It’s 6.30 a.m. on a late summer morning in Paris. Amid the rumbling coming from the Stalingrad Métro station, in the northeast of the French capital, hundreds of migrants, mostly men, sleep crammed under an overpass. Some rest on pieces of cardboard and old mattresses behind a urine-doused fence, ot...
It used to be something good back in ancient Greece, before we had the need to make a supershow out of fucking everything and each time trying to one up the last in pyrotechnics and gimmicks
Even as a kid i didn't really get it. I liked to watch the best off they showed on tv or when someone broke a world record or something. I thought that's what the Olympics are. Then one day my friend asked me if i wanted to watch the winter Olympics and i was excited. Just to sit there for hours just watching the most boring thing i have ever seen. And that was before i even knew about the steroid hypocrisy and uow scummy it is
Ah yes, the glorious Olympics tradition continues of host countries proudly jerking themselves off while spending insane amounts of money.
"Look at us while we jerk our selves off. Ignore the fact that we are completely making life harder for marginalized communities to be able to build these one time use stadiums and lodgings that may or may not be used to house people."
Way more than thousands, given the widespread economic effects on the victim hosting country.
Speaking as a Greek, 20 years later there are literally still multiple abandoned world-class sporting facilities, unused, in maximum disrepair.
Some like the one outside my town never used even once (Olympics included), after millions of euro spent.
I hope the homeless can use it for shelter at least, though it's in a pretty inconvenient spot anyway.
I felt like putting millions at first, but thought a bunch of people might try to argue with me, so I thought, no one can deny it fucks over thousands of people at least.
The Olympics are a great way to help build unity and promote friendly competition between otherwise adversarial nations. In theory. In practice it's an economic dick-measuring contest and a way for authoritarian shitholes to get good PR.
I was living in Vancouver at the time, it was kind of surreal. Now I’m living in one of the northern towns they shipped them to… it’s surreal in a different way.
I'm from Vancouver, and the way the homeless were treated pre Olympics was, if you'll pardon the language, a goddamn fucking disgrace. Only a bit worse than the rest of the time, to be fair, but it really solidified my dislike of the systems in place there.
In spite of the government’s denial of any connection to the Olympics, which Paris will host in the summer of 2024, some non-governmental organizations and elected officials believe the Games are part of the reason why this relocation plan has been recently activated.
He now has a full-time job in Paris but, even after so many years in the city, he has not been able to find permanent accommodation, largely due to extremely high rental costs in the capital and very limited availability of more affordable social housing.
Ahead of next year’s Olympic Games, hotels in Paris have started canceling their emergency housing contracts with the government to make space for the expected influx of tourists, according to Paul Alauzy from Medecins Du Monde, an NGO that works with homeless migrants.
In a televised interview Sunday, French President Emmanuel Macron insisted France was doing its part to help the migrants that arrive on Europe’s shores, spending, among other things, around 2 billion euros each year on emergency accommodation for homeless people.
“The approach of major sporting events – firstly, to a lesser extent, the Rugby World Cup in 2023, and then the Olympic Games in 2024 – means that we have to think ahead and anticipate the situation, thanks to a policy of de-cluttering,” he said.
Manzi, of Utopia 56, thinks the relocation effort could be a good idea in principle, but says the problem is that the regional shelters will only house people for three weeks, according to the cities tasked with hosting them, and what happens after that remains uncertain.
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This isn’t as disastrous as it sounds, even if it still sucks. France has social services capable of handling this, but the problem is that it dumps these folks on smaller towns where they probably have lost whatever meager social networks and support they might have built in Paris, and will probably face little welcome where they end up.
They do this stuff in the US to punt the homeless out of wherever, send them wherever, and where they land has no social services for them when they get there. Then that municipality gets tired of it and evicts them to the next place.