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

Religion

WITCH HUNTS ARE A FUNCTION OF WITCHES:

How Witches Shifted from Daily Healers to Heretics and Dangerous Women Under Christian Rule (Marion Gibson, January 22, 2024, LitHub)

In early history, magic was considered to be a power innate in healers, shamans, and religious leaders across multiple cultures. It allowed them to go beyond natural abilities, to change the world in inexplicable ways. Communities would have several such magical workers, combining medical and priestly roles.

There was no clear line between their magical healing and harming, since good and bad magic were two aspects of the same force. On Monday a user of magic might bless you, on Thursday they might curse you—that was just how things were. If you felt a magically gifted person was using that force to do harm, you might vilify them as a “witch”—a user of evil magic—and you might hold a local trial and mandate repentance. You might banish or kill the witch if their crimes were unacceptable.

But witchcraft accusations would not spread widely, and, on the whole, you would not begin to believe all magic was evil. Some societies were concerned about this possibility—the ancient Greeks and Romans feared magic was inherently ungodly—but most retained a blurry notion that magic could be a force for good.

This changed in Europe during the medieval period, when a new theological science was established: the study of devils or demons, appropriately called “demonology.” By the 1400s, the Christian clergymen who developed demonology had convincingly claimed a unique insight into the workings of the cosmos and God’s will. Now, demonologists argued, witchcraft was not just good magic gone bad; it was envisioned as a career committed to wickedness, setting itself against the church.

Sovereignty

THERE IS NO MYANMAR:

Rebel offensive taking toll on Myanmar military’s cohesion, soldiers say (Rebecca Tan, Yan Naing and Andrew Nachemson, February 14, 2024, Washington Post)


Accounts from Myanmar army soldiers who have surrendered or defected over the past three months reveal that the military is suffering from plunging morale and overstretched logistics amid a rebel offensive that has prompted mass surrenders. […]


Myanmar’s military seized power in 2021 after ousting the democratically elected government. When protests erupted across the country, the military responded with force, and thousands of its opponents turned to armed resistance, in some cases making common cause with ethnic rebel groups. The military has sought to crush opposition with methods so brutal and indiscriminate that U.N. investigators say they are likely war crimes.

But last year, the rebels pushed the military into its weakest position in decades by capturing towns on the edges of the country and driving the junta’s forces toward the middle, analysts say.

Investigators at Myanmar Witness, an independent nongovernmental group that verifies developments in the Myanmar war, said they used open-source information to geolocate footage of five mass surrenders and weapon seizures since October. The investigators said that their efforts have only just begun and that their findings represent “the tip of the iceberg of the military’s losses.”

Researchers at the Institute for Strategy and Policy-Myanmar, a Myanmar-based think tank, are also working to verify surrenders, and Executive Director Min Zin said it is already apparent that the scale is unprecedented in the military’s history. Myanmar analysts from four other independent research institutions agreed.

“It speaks volumes about the military’s capacities that they had to accept this kind of situation,” said Richard Horsey, a senior adviser on Myanmar for the International Crisis Group.

Anglospherics

COMIC GOLD:

Why are kids doing the ‘Brexit tackle’? They’re having fun at adults’ expense – and mocking our toxic politics (Lola Okolosie, 14 Feb 2024, The Guardian)


For the umpteenth time, my son, with an Ikea stuffed ball he has had since infancy, is playing football in the living room. He is joined by one of his best friends, an equally football-obsessed 10-year-old who, before slide-tackling in what can only be described as a deliberate attempt to knock my son’s legs off, shouts: “Brexit means Brexit!” Confused, I pass it off as an example of tweenage precocity: which 10-year-old is happy to quote Theresa May while playing football?

Over the next year, however, I will hear the term used again and again when my son plays football at the local park. He turns 11 and is off to secondary school. There, too, the phrase seems to have become a “thing”. One evening, as he recounts the details of how he got a painful-looking graze on his shin, he quotes the attacking player’s prelude to clattering into him: “Brexit means Brexit!” I ask, finally, why people are saying this. Nonchalantly, as he practises “skills” with the same softball, he explains that the Brexit tackle “is a tackle that doesn’t get the ball, only takes out the player”. Urban Dictionary concurs, stating it is, among other things, “when somebody hits a massive slide tackle and usually sends them flying and it hurts them servely [sic]”.

The ball was free trade and deregulation.

Just So Stories

CAIN WON:

Hunter-gatherers were violently wiped off the map by farmers, DNA reveals (Bronwyn Thompson, February 12, 2024, New Atlas)

Researchers from Sweden’s Lund University analyzed skeletons and teeth found in what is now Denmark, and found that 5,900 years ago, the region underwent a swift and total population change. Prior to this, Danish Mesolithic people of the Maglemose, Kongemose and Ertebølle cultures – genetically related to other Western European hunter-gatherers – were prominent inhabitants. But when Neolithic farmers arrived, an abrupt shift can be seen in DNA records, with next to no genetic contribution from the local hunter-gatherers.

Tracing the DNA timeline, the researchers could see that the hunter-gatherers had been swiftly wiped out by the late Stone Age, in what they suspect was a very bloody and very thorough takeover.

Identitarianism

YOLO HOUR IS OVER:

Violent crime is dropping fast in the U.S. — even if Americans don’t believe it (Karen Zamora, Ari Shapiro, Courtney Dorning, 2/12/24, NPR)

“At some point in 2022 — at the end of 2022 or through 2023 — there was just a tipping point where violence started to fall and it just continued to fall,” said Jeff Asher, a crime analyst and co-founder of AH Datalytics.

In cities big and small, from both coasts, violence has dropped.

