16 Dec Square One Fallacy – FT#187
Show Notes
The Square One Fallacy occurs when someone dismisses all the work and research that has been done and pretends we need to start from the beginning to solve or understand a problem.
Trump
We started out by discussing this clip of RFK Jr on vaccines:
Then we talked about this clip of Trump suggesting someone should look into violent video games:
Mark’s British Politics Corner
Mark talked about this clip of Nigel Farage suggesting we need another, even more Brexity, Brexit:
Fallacy in the Wild
In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this Op Ed about gender affirming care in the New York Times
Then we discussed this news report about legalizing cannabis in Guernsey:
And we finished up with this clip from a Congressional Hearing on tobacco:
Fake News
Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:
Mark got it wrong again this week, and is on 87 out of 175 – dropping below 50%!
Video game violence is not a logical fallacy
Jim talked about his recent deep dive into the corpus of media effects research in an attempt to clarify whether violent games cause violence in players.
The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about
- Remember those pipe bombs that were left near each party headquarters on the evening of January 5th, 2020. They were discovered and defused, there was grainy footage of the person who left them, but law enforcement seemingly had no leads. Some people randomly and possibly jokily accused Marjorie Taylor Greene at one point, because she had similar shoes, and last month a reporter on Glenn Beck’s “news” outlet The Blaze (I did scare quote for news, but you didn’t see) accused a female former US Capitol Police Officer by name of being the elusive bomber, based on gait analysis that he claimed made her a 94-98% match for the bomber. Well, either we just hit that 2-6% error margin, or The Blaze isn’t the bastion of responsible journalism we all thought it was, because they caught the guy, and he wasn’t the female Capitol Police Officer. The FBI and DOJ made a big fuss about how they got their man, and then slightly less fuss when it came out that he told authorities he believed the conspiracies that Trump really won the 2020 election. I’ll tell you who else believed the conspiracies, or at least was prepared to pretend he believed the ones he was actively making up – Trump’s new head of the Office of Response and Recovery at FEMA, Gregg Phillips. If that name rings a bell, you’ve probably listened to us talking about Dinesh D’Souza’s movie 2000 Mules at some point. Yes, Gregg is the one who claimed to have the evidence of all the voter fraud, just not the kind of evidence you can see in a movie or release to the public despite claiming you would. Coincidentally, he’s also the one who claimed Trump won the popular vote in 2016 if you don’t count the 3 million votes by illegal immigrants which he definitely had proof of, and would definitely release to the public but never did. The Head of the Office of Response and Recovery is a hugely fucking important job, and putting this lying grifter in charge will literally kill people. He has no experience whatsoever in disaster response, despite claiming on LinkedIn that his “work in disasters and emergencies goes back four decades.” Note he’s not saying whether he fixed or caused those disasters and emergencies. Of course, he said the same thing about voter fraud, and that was bullshit, too. He has held government jobs before – he spent a total of about four years in three different Health and Human Services jobs in Mississippi and Texas, two of which he left under a cloud of accusations of corruption, financial and ethical misconduct, impropriety and erosion of the public trust. That last bit’s a direct quote from the Mississippi Review committee that investigated him. Literally the best case scenario for everyone involved here is that he quickly finds a way to grift millions of dollars, gets bored, and moves on, like he always has before.
- Cos when you are Emperor you of course want everyone to see your face on everything and where better than on those things that you are destroying or removing safeguards from or failing to provide backpay for when you’ve made them all stop working whilst you perpetuate the longest government shutdown in US history and cutting staff by 25%. Imagine Trump’s whining when he hears that the Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit to halt federal plans to decorate next year’s national parks pass with an image of President Donald Trump’s face, arguing that federal law requires the pass to feature the winner of an annual nature photography competition instead. The Trump administration also recently announced it was cutting free admission to national parks on Martin Luther King Jr. Day (Jan. 19 for 2026) and Juneteenth (June 19) — the only two federal holidays honoring Black history. Visitors will instead get in free on June 14, which is both Flag Day and President Donald Trump’s birthday. The standard America the Beautiful pass for 2026 unveiled last month by the Interior Department, features side-by-side portraits of George Washington and Trump to mark the 250th anniversary of America’s founding. Kierán Suckling, the Center for Biological Diversity’s executive director said “The national parks are not a personal branding opportunity. They’re the pride and joy of the American people. America the Beautiful means wild rivers and majestic mountains, not a headshot of a bloated, fragile, attention-seeking ego. There’s nothing beautiful about that.” I guess it’s the equivalent of The National Trust membership card bearing the face of Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage as recent and current pretenders to the ego throne here. Though Nigel has been approached by the Amphibian Society to appear on their membership cards since Kermit the Frog turned them down again. In a statement, the Interior Department, which oversees the National Park Service, said the new free-entry schedule was part of its “commitment to making national parks more accessible, more affordable and more efficient for the American people.” Alan Spears, senior director of cultural resources at the National Parks Conservation Association said “This move is not going to make our national parks safer, more sustainable or more relevant, but it is going to make some people believe that their national parks are no longer interested or open to being relevant and welcoming to them.” Trump of course doesn’t give a fuck, he just wants to insert himself into every walk of American life and be thanked for it, to cover up for doing nothing of any merit, for any tax-paying park-visiting American ever. I hear Punxsutawney Phil will be wearing a red tie and a bad combover toupee next February as well.
