snake Posted November 20, 2016 Share Posted November 20, 2016 Is Canada a more attractive option now that Trump has become President? Vancouver Montreal and Toronto will I believe now be first choice for international DP . The apathy around the world for America at the moment is at an all time low. How does MLS take all this in? They seem to have right of first refusal for aging stars coming over ie stocking up the big US markets like Los Angeles and New York. exiting transfer window coming up in January Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Olympique_de_Marseille Posted November 20, 2016 Share Posted November 20, 2016 17 minutes ago, snake said: Is Canada a more attractive option now that Trump has become President? Not really. It will always be about the $$$ and the individual living situation of each player. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matty Posted November 20, 2016 Share Posted November 20, 2016 25 minutes ago, Olympique_de_Marseille said: Not really. It will always be about the $$$ and the individual living situation of each player. I dunno, I think some Latin might prefer going to Canada over the US with Trump in power but agree it won't mean shit for most players. Where it might matter is 2026 World Cup voting. It's possibly the US becomes what many fear it will and have an economy in the gutter and be a more troubling nation for human rights than Russia. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grizzly Posted November 21, 2016 Share Posted November 21, 2016 19 hours ago, matty said: I dunno, I think some Latin might prefer going to Canada over the US with Trump in power but agree it won't mean shit for most players. Where it might matter is 2026 World Cup voting. It's possibly the US becomes what many fear it will and have an economy in the gutter and be a more troubling nation for human rights than Russia. Having lived in both the US and Russia, the US is already a more troubling nation for human rights than Russia before Trump. We just choose to highlight the human rights problems in Russia and ignore those of the US. Look at the per capita prisoner rate of the two countries or the police shootings. Compare the per capita prisoner rate of Canada and the US. They are running a prison labour gulag system in the US, if any other country were doing this we would be raising a fuss about it but since they control the international media it is hardly mentioned. And that is not even mentioning what they are doing in various other countries. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Obinna Posted November 21, 2016 Share Posted November 21, 2016 20 hours ago, snake said: Is Canada a more attractive option now that Trump has become President? Vancouver Montreal and Toronto will I believe now be first choice for international DP . The apathy around the world for America at the moment is at an all time low. How does MLS take all this in? They seem to have right of first refusal for aging stars coming over ie stocking up the big US markets like Los Angeles and New York. exiting transfer window coming up in January I don't think Trump becoming president will have any impact on what goes on in MLS. Why should it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matty Posted November 21, 2016 Share Posted November 21, 2016 13 minutes ago, Grizzly said: Having lived in both the US and Russia, the US is already a more troubling nation for human rights than Russia before Trump. We just choose to highlight the human rights problems in Russia and ignore those of the US. Look at the per capita prisoner rate of the two countries or the police shootings. Compare the per capita prisoner rate of Canada and the US. They are running a prison labour gulag system in the US, if any other country were doing this we would be raising a fuss about it but since they control the international media it is hardly mentioned. And that is not even mentioning what they are doing in various other countries. At the current time, Russia is "worse" than the US when it comes to human rights. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/amnesty-international-reveals-the-10-worst-attacks-on-human-rights-across-the-world-last-year-a6892911.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Obinna Posted November 21, 2016 Share Posted November 21, 2016 2 hours ago, matty said: At the current time, Russia is "worse" than the US when it comes to human rights. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/amnesty-international-reveals-the-10-worst-attacks-on-human-rights-across-the-world-last-year-a6892911.html I'm going to put more stock in Grizzly's breakdown. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grizzly Posted November 21, 2016 Share Posted November 21, 2016 6 hours ago, matty said: At the current time, Russia is "worse" than the US when it comes to human rights. