Brothers Judd Blog

DISTAFF OBAMA:

What the Right Gets Wrong About Kamala Harris (Jill Lawrence, Oct 08, 2024, The Bulwark)

No one can predict exactly what kind of president Harris would be, but she has shown many signs that it would be nothing like what these prematurely disappointed conservatives anticipate. Their judgments about her seem based largely on geography (she’s from San Francisco) and on her first run for the presidency five years ago—a ten-month presidential primary campaign in a field of nearly thirty major candidates.

When Harris entered the 2020 race on Martin Luther King Day, January 21, 2019, the New York Times reported that liberals were skeptical about her. She ended her bid in December of that year. “Sen. Kamala Harris of California never settled on an overarching narrative and rationale for her candidacy that encompassed her life, her record and her plans. And she mismanaged her campaign,” I wrote in a March 2020 assessment of the many dropouts.

As a career prosecutor, gun owner and “top cop” of the nation’s largest state, Harris could have tried to carve out a moderate lane. Instead, she competed for progressive votes against a crush of progressive hopefuls, including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, former Reps. Beto O’Rourke and Tulsi Gabbard, then-Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, and former housing secretary Julián Castro.

Fair or unfair, both the right and the left judge her by the climate, energy, and health care positions she took in 2019—positions she left behind a few months later when she became Joe Biden’s running mate. Since then, she’s been what I’d call a solidly center-left politician, by all appearances very much like Biden in her policy preferences and her openness to bipartisan compromise.

Is she a socialist, or even a progressive? Not even close. She calls herself a capitalist, she’s courting Wall Street, and she would increase the $5,000 tax deduction for business startups to $50,000. She has welcomed support from Republicans like Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney, the former defense secretary and vice president, and has said she’d put a Republican in her cabinet. Harris has also pledged to make sure that “America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world” (a convention speech line that some in her family did not appear to love).

IT’S ABOUT TO GET MUCH BETTER:

Let us pause to appreciate the remarkable U.S. economy: It really doesn’t get much better than this, folks (Noah Smith, Oct 05, 2024, Noahpinion)

Essentially, there are four things you want from a macroeconomy:

You want high employment rates, so that everyone who wants a job has a job.

You want low and stable inflation rates, so that people know how much a dollar will be worth a month from now.

You want fast wage growth, so that regular working people are taking home their share of economic growth.

And you want fast productivity growth, because ultimately that’s what creates durable gains in living standards.

Right now, the U.S. economy is giving us all of those things.

Only the last matters and it will be driven by the trend towards zero of labor and energy costs.

REDUCING LABOR IS PRODUCTIVITY:

Automate the Ports (Eric Boehm | 10.4.2024, reason)

But whether they are open or closed, many American ports rank among the least efficient in the entire world. The ports in New York, Baltimore, and Houston—three of the largest of the 36 ports that could have been shut down by the ILA strike—are ranked no higher than 300th place (out of 348 in total) in the World Bank’s most recent report on port efficiency. Not a single U.S. port ranks in the top 50. Slow-moving ports act as bottlenecks to commerce both coming and going, which “reduces the competitiveness of the country…and hinders economic growth and poverty reduction,” the World Bank notes.

That so many American ports are struggling to keep up with the rest of the world should be unacceptable.

NO APOLOGY REQUIRED:

An Apologia for ‘Doubting’ Thomas (Zach Hollifield, 9/05/24, Mere Orthodoxy)

Jesus’s Commands
“See that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and they will lead many astray…Then if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘There he is!’ do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. See, I have told you beforehand. So, if they say to you, ‘Look, he is in the wilderness,’ do not go out. If they say, ‘Look, he is in the inner rooms,’ do not believe it.” | Matthew 24:23-26

Question: What is the general command here? Answer: Don’t be had by those claiming to be the returned Christ, and don’t believe anyone who tells you they have found him.

Scenario: You are one of the 12. You return from being out and about and the other disciples tell you, “We have seen the Lord!” Immediately, the above teaching of Jesus that you heard earlier that very week, bursts into your head: “See that no one leads you astray…If anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘There he is!’ do not believe it…If they say, ‘Look, he is in the inner rooms,’ [the disciples saw Jesus while hiding in a house] do not believe it.”

