actually, no. i've never lied to anybody. that interpretation of me is not empirical, but constructed out of your imperfect perceptions. it's always been your mental construction of me, rather than my own interpretation of myself. when your prejudices collapse, you blame your victim? no. don't throw accusations at me for not conforming to your idealizations. realize your own oppression.

there's all these ancient cities around the world that are practically buried. consider antioch, which is now in turkey. it was founded as the capital of a greco-syrian empire that one of alexander the great's generals created, around 300 BCE. it was a really important city in the roman empire for the entire time it controlled the levant, even holding one of the most important bishops (patriarchs) in the christian church. it became arab/muslim for a while, then got attacked in the crusades, and is today just a pile of rubble at the mouth of a river.

i could just imagine wandering into the place, though, in the period between when it was destroyed and when it got buried by geological processes. there would have been places to live there, free of rent or labour. i mean, you'd have to figure out how to plant and water some food, but besides that it's just free living. did people do that? i mean, it obviously couldn't have happened on too great a scale, otherwise the place wouldn't be rubble. but i'm interested in knowing who might have lived in these ruins and what kind of a society they may have had.

i guess a modern parallel would be ghost towns out west. i mean, they're called ghost towns because nobody (supposedly) lives in them. but, how empty are they actually? do people (besides the aboriginal inhabitants, but that's a different kind of ownership) actually own these structures? if i walked into an old house in ghost town, saskatchewan and just started fixing it up, is anybody going to charge me rent or demand i pay taxes?

i know there's this common law idea of gaining ownership over a structure by "improving it", but that's something else.

this is an extreme example, the climate's a little much for my tastes, but there must be literally thousands of abandoned houses here:

Uranium City was a thriving town until 1982, with its population approaching the 5,000 threshold required to achieve city status in the province. The closure of the mines on 30 June 1982 led to economic collapse, with most residents of the town leaving. It was later designated as a northern settlement with about 300 people remaining. The local hospital closed in the spring of 2003. The current population is 201,[1] including a number of Métis and First Nations people.[4]

i mean, a place like that, you can't just scatter seeds in your yard. that's far enough north it might even have permafrost.

then again, the permafrost is melting.

this is a little more reasonable. some of the houses may be unliveable, but smashing the doors down on the church might be something like discovering an empty castle.

there's probably ghost towns in southern ontario.

like i say, i believe the common law on this is if you smash the doors down and fix the place up, you take ownership of it.

like, check this abandoned church out. somebody is obviously maintaining the lawn. it's still an interesting possibility.

i'm stable and happy where i am, but it's an idea that crossed my mind and something i'm going to really contemplate should the shit hit the fan. i'll have to check the common law a little more closely, obviously.

http://www.ghosttowns.com/canada/ontario/wesleyville.html

always liked this song, although you'll need to find a translation if your german is rusty.

...and it actually turns out that burke's text is, itself, a rebuttal to this piece, which i should read and analyze before i analyze burke in an attempt to analyze paine. how far back is this going to go?

http://www.constitution.org/price/price_3.htm

actually, burke's response is not to this text but to a sermon published in 1789. note to self that the editor in the burke text has just discredited himself.

i'm going to go through that text anyways because it's fairly short.

this appears to be the text that was actually rebutted:

http://www.constitution.org/price/price_8.htm

yeah. the text (not the sermon) is a response to a text attributed to a james mcpherson, which is considered a response to the declaration of independence itself.

actually, no, that can't be right, it's anachronistic - if the mcpherson text was written in response to the declaration (and it's in the title, so there's no guesswork), it would be after the declaration, which was after the price text. price quotes the mcpherson text in his preface to the fifth edition, and dates it march, 1776, but this must be a later addition to the text, and an unfortunately placed date. so, i'm not going through with that for right now. i do have a copy of the constitution (written later) on my shelf though and will eventually get to it.

rather, it seems to be that price interpreted the mcpherson text partially as a response to his own, rather than only as a response to the declaration. and the declaration, of course, is not very long, so it makes sense to think that any response to it would seek some other source.

but that's not what i'm doing right now.

in context, i think it's important to realize that the american revolution was a dispute amongst members of the trans-oceanic british upper class, rather than something to do with a popular uprising (indeed, popular uprisings were brutally suppressed in this period, with a level of barbarity that would shock most people). people's histories of the period are valuable, but in a way that supplements rather than deletes the upper class philosophical debates.

