Holmesian Fallacy – FT#153

09 Jul Holmesian Fallacy – FT#153

Show Notes

The Holmesian Fallacy occurs when someone assumes they have eliminated all incorrect answers and arrive at their conclusion because it is the only remaining answer they can think of.

Trump

We started out by discussing this clip of Trump not getting foreign policy or military tactics:

And then we looked at this clip of Dinesh D’Souza being unable to think of reasons people might go places

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about Rishi claiming Labour doesn’t have a plan

He followed that up by talking about Marco Longhi struggling to think of anything better than deporting asylum seekers.

And he finished with Nadine Dorries’ views on abortion.

Fallacy in the Wild

In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from Star Trek:

Then we discussed a road sign that looked like this:

And we finished with this extract from Chris French’s excellent book The Science of Weird Shit:

 

Fake News

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

1. The fact is that when we want to sell to China they tax it. They have huge taxes, I don’t know if you know that. We didn’t tax them, but they taxed us, so I started the tariffs and they’ve been tremendous. And now if they want to sell stuff to us they have to pay. We sell very little to them. Very little, so it’s irreverent, relatively speaking, it’s really… irreverent.
2. They made up a suckers and losers statement. So terrible. And my stupid people, when I wanted to refute it, they said “Sir, don’t dignify it with a… refuttal.” Refutal or a refuttal? What the hell word would that be? Refuttal? Do I… they’ll say “he didn’t know refuttal or refutal,” but they don’t know either. “Sir, it should not be dignified, sir.” I said “well I gotta fight that.” That’s a… the worst thing you could probably say to me would be that.
3. His wife flew back and forth like it was a taxi cab. It’s Air Force One and/or Air Force Two. I mean, just back and forth, back and forth. Let’s go. Let’s go. Sit at a trial for a day. Go back, forth, back, forth. It’s really terrible. But that’s endemic of the big picture. That’s very endemic of the big picture. Crooked Joe spent $8 billion to build seven charging stations for an electric vehicle. Did you know that?

 

Mark got it wrong this week, and is on 52%!

 

Debates and Immunity are not logical fallacies

We talked about the Trump/Biden debate, and the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.

 

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

• If the Supreme Court had any sense… well, they wouldn’t have made most of the ruling they made last week, but they would have hidden some of the bad ones better. I understand why they left the immunity ruling until the last minute just before they ran away to their heavily beflagged summer homes and Nazi-funded RVs, but if they’d released it a few days earlier maybe everyone would have been too busy despairing over the death of the rule of law to notice the Court had overturned Chevron Deference, made bribery legal and redefined the word “otherwise” to narrow January 6 prosecutions. These were all 6-3 decisions and I bet you can’t guess which six Justices agreed when I tell you what the cases were about. Chevron deference was a 40-year old precedent that allowed actual experts at federal agencies to use their judgment when creating regulations based on ambiguous laws. The Court basically said “fuck the experts, judges are the right ones to decide on that stuff” and a judge in Mississippi immediately cited the decision in a ruling that the Department of Health and Human Services was wrong when they protected transgender Americans from discrimination when seeking healthcare. In Snyder v US, the court ruled that bribery doesn’t count if you don’t get the payment until after you’ve done the official act. So if, for example, a hypothetical Supreme Court Justice were to rule in someone’s favor and then later that person bought and renovated the Justice’s mother’s house, that’s not a bribe even though it’s functionally indistinguishable from a bribe, it’s just a gift to express gratitude, and who could possibly have a problem with that? And finally, in Fischer v US, the Court examined the obstruction of justice law, 1512(c), which very clearly covers anyone who tampers with documents in order to fuck with an official proceeding (I’m paraphrasing, but the next bit’s an exact quote) “or otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” To any normal person, obstructing via document tampering “or otherwise” pretty clearly means “or not via document tampering”, but to the howler monkey contingent of the Supreme Court, it means “or other document-based shit we didn’t mention in the paragraph about documents”. So, in summary, fuck the Supreme Court.
• At a State Board of Education meeting, Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters said the Bible is “one of the most foundational documents used for the Constitution and the birth of our country.” ‘Okay yeah’ you might say but the constitution doesn’t contain any reference to God, Jesus or Christianity in a deliberate attempt to recognise the division of Church and State and also to demonstrate the inclusivity at the heart of the founding of the United States and as an acknowledgement of the freedoms that the New World offered to people fleeing from religious persecution and segregation in other parts of the Old World. And sure it’s a useful reference point to see where the drivers that informed the creation of actual modern laws come from but that’s not enough for the Board of Education; they have decreed by law that every classroom in the state from grades 5 through 12 must have a Bible and all teachers must teach from the Bible in the classroom, and all public classrooms must display the Ten Commandments. When confronted on CNN by the fact that the US is made up of many, many peoples who observe many, many faiths and even within the Christian faith there are many, many different interpretations and practices, co-author of the law Lauren Ventrella started ranting about how this was typical of CNN and how much was the presenter asking, you know, grown up questions that themselves might have derived from Martin Luther nailing up such questions on doors of churches, was being paid by CNN to discredit this law and by implication the little baby Jesus himself. Naturally Interfaith Alliance, a national organisation that seeks to protect religious freedoms also pointed out that “True religious freedom means ensuring that no one religious group is allowed to impose their viewpoint on all Americans.” And oddly in the same Oklahoma their Supreme Court blocked an effort recently to establish the first publicly funded religious charter school in the country. “Under Oklahoma law, a charter school is a public school,” wrote Justice James R. Winchester for the court. “As such, a charter school must be nonsectarian. However, St. Isidore will evangelise the Catholic faith as part of its school curriculum while sponsored by the State.” And naturally of course the other author of the 10 commandments law; Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters said that had been the worst decision the Supreme Court had ever made – I’m thinking appointing Walters might be up there though! When asked what if the teaching staff or pupils or parents who practise a different faith or no faith at all have something to say about the inappropriateness of such a retrograde non-inclusive law ruling that the 10 commandments be displayed in classrooms – Lauren Ventrella replied “Don’t look at it!” Which kinda defeats the point of it being there doesn’t it? Also frighteningly echoes the “Don’t Look Up” campaign somewhat? How Christianity spread so far with people sticking their head in the sand for so long I just don’t know? Oh yeah I do – yeah War! Which I guess is also echoed in the bill-writer’s “Bring it on!” in the face of opposition legislators!
• Discount Nosferatu Rudy Giuliani has been disbarred in his own hometown of New York The court wrote in its judgement that Giuliani “flagrantly misused” his position and “baselessly attacked and undermined the integrity of this country’s electoral process. In so doing, respondent not only deliberately violated some of the most fundamental tenets of the legal profession, but he also actively contributed to the national strife that has followed the 2020 Presidential election, for which he is entirely unrepentant.” Naturally, Rudy blamed Democrats for all this, but what stood out to me was the headline in The Independent, which described it as “Rudy Hits Rock-Bottom”, which is pretty incredible for a man who just in the past four years accidentally held a press conference in the parking lot of a landscaping business between a crematorium and a dildo store, sweated hair dye on stage, appeared in a Borat film with his hands down his pants, was accused of sexual assault by a former employee, and was ordered to pay $148 million for defaming two election workers. Amazingly, despite all that, the claim that he’d hit rock-bottom was premature as the very next day it was announced that Mike Lindell had hired Rudy to present a daily show on his shitty website FrankSpeech.com, right in between Lou Dobbs and whichever guest host is standing in for Steve Bannon while he spends four months in prison.
• The South Park of X – Legalize Humour – Support this show and help fight the “woke mind virus” with laughter! Are the shouty commands around the first posting of The New Norm – which looks like a brilliant parody of what a low-budget Flash animation would be if it featured Archie Bunker style characters taking the piss out of what they would deem to be woke culture by cramming in as many red-mist descending tropes in between laugh track bursts of artificial hilarity. Except you have then to go back a step or two and realise it isn’t so shit it’s funny, it’s just shit trying to be the same shape as funny. The handrail to steady you in this maelstrom of double-think is that it’s been created by singularly unfunny Turning Point USA event whore and Blaze TV show Dave Rubin who gave up trying to do standup when he discovered that you have to be funny for five minutes at a time – or even just be funny – at all! Getting a grip on that helps you reorient and sigh “oh phew so it isn’t me!” It also explains the somewhat pleading tone of the ‘please, please like this thing I made, and I even included Elon Musk at the end as well as the words “thank god for Elon Musk and his shitpost memes X is the home of free speech” in the closing ‘musical’ number’, cos it seems not even Fox Nation or Blaze TV will contribute/support/be associated with what looks like a bad, cheap and doomed to fail Kickstarter thing. When the replies to the X post such as “This sucks, it’s like a cartoon designed for 50 year olds that revolves around a constant onslaught of facebook tier cringe political references that are too explicitly obvious to be funny,” get almost three times as many likes as the original post you probably ought to try to read the room and quietly write Alan Smithee at the end of the credits and withdraw. But this is the right we’re talking about and if we’ve learned anything it’s that not only that they don’t do funny, they don’t do humility and acceptance and just keep on shouting Woke! Goddammit! Until somebody either grimaces, nods, and walks away or leans in and switches off their life support. All together now “Oh my god they killed Kenny?”
• Just when you’re struggling to decide between the old guy and the psychopathic convicted felon/adjudicated rapist, and thinking maybe it’s time to vote third party, along comes a headline like “RFK Jr. denies eating a dog while sidestepping sexual assault allegations in Vanity Fair article,” and hopefully makes you think again. Yes, RFK Jr’s having another normal one, with Vanity Fair printing allegations by a former babysitter that he groped her in his kitchen in the late 90’s. Kennedy didn’t actually deny the story, instead choosing to dismiss it as part of his “very very rambunctious youth”, which is undercut a little by the fact he was 44 at the time. He did, however, deny eating a dog, claiming the picture in Vanity Fair of him eating a dog, which was taken the same year a worm ate part of his brain, in fact shows a barbecued goat carcass, and reassuring NewsNation that “There’s two things I wouldn’t eat — well, three. I wouldn’t eat a human, I wouldn’t eat a monkey, and I wouldn’t eat a dog.” Which is weird, because nobody asked about humans and monkeys and now I kind of think maybe he’s eaten human and monkey. Having dealt with those campaign issues to everyone’s satisfaction, he ended the week by announcing on Twitter that he wouldn’t take sides on 9/11, while simultaneously taking the side of people who don’t believe the official story.
• When you’re setting yourself up as a dictator/emperor in the vein of a Nero or a Caligula perhaps of course you‘ll need to have your vanquished foe – the targets of your disdain duke it out for the entertainment of your subjects to a) keep them feeling good about the fact that there are people below them in the pecking order that they can continue to blame for everything and thus be distracted from blaming you for all the shit that you as emperor are doing or all the governing you’re not doing, and b) remain in fear that it could well be them some day being exploited at the whim of a thumb up or down – Bread and Circuses, Bread and Circuses. Not that Trump would ever consider such a grossly inhumane and heinous thing – oh wait he did! Of course he did – he claims in another rambling rally/speech/campaign hustings aptly enough to Christian Conservatives in Philadelphia that he told his friend Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, that he should start a spinoff competition featuring migrants, as part of his riff on restricting immigration. ‘Dana, I have an idea. Why don’t you set up a migrant league of fighters and have your regular league of fighters, and then you have the champion of your league — these are the greatest fighters in the world — fight the champion of the migrants.’ I think the migrant guy might win; that’s how tough they are. He didn’t like that idea too much.” ​​Later at a post-fight news conference in Saudi Arabia Dana confirmed “I saw everybody going crazy online. But yeah, he did say it.” Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, dismissed concerns to the Washington Post over the degrading comparisons of migrants. “These elitists are the same people who stupidly think combat sports is human cockfighting, showing their ignorance to the sweet science of mixed martial arts,” – I think the word ‘dismissed’ is doing a lot of work there! The airy dehumanisation of the other – here in the form of ‘immigrants’ is of course the staple of all wanna be and actual be dictators as is the lamentation of persecution against people you’re wanting to side with you – in this case Christians, that Trump claims the Biden administration is enacting. And in an attempt to liken himself perhaps to the toughness of the gladiatorial spirit with which he shares saying “Together, we stood up to the communists, Marxists and fascists to defend religious liberty like no other president has ever done,” he also added “And I have the wounds all over my body. … I take a lot of wounds, I can tell you, more than, I suspect, any president ever.”  Roosevelt might have something to say about that perhaps, Garfield? McKinley? Lincoln? Kennedy FFS?
• We’ve yet to see exactly how Florida Judge Aileen Cannon will interpret the immunity decision in Trump’s favor – presumably she’ll find that stealing the nation’s secrets is one of the core powers of the President and refusing to give them back for over a year, hiding them from the FBI and your own lawyer and showing them to random journalists is an official act. But we did learn last month that when the case was assigned to her last June two more experienced federal judges advised her to recuse herself. Admittedly, even a judge who had handled five cases in court would count as more experienced than Aileen Cannon, but one of them was Cecilia Altonaga, the Chief Judge of the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida, who told Cannon it would look bad for her to oversee the trial after she was overturned by the 11th Circuit for decisions that unduly favored Trump. However, this accusal led to a recusal refusal, which bamboozled the Chief Judge, but made perfect sense in hindsight to everyone who’s been paying attention to exactly how little Cannon knows or cares about the actual law.  So, she’s still there, slow playing the case until Trump pardons himself or dies, or she finally does enough to get removed, at which point she’ll probably get a job on Fox.
• Oddly since the 5th July somehow it feels calmer, more sensible, grown up even in the UK; England flags don’t feel quite so divisive, Andy Murray made us proud to be Scottish, and we can all have a bit of a break from shouting “Woke!” at each other from the polar ends of the formerly-known-as-the Twittersphere. Cos, well what can I tell you – the dream’s come true rather – cos we had a General Election last Thursday and Labour won by a mahoosive majority – 411 seats to the Tories 121 – and many of the Tory big beasts lost not only their place “in charge” but also lost their seats, their jobs as MP’s entirely! Particularly enjoyable were Jacob Rees-Mogg who disappeared into a puff of smoke as the dawn’s rays struck him, and returned him to the oblivion preserved for his vampiric compatriots. Others included Grant “14 jobs in 14 years” Shapps, Gillian “does anyone say what a fucking good job I’ve done?” Keegan, Liz “outlived by a lettuce” Truss and Penny “Poundland logo outfit wearing” Mordaunt. Not only did the Tories not retain the many constituencies they gained in 2019, they came third to Nigel Farridge’s Reform Party. A disgruntled former Tory MP, who bemoaned the fact that there are now no Tory MP’s at all in the whole of Wales, said that the Tories weren’t right wing enough, this echoed the thoughts of many in the Conservatives that Reform had taken half their votes, which is probably about right – alternatively of course it could be cos the Tories weren’t centrist enough and the centrist votes went to Labour. So Keir Starmer had indeed managed to carry the ming vase across the tightrope for the whole 6 week campaign and cleverly kept out of the way of the Tories cocking it all up by themselves – It is possible to win a match at Wimbledon just by letting your opponent commit allsorts of unforced errors and Labour quietly stood aside whilst Sunak pissed off nearly everybody; left, right and centre. You’d have thought Ed Davey falling off things, out of things, and into things as part of his campaign would be sufficiently slapstick to distract from Sunak’s party hurtling off a cliff but no, all his mad shenanigans actually returned the greatest increase in the number of seats for the Liberals since 1923 – 71. Reform got 5 – fewer than the number of individual MPs running independently – but given the state of the media’s apparent hunger for the frog-faced racist, Farage will doubtless keep getting airtime and complain about not getting any airtime whilst failing to turn up in either his constituency or the House of Commons – you came 7th out of 13 Nige – shut the fuck up!

