Oh look, the Olympics (part 2)

Well the Olympics are over for another 4 years. It finished with, I must grudingly admit, a spectacular display from the Chinese, showing how good they are at syncronised dancing (even though I suspect it might have been at gunpoint. Those dancing girls who got in formation 1 second late are now lying in a ditch somewhere). The UK had it's time to showcase how great London is, which could have been described as medeocre at best. Dancers plucked straight out of a Mary Quant exhibition, a red double-decker with a hedge in it, Peter Gabriel and Leona Lewis (hey, at least it wasn't Amy Winehouse and Mick Jagger), a small Asian child hand-picked by the learned people at Blue Peter and to top it all off, David Beckham kicked a football! Wow! Too bad he missed the crowd and brained a nearby security guard.

Now we have the prospect of hearing about nothing else but the 2012 London Olympics for 4 years. Maybe if I'm anywhere near London in 4 years time I might try and perloin a ticket, just so I can say I've been to it. It's got to be better sitting in a stadium yelling advice at the best athletes in the world, rather than sitting on the sofa with pringles encrusting your face doing the same.

One question comes to mind; when London does start preparing for the 2012 games, will they go the same way as the Chinese and attempt to "socially educate" the chavs?

Oh look, the Olympics (part 1)

It's that time again, it's the Olympics.

If you've been anywhere near concious over the past few... what would it be, months, you'd know that the Beijing Olympics has been one of the most talked about events even before it's opening ceremony last Saturday.
Not that I saw the opening ceremony, because I am refusing to watch the Olympics this year.
I'm not that overly interested in televised sport to begin with, but I've done the whole patriotic routine each time the Olympics rolls around. Not this time.

I'm not sure what exactly it is that I dislike about the Beijing Olympics- the way they've gone about preparing for it or the general eagerness to please the rest of the world when everyone knows that the Chinese governnment is as corrupt as hell and is hiding things from it's own people (aka Tibet). I am in no way aiming the following barrage of dislike toward the people of China themselves, because it's not their fault their government is like the way it is, just like it wasn't the average German's fault that the Nazi government committed genocide. It just turned out that way.

Now, I'm not going to bang on about Tibet and how it should be free, because everyone already knows about that, apart from the Chinese themselves (or maybe they do, now). I'm also not going to talk about the government itself, because I don't really know that much about it, to be honest. I'm going to focus on what has been, for some reason, allowed to slip from the grasp of the government. What they have not been able to cover up. For example, in preparation for the Olympics, the government obviously realised that the wave of Olympic officials, journalists, athletes and spectators would not be happy with staying in the toxic equivilant of a car filled with exhaust fumes. Months before the Olympics opened, the air in China was shown to be several times higher than international guidelines. So, in order to counter this possible weakness, China started building parks. However, because of the ongoing industrialisation of China, there is little space in inner city Beijing or, indeed, other towns and cities in China, to build such parks. So the Chinese government has been evicting people from their homes, sometimes in the middle of the night, and demolishing their houses to make room to build said parks.
Now the clever thing is that this has been going on in areas of China where there is little or no media interest, so there is very often no documented evidence of this happening. One video, which was shown on BBC News, shows one man trying to hold onto his house while teams of policemen beat him up.

Now, forgive me for being negative here, but surely that is against human rights? Surely there is something illegal about that? Yet, and somehow this didn't surprise me, nobody in either the Olympic committee or higher (of course, the UN getting involved was too much to ask) seemed to mind, probably because the Chinese were fulfilling their promise to improve air quality.

Then there's all the stuff that happened during the Olympic flame marathon thing. Loads of protestors on the streets all protesting for a free Tibet. Now, any normal government would have just allowed the countries that the flame was passing through to deal with any problems in their own way, by posting their own police and armed guards. Oh no, not China. China invented their own "Flame Guard", blue-clad guards who ran beside the athlete carrying the flame, beaing up anybody who tried to stop the marathon. I when I say "beating up", I mean exactly that. The guards would actually stop, crowd round a protestor and kick the shit out of them. Once again, nobody on the Olympic committee batted an eyelid.

Also, because of the fact that China is a communist state (and as we all know, Communism is frequently seen as evil), it was required to make a few concessions for the wave of tourists and journalists who obviously wouldn't be happy about not being able to access anything other than government approved websites. In order to make everybody on the Olympic committee happy, the government agreed to unblock all censored websites.
Come on, now seriously, how long will that last? China is already having problems holding onto Communism, so therefore it would obviously be in the Government's best interests to keep the media censored. I wouldn't be surprised if as soon as the last camera was out of China, the government went back to censoring everything again. It just makes sense to me.

Ok, I've already gone on way too long about how much I dislike the way the Chinese government has prepared for the Olympics, but I also think that part of this is negligence or a lack of responsibility on the part of those people on the Olympic commitee. They just let all of the evictions and beatings happen, probably just because it was working towards one of their predefined standards. If that's the extent that the Olympic committee is willing to go to just to hold another glorious Olympic event, then it can no longer be called a noble contest. This, mixed with the increase of doping in athletes, the Olympics is swiftly losing credibility.

GB is still 3rd, though.