Appeal to Loyalty – FT#95

07 Mar Appeal to Loyalty – FT#95

Show Notes

The Appeal to Loyalty Fallacy is committed when someone suggests you should believe a truth claim due to the loyalty you feel to the person making the claim, or suggests that if you don’t believe something you are being disloyal.

Trump

We started out with this clip of Trump on the media:

We followed that with by discussing the GOP response to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger taking part in the Jan 6 Committee.

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about a talk radio caller called Debbie from the West Midlands who accused MPs and reporters of disloyalty to Dominic Cummings because they questioned his ridiculous Barnard Castle story.

He followed that up with this clip of MP Stuart Anderson claiming that holding Boris to account for crimes was akin to supporting Putin.

Fallacy in the Wild

In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from The Simpsons:

Then we looked at this clip from M*A*S*H:

And we finished with this clip from 12 Angry Men:

Fake News

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

1. The only thing he can do is just say sorry about it with the climate hoax. Sorry about it. Look, this climate situation is killing our country. And I know it’s politically not correct because people don’t understand it—and they don’t. But I understood it. We had the best air, the best water, the best everything else, and not destroying our businesses. This is killing our country.
2. None of them partake in cleaning the climate. They laugh at us how stupid we are. We clean the climate and then their air flows to us from Asia, just like all their garbage flows to us through the Pacific Ocean. You ever see what happens in Los Angeles where hundreds and thousands of tons of China garbage is floating. The tides bring it right in. So we have nice, clean water and you’re not allowed to put your toe in the water.
3. The whole climate thing is a joke. Germany is laughing at us. They make the windmills, and it’s a process that is very very bad, just terrible for the environment. And they don’t use them because they know they don’t work, they just sell them to us so that we can kill our birds. We’re wasting so much money, sending it to Germany just to have more dead birds than anyone’s ever seen. It’s crazy.

Click below for the answer

Mark got it wrong this week, and is now back down at 49%

Putin is not a logical fallacy

We talked about the right wing’s bizarre loyalty to Putin after he invaded Ukraine.

