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)

March 2025

Homocentric Universe

DITTO PLANETS:

Between Subjectivity and Science: Rethinking Objectivity in Wine Tasting (Dwight Furrow, March 23, 2025, 3Quarks)

The notion of objectivity, as it was forged in the smithy of modern science, is a curious thing. It assumes the world is composed only of discrete entities endowed with properties that exist independently of how they are observed. This account of objectivity works reasonably well when applied to the movement of planets or an analysis of the chemical constituents of wine but falters with phenomena whose existence depends on being perceived. The taste or smell of a wine is not given in isolation but unfolds as an interplay between the liquid, our sensory mechanisms, and the mind.

When we taste wine, we don’t taste attributes that are patiently waiting to be discovered. We participate in a process in which a wine’s latent capacities are coaxed into sensory actualizations. To capture this process, we need an ontology not of discrete entities but of dispositions that exist in the wine, in the taster, and within the environment in which tasting takes place.

A disposition is a capacity or tendency for something to behave in a certain way under specific conditions. Dispositions are unlike categorical properties, which describe what something is like independently of any conditions. Unlike static entities, dispositions exist in a state of readiness, awaiting the right conditions for them to be revealed. A glass is fragile even as it sits safely on the table. A good Pinot Noir is aromatic even as it rests in the unopened bottle. Acidity is not simply a measurement of ph; it’s a latent tendency to soften or sharpen depending on such factors as temperature, aeration, or the molecular interplay with the taster’s saliva. Tannins in a wine can be objectively measured. But that is only one dimension of them. They are relational potentials that can be described as astringent only when proteins and polyphenols interact in the mouth. A dispositional ontology grants that wine has real objective properties but also asserts that among those real properties are relational, dispositional properties that are actualized only when particular environmental, physiological, and cultural conditions converge.

It’s dispositions all the way down.

Identitarianism

IDEOLOGY UBER ALLES:

The “Nietzsche Thesis”: Why we don’t really care about truth (Jonny Thomson, 3/22/25, Big Think)

There are two strands to the argument for epistemic vigilance. The first is that adults are constantly calibrating how reliable we consider others to be. We tend to be a “truth default” species, which means we assume most people at least start out as being honest. Over time, if someone tells a lie or gets something wrong, we calibrate our epistemic vigilance. We say, “Okay, Alex clearly knows nothing about soccer, so I’m not going to ask him again.”

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The second observation is that children learn very early whom to trust or not trust. The psychologist Pascal Boyer observed that infants “seem to be sensitive to the difference between expert and novice agents. Later, toddlers use cues of competence to judge different individuals’ utterances, and mistrust those who have been wrong in previous instances, or those who seem determined to exploit others.”

The argument therefore goes that humans are born with a certain skill or vigilance for seeking truth over falsity. We have epistemic vigilance. […]

So, we are left with two facts. We are vigilant about what people are saying, but our vigilance is not based on epistemic grounds. So, what kind of vigilance is it?

For that, Shieber coined the expression “The Nietzsche Thesis.” He argues that “our goal in conversation is not primarily to acquire truthful information… [but] self-presentation.” In other words, we accept or reject statements based on utilitarian goals, not on their truthfulness. In Nietzsche’s words, we will accept and look for truth only when it has “pleasant, life-preserving consequences.” Conversely, we are hostile “to potentially harmful and destructive truths.” We do not have epistemic vigilance, but a Machiavellian one.

There is one important observation about modern society that might lend credence to Shiber’s ideas: the popularity of conspiracy theories and echo-chamber nonsense. If epistemic vigilance were true, we would all be fact-checking and dismissing conspiracists all the time. But we don’t.

The heck with truth, just confirm my prejudices!

