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)

Long War

Baseball Identitarianism

JUST DON’T CALL IT SYSTEMIC:

From the Warp and the Woof, We Rise: Reflecting on a lifelong relationship with something more than a game. (Jonathan Coleman, 3/21/24, Hedgehog Review)

And yet when I return to 1964, I return to Dick Allen, who became the National League’s Rookie of the Year for Philadelphia and yet was treated horribly by Phillies fans (and by one white teammate in particular, Frank Thomas, who provoked a fight with Allen, and whose trade from the team both the press and the fans blamed and castigated Allen for). He became the target of things thrown at him: fruit, ice, garbage, batteries. He faced racist taunts and boos so numerous and unrelenting that he became the first player in baseball to wear his batting helmet out in the field. At one point, he silently traced the word “BOO” in the dirt around his area of third base. It must never be forgotten that the Phillies were the last team in baseball to integrate.

Allen, who grew up in tiny Wampum, Pennsylvania, fascinated me. I read and heard he had been given a hard time in the fall of 1963 when he began in Little Rock. Once his rookie season started in Philadelphia, he said little—other than making it clear he did not want to be called “Richie,” which he considered patronizing. His given name was Richard, he pointed out, and he wanted to be viewed and treated like a man, not a little boy. About this he was not quiet, taking a public stand in what was becoming King’s America, one that rankled many and impressed itself on me.

End of History Long War

hISTORY eNDS EVERYWHERE:

How Capitalism Beat Communism in Vietnam: It only took a generation to go from ration cards to exporting electronics. (RAINER ZITELMANN, MAY 2024, reason)

In 1990, with a per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of $98, Vietnam was the poorest country in the world, behind Somalia and Sierra Leone. Every bad harvest led to hunger, and Vietnam relied on food aid from the United Nations and financial assistance from the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries. As late as 1993, 79.7 percent of the Vietnamese population was living in poverty.

By 2020, the poverty rate had fallen to 5 percent. Vietnam is now one of the most dynamic countries in the world, with a vibrant economy that creates great opportunities for hardworking people and entrepreneurs. Once a country unable to produce enough rice to feed its own population, it has become one of the world’s largest rice exporters, and a major electronics exporter too.

You can’t have a clash of civilizations when there is only one.

Identitarianism Sovereignty

MERE TRIBALISM:

Place and the Nation (John G. Grove, Spring 2024, National Affairs)

National conservatives claim to be defenders of locality and particularity over and against the forces of globalism and universalism. Remarkably, however, neither national conservatism’s “Statement of Principles” nor its most thorough theoretical account — as articulated by Yoram Hazony — points to the guiding concept of place as a prominent element of the nation.

This absence of place stands in marked contrast to the concept’s preeminence in the thought of another notable defender of the nation against encroaching international institutions and universalist philosophy: the late Sir Roger Scruton. Scruton built his entire understanding of the nation on the concept of “home,” or a certain way of life that emerges from “the place where we are.”

This distinction calls into question national conservatism’s claim to be the “only genuine alternative” to global liberalism. It also has important implications for the way conservatives ought to understand the authority of the nation-state, specifically as it relates to federalism and locality.

In Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Hazony defines a nation as “a number of tribes with a shared heritage, usually including a common language, law, or religious tradition, and a past history of joining together against common enemies and to pursue common endeavors.”

Place is absent because Nationalists are just racist. They define a nation ethnically.

Identitarianism

FIRST, DO NO HARM:

Banning the Blockers (Bernard Lane, 25 Mar 2024, Quillette)


Gender clinics from Stockholm to San Francisco, from Florence to Melbourne, have been running an uncontrolled experiment on children, while cloaked in the mantle of human rights and denouncing any critics as hateful bigots. It will take time to understand the implications of this experiment. Even those gender clinicians who sold blockers as safe have generally acknowledged one dangerous side-effect: low bone density. Hormone-suppressed teenagers are unlikely to get full benefit of the surge in bone mass that comes with puberty; as a result, they may be prematurely exposed to the brittle bones and fractures normally seen in the elderly. And there is another lesser known but potentially more profound risk: the effects of blockers on the brain.

The NHS decision to ban blockers rested heavily on a 2022 interim report by paediatrician Hilary Cass, who has led an independent review of gender dysphoria care. In her report, she writes,

It is known that adolescence is a period of significant changes in brain structure, function and connectivity. Animal research suggests that this development is partially driven by the [natural] pubertal sex hormones, but it is unclear whether the same is true in humans. If pubertal sex hormones are essential to these brain maturation processes, this raises a secondary question of whether there is a critical time window for the processes to take place, or whether catch up is possible when [cross-sex] oestrogen or testosterone is introduced later.


This question is not new. In 2006, Dutch clinicians, who had pioneered the off-label use of puberty blockers for gender dysphoria—these drugs had previously been used for other, distinct conditions—stated that, “It is not clear yet how pubertal suppression will influence brain development.”

There was talk of a study to elucidate this, but it was never carried out. Despite this, by 2016, a key Dutch clinician was claiming that puberty blockers were “completely reversible.”

