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)

October 2025

Republican Liberty

THE GENIUS OF REPUBLICAN LIBERTY…:

Forging the Chains of Virtue: Aristotle’s Raw Politics of Power (Clifford Angell Bates, 9/20/25, The Miskitonian)

While archē refers to legitimate authority, Aristotle also discusses bia, which refers to power that is exercised through force or coercion. Bia is characterized by the absence of consent and often involves rulers maintaining control through violence, intimidation, or oppression. This form of power is typically associated with tyranny, where the ruler governs through fear and force rather than through the consent of the governed. Aristotle views this type of power as fundamentally illegitimate because it violates the principles of justice and mutual agreement that should underpin political authority.

Aristotle condemns the use of unjust power (bia), arguing that it is corruptive both to the ruler and to the ruled. Power that is exercised through force leads to instability and oppression, as it disregards the common good in favor of the ruler’s self-interest. This form of power is in direct contradiction to natural rule, where authority is based on mutual consent and is directed toward the good of the community. Aristotle believes that legitimate power arises from the willing participation of citizens, and when rulers resort to force, they undermine the very foundations of political life.

Aristotle is clear about the negative consequences of coercive power. Rule by force leads to instability within the political community, as it erodes trust and undermines justice. Citizens who are governed through fear are less likely to feel loyalty to their rulers, and this can result in resistance, rebellion, and ultimately the destabilization of society. For this reason, Aristotle views coercive power as unsustainable in the long run. A ruler who relies on force may be able to maintain control temporarily, but the lack of legitimacy will eventually provoke opposition.

In Aristotle’s ideal political community, citizens play a central role in the exercise of power. In a democracy, power is distributed among citizens through mechanisms such as voting, holding office, and participating in decision-making processes. Citizenship is not simply about enjoying rights and privileges; it is about active engagement in the governance of the polis. Aristotle sees the collective power of citizens as essential to shaping the policies and laws that govern the state. In this way, power is not concentrated in the hands of a few but is shared among the many, creating a more equitable and just society.

For Aristotle, the rule of law is the embodiment of collective power. Laws are the means by which power is distributed and exercised fairly within a community. By adhering to laws, citizens can ensure that power is used to promote justice and prevent the abuse of authority by individuals. Aristotle contrasts the democratic form of power, where the many share authority, with oligarchic power, where a few wealthy elites hold power. In an oligarchy, power is often exercised for personal gain, whereas in a democracy, it is supposed to serve the interests of the community as a whole.

While Aristotle acknowledges the value of citizen participation, he also warns of the dangers associated with excessive collective power. In a democracy, the majority can sometimes use its power to oppress minorities or pursue selfish interests at the expense of justice and the common good. Aristotle refers to this as the “tyranny of the majority.” He emphasizes the need for balance and moderation in the exercise of power, ensuring that no single group dominates to the detriment of others.

…lies in the requirement that the majority bind itself by any laws it adopts.

Conservative Thought Religion

BELIEF IN MORALITY IS MONOTHEISM:

Evidence of Objective Morality Is Hidden in Plain Sight: A new book finds this evidence in rational arguments. And in something those arguments can’t capture. (Noah M. Peterson, 9/24/25, Christianity Today)

Moral realism is the philosophical term for the view that objective morality exists. The authors’ definition has four distinct features. First, moral judgments are “truth-apt” (meaning that statements like “Murder is wrong” are capable of being true or false). Second, some moral judgments are true (murder is wrong). Third, the truth of these judgments does not depend on human attitudes (murder is wrong even if people think it’s not). And fourth, at least some clear moral truths are known.

Without this foundation, moral arguments for God’s existence can’t get off the ground. But how do we know whether moral realism is true? We can’t run lab tests on justice. Nor can we dissect the human brain and find “goodness” inside. We need a different set of tools.

Secular philosophers Terence Cuneo, Russ Shafer-Landau, and John Bengson have approached the question by identifying moral “data” in need of explanation and suggesting we let the best theory win. For example, one’s moral theory should be able to explain why there is both widespread agreement about some moral issues and widespread disagreement about others. It should be able to explain why moral judgments are thought to motivate or direct our actions. And it should be able to explain why moral demands apply regardless of what we think or feel.