Identitarianism Israel/Palestine

A RACE OR A RELIGION?:

Kahane’s ghost: how a long-dead extremist rabbi continues to haunt Israel’s politics (Joshua Leifer, 20 Mar 2025, The Guardian

Kahane’s political career was marked by failure. Throughout his life he appeared to most Israelis to be a grotesque US import. His relentless demagogic campaign to expel the Palestinians won him notoriety and a small cadre of fanatical followers. Yet he never enjoyed the mainstream acceptance that he believed he had been promised by providence. Since childhood he had dreamed of becoming Israel’s prime minister. Instead he became the leader of a movement shunned across the political spectrum. In his multiple attempts to enter the Knesset, he succeeded only once, in 1984, before Kach was barred from electoral politics. At the time he was assassinated, his movement was on the verge of collapse, starved for funds, beset by infighting and hounded by authorities in the US. Kahane and Kahanism, the ideology to which he gave his name, seemed destined for historical obscurity.

But Kahanism did not die. It survived – not in its fully fledged theocratic form, but as an ultranationalist vision of a land and body politic purged of a non-Jewish presence. The germ of Kahanism persisted because the conditions that produced it did not go away. To the contrary, they grew more dire. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza became ever more entrenched, its maintenance more brutal and deadly. In the 1970s and 80s, Kahane had drawn much of his support from the disfranchised, predominantly Mizrahi working class and portrayed his movement as a populist revolt against Israel’s secular, progressive Ashkenazi elite. In the 21st century, as the uneven gains of capitalist globalisation and the country’s hi-tech boom deepened inequality, Kahanism reemerged to provide the grammar for a reinvigorated rightwing class war. In the wake of the suicide bombings of the second intifada, Kahanism was also buoyed up by an increasingly widespread radical pessimism: that Israel is doomed to war, that this war is zero sum, and that it can end only through a total, eschatological victory – that ultimately, as Kahane was fond of saying: “It is either they or we.”

For more than 30 years, Israel’s political system maintained a cordon sanitaire that largely succeeded in excluding Kahanist parties from mainstream politics and parliament. But in the late 2010s, this cordon sanitaire fell. Against the backdrop of successive wars in Gaza, veteran Kahanist militants with thick criminal rap sheets began to appear on primetime television. Ideas that were once taboo became commonplace. Vulgar anti-Arab racism became an easy way to generate attention on TV and social media. Support for the expulsion of Palestinians ceased to be a fringe proposal and became a routine part of political debate. By 2022, thanks to the intervention of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, parties that had until recently been deemed too dangerous to participate in elections now formed part of the coalition government. Itamar Ben-Gvir, a lifelong Kahanist agitator and convicted criminal, became national security minister, responsible for overseeing the police.

Since 7 October 2023, Kahanism has become mainstream. It is the political style that relishes the dehumanisation of Palestinians. It is the ethos according to which Jewish lives are seen as more valuable than all others. It is the ideology behind the normalisation of population transfer and ethnic cleansing. Netanyahu’s Likud has undergone a process of near total Kahanisation, to say nothing of the settler right.

In a January 2025 op-ed for the liberal daily Haaretz, the veteran Israeli journalist Gideon Levy described what had ensued since 7 October as the country’s first Kahanist war. “Almost everything about it was meant to appease the fascist, racist, population-transferist far right,” Levy wrote. “The spirit of Kahanism seized control over its goals and content.” Indeed, over the past year and a half it has often seemed as if Kahane’s malignant, vengeful ghost had been suddenly reanimated, manifest in the chorus calling to wipe Gaza off the map; in the images of grinning troops standing over white-hooded detainees, kneeling, hands zip-tied behind their backs; in the videos of uniformed men dancing with flags and Torah scrolls in the cratered landscape of the strip; in the line “Kahane was right” graffitied above scorched doorways.

Thirty years ago, Kahane was the name of a man who most thought would be forgotten. Today, Kahanism is the governing coalition’s operational ideology.

The same specter haunts Christian andf Hindu Nationalists.

Just So Stories

IT WAS NEVER MORE THAN A CULT:

The Social Turn: Psychoanalysis at an inflection point (Maggie Doherty, April 2025, Harpers)

[I] was in New York mainly to investigate rumors I’d heard about major changes afoot in the American psychoanalytic community. Psychoanalysis, I’d heard, was modernizing. APsA was opening up to the broader world. There was a push to bring in new members, as well as a rising tide of psychoanalytic work that sought to make analysis more accessible to and effective for people of different stripes. I wanted to understand what these changes meant for clinicians and patients and whether they were being resisted. What would it take for psychoanalysis to change?