Create your podcast today! #madeonzencastr

That’s almost all for this week, but here’s our AI-aided and minimally hand-edited transcript which is at least quite accurate, but not totally:

Holmesian Fallacy – FT#153 Transcript

 

Jim: Hello, and welcome to Fallacious Trump, the podcast where we use the insane ramblings of King Donald I to explain logical fallacies. I’m your host, Jim, and I’m,

Mark: Your other host, Mark. A logical fallacy is an error in reasoning that results in bad or invalid arguments. And the logical fallacy we’re looking at this week is the holmesian fallacy. And I guess ultimately, it’s logical that we’ve got to King Donald first, because that’s basically it, isn’t it?

Jim: For fuck’s sake, America. I go away for one week, and it all goes to shit. I can’t leave you alone for a minute? No.

Mark: Take your thumb off the pulse. Yes. Get it together, will you?

Jim: Well, we’ll talk more about how much it’s gone to shit and in which exact way is later. But in the meantime, the holmdian Fallacy comes from the famous Sherlock Holmes quote. Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. And we’ve talked before about how Sherlock Holmes inference of figuring out what’s going on, is actually not deduction, but induction. Deduction is what people call it when he figures out stuff from scant clues. But deductions would be if you were following, it to a logical conclusion, and that’s the only reasonable conclusion you can come to. Whereas what Sherlock holmes tends to do is induction, which is based on probability. He looks at, a collection of clues and thinks, well, there’s a better than average chance that this is why those things are all true, and because it’s fiction. He’s right. All the time.

Mark: Yes. And there is no other. Yeah. Possible, explanation. Yes. So he’s not. He’s not Poirot esque in the little gray cells where he weighs up all the stuff and then deduces that therefore it must be.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: He actually says. Well, actually, he takes a guess in all probability. Yeah.

Jim: Which is? Which he is extremely good at guessing, because he’s fictional.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: But the problem with saying once you’re dimenic, the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth is that that requires you to eliminate every possibility. It requires you to think about, to come up with every possibility and then eliminate them. And if you’ve missed a possibility and you haven’t thought of it, then there’s every chance that that one’s the truth and not the improbable thing that you’re left with through your system. of induction.

Mark: And because we now live in a post Douglas Adams world, where we know about the infinite improbability life, there are many, many, many possibilities. It’s not impossible. It’s just very, very improbable.

Jim: Yeah. So what this leads to is people jumping to conclusions because they think that they’ve evaluated all possibilities and settled on the only reasonable one, because they’ve eliminated all the others as being likely. And it’s especially true when you don’t really know what you’re talking about.

Mark: Right? Yes.

Jim: See, if you’re an expert in the field, then you’re much more likely to be able to figure out all the possibilities and eliminate them one by one. But if you really have no clue. Then this will be what you do quite a lot of the time. And in our first Trump example, this was during his debate with Hillary, and he was talking about why we warn the enemy when we’re going to do stuff.

Donald Trump: The biggest problem I have with the stupidity of our foreign policy, we have Mosul. They think a lot of the ISIS leaders are in Mosul. So we have announcements coming out of Washington and coming out of Iraq. We will be attacking Mosul in three weeks or four weeks. Well, all of these bad leaders from ISIS are leaving Mosul. Why can’t they do it quietly? Why can’t they do the attack? Make it a sneak attack, and after the attack is made, inform the american public that we’ve knocked out the leaders, we’ve had a tremendous success. People leave. Why do they have to say, we’re going to be attacking Mosul within the next four to six weeks? Which is what they’re saying, how stupid is our country?

Mark: There are sometimes reasons the military does that. Psychologically, I can’t think of any.

Donald Trump: I can’t think of anything it might.

Mark: Be to help get billions out.

Jim: The fact that Trump can’t think of any reasons why that might happen doesn’t mean there aren’t reasons.

Mark: No. What it means is it gives some weight to his argument.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Because it might be, you know, has he never seen the man that never was where, you know, where they chopped a guy in there and he had all the plans and everybody just went, oh, yeah, right. Okay, great.

Jim: His argument is, this seems a stupid method to me, what all the generals are doing, all the experts in the field, what they’re doing is clearly stupid because I can’t see why they’re doing it.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, I, yeah.

Jim: As far as I can see, it would make sense to do it the other way, to try and surprise ISIS in Mosul and take the city by force by doing that. And what he’s ignoring is all of the stuff he doesn’t know or understand, which is an immense amount of stuff.

Mark: Yeah. Well, it’s like people arguing on the Internet, you know, despite a hundred years of medical research and, you know, thousands of experts in the field, I found something.

Jim: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Mark: that they don’t know about. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, and because I’m unaware of all the other stuff, this has got to be it. Well, what about this? Well, I don’t know anything about that. All I know is this.

Jim: Yeah. So among the reasons why they would talk about going into Mosul for weeks before they do it is, first of all, giving the people who are trapped in the city a, morale boost. Like, don’t worry, we’re coming for you. Help is on the way. You know, keep holding on. Don’t give up. In fact, the US led coalition dropped flyers in the city promising the people there that they hadn’t been forgotten about. And they. They’re coming for them and they’re going to liberate it. There’s also a pr boost, essentially saying this is, you know, we are going to do it. We’re going to take Mosul back.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: But you can’t do it as a surprise attack because apart from anything else, it’s a fucking city and you can’t sneak up on a city, you fucking idiot. There’s literally thousands. There would be 20 to 30,000 troops involved in taking the city. And you can’t mobilize that number of troops without anyone noticing.

Mark: It’s like the advert where there were, garbage collectors walking up the street and being very, very quiet, picking up the garbage cans and not. And going, shh. Things like that. Yeah, they could do it if they just tiptoed in. Have you tried tiptoeing in combat boots? You can’t do it.

Jim: There’s also the fact that, of course, they’re going to try and take back Mosul. So not telling them you’re going to try isn’t. Doesn’t, like, lull them into a false sense of security that you’re not going to try.

Mark: They’re not coming because they haven’t said they are. So, we’re fine. We’re safe here.

Jim: Yeah. Stephen Biddle, a professor of political science and international relations at George Washington University, said an ISIS that didn’t know there’d be an attempt to retake Mosul would be an ISIS that was too stupid to have taken Mosul in the first place. If ISIS wasn’t already preparing, they’d be guilty of military negligence, and we would be delighted that they’re so incompetent.

Mark: Exactly. Yes, yes.

Jim: And the brilliantly named Michael Knights, which is surely just a code name for David Hasselhoff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He said, there’s no sneaking up on the other side’s capital. We didn’t sneak up on Berlin in world war two, and we’re not going to do a surprise attack on Mosul.

Mark: Yeah. Just exactly. Yeah.

Jim: So, yeah. The fact that he’s too stupid to realize the reasons why his plan would not work at all isn’t a good reason to assume that what he has thought of. Yeah, yeah. That his plan is the only reasonable solution.

Mark: Yeah. Because he’s been able to dismiss all the other ones. Because he. There’s something. Something of the echo of, you know, if an ISIS. That is too stupid to do. There’s an echo of if a, potential president, as he was then, is too stupid to realize this stuff, then he’s nothing worth the office of president. Which turned out to be true. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: So in a similar kind of not working out all of the possibilities way, we have a clip from 2000 mules where Dinesh D’Souza is saying that there’s really, there can’t be any reason why people would go to multiple drop boxes.

Gregg Phillips: We have people in Detroit that went. To more than a hundred drop boxes.

Dinesh D’Souza: I mean, this is stunning because it’s like, I cannot think of a rational, kind of innocent reason for someone to do that. It just doesn’t exist. So any reasonable person would say, you’re onto something big here. You should take a closer look.

Jim: So there’s a bit of accelerating truth there. He’s like, I can’t think of a reason. It doesn’t exist.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: There is not a reason.

