Brothers Judd Blog

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

What are you Haydn? The hoaxers who fooled the classical music world (Phil Hebblethwaite, 5 Nov 2024, The Guardian)

In his article, Beckerman wrote: “Knowing that a work is by Haydn or Mozart allows us to see ‘inevitable’ connections. Take away the certainty of authorship, and it’s devilishly difficult to read the musical images within.” He noted, too, that it was the inauthenticity of the manuscript that had exposed Michel and not the fidelity of the music. And so, Beckerman dared to ask: “If someone can write pieces that can be mistaken for Haydn, what is so special about Haydn?”

NO ONE SUPPORTS ROE:

Why Dems’ abortion messaging might not be enough to flip the NH governor’s office
(Lisa Kashinsky, 11/05/2024, Politico)

Democrat Joyce Craig, the former mayor of New Hampshire’s largest city, has built her campaign around expanding abortion rights in the only state in New England where access to the procedure is not guaranteed in the state constitution. And Craig has relentlessly attacked her rival, former Sen. Kelly Ayotte, over her past support for restricting abortion access. [..]

In New Hampshire, where abortion rights are widely supported, a series of surveys from Saint Anselm College shows likely voters ranking abortion behind the economy, democracy and border security as the top issues facing the country — even among women. Other polls show similar results.

“It’s not an unimportant issue, it’s just not an issue driving the election” the way it did in 2022, Sununu said in an interview.

IT’S JUST ABOUT HATE:

Inside the Ruthless, Restless Final Days of Trump’s Campaign (Tim Alberta, November 2, 2024, The Atlantic)

At the end of June, in the afterglow of a debate performance that would ultimately prompt President Joe Biden to end his campaign for reelection, Donald Trump startled his aides by announcing that he’d come up with a new nickname for his opponent.

“The guy’s a retard. He’s retarded. I think that’s what I’ll start calling him,” Trump declared aboard his campaign plane, en route to a rally that evening, according to three people who heard him make the remarks: “Retarded Joe Biden.”

The staffers present—and, within hours, others who’d heard about the epithet secondhand—pleaded with Trump not to say this publicly. They warned him that it would antagonize the moderate voters who’d been breaking in their direction, while engendering sympathy for a politician who, at that moment, was the subject of widespread ridicule. As Trump demurred, musing that he might debut the nickname at that night’s event, his staffers puzzled over the timing. Biden was on the ropes. Polls showed Trump jumping out to the biggest lead he’d enjoyed in any of his three campaigns for the presidency. Everything was going right for the Republican Party and its nominee. Why would he jeopardize that for the sake of slinging a juvenile insult? (A campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said the nickname “was never discussed and this is materially false.”)

Over the next several days—as Trump’s aides held their breath, convinced he would debut this latest slur at any moment—they came to realize something about Trump: He was restless, unhappy, and, yes, tired of winning. For the previous 20 months, he’d been hemmed in by a campaign built on the principles of restraint and competence. The former president’s ugliest impulses were regularly curbed by his top advisers; his most obnoxious allies and most outlandish ideas were sidelined. These guardrails had produced a professional campaign—a campaign that was headed for victory. But now, like a predator toying with its wounded catch, Trump had become bored. It reminded some allies of his havoc-making decisions in the White House. Trump never had much use for calm and quiet. He didn’t appreciate normalcy. Above all, he couldn’t stand being babysat. […]

In conversations with nearly a dozen of the former president’s aides, advisers, and friends, it became apparent that Trump’s feeling of midsummer tedium marked a crucial moment in his political career, setting off a chain reaction that nearly destroyed his campaign and continues to threaten his chances of victory. Even as they battled Democrats in a race that refuses to move outside the margin of error, some of Trump’s closest allies spent the closing months of the campaign at war with one another: planting damaging stories, rallying to the defense of wronged colleagues, and preemptively pointing fingers in the event of an electoral defeat.

At the center of this tumult, people close to Trump agreed, is a candidate whose appetite for chaos has only grown—and serves as a reminder of what awaits should he win on November 5.

AT LEAST PRETEND THERE’S A STRUGGLE…:

The Fox vs. the Hedgehog (Jonah Goldberg, November 1, 2024, The Dispatch)

A quick refresher: The basic gist of Fukuyama’s argument is that liberal democracy is the best and final answer to both the “social question” and the “political question” as 19th century thinkers put it (lengthy explainer here). The long dialectal, often bloody, contest over various forms of government—monarchy, authoritarianism, fascism, communism, liberal democracy, etc.—has been settled, and liberal democracy won. Fukuyama used the term “history” in a very specialized, Hegel-drenched, way. He didn’t argue that the clock would stop and events would no longer happen. From the Hegelian perspective, the “end of history,” Fukuyama explained, “did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.” For Marx—the quintessential hedgehog—history would end with the withering away of the state and everyone living in perfect communism. For Hegel, it would be the liberal state. […]

Anyway, one of the great, prescient insights in The End of History is that liberal democracy cultivates a kind of “boredom” that causes people to want to overthrow it. “Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause,” Fukuyama wrote. “They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.”