What do you do? You have not seen him for yourself. All you have to go on is the testimony of others claiming to have seen him–the very situation presented in Matthew 24. What do you do? It would be entirely reasonable for you to conclude that to believe the claim would be in direct violation of Jesus’ command in chapter 24.

If this is the case, then rather than doubting, Thomas did exactly what he was supposed to do.

Ultimately, he only doubted the fellow Doubter. How could a mere man not?

SUBTLE-TIES:

Ezra Pound’s Blue Dun (Ezra Pound, July 1976, Fly Fisherman Magazine)

[…]

Dark fur from a hare’s ear for a body

a green shaded partridge feather

grizzled yellow cock’s hackle

green wax; harl from a peacock’s tail

bright lower body; about the size of pin

the head should be. can be fished from seven a.m.

till eleven; at which time the brown marsh fly comes on. […]

Pound’s interests were oblique and wide-ranging, and yet our attempts to find an origin for this charming passage have not turned up any evidence that he was either a fly fisherman or fly tier. Although he often boxed with Ernest Hemingway, there is no evidence that he had fished with him. Perhaps it is only that the poet enjoyed the parallel between his own fascination with the importance of the subtle shadings of words and the fly fisherman’s fascination with the importance of the subtle shadings of color in fly tying. For the poet, the slight variation between two words can make all the difference in the value of his poem, just as the slight variation between two colors can make all the difference in the effectiveness of the fly fisherman’s pattern.

PEOPLE ARE SURPASSING PECULIAR:

When a Woman Turns into a Wife: Jenessa Abrams reviews Sarah Manguso’s “Liars” in the wake of Andrea Skinner’s revelation about her sexual abuse and her mother Alice Munro’s silence. (Jenessa Abrams, July 23, 2024, LA Review of Books)

I sent a different version of this piece to my editor days before Skinner published her devastating and poignant essay about the abuse in the Toronto Star. When I wrote that first version, the connection between Munro and her work felt straightforward. So did the connection between “Too Much Happiness” and the book I’d set out to review: Sarah Manguso’s sophomore novel, Liars (2024). Both stories confront the impossibility of marriage for women who long for an identity outside of it. For women who wear the title of wife as a shackle. For women whose husbands view their independence as a threat. For women whose husbands need to be held and coddled.

As the world now knows, Munro chose to stay married after learning about her husband’s sexual violence. She rejected her then nine-year-old daughter’s innocence and blamed her as an adulterer. Where does one go from here? A wife learns of her husband’s evil and chooses him anyway. The evil is done to her child. The wife is a woman is an author is a mother. The child is a child is a child is a child is a child is a child is a child.

This piece was never meant to be about Munro. It was meant to be about Liars and women who are erased by men—as, for many years, was the fate of the fictionalized Sofya Kovalevskaya and the silenced Andrea Skinner. That erasure is not only done by men, of course. There are also the women who enable them.

In “Too Much Happiness,” Munro retells the story of Sofya, a Russian mathematician who lived during the late 1800s and whose findings on partial differential equations made her the most significant female scientist of her time. (Here, I use the Russian spelling Sofya to distinguish between the real woman and the fictional character whose name Munro altered to Sofia.) In addition to being a mathematician and an author, Sofya was a wife and a mother—though her marriage was a formality she orchestrated to leave Russia to pursue an advanced education, and her child was sent to live with relatives so that Sofya could remain dedicated to her work. In Munro’s story, Sofia is rendered a bit like a schoolgirl due to her all-consuming love for the man she intends to marry.

Like many, I have assigned myself the task of reconsidering Munro’s authorial intent as it relates to the inner lives of the fictional women and children in her stories—though one’s intent can be easily manipulated into a digestible excuse, perhaps of the same sort that allowed Munro to stay with her husband in the face of proven abuse. I have done this somewhat involuntarily, knowing it’s probably the wrong task altogether, as it further centers Munro instead of Skinner—Munro, who chose to view her daughter’s sexual violation as a betrayed wife instead of as a mother.

