11 Jul Appeal to Self-Evident Truth – FT#104
Show Notes
The Appeal to Self-Evident Truth is committed when someone claims something is self-evidently true, thereby avoiding the need to provide any evidence.
Trump
We started out by discussing Trump’s claim that voter fraud in 2020 is obviously the reason Democrats tried to remove observers in Philadelphia:
We followed that with this clip of Trump claiming that his first impeachment was an open and shut case (but not the way you think):
Mark’s British Politics Corner
Mark talked about Nadine Dorries defending Boris against an ‘obviously’ coordinated attack:
And then he talked about Sir Kier Starmer pointing out how obvious it is that Boris is unfit to be Prime Minister:
And finally he talked about Charlotte Carew-Pole claiming as self-evident the fact that women are less problematic as politicians:
Fallacy in the Wild
In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from Peep Show:
Then we discussed this clip from The Blacklist:
And we finished with this clip from Evil Under the Sun:
Fake News
Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:
- And as to what happened on January 6, it was a simple protest, it got out of hand, and I will say one thing they don’t talk about, they never show the size of the crowd. I believe it was the largest number of people I’ve ever spoken to. I’m not talking about the very small percentage of people that went down to the Capitol, many of whom did nothing wrong, and they’re paying a big price because of this horrible situation that’s taking place. I’m talking about the crowd that I spoke before. And some people went down long before I spoke. But the crowd that I spoke before was, I believe the largest crowd, and I’ve spoken in front of big crowds. This is a big crowd. I’ve spoken in front of very big crowds. That was the largest crowd of people that I’ve ever spoken before.
- Dr. King gave a speech and it was great. The, “I had a dream”, speech. It was great. How good was that? But they showed the picture and it was massive, tremendous numbers of people. They said it was a million people. 1 million people. And then I gave my speech and they showed the same thing. It’s hard to believe, many, many decades later but it’s identical architecture, identical pools. You look at it, the Lincoln… Everything was identical, but it was many years later. I gave my speech. So his, they said, 1 million people. Now, my pictures were exactly the same, but the people were slightly closer together, they were more compact, but exactly the same. But there were more people, they were tighter together if you look at it. “Donald Trump has 25,000 people today.”
- His speech was a great speech, it was a great… But I give good speeches. Maybe not quite as good, I don’t want to say, but they don’t want to talk about that, I could say, you know, great things, and they turn the cameras off. And they never show the crowds. I’m watching with Melania, and she asks me, she says “How many people were there?” You can’t tell. I never see the crowds on TV. And I have some huge crowds, and I say the great things and MSDNC and fake news CNN they cut away and talk about hurricanes or something. I’ve probably… if you watch the fake news you’ve never even seen some of the rallies, with the great people. A lot of you have probably been to one? Who’s been to one of my rallies? Yeah, a lot of you. But even now they’re not going to report on any of this.
Mark got it wrong this week, and is now at almost 50%
Links
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The Supreme Court is still not a logical fallacy
We talked about just a few of the ways the Supreme Court has trampled over people’s basic rights recently.
The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about
- If, like most of us, you were under the impression that Senate Majority leader and pantomime turtle, Addison Mitchell McConnell III, had his finger on the pulse of the common man, get ready for a shock. Mitch has an explanation, you see, for the phenomenon those in power call a robust job market and those in opposition call a labor shortage crisis. Old Yertle reckons that the reason companies who pay minimum wage are having trouble finding staff at the moment is because Americans are just too damn rich, thanks to the coronavirus stimulus checks they got last year when record numbers of them suddenly found themselves out of work. Master Oogway is convinced that the $3200 Americans received between April 2020 and March 2021 not only kept them going through the pandemic, but is burning such a hole in their savings accounts that they just don’t need to go back to work yet. Gamera’s brilliant theory is that businesses who are hurting for staff shouldn’t consider whether to pay a liveable wage, offer meaningful benefits or prospects for advancement. All they need to do is wait for those wastrels to run out of cash, then they’ll come crawling back. The reality, of course, is that Republicans just don’t seem to understand the invisible hand of the market they stan so fucking hard. It’s a job seeker’s market right now, and with jobs available at many different levels, people don’t have to accept the conditions they did before. In fact, millions of people a month are voluntarily resigning from their jobs and quickly finding new, better paid ones, and the unemployment level is lower than it was in late 2019. Thanks Biden!
- The fabulous TV series where a group of earnest hometown occupants battles monsters to the tune of Running up that Capitol Hill continues with the Fulton County Court subpoenaing Lindsay Graham and Rudy Guiliani in connection with the 2020 election. It’s this season’s new thing to be calling in Trump’s inner circle about the attempts to overthrow the results. Graham’s starring role “questioned Secretary Raffensperger and his staff about reexamining certain absentee ballots cast in Georgia in order to explore the possibility of a more favorable outcome for former President Donald Trump.” and Giuliani’s comic cameo “made additional statements, both to the public and in subsequent legislative hearings, claiming widespread voter fraud in Georgia during the November 2020 election,” by re-upping the same previously debunked evidence, according to court filings. The subpoenas also cover the supporting cast of Trump’s other former legal advisers, including Jacki Pick Deason, and the usual suspects John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, Cleta Mitchell and Kenneth Chesebro to explain their solicitation of election fraud, making false statements, conspiracy, racketeering and threats related to election administration. Whilst packed with these goodies the special grand jury can only collect evidence and issue a report on whether Trump or any of his allies should face charges, however Season 5 of Even Stranger Things could pursue actual indictment from a regularly seated grand jury in Fulton County. Can’t wait!
