In case you missed it, Iran had a presidential election on Friday. In Iran’s quasi-theocratic regieme the office of Presidnent is secondary to that of the Supreme (Religious) Leader, Ali Khameni, but does wield a lot of influence in economic and foreign policy. This is why Holocaust-denying, populist, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been such a pain the ass. Not just anyone can run in Iran. All candidates have to be approved by the religious council. So, this year’s four-way race was between Ahmadinajad, and three other candidates all approved by the establishment. One candidate however, emerged as a “reform” candidate. Mir Hossein Mousavi promised more engagement with the West, more progressive economic policies and improvements for the lot of women in Iranian society.

Long story short: Mousavi’s movement gained momentum in the last days of the campaign. Come election day turnous was a massive 80%. People either in the Khameni camp or in the Republican Guard started to anticipate the massive defeat they were about to be handed. They got nervous. Instead of massaging the numbers, arranging for a runoff — In Iran, if one candidate does not get 50%+1 in the first round there is a runoff between the top two — or otherwise stealing the election with a modicum of subtlety and believability, they panicked and apparently just started making up huge landslide numbers for Ahmadinajad all over the country.

Just two hours after the polls closed late Friday night (after being held open extra hours to accommodate the insane turnout) the government declared Ahmadinajad the winner with 69 percent to Mousavi’s 29 percent. Such a naked fraud as this was over the line, even in Iran and predictably the streets of Tehran filled.

All day yesterday there was a steady dribble of news out of Iran. Mousavi under house arrest. Mousavi supporter, former president and member of the Supreme Expediency Council, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani resigned. Bloody protests in the streets. Web sites and phone texting blocked, but Twitter unacountably not. All through the day and into the night as one twitterer spoke:
ALL internet & mobile networks are cut. We ask everyone in Tehran to go onto their rooftops and shout ALAHO AKBAR in protest #IranElection.

And at 3:30 in the morning, Tehran rang to the cries of, “God is Great.”

Great stuff. This is the kind of thing that makes journalism careers.

Mainstream media coverage, especially the so-called 24 hour news networks — this story is tailor made for them — has been almost nonexistent. The old stalwarts are there of course. The NYT has excellent coverage on its blog, The Lede, along with the BBC and The Guardian.

But the real, up-to-the-minute stuff has been provided by native, Farsi-speaking blogs like that of the National Iranian-American Council and their blog as well as that of Andrew Sullivan and Juan Cole.

Above:A pro-Mousavi protester gives aid to a beleaguered Iranian riot policeman. Source: Getty Images, via The Atlantic Monthly.

Iran’s “Green Revolution” may well fizzle. The country has a seemingly endless capacity to eat its young. It ruthlessly put down student protests in 2003 and in 1995 and fed an entire generation into the meat grinder in its war with Iraq. But considering the huge strategic implications of these events, and the compelling visuals and overall storyline I am stunned that the TV and traditional media isn’t more all over this. But hey, its the weekend.

So, if things in Iran get really wierd and all of a sudden on Wednesday its all over the news and you are all like, “Where did that come from?” Just remember that the Internet has been working overtime while the rest of the media was sleeping.

Update:I originally wrote this up about 3 p.m Saturday afternoon. Since then, the regular news people have been trickling back into their offices and catching up. By Sunday morning, things are more what one would think the coverage levels would be like. Still, here’s your post of links to ongoing coeverage. The blogs listed above are probably still going to be the place to go to follow events in Iran.

It is true that many states and municipalities have made their citizen’s lives easier by putting so much information on the web. But, in too may areas there is still a fundamental misunderstanding of exactly the type of sea-change that the Internet is bringing to society and governance.

Here is an excerpt of a teriffic post by Tom Steinberg of the UK-based mysociety.org, which builds community organizing and open government websites, called What The Government Doesn’t Understand About The Internet And What To Do About It:

Current government policy in relation to the Internet can broadly be summarised as occupying three areas:

1. Getting people online (broadband access, and lessons for people who don’t have the skills or interest)
2. Protecting people from bad things done using the Internet (terrorism, child abuse, fraud, hacking, intellectual property infringement)
3. Building websites for departments and agencies.

The government does all these things primarily because it believes that the Internet boosts the economy of the UK, and that IT can reduce the cost of public services whilst increasing their quality. Together, these outweigh the dangers, meaning it doesn’t get banned. Gordon Brown’s recent speech at Google was an exemplar of this mainly economically driven celebration of the Internet’s virtues, telling audience members that your industry is driving the next stage of globalisation”.

The first challenge for the government is to understand that whilst these beliefs are true, they are only a minor part of the picture. Tellingly, Browns’ speech contained almost no language that couldn’t have been used to explain the positive impact of electrification or shipping containers.

What is different is the way in which the Internet changes social and economic practices – the vector of attack. In the 20th century, advancement of human welfare went hand in hand with the rise of companies that used economies of scale to deliver better goods and services for customers. Technology effectively made it possible and much easier to be a big, highly productive company, to gather expertise and capital together and to target markets for maximum yields.

Now take a look for a moment at Wikipedia, MoneySavingExpert, Blogger or Match.com – all big websites, all doing different things. Each one, however, is in its own way is reducing the ability of large, previously well functioning institutions to function as easily.

These services are reducing traditional institutions ability to charge for information, seize big consumer surpluses, limit speech or fix marriages. It has, in other words, become harder to be a big business, newspaper, repressive institution or religion. Nor is this traditional ‘creative destruction’ going on in a normal capitalist economy: this isn’t about one widget manufacturer replacing another, this is about a newspaper business dying and being replaced by no one single thing, and certainly nothing recognisable as a newspaper business.

Disruption like this is scary for any institution, which will tend to mean that as a public entity which interfaces with other institutions the temptation will be to hold back the sea, not swim with it. Government must swim with the tide, though, not just to help citizens more but to avoid the often ruinous tension of a citizenry going one way and a government going another. There are various things government can do to be on the right side.

1. Accept that any state institution that says “we control all the information about X” is going to look increasingly strange and frustrating to a public that’s used to be able to do whatever they want with information about themselves, or about anything they care about (both private and public). This means accepting that federated identity systems are coming and will probably be more successful than even official ID card systems: ditto citizen-held medical records. It means saying “We understand that letting train companies control who can interface with their ticketing systems means that the UK has awful train ticket websites that don’t work as hard as they should to help citizens buy cheaper tickets more easily. And we will change that, now.”

2. Seize the opportunity to bring people together. Millions of people visit public sector websites every day, often trying to achieve similar or identical ends. It is time to start building systems to allow them to contact people in a similar situation, just as they’d be able to if queuing together in a job centre, but with far more reach and power. This does open the scary possibility that citizens might club together to protest about poor service or bad policies, but given recent news, if you were a minister would you rather know about what was wrong as soon as possible, or really late in the day (cf MPs‘ expenses, festering for years)?

The killer app of the Internet as it relates to human politics and governance is not any sorf of enabling of direct democacy, which is simply too unwieldy for a handful of people let alone hundreds of millions. Instead it is the ability to maintain honesty in government through distributing the load of watchdogging it among millions.

Take the groundbreaking recovery.gov: “The site will include information about Federal grant awards and contracts as well as formula grant allocations. Federal agencies will provide data on how they are using the money, and eventually, prime recipients of Federal funding will provide information on how they are using their Federal funds. On our end, we will use interactive graphics to illustrate where the money is going, as well as estimates of how many jobs are being created, and where they are located. And there will be search capability to make it easier for you to track the funds.”

This is groundbreaking in the sense that this is the first time an administration has seriously attempted to embrace the Internet not as an extension of existing media but as a new medium in its own right. But it is still not up to snuff, it still shows an attitude that the primary role of the Internet is to reduce the cost of public services whilst increasing their quality — in this case making it faster and cheaper and more efficient to maintain a (albeit well-intentioned) veil of accountability for the massive spending being undertaken.

The recovery.gov site is kind of clunky. It also doesn’t go very deep. Mousing over the map of Iowa for example shows that $1,08 billion has been announced for Iowa. Clicking on Iowa takes you to a list of spending programs (of which the state budget stabilization fund is at the top at $472 million) for which money has been allocated. And… that’s pretty much it.

On the other hand, recovery.org is far more in depth. At their website, I can see that there are 291 active projects valued at $250.4 milion. I can drill down by county to see that Clinton has 2 active projects valued at $1.6 million and by drilling down further I can see that those two projects are for replacement buses for the Transit Authority.

Now, recovery.org is the product of onvia.com, a for-profit organizaiton that helps companies find state and fedral contract opportunities. They have a large research staff that combs federal, state and local media to glean this detailed information and post it not only for the benefit of their customers but free for everyone. Onvia’s information is not complete, just showing what projects are currently open for bid, instead of all projects planned, let and in progress or complete. But that’s okay, that’s not what Onvia is about.

What it does show is the power of community production and how the creative collective production that creates something like Wikipedia can be harnessed to keep our government accountable. And while things like recovery.org can scale up to the national level, they can also be scaled down to the state and local level.

The meta theme for this blog has always sort of been managing change. That is one of the many things that the “c” is for. There has been a forceful change in this country. If I were a betting man — and I am — I would say that there is going to be eight years of Obama presidency in which to make and deal with some serious change.

