18 May False Consensus – FT#100
While we went to all the trouble of making a special video version of episode 100, we don’t mind too much if you prefer just to listen to the audio version like usual, so here it is:
Show Notes
The False Consensus fallacy occurs when someone makes an argument based on their assumption that most other peoples behaviour, beliefs, thoughts and motivations are the same as their own.
Trump
We started out by discussing Trump’s claim that nobody knew that lots of people die from the flu. There were plenty of examples of Trump claiming nobody knows a thing that he just found out, so I made a video with 100 of them. You can see it by scrolling down past the headlines.
We followed that with this clip of Trump insisting everyone feels like he does about protesters:
And we closed with this tweet from Trump about something which is not legal, and doesn’t happen all the time in politics:
Mark’s British Politics Corner
Mark talked about Michael Gove insisting there’s a consensus that taxing energy companies on their huge profits would be really bad:
Then we looked at Lee Anderson MP assuming that poor people are as bad at budgeting as he and his rich friends are:
Fallacy in the Wild
In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from Friends:
Then we looked at this clip from Footloose:
And we finished with this clip of Beverly Hills 90210:
Fake News
In our special 100th episode of Fake News, Mark had to figure out which of these things Trump thinks go ‘bing’:
1. Marco Rubio
2. Cheese
3. Running from a crocodile
4. Shooting a traitor
5. Playing cards
6. Hitler
7. Driving a tank
8. Creating websites
9. Adjusting a car seat
10. Volcanoes
Click below for the answer
Mark got it right this week, and is now on exactly 50%
Madison Cawthorn is not a logical fallacy
In a segment recorded before Cawthorn lost in NC on Tuesday, we talked about the relentless attacks on him from his own party.
The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about
- Well, it’s a day ending in a Y, so there’s another book out by a Trump Administration official who was absolutely disgusted by the shit Trump was doing in office, but, you know, not disgusted enough to resign or say anything to anyone at the time. It’s Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s turn, and the revelations that he’s teased to gen up some pre-orders include the usual stuff about Trump asking why they can’t just shoot protestors, along with some new stuff about Trump wanting to recall a couple of retired four star generals to active duty specifically so he could have them court martialled for criticising him. The best/scariest though, is the fact that he suggested firing missiles from the US into Mexican Cartel’s drug labs, and then pretending it wasn’t him. The proposal didn’t go anywhere, of course, so we never got to see what would happen when Mexico responded to an act of war and the US claimed a bigger boy did it and ran away.
- In a variation of King Canute sitting soggy on the beach commanding the tide to go back it appears that Trump was convinced China was at the bottom of all the hurricanes the US suffers cos they have a Hurricane Gun, and had asked his aides to look into whether that’s true. I am envisioning the huge on-shoulder mollusc launcher in the Saint’s Row 3 game. Rolling Stone’s interviews with national security officials revealed this was on Trump’s unhinged mind for the first two years in office – hurricanes not molluscs – and eventually led to the question about whether the US could nuke hurricanes. QAnon recently also went weather-mental drawn from the same idea that China seeds clouds to create rain for agricultural use, blaming Biden for using the China weather-weapon to create the cold snap in Texas that Ted Cruz fled on holiday from! And not forgetting Sharpiegate where Trump said a hurricane was heading to Alabama (it wasn’t) and produced a drawn on map to prove it, an inspector general’s report actually concluded that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had actually falsely backed up Trump’s claim about the hurricane’s path as a result of actual White House pressure! Former Trump aide Stephanie Grisham simply noted: “Stuff like that was not unusual for him. He would blurt out crazy things all the time, and tell aides to look into it or do something about it. His staff would say they’d look into knowing that more often than not, he’d forget about it quickly — much like a toddler.” Still at least the GOP isn’t adopting some of those crazy ideas about the election-being-stolen invented by the toddler-king as party orthodoxy -now that would be crazy!
