Bulverism – FT#138

11 Dec Bulverism – FT#138

Show Notes

Bulverism occurs when someone explains why another is wrong without first establishing that they are wrong.

Trump

We started out by discussing this clip of Trump defending his stance on North Korea:

And then we looked at this clip of Trump complaining about his indictments:

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about Rishi Sunak explaining how Kier Starmer came to be so wrong:

And he followed that up by talking about this clip of Nigel Farage ranting about losing his bank account:

And he finished with this clip of Mike Graham being as wrong as it’s possible to be about concrete:

Fallacy in the Wild

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

Then we discussed this clip from Sister Sister:

And we finished by talking about this clip from Casablanca:

 

Fake News

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

1. Just a little while ago, backstage, there were nine – of the nine – now, these were tough guys. These are really – these are seriously tough cookies. In fact, I looked at them and I said I wouldn’t want to fight these guys. But of the nine, eight of them were crying. And I looked at the ninth – crying out of happiness, because they’re back. I looked at the ninth guy, I said, “What’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you crying?” “I don’t cry, sir.” I said, “That’s OK.”
2. Just today a guy came up to me, a very, very big guy – this actually happens all the time – big guy, military guy, army guy, army uniform. He was a soldier. Tears pouring down. He came up to me, said, “Sir, thank you, Sir. You rebuilt our military. It was going to hell and you rebuilt it.” And he saluted me, tears coming down on his face, this big guy who probably never even cried when he was a baby.
3. He said, “Sir, thank you for saving our country.” And I used to be surprised because I’ve been hearing this for a year and a half, I used to be surprised. You know, it’s a big statement and they’re oftentimes crying. And they’re people that don’t cry. These are not criers. These are people that are real stalwarts, not crying. Nothing wrong with crying, but they often are crying. And I’ve heard it so much.

Mark got it right AGAIN this week (that’s ten in a row!), and is on 51%. Our guest Ian got it wrong, and is currently on 0%

 

Ian Hawkins is not a logical fallacy

We talked with author, speaker coach, comedy writer, QED Quiz Host, and all-round excellent chap Ian Hawkins. You can find more about him at mr-hawkins.com

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

• Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is the latest to join the exodus of over 30 Senators and Congresspeople who have announced their decision not to run for re-election next year, but Kevin isn’t waiting until the election, vowing to leave Congress by the end of the month. Of course, every Exodus must have a Moses, and new House Speaker Mike Johnson announced this week that God chose him to be the new Moses in a series of late night conversations he had with the creator of the Universe himself. Not sure I love the idea of power being given to people who think they’re on a mission from God. Much as I love the Blues Brothers, I wouldn’t want them to be House Speaker either. But perhaps I was a bit hasty in assuming that Mike wouldn’t reach across the aisle. After all, he explained on Tuesday that the reason it was taking a little longer than expected to release all the January 6th footage is because “we have to blur some faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ,” and I think it’s very kind of him to commit obstruction of justice to help all the Antifa, BLM and FBI folk who dressed up as Trump supporters and attacked the Capitol that day. His office later clarified that of course the DOJ already has all the unblurred footage, so Mike is just trying to make sure members of the public can’t help them identify criminals. That’s OK then, much less obstructy.
• The New York Supreme Court judge overseeing Donald Trump’s fraud trial has reinstated a gagging order in a bid to prevent the former president from commenting on the case on social media. So that’s the last we’ll be hearing from the Donald for a while – sorry, my mistake, seconds later, he posted a screed of messages on Truth Social whining that he wasn’t getting a fair trial and that the judge’s wife was ‘almost as out of control as he is’. Because if anyone is in control, it’s walking id Donald J Trump, the inevitable result of a child who once won a shard of parental affection by exaggerating the truth and who has spent the last 75 years repeating the pattern in the desperate hope of filling the aching void. Parents, stop listening to this podcast, tell your children they are good enough, don’t let this happen again. As to whether the trial is fair or not, listeners outside the US should bear in mind that the American legal process is a complex and carefully balanced system of claim, counter claim and Trump queering the pitch by placing full page adverts calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five – who it turned out were wrongly accused of murder. They were black, by the way, no reason for mentioning it, just making up the word count.
  
• Remember when all looked like it wasn’t going in Trump’s favour election wise and how it seemed such a good idea to simply come up with “alternative” election officials who’d just say “Yeah he won” “ We counted everything and did all that stuff and sho nuff the orange dude won” Of course it didn’t matter that they were fake cos when Trump got in he’d simply overlook it all and call it legit. Weeee-eelll seems like the latest bunch of six electors who falsely submitted documents claiming that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election in Nevada  have just been handed an indictment by a grand jury. The grand jury charged the fake electors on two felony counts, including offering a false instrument to be filed, registered or recorded in public office — in this case, filing false election certificates — as well as forgery. All familiar things to us on the outside of Trump’s camp – and to be fair normal business practice within it too. This adds to felony charges against 16 false electors announced in Michigan and this summer, Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis (D) brought charges against fake electors as part of a larger indictment against Trump and his allies. Seeing the writing on the wall fake electors in Wisconsin agreed to withdraw their erroneous filings pertaining to the 2020 election and publicly acknowledged that Joe Biden won the presidency after reaching a settlement with Democratic voters in a civil lawsuit. Better late than never I guess, let’s see who’s the first to be called fake by the GOP when the Dems win things they’re not expected to in 2024.  
• Testimony in Trump’s NY civil fraud trial is nearing the end, with Trump’s final expert witness taking the stand on Thursday. NYU Sterns accounting professor Eli Bartov testified that “there is no evidence whatsoever of any accounting fraud.” Which, to be fair, is what you’d expect from a defense witness, even one picked and prepped by legal heavyweights like Alina Habba. When questioned about specifics, like the fact that financial statements valued Trump’s Manhattan apartment at $80 in 2011 and $180m in 2012, Bartov chalked it up to an innocent error, saying that it’s not fraud because if Trump meant to commit fraud by inflating the value of his apartment, he would have made some effort to conceal it. Because as we all know, if you just walk up to someone, lock eyes with them, reach into their pocket and take their wallet, that’s not a crime, because if you were stealing from them, you’d make some effort to hide it. Committing crimes in plain sight is Trump’s whole thing, just like Rudy’s whole thing is butt-dialling reporters and confessing to crimes on Trump’s behalf. Bartov was similarly sanguine about the same apartment suddenly growing to three times its normal size in financial statements a few years later, accompanied by another hike in value to $327m, and presumably, felt the other 200+ false valuations cited by Attorney General Letitia James were also the kind of inevitable mistakes that happen when preparing financial documents. What could lead a respected accounting professor to give such benefit of the doubt to such massive errors? In I’m sure entirely unrelated news, Bartov also testified that he had spent around 650 hours working on Trump’s behalf, at an hourly rate of $1,350, adding up to almost $900k in fees. I can see why the Trump team chose him, because if you want someone to testify about the subjectivity of financial valuations, choosing an expert who values their own work at two and a half times the average expert witness rate in NY is probably the way to go. 
• It’s very hard to tell if someone is gay or not, but one big giveaway is that they co-found a lobbying group that gets virulently homophobic legislation on to the few remaining unburned books in America. And so it was revealed that Bridget Ziegler, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, enjoyed three years of hot girl-on-girl action as part of an MFF menage a trois with her husband Christian. The Zeiglers’ hypocrisy is said to be breathtaking, but not so breathtaking as the tender yet assured touch of another woman during the commercial breaks on Bake Off. It’s also overshadowed the real story which is that Christian is accused of sexual assault, though presumably he’d argue that treating women like they only exist for his gratification fits squarely inside the Biblical definition of family values while stuff like “consentual fun with another adult” doesn’t. It’s a sad fact that the bad behaviour of a man is less of a story than a legal relationship between consenting adults, but that’s the society the Zieglers were instrumental in building so … meh. This whole scandal could’ve been avoided if they’d both minded their own fucking business. Still – bisexual erasure is a real problem in the community, and I for one can’t wait to see Bridget and her supportive husband stop chucking gay people under the bus, and instead, get on the bus, wave a rainbow flag and hope that none of the hot girls on the Pride route recognise them. I actually live near a church that holds regular conversion services. I know because every Thursday, the Grindr app on my phone crashes.
• There’s something about the act of paying money back to those in your family that have loaned you it, that acknowledges their helping you out but also repays their kindness by showing them how responsibly you took their help, you didn’t just take the cash and blow it and then ask for some more knowing full well they’’d give you it cos your like a member of the Trump family or something. So when James Comer noticed Hunter’s bank statements had repeated regular “illicit” payments to his father, Joe Biden. It didn’t occur to him that the documents likely showed repayments for a truck. Comer – from the school of Donald Trump getting money from Fred Trump with no word of thanks just grunts of entitlement claimed no one in his family repays him after he loans money. “When my son needs help, or my daughter, who’s in college, needs it, I just give her money. Nobody ever pays me back!” Comer said. You bet yo ass he’s storing that up to guilt them in his dotage! So when the Biden’s just behave like normal people Comer thinks “You can loan people money. If they pay you back, then you benefited directly from the influence-peddling!” adamant that Hunter paying his father back in any form meant Biden had benefited from his son’s overseas business. And of course we’ll gloss over Comer making no mention of his own business deals with his brother, which reportedly include Comer loaning his brother Chad $200,000 in 2019. His brother repaid him through land swaps. No cos that doesn’t count, hell no Dem Comer knows even owns  a truck unless its one of them ghost buses that turned up on Jan 6th with FBI Dem Woke Antifa dressed as Republicans on them. 
• It’s very easy to assume that when Republicans call themselves pro-life while enacting draconian laws against abortion, their motives aren’t so much about life as about controlling women. One of the reasons that is so easy to assume is because it’s objectively obvious any time they’re required to show their working. This week, there was a brief moment of hope in Texas, of all places, when Travis County District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble ruled that Dallas resident Kate Cox could have an abortion. Kate and her husband desperately want a baby, but discovered at 20 weeks that their fetus has a chromosomal abnormality which is almost always fatal before or shortly after birth. Partly because Kate has had two prior c-sections, her doctors say “continuing the pregnancy puts her at high risk for severe complications threatening her life and future fertility.” Of course, if Republicans were truly pro-life, they would see that risking the life and fertility of a mother of two who wants another baby is the exact wrong thing to do. But on top of being staggeringly corrupt and unfit for office, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is a fucking monster, so he immediately announced that regardless of the judge’s ruling he would prosecute any doctors or anyone else who helps Kate get an abortion, and on Friday night the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court issued an order temporarily halting the lower court’s decision while they consider the case. I know there weren’t any jokes in this bit, but sometimes you just have to rant. Fuck Ken Paxton.
• Liz Truss launched a bid to prevent harm to women and children which is a nicer way of saying ‘empower the state to proactively bully, demean and deny medical care to vulnerable and isolated children’ – in a private members bill this week. Liz says it’s common sense to hold off puberty blocking drugs until after someone’s gone through puberty, showing that when it comes to common sense, she’s ready to work the same magic as she did on the nation’s mortgage repayments. Despite everything, I still hold a soft spot in my heart for Liz Truss for the way she kept Boris Johnson away from a formal role in the Queen’s funeral, stumbling through a Bible reading with all the panache of a tired six year old. It coulda been him. On a personal note, I was on stage in Paris when Liz Truss resigned as Prime Minister. I noticed this chuckle go around the room and asked what was going on and was told “Your PM has resigned.” That was the day I learned the French word for schadenfreude is schadenfreude.   
• In Britpol this week another depressing week – James Cleverly the new Home Secretary turns out to be just like the old Home Secretaries, bit sweary, completely batshit crazy for Rwanda and determined to change the law to ensure that the tens of millions spent with Rwanda isn’t wasted any more than it clearly has been. The Supreme Court had ruled that the deal to send asylum seekers to Rwanda wasn’t lawful because Rwanda wasn’t a safe place to be, James Cleverly thought he could get round that by simply passing a bill that said that Rwanda was indeed a safe place. This from the government who denies that if people say they are a man or a woman that they are, and if they say they are genuine asylum seekers then they are foreign criminals looking to play the system. Meanwhile Rishi Sunak got pissed off at the Greek Prime Minister who met with Starmer first and consequently said I’m not playing and that he’s not gonna let the Greeks have their marbles back, despite laws going back to the dawn of democracy itself saying that they are theirs. The Greeks were last seen craning Stonehenge away to a museum in Athens for safe-keeping.

