by Brooks Riley

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by Mary Hrovat

After my power went out during a recent round of severe storms, I turned on my battery-operated Realistic Weatheradio. I bought this cubical radio at Radio Shack many years ago, and it sits on a bookshelf in the living room, largely ignored until extreme weather happens along. It can be tuned to one of two wavelengths on which the National Weather Service broadcasts a loop of information on current and predicted weather conditions. It has a large, obvious on-switch; the two dials on the bottom are labeled “Tuning” and “Volume.”

When I turned the radio off after the storms had moved on, it occurred to me that it would probably look very old-fashioned to young people; I was thinking of my grandchildren and nieces and nephews. The sides are covered in wood veneer, a nod to the fact that radios used to be pieces of wooden furniture. I wondered if anyone else still uses a radio that you tune with a dial. For some reason, the radio was defamiliarized so that even to me it seemed to be slightly out of place in time. (I feel that way myself sometimes.) And it unexpectedly conjured an entire lost world.

I looked up the Weatheradio and learned that it was sold between 1982 and 1992. Realistic was a house brand of Radio Shack, which for many years sold consumer electronics. It was a standard fixture of malls in my youth, like Orange Julius and WaldenBooks. In 2015, the company declared bankruptcy, in part because it couldn’t compete well as the market for electronics—in fact, the nature of consumer electronics—changed dramatically. It changed hands several times and is currently an online business called RadioShack (losing a space in its name, among many other things). The only actual radios it currently sells are four models of a vintage three-band radio (AM, FM, shortwave). (So I guess there are other people who tune their radios using a dial.) It’s a familiar story, and it encapsulates one of the ways the world has changed in my lifetime.

I can’t remember when I bought my radio, but my life has also changed considerably since the decade it was on the market. Seeing the weather radio as a vintage object brought home to me how many things that used to be familiar have vanished. I don’t miss Radio Shack, or malls, and I don’t particularly mind that some of the more recent technology I use is now considered vintage. But sometimes it feels as if the world has moved on and left me behind. I’ve always been a bit of an oddball, but the world I learned to adapt myself to was the one I grew up in, and that world is largely gone. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Seeing is Believing. Vahrner See, Südtirol, October 2013.

Digital photograph.

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by Richard Farr

It’s a ritual now. Every Sunday morning I go into my garage and use marker pens and sticky tape to make a new sign. Then from noon to one I stand on a street corner near the Safeway, shoulder to shoulder with two or three hundred other would-be troublemakers, waving my latest slogan at passing cars. 

Others are waving the Ukrainian or Canadian flag. Or Hire a Clown and Get a Circus. Or Support Our Troops: Fire Hegseth. In my small town we’re perhaps 2% of the population — not yet one of those mass movements to which the future’s textbooks will devote a chapter, but we are fearful enough to need the hope of that outcome. With America’s vaunted institutions and much-hyped freedoms on fire, we desperately want more people to (as one of my own signs says) Join Us Before It’s Too Late. 

We try to take comfort from the fact that we occupy three corners of the intersection, greatly outnumbering the Trumpers, a dozen people blasting patriotic country music on the northwest corner. But we know the truth: the only consequence of our protests, at least until ICE comes to town and starts handing out free tickets to El Salvador, is that it buys us a little dignity, a little solidarity, a little courage in the face of disaster.

Some of us are “leftists,” which is American English for “centrist neoliberals who look back wistfully to the era of Barack and Hillary.” Some are “radical leftists,” which is American English for “people so naïve that they actually care about things like climate change, the minimum wage, Citizens United, Gaza, nuclear command and control, universal healthcare, starving Yemeni children, and Ukraine.” All of us are appalled that Donald Trump and his one-eyed yellow minions are vandalising central functions of the state, especially the ones that involve anti-corruption oversight. 

So that makes us the statists and him the anarchist, right? Read more »

…..Why Being?

What happens, happens before & after,
every time, without fail, always— yet, is singular,
is a one-note affair in a symphony of nows
each moment of which then becomes
before & after, simultaneously.

