Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (219424)	2/19/2007 9:14:34 AM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I've gotten the "facts and logic" lecture from random W suckups too many times to count. It's moderately odd how people who seem to have dedicated so much to following the twists and turns of W's serial PR campaigns seem to always consider themselves the ones with the "facts", but that's another story. As far as the phrase "reality based community" is concerned, to the best of my knowledge it has a fairly precise origin, and the origin has nothing to do with any part of the blogosphere. Though it seems to have been picked up as a badge of honor there, which seems fair enough compared to the people who came up with it as a term of derision. In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'' (from nytimes.com ) I'm sure you can come up up with a suitably ironic reply on that one, though, whether you realize it or not.