05 Sep Countless Counterfeit – FT#131
Show Notes
The Countless Counterfeit fallacy is committed when someone suggests a large amount of unreliable evidence, when combined together, can be considered reliable.
Trump
We started out by discussing this clip of Trump talking about the many affidavits he’s collected:
If you’re interested, you can see those affidavits here.
Then we talked about this clip from Trump’s defense of hydroxychloroquine:
And we followed that up with this clip from 2000 Mules:
Mark’s British Politics Corner
Mark talked about this clip of Boris Johnson’s defense when questions about breaking lockdown rules with parties at Number 10:
And he followed that up with this Boris’s sister Rachel mangling the numbers to claim lots of evidence of tactical voting as the reason the Tories keep losing by elections
He finished with a look at Suella Braverman providing evidence for her claim that people arriving by boat are criminals by making arriving in boats a crime.
Fallacy in the Wild
In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at the namer of the fallacy, David Kyle Johnson, and his inspiration, Peter Kreeft.
Then we discussed this clip from Expedition Unknown – The Hunt for Extra-Terrestrials:
And we finished by talking about this clip from The Lost King:
Fake News
Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:
- This is one of the true seven wonders of the world. And you take a look at the Panama Canal, it was such an incredible engineering marvel. We sold it under Jimmy Carter. We sold it to Panama for $1. The following day they quadrupled the amount of money that ships had to pay to get across. They didn’t lose one ship.
- How dumb was Jimmy Carter? We went from getting all the money – which we should, by the way, because we built it and it wasn’t easy. Lot of people died. Sixty, maybe ninety thousand. Half from malaria, some from rocks. Big rocks falling on you. That’s not a thing that you want. And we just gave it away.
- In one day, they lifted the fees, which are, you know, pretty big for these massive ships to go through rather than going around the cape and through all the tremendous storms. Such beauty. It’s beautiful stuff, but you didn’t want to get caught in those storms. Those were storms that wiped out the biggest ships.
Mark got it right this week, and is on 48%
A Trumpless GOP Debate is not a logical fallacy
We talked about the first GOP debate, and the Tucker/Trump interview which was simultaneously released on Twitter.
The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about
- After disappointment in New York, Florida and DC, we were finally rewarded for our patience by the Fulton County Sheriff’s office last week when Trump became the first US President to have a mugshot taken. Based on his co-conspirators mugshots, Jenna Ellis thinks she’s going to prom, John Eastman is trying to hypnotize you into saying ‘Not Guilty’, Ray Smith might be possessed by an alien bug, and Trevian Kutti is definitely coming to kill you in your sleep. Trump, meanwhile, went for ‘just been caught taking a shit on the rug and chewing your best slippers’. Never one to look a grift horse in the mouth, he instantly plastered the mugshot onto various sellable items from obvious, like mugs, to ironic, like T-shirts which say ‘Never Surrender’ directly after the image the Sheriff’s office took when he surrendered. Speaking of which, it’s fairly well established that copyright of a photo rests with the person or organisation who took the photo, and while photos taken by federal employees automatically become public domain, the same is not true of state agencies such as the grossly underfunded Fulton County Sheriff’s office. So theoretically at least, the $1.7 million the Trump campaign has raised from selling an image he doesn’t own could end up being used to renovate the badly dilapidated Fulton County Jail.
- Hip Hip and yippee Ky-ay! The motherfucker Guiliani has been ruled liable for defaming two Georgia election workers whom he falsely accused of tampering with the 2020 election results. Judge Beryl A. Howell entered a default judgement against him “as a straight-up sanction” for his failure to provide necessary documentation to the plaintiffs. Giuliani will still go to trial in D.C. federal court on the amount of monetary damages he owes to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss. But Howell has already ordered Giuliani to pay roughly $132,000 in sanctions between his personal and business assets for his failures to hand over relevant information. And she said, those failures, combined with Giuliani’s own admissions, compelled her to rule without a trial that he defamed both women, intentionally inflicted emotional distress on them as part of a civil conspiracy, and owes punitive damages. We are standing and applauding on the steps outside Fallacious Towers in thanks for the sensible and wholesome application of the rule of law. You see Rudy you can’t just say stuff about people and then walk away and not have anything more to do with the fallout you brought on them. Nor can you rely on some sort of self-assigned self-importance in not having to bother to turn up and provide evidence for your outrageous slanderous rantings. Because Giuliani failed to preserve emails, text messages and social media account information from the time period when he made those accusations, Judge Howell said, Freeman and Moss are “severely hampered” in their ability to prove his statements were intentionally false and part of a broader conspiracy rather than merely negligent. And to add to the self-centred attributes of one disbarred ex-lawyer the judge also pointed out that Giuliani has “a self-professed 50 years of experience in litigation,” and plainly should’ve known better. And furthermore if he continues to withhold his financial records, Howell said, she will instruct the jury deciding damages to “infer that he is intentionally trying to hide relevant discovery about his financial assets for the purpose of artificially deflating his net worth.” Ha, ha and triple ha Rudy you no-good half-baked excuse for a crook. Fight the law? The law wins!
- All kinds of fun things are happening with Trump’s co-conspirators in Georgia. First of all, our favoritely named defendant, Ken Chesebro, invoked his right to a speedy trial, possibly under the impression that Fulton County DA Fani Willis wouldn’t be able to prepare her complicated case by October 23rd. Willis’s response? Bring it the fuck on, I’ll try you all on October 23rd. Judge? Let me at ‘em. The judge wasn’t quite so gung ho, but did grant Chesebro’s motion meaning he and any other defendants who request a speedy trial will be first to be tried. While Ken was busy regretting his haste, crazy Kraken Sidney Powell decided she wanted some of that action and chose to join the early cadre, causing old Cheesy to panic even more, because if there’s one thing worse than being the first one to have to defend against all that evidence, it’s doing it while metaphorically but sadly probably not literally handcuffed to Sidney “I get my legal claims from a woman who hears them in her dreams and who says the wind tells her she’s a ghost” Powell, a lawyer who even Trump says is crazy. Consequently, Monsieur Fromage Frère has asked to have his case severed from Powell’s, citing eight different ways in which he doesn’t know her. If he was a better lawyer, he’d know that doesn’t matter when you’re accused of both taking part in the same overall conspiracy. Meanwhile, former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is trying to get his case removed to federal court on the grounds that all the criming he did was done as part of his official duties at the White House, simultaneously blaming Trump for telling him to do illegal things, admitting he did them so Trump wouldn’t get angry, which is not a great legal defence, and confessing to violating the Hatch Act. Fun!
- Robert Sigg, who owns the increasingly-ironically-named far right-wing news network Real America Voice, apparently didn’t actually send a text message to Zachary Petrizzo of The Daily Beast. Petrizzo reported from the message that Sigg was launching an investigation into whether the network was duped by a Trump impersonator when presenters John Solomon and co-host Amanda Head talked to a convincing-sounding Trump voice in a 17-minute interview. Apparently Sigg quipped “Sounds like ChatGOP to me”. But that probably wasn’t really Sigg. So not only were the two presenters convinced by a possible TrumpBot’s inane ramblings peppered with the usual greatest hits and random changes of thought and inflection (and we know all about those and how easy/hard that is to emulate and spot the fake one hey Jim!), but the Beast reporter appears to have been duped by a text emanating from a number that a spokesperson for Real America’s Voice said that was not Sigg’s and is not his current number. Listening to the Trump voice it does have a glitchy quality which, with that and the possible fakeness of the guy who’s investigating the fakery, fits right into the Matrix-level layers of reality. Take the Blue Pill for once will ya and we’ll forget all about it!!
- In case you were wondering if the fact that Trump supporters are both crazy and heavily armed might be a problem, spare a thought for the Georgia Grand Jurors who, due to state law, had their names published in the indictment last month. Those back-the-blue, law-and-order loving, constitution-worshipping patriots on Truth Social, Gettr, and far right and Q-Anon themed message boards pretty much immediately doxxed the citizens who were chosen at random to do their civic duty, posting photos and addresses alongside death threats, racist slurs and general calls to violent retribution. Sure, some of the photos and addresses might not have been right, but hey, if you’re going to go around having the same name as someone who was made to vote on whether people should be held accountable for all the crimes they committed, you’re just asking for it I guess. One Texas woman took it a bit further and directly called the chambers of Federal Judge Tanya Chutkan to call her a racial slur – weird how that kind of keeps coming up – and say “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly, bitch”. The woman, Abigail Jo Shry, who has since been arrested, also threatened to kill all Washington Democrats, specifically Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee (who happens to be black) and all members of the LGBT community. I don’t remember what part they played in getting Trump indicted, but hey, thanks for your service.
- Who better to teach your kids in Florida than a drag queen? Yep the right-wing of course. The Department of Education in Florida (yeah an oxymoron right!) announced that it had approved the use of content by PragerU Kids for the coming school year. PragerU Kids was recently described by Time magazine as “a resource for schools”. But it is only a “resource” because the state of Florida has deemed it so. (He’s a villain and a jailbird again) PragerU is not an actual university. It has no accreditation. It is a conservative media company whose goal since its founding in 2009 has been to spread rightwing ideology to adults and children. Perfect fit for DeSanctus. Yes it’s our dear fiend and enemy Dennis Prager who we last encountered pontificating about 2000 Mules, who’s the founder of the auspicious edutainment provider who’s first avowed intent is to Fight Woke! Basically it’s one of those laughably dangerous right-wing youtube channels that make people’s algorithms angry for money. In a recent PragerU Kids ‘history’ cartoon Columbus tells two youngsters Leo and Layla: “Slavery is as old as time and has taken place in every corner of the world … Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?” Another describes George Floyd as a “Black man who resisted arrest”. Another features a cartoon version of Booker T Washington comforting white children by saying, “Future generations are never responsible for the sins of the past.” To which his young listener responds: “OK, I’ll keep doing my best to treat everyone well and won’t feel guilty about historical stuff.” The company is now reportedly going through the process of being approved as an “education resource” in other states. Clearly, serving an appetite for indoctrination, propaganda full of lies and half-truths specifically designed to manipulate and mold young minds to serve a rightwing political agenda is more fruitful income-wise than you know, actually educating future generations to progress beyond inequality and exclusion and think for themselves. Which of course has always been the problem – a problem that critical race theory and its proponents have been trying to combat and change. Get ‘em to learn to hate while they’re young hey Ron, and they’ll vote for you when you’re old!
- New York Attorney General Letitia James has asked for a partial summary judgement in her civil fraud case against Trump, his sons Eric and Don Jr, and the Trump Organization. Citing what she calls a ‘mountain of undisputed evidence’ included in documents submitted to the court, she says no trial is needed to rule on two simple facts: Were Trump’s annual financial statements misleading, and were those statements used to conduct business transactions? Part of the evidence appears to be a deposition which Trump sat for in April 2023, the transcript of which has now been released. I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t read the whole text of the seven hour deposition, but from what I’ve seen it appears to mostly feature Trump throwing his kids under the bus by claiming that he didn’t have time to commit fraud, because he was too busy being an awesome president and saving millions of lives by averting nuclear holocaust thanks to his negotiations with North Korea. I can see why Letitia James thinks the judge won’t be convinced by this argument since as we all know, Trump is never too busy to commit fraud, and there’s also the small fact that the fraud she’s talking about started in 2011, more than five years before Trump became very busy poking Kim Jong Un with a stick before making goo goo eyes at him so that he could end up with a vague and non-binding denuclearization agreement and claim victory.