If this seems confusing, blame time,
or life, or God which, in particular,
has been a widespread explanation
of the fact-of-being during millennia
of befores & afters since the

beginning-was-the-word,
and the word was,
………………………… Now
and always is.

But this is not an explanation,
nor was it meant to be anything
more than a statement of fact,
that of the breadth and depth
of our life-long ignorance of,

why being?

Jim Culleny
6/1/25

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by Derek Neal

I first started reading Jon Fosse’s Septology in a bookstore. I read the first page and found myself unable to stop, like a person running on a treadmill at high speed. Finally I jumped off and caught my breath. Fosse’s book, which is a collection of seven novels published as a single volume, is one sentence long. I knew this when I picked it up, but it wasn’t as I expected. I had envisioned something like Proust or Henry James, a sentence with thousands and thousands of subordinate clauses, each one nested in the one before it, creating a sort of dizzying vortex that challenges the reader to keep track of things, but when examined closely, is found to be grammatically perfect. Fosse isn’t like that. The sentence is, if we want to be pedantic about it, one long comma splice. It could easily be split up into thousands of sentences simply by replacing the commas with periods. What this means is the book is not difficult to read—it’s actually rather easy, and once you get warmed up, just like on a long run, you settle into the pace and rhythm of the words, and you begin to move at a steady speed, your breathing and reading equilibrated.

So this is how the words work, but what do they say? After reading the first two books in the collection, which together are called The Other Name, the best way I can explain it is by quoting a passage from the book itself:

and that’s how it also is with all the paintings by other people that mean anything to me, it’s like it’s not the painter who sees, it’s something else seeing through the painter, and it’s like this something is trapped in the picture and speaks silently from it, and it might be one single brushstroke that makes the picture able to speak like that, and it’s impossible to understand, I think, and, I think, it’s the same with the writing I like to read, what matters isn’t what it literally says about this or that, it’s something else, something that silently speaks in and behind the lines and sentences (italics mine)

The narrator who is talking, an elderly painter named Asle who lives in rural Norway, spends much of the book like this, thinking about his paintings and trying to explain what they mean. He is unable to explain their meaning, however, because language and painting are two different things, and something gets lost in translation. What he says about writing takes things even further, suggesting that words don’t mean what we say they mean—“what matters isn’t what it literally says about this or that, it’s something else, something that silently speaks in and behinds the lines and sentences.” I would like to suggest that this is the true subject of Fosse’s book (or at least the first two that I’ve read), the idea that words do not mean what we say they mean, but something else, something behind the words.

Fosse’s challenge, of course, is to express this idea through language. How do we say one thing with words that mean something else? Read more »

by Barry Goldman

The brilliant and recently departed Jules Feiffer drew a cartoon many years ago called Munro. It was later made into an Academy Award-winning animated short. You can watch it here.

Munro was only four years old, but somehow he got drafted into the army. He went to see his sergeant and said, “I’m only four.” The sergeant said:

It is the official policy of the army not to draft men of four. Ergo you cannot be four.

We see this form of reasoning in many contexts. It is the official policy of the United States that we do not torture prisoners of war. Therefore, waterboarding, which has been used to torture prisoners since the 14^th century, cannot be torture.

Alternatively, the prisoners captured after 9/11, detained at Guantanamo, and waterboarded regularly cannot be “prisoners of war.” Instead, they are “alien enemy combatants” to whom the protections of the Geneva Convention do not apply.

This kind of reasoning can be difficult and complex and may require many years of rigorous training. Only a highly-trained and rigorous thinker like John Yoo, now the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, could produce a document like Military Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combatants Held Outside the United States. Try to read it and you will see.

My point is: This is what lawyers do. As the Devil’s Dictionary put it:

LAWYER, n. One skilled in circumvention of the law.