Baggett and Walls agree with these criteria. They argue that moral realism, unlike its competitors, makes the best sense of what we actually experience. But as they remind us, “Moral theory is hard … and no single volume will clear everything up.” Though progress is possible, don’t expect knockout blows.

This intellectual humility is consonant with their previous books. They don’t overpromise. They don’t feign certainty. Their conclusions are modest, and their tone is winsome. They respect other thinkers and take their arguments seriously. It’s clear their goal is not to win but to woo.

The term “objective morality” is redundant. Were it subjective it would not be morality just personal preference.

Just So Stories

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

Is Life a Form of Computation?: Alan Turing and John von Neumann saw it early: the logic of life and the logic of code may be one and the same. (Blaise Agüera y Arcas, MIT Reader)


Although this is seldom fully appreciated, von Neumann was one of the first to establish a deep link between life and computation. Reproduction, like computation, he showed, could be carried out by machines following coded instructions. In his model, based on Alan Turing’s Universal Machine, self-replicating systems read and execute instructions much like DNA does: “if the next instruction is the codon CGA, then add an arginine to the protein under construction.” It’s not a metaphor to call DNA a “program” — that is literally the case.

Of course, there are meaningful differences between biological computing and the kind of digital computing done by a personal computer or your smartphone. DNA is subtle and multilayered, including phenomena like epigenetics and gene proximity effects. Cellular DNA is nowhere near the whole story, either. Our bodies contain (and continually swap) countless bacteria and viruses, each running their own code.

It’s not a metaphor to call DNA a “program” — that is literally the case.

Biological computing is “massively parallel,” decentralized, and noisy. Your cells have somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 quintillion ribosomes, all working at the same time. Each of these exquisitely complex floating protein factories is, in effect, a tiny computer — albeit a stochastic one, meaning not entirely predictable. The movements of hinged components, the capture and release of smaller molecules, and the manipulation of chemical bonds are all individually random, reversible, and inexact, driven this way and that by constant thermal buffeting. Only a statistical asymmetry favors one direction over another, with clever origami moves tending to “lock in” certain steps such that a next step becomes likely to happen.

This differs greatly from the operation of “logic gates” in a computer, basic components that process binary inputs into outputs using fixed rules. They are irreversible and engineered to be 99.99 percent reliable and reproducible.

Biological computing is computing, nonetheless. And its use of randomness is a feature, not a bug. In fact, many classic algorithms in computer science also require randomness (albeit for different reasons), which may explain why Turing insisted that the Ferranti Mark I, an early computer he helped to design in 1951, include a random number instruction. Randomness is thus a small but important conceptual extension to the original Turing Machine, though any computer can simulate it by calculating deterministic but random-looking or “pseudorandom” numbers.

Parallelism, too, is increasingly fundamental to computing today. Modern AI, for instance, depends on both massive parallelism and randomness — as in the parallelized “stochastic gradient descent” (SGD) algorithm, used for training most of today’s neural nets, the “temperature” setting used in chatbots to introduce a degree of randomness into their output, and the parallelism of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), which power most AI in data centers.

Traditional digital computing, which relies on the centralized, sequential execution of instructions, was a product of technological constraints. The first computers needed to carry out long calculations using as few parts as possible. Originally, those parts were flaky, expensive vacuum tubes, which had a tendency to burn out and needed frequent replacement by hand. The natural design, then, was a minimal “Central Processing Unit” (CPU) operating on sequences of bits ferried back and forth from an external memory. This has come to be known as the “von Neumann architecture.”

Turing and von Neumann were both aware that computing could be done by other means, though. Turing, near the end of his life, explored how biological patterns like leopard spots could arise from simple chemical rules, in a field he called morphogenesis. Turing’s model of morphogenesis was a biologically inspired form of massively parallel, distributed computation. So was his earlier concept of an “unorganized machine,” a randomly connected neural net modeled after an infant’s brain.

These were visions of what computing without a central processor could look like — and what it does look like, in living systems.

