The Olympics are a giant exercise in sports socialism — or crony capitalism, if you prefer — where the profits are privatized and the costs socialized. The games never pay for themselves because they are designed not to. That’s because the International Olympic Committee (an opaque “nongovernmental” bureaucracy made up of fat cats from various countries) pockets most of the revenue from sponsorships and media rights (allegedly to promote global sports), requiring the host country to pay the bulk of the costs. Among the very few times the games haven’t left a city swimming in red ink was after the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, when voters, having learned from Montreal’s experience, barred the use of public funds, forcing the IOC to use existing facilities and pick up most of the tab for new ones.
Even that’s far from fair. If anything, the Olympics should be compensating the host city for the hassle and inconvenience, not the other way around. The only reason they don’t is because the Cold War once stirred retrograde nationalistic passions, blinding the world to the ass-backwardness of the existing arrangement. Londoners are signaling that this can’t go on.
Shikha Dalmia, “Why London Is Yawning Over the Olympics: Have Western countries finally outgrown the sports socialism of the Olympic Games?”, Reason, 2012-07-31
July 31, 2012
QotD: The crony capitalist Olympics
New British tolerance: it’s still conform or be cast out
Brendan O’Neill on the dangers of dissenting from the cult of tolerance:
Did you enjoy the Olympics opening ceremony? If you didn’t, it’s probably wise to keep it to yourself. After all, you don’t want to end up like Tory MP Aidan Burley, who has been denounced as “reprehensible”, “offensive” and even “incompatible with modern Britain” — wow — for having the temerity to tweet that he thought the ceremony was “leftie multicultural crap”. There is a profound irony at work here. The ceremony celebrated the openness and diversity of modern Britain and has been hailed as a wonderful spectacle of “inclusion”. Yet it seems our celebration of diversity does not extend to allowing any criticism of the ceremony itself; our inclusiveness does not mean we will include dissenting views on Danny Boyle’s vision of the New Britain. When it comes to the opening ceremony, you must conform and celebrate, or risk being cast out (of polite society).
The opening ceremony is speedily morphing into another “Diana moment”, into another instance when everyone is expected to kowtow before a new, unstuffy vision of Britain, and heaven help those who don’t. Following the death of Princess Diana, we were told that we had entered a post-traditional, emotionally-aware New Britain, and yet the expression of certain emotions — such as criticism of the cult of public mourning outside the various royal palaces — was frowned upon and censured.
July 29, 2012
British army dispatches troops to … fill empty seats at the Olympics?
I don’t want to turn the blog into an exercise in mocking the major international sporting event being held in a major English city, but this report from the Guardian can’t be missed:
Soldiers have been drafted in to fill empty seats at the London 2012 Olympics after prime blocks of seating at the Aquatics Centre and gymnastics arena went unused on the first day of competition.
Troops were despatched to the North Greenwich Arena this morning by the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Locog), to take up seats left empty by accredited officials from Olympic and sporting federations, as well as some sponsors and members of the media. More troops, many of whom had their leave cancelled to provide emergency cover after the organisers failed to find enough security guards, will be issued with last-minute invites to take seats in venues when blocks of seats are found to be empty, the games organisers said this morning.
The culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said on Saturday the empty seats were “very disappointing” and suggested they could be offered to members of the public. He said the matter was being looked at “very urgently”.
I guess giving the seats to members of the public would be too much of a security risk?
NBC’s Olympic coverage under fire
Billy Gallagher at TechCrunch explains why he’s recommending viewers not watch NBC:
Spoiler alert: Phelps and Lochte raced today. The results are all over Twitter. But the race won’t air on TV in America until tonight.
This is 2012, not 1996. NBC has put all of the events live online, provided you have a cable subscription, but won’t have them available recorded online and won’t air many events, including the most high-profile ones, until a primetime tape delay.
This isn’t a new strategy, just a dumb, outdated one.
This isn't just the first social Olympics; it's the first Olympics where we can see in real time the dysfunction of the broadcast monopoly
— Michael Roston (@michaelroston) July 28, 2012
Sums it up pretty well. We’ve already covered the failings of NBC (and the IOC) fairly extensively, but its a topic that bears repeating. Check out #nbcfail for a live (gasp, what’s that?) stream of people’s frustrations with the peacock network.
A brief critical analysis of Olympic merchandise
Stephen Bayley – Founder of the Design Museum – gives the Olympics merchandise a critical mauling.
In ‘Rule Britannia: The Vice Guide to The Olympics’ VICE takes an in-depth look at the British public’s reaction to The Games coming to London this summer and the negative impact it’s having on certain people’s lives.
The six week festival promises to bring a a celebration of unity and sporting achievement, not to mention a huge cash injection to our beleaguered capital. VICE questions the real effects of The Games on a city as complex and tempestuous as London and discovers that they go much deeper, and murkier than the Olympics’ media spin-machine would have us believe.
