12 Aug Ethnocentric Fallacy – FT#179
Show Notes
The Ethnocentric Fallacy occurs when someone starts from an assumption that their own culture is superior to others or was more instrumental in history than it really was.
Trump
We started out by discussing this clip of Trump claiming Americans did everything:
Then we looked at this clip of Trump overestimating how much other countries need the US:
Mark’s British Politics Corner
Mark talked about Farage not recognising parts of Britain:
He followed that up by talking about Kemi Badenoch ranking the cultures:
And he finished with this clip of Boris Johnson:
Fallacy in the Wild
In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from Friends:
Then we discussed this clip from My Big Fat Greek Wedding:
And we finished up with this clip from Parks & Recreation:
Fake News
Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:
Mark got it right this week, and is on 51%!
The Epstein Files are not a logical fallacy
We talked about Trump’s desperate attempts to get everyone to move on from Epstein.
The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about
- Back in 95 BC, Tigranes the Great was king of Armenia. He pissed off the Romans by helping one of their enemies, and when a Roman general marched on Armenia, a messenger was sent to warn the King. Tigranes didn’t want to hear that, so he had the messenger beheaded. From that point on, nobody gave Tigranes any bad news, and the wars he was involved in went very badly, because he didn’t have good intel. If only Trump was a scholar of the classics, like good old Boris Johnson, he might have learned from Tigranes’ mistakes, but instead he fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics last month because he didn’t like the job numbers they reported. On Truth Social he claimed that the commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, rigged the numbers to make Trump look bad, and when he was asked about it by reporters he also said “Days before the election, she came out with these beautiful numbers for Kamala, I guess Biden-Kamala, and she came out with these beautiful numbers trying to get somebody else elected,” which is weird, because when the job report came out on November 1st last year, showing a very modest 12,000 new jobs in October, Trump called it a catastrophe and said it “definitively reveals how badly Kamala Harris broke our economy”. He also claimed that right after the election she revised the previous year’s job numbers down by 8 or 900,000, but this actually happened in August, ten weeks before the election. I’m sure Trump’s remaining department heads have got the message now that he only wants to hear good news – frankly I’m surprised any of them were still under the impression that the truth was important to him.
- Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s culture-warrior superintendent of public instruction, is a self-avowed opponent of pornography in education—so much so that he’s accused schools of “pushing pornography” for containing decidedly nonpornographic books like The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. Imagine our surprise/delight when in the closed-door portion of a Board of Education meeting last week, whilst a parent discussed appealing a district transfer denial, two board members Becky Carson and Ryan Deatherage noticed a video on the screen in Walters’ office was displaying a video featuring “multiple nude women” and “some sort of ‘chiropractic table.’” Whilst a little concerned both board members did seem to reveal some familiarity with the pornography genre sufficient to be able to describe the footage as “retro,” and did not feature intercourse. “Turn it off. Now,” Becky Carson recalls saying. Walters asked, “What is this? What is this?” and fumbled to turn it off while saying, “I can’t get it to turn off. I can’t figure out how to turn it off.” This is not the first time Walters is accused of subjecting unsuspecting Oklahoma lawmakers to porn. In March 2023, he emailed several pornographic images to state legislators, claiming he was supplying them with evidence they’d requested of inappropriate material in Oklahoma schools. But lawmakers on both sides of the aisle were left confused, as the email was entirely devoid of context, containing no mention of schools that allegedly had the material. Walters’ response to the new incident has been all but graceful. A spokesperson told NonDoc their story was “a junk tabloid lie,” telling a reporter to “get a job at” a different independent publication “and let us know when you are going to write a real story.” Claiming on XTwitter, “I have no knowledge of what was on the TV screen during the alleged incident, and there is absolutely no truth to any implication of wrongdoing. They aren’t just attacking me, they’re attacking the values of the Oklahomans who elected me to challenge the status quo.” Yeah cos if Oklahoma wanted you to challenge the status quo of NOT showing porn during board meetings, then way to go. If the challenge is to stamp out pornography in the state education system then this and identifying The Kite Runner as pornographic kind of suggest you don’t really know what you’re doing?
