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)

August 2025

Robotics/AI

ONE APOCALYPSE AFTER ANOTHER:

dive bar ai slop! decline of the novel! david copperfield! (Tara Isabella Burton, Aug 29, 2025, The Lost Word)

Here’s what I’ve been wrestling with. Whenever I want to smash a subway screen displaying advertisements for full-body deodorant, I remember that the invention of writing, the invention of the printing press, the invention of any technology that allows for the faster dissemination of information from one person’s brain to another, must also have felt apocalyptic. How can I defend myself as a novelist, as any kind of writer – how can I understand the purpose of what I love – while simultaneously decrying the creative potential of a different epoch-shift. How can I devote my life to one form of imaginative technology while worrying that another will erode our fundamental humanness?

If humanness even can be eroded. Even the most apocalyptic concerns about technology seem to me predicated that there are elements of our fundamental humanness that technology can take away from us, that there is a point beyond which the beings that we become no longer count as meaningfully human in the same way, and thus that we need a new theological anthropology to account for it. At which technological horizon does history end and the eschaton begin?

This means something for me as a Christian, too. My entire theological worldview, after all, is predicated on this idea that the word made flesh is a foundationally true way of understanding God’s existence in the world. The incarnate Christ is also a paradigm of the relationship between human language – and with it, human technological expansion of our imaginations – and the reality it either represents, or alters. We are, after all, in the imago dei, and that seems to mean something about our creative capacities. To say anything about God, from a Christian perspective, is also to say something about human language and, yes, technology. And if we grant that we are on the cusp of, if we have not already surpassed, an era-defining shift (be it the Internet, more broadly; smartphones more specifically; generative AI more specifically), we do, I think, need to ask ourselves what all this means vis a vis the wider cosmic story.

Identitarianism

ALWAYS BET ON THE DEEP STATE:

Most Trump tariffs are not legal, US appeals court rules (Dietrich Knauth and Nate Raymond, August 29, 2025, Reuters)


“The statute bestows significant authority on the President to undertake a number of actions in response to a declared national emergency, but none of these actions explicitly include the power to impose tariffs, duties, or the like, or the power to tax,” the court said. […]


“It seems unlikely that Congress intended, in enacting IEEPA, to depart from its past practice and grant the President unlimited authority to impose tariffs,” the ruling said. “The statute neither mentions tariffs (or any of its synonyms) nor has procedural safeguards that contain clear limits on the President’s power to impose tariffs.”


The 1977 law had historically been used for imposing sanctions on enemies or freezing their assets.

Grand Juries in D.C. Reject Prosecutors’ Efforts to Level Harsh Charges Against Residents (Alan Feuer, Aug. 29, 2025, NY Times)


For the third time in slightly more than a week, grand jurors in Washington have rejected efforts by federal prosecutors to obtain an indictment against a resident accused of a felony assault against a federal agent.

The pattern of failure — in what was now three separate cases — suggested that something extraordinary was taking place in the city’s federal courts. It indicated that the ordinary people called upon to sit on grand juries were pushing back against efforts by prosecutors to harshly charge fellow citizens who had encountered law enforcement officers on the streets at a moment when President Trump had flooded them with National Guard troops and federal agents.

Anglospherics Conservative Thought Religion

HOW THE ANGLOSPHERE WAS SAVED FROM THE CONTINENT’S DISASTROUS PLUNGE INTO REASON:

Can We Truly Know Anything? Hume’s Problem of Induction (Viktoriya Sus, 8/29/25, The Collector)

Induction is a technique of reasoning in which we derive general principles from specific observations. For example, if every swan we have ever seen is white, we might conclude that all swans are white. This kind of reasoning is deeply embedded in human thought and underpins a lot of science as well as our everyday decision-making.

But David Hume famously questioned this process, arguing that there is no logical justification for assuming that the future will resemble the past. Just because the sun has risen every morning up until now does not mean it will do so again tomorrow – yet this is what induction leads us to believe.

Hume’s critique is deeper than it first appears. It asks whether we can assume that the laws of nature will remain the same. For instance, how do we know gravity will work tomorrow exactly as it does today?

According to Hume, our belief in this consistency doesn’t come from logic itself. Instead, it is based on habit and custom. If something has always happened a certain way before, we expect it to happen like that again.

