[ExI] Call To Libertarians

[Giulio Prisco]

I just left this comment to the new article of RU Sirius on H+ Magazine:
Open Source Party 2.0: Liberty, Democracy, Transparency!
http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/02/24/open-source-party-2-0-liberty-democracy-transparency/

I have been reading this article again, and also the two previous
articles The Open Source Party Proposal and The QuestionAuthority
Proposal.

As in my previous comment, the events of the last 3 years show that
the time may be right to seriously thinking about giving power back to
the people, to whom it belongs. The open source and free software
movements, the Pirate Parties, Wikileaks, Anonymous, Bitcoin and the
possible renaissance of the cypherpunk movement are steps in the right
directions.

In the original Open Source Party proposal I like very much the
Liberal/Libertarian characterization of this emerging approach to
politics. Of course (look at the comments in the original article)
both fundamentalist Libertarians and fundamentalist Liberals reject it
with outrage, which makes me think that we are moving in the right
direction: fundamentalism means abandoning reason in favor of a
prepackaged one-line world-view which fits on a t-shirt. Instead, like
for many other issues, the only solution is that there is no solution.
The conflict between pure Libertarianism and pure Liberalism is here
to stay and become worse, and we should stay away from both extremes
and look for pragmatic, workable, ad-hoc midway local solutions.

Liberals want to protect citizens and the government from evil big
corporations, and Libertarians want to protect citizens and
corporations from evil big governments. I want to protect citizens
from both evil big governments and evil big corporations, and I think
the Open Source Party proposal represents a good initiative in the
right direction.

As far as the implementation of the proposal is concerned, I would not
recommend starting new political movements and parties. Rather, I
would recommend joining forces with the Pirate Party, which the Party
of the Free Internet and the only really novel and innovative
political force to emerge in this century. The Pirate Party and its
local national instances have achieved a certain success by linking
theoretical open source politics with practical initiatives in defense
of the citizens.

At this moment the Pirate Party is only focused on IT technologies,
but I see its stance in favor of individual empowerment and against
current IP and copyright laws as a much more general platform which,
in the future, could include bio-hacking, neuro-hacking and support
morphological freedom. Therefore, I think transhumanists should
support the Pirate Party.

On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Giulio Prisco <giulio at gmail.com> wrote:
> <<Probably all of us would agree that
>
> (A) Initiation of force is bad.
> (B) Starving children is bad.
>
> The question is which is worse. A libertarian would say initiation of force
> is unacceptable; figure out some other way to feed starving children. A
> liberal would say that starving children is unacceptable and so be it if
> force is necessary to avoid it.>>
>
> Well put. It is not easy when primary values are in conflict. In these cases
> I tend to look for midway solutions, like feeding children as much as
> possible while reducing initiation of force to the strictly necessary
> minimum. Needless to say, both fundamentalist libertarians and
> fundamentalist liberals dislike midway solutions.
>
> --
> Giulio Prisco
> giulio at gmail.com
> (39)3387219799
> (1)7177giulio