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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.

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That was good stuff. Of course, the translation destroys the alliteration in the original.

Sadly I cannot freestyle, and am therefore not a true skald.

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Enjoyable stuff. All barbarians should enjoy song and verse; especially those that take the battle to Mars.

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Poetry is the oldest and highest of the human arts. We must make poetry great again.

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Agreed. I don't have the talent for it, but a love. Homer and Virgil saved my life, almost literally. Now I'm reading the middle age poems of the every day lives of men, the warrior, the wife... They're awesome. We don't have that in our culture.

I'm interested to see what a man from Mars and a Tree can bring forth for our modern men.

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Homer and Virgil are first rate. I'm working on an essay that draws heavily on the Aeneid right now...

And of course, the Havamal, Beowulf ... our greatest literary treasures from the Dawn Age are all in verse.

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Hadn't heard of Havamal, I'll look into it. But yes, all of them do. Cid, Beowulf, Roland, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare... I mean, it's endless.

It's part of why we're destitute, culturally. And, without a culture worth fighting for, how do we expect men to fight? At least, not until the last minute - like, starving and in the streets.

That's why, for all that we can ridicule some of the Europeans, at least their peasants are in revolt right now. I'm fairly certain a main portion of it is because they have a culture that is somewhat intact and worth fighting for. So, the farmers revolted. We'll see how far it goes.

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I think the Amerikaner is in rebellion too, right now. Not as dramatically as the European farmers, but there's a lot happening at the local and state level.

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Mar 30Liked by John Carter

English translation here, courtesy of Pittsburgh university (I think):

https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/havamal.html

Below is linked to Heimskringla, a wiki collecting all the old Nordic/Norse texts that survive:

https://www.heimskringla.no/wiki/Forside

There's an english version of it, but I'm unsure which texts are translated. If you can read swedish, danish or norwegian, you can find multiple transcriptions of the original texts.

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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.

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This isn't the same one I shared the other day ;) I'll post that one later....

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Wait what? 🤣

I’m losing my mind over here. Working and listening to shit at the same time 😆😆😆☠️

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😂

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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.

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I think you're onto something here.

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Will give it a read, thanks!

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Mar 30Liked by John Carter

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

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I've been voicedoxxed for a while.

I agree completely with your analysis. A more succinct way of putting it: decadent empires get sacked by barbarians; the only way to prevent this is to conquer everything, such that there are no external barbarian hordes. Therefore a global empire, in principle, can be indefinitely stable, no matter how corrupt or decayed. Colonizing other worlds would lead to those worlds becoming the new barbarians. Thus, their only interest in space would be LEO satellites for communications, surveillance, etc.

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Mar 30Liked by John Carter

> Thus, their only interest in space would be LEO satellites for communications, surveillance, etc.

Which maaaaybe explains why "we" never went further than the Moon. ;) I mean... even if I can be sold on the idea nobody had the resources to colonize space up to this point, I can't really really be sold on the idea nobody had the resources to develop at least some prototype of a technology that would provide food in deep space. When I looked into this a few years ago, I was aghast to realize nothing has been done, and any space colonists need to build the entire technology stack from scratch!

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I think you're correct about that. The WEF types have absolutely no desire to colonize space, and indeed it is incompatible with their long-term goals. Thus national space exploration programs were starved of resources.

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Mar 30Liked by John Carter

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

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Interesting. I confess I don't recall that phrase being used at all back then, and certainly wasn't thinking of it in terms of minorities. However, when I look up 'New Normal' on Google's Ngram viewer, it seems to enter the lexicon around the year 2000, and goes parabolic after 2010 or so. Frustratingly, Ngram cuts off at 2019. I don't remember the phrase as being particularly common before the lockdowns...

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Mar 30Liked by John Carter

I think it has something to do with the PATRIOT Act and/or GWOT. Remember, this whole thing started way, way earlier. :) Way way way earlier. :) CARNIVORE

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Everyone forgets CARNIVORE...

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Mar 30Liked by John Carter

That's the problem with trading freedom for safety.

It's a perfect example of the most profound and enigmatic lesson in history; people have incredible ability to forget it.

Go ask a few people in line at airport security if trading freedom for safety was worth it. Not only do they look at you weird for asking such...they do not even know what you're talking about. Serious. Try it.

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What makes it even worse is that in the airport you're trading freedom (and dignity) for """safety""".

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Mar 30Liked by John Carter

Remember this?: https://vimeo.com/392509568

'Won't Get Fooled Again'.... Flash forward 20 years later: Mask on. Pockets empty. Shoes off. Hands up. BIOSCAN!

Oh the irony...

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Programming, It's all programming. Each step lays the foundation for the next.

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Mar 30Liked by John Carter

Okay, so you two got me looking for "the new normal", and I found something possibly interesting:

It popped up after the 9/11 attack, and was in full swing a few years later as a standard phrase, or rather a phraseological exxuse as to why things the way they used to be could no longer be, with no other reason than "the new normal".

