s since come to terms with having a bit of clutter. And he and his partner are planning to give the KonMari method another try, “at our own glacial pace.”

Jasmine Bager, who’s 35 and lives in New York City, also tried a KonMari cleanout but decided it wasn’t for her. After she piled up all her clothing for a Kondo-style review a few years ago, she found the prospect of carrying through with the project too exhausting and avoided the pile, shifting it back and forth between her chair and her bed. She later came up with her own decluttering system, which she says works for her: Every day, when she leaves her apartment, she forces herself to take three items with her to get rid of.

There is some flexibility to Bager’s rule (a bag of garbage counts toward the quota, and she doesn’t follow it if she’s in a real hurry), but she has been sticking with it for more than a year. In the course of what she calls her “little game with the city,” she’s been leaving behind various objects—a magazine, a key chain, a book, shoes—around town, unlabeled, with an expectation that someone who needs them will claim them. Once, months after abandoning a headband she’d made herself, she was pleased to see a stranger wearing it at a subway stop near her apartment.

Whether or not they followed the instructions in Kondo’s book, Bager and the others I talked to for this story discarded a significant amount of stuff. Some thought about it in terms of volume—a Jeep Grand Cherokee’s worth of objects, or enough furniture to fill a two-bedroom apartment. One woman estimated that she and her husband chucked 60 to 70 percent of their belongings.

Even with all this throwing out, people have had very few regrets. Most told me they now don’t miss a thing, even stuff that they hesitated to discard. Some recalled isolated instances of (usually fleeting) second-guessing. Velma Gentzsch, a 40-year-old in St. Louis who KonMari-ed in 2017, says she wishes she still had the pair of brown leather boots she parted with. “I loved them, but they were half a size too big … [but] it’s not a huge deal,” she says.

Christina Refford, whose fourth KonMari-versary is this year, remembers twice going to her bookshelf—once for a stack of cooking magazines, once for Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women—only to realize that she’d tossed out what she was looking for. She wasn’t too bothered. “Almost anything I would’ve gotten rid of can be found somewhere else,” Refford says.

The most missed item in all these purges was a special-edition pack of Pepsi bottles, each emblazoned with a cartoon alligator, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the University of Florida’s football program. The bereaved: Imani Clenance, a 34-year-old graduate of the university who lives in New York City. “Every now and then I think about those, like, Hmm, those might’ve been kind of cool to keep … But if I really wanted them, I could probably find them somewhere on eBay,” Clenance says. (I looked—she could.)

Marie Kondo writes that when doing a cleanout, “starting with mementos spells certain failure,” for they are plentiful, meaningful, and often irreplaceable. Kondo recommends tackling this difficult category last because it’s so hard, and indeed it’s one that the people I talked to struggled with. Many of them still haven’t finished it.

Lisa Shininger, who’s 40 and lives in Dayton, Ohio, told me about a beloved, ragged old T-shirt that she agonized over when she KonMari-ed in 2016. It carried so many memories for her that discarding it would feel like discarding them too. After rescuing it from her get-rid-of pile a few times, she ultimately let it go, and now she reports that she doesn’t miss it.

“If something didn’t make it in a move, or somebody else got rid of it by accident and I didn’t know about it—those kinds of things I regretted not having anymore,” Shininger says. “But I found that [wasn’t the case] when I myself made the deliberate choice [to get rid of it].” She particularly appreciates Kondo’s suggestion that people thank their stuff as they bid it goodbye—she thinks that helps prevent regret.

One particularly diligent KonMari practitioner, a 62-year-old retired child psychologist living in Washington, D.C., mentioned a strategy that helped her with this stubborn class of belongings. (She asked me not to publish her name because she didn’t want her clients’ families reading about her personal life.) She took pictures of the art her children had made in school and some trinkets she’d received from her grandparents. “I enjoy looking at the pictures,” she said, “but do not miss the actual objects.”

Another devotee, Ian Bate, shared his own secret to success. “I was surprisingly ruthless about [mementos], partly because I have an advantage: I’m old.” Bate is 70, an age at which he says it’s become clear which memories matter most to him and, more practically, “who might or might not like [my stuff] after I’m gone.”

