The Shrine

Just a reminder in case anyone's forgotten =)

It will be a very interesting two weeks. I missed the opening ceremonies, bt luckily in this age it is guaranteed to be all over the Internet anyway.

It'll be broadcasted tonight at 8 on NBC.

I lost faith in the Olympics in 2004, when they hired judges that could only find jobs in the Special Olympics. And then whatever faith I had after that was beaten when they made the dumbass decision to hold the Olympics in a country with some of the worst human rights abuses of any country.

Next up, Olympics in Sudan!

Only 40 minutes in and i'm already blown away. Politics aside, this is a powerful country, a monumental moment, and they are displaying it.

Ummm, fuck This man knows pain

Removed due to copyright. Gotta love Google

Here is the news article with pictures but the video looked absolutely brutal.

eeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

and there are just so many pictures..... gross.

Fuck that gangly Frenchman Bernard!

Not an event that a lot of people care about, but we swept all three medals for womens individual sabre. So far we are in first place as far as total medal count goes, but are far behind China in terms of gold medals. China has 18, we have 10. Thats a pretty distant second place.

Finally some medals, 7 total including 2 golds.

Phelps for the US swimming team set a new record for the history books last night, winning his 8th gold medal for the 08 olympics. Pretty damn impressive

Whoah, China has almost as many gold medals as the #2, 3, and 4 teams combined. I wish I would have had a chance to see some of the events this year. I just haven't been able to find the time.

Canada is now third among Northern Countries and 15th overall; The UK and Russia are ahead. Certainly a vast improvement over a few days ago.


Bolt shattered Bailey's record. 9.69 seconds; that's insane!

Bah, the Chinese are cheating!

I'll bite. Let's hear your theory on how the Chinese are cheating.

Well, for one, underaged gymnasts. And that's only the shit we're finding out on the surface. When the Olympics are being held in a Communist state with known human rights and governmental control issues, you can bet your ass that they are taking every advantage of the home location to try to sneak shit past the officials and win a few more gold metals!

Of course, there's plenty of cheating to go around in all of the countries. There is a lot of drug use going on, and some of it is undetectable (EPO, for example).

We are being defeated by the hated British!

It's been a weird Olympics for Australia. We keep scoring gold in places we don't expect it, and losing it where we're thought to be sure things.

Kupek wrote:I'll bite. Let's hear your theory on how the Chinese are cheating.

http://acostlymistake.ytmnd.com/

Eric wrote:http://acostlymistake.ytmnd.com/

Weak...that's just pictures, text, and music. I figured he would be saying it. Besides, I always favored this: http://reallylose.ytmnd.com/

I agree the Chinese gymnasts might be underage. I've been assured by some Chinese girls in my office that girls in China tend to look younger, but even they admit those girls look young.

But everything else is just you drawing conclusions out of nothing. Nice.

The Chinese are using ancient sorcery, obviously.

Its funny how Russia, Germany, and the US used to dominate the Olympics. While Russia and western Europe is still doing well this year, China is kicking ass and countries like Korea and Japan are not far behind in medal count.

Gymnastics in particular... Didnt romania and the soviet union always give us a run our money and now its Japan and China? At least the US always seem to stay at the top.

This past decade or so China has been trending upward. The last Olympics they were a very close second to the US (only 4 golds behind); this year it made sence for them to be way ahead. Russia has been slipping a lot.

Kupek wrote:http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008 ... T_MAP.html

Thats pretty cool and shows the Asian countries doing better and better very clearly.

Gymnastics is a subjective sport so it's hard to have an absolute dominance, unlike say swimming if your guys are bigger and faster it's pretty hard to lose.

Don wrote:Gymnastics is a subjective sport so it's hard to have an absolute dominance, unlike say swimming if your guys are bigger and faster it's pretty hard to lose.

Yeah... while i like the timed (swimming, running), distance (javelin, discus), and easily scored (basketball, volleyball) events to better distinguish who is the winner, there is also a lot less drama in those events. I mean, if you know your country's guy's best best time in something is, say, 60 seconds, but there are a few people around the world who always do it in 50, then your guy basically has 0 chance to win. A lot of the swimming and running events are over before it starts since you know who is the best and there is little room for a miraculous underdog to prevail.

Upsets and an unbelievable performances happen every so often, but not really.

The other day I saw this statistics: The opposing teams combined has a .042 batting average against the USA women's softball team. You're talking about a number that people won't even believe you in fiction, and yet it's happening on the Olympics. This is probably why they're getting rid of softball.

That's one of them. The stat I heard was there's a scoring ratio of 53:1 for the American softball team. (For every 1 run scored against them, they score 53.)

The reason (supposedly) that they're getting rid of baseball is the opposite: the major league stars aren't playing in the Olympics.

Women's softball is essentially going because it's always a fight for second. USA slaughters everyone.

Baseball I can see the major league thing.

Kupek wrote:I agree the Chinese gymnasts might be underage. I've been assured by some Chinese girls in my office that girls in China tend to look younger, but even they admit those girls look young.

But everything else is just you drawing conclusions out of nothing. Nice.

Did you bother to read the article I linked? The girls had their ages falsified by the government controlled news, and then given fake passports by the government passport agency. So, this was government sanctioned cheating.

If the Chinese government is willing to do that for gymnasts, why wouldn't they do similar things for other sports?

Is there actually any proof to support this, or just sore losers making excuses? Kind of strange though, it seems to me that this would be similar to a junior high student lying about their age to enter a high school level academic competition.

Dutch wrote:Is there actually any proof to support this, or just sore losers making excuses? Kind of strange though, it seems to me that this would be similar to a junior high student lying about their age to enter a high school level academic competition.

