Exact Definition Fallacy – FT#195

14 Jun Exact Definition Fallacy – FT#195

Show Notes

The Exact Definition Fallacy occurs when someone disingenuously demands their opponent provide a definition solely to score debate points when they can’t provide one that meets an arbitrary standard

Trump

We started out by discussing this clip of Trump pretending he doesn’t know what DEI means:

Then we talked about this clip of Trump pretending Biden doesn’t know what carbon means:

And finally we looked at this clip of Marsha Blackburn trying to dunk on Ketanji Brown Jackson:

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about Catherine McKinnell and Jacob Rees-Mogg’s very different definitions of fairness:

And he ended with Michael Gove questioning existence:

Fallacy in the Wild (Sting: Fastball – Out of My Head)

In the Fallacy in the Wild, we looked at this clip from A Few Good Men:

Then we discussed these clips of Jordan Peterson:

Fake News

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

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

Intelligence is not a logical fallacy

We talked about the new Director of National Intelligence, Bill Pulte.

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

• According to a new whistleblower report filed with two Senate committees, The Department of Government Efficiency came up with a plan to declare nearly three million living people dead, in order to more efficiently deport them. The report, from longtime Social Security Administration senior executive Jeremiah Schofield details a cartoonishly dystopian plan to place 2.7 million living people, including some U.S. citizens, into the Social Security Administration’s “Death Master File.” Physically, this would have very little effect, but financially, it’s a death sentence. Being added to the Death Master File instantly deletes a person from the American banking ecosystem, freezing credit lines, canceling mortgages, and cutting off the distribution of wages or federal benefits. According to Schofield, a DOGE staffer partnering with the Department of Homeland Security said the quiet part out loud. The explicit goal was to make these individuals so miserable that they would either self-deport or show up at a government office to prove they were breathing, at which point ICE agents would be waiting to detain them. The SSA’s attempt to push back against the claims basically amounted to “sure, we thought about it, but we didn’t actually do it”, while DHS completely ignored the question and pivoted to generic talking points about how “information sharing” is vital for catching violent criminals and terrorists. But, Schofield notes, a small-scale pilot of this exact scheme was quietly rolled out last year, successfully marking 6,100 immigrants as dead, some of whom later showed up at government offices to convince them they were in fact alive. Schofield should probably be on high alert for a while. Last April, another DOGE whistleblower, National Labor Relations Board IT staffer Dan Berulis, had warned Congress that mere minutes after DOGE teams accessed the agencies data, devices with Russian IP addresses attempted to log into the system with valid credentials. After filing the report, an envelope was taped to his door containing drone-shot photos of him walking his dog. Then, Elon Musk shared Berulis’s name and face to his 200 million Twitter followers, declaring that filing a false whistleblower report is a serious crime, which, it turns out, was very dangerous, because at least 8 or 9 of those followers weren’t bots. The very next day, Berulis’s brake lines were cut, causing him to crash into a stop sign. A mechanic later discovered that his vehicle’s front impact airbag sensor had been intentionally removed and rewired to trick the car’s safety protocols into staying silent. Maybe Jeremiah Schofield should get a bus pass.
• Former U.S. Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino who went from Border Patrol Chief to Former Border Patrol chief cos Trump, yeah even Trump, was forced to admit he’s a “pretty out-there kind of guy.” I’m not going along with the ‘pretty’ bit – he’s somewhere a few more than six degrees of Kevin Bacon crossed with an even sadder thin Mitch McConnell and Touche Turtle with an ar-15, or at least that’s how he likes to dress along with cosplaying as a Nazi not necessarily at the same time as promoting neo-Nazi propaganda – but yeah he’s out there. So much so that he’s being all coy about a presidential bid in 2028, so coy it’s no longer on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, where he said :NewsNation is reporting I’m exploring a run for President in 2028. Here’s the truth: My one and only priority is deporting the 106 million illegals who are here. That’s it. The grassroots support I’m seeing tells me the polls are completely wrong… “ So far so Trump – a lot of implied stuff about ‘other people have said…” including whilst the polls are proving otherwise I’m just going to go along with the evidence of my opinion of what’s happening in the world. His world a la Trump is about staying in the limelight — a limelight that includes his recent attendance at a