Didactic Fallacy – FT#192

07 May Didactic Fallacy – FT#192

Show Notes

The Didactic Fallacy occurs when someone attempts to apply a historical analogy to a current situation but takes the wrong lesson from history or applies it to an inappropriate modern problem.

Trump

We started out by discussing this clip of Trump following his latest assassination attempt:

Then we talked about this clip of Trump getting tariffs wrong again:

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about these three clips of Jacob Rees-Mogg:

Then he looked at this clip of Boris Johnson and David Davis’s response:

Fallacy in the Wild (Sting: Sting – History Will Teach Us Nothing)

In the Fallacy in the Wild, we looked at this clip from Brooklyn Nine-Nine:

Then we discussed this clip from Babylon 5:

We followed that with this clip of Margaret MacMillan talking about her book The Uses and Abuses of History:

And finally, we talked about this Guardian article by journalist Eva Ladipo.

Fake News

Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:

Mark got it wrong this week and is on 48%!

Trump’s latest court filing is not a logical fallacy

We talked about whatever the hell this real legal filing is.

The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about

• Devin Nunes, a man whose primary career achievement was unsuccessfully suing a fictional cow on Twitter, has finally decided that being the CEO of the currently burning dumpster known as the Trump Media & Technology Group, is just not the right fit. Say what you like about Devin, but he’s clearly done a phenomenal job at TMTG, the parent company of Truth Social, which brought in a whole $3.7 million in revenue in 2025. Good job, Devin! Let’s just have a look at the other side of that balance sheet. There’s another number here – $712.3 million under something called “net loss”. I don’t know much about business. Is losing $192 for every dollar you make a good thing, or a bad thing?  Don Jr. offered the standard corporate eulogy, thanking Devin for his “dedicated service” while presumably checking to see if the building’s insurance covers spontaneous executive combustion. The company’s largest shareholder is Trump, and I love that for him, because the stock price is currently around $9, less than 10% of the value back in 2021 when Devin abandoned his seat in actual Congress to run the company once described as a “conservative challenger to Silicon Valley.” In a desperate attempt to find a pulse, TMTG has spent the last year flailing through every buzzword in the book, including crypto, prediction markets, and fintech. In December, they announced a $6 billion merger with TAE Technologies, a nuclear fusion company. Because clearly, if you can’t run a social media app made of reheated QAnon memes and self-delusion, the logical next step is mastering the power of the stars to solve the global energy crisis. Devin is just the latest rat to swim for it, following board members Eric Swider and Robert Lighthizer out the door. While the company insists these departures aren’t due to any “disagreements,” it’s hard to imagine anyone agreeing with a 90% stock collapse and three-quarters of a billion dollars in losses. Devin claims he’s leaving to focus on his role as Chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, which is shocking news. I had no idea Trump had an Intelligence Advisory Board. It sounds like a pretty easy job. I assume they just tell him to ignore the Intelligence and do whatever he was going to do anyway, and then claim he’s solved the problem while it’s getting demonstrably worse.
• Like a real-life spoof re-enactment of a scene from My Son Hunter – Laurence Fox lookalike Eric Trump went on Fox Business on Thursday morning to boast about Foundation Future Industries, a company where he serves as chief strategy adviser, scoring a multimillion-dollar deal from the US Department of Defense. Nepo baby springs to mind, as does Phillips O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews comment that “the US government is now one of, if not the most, corrupt governments on earth.” Foundation Future is a robotics firm that earlier this year won a $24 million Pentagon contract that will see its robots deployed in Ukraine, where they will be used to inspect and transport weapons. When asked “what attracted” him to the multi-million dollar US government contracting enterprise Eric responded that he decided to get involved with robotics to help America “win” the race with China to build battle-ready robots, in the same way he purportedly helped the US “win” by being an early investor in cryptocurrency. Eric and his brother, Donald Trump Jr., for months have been investing in companies with the goal of scoring lucrative Pentagon deals. The Wall Street Journal reported in March that the Trump brothers invested in a Florida-based drone company called Powerus that “is vying to meet fresh demand from the Pentagon” for drones that started when the Trump administration banned foreign-made drones and drone components from the US in December. And in 2025, at least two companies backed by Trump Jr. received contracts collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars from the DOD. University of Michigan political scientist Donald Moynihan compared the Trump brothers to Uday and Qusay Hussein, the late sons of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and argued that much of Trump’s second administration appears to be running the US government like it’s a family business. National security attorney Bradley Moss, in a nod to possible future congressional investigations of the Trump family’s corruption, advised Eric Trump to “preserve your records.” ooh I’m surprised he didn’t say “cover your tracks hide your browsers” as The Outbursts would advise!  
