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

End of History

hISTORY eNDS EVERYWHERE:

Why Vietnam admires capitalism (Rainer Zitelmann, 4/04/24, The Article)


Why Vietnam admires capitalismHo Chi Minh city, Vietnam & Capitalism (image created in Shutterstock)
Officially, Vietnam calls itself “socialist”, but ever since the Doi Moi reforms at the end of the 1980s, the country has been steadily moving toward a market economy. Vietnam has opened up to the outside world more than China, it welcomes private investors, and an entrepreneurial spirit is making itself felt throughout the country. […]

In contrast, the two countries that describe themselves as socialist – as Vietnam does – receive the lowest levels of approval: only 40 percent of Vietnamese respondents admire China’s economic system, while 55 percent say they disapprove of it. The proportion of respondents who like North Korea’s economic system is even lower, at 35 percent, while 38 percent reject it.

We won the 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.

Israel/Palestine Religion

A RELIGION, NOT A RACE:

Judaism Is a Religion of the Heart (Shai Held, 3/22/24, WSJ)


We have all heard it a thousand times. Christianity is about love, we are told, but Judaism is about…something else, like law or justice. In a similar vein, we often hear that whereas Christianity cares about how you feel and what you believe, Judaism cares only about what you do. Judaism is a religion of action, we’ve been taught, not emotion; a religion of deeds, of rote rituals, not inwardness.

Centuries of Christian anti-Judaic polemics are not the only source of such distortions and misapprehensions; they are also part of a broader phenomenon in American Jewish life. Perhaps because of anxiety about assimilation, American Jews long ago began to define Judaism as whatever they thought Christianity was not. So because Christianity was about love, Judaism was, well, not about love. […]


The Torah issues three dramatic love commands. We are charged to love our neighbor, a fellow member of the covenant between God and Israel; to love the stranger, someone who lives among us despite not being part of our kin group and who is therefore vulnerable to exploitation; and to love God, who created the world, redeemed us from slavery, and gave us the Torah as an act of love and commitment. Later Jewish sources clarify that we have an additional obligation to love all human beings, who were created in the image of God and who are part of the same single human family as we are.

Anglospherics

THE UNDIVIDED COUNTRY:

When It Comes To Fighting Poverty, We Actually Agree On A Lot (Josh Bandoch, 3/22/24, Discourse)

From left-of-center think tanks such as the Brookings Institution, Urban Institute and Progressive Policy Institute, to right-of-center public policy groups such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Alliance for Opportunity, there exists remarkable consensus on how to empower individuals to rise out of poverty and into prosperity.

This consensus centers on seven “macro” solutions to poverty:

1) Empower people through the dignity of work.

2) Prepare individuals for the future of work through education and workforce development. (This issue is widely overlooked in the research on poverty.)

3) Remove barriers to work, especially occupational licensing and burdensome regulations.

4) Ensure the educational system prepares students for careers, particularly in industries that need more workers, through effective workforce development programs such as apprenticeships.

5) Restructure safety net programs to empower people to rise out of poverty, including through rigorous program evaluation.

6) Promote affordable housing, including through zoning reform.

7) Promote family formation and stability, including by making it easier for people to follow the “success sequence” of education, job, marriage and then children.

While there are certainly disagreements about how to execute these solutions, this is greatly overshadowed by the overlap in approaches and the notable consensus that exists around the solutions themselves.

Sovereignty

WHILE WE WHINGE ABOUT ANYTHING THEY DO:

Let’s Face It: Sanctions Are Warfare by Another Name (ASSAL RAD, MARCH 19, 2024, Inkstick)

At first glance, sanctions may appear like a useful alternative to war. Proponents of sanctions will argue that they avoid putting boots on the ground, thus protecting American servicemembers, they have the power to alter the behavior of targeted states, and prevent the devastation to innocent civilians caused by conventional warfare. But a deeper analysis of sanctions shows a starkly different picture.

Though there has certainly been evidence and literature that shows the limited efficacy of sanctions and their humanitarian costs on civilians, those findings are not always accessible to the broader public and tend to have a narrower focus.

And while many may recall the horror stories of how US sanctions hurt Iraqi children and civilians in the 1990s — especially the now infamous remarks by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stating that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children were “worth it” — sanctions policy is still not part of a wider political debate among the American public.


This discrepancy is due in part to the fact that sanctions are a silent killer. They do not draw the same media attention as bombs, dead bodies, and images of cities and homes turned to rubble — as we are seeing in Gaza now. To be clear, the enormous destruction and loss of life at such a rapid pace in Gaza should be the headline of every news outlet. But while sanctions can profoundly damage an entire society, the slow death they produce often goes unnoticed.

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.

Israel/Palestine

IT’S NOT ABOUT HAMAS:

Allegations UNRWA collaborated with Hamas are ‘flat-out lies’: Van Hollen (MIRANDA NAZZARO, 3/17/24, The Hill)


Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) ripped into Israel’s allegations that the U.N.’s Palestinian refugee agency, commonly referred to as UNRWA, is a proxy for the Palestinian militant group Hamas, arguing the accusations are an attempt by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to eliminate the agency.

“There’s no doubt that the claim that Prime Minister Netanyahu and others are making, that somehow UNRWA is a proxy for Hamas, are just flat-out lies,” Van Hollen said Sunday in an interview on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.” “If you look at the person who’s in charge of operations on the ground for UNRWA, it’s about a 20-year U.S. Army veteran. You can be sure he’s not in cahoots with Hamas.”

Which was obvious from the beginning when Israel failed to offer any evidence.

« Previous Page — Next Page »

You Missed

Robotics/AI

THE FUTURE ALWAYS HAPPENS FASTER THAN YOU EXPECT:

India

THE NEXT ORBAN?:

One Economy to Rule Them All

RISE THE TIDE:

Film/TV

IT DEMONSTRTES THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF EMPATHY:

Copyright © All rights reserved | Blogus by Themeansar.