27 May Argument from Popularity (Redux) – FT#175
Show Notes
The Argument from Popularity Fallacy occurs when someone makes a claim based on how many people believe an idea or use a product rather than providing evidence the idea is true or the product is good.
Trump
We started out by discussing this clip of Trump claiming a lot of people agree with him:
Then we looked at this clip of Trump citing (made up) polls:
And finally we talked about the Utah legislature lying about medical consensus.
Mark’s British Politics Corner
Mark talked about this clip of Rupert Lowe MP lying about rape gangs:
He followed that up by talking about these clips of Nigel Farage:
Then he talked about Sarah Pochin invoking the will of the people:
Mark just kept going, moving on to this clip of Kemi Badenoch:
And he finally finished with this clip of Richard Holden on Newsnight:
Fallacy in the Wild
In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this Tampax ad:
Then we discussed this Chase Bank ad:
And we finished up with this clip from The Case for Christ:
Fake News
Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:
Mark got it wrong this week, and is on 51%!
One Big, Beautiful Bill is not a logical fallacy
We talked about the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad bill.
The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about
- Trump went on a jolly to the Middle East this month and claims he came home with over $2 trillion of great deals. A couple of days later, as is typical with Trump, the number he made up got even bigger, claiming in a Rose Garden press conference that “They gave us a nice contribution of about $5 trillion”. In case you’re wondering, he didn’t get a late phone call from a Saudi Prince to say “ oh, we forgot to mention, we’d like another $3 trillion worth of unspecified American stuff please”, he’s just lying. He was lying about the $2 trillion as well, so why not pretend it’s 5, I guess. To get to that number he included some deals that were in place before he won the election in November, quite a lot of vague promises rather than signed deals, some numbers that were just made up, and one cloud computing contract between Amazon and the UAE which was worth $1 billion but was included in the calculations as $181 billion because that’s how much Amazon estimated the UAE could increase its GDP by using more cloud services. That one was also announced in October. One thing Trump did get from the trip was a massive bribe from Qatar, in the shape of a luxury jet worth $400 million. Even some Republicans think that’s a bit dodgy, but the Trump administration say it’s fine, because Attorney General Pam Bondi says it’s OK, and it’s a gift for the country, not Donald himself, plus Boeing are taking ages to deliver the new Air Force Ones they promised, so this will do in the meantime. Those arguments aren’t especially convincing, given that Pam Bondi is a former paid lobbyist for Qatar, who took a bribe from Trump to stop looking into his scam University in Florida, the country doesn’t get the plane, because it will go to Trump’s Presidential Library when his term ends rather than being used by future presidents, and The Boeing Air Force Ones are due in 2027 and experts suggest retrofitting this plane to make it a secure flying fortress like Air Force One will take several years and around 1 billion taxpayer dollars. So it’s just a luxury gift for Trump, from a country with a horrible human rights record, who he will now speak about in the most glowing of terms because they gave him a shiny thing. A shiny thing worth 100 times the value of every other presidential gift from foreign nations combined, since 2001.
- Remember all those gritty 70s and 80s sci-fi movies involving hard-done-by lowly blue-collar heroes, down-trodden members of a future dystopian society having to fight each other, the city, the elements, or aging, in an attempt to remain within and possibly ascend to the higher echelons, most of them featured Arnie or Kurt or Carradine or Jenny Agutter with few very clothes on, and mostly involved wielding driving or riding things with spikes attached to them. Well, never one to shy away from rehashing outdated formats, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is reviewing a reality TV pitch where immigrants would compete for American citizenship. Producer Rob Worsoff has stated that the idea would be a love letter to America and not punching down on contestants at all. Worsoff said he envisions his show being like “‘The Biggest Loser’ for immigration” – referencing the former reality show where overweight contestants competed to see who would lose the most weight whilst calling them an assortment of fat-shaming names. But he insisted (after having possibly listened to what the words he had just said sounded like): “There’s nobody who loses on this show — it’s ridiculous to even suggest otherwise.” Each episode would include a heritage challenge tailored to specific locations — a “gold rush” challenge in San Francisco, for example, or a “pizza” challenge in New York or a “NASA” challenge in Florida — to showcase “how cool America is.” There’d also be an elimination challenge, and each episode would end with a town-hall meeting, “just like in a presidential election.” So I think that means there’ll be as much cheating allowed as you can manage, you know like running pedestrians over for more points, bribing hookers to keep quiet using money that other people gave you and lying about talking to people to get you more votes. Whilst not acknowledging it would possibly be utterly demeaning for ordinary people seeking refuge and asylum at the invitation of Lady Liberty, Worsoff did acknowledge the stakes would be high for the contestants “I would hope that any competition reality show has stakes, Yeah, I’m not going to apologize for that. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, I think that’s a good thing.” It’s heartless enough for Trump to claim all the credit dressed as James Caan on the fake cover of Variety having won an artificial Emmy for it.
