If anyone is still intersted, you can follow all of the post-farce finger-pointing and blame assigning here.
So there wasn't anything for me to go see after all, as the impromptu, on the fly, last minute changes saw the torch go out towards the bridge then high tail it down to the airport and get the hell out of town, leaving me as well as about 10,000 others with nothing to see after all.
What a joke.
No biggie for me, as I just watched on local TV with their coverage and helicopter cams, waiting to see if they would indeed come back to the planned finishing ceremony location by the Ferry Bldg. It never happened, I stayed near work, no biggie. Hell, I've seen the torch before, as up close and personal as you can get, but it would have been awesome to walk down and see the spectacle of the mass protest first hand. But I really and truly feel sorry for the thousands of people who came out to see the torch. Many people flew here from all around the US and brought their kids just to see the torch, and they got royally shafted by our wanna-be superhero doofus mayor and his massive ego.
I basically agree with everything said here about yesterday's fiasco.
Basically the Free Tibet folks succeeded in bringing lots of attention to their cause, and basically scaring the mayor and the event out of town. And the mayor was a fool {as usual} as well- if they were going to run away like pussies then they should have just canceled the whole thing, not told 10,000 people that they were going to do it and then run away scared because they didn't plan properly to have enough police on the scene.
An embarrassment for SF: certainly not the first, and won't be the last. I'm sure Hannity, O'Really?, Rush et al all had massive erections yesterday that will probably stay good and hard for the rest of the week. And John Stewart writers and the staff at The Onion as well, although theirs will most likely soften and they'll move on after a day of well deserved snark.
Good luck, Buenos Aires, the hot potato is now in your hands.
Lastly, why give a flying fuck about the Olympic Torch relay at all?
4 comments:
On the brightside, at least the whole protest was peaceful. So there's that. I'm also going to go out on a limb here and say that it won't be nearly as a big deal in countries like Argentina or Brazil. There will be demonstrations, I'm sure, but nothing like what happened in London or Paris, or SF. I just don't think people outside of America and Western Europe cares as much about China's various issues and abuses.
Agreed- I think they are over the hump as far as the massive protests now that W. Europe & North America are out of the way.
But things will really gear up again about 2 weeks before the opening ceremony methinks.
You are probably right about that too. It's going to get pretty unbearable when that happens. I get that Olympics are political in nature, but sometimes I do wish people would just let the athletes do their thing. Fuck the medal counts and the flag raising ceremonies, they should have never been the point anyways.
Agreed. Unfortunately the Olympics have always been political and always will be.
But as I've said many times before, the IOC doesn't give a fuck about any of that, they're about one thing and one thing only: STRAIGHT CASH, HOMEY. And that is why Beijing 2008 came to be in the first place: commercial and merchandising opportunity.
They are the 2nd biggest money whore on Earth, behind only FIFA, of course.
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