https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/2074232764698620014

“Minnesota” did not pardon an illegal alien sex predator set to be deported. MN Governor Tim Walz, AG Keith Ellison (aka Fraudsters’ Best Friend), and Chief Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court Natalie Hudson (all DFLers) did.

Does political polarization exist because people "live in different worlds" with different sets of facts? Dan Williams, a British philosopher, calls that "factual polarisation" but says "interpretive polarisation" is really the bigger problem and uses George Floyd as an example:

>Interpretive polarisation is not primarily disagreement over narrow, verifiable facts, nor disagreement over the values or high-level ideologies citizens bring to politics. It involves competing systems of interpretation that determine which facts citizens attend to, how they understand them, and how they connect their values and ideologies to political action...

>Among liberals and progressives...[George] Floyd’s death was imbued with maximal political salience. It was not an isolated or unrepresentative murder and tragedy but the cause for a national reckoning...

>The core narrative frame here was racism—not just Chauvin’s racism, but also the deeper, even more insidious forms of racism (structural, systemic, implicit) that had long poisoned Western cultures and institutions, which Floyd’s death was an awful symptom of...

>Most generally, the events were narrated through a story of victims and villains in which Floyd’s direct victimhood both demonstrated and reflected the broader oppression of all [black people] and other non-white groups around the Western world, who now depended on the heroic actions of progressive, anti-racist activists awake to the reality of such oppression.

>Conservatives and right-wing populists viewed the events through a very different interpretive framework.

>Most obviously, they resisted any treatment of what they deemed a rare and unrepresentative act of police misconduct as the basis for a broader condemnation of American policing, let alone Western societies as a whole.

>They emphasised the specific facts of the case, including Floyd’s criminal record and behaviour. They expressed agnosticism or outright scepticism about the relevance of racism to the events, and often made efforts to publicise similar cases in which white victims were killed by police without receiving comparable media or political attention.

>Finally, this media and political attention was itself explained in terms of a broader, familiar pattern: the left’s cynical exploitation of isolated, unrepresentative incidents to advance its hysterical ideological agenda...

>For liberals and progressives, this very narrative is itself further confirmation that the right inhabits a deranged fantasyland. Floyd’s death reflected the extreme, well-documented historical oppression of Black people, which contrasts with the delusional victim complex of deplorable, racist white citizens today.

>This is what interpretive polarisation looks like....To understand what is going on...focusing on narrow disagreements over verifiable facts won’t get us very far. That’s not to say that there are no such disagreements, or that nobody is deluded or lying about basic facts. The point is rather that we need a richer account of how such facts become selected, ignored, and narrated in the minds of those who identify with different political tribes.

Williams then provides a different framework for "how facts become selected, ignored, and narrated..." (via Walter Lippmann). It's a too long to share here in full but I think it's worth reading if you find "interpretive polarization" interesting.

Is "interpretive polarization" a useful idea? Does it have better explanatory power than "factual polarization"?