I enjoy Kathleen’s essays and follow her Substack but this isn’t very coherent.

“that personal autonomy — in the basic sense of being able to choose what you do — is a universally important moral and political value, whatever else is also valuable.”

Isn’t this the crux of the culture war? There have to be boundaries on our personal autonomy for a society to function. Who sets the boundaries, by what criteria, is what’s being fought out.

For example

“As is well-known, there are almost certainly gay players in the Premier League but none who will dare come out publicly, so great is the stigma.”

I can be pretty sure in the 400 or so players in the premier league there would be more than a few (probably more than there are gay players) who didn’t want to take the knee, but “who didn’t dare come out so great is the stigma.”

“I see no reason not to take any armband-wearing over there as a sincere and admirable “
Or maybe just don’t go.

“And then there are those who dismiss all such gestures as self-interested attempts to gain social capital.”
And those of us who think that they are right.
Few things in this world are clear cut, but this is one of ’em.

So, in the world of woke, on the one hand assertion of cultural superiority is bad. We must atone for our historical sins by taking the knee, decolonialising, perhaps paying reparations. Qatar, though, is a society that doesn’t view maximal personal autonomy as an overall good. In this case, marching in and asserting our cultural superiority is a good thing. Perhaps we’re now at the stage of post-post-colonialism. For what it’s worth, I’m with Lloris. When in Rome…

If one encourages grotesque knee-bending BLM tosh, what else can one expect?

Perhaps make them ‘play’ naked (Gymnos) as the Ancient Greeks would have done. Then at least all forms of virtue signalling advertising etc would be virtually impossible!

Something irritates me about footballers and their political action: what about the fans?

In nearly all interviews the footballers and pundits trot out the mantra, “The main thing is the fans.” So, has anyone asked the thousands of travelling fans about their views on armbands?

Suppose Kane had worn an armband, got a yellow card and then a second yellow. Then he would have been sent off, England might have lost and been ejected at the group stage. How would the fans react, having paid (a relative) fortune to get out to Quatar? Would the footballers have clubbed together and paid the fans’ air fares? I think not.

So, footballers are non-too-clever, overpaid stars who think that their views are more important than others’. And they are not.

I don’t think the author’s stance is defendable. Anyone can be coerced into projecting stances they don’t in truth at all support – and Quatar is precisely the type of nation where you would be forced to keep your head down and go along with the consensus unless you want to get victimised or even killed. But it’s completely obvious them f’bllers are not in that bind, and they are playing to a different audience, ultimately for wonga, and nothing to do with supporting victimised groups etc.

I appreciate the author does not want to throw out the LGB baby out with the TQ++ bathwater, but imagine some interviewer asks Harry Kane, on the back of his ludicrous armband kerfuffle, to clarify his stance on if someone can change gender because they feel like it, or what his views on Rowling or even Stock are, and it turns out he actually believes all that stuff, and he snarls back an answer “of course people can self identify, what do you think that T in the rainbow means?” At that point it follows them f’bllers would be no different from the howling activists who hounded the author out of her career. Would the author then be quite so sanguine?

Football was once a working-class sport but TPTB have used it as a means to effectively demonstrate to ordinary people where they stand in the pecking order. It was so eloquently put by Andrew Neather “to rub the Right’s noses in diversity”. Of course “diversity” is nothing more than cultural Marxist triumphalism and should best be avoided.
As a spectacle it has become unwatchable. I used to enjoy watching it with my friends in the pub but can’t stand hearing any of it now. On top of that we have VAR which is a tangible way of “controlling” games on behalf of the Far-East betting syndicates and the corruption, both moral and financial, is complete.
Any objective viewer knew exactly what a World Cup held in Qatar would bring and it never should have been awarded there in the first place.
The virtue-signalling, female commentators (who have no right to share a platform with the likes of Roy Keane or Graeme Souness whatsoever), taking the knee and LGBT bull$h!t have made this something to avoid. I haven’t watched football for years as a result and I’m not bothering with this either.

