Can Facebook topple Egyptian authoritarianism?

Newest Egyptian Way to Learn Your Facebook Password: Torturing Ahmed Maher (by blogger Wael Abbas)

[see also See “Twitter, Facebook and YouTube’s Role in Middle East Uprisings” (Social Capital Blog, 1/26/11, updated 2/3/11)]

David Wolman has an interesting article in the current WIRED magazine chronicling the rise of Ahmed Maher and other activists in Cairo trying to use Facebook to organize student protest.  It describes all the cat-and-mouse intrigue and the government’s effort to arrest the ringleaders, torture them into submission or steal their passwords.

At one level it is a paean to technology: how the nimble, viral Facebook can out-organize the old brick-and-mortar state security force of the repressive Mubarak regime.  At another level, it raises all the risks of organizing over the Internet:  while one can build “movements” with amazing viral rapidity, will these “activists” (or slacktivists) with fewer real social ties actually come to the protests; or how without all the verbal cues and formal vetting through real networks, it is much easier for government agents to “infiltrate” the Facebook space and monitor what is going on.

The article ends on a possibly optimistic note: Ahmed Maher is not tortured in his most recent arrest by the Egyptian police, perhaps because they have no explicit orders of what to do with him, or perhaps he has reached the level of fame where harming him, fans the flames of the opposition.

[See my related post on the rise of trivial Twitter for social mobilization in developing countries.]

Anyway, “Cairo Activists Use Facebook to Rattle Regime” (WIRED, 10/20/08) is an interesting read on both the promise and peril of e-activism.

See updated post on TechPresident “Egyptian Activists Challenge Facebook-Enabled Diplomacy 2.0” (12/5/08)

 

Barack’s as Muslim as Sarah Palin

McCain/Palin’s slanderous attempt to portray Christian candidate Barack Obama as Muslim, by repeatedly having surrogates refer in nasty tones to Barack Obama by his full name “Barack Hussein Obama”, has spurred some impressive and inspiring reactions to seize a higher moral ground than McCain and Palin.

A lot of Facebook page owners (who also are not Muslim) have changed their middle names in sympathy to Hussein.  So I would post as Thomas Hussein Sander.  See this thread of Hussein is My Middle Name.

It’s reminiscent of the 1993 Billings, Montana story where a Jewish family’s window was shattered for lighting a menorah.

When a brick was thrown through the bedroom window of a Jewish child whose window bore a menorah, the community response was extraordinary. An organized alliance of citizens, churches, unions and the media banded together. The local paper printed a full-page, color picture of a menorah, so that others could hang it in their windows in solidarity. With the help of merchants, by late December nearly 10,000 people in Billings, Montana had this symbol of Jews overcoming persecution displayed in their windows.  PBS made a movie of this called Not In Our Town. (Thanks to Forgotten Fires for the specifics.)

And now this Massachusetts Observer page has claimed Barack O’Bama as Irish with a humorous rhyme.  What’s next?  Japanese Obama-san?

The moral roots of liberals and conservatives

Jonathan Haidt has an interesting talk on TED on where differences from liberals and conservatives originate from.

He notes that “being open to new experiences” is a key predictor of these divisions.  Liberals crave novelty, new ideas, travel. Conservatives like dependability, routine, order and are low on openness to new experiences.  (This was captured by Robert McCrae in “The Social consequences of Experiential Openness”, 1996).

He notes that we are trapped in our own way of thinking, much like The Matrix, such that when liberals “lose” the 2000 election they think that all the Red States must form a country called *Dumb@$#$istan*.

In any effort to help liberals and conservatives see the world from the other’s perspective he notes that nature provides an initial draft for our mind which experience then revises (Gary Marcus, 2004).  He shows fascinating graphs from 23,000 people who indicated their ideology and answered some questions on THe Morality Foundations Questionnaire at www.yourmorals.org concerning their beliefs.  He categorizes individuals along 5 fundamental moral dimensions, the first three of which are heavily entwined with social capital.  He says the 5 core dimensions for the moral mind (abstracting from anthropology, neurology, psychology, etc.) are:

1. Harm/care – as a species care a lot about others

2. Fairness/reciprocity

3. In group/out group – only among humans are there large groups that are united together for common purposes, and as a species we self-consciously produce or reinforce tribes (for wars, sports team loyalty, etc.)

