Argument to the Purse – FT#115

09 Jan Argument to the Purse – FT#115

Show Notes

The Argument to the Purse occurs when someone suggests rich people are smarter, better or more likely to be correct based on their wealth.

Trump

We started out by discussing these two tweets from Trump:

Isn’t it crazy, I’m worth billions of dollars, employ thousands of people, and get libeled by moron bloggers who can’t afford a suit! WILD.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 19, 2014

Dopey @Lord_Sugar I’m worth $8 billion and you’re worth peanuts…without my show nobody would even know who you are.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 7, 2012

Then we talked about this tweet from Ben Shapiro:

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about Rishi Sunak explaining why we can’t afford to pay nurses properly:

Followed by Mick Lynch’s common-sense response to the theory of inflationary spirals:

And finally he talked about Good Morning Britain presenter Paul Brand trying to claim Mick Lynch’s (fictional) six-figure salary affected the arguments he was making:

Fallacy in the Wild

In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from a Microsoft Office XP ad which I still can’t believe is real:

Then we discussed this clip from Madagascar 3:

After that we looked at this clip from Cop Rock:

And we finished with this clip from The Simpsons:

Fake News

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

1. It’s nothing but another deranged political witch hunt, which has been going on from the day I came down the escalator in Trump Tower. Although these tax returns contain relatively little information, and not information that almost anybody would understand – they’re extremely complex – the radical Democrats’ behavior is a shame upon the US. Congress. This precedent must now be applied to the corrupt Democrats themselves. The new Republican House should immediately obtain the financial records of Joe Biden and his entire criminal enterprise, because that’s exactly what it is.
2. Nobody cares what the Unselect Committee has to say. They are a group of radical left Democrats, Communists and RINOs who nobody would have ever heard of if not for me, and they went after me knowing they had nothing, just like they did with the ‘Russia Russia Russia’ hoax which did nothing but prove I was one of the cleanest, most innocent Presidents, if not the most innocent, there’s ever been. It was brutal to watch how badly they failed in their crazy TV hearings, which got terrible ratings, by the way.
3. The drug cartels and their allies in the Biden Administration have the blood of countless millions on their hands. Millions and millions of families and people are being destroyed. When I’m back in the White House, the drug kingpins and vicious traffickers will never sleep soundly again. We did it once, and we did it better than anybody else. There’s never been a better border than we had just two years ago. It was strong, it was powerful, and it was respected all over the world.

Mark got it right this week, and is slightly above 50%

George Santos is not a logical fallacy

We talked about insane lies of Congressman George Santos.

