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)

2025

Identitarianism

ALL DONALD HAS TO OFFER IS IDENTITARIANISM:

Against Identity by Alexander Douglas review – a superb critique of contemporary self-obsession: A philosopher challenges us to forget about ourselves in this powerfully strange counterblast to identity fetishism (Steven Poole, 10 Jun 2025, The Guardian)

Philosopher Alexander Douglas’s deeply interesting book diagnoses our malaise, ecumenically, as a universal enslavement to identity. An alt-right rabble rouser who denounces identity politics is just as wedded to his identity as a leftwing “activist” is wedded to theirs. And this, Douglas argues persuasively, explains the polarised viciousness of much present argument. People respond to criticisms of their views as though their very identity is being attacked. The response is visceral and emotional. That’s why factchecking conspiracy theories doesn’t work. And it’s not just a social media problem; it’s far worse than that. “If you define yourself by your ethnicity or your taste in music,” Douglas argues, “then you ipso facto demarcate yourself against others who do not share in that identity. Here we have the basis for division and intergroup conflict.”

The Right is the Left.

Homocentric Universe

NO ONE EVER BELIEVED IN ENTROPY:

Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex: A new suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution. (Philip Ball, April 2, 2025, Quanta)

In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was discussing the possibility of intelligent alien life with his colleagues. If alien civilizations exist, he said, some should surely have had enough time to expand throughout the cosmos. So where are they?

Many answers to Fermi’s “paradox” have been proposed: Maybe alien civilizations burn out or destroy themselves before they can become interstellar wanderers. But perhaps the simplest answer is that such civilizations don’t appear in the first place: Intelligent life is extremely unlikely, and we pose the question only because we are the supremely rare exception.

A new proposal by an interdisciplinary team of researchers challenges that bleak conclusion. They have proposed nothing less than a new law of nature, according to which the complexity of entities in the universe increases over time with an inexorability comparable to the second law of thermodynamics — the law that dictates an inevitable rise in entropy, a measure of disorder.

We are all designist.

Homocentric Universe Robotics/AI

EXCEPT THAT GAMES HAVE RULES AND WE KNOW THE RULE OF THIS GAME…:

The God that Glitched: Matthew Gasda on why the simulation theory is the religion of our time. (Matthew Gasda, Jun 06, 2025, Wisdom of Crowds)

[T]his is where I think critical engagement with ST really gets interesting. I hypothesize that SA has been disseminated as ST because we can no longer imagine a God in our own image, and have instead reworked the idea of God into a computer. Ontologically, Bostrom’s depiction of Godlike simulators (and Godlike simulators simulating Godlike simulators … simulators nested inside of simulators) bears so much resemblance to religion that it’s functionally indistinguishable from religion. It is basically an ultra-reductionist, ultra-scientistic vision of how God or Gods or higher or lower levels of reality could exist (like in Buddhism). In pragmatic terms, I’m not really sure what the point of thinking about SA is. The only point in engaging with either SA or ST is that you want to: the theory allows you to experience less experiential friction; you don’t have to worry so much; you don’t have to try to puzzle out why you’re on earth anymore, or what it’s all for. You aren’t really here.

Stated thusly, simulation theory and God ultimately are versions of the same thesis with different names and points of emphasis; simulation theory is a blend of monotheism and Buddhism without any duties, demands, or standard practices. Moreover, the trope of simulation theory better fits our current understanding of ourselves, and the direction of our technological civilization; it projects an astonishingly anthropomorphic idea of the divine: simulational theory is a narcissistic new projection of a God who resembles what we’ve become. We live more and more on and through screens; so God must too.

…”Love one another.”

Conservative Thought

THE cHURCH WAS A MISTAKE:

The Durable Mr. Nock (Edmund A. Opitz, June 6, 2025, Modern Age)

In conversation one day with several college presidents, Nock laid down a number of stringent guidelines for running a college. One of the presidents, somewhat shocked, said, “Why Mr. Nock, if my college were to follow your advice we’d lose most of the faculty and all but about five of the students.” Nock pondered this for a moment, and then replied, “That would be just the right size for a college.” […]

Every society constructs its institutions in its own image, and thus we get the schools we deserve, the economy we deserve, and the churches we deserve. Albert Jay Nock did his graduate work in theology, and before he joined the staff of American Magazine in 1908 he had served Episcopal parishes in three states. In later life he wrote that “when Christianity became organized it immediately took on a political character radically affecting its institutional concept of religion and its institutional concept of morals; and the same tendencies observable in secular politics at once set in upon the politics of organized Christianity.” And just as schools offend against education, so churches offend against high religion.

Which is why we Baptists are disorganized.

End of History

“YOU DIDN’T BUILD THAT”:

Dependent Ideologies and the Illusion of Revolution (Jonathan Emerson-Pierce, 5 Jun 2025, Quillette)

This is the paradox of dependent ideologies: they presume what they dismantle, demand what they did not cultivate, and function only so long as the old scaffolding holds. Once the structure collapses, they cannot stand on their own. And so they fall, not because they are attacked from without, but because they are hollow within.


