Tokenism Fallacy – FT#75

Tokenism Fallacy – FT#75

Show Notes

The Tokenism Fallacy is committed when someone makes a minimal gesture and claims it is far more significant that it really is.

Trump

We started out by talking about this Facebook post and why it doesn’t prove Trump isn’t racist:

Then we looked at Trump claiming other things prove he isn’t racist including this amazing example:

 

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about Sajid Javid disagreeing with Diane Abbott about the Windrush scandal in this video.

Then we heard Matt Hancock really struggle to answer a question about underrepresentation of black people in Johnson’s cabinet:

 

Fallacy in the Wild

We talked about this clip from Spin City:

We followed that up with this clip from That Mitchell and Webb Look:

Then we looked at this clip from Superstore:

And we finished with this clip from Sleeper:

Competition!

The winner was Myles Robinson! Yay, well done Myles. Feel free to keep leaving reviews, everyone!

Happy Birthday!

Yes, it was Jim’s (and Tucker Carlson’s) birthday when we recorded this, but it’s also Fallacious Trump’s birthday this month (we’re three!) so while we take an extra week off before the next episode, we’re also giving you some presents in your regular feed – the first two episodes of our Q Anon Book Club, and Jim’s Skeptics in the Pub talk about the BBFC. Enjoy!

 

Fake News

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

  1. Our nation is in the midst of the great American comeback. That’s what it is. In just over three years, we’ve created 7 million brand-new jobs — something that would have been unthinkable to even say. I wouldn’t have been able to get away with it. They would have stopped me. They would have said, “That’s not realistic. You’re exaggerating.” I would have never said “7 million” because even I didn’t think we could reach that number — 7 million new jobs.
  2. I brought our soldiers home from wars we never should have been in. Never should have been there. The Middle East.They’re coming home missing their arms, their legs, their faces. A lot of people don’t think they should be coming home. A lot do, but many don’t, but I think most people certainly do. We’re doing very well in our talks with Afghanistan. We’re getting out very rapidly over the course of three years. We’re already down to a much smaller number of people. People said it couldn’t be done.
  3. The radical democrats will implement nationwide catch and release. Do you know what that is? You catch a killer, you catch a rapist, and you say “Oh, thank you very much, please give us your name.” “Oh, come back in three years, we’re going to put you on trial.” “Oh, good.” You never see them, by the way. Remember, I had that debate with Joe Biden? He said “Oh, they come back.” Yeah. They don’t come back. They don’t come back. No, they don’t come back, like never. Maybe one percent, but I doubt it.

Click below for the answer

Mark got it wrong this week, and is currently on 46%

 

UK Voter ID is not a logical fallacy

One of our great listeners sent us this tweet and asked about the fallacies it contains, so we of course obliged!

 