And this was the slogan picked up by gender clinics around the world as they adopted the puberty blocker-driven “Dutch protocol” for paediatric gender transition. A crucial unknown had been memory-holed.

Eugenics is science too.

Identitarianism

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Jacob’s Dream: MAGA meets the Age of Aquarius (Frederick Kaufman, Harper’s)

It took some doing to get him to sit for an interview, as Jacob is wary of what he calls Operation Mockingbird, an alleged CIA-sponsored effort begun in the Fifties to use mass media to influence public opinion. Jacob believes that people like me are the tools of the Mockingbird operation, of the deep state, international bankers, pharmaceutical cartels, and corporate monarchies that control the world. People like me believe in medicines that are addictive drugs, in food that is poison, in environmentalism that is ecocide, in education that is ignorance, in money that is debt, in objective science that is not objective. “People are brainwashed by the elites and their propaganda networks,” he said. “Mass hypnosis, bro.”

He had agreed to meet with me on a number of conditions, including:

  1. That I mention Dr. Royal Raymond Rife, the American inventor of an oscillating beam-ray medical technology that, according to Jacob, is a cure for cancer that has been quashed by the government, the military, and pharmaceutical giants; and
  2. That I call attention to the existence of a clean, free, wireless, and renewable energy source powered by the earth’s magnetic field that was discovered by Nikola Tesla but suppressed by the government because such a technology would make the existing energy grid obsolete, and thus threaten the rule of the globalists and their corporate monopolies.

Jacob believes he has been sent to earth to combat wicked forces such as Warner Bros. and MGM. He believes in the clear and present danger of a global ring of slave-trading, adrenochrome-swigging Clintonistas. He would also like to lift the ban on psilocybin mushrooms. And he’s been doing the work for a long time—for “millennia,” he told me. “I have reincarnated on this planet numerous times throughout the ages.”

Jacob is as apt to paraphrase Shirley MacLaine as WikiLeaks Vault 7 or Alex Jones, which is why I had reached out to him. He is Exhibit A of the widely reported observation that MAGA, QAnon, and the broader conspiratorial mishmash draw substantial support from the consciousness-raising, om-chanting, sound-healing, joint-toking, crystal- and chart-reading crowd, the long-haired hippies who half a century ago were lumped together with the fellow travelers of the left, but have been reincarnated two generations later as pivotal elements of the Trump coalition.

Identitarianism Religion

GET OUT OF YOUR OWN HEAD:

Identity Satiation: Some rarely discussed phenomena can shed light on why the focus on identity and introspection has coincided with a rise of mental health issues, including identity disorders. (Brandon McMurtrie, 8 Mar 2024, Quillette)

This well-studied phenomenon—sometimes called “inhibition,” “fatigue,” “lapse of meaning,” “adaptation,” or “stimulus satiation”—applies to objects as well as language. Studies have found that compulsive staring at something can result in dissociation and derealization. Likewise, repeatedly visually checking something can make us uncertain of our perception, which results, paradoxically, in uncertainty and poor memory of the object. This may also occur with facial recognition.

Interestingly, a similar phenomenon can occur in the realm of self-perception. Mirror gazing (staring into one’s own eyes in the mirror) may induce feelings of depersonalization and derealization, causing distortions of self-perception and bodily sensation. This persistent self-inspection can result in a person feeling that they don’t recognize their own face, that they no longer feel real, that their body no longer feels the same as it once did, or that it is not their body at all. Mirror-gazing so reliably produces depersonalization and realization (and a wide range of other anomalous effects), that it can be used in experimental manipulations to trigger these symptoms for research purposes.

This effect doesn’t only occur with visual self-inspection, but with mental introspection too. I call this “identity satiation.” It has been studied for thousands of years and it is the basis of many Buddhist and other spiritual practices. It has long been understood that extended periods of introspection and self-contemplation result in a sense of identity-loss and a disorder known as “depersonalization-derealization” with eerily familiar symptoms. Depersonalization-derealization affects “your ability to recognize your thoughts, feelings and body as your own.”

It should not be surprising, then, that rumination—a persistent introspection and compulsive focus on one’s internal sensations, thoughts, or identity—is a hallmark of anxiety disorders of various kinds, including depersonalization-derealization. People who engage in compulsive introspection can become increasingly uncertain, anxious, and confused. […]

In other words, the proliferation of therapy culture and compulsive introspection, intended to encourage self-knowledge and mental well-being, may in fact be more like the poison than its antidote.

Psalm 27 as the Solution in the Struggle Over Self-Image (JOE COSATO, MARCH 04, 2024, Center for Faith & Culture)

In beholding our God, we will be captivated by his glory so that the troubles and pressures which surround us will begin to fade. When we are captivated by him, we become free to cherish, love, and delight in all that he is, forgetting ourselves and striving more and more for him.

This is the same path that Tim Keller urges us down. Avoiding too high or low view of self-image, Keller finds a middle way to wholeness and freedom: “A truly gospel-humble person is not a self-hating person or a self-loving person, but a gospel-humble person.”[1] Keller’s point resonates with Psalm 27, Freedom isn’t found in elevating or diminishing our self-image. Instead, freedom is found in forgetting ourselves! Freedom is had in being captivated by the beauty of Christ, rather than being held captive by the ideals we make for ourselves.

