Where’s the Outrage?

There are several reasons I liked Senator Barack Obama’s recent speech on race:

1. By correctly refusing to disown Pastor Jeremiah Wright, Obama showed loyalty.

2. By speaking at length about the good points and bad points of the black church, Obama acknowledged the basic humanity and complexity of the average person.

3. By addressing the historical experience of both blacks and whites in the United States, Obama asked us to consider context. Although this is something increasingly rare in our fragmented  and quick-paced society, context is a starting point of seeing the lives of others in a humane and caring way.

4. By speaking in a reasonably forthright manner about a difficult subject, Obama respected the intelligence of the average voter.

5. By offering the opportunity to move past divisive racial concerns in the 2008 Election, Obama offered voters a positive choice.

Here is a good USA Today story on the speech (No, you don’t need to read the 11,821 comments so far made about the story).

Here is the complete transcript of the speech.

Here is the Obama campaign web page.

Tags: Election 2008, Race by Texas Liberal
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A recent article in The Economist magazine discussed the origins of human morality. Here is the full article.  The following excerpt has to do with the differences in how liberals and conservatives think.

… Liberal teenagers always felt more stress than conservatives, but were particularly stressed if they could not decide for themselves whom they spent time with. Such choice, or the lack of it, did not change conservative stress levels. Liberals were also loners, spending a quarter of their time on their own. Conservatives were alone for a sixth of the time. That may have been related to the fact that liberals were equally bored by their own company and that of others. Conservatives were far less bored when with other people. They also preferred the company of relatives to non-relatives. Liberals were indifferent. Perhaps most intriguingly, the more religious a liberal teenager claimed to be, the more he was willing to confront his parents with dissenting beliefs. The opposite was true for conservatives.

Dr Wilson suspects that the liberal package of individualism and confrontation is the appropriate response to survival in a stable environment in which there is leisure for learning and reflection, and the consequences for a group’s stability of such dissent are low. The conservative package of collectivism and conformity, by contrast, works in an unstable environment where joint action, and thus obedience to their group, are at a premium. It is an interesting suggestion, and it is one that plays into the question of how morality actually evolved.

This mix of seeking time alone and sometimes finding myself in a confrontation matches some of my own experiences. Its also the case that family has not been the center of my life.

Like anything that deals with many people, these findings are generalizations. Still, they appear to hold some truth.

Any thoughts?

Tags: Other Political Thoughts by Texas Liberal
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The following people have been named “Worst Person in the World” by News Anchor Keith Olbermann:

• Himself
• Rupert Murdoch, for short changing his mother
• John McCain, for repeatedly saying that Iran was training Al Qaeda members

Tags: Countdown, Election 2008 by ecthompson
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