Don’t call it post-truth. There’s a simpler word: lies; Guardian, 12/16/16

Jonathan Freedland, Guardian; Don’t call it post-truth. There’s a simpler word: lies:

"We’ve been calling this “post-truth politics” but I now worry that the phrase is far too gentle, suggesting society has simply reached some new phase in its development. It lets off the guilty too lightly. What Trump is doing is not “engaging in post-truth politics”. He’s lying.

Worse still, Trump and those like him not only lie: they imply that the truth doesn’t matter, showing a blithe indifference to whether what they say is grounded in reality or evidence...

Only in the political realm have we somehow drifted into a world in which no one can be trusted, not on questions of judgment, nor even on questions of fact. But we cannot live in such a world. Evidence, facts and reason are the building blocks of civilisation. Without them we plunge into darkness."

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a misunderstood masterpiece; Guardian, 9/18/16

Michael Billington, Guardian; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a misunderstood masterpiece:

"Albee’s protective attitude to his play stemmed in part, I suspect, from the fact that it is widely misunderstood. The searing Mike Nichols 1966 film, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, stamped it in the public mind as a liquor-fuelled marital slugfest. But the play, I am convinced, is as much about the state of the Union as about marriage. Albee was a deeply political writer who once told me he liked plays to be “useful, not merely decorative”. It is also significant that he wrote the play in the early 1960s when America was slowly emerging from the narcoleptic Eisenhower years and when a fragile Cold War peace depended on the balance of terror...

Rumour has it that Imelda Staunton and Conleth Hill are to star in a new London production. With America currently engaged in its own form of post-truth politics, now seems the perfect time to revive Albee’s enduring masterpiece about the danger of living in a world of illusions."

The Age of Post-Truth Politics; New York Times, 8/24/16

William Davies, New York Times; The Age of Post-Truth Politics:

"Facts hold a sacred place in Western liberal democracies. Whenever democracy seems to be going awry, when voters are manipulated or politicians are ducking questions, we turn to facts for salvation.

But they seem to be losing their ability to support consensus...

The sense is widespread: We have entered an age of post-truth politics...

We are in the middle of a transition from a society of facts to a society of data. During this interim, confusion abounds surrounding the exact status of knowledge and numbers in public life, exacerbating the sense that truth itself is being abandoned.

The place to start in understanding this transition is with the spread of “smart” technologies into everyday life, sometimes called the “internet of things.”"

Trump’s lies aren’t unique to America: Post-truth politics are killing democracies on both sides of the Atlantic; Salon, 6/19/16

Brogan Morris, Salon; Trump’s lies aren’t unique to America: Post-truth politics are killing democracies on both sides of the Atlantic:

"“There was a time, not long ago, when we would differ on the interpretation of the facts. We would differ on the analysis. We would differ on prescriptions for our problems. But fundamentally we agreed on the facts. That was then. Today, many feel entitled to their own facts.”

So said Marty Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post, in a speech he gave to Temple University’s newest Media and Communication graduates not two weeks ago. Baron was talking about a new form of politics that’s been taking hold, a kind that brings into question the prospects of these hopeful future journos, a kind that threatens democracy as we know it."