The Economist: Written by Cloistered Hostages?

The Economist is very concerned about…something?

Non-paywalled link to the whole thing here.

I increasingly find myself wondering if “news” is being written by people who were buried alive, sometime in the 90s, and are still sending dispatches from deep under the earth, guessing at what humans are doing on the surface. Um:

It’s an explosion in a bullshit factory.

“National conservatives are seized by declinism,” and they’re “resisting progress.” You can go look for the part where the Economist explains what progress they’re referring to, or the part where they provide examples of the things these chimeric “national conservatives” use to argue for the “declinism” that has seized them, but you won’t find those parts. They assert that progress is everywhere, but they don’t argue that progress is everywhere. Argument involves evidence. Why would people think we’re living through an age of decline? Let’s take some educated guesses.

Our birth rate has fallen in half in sixty years.

After decades that looked like the trajectory of an airplane taking off, life expectancy in the U.S. suddenly did this interesting thing at the right side of the chart:

And while homeownership is getting harder…

…don’t worry, because starter homes are available for under $300,000!

The New York Times ran this story yesterday, by the way, so the Economist is purporting to be utterly baffled by “declinism” at the very same moment that the newspaper of record in the United States is matter-of-factly explaining that the future of American homes is the “400 square-foot subdivision house.”

But the good news is that we’ll fit in those tiny houses, because far more of us are spending our lives alone.

You can argue about all of these developments, and contextualize them or spin them, but showing up at the back of that parade and just casually wondering why all these weirdos are bogged down in declinism is just…. I mean, do they have brain injuries? What could possibly explain this behavior?

By the way, on the topic of decline, these dudes just beat the “world’s only superpower” after twenty years of war:

Next paragraph up: “Rather than being sceptical of big government, national conservatives think ordinary people are beset by impersonal global forces and that the state is their saviour.”

Yes, the person running for office by promising to demolish the Deep State isn’t skeptical about big government, and proposes the state as our savior. Sorry, I just spontaneously translated from English to American, right there at the end.

And why on earth would anyone think that “ordinary people are beset by impersonal global forces?” OMG, we just discussed this very question during our panel at Davos with Klaus Schwab and Alex Soros! It reminded us so much of the WEF article on how the so-called “national” state is obsolete:

Anyway, we’re off to the meeting of the World Health Organization!

Typing up these claims straight — strange extremists have bizarre views about “decline!” while dangerous freaks think global governance is a thing! — is like standing next to a smouldering pile of wreckage and saying that some people believe in the conspiracy theory that there’s been some kind of car crash. It’s naked gaslighting. Or, as we call it now, “journalism.”

And finally, the top paragraph says that a “motley crew of Western politicians” have built “a statist, ‘anti-woke’ conservatism that puts national sovereignty before the individual.” I don’t even know what this means. I can’t start, because it’s gibberish. How would “anti-woke” conservatism destroy individual rights when it’s a response to profoundly collectivist and identitarian woke progressivism?

The single argument I can find to say that a figure like Trump put national sovereignty ahead of the individual is the profoundly statist response to the pandemic, which saw his opposition on the left pushing for Trump to become even more nakedly authoritarian — as when the president who signed the order for Operation Warp Speed said that he wouldn’t support a mandate to take the resulting products.

The Economist, like so much news media lately, has produced a series of paragraphs that make me think of the uncanny valley. “In the 1980s Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher built a new conservatism around markets and freedom.” Prove to me that sentence was written by a human, and that an actual person believes Reagan and Thatcher suddenly invented markets and freedom as new ideas. It’s shaped like a journalism-thing, but…that so-called magazine ain’t natural, Jedediah. You run to the house and fetch grandpa’s shotgun.

Over and over and over again, journalists write things that flatly do not match the world you know you live in.

And on that note, if you watched any of the Fani Willis testimony, don’t miss the Washington Post explaining to you that you just saw a powerful black woman delivering a righteous blast of brilliant anger to her unjust tormentors.

She was also gorgeous and poised in a stunningly fashionable pink dress, by the way. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.