- White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony in front of the January 6 Committee last month made a few waves and drew some unusual responses from TrumpWorld. From supposed Trump allies claiming he’s way too fat to have been able to reach into the front and grab the steering wheel, to the brilliant legal mind of Rudolf Giuliani, who demolished Cassidy’s claim that he asked for a pardon by tweeting “Contrary to her false testimony, she was never present when I asked for a pardon”. It was also revealed this week that the two extremely witness-tampery messages disclosed at the end of the 6th public hearing were directed at Hutchinson herself, and one came from a Mark Meadows associate and referred to him by name, saying “Meadows let me know you have your deposition tomorrow. He wants me to let you know he’s thinking about you. He knows you’re loyal, and you’re going to do the right thing when you go in for your deposition”. Which, if you ask me, sounds a bit illegal. The next public hearing will be on Tuesday July 12th, and it seems likely it will feature testimony from White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who has agreed to a transcribed and videotaped deposition in the wake of Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony. Cipollone was with Trump on January 6th and is expected to be quite cooperative.
- In an echo of Trump’s lie about Hilary and the Second Amendment from our opening titles Arizona Congresswoman Debbie Lesko is convinced that cos of H.R. 2377 – Federal Extreme Risk Protection Order Act of 2022 “They wanna take away the rights of law-abiding citizens to protect their own children, and grandchildren, and wives, and brothers, and sisters. This bill takes away due process from law-abiding citizens.” She is sufficiently incensed by it and sufficiently twisted in a Moebius loop kinda QANON way that she went on to illustrate her fervour by saying “”I have five grandchildren. I would do anything, anything, to protect my five grandchildren. Including, as a last resort, shooting them if I had to, to protect the lives of my grandchildren. Democrat bills that we’ve heard this week wanna take away my right, my right, to protect my grandchildren.”
Okay will you tell her or do I have to? How does maintaining the right to kill your five grandchildren with, I assume, a 6-shooter – protect them? – “I would shoot them to protect them from having my firearms taken away from me?” WTAF! She said it out loud right on the floor of the house where things like that are streamed to the interwebs, like, verbatim! And naturally people commented on the sheer insanity of it. Of course Lesko then took to the same interwebs to say “It never ceases to amaze me the lengths gun control zealots will go! They turned my speech about protecting Second Amendment rights and my right to protect my grandchildren from violent criminals into a claim I would harm my own grandchildren. Absolutely ridiculous!” Yes you goddam are Debbie! I wonder what her children, you know the parents of her grandchildren have to say about that oft-experienced problem of your parents thinking they know better about how to take care of your own children hmmmm? Yes kids we’re not gonna be able to go see grandma for a while… - If you saw Missouri GOP senate candidate Eric Greitens’ ad last month in which he posed with a rifle and said he was going RINO hunting, you may have thought you’d seen the craziest, most violence inciting ad of the year. But this is the 2022 GOP, so I doubt it will even make the top ten. The latest comes from Arizona Congressional candidate Jerone Davison, who is black by the way – a fact that will become relevant very soon. In his ad he mocks Democrats who claim nobody needs high capacity magazines over slow motion footage of people in KKK uniforms charging towards his house with pitchforks and baseball bats. He concludes that you might just need those 30 rounds “when the rifle is the only thing standing between your family and a dozen angry Democrats in Klan hoods”. Davison displays a stunning lack of… I don’t think you can even call it insight – sight, I guess? Since he just needs to look at the incumbent he is trying to primary, avowed white supremacist Paul Gosar, to see where the threat is coming from. I would say it’s hard to choose who we want to win, but there are four other candidates and none of them have been quite as publicly batshit, so, maybe any one of them please. If you’re wondering what kind of campaign manager would sign off on such a fucking insane ad, meet Austin Steinbart, a man recently released from prison after serving eight months for hacking celebrities’ medical records. Steinbart claims he’s a time traveller from the future, and a deep cover operative for the Defense Intelligence Agency. He also claims he’s Q, but Vice have described his ideas as “too out there for the vast majority of QAnon followers, who have dismissed him as a kook”. So many of Paul Gosar’s followers, QAnon believers, who think Trump was sent by God to defeat a Satanic cabal of child eating movie stars while they wait for JFK to come back from the dead and send Hillary to GitMo, think this guy is a kook.
