A divide amongst the liberal blogs

The Obama supporters have a view of the world where the people are basically good and failures come primarily from miscommunications, incompetence, and stupidity.

The obama criticizers have a much more good and evil religiously based view of the world. To them the first group are religious zealots who support people based on charisma or unthinking irrationality.

So the first group basically trusts Obama and assume that the request is primarily so that Obama can do it right. The second group basically doesn't and assumes that the request is so that Obama can be Bush 2.0

The request that the first group makes is not that you should support things that you don't like. It is a request for you to see the world in a less binary good and evil manner

Now to be fair that might not entirely be a good thing. I think the latter view is probably more effective at organizing and mobilizing because it is based on simpler principles. A wait and see attitude does not translate into hits on a blog after all.

And I think while we criticize you we do think that you provide a helpful counterbalance to the right. But we don't agree and we aren't going to act like we do agree. We think that you might be too apt to ignore the importance of things like experience and skill.

Suffering does not make you more moral

I was reading http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/07/BA2N155CN1.DTL and thinking about Gaza and I had to post a thought that I had been thinking about for a while.

Suffering does not make you more moral. The rockets Gaza fires at Israel are wrong and riots are wrong.

They are an expression of rage.

When you suffer it is easy to justify making other people suffer too. But that makes hurting others no less immoral. And generally the targets of your reprisals are random or loved ones.

Such rage and hate is a natural response. But it is not a good response.