Boycotting the Olympics - by that I mean the athletes of a particular nation boycotting, not just the citizens - is a time-honored tradition. After all, the boycotts in the '80s are what ended the Cold War. (I think the Care Bears may have helped.) Somehow, the threat of keeping whoever passes for Tara Lipinski these days out of the games just whips those rogue nations into shape.
By extension, the average joes of the western world deciding to stay home and watch it on NBC (or whichever network has the unfortunate responsibility to bump their well-crafted and cutting-edge sitcoms and dramas
for a bunch of generally unattractive people in spandex) is surely such a dire threat to the oppressors that they'll quail in the face of our firm, couch-planted buttocks, or at least will rethink their policy of blowing up monks whose entire lives are focused on their own deaths anyway.
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In all honesty: If I'd bought tickets, I would have shredded them the instant the protests turned bloody. I thoroughly encourage everyone in the galaxy to boycott the games this year. I just don't necessarily think it will have any actual effect, no matter the economic consequences.
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