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

Identitarianism

TOO BAD IDENTITARIANS CAN’T READ:


A Manual for Adversity: Nearly 2,000 years after it was written, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations is rediscovered by each succeeding generation. (Darran Anderson, Winter 2024, City Journal)

The centuries of acclaim are, in many ways, well deserved. No revisionist Cadaver Trial need be held here. Meditations is full of sage advice. Its espousal of “wisdom, temperance, justice, and courage” rings true in these infantilized, puritan times. At its heart is autonomy and the responsibility that comes with it. “If you regard anything that is independent of your will as good or bad for yourself,” he writes, “it will necessarily follow that whenever you fail to escape such an evil or attain such a good, you will cast blame on the gods and hate the people who are responsible for your failing.” The key to breaking the cycles of misdirection and resentment that ensue is to find “contentment” in one’s “own just conduct and benevolent disposition.” The answer, that is, lies not outside but within, “for nowhere can one retreat into greater peace or freedom from care than within one’s own soul.” Meditations urges flexibility, the ability to adapt to being wrong, and a generosity toward the less advantaged. It discourages tribalism, fallacious thinking, and dogma, and promotes a healthy skepticism toward critics.

Books

WHAT WAS LOST:

The Last Chronicler of a Lost World: Searching for Joseph Roth in wartime Ukraine (EDWARD SEROTTA, FEBRUARY 28, 2024, Tablet)

This sprightly sounding young man, about to leave the shtetl and his mother behind, would die 26 years later, in 1939, as an impoverished alcoholic in Paris in 1939.

But in that period he also became one of the most prolific, insightful, and well-paid journalists in Europe, and wrote 17 novels and novellas along with at least four books of nonfiction (most of which he wrote while sitting in cafés and drinking). But despite these professional and artistic achievements, his personal life was one of catastrophe; aside from his oeuvre, he would leave behind nothing but debts and a schizophrenic wife locked away in Austria.

When the First World War broke out in August 1914, Roth initially identified as a pacifist. Nevertheless, he enlisted in 1916 and worked as a military censor, served on the Galician front, and then returned in 1918 to civilian life in a war-weary and impoverished Vienna.

Here is where Roth’s lies, fabrications, and “mythomaniac” days (as David Bronson, his first biographer, called them) began. He would claim his father was a Polish count, that he was captured and served time in a Russian prison, and that he left the army as a lieutenant, none of which was true.

What was true is that the world Roth knew had shattered completely. In 1916, the old emperor—the doddering Kaiser Franz Joseph I—died during the war he had started. His successor, Karl I, held on to the empire for two years before it collapsed. Soon after that, the victorious allies gathered in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors to begin redrawing the map of Europe.

Roth began his journalism career in Vienna in 1919 and churned out a hundred articles before the newspaper he was working for folded. He met Friedl Reichler in 1919 and they married in the Leopoldstadt synagogue in Vienna in 1922. Friedl accompanied him to Berlin and Roth began to work for the prestigious Frankfurter Zeitung.

Always short of money—his great translator, Michael Hofmann, called him “the most impractical man who ever lived”—Roth published his first novel, Flight Without End, in 1927. Zipper and His Father came out a year later and Right and Left a year after that. His first financially successful novel—Job: Story of a Simple Man, published in 1930—was certainly his most Jewish. Never again would a Jew hold such a central place in his writing, although Jews did appear in nearly every one of them and his descriptions in his novels of shtetls were surely based on Brody.

The Radetzky March, a family epic about the fall of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, came out in 1932 and is considered one of the 20th century’s greatest novels. At 369 pages, it is Roth’s longest, though that isn’t all that long for an epoch-defining piece of literature. But Roth’s other novels, often written in haste, tended to be around half that.

On Jan. 30, 1933, the day President Hindenburg installed Adolf Hitler as chancellor, Roth took a train to Paris. He would never return to Germany and, as Hofmann tells us, Radetzky March was published “nicely in time to be fed to the flames by enthusiastic National Socialist students in Berlin on 10 May, 1933.”

Identitarianism Immigration

WHY THE rIGHT HATES ECONOMIC GROWTH:

How immigration is driving U.S. job growth (Neil Irwin, 3/12/24, Axios)

New analysis from the Brookings Institution puts some hard numbers on the relationship between the rise in immigration and the labor market — finding an influx of workers is allowing the U.S. to sustain higher rates of payroll gains than forecasters thought it could before the pandemic.

