22 May Definist Fallacy – FT#193
Show Notes
The Definist Fallacy occurs when someone deliberately redefines a term in a way that’s favorable to their own argument (and is probably a stretch of the real definition)
Trump
We started out by discussing this clip of Trump redefining profit:
Then we talked about this clip of Trump not knowing what temperament means:
And finally we looked at this clip of Trump saying the quiet part out loud:
Mark’s British Politics Corner
Mark talked about these varying definitions of socialism:
Fallacy in the Wild (Sting: George Harrison – What is Life?)
In the Fallacy in the Wild, we looked at this clip from Friends:
Then we discussed this clip from Babylon 5:
And finally, we talked about this clip of Andy Ngo on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast:
Fake News
Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:
Mark got it wrong this week and is still on 48%!
Suing yourself is not a logical fallacy
We talked about the “settlement” in Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS.
The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about
- First off, we have some updates to news stories we covered last episode. The reflecting pool enshittification which was going to cost $1.8 million and take one week is now going to cost $13.1 million, and Trump says it should be finished by July 4, “our target date”, which is more than eight weeks after the project started. Despite previously referring to the contractor as his own “pool guy”, who had worked on his golf club swimming pools, he now claims “I didn’t give out the contract, ‘Interior’ did, to a contractor I did not know, and have never used before.” Maybe this selective amnesia is due to the budget and schedule overruns, or maybe it’s because internal Department of the Interior documents report that bubbles and small holes are appearing in one of the waterproof coatings, and the unevenly applied paint has left the pool mottled in various shades of American Flag Blue. There’s also been concern that Atlantic Industrial Coatings, the non-union firm that was awarded the no-bid contract despite never having worked with the federal government before, may be ignoring the safety of their workers in the rush to get the job finished within seven weeks of the original deadline. Meanwhile the $400 million of taxpayer money we told you Republicans were seeking for Trump’s new ballroom ballooned to a billion dollars, which I can only assume Lindsey Graham announced with his pinkie held up to his mouth. Fortunately, the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth McDonough, officially stepped in to cockblock the GOP’s attempt to sneak it in as part of a budget reconciliation package because apparently a führerbunker with a fancy top floor is outside the scope of such a bill. And finally, Kash Patel, keen to prove that the Atlantic made up all that reporting of his drunken shenanigans, has been ordering polygraphs for more than a dozen current and former members of his security detail to find out who leaked the definitely not true stories to Atlantic reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick just before she made them up, which he’ll totally prove in court. Fitzpatrick stands by her reporting, saying that since the article came out, even more people have come forward to corroborate the details. In fact, after he sued her, nevertheless she persisted, publishing a whole new story about Kash’s preferred souvenir that he hands out to people lucky enough to have met him – personalized bottles of Woodford Reserve Kentucky bourbon, engraved with the words “Kash Patel, FBI Director”, and an FBI shield held in the talons of an eagle. Kash has reportedly used DoJ aircraft to haul cases of this narcissism-juice across the globe, handing them out to civilians and staff alike. One bottle was even left behind in an Olympic locker room in Milan, the same trip where his beer-chugging antics reportedly infuriated teetotaler Trump. An FBI spokeslackey claimed it was just part of a long-standing Bureau tradition, saying “Senior Bureau officials have long exchanged commemorative items in formal gift settings consistent with ethics rules”. However, when a former senior FBI official was asked if any previous director had ever handed out personally branded liquor, he literally burst out laughing. In March, Kash took a case of his bourbon to a Quantico seminar where UFC fighters trained FBI agents in mixed martial arts, which is a weird sentence. When a single bottle went missing, Kash allegedly “lost his mind,” threatening to polygraph and prosecute his own staff over the theft. While regular FBI agents face a strict zero-tolerance policy for alcohol on the job, the Director is using the federal apparatus to protect his stash. Legal counsel for current whistleblowers are now giving agents a bizarre new piece of advice for dealing with the nation’s top law enforcement official: “Run from him.”