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:

Bulverism – FT#138 Transcript

Jim: Hello, and welcome to Fallacious Trump, the podcast where we use the insane ramblings of some offal dropped on the floor of a supercuts to explain logical fallacies.

Mark: I’m your host, Jim, 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 Bulverism. Can I just congratulate you on the mental images of ‘some offal’. Yeah.

Jim: I don’t want to be specific as to which piece of organ meat most resembles Trump, but it’s not just one piece. It’s some. various lumps of.

Mark: Just offcuts of lumps of innards.

Jim: Bulverism was coined, actually, by C. S. Lewis in an essay that he wrote of the same name. So this is a quote from C. S. Lewis. The modern method is to assume, without discussion, that he, [someone you’re arguing with], is wrong, and distract his attention from this, the only real issue, by busily explaining how he came to be so silly. In the course of the last 15 years, I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it Bulverism. Someday I’m going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five, when he heard his mother say to his father, who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than the third. Oh, you say that because you’re a man. At that moment, E. Bulver assures us, there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument.

Mark: Nice. The modern method.

Jim: That was a modern method written in 1941. Yeah. So he created the character of Ezekiel Bulver specifically for this anecdote and thereby called the fallacy bulverism. And the fallacy, therefore, is when, during an argument, you don’t refute what the other person is saying, you just explain why they’re saying it, why they are so silly as to believe or claim something.

Mark: Yeah, that’s quite interesting, isn’t it, that he says it’s to assume that he’s wrong, the other person, and then distract his attention from this, from the only real issue by busily explaining that they are idiots, rather than refuting an argument, rather than offering some kind of explanation as to why the.

Jim: Yeah, you don’t address the underlying argument, the claim itself. You just say, well yeah. You only believe that because of a silly thing about you. It’s a little bit ad hominem, a little bit genetic fallacy mixed in there because it’s where the argument is coming from that you’re addressing and something negative about that in kind of motivated reasoning. So ad hominem, circumstantial, which is like, you would say that, wouldn’t you? Our first Trump example comes when he was asked a question about his recent comments that were inflammatory towards North Korea.

Reporter: Mr President, you said you wanted to send a strong message to North Korea. What do you say to your critics who say that your rhetoric is actually raising the catch?

Donald Trump: Well, you know, my critics are only saying that because it’s me. If somebody else uttered the exact same words that I uttered, they’d say, what a great statement. What a wonderful statement.

Mark: That’s amazing, isn’t it? Yeah.

Jim: He’s not arguing that he hasn’t been making inflammatory statements or that the statements are not negative. He’s saying that the people who are saying their bad statements are just kind of essentially out to get him. They will just say whatever he says is bad. And if someone else had said it, they wouldn’t have said that.

Mark: So in a way, instead of saying to the reporters, well, they would say that because they’re stupid. He’s doing an about face kind of twisted back on itself version by saying, well, they’re only saying that because it’s me.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: always all about Trump.

Jim: Yeah. And that persecution complex comes through in his response to all of the various indictments for all of the 91 felonies that he is currently facing charge for. And he says things like this at rallies.

Donald Trump: These are ridiculous indictments, and all they’re doing is hoping for massive election interference. That’s all they want to do. They want to damage the leading candidate, by the way. Leading by far, I have to say.

Jim: So he’s saying the indictments are not because I’ve committed crimes and he isn’t addressing that and saying, I mean, he says, to be fair, has said on other occasions, I didn’t do anything wrong, but in this instance, he’s not saying I’m innocent of all of these things. He’s saying the indictments are because they are attacking me because I’m their leading opponent. So that’s the point of them. They’re not getting me because I committed crimes. They’re attacking me. It’s political persecution. They’re just out to get me. And so this is the kind of thing they do.

Mark: And in a way, he says they want to ruin the election. They want to skew the election. And in a way, he’s kind of setting it up. Bit like he set up the last election, whereby if he lost, it would be because there was corruption and he encouraged people to head to the council and just take a sightseeing tour in order to interfere with the election process as much as they possibly could. So he’s kind of setting it up so that if he doesn’t win, it’s because they want to corrupt the election process. And people will be so incensed that there will be riots.

Jim: Yeah, well, this kind of mixes in with conspiracy theory thinking, because what we’ve seen from just the first episode that we looked at of Police State with a Dinesh D’Souza film, this is being used. I mean, we knew it anyway, but it’s in there as well. this is being used by his followers and his allies to say he is being persecuted, he is being attacked. The deep statE, Joe Biden’s administration, they’re out to get him. They’re attacking their opponent, their main political opponent. He’s the leading Republican candidate. They’re not saying he is under indictment because of crimes. They’re not even addressing the crimes. They’re dismissing all of that in favor of. They’re attacking him. They’re out to get him. They’re coming after him. And when you say they’re coming after the crimes he committed, they are addressing the crimes. They have lots of evidence of the crimes. They just kind of ignore all of that stuff. And, you know, it’s unacceptable in America, to go after your political opponent.

Mark: Yeah, but they’re not, because he’s not being held to book for the crimes by his political opponents. It’s not politically motivated. It’s motivated by the law. People who want to see the rule of law and uphold the law are noticing that these things were ever so slightly illegal. So they’re kind of just pointing that out to him and saying, yeah, would you like to come to the big house and explain yourself? Because these things we think you did, they are in contravention to the law. So we think you should be being held to book for those. What do you say, Donald.

Jim: but the more he can convince people to see it as just political persecution and just them out to get him, the less it matters what evidence is put forward or if and when he is found guilty of any of these things. Because by that point, all of his followers don’t care as far as they’re concerned. Like I was saying about the conspiracy theory thinking thing, that’s just evidence that they’re good at being out to get him. If they manage to get convictions, and even if they were to manage to get him to go to prison or anything like that, that’s just evidence that they’ve succeeded in their task of being out to get him.

Mark: Being out to get him.

Jim: The judges are in on it, and the juries are in on it, and they’re all biased against him. They won’t believe the evidence or the fact that he’s been found guilty of these crimes. It won’t matter because it’s all just because they’re out to get him. The crimes are incidental.

Mark: Yes, because he’s peddling the persecution thing. And almost. Well, the byline of the police state is, if it could happen to me, it could happen to you.

Jim: They’re only indicting me because I’m standing in the way.

Mark: The bit in brackets has been ignored, isn’t it? If you’ve committed dozens of heinous crimes, then they will come and get you. Yes, they being the law.

