29 Dec Argumentum Ad Feminam – FT#188
Show Notes
The Ad Feminam Fallacy occurs when someone attacks their opponent using misogynistic or dismissive rhetoric because they’re a woman, rather than engaging with their argument.
Trump
We started out by discussing this compilation of Trump being a misogynist:
Mark’s British Politics Corner
Mark talked about this clip of Diane Abbott describing the abuse she receives:
Then he looked at these clips of Harriet Harman:
And finally this clip of Kemi Badenoch attacking Rachel Reeves:
Fallacy in the Wild
In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from Star Wars:
Then we discussed this clip from Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy:
And we finished up with this clip from Cheers:
Fake News
Here are the statements from this week’s special Christmas Fake News game:
Mark got one right this week, so he’s on 88 out of 176 – exactly 50%!
[Redacted] is not a logical fallacy
We talked about the few, heavily redacted Epstein files that have actually been released.
The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about
- In Trump’s first term he went through four Chiefs of Staff, but so far, this time round, he’s stuck with just Susie Wiles. I assume that’s because she says yes to whatever idiotic shit he wants to do and praises his ability to stand up and spout bullshit for hours on end. It certainly can’t be because she’s competent, since based on the latest piece in Vanity Fair, she hasn’t figured out that journalists write down the stuff you say and tell other people about it. She told reporter Chris Whipple that JD Vance was a conspiracy theorist, Russell Vought was a right-wing absolute zealot, and Elon Musk an avowed ketamine user. Wiles has claimed that her words have been taken out of context and disingenuously framed, and told the New York Times she never said the Musk quote in particular, saying “That’s ridiculous. I wouldn’t have said it and I wouldn’t know.” Apparently there are still a few actual journalists at the New York Times, and they contacted Chris Whipple, who played them the tape of her saying it. Whipple maintains the quotes were used in context and it is pretty hard to see what kind of context could be added to make them great things to say. About Trump himself, Wiles said he has an alcoholic’s personality and “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.” So, totally healthy and cool then. No notes. Meanwhile, Vanity Fair, who, I’m guessing, have made peace with the fact they’re not getting invited back to the White House in the next few years, accompanied the interview with some of the most amazing photojournalism I’ve seen this year. Photographer Chris Anderson documented various administration members including Vance, Wiles, Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, and Karoline Leavitt, and I can only assume they all believed they would look powerful, dominant and in control. But Anderson, a highly talented and experienced photojournalist, took the ugliest, most awkward portraits I’ve ever seen which brilliantly showcased how out of place, inadequate, and pointless these idiots are. Tiny in the frame, pushed back against a wall like an unwanted piece of furniture at a party, swamped by untidy light fixtures, loose cables, thermostat controls, wrinkled flags, cheap posters, and in Susie Wiles’ case, a staff member on the phone in another room through an open doorway doing the real work while she tries in vain not to look like a startled badger thinking back about all the shit-talking she’s done about her coworkers over the past year. It was glorious.
- With all the fake surprise of someone arriving at the surprise party that they organised because they don’t like surprises Fascist Voodoo Doll Barbie Karoline Leavitt announced on Ex-Twitter “I have just been informed that the highly respected Board of the Kennedy Center, some of the most successful people from all parts of the world, have just voted unanimously to rename the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center, because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building.” and not because of his frail needy ego, cos no-one other than him wants to name anything after him ever! Apart from firing every one on the board and installing his own puppet-y sycophants and thus it is no surprise that they’ll say anything he wants them to say, the vote wasn’t unanimous. An hour after Leavitt’s announcement, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), an ex officio member of the board at the Kennedy Center posted that she ‘was muted on the call and denied the opportunity to speak or register my opposition. That is not consensus. That is censorship.’ And apart from the fact that the renaming is illegal as congress did not give the board the authority to change the name of the Kennedy Center, is there anything more on the nose for this administration than literally muting a Black woman so that they can claim the vote was unanimous to rename a beloved culture and arts institution after an openly white supremacist president? I’m sure JFK would be proud and thankful for Leavitt thinking of him in the same post “Congratulations to President Donald J. Trump, and likewise, congratulations to President Kennedy, because this will be a truly great team long into the future!” And that’s what it’s for to guarantee some sort of immortality for Trump long into the future… yeah not gonna happen Donnie, soon as you’re deadmeat matey you’re being erased – Even Stalin got erased from the Museum of the Revolution. All together now “The sun’ll come up tomorrow….!”