- In Britain this week Kind of the only grown up in the room Ben Wallace Defence Secretary, who resisted all sorts of calls to resign or be reshuffled including when all around him were bringing down Boris, rather thinking it best to remain and help sort out a) Ukraine and b) Britain’s standing on the world stage vis-a-vis Ukraine – no Thatcher-lite cosplay in a tank for Ben. Anyway he has finally had enough and gone to “invest in the parts of life that I have neglected, and to explore new opportunities”. Far be it from me to suggest either of those might include a) winning and b) not hanging around with nasty, right-wing losers hell-bent on anything to stay in power. Speaking of which Grant Shapps will be the new Defence Secretary, This time last year he was transport secretary. Then he was home secretary, for a week. And then, in October, he became business secretary, before becoming energy secretary in February. But it’s not just his experience (five jobs in 1 year) that rocketed him to the top of the LinkedIn job applicants, but he’s good on telly. Good is obviously a relative term – he’s often rolled out to speak words in a given order, with a veneer of sincerity whenever crises blow up in the Tories’ faces; so a regular gig then! And with a general election next year they either need a face that communicates to the people so they vote for them, or a face that can convincingly blame everyone else for colossal and calamitous ruination of the nation once they’re evicted from office. Behind the big black door, someone you’ve never heard of – Amber de Botton doing a job you didn’t know was being done – PM’s director of communications has also resigned – rats ships sinking anyone? Oddly she got the job after Rishi got his, leapfrogging Nerissa Chesterfield who now gets her job, despite that she was working with Rish when the whole Liz Truss getting the job over Rish thing happened, a delicious kind of irony going on there? Anyway de Botton knew television but Chesterfield knows politics, so now that political butterfly Shapps is up for telly at least someone qualified might do the politics, oh no that’s right Ben’s resigned!
That’s almost all for this week, but here’s our AI-aided and minimally hand-edited transcript which is at least quite accurate, but not totally:
Countless Counterfeit – FT#131 Transcript
Jim: Hello and welcome Fallacious Trump, the podcast where we use the insane ramblings of inmate number P01135809 to explain logical fallacies. I’m your host, Jim.
Mark: And I’m your other host, Mark. A logical fallacy is an error in reasoning that results in bad or invalid arguments. And the logical fallacy we’re looking at this week is the Countless Counterfeit Fallacy.
Jim: So the Countless Counterfeit Fallacy, which is a great name, I love the name for it.
Mark: It is.
Jim: It is when people make the argument or make the claim that a large amount of unreliable evidence or evidence that on its own would be seen as poor evidence, if you have lots of it, that somehow means that’s a good and reliable way to back up your claim. Lots of bad evidence shoved together makes good evidence.
Mark: Yeah, because didn’t we talk about that in one of the countless filings against Trump when she just went, yeah, all of this is shit, and they kind of went, yeah, but there’s lots of it.
Jim: Well, coincidentally, that’s kind of what our first example is, because yeah, Trump is talking here about the many, many affidavits that they have from people claiming proof of election fraud.
Trump: We have so much evidence. And then you go to a court, oh, they don’t have enough evidence. We have hundreds and hundreds and even thousands of affidavits, and they say, he doesn’t have the evidence. We have so much evidence, we don’t know what to do with it.
Jim: He doesn’t have the evidence. That’s how court people talk.
Mark: We have so much evidence, we don’t know what to do with it.
Jim: I mean, that bit is true.
Mark: Yeah, that’s true. You don’t know what to do with it. And what you’re doing with it isn’t evidence if you just printed lots of copies of the same thing. And, then, yeah, there’s 150 of these. But each one of them is the same, and each one of them is a terrible piece of lawyering.
Jim: In the most part, what they’re talking about with this is the 234 pages of affidavits that they submitted in one of their many post election cases. This one, particularly in Detroit. They had others in other places as well, and they were from poll workers, poll challengers, poll watchers, occasionally just the random citizen who all reckoned that there was none of them were really kind of citing things that they could prove or showed fraud.
Mark: Yes.
Jim: And the thing is, if you did have that, you wouldn’t need lots. You would need a few good examples of people committing fraud, but instead, what they have is hundreds of people saying things like, this one is repeated multiple times. Like several people who gave their affidavit to had it notarized by the same notary all wrote almost exactly this paragraph. I observed a ballot being duplicated, and I approached the supervisor and asked if there was a Republican there to witness this duplication. He said he didn’t know. That’s not fraud.
Mark: No.
Jim: The supervisor not knowing whether there was a Republican watching this process happen isn’t fraud.
Mark: No. The possible Duplication of a ballot?
Jim: Well, the Duplication happens because, like, if a ballot has been spindled mutilated in such a way that it doesn’t go through the tabulation machine, something like that. So what they will do, they have a process, and usually they have a Democrat worker and a Republican worker doing it together and duplicating the ballot so it gets put through. And in fact, that’s the case for most of these things. Most of these claims are things that happen regularly in elections and in counting that these people didn’t understand. and in fact, the reply from the city of Detroit to this was most of the objections raised in the submitted affidavits are grounded in an extraordinary failure to understand the election.
Mark: That’s great. An immense amount of ignorance.
Jim: They so don’t understand what they’re talking about
Mark: It’s like when you go to an automated checkout and you put your bill in and it won’t do it because it’s folded, or try it a few times and you have to kind of.
Jim: Flatten it out or use another bill.
Mark: Yeah, it’s not going to work for some reason. Let’s put the other one in. Let’s make a copy and put the copy in.
Jim: And they have procedures for when things don’t work, or when, for example, they get something that has no signature on the outer envelope. Or they get something where the date of birth has been put in wrong or hasn’t been put in at all. They will put those to one side. They’ll get dealt with later. They contact the voters to give them an opportunity to fix cure their ballot. That process of putting things to one side and leaving them for later was questioned by loads of these affidavits. But also, there’s just mad stuff. Like one person said, I witnessed a meeting between election worker team leads where they gathered together and spoke, and the meeting ended in a cheer. Many of these team Leads wore masks or other materials supporting Black Lives Matter, and that’s not fraud.
Mark: Many of these people were wearing plaid pants.
Jim: a lot of them complained about not being able to stand close enough during COVID This was a thing that was litigated in Philadelphia, and that was the one case that the Trump campaign won, essentially, was that, yes, the poll watchers should be allowed to stand closer, but in michigan. They weren’t. And they were repeatedly told by supervisors, stand 6ft away.
Mark: Stand back.
Jim: Many people cited that as evidence of fraud.
Mark: No, it’s evidence of COVID Yeah.
Jim: The fact that in the TCF Center in Detroit, where counting was taking place, we’ve talked about this especially on the Patron episodes, about 2000 Mules, but I think we’ve mentioned it on the show as well. There was a point at which there were too many watches, too many people in the room kind of checking that everything was right. So at a certain point, they thought, this is getting ridiculous, it’s too full, we’re in the middle of a pandemic. And they stopped people being allowed to get in. And when people left to go to the toilet or go to get lunch or whatever, they couldn’t get back in. because they’re allowed 134 per party. 134 Democrats, 134 Republicans, 134 independents. And when they had too many, they didn’t chuck people out, they just stopped. More people coming in and stopped. And so a lot of the affidavits are saying, I came at this time and I wasn’t allowed in. That’s loads of them, there’s loads of them complaining about the fact that they put cardboard up against the windows, which was done because people were, outside wanting to get in and taking photos and video of what was going on inside. Which you’re not allowed to do.
Mark: Not allowed to do.
Jim: There were people who complained about loud public address systems. Mean looks from poll workers.
Mark: Yeah and the look of meanness is in the eye of the beholden.
Jim: One person who complained that a Democratic poll worker told her to go back to the suburbs, Karen.
Mark: To which she replied, I want to speak to your manager.
Jim: There were about seven or eight of them that included at the end, the paragraph almost word for word throughout the day, I witnessed a pattern of intimidation, secrecy and hostility by poll workers. Poll workers would cheer, jeer and clap when poll challengers were escorted from the TCF Center. There seemed to be collaboration between the Democratic poll challengers and the city of Detroit poll workers.
Mark: Wow.
Jim: So basically when people were being obnoxious, trying to stand too close, challenging things that were just standard procedure, eventually people got rid of them, they were ejected. They, in some cases called the police because they were trying to take photos of stuff that they weren’t allowed to and stuff like that. And every time an obnoxious asshole got removed, everyone went Yay. Evidence of fraud.
Mark: That was evidence of collusion. Yes.
Jim: One person said, I was accused by a Democrat volunteer of being part of a cult for my support of Trump.
Mark: So a man with the horns and fur.
Jim: I experienced intimidation by poll workers wearing BLM face masks. And another man of intimidating size with a BLM shirt on.
Mark: intimidating size? Don’t come at me with your size.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: It doesn’t matter how many hundred affidavits you have, when this is the quality of them, you can have thousands of them. It’s still not good evidence.
Mark: They live in a world where that’s enough to trigger other people’s anger. Algorithm. It’s the kind of stuff, that kind of conversations I have with my somewhat right wing neighbors who will say stuff and expect me, and I can see the gap waiting for me to say, oh yeah, you’re right there. And I’ve learned to kind of change the subject slightly to their dogs or whatever. And their, anger, suspicion, prejudices are all validated by other people agreeing with them. And that’s all they need. There is no more evidence required. Not only are they ignorant of the electoral, procedure, they’re ignorant of how the law works. Because when you try and send a thing into a court and practically say, yeah, you know what we mean? And that the court doesn’t go, oh yeah, right, yeah, no problem. Big tick with a sharpie. There’s no case to be answered here. This is just Karen like moaning. And also, it’s quite suspicious that all of you have used exactly the same phraseology.
Jim: Yeah, that is pretty weird. But yeah, the last one in the list of the 234 pages was one of the most specific. It was from a woman called Anita Chase, who didn’t appear to be a poll worker or involved in the election. But she said that she had checked the state’s online tool that showed that her deceased son had voted in the last two elections in Detroit. And she gave her son’s name, and middle initial. Obviously, this is proof that someone is voting in his name. So things like that, maybe if you had lots of things like that, that might be useful. Apart, from the fact that when you look into that as people have, like journalists and the court, it turns out that, yes, someone with that name did vote.
Mark: Right.
Jim: But turns out that that’s not the only person with that name. And the person who voted had a date of birth that was not the same as this.
Mark: I was going to say, did she neglect to check that?
Jim: So, continuing with Trump, he has also made similar claims about lots of evidence for things like hydroxychloroquine.
Trump: I’ve heard tremendous reports. Many people think it saved their lives. doctors come out with reports. You had a study in France, you had a study in Italy that were incredible studies.
Jim: Incredible is an interesting choice of word there, because as we know, it literally means not credible.
Mark: Yes.
Mark: Has no credence.
Mark: Yes.
Jim: A great way of describing the studies that he’s referring to.
Mark: because we know he hasn’t read them.
Jim: It doesn’t matter how many scientific studies agree with each other if the individual studies are dog shit. And that’s why when people do meta-analyses, where they want to see if there’s a trend or a relationship between two things. The first thing you do is look for all of the studies. The second thing you do is set criteria that remove shit studies. So you’re not including we don’t know exactly which studies he’s talking about. But given when he made this claim and the studies that had recently been publicized the French study was the one done by Didier Raoult, who won the Rusty Razor award from the Skeptic magazine, for worst promoter. Of pseudoscience for this study because he had done a study on six patients which was not properly controlled. Excluded data for patients whose condition worsened.
Mark: Right.
Jim: And then he claimed that this proved that it worked to improve people’s outcomes.
Mark: Right.
Jim: And obviously, it doesn’t, that’s shit. the Italian study, if this is the one he’s talking about. It wasn’t even really a study. It was looking at the details of how many people who were taking, hydroxychloroquine for other conditions for lupus or rheumatoid arthritis went on to get COVID over a period of time. It wasn’t controlled. It was a kind of observational study, essentially. And it didn’t take into account any potential confounding factors, like, for example, the fact that lupus and rheumatoid arthritis are autoimmune diseases. They are problems with an overactive immune system. and is it possible that an especially strong immune system, that’s so strong it’s attacking your own body might make you less likely to get COVID?
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: It’s at least plausible. And that should have been considered in the write up of that paper.
Mark: Yes, exactly. So not so much the thing that you’re taking in order to tone down your immune system a tad, but the actual thing that you’ve got that warrants the taking of hydroxychloroquine M might be the thing that prevents you from getting that. Yeah. As a scientist, one would probably want To consider .
