It just happened, probably too early to come to any conclusions.
I think the concern is that Wahl seems to have been a generally healthy person (although recently been feeling sick, according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33931689), wrote a critical article about a famously hard government, received a bunch of death threats and the day after drops dead. Again, too early to reach any conclusions, I guess we'll have to wait for a proper autopsy before reading too much into it.
there will never be any irrefuteable proof of any wrongdoing wherever it was murder or not.
an autopsy report done by them would be as untrustworthy and pointless as you can get and handing over the body would be just as pointless. The regimes publicly kill people which critique even abroads and continue to bribe anyone thats willing to take their money and can give them something they wish.
None of the news can be taken seriously one way or another in a trustless society which we've long since become.
While its possible that his death was a coincidence, the fact that remains is that there is a pattern of deaths whenever a person voiced critiques against these dictators.
Try not to end up psychologically in a place where nothing is real, because then also everything is real. It is this attitude that was fostered among the Russian population that allows Putin to senselessly send them to slaughter to Ukraine. This attitude is being fostered in America too. I hope it doesn't get that bad. I worry it will.
Sometimes I worry the world will end because people are too quick to jump to conclusions just because it happens to match their worldviews.
Don't get me wrong, I worry about what you said too, but around me in life, jumping to conclusions and sticking with it regardless is much more common than what you mentioned.
That analogy doesn't work since he was simply pointing out claims of a conspiracy are baseless. The guy had been sick for a week, complaining of tightness in his chest etc. Others are claiming with just as much evidence (i.e. none) that he died due to his recent Covid boosters.
Anybody that jumps to a conclusion that there is some conspiracy behind it, is being silly. Otherwise, we can just believe anything about anything, right?
"We know they are lying.
They know they are lying.
They know that we know they are lying.
We know that they know we know they are lying.
And still they continue to lie."
He was receiving death threats for the rainbow shirts he was wearing too.
"Eric Wahl said his brother had received death threats while in Qatar because of the rainbow shirt and his continued reporting on FIFA and the Qatari government."
His brother is on Twitter saying that he did not die of natural causes.
"Even a single preventable death on a job site is one too many. We are doubling down on safety precautions and training to prevent any further workplace hazards. While complete safety is impossible to achieve on a project of this scale, we are using our massive wealth to ensure our construction sites follow international best practices in this area. We value the lives and wellbeing of our workers and will take every measure possible to ensure they are safe while performing their jobs"
You know, the kind of thing you expect people to say in societies that value human life, and see migrant workers as humans, and not just cheap disposable robots.
What I'm getting at is that even if he had _said_ that, it doesn't actually mean anything about whether it's true or not. In contrast American companies might say something like that and then do nothing once the news cycle moves on.
"Even a single preventable death on a job site is one too many. We have contacted his family, made all the arrangements for a dignified flight home, memorial service and created a financial fund to compensate the family for his loss. It's the least we could do."
And we will do our best to improve safety around the workplace and avoid these deaths, because we value the life of our immigrant workers as much as that of our citizens.
There are 1+ million migrant workers in Qatar. Roughly, the average human mortality rate is about 1% per year. In a given population of 1 million, you could expect about 27 to die, on average each day. (0.01x1000000)/365 = 27
Sure, more elderly people make up the 1%, and if accounting for the workers ages maybe you'll have half that figure. Or a quarter. The point is, in context, one worker dying out of a million on any given day is unfortunately expected.
It doesn't mean it's not sad, or that the persons life was worthless, or that the death should not be investigated to determine the cause. It does mean that out of 1 million, thousands will ordinarily die during any given year.
How many times per day would it take for an authority to issue a statement like the above before such statements begin to seem trite and meaningless?
Where is the line? One could equally then argue use the number working on only the one construction site. Eventually a point can be reached where 1 death may "seem" improbable. A wider view reveals a context people seem to have missed.
The line is whatever level is being overseen by the official. If someone gets burned at a Dunkin’ Donuts, first would be the manager of that Dunkin’, then the regional manager, and then eventually the CMO. Maybe the CMO deals with reports of burns in a spreadsheet, because they see so many. For this case, you’ve misaligned a World Cup employee with the purview of the leader of the country. The number of migrant worker deaths in Qatar is not their concern, but the number of deaths of migrants working on the World Cup is.
> How many times per day would it take for an authority to issue a statement like the above before such statements begin to seem trite and meaningless?
Nobody asks them to issue a statement every time a worker was killed. This was what he said when was asked specifically about the incident. Still think it's trite and meaningless?
> the average human mortality rate is about 1% per year
Are you talking about death from any reason? Because I don't think anyone expect the Qatar authorities to comment on someone dying from a water-skiing accident or from old age. Given migrant worker have to be healthy enough to travel and work, one would assume their mortality was significantly lower than average.
The question, of course, is work-accidents. Does migrant workers in Qatar have the same rate of work accidents as workers in other rich countries?
Ensure efforts will be taken while deflecting any sort of actual responsibility. Nobody made a mistake. The death is just a tragic event. Nobody could have seen it coming, but now that we have realized it can happen, we will try very hard to ensure the event doesn't repeat itself.
That's the script alright.
I'm not convinced anyone is truly convinced the words are true. But it's the words you're supposed to say when an employee dies.
