My daily dose of the left & right

[habilis]

I start out my day leaving for work at 7a.m. and it takes me a 25 minute commute, during that commute I listen to NPR(National Public Radio) which has a very liberal slant on things. Then I get to work and fire up itunes where I usually listen to 2 or 3 hours of streaming media of speeches, lectures, and audio book excerpts from far-left wingers like Chomsky, Zinn, Parenti, and many others. Then at 11a.m. I start leaning to the right and I tune in to Glenn Beck for an hour on AM Radio, he's good for laughs but I don't take his moderate-right political views seriously. Then, finally from noon to 3p.m I listen to bi-hourly ABC news breaks and Limbaugh who, is obviously a hardline right-wing conservative. On my commute home I listen to 'Fresh Air' and world news on NPR again.

By the time I get home at 4, all the network news is usually old news and I'm busy with other stuff anyway but a couple times a week I'll tune in to The O'Reily Factor to watch kooky leftists get beat up. Then finally, by the end of the evening I like to just get some good unbiased history in, so I'm usually reading a history book in bed. Right now I'm reading a book about David Ben-Gurion and his formation of Israel.

So how do you get your daily dose?

 

[toast]

Notions of left and right vary from one country to another. In France, right and left are consensual on certain topics and are becoming consensual on some new ones, but questions are still big dividers.

Left-wing in France does not fight capitalism any more (as it did when the 20th century began) but still fights some aspects of liberalism (such as communautarism). Right-wing in France may be considered as moderate right in some countries like the US. Finally, our extreme-right is growing at the moment.

---

Here's my News bookmark in Safari:

International Herald Tribune: neutral
Le Monde: neutral (very slightly FR center-left)
The Independent: UK left
The Observer: UK left

I also receive Reuters news (neutral).

---

I listen radio all the time: France Info is completely neutral, France Culture is apolitical.

---

Newspapers: I read Les Échos, French right-wing economical newspaper.

 

[Cat]

I mostly get my news from Google::News

For opinions on the news I turn to newspaper sites: La Repubblica (Italian, left) and De Volkskrant (Dutch, maybe ever so slightly left, no clear political affiliation). Occasionally I read the Corriere della Sera (Italian, right), which however, in recent years has become worse and worse (since Montanelli left).

Usually I watch the news on TV (Dutch, NOS nieuws).

Sometimes I look at CNN and BBC sites too.

... and of course the MacOSX.com Cafe' for my favourite political discussions!

 

[Ugg]

The Guardian to start off the day, it's mostly left-centrist

Google News for a little dose of everything

Wired to see how the world is reacting to technology

Alternet.org for an extreme leftist dose

Die Zeit for in intellectual German dose

The BBC on the radio while I'm driving in the afternoon. We have a station that broadcasts 16 hours of live feeds a day. I've no tolerance for American radio anymore although I do listen to NPR from time to time.

The only rightist stuff I read is through Google.

I don't watch TV, talking heads and sound bites make me want to puke whether they are right or left.

Currently reading a biography of Lucius Clay, the US administrator of post WWII Germany. Iraq and the US could use a man like him now.

 

[Arden]

I like to get my news from satire like the weeknigh late shows or Saturday Night Live (though these aren't the only sources, of course).

 

[toast]

Oh, people are also posting what they're reading at the moment...

- I'm reading Fictions_by Jorge Luis Borges, nothing to do with politics.
- I'm also back on my Fighting Fantasy books, playing Legend of Zagor_by Ian Livingstone right now. Killer !
- Last, the book by Martin on Photoshop 7 for Professionals (though I'm a complete amateur).

Back to studies:

- Who killed Daniel Pearl ?,_Bernard Henry-Lévy (it sucks)
- The Israeli War of Information: Disinformation and Fallacious Symmetry in the Israel/Paslestine Conflict,Joss Dray and Denis Sieffert.
- Liberalism and Social Justice: Sacrifice and Envy, Jean-Pierre Dupuy.
- Public Corruption, Robert Neild.
- The Transformation of European Social Democracies, Herbert Kitschelt.

That's a lot, but that's what my studies cover.

 

[Cat]

Borges is a wonderful author, truly a master of magic realism.

I'm reading "Children of Dune" right now and planning to finish the whole Dune series by summer (before Harry Potter 5 comes out ... ).

For study, I'm reading Kandell et al. "Essentials of Neural Science and Behavior" and a lot of primary and secondary literature by and on Edmund Husserl. (I'm currently working on a lot of projects regarding Husserl: Husserl and the Infinite, Husserl & AI and my PhD. research project Husserl & the Cognitive Sciences).

Maybe "What do you read?" is worthy of separate thread though ...

 

[toast]

Amen to Cat's last point.

 

[Darkshadow]

I try to stay as far away from politics as I can get. So I don't really get a daily dose.

And yeah, what people read should be another post. Heh, I'd overwhelm people with what I read...I read about 120 pages an hour. I read constantly. Mostly Science Fiction/Fantasy, but I also like to read up on some history & historical figures, and I gobble up science journals. Even though I don't fully understand everything, I like readin 'em. I particularly like reading about String Theory.