Anonymous asked: Do you ever plan to actually participate in the zeitgeist, or when you're a old man looking back on the sum o your life will you be content with having written a few dozen effort posts?
Yeah, I feel what you’re saying, but writing IS traditionally how writers participate in the zeitgeist.
Anonymous asked: Writing what amounts to a few dozen printed pages over the course of years for an audience of hundreds is not really writing that works your will into the world. Even Leopardi hit seven volumes.
I recognize the voice of this anon and you’re actually pretty good at recognizing and invoking my insecurities as a spur to action so uh nice
Yeah, I should be more famous and more people should be under my influence agree with you there; my plan to that end was to write good stuff and put it where people could see, which brought me all the fame and influence I have so far.
Which isn’t nothing; mere hundreds though it might be I’m upstream from people a lot are downstream of and more of the kind of people with discriminating taste find me through them all the time
Maybe the key is networking and it’s not like that’s never paid off for me before; I found a circle of fellows in the LessWrong diaspora and got Scott Alexander occasionally showing my stuff around because I impressed nydwracu who talked me up to them
I don’t live in Brooklyn or London though and I don’t plan to; I don’t play to the vanity of my inferiors and I don’t plan to; I don’t tweet and though I’m sure I could raise my profile with a well-plotted campaign of leaving sick burns in the right people’s mentions Twitter is terrible, the things people make of themselves to get attention there are terrible, it’s mostly just a special case of “playing to the vanity of your inferiors” anyway
Maybe I should put out some longform, at the least I could package up some of my best tumblr work and add a few fresh pieces and… what? e-publish and buy ads on 4chan?
Anonymous asked: just by the way I got into late 19th century american police corruption and politics because of you and whoa it's fascinating, I would greatly enjoy if you would go on
more like “son buddy johnny “large ears” mcmaster, my main man, my most promising recruit [agressive back pat] what’s here gonna happen is that if me your favourite mentor get the newspaper boy to get me more happy news about our beloved senator, then I can pretty much guarantee that big boss “honey pot” oreilly is gonna hear about your mom’s flower shop”
Oh nice. Def. read Plunkett of Tammany Hall if you haven’t, if that’s not the link I got you into this with in the first place.
One thing I’m looking into lately is lynching and vigilante law. Got the standard background picture of lynching as a specifically racial Dixie thing but realizing that much of the country, between the Civil War and the 1920s, was developing traditions of extralegal killing.
I talked here about the Unwritten Law, that a man was entitled to (=routinely acquitted of) stalk and kill those who put hands on his women. Meanwhile the “true man” and “American mind” doctrines set into law something like modern Stand Your Ground laws. In popular conception the list of things a true man was not expected to tolerate rather than deploy righteous violence was longer, in practical application it turned on the testimony of survivor-defendants.
Not just individuals committed individual acts but communities came together, enacted deadly purges, and then published triumphant histories about it, as Regulators, Moderators, Committees of Vigilance.
(cf. the Vehmic courts of medieval Germany, particularly the resemblance of the Gilded Age to feudalism insofar as the state secures magnates’ holdings and leaves the people to themselves)
Anonymous asked: just by the way I got into late 19th century american police corruption and politics because of you and whoa it's fascinating, I would greatly enjoy if you would go on
more like “son buddy johnny “large ears” mcmaster, my main man, my most promising recruit [agressive back pat] what’s here gonna happen is that if me your favourite mentor get the newspaper boy to get me more happy news about our beloved senator, then I can pretty much guarantee that big boss “honey pot” oreilly is gonna hear about your mom’s flower shop”
Oh nice. Def. read Plunkett of Tammany Hall if you haven’t, if that’s not the link I got you into this with in the first place.
One thing I’m looking into lately is lynching and vigilante law. Got the standard background picture of lynching as a specifically racial Dixie thing but realizing that much of the country, between the Civil War and the 1920s, was developing traditions of extralegal killing.
I talked here about the Unwritten Law, that a man was entitled to (=routinely acquitted of) stalk and kill those who put hands on his women. Meanwhile the “true man” and “American mind” doctrines set into law something like modern Stand Your Ground laws. In popular conception the list of things a true man was not expected to tolerate rather than deploy righteous violence was longer, in practical application it turned on the testimony of survivor-defendants.
Not just individuals committed individual acts but communities came together, enacted deadly purges, and then published triumphant histories about it, as Regulators, Moderators, Committees of Vigilance.
