Bob-O wrote: ↑Sep 18th, '18, 07:36
Big Red Machine wrote: ↑Sep 17th, '18, 22:37
Does it not occur to them that doing a "no girls allowed" show less than a week after their historic "first-ever all-women's PPV" is basically shooting themselves in the foot, P.R.-wise?
Lesser of the two evils? They're going to get crap regardless, but $$$ so who cares. They stand to get LESS crap because the shows will be promoted simultaneously. I see your point with the hypocrisy of it all, but I think it ABSOLUTELY occurred to them, and we can expect an Evolution PPV right before every Saudi show moving forward. I mean, it kind of shuts the feminist argument down without changing a thing.
Yes, they're going to get crap either way, but I think you get slightly less crap for doing the women's show second (using the women's show to cut off the negative news story of the Saudi show, not the other way around). I also think that if they book the Saudi show the same way they did the last one where it was mostly a glorified house-show full of non-finishes and stuff that never mattered again (for example, the freakin' "Greatest Royal Rumble" that they named the whole show after) but then book the women's PPV like an actual PPV with matches that are truly unique (Trish vs. Alexa) as opposed to house-show rehashes of stuff like Cena/Hunter and Cena/Taker, then you can spin it as this being clearly more important than the Saudi show, with the Saudi show- "real WWE" as opposed to a watered-down, spreading tolerance and democracy version of WWE (if it were me in their position I'd have booked a show in somewhere like the UAE the next day or Sunday and brought along two-four women, plus Mustafa Ali/Sami Zayn/Noam Dar and whatever other people whose heritage or gender makes them persona non grata in Saudi Arabia and drop them off the day before to do local publicity, then use that show's footage along with the Saudi stuff to show how you're teaching tolerance, etc. etc.). And the Saudi's won't have a problem with you spinning it that way because...
Bob-O wrote: ↑Sep 18th, '18, 07:36
I'm wondering the reverse. How do the Saudi's justify doing business with a company that defiles their belief system, especially this run when their show is going to basically be co-promoted with an all women's show?
The Saudi's and the Wahabists have been comfortably in bed together (originally quite literally) for close to three-hundred years now. They are both so interdependent on each other that they have both learned exactly how far they can push- whether that pushing either all show, all legitimate, or some combination thereof- in order for everyone to get what they want/need politically in order to placate the populace. There is a reason that, despite having such a big population relative to the other Arab countries in the region (and we'll throw in Iran and Turkey as well), they are the country that has done BY FAR the best job of keeping things stable. The Wahabists have been just strict enough (read as: oppressive and intolerant) to keep and out-and-out murderous ISIS-type ideology out while still being extremely fundamentalist, and the House of Saud has been just oppressive enough to remain in total control while keeping the general populace happy enough to keep out the Nasserist/Arab Socialist or Khomeni-ist forces that had caused problems in the other non-Island monarchies in the region. They know how to say just the right things about the Palestinians to keep their populace angry at Israel, but not angry enough that the population realizes that they haven't actually done anything to help crush the evil Zionist entity militarily since 1948, or that the country does done a conspicuously thorough job of avoiding taking in Palestinians as compared to other Arab countries (even though, both being enemies of the Hashemites, you'd think they would be natural allies) because they realized what a destabilizing force the Palestinians would prove to be (see: Jordan, Lebanon), and yet still without saying enough that they had totally shot any possibility of relations with Israel should the strategic need arise (as it has in the last few years) and so now, when someone needs to bomb an Iranian nuclear reactor, it's going to Israeli jets flying over Saudi Arabia to get there, and when they do, the Saudis are going to know about it far enough in advance to make sure that every radar operator in the country is on break when it happens, and yet the Saudis are never going to admit it in public until it makes political sense for them to do so.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that the House of Saud and the Wahabists who they have put in charge of religion in their country are really the same clique of people who have been doing this dance together for years and are
very good at knowing exactly how to do things so that they appear just outraged enough to get credit from the people who want to be outraged while being just modern/progressive/diplomatic enough to impress the people who want them to be more modern/progressive/diplomatic.
