Quote:
Originally Posted by Edward64
Because its sports and we all grew up watching the Olympics.
I'm okay with boycotting the Olympics in China. But we made a half hearted political boycott, not many joined, no momentum and ultimately, it was meaningless. It showed how weak we are.
Ultimately, the answer is to come up with a strategy (economic, political, military, technological etc.), play the long game. Until then, let me enjoy my curling guilt free ...
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I remember 1980/84 quite well. Dueling boycotts, not sure any point was made other than screwing up the competition. And it led to violence in 1984 in Ann Arbor (perhaps in other places as well).
I was working for McDonald's that summer. It was my first job. They had spent millions on a promotional campaign surrounding the Olympics. The centerpiece was this elaborate set of scratch-off cards with names of US athletes in a gold, silver and bronze position.
The idea was if your card matched a gold-medal winner, you'd get a premium sandwich, maybe fries for silver, a coke for bronze. And then the Russians boycotted.
All of a sudden, a promotion with maybe one winner in dozens of cards... nearly every card won something. And the rules were you give one card with every purchase and people could ask for one free card per day.
The downtown Ann Arbor McDonald's was a strange scene. It was summer, so very few students around. And it was a very large restaurant - two floors of seating. So that's where all the teens in the area spent their days and evenings for a couple of weeks.
There was no way to cook enough food to meet the demand from the cards. Lines of kids demanding more cards. A couple of fights when employees declined to hand out free cards to kids who had already asked the same employee for a card earlier. Employees quitting. The police a constant presence.
I didn't normally work in that McDonald's, but the call went out after a few days that if you were a reasonably-sized male and wanted to remain employed where you were, you'd have to take night shifts downtown for the duration of the promotion.
Since jobs were impossible to find then (even at the minimum $3.35 per hour, don't even think about a raise), I did a handful of night shifts there. Talk about tension. Fortunately, by then they had pretty much worked out how to get enough Big Macs made to satisfy the crush and we were instructed never to say no. So we had incident-free shifts amid the tension and life eventually returned to normal.
Sports is supposed to be this refuge from politics. I don't know what we can or should do about the Uyghur camps in China. I doubt boycotting the games would have any effect. The "political" boycott was greeted with laughter over there, which should have been an obvious result to those making the statement in the first place.
You hold these games to try and bring people together. There's always going to be tension between Communist governments and Democracies. One can't become powerful without threatening the other in some critical way, and China, like the USSR before the Cold War ended, is becoming extremely powerful. But the games should be an opportunity to get people to see the other side as human rather than an opportunity to make ineffective and divisive political statements.
However, it does illustrate that there are places in the world where people are suffering far worse fates than we can even imagine over here. Hopefully, that strengthens our resolve to treat each other better and stop hating so much over relatively trivial issues.