Ironicwarcriminal posted:jools posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:
Are people genuinely annoyed at the expense being spent on the Games in contrast to the state of the economy or are they just going to do their sad-faced "musn't grumble" schtick and push on with a tawdry faux-Edwardian stoicism?well, like everything else here, it varies with social class. the middle classes and up are mostly just grumbling, although some sections probably generally support them.
lower down though.... well, let's just say the olympics were pretty much universally given as one of the reasons for the anger that precipitated the riots by those involved. canary wharf has a really powerful psychological effect on the desperately poor communities that surround it (iirc the poorest council wards in the uk are within like a mile or two of that place), and the olympic site is just having an even more extreme effect. for example, simultaneous to the olympic site being developed, another westfield shopping centre opened up in stratford. it follows the model of the other westfield, in west london, that's pretty much just high-end boutiques and shit. completely alienating.Yeah sorry for unleashing Westfield on you, it's a Sydney institution, we've got 13 of them, albeit mostly not as upscale as the London ones and more appropriate for our suburban fabric.
I noticed that about Canary wharf when I was there, riding the DLR through a forest of grim tower blocks to the imposing citadel of skyscrapers. And yet when you get close, on a wet late January day like I did, it really doesn't seem that way to me. Apart from the underground station (which was cool), there was a cheap tawdriness and hollowness to the whole area, like it was a film set as fragile and 2 dimensional as the credit default swaps that built it. What with it's twee little "heritage trail" signage and such.
I see what you mean about the psychological effects it must have on the ghettos around it though, that inaccessible wealth and power looming over you and mocking you for your inability to ever be a part of it. I imagine residents of Detroit feel the same way.
It's really depressing that the media and people will still gobble up truisms about the site "regenerating" East London or whatnot, despite evidence to the contrary clearly presented not only in the Docklands but every other piece of tacky, Blairite shit that went up across the regional cities in the "boom".
yeah when i was wandering around the docklands regeneration area i was kind of struck by how ephemeral it all was, nothing's been invested in the place besides money and when thats gone itll slide back into the mud
there will be riots again this year guaranteed but the govt will stop at nothing to make sure the olympics goes without a hitch, prepare for berlin 1936 levels of street sweeping and repression
tpaine posted:jools posted:
my old flat was actually about 200 metres from the olympic stadium site. it looked like akira or something.
it doesn't feel militarised (or more militarised than usual) yet. really the main thing is that boris johnson is doing a good job of making london feel like new crobuzon or somethingnew crobie...what? new crinkle...cron...new crinkieclack
cackalack
discipline posted:
nice av kenny
thank you. i have never watched the tv show depicted but i feel it communicates my posting style very well. the red doll symbolises marxism, the pink doll the New Masculinism, the brown bear thing transcendental empiricism, the cup boring sex stories, the dumb grinning child is of course myself
In addition to the minimal use of steel, which makes it 75% lighter, the stadium also reuses large pipes from a previous gas pipe project, recycled granite, and all building products were transported using trains and barges.
See that red thing? its the hubble bubble tower. You go up it and look out, best £19 million ever spent .
bonclay posted:
the increase in the number of olympic puff pieces on the bbc threatens to smother us all. we will be entombed in the soft cotton of disabled torchbearers and lavish trickle-down olympic largesse.
theyre running it into bristol, out of bristol over the clifton suspension bridge (so they can film it being run over A National Landmark) then running it back into bristol into the centre of town so that people will actually see it
http://giantelectric.blogspot.com/2009/03/morrisseys-5-most-depressing-songs.html
cleanhands posted:bonclay posted:
the increase in the number of olympic puff pieces on the bbc threatens to smother us all. we will be entombed in the soft cotton of disabled torchbearers and lavish trickle-down olympic largesse.theyre running it into bristol, out of bristol over the clifton suspension bridge (so they can film it being run over A National Landmark) then running it back into bristol into the centre of town so that people will actually see it
Seems to be all the rich part of Bristol!
deadken posted:
i dont think there'll be more riots, rioting induces a kind of cathartic relief, give it a couple more years.... hopefully we'll get some strikes though
Rioting is cool because you don't have to have a job to do it. Once all the jobs have been destroyed our only hope will be to like guerilla attack the rich people's builder robots and pain rays
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-17475292
People chosen to carry the 2012 Olympic torch during the relay can keep the torch for £199, London Games organisers have said.
