Invitation to a beheading
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
11:59PM - Getting psuched
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 18. High today: 24. Pearson recorded thunderstorms for four straight hours tonight.
If the Greek letter upsilon had always been transliterated into English as "u", as is now the convention, instead of "y", then the Olympics would be the Olumpics.
creakyMonday, July 21, 2008
11:59PM - The humid condition
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 20. High today: 25.
The stationary front that won't go away is still with us, or near us, undecided about leaving us. It rained out my softball game yesterday (BOOOO!), and has kept the temperature pretty tightly between 19 and 25, but mostly about 21, since Saturday. From 1 to 2 this afternoon, the dewpoint dropped from 18 to 14, but then jogged back up to 16; at the Island, it's back to 17, which is as high as it's been in the last 24.
Today, instead of beating on the weather gerbils, and since we have agreed not to do any baseball blogging for a while, let's beat on the baseball bloggers! Jordan Bastian, the Jays reporter and blogger for mlb.com, posted today: "It is stinkin' hot here in Baltimore. It's about as hot temperature-wise as it was in Florida, but here you feel like you're just wearing the weather. The humidity is unbelievable and this outdoor pressbox is like a sauna." So, you know, the claim that it's more humid in Baltimore today than it was in St. Petersburg yesterday sounds a little suspicious to me--could be, but probably not. Sure enough: at 6:54 today in Baltimore (13 minutes after he made his blog post), the temperature was 91F and the dewpoint was 62 (That's, like, 33C and 17.) At 6:53 yesterday in St. Petersburg, the temperature was 89 and the dewpoint was 72. (32 and 22.) So, yeah, pretty substantial difference in humidity--but substantially more humid in Florida.
Why does he think it's more humid in Baltimore? One obvious possible reason: baseball people love to talk about how humid it is in Baltimore, but not in St. Petersburg, because in St. Petersburg they play in a dome. Everyone knows it's humid in Baltimore, but everyone does not know it's humid in St. Petersburg. Interestingly, everyone also knows that balls carry well in the heavy air of Baltimore, and also that balls carry well in the light air of Denver, which is a Scientific Fact.
Actually, humid air is lighter than dry air, and that's also a Scientific Fact. You Could Look It Up.
uncertainWednesday, July 16, 2008
11:59PM - The following is a live presentation of CBC Sports ... in high definition!
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 24. High today: 31.
There's a ragged, broken-down cold front lying across southern Ontario, but it's only really evident if you look closely at the numbers, or if you look at the Weather Network's systems map, which I did because what happened to the numbers this afternoon was so screwy. The dewpoint at Pearson marched up steadily from 9 at 1 last night to 20 at 3 this afternoon, and then crashed back to 16 at 4 (with the wind swinging from SSE to NW), despite the temperature going up from 28 at 3 to 31 at 4. This made me suspicious because the dewpoint didn't drop at all at the Island, Waterloo, or Hamilton. But in Peterborough, from 1 to 4 this afternoon, it lost two degrees per hour, and at Lake Simcoe airport it dropped from 18 at 11 a.m. to 10 at 3 p.m. Now, tonight, between 8 and 11, it dropped from 20 to 14 in London--but it's only down to 18 in Waterloo, and while it's gotten down to 16 at the Island, it's been as low as 12 at Pearson. Peterborough, with the front well to the south, now has a temperature of 15, but a dewpoint one degree higher than Pearson's at 14. So, this is all a fascinating example of how ragged fronts can be in reality, as opposed to those nice clean blue lines on the weather maps.
More poking around on inflation reveals something pretty funny: since 1992 (and this effect is only evident since then), the CPI in the US has dropped between November and December in 11 years, stayed the same in four years, and risen once. Looks like maybe "seasonally adjusted" should be adjusted to account for Christmas sales.
I know, I know, baseball baseball baseball, but I have been meaning to say, and it must be said, and I am a bit surprised that no one on the world wide interwebs seems to have ever said it: DOESN"T ANDY PETTITE LOOK LIKE SNOOPY-VULTURE when he's peering in for the sign, especially from the stretch when he shoves his glove into his nose and it looks like a big long nose?
One more thing from the All-Star Game: somebody sometime said that A-Rod is the best player in the game, but Pujols is the best hitter in the game. This assumes that A-Rod is sufficiently superior to Pujols in some combination of defence and speed to make A-Rod an all-around better player. So, let's try to get speed out of the way first: A-Rod has 13 stolen bases this year; Pujols has 3. OK, no contest there. But A-Rod hasn't stolen more than 30 bases since 1998, and since 2004, A-Rod has four triples, while Pujols has six. A-Rod hasn't tripled since 2006, hasn't had more than one since 2004, which is really pretty amazing for a guy who's supposed to be fast, and especially for a guy who's supposed to be fast and who a) hits a lot of balls hard to right field, and b) has a home park with some of the longest power-alleys in baseball.
Having concluded that A-Rod is maybe a bit faster than Pujols and anyway a significantly better base-stealer but not in a way that would be particularly noteworthy if he didn't also hit a lot of home runs, let's look at fielding. A-Rod has had a below-average range factor every year since he's been a third baseman--remarkable for a converted shortstop, especially a converted shortstop who usually had an above-average range factor as a shortstop, and of course it goes to show how ridiculous it was to move A-Rod to third instead of moving Jeter to second, which Jeter would have happily done if he was the god among men that the Jeter Cult insists only bad people fail to recognize him as. But I digress. On the other hand, his fielding percentage has been a bit above average as a third baseman, which is also pretty amazing when you consider the case of yips he developed a couple of years ago that seemed to threaten to make him a DH for the rest of his career. Pujols, on the other hand, utterly destroys the average range factor for NL first basemen, year after year, with a slightly above-average fielding percentage. Of course, you can argue that third base is a more demanding position--it certainly is a position from which you can make more throwing errors--but look, the first baseman is involved in just about every infield ground ball in play, and even if missed scoops don't show up as errors, made scoops do show up in range factor. And if you want to say first basemen don't have to throw the ball, well, then, throwing is the thing that A-Rod is absolutely worst at, so, what?
So: A-Rod has a small but significant advantage in speed; Pujols blows A-Rod away in defence. Not only does A-Rod not have the speed and defence to make up the difference between his .972 OPS and Pujols's 1.074 this year (.312 BA vs. .350! 33/58 BB/K vs. 61/30!); A-Rod's speed and defence combined leave him further behind. QED!
And with one more reminder to HELP PROPAGATE THE CURSE OF YANKEE STADIUM, I am going to attempt to put my budding career as a baseball blogger on hiatus for a few weeks. A few days. Something.
Oh yeah, also: that thing Ryan Dempster does with his glove, twisting it back and forth, that is the weirdest thing I have ever seen a pitcher do with his glove.
That is all.
rushedTuesday, July 15, 2008
10:19PM - Jesse Barfield saved my swing
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 24, for the seventh hour in the last eight. High today: 25, in the eighth.
I was incredulous when loooooong-swingin' Jesse Barfield, the master of the strikeout on the low-and-away slider, became hitting coach of the Mariners. I have been irritated this year by the Jesse and Rance Talk About Hitting show that has used Jays games as its backdrop on CBC this year. But somewhere through all the gibberish and self-contradiction, something about staying closed and clearing your hips and I don't even know what anymore finally got through to me on Sunday, and I hit some balls impressively for the first time since, well, years ago. Thanks, Jesse!
When I was a kid, I sometimes imagined Jesse Barfield running the bases naked. Only Jesse Barfield. I do not know why. (FLAG FOR ADULT CONTENT Y/N)
Which reminds me that the other day I uttered the phrase "belly button plug" and L. said that was not sexy and I said I was not sure and that if I had a fancy livejournal I would make a poll as to whether "belly button plug" is sexy or not.
Anyway, I had to drop by this relatively early evening to say how touched I was when they wheeled Steinbrenner into Yankee Stadium before the All-Star Game tonight. That old man must be so sad that his team has to move out of his fabulous magical beautiful stadium because it is being eaten by termites.
That's why they have to move, right? The stadium is being eaten by termites? That is my understanding. So sad.
ADDENDUM I: Lidged! As soon as Lidge came in the game, I knew, if anybody can put an end to this game, and I don't care what shiny numbers he's got this year, it's Brad Lidge.
I was kind of abstractly hoping that they would run out of players, firstly because it would be awesome if Yankee Stadium spat out this stupid monstrosity of a game (which, despite its stupid monstrousness, was actually pretty awesome, the best one I've seen in years and years), and secondly because it would show up the irresponsible way Francona ran the game. But viscerally, dammit, I didn't want my game to be embarrassed, AGAIN.
ADDENDUM II: You know what there needs to be? THE CURSE OF YANKEE STADIUM. Do you know when the original agreement to build "New Yankee Stadium" was reached, Mandrake? Two thousand and one. How does that coincide with your post-20th-century World Series championship drought?
uncertainTuesday, July 8, 2008
11:59PM - As a matter of fact, it is the nicest hat I have ever known
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 23: High today: 31. Close to the most rain I've ever seen in an hour around 7:30-8:30 tonight, complete with lightning strike across the street that I felt in my left ear for a few minutes.
I think we're ready to name the official Stupid Weather Gerbil Trick of the season: "Lake-breeze fronts". All thunderstorms are now caused by lake-breeze fronts, or else lake-breeze convergence zones if yer exter-fancy. Nothin' like a little learnin'. More of the same old same old: last week a weather gerbil reported it was "muggy" with the dewpoint at 10, and another said it was "humid" with the dewpoint at 14. I don't think there's any doubt that there's a significant correlation between sun intensity and people believing that it's humid: sun makes people hot, which makes them sweat, which makes them believe it's humid. The interesting question is, is there a stronger correlation between sun intensity and people believing it's humid, or humidity and people believing it's humid?
I wonder how long my enthrallment with StatsCan reports will continue. Anyway, last Friday, StatsCan put its monthly petroleum products sales report. Sales of gasoline were in fact down 3.2% between May 2007 and May 2008. That breaks a string of 13 months of year-over-year increases. Clicking through the "previous month" links takes you back to the report for December 2005; early in that 2.5-year period, gas sales were mostly declining.
An oddity from the GDP report from the end of June: GDP for the Canadian "mining and oil and gas extraction" sector was down 4% in April over April of 2007; it's declined in all but one month since November. Fastest-growing sector of the Canadian economy, April 2007 to April 2008: "accommodation and food services", at 6.9%.
Since "stagflation" is now in vogue and annoying me, yesterday I decided to see if the internets would confirm my impression that, when I was a kid, inflation was way the hell higher not only than it is now, but also than the numbers in what are supposed to be scary forecasts now. Inflation in the US, anyway, was indeed running above 10% from about 1979 to 1982 or 1983. What's really fascinating, though, is this: I guess it shouldn't be surprising when you think about it, but it's amazing to see not only the giant spikes of inflation, but also the big spikes of deflation, all the way up to the middle of the 20th century. Kind of makes you think that maybe the people running the economy do actually have some idea what they're doing--or maybe it's just that larger systems produce more consistent results.
