Sour Grapes – FT#134

17 Oct Sour Grapes – FT#134

Show Notes

The Sour Grapes Fallacy occurs when someone rationalizes their failure after the fact by claiming the thing they were trying to attain wasn’t actually any good.

Trump

We started out by discussing Trump’s claim that Salma Hayek is too short for him after she turned him down for a date.

And then we looked at this tweet about how boring the NFL is:

The @nfl games are so boring now that actually, I’m glad I didn’t get the Bills. Boring games, too many flags, too soft!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 13, 2014

Finally, we talked about MAGA world’s obsession with Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, who are apparently rubbish and not good looking:

Also, she is homely. https://t.co/FIiTK9N7cB

— Roger Kimball (@rogerkimball) September 25, 2023

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about Jonathan Wallace’s reaction to losing his local election for Northumbria Police and Crime Commissioner.

And he followed that up by talking about this clip of Nigel Farage claiming ‘harvesting’ was to blame for UKIP losing:

He finished by talking about Richard Walker leaving the Labour Party.

Fallacy in the Wild

In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from I Love Lucy:

Then we discussed this clip from Father Ted:

And we finished by talking about this clip from Flight of the Conchords:

 

Fake News

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

1. Romney, who today couldn’t get elected dogcatcher in the great state of Utah, should have beaten an absolutely failed first term Obama. Should have beaten him very easily. If he and RINO Paul fought as hard against Obama as they do against President Donald J. Trump, they would never have lost. They would have beaten Obama. But remember, Republicans eat their young. They really do. They eat their young. Terrible statement, but it’s true. And that’s the problem with so many in our party. They just don’t have the loyalty and the strength to stick together. They go after people who are on their side rather than the radical left Democrats that are destroying our country.
2. Brilliant Rudy, Rudy Giuliani, he did amazing – really amazing things for this country which nobody ever talks about, and he’s being treated like a criminal. And make no mistake, it’s because he wouldn’t let himself be used to attack me. They wanted to attack me – of course they did, they never stopped, and I don’t think they ever will stop. Because I refuse to back down. It’s really a problem because I see what needs to be done and it’s stuff that nobody else can do, so what am I supposed to do? I’m the only one that can fix it, and Rudy knows that, so he’s happy. He’s told me, he’s happy that they’re coming after him. He’s proud.
3. I said so let me ask you let’s say your boat goes down and I’m sitting on top of this big powerful battery and the boat’s going down, do I get electrocuted? And he said you know what honestly nobody’s ever asked me that question. But if I’m sitting down and that boat’s going down and I’m on top of a battery and water starts flooding in, I’m getting concerned but then I look 10 yards to my left and there’s a shark over there so I have a choice of electrocution or shark. You know what, I’m going to take electrocution. I will take electrocution every single time.

Mark got it right AGAIN this week (that’s six in a row!), and is on 49%

 

Speaker of the House is not a logical fallacy

We talked about the lack of a House Speaker and what that means!

 

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

• Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York started last week, and Trump even attended the first few days, making sure to come out of the courtroom and yell to the press about how unfairly he was being treated. Judge Arthur Engoron appeared at first to accept this as exactly the kind of behavior you’d expect from this defendant, but by day two Trump crossed a line when he posted a photo of the Judge’s court clerk along with her name and instagram account and suggested she was biasing the judge against him, because she had once had her photo taken with Chuck Shumer. The judge issued a partial gag order “forbidding all parties from posting, emailing or speaking publicly about any of my staff”, saying “Personal attacks on members of my court staff are unacceptable, inappropriate and I will not tolerate them in any circumstances. Failure to abide by this order will result in serious sanctions.” Trump deleted the post and sat huffily in the courtroom for another day before leaving during a break on day three to head to some campaign rallies where he continued to yell about how unfairly he was being treated. Meanwhile, his lawyers argued that massively over-valuing properties isn’t fraud if you reckon someone might one day pay that amount for it, and former Trump employees testified said they were under pressure to inflate values because Trump liked to see his net worth going up, and that they considered applying a premium to the value of various properties based purely on the fact that they were owned by the President. Meanwhile, Scott Hall, one of Trump’s co-defendants in Georgia, has pleaded guilty to five counts of conspiracy, raising the question of whether he will now cooperate with prosecutors as a condition of his sentencing. Really looking forward to that televised trial!
• So if you are at a loss as to what to say to the orange pre-criminal at his club, and who wouldn’t be, take a leaf out of an Australian billionaire’s book. No not Murdoch, Anthony Pratt of Pratt Industries, one of the world’s largest packaging companies. According to special counsel Jack Smith’s team’s investigations, they discovered allegations that in a lull at Mar-a-Lago one evening, where Pratt’s a member, he brought up the subject of the American submarine fleet, as you do! According to Pratt’s account, Pratt told Trump he believed Australia should start buying its submarines from the United States, to which an excited Trump – “leaning” toward Pratt as if to be discreet (hah!) – then told Pratt two pieces of information about U.S. submarines: the supposed exact number of nuclear warheads they routinely carry, and exactly how close they supposedly can get to a Russian submarine without being detected. This all took place, of course, several months after Trump left the white house and errrrrr was no longer president! Anthony Pratt, the very model of discretion, must have noted this cos he then went on to keep very quiet about it to 45 others, including six journalists, 11 of his company’s employees, 10 Australian officials, and three former Australian prime ministers! Some of the Australian officials that sources said he told were, as reflected in news reports at the time, involved in the then negotiations with the Biden administration over a deal for Australia to purchase a number of nuclear-powered attack submarines from the United States. Ironic that in one braggadocious “my Putin’s bigger than yours” moment, Trump talking at Fox Business about Ukraine said that if he were still president, he would make sure Russia understood that the United States is “a greater nuclear power” with “the greatest submarines in the world. The most powerful machines ever built, and nobody knows where they are.” Except half of Australia! Pratt sees no problem in shafting Trump and cosying up to Biden describing himself as someone who tends to just “side with the king.” (Bruce Philosopher:) Mind if we call you Machiavelli just to avoid confusion, Bruce?
• In a shocking turn of events which nobody could have predicted, Robert F Kennedy Jr has abandoned his beloved Democratic party and decided to run as an independent presidential candidate for 2024. While running ostensibly against Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination, Kennedy was lauded, amplified and lied about by various right wing sources, which now seems to be coming back to bite them in the ass. His polling numbers among Democrat voters never really got above 20%, with more than that expressing disapproval. That 20% was presumably the ones who haven’t been paying attention for the past 60 years and vaguely remembered a good guy called Kennedy who had something to do with politics. The more coverage RFK got, the more people noticed that he’s a whackjob conspiracy theorist, and his approval ratings among Democrats dropped. But Republicans love that shit, and his GOP voter approval ratings frequently hit 50% and above. So now that he’s running as an independent candidate, it looks like he’s more likely to pull votes away from Trump than from Biden. Which is probably why all his former buddies have turned on him, with the RNC calling him “just another radical far-left Democrat”, Ronna McDaniel calling him a “Democrat in Independent’s clothing” and a “typical elitist liberal” And Trump’s spokesman Stephen Cheung going for gold in the irony olympics by saying “Voters should not be deceived by anyone who pretends to have conservative values… [An] RFK candidacy is nothing more than a vanity project for a liberal Kennedy to cash in on his family’s name.” Possibly most damning, though, was the statement put out by four of his siblings, who called his announcement “deeply saddening” and “dangerous for the country”. Come on other Kennedy siblings, join in – there’s enough of you left to beat Paul Gosar’s admittedly high bar of six siblings denouncing his political career.
• In a familiar whiff of Trump deflation-techniques; where the old windbag lets some of the over-pressured hot air out of his assets hole to blow people off the scent of the size of his shizzle; the jurors in Rudy Giuliani’s defamation case against the two Georgia electoral workers have been instructed that “it must, when determining an appropriate sum of compensatory, presumed, and punitive damages, infer that defendant Giuliani was intentionally trying to hide relevant discovery about the Giuliani businesses’ finances for the purpose of shielding his assets from discovery and artificially deflating his net worth,” since Rudy’s “continued and flagrant disregard of this Court’s August 30 Order that he produce financial-related documents concerning his personal and his businesses’ past and present assets”. Consequently Giuliani and his lawyer will be prohibited “from making any argument, or introducing any evidence, stating or suggesting that he is insolvent, bankrupt, judgement proof, or otherwise unable to defend himself” since he failed to hand over evidence that would show that’s true. In August Rudy was judged to have defamed the workers and was ordered to pay damages – one of them, Ruby Freeman, has reported that Rudy’s “failed to take any of the actions” ordered by the court, including turning over $89,000 in legal fees. “Consistent with his prior track record in this matter, Giuliani failed to file any response,” the judge wrote. Perhaps part of his delaying tactics is because he can’t find a lawyer willing to represent him, his former lawyers are suing him for about $1.4 million in unpaid legal fees, oh, and he also owes the IRS almost $550,000 in unpaid federal taxes. Yeah I guess that’s enough to make even the strongest sphincter-controller let fly a cacophonous trouser-trump surely!
• What the fuck is going on with George Santos? He got into a shouting match with a man in the halls of Congress, who was criticizing Israel’s military. I guess that’s not so weird, given how very Jewish George has claimed to be on occasion, but for some reason he was holding a two-month old baby at the time and nobody seems to be able to figure out why. Santos had just left Representative Tim Burchett’s office with the baby, and when Hill reporter Emily Brooks asked him if the baby was his he said “Not yet” and walked off. Maybe he’s distracted by the fact that he’s just been charged with 10 additional crimes in a superseding indictment, bringing his total to 23 – come on George, that’s barely a quarter of Trump’s number – how do you expect to get any respect among serious politicians until you commit a few more federal crimes. The new ones include conspiracy, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and credit card fraud, including charging almost $16,000 on a donor’s credit card without the donor’s knowledge. Last week, his former campaign treasurer Nancy Marks pleaded guilty to many of these same charges, and her attorney has said she will testify against Santos if subpoenaed. A small group of first-term New York Republicans in Congress have said they will introduce a resolution to expel Santos from the House, but given that would need a two-thirds majority I don’t see them getting enough Republican votes, because being a thieving lying grifter isn’t a bug in the GOP House, it’s a feature.
• If you’re looking for the example of why AI-created music and autotuned manipulations will ultimately take over the world, because we’ll all be too busy  tearing our own superior temporal gyruses out to prevent our brains from processing sound rather than worrying about say climate change, hyper-processed food or the extinction of the bees, then look/listen no further than Lara Trump’s – Eric’s Ivanka-Melania-all-of-’em lookalike missus – new single; a cover of Tom Petty’s I Won’t Back Down. In at number 6 with a bullet two weeks ago, according to Eric’s tweet, it’s now fallen out of the charts and Tom Petty can stop spinning in his grave! Despite Petty’s family telling the Trump’s not to use the song on the campaign trail in 2020, Maga outlets downloaded it en masse. I suspect before listening to it, judging by the one-star reviews outnumbering the 5-star. And no amount of good-ol’ boy lonestar bravado can make what is essentially very poor shrieky, twangy, very limited range, autotuned karaoke even as popular as Trump and the Massed Choir of the Jan 6thers “hit”! Lara herself thankfully admitted on Australian Sky News “I am not seeking this as a career, I am not a professional singer, I’m sure I’ll get a lot of critique from all the haters out there of my voice and my singing ability.” Yep dang right! Just think Lara, that with such self-awareness at 41, you could be lucky in following so many of your musical heroes; Elvis, Lennon, Marvin Gaye, Whitney, Billie Holiday, Kirsty MacColl and be dead very soon!
• It turns out sweaty mustachioed foghorn Mike Lindell had his lawyers working on a no-win, no-fee basis. That is, they had no chance of winning, and no chance of getting paid. Consequently, after three months of working for free, they have filed to withdraw as counsel in his defamation lawsuit against Dominion and Smartmatic. Lindell has said he will definitely not settle the case, but has no idea who will represent him going forward. I would say he should talk to Trump to get a recommendation, because if there’s anyone who knows lawyers who are prepared to argue bullshit with no guarantee of payment, it’s Trump. But all the lawyers Trump knows are either very busy on one or more of his four cases pending trial right now, or are facing charges themselves. Lindell claims his money problems have been exacerbated by American Express slashing his credit from $1 million down to $100,000 overnight, which he claims is due to his political views. AmEx say they don’t make customer decisions based on personal views or political affiliations, and conspicuously do not add that perhaps the reason they’re reluctant to give Mike a million dollar credit line is because he has no hope of ever paying it back. He’s already auctioned off all his stuff, he’s struggling to pay the workers who spend their days filling his pillows with lumps, and now he’s planning on holding a telethon to raise money to pay his legal fees.I’m not gonna lie, I kind of want to watch that, but I don’t think it will get him out of his current situation. Such a shame.
• It’s been conference time in the UK where Rishi Sunak and his gang and the other 2 or three gangs that make up the disunited party of the Tories/UKIP/GBNews presenters went to Manchester by train in order to announce among other things the scrapping of the high-speed rail link to Manchester. Never ones to shy away from opening their mouths, inserting their feet and blaming others for kicking them in the face: the housing Minister said not all renters smoke weed and are bad people in gangs (leaving unsaid perhaps “no, some of them are white!”, the deputy Tory chairman in response to HS2 being scrapped quipped “well who wants to go to Bradford anyway”, Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor of the exchequer, said halving inflation is the same as a 5p tax cut which means he either has no idea how the economy works or is lying through his teeth – lower inflation means prices are still rising – just at a slower rate, Suella Braverman evoked the ghoul of Enoch Powell saying multiculturalism has failed before going on to warn that a hurricane of migrants is coming and that the Human Rights Act should be renamed the Criminal Rights Act. And of course the party of such free thinking literally threw someone out of the building – a Tory voter – for quietly muttering dissent at Braverman’s practically stiff-arm salute of a speech. Meanwhile over at the Labour Party Conference someone protesting about… what I’m not sure, they were still explaining it as they were dragged from the podium and across the hall – made Starmer’s speech a bit more showbiz by flinging glitter all over him before he began! Quipping (if that’s the right word – no, no it isn’t) “If he thinks that’ll stop me, then he doesn’t know me”, Starmer drew a roar of applause as he had to take off his jacket and roll up his sleeves to lose the superficial sparkle and appear more down to earth and getting on with the work. The metaphors flow so effortlessly that I’m beginning to think that the whole thing might’ve been staged. Well, let’s hope they continue to not be dazzled by the glitz of the recent win over the SNP in Scotland and still realize there’s a lot of sensible hearts and minds winning-over work to be done before next year’s election.

