Argument from Too Much Evidence – FT#132

17 Sep Argument from Too Much Evidence – FT#132

Show Notes

The Argument from Too Much Evidence occurs when someone suggests an imbalance of evidence in one direction is somehow suspicious and therefore proof of the opposite being true.

Trump

We started out by discussing this clip of Kandiss Taylor talking to a couple of flat earthers:

Then we talked about this COVID and vaccine denying Tweet from Dinesh D’Souza:

If there’s a life-threatening pandemic, and people are dying all around us, we wouldn’t need a huge apparatus of government and media to constantly REMIND us about it. If vaccines worked well, we wouldn’t need a massive coordinated push to IMPLORE and COERCE people to get one pic.twitter.com/j47vqqMOMM

— Dinesh D’Souza (@DineshDSouza) March 17, 2023

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about Boris Johnson’s many promises to leave the EU on October 31st and Nigel Farage’s response to that.

And he followed that up with this clip of Miranda Green arguing that Jeremy Corbyn’s manifesto includes too many ambitious potentially good things to be credible:

Fallacy in the Wild

In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from Michael Flatley’s Blackbird:

Then we discussed this clip from Murder Mystery:

And we finished by talking about this clip from Inspector Gadget 2:

 

Fake News

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

1. Joe Biden’s ordered his leading opponent arrested on 91 fake and phony charges. 91! How many charges are there? But we’re going to ask for dismissals of a lot of it. Most of it. It’s just, you ask for dismissal. It’s called ‘dismiss the charges’. But remember, it’s a Democrat charging his opponent. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. That means that if I win and somebody wants to run against me. I call my attorney general. I say, “listen indict him.” “Well, he hasn’t done anything wrong, that we know of.” “I don’t know indict him on income tax evasion. You’ll figure it out.”
2. The polls you see aren’t real polls, we have the polls and I’m leading by a lot. I know none of you would ever look at the New York Times. I call them – I used to call them the Failing New York Times, but actually I think they’ve failed. They’re the Failed New York Times. They make stuff up They made up a thing I said about Panama. They didn’t put any of the context, but in the real polls by the places that do, you know, the right kind of polling, you’ve never seen anything like it. It’s like something nobody’s ever seen. And people have seen a lot.
3. I said to Kim Jong-Un, you know being a real estate guy it’s just sort of natural, I said, “You have the most beautiful shoreline. Think of it, you’re between China, Russia, and South Korea. Look at the beautiful shore, you could have the most beautiful condos that you’ve ever seen and become rich as hell. You don’t have to live like you’re living”. But he’s a tough guy, he’s a smart guy, and he just loves collecting nuclear weapons. That’s what he does. He collects nuclear weapons and we got along incredibly well.

Mark got it right this week, and is on 48%

 

School Vouchers are not a logical fallacy

We talked about the new rules about school vouchers in Florida thanks to DeSantis.

 

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

• One of the rare bipartisan accusations leveled against Fulton County DA Fani Willis recently has been that indicting 18 people is overly broad and complicated. The left says this out of concern that too much focus on minor players may distract from the charges against people like Trump himself. The right says it because they’ll latch on to any bullshit they can to avoid acknowledging Trump’s guilt. But the release of the Special Grand Jury’s report from December of last year has shown that Willis has actually been pretty cautious in only indicting 18 people, since 39 indictments were originally recommended by the Grand Jury, who spent eight months looking at evidence and heard testimony from around 75 witnesses. That was enough for them to recommend charging people like Michael Flynn, Lindsay Graham, former Trump lawyer Lin Wood, and former Georgia Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Purdue under the same RICO laws that were ultimately used to charge Trump and friends. There are many possible reasons Willis decided not to follow the recommendation of the Grand Jury. For some potential defendants she may have felt she would struggle to get a conviction, while it’s possible others have been given immunity in exchange for cooperation. One thing we can enjoy for now at least is that it’s quite likely the Fulton County 18 were carefully chosen because the evidence against them is the strongest. 
• Ted Cruz, that moderate thought-through, quiet, calm, all-embracing people-person kinda guy; you know think Keanu Reeves but times by 20, went on TV this week to caution against the adoption of more stringent recommendations regarding the consumption of alcohol in order to alert the nation to the ongoing health risks, by pointing out that recommendations veering so far from a country’s cultural norms might have the unintended effect of making people not take them seriously at all, even if the recommendations are scientifically sound. No, no he didn’t, of course not. Instead he wilfully ignoranted-down the facts and pumped up the fear and loathing on the socials, accusing Biden’s administration of forcing everyone to drink only two beers a week, adding Kiss my Ass as he tore the top off a beer and chugged it down in front of a barroom full of rednecks! Sufficient red mist was made to descend across middle America that no-one now needs to check that George Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism when asked which way the health-recommendations might be going from the current two beers a day, recounted that Canada are running an experiment where their recommendation is two beers a week and that future recommendations in the US would probably not be going in the direction of up. Nor do angry ten-gallon-hat-wearing plaid-shirted Bud Light-swiggers need to note that the NIAAA employed Koob as a scientist, and he is not a Biden administration appointee, and his recommendations are just that; recommendations. They’re not laws, and they’re not enforced in any way. In fact, they barely even carry any weight of stigma. The same two-a-day recommendation has been made since the 1990’s, but you probably wouldn’t be able to find any evidence of that in the drinking holes of the USA. Except, perhaps, oddly, in the one where Cruz was foaming at the mouth cos everyone in the background who all had to swig on Cruz’s cue looked like they’d never held a container before, let alone touched a drop in their lives. Word of advice Ted; don’t hire your location manager from the local Temperance Society next time hey!!
• Noted thinker Donald J Trump theorized back in 2016 that it is possible to win so much that you get tired of winning and beg to stop. For him, that’s very much still a theory, but for us it’s being put to the test every time an Oath Keeper or a Proud Boy sees the inside of a courtroom. We’ve been reporting back on the nice long sentences they get, and we’ll keep doing so until it stops being fun, which I’m thinking might be never. Up this week is the Proudest of Boys, Enrique Tarrio, who was offered a plea deal by prosecutors in October which would have seen him sentenced to 9 to 11 years in prison. Of course, they should have known that he would be too proud to accept that – it’s in the name of the group he led for Christ’s sake! I like to imagine that when he turned down the deal he flipped them off and said something like “fuck you coppers, I’ll see you in court!” but whether that’s true or not (I’m pretty sure it’s true), he was found guilty and, when it comes to sentencing Tarrio apparently Ain’t Too Proud to Beg, pleading with the judge “Please show me mercy. I ask you that you not take my 40s from me.” But the judge did, and then took his 50s too, sentencing Enrique to 22 years in prison – the longest sentence yet connected to the January 6 attack on the Capitol. And in a twist likely to make Trump’s arse pucker just a little (apologies for that visual), Tarrio was sentenced based purely on his leadership role leading up to the insurrection, as he was not even in DC that day. I for one am not getting tired of winning.
• In a tale about a hideously brash loud-mouth exploiter of the unwary to their way of thinking, thereby dragging them down to an eternal quagmire of calculatedly fiendish shaking of the foundations of civil and societal behaviour for their own ends, Lauren Boebert went to see the new musical stage version of Beetlejuice in downtown Denver. Asked to quiet down by members of the audience who also complained that she was using her phone to record the show, Lauren received a warning from staff during the intermission, and after doing the same again in the second half was escorted from the theatre where she declaimed “don’t you know who I am, I’m on the board, yeah go get the cops, I’ll be contacting the mayor”. Whilst she denies vaping in the theatre, her Campaign manager told the Denver post “I can confirm the stunning and salacious rumours: in her personal time, Congresswoman Lauren Boebert is indeed a supporter of the performing arts (gasp!) and, to the dismay of a select few, enthusiastically enjoyed a weekend performance of ‘Beetlejuice,’ adding ‘Lauren encourages everyone to see the play and its “fantastic cast, tremendous visuals and plenty of loud laughs” — but, he added, “with a gentle reminder to leave their phones outside of the venue.” And your firearms hey Lauren, even as a member of the behaviourally deceased you don’t want the detector beeping again like at the Senate House. Oh and if you’re going to see the show/vote for her in 2024 be careful not to summon her from the undead accidentally; Boebert, Boebert, Boe…….(claps hand over mouth) ooh shit that was close!
• It’s taken them a while, but Republicans are finally getting the message that not everyone is on board with their so-called ‘pro-life’ policies. Yes, after Roe v Wade was overturned they’ve suffered a disastrous midterm and seen definitive votes in favor of reproductive freedom even in very red states. So they got some pollsters to take the pulse of the electorate, crunched some numbers, and got together in a closed-door meeting last week with some Republican donors. Once they saw the cold hard facts even they couldn’t deny that something has to be done. What they’ve been saying and doing isn’t working, it’s only driving people away, so it’s time for a fundamental change in their stance on abortion. So here’s what they’re going to do about it. They’re going to… stop calling themselves ‘pro-life’ and come up with another name for it. Yes, their takeaway from the fact that almost 90% of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or some circumstances was that people either didn’t like, or didn’t understand the name ‘pro-life’. In a way, you can understand why they might think that because it is, after all, a bullshit euphemism designed to make the pro-forced-birth lobby sound less fascisty, but I’m not sure they’ve fully grasped the issue. Platonic ideal of manhood Josh Hawley said on NBC News “Many voters think [‘pro-life’] means you’re for no exceptions in favor of abortion ever, ever, and ‘pro-choice’ now can mean any number of things, so the conversation was mostly oriented around how voters think of those labels, that they’ve shifted.” Yes, I wonder why they think that Josh Hawley, Senator from Missouri where abortions are currently banned with no exceptions for rape or incest, it’s a real fucking head-scratcher that one! No word yet on what the GOP might come up with to replace the phrase which is single-handedly losing them elections, but Senator Todd Young of Indiana is in favor of “pro-baby”, which is pretty fucking rich for the Senator for the state ranked 47th in pre-k education enrollment, 45th in infant mortality, and with zero paid parental leave. What you mean, Todd, is that you’re ‘pro-fetus’. But if that phrase worked they would never have had to come up with ‘pro-life’ in the first place.
• Democrat-backed judge Janet Protasiewicz officially joined the Wisconsin Supreme Court in August. This raised hopes among Democrats that the high court could be more receptive to a lawsuit alleging that the current state legislative and congressional districts provide an unfair advantage for Republicans. Basically Wisconsin is gerrymandered to hell to aid the Right. Days after she took office in August, Democratic-friendly groups filed two lawsuits asking the Supreme Court to toss out the Republican-drawn legislative maps. GOP leaders quickly asked that Protasiewicz recuse herself, pointing to the donations from the Democratic Party – she was on the receiving end of some $10 million in Democrat donations. However, in 2010, Conservative majorities in the court approved a rule that allowed justices to hear cases involving their campaign donors. The rule was written in part by the Wisconsin Manufacturers and state board of Commerce – the WMC. It had spent more than $2 million to help elect Chief Justice Annette Ziegler, who voted for the measure as part of a then-Conservative majority on the court. Three years earlier, Ziegler refused to recuse herself from a WMC-backed case in which she wrote a majority opinion resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in business tax refunds. A Conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley wrote an order in 2017 rejecting a call from retired judges to create a recusal standard for cases involving donors. And now she too has called out Protasiewicz for not recusing herself from the redistricting challenge which she also maintains will shift power away from Republicans and bestow an electoral advantage for Democrat candidates – oh the boundary-shifting irony! So what we’re saying is the Right has form in this area, they claim it as their own. Their being asked to recuse themselves from cases where there’s a clear vested interest is a violation of their First amendment rights as far as they’re concerned. Except of course if you’re a Democrat and then if you don’t do what they won’t do, it’s an impeachable offence. If only the Wisconsin Chamber of Commerce sold pots and kettles – but see they’re not gonna get the irony embedded in that joke either! 
• Time for a quick court roundup, and I’m delighted to say that, as usual, it’s been a very bad couple of weeks for Trump and his lackeys. First of all, the judge in Trump’s civil defamation case in New York ruled that he is liable for defamation of E Jean Carroll for all the things he said about her after she beat him in her first defamation case against him and was awarded $5 million in damages. The ruling means that the trial, currently scheduled for January, will purely be for a jury to decide exactly how much Trump owes her this time. One the same day, Trump, two of his kids and the Trump Organization lost in their bid to delay their civil fraud trial, currently scheduled to begin in a couple of weeks. But they didn’t just lose. They lost so hard that the judge didn’t even bother to type out a ruling. Instead, on the bottom of Trump’s proposed order, he just wrote  “Decline to sign. Defendants’ arguments are completely without merit.” The next day, Trump advisor Peter Navarro was found guilty of Contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a Congressional subpoena which required him to testify in front of the House January 6 Committee and turn over documents. He claimed that he didn’t comply because Trump had told him he should assert executive privilege, but Trump did not back that up, either to the court or the January 6 Committee. Sentencing will take place in January, and Navarro faces anywhere from a month to a year in prison and up to $100,000 fine. And rounding out the week the very next day, former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ bid to remove his Georgia case to federal court was rejected, with the judge finding that Meadows was not in fact acting within his role as Chief of Staff when he conspired to overturn the election. It’s not great news for the other four defendants who have also filed requests to remove their cases to federal court, nor for Trump, who is expected to try that too. Yep, still not tired of winning.
• It’s been rather a sweary week or so in British Politics, the Education Secretary Gillian Keegan moaned on a live mic that no-one was thanking her for doing a fucking great job whilst everyone else has sat on their arses, when a reporter held her to account for the government doing nothing about the schools falling down cos of the Raac concrete and cos Gove axed the Labour Parties Building Schools for the Future scheme in 2010 to save money. Speaking of which Dominic Raab – only one letter difference from Raac but also a flaky, aerated, collapsing, no-good foundation for building the economy of a nation – is trying to save money to be able to offer tax cuts to the 3 or 4 remaining rich people who are going to vote for them next year, by axing the planned and way overdue and way over budget HS2 High Speed Rail Link from Birmingham to Manchester. Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham quipped “Levelling up? My arse!” And Penny Mordaunt, Tory Leader of the House of Commons, last seen wearing the Poundland logo as a dress at the Coronation of Charles, described Keir Starmer as Beach Ken (Yeah she’s not seen the movie!) and furthermore as having “no balls”. How do you know when the government has run its course and is doing that very COVID-era thing of quietly quitting? When people resort finally to swearing at everyone and doing stuff that makes you swear at them. It’s time to go people… vote off, vote right off and when you get there vote off some more! Arses!