- Some of Trump’s worst public moments seem to be his public meetings with other world leaders in the White House. He and Vance looked like petulant children next to Zelenskyy, he fawned over Bukele because he loves dictators, Mark Carney made him look stupid just by existing in the same room, and last week he met with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and spent a good chunk of their time amplifying White Supremacist lies about white genocide in South Africa. He claimed that white farmers are being murdered in the thousands, and as proof, held up a printed out photo from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and showed a video of crosses and earthen mounds which he claimed were mass graves, but was actually part of a protest that followed the murder of two people. It’s not clear where he got these ideas from. On an unrelated note, South African born Elon Musk was in the room at the time, and his homegrown AI chatbot, Grok, has recently been telling people about claims of white genocide in South Africa. That’s not so weird, you might think. People like Tucker Carlson, and by people, I mean white supremacists, talk about it, so perhaps people ask Grok if it’s real. But no, Grok is telling people about it even if the question they ask is completely unrelated, like “how many times has HBO Max changed their name. An official statement from Twitter blamed an “unauthorised modification” from a rogue employee. They didn’t name the employee, but I’ll give you one guess who I think it was.
- Determined to do something about finding a mate for the worm in his brain, and possibly ensuring the future sterility of his grandchildren, RFK Jr went on a Make America Healthy Again hike for Mother’s Day in Dumbarton Oaks Park in Washington, D.C. He added that he and his grandchildren took a swim in nearby Rock Creek — a highly Instagrammable if utterly contaminated waterway where swimming and even wading are prohibited by the National Park Service due to high levels of bacteria. According to The New York Times: Rock Creek, which flows through much of Northwest Washington, is used to drain excess sewage and storm water during rainfall. The creek has widespread “fecal” contamination and high levels of bacteria, including E. coli, and the city has banned swimming in all of its waterways for more than 50 years because of the widespread contamination of Rock Creek and other nearby rivers. Perhaps he thinks he’s just waging a one-man war on health-woke “we used to eat dirt and drink from the hosepipe and wipe our noses with our sleeves” but when it comes to the the inevitable “and it didn’t do us any harm” that’s where we, as the rest of the human race will, given our observations of YOU ya freakin’ idiot, have to part ways I’m afraid Bob. Still if you wanna go removing a generation or so of Kennedys from the gene pool and if they’re anything like you, you go right ahead and show us how safe it all is – have you not seen Toxic Avenger ferchrissakes?! Hmm perhaps he thought it was a documentary.
- On May 15th, the Huffington Post reported that, in a break from recent precedent, the Trump White House is not consistently releasing transcripts of the President’s remarks, interviews and speeches noting that perhaps they are trying to avoid having some of his more unhinged comments on public view. In fact, of 146 public speeches or interactions with journalists in his first 100 days, only 29 were transcribed on the ‘Remarks’ page of Whitehouse.gov. Being actual journalists, they asked the White House why, and being an actual asshole, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said, in part, “You must be truly fucking stupid if you think we’re not transparent. The president regularly does multiple press engagements per day and they are streamed live on multiple platforms.” Cheung demanded his statement be published in full, but fuck you Steven, you’re not the boss of me. Anyway, the White House took note of the concern over the lack of transcripts available to the American public, and within a week, they took all but one of the rest of them down, and replaced them with a curated selection of around 48 videos of Trump speeches, claiming the change is part of an effort to maintain consistency. JD Vance’s office, meanwhile, continues to put out transcripts of his remarks, presumably because videos would make too many people die of cringe.
