I am stunned by the attention being paid to the new opinion poll which shows Sinn Fein’s support down by 4% to 20% (as El Blogador would have it, echoed by Slugger O’Toole.
I may not agree with them on much else, but the Sinn Fein supporters in the comments threads to both posts have it right; SF tend to be very much underestimated in their support in polls, not (as Blogador seems to believe) because people magically change their minds in the run-up to polling day, but because their supporters or likely supporters are shy about revealing their view to nice men or women with clipboards. I don’t have any moral problem with this, actually; your views are between you and the ballot box, and pollsters have no automatic right to truthful answers.
El Blogador does raise the prospect of SF becoming so “respectable” that this effect will disappear. We’ve seen the process in reverse in recent years – it used to be that the Alliance Party’s rating in polls was twice its election results, but now people who want to sound more moderate than they really are choose different lies to tell the pollsters. Some day SF suporters will feel thaty can be honest with the pollsters, but the fact is that their party’s current poll rating is consistent with previous poll ratings for the party, and should be compared with those poll ratings rather than the last election results.
The commenters in the Slugger post make much of the 2.6% support for Republican Sinn Fein as evidence that Gerry Adams has been damaged by the St Andrew’s Agreement. I doubt it; I don’t think Ruairí Ó Brádaigh’s lot have a visible public profile, and I would bet that at least half of the people who chose RSF in the BBC’s poll thought they were indicating support for Adams as against the Stickies, rather than for Ó Brádaigh against Adams.
In summary: “Opinion poll shows SF support down 4% from last election” is simply not a news story worth reporting.
You’re daft. That’s a common interpretation of Job, but irreconcilable with the rest of the canonic books of either tradition. The various sense of the loving aspects of God are too important to both traditions for a dialogue about the amorality of God to be a central text.