Subverted Support – FT#103

29 Jun Subverted Support – FT#103

Show Notes

The Subverted Support Fallacy is committed when someone tries to describe or explain a phenomenon without first providing any evidence that the phenomenon exists at all. It is a form of Begging the Question in that the existence of the phenomenon is assumed.

Trump

We started out by discussing Trump’s description of the importance for removing critical race theory from schools.

We followed that with this clip of Trump explaining how the non-existent massive voter fraud was done:

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about Boris implying Labour’s energy policy is the root cause of current societal problems in the UK

And then he talked about Sky News’ Kay Burley attempting to get RMT Union boss Mick Lynch to vow violent revenge on strike breakers:

Fallacy in the Wild

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

And we finished with this clip from Dr Oz:

Fake News

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

1. CNN yesterday, did you see what happened? They came out with a strong statement that they are prohibited, totally prohibited from using the term, The Big Lie. They are not allowed to use it any more. You know why? Because they know that the big lie is actually the big lie in reverse, and they have great liability, and they don’t want to use it, but they came down with an edict.
2. It’s like the Russia Hoax. Russia, Russia, Russia. In fact, if you want the truth, it’s worse than the Russia Hoax. And Shifty Schiff is in this one as well. Remember he totally made up a call I made, it was a perfect call and he lied about it. Well now he’s lying about great people like Jim Jordan. He totally fabricated a tweet. But that’s what these people do. They’re corrupt, sick, evil people.
3. The Un-selects. So, I call them the Un-select, and they act like, oh, they never mention it. I think it’s one of the great … They’d never mention it. Someday, they’ll give me credit for that term. I had a lot of good terms. We had a lot of good nicknames, didn’t we? Didn’t we have great nicknames.? I think it’s one of the best. I don’t know. It’s not catching on because they won’t let it catch on.

Mark got it right this week, and is now at almost 50%

Links

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Public Hearings are not a logical fallacy

We talked about the first six public Jan 6 committee hearings.