There was a headline on the front page of the Star the other day saying "Ontario economy nosedives"--GDP contracted 0.3% in the first quarter of 2008. Imagine that! We're now as poor as we were IN THE MIDDLE OF LAST YEAR!
I've just seen that Jack Layton, or at least the NDP, following up the smashing success of his campaign to eliminate ATM fees, is now running a petition against Bell's and Telus's announced plans to charge for incoming text messages. (And I gotta say: they sure didn't leave Rogers squirming on the hook over the iphone business very long. Then again, today's story in the Globe was about how lots of Apple lunatics were probably going to sign up for the iphone plan anyway, so maybe that had already run its course. In any event, I'm thinking that maybe expensive iphones with expensive iphone plans are like Rolexes or whatever: being expensive is a feature, not a bug.) I was about to issue my usual complaint about treating corporations like political rulers, when it struck me: the weird thing isn't petitioning corporations; the weird thing is petitioning representative democratic governments. A petition, after all, is something that loyal but unhappy subjects send to the king, to let him know that the people are unhappy, since they don't get to express their unhappiness by electing a new one, and they're not motivated to overthrow him.
Petitioning corporations is a fitting expression of the acquiescence of their loyal but unhappy subjects.
And: I have managed to pick up another course at another school, thereby nearly doubling my projected income for the next year. Assuming no repeat of last year's shenanigans, this is definitely progress.
thirstyMonday, June 30, 2008
11:59PM - PRESIDENT BUSH HAVE A HOTDOG WITH ME
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 18. High today: 22.
After a lot of soul-searching, I have informed management that I will not be waiving my no-movement clause, because my heart is here in Toronto with the team that wishes I'd go away. Which reminds me that Roy Halladay is a Mormon, and thinks he makes too much money. Like Mats, Roy doesn't say much. Actually, Roy says even less than Mats, and since he became a Grizzled Veteran, he usually seems a bit grouchy. But I think I may someday love Roy as much as I love Mats. Come to think of it, actually, Roy Halladay is the only individual player I have ever bought a ticket specifically to see--his last start of his Cy Young season. Payin' homage to the jeen-yus, man.
Further to the question How Poor Are We, Anyway?: I was walking up past the big old highschool (Central Tech?) at Bathurst and Harbord the other night, seeing how that thing is built like a castle, thinking how--I guess--you couldn't build a highschool that expensive today ... and why is that, anyway? (This is in the same ballpark as questions like, why is it we could do things like build subways four or five decades ago, but massive public works projects seem impossible today? And: why have train stations gotten progressively, and drastically, uglier over the last century? Actually, my favourite recently gathered example of this kind of thing is the beautiful old room at U of T, with little gothic hand-carved faces around the windows and stuff, which has a screen attached to an unfinished two-by-six bolted to the wall above the blackboard. But then, it's hard to tell whether that's not having any money or not giving a damn. But then again, not giving a damn and not having the money really aren't two different things. It's all a matter of what you care enough to spend your money on.) Why is it that we seem to have so much less money for things that we used to have so much money for? Well, because we've got so much other stuff to spend money on, right? (OK, as far as schools go, it's because our governments have so much health care stuff to spend money on. (For American governments, subsitute ... so many stadiums?)) Doesn't it seem like we have so little money because we have so much stuff to spend it on? But how can that be, when, theoretically, ideally, the money supply is supposed to track the supply of real goods--but, actually, these days, the money supply is supposedly outstripping the supply of real goods at a dangerous rate?
For the record, by the way, I e-mailed StatsCan a few months ago and asked why they haven't adjusted the LICO formula in an abnormally long time; they e-mailed me back and said (without elaboration) that it's because they don't think the proportions (i.e., the percentage of average income spent on food, shelter, and clothing) have changed significantly.
On today's episode of Fun with StatsCan, I decided to look up the aboriginal populations of various portions of Canada. I was surprised, or rather shocked, to discover that the are more self-identified aboriginal persons in Ontario than in any other province, and by a fairly wide margin (over B.C.). I was also surprised that "census metropolitan area" with the largest population of self-identified aboriginal persons appears to be Montreal, with about 85 000. Winnipeg appears to be second, with about 76 000. Of course, since there are more than five times as many people overall in Montreal as there are in Winnipeg, Winnipeg blows Montreal away for aboriginals as a percentage of its population, 11.1%, to 2.4%. Toronto has about 26 500, which is about 0.5% of the overall population of just over five million. Edmonton seems to have the third-highest raw number of aboriginal persons, followed by Vancouver--but Vancouver's percentage, at 2.8, is the same as Fredericton's.
I've seen a couple of articles in the Star in the last couple of weeks concerning the fact that although people think they're driving less because of the Exploding Price of Gas, they don't actually seem to be. (Anecdotally, no one I know is driving any less, and this includes people who have negative net worths. But I know a very small sample of people.) It's pretty clear, anyway, that gasoline sales to The Average Driver are not yet in any significant decline. (A couple of weeks ago I was looking at some StatsCan gas sales figures that seemed to indicate a halting decline over the last several years, but they didn't differentiate between business and personal sales. It would stand to reason that higher gas prices would inevitably cut into sales to businesses, which can't afford to have their profits eaten away, but not necessarily to consumers, who are generally irrational.) Which finally prompted me to realize, today, how this really puts the lie to the widespread belief in The Great Gas Price Conspiracy (championed, in these parts, by Dan McTeague, an MP who has basically made a career of Fighting the Gas Price, but who seems, interestingly, to have fallen off the face of the earth during the recent run-up in gas prices). It's now evident that people will pay, oh, 50% more than they were paying when a lot of them were howling about price fixing--so, either the price fixers were complete idiots and used to fix prices way too low (and are probably still fixing the price too low--at any rate, the price of gas still hasn't tested the limits of demand), or the reason the price of gas always goes up and down in lockstep at neighbouring stations really is that profit margins are very slight and competition is extremely fierce.
While I'm waiting to get the Internet Tube back from L., here's something on Good Pitching Beats Good Hitting: last week, I went to a semi-pro game with a friend of mine from highschool, who I last went to a game with at Tiger Stadium in approximately 1994, maybe 1993. (Don Mattingly went 4-for-4, and the Yankees won something like 8-0.) First thing I noticed about these semi-pro players: they seem to average about three inches shorter than major-leaguers. That's always the way in any sport, it seems: NFL players dwarf CFL players; Team Canada towers over Team Germany in international hockey, and so on. What separates the men from the boys is that the men are built like supermen and the boys are built like men. But that's not the thing about Good Pitching Beats Good Hitting, which is, rather, this: my friend said, around the fifth inning, that the score in this game was a lot lower than your standard sandlot baseball game--and I said, that's because these guys are competent. They may not be anywhere near as strong and fast and whatever else as big-leaguers, but they're competent. They know what to do and they're well-practised in doing it. So, the pitchers don't walk the park and innings aren't extended on and on by errors. In baseball, as in hockey (as I was saying around here recently), competence favours the defence; if everybody's incompetent, the hitters just have to stand there with their bats on their shoulders and runs will score, as often happens in little leage games. Which gets me to wondering: are there sports in which competence doesn't favour the defence? I guess basketball is the most obvious one--if everybody's incompetent, nobody ever scores. In North American football, it seems, at first glance, like offenseive and defensive (in)competence would cancel each other out--except that all you need to do to score is hold on to the ball and run straight forward. If ya can't stop the running game, yer toast. So, probably, competence favours the defence there, too.
Anyway, the bottom line about Good Pitching Beats Good Hitting, it seems to me, is that there are conceivable pitches that are so fast or have so much movement (gyroball!) that skill as a hitter couldn't help you to hit them; the only way you could hit them would be to throw the bat out there and hope the pitch hits it in a good place. The question is, how close do actual pitchers and hitters come to that situation? What I can't figure out offhand is whether the question is hopelessly complicated by the fact that a good hitter gets out most of the time against an average pitcher anyway. (There's also the additional complication that a large part of good hitting is guessing what kind of pitch is coming before it's thrown.) Given that, what is the question? One possible question is: are there actual pitchers capable of throwing actual pitches so good that no actual hitter can ever actually hit them? But the answer to that question is: obviously not. So the question has to be something like: are there actual pitchers capable of throwing actual pitches so good that the best actual hitters can only hit them x distance from the sweet spot, with y bat speed, z% of the time? But how could you meaningfully fill in those variables?
tenseTuesday, June 17, 2008
11:59PM - You better start swimmin'
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 11. High today: 17.
Vancouver weather caught up with us, after about the thunderstormiest few days around here I could recall. Yesterday I saw a full horizon-to-horizon double rainbow for the first time probably since I was in highschool, and I saw something I've never seen before: the moon, waxing gibbous, rising from behind a receding cumulonimbus cloud. That was actually shocking: I saw it as a bit of the cloud puffing out, and then it was the moon. Another thing I saw today that I haven't seen in a long time: wild roses blooming, down in the ravine.
So, after only, I dunno, 2.5 years of serious job-hunting, I've made a short list. Not for a tenure-track job, mind you, but it's always good to leave plenty of room for progress. Also not for a Canadian job (which makes it a good thing that it's not for a tenure-track job). I would like to take this opportunity to note that no one is allowed to move (further) away from Seattle until I know that I will not be working there next year.
This is the sort of thing that, you know, should be pleasing. It is in fact pleasing when I think about it abstractly and not concretely. This news naturally comes the day after I've signed my "offer of appointment" for my 0.5 courses at York next year, and finally gotten around to opening an account at the credit union at York. Clearly, if I don't get this job, I just need to step up my measures to entrench myself at York, and then the job offers will come flooding in.
But enough trivia; back to the serious business of whether good pitching beats good hitting and all that. I hypothesized that the success of good-pitching teams at winning pennants and World Series relative to good-htting teams was due to good-pitching teams' generally being better at hitting than good-hitting teams are at pitching. However, the first bit of data I've collected doesn't particularly bear this out. Again using the years 2000-2007, American League leaders in runs scored averaged 5.75th in the league in ERA; AL leaders in ERA averaged 7.125th in runs scored. NL runs-scored leaders averaged 11th in ERA; NL ERA leaders averaged 9.25th in runs scored. So, overall, league leaders in runs scored averaged 8.375th in ERA; league leaders in ERA averaged 8.1875th in runs scored. Essentially the same.