4. Authority/respect – often based out of love

5. Purity/sanctity (either with regard to things like sex, or the foods we put in our body)

What’s fascinating is that if you chart individuals across parts of the world you find that in all societies, conservatives treat all these five factors as moderately important; liberals however focus almost exclusively on the harm/caring or fairness/reciprocity principles. In most societies, the increase in attention given by Conservatives to factors like Respect, Authority, Order, Purity rises much more sharply than the attention to Caring and Reciprocity falls. Haidt describes conservatives as having a 5-channel moral equalizer.

Haidt notes that Liberals speak for weak and oppressed; they want change and justice, even at the risk of chaos. Conservatives speak for institutions and traditions; they want order even at cost to those at the bottom. Haidt thinks Edmund Burke had it right when he said in the wake of the French Revolution: “the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights.”

He notes that liberals take for granted that order will always be there, but describes an interesting experiment by Fehr and Gachter written up in Nature in 2002. People in the experiment played a game in which they could cooperate or defect and like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the pot grew larger through collaboration. At the end of the game, the pot was split equally among the players. Although all shared in the gains of the group, an individual could often make out more on any given turn by not cooperating. When they played the game with no forms of punishment allowed (a liberal’s paradise), cooperation started at a moderate level and declined each round. Cooperators got angry at others’ defections and decided to reciprocate, creating a race to the bottom. Starting in the 7th round, the experimenters allowed the participants to punish through the remainder of the game. Cooperation rates immediately jumped to 70% and then increased in every following round.  The authors talk about how altruistic punishment is essential to cooperation.

Haidt says our most remarkable wonder of the world is not the Grand Canyon (erosion writ large) but our ability to cooperate and live together in hostile environments (the Alaska tundra or the Arizona desert) and in big cities. He notes that this takes full use of all of our moral toolkit and requires sub-groups, organizational tools, moral incentives to rise to our best and say no our worst voices (in which Haidt thinks religion plays a key role).

In our Saguaro Seminar, participant Liz Lerman asked “why aren’t our minds large enough to encompass “both-and” rather than “either-or.”  Haidt sings a similar tune when he notices how many Eastern Religions realize that both halves are essential: like Ying/Yang or Vishnu the preserve and Shiva the destroyer working together; or a quote from a Buddhist leader “The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease.  Haidt notes that our Righteous Minds were ‘designed” by evolution to: 1) Unite us in teams; 2) Divide Us against other teams; and 3) Blind us to the truth.  He says we don’t have to adopt moral relativism, but we can’t charge in to a situation saying “I’m right”, “You’re wrong”.  We need to first understand who we are and who they are; what are the reasons why others are doing what they are doing.  This will help us develop moral humility and ultimately be more effective in changing the world into what we want it to be.

Watch Haidt’s TED talk here.

Voter-gauged election fairness

(photo by danostuporstar)

My colleague Archon Fung has a new web-based project (in conjunction with ABC News) called My Fair Election to enable voters to rate how fair their voting experience was.

I’ve blogged before about how citizens could be on the front-lines in monitoring global warming or bird patterns or even improving GPS systems.  (See related post here.)  Now citizens can be at the forefront of helping to monitor our election process.

The My Fair Election website says “Rate your polling place and your experience of voting here. Was it easy to vote? Were there long lines, closed polling places, or broken machines? Your rating and those of thousands of other voters will produce a real-time map of voting conditions throughout the country on November 4, 2008. Sign up now, and you will receive an email message with instructions for submitting your own rating after you vote.”

My Fair Election enables American citizens or journalists or politicians to see where there are concentrations of voting unfairness or irregularity and enables high level of citizen-observed unfairness in the election process to trigger investigations into asserted irregularities.  One could also see the day after the election from the “Weather Map of Election Fairness” we collectively create whether concentrations of voting unfairness occurred in certain states or traditionally Blue vs. Red areas.

So don’t only vote on November 4, but sign up at My Fair Election and get your friends (in lots of different places) to sign up as well.  Together we can all hold the voting system accountable and we can add a layer of transparency to our voting process.

Note: other parallel efforts (although not enabling one to map the infractions) are a service which Twitter offered called Vote Report and Video Your Vote (a YouTube) effort enabling voters to upload a video of their voting experience.

Is early or weekend voting desirable?