The government has also backed the decision to charge for the souvenir, which will be offered to torchbearers for purchase.
But some torchbearers feel it is a high price to pay.
sorry, breast cancer survivors mentors to wayward children and disabled heroes, but we've got security contractors and spies to pay back. TANSTAAFL 
cleanhands posted:
i think the olympics is unedifying by default so the sight of anyone, abled or disabled, carrying the olympic torch, is unedifying.
stripped of its complicity in the interests of capital and all that, the concept of an international sport festival is actually pretty beautiful
even the pageantry itself is a pretty harmless and interesting callback to the emergence of western civilization which is sort of cool
Merzbow posted:cleanhands posted:bonclay posted:
the increase in the number of olympic puff pieces on the bbc threatens to smother us all. we will be entombed in the soft cotton of disabled torchbearers and lavish trickle-down olympic largesse.theyre running it into bristol, out of bristol over the clifton suspension bridge (so they can film it being run over A National Landmark) then running it back into bristol into the centre of town so that people will actually see it
Seems to be all the rich part of Bristol!
yyyyyyyup
Groulxsmith posted:cleanhands posted:
i think the olympics is unedifying by default so the sight of anyone, abled or disabled, carrying the olympic torch, is unedifying.stripped of its complicity in the interests of capital and all that, the concept of an international sport festival is actually pretty beautiful
even the pageantry itself is a pretty harmless and interesting callback to the emergence of western civilization which is sort of cool
yeah the idea of it is cool but in practice its basically the old western powers deciding which sports own and telling the rest of the world to get practicing
cleanhands posted:Groulxsmith posted:cleanhands posted:
i think the olympics is unedifying by default so the sight of anyone, abled or disabled, carrying the olympic torch, is unedifying.stripped of its complicity in the interests of capital and all that, the concept of an international sport festival is actually pretty beautiful
even the pageantry itself is a pretty harmless and interesting callback to the emergence of western civilization which is sort of coolyeah the idea of it is cool but in practice its basically the old western powers deciding which sports own and telling the rest of the world to get practicing
they got rid of baseball which had been dominated by cuban amateurs
girdles_gone_wild posted:
baseball is just fucking awful
wrong
Groulxsmith posted:
thanks for that insight you nerd loser
eat shit you boring baseballhaver
Groulxsmith posted:
baseball has been corrupted but not irrecoverably so by its own brand of positivism, i.e. sabermetrics but is still great
moneyball math is how we'll end up running socialism so that's good.
The match and wick had done their job, but as we reach the 20th anniversary of that day, we should recognize that the gunpowder was packaged to the point of bursting by urban neglect and rampant, unchecked police violence. It was the 45% unemployment-rate of African American males in South Central. It was Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates and his violent programs of police enforcement like the infamous Operation Hammer. It was deindustrialization and the loss of union jobs. It was the Bush recession, the longest the nation had seen since World War II. But there was an accelerant that started the city on the road to rebellion, and it’s what is regarded to this day as one of the city’s most shining moments: the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.
The 1984 Olympics were supposed to show the vibrancy and virility of Ronald Reagan’s America. The games were actually opened by a speech from Reagan, the first time a U.S. President had launched the games in Olympic history. These games were nationalist theater, an absolute gold glut for the United States since the countries behind the Iron Curtain boycotted in protest of the U.S.’s refusal to attend the 1980 games in Moscow.
The Los Angeles Olympic Games are remembered as as success because, appropriately for the Reagan era, they were the first privately financed Olympics in history. They ended with an announced surplus of over $200 million and spurred the creation of 70,000 new jobs. Olympic organizer Peter Uebberoth was the Time Magazine Man of the Year and given the job as commissioner of Major League Baseball. Also lauded were Mayor Tom Bradley and Chief Gates for keeping the peace.