- June 14th this year is Donald Trump’s 250th birthday, it’s the anniversary of the establishment of him in 1775 ahead of the Declaration of Independence. It’s also the US Army’s 79th birthday. And as we know, the US Army wants to be seen to be a strong force, a powerful force, very powerful, so strong around the world, something akin to the might of Russia, North Korea or China. As a young septuagenarian though the US Army is not so old, feeble and stupid to actually go through with staging some sort of Soviet Era Stalinesque Fascist Mussolini-ey parade to display just how great its cahones are. Trump however as a wrinkled sallow-skinned shallow duodecim-centenarian is tantrumming in the aisles of the White House until he gets to show all the dangerous weapons the US has under his command on the street playmat he thinks is laid out just for him in D.C. The festival celebrating the Army had been in the planning for more than a year, featuring displays of military equipment, musical performances and a fitness competition on the National Mall. Then, two months ago, Trump got involved. And now a parade is on the cards. Of course having cut all the welfare and environmental agencies he can afford to spend the estimated 10s of millions of dollars required to trundle big things past Trump’s bigly smugly em-podiumed face and, as pointed out by the mayor of the District of Columbia, Muriel Bowser, repair the torn up urban streets of downtown Washington. Last time the big baby was in office his pawade got canned cos of the $92 Million cost! But now that Musk has all but disappeared from view, DOGE’s waste-catchers won’t try to stop him wasting tax-payers money. As Jimmy Fallon alluded to, Musk also of course will want to parade some of the most dangerous and explosive vehicles that Trump helped sell – self-driving Tesla taxis!
- Shit-swimming bear prankster RFK jr continued to aggressively pretend science isn’t real if it disagrees with his political views this week when he directed the FDA to review the regulations around the abortion pill mifepristone. He claimed this is necessary due to new data, which must be pretty explosive, given that more than 100 scientific studies have already found it to be safe and effective. And when I say explosive, I mean the cool new definition of explosive you probably haven’t heard of. When the kids say explosive these days, they mean not peer reviewed, not published in a medical journal, and full of massive methodological flaws. The paper in question was written by the head of a right wing think tank which is probably using the word “think” a bit generously. Among complications it claims are due to mifepristone is ectopic pregnancy, where an embryo implants outside of the uterus, most commonly in the fallopian tubes. Jennifer Lincoln, a board-certified obstetrics and gynecology physician in Oregon pointed out “Pills can’t move your pregnancy out of your uterus and into your fallopian tubes” and I’ll be honest, I’m not sure we needed an expert for that one. It’s worth noting that Project 2025 advocates revoking mifepristone’s approval altogether. We don’t know if that’s going to happen, but I think it’s worth mentioning at this point that mifepristone is currently still legally available in many states, and it has a two year shelf life.
- Despite all the moaning by the Tories about the cutting of the winter fuel allowance for those pensioners who could well afford it, when Keir Starmer this week said he would restore it, Kemi Badenoch said in PMQs ‘tsk! when will he answer the question of restoring the winter fuel allowance” Starmer pointed out he already had, and Kemi later went on to say she cannot commit to fully reversing the Labour government’s cuts explaining “I can’t just say, ‘oh, I’ll reverse every single thing they’ve done’”.. Nigel Farage had no such compunctions – ‘yeah I’d restore the whole thing and do away with the child benefit cap while I’m at it’ – and just before we thought Farage was out-lefting the Labour party he added that he’ll pay for it by closing hotels for migrants, just in case Reform voters thought they were communists suddenly. Meanwhile the former Blackpool Conservative club has rebranded itself as the country’s first Reform pub – Carling Export is £2.60 a pint – that’s fellow-brexiteer-boozer-Wetherspoons-type prices, but of course that foreign muck Stella, Madri and Cruzcampo, are priced at a comparatively eye-watering £4.50. Raymond Head, 86, drove 200 miles from “Labour-controlled” Stevenage after he saw the pub on GB News. Stevenage has been labour-controlled since 1974 so Raymond – can I call you Dick? – Head must have been quite thirsty. He said: “I thought, if I’m going to support anyone, I want to support this guy. I want to come and have a drink here. It’s cheap and cheerful, and we all very much talk the same language.” Perhaps the same can’t be said of the Take That tribute act that will be there in August, all the way from Benidorm, which is possibly where Farage was holidaying when Starmer basked in the possible glory of his Brexit reset. Meanwhile his chancellor Rachel Reeves is coming under fire from at least 42 MPs in the Labour party protesting that cutting the Personal Independence Payment living allowance from the disabled community ought perhaps be replaced by doing something a bit more socialist, like taxing the very rich a bit higher on their 11th million, possibly restoring the 50p top tax rate; and increasing capital gains tax rates to align with income tax. This is estimated to bring in £12 billion whereas the OBR estimates the PIP cut will only save £3.4 billion. Given my theory that we have had unbroken Tory policies enacted upon us since 1979 it’s no surprise that when I heard “you don’t know whether you can go back to exactly where you were before” I didn’t know if it was Kemi Badenoch or Rachel Reeves speaking!!
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