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

• The January 6 committee report is pretty much the definition of something we really don’t have time to talk about, but of course we’re not going to let it go completely this week, so here are a few of the crazier takeaways. We learned, for example, that Trump wanted to trademark the phrase ‘Rigged election’, that Hope Hicks and Ivanka’s chief of staff were more concerned about the damage the insurrection was doing to their future job prospects than the damage it did to democracy, and that Trump was more directly involved in the fake electors scheme than we previously knew. Meanwhile, we learned from his tax returns that he paid more in foreign taxes than US taxes for several years, that he had a Chinese bank account while he was President despite claiming he had closed it in 2015, and that he probably didn’t donate his Presidential salary in 2020 even though a whole army of MAGA supporters on social media constantly rely on that claim to prove what a awesome guy he is. Oh, and one more thing, which will shock you to the core, so I hope you’re sitting down. Remember he said he couldn’t release his taxes himself because he was being audited by the IRS? That was a lie. I know. I can hardly believe it myself. We will definitely talk in more detail about these things as well as the criminal referrals to the DOJ, but first I might have to find a solution to the annoying need to sleep, eat and occasionally do my actual job. If anyone has one of those time-turner things from Harry Potter, hook me up.
• If you do what you’ve always done you’ll get what you’ve always got. Despite this truism Kevin McCarthy soldiered on, in a bizarre principles-shedding mashup of Groundhog Day and Theresa May’s repetitive Brexit withdrawal deal debacle, he finally got to be Speaker of the House of Representatives. On our “the Right-wing don’t do” list let’s simply add ‘shame’ or did we know that already? So determined was Kev to become the voice of the united GOP in the House that over 15 rounds of voting and 3 excruciating days he was seen giving away the goods, the store, the shirt off his back and his soul to Trump, who as we know can deliver the goods when it comes to chivvying Republicans over the phone to just find the right number of votes. Eventually McCarthy dragged his beaten, abused, debased carcass across the line, all integrity shattered but still smiling as if nothing had changed since his stalwart stand on many issues was defiled and demolished in the pursuit of power, position and office. As giggling popcorn-chugging Democrats pointed out; if he’s going to be this malleable in order to win, how’s he going to negotiate between the warring factions of the GOP let alone across the aisle? In a display of Republican unity – harhar – McCarthy eventually won by 4 votes only because some of his own party simply didn’t vote that round! Untrustworthy and vainglorious Florida Man Matt Gaetz, among Republican holdouts who had refused to support McCarthy in all rounds of voting, accused McCarthy of pursuing an “exercise in vanity” and said there is “insufficient trust” among GOP lawmakers in the House Republican leader. McCarthy quipped after finally getting the gavel to bang, “My father always told me, it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.” Which a) I guess is how his father got to be a father and b) remind me how that worked with Trump and January 6th 2020 again? With no speaker in post there’s been no congress sworn in and thus no one to enforce the rules about what can be broadcast from the House, so C-Span have broadcast days of riveting unfettered footage of fighting and flip-flopping, failure and frustration. The nation finally got to see the shameless, unprincipled bargaining and backsliding it takes to get your name over the door – though if ParliamentTV in the UK is anything to go by it won’t stop viewers from voting them in regardless!
• One of the Republican representatives voting against McCarthy as Speaker was Anna Paulina Luna from Florida, who is at the moment in a legal battle of her own. She’s suing a friend of Roger Stone’s called Matt Tito for claiming she is a witch. Literally a witch. The last republican candidate who had to defend herself against claims of witchcraft was Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell, who famously made a campaign ad in 2010 which started with her saying “I’m not a witch”. O’Donnell did admit to “dabbling in witchcraft”, but Luna says the claims made against her are not true. Tito stands by it, telling the Daily Beast: “I didn’t wake up one morning when I was going on the Bubba the Love Sponge show and say I am going to pull a bunch of stuff out of my ass and talk about it,” Oh yeah, did I not mention the claim was made on the, I assume paragon of journalistic integrity, the ‘Bubba the Love Sponge’ radio show? Tito says he learned about it from ‘Hispanics for Trump’ associate Paloma Zuniga, who doesn’t seem to be mentioned in the lawsuit, but the kind of people who both support Trump and believe in literal witches appear to be convinced. Failed GOP Congressional candidate Omar Navarro told the Daily Beast the rumors must be accurate because so many people were repeating them, saying “It has got to be true to a certain extent. It’s fair to say that it’s spread among people in the Republican Party.” Let them fight, I say.
• Still looking like a squeezed and even more impotently angry Ron Swanson Mike Lindell is keeping 2020 alive in a way no Republicans really think is relevant anymore, by maintaining Ron DeSantis’ 2022 election win was illegitimate. Oddly; DeSantis, you remember, is a member of the Republican Party and brought about an extraordinary flip when he won Miami-Dade County, a traditional Democrat stronghold. Rather than put that flip down to neighbour-down-the-road Trump’s power and influence, ol’ pillow-face Lindell is keeping the MAGA flag flying by whining on behalf of Trump in the face of Trump’s likeliest rival in any bid for the presidential nomination in 2024. Lindell’s reasoning comes from the fact that he himself looks “at deviations” DeSantis in 2022 “That’s a deviation. I don’t believe it.” Previous deviant pro-Trump behaviour on Mikey’s part have left him facing more than $1.3 billion lawsuits filed by voting technology companies Dominion and Smartmatic. But in another appeal to wealth he boasts of having already spent $25 million pushing his baseless fraud claims related to the 2020 presidential election so he must be right yeah?!
  There’s that joke that goes; I dreamt I was eating a giant marshmallow and when I awoke my pillow was gone – can someone check the inside of Lindell’s head for feathers? On second thoughts let’s just remake Horse Feathers with Trump, DeSantis and Lindell, only they can none of them talk!