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:

Sour Grapes – FT#134 Transcript

Jim: Hello, and welcome to Fallacious Trump, the podcast where we use the insane ramblings of Old Yeller 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 Sour Grapes.

Jim: So sour grapes is one which, for the first time, I’m not fully convinced is necessarily a logical fallacy.

Mark: Oh, okay.

Jim: It is a way of rationalizing stuff. It’s basically a thing that people use called post hoc rationalization, where they kind of make something they did or felt after the fact feel like it made sense. Right. In a way. The reason I’m, not sure it fits into our list of logical fallacies, but certainly will – it does appear on other lists, and other people claim it is a fallacy, is because it isn’t used quite so often to argue something or to provide evidence of an argument you’re making, so much as it is to convince yourself of something.

Mark: Okay. Doesn’t it also convince others that you’re right?

Jim: Or at least to convince them that you don’t care if you’re wrong or.

Mark: To dismiss something that’s leveled against you?

Jim: Yeah, well, we’ll see in some of the examples, basically, where post hoc rationalization comes in is to get rid of cognitive dissonance, which happens when you have two opposing feelings or thoughts that you’re trying to deal with, and that makes your brain uncomfortable. You want to, resolve that. And one of the ways to resolve it is to rationalize a decision you made and explain it away. There’s quite a lot of psychological studies. One study by Ragunathan and Huang, they looked into post hoc rationalizations and how they make people feel better. and one of the things that is quite a common one is that people will buy stuff based on emotion. They’ll buy things because they think, I want that.

Mark: Okay.

Jim: But they’ll justify it, claiming that they needed it or have some reason for having bought it.

Mark: Ah, yeah.

Jim: That wasn’t the reason they bought it. But it makes them feel better about it.

Mark: Yes. Because then because in the moment of buying it, you’re already getting buyers remorse. It’s a bit like that bit when you’re going shopping and you’ve only got a certain amount of cash in your pocket. But then if the thing that you want is above that, then it gets into the realm of not money. You just pay for it on a card.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: And you kind of justify that away, and you go, Well, I’ve still got all this cash. I’ve not spent the cash.

Jim: So one thing that Ragunathan and Huang did when they were looking into this was they presented people with two pictures, two photos of chickens, and asked them to choose which one they would want to eat. And one of the chickens was a nice, kind of plump, healthy looking chicken. And the other one was quite kind of thin and maybe a bit sick looking.

Mark: Right.

Jim: But for half of the groups, they’d said that the plump one was more healthy but less tasty, it wouldn’t taste as good, and the thinner one was kind of genetically engineered to taste great, but wasn’t as healthy as the other chicken. Both groups pretty much overwhelmingly chose the plump, healthy looking chicken, the nice looking chicken. But they justified it differently based on what they were told. So if they were told that was the healthier one, that didn’t taste as good, they claimed that their decision was based on the fact that they valued the health of the chicken over the taste of the chicken that was more important to them. But the other group who were told that the genetically engineered one was actually healthier but didn’t taste as good, they chose the plump one because they said, well, taste is the most important thing, right? So that’s why I’m choosing this one. So they both made the same choice, having been given different information and justified it to themselves in different ways, when actually they just chose it because it looked nicer. Yeah, that’s the reason.

Mark: I’m picturing it in my head as a kind of Foghorn Leghorn scrawny chicken versus healthy one. You’d want to eat a healthy one because it looks nicer, because you get that whole, Tom and Jerry thing where it fades through to roasted chicken.

Jim: This is why I think we can justify, even if it’s a post host rationalization, this appearing in our podcast is because it is faulty reasoning. This is an example of people using faulty reasoning because, the reasons that you come up with by using this method are not logical, right?

Mark: Yes.

Jim: They are not commonly used, or very frequently used, at least to back up arguments to other people. They’re more frequently used to justify your own bad decision making, or perhaps just even hasty or emotional decision making, which isn’t necessarily wrong, but it isn’t probably based on the logic you’re later claiming it is. And the sour grapes name comes from the Aesop’s fable of the fox and the grapes, where the fox is trying to get some nice, plump, juicy grapes from a grape vine, but, it’s out of reach. He can’t get them, tries and tries, gives up. And rather than going, oh, well, I can’t get the nice, plump, juicy grapes.

Mark: Rather than get some help from the elephant.

Jim: Yeah, he decides that, they were probably sour anyway. It’s not even worth it. I’m glad I didn’t get them in the end. It’s better that I didn’t get them because they were probably horrible.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So our first example from Trump actually comes from Selma Hayek, who said in an interview with – and the reason I don’t have a clip is because the interview was in Spanish, so I could have played it. Some of our listeners might have understood it, but it would have been like a minute and a half of a lot of our listeners, not knowing what the hell’s going on,

Mark: could have Google translated that and then faded it in.

Jim: I did an AI translation, but it didn’t sound anything like Salma Hayek. It sounded weird because she has a very specific voice.

