PSG v Istanbul

So UEFA are investigating. If it was a player and found guilty the player would get a ban and the club possibly fined, so does that mean UEFA might fine UEFA?

 

The account I read suggests that the referee was alerted to the behaviour of one of the Istanbul coaches. The referee asked the 4th official to identify which one and the 4th official said ‘the black guy’. He was referred to Pierre Webo who’s the only black member of the coaching staff at that club.

Don’t know how accurate that is. But here’s a genuine question: if you’re asked to identify someone from a group and the most obvious and easily quantifiable physical trait of that person is being black amongst the rest of the group being white, is it acceptable to identify that person as ‘the black one’?

 

If you are looking for offence i guarantee you will find it. The ones not looking for offence will have a very different view to the ones seeking it.

 

That’s how I see it. This is all going the way I feared. The subject of racism is eating itself. Most likely the official will face sanctions, could very well be fined and possibly even losing his job. For - allegedly - using the word ‘black’ to identify a black man within a group of white men, to a 3rd party, from a distance.

 

Just because i don't find something offensive doesn't mean it isn't offensive to others. Very little offends me yet i like to think i have enough intelligence and common sense to call a potentially offensive use of vocabulary when i hear it. You only have to read the opinions on social media of hypoctites like Collymore to realise this is only gonna get worse.

 

Intent seems irrelevant now, which is farcical.

 

don’t think intent has ever mattered, it is how something is perceived by the victim. It is far too easy to just say you didn’t mean anything by it, or it was just a joke

 

I don't see how intent, demonstrable intent, can't matter. I'd say that historically, intent was always a determing factor. Ignorance isn't a defence, but that's a different point. Whether someone takes offence is very subjective. How can a person with malicious intent be punished because someone else takes offence? Its madness.

 

So how would you show if someone had intent if they deny it?

 

I would think that for most people, its a matter of common sense. Unfortunately, there now seems to be a land rush for virtue signalling. Taking offence has become an Olympic sport. No one has the right not to be offended. Life doesn’t work that way. It’s such a subjective term. I’d say that until recently, i.e. within the last year or two, acts and language that were deemed to be obviously offensive, were fairly self evident. Now, the lines have become so blurred it’s ridiculous and I don’t think people genuinely know where they stand. As I say - is it wrong to use someone’s skin colour as a descriptor for the purpose of identification?

 

Unfortunately common sense doesn’t come into it and never has.

As for using the colour of a persons skin as a descriptor no it shouldn’t be an issue but it can be depending on tone of voice, body language etc.

not sure what you do for a living but if you have ever done any training around harassment and equality but they always emphasise it is how things are received that is the most important thing.

 

So if receive your repeated responses to my posts on this point as harassment and an attempt to minimise my opinion on a personally sensitive matter, I’m right and you should be banned?

Just to be clear - I don’t. And hopefully that didn’t need to be said, but you never know. But hypothetically it could be. I could decide to take offence, and despite you doing nothing through ill intent and where most people would vouch for you doing nothing wrong, its my interpretation that matters? My interpretation that’s the determining factor on whether you’re warned, maybe banned?

I’m exaggerating to make my point, but that’s the gist of it.

As I say, I think the whole ‘I’m offended’ movement is eating itself and worse, it’s clouding where there really are issues of oppression that need to be tackled.

 

If you feel harassed by something then who is to say you haven’t been. What happens because of it is something completely different. Just because you feel harassed doesn’t necessarily mean I would be punished that would depend on a number of things, if it was over repeated events then maybe mediation would be suggested to find out why you feel harassed by what I have said.

 

Why should it matter whether I feel harassed? What matters is whether there's an obvious or even reasonably evident act of malice. As I say, no one has the right not to be offended by something. In order to speak freely, you have to risk being offensive. And that's very different from setting out to offend. On the race issue, we're seeing a level of 'policing' on language and expression that I see as being harmful, not helpful. Interestingly a recent poll in the Guardian - about as liberal a paper as you can get - indicated that 55% of people surveyed believe that the BLM movement has caused MORE racial tension, not less.

These training courses you mention - I'd argue that a better use of that time and resource would be to coach people to not be quite so infantile, to understand that the world isn't a utopian wonderland where everyone gets along all of the time, to help people filter between obvious acts that are intended to offend, and what isn't. At times, you have to take certain things on the chin, agree to disagree etc. And this is the crux of what I posted earlier - people ARE being punished for subjective interpretation of things that aren't obviously offensive. The 'rules' have become so blurred that people are genuinely unsure of what is and isn't acceptable to say or do, because intent is irrelevant and one wrong and you're for it.

 

you say it should be if there is an act of malice, but what is the malice of you are saying it isn’t if someone is harassed?

I don’t think the rules are blurred they seem very clear, it is just you don’t agree with them.

a legal example would be The Protection from Harassment Act 1997 (PHA) outlines harassment offences as ‘causing alarm or distress’ (section 2), and ‘putting people in fear of violence’ (section 4).

 

I’m talking about social rules as much as legal rules. They’ve never been less clear. And the consequences can be significant.

Common sense could be applied as to whether someone is acting with an intent to cause distress or fear. It’s fairly obvious. But now, the obsession over ‘Social Justice’ means that the determining factor is about ‘feelings’ rather than anything resembling fact or objective assessment.

We’re digressing, so lets look at the case in point, in this thread. Hypothetically, if this is a case of an official identifying someone as ‘the black guy’, when that guy is the only black guy in a group of white people, and he’s doing it as a descriptive term for the purpose of identification, because skin colour is the most obvious differentiator for the purpose of a quick conversation with a 3rd party, is that wrong? Is it a reasonable statement to make?

 

BTW Demba Ba was also on the bench

 

In the context of what the 4th official said, I’m not sure what that has to do with it. The conversation between the ref and 4th official was specific to the sending off of a coach. Ba is a player, presumably not say with the coaching staff.