Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

2024

India

GOVERNING IS A STUBBORN TASKMASTER:

Narendra Modi’s Plan Backfired: India’s shock election result proves: people don’t care that the economy is booming when they can’t feel the effects. (Rupa Subramanya, June 6, 2024, Free Press)

His campaign was triumphalist, focusing on his claim that India will soon become the world’s third largest economy because it has the highest GDP growth rate of any major economy in the world. But this message didn’t resonate with the country’s working and lower-middle classes, who aren’t seeing the benefits of the boom. Unemployment levels are high, as is inflation.

About midway through the long campaign, Modi pivoted, making incendiary speeches targeting India’s Muslim minority, hoping to fire up those who support his Hindu nationalism. The plan backfired. In India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, the BJP lost most of their seats to secular parties that draw support from Muslims and lower-caste Hindus. Here, Modi saw the victory margin in his own parliamentary seat, Varanasi, shrink from half a million votes to about 150,000.

The BJP also lost its seat where a controversial temple stands in the city of Ayodhya. The temple was built, over the last four years, on the site of an ancient mosque. A few months ago, Modi personally inaugurated the temple, with great fanfare, in a move that came to symbolize his efforts to marginalize India’s Muslim minority.

Indian voters are fed up with Modi’s religious polarization. What they want is a stronger economy…

Crucifixion

RELIGION ITSELF REVEALED THE SILENCE:

Leo Tolstoy and The Silent Universe: Frank Martela relates how science destroyed the meaning of life, but helps us find meaning in life. (Frank Martela, June 2024, Philosophy Now)

What makes ‘What’s the meaning of life?’ such a powerful question that inability to deliver a satisfactory answer can push a person to the brink of a suicide?

When I started investigating the history of the question, the first surprise was how recent it actually is. We often think of it as an eternal question asked since the dawn of mankind; but actually, the first recorded usage of the phrase the ‘meaning of life’ in English took place as recently as 1834, in Thomas Carlyle’s highly influential novel Sartor Resartus: “Our Life is compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life itself no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force.”

Before asking the question, Carlyle’s protagonist goes through the classic steps of an existential crisis. First came loss of religious faith: “Doubt had darkened into Unbelief… shade after shade goes grimly over your soul… Is there no God, then?” Without God, the universe becomes cold and silent: “To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.” In a mechanistic universe void of any transcendental values, nothing seems to matter any more.

For Tolstoy, the existential crisis stage was marked by being constantly tormented by the question ‘Why?’ He attended to his estate. But why? Because then his fields would produce more crops. But why should he care? Whatever he did, whatever he accomplished, sooner or later, all would be forgotten. Sooner or later, he and everyone dear to him would die and there would be, as he wrote, “nothing left but stench and worms.” Since everything vanishes and is finally utterly forgotten, what’s the point of struggling?

The silence of God drove even Him to despair.

Long War

TWO-BIT BARBERY:

Ideology is the Enemy of True Faith (ANTHONY ESOLEN, CERC)

There is rest in their faith, but there can be no rest in ideology. Indeed the ideologue looks upon their prayer as quaint and pointless at best, and at worst a waste of human potential, even a culpable refusal to put their shoulders to the wheel of revolutionary change. The ideologue has no use — no use, for all things must be used — for what Christopher Lasch happily called the true and only heaven. The monk knows that no matter what political regime should come to power, this world, so beautiful and so bittersweet, will always be a world of sin and death; it will always be less of a home than a wayside inn. And if the inn’s sign is hanging from a broken nail, and the bed sheets are a little musty, and the roast beef is overdone, it does not matter too much, because he himself, he considers with a smile, stoops in the shoulder, and is a little musty and overdone too.

But the ideologue has no clear sense of the pilgrimage. He believes in progress, and the imperfections of the world offend him; they must be eliminated. Fortunately for him, those imperfections are external to his person. Sometimes they are social conditions, including those that come naturally to mankind, such as the stubborn particularities of the family. Sometimes they are persons who ought to lose their jobs for a crime of least dissent; or to be re-educated by a regimen of ridicule, emotional manipulation, and threats; or, when the ideopathy is particularly virulent, to be cured by a haircut from the national barber, a purgative stay hacking at permafrost in a gulag, or a bullet in the back of the brain. Ideology does not forgive.

One Economy to Rule Them All

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

When the Robots Take Your Job: Some Intuitions From Recent Models of Automation (MATT CLANCY, JUN 04, 2024, What’s New Under the Sun)

Economists typically think about three major inputs to making all the stuff in the economy: ideas, labor (us) and capital (machines, buildings, tools – all the non-labor stuff that doesn’t get used up in production).

As the cost of labor and of a main component of capital (energy costs) trend towards zero we can not grasp how much cheaper wealth creation is going to get.

Brothers Judd

THE SLOPE ALWAYS SLIPS:

Is the Slippery Slope ‘Fallacy’ Really a Fallacy? (CHRISTOPHER COYNE, 6/01/24, FEE)

[S]lippery slope arguments are not fallacious if you can show the initial step can improve the likelihood that the claimed effects will come about. The fallacy occurs when you claim there’s a slippery slope but then have no good reasons to expect the first step to increase the likelihood of the effects.

