bottom up change

I apologize to readers who have wondered where I’ve been over the past week.  Actually, the past two weeks have been very slow here at Bottom Up Change.  If it wasn’t for Nathan Pyles’ excellent contributions (for which I’m extremely grateful), there would have been little new content.  But I do have a good excuse!  First it was the OFA-MA Organizing Forum, which I posted about last week.  Since then, I have been busy starting up a new grassroots organization in Boston, which I want to write a little bit about here.

The past two weeks have been very exciting for me because I’ve begun to implement some ideas that I’ve been mulling over for several months.  Actually, these ideas date back to the beginning of this blog, when I began thinking about the possibilities of using blogs and other social media to connect with progressive organizers around the country.  But it was only over the past few weeks that my thinking about this topic began to crystallize into something more specific.  It’s been an inspiring few weeks and I’ve been able to confirm some of my suspicions about the power of social media as a tool for organizing.

In early May, I attended a meeting of the Young Democrats of Massachusetts (YDM), where I met with the chair of the Boston chapter, Kevin.  I had originally met Kevin at a “tweetup” (a meetup for users of Twitter) and we later connected on Twitter, where he told me about the YDM meetings.  I then met another YDM member, Ash, a few days later on Twitter.  It was refreshing to finally meet some active progressives in the Boston area who used Twitter as much as I did.  I had been to a half dozen tweetups this year, and while I always enjoyed meeting new people at these events, the attendees were usually in marketing and public relations.

When I met with Kevin and Ash in person at the YDM meeting, I laid out some ideas of holding a tweetup for politicos on Twitter.  They both were very interested in the idea and I began planning it.  My main reason for organizing a political tweetup was to see how much interest there would be in another idea I’d been toying with.  I wanted to organize a forum for the candidates in Boston’s mayoral race since it is the most competitive race for mayor that Boston has seen in over 10 years.  My idea was to make it a “social media” forum, where I would promote the event on Twitter and people could “tweet” their questions for the candidates to a hashtag (such as #Mayor).  I also thought it would be an interesting experiment to make a candidates forum as interactive as possible by making social media a major part of the forum.  The name for this forum would be Tweet the Candidates (of course).  I had been trying for several weeks to get in touch with the campaigns of Mayor Menino and City Councilor Sam Yoon, but not with much success.  It seemed that the campaigns weren’t too interested in attending a forum of uncertain turnout organized by an unknown person–me.  So after I talked with Kevin and Ash about the tweetup and the possibility of a social media candidates forum, I decided that I may have a better chance of persuading the candidates to attend the forum if there was an organization sponsoring it–one with a track record of achieving a solid turnout at events.  This led me to the idea of creating a social media organization in the Boston area that focused on politics and government.  When I began to promote the tweetup, I used the name “Social Media Progressives” for the group.

I wanted this organization to be identified as an association because at this stage, its primary aim is to connect people interested in progressive politics and social media.  I defined the organization as bringing together the tech community and the political community in the Boston area so people could start sharing ideas and collaborating about how social media and other technology can improve our politics.  Or, to use the more formal language I’ve written for the group, “Social Media Progressives is a new association of progressives interested in the ways that technology is changing politics, government, and journalism, particularly through the rise of social media.  One goal of this association is to increase collaboration between the online and offline worlds of politics and technology.”  As you can see, I wanted this group to serve as an umbrella organization for tech and politics broadly conceived, and I wanted the focus to be taking the online conversations offline so that progressives could meet, form relationships, and work together on real projects.  You can read more about our tweetup at the invitation page that we used.  I also created a Facebook fan page (please become a fan) and a Twitter account for our group.  

A few days before the tweetup, I met with Kevin, Ash, and another person I had met on Twitter, Yasmin, whose main interest was in the “Government 2.0″ movement.  Thankfully, they bought into the concept of Social Media Progressives and became founding members.  We didn’t have money and we didn’t have any other members, but our organization was up and running.

As you can see from the pictures on our Facebook page, the tweetup was a success.  We had over 40 people sign up, and over twenty people showed, which was a good turnout for our first event.  People from many different backgrounds attended.  We had the Chief Technology Strategist for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, members of the YDM,  almost the entire staff of Generation Progress, and several prominent members of the social media community in Boston.    We held a raffle for Clay Shirky’s book on technology and social change, “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations”.  When the night was over, people were enthusiastic about the potential of this organization to grow over the summer.  The plan is to have one Social Media Progressives tweetup a month.  In the future, we hope to attract prominent speakers in the world of politics, technology, and social media.  We are still planning a “Tweet the Candidates” forum sometime over the next few months.

Social Media Progressives could be a model for other online organizing efforts around the country, particularly those using Twitter.  In fact, I have talked with several people who are interested in creating SMP chapters in several cities.  Of course, this effort isn’t entirely unique.  I know that others in the progressive “Twittersphere” have been trying to organize progressives.  Most visibly, Jon Pincus has been successful in providing progressives on Twitter with a common space to share information under the #p2 hashtag.  There may be other efforts to organize progressives on Twitter that I am not aware of.  But what I would like to see with SMP is a way to take the online conversations and connections offline so that we start building relationships in local areas among people who use social media and consider themselves progressive.  These offline gatherings can also serve the purpose of educating progressives on new technology and create opportunities for collaboration with the tech community.  By focusing on offline gatherings and emphasizing the importance of local activism, I think that SMP can develop strategies for taking online organizing to a new level.  But this is just the start.  There’s a lot to learn and a lot to do yet.

In a later post, I’m going to go into more detail about how Twitter can be used for online organizing, and how SMP will be employing these techniques.  There is a lot of potential in combining social media with progressive organizing.  I’m excited about where this will lead.

Our Nuclear-Free Opportunity: Top Ten Reasons Why a World Free of Nuclear Weapons is Now Achievable

by Nathan Pyles

World War I Gas Warfare (Photo: Corbis)

In the introduction to her most recent book, Moral Clarity, Susan Neiman paraphrases Immanuel Kant - “Truth tells us how the world is; Morality tells us how the world ought to be.” It is the ability of men to imagine how the world ought to be which has formed our modern world. Our sense of moral possibility has inspired us to recreate democracy, expand and defend individual freedoms, and broaden civil rights.

In man’s brief moral history, we have moved past, or are at least trending to move past - human sacrifice, crucifixion, public dismemberment, mass slavery, and monarchy. Yet morality struggles to keep pace with technology. We banned biological and chemical weapons just this last quarter century. Recently we have moved nearer a global ban on landmines and cluster munitions, which have unintentionally killed and maimed thousands of innocent civilians long after conflicts have ended.

Despite this progress, morality will remain forever situational. Morality during war, especially so. Morality when facing an imminent existential threat … ? It is this situational nature of morality - the synaptic battles between morality and fear, morality and self-interest - which impedes our moral consistency and occasionally sets us back.

The sliding-scale nature of morality is laid especially bare during the stresses of war, or when corrupted by charismatic yet murderous leaders. Men, especially men with modern means, are indeed capable of evil. I once toured Auschwitz with a group of Polish students eager to show me the darkness in their backyard. No interpretation was needed. The room filled to the ceiling with tumbled and tangled eyeglasses still looks back. Genocidal madness and politically fomented fratricide erupted far too frequently this last century.

But it is not evil men who pose the only risk for using nuclear weapons. Since morality operates on a sliding scale, good men are capable of acts that in other circumstances would never be considered. Before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, would we have thought it possible to round-up and unlawfully imprison over 100,000 American citizens of Japanese descent? Before the nightly air bombing of London, would the targeting of civilian populations in the fire-bombings of Dresden and other cities been foreseeable?

Former General Secretary of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev understood this risk when he said, “It is my firm belief that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason.” Having once shouldered their power, Gorbachev knows the soul-dragging weight of their moral burden.

Because there is evil, and because good men’s actions and decisions are so susceptible to the circumstances of the moment, and therefore, unpredictable - our safest course is to ensure that no one has the capacity to make a fateful nuclear decision which could instantly end millions of lives.

We are best equipped to make the correct moral calls in times of relative calm rather than during the height of conflict. Our decisions as to what constituent’s legitimate weapons of defense - and what does not – should be made during these periods of comparative calm. This is the opportunity we have before us now, and have had before us since the collapse of the Soviet Union over twenty years ago.

This is not to say we are without threats. But it is to say we are today without threats which can best be dissuaded by waving the nuclear wand.

The real threat of nuclear terrorism is best countered by preventing terrorists from obtaining these weapons. Since only nation-states have the ability to produce the fissile material used to manufacture nuclear weapons, a step by step, verifiable global ban on both nuclear weapons and fissile material, is the low risk path to improved national and global security.