But the Olympics weren’t a glorious affair for everyone. Gates kept calm by expanding his infamous police gang sweeps (later immortalized in the NWA video for “Straight Outta Compton”) and keeping entire areas of the city, especially South Central and East LA, under conditions of military occupation. Politicians and judges conspired to revive old, anti-syndicalist laws to jail masses of black youth, though the overwhelming numbers of people arrested were never charged.
Before the Olympics, Gates was on thin ice as police chief. In 1982, he infamously said that African Americans died under a chokehold used by police officers because "the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do on normal people." But Gates emerged from the Olympics as an untouchable hero. Every incentive for him and his department was to stay in “Olympic mode.” Treating the city as occupied territory became institutionalized.
From 1984-1989, there was a 33% spike in citizen complaints against police brutality. The complaints went nowhere. According to an LA Times investigative report, the district attorney’s office chose not to prosecute the “vast majority” of complaints. Between 1986 and 1990, 1,400 officers were investigated on suspicion of using excessive force, less than 1% were prosecuted. Frustration, as Langston Hughes predicted decades earlier, “festered like a sore.”
Gates and Bradley, still basking in Olympic glow, were oblivious to the rising anger. As Gates said blithely, "I think that people believe that the only strategy is to harass people and make arrests for inconsequential types of things. Well that's part of our strategy, no doubt about it."
1968 Olympian John Carlos who was living in Los Angeles at the time, said to me that constitutional rights just didn’t exist for those “shut out of the Olympic party.” He remembered, “The police were on a mission to make sure whole sections of the city were on lockdown by any means necessary."
Then there was the economic side of the 1984 Olympic legacy. Many in Mayor Bradley’s office celebrated those official reports that showed 70,000 jobs were created by the Games. But all of those jobs were non-union temporary employment and disappeared with the recession as quickly as they arrived. If replaced at all, by more service industry jobs. How masses of people worked, in union-dense Los Angeles, had turned a corner toward a more precarious future. As Mike Davis wrote in 1990, "Southcentral L.A. has been betrayed by virtually every level of government. In particular, the deafening public silence about youth unemployment and the juvenation of poverty has left many thousands of young street people with little alternative but to enlist in the crypto-Keynesian youth employment program operated by the cocaine cartels."
Institutional support of police brutality against a workforce either unemployed or limited to service jobs was the flammable mix saturating the streets of Los Angeles, that caught fire when Rodney King hit the nightly news.
There are lessons here, if we are willing to learn them. For cities like London and Rio, the host cities of the next two Olympic Games, attack the working poor of your country in the name of “Olympic security” at your own peril. For the citizens of these cities, be vigilant against efforts to bestow absolute power into the hands of 21st century versions of Daryl Gates. But above all else, the lesson is about what happens when people are brutalized and their anguished cries are ignored. The lesson is about how people will respond if unchecked poverty and police violence puts a continual odor in the air that stinks like rotten meat. When the people have no voice, no community, and no power, their frustration is left no physical choice but to explode.
gyrofry posted:baseball is cool but only in person and on the radio not on tv
Ha, just like cricket
There seems to be no limit to the efforts of Lord Coe and his friends at the International Olympic Committee to bring this summer's London Games into ridicule and contempt. A week-long "military exercise" is currently under way in the capital. RAF Typhoon jets are to scream back and forth over the Thames. Starstreak surface-to-air missile batteries are being set up in East End parks and on flats in Bow, with 10 soldiers manning each one. Army and navy helicopters will clatter back and forth, with snipers hanging from their doors "to shoot down pilots of terrorist planes".
Machine-guns will for the first time be toted by guards on the London tube. Police special forces, "trained to kill", will wear balaclavas to avoid identification. There are to be naval landing craft roaming the coast off Weymouth and submarines at the ready. The Olympics have become a festival of the global security industry, with a running and jumping contest as a sideshow. No one in government dares call a halt. Nero in his prime could not have squandered so much money on circuses.
