bs2
> A Bush aide (later identified as key adviser #KarlRove)... disparaged #EvidenceBasedReality, though in his case by favoring facts created not through faith but power. As he so resonantly explained to those stuck “in what we call the #RealityBasedCommunity”:
'... We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality... We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'
https://tomdispatch.com/rebecca-gordon-confronting-alternative-facts/
#TomDispatch #RebeccaGordan #BushJunior #OnBullshit?
A Twenty-First-Century Incredibility Chasm

In one of the Bible stories about the death of Jesus, local collaborators with the Roman Empire haul him before Pontius Pilate, the imperial governor of Palestine. Although the situation is dire for

TomDispatch.com
Feb 3, 2023 at 1:51pmWeb
Show threadbs2Feb 3, 2023
The Hannah Arendt quote brought me back to this 2019 article:
> In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true… Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.
#HannahArendt
Show threadbs2Feb 3, 2023
Maybe the On Bullshit guy tied his distinctions between bullshitters and liars to totalitarian techniques? Or advertising? or maybe pulled them together somehow? The rest of the Hannah Arendt's paragraph makes me think of the "whatever the market will bear" business guys as if MBA's a trained revere psychopathic acts to serve corporations. I'm painting myself into a corner where I have to find out more about #OnBullshit now. And to think the big-name philosophers used to write _On Liberty_...
Show threadbs2Feb 3, 2023
> The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the.. assumption that... one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would.. instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
#HannahArendt #OnTotalitarianism