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)

June 2025

Identitarianism

OTHEFR THAN THAT, HOW DID YOU ENJOY THE SHOW…:

Autocracy, Corruption, and Decline: Why Hungary and Orbanism Must Never be a Model for the U.S. (Michael Maya, June 30, 2025, Just Security)

Do average Hungarians share the enthusiasm for Orban exhibited by Trump, CPAC, and the Heritage Foundation? In short, no. Here is one telling statistic: from 2010 to 2024, emigration from Hungary rose by 464 percent. In fact, the number of Hungarians leaving their country rose sharply almost immediately after Orban’s April 2010 election victory. For scores of Hungarians, the future looks bleak, with a recent survey finding that 34 percent of recent graduates and 55 percent of 18-40-year-old Hungarians plan to emigrate. In light of Hungary’s aging population – its median age is 43.9 years – Orban can ill-afford to drive out Hungary’s best, brightest, and youngest. That so many Hungarians are eager to flee Orban’s rule provides the first hint that enthusiasm among his U.S-based cheerleaders is misplaced, even suspect.

Even a cursory inquiry into Orban’s record reveals that he has presided not over Hungary’s advancement but rather its alarming decline. For one, he has masterminded Hungary’s transformation from a full democracy to an “electoral autocracy,” according to the European Parliament. Freedom House now rates Hungary as only “partly free.” As noted in Bertelsmann’s 2024 Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI): “Elections are typically free but not fair, with the ruling Fidesz party benefiting from large-scale gerrymandering, asymmetrical media access and the misuse of state assets.” Today, Hungary is an SGI bottom dweller, ranking 30th out of 30 with respect to: (1) Elections, (2) Quality of the Parties and Candidates, and (3) Access to Official Information.


Adding to Hungary’s woes is its economy, which has stagnated since 2022, with GDP growth rates declining for four years straight and a ballooning budget deficit of 4.9 percent of GDP, significantly higher than the European Union average of 3 percent. Hungary is also plagued by high inflation, forcing the government to take drastic steps such as limiting grocers’ profit margins. Predictably, Hungary’s currency, the Forint, has lost value and both domestic and foreign investors, wary of arbitrary regulatory shifts and opaque enforcement, are rethinking investments in Hungary. More than €20 billion in EU funds that would have come to Hungary have been suspended over rule of law violations, and innovation lags as firms hesitate to invest in research, development, or new technologies. Why? Among other things, they lack confidence in intellectual property protections.

For ordinary Hungarians, Orban’s mismanagement of the economy has translated into living standards significantly lower than many of the other 37 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Given these and other declines, it is no surprise that, just in the last year, Hungary fell 13 places in Gallup’s World Happiness Report. Hungary now ranks below Russia, China, Uzbekistan, and Honduras. Predictably, countries with thriving democracies dominate the list of happiest countries.

Identitarianism

WHY MAGA HATES AMERICA:

Rediscovering Order in an Age of Populism (Mike Pence & Ed Feulner, Summer 2025, National Affairs)

Conservatism once proudly embraced a positive vision, offering the American people clear alternatives to the prevailing left-leaning orthodoxies of the day. In the final decades of the 20th century, conservatives not only opposed affirmative action’s quixotic pursuit of equal outcomes, they championed equality of opportunity for all. Conservatives were not simply opposed to letting communism run wild; they contained it by boldly leading the free world. Conservatives were not just critical of big government; their support for free markets unleashed one of the greatest economic expansions in history. At the heart of conservatism lay an ambition to help America flourish, coupled with the desire to preserve the private institutions — families, churches, local communities, and the like — that serve as the building blocks of an ordered society. […]

Conservatism is not a rigid ideology promising utopia; it is a disposition — a state of mind grounded in timeless principles. It recognizes human nature as it is and has been throughout the ages, and points toward a distinct approach to governing ourselves. Conservatism values obedience to a transcendent moral order, reverence for tradition and our forebears, prudence in decision-making, humility regarding our place in history, and the pursuit of justice in a fallen world. These harmonious values make conservatism a timeless philosophy that aligns seamlessly with self-governance.

In seeking to privilege white males, the Right needs bigger government, has to repudiate morality for its universalism and, thereby, must oppose the Founding.

Health

SHAKE IT OFF (profanity alert):

Against therapy (Harry Readhead, 30 June, 2025, The Critic)

There is a more pernicious, insidious aspect of therapy. In Beyond the Self, the Buddhist monk and former scientist Matthieu Ricard questions the wisdom of an approach to wellbeing that is “me, me, me”. For him, trying to find peace “within the ego bubble” resembles a kind of Stockholm syndrome. Breaking free of our various entanglements and focusing on what is outside of ourselves might be better. We tend to make too much of things simply because we’re involved. One risks getting trapped in a hall of mirrors and losing one’s sense of proportion. To paraphrase the priest and writer Pablo d’Ors, we “martyr [ourselves] with diminutive problems or imaginary pains”. If we had a friend in the same situation, we would see things differently.