Jim: that it might be something you’d think about.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: And the thing is, because of COVID being a global pandemic and hydroxy being kind of suggested by multiple people, especially after the Didier Raoult study, it was quite, a common thing for people to study. So there’s a lot of these terrible studies that, in some cases, show evidence in inverted commas of improvement. In fact, between February and November 2000 and 2200 and six studies of hydroxychloroquine with regard to COVID were registered with the national, institute for Health Clinical Trials Registry as of November 2000. And 2135 of those 206 were still ongoing. 22 of them had been completed, and the rest had either basically been suspended or terminated because people were getting worse, or because other studies, like better studies, had come out and shown that there’s either no benefit or in some cases, it makes people’s outcomes worse.
Mark: Ah.
Jim: The fact that there are a lot of studies, if the studies are not well controlled, have high numbers of patients involved, have a good methodology, the number of studies that you can point to and say that’s not qualifying factor.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: If you have one really good high end number, well controlled randomized control trial, that’s really good. If you then can repeat that with a similarly controlled study, that’s even better. But 100 shit ones don’t add up to one good one.
Mark: Several hundred wrongs don’t make a right.
Jim: Yeah, quite.
Mark: Or 2000 wrongs don’t make a right.
Jim: So in our final example in this section, we go to 2000 mules which and it is filled with fallacies.
Mark: Hey, we should do a special on 2000.
Jim: We could spend a few hours on that. So this is Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary claiming election fraud happened
Mark: just stop you there. Documentary shaped film.
Jim: Yes. Claiming that election fraud happened through a system of stash houses and people paid to put ballots in boxes or something.
Mark: We never did see any evidence of a stash house, did we then?
Jim: Nothing. It wasn’t in the film. No. But what they did claim to present was evidence that lots of people went to lots of ballot boxes to put ballots in.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: And how they did that was by tracking their phones and claiming that meant you could put them in the vicinity.
Mark: Of these ballot boxes.
Dinesh D’Souza: So what was the criterion that used?
Gregg Phillips: That final decision was they had to have been to ten or more dropboxes, meaning unique visits inside of a space. And five or more visits to one or more of these organizations.
Catherine Engelbrecht: Those were the outliers. It was such an aberrant pattern.
Dinesh D’Souza: So what you’re saying, I mean, it seems to me there’s no reason for someone to go to even two dropboxes. But you’re saying that maybe there’s a conceivable reason someone did that. Let’s identify a large number of dropboxes and multiple trips and that way we’re going to catch not all the offenders.
Gregg Phillips: Right.
Dinesh D’Souza: But the worst offenders.
Gregg Phillips: The way we would describe it is we want to absolutely ensure that we don’t have false positives.
Jim: So what they’re saying is they set a criteria that meant that they have to have ten dropboxes that they’re found at or more. Because that means if you have that number, that means that this person is a ballot mule that didn’t have any other reason to be there.
Mark: Right.
Jim: The thing is, each one of those visits, they don’t have the evidence to prove that a person put anything in the ballot box. They can’t place them nearer than 30ft at best to a ballot box. But they’re saying because they were near so many, that’s proof.
Mark: Right.
Jim: But each individual one isn’t proof of anything.
Mark: No.
Jim: You can be quite near as many ballot boxes as you want. It isn’t proof you put anything in.
Mark: Any of as we saw, as we watched it for countless we talked about it for countless hours. Countless, countless. They were genuine hours, not counterfeit hours. They were in busy civic areas as you would want to put a post box.
Jim: Libraries, street corners, government buildings. In some states, they were in, gyms, shopping malls all over the place.
Mark: But deliberately put in places where there’s A lot of public access, you haven’t got to go out of your way to do it because that’s the way to make voting easy. We’ll put the ballot boxes where the people are.
Jim: Exactly. What they’re saying is we can’t show them doing a thing, but we can show them not doing it loads of times.
Mark: Exactly.
Boris Johnson: And, now is the time, I think, for Mark’s British Politics Corner.
Mark: Well, see, I’m going to return to March 23, where several prime ministers go. Boris Johnson was the Prime Minister when he appeared before Select Committee, looking into whether he misled the House. And he goes to some lengths to try to cite evidence that hasn’t been used. But in case we’ll start with Harriet Harman, who was the chairman of the Select Committee, just reminding us of what went on. And then we’ll hear Boris moaning about the fact that there’s all this evidence that he wants to bring that isn’t being brought.
Harriet Harman: Mr Johnson spoke about the question of COVID compliance in Number Ten in the House of Commons more than 30 times. I’d like us all to have a reminder now.
Boris Johnson: All guidance was followed completely during Number Ten. There was no party and that no COVID rules were broken. And that is what I have been repeatedly assured. And whatever happened, the guidance was followed and the rules were followed at all times. That when I said, and I came to this House and said in all sincerity, that the rules and guidance have been followed at, all times, it was what I believed to be true. Not only has the committee found nothing incriminating, it has gathered a huge amount of evidence which demonstrates very clearly that those working in Number Ten shared my belief. The overwhelming evidence which you have assembled is that these individuals believed that the rules and the guidance were being complied with. And what is so telling is the number of officials who say the same thing and the total silence of the written or electronic record about concerns that anyone wanted to raise with me. The best and fairest course now would be for the committee to publish all the evidence it has assembled so that Parliament and public can judge for themselves. Despite my repeated requests, the committee has refused to do this. It has elected only to publish the evidence which it considers incriminating and not the evidence which I rely on and which answers the charges.
Mark: Yeah. Ah.
Jim: How dare they only show the evidence which proves I did stuff wrong and.
Mark: Not the stuff I allege comes from multiple sources. So his evidence is itemized as these individuals who believe guidance was being followed.
Jim: Yeah. So many people believed while they were breaking the law that they weren’t breaking the law.
Mark: Yeah. It’ll be fine. It’s fine.
Jim: This was presumably before the video of the party where they said, you’re not videoing this, are you? Because we’re clearly breaking the law.
Mark: how are we going to spin this? And the evidence of the fact that there are lots of officials who all say the same thing. So that’s clearly evidence. So there are lots of officials who all say, well, we absolutely believed guidance was being followed.
Jim: They can’t all be lying, can they?
Mark: but it might be true that they’re all saying that they believe that. But there’s a difference between and we’ve spoken about this before. There’s a difference between belief and knowledge. We knew the guidance was being followed. No, I believed and Johnson, in the cascade of ever diminishing, smaller and smaller nuances of language, he said, yeah, I firmly believe, I sincerely believe that the insurers he’s being assured that I believe. You can believe all your fucking light, mate. It’s not true. Plus, right, not only is this evidence of individuals and officials who will say the same thing, but the evidence of the fact that there’s no evidence that there’s complete silence from the electronic record about people voicing concerns to him that the rules were not being upheld. So he’s citing a lack of evidence as evidence.
Jim: Nobody told me officially that it was illegal. I can’t be expected to know that the laws I passed apply to me.
Mark: Unless somebody tells me, people who are employed by me, they answer to me for the continuing of their career and their reputation and the possibility of promotion and just continuing to get paid.
Jim: This is identical to one of Trump’s claims about the Georgia phone call to Brad Raffensberger. He said, and he said it about the Ukraine call. As know there were lawyers on the call. If I was doing something illegal, why did none of the lawyers say on the call, stop this, you’re doing something illegal? The lawyers he employed.
Mark: we talked before about the photographers. Said if we were going to break the rules, why would we have photographers there?
Jim: Yeah, I think that’s the Basic Instinct defense.
Mark: Yes.
Jim: If I was going to kill someone, why would I then write a novel about that exact way of killing them.
Mark: Then of course, he compounds all that by saying, alleging that I’m not even allowed to present that evidence of no evidence. That evidence evidence which is evidence in itself, of a conspiracy against me.
Jim: It’s cover up. They’re out to get me.
Mark: It’s a kangaroo court. They’re out to get me. Infamy, infamy they’ve all got it in for me. So our second example is Boris’s sister, Rachel Johnson, who said there is lots of evidence for tactical voting in June 2022.
Rachel Johnson: I want to talk about tactical voting. It’s back. there was lots of evidence that this is what lost the Tories two by elections last week. but if you add up the number of votes actually won in both those byelections, labor 14,728. if you total Tiverton and Honiton and Wakefield, but Tories still outpunched them quite considerably, they got 24,634. So what this means is that a growing anti Tory coalition will have to form and coalesce if you want to kick the Tories out of office.
Mark: The whole idea of tactical voting is kind of frowned upon by the political parties. Mainly. Mainly Tories.
Jim: Mainly Tories, because the non Tories don’t get voted against in the same way.
Mark: So tactical voting is basically people vote for who they think is going to win that isn’t a Tory rather than the party that they would normally vote for.
Jim: Possibly normal voting, isn’t it?
Mark: We used to call it voting.
Jim: When all of the parties have a chance, then you vote for who you would like to win. But when it’s essentially a two party system, just like they did in 2016 and in 2020 and so on, you vote against the person you hate the most. And you don’t do that by voting green or independent. Jo Jorgensen got far too many votes in 2020, but they weren’t people, who were like, I don’t want Trump to win, so I’d better vote for Jo Jorgensen. Yeah, no, you vote for fucking Joe Biden if you don’t want Trump to win.
Mark: Exactly. Marine Le Pen, nobody wanted her to win, and nobody particularly liked Macron, so they would hold their nose and.
Jim: Begrudgingly vote for the person who is not big an asshole.
Mark: Yes, I’m going to tactically vote for the smaller of the assholes. Yeah, fair enough.
Jim: Yeah.
Mark: No, that’s all right. But, yeah, don’t do that, because that’s tactical voting. Fuck off. It’s voting. I get to vote. You can’t denigrate the way I’m voting. And actually, what she’s doing is thoroughly ignoring that the Lib Dems simply won in Tiverton and Honiton. The Tories lost the two seats in Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton by elections, even though they scored more votes than Labour, but they didn’t score more votes than the Lib Dems.
Jim: She’s entirely ignoring ignoring the fact that there was another party that got more votes than both.
Mark: Exactly.
Jim: Yeah.
Mark: In Wakefield, labor got 13,166, Conservatives got 8241, so they won by a lot, and the Tory lost by a lot. In Honiton and Tiverton, the Lib Dems won by 22,000, the Conservatives got 16,000 votes and labor only got 1000. It’s nothing to do with tactical voting because the Lib Dems internal data, which it wasn’t disclosed until after the polls had closed, showed that the Lib Dems were 5% ahead of the Conservatives over the weekend prior to the byelection. So, people, what’s your intention to vote? Well, I’m going to vote Lib Dem. And there were lots of local issues that weren’t being served by the Tory party, but were being campaigned about by the Lib Dems that caused people to vote Lib dem. And what’s interesting is that in what sounds like a case of sour grapes, labour front bench sources confirmed that senior labor figures had told them the party would be soft peddling the campaign in the by election in order to allow the Lib Dems an easier shot of winning. But the Labor Party candidate, who was Liz Pohl, was the chair of the constituency Labor Party and previously stood for labor in the same seat in 2019 and came second after the Tories. So it’s not a done deal.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: They didn’t withdraw from that.
Mark: No.
Jim: In some cases parties did, didn’t they? They basically pulled their candidates completely out of a local election.
Mark: They said, not going to do it.
Jim: Specifically for this person. Absolutely. We’re not going to win. And if we both stand, then the Tories will win and we don’t want that.
Mark: Exactly. Yeah. So for Rachel Johnson to selectively add up the number of popular votes. Then say that this is evidence that the only way to oust the Tories is for people to have a collaborative coalition, most of the by elections under the Tories, laterally, post pandemic have all gone not the Tories way. So they’ve come up with various excuses to deal with that.
Jim: Weirdly. None of them have been, turns out we were shit.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: No, people didn’t want to vote for us because of all the bad stuff we’ve done. No. They never cite that as the reason, do they?
Mark: No, of course not. They blame everybody else. The previous administration 13 years ago. but in keeping with Boris hiding in the fridge, the candidate, Helen Hereford locked herself in a storage room once she’d arrived at the counting venue and refused to speak to journalists. Which is quite cool, even though they beat labor by 15,000 votes.
