A sure way to get a laugh out of the smart people in college was to say "if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament." Hah! So true. 

If someone said that to me now, I'd say "you mean it isn't already?"

While my daughter was at karate tonight I wrote in a coffeehouse next door. In a chair a few yards away was an old man I remembered from my college days - an impossibly remote professorial type, Olympian in mien, utterly self-contained, exuding a strange sort of protective acid that warned off attempts to intrude.  

My daughter came bouncing in when her class was done, and I shut my laptop. We looked at the items in the bakery case, and I pointed out how some labels were in Papyrus font, and some were in Neutra, and how they clashed. The company did everything in Neutra. Papyrus was wrong. She rolls her eyes and says ONLY YOU THE FONT GOD CARES, which led to a discussion about fonts, and what they mean, and how you want your store to look, and how knowing the difference between one font and another is a skill you can parlay into a career. The quotidian intangibles of design.

The old man looked up with a cold stare: this vocal, fractious discussion of art was interfering with his reading. Children. Really. Must you?

No greater joy, Peter.  Ain’t it grand? 

I dream of the day when a man is judged not by the color of his skin, but by its thickness.

"Forced" to inhale nitrous oxide? At most college parties if you wheeled up a tank of the stuff the line would go down the block.

Newt can certainly explain conservatism, but it's the tone that occasionally grates. It's not the sound of a man explaining something; it's a guy telling you that what he's saying is obvious to anyone who hasn't replaced his brain with tapioca pudding. Sometimes he almost sounds as if he'd be angrier explaining these things, except that the people making the assertion don't merit his attention. But if you insist, it's like this. 

Imagine how well that tone works when he has to push an unpopular idea and his number are in the low 40s. 

Of course, Romney increasingly reminds me of a set of chattering teeth wound too tight lately. Not to happy with any of them. 

Good Lord, what's the matter with you people? Who wouldn't want to live in a world where Margaret Cho's idea of society has been completely manifested?

Sorry, personfested.

I enjoy Newt's skill at crafting historical references as much as the next Ricochetian, but this?

"I am the most seriously professorial politician since Woodrow Wilson.”

Ugh. That's three things I don't like, right there. 

Songwriter: "That is easily and by far the most frightening statement I've ever read on this website."

It's like arguing the details of property rights with a Communist. The individual is irrelevant; the Common Good matters above all. 

Santorum helps them reassure themselves that the scary religious GOP narrative is still valid. After all, the guy's very name sounds like the Latin for something used to disinfect holy relics. 

Valiuth:

"Why should the scale and efficiency of the sharing of my property even come into play on this issue?"

You own a copy. Not the contents. To say otherwise is to say that just because you own a copy of "Star Wars" you own the Millennium Falcon. 

"If I obtained the book legally why should there be any restrictions on how many people I let see the book at once?   It is not wrong or immoral to share books whether with one person at a time or one million. I can accept that sharing with one million at a time will make your life harder and I should avoid doing it out of courtesy, but not because of some innate right you have over me or your work, which you sold to me."

That’s why books have EULAs in the front, forbidding you to decide to reproduce it. If these standards are an onerous restriction, don’t buy the book. And to tell you the truth, Valiuth, I don’t want to sell you my book. I don’t trust you.

I know I sound rigid here, but I'm just trying to figure out where the ethical bright lines are. It seems wise to keep them in mind.

Joseph: "What if if I buy an MP3 album online (buy, not pirate) and then give a copy to one friend . . . Or if I want to "lend" it to a friend am I ethically obliged to delete from my iPod first, so I can't listen to it again until he "returns" it?"

It’s small examples like these that muddle the larger issues of piracy, and make it seem like making a mixtape is a SIN. Since it’s easy to copy, there doesn’t seem to be any ethical problems with duping and passing around to friends. But the rightness or wrongness doesn’t depend on scale; use your example and multiply it by your entire collection. 

If your friend likes it, he should buy it. Right? I know these ideas fail miserably in the real world, but whether or not something is ethical doesn’t hinge on whether it’s practical or realistic. 

Different in kind, Stephen, but not in principle. The degree of difference, or the nature of it, is what comforts many people who just don't want to pay for something.

We may debate the intellectual distinctions here, but for the average consumer of pirated materials, it comes down to wanting fun stuff for free. The quantity and variety of analogies is entertaining, though. 

Valiuth wrote: "My goal is not to allow them to copy the book but simply see it, and read it. They would have to be on my site to do this. If they left they could not continue reading it.  I view this as being equivalent to me leaving a book on my coffee table opening the door to my house and letting any one come in, pick it up and begin reading it. That would not be stealing would it?" 

There’s no equivalence, unless you’re the sort of chap who leaves his door open, lets anyone come in your house, and doesn't mind a stream of people outside the door waiting their turn. What’s more, in your analogy, there’s one person at a time reading it. On the web you can have thousands of people reading it simultaneously.

More to the point: why would you do this? Why would you want to deprive me of my livelihood? Because of some esoteric objection to copyright and an Olympian desire to see “the true value of art” defined by something other than the producer’s decision to price it as he sees fit?

Wow: nothing like seeing your name in a post title and 100+ comments to give someone a greasy feeling in the gut. WHAT’D I DO? Just to be clear where I stand:

* Copying something you own is not stealing. You bought it. Lending it to a friend is not stealing. You bought it. 

*  Downloading a movie instead of paying a buck or two to rent it? Stealing.  I've been drumming this into my daughter's head, because I want her to look at two scenarios - buying the song on iTunes, or downloading it for nothing - and realize which option is ethically correct.

It would seem unwise to teach a kid that there is no difference between the two. And unwise to indulge the ability to justify not paying for things that have a price.

* I have some books coming out in ebook form this year. Do you have the right to put them on your website and give them away? No. You do not. Why? Because they’re mine, and I don’t want you to. Write your own damn books. 

Porn can be art, but probably isn’t most of the time - it doesn’t intend to be art, or aspire to be art. It’s lotsa bouncin’ jolly-bits to titillate the Onanist-America demographic, and that’s that. It can have elements of art - composition, narrative direction - as well as the technical rudiments you find in movies or photos that aspire to make an artistic statement, but that doesn’t make it art,  anymore than a man getting down on his hands and knees makes him a dog. 

Paglia’s not stupid; she knows that there’s pr0n she’d consider artless, but what better way to start a conversation and make people walk crab-ways towards admitting that some naughty stuff has redeeming aesthetic values? Just because something stirs a base emotion hardly disqualifies it from being a work of art; it might mean that the jolted emotion is connected with shame or regret. War movies and horror flicks poke the id just as hard, but since they provide relief of a different sort - triumph, survival - they get a pass. 

That said, there’s a biiiig difference between “Saving Private Ryan” and “Saving Ryan’s Privates.” 

Why, thanks! Much obliged, folks.