One thing that does stand out from these numbers: teams that lead the AL in ERA or runs scored are usually aren't worse than mediocre in the other category; teams that lead the NL in ERA or runs scored are often lousy on the other side. This seems mostly attributable to two things: first, nobody dominates the NL like the Yankees and Red Sox (and, for one year, Mariners) have dominated the AL (although the Braves and Cardinals have done it for short spurts), and second, the NL has had three teams--Colorado, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati--with stats skewed in favour of offense by their home ballparks. Those three NL teams led the league in runs scored in five of the eight years, and finished no better than 11th in ERA; twice they finished 16th and last. Where the AL ERA leader's runs scored dips into the lower half of the league, it's generally Oakland, who play in what seems to be easily the most pitcher-friendly park in the AL (though it's still not as pitcher-friendly as San Diego, which accounts for a couple of the NL ERA leaders' lower-tier runs-scored placings).
To be continued! (Which of course signals that you will never hear anything about this from me again.)
queasyFriday, June 13, 2008
1:16PM - Old saws
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 24. Going up to 30 or so. Gained nine degrees of dewpoint in the last nine hours.
Today's Special Matinée Edition is prompted by an article in the Journal for the Philosophy of Sports arguing that "good pitching beats good hitting" is a meaningless proposition. (I shit you not.) Basically, the idea is it's meaningless because good pitching and good hitting are relative to each other. Anyway, like any good progressive right-thinking 21st-century baseball fan, I regard this as an empirical question to be decided based on statistics provided by baseball-reference.com. (Someday I might get around to justifying this view.) Here are the results of my preliminary investigations:
In the major league seasons of 2000 through 2007, eventual league-leaders in runs scored played eventual league-leaders in ERA 135 times. (Note 1: This may be fewer than you'd expect, due to the fact that hitting and pitching leaders usually don't come from the same division--in fact, in the period under study, it happened twice: 2007 Yankees and Red Sox, and 2005 Reds and Cardinals.) (Note 2: For the 2001 AL, I used the 2nd-place runs-scored and ERA teams, because the 116-win Mariners led the league in both.) The head-to-head records of the eventual ERA leaders against the eventual runs-scored leaders in those 135 games is 68-67. Throw out the 2005 Cardinals' 11-5 record against the Reds, and the ERA leaders' record is 57-62. Runs-scored leaders won 8 season series against ERA leaders; ERA leaders won 7, with one tie.
However: AL champions from 2000 through 2007 placed an average of 4.5th in the league in runs scored, and 2.5th in ERA. (The last three AL champions in a row have led the league in ERA, and the last champion to finish worse than 3rd in ERA was the 2000 Yankees. Only one champion in the period, the 2004 Red Sox, led the league in runs scored.) For NL champions, the numbers are 5.125 and 4.375. (The 2004 Cardinals were the only runs-scored leaders to win the pennant, but there were no ERA-leading pennant-winners, and the 2003, 2007, and 2006 champions were 7th, 8th, and 9th in ERA.) Overall, league champions placed an average of 4.8125th in their leagues in runs scored, and 3.4375th in ERA. World Series winners finished an average of 5th and 3.875th in their leagues.
So, preliminary conclusion: the old baseball saw that good pitching beats good hitting isn't particularly true, but the old hockey and football saw that defence wins championships seems to be true for baseball.
apprehensiveTuesday, June 10, 2008
11:59PM - without grandeur or self-deception in noble struggle of being a fool
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 17. High today: 23. Up to 33 or somesuch yesterday. Coming back from Vancouver was like leaving Canada for the tropics.
I thought I might invert tradition this year and interrupt a long stretch of not posting with a stretch of posting from Congress (né Learneds). No such luck.
In Vancouver, L. saw her first beaver, I saw my first seal, and we both saw our first naked hippies. The beaver was resolutely attempting to stop up the outflow grate from the marsh it lives in, which is called Beaver Lake, which is fortunately only half a misnomer and not a complete misnomer as we judged at first glance. It was yanking out lily pads by the roots and plastering them with mud against the grate, over and over and over, while we, and a few other passersby, stood there a few feet away and watched and smiled. (Surprisingly, telling this story to people has elicited at least a couple of reactions to the effect that beavers are nasty and vicious animals. Having been acquainted at a distance with at least a couple of beavers over the course of a number of years, I'd have to say that, in my experience, beavers are most interested in staying the hell away from people--so the complete nonchalance of this beaver in Beaver Lake was also quite surprising.)
Let me tell you something: you might think that you're not interested in totem poles, but being up close to the old massive woodiness of a totem pole (by which I don't mean the new and often brightly painted ones that you see here and there around Vancouver, but the old raw wood ones they have in the UBC Museum of Anthropology), you might find that it's really quite striking.
Vancouver after Saskatoon last year and coming from Toronto was very interesting in this respect: there is an aboriginal presence around Vancouver, as there is not in Toronto, which is very different from the aboriginal presence around Saskatoon (where, at a glance, there are more aboriginal people). In Saskatoon, the sense I got, and this is the sense you get about aboriginal people in Ontario, is that the aboriginals are a social problem: they're poor, many are addicted, they're living the legacy of oppression, carrying historical grievances. Around Vancouver, the sense is not so much of a poor and broken class and more of a culture interrupted. I guess, but I don't know, that this may be simply because there was a concentration of a particular kind of culture around southern BC--totem carving and potlatch. So there's this revival of West Coast aboriginal culture that started in the '60s or so. I have no idea how strong it is, but it's there. One thing I wonder about this as I'm walking around the Museum of Anthropology: the earliest totem poles they have are from the mid-19th century. So when did they start totem carving? ("Eskimo carving", I have heard, was a 20th-century invention. I've read that the southwestern peyote religion is only a century or two old.) Of course, wood is a perishable medium, especially when it's outdoors, but I wonder. And I wonder what it would be for, say, me to "revive my culture".
Every time I've gone into used bookstore in the last few years, I've looked for books by Al Purdy with either "Wilderness Gothic" or "The Country North of Belleville" in them. There was a Purdy book once, in The Bookstore Beside the World's Biggest Bookstore, but it didn't have those poems. In Vancouver, we went into three used bookstores, and the second had Wild Grape Wine, which has "Wilderness Gothic", and the third had Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets, which is a greatest hits book and has both (and was a "Canada Reads" selection in 2006, which makes it kind of surprising that I hadn't come across it in a used bookstore before), and also "At the Quinte Hotel", which the Tragically Hip made a video of--you might know it as the "for I am a sensitive man" poem. At the bookstore where I bought Wild Grape Wine--which was a hardcover (a "first edition", you'd say, come to think of it) and $15, which may be the most I've ever paid for a used book for myself--the guy behind the counter was talking with another guy about soccer (which people didn't used to to do in Canada, but now they do), and when I paid for the book he said he was glad that people were still reading Al Purdy, and did I know that Purdy lived in Vancouver for a while, and when Purdy lived in Vancouver he came in to this shop and gave this guy his card which said "Al Purdy, Bookseller", and that Purdy hoped that this would get him a discount. As L. and I were leaving, he was telling the other guy that the last time Purdy came in to the shop, he was with Steven Reid (or something like that--the famous Canadian criminal, bank robber or something).
The most impressive thing upon our arrival at UBC was the flowers--so many different colours of flowers, mostly flowering from two or three different kinds of bushes. And then a funny thing happened: after a couple of days of rushing back and forth between sessions of two different conferences, I realized that the flowers had disappeared, and I wondered if it was the flowers or me, and then in the last couple of days when the rushing stopped, the flowers reappeared.
I think the most amusing moment of my week--apart from the beaver, I mean--was when Gad Horowitz told me that I should be careful because I was sounding like Leo Strauss. "Oh, I'm quite conscious of that," I said. (In that particular paper, I was even consciously writing in the style of Strauss--although not reading it that way, which meant reading it with some "and"s and "but"s and "because of this"s thrown in. In Strauss's oracular style, every sentence is made to stand on its own, as if prepared to be read in fragments, like the pre-Socratics. Heidegger also writes that way.) The next morning I ran into someone lost on the road who wanted to go where I was heading, and along the way he told me--because I told him that I was giving a paper on the Charmides--that he had been Allan Bloom's TA at U of Toronto in the '70s when Bloom was "on the run from the black students union at Cornell". He said that Bloom chain-smoked in class and the students loved him although Bloom thought the students were all idiots.
This is the first year that I'm encountering people who have heard of me. I don't know where we're going, but maybe we're getting there. One thing that became apparent to me last week is that I am learning the steps of Plato well and the dance is joyful. (Of course there are those who think the dance is all wrong, but that's joyful too. Once you're really dancing, everything is joyful, getting knocked down and dancing on your back is joyful, and there are those who think your dance is all wrong but love it anyway because it's joyful, like the greybeard who grinned all the way through my Charmides paper.) Meanwhile, back on the ranch, word arrived that two more little job possibilities for next year were closed off. It's looking a lot like another year in the wilderness with one half course and a four-figure academic employment income, but who knows. The next six weeks, I'm bookifying my dissertation. I'm not sure whether this means you'll be seeing more of me or not.
okayTuesday, May 27, 2008
12:59PM - Let me through I got here late!
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 4. High today: 13. Which is 14 degrees off yesterday's high. We still have not had as many days over 20 in May as we had in April. Could be frost on the pumpkin seedlings back in KW tonight.
Now that I have mostly forgotten about everything I was meaning to say, it's safe to start over. Actually, I only just popped in to say that L. was reading me some quotes from Leon Kass tonight, and I came to one of those realizations which suddenly explain things and seem so obvious that they make you wonder why you never had them before and whether this really is a realization or something you actually knew all along anyway, namely this: the reason that I have been trying and failing to be a conservative (by which I mean a conservative and none of the several varieties of liberals currently passing for conservatives) the last several years is that I'm inclined to agree with the diagnoses but find the cures worse than the diseases.
(But this is just another way of saying that my most basic inclination is the most basic liberal inclination: the right trumps the good, procedure trumps substance--left to their own devices, people will generally screw up their lives and be unhappy, but they ought to be left to their own devices anyway. (Though some of my opposition to conservative cures comes out of a more deeply conservative attitude that there's not a damn thing you can actually do about it anyway.))
You might also like to know that among the 24 "census metropolitan areas" for which StatsCan has consistent numbers, the median distance commuted to work increased in 19 between 1996 and 2006, decreased in four (Saint John, Montreal, Vancouver, and Victoria), and stayed the same in one (Winnipeg). In the Toronto CMA (roughly co-extensive with what is now popularly known as the GTA), the median commuting distance rose from 9.3 km to 9.4.
Last week, when the Globe reported on StatsCan's inflation report for April (which had food at 0.5%, compared to 1.8% overall), I discovered that you can't do anything about the people who believe that food prices are skyrocketing (such as the idiots on the Globe idiot board) because they believe there is a Massive Conspiracy to cover up the true rate of inflation, which is actually somewhere around 10% or higher.