Jim: Yeah. It hasn’t been for those pesky Lib Dems. They would have won the whole thing.
Mark: Exactly. Yeah.
Mark: Tearing a mask off and revealing the nasty right wingers underneath. Speaking of which, at, the frighteningly sharp end of culture war, right wing voter courting tory policy Cruella de Braverman in April 23 said, as reported in the Guardian, I think that people coming here illegally do possess values which are at odds with our country. We are seeing heightened levels of criminality when related to the people who’ve come on boats, related to drug dealing, exploitation, prostitution. Saying that she’d been told this in conversations with senior police officers. And Tory Housing Minister Robert Jenrick also said politicians should take heed of protests in Nosley, widely reported to be fueled by far right activity as housing people seeking refuge in hotels could result in destabilizing local communities. And responding to that, Braverman said these are real challenges which go beyond the migration issue of people coming here illegally. We need to ensure we bring an end to the boat crossings. We’ve got people here who are coming here illegally. That in itself is. Criminal behavior. And that is why we’re setting up our new framework on illegal migration. So basically, with the evidence that they’ve got, which is some senior police officers who have seen an increase in drug dealing, exploitation and prostitution at the same time as people who’ve come on boats.
Jim: It’s not ironclad causality, is it?
Mark: No.
Mark: And that there are people who come here illegally, that in itself is criminal behavior. So these people are criminal. We’re making them criminals by changing the law visa vis rights of asylums so that it’s a criminal act to come here. Because we’ve changed the law which flies in the face of the international agreement on asylum seekers which might require a, withdrawal from the UN charter of human rights in order to change the law sufficiently to make that illegal and then saying yes. So that’s a criminal act. So these people are criminals and stirring up the problems of right wing hatred and then citing those as evidence that something needs to be done. And the Tories are the only one to do the something, which they will do by simply stopping doing the culture of war stirring and then the problem will go away. It’s, an entire problem of their own making based on no evidence whatsoever other than the evidence that they say, oh yeah, well, we talked to police officers and the Housing Minister says.
Mark: Stuff.
Mark: Like this is happening. All of which reminds me of Constable Savage from Not the Nine O’Clock News in the 80s.
Rowan Atkinson: Savage, why do you keep arresting this man?
Griff Rhys-Jones: He’s a villain, sir.
Rowan Atkinson: A villain
Griff Rhys-Jones: and a jailbird, sir.
Rowan Atkinson: I know he’s a jailbird, Savage. He’s down in the cells now.
Griff Rhys-Jones: Well, there you are, sir.
Rowan Atkinson: You arrested him. Savage.
Griff Rhys-Jones: Thank you, sir.
Mark: They’re making people criminals by arresting them. Then they go, well, there you are, they’re criminals. your own self referential evidence isn’t evidence. And you can have as much self referential evidence as you like, then you’ve just made a whole swathe of people criminal and then you can’t point at them and go, yeah, look at all these criminals coming. That’s why we need to do something about it. Self made evidence isn’t evidence.
MARK’S FALLACY IN THE WILD STING
Mark: Faith no More there, with ‘Evidence’
Jim: And in the fallacy in the wild we like to talk about the fallacy of the week from a non political perspective. And our, first example this week comes actually from the namer, of this fallacy, who is an author called David Kyle Johnson, who came up with this based on the writings of a philosophy professor from Boston College called Peter Kreeft, who is a Catholic and is also a believer in ghosts
Mark: Yet still an employed philosophy professor.
Jim: So he’s written about the fact that the belief in ghosts is not incompatible with Catholicism, essentially, because there are things some people say that the things in the Bible say you shouldn’t believe in that kind of stuff. but he says, no, it’s completely fine. in fact, if anything, ghosts prove an afterlife, and therefore Christianity is good and real.
Mark: Right. And one of the trinity is a ghost.
Jim: Absolutely.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: But one of his arguments is you hear a lot about people seeing ghosts, right? Lots of people see ghosts. It’s very common. And sure, most of those aren’t true. But right, here’s his analogy. And this is where the logic breaks down pretty quickly.
Mark: Okay?
Jim: the existence of counterfeit money strongly argues for the existence of real money somewhere. Basically, he’s saying that no one would bother making counterfeit money if real money wasn’t a thing, which that bit’s fair. Counterfeit money wouldn’t be useful. No one would make it. So that’s proof. Counterfeit money is proof of the existence of real money.
Mark: Right.
Jim: Therefore and this is where the analogy doesn’t go anywhere, right. Therefore, the fact that there are fake ghost sightings is proof of real ghosts. And the fact that there’s so many, so many ghost sightings, even though you can’t trust any individual ghost sighting because they might be a fake or a hallucination or all kinds of different things, the fact that there are so many is proof that ghosts exist. And therefore God, in some weird, twisted, extra bit of logic from him, his argument, basically. And that’s why it’s called countless counterfeits. Yeah, because the counterfeits are the fake. Fake ghost sightings, essentially in the same way as the counterfeit money. And somehow those fake sightings and the number of ones that can’t be decided whether they’re fake or real is evidence, is good evidence when you smoosh them all together into one evidence evidential ball.
Mark: Yeah. Okay, so wait a minute. So the one of the fake ghost sightings, they’re fake because some of them are lying.
Jim: Some people are lying.
Mark: Right?
Jim: Some people see something. They think they see something that isn’t there. But according to this guy, those are just evidence. It’s hard to quite figure out. It sounds like what he’s saying is that is evidence. Because if the direct analogy counterfeit money is evidence for real money, it sounds like what he’s saying is that the fake ghost sightings are evidence that there are real ghosts. if I’m trying to be as generous as I can be, I think it might be that he’s saying essentially they can’t all be wrong. There are so many ghost sightings. Yes, some of them are fake, but not all of them. We can’t assume all of them. He’s not even saying we can’t assume all of them are fake. He’s somehow using it as proof that some of them aren’t fake. Yes, which you can’t do.
Mark: And it’s not the correct analogy either.
Jim: It’s not at all, because counterfeit money is very specific. There’s a reason to make counterfeit money is because you can pretend it’s real money and you get things without actually having the money.
Mark: Yes.
Jim: I suppose in some cases there’s a reason to pretend you’ve seen a ghost. Like if you run a supposedly haunted pub or something like that.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: You still get that benefit even if ghosts don’t exist, because it’s the fact that some people believe they exist. So, yeah, the analogy is not great. And, he’s wrong. He’s wrong.
Mark: it was interesting because we were talking about this last week, and I, was in the car listening to a trailer for an edition of loose ends, which is kind of collection of people on the telly and people in entertainment who all kind of sit around and talk about stuff. And it was a live one from the Latitude festival. And there was a guy on there who has done a podcast about the paranormal and isn’t the ParaPod, but he’s a guy called Danny Robins, and he was talking about that phenomena of it’s not important whether ghosts exist or not, but also the fact that the existence of ghosts, we kind of need to believe in that. And I found the clip that I heard on the radio after some detective work. I was beginning to think it didn’t exist, but then I realized if I thought about that enough, then it would surely exist. And I found it.
Danny Robins: But I think we need ghosts. I think there’s a reason why we have believed in them for so long. I think we haven’t consigned them to the scrap heat with elves and unicorns and fairies and all these things that we’ve been prepared to give up on believing. So I think either that means that they are real, or it means that we as a society have this kind of need for a comfort blanket or some sort of buffer between us and death.
Jim: I think that either is doing a lot of work, though, isn’t it?
Mark: Yes, but it’s also interesting, I liked his list of other things that people get laughed at, if they believe in, like elves and unicorns. There’s a certain bunch of things that no matter how much you say, I’ve seen evidence of, I’ve seen a unicorn, people just don’t accept that. That’s using the counterfeit money analogy. That’s insufficient evidence to say that unicorns therefore, must exist. Whereas there’s and perhaps Danny Robbins has got a fingertip on the nub of it, saying, yeah, we don’t necessarily need unicorns, but we need ghosts because unicorns aren’t necessary for us to deal with the fact of our own mortality.
Jim: Whereas I can absolutely see where he’s going along that road with that. And I agree that there is more motivation for us to believe in an afterlife, which is why many people cling to religion, even if they don’t necessarily fully buy into it all. It’s comforting in some ways, for some people. So, yeah, I can see what he’s saying there. But when he says that this it was a weird false dichotomy as well there when he said either the fact that so many people still believe in ghosts is proof either that society and, like, humans need to have this comfort blanket or they’re real.
Mark: Wow.
Jim: Those might not be the only two options. Secondly, I don’t think they should be treated as equally likely. And that was kind of implied there.
Mark: Because what he should have said was something along the lines of, that’s why we accept the evidence of our and other people’s eyes, mainly other people. That’s why we’re motivated their experiences. So we’re willing to have this stack of counterfeit examples mean that therefore it must be true. Whereas if you ask a lot of eight year old kids with Barbie dolls and that where the unicorns exist, they go, well, yeah, I’ve seen a lot of unicorns. Where did you see those? Saw him in the toy box. So and I’ve seen them there are hundreds of thousands of them. So that surely and, they all look the same. Somebody somewhere has seen one for real, so they must.
Jim: a couple of years Ago, there was a trend for narwhals being a thing, like the animal that kids were into in some way. There was, like, stuffed narwhals and toy narwhals everywhere. Among the narwhal verse I saw in one shot, I can’t remember if it was like one of these a coloring thing or a kind of stick, little stickers or sequins or something on. But it was like, mythical creatures, and it was like mermaids, unicorns, and, narwhals. And I was like, the fuck do you think?
Mark: Wait a minute.
Jim: What’s going on?
Mark: No, because somebody saw off, somebody at the Millennium Bridge, where a terrorist kind of invaded a lecture hall and stabbed.
Jim: was that a narwhal? I thought it was a human.
Mark: And somebody saw him off by tearing the narwhal nose horn. Horn. If it’s a horn, if it’s on your nose, tore that off the wall and whacked the guy with it and chased him across the bridge with it. so not a mythical thing.
Jim: No, they’re real, in case anyone was wondering.
Mark: Yeah.
Mark: No, they’re real creatures.
Jim: Talking of, things that people believe that there isn’t necessarily great evidence for, our next example comes from a show called Expedition Unknown the Hunt for Extraterrestrials. And this is a, typical shitty Discovery Channel documentary. Discovery Channel used to be a good channel. They used to have real, proper documentaries about nature.
Mark: They were, like, next door to where we worked.
Jim: Yeah. Several people I know went to work for Discovery Channel, and it’s turned completely shit. The History Channel isn’t much better.
Mark: There’s no history on there, really.
Jim: Every second documentary on the History Channel is about Hitler and the occult. But with the Discovery Channel, they do a lot of this kind of bullshit of aliens and, cryptids and all kinds of stuff. And this is one where this presenter, he’s, gone to Chile because apparently they have a lot of extraterrestrial sightings.
Josh Gates: The people here are warm and generous, but the reason I’m here is that they also see a heck of a lot of UFOs, more per capita than any other country. So many that the government established an official agency to investigate. The government founded the agency known as CEEFA in 1997 to look into UFO claims and to keep Chile’s vast airspace as clear as possible. How many reports a year are we talking about?
Jim: last year, we have 85 case.
Josh Gates: 85 cases? Wow. In one year? In one year, what percentage of those cases are you able to scientifically explain?
Karen Navarro: 72%.
Josh Gates: 72%. And in that 72%, what what are the explanations that you found?
Hugo Camus: Most sightings turn out to be ordinary objects. Things like birds, insects, weather balloons, even other planets like Jupiter or Venus.
Josh Gates: But CEEFA’s most disturbing case came across their radar, so to speak. Only recently, they allowed me to view the raw footage of a government certified UFO sighting.
Jim: So then they go on to show this video.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: it’s an infrared video, so it’s black and white, taken from a Navy helicopter in November 2014. So, when he says only recently, this program was made in November of 2017, it was put out on Discovery Channel in November 2017. I think what he means by recently is this is when they released this footage.
Mark: Right.
Jim: But it’s not when it came across their radar, so to speak. It came across their radar in November 2014. There’s a little more context in as much as this isn’t an organization that was set up by the government because they get so many calls about UFOs.
