Another Casualty of the War on Reality

Via 5 Calls Civic Action.

There's a hint of rationality in Trump's violent reaction to the July jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, when he accused the BLS of "rigging" the numbers in an attempt to harm him ("ME"), and abruptly fired the commissioner, Erika McEntarfer:

Though the history is virtually all fiction: the October 2024 jobs report, issued two days before the election on November 1, was dismal for the Democrats, counting just 12,000 new jobs for the month, effectively zero, and a downward revision of 112,000 jobs to the August and September numbers; there was no report issued on November 15 (it always comes out on the first Friday of the new month); and in the next report, issued on December 6, listed a gangbusters gain for November of 227,000 jobs and significant upward revisions of 56,000 for September and October—so if it was rigged to affect the presidential election it must have been rigged against the Harris campaign and in Trump's favor. (Of course it wasn't rigged at all.) The 818,000-job downward revision referred to in the "Truth" was announced in August 2024, well before the election, and covered the previous 12 months, so that would have favored Trump too. Has anybody but me bothered to check any of this out? 

The Principle of Explosion

 

Classic XKCD.

A weird little detail on BBC this morning from their Moscow correspondent doing what Moscow correspondents need to do a lot of nowadays, watching TV: In re the sinking of the Moskva, state television is denying, as you'd expect, that Ukraine had anything to do with it (yes, there was an explosion of ammunition on board that damaged the ship's hull but more or less no attempt to explain what could have caused the explosion, and the ship sank after "losing its balance" as they were towing it back into port), but in the middle of this discussion some talking-head military expert says that this is an act of war for which Ukraine will have to be severely punished—not if this is Ukraine's responsibility, but making the unspoken presupposition that it is, sitting inside a conversation in which everybody agrees it isn't.

Reinforced by the subsequent news of the Russian bombing of the Vizar plant near Kyiv where the Neptune missiles, which as we understand actually sunk the Moskva, are made, which we're clearly meant to read as a very precisely targeted response to the sinking, but the Defense Ministry issues a very precisely targeted assertion that it is something else:

The Reality

 

Illustration by Todd St. John from The New Yorker (Jane Mayer's prescient piece of October 2017 on the prospect of a President Pence).

Page:

Vice President Pence, more than 210,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 since February. The US death toll as a percentage of our population is higher than that of almost every other wealthy nation on Earth. For instance, our death rate is two and a half times that of Canada, next door. You head the administration's Coronavirus Task Force. Why is the U.S. death toll, as a percentage of our population, higher than that of almost every other wealthy country? 

Pence:

I want the American people to know that from the very first day, President Donald Trump has put the health of Americans first. Before there were more than five cases in the United States, all people who had returned from China, President Donald Trump did what no other American president had ever done. And that was he suspended all travel from China, the second largest economy in the world. Now, Senator Joe Biden, Biden opposed that decision. He said it was xenophobic and hysterical, but I can tell you, having led the White House Coronavirus Task Force, that that decision alone by President Trump bought us invaluable time to stand up the greatest national mobilization since World War II.

Not only did Pence completely ignore the question, but as everybody ought to know by now, Biden was right to call the Trump travel restriction on travelers from China only (admitting US citizens and permanent residents and not imposing any quarantine on them) "hysterical" and "xenophobic", given the way it focused on a single Yellow Peril population (after 5 cases had been confirmed in the US and more in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, France, Italy...), too late and too restricted to be effective at stopping the coronavirus, which was already spreading in New York; spreading, in fact, through travelers from Europe, but hidden for weeks because of the Trump administration's failure to develop adequate testing, rejecting the advice of the WHO (consistent with Trump's xenophobic hatred of international organizations in general). 

What did you do in the war against reality, Daddy?

George W. Bush in Texas with chainsaw. From Erynn's Pinterest.

I've been reading and digesting and rereading this essay, "Normalnost", in the current LA Review of Books, by Peter Pomerantsev and in conjunction with the marketing of his new book, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, which brings together the Russia theme and the Trump and Brexit themes across some unexpected parameters: not that Pomerantsev discounts the thing we've come to expect about "them" doing something horrible to "us", but that he sees the horrible thing that's happened to us as something that also happened to them, first, and something you could notice at first in the world of the arts, at the time of the breakup of the USSR, in the collapse of "a system of making sense of the world":

In History Becomes Form, the Russian art historian Boris Groys describes this process as the “Big Tsimtsum,” a term he borrows from the Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, an alternative version of creation where God first brings the word into being and then retreats from it. “[T]he withdrawal of Soviet power, or the Tsimtsum of Communism, created the infinite space of signs emptied of sense,” writes Groys. “Soviet ideology knew nothing of chance. […] It saw itself as the necessary product of historical development as understood by dialectical materialism. […] In the early 1990s this ideology was suddenly gone — and the world became devoid of meaning[, leaving Soviets] in a sea of empty signifiers.”

Which led to the Russian avant-garde of conceptualists and performance artists becoming increasingly fixated on the panic of meaninglessness, depicting meaning as disposable or abandoning language altogether or contrariwise trying to rebuild meaning as a kind of group-therapy activity, when