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benvenceremos.bsky.social
@benvenceremos.bsky.social
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benvenceremos.bsky.social
I'm guessing he is planning to heavily rotate Vs Palace.
December 20, 2025 at 10:14 PM
benvenceremos.bsky.social
I didn't see any
December 20, 2025 at 10:10 PM
benvenceremos.bsky.social
to be clear,I wouldn’t expect him to do the ➡️ bit rather mirror that which Saka (and now Madueke) offer
December 20, 2025 at 4:33 PM
benvenceremos.bsky.social
I think he’d be a great signing for us to play on the opposite side to Saka, & because he’s so versatile, clever & athletic, not to mention the demonstrable end product, I think he’d “complete” our attack, by making it sharper, more fluid & by giving it pace & penetration from ⬅️,➡️ & ⬆️. Do you agree?
December 20, 2025 at 4:29 PM
Reposted
7amkickoff.com
The Emirates is what Trump, the Republicans, and the billionaires want for the USA: slavery, repression, and genocide.
It’s not just that the United Arab Emirates is a dictatorship, although that’s bad enough. It also has one of the worst human rights records of any nation on Earth today, up to and including complicity in genocide. According to the nonprofit Walk Free Foundation, the UAE has the seventh highest rate of modern-day slavery of any country, with an estimated 132,000 people living in conditions of functional enslavement. The majority of these are migrant workers, who come to the UAE seeking job opportunities, only to have their passports confiscated by their bosses. They’re then forced to work long hours in extreme heat and other dangerous conditions, and to live in cramped and unsanitary housing, often for little or no pay. Dubai, with its many skyscrapers and other construction projects, is a particular center for that kind of abuse. The Middle East and North Africa Rights Group also reports that arbitrary arrest, detention, and torture are “widespread” in the UAE, despite the country being a signatory to the United Nations convention against those practices since 2012. In one case from 2022, a British tourist named Ali Ahmed reports that he was arrested simply for wearing a Qatar football jersey, then “beaten, electrocuted, stabbed and interrogated days and nights, denied food or water, and was not able to contact anyone” until he was released, just as suddenly and arbitrarily, a month later. For women in the UAE, the situation is dire. True, there have been some reforms—women can now drive and vote in the sham elections, for what that’s worth—but the bar is still on the floor. As Human Rights Watch reports, the nation still has male guardianship laws that restrict women’s movement, with many state universities requiring their female students to “show they have male guardian permission before they can go on field trips or stay at or leave campus accommodations or grounds.” Nonmarital sex is also illegal, and if people who aren’t married end up having a child, both parents can face two years in prison—although, as HRW points out, it’s mainly women who are actually prosecuted, since only men can file the complaints. So while people like Sarah Hamoud and Maria Vehera might be relatively well-treated in Dubai, they should know better than to provide media cover for a government that still doesn’t see women as fully human. (Meanwhile, it shouldn’t be surprising in the slightest that the vile misogynist influencer Andrew Tate loves Dubai and has a home there.) And that’s for heterosexual people. The picture for LGBTQ rights is even more dire, as there really aren’t any. Homosexuality between men is illegal in the UAE, carrying a minimum prison sentence of six months. There’s also an array of more vague laws against “any flagrant indecent act,” which in practice means anything even vaguely non-heterosexual involving any gender. Gay clubs and bars exist in Dubai, as Dr. Ryan Centner has written, but they’re secretive, as they used to be in much of the United States. From his own visit, Centner describes a “constant sense of your hair standing on end and having to be cautious about who’s listening, who’s at the door, who’s invited, or what might be said and passed along, that could get us in trouble.” There’s also no legal recognition for transgender people in the Emirates—something the Thai model Rachaya Noppakaroon discovered when she was “unceremoniously stopped at immigration and interrogated at the airport for nine hours” in Dubai, then deported back to Thailand, all because her gender identity didn’t match the sex printed on her passport. And then there’s the genocide. It’s a sign of how bleak things are today that, when you mention a genocidal regime in the Middle East, you have to specify which one—but today it’s the United Arab Emirates we’re talking about, not Israel or Saudi Arabia. Earlier this year, the government of Sudan brought genocide charges against the UAE to the International Court of Justice, and although they were dismissed on a technicality about jurisdiction, Sudan had a strong case. Although the UAE officially denies it, there’s significant evidence that it supplies weapons to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary, one of the two sides in Sudan’s lethal civil war. This has been documented extensively in journals like Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, and by Amnesty International. Multiple U.S. legislators, including Senator Chris Van Hollen, also say they’ve been briefed about the arms shipments. The RSF, in turn, has been using those weapons to carry out horrifying massacres against non-Muslim ethnic groups in Sudan, especially the Masalit people in Darfur, seemingly with the goal of wiping them out entirely. Just as it is with Israel and Saudi Arabia, the United States is deeply complicit in all this. Last year, the Biden administration declared the UAE a “Major Defense Partner” and agreed to sell its leaders (along with Saudi Arabia’s) up to $2.2 billion worth of U.S. weapons, some of which may well have ended up in the RSF’s hands. Not for the first time, they have blood on their hands. But so does anyone helping to polish the UAE’s image with a cheery, green-tinted chocolate bar.
December 19, 2025 at 4:02 PM
Reposted
7amkickoff.com
FLY EMIRATES!
There’s no pretty way to say it: the UAE is a dictatorship. It’s even less democratic than its neighbor across the Persian Gulf, Iran, because Iran at least has somewhat competitive elections from time to time, and reform-minded candidates like Masoud Pezeshkian can sometimes get into office (though their power is limited, compared to the Ayatollah’s). In the UAE, there’s none of that. The Emirates themselves are seven hereditary kingdoms, ruled by sheikhs with absolute power, and the president of the UAE is always chosen from among those seven rulers. In fact, since the UAE was established in 1971, there have been only three presidents—all of them the ruling sheikh of Abu Dhabi, and all related to each other. There are parliamentary elections, but not everyone can vote in them; in the 2019 election, only an “appointed electorate of more than 330,000, representing just under one-quarter of the total citizen population” got to cast a ballot. The sheikhs and their bureaucracy, of course, control the “appointing.” Even this highly limited form of democracy only applies to half of the 40-member parliament; the other 20 members are selected directly by the sheikhs. In terms of democracy and authoritarianism, then, the UAE is in roughly the same category as North Korea—so the promotion of “Dubai” themed products should immediately raise our suspicions, just as it would if someone tried to sell us “Pyongyang taffy.”
December 19, 2025 at 3:53 PM