It's a deflection and not really worth addressing at all ("Well they're bad, but the fact that other people are worse means we should ignore that they're bad"). Apart from the bolded part which is just wrong - the UK Olympics certainly helped boost the government's flagging popularity, for instance.
That's the whole idea. The Olympics is a way for a country to boost popularity, and do fuck all for its people. Everyone loves the Olympics but the country that's hosting it. The 2004 Olympics were exemplified by Greece's overspending and corruption, and sparked an entire country's bankruptcy. In 2008 millions were displaced and people protesting disappeared, but at least we all got to watch some fancy CGI. In 2012, the UK saw its largest militarization since WWII with civilian houses being used as military installations, and the nation with the most cameras decided it needed not only more cameras, but a smarter integrated system that allowed for individual tracking of persons. The year we lived in was copyrighted and marketed out, the homeless disappeared and were used as labour all the while the speakers across the city blared inescapable poetry. It was overbudgeted and debted us a wonderful £9B, where it was supposed to provide increased tourism and rental business income it only achieved to deter people from abroad. And then the ticket revenue went to the IOC. The 2016 ones haven't even begun and already it's looking terrible with the Brazilians rioting because somehow all of their public industries have no funding when the Olympics does.
It is fucking shit, why do you hold it to be some paragon of virtue when it's corrupt to the core and encourages treating its own competitors as subhumans.It used to be about sportsmanship, and now it is only about achievement. So much so that those athletes who have suffered nothing less than child abuse their whole lives, only to fail at the last moment often kill themselves for the shame of having come second.
Oh and it's not a deflection, I'm just puzzled as to why people are boycotting Russian vodka or slamming them whilst happily consuming $3.5B of goods from Malaysia and Saudi Arabia with much worse policies. Yeah, yeah, starving children in Africa, but why does Russia earn all this special attention in the face of brutal treatment? At least it's commonly known people starve in Africa. This is one of the first time I've seen some big media spectacle and many small businesses uniting to boycott an entire country's goods over human rights issues. And really, I'm just questioning the validity of the activism, in that it should be inclusive of these other far worse laws held up by other countries.
Seriously though, fuck the Olympics.
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Topic: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread (Read 1285910 times)