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

• Betteridge’s Law says that if you ask a question in a headline, the answer is almost always ‘No’. And that’s why you’ll never see the headline “Is Tucker Carlson Racist”. I feel like we don’t even need to give examples to support this assertion, but another one presented itself this week, so we might as well.  You see, Joe Biden announced his Supreme Court pick to replace retiring Justice Breyer, and as predicted on this very podcast a month ago, it’s Ketanji Brown Jackson. Yes, you heard it here first. Unless of course you heard it somewhere else first, since she was a pretty clear front runner to be fair. Tucker, who is the human equivalent of one of those Psychic Hotline ads that are legally required to say ‘For entertainment purposes only’, responded to the news by asking why Biden didn’t use part of his State Of The Union address to tell the American Public what Judge Brown Jackson’s LSAT scores were. Actually he didn’t call her Judge Brown Jackson, he called her Kentaji Brown Jackson, because when you’re a massive racist misogynist, it’s important to deliberately mispronounce the names of impressive women of color. Apart from the fact that he made no such request of Gorsuch, Kavanaugh or Amy Coney Barrett, leaving us to wonder just what is different this time, it’s kind of amazing that he went all the way back to the LSATs, the test you take to get into Law School. Of course, questioning anything she’s done since would have led to Carlson being buried under an avalanche of evidence of how incredibly qualified she is for the Supreme Court, so he had to go back to the early 90s to claim the fact we don’t have her test scores from before she had any legal training at all proves some kind of cover up, when the reality is her LSAT scores were probably pretty fucking good, since she got into Harvard, unlike, say, Amy Coney Barrett 
• Ironically, given that one interpretation of artificial intelligence is exactly what QAnon followers possess, linguistics researchers from France and Switzerland have used AI to interrogate the language used in Q posts to determine who dropped them. The two teams from the Swiss OrphAnalytics and French computational linguists Florian Cafiero and Jean-Baptiste Camps – something feels so right about linguistics being the preserve of countries with a pot-pourri of languages – have determined that South African software developer Paul Furber and message board operator Ron Watkins are most likely the men behind Q. Seemingly tired of the anonymity Ron is now running for congress and both men, of course, speaking to the New York Times denied being Q; “We all started talking like him,” said Furber adding he “took over our lives, literally”. Yeah when you’re speaking to the New York Times about research done by linguists don’t you think someone would be studying your cadence and timbre for hints of lies? Viewers of the HBO series Q: Into the Storm (me!) are all jumping up and down saying yeah told you so! But beware your cognitive biases young man – the researchers only hold it to be about 90% accurate tee hee. But what it does of course, with 90% accuracy, is rule out Trump, Michael Flynn and Roger Stone as ever being Q. We await the QAnoners’ inevitable conspiracy theories explaining the findings. 
• Back when the Supreme Court was a bit less religiously fanatical, we talked about the Masterpiece Cake shop ruling, in which a baker was allowed to be a bigot, but only in very specific circumstances. Well, they’re back, and this time, handmaiden Amy Coney Barrett is there too. The court has agreed to hear a case called 303 Creative vs Elenis. 303 Creative is a web design company run by a bigot named Lorie Smith who doesn’t design wedding websites.  But, if in the future she decides to start designing wedding websites, she wants to be able to refuse to make one for those icky same-sex couples, and since Colorado has laws against that kind of thing, she decided to sue the state to block enforcement of the law because she really really doesn’t want to, because Jesus, and as far as she’s concerned that should be enough.  It wasn’t enough for the lower courts, who ruled against her, but the sad thing is, with this Supreme Court it will probably do just fine.
• Were you thinking of visiting friends in Washington last Jan 6th and whilst there take in a little breaking and entering, or joining in an illegal insurrectionist assault on a government building? Of course you took care not incriminate yourself by purchasing anything online with your bank card, like say a vintaged Texas flag, or maybe a patch for the back of your helmet from right-wing fascist rioters go-to decorative merch site OathKeepers.org and of course, if you’re going to park locally and pay by card, at least get the whole day ticket – no point in alerting the authorities. Of course if your name is Geoffrey Shough you’re also going to be as inconspicuous as possible in the process of shoulder-charging the line of Capitol Hill police and climbing through a shattered window by definitely not wearing a really bright tan Pleather jacket that Starsky’s pal Hutch might baulk at – and that guy knew Huggy Bear! And this is where the fun really starts, forget revenge porn, some 4 months later a week after she broke up with him, Shough’s ex-girlfriend confirmed to the FBI that suspect #TexasPleather was indeed Shough, in response to a tipster identifying him in his Hutch jacket on the “Be on the Lookout” posters. That’s why it was always cooler to have a Starsky jumper, and Starsky’s much cooler car; no one would ever break up with you then ya idiot!
• The Florida House of Representatives has passed House Bill 1557, which has come to be known as the “Don’t Say Gay’ bill, and it’s on its way to the Senate to be confirmed. The bill essentially requires schools to out any students to their parents who they discover are gender non-conforming or simply not straight and it prohibits any discussion in school about sexuality or gender before 3rd grade, “or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards” – but just to be clear, those are Florida state standards, so it’s almost as bad as it could be. I say almost, because if a proposed amendment to the bill hadn’t been withdrawn last month it would have actually been worse – yes, worse than a bill that only exists to make life harder for LGBTQ+ youth. Representative Joe Harding wanted to put a 6 week time limit on the school outing kids, and, and I swear I’m not making this up, specifically require that outing to occur even in cases where the school expected it would result in abuse, abandonment or neglect.  The original bill says that if that was likely the school did not have to tell the parents, and this fucking asshole was like ‘I don’t know, I think we should force them to ruin those kids lives with no exceptions’. To be clear, even without that, it’s still really fucking bad, and it’s almost certainly going to pass. Fuck.
• Speaking of definitely-not-Q-psychopathic-Prince-Charles-lookalike Roger Stone, who has a bit of a history of hiring thugs for security, hell he’s a hired thug so, you know, play to your strengths. Well he’s possibly moving one step closer to being nabbed by the feds for his part in fomenting the Capitol riots since Joshua James, a member of the Oath Keepers (other right wing fascist merch suppliers are available) has pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy and obstruction of justice after communicating and congregating with several other Keepers/Oathers(?) before and during the riot. He was hired by Stone as his security on Jan 5th and 6th and in being the first to plead guilty to charges that carry a 20 year sentence, if other Capitol rioters are anything to go by, cooperating with the investigation is likely to be part of a plea deal. Whilst Stone has not been charged in connection with the riots, James’ guilty plea raises the prospect of a potent witness turning on key players in the violent insurrection. Sometimes those down-home homilies like, ooh I don’t know; “there’s no honour among thieves” ought to be uppermost in your mind when hiring staff hey. Makes you proud boys doesn’t it!! Har har har!
• Biden gave his first real State of the Union address this week, and it was largely well received, even prompting a few bipartisan standing ovations. However,  Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert were also there, and they decided to show the world exactly how classy they are by heckling Biden like Snooki and Jenni after a long drinking session at a comedy club. At one point they tried and failed to get a chant going of ‘Build the Wall’, and MTG yelled something about women’s sports while Biden talked about supporting transgender Americans. Meanwhile, Boebert came prepared with a zinger about the 13 servicemen who died during the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and waited for just the right moment to let old Joe have it. But since she’s exactly the kind of person you think she is, she decided that the best moment was when Joe was talking about his son who died of cancer because of the toxic burn pits he and his fellow soldiers had to sleep near, and how Joe was committed to supporting the troops to avoid things like that happening in the future. You get him Lauren! 
• Tone deaf when it comes to optics as usual, Tory MPs voted themselves a pay rise of £2,200 for ‘2021’s dramatically increased duties‘ in the same week that home energy prices, personal tax levies went way up. Well they’ve got to raise the capital for their pay rise somehow. And did these duties involve continuing to provide 24 hour PPE-dressed health care in the face of a diminished workforce struck down ill and dying by COVID? or did they actually involve holding, hiding and lying about parties and smuggling suitcases of wine past policemen, whilst telling policemen to look the other way? You decide. Meanwhile the EU leads the way in responding to the Ukraine invasion without having the irritating, self-serving, whinging UK to hold them back. Boris is consequently feeling a bit left out, what with the Tories role in making the UK a Ruble laundromat suddenly becoming very apparent. Determined not to stay home to sort out effective refugee policies or sanctions or do anything other than say “Putin must fail”, he jetted off to a photo op in Poland and Estonia to say it there. Mind you it’s not like he hasn’t got form for this, he failed to attend an emergency defence meeting following the Russian Novichok poisonings in Salisbury in 2018 cos he was in his Foreign Ministry office having a photo taken of him resigning from Theresa May’s cabinet over her Brexit deal, the self-same deal he later used as oven-ready to get elected as PM. In other news, rules don’t seem to apply to the royals either – Prince Andrew sent 12 million pounds to a woman he’d apparently never heard of (as someone else he doesn’t know, I’m still deciding what to spend mine on), and after having tested positive for Covid, Prince Charles visited his mum, The Queen – so now she’s got it and is cancelling appearances left, right and centre. Perhaps Charles is deploying the Johnson-Trump-Putin playbook – if the role of king is not being offered quickly enough simply launch biological warfare?

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