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)

February 2025

Technology

CAIN IS THE HERO, NOT ABEL:

Natural doesn’t always mean better: How to spot if someone is trying to convince you with an ‘appeal to nature’ (Amanda Ruggeri, 2/12/25, BBC)

Often called an “appeal to nature”, or the “naturalistic fallacy”, it is one of the most commonly-seen types of logical fallacies, or flaws in reasoning that can make a claim sound surprisingly convincing. Anytime you hear someone make a claim that a product or practice is superior because it is “natural”, or that one is inferior (or even harmful) because it is not “natural”, this is the naturalistic fallacy at work. So are arguments that something is “as nature intended”, or that something is bad specifically because it is a “chemical” or “synthetic”.

Nature is, in many ways, wonderful. And it has a great deal to teach us. So why isn’t it true that something is better merely because it comes from nature?

For one thing, because nature, of course, does not have intentions – not in any conscious sense. As such, nor does it have intentions to be good, or to help humans, specifically.

We don’t need to get too philosophical to grasp this. Just consider a handful of nature’s creations. Arsenic, which can kill an adult with a dose as little as 70mg, is natural. So is asbestos, which causes cancer. Cyanide, which can kill with as little as 1.5mg per kilogram of body weight if ingested, is a phytotoxin produced, naturally, by more than 2,000 different plant species, including almonds, apricots and peaches. This is also why some “natural” remedies frequently marketed – such as ground apricot seeds – can in fact be dangerous to consume.

And this is the trouble with the use of the word natural that is so commonly used to market products. It is a poorly defined term that doesn’t necessarily mean the product labelled as such will be better for you, or indeed safer, than any other alternatives.

Identitarianism Religion

NEIGHBOR LOVE:

Gut-wrenching love: What a fresh look at the ‘Good Samaritan’ story says for ethics today: Philosophers have always wrestled with how love can be so morally important, yet so personal and even arbitrary. (Meghan Sullivan, February 11, 2025, The Conversation)

What exactly did the Samaritan do that reveals the core of the love ethic? Jesus says specifically that the Samaritan’s “guts churned” when he saw the man in need: the Greek word used in the text is “splagchnizomai.”

The term occurs in other places in the Gospels, as well, evoking a very physical kind of emotional response. This “gut-wrenching love” is spontaneous and visceral. […]

In Jesus’ time, as in our own, there was significant debate about how to understand the commandments to love one’s neighbor. One school of thought considered a “neighbor” to be a member of your community: The Book of Leviticus says not to hold grudges against fellow countrymen. Another school held that you were obligated to love even strangers who are only temporarily traveling in your land. Leviticus also declares that “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself.”

In the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus seems to come down on the side of the broadest possible application of the love ethic. And by emphasizing a particular type of love – the gut-wrenching kind – Jesus seems to indicate that the way of progress in ethics is through emotions, rather than around them.

There’s nothing arbitrary about human dignity.

Uncategorized

TV WRITERS SHOULD DO THE SAME:

Rifling Through the Archives With Legendary Historian Robert Caro (Chris Heath, March 2025, Smithsonian)

Students of Robert Caro know of a particularly famous trope of his: In order to write a book, he must first know its final line. Deep into his reporting of The Power Broker, he tells me, “I couldn’t figure out how to write it. It was just such a mass of stuff, and I couldn’t see how it all tied together.” He was, he says, “in a sort of mood of despair.”


Then on June 3, 1967, he attended a dedication ceremony for a park at the site of the 1964 World’s Fair. Moses’ power was waning by then, but the front two rows were stacked with his old-guard loyalists. “All his engineers and architects,” Caro says. “You know, the ‘Moses Men.’ What I remember was they all had gray heads.” Moses alluded to the public’s ingratitude to great men. “And I remember them nodding,” Caro says. Afterward, the men walked past Caro, and he could hear them talking, saying that Moses was right and wondering why people didn’t appreciate what Moses had done. And a phrase stuck in Caro’s head that summed it all up: Why weren’t they grateful?


In that instant, Caro says, everything became clear. “When I heard that line, I said, ‘Oh, that’s what this book is about,’” he recalls. And he didn’t just know how the book would end—with a description of that day’s event, ending with those four words. He could see—“in a flash,” he says—how everything he had learned and everything he was still to write would lead to that point. “I knew in that moment how to do the book. And I remember going back to my office and writing an outline as fast as I could. I was abbreviating words because I wanted to get all the words in there.”

