Women, children, and old people
September 4, 2008 – 7:20 am by JohnRyan McMaken makes some good points about the politicization of the Olympics, not that anyone cares now that college football season is here, but he makes some awfully stupid statements along the way. Comparing the bad human-rights record of this year’s host nation, China, to past instances of murderous governments hosting the Olympics, he says,
In 1908, when London hosted the Olympics, the Brits had only recently finished up their war against the Boers in which tens of thousands of Boer women and children were starved to death by the Brits in concentration camps.
In 1960, when the United States hosted the Winter Games in Squaw Valley, California, it had only been fifteen years since the US Government had dropped two atomic bombs on old people, women, and children, killing over 200,000 of them.
So we’re to infer that in his warped fundamentalist-Catholic morality, starving or nuking young or middle-aged men isn’t an atrocity? A war doesn’t become gruesome or barbaric until certain ages and genders of humans are mutilated, degraded, tortured, and murdered? Back at the time of those wars, no one found the loss of 18-30-year-old men’s lives anything to despair over?
Stupid.