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:

Argument from Too Much Evidence – FT#132 Transcript

Jim: Hello and welcome to Fallacious Trump, the podcast where we use the insane ramblings of shaved Oscar the Grouch 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 argument from too much evidence.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Because it’s a multiple of 11.

Jim: Much to your chagrin. 132 is a multiple of eleven.

Mark: I know.

Jim: Whether you like it or not.

Mark: Should be 133, shouldn’t it?

Jim: And in the multiples of eleven, we do ones that I have identified/made up, and this one is based largely around our first example right. Which unusually doesn’t come from Trump, but is very much Trump adjacent because this is from Kandiss Taylor, who you may remember we’ve talked about her before. She is the Jesus Guns Babies lady.

Mark: Jesus, guns, babies lady. Yeah.

Jim: She ran for Governor of Georgia, which she dramatically lost. Like heroically lost. She got, I think 3.7% of the vote.

Mark: Right.

Jim: And the winner got 73%. Wow. And she didn’t concede. She said it was rigged.

Mark: Nice. Yeah. Excellent. that’s how Trump she is.

Jim: And she has a podcast. And she is an idiot.

Mark: Right.

Jim: so those two things came together ah. When she interviewed a couple of flat earthers and said this

Kandiss Taylor: I can’t unsee this. All the globes everywhere I turn on TV, there’s globes in the background, there’s globes on there, right here. Like this would be a globe if I was a normal person. Everywhere there’s globes. You see them all the time. I mean, it’s constant. My children will be like, mama globe, globe, globe, globe. They’re everywhere. And that’s what they do to brainwash. And so for me, if it is not a conspiracy, if it is real, why are you pushing so hard? Everywhere I go, every store you buy a globe, there’s globes everywhere. Every movie, every TV show, news media. Why?

Mark: Because she’s not a normal person.

Jim: No, she’s got like a plant or something behind her. But that’d be a globe if she was a normal.

Mark: Or a map, which will be flat, which you also see in the back of pictures.

Jim: But no, globes are everywhere. That every shop you go in. You have to buy a globe. all movies and TV shows have globes. And constantly her children are like, mama, globe.

Mark: Globe. Globe. Globe.

Jim: That is what this fallacy is all about. It is when someone looks at evidence that is so strongly in one direction, that is so overwhelming in favor of one thing and thinks that’s suspicious, that’s somehow proof of the opposite of that thing.

Mark: It’s kind of the logical fallacy version of ‘methinks she doth protest too much’, isn’t it? If you just go, that’s a bit suspicious. All we’ve got, we’ve got are globes. If it wasn’t a conspiracy, why globes.

Jim: obviously. Maybe because it’s a representation of what the world is. Maybe that’s the reason. But no, it must be. They’re brainwashing you.

Mark: If she went to Sanford Map shop in Covent Garden, next door to where we used to work, there would be nothing but flat ones.

Jim: They are representations except for the shitty ones that flat Earthers push.

Mark: There’s nothing on the underside of it. There’s no turtle holding it.

Jim: I was going to say everyone knows that those are projections of a globe, but I don’t want to assume too much of Kandiss, I should say Dr. Kandiss Taylor.

Mark: What’s she a doctor of?

Jim: She’s a doctor of counseling. Because although on her website, she says that she is an educator, in fact she’s a counselor in a primary school, like for third grade kids. She has apparently done some third grade teaching but is not, I am happy to say, currently an actual educator.

Mark: She’s been struck off. But what qualifies as her as a doctor?

Jim: Oh, she did a whole degree at a Christian university.

Mark: Uh okay. A doctor’s degree.

Jim: One that was set up by Pat Robertson. Yeah.

Mark: That’s worth the globe it’s written on absolutely, yeah. It wasn’t in advanced geology.

Jim: No.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: That led me to think I mean, this is mad and it isn’t, I don’t think, covered by any current fallacies. So it’s the argument from too much evidence. And so to back that up because you don’t name a fallacy if there’s only one example. No, because the point of having names is because they are things that come up repeatedly and it’s worth referring to.

Mark: Yes, exactly.