This raises an important question: if induction (our process of reasoning) lacks a logical foundation but our understanding of the world relies on induction, can we ever truly say we “know” anything for sure?

We ultimately choose among faiths and the best of us choose the most beautiful ones.

60-40 Nation

CONFORMITY IS THE WISDOM OF CROWDS:

Against Angst: Most teen movies encourage rebellion and nonconformity, but a few offer lessons in prudence (Peter Tonguette, 8/24/25, American Conservative)

Based on a play by William Inge, the 1955 drama Picnic revolves around the competing dispositions and worldviews of two sisters in Kansas, the pretty and fawned-over Madge (Kim Novak) and the tomboyish and ignored Millie (Susan Strasberg), who seems to conceive of herself in opposition to her sibling. When we meet her in the film, Millie is first seen bouncing a basketball that she soon trades for a book and a cigarette—sure signs that she is an apostate to the conventions of mid-American life at midcentury. By contrast, Madge is first encountered drying her “silly hair,” as Millie calls it, while hanging her head outside of her window.

In fact, Inge leans on Millie to offer remarks on and against the real and imagined provincialism of the town into which she was born and from which she eagerly hopes to one day flee. For example, urged by her mother and sister to find herself a date for the Labor Day picnic, Millie says, “I will dress and act the way I want,” before arming herself with a baseball cap and eyeglasses and digging ever deeper into her copy of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter—just the sort of mildly literary, slightly scandalous book that signals to the audience her delusions of grandeur.


Not that I considered Millie deluded at all when I saw the movie all those years ago. I took her perspective as a rally cry. Having grown up on The Catcher in the Rye and Dead Poets Society, I loved it when Millie said, “When I graduate from college, I’m going to New York and write novels that’ll shock people right out of their senses.” Moving to New York, writing novels, upsetting the pieties of narrow-minded readers—it all sounded so worthwhile, so glamorous, so clearly right.

Yet the movie comes to a different conclusion. The great issue in the story is whether Madge will marry a fellow named Hal (William Holden), a wayward drifter who nonetheless has great reserves of magnetism, charm, and decency. At the decisive moment, Millie, of all people, encourages Madge to take the risk of going with Hal. She is careful to clarify that the path she is urging for her sister is not one she will ever take: “I’m never going to fall in love. Not me. I’m not going to live in some jerkwater town and marry some ornery guy and raise a lot of grimy kids.” Then, getting up from the bed where she was sitting, Millie exhorts Madge to choose another way: “But just because I’m a dope doesn’t mean you have to be.”

Culture

LABELS FOR LABILES:

The trouble with trigger warnings True drama is an emotional ambush (Kathleen Stock, August 22, 2025, UnHerd)

But let’s be honest: it can’t really be about harm-reduction, can it? For nobody seriously believes that the theatre can be quite that exciting. In my youth, plays were relatively boring things that parents or teachers made you sit through once a year, when what you really wanted to do was go to the cinema. The idea that you might be scarred for life by some unnaturally loud proclaiming, the odd bit of dramatic writhing around, and some judiciously applied lighting and props would have been ludicrous — as it is surely all the more so to generations raised on Netflix gorefests. And here the exception proves the rule: surely not every young dramatist can be the new Sarah Kane. If you were being cynical, you might conclude that the whole thing is a sneaky way of drumming up trade for a dying art form, by encouraging the idea that spectators might feel something visceral. (“Depending on your lived experiences, this performance may trigger memories of loss, grief, or bullying,” speculates another festival event, rather hopefully.)

The official explanation given for such notices is that they allow people to emotionally prepare for what is to come, the way you might steel yourself just before abseiling down a cliff or jumping out of a plane. But since you are not in fact going to be doing anything death-defying, but rather sitting in a cramped seat for a couple of hours casting surreptitious glances at your watch, it is possible that dire forecasts of impending emotional assault set some people up for anxiety where there would not otherwise have been any. And that, fairly predictably, is what several studies have found: trigger warnings have a tendency to increase anxiety rather than reduce it. Staying true to the ethos of the project, this awkward fact would seem to require that such warnings be given separate, prior trigger warnings of their own — and so on ad infinitum — rendering the whole process unmanageable for harried producers.


Further evidence that content warnings are basically fake news is that the theatre-makers who use them go ahead with their shows enthusiastically anyway.