So now, when our security interests are aligned with our moral instinct to minimize civilian casualties - now is the time to enact a global ban on nuclear weapons. A global ban reshapes the modern world as it ought to be. It is the inspired next step in our ongoing moral evolution.

This is the fourth post by guest blogger Nathan Pyles in a 12 part series on “Our Nuclear-Free Opportunity”.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Last week conservative commentator Eric “Mancow” Mueller attempted to demonstrate that waterboarding wasn’t that bad, that it wasn’t torture.  So he went ahead and had himself waterboarded.  The result was very different from his initial expectations.  Watch:

I already viewed waterboarding as torture, but this is just one more piece of evidence that what we did to some detainees after 9/11 was criminal.

In light of President Obama’s speech Thursday on torture and Guantanamo Bay, I wanted to share an “interblog” dialogue that’s going on between me, Winston Smith, and his crew at Philosoraptor on the morality of torture.  Join in the debate over there if you feel so inclined!  It’s a tough one, but very important.

Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison doesn’t want to go with his team to meet President Obama at the White House.  It’s not because he’s protesting Obama, either:

He didn’t go to the White House to see President Bush in 2006.  For the same reason.

Note: All links to photos, video, live-blogging, and live-tweeting of the OFA-MA Grassroots Organizing Forum are at the bottom of this post.

As regular readers of Bottom Up Change know, I have been very interested in the development of Organizing for America since I created this blog in early January.  In particular, I have wanted to see whether the grassroots energy of the 2008 Obama campaign could be translated to help President Obama achieve the changes that many of us spent so much time and energy working for during the campaign.  Some observers have expressed serious doubts as to whether an organization like OFA will be able to work.  Zephyr Teachout, for instance, made a case against the very existence of OFA in a provocative post at techPresident.  While I have been hopeful about OFA’s chances, it was only this past weekend that I saw real evidence that, contrary to Teachout, OFA can succeed.  In fact, as I argue below, the event I attended this weekend offered a case study in how OFA should work.

On Saturday, May 16, the Massachusetts chapter of OFA (OFA-MA) held a “Grassroots Organizing Forum”.  This forum was part of the OFA “listening tours” that are going on around the country right now, but it was much more ambitious in its scope.  There were 6 speakers and 2 panel discussions of grassroots organizing, advocacy, and policy.  There was also an hour-long break-out session involving the different regions of the state.  Right now, Massachusetts has no OFA paid staff, so the Forum was planned and organized completely by volunteers.  In the end, around 100 volunteers had participated in making the Forum a spectacular success.

The planning for the Grassroots Forum began in January, when Sarah Compton, the former Field Director of Massachusetts for the Obama campaign, began talking with staff and volunteers from the Massachusetts Obama organization to plan an OFA-MA event.  By the time I started attended meetings in early May, they had about a dozen core volunteers with specific roles and the planning was in its late stages.

The Forum was held at the SEIU 1199 office in Dorchester, which is Boston’s largest neighborhood.  The night before the event, nearly 700 people had registered on myBO, so we expected a good turnout and we held a training for volunteers to do a run-through of all the tasks that volunteers would need to perform.  Many volunteers ended up staying at the site until past midnight, and they had to be back at 7am on Saturday morning.  The logistical complexity of preparing for the event was high, and there was a lot that could go wrong.

Volunteers

Saturday was a beautiful day in Boston, and we haven’t had many of them this spring, so it was impressive to see that out of the nearly 700 people that signed up, more than 400 attended the Forum.  We had feared that there would be logistical problems getting people registered and seated before the 9am start time.  We only had an hour to register several hundred people.  But as you can see in the photograph below, registration was not crowded and it went very smoothly.  Another logistical challenge was helping people find the SEIU, which is very hard to find.  To solve this problem, volunteers (or “human arrows”) stood outside at key locations holding signs, wearing arrows (hence the name), and directing cars to the building.  Most everyone got inside, registered, ate their free coffee and donuts, and sat down with time to spare before the first speaker started.  The only problems that we encountered during the day were some minor glitches with the audio-visual systems, but those weren’t a very big deal.  From a logistics standpoint, nearly everything went perfectly.