“A dramatic reorganization of the home causes correspondingly dramatic changes in lifestyle and perspective,” Kondo writes. “It is life transforming. I mean it.” Language like this makes her book veer into self-help territory, but based on the experiences of the people I talked to, Kondo wasn’t overpromising. Whether a matter of causation or just correlation, many of the people I spoke to also said that their cleanouts coincided with pivotal moments in their lives.

One had just broken up with a longtime boyfriend when she did hers two years ago, and is planning another with her new partner now that they have moved in together. One found that his cleanout finally unburdened him of keepsakes he’d inherited when his parents died almost a decade earlier. One KonMari-ed, and then made long-procrastinated headway on getting her finances in order. And one finally went on the six-month backpacking trip she’d been thinking about for a long time, once she didn’t feel weighed down by her stuff.

“I wish I had encountered the book when I was 30,” Bate told me. He reflected on his career as a “good American consumer” and concluded that the majority of what he’d bought over the course of his life wouldn’t meet his new KonMari-calibrated standard. “If I had done it back when I was 30,” he says, “I just would have saved myself a lot of hassle by not buying and having to dispose of endless piles of crap.”

from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2TP6ylY

#Blogger

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conservativefreepress · 6 years

Text

New Post has been published on Conservative Free Press

New Post has been published on http://www.conservativefreepress.com/business/the-backlash-grows-mayor-bans-city-from-buying-nike-products/

The Backlash Grows: Mayor Bans City From Buying Nike Products

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Since Nike unveiled Colin Kaepernick as the focus of their new ad campaign, a Christian school in the Ozarks has banned their apparel from official sports use, stock prices for the company have plummeted, and now, the company has even been banned from an entire TOWN. That’s right, the mayor of Kenner, Louisiana sent out a memo last week to all playground booster clubs informing them that Nike was no longer welcome at the city’s recreation centers.

“Under no circumstances will any Nike product or any product with the Nike logo be purchased for use or delivery at any City of Kenner Recreation Facility,” wrote Mayor Ben Zahn in a memo leaked to the media.

Zahn is scheduled to release a more complete statement on his stance soon, but until then, there are his remarks at a Kenner festival last week that leave little doubt about how he feels regarding the Kaepernick situation.

“I’m going to ask y’all to stand for what’s about to happen,” Zahn said before the anthem was set to play. “Because this is not the NFL football players, right? This is the city of Kenner. In the city of Kenner, we all stand. We’re going to be proud of that.”

Honestly, the worst part of all this is not that Nike chose to dive headfirst into the left wing of the pool. It’s that they felt the need to get political at all. Can’t we just have some things in this country that don’t have anything to do with politics? Why do we have to think about ideology when we buy a damn pair of shoes? It’s just incomprehensible why Nike would need to do this. Yeah, it’s got more people talking about their brand…for a while. But is the backlash really worth it?

Frankly, it’s annoying when corporations try to be your buddy on Twitter or your friend on Facebook, and this is just an extension of that. No one needs to know where “Nike” stands on the political issues facing America. Just make your damn apparel and be done with it.

If the backlash facing Nike really tanks their sales, we will be grateful. Not (just) because we disagree vehemently with the message they’re sending but because it might be a signal to other companies that Americans don’t need their shoes, soap, coffee, window blinds, dog food, and picture frames to come with eight metric tons of political baggage. It’s bad enough that this crap has infected our football; why don’t we just leave it at that?

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alamante · 6 years

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Carl Recine / Reuters

Germany’s Mesut Özil retired from national team play on Sunday, citing “racism and disrespect” from the team’s fans and top soccer officials.

On Sunday afternoon, German national soccer team star Mesut Özil announced that he would no longer play for his country, thanks to the “racism and disrespect” he experienced from fans and top German soccer officials before, during and after a World Cup in which the defending champions left sitzmarks all over Russia.

Özil was far from Germany’s worst player at the tournament. He led all World Cup players, in fact, in goal-scoring chances created per 90 minutes, and he served up seven such chances in the team’s final match, against South Korea. But no player has faced more vitriol from German fans since the team’s disappointing finish, and finally, Özil, a Muslim of Turkish descent, got fed up.

“I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose,” Özil said in the Sunday statement announcing his retirement. “I was born and educated in Germany, so why don’t people accept that I am German?”