Of course they won't take every possible measure to ensure worker safety. It's more like, every possible measure that doesn't affect the bottom line too much. Construction work is dangerous in any country. People get hurt, sometimes they die, and there are diminishing returns efforts to mitigate this fact.
My body finally broke down on me. Three weeks of little sleep, high stress and lots of work can do that to you. What had been a cold over the last 10 days turned into something more severe on the night of the USA-Netherlands game, and I could feel my upper chest take on a new level of pressure and discomfort. I didn’t have Covid (I test regularly here), but I went into the medical clinic at the main media center today, and they said I probably have bronchitis. They gave me a course of antibiotics and some heavy-duty cough syrup, and I’m already feeling a bit better just a few hours later. But still: No bueno.
Honestly, as much as I’d like to lean into the conspiracy theories here, I think this post highlights the likely cause of his death. Won’t stop people from speculating though.
the conspiracy here, is the way this system of employees and companies pretends that it's very different from masters and slaves.
the real difference is that a slave has one master, but an employee is some sort of partial-slave that is shared amongst many masters in a way that the employee gets to chose who gets to tell them what to do and that's it.
I think I added far too much perspective... so this comment may as well go unwritten, but whatever... reddit shadowbanned so many replies like these, because replying under a -4 points comment was still too visible. hn, otoh doesn't notify of replies so that covers the visibility reduction.
I'm trying to understand what "public" means..
an employee is a public slave. also, don't undermine the meaning of my qualification of "partial"... I'm not saying they're the same thing
but I'm also observing the necessity of there being a lot of people without enough choice/privilege/safety-nets to say "NO, I won't take that job ever"
furthermore I'm thinking (trying to) in terms applicable to entire countries. slavery is often portrayed a an individual phenomenon. but what about a scenario when one country employs another entire country? without much choice about the terms? like, for example during a colonial period?
The difference between employment and slavery is the same as between rape and normal sex: Consent.
The consensual and forced versions can involve the same activities, but morally there is a big difference.
It's true that you may need to work to afford food and housing etc. But to me, that's just the human condition. We all need certain things, and most of them we need the help of other people to get.
Work and money is how we help each other and make sure everyone contributes.
those companies rely on there existing an entire class of people unable to refuse to get into a job where they may get in trouble for taking too long of a bathroom break; those people are clearly employees.
a less famous example would be people picking apples, or working in a meat packing factory.
where's the consent to exist in a situation that prevents refusing some jobs? jobs without which everything would get way more expensive for the privileged american consumer.
in any case, I don't think I can argue my perspective to you any better than this; we all believe (and notice) whatever we want and makes us feel alright.
it truly is a consequence of privilege that you see work and money as a way to collaborate and work together, because as I understand them, money is a social technology, hence it can be used as it has in your experience, as well as used to exploit and coerce people into crappy scenarios for the sake of the 'consumer's experience'
Yeah, yikes. Those are clear and dangerous symptoms. Literally worked himself to death. I find the conspiracies a little hard to swallow knowing how severe his symptoms were, and I love a good conspiracy. I would not entirely discount murder, but that was really not smart of him to keep working through such severe medical condition.
I agree. Conspiracy theories are fun. But the fact he experienced chest pain for days leading up to his death, does seem to imply it was a true medical issue.
It’s very possible his heart was moving in and out of AFIB for a few days and then finally gave out in the form of a heart attack.
He fought through it because it’s obviously the biggest few weeks of the year for his job (as a soccer journalist).
The fact that the pain was significant to write about it publicly in his newsletter implies that it was obviously getting pretty bad. Not just a passing chest pain. It was probably very bad.
It does question why better medical attention wasn’t given to him. If he had this pain for days leading up to a sudden attack, then it’s very sad because it was likely preventable.
To me it seems more that he wasn't willing to take the medical attention. Likely cause work seemed more important. 10 days of cold is pretty bad run and if it was getting worse and still kept pushing... I'm not sure if any sufficient care would have been accepted.
I used to work as an ambulance driver, and people with heart attacks often had no idea. One time a patient even called a doctor, who visited him at home and told him it's probably just a stomach bug, but he should get it checked out in the hospital just to be sure. I was driving with an experienced colleague, who looked at the patient and said, that's no stomach bug. Turned out to be a severe heart attack, they immediately rushed him to the cardiac catheter lab at the hospital.
Anyway, people die from heart attacks all the time because they don't realise what's going on before it's too late.
So the guy writing about people in Qatar being overworked and dying… is overworked and dies.
To some this means that the west and capitalism are just as bad as the “slavery” of the petrochemical state. To others this means that the petrochemical state probably gave him an accident.
Not surprising at all. mohammed bin salman personally ordered a journalist beheaded in the Istanbul consulate a few years ago. Why not poison a journalist at the World Cup?
royal families can commit genocide, and still have no legal financial or personal recourse.
To them, he was just a worker and workers are garbage in the Middle East.
To be fair, Mohamed bin Salman is the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, not Qatar. The two countries aren't on the best terms (as a matter of fact Qatar were blockaded by a Saudi-led coalition for years trying to strongarm them), so you can't just apply what one did to the other. They're absolutely similar (autocratic, Arab, traditional, family-based, Muslim, opressive towards anyone who is not a straight male but genuinely hospitable), but not the same.