Mark: God, he’s actually more omnipotent than Trump, really, isn’t he, in that regard? Because he’s. Because I can’t think of one. Then it doesn’t exist in the world.

Jim: Yeah. And they’re skipping past, of course, the, the fact that they can’t actually show that a single person went to a single drop box using their.

Mark: There’s a bit when he says, oh, yeah, we’ve got, we’ve got examples of visiting a hundred drop boxes. They didn’t, they didn’t kind of go.

Jim: They don’t have that.

Mark: Ah, where’s the proof of that? No, no, he just goes, oh, well, that means, well, they can’t possibly be doing that for any other reason other than.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: At the beginning of the film, he’s made the conclusion and then just everything fits that and he can’t be bothered with.

Jim: That’s his enemy.

Mark: Yeah. With any of the intervening bits and pieces like causality, horror, logic.

Jim: Yeah. Some of the reasons why people might go to more than one Dropbox, if they were indeed even going to dropboxes or near dropboxes, is, first of all, the fact that dropboxes are put in high footfall areas, busy junctions, libraries, government buildings, etcetera. There’s the fact that, for example, library employees might visit multiple libraries and the dropboxes are outside the libraries, in fact, usually at the door of the library. So they’ll be going past them. There’s delivery drivers who might be visiting different places, which are near dropboxes. There’s police, for example, who don’t have a set route that they follow and will be driving around the city, probably past multiple drop boxes. There are so many reasons that people will visit multiple places where lots of people go to, because that’s the kind.

Mark: Of their popular community places.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Yes. Lots of reasons that, people go to places where people go.

Jim: Yeah, absolutely.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah.

Jim: So the fact that Dinesh can’t think of any reason is very m unimaginative and doesn’t prove anything. And now is the time, I think, for Marx british politics.

Mark: Well, the first example was basically, I just wanted to go back and watch Rishi getting soaking wet, announcing the general election on May 24 outside number ten in the pouring rain. And I was pouring over his speech, basically in a, I’m trying to make an outbursts, advertise out for a gig out of his speech by cutting up in a cassette boy kind of way. And, there’s something of the homsian fallacy whiff about this bit that he.

Rishi Sunak: Says, I’m guided by doing what is right for our country, not what is easy. I can’t say the same thing for the Labour party because I don’t know what they offer. And in truth, I don’t think you know either, and that’s because they have no plan. There is no bold action, and as a result, the future can only be uncertain with them.

Mark: So there’s something in there. He can’t think what their plan will be and then does a bit of ad populum in there by saying, well, I don’t think you do either. So he can’t think what their plan can be, and therefore it can only mean uncertainty.

Jim: Yes.

Mark: And it could be that we didn’t know what the plan was because they hadn’t announced their manifesto, although they had announced a series of pledges and mission statements to look much the same instructor to Rishi’s pledges when he took office.

Jim: Yeah, it could be he’s deliberately not paying attention.

Mark: It could be. Or he’s willfully distracting us. You know, he’s doing the whole look over here because there’s, you know, I don’t know what it is. I really don’t know. It’s not like he’s been saying that forever and ever and ever. And Starmer was saying in all of the prime minister’s questions times up to the announcement. And then after that, he was saying, well, yeah, no, we do have a plan. Here are the pledges, here, are the bits in between the pledges, and here are the bits we’re going to do before we get to the bits in between the pledges. So there’s kind of a clear plan that if you actually listened and you weren’t in the opposition, determined to get people to think that there was no plan and that therefore you could only be certain with the Tories. Yes, very, very blinkered view, I think. And it turned out they have been quite bold. And only this week, two days, three days after the election, they’ve announced talks with the doctors union to address the pay dispute, talk to teaching unions about how best to increase teaching numbers and announce house building quotas, and a relaxing of planning rules to allow the swift implementation of those quotas.

Jim: So almost like they had a plan.

Mark: Yeah, and almost like they kind of boldly done it. You’ve got to kind of question, well, what is your. If this is your definition of I don’t know what it is, and therefore there is no plan, what would a plan look like for you? Well, a plan would look like his plan, which was kind of, undefined, and he just maintained that it was working, or rather that if you give him another chance, he could get it to work. He might even get to define it. So, second example, Suella Bravaman on the election campaign in Dudley in the midlands of the UK, in June, she agrees with Dudley conservative candidate Marco Longhi that the government has not done enough to stop the boats. Bravman says, what I would like to see is people, the minute they arrive in british waters, to be picked up by UK authorities and very quickly processed and on a plane to Rwanda, within hours or days. And she added, she thinks Britain should scrap its human rights act and pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights. Mister Longe, who’s been a longtime supporter of a tough stance on immigration, added, I, can’t think of any other solutions other than a deterrent.

Jim: Yeah. So there aren’t any.

Mark: Yeah. no, never mind the fact that several ministers in both houses of parliament can and have expressed as much in many, many, many hours of many debates about Rwanda Bill, that they’ve offered all sorts of other solutions and pointed out the problem, that it isn’t a deterrent. So there are several solutions, to be had, that this is a deterrent, isn’t going to work as a deterrent, and therefore, perhaps we should adopt some of the other solutions and not this one. But then I can only, I can only think that he’s toeing the party line because that was the party line.

Jim: That’s the only reasonable conclusion.

Mark: Yeah, well, I mean, and I, you know, far be it from the new home secretary to set out the first steps towards setting up a UK border security command. For instance, instead of the Rwanda deal, recruit an exceptional leader to head the body, which will start on Monday. So that’s today with the government preparing a bill to create counter terror powers aimed at tackling organised immigration crime rather than the Rwanda deal, and also asking Rwanda to repay the money it’s been given to accept people from the UK. So they’re doing all of that stuff. They are other solutions.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: That might work as a deterrent. Actually going after the people that are, doing the shipping of people rather than the people on the ships might be the actors as deterrent. And we know that the day the bill passed in parliament, the number of people that came across the waters to the UK was higher than it had ever been to date that year. So, yeah, he’s got a very blinkered view. Another one with a blink of view. You see, if you think of all the other possibilities, you might be able to see Mister Longhi. So. Oh yeah, and by the way, he failed to get elected. Came second to the Labour candidate. Suella Bravama’s majority was reduced from 26,000 in 2019 to 6000. Example number three. And no example would be complete without the reappearance of the ghoulish Nadine Dorries, who in May, 2008, for the conservative home website, wrote about why the abortion limit should be reduced from 22 weeks to 20 and said that the RCOG, which I guess is the Royal College of Gynecology, or Obstang issue guidelines, state that from 19 weeks of pregnancy the baby needs to be. And I can’t think of a gentler way of saying this, put to death in the womb before it’s delivered. Really, this is necessary in case it lives and it’s a procedure known as feticide.

Jim: I bet she could think of a gentler way if she.

Mark: Many, many of them that are very gentle. More putting that. Do you think maybe she isn’t because she’s making a pointed appeal to emotion?

Jim: Maybe that can’t be it just that she has very little imagination with words. That’s the only explanation that is.

Mark: That is true. Yes. Yeah. So you know, she is, she’s an author, isn’t she?

Jim: She’s a novelist, I believe. Dean Dorries. Hasn’t she written lots of, books about nurses, I believe.

Mark: Yeah, well, I think nurse. Yes, exactly. So she knows what she’s told.

Jim: I mean, I feel that if anyone could come up with a different way of saying it.

Mark: But. But also what you said about her limited imagination. Have you read any of that?

Jim: No, of course.

Mark: Yeah. No, we should do that.

Jim: We should veto.

Mark: They are. They are awful. Well, I mean, we could shut down her, argument by just saying. Well, elementary, my dear Doris. Blur there, of course, with their nineties hit the homesian. There is no other way.

Jim: Yeah. So in the fallacy in the wild, we like to talk about Fallacy of the week from a non political perspective. And our first example this week comes from the Star Trek film the reboot, not the original motion picture.

Mark: Right.

Jim: And the character who probably uses this exact quote, second only to Sherlock Holmes himself.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: This is Spock, of course.

Spock: He said he wanted me to see something. The destruction of my home planet.

Bones: How the hell did they do that, by the way? Where did the Romulans get that kind of weaponry?

Spock: The engineering comprehension necessary to artificially create a black hole may suggest an answer. Such technology could theoretically be manipulated to create a tunnel through space time.

Bones: Damn it, man, I’m a doctor, not a physicist. Are you actually suggesting they’re from the future?

Spock: If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Jim: Yeah, so the thing is, this is a Sci-Fi world where they are constantly meeting new and different alien races.

Mark: Yep.

Jim: And yet Spock can’t think of an alternative way that an alien race could get advanced technology other than time travel. That’s not the most likely possibility. He hasn’t, by any means eliminated all of the other possibilities. Yeah. They could have got it from anywhere. The Romulans could have interacted with another alien race that the humans and the Vulcans don’t know about yet. Who have been evolving for millions more years and had much more advanced technology. There’s no reason to leap straight to time travel.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: That’s madness. Exactly.

Mark: Do you think it’s essential for the.

Jim: Plot and that’s obviously he’s.

Mark: Eliminate all the other possibilities. Obviously.

Jim: The guesses are always right when people invoke this rule in fiction.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wouldn’t it be great if they just turned, it went, oh, no, I didn’t think of that. oh. You get all the way to the end, you go, yeah, well, you. So we bang this guy up, the murders are still happening. Oh, yeah. Is it because he didn’t do it?

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Oh, I thought that. Yeah, yeah.

Jim: So our second example is one from the real world. And this was one that I found myself falling into the trap of when I was driving my daughter home one night, a couple years ago. And on the a twelve, there was a sign that said street lighting turned off for safety purposes. And I, as a driver, thought, well, that’s stupid. Obviously, it’s safer to have street lighting on. How could it possibly be safer to turn the street lighting off? That’s insane. I can’t think of a reason to turn the street lighting off.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: For safety. And therefore, it’s stupid. Therefore they’re wrong. The people, the people who did the sign and turn the street lighting off are wrong. And I am right. Because I can’t think of a reason why.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Because,

Mark: It doesn’t matter that I’m not, a street lighting.

Jim: No, no. I know all I need to know as a. Ah, as a driver, that’s clearly. And I have to say the data backs me up on this. there are far more accidents on roads without street lighting at night than there are on roads with street lighting. It’s statistically significant. So I was absolutely right when I said there’s no possible way that it could be safer to turn the street lighting off. And my daughter, who was all of 14 at the time, pointed out that maybe.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: They were doing some kind of road works there. you go involved people who didn’t want to get electrocuted.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: By the street lights being on.

Mark: Yeah. Like putting in more street.

Jim: Yeah. Yeah. Something like that.

Mark: something like that. Yeah. Or changing the street lighting to put brighter stuff in. Yeah.

Jim: Which was good thing.

Mark: Well, you brought her up to be a critical thing, you know, fair play.

Jim: I take full credit.

Mark: Yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And should you be asked about it? Yes, it was a test, obviously.

Jim: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mark: yeah. So you, if I were to say a stupid thing, like I can’t think of any reason, what would be the response.

Jim: So at the time I thought, yeah, actually, having. That’s a good point, well done. And I, I might be wrong about what I thought. And I, and I thought, that’s quite an interesting fallacy. And I thought, I kind of thought maybe it was a new one. And I, and I start to think of it in terms of kind of lack of the lack of imagination fallacy or something like that. But actually, then when I, when I looked at this one, it kind of fits pretty well into it because it basically, I felt like I did dismissed all the reasons I could think of. Yes, that you might increase safety and I couldn’t think of any by turning the street lights off.