“Faster population and labor force growth has meant that employment could grow more quickly than previously believed without adding to inflationary pressures,” economists Wendy Edelberg and Tara Watson write for the Hamilton Project.
By the numbers: Before the pandemic, forecasters estimated sustainable monthly employment growth would be between 60,000 and 130,000 in 2023 — a key reason why last year’s monthly average of 255,000 looked way too hot.

But Edelberg and Watson say that, accounting for higher immigration, the economy could have accommodated job growth between 160,000 and 230,000 in 2023 “without adding to pressure in the labor market that pushed up wages and price inflation.”

MAGA’s adoption of the Left’s economics is not coincidental. They want to tank the economy.

Robotics/AI

THE SABOTS WILL BE 3-D PRINTED:

PODCAST: America Needs More Techno-Optimism (Andreesen Horowitz, March 13, 2024, American Dynamism Summit)

In this fireside chat from the American Dynamism Summit, a16z Cofounder and General Partner Marc Andreessen sits down with economist, podcaster, and polymath Tyler Cowen to discuss the state of innovation in America, from recent AI advances to growing support for nuclear power. They’ll explain why the future many people claim to want — a better economy, better quality of life, and a safer world — is only possible if America leads. […]

Tyler: Now, how will AI make our world different five years from now? What’s the most surprising way in which it will be different?

Marc: Yeah, so there’s a great kind of breakdown on adoption of new technology that the science fiction author, Douglas Adams, wrote about years ago. He says any new technology is received differently by three different groups of people. If you’re below the age of 15, it’s just the way things have always been. If you’re between the ages of 15 and 35, it’s really cool and you might be able to get a job doing it. If you’re above the age of 35, it’s unholy and against the order of society and will destroy everything. AI, I think, so far is living up to that framework.

What I would like to tell you is AI is gonna, you know, be completely transformative for education. I believe that it will. Having said that, I did recently roll out ChatGPT to my eight-year-old. And, you know, I was, like, very, very proud of myself because I was like, “Wow, this is just gonna be such a great educational resource for him.” And I felt like, you know, Prometheus bringing fire down from the mountain to my child. And I installed it on his laptop and said, you know, “Son, you know, this is the thing that you can talk to any time, and it will answer any question you have.” And he said, “Yeah.” I said, “No, this is, like, a big deal that answers questions.” He’s like, “Well, what else would you use a computer for?” And I was like, “Oh, God, I’m getting old.”

So, I actually think there’s a pretty good prospect that, like, kids are just gonna, like, pick this up and run with it. I actually think that’s already happening, right? ChatGPT is fully out, you know, and barred and banging all these other things. And so, I think, you know, kids are gonna grow up with basically…you know, you could use various terms, assistant friend, coach, mentor, you know, tutor, but, you know, kids are gonna grow up in sort of this amazing kind of back-and-forth relationship with AI. And any time a kid is interested in something, if there’s not, you know, a teacher who can help with something or they don’t have a friend who’s interested in the same thing, they’ll be able to explore all kinds of ideas. And so I think it will be great for that.

You know, I think it’s, obviously, gonna be totally transformative and feels like warfare and you already see that. You know, the concern, quite honestly, I actually wrote an essay a while ago on sort of why AI won’t destroy all the jobs, and the sort of the short version of it is because it’s illegal to do that because so many jobs in the modern economy require licensing and are regulated. And so, you know, I think the concern would be that there’s just so much, sort of, glue in the system now that prevents change and it’ll be very easy to sort of not have AI healthcare or, you know, AI education or whatever because, literally, some combination of, like, you know, doctor licensing, teacher unions and so forth will basically outlaw it. And so I think that’s the risk.

Health

ODD TO BE BEHIND EUROPE:

The ban on puberty blockers was long overdue (Jo Bartosch, 13th March 2024, spiked)


NHS England has banned the use of puberty blockers to treat children struggling with their gender. Although the health service hasn’t quite admitted that it was wrong to prescribe these drugs in the first place, it has probably got about as close as the lawyers will let it. Yesterday, a spokesperson confirmed: ‘We have concluded that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of puberty-suppressing hormones to make the treatment routinely available at this time.’

Anglospherics

GENIUS:

The Mystery Social Media Account Schooling Congress on How to Do Its Job (GABE FLEISHER, 03/08/2024, Politico)

Earlier this year, Matt Glassman — a congressional scholar at Georgetown who has spent most of his adult life studying the Hill — wanted to know the answer to an obscure procedural question. “When was the last time a ruling of the chair was overturned on appeal in the House?” he asked on X, tagging an anonymous user named @ringwiss.

Less than a minute later, the mysterious account responded with an answer — 1938 — and a decades-old edition of the Congressional Record to prove it.