That's the thing. In the middle-east there are no repercussions or consequences for the 1%. They can literally cut off the arms of house cleaners who quit, or behead journalists, without anything more than harsh words by b-rate American and German politicians.
They are above all laws, and we fight each other to suck their ... wallets.
President of USA are known to bomb civilians. And still they get re-elected and even some people give them donations that is bribes to support their murderous tendencies. And nothing is being done about this. No death penalties for people involved. No one is spending rest of their live in jail. Or being prosecuted and judged by jury made of peers of victims.
Are you saying there is a moral equivalence equivalence between killing terrorists in military operations .. and going to another country to behead a journalist who said mean things about you?
Whether its Qatar or Amazon, workers in the current climate are at a disadvantage; are still a (sub) human resource. We don't need more overseer empathy. We - i.e., not the exploiters - need be to much less tolerant of exploitation (whatever form it takes). Lip service "discomfort" isn't enough.
It seems pretty obvious that a totalitarian petrostate, that bribed its way into using a global sports event as a massive PR push, doesn't care. What matters is whether we care that they don't care. What matters is whether we care that our sports institutions are massively corrupt.
This has to be the shittiest take on this story I could possibly imagine.
One, this guy is a sports journalist. He wouldn't have covered COVID in any direct sense.
Two, you're comparing having to stay indoors to dying in the blistering heat during slave labor in service of an actually totalitarian government.
Three, the timing of this death is at the very least suspicious. It's weird that you'll lay the responsibility for the COVID lockdowns at journalists' feet, but when there is possibly an actual conspiracy going on you instantly regurgitate your own COVID talking points.
You seem to have read a different article than the one I linked, since your comment is incoherent given the contents of the linked article.
E.g. the lists literally include the 1936 (Nazi) Olympics, which is just about the textbook example of using a global sporting event for the sake of propaganda. Jesse Owens certainly threw a wrench in those (white supremacist) plans, however.
Not watching and giving them your attention (which equals advertising dollars).
Which isn't likely - all the people I know who were upset about Qatar hosting are sports fans in the first place and all got together to watch it regardless.
What seems pretty obvious is all the globalist institutions, everything from FIFA to the UN Human Rights Council, which are happy to take bribes from unashamedly totalitarian petrostates and worse, don't care.
That's what gets me. Qatar can Qatar in Qatar, but the disgusting, corrupt, hypocritical ruling class who would preach to me and claim to be the "experts" on how I should live my life and to be my moral superiors is what gets me. And they're the ones who really enable and legitimize these regimes too. They're the real evil, and it's high time to put an end to them.
So, putting FIFA aside since it’s not a public institution, you’re saying that because some institutions have a problem with some of their workings, that they should be abolished?
We need to strengthen our democratic institutions and of course also be more demanding of honesty from their leaders.
Just saying they’re evil and we need to put an end to them sounds like people saying the police is evil and should be abolished. A really bad idea in my opinion.
I'm saying that all institutions which support and enable and legitimize brutal theocratic dictatorships like this should be purged of the parasites which infest them, yes.
Not too nice but too cowardice, they don't want to deal with the moral psychological fallout of killing evil people, they rather sit in a corner and weep about how evil the world is.
Surely there are, say, British, European or American FIFA representatives who can be tried for taking bribes, or for being part of an organisation which takes bribes? Why are those people immune? They're complicit.
For better or worse, it's one country, one vote for a lot of this stuff. You can bribe the entire Caribbean for the cost of bribing France (Qatar did both).
You know, the FIFA is an association. It has members. The members either set the rules, or they are complicit.
Now you say, oh, the members won't do anything. They are willing complicits. Guess what. They are also associtations and have members. In the end your local football club is a member of a local association, that is member of a national association, that is member of FIFA.
Why not start there. Start an initiative in your local club, that they take action on the next level, that they take action on the next level, etc. If you local club takes that up, but the next level ignores it, use your contacts to neighbouring clubs. If still nothing happens start an initiative that your club leaves the association.
If your local club prefers to do nothing, they are complicits as well. But you can leave. Get your friends to leave. You can still play football. Just meet up at a field. Place some posts. But stop complaining about the corrupt FIFA.
But it's the members that are where the corruption comes from - they're the ones that elect the executive committee and the president, vote on proposals such as World Cup locations, etc. etc. FIFA is just a reflection of the corrupt state of world football federations.
In any case, professional sports is intrinsically corrupt, and the billions in broadcasting rights money sloshing around the trough are a magnet for scum.
It's not that it's a petrostate, it's that this has been the view of the region forever. This region did not come to the moral conclusion that slavery was wrong, they only stopped when Europeans showed up with gun boats and forced them to cut it out (Also, why isn't anyone asking these guys wtf happened to all the black slaves they imported because basically none of them exist in the region today despite the region likely taking more slaves during the slave trade than the USA. The answer is obviously castration and murder if one looks into it). This attitude has been present in this region since antiquity, finding oil just caused a white washing of the practice to something just below causing European gun boats to show up while expanding the practice dramatically.
Quite the shortcut you took there mate...
