Writerings

Here is my hot-take on the current major geopolitical situation in the Middle East. Even deciding the wording for that first sentence took some time before I settled on the word situation. Conflict, war, invasion, occupation are all loaded. Situation is bland and vague enough to not offend anyone. I hope.

But maybe my main discussion will offend people (if so, please share this and drive up the engagement online). I was very tickled at the words used by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when meeting US President Joe Biden. He described the attacks by Hamas as the equivalent of twenty 9/11s. After first putting this into my calculator to work out this 20×9/11 equalled 16.36, it struck me as an odd unit of measurement.

There was some part of me that appreciated the time taken to scale it as a rate per population. However, it has some limitations. Is the death of one person on the Isle of Man also worth equating to that population’s 9/11? How would it work in the Vatican City? By some rough calculations, it would be 1/200th of a person. Cutting off the hand of the Pope hardly seems comparable.

While the multiplicity of this comparison seems unique, tragedies are often framed in comparison by numbers. The sub-headline Worst X since Y is not just reserved for Manchester United starts to seasons. School shootings, natural disasters, missile strikes, famines and Oscar telecast viewer numbers are all measured in such a way.

But even if quantifying a tragedy purely in death tolls numbers seems overthinking it, the base premise is a bit wonky as well. As that famous Stalin quote goes, 1 death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.

The Bristol Rovers manager Joey Barton got into a bit of hot water a couple of years ago (given his off-field history is relatively minor) for comparing player performances to the Holocaust. That was seen as insensitive. I don’t think it was necessarily the Holocaust specifically that was the cause for the opprobrium. If he’d used 9/11 or Grenfell or even an ancient tragedy they wouldn’t have gone down well either. Ultimately, I think the issue was the trivialness of what he was looking to compare. Tragedies can, and will, be compared to other tragedies. Football performances can be described with generalities, not specifics.

Here is the allowed list of footballing bad things:

shocker, nightmare, disaster – all good standard commentator phrases

catastrophe – normally for a whole team/manager mistake

howler – reserved for goalkeepers

clanger – reserved for goalkeepers making mistakes with their hands

blunder – a rash challenge by a defender

disasterclass – a reddit comment