Skip to main content

The Olympic Flame

Olympic flame makes its way to Beijing

Click to enlarge. Feel free to pass it around.

You may think that the Olympic torch relay is part of an ancient tradition, dating back to 770BC. But it isn't. The ritual of running the torch from Athens to the venue of the modern games was invented by the Nazis for the 1936 Olympics. The idea was to draw a link between the ancient Greek ideals and the cockamamie ideas of racial purity and a master race whose origin was Germany. It was part of a Fascist spectacle - as is the current fiasco.

World leaders should follow the lead of Gordon Brown and Sarkozy of France and refuse to attend the opening ceremony (at the very least).

My guess is the whole thing is going to blow up in the face of the Chinese. They are not going to be able to cope with the western media or an influx of athletes who will feel a strong moral obligation to make a protest.

As for sponsors of the Beijing Olympics - I think they should get the cold shoulder.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Addict-o-matic

A cool resource for you to try. Aggregates search topics from a number of sources. Thanks to Brand DNA (again) for the heads-up.

Johnny Bunko competiton

The Great Johnny Bunko Challenge from DHP on Vimeo . There's a young chap in Indiana, one Alec Quig , who has written to me about creating a career based on a polymathic degree, from which he has recently graduated. He's an interesting young man and his concerns about going forward in life are the anxieties we all face at crossroads in our lives when we are forced to make choices. Dan Pink's latest book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need might help: "From a New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Washington Post bestselling author comes a first-of-its- kind career guide for a new generation of job seekers.There's never been a career guide like it.the fully illustrated story (ingeniously told in Manga form) of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job. Johnny Bunko is new to parachute company Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early days as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to find a new job. St

Sexist Advertising and stereotypes

Advertising lives in the short-form world. Because mass media is so expensive the 30 second commercial is conventional and because there is so much clutter simplified signals are essential to 'cut through'. One form of communication short-hand used as a default is the stereotype - "A stereotype can be a conventional and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image, based on the assumption that there are attributes that members of the "other group" have in common. Stereotypes are sometimes formed by a previous illusory correlation, a false association between two variables that are loosely correlated if correlated at all. Though generally viewed as negative perceptions, stereotypes may be either positive or negative in tone." In the 1950's and 60's when men dominated advertising stereotypical impressions of women as inferior or subservient were not only commonplace but usual. It was normal to show women as housekeepers, largely because most wer