Looking at the first few posts, it is pleasingly clear that sport represents an important piece of TAC’s mental furniture. I’d like, therefore, to point to Gideon Rachman’s article in today’s FT about the fuss over the Beijing Olympics. He makes a good point:

Any western effort to ‘disrupt’ the Olympics would play into the hands of the most paranoid and nationalistic elements in Chinese society. It would be used to validate a self-pitying narrative, in which the west is constantly out to thwart and humiliate China.

As Rachman has written before, the mistake was to honor China—an obviously creepy and reactionary regime—with the games in the first place. Now that blunder has been made, it seems reckless and hysterical to try to shame the Chinese by noisily denouncing their “tyranny” over Tibet or Darfur.

I should disclose a bias. In recent weeks, my Sunday lie-in has been disrupted by loud protests outside the Chinese embassy here in Washington.