• The Supreme Court is partying like it’s 1964 by gutting the Voting Rights Act even further to make it harder for voters of color to challenge clearly racist gerrymandering, unless the obvious racists who draw the maps film themselves wearing a Klan hood and holding  the map up to camera saying “I drew this to disenfranchise minorities”. Except they wouldn’t use the term “minorities”. You know which one they’d use. Definitely not-racist Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion in Louisiana v. Callais, which was signed on to by all the ones you’d expect, including John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh, despite the fact it directly contradicts how they voted in Allen v. Milligan in 2023, not to mention the past 40 years of Supreme Court precedent. This will, of course, absolutely fuck everything in red states in 2028, but fortunately the Purcell doctrine, which prevents courts from changing election rules just before an election, means that the midterms are safe. Unfortunately, Republicans don’t give a shit about that kind of thing if it makes their racist power grabs a bit inconvenient, so GOP governors and legislators across the South are scrambling to redraw maps and delete majority-minority districts to make sure the power of people’s votes is inversely proportional to how many episodes of Showtime at the Apollo they’ve seen. Louisiana governor Jeff Landry, who looks like unflavored tofu in a suit, is leaning into the chaos with the energy of a man who just found a “Get Out of Democracy Free” card. He’s actually suspended the House primary elections that were slated for May 16th despite the fact early voting has already started. Landry is essentially holding the entire electoral process hostage while he waits for a formal notification from SCOTUS that he can erase the districts held by Democratic Representatives Cleo Fields and Troy Carter. Over in Alabama, hairspray-human hybrid Governor Kay Ivey has already called a special legislative session to establish contingency primaries, betting that the Supreme Court will lift the injunction that was supposed to keep the current maps stable until 2030. Meanwhile, the map-making frenzy is spreading to Tennessee, South Carolina, and Virginia, like a wildfire fueled by spite. Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent noted that this decision makes the VRA “not just a toothless tiger, you’ve got no tiger.” But for the GOP, deleting districts that don’t vote for them is easier than improving people’s lives, so that’s what they’re going with.
• Okay so whilst the world waits to see what the markets will do to the value of their savings and the price of refilling your car to get to the supermarket to buy food at increasing prices and worry about the availability of pharmaceuticals and helium for MRI scans; at a gathering of the heads of the drug companies that made the treatment that saved his life when he got Covid Trump started blethering on about the state of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool cos yeah why not. Don’t tell us about your half-arsed exit strategy for your ill-thought out war-of-choice in Iran and the impact on the economy of the entire globe. Tell us about how a German friend of yours also thought the pool looked a bit scummy and make that a priority. Of course the fault no doubt lay with the Biden administration who allegedly solicited bids to renovate the pool that had come in at $301 million and would take as many as “three and a half years.” On that made up basis ol’ property-developer-in-chief Trump who’s probably by his own admission “built a hundred swimming pools” got his pool guy to look at it. His pool guy said “I’d like to work two weeks on cleaning it up … and he said ‘it’d take me two weeks,” and then in true we’ll be done with the war in a minute and a half fashion continued with an immediate cut in the timescale saying “Our job will take one week. It will cost about a million and a half dollars.” Trump then told reporters the hitherto completely unannounced reflecting pool project “is being done now” as he showed off photos of the ongoing work. Again, money? approval, due diligence, published timescales, schemes of work? But yeah fuck if he can’t do it for a fricking Middle East war then who’s gonna care about details of a pool clean! Except one detail will be that it’s going to have blue water, cos no point in water if it ain’t blue right! That’s classy! Given that he’s said don’t rush me when asked about timescales for the Iran war – “so we’re in Vietnam, like for 18 years. We were in Iraq for many, many years … . I’ve been doing this for six weeks, and we’re, their military is totally defeated,” any bets on how long this bleedin’ pool is going to take? The opening ceremony I hope will feature the reunion of The Doors singing “This is the End” whilst Robert Duval surfs past a jacuzzi-ing Jeffery Epstein down the entire 2,200 ft length of the reflecting pool whilst clouds of agent orange swirl in the downdraft of passing chinooks! And Forrest Gump finishes with “And that’s all I got to say about that!”