III / III pic.twitter.com/c8aTzYOhWU

— Mesut Özil (@MesutOzil1088) July 22, 2018

Özil’s retirement brought a sudden end to an abbreviated national team career that now serves as a microcosm of Europe’s shifting stance on immigration and the continent’s growing anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant hysteria. Özil was born in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, and was a pivotal piece of the golden generation that powered the national team’s resurgence. He was a key player on the team that won the 2014 World Cup ― even before that, he was given an award that recognized him as a model for integration in the country. Now, like immigrants in Germany and so many other countries, he’s a convenient scapegoat.

Özil’s accomplishments for club and country have never shielded him from unfair criticism that he is “lazy,” “unmotivated” and he lacks the gung-ho body language of a proper footballing man. But a World Cup staged in the midst of far-right German demagoguery about immigration turned all subtext into text, and turned Mesut Özil into the xenophobes’ favorite symbol of everything wrong with modern Deutschland.

I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose. I was born and educated in Germany, so why don’t people accept that I am German? Mesut Özil

That vitriol stems largely from a controversy that erupted before the World Cup, when Özil appeared in a photograph with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Erdoğan, an autocrat who has cracked down on political dissent in his country, then used the picture in his re-election campaign, prompting criticism from many Germans that Özil had helped legitimize an authoritarian figure.

Özil answered the criticism on Sunday by saying that his decision to appear in the photograph next to Erdoğan was apolitical, and that he would have taken a similar picture with any president of the country of his ancestry. There’s ample room to criticize that approach: The statement makes Özil look like a political naif for thinking that picture could ever, as Özil wrote, have “no political intentions,” especially in an election year, especially after the NBA’s Enes Kanter, an ardent Erdoğan critic, was briefly detained in a Romanian airport because his passport had been canceled by the Turkish government. Özil is free to respect the institution that is the Turkish presidency; he also should have anticipated that the man occupying that institution has no respect for him as anything more than a convenient PR prop.

But to paint Özil as the chief problem is to assume that much of the criticism leveled at him was made in good faith, when so much of it obviously was not. For high-ranking German political officials and members of its ascendant right-wing party, the AfD, the photograph was also a prop, a bludgeon they could use to beat the message into Özil, and other German Muslims, that they were not and never would be sufficiently German.

Before the World Cup began, members of the AfD and Germans sympathetic to their cause used the controversy the image created to argue that Özil didn’t belong on Germany’s World Cup squad, or at least should be demoted from the starting lineup to the bench. A member of the German legislature called him a “goatfucker”; another, according to Özil’s statement, said he should “piss off to Anatolia.”

During the tournament, an AfD member told HuffPost Germany that Özil was “an example of how integration has failed,” and an indication that Muslims had “infiltrated” Germany.

After Die Mannschaft’s lone win of the 2018 World Cup, against Sweden, a fan called Özil a “Turkish pig,” the player wrote in his statement, adding that he’s since been besieged by “hate mail, threatening phone calls and comments on social media.”

The attacks were not the only reason Özil quit. He was also mad that the German national soccer federation and its president, Reinhard Grindel, were less than eager to defend him from that sort of bigotry. Grindel was particularly incensed over the photograph, and spent the weeks before the World Cup demanding that Özil apologize and stewing over his exclusion from Özil’s meeting with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, during which the pair attempted to smooth over the controversy.

Özil recounted this in his statement. He had receipts, too, that the controversy was an exercise in race-baiting. Grindel, the player noted, has his own history of making anti-immigrant statements, and as a member of the legislature he voted against legislation that would benefit immigrants. He’s faced no censure for it, and the German federation, as Özil also pointed out, has not raised its voice at all about one of its top officials cheerily appearing with noted authoritarian Vladimir Putin during the World Cup.

The federation made more of a mess of the situation in trying to respond to Özil on Sunday, when it issued a statement that ultimately blamed Özil for much of the backlash and played up its own anti-racism efforts.

The German media, too, is partially to blame, especially after large swaths of it spent the last month insinuating that the photo controversy is at least partially responsible for Germany’s poor World Cup performance. The media hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory over the last 24 hours, either, choosing to pile onto the player instead of considering his concerns. Bild, one of the country’s largest newspapers, blasted Özil for “whining.”

That pooh-poohing of Özil’s worst accusations has only further emboldened the player’s worst critics. Members of the AfD reacted to the statement by reiterating their claims that Özil is, as one AfD politician said Monday, “a typical example of the failed integration of far too many immigrants from the Turkish-Muslim culture.”

