Refusing to award the Olympics to countries that don't have excellent human-rights records is political. But it's a better way of doing politics than the way the IOC has chosen.

So I guess we'd then have to retroactively remove the Olympics from Athens, Sydney, Atlanta, Barcelona, Seoul, L.A., Moscow ..... stop me when I get to the name of a city that is in a country with an "excellent human-rights record".

I'm old enough to have clear memories of all of those games. I'm old enough to remember the political palaver that went on in advance of all of them. And I'm old enough to remember that when the athletes started walking in all of that nonsense disappeared, even if only for a moment.

I was lucky enough to be in the stadium in Sydney -- in Australia, with its appalling record of Aboriginal human rights -- when the Korean teams walked in (as they do) together; when the tiny East Timor team enjoyed its very first games.

We clapped our hands red. There wasn't a dry eye in the house. Midnight Oil wore their "Sorry" suits, and a murmuring became a national dialogue.

So here's my prediction: there'll be lots of chatter, ranging from the excellent (Parag Khanna, today, in the Guardian) to the idiotic (Ted Kerasote, yesterday, on Salon), but the games will go ahead, and they'll be pretty good, and for a brief moment we'll forget about all the stupid politics and marvel at what could be, rather than what is.

Is the strongest memory of 1936 Hitler, or Jesse Owens?

I'm as cynical about the triumphalism of the Olympics as the next guy, but there is absolutely no doubt that it succeeds in having us see the "other guys" as just human beings, and makes us squirm about our own failings of humanity.

And that goes double for the host country.

The 1989 massacre on Beijing's Tiananmen Square, when the party's tanks mowed down peaceful demonstrators...

Not even the extremely credible western journalists who were present and reported on the incident in detail gave the demonstrators as clean a slate as this. Beating policemen to death is "peaceful" is it?

Of course, it's a much "cleaner" and easier to understand narrative to cast the Chinese government as the absolute aggressor of Tian'anmen -- but to do so simply ignores the public record. If they wanted to mow down peaceful demonstrators, why did they wait so long? Why did they send so many representatives?

Why didn't, to put it in terms that even Der Spiegel's emotive journalists might understand, "Tank Driver" simply drive over "Tank Man"? That image is one of extraordinary courage, but it's also one of extraordinary restraint.

And so, as always with Der Spiegel, the ancient legal precept applies: if you blur and willfully misreport the small details (we call that "lying" outside the courtroom) why should any reader believe the conclusions you draw?

False in one thing, false in everything.

I wonder if the author has ever watched a wildlife documentary? One with wolves "cruelly" separating a young animal from the herd, running it into the ground (its eyes wild, its nostrils flaring with terror) and then eating it alive, utterly immune to its cries of pain?

Not the same thing? Are humans not animals, then?

I wonder if the author is aware that most Chinese that I have spoken to about the topic view the American practice of shipping grandma and grandpa off to a nursing home at their most vulnerable time, to die surrounded by indifferent strangers, as utterly barbaric and unfeeling?

Not the same thing? I love you, Mom, but not enough to care for you like you cared for me. It's just not _convenient_. This is more "humane" than eating a dog?

I wonder if the author would deny drugs to his children, if said drugs had been tested or developed using animals?

Not the same thing? So there's a calculus of animal suffering?

"Human" and therefore "humane" is quite simply a bigger and more complex beast than simply "the stuff that Ted Kerasote feels comfortable with".

Animals of all kinds have been food for the entirety of human history. Which doesn't make it right. Which doesn't make it not cruel. But it does make it a complex issue that is intertwined deeply with who we are as tribal, cultural, regional, social human beings. Your barbarity is my normality, and vice versa.

It is a complex issue that is not served by this inaccurate, sexed-up "one anecdote and a bunch of guesswork" article. Really, this is an amazingly low-rent attempt to tie diet preferences -- and Ted Kerasote's personal beliefs about them -- to the Olympics (I mean, really, could any two things be _less_ connected?!).