Oh yeah, one thing I was going to talk about was the Two Days' Hate we had around here when the TTC union threw an unexpected fit of unionism, rejected its tentative agreement, and went on strike. I mean, the hate--it was astonishing. I eagerly await the next garbage strike. But what particularly gets me is this: what you heard in the hating (and still hear; as I found at my nephew's first birthday party last week, you can still hear the hate echoing) was that if the bus drivers want to be paid more, they should quit being such jerks. (Slightly related, my favourite signpost from the strike: the graffito, a picture of which appeared in the Star, spraypainted on the closed doors of a subway station, reading "IF YOU WANT $30/HR GO TO UNIVERSITY!". I also enjoyed the smashed windows in the emergency subway exit down in the ravine. THAT'LL SHOW 'EM!) Now, this is such a conventional bit of conventional wisdom--I should say, it somehow, sometime, became such a bit of conventional wisdom; it didn't used to be and I don't know when exactly it happened--that it took me a while to realize that, actually, I have been a periodically regular TTC user for many of the last twenty years, and if a driver has ever been a jerk to me, I don't remember it. What has made an impression on me is my fellow passengers being jerks, all the damn time, if not directly to the drivers, then at least on the busses and trains where their jerkishness is the driver's problem.
AND ANOTHER THING that reminds me of: cognitive dissonance. One reason people think the drivers are jerks is that the drivers fail to stop and wait for them when they're running toward the bus as it's pulling away. (A funny thing about this is that bus drivers often do start away, see people coming, stop, open the doors and let them on, and then pull away again, leaving behind new stragglers who are now angry that the jerks never stop and wait.) But something that people like to complain about about public transit generally is busses clumping together. Now, busses clumping together is going to tend to happen through the magic of statistics anyway. But it's especially going to happen if busses dosn't leave on time because the drivers stop to wait for stragglers.
The other cognitive dissonance thing: everyone was jumping up and down a few weeks ago about the fact that, according to another of the census-related reports StatsCan is periodically releasing, median income in Canada for full-time employment was only slightly higher in 2006 than it was in 1980. So, on one hand, we're upset whenever anybody else's pay goes up (including and especially people around the median, whose incomes will effect the median most directly, like bus drivers); on the other hand, we're upset when median pay fails to go up.
Finally, in other now-old news, and it turns out that it was not actually safe to start over, the CAW has agreed to wage freezes (in addition to concessions in various other areas) with each of the three automakers, so I guess we might be seeing if there's anything to what I was suggesting around here last month about autoworkers' contracts being bellwethers if not trendsetters for the labour market in general. (Well, OK, I actually just suggested trendsetters.)
uncomfortableThursday, April 24, 2008
6:19PM - Errata
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 18. High today: 19.
I was wrong about Sennett not mentioning Marx. There are three references in the index. There are two basic things he has to say about Marx. First, Marx doesn't respect the nobility of a life involving routine work. Second, Marx's theory of alienation predicts that people will rebel against stupifying work, but they don't. The first point is made in relation to the previous generation of workers. Sennett's schtick about the janitor who is his exemplar of the previous generation is that even though his work-life was meaningless in itself, the janitor is able to construct a meaningful narrative of his life, of which his reliable and modestly progressive career as a janitor is a part. The second point is made in relation to the "bakers" who work the machines that make the bread, and whose work requires them to understand neither bread-making nor the machines.
It's surprising that I hadn't remembered these bits, because the first one is very important for Sennett's scheme of things and also an important challenge to Marx, and the second seems to be something of a misunderstanding of Marx (although I imagine Sennett is a lot more familiar with Marx than I am). The important challenge is to Marx's premise that a flourishing human life requires, you might say, reversing the banishment from Eden. Sennett's view, I guess you could say, is more sympathetic to the "Protestant work ethic" view of the virtuous life, although, for him, it seems, it's not so much the case that life can be made good by the self-denial involved in alienated labour as that life can be made good in spite of it--not self-denial as an end in itself, but rational self-denial as a means to the end of building a life which is good on the whole, and which gains in virtue by overcoming the world's resistance to its achievement.
What seems to me a misunderstanding is the idea that Marx thinks people are motivated by alienation. Now, my Marx is still largely a product of my own imagination (though I have done a bit of reading lately), but I like to think that there are two basic aspects of Marx's critique of capitalism: there's a critique in terms of alienation, and a critique in terms of exploitation. Alienation of labour is what makes capitalism actually bad and damaging for human beings. Exploitation of labour is what makes capitalism "unjust" and, at its limit, motivates exploited labourers to revolt. Capitalist systems since Marx's time have done an excellent job of limiting exploitation and thereby eliminating motivation to revolt; they have also done an excellent job (and this, I have long thought, has been the real genius of capitalism) of making just about everyone complicit in exploitation (by turning just about everyone into an investor), and so utterly defusing the critique in terms of "justice" of capitalism per se. But this does nothing about alienation, which is the truly damaging thing about capitalism, and which doesn't motivate people to revolt.
worriedWednesday, April 23, 2008
11:59PM - A cloud comes over the sunlit arch
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 14. High today: 22.
Cold front through this afternoon, a brief shower and a rumble of thunder; hourly dewpoints from 2 p.m.: 13, 10, 9, 5, -3, -5, -6, -3, -2. But still no major shift in the blocked pattern coming until the weekend. The temperature maps have been remarkable the last few days--a bulge of blue from the Northwest Territories down to the Dakotas, and a finger of red from the South up to James Bay. Could be some snowflakes here next week, though. Could be some snowflakes in the middle of May--you never know.
The latest thing The Media have come up with to make me crazy is stories about the rising price of food. Of course, it is true that, worldwide, food prices are rising, catastrophically in some places. But since the news is now all about You, The Consumer (or You, The Taxpayer), the stories--at least, two of the three I've seen on the television--have to say something about how it's Hitting You In The Wallet. This, to me, living in Toronto in the middle of a grocery price war (driven by Wal*Mart's attempt to monopolize all aspects of low-end retail), is obviously insane, but I did wonder whether the price war is confined to Toronto (though one of the local stations ran a web poll asking whether you have changed your eating habits in response to rising food costs, and 44% of respondents claimed they had ... come to think of it, I wonder what kind of response they would get if they asked whether you missed work due to the recent TTC strike)--until the March CPI report came out from StatsCan last week, showing that the rate of inflation for food is running a full percentage point below the total inflation rate. There has, in fact, been pretty close to zero inflation in food prices in Canada over the last year: 0.4%. I would bet that, in Toronto, there has been deflation. (Incidentally, there has been Canada-wide deflation since last year in the "Clothing and footwear" category (in which the CPI, which has 2002 as its base=100 year, is currently at 96), and in "Goods" generally as opposed to "Services" (the latter of which is up 3.3% over last year, which I guess is due to wages rising above inflation--which you would expect they would have to, given that most of what we buy is now made by people in other parts of the world who make much less than us). Inflation in Canada is currently being driven by two things: energy (5.4% over last year, 143.2 relative to 2002) and housing (4.1%, 120.1).)
For those of you from out of town, there was no recent TTC strike. The hysteria leading up to the strike deadline coupled with the ongoing hysteria over the state of the US economy got me to thinking how preemptive North American society has become. I don't remember everyone getting as freaked out over the actual TTC strike that lasted a few days when I was in highschool as everyone did over this potential TTC strike. And given all the gnashing of teeth about The Economy, the fact that we're still not sure there is or will be a recession at all, is, really, unbelievable. (Something I read somewhere recently was claiming that the US economy indisputably has been in recession in per capita terms for at least one quarter, but that we conventionally talk about recessions in terms of total GDP because the total is what matters in geostrategic terms.) This must be partly due to the ubiquity of The Media these days. But I also have the feeling that everyone these days thinks of themselves as living right on the precipice--like, if you miss a single day of work because of a TTC strike, your world will come crashing down. (You compleekayted leetle man!) I get this from my students, this anxiety dripping off of them. But at the same time, they pass up so many easy opportunities to help themselves succeed. I get this from myself.
The other interesting thing about the TTC non-strike, a particular aspect of the massive public outpouring of hatred for the TTC employees, is the outrage at the employees getting 3% wage increases in each year of the contract. People expect that this will make the TTC more expensive for them, that it will set a precedent for other city workers that will force tax increases, and so forth. What's interesting to me about this, since I've been looking up numbers on wage inflation in Canada over the last sixteen years, is that people seem generally inclined to oppose everyone else's wage increases, especially when they're above the rate of inflation. But, presumably, wage inflation benefits most people. I mean, this appears pretty simple, but maybe it's over-simplifying: either the prices of goods will inflate faster than wages, or wages will inflate faster than the prices of goods. If the prices of goods inflate faster, then more money will flow toward capital in the form of profit on goods. If wages inflate faster, then more money flows toward labour. Presumably most people make most of their money on labour and not on capital (though I'm really not sure if this is true anymore in developed economies; anyway, people these days seem disproportionately interested in their capital investments), so presumably wage inflation benefits most people. If any given inflationary wage increases the likelihood of further inflationary wage increases (though that's a big if), then most people's long-term material interests are served by other people's inflationary wage increases, even if their short-term material interests are damaged by them.
Which brings me to What's Wrong with Pennsylvania. Clinging and bitter Obama brought Thomas Frank back with a vengeance to bookforum.com, which brought to my attention for the first time Frank's acrimonious exchange with Larry Bartels, which, it turns out, is really fascinating. In 2005, Bartels gave a paper (pdf) at the American Political Science Association using stats to argue that poor white voters weren't really abandoning the Democrats on "values" issues (and that only southern poor white voters were abandoning the Democrats at all, and that this is to be accounted for by the breakup of the southern Democratic monolith). Frank replied (pdf), saying among other things that Bartels had misread what he meant by "white working class", and that "without a college degree" was a better definiens than "poor". So Bartels re-did (pdf) his paper using that definition, and came up with results that look even worse for Frank: white Americans without college degrees regard the Democratic party as being well to their left on economic issues, and regard both parties as being to their right on social issues.
The Slate article that led me to all this (but which unfortunately says that Frank's response to Bartels was to the final paper) suggests (or quotes someone drawing the inference, or something) that "working class" white folks like the Republicans better than the Democrats on economics because they don't regard themselves as being downtrodden but rather are "aspirational". I think there's a very simple way to understand why working class people, however you define "working class", don't like redistributive economic policies: the most immediate and obvious effect of redistributive economic policies is that they take money away from you. What you get back indirectly is much less impressive than what you pay directly, even if you get a lot more back indirectly than you pay directly. This is fairly obvious in general, but it really crystallized for me a little while ago when my grandfather (who acquired most of his money as a capitalist, but spent his working life on the shop floor, starting from nothing) said something about how some guy probably supported some tax hike because he was rich and could afford to pay it. I suspect this is strongly representative of the economic views of "working class" people broadly speaking: taxes are more onerous on poorer people than they are on wealthier people, because wealthier people can afford to pay them more easily. (I doubt it makes much difference to this view how progressive you make the tax system, since if you regard yourself as among the less well off, all taxes are onerous, since your income is too low to begin with.)
