Talk:Reality-based community

message: *Previous deletion debate
I deleted most of the original text, which was a complaint about the page-request system.  I acted on the complaint by adding an "in-tray" heading to Wikipedia:requested pages. --Heron 12:40, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Verschiedenes

message: The article mentions use of "reality-based" in opposition to "faith based." I was aware of the origin of the phrase through the Suskind article, and its subsequent ironic use among critics of the Bush administration, but I didn't know that the phrase also had some sort of (a)theistic use as  well. Can anyone point to examples? Someone recently tried to remove the section describing this use and I guess it needs more explanation.
Scelerat (talk) 05:43, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  ...as opposed to "Faith-Based"? 

message: Although the article possibly documents accurately the origin of the phrase "reality-based community" (I'm not qualified to judge), its usage nowadays is nowhere near as limited as the article claims.   It has become a term used by anyone who feels that their point of view is based on actual facts, typically in contrast to some other point of view that they believe -- often with good reason -- is not.   The article should be amended to reflect this.Daqu 17:28, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The use of the name "George Washington" isn't nearly as limited as Wikipedia would make it out to be either, y'know. The point is that yes, people have been declaring their actions to be formed through realistic evaluation of the existing world for rather a long time. However, that this is occasionally  randomly phrased this as "being part of the reality-based community" is not particularly notable. What is notable is that this collection of words has been adopted and used in this form for some time by a particular contingent of bloggers. Chris Cunningham 10:10, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Meaning of "reality-based community" to the actual reality-based community

message: As far as I know, and I might be wrong, I, Marc Perkel invented the term reality-based community. I am the founder of the Church of Reality and one of the first things I did was start using reality-based terminology that mirrored faith-based terminology. (I also invented the term reality-based terminology.) Thus faith-based religion becomes reality-based religion. (faith-based * -> reality-based *). So I started using this term back in 1999. I'm also the host for Bartcop.com and host American Politics Journal and many anti-bush sites who we familiar with me and the Church of Reality started identifying themselves as the reality-based community.
The meaning of reality-based community is not limited to just Church of Reality membership. It refers to people in general who put reason and logic first, accept scrutiny, and the disciplines of science. Those who have a world view that they are part of an objective reality that we all share. The term contrasts with "faith-based" in that faith implies the acceptance of information through choosing to believe something without regarding or in some cases in spite of the evidence. Reality-based anything (in Church of Reality terms) implies that there is a recognition that reality is important and that reality-based methodologies are used to determine what is real.
So I'm pretty sure that's where it all started. But it is possible that something that I don't know about predates my usage of it. If that is so I'd like to know it.
Reality Based Google Search on Church of Reality Site --Marcperkel 00:41, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: What you need to do now is find a good, dated source that you can include in the article, e.g. an article from a major newspaper that mentions your organisation and uses the phrase "reality-based". If you could do that, you could say something like "the phrase dates back to at least 1999, when it was used by Marc Perkel's "Church of Reality" to describe etc.(source) More recently...", and then follow with the rest of the article. -Ashley Pomeroy (talk) 07:36, 11 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Term comes from Church of Reality 

message: This is one of the worst failures I've seen yet. The origin of this term comes from right, not the left, and was a derisive term popularized in the early Bush II administration, but then yes quickly picked up by elements on the left. I can't believe how twisted around this fairly well known thing is here, in fact diametrically the opposite of the easily verifiable facts. And part of the problem is the name, the original phrase was simply "reality community" to contrast stuffy old academics and the like who couldn't see that anything was possible in the dawn of the triumphant new American century 72.228.177.92 (talk) 21:13, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: The original quote would make more sense to me if "reality" were used in the sense of "realism." People are sometimes called "realists" in opposition to "idealists." Of course there are realists and idealists on both sides, left and right, pro- and anti-Bush, etc. I am planning on nominating Faith-based community for deletion. I will probably not AfD this one, but it could use some more clairity.Kitfoxxe (talk) 20:51, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  4 March 2010 

