13 Jun Pooh Pooh Fallacy – FT#102
Show Notes
The Pooh Pooh Fallacy is committed when someone dismisses a claim, argument or question as not being worthy of discussion, especially as a technique to avoid having a difficult conversation.
Trump
We started out by discussing Trump’s dismissal of the Green New Deal as childish:
We followed that with this clip of Trump telling a reporter what he thought of her question:
Mark’s British Politics Corner
Mark talked about Dominic Raab calling various things ridiculous nonsense, including the fact he was on a beach in Crete when he should have been coordinating the evacuation of Kabul, the fact that evacuation had been foreseen for a while, and the outrage over the illegal prorogation of Parliament, as he did in this clip:
Fallacy in the Wild
In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from Blackadder pointing out the dangers of pooh poohing a pooh pooh:
Then we talked about this clip from The Divine Comedy’s Something for the Weekend:
We also looked at this clip from Futurama:
And we finished with this clip from Airplane!:
Fake News
Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:
- I put out, like, this tweet. I think it was like a Saturday morning and I saw something on television. I said I believe Obama spied on my campaign, okay? Now I didn’t think it was that big a deal. You know, you put it out, boom. Three minutes later, I get a call, like my phone goes crazy. Sir, did you just say that President Obama spied on your campaign? Yeah. What’s the big deal? Sir, the wires are burning up. I said, really?
- After Covfefe it was the single biggest tweet I ever did. Covfefe was bigger. But after Covfefe, which was world’s number one, it was the biggest tweet I ever did. And I thought it was just going to be like routine, you know, throwing it out, but that’s what I thought. That’s what I heard. And you know why it was such a big deal? Because we caught them. And they realized that we caught them. And it became a monster.
- And now it turns out I was right all along. They thought they could get away with it. And they almost did. If I hadn’t tweeted about it maybe we wouldn’t even be talking about it right now. But you know if it was a Republican who did that – imagine if somebody spied on Obama – they’d be looking at a thing called the death penalty. It’s true. Because it’s totally corrupt. If a Republican sneezes they get arrested.
Mark got it wrong this week, and has dropped further below 50%
Kenneth Chesebro is not a logical fallacy
We talked about the upcoming (when we recorded at least!) public Jan 6 committee hearings.
The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about
- You know how if you forget someone’s birthday then you feel like you should get them something extra good to make up for it? Well, the universe realised it forgot my birthday last month and as a special treat just for me, Peter Navarro got arrested for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena from the Jan 6 Committee. Really, universe, you shouldn’t have, it’s just what I wanted, how did you know? Trump’s former trade advisor spent less than two hours in jail before he was bailed out and has spent every moment since complaining that it’s unconstitutional prosecutorial misconduct to put someone like him in jail. He said on Monday “Who are these people? This is not America. I was a distinguished civil servant for years. No one questioned my ethics.” Fortunately he wasn’t under oath at the time, or he’d definitely see perjury charges added for that one. When not complaining about being treated like a criminal for committing a crime, he’s trying to get people to buy his book to pay for his legal fees, saying “It could be up to a million dollars. Help me please, I can’t let this kill my retirement”. He has the money, you see, it’s just that he doesn’t want to spend it, so please would you pay for his legal defense. If he doesn’t raise enough, he has suggested he might defend himself, which would be amazing. He’s not a lawyer, but he’s pretty convinced he could do a good job. I’m not so sure, because he is an economist, and he was shit at that too. With a bit of luck, he’ll end up like Brandon Fellows, a January 6th insurrectionist who represented himself despite the judge’s advice not to and managed to admit to multiple additional felonies just during his bond hearing. So while I wait for Navarro’s hearing I’m going to be selling my furniture to make room for all the popcorn I’m going to need to really enjoy the show.