However, notwithstanding all that, there's a glaring problem with Bartels's analysis, no matter which definition of "working class" he uses, which is that one of his measures of people's views on economic issues--and he doesn't use many measures to begin with, because there aren't many consistently to be had--as opposed to social issues is their views on social and economic affirmative action for black people. Frank ridicules Bartels for including this as an economic issue rather than as a social one; Bartels's response is something to the effect that it's evidently an economic issue because "working class" white people's responses are in line with their responses on other economic issues and not on other social issues--which seems ridiculously circular. Now, evidently, you could throw that category out altogether and it wouldn't make any difference to Bartels's conclusions. What it would do is leave Bartels's with only two indicators of people's views on economic issues, which would seem to call the statistical significance of his findings into question. What makes this interesting is the acrimonious subtext of the Bartels-Frank exchange: Frank starts out by saying sarcastically what an honour it is to have his work cut up by an Ivy League egghead from Princeton, and he accuses Bartels of "class-baiting" him. Frank the folksy pop-sociologist claims that Bartels's bloodless stats don't reflect the real world--they might as well be about the moon, he says; if you want to know what's really going on, you need to get out there and get a feel for things. Bartels the political scientist assumes that people's feels for things can be wrong, and people's feels for things can be proven wrong quantitatively. Personally, I'm sympathetic to both sides. But here, both of them come out looking bad. Bartels's quantitative conclusions are impressive, but if you look at how he arrives at them, it's questionable whether the numbers actually mean what he says they mean. (This always horrifies me when I'm trying to come up with quantitative representations of complex phenomena--students' performances in courses, for instance, or my Incredible Waste of Time last fall. When you come up with the final numbers and chart or graph the breakdowns and the trends, they look real and hard, and it is horrifyingly easy to forget all the sloppiness and uncertainty that went into coming up with them.)
Frank, on the other hand, reeks of ressentiment; his response looks like classic pop-intellectual academy-anxiety. Turns out he has a PhD from the University of Chicago. Good grief.
Here are a couple of Interesting Facts which I have been meaning to note for a long time. First: the unemployment rate in the US, and presumably also in Canada, is arrived at by telephone survey: somebody from the government calls and asks how many people in your household are working, not working but looking for work, etc. Second: since the Montreal Canadiens fired Bob Berry in February 1984, they have hired nine permanent head coaches. The only one of those with any prior NHL head coaching experience was Jacques Demers. (Looking that up again just now, I have discovered some more Interesting Facts: Guy Carbonneau was preceded as both the captain of the Canadiens and as their head coach by Bob Gainey. He was succeeded as captain by Kirk Muller, who is now his assistant coach.) This may say something to the Toronto canard that teams in hockey pressure-cookers like Toronto need coaches with lots of experience. Then again, it may not: another notable fact about that list of nine head coaches is that eight of them have been Quebecois (the exception being Pat Burns, who was a cop in Hull, Quebec before he was a coach, and so presumably also spoke fluent French), and three of them have been former Habs hero players. Speaking of Habs heroes: I felt shame as a Leafs fan the other night when the camera scanned the crowd in Montreal and showed the royalty of both Quebec politics and Montreal hockey (two-in-one with Ken Dryden). When the Leafs are in the playoffs--I'm pretty sure that did used to happen sometimes--we get like Mike Myers in the crowd.
lateSunday, April 20, 2008
11:52PM - One month on the middle of May
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 17. High today: 22.
The warm season is here. Everyone blew the forecast for the last several days--the forecast going into the week was for one warm day on Wednesday, followed by the cold front that dropped Regina from 28 on Monday to 8 on Tuesday. But an area of high pressure unexpectedly materialized around New York state, blocked the cold front from ever getting here, kept pumping warm air into Ontario, and by a chain reaction allowed winter to set back up across Alberta and Saskatchewan. What's amazing about it is that, in the age of multiple computer models, you basically never see blown forecasts like that anymore (although the conventional wisdom will, no doubt, forever have it that The Weatherman Is Always Wrong).
What I said, the last time I was saying stuff, about wondering whether I do enough to have anything to say was supposed to lead into talking about going to see Howard Adelman that day. Howard Adelman (who is red-linked in Wikipedia, in the entry for Rochdale College; I'm thinking I might get around to doing something about that) was giving the first annual Howard Adelman Lecture at York's Centre for Refugee Studies, of which he was one of the founders (maybe the founder). Although I was only around him for a year, Adelman has almost certainly been my biggest intellectual influence--though the "intellectual" qualifier risks understating the case. There is what he taught me about Hegel and the bible, which has informed my understanding of all kinds of things. (I've just recently come to realize how Adelman prepared the ground for my reception of Strauss, variously in his esoteric readings of Hegel, in his ongoing argument that reason doesn't move politics, and in his Platonic interpretation of American politics as a contest between a party of appetite and a party of virtue, which has broken down as the pursuit of appetite became a virtue). But there is also the example of his life: it seems that if there's anything that it occurs to him he ought to do, he does it. In addition to being an academic, he has travelled the world to investigate refugee and genocide situations, and for the last ten years he has had a weekly TV show. (It's called Israel Today; it's one of the local Christian channel's CRTC-mandated bits of multicultural programming. It's extremely interesting. It's on as I write; he's interviewing someone about pewter bas-reliefs of biblical scenes.) He is staggeringly busy. I actually think about everything he does from time to time when I start to wonder how I'll ever find the time to do anything else when I'm teaching more than one course. And I think about a long e-mail he sent me once about American Beauty, stoicism, and epicureanism--for some reason, after a talk of his I'd gone to, I sent him an e-mail about the dope-dealer kid being a stoic, and he had replied about why the kid was actually an epicurean: I think about the fact that he took the time to send a student this long e-mail about a film and philosophy, when he had so much else to do. I think about that when my students write e-mails to me.
The thing about Adelman is that it seems that if it occurs to him that something ought to be done, he does it. He told a story at the Adelman Lecture last week about how, in the '80s, Canada was accepting refugees from southern Sri Lanka, but not from the north--but people were coming from the north, claiming that their lives were in danger. So Adelman went there, to see what was going on, and found that a war was going on in the north, and reported it, and so Canada started accepting refugees from the north. But what started Adelman's involvement in refugee issues were the Vietnamese "Boat People", and it was a story he told last week about this that I wanted to put down here. I don't know how this came about, but it came to pass that a rabbi, a priest, and I don't know who else met at Adelman's house to draft a letter to encourage the Canadian government to accept more Vietnamese refugees. Somehow, some bureaucrats from Immigration found out about this meeting, and showed up at his door. They told Adelman's group that they had been looking for groups of people to sponsor Vietnamese refugees, but hadn't been able to find anyone willing to do it except the Mennonites and the Dutch Reformed Church. So Adelman's group agreed to sponsor some refugees. Now, the story is this: a grad student of Adelman's happened to be at the meeting, because he wanted to talk to Adelman about his thesis. Unbeknownst to Adelman, the student was a stringer for the Globe, and the student filed a report on the meeting. In the following weeks, Adelman did 155 interviews for newspapers, and he says not one of the news stories reported that the bureaucrats had come to him; every one of them spun the story so that the government was being prodded into action by citizen activism, when actually citizens had been prodded into action by activist bureaucrats, whose efforts had mostly met with apathy.
(There's a CBC radio interview with Adelman here. Being on dial-up, though, I'm getting five seconds on, five seconds off. But the bit where the interviewer asks Adelman what he can do to help, and Adelman asks him where he lives, is priceless: this is what Adelman does; he takes you seriously, no matter who you are, and he assumes that every theoretical possibility is an actual possibility. And now I see that the York propaganda site has a blurb in its archive here, which doesn't reverse the citizen-government roles.)
It turns out that Charles Taylor's review of Lear's book is online here. (The New Criterion hatchet-job is here.) I see that in the online version, the reference does say "The Corrosion of Character" and not "The Conservative Character". Anyway, I finished reading Richard Sennett's The Corrosion of Character last night, after reading several reviews of Sennett's new book, linked off bookforum.com, yesterday. The Corrosion of Character is a short and meandering read. Sennett teaches sociology; the book ranges through philosophy--ancient, modern, and postmodern--and literature. I wish it would have said more about the idea of character and why it's important, but I get the impression from the reviews of the new book that all his books are one long project, so each one may inevitably seem incomplete. There are about four stories (which, he says at the outset, are somewhat fictionalized, which is worrying from time to time) he keeps coming back to in the book. One is about the son of an Italian immigrant Sennett had interviewed in, I guess, the '70s or so. Sennett contrasts the steady career-orientation of the father with the episodic work-life of the son, and suggests that the father's life was objectively worse but the son is, in many ways, and maybe overall, unhappier with his life. Another is about the owner of Sennett's favourite pub in New York, who goes off in middle age to work for a marketing company. Theoretically, the marketing company wants her accumulated expertise about how people drink, but actually everyone in marketing wants to re-make the world and isn't interested in people's experience of the world as it has been. Another story is about a group of IBM programmers who were laid off in the great downsizing of the early '90s. That story is all about their coming to terms with the fact that they can no longer think of their lives in career terms, which involves their being forced to give up on being invested in involvement with their communities and associated values like loyalty. (The book begins with a discussion of the etymology of "career".) The most compelling story is about a bakery in Boston, which Sennett says he has studied over a couple of generations. When he first studied the bakery, its workers were all Greek immigrants. Their work was hard, messy and hot manual labour, making bread by hand. They felt oppressed by their work, by their bosses, and by Boston society at large, but they felt a cameraderie with each other. When Sennett returns to the bakery in the '90s, its operation is entirely automated. The workers don't make bread anymore; they work the machines that make the bread. Often the machines malfunction and wreck the bread. Sometimes the machines break down, and the bakery is idled while they wait for the technicians to come in. What makes the story compelling is that while the Greek bakers found their work oppressive, they identified with it. The new workers also find their work oppressive, because they don't understand it and it's always going wrong (though, apparently, it's going right often enough and fast enough that it's still more efficient economically than it was formerly), and they don't identify with it at all; they don't think of themselves as having any future in baking; they assume that they'll be doing something else as soon as they can find something else to do, though they don't generally know what that will be.
The main theme of this book is that the nature of contemporary capitalism has us always starting over. I was thinking about this in relation to Marx's fantasy in The German Ideology that, when communism does away with division of labour, we'll be able to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, herd cattle after dinner, and criticize in the evening. "The new capitalism"--already when I was in highschool we were hearing about how we would all have seven different careers--makes Marx's fantasy real but in a perverse way. What's perverse about it is highlighted by the alienation of the bakery workers. For Marx, alienation and division of labour go together. Marx says that the essential division of labour, and the source of alienation in capitalism, is the division between intellectual and physical labour. Human beings create themselves and come to know themselves through their work. (This is an idea that I came to from Hegel, through Adelman. Marx thinks, or at least is thought to think, that his materialism turns Hegel upside-down, but, thanks to Adelman, I see Marx as emphasizing the materialist moments in Hegel.) Work actualizes human potential: the idea of the thing is potential; the thing made is actual. When labour is divided and there are bosses whose job is to direct the material labour of others, the labour of the individual no longer actualizes the potential of that individual but the potential of some other person or people. (Here Marxism can be seen to have a much more profound individualism than liberalism does.) Alienated from the things you work on, you're alienated from yourself. Putting that together with Sennett's book, we could say that building your own self requires a single, freely chosen, career of work. (Sennett says that he's a disappointed socialist; I don't think he mentions Marx in this book. He appears to be less of an individualist, less concerned with building your own self--he is indeed more of a conservative, it appears.)
