The War on Whatever isn't a Car

I have refrained, for the most part, from commenting on local politics, be they civic, provincial or federal, in part because my early experience as a blogger was in a political way, and I found most of these conversations to be time-consuming and pointless.

There were other reasons, mainly that I was in a job that prevented me from speaking about a lot of these things, and even though I'm out of that job, old habits die hard, and maybe I enjoy the troll-free (and I suppose, comment-free) solitude of this blog's current state.

That all being said, I would like to note to all the eternally red-faced members of "Ford Nation", the erstwhile, yet strangely anonymous supporters of our current right-wing millionaire mayor Rob Ford, that insofar as you are happy that the war on the car is over, you must be delighted to see that the war on any other mode of transportation is fully on.

I guess my own opinion on this matter is this - basically, if there are 60 people in a streetcar, and one person in a car, I believe that the car should have as difficult a time as possible to get to wherever they need to go in downtown Toronto. Rob Ford believes the opposite - he really does seem to think that if you got rid of all the streetcars and other things that get in the way of that lone driver, that magically the roads will clear up.

Except, obviously, the opposite will happen. More (unless gas prices keep rising) people will simply take their cars, and so instead of 60 people in a streetcar, you'll have 60 people in cars.
Here's some simple math for the citizens of Ford Nation - you think a single streetcar is a pain in the ass to get around as you gulp down your double double on the way to your soul-sucking job? How about 60 more cars on the road? That's like what, the length of 30 streetcars? Does this make any sense?

Now I'm sorry if this sounds patronizing, but I can't help it, it's just that this seems so obvious to me - if you take people out of public transit they still have to get to work, and they are left with two options - they either move closer to work or they drive. My guess is that many will, for lots of good reasons, choose the latter.

And what is really strange about this is that, as much as people dislike the TTC, what with all the crazy people and the jostling for a seat and the general rudeness, driving into downtown is a terrible, soul-sucking experience.

But such is the paradoxical world that we live in that, instead of many Torontonians looking at this and saying "how do we make this better for everyone", no, instead they decide that the best route is to pull everyone down with them.

All those angry, alienated people who voted for Ford, and his vaunted "respect" for taxpayers (not citizens of course), must have all peed their pants with joy finding out that, instead of using our precious, no sacred tax dollars on paying the people who pick up our garbage a good wage and good benefits, we are instead going to give our sacred tax money to the private sector, so they can turn those decently paid garbage workers into members of Ford Nation, that is, angry and alienated.

Then they too can direct their anger at their fellow workers and not at the people who actually profit off of them. All so that we don't have to worry about naughty labour getting all uppity and going on strike.

When it turns out that whatever company we give this money to ends up shafting its workers, or asking for more money, and it all winds up costing more (as it always does), Rob Ford, like his brethren, will just shrug his shoulders and remind people about how it somehow saved tax dollars, even if what saving dollars meant was really sacrificing the people who clean up your mess, day in, day out.

But our city has decided that these people aren't worth it, and so we have sold them off, just as we will now dismantle what little progress was made toward making downtown as uncomfortable for motorists as possible, because this would have meant the many were being served at the expense of the few, and not as it now stands, which is the other way around.

An Open Question

So in the bizarro world of Canadian politics, does Osama bin Laden's death mean that the Conservatives will get more seats today?

My guess is yes, or at least people will discuss it as a factor. You heard it here fist!

Ha!

From a Star article:

“Those here who remember the Liberal-NDP arrangement in the 1970s, remember how it took a generation to dig ourselves back out,” Harper said, referring to the minority government from 1972-74 led by then Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau with the support of David Lewis's New Democrats."

This is amazing to me. Here's a guy who was found in contempt of Parliament, and who has plunged Canada into 1970's-style defecits for uh, similar reasons, and he's asking people to remember 40 years ago how bad things were.

Except they weren't.

