John Perry Barlow, Prominent Libertarian, turns against Bushco, for Kerry

[dumpster_baby]

Interesting interview in Reason magazine with well known Libertarian author and founder of the EFF John Perry Barlow, a former Cheney campaign manager who is now supporting kerry and very very interested suddenly in beating Bush (join the club); he appears to even be advocating turning away from corporate capitalism.

Here are some excerpts from the interview:

>>>>>>>>>>>


"...we need something -- and I think it’s governmental -- to reregulate the market and make it free, because the multinationals have taken it away.

....

I’ve gone back and forth with politics. I’ve been a Republican county chairman. I was one of Dick Cheney’s campaign managers when he first ran for Congress. But generally speaking, I felt to engage in the political process was to sully oneself to such a degree that whatever came out wasn’t worth the trouble put in. I thought it was better to focus on changing yourself and people around you, to not question authority so much as bypass it whenever possible.

But by virtue of our abdication, a very authoritarian, assertive form of government has taken over. And oddly enough, it is doing so in the guise of libertarianism to a certain extent. Most of the people in the think tanks behind the Bush administration’s current policies are libertarians, or certainly free marketeers. We’ve got two distinct strains of libertarianism, and the hippie-mystic strain is not engaging in politics, and the Ayn Rand strain is basically dismantling government in a way that is giving complete open field running to multinational corporatism.
...
The other medium, TV, has a much smaller share of viewers than at any time in the past, but those viewers get all their information there. They get turned into a very uniform belief block. TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I’ve ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob.

Here is the interview in its entirety:

http://reason.com/0408/fe.bd.john.shtml

[NMDemDist2]

1. HOLY SH*T

is the world wobbling on it's axis?


Wow

[Catt03]

2. Good Grief!

I kind of like this guy.

[Florida_Geek]

3. In 2000

They got nationwide

Harry Browne Art Olivier Libertarian 384,516

and in florida 16,000+

While not a lot of votes as votes go, if big IF they pushed for Kerry, that would be a plus in Many states.

[starroute]

4. You can't love liberty and have any use for the Bushies

I've been watching the same thing happen on Slashdot -- the gradual radicalization of the geek liberatarians.

Libertarians prize liberty before anything else. This can make them a nuisance, since they don't have much sense of the common good, but it at least keeps them philosophically consistent.

So it's not surprising that many of them are anti-Bush. And it's inevitable that they would be anti-fundie. But what's more surprising is if they're also turning against the corporations, because that throws them right into the fundamental paradoxes of libertarianism -- that your freedom is probably going to come at the expense of my freedom, and that freedom for the powerful is always exercised at the expense of freedom for the weak.

Personally, I'd rather start by distinguishing creative freedom from greed-based freedom. For example, the freedom of the artist to be creative is a real freedom while the "freedom" of the record companies to screw over anyone and anything to make a profit is a fake freedom. I'd probably get along a lot better with libertarians if we could agree on the distinction.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

5. I have met him. He listens and thinks.

When you talk with him, he listens and thinks about what you are saying. Excellent person.

The EFF stands for Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has helped protect our cyber-rights. I believe it was Barlow who worked the Frontier into the organization name.

[nightperson]

6. He was one of JFK Jr.'s closest friends.

Hmmmmm....

Engaged in the politics necessary to wire the world, I encounter many people in positions of influence and visibility -- politicians, corporate leaders, scientists, engineers, writers, academics – who are motivated by the same mystical drive that propels me. They are acidheads, but nearly all of them are afraid to admit it. Its as though the future were being created by a secret cult. And even though it's my secret cult, I'm not crazy about secrecy or cults, and I'm certainly not keen on having them design the rest of society.

I think it's time to be brave and honest. I know that if everybody who'd ever taken a major psychedelic stood up and said, "Yeah, I did that and this is how it changed my life," the world would be a better place the next day."

On libertarianism and Kerry:

I think you can only go so far ignoring the opposing forces in the cultural war now arrayed against bohemian libertarians. It’s like in the ’60s, when there were two distinct camps in the boho scene, one of which was Marxist and ideological and political and engaged and humorless to beat the band. And the other one was acid-laced and freewheeling and took the view that if you could change consciousness, politics would take care of itself. I was of that view to a large extent...

But I think Kerry will be somewhat better than Bush, if for no other reason than he is not on the same side in the culture war. Kerry’s a Deadhead. He inhaled. He said he didn’t like it that much, but he certainly is not out there ready to impose steeper mandatory sentences on possession of drugs....

Kerry isn’t perfect, but the alternative is just completely....I hate to keep carping on this, but within the libertarian movement we’re gonna have to actually sit down and talk about where we stand on the two variants, because one of them is actually part of the problem at this point. I used to think of myself as both kinds of libertarian, but I have pretty well parted company with Grover Norquist at this point. I don’t see anything particularly free about a plutocracy.

His homepage, with a shot of the healthy-looking next generation.

On the Net:

There was a time in the '60s when I felt like if I wanted to change somebody's point of view, in a direction that I felt was going to be positive, the best thing I could do for them was give them LSD. I'm not sure I've given up on that, frankly, but I'd have to say, at the moment, the best thing I can do is get them on line. Don't tune in, jack in. I don't want to over-stress that relationship ... what you're seeing now growing is a backlash to the Net that is perfectly contiguous and continuous with the backlash of mind-expanding drugs, because this is all about expanding the Mind. The first phase was about expanding the mind inside, and now it's about expanding the mind outside.

from this.