So many other things floating around ... here's one, because the moment will pass otherwise: I would bet any money that today's game between the Red Wings and the Predators was the first game in the history of the NHL if not of any kind of hockey played anywhere in which there was exactly one goal on shots taken from each of the offensive zone, the neutral zone (bad bounce), and the defensive zone (empty net). There's also an excellent chance that this game had the highest average distance of scoring shots in any NHL game ever; the average scoring shot was taken from about centre ice. (It's possible that there have been games where a team needed a win and not a tie, pulled its goalie with the score 0-0, and the only scoring shot of the game was an empty-netter from the defensive zone.)
Here's another: the Star's lead story sometime last week was about a group urging the government of Ontario to commit to reducing poverty by 25% in five years, as the British government did some time ago. Funny thing about "poverty" in Canada: by "poverty", people generally mean "below Statistics Canada's 'low-income cut-off'" (LICO), but StatsCan is very careful never to refer to the LICO as a "poverty line". The history of adjustments to the LICO is very interesting. The LICO is a certain percentage of household income spent on food, shelter, and clothing. When it was created in 1968, it was pegged at 70%. According to the Canadian Council on Social Development, StatsCan pegged it there because they determined (using data for 1959) that the average household spent about 50% of its income on essentials, and they decided to peg the LICO at average + 20%. In each of 1973, 1980, 1986, and 1992, StatsCan adjusted the LICO downward, as the average household expenditure on essentials declined. But they haven't adjusted it since 1992, when it was set at 54.7% (as the average household expenditure on essentials was 34.7%). I don't know why not, but it appears that something very interesting, and which might be embarrassing, would happen if it was adjusted again today: the LICO would probably be set below what the average was when the LICO was created (i.e., the average household in 1959 would be considered "low-income" by the new standard).
Anyway, the Star article noted that the LICO for a single person (in Toronto or Ontario or whatever) is currently supposed to be $17 000 and change. Two things strike me about this. First, I have only once in my life had an annual income higher than that (and while I am not actually single, I am officially. Of course, for most of my adult life, I've been a student (though my income has been much lower since I've stopped being a student than it was for the last eight years I was a student). I don't know how students are accounted for in poverty accountancy). And, of course, I am very much not poor. (Point being that income is an extremely blunt instrument for measuring how well-off people are.) Second, if you want to reduce poverty by 25% in five years, the easiest way to do it would be to gather the 25% of people below the LICO with the highest incomes, and cut them cheques for the difference between their incomes and the LICO. (Point being that catchy things like 25-in-5 can make for asinine policy.)
In case you're wondering, I do wonder whether I'm annoying you by taking up so much space on your friends page.
anxiousThursday, April 10, 2008
11:59PM - For Heaven and the future's sakes
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 8. High today: 11. Nearly 20 yesterday; supposed to be 5 tomorrow.
I am glad that the Tibetans have brought to our attention that the Olympic torch relay is a Nazi invention, so that the purity of future Olympics will not be sullied by Nazi torch relays.
Here is something I find very odd about the current Olympic business: the refrain that the Olympics shouldn't have anything to do with politics. If the Olympics didn't have anything to do with politics, there would be no Olympics. Nobody is going to fund shot-putters and lugers if they are not bringing glory to their polities.
(A couple of weeks ago, I was hanging around a student gathering-place at York because it looked like a couple of groups were squaring off for an Israeli-Palestinian fight--an Israeli group had built a replica Security Fence in part of the space so that they could impress upon passersby the virtues of the Security Fence, and a Palestinian-looking group was assembling near them, and there was some sort of TV camera floating around. But it turned out that the Palestinian-looking group was actually there for a demonstration on behalf of a former York student who was being deported. A middle-aged woman approached me and gave me a leaflet and asked me to sign their petition. I told her that I had thought that the two groups were squaring off for a fight. She told me that, no, what the group she was with was doing had nothing to do with politics; it was just about doing what was right.)
It's hard to get over the whiff of hypocrisy hanging over the half-maybe-sort-of-boycott stuff. Imagine a real boycott of China, like South Africa: there goes the world economy. But, well, so what, right? Why not have our Tibetan cake and eat our fabulous cheap crap too? What's the point of keeping your hands clean?
There's the idea around that you can get to the Chinese by offending their honour--so, we don't need to even think about an economic boycott, because the real way to stick it to 'em is to bring shame to their Olympics. It is remarkable that a post-Marxist country could be driven by thumos and not by appetite.
I've been thinking for a long time now that HRC has no chance of coming back if she keeps seeming tired. If she was an athlete, I'd say the thing that seems to be costing her the contest more than anything is poor conditioning--she wore out fast. But I wonder now, and this is bugging me: how much does her being a woman have to do with my perceiving her as seeming tired? Women aren't allowed to get away with all kinds of things that men are allowed to get away with, and being tired is one of them. Having a hoarse voice, looking pale, bags under your eyes. John Kerry was born tired, right?
I often feel like women are pretending to do things that are traditionally male things to do. I get this feeling from female sports broadcasters and commentators all the time. I'd be a bit more worried about this if it wasn't for the fact that I sometimes get the same feeling from some male sports commentators. (Like on the sports panel Paikin used to have on Studio 2, which I referred to as the "sports dorks" segment.) But yesterday I was listening to some guy on the radio--it was some sort of scientician, and he was talking in that condescending, sing-song kind of way that people talk in when they apparently don't take what they're saying, or at least the task of saying it, all that seriously but are rather concerned with the performance of saying it--and it occurred to me that if it was a woman talking in that sort of way, I'd probably immediately have the feeling she was pretending, whereas with the male voice I don't get it automatically. But it's hard to tell. It would stand to reason that a lot of women would feel self-conscious doing things that women aren't expected to do, and when you do something self-consciously, you look like you're pretending--in a way, you are pretending.
While I'm revealing my inner sexism, let me say that I enjoyed this article on Ivy League chastity crusaders quite a lot, particularly the part where the female co-president of the Junior Anti-Sex League is shocked and horrified that the male co-president actually has to battle with himself.
In my second-year Renaissance Literature class, the (female) prof assigned us to read a couple of poems by a female renaissance poet(esse). Then in class she told us that she had had us read them to show how boring they were, and that they were boring because renaissance women--at least the privileged ones in a position to be writing poetry--didn't do anything, and therefore did not have interesting experiences, and therefore did not have anything interesting to say. This is something that I worry about from time to time--that I may not have anything interesting to say.
I noticed recently that the APA's "advice for jobseekers" blurb advises that you'll be better-positioned if you have an area of academic expertise outside philosophy. I find this surprising, and I think it's probably false generally (though true in specific and mostly faddish areas). Job-strategics aside, it's a tough question: how good a philosopher can you be if you don't commit yourself fully to philosophy? How good a philosopher can you be if you do commit yourself fully to philosophy? The answer is probably "it depends". There are kinds of philosophy that seem as if they can operate without extra-philosophical concerns. The most obvious of these is logic--but it pains me that so many people don't understand that logic is not a self-contained and magical system but a description of how the things we can say fit together.
I have been meaning for months now to say something about Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope, and the Crow Indians. Well: Radical Hope is Jonathan Lear's book about what happened to the Crow Indians and their last chief, Plenty Coups, during and after the time of the end of the buffalo. It's a book of philosophy, not of history; it relies on history done by others. Lear is concerned to explain what Plenty Coups could have meant when he told an anthropologist that after the buffalo disappeared and the Crow went onto a reservation, "nothing happened'. Lear's story is that what it means to say that "nothing happened" is that the integrated form of life that gave meaning to anything any Crow Indian did had ended; the telos or teloi of Crow life was gone, nothing the Crow did was for anything anymore, and so the future-directedness of their lives was gone: time, for them, was over.
I mentioned in the fall that I'd gone to a talk by Lear about this stuff. I read the book a couple of months ago. Last week, I read a hatchet-job in The New Criterion, not on the book, but on a review of the book by Charles Taylor that appeared in the New York Review of Books last spring. The hatchet-job was hacking at Taylor--the ivory-tower egghead, scholar of the philosopher Hegel--for mourning the end of Crow life, when actually Crow life was awful, and it's better for it to be over. The main point is not that Crow life was awful for the Crow, although the hatcheteer implies that too; the main point is that what Crow life was mainly about was war.
This is one of the things that fascinated me about Lear's talk and his book: he is describing and analyzing what is a tragedy from the point of view of the Crow, but from just about any modern Westerner's point of view (or at least any modern Westerner who is publicly taken seriously), the Crow way of life was awful--the Crow were awful. It fascinated me at the talk because he gained the unreserved sympathy of the lefty-liberal audience for the plight of people who, if they were simply told what those people did, they would think were monsters. (This reminds me of the unpopularity of Habermas's proposition that preserving cultures is not a good thing per se; there are cultures that ought to die out.) But, of course, neither Lear nor Taylor says anything in favour of the Crow way of life or even of preserving it (which, obviously, was impossible anyway); they're concerned, with varying emphases, with what happens when you take a way of life away from people. The practical thrust of Taylor's review is that we ought to find some way of anticipating cultural collapse and helping people whose cultures have collapsed into a new one--but this in light of the fact that our efforts hitherto have generally been more harmful than helpful.
There is no clear practical thrust of Lear's book. In the question period at the talk, the question was raised whether there are analogies to be drawn with the holocaust. I have a hard time now even seeing why that's a good question. I have been interested lately in the fact that Jews seem to have retained their religion-rooted culture (and even the religion-rootedness of their culture) despite widespread lack of belief in their god, which Christians have not managed to do very well at all. (I have lately been fond of thinking that post-Christian Westerners are the first people who ever repudiated their culture because they no longer believed in their gods.) To me, the interesting question is whether we Westerners generally are in the position of the Crow at the meltdown of their way of life. (The interesting question about the book is whether Lear intends to raise this question.) Lear says that everything the Crow did had meaning because it was directed toward the hunt or toward war. The example he gives is that a woman stirring a pot over a fire could say, when asked what she's doing, that she's preparing for the hunt. When there are no more buffalo, when asked what she's doing, she could say that she's not doing anything. (How often do we reply, when asked what we're doing, "nothing"? Ask kids what they're doing and they'll almost always say "nothing". Is this meaningful?)