- Michigan GOPers Introduce Ban On Nonexistent School Drag Shows That They Admit Don’t Exist – is the actual headline from Talking Points Memo.com. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) accused Republicans of manufacturing “fake issues,” having joked as the first gay person in Michigan to be elected to statewide office about a “drag queen in every school”. True to form, the Republicans didn’t see anything to laugh about and unveiled a bill that would ban K-12 public schools from doing anything that would “expose” students to “a drag show or drag presentation.” whilst admittedly none of the 5 bill’s sponsors could actually think of a time when schools put on drag shows. GOP Michigan gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon declared “She said she was joking, but we take this as a trial balloon, we’re here to fight that culture war.” and Michigan state House Reps. Beau LaFave (yes also Republican) argued “I don’t think that we need to have a problem occur in the state of Michigan before we address it.” Yeah course not, after all none of the other things your party gets heated about ever fucking existed. Let’s face it Trump’s entire presidency was a joke looking for a solution – the 2020 election which you didn’t like – I suppose cos it worked!
- The press has finally figured out what I’ve been saying for a while now, that Trump will probably announce his 2024 Presidential run soon so that he can claim all the legal cases against him are just political harassment. To be fair, I’ve been saying it for a while and I’ve been wrong so far, and I’m pretty fucking shocked it hasn’t happened yet – I mean it’s not like the legal cases have been going badly. Meanwhile, the press, in this case the Guardian, have pretty reasonably waited until they had something to report rather than just saying what they reckon like some podcaster. It’s not much yet, but apparently Trump has told advisers that he thinks throwing his hat in the ring would strengthen his argument that investigations into him are politically motivated, even though some of those advisers think he should wait until after the midterms. To be honest, I wouldn’t be shocked if those advisers are telling him to wait in the hope that he gets indicted for something pre-midterms and they can stop advising him because that must be a fucking nightmare. Meanwhile, maybe the reason Trump hasn’t announced yet is because his legal advisers are people like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, and they’re telling him he’s got nothing to worry about because they got their law degrees out of a cereal packet. Or maybe he realises that if he announces then maybe he’ll run, and maybe he’ll win, and then he’d actually have to be President again and he clearly hated it first time round. Of course, I’m just speculating. Maybe in a few months a major newspaper will find a source to say the same thing and then it will be news.
- Britpol – weee-eell been a bit quiet this week, oh no wait we do have a new Prime Minister, well the Tory party is in need of a new leader, the Prime Minister has yet to leave the building. Sorry let’s backtrack a bit – but not too far; It’s now Thursday when we record this, on Tuesday evening Health Secretary Sajid Javid resigned, closely followed by Chancellor Rishi Sunak in the wake of it transpiring that Boris knew about Deputy Chief Whip Chris Pincher’s behaviour and yet promoted him to the role of Deputy Chief Whip in February. Pincher had resigned btw on June 30th for getting drunk and groping other male members of the Carlton Club and had complaints of inappropriate behaviour towards a young male member of Tory party staff upheld by an investigation which was reported to Boris in 2019 and yet he was promoted to the role of Deputy Chief Whip, a role that oversees the ethics and behaviour of ministers – the right doesn’t do irony see!. The two cabinet members resigned cos number 10 lied about Boris knowing and even sent people out to speak to the media to tell that lie. It followed the usual form; “I didn’t know, nobody told me, people told me, I forgot that people had told me, sorry not sorry, can we move on now…” And in moving on, on Tuesday Boris appointed a new Chancellor and new Health Minister and new Education Minister to replace the one he’d moved to Chancellor. What’s perhaps least/most surprising is that after the constant deluge of mistruths, lies, obfuscations, denials, abuses of power, missing billions, tax breaks for the rich, actual criminal breaches of the actual law, and losses of local elections, the one straw that broke the camel’s back seems to have a whiff of homophobia about it. Wednesday morning Michael “Slimy Tove all mimsy were the Borogroves” Gove had a word and told Boris to go, he didn’t, and later that day in PMQ’s one of Boris’ own party Tim Loughton asked “are there any circumstances in which he – Boris should resign” in the list which didn’t contain found to be lying, partying in lockdown, being in receipt of a fine cos of criminal breaches of the actual law etc etc, Boris included “if there were circumstances in which I felt it was impossible for the government to go on and discharge the mandate that we’ve been given”. And taking him at his word, not only did 3 call for him to resign during PMQs, but by the end of Wednesday 44 members of his government had resigned, rendering it practically unable to discharge anything. Wednesday evening a delegation marched duly to Number 10 to tell him to go, he didn’t, saying he’d fight on and sacked Gove for disloyalty in doing so – only Gove, no-one else out of the 8 or so. Thursday the newly appointed Chancellor told us he was in the delegation that told Boris to go after he’d been made chancellor and the newly appointed Education Secretary resigned outright, after about 30 hours in office! Finally, as long ago as this morning, Boris said he would stand down as leader of the Tory Party and thus the internal election process for a new leader would begin. Of course as the architect of the shittiest premiership in 300 years of British politics, he agreed, well, stated cos no-one asked him, to stay on as Prime Minister until the new leader is in place. After all, he’s just cleaned up the vom from the lockdown parties and put up new 1,000 dollar wallpaper in Number 10! Whilst Labour are threatening to trigger a general election by calling for a vote of no confidence in the actual government to make him leave; here’s Cassetteboy’s new mashup which is a translation of Boris’ uncontrite, unapologetic, blame-everyone else, actual resignation speech
That’s all for this week, thanks for listening!