With each subsequent book, Caro has needed to know where he would end before he could launch into writing it. “I mean, everybody has their own way of writing,” he says. He is careful to clarify that knowing a final line isn’t some kind of glib talisman. “Somehow that ending tells you what’s important in everything that’s come before it, even if it’s 1,000 pages that came before it.” He goes on, “Once you have it, everything becomes easy for me.”

The moment he says this, his chosen adjective—“easy”—hangs in the air between us. The first volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power, which is about Johnson’s early life leading up to his first failed campaign for public office, took seven years. The second, Means of Ascent, detailing Johnson’s eventual election to the Senate (an election that Caro’s groundbreaking research definitively established was stolen), arrived eight years later. The third, Master of the Senate, about Johnson’s years as Senate majority leader, came 12 years after that. Then another ten years passed before the publication of The Passage of Power, which ends in 1964 after Johnson has assumed the presidency following John F. Kennedy’s assassination. That book was published nearly 13 years ago.

“Easy,” I point out, doesn’t feel like a sufficient adjective.

Anglospherics Iron Lady

THE IMPLOSION OF THE SECOND WAY MADE THATCHER/REAGAN NECESSARY:

The making of Margaret Thatcher: How the Iron Lady rose from obscurity to change Britain (Terrence Casey, 11 February, 2025, The Critic)

For the Conservative establishment, taking on the unions was madness. Harold Wilson and Ted Heath both suffered deep political wounds for trying just that. In their minds unions were unstoppable. Party Chairman Peter Thorneycroft was so distressed by what he saw as dangerous nonsense that he wanted every copy of Stepping Stones burned. Thatcher, Joseph, and crucially William Whitelaw, thought it brilliant, however, and it was integrated into Conservative policymaking. Resistance to these ideas from the Tory machinery remained strong, and progress in articulating policies was limited. When the crucial political moment came, though, Stepping Stones served to focus and clarify the Tories response.

The rise of Thatcherism must be grounded in the context of the seventies. The long-term record of poor economic performance, the period of relative decline, Britain as the sick man of Europe, undercut support for the status quo. The maladies that produced that decline were masked during the long postwar boom. When global economic crisis emerged, all these problems were exposed, and hence the country lurched from crisis to crisis. A miners’ strike in 1972 saw the lights going out and industry put on a three-day week — before the government capitulated. Another miners’ strike two years later saw more blackouts, more three-day weeks, and finally a gambit by Heath — the snap “Who governs Britain?” election, which he promptly lost. Yet Labour fared no better. Their Social Contract promised industrial peace in exchange for increases in spending, which was pushed to its postwar peak. However, so was inflation, hitting 25 per cent in 1975. A financing crisis followed, necessitating a loan from the IMF in 1976. Labour, now led by Jim Callaghan, was forced into deep spending cuts.

Inflation had fallen yet remained in the teens. Tightening the monetary supply to bring prices down was seen as an unacceptable threat to full employment, so Callaghan opted for an incomes policy, cajoling workers into capping wage growth at 5 per cent. With inflation over 10 per cent, this produced real declines in purchasing power. After two years of grudging cooperation, workers rebelled. The result was the Winter of Discontent, the wave of strikes sweeping the country in 1978-79. Strike followed upon strike throughout a frigid winter, the inconveniences, disruptions, and misery piling up upon the public. As those strikes were settled with increases well above 5 per cent, Callaghan’s economic policy was in tatters, and Labour’s electoral fortunes decimated for a generation.

The calamities of the decade provided political conditions amenable to transformative politics. Having the hardline approach to the unions advanced in Stepping Stones at hand proved most useful. Without it, the Tory Shadow Cabinet would likely have argued in circles over the appropriate response, as that is what they had done for the previous four years.

Joe Biden One Economy to Rule Them All

THE eND OF hISTORY MARCHES ON:

The Post-Neoliberal Delusion: And the Tragedy of Bidenomics (Jason Furman, March/April 2025, Foreign Affairs)

[T]he Biden administration’s post-neoliberal turn, the predicted economic transformations of which prompted comparisons to Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, fell considerably short of its lofty goals. In some respects, the macroeconomic outcomes have been impressive. The U.S. economy has bounced back much faster than it did after previous recessions, and its post-pandemic performance has also outpaced that of many peer countries in terms of economic growth. But the recovery has been uneven, frustrated by inflation at least partly induced by the administration’s own policies. Inflation, unemployment, interest rates, and government debt were all higher in 2024 than they were in 2019. From 2019 to 2023, inflation-adjusted household income fell, and the poverty rate rose.

