• Welcome to the new Internet Infidels Discussion Board, formerly Talk Freethought.

The Olympics

bleubird

bleubird

Veteran Member
Joined
Aug 18, 2002
Messages
1,365
Location
Alaska
Basic Beliefs
none
Brazil,really.The fotbal thing was a mess.The Olympic Games this summer will be a mess.
Feces in the harbor.
 
How was the "football thing" (the 2014 Fifa World Cup) a mess? The event was organized without any significant incidents, all stadiums were completed in time, public transport performed OK, public security was OK (no significant crime), airports worked just fine.
 
mopc said:
How was the "football thing" (the 2014 Fifa World Cup) a mess? The event was organized without any significant incidents, all stadiums were completed in time, public transport performed OK, public security was OK (no significant crime), airports worked just fine.
Click to expand...
But stadiums are mess NOW.
 
mopc said:
How was the "football thing" (the 2014 Fifa World Cup) a mess?
Click to expand...
Well it was for Brazilians. :tonguea:
Brazil-vs-Germany-World-Cup-2014-15.jpg

Brazil-vs-Germany-World-Cup-2014-3.gif

The event was organized without any significant incidents, all stadiums were completed in time, public transport performed OK, public security was OK (no significant crime), airports worked just fine.
Click to expand...
Well there were still problems, like building more stadiums than needed and in cities too small to sustain them.
But overall it was a successful tournament from the organizational perspective.
Olympics are much more difficult to pull off though. A World Cup is one sport spread over several host cities. Olympics is one city (and environs) and "brazillion" of sports.
 
The loss of public revenue and shifting of public revenue into a few private hands is a near constant in Olympics, except maybe LA whose voters wisely refused to allow any tax dollars being used.

If that is not reason enough to do away with this traditional that is no longer even essential to international sports competition, there is the trampling of rights and increase totalitarian abuse of authority that always occurs in the host country. This is true whether the host is a nations like Nazi Germany or Russia that is generally totalitarian and uses the games to praise totalitarian ideology, or generally more free countries like Great Britain that increase repressive tactics to maintain the control they think they need for "safety" and to avoid embarrassment and keep corporate sponsors happy.

In Rio's case, such abuses include robbing thousands of people of their homes and incarceration (aka hiding) of the poor for being poor.
 
What people had their homes stolen from them? What people were "hidden", and from whom and how?
 
Metaphor said:
mopc said:
What people had their homes stolen from them? What people were "hidden", and from whom and how?
Click to expand...

In the Sydney 2000 games, those sleeping rough (unsheltered homeless) were harassed before and during the Olympics.

http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/stories/s154590.htm
Click to expand...

Yeah, it isn't an insult directed at Brazil. Forcible displacement of the poor is standard protocol for virtually all Summer Olympic hosts, including London and Atlanta.

In Brazil, thousands of families have had been forcibly removed from their homes they lived in for generations that were demolished not only to build the Olympic Village and facilities, but even just to create more direct express bus routes between venues The estimates are that the World Cup and Olympics combined displaced about 75,000 people from their homes (not including displaced homeless).

Residents talk about police intimidating and threatening people to leave, their homes demolished while they were at work, and with those who resisted being threatened with even less or no compensation at all for their homes, which was already inadequate. Most people, including those who owned multi-story homes with land, trees, etc.. were sent to live in government funded apartments far west (50 miles) of the city in worse neighborhoods controlled by criminal militias that extort residents for electicity, gas, and cable services, and away from family, friends, and their jobs and areas where militias extort residents .

The Olympic village will be converted to high-end apartments for the rich, making the whole thing ultimately an excuse for a land-grab by powerful developers.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/28/brazil-officials-evicting-families-2016-olympic-games

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...ela-shanty-towns-evicted-brazil-a7168221.html

http://www.rioonwatch.org/?p=30919
 
mopc said:
What people had their homes stolen from them? What people were "hidden", and from whom and how?
Click to expand...

There's always some stuff torn down to make way for the Olympic venues. You don't really think the people thus evicted got reasonable compensation, do you??
 
bleubird said:
Brazil,really.The fotbal thing was a mess.The Olympic Games this summer will be a mess.
Feces in the harbor.
Click to expand...

I have to wonder how desperate a person would have to be to compete in an event where they'll be forced to flick turds out of the way in order to clear a path to swim. They should have moved the open water swimming events somewhere else.
 
[video]http://www.hbo.com/real-sports-with-bryant-gumbel/episodes/0/232-episode/video/ep-232-promo[/video]
 
So do I, after all Rio hosted the 2007 Panamerican games with plenty of water sports on the exact same waters (which were more polluted back then) nobody got sick or had any problems.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom