15 Apr Jingoism Fallacy – FT#172
Show Notes
The Jingoism Fallacy occurs when someone attempts to appeal to patriotic emotions rather than reason to persuade others.
Trump
We started out by discussing this Truth Social post by Trump:
Then we looked at another one of Trump’s euphemistically transphobic Executive Orders
And finally we talked about Dr. Carole Lieberman’s patriotic defense of Trump’s not-State-of-the-Union speech:
Mark’s British Politics Corner
Mark talked about Kier Starmer claiming he’s patriotic:
He followed that up by talking about Nigel Farage questioning Rishi Sunak’s patriotism:
Then he talked about Boris’s uber-patriotic ad for Brexit:
Next, he looked at Nigel Farage’s insane defense of British history:
And he finished with Laurence Fox’s appeal to the flag:
Fallacy in the Wild
In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from Malcolm in the Middle:
Then we discussed this clip from Dinosaurs:
And we finished up with this clip from Cheers:
Fake News
Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:
- You have a lot of applications for approvals for power plants which are going to really power the… the regular plants and they’re going to be right next to each other. Because we can’t rely on our grid. It’s old and it’s tired and it’s, you know, very… very subject to being attacked whether by rain or by bombs or by anything else.
- People can’t believe when I tell them, they say “Sir, I didn’t have any idea that was happening”, but it is happening. Every day the power plants are under threat, but this is part of why we have to have more, and in more places – in some places in the same places because the ones that are already there aren’t really producing any more.
- We’re letting people build their own power plants and these are – a lot of them being built, with the AI, and beyond the AI. Chips. And we’re letting them build their own power and… never been done before and we’re going to get it done quickly and approved quickly. As part of a plant they’ll have a – sort of be their own power company.
Mark got it right this week, and is on 51%!
Tariffs on penguins are not a logical fallacy
We talked about all the craziest aspects of Trump’s “liberation day” tariff debacle.
The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about
- When you base your immigration policy on the old Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” model, it’s inevitable that you’re going to make a few mistakes, but it’s OK, because they’ll just work themselves out with the help of the courts and it’s not like any of the people who matter are going to have their lives disrupted in any way, just – you know, those people. Like, say, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant who was legally living in Maryland with his wife and 5 year old son who are both US citizens. Back in 2019 he was picked up by police and accused of being an MS13 member based partly on the fact that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie. The judge in that case not only ruled that he wasn’t a member of the gang, but granted him “withholding of removal” status to block any future deportation to El Salvador because he in fact had previously testified against another gang who had attempted to recruit him, and if he was sent back he would be in danger. When they picked him up in March this year, ICE were apparently aware of this status, and still deported Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, where he was put in a maximum security prison with gang members. When it was challenged in court, the Trump administration did admit that his deportation was an administrative error, and immediately set about bringing him back to the US. Oh, sorry, I read that wrong. That should be “fought tooth and nail to keep him in the dangerous prison for terrorists even though they accept he’s innocent”. In District Court, the Justice Department argued that the court had no jurisdiction to order his return because he was no longer in US custody. Abrego Garcia’s lawyer quite reasonably pointed out that if this was the case then no immigration laws mean anything because “the government can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done”. The judge ordered the government to get him back and the Justice Department lawyer was fired because he admitted the deportation had been a mistake. Meanwhile, the DOJ appealed to the Fourth Circuit to keep the innocent man in a notoriously brutal foreign prison. The Fourth Circuit judges denied the appeal, calling it “unconscionable”, so they appealed to the fucking US Supreme Court who ruled unanimously that he should be returned to the USA. Unanimously. This Supreme Court. Even Clarence Thomas. Do you know who badly you have to have screwed up as a Republican that even Clarence Thomas won’t cover for you? So hopefully he’ll be home soon, but he’s damn sure not the only one. It’s almost like there needs to be some kind of due process to make sure this shit doesn’t happen.
- “If it crosses the U.S border illegally it’s our job to Stop it – learn more about our mission at ice.gov” so ran a graphic promotion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement on X. Fair enough, short and succinct, except the words ran atop graphic stencilled words behind listing not only People Money Products but Ideas! As I’m sure we’ve mentioned before, the fiction novel 1984 turned 75 years-old last year and the worst crime of all committed by Winston Smith among others is of course thought-crime. Coming over here, thinking those thoughts, what do they think they are thinking? The rapidly-taken-down post by ICE comes a day after the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency, announced it would be surveilling the social media of foreign students and immigrants applying for permanent status or other immigration benefits to the United States for alleged antisemitic activity, in a push to “protect the homeland from extremists” and “terrorist sympathizers.” (too late guys – they’re running the White House!) ICE told POLITICO that the post was put up in error, and that it is drafting a new post that will include “intellectual property” — not ideas. Pfft what are you thinking – anyone can think whatever they like – whoever’s property it is. Unless perhaps you think AI companies ought to not contravene the intellectual property rights of the artists and writers they are scraping? – “We regret any confusion that this error may have caused,” ICE spokesperson Mike Alvarez said. “Our number one goal is to provide accurate information to the public.” Though it is accurate that Trump has barred the Associated Press from covering some events at the White House due to the news wire’s refusal to use the name “Gulf of America”, and revoked visas for pro-Palestinian activists from college campuses across the country. On Wednesday, Trump ordered the Department of Justice to investigate two administration aides from his first term who have been sharply critical of him. His memorandum for one of those aides, Christopher Krebs, who at the time had pushed back against false narratives about the 2020 election, alleges Krebs engaged in the “the censorship of disfavored speech.” Was he censoring it? Or was his disfavoured speech in contravention of censorship? Of course as we all know from the Ministry of Truth; Trump won in 2020, he had always won, he is always the winner, everything is all right, the struggle is finished, we love Big Trumper, we’ve always loved Big Trumper!
- Elon Musk announced at Thursday’s cabinet meeting that he expected the work done by DOGE would result in $150 billion of savings this financial year. Yes, that is a little bit less than the $1 trillion in savings he promised just last month, and even less than the $2 trillion he estimated prior to the election, but you see now he’s had a chance to actually look at how everything works, and it turns out the only way you can get to a trillion dollars is by lying about everything, and people keep fact checking him, so $150 billion it is. But hey, that’s almost as much as the $154 billion that Trump has spent so far over and above what Biden had spent at this point in his presidency, so that efficiency’s going really well. One way Musk’s presence has helped Trump is that everyone in his administration is being a lot more careful about saying anything negative, because they’re all pretty sure they’re being spied on by DOGE. According to a Guardian report, a senior official at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs warned employees in an email that virtual meetings were being secretly recorded and anyone dissatisfied with Donald Trump’s decisions should be careful about voicing their opinions. Meanwhile, State Department staffers had started using white noise machines in their offices, or even turned on an office breakroom sink, to muffle conversations in case of nearby microphones. I’ve worked in a lot of different offices and honestly that just sounds like a totally healthy workplace where people are definitely going to be capable of going about their daily work in a productive way rather than constantly stressed that they’re going to get fired for complaining the vending machine ate their dollar. In a way, this kind of helps to explain why every single person in the administration is doing such a terrible job. When you start by hiring them based on loyalty rather than competence, and then spend every working hour making them prove their loyalty under laboratory conditions, you get bullshit like the whole tariff debacle.