In the 1970s-1990ish, you'd hear the phrase "new paradigm" in social sciences/humanities/politics, and "the next bog thing" in business used the same way; as an excuse and a "shutter-downer" of debate. A sort-of adult version of "Is too!".

But here's the interesting but: it also appeared right after World War 1, and from what I could see the usage was the same as today: after some major event (and WW1 trumps 9/11 by a fair number of magnitudes), equally major groups and prominent people start saying and opining that due to "the new normal" the topic or subject at hand no longer has to be measured, debated or even referred to "the old normal"; that something is magically "new" simply upends any and all shackels of reason, logic, knowledge, experience or other empirical stuff. A genesis that under its skin is nothing more than "So there!" or Ego Sic Dico.

Why can airport Gestapo ban /you/ from bringing on toothpaste on the plane, but can not stop aliens without documentation from debarking a plane? The New Normal. Why do we not invest in the best energy source as judged by the sliding scale between cost/power produced/environmental impact? The New normal. And so on with biased examples.

And there's a truth to it too: by creating a New Normality you create a new reality, and as creator you have dibs on trying to control your creation. So far, no creator - and I'm including all of religion here - has managed to control its creation. Instead, the created has always replaced the creator to repeat the cycle.

To borrow from the greeks: before Zeus and his family, there were the Titans, and before them were other beings even more shrouded in the shadow the future casts over history, making present peer to see anything behind itself. And after the Olympians came others, presently the Nazarene, soon to be replaced by Mohammed and after the prophet something else will come, until . . .

. . .until enough of us realise that trying to control what we create is why we fail.

Make it, and by making it make it free.

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Fascinating. I didn't realize the first usage went all the way back to the Great War.

It's certainly an insidious phrase, by means of which we can be told, get used to it, this is just how things are now.

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'Get used to it' more or less sums up regime messaging for the last 20 to 30 years

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Mar 30Liked by John Carter

Might have been a rebranding of "The New World Order" by the thugs in The Bush administration

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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! ❤️

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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.

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I may be of Anglo descent, but I don't have an English accent lol

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May 5Liked by John Carter

Definitely the highest form of reception/observation (there is probably a better synonym that I can't think of right now) is to read and listen simultaneously. There is something about listening to someone and reading what he is reading at the same time.

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I used to do that all the time as a teenager with black metal albums.

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Impressive thematic consistency over the years. This feels like something you might have written this year. Clearly very prescient

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Apr 5·edited Apr 5Author

Going through these poems is a bit like doing intellectual archaeology, yeah. Some things the same, others very different.

This particular one was written without much of a plan in mind. It came to me in a very dreamlike fashion. Perhaps thus the presience.

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Mar 31Liked by John Carter

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

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Only Ezra Pound is Ezra Pound (tbh I often find him too clever by half...)

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Yep, read it out loud. Even tried humming a few bars, but that didn't work. ;-)

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It isn't *quite* music lol

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founding
Mar 30Liked by John Carter

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”.

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LMAO

I agree with most people. In general, I hate poetry.

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Mar 30Liked by John Carter

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.

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Mar 30·edited Mar 30Liked by John Carter

Does this explain TDS?

Seems like a thousand years from now TDS will be the explanation for homosapiens speciation.

It's as if we've been separated by mountains or sea, like old world monkeys.

As far as the psychopaths at the top, they're quite comfortable in the environment of chaos/malice/dislocation/depravity.

That is their fairway and where they thrive.

Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.

Here's a poem of sorts that has some overlap with yours:

'I know the pieces fit

'Cause I watched them fall away

Mildewed and smouldering

Fundamental differing

Pure intention juxtaposed

Will set two lovers' souls in motion

Disintegrating as it goes

Testing our communication

The light that fueled our fire then

Has burned a hole between us so

We cannot seem to reach an end

Crippling our communication

I know the pieces fit

'Cause I watched them tumble down

No fault, none to blame

It doesn't mean I don't desire

To point the finger, blame the other

Watch the temple topple over

To bring the pieces back together

Rediscover communication

The poetry that comes from

The squaring off between

And the circling is worth it

Finding beauty in the dissonance

There was a time that the pieces fit

But I watched them fall away

Mildewed and smouldering

Strangled by our coveting

I've done the math enough to know

The dangers of our second guessing

Doomed to crumble unless we grow

And strengthen our communication

Cold silence has

A tendency to

Atrophy any

Sense of compassion

Between supposed lovers

Between supposed lovers

I know the pieces fit

I know the pieces fit

I know the pieces fit

I know the pieces fit

I know the pieces fit'

- "Schism" by Tool

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Wasn't thinking about Tool at all when I wrote this, but Schism is indeed a great song.

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Mar 30Liked by John Carter

They ROCK.

"Fear Inoculum" came out a few months before the vid abomination.

It was prescient. Seriously look up the lyrics.

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Maynard is a prophetic shaman, no question.

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Awesome. Didn't think I would enjoy it as much as I did!

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