Registration at OFA-MA Organizing Forum, 5/16/09

The event was very insightful for anyone who is interested in the future of the movement begun during the Obama campaign.  Mitch Stewart, the National Director of OFA, traveled to Boston from Washington DC and was one of the featured speakers.  This was one of the most fascinating parts of the day.  I hadn’t heard Mitch Stewart speak before and I found him to be a very grounded, reasonable, cool-headed person.  He’s from South Dakota, and he has a certain low-key, Midwestern sensibility which I believe will be effective.  In other words, he seems like just the kind of person that Obama would want to lead his grassroots organization.  The fact that he is a tested field operative who led President Obama to key victories in the Iowa caucuses and in Virginia during the general election is evidence that he has what it takes to manage OFA, which is very ambitious and unprecedented undertaking.

There were a few key pieces of information in Stewart’s speech which I thought were most interesting.  First, he emphasized the need for the grassroots to take a very active role in the health care effort that is coming this summer.  There was no doubt that health care was the top priority for the Obama administration and for OFA. Congress will apparently take action on this issue within the next few months.  Already, OFA is seeing a very positive reaction from the grassroots and an interest in helping on this issue.  Stewart noted that when he sent an email last week asking supporters to sign a statement of support of President Obama’s three health care priorities, the response was much bigger than anything OFA has seen so far.  Specifically, 170,000 people signed this declaration in 24 hours, which was three times bigger than the number of people who signed a similar statement in support of the budget earlier this year.  (By the way, if you haven’t signed this declaration yet, please do so.)   Stewart also stated that the second priority for OFA is to support the administration and Congress in passing energy legislation and in supporting the Supreme Court nominee that is expected to be announced shortly.  Interestingly, Stewart said nothing of education, which has been one of President Obama’s three main planks in his budget.  This omission most likely reflects the fact that education reform is a priority that will be addressed after health care and energy.

The most interesting part of Stewart’s talk came during the question and answer period.  Throughout his speech, Stewart repeatedly made it clear that OFA’s mission is first and foremost to “support the President’s agenda.”  While he was answering questions, a woman interrupted and shouted out “We want input in that agenda!”  A large number of people in the crowd applauded.  Stewart handled this issue deftly, stating that he encouraged people to provide input about policy by going to whitehouse.gov and also by speaking to local elected members of Congress.  OFA, he said, was not a policy organization and he was not a policy expert, so “at this time”, the best way to voice policy concerns is by using these other forums.  The issue of policy input from Obama’s base was one of the major themes throughout the day.  Closely related was the issue of top-down versus bottom-up control of OFA, which I’ll get to later.

I’m not going to provide a summary of my reactions to every speaker and every panel.  The videos are posted for you to see and the event was live-blogged in exhaustive detail.  Just a few more observations from my experience at this event, though.  There were some terrific speakers and panelists–especially interesting to me were Marshall Ganz’s speech and the first panel on “Grassroots Organizing: Harnessing the Obama Movement”.  I also found the presentation by David Cutler on health care riveting.  Cutler was a senior advisor to Barack Obama during the campaign and he is Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard.  He eloquently communicated the urgent need for the grassroots to get involved in the health care fight.  But from my perspective, the most valuable part of the Organizing Forum was the hour-long breakout session in which attendees broke into their region of Massachusetts and discussed their views about OFA.

Marshall Ganz speaks during a panel discussion on "Grassroots Organizing: Harnessing the Obama Movement"

One nice surprise in the breakout session that I helped facilitate was a woman who lived in Dorchester and just happened to walk by the OFA-MA volunteers outside directing traffic to the event.  She didn’t know about the Forum, but she decided to attend when she saw the volunteers.  To me, that was just a sign of both how incredibly organized this event was and how there is still a strong desire among ordinary citizens to get involved.  People were just walking into this event from off the street!  Clearly, a lot of people are still fired up.

The breakout session revealed some of the questions that had arisen during Mitch Stewart’s talk and which I heard repeatedly from participants throughout the day.  Many people felt that OFA needed to have some kind of connection to local politics and local issues or else people wouldn’t get involved.  There was a concern that OFA may be trying to “recreate the wheel” since there are already many local organizations working on many of the same issues that the President is working on.  Also, reflecting the concerns of the person who had interrupted Mitch Stewart during the Q&A, people expressed a desire to push for their views on policy through OFA.

