Iron Man Fallacy – FT#120

20 Mar Iron Man Fallacy – FT#120

Posted at 00:29h in Fallacies by
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Show Notes

The Iron Man fallacy is committed when someone misrepresents their own position (or one they agree with) to suggest it is in fact a much stronger position that nobody could argue with.

Trump

We started out by discussing this clip of Trump claiming he just really really cares about border security:

Then we talked about this clip of Trump missing Hugh Hewitt’s attempt to Iron Man his argument:

And finally we looked at Hans Spakovsky in 2000 Mules, claiming that all the restriction Republicans want to put on voting are really to help the most vulnerable people in society:

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about Suella Braverman calling migrants ‘an invasion’:

And Holocaust survivor Joan Salter telling Braverman why that’s not great:

Followed by Braverman claiming allowing migrants in could lead to a hundred million people coming to the UK:

He then looked at Braverman’s claim that in supporting legal refugees Labour was voting against taking a firm line on illegal migration:

Then he talked about Lee ’30p Lee’ Anderson explaining how much Labour relied on anti-immigration voters:

And he finished by looking at Boris Johnson’s dismissal of his lockdown birthday party as ‘lunch at my desk’:

 

Fallacy in the Wild

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

Then we discussed this clip from Robocop:

And we finished with this clip from Funny Games:

 

Fake News

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

    1. We mustn’t forget the people we’re fighting against. They’re Marxist thugs who want to destroy the country we love. There’s never been a more important fight than the one we’re in right now. The fight… it’s a fight that, let me tell you, it’s not a fight that we can afford to lose. These people are horrible, sick people and they won’t stop coming for me until they get to you. They won’t stop. Nothing can stop them. But we can stop them. With you beside me we can win, and we can Make America Great Again.
    2. If those opposing us succeed, our once beautiful USA will be a failed country that no one will even recognize. A lawless, open borders, crime-ridden, filthy, communist nightmare. That’s what it’s going and that’s where it’s going. I used to say that we will never be a socialist country. I said it oftentimes. I said it once at the State of the Union address and people didn’t understand what I was saying. But I’d shout it out loud and I was right because that train has passed the station long ago of socialism. It never even came close to stopping, frankly.
    3. We will expel the warmongers. They are people that don’t get it, although, in some cases, they get it. They get it for their wallets, but we can’t do that. We can’t let that happen. We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists. We will throw off the political class that hates our country. They actually hate our country. No walls, no borders, bad elections, no voter ID. We will beat the Democrats. We will rout the fake news media. We will expose and appropriately deal with the RINOs.

Mark got it wrong again this week, and is now at 48%

Oscar Pool Results

Thank you to all our listeners who joined in with our second annual Oscars pool. The top 5 places were:

  1. Paul C. (32 pts)
  2. Jim (30 pts)
  3. One I’d Nick (28 pts)
  4. Mark (26 pts)
  5. Kaz Toohey and Anders Hervik (18 pts each)

 

Meek Sightseers are not a logical fallacy

We talked about the unbelievably shameless rewriting of history Tucker Carlson attempted by lazily editing the January 6 footage and claiming it proves everyone was excellent to each other.

 