Jim: So last time we talked about Dinesh D’Souza in 2000 Mules this is another Dinesh D’Souza thing, but this is a tweet. So it’s nothing to do with 2000 mules or election integrity. It’s about questioning COVID. He said if there’s a life threatening pandemic and people are dying all around us, we wouldn’t need a huge apparatus of government and media to constantly remind us about it. If vaccines worked well, we wouldn’t need a massive coordinated push to implore and coerce people to get one. So what he’s saying is the fact that the media keeps going on about COVID and the fact that people say you should get a vaccine all the time about this disease that is ravaging society is proof there isn’t one, that it doesn’t exist. And simultaneously the vaccines don’t work against the nonexistent disease.

Mark: Yeah, well, they wouldn’t because it doesn’t exist.

Jim: Arguably, they would work perfectly.

Mark: Yes. No, that’s true.

Jim: Everyone who got a vaccine wouldn’t get the disease.

Mark: Exactly. And you could make – we could make a fortune. All you need is distilled water, wouldn’t you?

Jim: You’d probably do saline.

Mark: Yeah.

Mark: That’d be safer. Not air or anything. I was thinking we wouldn’t even need to do that because you could save people that horrible bit of seeing the syringe and just say, well, I’m going to put it in the back of your shoulder, so if you’d like to look the other way and then all you do is prickle with the pin.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: You’re done.

Jim: Get any saline or distilled water or anything.

Mark: No. Or even syringes.

Jim: Just get a pin, wipe it off, stick it in someone else.

Mark: We could start some sort of streptococcal pandemic. And then we would just keep quiet about it. Which would mean that it existed.

Jim: Exactly.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: That’s how you know. The only way you would know if there was a pandemic is if bodies just started piling up around your house.otherwise it’s clearly a fake. Because you would just know. You wouldn’t need anyone to tell you.

Mark: No.

Jim: That’s what the more they told and.

Mark: The more people told, you would think, well, there’s got to be something dodgy about that then, because they wouldn’t need to constantly ram it down our throat.

Jim: Yeah, but imagine if the bodies did start piling up outside and everyone you met says, these bloody bodies. Because every person, all the people telling you about the bodies would make you think they must be fake bodies. Yeah. Because otherwise people wouldn’t need to keep talking about them. If they were real.

Mark: If they were real. Yes.

Jim: So I hope you’re beginning to see the flaws in this.

Mark: Yeah. Thanks, Dinesh. It’s kind of the opposite of the one that we did last time, isn’t it?

Jim: That’s why I kind of put these two together, is because I thought the countless counterfeit one that we did last time is about a large amount of bad evidence. And using that large amount of bad evidence as proof, as evidence the thing is supposedly supporting is supported therefore, by evidence.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: This one is looking at a large amount of good evidence and saying I don’t trust that. I trust the 123 pages of bullshit affidavits, but globes. That’s a bit suspicious.

Mark: Right. Okay. So it only applies to those things that the mad in their mind think other people think are true.

Jim: They fight against the mainstream narrative. That’s the thing.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Whatever is the story that is told by the establishment yes. Whatever it is, that’s not true. It’s only the people who have the Secret information .

Mark: yes, of course.

Jim: That know more.

Mark: They’ve been laying on this stuff, like Kandiss

Jim: People that have done their own research.

Mark: That aren’t Sheeple

Jim: all the evidence they have. Not suspicious at all.

Mark: No. And you can’t apply this argument. You can’t apply this proof this causal connection, you can’t apply that to their evidence because they’ve got the secret knowledge and theirs is right.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: You can only apply it to the other one in order to reveal that we’re all duped by the mainstream media.

Jim: You’re being brainwashed.

Mark: There you go.

Boris Johnson: And, now is the time, I think, for Mark’s British Politics Corner.

Mark: Well, I’m going to take you back to the heady days of before Brexit, because it did occur to me that – and we’ll probably touch on that in the second example, that the entirety of Brexit is based on this stuff. There’s loads of evidence. It’ll all be absolutely fabulous. And then half of the people that aren’t in on that particular side of thought just thinking, yeah, you’re saying that. And there’s lots of things. So I’m beginning to think that it’s not going to not going to be quite the way that you’re talking about it. Far be it for me to say, they’re absolutely right. The example is Boris, good old Boris from June 2019, before the leadership election to replace Theresa May. Remember Theresa May? What’s that? Six leaders ago now, he was promising to get the UK out of the EU by the 31 October. And I’ve titled this clip, Boris Promises to Pull Out nine times.

Boris Johnson: We are all basically staring down the barrel of electoral extinction unless we get this thing over the line. October the 31st is eminently feasible to come out on October the 31st.

Ross Kempsell (TalkRadio): 31st.

Boris Johnson: Correct.

Ross Kempsell: Come what may.

Boris Johnson: Come what may.

Ross Kempsell: Do or die.

Boris Johnson: Do or die. Come what may.

Boris Johnson: And,come out of the EU on October the 31st. No, it’s or buts I’d rather be dead in a ditch.

Reporter: So you would resign first, Prime Minister, rather than go and ask for that delay?

Boris Johnson: I see no point whatever in staying on in the EU beyond October the 31st. And we’re going to come out, we will respect the law, and we will come out on October the 31st. That is why we are coming out of the EU on October the 31st. Come what may, we will be leaving on October the 31st. Deal or no deal.

Mark: So the more he said it, the more people became suspicious. That surely doesn’t exist. Here’s Nigel Farage employing the fallacy in response to Boris

Nigel Farage: coming into the studio this morning. I passed some really big billboards saying, get ready for the 1 November. If your business imports and exports from the EU, make sure you’re ready. The government’s spending a lot of money on all of this, but as yet, the man who said, we are leaving on the 31 October, come what may, do or die. I’d rather be dead in a ditch than extend beyond the 31 October. He didn’t say, I’ll do my best to get us out on the 31 October. He didn’t say I will try. He didn’t say I’ll do my damnedest. He said we will be leaving on that date. And at some point this week, do you think the Prime Minister will apologize for misleading the nation? I don’t think he will, I just don’t think he will. But we’re not leaving, folks. People will wake up on the 1 November and we’ll still be members of the European Union.

Jim: this is an important thing to remember about Fallacies, is that although Farage happened to be right in this instance, yes, it turns out his reasoning was bad. He was still doing the fallacy and saying, look, because he was suggesting that the amount that Boris keeps saying it, and the emphasis with which he says it, is the thing that makes it suspicious. There were plenty of reasons to doubt that we would get out by the 31 October, not least among them the fact that they didn’t have any idea of how they were going to achieve the things they needed to do to get out, like the Northern Ireland issue and many more. Those were reasons to say, well, yeah, it doesn’t matter how many times he says it, it’s not true, but saying, oh, he’s saying it a lot, so therefore it isn’t true,

Mark: and we will wake up the following day, we’ll still be in the EU. And it turns out he was right. An extension request had been sent by the government to the EU earlier in October and the UK didn’t withdraw from the EU until the 1 January 2020, after another election. So the other one is, see, I’m going to commit the fallacy here, just talk about Brexit benefits. Because somehow it occurs to me that no matter how much people bang on about them and I was listening to some of the LBC presenters who even fall into the same thing, where they just bang on about them, but talk about them in such vague terms, they say, yes, there are benefits, we just haven’t seen them yet. And the more they say that, the more I think perhaps there aren’t any to be seen. And if you bang on about it so much, are you hiding the fact that there are none, or we won’t see them for 50 years? Or the ones that you’re about to tell us about are things, that would have occurred whether Brexit had happened or not. And in that last case, here’s Rees Mogg again giving us the lowdown on things that would have happened without Brexit.

Jacob Rees Mogg: The NHS already had the 350,000,000 on the side of the bus that was delivered by my rival friend, the member for Maidenhead in 2018, with an extra 34 billion pound uplift to the NHS by 2023/24. Just think of the vaccines that we have and the success of the vaccine rollout program. And I believe I mentioned earlier in the happy Fish

Mark: Yeah, we talked about the Happy Fish, that fish were happier after Brexit.

Jim: Yeah, I can’t believe that was one of his three examples.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: Vaccines, fish.

Mark: As well as the heaping of lie upon lie to talk about the benefits. There’s this kind of just weird scrabbling for stuff like attributing happiness to fish in the first place, and then saying that’s as a result of winning back our international waters, or our national, which were never anyway, I mean, there’s certainly.

Jim: No previous information linking the internationality of the waters to sad fish.

Mark: No.

Jim: That I’m aware of. No.

Mark: And I’m glad for Reese Mogg, pointing that out, that there must have been for him to be able to bring us piscine happiness.

Jim: Ichtheal happiness.

Mark: That wasn’t on their list of take back control and bring happiness to various water dwellings. Exactly. So if there were so many of them, and they are abundantly obvious, why do people have to keep banging on about them? The more you bang on about them, the more we suspect that there are none.

Jim: I think the thing is and again, I made this fallacy up, so I get to say what it is. I think, although you have said that you are committing the fallacy in this instance, I don’t think you really are, because it’s about when the evidence is overwhelming in one direction. Because my examples were of globes versus the evidence for the flat earth. And it’s just the fact that there’s so much globe stuff, and that’s the point. In the Brexit benefit case, the overwhelming evidence is our lived experience that there aren’t any benefits. The nagging people who are saying, no, actually everything’s awesome now, is not the mainstream narrative. Well, it’s the mainstream narrative inasmuch as it is politicians for the ruling party who are saying it. But the fact that a small group of motivated people keep banging on about nonexistent benefits things yes. Isn’t overwhelming, isn’t something that you should take on face value in the face of all the evidence of no benefits. Whereas the fact that society accepts globes because of the vast majority of scientists saying we are on a globe yeah that is evidence in favor of it actually being true.

