Quote Of The Month - Special Olympics Edition

Bronze goes to Tom Paine:

I suspect these elements of the policy are pointless and therefore simply another example of LOCOG's tone deaf PR ability to make the inherently lovable despicable. Ergo they have failed to restrict your freedom of speech in any meaningful way. Relax. Chill. Worry rather about the costs of the games you will be paying for years to come.

Taking silver is A K Haart with a heartfelt paean to the true Olympic aspiration:

Sport is good, but the Olympics isn’t sport, it’s a circus. It’s a degrading circus too, because all is so deliberate and contrived and so very far removed from the simple exhilaration of running, jumping, swimming and the innocent pleasure of training hand and eye to do what once upon a time they could never do.

And a worthy gold, Heresy Corner points out that it's fitting we should host this farce, after all:

"The gigantic security budget, though, is part of a trend: in the midst of auserity and global recession, the past few years have seen an unpredented boom for the "loose confederation of defence, IT and biotechnology industries" that make up the domestic security sector. The Olympics operation belongs in the same realm as the government's monstrous proposals for email surveillance, now the subject of lacklustre Parliamentary scrutiny. As for the draconian protections - many legally novel and outrageous - enacted in the interests of corporate sponsors, these too are scarcely out of keeping with zealous copyright laws that see a young British student facing extradition to the United States for offences allegedly committed in his own bedroom.

The Olympics merely provide a uniquely public and unavoidable demonstration of the world, and the country, we have become."