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I Want to Learn More About Politics
Hexmage-PA
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm twenty years old and I feel like I know next to nothing about politics. I'd like to learn, but I'm not sure where to start or what sources I should consider as being reliable. So far all I've really been doing is reading relevant topics on Debate and Discourse. What resources can I use to gain an understanding of various aspects of policy making? Does anyone have any suggestions?
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The United States of America.
Personally, my favorite show for politics both in the US and internationally is The Charlie Rose show, which airs on PBS on weekdays at various times depending on location.
It's left leaning, but only slightly. The whole show is interview/round table format. A ton. and I do mean a ton, of their program is archived so you can go back and watch a lot of interviews with various political figures from this decade and the 90's... a great way to kill a few weekends.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
Basically the big newspapers work out like this:
Left leaning:
New York Times
Washington Post
LA Times
Houston Chronicle (it's also just a shit newspaper in general and not even that big, avoid)
Boston Globe
Right leaning:
Wall Street Journal
Washington Times
New York Post
Boston Herald
The Economist is good just because it is very good at being as middle of the road that it can. Some issues it seems liberal, others conservative.
I like the Wall Street Journal, because they have lots of op/eds from people in business.
Find out more about your president, his cabinet, the supreme court justices, and your state's senators and representatives, and then also some of the higher brow senators, the heavy hitters (and who is considered a 'heavy hitter' will depend on who you talk to, so I'll leave that up to you)
After you've got a BASE of knowledge, THEN start thinking about keeping that knowledge current. Keep in mind since you are a USA citizen, your politics other countries' politics greatly -- but it also works the other way around. Consider Iran's recent election and the ensuing riots thereafter.
But where to get your news? I personally go to The New York Times. A lot of people find it left-leaning, but as an independent, I've never really felt that way and I watched the presidential election through the Times like a hawk -- BUT to each his own opinions.
Wherever you settle on, though, make sure it's a paper. Not CNN, not MSNBC, not FOX, not any TV news station at all, because they bring news to you too fast -- and they have to include video which makes their job much harder, ultimately ending up in a sub-par recounting of events. Read your news, read it the day after it's happened -- whoever's talking to you will have much less of a guttural reaction and more of a comprehensive recounting and analysis.
The allegory of the cave isn't even about politics.
Really this. It is pretty great in its coverage of international politics.
Also, you may want to read up on some macroeconomics (and maybe microecononomics) to understand both a) many of the articles in the Economist, b) the mechanisms by which government programs can effect societies, if you haven't ever studied it.
Like, I'm going into engineering for university, and I'm not going to use economics at all and without a doubt I think economics was the most useful course I took in highschool from a daily life and political understanding point of view.
It helps to know some philosophy. You should also read some political theorists.
Look at this list and read about some of them
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_philosophers
but they're listening to every word I say
That's quite a big list.
If you're going to read any of them (and if you're interested in politics, political philosophy is not a terrible place to start), read some things by or about Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Mill.
On the flip side, picking up a tid bit then bringing it up in conversation and LISTENING to what others have to say about it is a good way to learn. Then when you feel you have heard enough to make an informed judgement on it, begin conversing more deeply about the subject.
Same thing goes for newspapers or magazines. Remeber, even the media -.- are biased. Before becoming an avid reader of something, find out who owns that zine/paper and find out how politically based they are.
Learning about politics is easy. Becoming informed about politics is difficult. There are many layers of crap you have to dig through to piece together a true opinion of your own.
meh thats 2cents. And I speak the truth =.=
Being factually informed about things is different than being knowledgable or having the tools to interpret facts. To make sense out of what you're reading, i'd A) read american history,
It's more like this, OP:
There are papers with good newsgathering operations, and bad newsgathering operations.
Newspapers of record don't filter things ideologically - this "left/right" bias thing is a bit silly and used to try to discredit factual realities people disagree with. It's not like people around the office are sitting around trying to figure out ways to shape the discourse for their political ends - Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch do that for Fox News, but even Rupert leaves the WSJ alone when it comes to newsgathering and writing. Often, newspapers are wrong, but that's because newspapers are in decline and journalists are lazy or overworked and just let their sources feed them information with doing little research on their own.
