These two episodes prove the impossibility of believing all women. Women are not a monolith. Two women may disagree. How could you believe women if two of them don’t agree? You can’t. You have to pick which woman to believe. The only way to do so that’s at all rational is to let the facts dictate what you believe.

It also shows the importance of prosecuting each case on its own merits, not on some perceived historical deficit. That many women have been raped and no one was ever prosecuted is awful. Prosecuting someone without evidence to tip the scales would be just as bad. This idea that injustice should be met with injustice is absurd and frightening.

At this point, the media is almost entirely comprised of narratives purpose built to serve some political ideology. Narratives are not facts. Hashtags are not guiding principles. But people force feed narratives and hashtags into their operating system as if they were facts. You can’t fill your entire world view with fictions and half-truths and expect to come to a rational conclusion about anything. It’s alarming and alarmingly common that people will respond to a statement with a pre-programmed hashtag response.

And you can even predict how someone might respond to various stimuli, the script is so pervasive. These bad ideas make true understanding almost impossible. Perversely, it’s the political class and the mainstream media along with social media that benefit from a broken discourse they foster.