Welcome back to the Stranger Voices Bazaar, a quasi-regular mid-monthly round up of interesting essays elsewhere. Stranger Travellers (i.e. paid or bartered subscribers) are free to submit anything relating to our principles for life and thought by any of the usual means for inclusion in the bazaar - my only request is nothing should be behind a paywall.
From the Stranger Travellers
At my old philosophy blog, Only a Game, I have my last long-form essay of this Gregorian year. Entitled “Termites vs Meerkats in the Knowledge Wars” it’s a 12-minute read that ties together many of the themes from this year’s Stranger Worlds, as well as setting out a tent that I’ll be camping in from time to time next year.
Asa Boxer has a great piece at Analogy considering how chemistry supplanted alchemy in the context of Sir Humphrey Davies, entitled “The Bays of Poetry and the Light of Science”.
The excellent Frank Akerman just put up a piece two days ago entitled “Retraction: Demise of Civilisation” that highlights certain hopes and fears that are timely. I share his concern that we could be facing a new ‘Dark Age’.
Nearby
Friend-of-the-blog David McGrogan recently posted an excellent reflection on the importance of the novel that is, sadly, framed about the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. Nonetheless, his piece “On Having a Better Story” is an intriguing read, with much to say about the effects of the internet upon the younger generation.
Otherwhere
There hasn’t been a pattern to my reading this month, and this is in part because I’ve been rounding up a year of Victorian literature with the magnificent Pride & Prejudice, which I have long wished to savour. (Shout out to another ‘always wanted to read’ from this year’s novels, Great Expectations, which was quite phenomenal.)
Tolkien is an author for whom I have swung wildly between love and hate, and I took great interest in this piece “Why Rings of Power Is So Terrible” at On the Banks. It touches on a topic dear to me - authentic adaptation, and why contemporary screenwriters are so miserably bad at it.
Bari Weiss’ The Free Press was part of what drew me to Substack in the first place (back when it was called Common Sense). “The Fight for the Future of Publishing”, by Alex Perez, is not only an insightful report on the ideological forces at work in book publishing, it has a magnificent cover image.
Meanwhile in government censorship land, a new whistleblower has brought to light yet another strand in the story of how the US and UK governments turned ‘anti-disinformation’ agencies against their own citizens.
Matt Taibbi’s Racket summarised the story as it broke, with a link to Public’s far longer article within it.
…and here’s Matt Taibbi again with a long thread on some of the shocking situations revealed by the CTI League leaks, entitled “The Hamilton 68 Connection”.
See also Michael Shellenberger’s testimony to the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.)
Speaking of censorship topics, a new paper in Nature adds to the ever-growing list of woes for the mRNA technology that legacy media work tooth-and-nail to whitewash as necessarily wonderful. It’s a tough read if you don’t have the background for it, but the short version is that the aspect of the mRNA biotech that just won a Nobel prize induces transcription errors in mRNA, intermittently producing nonsense proteins. A great many of the other side effects reported for vaccine candidates using this tech might be explained by this disastrous flaw.
Lastly, online identity questions. I have previously argued that real identities are important to solving some of the problems of the internet, although I vehemently resist any attempt for the nation-state to serve as the enforcer of such an arrangement. As such, I was intrigued by the arguments “Papers, Please: The Attack on Online Privacy” at Libre Solutions Network. While it is absurdly embedded in the ‘information’ paradigm (which I find an anti-human epistemology) it nonetheless raises interesting points about online anonymity.
Comments open. A new bazaar next month, chaos willing!
Another thank you, Chris. Much appreciated.