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What if anything is the potential contribution of web-based "social networking" to social movements and social change?

Joe Wilson called Obama a liar and a senior White House advisor called Wilson, "A pimple on the ass of progress." Obama waves a useless piece of paper in the wind and the Republicans become, well, carbuncles on the ass of progress.

The most important moral and intellectual voices within a disintegrating society are slowly discredited when their nonviolent protests and calls for justice cannot alter intransigent and corrupt systems of power. The repeated acts of peaceful civil disobedience, efforts at electoral and political reform and the fight to protect the rule of law are dismissed as useless by an embittered, dispossessed and betrayed public. The demagogues and hatemongers, the purveyors of violence, easily seduce enraged and bewildered masses in the final stages of collapse with false promises of vengeance, new glory and moral renewal. And in the spiral downward the good among us are reviled as naive and ineffectual fools.