hmm incoherent. Agree with Martin below. Kathleen also refuses to countenance the degree to which feminism – her kind of liberal feminism – created the kind of gender politics (there is no biological nature/natural law – only social construction), that led to the current trans-war

“I see no reason not to take any armband-wearing over there as a sincere and admirable attempt to speak up for the rights of oppressed others, and it seems to me highly uncharitable to take it any other way.”
Perhaps, but is it uncharitable to see his backing down under threat of a yellow card as being cowardly, weak, and a sign that he’s only happy to speak up until it causes him the tiniest amount of difficulty in his career? I mean, if I was in danger of death at the hands of a brutal regime, I’d hope the very least that a footballer could do would be to take a yellow card in my name. Still, at least he took the knee, so the oppressed of the world can take heart from that as they are confronted by a loaded gun in the hands of a soldier of their own country.

Please unherd I a bored sick of all this woke pandering to this profoundly unimportant, tedious and irritating subject…. as if those on the terraces give a damn, let alone have so much as a scintilla of sympathy? Do you seriously think that the lads at Millwall, Liverpool or West Ham lay awake a night concerned for LGBTQ? please?!!!!!!

“We can argue about whether free movement across the globe is a human right in this sense, but it would be difficult to argue that free movement around your own village is not.”

Interesting point, and in fact there’s a global-villagey sort of answer to this that exposes the whole problem in a conceptually-accessible nutshell: actually, a village is a physical, social, economic and institutional grouping within which free movement is only valuable at all as a direct consequence of the limits imposed upon it by other rights, privileges and obligations, and the historic efforts of others to build, maintain and mature that village to begin with.

For example, you can’t wander into people’s homes at will, rarely would walking through someone else’s garden be acceptable, your progress in a motor vehicle will necessarily be much slower on a road through the village than on the open roads outside it, you cannot just walk into a local workplace and offer your services and expect to be given work, and you cannot walk into the local doctor’s surgery and expect free treatment without registered and identifying (this last example is a bit iffy given that the NHS usually treats anyone for free if they are physically present in the UK, but if we go abroad to most villages, that won’t happen). Your presence in commercial establishments will usually require you to be a customer and if you trample the flowerbeds on the village green out of an obtuse desire to walk exactly how you please on public land, you are likely to face vandalism charges.

The point of course is that free movement in principle sounds very noble until you see that in practice, free movement always seems to involve people “freely” moving to places where the historic efforts of others have made them attractive places to be, and in some cases importing with themselves attitudes and values that rapidly dilute and damage the attractiveness of the place in question. Villages, with their stable social structures, established customs and their networks of cooperation based upon historic adherence to commonly accepted obligations and rules, do not experience the problem of the local unemployable deciding to move into the rich man’s house without his permission (not, at least, without this attracting immediate consequences for the transgressor). That is why the typical village cannot act as an accurate microcosm of the debate about free movement between nations.

On the final point of the article generally, while it might be plausible to argue that Harry Kane is sincerely speaking out for LGBT rights, the fact is that he’s ostensibly taking a stand against Qatari attitudes to LGBT people while tactily doing exactly what the Qataris want from him. So really I say it counts for nothing. That’s not to say that Harry Kane should ruin his career by refusing to play, but I do say that the gesture is empty. What would be best all round is that we and Harry Kane do whatever gives him and the team the best chance of winning the World Cup. That’s what he’s there for, and to listen to all the shouting it would appear many people have forgotten this.

It’s tiresome that trolls are ruining the comments section now, baiting others and bringing that childish Twitter energy here. It’s also quite sad that someone would actually pay a subscription to do so.