“The national picture shows that murder is falling. We have data from over 200 cities showing a 12.2% decline … in 2023 relative to 2022,” Asher said, citing his own analysis of public data. He found instances of rape, robbery and aggravated assault were all down too.

It’s just back to racial hysteria now.

End of History

ALL OVER BUT THE SHOUTING:

Chaos at the End of History (Matt Johnson, 12 Feb 2024, Quillette)

His critics argue that the book failed to anticipate a long list of ideological clashes and upheavals: September 11, populist authoritarianism in the US and Europe, the invasion of Ukraine, and the rise of aggressive Chinese nationalism. Many of these critics haven’t read the book or the essay that preceded it, or they would know that Fukuyama fully expected wars, demagogues, aggressive dictators, and political crises to continue filling the pages of the newspapers. His central argument was that capitalist liberal democracy has proven to be the most durable political and economic system—an argument that’s every bit as compelling today as it was 30 years ago.

The evidence for Fukuyama’s claim that the end of the Cold War brought the “unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism” is all around us. Western Europe has been at peace since World War II. The total number of democracies has surged. The liberal-democratic world is far more prosperous than any civilization in history—the United States’ annual GDP alone is nearly $28 trillion, while global GDP (adjusted for inflation) was around $23 trillion when “The End of History?” was originally published in 1989. Meanwhile, democracy’s authoritarian challengers are foundering. Russia’s pointless war against Ukraine has made the country a global pariah (Moscow’s best friends are now North Korea and Iran), tanked the value of the ruble, and put immense pressure on its already-meager petro-economy. China, meanwhile, faces a crippling demographic and economic crisis—Chinese stocks have contracted by almost $6 trillion in just three years as a massive real-estate bubble bursts and growth slows substantially.

Energy

WHEN THE WOLF LEADS THE SHEEP:

JOURNALIST UNCOVERS SOURCES OF WELL-FUNDED CAMPAIGN TO SPREAD DECEIT ABOUT OFFSHORE WIND ENERGY (Stephen ProctorFebruary 12, 2024, The Cool Down)

[C]ompanies pushing for offshore drilling have an interest in discouraging the use of offshore windmills through misinformation.


An op-ed published in a Delaware newspaper on Nov. 6 is one recent example.

The article, which was rife with misinformation, described offshore wind as an “environmental wrecking ball,” and it was written by David Stevenson, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy at the Caesar Rodney Institute, a think tank that works to shift policy in favor of dirty energy, according to CAP 20.

It just so happens that CRI recently received thousands of dollars from the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers and American Energy Alliance, the outlet reported.

Politicians can also play a role in misleading people about solar and wind energy.

In September, at a rally in South Carolina, former President Donald Trump claimed that offshore windmills “are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before,” per the BBC.

However, that’s not true. According to the BBC, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration examined about 90 humpback whales that washed up on U.S. beaches since 2016 and found that the No. 1 cause of death was human interaction, which includes their getting tangled in fishing nets or struck by boats.

The Department of Energy, alongside other government agencies, has addressed the “misinformation” about the whales, and the Associated Press also recently debunked the faulty claims, stating, “Scientists say there is no credible evidence linking offshore wind farms to whale deaths.”

Cheeto Jesus Identitarianism

VLAD’S GIMP:

Trump suggests he’d disregard NATO treaty, urge Russian attacks on allies (Marianne LeVine, February 10, 2024, Washington Post)


“One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?,’” Trump said during a rally at Coastal Carolina University. “I said, ‘You didn’t pay. You’re delinquent.’ He said, ‘Yes, let’s say that happened.’ No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.”

Conservative Thought Founding Long War

THE SOURCES OF THE lONG wAR:

The Great Debate: Edmund Burke vs. Thomas Paine : a review of The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right by Yuval Levin (Shaun Rieley, July 2014, Imaginative Conservative)

Paine was, of course, a great champion of the American Revolution – his tract Common Sense was seminal in igniting popular opinion in favor of the Revolution – and went on to be an important supporter of the French Revolution as well. Burke, on the other hand, was a supporter of the American Revolution, but when the French Revolution began in 1789, Burke became one of its most vocal critics, penning Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790. What caused this divergence, and how did that philosophical divergence lead to the divisions in our modern political debates? That is the question that Mr. Levin explores in the book. […]

Paine’s case, Mr. Levin argues, rests on several assumptions regarding the possibility of human freedom – understood in a particular way – and the nature of knowledge. Paine follows social contract theorists Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, arguing that it is possible to know through reason what man in the state of nature was like, and thereby, the rights which he possesses in that state, and this knowledge becomes the baseline for any judgment regarding the justice of any law, and the legitimacy of any political arrangement. Thus, the individual – applying judgment through reason – becomes the basis for all social relationships. Choice becomes paramount, and obligations are only binding in so far as the individual chooses to be bound – presumably, through a rational judgment. The heart of Paine’s political philosophy, says Mr. Levin, is his understanding of rights and choice.

Burke, on the other hand, builds his moral and political philosophy around “obligations not chosen but nevertheless binding” (p. 102). “An enormous portion of Burke’s (and the conservative) worldview,” says Mr. Levin, “becomes clearer in light of the importance he places on the basic facts and character of human procreation, and an enormous portion of Paine’s (and the progressive) worldview becomes clearer in light of the desire he evinces to be liberated from the implications of those facts. Almost all of what we loosely call “the social issues” have to do with the dispute about whether such liberation is possible and desirable…” (p. 103).

The Anglosphere was able to avoid the Continent’s utopian disasters precisely because we never succumbed to Reason and the denial of human nature.

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