In the early 1990s, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard published a notorious hot take on Iraq: The Gulf War Did Not Take Place . The title was designed to scandalize. But Baudrillard was not denying that there had been a conflict, or that people died. He was challenging how that reality was conveyed to people watching. As the introduction put it: it was "not a question of being for or against the war," but of being "for or against the reality of the war." That argument stemmed from the