pro-extremist, Nazi-aligned conference in Portugal! And as for the 106 million illegals he talked about – we..eell that’s about a third of the entire population of the US. Now if he was addressing a conference of the united tribes of the original indigenous nations then he might have a point – everyone since and including the founding fathers are technically immigrants! If anything will scupper Bovino’s attempt at running it won’t be the lack of support from the anti-antifa far right movement MadCo as I’ve just called them – the Mass Deportation Coalition, it will be going to early to announce his bid to drive his Cadillac into the demolition derby of the primaries alongside Rubio, Vance, Hegseth, DeSantis, Cruz, Hawley etc. Sheesh with co-bidders like that who needs the Nazi Party – yeah sorry Greg you’ve denied any wrong-doing vis a vis intending to convey Nazi ideology – I salute you!!
• The White House briefing room is supposed to be the ultimate crucible of political messaging, but the always professional and transparent Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is out on maternity leave, so the administration has resorted to treating the podium like a rotating guest-host slot on daytime television. We’ve already seen JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Scott Bessent stumble through their respective guest appearances, and when it came time for Dr. Mehmet Oz to have a go, the head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said that he’d made sure to watch his predecessors attempts, because “I’m a doctor. I try and do my homework. I prepped for the case.” I think I’m starting to see why it was so much safer to make Dr. Oz a TV doctor and keep him away from hospitals where they do, like, surgery and stuff. If his method of prepping for a case is watching three other people who have no training and no clue what they’re doing bluff their way through a heart operation because the regular guy was off that day, maybe he’ll do less harm pretending Reiki is real on Oprah. Perhaps if he’s spent less time watching his mates fuck it up, and literally any time keeping tabs on the news, he might have been able to answer the kinds of questions the White House Press Corps was very obviously going to ask him when he walked into that room. Instead, when asked why Trump casually handed the keys of the nation’s entire intelligence apparatus to a Twitter-famous housing executive, Oz could only offer “I think Bill’s a great guy. I know him socially”. Shockingly, the reporters who have spent over a year putting up with Karoline Leavitt’s bullshit weren’t placated by this and further questioned Pulte’s qualifications for overseeing 18 sweeping spy agencies despite having zero national security credentials., and Oz threw up his hands and claimed the question was out of his lane. When the reporters pointed out that nobody else in the building was providing information, he just said “I appreciate you want an answer. I’m not going to be the one giving it to you.” Under a final barrage, the CMS chief finally snapped, saying “I don’t know anything more about Bill Pulte than you do. I did not think that the questions would even come up here. I hadn’t even heard the news when I walked out.” Way to prep for the case, Doc. Desperate to steer the conversation back to literally anything else, Oz retreated to what he does best: sycophantic health assessments. He gushed over Trump’s recent series of medical screenings, claiming that the reason he goes to the doctors so much is that he likes the results he gets, and then, I think, praised Trump’s physique, saying bizarrely “That amount of energy, and that amount of mental acuity does not exist in a vacuum, you have to have a vessel to carry it.” And to be fair, the amount of energy and mental acuity that Trump has could easily be contained within a used, wet hotdog skin, so yeah.
• Our favourite jailed wire fraudster, identity thief, money launderer, resume fabricator especially the bit where he covered up the rap sheet as long as your arm – George Santos is so grateful for Trump commuting his jail sentence that he told everyone on TwiX (he’s got millions of followers) that he was going to attend the State of the Union address in February ‘I’m gonna be in the gallery’. He might have added ‘and you can bet on that’ cos he was so sure. Why would you bet on that kind of a thing, well I guess that’s how bookmakers and betters make their money – especially if you’re in control of the events themselves I guess. (War on Iran *cough cough* *ceasefire oil stocks rising *spluitter*.) Santos did not attend the event. The prediction market Kalshi alerted the Justice Department about bets Santos placed regarding his attendance at the event. Kalshi also detected that Santos had been placing bets against his own attendance. On thursday he posted on Twex that the DOJ might be looking into him “I will comment further when appropriate and clarify everything accordingly while being mindful and respectful of any process that might be underway,” “The bases of the accusation is preposterous and I look forward to supplying any information asked of me to any agency that inquires, till then media please do not inquire.” you know cos asking questions might unearth the truth about insider dealings and where would Santos go next to make a dishonest buck – 10 to 1  it’ll be back into the Brazilian drag performance circuit as his alter ego Kitara Ravache.
