Appeal to Definition – FT#194

02 Jun Appeal to Definition – FT#194

Show Notes

The Appeal to Definition Fallacy occurs when someone relies on a specific definition, from a dictionary or other authority, which supports their argument, and ignores the possibility that other definitions are also reasonable.

Trump

We started out by discussing this clip of Trump pretending MAGA only means one thing:

Then we talked about this clip of Trump being wrong about 86:

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about Boris Johnson quibbling over the definition of checks at the border after Brexit, and his later clarification:

And then we looked at Theresa May explaining what Brexit means:

Fallacy in the Wild (Sting: Supertramp – The Logical Song)

In the Fallacy in the Wild, we looked at this clip from Taskmaster:

Then we discussed this clip from an Autechre track:

And finally, we talked about this clip from Bill Clinton’s deposition:

Fake News

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

Mark got it right this week and is still on 48%!

Prosecutorial misconduct is not a logical fallacy

We talked about the case of the Broadview Six.

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

• America’s 250th birthday bash on the National Mall will feature an event called The Great American State Fair, a 16 day expo organized by Freedom 250 – a public-private partnership spawned by one of Trump’s executive orders to rival the actual, congressionally mandated America250 committee. On Wednesday, Freedom 250 proudly announced its lineup of nine musical acts for the Fair, which included country music superstar Martina McBride, funk/soul group the Commodores, and several much less famous performers. Almost immediately, they frantically sprinted to social media to announce that no the fuck they wouldn’t be performing. The lovely and talented McBride, the only one I gave two shits about, said she was told when she agreed to perform that it would be a nonpartisan event to celebrate America, and that “is, in fact, not what is happening.” I’ve got a feeling that the public backlash might have had a bit more to do with it, but at least she came to her senses. Young MC, the Commodores, and Poison frontman Bret Michaels also cited the shocking revelation that there might be a political angle to something Trump does as their reason for peacing out, while Morris Day of Morris Day and the Time simply channeled Simon Cowell and said “It’s a no from me”. Two of the other acts announced were C+C Music Factory, of Gonna Make You Sweat fame, and Milli Vanilli, of massive fraud fame. Neither act is technically performing, because neither act technically ever was, despite the announcement. Freedom Williams, the rapper from C+C, who owns the trademark to the group’s name, announced in a seven minute Instagram rant from his toilet, that he will still be performing despite the backlash because, in his words, “I don’t fuck with Trump. I don’t give a fuck about Trump. I don’t give a fuck about Trump’s family. I know the type of fucking anarchy he creates. But the day I let you motherfuckers tell me what to do is the day I die”. As for Milli Vanilli, the people who actually sang the songs released a statement confirming that they will not be performing, so if you manage to get tickets you’ll only see the lip-synching fakes. Well, one of them anyway, as the other one’s been dead for nearly 20 years. Not sure if that was Milli or Vanilli. Luckily, you will still get to see Flo Rida and Vanilla Ice, so not all is lost. And, of course, the festivities will also include a 110-foot Ferris wheel, special screenings of “National Treasure” and its sequel, “National Treasure: Book of Secrets,” and every kid’s favorite part of a state fair, “CEO and innovator-led conversations and demonstrations”. Faced with an empty stage and a massive lineup deficit, Trump handled the mass exodus with his signature grace and humility. Taking to Truth Social, he suggested canceling the “overpriced, boring singers who nobody wants to hear anyway” and replacing them with a much better, totally non-musical alternative: himself. Because what the people really want is a furious spoken-word performance about crowd sizes and biased federal judges, with occasional air-accordion solos.
• In a deal not- unlike Baroness Mone’s dodgy PPE contract fast-tracked by mates in the Tory party during covid – after all who better to make hospital approved medical grade PPE than a former lingerie influencer, the Pentagon announced a $620 million loan last year to a small North Carolina startup Vulcan Elements. Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was considering funding at the time, Vulcan’s was the only deal initiated by a top aide to the president, remember Peter Navarro?