So I wouldn't worry about trying to place your newspapers on an ideological spectrum. Instead, i'd consider who is good at reporting and who isn't. The good: WSJ, NYT and WaPo (surprisingly, USA Today has good domestic reporting and local interest stories lots of the time).
The bad: everyone else. The globe and the LA times are second-string papers not worth your time reading. They are circling the drain. The washington times and the new york post are insane - they're simply propaganda pieces. You're better off reading the volkischer beobachter. The WSJ's deserved reputation for being right-wing comes from its op/ed page, but it doesn't taint the rest of the paper, which is renowned for its journalistic excellence.
The economist has a classical liberal view on things. They are not middle of the road - they're good at evaluating positions, rather than just reporting the false dichotomy of "both sides of a story." They cultivate a reasoned tone on things, but they only sound reasoned if you buy their assumptions. It's the only news magazine I subscribe to, but i'd think carefully about the way they frame issues before you drink their kool-aid too much. It's good to get a feeling for how to create your own discourse though, and sound smart at parties about things.
Indeed. Personally, I find it a bit disturbing how readily people on this forum are to recommend it in various threads. I sometimes enjoy reading it for an intelligent, conservative individualist perspective, but I wouldn't recommend it to a political novice who wouldn't know their polite, reasoned arguments from facts.
My recommendation is the BBC news site. Just read that every day. It's not perfect, but it's about as good as you can get. Also, consider the website for your hometown paper for local news. It's not as compelling, but it's often more useful, and personally applicable.
So far as other sources go - I've grown to love news media review radio/podcasts - we have them in the UK and NZ - so I guess the US (maybe NBR?) has something similar - these shows basically report on news trends for the week and sometimes offer analysis.
Electoral Politics is about who is winning decision-making authority. I strongly recommend Politics 1 to follow this. It's pretty good about giving you bite-sized chunks of information so you know what you have to google if you want to learn more. Fivethirtyeight.com is also very good. Frankly I don't consider there to be a good major media source to learn about how the campaigns are functioning because while the media plays a key role in how elections work, it's horrible at being introspective about the role it's playing. I only read the NYT, WaPo, WSJ etc to find out what most Americans are reading, not to learn stuff.
Legislative/Parliamentary Politics is about how laws emerge out of the legislators and political parties that run Washington D.C. (or any state capitol). I'd recommend subscriptions to Roll Call and Congressional Quarterly. Politico.com is also not too terribly bad for this.
Policy is tricky because it's basically where the rubber meets the road -- so you not only have to understand how tires are made and who is making the tires, you have to understand the driving conditions, road conditions, how's the traffic, what's the weather like, and why does SammyF draw out long and tortured metaphors. The Economist is a pretty good starting place for a lot of this stuff, but if you want more details, you're going to want to get into more-scholarly journals, trade magazines, or department websites. For instance, you could probably have gotten a reasonably good digest on what happened with the Maersk Alabama off the coast of Somalia had you restricted yourself to the AP's headlines and what the economist wrote about it, but if you want to actually learn how things work, you would have to read Lloyd's List (a trade journal dealing with global maritime traffic), Proceedings (which is basically the trade journal for the United States Navy), the United States Naval Institute's blog (not necessarily to be taken at face value but it's a great example of a good online resource because they link to a lot of scholarly journals and technical publications) and the US DoT's Maritime Administration Division page for statistical data.
Obviously, studying these sources are great for understanding global commerce and naval strategy viz. piracy on Tuesday, but they're not going to teach you about healthcare on Wednesday. So everytime you want to get a detailed understanding of a certain facet of policy, you have to start researching anew. A great method to do this is to look for scholarly articles that footnote into other articles (Foreign Affairs Magazine no longer does this, the bastards, which is why it's no longer worth subscribing). It gives you a paper trail you can follow when learning about an issue.
Read what the founders intended, then weep at how most modern politicians trample over the Constitution -- from Bush's warrantless wiretaps to Obama abrogating contract law to take over the car companies.
This is actually why I like reading the Economist so much. It's not because I will read something and immediately go "well, here it is printed on this paper, it must be the whole story." But because the longer articles are opinions I actually find them more interesting, and if something specifically grabs me I'm more inclined to do some more research on the subject.
Likewise. I just wanted to make it clear.