i mean, all these people - paine, burke, price - were born in britain. only paine even bothered to visit america.

the "philosopher's circle" that price entertained franklin, jefferson, paine and others in was located in london, not philadelphia. it also included the circle of british liberals that first articulated the collection of ideas know known as anarchism.

that goes back to what i said about paine: you want to root for these people, but you know they're out to lunch on some really fundamental assumptions.

and it also goes back to what i said about understanding the american revolution as an internal restructuring of power within the boundaries of the british empire.

it's kind of like when the center of the roman empire moved from rome to constantinople. we sometimes talk about the "byzantine empire" as though it were something different, but we don't forget that it was fundamentally the "eastern roman empire". there were periods under, say, justinian, when the "eastern roman empire" controlled most of spain, africa and italy, while rome was being pillaged by germans. in these periods, the eastern empire was THE empire - and was merely the *roman* empire. likewise, we should be explicitly speaking of the united states both as the western british empire and as THE british empire, especially after 1945.

in the end, the russians might conquer london. well, they might. but the british empire will carry on from washington.

another sort of interesting comparison is that rome was founded on a weak memory of greece - not ethnically, but culturally. the historical foundations of london are blurry, even today, but exist somewhere in a roman cultural tradition. as athens birthed rome, rome birthed london, which birthed washington: stages of a western empire. likewise, there are stages of an eastern empire: persepolis birthed antioch birthed constantinople birthed kiev birthed moscow. and, so understanding the conflict between london and moscow (and now washington and moscow) can be reduced to the conflict between rome and constantinople, and before that between athens and persepolis. the geography has shifted, but the basic struggle (and a lot of the same themes of republicanism v despotism) has remained constant.

again, that's a lot of stasis.

so, i'm coming to the conclusion that burke was basically hired by a clique of aristocrats to represent them in ways they could not represent themselves. that is to say that the aristocrats he represented realized they didn't have the legal knowledge or rhetorical eloquence (and, perhaps, also, the idle time to lay out legal arguments in rhetorically eloquent ways) to advance their causes, so they hired him to act as a front. it's kind of like a michael ignatieff or late hitchens type thing. more generally, the rich still maintain a clique of lawyers to use to get what they want in private life, they just don't see the use in paying for philosophers any more.

when you put it in context, it's hard to even take him seriously. i mean, he's being paid to provide an argument to advance a desired conclusion. he's the guy the aristocrats hired to argue in favour of aristocratic government, to uphold the status quo, which were their own interests. there's no intellectual integrity in that position. it's the definition of charlatanism.

however, it also sort of turns him into a rube who's just arguing for his own job security.

preliminary thoughts that will no doubt evolve through the course of reading this...

i mean, i realize he was sort of a liberal in some ways, but something i'm going to be focusing on is how his brand of liberalism may have actually led to greater benefits for the aristocracy than the bourgeoisie, or more generally how those two classes merged together - specifically in the context of controlling foreign markets. i've never really been comfortable with the way marxists narrate this because i've seen a lot of empirical evidence that suggests a high level of continuity between aristocracy and bourgeoisie. that is to say that as the aristocracy took advantage of religion to advance it's interests (in complex ways that sometimes backfired, or sometimes led to submission), it also took advantage of "free trade" in a way to extend it's influence. that's leaning more to a theory of class *stasis* and class *metamorphosis* than one of class revolution. or, if you want to think about anthropology, it's a continuity hypothesis.

so, to what extent did burke more or less co-opt liberal economics as a tool for the aristocracy to increase their control, particularly in foreign markets?

i think these kinds of "mercantilist" ideas of "free trade" are still with us, are even the dominant form of global organization. they may not be the same when written out, but the general idea of twisting market theory into a tool to prop up an elite is.

i also think there's a comparison to something like fordism, which used quasi-socialist ideas with a similar goal.

but, the question i want to ask is whether burke had the foresight - and i think it is foresight - to realize that the ideas liberals were promoting would actually work in favour of the aristocracy, and if that was the reason he had this liberal streak.

yeah, it's interesting that he seems to have jumped back and forth from being a spokesperson of aristocrats with shipping interests and being a spokesperson for merchants directly, including large family-run shipping interests in the new york colony.

i haven't read the speech and probably won't but the notes here are interesting:

http://www.econlib.org/library/LFBooks/Burke/brkSWv4c1.html