Tropes turn patterns into evidence

Back when I first talked about tropes, I hadn’t fully sketched out my idea of open arguments.

With that lens, the use of tropes becomes more clear. Take this one, for example:

This is a trope that is going around about Lahaina. It’s the “Jewish Space Lasers” stuff — the idea that this is the result of a “Direct Energy Weapon”. DEW conspiracy theories are pretty old, but the whole “buildings are burnt but the trees are still standing” thing emerged as a social media activity during the 2018 California wildfires:

What does the trope here do, exactly? The trope is a roadmap of sorts. Given a set of photographs or aerial video, someone familiar with the trope can spot the otherwise un-noteworthy phenomena and submit it as “evidence” of the fakeness of the wildfires. This ends up important to some folks for whom evidence of increased intensity weather-related events causes cognitive dissonance. If you don’t support measures to deal with global warming, you want a handy trope that allows you to discard inconvenient evidence; this does that.