Mark: It makes me think of the, the bubble that you’re in on, you know, the echo chamber that you’re in, or the box that you’re in, that you actually, your experience, and that’s the thing about Trump’s example, is that he lives permanently in his own echo, echo chamber, where everything he says is perfectly right and anything outside of that is absolutely wrong because he has no experience of it. And that includes reading books and things like that. So that, you know, that. Whereas more enlightened people think, ah, right, maybe my experience of the world is limited somewhat by my experience of the world. Yeah, there are probably countless other experiences that would have a different point of view and explain what I am perceiving in a different way. Looking at you, mister speaker, it’s a.

Jim: Useful thing to remember. Absolutely.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: So our, final example comes from the excellent book the Science of weird shit by Chris French, Professor Chris French, to give him his full title. And he’s writing in this about ghost phenomena in terms of, why people believe in ghosts. Science of Wirshit is all about why people believe what they believe and actually what the science is about it, he says. A rather cute example of the mysterious movement of objects was reported in the british media in March 2019. Stephen McKeers, a 72 year old man from Severn Beach, South Gloucestershire, was puzzled when he noticed that his garden shed was being tidied up overnight by unknown means, and began to consider the possibility that a helpful ghost was responsible. A kind of anti poltergeist who did the opposite of more traditional poltergeists by creating order out of chaos. After some months, and with the help of a friendly neighbor, Stephen decided to get to the bottom of the mystery by setting up a video camera to record what was happening when he left his shed. The answer came as something of a surprise. No ghost, but a tiny house proud mouse, spending several hours tidying away the metal objects that Stephen had deliberately left scattered around. These included not only nuts, bolts and screws, but even small metal tools that the determined mouse would strenuously tidy away. This is a wonderful example of an explanation for the mysterious movement of objects that no one would have guessed if we didn’t have the evidence of the video recording reminiscent of that scene from Disney’s Cinderella. Needless to say, the video went viral, enthralling viewers around the world. Of course, if one is able to figure out the cause of the initially puzzling events, 1 may be able to stop worrying about them, although this often does not apply in cases of sleep paralysis. But if one is unable to come up with a satisfactory, non paranormal explanation, the idea that one’s house is haunted may take, and thenceforth, even relatively mundane events are interpreted within that context. You can’t find your keys in the morning. Ah. the ghost must have moved them. So I think that’s a really great example of something that I think very few people would have come up with that answer. Why? Yeah, he, he would leave his shed in a bit of a mess, and then in the morning, everything would be tidied away into a bowl.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Without having that evidence, without actually going to the trouble of trying to gather the evidence and then finding out that a mouse was tidying up.

Mark: It’s way outside of the list of possibilities, isn’t it? They might come down the list of a, particularly imaginative roald doll. Oh, it’s just a mouse tidying up.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: It’s ridiculous. But in the absence of that, if you don’t think of that, then you, you start coming up with all these fantastical things. And if you are inclined to believe in ghosts or elves or whatever, yeah. Then you, may start to think, well, yeah, this is, this is evidence. This is evidence towards the thing. I already am slightly inclined towards believing, and I can’t think of any other.

Mark: Explanations, but it’s a bit like the stones that appear to move across the surface of the salt flats in death Valley.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: And it’s been troubling people for decades. Why haven’t you just set up a camera or just sit there and watch it? Why has nobody done that, they just go out, go home at night. They put a stone there or they go, right, the stone is there, go home at night, come back in the morning and there are tracks and it’s been moved.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Turns out it was nothing more than water and gravity and the wind and shit like that. But actually it was Aardman. It was animators just going along, pushing.

Jim: One frame just a little bit, taking picture.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: but when you are either already a little bit inclined to believe the alternative explanation or not curious enough to gather the evidence, or it’s a situation where there isn’t a reasonable way to gather evidence. If like unexplained phenomena that have already happened, like stories that people have, you know, anecdotes that people have about ghosts or UFO or paranormal phenomena, there’s no way necessarily to gather the evidence to explain those phenomenon. M that doesn’t mean there isn’t an explanation.

Mark: There isn’t the one that you’re, yeah.

Jim: Believing in or it’s always worth remembering. Sometimes those explanations might be just something you don’t, you haven’t come up with and you can’t imagine.

Mark: So you’ve not thought.

Jim: Before we move on to fake news this week, I just want to tell you about a talk that I have coming up on skeptics in the pub online. I did a talk for them a few years ago about my work at the BBFC, and they asked me to do another one, which is very kind of them. And because all I’ve been able to think about for the last six months is the book I’m writing. I’m doing about that, about 2000 mules. So you probably listeners to this have already, probably already heard me talk enough about that. But on the off chance that you feel like you haven’t and would like to know more about it, the talk is going to be on Si TP dot online. So that skeptics in the pub dot online on confused the 25 July, it’ll ah, be live at 07:00 p.m. british summertime. But there’ll be a recording available soon after that on that website, SITP dot online. And I thought that in the skeptical community, probably everyone’s heard about 2000 mules. And so I wasn’t sure kind of how to pitch this talk in terms of the level of detail and all that kind of stuff. But when I went to QED last year, I went to a workshop on writing about skeptical topics. And the kind of the thing I did an outline for was the story of 2000 mules or debunking it. And the person who was running the workshop was like, oh, what’s that about? I’ve never, I haven’t heard of that. And I thought that’s interesting because I kind of thought everyone would have done. So I asked the people at skeptics in the pub, you know, how many of them have heard about this? And they did a little kind of straw poll and, and only two people in the group had heard of it. And one of those is Marsh, who’s, who’s heard everything.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah.

Jim: So, yeah, so I think actually, because, we were talking about bubbles and echo chambers and stuff, obviously, I’m very much in the bubble of people who’ve heard of 2000 viewers. we’ve watched it, we’ve talked about a lot and I know that the listeners know about it and the people on our Facebook group know about it. And basically everyone, I talk about it to everyone because I’m just obsessed with it. So it’s interesting to find that people who are interested in skeptical topics, actually some of them, large proportion of them, at least in the UK, aren’t aware of it at all. So.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: So it’s kind of from basics.

Mark: Oh, that’s excellent.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Well, that’s quite cool. Is it? Because that we’ve got so in it that we’ve got beyond the initial premise that this happened and that’s intriguing in itself, that that kind of thing might have happened. And, and actually that’s not the interesting thing. The interesting is that is the massive lie that’s being told about it and peddled about it with no evidence. That’s the, the part, the nub of the crux for the skeptical society. So that they’re gonna, it’s gonna be great, isn’t it? Because they’ll go, oh, oh, look at that. Oh, Blimey. I didn’t know that happened. Well, it didn’t and it really didn’t. And, and yeah, you should be really upset.

Jim: Here’s what they say happened.

Mark: Here’s how we know. Yeah. Yes. Promoting the fact that it is happened.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: In an attempt to, in the panoply of things that, made the elect, the election rigged. This is one of the large ones and it’s an attempt to crystallize the big lie.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: And it just, it fails to do so. It, yeah.

Jim: And that fails so.

Mark: Well, so you’re going to introduce something to them that they’re getting then gonna lose sleep about, thanks to you. Yay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As if you’ve got not enough to worry about. Tune in skeptics in the pub. So what’s the time and date again?

Jim: Seven. PM british summer time on the 25 July. Nice. S I t p. Online.

Mark: Sitp dot online.

Donald Trump: So we’re gonna. We’re gonna play fake news, folks. I love the game. It’s a great game. I understand the game as well as anybody. As well as anybody.

Jim: Yes. It’s time for fake news. The game where I read out three trump quotes, two of which are real, and one I made up, and Mark has to figure out which one is fake news.

Mark: So I was thinking about this this week, and, I just can’t think of a reason why I haven’t won all of these. So it can only be that the entire game has been reached. That’s the only conclusion that I could come to with as the only possibility.

Jim: Yeah. Yeah. You know, the only remaining option.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. But actually, looking back through my rebuttals each and every time, I think that’s. That I have. That I’ve fixated on that. I really ought to broaden my. Yeah, yeah. I just don’t know. Just don’t know why. It’s not fair.

Jim: Yeah. So the theme, this week. Oh, yes. Is times that Trump didn’t word good. And I know that that is often.

Mark: It’s every time. Yeah, yeah.

Jim: But these are specifically times when he didn’t understand the meaning of a word I. Or what the word that he was trying to use was.

Mark: Okay. Yeah.

Jim: So statement number one.

Jim: The fact is that when we want to sell to China, they tax it. They have huge taxes. I don’t know if you know that we didn’t tax them, but they taxed us. So I started the tariffs and they’ve been tremendous. And now if they want to sell stuff to us, they have to pay. We sell very little to them. Very little. So it’s irreverent. Relatively speaking. It’s really irreverent.

Mark: Okay. Right. Yeah. So not only does he not understand tariffs, that’s fantastic. he’s not just being racist there, is he?

Jim: I don’t think so. Although that’s a possibility I hadn’t considered.

Mark: It is a possibility, yes.

Jim: So, yeah, I’d eliminated that as a possibility by not thinking of it and therefore gone with just him not wording. Good. So, yeah, statement number two, they made up a suckers and losers statement. So terrible. And, my stupid people, when I wanted to refute it, they said, sir, don’t dignify it. With a refutal. Refutal or a refutal. What the hell word would that be? Refutal. Do I. They’ll say he didn’t know refuttle or refutal, but they don’t know either, sir. It should not be dignified, sir. I said, well, I gotta fight that. That’s, the worst thing you could probably say to me would be that.

Mark: That’S great. That’s brilliant. And he skipped from fuddle. Such a brilliant word. So what the hell? He skipped from what the hell was that? To people reporting that he didn’t know refuttle or refutal.

Jim: But those people don’t know. They do.

Mark: Those people, it’s gone from I don’t know what that word is to people reporting that word. And then the people reporting that he didn’t know that word. And then those people that are reporting it that he’s just made up. They don’t know it either. What the fuck? Yeah. and you just know that nobody ever said that. Don’t dignify with a rebuttal. That’s brilliant. Well, I guess if you have a rebuttal, do you rebuke something? That would be the other way, wouldn’t it? Yeah. With fuddle. So excellent. Oh my God.

Jim: Number three.

Mark: Ah.

Jim: This is talking about Biden at the D day remembrance thing in Europe.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: His wife flew back and forth like it was a taxicab. It’s air force one and or air force two. I mean, just back and forth, back and forth. Let’s go, let’s go sit at a trial for a day. Go back, forth, back. Fourth, it’s really terrible, but that’s endemic of the big picture. That’s very endemic of the big picture. Crooked Joe spent $8 billion to build seven charging stations for an electric vehicle. Did you know that?

Mark: Okay, he’s, oh God, he’s such an ass, isn’t he? It’s just, it’s that kind of, it’s misses melaprop, isn’t it?

Jim: Huh?

Mark: There’s just such fun to be had in people using the wrong words. It’s delightful. And he doesn’t know that he belongs to that. The, the panoply, the pantechnicon of idiots that use the wrong words. Okay, so, no, so is it gonna be endemic, irreverent or re fuddle. Re fuckle. Such a good sounding word, isn’t it? okay, we just part that one to my right. So is it irreverent? Relatively speaking. It’s really reverent. Endemic. Back and forth like a tax cab. I want, I want rebuttal be true. Just. I’m not gonna say you wrote that one. I think, just going with my gut, I think that. I think probably endemic is probably more real than irreverent. Might live to regret it. So, I’m. But I’m gonna say that number one is the one that you made up.

Jim: Okay. So of the other two, I’m sensing that you a more convinced.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. I thought about convinced. Just.

Jim: That’s the one you really, really want to hear.

Mark: That’s the one I really, really want to hear. Yeah.

Jim: And number two.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Is real.

Mark: Oh, excellent.

Donald Trump: They made up a suckers and losers statement. So terrible. And my stupid people, when I wanted to refute it, they said, sir, don’t dignify it with a refuddle. Refutal or a refuddle. What the hell word would that be? Refuddled.