- yep him. Okay weird howcumzit Navarro was able to fasttrack funding to this particular startup we-eelll about three months before the Pentagon announced plans to lend money to Vulcan Elements, Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm took an undisclosed stake in the company. The $620m loan was a massive financial commitment from the Pentagon in its effort to fund companies that could help the U.S. reduce dependence on China’s critical mineral supply chains. The deal was a dramatic win for Vulcan, a North Carolina rare-earth magnet company launched just two years earlier. Estimates of its valuation grew tenfold after the deal was announced. Don Jr had visited Navarro in prison while he served time for defying a subpoena from lawmakers investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Trump Jr. was one of the small group of people Navarro dedicated his latest book to for having “my back when it was against the wall.” And a week before the Vulcan deal was announced, Trump Jr. hosted Navarro — now the president’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing — on his streaming show, encouraging his nearly 2 million subscribers to buy Navarro’s book. “No company receives preferential treatment,” a Pentagon spokesperson said. “Outside affiliations, investors, or political connections play absolutely no role in the Department’s funding decisions.” The Pentagon’s response did not address how Vulcan was selected, explaining only how the department addresses conflicts that arise from its employees’ financial holdings, not those of the president’s family. The Office of Strategic Capital is expected to deploy billions more in loans in the coming months to critical mineral and military technology companies. Among the companies under review was Unusual Machines, a Florida drone parts maker, a Defense official said. Trump Jr. sits on the company’s advisory board and holds millions of dollars worth of shares. Brodie Sutherland, CEO of Nevada-based tungsten mining company Patriot Critical Minerals, said “It’s like any industry: A lot of what it is, is who you know.” Defense Department records reviewed recently by ProPublica show Sutherland’s company had already been considered for a loan but was rejected. Yep yep yep.
• Let’s check in on the beautiful, unsoiled ecosystem of American campaign finance, which has recently birthed a shiny new Super PAC called “Lead Left.” According to its official mission statement, Lead Left exists to “stand against MAGA extremists who will infect our country with Donald Trump’s agenda.” It sounds ideal, basically a progressive grassroots collective operating out of a yurt. But if you look at their actual spending, Lead Left has a very specific, almost avant-garde strategy: they are dropping millions of dollars into Democratic primaries to back candidates who are completely insane. Take Texas’s 35th District, where Lead Left dumped nearly a million dollars supporting a primary candidate named Maureen Galindo. Galindo is a progressive housing advocate, a sex therapist, and a casual enjoyer of vibrant antisemitic conspiracy theories. In a series of totally normal Instagram posts, she promised that if elected to Congress, she would introduce legislation to convert a local ICE detention center into a literal internment camp for “American Zionists” that would also double as a “castration processing center for pedophiles which will probably be most of the Zionists.” Naturally, mainstream Democrats aggressively backed her sane opponent, Johnny Garcia, who thankfully won the runoff last week. Lead Left has pulled the same stunt in swing House districts in Nebraska and Pennsylvania, backing supposedly progressive candidates with massive political liabilities, or running bizarre TV ads smearing moderate Democrats as secret Trump lovers. It’s almost as if Lead Left isn’t actually run by progressive activists at all. When the investigative journalists at Popular Information started looking into it, they found two Republicans in a trenchcoat instead, For starters, Lead Left structured its filings so it wouldn’t legally have to disclose its real donors until late June—handily after most of these primaries are already over. The PAC registered its official headquarters at a mailbox inside a Staples store in Tallahassee, Florida, and of the 48,000 political committees registered with the FEC over the last decade, only two others have ever used that exact same Tallahassee Staples mailbox. Both of them are directly run by the Crosby Ottenhoff Group, a prominent Republican compliance firm. Furthermore, a quick peek into the metadata of Lead Left’s original website revealed code directly linking it to WinRed, the official fundraising platform for the Republican Party. The man sitting at the top of this entire apparatus is Caleb Crosby, a top-tier Republican operative who concurrently serves as the treasurer for the Congressional Leadership Fund – the primary Super PAC dedicated to electing House Republicans. Yes, the chief fundraising arm of the GOP is secretly laundering millions through shell companies, painting themselves blue, and using a Staples mailbox to fund antisemitic sex therapists and sabotage competitive Democratic primaries from the inside. It’s the kind of cartoonish, multi-layered ratfucking that would make Dick Cheney shed a single, proud tear.
