Argumentum Ad Nauseam – FT#15

17 Dec Argumentum Ad Nauseam – FT#15

Show Notes

The Ad Nauseam logical fallacy refers to a situation where someone asserts a claim repeatedly, often even after the claim has been debunked, in the hope that people will start to believe it through sheer repetition and that people will get sick of trying to refute it so they will simply give up.

To be honest, it’s hardly fair even calling this an argument; it’s really just ‘pretending nobody has noticed that you’re lying’.

Trump

We started out with Trump talking about his tax cut:

We followed that with Trump claiming they’ve already started building the wall:

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about this incredible Ed Milliband interview:

Then he looked at Theresa May’s repeated assertion that Brexit means Brexit:

Fallacy in the Wild (Sting: Wild by Jessie J)

In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares:

Fake News

Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:

1. The Pope is being told that Donald Trump is not a nice person, ok? Donald Trump is a very nice person and I’m a very… I am a very nice person. And I’m a very good Christian.
2. I think Donald Trump is a very down to earth kind of.. a very humble person. Probably the most humble person you’ve ever met.
3. China has total respect for Donald Trump, and for Donald Trump’s very, very large brain.

Click below for the answer

Mark got it wrong this week, and is currently on 21%

Recruitment is not a logical fallacy

We talked about the difficulty of recruiting a new Chief of Staff

The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about:

• A federal judge has sentenced Michael Cohen to 3 years in prison for financial crimes, lying to congress, and campaign finance violations which were at the direction of President Trump.  Seems like if Trump really wanted Hillary to get locked up he should have given her a job on his campaign.
• AMI, the company behind The National Enquirer has apparently been working with prosecutors since September, and has admitted coordinating with Trump’s campaign to pay hush money to a playboy model in order to influence the election. Honestly, if you can’t trust the National Enquirer, who can you trust?
• The sentencing memos for Michael Cohen heavily implicated someone called ‘Individual 1’ in various felonies. Trump tweeted “Totally clears the President. Thank you!” because, hey, it’s worth a shot, right?  The identity of Individual 1 remains a mystery, although the memo does mention that they began an ultimately successful run for President in 2016.
• On 10th Dec in a collusion-denying tirade Trump tweeted that the Democrats were unable to find a weapon that fired decorative embroidery made by gathering cloth in regularly spaced round tucks. Whilst hundred of thousands of people on twitter immediately thought he just couldn’t spell Smoking – Bill Mitchell, the host of a YouTube channel “dedicated to supporting the presidency of Donald J Trump” quickly retorted; five hours later, cramming Mocking and Smoking together to save Trump’s ass;  that’s got to be worth a cup of covfefe next time he’s passing the White House surely!
• When told that federal prosecutors believe Trump has committed multiple crimes, Utah senator and spineless dinosaur Orrin Hatch said “OK, but I don’t care, all I can say is he’s doing a good job as president.  I don’t think he was involved in crimes but even then, you know, you can make anything a crime under the current laws if you want to”. Fortunately, we don’t have to care about Orrin Hatch any more, as he’s retiring from the Senate, and gave his farewell speech this week.  The internet’s response was not exactly mournful. Here’s a genuine, typical tweet:

“Sen. Orrin Hatch delivers his farewell address on the Senate floor” and I cackle and give zero fucks. I hope that ghoul dies of boredom as soon as retirement starts. fuck him.”

• Last week Dan McCready, the Democrat running for Congress in the disputed 9th District, renounced his concession that he’d made to Republican Mark Harris in the midterms despite being entitled to a recount. North Carolina Republicans originally threatened to sue the elections board if it refused to certify the Ninth results. But following ballot tampering evidence, they have weirdly since backed all the way down from that and their own State GOP executive director Dallas Woodhouse is this week effectively calling for a new election. Whilst it is rather gratifying seeing a right-wing party that isn’t British fighting amongst itself for once, our lot could learn a thing or two about admitting to tampering and re-running votes!
• Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was interviewed at an event in Houston last week and said “the president would say, ‘Here’s what I want to do, and here’s how I want to do it,’ and I’d have to say to him, ‘Well, Mr. President, I understand what you want to do but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law”.  Naturally, Trump accepted the criticism with good grace and.. No, seriously though, he tweeted: “Mike Pompeo is doing a great job, I am very proud of him. His predecessor, Rex Tillerson, didn’t have the mental capacity needed. He was dumb as a rock and I couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. He was lazy as hell.” The best people.
• Trump is of course concerned about managing the debt owed to America’s creditors by the most successful economy in history – currently about $21 trillion – and expressed his concern with a heartfelt; “Yeah, but I won’t be here,” So now we know why he doesn’t care about climate change – there is of course no correlation between Trump’s statement and the recent successful flight by Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic to the edge of space.

If you wanted to buy a T-shirt featuring this fallacy, you could click here. No pressure

And if you have some money left over after that, Jim’s book, 2000 Mules and One Big Lie: A Stubborn Conspiracy Theory is available now.