They’re just unearned boasts.

Anglospherics Conservative Thought

THE HUMAN COMEDY:

Gnostic Identity in the Therapeutic Age (Albert Norton, 7/21/25, Voegelin View)


We all feel a tragic sense, owing to awareness of mortality, and of evil, and of our own part in evil. Though we revere human life in the abstract, we’re intensely aware of the moral imperfections of humanity. We know justice is real, and so we know judgment is real, even if we don’t experience it immediately within this finite life in the body. We know we’re going to die, and this is difficult to reconcile with the weighty significance we attach to human life, especially our own.


We also know, even if we attempt to avert our eyes in the moment, that there is a moral structure to our existence, and that it is not of our own invention, individually or collectively. That structure means that what we do and fail to do in this life is consequential. It results in the heaviness of being that many find unbearable, tempting one to adopt in its place the fiction that good and evil are merely words we attach to what we collectively like and don’t like. The tragic sense springs from our awareness of moral significance, and from our moral failings, and our mortality, and the reality of justice. It is the seed of faith, but it can also motivate corrupted visions of reality, as with early Gnosticism and postmodern ideologies that Voegelin correctly identified as “Gnostic.” […]

Here is how, in his The New Science of Politics, Eric Voegelin described the sense religion leaves us with even after the Resurrection:


Uncertainty is the very essence of Christianity. The feeling of security in a “world full of gods” [i.e., the pagan world] is lost with the gods themselves; when the world is de—divinized, communication with the world-transcendent God is reduced to the tenuous bond of faith, in the sense of Hebrews 11:1, as the substance of things hoped for and the proof of things unseen. Ontologically the substance of things hoped for is nowhere to be found but in faith itself; and, epistemologically, there is no proof for things unseen but again this very faith. The bond is tenuous indeed, and may snap easily. The life of the soul in openness toward God, the waiting, the periods of aridity and dullness, guilt and despondency, contrition and repentance, forsakenness and hope against hope, the silent stirrings of love and grace, trembling on the verge of a certainty which if gained is loss—the very lightness of this fabric may prove too heavy a burden for men who lust for massively possessive experience.


These kinds of observations are attributable to many other thinkers, including but not limited to Philip Rieff, a seminal thinker on the impact of the rise of the therapeutic mentality. Voegelin is particularly relevant here, however, because he invoked “Gnosticism” to explain the advance of “speculative systems,” ideologies that supplant religious faith. As he suggests in this passage, the worldview of faith is perhaps a too-light undemanding burden; airy compared to the heavens teeming with pagan gods that preceded it. It is a relief to mankind, but it does not eliminate the tragic sense and requires much social reinforcement.

Every ism/ideology is driven by the need to escape from the reality of our Fallen nature. The fact that we are not merely imperfectable but prone to sin leads people to try and hide behind the silliest theories, lately the denial of Free Will.

Cheeto Jesus

THE DOOR WAS AJAR:

The history of American corporate nationalization (Tyler Cowen, August 24, 2025, Marginal Revolution)

You should note that although the United States has not so many state-owned enterprises, the American government still has ways of expressing its will on business, or as the case may be, favoring one set of businesses over another. In these latter cases it can be said that American business is expressing its will over government through forms of crony capitalism, a concept which is spreading in both America and China.

The United States has evolved a subtle brand of corporatism and industrial policy that is mostly decentralized and also – this is an important point — relatively stable across shifts of political power. America uses its large country privileges to maintain access to world markets and to protect the property rights of its investors, usually without much regard for whether they are Democrats or Republicans. For instance the State Department works hard to maintain open world markets for films and other cultural goods and services. Toward this end America has used trade negotiations, diplomatic leverage, foreign aid, and also explicit arm-twisting, based on its military commitments to protect allied nations in Western Europe and East Asia. America already had successful entertainment producers, it just wanted to make sure they could earn more money abroad, and that is why the American government usually insists on open access for audiovisual products when it negotiates free trade treaties. Yet in these deals there is not much if any explicit favoritism for one movie or television studio over another, or for one political alliance over another. Democrats are disproportionately overrepresented in Hollywood, but Republican administrations protect the interests of the American entertainment sector nonetheless. It’s about the money and the jobs, not about shifting political coalitions. You’ll note that the independence from particular political coalitions gives the American business environment a particular stability and predictability, to its advantage internationally and otherwise.

