Blowing Up

Lots of referring traffic today now that the AZ is out and about as the other JB.

Good times.

Meta Talk Time. How do we build a grassroots progressive coalition in the Crescent City?

I don't think we need to get into too much detail when describing what is meant by 'progressive.'

For me, it means demolishing the notion in this city that people who care about social justice and people who care about tax dollar efficiency must be in mutually exclusive groups.

Barack Obama just won the Presidency on a general platform that combined transparency, competence, and social justice.

We can replicate that on the municipal level and I think we have to.

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Cliff gets at something good in the comments portion of this post.

I think it's hard to organize the big picture. I got myself pretty frustrated at times trying to figure out ways to get the big picture message across. Ultimately, I decided that I could be a more effective advocate for the kind of change I believe in by actually engaging in an issue, by injecting a progressive perspective into the repetitive back-and-forth "discourse" that has characterized the political arena.

But Cliff is right, the big picture is what is ultimately important.

The question I've been struggling with all along is how do we get there.

At some point, you've just got to dive in.

By engaging a variety of singular issues, we can build loose coalitions that can be tied together to form a cogent vision for progressive change.

That is why I'm anxious to see how I can now contribute to the fight against the destruction of Lower Mid City.

And there will be plenty of others after that too.

One key, I think, is to figure out how to translate our online communities and our online tools into live direct action. New Orleans progressive bloggers have had some very notable successes, but now is the time to push forward.

NOLA.com Take Note!

Broken window theory applied to online space:

Much of the tone of discourse online is governed by the level of moderation and to what extent people are encouraged to "own" their words. When forums, message boards, and blog comment threads with more than a handful of participants are unmoderated, bad behavior follows. The appearance of one troll encourages others. Undeleted hateful or ad hominem comments are an indication that that sort of thing is allowable behavior and encourages more of the same. Those commenters who are normally respectable participants are emboldened by the uptick in bad behavior and misbehave themselves. More likely, they're discouraged from helping with the community moderation process of keeping their peers in line with social pressure. Or they stop visiting the site altogether.

Unchecked comment spam signals that the owner/moderator of the forum or blog isn't paying attention, stimulating further improper conduct. Anonymity provides commenters with immunity from being associated with their speech and actions, making the whole situation worse...how does the community punish or police someone they don't know? Very quickly, the situation is out of control and your message board is the online equivalent of South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s, inhabited by roving gangs armed with hate speech, fueled by the need for attention, making things difficult for those who wish to carry on useful conversations.

Via Sully