Europeans stopped slavery when it was no more economically interesting for them to go on. Still they kept going in their remote colonies (Brasil, USa,...)
They posted it because he collapsed and died during extra time at the Argentina Netherlands match the day after he wrote it. Lots of theories and potential explanations for what actually happened as he’s been talking about not feeling well recently, but you can’t really blame people for being suspicious after what happened with SA and Khashoggi.
His brother posted a video saying he believes he was killed, but he was obviously and understandably in a really emotional state. To add to this, his brother is gay and Grant wore a rainbow shirt (as many other prominent journalist have done during this World Cup to protest the Qatari stance on LGBTQ rights) to a match and was told he couldn’t enter the stadium.
I didn’t miss the point. It was just soon enough after it happened that I figured they lacked the context about why it was posted, so they thought it was just meant to be a standalone article about this issue and not an attempt to draw a line between it and his death.
How long do you think before the HN audience tips on this one? That your comment isn't at the bottom of the comments and grayed out shows there might be hope after all.
Yeah, I thought something was up with that so me and my friends did our own randomized controlled trial where some of us got the vax and some didn't. Luckily I was part of the latter group because, believe or not, the vaccinated ones all dropped like flies.
The result was pretty shocking, so I asked someone I know at the CDC and he basically admitted that The Global Elites (as he called them) ordered a mass-genocide and while he had some misgivings about it, a job is a job and what are you gonna do, y'know?
Anyway it's winter time and I wanted to protect myself and help build up herd immunity so I got the shot last week, so here's to hoping they updated it.
Soooo many people dying suddenly! As opposed to the good old days, when almost everyone knew well in advance when they were going to kick the bucket and entertained long monologues to their loved ones on their hospital bed before taking their last breath!
Think as you like but behave like others is the western approach. They would bemoan the loss and be very emotional about it while internally thinking the same thing this guy said. I prefer my leaders to be less fluff.
What they’re thinking internally isn’t the issue. The statements send a signal to the rest of the organization and impact what gets prioritized. In this case, the signal is “life of workers doesn’t matter”.
Working conditions in the US have improved dramatically over the last century because politicians and leaders took action to improve them.
Your position seems to be that it doesn’t matter what leaders and politicians say if they don’t believe it in their heart. I think that’s less relevant than their actions.
(And FWIW, yes, usually when a worker dies on the job in the US the company does sponsor a memorial)
Ah, so you are projecting your own society's ideals onto another which wasn't always how it was. Which society told you the way to do it was to create laws to deal with it? Was it your own?
Have you perhaps considered that just because US society might be a few decades ahead in certain types of rights, that maybe that's just a fluke of nature and doesn't give the US any moral standing?
Edit: can't respond any more, so I will just say: this thread is exactly an example of fake empathy. None of these guys will go out of their way to help the migrant worker, they will demand others do so. Fake empathy.
There’s plenty of room for improvement. But it used to be that a 10,000 person steel mill could expect 1200 deaths and serious injuries each year. That only changed because people cared enough to fight for better conditions.
Maybe you think that, but I’m sure many people have basic human empathy at the end of the day.
Yes statistically many people die on the job in many countries but every one is still a tragedy. You can think that and be running a large organization.
I feel like many conservative thinkers believe that it’s all “fake” and just PR. But human empathy is a real thing.
I honestly think my leaders (in the Netherlands) roughly do what they believe is in the best interest of the people. I think there’s few that truly feign empathy.
There’s people that don’t care. I just don’t see them in politics, they’re all business leaders.
Moving the goalposts a lot here. I think that when confronted with a meaningless death directly most will feel empathy.
I’m sure a lot of politicians will feel like it’s unfair to pin some event on them, and that might be their base reaction. But this is not a mutually exclusive thing! People can be mad about political messaging and still feel something about people dead while building a soccer stadium of all things.
I think that people dying for a football stadium, then having their death be compared to dying in their sleep (a luxury for people in a lot of dangerous work) should generate some emotion.
What’s the point of anything if we’re going to turn every person into a number? We can’t care about everything all the time, but if we do care about something, it’s probably for valid reasons.
I think the implication is that the death is emblematic of a larger issue in Qatar, migrant worker rights. And that is something a good leader should and should be expected to care about!
Maybe it’s all a facade, but in the U.S. such shows of concern have gotten us effective workplace safety regulation. I don’t really care if the politicians’ concern is fake: the avoided deaths are real.
I don’t think that’s very unreasonable? In a analytical sense it’s bad of course, you don’t want workers to die if you can prevent it, but you cannot really expect me to care about every person that dies.
This person is just very blunt about stating as much, or maybe they don’t care in the first sense either, and they wouldn’t change anything for the better even if they had opportunity to.
I think the issue may be that humans have social norms which dictate that we express that we care. If someone flouts that norm then it implies that there is something significantly wrong with them.
I thought we went past that three centuries ago. But then, globablization of communication showed differently.
I am not even sure about when and where these "social norms about expression" emerged; I am not sure they existed among the Romans, the Carolingian Franks etc.
Surely, they are apparent in some anglophone contexts. The Britons very often go "Will you apologize?" in odd contexts very far from those others would find consistent with the request (e.g. if A randomly knocked B down and showed indifference).
