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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   1907 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 1, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

Still on Paradise Lost. Satan always knows what to say.

Also starting Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son, which has been very worthwhile. He's a man both clever and decent, and he writes plainly about things that clever people often don't say. It also has gems like

Adieu! and be persuaded that I shall love you extremely, while you deserve it; but not one moment longer.

I don't think he meant it, but it must have been something to get these letters.

Paper I'm reading: Podgorski's Dynamic Conservatism.

Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World

It's a long series of short and funny meditations on politics and philosophy. A typical paragraph:

I am well aware that the word “property” has been defied in our time by the corruption of the great capitalists. One would think, to hear people talk, that the Rothchilds and the Rockefellers were on the side of property. But obviously they are the enemies of property; because they are enemies of their own limitations. They do not want their own land; but other people’s. When they remove their neighbor’s landmark, they also remove their own. A man who loves a little triangular field ought to love it because it is triangular; anyone who destroys the shape, by giving him more land, is a thief who has stolen a triangle. A man with the true poetry of possession wishes to see the wall where his garden meets Smith’s garden; the hedge where his farm touches Brown’s. He cannot see the shape of his own land unless he sees the edges of his neighbor’s. It is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one harem.

I disagree with many of them - e.g. the above hints at distributism, the idea that individuals will make better use of their property if they own and work it independently, rather than a few capitalists owning it all. But the capitalists mostly make more efficient and productive use of it, which is why individuals sell their productive capital to capitalists - the capitalists can pay more for it than the individual would make on his own. But it's still funny.

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