by Eric Feigenbaum

How do you square the following the statements?

I will be very unhappy if I went around Singapore and in spite of our prosperity, I saw a few hundred people living on the streets, begging, playing a violin, or pretending to play a violin to collect money. That means something has gone wrong with the society. They have not been given the proper chance.

And

Welfares and subsidies destroy the motivation to perform and succeed. Where we must help, give cash or assets and leave it to the individual to decide how he will spend it. When people become dependent on subsidies, and the government can no longer afford and has to cut subsidies, people riot.

In the United States and Europe, these two quotes may well be made by politicians from rival political parties. We generally think of them as a liberal versus conservative view and for some, perhaps a compassionate versus callous perspective.

Both were said by Singapore’s founding and long-time Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew. They do not represent a change in perspective over his tenure – they are two sentiments he held simultaneously throughout his long career.

He put his convictions to the test. No country has been so successful as Singapore in eliminating homelessness and abject poverty while avoiding public welfare programs.

The western model for dealing with social ills is for government to step in and create systems reliant on some variety of wealth redistribution – with countries like Sweden and Norway achieving some of the best results and Britain and America experiencing lesser ones.

In fact, Americans have been notoriously wary of anything that smacks of socialism – which is why there was so much initial resistance to many New Deal programs including Social Security. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society introduced food stamps and Medicare to create additional social safety nets. Today, these programs are entitlements Republican and Democrat retirees alike support. Social Security has become the “third rail” of American politics.

Singapore, on the other hand, is extremely wary of anything that presents as wealth redistribution. Lee Kuan Yew proudly proclaimed it the “No Beggar Bowl Society.” Yet, Singapore has socialistic goals on par with Europe.

Only, instead of giving money, Singapore aims to make life more affordable for its poorer citizens. Read more »

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NEW POSTS BELOW

by Paweł Skała-Piękoś

On method

This essay was extracted from roughly two months of work in collaboration with multiple AI systems. The methodology is not a disclosure I add reluctantly — it is the condition under which an essay of this kind could exist at all.

The work began not with AI as a topic, but with a political manifesto on what I call “the liberalism of subjectivity,” addressed to specific challenges in Poland. I used AI cross-model (Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini) as editorial sparring — searching for counterarguments, logical gaps, unearned generalizations. An early reader, Magdalena Kamińska, a professor of cultural studies at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, diagnosed that the manifesto, against my own de-escalating intention, was in fact escalating. I needed a method that would discipline me against my own affect, in the same way one disciplines AI against its hallucinations.

Out of that practice I developed what I call the “Kołakowski prompt” — an epistemic discipline modeled on Leszek Kołakowski’s anti-dogmatism: empathetic acceptance of the thesis, then skeptical examination, then identification of what survives, closed with self-irony against both narcissism and self-abasement. I paired it with a “destabilizer” modeled on Jerzy Urban, the Polish columnist who defended the late communist regime as a polemical exercise and then, from 1989 until his death in 2022, turned the same instinct against the post-communist elites. The technique borrowed from him is structural — calibrated to keep prose honest rather than ornamental. The political position is not.

I tested the resulting materials with Dawid Szombierski, a philosopher; Piotr Napierała, a historian whose books I publish; and two programmers experienced with AI. This essay was shaped from a longer shared human-AI framework I have been developing — at the suggestion of an AI instance itself, after I asked what in the broader project might be ready for outside readers. Read more »

by David Winner

I’ve heard older generations of white Americans refer to Black people as “the Black,” and I will take that on myself. I am “the white,” and the prejudice discussed here will be my own, white on white.

“Fucking whites, motherfucking whites,” I mutter all too audibly not exactly under my breath as I walk Ava, our Great Pyrenees mix puppy around my block, which lies in the far eastern corner of a neighborhood called Kensington in a city once known as Flatbush in Brooklyn, New York. I’m mad about the trash all over the street, which distracts Ava from her sacred duty to relieve her bladder and vacate her bowels. Many delicious distractions from rubber bands to chicken bones end up scooped into her snout (and sometimes out her rear end) before I can do anything to prevent them.

Why do I imagine the white is responsible? I don’t know that I’ve actually witnessed trash being tossed onto the sidewalk, and, anyway, why can’t I just be annoyed by this minor inconvenience? Why do I need to specify the race of the perpetrators?

