Two examples came up today of people who seem to cope easily with contradicting beliefs.
A well known pro-Syrian rebels dude posted these two tweets within 15 minutes of each other:
6:31 AM – 27 Jul 2016 – Hasan Sari Verified account @HasanSari7
300,000+ civilians in E. Aleppo (40klm) under bombardment & will be starving in 2 weeks as Castillo road cut. Bad.
6:44 AM – 27 Jul 2016– Hasan Sari Verified account @HasanSari7
Out of 300k residents in Eastern Aleppo 30-40k remained there.
300,000 people are under bombardment in an area where – says the same person – only 30,000 people remain.
The 30,000 number is about correct. In March 2015 Martin Chulov of the Guardian visited east Aleppo and estimated that some 40,000 were still living there. He has since re-confirmed that 2015 observation but the number it must have shrunk since. There has been no running water there for a long time and no electricity. Only fighters and their immediate families are left in east-Aleppo. The current estimate is some 5,000 fighters and 20-25,000 civilians. They have, according to multiple sources, food and medical supplies for about three month.
The area is completely closed off though people on foot can leave through checkpoints. The Syrian government sent SMS to invite everyone in the area, civilians and fighters, to get out without trouble. This is all well known to "western" journalists but will not hinder them to daily offer dozens of harrowing accounts of the 300,000 starving children in east-Aleppo and the 286 hospitals that just now were bombed to rubble.
Here is another example of contradicting beliefs in the news. NBCnews headlines: Why Experts Are Sure Russia Hacked the DNC Emails.
Many U.S. officials and cyber security experts in and out of government are convinced that state-sponsored Russian hackers are the ones who stole 20,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee and leaked them to the public just in time to disrupt the Democrats' national convention in Philadelphia. Here's why the experts are so confident the Russians did it:
[… innuendo and marketing talk from cyber snakeoil dealers …]
Then follows this paragraph:
Like other cyber-experts, however, [retired four-star Adm. James] Stavridis said definitively proving such connections is virtually impossible. "I don't know the answer to that and I'm not sure anyone knows the answer to that except for a few individuals in the Kremlin."
So experts are "sure", says the piece, while the quoted expert and his colleagues say there is no way to be sure. How does that compute?
It may be plausible that Russian and other governments' services have sniffed off the DNC email servers. It would have been a regular part of their their job. The U.S. does the same and more, says former Bush administration lawyer Jack Goldsmith. But there is no evidence at all, as in zero, that some Russian government service did so. There is no evidence at all that some Russian directly or indirectly gave the hacked DNC emails to Wikileaks. The alleged proof does not make sense. The culprits could be anyone with the relevant resources.
The case is probably like the Sony hack which the U.S. government and Sony stitched to North Korea while the real experts said it was an insider attack.
But the media has orders to promote Clinton for president and to damn Trump, as well as Putin, wherever it can. Thus Trump is Putin and Putin personally hacked the DNC email servers. What DNC or Clinton crimes were documented in those emails is not of interest and does not matter at all.
For believers in their mission, be it damning the Syrian president Assad or promoting Hillary for U.S. president, any contradiction only confirms their faith.
This is hard to swallow for observers outside of such faith. One can smile and accept such contradictions as funny phenomena. But they can be dangerous when they build upon each other and create their own reality:
Every time a claim of attribution is made — right or wrong — it becomes part of a permanent record; an un-verifiable provenance that is built upon by the next security researcher or startup who wants to grab a headline, and by the one after him, and the one after her. The most sensational of those claims are almost assured of international media attention, and if they align with U.S. policy interests, they rapidly move from unverified theory to fact.
For hawks it will follow from such facts that one has to bomb Russia. This for a harmless, routine hack Russia has likely nothing to do with. Or that Assad must be assassinated and the Syrian people deliver to Jihadis because of some fake number.
This is why such contradictions must be dragged into the light and exposed as the nonsense they are.