- As part of Trump’s supposed growing media empire, well let’s call it an aspiration, his Trump Media and Technology Group is launching a new service TMTG+ which sounds rather apt for Pride month. But there’ll be no coverage of Pride on this streaming service as it’s gonna “offer programs including, but not limited to blue collar comedy, canceled shows, Trump-specific programming, faith-based shows, family entertainment, shows that embrace the Second Amendment, and news. TMTG intends to license, produce, and deliver news, sports, and non-woke entertainment content through this platform.” Apparently TMTG will not censor the creators of entertainment for TMTG+, nor will it insist that its programming push some particular political ideology… whilst at the same time maintaining it will provide a platform for conservative and/or libertarian views”, so I guess no ideology in particular there then! Feels an oddly strange notion given Jim’s experience preparing programmes for air which involves cutting all that kind of stuff out, perhaps there’s a living to be made there just editing all that stuff together and selling it on to TMTG+, they’d be too enraged to see through their red mist to notice. Might work – after all they reportedly noted at an investor presentation in 2021 that they anticipate 40 million subscribers by 2026 and who are we to doubt the investors faith? It’s not like Trump’s endeavours have ever gone bust in the past – er no wait!
- OK, Marjorie Taylor Greene finally got me. I was trying to be strong and give her just the amount of attention she deserves, so when she mixed up the Gestapo and gazpacho soup, we didn’t even talk about it on the show. But I’m only human. I think I would have been able to ignore it if she had just called a petri dish a ‘peach tree dish’, but the fact that she did it during an insane rant about the government giving you an electric shock if you don’t eat Bill Gates’s fake meat products is just too much. I can’t not talk about it. So here’s what Marjorie, who incidentally looks like David St Hubbins reflected in the back of a spoon, said: The government totally wants to provide surveillance on every part of your life. They want to know if you’re eating a cheeseburger, which is very bad because Bill Gates wants you to eat his fake meat, which is grown in a peach tree dish. So you’ll probably get a little zap inside your body, and that’s saying no, no, don’t eat a real cheeseburger, you need to eat the fake meat from Bill Gates”. If anyone knows what the fuck she’s talking about, our contact details are on the contact page. In other MTG news, the Congressperson most likely to call people she disagrees with ‘pedophiles’, has hired a new intern. The 40 year old right wing troll who got fired from Breitbart for his pro-pedophilia views, Milo Yiannopoulos. I can only assume she and Lauren Boebert are having some kind of competition for worst human, and hiring Milo was worth a certain number of points. If Lauren doesn’t hire Kyle Rittenhouse soon I will be shocked.
- Understandably a US official cannot legally accept a personal gift from a foreign source of more than $415, cos it could lay one open to claims that interests outside of the US might be unduly buying influence. And Trump’s administration, say in 2020, would be ever vigilant of that of course which is why State Department officials recently told the Oversight Committee that they still cannot fully account for the foreign gifts the Trump administration received during the former President’s final year in office, in part because of “problems during the transition” and “issues of record-keeping” (my italics) during the Trump administration. According to a top State Department official who briefed the committee last month, Trump officials, including members of the former President’s family, maintained possession of items each valued in the tens of thousands of dollars range – raising concerns that there are potentially more items missing that are worth just as much, if not more. Other gifts, such as a rare whiskey valued at $5,800 that was gifted to then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, “went missing”, according to the State Department. Look I know we found it kinda endearing when cast members of the West Wing took door plaques and ornaments from their White House, but they, and we, know it was a film set and it, and they, were all made up. Ah! right, I see I could save the State Department a lot of time investigating the motives behind Trump’s kleptocratic regime!
- You may remember on our 100th episode I told you about Kandiss Taylor, the Georgia gubernatorial candidate whose entire platform is Jesus, Guns, Babies. You may also have noticed that we didn’t mention her in our primaries round up in the next episode. That’s because while current governor and Trump’s sworn enemy Brian Kemp got almost 74% of the vote, Kandiss got only 3.4%. You probably thought that would be the end of it, but silly you, you forgot that this is 2022, and if you lose an election you can just claim whatever bullshit you like. So Kandiss, despite getting less than one twentieth of the votes that Kemp got, has refused to concede, and claimed the election was rigged and Georgians are communists. She’s not on her own, though. Oh no, she’s got noted election fraud expert and man balancing a hairbrush on his upper lip, Mike Lindell in her corner. Mike went on his own media platform, Frank TV, the only place he’s still allowed to say words, and said these words: “Let me tell you everybody, we have preliminary evidence that Kandiss Taylor, for every single vote that Kemp got, he took her votes and then added them, and Kandiss got 5%”. Yeah, I’ve got no idea what that means either, but I’ve no doubt that he’ll release the evidence any day now.
