111–120 of 151 posts
Football is thriving because of fantasy and betting. The NBA has clips, NFTs, and creators producing endless content.
What do the Olympics have? Sure they have human stories, but you need to watch a major network to consume them. The games need to figure out how to fit in today's consumption model.
Remember that propaganda does run both ways, and the constant inflow of anti-Chinese sentiment in this year's presentation starts to get on my nerves. It's become so prominent that I start being willing to pay for a full-event streaming service with no commentators.
Maybe it’s time for Olympics to leave the stage.
Personally I got bored on my 5th watch of it.
Nothing new there, except political scandals that nobody really care about. Just competition of pharma.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like there was this crazy escalation of spending promises to win the bid. At some point responsible democracies dropped out, the irresponsible democracies, so all that was left were authoritarian nations looking to improve their image without changing. Now it seems like even the authoritarian nations are deciding it's to expensive and you see responsible democracies getting back in with more realistic bids.
Except that the next Olympics are due to be held in France, Italy, USA, Australia - and only one of those is partly an authoritarian nation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_Games_host_cit...
The model of "go to a new place every four years, build an Olympic village and a bunch of athletic facilities" doesn't work economically. It doesn't make enough money in the short term, and the facilities don't get enough use in the long term to justify it either. That makes it hard for a city in a free society to want to be the host. The costs are very real but the benefits are elusive. Probably the last time the Ol…
You are disregarding the fact that there is a competition to get the Olympics, where perfectly normal democracies also participate each time. There have certainly been offers from competitors to arrange Olympics on tighter budgets too. The question is why those locations don't win? I'm sure it's due to corruption within the Olympic organization, but who am I to judge. I just stop watching the crap.
I think this is first worlders thinking "democracy = the West".
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> The Olympics is about setting that aside for a moment https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55794071 Ah.. just set it aside for just a moment..
You are repeating state department propaganda about Uighur camps. Most of the information about Xinjiang has been coming from CIA contractors and vague satellite photos. They were claiming that 2 million (out of 10 million) people were in camps until it became untenable to maintain this lie. There's no doubt that China is an authoritarian state with major human rights issues there, but it's not at the scale being cla…
I tend to think there are countries which have reached the "no-win" stage of public relations. It sort of reminds me of when the UN sent inspectors to Iraq looking for the legendary WMDs-- even transparency wasn't good enough. The fix is in, and there's no reasonable sequence of definite actions they can perform that would get China on the West's good side. They could walk Joe Biden personally through the length of Xinjiang and someone would still say "they must have hidden the prisoners!"
Every positive story about China is always tempered with "but but Tibet/the Uighurs/social case-celebree of the week."
That slant, in particular, is particularly annoying. It's dehumanizing because we're treating a country of over one billion people as a single undifferentiated unit.
Did any of the tens of thousands of people who worked to deliver this event get up in the morning and think "Gosh, if I just paint these bleachers just right, they'll let people I don't know, 5000km away, get away with a genocide! Can't wait!" I doubt it. On the ground level, this is the work of ordinary people with ordinary motivations-- and the concept of "If we're going to be on a global stage for two weeks, let's do the best possible presentation we can." is not some malicious whitewashing conspiracy. They don't deserve the slander.
I have to wonder if we're in a situation where we're looking for an enemy. The Cold War was great for business-- it justified eternal defense spending and trade restrictions against a major economy. What a coup if they could pull it off against China!
The Olympics have a lot of 1-minute clips that would be perfect for TikTok or a short YouTube video, but even in countries with good Olympics coverage the seem stuck in a TV-like format where you cannot publish anything without permission of whichever company bought the rights in your country.
This is a pity, because the Olympics are objectively great: seeing the end result of years of effort by the greatest athletes in the world is the best motivation anyone can have to achieve more in life.
I love the athletes, I hate the business.