Foppberg
Registered User
I'm with @dahrougem2 that all of this anti-Russian stuff is another form of cancel culture in disguise. I think the dumbest or ignorant thing is to group people based on genes, culture, religion, race, or background and then full on judge them within that group. Every person on this earth is individually different from one another even if they are all white, asian, or black. Punishing Russian athletes just because they're Russian could be quite xenophobic considering they have absolutely nothing to do with Putin's decision, even for the pro-Putin hockey players in the NHL. You think Ovechkin or Varlamov called Putin directly and told him, "hey Supreme Leader, I am not really liking Ukraine at the moment, can you invade them?" That's just rubbish even though I think on a moral level you should definitely voice a concern to who they're backing.
Just look at Russia right now, a percentage of their population actually came out and opposed the invasion with protests. It's not their fault the Russian police took a page out of the Canadian police and shutdown peaceful protests. Now there are things I do accept, for example on TNT yesterday the entire panel mentioned that if you're a USA or Canadian player in the KHL, you need to GTFO of that country ASAP. There are ways to pressure Russia on other fronts than banning their athletes. For example, leaving the KHL is one option, being like Poland and actually boycotting their game against Russia is another for the World Cup. I also don't mind if IIHF decides to ban Russia from U18, U20, and World Champions' as it was employed against South Africa and their racist constitution. But targeting individuals because they were born in a country with one person deciding to do a terrible act is crazy. Hasek probably means well, but his ideology is the same of what USA did to Japanese citizens during WWII with the prison camps.
EDIT: Actually, I dunno. Some random Russian couple with a small business in small town Colorado shouldn't be discriminated against, but squeezing Putin from possible angle? Yeah, I'm for that. Sucks that innocent players are part of the collateral damage but I mean, shouldn't have invaded a country and committed war crimes.
However the bolded is just silliness. It was far from peaceful, and not at all legal from the very beginning. I don't want to get into it too much, as this thread is already talking politics and with that comes instant "code orange" level of rigidness on how much the envelope can be pushed. Slide into my DMs if you really want to though
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