Since I’ve never talked about this subject, let me just get this out there so you know where I’m coming from and can stop reading now if you want — I am a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment. I support the individual right to keep and bear arms and to engage in righteous self-defense. I support both concealed carry and open carry (open carry to a degree but I’ll save that for a different post).
To get an idea of what I think the Second Amendment means, watch this clip from Penn & Teller: Bullshit!:
Of all the issues this country is facing at the moment, Congress feels that the most important thing to do is reaffirm “In God We Trust” as the official motto of the United States. Yep, glad the House took time out to work on this utter waste of time:
Reaffirming ‘‘In God We Trust’’ as the official motto of the United States and supporting and encouraging the public display of the national motto in all public buildings, public schools, and other government institutions.
Point of clarification, when I say “physical media” I’m referring to both CDs, and digital copies (MP3s). Also, I’m not a subscriber to Spotify or Rhapsody. I do use Pandora often though. I’d also like to mention that I’m a fan of Scalzi’s work and recommend you check out any of his books.
A couple of weeks ago John Scalzi made a post on his blog titled “How I Buy Music, 2011 (Featuring John Wesley Harding)” where he described how he bought a John Wesley album from Amazon MP3 but didn’t download it. Instead, after buying the album from Amazon MP3 he went and streamed it via Spotify.
Scalzi explained his reasoning in the post but I was still confused so I asked him to explain further. You can read our dialogue in the comments section; I posted as Rocketboy001. In our dialogue Scalzi makes it quite clear that he thinks it’s the consumer’s responsibility to make sure that an artist is adequately compensated for their work and he throws on a heavy dose of guilt to drive his point home.
Let me first make one contention: Scalzi didn’t implicate guilt in his post; not directly anyway. But in our dialogue he did imply that consumers should feel bad if they get their music solely through streaming services because what an artist makes via streaming is “appallingly miniscule.” It’s disingenuous of Scalzi to deny (as he did) that he was trying to place guilt on the consumer in his dialogue with me. Scalzi says that if you care you’ll buy the artist’s album, and if you don’t then you don’t care about the artist.
You really should stop invoking god to support your position.
You know what you do – you invoke an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect being and assert that he/she/it supports your position. Since this god is so beyond everyone else you can assert their authority as an irrefutable argument to support your position.
