Our old friend Paul Elam of Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men has promised his long-suffering and evidently increasingly broke donors that he would be looking into some exciting new money-making ventures in order to fund his lifestyle site.
We’ve already seen the the first of these get-rich-quick schemes in action: AVFM’s new publishing house. Elam evidently sees publishing as a sort of virtual ATM in which near-zero effort is repaid handsomely with cash.
The first book from what’s now called Zeta Press was a poorly received collection of re-edited blog posts about Men Going Their Own Way. AVFM followed with e-book reprints of the public domain writings of anti-women’s-suffrage socialist E. Belfort Bax, first published more than a century ago. (Never mind that Bax’s works are already available for free online at Marxists.org, the Internet Archive, and elsewhere.)
Apparently feeling that they are not yet squeezing enough blood from the turnip that is E. Belfort Bax, AVFM is floating another idea: a book that “translates” Bax’s often convoluted Edwardian era prose into hip and happening modern lingo. In an post today, AVFM “writer” August Løvenskiolds presents a little sample of what this might look like.
Unfortunately, Mr. Løvenskiolds may not be the best man for the job. For one thing, he seems to lack the necessary attention to detail. In his post today, he refers to E. Belfort Bax several times as E. BEDFORD Bax. I’ve indicated one instance in the screenshot below:
But there may be an even bigger problem with Mr. Løvenskiolds’ proposal: He seems to think that “translating” Bax into the parlance of our times means, well, completely rewriting it so it sounds like a Paul Elam fever dream.
Here is a sentence from Bax’s writings:
From all we have said, it will now be evident, one would think, to the most prejudiced reader that modern English Law, following obsequiously a deluded or apathetic stage of public opinion, has solved the problem of the division of rights and duties between the sexes, by conceding to woman all rights, and imposing on man all duties.
And here is Løvenskiolds’ “translation” of this passage:
So, it all comes down to this: even the most tone-deaf feminists have to be quaking in their Louboutins over the facts I’ve presented so far – so much so that I expect a false rape accusation from some disgruntled women’s studies ingenue will occur at any time. The general apathy to a critical examination of the claims of feminism is policed by such false accusations, which are a near certainty once a critical examination of feminism begins.
Rape hoaxes are well-known and were an “old school” feminist tactic at the time To Kill a Mockingbird was written fifty plus years ago. I expect one to drop on me like Dorothy’s tornado=blown house in The Wizard of Oz but unlike a privileged Wicked Witch I’ve taken precautions against such petards.
The fact remains: modern feminism has gained all the rights of men, and then some, while rejecting the obligations of men to preserve society and protect women and children. When women have all the rights and men, all the obligations, this system of society has a simple name. Slavery.
A person with no rights and lots of obligations is identical to the most downtrodden of slaves. A person with all the rights and no obligations is the most extreme of tyrants.
I’m not making this up; if you don’t believe me, take a look at his post.
I think we could probably do a better job than Mr. Løvenskiolds. And so I’d like to invite you all to try your hand at some Bax translations – take the passage above, or any other passage from Bax’s work, and “translate” it into something a little more groovy in far out ways.
NOTE TO EXCESSIVELY LITERAL MINDED READERS: Paul Elam is not actually our friend.
Aw, potty training twins! Good luck! How old are they now anyways? And are they old enough you can get those pull up diapers so your girl can do it herself at least? Might calm her no-diaper thing.
I believe this roughly translates to:
Shorter Bax:
I found this awesome tumblr a few days ago, and I think you guys would enjoy it too. Behold, the manslator! http://manslator.tumblr.com/
It cracks me right up when they drag out and play the “protection” card, completely ignoring the fact that there is nothing women need them to protect them from other than the assholes of life (them).
Translation: “Women cry in the street for bonbons and men give them money and scented FUCKING candles. This is obvious because reasons.”
Anyway, I’m always amazed at how MRAs know so much about fashion, when they purport to hate it so much. Louboutins? Is that spelled right? Are those shoes, or bags? How do you pronounce it? Can an MRA help a girl out, here?
People speaking fluent but non-native English generally don’t make mistakes like translating a passage by quadrupling the original text and adding a bunch of crap about false rape accusations, designer shoes, and old novels. You are more likely to see mistakes like subject-verb agreement or incorrect pronouns, none of which are mistakes that are particularly evident in this fellow’s writing. In any case, that’s not what we’re making fun of here. His English is fine.
My boyfriend, who is a non-native English speaker, hates articles (aka “a” “the” etc) with a deep and undying passion. Also prepositions. He also tends to ask me complicated questions about grammar and idioms, which I can never explain.
But as a person who has edited work by both pretentious undergrads and fluent non-native English speakers, this dude’s is definitely closer to the former.
Abra kadabra!
Also, if English is not one’s first language and one hasn’t mastered it, one probably shouldn’t attempt to translate from English into English.