At the talk, which was last fall when I was unemployed and feeling absolutely uncertain of my academic future, I was thinking about how, when I left the talk and went back over to the library to read, it would not be clear for me what I was doing--I would be reading philosophy as part of some future-directed project, but with the future uncertain, it would be uncertain whether there even was a project. If there was no project, then, reading in the library, I could be said to be doing nothing. (There is this vertiginousness to academic work, which must be the same for any work in which one might play for mortal stakes, from the fact that it is largely accidental whether or how much one is paid to do things that one would do or would want to do anyway--and if one is not paid to do them or not paid much, then one is in some senses only killing time, while the same work, paid, is work and ennobled.) (This was also at the time that I'd just found out that that bit of work had been taken away from me, so I was fighting that venom, and I didn't like that my reaction to what Lear was saying was personal--he was talking about cultural devastation, and I was thinking of it in terms of my petty situation. "If thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door," I thought, and I keep thinking.)
Taylor explicitly, but not too emphatically, brings out the implications for the (post)modern West. He refers to a book the title of which I was quite sure was The Conservative Character but which appears to actually be The Corrosion of Character, which I'm reading (at the same time as I'm fitfully reading Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History) now. Taylor basically says that we've so gotten used to being in the situation of the Crow at cultural meltdown that we can't recognize it as being bad for us, nor can we recognize cultural devastation when we see it--we see it as liberation. But Taylor hasn't so gotten used to it.
There is much else to be said, but, well: for someone with so little future, I'm always getting there too quickly.
lateMonday, April 7, 2008
11:59PM - Tastes like piss and flies, don't it?
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 6. High today: 12.
L. and I watched Clerks II yesterday. It has a lot of words. I wonder a) what movie has the most words of any movie ever made, and b) what feature-length movie has the highest word density? "Tastes like piss and flies" is, anyway, the funniest thing I have seen since I first saw Garfield Minus Garfield. Garfield Minus Garfield is the funniest thing I have seen since ever.
There's only snow left on the northeast-facing slopes of the ravine, and on the paths where it's been packed down. A winter's worth of dog-abandoned tennis balls has emerged. The golden-crowned kinglets are back--I think they must be the birds I was never able to identify last fall; it could be that I'm getting a better look at them now because the grass isn't hiding them. And the chipping sparrows, and the red-winged blackbirds, and the woodpeckers are no longer pecking solo but hammering away at each other. It was a good evening for watching the earthlight on the tipped-over moon. The wind was cold today like the wind can only be cold when it's warm. It's not quite the warm season yet, but it's getting there more days than not.
I woke up this morning to a, hmm, discussion, debate, frame-job, concerning the homework issue which has become burning lately for some reason and caught fire this week because somebody at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education released some study saying that kids have too much homework and it's interfering with their family lives and so forth. I saw a blurb in the paper the other day on this; it said that the study's authors said that young children should have as homework to talk with their parents. This probably tells you something about the study's authors. (I guess the way the education wars shape up these days is like this: the parents think everything's the teachers' fault, the teachers think everything's the parents' fault, and the policymakers think we just need to get the teachers and parents to work together.) Anyway, I find this whole homework business remarkable because it turns the picture of the world I grew up with on its head: as a kid, I knew that the way the world worked was that my parents and my teachers were on one side, and I was on the other. (This is not to say that there wasn't plenty of evidence to the contrary; it's just that no amount of evidence could be sufficient to shake this world-foundational belief.) But this homework business indicates that parents--at least, the squeaky wheels who are getting all the grease these days--see themselves on the side of their kids against the teachers. The teachers, I take it, are like the government, and homework is like taxes: no matter how much you have, you should have less.
This afternoon I went to a talk about video surveillance. The speaker was arguing that we (i.e., we leftists) should quit trying to get privacy laws enacted, because The State always gets exempted from privacy laws so privacy laws only restrict what we can do and not what they can do. Instead, we should subvert surveillance by practising sousveillance! Go to your local Wal*Mart and record them! See how they like it!
Part of the homework frame-job was the host getting a guy from Finland on to say how wonderful Finland is despite not having any homework, so that the American "expert" would realize that he is wrong when he says that kids do not have too much homework. But the guy from Finland didn't want to talk about homework, which he obviously thought was not an issue; he wanted to point out that in Finland teachers have master's degrees and are well paid and highly thought of in society, and that in Finland everyone wants kids to be educated for the good of Finland in the world. The host was not interested in or prepared for this diversion, but it was not a diversion. The point is, in Finland, people take themselves to all be on the same side. Here, we are all at war with each other.
I think I said a few years ago, while the hockey lockout was going on, that it had occurred to me that the players by now have the financial werewithal to run the league themselves, but they couldn't do that because they wouldn't be able to agree on how to distribute the money: you can't divide things amongst yourselves in an inegalitarian way without creating conflict amongst yourselves. So they need to have somebody over above them, who they can all hate together, to distribute the money unequally. It occurs to me today that we, at least we North Americans, all need the government for much the same reason. We can all harmlessly hate the government (and everyone who looks like the government, including teachers and bus drivers and Eljay Inc.) together, and blow off most of the hatred we would otherwise harmfully focus on each other.
Speaking of Eljay Inc., the last question in the question period this afternoon was: "What do you think of Facebook?" (The speaker's answer was "I'm too old for Facebook!" I think she was likely younger than me. No more than a couple of years older.) I had been thinking of this myself. I saw another thing in one of the papers yesterday about some kids somewhere making a facebook group devoted to hating their teachers and saying outrageous things about them--and the principal or whoever gets into the group, and a whole production ensues. This is a lot like how the internet makes it easier to get caught plagiarizing. Before kids started stealing googlable stuff from the interweb, it was virtually impossible to catch them plagiarizing. Before facebook, if you wanted to have a discussion group on your teacher's fat ass and how you will remove it and feed it to her, you would have it in the far corner of the schoolyard, or in your basement, and no one would ever know that you, like all the other children, were a psychopath.
What the questioner was actually interested in, though, was the whole exhibitionism thing. Which, you know, I can't really find interesting. Adolescent kids display themselves to strangers, like monkeys showing off their genitals. It's how you get out of the troop that raised you and start your own. The media change, but the basic principle stays the same.
It's the sudden season, spring:
Blooms are bursting from the snow
They've spent the winter pent below,
Growing there impatiently
To save up time for when they're free.
Daffodils three inches tall
Before you know they're up at all.
All around the birds are back
As if there'd never been a lack.
Birds chase down the falling sun
And up again where they'd begun.
Meanwhile, we forget them here
As soon as they're no longer near.
But, around comes life again.
We don't appreciate it then;
Only on some later day
When it's already underway.
It's the sudden season, spring.
lateThursday, April 3, 2008
8:02PM - The rites of spring begin anew
And you are there!
John Robertson, who was the best columnist who ever covered the Blue Jays, started the beginning-of-spring-training columns that led off both his books of collected columns (for the 1983 and 1984 seasons, the first two seasons the Jays were good) with those two sentences. "The rites of spring begin anew. And you are there!" And then he would describe the scene in the clubhouse in Dunedin, Florida. Every fall when I go back to school, I think: "The rites of fall begin anew. And you are there!" Well, it's spring, finally, unequivocally, and more or less irrevocably, here in Toronto. The last day of most classes at York. The rites of spring begin anew, and who knows what is and is not ending.
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 7. High today: 9.
I got my second present that I have ever gotten from a student today. The first one gave me something from his culture, a cartoon book about Buddhism; the second one has given me something, apparently, from what she takes my culture to be--not that she's wrong, or far off. It has a picture of Jesus on it. I have hung it on the wall.
Last year, I learned that that I can teach; this year, I learned that I can be good at it. So, this is progress. I've been thinking about writing a textbook for this human nature course--I think I'll do it, if I find out I'm getting the course again next year. I may not get anything next year. Not a thing. Who knows. You know, last fall, when I said that somebody had done maybe the worst thing that anybody had ever done to me? That was about another course at another university. If I'd actually gotten to teach that course, I'd be on strike now. Again.
(I've been thinking, with the possibility--I was about to say threat, like the television always say--of a public transit strike looming (like the television always says) that I would like for a survey to be done of Torontonians to see how often they believe the public transit workers go on strike. How many TTC strikes have there been in the last, say, ten years? I bet the average answer would be around three or four. In fact there has been one TTC strike in the last ten years. It was a wildcat strike, and it lasted less than a full day.)
This afternoon, on the subway home, I was talking with a guy I've known since I started at York about the history of the International Socialists. Imagine that. I told him that I had learned--and he did not know this, which was surprising, because he has been (but is no longer, I learned today) a member of an International Socialist splinter group--just last week that the International Socialists in Canada formed from some of the remnants of The Waffle after it was kicked out of the NDP in the early '70s. Imagine that.
It has been a long time since I have had a year--for me, as for google, the rhythm of life is the rhythm of the school year--this good. (I was lately thinking how grad school is a humiliation, and that though this is obvious when you are a grad student it is still a humiliation in subtle ways that you can't comprehend until it's over, and that I seem to be emerging from this humiliation. I'm listening to classical music again. You wouldn't think that has anything to do with it, but like I say, it's subtle. It's not all bad, either. Humility is good in due measure. But it's better to be strong and humble than to be humiliated into weakness.) I think to myself frequently, lately: I have almost everything that has ever been really important to me. (That guy who gave the social-psych talk the other day said on some tangent that he was raised Catholic and that he thinks there's a certain genius in the practice of saying grace before meals--it's a reminder, three times a day, that your life is actually pretty good. (Grace-saying, incidentally, is one of those things of religion that I have wished I could reclaim somehow, as a thrice-daily reminder that there but for the grace of something that is not you there would be naught at all.)) It's just a matter of keeping it going....
I keep meaning to say this: you think that life is about getting past one thing and another, moving forward, progress, victory here and on to the next. But it's not about moving forward; it's about deepening. Not staying in the same place, but going away and coming back, starting again from the same place, deeper and deeper.
relaxedMonday, March 31, 2008
11:59PM - Dear Professor C., May I have a pony?
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 7. Slowly rising since this morning, supposed to continue rising overnight. Tomorrow should be the first significantly above-normal day of the spring--but no chance of hitting 20 at UW.
It's amazing how much snow is left in the ravine, given that the only snow left around the city is in the snowbanks. The ravine still has a blanket several inches thick. It's disturbingly grimy. So I wonder, is the difference in snow cover due to the ravine being a cold-air sink? (Seems somewhat likely, though the ravine's not very deep.) Is it due to the trees? (Probably not much if at all; they're pretty sparse.) Is it due to the ravine being a snow-trap? (Seems somewhat likely.) Is it due to the ravine being sheltered from street-salt? (Certainly has something to do with it.) Is it due to the lack of sun-catching pavement? (Definitely has something to do with it.) Is it due to the lack of heat sources under the ground? (Probably has something to do with it, although the subway runs under the ravine and there are bare spots in the snow where heat is vented--still, the subway tunnels are much colder than underground bits of buildings.)
