1. FIDE shouldn't have as its President the single most notorious misogynistic goon in the world of chess. It represents women as well as men and Nigel Short has spent his entire career treating women with an entire lack of respect.
2. FIDE shouldn't have as President somebody who thinks it is all right to bully chess officials and menace them.
3. FIDE shouldn't have as its President somebody who is quite prepared to denigrate people on account of their racial origins ("Asiatic despot"), or to insult whole nationalities. This is a sport for everybody, and people who engage in racial or national jibes shouldn't be in positions of responsibility.
4. FIDE shouldn't have as its President somebody who was quite prepared to take the world championship match away from that organisation when it suited him financially, and never mind the consequences for chess, FIDE or anybody else. It's not just the absurdity, it's the untrustworthiness. And it's not just the untrustworthiness, it's the absurdity.
5. FIDE shouldn't have as its President somebody who misused his position as the ECF's FIDE Delegate to pursue specious court cases on behalf of his political ally while hiding the fact from ECF members. It's that untrustworthiness again.
6. FIDE shouldn't have as its President somebody who has a history of being spectacularly obnoxious to people with whom he's fallen out, of which that notorious obituary is only one (and this another) of far too many examples.
7. FIDE shouldn't have as its President somebody who make a fantastic amount of noise about misconduct but is silent as the grave where his mates are concerned. Or, come to that, somebody whose concerns about Kirsan weren't especially big until the money appeared to dry up. Being a crusader only when it suits you may impress the gullible or the cynical, but there's quite a lot of people in between.
I could go on, and no doubt I will, but that'll do for now. Nigel Short is an offensive, untrustworthy, self-centred and misogynistic bully whose standard mode of behaviour is the feud. I wouldn't put him in charge of a weekend tournament.
I'd say you are demonizing Nigel with things taken out of context.
ReplyDelete1) He's not misogynistic. He just applied Occam's Razor to the question: "Why aren't there proportionally as many women as men in the top?" Note the word proportionally, since even after adjusted for the relative sizes of male and female total players, women are still vastly underrepresented at the top. Simplest answer is women are not as good as men in chess. This may or may not be true, but in any case it doesn't reflect hatred or contempt towards women, and remember: is the ability of playing one board game what we are talking about here.
2) He was right in that case. Yes, his choice of words may have not been the most polite and politically correct, but actually tournaments stopped device searches after his declarations. So it seems sometimes mean words get stuff done. One point for Nigel, for making the chess world better.
3) Nigel's humor about Kasparov's hairiness. Actually Nigel has great respect for Kasparov, so why even bother commenting this?
4) It was more a Kasparov's move than Nigel's. That said, he felt it was the best for chess back then. Now he thinks otherwise. It's not 1993, that may have been a mistake (it was), but if his goal is to make chess better, I don't see why parting from FIDE 25 years ago should matter at all.
5) & 7) These two are in a middle ground. He had all the right to be critical of FIDE and try to take them down. However, if he did so on behalf of his own personal interests, that's plain wrong. But as I have seen, those claims only appear on your blog, and no in the official sources of the news.
6) Ok, highly unclassy. I can't defend him on this one.
To sum up.
Is Nigel controversial? Yes.
Is Nigel unpolite sometimes? Yes.
Is Nigel a natural diplomat? No.
Is Nigel half as bad as you claim he is? Probably not.
At the end of the day, Nigel, with all his flaws, is somebody who is transparent, has no problem to speak his mind and gets stuff done. He is not perfect (he is really far from perfect), but a honest candidate willing to do things is the best of the three choices.
I wish there was someone better than him running, but he is much, much better than the corrupt alternatives.
Starting and finishing with your first point, if you can't spot the misogyny in a whole adult lifetime's worth of sexist commentary then I genuinely don't think we need spend any further time with your powers of observation. I've had several decades of people in English chess seeing only what suits then, and this blog aims in rather the opposite direction.
ReplyDeleteCertainly he doesn't seem to be a good choice as a leader or a diplomat. As always in elections, you are voting for the best available candidate. So it seems only fair to compare him to the opposition. Strangely enough he may turn out to be the best in your estimation then. I think he doesn't have a hope though, and that GM will win.
ReplyDelete--theblueweasel --bluerthanthecolourblueafterithasbeenbluedtokingdomcomeandbackagain
You could also have mentioned Short's support for scrapping the stalemate rule. An absolutely ridiculous idea that would ruin chess as we know it.
ReplyDeleteHave you learned nothing from Donald Trump? If you're trying to make someone win an election, simply praising them is ineffective; readers will detect your bias and filter you out. The way to really make the neutrals feel sorry for your candidate is with a ridiculously overblown assassination of their character. Be sure to surround every actual citation with at least 4 self-citations, lest people actually click on them.
ReplyDeleteJudging by the comments so far, it's working perfectly!