And there you have all the explanation you need for the post-liberal, neoreactionary, “Do you know what time it is?” right. Ditto all of the post-liberal, anti-Enlightenment, critical theorists and neo-Marxists of the left. And let’s not forget the deracinated and alienated goobers who signed up to join ISIS or the trustafarian jabroneys and grad students who simp for Hamas. It’s not monocausal, of course. But, you get my point. As I’ve said before, boredom kills.

But where does the boredom come from? “Tocqueville explained that when the differences between social classes or groups are great and supported by long-standing tradition, people become resigned or accepting of them,” Fukuyama wrote. “But when society is mobile and groups pull closer to one another, people become more acutely aware and resentful of the remaining differences.”

The narcissism of small differences is one of the great drivers of human conflict. From college faculty fights to intramural libertarian fights, to the Russia-Ukraine war, groups that are very similar often have the nastiest conflicts. There’s something about people sharing most of the same cultural, religious, and political assumptions that makes the remaining disagreements seem wildly more important than they should be. Huge differences between cultures don’t bother people the same way as small ones because the big differences aren’t threatening. European Catholics weren’t all that outraged by Confucianism, Hinduism, or Shintoism, but man, Protestants got under their skin. Why? Because Protestantism was a threat to the way Catholics defined themselves, and vice versa. You fight enemies, you hate traitors. You try to convert pagans, you punish or exterminate apostates and heretics (vast swaths of antisemitism in various eras can be chalked up to this dynamic). You see this everywhere in politics. The hard left hates “neoliberal” moderates far more than they hate conservatives, even though they agree on so much more. If the Trumpified corners of the Christian right hates anybody more than they hate David French—pro-life, devout, Christian, David French—I don’t know who that person is.

Given that a President Kamala would likely be constrained by a GOP Congress, she should offer two fake existential crises that they could work on together: establishing control over the border and the budget. Summon all Americans with a vision of sacrifice to get the government’s economic house in order and make believe we’ll be enduring major sacrifices. Recall that when Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich managed it both sides were able to take credit and government t seemed to be working.

MAN IS FALLEN:

Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, Willie Nelson: What I Learned About Happiness From Country Music (Timothy O’Malley, July 26, 2024, Church Life Journal)

The hobby has made me recognize a couple of things about country music: it is the kind of music that proposes something about the human condition. It means something. It has revealed something, to me, about happiness (and how perilous that condition of contentment is).

The first thing such music has unfolded for me is, in fact, that something is wrong with me. Something is wrong with you. Something about this world is wrong. It is a bit of a cliché at this point: dogs die, trucks break down, and relationships end. But listen for a moment to Miranda Lambert’s “Tinman.” Or Carly Pierce’s recent “Fault Line.” Or Willy Nelson’s “Can I Sleep in Your Arms.” Broken hearts rip you apart, such that you would be willing to trade it all to be made of heartless tinman. Love leads to suffering, the kind where once solid relationships become sources of violence. A red-headed stranger may be able to kill you at a moment’s notice, but what he longs for most is to spend the night in the arms of a woman: “Don’t know why, but the one I love left me / Left me lonely and cold and so weak / And I need someone’s arms to hold me / ’Til I’m strong enough to get back on my feet.”

The wrongness of the world is often tinted with the kind of violence more appropriate to a Flannery O’Connor short story than popular music. The murder ballad, “Knoxville Girl,” sung in the haunting blood harmony of the Louvin Brothers, narrates the senseless murder of a young woman. The tale is recounted by the murderer himself, who confesses the deed. There is never a reason described for the murder. He kills, and he pays the price, spending the rest of his life in jail.

Such violence is also addressed by singers who have a definite reason to kill. The erstwhile Dixie Chicks gleefully tell us why Earl must die. More recently, Ashley McBryde speaks to Martha Divine, her father’s mistress: “Honor thy father. Honor thy mother. But the Bible doesn’t say a damn thing about your daddy’s lover.” So, the singer kills Martha Divine—if she is caught, she willl say the devil made her do it. In his “Wait in the Truck,” Hardy describes a murder of an abused woman’s partner. The singer faces the consequences of his murder, spending the rest of his life in jail.