Mark: Right. Got you. Yes. So to use that as evidence of it being false is the fallacy being employed.

Jim: That’s my argument, and I’m sticking it.

Mark: Nice. Sounds good to me. So, my third example, we’re going to revisit Corbyn’s 2019 election manifesto, which listed a lot of seed, so it falls kind of in the same category. But I think that the reporter who is Miranda Green, who’s the Financial Times deputy opinion editor at the time, I think she commits the fallacy.

Miranda Green: Labour promised a hike in corporation tax alongside increases in income and wealth taxes, plus a list of nationalizations and a windfall tax on the oil industry. Plus a fudge on protecting freedom of movement for EU citizens after Brexit, free university tuition for all, plus free broadband and a lot of other free stuff that could prove tempting unless voters see this list as not credible rather than, as Mr. Corbyn would prefer, as radical.

Mark: You see, I think that she is employing the fallacy insofar as these things can’t be credible. There’s a lot of stuff here and I’m using it as evidence for things that are not credible. So all of these things that they promised aren’t credible?

Jim: It sounds like she’s saying this all sounds a bit too good to be true.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: from political promises in a manifesto.

Mark: And the thing is that in a way, she belonged to the movement because he’s part of the mainstream media and the Financial times at that. So it’s all going to be kind of financially. So you could either term it as Corbyn termed it, as radical, or you could term it as not credible. And because the narrative was that Corbyn wasn’t electable, therefore his manifesto was not credible, consequently it became not credible rather than radical. It was viewed as radical. Because we talked about the overton window moving way over to the right. So it was radical.

Jim: in the face Of what was going on at the yeah, I’ll be honest, in the list of awesome stuff, I got distracted halfway through because she mentioned Fudge and I was like, mmm, fudge. I didn’t really pay attention to the rest of it.

Mark: But the free broadband well, they also do like privatizing water and the trains and all those kind of things that people are kind of saying, oh, now if only the water companies weren’t just hell bent on making a profit, they would be pouring shit into our streams. And if only there was a wealth tax on, say, oil companies, then we wouldn’t be fighting.

Jim: This is someone who wants to be in power saying I will do good stuff. And the media going, well, that doesn’t sound like politicians.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Good stuff that people want, not bad stuff people don’t want.

Mark: And thena mere four years it’s only four years. A mere four years on, people are saying, really fed up with all the stuff that hasn’t been done by this government in terms of windfall taxes for oil companies. Maybe the privatization of the water thing was a bad thing. That should have been yeah, radical stuff like that. That’s what we want. And they’re now accusing Starmer of not being radical enough. Weirdly. Because he’s not adopting Corbyn’s manifesto. Which over in Scandinavia, that’s just normal politics.

MARK’S FALLACY IN THE WILD STING – The Beatles, Too Much

Jim: In The fallacy in the wild. We like to talk about the fallacy of the week from a non political perspective. And there’s kind of a theme this week in that there’s three films and they’re all awful films. One of them is a little bit unfair because the other two are so bad that it’s kind of not by comparison. It’s Oscar worthy. They’re just shit.

Mark: Well, the first one, he won best actor in his own sponsored.

Jim: Monaco streaming festival because it is Blackbird the film. Which by the time you hear this, we will have enjoyed spending time watching with our patrons. But yeah, blackbird the Michael Flatley film. In this scene, Michael Flatley’s colleague Nick is telling him about a background check they’ve done on one of their guests in a hotel.

Nick: We’re checking this guy out. Clean as a whistle.

Victor: Who?

Nick: Blake. He feeds the hungry, houses the poor. Perfect role model for society.

Victor: But?

Nick: Something doesn’t sit right with me Victor. Nobody’s that good, especially in his line of work.

Jim: We’re not currently at this point in the film, aware of what his line of work is.

Mark: No other than he feeds the hungry and houses the poor.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: There’s the fallacy right there. Even if you are in the hungry, feeding poor housing business, if you do that, if you do what you do because that’s your line of business. There’s something a little bit suspicious. The fact that flatly just went in with the but nothing. But nothing. What do you mean, but?

Jim: He knows Nick. He knows Nick is too suspicious to accept someone being a good person. So yeah, for Nick, the thing that convinces him that this guy is a bad guy is the fact that when they’ve done a background check and these are former government secret Service agent like spies, they’ve done a background check. When people like that do a background check, they’re going to find stuff. But they found nothing. So that is evidence that he’s a bad guy. Everything they found is positive.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So yeah. Clean as a whistle, therefore bad guy.

Mark: Yeah. Nothing about his ill fitting suits or anything. The fact he’s far too small for his clothes.

Jim: Uh huh.

Mark: What does that say? Something suspicious about that.

Jim: So our second example comes from the Jennifer Aniston/Adam Sandler film Murder Mystery. Which again…

 

Mark: vehicle I was going to call it. like a kind of broken down old car.

Jim: Like a boat with a big leak. they’re on a boat in this. And someone’s murdered he’s a cop. She’s his wife. She likes murder mysteries. Basically, that’s all you really need to know. And someone’s been killed.

Audrey: Who do you think did it?

Nick: I don’t think. I know.

Audrey: Who?

Nick: It was the son. Toby.

Audrey: No. No way. Not a chance. Too obvious. Most obvious suspect is never, never the killer.

Nick: The most obvious suspect is always the killer. When a wife gets killed, 90% of the time, it was the husband.

Audrey: Why did you just use that as an example? And I disagree. I think people are more complicated than that.

Nick: Judging off of what? those books that you read? People are simple. Okay? It was Toby. He had the most to gain and he also had the most to lose.

Audrey: Which is exactly why he’s not the killer.

Mark: So the one with the motive and the opportunity and the means.

Jim: The obvious one, that’s the way you know it’s definitely not them.

Mark: Because that’s how policing works.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: They go for well, far be it for me to cast aspersions on the, uh but they do seem to arrest the wrong people along the way. Or maybe that’s just those kind of cop shows that we watch. I quite liked actually, that she said, well, I disagree. No, those are the facts. But you could disagree. Did have a heated exchange of views over the weekend about facts versus opinions and no, facts are facts. Surely there are such things that are facts and then they are people’s opinions about them. They don’t alter the facts. Well, I don’t agree with you. Doesn’t matter whether you agree with me or not.

Jim: Facts don’t care about your feelings.

Mark: If only we could quote the Talking Head song right now. And I suddenly gained an insight into what’s the philosophical question. When a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there, is there sound? I think that it’s a question about that. There are truths that don’t rely on humans to exist and those things are in the realm of facts. And the fact that humans come into the equation makes the interpretation of those factual things into opinions. So the tree falling in the forest, of course there’s sound, there’s just no one there to hear.

Jim: I mean, this is something we could get into. But arguably the tree falling causes air vibrations. It’s our brains that turn those vibrations into sound. Right. They vibrate our eardrums and then create sound as a perception. Right.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: It doesn’t have to be humans, but I would say there has to be some receptor of some kind, whether it’s a recording device or an animal or something. Otherwise I’m not sure it’s a sound.

Mark: Yeah, but surely that just records the sound. So you’re recording the thing.

Jim: Well, the receiver, essentially the microphone has a diaphragm which vibrates in the same way and turns that electronically into the thing we recognize as sound. Because when it plays it back through the vibratey things on speakers or headphones, our brain turns it into sound. At no point in that process is it technically, in my opinion, a sound until a person hears it, or until a thing an animal hears it.

Mark: Okay.

Jim: It’s air vibrations turned into electronic signals turned back into air vibrations by the output.

Mark: Or if you shove a human there. Then the air vibrations make the diaphragm move, which turns it into electronic signals that then get interpreted by your brain.

Jim: Not quite so easy, is it? Anyway, this is a bad film. It’s not quite as bad as the other two, but it deserves its place in here. And yes, Jennifer Aniston is arguing that it is the obviousness of one particular character. That means he can’t be the yeah.

Mark: And the more obvious than it yeah. The less likely

Jim: to give her a tiny bit of credit. She’s in a murder mystery film. And therefore is right. Because that’s the rules of murder mystery murder mystery films.

Mark: Because otherwise you don’t get the Poirotesque.

Jim: It would be super shit the most obvious person in a murder mystery because.

Mark: It’d be over in five minutes.

Jim: Yeah. Within the universe in which she is playing by these rules, arguably, she is being accurate. But if this imagining this film is set in the real world, she’s wrong and bad at what she’s doing.

Mark: Which is also true in this film.

Jim: Speaking of things that are wrong and bad at what they’re doing.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Our third example is Inspector Gadget 2, the straight to video sequel I.

Mark: Didn’t even know it existed.

Jim: Of Matthew Broderick’s already bad Inspector Gadget.

Mark: Because I was thinking, oh, is this Matthew Broderick? No, it’s the guy on Third Rock.

Jim: No, Matthew Broderick wasn’t prepared to come back for this film. In fact, the only person who came back from the Inspector Gadget was D.L. Hughley, who plays the voice of Gadget’s car, the Gadgetmobile. And presumably that’s only because he did it, because he could do it from home. And it was easy. But, everyone else was like, fuck that, I’m not being in another one of those. And it consequently is mean. The bad CGI is only matched by the bad writing and bad acting and bad everything else at the beginning of the film. Because spoiler for Inspector Gadget Gadget caught Dr. Claw. Right. There isn’t any crime now where Gadget lives. Right? And so he starts the second film like this.