More: what Carl Rogers called “unconditional positive regard” can feel to the patient like endorsement. The patient suggests his friend or parent is “toxic”. The therapist does not disagree. Emboldened, the patient grows more certain. But his view may be highly subjective. Ask ten people for theirs and, on balance, they might find he has more to answer for. He is unlikely to hear that in therapy. Worse: his therapist has only his version of events, and is duty-bound principally to him. Yet our patient lives among others and must answer to them, too. This can lead to an absurd state of affairs in which someone grows ever more sure of his rightness, and ever less able to mix with those around him. He may even turn away from those precious few who would drop everything to get him out of a bind — or at least bring him tea and sandwiches — because their idea of affection doesn’t quite match his.

Abigail Shrier, who has a knack for walking straight into the hornet’s nest, charts this drift in Bad Therapy, which paints a vaguely dystopian picture of the therapeutic landscape. She shows that therapy can teach helplessness and induce distress; that its very definition (The American Psychological Association defines therapy as “Any psychological service provided by a trained professional.”) is circular; and that the idea behind the bestseller The Body Keeps the Score is reheated “repressed memory”, a discredited theory that led to the wrongful incarceration of people in the 80s. (The book’s author, Bessel van der Kolk, was a witness in their trials and “crucial to putting innocent people in prison”, according to journalist Mark Prendergast). Shrier’s book ruffled some feathers, as you can imagine; but it also drew approving nods from many in the therapy world. The writer and psychotherapist Joseph Burgo admitted that the profession “has come to be dominated by bad ideas”. […]

Ricard may well have been onto something when he said that trying to find peace through the filter of self-centeredness might not be all that wise. It is, after all, striking that some of the more well-grounded ways to lift our spirits involve, in effect, getting out of our own way. Many are ancient. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy owes much to the Stoics; meditation turns up in nearly every faith; and yoga came about over 2,000 years ago. Amusingly, there is now some evidence that those who suppress fearful thoughts feel better than those who don’t. It had been roundly accepted that it is terribly unhealthy to bury our feelings. But it seems the stiff upper lip might in fact have its uses.

Republican Liberty

TO BE FULLY A CITIZEN:

Hitting the Doorsteps: There may be no better way to get involved in politics than canvassing – knocking on your neighbors’ doors and taking time to listen. (Daniel Payne, May 12, 2025, Plough)

An MP’s campaign has the feel of a community project, with a shambling cast of characters you might at other times find involved with the local scout troop or running a church fair. For six weeks the office was full and loud with activity. All available space was crammed with the latest batch of leaflets, the windows blocked up with boxes, desks piled with literature or deliveries to be processed. Volunteers piled in to stuff envelopes, expecting to be paid only in cups of tea.
My job was to help arrange the candidate’s schedule and prep him for awkward and difficult questions he could get thrown – anything from his thoughts on China invading Taiwan, to single gender spaces, to unpopular plans for a new housing estate. And, of course, all those of us who could were expected to hit the streets to canvas voters. As someone who had urged other Christians to engage with politics, here was a chance for me to put it into practice. What better way than by canvassing!

Canvassing is simple. An app has the registered voters of an area logged. You knock on a door, tell them you are campaigning for so-and-so, and ask if they have thought yet about how they might be voting. You log their response in the app and move to the next door.

It is exhausting work. Each door is an unknown. One door could be friendly, chatty, open to questions. The next could be utterly uninterested. The next could chew your ear off about proportional representation and the need for voting reform. The next could be coming off the back of a terrible day at work, with the kids acting up and the dinner burnt, before you knock on the door asking for a vote. I had the demoralizing record of waking up sleeping babies two doors in a row.

Canvassing requires good walking stamina and a thick skin. Don’t take a sharp word or a slammed door to heart. Always beware of the dog.

Once you knock on enough doors in communities like these, you start make connections.

After visiting all (then) 106 Superfund sites in NJ on the campain trail in 1985, and canvassing with the candidate (who had first been elected to the NJ Senate by knocking on every door in his district), I went to work for a Naderite organization, the New Jersey Environmental Federation. We raised money to lobby for a bill requiring the polluters to pat to clean up the toxic waste sites they had created (taxing the externalities) by doing door-to-door canvassing. People were rather uniformly courteous and a perhaps surprising percentage supported the effort. It’s one of the most worthwhile experiences you can have, meeting your fellow citizens.

Identitarianism

WHY MAGA IMAGINES DONALD MUSCULAR:

The Dark Magic of Words: Why Fascism and Illiberalism is So Seductive to Writers: Ed Simon Looks at Eduard Limonov, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Yukio Mishima, and Others (Ed Simon, June 23, 2025, LitHub)

Myth and fantasy are what the fascist trade in, of Russia made great again, or Italy made great again, or someplace made great again (it’s always some place), but at the expense of our souls. This is the danger of an artistic temperament at its most extreme, what Nietzsche celebrated as the “Dionysian” in The Birth of Tragedy, where the artist “enriches everything out of one’s own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever wills is seen swelled, taught, strong, overloaded with strength” until all of reality merely becomes “reflections of his perfection.”