That kind of speedy response time and wide-ranging legislative knowledge is what has made @ringwiss a go-to resource for staffers, lobbyists and reporters across Washington looking for answers on congressional procedures, especially in a year when lawmakers have been stretching procedures to novel ends and increasingly bucking leadership — creating a need for deeper understanding of oft-forgotten rules.

His tweets have gained renown around the Capitol for their nuanced discussions of arcane congressional rules and history, and for his comfort with correcting longtime lawmakers and Washington journalists alike. His following is only around 4,000, but it’s a well-connected bunch, including congressional chiefs of staff, committee staff directors and other leading insiders.

“He’s just a complete parliamentary obsessive and savant, really like no one I’ve ever met, even people in the parliamentarian’s office,” Glassman told POLITICO Magazine.

U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.
The U.S. Capitol building in Washington. “He’s just a complete parliamentary obsessive and savant, really like no one I’ve ever met, even people in the parliamentarian’s office,” Matt Glassman, a congressional scholar at Georgetown University, said of Kacper Surdy, aka #ringwiss. | Francis Chung/POLITICO

The catch: Nobody knows who he is. […]

“When the Senate isn’t doing anything, there’s a quiet hum that’s captured by the microphones,” Surdy told POLITICO Magazine. “And that’s very, very soothing. It’s kind of like white noise. It’s very relaxing, even when nothing’s going on.”

Health

LIKE “LONG COVID”:

The Placebo Effect’s Evil Twin (Michael H. Bernstein, 3/11/24, Quillette)


The term “nocebo effect” derives from the Latin word nocere, which translates roughly as “to harm” (as in the Hippocratic injunction, primum non nocere—first, do no harm). Whereas the better-known placebo effect is typically positive (the alleviation of pain or malaise through treatments that otherwise have no inherent therapeutic value); the nocebo effect is negative, often manifesting as headache, skin irritation, or nausea.

No surprise, then, that the nocebo effect has been called “the placebo effect’s evil twin.” It can be more formally summarized as “the occurrence of a harmful event that stems from conscious or subconscious expectations.” Or, more simply: When you expect to feel sick, you are more likely to feel sick. […]

The mind’s unfortunate ability to create suffering ex nihilo can sometimes affect large groups of people though a process of social contagion (or, in the more indelicate language of the past, hysterical contagion). One such example, known as “The June Bug,” occurred in a U.S. textile mill in 1962. Many employees began to feel dizzy and nauseous. Some vomited. Rumors of a mysterious bug that was biting employees began to circulate, and eventually 62 workers became ill. Yet a subsequent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigation determined that no bugs could be identified. Nor could investigators find any other physical cause of the illnesses. This type of phenomenon is now referred to as psychogenic illness—sickness caused by belief.

Over the course of history, there have been countless other examples of psychogenic illness, with symptoms ranging from hysterical laughter to seizures. Aldous Huxley, the famed author of Brave New World, described one such seventeenth-century example in his lesser-known historically-based novel, The Devils of Loudun. In the 1630s, as Huxley documents, an entire convent of Ursuline nuns in the western French community of Loudun became convinced that they’d been demonically possessed (complete with convulsions, and other symptoms recognizable to any connoisseur of the modern exorcism-themed horror-movie genre) due to the unholy machinations of a (genuinely licentious) local priest named Urbain Grandier.


Could such a mass outbreak occur today, in an era when few believe in demonic spirits? Consider that during 2016 and 2017, no fewer than 21 American diplomats serving in Cuba reported a range of bizarre neurological symptoms that later came to be collectively described as “Havana Syndrome.” News of the outbreak spread globally through American diplomatic networks, and eventually more than 200 U.S. diplomats became ill. One leading theory was that the Russian government was attacking American embassies and consulates with microwaves.

Canada End of History

“WE WANTED YOU TO ACT LIKE SAVAGES, DANGIT”:

Vancouver’s new mega-development is big, ambitious and undeniably Indigenous: In B.C., Indigenous nations are reclaiming power and wealth for their own citizens—no matter what the neighbours thin (Michelle Cyca, March 11, 2024, Macleans)

Sen̓áḵw is big, ambitious and undeniably urban—and undeniably Indigenous. It’s being built on reserve land owned by the Squamish First Nation, and it’s spearheaded by the Squamish Nation itself, in partnership with the private real estate developer Westbank. Because the project is on First Nations land, not city land, it’s under Squamish authority, free of Vancouver’s zoning rules. And the Nation has chosen to build bigger, denser and taller than any development on city property would be allowed.