Mark: 80.
Jim: This was an organization that was originally a Ufologist hobbyist organization, that lobbied the government to be given some kind of mandate and were kind of essentially given an office and allowed to be called part of the, kind of civil aviation type part of the government. So it’s the same UFO believing hobbyists, but they’re just now, yeah, they’ve got an office, and they still identify a large number of the things that they get sent as bullshit. But then they’ll also do this thing, this kind of thing. So they spent a couple of years looking at this before they released it. And what it is, is you see this kind of dark shape, as if it’s hovering, moving very kind of slowly to the left, to the west. Essentially. This is footage from a camera on board a Navy helicopter. So it’s got all the metadata of exactly where they were longitude and latitude and all that kind of stuff. When it was, what day it was, what time, and all that kind of stuff. And then at a certain point, there’s this kind of plume of gas that comes off this object, stays still in the air and gets longer. And they’re like, this goes on for ten minutes and they have no clue, they don’t know what it was. And they say that the helicopter pilots kind of tried to contact the craft and there was no response. And they checked with Air Traffic Control and there was nothing in the area. and they just don’t know what it is. And so it’s clearly a, UFO. I mean, they call it a UAP. An Unidentified Aerial phenomenon. So they’re not saying it’s aliens, but they’re saying this is a thing we’ve looked into, we can’t debunk it. So therefore and as far as the show is concerned, this is like their best proof of extraterrestrials.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: The trouble is that, when this video was released to the public in January of 2017, after a couple of years of this UFO friendly organization kind of trying to figure out what it was, within five days, people on the Internet had figured out what it was.
Mark: Oh, yeah.
Jim: Because it’s a plane. Yeah, it’s a plane flying away from the helicopter. And it’s quite a long way away. But because it’s a plane, it’s got big engines and so they put out quite a lot of heat. So when you show that on infrared, even though it’s actually further away than they could see it, because it’s through clouds and stuff as well, it shows up on the infrared as, this kind of darkish blob. And because it’s traveling away from them.
Mark: It doesn’t move up.
Jim: It looks like it’s not moving very fast. And the plume of gas is just a contrail. It’s the gas being ejected from the Plane’s engines
Mark: and condensing in colder air than the hot engines.
Jim: Yeah, but the thing is, they released this footage to a kind of UFO friendly reporter who then put it out and said, look, they don’t know what it is, and so on. And that was months before this program was put out. That by the time this show went out, by the time it was post produced, knew exactly what it was, they had the flight number and the latitude and longitude, and it matches up exactly. And the reason when they contacted Air Traffic Control, there wasn’t anything in the area is because when you are looking at a, blob in the sky, you can’t tell how far away that was. So when they said, when they asked Air Traffic Control, is there anything in this area? They were asking about the wrong area. it was miles away from them.
Mark: Yeah. Because all they’re going to register on infrared is the heat.
Jim: Yeah, it’s a blob.
Mark: It’s going to register as hot. And a black blob.
Jim: And on top of that, when they were asked about it, it turned out that this is the first time that this organization has looked at infrared footage. So that’s part of the reason they didn’t know what it was. Because people who have looked at planes through infrared cameras are like, oh yeah, that’s a plane. That’s what they look like.
Mark: And even though we haven’t done that, we knew that it doesn’t move because it’s just going away and the contrail will look like it’s coming out of the top of it.
Jim: So the point is that it doesn’t matter how many reports you get, if the reports are that kind of quality, but if you treat them as not really looking into them, or looking into them without really understanding what’s going on, not giving it as much attention as Randos on the Internet, on Metabunk website, then it doesn’t matter how many you’ve got. Because having a bunch of ones that you’re like well, I’m m not sure what this is. Doesn’t mean it’s aliens. And in this kind of shitty show, it is presented just like in the Ghost Hunters shows and in the shows about Bigfoot or whatever. There was one about Ness Monster that I was going to use as an example and they’re talking about the surgeon’s photo and long debunked things, the footprints that were shown to be a hippo foot umbrella stand or something like that. These are things we know about and they’re still going. But look at all of these pieces of evidence. Look how many people have claimed that they’ve seen and it’s held up as proof that a thing exists. When they’re like the sheer number of them. It’s almost like a gish gallop. You have to debunk every single piece before people are prepared to go, okay, yes.
Mark: Well, on the basis that one hasn’t been debunked means that all the other ones that have their debunking is somewhat suspect.
Jim: Yeah. They’re somehow held up as even though they are shaky and not reliable, they’re held up as supporting evidence. I’ve got all these other bits that are shitty on their own, but when you put them all together, it’s very.
Mark: Convincing, the sheer weight of numbers.
Jim: So our final example in this section is from The Lost King.
Hamish: We have hard evidence to refute every accusation that Richard Detractors would put to us.
Alex: Us if we ever get the opportunity.
Hamish: Exactly. But we’re shouting in the void and nobody’s listening.
Someone else in the pub: Shut up!
Hamish: Thank you. Because Shakespeare’s play is more attractive than the truth.
Philippa: I’m sorry. My name’s Philippa. You must be the Richard the Third Society.
Big Keith: correct brackets, Edinburgh branch, close brackets at, your disposal.
Philippa: Well, so many people seem to take such a dim view of him.
Lorna: They do indeed.
Philippa: But they can’t all be wrong, can they?
Big Keith: You ever heard gossip about yourself and thought, how can they say that about me when they don’t even know me.
Annette: Most of what is written about King Richard is based on Tudor history, because Henry VI won the Battle of Bosworth.
Big Keith: If you get in quick with the first lie and repeat it often enough, then it becomes the truth.
Hamish: And Richard wasn’t around to defend himself, was he?
Jim: So this is a reasonable argument. Because like I was saying about the science, if you have lots of scientific studies which are shit, that doesn’t mean you can prove something. You can’t rely on those. And if you have various historical accounts, but they’re all based on the same source, or they’re all tainted by the fact that history is written by the winners and stuff, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s reliable. And when you get someone like Shakespeare, who is writing plays essentially for the monarchy to praise the monarchy, in some cases, that doesn’t become reliable historical evidence. And when you put all of those unreliable historical accounts together, you don’t get a good history, something that you can point to and say, this proves a thing about this person from history. You have to kind of essentially assign a value, in a way to the quality of the evidence that you’ve got. And if you get multiple corroborating pieces of good evidence, that’s something you can start to rely on. But if you get multiple pieces of bad evidence which all agree with each other, that doesn’t work in the same way.
Mark: And you can’t just say, oh yeah, we’ve got loads of stuff. It’s not the quantity, it’s the quality that counts.
Jim: I mean, if you look at, medieval paintings of cats, right?
Mark: Yes.
Jim: They are fucking insane.
Mark: Yes.
Jim: But there’s lots of them. But the fact that there’s lots of them doesn’t mean cats were freakish mutants in medieval times.
Mark: And also the same with, if you look at horses running, pre Edward Muybridge, they all run wrong.
Jim: Yeah.
Mark: So there are portraits of, race horses and steeple chasers that are all running with both sets of legs away from their body.
Jim: like a dog
Mark: Yeah. And it wasn’t until Edward Muybridge ran them through his multiple tripping cameras that the art world completely changed after that. And it does that because nobody’s ever seen it.
Jim: No, because they run really fast.
Mark: They run really fast. But nobody said to Muybridge, well, you’re wrong. Because look at the past 500 years of history, of painting, all it took was one set of photographs.
Jim: Yeah. Good reliable evidence.
Mark: There you go. Yeah.
Jim: So before we move on to fake news this week, a couple of upcoming events to talk about, one of which is, our Blackbird Watch party, which we’re doing for patrons on Sunday, the 17 September. We’re going to get our, patrons all together on a big zoom call. Hopefully big. Depends how many people show up.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: Turn up and watch the entertainingly terrible Michael Flattery blackbird film.
Mark: It’s wonderfully. Terrible. Yeah, the terrible wonder or the wonderful terror.
Jim: One of them.
Mark: One of those.
Jim: Definitely one of them. We’re going to have fun. We’re going to have a few laughs and wear silly hats. and drink.
Mark: I was looking at my collection of hats. Oh, now that’s a good one. Now that’s a very nick hat.
Jim: I hope You’re going to switch hats regularly.
Mark: Oh, God. Yeah, absolutely.
Jim: that’s for patrons. So if you think that that sounds like a thing you’d be interested in joining us on, then you are going to have to sign up at patreon.com/Ftrump by the 17 September. And we will be putting out a link on the 17th to the Zoom call so that people can join us at the time.
Mark: And as an added incentive, Jim and I were realizing that our latest target, which you could help us meet, is that we have to reverse roles for the next episode of Fallacious Trump. So if we get sufficient numbers of patrons signing up, you could force us to do things that we’re not…
Jim: Qualified For.
Mark: Including the one I’m looking forward to is the Fallacy in the Wild sting, which seems it’d be possibly a, crotchet too far.
Jim: Yeah, that is a thing that could be coming up if anyone else joins up,
Mark: Yes, you could enjoy with us the wonderful terror that is Michael Flatley’s Blackbird, and also force Jim to sing.
Jim: And slightly later in September, on the weekend of the 23rd and 24th, it’s QED in Manchester. there are still some tickets left, but not many. They’re going far. There’s less than 40 tickets left for the weekend if you are able to get to Manchester. It is a fucking brilliant weekend.
Mark: So good.
Jim: They’ve got, an amazing selection of speakers, including Professor Chris French Dan from Knowledge Fight podcast, Cara Santa Maria. There’s going to be live recordings of Skeptics with a K and Incredulous. It’s just an amazing weekend. If you are able to get to Manchester and you fancy having an enormous amount of fun and learning some cool stuff, get your tickets now at qedcon.org. If you can’t get to Manchester this year for the first time, they’re doing a streaming ticket where the events on the main stage will be streamed live and also available to view for two weeks after the event. So if you have thought about going to a QED but can’t get there, can’t make it this year, that’s another alternative. And you can see what QED is like and then decide, oh, that looks awesome, I’ll go along next time instead. And if you do go seek me out, I’ll be there. Have a chat and a drink.
Mark: I’m not there because I’m deliberately boycotting or anything. I’m away because member of the, band that makes the music for this show, the Outbursts, is turning 60 and we’re having a party and it’s up north. And so I’m going up there for the weekend and also another band reference, the Lost King. They’re talking about richard II. The outbursts have got a track called Richard III, which talks about Richard III. He was a wrong’un, so I heard.
Jim: Well, maybe he wasn’t. You should rewrite that track.
Mark: He might have been a wrong’un.
Jim: He might have been a wrong’un depending on how reliable the history is exactly. Doesn’t scan as well, admittedly.
Mark: No. This is why I’m looking forward to the fallacy in the wild sting.
Jim: It won’t be musical, but it’ll be accurate.
Mark: It’ll be yes. Yeah.
Mark: It’s like that version of the thing from Monty Python Meaning of Life that they got Stephen Hawking to correct.
Jim: Or that They Might Be Giants. The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, which they changed that in later shows to the sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma, because people pointed out it’s not gas, it’s plasma.
Mark: Excellent.
Jim: Brilliant.
Trump: So we’re going to play fake news, folks. I love the game. It’s a great game. I understand the game as well as anybody. As well as anybody.
Mark: Yes.
Jim: It’s time for fake News, the game where I read out three Trump quotes, two of which are real and one I made up, and Mark has to figure out which one is fake news.
Mark: Can I just say at this juncture that I’ve numerous sworn testimonies from high ranking officials. I’ve, tweets greetings cards, proper ones, not ones bought at the last minute from the gas station, blog posts from friends reunited in letters from French Estonian students from 1978, all attesting in a non patronizing way that yes, Mark, of course you’re very good at this game. It’s a bit patronizing, and you should thus have the scorecard reevaluated, for sure, in a court of law. Okay. Yes, it’s a bit sarcastic, too, but nevertheless, it’s weighty evidence. I’m sure you’ll concur.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: Hard to argue with that, really.
Mark: Absolutely.
Jim: Because there’s so much of it. That’s the thing.