Books Conservative Thought Film/TV

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

Two Classics: “Crime and Punishment” and “Columbo” (Dwight Longenecker, September 16th, 2025, Imaginative Conservative)

So Columbo, like Crime and Punishment, is a classic, and rightfully so because it too penetrates to the heart of a modern heresy and exposes it for the lie that it is. This is the Nietzschean idea of the ubermensch—the superman who can transcend ordinary law. Nietzsche formalized the idea later in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but Dostoevsky has Raskolnikov echoing proto-Nietzschean concepts: the utilitarian and Hegelian theories abroad in nineteenth-century Russia.

Columbo deflates the arrogance of his suspects; in the final scene each murderer is humbled. So Dostoevsky critiques the superman heresy by showing that Raskolnikov does not have the emotional fortitude to live with his irrevocable act. His final humiliation (and salvation) is to accept the unconditional love of Sonya and to pursue the path of repentance and reparation.

Israel/Palestine

A RACE OR A RELIGION?:

The origins of today’s conflict between American Jews over Israel: In the early years, American Jewish support for Israel was a fraught issue. The turning point was the six-­day war of 1967, which solidified a strength of feeling that has only recently begun to fracture (Mark Mazower, 25 Sep 2025, The Guardian)

Of the few figures who stood out against the tide, perhaps the most notable was William Zukerman, a journalist who had been reporting on international Jewish affairs since the 1920s. Arguing that since 1948 the terms ­anti-­Zionist and Zionist had lost their meanings, Zukerman described himself as “pro-Israel” but “anti-nationalist”. He criticised what he called “the wave of Messianic nationalism which the Hitler Holocaust has released” among American Jews. In embracing the ethnic chauvinism that had swept over the world since the late 1930s, he argued that the Jews risked adopting a cruelty that was already changing “the entire character of the people”. Israel had turned Jews into “conquerors” whose indifference to the plight of the Arab refugees betrayed Judaism’s tradition of sympathy for the oppressed. For Zukerman, the Israeli leadership’s deliberate efforts to identify the country with Jews abroad served merely to increase the danger of antisemitism faced by the latter since it introduced “new diplomatic and political reasons in addition to the old social, economic and psychological ones”.

Zukerman’s articles were much discussed by American Jews at the time and are attracting new interest today. Nor was he alone: other Jewish leaders expressed similar concerns. But such a stance carried costs, and he was denounced as a “self-hating Jew” and an antisemite. What he termed a “perverted chauvinistic reasoning” meant that his opinions were treated “as almost the equivalent of treason”. He wrote: “To criticise any policy of Israel, whether it is the rendering homeless of a million native Arabs, the treatment of the Arab minority as­ second-class citizens or the transformation of the new state into a racial theocracy, is denounced not only as anti-­Israel but as ­antisemitic.”

One senses the shock he felt at the term being applied in this way to someone like him, who had done as much as anyone to chart the rise of antisemitism in interwar Europe. We are here at the very beginning of what one might call a kind of Zionist usage of the term that was only conceivable once Israel itself had come into existence. Recent research has revealed that Israeli diplomats were concerned enough about Zukerman’s influence to mount a ­behind-­the-scenes campaign against him, enlisting American Zionist organisations and eventually pressuring the proprietors of Jewish newspapers to drop him. As a result, his articles ceased to be widely available and when he died in 1961 his Jewish ­Newsletter, which he had kept going for 14 years, folded.

Identitarianism

NOT NAZIS!…JUST FOLLOWERS OF NAZISM…:

How a German Thinker Explains MAGA Morality (David French, Jan. 26, 2025, NY Times)

No one was more aware than the founders that the American experiment contradicts our base natures. A century before Schmitt was born, they understood that reality intimately.

Our government is constructed with the understanding that, as James Madison famously put it in Federalist No. 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

The Constitution tries to ameliorate the will to power as best it can — as Madison said in the same essay, “ambition must be made to counteract ambition” — but the founders also knew that even our elaborate system of checks and balances is insufficient. To make our system work, virtue is a necessity.

“We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion,” John Adams wrote in his 1798 Letter to the Massachusetts Militia, “Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.”

Adams’s New England metaphor is perfect (his readers would absolutely know what a whale would do to a net): Pluralism requires both law and ethics to function, and without ethics the law will fail.