H/T to Nick Packwood for the link.
July 28, 2012
Feschuk’s Olympic opening ceremony highlights
I didn’t watch the opening ceremonies, but I did enjoy Scott Feschuk’s twitter updates during the festivities. He’s collected some of them along with the appropriate photos for Maclean’s:
Clocking in at three hours and 45 minutes, the Opening Ceremonies of the 2012 Summer Games featured many remarkable moments and tophats. Here’s a selection of just a few of the images that captivated the world when the world wasn’t busy asking, “Did they seriously just play a song by Frankie Goes to Hollywood?”
[. . .]
[. . .]
[. . .]
July 27, 2012
Bruce Arthur calls for moderation in regard to the London Olympics
In the National Post, Bruce Arthur tries to encourage all of us, in spite of our memories of what British journalists were saying about the Vancouver Olympics, to avoid being nasty about the London games:
But perhaps we in Canada should restrain ourselves, as a nation. Perhaps we should take the higher road. That is, unless the higher road is crammed with traffic in this built-for-horses-and-carriage town. Or the tube is down again.
The Brits did not treat Canada kindly two years ago, it’s true. The Guardian said Vancouver could be the Worst Games Ever three days in, and they based the assessment on refunded snowboard tickets rather than on the preventable death of an athlete. The Guardian also called our glowing totem poles a collection of ice penises, and even the BBC announcer cocked an eyebrow, as it were. The Times of London called us cursed, while the Daily Mail mocked the escalation of the budget. They were, to be honest, kind of jerks about it.
But that doesn’t mean that Canadians should stoop to a similarly savage brand of mockery, beginning with the Opening Ceremony. It doesn’t mean we should make fun of the leaked details of the event, starting with children in hospital beds, which doesn’t seem terribly festive. It doesn’t mean we should make fun of the fact that Muse will apparently play, and even if they do not, that the official song of the Olympics by Muse is a grating, strutting, whining, overcompensatory sneer of a song.
If Boris wasn’t mayor of London
Lawsmith imagines what Boris Johnson would write about the London Olympics “major international sporting event” in a “certain major city in the UK” if he were not mayor:
I can imagine his perfect article in this alternative history in my dreams. Written in the Spectator and littered with self-deprecation, references to dead or fictitious Greeks, Liverpool and wiff-waff, Boris would have danced across the pages as he gleefully excoriated the Labour administration for the absurd idea of inviting a bunch of prima donna athletes and bureaucrats, most of them foreign, to compete in an outdoor stadium during the coldest, wettest summer in British history.
He might have pointed out that all this would take place in Newham, a place not altogether unlike Portsmouth and, in any case, one most Londoners consider more alien than Paris, with among the highest incidence of robbery and assault in the entire city. He might have joyfully foretold the pain and suffering of millions of income taxpayers on account of the shut-down of major roads and TfL advising know-nothing tourists to hop the tube at rush hour to make the 10 AM events, and seriously questioned the wisdom of erecting a steel wall around Hyde Park for an entire summer before fouling it up beyond recognition.
In our alternative history he would have savaged, rather than prodded, the implementation of widespread censorship undertaken by a hit squad of intellectual property ninjas; he would have lamented the fact that our police were arresting “marginal” (i.e., possibly innocent) suspects – living, breathing, thinking people – on terrorism charges which they might not be able to prove. If he had really driven it home, he would have pointed out that, under normal circumstances, those arrests would never have been made. He would also have asked why nobody seems to care.
By this point, his oeuvre would have been the most hilarious political essay ever written. He would flay alive in full public view the pathetic, uncritical, fawning news-media industry which crafts its Olympic stories with all the creative flavour of an oak plank, their proxy world to escape from our own inadequacies where professional athletes become “heroes” (seriously, find a different word), washed-up “heroes” become “legends,” and civil liberties violations and government largesse are completely ignored.
July 26, 2012
The “international sporting event” in “the capital of the United Kingdom”
Dahlia Lithwick explains why we all need to be careful how we refer to a certain large organized sports extravaganza happening in a major city in England:
At the London Olympics, we’re seeing unprecedented restrictions on speech having anything to do with, erm, the Olympics. There are creepy new restrictions on journalists, with even nonsportswriters being told they should sign up with authorities.
Then there’s the London Olympic Games and Paralympics Games Act 2006. The law was originally aimed at preventing “over-commercialization” of the games, but it seems to have unloosed something of a Pandora’s box of speech suppression. Provisions triggering worries for protesters include sections regulating use of the Olympic symbol “in respect of advertising of any kind including in particular — (a) advertising of a non-commercial nature, and (b) announcements or notices of any kind.” The law further seems to authorize a “constable or enforcement officer” to “enter land or premises” where they believe such material is being produced. It also permits that such materials may be destroyed, and for the use of “reasonable force” to do so.