Mark: Countless.
Jim: So, as we will talk about in a little minute, trump did a thing when the GOP debate was going on where he talked to Tucker Carlson on Twitter, because he not only wanted to boycott the debate, he wanted to try and pull as many viewers away from the debate as he could. So they released it on Twitter at the time. They talked about all kinds of weird things that we’ll talk about in a minute. But one of the things he talked about, which I’m hoping you haven’t seen in clips of this, was he went off on a bit of a tangent about the Panama Canal.
Mark: Okay.
Jim: And I’ve watched it, and I’m still not quite sure how he got there or what point he was making.
Mark: Right.
Jim: But here are some things he said about it. This is one of the true seven wonders of the world. And you take a look at the Panama Canal, it was such an incredible engineering marvel. We sold it under Jimmy Carter. We sold it to Panama for $1. The following day they quadrupled the amount of money that ships had to pay to get across. They didn’t lose one ship.
Mark: Okay. bit of a non sequitur there. They quadrupled the money and they didn’t lose one ship. Well, you wouldn’t if you could.
Jim: He means by that that ships didn’t say, oh, no, that’s too much money.
Mark: Oh, okay. They didn’t just go, no, we’ve lost shit.
Jim: You wouldn’t pay the money if they started losing ships in the panel.
Mark: Exactly.
Mark: Yes.
Jim: So, statement number two: How dumb was Jimmy Carter? We went from getting all the money – which we should, by the way, because we built it and it wasn’t easy. Lot of people died. Sixty, maybe ninety thousand. Half from malaria, some from rocks. Big rocks falling on you. That’s not a thing that you want. And we just gave it away.
Mark: Brilliant. Die from malaria, some from rocks. That’s excellent.
Mark: Yeah.
Mark: Big rocks falling on you. Okay, well, how else would you die? From rocks swallowing them?
Mark: Could be. Yeah.
Jim: You never can tell. Statement number three: In one day, they lifted the fees, which are, you know, pretty big for these massive ships to go through rather than going around the cape and through all the tremendous storms. Such beauty. It’s beautiful stuff, but you didn’t want to get caught in those storms. Those were storms that wiped out the biggest ships.
Mark: Okay, well, good that he knows the history and the geography of why it was built. See, I’m quite beautiful stuff. Such beauty. Trend of storms are beautiful. Beautiful storms. See, he can’t be seen to be going down Mother Nature in case God is looking on. Okay. Half a malaria, some from rocks. That’s a superb I want to say non Trump type joke. Half from malaria, some from rocks. Big rocks. Falling idea. Okay. Sorry. The power for a dollar. All right. So I think on the basis of trouble is he’s not smart enough to make that joke, but he might just be dumb enough to make that joke. Despite that, I think number two is the one that you made up.
Jim: Okay, so of the other two, which are you more convinced by?
Mark: I think I’m more convinced by.
Mark: The sold it for a dollar.
Mark: Number one.
Jim: Okay. And number one yeah. Is real.
Trump: This is one of the true seven wonders of the world. And you take a look at the Panama Canal, it was such an incredible engineering marvel. We sold it under Jimmy Carter. We sold it to Panama for $1. The following day they quadrupled the amount of money that ships had to pay to get across. They didn’t lose one ship.
Mark: Why is he extending the story of the stupidity of the Democrats back in time? Why is he doing that? with that stupid, awful voice? It was such an incredible, it was such a powerful $1.
Mark: Yeah.
Mark: What the fuck? What are you talking about, man? Is that any of that true? I mean, well, it got sold under.
Jim: Whilst Jimmy I mean, it’s incredible engineering marvel. They didn’t sell it under Jimmy Carter?
Mark: No.
Jim: Jimmy Carter, in 1977, signed a treaty with Panama to transfer ownership, essentially, of maintenance m of it to Panama, but that wouldn’t take effect until 2000, which it ultimately did.
Mark: So that following day was following 77, or was that in 2000?
Jim: It’s hard to say, because they never quadrupled the amount of money at all in any way.
Mark: Right.
Jim: But what he seems to be suggesting is Americans built it, gave it away, they gave almost gave it to the Panamanians, who then immediately charged Americans four times the amount to go through the canal and made loads of money on it, which is not, none of that is true. There were multiple increases in the fee for going through the Panama Canal, as you would expect over time. it did increase in quite large chunks. In, 1974, before the treaty was even signed, it increased by 20%. In 1979, it increased by 29%. 1997, it increased by 8%. In 1998, it increased by seven and a half percent. This was all before Panama had control.
Mark: Of ah, it right.
Jim: 2007 to 2012 ish it increased again. And it’s been quite difficult to figure out what the increase was in that case. And I’ve read places where it says ten to 15%, and other places where it says 65%. But either way, at, no point, certainly not in one day, did they quadruple it. Most of those increases were based on, analysis that said, essentially what he said by they didn’t lose one ship is at, most of those points. They said you could increase it by like three quarters. Everyone will still do it. It’s still so worth doing, still so cheap, comparatively, to going around the Cape and being in trouble, and the extra fuel and all of that kind of stuff. It’s expensive to go through the Panama Canal, but we’re still not charging enough. And obviously it’s got and straight, from when it was built, the fees essentially were aimed at just controlling the maintenance of it. They weren’t trying to make money out of it, as they still aren’t, as far as I understand. It’s an expensive thing to run. they’ve widened it, essentially doubling the capacity. And so some of those increases are to do that engineering work. Some of it was also dealing with the fact that ships changed during that period. Whereas previously everything was stored, below decks, they now have these massive container ships that kind of stack huge shipping containers on top of the decks. And so, whereas previously the toll was based on your capacity, below deck, that didn’t make any sense for all the ships that stacked didn’t have anything below.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: So, yes, it’s changed over time, at no point did it quadruple. And it certainly, wasn’t. The people in Panama. Now we own it. We will charge you four times the price. So you also think number three was real?
Mark: I ah do, yeah.
Jim: And number three is real.
Trump: In one day, they lifted the fees, which are, you know, pretty big for these massive ships to go through rather than going around the cape and through all the tremendous storms. Such beauty. It’s beautiful stuff, but you didn’t want to get caught in those storms. Those were storms that wiped out the biggest ships.
Mark: Such beauty.
Jim: He’s already on a tangent. This is not something he was asked a question about. And then he starts to go off on another tangent about the storms. They, are the best storms, all.
Mark: The best storms have. They handed them over to the Panamanians around the Cape. They’re not even our storms. And it’s just, what the fuck, man? But, then he’s actually kind of he’s justifying the reason for the cost going up or the fact that people are prepared to pay. That prepared to pay because it’s a lot safer. What’s the problem? Where’s the problem?
Jim: the only sense I could make out of any of it was that he’s complaining that Americans have previously done stupid things, specifically Democrats. But we’ve done such stupid things in the past, like giving away or selling the we didn’t sell it for a dollar. I don’t know where he got a dollar from. There’s no evidence whatsoever that a dollar changed hands between Panama and the US.
Mark: He’s channeling one of my uncles who says, even if you agree to swap a bicycle with somebody, you should give them a penny just to kind of seal the deal.
Jim: Yeah, it’s like a contract thing. It’s not a contract unless someone less some money changes. And maybe that’s where he’s getting that from. But this was a complicated treaty. It wasn’t a give us a dollar, you can keep it.
Mark: Buying most of the Wild west from the absolutely.
Jim: Yeah. Like the Louisiana Purchase or buying Alaska off the Russians. It involved lots of agreements about kind of who would be involved in the maintenance and the fact that Panama would, as a kind of result of getting it, would end up having to spend a lot of money in the US. And they would like, when they bought stuff for it, they would buy stuff from the US. They would buy American made things. It was a trade deal, essentially. So, yeah, you’re right. That number two was one I made up. the big rocks falling on you was a thing from me. in fact, did he actually say it? He didn’t say the big rocks.
Mark: Right. Okay.
Jim: Because that’s accurate. The stuff he said. I mean, I inflated the death toll more than he did, but he still inflated it. He claimed that they lost 35,000 Americans to mosquitoes to malaria.
Mark: Right.
Jim: And that’s how people died. That’s not true. 5000 Americans died. I mean, it’s still a lot. Yeah. No. Well, no, not from malaria. Prior to the Americans taking over construction, the French had a go.
Mark: Right.
Jim: They found it even harder. Reports vary, but around 20,000 French construction workers died. That was largely from disease, including malaria.
Mark: Right.
Jim: although there were some incidents as well with dangerous equipment and rocks and all that kind of stuff. But the American casualties were pretty much due to construction problems, rocks and the difficulty of excavating, that enormous amount of stuff.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: So I added that in to make it more realistic.
Mark: Right.
Jim: Because it wasn’t like those people didn’t die from malaria for the most part. He claimed that they were having to build it under nets and things. I don’t know where he gets it from.
Mark: No.
Jim: So, we have got some responses on, Facebook and Patreon, some of whom agreed with you. We’ve got on Patreon, colleen and Kaz both think number two. Colleen says, I think, too, because I saw a clip of him babbling incoherently about 35,000 people dying from mosquitoes.
Mark: All right, just purely on the number of babble was incorrect. Right.
Jim: Invisible unicorn thought number one. On Facebook, Scott says, number one is fake news. He’s probably struggled with the word quadruple.
Mark: True.
Jim: Molly says, I’m likely wrong. Going to say three. Andrew says number two. Well written fake news.
Mark: That is.
Jim: Benjamin says number one. No way is he that articulate. I mean, when you hear it when you hear it out loud yeah, it’s not it doesn’t come across articulate.
Mark: No.
Jim: Mary and Miles both say, I think three is fake. And Mike says, I want two to be true. So much so we’ll go with three.
Mark: Right.
Jim: Which is your user system isn’t is. I want to hear him say, so.
Mark: I’m just going to choose the other one. And then trouble is, you don’t get to hear him say it. If it’s not true, he doesn’t say it. Yeah, that’s how it works.
Jim: thanks for joining in. If you’d like to join in, then just be on our Facebook, page and our patreon constantly in case we record something.
Mark: Oh, so that means I won.
Jim: You won. You’ve won. You’re on a bit of a roll. I think you might have won three in a row now.
Mark: Oh, my God.
Jim: Right. Well, that’s step up my game.
Mark: It’s either going to be a hot hand or a gambler’s fallacy, isn’t it?
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: hoping for one of those specifically.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: And it’s time for the part of the show that this week at least, is called a Trumpless GOP debate is not a logical fallacy, because as I alluded to earlier on, I actually outright stated, there was a GOP debate for the potential nominee. I mean, it’s not really it was a GOP debate for whoever’s going to lose to Trump in the kind of nomination thing. And yeah, some of them did a thing. None of them particularly did anything good enough to make a difference.
Mark: Well, I quite like the fact that, new Kid on the Block, vivek Ramaswami yeah. Was just more Trump than Trump.
Jim: Oh, he was such a fucking dick. I know, but it was so obnoxious.
Mark: But it was brilliantly. Trump, he’d studied.
Jim: You can see what he’s doing. Absolutely.
Mark: Yeah.
Mark: He wouldn’t have been able to do that if Trump was there. No, it was just great. I really liked that performance. It was excellent. And, he knows full well that the system, even with DeSantis, who’s the other youngest new kid on the Block, who thinks he’s kind of subverted the system, even he isn’t fast enough and flexible enough to deal with Ramaswami’s thing, the mining of the whole thing.
Jim: Ramaswami’s thing. Was I’m the only one here on stage tonight who’s brave enough to say obnoxious, awful, untrue thing?
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: he wasn’t. Many of them said obnoxious, awful, untrue things.
Mark: He made it his personality to say it.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: None of you, you’re all born and paid for. I can say climate change is a hoax, because I believe it, because it is. And that he will pardon Trump and he won’t give any more money to Ukraine and stuff like that. He’s just an you know, that plays well with gallery.
Mark: Oh, absolutely. He’s kind of spotted that. In a way, he’s smarter than Trump ever was. Because I don’t know that Trump read the runes, well enough. All he was doing was having a.
Jim: Go at being Hillary.