Inspector Gadget: Wowzers… It’s quiet… Too quiet… And when it’s this quiet, you know what that means Brain? Evil’s afoot.

Mark: It’s quiet. Too quiet.

Jim: Yeah. That is quite a significant trope to the extent that there’s a page about it on TV. Tropes. And there’s a supercut on YouTube of people saying it’s quiet, too quiet with plenty of examples. But yes, the idea that it’s too quiet in some cases, arguably could be a reason for being suspicious. If you expect there to be activity, if you go into a crowded shopping street in London in the middle of the day and there’s no one around, and you say it’s quiet, too quiet, arguably, that’s not fallacious that’s reasonable because there should be activity. Stuff should be happening in uh like a dinosaur movie. Type thing. If there’s general animal noise in the forest and then all the animals shut the fuck up and go away again, that could be a reason. Because there’s a giant predator around and they’re being quiet. So there are times when it being too quiet. Is plausibly cause for concern or, uh.

Mark: Like a forest with lots of trees falling down.

Jim: Yeah, absolutely.

Mark: And nobody there. Nobody there.

Jim: Yeah, but in a situation where you have locked up the person who was doing all the crime and now there’s no crime, that’s not suspicious.

Mark: No, it’s quiet. Too quiet. How I like it. End of film.

Jim: Exactly the right amount of quiet.

Mark: Yeah, perfect. Job done. End of film. I am intrigued because I didn’t even know that existed.

Jim: Don’t seek it out. Honestly, it was tough for me to watch enough of it to get that Clip.

Mark: Wow.

Donald 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.

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: See, now the problem is that over the last few episodes, you’ve written them in such a way as to make me think that the game is going my mean, just look at the scores. Several of them are in my favor. I don’t like it, I’ll tell you. I don’t like everything points to a deliberate ploy to make me demand to start losing again. Damn it. I see your strategy. Right. I’m going to thwart you and start losing.

Jim: Well, that’ll teach me. our examples this week.

Mark: Too quiet.

Jim: Our quotes this week come from Trump’s, recent rally in Rapid City where he did all of his usual stuff, but with added stuff about his recent indictments. And the rest of it was the same old, same old. Yeah. So starting off then number one is the whole indictment thing. He said: Joe Biden’s ordered his leading opponent arrested on 91 fake and phony charges. 91! How many charges are there? But we’re going to ask for dismissals of a lot of it. Most of it. It’s just, you ask for dismissal. It’s called ‘dismiss the charges’. But remember, it’s a Democrat charging his opponent. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. That means that if I win and somebody wants to run against me. I call my attorney general. I say, “listen indict him.” “Well, he hasn’t done anything wrong, that we know of.” “I don’t know indict him on income tax evasion. You’ll figure it out.”

 

Mark: right.

Jim: Statement number two: The polls you see aren’t real polls, we have the polls and I’m leading by a lot. I know none of you would ever look at the New York Times. I call them – I used to call them the Failing New York Times, but actually I think they’ve failed. They’re the Failed New York Times. They make stuff up They made up a thing I said about Panama. They didn’t put any of the context, but in the real polls by the places that do, you know, the right kind of polling, you’ve never seen anything like it. It’s like something nobody’s ever seen. And people have seen a lot.

Mark: It’s just like he says something and then he catches himself listening to it. So he kind of repeats what he’s just said and like, it’s the first time he’s ever heard it and then comments on it. You’ve never seen anything like it. It’s like nothing anybody’s seen. People have seen a lot. He said, there’s a tribe a three handed conversation going on inside his head. Wow.

Jim: Statement number three, he said: I said to Kim Jong-Un, you know being a real estate guy it’s just sort of natural, I said, “You have the most beautiful shoreline. Think of it, you’re between China, Russia, and South Korea. Look at the beautiful shore, you could have the most beautiful condos that you’ve ever seen and become rich as hell. You don’t have to live like you’re living”. But he’s a tough guy, he’s a smart guy, and he just loves collecting nuclear weapons. That’s what he does. He collects nuclear weapons and we got along incredibly well.

Mark: So yeah, I’ve just got to look at the coastline in yeah, you could ruin that. You could make a lot of money. Do you think he isn’t as rich as hell, Kim Jong UN? You don’t have to live like you’re living with your fat legs in your straight trousers. Okay? I’ve got to work out which one’s not real. Well, see, I’m trying to hear the cadence of the thing and I’m trying to spot, the Jim style jokes, but I think you’ve toned down the kind of, the non secretary leaps in order to make it sound more convincing.

Mark: Arg.

Mark: See, I’m quite convinced by the indictment. One cassette almost he’s almost workshopping that, isn’t he’s? Kind of working it’s a new thing, so he’s workshopping it. So it’s not quite as slick as the others yet, collecting nuclear weapons. Oh, God. Okay, so on m all right, on that basis, I think number two is the one that you made up.

Jim: And which of the others are you more convinced by?

Mark: More convinced? It’s a strong word. number one, the indictment.

Jim: Dismisses the charges. Okay, yeah. Number one yeah. Is real.

Donald Trump: Joe Biden’s ordered his leading opponent arrested on 91 fake and phony charges. 91! How many charges are there? But we’re going to ask for dismissals of a lot of it. Most of it. It’s just, you ask for dismissal. It’s called ‘dismiss the charges’. But remember, it’s a Democrat charging his opponent. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. That means that if I win and somebody wants to run against me. I call my attorney general. I say, “listen indict him.” “Well, he hasn’t done anything wrong, that we know of.” “I don’t know indict him on income tax evasion. You’ll figure it out.”

Mark: But he has done something wrong. Yeah. We’re going to ask for dismissals of a lot of it. Most of it. Not all of it. You can ask it’s just you ask for dismissal. It’s called dismiss the charges. Yeah, but you can ask all you want. It’s not called dismissal because you just why are you doing that? With that emphasis? 91 fake and phony charges. But yeah, 91. How many charges are there? it’s Archie Bunker’s. Uh aged grandpa again. They lap it up.

Jim: Yeah. They love it.

Mark: Oh my God.

Jim: They were loving it, actually. Well, they were loving select portions of this speech for a lot of it. The audience were just fucking stony faced bored. Right. But, at times, a few of the hits.

Mark: Yeah sing Born in the USA again. Yeah, do that one. People turning to each other when he’s coming up with this stuff and going, yeah, I prefer his earlier stuff. I prefer the Russian thing. Yeah, they were good. Yeah, that was good. The perfect phone call. I love that one. This stuff, uh i,hate that. Bring back Hillary. Do the Hillary stuff. Yeah.

Jim: so,you also thought number three is real.

Mark: Yeah. Not quite so confident.

Jim: and number three Is real.

Donald Trump: I said to Kim Jong-Un, you know being a real estate guy it’s just sort of natural, I said, “You have the most beautiful shoreline. Think of it, you’re between China, Russia, and South Korea. Look at the beautiful shore, you could have the most beautiful condos that you’ve ever seen and become rich as hell. You don’t have to live like you’re living”. But he’s a tough guy, he’s a smart guy, and he just loves collecting nuclear weapons. That’s what he does. He collects nuclear weapons and we got along incredibly well.

Jim: He just loves collecting nuclear weapons.

Mark: That’s what he does. He collects nuclear weapons. I m want a blue one now. I see you’ve got one with Stars of Tropical.

Mark: Yeah.

Mark: Can we get one with the little red star?

Mark: Yeah.

Mark: You don’t have to live like you’re Living.

Jim: Sounded weirdly like Quint. Expect him to start singing Ladies of Spain

Mark: Exactly. I narrowed my eyes. You’re. Between China, Russia and South Korea,

Jim: 1800 men went into the water. Yeah. So it means you’ve won again. You’re unstoppable. Or is it all just a trick?

Mark: It’s all just a trick.

Jim: It does seem a bit suspicious, winning. It’s proof of something.

Mark: Yeah, but I did really like that. See, I was nearly taken with you’ve. Never seen anything like it. It’s like something nobody’s ever seen. And people have seen a lot. It’s so well, observed. Nearly had me on. Failed New York Times. Don’t know why I didn’t choose it. Mainly because I wanted to believe the other ones were true.

Jim: Yeah. Well, we have had some guesses on Patreon and Facebook. On Patreon, Anders and Will both say number 3.

Mark: Collecting nuclear weapons.

Jim: One person was basing it on a subtle difference in font, which I don’t think I think I made them all the same font, but maybe the JPEG made it an artefact thing.

Mark: Can’t base that. He puts those things in deliberately.

Jim: Maybe I’ll make the fonts add a bit more kerning one of them to see if it gets you next time.

Mark: yeah. Put some serifs on one of yeah.

Jim: Invisible Unicorn went for number one. It seems that would be the easiest to make.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah.

Jim: And then Stephen Bickle said number two. Said, I don’t think Trump ever cares about context as long as he’s being talked about.

Mark: fair nice nice.

Jim: On Facebook, Molly said number three. Nick says, number one. And Scott said, I’m going to pick number two. That way one of us is sure to be right.

Mark: Good thinking.