But there is a larger point that is both more important and less discussed. Even if there were a clear and unambiguous law, duly approved by Congress and signed by the president that said “Torturing prisoners is perfectly fine,” it would not be fine. If anything is wrong, torture is wrong. It doesn’t matter what Mr. Yoo or Congress or the President says. An atrocity enacted into law does not cease to be an atrocity. Read more »

by Rachel Robison-Greene

Many people who have thought carefully about AI are anxious about certain uses of it, and for good reason.  Many are concerned that people (young people in particular) are increasingly offloading their critical thinking development and responsibilities to Chat GPT and other large language learning models.  We may fail to flourish as citizens, neighbors, and friends because we allow AI to do so many of the tasks that would otherwise prepare us for the challenges we’ll encounter in our lives.  That said, some applications of AI seem like they offer tremendous benefits.  For example, there is promising research being done into using AI models to understand non-human language.  Doing so will help us to better understand non-human consciousness.  This has the potential to change how we see and treat other animals and how we view ourselves as members of biotic communities.

Some AI companies, such as the Chinese company Baidu are looking to fulfill very human impulses. Their products focus on deciphering the communication of companion animals such as cats and dogs.  What pet caretaker wouldn’t be interested in knowing what their furry friends are trying to communicate?  Other AI applications focus on the communication patterns of big-brained animals such as sperm whales.  These creatures engage in an impressive amount of vocalization and there is good reason to believe that mapping whale sounds can tell us all sorts of important things about the mental and social lives of whales.  These scientific advances have the potential to finally pull us out the philosophical rut we’ve been in with respect to animal minds for the entire history of human philosophical engagement. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

My sister and I have always been close. But for the last few years, something has bonded us like nothing before: trashy television. We love nothing more than to watch reality TV shows and rejoice that we are not these people. 

90 Day Fiancé (hereafter affectionately referred to as 90 Day) is one of those shows. The premise is simple: people find each other (usually an American and non-American, typically online), develop some kind of virtual relationship, and then finally meet up in person. 

The name comes from the “K-1 visa”. This legally gives a foreigner 90 days to get married to a U.S. citizen after they have entered the country if they want to stay. For our delight at home, that’s usually when things go to shit. 

There are different versions of 90 Day, but no matter which one we watch, one truth remains: the show really is a master class in love. Not necessarily what you should do to ensure a healthy relationship – but what you should avoid at all costs.

What follows are 20 lessons in love that 90 Day Fiancé has taught me. I hope you learn as much as I have! Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

The idea that ‘indigenous’ knowledge counts as knowledge in a sense comparable to real i.e. scientific knowledge is absurd but widely held. It appears to be a pernicious product of the combination of the patronising politics of pity and anti-Westernism that characterises the modern political left (dumb, but still preferable to the politics of cruelty that characterises the modern political right!).

My point is simple: knowledge is knowledge. Where it comes from doesn’t matter to its epistemic status. What matters is whether it deserves to be believed. The scientific revolution has provided a general approach – systematic inquiry – together with specialist methodologies appropriate to different domains (such as mathematical modeling, taxonomy, statistical analysis, and experimental manipulation and measurement). It is irrelevant that this approach first appeared in North-Western Europe and that many of the domain specific techniques were first developed and refined by white men from the ‘west’. What is relevant is that modern science allows a degree of confidence in factual and theoretical claims that has never been warranted before, and made this capability equally available to everyone around the world as the new standard for objective knowledge, i.e. knowledge that is reliably true no matter from what perspective you look at it.

If indigenous peoples have observational data and successful technologies to contribute to this kind of systematic inquiry into what makes an ecosystem resilient, or what plants might contain molecules with pain-relieving properties, or the history of climactic events, then that should be welcomed. But the test of whether these are an actual contribution must come from whether they survive scientific scrutiny, not the authenticity of their indigenous origins.

Read more »

Center of a peony in Vahrn, South Tyrol. Happy Spring!

