Incoherent

Paul Wells has been doing a good job of telling it like it is over the last little while. In his most recent post he takes the Conservative government to task for their failure to appoint someone to head an inquiry into the deaths caused by listeriosis, linking it to a pattern of incompetence and inability to follow through shown by the Conservatives.

Links to Some Good Posts

Rather than coming up with a clever title, I decided to go with the 'realist' school of post-title-writing this time around.

Anyway, it's always nice when someone who generally seems to know what they're talking about writes a column which supports one of your long held positions. In this case it's Paul Wells, writing in Maclean's who hunts down the provinces 'fiscal imbalance' whinesrationalizations like the herd of stray sickly cattle that they are and mercilessly puts them out of their misery.

Meanwhile, over at 'How to Save the World', Dave Pollard talks about how people will believe what they want to hear (and disbelieve what they don't want to hear) and links to yet another in what seems to be becoming a long string of almost humourous (if you like black comedy) investigations into the methodology of global warming 'skeptics'.

Finally, it's a good thing that the Blank Out Times is an online site rather than being published on real paper because otherwise the 100 acre woods would probably be down to about 85 acres by now in order to supply the pulp mill which would be required for the voluminous writings of the forest dwellers. This post on maps and wishes really puts the question of Native Reserves in Canada into an interesting context (in my opinion), and this post , after suggesting that the U.S. might invade Iran (which I doubt), then goes into long thorough detail on all the reasons why that would be a truly insane decision to make - I guess we just differ on the willingness of the U.S. to make an insane foreign policy decision.

Shouldn't We All be Paid for Our Work?

OK, enough about the Blog, back to Politics.

If Paul Krugman is the American columnist you should read if you only read one, then Maclean's columnist Paul Wells (and his Inkless Wells blog) is probably the Canadian equivalent. But is that going to stop me from nitpicking at a throwaway comment he made in a recent column? Of course not, if anything, the best need to be held to a higher standard.

The recent column in question included the following line,

I have enough musician friends that I'd really rather see musicians get paid for their work.

First off, there's a word for what happens when people set policy according to who their friends are, and I believe it is 'cronyism'. But I'm guessing that Wells' didn't really mean it the way it came out, so we'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

More interesting, and the reason I made this post, is the 'Musicians should get paid for their work' argument, which I've heard a number of times. The problem, to me, is that the word 'Work' has two (relevant) meanings.

From my girlfriend's concise (yet massive) Oxford dictionary:

1. activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a result.
2. such activity as a means of earning income

So taken on definition 2, the statement is basically that musicians should earn an income from the activity they take as a means of earning income, the logical fallacy of 'begging the question'.¹

Even if the people who say this have definition 1 in mind, their argument derives force from the fact that the reader has definition 2 in their mind. After all, shouldn't we all be paid for our work?

Given that the question we are trying to answer is, should musicians be paid for the music they create?, it would seem to be more (at least equally) intellectually honest to say that you think musicians should be paid for their hobby, but it doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it.

¹ Via the Nizkor Project,

Begging the Question is a fallacy in which the premises include the claim that the conclusion is true or (directly or indirectly) assume that the conclusion is true. This sort of "reasoning" typically has the following form.

1. Premises in which the truth of the conclusion is claimed or the truth of the conclusion is assumed (either directly or indirectly).
2. Claim C (the conclusion) is true.

In this case, the Premise is that what musicians are doing is work (in the sense of work being something you do and get paid for) and the conclusion which follows is that they should be paid for their work which they are doing to get paid for.

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Irony: The Blogger spellchecker suggests Nigger as an alternative to Nizkor.
Go Figure: The Blogger spell-check dictionary recognizes Nigger but not Blog???