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Comment by ff317 | Hacker News Reader

My personal favorite recommendation in this vein is The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ . They've got some great writers and editors and often deliver pretty unique insights. Their articles tend towards long-ish-form, but not nearly as long as e.g. the New Yorker. They're a little less world-focused and more US-centric, but not completely. There is some bias (isn't there always?), but I've seen them cover a single issue from multiple POVs using multiple writers before. They have a print edition as well, for ~$70/year (includes digital access as well).

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I friggin love the Atlantic even though most of the time they have a way different political view than me. They don't hide their view but instead of assuming it's universal they give details and context for their views, where as the Economist seems to hide their agenda and present the underlying story to lead you to their point of view based on the facts and details they choose to report. The Atlantic has discourse and discussion, which is what I want. And they are not afraid to challenge their own core ideas. They are like my liberal hippie parents raising me with critical thinking skills, "you are free to have your opinion, here's ours and here's how we came to them". It's hard to explain the difference, especially as I agree (or I should say want to agree) more often with the Economist's politics.

> the Economist seems to hide their agenda

I think that they are pretty clear about their agenda to be honest. E.g. they explained and even gave a name to their stance ("extreme centre"), they openly endorse candidates in many elections worldwide, they often include sentences in articles such as "this paper believes that..." etc.

I don't agree with some of their points, but by making them explicit they also make them easy to filter out IMHO

Yeah the Economist is pretty well known to be neoliberal. Which is fine… I subscribe and it’s a pretty good source if you understand that.

Why are the journalists and writers names not revealed?

That’s a specific editorial decision[0] to present work in The Economist’s voice rather than the individual journalists’.

[0] https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2013/09/04/...

~no regwall

https://medium.economist.com/why-are-the-economists-writers-...

and previous discussion

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14015708

Neocon*

Neoliberalism is not related to liberalism, its economics theory we've been living in since Reagan. Ds and Rs embrace it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

Neoconservatism is more a social theory, i.e. pushback from 60s social liberals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism

The Wikipedia article is quite misleading; the current neoliberal movement absolutely leans left. In modern usage, neoliberal refers to a particular type of liberal/Democrat.

>They don't hide it. I think that they are pretty clear about their agenda to be honest. E.g. they explained and even gave a name to their stance ("extreme centre")

My point exactly, that's anything but clear and honest! Calling their views, which are objectively right-wing neoliberal capitalist, calling them "centre" or "moderate" is part of an attempt to naturalise (if that makes sense) their worldview into something that is objective, common-sense, and neutral.

I don't think there is objective agreement that the Economists views are right-wing neoliberal capitalist.

AllSides rates them as "Leans left": https://www.allsides.com/news-source/economist

They've endorsed Democrats for US President since 2004.

Ad Fontes also rates them slightly left leaning: https://adfontesmedia.com/the-economist-bias-and-reliability...

As in an old joke that rings true to anyone living outside the US, in US politics you have, on the one hand, an extreme right-wing party, far to the right of anything in other countries; and on the other hand, you have the Republican party.

It's absolutely true that on cultural issues (particularly rights of minorities), the Democratic party and even the Economist is actually left or even far left compared to many world countries.

But on economic matters, the Economist's positions, and indeed Democratic party positions, are indeed far right-wing of what you'll see virtually anywhere else (maybe other 5-eyes countries are getting closer?).

Also, on foreign policy, the media and political parties in the US almost speak with a single voice, which is often, again, far outside mainstream opinion in the rest of the world.

Or as the other joke goes;

America is a one party system - the War Party. It's just that as per typical American extravagance they've got two of them.

It's fine to be upset about the Overton window of American politics, but I don't think it's too egregious that an American publication describe their politics within the usual political language of their country.

Or, at the very least, it's not deceptive to call themselves "centre" as neoliberals in a country where the majority understand "centre" to mean "neoliberals" (even if they don't actually know what "neoliberals" means.)

The Economist is a British publication.

This is peak HN discussion.

When you say "an American publication" you mean The Economist?

They are not exactly Americans, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist

Could you clarify what you mean without using the words right, left, or neoliberal? All of which are extremely vague.

Not the OP but,

Right: conservative. Policy designed to preserve corporate interests and wealthy elite. Often masquerading as “looking after the middle class” - when really at best they get some trickle down benefits. Selfishly You should be right leaning if you are a significant owner of capital or have a very high chance of that (they will convince you that everyone has this chance).

Left: Progressive (in that it looks to reform the existing structure). Policy design to assist the working class (wage earners). It typically looks to take from corporates/wealthy elite and redistribute. Selfishly You should be left leaning if you don’t own significant capital and derive most of your income from wages.

