French poet French Valery famously said, “everything changes but the avant-garde.” The same could be said of the recurring pet arguments online. The same debates have raged seemingly since the turn of this century, with floods of armchair lawyers dispensing legal advice, dismissing political institutions out of hand, and proudly declaring the end of whatever institution rubs them the wrong way. It would be laughable if these ideas weren’t only growing more entrenched and persistent with time. Below are five glib, spurious or just plain boring arguments I’d like to see put to rest this year.

A) The RIAA is idiotic, so therefore creative producers should not be compensated for their labor
This debate’s been raging for a decade now, and the ridiculousness of the music industry’s response to P2P has been equalled by the idiocy of the counter-arguments online. I’m not even going to dignify the typical comments with a response (ie, “I DL music of Bittorrent to try before I buy”…really? Got some receipts?) Here are some really basic points:

1) Nothing would make me happier than to see the RIAA and their lawyers practicing the rest of their working lives in a call center in Bangladore.
2) Most musicians are not Radiohead, and are scraping by on poverty-level income.
3) For most musicians, this poverty-level income is eked out by playing shows, selling CD’s and merch, and working day jobs.
4) Most musicians and artists do rely on the sales of their product to make their work sustainable.
5) In an economy that only supports the professional creative creator, then the only amateur creative creators who will succeed are the ones with trust funds or other such well-heeled, gifted amounts of money.

Still, a prevailing response to the RIAA/piracy debate — a debate that if anything else is more tedious than compelling at this point — is not only that individuals consider it to be their right to take content for free, but that the creators deserve no compensation whatsoever for their work. This comment about the commercial viability of recorded music yesterday on Metafilter is emblematic:

(Blah blah blah, gotta eat. So get a day job.)

Hey all you angry commenting coders who make far more in one year than most creative producers will make in a decade: when all the coders over at Bungie start knocking out the code for Halo 4 on their lunch hour and while their kids are sleeping, maybe that’ll be an equitable request. Until then, stop demanding $60,000 a year for your efforts while you demand all creative producers and artists to subsidize their work with clerical work.

These arguments are generally made within the music/RIAA/piracy debate, but show up increasingly in reference to many other forms of creative output — fiction and nonfiction writing, visual arts, design, handcrafts et al. People deserve to be paid for their talents and trade, especially if there is a market for their work. No amount of dismissing this fact justifies your desire to own Trent Reznor’s entire discography without paying for it, coder.

B) Vote for Ron Paul / OMG Libertarianism will save America 1!!11!
The libertarian undercurrent of the blogerati has come out in full force for Ron Paul, a anti-gay, anti-abortionist who believes that all public works will be done by a wish and a prayer. He doesn’t want us to pay taxes, you see. The Paul enthusiasm only confirms that techies like to consider themselves liberal in rhetoric but in practice care only about their own bank accounts and lower taxes. Also, that they don’t have the slightest understanding of how politics works. Here’s a tip, pretend-citizens: when the privatized fire department charges you for putting out a fire in the west wing of your Ayn Rand library, don’t expect any sympathy.

C) Citizen /Amateur Journalism is better than professional journalism
Operating a web 2.0 tip line is not the same as deputizing a generation of journalists. Journalism take s a lot of time, research and resources, and Internet User #603829172 leaking a document to the Daily Kos does not make them a journalist. It makes them a source perhaps, a tipster. Which leads to the next argument…

D) Boo! Hiss! Journalists!
The rise of blogs, the 2004 scandals of Jason Blair and Dan Rather, and continued media consolidation has enabled a lot of glib dismissal of a profession that, among many of those who practice it, still holds a lot of honor. This country would be a even more grim place after the last eight years without courageous reporting of the handful of reporters embedded in Iraq and Afghanistan, the muckraking of Seymour Hersh, the clear-eyed old-school reporting of Bill Moyers or the producers of Frontline, recently canned Chicago Reader journalist John Conroy, hundreds of unheralded beat reporters across the country. This is something that the single-zygote mouth breathers on Digg will never understand, and its not in the interests of the fat cat refugees of old media who represent the form’s worst excesses to make this point (looking at you, Jeff Jarvis.)

So please, all of you, stop it already. These arguments are ridiculous, they show far too much engagement with online discussion forums and too little engagement with reality, and they’re growing increasingly tedious — and entrenched. If nothing else, please find some new pet topics to opine upon and demonstrate your complete misunderstanding of complicated topics with glib one-line responses.