Monday, May 19, 2014

They Walk Among Us...

The following 3 texts - in no particular order - illustrate the terrifying fact that there exists a scary subset of humanity (I use the term loosely here) for whom reality simply does not exist:

"Phase one of Tony Abbott's strategy to sell the budget is to deny, point blank, that it is based on the deceit of broken promises made before last year's election. More than that, it is to assert - again point blank - that there were no broken promises and, in effect, that black is white." (Abbott denies breaching faith, Michael Gordon, Sydney Morning Herald, 15/5/14)

"The aide said that guys like me [i.e., reporters and commentators] 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'." (A 'senior advisor' to President Bush, quoted in The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo & the Iraq War's Buried History, Mark Danner, 2006)

"Even a cursory look at the history of this conflict would tell an observer that the plight of the Palestinians is so much more a product of the decisions that their leaders made over the years, of squandered opportunities and of deceit engaged in, than of anything that Israel did to them." (Paragraph from a letter to The Australian by Felix Elberg, Caulfield, Vic., 17/5/14)

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