{"id":49,"date":"2014-02-24T12:54:32","date_gmt":"2014-02-24T19:54:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/joshgd\/?p=49"},"modified":"2014-02-24T12:54:32","modified_gmt":"2014-02-24T19:54:32","slug":"paine-x-attacking-the-burke-x-idealistic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/joshgd\/2014\/02\/24\/paine-x-attacking-the-burke-x-idealistic\/","title":{"rendered":"Paine x Attacking the Burke x Idealistic"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hope everyone had a nice break. Trying to finish up my Foucault essay now, definitely having a lot of trouble. I&#8217;ve been wondering if I might have an easier time writing these essays if we received the prompts beforehand, or wrote them without prompts altogether (choosing our own essay topic kind of thing). Every time I take a crack at these essays, especially essays on non-fiction works, I find myself wishing I could re-read the entire text with the prompts in mind. I&#8217;ve been trying to guess essay prompts for\u00a0<em>Rights of Man<\/em>, I guess we&#8217;ll see how that turns out.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t follow current American politics very closely, but I can&#8217;t help but laugh at the way Paine goes at Burke and how familiar that feels. Political discourse in the states is centered around attacks and rebuttals, and\u00a0<em>Rights of Man\u00a0<\/em>is like watching a period piece on bi-partisanship. Paine just goes for it. He slips in ad hominem attacks whenever he can. I know its supposed to be a counter-attack to Burke&#8217;s criticism of the French Revolution, but it comes off as super aggressive and a little silly at time. I guess its funny to see what the current tradition of party politics evolved from.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d like to put forward a question to finish off this post. This text strikes me at times as highly idealistic. Flashes of pragmatism are evident in this text, but Paine&#8217;s high hopes for government and society are a lot more prominent. He characterizes the French Revolution as principled over and over again, but it often feels to me that these principles are inherently idealistic and unworkable. Any thoughts?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hope everyone had a nice break. Trying to finish up my Foucault essay now, definitely having a lot of trouble. I&#8217;ve been wondering if I might have an easier time writing these essays if we received the prompts beforehand, or &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/joshgd\/2014\/02\/24\/paine-x-attacking-the-burke-x-idealistic\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20787,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/joshgd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/joshgd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/joshgd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/joshgd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20787"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/joshgd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/joshgd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/joshgd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions\/50"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/joshgd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/joshgd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/joshgd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}