- While Elon Musk is no longer working at the Department of Government Efficiency, somehow it still exists, and some of the people he brought in are still part of the fake government agency named after a meme-coin. Some of those engineers were responsible for coding an AI tool that is being used to slash federal regulations. There are about 200,000 federal regulations apparently, and according to a Powerpoint presentation obtained by the Washington Post, DOGE reckons they can get rid of 50% of them. How do they estimate 50% without even reading them, let alone trying to figure out why they exist in the first place? Fuck you, that’s how. Cutting regulations is a core part of Trump’s goals because regulations make it harder for billionaires to make more money, and the only people they protect are consumers and workers, and according to the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank that tracks regulations, during the first six months of Trump’s second term, his administration cut regulatory costs by about $550 million and paperwork hours by 566,000. However they also note that nearly all of the cost reductions are due to repealing one rule regarding what businesses have to report about their ownership ties. Without that, regulatory costs would have increased under Trump by $1.1 billion and paperwork hours by 3.3 million. So it’s going great, and at least we know that AI tools coded by Musk’s engineers are definitely reliable and not at all prone to fascism. In related news, Musk got frustrated last month that his AI chatbot, Grok, kept disagreeing with him because it was basing too many of its answers on objective reality, so he tweaked the code to turn down the “wokeness” and within three days it was calling itself MechaHitler and posting violent rape fantasies about Democratic political candidates. Some people see this as a bad thing, but evidently not Pete Hegseth, as a week later the Department of Defense awarded a $200 million contract to xAI, and announced the Pentagon would be using Grok. Suddenly, it all makes a lot more sense. I thought the Hitler praise and violent rhetoric was an unintended by-product of telling Grok to ignore reality, but now that we know they were auditioning for far-right Fox and Friends weekend host Pete Hegseth, it’s clear that Grok was just showing him what it was capable of.
- Hurricane season is almost upon the US and the National Weather Service which Elon Musk’s DOGE experiment, in some sort of attempt to hold back the sea Canute-style and make good on Trump’s implied promise of ‘nothing but blue skies from now on’ slashed by 550-odd staff has received permission to hire 450 meteorologists, hydrologists and radar technicians. The NWS had been arguing for months for a public safety exemption from the federal hiring freeze. That exemption has been granted, and the agency now has direct hiring authority “for filling vacancies when a critical hiring need or severe shortage of candidates exists.” Agency employees are greeting the news, unveiled at an all hands meeting on Monday, with guarded optimism and relief. Current employees have been working additional hours trying to maintain the 24/7 posture US extreme weather requires. One National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official also expressed some frustration in that relief “How much time/money is it going to cost to train a bunch of new people when we had already-trained people in place?” yeah you know, the kind of inefficient practices in government that Musk was tasked to wheedle out! Thank goodness Trump’s administration is completely different from Biden’s pointlessly wasteful administration!
- The White House has announced that construction will soon begin on a new ballroom, which Donald is very excited about because building pointless vulgar monuments to his greatness is much more fun that trying to actually improve the lives of Americans. The architect’s renderings are in, and it’s exactly as gaudy as you expect, which is gaudy as fuck. If you haven’t seen them, just picture any square foot of the oval office. Not the oval office you’ve seen in films, the new and improved one with gold spray painted polystyrene superglued to every conceivable surface. Got that image in your head? OK, now just extrapolate that out to a 90,000 square foot room. You might have trouble picturing a room that size without context, so it might help if I tell you that the entire White House is 55,000 square feet. Yes, it’s a single room almost twice as large as the whole building the executive branch works out of every day. Unnecessarily large you say? Not so. It’s totally necessary actually, because you see the White House isn’t able to host large events because the current largest room is the East Room, which only has a seating capacity of 200. According to the official announcement, the seating capacity in the new ballroom will be 650. I haven’t been able to find anyone reporting on this aspect of it at all, but the math is, in my opinion, a little off. The East Room, is just under 3000 square feet. That’s about 15 square feet per person, which is roughly the space you get in a fine dining restaurant. With 650 people in a 90,000 square foot ballroom, each person gets 138 square feet. That’s almost 12 feet between you and the person sitting next to you. Trump claims this hasn’t been done before because no previous President knew how to build a ballroom, but I’m pretty sure most previous Presidents at least knew how to math. Or maybe they just all had wives and friends who were prepared to spend time within 12 feet of them.
- Uber-Karen and man who’s face is made of the marshmallows that fall into the fire; Alan Dershowitz has been continuing to make his sour self and the grievances he feels as a result of what the world thinks of him, everyone else‘s problem. Notwithstanding his fine upright lawyerly standing alongside the likes of Rudy Giuliani in defending the indefensible: Donald Trump, O.J. Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein and Claus von Bülow; Dershowitz’s wearing a t-shirt with Proud American Zionist on it at the West Tisbury Farmers’ Market at Martha’s Vineyard got the attention of Krem Miskevich who runs the Good Pierogi stall there. Sufficient for them to exercise the right “to refuse customers of their choosing,” as the police officer could be heard saying when he asked Dershowitz to stop blocking the stall so other customers could be served. Calling this act of proprietorial discretion “pure McCarthyism” – yep that’s how much of a cultural and historical scholar he is – Dershowitz showed up at Miskevich’s stand again the following week, in what he called “an effort to try to restore community, in the interest of keeping the island together.” Cos yeah it’s all falling apart through lack of your effort Alan-mate! He arrived bearing an autographed copy of his book Ten Big Anti-Israel Lies And How To Refute Them With The Truth – inscribed “To Krem, please learn the truth“—and offered the vendor an opportunity to at long last sell him pierogi and “show that you’re prepared to sell to anybody, and not allow your anti-Zionism to decide which people you’ll sell to.” Krem didn’t sell him any, and a large crowd that had come out to support Miskevich chanting “time to go” led once again to Dershowitz being escorted away. Dershowitz ranted in his best Dr Jacobi fashion on his YouTube channel whilst sporting a farmers’ market T-shirt to hide the blackness of his heart when supporting his fellow man – and threatened legal action against the farmers’ market to ensure that they only have booths that will sell to everybody and don’t allow booths that discriminate on the basis of race, gender, religion or politics. Despite saying “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a place that is as intolerant as Martha’s Vineyard.” he’s apparently been vacationing there for 50 years, and yet previously has had a shouting match with Larry David on the porch of the Chilmark General Store and complained that the library won’t stock his books which he said is “ losing me friends, and my wife, who doesn’t agree with what I’ve done and said, is losing friends.” Perhaps Alan you should either heed the advice of the director of the library and realise that “you’re retired, enjoy it.” or seek some from the likes of Peter Crone the Mind Architect who might begin by holding up a mirror and asking how it would be if the world is just fine and it’s all in your head? The next thing that popped up in my YouTube feed after Alan and Peter, delightfully, Top 5 times Karen’s got Instant Karma – sometimes the universe IS sending messages.
