Beki Mc. > Recent Status Updates

"Without the power to exclude, as enforced by the law and the forces thereof, rent would be inconceivable."

"...the manifestation of how far the property concept has come since Locke's justification: land is no longer valued for its use, but for its worth as an investment. Empty, bewitched and worthless to all but its owners, this is England."

"It was in this era that knowledge of the land itself became a kind of property: as the land was enclosed, so, too, were the exact specifications of its acreage, use and ownership fenced off from public access. But to peer over these walls of secrecy is not just an act of nosiness; it is essential to both the economy and democracy of England."

"As landlords churned the land into profit, they killed the culture of the commons."

"The greatest lie of nationalism is that it defends the interests of its nationals. The people it defends, however, are not those it defines, but those who define it. Englishness has always been defined by the landed lords of England and fed in columns of hot air to the landless: you might not have land, but at least you have England."

"...they are constantly thwarted by the cult of exclusion and its central hallucination: dominion. The laws of property pretend that whatever lies within the fence line is entirely unconnected to the land and communities outside of it, as if ecology can be partitioned with a neat line. Floodwater doesn't obey these legal fictions."

"This is the the effect of magical architecture: to infiltrate one site with the aura of another, to be Greece, to be Rome, or Heaven itself, and yet still to be Hampshire."