Right, so that's a first attempt to spit something out in the style and manner of the old ones. A skald was supposed to not take hours or days or even longer to compose a rhyme, not even in Töglag (a kind of verse) or when weaving kennings into the stanzas. A true skald would spit out verse on the spot, possibly only requiring a sip of the blood of Kvaser to set the tongue in motion. A very "limping translation" (swedish idiom for poor translation) would be:
The knife of speech spouted many meanings;
egging men on to brave courage
The one who hears shall know to ought and to do;
deedfulness undone; lame of hand;
indecision detested is by those on high
Only beasts keep silent for fear
That's a very rough-and-ready attempt to get some of the meaning to carry over. But for the real stuff, give up an hour to read Havamal and Voluspa. There are good english versions, as long as you stick to ones made before the 1950s.
Enjoyed listening the other day, and got alot more out of it this time while reading along.
And as you know, I particularly agree with this:
Yet at the same time, while every eutopia is a utopia, there’s no question that it feels that we’re perched on the edge of some sort of epochal planetary phase change, which can and perhaps soon will tip over into one or another attractor state; Langan’s concept of the Tech Singularity vs. the Human Singularity is one of the more concise descriptions of the choice our species confronts, and which of these transpires will ultimately be decided by our psychic or spiritual state as the transition unfolds.
On the subject of Service-to-Self and Service-to-Others, I thought it might be useful to chip with an observation on markets and large organisations. A number of individuals prominent in the culture have remarked on the problems of scale or government as a 'corporation at the limit'. It was edifying at the time, because it's always nice when admirable people seem to be thinking along similar lines as oneself.
Anyway, my point is this- under normal circumstances the market naturally orients people towards serving others by necessity, because no business or businessman can survive unless it provides products or services which others want and/or need. Under normal circumstances- but the prevailing economic landscape which dominates the West could hardly be described as normal. One of my irritations about the modern Left is that there is actually quite a bit to criticise about capitalism at the detail level, but it never gets addressed because instead all energy is instead diverted to propagating a deceitful caricature which bears only the most superficial resemblance to reality. Adam Smith himself was an outspoken critic of the East India Company, its monopoly power and perennial penchant for corporate bailouts, yet, apart from the occasional reference to large multinationals not paying their taxes or complaining about the fact that money can somewhat remove the corporate Centre Left's insane messaging advantage (although many more billionaires are funding Biden this cycle, rather than Trump) , they don't really describe in detail the very real problems with crony capitalism.
I recently came across a very interesting 2018 survey from the UK which showed that 75% to 80% of people who worked for small businesses were either 'very' or 'extremely' happy with their employment. Predictably, when one looks at government work, institutions or large corporations the figures are much lower, about a third. Here's a radical thought, what if most people are naturally geared to want to help others? I don't mean this in the selfless sense. I mean this very much in the selfish sense. What if a huge portion of the population is desperate to demonstrate their value and worth to the world, a process which occurs naturally through the reciprocal interactions in the market when the players are small, yet our modern world has completely frustrated this process by making large numbers of us drones to large hierarchies, wage slaves to corporate, governmental and institutional behemoths? Wouldn't that naturally drive people to other, ultimately less fulfilling and destructive ways of serving others, to politics, to activism, to policies which help a few at the expense of more people overall?
Anyway. I think I'm going to write this up as an essay.
I shall inform Pater Alexander Macris, Contemplator on the Tree of Woe Himself, that the Good Ser John Carter has formally declared the Commencement of Hostilities, this being the Opening Salvo in the Future Rap battle.
& a most Powerful Opening Salvo it is... Bravo Good Ser! ❤️
I hope you realize the OPSEC implications of publishing the recording of your voice? :)
> To the contrary: if the parasite lords that are currently trying to consolidate their control of the planet emerge victorious from this global struggle for the future, it seems far more likely that they will lock humanity down on our birth world, in order to ensure that their rule remains perpetual.