Toward the end of her life, Sofya fell in love but never intended to marry, perhaps understanding the contractual realities of a woman binding herself to a man. Munro’s reimagined Sofia is engaged to her lover and acknowledges that she is unable “to think of anything but him”; this “at the very time when she should [be] working day and night.” Ultimately, it is Sofia’s impending nuptials to this man—who retreats emotionally after she receives a major award because, in the glow of her success, “he had felt himself ignored”—that is the too much happiness that kills her. In this way, the narrative suggests that the marriage of equals is impossible.

TOO LATE FOR PURITY:

Notes on Context (Callum Tilley, August 2024, London Magazine)

The tension between politics and things people want to separate from it is old, divisive, and extends far beyond artistic media. While not related to literature, Hannah Arendt’s socio-political theory is illustrative of this false dichotomy between politics and apoliticality. In The Human Condition, Arendt distinguished between political and social spaces, arguing that the ‘politicisation’ of social spaces erodes their sanctity. Her opinion on this was so strong that, in ‘Reflections on Little Rock’, she opposed the forcible desegregation of schools in Southern U.S. states because she saw it as a violation of their apolitical nature. She believed, in the words of Samantha Rose Hill, that ‘political change must come through persuasion, not force’, favouring instead organic desegregation through public education about racial issues.

This, of course, is a false choice; centralised policy was needed to overcome the legacy of Jim Crow and begin the march towards educational equity and equality. Failure to recognise this was undoubtedly a product of both Arendt’s unfamiliarity with the U.S. political context and her understanding of the social versus the political being shaped by her experiences of Nazi Germany. To her, the Nazis violated supposedly apolitical spaces such as schools, libraries, shops, and other social spaces to promote their ideology. Her opinion on this was not flexible when applying her idea to very different situation because she thought that schools – and African-American children – were being used as political tools, an assertion for which she remains controversial. However, in being segregated, schools were already politicised; for her, Arendt’s defence of their ‘social’ nature was actually in itself – as Morrison argues – an unwitting political choice to defend the status quo. While trying to avoid politics, Arendt stumbled into it.

rEASON FAILS THE TEST OF REASON:

Mind and Matter (Erwin Schroedinger)

In this chapter I have tried by simple examples, taken from the humblest of sciences, namely physics, to contrast the two general facts (a) that all scientific knowledge is based on sense perception, and (b) that none the less the scientific views of natural processes formed in this way lack all sensual qualities and therefore cannot account for the latter. Let me conclude with a general remark.

Scientific theories serve to facilitate the survey of our observations and experimental findings. Every scientist knows how difficult it is to remember a moderately extended group of facts, before at least some primitive theoretical picture about them has been shaped. It is therefore small wonder, and by no
means to be blamed on the authors of original papers or of text-books, that after a reasonably coherent theory has been formed, they do not describe the bare facts they have found or wish to convey to the reader, but clothe them in the terminology of that theory or theories. This procedure, while very useful for our remembering the facts in a well-ordered pattern, tends to obliterate the distinction between the actual observations and the theory arisen from them. And since the former always are ofsome sensual quality, theories are easily thought to account for sensual qualities; which, of course, they never do.

IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Worldview may have more impact on mental health than chemical imbalances – study (Ryan Foley, 30 September 2024, Christianity Today)

The Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University released the study Tuesday, attributing the rise in mental health issues, such as anxiety, depression and fear, to what researcher George Barna calls “worldview deficiencies” rather than “psychological or chemical imbalances.”

The findings are based on interviews conducted in January with 2,000 U.S. adults aged 18 or older, with a sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

The report highlighted mental health struggles among younger generations, noting that 56% of Generation Z and 49% of millennials regularly experience anxiety, fear or depression. Generation Z refers to the youngest group of American adults, while millennials are defined as those born between 1984 and 2002. In total, one in three adults from these generations has at least one diagnosable mental disorder.

AND THAT’S HOW THE LEOPARD GOT ITS SPOTS…:

Coyotes have the face muscles for that ‘sad-puppy’ look (Susan Milius, 10/01/24, Science News)

Coyotes turn out to have face muscles that look capable of making that big-eyed, sad-puppy face that dogs have used to melt human hearts for eons.