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

“YOU’RE SOAKING IN IT”

The Religion That Remade the World: a review of Dominion by Tom Holland (John F. Doherty, 2/07/24, Public Discourse)

The thesis of Dominion, like that of Christopher Dawson’s Progress and Religion, is that the Enlightenment’s account of “progress” is a myth. Everything on which modern Westerners pride themselves—the separation of politics from religion, respect for the dignity of each human being, and a zeal to eradicate injustice—traces its origins not to secular reason and science, but to the Christian faith.

The concept of human rights started not in revolutionary politics but in the canon law of the medieval Catholic Church—a law rooted in the belief that man is made in God’s image and that God took on human flesh in Jesus. European Christians enslaved non-Europeans, but their worship of the God-man who let himself be crucified, stung their consciences so much, or so inspired those they oppressed to revolt, that slavery and colonialism eventually died out. It was also Christianity, not 1960s feminism, that elevated women’s status in society and marriage, through the veneration of women saints like Macrina of Cappadocia, Catherine of Siena, and Mary the Mother of Jesus.


Even apparently anti-Christian Western movements are inescapably Christian. Secularism would not have been possible unless Jesus had distinguished “the things of God” from “the things of Caesar.” Disbelief in the miraculous began with Christian wonder at the wisdom of nature as God created it: why look for extraordinary interventions of God on earth when creation itself is miraculous enough? Progressivism’s zeal for social reform began in the Protestant Reformation, which itself continued the medieval clerical reform movements that were begun by Pope Gregory VII.

No Imago Dei, no basis for rights.

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.

End of History Israel/Palestine

SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY:

Saudi Arabia: The Chimera of A Grand Alliance (REUEL MARC GERECHT, Liberties Journal)

Which brings us to the current Saudi crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the country — easily the most detested Saudi royal in the West since the kingdom’s birth. With the exception of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who is the most indefatigable Middle Eastern dictator since World War II, MBS is the most consequential autocrat in the region. And the prince made a proposal to America — a proposal that may survive the Gaza war, which has reanimated anti-Zionism and constrained the Gulf Arab political elite’s decade-old tendency to deal more openly with the Jewish state. To wit: he is willing to establish an unparalleled tight and lucrative relationship with Washington, and let bygones be bygones — forget the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and all the insults by Joe Biden — so long as America is willing to guarantee Saudi Arabia’s security… […]

When it came to cult worship, Saudi kings and princes had been fairly low-key compared to most other Middle Eastern rulers. Yet MBS’ sentiments are, again, more modern. He has effectively established a police state — the first ever in Saudi history. His creation is certainly not as ruthless as the Orwellian nightmares of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Assad’s Syria; it is neither as loaded with internal spies nor rife with prison camps as Abdul Fattah El-Sisi’s Egypt. But MBS’ Arabia is a work in progress. Those in America and Israel who advocate that the United States should draw closer to MBS, so as to anchor a new anti-Iran alliance in Riyadh, are in effect saying that we should endorse MBS and his vision of a more secular, female-driving, anti-Islamist Saudi Arabia without highlighting its other, darker aspects, or that we should just ignore the kingdom’s internal affairs and focus on what the crown prince gives us externally. This realist calculation usually leads first back to the negatives: without the crown prince’s support of American interests, Russia, China, and Iran, the revisionist axis that has been gaining ground as America has been retrenching, will do even better. And then the positive: Saudi recognition of Israel would permanently change the Jewish state’s standing in the Muslim world — a long-sought goal of American diplomacy.

The prince clearly knows how much Benjamin Netanyahu wants Saudi Arabia’s official recognition of Israel. The Israeli prime minister has loudly put it at the top of his foreign-policy agenda. (Before the Gaza war, it might have had the additional benefit of rehabilitating him at home.) The prince clearly knows how much American Jewry wants to see an Israeli embassy in Riyadh. And after some initial weariness, the Biden administration now wants to add the kingdom to the Abraham Accords. Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Sudan recognizing Israel was good, but Saudi Arabia would be better. Although the White House certainly hasn’t thought through how the United States would fit into an Israeli-Saudi-US defensive alliance, whether it would even be politically or militarily possible, the administration proffered the idea before Biden went to Saudi Arabia in 2022 — or echoed an earlier, vaguer Saudi suggestion of a defensive pact — as part of Riyadh’s official recognition of Israel. Given the importance that MBS attaches to things Jewish, he may well believe his offer of Israeli recognition gives him considerable leverage in future dealings with the United States.

