Heard on Talk Radio

So yesterday I was driving around, getting some things done on my lunch hour, and I decided to listen to the AM "progressive talk" station that I keep seeing billboards for (AM 1150). I ended up flipping back and forth between that and some conservative talk station that was broadcasting Michael Medved's show. Medved was talking about the anti-gay marriage amendment, and he kept insisting that it wasn't a ban on gay marriage. "I would like anyone to call me up and explain to me how this bill is a ban on gay marriage, when gay marriage isn't mentioned anywhere in the bill. All this bill does is define marriage as consisting of one man and one woman." Now, of course it's no surprise that Michael Medved is a complete asshole--duh. But the level of either dishonesty or stupidity in that statement is astounding. Whether it says the words "gay marriage" or not, the effect and intention of the amendment would be to ban gay marriage. I mean, look, if there was an amendment that said, for the purpose of constitutional law, a "person" is defined as a property-owning, white male, would you try to claim that it was not an attempt to deny rights to black people or women?

Since everyone else is linking to it, here's Jon Stewart absolutely slaying Bill Bennett on the issue the other night. What people like Bennett and Medved undoubtedly want is for gay people to just suck it up, go back into the closet, either get into a heterosexual marriage or stay celibate, and just keep the whole "gay thing" to themselves, and since that's just never going to happen again, the best thing to do to preserve the family is to open that institution up to gayfolk. Sorry, reality.

Another talk radio thing, probably more interesting than that, was this discussion on Talk of the Nation about the rise of YouTube and viral video on the web, which ended up having a lot of discussion of creative commons and the need for copyright laws that have anything to do with the real world of the electronic age. One caller phoned in with this comment:

I'm an internet content producer, and we actually sell our content for cash money. The one problem I have, or the one thing I don't understand is that there's kind of an ideology of criminality that's formed around the internet, that people think internet content is free. I have customers calling me, and being angry at me because I'm not giving away free stuff. My question is, what is being done by YouTube to educate people? When you say you stream the videos and not download them, it doesn't matter. What is being done, besides harsh penalties, to inform people that these are people's livelihoods, that people make money off of them?

Now, I'm not exactly sure what his concern is. Maybe it's that he doesn't want his content ending up on YouTube, which is perfectly understandable. But it seems more like he's angry because internet video has been devalued, and it's hard to get people to pay for it, which really means he's mad at the market. I don't know what the guy is selling, but I have to say that, yeah, it would have to be something pretty fucking spectacular for me to pay for video content on the web! You can find creative ways to make money off of that content, but is anyone surprised that people don't want to pay for his videos?