APsA may have an iron hold on the profession, but it has a small fist, I thought, as I counted the people milling about on the hotel’s second floor. It was Thursday, the convention’s third day but only the first with a full slate of panels and discussions, and there were perhaps fifty people present before the afternoon sessions. The crowd seemed old, strikingly so; I saw a lot of gray hair and sensible shoes and the kind of funky jewelry worn by women of a certain age. According to their name tags, many attendees hailed from a few coastal cities: Boston, San Francisco, New York. Almost every person I saw was white. There was a small book exhibit next to a poster display that reminded me of a high school science fair. Representatives from the mental-health treatment center Austen Riggs, advertising in-patient treatment in the Berkshires (more than $70,000 for six weeks), had set up shop just a few steps away.

The sleepy atmosphere, the sparse crowd: it was hard to believe that psychoanalysis had once been central to American culture. From the aftermath of World War II through the mid-Sixties, analysis was seen as a reliable treatment for mental illness. Psychoanalysts sat on the boards of medical schools and chaired departments of psychiatry. Psychoanalytic researchers received government funding. A rosy portrait of the psychoanalyst appeared in the press; journalists themselves entered treatment. The historian Nathan G. Hale Jr. calls this time the golden age of psychoanalysis.

But the golden age didn’t last. In the Sixties, psychoanalysis came under attack from feminists, as well as from advocates of community mental-health services who derided the practice as a luxury for the well-off. Meanwhile, a new generation of physicians and psychiatrists were turning away from psychoanalysis—particularly with the development of what would later be called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which was evidence-based and promised concrete results within a set time frame. By the late Seventies and early Eighties, insurance companies largely excluded psychoanalytic treatment on the grounds that it wasn’t evidence-based, and the majority of analysands had to pay out-of-pocket. In 1980, the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders purged its pages of psychoanalytic theory, explicitly bringing American psychiatry into a post-psychoanalytic era that was more focused on “biological” explanations and cures, like drugs. Soon pharmaceutical companies began promising patients that their depression or anxiety could be treated with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and by the end of the century, mainstream American psychoanalysis could be said to be on the decline—and in crisis.

Identitarianism

THOUGH WE’D SOMEHOW…:

Frank Herbert’s Amazing ‘Dune’ Quote: ‘All Governments Suffer a Recurring Problem’ (Jon Miltimore, Mar 20, 2025, The Daily Economy)

Recently, I came across a Frank Herbert quote I hadn’t heard before, one far less known.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.

It’s a penetrating thought, and when I first read the words, I wondered if they were too good to be true. Most of us at one time or another have seen a quote online attributed to Morgan Freeman, George Washington, Robin Williams, or some other famous or influential person only to find after a two-minute investigation the quote is pure fiction or falsely attributed.

This is not the case with Herbert’s quote on power. Even though I had never heard it before, it appears in Chapterhouse: Dune (1985), the final book in the series, and one widely considered the weakest of the Dune novels. (This might explain why I didn’t read the book and was unfamiliar with the quote.)

Herbert’s words on power stood out to me for two reasons. First, it somewhat turns on its head Lord Acton’s famous line that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Unlike Acton, Herbert was not saying individuals are corrupted by power, but that power draws corrupt people.

Second, Herbert’s line is deeply Hayekian. In his magnum opus The Road to Serfdom, the Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek dedicated an entire chapter to the idea of the worst men in society rising to the top (it’s literally called “Why the Worst Get on Top”).

In that chapter, Hayek describes at length how centralized systems elevate individuals to lead them, and concludes that those possessing the strongest desire to organize economic and social life to their plan tend to have the fewest scruples about exercising power over others.

“To undertake the direction of the economic life of people with widely divergent ideals and values,” Hayek wrote, “the best intentions cannot prevent one from being forced to act in a way which to some of those affected must appear highly immoral.”

…managed to avoid electing psychopaths until Donald.

