John Perry Barlow has a blog!!!

One of the more interesting characters to come around in the last thirty years or so - he just started his own blog here and talks about getting linked by a conservative blog (Instapundit) and then finding a lot of right-wing comments on his website here His reaction: bq. Since I'm such a Blogosphere newbie, I had not heard of Glenn before, but a lot of other people have. Reynolds has a numerous and devoted following, several platoons of whom turned up here following his Instapundit post about my exchange with Misanthropyst. What has followed is worth reading, despite its considerable length. (It's currently almost 28,000 words.) bq. I originally started this blog with the intention of giving my friends a place to gather and respond to BarlowSpams, as well as attending to other matters of local community interest. I didn't really expect that I'd be getting thousands of hits a day from strangers who were neither friends nor even terribly likely to become friends. But I'm delighted it's turning out this way. This sort of discussion, conducted properly, is the very foundation of democracy. bq. So far, I'm impressed with the level of civility I find in these 126 comments, despite profoundly differing political views and cultures. There are occasional gouts of self-righteous napalm blasting from both sides, and the Third Reich has been mentioned more than once, but people are generally acting like rational adults. bq. I hope this exchange is as useful to its participants as it is to me. Lately I have found myself too easily seduced into a belief that no one who is neither crazy nor dim-witted nor TV-psychotic nor pretending to be asleep could actually support the policies of the Bush Administration. But the Bush supporters who have arrived here are, with a few exceptions, intelligent, articulate, and more courteous in debate than many of my own cohort. This discussion is a great reminder - as if I should need one - that the other side deserves to be taken as seriously as I would have them take me. Compare this reaction to the nit-wit 'guest column' in today's Seattle PI from Neal Starkman: Here he is talking about the high popularity of G.W. Bush and the overall approval for the Coalition presence in Iraq: bq. It's the "Stupid factor," the S factor: Some people -- sometimes through no fault of their own -- are just not very bright. bq. It's not merely that some people are insufficiently intelligent to grasp the nuances of foreign policy, of constitutional law, of macroeconomics or of the variegated interplay of humans and the environment. These aren't the people I'm referring to. The people I'm referring to cannot understand the phenomenon of cause and effect. They're perplexed by issues comprising more than two sides. They don't have the wherewithal to expand the sources of their information. And above all -- far above all -- they don't think. bq. You know these people; they're all around you (they're not you, else you would not be reading this article this far). They're the ones who keep the puerile shows on TV, who appear as regular recipients of the Darwin Awards, who raise our insurance rates by doing dumb things, who generally make life much more miserable for all of us than it ought to be. Sad to say, they comprise a substantial minority -- perhaps even a majority -- of the populace. One is intelligent, one is a braying ninny. Hey Starkman -- if you are so smart, why isn't your party in power now. (meditate on this for four more years)