Every viable order arises from long and often painful accumulation: habits forged over generations, trust earned through patient civic practice, institutions formed by the slow convergence of prudence and tradition, and an understanding of human nature that resists both cynicism and naivety. These are not the accessories of civilisation; they are its very substance.

Nevertheless, today’s ideological movements treat this inheritance with contempt. They cast it not as a legacy to steward, but as a burden to escape. They promise radical transformation while quietly assuming the stability they do not know how to create. They deconstruct tradition but retain its syntax. They inhabit a moral grammar that predates them, yet claim authorship of its every clause.

This is not progress. It is iconoclasm dressed as enlightenment. It is cultural amnesia parading as moral vision. It is the wilful disavowal of what sustains meaning and coherence, the attempt to harvest fruit while cursing the roots.

Technology

THE AUTHOR HAS NEVER MATTERED, ONLY THE TEXT:

AI Signals The Death Of The Author: The meaning of a piece of writing does not depend on the identity of the author, even if the author is not human (David J. Gunkel, June 4, 2025, Noema)

I hold a different view. LLMs may well signal the end of the author, but this isn’t a loss to be lamented. In fact, these machines can be liberating: They free both writers and readers from the authoritarian control and influence of this thing we call the “author.”

If you were to ask someone what an author is, they would most probably answer that it is someone who writes a book or some other text and is therefore responsible for what it says. They could reel off the names of people we identify as such: William Shakespeare, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Virginia Woolf, maybe even this guy David Gunkel. But this understanding of an author is not some kind of universal truth that has existed from the beginning of time. Rather, it is a modern conception. The “author” as we now know it comes from somewhere in the not-so-distant past; it has a history.

The French literary critic Roland Barthes, in his 1967 essay “The Death of The Author,” traced the roots of this now-commonplace idea to the modern period in Europe, beginning around the mid-16th century. Before then, people did of course write texts — but the idea of vesting responsibility and authority in a singular person was not common practice. In fact, many of the great and influential works of literature — the folklore, myth and religious scripture that we still read today — have circulated in human culture without needing or assigning them to an author.

Religion

WHO YA GONNA TRUST? hIM OR YOUR LYING EMOTIONS:

The Fly in the Honey: Are emotions a trustworthy guide to God? (Aldous Huxley, June 1, 2025, Plough Quarterly)


The phrase “religion of experience” has two distinct and mutually incompatible meanings. There is the “experience” of which the Perennial Philosophy treats – the direct apprehension of the divine Ground in an act of intuition possible, in its fullness, only to the selflessly pure in heart. And there is the “experience” induced by revivalist sermons, impressive ceremonials, or the deliberate efforts of one’s own imagination. This “experience” is a state of emotional excitement – an excitement which may be mild and enduring or brief and epileptically violent, which is sometimes exultant in tone and sometimes despairing, which expresses itself here in song and dance, there in uncontrollable weeping. But emotional excitement, whatever its cause and whatever its nature, is always excitement of that individualized self, which must be died to by anyone who aspires to live to divine Reality. “Experience” as emotion about God (the highest form of this kind of excitement) is incompatible with “experience” as immediate awareness of God by a pure heart which has mortified even its most exalted emotions…. The peace that passes all understanding is one of the fruits of the spirit. But there is also the peace that does not pass understanding, the humbler peace of emotional self-control and self-denial; this is not a fruit of the spirit, but rather one of its indispensable roots.

Republican Liberty

AND YOU WONDER WHY DONALD HATES THE FEDERALIST SOCIETY?:

The great undoing: Trump’s presidency reeled in by courts (Sam Baker, 5/31/25, Axios)


Between the lines: To some extent, this is the system working the same way it always works. The big things presidents do, at least in the modern era, end up in court.

Obamacare was a big thing, done by both the president and Congress. It’s been before the Supreme Court no less than three times.

Forgiving student loans and trying to impose COVID vaccine mandates were, for better or worse, big things President Biden attempted. The Supreme Court said both were too big.

Trump has made no bones about wanting to go as big as possible, all the time, on everything — and to do it mostly through executive action. Everyone knew before this administration began that myriad legal challenges were inevitable. And, well, they were.

Always bet on the Deep State.

Just So Stories

IT’S JUST VIBES:

If it looks like a dire wolf, is it a dire wolf? How to define a species is a scientific and philosophical question (Elay Shech, 5/30/25, The Conversation)


This gap between appearance and biological identity raises a deeper question: What exactly is a species, and how do you decide whether something belongs to one species rather than another?

Biologists call the answer a species concept – a theory about what a species is and how researchers sort organisms into different groups.

There’s no such thing as species.

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You Missed

Anglospherics

WE ARE ENGLISH:

Identitarianism

IDENTITY POLITICS AT ITS UGLIEST:

Cheeto Jesus

DONALD WHO?:

Religion

ALL SCIENCE LEADS BACK TO FAITH:

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