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/amnesty-international-reveals-the-10-worst-attacks-on-human-rights-across-the-world-last-year-a6892911.html That depends on who is doing the assessment, what they are assessing and how the organization is controlled. Western countries commit more human rights violations than any other block of nations in our desire to control the resources of poorer countries but this rarely gets mentioned in the various bodies that we control from the UN to NGOs not to mention most of the world's media. And while most of the western countries have a relatively good human rights record at home the US does not. I have lived in Germany as well and I think that in Canada and Germany have significantly better human rights record internally than Russia does. I would not say the same about the US. I could go through a long list of areas in which the US is worse than Russia, more chance of being jailed, more chance of being arrested, more chance of being killed or seriously injured during an arrest, death penalty (how many people have been wrongly executed in the US compared to Russia which placed a moratorium on the death penalty in 1999?), slums, violent crime, lack of access to quality education or health care for poor people. If I were to have a choice to get arrested at midnight with no one around by a Russian policeman or an American policeman I would definitely choose the Russian. Look at the amount of police in the US now often in military gear and carrying machine guns. Last time I was at Brighton Beach in New York there were armed cops in jeeps driving up and down the beach. You don't see stuff like that in Russia yet the media and groups like Amnesty International will say Russia is a police state and the US is not. There are also areas where Russia is worse such as a weaker legal system although again the US legal system seems to work differently for a rich white man compared to a poor black man. Corruption is worse in Russia though again a lot of the corruption in the US and also Canada is more hidden and higher level and sometimes legalized corruption like the offshore banking tax havens. Putin has also greatly reduced corruption in Russia but you will never hear about anything positive Putin has done in Russia in our media. If you got caught speeding you used to be able to give the cop a few bucks and all was forgotten but Putin has reformed the police and now this is far less common (one of my friends even complains about this, "I realize that for Russia overall this is better but for me personally this is bad, now I have to stick to the speed limit or pay a fine and lose points on my license and risk losing my license!" ) Believe me I first went to Russia shortly after Putin took power the country was in a terrible state after Yeltsin and he has done a very good job in improving the lives of his citizens which is why he is still very popular. Some people wish the changes or improvements were faster but every time I go to Russia things have improved a little bit over the last time and unlike Gorbachov and Yeltsin when he makes changes or reforms they are done in a very intelligent and well thought out manner. He is popular for a reason and we liked Gorbachov and Yeltsin because their screw ups and incompetence worked to our advantage not because they were good for the Russian people. (Gorbachov had good intentions he was just incompetent in achieving them and naive and trusting when dealing with the US while Yeltsin was both incompetent and corrupt). Political repression is harder to judge, yes it can be more dangerous to be an opposition politician in Russia than the US but that is largely because in the US if you are not an adherent to one of the two parties (or 1 and a half parties as I think is more accurate) you are completely ignored by the media and have no chance of achieving change ie. you are no danger to the system. In an election in which the majority of the US electorate disliked both candidates the 3rd parties combined got less than 5% of the vote which does not exactly scream fair democracy. When I lived in the US I remember most of my friends absolutely hated the Democratic Party but also voted for them because the alternative was worse and that was before the Democrats moved so far to the right. Both the US and Russia are what I would call tilted democracies in which people have a right to vote but certain parties have far better chances than others and the media is quite biased (I think Canada and Germany are also tilted democracies but the tilt is less steep). Plus the US has completely infiltrated the Russian opposition which both hurts the legitimacy of the real Russian opposition members (ie. the guys who are not getting funded by the US) and gives Putin justification to crack down on the opposition as a 5th column (and in many cases he is not wrong about this). Russia has two parties that I consider to be American opposition parties as their platform mirrors US policy not genuine Russian opposition positions, Yabloko and Parnas. I actually used to support Yabloko but at some point there was a noticeable change in their positions and now I really distrust this party. Also while 2 of the 3 opposition parties in the Duma seem to support Putin on important issues (ie. only partly independent opposition) the largest opposition party, the Communist Party, seems to be a genuine opposition party as far as I can tell. We never hear about them because we would like them less than we like Putin so our media only reports on Yabloko or Parnas or Kasparov's crazy and marginal coalition all of whom are very unpopular in Russia because of their policies, their ties with the US and the Yeltsin government