Unselfishly you should err on the side of the left as it is aiming for a “greater good”.

That’s a pretty biased interpretation.

Care to elaborate? Seems pretty accurate to me.

It basically oversimplifies "right" to selfish ideology and "left" to ideology of "greater good".

For once I would argue, it is for the greater good, if "selfish" individual rights are increased - and apart from that, I think using the left right spectrum is not very helpful for anything, but dividing society into tribal thinking.

Capitalism, or more specifically inequality created the tribes. Denying their existence is to purposefully avoid looking for a solution.

It’s not an ideology of greater good. I mean it literally in the utilitarian sense: left thinking, focusing on improving the plight of wage earners literally effects more people and is a greater good.

Improving/preserving wealthy elites will naturally benefit fewer people.

These are facts, with evidence. I can go deeper if you find this simplification too blunt. It isn’t overly simplified it. It describes what the left right spectrum means, and yes I’m applied a value judgement, but I can back up my value judgement with facts.

I’m not an extremist in my views though, and I will accept democratic processes, and there is benefit to floating around the spectrum, rather than committing to a single point.

"Improving/preserving wealthy elites will naturally benefit fewer people.

These are facts, with evidence"

You are implying, that it is a fact that right leaning people want to preserve wealthy elites.

But this is not, what I heard from right leaning people as their goals.

"Capitalism, or more specifically inequality created the tribes."

And I believe, tribes existed way before capitalism.

So I believe, that you are indeed quite extremist in your ideology, if you know as a fact, that left is good and right is bad.

There are many, many different contradicting views and concepts on the right as well on the left. To some I agree, to many I do not.

But as an example, the nazis are considered quite right usually. But it is nationalsocialism. The concept of the greater good for the people (of one race). So they are left then?

I rather think the whole left right concept is flawed and not helpful.

There are not contradicting views. If you look at them with a lenses of preserving wealth they align quite neatly. I’d like to see a counter example.

Nazis are the very definition of preserving the wealth of a few. It’s just you have seen the words “National Socialism” and assumed that meant left. You’ll find the labels are high jacked quite often. But left and right remain more consistent.

Are you saying that trying to bring more benefit to wage earners is not good?

Could you give an example of right wing policy that wasn’t focused on preserving wealthy elites?

I can give you plenty of left-wing policies that ended in mass genocide. How do you fit that into your mental model?

Were they trying to redistribute wealth or consolidate it?

Where does genocide fit into anything I’ve said?

"It’s just you have seen the words “National Socialism” and assumed that meant left."

No, I just happen to live in an area (in germany) with lots of nazis and had to engage with their ideology a lot.

There definitely exist anticapitalist, socialist fascist today, as did back then. Those are the ones, that were put down in Nazi germany in 1934 in the Röhm Putsch, so they did not rose to power, but nevertheless exist. They do believe in a socialist aryan society. So the greater good and negating of the individual, but limited to a certain race.

So how do they fit in, in the left = altruistic, right = selfish metric?

They are not individualists. They are willing to sacrifice themself for Volk und Vaterland.

"There are not contradicting views"

And with contradicting I meant in general. The socialist pagan Nazis do not really agree with the capitalist, catholic fascist of spain for example, but both are labeld right.

While anarchosyndicalist do not really share much with stalinist, yet both are labeled left.

Seems you’ve applied values of your own. I didn’t frame one as selfish and the other as altruistic. I framed one as spreading wealth and one as consolidating it. I gave “selfish” examples for both.

If you care about preserving wealth with elites that is right wing… whatever weird political label you give it.

If you care about distributing it to non elites that is left wing.

Stalinists are not “left” they were about wealth and power consolidation.

This is why right and left are useful measures because it sees passes all the bullshit names/political measures and provides a simple scale: are you redistributing wealth (left)? Are you consolidating wealth (right)? Are you doing something in between (centrist)

Ok, so how do the national socialist fit into your metric?

They are left, because they want to redistribute wealth, from the few rich (jewish) bankers, to the poor (aryan) german masses?

No, they wanted to move wealth, and consolidate it. So you could be fooled into initially thinking it was a leftist agenda when it was “take wealth away from rich bankers”. But it quite quickly deteriorated to something else.

It’s important distinction that at the extremes both left and right don’t look that different. It is essentially use extreme violence to achieve wealth distribution/consolidation. Typically once someone is in control of such power even if they set out/pretended to distribute they pivot to consolidation. I guess this is what is meant by “power corrupts”

So 17 levels below a comment I made about the news just making everyone angry and addicted to it, people are still commenting about whether Nazis are economically left or right. I guess that tracks.

