We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The child benefit reforms have taken effect. Tomorrow, hundreds of thousands of people must register for tax self-assessment for the first time.
To summarise, if any member of a household earns more than a certain amount, then some amount (possibly all) of the child benefit received by the mother in the household must be paid back by the high earner in the household. The more you think about this, the more absurdities you will notice.
Some will point out that child benefit should not exist. They are right. My wife receives child benefit and I view it as a small reduction in the vast amount of tax I pay. So these changes mean I will be paying more tax.
But the real problem is that I will also have to fill in forms. I do not like filling in forms. My approach to the state is to bumble along following the path of least resistance, because there are too many other interesting things to do. Until now they have had the good courtesy to quietly steal my money without interrupting the quiet enjoyment of my evenings. I think most middle class families do the same: they get on with it and they do not think about it.
Anyone like me following this path is about to get rudely awakened because they will have been receiving child benefit since April without realising that they need to pay it all back, and to pay it all back they need to register for self-assessment.
Importantly, then: if I am to avoid jail, for the first time in my life I have to actively interact with HMRC. Ignoring them is no longer an option. The same is true for a large section of the population who would rather spend time playing with their children.
Now might be a good time to publicise the idea of a flat tax.
Allison thinks the [bank risk] models are doomed from the get-go because they are based on fundamentally incorrect notions. “They always assume normal curves, and they try to manage things to a 99 percent probability. That means there’s only a 1 percent probability that certain bad things can happen. Well, there’s an interesting thing with a 1 percent probability: Give it long enough, and it becomes certain.”
– Former BB&T chief executive officer John Allison, quoted on page 84 of I Am John Galt, by Donald L Luskin and Andrew Greta. (The chapter on Paul Krugman is gruesome reading.)
I heard Allison speak in London about a year ago, and he’s very good.
If you think what Edward Snowden did was wrong, read this article by John Lanchester.
Circumcision ruling: European bureaucrats are effectively banning Jewish boys, argues Brendan O’Neill, quoting the Jerusalem Post and unintentionally supported in his argument by the creepy quote from the Council of Europe in which it calls for “debate” and in the same breath announces what the result of said debate is to be. And this was put forward by a German rapporteur. I am not usually one for endless digs at modern Germans for evil done before most of them were born, but, Frau Rupperecht, do you have any idea of what that must look like to some of the Jerusalem Post’s older readers?
And yet – irreversible modification of a child’s body without the child’s consent. Gulp.
And yet again – parents irreversibly modify their children’s bodies by surgery all the time.
We have discussed this several times before, acrimoniously. Any new thoughts? Any constructive reformulations of old thoughts?
I have a question for medically knowledgeable readers. I gather that a far higher proportion – 79% in 2002 – of men in the US are circumcised than in the UK, yet the number uncircumcised is also huge. There must therefore be scope for large scale comparisons of outcomes. Have these been done? Does male circumcision make much difference?
We are the ones, we militants without a strategy of emancipation, who are (and who have been for some time now) the real aphasics! And it is not the sympathetic and unavoidable language of movementist democracy that will save us.
– Professor Alain Badiou, in an article arguing that “We need to rediscover the language of Communism.”
Things are also grim here in Arkham, Massachusetts but as Samizdata commenter Bobby B has managed to get this message out to the world, I had to share it with you…
Don’t know if this report will get through – the power grid is failing, internet technicians throughout the country are being deported as their work visas expire, and my federal-law-mandated ergonomic keyboard is dissolving even as I type – but I’ll send it anyway, because this news must get out.
With the total collapse of the United States of America now entering its seventeenth hour, the situation is grim. Here in Minnesota, with our frigid winter approaching, we are unable to procure supplies of heating oil and natural gas until interstate transport of these commodities resumes. Tanker trucks remain backed up for miles at our southern border awaiting the printing of additional Federal Hazardous Waste Transport Authorization forms.
Across the state, worried citizens are being confronted with grocers’ foodstocks which have received no federal inspection stamp. With hungry children waiting anxiously at home, hoping against hope that Today Will Bring Food, bewildered parents are facing for the first time in their generation the choice between saving their childrens’ lives, or obeying federal law. Across the Plains states, children are perishing in droves.
All throughout the states, ongoing and viable Alternative Sustainable Energy businesses – businesses that employ tens of people – are closing their doors and turning off their lights, no longer able to sell solar panels and windmills without the federal checks that buttress the consumers’ heavily-subsidized prices. The 12,715-year payback period for solar panels which consumers will now experience in the absence of government purchase-price subsidization has crushed this entire economic sector – the fastest-growing sector of our economy for the last seven years – leaving entire barrooms filled to capacity every evening with old Obama donation bundlers commiserating about the end of the good times and trying to sell each other their $30,000,000 coastal homes.
. . .
As I type this, the air in our underground shelter is becoming more foul and depleted. Frantic calls to the EPA for advice and support go unanswered – the phones just ring and ring. My wife says, open the damned windows, you big idiot, but I dare not, at least without proper approval. She would seemingly expose our lovely children to hazards unknown, without even bothering to check with The Authorities. Bitch.
