"In other words, for all its many missteps of the past two decades, America is remarkably well placed to win the war of ideas now unfolding in the Middle East. This is not because Arabs are fond of America. Most aren't, right now. But thanks to globalisation, education, satellite television and the palpable failure of the local alternatives, most Arabs (and Iranians) are fully aware of what sort of societies the Western democracies are, and they would like some of the same fresh air for themselves. Is America less powerful today than when its pilots were shooting up Saddam's Republican Guard on the highway out of Kuwait 20 years ago? [...]

There's no pique quite like the British kind. The eyebrows arch, the throat clears, the spittle flecks, and the rhetoric swells portentously. It's not for nothing that the coronation robe of the country's wheezing monarchy is purple.

But when you combine this tradition of jowly hauteur with the smug shibboleths of neoliberal free-trade dogma, well, then the royal fireworks really start combusting. Just witness the Economist's June 17 opinion leader on the White House's deal with BP to create an escrow fund of $20 billion to cover the company's liabilities in the enormous Gulf oil spill.

The Economist takes a look at black people and white people Internet, finding that they are, in global terms (not individual terms!), two very different things. (And also that people flee services they feel are for poor people.) This includes Twitter: "In May Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, who research the display of social information, looked at the ten most popular hashtags on Twitter and discovered that most were used almost exclusively by either black or white authors." Another researcher found that, across the Internet, "in their online life, American teenagers were recreating what they knew from the physical world-separation by class and race." I won't hold my [...]

The current issue of the Economist contains both a leading article and a more in-depth piece condemning America's treatment of sex offenders, which the magazine considers both ineffective and overly harsh. The specific cases they use to make their points are obviously extreme examples designed to provoke outrage, but you know what? They're pretty outrageous.

"When a magazine has to go to such great lengths to explain their cover or explain their ideas, then perhaps their message wasn't as clear or powerful as they thought it would be. Whether it's one of their readers or a casual browser, the cover seems to paint a picture of Obama being a lonely man. In addition, the fact that The Economist they didn't consult Reuters before using the photo seems to be the first red flag that their cover wasn't going to work." —The Weekly World News upbraids The Economist for improper use of Photoshop on the cover of its June 19 issue. Because this is where [...]