• Trump’s Labor Secretary has become the third administration official in a month to be ousted, and weirdly, they’re all women, and they’ve all been replaced by mediocre white men. Just a coincidence, I’m sure. When I wrote that, I was just assuming that new acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling is mediocre, based on the fact that he’s working for Trump, but then I looked him up, and yeah – fuck that guy. Anyway, back to the now former Labor Secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who the White House says stepped down to “pursue opportunities in the private sector,” but whose lawyer said she left “to ensure the administration’s work continues without distraction.” What distraction would that be? Maybe months of complaints and an internal investigation into what the New York Post delicately described as “workplace misconduct.” The former Mayor of Happy Valley was allegedly caught knocking back drinks in her office during the workday, which is just not acceptable unless you’re in charge of one of the less important things like Defense or the FBI. She’s also accused of having her staff manufacture “official trips” to destinations that conveniently aligned with her vacation wishlist. While she denies the travel fraud, it’s hard to look like a champion of the American worker when your primary labor involves deciding which five-star hotel has the best minibar. Personally, I think I’d be keeping a low profile at work if my spouse had already been banned from the building for inappropriate touching of two of my employees but fortunately Jeanine Pirro, who I keep forgetting is somehow US Attorney for DC, decided there was “no indication of a crime”, and I’m sure absolutely no boxes of wine changed hands to make that happen. Probably Lori just invited her to one of the daydrinking sessions in her office. Naturally, the White House is pretending this is a victory lap. Communications Director and Oddjob stunt double Steven Cheung touted her “phenomenal job,” presumably referring not only to her ability to remain upright almost all day, but also the fact she fucked over both kinds of minors/miners – by scrapping millions of dollars worth of grants for fighting child labor and slavery overseas, and repealing workplace safety regulations in literal mines. And those are just a couple of the worst things she did in between cocktails. I’d love to say her replacement will be less evil, but that doesn’t seem to be a direction this administration is capable of moving in.
• “Okay fellas I want you to get Comey” “ I don’’t like him, I don’t like how he got near the truth of the Russian influence on the 2016 election” “But you fired him” “ Yeah that’s not enough, what’ve you got” A nervous intern raises his hand pushes up his glasses and in a voice that momentarily cracks with the idiocy of what he’s about to say offers “ She..Shells, on a beach…” and then goes quiet, ashamed of the triviality of what he’s just said. “What? say that again!” “I saw a picture Comey posted of shells on a beach… he took it down though” “Whadit say?” Really embarrassed now at the ephemeral nature of anything drawn in sand and mindful of the cautionary tale of King Canute he only manages, when his shirt front is twisted and he’s slammed against the wall of the oval office,  to squeak out “8647”. The room laughs and he’s dusted down and apologised to when they realise that it’s meaningless and stupid and of no possible substance, except Trump. Like something from a shlock 60’s TV police drama he splutters “If anybody knows anything about crime, they know 86, it’s a mob term for kill ’em,” he told this to reporters during an appearance with NASA astronauts in the Oval Office. He also called Comey “a dirty cop.” Consequently, yes indeed James Comey made his first court appearance on Wednesday in a criminal case against him that legal experts say presents significant hurdles for the prosecution and will likely be a challenge for the U.S. Justice Department to win. Not least cos First Amendment. He’s charged with making threats against U.S. President Donald Trump related to a photograph he posted on social media last year of seashells arranged in the numbers “86 47.” Miriam-Webster who knows everything about words and symbols and their meaning says 86 is slang meaning “to throw out,” “to get rid of” or “to refuse service to.” It notes: “Among the most recent senses adopted is a logical extension of the previous ones, with the meaning of ‘to kill.’ We do not enter this sense, due to its relative recency and sparseness of use.” The prosecution will have to prove Comey recklessly disregarded the risk that a statement could be perceived as threatening violence. In a 2023 Supreme Court case, the majority held that prosecutors have to show that the “defendant had some subjective understanding of the threatening nature of his statements.” Meanwhile, the high court has found that hyperbolic political speech is protected. In a 1969 case, the justices ruled that a Vietnam War protester did not make a knowing and wilful threat against then-president Lyndon B. Johnson, when he remarked, “If they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.” The court noted that laughter in the crowd when the protester made the statement, among other things, showed it wasn’t a serious threat of violence. Comey deleted the post shortly after it was made, writing: “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence” and “I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.” Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, wrote in an opinion piece published Tuesday that “despite being one of Comey’s longest critics, the indictment raises troubling free speech issues. In the end, it must be the Constitution, not Comey, that drives the analysis and this indictment is unlikely to withstand constitutional scrutiny.” Trump merely demonstrates again that he has the thick hide of a jellyfish and thus we’ll all get to collectively piss on him and render his sting neutralised.