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

Mark: Speaking of the person who’s at the top of the tree this side of the pond, Rishi Sunak was exercising this… Exercising? Is that the right word? Using, utilizing. He was doing it, doing the fallacy this week in Prime Minister’s questions. Last week’s Home Affairs Committee was extraordinary. The representatives of the Home Office in charge of immigration were unable to come up with any numbers at all regarding immigration in answer to questions put to them.

Jim: Lucky it’s not their job or anything.

Mark: No, quite. And even Lee, 30p Lee. Lee Anderson was asking things like, how many immigrants got sent back over the past year? And there was a shuffling of papers and said, well, we’ll have to get back to you on that. And even the chair at the end said, when you came to this meeting, what questions did you think we were going to ask you? People in charge of immigration.

Jim: Yeah, this is Diane Abbott levels of preparation for a meeting.

Mark: You would need numbers. People on the committee were saying to them, here are numbers of people. Where are they and how many have you processed and where have they all gone and all that. And they had no clue. They could not respond at all. There were shufflings of papers. People kind of just moved things around behind them. Even somebody said, there’s a massive big folder that looks like it’s full of papers on the benches behind you. Your advisors help. Can they find anything? No, they can. So they flip through the thing. Nothing. So, this week, in Prime Minister’s questions, Keir Starmer brought it up.

Kier Starmer: Madam Deputy speaker, last week, the Home Office admitted that 17,000 people in the asylum system have disappeared. Their exact words. It’s hard to believe this. We don’t think we know where all these people are. Now. You might lose your car keys, you might lose your headphones, you might lose your marbles. How do you lose 17,000 people?

Deputy Speaker: Prime Minister,

Rishi Sunak: Deputy Speaker? I mean, on the topic of football teams, he used to describe this Rwanda Policy as immoral, and yet his football team has a visit Rwanda badge on the side of the arm.

Mark: Yeah. Did he answer the question? No. Yeah. So, two questions prior, Starmer had referred to Rishi’s team that he purports to support in soccer, Southampton. And he points out that they’ve been on a winning streak when they’ve won eleven games in a row. Unlike Rishi, who’s lost 17,000 people Starmer’s team incidentally is Arsenal and their shirts do indeed have visit Rwanda on the sleeve. on the visit Rwanda.com website, it says, Rwanda is Arsenal Football Club’s official tourism partner. So it’s money, basically.

Jim: They give them money to have their thing on the sleeve.

Mark: Yeah, but in two ways. It doesn’t answer the question. So it doesn’t answer the question. How do you lose 17,000 people? Why the fuck doesn’t your home office know where you’re supposed to be in control of the borders? Where are these people? Doesn’t answer that bit. And nor does it counter that Starmer’s assertion that the Tories deal with Rwanda is immoral with the ones that take asylum seekers from the UK is deeply flawed, unworkable and immoral. He just says, yeah, but the football team you support have got Rwanda on their shirts.

Jim: It’s very strange, I would say. I’m not convinced this is Bulverism as such. It’s definitely a red herring because it’s distracting from the point by just going off in a different direction completely and not talking about the question at all. It’s a very weird guilt by association as well, of suggesting that the football team you support takes money from a tourism group that wants to promote a country that we don’t think it’s moral to send our immigrants to. That’s circuitous at best.

Mark: Yeah, he says we’re immoral, but he supports. He’s not answering two questions. One about whether the deal is actually moral. How much is it costing? Where’s the 400 million that we spent already? What has that got us?

Jim: yeah, but crucially for this fallacy, he’s not explaining why Kier thinks it’s immoral or why Kier thinks that 17,000 people are missing.

Mark: He’s just saying it’s all very well. You say it’s immoral. Look over here.

Jim: Jingly keys.

Mark: Lasers dot on the wall all right, well, let’s try this one. Nigel Farage was deemed to be a pep. A politically exposed person by Coutts bank, who famously is the Queen’s Bank. So it’s kind of a Swiss bank, but I think it’s part of the NatWest Group. It’s a very select bank.

Jim: Posh place to have your money.

Mark: Yeah. And rather than carry the risk of him suddenly having no job at all in the political sphere, so he’s a politically exposed person and thus have no income and or get eaten by crocodiles on television, in the jungle, or, for them, run the risk of being associated with the far right views that he says out loud in public. They opted to close his account. So here’s Farage on his GB news show discussing the documents he got from a subject access data request to Coutts, and he reassures them that he is a good investment and he’s a gracious and understanding person with nothing to answer for extreme views wise. Yeah, no, he doesn’t do any of, uh. That.

Nigel Farage: The word Brexit is mentioned 86 times. I get the feeling the corporate banks will never forgive anybody involved with the campaign. And appallingly, the word Russia is mentioned 144 times. All part of the Russia hoax. The word racist is used twelve times. Well, I suppose we could have expected that from a group who were filled with malice and the very special kind of prejudice that you only get from the upper middle classes with metropolitan views.

Jim: What?

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: No, I mean, I’ll give you this one. Definitely, because he’s saying that the only reason he’s a racist person who is responsible for Brexit and too closely linked to Russia, is because of their metropolitan views.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: not because they’ve been paying a little bit of attention for the last ten years.

Mark: Yeah, for the upper middle classes with metropolitan views. The special kind of prejudice that’s reserved for the upper middle class.

Jim: Prejudice against racists.

Mark: Yes, exactly. So he is upper middle class with metropolitan views.

Jim: Yeah, but he’ll have a pint with you down the pub.

Mark: He’ll play that game, yeah. And the whole thing about metropolitan views, that’s kind of as opposed to extreme estuarine, rural views. Don’t know. this is the point at which I realized that Bulverism is basically, never trust a hippie. We know what those kinds of people are. So here’s the direct refutation of what they’re saying. They’re saying they’re closing down my account because they hold Metropolitan views. Speaking of hippies, here’s Mike Graham in October 2021, on his talk radio show, speaking with Cameron from the insulate Britain campaign, which is a cause devoted to pressuring the government to insulate Britain’s homes to help lower energy costs, keep voters warms and react to climate change. I think it’s fair to say that Mike’s not a fan.

Mike Graham: What do you do for a living, Cameron?

Cameron: I’m a carpenter.

Mike Graham: A carpenter, right. So how safe is that for the climate?

Cameron: Well, I work with timber, which is a much more sustainable material, rather than concrete.

Mike Graham: You work with trees that have been cut down then, don’t you?

Cameron: It’s a sustainable building practice.

Mike Graham: How is it sustainable if you’re killing trees?

Cameron: Because it’s regenerative. You can grow trees.

Mike Graham: Right? Well, you can grow all sorts of things, can’t you?

Cameron: Well, you can’t grow concrete.

Mike Graham: You can. [EXTREMELY LONG PAUSE WHILE CAMERON LOOKS AT MIKE IN DISBELIEF]  See you, Cameron. Cheerio. That was Cameron. he grows trees and then cuts them down and then makes things from them. Brilliant. Marvellous. I don’t think I ever want to talk to any of those people.

Mark: So the silence that followed the You can grow concrete. Was a genuine massive gap left by the aghast and amused Cameron.

Jim: I mean, what can you say to it? There is no answer to, you can grow concrete. You have to just look at the person and let them sit there and think about what they’ve just said.

Mark: And I think what’s happened is the kind of the background noise in Mike Graham’s head has risen to such a point where he’s thinking, oh, my God, I’ve got to get rid of him. Hoist by my own stupid petard. Yeah. So he just goes, like, cuts him off. And whilst not saying it in so many words, he’s intent on dismissing anything Cameron says because he didn’t think he ever wants to talk to any of those people.

Jim: Well, also because Cameron is the kind of person who will grow trees and cut them down.

Mark: Yeah, those people. And then grow more trees whilst he’s cutting it. So they’re planning to cut these ones down. So we’ll plant some others and in 15 years time they’ll be ready to cut down. Yeah. It’s not like that’s kind of been a management process for timber forever. Since farming. Since trees. Yeah. Wow. So he’s just dismissing anything those people say just because they are those people.

MARK’S FALLACY IN THE WILD STING

Mark: Yvonne Elliman there with I don’t know how to love him from Jesus Christ Superstar, which is the story of Boris Johnson at the COVID Inquiry.

Jim: And so in the fallacy in the wild we like to talk about the fallacy of the week from a non political perspective. And our first example this week comes from Friends.

Mark: Yay.

Jim: This is an episode where Joey’s moved out, Eddie’s moved in, and Chandler is missing his friend and they turn on Baywatch and chat over the phone while it’s on.

Joey: Can you believe they gave Stephanie skin cancer?

Chandler: I still can’t believe they promoted her to lieutenant.

Joey: You’re just saying that because you’re in love with Yasmine Bleeth.

Chandler: Well, how could anyone not be in love with Yasmine Bleeth?

Mark: You’re just saying that, uh. Oh God, that’s just reminding me of Eddie. Oh, Jesus.

Jim: Fruit drying psychopath.

Mark: Completely forgot about.

Jim: So, yeah Chandler is only saying that it’s unfair in some way that Stephanie was made a lieutenant because he’s in love with Yasmine Bleeth. Yeah, and I mean, clearly Stephanie deserved to be lieutenant. She’s way more responsible than Caroline. Just doesn’t. Wouldn’t make any sense to make Caroline lieutenant. But that’s the motivated reasoning that Chandler comes to that with. But Joey doesn’t address the claim, he doesn’t address Chandler’s incredulity that Stephanie deserved to be lieutenant. He just says, well, you’re just saying that because you love Yasmine Bleeth.

Mark: Yes, and fair enough. Chandler kind of comes back and said, well, yeah, that’s not an unreasonable assumption. Who wouldn’t be in love with kind of, in a way, he’s responding to Joey’s erroneous rebuttal and just saying, well, yeah, so he’s kind of neutralizing it. He’s saying right now, answer the proper question. Yeah.

