DC:Marvel :: Red Tribe:Blue Tribe

A lot of different stories have been percolating the right today about Ukrainegate, the whistleblower, the whistleblower's lawyer, and the general idea that the deep state are out to rig everything.

All of this comes across as them starting with the conclusion (the deep state is out to get Trump) and working backwards. All of this evidence is the type of 'evidence' you could find even if the 'deep state' didn't exist.

So a few weeks back, I had a discussion/argument about Trump devolve into a discussion of "context". Every individual thing Trump does had to be put into a context in which it was understood that Trump was a racist, rapist, etc, because this one individual thing was slotting into a pattern of many, many similar things. This meant that disputing anyone one item would fail, because at best "OK, this one attack against him was ill-advised. He's still [evil]".

Ever seen the citogenesis XKCD? As part of that discussion, I went into basically all of the historical arguments for Trump's racism, sort of the methods from You Are Still Crying Wolf, and I felt like I successfully demolished the overwhelming majority of the claims up until the election itself. But it didn't really matter at all, because there were a hundred examples post the election, and while each of them were sketchy, weak claims, that only felt strong because they were being interpreted in the context of the fake strong claims that preceded them, they were still more than enough to provide a subjective experience of justifiable, unshakable certainty in my discussion partner.

My real point here isn't the specifics of this example, it's that the "two movies" hypothesis really doesn't do reality justice. It's more like "two cinematic universes". You say that the links above come across as "starting with the conclusion", but to a conservative, it's like you've just watched 20 minutes of the middle of Thor Ragnarok, and you're complaining that the audience is just assuming a background and history and plot arc for these random characters, and the conservative rolls their eyes because of course it doesn't make sense if you haven't seen at least Incredible Hulk, Thor 1, Thor: The Dark World, Avengers, and Age of Ultron. Well, in the real world I think most conservatives don't really grok how many of their opponents have never heard of the franchise, much less seen any of the movies.

To drop the analogy and go back to reality, from the conservative perspective, this looks like a conclusion because it's actually the product of years of preceding buildup. If you follow the conservative media, every day for months has had articles and talk about the naked nonsense involved in the Ukraine investigation. In just a few months of accumulation, summarizing all of the tidbits would be a massive undertaking - and even that has to be put in the context of the three year Mueller investigation. Expecting the lawyers involved to be shady makes a lot more sense if you have a years long history of slowly learning that the median "impeccable Republican lawyer" working for Mueller was actually a former lawyer for Hillary Clinton's private server technician.

Imagine each of us is a neural net, but we're being trained on two totally different data sets. Our minds are drawing conclusions, building networks and establishing holistic connections, so that each node explains and is in turn explained by all the others. What /u/Shakesneer has done is shared one node from the other data set. Of course it doesn't slot neatly in! But that doesn't mean it isn't instantly comprehensible to a net trained on it's home data set.