Mark: Yeah.
Mark: Just being himself. And Trump’s self, as we know from reading Mary Trump’s book, is based on the 1950s. So despite the fact that he kind of thinks he’s an 80s playboy, he’s not. He’s from a 1950s early television background. So that’s kind of his. Whereas Ramaswami is in a post Trump world and can spot all the things that will enliven the right wing and say, I’m going to enliven the right wing. And then by saying something that will appeal to the right wing. So he’s doing it and he’s calling out what he’s doing at the same time. So he’s being an asshole and a meta asshole, all at the same time, in a kind of Dominic Cummings kind of way, but without any, whereas Cummings has got, a, cunning subterfuge who likes to think of himself as a machiavellian. He isn’t. But whereas Ramaswami isn’t smart enough to know that. So he was just saying, I’m going to identify all the things that will garner me some yeah. And then do it and then announce that he’s doing I, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
Jim: I mean, as a performance, if he wasn’t there, it would have been less interesting because the others, I mean, they were just pretty dull. Because Ramaswamy and DeSantis were in the center because they’re the highest polling candidates at the moment.
Mark: Right.
Jim: Or at least going they’re still only.
Mark: On sixes and tens or something.
Jim: They’re still not, they don’t have any chance. None of them have any chance against Trump, which is amazing given that he is four times indicted, facing 91 felony charges and going to end up in jail. Yeah, he’s still going to be the candidate. They’re vying for second place. And DeSantis, kind of did exactly what you’d expect him to do, which was kind of pretty much fade into the background while saying generally awful things. But he didn’t stand out in any way. Pence, I thought, stood out in some way more, which is weird because at first when I’d seen a few highlights, I couldn’t actually remember whether Pence was there or not. Because going into the debate, he hadn’t reached the criteria. Because there’s another debate coming up where the criteria are different. But for this one, you had to have 40,000 individual donors.
Mark: Wow.
Jim: you had to have got above 2% in a national poll or something like that. No, not a national poll. In a poll. Ah, in some poll, basically, if you start your friends, then fine. and I think you had a certain dollar value that you had to have donations in or something like that. Right. but he hadn’t reached, I think, the number of individual donors with a couple of weeks to go before the debate. So I wasn’t sure he was going to be there. He was there. He obviously hasn’t got a chance. But he did snap back at Ah Ramaswami a few times and he very much played on the guy’s lack of experience as to be honest, they all did. That was their main argument with him was basically you’re young and you’re not just young, you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, you don’t have any foreign policy experience, you don’t know anything about the things you’re saying, and we all have done stuff and you haven’t your shit.
Mark: But it’s quite terrifying in a way that, in British politics, it’s kind of terrifying that the last but one administration, maybe the last but two administration is now being seen to know the wise elder statesman. They were complete novices and Pence is now being seen as the sensible mance.
Jim: Had some interesting phraseology when he was listing the accomplishments of the Trump administration. One of the things he said in the kind of towards the end of the list is we were there for COVID. Which is true, they were.
Mark: And the same for most of the rest of the mike. Some of us didn’t have a fly land and sit on ahead for minutes at.
Jim: A mean to be fair, that is the best thing he can say about the Trump administration’s approach. They were there.
Mark: We were there. We were so there.
Jim: Yeah, I think, Chris Christie was most vocally anti Trump, which is kind of his campaign, isn’t it? Trump is bad. I’m the best option other than Trump, and he’s bad.
Mark: But what’s terrifying is that he’s in the utter minority. He’s absolutely right. When he said, someone’s got to stop normalizing this conduct, he kind of go, yeah, absolutely, you’re right.
Jim: And in that way, he kind of came across as one of the voices of reason.
Mark: Which got booed.
Jim: Yeah, a little bit. It’s actually quite an interesting mixture of the audience, because there were some things where, like, some things Ramaswami said he got booed, and some things he said he got cheers. Nikki Haley got some cheers for some quite anti Trump stuff and some quite anti Republican stuff. Actually, one of the things she was talking about was they were all talking about inflation, and she said, the inflation that we’re experiencing, and a lot of these things and the deficit problems aren’t biden, they were caused by the Republicans. And she got a cheer, which was very surprising, but she was basically saying, we need someone who understands this stuff to be in the White House. It’s time for an accountant in there. It’s not enough to just say we’re great. They’re not great. And when actually, Trump added trillions to the budget. Yeah.
Mark: don’t get an account.
Jim: We got no, it’s not, and then you’ve got people who were also there, which mainly is ASA Hutchinson, who was governor of Arkansas, who, they didn’t come to him much because he didn’t have a great deal to say. And, the other one was a guy called Doug.
Mark: Called Doug?
Jim: Doug Bergum. I want to say.
Mark: Right.
Jim: His thing that he kept saying every single time. Oh, and Tim Scott. I haven’t mentioned Tim Scott. He was a bit more vocal. but Doug Bergam, the thing he said every time it came up was that he was from a town of 300 people. He was from a small town. That was his thing.
Mark: And yet nobody in the town knows who yeah.
Jim: No, that was basically it. And the thing is, there’s an interesting reason why Doug Bergen was there at all, right. Because I mentioned those requirements to make it to the debate stage. one of them is you had to have 40,000 individual donors.
Mark: How do you do that in a town of 300?
Jim: Well, yeah, what he did was, he’s very rich, and he offered people a $20 gift card if they make a donation above one dollars.
Mark: Okay.
Jim: Loads of people who definitely don’t support him went, yes, please, I’d like 19 free dollars.
Mark: Yeah.
Mark: Send you a dollar and a cent. Send me 1899.
Jim: So that’s how he got over the limit, because the supporters don’t have to actually support you. The donors don’t have to support you. They just have to donate to your campaign. And so he paid people to donate to his campaign.
Mark: So if they all paid a dollar to get the $40,000
Jim: He’s out by 20 times that. 19 times that. Yeah. $800,000.
Mark: Something like that.
Jim: Wow.
Mark: bloody hell. Why didn’t we support Him?
Jim: Which means he, I think, has already made it to the next stage. Well, in terms of number of, donors. But he’s only polled, above 2% in local polls, in, like, state polls up to this point. And for the next stage of the debates, you have to have polled above I think it’s two or possibly 3% in a national poll, which is going to cut out basically several of the people who were there, for that. He’s kind of running a huge advertising campaign, to try and get his name out there. He didn’t make any impact. He didn’t really say anything that seemed to resonate with anyone. he’s an also ran. He didn’t get as much chance to as some of the people who were closer to the center, like Nikki Haley and Tim Scott. Nikki haley quoted Margaret Thatcher.
Mark: Yeah, I like that bit when she got waded in and said, if you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman. Which was quite good. But if that’s her role model, heaven help Gary.
Jim: Yeah. Including the moderators lied about abortions, like, to a man. the moderators cited five states where abortion on demand is legal up until birth, which is not a thing. No. And they all agreed that shouldn’t be allowed, which is good because it isn’t.
Mark: So that thing that isn’t allowed, we All agree, don’t like that.. neither does anybody else. And that’s why it isn’t a thing.
Jim: They had to sign an oath. There’s another thing of being on this stage was they had to sign an oath to support the Republican candidate, which is a mad thing because it’s obviously going to be Trump. They asked the question, having signed that oath, essentially, will you still support Trump if he is convicted?
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: ASA Hutchinson and Chris Christie didn’t. They kept their hands down. Everyone else would.
Mark: Wow. Yeah.
Mark: Wasn’t there a moment when they reviswami stuck his hand up straight away?
Jim: Other people just got, oh, he’s all in. He says he’ll pardon him on day one.
Mark: Well, it doesn’t matter because he’s never going to get there. But this is his moment in the spotlight. I mean, the thing is, he’s going.
Jim: To disappear off in some weird scenario where Trump, for some reason, drops out of the race. Don’t think it’s going to happen. But if he did, then he would be the obvious choice to endorse, because he’s the only one who said, I will immediately pardon.
Mark: And so he knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s being the ultimate lick spittle to Trump. And Trump’s going to love that. And he’s not going to question anything, least of all that he’s got no substance or anything. He’ll just go, oh, yeah, but no, he loves I’ll just, I’ll just pick him, until such time as he’s fed up with him, in which case he’ll call him a loser and fire him.
Jim: One of the entertaining moments from Chris Christie, which had nothing to do with any of the issues they were debating, was that after a while, it was only kind of like 20 minutes in, I think, into this two hour debate. He basically just got annoyed at Ramaswami and said, I am sick of listening to this guy. Not relevant to any issue. Just like, I’ve had enough of this asshole, essentially.
Mark: Brilliant.
Mark: That’s.
Jim: Excellent.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: But, meanwhile, while this was going on, trump, meanwhile, over on X, the.
Mark: Artist formerly known as Twitter
Jim: Trump’s, pre taped interview with Tucker Carlson was going out, which Trump has subsequently claimed is the most watched social media video in history, ever, and massive outrated the GOP debate. because it got 260,000,000 and counting views.
Mark: Right.
Jim: I mean, obviously it didn’t no, you.
Mark: Could easily check that.
Jim: Well, the thing is, if you go on it X, then it does say a ridiculously large number of hundreds of millions of views. Because the way that Twitter now counts views for videos is impressions. If you scroll past it on your feed, you.
Mark: Viewed it’s reach.
Jim: It’s reach rather than absolutely. And because Twitter promotes stuff like that, because of how awful Twitter is, it was on everyone’s feeds, because they can make you see things that you don’t choose to from people.
Mark: You don’t count it as, yeah, so we’re making these people criminals by changing the law. So they’re criminals. We’re making these, numbers of views by forcing you all to look at it.
Jim: Yeah. So, in post debate polling, they asked Republican voters who actually watched the debate, who watched the Trump video. 15% of likely voters who are Republicans said they watched the whole debate. Right. 17% said they watched at least part of the debate. 7% said they watched the Trump video. Well, half of the people who watched the entire two hour debate watch Trump’s half hour video. About, a quarter of the people.Who watched part of some of it.
Mark: Wow.
Jim: Yeah. So it was massively less popular than the debate. But obviously he’s claimed victory oh, yeah. Of, mean, of course it was less popular, because he has nothing to say. It’s all the mad nonsense, like the Panama Canal stuff mixed in with Tucker asking questions about stuff like, do you think Jeffrey Epstein killed himself?
Mark: And also, the justification of by his own invention of why he isn’t in the debate. He was saying, well, on the face of it, well, I’m leading by 60 points. Why would I get into a room With somebody who’s only got twelve points.
Jim: On truth social, I think daily. He posts all the most favorable polls, and none of them are 60 points above DeSantis and the others. He regularly shows people how well he’s doing by the most favorable numbers, and he’s still misrepresenting it when he talks to Tucker. And the kinds of questions he was getting apart from know, are you the best president or just a great was? There are things like the do you think Jeffrey Epstein killed himself? Which Tucker absolutely does. He said, I’m, not a conspiracy person, I believe everything I hear. but he’s convinced that Epstein killed himself, and Trump was like, well, maybe, but maybe not. And he also basically was saying things, know, they’ve tried to take you down with the Russia things, and then now they’ve indicted you. What’s next? Surely they’re going to try and kill you. That’s surely what’s next isn’t obvious. It’s the logical next step.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: and mad things like that. Because now he’s unrestrained by Fox. He’s not and he get chucked off Twitter, is he? Because Elon’s in charge. Yeah, exactly.
Mark: But also he’s kind of unrestrained by his previously tweeted, the fact that he hates messages. Hates him with the passion. So he’s kind of thinking, okay, well, I’ve no longer got a job at Fox, so I need to what’s the best way to earn a lot of money? Oh, let me interview Trump again. So, far from being able to ignore him, most nights, he’s just putting him on screen again. And finally, some things we really don’t have time to talk about.