Off topic, but you guys have to see the new Oglaf. Orc. Chainmail. Bikinis. Gender-neutral orc chainmail bikinis.
http://oglaf.com/newmodelarmy/
@wordsp1nner:
Yeah, but the one just before it though! It sums up so many things so perfectly for me.
http://media.oglaf.com/comic/clustering.jpg
Graphs based on valid data and statistics are sexy. I am weird.
Needing Victorian/Edwardian/etc English dumbed down is not sexy. I do not think I’m weird for this one.
deniseeliza: Louboutins are very expensive, usually very pointy shoes, designed by a Frenchman called Christian Louboutin. They have distinctive bright red lacquered soles. Louboutin and Manolo Blahnik are usually the two names most associated with high-fashion women’s shoes. I have no idea why the attempted translator thinks they are standard issue for feminists. I guess he assumes all feminists have lots of money (which they took from hard-working men, or “earned” in luxurious jobs that they were given just for being women) to spend on shoes that cost three hundred to eight hundred dollars a pair. They look horribly uncomfortable to me, but I have always preferred kitten heels to stilettos.
I would like to include audio of my proposed translation.
(Crossing fingers for the success of the embed)
https://archive.org/embed/PeanutsTeacherVoice
Doesn’t this remind anyone of Scientology selling and re-selling it’s followers the same core Hubbard books over and with a few words changed or a semicolon added where there wasn’t one before? (actually not making up the semicolon thing, incredibly)
Louboutins, trembling in?
Yeah- no. I’ve got running shoes because 85 pounds of dog requires a lot ofwalking. I’ve got hiking boots because moderate amounts of landscape requires clambering over with camera to hand. I have Docs and Docs are not trembling gear. Oh, wait, I have Fluevogs. So yes high heels but stable as hell and I can dance all night in them.
Dude is bad at translation and at predicting women’s fashion choices.
Plus, he’s weirdly sure he’s gonna be accused of rape, isn’t he?
^ He JUST wants to have sex with women whether or not they consent.
Guh.
And then they’ll be all like, “RAPE! RAAAAPE!” when they totally liked it.
Fickle whores.
/sarcasm
I think Lovenskiold was attempting to translate into Heartiste, but it’s not frothing and purple enough.
Aren’t all the youngsters speaking the hippity hop nowadays?
“Bros be dissed, bitches be getting all the benjamins.”
Realistically, how much could Elam make off of this? Anyone got any ideas? My gut instinct is very little but I’m no expert.
@Carnation, my Masters in Publishing says your gut instinct is correct. The publishing industry as a whole is floundering, and independents in particular, with small to medium presses being swallowed up by big global players like Hachette on a monthly basis. Digital publishing is even more of a mess: Amazon has a seemingly unshakable monopoly and jealously guards any useful marketing information like Smaug on a big old pile of gold, ebook pricing is all over the gaff, and the ease and popularity of self-publishing makes it very difficult for publishers to show exactly where they can add value to digital products. Trade non-fiction presses generally make the bulk of their profits from one or two big names, with everything else running a loss or just about breaking even.
TL;DR traditional publishing is currently in a protracted state of LOL WHAT IS HAPPENING and there’s very little money in it unless you own Harry Potter or something similar. This is Elam’s worst money-making scheme ever.
Since I was duly chastened the last time I posted (for being a terrible human being), I’ll refrain from saying what I really think. But the gall of these bottom-feeding scum to compare their fever dreams to slavery is too much. Seriously. Slavery. Really? I remember why I do not read the derangements of these stupid clowns.
Not one man has given me bonbons, money or scented FUCKING candles. I’m a bit upset about that. Where are those men who are giving away bonbons, money and scented candles? I want mine now!
@Argenti: They’re almost two! We have some pull-ups, she just resists the whole idea of Wearing Something On Her Bottom.
They can adorably mispronounce the names of lots of animals already. S got most of the way through “hippopotamus” last night. Their potties came with reward stickers, one of which was a cartoon hippo. Beloved pointed out it was probably a hippo-potty-mus.
They also do jaff (giraffe), ossitch, panna, zeeba, eppant (elephant) and tiger rar!.
On some level, I feel the following video is probably wrong in a lot of ways, but I can’t help it, I laughed:
re:state of publishing
The legal publishers have started to move pretty aggressively into the ebook market and are making money hand-over-fist by selling subscriptions with “updates” to old titles that are just tables of cases, which means they don’t even pay royalties to the original authors anymore.
Of course, since there are really only three legal publishers in the U.S. and the texts are kind of necessary they’re more like textbook companies than they are a standard nonfiction publishing house.
Lexis, at least, seems to have realized that by doing their own ebooks they can charge their customers every year for the same books, plus charging them a platform fee, plus requiring additional subscriptions to get updates.
This isn’t supposed to be an attack on Lexis though – they’re at least making an effort at accomodating their customers. Wolters Kluwer doesn’t even have a public access model for their ebooks yet and West’s ebook policy seems like a total mess.
/offtopic