• In the tragically overlooked 1992 Eddie Murphy film The Distinguished Gentleman, Eddie plays a conman who gets elected to Congress because he has the same name as the recently deceased incumbent. The script was by Marty Kaplan who, before turning to screenwriting, worked in the Carter Administration as speechwriter for Vice President Walter Mondale. And Kaplan might just have been on to something. Fast forward 34 years, and the upcoming open primary for the US Senate seat in Alaska. A retired teacher from the tiny, isolated fishing village of Petersburg has filed to run for the U.S. Senate as a Republican. His name? Dan Sullivan. The issue here is that Alaska’s incumbent Republican U.S. Senator is also named Dan Sullivan. On realizing that he might have to share a ballot with his own echo, Senator Dan Sullivan immediately steered his campaign bus into a metaphorical ditch of deep-state paranoia. The incumbent publicly accused the rookie candidate of orchestrating a coordinated, fraudulent psy-op cooked up by the state’s Democrats to hoodwink voters and hand the seat to Democratic challenger, Mary Peltola. The senator even threatened aggressive litigation to expose this grand Alaskan conspiracy and is upset that nobody is taking this seriously, saying “People are laughing about it. It’s not funny.” It is, though. It’s objectively funny. Not to be outdone in the theater of the absurd, Alaska’s Republican Lieutenant Governor, Nancy Dahlstrom, formally opened an official state investigation into the audacity of a man using his own legal name on a government document. For his part, the challenger, now officially distinguished on the state’s election website as Dan J. Sullivan, to disambiguate him from Dan S. Sullivan, seems thoroughly entertained by the fact that he has given the entire Republican establishment a collective panic attack. Speaking from his island community, the 69-year-old dismissed the collusion theories as complete fiction, confirming his contact with national Democratic operatives stands at “zero, none, zilch.” Currently, his grand strategy to topple the incumbent involves figuring out how fundraising works and eventually buying a plane ticket to Juneau. In the meantime, he offered some amusingly simple campaign advice to his panicked namesake: “Dude, why don’t you just run your campaign? If you’ve got a strong record, run on your record. People will love you for it and you’ll be swept back into office. Why would he be concerned that a guy out of Petersburg is this huge threat?”
• Back in the day, the good old days of politics MPs in the UK would have to resign their posts for taking bribes in order to have them raise questions in parliament on behalf of the briber, Presidents who broke into offices and covered it up had to go. Nowadays I guess it’s refreshing that that kind of stuff is out in the open. Yeah they just go about it openly accepting donations and conferring favours, is that what they mean by transparency? Donors to Trump’s ballroom – all paid for privately folks – yeah that’s gonna be taxpayer money and those donations are just gonna get hoovered up into the slavering orange cat’s-arse mouth of the Trump slush fund. More than half of the publicly identified donors to President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project have won new or expanded federal contracts worth more than $50 billion during the past six months. Fourteen of the 27 known corporate donors to the $400 million project, which would replace the East Wing that Trump demolished in October, have seen their government business grow since then, and oddly in the spirit of Trump’s ‘I know a guy’, most of those same companies are also facing federal enforcement actions over alleged wrongdoing or have had such actions suspended by the Trump administration since the start of Trump’s second term. Sixteen of the 27 donors are facing federal enforcement actions or have had such actions suspended by the Trump administration, including major antitrust reviews involving Amazon, Apple, Meta and Nvidia; labor rights cases involving Google, Lockheed and Meta; and securities matters involving Coinbase and Ripple, whose cases have been dropped or scaled back under Trump. Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal told WaPo what they already knew “At every turn, President Trump has sought to conceal the facts about his monstrous multimillion-dollar ballroom” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement. “The same critics who are alleging fake conflicts of interests, would also complain if American taxpayers were footing the bill for these long-overdue renovations, the donors for the White House ballroom project represent a wide array of great American companies and generous individuals, all of whom are contributing to make the People’s House better for generations to come.” Make that “Current occupier of the People’s House/House of Trump comfortable for generations to come” and we might concur.
