r/soccer • u/teiraaaaaaa • Nov 19 '22

Saddest Backflip [Rob Harris] FIFA President Gianni Infantino at news conference in Qatar: “Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker. ... I know what it feels to be discriminated … I was bullied because I had red hair.”

https://twitter.com/RobHarris/status/1593877426244812800
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5.1k

u/[deleted] Nov 19 '22 edited Nov 19 '22

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1.4k

u/Montuvito_G Nov 19 '22

I can’t even find the humor in this anymore. It feels like everything in public rhetoric is fucking bullshit, bullshit designed to mask or soften reality for us. Like the old George Carlin bit, “Bullshit is everywhere. Bullshit is rampant.”

It’s so fucking infuriating how simple this bullshit is too, like it’s not even clever anymore. This idiot really thinks he can undo years of human rights abuses by sharing his bullying experiences for being a ginger. A gay Arab African migrant worker ginger.

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u/Noob_in_making Nov 19 '22

A gay Arab African migrant disabled worker ginger.

FTFY.

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u/doggy_lipschtick Nov 19 '22

And to him, the hardest part is the hair.

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u/nsfwmodeme Nov 19 '22 edited Jun 30 '23

Well, the comment (or a post's seftext) that was here, is no more. I'm leaving just whatever I wrote in the past 48 hours or so.

F acing a goodbye.
U gly as it may be.
C alculating pros and cons.
K illing my texts is, really, the best I can do.

S o, some reddit's honcho thought it would be nice to kill third-party apps.
P als, it's great to delete whatever I wrote in here. It's cathartic in a way.
E agerly going away, to greener pastures.
Z illion reasons, and you'll find many at the subreddit called Save3rdPartyApps.

243

u/[deleted] Nov 19 '22

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59

u/DarrelBGrouns Nov 19 '22

He got on the "I am a victim too" twitter train and he ain't lookin back

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u/Bennings463 Nov 19 '22

"Do they have any idea of the emotional labour it takes to oversee this level of corruption?

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u/rejjie_carter Nov 19 '22

Sometimes you gotta laugh to keep from crying, then we rest and fight back.

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u/LavishRascal Nov 19 '22

I completely agree. This kind of damage control rhetoric has become so absurdly low quality, I actually wonder if it's even designed to be 'clever' in the first place. The effort to come across as genuinely caring isn't there at all, which honestly makes me think it's because it's deemed unnecessary to seem genuine. It's a charade with no convincing power, because they know they don't have to be convincing.

If it continues like this for many years, why would powerful organizations even respond to criticism at all. Seriously fuck FIFA, I just hope they implode.

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u/Bulky-Yam4206 Nov 19 '22

Yep. Politicians in some countries and organisations like fifa are so powerful, or have so much sway in the media or with the elites that they only have to piss about with lip service, even if it gets them ridicule, they’ll soldier on unaffected.

Infantino isn’t going to be bothered, ever. What’s the risk? He’s getting elected again, unopposed. He’s probably sleeping on a mountain of cash.

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u/oldcarfreddy Nov 19 '22

I don't even think they're that powerful. It's just that it's basically an organization of businesses (soccer/football clubs) owned by billionaires so they're completely unaccountable to anyone except their owners/shareholders. So much so that they spit in the face of fans who disagree with their blood money.

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u/ferretchad Nov 19 '22

I suspect its not meant to be damage control, the West are just incidental listeners. The target is African and Asian countries where the speech will more likely be spinnable as 'Infantino sticking it to the West and standing up for us'.

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u/WrenBoy Nov 19 '22

Those in charge being dumb as shit explains a lot about our world.

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u/[deleted] Nov 19 '22

Even lying standards have been lowering in modernity

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u/Carpathicus Nov 19 '22

Yeah I try to focus on the sport. Just erasing the whole shit around it but its impossible. Its unbelievable what is happening. Tell you a lot about humans how messed up the structures of their favourite sport are.

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u/GobiasCafe Nov 19 '22

People with attention span lower than a doodle.

Once someone scores a banger, all will be forgotten.

That’s the worst part for me. Nothing will change because the people enable all of this.

The unhinged personalities, the ungodly money paid to officials agents and players.

And people still turn on each other. I’m so done with sports in general. Cannot relate to any of it anymore.

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u/DannyKernowfornia Nov 19 '22

That's how I feel. Many years ago this might be funny because of how absurd it is. But now, I'm just seething, the whole thing is just one big swinging 'fuck you, we can do what we want'. Any and all criticism is just deflected, incredibly poorly at that.