• Amateur mammal pathologist RFK Jr is all about transparency and following the science, so that’s why the CDC has 86’d a report that showed the COVID-19 vaccine cut ER visits and  hospitalizations in half last winter according to three insiders who spoke to the Washington Post on condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisals from the administration. You know, just like a normal and totally cool government. I don’t blame them, I wouldn’t want to be put in a Dr. Oz themed re-education camp until I admitted reiki worked either. Intially, we were told that publication of the report in the CDC’s own flagship journal was simply delayed due to a routine check on methodology. Sure, they used exactly the same methodology in a flu vaccine report they published the week before, but this time interim CDC head Jay Bhattacharya, who is keeping the seat warm until they find someone whose name Trump can pronounce (he struggles with “Jay”), had concerns. It seems pretty likely those concerns are related to the fact that the report completely disagrees with Health Secretary RFK, who once called the COVID vaccine “deadliest vaccine ever made”. Only when he said it, it sounded like an air-fryer falling down a spiral staircase. According to the whistleblowers the report had already cleared the agency’s scientific-review process, which includes scrutiny by dozens of scientists. In the world of federal health, stopping a report at the publication stage is pretty much unheard of, but Bhattacharya and his team aren’t backing down. They’re now claiming the paper wasn’t “accepted for publication” at all, a blatant pivot from their earlier story that they were just “working through concerns.” Meanwhile, GOP pollsters are trying to convince the administration to soften their antivax stance because they’ve started to notice that some voters prefer not dying of preventable diseases. We’re now officially at the stage of government where the CDC has shifted from Disease Control to Damage Control, but the damage is only to their boss’s ego and everyone else is still getting the diseases.
• It’s been a tale of Left, Right and Centre in British Politics this past week or so, the knife attack on two Jewish men in Golders Green of course prompted the Labour Party to highlight the failure of the Tory’s Prevent scheme that was designed to pre-emptively identify potential terrorist threats by individuals in releasing the attacker who went on to also knife a Muslim man in South London not far from where I am right now, Labour also said it would review the funding for mental health services provided in the Maudsley and South London hospitals where the attacker had been treated prior to release, and caution against hysterical reaction for political gains. No, no they didn’t, mindful no doubt of the appalling stink of the Mandelson mismanagement Labour seized on the opportunity to label all pro-Palestinian marches as anti-semitic and are looking at legislation to ban any such protests on that basis. The Tories didn’t caution the Labour Party for being heavy-handed in its curbing of the rights to freedom of protest and free speech but rather Badenoch agreed that yes Palestine support marches should be banned whilst allowing those of Steven Yaxley-Lennon’s far right and anti-muslim mob to be able to continue to march unencumbered in the name of freedom to protest and speak freely in the dissemination of their hatred for brown people. The Times newspaper responded to Green Leader Zach Polanski posting a protest at the over-zealous response bordering on brutality when they literally kicked the Somali-born brown man Essa Suleiman responsible for the attacks after he was tazered to the ground by publishing a cartoon depicting the Jewish Polanski in a graphical hooked-nosed way not unfamiliar to students of the propaganda put out in 1930s Germany! Polanski, who’s party is on track to win control of many London councils in the upcoming local elections had been on the receiving end of widespread smears by the vested-interest controlled media up to and including accusing him of anti-semitism – he’s Jewish!. To his credit he is learning the right lesson from the history of the establishment’s co-ordinated take-down of fellow status quo-questioning Jeremy Corbyn by not conceding his position regarding the imbalance of power designed to maintain those vested interests of wealthy donors and the parties they donate to. Even further on the right Nigel Farage receiving an undeclared, secret personal £5m donation from a Thai crypto millionaire has received about a hundredth of the outraged coverage given to Starmer in the wake of his gifts of free spectacles and football tickets – both of which he declared and eventually returned. Gleefully relaxed in his position as favourite to win big in the national local elections Farage has pretty much broken all election rules about coercion and, let’s face it hate crimes, by announcing that his party will not build centres for refugees seeking asylum in the UK in those constituencies that vote him in but rather will do it to the Greens. So every party is being strong on deflection and weak on policies to distract from actually doing stuff that might appeal to the vast population that would like clean water and reliable inexpensive transport and affordable food and for disgustingly rich people to pay their fair share, everyone except Zach Polanski that is, who is being a Green thorn in their side.

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