Jim: So our second example comes from Sister Sister.

Jordan: You women always get so emotional over nothing.

Tamera: You women. Being a woman has nothing to do with it.

Jordan: You’re only saying that because you’re a woman.

Jim: So it’s very close to the original Bulverism of, uh. You’re only claiming that two sides of a triangle are bigger than the other one because you’re a man. And in this case, Jordan is claiming that the only reason she is saying that women don’t constantly get overemotional about everything is because she’s a woman. He’s not addressing her upset over that phrase, which obviously he should, as her boyfriend, first of all, not have said. And then second, recognize that and why she’s upset about it rather than just doubling down. and this actor, Deon Richmond, was Kenny on the Cosby Show. Rudy’s friend, exactly the same way, was like a six year old misogynist who was constantly… Because he had an older brother who didn’t give him good advice about women. And so he was constantly like, well, you’re not going to get married to anyone. And if you do, you’ll have to cook them meals and clean their stuff and that kind of stuff. And it was funny because he was young, but he’s the same guy. Why does he keep getting cast in these roles? That’s so weird.

Mark: What’s he done recently?

Jim: he’s a producer and actor still.

Mark: Okay. He’s not a kind of grouchy, older, middle aged guy who’s dispensing erroneous advice to his son.

Jim: I mean, there’s a lot. There’s a lot of stuff of his I haven’t seen. So I can’t say that every single character he plays has this view of women, but, yeah, I think so. Finally, we have a clip from Casablanca.

Rick: You have any idea what you’d have to look forward to if you stayed here? Nine chances out of ten, we’d both wind up at a concentration camp. Isn’t that true, Louis?

Louis: I’m afraid Major Strasser would insist.

Ilsa: You’re saying this only to make me go.

Rick: I’m saying it because it’s true.

Jim: So, yeah, Ilsa claims that the only reason he’s telling her they’re going to be in trouble with the Nazis is so that.

Mark: Just to make her go.

Jim: She’ll go with Victor. Yeah, which is probably true. I mean, this is the point at which he then goes into the whole you know, you’re part of his work. You’re what keeps him going. And what I have to do, you can’t be any part of. And he’s no good at being noble. But the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world and all of that kind of stuff. But, yeah, this whole speech is his attempt to convince her that actually what needs to happen is she needs to get on a plane with Victor. He needs to go off and fight the Nazis, and that’s the only way it’s all going to work. But rather than addressing the argument of them ending up in a concentration camp and, you know, we can flee from here, I’m sure that Louis can help us out with some exit visas and we’ve got other options.

Mark: There’s a fucking plane on the tarmac. We could go anywhere with it.

Jim: she instead addresses the reason he’s saying it, the reason he’s telling her that she’s in danger is because he’s trying to convince her to leave.

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 I made up. And Mark, and this week, our special guest, Ian, have to figure out which one is fake news.

Mark: Before you go any further, I’d just like to point out, Ian, that it’s all leveled against us. And you might accuse us, Jim, of saying that because we’re constantly trying to distract you. But that’s just the kind of thing that you would say, because you’re utterly biased when it comes to being even handed.

Ian Hawkins: Mark, I would say to you that I think you do really well in this, because what is the score?

Mark: You’re about 64 out of 127 currently.

Jim: Just over 50%.

Ian Hawkins: Just over 50%. But when you think about it, if this was at random, you’d be at 33%.

Jim: Yeah.

Ian Hawkins: So you are.

Mark:  You see, he’s been playing it down all this time. He’s saying, oh, yeah, you’re only like. As if it’s one on one. Right?

Jim: That’s exactly the kind of thing you would say, because you’re on Mark’s team.

Mark: In the spirit of this week’s fallacy. Yes.

Ian Hawkins: Mark, I would not let Jim push you around like this. I would say you’re doing far better than random.

Jim: Especially over the last, like, two months or so, Mark hasn’t missed one. insane run of good luck. Excellent work.

Mark: Insane.

Jim: Unprecedented, let’s put it that way.

Mark: Yeah.

Ian Hawkins: And I tell you what, I’m going to make a pledge now. Right? Because if there’s one thing I don’t like, it’s when people take the easy choice, which is whatever you choose, Mark, I will not go along with you. I’ll go with something else.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: Brave.

Mark: So we could get both of them wrong. We could do. That would be cool. Because there are three, so that’s. Yeah, well, good thinking.

Jim: There you go.

Mark: There’s also the act of a madman. Yeah. Right. Okay, well, yeah, lay it on us.

Jim: The quotes this week are separate incidents. And I could have picked from many others in which Trump claims big, strong people with tears in their eyes came up to him and said something lovely. So.

Mark: Mhm.

Jim: Statement number one. Just a little while ago, backstage, there were nine. Of the nine. Now, these were tough guys. These are seriously tough cookies. In fact, I looked at them and I said, I wouldn’t want to fight these guys. But of the nine, eight of them were crying. And I looked at the 9th, crying out of happiness, because they’re back. I looked at the 9th guy, I said, what’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you crying? I don’t cry, sir. I said, that’s okay.

Mark: Okay.

Jim: so that’s about a group of miners M-I-N-E-R-S because he’d recently reopened a mine or something.

Mark: Right? That’s why they’re back. Okay, I see, yeah.

Jim: Statement number two. Just today, a guy came up to me, a very, very big guy. This actually happens all the time. Big guy, military guy, army guy, Army uniform. He was a soldier, tears pouring down. He came up to me, said, sir, thank you, sir. You rebuilt our military. It was going to hell, and you rebuilt it. And he saluted me, tears coming down on his face. This big guy who probably never even cried when he was a baby.

Mark: Right. Okay. I like the fact that. Yeah, I’m a bit confused as to what his job is because he goes, big guy, military guy, army guy, Army uniform. He was a soldier. All right, thanks for clearing that up.

Ian Hawkins: You ever seen on social media where people go, I’m not going to do such and such because it’s gay. And then they say something completely innocuous. I’m not going to eat sourdough because it’s gay.

Mark: Right?

Ian Hawkins: And I’m so not gay, I didn’t even cry as a baby. Whose life is so gilded and fluffy?

Mark: If you’re in the military, don’t tell. Ask about sourdough.

Ian Hawkins: as a child, was he on this? Was he in some kind of incubator, sort of flotation tank?

Jim: he was already a big, muscly, big tough guy.

Mark: Military guy. Yeah. Camouflage nappies.

Ian Hawkins: There’s a khaki nappy joke in there. But I’m not going to do.

Mark: Nice.

Jim: Statement number three. He said, sir, thank you for saving our country. And I used to be surprised, because I’ve been hearing this for a year and a half. I used to be surprised. It’s a big statement. And they’re oftentimes crying. And they’re people that don’t cry. These are not criers. These are people that are real stalwarts, not crying. Nothing wrong with crying, but they often are crying, and I’ve heard it so much now. Ian, just to preserve the integrity of the game, we have to let mark guess first. otherwise he could…

Mark: And then, whatever. I guess Ian’s going to guess the opposite. Whatever the opposite of a triangle is.

Ian Hawkins: Okay. Because I’ve got in my mind, which I think is true, but I will stick to my guns.

Mark: And then when we’re both wrong, we can say what we, oh, what we should have said. Yeah. Well, I’m just wild about Harry. I’m just wondering, you see the big guy, military guy, army guy, army uniform. He was a soldier. Sounds a bit too much hyperbole. It could be a gym thing. However, the other one had a lot of. The first one there were nine of the nine. These are really, these are seriously lots of little Soto voce asides, which I don’t see that hasn’t helped me at all. I don’t know why I listened to myself. That’s not helped one bit. so hearing for years, see, the third one is sort of ordinary.

Jim: You think that, like, for a normal. For Trump, or for a normal person. No.

Mark: I mean, no, but compared with the other, yeah, for Trump, that’s quite normal, insofar as it doesn’t have little asides, quotes of other people, all that kind of stuff, and that sort of rundown of the military guy, army guy, Army poor now, sir. Thank you very. So probably never even cry when he was a baby is, I think, too good a joke for Trump. Okay, so on that basis, just wanton ignorance? I’m going to go for number two, is the one that you made up.

Jim: Okay.

Mark: Big guy, Military guy, Army guy, army uniform.

Ian Hawkins: This is good, because naturally I’ve put the word true and underlined it a couple of times on number two.

Mark: Oh, have you?

Ian Hawkins: And I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you why. Because I think that that repetition, when he’s telling a lie, he’s always putting in more, when people lie, they always put in more detail. And the more detail is the more you think you like a big guy, military guy, army uniform, wore this, did that, did that.

Mark: Ah.

Ian Hawkins: And he’s trying to paint a picture. So I’ve gone for number one because I think these nine tough guys, eight of them were in tears and one of them was not. I don’t think Trump would ever.

Mark: And the 9th one was.

Jim: Crying.

Mark: Oh, he has to. Just a little aside, he doesn’t cry.

Ian Hawkins: But I don’t think that he would ever admit. Even if you said, is it eight out of nine or nine out of nine? I don’t think he would go eight out of nine.

Mark: Right.

Ian Hawkins: So I’ve written false. So we’ve naturally divided. I didn’t have to invoke my fair play rule.

Mark: Get out of jail clause. Yeah.

Jim: So you both think that number three is real.

Mark: We do by process of elimination.

Jim: I’m going to start with that one.

Mark: Okay.

Jim: And number three, turns out, is real.

