JOHN PERRY BARLOW has had a good blogging experience:

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.

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.

Read the whole thing, which offers some useful lessons to, well, all of us. Funny that this whole conversation was really started by Don McArthur, who calls himself “The Misanthropyst.” But hey, he and Barlow have motorcycles in common, too.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis says “right on!”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Don McArthur comments:

I am concerned that this Manichean Hell our politics has descended into has ruined any sort of useful and productive conversation. And that this state of affairs is not an accident, and serves the purposes of a small subset of fanatics, pundits and political opportunists. You don’t have to play along.

Not a complete misanthrope.