That is a sweet sentence, right there. Sounds like the start of an essay or something. Eloquent yet provocative.

Really, the whole issue-- or my conception of it, anyway-- is so simple that a five-year-old could have figured it out. Information is essentially different from material property. If I have an apple, and I sell it to you, you now have the apple, and I do not. You can then go on to sell that apple to anyone else, and it's no skin off my nose. If I tell you that it will rain tomorrow, now you know it and I still know it. If you go and tell all your friends what I said, I will then have nothing to sell. That is the key issue here. No one would get mad if I started giving away apples over the Internet.

Applester

In the past, complex information was necessarily tied to matter. Records were on scrolls. Paintings were on canvases, walls, or vases. That has changed. Thanks to digital technology, even really massive information like movies or games can be shared with the ease of my telling you the weather. Thus, we have thousands of people trying to find ways of preventing the public from giving away their music simply because they are still trying to force a material economic system on the immaterial.

You cannot put a saddle on a cow and call it a horse. We have two different things here, and they need to be treated differently. The longer we try to force songs and cartoons to wear the suit and tie of capitalism, the longer it will take to change.

Artists, of course, deserve to be compensated for their work (except for Aaron Carter), but who's to say that that compensation should be in direct proportion to the usage of their material? Porn companies have a lot of customers, but most people agree that porn stars (and Aaron Carter), as a rule, do not deserve to become billionaires.

In the olden days, even great composers and artists usually died poor and unappreciated. I'm not saying that's a good thing, but some musicians could sure use a smack upside the head. Preferably with a live trout.

And I want to be the one who gets to do it.

As a member of this new, largely post-modern generation, I feel a kind of sympathy with vandals, anarchists, and assorted rapscallions. The disrespect they show to conventional authourity (it's all corrupt anyway, right?) is refreshing. I'm not talking about arsonists or rapists, here-- I'm talking about people who hit Bill Gates in the face with a pie. Now that's cool.

Some people try to find an excuse for their behaviour, try to propose anarchy as a workable government model. I don't like the idea of a completely anarchist state. I mean, how do you rebel against it? Form corporations? Rebellion is an essential part of adolescence. If we don't have an oppressive system against which to bang our heads, we may have brain cells left upon reaching maturity. Society will go downhill after that, my friends.

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There is, I believe, such a thing as too much intelligence, but only in a macroscopic sense. People need stupidity. Individuals do not.

I guess I subscribe to Plato's idea of the Philosopher Kings, despite the fact that I have only the vaguest idea of what it's about. I know he did say, however, that those who are most fit to rule are least inclined to do so. I totally agree with that.

Of course, before we all hop on the Ancient Greek bandwagon, let's remember that this is the guy who proposed the whole man/boy love thing. That's supposedly coming back into vogue now, though, so what do I know?

Sexual ethics are weird like that. In theory (and that's a big leap), it doesn't hurt anybody to be promiscuous, so long as you use the proper protection. Therefore, a lot of people deduce that there really is no sexual morality. In a way, I think they're right. I have two sets of laws to which I subscribe: a Christian morality, and an Absolute ethic. Christian morality (henceforth, "morality") includes everything God commanded us to do, and I can only apply it to myself. I can hardly demand that a Hindu or a Wiccan follow the Third Commandment. Absolute ethics (henceforth, "ethics"), have only one commandment-- do no harm. Aside from theft, assault, and murder, there's really very few rules in this category. I don't see how you could run a society with laws based exclusively on Absolute ethics.

I once heard a man featured on the news criticize homosexuality in rather graphic terms because it was "unnatural". That , to me, is ridiculous. Cars are unnatural. Polyester is unnatural. Eyeglasses are unnatural. Sapience breeds perversion. If you want to enforce some biological ethic, you first have to return naked to the jungles.

I get flak, sometimes, for Terra's presence in the strip. On the one hand, I've got my parents concerned because their darling baby boy is actually aware of such things. On the other, a lot of people are mad about the fact that the one homosexual in 1/0 happens to be a complete <female dog>. Terra's not a <female dog> because of my sexualism. She's a <female dog> because I wanted a <female dog> to balance out the personalities, and <female dogs> generally have to be female.