Political International Kitchen Sink LJ Poll....

[shadowkat]

Does anyone really read posts on the weekends, besides me? Since I can't read them during the week? And how often do you actually respond to the posts you read? Do you read or do a quick scan? How often do you regret the responses you've made and wish you could retract it like an errant email before it gets read as opposed to merely deleting? To what degree are you immersed in politics? Where do you get your information? What information do you trust as reliable, what don't you trust? And do your question your views or just hunt for information that reinforces it?

I ask too many questions. It's not that I want to know so much as I want to understand. It's why I've taken psychology classes at different points and read the books - the attempt to understand how others think and how I think. Seldom works. Except when I force myself to step outside my own perspective completely.

Anywho...here is a poll, that I'm doubtful will get many responses since I'm posting it at 9:45 pm on a Sat morning and not during the work week - when many people are surfing to deal with boredom/downtime at work. Then again, I may be wrong about that - perhaps there are few out there like myself who do? If so, please take a moment. Also if you can link to it that would be great...more responses the better.

[In hindsight, I should have probably put "All of the Above" as a category for one of those entries...oh well.]




[Poll #1259205]

Comments

[atpo-onm.livejournal.com]

It wasn't on your list, but I rely heavily on NPR/PBS (radio and TV) for what I consider to be fair, even handed, accurate journalism and reporting. They aren't perfect, no one is, but they're a lot closer than 90% of the stuff that's readily available to the public. Newspapers are generally good as long as you read several of them, to balance out the inevitable owner/publisher biases.

Washington Week and Bill Moyer's Journal are must-see TV for me every Friday, and Frontline is brilliant although I don't always watch it because it usually upsets me and then I'm all grumpy right before bedtime.

BTW, I entered "left wing" as my choice, but that's really only very generally speaking. At heart I'm an anarchist but humanity isn't ready for that yet. ( I define anarchist as it was described in Ursula LeGuin's "The Disposessed", or as summed up in Bob Dylan's classic line "To live outside the law, you must be honest.")

Practically speaking, for the current real world, I'm moderate to conservative financially, but fairly liberal socially. As far as the connection between religion and politics goes, I'm an atheist, (and far more so now then when I was younger) so that inherently tends to dictate what I think about the role of the former in the latter.

As to when I question my own views or beliefs, all I can say is that I try very hard to evaluate contrary views as fairly as possible, but with the condition that the arguments made must be logical in nature and empirically testable. So, for example, someone using the argument that "God says etc. etc." has no chance at all with me because it's the same (to me) as someone saying "Santa Claus says... etc etc").

Now if someone want to argue that, for example, "abortion is wrong because it takes a life, and it should be the goal of a socially conscious human society to preserve life whenever possible", that gets harder to dismiss, especially if the person arguing the point is a) against the death penalty, period, always, b) a vegetarian c)concerned for the welfare of non-human animals, d) in favor of birth control to prevent as many abortions as possible, e) and so on.

That is, a logically consistent argument. I might still disagree with the conclusions, but at least I can understand how the person arrived at their beliefs.