Anyways, the Premier League has announced a return date for its football (17th June). Great news. This also means that fpl - Fantasy Premier League that is - should be back too. This is something I play and also blog about. I find it quite a nice little excursion from the more serious newsy stuff I focus on here and elsewhere (at least that was the case until Covid came along).
So, to try to not get too bogged down, this is the thing; there's quite a large online community surrounding fpl. In fact, it has millions of players worldwide. Now though I play and make fpl content I generally keep myself to myself and refrain from interacting with this wider community. I watch their YouTube channels and follow a few accounts on Twitter, but I always make sure not to contact or interact with them. This is largely just out of respect. A lot of my online output is a little controversial (politics, conspiracies - not to mention odd memes and other crap). So I feel it would be unfair to taint their world with mine. All these guys focus solely on fpl. For some it's their main job, for others it's maybe a semi-profession or hobby they've invested a lot of time in. So either way it's their overriding interest.
Of course, when you do make money doing something like this then sponsors and larger employers come into the equation. So being controversial or associated with controversial people and ideas can have negative implications. Due to this factor I keep my distance. Knowing that they'd either rather not interact with me at all as they have the common sense and self-interest to stay away from "controversial" troublemakers. Or that they'd willingly and kindly interact, but that it might have some adverse effect on them further down the road. They may get tarred for being associated with "a conspiracy theorist" or something like that. Heck, they may end up even becoming a conspiracy theorist listening to me 😅 So I always feel it's not really fair to intrude into their space. It's a bit like going into someone's workplace and causing trouble. So I don't do it. This does mean that my little fpl blog wallows in obscurity though.
Anyway, today..
..as English football is coming back I did a little blog post about it. In the past I've actually kept my fpl blog exclusively for fpl. All football, no politics. A firewall hiding my political opinions from anyone that does consume my fpl content. However, when the lock down kicked in I did do a few posts criticising it, and basically stating how bad it is for football and civil liberties in general. I did it knowing that it would make me even more of a black sheep - not that many people actually read the blog posts anyway. However, my conscience kicked in. So I felt I had to pollute the football world with my unpopular opinions. There were bigger things at play.
When I returned today I tried to draw a line under all this, and get back to "just the football". However, it got me thinking about how wrong this whole situation is. When I thought about the professional fpl players - the YouTubers, bloggers and whatnot - it occurred to me. Actually, they are very political. They often promote all sorts of political issues. They're just always issues that are verified by the mainstream. Be it discussing mental health issues, promoting LGBT+ causes, and so on and so forth. In fact, one of the guys I follow on Twitter (a very intelligent young guy who posts some truly great fpl content) also often posts lots of "remain" and "anti-Tory" type stuff. Of course, that's all acceptable. You can't get ostracised or lose your job or income for posting that sort of political content online.
What struck me the most when I thought about it all though was not simply the unfairness, but also the actual consequences of this situation. In Hong Kong at the moment, as we speak, people are losing their rights and being sucked ever further into the Chinese totalitarian state. Now I'm sure the issues on the ground there are complex and not all one-sided, but nevertheless freedoms are most certainly being eroded. Yet few in the west are speaking out about this. This is no doubt because it's "the wrong type of issue to be talking about". We have a culture and business environment where certain opinions are not supposed to be discussed, and may even result in complete career termination. Generally this means anything that's deemed on "the right", though it's not always quite as clearly delineated as that.
In this particular case it's; the British Empire is bad, therefore being pro-Hong Kong is bad, and by virtue of the "empire" overtones a little bit racist too ..and that slight and completely illogical perception of "racism" will be enough to make it unacceptable in the workplace. So you can champion say an Antifa or climate change protest in the workplace, but not a Hong Kong protest.
(Hong Kong Earth flag - I'm
just going to do this with everything)
Given the situation in Hong Kong, and in the world in general, perhaps we need to start changing this ..and sharpish. As it seems we're completely failing to defend our core values both here and around the world. So I'm now wondering do we need to start pushing back against this "career termination" type censorship more aggressively. Is it time that I and others stopped being so worried about politicising things which are already clearly very politicised anyway?
And is there a way to do this that doesn't simply come across as confrontational?
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