I think a reasonable reading here is that workers dying is a systemic issue (also related to their overall conditions), not a series of just unfortunate accidents. We may expect the ruling class to do something to make people die less, and this would start with communicating that this is important matter.
OTOH caring in front of camera is of course a pretty trash signal about the rulers actually doing anything, especially if said rulers are authoritarian and all they have to care about is strong police. An elected politician in representative democracy has a little more incentive to be half-truthful at least some of the time.
You can be cynical all you want. These regime-type considerations are separate from whether we think the culture should value preserving life of people, and not saying "well it's just how things are for thousands of years, good thing I am hereditary elite".
Yeah the countries which export the labour don't care themselves. None among India, Bangladesh, Pakistan have even issued any statement condemning the working conditions or the govt. of Qatar and that is when none of these countries are even playing in the world cup. The world certainly doesn't care. There are more people in this world than you can count in a lifetime, what matters if a few hundred poor people die. With the way things are, the west is also probably only condemning Qatar because of future plans of stealing their oil/natural gas resources than due to some poor people dying.
That's a plausible take on the situation. I honestly don't see anything wrong with that. Hell, he's right.
No, this wouldn't fly in USA. If I was a CEO of an American company and one of my employees died, I would not react like that. But we're talking about a foreign country here.
Not really a story I have followed but the numbers I see after a quick search suggest this is another bullshit story.
This website (first result on google, I don't particularly vouch for it [1]) suggests in 2020, 340 workers died every day from hazardous working conditions in the US. If you scale it to the population of Qatar, that's about 3 per day, or 20 per week. The guardian claims 12 migrant workers died per week in Qatar the last decades [2]. Not exactly out of proportion.
Slightly misleading Guardian source. Their number includes all migrants, not just those migrants who’ve worked in construction and not those who just worked on construction projects to do with the World Cup, their figures are for literally all migrants.
Plus there are probably not many locals in Qatar touching hazardous jobs. And this is probably a large infrastructure project compared to the scale of the country (if you do more work you get more accidents).
Hazardous working conditions is described in the report: "Chronic occupational diseases receive less attention, because most are not detected until years after workers have been exposed to toxic chemicals, and because occupational illnesses often are misdiagnosed and poorly tracked" [1] The context here is the deaths of migrants working on construction sites for the World Cup. On site. 14 deaths/daily is a more comparable number. [1]
Also, you cited a report by the unions, for the purpose of promoting workplace safety. There are no such champions for migrants working in Qatar.
That's incorrect way of scaling, since the majority of deaths in Qatar are migrants from countries such as the Philippines, Bangladesh, India or Pakistan.
You don't care either. If you cared you wouldn't be dimissing the things Qatar has done as OK because others do them.
See you are presenting a logical fallacy - specifically the notion that "two wrongs make a right". Yes the US nonsense in Iraq was terrible, and a lot of people should be punished for it. How stupid do you think I am to try and pretend that it somehow makes Qatar a non-issue?
while I agree that Russia and the USA have done much worse than Qatar has ever done, I think people are more willing to be lenient to Russia and the USA on this because there’s some footballing history there. as more or less a marketing operation, Qatar have just turned up with a load of cash and built some stadiums in the desert, and then FIFA expects everyone to take it lying down
I genuinely think it’s more about football than politics, but the politics are a real issue too and they have a larger attack surface
Facts, also don’t forget about Ukraine too. Or even American lives for that matter, eg astounding number of people dying of fentanyl, or the fact there are more teenagers homeless in LA than homeless people with mental health problems.
The accusation is that the Qatari government killed Grant Wahl because of his reporting. But then again, Wahl's last post is all about how the Qatari government doesn't care about the worker's death and doesn't care if you know it ... so why would they kill an American journalist - with all the negatives that would bring down on them - over something they don't care about?
Exactly, and no offence to Grant Wahl, but he's a nobody in the grand scheme of things. He might be a big journalist in the context of American soccer, but he's not a meaningful presence in the world of football -- a sport America doesn't really care about. There's lots of journalists who are being vocal about their dissatisfaction with Qatar to varying degrees, he's far from unique. Given he complained about illness, and acknowledged he was over working himself, it seems the default position should be a death of natural causes until there's some evidence otherwise. I guess someone could argue that the Qatari authorities knew he was unwell and thought that was good cover for killing him... but why bother? What's the motivation?
Did Grant care about the incredible number of young people dying of fentanyl in USA? Did he care about the fact there are more teenagers homeless in LA than people with mental health problems?
Condolences to his family and colleagues (covering this - already controversial - competition must now feel even more senseless for this teammates.)
In case you're worrying about jumping to conclusion and bordering on conspiracy theories (Quatar somehow poisoning him, or not treating him properly, because of his unfavorable coverage, substance abuse, etc...) : don't overthink it - I've already been shared the articles about why "it's (obviously) side-effects of the covid vaccine."
Which I suppose begs interesting questions about filter bubbles, journalism, how much speculation is enough, how much is too much, and how much "admitting we just don't know" is both wise (you avoid all the crazy theory) and foolish (when one of the crazy theory ends up being right in the end, khashogghi-style, you retrospectively looks sheepish.)
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] thread> (CNN) Prominent American journalist Grant Wahl has died in Qatar after collapsing while covering the World Cup
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/09/football/grant-wahl-death-wor...
