12/26/23

 Tuesday, December 26, 2023

In bed at 11 (too much sugar?), up at 6:30 thinking about Maestro.  Let Lily out (twice), 42°, mostly cloudy day ahead, high of 47°, 14 degrees above average,  Wind is SSW at 8 mph, 5-15/29. 0.3" rain in last 24 hrs.  Sunrise at 7:22, sunset at 4:22, 8+59.     

Treadmill; pain.  I missed my opportunity earlier today and now at night persistent pain/discmfort keeps me off the treadmill.  Rats!      

I'm grateful  this morning for the completion of all the road construction on Port Washington Road and I43 near County Line Road.  I thought of it this morning as I took the trash cart out to the street and looked down County Line to the traffic lights controlling the intersection of County Line and Port Road.  For the first 10 years or so that we lived here, there were stop signs on County Line but no stop signs on Port Road.  At busy times during the day, we had to wait a long time to gain access to Port Road.  Once the heavy construction started, the intersection was made a 4-way stop and access improved dramatically.  Why hadn't those stop signs on Port Road been put up before then???  Now we have traffic lights aw well as newly-paved and widened roadways, plus much improved entrance ramps both southboud on I43 as before and now northbound as well, and an exit ramp where before we had none.  It was a long wait for the construction to be completed in our neck of the woods, but I am grateful for the results.

Geri is still not well, coughing in bed during the night and still this mornng It makes my heart ache.  How is it that I am still uninfected, either by the covid that plagued her for almost a month or by her current infection?  Tonight we drove to Walgreens and picked up a prescription for an anti-biotic and some cough medication that didn't contain codeine which Dr. Baugrud said she couldn't authorize over the phone. 

  

From How Lea Ypi Defines Freedom by Han Zhang in the 12/26/23 NewYorker:

At a talk in Chicago earlier this year, she reminded her audience that democracy is a “demanding ideal.” Our current system, she went on, “is not really democracy: we have constellations and configurations of interests that are very powerful . . . you have a world where strong states shape the fates of weaker states. You have countries where stronger citizens with more money shape the fates of weaker citizens.” When I met her, she told me, “I want to get away from this idea that, because you have an election, democracy is secure. It’s not a finish line.”

Ypi sees “an obvious discrepancy between the ideology of freedom and ideal freedom.” In the absence of the real thing, the word is often invoked as a license to disregard the well-being of others: to refuse to wear masks during a covid surge; to flaunt civilian ownership of assault weapons at a time when mass shootings outnumber the days of the year; to voice anti-trans rhetoric that fuels real-world violence and suicides. Ypi has a refreshing insistence on the responsibility that freedom entails. “There’s a dimension of freedom that’s not just about satisfaction, but it’s about placing your desires in a moral context and in the context of relationship to other people, and saying, ‘Well, what makes sense for all of us?’ ” Ypi told me. In a 2019 article for the New Statesman, she echoed Plato’s warning, in “The Republic,” that the demagogue, the “man of the people” in thrall to his desires and whims, is a perennial threat to democracy. Failure to work toward the freedom of others, she pointed out, leaves the door open to populists like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. 

Before she left for college, she had promised her father not to study Marxism. But her experience of the forms of unfreedom that persisted in liberal societies eventually pushed her to reëngage with the tradition of socialism. During her pursuit of a Ph.D., she began to explore “the possibility of reconciling Kant and Marx” and their common ground in society’s search for freedom.

Ypi thinks that economic migrants should be seen as akin to refugees or political-asylum seekers. The lack of employment opportunities that drive them to leave their home countries are almost always the result of historical oppression and exploitation. Politicians should frame economic migration as “an implication of global injustice,” she says. If freedom of movement is a right worth defending, she argues, liberal societies can’t condemn countries like North Korea that prevent citizens from leaving while closing their own borders and imprisoning immigrants.

I was struck by the phrase "the forms of unfreedom that persist in liberal societies" and  her recognition that "Our current system, she went on, “is not really democracy: we have constellations and configurations of interests that are very powerful . . . you have a world where strong states shape the fates of weaker states. You have countries where stronger citizens with more money shape the fates of weaker citizens.”  She recognizes the Cynical Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.

VA Whole Health video seession with Melinda at 19 this morning.  

Homelessness in Phoenix.  There is a long feature story in today's NYT on this challenge and its effect on local businesses surrounded by tent encampments providing shelter to homeless people with severe mental health problems, opioid addiction, and what have you.  The description of the hazards of living on the street is scary.  There are as many as 1,100 people sleeping outdoors in Phoenix each night,    according to the story.  That number seems way too low.  The story also says that the population of the Phoenix area grows by about 25,000 every year, including hundreds of humoeless.  The number of homeless has more than tripled since 2016.  These are the people that my sister Kitty uded to feed at André House.  Quaere: why do Phoenix and Arizona contunue to support population growth when the availability of water is a growing problem, when polluting traffic on I10, the 101, 202, and 303 is such a problem with a polluted pall of smog literally floating over the valley, and when the city's mentally ill, and addicted homeless population is such a problem.  The Phoenix metro population in 2023 is more than 4.7 million people and the population growth for years has been averaging more than 1.5%.  This strikes me as lunacy.