Identitarianism Republican Liberty

LIBERTIES:

Notes on a Dangerous Mistake (Michael Waltzer, Liberties Journal)

Several groups of rightwing intellectuals hover around the Republican Party, defending a stark conservatism. But there is a very different group, definitely rightwing, that is equally disdainful of Republican conservatives and Democratic progressives — who are all at bottom, its members insist, liberals: classical free-market liberals or egalitarian liberals, it’s all the same. These ideological outliers call themselves “post-liberal,” and they aim at a radical transformation of American society. Their overweening ambition is based on a fully developed theology, Catholic integralism, but the political meaning of this theology has not yet been fully worked out or, better, not yet revealed. A small group of writers, mostly academics, constitute what they hope, and I hope not, is the vanguard of a new regime and a Christian society. They have mounted a steady assault on liberal individualism and the liberal state, but so far they haven’t had anything like enough to say about life in the post-liberal world — not enough to warrant a comprehensive critique.

I wrote at the beginning that I would provide my own defense of liberalism. The description above of the post-liberal state and society — that is my defense of liberalism. Individual choice, legal and social equality, critical thinking, free speech, vigorous argument, meaningful political engagement: these are the obvious and necessary antidotes to post-liberal authoritarianism. Above all, we must treasure the right to be wrong. The post-liberals are actually exercising that right. They shouldn’t be allowed to take it away from the rest of us.

Identitarianism

TOO BAD IDENTITARIANS CAN’T READ:


A Manual for Adversity: Nearly 2,000 years after it was written, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations is rediscovered by each succeeding generation. (Darran Anderson, Winter 2024, City Journal)

The centuries of acclaim are, in many ways, well deserved. No revisionist Cadaver Trial need be held here. Meditations is full of sage advice. Its espousal of “wisdom, temperance, justice, and courage” rings true in these infantilized, puritan times. At its heart is autonomy and the responsibility that comes with it. “If you regard anything that is independent of your will as good or bad for yourself,” he writes, “it will necessarily follow that whenever you fail to escape such an evil or attain such a good, you will cast blame on the gods and hate the people who are responsible for your failing.” The key to breaking the cycles of misdirection and resentment that ensue is to find “contentment” in one’s “own just conduct and benevolent disposition.” The answer, that is, lies not outside but within, “for nowhere can one retreat into greater peace or freedom from care than within one’s own soul.” Meditations urges flexibility, the ability to adapt to being wrong, and a generosity toward the less advantaged. It discourages tribalism, fallacious thinking, and dogma, and promotes a healthy skepticism toward critics.

Identitarianism Immigration

WHY THE rIGHT HATES ECONOMIC GROWTH:

How immigration is driving U.S. job growth (Neil Irwin, 3/12/24, Axios)

New analysis from the Brookings Institution puts some hard numbers on the relationship between the rise in immigration and the labor market — finding an influx of workers is allowing the U.S. to sustain higher rates of payroll gains than forecasters thought it could before the pandemic.

“Faster population and labor force growth has meant that employment could grow more quickly than previously believed without adding to inflationary pressures,” economists Wendy Edelberg and Tara Watson write for the Hamilton Project.
By the numbers: Before the pandemic, forecasters estimated sustainable monthly employment growth would be between 60,000 and 130,000 in 2023 — a key reason why last year’s monthly average of 255,000 looked way too hot.

But Edelberg and Watson say that, accounting for higher immigration, the economy could have accommodated job growth between 160,000 and 230,000 in 2023 “without adding to pressure in the labor market that pushed up wages and price inflation.”

MAGA’s adoption of the Left’s economics is not coincidental. They want to tank the economy.

Identitarianism

INTEGRALISM IS JUST POPERY IN FANCY DRESS:

Two Christians Take On Postliberalism: The increasingly hostile political landscape requires a reevaluation of the roles of church and state. (Hunter Baker, March 8, 2024, Modern Age)

As a matter of conviction, Baptists would tend to reject Christian nationalism because of their strong emphasis on a regenerate church community. That means that they envision a church whose members have voluntarily and enthusiastically embraced the Christian faith. It also means Baptists have tended to be great advocates of religious liberty, as they deem forced religion to be an offense to God through its production of hypocrisy. It is no surprise, then, that Miller opposes Christian nationalism.

Wolfe, as a Presbyterian, comes from a denominational background that is connected to the Magisterial Reformation, which was certainly comfortable with national churches. It is probably no accident that the Baptists vigorously reject infant baptism, while both Presbyterians and Catholics embrace it. One cannot fail to notice that in the national churches of the types Magisterial Reformation traditions and the Catholic Church employed, to be born effectively meant to simultaneously enter the church as a Christian and the state as a citizen. This style of Christianity is comprehensive (in that it comprehends almost all citizens within its community) as opposed to the regenerate style that has appeared to work well in modernity. Wolfe would like to return to the comprehensive Christianity of the old national churches and their partner states.

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