We forget how much the founders — for all their faults — were focused not just on the forms of American government, but also on personal virtue. One of my favorite books from last year was “The Pursuit of Happiness” by Jeffrey Rosen, the president of the National Constitution Center.

The book describes how the founders envisioned the pursuit of happiness not as the pursuit of pleasure or wealth, but rather as “the pursuit of virtue — as being good, rather than feeling good.” Benjamin Franklin, for example, listed temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity and humility as indispensable elements of virtue.

You can immediately see the contrast with Schmitt’s friend-enemy politics. Virtue ethics certainly recognizes the existence of enemies, but it still imposes moral obligations on our treatment of our foes. The virtues Franklin listed are not simply the way you love your own political tribe; they are universal moral obligations that apply to our treatment of everyone.

Demonstrate these virtues, and your enemies can live with dignity and freedom even when they lose a political battle. When your enemies show the same virtues, you can still enjoy a good life even when you lose. That’s the social compact of pluralism. In a decent society, no defeat is ultimate defeat, and no victory is ultimate victory. And in all circumstances, your fundamental human rights must be preserved.

Dive too deeply into the friend-enemy distinction, by contrast, and it can become immoral to treat your enemies with kindness if kindness weakens the community in its struggle against a mortal foe. In the world of the friend-enemy distinction, your ultimate virtue is found in your willingness to fight. Your ultimate vice is betraying your side by refusing the call to political war.

The friend-enemy distinction explains why so many Republicans are particularly furious at anti-Trump dissenters — especially when those dissenters hold conservative values. In the friend-enemy distinction, ideology is secondary to loyalty.

Anglospherics

MANIFEST DESTINY:

Never Bet Against America: why the united states is geographically overpowered (Tomas Pueyo, Oct 9, 2025, Pirate Wires)


In fact, the U.S. has followed an uncanny trend of nearly two percent growth in per capita GDP for over two centuries:

You can go back to the 1650s and see a similar trend. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, it did slow down a bit, which is understandable given two wars against the UK.


Why are we so rich?

Some believe it’s the result of democracy, rule of law, the U.S. dollar, a strong military, an entrepreneurial culture… but what if these factors are threatened, as many believe they are now? Will the U.S. keep growing or fall due to mismanagement? Will China surpass it?


Fortunately for the U.S., it sits on the most advantaged piece of land in the world — and this is not changing anytime soon, so its power will likely keep growing.

Here’s why geography is the United States’ superpower.

Anglospherics

REPUBLICAN ROOTS:

Sources of Authority: The Roots of the Great American Identity Crisis (D.C. Schindler, September 14th, 2025, Imaginative Conservative)

According to the classical mind, the ultimate root of social order is authority. To know what this means, we should explain the various words. “Order” is a unified multiplicity, a whole in which the many and diverse parts are all related to each other because they are related to a common principle that transcends them. In this respect, there cannot be an order without a source of unity that transcends what it unifies; every order has a principle, just as every principle implies an order. In a social order, or in other words in a society that is not simply a set of self-contained and unrelated individuals who just happen to occupy the same geographical space (Aristotle compares such a “society” to cows feeding at the same trough), there must therefore be some unifying principle that is able to bind the individuals together in a genuine whole. This unifying principle must be, on the one hand, transcendent of the individual members of the whole, and indeed of the whole itself, in order to bring it about as a unity, but on the other hand it has to be a reality immanent within the whole in order for its unifying power to be effectively communicated. This is the role, in a social order, of authority, which represents the originating principle in the community as one of its members, and at the same time as distinguished from the members of the community through office. The word “authority” denotes an asymmetrical bond between human beings that arises through (as opposed to “merely” symbolic) representation of a transcendent principle of order by one person to another. This transcendent principle—the “auctor,” originator, appealed to in auctoritas—unites the holder of office and those that are subject to the office within a more basic order: since they are both originated by it.

The Anglosphere’s Unifying principle is republican liberty: we invest the state with authority to enforce restrictions on freedom that are arrived at in participatory fashion and applied universally.