Other players from immigrant backgrounds faced similar backlash during the World Cup. Swiss players Granit Xhaka and Xherdan Shaqiri ― both of whom are of Albanian-Kosovar descent ― were blasted by Switzerland’s right wing and parts of the country’s media as “not Swiss enough” after they celebrated goals against Serbia by making pro-Albania gestures. And though Belgium’s Romelu Lukaku was largely hailed for his performances in Russia, it is impossible to ignore how similar Özil’s statement is to one Lukaku made before the World Cup began.

“When things were going well, I was reading newspaper articles and they were calling me Romelu Lukaku, the Belgian striker,” Lukaku wrote for The Players’ Tribune. “When things weren’t going well, they were calling me Romelu Lukaku, the Belgian striker of Congolese descent.”

Simply highlighting this reality is enough to draw the ire of the critics, and to illustrate the point, Ozil’s claims of racist treatment made Bayern Munich president and 1974 World Cup winner Uli Hoeness so mad that he went on an inexplicable rant Monday. “He’s been playing crap for years,” Hoeness said. “The last tackle he won was before the 2014 World Cup. And now he is hiding himself and his poor performances behind this photo.”

That’s nonsense. A review of statistics from England’s The Sun ― which isn’t exactly renowned for its coverage of players from racial minority groups ― showed that Özil averages as many tackles per game for the national team as 2014 World Cup hero Mario Götze, and others have shown that his defensive work is similar to that of other attacking midfielders of the Premier League. This is the code exposed. Just look at how easily AfD politicians switch between it and their overtly racist criticisms: The AfD member who criticized Özil to HuffPost Germany also railed against the midfielder for “only play[ing] safe passes” and “having no attractiveness, no leadership qualities.”

The racist backlash he has faced, Özil said in his statement, “represent[s] a Germany of the past, a Germany not open to new cultures, and a Germany that I am not proud of.”

But at a time when the AfD is steadily gaining seats in Germany’s legislature and polling shows high rates of disapproval for policies that would bring in more Muslim immigrants and refugees, it is representative of the Germany of the present, too. In that Germany, the photo wasn’t the problem. It was just the pretext Germans needed to scream the quiet parts as loudly as they could.

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democratsunited-blog · 6 years

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Lack of civility fires up base; Democrats fearing backlash | Politics

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=4615

Lack of civility fires up base; Democrats fearing backlash | Politics

NEW YORK – Political rancor over immigration boiled over into increasingly personal insults Monday, as President Donald Trump took a harsh shot at a prominent congresswoman’s intellect and Democrats worried that some of their own anti-Trump rhetoric might play into his hands and backfire in November.

With language reaching belligerent levels seldom heard since the 2016 campaign, Republican tactics seemed aimed at least in part at activating loyal supporters for the midterm elections.

The issue of what passes for political civility in 2018 has been eagerly stoked by Trump, who has embraced the cultural battles playing out everywhere from restaurant tables to football fields to late-night comedy. And the ejection of White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her family from a Virginia restaurant over the weekend symbolizes the public anger that has tied Democrats in knots, leaving them torn as to how to respond to a president who defies the norms of his office.

Trump punched back sharply Monday after Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California told a crowd in her state over the weekend that “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd, and you push back on them!”

Trump, always eager for a foil, tweeted in retort: “Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an extraordinarily low IQ person, has become, together with Nancy Pelosi, the Face of the Democrat Party. She has just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!”

Other Democrats quickly distanced themselves from Waters’ call to action, suggesting it could endanger Democrats’ chances in the midterms that could determine the next chapter of Trump’s presidency.

“In the crucial months ahead, we must strive to make America beautiful again,” tweeted Pelosi, the House minority leader. “Trump’s daily lack of civility has provoked responses that are predictable but unacceptable. As we go forward, we must conduct elections in a way that achieves unity from sea to shining sea.”

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Monday from the Senate floor that “the best solution is to win elections. That is a far more productive way to channel the legitimate frustrations with this president’s policies than with harassing members of his administration.”

Trump welcomes the fight, from the depiction of his supporters in the short-lived “Roseanne” revival to NFL players kneeling for the national anthem, believing that us-versus-them partisan issues fire up his base.

With the Russia investigation swirling and Republicans facing an uncertain fate in November, he has further abandoned any unifying powers of his office, leaning hard into partisan warfare while adopting an aggrieved stance to dish out attacks that dominate the news and distract from scandals.