It’s the primal nature of prejudice. We, the white, don’t have to deal with racism. I’ve never been deprived of opportunities because of my race, and while I may have occasionally looked sketchy enough to get followed around a store, all I would have needed to do was change my clothes, shave and get a haircut. But the white along with the Black and the just about everyone else has experienced prejudice whether it’s because of our height or build or accent or our education or lack thereof.

Concerning the white, there are two types of us on the block. Thirty-five odd years have passed since I made my way from Charlottesville, Virginia to Brooklyn, but I am still a transplant, a Johnny come lately, what I will call the white white. Decades ago, Angela, my wife, interviewed teenage Italian American girls working at the Court Street Bakery in Carrol Gardens for a webpage called Brooklyn Profiles. The bakery girls complained about the “whites” moving into the neighborhood: outsiders, yuppies, homegrown immigrants. Their skin may have been white, but that was not how they defined themselves. Read more »

Airplane wing (and winglet) while flying through clouds somewhere over Germany.

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by Charles Siegel

Last week the Supreme Court temporarily restored access to mifepristone, one of two drugs commonly used in combination to terminate pregnancy. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the most conservative circuit court of appeals in the country, had halted shipments of mifepristone while weighing a suit by the state of Louisiana. For now, at least, shipments will resume while the case proceeds in the Fifth Circuit, and possibly in the Supreme Court as well.

The case is another in the endless series of battles over abortion access that have played out in the years since Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org. The point of Dobbs, as Justice Alito so solemnly intoned, was to “return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” But that is not what the implacable foes of women’s reproductive rights want at all.

In the four years since Dobbs, they have tried, in every way imaginable, to subvert the will of the people. They have poured billions of dollars worth of lobbying and litigation into this effort, and will never stop.

Take Missouri, for example. Two years after Dobbs, voters approved an amendment to the state constitution, enshrining the right to abortion. Yet Republican legislators immediately sued to invalidate it, and have sought to place a contradictory referendum on the ballot soon too. Similar fights have occurred in Kansas, Arizona and elsewhere.

And they’re not content with trying to undo the actual votes of the people in state after state. Read more »

by William Benzon

The term was coined by interior designer David Hicks back in the 1960s, but I didn’t know that when I coined the term earlier this year.

I’ve been taking photos of my meals for several years now. Every now and then I’d sit the camera on the table and take a shot. The shot below appears to be my oldest tablescape. It’s from Hoboken’s Malibu Diner back in July of 2029.

It’s a straightforward shot of a cup of coffee, though obviously the coffee is not visible from this angle. You can see the shadows of the coffee saucer, the cup’s handle, and a spoon cast on the tabletop by the overhead lighting, some light glinting off the cup, and some very faint coffee stains a bit left of center. To the right you can see a booth next to a window and, through the window, some building. Light from the window reflects off the tabletop to the right of the cup. By the nature of the shot, the tabletop itself tends to play a big role in such shots, as does the ground in landscapes.

As for David Hicks, and his meaning for the term, as I said, he’s an interior designer. He coined the term to characterize the selection of objects for, and arrangement on a table in a decorative way. That is, his usage refers to the table and the objects on it. In contrast, my usage refers to a photograph taken from a certain vantage point. The act of coining the term signaled my intention to explore tablescapes in a systematic way.

Given that I am by inclination a street photographer I have little interest in tabletops composed for their visual appeal. I take my tabletops like a find them. In the rough, and in front of me. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Rafaël Newman

Amid the present surfeit of geopolitical obscenities, one incident is distinguished—by the absurdity of its moral aesthetics. On April 20 this year, the New York Times reported that the Israeli military was investigating an IDF soldier who had allegedly sledgehammered a statue of the crucified Jesus in a village in southern Lebanon. Local Lebanese authorities and Christians in Israel expressed their dismay; the Israeli army condemned the soldier’s actions as “wholly inconsistent with the values expected of its troops” and noted that it was assisting the affected community with the restoration of the statue; and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised “appropriately harsh disciplinary action against the offender.”

Setting aside for a moment the grotesquery of solemn protests at vandalism perpetrated on a depiction of the putative son of God while the IDF has been murdering with impunity actual children of God in Lebanon, Gaza, and Iran, the soldier’s alleged actions might be considered under two opposed aspects. One could understand, even empathize with his (presumed) rage at the image of a suffering Jew serving as the central symbol of a religion whose central tenets are love and forgiveness. At the same time, however, it seems that the soldier will have thus misunderstood the more crucial (and more sinister) theological message of the crucifixion, which is that human sacrifice is not to be renounced, as promulgated by the Old Testament parable of the Binding of Isaac and by the consequent Jewish rejection of Christ as the Messiah, but rather that such sacrifice may, in fact, be necessary for redemption: and that such a message is one of profound and important significance for Israel’s current campaigns in the territories that surround it, where the lives of civilians are being treated as necessary collateral damage in the pursuit of Israel’s (and, as it happens, Netanyahu’s own) larger aims. And that it thus serves as a ready justification of that same soldier’s other, more lethal actions in Lebanon.