All Comedy is Conservative

SKEPTICISM IS REALISM:

Grumpy Old…Men? (Jeannette Cooperman, July 3, 2025, Common Reader)

But curmudgeons grow people up, too.

Lou Grant, shirtsleeves rolled up, scowling across his desk at Mary Tyler Moore. Abe Vigoda as Fish on Barney Miller; Redd Foxx as Fred Sanford, Hugh Laurie as Dr. Gregory House. Samuel Johnson, John Adams, even the man called Ove. I loved those guys. Too much sweetness, too much palaver and perky optimism and influencer smarm, and you need an antidote. Grumpiness is honest, and there is often wisdom beneath its crust. I regularly pull out Montaigne as a yardstick: “Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.” Samuel Johnson stopped me cold by observing, “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” Thomas Szasz stopped me, too, when he defined happiness as “an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.” H.L. Mencken presaged Trump’s sales of golden sneakers with the weary aphorism: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” And Voltaire left us an even sharper lesson: “To succeed in claiming the multitude you must seem to wear the same fetters.”

Politics is a curmudgeon’s favorite playground. In his Devil’s Dictionary, Bierce defined political life as “a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.” He defined “alliance,” in international politics, as “the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted into each other’s pocket that they cannot safely plunder a third.” He defined history as “an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.”

Curmudgeons, you see, have standards. Sherlock Holmes could not abide being fooled, and Statler and Waldorf suffered no foolish puppets. Mark Twain rolled his eyes at idiocy of all sorts, and Lewis Black skewers it. “Curmudgeon” once implied that you were a “surly, ill-mannered, bad-tempered fellow,” which certainly explains why women could not qualify, as none of those adjectives are sanctioned for us. But environmentalist Edward Abbey noted in self-defense that the label’s meaning had evolved “to refer to anyone who hates hypocrisy, cant, sham, dogmatic ideologies, the pretenses and evasions of euphemism, and has the nerve to point out unpleasant facts and takes the trouble to impale these sins on the skewer of humor and roast them over the fires of empiric fact, common sense, and native intelligence. In this nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, it then becomes an honor to be labeled curmudgeon.”

What saves a curmudgeon from bitterness is the acceptance that man is Fallen and those standards will not be met much.

Homocentric Universe

THE CONTINENTAL DELUSION HUME SAVED US FROM:

Why Science Hasn’t Solved Consciousness (Yet) (Adam Frank, July 8, 2025, Noema)


In this way, over time, scientists began to imagine a perspective-less perspective, a supposed God’s-eye view of the universe — free of any human bias. The philosopher Thomas Nagel calls this the “view from nowhere.” And this philosophical position eventually became synonymous with mainstream science itself.

The development of the thermometer, and from it the science of thermodynamics, offers a notable example of our scientific culture’s blind spot. In it, we can see how those unchanging elements of experience are extracted and then, in time, misconstrued as a false perspective-less perspective.

The embodied feeling of being hot or cold is a basic example of direct experience. But developing a measurable scale of this experience for future scientific inquiry took centuries of work. Much of this story played out in what we now call laboratories, where those elements of experience could be isolated and probed. First, hot and cold needed to become correlated with something like the level of alcohol or mercury in a graduated tube. This was the invention of thermometry. Once a way to measure degrees was established, those degrees could then be used to investigate other focal points of experience, like the boiling point of water. A mathematically formulated theory of thermodynamics was then slowly developed, describing the relationship between temperature and heat flow. Later, higher levels of abstraction came as the random motions of unseen atoms — studied via the new field of statistical mechanics — were recognized as the true nature of heat. In this way, more phenomena studied in labs became describable in ever more precise terms. Along with those new, precise descriptions came new, powerful capacities to control the world via technologies like heat engines or refrigeration.

As this upward spiral of abstraction was traversed, something, however, was lost. In what Husserl called the “surreptitious substitution,” abstractions like thermometric degrees were treated as more real than the experience they imparted. Eventually, the first-person, embodied experience of being hot or feeling cold was pushed aside as a phantom epiphenomenon, while abstracted quantities like temperature, enthalpy, Gibbs potentials and phase space became more fundamental and more real. This amnesia of experience is science’s blind spot.

Science is nothing more than a product of consciousness.

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