- As we know, the only reason Trump and his Secretary of War, boozy white supremacist part time TV host and accused sexual predator Pete Hegseth, are committing war crimes off the coast of Venezuela is to protect Americans from the scourge of the Latin American drug traffickers that kill, by Trump’s reckoning, 25,000 people per recently exploded boat. Well this might shock you, but it’s possible Trump doesn’t really care about the drugs after all. I mean, if he did, why would he pardon ex-Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was sentenced last year to 45 years in federal prison for conspiring with drug cartels during his tenure as President as they moved more than 400 tons of cocaine through Honduras toward the United States. In exchange, prosecutors said, Hernández received millions of dollars in bribes that he used to fuel his political rise. Maybe it’s because Hernandez is a rich, corrupt, right-wing authoritarian, and his successor, Xiomara Castro, has spoken out against Trump. Maybe it’s because Trump’s rich friends Peter Thiel and Marc Andreesen are supporters of Hernandez and investors in a Honduran economic zone championed by Hernandez. Or maybe, he doesn’t have a clue what’s going on, signs whatever’s put in front of him and doesn’t give a shit how it looks or who it affects. I think probably that one, but only because it would be irresponsible to speculate on whether anyone bribed Trump for the pardon. Meanwhile, Honduras’s attorney general has issued an arrest warrant for Hernández, and has asked government agencies and global police agency Interpol to arrest him.
- 21 Republican senators in Indiana voted against Trump’s redistricting proposal which would have divided Indianapolis into four pieces, grafting pieces of the city onto other districts to dilute the influence of Democratic voters. Disregarding what the senators’ constituents might have to say about it, some Republicans lashed out at senators for defying Trump. “His life was threatened — and he was nearly assassinated,” Indiana Lieutenant Gov. Micah Beckwith wrote on social media. “All for what? So that Indiana politicians could grow timid.” The night before the vote Trump laid off the nicey-nicey and went all-out tantrumic toddler on the senators accusing the state’s top senator of being “a bad guy, or a very stupid one.” In interviews after Thursday’s vote, several Republican senators said they were leaning against the plan from the start because their constituents didn’t like it and some said they simply didn’t like the president’s tone, like when he called senators “suckers.” Trump didn’t seem to get the message. Asked about the vote, the president once again took aim at Indiana’s top senator, Rodric Bray. “He’ll probably lose his next primary, whenever that is. I hope he does, because he’s done a tremendous disservice.” Sen. Sue Glick, an attorney from La Grange who also opposed redistricting, brushed off Trump’s threat to unseat lawmakers who defied him. “I would think he would have better things to do,” she said. “It would be money better spent electing the individuals he wants to represent his agenda in Congress.” Of course as a permanent three-year-old Trump is incapable of learning or humility or co-operation or compromise so he’s not going to take anything from Mitch Daniels, a former Indiana governor and a Republican’s, straightforward explanation for what happened. “Folks in our state don’t react well to being bullied.” in thus dealing Trump one of the most significant political defeats of his second term Sen. Greg Goode in not voting for the proposal said “I’m confident my vote reflects the will of my constituents.” You see Donnie for people to genuinely love you, you’ve got to show them a bit of love. Kim-Jong Un may be described as the beloved leader but that’s cos people are scared of him, they don’t actually love him. Indiana’s Republicans neither love, nor are scared of, you, you petulant child!
- Trump is really upset that the Nobel Committee didn’t give him the peace prize this year despite stopping eleventy hundred wars including that really bad one between Albania and Aberbaijan, two countries who Karoline Leavitt probably claims have always been at war. If there’s one thing Trump’s better at than peace, it’s putting his name on things, so earlier this month he combined the two, and renamed the US Institute of Peace the Donald J Trump Institute of Peace. I’d like to be outraged, but I have to admit I didn’t even know the US had an Institute of Peace, and I am a bit surprised. It’s like finding out we have an Institute of Not Oppressing Other Countries Peoples and Stealing Their Stuff. We don’t, just for the record, instead, we have the British Museum, where people from other countries can come and look at their stuff, which we’re keeping safe for them, since they obviously weren’t very responsible and just let someone come and take it. Anyway, a day later, Trump got the next best thing to the Nobel Peace Prize, the FIFA Peace Prize. I’m not from sports, so I’m not sure if this is the kind of thing that generally happens, but I have a feeling that it might just be another example of horrifically corrupt rich folk stroking the world’s most fragile ego for some future unspecified monetary or pardon-related benefit. Needless to say, Trump was thrilled, because they gave him a medal, and he likes shiny things. The Qatari royal family are probably kicking themselves now that they know that instead of giving him a $400 million plane they could have just got him a medal off Etsy and had it engraved. Meanwhile, I’m just waiting for KFC to announce their inaugural Biggest Hands Award – I wonder who will win!
