Slow, slow, quick quick slow

High today, here: 20. Dewpoint then: 4. High dewpoint: 4.
High today in TO: 17. Dewpoint then: 3. High dewpoint: 3.
Low today on the balcony: 8.2. High: 21.8. Currently: 15.2.

I am now doing worse than your average dart-throwing monkey. 2/4 in the East; 1/3 so far in the West. If Anaheim beats Calgary tomorrow--which, it still says here, won't happen--that'll be the top four seeds in the East and the bottom four in the West on to round 2. The world, however, needs Calgary vs. Edmonton.

I went outside today and it smelled like flowers. Magnolia, mostly, I think. There's a big magnolia at WLU that's already just a bit past its peak. I think, in my advancing age, the spring is starting to kill me almost as much as the fall. It's almost like I can feel the leaves growing--they just won't stop!

Universities are so much different in the spring and summer. York, I guess, is the only campus I've seen for the first time in the winter, and I'd heard so much about how ugly it is that it couldn't help but look good by comparison. All the rest, with the grass and the trees and the flowers--first impression is always a park with buildings, nice big spacious buildings, plenty of room to expand. Then the fall comes and it's all just people people people. Trample trample trample. No expansion. Contraction, friction, reaction!

Today, back at the library, the expansive, quiet, virtually deserted library, reminding me that, really, all I want out of life is (not much more than) room, board, and unlimited access to a decent library. And a fine and fancy ramble to the zoo, on the way home. No fat chicks yet, but the kids are all right. I don't know whether the maple blossoms they were eating as they fell from the trees are all that good for them, but a kid'll eat ivy, too. Falling from trees is probably the greater cause for concern.

Here's something that bugs me: people saying, e.g., that today's budget was "the first Conservative budget in thirteen years". Actually, today's budget was the first Conservative budget since the '30s, which was the last time there was a Conservative, and not Progressive Conservative, government. But, really, I'd rather call that "Conservative Party" merely homonymous with the current one, and say that this is the first government of the new Conservative Party of Canada, which is, after all, only fairly accidentally not the CRAP.

Here's something else that bugs me: people saying, e.g., that since the dollar's gone up, goods imported from the US should be costing you less--but are they? (Which was one of Mansbridge's lines tonight.) How about: since the dollar's gone up, retailers' profit margins should be increasing--but are they? Or: since the dollar's gone up, workers' wages should be increasing--but are they? (See also price of oil, wholesale price of cattle, etc.)

The most remarkable thing from today's periodical tour is perhaps most remarkable for its coming from the eminently un-remarkable Walrus. It's by James Laxer (who has got to have the most ratemyprofessors.com ratings of any York prof, if not any prof anywhere, with a perfect score), on the NDP's drift into irrelevance as, under Broadbent, it focussed on taking votes away from the Liberals, enabling the Mulroney Conservatives to win the Free Trade election, prematurely bringing Martin down, and blithely handing the last election to a bunch of right-wing ideologues--meanwhile abandoning its core principles such that it's no longer essentially distinguishable from the Liberals, a point that Laxer drives home by noting that today's NDP wouldn't propose anywhere near as radical an intervention into the market as Trudeau's NEP (if such an intervention weren't precluded anyway by NAFTA, which the NDP let happen).

In the Dalhousie Review, Paul Viminitz--in whose house I once ate a turkey dinner, and who, with Alistair MacLeod and Jan Narveson, comprises one of Canadian philosophy's Three Elephant Hunters--argues that the standard arguments for why he should vote fail, and since it's more bother for him to vote than it's very most likely worth, he is morally justified, and perhaps even morally required, not to vote. It's a very lively piece, and, having seen Viminitz in very lively action, I highly doubt that voting is really the issue (despite the high dudgeon of the straight-man response following Viminitz's piece). The point, I'm guessing, is to demonstrate something about game theory (or "decision theory", which is the term Viminitz uses) as opposed to Kantian moral philosophy: Viminitz's argument is game-theoretic and anti-Kantian; i.e., it's most concerned to argue against the Kantian position that, since I don't believe it's OK for everyone not to vote, I can't consistently believe (which is to say, I can't rationally defend believing) it's OK for me not to vote (though there's also a rhetorically pleasing broadside against the "Argument from Gratitude", i.e., that you owe it to the guys who died at Normandy to vote). What I'm not sure about is what it's supposed to demonstrate. As I was reading it, my feeling was that it was using the voting example to show the weakness (at least, the non-persuasiveness) of Kantian arguments generally, but I wonder now whether it's more of a reductio against game-theoretic moral reasoning. I do know that Viminitz is into game theory; what I don't know is whether he actually believes it's the right way to reason morally.

And then, back to Strauss. Looked through On Tyranny, because Levine says that on p. 27 Strauss tells his readers that they should look for the exoteric/esoteric split in his own writing. Strauss certainly doesn't say that. What he does say is that he can't say right off the bat what the point of the book is; it has to be worked into--which is, for instance, what Hegel says about the Phenomenology in its preface, and is not at all the same thing as saying that you need to read between the lines to figure out what he really means. So, in addition to Strauss's introduction, I read Xenophon's Hiero: The Tyrant, which the book is about, and also some very entertaining letters between Strauss (exhibiting a surprisingly playful wit) and Kojeve, whom Strauss always addresses as "Kojevnikov" or "Kochevnikov". (As an appendix to the Zollikon Seminars, Medard Boss includes some letters between Heidegger and him. In one of the early ones, shortly after the war, Heidegger asks Boss if he might be able to send some chocolate, since they aren't able to get any in Germany. Reading this kind of thing is, you know, I think, extremely important. Like Paul telling the Ephesians he left his coat behind, and so on. Further incidentals: the editor's introduction to the letters points out--news to me--that Kojeve didn't go back to academia after the war, but became a French bureaucrat, and an architect of the GATT and ECC.) After Strauss has read Kojeve's Hegel book, he tells him how wonderful it is (Strauss tells Kojeve he wants him to review one of his books, because Kojeve is one of two--in a later letter, three--people who can understand what he's really on about in it (the second being Jacob Klein--but, Strauss says, Klein is too lazy to review his book)), but then concludes to the effect that he has a basic objection to it which he will sum up for now by pointing to Nietzsche's "last man".

Thus spoke Zarathustra: incipit Fukuyama.