(cf. the Vehmic courts of medieval Germany, particularly the resemblance of the Gilded Age to feudalism insofar as the state secures magnates’ holdings and leaves the people to themselves)
someone created a random generator that creates randomized inspirational quotes overlaid on random images in a soothing fashion and each and every image is comic gold
it’s pretty much the best thing ever and here are some of my favorites so far
so good
I’m getting this one made into a motivational poster for my home office
Before the 1960s, the basic wealth management problem for every high-income Briton was that capital gains weren’t taxable, but income was. If you earned money from selling services, then it’d be taxable income, but if earned money from the sale of capital, then it wouldn’t be taxed at all.
David Lough No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money (Head of Zeus, 2015) tells the delightful story of Winston Churchill and his lawyers’ long battles to evade tax on his personal income, including one ridiculous attempt to get the receipts from his syndicated newspaper articles characterized as sales of capital rather than as income.
In 1941, the Chairman of the Inland Revenue advised the Chancellor the Exchequer that Churchill’s lawyers had been “unable to produce any evidence which could lead me to the view that these were not taxable.” There was no reason it should be: the contracts were for a fixed sum and didn’t involve the entire copyright, so the receipts were transparently in the nature of income, not sales of capital. “He wants to argue that each excerpt was a capital transaction in itself: but it seems to me a hopeless contention,” the Commissioner advised his staff. “However we must listen.”
On May 19, 1942, weeks after the fall of Singapore, Churchill spent the afternoon away from the House of Commons speaking with his newly-hired solicitor about the prospects of an appeal:
I was warned that he would probably give me ten minutes, that I must be very brief and that I must tell him (if such was the case) that he had two or more courses open to him. Thereafter he would instantly make up his mind which course he would pursue… I was ushered into the Cabinet Room… and started off and said my piece which I had carefully prepared. [Churchill] after a short time got up and started walking around the table, talking as he did so, with the result that, when he arrived at each end he was completely out of earshot. … “If I appeal, will it be entirely private; can anyone get to know about it?’ I replied that it would be entirely private before the Commissioners, but if we won, they could appeal further and then the hearing would be in public. … And so it went on. My “ten minutes” was eventually turned into one and a half hours, but when I left I came away with instructions to lodge an appeal. I remember walking down Whitehall and buying an evening paper, the headline of which was “Why wasn’t Churchill in the House Today?” and at least I felt that was a question which I could answer with some conviction!
Churchill won that battle, even though he really shouldn’t have – the appeal was decided by Inland Revenue’s general commissioners, who ruled in Churchill’s favor at the end of September 1942 – but the earnings from those articles were small compared to Churchill’s copyright in his books. Churchill cleared £50,000 – untaxed – from assigning the copyright in his Life of Marlborough to Filippo Del Giudice’s production company, Two Cities, and another £50,000 – untaxed – from assigning the copyright in his History of the English Speaking Peoples to Sir Alexander Korda and MGM.
The great battle would be over Churchill’s memoirs. He postponed writing them for years; he couldn’t figure out how to make them pay. Even after the war, the top rates on personal income would be punitive – 97.5 per cent during the war, 92.5 per cent in the October 1945 budget, and back up to 97.5 per cent in the April 1946 budget – so Churchill needed some way to transform income into capital.
Soon enough, Churchill’s lawyers figured it out. Winston Churchill would gift his personal papers to a trust administered by his wife, Clementine, and his son, Randolph, whereon the trust would sell the copyright in the papers to the publishers. Then the publishers would hire Churchill to edit the papers – that is, write the memoirs – for a nominal sum. And it worked!
… it was an offer from the Eton-educated American newspaperman Marshall Field III that gave Churchill’s advisers the kernel of the idea which they eventually used to avoid a large measure of tax. While offering Churchill a five-year deal worth $1.25 million for newspaper articles, Field mentioned that his Chicago Sun would also be part of a consortium bidding at least $1 million for the memoirs. He then suggested that, before writing anything, Churchill should gift his personal papers to a trust for his children and grandchildren. The trust could then sell the book rights before employing him for a much lower sum to ‘edit’ the text – only this last link in the chain would attract tax.
‘They certainly disclose an interesting situation in America, if only it were possible for us to take advantage of it,’ Churchill confided to Lord Camrose.
[…]
By mid-February Charles Graham-Dixon had prepared a detailed tax scheme for Churchill’s memoirs. He had discounted the safest option, the so-called ‘tin-box’ scheme that would delay publication until after Churchill’s death, on the assumption that Churchill or his family would need the money during his lifetime. Instead, he advised, Churchill should gift his papers to a family trust before he started writing his memoirs; then the trustees should sell the copyright of the papers, for a lump sum, to a publishing group; finally that group should make its own separate arrangements with Churchill to write the memoirs for a lesser sum.