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

  • A couple of weeks ago at CPAC, Lauren Boebert spoke out against sex education, saying there shouldn’t be “any student in a public school” learning comprehensive sex ed. On an unrelated note, she announced this week that she’ll soon be a grandmother at age 36. It seems Lauren managed to figure sex out despite only getting her GED months before her 2020 election to Congress. And it seems her 17 year old son also managed to muddle through. Boebert confirmed to the press that her son and his partner were not married, but declined to reveal the age of the girlfriend other than to say she’s over 14. So… so 15 then. That’s how numbers work. If she was 17 or older, Bobo would say that, presumably. 17 is the age of consent in Colorado, by the way, although there are exceptions when both partners are no more than 4 years apart in age. Wow, 15. That’s even younger than the girl Lauren’s husband Jayson exposed himself to in a bowling alley in 2004. Which party is it again that constantly claims they want to protect children? I know I said this last time about education in general, but maybe LESS sex education isn’t the way to go here. 
  • Hi ChatGPT I’ve a question for you – if I don’t do any reading but watch 5 or 6 TVs at once, can barely write except with a sharpie or a crayon, how can I look literary, popular, relevant and a man of letters? Thank you for your question “Nothing says deeply-insecure-has-been quite like publishing private correspondence with the hope that people will believe you once garnered respect,” – No not ChatGPT but Hillary Clinton’s spokesperson Nick Merrill speaking to Newsweek. “Feels like the adult equivalent of when a toddler proudly presents you with what they’ve done on the potty.” Which actually feels a bit like a ChatGPT analogy – not quite on target, but you get the idea. Trump is about to publish a book of correspondence! yeah right! Yeah you’re right; it’s not Churchill and Roosevelt we’re talking here, or even Hemingway to O’Keefe, it’s a bit more one-sided. It’s just letters he got from famous people including Jay Leno, Oprah Winfrey, Hillary Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Kim Jong-un and Princess Diana – so yeah all good contemporary stuff! The problem is neither Leno nor Clinton gave permission for him to do so and the precedent that the writer holds the copyright and not the recipient was set in 1741 when poet Alexander Pope successfully sued Edmund Curll for publishing Pope’s letters. At $99 or $399 for a signed copy, a real signature you think? the book is out on April 25th, and may, courts permitting,  even contain some real letters including repeated demands for payments from everyone he ever hired to do some work for him and the original note for Donald to “please be excused from the draft cos he has bony spurs this week” signed My Pop.
  • In other ‘Republicans are all about protecting children’ news, the GOP led Senate Judiciary Committee in West Virginia voted on a bill which would ban child marriage in the state and establish 18 as the age of consent and I bet you can’t guess which way they voted. What’s that? Oh, ok, yes of course they rejected the bill, going instead with the current system of NO MINIMUM AGE for marriage. Children as young as 16 can marry with parental consent, and according to the AP news article, ‘anyone younger than that also must get a judges waiver’. What the fuck? Why do you have a rule giving instructions for marrying someone younger than 16? In the UK we have a thing called the Food Standards Agency which gives restaurants and cafes a rating on how hygienic they are, kind of like health inspectors do in the US, and they give stickers that the eating establishments can put up to show how clean they are. It’s a six point scale that runs from zero to five, with five being the highest, and it always blows my fucking mind that three is “hygiene standards are generally satisfactory”. How are there three more ratings below that? Just shut the fucker down, don’t give them a rating and a fucking sticker! Anyway, that’s how I feel about West Virginia marriage laws.
  • Randy McNally  Lt Governor of Tennessee – you know the state that just signed bills into law that bar transgender children from receiving gender-affirming care and outlaw drag performances in most public spaces among more than two dozen bills proposed by Republican lawmakers in the state targeting LGBTQ people and culture – may be Tennessee’s best example of a) hypocrisy and b) nominative determinism cos he’s been commenting in effusive terms on one Franklyn Superstar’s Instagram account. 79 year old Randy heart emoji’d a pic of a man’s backside that appears to show him only wearing briefs, left a message “Love it” and a heart under a picture of Franklyn dancing in the rain in underwear, and a message using Franklyn’s nickname “Finn, you can turn a rainy day into rainbows and sunshine!”. Ever the politician Randy McNally insisted that his intentions behind the Instagram comments have been misconstrued answering “Yeah, I don’t know a lot of times on some people’s posts you see the name and you see what they’ve written, and you just press the button that says like” when in an interview with Nashville-based WTVF he was asked why he liked Franklyn’s bio that included a part about how he “gets free weed” for giving oral sex. Activist and former Democratic candidate Kate Craig tweeted “I’m not going to drag Lt. Gov. McNally for his comments, but I will drag him for his hypocrisy. He’s put LGBTQ+ Tennesseans’ lives in danger.” And Franklyn Superstar himself added “If he can be kind to a 20-year-old guy posting his butt, he can be kind enough to not help pass a bill that hurts anyone like me.” Yeah Randy how about that?
  • For all those people who claim Democrats are just as bad as Republicans and there’s no difference between the parties, here’s a great example to bolster your case. Yes, the GOP led House of Representatives are spending all their time coming up with fake investigations and never doing any actual Representing or trying to do anything to actually help people, but in the Nebraska State Senate there is a Democratic lawmaker who has spent the past three weeks actively blocking and delaying any attempt to pass any bills of any kind. Senator Machaela Cavanaugh has spent eight hours a day filibustering every bill that comes up for debate, talking about everything from Omaha’s best donuts to the plot of the film ‘Madagascar’ in order to prevent votes being taken and bills being passed. Cavanaugh’s objection to the State Senate getting any work done is that the work they would like to get done is the passage of bills which would ban abortions after 6 weeks, ban gender affirming care for anyone under 19 and ban trans people from using bathrooms and locker rooms or playing on sports teams that don’t align with the gender listed on their birth certificates. Cavanaugh explained “If this Legislature collectively decides that legislating hate against children is our priority, then I am going to make it painful — painful for everyone”. For any Republicans taking notes, this is what protecting children looks like. Trans youth are at far higher risk of suicide than their peers, and it’s largely due to how they are mistreated and stigmatized by society, which is only made worse by these kinds of bills. The American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychiatric Association all support gender affirming care for youths. 