Mark: What?

Donald Trump: They’ll say he didn’t know, refuddle or refuddle, but they don’t know either, sir. It should not be dignified, sir. I said, well, I gotta fight that. That’s a, the worst thing you could probably say to me would be.

Jim: That, yeah, it’s definitely, it’s definitely either a fatal or a futile. There’s no other possibilities.

Mark: No other possibilities. But they don’t know either. Yeah, it’s. And then, and then he kind of edits it, thinking, okay, I’ll just, I’ll just resay that.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: And what they’ll do is cut that out and they’ll just get rid of all that bit. And they say, well, we’ve got to fight that. And they said, we’ve got a gotta, yeah, no, you can’t. You can’t fight all that. We’ve got an issue of vital. Wow, that’s so good. That’s brilliant. So did he, is he trying to read the auto queue or is he just doing. I think he was hanging as a.

Jim: It was just, yeah, like you do.

Mark: As a kid when you go, well, what’s the signal? Yeah, if, if foot is feet, it must be shoop. That’s. Yeah, just those things that you enjoy hearing as a parent with your six year old kid. Not so much with a, yemenite presidential candidate in his seventies.

Jim: It’s one of the ways you can tell that he’s not reporting a thing someone actually said to him. Because m. Because I’m pretty sure if anyone had said it, they wouldn’t have said, sir, don’t dignify it. With a revival.

Mark: I don’t know. I think Mike Pence might have said that. Yeah. It’s such a brilliant word. It does remind me of who was the. There was a comedic hero, of, Robin Williams, who, an older.

Jim: Guy that Jonathan Winters.

Mark: Yes. It’s the kind of thing he would have.

Jim: Yes, absolutely.

Mark: Made something up like that. And he would played with it and toyed with it.

Jim: He’s on the Jack Parr show many years.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: and later in season four of mork and Mindye.

Mark: There you go. Nice.

Jim: So you also think the number three.

Mark: Israel three, the endemic. Yeah.

Jim: And number three.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: Is real.

Donald Trump: His wife flew back and forth like it was a taxicab. It’s Air Force one and or air Force two. I mean, just back and forth, back and forth. Let’s go. Let’s go sit at a trial for a day. Go back forth, back forth. Really terrible. But that’s endemic of the big picture. That’s very endemic of the big picture. Crooked Joe spent $8 billion to build seven charging stations for an electric vehicle. Did you know that?

Jim: So that’s not what endemic means.

Mark: No.

Jim: I don’t know what word he was going for.

Mark: No. Obviously endemic keeps getting in the way.

Jim: Yeah. indicative.

Mark: Indicative is all I could think of. Yes.

Jim: It m doesn’t feel right. Feels like there’s another word there that he and we are, ah. Grasping for, but not grabbing. It’s definitely not endemic though.

Mark: No, no. And, I guess if it covers everything, it would become endemic. Yeah.

Jim: So Jill did leave the D day remembrance to go and visit with hunter while he was in court.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Which is a parental thing that Trump wouldn’t understand, naturally. And yes, she did fly in Air Force two because as first lady, she is not allowed to fly commercial.

Jim: And because it was a personal trip, the DNC and the Biden’s will have. Will end up paying for that, basically.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: They’ll end up reimbursing the,

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Whoever it is. The Air force or whoever runs Air Force one. Air Force two. So, yeah, that’s that situation. The 8 billion for seven.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Charging station. This is charitably a misunderstanding, but really it’s a. It’s a lie.

Mark: Yeah. No, really. Right.

Jim: What happened was, yeah, Congress is a.

Mark: Distortion of the truth.

Jim: Congress allocated seven and a half billion dollars to increasing charging stations, electric vehicle charging stations across the US. Across. Well, yeah. In order to encourage the rollout of electric vehicles as part of the whole infrastructure deal.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: After two years, that because.

Jim: There’s a lot of stuff that needs to be dealt with in terms of acquisitions and allocating funding and that going out to various states, then things getting built. So two years in, seven have been built.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Those seven didn’t cost seven half billion dollars.

Mark: No.

Jim: They are the first seven of 500,000 charging stations that will be built under this plan.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So, yeah. It is misleading to say that he spent $8 billion building seven charging stations.

Mark: Yeah. Well, it’s a bit like the four and a half feet of the wall.

Jim: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mark: He didn’t, he didn’t build.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: With, with an enormous amount of money that he said he got, but nobody kind of points that out. rally and. Yeah. What about the wall? What about the wall? I. Yeah, because you’d be thrown out, wouldn’t you?

Jim: I should say that, yeah. because I don’t want to give the wrong impression that seven and a half billion, although the plan is ultimately to build 500,000 charging stations by 2030, that 8 billion is just the very first step in this plan. That, that won’t cover those 500,000. That will cover about 5000 charging stations, which, which will cover about 20,000 charging spots because you can charge more than one vehicle per charging station. So it’s the first step. They’re, in the first couple of years of this program, they’ve started rolling it out. The funding has gone out to states, there’s allocations being done and all of that administration and paperwork and everything. As of yet, the impact hasn’t been seen. But equally, they haven’t run out of that money.

Mark: No. They haven’t stopped after seven.

Jim: No, no. They’re not like, oh, no, we need to, we need more money now because we’ve spent.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. Building seven of them. Yeah. I think questions will be asked. Yeah.

Jim: Be reasonable. Yeah. To ask questions.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Obviously Trump can’t.

Jim: No, no. So that means you’re right in that number one, irreverent was the one I made are, very good.

Mark: Yeah. It was, it was touch and go. It was endemic or irreverent.

Jim: Yeah. Well, I. The trouble is, you see, reverend, I, in order to come up with one, I was like, well, what mistakes do people make?

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And, and so I was looking up like, what common words do people mistake for other words? And that’s not what Trump does. He doesn’t mistake common. He doesn’t make common mistakes. He makes fucking weird, random mistakes.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Like for a fuck.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So, so I had to kind of go beyond the. Yeah, mistakes are. Yeah. Quite far enough. So there you go.

Mark: But, I mean, it was. Yeah, I don’t know what it was that was to tell. I think the. It was touch and go. It was just plumped. Yeah. When we got it. Could have been.

Jim: Well, if I fool any of the social contestants, because we have some. We have one patron, we have cas. Two, he said. So I’ve heard the rotting orange fungus carrying on about re fuddle. Bloody idiot.

Mark: Right.

Jim: And he just can’t understand family support when Jill was at Hunter’s trial. So I’m going with number one as fake news. Well done, Cass. Yeah, but let’s face it, having got one right so far, Mark, stats are better than mine. So there you go. You got one right.

Mark: Oh, I think that was a backhanded compliment there.

Jim: I’d say that’s a compliment. Yeah. Yeah.

Mark: All right. Okay. I’m just a bit sensitive about that. Yeah, yeah. It’s not like I bang on about it or anything. No. Yeah.

Jim: Richard Thunder Hopkins says, sweet bejesus, I’m awake when you posted this, and I get to play along for the first time in months. Hey, I’m going with number three this time. The misuse of the word irreverent and the argument with himself about the pronunciation of Rafuttle is just priceless. I pray to God I get to hear that sound bite. Yeah, well, I do believe that he believes it cost 8 billion to charge an electric car. I’m saying that number three is fake news. Ding dong.

Mark: So, okay, yeah, I see you’re thinking.

Jim: There, but, yes, Renee Z says, jim, you’re really tricky. Good luck with this one, Mark. I’m choosing number three as fake news, but it’s probably number one with Jim inserting irreverent to throw us off from Trump’s inability to understand tariffs. Three just sounds like his drug addled brain has exploded.

Mark: Yeah, it wouldn’t be a large explosion, would it? Yeah, more of a whimper.

Jim: Scott says, I’m sorely tempted by number one because we all know Donald cannot tell the difference between irrelevant and irreverent. And of course, he’s utterly oblivious as to how tariffs work. Number two sounds real because he loves the sir stories and also because it consists of 15 seconds of gibberish. Then again, number three, being completely incoherent, has to be the real thing. So I think number two is the one you made up.

Mark: Oh. Ah. Oh, I say. Right, well. What? Cool.

Jim: Yep. invisible unicorn says endemic. I don’t think he knows that word three is fake. I mean, he doesn’t know the word and yet. No.

Mark: That’S the thing, isn’t it? You kind of.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. It doesn’t. It’s like. It reminds me of when you talk to. Well, real estate agencies seem to be the worst offenders when they say they refer to themselves as myself. Yeah, you as yourself.

Jim: It’s real estate agents and apprentice contestants.

Mark: Yeah. Yes. They think it sounds more classy or something, or more formal, but it’s. It’s just. It isn’t. It’s. You don’t understand that. You can’t use that word there.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Like that. It doesn’t mean what you think it means. Stop it.

Jim: So on, Facebook.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Andrew John says, I think I’ve heard the first and third.

Mark: Oh.

Jim: There may just be parts of them that are real. That’s how he gets us. Anyway, I’m still going with number two is fake.

Mark: Wow. Wow. There you go. Yes. That’s exactly how he gets us. Yeah.

Jim: Made up from whole cloth, the number one. Yeah. And, Nick says, I’ve never known anyone transition so jarringly from one batshit lunacy to another, as in number three. I’ve seen graffiti in public toilet stalls with more sense and order than that, which makes me think it’s real.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah.

Jim: Number two does have someone calling him sir, but also says he got something wrong ish. Number one talks about how China paid more taxes thanks to him, which sounds right, but it sounds a bit too like him. So I’m gonna say number one is fake.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: Well done.

Mark: You see, this is the. Yeah, these are. That we’re. We’re. We clutch at straws, but. But sometimes you come up not drowning.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: As a result. Yeah, it’s gonna. Yes. If it sounds like. It really sounds too much like him.

Jim: When you eliminate all the ones that are impossible for me to have made up, the remaining one, however improbable, has.

Mark: Got to be the right one.

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Jim: And it’s time for the part of the show that this week at least is called debates and immunity are, not logical fallacies. I was kind of tempted to call this bit cabbages and kings.

Mark: nice, nice, because that would have been, cruel, but yeah, fair, I.

Jim: Think some, yeah, last time, well, actually it wasn’t, it wasn’t last time. It was when we were doing our last patron special.

Mark: That’s it.

Jim: Yeah, we were recording as the debate happened and we finished, as patrons will recall, with a kind of quick, oh, we were both going to go and watch the debate now, but you know, it’s probably not going to make much difference. We know what’s going to happen. Trump’s going to be crazy. All Joe has to do is show up, really, and kind of show that he can talk and it will be fine and it probably won’t make which of a difference to anyone.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And then we watched the debate and.

Mark: And he didn’t do that bit that all he had to do was turn up and do.

Jim: I, I don’t think it was as bad as a lot of people said afterwards reported it as like immediately the debate was over. CNN was, was basically saying, oh, we’re fucked.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: And, and talking about what possibly can be done.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And, and it was, I mean, basically the way I saw it was that Biden had a lot of the facts at his fingertips. He was clear about what his policies are. Ah, and the policies that he had were sane.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: He sounded old and he stumbled over his words and lost his train of thought a few times. He also, yeah, was unfairly characterized as being stumbling and, and losing his train of thought a couple of times when what he was actually doing was stopping out of respect for the moderators. Because at one point he said, and by the way, at ah, the point at ah, which Dana Bash, I think it was, was saying, okay, Mister Trump, and he stopped. He didn’t continue his thought because his time was up. He did that in the first set of debates with Trump a few years ago, four years ago, and it came across very differently then to Trump because Trump was riding over anything they said and he was respecting the things they said and was keeping to his time. And when they said, that’s your time up, he stopped talking, even if he was in the middle of a sentence.

Mark: Yep.

