04 Nov Appeal to Fame – FT#184
Show Notes
The Appeal to Fame Fallacy occurs when someone equates fame with being trustworthy
Trump
We started out by discussing this clip of Trump defending his TikTok deal:
Then we looked at this clip of Trump lying about a very famous man he talked to:
And finally we talked about this clip of Trump unable to tell a tattoo from Photoshop:
Mark’s British Politics Corner
Mark talked about this clip of Liam Gallagher praising Tony Blair:
Then he looked at this clip of Elton John:
Followed by these ones of Nigel Farage and his voters:
Fallacy in the Wild
In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from BoJack Horseman:
Then we discussed this clip from The Rocketeer:
And we finished up with this clip from Drunk History:
Fake News
Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:
Mark got it wrong this week, and is still on 51%!
QED was not a logical fallacy
We talked about the final QED.
The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about
- Back in July Trump said that his ridiculously huge ballroom wouldn’t interfere with the current White House building, and that it would pay total respect to the existing building, but it turns out this guy’s not to be trusted. The building probably felt a bit disrespected when its entire East Wing was torn down, and the American people are also a bit miffed, with more than 54% saying they somewhat or strongly disapprove of the demolition, compared to only 28% who approve. Of course, it wouldn’t be Trump if he didn’t do an unpopular thing in the shittiest possible way, so he also neglected to go through the legally required public review process, which would have required consultation and review by the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts. Thanks to the inherent swampiness of the Trump Administration, it probably wouldn’t have mattered much, as the current chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission is Will Scharf, who also happens to currently be employed as Trump’s staff secretary. Fortunately, Trump informed us that we’re all just overreacting, because the East Wing was “a very small building” and “it was never thought of as being much”, Stephen Miller called it a “cheaply built add-on structure” and the official press release from the White House described this as just the latest instance of manufactured outrage, [where] unhinged leftists and their Fake News allies are clutching their pearls over President Donald J. Trump’s visionary addition of a grand, privately funded ballroom to the White House”, followed by a list of other times Presidents made changes to the People’s House over the years. Notably, none of them involved destroying large parts of the house, nor did any of them plan to create gaudy, bling palaces where oblivious billionaires can hold decadent parties while their lowly subjects struggle to buy groceries. Let’s just hope that he doesn’t live to see the gold leaf encrusted shit mansion completed.
- Even when I was a kid I kinda knew whether a song was bad or not – I knew something was off with the cover versions of good songs that appeared on the budget Top of The Pops records – that traded on their association with the famous TV show of the same name even though they had nothing to do with it. But when I saw that Jim had linked me to the story about friend-of-the-show My Son Hunter “actor” Laurence Fox had released a Charlie Kirk tribute song I kinda whooped! I’m beginning to think my ear, or nose (throat?) for a good song might be waning? Sounding like the quiet bit that you get at the start of a heavy metal number, without ever going into the big thrashy noisy bit, it has fabulous lyrics of course ‘From a single crack of a shot was when your talking just stopped’ – ‘Your life was beautifully made, you came unarmed, was betrayed,’ and the chorus is sublime “‘Charlie is his name, his words struck chords of those who heard so much they sent him to his grave in fear of the power of his words.” Now I don’t know whether Laurence had studiously attended to everything Charlie ever said or whether he is a shameless grifter trying to worm his skinny greasy pole of an excuse for a body into Trump’s affectionate orbit, that’s not for me to say – (ah yes it is – yes he is!) but I suspect ol’ Foxy a) didn’t write this, 2) doesn’t know the rule about keeping it real and truthful and emotionally honest or c) paid no attention to Elton John’s entreaties and just shoved some context into AI and “sang” the first thing it spat out into a cassette recorder. Wise up Larry this is how SkyNet will get us in the end, convince you you’re a musician, make us think your fame as Inspector Morse’s sidekick’s sidekick is enough to convince others of the truth of your “singer” entry in Spotlight two universally panned albums notwithstanding! And then get some schmuck to release it. I’m all for the self-publishing Spotify Bandcamp thing but surely this is one of the very things the online safety act was created to prevent!