Mark: Yes, exactly. Yeah.

Jim: Anyway, she said to a Spanish radio show, El Show del Mandrill, about Trump asking her out, he befriended her boyfriend at the time to try and get her phone number, and then he asked her out. And she told him that she wouldn’t even go out with him if she wasn’t with someone else. If she didn’t have a boyfriend, she still wouldn’t.

Mark: Yeah. This is a horrible, small handed, fake haired, orange tanned idiot, et cetera. Put in your insults now and then.

Jim: She says, someone told the National Enquirer, I’m not going to say who, because you know that whatever he wants to come out comes out. In the National Enquirer, it said that he wouldn’t go out with me because I was too short.

Mark: Right.

Jim: So her claim, at least, is that Trump told the National Enquirer that he didn’t want to go out with Salma Hayek because she’s too short for him. It’s essentially that I can’t have her. I didn’t want her anyway. She’s short. That notoriously disgustingly short Salma Hayek that nobody would want to go out with. Why would anyone?

Mark: No, because that height, it’s the same thing. She’s like, yeah, five foot two and a half, whatever.

Jim: So our second example from Trump comes from a tweet from 2014. He had previously tried to buy the Buffalo Bills, the NFL team, but didn’t get his bit accepted. It went to someone else, and he tweeted in October of 2014, the NFL games are so boring now that, actually, I’m glad I didn’t get the Bills. Boring games, too many flags, too soft.

Mark: Brilliant.

Jim: And has continued to berate the NFL pretty much ever since. Because he didn’t win the bid, he didn’t get a team. But he’s glad he’s glad he didn’t because it’s yeah.

Mark: Yeah. Ah. Because the same way that Salma Hayek wouldn’t even entertain the notion that the NFL are going, yeah, we really don’t want Trump involved in that. We’re not going to no, let’s sell it to somebody else. So Trump’s going, oh, yeah, just as well. Bloody awful. And that’s the thing about the sour grapes thing is, well, why were you in it in the first place if the thing is so shit now, and it’s so transparent.

Jim: It is the logical equivalent of essentially being sent to your room and going, oh, I wanted to go to my room anyway. I was going to go there now where I keep my toys.

Mark: That’s what I wanted to do. Yeah. Didn’t want to watch that. Didn’t want to play that just stupid. Okay. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. Well, I’m glad that I did you that service of not allowing you to go out with someone.

Jim: You’re welcome.

Mark: Yeah. Which is brilliant, because that’s the, perfectly annoying parental thing to do, isn’t glad I did you the favor. Thanks. Kudos to you. Could twist the knife. Yes.

Jim: So our, third, example is from Trump world in as much as kind of MAGA verse and, right wing media, because Taylor Swift has recently started going out with NFL tight end Travis Kelce. And she has previously spoken out against Trump and specifically against Marcia Blackburn. And also in a single Instagram story that she did that said, basically, use your powerful voice. Get out and vote. Recruited 30,000 new voters of kind of her demographic, young, probably Democrats, to register to vote. Didn’t tell them to vote Democrat. Just said, it’s important that you use your voice, essentially. And everyone went, okay, Taylor Swift, we’ll do that. And so, as the Republicans hate people voting, that’s dangerous.

Mark: Yeah. Full stop. Yeah.

Jim: Travis Kelce, meanwhile, has spoken out in favor of vaccines. In fact, he did an ad for Pfizer to promote getting your flu and your COVID shot together. He’s done an ad for Bud Light. He’s been outspoken, just generally, kind of politically in favor of democracy. He, I think, took a knee during the national anthem once. So these two rich, famous, beautiful, powerful people getting together is a disaster for Republicans. They have become determined to claim that these two people are bad, evil, and also shit and ugly. So, right wing YouTuber Clay Travis said this.

Clay Travis: You are wasting your time with Travis Kelce. He is a dime a dozen. He’s not that good looking. His career is almost over. You can do better even if you want to date a tight end in the NFL. I don’t know how many of them are single. A lot of them are better looking than Travis Kelce, and they’re younger. They’re going to be in the league for longer. In three years, Travis Kelce is going to be done in the NFL. What’s he going to be doing? WWE Wrestling? Taylor Swift. Want to date a WWE wrestler?

Jim: Now, Travis Kelce is older than most tight ends. In fact, he’s 34. He’s just turned 34 this week, which is pretty old for a tight end.

Mark: Yeah. So he’s still got all his hair and his own teeth crikey.

Jim: He’s not only that, but he is, like, one of the best not just one of the best Tight Ends of all time, but one of the best currently playing even at 34 compared to the other. They’re like 24 year olds he’s mostly playing against.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: This season, he’s had 36 receptions and 346 yards. We’re, like, six weeks into the season. which is ridiculous. That’s the most that’s the most yardage and, receptions of any tight end in the league. he’s got three receiving touchdowns, again, equal to the most in the league at the moment. during their season, he’s had seven consecutive seasons with 1000 plus yards receiving. He’s had the most yards in a single season of any tight end in history, during a season when he only played 15 games.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: He’s the fifth tight end in history to have more than 10,000 yards in his career. Basically, he is one of the top tight ends that there is right now, despite the fact he’s ten years older than most of the people who are competing at that level.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So to suggest that he’s at the end of his career, he’s rubbish, he’s not even that good or that good looking is insane. And it is clearly just bitter, sour grapes.

Mark: Yeah. And of course, Taylor Swift is going to be listening to, a bitter incel.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: As to some advice about her relationships. Well, yeah.

Jim: I mean, apart from anything else, even if it was true that he was at the end of his career and wasn’t going to be making any more money out of the NFL, so fucking what? She’s Taylor Swift. Travis Kelce, not only one of the highest paid football players in the NFL, he’s on a $57,000,000 4 year contract at the moment. Her Eras Tour has brought in about his annual salary every single night that the Tour has been running.

Mark: What?

Jim: So I don’t think she’s worried about whether he’s rich or not. I think she’s fine.

Mark: But that’s a very kind of not a Democrat equality kind of viewpoint, saying, well, you’re tying your star to.

Jim: This fade this has been, who’s only worth $30 million.

Mark: Yeah. There you go. You get an insight into how much money the Republicans think you need to be able to survive to keep you away from the poor and the workers. she’s not going to have any problems. She just need to put out another album, do some more touring.

Jim: But that guy, Clay Travis was kind of he wasn’t rude or disrespectful to Taylor Swift as such. I mean, he was a bit but kind of Republican levels of rude and disrespectful. Not actively attacking.

Mark: Her.

Jim: He was saying, like, you’re too good for this loser who’s one of the best in the business. So he was kind of saying, like, Taylor Swift, you shouldn’t be with this guy, whereas other people have gone in the other direction. Sean Davis wrote an article for the federalist. The title of it was Taylor Swift Is Dumb and Her Music Sucks. And then a right wing guy called Roger Kimball, replied to that tweet, saying also she is homely. So for some reason they have this need to portray the people who are against them as not just politically opposed to them and wrong, but bad at what they do, and ugly, despite ridiculous amounts of evidence of the country.

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

Mark: I thought immediately when talking about sour grapes, it’s about when people lose elections. So I was thinking, right, ah, is there examples of where Sunak lost out to Liz Truss, where Corbyn lost to Boris Johnson, where Farage has lost to anything? And, yeah, sure enough we’ll come to that. But it’s kind of difficult to find that because doing such similar things to, yeah, she’s dumb and her music sucks and also she’s ugly in a political media means, well, certainly Britain, that you’re going to come in for some stick and basically your career is over. So I did look at those kind of pivot points where the losers of an election will often say, oh yeah, well, it wasn’t worth winning. And you think, well, why were you campaigning so vehemently for this thing? So I found several examples and the most brilliant one featuring a politician we’ve never heard of. And we’ll find out why in the August 2019 elections for the post of Police and Crime Commissioner for Northumbria told you it was obscure. The Lib Dems put up a candidate, Jonathan Wallace, who at the time was the Lib Dems parliamentary candidate for the Bladen constituency. But in the election for the Police and Crimes Commissioner for Northumbria, he was eliminated in the first round. So the first round he scored 28,000, conservatives got 33,267, then the Independent got 33,704, and the out and out winner, Kim McGinnis from the Labor Party got 58,355. The highest scorers of the first round go through the second round. So he got eliminated, Jonathan Wallace got eliminated. And on a rant, whilst driving YouTube message, he said this

Jonathan Wallace: I think, sadly for the system, the governance system, and I think this form of governance that we’ve got is rubbish. But the other three candidates were lightweight at best. Now, the Labour candidate was little more than, Barbie doll reading from a script.

Mark: There you ah, go. So he didn’t go forward. He dismisses the entire system that allows this kind of the first two people who get the highest score go through the second round because you can only have one representative, you can’t have all four. So what’s the best way of doing it? Well, let’s see who scores the highest. And if it’s one that scores higher than everybody else by a big margin, we’ll just select them. If there are two, we’ll just eliminate the two lowest. Surely it seems like a good system, but no, the governance system is rubbish. I don’t know why I even bothered standing because the system itself, absolute crap. Also, the candidates were lightweight at best and didn’t count himself in that. But they weren’t that lightweight that they didn’t beat him.

Jim: Yeah, absolutely.