Jim: Mike Thunder says two. Mary says, I think I’ve heard him say three, so I reckon two is fake. Simon Says number one. And Peter says number three. I don’t think Trump is that stupid to say stuff like that, but I hope it is real because he might just be that stupid.

Mark: Brilliant. You get to hear it. Yeah. No, he is. That’s my kind of reckoning. Yeah. Is based on I just wanted to hear him say that. Yeah. If you can hear the gaps for the audience, that’s one for, uh mind you, Jim puts those in as well.

Jim: Yeah, I think about that.

Mark: God damn it.

Jim: If you’d like to join in, then you can do that. You’ll have to just be there when we record and happen to catch it on Facebook or Patreon. Join in, see if you can beat Mark.

Mark: And well done. Some people.

Jim: Yeah, some people did. Well, they didn’t. Agreed with you. People have beaten you in the past.

Mark: Yeah, there’s always that possibility. It’s all a plot just to make me think that I’m better at this than.

Jim: So it’s time for the part of the show that this week at least, is called School vouchers are not a logical fallacy.

Mark: This is amazingly corrupt. At first you think, oh, yeah, this is quite a good thing.

Jim: Well, yeah, this is the thing, because we don’t have a similar kind of system here. School vouchers are a contentious issue in the US. And it was something that I didn’t really understand because, as I say, we don’t have a similar kind of thing. The only thing I knew about school vouchers until I started paying more attention to American politics is that in The West Wing, one of the very early episodes, they were kind of lobbying for school vouchers, and the Bartlett administration were saying, no, this is not something that we’re going know. What we want to do is make public schools all really good, and public schools should be palaces and teachers should be paid like kings. That was like Sam Seaborne’s argument, if you don’t know what school vouchers are. Basically, it is quite popular among Republicans, it is quite unpopular among Democrats. And in large part, it is about giving students the amount of money as a voucher, essentially that would be paid, some of it, or in some cases all of it, that would be spent by the state on their education.in the understanding those ones are not going to go to a public school, they will be going to a private school or in some cases be homeschooled. On its face, just in that bit of information, it sounds like, okay, that kind of seems reasonable. They’re not using those public resources. They get essentially a kind of like a tax rebate. Essentially they get a refund. They get that money that they can then use for the education of their own education.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: in some cases, those vouchers are used for transport to a better public school further away, so it’s still used for education, but those students then still get the use of that taxpayer funded public school. So I don’t really quite understand how that works. But the argument against this is that essentially those private schools are getting taxpayer money. Those private schools are being run for a profit, and many of them are religious schools. Those schools are getting money that is from taxpayers that is supposed to be in the public school system. The public school system is dramatically underfunded to the extent that a huge number of teachers end up just buying material, for their classrooms out of their own.mean, in Florida, which is where we’re talking about, this is a story about DeSantis and school vouchers in Florida, and in Florida, teachers are underpaid compared to the national average. And still they buy materials for their.

Mark: Students because they’re under.

Jim: Resources, have the money for, the teaching equipment and resources that need to go on those public school students. So teachers end up paying for that stuff out of their own pocket. And where some of that money is going is into school vouchers, which are being given to students to not go to public school, which they’re paying for profit academies, private schools, religious schools, and in some cases, homeschooling.

Mark: And the people that issue the, vouchers, it’s not the government itself. They get paid by the government, funded.

Jim: By the government it’s funded by, and.

Mark: They get incentivized to have as many students as they can get. So they want to expand the student body that receives the vouchers. So they’ve just changed the rules, haven’t they? So that it’s an expanded and increased so they’re no longer not available to privately.

Jim: Well, yeah, I mean, that’s the thing. traditionally, and one of the main arguments by conservatives for school vouchers is that they end up in the hands of lower income and minority students and enable them to have choice of where they send their kids to school. And it means that if you are, in a low income area and your schools are bad because those things tend to go together underfunded, then you can choose with this voucher to either travel to another area and go to a better public school. you can go to a private school or you can home school. The reality is that even within that system where they’re aimed at and often there are income caps that say you have to be below this income level to qualify. Even then, 75% of those go to students who are already at private schools. Wow. Just the way it works. This isn’t helping kids get out of low performing public schools into private schools. This is giving money back to people who are already finding ways to send their kids to private schools.

Mark: Because the problem is that the low performing or the badly performing low funded schools are, uh because the money is shoved, into these some of the reason, part of the reason is that the money is shoved into these voucher schemes. If they didn’t shove it into the voucher schemes, just funded the schools, then they wouldn’t be bad sufficient for you to use your voucher to bust them out to another school.

Mark: Absolutely.

Jim: The vast majority of private schools, the vast majority of parents of students at private schools can afford those fees to send their kids to the private schools. And so where income caps are taken away from these kinds of things, all you’re doing is essentially giving rich people money, which is what the Republican Party is all about and why they’re quite popular among Republicans both that and also, kind of funding religious schools under the table, because the taxpayers can’t fund religious schools, but they can give, families school vouchers, which then end up paying religious schools. And so it’s a way to get around that. and this particular story, although some of those private school students are included in this, is about the personalized education program that is due to a new law that was signed by Ron DeSantis last year, where this is aimed at homeschooled students. And the thing is, if you teach your kids at home, you need resources, m, and I think it’s fair that shouldn’t be income based. There are reasons to teach your kids at home. Some of those reasons are bad and evil in as much as you don’t want them to be exposed to the idea that gay people exist, etc.

Mark: books and literature exists.

Jim: We talked a few months ago about a literal Nazi homeschool organization who were providing lesson plans based around praising Hitler, that kind of thing. Not a plus, in my opinion.

Mark: No.

Jim: but there are to be given vouchers.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: There are legitimate reasons to homeschool your kids. I think it does skew towards conservatives and religious people because they generally are ones who have more of a problem with public education being too woke and all that kind of stuff. But there are low income people with super intelligent kids who aren’t getting enough out of the public school system, can’t afford to send their kids to private schools and have either the skills or are, prepared to learn the skills to help, their kids thrive themselves. That’s a good thing. And it shouldn’t be, reliant on those people having enough money to be able to buy the resources to do that themselves.

Mark: Yeah. Because you’ll need the kind of stuff that the teachers in public schools are having to buy because there isn’t enough money you need to be able to afford to buy those the textbooks and the paper, the pens and whatever.

Jim: So I do kind of feel like there should be some system that is set up to support low income homeschool families. This system, however, gives $8,000 annually to homeschooled students families. It was set up to be, limited in the first year, 2023 to 2024 to 20,000 students, but then expand by 40,000 students every school year after that. Wow. So quite rapidly. And there isn’t an income cap. So it isn’t just for low income families. Some of these people doing it were already homeschooling their kids and could perfectly afford to do all of that and had all the resources that they needed to do it. They just now get an $8,000 a year from Florida, from the state. And there is a, kind of set of things that you can apply for to be covered by that money. Mhm, some of which seem a bit more educational than others.

Mark: Right?

Mark: Yeah. Books and pens.

Jim: Yeah, that kind of thing .also apparently games consoles, for example, is something that is covered for students with special needs.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Which again, there are plenty of really good educational video games and that’s a potentially useful thing, especially for students who don’t necessarily learn in a traditional way. Things like outdoor activities, swing sets, foosball tables, skateboards, those kinds of things. Again, it can be useful for students to have that physical activity that they might not otherwise have the opportunity to have and that also benefits their learning and so on. So there are reasons to have these kinds of things. TVs is a thing that is apparently included, which again, I can understand. If you can’t afford a TV, there are very useful educational programs that you can access. I don’t necessarily know that they need to be specifically up to 55 inch.

Mark: TV to replace an old one that could use replace it.

Jim: Yeah. That seems maybe a little excessive, and.

Mark: A screen and a yeah.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: The one that’s got the most kind of publicity and probably led to this article in Popular Information. This is Judd Legum’s blog is Disney tickets, theme park tickets, which apparently are now a thing you can use your eight grand to pay for.

Mark: Wow.

Mark: Yeah.

Mark: You kind of think, okay, a field trip.

Jim: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t begrudge it being used for trips out. Like field trips. Yeah. Educational visits to museums, that kind of thing. I’ve been to Disney.

Mark: Guy did coastal walks.

Jim: I’ve been to Disney in Florida.

Mark: It was good.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: I didn’t particularly yeah.

Mark: Other than the Mickey Mouse real.

Jim: I’m not ruling out that there is possibly some educational benefit from that. Like I was saying about homeschooling shouldn’t be income dependent. This is a thing I don’t feel like should be something that is subsidized for.

Mark: People.

Mark: So that’s taxpayers money going to be sending family to Disney and then going to a massive corporate enterprise.

Jim: Yeah. One that DeSantis is famously at war with, which is a bit strange. but also, the people who are using their school vouchers to go to private schools, essentially, if they have any money left over, they’re allowed to spend it on this kind of stuff, too. Yeah, it’s weird that, first of all, he has DeSantis has specifically, with this new law that was signed last year, eliminated the income cap. So it means this does not target low income families. but also dramatically widened the amount of stuff you can spend this money on. I would argue at least some of it outside of what is most beneficial for their education. and I would definitely say it is not most beneficial for the students of Florida as a no no, because this money is, when you add it up, ending up being billions and billions of dollars that are not going into Florida’s underfunded schools.