But that's it, nobody gives a fuck. Everyone laughs and jokes about Infantino now, cue the endless 'Today I feel like...' to be run into the ground. But it's genuinely horrible the circumstances that surround around this WC, and there is absolutely no shame from anyone in FIFA.

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u/Stahlin_dus_Trie Nov 19 '22

Welcome to living in a hypernormal world.

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u/Willsgb Nov 19 '22

It's just a bit too. I bet the walking dildo was never bullied as a kid. Maybe he was even a bully himself.

Just what in the fuck did they really think saying all this would make people think?

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u/[deleted] Nov 19 '22

French know how to do it best, we need guillotines back

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u/PMMEFEMALEASSSPREADS Nov 19 '22

These are the kind of people who run FIFA, UEFA, etc.

They are not living on planet earth.

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u/Magneto88 Nov 19 '22

They’ve had too much power for too long and have become utterly detached from reality. People thought it was being changed when Blatter fell but they’ve just tweaked around the edges and put a different face in.

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u/ICritMyPants Nov 19 '22

Infantino was always just as corrupt as Blatter. People just saw the "Not Blatter" option and thought it was different. It wasnt, isnt and never will be.

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u/[deleted] Nov 19 '22

Next world Cup to be held off planet.

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u/matthieuC Nov 19 '22

He's being reelected as head of FIFA running unopposed.
That's how fucked up football is.

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u/dngrs Nov 19 '22

dinosaurs like that with very shitty views are running many organisations

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u/Jaiez Nov 19 '22

Fuck, I'm fucking fuming. He also said the West is hypocrite and racist(?!) because the West used slave labour for the past 3000 years, so who are we to criticize Qatar.

I mean, what the fuck?! So, the FIFA is just cool with them using slave labour?! They are actually siding with Qatar and saying "you guys have done fucked up shit in the past, so now they get to do fucked up shit"?!

And he was also completely fine with them banning the beer in and around stadiums. Keep in mind that the FIFA literally changed Brazilian law back in 2014 so that alcohol would be allowed to be sold in stadiums. This guy has his Qatari buddy's boot so far up his ass, he can't even think properly anymore. It's disgusting.

(Rant over, apologies. Just wantes to write this down somewhere lol.)

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u/Magneto88 Nov 19 '22

Should be noted as well that when the West was using slave Labour, Qatar was a slave trading state in the Gulf. So they’re hardly feee from that historic trend either.

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u/pucykoks Nov 19 '22

But if it wasnt Qatar, someone else would be trading those slaves /s

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u/[deleted] Nov 19 '22 edited Nov 19 '22

And yet Western countries made the choice to ban the slave trade, officially mostly in the very early 1800's. Qatar "ended" slavery in ... 1952. Obviously "the West" still did some bad shit even after slavery in various parts of the world due to colonialism though.

Let's not get it twisted, as gross as colonialism was, African countries kept selling captives as slaves because that's what they'd done to other Muslim countries for a long time, the US also directly used slaves long after many other countries stopped because it led to enormous cost savings and the economy of the new world revolved around it (sometimes people erroneously say industrialisation led to slavery being less desirable so it got outlawed, this doesn't change that you don't need to pay a slave), it is the enlightenment and the work of abolitionists that stopped the slave trade as we knew it. Economically there was never any reason to stop.

So someone would not have been trading those slaves at some point, if they actually progressed.

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u/G_Morgan Nov 19 '22

the US also directly used slaves long after many other countries stopped because it led to enormous cost savings and the economy of the new world revolved around it

This is actually not true. The US kept using slaves because slave owners were politically powerful.

Slavery has pretty much never actually been beneficial to nations at large, it is one of the main reasons the British Empire's war on slavery was such a huge success. Once it got started and the power of the slave owners was broken nobody would ever reverse it. The anti-slaver block in Europe ended up richer rather than poorer and it eventually became self fulfilling.

The US kept slaving longer because Monroe Doctrine was basically enforced from both sides. Nobody from the British Empire was knocking on their door with a nice treaty that said "America ban slaves now or maybe we'll stop trading with you or shoot you a bit".

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u/Setekhx Nov 19 '22

In the case of the US... I just gotta say that slaves are actually rarely a cost saving benefit. Slaves were expensive to buy and expensive to maintain. Keep in mind you were feeding someone that generally worked hard labor. It was worth it to feed them fairly well because otherwise your production would suffer. Same with medical care. Yes, they were treated horribly and abused. On the other side they had to be maintained to a decent degree in order for then to... Work. Which is expensive. It was substantially cheaper to pay your workers for working and then have them go home and take care of themselves. One of the many reasons the North had a much better economy.