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

• To be honest, it’s been a pretty shitty month for fundamental rights. The Supreme Court tried Trump’s tactic of doing so many awful things at once that nobody can possibly pay attention to all of them, so in their last two weeks of term, The Supreme Court ruled that certain federal agents can assault you and there’s not much you can do about it, that taxpayers in Maine have to fund private Christian schools because of religious freedom, that public school teachers can now lead their students in prayer during school events, and that being informed of your right to remain silent and your right to an attorney isn’t all that important after all. Also, they decided that gun control is too important for States to decide, and then one day later decided that States deciding who gets the right to an abortion is the only logical option. So if you have an unwanted pregnancy the Court’s view is that you have to have the baby, but thanks to a complete lack of gun control, the problem will work itself out by the time the kid gets to elementary school. I think I have a solution though. All we have to do is come up with a method of abortion that involves shooting the fetus with a tiny AR-15, and I’m pretty sure Republicans will be on board. Arguably, the GOP is now over-delivering on Sarah Huckabee-Sanders pledge last month when she said “We will make sure that when a kid is in the womb, they’re as safe as they are in a classroom.” She said that, by the way, on the day of the Uvalde school shooting. But it wasn’t just unfortunate timing/depressingly inevitable that there happened to be a school shooting on the day she said it. The shooting happened first, hours before Sanders decided classrooms were the best example of a safe space for tiny humans.
• So we all watched the second series of Picard didn’t we, a grand time-travelling psychodrama of operatic proportions with the much-celebrated return of Q, who reappeared, whilst facing his own demise, to bring about huge changes on behalf of a floundering Arizona Congressional candidate called Ron Watkins. Er no wait, life, as ever, has a habit of emulating art! I hesitate to say the word “real” but the “real” Q we know about through the QAnon conspiracy theory – which everyone of course denies, cos where’s the arrest of Hillary, Biden, all of the paedophile ring within Hollywood, resurrection of John F Kennedy etc etc etc. oh look nowhere – yeah better keep a distance from all that shiz, is back. Big whoops of directionless sheep-like joy when Q dropped a post saying “Let’s play a game” back on 8kun the other day followed by “lol soz had to be done this way btw” – yeah my text slang added for deprecating effect – when everyone said where you been we need you – to do what exactly is unclear. However fellow 4chan 8chan 8kun Q psychodrama “actor” Frederick Brennan thinks somethings a bit off cos the tripcodes Q used to identify that he was the same guy posting, though anonymously, appeared again after two years, despite 8kun administrator Ron Watkins, yes him the congressional-wannabe, said those codes change automatically every month. So Fred knows it’s Ron, we know it’s Ron, his Dad Jim denies it’s Jim cos he was giving a speech on Truthtour, and who are we to doubt that! So yeah; it’s Ron, always was, he’s doing the reverse of John Eastman and actually is using himself to incriminate himself less than 40 days before the Arizona Primary. Cos when he posted the same stuff as Q as plain old Ron no one listened. Look, unless you’re the Borg Queen melded with a geeky AI scientist Ron no-one gives a shit about what you have to say, and who’ll believe you if you say you were Q all along, you’re really gonna need to use the Picard manoeuvre after all!
• We’ve talked before about the many lies Georgia GOP Senate candidate and former Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker has told on the campaign trail. This month you can add claiming he was a member of law enforcement in Cobb County, a claim the Cobb County Police Department has denied. It’s no surprise that these lies have had little impact on the Republican voter base, since honestly they seem to prefer being lied to. It’s almost a fetish for them at this point. Even the fact that he seems to think there are 52 states, since he suggested if Stacey Abrams doesn’t like it in Georgia there are 51 other states she could move to, doesn’t make a dent in his electability.  The weird thing is his popularity among religious folk, even though he’s running against a literal Christian pastor.  Walker spoke at the Faith and Freedom Coalition the day before Father’s Day at the end of a week of revelations about the three secret children he had out of wedlock in different relationships, one of whom he only supports financially because the mother sued him for child support. The good Christians at the Faith and Freedom Coalition apparently don’t mind a bit of hypocrisy either, since Walker regularly rebukes Black men in general for creating fatherless homes by abandoning their children. Of course, to anyone who’s been paying attention for the last 2000 years, it’s not actually surprising that Conservative Christians value the Conservatism more than the Christianity, and that’s why conference attendee Paulina Macfoy claims Walker is a good candidate because he ‘stands for family’, and Faith and Freedom founder Ralph Reed said “I’ve never seen a candidate that open about his faith.” Again, he’s running against a literal Christian pastor!
• Not happy with banning books, calling teachers pedophile groomers, and likening equal rights for the LGBTQ+ community as the end of civilisation as they know it, right wing commentators (of course) are having a go at Pixar’s Lightyear – Perez Hilton tweeted as a reminder to all sentient beings watching the film, that Lightyear is “banned in multiple countries over a gay kiss. CARTOONS KISSING, Y’ALL. That’s some commitment to homophobia.” Never one’s to baulk at looking fascistically committed in the name of suppression of anyone’s rights but their own, talk radio host Larry O’Connor responded that “Disney has decided to warp its credibility with parents everywhere by letting us know that even its cartoons are no longer free from content that might be objectionable.” Keep up Larry where you been? Disney decided in the 50’s that Donald Duck could walk around bottomless, whilst Mickey had to wear pants, and it was fine for a man to make a boy out of wood and take it on biblically-flavoured Whale-gullet adventures. More self-incriminating irony from American Conservative’s Ron Dreher who accused Disney of appeasing the “woke mob that wants to sexualize children” and trying to “turn popular art into culture-war propaganda.” When he’s doing exactly that. Amit Paley, the CEO of the Trevor Project, a LGBTQ+ youth advocacy organization, warns that “The resurgence of regressive anti-LGBTQ attacks that seek to smear adults—including parents, teachers, counselors, and doctors—who affirm and support LGBTQ youth is incredibly dangerous, and diverts attention away from the critical work being done to prevent and address actual child abuse and sexual assault perpetrated against LGBTQ youth.” But hey conservatives don’t care as long as they get all the rights and everyone else gets none, so they can stay in power and not have to listen to actual public opinion to infinity and beyond!