How much does the initial step need to increase the likelihood of claimed effects for the argument to not be fallacious? It’s unclear. Wikipedia argues the initial step should be “demonstrably likely” to result in the claimed effects, but I’d argue that if the claimed effects are bad enough, we can imagine even a slight increase in probability as being too slippery of a slope.

Music

FORGIVENESS (profanity alert):

On the Music of John Prine (Erich J. Prince, 06/02/2024, Merion West)

For me, though, there is one Prine song I find the most philosophical, though many of his songs do indeed have that bent. (Being born in the 1990s, I often—and I’m told this is to my great detriment—think of artists in terms of their songs rather than their albums, but maybe this will one day change.) The song is “Fish and Whistle,” the first track on his 1978 album Bruised Orange:

“Father forgive us
For what we must do
You forgive us
We’ll forgive you
We’ll forgive each other
Till we both turn blue
Then we’ll whistle and go fishing
In heaven.”


Along with Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne,” “Dona, Dona,” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “America,” I consider “Fish and Whistle” to be among the most lyrically profound songs of the second half of the 20th century, as stiff of competition as there might be. Prine, the amateur theologian of the Heartland, wonders aloud: Our faith tells us we must constantly ask God for forgiveness, including often for our peccadilloes, but might He apologize to us for the cancer that takes a child, the car accident that destroys a family, or the wars that bring continents to their knees?

Art

ALL IT DID WAS BECOME DISORDERLY:

On Beauty and Imitation (Daniel McInerny, June 3rd, 2024, Imaginative Conservative)

Art as address to sacred order saw itself, to borrow a term from J.R.R. Tolkien, as sub-creation. It was human making done from materials provided by sacred order, for the sake of contemplating and celebrating that order, under the aspect of its beauty.

Such work was driven by an understanding of art as mimēsis. This Greek word is often translated as “imitation” or “re-presentation.” Art as mimesis re-presents, makes present again, the sensible and intelligible forms of things in media other than their own, for the sensible and intelligible delight of an audience.

When we take in Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of Sir Thomas More, Thomas More is truly present in the portrait. Not, of course, in all his living three-dimensionality. But the sensible look of his features, and of his bearing, are right there, amazingly, on Holbein’s two-dimensional canvas, as are, even more amazingly, certain signs of the character of the man who would not sacrifice God’s law to the whims of a human prince.

But then one day, something happened to culture and to art.

Culture no longer saw itself as the address to sacred order. Indeed, culture began to style itself as emancipation from that order.

One Economy to Rule Them All

THINGS HAVE NEVER BEEN EASIER:

Here’s how long it takes workers to become 401(k) millionaires: The number of people who crossed the seven-figure mark hit an all-time high in the first quarter, though retirement savings surged across the board. (Michelle Singletary, May 31, 2024, Washington Post)

The millionaires have an average contribution rate of 17 percent.

Fidelity said record-high contribution levels and positive market conditions pushed average account balances to their highest levels since the fourth quarter of 2021.

In the most recent quarter, total average 401(k) savings rates reached a record high of 14.2 percent, driven by employee and employer 401(k) contributions.

This savings rate is a milestone. It’s the closest it has ever been to Fidelity’s recommendation that workers contribute at least 15 percent of their gross income to their workplace plan. This could include a combination of their savings and a matching contribution from their employer.

FDR Identitarianism

IT DID HAPPEN HERE:

Roosevelt’s Revolution: a review of The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance
By David T. Beito (Reviewed by Michael Lucchese., University Bookman)

Perhaps no single group suffered more, though, from Roosevelt’s policies than Japanese Americans. In a moment of wartime paranoia, Roosevelt blatantly disregarded the civil rights of over 120,000 Japanese people, two thirds of whom were U.S. citizens, and sent them to internment camps. Beito does not hold back in his description of the dreadful conditions they faced. He outlines Roosevelt’s genuine racial animus against East Asians, which he describes as “amateur eugenicist views,” and successfully argues that the president was “the man who was chiefly responsible” for these outright tyrannies. Beito even compares the internment camps to the concentration camps established by communist and fascist regimes around the same time.

Japanese internment is among the darkest moments in American history, and Beito does a real service confronting its sordid realities. The United States government did not right these wrongs until President Reagan signed a bill providing restitution to surviving victims, and even today the crimes committed by Roosevelt’s regime are too often forgotten. The episode should serve as a bleak reminder of what happens when the Bill of Rights is thrown out.

It's a RICO case

ORANGE IS THE NEW ORANGE:

Donald Trump had lots of negative opinions about felons. Now he is one. (Lois Beckett, Jun 2024, The Guardian)


Donald Trump has spent years complaining that American police and the criminal legal system should be “very much tougher”, arguing that some criminals should not be protected by civil liberties, police should rough up suspects and a much wider range of people should face the death penalty for breaking the law.

Now that the former president has been convicted on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records, Trump is arguing that the US legal system is out of control. “If they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone,” he said on Friday.


Here’s a recap of some of Trump’s notable comments about “felons” and “criminals” – and a look at how the convict himself has actually been treated.

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