Jim: You could see that as respectful. You could see it as weak. In this case, some people saw it as him forgetting what he was going to say. But I don’t think it was that, that’s not to say he didn’t forget what he was going to say at any point. He did, he did a few times, yes.

Mark: But he was much more respectful of the procedure.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Than Trump was. Ah. Also, there was a kind of. There was a disappointment on my part that the. Not that I was disappointing, I was disappointed, that when Trump came in and Biden stopped to defer to him, to allow him to say stuff, they, they just then moved on. They didn’t.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: They didn’t go back. All that you’ve just said, trump was absolute. Let’s go back to Joe to refute all of that.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: To know there was a refutal.

Jim: There were three parties in the debate. There was that. There was Trump, Biden and the moderators.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: I’ve said how I felt about Biden. He didn’t do what he needed to do to show some doubters that he’s strong enough.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Trump was arguably more coherent than sometimes we see him. He had, I think, been given talking points that sometimes he stepped, he stuck to. Not all the time, by any means. Yes, everything he said was a massive lie. Yes, he lied from start to finish. And, just blatantly lying about things like saying everyone, including democrats, thinks that it’s better now that Roe has been overturned and that decision to go back to the states. What fucking bullshit. That’s the weirdest lie I’ve ever heard. Everyone knows that’s not true. That’s not fooling anyone. That Republicans aren’t going to believe that. His base isn’t going to believe that. They know that. Everyone’s pissed off about Roeze, so who is he doing that for? It’s madness. And. Yeah, and, and it like, just like that. Every time. He lied constantly. And the third party, the moderators were, fucking awful. Yeah, they were absolutely abysmal because CNN made the decision not to do any fact checking whatsoever. And when he didn’t answer the question, they gave him more time. So they would. They would ask him a question and give him two minutes. He would spend the two minutes talking about immigration and then they would say, doing lies.

Mark: Question was. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: So he got, he got more time by breaking the rules and no point when he would say a complete fucking lie, they would say, thank you, mister Trump, and move on to Joe.

Mark: Yeah. Rather than go, that’s all been refutled.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Thousands of times. And then you can’t get away with saying that shit. It’s not true.

Jim: And then 2 hours later, after everyone had gone to bed, they had Daniel Dale on to talk about the 30, at least 30 things. Like the first 30 things that came into his head that Trump had lied about.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: And then he, he continued on a tweet thread after that with more stuff that he’d kind of researched and gone. And this was a lie too. And so is that. It was amazing that it gave an impression that Trump had some points and he didn’t have any point. He’s.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Every policy he talked about was either insane or not real.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Or insane or insane and not real. Yeah, yeah. Really insane to some extent. When he said a batshit thing that wasn’t true. And then it was Joe’s turn to speak. Joe would say, well, that’s completely not true. And sometimes he would back it up and say, look, here’s the real thing. Here’s the real thing. These are the facts. But he couldn’t spend all his time doing that because as we know from the gesh gallop, debates are, timed.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And it takes a lot longer to refute, re fuddle, to give a refuge to a, to a lie than it does to say the lie. So Trump could say many more lies than Joe could rebut and then have any time at all to make his own points. So basically everyone fucking lost. Nobody won the debate. It was, it was a bad debate. It didn’t go well for Joe. It didn’t go well for Trump. It went fucking awfully for CNN.

Mark: Yeah. I watched the election coverage in the UK on channel four because the, because the BBC were far too deferential to everybody and channel four weren’t. And it’s filled with lots of, friends at the show, Krishna Gurumir, thinkers on ithood, and, Emily Maitlis, and lots of ex BBC people and lots of, politics podcasters were on it. And then they had some out and out crazy.

Jim: I was very disappointed we didn’t get.

Mark: A call, I know, as out and out crazies.

Jim: Absolutely. Yeah. That was the category I was putting us in.

Mark: Exactly. Yeah. And the thing was that the out and out craziest were called out on their out and out craziness.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: By the. By the moderators. Yeah. They just went, what are you talking about? If there was a, Nadine, Doris was on it, talking about the whole of the reason that the conservatives lost was because Boris had been ousted, Alastair, Campbell was on with, and Rory Stuart. Alice just went, right, well, I think you’re wrong there. And she went off into. And said, well, you’re just being racist and feminist and anti abortionist and chorus knows what, and, he just turned to Rory and said, can you say something grown up Rory? It was just brilliant. And that. She took real umbrage at that. And you did what you. What this, what the debate need is the australian guy that Jonathan Swan. Yes. It just needs.

Jim: So Daniel Dale just there. Just have Daniel Dale sitting there. He knows all of the shit.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Trump doesn’t, have new material. Daniel has already researched everything he’s ever going to say.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So why is that?

Mark: Why there’s too much deference, paid to politicians. The BBC was. It was kind of cringy, that minded. They are, there fantastic graphics to illustrate what was going on. But the. The journalists, it wasn’t journalism. It was. It was toadyism.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: And. And Kal Taoism, they. Nobody got held to account at all.

Jim: Incidentally, I should say, if anyone, if our listeners are interested in the UK election, which has. Has happened this week, and I’m sure, yeah, Mark M. Might mention it later, as he has already done. Our next patron special episode is going to be all about the UK general election, hosted, by Chris Cole, who did our breakdown of 2023.

Mark: Yep.

Jim: Look forward to 2024 thing at the beginning of the year.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So we’re going to be talking with him. No, we’re going to be looking. We’re buying predictions is more accurate rather than looking forward to. Yeah. Ah. So, yeah, if you enjoyed that and if you want to hear about the UK election, we’re going to be talking all about that next time on our, patron special. So. But, yeah, I don’t want to stop you talking about the UK election, but just to. Let’s be a, whole thing.

Mark: A special thing. Yeah. So that. Yeah. If nothing else, if you want to learn all about UK politics, really, if you want to learn all about UK.

Jim: Politics, I’m going to be fine.

Mark: Go listen to Alastair Campbell and Roy Stuart and Emily Rateless. Don’t, listen to us.

Jim: No, no, no. Yeah, we’re just as.

Mark: We’ll just as qualified. We’ll just. We’re just unhinged crazies. Yeah, yeah. That would just lose our shit over it.

Jim: So, yeah. The response to the debate, sadly, didn’t focus very much on how much Trump lied and how incoherent he was on many of his statements. Yes. He was saying stuff that was not only not true, but also not crazy.

Mark: Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: Things like when he was talking about climate change and rolling back, regulations, he said we had h two o. We had the best numbers ever. Which, I mean, that doesn’t mean anything.

Mark: No, that doesn’t mean anything. Well, there’s a two in there. There was a two in there. Yeah, yeah.

Jim: he said I had just to kind of back it up with some hard figures. He said I had the best environmental numbers ever and my top environmental people gave me that statistic just before I walked on the stage, actually. So, so he’s his top environmental people. Just before he went on stage, they said to him, gave him, you had the best environmental numbers ever.

Mark: Best numbers. Yeah.

Jim: Brilliant. I’ll use that.

Mark: I’ll use that. I love that. Yeah, yeah, that’s. Yes, because that’s the thing that even John Oliver and Stuart were kind of ripping the piss more from Biden than Trump. There was a. There’s kind of a, I think on, in the left commentariat, there’s this assumption that Trump is crazy. So they. So if anything comes along, there isn’t Trump.

Jim: Yes.

Mark: And. Which is shocking. It. It is shocking.

Jim: Yeah. and absolutely to say Trump lied and was crazy.

Mark: Yeah. But it’s important that people continue to say that.

Jim: Yes, they.

Mark: And that’s the point that we try and going to lose. Yeah. That’s going to lose him the election. Not Biden stepping down and Kamala Harris stepping up. That’s not going to lose him the election. The fucking media saying, you are an ass. we’re not going to let you get away with this shit. Get off my show. That’s going to lose him the election.

Jim: Yeah. So, so the response from some people on the left and a lot of people on the right who just want to cause chaos has been to say, well, Biden has to step down now because that, because one night of a bad debate means he can’t possibly run the country for another four years. Because as we all know, presidents, their whole job is debating.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: That’s all they do. He was bad at it that night when he had a cold and had just been around the world three times. Yeah. So, so therefore, he can’t.

Mark: Presidential stuff. Yeah, yeah.

Jim: He, he is now trying to do some unscripted things to show that he can actually talk. he did an interview with ABC, which didn’t go fantastically. He did. In fact, if you watch the rally, he did the following night after the debate, he was really quite strong and, powerful. Some of it was scripted, but he went off script a few times and he came across very well on that. Basically, if you pay attention, you know that he is, first of all, a good person and he understands what’s important and. Yeah, he’s fucking old. He’s 81. He’s.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: you know, that’s not great. And. But that was true months ago when everyone decided that he should be the candidate, when the people voted between him and other people.

Mark: And it’s still true whilst he’s doing all the great things for America.

Jim: Yeah. All of the accomplishments that he’s made over the last four years.

Mark: Yeah. He’s been.

Jim: When he was in his late seventies, early eighties, everything he’s done. And he’s done a fuck ton of stuff. As we discussed on that roundup of 2023 episode. All of that has been achieved by, an old man. And part of that is because when you elect someone as president, you aren’t just electing a president, you’re electing all of the people that they appoint to be, their advisors and to carry out their agenda. Because the president doesn’t do the stuff that they promised to do. I mean, most of them don’t have other people do it either. But, but when he wants to get stuff done, he makes big decisions. He talks to foreign leaders. you know, he, he will be briefed and be the person who the buck stops at. Yeah, yeah, but, but he isn’t the one making things happen day to day.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Those are people here points. And Biden knows how important it is to appoint people who know what the fuck they’re doing.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And are able to do that in.

Mark: Stark contrast with Trump, who’s just going to appoint people that say that he’s great.

Jim: Absolutely. That’s his only requirement.

Mark: Nothing but stroke his ego is that.

Jim: They say nice things about him and are, loyal to him.

Mark: Yeah. And, and the moment they’re not, they’ll get rid of it.

Jim: That’s who you’re allowing.

Mark: He appoints people to understand that.

Jim: That’s who you’re lacking. If you, if you vote. I know no one listening is going to vote for Trump, but, yeah, it’s, that’s what makes it so important and so irrelevant that Biden is old because he’s the choice. And frankly, if the choice was a bucket of wet shit, it’s still a better choice than Trump.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Because at least you know where it’s come from and what it thinks of itself and how people will treat it. Yeah.

Jim: And I don’t, I don’t think Biden’s going to step down. That we’ve got until, the democratic convention is until August. There’s time for stuff to happen. There’s time. If, if enough people tell him that he should and he.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Agrees with them or listens to them or whatever, it could happen. I don’t think it’s likely, but if it does, whoever steps up, fucking vote for them and convince everyone else to vote for them. Yeah, if.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: if he stays doing what he’s doing, which I suspect he will, because actually, of the people who are saying stuff, it’s like nine Congress people, nine Democrat Congress people who are saying he should step down. And that based on people, on phone calls and people kind of talking to the newspapers and stuff, it’s not a huge number. More stuff can happen. He can make m mistakes that might make more people think, actually, yeah, this isn’t going to go good, but he’s the only person who’s beaten Trump in an election. And as you said. Yeah. He’s responsible for all of the good stuff that he’s done, that his administration has done over the last three and a half years. And his agenda moving forward is more good stuff. Not the horrendous fascism of, project 2025.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: So that’s where I stand.

