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)

Anglospherics

Israel/Palestine

IT’S NOT ABOUT HAMAS:

It’s Not Just the West Bank Settlers. It’s Israel. (Mairav Zonszein, 9/06/26, NY Times)

But the settler militias terrorizing Qusra and other villages across the West Bank could not continue to act as they are without state and military cover. These are not isolated extremists or hooligans, as Mr. Huckabee, Mr. Netanyahu and other leaders have said.

Nor is this simply settler violence. In the West Bank, Palestinians live in daily fear for their lives. Mr. Ridi is not the only homeowner at risk. Even as the U.S. flag waved over his home, there was another settler attack against a different Palestinian home in Qusra on Aug. 29. Israeli settlers arrived in white pickup trucks, their faces masked, throwing stones. Despite a statement by Mr. Netanyahu condemning the act and assuring that authorities would take action, there has been only one reported arrest related to the attacks in Qusra and a handful of arrests related to other settler-based violence in the area. These moves may not result in much: Even when arrests are made, only 3 percent of settlers are convicted.

In other words, what’s happened in Qusra is a feature, not a bug, of Israeli policy, which has expanded and deepened its control over the occupied territory over the last four years. This has been accomplished through intensifying economic strangulation, restrictions on freedom of movement, transferring governing powers from military to civilian control and, most egregiously, the emboldening of settler militias. Such groups already existed when the current government was formed in late 2022. But in the past three years, these militias have been largely given free rein to intimidate, harass and make Palestinian life in the West Bank unbearable. Since 2023, thousands of Palestinians have been displaced by a combination of settler attacks, military operations and restrictions on access and movement. On Sept. 2, Israeli forces demolished homes and structures in the Palestinian village of Khirbet al Tabban in the southern West Bank, rendering the village’s 70 residents homeless.

Folks might have taken the hint when they changed the constitution to declare it an ethnostate.

Israel/Palestine

A RELIGION OR A RACE?:

Israel Isn’t Debating a Palestinian State. It’s Preparing for Expulsion: Gadi Eisenkot’s position on Palestinian statehood is beside the point. Across Gaza, the West Bank and Israel itself, the machinery for making Palestinian life impossible is already operating, laying the groundwork for mass expulsion (Amira Hass, 9/01/26, Ha’aretz)

The debate over one state, two states or a federation is more theoretical than ever. Any agreed-upon solution requires first acknowledging the problem and agreeing on what it is. Too many Jews in Israel have been conditioned to believe that the problem is the very presence in this land of a Palestinian people with roots, historical and economic continuity, cultural capital and material assets, a rich agricultural heritage and a profound love of homeland.

“Erasure” is the nightmare solution being written into reality every day. Knesset laws, politicians’ declarations, military orders, school textbooks and the holy real estate battalions operating in Gaza, the West Bank and the Negev all work, together and separately, to advance this “solution” diligently and without fear of international condemnation.

There is nothing mnore anti-Semitic than exempting Israel from Judeo-Christian moral standards.

End of History

BOREDOM IS THE DANGER OF AFFLUENCE:

He Warned That the End of History Could Be Rough. Maybe Now People Will Listen.:
Francis Fukuyama’s famous take on the post-Cold War world was widely misunderstood. In a new memoir, he tries to set the record straight. (Jennifer Szalai, Aug. 31, 2026, NY Times)

In the last five chapters of his book, which hardly anyone seemed to read or remember, Fukuyama predicted that boredom and restlessness could fuel a rage against the establishment machine.

More than three decades later, restlessness and rage are everywhere, and Fukuyama, at 73, is still trying to make himself understood. On Sept. 8, Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish “In the Realm of the Last Man,” a memoir. As the title suggests, Fukuyama is doubling down, pushing back against what he derides as “these stupid, superficial interpretations of the end of history” that caricatured him as a naïve Pollyanna. He sees the current plight of liberal democracy not as a rebuke to his earlier work but as a vindication. The “last men” of our age grew so restive that they fell for populist demagogues who convinced them everything was rotten — “an outcome,” he says, “that was perfectly predictable more than 30 years ago.”

One of the reasons 9/11 was so thrilling was because Islamicism at least presented a challenge. But W and Obama dispatched it without asking much (not enough?) of us.

Suppose a presidential candidate treated eliminating the national debt and reforming the welfare state as the equivalent of the moon landings? He’d have to guarantee that everyone’s ox was going to get gored: not just budget cuts but getting rid of tax breaks; Means-testing all social programs; etc. An ideal candidate would offer a plan that his own party bitched about. This would foster some sense of shared sacrifice and treat the problem (even if it is aesthetic rather than economic) with a seriousness that folks could rally round. And the numbers have grown so big that folks could believe it a superhuman challenge.

Identitarianism

THE rIGHT ALSO ENVIES THEIR OPPRESSION OF “OTHERS”:

Suicidal hostility and the fall of the American empire: The price of paranoid conservatism (Nick Cohen, Aug 28, 2026, Writings from London)

In ways I do not believe most of us have grasped yet the perverse logic of paranoid conservatism leads Trump to embrace the West’s enemies, and leads Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen to do the same.

If you believe your allies are cheats, who have been ripping off honest Americans since 1945 with one-sided trade deals and defence alliances, what then of America’s actual enemies?

If America’s allies are “the worst countries in the world”, the countries that genuinely are the world’s worst cannot be so bad.

Suicidal hostility turns friends into enemies and enemies into friends. Just as the man who insists that benefit claimants are cheats whitewashes the behaviour of sweatshop employers so the superpower that insists its allies are swindlers, whitewashes the behaviour of its enemies.