Identitarianism

THE GLOBE IS A NEIGHBORHOOD:

Localism, Immigration, and the Ordo Amoris (Logan Hoffman, March 12, 2025, Front Porch Republic)

I am skeptical, however, of the way this principle has been applied by the current administration to immigration policies. Augustine makes clear the circumstances in which this principle is to be applied: “Suppose that you had plenty of something which had to be given to someone in need of it but could not be given to two people, and you met two people, neither of whom had a greater need or a closer relationship to you than the other: You could do nothing more just than to choose by lot the person to whom you should give what could not be given to both.” One is morally justified, according to Augustine, in honoring one’s commitments to family and community, perhaps to the exclusion of others if resources are limited. If one has resources to give, however, then one should give first to those God has determined, as though by lot, to live closest to you.

If the United States were in a qualitatively similar situation to this example, in which we, societally, did not have plenty, then perhaps we would be justified in denying aid to foreign nations in order to aid those nearest to us. Personally, though, I am inclined to view America (collectively, not individually) as having plenty to give. Our national debt may indeed be increasing at a rather alarming rate, but the primary causes are not profligate generosity to distant people. We spend far too much on our own comfort and in pursuit of our own interests to claim that our purported love must select those nearby. That is, however, a prudential judgment and others may well judge differently.

The real difference between Augustine’s hypothetical and America’s situation, in my view, is that immigrants are already our neighbors. Augustine’s suggestion is that we allow God to direct our finite love by bringing certain people into our orbit. By his providential hand, God has done exactly that; many of our current neighbors and friends, those nearest to us, are those most affected by these shifts in immigration policy. Precisely according to Augustine’s ordo amoris, we are called to act with love toward our immigrant neighbors, not to differentiate who among our neighbors is deserving of our love and aid.

Music

TWIXT:

Punk, Poet, Prophet: In Praise of the Late, Great Shane MacGowan : Ed Simon on One of Music’s Great Lyricists (Ed Simon, March 17, 2025, Lit Hub)

“There’s a glass of punch below your feet and an angel at your head / There’s devils on each side of you with bottles in their hands / You need one more drop of poison and you’ll dream of foreign lands,” MacGowan sings in “The Sick Bed of Cuchulain,” the album’s first track. Poetry between heaven and hell, with all the sublimity of Yeats and the profanity of Behan, where they “took you up to midnight Mass and left you in the lurch / So, you dropped a button in the plate and spewed up in the church.” Wild music, but haunted. Shades of the dunes when on “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” a MacGowan describes “blood and death neath a screaming sky… And the arms and legs of other men / Were scattered all around, / Some cursed, some prayed, some prayed then cursed / Then prayed and bled some more.”

Back when I used to drink, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash was a favored album to shell out quarters for in the neon cacophony of the barroom jukebox; “Farewell to New York City boys, to Boston and PA!” belted out at Silky’s, Kelly’s, the Cage. “I’m a free born man of the USA!” goes the chorus in “Body of an American,” from the EP of Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, a declaration of independence, but half-hearted, knowing that the inverse of freedom can always be another form of servitude.

I quit drinking, but I still listen to the Pogues.

Technology

THE MODERN QUILL:

What’s in a Name: Signatures, autopen, and the question of verifiable identity (David E. Brown, Winter 2001/2, CABINET)

An Autopen looks like a cross between a school desk and a pantograph—an arm jutting out of a 1960s-looking enclosure grips a felt-tip pen. Inside the machine is a model of a signature; the penned arm extends out onto the desk and accurately re-creates the signature “matrix” inside, hundreds or thousands of times a day. Early users were presidents and CEOs, who could have spent weeks signing their names, barely making a dent in the demands of the important identity. (A more recent application is direct-mail marketing, which benefits from a “personal” touch.)


The Autopen was a lifesaver for important men. But the Autopen undid some of the progress that had been made in identification. Your signature, with its practiced flourish, is as close to you that writing can get. “I am that I am,” your signature wants to say. And that closeness-to-you is what convinces governments and banks and landlords that you are who you claim to be. But how can that certainty exist along with a machine that can sign and sign and sign, with no care as to who has told the machine to sign? (It can’t, as evidenced by a series of unauthorized, autopenned Donald Rumsfeld signatures that appeared on official documents in early 2001.2)

To say nothing of value. After the Autopen was adopted by US presidents (LBJ was a big user, as was Nixon and everyone since) it found new markets among celebrities. It really is hard to sign your name for hours and hours, but maybe not so hard as disappointing one’s fans. So by the late 1960s many famous people had their own Autopens churning out signatures for the people. And while Autopen signatures from presidents and business leaders had been accepted at more or less face value, they did not have to deal with the invisible hand of the collectibles market. An Autopenned document may be good enough for the Department of Defense, but don’t try to convince a collector that a machine carries the emotional—and thus, in the irrational economics of nostalgia, financial—weight of a real autograph.