Well, younger gymnasts tend to have an advantage over older gymnasts because they are usually more flexible and usually have shorter legs. So events like the seperated bars is easier for them.

So it's not like your example at all, really. The older gymnasts might have a few more years experience, but considering these girls have been training since they were little, the advantage there for the older girls is probably negligible.

There's no proof that they cheated in any other events, but it sure looks like they cheated by violating the rules here. In that case, they need to disqualify this team. If I found out Michael Phelps violated some rule to take part, I'd feel the same way and think they should disqualify him a well. Rules are rules.

Proof: China is a communist country which even forced the IOC to partially censor the media and internet access in the country when one of the conditions of them getting the games would be that they wouldn't do that.

'Nuff said

Sine, I agreed with you on the gymnasts. But I require some evidence of cheating, not a nebulous "they probably cheated."

Zeus wrote:Proof: China is a communist country which even forced the IOC to partially censor the media and internet access in the country when one of the conditions of them getting the games would be that they wouldn't do that.

'Nuff said

So from your statements.This is your path of logic:
(China is communist) + (partially censors media in their country) = Proof that China cheats at the Olympics

Is this correct?

Dutch wrote:

Zeus wrote:Proof: China is a communist country which even forced the IOC to partially censor the media and internet access in the country when one of the conditions of them getting the games would be that they wouldn't do that.

'Nuff said

So from your statements.This is your path of logic:
(China is communist) + (partially censors media in their country) = Proof that China cheats at the Olympics

Is this correct?

You're right, I should have been more clear. It's proof of gov't misdoing more than proof of cheating. The misdoing does significantly increase the possibility of cheating but is not necessarily directly leading to it

Don't the host country usually get more medals than normal anyway?

Don wrote:Don't the host country usually get more medals than normal anyway?

Yeah, typical home field advantage.

Kupek wrote:But everything else is just you drawing conclusions out of nothing. Nice.

Dutch wrote:Is there actually any proof to support this, or just sore losers making excuses?

Dutch wrote:So from your statements.This is your path of logic:
(China is communist) + (partially censors media in their country) = Proof that China cheats at the Olympics

Wow, everybody's going "Is there proof? Is there proof?", I link to said proof, and everybody talks like I didn't say anything. How fucking dense are you guys?!

Fuck it! I'm tired of arguing with brick walls.

SineSwiper wrote:And that's only the shit we're finding out on the surface. When the Olympics are being held in a Communist state with known human rights and governmental control issues, you can bet your ass that they are taking every advantage of the home location to try to sneak shit past the officials and win a few more gold metals!

We already addressed the gymnasts - most people here think they're cheating on that. But the above is pure speculation. Sure, be suspicious, but you've concluded they're cheating elsewhere.

Kupek wrote:

SineSwiper wrote:And that's only the shit we're finding out on the surface. When the Olympics are being held in a Communist state with known human rights and governmental control issues, you can bet your ass that they are taking every advantage of the home location to try to sneak shit past the officials and win a few more gold metals!

We already addressed the gymnasts - most people here think they're cheating on that. But the above is pure speculation. Sure, be suspicious, but you've concluded they're cheating elsewhere.

So you think this behaviour is limited solely to the gymnasts as Kali's article seems to support? That the gov't, who would clearly be doctoring documents in order to make the gymnasts appear younger to increase the chance of winning medals, would only limit themselves to the one sport?

For argument's sake, let's assume for a minute that there is another sport where it would be beneficial for an underage to compete.

Zeus wrote:

Kupek wrote:

SineSwiper wrote:And that's only the shit we're finding out on the surface. When the Olympics are being held in a Communist state with known human rights and governmental control issues, you can bet your ass that they are taking every advantage of the home location to try to sneak shit past the officials and win a few more gold metals!

We already addressed the gymnasts - most people here think they're cheating on that. But the above is pure speculation. Sure, be suspicious, but you've concluded they're cheating elsewhere.

So you think this behaviour is limited solely to the gymnasts as Kali's article seems to support? That the gov't, who would clearly be doctoring documents in order to make the gymnasts appear younger to increase the chance of winning medals, would only limit themselves to the one sport?

For argument's sake, let's assume for a minute that there is another sport where it would be beneficial for an underage to compete.

For arguments sake, it would be better not to make any assumptions.

Zeus wrote:So you think this behaviour is limited solely to the gymnasts as Kali's article seems to support?

That's not what I said. I have made no conclusions; I think they are suspect, but with no other cases of alleged cheating, I'm not even going to say "they probably cheated elsewhere." That's too strong a statement with no evidence.

Dutch wrote:For arguments sake, it would be better not to make any assumptions.

Not at all. It's always better to make assumptions or have limitation to develop a framework under which to develop your hypothesis and then alter that framework for additional details/complexity as you go along.

If you focus only on the details or variables, you never have a framework from which to work with. Without a framework you can never really develop useable hypothesis (or even fact/law). You'll always be arguing/debating without the hope of a conclusion (and by extension, turn it more into a destructive as opposed to constructive discussion). This holds more and more true the more and more complicated the situation/argument/scientific experiment gets.

Don't you remember when you were in grade or high school science and they always said "make this assumption" and everyone always said "but that's not reality"? They did that so your young (and feeble:-) mind could comprehend the very basics before it became very complicated.

If a person robs you once, and then you meet this person again, you will immediately think that he will probably try to rob you again. Or as Bush so eloquently put it "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice....never get fooled again."

That is different from assuming they have robbed you. Subtle distinction.