- We talked last time about the joyful sight of the Pentagon Press Corps standing up for the first amendment and walking out rather than signing a pledge of fealty to the drunken former TV presenter who somehow now commands the armed forces. But of course, that walkout left plenty of empty seats in the Pentagon press rooms, and someone had to fill those seats, so on October 22nd Pentagon Spokesperson Sean Parnell announced a new press corps, made up of “a broad spectrum of new media outlets and independent journalists.” Quite a few of the words in that sentence are either already in invisible scare quotes, or have recently had their meanings officially updated by some kind of Executive Order. “Journalists”, for example, and “broad”. The spectrum inhabited by the outlets could in fact, hardly be narrower, since it is made up entirely of people who are prepared to only report what proven and practiced liars with White Supremacist tattoos want them to report. Among the bootlicking sycophants who signed on are Gateway Pundit, The Daily Signal, Real America’s Voice, Tim Pool’s Timcast, RedState, Mike Lindell’s LindellTV, and Frontlines, the media arm of Turning Point USA. It’s going great so far, with newly accredited Substack The Washington Reporter really holding Secretary Pete’s feet to the fire with an editorial that includes the line “the guidelines are common sense and the media freakout is another example of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Our only concern is that the Department of War has waited until October to implement these new changes.” No doubt in months to come we’ll see some tough reporting from the press corps, like new members the National Pulse, whose coverage of Hegseth’s team leaking war plans to a journalist over Signal earlier in the year used the headline “The Atlantic’s ‘War Plan’ Leak Story ‘Exposes’ Team Trump as Thoughtful, Competent, and Ruthless”.
- Trump’s plan to double the size of the ICE workforce has met a foe more powerful than any activist group. It is decimating new recruits at the agency’s training academy in Georgia. It is the ICE personal-fitness test. I suspect when he said double the size of the ICE force he probably meant get people who eat as many hamburgers as him. To pass, recruits must do 15 push-ups and 32 sit-ups, and run 1.5 miles in 14 minutes. More than a third have failed the physical so far, somewhat impeding the agency’s plan to hire, train, and deploy 10,000 deportation officers by January. The recruitment criteria have been relaxed to boost recruitment but even with the minimum requirements many applicants are simply lying about their physical abilities on the application forms. Now from what I’ve seen ICE has been all about turning up in person, and thinking that the recruiting office wouldn’t be able to see the apparent differences between the adonis they have on paper and the Barney Gumble physique that actually stands up when they call their name out for me might sound some alarms.Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin in a statement said that the one-third failure rate reflected only “a subset of candidates in initial basic academy classes,” and not all new hires. She said DHS expects to fill 85 percent of new deportation-officer positions with experienced law-enforcement officials whom they can fast-track. Although they will not be required to pass a fitness test at the ICE academy, “they remain subject to medical, fitness, and background requirements,” Some of the fresh hires have dropped out of the academy after flunking exams on immigration law and Fourth Amendment limits on officers’ search authority – lets hope those are not background requirements – let’s face it if they were we wouldn’t have the guy in the oval office we do have! “We are moving fitness checks earlier in the training sequence to improve efficiency and accountability—not to lower standards,” added McLaughlin. The new recruits are the only ones who have to complete the fitness test. Retirees and currently employed law-enforcement officers can “self-certify” without being tested. Dammit if only Trump was signing up to run now!
- Trump is still pissed about the whole Nobel Peace Prize thing, so when he isn’t threatening to go to war with Venezuela or Nigeria, backtracking on sending missiles to Ukraine, or propping up war criminals who keep breaking ceasefires he claims he negotiated, he’s instructing the Department of War to start testing America’s nukes. The instruction, which took the form of a Truth on Donald’s bullshit social media network, read like this: “The United States has more Nuclear Weapons than any other country. This was accomplished, including a complete update and renovation of existing weapons, during my First Term in office. Because of the tremendous destructive power, I HATED to do it, but had no choice! Russia is second, and China is a distant third, but will be even within 5 years. Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP” He spelled his name right, but most of the rest of it is wrong. The US does not have the most nukes, that’s Russia, China aren’t five years away from catching up. In fact, if they reach their maximum projections over the next ten years, they’ll still only have a third of the USs current stockpile. Trump did not spend his first term updating and renovating nukes any more than any other president, in fact he ended his first term with fewer in the stockpile than he started with. And most importantly, Russia and China are not testing nuclear weapons. The only nuclear weapon tests so far this century were carried out by Trump’s good buddy in North Korea. China stopped testing in 1996, and Russia in 1990. Russia have conducted missile tests without any nuclear warheads, but the US totally does that all the time anyway, and if we’re relying on Trump understanding the difference, we should probably all start practicing ducking and covering.