Strange

I said to someone a few days ago that what was happening in this federal election was starting to look a lot like Bob Rae's election in 1990.

It seems that this might actually be the case. I don't really know what to say except that nothing makes any sense! But maybe I should also say sorry for accusing Canadians of hating democracy, because their annoyance with politics seems to be turning into a desire to elect the one person who has been fairly positive during the campaign.

The question is whether or not Canadians actually know what the NDP stand for beyond "positivity". My guess is that, like Bob Rae in 1990, things could get very negative very quickly. But there's still a week left!

An Easter Tradition

For 10 years now...really wonderful stuff.

Canadians hate Democracy

At least that's how this reads to me. I mean, we have here a populace deeply frustrated and annoyed by elections. The fact that people have to go and spend 15 minutes voting seems to be such a terrible, difficult act, that they are prepared to reward the Conservatives for being in contempt of Parliament.

Ironically, it seems that their contempt reflects the contempt of enough Canadians to justify their re-election.

Ich bin nur durch die Welt gerannt

I was reading the last act of Faust II today (again), and I think I finally get it. I mean, kind of. There is so much here that really got to me this time, maybe because I'm a year older today. And I feel little need to editorialize here, I will let Goethe again speak for himself.

After so many lines where it seems that Faust is this remote figure, whose motivations often seem strange, he says the following near the end, before he dies:

I have run through the world, grabbed at
My lusts and dragged them by the hair
And left them lying when I wanted more,
And what I escaped I let them go.
All I have done is lust and do
And want again and so stormed through
My life with power; at first mightily great
But wisely now, now I deliberate.
I know the round earth well enough
And what's beyond, the view of it's blocked off.
The man's a fool who ogles over there
And dreams his kind inhabit the upper air.
Let him stand still and look around him here,
This world speaks to the man who stands four-square.
Why wander off into eternity?
He makes the things he knows his property.
So let him journey through his earthly day;
However haunted, still go on his way,
Onwards, to happiness and torment,
And never satisfied by any moment.

(From the 2009 Penguin translation of Faust II by David Constantine)

Resolutions

I made a whole bunch of New Year's resolutions this year.

One of the good reasons for making more than one is that you have more chances to actually succeed, which motivates doing more of them. Sounds counterintuitive, but it's true.

So far, I've only kept one of my resolutions, which was to quit my job. Yeah, I know that doesn't really sound like a resolution, but it was.

However, a lot of the other resolutions where the kinds of resolutions that are more things that I can look back at the end of this year and say, OK, I actually did that stuff. And for those, about half of them are well on their way to completion.

The rest, well...some of them were "if this happens then I can do this" resolutions. Does that make sense? Like if I had kept my job there would be some resolutions that would be flat out impossible? They are contingent on other things.

So yes, I am patting myself on the back a little, but ever mindful that something horrible could happen tomorrow that will throw them all off.

Actually, something horrible has happened. But I don't think I will blog about that for a while.

But at least I am blogging, right? Right? Hello?

Alain de Botton on Pessimism

Here's a very nice talk by Alain de Botton on Pessimism.



I have to admit, I run sort of hot and cold around the writings of Alain de Botton. I really enjoyed his "breakout" book, How Proust Can Change Your Life, although I haven't read it in over a decade, but some of his more recent work has disappointed me.

I know one of the criticisms that's levelled against him, that he's a dilettante, seems apt, but I think it's a bit unfair - we don't stop reading Montaigne because he was ridiculously wealthy and powerful, do we? And OK, so maybe Alain de Botton isn't Montaigne, but he's not Pol Pot either. Maybe I just find certain types of intellectual posturing kind of ridiculous. And to give credit where credit is due, this is a great talk on, uh, pessimism.

About that. Pessimism. As I noted in a previous entry, I myself have recently embraced pessimism. There are a few reasons for this - my long time strategy of hoping for the best and being constantly disappointed hasn't really worked very well for me, especially when it comes to people (including myself). Moreover, for a number of reasons, about 2 years ago now I became a fully functioning nihilist. Indeed, optimism seems to be the royal road to nihlism.