Even before inflation doomed Biden’s chances for reelection, it undermined the administration’s goals. Despite efforts to raise the child tax credit and the minimum wage, both were considerably lower in inflation-adjusted terms when Biden left office than when he entered. For all the emphasis he placed on American workers, Biden was the first Democratic president in a century who did not permanently expand the social safety net. And despite signing into law an infrastructure bill that committed over $500 billion to rebuilding everything from bridges to broadband, skyrocketing costs of construction have left the United States building less than it was before the law’s passage.

There have been important successes, especially considering the slim congressional majority with which Biden was forced to operate. Massive legislation that he pushed to address climate change is already reducing emissions and likely will continue to do so even in the face of hostility from the Trump administration. Domestic semiconductor production is being revived. But a hoped-for manufacturing renaissance has not materialized, at least not yet. The proportion of people working in manufacturing has been declining for decades and has not ticked back up, and overall domestic industrial production remains stagnant—in part because the fiscal expansion Biden oversaw led to higher costs, a stronger dollar, and higher interest rates, all of which have created headwinds for the manufacturing sectors that received no special subsidies from the legislation he championed.

The Biden administration failed to seriously reckon with budget constraints and to contend with the effects of “crowding out,” when a surge in public-sector spending causes the private sector to invest less. Both missteps reflected a broader unwillingness to contend with tradeoffs in economic policy and allowed Trump to ride a wave of discontent back into the White House. For Democrats, it would be a mistake to think their loss was due solely to a global backlash against incumbents—or worse, to conclude that American voters had simply been insufficiently appreciative of everything Biden did for them.

Truly building back better will require harnessing the Biden administration’s ambitions for economic transformation without discarding conventional economic considerations of budget constraints, tradeoffs, and cost-benefit analysis—in other words, not giving in to the post-neoliberal delusion.

Sport

ZEPHYRUS HATH INSPIRED:

Walking the Camino to Santiago de Compostela: How a long-awaited pilgrimage finally came to fruition (Joanne Drayton, December 20, 2024, New/Lines)

[I]t was the Camino that set my mind on fire and the matter of relics that gripped my imagination and nagged at me during the COVID-19 pandemic, when New Zealand’s borders were shut to international flights from March 2020 to August 2021. By the time Kiwis were finally free to move and tickets vaguely affordable, I felt like a shaken bottle of sparkling wine ready to pop its cork. I had ruminated on all aspects of pilgrimage and was about to explode with curiosity and the need to escape.

An ancient walking path across the top of the Iberian Peninsula to its northwestern corner was the perfect place to abscond to. For over a thousand years, Christian pilgrims have traveled multitudinous miles to the town of Santiago de Compostela to worship at the shrine of St. James. Many began their journey outside Spain, in places such as France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Medieval pilgrims often followed the trail on foot for months, sometimes years. The dangers were myriad, and many never made it back home.

The huge commitment of time and resources, the risk — I was fascinated to know what propelled these pilgrims. I wanted to understand what these journeys meant to them, and why, in this world of virtual reality, people still travel in increasing numbers to sites of pilgrimage. Why do shrines and their relics, which should be anathema in modern times, still draw people? Why, when human experience is increasingly digitized, coded and uploaded, do people still feel the imperative to be present in a place and to walk?

So my partner Sue and I joined the throngs of pilgrims seeking answers on the Camino. While we were actually walking the trail, The Daily Telegraph published an article predicting that 2024 would see nearly half a million pilgrims journey to the shrine of Santiago (St. James), the greatest number ever. The article also pointed out the exponential increase in traffic between 1984, when just 423 pilgrims claimed the Compostela (certificate of completion), and 2023, when numbers hit a record 440,367 — a number that is about to be exceeded because 2024 figures are up 12.5%.

But, fortunately for those averse to crowds, the Camino is not just one pathway. The map to Santiago de Compostela looks like the crazy cracks a flicked stone creates on a car’s windshield. Every line radiates out in a jagged pattern from the central point of impact. In nearly a thousand years of pilgrimage, many routes have been traveled. From their end point of Santiago de Compostela, nestled in the far northwest of Spain, the routes spread out across the country — heading upward along the west coast of Portugal, hugging the northern border of Spain, or cutting straight across the country to the Mediterranean. Today, however, the Camino Frances — the one we chose — has emerged as the most popular. In the 1980s, the route was marked out by a local priest who made it his mission to reignite people’s passion for pilgrimage.

Presidents

THE 40 YEAR EPOCH:

Jimmy Carter: The First Reaganite (John Phelan, 2/08/25, EconLib)

Despite claiming ignorance of the causes of or remedies for rising inflation, he acted as though he did grasp that inflation was, in the popular formulation, “too much money chasing too few goods.”

