As in last November, my house was the polling place for Ward 66, Division 31 in Northeast Philadelphia for this primary election. (I talked about that day in a dKos diary at the time.) In November, roughly 450 out of 600 voters turned out to vote.

In this off-year municipal primary, 56 people voted. Somewhere around 35 people voted in the Democratic primary.

Mike Stark wrote a diary on dailyKos called Screaming into the ether. Among the lines that struck me were these:

I made a couple of comments in Mike's diary because his question catalyzed a thought process that has been running in the background of my mind for a few months now, in terms of my general political outlook and also my dissertation research. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the progressive Net-based activists? I'm mostly an outsider to this world. I've made a few comments, posted a few diaries, donated to a few candidates. But I'm not immersed in it, and so I think there's a fair amount that I miss. On the other hand, maybe an outsider's perspective might be helpful with the question. I don't know. I have some ideas, some of which I'm committed to more than others. If my impressions are based on faulty data, I trust I'll be corrected. If my vision of what Net activism could be differs from the people who are on the front lines . . . well, they're the ones putting in the time, so obviously their vision is what will and should drive things. This is not a "Here I am to tell you what you're doing wrong and what you should change" diary. This is a "Here's how I think we're doing - please tell me where you think I'm on to something or way off base" diary.

This entry is pretty much word for word from the diary I used to introduce myself at dailyKos. I'm posting it here because I've been interested in participating in some of the PA-centric conversations here, and I'd like to have this available so that anyone who wants to get a sense of where I'm coming from can easily find out.)

I'm a grad student in philosophy at Philadelphia's Temple University, writing my dissertation on John Dewey's democratic theory. The words "pragmatism" and "progressive" are near and dear to my heart - they're at the core of how I think about myself and the kind of world I'd like to help create. It wasn't until my second year at Temple that I really delved into Dewey's works, after reading Robert Westbrook's excellent intellectual biography, John Dewey and American Democracy. As I explored Dewey's writings, I found a remarkably robust way of thinking that was intellectually satisfying and still engaged in the world. To have any shot at explaining that, though, I'm gonna need the extended entry box.