Mark: All three of them, even the one that got eliminated with him, beat him by 5000 votes. And then he describes the, winner as a Barbie reading a script. Kim McGuinness got reelected in the post in 2021. Jonathan Wallace didn’t stand for that post in 2021. Also, he came third in the Bladen constituency in 2017 general election. And weirdly, didn’t present the Lib Dems in the December 2019 election. Possibly something to do with those kind of misogynist, kind of what the fuck all of that. Yeah, so now he’s a local councilor. That’s it. That’s his career over. Speaking of elections, we’re going back in time, further back, to 2015, and pretty much every newspaper predicted that in the Olden West and reiton by election in December 2015, labor would struggle to hold the seat, might hold it by a few hundred votes. And this was the first election after Jeremy Corbyn became the labor leader. So they’re still in opposition, but he’s taken over leadership. Everyone’s a bit doubtful about it. This is the first by election and Nigel Farage’s, Ukip candidate, loses to Corbyn’s Labor Party in this by election. And the labor candidate won, with 17,000 votes, ukip got 6000 and the Conservatives got 2000. The morning after the election, Farage says.

Nigel Farage: This massive increase in the number of postal votes yesterday. So somebody was out there harvesting the postal votes. But there’s a bigger question. Why do we have postal voting on this scale at all? We used to have it for people who were elderly, infirm or who worked overseas. Now we have whole blocks of communities signed up to postal votes. And in many ways you could say these byelection results are over before the contest has even begun.

Jon Kay: Sour grapes?

Nigel Farage: No.

Jon Kay: Bad loser?

Nigel Farage: No. look, I’ve said this at every single by election for the last three or four years.

Jon Kay: Yeah, but you’ve said it every time you’ve used this. They said they found no evidence at all.

Nigel Farage: I didn’t mention it in South Thanet at all. I’m talking particularly about by elections. And don’t forget, we’ve had Tower Hamlets evidence of fraud within the postal voting system. So I’m raising that. I think British democracy should be clean. and I think with this system it’s not.

Owen Smith: I don’t remember him moaning about postal votes when they won the by election. I think the truth is, Labour won a stonking great victory in Oldham. Why on earth, should anybody suggest until they’ve provided some evidence, or indeed said that they’re going to report this to the police? Anybody draw any connection between Jim’s brilliant win in Oldham and what happened in Tower Hamlets? I think it’s complete sour grapes from Nigel Farage. He just needs to learn to lose a little better.

Mark: So that second voice was Owen Smith who was the candidate for leadership against Corbyn in 2015. So part of Farage’s argument is that he calls the whole system bent because they didn’t win. He says bent, Postal said but it’s with the same deal with King Trump. Oh yeah, Postal voting, all that non in person voting it’s all open to corruption and fraud. The thing is that the Postal vote was about 7000 people. Labor’s majority was 11,000 in the election. And part of Farage’s argument is that he’s seen some 30 something by elections and this is a bad one. And also guilt by association that the election fraud in Tower Hamlets which was upheld in 2014 and was a labor candidate. But Owen Smith says, well he’s got nothing to do with that and why is he trying to tie the two together and he doesn’t complain when he wins. So 2 hours after this morning interview Farage’s Ukip, the UK independence Party backtracked slightly and said it would consider the evidence before lodging an official complaint and it didn’t lodge one.

Nigel Farage: I hope and pray that my sense of this tonight is wrong. And my sense of this is – No, I’m not conceding but my sense of this is that the government’s registration scheme getting 2 million voters on the 48 hours extension may be what tips the balance.

Mark: So that was him talking a year later on the eve of the referendum vote to leave the EU. And I would submit that he’s having a pre sour grapes moment. So this is, the evening before the result comes out and it’s looking like Remain will win so we’ll all stay in the EU and leave won’t win. So instead of saying I’m not conceding but it looks like we’re going to lose he’s saying I’m not conceding but it looks like the system is completely biased against us. He’s setting up the possibility of the sour grapes. He’s saying this system we’re all involved in is just ultimately corrupt because there were 2 million registered voters extra. He’s assuming they all voted Remain they didn’t. And that they extended the 48 hours voting bit for registration would mean that more remainders would be able to it’s the usual Republican Democrat thing. If we give people the chance to vote they will all vote Democrat. Also he added that if there was a 52% to 48% in favor of Remain he would never shut up about it. And then because the remainders who lost by the same percentage, the same ratio don’t shut up about it. He says you should shut up about this. He turned up at a bloody Tory party conference this year with his same smug frog like face thinking I the.

Jim: Only face he’s got, to be fair.

Mark: yeah, that’s because nobody in their right mind would kiss him and turn him into a prince. He’s still saying I’ve changed the face of politics. Yeah, you’ve turned it to a fucking frog face. His acceptance is he’s always going to be the bridesmaid and never the bride, and he always blames the system. But I think part of his Moses operandi, the thing that keeps him going, that gets him out of bed in the morning, is that somebody somewhere is corrupting the system. He is the corrupt part of the system, and yet he accuses everybody else of corrupting that. He’s kind of no wonder he turned up with Trump and visited his golden toilet in Trump Tower. So I’m going to squeeze in a cheeky example for and bring it up to date. Last week, Richard Walker, who’s the executive chairman of Iceland in the frozen goods store and major Tory Party donor, gave 9000 this year, and his father, Malcolm Walker, gave 165,000 left the Tory Party having at, one time announced that he would stand for them at the next election. Saying this,

Richard Walker: it’s become clear to me over recent months that, the Conservative Party are drifting out of touch with the needs of business, of the environment, and also the everyday people that my business touches and serves.

Laura Kuenssberg: Now that’s Richard Walker, I know some of your colleagues will say he’s grumpy because he wants to be a Conservative MP and hasn’t found a seat to run in.

Mark: So that voice is, Laura Kuenssberg there. So this is her program last Sunday. She’s in there spotting that and they have done it, that Tory insiders are using what is the sour grapes argument against Richard Walker in order to dismiss his points, which are that the Tory party is out of touch. They going against the environmental standards. They don’t give a shit about their workers and all of the things that he actually is lauded for doing. And everybody’s thinking, and yet you want to stand for the Tory Party. So finally, he’s kind of seen the light and he’s leveling these accusations at Rishi Sunak, who scoffs in a very rehearsed way, at, ah, the very thought that these are, ah, things that they need to address and that they are doing wrong. He’s just a bit grumpy because we haven’t yet found him a seat to stand in. So therefore, the sour grapes argument can be used by one’s opponents to dismiss all of the valid points that you’re making against you. I would submit

MARK’S FALLACY IN THE WILD STING

Mark: That’s James Marriott there with the track called Grapes.

Jim: So, in the fallacy in the wild, we like to talk about the fallacy of the week from a non political perspective. And this week our, clips have a purely coincidental kind of musical theme because our first one is from I Love Lucy. And this is an episode where she and Ethel and some friends have formed a band, formed an orchestra. But she has been chucked out because she’s bad at playing her, saxophone. And as it turns out, the rest of the band is also very, very bad.

Ethel: Wait a minute, wait a minute, twelfth Street Rag never sounded like that before.

Lucy: Oh, is that what it was?

Ethel and others: Oh, hi Lucy.

Lucy: Well, if it isn’t Ethel Mertz and her ‘makes you want to stick your fingers in your ears music’.

Ethel:Come on now, no use being sore just cause we won’t let you play with the orchestra.

Jim: So, yeah, she is basically saying, well, this is a rubbish band, and kind of justifying the fact that she’s glad she’s not in it’s. Rubbish. Terrible. But I mean, she’s got a point.

Mark: But they’re also saying you’re just saying that you don’t like it because you can’t be in it. Yes. So there’s two versions of the Sour Grapes application.

Jim: Yeah, and she goes on to rope Ricky into trying to make them better, which he can’t, because they’re terrible. Our, second example is from Father Ted, and this is also when Father Ted and Father Dougal have kind of formed a band because this is the Song for Europe episode with My Lovely Horse, in which they are competing to become Ireland’s entry in what is essentially the Eurovision Song Contest. And, they are also very bad. And one of the other contestants complains that he should have won.

Father Dick Byrne: What’s going on? I mean, our song was clearly miles better than theirs.

Charles Hedges: Well, we thought

Father Dick Byrne: for God’s sake, it was the same no over and over again.

Charles Hedges: Yes, but we admired it.

Fred Rickwood: (unintelligible gibberish)

Charles Hedges: Exactly. Fred put it better than I ever could.

Father Ted Crilly: Yeah, so there!

Father Dick Byrne: Anyone would think you wanted Ireland to lose the next EuroSong contest.

Charles Hedges: Nonsense. Why would we want to do that?

Father Dick Byrne: well, I don’t know. Maybe because it was costing you too much to stage.

Jim: So Father Dick Byrne there, who was the one who had put on

Mark: Father Martin Byrne? Is he related to Father Martin Byrne?

Jim: Father Dick Byrne. This is Father Dick Byrne. He put on a much better, performance than, Dougal and Ted’s and actually hit on the exact reason that they chose. Ted and Dougal instead, because it was far too expensive to host the Song for Europe competition and they desperately wanted to lose. But the reasoning that got him there was essentially know, I should have won. I feel like I did a better job than them. I should have won. There must be something else going on behind the scenes. This is all rigged. There’s other reasons why I didn’t win.

Mark: And there’s that beautifully measured laugh where they come. How can you be so silly? And then there’s like the beat where in which you can insert, well, that’s exactly why. And then they try and laugh it. Yeah. Brilliant.

Jim: And our third example is from an actual band, Flight of the Conchords. this is, a band meeting with Murray.

Murray: So good news. Anyway. We’ve got a winner for the fan competition.

Bret: Mel.

Murray: Yeah. How’d you know that?

Bret: Because there was probably only one entry.

Murray: No, there was hundreds, actually.

Bret: Really?

Murray: Yep. They were all from Mel. And one from Jermaine. But he was disqualified.

Jermaine: Disqualified? Why was I disqualified?

Murray: Because you can’t be a fan of the band.

Jermaine: Why?

Murray: It’s not a good look.

Jermaine: But I’m a fan.

Murray: Yeah, but people look at the fan list and they say, oh, hang on, that guy’s in the band, isn’t he? he likes himself. It’s not a good look. You don’t see Bret on the fan list.