I think the concern is that Wahl seems to have been a generally healthy person (although recently been feeling sick, according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33931689), wrote a critical article about a famously hard government, received a bunch of death threats and the day after drops dead. Again, too early to reach any conclusions, I guess we'll have to wait for a proper autopsy before reading too much into it.
an autopsy report done by them would be as untrustworthy and pointless as you can get and handing over the body would be just as pointless. The regimes publicly kill people which critique even abroads and continue to bribe anyone thats willing to take their money and can give them something they wish.
None of the news can be taken seriously one way or another in a trustless society which we've long since become. While its possible that his death was a coincidence, the fact that remains is that there is a pattern of deaths whenever a person voiced critiques against these dictators.
Don't get me wrong, I worry about what you said too, but around me in life, jumping to conclusions and sticking with it regardless is much more common than what you mentioned.
Worldviews affect what upsets people. Like, duh?
Anybody that jumps to a conclusion that there is some conspiracy behind it, is being silly. Otherwise, we can just believe anything about anything, right?
— (probably not) Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"Eric Wahl said his brother had received death threats while in Qatar because of the rainbow shirt and his continued reporting on FIFA and the Qatari government."
His brother is on Twitter saying that he did not die of natural causes.
https://twitter.com/ziplamak/status/1601373769326792705
Wow. Truly astounding apathy.
"death is a natural part of life, whether you die of old age or you get murdered by too much work"
ah, them wise ruling elites.... (or more accurately, them wise ruling elites of people in Qatar)
What is he supposed to say instead?
You know, the kind of thing you expect people to say in societies that value human life, and see migrant workers as humans, and not just cheap disposable robots.
"Even a single preventable death on a job site is one too many. We have contacted his family, made all the arrangements for a dignified flight home, memorial service and created a financial fund to compensate the family for his loss. It's the least we could do."
Sure, more elderly people make up the 1%, and if accounting for the workers ages maybe you'll have half that figure. Or a quarter. The point is, in context, one worker dying out of a million on any given day is unfortunately expected.
It doesn't mean it's not sad, or that the persons life was worthless, or that the death should not be investigated to determine the cause. It does mean that out of 1 million, thousands will ordinarily die during any given year.
How many times per day would it take for an authority to issue a statement like the above before such statements begin to seem trite and meaningless?
Nobody asks them to issue a statement every time a worker was killed. This was what he said when was asked specifically about the incident. Still think it's trite and meaningless?
Are you talking about death from any reason? Because I don't think anyone expect the Qatar authorities to comment on someone dying from a water-skiing accident or from old age. Given migrant worker have to be healthy enough to travel and work, one would assume their mortality was significantly lower than average.
The question, of course, is work-accidents. Does migrant workers in Qatar have the same rate of work accidents as workers in other rich countries?
That's the script alright.
I'm not convinced anyone is truly convinced the words are true. But it's the words you're supposed to say when an employee dies.
Of course they won't take every possible measure to ensure worker safety. It's more like, every possible measure that doesn't affect the bottom line too much. Construction work is dangerous in any country. People get hurt, sometimes they die, and there are diminishing returns efforts to mitigate this fact.
My body finally broke down on me. Three weeks of little sleep, high stress and lots of work can do that to you. What had been a cold over the last 10 days turned into something more severe on the night of the USA-Netherlands game, and I could feel my upper chest take on a new level of pressure and discomfort. I didn’t have Covid (I test regularly here), but I went into the medical clinic at the main media center today, and they said I probably have bronchitis. They gave me a course of antibiotics and some heavy-duty cough syrup, and I’m already feeling a bit better just a few hours later. But still: No bueno.
the real difference is that a slave has one master, but an employee is some sort of partial-slave that is shared amongst many masters in a way that the employee gets to chose who gets to tell them what to do and that's it.
We all hate our jobs from time to time, but keep it in perspective.
I'm trying to understand what "public" means..
an employee is a public slave. also, don't undermine the meaning of my qualification of "partial"... I'm not saying they're the same thing
but I'm also observing the necessity of there being a lot of people without enough choice/privilege/safety-nets to say "NO, I won't take that job ever"
furthermore I'm thinking (trying to) in terms applicable to entire countries. slavery is often portrayed a an individual phenomenon. but what about a scenario when one country employs another entire country? without much choice about the terms? like, for example during a colonial period?
Does that apply to you or the sports journalist?
The consensual and forced versions can involve the same activities, but morally there is a big difference.
It's true that you may need to work to afford food and housing etc. But to me, that's just the human condition. We all need certain things, and most of them we need the help of other people to get.
Work and money is how we help each other and make sure everyone contributes.
those companies rely on there existing an entire class of people unable to refuse to get into a job where they may get in trouble for taking too long of a bathroom break; those people are clearly employees.
a less famous example would be people picking apples, or working in a meat packing factory.
where's the consent to exist in a situation that prevents refusing some jobs? jobs without which everything would get way more expensive for the privileged american consumer.
in any case, I don't think I can argue my perspective to you any better than this; we all believe (and notice) whatever we want and makes us feel alright.
it truly is a consequence of privilege that you see work and money as a way to collaborate and work together, because as I understand them, money is a social technology, hence it can be used as it has in your experience, as well as used to exploit and coerce people into crappy scenarios for the sake of the 'consumer's experience'
This doesn't necessarily contradict the conspiracy theory
It’s very possible his heart was moving in and out of AFIB for a few days and then finally gave out in the form of a heart attack.
