Anyone citing Wikipedia will be fired for incompetence
The definition of “recession” has not changed for decades. Largely because technical definitions of economic phenomena are dry and boring.
Government gnomes in the bowels of the Commerce Department have been calculating the statistics behind our economic numbers for decades and “recessions” come and go without much excitement. That was true until Magic Opposites Meaning Day was brought to us by the Biden Administration in July of this year.
What a time to be alive!
The United States slipped into recession in the 2nd quarter of 2022. A “recession” has been defined by economists since the 1940s as “two consecutive quarters of negative growth.” That’s it - nothing thrilling, and the negative growth rate could be -0.05% per month to qualify. “Recession” in and of itself is a boring, dry, technical term. A recession could be devastatingly drastic, with lots of layoffs and foreclosures or it could be, well, a barely noticeable event which was only noticed by the statisticians who calculate the figures for the Department of Commerce.
1Q22 growth was -1.6%. 2Q22 growth was -0.9%. Hence, recession.
But wait! There’s more! The Administration could have just said something like, “Yes, the technical indicators show recession, it’s always helpful to put things in context, to describe how those figures are calculated…” They could even have lied some more about the Wuhan Hysteria’s supposed impact on the economy or how Putin was making your Pop-Tarts pricier.
Nope. They decided - in the phrase the kids like - to gaslight all of America by having the White House mouthpieces all look us straight in the eye and say, “No, that is not the definition of recession. We are not in a recession and no, we have not changed the definition. It’s never been that two successive quarters thing.” They did so while shaking their heads at our soft-brained stupidity, the way you would with a small child who insists he or she (there are no other choices) just saw a dinosaur walk across the backyard for realzies.
The American Left has gotten so insane that they - of course, mistaking online life for the real thing - instantly took to Wikipedia to change the definition of recession. Because, in their minds, Orwell’s 1984 was not a cautionary absurdist tale about the inherent evils of dictatorship but a practical manual for governance, so if the magic winking screen says something, that must be true.
The few rational people - I can only assume - who bother with Wikipedia, found this insane and ridiculous, so they re-corrected the definition so that it was consistent with the definition as understand by dozens of Nobel Laureates, not the one some gaslighting clown in the West Wing came up with 9 seconds prior as a way to “save” the President from being President during a recession coming into the midterms.
The Useful Idiots doubled down and after multiple back and forth (shown by the change log above) corrects and miscorrections, the ridiculous “new” definition was locked in place by the Hand of WikiGod so no more changes could be made. So now in the Gospel According to Wikipedia, decades of consistent understanding by economics were tossed aside in an hour by ideologically driven political partisans.
(I wonder which side the proposed Department of Homeland Security’s Ministry of Truth would have called “misinformation.” Actually, no, I don’t have to wonder that at all.)
These Marxist clowns are so ham-handed it is now terrifying or delightful. It was funny in a strange, desperate way, but now that they are demonstrating a willingness to be so in our faces blatant about their lies, it means they are growing confident in their project. The fact that they no longer even try to hide their lies means that they really don’t care what we the people think - they are going to tell us what to think and if you’re a good little slave, you’ll shut up lest your real-world boss hear that you doubted The Truth online and you lose your job.
There is a reason Lenin said the Communists would hang the bourgeoisie with the ropes bought from them. This kind of evil manipulation of facts has nothing to do with policy debates about the relative merits of government policy versus free capital markets. This kind of nonsense is about asserting total control over people’s minds and lives. This attempt at knowledge manipulation and control of definitional power is not traditional Democrat v. Republican fights over Labor v. Capital. This is the path developed by Lenin and Mao from the rantings of a failed stock market speculator named Karl who spent his time writing bitterly about the capitalist system he failed in so spectacularly. This is one group of people demanding they literally control reality to the extent that if they tell you pain is pleasure, you must accept it is therefore so.
Ponder this when you have a minute: Had Karl Marx succeeded in his wagers on the stock exchange, he would likely have retired to a big old country pile outside London and lived his life as a dissolute country squire. He would not have spent years obsessively reading and witing in the British Library. He would not have written Das Kapital. Or if he had, it would have had a very different emphasis and conclusions. “Communism” would either not be a named movement or would not have the meaning it does today. The Soviet Union would never have formed. Pol Pot may never have murdered millions of his countrymen. Mao may never have found a unifying ideology with which to hijack a 5,000-year-old culture. Cuba would never have endured the unmitigated evil of Che Guevara and the Castro brothers. The Village Voice and New York Pravda would have been entirely different periodicals… Bernie Sanders would be just another bitter old Brooklynite pestering folks in Vermont who’d rather be left alone. Ah, the what-ifs of history….
For years I have told employees that if they ever cited Wikipedia as a source, they could immediately pack up their desks and go work for a competitor. I would like to thank the idiots at Wikipedia for confirming publicly how completely correct I have been in enforcing that rule.
Vote accordingly in November.