- Sadly last week saw the resignation of the White House’s best Press Secretary since CJ Cregg, the fantastic Jen Psaki. But another kick-ass woman takes on the role of owning Peter Doocy on a daily basis. Karine Jean Pierre was Regional Director of the Office of Political Affairs in the Obama White House, she’s been Deputy Press Secretary since Biden was elected, used to be Chief Public Affairs Officer for MoveOn.org, and once leapt in front of Kamala Harris to protect her from a protestor despite being about half his size. She also happens to be the first black and openly LGBT White House Press Secretary, but I’m sure that has nothing to do with the attacks she’s had to weather from the right wing since her promotion was announced. Hilariously, since she’s awesome, they have nothing to actually attack her with, so the New York Post went with her history of calling people and things racist, which included racist things like Voter ID, calling COVID ‘The China Virus’, Fox News, Jeff Sessions, Steve Bannon, and Donald Trump. Fox News added that she accused Republicans of lying about Critical Race Theory in schools. So all in all, it sounds like she’s going to do an awesome job!
- A man accused of killing his wife and then tossing her body in a creek won a Republican primary election in Indiana for a spot on a local township board this week. Is the unsurprising verbatim headline in Buzzfeed news. Despite being held in the Boone County jail without bail Andrew Wilhoite won his spot in the May 3 election, garnering 60 votes in the local election somewhat reassuringly he did receive the lowest number of votes from the three candidates — the two other candidates received more than 100 votes — but with only three candidates vying for three seats, Wilhoite was able to secure a place in the November election. According to state election requirements candidates for the upcoming election have until July 15 to withdraw their names from the ballot. The only exception for removing their name past that deadline, according to state requirements, would be disqualification by moving out of the district, death, or conviction of a felony. Wilhoite is scheduled for trial in August. Whilst feeling it’s all a bit horrifyingly Republican it’s “good” to know the principle of innocent til proven guilty still pertains in Indiana I guess!
- People have responded to the Roe v Wade news we talked about in our special extra episode last week with incredible restraint so far, largely staging protests in public spaces, outside the Supreme Court, and in some cases outside judges houses. Despite a rumor spreading across the right-wingosphere that Justice Alito had been forced to go into hiding for the safety of his family, in fact protests have been entirely peaceful, and in some cases extremely civilised, with Alito’s neighbors supplying the protestors and reporters outside his house with wine, cheese, and key lime pie. The GOP complaint of ‘Won’t someone think of the neighbors’ has been a bit undercut by this not to mention the fact that when someone said it to protestors outside Brett Kavanagh’s house they replied “We ARE his neighbors”. Meanwhile, Susan Collins called the police after someone wrote the most polite fucking message ever to her on the sidewalk outside her house in chalk, pleading with her to vote to codify Roe. Presumably, she told the cops she was concerned and disappointed by the note, since those appear to be her only two emotions.
- At a time when Republicans have attacked mail voting and falsely characterized it as rife with abuse by their Democrat rivals, we at Fallacious Trump plead with the Republicans to stop it cos ours sides are aching with laughter again, when the GOP have once again been found guilty of doing exactly what they blame the other side for. Philadelphia’s fellow GOP ward leaders voted Saturday to oust Billy Lanzilotti from his position as the leader of South Philadelphia’s 39th Ward, following the discovery that he was helping voters fill out their applications for mail-in ballots by putting his P.O. box number where their home address would go. Though Lanzilotti maintained he was doing this as a “service to the voters” and intended to hand deliver the ballots once they arrived, State law forbids third-party ballot delivery — yeah what Republicans call “ballot harvesting”. Attempting to distract us perhaps from laughing at the GOP too much again candidate Republican Bill McSwain in the governor’s race for Southeast Philadelphia against Republican Dave White accused White’s campaign of being connected to Lanzilotti in another smear of mail-in voting – White was quick to point out that McSwain had been scathingly not endorsed by Trump and this was as lame an attempt as saying labour unions who’d donated to White’s campaign had also once donated to Democrat campaigns. With friends like these in the Republican party who needs the Democrats (no only joking we all do!)