And while his rough rhetoric since his campaign has given license for some of his followers to engage in inflammatory acts, the anger on the left has sparked its own set of unruly images.

Sanders used her press briefing Monday, the first in a week, to declare that Americans are “allowed to disagree, but we should be able to do so freely and without fear of harm.”

The restaurant episode comes amid other acts of street protests against Trump aides and allies.

Many on the left cheered the efforts, citing the Trump administration’s policies toward immigrants as attacks on human rights that deserved the same sort of public displays of disobedience that defined the civil rights and gay rights movements.

But Trump appeared to believe that the debate was to his advantage, retweeting a post from Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who wrote that “Trump haters still haven’t realized how much they help him with their condescension of those who either voted for him or don’t share their hatred of him. And how much they help him with their irrational hostility toward those who work for him.”

Both parties have grappled with threats in recent years amid political firestorms. In the wake of the passage of President Barack Obama’s health care law, Democratic lawmakers received death threats. Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s Republican governor, said his family was threatened when he clashed with supporters of public labor unions in 2011.

Trump has also been accused of stoking violence through his language at rallies. In 2016 in Iowa, for example, he said that if someone decided to “knock the crap out of” a protester, he would “pay for the legal fees, I promise.”

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump ally, described the Waters-Trump standoff as another instance of elements of the Democratic Party being outraged by Trump’s election in 2016, which could play to Trump’s advantage.

“If the country looks up at the television and sees Maxine Waters saying what she said, that Democrats should make life miserable for the Trump administration, most voters will say that’s not right,” he said.

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wbayne · 6 years

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Your Boss Wants You to Be Happier. This Is Not a Good Thing.

Work often sucks. Broadly speaking, people have agreed upon that idea since the first time someone did some crap he or she didnâ€™t want to do because they needed the dough. Ah, but bosses and corporations are a bunch of sneaky (and increasingly sophisticated) Petes, and in his fascinating, somewhat depressing new book The Happiness Industry, English sociologist and economist William Davies uncovers and deconstructs the ways in which our workplace masters have turned to science and measurement to influence theirÂ employees'Â happiness â€” which takes a regular beating from institutional factors (poor work-life balance; intense competition) that these same bigwigs aren't nearly as interested in examining or changing.Â

Deeply researched and pithily argued, Davies's work is a welcome corrective to the glut of semi-scientific happiness books that have become so popular in business and management circles, and which rarely, if ever, acknowledge the larger ideological goals of workplace well-being. Science of Us spoke with the author about the pitfalls of the quantified life, why it's important to be misunderstood, and Google's insidious Jolly Good Fellow.

You lay out in the book all these different ways that corporations have become increasingly attentive to employee happiness and well-being: everything from giving out gym memberships to engaging in biophysical monitoring. You also say that, in the long historical view, caring whether or not your employee is happy is a relatively recent phenomenon. Isnâ€™t a shift toward happiness a good thing? It seems like you see some nefarious dynamics behind it. Yeah, I understand that to be critical of any suggested move towards happiness is to put oneself in an absurd situation, but the problem is that the drive toward happiness is the result of a set of power relations that are both potentially manipulative and slightly clandestine. What the book is trying to do is bring some of this to the surface, because it's better that people are aware of the strategies that are shaping their environment.

Like what? The rise of wearable technology is something to be worried about. There's potential for managers to track the movements and behavior and stress levels of their employees. That in itself is not malignant, but itâ€™s often presented as being purely for everyoneâ€™s benefit, and thatâ€™s just not the case.

Whatâ€™s an example of how itâ€™s not beneficial? If you talk to people at companies like Jawbone and Fitbit, one of the things they say is â€œeverybody wants to live a better life.â€ Of course the way that they say you should achieve that is to quantify your existence. Where things get tricky is when existence becomes inextricable from work. Thereâ€™s the idea that how we feel about our work and how we feel about the rest of our lives is intertwined. So workplace well-being strategies often include emotional counseling, nutritional advice, all this stuff which suggests no separation between what we do at work and how we are as human beings in some broader sense. The irony is that work often creates the conditions that lead to the unhappiness.