He fought through it because it’s obviously the biggest few weeks of the year for his job (as a soccer journalist).
The fact that the pain was significant to write about it publicly in his newsletter implies that it was obviously getting pretty bad. Not just a passing chest pain. It was probably very bad.
It does question why better medical attention wasn’t given to him. If he had this pain for days leading up to a sudden attack, then it’s very sad because it was likely preventable.
Anyway, people die from heart attacks all the time because they don't realise what's going on before it's too late.
To some this means that the west and capitalism are just as bad as the “slavery” of the petrochemical state. To others this means that the petrochemical state probably gave him an accident.
I’m sure there are other interpretations, too.
royal families can commit genocide, and still have no legal financial or personal recourse.
To them, he was just a worker and workers are garbage in the Middle East.
They are above all laws, and we fight each other to suck their ... wallets.
One, this guy is a sports journalist. He wouldn't have covered COVID in any direct sense.
Two, you're comparing having to stay indoors to dying in the blistering heat during slave labor in service of an actually totalitarian government.
Three, the timing of this death is at the very least suspicious. It's weird that you'll lay the responsibility for the COVID lockdowns at journalists' feet, but when there is possibly an actual conspiracy going on you instantly regurgitate your own COVID talking points.
My mind is truly frayed here.
So common that it has a name.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportswashing
E.g. the lists literally include the 1936 (Nazi) Olympics, which is just about the textbook example of using a global sporting event for the sake of propaganda. Jesse Owens certainly threw a wrench in those (white supremacist) plans, however.
Which isn't likely - all the people I know who were upset about Qatar hosting are sports fans in the first place and all got together to watch it regardless.
That's what gets me. Qatar can Qatar in Qatar, but the disgusting, corrupt, hypocritical ruling class who would preach to me and claim to be the "experts" on how I should live my life and to be my moral superiors is what gets me. And they're the ones who really enable and legitimize these regimes too. They're the real evil, and it's high time to put an end to them.
We need to strengthen our democratic institutions and of course also be more demanding of honesty from their leaders.
Just saying they’re evil and we need to put an end to them sounds like people saying the police is evil and should be abolished. A really bad idea in my opinion.
But I don't think "we need to care more" is a good mental model for the issue
----
You're so nice
You're not good
You're not bad
You're just nice
I'm not good
I'm not nice
I'm just right
I'm the witch
You're the world
--Into the Woods, Last Midnight
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/nine-fifa-officials-and-five-...
For start, do not watch their events, and ignore them as far as possible.
---------------------------------
Reject hosting events organised by them. The same goes for olympics, fortunately most people are noticing that it is a waste of money.
(my city overwhelmingly rejected applying for winter olympics hosting after grassroot campaign by local people - I also participated in it a bit)
69.72% against, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Krak%C3%B3w_referendum
Reducing public funding for professional sports would be also nice.
Now you say, oh, the members won't do anything. They are willing complicits. Guess what. They are also associtations and have members. In the end your local football club is a member of a local association, that is member of a national association, that is member of FIFA.
Why not start there. Start an initiative in your local club, that they take action on the next level, that they take action on the next level, etc. If you local club takes that up, but the next level ignores it, use your contacts to neighbouring clubs. If still nothing happens start an initiative that your club leaves the association.
If your local club prefers to do nothing, they are complicits as well. But you can leave. Get your friends to leave. You can still play football. Just meet up at a field. Place some posts. But stop complaining about the corrupt FIFA.
Fans can quit paying teams.
But teams don't care and fans don't care.
https://www.espn.com/soccer/fifa-world-cup/story/4501424/uef...
In any case, professional sports is intrinsically corrupt, and the billions in broadcasting rights money sloshing around the trough are a magnet for scum.
His brother posted a video saying he believes he was killed, but he was obviously and understandably in a really emotional state. To add to this, his brother is gay and Grant wore a rainbow shirt (as many other prominent journalist have done during this World Cup to protest the Qatari stance on LGBTQ rights) to a match and was told he couldn’t enter the stadium.
You missed the point. He's [rightly] complaining about substack.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fjmqz0GXoAA9jg8?format=jpg&name=...
The result was pretty shocking, so I asked someone I know at the CDC and he basically admitted that The Global Elites (as he called them) ordered a mass-genocide and while he had some misgivings about it, a job is a job and what are you gonna do, y'know?
Anyway it's winter time and I wanted to protect myself and help build up herd immunity so I got the shot last week, so here's to hoping they updated it.
Most would like have the decorum and PR experience to feign shock, but I doubt you’d get more than an empty “oh that’s terrible“ from most in power.
To me the fact that anyone would find this shocking is the most shocking part as it implies people are believing politicians facades.
Your position seems to be that it doesn’t matter what leaders and politicians say if they don’t believe it in their heart. I think that’s less relevant than their actions.