Donald Trump: He said, sir, thank you for saving our country. And I used to be surprised, because I’ve been hearing this for a year and a half. I used to be surprised. You know, it’s a big statement. And they’re oftentimes crying. And they’re people that don’t cry. These are not criers. These are people that are real stalwarts. They’re not crying. Nothing wrong with crying, but they often are crying. And I’ve heard it so much.

Jim: Yeah. So many people come up to him crying, thanking him for saving the country.

Mark: And these are the people that don’t cry. They’re not Criers.

Jim: No, he’s not crying.

Ian Hawkins: He’s So traumatized. This man is so damaged. Listen to him. He’s saying, there’s nothing wrong with crying. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. You wouldn’t catch me doing it. No. What have I got to be?

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: No. In the process of looking for these, I did find a couple of quotes of his from saying, first of all, he’s not A crier, but also he doesn’t like other people crying. he talked about John Boehner and Meatloaf when he was on Celebrity Apprentice, kind of sobbing uncontrollably. And he says, I don’t understand it. I don’t like it when people do ask.

Ian Hawkins: I have to ask Jim, after this recording, are you supported in any way emotionally?

Jim: I just go quietly cry by myself in a room.

Mark: He’s not a crier. He’s a stalwart. He’s not the kind of guy that cries. Yeah, because Jim is also he was professionally traumatized at the British Board of Film Certification, where they offered you trauma counseling, didn’t they? And you said, it’s fine. I know they’re just films. I know it’s just fiction.

Jim: Yeah. They put a psychologist in place for us in case we needed it. And that got out to the papers, who then put the headline that said, Dawn to Dusk Sex Puts Censors in Therapy.

Mark: Brilliant. Brilliant.

Ian Hawkins: Didn’t an artist make a 15 hours film of paint drying?

Jim: They did.

Ian Hawkins: You all had to sit through.

Jim: Just two people had to sit through it.

Mark: PG or something.

Jim: Suitable for all.

Mark: Suitable for all. Even if you’ve got.

Jim: Contains mild paint drying . Of the other two, Ian thinks number one is made up

Mark: So I think number two is made up by you.

Jim: Number two.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And I will reveal, yes, that number one is real.

Donald Trump: Just a little while ago, backstage, there were nine of the nine. Now, these were tough guys. These are really. These are seriously tough cookies. In fact, I looked at them, I said, I wouldn’t want to fight these guys. But of the nine, eight of them were crying. And I looked at the 9th crying out of happiness because they’re back. I looked at the 9th guy, said, what’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you crying? I don’t cry, sir. I said, that’s OK

Mark: Said I wouldn’t want to fight these guys. Like he’s capable of fighting anyone. these are tough guys. I only want to fight nine stone weaklings that I can possibly beat.

Ian Hawkins: I wouldn’t want to fight this guy. Donald, you can’t even fight your own past.

Mark: You can’t even win or fight with your hair.

Ian Hawkins: Yes, see, I had a traumatic childhood, and I dealt with that, ah. by the ingestion of alcohol to what I’m prepared to call a professional standard for 20 years. Okay, yeah, I’ve been sober for eight years. But every time I look at Donald Trump, who does not drink, I think maybe a beer or two. The only person I really harmed was myself. That is the one thing I cling to.

Jim: we have some social contestants on Patreon and Facebook who posted this just before we started recording. And we’ve got Renee, Will, and Nick on Patreon all thinking number three is fake. Renee and Will say it’s because they don’t think that he would know the word stalwarts. and oftentimes doesn’t sound like him either.

Ian Hawkins: He’d know the word stalwart because that’s what he was told by his father as a child.

Jim: You must be stalwart.

Mark: Yes. Oftentimes. You must be a stalwart.

Jim: Oftentimes.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And on Facebook, Andrew wishes for them all to be fake. Mike says, gut feeling number two. So, yeah, good. And Melanie says she thought it was number one because the fact that there might be nine big guys crying backstage at the time is a bit too kind of verifiable. Some people might look backstage and notice that there aren’t.

Mark: That doesn’t bother him.

Jim: No, he’s not bothered by that. but, yeah, that means that Mark continues his impressive run, gets another one in the wing column.

Mark: Fantastic. So you’re kind of pointing out, you see, I’ve realized that this is the equivalent for Jim of machine learning, because what he does is find out all those things that we kind of go, well, there’s the tell there, then next time he just stops using it. But that rundown, the big guy, military guy, army guy. You’re right, that is a Trumpian thick trope. When he does the. Yeah, he makes the lie more visually realistic.

Ian Hawkins: me and Melanie are a team of our own. And you know what? Trump having nine big, strong men delivered backstage to him is not what I expected on his rider.

Mark: Yeah, I think they were each carrying a different coloured M&M so that was fine.

Jim: And it’s time for the part of the show that this week, at least, is called Ian Hawkins is not a logical fallacy, because as you already heard in the fake news section, we have a special guest. Ian Hawkins is an author. Speaker, business journalist, comedy writer, stand up. And most importantly, was the writer and host of the QED Quiz this year, which was an excellent quiz. And I do like a quiz. It was a very good one, and we didn’t come first, but we did. All right.

Ian Hawkins: I can tell you what, Jim, you won a moral victory

Jim: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Mark: And despite not winning, you invited him on the show.

Jim: Yeah. Even though I felt slightly bitter about some of the questions. Yeah, it wasn’t really the questions, it was my answers, really, that were the problem in that they weren’t considered right. So, yeah. Ian, welcome to the show.

Ian Hawkins: Hello, Jim. That’s frightened me. First of all, I think I have to argue with the title of this about me not being a logical fallacy, because I suspect, having listened to your show for a bit now, I’m just a mess of them. A complete mess of logical fallacies and all kinds of things.

Jim: I think we all are, to lesser or greater extent. Yeah.

Ian Hawkins: I was sitting around a table, as I often do, as part of my job, and I said to this woman, I said, we never make a decision based on logic. It’s always about emotion. It’s very unlikely that you’ve ever made a decision based on the facts. And she said, well, I’m a property developer. That decision is always based on the fact. It’s, what property do I buy, what can I afford, and what is going to net me the most money? So I sit there and I do a spreadsheet. And I said, great. So you know how difficult it is to actually make a decision based on raw data? And I said, why is it that you want to have the best return on your money? Which is like a lot of question people often ask, but why do you want it? And she said, yeah, when my mum came to this country, she had nothing. And we grew up really poor, and I wanted to give her. And I was like, right. So completely emotional. You want to give your mum a nice retirement?

Mark: She didn’t say, well, no wonder you said that, because you’re a man, which is the subject of this week’s fallacy. Ah. But also the property development and the price of stuff is completely up in the air. Visa, vis.

Jim: Yeah, it’s all completely subjective, apparently. According to an expert witness.

Mark: Expert. Yeah. I lost the opportunity to come to the QED this year because I was playing a gig at somebody’s 60th birthday. Oh, the guitarist from my band. so I think I clashed. So what was the process like? Creating the quiz for a room full of skeptical thinkers and people that can see through magicians and know exactly what the answers are before you’ve even got to the second word in the question?

Ian Hawkins: It was tricky, but I really worry about quizzes when I write them. One of the things I do is a sports quiz. I’m the resident quiz host at the Ivy Club, and every year they have a sports quiz, and they fill the place with sports people. And I don’t like sport at all. So I never know what a good sports question is. Whether it’s, oh, who won the FA cup in 1994? I don’t know.

Mark: Yeah.

Ian Hawkins: And whether people that know sport would go, that’s easy, or that’s completely.

Mark: Yeah. Ah.

Ian Hawkins: And so for this one, I just crossed my fingers and hoped that being a little bit esoteric, and I tell you what, being a listener to the no such thing as a fish podcast saved my bacon on that one.

Mark: Right.

Ian Hawkins: Because you need something a bit quirky, you need something a bit sciency, you need something sports adjacent. and that was it, really. It was a bit of a hope for the best and try and carry it through with what I’m pleased to call a force of personality.

Jim: Well, it went down very well. And you hung around for the weekend, didn’t you? And did you get to go to some of the talks?

Ian Hawkins: I did. I’ve got one of the books on my desk being unreasonable, which I loved.

Mark: Okay.

Ian Hawkins: I knew that as soon as somebody said, buy my book. There’s no logic in that at all.

Mark: Yeah.

Ian Hawkins: I just go, yes, you’re brilliant.

Jim: I’ll buy your book.

Mark: So you hung around for the whole weekend, and was there a moment when you suddenly thought, oh, I think I might have found my tribe?

Ian Hawkins: I was at QED last year but I had a terrible time at QED. Not for the fault of the organizers or anything, but I had three members of my family died in that weekend.

Jim: Oh, my God.

Ian Hawkins: I went home to talk to my mum. They’re all elderly, but even so, three in a weekend is a bit much. I got to Sunday morning, and I thought, I can’t be here.

Mark: right.

Ian Hawkins: Yeah, I can’t make small talk, so I thought, I promised myself I would come.

Mark: That’s fine, because neither can anybody else. Sorry, listeners.

Ian Hawkins: I’ve made a couple of good friends, and it was quite nice to go in on, you know, after having not seen them for a year, walk into the bar and go, oh, hello.

Mark: Yeah, that was quite.

Jim: I mean, I hope you’ll be back another time because we’ll definitely be there. Well, I’ll definitely be there. Mark is very flighty about these things.

Ian Hawkins: Can we talk a little bit about the strange Nature of podcast fame?

Jim: Absolutely.

