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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

How to Kill More Deer, Foucault’s Late Libertarianism, and David Mamet on Women Writers

Also: Mass surveillance is coming to a city near you, and more.
White-tailed_Deer_-_Odocoileus_virginianus,_Waterway_Farm,_Lovettsville,_Virginia

Happy Friday, everyone. It looks like it’s going to be a glorious day here in southeastern Virginia. Too bad I’ll be sitting at a desk all day. At least I have big windows.

First up, we have David Mamet on women writers, and the hypocrisy of the intelligentsia, if they can be called that, only touting women writers who write about sexism—as if women are incapable of having other interests. Mamet provides a list of interesting women writers that are “forgotten and unread.” Many of them are neither, alas, but there are a few I had never heard of that sound interesting: “Mari Sandoz (1896–1966) grew up in a log cabin in Nebraska. See her reminiscences in Old Jules and her beautiful novels. I mention in particular Miss Morissa, Doctor of the Gold Trail. Miss Sandoz was the state historian of Nebraska. Her pioneer sister, in New Mexico, was Agnes Morley Cleaveland. Her No Life for a Lady is a thrilling report of a cow-woman, rancher, genteel gun-toting rustler, and if that don’t get you running to Amazon I don’t know what [will] . . . The greatest war correspondent of the 20th century was Martha Gellhorn. Collier’s sent her, just out of Vassar, to Spain, after which she covered the fall of Czechoslovakia, all of World War II, and Vietnam. She is the only woman to have landed on D-Day. She dressed as a man, bribed her way onto a hospital ship, and landed among the first waves, working as a stretcher-bearer. She was at the liberation of Dachau. No one wrote better than Martha Gellhorn. Here is a list of her books that would take you through a winter you’d hold in memory. War correspondence: The Face of War; short stories: The Trouble I’ve SeenThe Heart of AnotherThe Honeyed Peace; novels: A Stricken FieldThe Wine of Astonishment.”

Of the fascination with Sherlock Holmes there is no end, or so says Michael Dirda: “It’s been said that Sherlock Holmes is the most famous man who never lived and who, consequently, can never die. Just in the past decade, Holmes has repeatedly dazzled us with his deductions in blockbuster movies, two popular television series and dozens of new stories and novels. More than ever, enthusiastic devotees crowd exhibitions about the great detective, attend conventions in his honor and join ‘scion societies’ of the revered Baker Street Irregulars, including the Red Circle of Washington. However, given that Elementary is now on its final season, might Holmes’s caseload finally be growing lighter? Perhaps a little, though fans don’t need to worry about losing their Baker Street fix.”

Andrei Znamenski writes about Foucault’s late turn towards neoliberalism: “Foucault started examining and challenging some 20th-century conventional left orthodoxies, especially the veneration of the power of a benevolent welfare state that faced economic and social stagnation by the end of the last century. The philosopher suggested that democratic socialism failed to deliver a well-working political matrix and suggested his left-leaning audiences explore ideas of ‘neoliberalism’ – free market and individual liberty notions that were gaining popularity in the 1970s and the 1980s. Foucault assumed that this emerging political mindset was worthy of attention and intellectual respect because it could offer a type of ‘governmentality’ that developed and corrected itself through its own critique.  He never approached his toying with ‘politically incorrect’ insights as some kind of an intellectual epiphany. In fact, more often than not, Foucault simply narrated and summarized for his students and acolytes what he was learning from the writings of West German Ordoliberals (Röpke), Austrians (Mises and Hayek), and Chicagoans (Friedman and Becker) . . . François Ewald, one of his close students who was listening to those talks, later tried to explain the keen attention of his teacher to the libertarian economists, ‘The sole liberalism for Foucault, the sole interesting liberalism is the liberalism practiced by economists and not by the theoreticians of the political or of the philosophical politics of liberalism. Why? Because Foucault gives to the economists a very specific status, that is, they are truth producers.’” (HT: Brandon Christensen)

Memento mori: Here is how an asteroid could cause a heck of a lot of damage before it even hits the ground.

Also: Mass surveillance is coming to a city near you. “Tech entrepreneur Ross McNutt wants to spend three years recording human outdoor movements in a major U.S. city, KMOX news radio reports. If that sounds too dystopian to be real, you’re behind the times. McNutt, who runs Persistent Surveillance Systems, was inspired by his stint in the Air Force tracking Iraqi insurgents. He tested mass surveillance technology over Compton, California, in 2012. In 2016, the company flew over Baltimore, feeding information to police for months (without telling city leaders or residents) while demonstrating how the technology works to the FBI and Secret Service.”

Show me the money: “As Notre-Dame holds its first mass Saturday since a devastating fire two months ago, billionaire French donors who pledged hundreds of millions for rebuilding have ‘yet to pay a penny’, a spokesman for the cathedral said.”

Essay of the Day:

In Reason, Tate Watkins writes about the damage that deer are causing across the country and how markets might help:

“In 1900, the last known passenger pigeon to be hunted was supposedly shot by a boy in Ohio. Seven decades later, he said he had no idea what type of bird it was at the time. The species, which once traveled in flocks so vast that they darkened the sky for hours at a time, had served as a plentiful and cheap source of protein for 19th century settlers making their way westward. While early Americans hunted the birds for food, professional hunters later massacred them for sport. All the while, the pigeon’s nesting territory and forest habitat were gradually eliminated as white men plowed their way to manifest destiny. In 1914, when the last captive pigeon died in the Cincinnati Zoo, a species that had once numbered in the billions was extinct.

“Out of this era came a new approach to managing wildlife—or rather, the first attempts to bother with a concerted approach to managing wildlife at all. European settlers who had discovered a continent teeming with game saw little need to regulate who could take how much and from where. Wildlife was an open-access resource, a ‘commons’ to be exploited with no regard to notions of scarcity. But zero limits on hunting, combined with widespread habitat loss from clearing lands for agriculture and other uses, took their toll. We sent the passenger pigeon to extinction; slaughtered American bison indiscriminately on the plains; extirpated white-tailed deer from many eastern areas; and decimated populations of beavers, minks, and other valuable and trappable furbearers.

“With many fauna depleted from sea to sea, hunters and early conservationists began to develop the ‘North American model’ of wildlife management. One of its key tenets: eliminating markets for game and wildlife products. As a definitive report published by The Wildlife Society recounts, old boys’ networks like the one found at the New York Sportsmen’s Club played a significant role: ‘The club’s membership included many influential lawyers, judges, and politicians, who often acted in their official positions on behalf of the club. At a time when there was limited or no government oversight on wildlife, they drafted, led efforts to enact, and enforced the first game laws directed against market hunting.’

“Eventually, states began to regulate the taking of wildlife. They instituted license systems, bag limits, and hunting seasons. The federal government played its part as well, via the Lacey Act of 1900, which effectively outlawed commercial hunting nationwide ‘and remains the most powerful legal tool to combat this activity,’ as the report put it.

“The upshot is that selling products from wild game animals has effectively been illegal for more than a century, a source of great pride among many sportsmen and -women. That status quo suits most environmentalists, too. Regulation managed to close off the commons, and many species rebounded. It’s an oft-touted conservation success story. Yet it has brought about new problems that stem from a new reality: wildlife overabundance.

“As it becomes clearer that the current regulatory scheme is counterproductive to managing wildlife in an era of plenty, it’s worth exploring whether markets could provide incentives to deal with animal populations that have gotten to nuisance levels.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Stade

Poem: Anna Lena Phillips Bell, “Floss”

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