A recent eBay search turned up just two Autopenned items among the 60,000-plus autographed 8x10s, books, and other baubles up for sale. And of that multitude of signatures up for bid, hundreds of their sellers went out of their way to point out that they weren’t Autopenned. If we accept the opinion of the collectibles market—and as odd as that market is, there seems to be no reason not to—then eBay has become the ultimate measure of desire, value, and authenticity. And that measure says that more than a century of effort to create a mechanical stand-in for the human hand, for the written personality, has come to naught.

Identitarianism

MAYBE JUST BE A DECENT HUMAN BEING?:

Most Men Don’t Want To Be Heroes (And That’s Okay): Despite the self-pity of some, there has never been a better time to be a man (Toby Buckle, 17 Mar 2025, Liberal Currents)

When I was much younger, I saved someone from drowning. They had (possibly while intoxicated) gone into a rough and choppy sea, at night, and were struggling to stay above water. Worse, the tide was pulling them out. I went in after them and, with some effort, brought them back to shore. As we got close, an older man I did not know also came in to help and, between the two of us, we dragged them out. Exhausted and freezing cold, but safe.

It might surprise someone like Arnade to learn that this has not proved an especially important moment in my life. I’m glad I did it. I received profuse thanks from the person in question and general plaudits from my peers (which Arnade imagines all young men need). And then, well… life moves on. Other things happen to you. It’s not something that’s provided any great moral lesson for me. Nor is it important to my sense of identity—this is the first time I’ve mentioned it publicly, not out of humility; I honestly just don’t really think about it.

I’ve also provided support to people in less dramatic, more long-term, more female-coded ways. For instance, assisting a loved one through a disability. Or being, with my family, a carer for a close relative with Alzheimer’s. There is absolutely no doubt the latter have given more meaning to me, developed my character more, and have strengthened my relationships with others in a way more traditional ‘heroics’ couldn’t.

Providing long-term care for someone is an endless series of small decisions to prioritize the other person, most in themselves trivial and quickly forgotten. Rather than one moment in which you have to master yourself, you have to decide to continually live that value. And it improves you. It will teach to be kind, it will teach you how to care about someone in a way that taking a one-time risk won’t. You will feel frustration with people for things that are not their fault and have to move past that. You’ll then feel guilt—often quite profound guilt—for having felt that frustration. You will learn—and you will be forced to learn—how to forgive others and yourself. All of this will be mixed with moments of real joy and real connection. I can’t speak for everyone, but these have been among the most important parts of my life.

On a societal level, if there is a crisis of acts of service not being recognised it is of this latter, female-coded, kind. Despite Arnade’s claim that heroics are now (somehow) looked down on, whenever I’ve done something (even something quite minor) that fits this male-coded frame, I’ve received praise and recognition. In Arnade’s own story—which he takes as an exemplar of his thesis—the ‘hero’ (who retrieved a drunk from a locked bathroom) was bought drinks and made to feel good about his actions. (“he strutted around like the cat’s meow.”) In contrast, looking after a relative in cognitive decline can be very isolating. Despite it being the much more common experience, many carers feel profoundly alone. Finally, as societies age, more and more of us are going to need to fill this role.

There is not the same structural need for an army of men pulling people out of locked bathrooms or choppy seas. That’s not the point, Arnade might say—men need that, and without it we’ll be forlorn, miserable, useless mopes. But will we? For most of us, a true emergency rescue moment might happen once or twice throughout your life. You want to meet the moment, but I think it will be challenging to build a stable identity around.

It’s perfectly normal to want to be the hero of your own story, but imagine how insecure (unmanly) you have to be to demand others pretend you heroic?

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