At City of God, Dan repsonded to my comment on his post on Olympic Oppression at City of God.  Here is correspondence between us:

You really didn’t bother to read my post. First of all, I don’t know what would make me a “new Pharisee” and therefore I very much doubt I can speak intelligibly about one. What I said I found troubling about the Olympics is how we are all expected to derive some noble sentiment from them how Canada as a nation was supposed to “come together” and support the games. Being critical about something like that may hardly have anything to do with envy. Accusing the poor of envy does not provide the rich with anything more than an ad hominem attack. Calling someone envious is almost as sneaky an attack as calling your opponent “defensive.”

Dan,

I did read your post several times. Originally, after hurriedly writing my comment, I wondered whether I’d unfairly lumped you with the new Pharisees. But I see from your comment that it was probably fair, at least to certain degree. For you accept uncritically the argument that the Vancouver Olympics were a just a big party for the rich. You add in fact to that argument by mentioning the price of hockey tickets. Of course, Maple Leaf tickets and Raptor tickets are also very expensive. Does that make the NHL or the NBA a party for the rich? Should the funding that goes into these sports be spent on the poor instead? Let’s be consistent. Certainly the sins of professional sports are greater than that of the Olympics, because they do their gig every year, week after week, and not just every two years. Maple Leaf gardens, the SkyDome, and Air Canada Centre take up an inordinate amount of space in downtown Toronto that the Federal government and evil Stephen Harper should use to build low-cost housing for the poor and homeless which number nearly 10 times the homeless of Vancouver!

The first definition of envy according Webster’s is (11th ed.): “painful or resentful awareness of an advantage enjoyed by another joined with a desire to possess the same advantage.” This perfectly sums up the protesters’ complaint: they resent the Olympics; it is being done to their detriment and to the advantage of the rich; the money should have been spent on them instead so that they can have housing and adequate support. This is an unadulterated case of class envy. The community organizers like Diewert and Oudshoorn contribute by stirring up and adding legitimacy to the envy of the poor; it doesn’t usually take much to get that emotion stirred up after all. And once stirred up, it doesn’t take much more before it leads to vandalism, theft, and eventually in certain cases, to murder, which too often happens when the masses rise up and murder those that those that they believe to have wronged them. The most recent example that I can come up with off the top of my head is the Rwandan genocide, where the Hutus were stirred up to murder as many as a million Tutsis (a less dramatic example would be the recent anti-Kikuyu riots in Kenya)–if the mass murder doesn’t happen here in Canada, it’s because the envious poor and their organizers are still a relatively insignificant proportion of the population. But it seems that the number of sympathizers is growing.

So you start with the premise that is based upon envy. It is this notion that the Olympics are done for the sole benefit of the rich for their own selfish pleasure all others be damned; it is an unfair assessment of the Olympics which is full of envy. Many people benefit from the Olympics, not simply the rich, but every poor schlub who got a job providing security or hammering a nail (who managed to show up for work not wasted), First-Nation owned businesses, vendors selling hot dogs, my chiropractor, my sister who rented out her condo at Whistler, the athletes (they’re not rich are they?), and many others.

And nobody, not even one person, ever told me that if I wanted to be a good Canadian, I had to somehow cheer for the Olympics. I didn’t follow the events on TV but only heard about the news through newspaper reports or third hand. So I am a neutral and indifferent observer with regard to the Olympics.