/lit/ - Literature

Spanish, without a doubt.
Cervantes, Borges, and Ruben Dario are the absolute GOAT in: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry - respectively.

He probably didn't say that, but he would be very hypocritical if he did, considering his fondness for pseudonyms

The Ladder of Divine Ascent

First kiss: invigorating, made my head spin. Sex proceeded soon thereafter

First tongue action: took my by surprise because she initiated completely. I really liked it. Got mono tho, however I did not even know what that was until later.

This was all before I became an Orthodox Christian fyi

Reading Thomas Paine's "The Rights of Man". I am myself very fond of Edmund Burke (which this work was written to rebut--Burke himself in turn rebutted it in his Appeal, which denounces democracy and individual consent as a the basis of either society or state). I am myself pretty conservative (pic related), and by that I mean a classical conservative who opposes not only contemporary progressivism but also classical liberalism. However I think it's fair to give the opposition a fair hearing, as I am doing here.

Here are a few issues I have found.

1. Paine goes at length to tear down the legal authority of the dead, which Burke asserted. Now certainly the dead are descriptively powerless if we disregard them (as are the yet to be born which Burke also says we have a duty to). Paine doesn't stop here, however, but attacks the very idea of the dead having authority over the living, as some sort oppression. Well has he followed the implications of this line of thought? How would national debt continue from one generation to the next? How would wills be effected when they reflect the will of the dead? Paine would have to be a proto-Bolshevik here to be consistent, which afaik he was not (although his views on land ownership expressed in a later work, trouble me).

2. Paine certainly heaps undue indignation over the Bastille as some sort of monstrous oppression, and pours vitriol on Burke for failing to talk about it. Perhaps Paine was not aware that when the Bastille was stormed, it contained a handful of prisoners, none incarcerated for political crimes? One was a deviant aristocrat, and another deviant aristocrat, a certain Marquis de Sade, had been transferred out shortly before it was stormed. Paine's portrait of the Bastille as some sort of gulag used to keep the plebs in line is hardly apt.

3. Paine rejects utterly the idea that there can be unwritten constitutions. Those who feel likewise ought to read Count de Maistre's "The Generative Principle of Political Constitutions" (you need not be a theist to appreciate it), and perhaps "The American Republic", by Orestes Brownson (this is mainly concerned with America, and often repetitive, but makes excellent points). I will only say this: Paine is too caught up in the Enlightenment to realize unwritten law used to be extremely important to society (and still was in his time, English common law was used to justify the American Revolution through William Blackstone). Literacy was not common even among nobles once. Many constitutions and laws which date to feudal times were consequently unwritten, yet were certainly recognized judicially even against kings (see Joseph de Maistre's "Considerations on France").

This is not intended as a thorough critique, just a few issues (I have many other objections), and perhaps they are addressed later in the work (which I am still reading), but I thought I would post this.