[spellbanisher]

Wow, talk about a complete misinterpretation of what I wrote.

I was writing in response to Giggleton's appeal to emotion:

"What I do not believe, what is impossible for me to ever believe is that humanity is so base as to disregard its artists so completely, to neglect to compensate them for their extremely worthwhile contributions to the species."

What I was referring to was his naive belief that humanity is not capable of such baseness as failing to compensate its artists. Humanity is capable of great baseness, so relying on the goodness of others is not a smart bet.

Anyways, there are lots of things we should care about but don't. We should care about the 40 million children living in poverty in the richest country in history, but we don't. We have 10 plus billion to spend on cosmetic surgeries every year, yet millions of children don't have adequate access to healthcare.

We should care about the horrid conditions of our inner city schools, about the fact that the gap between white literacy and black literacy is greater than it has ever been in our nations history, including the days of slavery. We should care our inner city education is such a failure that the average black man in our country reads at an eighth grade level. But we don't. Not really. Not enough to do anything about it. Fixing this problem might mean that poor billionaires and millionaires might have to pay an extra three percent on their taxes. We wouldn't want to impinge on their liberty. Let's elect a savior or a scapegoat, then blame him when he can't fix all our problems.

We should care about the excess of a billion people in the world who are starving, who can't afford adequate food. How much would it cost to end world hunger? About 30 billion dollars a year. That's about half Bill Gates net worth. That's less than 3 percent of what we gave to Wall Street in the Bailout. That's less than one-third the amount of money we spend fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq every year. That's one-twentieth of the Pentagon's budget. It's about one-fortieth of what all nations in the world spend on their militaries.

We should care about the fact that the metals used in our computers, televisions, tablets, and readers are harvested by slaves in the Congo and enrich genocidal regimes.

We should care that despite their claims, the world bank and other global economic institutions actually destroy third world countries. It's the same pattern again and again. A country asks for economic aid, speculators rush in, extract as much wealth out of the country as possible, a bubble is created, the speculators panic, the bubble bursts, and the nation is left in worse condition than it was before. That nation is then forced to adopt "austerity measures," i.e., cutting wasting social services like medicare and public education. They still got to pay their loans back too, so instead of those nations tax payer dollars going to pay for services such as infrastructure development they go to paying debts to the world bank and other global economic institutions.

We should care that advertisers in this country have deliberately destroyed the self-esteem of our women, have created in them an indelible sense of inadequacy and insecurity, just so that they can sell them an endless supply of cosmetic products. We should care that because of these advertising companies most women can't look in the mirror and not feel disgust or anguish, that this sense of inadequacy taunts them every hour of every day, that society accepts this as normal and that there is no escape.

We should care that despite the fact that it was Wall Street that crashed the world economy it's teachers and firefighters and policemen and immigrants that are getting blamed, that are being bombarded and disdained for their greed and power, despite the fact that most of them barely make enough to live off of. Meanwhile, Wall Street is back to the same practices that crashed the economy, making record profits, while the rest of the economy languishes.

We should care about the hundreds of millions of people who die of treatable diseases every year. We should care that our political leaders have propped up dozens of oppressive pro-american dictatorships all around the world. We should care that we are causing irreparable damage to the environment.

We should care that our government subsidizes agriculture and then dumps food in third world countries so that those countries can't afford to grow their own food. We should care that the clothes we donate to charities like Goodwill and Salvation Army are often bundled and sold to African merchants who sell them back home in Africa. Why is this important? Because in the 60's and 70's many African nations were industrializing, building up wealth and creating jobs through their textile industries. These second hand American clothes, priceless to many people in third world countries because they are from America, drove homegrown textile companies out of business, completing undoing the economic progress made by these African nations.

We should care that our nation is becoming deindustrialized through outsourcing, that global corporations are pitting workers across the globe against each other to drive down wages, that our future may be a rat race to the bottom. Or maybe I should say free fall? That this global competition, instead of improving the lives of people everywhere, will become a contest of “how low can you go.”

