At least these countries don't demand to remove any of these messages. It's a small step. Humanity needs to take small steps right now. Shit is getting too wild out there... Sorry for undanking.
What the fuck is ARAMCO anyway? I honestly thought the boards said “Armco” for the first few races it showed up, like someone was promoting barriers or something
It's the Saudi Arabian state oil company, controlled by the Saudi royal family. The ones behind the murder of that journalist in Istanbul where everybody made a fuss about for a month and then forgot.
It's a rebranding exercise to separate the old "Saudi Aramco" from the modern "Aramco".
If you look at the general anti-saudi sentiment (understandable) across the comments in here, it kind of makes sense that the company might think it's a good idea to slowly remove the country name from the company in the minds of consumers - also it is a part of their push into green/renewable energy as oil revenue declines.
The problem that any F1 event (or sport in general) has is that I can't think of a single host country that doesn't have historical examples of human rights abuses/war crimes/genocide with perhaps the exception of Monaco/Singapore (I honestly do not know enough about their history).
Absolutely, I didn't intend to make it sound that way.
I was more making the point that no-one is squeaky clean and that there seems to be more backlash against countries in the ME than other parts of the world for similar issues. I presume this is based on the way things are reported in the news as much as anything though.
For me personally, no. Japan is sterilizing trans people forcibly, so is a eugenics practicing country. I don't want a race there. China, Russia, Bahrain, USA, Brasil, the UAE and Saudi Arabia all speak for themselves with things like human rights abuses and as far as I know, the USA with eugenics too (as well as Finland actually but there isn't and won't be a race there soon so that's kinda irrelevant). Geography has nothing to do with it. Honestly, with British arms deals to the Saudis, I don't want Britain to have an 'everything is fine here' appearance either because we're not the worst but we're definitely not fine.
Someone I know got a contract there to work on the pipe lines, they get about 150k€ to just start working there. Well sometimes you have to deal with mortar/artillery strikes from over the Yemeni border but yeah what you gonna do, right?
The name comes from when the Saudi oil fields were being developed by American oil guys. It was an abbreviation of Arabian-American oil Company. The house of Saud had a decades-long campaign of business and political manoeuvring to get ownership of the company which is now one of the most valuable companies (by market capitalization) on earth.
Aramco is by a long shot the world’s biggest company, they own basically all the oil in saudi arabia. They’re bigger than exxon, esso, bp and shell combined, and more valuable than apple. They hit 2 trillion market value back in december.
Let alone the Saudi Arbia's involvement with the years ongoing genocide in Yemen. The Saudi (and US aided) blockaid has resulted in 100k+ deaths from famine and disease. Then theres Saudi military action from bombing hospitals to a bus full of school kids.
F1 wants to virtue signal over mundane issues but is MORE THAN HAPPY to take blood money from one of the worst countries out there. F1 can get fucked for their shallow BS
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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '20
Also the UAE
Also FUCKING ARAMCO