2rafa
25d ago
No, The Economist’s readership has a substantial number of students and juniors, plus interested normal people who like to imagine themselves as the kind of person who reads it, many of whom don’t have a lot of money. It’s largely the magazine for the back office. FT Weekend’s readership is likely wealthier, because it’s mainly older print readers of the paper who have some money (students and juniors on the app aren’t going to care to read it).
Tatler’s readership is bifurcated between that sub-group of rich Arabs and Asians (they have a big audience in Hong Kong, Singapore and the Gulf) who enjoy the Anglo aesthetic, are often involved with polo, ride, have country houses in England, that sort of thing, and the residual English upper and upper-middle classes, some of whom have money and some of whom don’t. That niche means Tatler’s ads are more targeted, although there is still plenty of Patek and Lori Piana. Bien pensant PMCs might read that awful Air Mail or even worse Monocle, which also have all the Rolex and Porsche ads.
2rafa
25d ago
Problem was that they started actually believing all of the universal spread of liberal democracy stuff because the Cold War involved an ideological component that 19th century European colonialism didn’t (“spreading Christian civilization” was a post-hoc thing). That meant that which side was supported was often determined more ideologically than it had been under the British or French, who were regularly willing to screw over fellow Christians, liberal reformers, or other more ideologically aligned factions if their opponents had better will to power.
The Mamdani craze is because progressives, especially in Manhattan, cannot help themselves when it comes to electing DSA types who want to defund the police.
Amusingly, black people saved NYC by electing Adams who arrested the Floyd crime wave by allowing the NYPD to do their jobs. Now, because memories are short, the libs again forget what it’s like to live in a society without the rule of law. Crime rises, progressives get pragmatic, crime falls, progressives become idealistic, crime rises, etc.
The win state for big American cities is to elect a slightly grizzled, probably somewhat corrupt older black male cop who is technically a democrat but too compromised by big business to pursue dumb ‘justice reform’ policies.
2rafa
26d ago
The Christian population of the Middle East has been leaving since the late years of the Ottoman Empire, a process that has only accelerated since the rise of Islamism post-Qutb after the middle of the 20th century and especially since 1979.
The War on Terror was the death knell for ‘humanitarian’ US regime change opps because it was the moment it became clear that the State Dept, CIA and DoD no longer had the appetite for actual population transformation. There were people who pushed for it. Ann Coulter after 9/11: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”. But when it came to it, nobody had the guts to do it and it seemed like a lot of work when you could get some peace corps Yale grads at State to fund a few schools to teach women how to sew, fund girls sports teams, give the top ten high school students in the country scholarships to Georgetown and call it a day.
2rafa
26d ago
Libya was already relatively internally divided, Gaddafi was just a great autocrat. Iran has far fewer internal divisions than Libya did in 2011.
2rafa
26d ago
Interesting how much “Imaginal Christianity” resembles an Islamic-Buddhist hybrid with some Christian characteristics.
2rafa
27d ago
Without dismissing what you’re feeling, I think your narrative of modernity maps to a lot of great criticisms of the wealthy society begat by the Industrial Revolution over the last 150 years. It’s not as new as you suggest.
I think measures of national or even personal happiness are hard to parse. Swedes versus Danes, Greeks versus Germans. Are some happier, or is what counts as ‘happy’ for a Finn just less ambitious, less happy, than what counts as the same for an American? How happy were our ancestors a century ago really?
As a young person online, I was never deep into ‘new atheism’, but like many people I adopted a deep disdain for any kind of spiritualism, hackneyed ‘the secret’ style self-help and so on (which of course only made adherents vulnerable to slightly modified versions of the same eternal ideas). As I got older, I realized that a version of “the law of attraction” or “the secret” or “practice gratitude journaling to make you happy” was in fact pretty much true. The happiest people are those who convince themselves most absolutely that they are happy, will remain happy, and that good things will happen to them, indeed that life itself is good and (broadly, if not in every case), just.
As I had more life experience and met more people, I realized that artists, (serious) writers and philosophers were often some of the most unhappy, most depressed people I knew, even if they had achieved great professional success or were otherwise wealthy, attractive and so on. This is no coincidence, it is because these careers often lead people to question the meaning of their lives, and doing that is a death blow to that simple kind of happiness that provides genuine satisfaction. Even those philosophies that attempt to grasp earnestly at a value and a happiness in that direction, like Buddhism, often embrace what appears at least to me to be a fundamental nihilism in their obsession with the mirror, with an interrogation of the self.
The key to happiness, and I say this as an amateur, is caring less, feeling more, and studiously avoiding the temptation to try to look behind the curtain. The smarter and more curious and more interested in the discussion of grand narratives you are (and if you’re here, that is probably ‘very’) the harder this is. But it is possible. As for young men, you can ‘enjoy the decline’ (which I suppose means checking out and enjoying the bountiful brothels of South-East Asia, or something), or see if there’s happiness to be found in the other people where you are. I suspect the latter might be more fruitful, but I won’t judge.
2rafa
28d ago
I agree that the last 20 years saw a move of the last of these Catholics to the GOP. Pro choice Democratic politicians were censured by the church itself which is a big step. In liberal European countries like Germany there are Catholic groups who have semi-openly broken with the Vatican on abortion but in the US the clergy tend to be more socially conservative.
But an example of the above would be like ACB who is a liberal except for abortion.
To be honest, though, everything is midwit if you’re an internet snob like you and me, Dean. Bellingcat? The ultimate midwit NAFO publication. The London/NY/Paris Review of Books? Catastrophically midwit zine read by aging socialists of the kind who use The Guardian’s dating platform and chuckle at another lame Trump nickname at dinner parties. The New Yorker? Vanity Fair? Magazines for parents of Juilliard students, nought more need be said. The popular substacks or newsletters (unaffiliated or affiliated) of erstwhile online political commentators (Iglesias, Sullivan, Klein)? Soothing balm for dull, aging millennial and GenX centrists upset at a world they no longer understand. More obscure commentator figures (Yarvin, Kriss)? Slightly more verbose Twitter bait dressed up for the audience of clapping chimps paying $5 a month to chuckle gently while pretending to do their email job and thinking themselves above the worker ant masses consuming their cyber slop.
In the end, the choice is between the last few good blogs (never read the comments), the intelligent but supremely annoying autists at HN and LW (but only on topics they know something about), prediction markets, a few good bank and third party research analysts if you can get access through your company, some columnists that agree with your personal biases at major publications and this place.
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