Slashdot Mirror
Getting Accurate Political Information?
XMorbius asks: "With the elections coming up in a few months, I (along with other Slashdot readers, I hope) want to get more informed about the candidates. But, where does one turn to get accurate (or as accurate as possible) information about them, while at the same time not having to review long logs and records of various hearings over the last decade or so? This seems like a nice compilation of information, but something tells me that it may not be very accurate. I've seen factcheck.org but I feel like there is more knowledge out there to be acquired. What does the Slashdot community recommend?"
I don't think you're going to find any single source that's never been accused of bias. There's just too many viewpoints out there-- and any source that tries to go straight down the middle of the road, like CNN, tends to be pretty dry.
So, my solution: Read a lot. I mean, a lot, and, by exposure to many viewpoints, you'll be better off when it comes time to form your own opinions.
If you're asking about specifics, I try to take in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Drudge Report, Slate, Salon, Al-Jazeera, the International Herald-Tribune, and the Guardian. Of course, all of the above have their strengths and weaknesses.
If you don't want to spend the time on all of those, though, I recommend Slate. It leans slightly left, but has good analysis from both sides of the aisle.
Read, read, read. Don't assume you're getting the whole story from a single source.
Which is exactly the point. The more expensive the oil, the more money Bush and his cronies make.
The article that you're quoting isn't talking about the price that consumers pay for oil--it's talking about the price that the oil companies pay. If you read a bit further, you get to the part that says "oil was cheaper for US oil companies and the world as a whole under the UN's Oil-for-Food program. Now that Saddam is gone, this program no longer exists. If this war was about oil, you'd see either an extension of the program, or even sanctions lifted (in return for secret deals to use Iraq's oil). Yet, neither happened."
In other words, it now costs US oil companies more to buy oil that they can process and sell to the consumer. Sure, the oil companies will pass that excess price on to the consumer, but they won't be making more money because of it.
especially if one of those secret deals were made.
If the Big Oil players wanted to make secret anticompetitive deals to widen their profit margins, they would not have needed a war in order to do so. I'm pretty sure that a a controversial war which puts their business practices under the microscope and could seriously affect their supply of crude is precisely what they would not want.
If you think that The National Review is "unintelligent" but Andrew Sullivan, Slate, or The New Republic are more "intelligent" or more inherently reliable, then you're not getting it. You're a parrot.
If you think Rich Lowry, George Will, or Jonah Goldberg are more "intelligent" than Andrew Sullivan or TNR, then you're still not getting it. You're still a parrot.
If you read Daily Kos or Free Republic and think either one is particularly accurate, you're not getting it.
When you stop thinking that people on one side are fools and the other side is the only one that has morality or truth on its side, then you'll be getting it.
www.freerepublic.com
This'll probably get modded down, but consider that there are more than 2 points of view. Now, you may feel that the left is being underrepresented and all the media is pro-Bush - but the Free Republic people feel otherwise, and will show you the other side. Even if you don't like it, it's interesting to see what kind of stories are out there.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
That's actually sort of true. I wasn't terribly worried about Saddam having non-nuclear WMDs. Here's why.
The US military also deposed one of the world's terrible dictators. That alone should have been reason enough to justify military action.
Okay, which thugocracy should we go after next? Can you even name one of the ones in the Middle East, or Africa, or even South America? Personally, I think we should have stuck to rebuilding Afghanistan from the thugocracy we'd already overthrown, but nobody even remembers them anymore.
Would you rather fight the war in NYC?
The whole point is that Saddam wasn't going to invade the US. Please, please, come up with any kind of scenario (I won't even ask you to come up with a plausible one) that has Iraqi tanks rolling down Wall Street.
And if you read enough about Iraq trying to get nuclear weapons, there is a substantial back story that may indicate they were looking into African uranium. I really don't know.
No, you really don't.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!