King of Men

Sometimes I translate poetry. Sometimes I post it.

[King of Men @KoM112358]

As someone who was a teenager before the Internet was much of a thing: I unironically think this is Good Actually. Forbidden fruit tastes sweeter. Sex, or at least porn, is better when it's a filthy taboo thing that you have to hide from authorities and especially parents, and share with a band of your wide-eyed friends in a dark garage. (This is male experience, I don't know what the girls were doing at the time.) No censorship, to include full 24/7 AI-monitored camera surveillance, is going to *actually* keep the kids out of the porn stash, but you can make it difficult enough that each glimpse of nudity is a victory, a rare treat instead of an everyday superstimulus that they quickly grow jaded to. We should do the same with ice cream.

Epistemic status: Ha ha only serious.

(All that said, having the age of consent for actual sex be 18 is Actively Insane.)

[Aella @Aella_Girl]

im sure this movement to completely isolate people from exposure to anything erotic until they're 18 wont have any lasting repercussions to their sexual development

[King of Men @KoM112358]

https://t.co/qDnNVssPX0

[King of Men @KoM112358]

You have to wonder how much Cato the Elder had riding on that prediction that Carthage would be destroyed. If only the Romans had invented the social technology of bribing the decision oracles, history might have one fewer genocide in it.

[King of Men @KoM112358]

@BretDevereaux You're by no means wrong, but picking on Alexander is easy mode. How about Napoleon, who did manage to reform French law? Washington? Elizabeth I?

[King of Men @KoM112358]

If there are X people in the world who will be good wives, and Y > X people in want of a wife, then some of the latter will necessarily either go without, or settle for someone who cannot be trusted with their money. (Assuming monogamy.) That's true even if everyone has superhuman Good Wife Detection skills and nobody's goodwifeness ever changes over time.

[King of Men @KoM112358]

https://t.co/3LIwadXnlp

[King of Men @KoM112358]

Well, it's still possible to be better than the other guy. If the Republican party improves on that number by alienating ninety percent of voters...

[King of Men @KoM112358]

@allTheYud Thank you, I see it now.

[King of Men @KoM112358]

@KelseyTuoc You're not wrong but if he's going to make himself useful, that seems good even if he does have a financial interest. Set a sharp-elbowed billionaire to catch, etc.

[King of Men @KoM112358]

https://t.co/LjCm6E15PC

[King of Men @KoM112358]

It is true that wealth tax revenue increased. It does not follow that the revenues came mainly from the wealthy. Observe, to begin with, that Norway's wealth tax kicks in at 1.7 million kroner, about $170,000. This is not a wealthy-person threshold, even allowing that most Norwegians have much of their wealth in their house and owner-occupied residences are valued very leniently for purposes of the tax.

Further, while that headline rate of 1.1% is what makes the, well, headlines, the 2022 changes were rather complex and the most impactful ones were "under the hood" as it were. (Sourcing this from the Norwegian government report linked at the bottom.) Specifically: The tax valuation of owner-occupied residences whose market price is above 10 million kroner (a healthy but not outlandish house price in Norway) was increased; so was the valuation of secondary and holiday homes. (Note that owning a holiday home is more common in Norway than the US, extending very far down into the middle class.) The tax valuation of stocks was also increased. And, while the headline rate applies only to wealth above 20 million kroner (even so, I observe that 2 million dollars is not that high a net worth in this context), the base rate was also increased.

All of these changes very much apply to the middle class.

https://t.co/3U6z4fFSUP

[King of Men @KoM112358]

The shortest poem I have ever translated, but I wasn't feeling well at the time and was pleased to get anything done. My commentary from the original post:

I chose Gulf War images more or less at random, as the most recent war in which Western armies had a machine-guns-versus-spears level of technological advantage against an adversary that tried to fight open-field battles of formed regular units; and Bergen dialect because it comes most naturally to me, and also allows the formation "ha'kje" which formally-correct Oslo Norwegian would stiffen into "har ikke", spoiling the scansion.

Norwegian text:

Samme ka,
så har dog vi
maskingevær.
Det ha'kje de.

[King of Men @KoM112358]

The obvious rejoinder is that many people who are currently alive and fertile would prefer not to become infertile. The person-affecting theorist doesn't have to say a word about harms to future people; there are plenty of perceived harms to currently-existing people who would like to have children.

[King of Men @KoM112358]

@mathsboi42 This is your regular reminder that he predicted that the Higgs boson would not be discovered at the LHC.

I am happy to agree that he was correct about effectively everything AI-related. :)

https://t.co/TMIi3P1gXM

[King of Men @KoM112358]

"X is a monopoly funder" seems like a fairly easy problem to solve! Much easier than trying to compete with a humongous network-effect tech company, or a state-enforced guild system.

[King of Men @KoM112358]

@KelseyTuoc @tolstoybb Good for them if they didn't. The value of upholding the non-bribing, honest-business-only norm is large even compared to the value of getting these vaccines some years earlier. Trump too shall pass.

[King of Men @KoM112358]

@paulg Could you? There are only so many smart humans going around, many of them have their own agenda, and a non-smart but determined founder would have some difficulty both finding them and impressing them enough that working for their startup seems attractive.