- Georgia GOP gubernatorial candidate Kandiss Taylor, who somehow spells her name with a K and two SSs, has apparently not been sufficiently mocked for her campaign slogan, which is, I shit you not, ‘Jesus Guns, Babies. I feel like we are partially to blame for this, but in our defence, there are a lot of batshit Republicans and only so much mocking time. We do have jobs, you know! Anyway, partly due to us not mocking her into oblivion, she has now released a new campaign video which is indistinguishable from a Blair Erskine skit. So much so, that Kandiss unironically tweeted a Blair Erskine video taking the piss out of her platform because she thought it was genuine. In Kandiss’s latest, she’s announced that one of her top priorities on being elected will be to destroy the Georgia Guidestones. Patrons may remember our discussion of the Georgia Guidestones when we read the Q Anon book, since it is directly from that vat of bullshit that this plan has been dredged. For the uninitiated, the Guidestones are some standing stones with advice etched into them for anyone who survives an apocalyptic event, like a nuclear war. Q Anoners and other morons, however, believe that they were placed there by a Luciferian cabal who just couldn’t help themselves from carving their secret plans for world domination and population control into giant fucking bits of rock and planting them in the Georgia countryside. Kandiss Taylor also somehow seems to think that the Luciferian cabal will be helpless to carry out their evil plan if she gets rid of the big rocks, because presumably, that’s their only copy. Fucking hell.
- In another week of excruciating nonsense in British Politics after a further 100 fines for criminal breaches of the law during lockdown by the actual government, funeral director mood-board Jacob Rees-Mogg appeared on BBC news saying “this is non-story” and that “We need to look at whether these rules were right in the first place” You wrote the fucking rules and made sure people were fined for breaching them, and people couldn’t attend the funeral of the Queen’s husband for 70-years as a result of the rules! Chancellor Rishi Sunak – who’s obviously been getting advice for the woman who spaffed billions of pounds up the wall with the trace and trace system lashed together on Excel 95 – said the government’s computer system wouldn’t let him increase benefits further this year in response to the cost of living crisis. Whilst he himself acknowledges “technical problems sound like an excuse” economist Stephanie Flanders points out “ so we can create a furlough scheme [from scratch] for 11 million people in a matter of weeks but can’t raise benefits more than once a year!” And just when you thought the Tories weren’t taking the piss enough, at a charity fundraiser (oh so that’s alright then) in Hertfordshire local MP and Tory party chairman Oliver Dowden donated a bottle of champagne signed by Boris as and I quote “a souvenir of partygate and the exemplary behaviour and morality of our dear leader!’ And finally a bluffer’s guide to the NI Protocol; those who voted Remain and lost have had to adjust to Brexit and get on with making it work, while those who voted for Brexit and won i.e. the DUP are furious and want to rip the whole thing up. Also the DUP are now the minority party in Northern Ireland with Sinn Fein winning the majority in elections last week, but the British Government are saying we should heed the words of the minority when it comes to the Northern Ireland protocol, like they did for the minority in the Brexit vote? Hmm, is that logical? Well you’re in the right place, I’m off to France again!
Here’s the video of 100 things Trump claims nobody knows:
During the episode, we kept getting messages of congratulations from these very special guests. Totally random. Don’t know how they found out about it. I guess they’re just fans.
And we also heard from our lovely former guest presenters:
Thank you all so much. We mean that. The first hundred episodes have only been so much fun to make because of all of you.
In no particular order, that includes:
- Our brilliant guest hosts: Frank, Rachel, Matt and Chris.
- Our amazing guests: Caplin & Massiah, Michael Marshall, Bo Bennett, Norma Mendoza- Denton, Ron Placone, Jen Briney, and Joe Strupp
- Our incredible Patrons: Loren, Kaz Toohey, Andrew Hauck, Max Beaver, Steven Bickel, Schmootz, Mark Reiche, Amber R. Buchanan, Hugh, Brian Schwimmer, Jude Searles, Neil Kerlogue, Richard Hopkins, Neel Upadhaya, Aya Sakurai, Nilek, Anne McKinley, Myles Robinson, Invisible Unicorn, Janet Yeutter, Maybe the Dingo Ate Your Roy Cohn, Gary Jungling, Bill Black, Resolved OA should adopt a policy to do a live show in Cleveland, Alan Firth, SKC, Joel Longcoy, Shad Malloy, Julia Munde, Erik, Tash Pyne, Amar Subramanian, BCPDoc, Eltee, Michael Stevens, Colleen Lyerla, and Steve Hillier.
- And all of our wonderful listeners (I’m sorry, I don’t know your names)
Jim and Mark
That’s all for this week, thanks for listening!