- If you had to prove where you were born, where would you start, and how much proof could you gather quickly? For most of us, it probably won’t be much of an issue, but that’s not the case for all Americans right now. If you had your birth certificate, you might imagine that would be enough. How about if you also had medical records of your immunization records from when you were a baby? Multiple affidavits from people who can confirm they were present at your birth? How about medical records from the hospital that show you were born there? Yeah, of course that’s enough to convince literally anyone that you’re a citizen, unless those people don’t give a shit about objective reality because it gets in the way of deporting people. That’s why people like Dulce Diaz Morales, who was arrested by ICE for existing while brown on December 14th, has now been deported, probably to Mexico, but nobody seems to know. She and her sister were on their way to pick up some Taco Bell in Baltimore and were surrounded by several law enforcement vehicles, Dulce, who has no criminal record, by the way, was arrested and put in a van, and her sister Shirley, whose skin is lighter, was released. Attorneys presented all the evidence I mentioned earlier that she was born in Maryland, and got an injunction from the court saying she wasn’t allowed to be moved from the jurisdiction, but she was transferred to Louisiana, and then, despite a US District Court ruling that she could not be deported pending a hearing, her family was informed that she has in fact been deported, and her attorneys have not been able to confirm where. The DHS claims, without apparently providing any evidence, that her birth certificate is fake, and just pretends that none of the corroborating evidence exists, saying “She did NOT provide a valid U.S. birth certificate or any evidence in support of her claim that she is a U.S. citizen.”So, in conclusion, Fuck ICE.
- In a similar vein to cancelling despots (it’ll happen to you Donnie) or perhaps retaining statues of slave-owners but putting explanatory plaques next to them to ‘inform and educate’ Trump has taken to annotating the portraits of previous presidents along the White House Colonnade “Presidential Walk of Fame”. Of course this is to mis-inform and uneducate and is the presidential equivalent of sitting in the middle of the aisle at Walmart balling his fists and bawling ‘oh but why can’t I be as respected as they were’. Well the clue as to why that might be is cos the plaques under Biden and Obama, obviously emanating from the fevered egobrow of multiple-exclamation-mark sporadic-capitalizations-and-punctuation three-year-old vocabulary-meister Trump himself, insult and make unfounded claims. Sounding like scrawlings made in a secret tree-house next to pictures of the kids that bullied Trump torn from the kindergarten yearbook, Biden’s plaque reads “Sleepy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst President in American History,” adding that he took office “as a result of the most corrupt Election ever seen in the United States” and that “Biden oversaw a series of unprecedented disasters that brought our Nation to the brink of destruction.” Obama’s ends with the false claims that he “spied on the 2016 Presidential Campaign of Donald J. Trump, and presided over the creation of the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, the worst political scandal in American History.” “The plaques are eloquently written descriptions of each President and the legacy they left behind. As a student of history, many were written directly by the President himself.” Ass-licking Press Lackey Leavitt said in a statement – yeah no shit! Sorry; Yeah? No. Shit!