message: On Real Time with Bill Maher tonight, she attributed that phrase to Karl Rove.
is that a citable source?
--Patbahn (talk) 02:30, 8 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Kristina van der Heuvel attributes this to Karl Rove 

message: The spun text in the lede now is surprising and I suppose not without some basis but it's nonetheless contrary to the common perception of this thing as it exists in culture and therefore problematic as encyclopaedic content without some framing, apposition to that common conception, that the sogenannte "Reality Community" were those that only accept fact/reason based constructions of their fundaments, as opposed, e.g., to those that Christians do. Lycurgus (talk) 04:22, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  21 February 2015 

message: The article, as it now exists, is now rather anemic, which somewhat explains the repeated AfDs.  It should have more, but it's difficult to add information about a decade-plus-old phenomenon primary restricted to TV, radio, and blogs without violating WP:RS, WP:NPOV, etc.  If not for policy restrictions, we might want to add something a little like this:
:Ron Suskind later wrote an article in the New York Magazine, on the eve of the 2004 election, predicting a "civil war within the Republican community" between Bush loyalists, who took intelligence estimates about pre-war Iraq "on faith," and a "reality-based community," which demanded evidence[1].  This use of the phrase, by Bush detractors as a point of pride in their skepticism about Iraq and WMDs, spread in use throughout the American left[2].  Suskind noted, "The quote has had quite an extraordinary life since 2004."[3]  It was also used as a disparaging term by the right, not in its original meaning (to defend Bush), but sarcastically on occasions in which left-wing people believed things that did not appear true[4][5], such as the prediction of a post-election Republican crack-up[6].
# http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html?mcubz=0 "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush" By RON SUSKIN, OCT. 17, 2004 
# http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/27/opinion/27sat1.html?_r=1&n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fEditorials&oref=slogin
# http://www.newsweek.com/national-sleep-well-beast-karl-rove-662307
# https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/258143/
# http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jay-rosen/the-retreat-from-empirici_b_36772.html
# https://web.archive.org/web/20050621232425/http://michellemalkin.com/archives/002779.htm
This shows the three distinct uses of the phrase and its long lifespan.  I'm just at an impasse as to how to write a policy-conforming version of this, given that most of these are primary sources and/or opinion pieces (though not [3], which provides a lot of information, but which might be dismissed as being a "culture" article rather than news).  Any help would be appreciated; I hope this is a good starting-off point for improving the article.  (I'll add that this year the phrase appears to have taken off again in the second sense given, that of an opposition believing a president is not acting based on verifiable facts; the aforementioned Google News search looks a lot different now than it did in January.) Calbaer (talk) 15:15, 9 September 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Good work, I also hope it improves :) Mathiastck (talk) 19:42, 12 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Expanding with RS 

message: We could cite Matt Berninger's interview in The Atlantic in summarizing what he said about using the phrase reality-based community (if it's not found to be undue). But to make any general statements about the phrase's usage we'd need a secondary source that synthesizes or evaluates its use in such publications. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 20:21, 16 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Matt Berninger Q&A 

message: What is the specific reason that the term appears here as reality-based rather than reality-based?Weeb Dingle (talk) 17:19, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: The article is about a word or phrase; italics are used to indicate the use-mention distinction. See MOS:WORDSASWORDS. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 19:08, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  really basic usage question: 

message: There are a couple of problems with these sources, so I've removed this. First, the David Limbaugh book is  a polemic and not reliable for factual information. In this case the relevant part is just a quote from Eric Alterman. Even if the book said anything about "conservatives" in general here (it doesn't), it is still a just a primary source for Limbaugh's own opinion.
Second, the piece by Bruce Bartlett doesn't say the specific "piece of writing" was dismissed by conservatives; it says that not one of Bartlett's "think tank friends ... had read it or cared in the slightest what the New York Times had to say about anything". Besides this being a mere personal anecdote, The American Conservative should really only be used for attributed opinions; see RS/P. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:53, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Conservative response