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by Kevin Lively

Introduction

It is a well-worn observation that a sense of fatalism seems to be settling across the peoples of the world. There is a wide-spread feeling that global developments are echoing trends from the 1930s. Economic centers in the USA are gearing up their domestic industrial capacity, while the defense department speaks of Great Power Competition. China does the same, while trenches and mines scar the fields of Ukraine. With the NATO alliance under question, Europe begins to look after its own industrial base while refugees from drought-stricken, strife-torn lands drown in the Mediterranean. Those who manage a safe arrival, both in Italy as in Texas, often struggle to integrate into an aging society despite a desperate need for young workers. Substantial and growing fractions of the US and European populations are of the mind that this influx of hands — ready and eager to work — should not be turned to repairing crumbling bridges or staffing overworked retirement homes. Rather they should be banished and sent away in disgrace, regardless of the final destination.

An unspoken thought seems to be flowing among the currents beneath many people’s minds. More and more often now, it seems to break to the surface at unexpected times. Here’s a drinking game: every time you hear some variation of the phrase “in today’s geopolitical climate”, take a shot. Depending on where you work and what topics your lunch conversations drift towards, it may be unwise to play this game on a weekday. These events increasingly beg for certain pressing questions to be asked.

For example: how do we, as a species, deal with these dislocations of people, and the disruptions to their means of supporting themselves? How do we, as a species, plan for the future dislocations to come, as crop cycles grow increasingly unpredictable and failure-prone, while the ocean’s fish are replaced with plastic as ever more forms of pollution with unknown consequences accumulates? How do we, as a species, allocate this planet’s apparently dwindling resources between ourselves in order support a simple life of dignity and peace, unburdened by the deprivation of extreme poverty and the chaos it brings?

Discussions around such questions are, by necessity, discussions of death, religion, power and land — among the topics best avoided both at Thanksgiving and a bar. Thus there is a tendency to tread carefully around them while in polite company. Yet in today’s geopolitical climate it increasingly behooves us all to address such questions in a sober and critical manner. Ideally we should all have some mutually understood context for the stage on which these events are playing out, whether we’re in the audience, on the gantry or elsewhere, busy prepping the smoking lounge in your bunker. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe. Mine Dancers, Alexandra Township, South Africa, 1977.

More here and here.

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by Malcolm Murray

Aella, a well-known rationalist blogger, famously claimed she no longer saves for retirement since she believes Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will change everything long before retirement would become relevant. I’ve been thinking lately about how one should invest for AGI, and I think it begs a bigger question of how much one should, and actually can, act in accordance with one’s beliefs.

Tyler Cowen wrote a while back about how he doesn’t believe the AGI doomsters actually believe their own story since they’re not shorting the market. When he pushes them on it, it seems to be that their mental model is that the arguments for AGI doom will never get better than they already are. Which, as he points out, is quite unlikely. Yes, the market is not perfect, but for there to be no prior information that could convince anyone more than they currently are seems to suggest a very strong combination of arguments. We need “foom” – the argument, discussed by Yudkowsky and Hanson, that once AGI is reached, there will be so much hardware overhang and things will happen on timescales so beyond human comprehension that we go from AGI to ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) in a matter of days or even hours. We also need extreme levels of deception on the part of the AGI who would hide its intent perfectly. And we would need a very strong insider/outside divide on knowledge, where the outside world has very little comprehension of what is happening inside AI companies.

Rohit Krishnan recently picked up on Cowen’s line of thinking and wrote a great piece expanding this argument. He argues that perhaps it is not a lack of conviction, but rather an inability to express this conviction in the financial markets. Other than rolling over out-of-the-money puts on the whole market until the day you are finally correct, perhaps there is no clean way to position oneself according to an AGI doom argument.

I think there is also an interesting problem of knowing how to act on varying degrees of belief. Outside of doomsday cults where people do sell all their belongings before the promised ascension and actually go all in, very few people have such certainty in their beliefs (or face such social pressure) that they go all in on a bet. Outside of the most extreme voices in the AI safety community, like Eliezer Yudkowsky whose forthcoming book literally has in the title that we will all die, most do not have an >90% probability of AI doom. What makes someone an AI doomer is rather that they considered AI doom at all and given it a non-zero probability. Read more »