The Olympics have become an Orwellian parody of what happens when a world agency blackmails a government aching for prestige into spending without limit. Not one defence spokesman has come up with a plausible scenario for the jets and missiles. The latter have a range of just three miles and are said to be usable "only at the express instruction of the prime minister". What will they shoot down, and on whose head will it crash?
These boys-with-toys are costing taxpayers £1bn yet they cannot add an iota to national security. They have nothing to do with deterring terrorism, even supposing there to be any such threat. The modern terrorist uses suicide tactics, by definition immune to deterrence. All the government has done is raise the politico-military profile of the Games and tempted some crackpot to have a go. Even at the street level, Occupy London and the cycling militants must regard Lord Coe's VIP lanes as a golden opportunity. The Olympic organisers are planning to close the Mall, Horse Guards Parade and most of St James's Park from June onwards, for fear someone might plant a bomb near the volleyball contest, crazily located behind Downing Street as a sop to Tony Blair. This is despite the prime minister and the mayor's office specifically countermanding the decision. Computer firms eager for contracts place regular stories about the "threat to the games from cyber-attack". One firm has been hired to deploy 450 "IT wizards" to guard the Games from hackers.
This means that, for the rest of the summer, London will effectively be "ruled" by the IOC. Enthusiasts for world government should take note. An unaccountable, self-validating body expects five-star hotels, chauffeur-driven BMWs, Soviet-style Zil lanes and all-green light phases for its thousands of "officials" and corporate hangers-on. It not only expects them, it gets them. It demanded and got its own legislative powers, under the 2006 London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act. Lord Coe does what the IOC tells him and passes the bill to George Osborne, who pays it. When the opening ceremony alone was £30m short (on a staggering budget of £60m), the cheque was promptly sent round.
The IOC is ever vigilant for its sponsors. Inspectors are to fan out across the capital, arresting anyone who uses the words "2012 Olympics" or any other associative phrase, for not paying Coe and the IOC a fortune in sponsorship fees. Jamie Oliver cannot hold an Olympics party in Victoria Park as he is a non-sponsor. Blogs, pictures or videos on YouTube or Facebook are banned. Anyone who so much as carries an unapproved bag, hat or shoe in a venue is banned. The Chinese politburo is Liberty Hall compared with this authoritarianism.
Transport for London has been reduced to a gibbering wreck. It has warned Londoners to get out of the city for the duration – at what cost to the economy? Citizens have been warned that central London roads will be closed, tube drivers may go on strike, and hospital casualty departments will be short of blood. How this will make money for London, as promised by Coe and others, is a mystery. As a tourist destination the place is being put on a par with Baghdad or Kabul.
There is no civic dividend from this sum and never has been. August in London is always a light month and, as the empty rows at Athens and Beijing showed, Olympic sports are not people draws. The irony is that the chief success of the London Olympics organisers has been the chief source of criticism. They have undoubtedly generated domestic enthusiasm. By making ticket sales a national lottery they achieved what appears to be the first sold-out Olympics of modern times.
However, roughly 85% of these buyers are Britons, few of whom will stay in London hotels. The crowds will be concentrated at the venues. It is the government, through its hospitality for the IOC "family", that will sustain the luxury hotel market this August. For the non-games districts of the capital, I would be surprised if shops, buses and tubes are not half deserted, taxis unused, theatres, cinemas and concert halls empty and any royal park not fenced off for a commercial sponsor pleasantly uncrowded.
The London Games began in a spirit of economy and popular enthusiasm. At the considerable cost of £2.4bn, they were to answer the state gigantism of the Beijing Games and fuse modern sport into the urban fabric. London would prove that cities did not have to be rich to host the games. It would be "the people's games".
The IOC put a stop to that. It drove a pliant British government to the present paranoia, budgetary incontinence and corporate greed. If the image of the London Games is to be rescued this summer, it must rely on diverting attention to the sincerity of young athletes and spectators, on somehow restoring the dignity of the sporting spirit. For now, a noble movement has been hijacked by a monster that is plainly out of control.