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Murder, Treachery, Lust and the State of Nature

The New Atlantis
June 3, 2019
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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.

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While looking down on Americans never seems to get old, Ben Shapiro in Jewish World Review demolishes that mindset with a survey of stunning successes that only America could have delivered. In a matter of days, “Americans have watched astronauts push farther into space than any human beings in history, while U.S. forces execute military operations so precise and technologically overwhelming that they look like something written for a Hollywood script.” The crazy part is that such feats are so routine “we barely stop to appreciate it.”

At Least He Paid his Losing Bet

Paul Ehrlich, author of the spectacularly incorrect 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb, recently died at 93. Despite his longevity, Ronald Bailey points out in Reason, Ehrlich did not live to see even one of his numerous apocalyptic predictions come true. The world’s population certainly grew, but not merely larger, richer and fatter too. Most famously, Ehrlich once bet economist Julian Simon that the world was approaching economic collapse – but in 1990 had to mail Simon a cheque.

Javier Milei Makes Fools of the “Experts”

As it began looking like Javier Milei might actually be elected President of Argentina, more than 100 leading international economists warned that this “far-right” political “wrecking ball” would “cause ‘devastation,’ spike inflation, expand poverty, and unemployment.” But as David Harsanyi relates in the Washington Examiner, Milei has tamed inflation, balanced the budget, shrunk the bureaucracy, deregulated the economy, driven down poverty and repaid billions in U.S. loans. And now, Harsanyi notes, Argentina is starting to boom.

Beware the Subversive Sexbots

Compounding problems of increasing social isolation, disintegrating family life and declining fertility is a new threat: the fusion of AI with sex dolls to create at-once ultra-realistic and emotionally empty “AI companions” intended to substitute for real human intimacy. It’s a formula that can – and already does – kill, warn Tim Rosenberger and Vilda Westh Blanc in City Journal. Not surprisingly, teen-agers are most vulnerable to the allure of quick and seemingly consequence-free gratification. In fact, warn the authors, it can be a path straight to suicide.

The Indispensable Country

While looking down on Americans never seems to get old, Ben Shapiro in Jewish World Review demolishes that mindset with a survey of stunning successes that only America could have delivered. In a matter of days, “Americans have watched astronauts push farther into space than any human beings in history, while U.S. forces execute military operations so precise and technologically overwhelming that they look like something written for a Hollywood script.” The crazy part is that such feats are so routine “we barely stop to appreciate it.”

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