There is something like a gothic sensibility to country music. Violence is lauded not because it is a good, but because the reality is that in this broken world where dogs indeed die, where love does not last forever, there is also the violence of the human heart. There is a genuine tragedy defining the human condition. The only thing to do is to sing about it.

All of this seems to go against any sense of what constitutes naïve happiness (more appropriate to the bubble gum pop of the late nineties). That naïve sense is dreadful: the beginning of happiness is recognizing that you are broken. That you long for something more. Dolly Parton’s “The Grass Is Blue” reveals to anyone who listens to it the terrible irony of heartache. The world is so beautiful, so wonderful. But guess what, you are still going to cry. “The Tennessee Waltz” is beautiful and haunting at once: your sweetheart can be taken from you in a moment’s notice.

How can something so terrifying be sung in such a beautiful way? Rainbows and bunnies are not how country music thinks about reality. Even if the genre employs a stock series of archetypes (the adulterous spouse, the violent lover, the fragility of all relationships), it forces the listener to reckon with the truth that we all eventually figure out: something is wrong. And coming to terms with that wrongness is part of the beauty of human life.

NEVER “JUST TRUST THE SCIENCE”:

Book Review: Why the Medical Establishment Often Gets It Wrong (Lola Butcher, 11.01.2024, UnDark)

“Much of what the public is told about health is medical dogma — an idea or practice given incontrovertible authority because someone decreed it to be true based on a gut feeling,” Makary writes.

Makary’s assertions are supported by hundreds of footnotes as he builds each indictment, but that doesn’t mean all physicians and researchers are nodding in agreement. One example: When a research team analyzed 13 studies comparing antibiotics to appendectomy, it found almost a third of the patients initially treated with antibiotics had an appendectomy within the year. Although the other two-thirds did not, the researchers called the evidence that antibiotics are better “very uncertain.” So surgeons who choose to operate immediately are not necessarily doing something wrong.

Makary, one of medicine’s most prolific iconoclasts, has been poking at America’s health care system since at least 1998 when, as a medical student, his article calling on hospitals, medical schools, and health insurance companies to divest their tobacco stocks was published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association.

A few years later, ignoring criticism from his colleagues, Makary created a checklist to improve surgery safety; after proving that safe surgery checklists reduced surgical errors and deaths, they are now used in most operating rooms around the world. His 2012 book, “Unaccountable,” demanded that hospitals reveal their infection rates and medical errors. A few years later, Medicare began requiring public reporting of those and other indicators of health care quality. His 2019 book, “The Price We Pay,” documented hospitals’ price-gouging practices and called for all hospitals to post cash prices for certain services — which is now required by law. […]

He does not call the medical establishment nefarious; rather, he accuses it of frequently embracing a narrative — that stress causes ulcers, for instance — without evidence, ignoring scientific findings that do not support the idea, and blackballing those who question their position.

JUST A RETURN TO HUME:

What Is Postmodernity? (Zygmunt Bauman, October 10, 2024, Church Life Journal)

When Toynbee first announced spotting a gray postmodern era that stretched at the other end of the Modern Age, what he meant was simply indeterminacy. What this way of coining the name (particularly the use of the prefix “post” as the only differentiating/signifying unit) conveyed, in the first place, was the absence (or ignorance) of any positive distinctive features which, in addition to setting the hazy prospect apart from the preceding period, could also give it a degree of internal unity and an identity of its own.

The Anglosphere avoided the catastrophe of Modernity because our philosophers always recognized that Reason was incapable of internal unity and thus could have no distinct identity. It was a faith all along.

THE FOUNDING DID NOT BEGIN IN THE 1700s:

The Lasting Importance of the Case of Proclamations (John Kennerly Davis, Oct 26, 2024, federalist Society)

In the fall of 1610, representatives of Parliament officially requested Sir Edward Coke and three other noted jurists to provide Parliament with a formal legal opinion as to whether and to what extent the King could rule by proclamation in contradiction of the limits set by the laws enacted by Parliament. Specifically, Parliament asked the jurists for their opinion on the legality of two proclamations that had been recently issued by the King, one to prohibit the construction of additional new buildings in London and one to outlaw the making of wheat starch used to stiffen the dress collars widely worn at the time.

After taking the matter under advisement for several weeks, the jurists issued their opinion in the Case of Proclamations. The opinion found that the King could not, by proclamation, create new offenses or arbitrarily extend his administrative reach into areas not sanctioned by the laws enacted by Parliament.

