Dear friends,
My reading has been all over the place recently, including making good progress through Dickens’ Little Dorrit, which I have long wanted to read. Here’s some of the more interesting articles I’ve found online in the last month.
Stranger Travellers
Frank has a new piece over at Citizen Philosophers, in which he continues his exploration of ‘social reality’. I love the honesty and humility by which Frank pursues his enquiries, and I wrote a substantial commentary to “Truth, Evidence, Validity, and Facts”, that I hope adds some perspective from a history of philosophy angle.
Meanwhile, Asa continues an ongoing mission to dig up the roots of contemporary denial of the inner life in “J. S. Mill’s Cure for Chronic Analysis Dysfunction” over at Analogy magazine.
Nearby
These two pieces landed in my inbox back-to-back and made such a startling pairing I thought I’d share them together:
From David McGrogan’s News from Uncibal: “The Right to Everything - and Nothing: Toward the ‘universal and homogeneous state’”, spears the vacuous nothings at the heart of the contemporary authoritarian ‘system’.
While anarchist firebrand Paul Cudenec’s “The false red flag: a repugnant racket”, uncovers the way the Soviet authoritarian ‘system’ was propped up by mercantile banking.
Café Américain
The inaugural edition of Café Américain was a great read! My favourites:
“Modelling our Scientific Crisis: How Models became the Blueprint for Reality” by the inestimable Toby Green looks at how statistical models have distorted governance.
“We Can Only Be Ahistorical for So Long: Appreciating the beauty of modern music requires historical consciousness” by Eva Moreda Rodriguez, is a refreshing defence of the idea of a ‘historical canon’.
While co-editor Daniel Hadas’ piece, “Junk Language: Our Everyday Life is Swamped with Linguistic Trash”, laments the way the internet is filling up with ever more junk text.
Otherwhere
And here’s a few other essays that caught my attention this month:
“‘My Country Is Returning To Totalitarianism’, Warns Daughter Of Legendary Czech Freedom Fighter” by Cecílie Jílková at Public, is a sobering read about the situation in the Czech Republic.
Beyond the click-bait title, “The Outsider Legal Genius Who May Rescue Trump” by Armin Rosen in Tablet is a fascinating legal story.
This month I also read yet more papers on ‘long covid/long vaccine’ and other post-viral syndromes, although they might be too technical for most folks to endure. This is a complex and developing research topic that’s largely not being dealt with even-handedly by anyone because - yet again - it has been hopelessly politicised.
de Havenon et al compare severe cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections to severe cases of influenza infections, and discover a lower rate of post-viral syndromes (aka ‘long covid’) with the former (i.e. influenza post-viral syndromes are more proportionally more common).
M.C. Arjun et al studied the predictors for ‘long covid’ and discovered that people who received two doses of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine were worryingly more likely to develop a post-viral syndrome.
And relatedly (and an easier read), Vinay Prasad foregrounds the distorting role of political partisanship when he wryly remarks, in response to a junk science paper blaming vaccine injuries on Republicans: “Strongly suspect that being Republican is a protective factor against the development of long COVID.”
For context: there are definitely people with long-term sequelae from SARS-CoV-2 (I know at least two, not counting clear cases of vaccine injuries), and some of these symptoms seem radically different in kind to influenza sequelae. However, the state of the research remains fragmentary and partisan, and I remain resistant to the name ‘long covid’, which reporters pushed long before there was credible evidence, for entirely political purposes. This was terrible scientific process… but that, after all, is where we live now.
And finally, from The Free Press, NPR reporter Uri Berliner talks honestly about the mistakes the station has made in “I’ve Been At NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust”. One of the best opinion pieces I’ve read in quite a while.
Hope something in these eclectic essays is of interest to someone!
Comments open. A new bazaar next month, chaos willing!
Hey Chris, thanks for adding Bazaars to your own thoughts. Letting your readers in on your reading adds a helpful dimension to understanding your thinking. My take is that here at Stranger Worlds we are engaged in trying to clarify and understand bits of objective reality rather than burnish individual reputations. In this endeavor our only reliable tool is sustained civil, empathetic, and informed dialogue. The more visibility we have into each other’s “strange worlds” the better.
Once again, thanks for the mention, Chris... and your reading suggestions.