The 25 Worst Headlines of 2018 | Current Affairs
▻https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/12/the-25-worst-headlines-of-2018
6. The Economist : “The Drug That Is Starving Yemen: Famine in Yemen could be avoided if the men chewed less qat.”
A little-known fact about neoliberalism is that it’s quite emotionally satisfying. If everything bad that happens to someone is their own fault—or, more specifically, you can find some small negative aspect of their behavior and blow it up to outsized proportions of blame—then you never have to feel sorry for people, or take responsibility for the fact that you yourself are complicit in harming them. Say it out loud: “The U.S. isn’t starving Yemen, the bad moral choices of Yemeni men are starving Yemen.” How did that feel? It felt good, right? In fact it feels so good it’s practically addictive. Time for another headline: “Neoliberalism: The Ideology That Is Psychologically Starving America,” and its subtitle: “Moral rot in America could be avoided if we collectively declared ‘Death to the Economist.’”