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

  • Amazingly, the Arizona recount run by Cyber Ninjas, a company with no experience at all in elections, is going poorly. The audit, which is impressively both bullshit and batshit, was due to finish on May 14th, a hard deadline, as the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, where the counting is taking place, is booked for some High School graduations. That shouldn’t have been a problem, since the conspiracy theorist, Stop the Steal supporting CEO of Cyber Ninjas estimated the count would take 16 days and they had 21.  Unfortunately, with two days to go, only 17% of the 2.1 million votes had been counted. Why so slow? Well Cyber Ninjas tried to claim their counting methods were a trade secret, but a judge called bullshit on that, so we got to see their security documents, which revealed that… well, they didn’t actually have a plan for how to do the count, but they did work out what to do if Antifa attacked the facility to stop the count. Meanwhile, we’ve learned from audit observers that they are taking 5k pictures of each ballot to look for traces of bamboo in the paper, based on a conspiracy theory that 40,000 ballots were flown in from Asia, and, you know, that’s probably what Asians make paper out of, right? They’re also holding them all up to UV lights to check for watermarks based on a Q Anon theory that Trump secretly watermarked the real ballots, and they’re looking at them under microscopes to see if they were folded by people or robots. I fucking swear, I am not making any of that up. The count will now be delayed until after all the graduations, with the ballots going into storage in the meantime, but they’ve only got until June 30th, because then the venue is needed for a gun show!
  • In another normal day in the alternative parallel universe of Trumpland, the GOTP – Good ol’ Trump Party reported at the Capitol Hill hearing on Wednesday, courtesy of Georgia Representative, Andrew Clyde, via the peculiarly Republican cherry-picking lens, that the insurrectionist seditionary riots on Jan 6th were like a normal tourist visit. The cherry picking lens requires you to only look at that odd launcher-of-a-thousand-memes bit of footage of the breakers and enterers meekly keeping between the red ropes and taking selfies in Statuary Hall. Sure let’s turn a blind eye to the smashing of the windows, the 5 people dead, the hangman’s nooses, the zip tie handcuffs for hostages, the utter trashing of Pelosi’s office and guns and tear gas and chants giving a clear intention of actual bodily harm. All I can say is I am never going to accept an invitation from the Clydes to go with them to visit any tourist destination – can you imagine the lawsuit for damages to Mickey’s cheery demeanour that Disneyland would file! Actually I would need to see what the Clyde family’s holiday schedule is so I can get there first before monument valley is reduced to rubble! Do you think he’s related to Keith Moon?
  • Facebook’s Oversight Board ruled that Trump will continue to be banned from the platform for at least six more months, but Donald doesn’t care, because he has another way to talk directly to his fans. No, it’s not Frank Speech, the new social network from pillow baron and illegitimate lovechild of Tom Selleck and a pillow, Mike Lindell, since that site STILL isn’t working, four weeks after its official launch.  No, instead, Trump has, to great fanfare, created his own ‘Communications Platform’ called ‘From the Desk of Donald J Trump’. I mean, I say communications platform… It’s a blog.  He’s started a blog.  It’s not even on a new website, he’s just added a blog to his existing website. The totally original concept allows Trump to post his thoughts on which Democrats or Republicans should go fuck themselves and how, and includes share buttons so that his drooling followers can feel like they’re helping their beloved God King by posting his musings on sites he’s banned from but no opportunity to comment or reply.  According to a report from BuzzSumo, in the first couple of weeks the entire blog has received about one fifth of the engagement a single Trump Tweet was getting pre-ban.
  • More proof that the internet probably IS the real world after all – a ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline, which stretches from Texas to New Jersey and supplies 45% of the East Coast’s gasoline – (who knew that was part of the internet of things?) – shut down operations on Friday causing shortages across the SouthEast whilst the supply chain was rebooted or something. Footage of lines forming recall images from the gas crisis in the 70’s only with fewer US muscle cars. Not really a problem, until of course – people. Fed up with nothing to hoard now that COVID and toilet paper are no longer conjoined, people are filling everything that’ll hold liquid and stacking it in their SUVs. Yeah none too safe given the definite possibility of impactful road rage if a bumper kiss in line causing spitting and tussling and arrests for assault is anything to go by! Thankfully the US Consumer Product Safety Commission still has a sense of public duty/humour and tweeted “Do not fill plastic bags with gasoline”. Is it me or is there a direct correlation with Republican voters and the Colonial Pipeline states, and if so don’t stop ‘em; this the Darwinian natural selection event we’ve been waiting for! What is great about the report in the Daily Kos is how quickly the comments section turns into a discussion about which brand of electric mower is best – there you are Andrew Clyde some more battery operated cherry-picking for ya!  
  • Former National Security Traitor – sorry, Advisor and convicted traitor General Mike Flynn appeared last week at a rally for pro-Trump lawyer and fucking nutter, L. Lin Wood.  Flynn announced that he was going to lead the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance, and made a big deal of how you’d have to be a commie bastard not to understand the fundamental importance of the Pledge to all red-blooded God-fearing true American Patriots, saying “I want you to hear, not just listen, I want you to hear every single word of the Pledge of Allegiance. That is our pledge to each other, that is our pledge to this country.” He then started the Pledge and immediately forgot the words.  I mean it’s so on-the-nose for a General who sold out his country to not even know how to fake allegiance to it.
  • Someone who is obviously not a listener to our show, or apparently any news channels either, the manager of the Hyatt Centric hotel in Arlington Virginia said that the venue’s operating team had no knowledge of fiends of the show – our favourite idiots Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman’s – extensive past history of scams and schemes – bit odd given that Burkman does this kind of thing outside his house down the road much to the chagrin of his neighbours. Apparently the moronic duo had told hotel staff they planned to hold a “book signing,” not a press conference. “I’m upset they lied to me,” said the manager.  Yeah hello join the club! The hotel unwittingly hosted a presser where the clueless couple launched meritless allegations against Rudy Giuliani and Matt Gaetz – that in itself is fairly unique, I’d’ve thought, meritless allegations against those two??. On reading this entire report I felt my mind go through some sort of moebius loop. Whaa-aat – no longer satisfied with having no one listen to their utter bollocks about left-leaning politicos as attempting to besmirch the good name of Donald J Trump, they’re going so far out they’re after fellow nut jobs Rudy and Gaetz? “This is a sad day. It’s not the kind of thing we like to do,” Burkman said in his opening remarks. Gaaaaah just Gaaaah – Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel. Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel As the images unwind, like the circles that you find In the windmills of your mind!
  • House Republicans have decided that even Liz Cheney isn’t shitty enough to be their Conference Chair, so they’ve voted her out and replaced her with the admittedly even more shitty Elise Stefanik. According to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the problem they had with Cheney was that she was too intent on ‘relitigating the past’ and should move on and focus on the next election. You know, like Trump, whose new communications platform is about 80% rants about how the 2020 election was stolen from him, or the Arizona Republican party, who are spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars reauditing a settled election. The truth is, Liz has decided to stop lying for Trump.  But in today’s Republican party, lies are all they have.
  • A hard week for my sanity this week, I could watch neither prime minister’s questions for the inevitable smug-fuckery from Johnson posturing from a position of no-moral-high-ground-whatsoever, guffawing over Starmer’s defeats in the local elections, nor the Queen’s Speech at the opening of a new session of parliament where she outlined that her government would be taking leaves from the GOP playbook and introducing curbs on voting, restricting the calling of elections and clamping down on public protests about the same in the face of no effective opposition. Seeking solace in similarly cognitively biased communities I spotted an image that reversed the opening titles from Boris’s favourite 1970’s nostalgia-for-World-War-II British TV programme “Dad’s Army” where the three original animated Nazi flags threatening to cross the English Channel against the Plucky Union Jack is now reversed to show the one Nazi flag standing in for the English government taking on the flags of the entirety of the EU if not the world. I say England cos following wins by the Left Wing and their own non-Westminster-based parties; Wales, Scotland and even Northern Ireland are kind of ghosting Bozza’s Tinder advances saying “it’s not you, it’s me, and hey let’s just not hang out any longer” And no we can’t still be friends. Vive la Difference!

That’s all for this week, and thanks for listening!

Jim Cliff
jim@fallacioustrump.com


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