Ian Hawkins: Which you two will be basking in right now. Do you find people feel intimidated by the fact that they put you in their ears for an hour every week?

Jim: We found it absolutely fascinating because we had. I mean, basically, there’s a number of the people there, like the puzzle in a thunderstorm guys, and the knowledge fight guys, people like that.

Ian Hawkins: I found myself weirdly starstruck by running into Heath.

Mark: Absolutely right.

Jim: So I listened to them. I’ve been listening to them for years, and I felt exactly that. I was like, no, I couldn’t even bring myself to go and talk to them until the Sunday.

Mark: Yeah, there was a… There he is.

Jim: and, yeah, we did have a couple of people come out to us and say the same thing.

Ian Hawkins: Fanboy.

Mark: Yeah.

Ian Hawkins: I’ll tell you an absolutely true story, right. A friend of mine is a reasonably big comedian and said, oh, I’m doing QI. Do you want to come to QI and see the recording? So I said, yeah, of course. We’d love to. So went to QI, and afterwards he said, come on down, come and we’ll sit in the green room. We’ll have a drink. So we go down to the green room and I’m with my partner, and we go in and we have a drink, and then in walks the rest of the panel. So my other half then starts chitchatting to Sandi Toksvig. Right. And having a lovely conversation. I’m breezing around, and then in through the door walks Anna Ptaszynski from no such thing as a Fish podcast, which we listen to a lot. And I said, hey, why don’t we go and talk to Anna Ptaszynski? And my partner just went, oh, no.

Mark: I’d be.

Ian Hawkins: So maybe.

Mark: Maybe you’re right. Maybe when you know people that have us in their ears, maybe there’s something about the intimacy of.

Jim: It’s curiously personal, isn’t it? And there’s also a tendency for podcasters to reveal quite a lot about themselves and their lives and all of that kind of stuff. So you really feel like you know people.

Ian Hawkins: Yeah. It’s the difference between doing telly and radio and Telly, you know that you’re talking to millions of people, and if you do radio, you’re talking to one person. Terry Wogan was once asked, how many listeners do you have? I think the queen asked him, she said, how many listeners do you have? And Terry just went, oh, just the one, m man. Just the one. And I used to do a radio show on BBC Three counties, and I would always refer to my dear listener. And I think, mhm, once or twice. That was literally true. But I always thought of it as just one person on the other side.

Mark: That nearly cued Jim’s Terry Wogan impression.

Jim: Yeah, any opportunity. I had a friend who was a BBC News reporter, and he would do outside broadcasts and say the only way he could get through it was just to pretend that the transmitter was down, the camera was broken. He was just talking to the cameraman. No one’s going to see this. This is fine. This is just me in a field.

Mark: Yeah. With an entire crew. But I think the notion that we’re broadcasting to one person. Well, in fact, I think even in a podcast that it just happens that we’re chatting to each other about all sorts of stuff, but it just so happens that we’re recording it. So we are constantly surprised when downloads hit more than double figures and that people come up to us and say, oh, yeah, I’ve been looking for you. Which happened last time we were both at QED. Somebody came up to us wearing the fallacious Trump T shirt and sort of announced himself. Finally found you, or finally found. That’s our T-shirt. There was a surprise and a joy for, uh.

Jim: Mean, I’m not good at meeting people and making small talk, like starting a conversation. I’m terrible at it. I absolutely loved the fact that people came up to me and talked to me, because I like having the conversations and meeting people. I just don’t want to start that process.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So that really works for me, I suppose.

Ian Hawkins: Do you ever feel that you’ve become an authority and that what you say kind of carries more weight suddenly?

Jim: Oh, we’re one of the world’s leading authorities? According to one podcast interview we did.

Mark: Yeah, somebody interviewed us and called us that. as well as making films, I teach filmmaking. And part of the that moment of nervousness when you go into a classroom or into a session when you’re about to start, you’ve got to believe that you’re an expert. You got to behave like you’re an expert. And in a way you are, because you know stuff that they don’t. So you just kind of.

Ian Hawkins: Audiences do not want to be given any ambiguity about that whatsoever. I once did an interview where for square Mile, and I’ve been a speaker coach for a long time. So I coach people on how to stand on stage and deliver speeches. And they said, who have you coached? And I said, well, quite a few big names, some Olympians, some CEOs, and a cabinet minister who’s. I’m not going to tell you who it is because they asked me not to. And that’s fine, because they’re really shit at public speaking.

Jim: They’re terrible.

Ian Hawkins: I don’t want that reputation to follow me.

Mark: Yeah.

Ian Hawkins: And in the interview, it came out as Ian Hawkins is the UK’s most trusted speaker coach.

Jim: There you go.

Mark: Nice.

Ian Hawkins: I thought. Yeah, well, I don’t know if I believe that, but I’ll have it.

Jim: Absolutely.

Ian Hawkins: I’ll put it everywhere.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: And you can always counter any argument by saying I’m entitled to my opinion.

Ian Hawkins: Exactly.

Mark: Oh, yeah.

Ian Hawkins: And the other thing is, because I say there’s three rules of good communication. Right. The first one is to find out what the audience needs and make sure you deliver it. But you have to deliver it as only you can deliver it. So you’re authentic. So you’re authentic and you’re being yourself. And the last thing is you do have to be in charge. So you have to be absolutely in charge of everything you talk about, and you have to be in charge of the space. So once you’ve nailed those three things, everything else follows. And if somebody says you’re wrong about this, you can turn it to say, well, that’s my authentic experience.

Mark: Yeah. Yes.

Ian Hawkins: Which gives me the authority.

Jim: Yeah. And you’ve written about changing minds through stories rather than through data, as you mentioned. People don’t change their minds through data.

Ian Hawkins: Yeah. Because stories are this. Ah, I think, right. Humans have got this brilliant way of seeing patterns and seeing shapes and imposing shapes and patterns on things. So you see a shape in the clouds and you go, oh, looks like a face. In fact, it looks like my grandma. Uh huh. Or it looks like a dragon or whatever. So we’re really good at imposing patterns on the world. And when we look back on stuff you must have been in the situation where somebody says, what happened to you last weekend? And you say, oh, this happened. And then the friend you’re with says, no, it wasn’t quite like that. It happened like this. And somebody else goes, no, this happened. And you all three were at the same place or the same thing, but you’ve all imposed a slightly different narrative on it.

Mark: Okay?

Ian Hawkins: And what it is is your memories. And your brain imposes this pattern on your memories and reorders it and reshapes it into a story that puts you in the heart of the action. Your brain is not a recording device. It’s a pattern seeking device before all other things. So if you want to Create change, and we all know that change is really hard, a story is a set of data with a very specific pattern, a beginning, a middle and an end. And if you’re at the end of your story and you say, this is where we’ve ended up, this is how things are. You cannot create change. It’s impossible. You’re at the end of it. And the only way to change is to put yourself right at the beginning of a story. Because every story in the world is about change. There’s a crisis, you make a decision about it, and the crisis is resolved. Okay, so when you go into your office, this is me doing my sales pitch, and you’re trying to introduce a new piece of technology or a new process or whatever, and people say, no, but we’ve always done it like this. Change is really difficult because they do not see that they’re actually at the beginning of a story where that new thing comes in, and you have to get people understanding that a decision lies ahead of them.

Mark: So in the way that one’s brain orders things into patterns, is that based on past experience? So what determines how your brain sorts things into patterns? Because we have been. Here’s my neat segue. We have been looking at, as part of our kind of sister program for the patrons. We’ve been looking at Mary Trump’s book about Donald Trump. And it’s basically a big. It’s a very narrative storytelling kind of way, which is very compelling. But her thesis is that Donald Trump is the way that he is because of his dad. Yeah.

Jim: Because she’s a clinical psychologist as well as his niece.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So she’s kind of looking at the pathology of Trump

Ian Hawkins: But, I mean, trauma is a really interesting thing because we can go through all kinds of stuff, but if we don’t have agency, then it becomes trauma. Right. So, yeah, I always think of how happy I was to get quite badly hurt if I was going out and playing a good game of rugby at school. But an injury that was inflicted on me that I had no choice over would be much more traumatic. So I spent most of my childhood in hospital, and I was born with heart disease. And I had a long and very difficult time in hospital getting my heart fixed. And it was a time I was born when the chances of survival from what I’ve got were not good. it was low percentages. And the idea was, oh, he seems to be walking around okay at the moment, so we won’t fix it unless there’s a problem. Spoiler alert, there was a problem. And when I left the hospital, people said, you’ve got a great story. You’re a survivor. And, of course, I wasn’t really a survivor. All I had done was be entertained while the medical profession did their business, and my body healed itself, and I had nothing to do with it. Long, long trauma and the long tail of that, which I will not bring the mood down with lots of very self destructive behavior. But then COVID came along, and I found myself back in hospital, back having all the symptoms of my heart not working properly, back having trouble breathing, all of that. But this time I had agency and I sat there and it was 03:00 in the morning. And I seriously thought I, ah, was going to be permanently disabled by COVID sitting in Hospital thinking, this is it. You probably got 6 hours of solid work in you per week, if you’re lucky, rather than 40. So what are you going to do with that 6 hours? The only way you can keep the lights on and keep paying the mortgage is by making sure you do something really high value to the top of your talent in those 6 hours. So I started a business. Uh huh. It’s 03:00 in the morning. I got my iPad out, I built a website, and I built a business there and then because I knew it was the only way to keep the lights on newsflash I.

Mark: Got better, but fab, because you’ve only been.