Mark: Yeah. Well, it’s kind of similarly in the UK that Starmer is a safe pair of hands. He’s not. It’s interesting that Wimbledon, the Wimbledon tennis championships are on at the same time, and there are nimble footed, players who smash stuff all over the place. And then there are people that stand steadfastly on the baseline and defend everything in a kind of boring kind of way. They’re not McEnroe, you know, they’re not. They’re bjorn Borg. You know, they’re kind of Boris, they’re Djokovic. They’re dull to watch, but they are really good at what they do. And that’s what Starmer is. He’s at doing off the cuff stuff because he’s not a stand up comedian. And that’s the thing, is that the reports on Biden are like the newspaper reports on Starmer, which make you think that in order to be a good politician and a good governor of a country and a good manager of the economy and the human rights for your citizens has got to be somebody that’s basically your drives in a car with offset wheels and wears a red nose and their hair goes up and their feet are big and they’ve got, you know, they entertain the crowds and all this. No, we’ve had that in the UK.

Jim: We’ve had it in the us. Ah, as well.

Mark: Yeah. They’re only interested in themselves.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Being entertaining, being, you know, I still, I still blame, JFK, you know, being beautiful and charismatic and a rock star. You don’t need to be. And Ronald Reagan to a certain extent, you don’t know. And sports and I guess you don’t need to be that to be a effective politician, an effective representative of the people. Yeah. Actually, you know, after 14 years of clowns and entitled buffoons, you need somebody that’s good at spreadsheets.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: That’s what we want in the UK. You know, that. That kind of thing. the US lucked out with Obama, who was cool and, charismatic and a very good manager of the country.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: And, you know, it advanced a lot of things. He was and was just very cool. And that’s despite. Despite the fact that politics is showbiz for ugly people. That’s, that’s the, the thing about politics is when occasionally you get somebody who is charismatic and could be on television. Boris and Trump, I think the world of politics thinks, yay, at last. Somebody who isn’t a spreadsheet nerd with one side of his face longer than the other and strange hair.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Michael Fabricant, I’m looking at you. It’s, you know, that, that politics just goes. It is brilliant. And the, the publicity wing of any political party, which are the newspapers, Murdoch, for fuck’s sake. They are interested in people that sell newspapers that are, good looking on the telly or, or funny or make.

Jim: The headline or outrageous people.

Mark: Or outrageous people. People that make the headlines aren’t, ah, good policymakers.

Jim: No.

Mark: If you make the headlines as a politician, it’s mainly because you’re about to. You have been caught doing something that means you’re about to be fired or. Yeah.

Jim: You’re going to be reading out a statement next to your wife.

Mark: Yeah. I’m going to spend more time with my family.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: You know, the revolver is metaphorically being slid across the table towards you.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Yes. Yeah.

Jim: So, all those reasons for, riding with Biden were true.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: The day after the debate, m and they are even more true following the supreme court decision in the immunity case.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Which, I was, I was on holiday when it came through and I knew, like, which, because they left it till the very last day and announced that it was going to be on that, on that day on.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: And, and what time it would be coming out. So I kind of had a look at it, and initially when I looked at the kind of headline of it and the outline, I thought, okay, well, this is pretty much what we said. This is.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Because the, the top line information is that, core presidential powers are immune. there’s more official acts that have some immunity, and private acts aren’t immune. And that is how we described what would probably happen based on the oral arguments. When we talked about that, because that was how the justices seemed to be responding. They were like, okay, they were exploring with the two lawyers about, okay, what are the core presidential powers and the things that only the president can do. they have to have some kind of immunity and so on. I read that and I was like, okay, well, that’s pretty much what we thought. It’s not great, but it doesn’t really change very much. And then when I looked a bit more into it, I noticed that everyone was freaking the fuck out, and I thought I maybe there’s more to this.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And then when I looked even more into it, I realized that they define those various powers pretty fucking vaguely. So that, yeah, most things can be pushed into the more, more likely to be official acts category.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: The fact that core powers have absolute immunity means that, for example, commanding the armed, services is something which, no matter what you do with them, no matter what you tell them to do, you can never be prosecuted for anything you tell them to do.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Like, for example, a military coup, or assassinating your political rivals, violating posse comet artists, and putting troops in the streets to, to tamp down insurrection or protests against you, things like that, you know. Yeah, those are absolutely trifling. Yeah. So m. That’s not great. And obviously, the fact that official acts go out towards the outer perimeter of what might be considered an official act, but are never defined. They talk about a number of things that are official acts in the ruling, but never mention a thing that isn’t an official act. They just vaguely define things so that you could kind of see if there’s any possibility that it could be an official act. It probably is. And those things, ah, have presumptive immunity, so it’s not impossible for prosecutors to get around that. But essentially, the way you would need to get around it is show that it could never have any impact on the work of the president if you prosecute that, which is tricky, given that you have to predict the future in order to do that.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: yeah. And then there’s the fact that, yes, private acts have no presumed immunity, but you cannot use anything that does have either absolute or presumed immunity evidence when prosecuting private acts.

Mark: Mm

Jim: Yeah. The thing which, which, Chief Justice Roberts brought up with John Sauer, Trump’s lawyer, kind of out of nowhere, he said, in oral arguments. So, you know, this kind of feels like it. It’s pointless to make these official acts immune unless you also stop them from being used in. As evidence when you’re, you know, in. In prosecutions. And do you think that’s right? And of course, Trump’s lawyer went, oh, yeah, yeah, we think.

Mark: Yeah, course.

Jim: And, so that means that if Trump, for example, or any, any president. Let’s not assume Trump.

Mark: Yeah, any president. There won’t be any president after this because he. President for life. Yeah.

Jim: If any president took a bribe for a pardon and. And did it, the, not the way that the supreme Court have just made legal, but the other way, still illegal, where they took the money and then pardoned someone, you could, you could bring in evidence about money changing hands, but you couldn’t mention that it was in response to a pardon because the pardon is an official act. In fact, it’s corporate, core power of the president. So that’s absolutely immune. So you can’t mention that there was a pardon when trying to prosecute him for taking a bribe in return for a pardon.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So you. So essentially that makes that non prosecutable as well.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: The other aspect is you can’t question at all the motive or intent of the president in doing something that is completely out.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So if, he does a thing officially.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: The only reason for doing it is for his own political aim, for example, withholding aid from Ukraine.

Mark: Right.

Jim: If he’s doing that in order to get dirt on his political rival.

Mark: Yeah. You can’t mention the fact that he’s getting dirt on his political rough.

Jim: There’s nothing, nothing you can’t, you can mention. I mean, I don’t know what you could mention there because you can’t. You can’t question his motive. So you can’t say why he did it and you can’t, in that instance, say what he did because withholding aid from a foreign country would be an official act. So you can’t, you can’t say what he did or why he did or.

Mark: Why he said it. Blood.

Jim: So this is why I said King Donald first.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: I mean, we just had America’s birthday. It was just July the fourth.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And the whole thing was about getting away from tyrannical kings that you couldn’t hold to account.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And that’s what they’re doing, that they have, they have created that system again. They have created a system where someone who’s in charge can do whatever the fuck they want and there’s nothing you can do about it. And notice that Republicans are not freaking out about the possibility of Biden doing any of this stuff.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Because they know he won’t.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: They know he’s not going to do.

Mark: Any of this shit because it’s un american.

Jim: Because we don’t do that shit on our side.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: Yeah, but, but we are freaking out that Trump will definitely do this the very first chance he gets because he’s, oh, yeah. Constantly talking about the shit he’s gonna do when he gets the chance. He’s constantly saying how he’s gonna go after his political rivals and lock them up.

Mark: But that was the entire point of populating the supreme Court with absolutely his people. Either he’s really smart and plays, playing the long game insofar as he could see how the system, yeah, he could see how that was probably banned. It’s the equivalent of Dominic Cummings who could see how the system works and, and therefore, and that the system is too large and old and based on gentlemanly agreements to deal with a nimble, rule, breaker. And that’s, you know, if only Trump was a nimble rule breaker. He’s just a, ah, ignorant.

Jim: Yeah, see that, that’s the, that’s the thing is that he hasn’t exactly held back from committing the crimes when he, when he didn’t have an expectation of immunity. So what the fuck is he going to be like?

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: When he’s in a position where it, where, you know, there isn’t any possibility of consequence. So that’s great.

Mark: Yeah, that’s, yeah. And finally, so finally some things we really don’t have time to talk about.

Jim: If the Supreme Court had any sense, well, they wouldn’t have made most of the rulings they made last week, but.

Jim: They would have hidden some of the bad ones better. I understand why they left the immunity ruling until the last minute just before they ran away to their heavily beflagged summer homes. And nazi funded rvs. But if they’d released it a few days earlier, maybe everyone would have been too busy despairing over the death of the rule of law to notice that the court had overturned Chevron deference, made bribery legal, and redefined the word otherwise to narrow January 6 prosecutions. These were all six three decisions, and I bet you can’t guess which six justices agreed when I tell you what the cases were about. Chevron deference was a 40 year old precedent that allowed actual experts at federal agencies to use their judgment when creating regulations based on ambiguous laws. The court basically said, fuck the experts. Judges are the right ones to decide on that stuff. And a judge in Mississippi immediately cited the decision in a ruling that the Department of Health and Human Services was wrong when they protected transgender Americans from discrimination when seeking health care. In Snyder v. Us, the court ruled that bribery doesn’t count if you don’t get the payment until after you’ve done the official act. So if, for example, a hypothetical Supreme Court justice were to rule in someone’s favor, and then later that person bought and renovated the justices mother’s house, that’s not a bribe, even though it’s functionally indistinguishable from a bribe. It’s just a gift to express gratitude. And, who could possibly have a problem with that? And finally, in Fisher v. Us, the court examined the obstruction of Justice Law 1512 C, which very clearly covers anyone who tampers with documents in order to fuck with an official proceeding. Paraphrasing, but the next bits, an exact quote or otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding or attempts to do so. To any normal person, obstructing via document tampering or otherwise pretty clearly means or not via document tampering, but to the howler monkey contingent of the Supreme Court, it means or other document based shit we didn’t mention in the paragraph about documents. So in summary, fuck the Supreme Court.

Mark: At a state board of education meeting, Oklahoma State Superintendent Republic instruction Ryan Walters said, the Bible is one of the most foundational documents used for the Constitution and the birth of our country. Okay, yeah, you might say, but the Constitution doesn’t contain any reference to God, Jesus, or Christianity. In a deliberate attempt to recognise the division of church and state, and also to demonstrate the inclusivity at the heart of the founding of the United States and as an acknowledgement of the freedoms that the new world offered to people fleeing from religious persecution and segregation in other parts of the old world. And, sure, it’s a useful reference point to see where the drivers that, inform the creation of actual modern laws comes from. But no, that’s not enough for the board of education. They have decreed by law that every classroom in the state from grades five through twelve must have a Bible and all teachers must teach from the Bible in the classroom, and all public classrooms must display the Ten Commandments. When confronted on CNN by the fact that the US is made up of many, many peoples who observe many, many faiths, and even within the christian faith, there are many, many different interpretations and practices. Co author of the law, Lauren Ventrella, started ranting about how this was typical of CNN and how much was the presenter, asking, you know, grown up questions that themselves might have derived from Martin Luther. Nailing up such questions on doors of churches was being paid by CNN to discredit this law and by implication, the little baby Jesus himself. Naturally, Interfaith Alliance, a national organization that seeks to protect religious freedoms, also pointed out that true religious freedom means ensuring that no one religious group is allowed to impose their viewpoint on all Americans. And oddly, in the same Oklahoma, their Supreme Court blocked an effort recently to establish the first publicly funded religious charter school in the country. Under Oklahoma law, a charter school is a public school, wrote Justice James R. Winchester for the court. As such a charter school must be non sectarian. However, St. Isadore will evangelise the catholic faith as part of its school curriculum was sponsored by the state. And naturally, of course, the other author of the ten commandments law, state superintendent of public instruction Ryan Waters, said that had been the worst decision that the Supreme Court had ever made. I’m thinking appointing waters might be up there, though. When asked, what if the teaching staff or pupils or parents who practice a different faith or no faith at all have something to say about the inappropriateness of such a retrograde, non inclusive law ruling that the ten Commandments that’s been displayed in classrooms, Lauren Ventrella replied, well, don’t look at it. Which kind of defeats the point of it being there, doesn’t it? Also frighteningly echoes the don’t look up campaign somewhat how Christianity’s spread so far with people sticking their heads in the sand for so long, I just don’t know. Oh yeah. Do ye war? Which I guess is also echoed in the bill writers. Yeah, bring it on. In the face of opposition, legislators discount.