Oh, people can always fight about and against nazis.

But I am not angry, just mildly annoyed, that my point does not get through.

(my point was the left right metric is not helpful - but when applied, you will find not a homogenous group, but right leaning nazis, as well as left leaning nazis, when defining right or left with distributing or conserving wealth. Another common definition would be racist, or not.

But I am out of this semantic debate)

Perhaps we were talking past each other. You were saying left and right is useless because you can have left and right nazi's or left and right socialists. I was saying left and right is useful: Nazi and Socialist are the meaningless label.

I mean, it's true if you reinterpret "selfish" as "individualist". At the end of the day its "prioritize concerns of the individual at the expense of society" versus "prioritize concerns of society at the expense of individuals".

I disagree. Because in your statement you are hiding the fact that the “expense of the individuals” is a tiny number compared to the number of “members of society”.

This seems to the world view of the Democratic Party as described by the Democratic Party.

Not American, so I wouldn’t know. But from outside the Democratic Party looked more right than left. Though I guess it’s mostly left of the republicans.

Yes, left and right are used in many different senses. They're impossible to pin down as they mean different things to different people.

I sometimes think it's useful to consider political ideologies as existing somewhere along a spectrum of collectivist to individualist.

Communism would be far to the collectivist end of the spectrum. Socialism less so.

Most neoliberals wouldn't subscribe to an extreme form of libertarianism as they are predominantly concerned with free market capitalism. But neoliberalism is definitely on the individualist end of the spectrum. An example would be promoting privatisation and discouraging government (collective) ownership.

Personally, I think that a mix of individualism and collectivism is best, and this is indeed what you'll find in many places (including, to a large extent, the US).

From this perspective, you can't call yourself both the "extreme centre" and neoliberal. It would be like calling yourself "extreme centre" and socialist.

It's an effort to distance themselves from those left/right labels that are so thoroughly debased as to afford little meaning[1].

The term "extreme centre" is far from new. It was used in 1955 by Geoffrey Crowther, editor at the time, when he said "the extreme centre is the paper's historical position"

[1] https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2013/09/02/...

The Economist is absolutely not "right wing." In fact, it's anything but right wing. So that you say that is obectively true makes me wonder about your agenda here and whether you're making these statements in good faith.

Is hackernews turning into twitter? This seems like a comment from reddit or twitter.

Ironically yours is the most unsubstantive in this whole thread.

> right-wing

Ask a few self-professed conservatives if they agree with the Economist and see what they say.

Yes and no.

The Economist has a Prospectus which spells out its ideology.

I'd known of and read the ... newspaper ... for three decades before learning of this and reading it.

PROSPECTUS of a weekly paper, to be published every Saturday, and to be called THE ECONOMIST, which will contain— First.—ORIGINAL LEADING ARTICLES, in which free-trade principles will be most rigidly applied to all the important questions of the day—political events—and parliamentary discussions; and particularly to all such as relate immediately to revenue, commerce, and agriculture; or otherwise affect the material interests of the country. ...

https://www.economist.com/unknown/1843/08/05/prospectus

That is, The Economist is, and always has been, overtly free-trade propaganda. (Though one might argue that the meaning(s) and connotations of that term have evolved since first proposed in 1843.)

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29285722

The Economist is usually pretty clear about which side it supports.

They generally try to outline both sides of a discussion but are often a little weak in championing a cause that they're not for.

But it's rarely ambiguous where they stand, or why.

The Atlantic is superb. Their pandemic coverage has been my go-to for that subject since the beginning. They’re consistently one, two steps ahead on best mitigation strategies for public policy and have been since the beginning. They were talking about things like HEPA filtration and open windows when everyone else was stuck on masks and hand-washing, for example.

I loved the Atlantic until they started sponsoring "happiness" seminars with Deepak Chopra.

Really? That's disappointing for an organisation with so many intelligent columnists.

At some point the employee wellness budget is just burning a hole in your pocket and so you put it to a vote. I wouldn’t feel too bad about it. Deepak is a charlatan and everyone knows it anyway :)

But I hear his retreats are very expensive and luxurious.

Can you explain what the issue is with this? I don’t understand the reference.