OK, some interesting points but I still feel its one of her weaker articles as it is a bit incoherent.
As others have said. If Harry Kane (and others) don’t agree with Qataris just don’t go. I you do go just play football. He can state clearly that he why objects back home. Otherwise do as Hugo Loris stated (I think he is unfairly slighted by the writer (does she know what his motives are)).
At the end of the day there is so much wrong with holding a World Cup in Qatar – most of it already said – I think this just shows that to hold any major sporting event the host country should, at the very least be a democracy.
All this thing about arm bans etc. now the the Qataris have made their own with “I love Qatar”. At the end of the day (whatever they their own regime) most of them would strongly disagree with any LGBT+ sentiments – as do most Muslims and this “virtue signaling” will change nothing.
Another couple of interesting points (made by Ed West on his substack) is that:
when England hosted the WC , homosexuality was illegal too.
it is mostly post-protestant countries who shout loudest about these things.

“As is well-known, there are almost certainly gay players in the Premier League but none who will dare come out publicly, so great is the stigma.”
This struck me as interesting because in The Gulf the median position is that sexual behavior is something that should remain private for all. There is a sense that life in public should be pursued modestly. All that Qatar has asked for, looking at it from my position living for much of the year in the Gulf, is to observe that modesty when you come to watch the football.
They are well aware that the expression of sexuality in public is considered liberating in the West but then the West might like to consider that all that will interest people living in the Gulf, is the quality of the football play, rather than a rigorous examination of the player’s views on sexual and gender rights. If these countries do evolve into less modest societies where openness is considered a virtue they will do it without being pushed. Personally, I find modesty very attractive among all my friends who cover all the letters.
Many people in these columns lament the constant attention given to T issues and the creeping way in which it has gone from being a few hundred people wishing to reassign their gender each year, which is enshrined in law, to a Tsunami of self-identification and non-binary this and that and the other. I agree with this view and the “pressure” put on Qatar is part of the same movement, where you raise up to a very high-level something that is of little interest to others, particularly if you agree that sexual preferences are a private matter and gender questions should be dealt with the utmost diligence and care. Put simply the vast majority even in a so-called tolerant society do not mind what people are but they do not want it pushed into their faces that in a different way applies in the Gulf.
On the question of woman’s access to the internet, smartphones are everywhere and given it is the same smartphone I use Unherd is available to them too. The idea they are hidden from the Global Internet just does not fly. Walk into any mall or check out any restaurant they are wedded to their phones like everyone else in the world.
Though this article is not about ensuring and improving the lot of workers in the Gulf it is a far more important matter and one which behind the scenes I would hope everything possible is being done to change practices. It’s true to say the abuses I am aware of come from fellow countrymen higher up the food chain and X Pats as much as the locals and it needs to be frowned upon and practices introduced from the very top so that all stop it.

This should be really simple. Don’t use your extremely privileged position in elite sport as a platform to make political statements. End of.

Stock is great, I love her writing and this piece even though I have some questions about it. I think the title is actually not very good, and colours the reading of the article in a bad way.

“he was then criticised by those well-known bleeding heart-types Roy Keane and Ray Winstone for capitulating in the face of a threatened booking from Fifa.”

Tbf, Keane said that if this issue is *actually* that important to Kane, then he should be willing to take the punishment. That’s integrity. I agree with Keane. His bleeding-heart sensibility, or lack thereof, is irrelevant.

“Generally, the public mood on armbands and bent knees seems to be split. There are those who assume every organised public gesture in the name of human rights must be altruistically intentioned and beneficial. And then there are those who dismiss all such gestures as self-interested attempts to gain social capital.”

This could be a fair characterisation of some (most?) of the discourse. But there are some people who think all the kneeling and armband-wearing is done out of good intentions. These footballers are well-meaning and useful idiots for the progressive movement.

If Kane and co. stuck to purely football – racism in football, LGB discrimination in football, etc. – that’s one thing. But they’ve set themselves a wider remit – to be moral arbiters of the culture in the UK, and now of the world. It’s bizarre.

My 16 year old grandson: ‘Been stuffing my eyes with the World Cup. Great quality of football.’ One person who hasn’t taken his eye off the ball…..

Anyone who uses the term “virtue signalling” can be safely ignored. Same goes for “woke”.
The only thing being signalled is that the writer is mad about about something while also being a hopelessly lazy scribe.
Although it is funny to see the right lose their collective minds over every little gesture. But if someone doesn’t wear a poppy in November then look out!