Mark: If the taxpayers dollars coming from the right wing went into welfare, which includes, arguably includes the mental and physical well being of people just as much as their education on the part of the left. If the left were saying, yes, we’re going to take your tax dollars and we’re going to plow billions of dollars of it into the education system and into physical education and mental well being, classes and resources, and we’re going to allow people to go on field trip, the right would explode and say, that’s an awful waste of taxpayers money. How is it the other well, yeah, like you hit on the nail on head earlier. You’re giving money to rich people.

Jim: That’s the thing. They begrudge. They begrudge poor people getting money yeah. Without well, no. Even working really hard for it. They pretty much begrudge that too, because they’re constantly against raising the minimum wage. They’re not okay with people working really hard and getting paid if they’re poor. or getting paid fairly. But they are, it seems, okay with, handouts for this kind of.

Mark: Stuff.

Mark: Being able to buy an $800 Lego set for Christmas and the little clip that was on Twitter or whatever. The thing that annoyed me, two things that annoyed me, one of them was trying to work, asking advice on Facebook.

Jim: Or wherever it was a Facebook group set up for parents who were in this scheme.

Mark: Could I get away with spending $800 on a Christmas present for my kids? And you think, okay, yeah, building blocks and all that stuff. Lego was built as an educational toy. That’s quite cool.

Mark: Yeah.

Mark: But, to buy an $800 set for Christmas out of a voucher. And the second thing that annoyed me is that there is no plural of Lego.

Jim: well, I mean, many of our listeners will disagree with that. I agree, obviously. Yeah. Lego bricks. Legos is not a thing.

Mark: No, they’re not a noun. They’re not an object. You have Lego bricks. they’re made by Lego. And Lego means let’s play, or something.

Jim: Like that, isn’t it? Something like that, yeah.

Mark: So apart from that, it strikes me as being as self entitled sometimes as mum’s. Net is just these people arguing about, oh, God, I can’t get oat milk. Yeah, absolutely. In my corner shop. It’s awful. Something ought to be done about it.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: The man in waitrose was very rude when Tarquin knocked the avocados over. Yes. Unacceptable. I’ve asked for him to be fired.

Mark: And I can’t get my Ponies feed to there any more. They simply don’t have it. They won’t deliver. And I’m nearly 300 yards away.

Jim: Yeah, that’s what this story is about, basically, is rich in Florida giving other rich assholes money that should be going into the school system, but is going to line the pocket, calling it,entitled people.

Mark: Yes.

Mark: And calling it education vouchers. And at the same time, Florida teachers are the underpaid. It’s costing this thing. If they’re expanding it by 40,000 tunes a year, that’s billions upon billions of taxpayers dollars. And they don’t mind, because it’s going to other rich people who are going to spend it on Legos.

Jim: yeah. Just to give you, some scale, doug Tuthill, president for Step Up for Students, which is one of the organizations that awards vouchers, again, funded by the state government. Therefore, the taxpayers tweeted on 26 August, as of 09:00 a.m.. M. This morning, we have awarded 410,365 full time scholarships and 22,545 part time scholarships. Scholarships, in this context, is just another word for school vouchers. So that is almost half a million. Just that, that organization. And there are other organizations, and again, that’s just in Florida, with students families getting eight grand of taxpayer money a year, many of whom at least 75% of whom were already in private school.

Mark: And they were managing perfectly.

Jim: They were doing it without subsidies.

Mark: Without the subsidies. And now they’re going to vote for DeSantis.

Jim: Yeah. And just as a bit of a caveat, not every parent who has their kid at a private school is doing brilliantly for themselves. Yeah. One of my kids was in a private school for a couple of years because his local public school was not doing a good job. And, we did everything we could to get him into a private school for as long as we could afford him to be at a private school. And it was tough. Yeah. And we couldn’t really afford it. We ended up moving to an area where the schools were better. But the point is that, yes, I recognize that there are going to be individuals in those places where actually they are struggling, they are in need of assistance, and that is the best thing for their kid, and that’s why they’re doing it.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: But in many more cases, it is people who don’t need this money, and they’re getting it over people who do need it.

Mark: And that’s why it ought to be means tested.

Mark: Absolutely.

Jim: Income Cap.

Mark: Absolutely.

Mark: So if there are people struggling because otherwise, if they’re not, then that’s going to mean that the distribution there’s going to be less available for the people that are struggling because it’s being spread across people that don’t need it at all.

Jim: Absolutely means testing income caps, are the very minimum that should be in place for this kind of thing. And again, a lot of people, and I can’t say I disagree with them, are against the concept of school vouchers. Because what it ultimately does, the people it benefits are the private schools.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: Takes it out of public for profit organizations that don’t then, and it doesn’t increase outcome. It doesn’t actually help those kids. Even the ones who use vouchers and end up at private schools. It doesn’t increase their test scores or anything like that. There have been studies since 2018 in various states in DC and Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, that show that actually test scores drop from students who move from their local school to either further away public school or a private school that may perhaps be not a great private just especially when they are subsidized by taxpayer money. They don’t necessarily have to achieve the great things. When a private school lives, and dies on its results, they have to achieve. And that is what gets rich people to send their kids to that school. But if they are just getting funded by the government, by taxpayers, they don’t necessarily need to keep up those standards. And not all private schools are the same. Some of them aren’t great. And the ones that are great aren’t necessarily the right places for all kids.

Mark: Yeah. And finally, some things we really don’t Have time to talk about..

Jim: One of the rare bipartisan accusations leveled against Fulton County DA Fani Willis recently has been that indicting 18 people is overly broad and complicated. The left says this out of concern that too much focus on minor players may distract from the charges against people like Trump himself. The right says it because they’ll latch on to any bullshit they can to avoid acknowledging Trump’s guilt. But the release of the Special Grand Jury’s report from December of last year has shown that Willis has actually been pretty cautious in only indicting 18 people, since 39 indictments were originally recommended by the Grand Jury, who spent eight months looking at evidence and heard testimony from around 75 witnesses. That was enough for them to recommend charging people like Michael Flynn, Lindsay Graham, former Trump lawyer Lin Wood, and former Georgia Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Purdue under the same RICO laws that were ultimately used to charge Trump and friends. There are many possible reasons Willis decided not to follow the recommendation of the Grand Jury. For some potential defendants she may have felt she would struggle to get a conviction, while it’s possible others have been given immunity in exchange for cooperation. One thing we can enjoy for now at least is that it’s quite likely the Fulton County 18 were carefully chosen because the evidence against them is the strongest. 

Mark: Ted Cruz, that moderate thought-through, quiet, calm, all-embracing people-person kinda guy; you know think Keanu Reeves but times by 20, went on TV this week to caution against the adoption of more stringent recommendations regarding the consumption of alcohol in order to alert the nation to the ongoing health risks, by pointing out that recommendations veering so far from a country’s cultural norms might have the unintended effect of making people not take them seriously at all, even if the recommendations are scientifically sound. No, no he didn’t, of course not. Instead he wilfully ignoranted-down the facts and pumped up the fear and loathing on the socials, accusing Biden’s administration of forcing everyone to drink only two beers a week, adding Kiss my Ass as he tore the top off a beer and chugged it down in front of a barroom full of rednecks! Sufficient red mist was made to descend across middle America that no-one now needs to check that George Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism when asked which way the health-recommendations might be going from the current two beers a day, recounted that Canada are running an experiment where their recommendation is two beers a week and that future recommendations in the US would probably not be going in the direction of up. Nor do angry ten-gallon-hat-wearing plaid-shirted Bud Light-swiggers need to note that the NIAAA employed Koob as a scientist, and he is not a Biden administration appointee, and his recommendations are just that; recommendations. They’re not laws, and they’re not enforced in any way. In fact, they barely even carry any weight of stigma. The same two-a-day recommendation has been made since the 1990’s, but you probably wouldn’t be able to find any evidence of that in the drinking holes of the USA. Except, perhaps, oddly, in the one where Cruz was foaming at the mouth cos everyone in the background who all had to swig on Cruz’s cue looked like they’d never held a container before, let alone touched a drop in their lives. Word of advice Ted; don’t hire your location manager from the local Temperance Society next time hey!!

Jim: Noted thinker Donald J Trump theorized back in 2016 that it is possible to win so much that you get tired of winning and beg to stop. For him, that’s very much still a theory, but for us it’s being put to the test every time an Oath Keeper or a Proud Boy sees the inside of a courtroom. We’ve been reporting back on the nice long sentences they get, and we’ll keep doing so until it stops being fun, which I’m thinking might be never. Up this week is the Proudest of Boys, Enrique Tarrio, who was offered a plea deal by prosecutors in October which would have seen him sentenced to 9 to 11 years in prison. Of course, they should have known that he would be too proud to accept that – it’s in the name of the group he led for Christ’s sake! I like to imagine that when he turned down the deal he flipped them off and said something like “fuck you coppers, I’ll see you in court!” but whether that’s true or not (I’m pretty sure it’s true), he was found guilty and, when it comes to sentencing Tarrio apparently Ain’t Too Proud to Beg, pleading with the judge “Please show me mercy. I ask you that you not take my 40s from me.” But the judge did, and then took his 50s too, sentencing Enrique to 22 years in prison – the longest sentence yet connected to the January 6 attack on the Capitol. And in a twist likely to make Trump’s arse pucker just a little (apologies for that visual), Tarrio was sentenced based purely on his leadership role leading up to the insurrection, as he was not even in DC that day. I for one am not getting tired of winning.