Because work has become all-encompassing? Yes, among other things. Long-hour cultures, a dominant highly competitive ethos, people striving to outdo each other or outdo themselvesâ€”thatâ€™s what creates a lot of the stress that then needs to be alleviated through things like meditation and mindfulness. All the workplace happiness gurus ever say is, "we need to teach more happiness habits to people." Theyâ€™re not saying, â€œWe need to reform workplaces.â€Â

Itâ€™s like if someone was punching you in the face and their idea for how you might feel better about that situation is for you to learn to take a punch better, rather than they stop punching you in the face. Does my convoluted metaphor capture what you mean?

Yeah, I think thatâ€™s right. You know, a lot of the early efforts to affect and measure happiness come out of what's called the Social Indicators Movement, which is associated with things like humanist psychology and began in the 1960s. There was this idea that the human being should flourish and grow and enjoy the simple things in life. But when you extend that idea, it potentially puts quite a critical bite on the excesses of market competition and materialism.

Has there been any backlash to that notion? I think what's happening now, which is a countervailing force to a more humanist approach. Neuroscience and happiness economics are repositioning our understanding of happiness as something physical and chemical that happens in the brain, and are interested in things like how happiness manifests itself in terms of, for example, vocal inflection or facial monitoring. There's a company called Beyond Verbal that measures happiness by your tone of voice, and then that information is used to, say, direct telesales so that you can alter your sales pitch accordingly.

But the underlying point Iâ€™m trying to make with all this is that businesses are increasingly taking a cynical economic view of how emotion is triggered, altered, monitored, and then integrated into managerial and marketing-type strategies. Thereâ€™s no room for happiness for happinessâ€™s sake. Itâ€™s all understood in the context of workplace efficiency.

The idea that human beings might treat happiness as a scientific problem meant to be â€œsolvedâ€ feels like something out of a dystopian sci-fi movie. Well, the issue, or one of them, is that work society is organized around the logic of behavioral scientists: You have the majority of people going about their day-to-day life and a very small group of experts who observe and then come up with the facts of whatâ€™s really going on. That way of thinking is not just true of happiness science, itâ€™s true of things like behavioral economics, too. Weâ€™ve arrived at this moment where thereâ€™s this utopian expectation that there is a scientific answer to questions like â€œwhat makes an employee happy?â€

Do you think Americans have different expectations about workplace enjoyment than people from other countries? It always seemed absurd to me that itâ€™s not enough for us to just do the job, but weâ€™re supposed to demonstrate pleasure in doing it â€” especially in jobs that arenâ€™t even public-facing. Why? Itâ€™s hard to imagine, I donâ€™t know, the French or Russians feeling obligated to evince pleasure at engaging in work-for-pay. Differing cultural attitudes toward work could be the topic of a whole other fat book. But there is a sense in America that if you donâ€™t love your work then youâ€™re not striving properly. One of the bits in the book where I address this a little is in relation to the Chicago school of neoliberal economics.

I hate those ding-dongs. [Laughs.] I think theyâ€™re misunderstood at times. It strikes me that what the Chicago school really believed in wasnâ€™t actually markets. Everyone thinks they were the market fundamentalists, but really what they believed in was the American spirit of refusing to accept defeat in various respects, which is associated with an old-world class consciousness â€” whereas America has a new-world entrepreneurial consciousness. The way in which neoliberalism worked as an ideology so successfully was in the way it shackled the vision of the entrepreneur to a 1960s version of individual flourishing.

That sounds like a bad mix for workers. What you get is the very clichÃ©d new economy worker who is keeping up with football and loving every minute of it, but also working a 16-hour day.

How do you keep an employee feeling engaged for 16 hours a day?

I donâ€™t know the answer to that, but I do know that businesses are keenly aware that the costs of disengagement are dramatic. Gallup does a huge amount of work on the issue of employee disengagement, and they say that something like less than 20 percent of the U.S. workforce is actually psychologically engaged, and they calculate the cost of that employee disengagement to the U.S. economy as a remarkable 500 billion dollars per year.

And that cost causes business to think of happiness as a form of labor capital? Yes, which is why companies are doing things like appointing Chief Happiness Officers. Iâ€™m not sure what this person does exactly, but Google has something they call a Jolly Good Fellow, who goes around the company spreading happiness and mindfulness to try and combat the mental impact of living a 24/7 work-life. Google is always held up as the exampleÂ par excellenceÂ of this kind of thing worker well-being, with their amazing free lunch service and the endless perks and so on. Again, itâ€™s difficult to be against that, but itâ€™s about building a workplace culture that says you have to put your entire self to work, and therefore the company has to kind of nurture the entire person.