- When you’re a billionaire – I’m sure you’ll all be able to speak from similar experience – when you’re a billionaire surely you can simply ignore what anyone thinks of you – you’re a fuckin billionaire you dont have to pay any attention, hell you don’t have to pay any taxes! But of course fragile weird-faced master-race delusional Dr Strangelove arm-spasm tribute actor Elon Musk can’t let anything lie. Least of all the truth. He’s taken issue with the factophiles at Wikipedia being all independent and objective and truthy and venerated and revered and supported and defended as the last bastion of common sense in the current fucked-up by the likes of disinf-peddlers Musk-Bezos-ZuckerTrump world. Resistant to any overtures on Muskies part to buy the thing, he’s decided to launch his own version that he is touting as a less biased alternative – i.e. One that agrees with everything he thinks and says and reflects the fantasy land he inhabits. Thankfully not call X-ipedia he’s named it Grokipedia and it reminds me of when Bill Gates tried to create MSN – his own version of the internet cos somehow the freely accessible – well Internet Explorer sheesh! – interwoven web of independently produced home-grown sites of interest wasn’t somehow controllable enough. And we all know what happened there; it failed and we all benefit now from the joy of having an online environment free from the influence of corporates and billionaires determining and tracking our every move and trying to sell us stuff as a result – oh er hang on I think I may have inadvertently typed internet into Grokipedia!
- As we teeter on the brink of this government shutdown becoming the longest in US history, Trump and the other assholes he hangs around with have found various quasi-legal or just illegal ways to make sure that the troops and the masked ICE thugs still get paid. Meanwhile, they’ve done everything they possibly can to ensure that poor Americans suffer. In particular, I’m referring to the 42 million low-to-no-income Americans who rely on SNAP benefits for more than half of their monthly food budget. 83% of them are either children, elderly, or people with disabilities. They’re also disproportionately more likely to be Black, Hispanic or Native American. What I’m saying, is you can see why Republicans are keen to make their lives harder, and ideally kill some of them. Democrats tried to advance a plan to fund SNAP despite the shutdown, but Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune rejected it, saying “We’re not going to let them pick winners and losers.” Of course, while this shutdown is dragging on, it’s not the first one, and SNAP benefits have continued during every single other shutdowns since they were introduced as food stamps in the 30’s. Trump’s own Department of Agriculture even had a 55 page contingency plan on their website, showing how to keep SNAP running during a shutdown, but then someone, I’m guessing Stephen Miller, since this seems like the kind of thing he’d do, whispered to Trump that they could just refuse to feed hungry children for a bit of a laugh, and they promptly deleted the plan from the website and pretended it would be illegal for them to fund the program some other way, and you know what a stickler for the law Trump is – he’d love to help, but his hands are tied! 25 States Attorneys General sued the Trump Administration to force them to release the funds, and last week U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani ruled that the administration must disburse SNAP payments, saying “Congress has put money in an emergency fund for an emergency and it’s hard for me to understand how this isn’t an emergency.” The deadline imposed by the judge ended just a few hours ago, and the government had announced they will pay half the usual amount, but that it might take weeks or even up to several months for the payments to go out. I don’t think that’s in the spirit of the judge’s ruling, so we’ll be watching to see what happens next, but meanwhile, I’d advise watching the Hunger Games films for a few pointers on how to get an advantage over the other tributes.
- In British politics this week it seems to be all about money – ah no wait that’s every week really – anyway Kemi BadEnoch revealed on the anniversary of her taking up the office of Tory Party leader that the party nearly ran out of money as their donors dropped them in droves after their woeful defeat in the last general election. I wonder how they persuaded donors to stay, never mind giving them money, might it have to do with moving further to the right and stirring the “immigrants are to blame” pot in order to deflect attention away from say billionaire party-donors who can write that off as a tax exempt kind of thing? Rachel Reeves got berated by Nigel Farage for possibly having to break a self-imposed-but-no-one-really-cares-anyway red lines vis a vis raising tax. Of course she’d be raising income tax on the working population and not the people like say billionaire party-donors who Green Leader Zak Polanksi reminds us earn more overnight whilst they sleep than entire cities of working people earn in their working lifetimes. Farage then went on, probably to blame the immigrants, for the fact that he wouldn’t be able to effect the massive £90 billion tax cut he’d touted off ReFuk’s beermat-scribbled ‘manifesto’. Either someone had whispered Liz Truss in his frog-like ear or many of his voters had seen Led By Donkey’s latest video in Clacton showing that Nige had earned £1.1m from his 12 other jobs since he’d been elected as an MP to represent their interests. Meanwhile Jeremy Corbyn will be appearing on screen as the Wizard of Izlington in an upcoming production of the Panto in North London, though next door’s Keir Starmer was less than convincing at his audition for Baron Hardupp.
You can now buy Jim’s book, 2000 Mules and One Big Lie: A Stubborn Conspiracy Theory, and you can buy all our t-shirts, mugs, hats and more at our TeePublic Store
Create your podcast today! #madeonzencastr
