Is getting a lot of heat this year. So many protest!

Boycotting the olympics this year anyways.


Seriously china, displacing 300,000 people?

Good thing for China there isn't a "enforcing civil rights" event at the games, amiright?

I hate it when people throw around "constitutional right" when they've clearly never read it.

In 2001 or whenever they agreed to let China have the '08 Olympics, they set certain requirements for civil rights and media rights.

China has not met those requirements.

And yet they're giving them the Olympics anyway.

Which is why I'm telling people to boycott it.


If enough people get pissed off, world leaders will follow and not show.

lol pun

Why did they choose China anyways? Did they know this would happen?

Because we need China for the production of cheap crap.

In 1936 The Olympic Games were hosted in Berlin. In 1939, World War 2 commenced.

I hope history repeats itself and we see World War 3 in 2011.

right before the end of the world in 2012....:tinfoil:

I think a giant floating Olympics stadium is in order. Not just some anchored deal, this baby needs turbo powered jet engines to lift it off the water to fly to different locations. None of this propellor wussyness. And some lasers too.

We can use the Tibetans as oil.

she has a "genius grant," she's probably read the constitution.

more likely she's going to do whatever she can get away with, constitutional or not. she is from the SB after all

Question on Tibet... People are protesting and demanding "Free Tibet" but who's responsibility is it to demand freedom? The leaders in Exile aren't even demanding freedom, they are just aiming for the right to exist as a state within China. Should the west be intervening on nations like this?

Chechnya is another area of the world that has been cruelly oppresed. Should the west step in and prevent the Russian's from ever hosting the Olympics?


I'm just curious and I'm really not trying to sound pretnetious or *****y about any of this.

300,000 people is nothing. Read up on the Three Gorges Damn.

Or you could read about how the US has displaced over 4 million people in Iraq.

All the supposedly autonomous states in China on its peripheries are run and enforced by Han Chinese. Imagine if you guys were somehow still under our rule and we'd tried to appease you by claiming to give you autonomy while the police force and local military were all British and all the local government officials were British. You'd be doing that revolution thing again before we could say "Tea, anyone?". Freedom or true autonomy is what is desired, they are similar enough to be common goals.

Btw, how exactly can I boycott the Olympics? Just not watch it? Without a TV, it's not like I'm contributing much anyway, you may as well tell me to boycott Ferrarri or diamonds. To make any impact it would require athletes and officials who would otherwise be there to boycott it.

Exactly, not to mention the former government leaders are afraid that if they speak up for Tibetan independence, their former subjects will be instigated and the "crackdown" becomes more brutal than it is now (how, I don't know), and that they would possibly ruin any chance of a peaceful negotiation with the Chinese government.

As for the boycotting, I'm with Recusant in which I won't be watching the Olympics in the first place. I just want to mention that some athletes are dropping out. One dropped out for health concerns though (pollution in Beijing is hazardous to athletes with asthma).

Any reasonably informed Athlete wouldn't perform in China, Olympics or no. I can't imagine why you'd want to support such a disgusting government/culture.

i never knew that performing in one's sport in a particular nation meant that one suppoted that nation's policies.

/sarcasm


seriously, the olympics are not supposed to be about politics, they are supposed to be about sports, and the best atheletes of each nation competing agianst each other.

Yes.

Sending a message to people is always retarded.

and there are far better places for it, after all, the IOC itself has in its regulations that the athletes are not to use the olympics to promote a political viewpoint.

Yes, but at the same time, people train their whole lives to make it to an Olympic event. It's a huge thing to ask of them to give it up, no matter what the cause.

That's far too noble a sentiment for such a group of ignobles to adhere.

China is the most disgusting and evil country in the entire world. When I say this I mean "actual country" and not "killing fields" like Burma. They're irresponsible and vile, yet they've been legitimized by every government on Earth. Our politicians are too greedy and stupid to put China in their place, and the same goes for the IOC.

The only reason the Dalai Lama isn't asking for sovereignty is because he knows he's not going to get it. He's smart enough to ask for a reasonable compromise, but then again he's dealing with China. The whole situation in Tibet isn't about China protecting a financial investment like Britain and its colonies, it's about racism and religious persecution.

you do know that the IOC's job is not to get itself into international relations, as it is a body that regulates the sporting aspect. also, i seriously doubt that china is worse than north korea, which only maintains a state of reletive calm by making it leader out to be some kind of devine figure to be worshiped.

also, i will remind you that china was a whole lot worse when it was being cut off by the rest of the world. the only way a nation will improove is if it is maintaining ties with other nations, otherwise, why would they have any reason to improve their country if there is no incentive (such as maintaining trade with other contries on the condition that they try to improove).

You do realize that by boycotting the omlympics because they're being *******s is depriving them economically? It's very close to the same thing as not giving trade agreements based on their rate of approvement.

and do you realize that by boycottiung the olympics, any athlete that does so is probably depriving themselves of what may be their only chance to go to an olympic games. four years is a long time for an athlete, and many thing could happen in that time.