Such idealization of pure experience is an idolatry of death, since such an artist can’t envision the world beyond their individuality, can’t conceive of others enduring after the poet’s extinction. Think of Limonov’s “Yes, Death!,” of D’Annunzio’s 1894 novel The Triumph of Death.

Environment

GOS:

The goshawk’s name was bestowed by medieval falconers and honours the birds’ formidable predatory powers (Mark Cocker, 6/05/25, Country Life)

What really makes a goshawk hard to see is its blend of sheer speed and inherent caution. They are widespread in Britain, particularly north and west of a line from the River Severn to the Tweed, where there are an estimated 1,200 breeding pairs. In all places, they are lovers of deep woods and spend most of their time within the canopy, dashing along rides or weaving through the trees, using shock tactics to flush and catch prey. In Europe, goshawks can sometimes occupy heavily urbanised places, but remain invisible to the public. There is a celebrated colony in downtown Berlin, Germany, and, although it might be the scourge of the city’s pigeon flocks, its human neighbours remain blithely unaware. The species is particularly partial to pigeon flesh, with some studies putting it as high as 60% of the entire diet. Yet goshawks have the power to overwhelm larger birds. Part-ridges, coots, mallards and even capercaillie — the latter three times the weight of its assailant — have all been recorded.

I once saw a female retrieving an egret from a dyke, where the prey had fallen after the raptor had struck. They will also adjust to more modest fare: squirrels, starlings, sparrows and beetles are fair game for males, which have only two-thirds the bulk of their mates. For all their fondness for deep cover, goshawks will forgo their ghost status during the pre-breeding period. For a few spring weeks, especially on sunlit March mornings, they sail high over their territories, circling and swooping. The climax of these nuptial displays is when a male and female fly together, bonding in a deep-winged, slow-motion butterfly action that they alternate with passages of effortless soaring. A mystery attaching to Britain’s population centres on the precise nature of its origins.

As Helen MacDonald relates in H is for Hawk, T. H. White’s the Goshawk is kind of insane.

Health

A LITTLE PAIN NEVER HURT ANYONE:

Pills or Perseverance: How Japan and Other Nations Tackle Headaches (Nippon, Jun 23, 2025)

When asked whether headaches should be endured to some extent, 78.2% of respondents in Germany either “strongly agreed” or “somewhat agreed,” which was the highest level among the five countries. Japan had the lowest level of agreement, at 59.8%.

However, 77.2% of the respondents in Japan said that they do in fact tend to endure their headaches. This suggests a significant gap between the attitude towards headaches and actual behavior.

Religion

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT ONE:

What Did Socrates Really Mean When He Said “Know Thyself”?: One of the most famous maxims in the history of philosophy is “Know thyself”, but what does it actually mean? (Maysara Kamal, 6/21/25, The Collector)

Although the dialogue ends inconclusively, it shows that self-knowledge is a self-examination that involves constituting ourselves as knowers, becoming aware of the limitations of our knowledge, and applying our knowledge of what is good into our actions.

In Phaedrus, Socrates famously proclaims, “I am not yet able, as the Delphic inscription has it, to know myself”. In this passage, Socrates explains why he has no time to contemplate the truth behind ancient Greek mythology. The passage highlights the importance of self-knowledge and suggests that self-knowledge is an ongoing process. One would assume that a philosopher as mature as Socrates would have completed the task of self-knowledge, but the Phaedrus shows that self-knowledge is not a destination but an ongoing journey, as there is always more room for self-examination and moral self-improvement.

No one can ever know themself and what they are capable of, which is why empathy is such an inane concept.

Health

HIP TO BE DISORDERED:

Children shouldn’t fear their feelings (Josephine Bartosch, 26 June, 2025, The Critic)

Report author and counsellor Lucy Beney says that rather than toughening kids up to deal with the challenges of life, today’s schools may be talking them into fragility.

Every school is now required to appoint a “Senior Mental Health Lead”, and there’s cross-party enthusiasm for parachuting therapists into educational institutions. By 2023, over a third of schools had signed up with Mental Health Support Teams (MHSTs), and though the Department for Education doesn’t routinely collect data, a 2017 survey suggested that around 85 per cent of secondary schools and 55 per cent of primary schools were already offering counselling services.

This shift is amplified outside the classroom, as social media picks up where school counsellors leave off. On TikTok mental health labels like anxiety and depression, or conditions like ASD, ADHD are used as social capital — with young people trading symptoms like status symbols.

Next Page »

You Missed

Latin America

THE CRYING ENDS:

Technology

SCROLLING IS READING:

Republican Liberty

RETURNING LAWMAKING TO THE LEGISLATIVE BRANCH:

Health

NO BODY’S PERFECT:

Copyright © All rights reserved | Blogus by Themeansar.