It says in The Register that the BBC’s archgeek (ex-Micro$oft) is now demanding that people who have no television set, but watch non-simultaneous BBC content using ‘iPlayer’, are required to pay the television tax.
The point of this, as ever, is not to tax those who watch the BBC using computers; it is to tax privately-owned computers in general, on the basis that if you own one at all you could use it to watch the BBC.
On and on it goes.
The BBC is an outrage in a nominally civilised country: a state propaganda machine paid for by an iniquitous and steadily widening tax on all kinds of information equipment. It makes us the laughing-stock of the world, and should have been abolished decades ago.
No iPlayer; no Flash player; no television set; if Radio 3 goes on getting worse, with the music regularly interrupted by the patronising bletherings of slotty-spectacle-wearing Grauniad readers, before long no BBC at all.
I won’t watch this rotten organisation’s TV propaganda and I’m damned if I’ll fund any of it.
I’m with you, man. I haven’t had a TV for years, and don’t miss it at all. When I do see it at friends’ houses, I notice the hypnotic, mesmerising effect it has. It’s like a sedative.
The BBC is a relic, and the licence fee unjustifiable. If there is a case for tax-payer funding, it should come from central government, which would be far more efficient. No doubt you would reject this, but at least this would be cheaper to administer (it would save the cost of the hundred letters I’ve received over recent years).
I believe that it takes about six weeks, on average, for the low-level hypnosis imposed by television to wear off.
There doesn’t seem to be much justification for the state funding of broadcasting, to be honest. If, however, it were to be preserved on sentimental grounds then I’m sure there’d be a much better way of organising it than this.
We stopped getting letters from TVL after (a) I phoned them up and asked them legal-sounding questions in my best lawyer’s voice, and (b) they came round to find nobody here, but the front window plastered with posters about whitedot.org (the international campaign against television), one of which we’d designed ourselves.