Great news for Deadwood fans – a movie version’s out! The HBO TV series vividly traced the history of Deadwood, South Dakota, from a rough-and-ready 1870s mining camp into a thriving small town, bawdily showing how civil society and functioning politics can overtake a lawless state of nature. The May 31 release of the new Deadwood movie enabled Robert Herritt to reflect on its deeper themes in The New Atlantis. “Deadwood inverts a certain rationalist picture of the social and political — of top-down, technocratic deliberation as the ideal of proper action,” Herritt writes. In recognizing reason as subordinate to the exigencies of life, Deadwood subtly presents a Burkean philosophy. That’s certainly one explanation for the aptly named Swearengen’s continuous F-word eruptions.

France is in the Crosshairs, but the Target is Western Civilization
Theodore Dalrymple in Law & Liberty crystallizes the recent riots in France to a simple equation: “Whole generations have been taught and come to accept that Western civilization consists of slavery, exploitation, and massacre.” Tearing it all down – not merely reforming it – is therefore not just understandable but desirable. Dalrymple disposes of the delusional trope that these are “student” protests, noting the preponderance of Muslim migrants committing the mayhem.
For a luminous glimpse into the singular civilizational achievements the rioters would tear down, read this C2C article by Patrick Keeney.


