The World Cup of soccer opens play Sunday, but the virtue signalling by social justice warriors has been in full song for weeks, if not months.
The venue for this World Cup is Qatar, a tiny oil-rich state in the Middle East whose desert climate has required the event to be held, uncharacteristically, in late autumn/early winter instead of its traditional summer timing.
Qatar landed the World Cup, soccer’s world championship contested every four years, the old-fashioned way, by spending copious amounts of money. And some neophytes gasp in mock horror that sports can be bought.
The reworking of the calendar has allowed broadcaster Fox to hit us with ads featuring Santa Claus hearing from a young fan who would forego Christmas presents if only the U.S. Men could claim gold.
For the uninitiated, that would be about as likely as the Cleveland Browns winning the Super Bowl, or the Pirates winning another World Series championship. Santa better get busy making presents to give to that fictional kid.
Maybe he could give him a U.S. men’s jersey, one with a patch eschewing the traditional red, white and blue stripes in favor of a rainbow array, the better to stand in solidarity with all things gay.
Qatar, you see, is intolerant on gay rights.
I know what you’re thinking. If the U.S. men felt so strongly about this issue, why not just refuse to go and play there? It’s not like they would be sacrificing anything other than the right to display yet again how weak our men are on the world soccer stage, despite the spending of copious amounts of money and the spilling of countless gallons of ink to insist otherwise.
Yes, boycotting this Qatar World Cup would be making a serious statement. Instead, we get an example of virtue signalling while ignoring the problem, or more correctly not doing anything concrete about it.
The whiners in general are outraged, claiming this might be the most absurd sporting venue since Nazi Germany hosted the 1936 Olympics.
Qatar’s purported sins are mistreatment of non-native workers, corrupt obtaining of the World Cup, and killing the climate by pumping that vile oil from its sands.
You know, oil, the lubricant of the world’s economy that climate crazies have deemed to be a poison that cannot be used because maybe its burning and/or production harms the climate. Or maybe not.
All that could be tolerated, but now Qatar has gone and done it by banning beer sales in and around the stadiums for cultural reasons.
Just as oil fuels world economies, so it is that beer fuels sports, both in terms of fan consumption and advertising support.
Maybe our U.S. Men might want to substitute uniform patches bearing beer mugs for those rainbow examples.
That would be some virtue signalling most sports fans could support.
Sam Ross Jr's site 