Bret: Yeah, well, that’s because I’m not a fan of the band. I’m more fan of popular bands like the BeeGees, Pearl Jam.

Murray: All right, this is what we’re trying to do is become popular. That’s why I’ve got this competition, you know,

Bret: all right, what did Mel win?

Murray: First prize. The chance to cook for you two tomorrow night.

Jermaine: That’s a terrible prize. I’m glad I didn’t win that.

Mark: It reminds me that the kind of circular reasoning reminds me of the ‘Hello, Eccles. Have you got the time?’ ‘Yeah, I got it on a piece of paper’. I only like popular bands, but that’s why we’re running in a competition. you didn’t enter. Yeah, Jermaine entered, but he’s disqualified. Well, I like the band.

Jim: So he entered the competition presumably hoping to win, didn’t win, but feels now pleased that he didn’t win. Because the prize is rubbish.

Mark: Because the prize is you get the cook. Yeah, exactly.

Jim: So, I mean, arguably he’s not justifying feeling happy that he didn’t win. He’s genuinely thinking that is a rubbish prize. That could be said. But part of it may be that now that equally makes him feel better, not, winning the thing he entered, or being disqualified even. Not just not winning. Fairness of being disqualified for not being able to enter his own competition.

Mark: It might also be tempered by the fact that Mel is completely crazy and I wouldn’t trust her, cooking skills as a result of that.

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: Yes. It’s time for fake news. The game where I read out three Trump quotes, two of which are real and one are made up, and Mark has to figure out which one is fake news.

Mark: You see, we week after week, I struggle with this, and for what? To get the accolade of a corrupt and bias scoring system bestowed on me, but it’s just not worth it. It’s not worth it’s. Not worth it.

Jim: Well, I’m glad you feel that, because you’ve won five in a row now.

Mark: Yeah. it’s all very well.

Jim: I agree. I think it’s clearly a faulty system that shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Mark: Exactly. All those postal votes being stuffed in at the last minute.

Jim: Ah.

Mark: The whole thing is corrupt. Corrupt beyond belief. Yeah. I wouldn’t want to win it even if I did. Thankfully, I am. So I’m fine. I’m fine with it. Yeah.

Jim: there’s no theme this week, unusually. These are just all kind of he’s been talking a lot over the last week or so, basically ever since he left the courtroom in New York, where he was kind of just sitting sulking mostly, for the first couple of days, and then decided he had enough. He’s been going around just spouting off nonsense at people, anyone who listens. Stuff on Truth Social, stuff at rallies, campaign stops. He’s been to several places in Iowa, so these are just some things from places he’s talked. The first one was from Truth Social. He said: Romney, who today couldn’t get elected dog catcher in the great state of Utah, should have beaten an absolutely failed first term. Obama should have beaten him very easily. If he and Rhino Paul fought as hard against Obama as they do against President Donald J. Trump, they would never have lost. They would have beaten Obama. But remember, Republicans eat their young. They really do. They eat their young. Terrible statement, but it’s true. And that’s the problem with so many in our party. They just don’t have the loyalty and strength to stick together. They go after people who are on their side rather than the radical left Democrats that are destroying our country.

Mark: Wow. There’s a lot of anger in there. Wow. If they worked hard against Obama, but then to go into republicans eat their young. What? They really do. No, they no, no, they don’t. And also, you’re a Republican. Why would everybody’s against me?

Jim: Isn’t it?

Mark: Jesus Christ. That’s the trouble with that. No, you’re the trouble with the party.

Jim: statement number two. This was a campaign stop in New Hampshire. He said: Brilliant Rudy. Rudy Giuliani. He did amazing, really amazing things for this country, which nobody ever talks about. And he’s being treated like a criminal. And make no mistake, it’s because he wouldn’t let himself be used to attack me. They wanted to attack me. Of course they did. They never stopped, and I don’t think they ever will stop because I refuse to back down. It’s really a problem because I see what needs to be done, and it’s stuff that nobody else can do. So what am I supposed to do? I’m the only one that can fix it. And Rudy knows that, so he’s happy. He told me he’s happy that they’re coming after him. He’s proud.

Mark: Wow. That’s great. Isn’t it? He did amazing things, which nobody ever talks about. He’s been treated like a criminal because he is. Okay, and statement number three, this was.

Jim: A campaign stop in Iowa, I think. He was talking about electric boats. He said: I said, So let me ask you. Let’s say your boat goes down and I’m sitting on top of this big, powerful battery and the boat’s going down. Do I get electrocuted? And he said, you know what? honestly, nobody’s ever asked me that question. But if I’m sitting down and that boat’s going down and I’m on top of a battery and the water starts flooding in, I’m getting concerned. But then I look ten yards to my left, and there’s a shark over there. So I have a choice of electrocution or shark. You know what? I’m going to take electrocution. I will take electrocution every single time.

Mark: I think that’s kind of foreshadowing of the chair, isn’t it? Wow. Actually, I’ve never actually thought about that. Mainly because don’t you have a battery on a motor launch? You press a button and it runs the starter To start the engine. So that needs a battery to do that. And you’re on a boat, and there’s a battery to run all up to run the sound system and the lights and the fridge. You’re always going to have a battery on a boat. So why would nobody ever ask you that question? Okay, there’s some sort of normally, there’s a common thread through them all, which leads me somehow to think, okay.

Jim: Well, that one’s common thread is insanity.

Mark: okay, talking about himself in the third person. If they hard against Obama, as they do against President Donald J. Trump, feels a very Trumpian thing. But electrocution and sharks are just because it will be lovely to just continue to play. I’m going to take electrocution every time when he’s sitting in the chair and we just on over the footage, we just play that, and you go, yeah, you could see it coming. See, I was thinking that, the second one being happy to be attacked was not real. But then you get to the bit where he says he’s told me he’s happy that they’re coming after him, he’s proud. Suddenly feels real. Okay. They wanted to attack me. Of course they did. They never stopped drinking. The Ever will stop because I refuse to back down. That might be a tell. Okay. All right, we’ll go for that. I think number two is the one that you made up. Okay.

Jim: And which of the other two is more convincing to you?

Mark: Weirdly. Number three, the boats and the electrocution. Yeah.

Jim: You think he just randomly imagined a shark while he was busy imagining himself sinking in an electric boat?

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And number three is real.

Mark: Yeah.

Donald Trump: I said, So let me ask you. Let’s say your boat goes down and I’m sitting on top of this big, powerful battery and the boat’s going down. Do I get electrocuted? And he said, you know what? honestly, nobody’s ever asked me that question. But if I’m sitting down and that boat’s going down and I’m on top of a battery and the water starts flooding in, I’m getting concerned. But then I look ten yards to my left, and there’s a shark over there. So I have a choice of electrocution or shark. You know what? I’m going to take electrocution. I will take electrocution every single time.

Jim: What point does he think he’s making?

Mark: And then I look ten yards to my left and there’s like, electrocution.

Jim: He’s trying to be anti electric, and yet he’s basically saying, actually, no, it’s better. It’s better because at least I’ll be electrocuted before the sharks get me.

Mark: What a brilliant invention. We should all go electric. That’s a brilliant idea.

Jim: Of course, nobody he’s asked the boat guy that question. It’s a fucking stupid question. Of course they’ve thought about the fact that there’s electricity.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: First of all, it’s really hard to get electrocuted by a battery. It’s a different kind of current. And the current, basically, it’s current that is most dangerous. Needs to be with a certain amount of voltage. But the reason that if you get attached to the mains in some way that’s a problem for you is because of a large amount of current is going through your body to the ground. If you touch both ends of a battery, you don’t feel anything. There’s very little current. The voltage is quite low.

Mark: because we’ve all stuck our tongue On a nine volt battery.

Jim: You get a little buz, but you don’t get electrocuted. And the kinds of batteries that you get on boats tend to be quite low voltage, quite low current. you’re not going to get a big deal from them if they are ones that power big electric boats that require more power, more voltage. For some reason, generally, the size of them is for the storage rather than for the extra voltage. The voltage is constant. They need to be bigger because they store the energy chemically. But they are just like the batteries for cars, because cars unbelievably electric cars sometimes go through puddles or, are in the rain. So they’ve thought about this shit. They are completely enclosed. And, the water doesn’t get into the battery. The wires that come out of the battery are insulated and separated from any place where water might get in and even more in a boat.

Mark: Yeah, well, it’s a bit like having electric light in the bathroom.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: People think about this stuff. They don’t just go, okay, we’ll have naked terminals.

Jim: Trump thinks he’s the first person to have considered this thought about it.

Mark: He thinks that everything is like putting an electric fire into a bath. I’m surprised he didn’t put a sir in there. And he said, you know, sir, honestly, nobody’s ever asked me that question since 1876. Because we sorted that out. Nobody’s thought to ask me that because they’re not stupid like you are, you big ginger fool.

Jim: So you also think number one’s real?

Mark: I also think number one is real, though I’m beginning to have my doubt.

Jim: And number one, is real.

Donald Trump: Romney, who today couldn’t get elected dog catcher in the great state of Utah, should have beaten an absolutely failed first term. Obama should have beaten him very easily. If he and Rhino Paul fought as hard against Obama as they do against President Donald J. Trump, they would never have lost. They would have beaten Obama. But remember, Republicans eat their young. They really do. They eat their young. Terrible statement, but it’s true. And that’s the problem with so many in our party. They just don’t have the loyalty and strength to stick together. They go after people who are on their side rather than the radical left Democrats that are destroying our country.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: It’s really bad when people go after people who are on the same side as them politically, isn’t it?

Mark: Yeah. They just don’t have the loyalty.

Jim: Like that loser Romney and Rino Paul Ryan, because of just eating no talent. Bill Barr and other people who he talked about in this rant.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: He was exclusively calling Republicans losers and pointless because they attack Republicans because they.