- Remember good old sensitive, feeling Mike Pence, so sensitive a fly could crawl on his actual head for a good few minutes without him noticing, the fly eventually got bored and left, well turns out he was felt to be grimly unfeeling of Trump’s grievances about not winning the election so much so that Pence’s chief of staff warned the head of Pence’s Secret Service detail that Trump was about to turn on his own vice-president, endangering his security. Whilst the mob attacked the Capitol on 6 January, chanting “Hang Mike Pence” and setting up a gallows outside. Maggie Haberman of the NYTimes reported two witnesses at the January 6 committee had said Trump told Mark Meadows, his own chief of staff, “something to the effect of, maybe Mr Pence should be hung”. We all know it should be hanged – the right word – not the actual act! Pence who refused to go through with Trump’s plan of overthrowing the results of the electoral college on the 6th Jan was bundled to the basement safe space that day yet refused to leave the building saying “I’m not going to let the free world see us fleeing the Capitol, and I’m staying.” All that standing at the back silently smiling behind Trump for all those years he finally got the last laugh!
- We’ve talked before about special counsel John Durham, who was appointed to look into the oranges of the Russia investigation, and about his attempted prosecution of Michael Sussmann. As a reminder, Sussmann was the lawyer who gave the FBI information linking the Trump Administration to a Russian bank, and Durham claims Sussmann didn’t tell the FBI he was working for Hillary Clinton at the time, despite the only proof being the testimony of an FBI agent who told congress he couldn’t remember what Sussmann said. That apparently damning evidence wasn’t enough for a jury, who acquitted Sussmann last month, leaving Durham with very little to show for a three year investigation. Current front runner in a multiway neck and neck race for stupidest person in Congress, Louie Gohmert believes that this outcome, along with Peter Navarro being arrested, represents indisputable evidence of a two-tier justice system, complaining last week that if you’re a Republican you “can’t even lie to Congress or lie to an FBI agent or they’re coming for you”. I mean he’s technically right, in that you can’t commit a crime without at least the possibility that you’ll get arrested for it. Unless you’re Trump of course, or, you know, Mark Meadows, or Dan Scavino, or Matt Gaetz, or Don Jr, or Madison Cawthorn, or Kellyanne Conway, or Jacob Wohl, or Rudy Giuliani, or… There’s a few examples if you look for them, is what I’m saying.
- This week in the UK we felt no compassion at all towards Boris when it turns out he had heard that the number of letters submitted to the chairman of the 1922 committee – the committee of all Tory party backbenchers – had reached the threshold to trigger a vote of no confidence, and that he heard it the day of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations so had to pretend to be jolly in the face of all the pageantry knowing that his livelihood was under threat. Yeah right now you know how the rest of us feel; suffering under a cost of living crisis and tax burden the likes of which we’ve not seen since the 1940’s, and looking on as an empty 4-ton gold carriage trundles in front of us figuratively thumbing it’s over-privileged nose at us, whilst we’re expected to wave a bit of flaggy bunting and be thankful. Despite the bread and circuses of the pageantry the vote went ahead and over 40% of his own government had no confidence in him as a leader, about which Jacob Rees-Mogg, staunch brexiteer and Boris supporter said this, “a terrible result for the prime minister… The prime minister must realise that under all constitutional norms she ought to go and see the Queen urgently and resign”, and mis-pronoun-ed him in the process? No, of course he didn’t that was for Theresa May who won her vote of no confidence orchestrated by ReetSmugg in 2018. No he actually said this; even though Boris got 148 no votes to May’s 117: “a good victory for the prime minister – he won comfortably – and now he is getting on with business”. We’re promised another “reset” – the 6th so far by my reckoning where the government will concentrate on “doing what the people want”. Of course it won’t be what the public expressed by booing at Boris during the Platty Jubes Bilations in vocal representation of the 60% of the polled public wanting him gone. Serves him right for venturing out in public I guess – never get out of the boat Boris!
That’s all for this week, thanks for listening!