- Trump loves golf – he loves golfers, he loves Arnold Palmer’s weiner! But he only loves golfers that pay him to belong to one of his golf courses – Jeffrey Epstein please stand up! And he loves balls and ballrooms more, so much so the debris from the demolition of the East Wing has been piled up on the nearby 100 year-old public East Potomac Golf Links. Like some huge inside out bunker 30,000 cubic yards of soil and detritus looms over the greens causing golfers to detour around piles of it. An interim report requested by the parks service from a Virginia engineering firm says the soil has tested positive for lead, chromium and other toxic metals, along with PCBs, pesticides, petroleum byproducts and other chemicals that were detected at levels above laboratory reporting limits in soil. The nonprofit DC Preservation League has sued the Trump administration arguing “the Defendants dumped a cocktail of contaminants — and despite indications of the refuse’s contents, they continued dumping it”. Trump’s Interior Department said in an email Tuesday that the soil removed from the White House “was tested multiple times, by multiple parties, and this project passed all standards set by law.” (*scoffs*) and that it is “committed to continuing the relationships we have built with the local golf communities to ensure these courses are safe, beautiful, open, affordable, enjoyable, accessible, and world-class for people living in and visiting the greatest capital city in the world.” Oddly this commitment includes the Trump administration’s plans to renovate the 105-year-old course to make it a professional-level course, including the proposed felling of a dozen or so trees. Yeah nothing says beautiful, enjoyable and accessible like dumping your shit in the neighbour’s garden and then declaring you’ll close it, chop everything down and reopen it as a members-only facility as a way to solve the problem. Will membership include a hazmat suit, geiger counter and face mask? – yeah sure in Trump branded colours of course!
- Fun fact, the US government still technically has an Office of Government Ethics. I’m guessing it’s run by three monkeys with their hands glued to different parts of their heads. Last week, they released Trump’s latest financial disclosure form, and I’m starting to think this guy might not be playing by the rules. In November, Trump launched the “Genesis Mission,” a Department of Energy initiative designed to use US supercomputers to harness AI for scientific research, and casually slash regulations for his billionaire tech backers along the way. On December 18th, Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced tech startup CoreWeave had joined the programme, and their stock shot up by almost 20%. During the week before the announcement, buried deep inside the 113-page financial disclosures, are two purchases, by Trump, of CoreWeave stock, each worth between a quarter and half a million dollars. We don’t know exactly how much, because disclosure rules only require broad ranges rather than dollar amounts. What we do know is that when he sold his CoreWeave stock the very next fucking day after the announcement, that transaction was in the $1 to 5 million range. Now you may think that sounds like the kind of felony insider trading that usually carries up to 20 years in prison, but actually, it must have just been a lucky guess, as according to a spokesperson for the Trump Organisation, “President Trump’s investment holdings are maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts independently managed by third-party financial institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions. Trades are executed and portfolios are balanced through automated investment processes and systems administered by those institutions.” But we know that wasn’t true for Thermo Fisher Scientific, a medical supply company. On March 11, Trump toured their facility in Ohio, dragging the executives onto the stage to talk about what an “incredible company” it was, and begged Big Pharma to give them contract work. He didn’t mention that the exact same day, he had personally bought between $15 and $50,000 of Thermo Fisher stock, to add to the $66 to 165,000 worth he’d already bought in the weeks leading up to his visit. We know this wasn’t an automated trade by a clairvoyant investment system because the forms explicitly marked these transactions as “UNSOLICITED.” For anyone who doesn’t speak Wall Street, that means the trade wasn’t recommended by a broker. The client demanded it themselves. That same day, Immediately after leaving Thermo Fisher, Trump flew to Kentucky and gave a speech drooling over Apple, calling them a great company, and announcing that they would be spending hundreds of billions of dollars on new plants in the US. Right on cue, the disclosures show that on that exact day, Trump made another unsolicited purchase of between a quarter and half a million dollars in Apple stock, bringing his total so far that month to between $2 and 7.2 million. He did it again with Micron, buying up to $100,000 in unsolicited stock right before calling into Fox News to declare them “one of the hottest companies.” He did it with Dell, buying at least a million unsolicited bucks in shares before literally telling a crowd in Georgia to “go out and buy a Dell computer.” He even managed to buy up to a million dollars in Nvidia stock precisely a week before his own Commerce Department magically approved chip sales to China. But don’t worry, those three ethics monkeys are on the case and Trump has already faced swift, brutal consequences related to these trades. By law, he was required to report all trades within 45 days, and he missed that window frequently, so they fined him $200.
