Lighthouse

Mental game this.

Christ, even for this place it’s getting a bit much now. Everyone have a chamomile and go to bed.

Weirdly, if Germany had lost that and been stuck on zero, I’d still have bet on them going through.

Christ, we look like a non-league team who’ve drawn Chelsea in the Cup.

Erm… no. By most credible accounts he had no intention of coming to us or Leeds, even when we offered to blow our own transfer record out of the water with a £30m plus bid.

No, I’ll say it again slowly. It’s gay rights for gay Qataris, in Qatar. Gay Qataris have the same right to their own beliefs as Islamic fundamentalist Qataris, that’s the issue here.

Qatar.

Just pointing out the irony. "Let’s just agree to differ," is literally the exact thing that people have been campaigning for the right to say in the Middle East. The fact that you think you have the right to say that in an argument on the internet but Muslims don’t when they’re being executed for their sexuality is absurd. Never mind.

No, that’s not allowed. You live in my country and a big beardy sky man says you have to live your life according to everything I say.

I'm not saying these are your beliefs. I'm saying that you're pretending to not really know whether the Qataris are wrong or not and using phrases like, "it's different to our perception of the right way." It's not different it's wrong and I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would think this is somehow ambiguous. The only differences are: 1. The Qataris claim a big beardy man in the sky is telling them they should be doing this. 2. It's always been the case. Which is a terrible justification for their beliefs on both counts. "We kill gays because Allah says so and it's always been the case," is about as dreadful an argument as I've ever heard. I'll say it one last time because I'm bored with it now. THEY are the ones saying that everybody should live by their beliefs. I am not telling anyone to live by anything. If a Qatari wants to wear a hijab, not eat pork, not drink alcohol and pray to Allah 462 times per day that's absolutely fine. If he's gay and thinks its a sin so marries a wife and lives a misserable life of denial trying to pray the gay away, also fine it's his life. And yet when we pulled out of Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands fled, many more were dragged out into the street and executed and millions now live in fear. We didn't try to impose any way of life there, we removed the opressors. The problem is that it's one of the most dreadfully corrupt countries in the world and when the coalition pulled out the government and the armed forced collapsed without a fight and were overrun. Sure, there are plenty of fundamentalist Taliban supporters but as we saw, there are also a huge number who didn't want to live like that.

You agonisingly close to the right answer there, you just need to tweak it slightly.

It's not desparate at all. I get that people don't like virtue signalling, neither do I, but this kind of faux-pragmatism is just plain weird. For sane adults to sit here and basically say, "state sanctioned execution of homosexuals, who's to say if that's right or wrong," as if it's some sort of quirky, local mannersim is just ridiculous. It's very obviously wrong. You're arguing that is fine to kill innocent people based on your own personal beliefs, you do realise this? If you think you can explain to a teenage lesbian who's about to be beheaded that her death is nothing like Jews in a gas chamber then I don't know what to say.

You’re all clinging to this erroneous idea of, ‘their way’. ‘Their way’ is the way of the ruling elites and not the way of the entire country. If you’re going to apply that logic then the Holocaust was absolutely fine. I know Godwin’s law is lazy but in this case it’s a perfect fit, the law of the land said don’t be Jewish, so what right did we have to go in there and liberate them? Should have respected their culture.

You are determined to turn this into us imposing our views on them when really it’s them imposing their views on others in their country. Not everyone in these countries wants to live in accordance with Sharia law, many of them are being oppressed. If you can’t understand this basic concept, I can’t help you.

No, the imposing of beliefs is what people are protesting against. We’re not trying to force all Arabs to have a big gay orgy, we just want them to leave the Arabs who are gay in peace.

Their laws are wrong and inhumane, that’s the whole point, that’s why people are protesting.

They aren’t protesting for people who want to go there on holiday, they’re protesting for the homosexuals who are born there and don’t have a choice. I’m sure if you and Turkish were forced to bone each other from the age of 14, or face a state imposed death penalty, you might have a problem with it.

That’s not the argument. Nobody is asking any Muslim to change their own personal faith, simply not to impose it on other people. You’re allowed to believe whatever mental sh*te you want, whether it’s the Earth being flat or a 2000 year old Jew being nailed to a piece of wood to absolve you of all sin. Everyone else is allowed to think your beliefs are ludicrous and not adhere to them.

People are imposing their own personal beliefs on the entire country, on penalty of death in some cases. I can’t put it any more simply than that. If you’re having trouble differentiating between a same sex relationship and 12 year olds underaged drinking, I can’t help you.

No, not in any way, what a bizarre thing to try and argue.

But the very thing people are protesting about is non-homosexuals instilling their will on homosexuals. Nobody is trying to take Islam from them, you can still live according to strict Sharia law if that’s your choosing. The whole argument is that people who don’t believe in this medieval belief system shouldn’t have to live by it.

Could we get a points deduction when Gao has sold up and left? Seems like that’d be zero punishment on him and everything on SR.

Is it coming over the hill?

Obviously it’s not going to change much with the current regime but younger, more impressionable Qataris might just realise there’s more to life than very conservative Islam. I have some personal experience of Saudi Arabia and whilst they still have a long way to go as a country, there are signs of a shift culturally. Countries in that region have realised that selling oil and religious dogma just doesn’t cut it in 2022 and they have to move with the times or face a popular uprising. There are already signs of that in Iran, where women are getting rather annoyed at being made to feel shame for their own hair because it says so in 9th century scripture. If nothing else I’m just glad that they’re protesting against an actual law which can actually be changed, rather than against something vague and conceptual, like with all the knee/racism stuff.

I know it’s 5-0 but that crowd is just an embarrassment.