Jim: Nosferatu Rudy Giuliani has been disbarred in his own hometown of New York. The court wrote in its judgment that Giuliani flagrantly misused his position and baselessly attacked and undermined the integrity of this country’s electoral process. In so doing, the respondent not only deliberately violated some of the most fundamental tenets of the legal profession, but he also actively contributed to the national strife that has followed the 2020 presidential election, for which he is entirely unrepentant.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: Naturally, Rudy blamed Democrats for all this. What stood out to me was the headline in the Independent, which described it as Rudy hits rock bottom. Which is pretty incredible for a man who just in the past four years, accidentally held a press conference in the parking lot of a landscaping business between a crematorium and a dildo store. Sweated hair dye on stage, appeared in a Borat film with his hands down his pants, was accused of sexual assault by a former employee, and was ordered to pay $148 million for defaming two election workers. Amazingly, despite all that, the claim that he’d hit rock bottom was premature, as the very next day it was announced that Mike Lindell had hired Rudy to present a daily show on his shitty website, frankspeech.com, comma, right in between Lou Dobbs and whichever guest host is standing in for Steve Banham while he spends four months in prison.

Mark: Ooh, thanks, speech.com. have to get on there. The south park of X legalise humour, support this show and help fight the woke mind virus with laughter are the shouty commands around the first posting of the new norm, which looks like a brilliant parody of what a low budget flash animation would be if it featured Archie, bunker star characters taking the piss out of what they would deem to be woke culture by cramming in as many red mis descending tropes in between laugh track bursts of artificial hilarity. Except you then have to go back a step or two and realize it isn’t so shit. It’s funny. It’s just shit trying to be the same shape as funny. The handrail to steady you in this maelstrom of Doublethink is that it’s been created by singularly unfunny turning point USA event whore and Blaze tv show Dave Rubin, who gave up trying to do stand up when he discovered that you have to be funny for five minutes at a time or even just be funny at all. Getting a grip on that helps you reorient and say, oh, phew, so it isn’t me. It also explains the somewhat pleading tone of the please please, like this thing I made. I’ve included Elon Musk at the end, as well as the words thank God for Elon Musk and his shitpost memes x is the home of free speech in the closing musical number because it seems not even Fox Nation or Blaze TV will contribute support be associated with what looks like a bad, cheap and doomed to fail Kickstarter thing. When the replies to the expost such as this sucks. It’s like a cartoon designed for 50 year olds that revolves around a constant onslaught. Facebook tier cringe political references that are too explicitly obvious to be funny gets almost three times as many likes as the original post. You probably ought to try and read the room and quietly write Alan Smithy at the end of the credits and withdraw. But this is the right we’re talking about, and if we’ve learned anything, it’s not only that they don’t do funny, they don’t do humility and acceptance and just keep on shouting woke, God damn it. Until somebody either grimaces, nods and walks away or leans in and switches off their life support altogether. Now oh my God, they killed Kenny.

Jim: Just when you’re struggling to decide between the old guy and the psychopathic convicted felon adjudicated rapisthe and thinking maybe it’s time to vote third party, along comes a headline like RFK Junior denies eating a dog while sidestepping sexual assault allegations in Vanity Fair article what? And hopefully makes you think again, yes, RFK junior’s having another normal one, with Vanity Fair printing allegations by a former babysitter that he groped her in his kitchen in the late nineties. Kennedy didn’t actually deny the story, instead choosing to dismiss it as part of his very, very rambunctious youth, which is undercut a little by the fact he was 44 at the time. He did, however, deny eating a dog, claiming the picture in Vanity Fair of him eating a dog, which was taken the same year a worm ate part of his brain, in fact, shows a barbecued goat carcass and reassuring news nation that there’s two things I wouldn’t eat. Well, three. I wouldn’t eat a human, I wouldn’t eat a monkey and I wouldn’t eat a dog. Which is weird because nobody asked about humans and monkeys.

Mark: Exactly.

Jim: And now I kind of think maybe he’s eaten human and monkey. I know.

Mark: Which of the three did he add last? Oh no, I say there’s three. Yeah, he added dog on the end. No.

Jim: Having dealt with those campaign issues to everyone’s satisfaction, he ended the week by announcing on Twitter that he wouldn’t take sides on 911 while simultaneously taking the side of people who don’t believe the official story.

Mark: What the fu. That’s a brilliant headline, isn’t it? When you’re setting yourself up, as a dictator, emperor in the vein of Nero or a caligula, perhaps. Of course, you’ll need to have your vanquished foe, the targets of your disdain, duke it out for the entertainment of your subjects to a, keep them feeling good about the fact that there are people below them in the pecking order, that they can continue to blame for everything, and thus be distracted from blaming you for all the shit that you, as emperor are doing or the governing that you’re not doing, and b, remain in fear that it could well be them someday being exploited at the whim of a thumb. Up or down? Bread and circuses. Bread and circuses. Not that Trump would ever consider such a grossly inhumane and heinous thing that. Oh, wait, he did. Yeah, course he did. He claims in another rambling rally speech, campaign hustings, aptly enough, to christian conservatives in Philadelphia, that he told his friend Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, that he should start a spin off competition featuring migrants as part of his riff on restricting immigration. Dana, I have an idea. Why don’t you set up a migrant league of fighters and have your regular league of fighters, and then you have the champion of your league. These are the greatest fighters in the world. Fight the champion of the migrants. I think the migrant guy might win. That’s how tough they are. He didn’t like the idea too much. Later, at a, post fight news conference in Saudi Arabia, Dana confirmed, I saw everybody going crazy online. But, yeah, he did say it. Stephen Chung, communications director for the Trump campaign, dismissed concerns to the Washington Post over the degrading comparisons of migrants. These elitists are the same people who stupidly think that combat sport is human cockfighting, showing their ignorance to the sweet science of mixed martial arts. I think the word dismissed is doing a lot of work there. The airy dehumanisation of the other here in the form of immigrants, is, of course, the staple of all wannabe and actual be dictators, as is the lamentation of persecution against people you’re wanting to side with you in this case, christians. That Trump claims the Biden administration is enacting, and in an attempt to liken himself, perhaps, to the toughness of the gladiatorial spirit with which he shares, saying, together we stood up to the communists, Marxists and fascists to defend religious liberty like no other president has ever done before. He also added, and I have the wounds all over my body. I take a lot of wounds. I can tell you more than I suspect any prison, ever. Yeah, Roosevelt might have something to say about that. Perhaps. Garfield, McKinley, Lincoln, Kennedy, for fuck’s sake.

Jim: I feel like I’ve learned a lot about Stephen Chung just by his use of the phrase the sweet science of mixed martial arts. I know. I feel like that’s told me everything I need to know about.

Mark: Yeah, Stephen.

Jim: Chuck.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: We’ve yet to see exactly how Florida judge Eileen Cannon will interpret the immunity decision in Trump’s favor. Presumably she’ll find that stealing the nation’s secrets is one of the core powers of the president and refusing to give them back for over a year. Hiding them from the FBI and your own lawyer and showing them to random journalists is an official act. But we did learn last month that when the case was assigned to her last June, 2 more experienced federal judges advised her to recuse herself. Admittedly, even a judge who had handled five cases in court would count as more experience than Eileen Cannon. But one of them was Cecilia Altonaga, the chief judge of the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida, who told Cannon it would look bad for her to oversee the trial after she was overturned by the 11th Circuit for decisions that unduly favoured Trump. However, this accusal led to a recusal refusal which bamboozled the chief judge but made perfect sense in hindsight to everyone whos been paying attention to exactly how little cannon knows or cares about the actual law. So shes still there, slow playing the case until Trump pardons himself or dies, or she finally does enough to get removed. At which point shell probably get a job on Fox.

Mark: Oddly, since the 5 July, somehow it feels calmer, more sensible. Grown up. Even in the UK, England flags don’t feel quite so divisive. Andy Murray made us proud to be scottish and we can all have a bit of a break from shouting. Woke at each other from the polar ends of the formerly known as the Twitter sphere because, well, what can I tell you? The dreams come true. Rather, because we had a general election last confused and Labour won by a mahousive majority, 411 seats to the Tories 121, and many of the Tory big beasts lost not only their place in charge, but also lost their seats. Their jobs as MP’s entirely. Particularly enjoyable were Jacob Rees Mogg, who disappeared into a puff of smoke as the dawns rays struck him and returned to the oblivion preserve. His vampiric compatriots. Others included grant 14 jobs in 14 years. Shaps Jillian does anyone say what a fucking good job I’ve done. Keegan Liz, outlived by a lettuce truss and penny Poundland logo outfit wearing mordant. Not only did the toys not retain the many constituencies they gained in 2019, they came third to Nigel Farage’s Reform party. A disgruntled former Tory MPDev who bemoaned the fact that there are now no Tory MP’s at all in the whole of Wales, said that the Tories weren’t right wing enough. This echoed the thoughts of many in the Conservatives that reform had taken half their votes, which is probably about right. Alternatively, of course, it could be that the Tories weren’t centrist enough and that the centrist votes went to Labour. So Keir Starmer had indeed managed to carry the Ming vase across the tight rope for the whole six week campaign, and cleverly kept out of the way of the Tories cocking it all up by themselves. It is possible to win a match at Wimbledon just by letting your opponent commit all sorts of unforced errors, and Labour quietly stood aside while Sunak pissed off nearly everybody left, right and centre. You thought Ed Davey falling off things, out of things and into things as part of his campaign would be sufficient slapstick to distract from Sunak’s party hurtling off a cliff. But no. All his mad shenanigans actually returned the greatest increase in the number of seats for the Liberals for a hundred years, since 19 23 71. Reform got five fewer than the number of individual mp’s running independently. But given the state of the media’s apparent hunger for the frog faced races, Farage will doubtless keep getting airtime and complain about not getting any airtime whilst failing to turn up in either his constituency or the House of Commons. You came 7th out of 13, Nige. Shut the fuck up.

Jim: so that’s all the bad arguments and faulty reasoning we have time for this week. You’ll find the show notes@fallacioustrump.com and if you hear Trump say something stupid and want to ask if it’s a fallacy, our contact details are on the contact page.

Mark: If you think we’ve used a fallacy ourselves, let us know. If you had a good time, please give us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast, or simply tell one other person in person about how much they’d like our podcast and you can support the show@patreon.com. f. Trump just like our strawman level patrons, Colleen Lyella, Richard Thunder Hopkins, Will M. Scott Ozzy on bank, Laura Tomsick Schmootz, Mark Reiche and Amber RBU Cannon, who told us when we met her at QED, we could just call her Amber, though another listener recognised her at QED last year because we keep using a full name all the time. And our, true Scotsman level patrons, Sharon Robinson, Renee Zed, Melissa Saitek, Stephen Bickle, Janet Yueto, Andrew Halk, and our, team top patron, Kaz Tui. Thank you so much for your continued patronage. It’s really very much appreciated. Thank you.

Jim: You can connect with those awesome people as well as us and other listeners in the Facebook group@facebook.com. groups fallacioustrump.

Mark: All music is by the outburst and, boys used with permission. So until next time on fallacious Trump, we’ll leave the last word to King Donald. I. That’s right.

Donald Trump: Go home to mommy.

Speaker A: Bye.