We should care that the average executives salary has grown exponentially while the wages of the average family has stagnated and declined over the last thirty years. We should care that the gains our ancestors fought for over the last century are being unraveled by greedy magnates searching for any way to increase their bonuses. You should care that unless you are the boss you are seen as an expense and not an asset, that you will be used and then discarded.

We should care that our food is made of artificial ingredients like high fructose corn syrup, that tax payer dollars actually fund big agro factories that grow this crap, and that this crap is destroying the health of all Americans. Forget Health Care Reform. We need agricultural and food reform.

We should care that while we spend tens of billions on entertainment, give trillions away to Wall Street, while our infrastructure is crumbling, getting a grade of D from the Society of Engineers.

Sure, we care about all these things, but not enough to do anything about it. Yet you expect people to care enough to pay artists out of the goodness of their hearts?

If anything, we have too much access, not too little. Maybe we would know about these things, maybe we would even care enough to do something about these things, if we didn't waste every free hour watching television and movies, reading magazines and junk novels, listening to pop music, playing video games, and pissing away time on internet surfing. If anything our unparalleled access to information has been a distraction from things that matter, not a gateway to a better future.

If anything, our unparalleled access to information has made us esteem it too little. As Tom Paine says in the opening paragraph of “The American Crisis,” “What we Obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.” For us that dearness is our labor, our sacrifice of time and energy. Money represents that sacrifice, and when we pay for our information it should be a reminder that nothing is free, that everything has cost, that the work you consume required hundreds if not thousands of hours of labor and sacrifice on the part of the artist. Having to pay for access is not an obstruction of liberty; it is an acknowledgment of the reality of cost, it is an impetus to work and create value so we can have what we want, it is an affirmation of the dignity of the artist and his work, that it is worth something, that his sacrifices were dear, that his sacrifices are worth your sacrifices at least. You think we should pay when we can. So is the artist and his work only worth our leftovers?

Again, our unparalleled access to information has made us esteem it too little. We should cherish what we have. We should read, and reread, and ponder, and contemplate, and debate, and think critically. Instead we consume and we devour, as if a movie or a book is a bag of potato chips. One after another, there is so much out there that we wish to gorge ourselves, but it is all empty calories for the soul. We don't value our information. Instead of it making us smarter it makes us dumber. We chow it down and shit it out.

If anything, if we didn't spend every free hour of our lives looking to obliviate our consciousness with the next distraction, with the next dazzling spectacle, if we weren't drowning in content, we'd be able to focus on things that matter. We'd be able to focus on being good and transformative citizens instead of spending our lives as inconsequential consumers. Maybe then we wouldn't need to search for meaning or substance or the next analgesic. Maybe then we'd be able to actually make a difference.

You point out that many scientists have been inspired by shows such as Star Trek. Fine. So entertainment has done some good. No one denies that. But what of all the bad it is responsible for that greatly outweighs the good? What if kids didn't spend all their time on video games and television? Maybe we'd have more and better scientists and engineers. What if adults didn't spend all their time looking for the next titillation? Maybe we'd have an educated and alert citizenry, one that would hold the culprits for most of our worlds ails responsible, one that would value science and fund it so that our scientists wouldn't have to spend countless hours begging for more money so they can finish their research projects.

We have more access to information than we can ever digest. The internet has provided us with the means to become fully educated and informed. But have we? In the internet age we have become more misinformed, more insular, and more tribal. The internet allows us to escape from reality, to only have to deal with people we agree with, to live in fantasy land.

You say that entertainment should be free because any creation can alter your worldview, that any creation can be beneficial. Fine. If that is true, then Bon Apetite. There is more free stuff on the web than you can read in a thousand lifetimes. The latest novel at fanfiction.net is just as good as J.K. Rowling according to your perspective. All those stories at scribd.com are just as valuable as any pulitzer prize winner. Why don't you start with them. You say that the copyright regime is unnecessary for the production of high culture, yet you want the labor produced by the copyright regime. There are millions of people who agree with you whose work you can read. But you want the stuff that you can't have for free. Who's being greedy now?

Now, this doesn't mean that I don't think the current copyright regime is broken, because it is. I'll explain in another post. But there is no lack of access to information. Those billions of souls you say are hungry for knowledge are really just hungry for food.