Mark: In a tale about a hideously brash loud-mouth exploiter of the unwary to their way of thinking, thereby dragging them down to an eternal quagmire of calculatedly fiendish shaking of the foundations of civil and societal behaviour for their own ends, Lauren Boebert went to see the new musical stage version of Beetlejuice in downtown Denver. Asked to quiet down by members of the audience who also complained that she was using her phone to record the show, Lauren received a warning from staff during the intermission, and after doing the same again in the second half was escorted from the theatre where she declaimed “don’t you know who I am, I’m on the board, yeah go get the cops, I’ll be contacting the mayor”. Whilst she denies vaping in the theatre, her Campaign manager told the Denver post “I can confirm the stunning and salacious rumours: in her personal time, Congresswoman Lauren Boebert is indeed a supporter of the performing arts (gasp!) and, to the dismay of a select few, enthusiastically enjoyed a weekend performance of ‘Beetlejuice,’ adding ‘Lauren encourages everyone to see the play and its “fantastic cast, tremendous visuals and plenty of loud laughs” — but, he added, “with a gentle reminder to leave their phones outside of the venue.” And your firearms hey Lauren, even as a member of the behaviourally deceased you don’t want the detector beeping again like at the Senate House. Oh and if you’re going to see the show/vote for her in 2024 be careful not to summon her from the undead accidentally; Boebert, Boebert, Boe…….(claps hand over mouth) ooh shit that was close!

Jim: It’s taken them a while, but Republicans are finally getting the message that not everyone is on board with their so-called ‘pro-life’ policies. Yes, after Roe v Wade was overturned they’ve suffered a disastrous midterm and seen definitive votes in favor of reproductive freedom even in very red states. So they got some pollsters to take the pulse of the electorate, crunched some numbers, and got together in a closed-door meeting last week with some Republican donors. Once they saw the cold hard facts even they couldn’t deny that something has to be done. What they’ve been saying and doing isn’t working, it’s only driving people away, so it’s time for a fundamental change in their stance on abortion. So here’s what they’re going to do about it. They’re going to… stop calling themselves ‘pro-life’ and come up with another name for it. Yes, their takeaway from the fact that almost 90% of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or some circumstances was that people either didn’t like, or didn’t understand the name ‘pro-life’. In a way, you can understand why they might think that because it is, after all, a bullshit euphemism designed to make the pro-forced-birth lobby sound less fascisty, but I’m not sure they’ve fully grasped the issue. Platonic ideal of manhood Josh Hawley said on NBC News “Many voters think [‘pro-life’] means you’re for no exceptions in favor of abortion ever, ever, and ‘pro-choice’ now can mean any number of things, so the conversation was mostly oriented around how voters think of those labels, that they’ve shifted.” Yes, I wonder why they think that Josh Hawley, Senator from Missouri where abortions are currently banned with no exceptions for rape or incest, it’s a real fucking head-scratcher that one! No word yet on what the GOP might come up with to replace the phrase which is single-handedly losing them elections, but Senator Todd Young of Indiana is in favor of “pro-baby”, which is pretty fucking rich for the Senator for the state ranked 47th in pre-k education enrollment, 45th in infant mortality, and with zero paid parental leave. What you mean, Todd, is that you’re ‘pro-fetus’. But if that phrase worked they would never have had to come up with ‘pro-life’ in the first place.

Mark: Democrat-backed judge Janet Protasiewicz officially joined the Wisconsin Supreme Court in August. This raised hopes among Democrats that the high court could be more receptive to a lawsuit alleging that the current state legislative and congressional districts provide an unfair advantage for Republicans. Basically Wisconsin is gerrymandered to hell to aid the Right. Days after she took office in August, Democratic-friendly groups filed two lawsuits asking the Supreme Court to toss out the Republican-drawn legislative maps. GOP leaders quickly asked that Protasiewicz recuse herself, pointing to the donations from the Democratic Party – she was on the receiving end of some $10 million in Democrat donations. However, in 2010, Conservative majorities in the court approved a rule that allowed justices to hear cases involving their campaign donors. The rule was written in part by the Wisconsin Manufacturers and state board of Commerce – the WMC. It had spent more than $2 million to help elect Chief Justice Annette Ziegler, who voted for the measure as part of a then-Conservative majority on the court. Three years earlier, Ziegler refused to recuse herself from a WMC-backed case in which she wrote a majority opinion resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in business tax refunds. A Conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley wrote an order in 2017 rejecting a call from retired judges to create a recusal standard for cases involving donors. And now she too has called out Protasiewicz for not recusing herself from the redistricting challenge which she also maintains will shift power away from Republicans and bestow an electoral advantage for Democrat candidates – oh the boundary-shifting irony! So what we’re saying is the Right has form in this area, they claim it as their own. Their being asked to recuse themselves from cases where there’s a clear vested interest is a violation of their First amendment rights as far as they’re concerned. Except of course if you’re a Democrat and then if you don’t do what they won’t do, it’s an impeachable offence. If only the Wisconsin Chamber of Commerce sold pots and kettles – but see they’re not gonna get the irony embedded in that joke either! 

Jim: Time for a quick court roundup, and I’m delighted to say that, as usual, it’s been a very bad couple of weeks for Trump and his lackeys. First of all, the judge in Trump’s civil defamation case in New York ruled that he is liable for defamation of E Jean Carroll for all the things he said about her after she beat him in her first defamation case against him and was awarded $5 million in damages. The ruling means that the trial, currently scheduled for January, will purely be for a jury to decide exactly how much Trump owes her this time. One the same day, Trump, two of his kids and the Trump Organization lost in their bid to delay their civil fraud trial, currently scheduled to begin in a couple of weeks. But they didn’t just lose. They lost so hard that the judge didn’t even bother to type out a ruling. Instead, on the bottom of Trump’s proposed order, he just wrote  “Decline to sign. Defendants’ arguments are completely without merit.” The next day, Trump advisor Peter Navarro was found guilty of Contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a Congressional subpoena which required him to testify in front of the House January 6 Committee and turn over documents. He claimed that he didn’t comply because Trump had told him he should assert executive privilege, but Trump did not back that up, either to the court or the January 6 Committee. Sentencing will take place in January, and Navarro faces anywhere from a month to a year in prison and up to $100,000 fine. And rounding out the week the very next day, former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ bid to remove his Georgia case to federal court was rejected, with the judge finding that Meadows was not in fact acting within his role as Chief of Staff when he conspired to overturn the election. It’s not great news for the other four defendants who have also filed requests to remove their cases to federal court, nor for Trump, who is expected to try that too. Yep, still not tired of winning.

Mark: Wow.

Mark: So he wasn’t acting within his role of Chief of Staff whilst he’s conspired?

Jim: No, the judge didn’t accept. I was just violating the Hatch Act.

Mark: It’s been rather a sweary week or so in British Politics, the Education Secretary Gillian Keegan moaned on a live mic that no-one was thanking her for doing a fucking great job whilst everyone else has sat on their arses, when a reporter held her to account for the government doing nothing about the schools falling down cos of the Raac concrete and cos Gove axed the Labour Parties Building Schools for the Future scheme in 2010 to save money. Speaking of which Dominic Raab – only one letter difference from Raac but also a flaky, aerated, collapsing, no-good foundation for building the economy of a nation – is trying to save money to be able to offer tax cuts to the 3 or 4 remaining rich people who are going to vote for them next year, by axing the planned and way overdue and way over budget HS2 High Speed Rail Link from Birmingham to Manchester. Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham quipped “Levelling up? My arse!” And Penny Mordaunt, Tory Leader of the House of Commons, last seen wearing the Poundland logo as a dress at the Coronation of Charles, described Keir Starmer as Beach Ken (Yeah she’s not seen the movie!) and furthermore as having “no balls”. How do you know when the government has run its course and is doing that very COVID-era thing of quietly quitting? When people resort finally to swearing at everyone and doing stuff that makes you swear at them. It’s time to go people… vote off, vote right off and when you get there vote off some more! Arses!

Jim: What the fuck? He’s not ‘Beach Ken’. He’s Ken and his job is beach.

Mark: Exactly.

Jim: What does she think it is?

Mark: She’s never seen the movie.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Unacceptable.

Mark: I know. Exactly.

Jim: So that’s all the bad arguments and faulty reasoning we have time for this week. You’ll find the show notes at 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 you’ve had a good time, please give us a review on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Or simply tell one other person in person about how much they’d like our podcast and you could support the show patreon.com slash f Trump. Just like our straw man level patrons, Laura Tomsick, Renee Z, Schmootz, Mark Reiche, 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 Stephen Bickle, Melissa Sytek, Janet Yuetter, Kaz Toohey, Andrew Halk and our top patron, Lauren. Thank you so much, everyone, for your continued patronage. It really is very much appreciated.

Jim: You can connect with those awesome people as well as us and other listeners at QED in Manchester this coming weekend or in the Facebook group at facebook.com/groups/fallacioustrump

Mark: All music is by the Outbursts and was used with permission. And we will be playing this coming weekend, not at QED. So until next time on Fallacious Trump, we’ll leave the last word to The Donald.

Donald Trump: That’s right. Go home to mommy. Bye bye.

Jim: And rounding out the week, the very next day, former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows bid to I should write these, like, as if I’m going to.

Mark: Say them, not just read.

Jim: Yeah, yeah. And rounding out the week the very next day, former Trump Chief of Stock fuck me.