• Back in episode 96 we talked a bit about Tina Peters, the County Elections Clerk who committed seven felonies and three misdemeanors in an attempt to prove how easy it is to get away with election tampering by copying and then publishing the contents of voting machine hard drives. Incidentally, as we record this episode, people are voting on whether to make Tina the Republican candidate for Secretary of State for Colorado. Thanks to some New York Times reporting this week, Ms Peters has now been linked to two other prominent election conspiracy theorists.  It seems her legal defense is being paid for by friend of the show and Mario after he’s eaten a rotting mushroom, Mike Lindell. That relationship has been public for a while now – she even appeared onstage at Lindell’s Cyber Symposium in which he proved once and for all that not one of the cyber experts he paid millions of dollars to knows what a packet capture actually is. The revelation in the Times article, though, was that Ms Peters also knows Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert. In fact, she claims that it was Boebert who encouraged her to go forward with the scheme to image the machine’s hard drive. Lauren is also in a primary race today, where the polls close in about an hour, but win or lose, it sounds like she might get to add ‘accessory before the fact’ to her already impressive rap sheet.
• For a man who upholsters sleep, fat comedy-Rupert Pupkin; Mike Lindell just can’t keep quiet – anyone would think he’s running for office or courting the popular vote or something. Why else would he have no qualms about committing the old reductio ad hitlerum fallacy? Walmart has decided from now on to only sell Mike’s MyPillows online and no longer in store, this of course according to Lindell is “cancel culture gone mad.” Likening himself to everyone who had their right-wing conspiracy-riddled accounts on YouTube FB Twitter etc blocked on Jan 7th, you know after the attempted coup by Trump’s acolytes – he said “this is like Nazi Germany” but expanded no further as to why. Incensed that his overpriced, overstuffed, bonce-cushions would not be carried in store he declared that they were “Walmart’s biggest product, the biggest of all time!” (again citation required) and got so angry after the Zoom call with Walmart informing him of their decision that he….. “shut the computer”. Jeezers Walmart be careful! Still they have retail colleagues to help them over the trauma; Costco pulled MyPillow’s products, as did Bed Bath & Beyond, QVC, JCPenney, and Wayfair. In February, Lindell also told Insider one of his banks had cut ties with him, citing him as a “reputation risk.” Open your eyes Mikey can’t you see when you’re in bed with the likes of Trump peddling his nightmare election batshittery, is it any wonder no one wants to wake up with your horsey head in their bed!
• I have to admit, when I heard Rudy Giuliani got slapped in a Staten Island supermarket, I was pretty excited. I was picturing a Will Smithian attack, and then I found out there was a video of the incident. It’s a great angle, too. It unmistakably shows the Shoprite employee walking up to Rudy and patting him lightly on the back, as if America’s Mayor was choking on a pretzel and this guy wanted to be able to say he’d tried, but didn’t want to hit him hard enough that the pretzel would actually dislodge, and then he’d have to live with the fact that he’d saved Rudy’s life. It’s the kind of careful pat on the back you’d use to burp a baby who is particularly prone to throwing up all over you. Of course, that’s not how Rudy described it before he knew there was a video: “All of a sudden I feel a shot on my back like somebody shot me. I went forward, but luckily I didn’t fall down. Lucky I’m a 78-year-old who’s in pretty good shape, because if I wasn’t I’d have hit the ground and probably cracked my skull,” You can’t blame Rudy, he’s never experienced a pat on the back before, because he’s never done anything to deserve one, but given how wildly inaccurate his account of this incident was, I’m beginning to doubt his election fraud claims. But in case you think Rudy reached the limits of exaggeration, that honor goes to the Twitter account Republicans for National Renewal, who tweeted “This was an assassination attempt on a great patriot by a radical leftist terrorist”. I really wish I could tell you this is a parody account, but unless they’ve been in really fucking deep cover for a couple of years as a 501c3 that hosts events at CPAC, this is real. I’m still not completely ruling it out, since they did manage to misspell Merry Christmas on a poster advertising their Christmas party last year. 
• In miserable, cut-off, xenophobic, slowly-disintegrating, strike-bound, energy-poor, fatcat-rich, increasingly-irrelevant Blighty this week Boris underwent routine nasal surgery. Presumably Geppetto hacked the usual 15-foot extension of mistruth-based proboscis off his face – again! Apart from lying about trying to get his then girlfriend Carrie a job in government or the Royal Family, or lying about encouraging pay-restraint and then okaying a removal of pay caps for bankers’ the Tories lied about how it didn’t matter that they lost two by-elections! One of which Boris was at great Trump-like pains to say they’d won with a big majority only the year before – like that counts! Devoted folks in his party who voted that they had every confidence in him in the vote of no-confidence he survived last week, expressed feigned surprise and buyer’s remorse and either resigned or, true-to-form, looked to change the rules so they can have another go at ousting him. Unabashed Boris talked of undergoing no psychological shift, ignoring anyone who’s opinion he didn’t like, including the voters in Wakefield and Honiton and Tiverton and indeed spoke of his plans for a 3rd term in office whilst standing on the beach commanding the tide go back! Meanwhile, determined to refocus the nation’s Boris-weaponized nostalgia away from Vera Lynn, White Cliffs, rickets diphtheria and White-supremacists sorry the Queen’s Platty Jubes, Sir Paul McCartney reminded the world of all the good things born in the sixties, other than the current government that is, by playing a three-hour set at Glastonbury consisting of every single song everyone innately knows the words to ever, all of which were written by him. “If you find yourselves in times of trouble remember Stormzy came to we, speaking words of wisdom – Fuck Boris!”

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