What this discussion left me thinking was that the only way OFA is going to be effective is if it is truly grassroots.  There is always going to be some element of a top-down structure to OFA–or to any large organization, for that matter.  However, there needs to be a groundswell of activity and support at the local level for people to get involved.  I think that health care reform is an issue that will rally Obama’s base supporters because most of us feel passionately about it.  But unless some of the grassroots’ policy concerns are taken into account by the President, there will not be the kind of intense activism at the local level that can make a difference in terms of passing legislation.  For instance, many people in the audience Saturday wanted a single payer health care system and there was some disappointment that this was not on the table.  But if the “public option” is taken off the table as well, I am doubtful that a large segment of Obama’s base will be motivated enough to spend time volunteering or donating to OFA.

Incidentally, Massachusetts may have a role to play in helping the public option succeeds, because moderate Senators to our north in Maine will be key players in whether or not reconciliation has to be used to pass health care reform.  This report suggests that Sen. Olympia Snowe is trying to delay the creation of a public option.  This is just the kind of thing that OFA volunteers in Maine and Massachusetts should be acting on now, and I imagine there would be a lot of support for some kind of action to put pressure on Sen. Snowe not to try and delay the public option.

But going back to the need for OFA to have a very strong “bottom-up” component: I think the reason why the OFA-MA Grassroots Forum was so successful had a lot to do with the fact that it was organized entirely by volunteers.  A group of people decided on their own that they could build from the idea of a listening tour by making it an opportunity to hear from some of the most prominent organizers and policy minds in the Boston area.  The kind of energy that I saw at the Forum and the way it was organized should be a model for Mitch Stewart and his team at the OFA headquarters in Washington DC.  Grassroots success depends on grassroots commitment and passion.  That kind of involvement requires that volunteers and activists at the local level will largely drive an organizing effort around their concerns and their agenda.  The good news is that OFA will be receiving all of this feedback.  After hearing from Mitch Stewart on Saturday, I trust that he will be listening.

Below you will find links to various media from the OFA-MA Grassroots Organizing Forum:

Here are some of the pictures that I took during the event.

A much more impressive collection of photographs by one of OFA-MA’s volunteers, Harmony Wu.

Here is the video of Mitch Stewart speaking and his Q&A (you can also see me introducing a speaker in one of the videos on this page)

Here’s the live-blog from the event.

Video of Panel 1: “Grassroots Organizing: Harnessing the Obama Movement”

For a lot of this material in one place and more, check out the website for OFA-MA, www.massforchange.com

Finally, here’s the Twitter page for OFA-MA and the live-tweet from the event under the hashtag #OFAMA.  By the way, this experiment with Twitter was encouraging.  I’ll have more to say about this in a later post.

Our Nuclear-Free Opportunity: Top Ten Reasons Why a World Free of Nuclear Weapons is Now Achievable 

by Nathan Pyles

Internet Cafe Hanoi, Vietnam (Photo: AFP)

At the height of the Cold War my father went to Vietnam in the first of many waves of U.S. servicemen. In 1965 international telephone service was unreliable and incredibly expensive. While he wrote letters home daily, I remember him calling only twice. His miraculous calls sent me and my brothers bouncing around our mother impatiently waiting our turn.

Last year while our daughter was studying in Asia, my wife’s and my weekly high point was our Skype video chat. It was free and easier than dialing a phone. My daughter and her friends are more than the first internet generation – they are a nascent global generation. Of her nearly two hundred Facebook friends, nearly half are from countries other than the U.S.

All these communication advancements in less than two generations. The number of transnational Facebook or Linked-In relationships will only grow. Business and science colleagues work daily on international projects in real time using instant messaging to exchange quick thoughts and gather immediate feedback. Gamers from every country, between plotting gory headshots, are pausing long enough to build global friendships.

Free instant global communication is more than just a convenience or a cost savings. It is a sledgehammer to our cultural and national boundaries. Our lives are already laced with virtual artifacts from this splintering blow. A surprised world turned to YouTube to witness candidate Obama win a most unlikely victory, won in part by his supporters’ viral creativity. Susan Boyle of Scotland is being cheered on by over 100 million people from every country in a four minute real-life Rocky recreation. Our shared experiences are now global, not just national, not just local.

Increased transnational exchanges, while also exposing our darker undersides, do far more to dissolve barriers and perceived differences. So much so that I’m going out on a limb with a prediction – that Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, will one day receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Berners-Lee’s innovation and decision to make web access unfettered and free, has been a diplomatic tsunami. The web and social networking have democratized foreign relations. Affordable travel brings us into more frequent international contact – free global communication makes it easy for these relationships to last.