• Since Trump bought between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of shares of stock in TKO, the parent company of UFC, this week, he wants to make sure the TKO event on his front lawn looks good on TV, What better way than to fill out the bleachers with fine examples of strapping young manhood, and where better to go than the military for that following Pete Hogsbreath’s edict told to that room of fat generals and beardos. a memo circulated within the Air Force, eligibility is contingent on meeting “CURRENT WAIST-HEIGHT RATIO and current physical fitness standard.” Another internal message stated that the Department of Defense was looking for junior personnel and officers, specifically. Great okay it’s bit of a jolly, a day out at the White House representing the nation’s prowess, does it really matter that it’s a bit Hitler-youthy in its optics? Except the caveat is that the co-opted aryan specimens have to pay their own way to get there and probably buy their own snacks, though I expect they’re not allowed to be seen holding a coke and a burger – they’d all be on Trumps TV-dinner tray anyway. This despite the fact that the junior troops are the lowest paid in the military. Well I guess AVClub is right in summarising it as there’s no better way to ring in America’s 250th birthday than by humiliating its military while watching some guy have his orbital bone obliterated all in the service of Trump’s share portfolio. Welcome to the American Utopia!
• As we know, if there’s one thing Republicans hate, it’s the weaponization of the Federal government against the President’s enemies. So it must have been a really tough decision for Todd Blanche to launch a criminal perjury investigation into E. Jean Carroll the 82-year-old woman who already beat the deep-fried, spray-tanned stroke hazard in chief twice in civil court and walked away with an $88 million judgment after he was found civilly liable for sexual assault and defamation. The prosecutors’ theory hinges on a 2022 deposition statement by Carroll, that she received no outside funding for her lawsuit, though it was later revealed that billionaire Reid Hoffman had paid some legal fees and expenses. Blanche, the current head of the DOJ, had to recuse himself because he was literally Trump’s personal defense attorney during the Carroll trials. So instead, the DOJ packed up this vindictive little file and shipped it off to prosecutors in Chicago. The moment the story leaked, the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney in Chicago, Andrew Boutros, sprinted to Twitter to declare that his office “has never opened” an investigation into Carroll and that the rumors were categorically false. Naturally, within minutes, investigative reporters confirmed that the investigation is ongoing, but Boutros says he’s not investigating Carroll, he’s only investigating Hoffman’s nonprofit, American Future Republic. It’s based in Chicago, so there’s the illusion of justification. But that doesn’t make literally any sense. What has American Future Republic done wrong? It’s allowed to donate money to a legal defense fund. I’m not sure Mr. Boutros is telling the truth. Unsurprisingly, this petty act of presidential score-settling is throwing Senate Republicans into an absolute tailspin, because Democrats are already planning to force endless floor votes explicitly condemning the DOJ’s weaponization against an elderly sexual assault survivor, meaning vulnerable Republicans will have to publicly vote to defend this pathetic stunt right on the Senate floor. But hey, that’s the modern American justice system for you. If you’re a private citizen who gets a legal line-item wrong while suing a corrupt administration, they’ll threaten you with a federal cell. If you’re the guy in the Oval Office executing unsolicited multi-million dollar insider trading deals on government supercomputers, they slap your wrist with a devastating $200 fine. Everything is fine, the system works, and the rule of law is totally intact.
• Rather than, say, admit that the self-begun war on Iran is leading to a global economic crisis that’s impacting the American voter’s cost of living and work out a way to call it all over, admit defeat and graciously accept the error and the impact, Trump’s worked out a way to save money at the grocery store; reduce legislation restricting the use of hydro-flourocarbons in refrigerators. Similar to his concerns about showers not working and wind farms noise giving people cancer, Trump’s reversal of Biden-era rules as a way to ease the economic strictures is another way to kill off any and all green policies. Of course it’ll have no such impact as industry groups said it could even raise prices because manufacturers have already redesigned products, retooled factories and trained workers to build and service next-generation refrigerant equipment. But that’s not the point the point is to create another distraction by creating an enemy out of pro-carbon reducing eco-centred net-zero type legislations in order to say that it’s that’ that’s causing the problem and not the large gas-emitting orange bloat himself with an ego that requires so much power it’s dimming the national grid every time he opens his mouth. Inflation in the United States increased to 3.8% annually in April, amid price spikes caused by the Iran war and Trump’s sweeping tariffs. Inflation is now outpacing wage gains as the war has kept oil and gasoline prices high. David Doniger, a senior strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, called Trump’s action “a lose-lose for the environment and the economy. It will harm consumers and the climate and reduce American competitiveness in the global markets emerging for environmentally safer refrigerants.” though Kevin McDaniel, whose company operates 14 Piggly Wiggly stores in Florida, Alabama and Georgia (- hmm noticeably Red States I see), said the Biden-era rule would have forced many independent grocers out of business. “It was thrown together too fast,’’ he said. “The technology is not there yet. It’s just way too fast. That’s the problem. Good idea, but it’s terrible.” Oh for a minute there I thought that last bit was a reaction to the notion of making the greediest stupidest failingest reality TV-host President of the United States.
