Why is IP being allowed to take precedence over civil liberties and cultural inheritance these days? WTF?
"Police will have powers to enter private homes and seize posters, and will be able to stop people carrying non-sponsor items to sporting events." The second part is just as scary in my opinion
It's just a small step from suddenly "needing" to question what constitutes "really necessary". We should be resisting tyranny as it creeps up on us, not remain complacent until after it becomes a true crisis.
EDIT: On further thought, it's worse. The article implies that police will have the power to remove items from people on the way to an event. That would be hideous if true. I want a corroborative source before I get too worked up about this, though.
What made Vancouver such a success is the low key policing. 6000 police + RCMP + army and they made 93 arrests (mostly drunk+disorderly), one policeman was slightly hurt when he broke a window stopping a fight. The result is the best press for the VPD in living memory.
Now picture the Met's response to any sort of demo in London.
I also think people are waking up to SCAM that is the olympics. The IOC is private organization that profits from the games, by stealing taxpayer money to fund their events. I don't know why anyone would want to host the olympics anymore.
Likewise with Vancouver; one of our major downtown streets, Granville, got a complete overhaul. Gone were the old, broken stones, the cracked sidewalks, the run-down streets and sickly trees. It's now a much better place to walk around and explore.
We also have a new mass-transit line connecting our downtown core with South Vancouver and Richmond, as well as the airport. Catching a flight used to be $25-35 by taxi, or god knows how much in parking. Now, it's about $4 per person, and that gets you there and back if you're dropping someone off. The project was a public-private partnership that was within budget and opened fifteen weeks early, and has made Richmond far easier to travel to and from (making everyone's life easier). The project was a no-brainer improvement to the region, but I doubt we would have had as much support and funding if we hadn't had the olympics coming to town.
Whether the other renovations to the city will prove useful, it's hard to tell yet, but I'm cautiously optimistic that they will.
However, similar arguments are made all the time in support of building new sports stadiums. And at least in those cases, the arguments simply don't hold water: the beneficiary is the team ownership, NOT the taxpayers.
See http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-339es.html : The economic facts, however, do not support the position that professional sports teams should receive taxpayer subsidies. The lone beneficiaries of sports subsidies are team owners and players. ... Indeed, the results of studies on changes in the economy resulting from the presence of stadiums, arenas, and sports teams show no positive economic impact from professional sports -- or a possible negative effect.
When your spending on beautification to show the world your city for 3 weeks, major infrastructure projects like sewer systems aren't high on the list.
I do feel Atlanta did a good job hosting the '96 Olympics. However, your perspective that "Atlanta was a total ghetto before the Olympics" is far off. The "ghettos" can be restated as "poor black communities". These did not go away. They just relocated. This gentrification process was in place prior to the Olympic prep. The prep simply added more money to accelerate the process.
I understand organizers of sporting events and people who have paid a lot of money for broadcast rights (public money, in the case of the BBC) don't want to give free advertising to other brands surfing on the popularity of the Olympics...but surely the way to approach this is to hold the brand owners responsible, and agree that organized displays outside normal commercial channels (front gardens vs. billboards along a marathon route, say) are the commercial equivalent of graffiti.
Letting police come into people's houses because they can see objectionable material from the outside will end in tears. Sure, it's inappropriate if someone decks their house with ads for candy or cheap beer, but between poorly-drafted rules and over-enthusiastic police officers, I feel pretty certain that non-commercial displays of everything from political views to portraits of people who look overly sad or gloomy will become grounds for police censorship.
I lived in the UK for about a decade and loved it. But between the plethora of security cameras and things like this, I just can't imagine living there now. Neither Labor and Conservative governments over the years have shown any real respect for civil liberties.
There's a similar but less extreme generalisation to be made about its effect on cultural inheritance.
We shouldn't have to beg to have our rights (back). Just remember how you got those rights in the first place.
(Remember fascism means the union of the corporate and the state. Egomaniacs in funny uniforms and goose stepping is optional.)
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