Jim: After disappointment in New York, Florida and DC, we were finally rewarded for our patience by the Fulton County Sheriff’s office last week when Trump became the first US President to have a mugshot taken. Based on his co-conspirators mugshots, Jenna Ellis thinks she’s going to prom, John Eastman is trying to hypnotize you into saying ‘Not Guilty’, Ray Smith might be possessed by an alien bug, and Trevian Kutti is definitely coming to kill you in your sleep. Trump, meanwhile, went for ‘just been caught taking a shit on the rug and chewing your best slippers’. Never one to look a grift horse in the mouth, he instantly plastered the mugshot onto various sellable items from obvious, like mugs, to ironic, like T-shirts which say ‘Never Surrender’ directly after the image the Sheriff’s office took when he surrendered. Speaking of which, it’s fairly well established that copyright of a photo rests with the person or organisation who took the photo, and while photos taken by federal employees automatically become public domain, the same is not true of state agencies such as the grossly underfunded Fulton County Sheriff’s office. So theoretically at least, the $1.7 million the Trump campaign has raised from selling an image he doesn’t own could end up being used to renovate the badly dilapidated Fulton County Jail.
Mark: Hip Hip and yippee Ky-ay! The motherfucker Guiliani has been ruled liable for defaming two Georgia election workers whom he falsely accused of tampering with the 2020 election results. Judge Beryl A. Howell entered a default judgement against him “as a straight-up sanction” for his failure to provide necessary documentation to the plaintiffs. Giuliani will still go to trial in D.C. federal court on the amount of monetary damages he owes to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss. But Howell has already ordered Giuliani to pay roughly $132,000 in sanctions between his personal and business assets for his failures to hand over relevant information. And she said, those failures, combined with Giuliani’s own admissions, compelled her to rule without a trial that he defamed both women, intentionally inflicted emotional distress on them as part of a civil conspiracy, and owes punitive damages. We are standing and applauding on the steps outside Fallacious Towers in thanks for the sensible and wholesome application of the rule of law. You see Rudy you can’t just say stuff about people and then walk away and not have anything more to do with the fallout you brought on them. Nor can you rely on some sort of self-assigned self-importance in not having to bother to turn up and provide evidence for your outrageous slanderous rantings. Because Giuliani failed to preserve emails, text messages and social media account information from the time period when he made those accusations, Judge Howell said, Freeman and Moss are “severely hampered” in their ability to prove his statements were intentionally false and part of a broader conspiracy rather than merely negligent. And to add to the self-centred attributes of one disbarred ex-lawyer the judge also pointed out that Giuliani has “a self-professed 50 years of experience in litigation,” and plainly should’ve known better. And furthermore if he continues to withhold his financial records, Howell said, she will instruct the jury deciding damages to “infer that he is intentionally trying to hide relevant discovery about his financial assets for the purpose of artificially deflating his net worth.” Ha, ha and triple ha Rudy you no-good half-baked excuse for a crook. Fight the law? The law wins!
Jim: All kinds of fun things are happening with Trump’s co-conspirators in Georgia. First of all, our favoritely named defendant, Ken Chesebro, invoked his right to a speedy trial, possibly under the impression that Fulton County DA Fani Willis wouldn’t be able to prepare her complicated case by October 23rd. Willis’s response? Bring it the fuck on, I’ll try you all on October 23rd. Judge? Let me at ‘em. The judge wasn’t quite so gung ho, but did grant Chesebro’s motion meaning he and any other defendants who request a speedy trial will be first to be tried. While Ken was busy regretting his haste, crazy Kraken Sidney Powell decided she wanted some of that action and chose to join the early cadre, causing old Cheesy to panic even more, because if there’s one thing worse than being the first one to have to defend against all that evidence, it’s doing it while metaphorically but sadly probably not literally handcuffed to Sidney “I get my legal claims from a woman who hears them in her dreams and who says the wind tells her she’s a ghost” Powell, a lawyer who even Trump says is crazy. Consequently, Monsieur Fromage Frère has asked to have his case severed from Powell’s, citing eight different ways in which he doesn’t know her. If he was a better lawyer, he’d know that doesn’t matter when you’re accused of both taking part in the same overall conspiracy. Meanwhile, former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is trying to get his case removed to federal court on the grounds that all the criming he did was done as part of his official duties at the White House, simultaneously blaming Trump for telling him to do illegal things, admitting he did them so Trump wouldn’t get angry, which is not a great legal defence, and confessing to violating the Hatch Act. Fun!
Mark: Robert Sigg, who owns the increasingly-ironically-named far right-wing news network Real America Voice, apparently didn’t actually send a text message to Zachary Petrizzo of The Daily Beast. Petrizzo reported from the message that Sigg was launching an investigation into whether the network was duped by a Trump impersonator when presenters John Solomon and co-host Amanda Head talked to a convincing-sounding Trump voice in a 17-minute interview. Apparently Sigg quipped “Sounds like ChatGOP to me”. But that probably wasn’t really Sigg. So not only were the two presenters convinced by a possible TrumpBot’s inane ramblings peppered with the usual greatest hits and random changes of thought and inflection (and we know all about those and how easy/hard that is to emulate and spot the fake one hey Jim!), but the Beast reporter appears to have been duped by a text emanating from a number that a spokesperson for Real America’s Voice said that was not Sigg’s and is not his current number. Listening to the Trump voice it does have a glitchy quality which, with that and the possible fakeness of the guy who’s investigating the fakery, fits right into the Matrix-level layers of reality. Take the Blue Pill for once will ya and we’ll forget all about it!!
Jim: In case you were wondering if the fact that Trump supporters are both crazy and heavily armed might be a problem, spare a thought for the Georgia Grand Jurors who, due to state law, had their names published in the indictment last month. Those back-the-blue, law-and-order loving, constitution-worshipping patriots on Truth Social, Gettr, and far right and Q-Anon themed message boards pretty much immediately doxxed the citizens who were chosen at random to do their civic duty, posting photos and addresses alongside death threats, racist slurs and general calls to violent retribution. Sure, some of the photos and addresses might not have been right, but hey, if you’re going to go around having the same name as someone who was made to vote on whether people should be held accountable for all the crimes they committed, you’re just asking for it I guess. One Texas woman took it a bit further and directly called the chambers of Federal Judge Tanya Chutkan to call her a racial slur – weird how that kind of keeps coming up – and say “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly, bitch”. The woman, Abigail Jo Shry, who has since been arrested, also threatened to kill all Washington Democrats, specifically Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee (who happens to be black) and all members of the LGBT community. I don’t remember what part they played in getting Trump indicted, but hey, thanks for your service.
Mark: Who better to teach your kids in Florida than a drag queen? Yep the right-wing of course. The Department of Education in Florida (yeah an oxymoron right!) announced that it had approved the use of content by PragerU Kids for the coming school year. PragerU Kids was recently described by Time magazine as “a resource for schools”. But it is only a “resource” because the state of Florida has deemed it so. (He’s a villain and a jailbird again) PragerU is not an actual university. It has no accreditation. It is a conservative media company whose goal since its founding in 2009 has been to spread rightwing ideology to adults and children. Perfect fit for DeSanctus. Yes it’s our dear fiend and enemy Dennis Prager who we last encountered pontificating about 2000 Mules, who’s the founder of the auspicious edutainment provider who’s first avowed intent is to Fight Woke! Basically it’s one of those laughably dangerous right-wing youtube channels that make people’s algorithms angry for money. In a recent PragerU Kids ‘history’ cartoon Columbus tells two youngsters Leo and Layla: “Slavery is as old as time and has taken place in every corner of the world … Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?” Another describes George Floyd as a “Black man who resisted arrest”. Another features a cartoon version of Booker T Washington comforting white children by saying, “Future generations are never responsible for the sins of the past.” To which his young listener responds: “OK, I’ll keep doing my best to treat everyone well and won’t feel guilty about historical stuff.” The company is now reportedly going through the process of being approved as an “education resource” in other states. Clearly, serving an appetite for indoctrination, propaganda full of lies and half-truths specifically designed to manipulate and mold young minds to serve a rightwing political agenda is more fruitful income-wise than you know, actually educating future generations to progress beyond inequality and exclusion and think for themselves. Which of course has always been the problem – a problem that critical race theory and its proponents have been trying to combat and change. Get ‘em to learn to hate while they’re young hey Ron, and they’ll vote for you when you’re old!
Jim: New York Attorney General Letitia James has asked for a partial summary judgement in her civil fraud case against Trump, his sons Eric and Don Jr, and the Trump Organization. Citing what she calls a ‘mountain of undisputed evidence’ included in documents submitted to the court, she says no trial is needed to rule on two simple facts: Were Trump’s annual financial statements misleading, and were those statements used to conduct business transactions? Part of the evidence appears to be a deposition which Trump sat for in April 2023, the transcript of which has now been released. I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t read the whole text of the seven hour deposition, but from what I’ve seen it appears to mostly feature Trump throwing his kids under the bus by claiming that he didn’t have time to commit fraud, because he was too busy being an awesome president and saving millions of lives by averting nuclear holocaust thanks to his negotiations with North Korea. I can see why Letitia James thinks the judge won’t be convinced by this argument since as we all know, Trump is never too busy to commit fraud, and there’s also the small fact that the fraud she’s talking about started in 2011, more than five years before Trump became very busy poking Kim Jong Un with a stick before making goo goo eyes at him so that he could end up with a vague and non-binding denuclearization agreement and claim victory.
Mark: In Britain this week Kind of the only grown up in the room Ben Wallace Defence Secretary, who resisted all sorts of calls to resign or be reshuffled including when all around him were bringing down Boris, rather thinking it best to remain and help sort out a) Ukraine and b) Britain’s standing on the world stage vis-a-vis Ukraine – no Thatcher-lite cosplay in a tank for Ben. Anyway he has finally had enough and gone to “invest in the parts of life that I have neglected, and to explore new opportunities”. Far be it from me to suggest either of those might include a) winning and b) not hanging around with nasty, right-wing losers hell-bent on anything to stay in power. Speaking of which Grant Shapps will be the new Defence Secretary, This time last year he was transport secretary. Then he was home secretary, for a week. And then, in October, he became business secretary, before becoming energy secretary in February. But it’s not just his experience (five jobs in 1 year) that rocketed him to the top of the LinkedIn job applicants, but he’s good on telly. Good is obviously a relative term – he’s often rolled out to speak words in a given order, with a veneer of sincerity whenever crises blow up in the Tories’ faces; so a regular gig then! And with a general election next year they either need a face that communicates to the people so they vote for them, or a face that can convincingly blame everyone else for colossal and calamitous ruination of the nation once they’re evicted from office. Behind the big black door, someone you’ve never heard of – Amber de Botton doing a job you didn’t know was being done – PM’s director of communications has also resigned – rats ships sinking anyone? Oddly she got the job after Rishi got his, leapfrogging Nerissa Chesterfield who now gets her job, despite that she was working with Rish when the whole Liz Truss getting the job over Rish thing happened, a delicious kind of irony going on there? Anyway de Botton knew television but Chesterfield knows politics, so now that political butterfly Shapps is up for telly at least someone qualified might do the politics, oh no that’s right Ben’s resigned!
Jim: So, that’s all the bad arguments and faulty reasoning we have time for this week. You’ll find the show notes at https://fallacioustrump.com/ and if you hear Trump say something stupid and want to ask if it’s a fallacy, our contact details are on the contact page.
Mark: If you think we’ve used a fallacy ourselves, let us know, and if you’ve had a good time please give us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts or simply tell one other person, in person, about how much they’d like our podcast. And you can support the show at patreon.com/ftrump, just like our newest Patron, Melissa Sytek; our Straw Man level Patrons, Laura Tomsick, Renee Z, Schmootz, Mark Rikey and Amber R. Buchanan (who told us when we met her at QED we can just call her Amber); and our True Scotsman level Patrons, SteveN Bickel, Janet Yuetter, Kaz Toohey, Andrew Hauck, and our top Patron… Loren! thank you so much for continuing to be our patrons and for joining as a patron. It’s very much appreciated
Jim: You can connect with those awesome people, as well as us and other listeners in the facebook group at http://facebook.com/groups/fallacioustrump
Mark: All music is by The Outbursts and was used with permission. So until next time on Fallacious Trump we’ll leave the last word … to the Donald!
Trump: That’s right, go home to mommy.