Is this how YOU get to the polls? (photo by glesgagirl59)

An Op-ed in the NYT “Everybody’s Voting for the Weekend” (Steve Israel/Norman Ornstein, 10/24/08) makes clear that the fact that we vote on Tuesdays is a historical anomaly, born of the days when we had to vote at the county seat and it took a day to travel in both directions.  As the title suggests, Israel/Ornstein favor weekend voting.

A thought piece in the Washington Post by Marc Fisher makes clear that there is more at stake than simply trying to increase voter turnout.  He deplores early voting laws that spread the vote out over weeks.  Citing my colleague Bob Putnam, Fisher notes that voting is a collective act, a chance to affirm one’s commitment in front of one’s neighbors:

Voting is a proud expression of who we are and of our belief in our system and our future. It is an individual act but a communal experience. It is a statement we make about ourselves, to ourselves, but also to each other. It is how we say, “I am part of something larger, and my voice matters, and so does yours.” When we chip away at that communal experience, we diminish democracy.”

Voting alone could be worse than bowling alone,” says Dennis Thompson, a political philosopher at Harvard University, referring to Robert Putnam’s book arguing that as Americans have withdrawn from community and civic activities, our sense of trust and political engagement has declined. Early voting, Thompson says, “divides people, and in elections, we’re all supposed to be equal. The meaning of an election is that all of us come together to make decisions based on our common experience.” Take away the chance to vote together and you take away some of that meaning.

And while in Obama’s case, it looks like early voting favors disaffected African-American voters drawn to the polls for the first time in decades, who might otherwise not vote amidst the long lines and delays on Election Day or have their right to vote questioned, history shows otherwise.

“Early voting is a strongly biased opportunity,” Thompson argues. “Some people have more information than others.” In local and state races, voters might not hear much about candidates until the final week. That’s when less well-funded candidates might make their big push, and it’s when newspapers and other media produce voter guides.

More disturbing, early voters tend to be “older, better educated and more cognitively engaged in the campaign and in politics,” Gronke says.

“Early voting encourages a campaign strategy that divides the electorate and conceives of early voters as a different group,” Thompson says. Last week, Obama spent a big chunk of time in Florida just as early voting began there….

Either way, early voting shouldn’t be a partisan issue. The real debate should be about whether convenience is more important than the unique power of Election Day to pull us out of our atomized lives and put us in one room with our neighbors so that we see, if only briefly, just what we are voting about.

It may be that weekend voting is the best compromise: enabling more people to vote, easing the hunt for poll workers (whose average age is now usually in their 70s or 80s), delaying early voting until more of the electorate is well informed, and increasing the communal aspect of voting, even if spread out over two days.

See Marc Fisher’s “In Early Voting Trend, Democracy is the Biggest Loser” (Washington Post, 10/24/08).

Priming people to vote

Priming you to vote for Obama? (Obama mosaic of people image by tsevis)

Priming is the influencing of an outcome by exposing people to some stimulus in advance (a picture, a concept, an advertisement) that then influences their subsequent outcome in systematic ways.  Nobelist Daniel Kahneman and others talk about the pervasiveness of this effect and how it can influence voting…

KAHNEMAN: “…We are all aware that our behavior and our thoughts and feelings are highly context-dependent: none of us is quite the same person at home and in the office, in bed or in the subway. We are used to the context-dependency of our behavior and we have stories that make sense of it—social pressure, norms etc. What we are learning from the priming-anchoring effects is that context-dependency is mediated in part by multiple subtle cues of which we are not necessarily aware. ”

The effects according to Kahneman are systematic and pervasive (with a HOST of examples).  The magnitude of the effect is not negligible but not overpowering.  And the effect doesn’t always persist.  It happens without us being aware of the prime (and even consciously explaining that the priming influence did NOT influence our behavior), but it affects us nonetheless, unless on issues on which we have irrevocably made up our mind.

This dialogue is taken from a fascinating conversation on Edge 262 with W. Daniel Hillis, Kahneman, Nathan Myhrvold, Richard Thaler, Elon Musk, France LeClerc, Salar Kamangar, Anne Treisman, Sendhil Mullainathan, Jeff Bezos, and Sean Parker.

MYHRVOLD: You can make Democrats and Republicans by threatening them with death? That’s fascinating!

KAHNEMAN: Those effects would be small at the margin, but there are those effects that are small at the margin that can change election results.