and what many of them did during Yeltsin's illegitimate government (he maintained power by force and a massacre that everyone seems to have forgotten about). When Putin shuts down a NGO I always research the NGO and he usually has a fairly high level of justification, ie. there are often clear links to the US government and/or "philanthropists" like George Soros who are really involved in trying to achieve regime change. Yet all we hear about in our media is Hillary Clinton's red scare McCarthyist claim that Russia was manipulating the US election. Is it possible Russia gave some funds to Trump? It is possible but I think unlikely but even if they did that would not give them control over him or the Republican Party establishment he will have to deal with. Could Russia be responsible for the Wikileaks stuff? Also possible but I still think it was probably people within the US who leaked the documents. Russia might be able to influence the policies of a Jill Stein but I doubt they are able to have a lot of influence on either of the two governing parties in the US and I don't think they are capable of building a network of influence comparable to what the US has in Russia and many other countries including our own. And if we claim to be such a great democracy with a variety of opinions why did Obama's visit to our parliament consist of every party giving him a standing ovation and yelling "4 more years" and not one member mentioning the drone war, Libya, Syria Yemen, his deportation of millions of immigrants (somehow in the criticism that Trump has faced over this policy no one has cared to notice that Obama did the same thing) the Democratic Party receiving funding from the private prisons or the lack of action about police brutality towards minorities. Both the US and Russia also have huge differences in human rights in certain regions and classes of people. Dagestan and Chechnya are to some extent in a state of war consisting of terrorist attacks which are also met by state repression so the human rights situations in these regions is far worse than in the rest of Russia (however Chechnya has greatly stabilized under Kadyrov who is not a great champion of human rights and democracy but at the same time for the majority of the population he is the best thing that has happened in Chechnya in a couple of decades because he has mostly stopped the war and rebuilt Chechnya and every viable alternative to him is probably much worse). Likewise a white person living in Boston probably isn't experiencing or even noticing (intentional ignorance) the human rights problems that a poor black person in Alabama or Baltimore will experience. A poor person in Russia will have a worse standard of living than a poor person in the US but is also less likely to face repression or be refused medical care or be illiterate. I have been to dictatorships where no one wanted to talk about politics or looked around to make sure no one was listening if they did such as Tunesia when Ben Ali was in power but people in Russia talk freely about their opinion of Putin even if it is negative (and even in Tunesia Ben Ali was overthrown more due to standard of living and unemployment issues than repression issues. It was the first revolution of the Arab Spring and the only one that was mostly successful largely because it was the only one the US did not get involved in because it was a surprise and they probably did not care too much one way or another if Ben Ali stayed in power or was overthrown.) If there is a problem in Russia today it is not human rights or political oppression it is standard of living and that is true in most countries in the world. We like to criticize the human rights or democratic freedoms of other countries and ignore poverty and trade fairness issues because the former allows us to bitch at others without having to do something while if we are concerned with the later we would feel obliged to do something to improve the situation and examine our own role in causing the current situation. Anyone who thinks organizations like Amnesty International are fairly reporting each country with no political influence and our media is giving us an accurate picture of the situation is deluded. The problems and incidents that are happening in the US after the Trump victory are not new things that are just occurring, they are just revealing what was already there and hidden or not talked about or reported in the media. And the Democrats have not really been much better in many of these areas than the Republicans. The actions of the people also don't lie, Putin is popular because he has improved the lives of most Russians while Clinton did not get out the black vote because she and Obama did not do this (notice that Clinton during the primaries had the support of most Black Democratic Party organizations but when it came to getting out the regular non party member black voters many of them stayed home because they did not like either choice). The breakup of the Soviet Union resulted in a lot of ethnic conflicts because old disputes/hatreds that were suppressed under communism were free to flourish again and some regions and ethnic groups ended up in the wrong countries often because the communist party gave regions to different countries because it was