Last week I went to a talk about liberal education and democracy. In the question period, someone said--with conviction--that she believes that the essay is a great exercise in democracy. You make your case, giving your reasons, and it's a model for how to settle disputes without resort to force. She compared it to the way courts of law operate. This is interesting to me because it's true and good in its own way, and it is completely at odds with my attitude toward philosophy, which I want to encourage my students to share. One of the ways that I try to encourage them to share it is by not having them write essays, and by trying to get them not to write what I do get them to write as if they were essays. That is, I want them to not adopt the pose that they have mastered what they are writing about and are in a position to pronounce a verdict on it; I want them not to engage in the standard essay-writerly bullshit which is all about being impressive and not about speaking truthfully. If you have a system of criminal law in which accuseds have the right to defend themselves, then the system has to be adversarial because you have to assume that the accused is motivated not to tell the truth but to be acquitted. To balance out the accused's interest in being acquitted, the prosecution must be motivated not to get at the truth but to get the accused convicted. The system rests on the assumption that the accused's seeking acquittal and the prosecution's seeking conviction will cancel each other out, and the truth will be left over. It's widely held in academia that the disinterested pursuit of truth is impossible. An adversarial system, seeking truth as a whole, seems like it might be a remedy for the inability of individuals to seek truth. But the adversarial legal system only works because there is a judge and/or jury, who are presumed to be disinterested pursuers of truth, to decide the question. This is not so in the academic case, and it's not so in the political case. This does not show that adversarial essay-writing is not a good exercise in democracy. It indicates why philosophy is at odds with both democracy and, alas, academia.
Today I went to a talk that was titled "A History of Liberty", but was actually a rehearsal of the cognitive-bias people-are-irrational-and-don't-understa
Another of the things the speaker today was talking about was how giving people more choices can be paralyzing: extra choices can be noise in the decision-making process. Obviously, this is a well known phenomenon. But it--and his example of an academic at Yale getting offers from Princeton and Harvard and turning them both down because she couldn't decide between them, though she would've taken either one if it was the only one she got--got me thinking about my pet example of paralyzing choice: I was in a used bookstore which had just gotten a bunch of philosophy books in, any one of which I would've bought if the others weren't there, but since they were all there and I couldn't decide between them, I didn't buy any of them. It was depressing. But since his analysis of his examples agreed with my analysis of my example, I was prompted to disagree with my analysis of my example. (My friend DD, who likes this social-psych stuff a lot, told me once that there is one group of people who Studies Have Shown not to be affected by agreement biases, namely, philosophers. I don't recall whether he said that Studies Have Shown philosophers to have a perverse disagreement bias instead.) The extra choices weren't noise; they were informing me that I didn't really want any of the books any more than I wanted a whole bunch of other books, and so would probably be better off not buying any of them. This analysis is partially confirmed by the fact that most of the books I buy in used bookstores lie around mostly unread for years.
giddyMonday, March 24, 2008
9:33PM - Striking out
Currently at Toronto Pearson: -3. High today: -1. Eight degrees below normal; we were re-blanketed with snow last night, more coming tomorrow, more supposed to come Friday. I got April 23 in UW's 20-degrees pool.
First I heard of the eljay strike, I thought it was wrong-headed: eljay's a business, and it's inappropriate to protest a business not behaving the way you want it to, as long as it's not breaking the law or its contracts. (It was a strike, insofar as it was a withdrawal of labour. (The fact that you do something voluntarily and even pay to do it doesn't mean it's not labour. It's labour if it produces value for someone else; contributing content to eljay produces value for it.) What, to me, makes it a deviant sort of strike is that it had nothing to do with any kind of contract. My thinking on this may be coloured by the fact that my union is currently on a work-to-rule campaign over something that has nothing to do with the collective agreement, which strikes me as inappropriate.) But then I thought, well, hang on: businesses can do what they want, but their producer-consumers can do what they want, too. The business doesn't have any obligation to be the way you want it to be, but if you want it to be somehow, you don't have any obligation not to exert force on it, within the law, to try to make it that way.
So, first interesting point the eljay strike brings to light: there's this tension between the idea of a strike as a moral gesture and the idea of a strike as a forceful action. (Using the distinction Habermas draws between the moral and the ethical, where the moral has to do with what's right and wrong (so duties and obligations) whereas the ethical has to do with what's better and worse, the forceful action may still be ethically motivated.) Unions always portray their strikes as moral gestures, to any interested parties, including themselves. (This is all very complicated now, but there's a basic Marxist principle at work: the employer has a perpetual obligation to pay the employee more, because everything the employer has is exploited from the employee.) They portray their strikes as forceful actions much more judiciously: to strikebreakers, management, themselves to some degree.
Some of the backlash against the eljay strike could have been motivated by perception of it as a moral gesture, but I actually suspect that more of it was motivated by the perceived ethical motivation of the forceful action: if you don't care whether your world fills up with ads, you are likely to feel personally offended when people assert that a world full of ads is a bad world to live in. They're asserting that a world you're OK with is a bad world; there's something wrong with the way you live in the world. This is, I take it, why there generally are backlashes against "do-gooders" of all sorts. At root, it's the same principle that leads to genocide: another ethnos projecting a world different from yours is an insult to your way of life.
The second interesting point the eljay strike brings to light: there is no public square on the net. All communication on the net takes place in some forum that is owned by some private interest. Even usenet: for usenet, you need a feed which is supplied by some private interest (not to mention all the connecting hardware), even if you've set up your own server and that private interest is you. The eljay strike may have kind of felt inappropriate because it seemed not so much like a strike as a demonstration against a government. It was a matter of petitioning our rulers for more gracious treatment: the subjects will be heard. That feeling of inappropriateness will probably fade, is probably fading, as the public square disappears in the real world as well and is replaced by the Wal-Marts. Of course, in the suburbs, there never was a public square, but rather a mall.
(Has anyone ever demonstrated to assert their right to free speech in a mall? There is, in my understanding, a perpetual confusion in Canadian law, and definitely in the Canadian public consciousness, as to whether the Charter of Rights binds private entities. This is, I'd say, an amazing development: the idea that the Constitution would protect your rights in the private sphere. I don't imagine the US is anywhere near this point yet, because it has always been obvious there that the point of the Bill of Rights was to protect you against the government. We have only recently in Canada come to perceive the government as our natural enemy--although we've never worshipped our leaders like Americans do, either.)
I was going to say, back about January, that I wondered how long it would be until Obama's church popped up to bite him. It took so long that I figured it wasn't going to. But then it did, and now it's gone. Ho hum. I caught the end of the McLaughlin Group yesterday, Wild Prediction time, and somebody's Wild Prediction was that McCain would move into a tie with Obama or HRC or both in the polls soon. This is really incredibly bizarre, how people are ignorning the plain fact that McCain has been leading polls, sometimes substantially, ever since he became the Republican frontrunner.
Meanwhile, Canada's Conservative government is now looking like it might die of old age. Who woulda thunk. And they'll win the next election, because the same sort of thing seems to be going on in Canada now as has been going on in the US for a long time: we will vote right of what we believe in, because people as left as what we believe in are gay.
Last night a full, 750 mL glass bottle of oil-and-balsamic-vinegar salad dressing spontaneously exploded in our kitchen. This may have been the stupidest thing that has ever happened. I feel like something stupider must have happened, but I can't think of anything in particular.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
5:33PM - Haiku to a Questionable Dog while Brushing my Coat
You eat my flowers
And repay me with your hairs.
Is that a fair deal?
Monday, February 4, 2008
11:42PM - Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar-gooooooooooooooooooes!
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 2. High today: 2. EC has "Thunderstorm with rain" down at 10 p.m. That seems unlikely. But not impossible. Supposed to get to 7 by morning.
The TV weatherpeople--I can't say the weather gerbils, because Michael Kuss, God love 'im, was doing it too--have come up with a new way to annoy the hell out of me. I suspect it is actually Environment Canada's fault: recently (at least, I think this is recent) its website started listing, not only the record high and low temperatures for the current day, but also the most rainfall, snowfall, and snow on the ground. This means that every day of the winter now has a "record snowfall", just like it has a record high and a record low temperature. This means that just about every significant snowfall in Toronto is now a RECORD-BREAKING SNOWSTORM! The "old record" for last Friday was 8.1 cm, which we blew away with 16.4 cm! We more than doubled the record! Woo!
There are two ways to look at this, though. One is that it's ridiculous for just about every significant snowstorm we get to be "record-breaking". The other is that it's no more ridiculous to have three record-breaking snowstorms in a season than it is to have three days of record-high temperatures in a season, which also often happens when you have daily records. Really, it'd be better to just forget about daily records altogether. At least until we have a few hundred more years of history.
Some more poking around on Kenya reveals that the internets are really still not up to serving all your research needs. There is not much out there, and a lot of it is conflicting. One thing I had wrong at last report was the bit about the proposed constitution making the president a figurehead. That's what a constitutional commission recommended, but the recommendation was amended to make the president more powerful again. It would, however, have moved the president out of parliament and created a position of prime minister, which did not and does not exist in Kenya. This was apparently the key to Odinga's alliance with Kibaki in the 2002 elections: Kibaki would get the constitution amended to create the position of prime minister, and he would make Odinga his prime minister. Apparently Kibaki didn't move on this as quickly as he had agreed to, so Odinga left the governing coalition; then, the constitution that Kibaki brought to the referendum had the balance of power between president and prime minister tilted more toward the president than Odinga wanted, so he led the opposition to it. Something I read somewhere yesterday suggested that the way out of the current mess would be for Kibaki to make Odinga the prime minister--but if Kibaki could do that, there wouldn't be the mess in the first place.
An interesting subtext that's mentioned in only one thing I've seen (I think from the U.S. State Department) is that the Anglican Church of Kenya opposed the proposed constitution, because it would have given Islamic courts a formally recognized position in the justice system. It's a somewhat odd feature of the current situation that the cleavages are entirely (portrayed as being) along "tribal" lines, whereas before the 2005 referendum, the important cleavage apparently was Muslim vs. non-Muslim. But, apparently, the Muslims live along the Indian Ocean coast; the current violence, apparently, is taking place inland.
One other thing that has to be noted about the December elections, which has not been widely reported at all: Odinga's coalition won more than twice as many seats as Kibaki's in parliament, though still not an outright majority. (Another crucial fact about the presidential election is that a splinter candidate from Odinga's coalition took enough votes that his votes and Odinga's combined would easily have beaten Kibaki, maybe so easily that the count couldn't practically have been rigged as it probably was.) You would think this would make it difficult for Kibaki to govern, particularly since, under the current, old, constitution, Kibaki is a member of parliament and directly accountable to it.
So you see how many things I seem to think I know, based on all the conflicting reports I have read on the internets.
I have periodically, though not intensively, been trying to figure out why I have taken an interest in Kenya (as opposed to, say, C