Mark: Go after people on their own side. Yeah.

Jim: There’s no loyalty.

Mark: No loyalty.

Jim: He’s disgusted by.

Mark: Wow. Wow.

Jim: So we’ve had a few guesses on Patreon and Facebook. On Facebook we’ve got one of each. Basically, we’ve got, mike says two is fake. Never heard him be complimentary to anyone. Scott says, I think number one is fake. I doubt he knows anything about dog catchers. And Andrew says, I’ll go with three. I don’t think he’d choose either like electrocution or shark. He’d somehow ask if the battery could electrocute the shark. Nobody ever thought to do that to save themselves that way before.

Mark: Yeah, excellent. Yeah.

Jim: And on Patreon we got Becca said, I think number three is the fake. And Colleen said, I’m going number two is fake because he’s been increasingly batshit. And the other two statements are battier. And also, Stormy Daniels said he’s super afraid of sharks. And I just enjoy believing stuff she says about him.

Mark: I think the tell for me was actually, i refuse to back down, because of the later story that’s Coming up.

Jim: see, I didn’t deliberately insert that, but it may have been in my subconscious.

Mark: In your but you see, with the advances in AI, I think we should just play those ones anyway. Should just make him do that. Oh, I listened to the Sultans of Swing with an AI Biden and Trump singing it. It was excellent. So it’s know, kind of Biden’s cadence and his slightly limited range mumbly vocals, and then Trump with his abrasive ends of sentences where the emphasis is completely on the wrong syllable and just great. And I think people kind of send this guy, whoever he does it, they send him requests. Say yeah. Can you do I got you, babe. Or you’re the one I want, or something like that. So good. So, yes, it ought to be possible to find an AI thing that would just create these create the ones. Yeah. And, this is the one that is fake. But here he is saying, it would be great, wouldn’t it? God. Hey.

Jim: So that means that means six in a row. This is getting ridiculous.

Mark: Yeah. I think we need to have words with the system.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: So what’s that? 61 out of 61 out of 124?

Jim: Four. So, yeah, two more to go. And you’re 50%.

Mark: All right. I need to continue to work hard and zoom in rather than just guess. Yeah, I, must.

Jim: Stop just randomly guessing.

Mark: I’ve stopped and I’ve begun to study it and also add that to my guess. I don’t know. Don’t know. I’ll have to go back and listen to see what my rationale is.

Jim: So this episode is sponsored by Zencaster. We love who is who are the tool which is the tool yes. They make Zencaster, which is a really good recording tool that we use. And we’ve used it from day one to record our podcast because we do not live in the same house. And so it’s handy to be able to connect, over the Internet. We can see each other, we can talk to each other, and it records it all for us.

Mark: It’s seamless, it’s easy. We’ve never had any problem with it. And in fact, when we’ve invited guests on, the brilliant thing about Zencaster is you can extend it to, oh, yeah, here’s the link. Just come on in. Way you go. And then it will record separate audio tracks.

Jim: That’s what I like as an editor. It records separate audio tracks. And then you can download them separately and put them in, so that if I cough or mark swears or something like that, then I can just cut that out. It’s fine. I leave the swears in. It’s fine. They also have, for pro customers, post processing, that makes the sound sound even better. And it can do things like cutting out filler words, ums, and ahs and stuff, which I do a lot of and end up cutting out in the edit. So that you don’t have to sit through that, but it makes you sound.

Mark: The best you can sound if you’re thinking about podcasting. If you’re already a podcaster and you’re wanting to have something that’s seamless and useful and very easy to use, we would thoroughly recommend Zencaster. And in fact, if you go to Zencaster.com pricing and use our code, fallacious trump all one word, you will get 30% off your first month of any Zencaster paid plan. Because fundamentally, we want you to have the same easy experience we do for all our podcasting and podcast content needs. And if you’re up for podcasting, it’s time to share your story. And, you should use Zencaster to do that.

Jim: And it’s time for the part of the show that this week at least, is called speaker of the House is not a Logical Fallacy because there isn’t one at the moment. Yeah, it’s been a while. It’s been almost two weeks now. We’re recording this, early morning on the 16th, and it was the third, I think, that McCarthy was ousted, which I mean, he lasted 27 Scaramuccis right. Which was more than I expected, to be honest.

Mark: Smooth.

Jim: 270 days he lasted. Because when he got in after his 14 failed attempts and then final 15th vote, he only got in because the – I’m doing inverted commas – Freedom Caucus, the MAGA nut jobs.

Mark: Yeah. That’s not in inverted commas.

Jim: No. they had a system where he gave them his balls and they put them in a little jar and then they said, okay, we’ll vote for you. And that meant that anyone, any single person in Congress could submit a resolution to vote for him to be ousted at any point. So I’m pretty surprised he lasted 270 days.

Mark: Yes. Given that the right wing, the Republicans were still around.

Jim: Yeah, but I mean, it led him to do things like start the impeachment inquiries against Biden when he probably wouldn’t have done otherwise because they had nothing for lack of evidence and approving various kind know, the weaponization of government committee and all of that shit. And these things came out of him being too afraid not to do the things the Mad people wanted him to do. Because he knew that as soon as he didn’t do the thing the Mad people wanted him to do, he’d be out. And exactly, that’s what happened.

Mark: Glass on his ball jar.

Jim: Ultimately, he kind of agreed some things with some Democrats when the, budget was coming up for renewal and the government was going to shut down if they didn’t sort it out. And he didn’t want that to happen. He came to an agreement.

Mark: He was kind of mindful of the working people that he wants to continue to vote Republican on the basis that they’re supporting the working man in the way that the Tory party in England isn’t doing either. but they wanted to keep up that subterfuge. So if they shut down the government, many thousands of people wouldn’t get paid. So he was kind of going.

Jim: It wouldn’t have been the first time that the Republicans had shut down the government just in recent years. So they know what happens and it doesn’t work out well for them. Everyone knows that it’s their fault and they become even less popular. But that wasn’t enough for Matt Gates, particularly because coming to any kind of agreement with Democrats, working with Democrats for anything, is very, very bad. So Matt Gates proposed a vote and worked with the Democrats in Congress to get rid of McCarthy because it was basically ultimately the Democrats who voted him out, plus several Republicans, because the makeup of Congress is so close. It’s 221 to 212. So, had all of the Republicans wanted to keep McCarthy, they could have done, but they didn’t, not all of them. That meant he’s out.

Mark: And I wonder whether part of that is, yeah, if we get rid of him, that will cause a complete fucking chaos.

Jim: Well, the Democrats, yeah, they could have decided to vote to keep McCarthy, but frankly, he’s been shit. He hasn’t done any because he’s been on a hair trigger of getting out time and so terrified to do anything that the mad people didn’t want. he hasn’t done anything good at all. Everything has been shit. He hasn’t worked bipartisanly. He just about caved just before they ran out of money on time. So that’s not good enough, in my opinion. Correctly thought, we can do better. And we don’t know because even though we’re twelve days on, 13 days on from that, we don’t know who the leader is going to be initially. At first, it looked like maybe it might be Steve Scalise, because the Republicans kind of shot themselves away in a room and voted a couple of times on who should be speaker. Some people were saying maybe Trump, because the speaker doesn’t have to be a member of the House of Representatives, and everyone else ridiculous, that’s stupid.

Mark: Surely somebody as speaker, ought to be able to speak rather than just yeah, and have his own agenda.

Jim: So, Jim Jordan put himself forward. He was endorsed by Trump, and lots of people don’t like Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise put himself forward, and lots of people don’t like Steve Scalise either. He’s described himself as David Duke without the baggage. I mean, David Duke is all baggage, so I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what that would be.

Mark: you’d still identify the nasty stain that had no baggage as David Duke. Yeah.

Jim: And initially Scalise came out on top in terms of getting more votes than Jim Jordan. So he was the presumptive Republican nominee for speaker. Obviously, they then have to have a full House vote, and the Democrats are all voting for Hakeem Jeffries, just like they did before, because he’s the Democrat’s choice. So it’s 212 for hakeem Jeffries, they need basically 217 votes. With a full House, it would be 218. But two seats are a vacant at the moment, so whoever gets the vote needs 217. Assuming everyone shows up, if people stay away from the vote or vote present, then the winning margin goes down. The Republicans probably don’t want it to go down to a level where 212 is a winning margin, because then Hakeem Jeffries gets voted into speaker. So they need a lot of votes. They need pretty much every Republican to vote in the same way. And the Republicans, as Trump said, they’re young. I don’t think he meant they’re young. I think he meant they eat each other their own, maybe, but basically they are fighting and they continue to fight. And so Scalise eventually realized that he was never going to get 217 votes. There were too many people who just were kind of saying they would never support him. So he stepped down, which means that currently Jordan is the front runner, but that he hasn’t got enough votes either. There’s at least ten Republicans who have said they won’t vote for him. Obviously, the Democrats aren’t going to vote for him because apart from the fact that he’s kind of looked the other way when people were getting sexually abused while he was at Ohio State, also, he’s been in Congress for, like, 20 years, and he has not passed a single bill.

Mark: What?

Jim: He hasn’t done a thing.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: He’s utterly ineffective as a Congressperson. The main thing he’s done is being on the Weaponization Committee thing. and that’s been a pointless waste of time.

Mark: Right.

Jim: So Vanderbilt University Center for Effective Lawmaking ranked all of the House Republicans. He is 217th out of 222 House Republicans in the 117th Congress. So that’s who they think is the best guy to be in charge of them all.

Mark: No, that’s back to our QAnon. These were the best proofs. Wow. Oh, my God. It’s a tough, tough job because it’s.

Jim: Too hard for Kevin McCarthy, certainly.