  • Remember when our hearts bled when we learned from Devin Nunes of the prospect that Truth Social could run out of money unless the merger with Digital World Acquisition Corporation (DWAC) went through – no? us neither, but anyway the merger has shall we say hit a few stumbling blocks – DWAC being under investigation over whether the deal was made before they became a publicly listed company, a deal that would give Truth Social $1.3 Billion and a stock market listing. And then a coupla other stumbling blocks in terms of dodgy looking loans – $8 Million of dodgy. A $2m loan payment to Trump Media came in December 2021 wired from Paxum Bank registered in Dominica. The wire transfer identified Paxum Bank as the beneficial owner, although the promissory note identified an entity called ES Family Trust as the lender. Two months later, an unexpected second $6m payment arrived in Trump Media’s account from ES Family Trust. The trustee of ES Family Trust, a completely legit-sounding person called Angel Pacheco, appears to have also been a director of Paxum Bank. And a part-owner of Paxum Bank – Anton Postolnikov, appears to be a relation of Putin ally Aleksandr Smirnov. the first deputy minister of justice of Russia until 2014, who served in the executive office of the president for most of Putin’s first two terms. The obscure origins of the $8m loans caused alarm at Trump Media and, in the spring of 2022, Trump Media’s then chief financial officer Phillip Juhan weighed returning the money, according to Trump Media’s ousted co-founder turned whistle-blower Will Wilkerson. But the money was never returned, natch! And it just keeps on garnering interest; prosecutors appear to have also taken a special interest in the payments because the off-shore Paxum Bank has a history of providing banking services for the pornography and sex worker industries, which makes it a higher risk of engaging in money laundering and other illicit financing. It’s a wonder Trump can see anything at all he’s turning so many blind eyes! Still his solid business-ignorance should make him GOP favourite for the presidential run next year where orange Trumpsuits will be the campaign uniform.
  • After I told you about the sterling investigation work of Nashville’s NewsChannel 5 uncovering Congressman Andy Ogles lies last episode, you probably thought the good people at NewsChannel 5 had earned themselves a nice cup of tea and a sit down. But that kind of attitude didn’t get them where they are today, which I assume is at least in the top five news channels in Nashville. So instead they looked into a tip they had about a story so sensitive, personal and tragic that some might assume might never be used for financial gain. In 2014, Ogles and his wife reportedly had a stillborn son, and two days later Ogles started a GoFundMe to raise money for a children’s burial garden in his memory. The campaign raised almost $25,000, which GoFundMe has confirmed was paid to Congressman Ogles, but eight years later, there’s no children’s burial garden and nobody seems to know what he did with the money. Ogles has refused to give any explanation, but did accuse the reporters of exploiting the death of a child, which is fucking rich. Meanwhile, we can’t forget the OG GOP criminal liar. No, not Trump, the other one. No, not that one. Oh, this could take a while. It’s George Santos I’m talking about, and this week Gustavo Trelha, a former roommate of Santos gave a sworn statement to the FBI accusing Santos of orchestrating a massive ATM and credit card skimming operation. Santos filed the paperwork this week to run again for his seat in Congress in 2024 which might be the most optimistic thing I’ve ever heard. I don’t mind whether Santos or Trump gets indicted first, but I’d appreciate it if they could make sure they hold the televised trials on different days, because I really want to watch them both.   
  • Last week Gary Lineker – world class soccer player – who never got a yellow or red card in his career, and tv sports pundit – remarked, like Joan Salter, that the language of Suella Braverman was rather like that of the language of 1930s Germany. To prove that they weren’t at all like that, Tories brought pressure to bear on independent national broadcaster BBC to sack, silence and make disappear Lineker for disagreeing with the government. He was duly ‘stepped back’ from presenting the famous Match of the Day show on the Saturday. Every other TV sports pundit followed suit in support and the BBC was left to broadcast big swathes of emptiness without any commentary. Once again public sportsmen and team players like Marcus Rashford and England Team Manager Gareth Southgate before him, Lineker showed the moral vacuum at the heart of politicians and what the people of Britain actually thought,. Which ran somewhat contrary to what our superficially elected representatives in the Westminster Middle Class Liberal Elite/out and out vote-hungry xenophobic racists think they thought. The BBC reached a compromise where they reinstated Lineker on the basis that he issued an apology?; no, won’t do it again?; no, promised to check if he should tweet something with the BBC before he does?; no. His reinstatement has naturally led to libellous comments from Tory MP’s who didn’t read what Gary’d actually said and compared that with what 1930s Germany actually said, but just went all-out accusing Lineker of calling voters who voted Tory actual Nazi’s. Meanwhile Jeremy Hunt who said of the Lineker thing that it was nothing to do with Government, and had previously done the same with the enormous rate of inflation – war and pestilence and migrants are to blame for that, nevertheless took credit in this week’s budget for bringing inflation down at some time in the future, it took Starmer to point out that this was probably due to no-one being able to buy anything cos the prices were too high and their wages were not being put up cos of inflation. Jeremy What-rhymes-with-Hunt has the gurning rictus smile of a moose struck by an ancient Ford S10 pickup with the LED lightbar over the cab, surprised when people can actually see what he’s doing but unable to prevent the oncoming crash! There’s still time to swerve folks, only 12 months or so til we get to vote them out, don’t be misled in the meantime they are empty, meaningless, vindictive and dangerous bastards!

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

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Jim Cliff
jim@fallacioustrump.com


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