Zohran Mamdani Victory Speech
Zohran Mamdani Victory Speech Read More »
Politics
Primary Candidates for CA State Senate 7
Websites for the five candidates who provided candidate's statements for the Voter Information Guide for the primary election on March 5, 2024:
Dan Kalb
Jovanka Beckles
Kathryn Lybarger
Sandre Swanson
Jesse Arreguin
Jeanne Solnordal is also on the ballot but didn't provide a candidate statement and doesn't have a web page. Her Youtube channel is here.
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Lapland: A Prisoner of Geography
. . . Laplanders know that geography brings with it vulnerabilities. Finland’s shared border with Russia – which spans more than 1,300 km to the east – has been an increasing concern since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Three months later Finland applied to join Nato. The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the move was an “escalation” that “forces us to take countermeasures to ensure our own tactical and strategic security”. Finland became a full member of the defence alliance in April 2023.
Nato membership has not insulated Finland from Russian aggression. In recent weeks, Finnish border guards have reported a large increase in asylum seekers, many of them from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, attempting to cross the border from Russia. Finnish officials accuse their neighbour of aggressive tactics like those previously employed by Belarus, which since 2021 has been pushing thousands of asylum seekers over the border into Poland. In November alone, more than 900 asylum seekers crossed the Russian border into Finland; prior to November, ten or fewer such crossings took place each month.
On 22 November the Helsinki government, hoping to stem the flow of refugees, announced that it was closing seven of its crossings on the Russian border, leaving just one, Raja-Jooseppi in Lapland, open. (Update: on 28 November the government ordered the entire border closed.) Anxiety over Russian hostility is high. In a low-lit restaurant adorned with reindeer antlers in central Rovaniemi, Antti Kokkonen, the editor-in-chief of Lapin Kansa, Lapland’s largest daily newspaper, told me that “there is a lot of worry that hiding among these migrants are little green men”. This is a reference to the Russian soldiers in unmarked clothing who infiltrated and then helped to annex Crimea in 2014.
Megan Gibson, "Lapland: A Prisoner of Geography," The New Statesman, November 29, 2023.
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Liberalism
Images illuminate ideas, and pictures of people are usually clearer than statements of principle. When I think about the liberal tradition I wanted to show my daughter, my inner vision kept returning to a simple scene, one that had delighted me for a long time. It's of the nineteenth-century philosoper John Stuart Mill and his lover, collaborator, and (as he always insisted) his most important teacher, the writer Harriet Taylor. Desperately in love, they were courting clandestinely and they would meet secretly at the rhino's cage at the London Zoo. "Our old friend Rhino," Taylor called him in a note. It was a place where they could safely meet and talk without fear of being seen by too many people, everyone's attention being engaged by the enormous exotic animal . . . .
It dawned on me while I brooded on the long-dead rhino in his long-gone cage that the rhinoceros was the perfect symbol of liberalism. All living things, Darwin taught us, are compromises of a kind, the best that can be done for that moment between the demands of the environment and the genetic inheritance it has to work with. No living thing is ideal. A rhinoceros is just a big pig with a horn on it.
The ideal of the unicorn is derived from the fact of the rhinoceros -- the dream image of the rhinoceros, the single horned animal reported on and then idealized by the medieval imagination. People idealize unicorns and imagine unicorns and make icons out of unicorns and write fables about unicorns. We hunt them. They're perfect. The only trouble with them is that they do not exist. They never have. The rhino is ungainly and ugly and short-legged and imperfect and squat. But the rhinoceros is real. It exists. And it is formidable.
Most political visions are unicorns, perfect imaginary creatures we chase and will never find. Liberalism is a rhinoceros. It's hard to love. It's funny to look at. It isn't pretty but it's a completely successful animal.
-- Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (Basic Books, 2019)
AOC’s Day Job
Yeah, you know, the day to day of my day job is frustrating. So is everyone else's. You know, I ate shit when I was a waitress and a bartender, and I eat shit as a member of Congress. It's called a job. You know? And yes, I deal with the wheeling and dealing, and . . . I advance some amendments that some people would criticize as too little and too small, and . . . I also advance big things that people say is unrealistic and naive. . . [T]hat is like always the great fear when it comes to work or pursuing anything. You want to write something, and in your head it's this big, beautiful, like Nobel-prize-winning concept, and then you are humbled by the words that you actually put on paper. And that is the work of movement, that is the work of organizing, that is the work of elections, that is the work of legislation . . . that is what it means to be in the arena.
-- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez interviewed by David Remnick on The New Yorker Radio Hour Podcast, February 14, 2022.
