J
Neil Immerman's web site:
===================================================================
an excerpt:
# 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.
--
Jobst Brandt
===================================================================
an excerpt:
# 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.
--
Jobst Brandt