• They say you should write what you know, so right wing commentator Dennis Prager wrote an article on his website before Christmas about all the evil liberals who refuse to invite their conservative parents round for Christmas, just because they’re hateful bigots, forcing them to sit at home alone watching It’s a Wonderful Life and identifying with Mr Potter. Prager says he knows of this first hand and complains how unfair it is that just because he SUCKS as a human he doesn’t get to see his grandkids. It’s totally on one side as well, you understand. Conservative families don’t cut off their grandparents simply for voting for Biden – which, to be fair, does probably happen a lot less often, but on the other hand they do cut off their own children for being gay, not believing in the same invisible sky daddy or believing crazy things like black lives matter. The thing is, in my admittedly limited experience, liberals tend to bite their tongue and try to get along for a couple of days, like I did this Christmas when my GB News watching brother-in-law explained why nurses are all very well off actually, or a colleague of mine did when his mother arrived for Christmas and announced in lieu of a greeting “We are anti-woke”. Maybe we don’t get ostracised because we can read a fucking room.
• Andrew Tate – if you don’t know who he is that probably means you’re not an incel cis-het misogynist out to reassert your rights over your need to assert your rights over women. And if you’re not one of his followers who can no longer get him freely accessibly on Twitter, Youtube or TikTok, you probably know of him cos he got utterly owned recently by just the kind of person that would make him rue it the most; Greta Thunberg. Tweeting Greta in December after Elon allowed him back on the platform – “I have 33 cars. My Bugatti has a w16 8.0L quad turbo. My TWO Ferrari 812 Competizione have 6.5L v12s. This is just the start. Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions.” Greta replied “yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com” and TikTok exploded with memes of Tate wondering why all the emails kept getting bounced back! Tate is one of those bandwagon jumping alt-right sub QAnon conspiracy pizzagate theorists making money off basement dwelling guys who wonder why they can’t get girls, by getting them to subscribe to his Hustler’s University and “advising” on crypto, stock investing and freelancing for all aspiring alpha males. You know, the kind of people that hail Trump as an exemplary example of alpha maleness and who are blind to the law-breaking grifting chicanery that Trump and Tate and their ilk peddle. Ex-kickboxer and expelled Big Brother UK contestant – these “escape the matrix” beat the wife types all are, aren’t they? – Tate also posted a video of himself smoking a cigar and eating pizza in Romania, where he says he moved because of more relaxed sexual assault laws. Well not so much – Romanian authorities seized his cars and assets and detained him under investigation for human trafficking and rape. Greta sealed the deal with a scything tweet – “this is what happens when you don’t recycle your pizza boxes”. I’ve had the crying with laughter emoji as a kind of visual earworm ever since! 
• Having watched Trump panic about his tax returns being released,  Kevin McCarthy repeatedly lose votes to become speaker, and Andrew Tate get arrested, I was pretty sure my schadenfreude well was dry. Actually, I was pretty sure the entire National Schadenfreude Reserve was in need of a top up. But then I watched a video and I’m beginning to wonder if the capacity for schadenfreude might be infinite. The video, which I’ll link in the show notes, features a couple of upstanding members of the Bakersfield community attempting to burn down an immigration center. Now these two aren’t idiots – they came prepared with plenty of flammable liquid, which they proceeded to splash all around the walls and the parking lot to make sure it was a good blaze. Then, while patriot number one was still spinning in circles spraying accelerant in all directions, patriot number two stood in a pool of flammable liquid, bent down, and set it alight. If you’re a bit smarter than these two geniuses, you might see what’s coming, but they didn’t. The accelerant accelerated things, the guy nearest the flames ran away with his legs on fire, and his friend panicked and fell over twice, giving the flames time to reach him too. Neither seemed badly hurt, which I think means we can all enjoy the video, wherever we sit on the nazi-punching-approval spectrum. I’ve certainly enjoyed it several times. I’m happy to say the fire department quickly arrived and dealt with the fire, but the arsonists are still at large. Probably not for long, though, as a worker at the immigration center told Vice the men dropped their phones during their escape, and they’re now in the hands of the authorities.
• In January Rishi Sunak delivered a speech like the headboy pleased with his homework in order to address the nation fundamentally fed up with his unelected unrepresentative leadership playing politics with rail workers, postal workers, and nurses actual lives. Instead of agreeing to negotiate with the elected representatives of those workers, he revealed 5 things ranging from ‘inevitable’ to ‘highly unlikely ever to happen’ which he then pretended were the “people’s priorities”. We’re then supposed to judge him on his efforts in order to make it look like he was actually in charge of doing stuff – without setting any timescales of course in case all or none of it happens by itself. He is thus the homoeopathic cure for the nation’s ills. Whilst very light on details in true “we will deliver” and “hold me accountable” Tory style – make ‘em vague and thus you can attribute any thing back to “yeah I did that” – they boil down to: Thing 1; make it illegal to strike and remove workers rights – just after a Xmas holiday break which, let me see, yep was negotiated originally by workers’ unions. The problem in Britain isn’t strikes, it’s an economy that makes strikes necessary. Post-Brexit Sunak is taking back the freedom not to do what Europe does unless it is him telling us that it’s okay cos France, Spain and Italy also have laws that permit companies to sue unions for going on strike! 2. Bring down inflation – not really his job; the banks and the markets have put 65 billion pounds worth of stuff in place to recover from Kwarteng and Truss destroying the economy and pushing inflation up above 10%, so it will fall of its own accord, 3. Stop people coming across the channel in dangerously unsafe boats – not happened in the last 12 years of his party’s government, won’t happen with Braverman’s closing of all legal routes. 4. Distract from the enormity of the national debt brought about by bunging large amounts of cash at mates during covid, by saying just how trustworthy he is to grow the economy cos he was when he paid people’s wages during Covid, though of course he was originally strongly advised against it. Oh and 5. Make it compulsory to teach maths to school kids until they are aged 18 – currently it’s only to age 16. Cos that’s very important to the economy – how do you think HE got to be so rich; charm? personality? creativity? musical ability? social skills? mindfulness? caring for other people? No – Maths! No extra teaching staff or resources provided of course, just like the hundreds of extra police, nurses and hospitals that were promised and not delivered; by whom? Oh his party! Happy Bleedin’ New Year Britain!

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