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You can crush a man with journalism - William Randolph Hearst
Olympic Games: Web censorship be damned
THE OLYMPIC GAMES, started in Chipping Campden four hundred years ago, have become a multi-billion dollar industry.
But the current travails of the butane-powered torch to run its impossibly-convoluted route towards Beijing - which seemingly cannot be achieved without paramilitary goons in blue T-Shirts dealing out swift, violent and arbitrary vengeance on human rights protesters - raises some serious questions.
When we learn that the torch's passage to India involves some 15,000 police and paramilitary commandos sealing off the heart of Delhi, concerns over China's relaxation of Web censorship seem somehow sadly irrelevant.
It occurs to me that I don't actually know a single person who gives a rat's ass about the Olympics. And being a very old person, I know lots of people.
Who exactly wants to watch this pathetic and interminable display of drug-addled freaks in dodgy lycra performing the Alpine Cross-Country Combined Ballroom Dancing and Synchronised Triple Jump?
Do you know anyone gagging with eager anticipation of the 4x400 metres Urine Test?
Web censorship be damned. Is there anyone out there who actually gives a damn about the whole sorry mess?
Pop on over to the Inq forum and cast your vote. No purchase necessary. ยต
L'Inq
Hermit's
Cave Poll
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I still like them. Of course they're irrelevant, but it isn't hard to marvel at some of the things that the athletes do, steroid enabled or not. Honestly, some of those gymnasts are almost superhuman. 

I'm sure I'll watch them and then a few weeks later forget about the mess as usual. It's all in good fun.
They aren't ALL drugaddled.. some are just suffering from OCD :)
(Of course they might be boosted by some drugs, to stay competitive)
I get bored stupid by it...

(Although it's not quite the 24x7 yawn-fest known a soccer). At least it f***s off!

However this year things have worked out well... A friend is getting married in Poland, right when the Olympics occur.

Polish weddings are renowned for running several days. I'm intend to push this to several weeks.

If my plan works out I will have no recollection of the 2008 Olympics in whatever passes for my memory after this!

Na zdrowie :-D
Olympic games is an idea, a symbol, a moral. The poll asks "Have the Olympics outlived their usefulness?". An idea is not "outlived" simply because it was heavily commercialized, misinterpreted or exploited for various reasons. Ideas are not attached to circumstances or to their carriers, this is what makes "ideas bullet-proof, Mr. Thomas".
Symbols do not get discarded simply because they are not relevant at the present time. On the contrary, on those low times they are more needed to remind us where we should be heading.
The logic approach in this article is questionable. The facts in this article actually speak for the Olympic games idea rather than against it. This idea is well alive in the minds of billions of people. That's why the Olympic games and the flame relay were chosen as grounds for expressing the desire for freedom throughout the history. Do you think that Tibetans or anyone else for that matter would care to unsettle any other world athletic event?
Having said that, the results of the Hermit cave's poll came as no surprise. Westerners, having been (self-) humiliated by their own (democratic?) surveillance regimes and having split the world in good and evil empires, do not want to be reminded of freedom and convergence by relevant symbols.
I just passed through Beijing's International airport April 9th and I feel sorry for the upcoming Olympic travelers. While the shiny new humongous airport looks very nice, none of the airport agents I encountered could speak even a modicum of English.

Also, there was no Wi-Fi available nor even an Internet cafe that I could find. I guess they don't have to worry about backlash from censoring the Internet since none is available. Good plan!

I needed to make an international phone call desperately as my flight arrived four hours late from the U.S. (Yes, United Airlines sucks!) and needed to advise my friend in Thailand that my itinerary had changed. The international phones wouldn't accept my Visa or Mastercard, even though they had those stickers plastered on them. The first phone I tried had the card slot manufactured too narrow to physically insert a card. The others I tried just kept giving me an error message after I inserted the card. And I did try inserting two credit cards every way imaginable.

Good luck Beijing travelers...you'll need it!

Jim Murphy
Yes I too couldnt give a monkeys about the Olympics either. I think the best Olympics was the one held in Australia, due to the time difference we hardly noticed it was on. Brilliant!

I'm not looking forward to 2012 either. As the world will all get a ringside seat to see the UK's ultimate humilation as we totally screw up the whole thing and our even now tattered reputation as a minor world power totally implodes. For heavens sake its going to rain the whole two weeks anyway!!!! Havent they ever watched Wimbledon?

Big mistake.
Can't help but notice how the city of Glasgow began demolishing the area where the Games are going to be held - about 6 years or more before any bidding started, and no-one's really built a thing on the site in all that time (some ugly apartments seems about it).

Then 10 or so years following all the new builds, they'll all be as abandoned as the Gorbals was prior to its demolishment.