You call and ask people ahead of time, “Will you vote?”. That’s all. “Do you intend to vote?”. That increases voting participation substantially, and you can measure it. It’s a completely trivial manipulation, but saying ‘Yes’ to a stranger, “I will vote” …

MYHRVOLD: But…suppose you had the choice of calling up and saying, “Are you going to vote?”, so you prime them to vote, versus exhorting them to vote.

KAHNEMAN: The prime could very well work better than the exhortation because exhortation is going to induce resistance, whereas the prime ‚the mild embarrassment causes you to make what feels like a commitment, and the commitment, if it’s sufficiently precise, is going to have an effect on behavior.

THALER: If you ask them when they’re going to vote, and how they’re going to get there, that increases voting.

KAHNEMAN: And where….Here is a study, this one will demonstrate that those effects are not so weak. You look for support for school bonds, and what you look for is where were the polling stations. When the polling station is in a school, you get measurable effects on the support for school bonds. They increase. That is non-trivial, it’s in the real world, except that you have something that is focused, you know what the direction is. You expose a lot of people to the prime, and you observe the behavior, and it’s quite measurable.

THALER: And to answer your question, on that one, my recollection is the magnitude is something like 2 or 3 percent. It’s not a huge effect, but a noticeable effect.

KAHNEMAN: Yes, that’s what you would expect.

MULLAINATHAN: There is another response to this question. And I’ve struggled a lot with this question. If these effects are so big, how can it be, right?

There is another more controversial response to that, which is, let’s say that the two phenomena that are opposing each other is that people are relatively consistent and stable, but these effects suggest a lot of instability. One resolution to that is that, in fact, people are not consistent and stable …… and, the bias is that we think ourselves and others are consistent and stable when we’re not. There is good evidence that if you take even something as simple as stated preference for Democrat, Republican, test-retest validity on these things is tiny, risk aversion measures have tiny test-retest validity. One possible resolution control of this is that the mistake is on our end in presuming stable interpersonal characteristics.

KAHNEMAN: That’s a beautiful way of putting it, because one of the things that psychologists have been exercising over and over for decades is the relative impact of personality, if you will, or character or temperament—internal factors as against environmental factors in the control of behavior. We have a hugely powerful bias against the environment as a determinant of behavior. We tend to believe that somebody is behaving that way because he wants to behave that way, because he tends to behave that way, because that’s his nature. It turns out that the environmental effects on behavior are a lot stronger than most people expect.

KAHNEMAN: …Another condition is a pile of Monopoly money on a neighboring table. What would you guess, by the way? Those of you who have read it shouldn’t guess, but can you guess? I was stunned by the result, which I wouldn’t have predicted. But can you guess what priming people with money will do? They don’t want help. They’re on their own. They also don’t want to give help. You’ve got very clever ways of manipulating that, of observing that, but my favorite is the experimenter that comes in clutching a batch of pencils, and the pencils drop on the floor. The dependent variable of the study, the number of pencils the person picks up, is fewer if there is money on that screen saver.

MYHRVOLD: [On effect of playing Monopoly in advance]…Makes them Democrats?

HILLIS: Republican.

KAHNEMAN: It’s closer to making them Republican. It makes them individualists. And it’s quite deep, and very unexpected. It doesn’t make them good or bad, it just makes them different.

Here is the whole conversation on Edge 262.

Note: in another recent priming example relevant to social capital, scientists found that you feel warmer to someone you just met if you are holding a hot cup of coffee rather than a cold beverage. Not kidding…See study by Lawrence Williams (Univ. of Colorado) and John Bargh of Yale here in Science magazine.

For an interesting post not on priming, but on getting individuals to make commitments to voting, see the Freakonomics blog post on how to improve efficiency and effectiveness in the voting process through enforcable commitments to vote in Ian Ayres’ “A Political Do Not Call List“.

Job loss linked to lifelong community disengagement

(photo by khalishah)

An interesting study by sociologists Jennie Brand (UCLA) and Sarah Burgard (Univ. of Michigan) found that workers who laid off even once are 35% less likely to be involved in community or social organizations than workers who have never been jobless.

The plus is that this study (the high quality Wisconsin Longitudinal Study) tracks  Wisconsin high school graduates for decades from their graduation in 1957. The caveat is that this group was almost entirely white Americans so it is hard to know whether this applies to a New York or an L.A.