And like many "recovering" people, I've spent a lot of time around nihilists over the past few years, and now that I'm no longer there, I find them really difficult to be around.

Now what's the difference between a pessimist and a nihilist you ask? Well, for me it's basically that pessimists look at the glass half empty so as to better see the sublime, while nihilists think the world lacks sublimity and so are prepared to throw the glass onto the floor when it's dirty.

Now these might sound like the same thing - Nietzsche's pessimism is often confused with nihilism, but if he were a nihilist, he simply wouldn't bother writing. (So maybe that's why I stopped writing a lot...) Same with Kafka, I think.

But they're not. Pessimism is a strategy while nihilism is a worldview. When I was really more of an optimistic cynic, I tended to lump them together. But spending a lot of time wondering just how much worse my life could be, in order to see how delightful it really is, tends to put the nihilists in my life into great relief.

You begin to see your friendships with these people in a very different light. Where you one saw their opposition as a kind of helpful corrective to an overly optimistic, even naive, sensibility, you see it now as an incessant production of bile, a cancer of the soul.

Perhaps this is my own narcissism of small differences, but I have had some recent conversations with people I would label as nihilists, and they aren't pretty. I mean, the world. To them.

One tries to reason with them, but the problem with nihilism is that, as a world view, it's a much tougher nut to crack, because this is the world to them. To them, my pessimism looks like I am lying to myself. But I'm not - I'm imagining the world as being much worse than it actually is.

I know this all sounds rather strange, but Alain de Botton does a nice job of explaining why pretending to be happy all the time is a bad thing - hey, that's another thing - most nihilists I know, are often also people who try to look really happy. But then you scratch that surface...

It's tough, because one wishes they could help them, but they are seemingly happier in their misery, and spreading that misery, than finding peace. They would generally prefer the destruction of everything, which validates their own view, than an approach that imagines the worst in order to see a better possibility.

Sorry, but as a recovering nihilist, this is just so obvious to me now. I just hope that my friends aren't nihilists now in part because of me, because I can be very persuasive. Just not on this blog.

Old Time Blogging

Hey, here are some links of things I have read lately and either enjoyed or didn't - which ones are which I leave as an exercise to the reader.

A fantastic piece on the NFL lockout (yes, I know, sports!) by Stephen Squibb at N+1. People balk at the idea of rich football players being unionized, but when you look at what they're up against, oh and the whole dying really young thing, I can tell you it's a lot easier to see their plight than that of a bunch of plutocrats.

Given I live in a city where our current mayor wants to "privatise" garbage collection, because a large number of my fellow Torontonians believe the people who pick up our garbage don't deserve a good wage and our thanks. Instead, they would prefer some guy make a lot more money so our garbage collectors don't, and on top of that, they can't bargain collectively. I'm sure people here in Toronto looked at what was going on in Wisconsin and thought how we are somehow better off, but privatizing everything is simply eliminating collective bargaining through the back door. Anyway...

And here's a piece from the Awl about someone who doesn't own a cell phone. I kind of admire her, but part of the fun in reading this one is actually also reading the comments. People sure do like their cell phones. Or not.

As someone who dropped Facebook six months ago, I have had a lot of similar conversations. At the end of the day, all the arguments about adopting or not adopting technology wind up having a lot to do with what kind of a distinction we want to make between our "public" and "private" lives. So if this is at all of any interest to you, I would urge you to read philosopher Thomas Nagel's Concealment and Exposure. He does a nice job of trying to point out some of the problems with letting it all hang out.

Now you might accuse me of "letting it all hang out" lately, but you need to ask yourself, do you really think I would get that personal on a blog no one reads? Or maybe you've just found me baffling lately.

If it's any consolation, I kind of feel the same way.