- In more practical demonstrations of the thought-police at work a Florida high school teacher lost her job after calling a student by an alternative name without parental permission. Jesus H Fucking Christ – no that’s not their alternative name that’s just how I’m feeling about it! Melissa Calhoun had taught in Brevard County for 11 years when she ran headlong into a state rule that bars school staff from deviating from students’ legal names without written parental permission. The rule applies to students who choose an alternative name because of a change in gender identity, as well as those who might want to use a nickname. In this case, Calhoun was respecting the wishes of a student whose legal name is associated with girls. One of the student’s parents complained to the school district, which investigated the matter. The teacher admitted to knowingly using an alternative name without permission, district spokeswoman Janet Murnaghan said in a statement. The school district “supports parents’ rights to be the primary decision-makers in their children’s lives, and Florida law affirms their right to be informed. Teachers, like all employees, are expected to follow the law”. “The parents are the number one decision-makers for their children. That’s why we send out the form, that’s why the State Board of Education made the rule,” school board member Katye Campbell added. Asked about the rights of the students, she said it was not the district’s place to interfere in family relationships “unless we legally have a reason to.” But it’s fine apparently to interfere in the work of teachers connecting with students who on average spend more time at school than they do at home! “Not only is this a direct attack on educators who support trans students, but it also is an indicator of the bureaucratic overreach of anti-transgender policy,” Brian Dittmeier, director of public policy for GLSEN, an advocacy group for LGBTQ students added. “A teacher could potentially be fired for calling a student Tim instead of Timothy.” Yes indeed how many times has the Cheeto Benito called the champion of the law from which the Parental Authorization for Deviation from Student’s Legal Name Form derives; Ron DeSantis, a fucking nickname – well now we know why poor little aggrieved DeSanctimonious is waging a war on woke on behalf of his traumatised inner 8-year-old who never got connected with by any teacher – cos he’s an unreconstructed ‘kin a-hole! Now that’s a nickname to conjure with!
- The Trump administration is planning to close “all weather and climate labs” and slash the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration because its programs “are misaligned with the … expressed will of the American people”. I don’t remember it appearing on the ballot in November, but apparently the expressed will of the American people is that they’d rather be surprised by hurricanes rather than knowing when and where they’re going to happen. Being alerted to flash floods or tornadoes is woke, probably. But it’s not just short term weather information that’s on the chopping block, the Trump White House also doesn’t want to know anything about changes to the climate, which famously can’t hurt you if you don’t look at it, so they’re also ending funding for the body that produces climate reports for the federal government every four years. The US Global Change Research Program was due to release its next report in 2027, but it’s not really needed now that the EPA administrator is Lee Zeldin, who reckons we can deal with greenhouse gases by just saying they’re harmless. In a way, I can kind of see Trump’s point of view on this one. If you’re going to spend the next few years ignoring climate change or actively making it worse, why would you want to pay for a report showing what a bad idea that was? Cancelling it now just makes sense.
- Moral-vacuumed botox-frozen love-child of Pritti Patel, Cher and Elvira; Laura Loomer; “proud Islamophobe” and “pro-white nationalist” who’s endorsed claims that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an “inside job”, alleged that the “deep state” manipulates the weather to influence elections, and spread conspiracy theories implying that the FBI let school shootings happen in election years to help the Democrats push gun control has finally been ostracised by all in government and excommunicated from all social-media platforms as a result of her unchecked racism. Nah course not – whilst some of her comments have drawn push-back from properly Maga J.D. Vance, and far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, ol’ television-obsessed Trump loves her and she’s oh so mindful that this exposure can be transformed into access and, ultimately, political power. Loomer’s schtick is her single-minded loyalty to the president. Loyalty to Trump, and fury at the disloyalty of others, is the central component of her identity. Loomer’s apparent recommendation that Trump fire a slew of national security officials including General Timothy D. Haugh, the head of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command had its roots in this obsession with loyalty. Many people serving in national security positions in the Trump administration are not card-carrying members of the Maga movement. Such positions require deep expertise developed over long apolitical careers in the civil service or military. For 31-yr old Loomer, who’s only exposure to conservatism in her short attention span life-time has been Maga conservatism openly prejudiced, vindictive, and more a stew of grievance and hatred than a coherent political platform, such long-serving expert figures pose a threat. Not because people like General Haugh have ever shown open disloyalty to Trump. It is merely that they are not, like Loomer, his fanatical adherents. In her worldview, anything less is unacceptable. Even Mitch McConnell was moved to comment “If decades of experience in uniform isn’t enough to lead the N.S.A. but amateur isolationists can hold senior policy jobs at the Pentagon, then what exactly are the criteria for working on this administration’s national security staff? I can’t figure it out.” Sensing her opening, Loomer has declared that she will establish an organisation dedicated to investigating executive branch officials for suspected disloyalty to the president. Just like Steerpike in the Gormenghast Trilogy and our very own Dominic Cummings, sycophancy and obsequious loyalty flatters the kings in the all-together leading inevitably to their attempts to seize power when the king succumbs to a fatal “accident”. Hopefully however, in the way the idiot-king Boris’ failure of intelligence/surfeit of vanity lead to the firing of Cummings, Loomer won’t have factored in that the chaos she is fomenting will inevitably lead to her being torn apart by Death Owls in the Tower of Flints.