[King of Men @KoM112358]

All right, all right, I'll translate the patriotic doggerel and get it out of the way!

I was, actually, working on translating some fairly serious poetry when this minor verse of Kipling's came to my attention and insisted on taking up all the lyrical parts of my brain. I ended up translating it out of sheer self-defense just so I could be thinking about some other words than "England's sword unsheathed / put half the world to flight". Kipling wrote this literally as schoolboy history, for "A School History of England", but for all I call it 'doggerel' you can't say he didn't put his best effort into the thing; that repeated bitter "not while" is really quite memorable. One hopes nobody in the Foreign Office in, say, 1956 (or 1941, or 1947, or 1973…) had learned their Atlantic history from the book and allowed it to influence their attitude to the hegemon. Churchill's quip, about the US always doing the right thing after all alternatives have been tried, comes to mind; but he was in school twenty or thirty years too early for the "School History". Kipling's opinion on the colonial rebellion may have been widespread among the British elite - indeed for all I know he got it from his own schoolbooks. At any rate the position that the colonies had been defended at extreme expense and the colonials ought to pay was the core of the whole conflict, and Kipling naturally takes the strongest version of the English side of the dispute. Adam Smith, contemporary to the rebellion, took the opposite side that if the colonies couldn't be made to pay, they should rather be made independent - in which case, presumably, they'd be paying for their own defense whether they liked it or not. But Smith was an economist and thought of incentives and efficiency; Kipling was a patriot and thought of loyalty and duty. Economics be damned, the colonials had a duty to the Crown and ought to pay for the Royal Navy the same as every other subject; and by the evidence of the first two verses, he's genuinely angry, more than a century later, that they chose otherwise.

The switch from that anger to the elegiac calmness of "After" is a little startling; in the "School History" these verses were separated by the narrative text describing the war, and Kipling may not have thought of them as being two parts of the same poem. It does seem that being angry brought out his best effort; "worshippers at Freedom's shrine" is heartfelt if sarcastic, "too busy to think of war" is conventional.

The illustrations for "Before" are mostly paintings of scenes from the Seven Years' War (presumably the specific conflict Kipling had in mind, with "Frenchman gone from the North" and "shattered Spain"); in order, they are:

"Half the world to flight" - scenes from the most famous battles in each major theatre: climbing the cliffs to the Plains of Abraham, advancing with fixed bayonets at Minden, and following Clive into the attack at Plassey.
"New-built cities" - contemporary map of the English colonies.
"Pole to Line" - Battle of Quiberon Bay by Richard Paton.
"Did not quit her then" - Washington at Monongahela, organising the rear guard after Braddock's disaster.
"Foes were driven forth" - Battle of Quiberon Bay, the Day After by Richard Wright.
"Frenchman from the North" - capitulation of Montreal.
"Clean-swept oceans" - Bombardment of El Morro Castle during the Capture of Havana, Raphael Monleon.
"What they owed" - Join or Die, showing eight colonies as pieces of a snake.

Norwegian text:

Før

Ikke mens Englands sverd påny drev halve verden på flukt
ikke mens nybrøten bygd og by pustet bak hennes tukt
ikke mens England til forsvar ga hen gull, og skip, og blod
- disse Frihetens svorne menn: da var de henne tro!

Ei før hver uvenn fra kysten fór og England vant deres sak
ei før franskmannen rømte fra nord og spanjolens rike lå vrak
ei før på ryddet og trygget hav intet fiendtlig flagg å se
husket de Frihetens strenge krav og tok til motet for det!

Etter
Snø ligger tykt over Valley Forge
isen på Delaware
men de som falt her for kong George
de bryr seg aldri mer.

Ikke skjønt kusymra smått om senn
bryter ut der solstrålen når
og knuffende kråkereir kunngjør igjen
at vårt England på ny har vår.

De rører seg ikke for smeltet fonn
eller isen som tiner i fjorden;
og de som falt for Washington
ligger like stilt i jorden.

De rører seg ikke når blomsterflor
fordriver furuskogs dis,
og i alle steinete beiter gror
akeleie og filtkongslys.

Hver for sitt land, i åpen strid,
kjempet og møtte sin død;
og den gode jord, fri for hat og nid,
dekker dem i sitt skjød.

Hun har ingen tid til menneskers hær;
mot vinter og is hennes slag;
og se, de årlige blomstene er
hvor de var i fedrenes dag!

Gullris hvor beite mot skogen lir
når kongslysets blomst har falt fra
og sumak-løv som høsten gir
fargen til blodet de ga.

[King of Men @KoM112358]

Norwegian translation of "Ich Hab Die Nacht Getraumet"; lyrics:

Det var i natt jeg drømte
en drøm jeg ikke vil se
der vokste opp i hagen
et enslig rosmarinstre.

En kirkegård var hagen
et blomsterbed en grav;
og fra de grønne trærne
falt krone og blomster av.

Jeg samlet blomster sammen
i et forgyllet krus
det falt fra mine hender
og gikk i tusende knus.

Derfra så jeg perler renne
og en dråpe rosenrød:
Hvem kan den drømmen tyde?
Min kjæreste, er du død?

#poetry #translation #norwegian #norsk