And now, on the topic of healthcare reform...

[dwer.livejournal.com]

Comments

[dwer.livejournal.com]

So American Olympian's lives aren't actual?

I'm agnostic about the Olympics. I think it's not a bad thing to celebrate physical accomplishment, especially in such a multinational way, but I know it rarely makes a lot of money for the host city.

[spaz-own-joo.livejournal.com]

Not all that actual. There's less than a thousand of em.

I agree that the Olympics are fantastic in the sense that they're a multinational media event, and the world really needs to get used to being able to watch stuff together. If only we could drum up this sort of interest in, y'know, human rights or starvation.

As a resident of Vancouver, I've observed some pretty crass behaviour on the part of the city. We've got a real homelessness problem around here, and instead of taking steps to address it in any real way, we've been setting up temporary housing and relocations, drafting "safe streets" bylaws that would have people arrested for panhandling, that sort of thing. Money has been diverted from an already overburdened bus system to pay for the fancy new Skytrain line that goes to the airport. All the billboard spaces in the city have been bought up by the Olympic committee, and apparently there are some deep freedom-of-speech problems in their new advertising guidelines and how they're planning on enforcing them.

[dwer.livejournal.com]

Not all that actual. There's less than a thousand of em.

So?

I agree that the Olympics are fantastic in the sense that they're a multinational media event, and the world really needs to get used to being able to watch stuff together. If only we could drum up this sort of interest in, y'know, human rights or starvation.

You realize that music festivals that send profits to charities get hundreds of thousands of participants, right? It's not a lack of interest from the public. It's a lack of organized action by government.

[spaz-own-joo.livejournal.com]

So, the amount of resources required to change the lives of a thousand people misses the amount of resources required for an Olympic event by a few orders of magnitude. If it were really just about the athletes, let's save 99.99% of our money and dispense with the audience and the advertisers, and just provide some grants to amateur athletics.

But people who care about the success or failure of the President, they're concerned to the tune of millions of people and livelihoods, not thousands, and next to that, the personal challenges and glory of a tiny minority of athletes seems totally ephemeral to me. Besides, I'm at least 40% sure that Michael Phelps is a robot.