The Crime. III

Drawing by Victor Juhasz for Matt Taibbi's Insane Clown President, 2017. 

Jeff asked, in comments to yesterday's post, "What happened in the wake of the 9 June meeting?" Meaning, I thought, what real-world consequences did it have? If they formalized an agreement between the Trump campaign and the Russian agents, what did the agreement lead to that's different from what happens in the Trump story that that the meeting was pure senseless noise ("She didn't have any information we could use and we went home")? And how would it help you recognize, based on the evidence we do have, which one is true?

That's not exactly what Jeff meant to ask, but let that pass for the moment. This more or less philosophy-of-science approach led me back to the situation in the trumpological world that we were in before the report of the meeting came out in July 2017, and a post I wrote back then, in March, as we were all starting to digest the Steele dossier and all the reports of Trump associates making contact with Russians and lying about them, and Adam Schiff's statement, when the House Intelligence Committee was interviewing FBI director James Comey (remember him?), laying out the narratology as he understood it at the time. I was focused on what had happened, if you assumed the Steele information on Carter Page's activities was pretty good, in July 2016:

Sunday troll-baiting: Weapons of Mass Disjunction

From boarmasters.com.

The genial Barracks O'Bama had spotted the quarry first; she was an extremely frisky specimen, and by the time I ran across them Barracks was feeling some fatigue:

.@PennyDreadful81 As long as you've admitted that Cheney lied about WMDs so he could profit off our soldiers' deaths, my work here is done.
— Barracks O'Bama (@P0TUS) May 18, 2014

Thus gloriously and unwounded did Barracks retire from the field. But a deep fog of derp still hung about the meadow, the birds sang, and my blood was up. Dr. Google and I dumped some tempting evidence in front of the opening to the troll's cave:

Confirmation Bias Watch

Image by John S. Dykes for Wall Street Journal, July 2012.

A little over a month has passed since famous conservative genius Yuval Levin accused Paul Krugman of refusing to entertain evidence that challenges his beliefs even as he criticizes everybody else for doing the same thing. Here at the Rectification of Names we were able to adduce empirical evidence that Krugman has, actually, repeatedly changed his mind in the face of facts and publicly admitted it, as scientists are supposed to be capable of doing, but not as it happens that Yuval Levin has ever done so.

I just want to note here that Krugman has done it again, on the very important question of whether humanity can afford to stop destroying our Earth with greenhouse gases, in yesterday's Times column:

One front many people didn’t take too seriously, however, was renewable energy. Sure, cap-and-trade might make more room for wind and the sun, but how important could such sources really end up being? And I have to admit that I shared that skepticism. If truth be told, I thought of the idea that wind and sun could be major players as hippie-dippy wishful thinking. But I was wrong.

Still no data on Levin. In 2008, incidentally, he wrote on the subject of climate change denialism,

the genuine abuses of science have been (and frankly continue to be — just listen to “rolling back the waters” Obama lately) more serious on the left in this debate than on the right. 

Maybe now we have some hard evidence on the relative abusiveness of left and right in this connection, this could be a good opportunity for him to demonstrate his ability to revise his views in the light of reality. I can't find that he's said anything on the subject at all lately.

Confirmation bias has a conservative bias

Via.

Yuval Levin on the hot topic of confirmation bias at the National Review:

Without (it seems) a hint of irony, Paul Krugman argued on Monday that everyone is subject to confirmation bias except for people who agree with him. He was responding to this essay Ezra Klein wrote for his newly launched site, Vox.com, which took up the question of confirmation bias and the challenges it poses to democratic politics. Krugman acknowledged the research that Klein cites but then insisted that his own experience suggests it is actually mostly people he disagrees with who tend to ignore evidence and research that contradicts what they want to believe, while people who share his own views are more open-minded, skeptical, and evidence driven. I don’t know when I’ve seen a neater real-world example of an argument that disproves itself.

With the implication that I'm rubber, you're glue, and neener neener neener. Or as Jennifer Rubin calls it,