As for the Israeli administration’s severe condemnation of the soldier’s alleged action, that likely has a different, more cynical motivation: namely, the fear of offending, and thus alienating, the vital American lobby of Christian Zionists. Read more »

by Marie Snyder

“When asked about a ‘major cyberattack’ from China, the president shrugged with indifference. ‘It is what it is.’ … Three days earlier, the president described China’s support for Iran as just ‘one of those things’” —Steve Brown

A year after coming out with Nihilism and Technology, Nolen Gertz wrote just plain Nihilism (2019), an “examination of the meaning of meaninglessness: why it matters that nothing matters.” It’s a really short book, but it took a while to wade through it all. Here it all is even more briefly assembled to highlight the salient points. 

We typically think of nihilism as very simply meaning, “we believe in nothing” (4), but he takes us through Western philosophy to get to a view that, “Nihilism is about evading reality rather than confronting it, about believing in other worlds rather than accepting this one, and about trying to make ourselves feel powerful rather than admitting our own weaknesses” (73).

THE HISTORY OF NIHILISM

Gertz explains the trajectory along lines similar to the move from pre-modernism to meta-modernism. We once trusted God, then flipped that trust on to science; then we questioned the possibility of knowing anything at all, and now we’re just starting to recognize the need for a few core Truths. Gertz goes back further to Socrates’ provocation to question everything: “From a Socratic perspective, nihilism can be overcome by enlightenment. From a Cartesian perspective, nihilism can be overcome by self-restraint. But from a Humean perspective, nihilism cannot be overcome. It is simply a product of human psychology” (28).

Then he gets to Kant who shifts us from the idea that we can’t know things to the idea that our values are contrary to genuine freedom. Freedom means obeying the self, and, since our desires aren’t within our control (we discover our tastes rather than choose them), our desires aren’t within our freedom but are “forced upon us.” So, true freedom (and morality) can only be understood as obedience to reason. 

Then Nietzsche argued that there isn’t one universal morality, but “the end result of a war between rival moralities” (41), and the morality of the Christian church was against life itself. We’ve been conditioned to renounce strength in favour of group safety, but “repressing an instinct is not the same as removing that instinct . . . Since it was ‘immoral’ to be cruel to others, members of society could only maintain their morality by redirecting their cruelty at themselves. This self-cruelty is what became known as ‘guilt’” (46).

What’s all this got to do with nihilism? Read more »

David Hammons. Untitled, Ca. 1990.

Metal coat rack, rubber, plastic bags, tin can and found hat

More here and here.

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by Michael Liss

Eight years ago, in May of 2018, motivated by a series of discussions with my then-graduating son, I wrote a piece for 3 Quarks Daily titled “The Graduate Schools His Father.”

Then, chaos descended upon the land. Trump, Biden, Trump. Wars, pestilence, theological disputes, DOGE, gigantic icebergs of cash floating away from the mother ship. Economic upheavals, mass firings/ritual sacrifices of entire Departments, even the slaying of the first-born East Wing (it’s being replaced, you might have heard).

Also, Deals, many Deals. So many, you will lose count of them (that’s by design, by the way). Just this past week, the President has concluded his summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. A veritable master class—it may be the greatest set of Deals in the history of Deal-making—a diplomatic coup eclipsing the Congress of Vienna.

Eight years is a long time for a fire-alarm to go off, especially when it is the 24/7 model with the flashing kaleidoscopic lights. Yet, especially if you are a parent, the time goes by in an instant, and suddenly they are adults.

I decided to revisit what I had written in May of 2018 and what he had said. How much did the world change in eight years, and how did the country react to it? I armed myself with numbers from a recent CNN-SSRS poll that contained current results along with historical data.

To start with, in what world were we living, in May of 2018? Read more »

…. Ménage à trois

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by Robert Jensen

Caitlin Taylor believes that a sustainable food system needs “legible” infrastructure, which is why she proposes—not entirely in jest—building slaughterhouses next to farmers markets.