[. . .]
But it’s not just the Olympic rings that are being protected; it’s also Olympic words. As Nick Cohen recently observed, the “government has told the courts they may wish to take particular account of anyone using two or more words from what it calls ‘List A.’ ” Those words: Games, Two Thousand and Twelve, 2012, and twenty twelve. And woe betide anyone who takes a word from List A and marries it with one or more words from “List B”: Gold, Silver, Bronze, London, medals, sponsors, summer.
Spectators have been warned they may not “broadcast or publish video and/or sound recordings, including on social networking websites and the Internet,” making uploading your video to your Facebook page a suspect activity. Be careful with your links to the official Olympic website as well.
July 24, 2012
Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, welcomes you to the Olympic Games
H/T to Nick Packwood for the link.
July 16, 2012
If this forecast is accurate, we’ll all be nostalgic for global warming
In his Telegraph column on the current weather in Britain (and what it may or may not do to the Olympic schedule), Boris Johnson shares a long range weather forecast that is chilling — literally:
I have just been on the blower to my old chum, Piers Corbyn, the world’s foremost meteorological soothsayer, and he sounds like Jeremiah with an ingrown toenail. This is the same Corbyn, with a first-class degree in physics, who decisively beat the Met Office in 2010 and accurately forecast the cold and snowy winter — and I am afraid he has been bearish about this summer from sometime in February or March.
According to Piers and his team at Weather Action, we all underestimate the role of the sun. This is set to be just about the wettest July on record, he says, and that is mainly because of things taking place in the nuclear fireball millions of miles away from earth. “Sometime too bright the eye of heaven shines,” says the Poet, and often is his gold complexion dimmed. This is one of the dim moments. The old boy is suffering from some kind of solar acne, called “coronal holes”, and on July 12 he apparently emitted a colossal flare — a cosmic spurt of X-rays and other charged particles; and, by a process that we (or at least I) do not fully understand — perhaps because rain droplets form more easily when there are charged particles around — this distemper in the celestial orb is helping to cause the current inundations.
For the sake of completeness, and so that no one can later accuse me of concealing the bad news (what did he know about the weather, and when did he know it?), I should say that Piers has a general thesis that the current phase of grim weather — cold, snowy winters and wet summers — is just the prelude to something yet more bracing. We are heading, he says, for a mini Ice Age. These wet Julys and frosty Januaries are part of the opening drum roll of a cold period that will set in over the next decades.
Some say it will be upon us by 2045, some say by 2030. Looking at the pattern of the last few years, Piers Corbyn now thinks it could be sooner than that. He does not say that sabretooth tigers will roam the streets of Newcastle. He does not say that the Thames will freeze at London Bridge and that we will have fairs on the ice — unlikely, given how fast the river flows these days. But he does believe that it will get nippier, and that we will see the kind of cold period last experienced in the late 17th century and early 18th century.
July 11, 2012
President Hollande “dwarfed” by Coldstream Guards
So much for a honeymoon period in office for French President Francois Hollande:
Francois Hollande was ridiculed today after allowing himself to look like a ‘dwarf’ alongside a British regiment which won battle honours at Waterloo and then occupied Paris.
During an official visit to London on Tuesday, the French President inspected a guard of honour from the 1st Battalion of the Coldstream Guards at the Foreign Office.
He then appeared in hugely embarrassing photographs alongside Major James Coleby, who looked around two feet taller than the Gallic head of state.
Comments alongside the image on a website of pictures taken by AFP, France’s national news agency, suggested Hollande had fallen into a ‘trap’ made to make him look ridiculous.
‘Poor France,’ wrote Jean-Marc Rameau, from Paris, while Dmitri Kovaley mocked Mr Hollande, who is 5ft 7ins, with the words ‘Dwarfs rule the world’.
H/T to Nicholas Packwood for the link.
June 26, 2012
Railway engineering, 1947 style
London, Midland & Scottish Railway documentary that shows the relaying of St. Pancras Junction with prefabricated trackwork, along with the associated changes to the signalling system.
What struck me while watching this was the ages of most of the track crew: I’d have expected them to be a bunch of teens-to-early 20’s guys, but there are a lot of old gaffers still doing the heavy lifting here. Oh, and of course the work clothes: caps, hats, jackets, and braces. Not a hard hat or much in the way of obvious safety gear in sight. They may or may not have been better men in those days, but they earned their aches and pains honestly.
H/T to Roger Henry for the link, who pointed out “This will get your pulses racing. Also makes you realize that working on the railroad was for real men. Mechanisation has come a looong way since then.”.