- Back in January, Trump issued an Executive Order cancelling birthright citizenship. Multiple judges pointed out you can’t just erase the 14th Amendment with an Executive Order, and blocked it going into effect. Then in June the Supreme Court ruled that federal district judges can’t issue nationwide injunctions, they can only give relief to specific plaintiffs with standing to sue. Naturally Trump declared victory despite the Supreme Court not making any ruling on the birthright citizenship issue itself, but he figured his troubles were over. You can kind of forgive Trump for thinking that judges aren’t smart, since he’s gone out of his way to only appoint judges who either don’t understand the law or are willing to overlook it if it benefits their political ambition. However, many judges are smart, and so far four have managed to block the executive order despite the Supreme Court’s ruling. The first was in New Hampshire, where US District Judge Joseph LaPlante, a Bush appointee, granted class action status to a lawsuit challenging the order, and made all babies born in the US members of the class. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals then ruled that a nationwide injunction was the narrowest possible way to provide relief for the four Democratic states who sued the administration, because people move around a lot, so if the injunction didn’t also cover the states where people were born or later moved to, they could still suffer irreparable harm. A Massachusetts judge used the same reasoning to uphold the injunction he issued in February, and just last week, a Maryland judge certified another class action, saying “The Court finds that the only way to afford complete relief to the certified class is to enjoin enforcement of the Executive Order as to each member of the class. That relief must include every child in the United States who is subject to the Executive Order.” Legal solutions take a long time, and much damage can be done during the delay, but cases like these and others are still working their way through the courts and at least some of the time, will be able to prevent bad things happening. Not as much as I’d like, but sometimes you have to take wins where you can!
- News appeared this week that in March, Labour’s Minister for Homelessness, Rushanara Ali, served notice on four tenants renting her East London property. Ali is the minister in charge of tackling evictions, rising rents, and insecure housing, basically in charge of fighting for renter’s rights. Labour’s election campaign promised to clamp down on no-fault evictions, skyrocketing rents, landlords gaming the system and letting agents breaking the law. The MP evicted the tenants – no misconduct, no rent arrears – just a Section 21 “no-fault” eviction.The tenants were then offered rolling contracts – but only temporarily while the property was listed for sale. When no buyer emerged, it was quietly put back on the rental market – now at £4,000 a month, £700 more than before. New tenants then moved in. What happened to the old ones? They were hit with charges – including £2,000 for repainting and £395 for cleaning, both charges are banned under the Tenant Fees Act 2019, after the tenants revealed their landlord was a sitting MP, the letting agents backed off and dropped the charges. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, whilst declaring she doesn’t know any of the details, defended Ali saying she ‘followed all the rules’. Far be it from me to reductio ad Hitlerum but the optics are a bit redolent of “I was just following orders”. Thank goodness Labour are so different from the visibly corrupt Tories. Meanwhile 600,000-odd people have signed up to Jeremy Corbyn’s new political movement called Your Party. Positioned as a left-wing alternative, the knives are out already – not from the right-wing they’re too busy fending off/absorbing what’s left of Farage’s policies after Starmer has apparently hoovered most of them up, no of course not, its the Labour Party themselves who dismiss Corbyn as a personality politician. Well I guess when you’re styling a party full of drony-voiced middle-managers, oh and finding an excuse to oust something-of-a-personality and mother-of-the-house vocal-campaigner Diane Abbott again, meek and mild, yet principled socialist Corbyn could indeed look like a superstar! Everybody, to the tune of Seven-Nation Army, you know what to do….
You can now buy Jim’s book, 2000 Mules and One Big Lie: A Stubborn Conspiracy Theory, and you can buy all our t-shirts, mugs, hats and more at our TeePublic Store
Create your podcast today! #madeonzencastr