If that was the problem, one half of the solution lay on the supply side by increasing the number of goods on which the money could be spent. To this end, Carter deregulated the airline, trucking, rail, and telephony industries. “These actions,” Susan Dudley writes, “allowed new entrants into the markets, increased efficiency, lowered prices, offered consumers more choices, and likely contributed to declining inflation.”

The other half of the solution lay on the demand side by reducing the amount of money. Carter appointed Paul Volcker chair of the Federal Reserve in 1978. “We needed a new approach,” Volcker wrote, “Put simply, we would control the quantity of money (the money supply) rather than the price of money (interest rates).” As money growth fell, interest rates soared. The economy shrank in 1980, and unemployment hit 7.2% but inflation would fall from 13.5% to 3.2% in 1983. By then, Carter was out of office and Reagan was cruising to a landslide reelection due to an economic boom thanks, in some small part, to Carter’s deregulatory and sound money policies.

Historians will not differentiate the presidencies from 1976 to 2016.

Conservative Thought

CONSERVATISM SEEKS TO CONSERVE LIBERALISM:

Moderation as Pursuit of Justice: John Kekes and Aurelian Craiutu ask what virtues make a society truly good. (Daniel J. Mahoney, February 3, 2025, Modern Age)

John Kekes’s lucid and for the most part compelling book begins with a self-correction. As the author of several books making the case for conservatism and taking on academic egalitarianism on the left, he now wishes to emphasize what his “moderate conservatism” has in common with a “moderate liberalism” that also wants to preserve the American political system against extremists on the left and right. In making this change, he has clearly been unnerved by certain forms of populist activism and by soi-disant conservatives who refuse to acknowledge what remains valuable in liberal theory and practice. At the same time, however, he remains deeply skeptical of theorists and activists on the left and right who appeal (in Adam Smith’s phrase) to “ideal plan[s] of government” that treat “the different members of a great society” as “different pieces upon a chess-board” to be moved about at will. With Smith, Kekes opposes as “the highest degree of arrogance” the pretension of ideologues and abstract theorists that their “own judgment” is “the supreme standard of right and wrong.” Tocqueville aptly called this destructive propensity “literary politics,” as if these irresponsible theorists believed they were free to write a political play that ignores historical experience and the limits that define the human condition. This preference for abstract theorizing over practical reason and historical experience is shared by reactionary thinkers and those who hold up models of a “postliberal” utopia, along with the far more numerous class of “progressive” ideologists.

In a striking passage, Kekes takes pointed, and well-deserved, aim at those “motivated by an immoderate moralistic fervor and indignation at the history of the wrongs that have been done to those they suppose themselves to be defending.” These purveyors of egalitarian dogmatism and “crusaders” for liberation and emancipation are angry, “immoderate and intolerant,” and thus “blind to the complexities of moral and political evaluations.” They weaponize the law “against their opponents” while ignoring or being “unaware of external threats and of the domestic necessity of maintaining order, peace, and security.” They are feverishly committed to untenable “overriding ideals” and are contemptuous of the moral achievement that is a constitutional order rooted in liberty and law, which has the great merit of having “met the test of time.”

In contrast to this attitude of unrelieved repudiation and negation, moderate conservatives display gratitude for what has been passed down from previous generations and support gradual and cautious—moderate—reform when it is called for. They studiously avoid indignation and prefer “civility” to “contempt” in dealing with fellow citizens. They want “to heal the nation’s wounds,” in the noble words of Lincoln’s second inaugural address, and not to irresponsibly exacerbate them. They prefer thoughtful citizenship to reckless activism. This is a noble and emphatically non-utopian “ideal” precisely because it is much more than simply an abstract ideal.

In a manner befitting what some have called “conservative liberalism” and what he calls “moderate conservatism,” Kekes defends the full range of common decencies that “make possible political moderation” and “peaceful coexistence with others in our society.”

Books

IF HE’D BEEN A GOOD MAN HE’D STILL BE ALIVE TODAY:

How we misread The Great Gatsby: The greatness of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel lies in its details. But they are often overlooked (Sarah Churchwell, 1/22/25, New Statesman)

Many of our most recycled, plagiaristic observations about Gatsby miss the point, failing to read between the lines. For example, it is often noted that Benjamin Franklin’s schedule for self-improvement provides Gatsby with a manual for upward social mobility, that he is a representative American who buys into the nation’s founding dreams. But Jimmy Gatz’s plan focuses on physical activity and hard work, omitting the spiritual dimension of Franklin’s schedule, who asked himself every morning, “What good shall I do this day?” Franklin centred morality as well as industry, and Fitzgerald expected his audience to recognise what was missing. The Great Gatsby renders a society that has confused material enterprise with moral achievement. Gatsby, like the country he embodies, forgets that he should be trying not just to be great, but to do good.