- Airwars, a civilian harm monitor, estimated that US drone and air strikes alone killed at least 22,000 civilians – and perhaps as many as 48,000 – in the 20 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, perhaps that’s why Hegseth was clear to say that no nation in history had taken more precautions than the US to avoid civilian deaths and was full of praise for the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation and response (CHMR) program, designed to handle training and procedures critical in limiting civilian harm in theaters of war. It was created by Lloyd Austin, then defense secretary, in January 2022, under Joe Biden, following years of deadly US bombing campaigns in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. No no of course Hogsbreath wasn’t full of praise – he blamed Iranians for hiding missile launchers in civilian areas when asked why the US had bombed and killed 175 people, a majority of them children, at an all-girls school in Minab. The bombing took place the same month that Hegseth’s Pentagon had quietly dismantled that very program which it is legally required to operate in order to prevent and respond to civilian deaths in US military operations, according to its internal watchdog. While the program has not been officially canceled, the inspector general’s report said that funding had ended for a data management platform; committee meetings had halted; and many dedicated personnel had been lost or reassigned. The report, published on 13 May, points to an inflection point in February, when two senior officials – the acting under-secretary of war for policy, Elbridge Colby, and the secretary of the army, Dan Driscoll – separately proposed to Hegseth the program be cut or eliminated. One proposal recommended scrapping its action plan and its underpinning departmental instruction entirely. Then, without waiting for a response, the military began acting as if the cuts had already been approved. Later that month, the US launched strikes on Iran. The US strike on the school in Minab, occurred on 28 February – around the same time as the inspector general found that CHMR’s operations had ground to a halt. Madison Hunke, US program manager at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, said: If Iran is “any indication of the Department’s current approach to civilian harm after gutting 90% of it’s CHMR workforce, it’s hard to imagine what future US operations might look like if these programs are further degraded.” The Trump administration cut peace time funding to foreign aid affecting millions of people so why would they care about preventing deaths during war? Nobel Prize anyone?
- Some hypothetical questions have dogged philosophers for decades, or even centuries. If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? Can we ever truly know if we’re living in a simulation? The whole Ship of Theseus thing. But earlier this month, YouGov asked what may be the greatest hypothetical question of all time: Could you beat Donald Trump in a fight? For Democrats, of course, this is a fucking easy question, He’s an obese nearly-80-year-old and he’s actively decomposing. 75% of Democrats questioned said they could beat Trump. 19% said not sure, and 5% said Trump would win – I presume that 5% are currently already in hospice care. There was no box to tick to confirm that you’d bloody love to have a go, but that would have been 100%. But for Republicans, it’s a different story. MAGA folk are genetically unable to describe themselves without using the word Alpha, but if they even entertain the possibility that Trump is less physically fit than Ivan Drago, their entire worldview collapses. Sure enough, they are such monumental cucks that only 33% of Republican voting Americans are prepared to claim they could defeat Trump in a fight, and 39% reckon the wheezing lump of trans fats in a bad suit would win. The event that triggered this amazing survey was the Oval Office based signing of a proclamation to revive the Presidential Physical Fitness Award, during which Trump did a totally normal, well-adjusted thing. He turned to one of the kids who’d been brought in for a photo op and asked him “Do you think you could take me in a fight?” Naturally, YouGov looked at this and thought, “This requires a scientific sample size.” So they also asked those same 2,609 Americans who they thought would win in a brawl between Trump and a hypothetical eight-year-old boy. Again, Democrats are skeptical of Trump’s combat skills, and short of a scenario involving a golf club and a highly strategic golf cart getaway, only 26% put their money down on Trump, while 54% say the kid would win, then go back to watching Bluey. And before you say eight is too old for that show, my Mum is 86 today, and she fucking loves Bluey. To put that in perspective, Democrats have way more confidence in a literal eight-year-old than Republicans have in their own grown-adult selves. 72% of those Republicans, by the way, think Trump would crush the eight-year-old who, let’s face it, would be weakened by the stench before he got too close, but 6% are woke enough to admit that the third-grader, or presumably a light breeze, would be enough to topple the melting senior citizen.
- On Mother’s Day the White House launched a new website, Moms.gov. On first glance that looks like Mumsnet yeah? A forum for discussing and exchanging views relating to the difficulties in navigating motherhood and the working and political environments, a supportive environment cognisant of and dedicated to, the rights and equalities of women and mothers.Yeah you’re not gonna get that from an administration where at a press conference launching the site Dr. Mehmet Oz warned that “One in three Americans are ‘under-babied,’” and where Trump declared himself the “father of fertility.” At the launch Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promoted Moms.gov as “one-stop shopping for IVF, for prenatal care, for postnatal care, for nutrition, for baby formula, and of course, for TrumpRx.” It would be more accurate, however, to say that the website is aimed at asserting Trump’s “pro mom” bona fides while preying on vulnerable women with thinly veiled propaganda of an anti-abortion, anti-vaccine, and anti-feminist bent. On pregnancy support for instance the website says, sympathetically, that “navigating pregnancy can feel overwhelming, but you don’t have to do it alone.” Moms.gov then offers a link to “Find Pregnancy Centers Near You,” the linked website, Option Line, which you’re not told, is operated by the Christian anti-abortion organization Heartbeat International. It directs women away from clinics like Planned Parenthood and toward faith-based crisis pregnancy centers, where they will be bombarded with misinformation and love-bombed with support. The word “abortion” never appears on the Moms.gov homepage, but the message is anti-abortion all the same. As a whole, Moms.gov carries a strong anti-feminist undercurrent. In March, the Trump-allied Heritage Foundation released a new document titled “Saving America by Saving the Family.” Heritage, which previously spearheaded Project 2025, blamed falling fertility rates not only on “the proliferation of birth control,” but also on “more prospects for women to receive higher education and work outside the home, the delayed financial independence of young adults, and the government’s role in old-age security.” Furthermore the only mention of working motherhood on the homepage links to a warning that “workplace exposures, conditions, and tasks can affect workers’ sexual and reproductive health.” With the Trumpfather of fertility the “tradwife” life is the only safe choice for babies and moms. As with all of the MAHA rhetoric voiced by metal tool-shed thrown into a concrete mixer RFK Jr the intent is to flood the search engines and distract overworked underinformed women with Government sanctioned propaganda designed to further their aim of disenfranchising anyone but rich, white, christian men, but then DangerousMysoginistsinPower.gov doesn’t have quite the same Maga needs Moms feel I guess.
- Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has decided that the best way to handle a national energy crisis and a chaotic, disaster-prone aviation sector is to return to his true passion: being an MTV reality television star. In a move that perfectly represents the crossover between the current federal cabinet and 90’s trash TV, Duffy dropped a trailer for The Great American Road Trip. It’s a five-part YouTube series following him, his wife, and their nine children as they trek across the country on what he calls a “civic experience” to celebrate America’s upcoming 250th birthday. The trailer features the family snowmobiling, hitting up water slides, and hanging out with a Benjamin Franklin reenactor, Kid Rock, and Trump himself, but it’s OK, because Duffy was working from the road, which in this case means he occasionally glanced at an air-traffic control tower as they sped past. The backdrop to this wholesome family content is that the administration’s war in Iran has sent gas prices skyrocketing to their highest levels in nearly four years. While everyday Americans are having panic attacks at the pump, the nation’s Transportation Secretary is cheerfully telling them to “gas up the car!” Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg immediately took to Twitter to call the project “brutally out of touch,” prompting Duffy to counter that the “radical, miserable left” simply hates patriotism and doesn’t want people to learn civics. But some people who already know about civics have been asking questions about how this boondoggle was funded. Duffy and his spokespeople have repeatedly insisted that “zero taxpayer dollars” were used, because the producers formed a brand-new nonprofit called The Great American Road Trip Inc.—an organization whose corporate sponsor list is made up entirely of companies currently under the direct regulatory thumb of Sean Duffy. Toyota, Boeing, and United Airlines – firms that rely on the Department of Transportation for safety approvals, oversight, and a lack of crippling fines – generously footed the bill for the Secretary’s gas, car rentals, lodging, and activities. The trailer even features prominent, unmissable product placement for Toyota, which I’m sure American automakers are super happy about. Donald Sherman, president of Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, pointed out that if this is an official work project, “then taxpayer funds should be paying for it, and if it’s a vacation or some kind of personal trip, then certainly industry should not be paying for it.” Being Transport Secretary probably is much more difficult and boring than being on reality TV, so if that means turning the Department of Transportation into a rolling, tax-exempt commercial for the companies you’re supposed to be regulating, so be it.
- Well Labour received a whipping at the local election polls, acting as a kind of mid-term assessment of how the country thinks the government is doing, the local elections half way through a national administration’s term in office are really about who people want to be in charge of their local councils, there is no direct effect on who is in power. This has led to buyers remorse when fed up racists vote for reform and then find out that their candidate said things about melting down Nigerians to fill in potholes and had to stand down and force another election. Rinse and repeat across the country as newly-elected and sorely underqualified councillors resigned. Like all disappointed footballers, calls are being made within the team to replace the coach after this one-sided scoresheet event. And one Labour MP, of whom no-one had heard, Catherine West said she’d launch a leadership campaign unless Starmer bucked his ideas up. She didn’t, and really neither did he. Instead, to show he was in touch with the people’s present day concerns in post-brexit post-covid, post-Reform Britain Starmer drafted in support from Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman who were last in office three decades ago. Victim of Bloatyhead from the Theme Hospital Game Wes Streeting resigned as Health Minister and has yet to launch a leadership contest, a Labour MP stepped down to enable left-wing man-of-the-people Andy Burnham to be able to stand for election as an MP and thus challenge for the leadership, both Wes and Keir have since announced a full-blown return to the EU as something they’d do which is directly stolen from Andy Burnham’s recent rhetoric and designed to thwart his chances, as is his standing in a seat that voted 60% Leave in the Brexit Referendum and has just elected a Reform Council. As always – never ones to waste a good crisis the Labour Party start falling on each other with knives out.
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