Mark: Yeah. There’s this fabulous opening paragraph in the Guardian Report of this that says how to unite the fractures majority and prove to a skeptical public that they are a party capable of governing, not just funneling right wing outrage and culture war rhetoric. For a minute, I thought I was reading about the Tory Party conference. it’s the leader of the right wing, both in the UK and the US. Or the one that kind of represents the party. I hesitate to use the word unity, but it’s a tough job because there are these infighting factions that are just about, we’ve got to remain in power, so let’s unleash the dogs of culture wars versus we need to be selling the idea that we’re doing some governing. we’re doing a bit of parliamentarianism. We’re not just shouting at people at their taxpayers expense. So it’s a tough old job. And also, it’s the job that, is probably one of the most Machiavellian of all because it’s the most powerful position in the House after the President.

Jim: Yeah. I mean, essentially, it is the person who decides if bills go forward for vote, if committees get formed. All, kinds of things, are decided by the speaker. And it requires someone who has widespread support from their party to the extent that they are then able to corral their members to a vote, especially when the margin is so thin they can’t afford to lose five votes to the other side on anything because they can’t get anything passed.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: When it’s 221 to 212, if five Republicans decide to vote with Democrats, essentially the Democrats win. So whoever is in that spot needs to be someone who can bring his party together or her party together. And, I say her as an afterthought because there’s barely any females in the Republican Party. Well, certainly none who have put themselves forward for the job. Fortunately, people like Marjorie Taylor Green have. Not even their names haven’t come. yeah. So whoever ends up doing it has got an incredibly difficult job. Obviously, Jim Jordan isn’t up for that. He doesn’t have the support of most of his members after he won the vote because after Scalise pulled out, georgia Representative Austin Scott stepped up and put himself forward. so there was a vote between Jordan and Scott, and Jordan won 124 to 81. This was on Friday. So Jordan kind of went forward as the party’s choice, but then he called a second vote to ask if members would actually support him in a floor vote, basically, because it’s going to be him versus Hakeem Jeffries, probably. And that vote was a secret ballot, and it went 152 to 55. So he got 152 votes from Republican members saying that they would vote for him to be speaker. And he needs 217. So he’s way short the chances that over this weekend or even over the next week, he can convince, another what’s that 65 members to change their vote to support him because he took McCarthy 15 times to do it.

Mark: And you kind of think if the 200-odd Republicans, that collectively just go, no, it’s the annoying guy in your class at school who just never wants to do anything. Think of the Republican as that annoying guy who will never do anything, but somehow commands this influence such that if they’re not going to do it, nobody else wants to do it, so go, no, I’m not going to do that, because he’s rubbish. Bit like if they’re that cool if they’re the Fonz and the Fonz says, no, don’t join the swim team because the swim team is awful, nobody will join the swim team, even though lots of people would like to join the swim team. So the Republicans, they want to have the speaker so that the Democrats don’t. But they’re too. Busy going they’re crap in order to get behind. They haven’t fundamentally worked out the notion of right wing politics, certainly in the UK. And we could tell we’re coming to the end of a parliament because the notion that whatever we do collectively we’ve got to stick together in order to remain in power. So they hide the factions and the fractiousness and they present a united front. They haven’t even worked that out in the Republican Party. We just need to rather than just go, yeah, you’re no fucking good, we’re not going to vote for you, say, well, why don’t you stand? Because I don’t want to, but I don’t want you. how is that presenting united front? And all the Democrats have got to do is just sit back there.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: We’ll just wait for them to finish fighting and then we’ll go.

Jim: Yeah, well this is the thing.

Mark: It’s been 57 years since we’ve had a speaker, perhaps we ought to have one now.

Jim: Yeah. When this happened almost two weeks ago, some friends of mine who don’t follow American politics quite as fervently as I do were like, okay, well, what’s the result of this going to be mid m to long term? How is it going to come out? And obviously I don’t know. But I said, actually, I think this is potentially good for Democrats. I think that it could result because I don’t think that any there’s not enough Republicans who are as aggressively MAGA as the ones who got rid of McCarthy. So I don’t think they will get someone more right wing to be in charge because I don’t think they’ll get enough support. I think that they probably will end up having to have someone who is prepared to reach across the aisle because I don’t think that anyone is probably going to get enough universal Republican support. I think they’re going to have to get either some Democrat votes because if there was a Republican who stood up and said, look, we’ve been doing everything wrong, I want to change things, I want to work with the Democrats. We need to make changes, we need to actually start passing bills and making things better for American people doing some governing. Yeah, they might only get like twelve Republican votes, but if all the Democrats vote for them, they’re in.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: and if this gets to the point where Republicans are too pissed off with the system and stay home or vote present, it actually could become hacking Jeffrey’s job and it could be a Democrat Speaker. I don’t think they’ll let it get that far. But I do think there’s a chance that they’ll need to choose a more moderate speaker in order to get a little bit of Democrat support that will push it over the line. I don’t think they’ve got anyone who can bring the party together. They’re too fractured.

Mark: It hands the control and the overall flavor of what the speaker is like to the Democrats because they are sitting.

Jim: On 212 votes, I think that’s a genuinely possible outcome. I’m not saying it’s definitely going to happen, I hope it does. But in the absence of them coming up with, an as yet unnamed candidate who, it turns out, everyone’s in favor of, yeah, I think it’s a possible outcome and it might need to wait another couple of weeks while they scrabble around and fail to get anyone in. But, yeah, we’ll see.

Mark: Wow, it never ceases to be exciting, does it? Just when you think we can’t have had it can’t possibly get any worse, more exciting, it does. And finally, some, ah, things we really don’t have time to talk about.

Jim: Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York started last week, and Trump even attended the first few days, making sure to come out of the courtroom and yell to the press about how unfairly he was being treated. Judge Arthur Engoron appeared at first to accept this as exactly the kind of behavior you’d expect from this defendant, but by day two Trump crossed a line when he posted a photo of the Judge’s court clerk along with her name and instagram account and suggested she was biasing the judge against him, because she had once had her photo taken with Chuck Shumer. The judge issued a partial gag order “forbidding all parties from posting, emailing or speaking publicly about any of my staff”, saying “Personal attacks on members of my court staff are unacceptable, inappropriate and I will not tolerate them in any circumstances. Failure to abide by this order will result in serious sanctions.” Trump deleted the post and sat huffily in the courtroom for another day before leaving during a break on day three to head to some campaign rallies where he continued to yell about how unfairly he was being treated. Meanwhile, his lawyers argued that massively over-valuing properties isn’t fraud if you reckon someone might one day pay that amount for it, and former Trump employees testified said they were under pressure to inflate values because Trump liked to see his net worth going up, and that they considered applying a premium to the value of various properties based purely on the fact that they were owned by the President. Meanwhile, Scott Hall, one of Trump’s co-defendants in Georgia, has pleaded guilty to five counts of conspiracy, raising the question of whether he will now cooperate with prosecutors as a condition of his sentencing. Really looking forward to that televised trial!

Mark: So if you are at a loss as to what to say to the orange pre-criminal at his club, and who wouldn’t be, take a leaf out of an Australian billionaire’s book. No not Murdoch, Anthony Pratt of Pratt Industries, one of the world’s largest packaging companies. According to special counsel Jack Smith’s team’s investigations, they discovered allegations that in a lull at Mar-a-Lago one evening, where Pratt’s a member, he brought up the subject of the American submarine fleet, as you do! According to Pratt’s account, Pratt told Trump he believed Australia should start buying its submarines from the United States, to which an excited Trump – “leaning” toward Pratt as if to be discreet (hah!) – then told Pratt two pieces of information about U.S. submarines: the supposed exact number of nuclear warheads they routinely carry, and exactly how close they supposedly can get to a Russian submarine without being detected. This all took place, of course, several months after Trump left the white house and errrrrr was no longer president! Anthony Pratt, the very model of discretion, must have noted this cos he then went on to keep very quiet about it to 45 others, including six journalists, 11 of his company’s employees, 10 Australian officials, and three former Australian prime ministers! Some of the Australian officials that sources said he told were, as reflected in news reports at the time, involved in the then negotiations with the Biden administration over a deal for Australia to purchase a number of nuclear-powered attack submarines from the United States. Ironic that in one braggadocious “my Putin’s bigger than yours” moment, Trump talking at Fox Business about Ukraine said that if he were still president, he would make sure Russia understood that the United States is “a greater nuclear power” with “the greatest submarines in the world. The most powerful machines ever built, and nobody knows where they are.” Except half of Australia! Pratt sees no problem in shafting Trump and cosying up to Biden describing himself as someone who tends to just “side with the king.” (Bruce Philosopher:) Mind if we call you Machiavelli just to avoid confusion, Bruce?

Jim: Yeah. The fact he leaned in like conspiratorial because you wouldn’t want other people to hear the nuclear secrets you’re divulging to a businessman, would you? That would be wrong.

Mark: Exactly.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: He’s just been played.

Jim: I think it was Andy McCabe on the Jack podcast said it would be malpractice of foreign governments not to try and get this kind of information out of Trump, because it’s clearly so easy that if you haven’t got hostile foreign governments trying to trick him into just boasting about secrets, you’re not playing the game. You’re not doing it right, are you?

Mark: Yes, exactly. And it is, Pratt’s whole idea of I’ve just got a side with the king is you. Would you work out the overblown, self aggrandizing, self important king? Well, you just flatter him and all of that stuff. And to release the torrent of information that you know, from this stupid, overweight, overhight, over, orange idiot. It’s the stuff of kings in fairy tales.

Jim: In a shocking turn of events which nobody could have predicted, Robert F Kennedy Jr has abandoned his beloved Democratic party and decided to run as an independent presidential candidate for 2024

Mark: Shocked. I could never have predicted that.