Itâ€™s not enough anymore that you bring your particular skills, that you come in and put your work hat on and then leave and take your work hat off. This goes back to digital technology â€” I donâ€™t think that all managers are exploiters who want their employees to be plugged into work all the time, but very few places are introducing institutional norms and practices to stop that from happening.

It seems to me that with increased measurement of, and attention to, employee happiness, what happens is that the burden of well-being really ends up falling on the individual rather than the company. Because then these places can say, â€œHey, weâ€™ve got wellness expert on-staff, but youâ€™re still not happy. So you have to go, and itâ€™s your own fault.â€ Absolutely. This is also an American phenomenon. There are these people, these corporate happiness experts like Tony Hsieh, who's the CEO of Zappos [and author of Delivering Happiness] â€” his recommendations are some of the most brutal. He basically just advocates laying off the least happy 10 percent of your workforce. This is when happiness gets repositioned as a business resource, and it's up to each of us to either invest in it or let it depreciate, and if the latter happens, you become extraneous. That attitude renders happiness into something completely joyless.

It's happiness as an economic investment. Itâ€™s blaming unhappy people for being unhappy. The origin of the word happiness comes from happenstance â€” something that just falls on you unexpectedly. When you look at happiness as a form of capital, weâ€™ve gotten pretty far away from that original meaning.

Isnâ€™t that also an inversion of how economics historically treats happiness? I think so, because instead of it being an output of the market, it's an input. Since the late 19th century, economics has been interested in whether our purchasing decisions bring us pleasure or not. The underlying assumption of neoclassical economics is that the way we spend our money is an indicator of what might cause utility or pleasure. The management trends now are to see happiness as the opposite â€” something that we bring to work and run down and then have to build it up again. It doesn't correspond to any ordinary understanding of what happiness means to people.Â

Okay, this is all a giant drag. Itâ€™s not likely that corporations will suddenly decide that decreasing the work week is going to be a happiness method that fits in with their larger economic goals. So is the future of workplace happiness necessarily grim? So one of the things that I argue quite strongly in the book is that we've developed a society that's become more and more expert at being able to detect and monitor the notion of happiness, and yet the question of, "Why do you feel like that?" is no longer really a question that we really ask. Thatâ€™s what psychoanalysis was interested in â€” the effort to try and understand happiness and unhappiness, not just monitor it and measure it. Thatâ€™s what the new frontier of happiness research is abandoning.

We need to recover from that and actually listen to people when they tell us what theyâ€™re feeling. Weâ€™ve become dislocated from our emotions. We think of them as like blood-pressure levels or something. I think it might be idealistic, but we should aim for more democratic types of workplaces, where people can actually voice what's bothering them and be listened to and dealt with rather than be given a tool that will monitor their facial muscles or a survey that says "How do you feel on a scale of 1 to 10?" Economists and behavioral scientists too often say â€œpeople think they know why they do what they do, but theyâ€™re wrong.â€ That, to me, is a problem.

I think in that â€œwrongâ€ is where personality and culture and humanity exist. Itâ€™s fundamental! Culture is people telling stories to each other, saying, "I had a bad day today because of this, that, and the other." As a society we're undermining the authority of the explanations that people give about their own lives and their own feelings. Because we're more and more obsessed with detecting the so-called facts about those things.

So the key problem is that happiness and workplace science make a kind of category error about what happiness means to us as individual minds? We're fascinated by the unconscious, but it's an unconscious that well-being experts claim to have some sort of perfect scientific view of. It's not the unconscious that someone like Freud was interested in, which is a much darker, more unruly thing that really only emerges through the messy, ambiguous, flawed tools of human conversation. It doesn't come out through some sort of scientific indicator. There's a neurotic fear that comes with a lot of behavioral science, that if we rely on conversation to understand each other, that we might misunderstand each other, and that that might be disastrous.

When really it's just a part of life. Our relationships go well, they go wrong; politics goes well and politics goes wrong. We have to live within the limits of our understanding of each other, and if you can't cope with the flaws in the human condition, you can't encounter any of the joys either. This desire to live in a fact-based, quantifiable wayÂ â€”itâ€™s actually not what the experience of being a human is about on any deeper, more meaningful level.Â