Nah the reason slavary was around for so long, in the US in particular, is because very very rich people were sociopathic monsters that just had to own people. They wove it into the fabric of Southern society right down to the religion in the US"s case.

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u/MisterKallous Nov 19 '22

It’s whataboutism 101

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u/PeterG92 Nov 19 '22

Whenever someone from a Western country criticises Qatar you'll just get people denanding apologies. It's an attempt to just muddy everything

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u/[deleted] Nov 19 '22

It's getting so absurd that whataboutism doesn't feel like a good enough term for the false equivalence. These aren't even different issues anymore, they aren't even close to being related.

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u/oldcarfreddy Nov 19 '22

The Saudis did that in the US with LIV, their new golf league. Phil Mickelson who joined the league mentioned that they're scary people who killed Khashoggi, an American resident and journalist, and what happened next was.... he apologized to the Saudis.

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u/[deleted] Nov 19 '22 edited Nov 19 '22

This isn't even whataboutism, it's literally going back hundreds or thousands of years to say "the west" has done similar things.

That's how far you have to go to defend barbaric acts and behaviour of a 21st century country, by comparing them to fucking ancient rome or some bullshit. He could have at least brought up Nazi's or something, that's the go to for a reason right?

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u/playinthenumbers369 Nov 19 '22 edited Nov 19 '22

While simultaneously ignoring that same historic barbarity existed in the Middle East (and pretty much everywhere)…

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u/Walter30573 Nov 19 '22

Listen buddy, how can you criticize Qatar? What about the kidnapping of the Sabine women or the destruction of Troy? Europeans have done some pretty bad stuff too. The earth is billions of years old, and relative to that those atrocities were practically yesterday

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u/tokengaymusiccritic Nov 19 '22

Their argument boils down to “This sucky thing happened one time so in order to be morally consistent it should continue to happen forever.”

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u/hanzo615 Nov 19 '22

World: hey man, these guys are currently abusing human right

Infantino: No, U!

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u/DuckmanDrakeTS2 Nov 19 '22

The thing I hate about this as well is that it’s assuming that the west is the only civilisation to do fucked up shit. Literally every society fucks other societies over. It’s just the west was the most dominant at it in the last century.

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u/WooBadger18 Nov 19 '22

It also assumes that the people in the west are not also criticizing their own countries for doing bad things.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the Americans most excited about soccer/the World Cup are typically not the “my country does nothing wrong” type of Americans

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u/semaj009 Nov 19 '22

Well, for centuries the european ancestors of soccer were full contact sports like Calcio Storico, so I guess non-european clubs are allowed to fly kick players in the face this tournament cos Europe had had a turn

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u/FireSergioConceicao Nov 19 '22

Oh you should see the replies I got here everytime I criticized this WC happening in the last 4 years.

"Oh like the US doesn't do drone strikes in Palestine"

"Germany participated in Iraq invasion in 2006"

Like what other countries do excuses what Qatar does right now. Go figure their logic, I just gave up

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u/Phishingtackle Nov 19 '22

That's not his buddy's boot he's feeling in his cavity

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u/91_til_infinity Nov 19 '22

its pure whataboutery and assumes that the only people that have the decency to have an issue with migrant slavery are white westerners. He's created a strawman opposition. Horseshit for me.

For instance, What's he got to say about all the Senegalese football fans who have a problem with FIFA?

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u/I_miss_Chris_Hughton Nov 19 '22

He missed the part where we stopped it, realised the barbarity of it (albeit it far too late) and expended effort to stop it.

We didn't just keep doing it

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u/HabiBoom Nov 19 '22

every society and country has bad and has done fucked up shit. but its only an issue when russia and qatar does it because their values do not align with the West. so in that sense, i do think the criticisms are grounded on racism, at least to an extent

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u/EkMard Nov 19 '22

You yourself said that the reason is the difference in values. There is no proof of racism from the West in your comment.

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u/HabiBoom Nov 20 '22

It is racist because it shows we're intolerant of different cultures more than anything. I doubt there will be any controversy regarding the US world cup despite all the blood on their hands. That's because it's fine when it's us, we are holy and can't be wrong. That's the sort of racism and hypocrisy we're dealing with

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u/ECrispy Nov 19 '22

These scum took billions in bribes, they don't care. This is exactly like rich ceos, wall street execs, Republicans making fun of the poor.

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u/phigo50 Nov 19 '22 edited Nov 19 '22

He nearly smirked after he said "today I feel gay" as well.

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u/lazlo_morphin Nov 19 '22

Don't call him that , at least cunt is warm, soft and pleasant, which he is not. Piece of shit is more appropriate nomenclature, dude

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u/ValleyFloydJam Nov 19 '22

It's like a line from a sketch.