- A second unvaccinated child has died of the measles in Texas, and RFK Jr thinks it’s going so well that his response to the outbreak should be a model for the world. He’s not entirely wrong. You can learn a lot by watching someone else fuck up entirely. For example, if not for RFK Jr we might not know that we shouldn’t promote Vitamin A as a home treatment for measles. While it’s true that very high doses of Vitamin A administered in hospital has been shown to reduce mortality in measles cases, trying to do the same thing at home has put multiple children in hospital in Texas and New Mexico, where they’re being treated for Vitamin A poisoning which causes liver failure. Equivocating on whether the measles vaccine is good or bad is also, exactly the wrong thing to do, given that measles was declared eliminated in the US in 2000 specifically because of the vaccine. The current outbreak, according to Republican Congressman Ryan Mackenzie, is due to immigrants: “Many of these instances that are coming into our country are from illegal immigrants who have crossed the border and they are bringing these diseases into our country. There is a reason why measles has started to spread in our country”. Yes Ryan, there is a reason. The rise in vaccine hesitancy, fueled by anti-science dickwads like RFK Jr.
- In British politics – Boris hair-tribute act and hated straw-thatched Thatcher devotee Michael Fabricant failed to overturn the eviction election from Celebrity (hah) Big Brother 2025 and lost his Tory-arsed seat in the Big Brother house this Saturday just as he failed to defeat the overturning of his 23,638 majority in the 2024 election and lost his Tory-arsed seat in the House of Commons. All this whilst refusing to confirm whether it is his natural hair or a wig. Labour Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds similarly refused to confirm whether the government could keep the furnaces running at the British Steel production plant in Scunthorpe. Despite the urgent need for raw materials that feed those furnaces being the very reason the government chose to step in. The government was recalled from the Easter break for an emergency session this Saturday to rush through a law allowing the government to take control of the plant after Chinese owners Jingye announced that the plant is losing £700,000 per day and that they couldn’t afford to keep it running. He also couldn’t put a number on the cost to the taxpayer if the plant was put under public control. It needed to be put under government control cos Labour is the party of protecting workers jobs and the patriotic right of Britain to be able to make its own steel in its last remaining steel plant, notwithstanding the fact that the cost of energy supplied to industrial plants is 46 times higher in the UK than the global average. Kemi Badenoch poo-poo’d the proposed law saying the deal that the Tories would have worked out when she was Business Secretary but didn’t get round to actually defining cos they were in the midst of negotiations when the General Election was called would’ve been oh so much better than any deal that Labour is going to work out. Sounds familiarly like Michael Gove saying that ooh the Brexit deal that Boris will come up with whilst voting down Theresa May’s countless times will be so much better than anything anyone else can think up. Despite this Gove got granted a peerage in Rishi Sunak’s resignation honours list, so he’ll get to sit in the House of Lords and provide expertise as to whether bills such as Jonathan Reynolds’ should be made law – of course as Gove will no doubt fail to remind us of what he said during Brexit, such expertise is the stuff of which we have had enough!
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