The effect of divorcing the documents’ ownership from the memoir’s authorship, he contended, would be to leave the publisher’s money in the trustees’ hands as capital, while only Churchill’s fee as an author would attract any tax. He stressed two points: Churchill must gift the documents before writing a word; and the trustees, not Churchill, must settle the publishing contract. The prospects for success, Graham-Dixon thought, were ‘reasonable’.
[…]
Arriving back in Britain in late March, Churchill continued to claim publicly that he had not made a final decision whether to publish his memoirs. Within a week, however, he had asked Bill Deakin to help him write them and his solicitor Anthony Moir to establish the trust for his papers. Moir’s first draft suggested that the trust should include all papers from Churchill’s birth up to the end of the war; that Churchill should appoint the trustees; that they should be able to publish only with his permission; and that, at his death, the trust’s capital should be divided equally among his children. A firm believer in primogeniture, Churchill changed Randolph’s share to a half.
The Chartwell Literary Trust came into being on 31 July 1946 with Clementine, Brendan Bracken and Professor Lindemann (now Lord Cherwell) as its first trustees. Its official objective was to safeguard Churchill’s papers for posterity, without any mention of the tax advantages: to this end, Churchill expressed his wish that the trustees should eventually pass the papers on to Randolph or Randolph’s own son Winston, one of whom he hoped would write his official biography. Churchill was aware that the duke of Marlborough was considering selling Blenheim in the aftermath of war, so he wanted to make sure that the papers would ‘remain intact at Chartwell and it may well be that my son or grandson will ultimately give them to the National Trust, should Chartwell itself be vested in that Body’.
[…]
Meanwhile [in 1948] the Inland Revenue was on the point of deciding whether or not Churchill’s complicated tax scheme to shelter the majority of the income earned by The Second World War was sound. On their decision rested a much greater sum of money than Churchill had lost through the farms. The local tax inspector, a Mr Boarland, had asked to see a copy of Churchill’s contract with The Daily Telegraph and any other ‘relevant’ document, which Anthony Moir took to mean the parallel agreement between the newspaper and Churchill’s Literary Trust. After consulting Churchill Moir decided against volunteering any extra documents, but instead he disclosed to Boarland:
“In July 1946, Mr Churchill created a Settlement of cash, a large number of personal records and memoranda covering his life both public and private during the period of approximately 1906 to 1945, papers formerly belonging to Lord Randolph Churchill and a casket containing letters from the First Duke of Marlborough, which are of considerable value and were given to him by the Queen of the Netherlands at the close of the War. Under this Settlement no benefit, whether pecuniary or otherwise was reserved to Mr Churchill and this document is not in his possession or under his control.”
Churchill had sold his early copyrights after the war while ‘retired’ as an author, Moir added, but since resuming his writing career on 1 September 1946 Churchill had received twelve payments. Most of them, he contended, were ‘capital moneys’ for the Secret Session Speeches. However, Moir ended his carefully worded letter by offering the tax inspector one small morsel: Odhams Press had paid £500 to reproduce sixteen of Churchill’s paintings in a new version of Painting as a Pastime, which he admitted could possibly be construed as a royalty and therefore subject to tax. ‘If the point is pressed Mr Churchill will submit, without prejudice, to an assessment in respect of this sum,’ he offered.
There followed a ‘very friendly’ meeting at the tax inspector’s office, during which Moir insisted that Churchill’s prime motive for setting up the trust had naturally been to safeguard these ‘vitally important documents’. For more than a month the most senior minds at the Inland Revenue, including the chief inspector of claims (Intelligence Section), pored over Moir’s letter and the documents, but they could find no ‘catch’.
Churchill’s solicitor was confident of the final outcome and in February all five members of the Inland Revenue Board signed a piece of paper that allowed Boarland to confirm that ‘no liability to Income tax arises under the present law in respect of the £375,000 payable by The Daily Telegraph to the Trustees – either on Mr Churchill or on the trustees.’
These days, of course, legislation has reduced the tax preference on this transaction – it might even have made it unworkable – but it’s a stirring story. If Winston Churchill was, as A.J.P. Taylor called him, “the savior of his country”, then his lawyers were the men who saved the savior of their country – well, saved him a lot of money, at least.
Sea otters and giant river otters are like if someone got two artists to design a giant otter, but ended up with two very different ideas on what they should look like cause one draws hello kitty fanart and the other was a nihilist.
Ok, but like… seriously.
this looks like sea ottters reacting to the incredible violence of a river otter