• Well, it looks like Donald Trump’s highly anticipated $1.8 billion right-wing piggy bank has entered hospice care after a brief, magnificent lifecycle of about two weeks. In a stunning display of Trump Always Chickening Out, the White House has officially informed congressional leaders that they are pulling the plug on the “Anti-Weaponization Fund”, the taxpayer-funded vault originally designed to dole out cash rewards to the president’s political cronies and January 6th rioters, thanks to a Republican mutiny and some deeply annoyed federal judges. In case you weren’t paying attention to us in episode 193, the trouble started when Trump decided to file a completely bogus $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS because a contractor leaked his tax returns years ago. But instead of pursuing actual legal damages, Trump’s private lawyers huddled in a room with acting Attorney General and Trump’s previous personal defense lawyer Todd Blanche, and hashed out a “settlement.” The terms? Trump would drop the suit, the IRS would magically waive all ongoing tax audits against him and his sons, and the government would deposit $1.776 billion into a shiny new fund to compensate “victims of lawfare.” Basically, Trump sued his own administration so he could agree to settle with himself, give his family a lifetime tax-evasion pass, and build a massive bribery fund for MAGA loyalists. Somehow, this crossed the line even for Senate Republicans. Mitch McConnell publicly called the fund “utterly stupid” and “morally wrong,” asking why the nation’s top law enforcement official was asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told the White House that if they didn’t kill the fund themselves, the Senate would do it for them. Meanwhile, the judicial system decided it wasn’t particularly fond of being used as a prop for administrative money laundering. On Friday, a federal judge in Virginia slapped a temporary restraining order on the fund to freeze any payouts. Simultaneously, Miami federal judge Kathleen Williams, prodded by a bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges, reopened Trump’s original IRS case and demanded answers. The former judges explicitly filed a brief stating that the court had been “deceived” by a collusive, feigned, and fraudulent lawsuit designed entirely to provide a fake veneer of legality to an illegal payout scheme. Faced with a full-blown Senate revolt and two federal judges actively breathing down his neck, Trump did what he always does when a grift goes sideways: he folded. The Justice Department sheepishly released a statement on Monday announcing they would “abide by the court’s ruling” and halt all progress on the fund. So OK, everything’s not fine exactly, and the system’s still broken, but maybe the rule of law has a temporary pulse.
• In another week eclipsed by the announcement that tickets are soon to be on sale to see the visiting cloth narrative from Bayeux, Westminster weaves its own tapestry of hasty tone-deaf non-decision-making and self-important mini-me Machiavellian mis-steps, basically a room full of people having things jabbed directly in their eye and yet they can’t see for looking. Wes Streeting who resigned expecting people to beg him not to, has yet to announce his leadership campaign and has endorsed Andy Burnham as Labour’s Best Chance of Winning as he walks behind Andy’s human shield body into the slaughter that will be the Brexit leave and Reform UK council-voting   Makerfield by-election. “Yeah Andy you go ahead I’m not going for the top job” uttered between breaths polishing the tape measure at the crown-makers. It’s going to be expensive; Wes has a huge sticky thumb for a head, just warning you Garrard and Co. If Andy does become leader Jeremy Corbyn said he would not rejoin Labour, I’m surprised anyone asked him really given how shittily he was dealt with under member-of-Keir’s-cabinet-admitted “unpopular” Starmer. A bit like inviting advice from Tony Blair on how to deal with the US President notwithstanding the debacle of the Iraq war – oh no wait that happened. Angela Rayner, recent returnee to the Labour party suggested ministers take action on the upcoming report from the consultation on a social media ban for under-16 year olds, which in some ways whiffs of umbrage that TikTok has successfully raised an entire generation when government has not. Nigel Farage thinks his gift of £5m was not subject to declaring among the declaration of gifts over £300 in the 12 months prior to being elected cos apparently it wasn’t a gift given to him two weeks after he stood for election in Clacton, it was a reward for all the good work he had done on Brexit, and all the good work he’s doing to promote crypto since crypto zillionaire Christopher Harborne gave him the bung. But it’s personal and non-political so that’s alright we shouldn’t even be asking questions about it cos Nige gets upset, even though it’s more than all of his constituents in Clacton could earn in all their lifetimes put together, “yeah but ‘e’s one of us in’ee eeza proper geezer” – will we never learn!

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