As Coke notes in the opinion, “the King cannot change any part of the common law, nor create any offense, by his proclamation, which was not an offense before, without parliament.” This is so because, “The King has no prerogative but that which the law of the land allows him.”

James resisted the judgment and continued to argue that his proclamations had the force of statutes enacted by parliament. Nevertheless, the opinion was issued and the case decided. The vitally important principles of law, limited government, and separation of powers were strongly affirmed. These principles would inspire the English Bill of Rights in 1689 and our own Constitution in 1787.

They should continue to inspire us today as we labor to preserve our constitutional order against the relentless onslaught of those who work tirelessly to extend by regulatory proclamations the arbitrary reach of the administrative state into areas not sanctioned by the laws enacted by our Congress.

WE HAVEN’T FACED AN EXTERNAL THREAT SINCE BEFRIENDING BRITAIN:

Are We Too Worried About International Threats?: We should chill out and let the threats to America self-destruct—even China (John Mueller, Oct 31, 2024, Discourse)

Because of its size and economic growth, China is now in second place globally in total GDP (though 78th in per capita GDP), a position it has occupied for most of the past two millennia. Partly impelled by that development, it wants to be seen as a “great power.” As part of this, China is seeking to gain “influence” and “to assert dominance in East Asia and project influence globally” by lending money through its Belt and Road Initiative to a vast array of other countries and by engaging from time to time in “wolf warrior diplomacy” using economic and military muscle to badger and to bully.

However, these efforts have been remarkably futile and counterproductive. Rather than generating admiration or obedience from countries that once wished it well, resentment at its “wolf warrior” antics has soared not only in the West but also in important neighbors like Japan, South Korea, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Australia and, most significantly, Taiwan, pushing some of them further into the embrace of the United States.

The Belt and Road Initiative is awash in unpaid debt, and loan outlays were cut from $75 billion in 2016 to $4 billion in 2019. As former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has recently observed, “The BRI is often depicted as helping China win hearts and minds, but in reality it is not winning anything” as recipients grow “frustrated with the corruption, poor safety and labor standards, and fiscal unsustainability associated with its projects.”

China’s Taiwan Weakness
The report sees China’s potential future invasion of Taiwan as its first salvo in its drive to “dominate” East Asia. To supply his military with some guidance, Xi has given it the goal of being able to successfully invade Taiwan by 2027, a mission that the report and many others in the West consider ominous. However, Timothy Heath of RAND points out that in setting that timeline, Xi was seeking primarily “to keep the military focused on its goal of becoming more professional and resist tendencies of slipping into corruption and lethargy,” and that there appears to be no evidence of an intent, in anything like the immediate or not-so-immediate future, to actually invade. Xi himself is reported to be exasperated at the West’s claim and insists that plans to invade in 2027 (or, for that matter, in 2035) simply do not exist.

Moreover, the problems accompanying such an effort are likely to be sobering to military planners. The report does note that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be economically devastating, but it fails to note the difficulty, emphasized by many in the U.S. military, of a massive amphibious landing: Stormy seas and weather rule out landings for the vast majority of the year, and potential landing beaches are small in number and well-fortified. In addition, resistance in the form of guerrilla and urban warfare in the mountainous interior by some of the 20 million intensely hostile Taiwanese residents could prove to be extensive.

Moreover, in the contingency considered by some analysts to be “most likely,” a military conquest of Taiwan would require China to outdo Pearl Harbor by raining thousands of missiles not only on Taiwan but on American military bases and ships in Japan and Guam. The judgment of the CIA, according to its director William Burns last year, is that “President Xi and his military leaders have doubts today about whether they could accomplish that invasion,” and that “if they look at Putin’s experience in Ukraine, that’s probably reinforced some of those doubts.”

Impelled by such considerations, longtime diplomat and China-watcher Ambassador Winston Lord has concluded that the chances of an invasion of Taiwan in the next decade or two are “somewhere between one and two percent.”

The Potential for Chinese Decline or Stagnation
A more plausible occurrence is that rather than rising to anything that could be conceived as “dominance,” China could decline into substantial economic stagnation.

AS maga CALLS IT, bIDENOMICS:

The Dow jumps 150 points as strong earnings and GDP growth boost stocks (Vinamrata Chaturvedi, October 30, 2024, AP)

The Dow and other major indices jumped Wednesday morning, fueled by a stronger-than-expected earnings report from Alphabet (GOOGL) Google’s parent company, and new GDP data signaling a stable U.S. economy. Released just days before the U.S. election, the third-quarter Gross Domestic Product (GDP) report showed an annualized growth rate of 2.8%.