Rollins's Review, August 12
I’m going to be doing a weekly Substack link review Fridays.
First up is Michael D. C. Bowen, author of Stoic Observations. Michael is a practical guy, and I enjoy his musings on Modern Stoicism very much. His latest, Implicit Assumptions About Unconscious Bias, hits three of my personal interests; practical cognitive neuroscience, anti-wokism, and good linguistic flow. It’s method for gaming the implicit bias tests given by corporations to contractors.
John Carter, the Sage of Barsoom, is a first-rate sparring partner. Alternately crass and poetic, he’s a breath of fresh air scented with One Point Four. His latest, Tlaloc’s Revenge, posits an intriguing moral inversion of the establishment line regarding the conquest of the Aztecs. Highly recommended.
Wesley Yang writes like William Gibson if he were a cultural anthropologist. His newsletter, Year Zero, is consistently smart and interesting. He just posted a transcript of a great interview he did with Katie Herzog on woke racism at NPR and the social memory-holing of detransitioners.
I always imagine Handwaving Freakoutery as looking like R. Lee Ermey, but I have no basis for this assumption aside from the fact that he’s methodical, zero-bullshit, and super into guns. His latest, The Compu-Crypto-Darwinist Case for Free Will, his take on determinism (he’s against it), is well-argued, but I’m boosting him as much for that as because his archive contains the best collection of data-driven pro-2A argumentation I have yet discovered.
Mike Hind’s Rarely Certain is always interesting. He has a post on how to be a meadow up called Are We Having Fun Yet. I loved the character of Gilbert, AKA Fiddler’s Green, in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic book, the O.G. of people who turn out to be places, so I loved this.
Rhyd Wildermuth is a Marxist. But not the cultural kind, the Freddie deBoer kind. I read From the Forests of Arduinna, his newsletter, becuase his use of language is superb and he comes at issues at an angle that’s underappreciated; old-school economic Leftism untainted by wokism. His latest free piece is “A Good Life.”
Rounding out the list for the week is Doc Hammer. Blacksmiths possess the oldest human magic, and if they say something, it’s probably worth your time to listen. Doc is also an economist, and his newsletter is about forging and finance. Pay attention.