It is probably provable that this is the most likely and most sensible outcome. Consider: parasites dream of a planet-sized centralized control of the society. Under those circumstances, all small decisions need to be scrutized or else the entire planet-sized system will unravel. In the absence of FTL communication, the only way this can be done is by keeping everything close together, so that HUMANITY-AI (our benevolent robot overlord they're building currently) can calculate everything sufficiently fast. That requires keeping everything on the same planet, basically. Maybe we can have stuff on the Moon, but we can't have anything further out. BTW, this leads us to conclude that making a *self-sufficient* offworld society would be the worst enemy of HUMANITY-AI, because it would introduce too many unknowns for it to compute. Therefore, the best way to defeat HUMANITY-AI is to colonize space, the further away, the better. But this also means the progenitors of HUMANITY-AI will do *e-ve-ry-thing* in their power to prevent colonization of space. So anybody who plans to colonize space needs to steel him/herself to potentially fight a pitched defence against getting genocided, and needs to plan how to emerge from that war while still being able to colonize. After all, what good is surviving that if you can't colonize afterwards?
I took a listen as opposed to reading the poem and the voice had me shocked - I don't know why, but I always read your pieces as if they were written by a gruff, remote and monkish English barbarian of yore penning his thoughts and then somehow having them transposed online. Keep going strong, John.
How fitting that I was looking at Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics on one tab, and a Clockwork Orange-reaction video on another (Millennials watching the movie, highly entertaining).
Amazing poetry and observation. You were there at ground zero, year zero, day 1, slamming out the truth. As the tips of the first turds touched the screaming blades. This poetry is the same poetry we hear in your current writing. Spine chilling indeed. You ARE waking people up, you are mobilising them, by channeling this revelatory poetry through your pugilistic prose style.
Målets kniv mälde mening mången;
manade mannar mot mäktigt mod
Den som höra veta att böra och göra;
dådkraft ogjord; handen stilla;
vankelmod de höge ogilla
Endast fä tiger stilla.
-
Right, so that's a first attempt to spit something out in the style and manner of the old ones. A skald was supposed to not take hours or days or even longer to compose a rhyme, not even in Töglag (a kind of verse) or when weaving kennings into the stanzas. A true skald would spit out verse on the spot, possibly only requiring a sip of the blood of Kvaser to set the tongue in motion. A very "limping translation" (swedish idiom for poor translation) would be:
The knife of speech spouted many meanings;
egging men on to brave courage
The one who hears shall know to ought and to do;
deedfulness undone; lame of hand;
indecision detested is by those on high
Only beasts keep silent for fear
That's a very rough-and-ready attempt to get some of the meaning to carry over. But for the real stuff, give up an hour to read Havamal and Voluspa. There are good english versions, as long as you stick to ones made before the 1950s.
Enjoyable stuff. All barbarians should enjoy song and verse; especially those that take the battle to Mars.
Enjoyed listening the other day, and got alot more out of it this time while reading along.
And as you know, I particularly agree with this:
Yet at the same time, while every eutopia is a utopia, there’s no question that it feels that we’re perched on the edge of some sort of epochal planetary phase change, which can and perhaps soon will tip over into one or another attractor state; Langan’s concept of the Tech Singularity vs. the Human Singularity is one of the more concise descriptions of the choice our species confronts, and which of these transpires will ultimately be decided by our psychic or spiritual state as the transition unfolds.
Great stuff. I believe 'new normal' became a buzzword in the Obama era, so we may have you to blame for that ;)
IIRC, it morphed from "minorities are the new normal!" to "this shitty economy is the new normal so you can't blame Obama!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zp2RhXOkntU
On the subject of Service-to-Self and Service-to-Others, I thought it might be useful to chip with an observation on markets and large organisations. A number of individuals prominent in the culture have remarked on the problems of scale or government as a 'corporation at the limit'. It was edifying at the time, because it's always nice when admirable people seem to be thinking along similar lines as oneself.
Anyway, my point is this- under normal circumstances the market naturally orients people towards serving others by necessity, because no business or businessman can survive unless it provides products or services which others want and/or need. Under normal circumstances- but the prevailing economic landscape which dominates the West could hardly be described as normal. One of my irritations about the modern Left is that there is actually quite a bit to criticise about capitalism at the detail level, but it never gets addressed because instead all energy is instead diverted to propagating a deceitful caricature which bears only the most superficial resemblance to reality. Adam Smith himself was an outspoken critic of the East India Company, its monopoly power and perennial penchant for corporate bailouts, yet, apart from the occasional reference to large multinationals not paying their taxes or complaining about the fact that money can somewhat remove the corporate Centre Left's insane messaging advantage (although many more billionaires are funding Biden this cycle, rather than Trump) , they don't really describe in detail the very real problems with crony capitalism.
