Ouzo

A c’mon. That’s just slack. What brand of ouzo? How is it to be consumed? Olympics drinking game? Slurped from the pierced bellybutton of an olympic swimmer? Out of the last clean mug in the house while sprawled in your trakkie daks, surrounded by corn chip crumbs?

I don’t see a problem with Rudd not attending the Olympics. In fact I don’t really have a firm view on this. I do believe that there would be little point in the atheletes boycotting the Olympics, but of course that is not really in question.

Summing up beautifully the mentality of the majority of people who come here to have their groupthink confirmed.

If you’re going to indulge in cheap snark, why not get it right? China is generally regarded as a fascist power at Last Superpower.

Oh, I forgot, cheap innacurate snark is all that most of the commenters here are interested in.

What about “baijui”, “going forward”… because you need to say the latter, five times a day… coz you can run your car on it as well as getting pissed?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baijiu

A boycott will only work if it has a fairly broad level of support behind it, so unless things change a lot there is no point pushing for athletes to not attend. However, turning the opening ceremony into a vast no-show would be pretty effective at getting the point across. It’s a way of saying “Ok we aren’t at war so we’ll turn up and play, but we’re not going to give you any chances to tell us how great you are when your behaviour is so reprehensible”.

Almost certainly some athlete is going to say something about China while at the Olympics that will infuriate the Chinese. This will be the big test.

Dawn Fraser has used her believes (which I believe are genuinely held) as a reason not to go to a city she doesn’t like. Fair enough, kill two birds with one stone.

Some have used Midnight Oil at the 2000 Closing Ceremony as a previous example of politics encroaching on the Olympics. At least they can do something like that in Australia.

All this was avoided in 2000 when the IOC decided to give Sydney the games rather than Beijing. Hopefully the IOC will learn the lessons of this Olympics and avoid any repeat of these problems by not awarding the games to nations like China.

For the Melbourne Commonwealth Games, five acts of parliament were introduced in Victoria. Most of them related to either copyright protection or stifling civil liberties.

Their brand protection is so paranoid it verges on the demented.

Particularly when you realise that countries have specific laws protecting them: Olympic Insignia Protection Act

It has spawned a whole anti-Olympics movement in academia – I strongly recommend Pierre Bourdieu, “Jeux olympiques: Programme pour une analyse” (Olympic Games: Program for an Analysis).

This torch fiasco is a chance to protest China’s political system (and implicitly, those countries that tolerate it), but I would take the chance to oppose the Olympics wherever it’s held.

Can someeone please tell me, just who the fuck is the Olympics Committee?

I once worked at a job, for a museum which had an affiliation with the Olympics. But they weren’t allowed to use the bloody rings logo. Their brand protection is so paranoid it verges on the demented.

Also, it’s mostly just the opening ceremony folks are talking up boycotting. Nobody seriously wants to miss seeing how the showjumping pans out.

So I take it you oppose the blocking of South Africa for their apartheid policy, too?

I don’t think the Olympics should be used (in a formal way) to comment on the domestic politics (well anything short of say genocide). Although that brings up the question… are Tibetans being prevented from competing at all?