administratively or politically advantageous not anticipating what could happen in 75 years if the Soviet Union broke up. If we were truly interested in solving the human rights issues of Russia and other former Soviet and Eastern Bloc countries we would be looking for peaceful means not moving NATO and our missiles to Russia's borders and favouring certain ethnic groups and countries over others. Indeed the Reagan government negotiators with the Soviets like George Kennan opposed NATO expansion and predicted exactly what would happen if that occurred, ie. a lot of dangerous regional conflicts that would then blame on Russia. As for Trump it is hard to know what to expect, he said a lot of bad things that have caused certain reactions that have laid bare some of the problems that always existed in the US but at times also seemed to propose more solutions to them than Hillary did. The problems that have been exposed were always there though, just no one was looking and possibly in the long term it is better to have this stuff out in the open then hidden and continuing with the status quo. And to relate this back to soccer I don't think it will have much effect on players wanting to sign in Canada as opposed to the US. At the height of the cartel war Mexican teams were still able to sign good international players, individual players might be influenced by social issues but most will go where the money is. But a drop in the US reputation might help our World Cup aspirations as others have already commented. As for Amnesty International there is some truth to what they are saying but I think there is a double standard in how they are assessing certain countries compared to others. I will go with my own experience in living in both countries over these reports. I don't have a problem with criticism of Russia or Putin but I have a problem when the same standard is not applied to so many other countries and particularly the US. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matty Posted November 21, 2016 Share Posted November 21, 2016 5 hours ago, Obinna said: I'm going to put more stock in Grizzly's breakdown. For the record: The Independent is a RUSSIAN owned paper which was unable to ignore MAJOR AND RESPECTED WORLDWIDE international organisation shitting on Russia. It's nice to know that anecdotal > extensive research Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matty Posted November 21, 2016 Share Posted November 21, 2016 @Grizzly without going into detail a lot of what you've said is not correct. For example violent crime in Russia is a fair bit higher than the US and that murder rate is also higher. The US has a fuck ton of issues but Russia's ATM are greater. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ansem Posted November 21, 2016 Share Posted November 21, 2016 On 19/11/2016 at 11:20 PM, snake said: Is Canada a more attractive option now that Trump has become President? Vancouver Montreal and Toronto will I believe now be first choice for international DP . The apathy around the world for America at the moment is at an all time low. How does MLS take all this in? They seem to have right of first refusal for aging stars coming over ie stocking up the big US markets like Los Angeles and New York. exiting transfer window coming up in January Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Obinna Posted November 22, 2016 Share Posted November 22, 2016 18 hours ago, matty said: For the record: The Independent is a RUSSIAN owned paper which was unable to ignore MAJOR AND RESPECTED WORLDWIDE international organisation shitting on Russia. It's nice to know that anecdotal > extensive research This does not persuade me, nor is it much of an argument. No offence. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TRM Posted November 22, 2016 Share Posted November 22, 2016 DPs will go where the money is. They would care more about the surface they play on than the country they play in. They play in China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia etc. You get the point. PS. More Latinos and blacks voted for Trump than Romney in 2012. He got 30% of the Latino vote in Florida for example. PPS. 45% of the people voting for Trump listed their prime motivation being "he's not Hillary". 42% of Clinton's support was due to "she's not Trump". Pretty much bottom of the barrel on both sides IMHO. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matty Posted November 22, 2016 Share Posted November 22, 2016 51 minutes ago, Obinna said: This does not persuade me, nor is it much of an argument. No offence. I didn't want to argue because I wanted to avoid an annoying political argument on this forum and I honestly don't care if you trust anecdotal stories over studies done by trusted groups and moderate media outlets. I'll say this, a lot of what Grizzly said of Russia isn't correct but I'm not shocked they would think or that you would trust it over Amnesty because Russia has over the last 5 to 10 years done a realy good job promoting Russia and making people question MSM and western governments and organisations. I'm not going to go further into this. If you want to reply with something go for it but I'm done. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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