- In the world of documentation I think it’s fairly safe to state that the content of the documents, the meaning of the words, and the order they are written in is the most important thing. But no, Secretary of State and bastard son of Mark Ruffalo and Billy Crystal smacked in the face with a snow shovel – Marco Rubio thinks that the actual typeface itself is more important, I suspect it’s because whilst he can see, he can’t actually read. In an echo of the jokey global disdain for Comic Sans the State Department distributed a cable on Tuesday which read “To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program, the Department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface.This formatting standard aligns with the President’s One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations directive, underscoring the Department’s responsibility to present a unified, professional voice in all communications,” Well I guess when your ultimate boss has pretensions to be a Little Caesar why not use Times Roman, and was Calibri – the font put in place by Biden in 2023 for, I dunno, legibility and accessibility reasons, really a DEI decision? Yeah how would it be to make documents a bit more readable and approachable? Pshaw ya woke snowflakes, all that leftie philanthropic Bill Gates’ fault for making Calibri the default font in the Microsoft Office Suite in 2007! What’s wrong with making official documents inaccessible and foreboding, and impossible to read on a monitor and get all distorted in small point sizes? God forbid they hear of the Plain English campaign in government offices in the UK! And is this not just another wasteful anti-DEIA program? It all feels a bit like Trump is trying to outdo Ramses III who re-carved or re-inscribed existing statues or monuments to attribute them to himself. Even the Times itself abandoned Times New Roman – the typeface was designed for ancient outmoded redundant useless metal typesetting, specifically for legibility with bad ink and cheap paper – yeah sounds about right for the whole Trump Rubio State Department!
- Given the stories of some tourists who have been critical of Trump being refused entry to the US, I’ve made peace with the fact that I probably wouldn’t make it into the country until after Trump leaves office in 2029. Or maybe 2033. But just recently, the Visa restrictions the Trump administrations have announced are starting to feel like a personal attack on me. I’m not claiming that the recent plan to vet the past 5 years of social media posts by potential visitors from 42 different countries is targeted at me, that would be insane. Sure, I’m one of the hundreds of millions of people that would definitely rule out, but obviously they think I’m clever enough to somehow get round that rule and give them some of my many conservative sock-puppet social media accounts I’ve been cultivating since 2016 for this exact eventuality, so the State Department have also issued an order demanding enhanced vetting of applicants “to see if they have worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance and online safety, among others.” I mean, Jeez, why don’t they just name me. Oh, sure they try to cover it up by claiming it’s about protecting freedom of speech and combatting censorship, but that’s obviously bullshit. Who would believe you’re protecting freedom of speech by refusing freedom of travel to people who have said something you don’t like, or checked a fact you lied about? No, this is obviously retaliation for the work we do here on Fallacious Trump, or the book I wrote about Dinesh D’Souza’s bullshit election rigging film, or the memes I occasionally repost on Threads and Bluesky. Well, I won’t be bowed. I can wait another 1,132 days to visit America again. Or maybe 2,594 days if he runs again.
- 18 months into the Labour government and 18 months away from the above inflation pay rises they gave to the medical nursing sector who they saw as so vitally important to the nation and who had been underprovisioned for so long under the Tories, Health Secretary and Mr Potato Head too long in the microwave Wes Streeting declares war on Doctors seeking more pay in line with their nursing colleagues. In language resonant of Thatcher, Cameron and Johnson; Starmer says a fair deal is on the table and Streeting says ooh but what about the ‘flu, going on strike will put patients at risk. Using the language of the Tory party that wanted to privatise the NHS looks to me to be every bit as risky. To help health matters Badenoch’s Tories would lift the 2030 ban on manufacturing petrol and diesel cars and do away with the legislation forcing manufacturers to make electric vehicles. We may all end up wheezing in a fossil-fueled climate inferno but at least we might vote Tory rather than Reform eh Kemi? Starmer, leafing through Farage’s playbook, is urging Europe’s leaders to curb ECHR to halt the rise of the far right. In a twisted logic he wants to water down the legislation protecting asylum seekers and refugees so countries can take tougher action to protect their borders and thus see off the rise of the Populist Far Right across the continent – you know exactly the thing that the far right populists say they want to do? Meanwhile a man in Bristol fell to his death from a ladder whilst attempting to hang a Union Flag on a lamppost. Whilst not quite to Charlie Kirk excesses, the man is being lauded in the local press as a keen football fan, loving father etc etc and not called out for ignorant racist servitude to Frog-Faced Farage’s shit-stirring. A bit like when Sir Oswald Mosely, Baronet, MP, founder of the blackshirts shit-stirrinig neo-nazi racist movement, died and was lauded as a fine upstanding member of the aristocracy! Fucking hell this country sometimes!!!
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