Anglospherics

ORDINARY MEN AND WOMEN:

You Have No Idea How Hard It Is to Be a Reenactor: Benedict Arnold’s boot wouldn’t come off, and other hardships from my weekend in the Revolutionary War. (Caity Weaver, November 2025, The Atlantic)

The reenactor community generally discourages members from claiming to be dressed as specific historical figures—though a few key roles may be assigned in highly choreographed public-facing reenactments. A reenactment of Washington crossing the Delaware, for instance, needs to have a Washington. With the exception of Arnold and a pugnacious Ethan Allen (the leader of the Green Mountain Boys, famous for yelling, as interpreted that weekend by a man named Tommy Tringale), plus a coterie of commanders at a reenactment of the attack on Bunker Hill, few reenactors I met purported to be dead people. They portrayed, instead, historically plausible types (a scraggly farmer; a wealthy townsman), which reenactors call “impressions.”

Who would you be if you traveled to America’s colonial past in 2025? If you have a large disposable income, an obsessive personality, an idolatrous affection for protocol, or ideally all three, then you possess the trappings for a fine portrayal of a member of the King’s army. Top-notch redcoat impressions are renowned among “RevWar” reenactors for requiring an exceptional degree of precision, and also for their eye-bursting expense. The stiff bands of contrasting fabric, or “lace,” sewn around each button on the front of a British regimental coat can cost several hundred dollars. Again, just the part around the buttons. An entire “kit”—reenactors’ term for all the clothing, weapons, and associated paraphernalia—can easily cost thousands. (Reenactors reject the assumption that they wear “costumes,” which they do not consider functional clothing.)

A man named Sean, who works as a military contractor—one of several Green Mountain Boys who normally “do British” but were slumming it as rebels for the weekend—told me that he likes to portray a British officer because of how hard it is. British Army reenactors, he said, possess “a desire to do things to a level of research perfection.” Unlike the tailors, sailors, and shopkeepers who took up arms against them, the British forces were professional soldiers. “We can’t look like a quote-unquote ragtag band of militia,” Sean said. “We have to look like people who, this is their job.” Emily, a college student studying music—one of three women dressed up as a Green Mountain Boy—told me she delights in “the degree of organization” and “very standardized drilling” inherent in redcoat portrayals.

(Note: People who spend thousands of dollars outfitting themselves as 18th-century British soldiers reacted so strongly when I asked if they considered themselves Anglophiles—they do not—that I felt embarrassed to have even suggested they might.)

If you want to be a reenactor but are laid-back, messy, or broke, you might be better suited to portraying an American. Or rather, a “Patriot”; technically, there were no “Americans” at Fort Ticonderoga or Lexington and Concord. The American Revolution began as a British civil war; before the Declaration of Independence in the summer of 1776, indignant colonial citizens considered themselves as “British” as the crimson-coated soldiers sent to patrol them.

Russia

THE LINCOLN BRIGADES MAY HAVE BEEN JUST DUPES…:

Preface to the Ukrainian Edition of Animal Farm (George Orwell, March 1947)

In the early stages of the war foreigners were on the whole unaware of the inner struggles between the various political parties supporting the Government. Through a series of accidents I joined not the International Brigade like the majority of foreigners, but the POUM militia—i.e. the Spanish Trotskyists.

So in the middle of 1937, when the Communists gained control (or partial control) of the Spanish Government and began to hunt down the Trotskyists, we both found ourselves amongst the victims. We were very lucky to get out of Spain alive, and not even to have been arrested once. Many of our friends were shot, and others spent a long time in prison or simply disappeared.

These man-hunts in Spain went on at the same time as the great purges in the USSR and were a sort of supplement to them. In Spain as well as in Russia the nature of the accusations (namely, conspiracy with the Fascists) was the same and as far as Spain was concerned I had every reason to believe that the accusations were false. To experience all this was a valuable object lesson: it taught me how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries.

My wife and I both saw innocent people being thrown into prison merely because they were suspected of unorthodoxy. Yet on our return to England we found numerous sensible and well-informed observers believing the most fantastic accounts of conspiracy, treachery and sabotage which the press reported from the Moscow trials.

And so I understood, more clearly than ever, the negative influence of the Soviet myth upon the western Socialist movement.

…but the fact is they were serving Stalin, not the Spanish people.

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