• The concept of a traditional presidential pardon used to involve a sober, rigorous deep-dive by the Justice Department’s Pardon Attorney. It was a multi-year bureaucratic slow-dance featuring character affidavits, victim notifications, and a meticulous evaluation of whether a convict was actually ready to reintegrate into polite society. But on Day One of his second term, Donald Trump decided that bureaucratic due diligence was for losers, and with a single, Sharpie-based signature that looks like he writes it while fighting off a swarm of bees, he granted mass clemency to nearly 1,600 individuals involved in the January 6th Capitol riot, instantly evaporating the largest federal investigation in American history. According to an alarming new data crunch by Lawfare, that might not have been a great idea. At least 97 of Trump’s pardoned “patriots” have been arrested, charged, or convicted of entirely separate, non-political crimes since their field trip to the Capitol. That means roughly one out of every sixteen insurrectionists managed to land back in handcuffs in less than eighteen months. For reference, roughly one in 50 non-insurrectionist Americans is arrested each year, which is still absurdly high; twice the per-capita arrest rate of the UK. That means the Jan 6ers are twice as likely to be criminals as everyone else, you know, in their spare time, when they’re not trying to overthrow the government. No way! Who would have thought. The rap sheets for the freshly liberated DC tourists span from standard public nuisance behaviors, like a collective 20 DUIs and public intoxication charges, to horrific felonies. The data shows that 41 pardonees have been charged or convicted of violent crimes, including domestic abuse and picking up a 12-year-old boy by the neck and slamming him into the ground because the kid dared to criticize Trump. Then there are the sex crimes. Fourteen individuals have faced charges involving sexual assault or child sexual abuse material, including online solicitation of minors. Lawfare identified five instances where Trump’s pardon directly facilitated new criminal conduct while these men legally should have been sitting behind bars. For example, in February, a Florida handyman named Andrew Paul Johnson was convicted on five charges of child molestation, some of which took place after his release, and according to law enforcement, he tried to buy his child victims’ silence using the promise of future government restitution money. So maybe don’t promise these fuckers money for being convicted of the crimes they committed. Thanks to the pardon, these people are out there, untracked by parole officers and entirely unsupervised. Just last month in Colorado, an unindicted January 6th rioter named Tim Arvidson, who boasted of his involvement on Facebook and posted that a “dark cloud had been lifted” after Trump ordered the DOJ to drop all pending January 6th probes, was arrested for allegedly shooting and killing a man on the side of the road.
• In the UK, I’ve been trying to not pay much attention, this being mental health year, but I can report that Someone on television, probably Farage, confidently announcing a plan that sounds like it was drafted on the back of a Pret receipt during a delayed train journey, followed by immediate clarification that the plan is “not actually a plan, more of a vibe, and also legally non-binding on reality.” Meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch responded with the kind of outrage that suggests they’ve only just discovered the government exists, despite it having been legally required to exist for several centuries. There was a brief period of consensus on something extremely boring—like the idea that water should, in theory, stay inside pipes—before everyone remembered they hate each other and reverted to arguing about who is responsible for problems that pre-date the invention of electricity. Defence Secretary John Healey and Armed Forces Minister Al Carns resigned over insufficient funding for defence which is a bit of a blow to Starmer’s administration given his recent decision to cut overseas development aid funding (the stuff that prevents wars from happening in the first place) to fund defence. A minister was asked a direct question about this and answered it with such precision that it looped back around into being unrelated to the original question, which was then described as “very clear” by a spokesperson standing nearby for emotional support. A policy was announced, praised, criticised, quietly paused, re-announced with different punctuation, and then described as “unchanged” in a way that would make a philosophy lecturer resign on the spot, Angela Rayner threatened to do as much over the change in visa rules for care workers but is so glad to be back in government after paying/not paying/paying stamp duty/not stamp duty that nothing will come of it, particularly since she is waiting to see what Grownup-Rugrat Andy Burnham’s bid against ReFuk in the Makerfield by-election means for future leadership bids. Yep same old same old!

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