To that end, I really want this blog to become more about ideas for change and less about why it has to happen. I think we won that why argument. For the past eight years so much of my and my fellow progressives’ energy has been devoted into political resistance and creating a political environment that is not resistant to change; of creating the era we are now entering.

Now, our challenge is to develop ideas that can move men’s minds; to develop a vision of a new economy and culture that is attractive. So much of the progressive movements’ approach to policy has been one of doom, hair shirts and secrifice. But as a technologist and a future-oriented person I have never bought into that. The first posts on this blog was about the Viridian Movement, an alternative environmental philosophy that said that the enviromnental movement was a design challenge, not a policy challenge.

But, before we begin in earnest, I think is important to talk about why I am so confident that progressives can and should — at least for the time being — put the politics of the past behind us and really focus our energies on policy ideas and a vision for a better city, state, nation and planet.

My own observations over the last two or three decades is that the difference between movement conservatives and movement progressives is one of perception of how their ideas are held by the rest of the country. In most cases if you ask a progressive they will admit that their views are not yet shared by most of the country; that the progressive’s job is ideally selling a solution to a problem. Progressives will, for example press harder on gay marriage not because it is assumed to be popular but becasue marriage equality is to us seen as a broader social good and that the rest of the country needs to be sold on this idea.

In this sense progressives try to operate in a market of ideas. In that market facts are important e.g. gays in the military are overwhelmingly well-behaved and good soldiers/sailors/airmen. Further appeals to a percieved innate sense of social justice among the polulation are considered persuasive e.g. gay rights = civil rights.

To use another example: Governmentsponsored and regulated health care is a good solution because it has an excellent long-term track record in many other countries (factual evidence) and because our present system is self-evidently unfair and broken (appeal to social justice AND self-interest).

Contemporary conservatives on the other hand seem to operate under the assumption that their core beliefs are those of ordinary people, that conservatisim is a defense of those core beliefs against an “elitist,” urban, coastal agenda. If that is true, then the movement requires leaders of a sort of “pure” moral character to embody those values to lead and persuade the people that your ideas are ones they already hold.

Therefore, the conservatives argument is almost always an appeal either to cultural tradition and nativism or to faith, e.g. homosexuality is an innate wrong both because it has long been pushed underground in Western Civilization and the Bible says it is wrong. OR: Government sponsored and regulated health care is a bad solution because it is used by left-leaning countries like France and Sweeden (appeal to cultural/nativist tradition) and because it kills free enterprise among health care providers and insurers (appeal to faith in pure capitalism).

For conservatives, theirs is also a market of ideas, but for them the assumption is either that their ideas are already held or supressed by culture and media. Witness the pevasive belief within the conservative movement that the entire range of the mainstream media (Fox excepted) leans heavilly to the left and skews the entire country in that direction.

With that set of operating assumptions then, what are we to make of the prospects for the Republican Party for the next four to eight years? Over drinks with a former Obama staffer last week, I said that intellectually it is much more interesting to think about the problems of the Republicans than it is of the Democrats.

For Democrats our chief task is really just to persuade our more timid members that we have (albeit temporarily) cleared the field of our enemies and to stiffen their spines enough to actually vote for good policy instead of “compromise” bills, with the rump of the GOP. It all comes down to legislative hallway arm-twisting and constituent pressure on party members who haven’t gotten the “Change Is Here” memo yet. Pretty boring and frustrating stuff.

Republicans on the other hand are faced with somehow completely transforming their party ideologicaly and demographically. The GOP faces a couple of really big hills to climb. One, is that their politics of cultural identity and moral surety is rapidly pushing them into a demographic and geographic box which — unless they drasticaly broaden their reach — they face a future as a purely regional party that is permanently in the minority at the national level.

The party’s other big hill to climb is one that is summed up in the phrase, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” In other words, the party’s most recent turn at power in which its policies were given what passes in the US as almost total freedom, was a dismal failure. This is a fact that is recognized by almost everyone but the party’s most faithful supporters.

Barack Obama — and Democratic candidates all up and down the ticket — won not only because of his/their superior policy initiatives. It was the fact that the alternative — essentially more of the same — was so obviously *wrong* that people were more than willing to give the unknown a shot.

Therefore, as long as the Obama administration continues to make even slow but steady progress on its promises, it will probably continue to get the benefit of the doubt from the electorate. And as long as the Republican party resists fundamental change in its character and policies, they will not be able to offer a compelling alternative agenda.

So, that is all just an explanation why I feel pretty comfortable in pulling back somewhat from day to day politics and instead starting to focus on actual ideas for change and transformation and maybe even implementing them.

