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
Analogy magazine’s Asa Boxer offers a critique not dissimilar to one that I provided within The Mythology of Evolution with this piece, “Darwinism Denies Inwardness”. I hold a more positive view of Darwin’s contribution (I place far more blame upon Huxley’s shoulders), but I concur with the underlying metaphysical critique in this piece - and the historical point that Origin of Species appears into a context where both evolution and natural selection already had a significant history.
…in response to Asa’s essay, I was invited to submit my own piece on this issue. It appeared shortly afterwards at Analogy as “The Minds of Squirrels”, being an essay on the implausible stories we tell about our natural history, and a defence of the idea that minds have a role not just in life, but in the emergence of new species.
My most excellent sparring partner here, Robert Bachrach, sent with some amusement this link to the bizarre “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, which he encountered thanks to a New York Times article entitled “The Chief Ideologist of the Silicon Valley Elite Has Some Strange Ideas” (not linked as behind paywall). If you want to look inside the mindset animating Silicon Valley right now, this is a fascinating (and somewhat terrifying) way to do so!
Nearby
Friend of Stranger Worlds David McGrogan reflects brilliantly on a uniquely contemporary problem in “The Happiness Machine”. An insightful reflection on the difference between the empty pleasures of compulsion and the commitments that make life worth living. I was expecting Nozick and found instead a brilliant interposition of Bradbury and Kundera.
Although I balk somewhat at the mythic evocation of evolutionary imagery within it, another friend of Stranger Worlds - the inestimable Max Borders - offers a timely revolt against the replacement of charity with moralism in “The Giving Paradox” that is brilliantly succinct in making its point.
Otherwhere
Most of my reading this month has been on ‘disinformation’, which is a term I believe we should reject and refuse to empower.
If you only read one piece on contemporary censorship, I suggest Debbie Lerman’s “Internet Censorship: Everything, Everywhere, All At Once”, which is a round-up of the rapid erosion of international democracy through censorship with reference to several of the key battlegrounds, including the EU, the US, the UK, and Canada. This is the international democratic crisis in a brilliantly expressed nutshell.
Racket News has a great short piece looking at how Newsguard denies it is ‘government funded’, despite receiving funding from the US government to besmirch the reputation of anyone deviating from the administration’s political stance. Entitled “Newsguard Case Highlights the Pentagon’s Censorship End-Around”, it is a great primer if you are new to the censorship-industrial complex, and if you’re already familiar with the concept you probably already read Racket.
Paul Thacker’s ever-insightful investigative Substack The Disinformation Chronicle had a guest piece entitled “Americans Are Fools for Pharma” exploring the odd way that the principles of pharmacovigilance that apply to other drugs do not for some reason apply to vaccine candidates…
Comments open. A new bazaar next month, chaos willing!
Thanks once again, Chris.