Jim: While running ostensibly against Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination, Kennedy was lauded, amplified and lied about by various right wing sources, which now seems to be coming back to bite them in the ass. His polling numbers among Democrat voters never really got above 20%, with more than that expressing disapproval. That 20% was presumably the ones who haven’t been paying attention for the past 60 years and vaguely remembered a good guy called Kennedy who had something to do with politics. The more coverage RFK got, the more people noticed that he’s a whackjob conspiracy theorist, and his approval ratings among Democrats dropped. But Republicans love that shit, and his GOP voter approval ratings frequently hit 50% and above. So now that he’s running as an independent candidate, it looks like he’s more likely to pull votes away from Trump than from Biden. Which is probably why all his former buddies have turned on him, with the RNC calling him “just another radical far-left Democrat”, Ronna McDaniel calling him a “Democrat in Independent’s clothing” and a “typical elitist liberal” And Trump’s spokesman Stephen Cheung going for gold in the irony olympics by saying “Voters should not be deceived by anyone who pretends to have conservative values… [An] RFK candidacy is nothing more than a vanity project for a liberal Kennedy to cash in on his family’s name.” Possibly most damning, though, was the statement put out by four of his siblings, who called his announcement “deeply saddening” and “dangerous for the country”. Come on other Kennedy siblings, join in – there’s enough of you left to beat Paul Gosar’s admittedly high bar of six siblings denouncing his political career.

Mark: In a familiar whiff of Trump deflation-techniques; where the old windbag lets some of the over-pressured hot air out of his assets hole to blow people off the scent of the size of his shizzle; the jurors in Rudy Giuliani’s defamation case against the two Georgia electoral workers have been instructed that “it must, when determining an appropriate sum of compensatory, presumed, and punitive damages, infer that defendant Giuliani was intentionally trying to hide relevant discovery about the Giuliani businesses’ finances for the purpose of shielding his assets from discovery and artificially deflating his net worth,” since Rudy’s “continued and flagrant disregard of this Court’s August 30 Order that he produce financial-related documents concerning his personal and his businesses’ past and present assets”. Consequently Giuliani and his lawyer will be prohibited “from making any argument, or introducing any evidence, stating or suggesting that he is insolvent, bankrupt, judgement proof, or otherwise unable to defend himself” since he failed to hand over evidence that would show that’s true. In August Rudy was judged to have defamed the workers and was ordered to pay damages – one of them, Ruby Freeman, has reported that Rudy’s “failed to take any of the actions” ordered by the court, including turning over $89,000 in legal fees. “Consistent with his prior track record in this matter, Giuliani failed to file any response,” the judge wrote. Perhaps part of his delaying tactics is because he can’t find a lawyer willing to represent him, his former lawyers are suing him for about $1.4 million in unpaid legal fees, oh, and he also owes the IRS almost $550,000 in unpaid federal taxes. Yeah I guess that’s enough to make even the strongest sphincter-controller let fly a cacophonous trouser-trump surely!

Jim: What the fuck is going on with George Santos? He got into a shouting match with a man in the halls of Congress, who was criticizing Israel’s military. I guess that’s not so weird, given how very Jewish George has claimed to be on occasion, but for some reason he was holding a two-month old baby at the time and nobody seems to be able to figure out why. Santos had just left Representative Tim Burchett’s office with the baby, and when Hill reporter Emily Brooks asked him if the baby was his he said “Not yet” and walked off. Maybe he’s distracted by the fact that he’s just been charged with 10 additional crimes in a superseding indictment, bringing his total to 23 – come on George, that’s barely a quarter of Trump’s number – how do you expect to get any respect among serious politicians until you commit a few more federal crimes. The new ones include conspiracy, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and credit card fraud, including charging almost $16,000 on a donor’s credit card without the donor’s knowledge. Last week, his former campaign treasurer Nancy Marks pleaded guilty to many of these same charges, and her attorney has said she will testify against Santos if subpoenaed. A small group of first-term New York Republicans in Congress have said they will introduce a resolution to expel Santos from the House, but given that would need a two-thirds majority I don’t see them getting enough Republican votes, because being a thieving lying grifter isn’t a bug in the GOP House, it’s a feature.

Mark: Yeah, If you’re looking for the example of why AI-created music and autotuned manipulations will ultimately take over the world, because we’ll all be too busy  tearing our own superior temporal gyruses out to prevent our brains from processing sound rather than worrying about say climate change, hyper-processed food or the extinction of the bees, then look/listen no further than Lara Trump’s – Eric’s Ivanka-Melania-all-of-’em lookalike missus – new single; a cover of Tom Petty’s I Won’t Back Down. In at number 6 with a bullet two weeks ago, according to Eric’s tweet, it’s now fallen out of the charts and Tom Petty can stop spinning in his grave! Despite Petty’s family telling the Trump’s not to use the song on the campaign trail in 2020, Maga outlets downloaded it en masse. I suspect before listening to it, judging by the one-star reviews outnumbering the 5-star. And no amount of good-ol’ boy lonestar bravado can make what is essentially very poor shrieky, twangy, very limited range, autotuned karaoke even as popular as Trump and the Massed Choir of the Jan 6thers “hit”! Lara herself thankfully admitted on Australian Sky News “I am not seeking this as a career, I am not a professional singer, I’m sure I’ll get a lot of critique from all the haters out there of my voice and my singing ability.” Yep dang right! Just think Lara, that with such self-awareness at 41, you could be lucky in following so many of your musical heroes; Elvis, Lennon, Marvin Gaye, Whitney, Billie Holiday, Kirsty MacColl and be dead very soon!

Jim: It turns out sweaty mustachioed foghorn Mike Lindell had his lawyers working on a no-win, no-fee basis. That is, they had no chance of winning, and no chance of getting paid. Consequently, after three months of working for free, they have filed to withdraw as counsel in his defamation lawsuit against Dominion and Smartmatic. Lindell has said he will definitely not settle the case, but has no idea who will represent him going forward. I would say he should talk to Trump to get a recommendation, because if there’s anyone who knows lawyers who are prepared to argue bullshit with no guarantee of payment, it’s Trump. But all the lawyers Trump knows are either very busy on one or more of his four cases pending trial right now, or are facing charges themselves. Lindell claims his money problems have been exacerbated by American Express slashing his credit from $1 million down to $100,000 overnight, which he claims is due to his political views. AmEx say they don’t make customer decisions based on personal views or political affiliations, and conspicuously do not add that perhaps the reason they’re reluctant to give Mike a million dollar credit line is because he has no hope of ever paying it back. He’s already auctioned off all his stuff, he’s struggling to pay the workers who spend their days filling his pillows with lumps, and now he’s planning on holding a telethon to raise money to pay his legal fees.I’m not gonna lie, I kind of want to watch that, but I don’t think it will get him out of his current situation. Such a shame.

Mark: It’s been conference time in the UK where Rishi Sunak and his gang and the other 2 or three gangs that make up the disunited party of the Tories/UKIP/GBNews presenters went to Manchester by train in order to announce among other things the scrapping of the high-speed rail link to Manchester. Never ones to shy away from opening their mouths, inserting their feet and blaming others for kicking them in the face: the housing Minister said not all renters smoke weed and are bad people in gangs (leaving unsaid perhaps “no, some of them are white!”, the deputy Tory chairman in response to HS2 being scrapped quipped “well who wants to go to Bradford anyway”, Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor of the exchequer, said halving inflation is the same as a 5p tax cut which means he either has no idea how the economy works or is lying through his teeth – lower inflation means prices are still rising – just at a slower rate, Suella Braverman evoked the ghoul of Enoch Powell saying multiculturalism has failed before going on to warn that a hurricane of migrants is coming and that the Human Rights Act should be renamed the Criminal Rights Act. And of course the party of such free thinking literally threw someone out of the building – a Tory voter – for quietly muttering dissent at Braverman’s practically stiff-arm salute of a speech. Meanwhile over at the Labour Party Conference someone protesting about… what I’m not sure, they were still explaining it as they were dragged from the podium and across the hall – made Starmer’s speech a bit more showbiz by flinging glitter all over him before he began! Quipping (if that’s the right word – no, no it isn’t) “If he thinks that’ll stop me, then he doesn’t know me”, Starmer drew a roar of applause as he had to take off his jacket and roll up his sleeves to lose the superficial sparkle and appear more down to earth and getting on with the work. The metaphors flow so effortlessly that I’m beginning to think that the whole thing might’ve been staged. Well, let’s hope they continue to not be dazzled by the glitz of the recent win over the SNP in Scotland and still realize there’s a lot of sensible hearts and minds winning-over work to be done before next year’s election.

Jim: The main photo that went viral of the glitter around Kirstalmer was such a fucking great photo. It really made him look much better. Totally failed.

Mark: It was like to make him look really showbiz.

Jim: It was, so good.

Mark: Or to have him take the jacket off and appear to eschew all the showbiz glitter.

Jim: And I can’t believe you did a whole thing on the Tory Party conference didn’t talk about Penny Mordaunt’s bizarre stand up and fight speech. fucking hell, what was that?

Mark: No, it, was so good. Did you watch the Michael Spicer, revives his man in the room and exhaust. And then there’s this bit where he breaks the fourth wall and looks at the camera and goes you see why.

Jim: I don’t want to do this anymore?

Mark: Anymore? Don’t just say stand up and fight again. Bizarre. Bizarre.

Jim: So, ah, that’s all the bad arguments for 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 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 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, though another listener recognised her at QED this year cos we keep using her full name all the time!); and our True Scotsman level Patrons, Melissa Sytek, Steven Bickel, Janet Yuetter, Kaz Toohey, Andrew Hauck, and our top Patron… Loren! thank you so much for your continued patronage. It’s really very much appreciated. Thank you.

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.

Donald Trump: That’s right, go home to mommy. Bye