I think this is a wise thing for many progressive acitivsts to do. Not to abandon politics altogether, but to devote more time to developing ideas for building resliliance and change in our communities; to get our hands dirty doing community organizing and local policy work. Change after all comes from below.

I’ll have more on this soon and later in the month I expect to announce a major community-building project in the Clinton region. In the meantime, enjoy the weekend.

Needless to say, we were both utterly stunned when I had to pay off last month.

It is really hard to get one’s head around the fact that the world has changed rather fundamentally in the last four months. Although I lost the oil bet, I am rather pleased that my bet on Barack Obama placed 21 months ago has paid off. If someone had told me on that evening that I could trade the $1000.00 for an Obama victory in November, I would have headed to the ATM right then and there.

The last week has brought an avalanche of emotions. I find myself a bit lost with my free time. Kind of like this guy:

But I think Andrew Sullivan hits it on the head for me:

It isn’t redemption: I don’t expect that from politics. I realize what I’m feeling is relief.

What I wrote last Monday was not meant casually. Knowing that the Bush-Cheney-Addington axis will be forced out of power is an immense, slackening relief. I’ve felt compelled by politics these past few years in ways I don’t like or enjoy. With men and women finally back in power I can trust to act reasonably and ethically and within the rule of law, I feel less hesitation in getting on with life.

This has defied ALL conventional wisdom. This result is a testament to not only Obama and his campaign’s extraordinary skill, but to America itself and our ability to continue to hope, dream and work for healing change. Win or lose, Barack Obama has permanently transformed the landscape of American politics. And he’s just getting warmed up.

From John Podhoretz:

A black man will be his party’s nominee to be president of the United States. If you were a betting man and you had to place a bet on who is going to win in November, you would be prudent to place it on him. He is a problematic candidate, but not because of his father’s ancestry; rather, because of his views. He will carry aloft the standard of a great political party and a powerful ideological coalition. This is a culminating moment for the United States.

The final word from The Man himself. The concluding paragraph of a very interesting profile of Obama in todays NYT:

“I love when I’m shaking hands on a rope line and”— he mimes the motion, hand over hand — “I see little old white ladies and big burly black guys and Latino girls and all their hands are entwining. They’re feeding on each other as much as on me.”

He shrugs; it’s that distancing eye of the author.

“It’s like I’m just the excuse.”

]]> http://cman.cx/blog/index.php/2008/06/04/everything-is-different-now/feed/ 0 http://cman.cx/blog/index.php/2008/03/27/self-violating-goodwins-law/ http://cman.cx/blog/index.php/2008/03/27/self-violating-goodwins-law/#comments Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:23:04 +0000 Connor http://cman.cx/blog/index.php/2008/03/27/self-violating-goodwins-law/ Goodwin’s Law is one of the principal rules governing how people behave in online discussions. It states, As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”

I’m going to do what a good moderator should never do and be the one to bring up the Nazi analogy. It is this. Like Nazi Germany circa Fall 1944, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is over. But her hubris is such that she cannot shake the assumption that the nomination is her destiny, facts and circumstances be dammed. So, she condemns all of us to slog on through a campaign of attrition to the bitter, bitter end.

The mainstream media is slowly coming around to the idea that there is no realistic strategy whereby she can win the nomination in the normal fashion. Jake Tapper at ABC news yesterday gives Hillary’s remaining gambits an appropriate, lower-middlebrow, blue-collar spin. He calls this Hillary’s Tonya Harding Option:

What Democratic officials across the country fear is what Clinton will have to do to party rival Illinois Sen. Barack Obama — who leads in pledged delegates and the popular vote — to make that happen.

“I don’t think she has no chance, but the route for her to victory is so bad for the Democratic Party — it’s to damage Obama so much that people feel he’s not electable,” said ABC News political contributor Matthew Dowd, a former adviser to President Bush, repeating the sentiments of many in the other party.

One Democratic Party official called Clinton’s strategy “The Tonya Harding Option” — the idea that Clinton’s only path to the gold medal is to destroy her leading competitor.

After staying away from the controversy involving Obama’s former pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright for almost two weeks, Clinton for the first time personally injected him into the race.

“He would not have been my pastor,” Clinton said of Wright during a news conference Tuesday in Greensburg, Pa. “You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend.”

So thanks in advance Sen. Clinton for subjecting us to several months of metaphorical leg-breaking. A Battle of the Bulge and Battle for Berlin, if you will, and all the collateral damage for the party and for its White House prospects that such metaphors might suggest.

I’m sure that is the kind of positive, new-Democratic-majority campaign for change she had in mind when she started this thing.

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