(And FWIW, yes, usually when a worker dies on the job in the US the company does sponsor a memorial)
Have you perhaps considered that just because US society might be a few decades ahead in certain types of rights, that maybe that's just a fluke of nature and doesn't give the US any moral standing?
Edit: can't respond any more, so I will just say: this thread is exactly an example of fake empathy. None of these guys will go out of their way to help the migrant worker, they will demand others do so. Fake empathy.
To the extent that those ideals are “migrant worker’s lives should not be treated as expendable”, hell yes I am. (FWIW I’m Canadian, not American)
Your attempt at positioning that as some sort of cultural chauvinism is weird.
https://torontorailwaymuseum.com/?p=1152
What? Who?
Amazon docks people productivity points for the time it takes to walk a longer route to avoid a dead body on the warehouse floor.
There’s plenty of room for improvement. But it used to be that a 10,000 person steel mill could expect 1200 deaths and serious injuries each year. That only changed because people cared enough to fight for better conditions.
Yes statistically many people die on the job in many countries but every one is still a tragedy. You can think that and be running a large organization.
I feel like many conservative thinkers believe that it’s all “fake” and just PR. But human empathy is a real thing.
Is it a majority? At what level of government do you think it becomes a majority or minority?
There’s people that don’t care. I just don’t see them in politics, they’re all business leaders.
I guess politics isn’t lucrative enough here.
The more "other", the more fake empathy.
I’m sure a lot of politicians will feel like it’s unfair to pin some event on them, and that might be their base reaction. But this is not a mutually exclusive thing! People can be mad about political messaging and still feel something about people dead while building a soccer stadium of all things.
I think it's essential for mental health to find a way to not grieve these strangers!
What’s the point of anything if we’re going to turn every person into a number? We can’t care about everything all the time, but if we do care about something, it’s probably for valid reasons.
And yet I think most politicians and leaders do not have true empathy, they are just faking it.
If it helps, you can safely read “I don’t really care about X” as “I think X is significantly more important than Y in this particular situation.”
Those are much better terms ;)
This person is just very blunt about stating as much, or maybe they don’t care in the first sense either, and they wouldn’t change anything for the better even if they had opportunity to.
I thought we went past that three centuries ago. But then, globablization of communication showed differently.
I am not even sure about when and where these "social norms about expression" emerged; I am not sure they existed among the Romans, the Carolingian Franks etc.
Surely, they are apparent in some anglophone contexts. The Britons very often go "Will you apologize?" in odd contexts very far from those others would find consistent with the request (e.g. if A randomly knocked B down and showed indifference).
OTOH caring in front of camera is of course a pretty trash signal about the rulers actually doing anything, especially if said rulers are authoritarian and all they have to care about is strong police. An elected politician in representative democracy has a little more incentive to be half-truthful at least some of the time.
You can be cynical all you want. These regime-type considerations are separate from whether we think the culture should value preserving life of people, and not saying "well it's just how things are for thousands of years, good thing I am hereditary elite".
Not A workers death. 6,500 worker deaths. That's over double the number of people that died on 911.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/r...
These were healthy people that had their passports taken away from them and worked until they died and you're talking about a single death.
In 1931 5 people died building the empire state building.
https://www.reference.com/history-geography/many-people-died...
No, this wouldn't fly in USA. If I was a CEO of an American company and one of my employees died, I would not react like that. But we're talking about a foreign country here.
This website (first result on google, I don't particularly vouch for it [1]) suggests in 2020, 340 workers died every day from hazardous working conditions in the US. If you scale it to the population of Qatar, that's about 3 per day, or 20 per week. The guardian claims 12 migrant workers died per week in Qatar the last decades [2]. Not exactly out of proportion.
[1] https://aflcio.org/reports/death-job-toll-neglect-2022
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/r...
I’m not sure we’re given clarity here - rhetorically, ok, fine, but the math doesn’t line up quite this way.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/more-or-less-behind-th...
Also, you cited a report by the unions, for the purpose of promoting workplace safety. There are no such champions for migrants working in Qatar.
[1] - https://aflcio.org/reports/death-job-toll-neglect-2020
> if you scale it to the population of Qatar
That's incorrect way of scaling, since the majority of deaths in Qatar are migrants from countries such as the Philippines, Bangladesh, India or Pakistan.
Where exactly do you think that’ll get us?
See you are presenting a logical fallacy - specifically the notion that "two wrongs make a right". Yes the US nonsense in Iraq was terrible, and a lot of people should be punished for it. How stupid do you think I am to try and pretend that it somehow makes Qatar a non-issue?
I genuinely think it’s more about football than politics, but the politics are a real issue too and they have a larger attack surface
‘Died suddenly’ will be Oxford's 2023 Word of the Year.
In case you're worrying about jumping to conclusion and bordering on conspiracy theories (Quatar somehow poisoning him, or not treating him properly, because of his unfavorable coverage, substance abuse, etc...) : don't overthink it - I've already been shared the articles about why "it's (obviously) side-effects of the covid vaccine."
Which I suppose begs interesting questions about filter bubbles, journalism, how much speculation is enough, how much is too much, and how much "admitting we just don't know" is both wise (you avoid all the crazy theory) and foolish (when one of the crazy theory ends up being right in the end, khashogghi-style, you retrospectively looks sheepish.)