Architects and engineers usually strive to make infrastructure invisible—so functional and reliable that we forget about the countless systems that undergird modern life. We turn on a faucet without wondering where the water came from and flush toilets without thinking about waste-treatment plants.

Most people probably prefer invisible infrastructure for beef production and poultry processing, but Taylor believes that the legibility of infrastructure—making systems visible and understandable—is crucial for justice and sustainability in food production.

“There is a transformative power in making infrastructure accessible, on a human scale, specific to a place,” said Taylor, an architect and a farmer. “Our goal is a food system that people can understand—what it is, how it operates, where the food is coming from. That makes it easier to see the need for real change.”

Taylor said that one problem in today’s food system is “the missing middle.” Between a globalized corporate industry on one end of the spectrum and local farmers markets on the other, there is not enough regional storage and processing infrastructure, either for small farmers who need to sell crops or for businesses that make and bake food products. Taylor wants to change that, starting close to her own backyard. Read more »

by Lei Wang

Stephen Colbert in conversation with the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson:

COLBERT Which is better, to know or not to know?

TYSON To know. Of course.

COLBERT But why? Why is it always better to know?

TYSON Well, you asked for my opinion.

COLBERT Yes, that’s what Oedipus thought too.

“There are two kinds of people in the world,” Neil deGrasse Tyson once tweeted: “those who divide everybody into two kinds of people, and those who don’t.” I would like to be part of the latter, but I’m afraid my favorite pastime is putting people into elaborate boxes, including myself (4w3/INFP-T/Scorpio Rising/Earth Snake/Obliger/Heretical-Investigator Projector, etc.).

One of my favorite parlor games is called Essence, a guessing game in which one person in a friend group—the guesser—leaves the room and the rest of the people choose a person in the group the guesser has to guess. But the guesser can only ask for clues in metaphors, for example: “If this person were a body part, what body part would they be?” Or: what holiday/cuisine/piece of furniture/type of music would this person be? Members of the group throw out options until the entire group comes to a consensus (nape of the neck/bar stool/bento box) which involves some pretense and courage on the part of the person being guessed, to participate in the determining of their own essence and to potentially be indicted by what the rest of the group really thinks of them. I love this game, especially since discovering my friends don’t see me as a disposable spork, instead a long-necked spoon for stirring.

I am constantly looking for ways to systematize the world, so that I might—what, prepare? The real advantage of having a brain, the cognitive scientists tell us, is not so we can think. It’s so we can predict. There are people who want to know and people who don’t want to know, people who eat the ass end of the asparagus first and people who don’t save the best for last. I am someone who looks up the ending of any movie that seems even vaguely thriller because I can’t stand the mystery. I read the Wikipedia articles for books I’ve never read, books I plan to read, books I never even plan to read. I just want to Know What Happens. My way of procrastination is to discover yet another personality archetype, take another 100-question survey, read the associated book, find out if I am a Leaver or a Merger, Hufflepuff or Slytherin, what my sleep position says about me, what kind of dog I am (supposedly a Corgi, but I’m actually just an affectionate cat).

Writers love symbols, of course—Alexander Chee has a lovely essay on his relationship to tarot, which is his relationship to trust—but so does the rest of the world, it seems, with the boon of astrology apps. In times of uncertainty, we look to fortune-telling because everything else is unpredictable anyway, so why not? Read more »

by Jim Hanas

A wag on Substack recently noted that there are apparently only four ideas: the angel of history, the eternal return, will to power, and one I can’t remember, the idea being that all philosophical conversations on the Internet terminate in four commonplaces. (The fourth might have been the trolley problem.) 

Philosophy might be understood as the articulation of all possible relations—universal/particular, whole/part, cause/effect—and while there are likely more than four, there may be fewer than we think. Look how exciting it is when a new one comes along. (At least until we discover it is an old one with a new name.) Kant’s phenomenal/noumenal was a game changer we’re still working through. Recent examples might include Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” or Nassim Taleb’s “antifragility.” These are novel functions that can be defined, discussed, tested, and installed in new philosophical systems. I would love to read a catalog of every possible such component, though I’m sure some Hegelian would tell me it is called “the Logic” and maybe I should read it. To which, fair point.

Mount Analogue, the unfinished, posthumously published novel by René Daumal—the somewhat unclassifiable French poet, pataphysician, and spiritual seeker—begins with a unique relationship that I’m not sure can be found elsewhere in fiction, philosophy, or myth.  Read more »