Ian Hawkins: Working 6 hours a week ever since. It turns out the six hour dream was just that and was probably a result of being slightly deoxygenated. But again, you wonder what the other perception was. I sat in that Hospital bed, and there are three other guys there, and there’s one waiting for a bypass, one on end of life, and one who was completely away with the fairies. And I did think, as somebody walking past would go, who’s that young man among all those sick old people? And then I thought, maybe that’s not what they’re thinking. Maybe they’re thinking, four blokes in there, God’s waiting room. That don’t look good. Yeah, it was a real slap in the face to think, actually, I look terrible.

Mark: But also, you kind of touched upon that. You likened the flawed and traumatized individuals to the great and the good of our leadership. politically speaking I use the term advisedly because we’ve learned that about Trump. I mean, is there a correlation between flawed individuals and their outrageous coping mechanisms? I’m thinking of Eton educated Bullyington Club members and their popularity as leaders, or their sense that they can be leaders, even though the latest tranche of the COVID inquiry is, by their own admission, pointing out that they’re all, well, yeah, we had no idea what we’re doing.

Ian Hawkins: It’s the incompetence that gets me.

Mark: Right.

Ian Hawkins: who do I not like politically? Thatcher. Right.

Mark: Fine.

Ian Hawkins: Was she competent? Yes. Did she do what she set out to achieve? Yes. Without wanting to do a sort of Kier Starmer. Here you can go. If nothing else, the core business of the UK was kind of protected during Thatcher.

Mark: Okay.

Ian Hawkins: I think that what they did was they looked at this age of spin with Blair and they went, oh, good. Reality is totally plastic. You can do with it whatever you like. And every time Johnson says something, you go, oh, you’re just telling me what you think will convince me, not what is true, but what you think will convince me what will make a convincing argument. You see it in the papers and you go, that’s not an argument. That’s completely not an argument. But you’re saying it because it’s the thing that you think is the fig leaf that will work. And for me, the one that I cannot get it out of my head is when Dominic Cummings went to Barnard Castle to test his eyesight and it was Nick Ferrari talking to and he says, do you ever do that? Do you ever do that to test your eyesight? And Michael Gove goes, and in that moment, you can see that Gove knows that he’s not telling the truth. And he knows that Dominic Cummings is not telling the truth. And not only does he know that he’s not telling the truth, he knows that Nick Ferrari knows he’s not telling the truth and that the audience at home does not think he is telling the truth. But he is playing this game that as long as I say these words, as long as I say it is acceptable to get into a car and drive it to test your eyesight, that that is enough. It doesn’t matter how outrageous the lie, but as long as we all keep.

Mark: Saying it and all keep saying, remain.

Jim: In office, it’s like they think they found a cheat code for reality, where it’s just, yeah, this isn’t how it works. We all know this isn’t how it works. But we’ll say it, it’ll be fine.

Mark: And the thing is, we all know, and we all know the people listening and you think, who are they? Because they refer to them often as the British people. That was Braverman and Patel. And now outrageous immigration policies are fulfilling the will of the people. Which people?

Ian Hawkins: This is the thing you can put in the place of Barnard Castle, you can put absolutely anything. I’ve seen people argue, why are we looking after all these immigrants when we’ve got homeless people? You think, well, what is it that makes you think the government cares about homeless people?

Mark: Yeah.

Ian Hawkins: What is it that makes you think, oh, we would love to give homeless people money. We’d love to help. Single mums just can’t afford it

Jim: because Of all the immigrants.

Mark: Because coming over here, being homeless or taking up our park benches or trans people.

Ian Hawkins: Now, the trans debate is something I don’t really want to get into, because it’s about people’s personal lives. And you want to go, right. So should trans people be involved in sport? And you go, well, sitting back from it, I don’t know, but I’m not sure how it can be worked out. Probably by, for instance, in rugby, you get the rugby people to talk about it. And that’s probably quite a good way of sorting out whether or not trans women should be playing in women’s sports. Front page of the newspaper is probably not the best way to do it. Liz Truss saying, let’s ban puberty blockers for kids.

Mark: right.

Ian Hawkins: Is there any other area of medicine I’d like Liz Truss to start looking at.

Mark: Yeah, exactly. Because she did so well in economics and politics. So why not let her have a go at that? After all, Matt Hancock did a fabulous job. They’re all terrific experts.

Ian Hawkins: You see, I’m not saying that I would have made a better fist of the economy if you left me in charge of it for 49 days. I’m not saying I’d do better. What I’m saying is that after I’d broken it, I might sit down and say, do you know what, Ian? Stick to the quizzes. I’ll not do that again. This isn’t your forte. And instead, she’s done a book called about how to Save the West. The war on woke starts here. And you go, right, okay. page one has to be a definition of woke.

Mark: Yeah, well, that’s. And I went to see Stuart Lee doing his snowflake tour, and he was talking about wokery and snowflake ens, and he kind of did this definition of caring about other people, allowing other people to have their own lifestyles. If that’s what being a snowflake is, then I’m a know quite happy to be that. Or as Farage said on this week’s episode, people with metropolitan views.

Ian Hawkins: I don’t know what that means. When you’re being told that you’re part of a metropolitan elite that denigrates, leave voters at my fancy pants dinner parties. I just thought, I don’t have fancy pants dinner parties. I am a metropolitan. Yeah, but in what world are these eaten? What world is Jacob Rees Mogg not part of the Metropolitan elite?

Mark: Yes, but I am telling me that, well, you know, in exactly the same way of redefining experts as Michael Gove famously did when he told us that we were all fed up with experts. Yeah.

Ian Hawkins: As a man who’s had open heart surgery. I like experts.

Jim: Yeah, experts are great.

Ian Hawkins: I’m not a great believer in the School of Life. If you get struck down with appendicitis and I offer to do you know, whip out your appendix.

Mark: No.

Ian Hawkins: I would pause. I would say no. Ian, let’s see if there is another way through this.

Jim: I think part of the problem is that that’s the entire system of cabinet ministers is they’re all put in positions of being in charge of areas they have absolutely no expertise in and then shuffled randomly into other areas they have no expertise in. So that’s what they think is the way to…

Mark: I think if they show any kind of ability and of they get shuffled anyway. Who was Rick Wallace, who was actually quite a good defense minister. They said, well, we’re going to move you out of defense. Well, not fucking doing anything else. I’ll go then, because I’m really good at this.

Ian Hawkins: James Cleverly has been castigated in the House of Commons this week because he’s not on top of his brief. and part of me goes, he’s only been in the job two weeks. I mean, I was still figuring out where the coffee machine was.

Mark: When I don’t leave it too long. Like Liz Truss, we think, well, she’s only been in the job 44 days. Yeah, that’s long enough. That’s long enough.

Ian Hawkins: By the way, that’s not me defending James Cleverly. That is me criticizing the whole system that goes. You were foreign Minister, weren’t you? Why don’t you have a jolly good go at the Home Office?

Jim: Yeah, have a go. Well, Ian you’ve agreed to stick around for the next section of stories we don’t have time to talk about. But for now, if people want to find out more about you, where’s the best place for them to go?

Ian Hawkins: Best place to find me is Mr-Hawkins.com. That’s where all my shtick is.

Mark: Excellent.

Jim: Thank you very much for joining us.

Ian Hawkins: thank you very much indeed for having me, Mark, Jim, it’s a pleasure.

Mark: Pleasure is all ours. And finally, some things we really don’t. Have time to talk about.

Jim: Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is the latest to join the exodus of over 30 Senators and Congresspeople who have announced their decision not to run for re-election next year, but Kevin isn’t waiting until the election, vowing to leave Congress by the end of the month. Of course, every Exodus must have a Moses, and new House Speaker Mike Johnson announced this week that God chose him to be the new Moses in a series of late night conversations he had with the creator of the Universe himself. Not sure I love the idea of power being given to people who think they’re on a mission from God. Much as I love the Blues Brothers, I wouldn’t want them to be House Speaker either. But perhaps I was a bit hasty in assuming that Mike wouldn’t reach across the aisle. After all, he explained on Tuesday that the reason it was taking a little longer than expected to release all the January 6th footage is because “we have to blur some faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ,” and I think it’s very kind of him to commit obstruction of justice to help all the Antifa, BLM and FBI folk who dressed up as Trump supporters and attacked the Capitol that day. His office later clarified that of course the DOJ already has all the unblurred footage, so Mike is just trying to make sure members of the public can’t help them identify criminals. That’s OK then, much less obstructy.

Ian Hawkins: He’s such an idiot. The New York Supreme Court judge overseeing Donald Trump’s fraud trial has reinstated a gagging order in a bid to prevent the former president from commenting on the case on social media. So that’s the last we’ll be hearing from the Donald for a while – sorry, my mistake, seconds later, he posted a screed of messages on Truth Social whining that he wasn’t getting a fair trial and that the judge’s wife was ‘almost as out of control as he is’. Because if anyone is in control, it’s walking id Donald J Trump, the inevitable result of a child who once won a shard of parental affection by exaggerating the truth and who has spent the last 75 years repeating the pattern in the desperate hope of filling the aching void. Parents, stop listening to this podcast, tell your children they are good enough, don’t let this happen again. As to whether the trial is fair or not, listeners outside the US should bear in mind that the American legal process is a complex and carefully balanced system of claim, counter claim and Trump queering the pitch by placing full page adverts calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five – who it turned out were wrongly accused of murder. They were black, by the way, no reason for mentioning it, just making up the word count.