Meanwhile, there are policy makers within the nuclear weapons states who continue to make the case that we are somehow made safer by wielding weapons which can annihilate us at any time. While they talk targeting strategies, counterforce versus countervalue, and extended deterrence – global communication technologies are racing ahead of them obliterating borders and eroding national differences. These nuclear proponents seem oblivious to how these communication innovations are rapidly remaking our social, economic, and political worlds. Their worldviews still shaped as if the Cold War were a current event.

Nearly 180 nations already get it. These nations have renounced nuclear weapons and any attempt to acquire them. Several South American nations abandoned their fledgling nuclear weapons programs years ago. Just this spring the Central Asian Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone entered into force with five more nations agreeing to forever forgo nuclear weapons. South Africa once achieved nuclear capability and subsequently dismantled both their warheads and their nuclear weapons program. And in doing so, they demonstrated to others that the nuclear genie can indeed be coaxed back into its bottle when accompanied by genuine political will.

It is the nuclear weapons states who are now the risk-taking minority. To have any chance of marshalling global consensus for effective sanctions to halt North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs, the current nuclear weapons states must simultaneously turn their sights on their own nuclear arsenals.

The nuclear weapons states will need to lead by example if we are to finally halt proliferation and reduce our nuclear risks.

This is the third post by guest blogger Nathan Pyles in a 12 part series on “Our Nuclear-Free Opportunity”.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Winston Smith has some more insightful stuff at Philosoraptor about the latest revelations concerning the torture memos.  His reply to Charles Krauthammer’s recent editorial is especially interesting.  Krauthammer is arguing again today that Speaker Pelosi’s knowledge of waterboarding shortly after 9/11 reveals that our intuitions at that time were that torture was “reasonable,” in his words.  He links to a very disturbing piece by the liberal journalist Jonathan Alter, written just weeks after 9/11.  If you have time, read Alter’s piece.  It is a reminder that the mindset of many Americans just after 9/11 was very, very different than it is today.  Alter’s account of the passage of the Patriot Act is just one example of the confusion that reigned shortly after the terrorist attacks.  In the end, Alter seems to endorse sending terrorist suspects to the CIA’s black sites to be tortured by foreign governments, something that we ended up doing.  It would by “hypocritical”, Alter writes, but “nobody said this was going to be pretty.”  I wonder if he would agree with this article today.

What Krauthammer concludes from Alter’s piece, and Nancy Pelosi’s awkward position about waterboarding, is that all the outrage over the torture memos today is really “false”.  Our correct intuitions about torture were the ones we had immediately after 9/11, when many people, including liberals like Alter, were considering the use of torture to extract information from terrorist suspects.

But the problem with this argument is the following, and it’s not hard to see.  Just because many people, including possibly Nancy Pelosi, were not as disturbed about torture shortly after 9/11 as they are today does not mean that these intuitions were correct back then.  I concede that if there were a very significant terrorist attack tomorrow, the percentage of Americans who would support torture as a method to gain intelligence would increase dramatically.  Perhaps Pelosi would go back to not speaking out against torture.  But that does not prove that these “aftermath” intuitions would be correct.  It is often the case that our intuitions about right and wrong are distorted when we are angry or have recently been harmed.  One reason why we have laws, I believe, is to check the darker emotions of individuals that may lead them to act in uncivilized ways.

If anything, Krauthammer’s piece challenges those of us who oppose torture to take account of the way that intuitions about right and wrong do seem to have shifted somewhat.  Winston Smith is also correct that liberals need to be more open to the possibility that torture may sometimes “work”, in the sense that it may sometimes have been effective at getting at the truth.  As he goes on to say, however, torture still seems to be an unreliable method of interrogation, even if it sometimes “works.”  (By the way, I have no idea how effective torture is.  I have listened to many intelligence officials and professional interrogators say it doesn’t work, but that is consistent with saying it is unreliable but gets at the truth in some cases.)

In any case, even if torture did work, that would not by itself answer the ethical question.  In my view, the immorality of torture still stands in all cases except, perhaps, very rare “ticking time bomb” cases.  The problem with people like Krauthammer who advocate torture in cases beyond “ticking time bomb” scenarios is that there is no clear end to the lengths we should be willing to go to extract information if his position is correct.  Krauthammer says he’s okay with slapping, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and the other techniques that have been used.  But if those techniques are okay by him, then what if other terrorists are resistant to these methods?  Would Krauthammer be okay with methods that do cause permanent mental or physical suffering?  I don’t see how his position prevents him from going down this road.