This is why it’s a comedy not a tragedy. Gatsby is just a social climber focussed on personal wealth rather than his soul. (Sound familiar?)

Identitarianism

X MARKS THE HAKANKREUZ:

The Making of an Anti-Woke Zealot: How Elon Musk Was Infected with the MAGA Mind-Virus (Eoin Higgins, February 5, 2025, Lit Hub)

Musk began combining all his complaints into one overarching idea: the threat of wokeness, which he saw as censorious and against the meritocracy he believed existed in Silicon Valley. As Musk became more and more obsessed with woke, his right-wing friends cheered him on. Always desperately in need of approval, the world’s richest man lapped up the praise and decided it was time to get more involved in Twitter, the social media site where he was fast becoming a major celebrity.

He began the process by getting on the company’s board but soon found the position too restrictive. Musk convinced himself that he could quintuple the site’s revenue by 2028 if he had control. He secured funding from Larry Ellison, Sequoia Capital, Binance, and Andreessen Horowitz, as well as funds from Dubai and Qatar.

By this point, Musk believed that part of the business problem of Twitter was that, somehow, the right wing was “suppressed.” As such, “woke culture” needed to be destroyed for Twitter the business—and democracy itself—to survive. In many ways this belief was a natural outgrowth of the Silicon Valley mythos of meritocracy and the tech industry’s opposition to diversity; a politics based on destroying wokeness was not far from the supremacist ideology he grew up with in South Africa.

Despite his bluster about buying Twitter, Musk went back and forth on the deal. In more rational moments, he realized it was a mistake and tried to back out. Musk’s approach to strategy and tactics can be seen in the way he played cards, as Max Levchin recounted.

“There were all these nerds and sharpsters who were good at memorizing cards and calculating odds,” he told Musk biographer Walter Isaacson. “Elon just proceeded to go all in on every hand and lose. Then he would buy more chips and double down. Eventually, after losing many hands, he went all in and won. Then he said, ‘Right, fine, I’m done.’”

Eventually, Musk was sued by Twitter’s management to agree to the sale. Musk was unable to force the company to a lower price than the gag cost of $54.20 a share, a price he had posted as a joke for his followers as a play on the association “420” has with cannabis. He faced certain doom in court and begrudgingly bought the company in October 2022.

A few days before the deal closed, he visited the headquarters and was disgusted with the company’s emphasis on diversity and inclusion. To Musk, these were signs of weakness. Once in charge, he slashed staff and installed loyalists.

Isaacson argues Musk was irrationally passionate about Twitter in large part because he had paid too much for it and was incapable of thinking logically about the business. It’s true that $44 billion was an overvaluation, but the implication that Musk wasn’t thinking rationally once he was trapped only works if he had been capable of making a sound business decision about Twitter in the first place. Making a meme share price offer doesn’t indicate that this was ever the case.

His passions overrode basic logic particularly when it came to the site’s content moderation. Unfortunately for Musk, moderation was important for running the company. As he tried to make Twitter into an anti-woke, far-right message board, Musk began tilting into extremism and conspiracy theories. The venue he claimed was for unfettered free speech was simply becoming a venue for right-wing speech.

That was no good for advertisers; predictably, revenue collapsed. Twitter had long struggled to avoid placing ads next to extremist content, and Musk’s cuts didn’t help.

Initially, Twitter’s trust and safety department head Yoel Roth was the only one with access to content moderation tools. Roth tried to hold a line on some content but soon found himself at odds with Musk and his allies.

Their requests were fundamentally unworkable on a technical level. Del Harvey, a former Twitter staffer who was the company’s first head of trust and safety, told Wired in November 2023 that part of the problem was that advertising “was built on an entirely separate tech stack than all of the rest of Twitter.”

“Imagine two buildings next to each other with no communication between them,” Harvey said.

The possibility of identifying problematic content on the organic side couldn’t easily be integrated into the promoted content side. It was this ouroboros of a situation, two sides locked in this internal struggle of not getting the information because they didn’t connect the two.

Unwilling to admit error, Musk blamed activists. The platform of open discourse that had been promised was in no way universal—Musk demanded Roth ban boycotts, reasoning that this would stop people from pressuring advertisers to step away from an increasingly toxic platform. Predictably, it acted as a kind of “Streisand effect,” so named for the pop star whose attempts to stop people from talking about her mega mansion in the early 2000s only made it more of a story, and backfired.

Musk continued to make decisions based on his anger over wokeness and his pathological need for praise rather than sound business practices.

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