OOOH OH NO!

YOU MEAN THE NEEDS OF THE MANY MIGHT OUTWEIGH THE NEEDS OF THE FEW!

Sounds.. alot... like... Democracy! Oh my god! You might be on to something.

And it's not President Bush's job to start wars, but why should little things like the Constitution and the Olympic Charter stand in the way of gross incompetence?

Selecting China was a political decision. It was supposed to be a dreamlike celebration of how much progress China has made, sorta like when Nazi Germany hosted the Olympics in 1936. The Olympics has everything to do with international relations. If it didn't, the Olympics wouldn't exist at all.

I really don't think we should be rewarding a brutal dictatorship for just slightly edging out their closest friends....

This is like saying that you can murder someone and still be a good person, because Stalin killed millions. Morality is neither relative nor is it based on a weighted percentage.


I agree, a lot more of China's religious and free-willed people died back when China had religious and free-willed people.

The issue is that our countries are cowtowing to China's demands. China is a vicious dog. Feeding it isn't going to teach it good manners. China progressed just far enough to get America to bend over and say "be gentle, it's my first time" and then they stopped.

The solution doesn't even involve China. The solution is to punish our companies and our people who are ignoring their ethical mandates in exchange for a hefty bag full of cash. We need to leave China alone, we need to keep their barely running internet connection going. But we also need to cut off the money they're using to terrorize their own people, and that money comes from companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Apple, and Walmart.

Here's my solution, by the way: a 5% capital gains levy on money invested in a company that does business with China, or that does business with any corporate entity affected by the levy.

The nice thing is that it wouldn't really affect the day-to-day operations of our high tech companies, but it would terrify shareholders into pressuring those companies into doing business elsewhere.

you do realize that without money, things will get even worse, as if there is no money going into china, the economy there would go straight to hell, causing big problems for the people who live there.

Also, you do know that there are nations who have products that they export to china, and breaking trade relations with them (or having china stop buying because the US suddenly decides to stop buying things from china, meaning that china cannot afford to import things) would cause damage to their own economy as well.

You cant just stop trade between two nations as large as the US and China (china is a superpower, get bloody used to it) and not expect serious consequences in the economies of other nations as well.

You are the one that suggested we threaten to stop giving them our business.

rob, you do not seem to have read ANY of my posts clearly, I never said that we should do it, I was saying what would happen if it was done.

Gasp! You mean... you mean the citizens, and maybe even the military, might wake up and actually hold the government accountable???????????

Yes, I do know that, because I was the one who suggested punishing people who do business with China.

If companies are no longer buying Chinese exports, and China can no longer afford to buy foreign imports, it stands to reason that suddenly jobs manufacturing formerly-chinese goods would open up? No?


That's the thing. And the same concept applies to evolution:

If you don't change the environment, nothing will ever get better. Things will progress to a certain point and then they'll stop. Like the Chinese government, like the American two-party system, like how dinosaurs used to be the dominant life form.

We have two choices. We can proceed as we are now, developing a symbiotic relationship with a violent and sociopathic government that will stab us in the back sooner or later (and is trying very hard now, by buying American debt and trying to sink the American economy).

Or we can mix things up a bit. I'm confident that all of us can weather the storm, and I'm also confident that China cannot.

Incidentally, as I mentioned - my 5% levy idea would still permit companies to operate. The people bearing the consequences would be the investors and the shareholders. I'm not talking about banning Chinese import and export, nor am I talking about a sudden change.

If companies and shareholders decided to continue doing business with China, it would only mean more money to spend on our collapsing infrastructure. Or pointless wars. Whichever.

except that some countries have jobs that exist because they sell things to china.

Also, how the hell are you going to make a rule to not trade with china. At least one of the nations that has veto power in the UN would use it, and making laws to punish US companies would fail, and trying to punish companies from other countries that trade with the US as well is stupid (you have that with cuba, and it was so insultingly against soverienity of nations that everyone ignores it).

Or is america just so important that it doesnt matter if many more millions of jobs in other nations are lost while the US companies that outsource will just pick another nation that they can use. seriously, "carrot and stick" is called that for a reason, if you only use the "stick" when people are doing things you dont want them to do (outsourcing jobs to nations with cheap labor), but dont use the carrot (giving some sort of incentive to use workers inside the US), you will have a lot of trouble getting the people to do what you want them to.

I'm not American and you didn't read my post.

Jonsee is Canadian i believe.
And we don't have a retarded embargo with Cuba.

sorry, I didnt realize that he was canadian. As I was foolish enough to assume that only someone from the only major power that thinks embargos work (i.e. the US) would think to suggest enecting an embargo with an economic superpower (said it before, and I will say it again, China is a superpower, DEAL WITH IT)