And these are: what you see with your own eyes and what you're told.
Michael Totten offers another in the endless array of "there are two types of people" jokes, suggesting that conservatives know more/pay more attention to the international scene than liberals do. Needless to say, this set off a bit of a brouhaha. To which I feel the need to contribute a caution.
We each live in the world in which we live. We each see the things we can see and we each hear the people we are with.
I often work with humanitarian aid and development agencies. Most of the people (but not all, by any means) working in such agencies are left-leaning; all of them take an active view towards understanding the international world. These are people "professionally engaged in politics" (to use Matthew Yglesias' extremely limiting formula); at the very least, their work is steeped in politics - which they must understand in order to do their work, even if their organizational mandates require that they remain impartial. Based upon this experience, I could argue that "liberals" know more about the world than conservatives, especially as they actually go out and live in it.
I could treat this particular set of experiences of mine as normative, but since it is not my only experience, I do not feel inclined in that direction. C'mon people, you have got to get out more.
Posted by Martial