As you can see, the walls of our suburban basement seem to be closing in on us, making us all edgy and tense and hostile. Our new Hobbesian existence strains the bonds of our shared civility, and I do believe that another day in this hell will find us treating people of differing genders and races in unequal ways, refusing to share our wealth with those among us who are too uneducated to understand that bar-hopping 24/7 will not generate wealth for themselves, and drinking unhomogenized milk.
If you read this report – if the internet remains functional for a few more hours – please – Send Warm Clothes.
US government begins shutdown after Congress debates end in stalemate
Far-called our navies melt away—
On dune and headland sinks the fire—
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
With the watchmen gone from their posts, there can be very little chance that any of our American readers can have survived the plagues, the zombies, the rampaging NRA members and lack of a panda-cam. Theirs has been the fate of Belgium.
Mourn. Survive. But can our doom be far behind, now that they have said they will scrap the Human Rights Act?
The truth may set you free, but since the media is firmly on the side of serfdom, I doubt we will ever hear truth about socialism from big media. The recent attempts to define “journalist” in the US may indicate that the system realizes that the internet has made the ability to control internal news more difficult.
However, international reporting is where the legacy media still has a lot of power and it has been and will be used to protect their ideological partners (like Cuba and Venezuela) from responsibility for their failures. The media watches socialists ‘create a desert and call it prosperity’ over and over again and lies about it. This has been going on since Duranty and the NY Times won Pulitzers for lying about ‘Papa Joe’ and the early USSR.
– Gary Poteat, commenting here on Samizdata.
Venezuela food shortages: ‘No one can explain why a rich country has no food’
I know you all want to jump in and offer your suggestions. Do not, however, be too scathing. Seriously, the clue train shows signs of having made an unscheduled stop at the Guardian station. The article mentions, albeit in a hurried way and sandwiched between irrelevancies, price controls as a possible explanation for the mystery. And this is downright subversive:
For Oliveros, an additional cause for the shortage of basic food staples is the decrease in agricultural production resulting from seized companies and land expropriations.
From the way that is phrased one could almost think that a decrease in agricultural production was a result of seized companies and land expropriation. I am beginning to wonder if the “No one can explain it” title was selected by either the writer or the mole among the Guardian‘s sub editors in order to call forth the responses it did get.
[T]his Conceit of Levelling of property and Magistracy is so ridiculous and foolish an opinion, as no man of brains, reason, or ingenuity, can be imagined such a sot as to maintain such a principle, because it would, if practiced destroy not only any industry in the world, but raze the very foundation of generation, and of subsistence or being of one man by another. For as industry and valour by which the societies of mankind are maintained and preserved, who will take the pains for that which when he hath gotten is not his own, but must be equally shared in, by every lazy, simple, dronish sot? or who will fight for that, wherein he hath no other interest, but such as must be subject to the will and pleasure of another, yea of every coward and base low spirited fellow, that in his sitting still must share in common with a valiant man in all his brave and noble achievement? The ancient encouragement to men that were to defend their Country was this: that they were to hazard their persons for that which was their own, to wit, their own wives, their own children, their own Estates. And this give me leave to say, and that in truth, that those men in England, that are most branded with the name of Levellers, are of all in that Nation, most free from any design of Levelling, in the sense we have spoken of.
– John Lilburne defends himself against the accusation that he was a “Leveller”. But, the name stuck. Last night Richard Carey gave a fascinating talk about the Levellers, and about the seventeenth century historical context within which the Levellers proclaimed their ideas, in the course of which he quoted the above piece of writing.
Carl Watner includes it in this JLS article (p. 409) about Richard Overton.
Lisa Longstaff is a spokesperson for a group called Women Against Rape. She and and Lisa Avalos, assistant professor of law at the University of Kansas, wrote this article for the Guardian: Michael Le Vell’s acquittal is no reason to give rape defendants anonymity.
If you want to read my views on the anonymity issue, see here. The discussion of that was not what shocked me. This was:
But the prosecution of women for alleged false reports strengthens the myth that women frequently lie about being raped and discourages victims from coming forward. It diverts law enforcement away from thoroughly investigating rape and lets rapists loose on the public. It is not in the public interest, and must be stopped.
The writers literally believe that no woman ever should be prosecuted for making a false report of rape. Not that the decision to prosecute should be weighed carefully, that it should never be made. Effectively that it should be legal to knowingly and maliciously make a false report of rape. This cannot be put down to careless phrasing; as pointed out by commenter snoozeofreason, Ms Longstaff has made the same demand at greater length here.
I was relieved to see the response from Guardian commenters, particularly StVitusGerulaitis and EllisWyatt, but that relief could not overcome my disgust that a law professor could be so utterly indifferent to any notion of justice, or that a representative of a group that claims to want to help real rape victims could lobby in favour of those who are parasitical upon them.
I think we should rephrase the analogy. The position of scientists dependent on the approbation of their peers and government funding is knowing that to dissent from the thermogeddon narrative is as disastrous careerwise as that of the Islamic apostate’s future, and so keeps his silence as do the massed ranks of Muslims unenthusiastic about violent jihad but unwilling to draw the attention of Islamists to themselves by speaking out. I think Mehdi Hasan should understand that.
– Samizdata commenter ‘Ljh’, commenting here.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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