Joe Biden paved the way for MBS’ go-big proposal by making one of the most embarrassing flips in presidential history. Biden came into office pledging to reevaluate US-Saudi ties and cast MBS permanently into the cold for the gruesome killing of Khashoggi and, a lesser sin, making a muck of the war in Yemen, which has led to the United States, given its crucial role in maintaining and supplying the Saudi Air Force, being an accomplice in a bombing campaign that has had a negligible effect on the Shiite Houthis capacity to fight but has killed thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Yemeni civilians. (In civil wars, it is hard to know who is starving whom, but the Saudi role in bringing starvation to Yemen has not been negligible.) Fearing another hike in oil prices before the midterm elections, Biden travelled to Saudi Arabia, fist-bumping MBS and getting not much in return except reestablishing what has been true in US–Saudi relations from the beginning, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt hosted two of King Ibn Saud’s sons in Washington: everything is transactional.

We conspire to deny Arabs the self-determination we claim is universal and then wonder why we are unpopular.

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.

Republican Liberty

REPUBLICAN LIBERTY DETERMINES THE COMMON GOOD:


Raymond Aron’s Liberal Virtues (Paul T. Wilford, Ethan Cutler, Mar 01 2024, City Journal)

Liberal democracy stakes its claim to justice on securing individual liberty for each by granting legal and political equality to all. […]

At the heart of Aron’s lecture is a penetrating threefold distinction among kinds of liberties—the personal, the political, and the social—that he employs to correct the abstract thinking that keeps us from recognizing, and thus from making good use of, the rights we already enjoy.

Aron elaborates his typology of liberties beginning with personal liberties, which he defines as the protection of individuals from various forms of coercion. Among them are freedom of movement, choice of employment, and freedom of conscience, which, in increasingly secular societies, has grown from religious liberty to include the freedom to express differing political ideologies—even those that are illiberal or anti-liberal. Such guarantees of personal independence are complemented by the political liberties that assure citizens the possibility of active participation in the political process, which “may be summed up by three words: voting, protesting, and assembling.” Mediating between the personal and the political are the social liberties, which depend immediately on material welfare without directly involving either political participation or freedom from coercion. These include the aims of the welfare state, such as “the liberty of being cared for, or that of being educated,” as well as the freedom of groups (such as unions) to organize for their interests within civil society. This final kind of liberty mitigates the socioeconomic inequalities that are a necessary consequence of equality before the law.

If Aron’s stress on the reality of individual liberty indicates his distance from the Left, his defense of forms of collective liberty distinguishes him from the libertarian Right. But Aron cannot be pinned on such a spectrum––not even in its center—because each position on it prizes a particular kind of liberty above others, which is just what he avoids. When liberal democracies are at their best, Aron observes, personal, political, and social liberties counterbalance rather than subsume one another. Liberal regimes flourish, he maintains, when personal, social, and political liberties check and balance one another; they decay when just one form of liberty is considered the true end of political life, rendering the others mere means.

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.

Anglospherics

GENIUS:

The Mystery Social Media Account Schooling Congress on How to Do Its Job (GABE FLEISHER, 03/08/2024, Politico)

Earlier this year, Matt Glassman — a congressional scholar at Georgetown who has spent most of his adult life studying the Hill — wanted to know the answer to an obscure procedural question. “When was the last time a ruling of the chair was overturned on appeal in the House?” he asked on X, tagging an anonymous user named @ringwiss.

Less than a minute later, the mysterious account responded with an answer — 1938 — and a decades-old edition of the Congressional Record to prove it.

That kind of speedy response time and wide-ranging legislative knowledge is what has made @ringwiss a go-to resource for staffers, lobbyists and reporters across Washington looking for answers on congressional procedures, especially in a year when lawmakers have been stretching procedures to novel ends and increasingly bucking leadership — creating a need for deeper understanding of oft-forgotten rules.