- Traditionally, when the White House announces that the President is going to give an address to the nation, and every major TV network takes a break from their regular programming to carry the address live, it’s because something important has happened. War’s broken out, they’ve decided to resign, someone landed on a moon. But we don’t live in traditional times. So when Trump addressed the nation for twenty minutes on Wednesday night it was mostly to shout at Americans for not being happy enough about all the things he pretends he’s accomplished. Gas and groceries are so cheap now, so why are my approval ratings in the toilet? You’re all idiots! I’m paraphrasing, but honestly not that much. It was basically a condensed rally speech, and as such, contained slightly more than usual lies-per-minute, such that Daniel Dale, CNN’s fact checker, did his usual fact checking later that night and then had to add more the following morning because he realised he hadn’t covered everything. Some of the topics Trump lied about included inflation, grocery prices, prescription drug prices, coal, foreign investments, immigration, peace deals, the one big beautiful bill, crime, and healthcare. A whole new lie involved the promise to send a Christmas bonus of $1,776 to the troops as a “warrior dividend”, which he claimed was thanks to all the money raised by his tariffs, but in fact this is just money that was already allocated by Congress for military housing assistance, not new money that Trump has decided to give them. So, in conclusion, Fuck Trump
- Former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith told lawmakers in a closed-door interview Wednesday that his team of investigators “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that President Donald Trump had criminally conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election, according to portions of his opening statement obtained by The Associated Press. Smith also said investigators had accrued “powerful evidence” Trump broke the law by hoarding classified documents from his first term as president at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and by obstructing government efforts to recover the records. Multiple prior Justice Department special counsels, including Robert Mueller, have testified publicly but Smith was summoned for just a private interview. Several Democrats who emerged from Smith’s interview said they could understand why Republicans did not want an open hearing based on the damaging testimony about Trump they said Smith offered. If asked whether he would “prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, Smith said “I would do so regardless of whether the president was a Republican or Democrat.” Democrat members of the House Judiciary Committee hearing the deposition congratulated Smith on his courage and resolve in schooling the committee on the professional responsibilities of a prosecutor and the ethical duties of a prosecutor.” The committee chairman, Republican Jim Jordan, told reporters, “I think we’ve learned some interesting things.” Perhaps this is the moment in the Salem witch trials as Arthur Miller told it in the Crucible and its allegorical context the McCarthy Trials where daylight and sense floods in to reveal the hounding of Smith as the retribution that it is being piled on him by an administration that is guilty on all charges. Let’s hope Trump lives long enough to be an ex-president and can somehow face Smith’s charges as a civilian!
- Last year, Trump sued the Pulitzer Prize board for defamation, based on the fact that they refused to rescind awards given to journalists who had reported on the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in 2016. What Trump failed to realise is that he is an incompetent narcissist, and everyone he surrounds himself with is an incompetent sycophant, and the smartest person among them is much stupider than the dumbest person members of the Pulitzer board have ever held a conversation with. Consequently, the Pulitzer Board filed documents last week demanding discovery in the case, and it’s fucking devastating. They say that to show harm and therefore extract damages he must obviously claim that he has either been financially harmed, or suffered physical or mental distress, and as such they need to see all of his tax returns — “from all jurisdictions, including all attachments, schedules, and worksheets” — from 2015 to the present day, documents “sufficient to show all sources of Your income” over the same time period, documents sufficient to show all of his financial holdings and his liabilities. As for the health aspect, they’re also going to need “all Documents (whether held by You or by third parties under Your control or who could produce them at your direction) concerning Your medical and/or psychological health from January 1, 2015, to present, including any prescription medications you have been prescribed or have taken”. In the unlikely situation Trump doesn’t want to provide them with any of this, they offer him an out, which is to confirm in writing that he doesn’t want to seek any such damages. This is super fun, because all the Pulitzer Board really needed to do to win the lawsuit was show that their processes were robust and that the reporting they awarded has fully held up to scrutiny, but they decided to have a little fun with it!
- In Blighty this week police leaders are set to recommend scrapping non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) in a review to be published next month. NCHIs are alleged acts motivated by hostility or prejudice towards people with certain characteristics, such as race or gender, but which do not meet the bar for a criminal offence. Current Home Office guidance says they are recorded to collect data on “hate incidents that could escalate into more serious harm”, but critics say they divert police resources and restrict freedom of speech. College of Policing chair Lord Herbert said “an explosion of social media” in the years since they were introduced has meant police had been drawn into monitoring “mere disputes” online. Officers do not want to be “policing tweets”, he said. Meanwhile officers have been policing bits of cardboard when Greta Thunberg got arrested today for allegedly holding a placard supporting Palestine Action, knowing full well that such an act by notoriously mild-mannered Greta could escalate to more serious harm like diverting police resources and restricting freedom of speech? In other matters, caving under pressure from long-standing family farmers like Nigel Farage and Jeremy Clarkson, Rachel Reeves has watered down the inheritance tax burden for farms lifting the threshold for paying inheritance tax from farms worth 1 million to now being levied when they are valued at 2.5m or above, because no system of reckoning could possibly be made to work out who had owned a farm since time immemorial and who had bought them in the early 2000’s as a tax dodge to avoid inheritance tax, crikey the rozzers will be expected to start policing family trees next!!
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