Israel/Palestine

THEY ARE STILL FIGHTING FOR ISRAEL:

These Generals Fought for Israel. Now They See ‘Jewish Terrorism’ as the Threat. (Azam Ahmed, Natan Odenheime, Ronen Bergman, Aug. 31, 2026, NY Times)

“This is ethnic cleansing, to put it simply,” Ephraim Sneh, a retired brigadier general and former minister of health, said of Israeli settlers’ attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.

Asaf Agmon, a retired Air Force general, went even further, comparing it to what some Israelis’ forebears endured in the Holocaust — not in the scale of the violence, he explained, but in the effort to erase the Palestinian presence from much of the West Bank.

“Once a society behaves this way,” he said, “that society is doomed.”

Founding Republican Liberty

LIBERTY RESTRICTS FREEDOM:

Liberty for Whom? David M. Kennedy on Patrick Henry: The Revolution’s master orator saw freedom in states’ sovereignty, not federal control. (David M. Kennedy, August 25, 2026, Freedom Frequency)

But what about that word “liberty”? My callow and rambunctious adolescent brain understood it to mean personal freedom, the kind of autonomy that latter-day libertarians assert as an unalienable individual right.

I’ve come to believe that my youthful understanding was not entirely wrong, but it was seriously incomplete, arguably even mistaken in its fundamentals. Properly understood, Henry’s concept of liberty indeed embraced at least a qualified sense of individual prerogatives, of the sort that Thomas Jefferson enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But for him the essential, foundational concept of liberty was a collective attribute, the sacred right of organic communities—or, more precisely, majorities in such communities—to govern themselves without outside interference, and sometimes even to subordinate individual welfare to the will of the larger community.

Anglospherics

GOING TO EXTREMES:

My quest to the most northerly point of the British Isles: A journey around the ‘island above all others’: Having grown obsessed with a tiny rocky outcrop off the coast of Shetland, travel writer Amelia Neath sets out on a journey to reach Britain’s most extreme northerly point (Amelia Neath, 25 August 2026, Independent)


I spend perhaps an unhealthy amount of time staring at the Maps app on my phone, zooming into remote roads, tiny islands, or the middle of vast plains peppered with isolated buildings. One place I always come back to – via satellite image, that is – is the Shetland Islands, or more specifically, Out Stack, a small skerry in the North Atlantic Ocean marking the northerly point of the British Isles. There’s just something so satisfying about an endpoint, an extreme boundary, that keeps piquing my curiosity during my late-night virtual explorations.

So when I found myself this summer standing on the cliffs of Shetland’s Hermaness National Nature Reserve, looking directly out at the uninhabited rocky islet that poses as the final full stop of Britain, I finally understood why Romantic poets found our country’s nature so powerfully awe-inspiring. Other walkers we chatted to along the cliffs also shared these feelings; we were all harbouring a triumphant secret that day about what it’s like to be the most northerly people in the country.

Anglospherics Homocentric Universe

WE ARE CHILDREN OF HUME:

Detours on the Road to Wisdom (Steven Willing, 8/17/26, Public Discourse)

Collins claims that wisdom contains four essential ingredients: truth, science, faith, and trust. There is a certain paradox here. Collins’s fourfold prescription is considerably more problematic than he suggests. But the path to wisdom is much simpler than he proposes: not a better method for vetting experts, but the cultivation of humility in the seeker.

What follows is not an indictment of Dr. Collins, whose leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic saved countless lives. His treatise serves as a helpful springboard for a continuing conversation about what truly is “the road to wisdom.” What are perhaps lacking in his analysis are two major issues: first, that the case for science skepticism is much stronger than he allows; second, that humility on the part of the observer is fundamental to all other elements.

Einstein could never forgive Heisenberg and Schroedinger for the latter.

Identitarianism

SEX DEGREES OF SEPARATION FROM THE TRUTH:

The Cruel Mercy of Truth (SEAN WALSH, 8/16/26, Country Squire)

The DEI machine has been running psychological operations against the public for decades now, using weaponry put together in the publicly funded but intellectually contaminated social science laboratories of our most respected universities. And we are not supposed to get to comment when the whole thing is shown to be fraudulent?

Addiction is much like this. It feeds off a need to recreate day-to-day fantasy vignettes, sometimes the more outlandish the better, because that way the agony that truth brings cannot prevail against it.

What happened to Arday was a kind of intervention. Those are brutal, harsh and painful and yet, when conducted in the right way and with love, purgative.

No one is more-ill-served by ideology than the adherents.

MORE:
Liberals and Conservatives Need a New Relationship with Minorities Like Jason Arday:
Both sides of the political spectrum have an unhealthy relationship with minorities. (Zaid Jilani, Aug 16, 2026, American Saga)

Conservatives obsessed with Arday’s case because they saw him as representative of negative trends in academia. Here was a black academic who specialized in racial theory who fudged his research. A story like that is crack-cocaine for the modern day British and American right. And where there’s demand, there’s coverage. There were hundreds of articles written in the British press about a singular academic and his misdeeds. While Arday’s behavior as an academic was clearly inappropriate, it’s hard to justify the disproportionate coverage of it. The man was being treated as if he was a supervillain. From his perspective, not only was his career finished but he was basically the Worst Man In the World.

But for conservatives, he was more than a man. He was a symbol of everything they’ve come to hate about Western culture. So he had to be made an example of. The fact he was clearly mentally unwell — we know, for instance, that he was on the autism spectrum — was not a consideration in the endless pile-on. Because for those who were crucifying Arday, the larger mission of winning the culture war was the ultimate goal.

(I don’t think it’s relevant to the accuracy of the charges against Arday, but an openly racist theorist, Nathan Cofnas, led the crusade against him.)

Yet we can’t let liberals off the hook here. Questions about the veracity of Arday’s work and his life story arose as early as 2023, shortly after his appointment to Cambridge as the university’s youngest black scholar ever. They were not taken seriously.

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