What’s especially troubling is that it doesn’t appear to be a simple explanation of people who are jobless temporarily disengaging from community to find a new job.  The scholars found that those who had been jobless had lower levels of civic engagement decades after they were laid off, and this “civic gap” remained relatively stable.  Author Brand describes them as being on lifetime lower civic trajectory across a range of civic activities, from joining book clubs to participating in the PTA and supporting charities.

Their study tracked six forms of civic engagement: churches; charitable organizations; youth groups or community centers; business or political groups; professional organizations; and social or leisure organizations, such as country clubs or sports teams. The average participation of respondents decreased over this period, consistent with the trends highlighted by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone.  But the 25% of workers in the study laid off between 1975 and 2005 dropped faster (statistically significantly) in all categories other than business or political groups, and professional organizations. The declines were largest on participation in youth groups or community centers.  The only group that seemed somewhat exempt from these effects were those that were involuntarily let go in their later years (after age 53), when they could recharacterize this as ‘early retirement.’

Brand admits she doesn’t know why job displacement has this long-term effect.  She suspects it might be one of three causes: 1) those who are laid off are depressed and often downwardly mobile; 2) there may be embarrassment or shame with job less that causes people not to interact with others; 3) there may be bitterness or a loss of trust in others that comes from the implicit social contract being torn asunder that causes long-term withdrawal.

The study (“Effects of Job Displacement on Social Participation: Findings Over the Life Course of a Cohort of Joiners”) will appear in the September issue of Social Forces.  See earlier research report on this.

Brand’s study grew out of her interest in the rapidly growing practice of companies laying off Americans (see Louis Uchitelle, The Disposable American, 2006) and work by my colleague Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone, 2000, and Better Together, 2004) on social capital and civic engagement.

Given the looming economic recession/depression(?) this obviously doesn’t bode well for longer-term civic engagement.  Although it’s also worth noting that the Long Civic Generation that came of age through the Great Depression and two World Wars has been far more civic and socially engaged their entire lives than the generations that preceded or followed.  We hope that the next Administration can work together with businesses, non-profits, religious leaders, and civic leaders to think about how to spur greater civic engagement in this period of far less economic security and confidence.

Abstract and description of the study available from UCLA.

Tip of the hat to Robert Putnam for alerting me to this study.

The Great Schlep: using Jewish social capital to lead Obama to Florida victory

A migration of younger Jewish voters is going to the battleground state of Florida in what some have termed ‘The Great Schlep’ (borrowing the Yiddish for a long and arduous journey) to convince their grandparents to vote for Barack.  It’s a consummate use of social capital (familial social capital) to change votes; and studies show that face-to-face appeals by friends (or family) work better.  [I blogged about the Obama iPhone application along these lines.]

When Mike Bender, one of the Great Schleppers, “brought up the idea of voting for Obama over Thanksgiving dinner last year, he was met with an uncharacteristic silence…..[His grandparents’] reaction was, as they said, ‘I’m a little meschugah.’ (crazy)  This despite the fact that Bender’s grandparents were lifelong Democrats.

The idea gained momentum when Ari Wallach (co-executive director of Jews Vote) and others enlisted comedian Sarah Silverman. See her humorous video here where she explains all the commonalities between Barack or African Americans and elder Jews (including their love of track uniforms)

(Note: Viewer discretion advised; lots of 4 letter words, some offensive)

“The Silverman video quickly became a Web sensation, garnering about 2 million hits in the two weeks since it was posted on thegreatschlep.com, organizers said. Thousands of people pledged to call their relatives in Florida and more than 100 people volunteered to pay their own way to travel to the Sunshine State to campaign for Obama among Jewish voters, Wallach said.”  There are 650,000 Jews (with very high voting rates and high affiliations to the Democratic party) living in Florida.

Note:  for the etymology on schlep, see William Safire’s column where he explains that it originally came from German meaning “to drag, haul, lug.”…”Earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from James Joyce’s 1922 novel, Ulysses: ‘She trudges, schlepps, trains, drags . . . her load.’ The closest synonym is drag, but schlep has a greater connotation of exasperated weariness on the part of a person clumsily trying to cope with an unwelcome burden. This has given rise to a second meaning to the noun: ‘an arduous journey.'”

It’s interesting because,  even beyond Jews, there is much higher support for Barack among younger generations than Baby Boomers.  This came out during the primary where Baby Boomers were far more likely to support Hillary than Barack.  And it fed into the ‘Mom won’t you vote for Barack” effort.  Maybe there need to be a lot more schleps.  Could we get Latinos to convince their parents to vote for Obama and find a catchy name for this as well?