June 4, 2012
BBC coverage of the Jubilee Thames Pageant nearly as bad as the CBC coverage
I was in the same room as the TV yesterday, which was tuned to the CBC’s “coverage” of the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations along the Thames River. Every time I paid a bit of attention, Peter bloody Mansbridge was committing another linguistic atrocity (HM-C-S Belfast? She’s a former Royal Navy ship, not an RCN vessel, Peter — oh, and she’s a light cruiser, not a “battle cruiser”). And aside from the Royal Barge, and the canoe from Peterborough, the boat that got the most attention was a bloody power boat that apparently was in a James Bond film. Crikey!
It seemed as though every appearance of a maple leaf had to be relayed to viewers — not, mind you, actual footage of the things they were talking about. The mandate seemed to be to keep the faces of the presenters front-and-centre all the time when they weren’t showing the Royal Barge. And on the odd occasion they’d show part of the flotilla, the CBC personalities felt the need to talk as much as possible even while they weren’t on camera.
From the National Post, Scott Stinson on the banality of it all:
Long after the royal barge had passed my vantage point near Chelsea Bridge on Sunday afternoon, I nipped into a London pub to warm up, dry off, and catch the rest of the proceedings on the television.
After the first few times someone on the BBC broadcast gushed about this or that aspect of the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant, I chalked it up to a mild case of homerism. The 1,000-boat flotilla was, after all, an impressive spectacle. Then I noticed how often the commentators were using the pronoun “we” when describing things, as in “we are all so anxious to catch a glimpse of Her Majesty.” So much for journalistic detachment. By the time one of the broadcasters was positively marvelling at the skill and ingenuity of the captain who was in the process of docking the royal barge, it was apparent that most of the Beeb’s broadcast team had gone right bloody native.
I mean, shouldn’t docking a boat be part of the job? Would we not expect that the person given the task of piloting the Queen up the Thames be better than decent at it? Yet, here was the commentator, oohing and aahing at the fact that the captain of the Spirit of Chartwell had pulled up alongside the dock and was now moving the boat sideways up to it for a gentle landing. “Look at that!,” he enthused. “It’s amazing!”
Jan Moir in the Daily Mail:
Turn the royal trumpets to the parp and piffle setting. Muffle the funeral drums. For on a molten grey stretch of the Thames, with a global television audience of millions watching, something died yesterday.
It was the BBC’s reputation as a peerless television broadcaster of royal events. It just could not survive under an onslaught of inanity, idiocy and full cream sycophancy uttered, muttered and buttered on thickly by a team of presenters who were encouraged to think that they were more important than the events unfolding around them.
Someone, somewhere thought that their celebrity personalities were enough to see them through this all-day broadcast. How very wrong they were.
‘I’ve just spotted my 70-year-old dad out there,’ gurgled Sophie Raworth, as barges packed with senior royals and VIPs slid by, unremarked upon. Who was in all the other boats? We never did find out.
Yes, the BBC1 coverage of the Diamond Jubilee Thames Pageant was historical — historically awful.
[. . .]
What were Beeb bosses thinking? If ever an event was crying out for a Dimbleby to dimble nimbly in the shallows, with that trademark mixture of gravitas, humour and sagacity, then this was it.
Instead, we got Sophie Raworth and Matt Baker, bouncing around as if they were presiding over the jelly stall at a chimps’ tea party, somehow managing to sound patronising about nearly everything.
June 1, 2012
“Only the enemies of the Euro and of the European political project … dream of such a cataclysm”
To be a True European, you must believe in the European project wholeheartedly and unreservedly. Any other attitude is unacceptable:
I was once interviewed by one of Le Soir’s best-known journalists, who asked me whether I was in favor of the European project. I said that I would answer if she would tell me what it was. She did not, and we moved on to other subjects. Whatever the European project may be, those who don’t embrace it wholeheartedly — with a fervor that can only be described as mystical, considering that no one can explain or define it in simple terms — are depicted not as skeptics, but as enemies. Thus in Le Soir, we read: “Only the enemies of the Euro and of the European political project, notably the City of London, dream of such a cataclysm [the break-up of the single currency]!”
The City of London — Britain’s equivalent of Wall Street — here plays the role of the bloated plutocrat of Soviet iconography or of the Jewish manipulator of Nazi iconography, pulling the strings behind the scenes in order to achieve its malevolent design of controlling the world. One can make many possible criticisms of the City of London, but a determination to destroy the viability of the euro for some unspecified, atavistic reason is certainly not among them. If the euro is viable, the City couldn’t destroy it; if it is not, the City cannot save it. Besides, the idea that there is a congregation of malign conspirators within the fabled Square Mile who would rejoice at the euro’s implosion is absurd; the prospect is almost universally viewed with apprehension, though it would not come as a surprise to everyone.
