{"id":8579,"date":"2020-01-05T19:25:29","date_gmt":"2020-01-05T18:25:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/?p=8579"},"modified":"2020-01-05T19:26:19","modified_gmt":"2020-01-05T18:26:19","slug":"discernible-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/?p=8579","title":{"rendered":"Discernible reality"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>The aide said that guys like me were &#8222;in what we call the reality-based community,&#8220; which he defined as people who &#8222;believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.&#8220; I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. &#8222;That&#8217;s not the way the world really works anymore,&#8220; he continued. &#8222;We&#8217;re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you&#8217;re studying that reality \u2014 judiciously, as you will\u00a0\u2014 we&#8217;ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that&#8217;s how things will sort out. We&#8217;re history&#8217;s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.&#8220;<\/p>\n<p>\u2014<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2004\/10\/17\/magazine\/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Ron Suskind<\/a>, Oct. 17, 2004, relating a conversation with Karl Rove<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Whenever I&#8217;ve read this or read commentaries on it Rove has seemed hubristic and delusional. How could a political consultant, or anyone for that matter, be taken seriously when they talk about creating their own reality? This has seemed something to be dismissed out of hand.<\/p>\n<p>I was reading this evening of an anti-war march in LA being addressed by Jimmy Dore, a comedian. Acquaintances respond to social media posts with &#8222;likes&#8220; or one-liners about how they &#8222;feel&#8220; rather than with sourced arguments of any complexity. I find myself wondering if Rove&#8217;s lack of prescience is to be found in his mistaken use of a single adjective, if perhaps actors like Obama, Trump, Schiff, Pelosi, Grenell are in fact quite successfully creating and recreating reality, and Rove&#8217;s failing was in his assuming there would be judicious study of it rather than simply unthinking cheering or shrill scatological\u00a0denunciation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The aide said that guys like me were &#8222;in what we call the reality-based community,&#8220; which he defined as people who &#8222;believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.&#8220; I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/?p=8579\">Weiterlesen <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8579\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}