Krauthammer’s road is a very slippery slope, and barbarism is the destination.  Law is the only solution to this problem.  We need a truth commission to investigate what happened.  We are fortunate to live by a constitution that puts a very high value on the rule of law so that we have a check on the things we might do out of anger and fear.  It’s true that the constitution is not a suicide pact, but danger is not a permit to become monsters.

Blogging lately has been slow because I’ve been sidetracked by some side projects.  One is the Grassroots Organizing Forum that I am helping plan.  I didn’t realize this before, but this event is the first statewide Organizing for America (OFA) event in the nation.  OFA-Massachusetts is a genuinely inspiring group of very hard-working volunteers (I don’t think anyone is staff here) and I’ve enjoyed working with them.  Our event is Saturday, and I think it’s going to be a big success.  So far, over 600 people have signed up.  I will write a follow-up post about it for sure.

In any case, I’ve been experimenting a bit with Twitter by creating an account for OFA-MA and then using it to promote our event and raise money for it.  My experiment has been to test the capacity of Twitter as not only a marketing and communications tool, but as an organizing tool.  I’ve tried to experiment with Twitter in this way in the past when I organized my Ice Cream Tweetup and Pledge Project Canvass.  That worked fairly well, and I was pleased that a very effective organizer in my neighborhood, Joseph Porcelli, heard about the event through Twitter, showed up, and helped get the word out on his website, Neighbors for Neighbors.

So I’m still in the early stages of my experimentation with Twitter as an organizing tool, but so far I have learned a few things.  First, it is very difficult to find people on Twitter who would be interested in a specific cause and who are living in a specific area.  As a result, it is tough to find the right people on Twitter to contact about an event or action.  The fact that Joseph learned of my event through Twitter was just good luck.  The problem is that Twitter does not have a search function that allows one to search by location and keywords in the user’s bio, so finding the right kinds of people to follow is cumbersome.  There may be apps that allow for this kind of search, but I do not know of them.  Second, because tweets get lost in one’s ever-changing stream, it is very difficult to communicate one’s message and get relevant updates out to people in an effective way.  (I’m sorry if this point is lost entirely on people who don’t use Twitter.  Solution: sign up and start using it!  It’s free, after all!)  Third, despite these setbacks (which I hope to solve soon) Twitter is an extremely effective tool for getting one’s message out to a different audience and as a supplement to more traditional forms of outreach.  I am finding new Obama supporters through Twitter that I didn’t know about before.  I followed them, they followed back, and we started a conversation that revealed their support.

At the Organizing Forum I hope to have a hashtag (#OFAMA) for any Twitterers in the audience to discuss the event for people who are not able to attend.  My hope is that this will allow me to identify more Obama supporters in Massachusetts who use Twitter.  I am also planning a more ambitious Twitter-and-organizing event in June, focusing on local politics.  Stay tuned!

I respect Paul Krugman’s work, and I’m currently reading his very interesting book The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008.  But the fact is that for almost two years now, Krugman has been one of the leading progressive voices to complain at every opportunity that Obama wasn’t pure enough.  Don’t get me wrong: criticizing Obama from the left is fine and there’s a point to trying to make Obama deliver on a strong progressive agenda considering the mandate that he has.  But there has frequently been a nasty edge to Krugman’s commentary on Obama the candidate and the Obama administration.

Nonetheless, we occasionally get a grudging admission that Obama may just succeed as a progressive.  Here is Krugman in today’s New York Times commenting on the health care meeting yesterday at the White House:

But let me not be too negative. The fact that the medical-industrial complex is trying to shape health care reform rather than block it is a tremendously good omen. It looks as if America may finally get what every other advanced country already has: a system that guarantees essential health care to all its citizens.

And serious cost control would change everything, not just for health care, but for America’s fiscal future. As Mr. Orszag has emphasized, rising health care costs are the main reason long-run budget projections look so grim. Slow the rate at which those costs rise, and the future will look far brighter.

I still won’t count my health care chickens until they’re hatched. But this is some of the best policy news I’ve heard in a long time.

This is improvement–whether for Krugman or for Obama depends on your perspective, I guess.