Deepak Chopra is a prominent and controversial figure in "wellness" and "alternative medicine", promoting "quantum healing" and claiming that it can cure cancer and so on. It's widely accused of being psuedoscience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepak_Chopra

The Atlantic. The New Yorker. The Economist. These are neutral to left facing. In a feeble effort to avoid being put in a different bubble, does anyone have something that an educated republican/conservative would read?

https://www.reuters.com/

Wall Street Journal - there's a quip from someone that when he wanted to read things he agreed with, he opened Jacobin, when he wanted to know what was going on in the world, he went to WSJ. Being based entirely on serving money anchors you to a certain reality that can't be swung to far left or right. The journalism has had some really great scoops these last few years - they broke a lot of the Facebook drama, and some tax evasion shenanigans - while the editorials tend to be pretty principled conservatism ("we'll give a voice to anyone, but we'll put a letter from the Editors in where we call them liars" seems to be their approach to Trump and co).

National Review is similar to The Atlantic in that their long form pieces meant for print publication are wonderful, and tend to be rather nuanced, whiletheir short pieces meant for immediate internet consumption are heavily biased. They're interesting in that they take a "big tent" approach, and will allow a lont of dissenting voices to appear under their mast head - this was always true but became really rather evident during the 2016 elections.

The Dispatch is made up of authors and editors who didn't like that Trump supporters were allowed under the "Big Tent" of the National Review. It's edited by Jonah Goldberg, and David French, who shows up as a guest writer for the Atlantic every now and then.

None of those publications are leftist in the least. However, they do all happen to share a very strong neoliberal bias—which would put one in more of a corporate centrist bubble—akin to watching just CNN and MSNBC on cable. If you want news without extra commentary, just go straight to Reuters and/or AP.

That someone can honestly say with a straight face that "the Economist is left-facing" speaks volumes to the sad state of the Overton window.

You keep repeating the Economist is rightwing in this thread, but it seems most here disagree with you. I mean, Fox, Breitbart or the NY Post are pretty much rightwing, and the Economist does not even compare, both in tone and in content. What puts them in the right wing camp according to yo?

Growing up in NZ, If you championed free market capitalism and privatisation, you would definitely be considered right wing. That is the Economist's bread and butter.

That NZ's major left wing party was and is still a big proponent of these policies didn't change that.

Today, it could be argued that neoliberalism has moved the overton window, but many, many people still don't buy it.

I'm not sure it does "champion privatisation". I've read some pretty damning reports on bad privatisation, for example about the problems from rail privatisation, as well as on monopolistic practice by big companies. I would say it's rather more nuanced than private good, public bad.

What is "left" and what is "right" is a question of consensus, of course. The Eke is surely considered right-wing in Britain, and likely in most of Europe.

The Economist is old school liberal: let companies do what they want (US "right-wing"), let people do what they want (US "left-wing"), but unlike US libertarians, also have some regulation and support in place to prevent the worst abuses.

> That someone can honestly say with a straight face that "the Economist is left-facing" speaks volumes to the sad state of the Overton window.

Or that they are viewing things entirely through the lens of American culture war dimension of politics (where the Economist might fit in the neutral to left-facing description), rather than the usual left-right economic spectrum, where it is agressively center-right.

Reason?

That's Libertarian, not Republican, and it's not a news site, it's more of a magazine.

It's often a good read nonetheless, but it's not a news site.

I highly recommend The Dispatch. They make a point of not being click-baity and try to give thoughtful takes instead of reactionary ones.

Rossiyskaya Gazeta.

Anything by The Hoover Institution

Really great, conservative, and academic stuff. Highly regarded by many.

Excellent publications, and whole video series on YouTube are free to watch

Agree there. Econlib podcasts by Russ Robert of the Hoover Institute are fantastic. He has a range of guests on, seeks to understand opposing views and it’s more of an academic discussion.

His podcasts about the 2008 financial crisis were fantastic.

My recommendation for that would be https://www.nationalaffairs.com/ Thoughtful and driven by social science.

Realclearpolitics has started providing some original content to go with their aggregation. Tends to be non-reactionary 'traditional' Republican leaning.

> The Atlantic. The New Yorker. The Economist. These are neutral to left facing.

No, they aren’t, especially the Economist, which is aggressively center-right pro-capitalist.

Here's another vote for The Atlantic. They are also the only online website (AFAIK) where, once you pay for a subscription, you actually get an ad-free experience.

And most importantly it’s owned by the billionaire widow of Steve Jobs who also hangs out with Ghislaine Maxwell

https://news.yahoo.com/steve-jobs-widow-takes-stake-atlantic... https://www.twitter.com/austerewyatt1/status/146967519091742...

Atlantic truly is all over the map. They'll have articles like the watershed Coddling of the American Mind from 2015, but then shortly after it's nothing but Trump 24/7 like every other outlet.

I like reading the Atlantic when I want to know which propaganda the DNC is pushing for the day.

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