See CNN story on the Great Schlep here.

How low can McCain and Palin stoop in campaigning?

John McCain and Sarah Palin continue to campaign at some of the basest levels we’ve seen in recent years.  Sarah Palin now regularly throws “meat” to racist bigots that I’m embarrassed live in America. Does she believe that her best and maybe only hope of becoming V.P. at this point is to incite an assassination of Barack Obama?    The simple fact that she dresses it up in lipstick and says it with a smile doesn’t make it any better.

(photo by thekateblack)

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank described this scene in Clearwater, FL:

Palin’s routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”

Cindy McCain has joined her husband in the nasty, angry tirades. [Spreading more lies about “Obama not funding the troops in Iraq” when this is equally true of McCain who refused to back a funding bill for U.S. soldiers in Iraq that had a withdrawal timeline.]

And John McCain continues to dwell on the fact that Barack Obama has served on non-profit boards with former Weatherman Bill Ayers, even though the two are not even close friends and Ayers is now a tenured professor in Chicago, Ayers been commended for his recent educational work, and got a Citizen of the Year award from the city of Chicago in 1997.  [Not to make light of the subject, but Jon Stewart nails what is going on.]

His latest is this “about-to-air” commercial which the New York Times calls “paint-peeling” in tone (10/10/08)

I know McCain is embarrassed that he is not stronger on the economy, and E.J. Dionne has noticed that McCain, in his campaign desperation, has decided to start putting “John McCain First” rather than “Country First” as his campaign slogan claims.  The only mark that McCain has any scruples is recent claims that he has put the brakes on advertising that tries to make hay out of comments of Obama’s ties to his previous pastor, Rev. Wright;  McCain apparently, as least as of today, feels that this is a bridge too far.  Let’s hope he holds on to at least this shred of campaign decency, even if his campaign numbers fall further, and current polling shows a 168 point electoral landslide for Obama.

One would hope that McCain would have learned something positively from the nasty smear campaigns that George Bush’s campaign ran against McCain in 2000, but instead he appears to have learned: ‘if you can’t lick ’em, join ’em.”  Desperation has no fury like a McCain scorned…

Let’s hope that Americans have greater common sense than to fall to McCain’s baiting.

Coda: David Tanenhaus, who met Ayers and Obama in the early 1990s, writes about how Ayers’ 1997 book A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court and the serious national discussion that ensued ushered in policy reforms of blended sentences, “whereby kids, even though tried as adults, received suspended sentences and were then referred to juvenile programs instead of rotting away for years in adult prisons.”

By the late 1990s, such ideas had become part of the national dialogue. Approaches that Ayers helped publicize were being adopted in several states—including Texas under then-Gov. George W. Bush. Juvenile justice was, in fact, a cornerstone of Bush’s “compassionate conservative” agenda. In his 2000 acceptance speech, he spoke movingly of a 15-year-old African-American boy he had met at a juvenile jail in Marlin, Texas, who had committed a “grown-up crime” but was still a “little boy”: “If that boy in Marlin believes he is trapped and worthless and hopeless—if he believes his life has no value—then other lives have no value to him, and we are all diminished.” The passage could have come directly from Ayers’ book….

Leading Chicagoans, including Mayor Daley, now commend Ayers for his service to the city. “I don’t condone what he did 40 years ago, but I remember that period well,” Daley said last April. “It was a difficult time, but those days are long over. I believe we have too many challenges in Chicago and our country to keep refighting 40-year-old battles.”

See a related comment on McCain’s deplorable tactics in Gail Collins’ “Confessions of a Phone Solicitor” (NYT, 10/23/08)

Characteristics of a great neighborhood

The American Planning Association has released their list of best places in America.

And 2 of their 7 factors for ‘great neighborhoods’ focus on social capital (numbers 4 and 5):

Characteristics of a Great Neighborhood include:

1. Has a variety of functional attributes that contribute to a resident’s day-to-day living (i.e. residential, commercial, or mixed-uses).

1. Accommodates multi-modal transportation (i.e. pedestrians, bicyclists, drivers).

1. Has design and architectural features that are visually interesting.

1. Encourages human contact and social activities.

1. Promotes community involvement and maintains a secure environment.

1. Promotes sustainability and responds to climatic demands.

1. Has a memorable character.

See the list of what APA thinks are the great neighborhoods in America.