His tweets have gained renown around the Capitol for their nuanced discussions of arcane congressional rules and history, and for his comfort with correcting longtime lawmakers and Washington journalists alike. His following is only around 4,000, but it’s a well-connected bunch, including congressional chiefs of staff, committee staff directors and other leading insiders.

“He’s just a complete parliamentary obsessive and savant, really like no one I’ve ever met, even people in the parliamentarian’s office,” Glassman told POLITICO Magazine.

U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.
The U.S. Capitol building in Washington. “He’s just a complete parliamentary obsessive and savant, really like no one I’ve ever met, even people in the parliamentarian’s office,” Matt Glassman, a congressional scholar at Georgetown University, said of Kacper Surdy, aka #ringwiss. | Francis Chung/POLITICO

The catch: Nobody knows who he is. […]

“When the Senate isn’t doing anything, there’s a quiet hum that’s captured by the microphones,” Surdy told POLITICO Magazine. “And that’s very, very soothing. It’s kind of like white noise. It’s very relaxing, even when nothing’s going on.”

Canada End of History

“WE WANTED YOU TO ACT LIKE SAVAGES, DANGIT”:

Vancouver’s new mega-development is big, ambitious and undeniably Indigenous: In B.C., Indigenous nations are reclaiming power and wealth for their own citizens—no matter what the neighbours thin (Michelle Cyca, March 11, 2024, Macleans)

Sen̓áḵw is big, ambitious and undeniably urban—and undeniably Indigenous. It’s being built on reserve land owned by the Squamish First Nation, and it’s spearheaded by the Squamish Nation itself, in partnership with the private real estate developer Westbank. Because the project is on First Nations land, not city land, it’s under Squamish authority, free of Vancouver’s zoning rules. And the Nation has chosen to build bigger, denser and taller than any development on city property would be allowed.

Predictably, not everyone has been happy about it. Critics have included local planners, politicians and, especially, residents of Kitsilano Point, a rarified beachfront neighbourhood bordering the reserve. And there’s been an extra edge to their critiques that’s gone beyond standard-issue NIMBYism about too-tall buildings and preserving neighbourhood character. There’s also been a persistent sense of disbelief that Indigenous people could be responsible for this futuristic version of urban living. In 2022, Gordon Price, a prominent Vancouver urban planner and a former city councillor, told Gitksan reporter Angela Sterritt, “When you’re building 30, 40-storey high rises out of concrete, there’s a big gap between that and an Indigenous way of building.

The subtext is as unmissable as a skyscraper: Indigenous culture and urban life—let alone urban development—don’t mix. That response isn’t confined to Sen̓áḵw, either. On Vancouver’s west side, the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations—through a joint partnership called MST Development Corp.—are planning a 12-tower development called the Heather Lands. In 2022, city councillor Colleen Hardwick said of that project, “How do you reconcile Indigenous ways of being with 18-storey high-rises?” (Hardwick, it goes without saying, is not Indigenous.) MST is also planning an even bigger development, called Iy̓álmexw in the Squamish language and ʔəy̓alməxʷ in Halkomelem. Better known as Jericho Lands, it will include 13,000 new homes on a 90-acre site. At a city council meeting this January, a stream of non-Indigenous residents turned up to oppose it. One woman speculated that the late Tsleil-Waututh Chief Dan George would be outraged at the “monstrous development on sacred land.”

To Indigenous people themselves, though, these developments mark a decisive moment in the evolution of our sovereignty in this country. The fact is, Canadians aren’t used to seeing Indigenous people occupy places that are socially, economically or geographically valuable, like Sen̓áḵw. After decades of marginalization, our absence seems natural, our presence somehow unnatural. Something like Sen̓áḵw is remarkable not just in terms of its scale and economic value (expected to generate billions in revenue for the Squamish Nation). It’s remarkable because it’s a restoration of our authority and presence in the heart of a Canadian city. […]

What chafes critics, even those who might consider themselves progressive, is that they expect reconciliation to instead look like a kind of reversal, rewinding the tape of history to some museum-diorama past.

Hilarious that the Left expected the End of History to pass them by.

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