Predictably, not everyone has been happy about it. Critics have included local planners, politicians and, especially, residents of Kitsilano Point, a rarified beachfront neighbourhood bordering the reserve. And there’s been an extra edge to their critiques that’s gone beyond standard-issue NIMBYism about too-tall buildings and preserving neighbourhood character. There’s also been a persistent sense of disbelief that Indigenous people could be responsible for this futuristic version of urban living. In 2022, Gordon Price, a prominent Vancouver urban planner and a former city councillor, told Gitksan reporter Angela Sterritt, “When you’re building 30, 40-storey high rises out of concrete, there’s a big gap between that and an Indigenous way of building.

The subtext is as unmissable as a skyscraper: Indigenous culture and urban life—let alone urban development—don’t mix. That response isn’t confined to Sen̓áḵw, either. On Vancouver’s west side, the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations—through a joint partnership called MST Development Corp.—are planning a 12-tower development called the Heather Lands. In 2022, city councillor Colleen Hardwick said of that project, “How do you reconcile Indigenous ways of being with 18-storey high-rises?” (Hardwick, it goes without saying, is not Indigenous.) MST is also planning an even bigger development, called Iy̓álmexw in the Squamish language and ʔəy̓alməxʷ in Halkomelem. Better known as Jericho Lands, it will include 13,000 new homes on a 90-acre site. At a city council meeting this January, a stream of non-Indigenous residents turned up to oppose it. One woman speculated that the late Tsleil-Waututh Chief Dan George would be outraged at the “monstrous development on sacred land.”

To Indigenous people themselves, though, these developments mark a decisive moment in the evolution of our sovereignty in this country. The fact is, Canadians aren’t used to seeing Indigenous people occupy places that are socially, economically or geographically valuable, like Sen̓áḵw. After decades of marginalization, our absence seems natural, our presence somehow unnatural. Something like Sen̓áḵw is remarkable not just in terms of its scale and economic value (expected to generate billions in revenue for the Squamish Nation). It’s remarkable because it’s a restoration of our authority and presence in the heart of a Canadian city. […]

What chafes critics, even those who might consider themselves progressive, is that they expect reconciliation to instead look like a kind of reversal, rewinding the tape of history to some museum-diorama past.

Hilarious that the Left expected the End of History to pass them by.

End of History One Economy to Rule Them All

hISTORY eNDS EVERYWHERE:

The most important immigration story of all: The West doesn’t share the same fate as Rome (Peter Heather, MARCH 12, 2024, UnHerd)

The process only accelerated under the newly independent governments of ex-imperial territories in the years after 1945. Many devoted considerable resources to basic education, attempting to create homegrown industrial bases to fend off expensive imports from their former masters. And this sucked people in massive numbers from continental interiors to congregate in coastal cities such as Shenzhen, São Paolo, Lagos, and Mumbai. Once there, better healthcare and a plentiful food supply added exponential population growth into the mix.

In economic terms, these import replacement strategies enjoyed only limited success, and largely failed after the oil price shocks of the Seventies. But what this astonishing flow of humanity did achieve was to put in place a ready-made labour force across different parts of the developing world for the Eighties, when Western countries lifted their long-standing capital controls. As the West deindustrialised, investment began flowing outwards to the developing world, where labour was so much cheaper, with the aim of returning Western corporations — and hence the West as a whole — to post-war levels of growth.

This worked, for a time. But over subsequent decades, Western investment has combined with the emergence of new classes of indigenous entrepreneurs to generate a global shift in the geographical location of manufactured wealth production. Since 1947, for instance, the population of Bangalore has increased from 700,000 to about 14 million, the vast majority supported by manufacturing jobs, while India’s national literacy rate has risen from about 20% to 75%. Over the same period, by contrast, London’s population has stayed more or less the same and it has ceased to be a major manufacturing centre. This second Völkerwanderung had created such a cost-effective labour force that it proved overwhelmingly logical, as globalisation gathered momentum, to relocate a huge percentage of global industrial production away from the West’s old manufacturing centres to the teeming new coastal metropoles of the developing world.

The process is irreversible, and far from complete. Public attention focuses on China and the other Bric countries, but seven of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies are now African. Kenya, for example, is still mostly famous for its tea and game reserves. But it currently enjoys an annual growth rate of over 7% and Nairobi has become a digital finance hub. And it is in examining the peripheries of the Western world’s old empires, that the comparison with Late Antiquity achieves a new resonance. Imperial systems first come into existence with the purpose of enriching the population at the imperial centre. But over the longer term, they unintentionally kickstart revolutionary processes of economic and hence socio-political change around their fringes, and eventually the emergence of new entities capable of challenging the Empire’s continued dominance.

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Identitarianism

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