Mark: Remember when all looked like it wasn’t going in Trump’s favour election wise and how it seemed such a good idea to simply come up with “alternative” election officials who’d just say “Yeah he won” “ We counted everything and did all that stuff and sho nuff the orange dude won” Of course it didn’t matter that they were fake cos when Trump got in he’d simply overlook it all and call it legit. Weeee-eelll seems like the latest bunch of six electors who falsely submitted documents claiming that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election in Nevada  have just been handed an indictment by a grand jury. The grand jury charged the fake electors on two felony counts, including offering a false instrument to be filed, registered or recorded in public office — in this case, filing false election certificates — as well as forgery. All familiar things to us on the outside of Trump’s camp – and to be fair normal business practice within it too. This adds to felony charges against 16 false electors announced in Michigan and this summer, Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis (D) brought charges against fake electors as part of a larger indictment against Trump and his allies. Seeing the writing on the wall fake electors in Wisconsin agreed to withdraw their erroneous filings pertaining to the 2020 election and publicly acknowledged that Joe Biden won the presidency after reaching a settlement with Democratic voters in a civil lawsuit. Better late than never I guess, let’s see who’s the first to be called fake by the GOP when the Dems win things they’re not expected to in 2024.

Jim: Testimony in Trump’s NY civil fraud trial is nearing the end, with Trump’s final expert witness taking the stand on Thursday. NYU Sterns accounting professor Eli Bartov testified that “there is no evidence whatsoever of any accounting fraud.” Which, to be fair, is what you’d expect from a defense witness, even one picked and prepped by legal heavyweights like Alina Habba. When questioned about specifics, like the fact that financial statements valued Trump’s Manhattan apartment at $80 in 2011 and $180m in 2012, Bartov chalked it up to an innocent error, saying that it’s not fraud because if Trump meant to commit fraud by inflating the value of his apartment, he would have made some effort to conceal it. Because as we all know, if you just walk up to someone, lock eyes with them, reach into their pocket and take their wallet, that’s not a crime, because if you were stealing from them, you’d make some effort to hide it. Committing crimes in plain sight is Trump’s whole thing, just like Rudy’s whole thing is butt-dialling reporters and confessing to crimes on Trump’s behalf. Bartov was similarly sanguine about the same apartment suddenly growing to three times its normal size in financial statements a few years later, accompanied by another hike in value to $327m, and presumably, felt the other 200+ false valuations cited by Attorney General Letitia James were also the kind of inevitable mistakes that happen when preparing financial documents. What could lead a respected accounting professor to give such benefit of the doubt to such massive errors? In I’m sure entirely unrelated news, Bartov also testified that he had spent around 650 hours working on Trump’s behalf, at an hourly rate of $1,350, adding up to almost $900k in fees. I can see why the Trump team chose him, because if you want someone to testify about the subjectivity of financial valuations, choosing an expert who values their own work at two and a half times the average expert witness rate in NY is probably the way to go.

Mark: And then they can write that off against tax, even though they’re not going to pay him because Trump never pays lawyers.

Ian Hawkins: Trump, like crime, never pays. Yeah, It’s very hard to tell if someone is gay or not, but one big giveaway is that they co-found a lobbying group that gets virulently homophobic legislation on to the few remaining unburned books in America. And so it was revealed that Bridget Ziegler, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, enjoyed three years of hot girl-on-girl action as part of an MFF menage a trois with her husband Christian. The Zeiglers’ hypocrisy is said to be breathtaking, but not so breathtaking as the tender yet assured touch of another woman during the commercial breaks on Bake Off. It’s also overshadowed the real story which is that Christian is accused of sexual assault, though presumably he’d argue that treating women like they only exist for his gratification fits squarely inside the Biblical definition of family values while stuff like “consentual fun with another adult” doesn’t. It’s a sad fact that the bad behaviour of a man is less of a story than a legal relationship between consenting adults, but that’s the society the Zieglers were instrumental in building so … meh. This whole scandal could’ve been avoided if they’d both minded their own fucking business. Still – bisexual erasure is a real problem in the community, and I for one can’t wait to see Bridget and her supportive husband stop chucking gay people under the bus, and instead, get on the bus, wave a rainbow flag and hope that none of the hot girls on the Pride route recognise them. I actually live near a church that holds regular conversion services. I know because every Thursday, the Grindr app on my phone crashes.

Mark: There’s something about the act of paying money back to those in your family that have loaned you it, that acknowledges their helping you out but also repays their kindness by showing them how responsibly you took their help, you didn’t just take the cash and blow it and then ask for some more knowing full well they’’d give you it cos your like a member of the Trump family or something. So when James Comer noticed Hunter’s bank statements had repeated regular “illicit” payments to his father, Joe Biden. It didn’t occur to him that the documents likely showed repayments for a truck. Comer – from the school of Donald Trump getting money from Fred Trump with no word of thanks just grunts of entitlement claimed no one in his family repays him after he loans money. “When my son needs help, or my daughter, who’s in college, needs it, I just give her money. Nobody ever pays me back!” Comer said. You bet yo ass he’s storing that up to guilt them in his dotage! So when the Biden’s just behave like normal people Comer thinks “You can loan people money. If they pay you back, then you benefited directly from the influence-peddling!” adamant that Hunter paying his father back in any form meant Biden had benefited from his son’s overseas business. And of course we’ll gloss over Comer making no mention of his own business deals with his brother, which reportedly include Comer loaning his brother Chad $200,000 in 2019. His brother repaid him through land swaps. No cos that doesn’t count, hell no Dem Comer knows even owns  a truck unless its one of them ghost buses that turned up on Jan 6th with FBI Dem Woke Antifa dressed as Republicans on them.

Jim: It’s very easy to assume that when Republicans call themselves pro-life while enacting draconian laws against abortion, their motives aren’t so much about life as about controlling women. One of the reasons that is so easy to assume is because it’s objectively obvious any time they’re required to show their working. This week, there was a brief moment of hope in Texas, of all places, when Travis County District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble ruled that Dallas resident Kate Cox could have an abortion. Kate and her husband desperately want a baby, but discovered at 20 weeks that their fetus has a chromosomal abnormality which is almost always fatal before or shortly after birth. Partly because Kate has had two prior c-sections, her doctors say “continuing the pregnancy puts her at high risk for severe complications threatening her life and future fertility.” Of course, if Republicans were truly pro-life, they would see that risking the life and fertility of a mother of two who wants another baby is the exact wrong thing to do. But on top of being staggeringly corrupt and unfit for office, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is a fucking monster, so he immediately announced that regardless of the judge’s ruling he would prosecute any doctors or anyone else who helps Kate get an abortion, and on Friday night the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court issued an order temporarily halting the lower court’s decision while they consider the case. I know there weren’t any jokes in this bit, but sometimes you just have to rant. Fuck Ken Paxton.

Ian Hawkins: On a lighter note, Liz Truss launched a bid to prevent harm to women and children which is a nicer way of saying ‘empower the state to proactively bully, demean and deny medical care to vulnerable and isolated children’ – in a private members bill this week. Liz says it’s common sense to hold off puberty blocking drugs until after someone’s gone through puberty, showing that when it comes to common sense, she’s ready to work the same magic as she did on the nation’s mortgage repayments. Despite everything, I still hold a soft spot in my heart for Liz Truss for the way she kept Boris Johnson away from a formal role in the Queen’s funeral, stumbling through a Bible reading with all the panache of a tired six year old. It coulda been him. On a personal note, I was on stage in Paris when Liz Truss resigned as Prime Minister. I noticed this chuckle go around the room and asked what was going on and was told “Your PM has resigned.” That was the day I learned the French word for schadenfreude is schadenfreude.

Mark: So, yes, it’s been another depressing week in British politics. James Cleverly the new Home Secretary turns out to be just like the old Home Secretaries, bit sweary, completely batshit crazy for Rwanda and determined to change the law to ensure that the tens of millions spent with Rwanda isn’t wasted any more than it clearly has been. The Supreme Court had ruled that the deal to send asylum seekers to Rwanda wasn’t lawful because Rwanda wasn’t a safe place to be, James Cleverly thought he could get round that by simply passing a bill that said that Rwanda was indeed a safe place. This from the government who denies that if people say they are a man or a woman that they are, and if they say they are genuine asylum seekers then they are foreign criminals looking to play the system. Meanwhile Rishi Sunak got pissed off at the Greek Prime Minister who met with Starmer first and consequently said I’m not playing and that he’s not gonna let the Greeks have their marbles back, despite laws going back to the dawn of democracy itself saying that they are theirs. The Greeks were last seen craning Stonehenge away to a museum in Athens for safe-keeping.

Ian Hawkins: I’d noticed a factual error when you said James Cleverly thought, no, he didn’t.

Jim: Oh, yeah. So that’s all the bad arguments and faulty reasoning we have time for this week. You’ll find the show notes at fallacioustrump.com, and if you hear Trump say something stupid and want to ask if it’s a fallacy, our contact details are on the contact page.

Mark: If you think we’ve used 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 and 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 Tomsik, Renee Z, Schmootz, Mark Reiche and Amber R. Buchanan, who told us when we met her at QED, we can just call her Amber, though another listener recognized her at QED this year because we kept using her full name all the time. And our true Scotsman level patrons, Melissa Sytek, Stephen Bickle, Janet Yuetter, Kaz Toohey, Andrew Hauck, and our top Patron… Loren! Thank you ever so much for being our patrons and continuing to support the show. And thank you, too, to our very special guest, Ian Hawkins, who’s been fab.

Jim: You can connect with awesome people as well as us and other listeners in the Facebook group at facebook.com/groups/fallacioustrump. Ian, are you in the Facebook group yet?

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.