I recently came across a very interesting 2018 survey from the UK which showed that 75% to 80% of people who worked for small businesses were either 'very' or 'extremely' happy with their employment. Predictably, when one looks at government work, institutions or large corporations the figures are much lower, about a third. Here's a radical thought, what if most people are naturally geared to want to help others? I don't mean this in the selfless sense. I mean this very much in the selfish sense. What if a huge portion of the population is desperate to demonstrate their value and worth to the world, a process which occurs naturally through the reciprocal interactions in the market when the players are small, yet our modern world has completely frustrated this process by making large numbers of us drones to large hierarchies, wage slaves to corporate, governmental and institutional behemoths? Wouldn't that naturally drive people to other, ultimately less fulfilling and destructive ways of serving others, to politics, to activism, to policies which help a few at the expense of more people overall?
Anyway. I think I'm going to write this up as an essay.
I shall inform Pater Alexander Macris, Contemplator on the Tree of Woe Himself, that the Good Ser John Carter has formally declared the Commencement of Hostilities, this being the Opening Salvo in the Future Rap battle.
& a most Powerful Opening Salvo it is... Bravo Good Ser! ❤️
I hope you realize the OPSEC implications of publishing the recording of your voice? :)
> To the contrary: if the parasite lords that are currently trying to consolidate their control of the planet emerge victorious from this global struggle for the future, it seems far more likely that they will lock humanity down on our birth world, in order to ensure that their rule remains perpetual.
It is probably provable that this is the most likely and most sensible outcome. Consider: parasites dream of a planet-sized centralized control of the society. Under those circumstances, all small decisions need to be scrutized or else the entire planet-sized system will unravel. In the absence of FTL communication, the only way this can be done is by keeping everything close together, so that HUMANITY-AI (our benevolent robot overlord they're building currently) can calculate everything sufficiently fast. That requires keeping everything on the same planet, basically. Maybe we can have stuff on the Moon, but we can't have anything further out. BTW, this leads us to conclude that making a *self-sufficient* offworld society would be the worst enemy of HUMANITY-AI, because it would introduce too many unknowns for it to compute. Therefore, the best way to defeat HUMANITY-AI is to colonize space, the further away, the better. But this also means the progenitors of HUMANITY-AI will do *e-ve-ry-thing* in their power to prevent colonization of space. So anybody who plans to colonize space needs to steel him/herself to potentially fight a pitched defence against getting genocided, and needs to plan how to emerge from that war while still being able to colonize. After all, what good is surviving that if you can't colonize afterwards?
I'm skipping over the entire problem regarding the Paradox of Centralization: https://gaiusbaltar.substack.com/p/why-is-the-european-union-destroying/comment/51521003
It's not Ezra Pound but it's better than the slam poetry I've seen
(A memorably shit line from Def Poetry Jam: "Don't lick Bics cuz fire sticks ta flames!")
Nicely done
Yep, read it out loud. Even tried humming a few bars, but that didn't work. ;-)
In the Adam McKay movie, “the big short” he put up on screen little written snippets, aphorisms, one I chose to write down because it was so funny:
“The truth is like poetry, and most people hate fucking poetry”
The other quotes in the movie were attributed to people, like Mark Twain, but not this one, it read “ overheard at a bar in New York”.
I took a listen as opposed to reading the poem and the voice had me shocked - I don't know why, but I always read your pieces as if they were written by a gruff, remote and monkish English barbarian of yore penning his thoughts and then somehow having them transposed online. Keep going strong, John.
How fitting that I was looking at Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics on one tab, and a Clockwork Orange-reaction video on another (Millennials watching the movie, highly entertaining).
Will have to return later.
Impressive thematic consistency over the years. This feels like something you might have written this year. Clearly very prescient
Awesome. Didn't think I would enjoy it as much as I did!
John I love it. Thank you.
Amazing poetry and observation. You were there at ground zero, year zero, day 1, slamming out the truth. As the tips of the first turds touched the screaming blades. This poetry is the same poetry we hear in your current writing. Spine chilling indeed. You ARE waking people up, you are mobilising them, by channeling this revelatory poetry through your pugilistic prose style.