Pirates! Why Are We So Interested? Were they Originators of Democracy or the Last Holdouts of A Modernizing World? Does It Matter If the Facts Are Different From Reality? What About Modern Pirates?

The Best Paragraph I've Read: It’s as if Kidd and his fellow-marauders never stopped sailing. These days, pirates are everywhere. The five “Pirates of the Caribbean” films have collectively grossed billions. And then there are the shows, games, memes, bars, festivals, and rum bottles. Three major sports teams are named for them—the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Las Vegas Raiders, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers: the first two from cities with no connection to piracy whatsoever.The pirates we typically have in mind are specific ones: the English-speaking sea robbers who sailed from the mid-seventeenth century to the first few decades of the eighteenth. And what makes these maritime lawbreakers of long ago so fascinating that, three centuries later, we’re still dressing up like them? The easy answer is that they were rebels. We delight in their lusty, wild lives because we, too, want to live freely. Pirates are especially fascinating because they sailed at the dawn of our era, just as the British Empire was rising and the portcullis of modernity was descending. Viewed in a certain light, pirates—the scourge of admirals and merchants—were the last holdouts against a world dominated by states and corporations. This paragraph comes from the New Yorker. The article is titled: "Were Pirates Foes of the Modern Order - Or Its Secret Sharers?" The author is Daniel Immerwahr. You can read the full article here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/22/were-pirates-foes-of-the-modern-order-or-its-secret-sharers Zac & Don discuss pirates. They wonder why pirates continue to be popular today despite the reality being so different that what we imagine.