It’s already clear that this World Cup will bring an exhausting month of misinformation, bad faith, false equivalence and disingenuous bullshit.
Everyone’s going to have things that grind their gears about this most grimly depressing of World Cups.
It doesn’t have to be the big ticket items; we all know about those macro problems that sit astride the tournament shitting all over it.
We’re not necessarily talking about things of that magnitude here, although in truth it is all shite from the same arse and anus.
So far the relatively minor issue – in the grand scheme of things – that’s really boiling our piss is the idea that any and all criticism of anything about this tournament amounts to hypocrisy.
At some level, absolutely every single one of these is a variation on the ‘And yet you participate in society?’ meme and all of them are designed to deflect or divert. It’s simple whataboutery.
It is itself a minor grumble but its impact is massive.
When Alex Scott so brilliantly eviscerated Gianni Infantino’s absurd claim that no, the man earning millions from running FIFA does not know what it’s like to be a migrant worker, the online right lurched into gear to point out that she was speaking to Gary Lineker and Gary Lineker also earns a great deal of money.
This is a double victory for the right, for whom Gary Lineker has long been a bogeyman figure for ‘trousering’ so much BBC cash and for also expressing some of the least challenging centrist opinions ever encountered on popular hellscape twitter dot com.
In this instance, though, its main purpose is clear: detract from and muddy Scott’s crystal-clear point with some vaguely articulated false equivalence. Doesn’t matter that Lineker has quite pointedly never made a rambling incoherent speech claiming to feel like a migrant worker on a pound an hour, or been involved in the awarding of a World Cup to Qatar and subsequent decade-long defence of said decision.
And those making these claims know that. They know it’s bollocks. But poison the well enough and you can undermine the most straightforward message. It’s the big lesson of the last decade.
Just being in Qatar covering the tournament was enough to get Lineker and co labelled hypocrites for their criticism. It is patently absurd and another false equivalence with those who have taken Qatari money to cover the tournament.
It’s just so exhausting, and it’s going to continue throughout the tournament. We now have…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Football365…